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

Hindus could not withstand their earlier invasions. But as those wild and valorous Muslims from beyond the Himalayas began to settle down here for centuries together, generation-after-generation, and as many of their dynasties ruled here, they, too, were victims of laziness, mildness, and proclivity towards luxurious living. They could not retain their former sturdiness, endurance and savage strength, which could stand them in good stead on the battlefield. The ‘unhealthy’ climate of India did not fail to tell upon their originally strong wild bodies! On the whole, the descendants of those very Muslims came to be weaker and ‘not true to their mettle’. That is why the Hindu, especially the Marathas could vanquish only those Muslims! 1054. How very imperfect and unrealistic is this statement! Only one instance of the Maratha offensive against the Rohillas and the Pathans in the Doab and the fact that the Marathas killed as many as twenty thousand of the enemy in the action is quite sufficient to prove the falsity and platitude of the above estimate of the Muslim failure! The Pathan-Rohillas ruling from the Doab to Rohilkhand at that time considered themselves to be ‘high-born’ Afghans of the finest mettle. Even the Moghal imperial power and the Turkish Nawabs and chieftains dreaded them most. These Afghans had even at that time close and uninterrupted blood relation and family ties with the ‘original’ stalk of the Afghans beyond the Himalayas. Every year, hundreds of those ‘true-bred’ and ‘real’ Afghans came to reside in this Pathanistan in the Doab, while the Afghans here went over to their original homes. It clearly means, therefore, that the thousands of the Pathan-Rohillas in the long tract between the Doab and the Rohilkhand were till that time, at least, ‘real’ and ‘original’, ‘true-born’ and ‘thorough-bred’ Pathans and Afghans! And the Marathas? They belonged, after all originally and traditionally, to that country—India—which her enemies called sterile-born and brought up there for generations together! Even then, did they not often prove these so-called ‘true-born’ and ‘thorough-bred’ Pathans and Afghans to be of baser mettle in the final test on the field of battle? Even when Nadirshah fell upon Delhi with an army of the thousands of his ‘true-born’ and ‘thorough-bred’ Pathans, crowned himself ‘Emperor of Delhi’ and threatend to march to the South like Mahmud of Ghazni, is it not because he realized in his heart of hearts that the times had then changed—that it was not the India of Ghazni’s times—