Social ideals in India

Preface

Men and women of goodwill everywhere are engrossed in the tasks of social reconstruction. We live in days when the whole fabric of European society has been shaken so severely that many are tempted to doubt whether it may not dissolve in chaos. There can be little doubt that in our own, as in other countries, the whole social order is destined to undergo a drastic change, and the quality of the new order will depend upon the ideals and the courage of those who labour at the making of it. The lapse of a few years has translated us from the seemingly unshakable calm of the Victorian time to a new era when all things are being questioned and nothing is taken for granted. At a time like this the service of the community appeals to every man and woman of worthy spirit as the supreme call.

In all this great work of social renewal, the principles, the example, and the spirit of Jesus Christ must be to Christians the supreme guide, and most enthusiasts for social renewal, whatever may be their attitude towards the Church as an organized community, do in fact admit the great importance of the Christian ideal and standard. Yet there are comparatively few people, whether within or without the pale of the Church, who seem to realize the bearing of the world-wide missionary work of Christianity upon this question. We are all becoming accustomed to the thought that nations, like individuals, are members one of another. Social Reconstruction and the League of Nations are not only two current phrases ; they are two intimately related ideas. Nevertheless, the work of the Christian Church in building up a new social order throughout the world is rarely taken into the view even of those who have realized that human betterment and human brotherhood must be international if they are to have any chance at all.

Perhaps this is because in the mind of the average man “ foreign missions ” connotes the evangelizing of individuals and nothing more. He has never understood, probably he has never been told, that the missionary enterprise, looked at broadly, is the greatest influence working in the

VI world to-day for the uplifting of oppressed humanity and the creating of true human fellowship. The work of individual evangelism must always be of prime importance to the missionary, but just because the individual lives in a society, the effects of Christianity must be not individual only, but social also. Of the truth of this no better proof is needed than a study of the work of foreign missions.

The purpose of this book is to show some aspects of the social working of Christianity in India, and I hope that what is told here may help some readers to see the work of missions in a new light.

My own experience of India is no more than could be gained in a tour of one year’s duration, with the help of numerous friends, Indian and European, who laid their experience and insight at my disposal. Everyone who goes to India must be aware of the derision with which “ another globe-trotter’s book on India ” is greeted, and I am well aware that I have laid myself open to this gibe. I can only plead that I have relied at every point either upon acknowledged authorities or upon the guidance and help of friends whose judgment and knowledge is beyond criticism ; and that the aspect of Indian Christianity which I have tried to describe seemed to need emphasizing. While I have to thank a great number of friends in India for their help, I do not wish to make any one else responsible for what is written.

I have to pay special thanks to the Y.M.C.A. of India and Ceylon for inviting me to go to India, and enabling me to see not only their own remarkable work but many other sides of Indian life ; to Mr K. T. Paul, National Secretaty of the Indian Y.M.C.A., for his friendship and inspiration ; to Dr J. N. Farquhar for his help and advice, especially on matters relating to Hinduism ; to Miss Ovenden of the United Council for Missionary Education for assistance in seeing the book through the press and for preparing the Index ; and to my wife for her constant help and guidance.

W. P.

London, June 1919.

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I

Chapter I The Religious Basis Of Indian Society : Caste

The first impression left on the European who travels about India is that he has come to a country where religion is very much in evidence. He will never be far from temple or mosque or wayside shrine ; he will witness the ritual washings in tank and river, in which not the few only, but the mass of the people engage ; in the south especially he will see sect marks on almost every forehead ; and if he is lucky he may behold one of the great religious fairs or melas, where thousands of ascetics are to be found, and people have come together in hundreds of thousands or even in millions. If he has any sympathy and imagination, he will find that all this absorption in religious observance has a fascination and appeal from which he will not readily escape. The magical spell which an Eastern country lays upon the traveller from the West is due, in part at least, to this apparently engrossing interest in the things of religion. It is so different from the spirit which has ruled the externals of his own native society, especially if he be a citizen of an Anglo-Saxon country, where the traditions of Protestantism and the effects of industrialism have kept religion decently in its place, and restrained any unseemly obtrusiveness. If he were asked to name any great concourse of his own countrymen to which he would direct a visitor who desired to gain some insight into the spirit of England, he might perhaps mention Epsom on Derby Day or Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, but he would hardly point to the Keswick Convention or the Church Congress ! Yet the Kumbk mela at Allahabad, where two or three million people gather to bathe in the sacred waters where Ganges and Jumna meet, or any one of the hundreds of smaller melas up and down India, will afford an opportunity of seeing Indian life which no other gatherings could give, and these melas are religious gatherings. Small wonder that such a traveller is apt to fall down in ecstasy before the spiritual East ” and decry the materialism of Western lands !

