HINDU PHILOSOPHY
The barrenness of Hinduism. _The Golden Threshold_; its
authoress--her poetry; the four kinds of religion; her
motherly instincts; her letters; her father; her search for
beauty; her portrait. Rarity of happy Hindu faces. The
picture of "Jerome."
People sometimes say, when asking about Hinduism, "Surely if the
idolatry, and folly, and indecency, which we know exists in the
religion as it now is could be cleared away, we should find remaining
some deep philosophic thoughts and mystical poetical fancies which we
might admire?"
The reply to this question is that, if Hinduism was subjected to this
purging process, what would be left would be practically nothing at
all. This can be strikingly illustrated in the following way.
An Indian lady, Mrs Sarojini Naidu, has published a little volume of
poems called _The Golden Threshold_. There is an introduction to the
book by Mr Arthur Symons, giving a few particulars of the life of the
authoress. She is apparently a thoroughgoing Hindu, although one of
sufficient independence of character to marry another Hindu who was
not a Brahmin like herself, and on that account meeting with obloquy
from her own people. She is evidently a highly cultivated lady,
knowing English perfectly. But though she has lived in England, and
travelled much, there is nothing to indicate that she has been touched
in any way by Christianity. She has had, therefore, only Hinduism from
which to get poetic thoughts connected with religion. She is evidently
a true poet, and if there had been anything in the religion capable of
suggesting poetic ideas she would have certainly found it. She has
undoubtedly a mind of great refinement, so that all that is otherwise
in connection with Hinduism has to be eliminated from the field in
which she could gather poetic thought. What, then, is the result?
While there is a distinct charm in the rhythm of her verses, their
utter emptiness makes them of no real value. The only poem, curiously
enough, in which a deeper note is struck is when she describes the
four kinds of religion which flourish under the kindly rule of H.H.
the Nizam of Hyderabad: the Mohammedan, the Hindu, the Parsee, and the
Christian. The verse is as follows:--
"The votaries of the Prophet's faith,
Of whom you are the crown and chief;
And they who bear on Vedic brows
Their mystic symbols of belief;
And they who worshipping the sun,
Fled o'er the old Iranian sea;
And they who bow to Him who trod
The midnight waves of Galilee."
Each religion is happily touched with a delicate hand. To get a
suitable idea concerning each into a couple of lines of real poetry
shows a gifted mind, and the two last lines are specially happy. (The
capital letter in the pronoun is so printed in the book.) Her mind
coming thus into brief contact with higher and truer things, she rises
in the concluding verse to a kind of benediction on this beneficent
Mohammedan ruler, which almost approaches the nature of a prayer:--
"God give you joy, God give you grace,
To shield the truth and smite the wrong,
To honour Virtue, Valour, Worth,
To cherish faith and foster song.
Your name within a nation's prayer,
Your music on a nation's tongue."
The only other poem which rises above the mere commonplace is that in
which Queen Gulnaar expresses the unsatisfied condition of her heart
because she has no rival to her beauty, and with none to envy, life
has no savour. Although seven beautiful brides are sent for and
brought before her, she remains without a rival. Finally, with
delight, she finds what she sought for in her own little two-year-old
daughter. But it was not her religion which supplied the poetess with
this pretty fancy. It arose out of her own motherly instincts, which
amongst Easterns are charmingly dominant.
There are in the Introduction some extracts from Mrs Naidu's letters
which show that if there was anyone who might have been expected to
discover anything beautiful in Hinduism, or suggestive of true
philosophy, or capable of being idealised in any way, she was the
person who would have done so. She says herself: "My ancestors for
thousands of years have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves,
great dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer
himself, a great dreamer.... I suppose in the whole of India there are
few men whose learning is greater than his.... He holds huge courts
every day in his garden, of the learned men of all religions. Rajahs
and beggars and saints, and downright villains all delightfully mixed
up. And then his alchemy!... But this alchemy is only the material
counterpart of a poet's craving for beauty, the eternal beauty....
What in my father is the genius of curiosity, is in me the desire for
beauty."
She is described as being the embodiment of the wisdom of the East,
her intellectual development such as to make her a wise counsellor,
combined with "passionate tranquillity of mind."
Yet with this long ancestry of dreamers, and her own intellectual
capacity, and her poetic craving to find beauty, which even Nature did
not satisfy (because what is Nature without Nature's God?), she
obviously finds Hinduism completely barren of what she was yearning
for, and apparently not having searched for it anywhere else except in
Nature, she never comes at it at all. She appears to have been struck
by something in the faces of the monks that she saw in Italy, and she
"at one moment longs to attain to their peace by renunciation." But as
the secret of their peace was not known to her, it only makes her long
for Nirvana, or final nothingness.
Her portrait at the beginning of the book represents a touching type
of face which one meets with not unfrequently in India. The expression
is dull and lifeless. There is none of the light which shines out of
the face of a Christian Indian. But there is at the same time an
expression of wistful longing for that hidden treasure which Hinduism
could not give her, even when purged of its defilements. The result of
which is, that her poetic mind has had to waste itself upon such
themes as nightfall at Hyderabad, or the alabaster box in which she
treasures her spices, or the bride weeping because her lord is dead.
It is no exaggeration to say that a really happy-looking Hindu is a
rare sight, even when on pleasure bent. Childhood in the Hindu world
has its flashes of fun, but except in the passing excitement of some
romping game, the faces of the children are usually as dull as those
of their elders. Two Hindu boys were looking at the picture in the
story-book of "Jerome, the Brahmin boy," in which the photographs
taken on his first arrival is reproduced, showing his Hindu pigtail,
and the paint marks on his forehead, and his sacred thread. Contrasted
with this is the photograph taken soon after his baptism. I do not
suppose that the boys understood the full significance of the
pictures, and this made the comment of one of them the more valuable.
"There is a great difference," he said, "between these two pictures.
In the first the boy has a very bad face. But in the other picture it
is very good." An English boy, writing in a letter on the subject of
the same picture, says of Jerome as a Christian, "He looks twice as
happy as when he was a heathen."