Hindu or Christian.
In the last chapter we have spoken of the Hindu girl as yet untouched by
Christianity, save as such influence may have filtered through into the
general life of the nation. We have had vague glimpses of her social
inheritance, with its traditions of an ancient and honorable estate of
womanhood; of the limitations of her life to-day; of her half-formed
aspirations for the future.
Of education as such nothing has been said. As we turn now from home to
school life, we shall turn also from the Hindu community to the
Christian. This does not mean that none but Christian girls go to
school. In all the larger and more advanced cities and in some towns you
will find Government schools for Hindu girls as well as those carried on
by private enterprise, some of them of great efficiency. Yet this
deliberate turning to the school life of the Christian community is not
so arbitrary as it seems.
In the first place, the proportion of literacy among Christian women is
far higher than among the Hindu and Muhammadan communities. Again,
because a large proportion of Christians have come from the depressed
classes, the "submerged tenth," ground for uncounted centuries under the
heel of the caste system, their education is also a study in social
uplift, one of the biggest sociological laboratory experiments to be
found anywhere on earth. And, lastly, it is through Christian schools
that the girls and women of America have reached out hands across the
sea and gripped their sisters of the East.
The School under the Palm Trees.
"And the dawn comes up like thunder Outer China 'cross the Bay." Far
from China and far inland from the Bay is this South Indian village, but
the dawn flashes up with the same amazing swiftness. Life's daily
resurrection proceeds rapidly in the Village of the Seven Palms. Flocks
of crows are swarming in from their roosting place in the palmyra jungle
beside the dry sand river; the cattle are strolling out from behind
various enclosures where they share the family shelter; all around is
the whirr of bird and insect as the teeming life of the tropics wakes to
greet "my lord Sun."
Under the thatch of each mud-walled hovel of the outcaste village there
is the same stir of the returning day. Sheeted corpses stretched on the
floor suddenly come to life and the babel of village gossip begins.
In the house at the far end of the street, Arul is first on her feet,
first to rub the sleep from her eyes. There is no ceremony of dressing,
no privacy in which to conduct it if there were. Arul rises in the same
scant garment in which she slept, snatches up the pot of unglazed clay
that stands beside the door, poises it lightly on her hip, and runs
singing to the village well, where each house has its representative
waiting for the morning supply. There is the plash of dripping water,
the creak of wheel and straining rope, and the chatter of girl voices.
[Illustration: A TEMPLE IN SOUTH INDIA]
The well is also the place for making one's morning toilet. Arul dashes
the cold water over her face, hands, and feet. No soap is required, no
towel--the sun is shining and will soon dry everything in sight. Next
comes the tooth-brushing act, when a smooth stick takes the place of a
brush, and "Kolynos" or "Colgate" is replaced by a dab of powdered
charcoal. Arul combs her hair only for life's great events, such as a
wedding or a festival, and changes her clothes so seldom that it is
better form not to mention it.
Breakfast is equally simple,--and the "simple life" at close range is
apt to lose many of its charms. In the corner of the one windowless
room that serves for all domestic purposes stands the earthen pot of
black gruel. It is made from the _ragi_, little, hard, round seeds that
resemble more than anything else the rape seed fed to a canary. It looks
a sufficiently unappetizing breakfast, but contentment abounds because
the pot is full, and that happens only when rains are abundant and
seasons prosperous. The Russian peasant and his black bread, the Indian
peasant and his black gruel--dark symbols these of the world's hunger
line.
There is no sitting down to share even this simple meal, no conception
of eating as a social event, a family sacrament. The father, as lord and
master, must be served first; then the children seize the one or two
cups by turn, and last of all comes Mother. Arul gulps her breakfast
standing and then dashes into the street. She is one of the village herd
girls; the sun is up and shining hot, and the cattle and goats are
jostling one another in their impatience to be off for the day.
The dry season is on and all the upland pastures are scorched and brown.
