New ideas in India during the nineteenth century : a study of social, political and religious developments

Front matter

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NEW IDEAS IN

INDIA

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The New Era — Some Leading Witnesses . 1

II. Indian Conservatism. . . . .11

CHAPTER I The New Era — Some Leading Witnesses

“The epoch ends, the world is still,

The age has talked and worked its fill ;

The famous men of war have fought,

The famous speculators thought.

See on the cumbered plain,

Clearing a stage,

Scattering the past about,

Comes the New Age.

Bards make new poems ;

Thinkers, new schools ;

Statesmen, new systems ;

Critics, new rules.”

Matthew Arnold.

India is a land of manifold interest. For the visitors who crowd thither every cold season, and for the still larger number who will never see India, but have felt the glamour of the ancient land whose destiny is now so strangely linked to that of our far-off and latter-day islands, India has not one but many interests. There is the interest of the architectural glories of the Moghul emperors, in whose grand halls of audience, now deserted and merely places of show, a solitary British soldier stands sentry over a visitors’ book. For the great capitals of India have moved from Delhi and Agra, the old strategic points in the centre of the great northern plain, to Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Rangoon, new cities on the sea, to suit the later over-sea rulers of India. There is the interest of the grand organisation of the British Government, holding in its strong paternal grasp that vast continent of three hundred million souls. Sometimes the sight of the letters Y.R.I. or E.R.I. (Edwardus Rex Imperator) makes one think of the imperial S.P.Q.R.1 once not unfamiliar in Britain. But this interest rather I would emphasise— the penetration into the remotest jungle of the great organisation of the British Government is a wonderful thing. By the coinage, the post-office, the railways, the administration of justice, the encouragement of education, the relief of famine, — by such ways the great organisation has penetrated everywhere,— in spite

1 The Senate and People of Rome — Senatus Populus-que Romanus.

THE NEW ERA of faults, the greatest blessing that has come to India in her long history. Travelling by rail from Calcutta to Benares, the metropolis of Hinduism, situated upon the north bank of the sacred Ganges, we see the British rule, in symbol, in the great railway bridge spanning the river. By it old India, self-centred, exclusive, introspective, was brought into the modern world ; compelled, one might say, by these great spans to admit the modern world and its conveniences, in spite of protest that the railway bridge would pollute the sacred stream. Crossing the bridge, our eyes are fixed on the outstanding feature of Benares — city of hundreds of Hindu temples. What is it ? Not a Hindu temple, but a splendid Mahomedan mosque whose minarets overlook the Hindu city, calling the city of Hindus to the worship of Allah. For the site of that mosque, the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb ruthlessly cleared away a magnificent temple most sacred to the Hindus. Concerning another famous Hindu temple in the same city, listen to the Autobiography of another earlier Moghul emperor, Jahangir. “ It was the belief of these people of hell [the Hindus] that a dead Hindu laid before the idol would be restored to life, if in his life he had been a worshipper there. ... I employed a confidential person to ascertain the truth, and as I justly supposed, the whole was detected to be an impudent imposture. . . . Throwing down the temple which was the scene of this imposture, with the very same materials I erected on the spot the great mosque, because the very name of Islam was proscribed at Benares, and with God’s blessing it is my desire . . . to fill it full of true believers.” These things I write, not to hold up to condemnation these Moghul rulers, but to point out by contrast the voluntary character of the influence during the British and Christian period. For there is in India a grander interest still than that of the British political organisation, namely, the peaceful gradual transformation of the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and fears, of each individual of the millions of India.

