274 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
among themselves for their dynastic ambitions. The Sungas, Kanvas and the Andhras fought for supremacy among themselves. But they, like the Muslim invaders of Hindu India, had one object in common that was to destroy Buddhism and the Buddhist Empire of the Mauryas. Surely if Muslim invasions of Hindu India are worthy of study at the hands of the historians, the invasions of Buddhist India by Bramhanic invaders are equally deserving of study. The ways and methods employed by the Bramhanic invaders of Buddhist India to suppress Buddhism were not less violent and less virulent than the ways and means adopted by Muslim invaders to suppress Hinduism. From the point of view of the permanent effect on the social and spiritual life of the people, the Bramhanic invasions of Buddhist India have been so profound in their effect that compared to them, the effect of Muslim invasions on Hindu India have been really superficial and ephemeral. The Muslim invaders destroyed only the outward symbols of Hindu religion such as temples and Maths etc. They did not extirpate Hinduism nor did they cause any subversion of the principles or doctrines which governed the spiritual life of the people. The effects of the Bramhanic invasions were a thorough-going change in the principles which Buddhism had preached for a century as true and eternal principles of spiritual life and which had been accepted and followed by the masses as the way of life. To alter the metaphor the Muslim invaders only stirred the waters in the bath and that too only for a while. Thereafter they got tired of stirring and left the waters with the sediments to settle. They never threw the baby—if one can speak of the principles of Hinduism as a baby—out of the bath. Bramhanism in its conflict with Buddhism made a clean sweep. It emptied the bath with the Buddhist Baby in it and filled the bath with its own waters and placed in it its own baby. Bramhanism did not care to stop how filthy and dirty was its water as compared with the clean and fragrant water which flowed from the noble source of Buddhism. Bramhanism did not care to stop how hideous and ugly was its own baby as compared with the Buddhist baby. Bramhanism acquired by its invasions political power to annihilate Buddhism and it did annihilate Buddhism. Islam did not supplant Hinduism. Islam never made a thorough job of its mission. Bramhanism did. It drove out Buddhism as a religion and occupied its place.
These facts show that Brahmanic invasions of Buddhist India have a far greater significance to the Historian of India than the Muslim invasions of Hindu India can be said to have produced. Yet very little space is devoted by historians to the vissicitudes which befell Buddhist India built up by the Mauryas and even where that is done they have