dead Hindu laid before the idol would be restored to life, if in his
life he had been a worshipper there.... I employed a confidential person
to ascertain the truth, and as I justly supposed, the whole was detected
to be an impudent imposture.... Throwing down the temple which was the
scene of this imposture, with the very same materials I erected on the
spot the great mosque, because the very name of Islam was proscribed at
Benares, and with God's blessing it is my desire ... to fill it full of
true believers." These things I write, not to hold up to condemnation
these Moghul rulers, but to point out by contrast the voluntary
character of the influence during the British and Christian period. For
there is in India a grander interest still than that of the British
political organisation, namely, the peaceful gradual transformation of
the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and fears, of each individual of
the millions of India.

[Sidenote: The nineteenth century in India--a conflict of ideas]

The real history of the past century in India has been the conflict and
commingling of ideas, a Homeric struggle, renewed in the nineteenth
century, between the gods of Asia and Europe. Sometimes the shock of
collision has been heard, as when by Act of Legislature, in 1829, Suttee
or widow-burning was put down, and, in 1891, the marriage of girls under
twelve; or when by order of the Executive, the sacred privacy of Indian
houses was violated in well-meant endeavours to stay the plague [1895-],
great riots ensuing; or when an Indian of social standing has joined the
Christian Church. At other times, like the tumbling in, unnoticed, of
slice upon slice of the bank of a great Indian river flowing through an
alluvial plain, opinion has silently altered, and only later observers
discover that the old idea has changed. Not a hundred years ago,
students of Kayasth (clerk) caste were excluded from the Sanscrit