भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

of the deterioration of the age and the theory of कलिवर्ज्य things, did actually affect adversely the immutability of the old smritis. But such an indirect change, in the best interests of the society, was unavoidable for the religious law-givers of the times, who sometimes modified or enlarged some old precepts, while they introduced some altogether new ones. The verse, अन्ये कृतयुगे etc., which occurs in most of the smritis mentioned above, bears out this remark very clearly. It is only in the smritis compiled or edited in this Smrityite fashion after the periods of Maharshi Deval and Acharya Medhatithi, that the unequivocal ban on sea voyage, denying every sort of redemption for one undertaking sea voyage, and making illegal the acceptance of such a person into his original religion or caste, seems to have been enforced strictly. That period synchronizes with the preponderance of Christians, more particularly the Portuguese, in our Western Sea, with the Portuguese persecution and proselytization of the thousands of Hindus in Gomantak (Goa), and with the Arab occupation of Java, Sumatra and Indo- China and the wholesale violent conversion of the Hindu-Buddhist population of those lands. This was the period when the sea-faring Hindu- Buddhist states of the greater Indian empire, staunchly supported by the gallant navies of the Cholas and the Pandyas, fell along with the whole of Southern India, devastated before the Muslim might. It was the same period when the Hindu ships stopped visiting those distant states and the Hindus lost all contact with them. It was the most miserable, the most wretched period in the religious and political life of the Hindu nation. Naturally, this must have been the period when the ban on sea-faring was strictly and universally clamped on the Hindus. And it is only in the latest smritis of this period, let it be remembered, that the verses about the ban on the crossing of Attock and that on sea-faring are to be found! 534. It is clear from the above-mentioned state of things that it was only when every Hindu rover, crossing any of the three Indian seas, had to fall a prey to the rapacious Muslim or Christian crocodiles, with no Hindu power overlording the sea any longer, to protect him from that tragic fate, that their foremost leaders had to issue this ban—this order not to cross the seas on any occasion—with the noble intention of protecting the Hindu society. 535. A nation that obliged to suffer all sorts of humiliation heaped on her natives and the adherents of the native religion (one which is obliged to see helplessly foreign Muslim or Christian religions imposed on pain of death