Such a judgment would be superficial. A religion which permeates every action of life may be no more truly spiritual ” than one which is less outwardly visible. He would be a rash man who would affirm spirituality ” to be the peculiar endowment of any one nation or race of men. It is a rare thing at the best ; and East and West alike have proved that men may be much occupied with religion and very little occupied with the things of the spirit. Yet the talk about the spiritual East ” conceals a fact of the greatest importance to all who seek to understand India. Whether or not India is more ^^spiritual” than other countries, certainly her society is based on religious principles and impregnated with religious ideas. All the social problems of India can be traced, and in most cases traced immediately, to religious causes and conditions. To a degree which is found in no Western land, Indian society is a religious organism, and the secret of its strength and weakness, its hope and its peril, is to be found in religion.

Hinduism a Social System. — Hinduism itself is as much a social system as a religion. Within the fold of Hinduism may be found men and women professing religious views so widely divergent as to be almost hostile. The term ‘ Hindu ’

may include the cultured student of the Indian philosophical classics, the husbandman in the country village worshipping Rama or Siva or some other of the great gods, or the outcaste in his miserable hovel with his crude worship of stones and fear of devils. It is easy to find Hindus who believe in one God, or in many gods ; who believe that all that exists is God, or who deny the existence of God altogether. Not only are they Hindus, but they are stamped with that unmistakable seal which marks the Hindu so clearly. There are Hindu sects which profess clearly defined beliefs, and which are as distinct from one another as the churches of the West, but in Hinduism as a whole it would be hard to find any single doctrine or precept of which it could be said without reservation that to be a Hindu a man must believe this.^

While comprising such wide extremes and lacking the definition which is to be seen in those religions, such as Christianity and Islam, which have founders, Hinduism is very far from being a vague and nebulous influence. As a social system rooted in religious ideas it is immensely powerful. It may be doubted if any stronger and more durable social fabric has ever been constructed by man than the social system of Hindu India. The history of India records invasion after invasion, but the people remained unchanged. The influence of the Greek invaders under Alexander was short lived, and although Greek culture, two or three centuries later, had a widespread effect, as is shown by the sculptures of North India, yet on the social system of India the Greeks seem to have had no influence at all. Mohammedan conquerors swept over India time and again, and eventually formed a mighty empire, distinguished by culture and social development, as well as by military force. Yet

^ The doctrine of the transmigration of souls under the law of Karma might perhaps be excepted as the one religious idea in which, in some form, every Hindu believes.

India remained essentially unchanged. Certain portions of 1 India became largely Moslem, and a permanent Moslem element took its place in the Indian population, but on Hindu India little effect was created — an amazing contrast to the manner in which Moslem institutions were planted all over the Near East to the virtual obliteration of the more ancient cultures.

The immense resisting power of Hinduism Hes, therefore, not in the clearness, simplicity, and permanence of its doctrines, but in a social system rooted in certain religious principles, and maintained in full vigour even where those principles are half-understood, forgotten, or denied. We have now to examine some of the characteristics of thi^ society, and attention will be concentrated on two questions, the question of caste and the question of woman and the family.

The Origin of Caste. — What is caste ? Very different answers are given to this question. A Territorial soldier in India was heard to remark that he couldn’t see that this caste they talk about was any different from class-distinctions at home,” and undoubtedly many Indians would say that he was right. On the other hand, many readers of missionary books know of caste only as a baleful influence, which has lain for centuries like a pall on India’s life, a thing wholly and essentially evil. Which of these estimates is true, or does the truth lie somewhere between them ?

The precise date at which caste took its present form is doubtful. Probably the Christian era might be taken as a mean date. The institution itself, however, was in process of formation for centuries before Christ. When the fairskinned Aryan invaders came from the north-west to the plains of Hindustan, they found there a people darkerskinned than themselves, professing a different faith and marked by different social customs. The Aryans themselves brought with them a society roughly divided into nobles, priests, and commonalty. The hymns which have come down to us from them show that a natural class-division existed among them, and that the priestly class tended to become very clearly marked off, owing to its increase in culture, the progress of ritual, and the establishment of schools for training young priests. Of caste in the modem sense, however, there is in the earliest hymns (or Vedas) nothing, and even in the later Vedas the developed idea of caste is not yet found.

