“LORD OF THE WORLD”
From every part of India, by day and night, the pilgrims come,
and the roads to the great temple, by the sea at Puri, are always
open and always thronged. The pilgrims come from behind the white
mountains, and from the purple lands of the south, and across the hot
plains from the other ocean. The train that shot me out upon the sand
amid a crowd of dim white figures at three o’clock one morning raises
a high dividend from religion. Hundreds come by it every day, for it
saves time—and under British rule even devotion goes by time. But
worshippers still think it more religious and purifying to make the
whole journey on foot, visiting other sacred temples upon the road,
bathing in holy rivers, and turning at every dawn towards the rising
sun, as all mankind instinctively turn for worship, just as for love
we turn towards the sunset. To take years upon the journey only
extends the glory of expectation, and if you have the holy patience
to travel the Grand Trunk Road, measuring every two yards of its
thousand miles by prostrating your body along the dust, what is
space, what is time, when you are on the way to God?
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF EQUALITY.
[_Face p. 152._
]
Children and young mothers come if the entire family sets out for
holiness, but the best time for the great act of worship is late in
middle-age, when for many years the field has been sown and reaped,
the buffalo fed, the taxes paid, the children tended, the cotton
garment daily washed. Then the present career upon this visible
world is almost over, the shadowy gate to the next stage upward is
almost in sight. Then men and women long to go on pilgrimage, and,
untouched by the cares of fortune, family, or any transitory things,
they travel forth in calm elation of soul, their thoughts fixed only
on the lasting realities of eternity, till they hear the thud of the
long waves upon the sand, and before them rises the great white tower
of the Lord of the Universe, surmounted by its wheel and flag. There
stands at length the beatific vision, there the end of all these
labours, the revelation of the Divine Essence for which they had
waited so many years of repeated seasons in the fields.
It is the ancient temple of Juggernath, “Lord of the World,” to
which they have come. Yes, our old friend Juggernath, of childhood’s
stories and journalistic tags—the God in the Car, before whose
bloodstained wheels the benighted heathen were driven by deceiving
priests to fling themselves shrieking down, before the days when
enlightened missionaries and British rulers combined to clean up
India’s coral strand. Since then, as is well known, such extremity of
devotion has been prosecuted as the law directs, and the guide-book
tells us that “of recent years much has been done to improve the
sanitation of the place.” Both signs of progress are good. But, after
all, it is only an Englishman whose first thought is of sanitation
when he approaches the divine presence, and the British missionaries
who first told that weary old tale of the car were as incapable of
understanding the divine passion that, even at the cost of life,
yearns for union with eternal powers, as they would have been of
understanding the passion of a woman whose grandson described to
me how, with proud bearing and joyful face, she walked from her
chamber and sat down in the midst of the flames beside her husband’s
body till their ashes lay indistinguishably commingled. Sanitary
appliances and the “Merry Widow” appeal more successfully to our
Western minds.
The fame of Juggernath may be due, as scholars say, to some ancient
attempt to conciliate under his symbol the new Buddhistic reformers
with the primeval Hindu worship. It seems to be certain that his
temple as it stands shows the trace of Buddhistic influence—the
teaching of Buddha who made the great renunciation, Buddha who
received the poor and all mankind beneath his blessing. It is a
shrine of peace and conciliation, perhaps the one place in India
where former generations saw some hope of acquiring the new purity
and kindliness of life, without rejecting the sacred traditions of
immemorial wisdom brought by unknown ancestors from lands of bitter
cold. And it may have been this bright hope of peace that first
established the unaltering rule of Juggernath’s worship, that before
his sight all castes and ranks and riches are equal, and the woman is
equal with the man.
Lions and monsters guard the four gates of his enclosure, but when
once they are passed, all the earthly distinctions of mankind fall
away, and only the naked soul remains to worship. Within that oblong
wall, Brahman may eat with sweeper, and warrior with the retail
seller of flesh for carrion Europeans. Along the inner side of the
south wall are simple kitchens, where the god’s four hundred cooks
daily prepare the sacred food for pilgrims, beggars, and all who
come. One is served with another, and all may eat from the same
dish, side by side, without contamination. Thousands of monks in the
service of the god carry the food far through the country, and the
pilgrims themselves take some of it home in their brazen vessels, so
that the villagers and children left behind may taste of wisdom, and
share the blessings of pilgrimage. For wherever the sacred food is
eaten, worldly differences disappear, and soul stands bare to soul.
It is the sacrament of equality, the consecration of mankind.
