THE EDUCATED HINDU
Education divorced from religion. Its effects on character;
instance of this in Babaji. Wealth will not purchase social
position. The new bungalow. Quarrels with the contractor.
Indians nervous about thieves. Night raids. Robberies
amongst plague refugees. Skilful thieves. Babaji's
inconsistency; removing his neighbour's landmark. The future
of the bungalow. Airy houses unpopular. Preference for
apparent discomfort.
There are many opportunities in India of studying the effect on
character of education when divorced from religion. The effect on a
few has been that the cultivation of their mental gifts in secular
study has helped them to understand and assimilate Christian truth.
Others, with a natural propensity for evil, have had their capacities
for mischief quickened by the varied knowledge which they acquired.
But with the vast majority of Indians, and more especially Hindus,
English secular education does not alter their character, and except
for the assumption of a few European externals, they remain exactly
the same as they were before. Even many of those who go to England, if
they do not take up some definite profession on their return, drop
back so entirely into their former manner of life that you would
hardly suppose it credible that they had ever been out of their own
country.
If you live amongst the people you will frequently meet with examples
of this kind of thing. And it should be observed that it is generally
in a man's ordinary everyday life that his real nature comes out. Here
is an illustration:--A Hindu, who was by caste a brass-worker, had
been for some years in the important position of assistant collector.
His father having been a good English scholar and a great reader of
books, both in that language and in Marathi, had given his son an
education which enabled him to rise to the responsible post which he
ultimately filled. He, in his turn, educated his sons carefully, and
they knew English well. The family possessed houses and land, so that,
together with the father's official income, they were well off.
But in India wealth will not purchase social position, as it does to
some degree in the West. Money is not powerful enough to override
caste. The members of this family, whom we will call Babaji, did their
best to pose as high-caste people, and were ready to dispense lavish
hospitality if it would have been accepted; but Brahmins ignored them,
and they never seemed to associate on equal terms with anyone except
members of their own caste, or those below it.
When the father of the family retired on his pension, he returned to
his own district and prepared to settle down. Besides a house in the
city, they had a sufficiently habitable one in a large garden in a
village in the Poona district. But the old grandfather had died in
this country house, and was said to haunt it. Servants refused to stay
there, and none of the family would live there. So they pulled it down
and prepared to build a new house in another garden.
I had an opportunity of watching the whole progress of this project,
and it gave me a good deal of insight into the character that Hinduism
creates. Babaji having seen something of English ways during his term
of office as collector, prepared to build the sort of house which
would suit an Englishman. It was conveniently planned, and had many
doors and windows and large verandahs. He also employed a contractor
of some repute. The house was quickly built, and would have been an
excellent one in all respects but for certain economies which Babaji
insisted on, to the great indignation of the contractor. He bought a
set of old doors and windows from a house in Bombay which was being
pulled down, and had them adapted to his new bungalow. And having been
accustomed to deal with petty contractors, with whom it is customary
to carry on a perpetual war of words, he tried the same plan with his
present builder, and whenever he came to inspect, railed at him for
faulty work and bad materials.
I asked him why he did this, when there was nothing to justify his
complaints. He said that it was the only way of keeping men up to
their work. There is also an underlying idea that if the cry of faulty
construction is uttered with sufficient persistency, it will give an
excuse for cutting down the final bill. Babaji made an effort in this
direction also, but the contractor said that unless he got his money
he should take the matter into court, and refused to have anything
more to do with the job. After much fierce wrangling, the latter came
triumphantly one day to show me the cheque which Babaji had just
written for him.
So Babaji was left to finish off his bungalow in his own way, and I
think that on the whole he was rather glad, because he could now do
things more in accordance with his own ideas. The English type of
bungalow is not really suited to Indian taste. A dark, windowless
house with an earthen floor is where the ordinary Indian feels most at
home. The first thing that Babaji did when left to himself was to put
iron bars to the windows to keep out thieves, and to close in the
fronts of his verandahs in the same way, so that they looked like
cages in the Zoological Gardens. Most Indians live in constant dread
of nocturnal thieves, and their fear is not entirely without
justification. In years gone by the raids made by robbers in villages
were sufficiently alarming. These depredators went to great lengths in
their efforts to induce women to declare where their gold and silver
ornaments were hidden. The threat to cut off their nose was not an
empty one, if we can trust the statement that in those days the sight
of a woman thus disfigured was not uncommon.
More efficient police supervision has done much to prevent these
organised raids, although they are still not unknown. But ordinary
night thieves are apt to come along wherever they think there is
plunder, and this type of Indian thief is as skilful in reality as he
is proverbially said to be. The habit of hiding money, instead of
investing it usefully, or the common custom of turning it into
ornaments for women, makes the visit of a thief to the house of a
well-to-do Indian likely to be lucrative.
