A HINDU REVIVAL
Thirty years ago, when I first visited India, the young Western-educated
Hindu was apt to be, at least intellectually, _plus royaliste que le
roi._ he plucked with both hands at the fruits of the tree of Western
knowledge. Some were enthusiastic students of English literature, and
especially of English poetry. They had their Wordsworth and their
Browning Societies. Others steeped themselves in English history and
loved to draw their political inspiration from Milton and Burke and John
Stuart Mill. Others, again, were the humble disciples of Kant and
Schlegel, of Herbert Spencer and Darwin. But whatever their special
talent bent might be, the vast majority professed allegiance to Western
ideals, and if they had not altogether-and often far too
hastily-abjured, or learned secretly to despise, the beliefs and customs
of their forefathers, they were at any rate anxious to modify and bring
them into harmony with those of their Western teachers. They may often
have disliked the Englishman, but they respected and admired him; if
they resented his frequent assumption of the unqualified superiority,
they were disposed to admit that it was not without justification. The
enthusiasm kindled in the first half of the last century by the great
missionaries, like Carey and Duff, who had made distinguished converts
among the highest classes of Hindu society, had begun to wane; but if
educated Hindus had grown more reluctant to accept the dogmas of
Christianity, they were still ready to acknowledge the superiority of
Western ethics, and the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, the Prarthana Samaj in
Bombay, the Social Reform movement which found eloquent advocates all
over India, and not least in Madras, and other agencies of a similar
character for purging Hindu life of its more barbarous and superstitious
associations, bore witness to the ascendancy which Western standards of
morality exercised over the Hindu mind. Keshub Chunder Sen was not
perhaps cast in so fine a mould as Ram Mohan Roy or the more
conservative Dr. Tagore, but his ideals were the same, and his
life-dream was to find a common denominator for Hinduism and
Christianity which should secure a thorough reform of Hindu society
without denationalizing it.
Nor were the milder forms of political activity promoted by the founders
of the Indian National Congress inconsistent with the acceptance of
British rule or with the recognition of the great benefits which it has
conferred upon India, and least of all with a genuine admiration for
Western civilization. For many of them at least the political boons
which they craved from their rulers were merely the logical corollaries
of the moral and intellectual as well as of the material boons which
they had already received. The fierce political agitation of later years
denies the benefits of British rule and even the superiority of the
civilization for which it stands. It has invented the legend of a golden
age, when all the virtues flourished and India was a land flowing with
milk and honey until British lust of conquest brought it to ruin. No
doubt even to-day there are many eminent Hindus who would still rely
upon the older methods, and who have sufficiently assimilated the
education they have received at the hands of Englishmen to share
wholeheartedly the faith and pride of the latter in British ideals of
liberty and self-government, and to be honestly convinced that those
ideals might be more fully realized in the government of their own
country if British administrators would only repose greater confidence
in the natives of India and give them a larger share in the conduct of
public affairs. But men of this type are now to be found chiefly amongst
the older generation.
No one who has studied, however scantily, the social and religious
system which for the sake of convenience we call Hinduism will deny the
loftiness of the philosophic conceptions which underlie even the
extravagances of its creed or the marvellous stability of the complex
fabric based upon its social code. It may seem to us to present in many
of its aspects an almost unthinkable combination of spiritualistic
idealism and of gross materialism, of asceticism and of sensuousness, of
over-weening arrogance when it identifies the human self with the
universal self and merges man in the Divinity and the Divinity in man,
and of demoralizing pessimism when it preaches that life itself is but a
painful illusion, and that the sovereign remedy and end of all evils is
non-existence. Its mythology is often as revolting as the rigidity of
its caste laws, which condemn millions of human beings to such social
abasement that their very touch--the very shadow thrown by their
body--is held to pollute the privileged mortals who are born into the
higher castes. Nevertheless, Hinduism has for more than thirty centuries
responded to the social and religious aspirations of a considerable
fraction of the human race. It represents a great and ancient
civilization, and that the Hindus should cling to it is not surprising.