A mile away is the empty bed of the great tank. A South Indian tank in
our parlance would be an artificial lake. A strong earth wall, planted
with palmyras, encircles its lower slope. The upper lies open to receive
surface water, as well as the channel for the river that runs full
during the monsoon months. During the "rains" the country is full of
water, blue and sparkling. Now the water is gone, the crops are
ripening, and in the clay tank bottom the cattle spend their days
searching for the last blades of grass.
"Watch the cows well, Little Brother," calls Arul, as she hurries back
on the narrow path that winds between boulders and thickets of prickly
pear cactus. Green parrots are screaming in the tamarind trees and
overhead a white-throated Brahmany kite wheels motionless in the vivid
blue. The sun is blazing now, but Arul runs unheeding. It is time for
school--she knows it by the sun-clock in the sky. "Female education," as
the Indian loves to call it, is not yet fashionable in the Village of
the Seven Palms. With twenty-five boys there are only three girls who
frequent its halls of learning. Of the three Arul is one. Her father,
lately baptized, knows but little of what Christ's religion means, but
the few facts he has grasped are written deeply in his simple mind and
show life-results. One of these ideas is that the way out and up is
through the gate of Christian education. And so it is that Arul comes to
school. She is but eight, yet with a mouth to feed and a body to clothe,
and the rice pot often empty, the halving of her daily wage means
self-denial to all the family. So it is that Arul, instead of herding
cattle all day, runs swiftly back to the one-roomed schoolhouse under
the cocoanuts and arrives not more than half an hour late.
The schoolroom is so primitive that you would hardly recognize it as
such. Light and air and space are all too little. There are no desks or
even benches. A small, wooden blackboard and the teacher's table and
rickety chair are all that it can boast in the way of equipment. The
only interesting thing in sight is the children themselves, rows of them
on the floor, writing letters in the sand. Unwashed they are, uncombed
and almost unclothed, but with all the witchery of childhood in their
eyes. In that bare room lies the possibility of transforming the life of
the Village of the Seven Palms.
But the teacher is innocent of the ways of modern pedagogy, and deep and
complicated are the snares of the Tamil alphabet with its two hundred
and sixteen elusive characters. Baffling, too, are the mysteries of
number combination. "If six mangoes cost three annas, how much will one
mango cost?" Arul never had an anna of her own, how should she know? The
teachers bamboo falls on her hard, little hand, and two hot tears run
down and drop on the cracked slate. The way to learning is long and
beset with as many thorns as the crooked path through the prickly pear
cactus. Bible stories are happier. Arul can tell you how the Shepherds
sang and all about the little boy who gave his own rice cakes and dried
fish, to help Jesus feed hungry people. She has been hungry so often
that that story seems real.
The years pass over Arul's head, leaving her a little taller, a little
fleeter of foot as she hurries back from the pasture, a little wiser in
the ways of God and men. Still her father holds out against the
inducements of child labor. Arul shall go to school as long as there is
anything left for her to learn. And into Arul's eyes there has come the
gleam of a great ambition. She will leave the Village of the Seven Palms
and go into the wide world. The most spacious existence she knows of is
represented by the Girls' Boarding School in the town twenty miles away.
To enter that school, to study, to become a teacher perhaps--but beyond
that the wings of Arul's imagination have not yet learned to soar. The
meaning of service for Christ and India, the opportunity of educated
womanhood, such ideas have not yet entered Arul's vocabulary. She will
learn them in the days to come.
Countless villages of the Seven Palms; countless schools badly equipped
and poorly taught; countless Aruls--feeling within them dim gropings,
half-formed ambitions. Somewhere in America there are girls trained in
rural education and longing for the chance for research and original
work in a big, untried field. What a chance for getting together the
girl and the task!
[Illustration: THE SORT OF HOME THAT ARUL KNEW IN THE VILLAGE OF SEVEN
PALMS]