Thenineteenth The real history of the past century in India

India— am has been the conflict and commingling of ideas,

conflict of <

ideas. a Homeric struggle, renewed in the nineteenth century, between the gods of Asia and Europe. Sometimes the shock of collision has been heard, as when by Act of Legislature, in 1829, Suttee or widow-burning was put down, and, in 1891, the marriage of girls under twelve ; or when by order of the Executive, the sacred privacy of Indian houses was violated in well-meant en-

THE NEW ERA deavours to stay the plague [1895- ], great riots ensuing ; or when an Indian of social standing has joined the Christian Church. At other times, like the tumbling in, unnoticed, of slice upon slice of the bank of a great Indian river flowing through an alluvial plain, opinion has silently altered, and only later observers discover that the old idea has changed. Not a hundred years ago, students of Kayasth (clerk) caste were excluded from the Sanscrit College in Calcutta. Now, without any new ordinance, they are admitted, as among the privileged castes, and the idea of the brotherhood of man has thus made way. The silent invasion is strikingly illustrated in the official Report on Female Education in India, 1892 to 1897. On a map of India within the Report, the places where female education was most advanced were coloured greener according to the degree of advance — surely most inappropriate colouring, though that is not our business. The map showed a strip of the greenest green all round the sea-coast. There the unobserved new influence came in. The Census Report for 1901 showed the same silently obtruding influence from over the sea in the case of the education of males. Many such silent changes might be noted. And

Indian ideas.

yet again, the most diverse ideas may be observed side by side in a strange chequer. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the University of Calcutta accepted an endowment of a lectureship “ to promote Sanscrit learning and Yedantic studies,” any Hindus without distinction of caste being eligible as lecturers ; and then, shortly after, agreed to the request of the first lecturer that none but Hindus be admitted to the exposition of the sacred texts, thus excluding the European heads of the university from a university lecture. Perhaps the lecturer thought himself liberal, for to men like him at the beginning of the century it would have been an offence to read the sacred texts with Sudras or Hindus of humble castes. According to strict Hindu rule, only brahmans can read the sacred books.1

For in all three spheres, social, political, and religious, the advent of the new age implied more or less of a conflict. India has still of her own a social system, political ideas, and religious ideas and ideals. In the Indian social system, caste and the

1 In the Hindu College at Benares, affiliated to Allahabad University, certain orthodox Hindus also objected to sacred texts being read in the presence of European professors and teachers. Think of it, in that college preparing students for ordinary modern degrees ! — Bose, Hindu Civilisation , I. xxxiii.

THE NEW ERA social inferiority of women stand opposed to the freedom of the individual and the equality of the sexes that prevail in Great Britain, at least in greater degree. In the sphere of politics, the absolutism, long familiar to the Indian mind, is the antithesis of the life of a citizen under a limited monarchy, with party government and unfettered political criticism. In the sphere of religion, the hereditary priesthood of India stands over against the British ideal of a clergy trained for their duties and proved in character. The Hindu conception of a religious life as a life of sacrificial offerings and penances, or of ecstasies, or of asceticism, or of sacred study, stands over against the British ideal of religion in daily life and in practical philanthropies.

To the Hindu, the religious mood is that of ecstatic whole-hearted devotion ; the Briton reverences as the religious mood a quiet staying intensity in noble endurance or effort.

The nineteenth century has witnessed a great transition in ideas and a great alteration in the social and political and religious standpoints. It is easy to find manifold witness to the fact from Testimony to

the change

all parts of India. The biographer of the modern in ideas. Indian reformer, Malabari, a Parsee 1 writing of a

1 One of the Zoroastrian Persians who fled to Western India at

Parsee, and representing Western India, is impressed by the singular fate that has destined the far-away British to affect India and her ideals so profoundly. Crossing to the east side of India, we seek a trustworthy witness. The well-known reformer, Keshub Chunder Sen, a Bengali, and representative therefore of Eastern India, declares in a lecture published in 1883 : “Ever since the introduction of British power into India there has been going on a constant upheaval and development of the native mind, . . . whether we look at the mighty political changes which have been wrought by that . . . wonderful administrative machinery which the British Government has set in motion, or whether we analyse those deep national movements of social and moral reform which are being carried on by native reformers and patriots.” All Indian current opinion is unanimous with the Parsee and the Bengali that a great movement is in progress. The drift from the old moorings is a constant theme of discourse.