Nor is it surprising that after the first attraction exerted by the
impact of an alien civilization equipped with all the panoply of
organized force and scientific achievements had worn off, a certain
reaction should have ensued. In the same way it was inevitable that,
after the novelty of British rule, of the law and order and security for
life and property which it had established, had gradually worn away,
those who had never experienced the evils from which it had freed India
should begin to chafe under the restraints which it imposed. What is
disheartening and alarming are the lengths to which this reaction has
been carried. For among the younger generation of Hindus there has
unquestionably grown up a deep-seated and bitter hostility not only to
British rule and to British methods of administration, but to all the
influences of Western civilization, and the rehabilitation of Hindu
customs and beliefs has proceeded _pari passu_ with the growth of
political disaffection.
Practices which an educated Hindu would have been at pains to explain
away, if he had not frankly repudiated them thirty years ago, now find
zealous apologists. Polytheism is not merely extolled as the poetic
expression of eternal verities, but the gods and goddesses of the Hindu
pantheon are being invested with fresh sanctity. The Brahmo Saniaj is
still a great influence for good, but it appears to be gradually losing
vitality, and though its literary output is still considerable, its
membership is shrinking. The Prarthana Samaj is moribund. The fashion of
the day is for religious "revivals," in which the worship of Kali, the
sanguinary goddess of destruction, or the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the
Mahratta chieftain who humbled in his day the pride of the alien
conquerors of Hindustan, plays an appropriately conspicuous part. The
Arya-Samaj, which is spreading all over the Punjab and in the United
Provinces, represents in one of its aspects a revolt against Hindu
orthodoxy, but in another it represents equally a revolt against Western
ideals, for in the teachings of its founder, Dayanand, it has found an
aggressive gospel which bases the claims of Aryan, _i.e._, Hindu,
supremacy on the Vedas as the one ultimate source of human and Divine
wisdom. The exalted character of Vedantic philosophy has been as widely
recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the
Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been
developed along different and often conflicting lines of thought to
suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya-Samaj has not been
content to assert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to
proclaim the immanent superiority of Aryan civilization--it repudiates
the term Hindu as savouring of an alien origin--over Western
civilization, it claims to have discovered in the Vedas the germs of all
the discoveries of modern science, even to wireless telegraphy and
aeroplanes.
Just as the political agitation in India has derived invaluable
encouragement from a handful of British members of Parliament and other
sympathizers in Europe and America, so this Hindu revival has been
largely stimulated and to some extent prompted by Europeans and
Americans. Not only the writings of English and German scholars, like
Max Müller and Deutsch, helped enormously to revive the interest of
educated Hindus in their ancient literature and earlier forms of
religion, but it was in the polemical tracts of European writers that
the first protagonists of Hindu reaction against Christian influences
found their readiest weapons of attack. The campaign was started in 1887
by the Hindu Tract Society of Madras, which set itself first to inflame
popular fanaticism against the missionaries, who, especially in the
south of India, had been the pioneers of Western education. Bradlaugh's
text-books and the pamphlets of many lesser writers belonging to the
same school of thought were eagerly translated into the vernacular, and
those that achieved the greatest popularity were books like "The Evil of
Continence," in which not only Christian theology, but Christian
morality was held up to scorn and ridicule. The advent of the
theosophists, heralded by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, gave a
fresh impetus to the revival, and certainly no Hindu has done so much to
organize and consolidate the movement as Mrs. Annie Besant, who, in her
Central Hindu College at Benares and her Theosophical Institution at
Adyar, near Madras, has openly proclaimed her faith in the superiority
of the whole Hindu system to the vaunted civilization of the West. Is it
surprising that Hindus should turn their backs upon our civilization[2]
when a European of highly-trained intellectual power and with an
extraordinary gift of eloquence comes and tells them that it is they who
possess and have from all times possessed the key to supreme wisdom;
that their gods, their philosophy, their morality are on a higher plane
of thought than the West has ever reached? Is it surprising that with
such encouragement Hinduism should no longer remain on the defensive,
but, discarding in this respect all its own traditions as a
non-proselytizing creed, should send out missionaries to preach the
message of Hindu enlightenment to those still groping in the darkness of
the West? The mission of Swami Vivekananda to the Chicago Congress of
Religions is in itself one of the most striking incidents in the history
of Hindu revivalism, but it is perhaps less wonderful than the triumph
he achieved when he returned to India accompanied by a chosen band of
eager disciples from the West.