The contact of these tall and fair Aryan invaders with the dark-skinned, short, aboriginal inhabitants of India produced a very difficult problem. The two groups were very different, not only in race and colour, but also in manners and customs. The upper class of the Aryans could not tolerate either the personal habits or the gross superstition of the aboriginals ; intermarriage with them was impossible, even social intercourse was difficult. The conquerors adopted the plan of segregating the Aryan element from the aboriginal tribes, and at the same time allowing the old tribal divisions among the aboriginals to remain. The upper class of the Aryans did maintain this separation with a measure of success, but the lower classes must have intermarried freely with the inhabitants of the country, as the racial inter-mixture of modem India makes manifest. The aboriginals, however, were not all embraced in the Aryan society as a separate group, or series of groups. Those of them whose habits and customs were most primitive, and to the Aryan most repulsive, were left outside the pale, and there were many groups of aborigines who lived in secluded places, to whom the Hindu influence never reached at all, and they too remained outside the Hindu society. In these ways grew up the outcastes or untouchables of India to-day.

The stages by which all this came about were very gradual.

The earliest Vedas do not reveal the existence of caste; even after it had been developed, it remained more or less fluid for centuries, and not until about the Christian era did it settle down into its present rigidity. The caste-scheme as eventually framed is usually represented thus : —

1. Brahmans, priests.

4. Sudras, servants.

5. Panchamas (fifth-class men), outcastes.

Of these the first three represent the pure Aryan stock, although even among them there has been a considerable racial mixture. They are the twice-born ” castes, who wear the sacred thread, and to whom the sacred learning is open. The fourth represents the aborigines who entered the Aryan community. They are not twice-born,” but they are allowed to enter the temples. The fifth represents the mass who remained outside the religious community. This five-fold division, however, is of little use to a student of Indian castes to-day. The tendency to divide into closed groups, which produced caste, worked out into an immense number of subdivisions, until the number of castes and sub-castes returned at the last census is between two and three thousand. In the north it is not easy to fit these divisions into the five-fold scheme. The three twice-born castes are plainly evident, but below them there is a medley of castes which it is impossible to divide with any assurance into Sudra and Panchama. In the south there are many Brahmans, but few of the Kshatriya and Vaisya castes, whereas the Panchamas (outcastes) are clearly marked, and the population may be easily divided into Brahmans, Sudras, and Panchamas.

So far, then, we find caste to be a product of several different forces. Partly it is the result of difference in race, partly it corresponds to the natural divisions between tribes, and partly it represents the differences in the types of work performed by different sections of the community. We have not yet, however, touched on the point wherein caste differs from class-distinction on the one hand, and from ordinary tribal grouping on the other. This point is the relation of caste to the doctrine of Karma and transmigration.

The Religious Basis of Caste. — There is not space here to develop the doctrine of Karma, which is of cardinal importance to Indian thought. Briefly, it is the theory that all souls wander from body to body through an endless series of incarnations, and that each incarnation and everything in it is determined by the actions {Karma) of the soul in the preceding series of lives. Thus the condition of life into which a man is bom, the actions he performs, and everything about him, are the pre-determined result of a long chain of previous lives.

The relation of this theory to caste is obvious. A man is a Brahman, not because in this life he has shown himself to possess spiritual qualities, but because of spirituality in a previous existence which has prepared him to be a Brahman now. If he is a Kshatriya, that is evidence that he was in a previous existence a little less spiritual than if he had been bom a Brahman. If he is an outcaste, he must be expiating some very serious sin or sins committed in a previous birth. These are few words to describe a famous theory, but here we are interested in this doctrine from one point of view only. When a man’s caste is believed to be the result of Karma, of action in previous births, then it is clear that his “ caste is held to be an infallible index of the state of his soul.” ^

It is easy to see the power lent to the institution of caste by the support of this far-reaching religious belief. The rules of caste are to be observed not only because they are of hallowed antiquity, but because the loss of caste is the loss of character.

^ Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism, p. 159.

This explains some of the things one sees in India. An Indian friend told the writer that he had seen a Brahman, almost dying of thirst, refuse, with a gesture of mingled horror and contempt, water offered to him by an untouchable.” There is something more than inherited custom here. Such an action is dictated not by pride only but by religious scrupulousness. It is believed with perfect sincerity that upon such actions and such scrupulousness depends the elevation or degradation of the soul. Nothing less compelling than religious hope and fear could have sustained the mighty system of caste for so many centuries. Even where belief in its religious basis is weakening or has disappeared, as is happening to-day among the mass of educated Hindus, the accumulated power of caste dies hard, and men do not readily free themselves from the thraldom of a system which has held their forefathers for ages in an unquestioned allegiance.