Let Sir Alfred Lyall, once head of the United Provinces, speak for the most competent European

the beginning of the eighth century a.d. At the census of 1901 they numbered 94,190. They are most numerous in the city of Bombay.

THE NEW ERA observers. “ There may be grounds for anticipating,” he says, “ that a solid universal peace and the impetus given by Europe must together cause such rapid intellectual expansion that India will now be carried swiftly through phases which have occupied long stages in the lifetime of other nations.”1 In another essay, in a more positive mood, he writes of British responsibility for “ great non - Christian populations [in India] whose religious ideas and institutions are being rapidly transformed by English law and morality.” 2 In a third passage he even prophesies rashly : “ The end of simple paganism is not far distant in India.”

Sir George Birdwood has also had a long Indian career, and no one suspects him of pro-British bias — rather the reverse. Yet we find him writing to the Times in 1895 about one of the Indian provinces, as follows : “ The new Bengali language and literature,” he says, “ are the direct products of our Law Courts, particularly the High Court at Calcutta, of Mission schools and newspaper presses and Education Departments, the agents which are everywhere, not in Bengal only, giving if not absolute unity yet community in diversity

1 Asiatic Studies, I.

2 Ibid., i. iii.

to the peoples of British India." The modern literature of Bengal, he goes on to say, is Christian in its teaching ; if not the Christianity of creed and dogma, yet of the mind of Christ.

It is that transition in ideas, that alteration in social, political, and religious standpoint which we are going to trace and illustrate.

CHAPTER II “By the well where the bullocks go

Silent and blind and slow.”

Rudyard Kipling.

But while acknowledging the potent influences at Indian

_ conservatism.

work, and accepting these representative utterances, it may yet be asked by the incredulous —

What of the inherent conservatism, the proverbial tenacity of India ? Is there really any perceptible and significant change to record as the outcome of the influences of the nineteenth century? Well, the expression “ Indian conservatism ” is misleading. There is no Indian conservatism in the sense of a philosophy of politics, of society, or of religion. Indian conservatism — what is it ? To some extent an idealising of the past, the golden age of great law-givers and philosophers and saints. But very much more — mere inertia and is mere

inertia.

torpidity in mind and body, a reluctance to take stock of things, and an instinctive treading in the old paths. “ Via trita, via tuta.” In the path from one Indian village to another may often be observed an inexplicable deviation from the beeline, and then a return to the line again. It is where in some past year some dead animal or some offensive thing has fallen in the path and lain there. Year after year, long after the cause has disappeared, the feet of the villagers continue in that same deviating track. That is in perfect keeping with India. Or — to permit ourselves to follow up another natural sequence — things may quickly begin to fit in with the deviation. Perhaps the first rainy season after the feet of the villagers had been made to step aside, some plant was found in possession of the avoided spot. India-like, its right of possession was unconsciously deferred to. And then the year following, may be, one or other of the sacred fig trees appeared behind the plant, and in a few years starved it out. Ten years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox, or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied upon the tree or some rude symbolic painting put upon it. Then an ascetic comes along and seats himself in its shade, and now, already, a sacred institution has been established that it would raise a riot to try to remove.

Visitors to Allahabad go to see the great fort erected upon the bank of the River Jumna by the Mahomedan emperor, Akbar. One of the sights of the fort, strange to tell, is the underground Hindu temple of “ The Undying Banyan Tree,” to which we descend by a long flight of steps. Such a sacred banyan tree as we have imagined, Akbar found growing there upon the slope of the river bank when he was requiring the ground for his fort. The undying banyan tree is now a stump or log, but it or a predecessor was visited by a Chinese pilgrim to Allahabad in the seventh century a.d. Being very tolerant, instead of cutting down the tree, Akbar built a roof over it and filled up the ground all round to the level he required. And still through the gateway of the fort and down underground, the train of pilgrims passes as of old to where the banyan tree is still declared to grow. Such is Indian conservatism, undeterred by any thought of incongruity. Benares is crowded with examples of the same unconscious tenacity. I have spoken of the ruthless levelling of Hindu temples in Benares in former days to make way for Mahomedan mosques.

