known, founded an independent kingdom with Kulbarga for its capital. The Sultan made a Brahman his Prime Minister, without, as it appears, requiring his adoption of the faith of Islam. From this circumstance the new Dekhan kingdom came to be termed the Bahmani or Brahmani kingdom. Hasan was a Shiah, and would seem to have been tolerant of the Hindus even to the extent of sympathising with their views. On the other hand, his son and successor, Mohammed Shah, was a Sunni, and was as bitter and hostile to the Hindus as his father had been courteous and indulgent. The ferocity of his nature, quite as much as his religious bigotry, appears in a terrible episode in his history. During the progress of a war between himself and the Hindu sovereign of Vijayanagar, Mohammed made a solemn vow on the Koran that he would not sheathe his sword until he had dyed it with the blood of 100,000 idolaters. Fearful to relate, he kept his vow to the letter, and by the indiscriminate murder of men, women, and children, made up the dreadful tale of slaughter. A touching scene followed upon this cruel outrage--a scene which surely ennobles the character of the Hindus, whilst it blasts that of the ruthless tyrant. A Hindu embassy from Vijayanagar waited upon Mohammed, and thus addressed him: 'O Sultan! Krishna Rai (the Hindu Rajah) may have committed sins, but it is not good for you to kill the innocent. The Bestower of kingdoms has given the Dekhan to you and the Kanarese country to Krishna Rai; there may yet be many wars between the two kingdoms; let therefore a treaty be made, that henceforth none shall be slain excepting the soldiers fighting in the field.'

Between the death of Mohammed Shah, in 1374, and the dismemberment of the Bahmani kingdom, in 1516, nought but the barest hints and incidents of religious interest meet us; these cast at best a fitful and flickering light on the mutual relations of the two antagonistic faiths in the Dekhan. One thing

1 Vide Wheeler's History of India, Mussulman Period,

P. 94.

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is abundantly clear, that in this part of India more than elsewhere, Islam was a house divided against itself; the hereditary hate of the Shiah and Sunni factions repeatedly manifested itself in bitter party strifes. During the century and a half which intervened between the death of Hasan Gangu and the disappearance of the kingdom which he founded, only one sultan appears on whom the mind can rest with pleasure. This was Mahmud, who reigned for twenty years, from 1378 to 1397 A.D. In character he seems to have resembled Firuz Shah, of Delhi; he was a good Moslem, and a righteous and beneficent sovereign -in short, just one of those rulers who may be supposed to have exercised all the more religious and moral influence upon his subjects from the fact that his genial and peaceful reign left hardly any materials for the secular historian to record. A serious famine occurred whilst he was on the throne, and he, anticipating the benevolent and enlightened policy of the present Government of India in such emergencies, employed many thousands of bullocks to import grain to sustain his famishing subjects. He then did the very thing which in our day has been carried out, he collected the orphans left by the devastation of the famine, and in all the chief towns in his kingdom established schools and orphanages for their instruction and support. In searching for auxiliary agencies in the propagation of Islam in the Dekhan, such a fact stands out with singular prominence.1

A very curious history attaches to an institution of this nature in Bengal. In the Orissa famine of 1866 probably half a million of persons perished; hundreds of orphans were collected; some two hundred of these were received by the Commissioner of Police in Calcutta, the present Sir Stuart Hogg. This gentleman organised an Orphanage for them, and, in order to conciliate the religious prejudices of the natives, left it to a joint-committee of Hindu and Mohammedan gentlemen to decide the question of the religious and moral training of the children. Probably the Commissioner had a shrewd apprehension of the inevitable result. It was a case in which not even Herod and Pilate could agree; all agreed in the necessity of some religious training, but what should be its character? Who was to say what the religion of the parents had been? in many cases this was impossible to decide; but without caste they could not be Hindus-here was the Hindu difficulty. 'Then,' said the Moslems, let us train them all as Mohammedans.' 'No,' said the Hindus,

Amongst the worthless sovereigns who succeeded Mahmud, we find one, Firuz, a libertine in morals and a liberal in religion. He studied the Old and New Testaments along with the Koran, / and he filled his harem with women from various lands and of various creeds. Hindu ladies shared the dubious honours of the seraglio. In his day, the Hindus routed the Moslem forces, levelled to the ground mosques and Moslem shrines, and imitated, we fear, too closely the atrocities which had been perpetrated on themselves. This broke the heart of Firuz; but his successor, Ahmud Shah, amply revenged the injury and fully developed the savageness of his nature. He slaughtered the Hindus of all ages and sexes by twenty thousand at a time, and then paused for a three days' feast before repeating the holocaust. He demolished temples and Brahmanical colleges. How far his atrocities affected the religion of his day does not appear. If the generous rule of Mahmud appealed to the convictions of the best of the Hindus, the ruthless might of Firuz might well help on the conformity of the worst.