The Value of Caste. — Can we estimate the meaning and value of caste to-day ? Undoubtedly it was at the time of its adoption a truly noble conception, far in advance of any social system which that age knew or could have applied to the problems of the time. The higher (Aryan) civilization was secured and conserved, while the lower was neither crushed nor forcibly Aryanized, but included within the Aryan system. The whole Indian people, with its great variety of types and cultures, was united by caste in the sense that a single ordered system included the whole. The divers elements in society were held apart, it is true, but they were also held together as parts of a whole, related to one another. Thus the Indian people withstood invaders, not by force of arms so much as by the silent resistance of a powerful social system, and thus down the centuries the Hindu tradition was passed on. Further, the confining of certain occupations to certain castes meant that the caste performed something of the functions of a trade-guild in mediaeval Europe ; manual skill was preserved, division of labour secured, and wages regulated.

Even to-day the most zealous reformer can hardly deny some merits to caste. There is among members of a caste, we are told, enough sense of brotherhood to ensure that the poorer will be looked after, and no poor law ” is needed. Caste, moreover, has nothing directly to do with wealth, and the same caste includes people of widely different worldly condition. There is a certain power about a social institution which absolutely denies that worldly prosperity is the supreme human consideration. If only the qualification for high caste were a moral qualification, caste would be a magnificent testimony to the fact that neither wealth nor learning nor earthly power constitute true nobility.

The Defects of Caste. — Yet among reforming Hindus to-day caste finds few defenders, and nothing harder or sterner could be said of it than is said continually by men who, while remaining Hindus, realize that caste is the greatest enemy of Indian progress and liberation. It is flatly impossible to defend caste to-day on any rational ground, and where enlightened men defend it, they will be found, on being pressed in argument, to be defending not the caste that reigns in twentieth-century India, but an idealized version of it, as it existed, or as they conceive it to have existed, many centuries ago.

What are the defects inherent in the caste system ? Hindu society is now divided into nearly three thousand castes and sub-castes. A man . must not marry outside his caste, frequently not outside his sub-caste. He may not eat with, nor receive water from^ a member of a lower caste. What hope is there of a healthy society, a unified national life, while such a system continues ? The people are divided into comparatively small groups ; inter-dining and intermarriage

B lO are in strict orthodoxy confined to those groups, and social and national unity are rendered totally impossible until the system is undermined and overthrown.

The system of caste, moreover, has meant an incalculable loss to India of the services and ability of her ablest sons. The boy has been compelled to follow in his father’s footsteps and adopt his caste trade or occupation. The potter or tinsmith you see working at his craft in the village street is performing his caste work. His father did the same work before him, and his sons will do it after him. It is better, one of the most popular of the sacred books declares,^ to perform one’s own caste-work badly than the work of some other caste well. But Nature does not work in this way. She scatters her endowments more widely and with a less narrow discrimination. Yet the low-caste boy has been denied learning, the Brahman boy with a knack for handicraft compelled to take up the path of literary study, because caste demands it. Whatever can be said of the loss of power to England entailed by her failure to provide an adequate education for the sons of the poor can be said tenfold of India, for there rich and poor, high-caste and low-caste, have their task in life allotted. Educated men are to some extent breaking through these restrictions, as will be shown later, but for the mass of the people the restrictions hold, with variations in different parts of the country. It would not be unfair to attribute part at least of the lethargy and enslavement to routine, which so many observers find in the Indian, to his confinement to an ancestral task. “ He has been,” says Dr Farquhar, “ at a single job for two thousand years.” ^

Further, caste is a fatal obstacle to the clear realization of moral standards, such at least as can be justified at the bar of enlightened conscience. Caste regulations are minute and

^ Bhagavad-gita, xviii. 45, 47.

2 Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism^ p. 185,

II careful, but they touch only ceremonial purity. Moral purity is outside their range. An adulterer does not break caste by his sin, but a Brahman who accepts water from an outcaste contracts grave spiritual pollution. Caste even acts as a restraint upon unselfish service. An outcaste woman, taken ill in the street of an Indian town, was left helpless and untended, until a couple of Indian Christians came and carried her away. No one else would touch her : it would be defiling. To be sure, our own society, which punishes a man more severely for a comparatively small theft than for ill-treating children, is not innocent of the subver^on of moral values. Yet the separation of legal morality and personal purity has never been carried as far as it is carried in caste.