Yields before a persistent obtruding influence.

E.g. British influence.

Near the gate of Aurangzeb’s mosque a strange scene meets the eye. Where the road leads to the mosque, and with no Hindu temple nowadays in sight, are seated a number of Hindu ashes-clad ascetics. What are they doing at the entrance to a Mahomedan mosque ? That is where their predecessors used to sit two hundred years ago, before Aurangzeb tore down the holy Hindu temple of Siva and erected the mosque in its stead.

But Indian conservatism is more than an indisposition to effort and change ; for the same reason, it is also an easy adaptation to things as they are found. When a new disturbing influence obtrudes from without, and persistently, it may be easier to give way than to resist. British influence is such a persistent obtrusion. In English literature as taught and read, in Christian standards of conduct, in the English language, and in the modern ideas of government and society, ever presented to the school-going section of the people of India within their own land, there is such a continuous influence from without. The impression of works like Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Idylls of the King, common text-books in colleges, the steady pressure of Acts of the British Government in India, like that raising the marriage age of girls ; the example of men in authority like Lord Curzon, during whose vice-regal tour in South India there were no nautch entertainments ; the necessity of understanding expressions like “ general election ” and “ public spirit,” and of comprehending in some measure the working of local self-government — all such constant pressure must effect a change in the mental standpoint.

The army of Britain in India, representative of the imperial sceptre, has now for many years been gathered into cantonments, and its work is no longer to quell hostilities within India, but only to repel invaders from without. Other British forces, however, penetrating far deeper, working silently and for the most part unobserved, are still in the field all over India, effecting a grander change than the change of outward sovereignty.

“ Ideas rule the world,” and he who impresses his ideas is the real ruler of men.

Telling against Indian conservatism or inertia Indian

conservatism

are other things also besides persistent Western overpowered

. > otherwise.

influences. Many things Western appeal to the natural desire for advancement and comfort, and the adoption of these has often as corollary a change of idea. To take examples without further explanation. The desire for education, the key to advancement in life, has quietly ignored the old orthodox idea that education in Sanscrit and the Sacred Scriptures, i.e. higher education as formerly understood, is the exclusive privilege of certain castes. The very expression “ higher education ” has come to mean a modern English education, not as formerly an education in Sanscrit lore. Had the British Government allowed things to take their course, the still surviving institutions of the old kind for Oriental learning would have been transformed, one and all, into modern schools and colleges. Even in 1824, when Government, then under “ Orientalist ” influence, founded the Sanscrit College in Calcutta for the encouragement of Sanscrit learning, a numerous body of native gentlemen, with the famous Raja Rammohan Roy at their head, petitioned that a college for the study of Western learning might be established instead. For a number of years now, the Sanscrit College, then founded, has actually had fewer pupils on its rolls than it is permitted to admit at a greatly reduced fee.1

Again, the idea of public questions , the idea of the common welfare, has come into being with the nineteenth century, and is quietly repudiating caste and giving to the community a solidarity and a 1 Quinquen. Report on Education in India, 1897-1902.

