BENGAL.
288
which a third of the population starved to death, kept alive a sense human powerlessness in the presence of an Omnipotent fate with an intensity which the homilies of a State clergy sometimes fail to awaken. Under the Muhammadans, a pestilence turned the early capital into a wilderness, never again to be re-peopled. Under our own
in
of
rule, it is estimated that lo millions perished within the Lower Provinces alone during the famine of 1769-70; and the first Surveyor-General of Bengal entered on his maps a tract of many hundreds of square miles
as bare of villages, with the words written across
it,
depopulated by
‘
the Maghs.’
—
Popular Religions The people of Bengal, thus constantly reminded by calamity of a mysterious Supreme Power, have always exhibited deep .
modes of propitiating new forms of faith. Great
and a singular waves of religion have again and again swept over the Provinces within even the brief period of the Christian era. Islam was one of several reformed creeds offered earnestness in their
that Power,
susceptibility to
tidal
to them and many circumstances combined to render its influence more widely spread and more permanent than that of its rivals. It
was the creed of the governing power ; its missionaries were men of zeal, who spoke to the popular heart it brought the good news of the unity of God and the equality of man to a priest-ridden and caste-ridden
Above
people.
the initiatory
all,
rite
made
relapse
impossible,
rendered the convert and his posterity true believers for ever.
and
Forcible
conversions are occasionally recorded, with several well-known instances of Hindus becoming apostates from their ancient faith to purchase pardon for crime. Such cases, however, were comparatively few in number, and belonged to the higher ranks. It would also appear that a Mughal adventurer now and then circumcised off-hand the villages allotted to him in fief. But it was not to such measures that Islam owed its success in Bengal. It appealed to the people, and it derived the great mass of
its
converts from
among
the poor.
a truer conception of God, a nobler ideal of the it
offered to the teeming low-castes of Bengal,
life
It
of
who had
despised and abject beyond the outermost pale of the munity, free entrance into a tradition,
modern
new
and the other fragmentary evidence that
man
and
sat for ages
Hindu com-
So
far as local
survives, enable a
Muhammad was for the most by violence nor by any ignoble means.
inquirer to judge, the creed of
part spread in Bengal neither It
social organization.
introduced
succeeded because Nevertheless,
it
it
deserved to succeed.
conspicuously failed to alter the permanent religious
conceptions of the people.
mans from the
rest
The
initiatory rite separated the
Musal-
of the Bengali population, and elevated the hetero-
geneous low-caste converts into a respectable community of Islam. But the proselytes brought their old superstitions with them into
