unity. It was not so in 1830 A.D. Up till 1849 the Punjab was independent and so were the other provinces annexed by Lord Dalhousie. So Vincent Smith’s claim, that it has been so since 1818 A.D.[1] is not well founded. What is more important for our purpose is the present and the future. It is claimed that under the British, India is a political unity though Nepal is still independent.
The critics of Indian aspirations are very unfair, when they compare the India of the seventeenth or the eighteenth or even of the nineteenth century with Great Britain, Germany, France and United States of the twentieth. They forget that the political nations known by these names are only the growth of yesterday. India is as big as the whole of Europe excluding Russia. Yet what was Europe before the nineteenth century? It was a big camp of warring nations and warring religions, engaged in exterminating and persecuting each other alternately. India was more or less a political unity when Great Britain was smarting under the heels of the Romans. It took the British over 1600 years to establish their present political unity. Compare the following account of “England under foreign rule” (1013-1204), given by Green in his “Short History of the English People,” with the condition of things in India from the time of Samundra Gupta onwards.
“Britain had become England in the five hundred years that followed the landing of Hengest, and its
- ↑ See footnote to p. 5, of his “Early History of India,” 3rd ed.