feeling of solidarity unknown hitherto. Upon one platform now meet, as a matter of course, the native gentlemen of all the castes, when any general grievance is felt or any great occasion falls to be celebrated. The Western custom of public meetings for the discussion of public questions is now an established Indian institution, and daily gives the lie to the idea that there is pollution in bodily contact with a person of lower caste. That a special seat should be reserved for a man because he is a brahman would be scouted. The convenience of travelling by rail or in tram-cars has been even more widely effective in dissolving the idea. And if the advantage or convenience of the new ways can overcome the force of custom, so can the unprofitableness of the old. For illustrations, I pass from the gentlemen who attend public meetings where the speeches are in English, to the less educated and more superstitious and more blindly conservative people. In the Mahratta districts of the Central Provinces, says the Census Report for 1901, in recent years an unavoidable scepticism as to his efficiency has tended to reduce the earnings of the Garpagari or averter of hail from the crops. In Calcutta the same influence has extinguished the trade of supplier of Ganges water. The water taps in the house or on the street are too convenient, and the quality of the water is too manifestly superior for the desecration from the iron pipes to outweigh the advantages. A few years ago, in Darjeeling, north of Bengal, the brahman names upon the signs of the liquor shops were distinctly in the majority. The sacerdotal caste, new style, had appreciated the chances of big profits and shut their eyes to the regulations of caste, which have relegated drinksellers to a very low place in the scale. Brahmans are even said to figure among the contractors who supply beef, flesh of the sacred animal, to the British army in India. “ A curious sign of the changing time,” says Mr. Lockwood Kipling ( Beast and Man in India), “ is the fact that Hindus of good caste, seeing the profit that may be made from leather, are quietly creeping into a business from which they are levitically barred. Money prevails against caste more potently than missionary preaching.”

In this region, where convenience or comfort or personal advancement are concerned, it may safely be asserted that the so-called Indian conservatism has not much resisting power. There, at least, it is found that where there is a will there is a way.1

1 For an apparently contrary view, see Census of India, 1901, Report, p. 430 : “ Railways, which are sometimes represented as a

And there is a higher influence at work dis- The Indian

mind

solving and reconstituting the whole framework awakened, of ideas. Upon the Indian mind, long lain fallow, modern civilisation and modern thought and the fellowship with the world are acting as the quickening rain and sunshine upon the fertile Indian soil. That these and similar obtruding influences have had a transforming effect has already been alleged. But far beyond, in promise at least, is the revived activity of the Indian mind itself. If the age of Elizabeth be the outcome of the stirring of the minds of Englishmen through the discovery of a new world, the multiplication of books, the revival of learning, and the reformation of religion, how shall we measure the effect upon the acute Indian mind of the far more stimulating influences of this Indian Renaissance !

What comparison, for example, can be made between the stimulus of the new learning of the sixteenth century and the stimulus of the first introduction to a modern library? It would be an exaggeration to say that the Indian mind is now showing all its power in response to the

solvent of caste prejudices, have in fact enormously extended the area within which those prejudices reign supreme.” The sentence refers to the influence of the fashion of the higher castes in regard to child marriage and prohibition of the marriage of widows.

stimulus. But it is everywhere active, and in some spheres, as in Religion and Philanthropy, in History, in Archaeology, in Law, in certain Natural Sciences, individuals have already done service to India and contributed to knowledge. Glimpses of great regions, unexplored, in these domains are rousing students to secure for themselves a province. “ More copies of books of poetry, philosophy, law, and religion now issue every year from the press of British India than during any century of native rule.” 1 Of course it would be misleading to ignore the fact that reaction as well as progress has its apostles among the awakened minds of India. Much of the awakened mental activity, also, is spent— much wasted — on political writing and discussion, which is often uninformed by knowledge of present facts and of Indian history. The general poverty also, and the so-called Western desire to “ get on,” prevent many from becoming in any real sense students or thinkers or men of public spirit.

Indian conservatism, therefore, we contend, is not the insurmountable obstacle to new ideas that many superficially deem it to be.

1 Sir W. W. Hunter, England's Work in India.

Chapter III

[. Purusha , the One Spirit , embodied ,]

“Whom gods and holy men made their oblation.

With Purusha as victim, they performed A sacrifice. When they divided him,

How did they cut him up? What was his mouth?

What were his arms? And what, his thighs and feet?

The Brahman was his mouth ; the kingly soldier Was made his arms ; the husbandman, his thighs ;

The servile Sudra issued from his feet.”

From the Rigveda, Mandala x. 90, translated by Sir M. Monier Williams.