Side by side with Juggernath, within the dark and secluded shrine,
upon which no alien may look, stand his brother and little
sister—quaint figures all of them, hideous as gollywogs with
symbolism—the round and staring eyes of eternal vision, the atrophied
hands and feet of eternal meditation. Every year new cars are built
for them, and every twelve years the gods themselves are made anew of
wooden blocks, while their old forms are sunk into a pit to perish.
This was told me by the treasurer and chief trustee of the god’s
vast estate, who traced to this renewal the well-known story of the
physicians appointed to minister to the deity’s health, and put him
to bed if he ails. He informed me this was a popular error, but there
is a Rajah who is hereditary guardian, and also hereditary sweeper of
the temple, and he, as I understood, had rather frequently to be put
to bed by his physicians, so that possibly the two cases have become
confused.
It would be, perhaps, too curious to identify the little sister
of Juggernath with Liberty, and his brother with Fraternity. But
Juggernath, “Lord of the World,” has beyond question the attribute
of Equality, and it seems possible that it is just this glorious
attribute, and no deeper metaphysic reason, which gives his temple
its place as the most worshipped fane of India, and inspires the
common people with a passionate desire even to touch with one finger
the painted board of which he is made. Many people worship what most
they fall short of, just as in England we struggle to worship Christ,
whose character and manner of life differed so entirely from our own.
And of all great virtues the Indians, perhaps, have been most wanting
in the sense of equality. Their whole system of existence is based on
inequality, inevitable and permanent. The man who is born to study
the Vedas will continue to study the Vedas, and so will his son. The
man who is born to carry sewage will continue to carry sewage, and so
will his son. Nor could the daughter of a millionaire ever hope for
marriage with a man of learning, since wisdom lies beyond the dreams
of avarice.
This ancient basis of inequality has made the Indian people the
easiest in the world to govern. It lies also, I think, at the bottom
of their almost excessive politeness, their reverential manners,
their courtly deference to any one who appears to have been born of
higher station, or with higher advantages. No one denies the charm
of such qualities. It is an education in behaviour to pass from a
Scottish or American crowd to the streets of an Indian city. The
obligations of high caste—such things, I mean, as cleanliness in food
and life, intellectual alertness, and disregard of wealth—are as
valuable as any obligations laid on Europeans by noblesse. The only
weakness about both is that they are restricted to caste or class,
and are not considered universally binding, as such principles must
be.
There is much to be said for reverential manners; but take a race
which has very little notion of manners of any kind—a race not very
sensitive, not very imaginative or sympathetic, trained from boyhood
to think little of personal dignity, and nothing at all of other
people’s feelings; take such a race and set its most characteristic
members from the well-to-do middle classes, with the help of rifles
and batteries, to dominate an entirely different people, among
whom reverential manners are ingrained by birth, and see what evil
effects for both races will result! Watch the growing arrogance of
the dominant people; watch their demands for deference, their lust
for flattery, their irritation at the least sign of independence,
their contempt for the race whose obeisance they delight in, their
rudeness of manner increasing till it becomes incredible to the
relatives they left at home, and would once have been incredible to
themselves. Then turn to the subordinate race, and watch the growing
weakness of character, the temptation to cringe and flatter, the loss
of self-respect, the increasing cowardice, the daily humiliation.
In that hideous process—that degeneration in manners of two great
races, each of which has high qualities of its own, we recognize the
true peril which has been advancing upon Indians and ourselves for
the last ten, or, perhaps, fifty years of Indian history. It is not
a question of loss of power, or loss of trade. It is a question of a
much more serious loss than these.
But what if all this so-called unrest is only the beginning of
another great humanistic reform, another incarnation of that “Lord
of the World” whose attribute is equality? Throughout India we are
witnessing the birth of a new national consciousness, and with it
comes a revival of dignity, a resolve no longer to take insults lying
down, not to lick the hand that strikes, or rub the forehead in the
dust before any human being, simply because he wears a helmet and is
called white. Like pilgrims bound for the shrine of Juggernath in
an ecstasy of devotion, the leaders of India are inspired by that
longing for equality which is always springing afresh in human minds.
If any one chooses to say that equality is like Juggernath’s Car,
crushing everything equally flat, he is welcome to his little jest.
But as I saw the white-robed pilgrims passing into the temple, there
to partake of equality’s sacrament, I knew that these outward things
were but the symbols of an invisible worship, which may renew the
face of the Indian people, and save ourselves from a threatening and
dishonourable danger.