There are, indeed, endless forms to this revival of Hinduism--as endless
as to Hinduism itself--but what it is perhaps most important for us to
note is that, wherever political agitation assumes the most virulent
character, there the Hindu revival also assumes the most extravagant
shapes. Secret societies place their murderous activities under the
special patronage of one or other of the chief popular deities. Their
vows are taken "on the sacred water of the Ganges," or "holding the
sacred Tulsi plant," or "in the presence of Mahadevi"--the great
goddess who delights in bloody sacrifices, Charms and amulets,
incantations and imprecations, play an important part in the ceremonies
of initiation. In some quarters there has been some recrudescence of
the _Shakti_ cultus, with its often obscene and horrible rites, and the
unnatural depravity which was so marked a feature in the case of the
band of young Brahmans who conspired to murder Mr. Jackson at Nasik
represents a form of erotomania which is certainly much more common
amongst Hindu political fanatics than amongst Hindus in general.
By no means all, however, are of this degenerate type, and the _Bhagvat
Gita_ has been impressed into the service of sedition by men who would
have been as incapable of dabbling in political as in any other form of
crime, had they not been able to invest it with a religious sanction.
There is no more beautiful book in the sacred literature of the Hindus;
there is none in which the more enlightened find greater spiritual
comfort; yet it is in the _Bhagvat Gita_ that, by a strange perversion,
the Hindu conspirator has sought and claims to have found texts that
justify murder as a divinely inspired deed when it is committed in the
sacred cause of Hinduism. Nor is it only the extremists who appeal in
this fashion to Hindu religious emotionalism. It is often just as
difficult to appraise the subtle differences which separate the
"moderate" from the "advanced" politician and the "advanced" politician
from the extremist as it is to distinguish between the various forms and
gradations of the Hindu revival in its religious and social aspects. But
it was in the courtyard of the great temple of Kali at Calcutta in the
presence of "the terrible goddess" that the "leaders of the Bengali
nation," men who, like Mr. Surendranath Banerjee, have always professed
to be "moderates," held their chief demonstrations against "partition"
and administered the _Swadeshi_ oath to their followers. Equally
noteworthy is the part played by the revival of Ganpati celebrations in
honour of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, perhaps the most popular of
all Hindu deities, in stimulating political disaffection in the Deccan.
Hand in hand with this campaign for the glorification of Hinduism at the
expense of Western civilization there has been carried on another and
far more invidious campaign for the vilification of everything British.
The individual Englishman is denounced as a bloodsucker and a tyrant;
his personal integrity is impugned and derided; his methods of
administration are alleged to be wilfully directed to the
impoverishment, and even to the depopulation, of India; his social
customs are traduced as depraved and corrupt; even his women-folk are
accused of common wantonness. This systematized form of personal calumny
is a scarcely less significant feature of the literature of Indian
unrest than its appeals to the Hindu scriptures and to the Hindu deities
and its exploitation of the religious sentiment for the promotion of
racial hatred. _Swadeshi_ and _Swaraj_ are the battle-cries of this new
Hindu "nationalism," but they mean far more than a mere claim to fiscal
or even political independence. They mean an organized uplifting of the
old Hindu traditions, social and religious, intellectual and moral,
against the imported ideals of an alien race and an alien civilization,
and the sincerity of some, at least, of the apostles of this new creed
cannot be questioned. With Mr. Arabindo Ghose, they firmly believe that
"the whole moral strength of the country is with us, justice is with us,
nature is with us, and the law of God, which is higher than any human
law, justifies our action."