The Challenge of the Outcaste. — But the greatest charge that can be made against caste is the state of the outcastes. Fifty-three million people in India come into the category of j outcaste or untouchable. The historical reasons for this ! have been briefly mentioned above, but no justification can I be offered for the system which has reduced these people to their present level and is keeping them there. Strictly speaking, the outcaste is outside the Hindu fold. He is forbidden access to the temple ; he may not marry into any caste family nor eat nor hold social intercourse with them ; he is confined to the ceremonially defiling trades and occupations, such as scavenging or handling the skins of dead animals. He is

untouchable ” and even unapproachable.” In South India especially, where on the whole Hindu orthodoxy is most rigid, this ban of untouchability is a very real thing. A Hindu reformer, writing to a daily paper in denunciation of caste, stated that “ in Cochin a Yayar can pollute a man of a higher caste only by touching him. The Kammalan group — that is, masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and leather-workers — pollute at twenty-four feet, toddy-drawers at thirty-six feet, Pulayan or Cheruman cultivators at forty-eight feet, and Pariahs, who eat beef, at sixty -four feet. Fancy one Englishman polluting another at sixty -four feet ! ” ^ The outcastes live in their own quarter outside the caste village, usually in conditions of extreme destitution. The pay they are able to earn, whether on the fields or at their miserable crafts, is a mere pittance, at the most three or four pence a day. Yet they are in many places the backbone of the agricultural system, and their labour is absolutely necessary to their masters and superiors. They are practically all illiterate, and great objection has been raised by caste people to outcaste children being allowed to enter a school where caste children are taught. Their religion has nothing whatever to do with the Hinduism of the books. It is usually little more than demonworship. A couple of stones set on end smeared with red ochre, or crude images of the local demon-goddess are their objects of worship. The religious atmosphere of the outcaste is mainly one of fear. The world is filled with capricious spirits, who can do harm to those with whom they are displeased. The most that man can hope for is to appease them, so that cattle and crops may escape disease and blight.

Only the most rigidly orthodox Hindu will defend this state * of things. The various reforming sects, the Arya Samaj in North India, the Brahma Samaj in Bengal, and similar bodies have made efforts to better the lot of the outcaste socially and materially, and even to give him some kind of status within Hinduism. On the whole, the results of their efforts have been poor. Many men can be found to deplore the lot of the outcaste and inveigh against the folly of the

untouchability ” idea, but few will themselves take up the labour of reform and personal service.

^ Quoted from an article in the Statesman, Calcutta.

Apart from Christian efforts there will be found to be two types of attitude among Indian reformers to this question. There is the thorough-going criticism of the few ardent souls, nearly always influenced by Christian ideas, who will go the whole way and abolish the caste system and untouchability ” with it. Their criticism is really Christian criticism, and is in principle destructive of Hinduism, as orthodox Hindus frequently point out. There is, secondly, the type of reformer who clings to orthodox Hinduism, but wishes to retain what he regards as the essentials of caste, while removing the non-essentials. The Depressed Classes Mission received the following message last year (1918) from His Holiness the Jagadguru Shri Shankaracharya,a pillar of Hindu orthodoxy, and an able man, awake to the challenging nature of the outcaste problem : ‘‘I need hardly assure you of my sympathy, but I should exhort you not to be so far carried away by your enthusiasm as to ignore our ancient teaching. . . . Certain rules of purity and of strict exclusion of all contaminating influences are indispensable in the case of those who follow a rigid course of discipline. . . . Everyone undertaking to go through a period or whole life of religious training must strictly observe these restrictions, and . . . must carefully keep himself in the finest environment possible, physically, mentally, and morally. But . . . those who follow such a life are few. In the case of others, great latitude has always been allowed, nor must we forget the changed national environment in which we live in these days. ... A man who does not devote himself entirely to spiritual discipline, who is ready to extend social amenities to a Mussulman or Christian, commits almost a sin when he shuns a depressed Hindu. ... It is high time that the high-class Hindus begin to recognize their brothers in the depressed classes. . . .” The message, from which only a part has been quoted, was moderate in tone, and intended as encouragement to the Depressed Classes Mission. Certainly it would be regarded as liberal by orthodox Hindus, and it does urge that the average Hindu should give up the untouchability ” dogma. The reader must judge whether this spirit, which forbids contact with the outcaste to the man who is really making a life-study of religion, and permits it to the more secular-minded, is likely to inspire the moral energy needed if this great and crying need is to be met from within Hinduism. Not so did Wilberforce labour for the slaves, or Josephine Butler for the prostitute. They were lighted on their way by the very flame of religion itself ; they loved the downtrodden because Christ had loved them.