During the reign of his son, Alla-ud-deen, the Hindu Rajah of Vijayanagar held a council of Brahmans and Rajpoots, and | asked their solution of the problem which troubled him how was it that the Moslems almost invariably defeated the Hindus? The Brahmans replied that the true answer was that God willed it, that this anomaly was a necessary concomitant of the age of Kali (the dark age) and had been foretold in the holy Shasters. The soldiers took a more practical view of the difficulty; they assured the Rajah that the superior discipline and equipments of the Moslems sufficiently accounted for the phenomenon which he deplored. The Rajah bowed to the comments of the Brahmans, and acted upon the suggestions of the Rajpoots;

'for some are certainly of our creed.' The upshot was, that each party gave up the matter as hopeless, and the Commissioner, nothing loath, surrendered the children to Christian guardianship, and we look back with thankfulness to the time when it was our happy privilege to admit the greater part of them by baptism into the Church of Christ.

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he improved the discipline of his Hindu troops, and enlisted great numbers of Mussulman soldiers in his army. To meet their case, he built them a mosque and placed a copy of the Koran before his throne, to which they might honestly render obeisance. Here, again, we obtain a glimpse of one of the manifold agencies which, in the absence of direct missionary effort, aided the development of Islam in the country.

Ultimately the Bahmani kingdom was broken up into five independent Moslem States. The change abolished the Mohammedan supremacy in the Dekhan. The future religious history of that portion of India consists, for the most part, of struggles between Shiahs and Sunnis, the Hindus now allying themselves to the one party, now to the other. During that era of unprofitable strife, the Shiah Sultan of Bijaypur, Yusuf Adil Shah, alone deserves specific mention. He rose superior to the narrow spirit of the age; he stretched forth a kindly hand to both Sunnis and Hindus: Islam,' said he, has many sects, and heaven has many mansions.'

Returning to Hindustan proper, we find Baber, the first of the Moghul Emperors, ascend the throne of Delhi, A.D. 1526. Until his distinguished grandson, Akbar, grasped the sceptre in 1556, nothing of religious importance meets us. For half a century did this remarkable man rule the destinies of Hindustan; that his reign was of considerable religious importance to India no one can doubt. In order to comprehend rightly the kind of impression produced upon the country during his sway, it is necessary to enquire into the religious character of Akbar himself. At no period of his life does he appear to have been a devout and earnest Moslem; his sympathies, so far as they went with one party rather than another, inclined towards the Shiahs.. To the Hindus he was more than tolerant; there is little doubt that his policy, quite as much as his religious principles, influenced his bearing towards them. He was a soldier and a 1 Vide Wheeler's History of India, Mussulman Rule, p. 104.

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statesman; he beheld the Mussulman community torn by party - 2 spirit-elements of faction were at work which might eventuate in a dismemberment of his empire corresponding to that which had taken place in the Dekhan. He set his eye and heart upon the Rajpoots; if only he could succeed in attaching these valorous champions of India and Hinduism to himself, his throne would be secured by a bulwark of strength, however the waves of Sunni 1 and Shiah fanaticism might surge around it or Hindu conspiracy threaten it. He sought their support, not their conversion. To bring about the desired end he proposed to the three leading Rajpoot princes a marriage between himself and three of their daughters. After considerable delay, and with ill-disguised reluctance, the Rajahs of Jaipur and Jodhpur consented to the proposal. The Rana of Chitore indignantly spurned the suggestion, and accepted the penalty of an exile and an outlaw in preference to a union of his daughter with the great Moghul. ✔ A number of inferior Rajpoot chiefs followed the example of the two Rajahs, and rendered homage to the emperor.

Akbar was thus gaining his point. Besides forming family ties with the leading Rajpoots, he admitted them to a share in the military dignities and emoluments which had previously been monopolised by the Moslems. His efforts at uniting the Rajpoot and Moslem elements met with very partial success. Yet those efforts, doubtless, had an influence on both parties-the Mussulmans became more or less Hinduised, and the Hindus grew more tolerant of the dominant creed. Akbar, indeed, met the Hindus more than half way: he maintained Brahman priests to minister to his Hindu wives, and sometimes even joined in their idolatrous worship. All this disgusted and scandalised the orthodox Sunnis; the Shiahs and Sufis, on the other hand, regarded the Emperor's laxity with tolerable complacency. This was to them a day of grace; they went through the country proclaiming the coming of the great Imam Mahdi, who, as they believed, was about to appear to usher in the Mussulman mil