This is a grave phenomenon not to be contemptuously dismissed as the
folly of ill-digested knowledge or summarily judged and condemned, in a
spirit of self-righteousness, as an additional proof of the innate
depravity and ingratitude of the East. It undoubtedly represents a deep
stirring of the waters amongst a people endowed with no mean gifts of
head and heart, and if it has thrown up much scum, it affords glimpses
of nobler elements which time may purify and bring to the surface. Nor
if our rule and our civilization are to prevail must we be unmindful of
our own responsibility or forget that our presence and the influences we
brought with us first stirred the waters.
The part played by Brahmanism in Indian unrest is far more conspicuous
in some parts of India than in others, and for reasons which are
generally not far to seek. Wherever it has been most active, it connotes
perhaps more than anything else the reactionary side of that unrest.
Though there have been and still are many enlightened Brahmans who have
cordially responded to the best influences of Western education, and
have worked with admirable zeal and courage to bridge the gulf between
Indian and European civilization, Brahmanism as a system represents the
antipodes of all that British rule must stand for in India, and
Brahmanism has from times immemorial dominated Hindu society--dominated
it, according to the Hindu Nationalists, for its salvation. "If," writes
one of them, "Mother India, though reduced to a mere skeleton by the
oppression of alien rulers during hundreds of years, still preserves her
vitality, it is because the Brahmans have never relaxed in their
devotion to her. She has witnessed political and social revolutions.
Famines and pestilence have shorn her of her splendour. But the Brahmans
have stood by her through all the vicissitudes of fortune. It is they
who raised her to the highest pinnacle of glory, and it is they whose
ministrations still keep up the drooping spirits of her children."
The Brahmans are the sacerdotal caste of India. They are at the same
time the proudest and the closest aristocracy that the world has ever
seen, for they form not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest
sense of the term, but one of divine origin. Of the Brahman it may be
said as of no other privileged mortal except perhaps the Levite of the
Old Testament: _Nascitur non fit_. No king, however powerful, can make
or unmake a Brahman, no genius, however transcendent, no services,
however conspicuous, no virtues, however pre-eminent, can avail to raise
a Hindu from a lower caste to the Brahman's estate. In early times the
caste laws must have been less rigid, for otherwise there would only be
Aryan Brahmans, whereas in the South of India there are many Brahmans
of obviously Dravidian stock. But to-day not even the Brahmans
themselves can raise to their own equal one who is not born of their
caste, though by the exercise of the castely authority they can in
specific cases outcaste a fellow-Brahman who has offended against the
immutable laws of caste, and, except for minor transgressions which
allow of atonement and reinstatement, when once outcasted he and his
descendants cease for ever to be Brahmans. The Brahmans might be at a
loss to make good their claim that they date back to the remote ages of
the Vedas. But a good deal more than two thousand years have passed
since they constituted themselves the only authorized intermediaries
between mankind and the gods. In them became vested the monopoly of the
ancient language in which all religious rites are performed, and with a
monopoly of the knowledge of Sanskrit they retained a monopoly of
learning long after Sanskrit itself had become a dead language. Like the
priests who wielded a Latin pen in the Middle Ages in Europe, they sat
as advisers and conscience-keepers in the councils of every Hindu ruler.
To the present day they alone can expound the Hindu scriptures, they
alone can approach the gods in their temples, they alone can minister to
the spiritual needs of such of the lower castes as are credited with
sufficient human dignity to be in any way worthy of their ministrations.
