Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/27

10 imagine in these degenerate days of trumpery and passing fashions. No one who has been in the Fort of Agra, and noted the styles of using black and white marble against red sandstone, distinctive of the reigns of Akbar, Jehangir, and Shah Jehan, could afterwards make a mistake as to which of these a particular pattern must be assigned to. The designs appear side by side at Agra, yet it took three reigns to make them possible.

The year, as we go through it, constitutes another kind of historical record. The festivals of the old village life which follow each other in such quick and delightful succession throughout the twelve or thirteen moons of the solar year, are not all effects of some single cause. On the contrary, the Car-festival of July hails from Buddhism, and has the great metropolis of its observance at Puri on the Orissan coast. But Janmashtami belongs to the Vaishnavism of Krishna, and turns our eyes in a very different direction, to Mathura and Brindaban. The Dewali Puja, again, connects us on the one side with the famous Japanese Feast of Lanterns, and on the other with Latin and Celtic anniversaries of the souls of the dead. How different are the thought-worlds out of which spring inspirations so various as all these! How long a period must each have had, in order to win its present depth and extent of influence! The very year as it passes, then, is a record of the changing ideas that have swept in succession across the Indian mind.