22

INDIA

doms of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Elichpur, Golconda, and
Bidar, whilst the most powerful monarch in all India was
the Hindu rajah of Vijayanagar, who reigned paramount
over the southern provinces.
In 1683 Portuguese power was at dead low tide, the
Mahrattas advanced to the very gates of Goa—the Portuguese
 capital—and the ¢ further history of the Portuguese
in India is a miserable chronicle of pride, poverty, and
sounding titles.” ?
All that remains to them now are Goa, Daman, and
Diu on the west coast, with an area of about 2350 square
miles and less than half a million population.
During the seventeenth century the Dutch were the
foremost power on the high seas. In 1651 they founded
a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1658 they
had wrested the last stronghold from the Portuguese in
Ceylon. Just one century later Clive broke their power
finally at Chinsurah, and at the present time there is not
a Dutch settlement on the mainland of India. In the
census of 1881 but seventy-nine Dutchmen were enumerated
 throughout the country.
Next followed the French and English ; and modern
history recounts the further process of building up the
[ndian Empire until it finally took shape as we now find
it, and as we shall now attempt to describe it. The India
of to-day is not the India of the ancients; it is not the
India of medizeval Arab history; it is not the India of
Portuguese and Dutch ascendency which was limited to
a narrow fringe of country washed by the sea and represented
 by scattered commercial “factories.” India must
be accepted as the whole area of Southern Asia over which
British political influence now extends, whether strictly
within the limits of the red line of “ British’ India or
beyond it. As a geographical expression it cannot be
dissociated from the frontier which binds it, or from the
wide border mountain lands of the west and north-west,
wherein are to be found the gates of it. No geographical
description of the peninsula of India would be complete
I Hunter, *“ Imperial Gazetteer,” vol. vi,