For long, however, Delhi was the capital only of the north; it was not till the fourteenth century that the first attempt was made to bring India south of the forest belt under Mohammedan rule. Then armies marched through the length and breadth of the Dekkan, and the attempt was for the time successful ; but too much had been undertaken, and by this time, also, the third Mohammedan people had begun to enter India and disturb the existing conditions, so that in a few years the remoter provinces threw off the allegiance to Delhi. The central authority had not only to fight against the natural tendencies to disruption, the diffi culty of ruling a subject people who looked on life with different eyes from those of their conquerors, and difficulties introduced by the existence of natural differences between Bengal and the Dekkan and the North-West Provinces ; they were weakened by new immigrants, who again were finding their way in from the north-west. These were Tatars from the steppe lands of Central Asia. From about 1250 onwards successive bands entered the Punjab, and at the same time added to the number of the Mohammedans in India, and increasingly weakened the government which they found there. The collapse of central rule from Delhi was brought about in the end of the fourteenth century by the devastation caused by the invasion of Tamerlane, or Timour. He returned to Samarcand, but left India again split up, with independent states in the jungles of Bengal, in the dry Punjab, in the grass lands of the Dekkan, and in the plains of the south, some under Mohammedan, some under Hindu rule.
For a century and a half no central power existed. Then again from Central Asia descendants of Timour, the Moguls or Mongols, entered India, and after varying fortunes began in 1556 to establish central rule from Delhi. Between that date and 1605 Akbar—a great contemporary of Queen Elizabeth — consolidated a power which lasted till it slipped gradually into the hands of the British. Step by step he reorganized the whole land north of the forest belt on sounder economic principles than had been tried before, but gained control of little else. His power was chiefly due to the fact that he was able, though a Mohammedan, to unite the more virile Hindus who lived in the harder lands to north and west, and keep in check the other elements which caused disruption. Fifty years later his great grandson Aurangzeb, during the fifty years of his reign, attempted with more success to bring Southern India under his rule, and actually ruled over a greater portion of India than any of his successors ; but on his death the old story was repeated, differences reasserted them selves, and in 1739 fresh hordes from the north-west trooped down on the plains of Northern India to destroy central government and carry off booty.
But by this time those who had reached India overseas from the south had begun to make their power felt. Portuguese and Dutch had given place to French and British, and now the latter began to take control of the disunited states which went to make up India. Blown across the seas by the summer monsoon, they naturally approached the land from the south and south east ; the parts they came to first were thus the plains of the Carnatic and of Bengal. In these, which had always been farthest from the north-west sources of disturbance and centres of authority, the government was now centralized in Madras and Calcutta, and from Madras and Calcutta English power spread north-westwards through the plain and westwards across the Dekkan. From westwards also, first when India was approached by hugging the east coast of Africa, and again since the Suez Canal was opened, is the land entered, by Surat, the oldest British station, and by Bombay, the oldest British possession, which for long was of less account than Madras or Calcutta, but which now has far sur passed the former and equals the latter in population.
Till the Suez Canal was opened, this approach was less effective, so that in the disorders which followed the collapse of Mogul rule the reorganization of the land under British dominion was directed from Calcutta and Madras, rather than from Bombay, and time was given for native confederacies to form in the more distant west and north-west—the Marathas in the dry plateau eastwards of Bombay, and the Sikhs in the dry land of the Punjab. It is possible that, had not Britain inter vened, one or other of these confederacies might have attempted to dominate the whole land. In any case, it was these confederacies which British power even tually had to face, and they required more ability and force to subdue' than had been necessary elsewhere. Far from the sea entries of Calcutta and Madras, it is little more than half a century since the Punjab came under direct British government. Since that time, though territories have lapsed to British control because of bad government or in the absence of a direct heir to absolute power, there has been no extension of territorial rule by the exercise of military force.
Here, then, is India, many parts ruled, as any great Indian area always has been ruled, by foreigners ; organ ized now from Calcutta, because there is the entrance to the plain from the ocean, in the future from Delhi, because alone of the cities of India it has the claim that the land has been ruled from there; with so-called native states, which have no greater antiquity than British rule in India itself—the greater number of them despotically governed by those who are as foreign to their subjects as any Englishman ; India, supporting a vast native population on the supply of energy for the body gained from the produce of its hot, wet land, and yet never yet able to govern itself nor have a permanent organization for government ; policed and ruled so that there is less dissipation of saved energy than ever before since internal anarchy has been ended, and since the north-west, now approached not only from Calcutta but by railway up the length of the Indus Valley, has been held strongly against any danger of disturbance or domination from Afghanistan or beyond. An advance has been made. And yet the British rulers are rulers merely ; the conditions of life in India are so different from those in Britain that they never intend to remain ; they exile themselves to India for a time, and return " home " when their work is finished. They do not even settle as the Mohammedan conquerors settled at Delhi, and if they did settle they would be absorbed or overwhelmed as surely as other immigrants have been overwhelmed or absorbed. And, further, though the steppe peoples of the plain beyond Afghan istan are tamed and organized under the power of Russia, yet the way is as open as it has ever been, and organized attack is no less dangerous than the invasion of loosely united hordes.
The geographical controls still remain. The hot, wet continental peninsula is still open to the sea and open to the north-west. Europeans from overseas, in their northern land with its diverse and difficult geographical conditions, have learned to solve ever harder and harder problems ; they have learned how to approach and how to govern India, but they are unaccustomed to the conditions of life in India itself, where the in habitants, while able to obtain bodily energy easily and to increase in numbers, yet find that life so easy that there is little stimulus to save and control energy on a large scale. The European does not stay in India, and the native is not yet able to govern the land as effectively as the European.