In the course of ages differences and distinctions have gradually grown
up amongst them, and they have split up into innumerable septs and
sub-castes. As they multiplied from generation to generation an
increasing proportion were compelled to supplement the avocations
originally sacred to their caste by other and lowlier means of
livelihood. There are to-day over 14 million Brahmans in India, and a
very large majority of them have been compelled to adopt agricultural,
military, and mercantile pursuits which, as we know from the Code of
Manu were already regarded as, in certain circumstances, legitimate or
excusable for a Brahman even in the days of that ancient law-giver. In
regard to all other castes, however, the Brahman, humble as his worldly
_status_ may be, retains an undisputed pre-eminence which he never
forgets or allows to be forgotten, though it may only be a pale
reflection of the prestige and authority of his more exalted
caste-men--a prestige and authority, be it added, which have often been
justified by individual achievements. How far the influence of
Brahmanism as a system has been socially a good or an evil influence I
am not concerned to discuss, but, however antagonistic it may be at the
present moment to the influence of Western civilization, it would be
unfair to deny that it has shown itself and still shows itself capable
of producing a very high type both of intellect and of character. Nor
could it otherwise have survived as it has the vicissitudes of
centuries.
Neither the triumph of Buddhism, which lasted for nearly 500 years, nor
successive waves of Mahomedan conquest availed to destroy the power of
Brahmanism, nor has it been broken by British supremacy. Inflexibly as
he dominates a social system in all essentials more rigid than any
other, the Brahman has not only recognised the need of a certain
plasticity in its construction which allows for constant expansion, but
he has himself shown unfailing adaptability in all non-essentials to
varying circumstances. To the requirements of their new Western masters
the Brahmans adapted themselves from the first with admirable
suppleness, and when a Western system of education was introduced into
India in the first half of the last century, they were quicker than any
other class to realize how it could be used to fortify their own
position. The main original object of the introduction of Western
education into India was the training of a sufficient number of young
Indians to fill the subordinate posts in the public offices with
English-speaking natives. The Brahmans responded freely to the call, and
they soon acquired almost the same monopoly of the new Western learning
as they had enjoyed of Hindu lore through the centuries. With the
development of the great administrative services, with the substitution
of English for the vernacular tongues as the only official language,
with the remodelling of judicial administration and procedure on British
lines, with the growth of the liberal professions and of the Press,
their influence constantly found new fields of activity, whilst through
the old traditional channels it continued to permeate those strata of
Hindu society with which the West had established little or no contact.
Nevertheless the spread of Western ideas and habits was bound to loosen
to some extent the Brahmans' hold upon Hindu society, for that hold is
chiefly rooted in the immemorial sanctity of custom, which new habits
and methods imported from the West necessarily tended to undermine.
Scrupulous--and, according to many earnest Englishmen, over-scrupulous--as
we were to respect religious beliefs and prejudices, the influence of
Western civilization could not fail to clash directly or indirectly with
many of the ordinances of Hindu orthodoxy. In non-essentials Brahmanism
soon found it expedient to relax the rigour of caste obligations, as for
instance to meet the hard case of young Hindus who could not travel across
the "black water" to Europe for their studies without breaking caste, or
indeed travel even in their own country in railways and river steamers
without incurring the pollution of bodily contact with the "untouchable"
castes. Penances were at first imposed which had gradually to be lightened
until they came to be merely nominal. Graver issues were raised when such
ancient customs as infant marriage and the degradation of child widows
were challenged. The ferment of new ideas was spreading amongst the
Brahmans themselves. Some had openly discarded their ancestral faith, and
many more were moved to search their own scriptures for some interpretation
of the law less inconsistent with Western standards. It seemed at one
moment as if, under the inspiration of men like Ranade in the Deccan and
Tagore in Bengal, Brahmanism itself was about to take the lead in purging
Hinduism of its most baneful superstitions and bringing it into line with
the philosophy and ethics of the West. But the liberal movement failed to
prevail against the forces of popular superstition and orthodox bigotry,
combined with the bitterness too frequently resulting from the failure
of Western education to secure material success or even an adequate
livelihood for those who had departed from the old ways. Though there
have been and still are many admirable exceptions, Brahmanism remained
the stronghold of reaction against the Western invasion. Of recent
years, educated Brahmans have figured prominently in the social and
religious revival of Hinduism, and they have figured no less
prominently, whether in the ranks of the extremists or amongst the
moderate and advanced politicians, in the political movement which has
accompanied that revival.