When people moved out from the city because of plague and camped in
the surrounding villages, they were much troubled by thieves. The
refugees were afraid to leave their valuables in their shut-up homes
in the city, lest the house should be raided in their absence; and
yet, lodging in tents and frail huts, it was very difficult to
circumvent the robbers. Many people camped as close as they could get
to the Mission settlement at Yerandawana, under the idea that thieves
avoid the neighbourhood of Europeans. Nevertheless an extraordinarily
clever robbery took place in a hut exactly opposite the Mission
gateway. This hut was built of split bamboos tied to a wooden
framework and then plastered with mud. A house of this kind,
carefully put together, affords good shelter, and when the mud peels
off it can easily be repaired. A widow with her sister and little
daughter lived in this shelter during plague time. Their fortunes were
invested in the precarious form of personal jewellery. At night these
ornaments were put into two boxes, which they placed under the cot on
which one of the women slept, in order, as they thought, to be quite
secure against thieves. In spite of this precaution they woke up one
morning to find their treasure gone. Thieves had dug under the walls
of the house and had made an opening large enough to creep through.
How they were able to do this without waking the inmates, and how they
took the boxes from under the bed and got away with them unobserved, a
light having been kept burning in the room, is one of the mysteries of
Indian crime. The boxes were found, broken open and empty, a few
fields off, but the thieves were never detected. I myself saw the
burrow through which they got in.
Babaji had built his new bungalow immediately behind two dilapidated
cottages, in which he had sometimes lodged during brief visits to the
country. Everyone took for granted that he would pull down these
cottages when the new house was ready. They abutted on to the front
verandah, and occupied the ground which would naturally form the
approach to the house. But when Babaji, with pardonable pride, was
showing me round the completed house, he told me that he had decided
to retain the two cottages; they would be useful as cookroom and
storeroom; besides, they had been built by his father, and so out of
respect to his memory he would wait till they fell down of themselves.
I represented to him what a barbaric arrangement it was, but without
effect, and next day he was busy making a passage-way from the new
bungalow into one of the old cottages.
His next exploit was to try and acquire a strip of land by removing
his neighbour's landmark. Babaji wanted to build stables and other
out-buildings. In digging his foundations he purposely encroached
about four feet over his boundary line. When the owner remonstrated he
endeavoured by bluster to carry the thing through. He pointed to a
bogus boundary stone of his own planting, and called in the village
clerk to certify that there was an error in the village map, and that
the real boundary line was as Babaji represented it to be; the average
Hindu village clerk being ready to certify anything you like, if you
make it worth his while to do so. The owner of the land seated himself
on the disputed plot and defied the workmen to continue their
operations. The dispute continued for some days, waxing more and more
furious, until the owner and the contractor at last came to blows--a
form of demonstration which in India is impressive in appearance, but
the amount of damage done is infinitesimal. I was then asked to act as
arbitrator in the case. I declined; but I told Babaji that he was
totally in the wrong. Finally, after all this waste of time and
temper, he gave up the struggle and withdrew his forces to within the
proper limit.
That a man of education, who had himself been a magistrate, should
have made this attempt to filch a strip of land off his neighbour
might seem unaccountable. But his natural Indian characteristics, when
circumstances prompted it, came uppermost, and his English training
for the time being went to the wall.
The new bungalow proved after all to be a white elephant. The
water-supply was limited, and without plenty of water Babaji said he
could not live there. His servants, who were city people, said that if
he went to live in the country they would not go with him. So the
bungalow awaits the day, which we sometimes dream of, when it may fall
into our hands and become a convalescent home for Indians, which is a
great need, and for which it is admirably adapted.
Houses built by English missionaries for Indian mission workers are,
as a rule, not at all the kind of abode which the tenants really like.
A row of cottages, built some years ago in Poona City for Indian
Christians, has never been popular; chiefly because, besides many
doors and windows, there are ventilators in the roof which cannot be
closed. In more than one mission school some of the doors and windows
have had to be permanently bricked up, because both teachers and
children complained so much of the cold. Visions of tidy cottages for
Indian Christians gradually get dispelled. Here and there a home-like
dwelling is to be found, but they are scarce. A young married girl,
who had been brought up in refined surroundings and had an unusually
comfortable home when first married, had to live for a time in the
open sheds and apparent discomfort of a plague camp. Instead of
disliking it she settled in with great contentment, cooked her own
dinner in the open, and was evidently more at home than in her
well-built house. This also, as time went on, gradually lost its
original look of comfort. Hens, and goats, and cow-dung cakes, and
rubbish of all sorts by degrees got the upper hand, and proportionate
to the increase of apparent discomfort was the increase of contentment
in the minds of the young couple who lived there.