The Immortals of Kurukshetra and the Future of India⁴⁵⁴ Such is the aspect of this shore; ‘Tis Greece, but living Greece no more! So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there. Hers is the loveliness in death, That parts not quite with parting breath, But beauty with that fearful bloom, That hue which haunts it to the tomb, Expression’s last receding ray, A gilded halo hovering round decay. The farewell beam of Feeling past away! Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth Which gleams, but warms no more its cherish’d earth! * * * Approach thou craven crouching slave! * * * These scenes, their story not unknown, Arise and make again your own; Snatch from the ashes of your sires, The embers of their former fires!⁴⁵⁵ And thou Delhi, whom I am looking down upon from the top of a minaret! Delhi, the barbarous, the cultivated, the heroic! What do I see? A fortress, a mosque, a plain! A fortress where through centuries of glorious deeds or fearful crimes, dark plots and secret tragedies, the great figures of thine Emperors have retained uninterrupted power. A mosque—the Great Mosque—the Jumma Musjid, the majestic symbol of the Crescent whose conquests thou, less favoured than Vienna, wert unable to arrest. A plain watered with blood, the scene of struggles which have more than once decided the fate of millions of human beings. That is what thou wert. This is what thou art now—a broken mirror reflecting the destinies of India.... But it is not the contingency of Russian aggression that would disturb me, if I were an Englishman. The internal policy to be pursued in India is the subject that would absorb my attention. I confess that certain ideas which enjoy great favour in certain quarters would give me food for reflection, and none more than the scheme of welding into a single nation the diverse races which inhabit the peninsula, of creating a new nation, and of creating her in the image of the English....British rule is firmly seated in India; England has only one enemy to fear—herself.⁴⁵⁶ In their national life the Indians have exhibited down to our days their long-practised and often-tried courage of patience... With this they have retained a costly possession, that inclination towards the highest intellectual attainments which runs through their whole history. This treasure is still vigorous in the hearts of the best Indians, and appears the more certainly to promise a brighter future as the government which now controls the nation has come to an earnest though late resolution to rule with the help of the Indians for the good of the people, while the intellectual force and cultivation of their western tribesmen are disclosing themselves ever more clearly to the eager activity of eminent Hindus.⁴⁵⁷ “To the Aryans I give the world!’’ So ran the prophecy of an ancient Hindu seer, and on this prophecy, which history attests,

Herr Arnoldson builds his theory as to the fulfilment