POLITICAL CHANGES

In our attempt to penetrate the obscurity which at many points still rests on the story of the first coming of Christianity to India, we left on one side the contemporary developments in politics, literature and religion which form the background of the later penetration of the Indian world by the Christian Gospel. Many things, in that period of nearly a thousand years, are still no more than dimly known – the rise and fall of kingdoms, the movements of armies of invaders, the emergence of great cities and the disappearance of others well known to earlier history. In this chapter we shall be concerned in the main with two questions – what traces are there during this period of Western influence on India and of Indian influence on the Western world; and, what permanent contribution was made by the movements of these centuries to the complicated situation which faced Christians from abroad, when at last direct connection between Europe and India was re-established at the end of the fifteenth century?

With the gradual decay of the Maurya power, the destiny of northern India fell into the hands of a number of small and weak kingdoms, perpetually at war with one another and in a continual state of ebb and flow. But the idea of the cakravartin, the king of kings, who would subdue all things to himself and introduce peace and order into a vast area, was never lost.