The Decline of India

Before the Mahabharata war was fought by the Pandavas and Kauvaras, India had reached the zenith of a rich civilization. She was then the international center for knowledge, wealth and political power. Because of her tremendous influence, India controlled dominions abroad. In preparation for the War, Yudhisthir, on behalf of the Pandavas, called up armies from dominions that he controlled, while Duryodhan, on behalf of the Kauravas, called up armies from dominions loyal to him. As a consequence of this ruinous eighteen-day war, countless illustrious kings and genuine brahmin-scholars who had cared for Vedic learning were killed, and the process of decline subsequently started for India. It started from the surviving brahmins, the very core of Indian society. They saw an opportunity for survival by neglecting the study and teaching of the Vedas and also by focusing on earning a livelihood. Thus, they lost the ability to genuinely lead people on the path to progress. They became god-men, they fabricated superstitions, ensnared people and demanded privileges. This process of national disintegration continued unabated until Jainism came into the picture. At that time, the Jains used to inhabit the borderlands between India and China. They entered India through the pretext of trade and established their presence starting from Bihar and gradually spreading to the rest of India. In the absence of genuine Vedic scholars, the Jains reviled the Vedas, propagated their own literature, beliefs and practices, made many converts and built many temples wherein they erected statues of their saints who, on achieving perfection, were considered gods.

In the midst of national decline in India becoming more and more intense with ages passing by, a number of great reformers were born. The first one known in history was the famous Hindu reformer, King Vikram Aditya of Ujjain, who was born in 102 BC. He was a legendary emperor of ancient India and often characterized as an ideal king. He was known for his generosity, courage, and patronage of Vedic and Sanskrit scholars. Stories credit him as having liberated India from the non-Arya Shaka invaders. The famous Vikram Era, associated with his name, commenced in 57 BC and is still used both in and out of India in these modern times.

The second reformer was the great Shankar Acharya, born in the 8th century in Kerala, South India. At a very young age he became a monk, he studied Sanskrit and the Vedas and he traveled all across India. In these travels, he defended and revived the ancient Vedic religion, defeating Buddhists, Jains and Charvakas in public disputations, and re-converting Hindu kings who had become Jains. While pursuing this objective, he created quite a national stir and started a renaissance of Vedic learning. Unfortunately, his life came to an end at the early age of thirty-two years and this brought about a collapse of his reform, renaissance movement.

A third great reformer was Raja [King] Bhoja. From 1010 to about 1055, he ruled the Malwa region which, at that time, comprised parts of today’s Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. He had loved Sanskrit and Vedic language and literature and had patronized many scholars. His extensive writings covered philosophy, poetry, medicine, veterinary science, phonetics, Yoga, and archery. Under his rule, Malwa, with its capital Dhar, became one of the principal intellectual centers of India. King Bhoja, together with the Solanki king Bhimdev of Gujarat, rebuilt the temple at Somnath between 1026 and 1042 after it was sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1024. He founded the city of Bhojpur.