New ideas in the social sphere first claim our Caste

represses

attention. The individual and the community individuality, each have rights, says a writer on the philosophy of history, and it is hurtful when the balance is not preserved. If the community be not securely established, the individuals will have no opportunity to develop ; if the individual be not free, the community can have no real greatness. Speaking broadly, when Western social ideas meet Indian, the conflict is between the rights of the individual as in Western civilisation, and the rights of the community or society as in the Indian. India stands for the statical social forces, modern Europe for the dynamical and individualistic. In India, as in France before the Revolution, certain established usages are prejudicially affecting the progress of the individual, fettering him in many ways. I refer to caste, the denial of the brotherhood of mankind, the artificial barricading of class from class, the sacrifice of the individual to his class — -condemned by native reformers like Ramananda, Kabir, Nanak, and Chaitanya long before the advent of European ideas. Whatever the origin or original advantages of the caste system, it has long operated to repress individuality.1 It is a vast boycotting agency ready to hand to crush social non-conformity.2 One can easily understand that if society is rigidly organised for certain social necessities (marriage for example) into a number of mutually exclusive sets or circles, admission to all of which is by birth only, an individual cast out from any set must

1 The manifold origins of castes are fully discussed in the newest lights in the Census of India Report, 1901.

2 Miss Noble [Sister Nivedita], finds herein an apology for caste. “The power of the individual to advance is by this means kept strictly in ratio to the thinking of the society in which he lives.” (The Web of Indian Life , p. 145.)

perish. No one will eat with him, no one will intermarry with him or his sons and daughters. It is into such a society that modern social ideas have been sown, the ideas let us say of John Stuart Mill’s book, On Liberty — the individual's liberty, that is to say — which used to be a common university text-book in India.

Besides setting the community too much above the individual, the caste system is faulty in presenting to the Indian mind an imperfect idea of the community. The caste is the natural limit to one’s interest and consciousness of fellowship, to the exclusion of the larger community. According to Raja Rammohan Roy, writing in 1824, the caste divisions are 11 as destructive of national union as of social enjoyment.” In Modern India, Sir Monier Williams expresses himself similarly. Caste “ tends to split up the social fabric into numerous independent communities, and to prevent all national and patriotic combinations.” Too much, however, may be made of this, for the practical solidarity of Hinduism, in spite of caste divisions, is one of the most striking of social phenomena in India. Whatever may have brought it about, the solidarity of Hinduism is an undeniable fact. The supremacy of the priestly caste

Caste suggests an imperfect idea of the community.

Nevertheless, a practical solidarity in Hinduism.

over all may have been a bond of union, as likewise the necessity of all castes to employ the priests, for the Jewish ritual and the tribe of Levi were the bonds of union among the twelve tribes of Israel. Sir Alfred Lyall virtually defines Hinduism as the employment of brahman priests, and it is the adoption of brahmans as celebrants in social and religious ceremonies that marks the passing over of a non- Hindu community into Hinduism. It is thus it becomes a new Hindu caste.1 Then, uniting further the mutually exclusive castes, there are the common heritages, actual or adopted, of traditions and sacred books, and the common national epics of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. The cause of the solidarity is not a common creed, as we shall see when we reach the consideration of new religious ideas.

New ideas If Hinduism as a social system is to be moved

opposed to

caste, namely, by the modern spirit, we may look tor movement

individual

liberty and in the direction of freedom of individual action,

nationality.

that is, the loosening of caste ; and we may look for larger ideas of nationality and citizenship,

1 Sir A. Lyall, Asiatic Studies, I. v. : “A man is not a Hindu because he inhabits India or belongs to any particular race or state, but because he is a Brahmanist.” Similarly Census of India, 1901, Report, p. 360 : “ The most obvious characteristics of the ordinary Hindu are his acceptance of the Brahmanical supremacy and of the caste system.”

superseding to some extent the idea of caste. As is not infrequent in India, Government pointed out the way for public opinion. In 1831 the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, issued his fiat that no native be debarred from office on account of caste, creed, or race, and that a son who had left his father’s religion did not thereby forfeit his inheritance.