the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges
system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims
were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the gods. On
the way we passed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like
shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola,
"the Mother of the Smallpox," as the priest called her, to which
smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest
assured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna
is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking,
bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" and give me
a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming--and the high priest,
in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his assistance--there
ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of
"worshippers," such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got
for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a
swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.
Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the
daughters of the horseleech they always cry for "more") I went back to
my hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu
"religion."
It was Sunday morning.
Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went that afternoon
to another Indian religious service--this time of Christians--and
compared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of a
money-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher's block and exacting a
prescribed fee from each pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a
bloodthirsty goddess, herself only one of the many jealous gods and
goddesses to be favored and propitiated--instead of this there was a
converted Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whose
characteristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. And
instead of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the
fine rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily {202}
recognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words
into the strange tongue of the Bengali.
At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly and
outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he were
an infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what a
tremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majority
of Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and how
tremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives
even of those of
"Deaf ear and soul uncaring"
who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no desire to
preach, I set down these things, simply because they are as obvious as
temples or scenery to any Oriental traveller who travels with open
eyes and open mind.
But let us now go to Benares, the fountain-head of the Hindu faith,
the city which is to it what Mecca is to Mohammedanism and more than
Jerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares is so important that I must
give more than a paragraph to my impressions of it.
The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I found
surprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many-storied
pilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious to win the
favor of the gods, tower like mountains from the river bank. A strange
mingling of many styles and epochs of Oriental architecture are they,
and yet mainly suggestive of the palaces and temples that lined the
ancient Nile. An earthquake, too, has heightened the effect by leaving
massive ruins, the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem to
whisper tales even older than any building now standing in Benares.
For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was old when
the walls of Rome were built; it was historic when David sat on the
throne of Israel.
But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly {203} unlike
these beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth may one see
crowds like these--crowds that overflow the acres and acres of stone
steps leading up from the river's edge through the maze of buildings
and spill off into the water. There are indeed all sorts and
conditions of men and women. Princes come from afar with their
gorgeous retinues and stately equipages, and go down into the
bathing-places calling on the names of their gods as trustingly as the
poor doomed leper who thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring
the hoped-for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose
faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own
households--they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to
be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained,
man-borne _palki_ and are taken within boats with closed sides, where
they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and women, old and young,
high and low (except the outcasts)--all come. There are once-brown
Hindus with their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with
limbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis,
palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or that
impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearest
Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by dying in the sacred place.
A great many pilgrims--may God have pity, as He will, on their poor
untutored souls--die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, ere
they reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but many
other aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that they
have reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick
work of the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the
Ganges. "_Rama, nama, satya hai_" (The name of Rama is true): so I
heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad
figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is
wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on light
bamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood above
and beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that which
was a breathing human being when the sun set the day before.
Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief that
accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimes
hired--for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wail
heart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law--but
somehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show little
evidence of grief. "But where are the bereaved families?" I asked a
Hindu priest as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and
talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor of burning
human flesh. "Oh, those are the families you see there," he replied.
And sure enough they were--I suppose--although I had thought them only
the persons hired to help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the
funerals occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the
cremation is concluded it is the son's duty--in some places I visited,
at least--to take a big stick and crack the skull in order to release
his father's spirit!
But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why should the
Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his theology, is itself a
curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul running its course
through the bodies of beasts and men, the ultimate good, the greatest
boon to be won from the propitiated gods, is "remerging in the general
soul," the Escape from Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and
Self; not Annihilation itself but the Annihilation of Personality, of
that sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement in
human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that you are a son
of God and that you will maintain a separate, conscious, responsible
identity throughout eternity, Hinduism teaches that your spirit is a
part of the Divine and will ultimately be reabsorbed into it. Its
doctrine in this respect is much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably
neither religion {207} lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of
the individual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian
civilization, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic
of the social and political institutions of the Orient.
{205}
[Illustration: TYPES AT DARJEELING, NORTHERN INDIA, AND AT DELHI,
CENTRAL INDIA.]
India has not a homogeneous population. There are almost as many
races, types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The
right-hand figure in the upper picture bears a striking resemblance
to a North American Indian. The instrument in his hands is a
praying-wheel.
{206}
TWO RANGOON TYPES.
[Illustration: Supi-yaw-lat and her "whackin' white cheroot."]
[Illustration: A Hindu girl.]
Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one
need not go far to find the Burmese girl Kipling has immortalized:
"'Er petticoat was yaller and 'er little cap was green,
An er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot.
An' a wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot'"
{207 continued}
But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do not all die,
nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred waters of
"Mother Gunga," as the Ganges is called. Naturally there are many
temples in which they must worship, many priests whom they must
support. There are said to be 2000 temples in Benares and the high
priest of one of them--while sparring for a bigger tip for his
services--told me that he was at the head of 400 priests supported by
his establishment alone (the Golden Temple).
And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some great
cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are
"temples" in Benares--so-called "temples" that should minister to
man's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides to
their foulness--that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No
wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against
indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for
Hindu "religious"(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the
endurance of the British Government, and at the Nepalese Temple I was
told that the authorities do not allow such structures to be built
now. Moreover, it is not only admitted that the temples in many parts
of India are the resort of the lowest class of women, "temple girls"
dedicated to gods and goddesses, but their presence is openly defended
as proper.
Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanliness as
they are from godliness. The Golden Temple with its sacred cows penned
up in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked worshippers, its holy
cesspool known as "The Well of Knowledge," its hideous,
leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its lustful god
Krishna, and its mercenary priests, {208} is a good illustration. And
the famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali)
I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the
most loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the
misfortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the
monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on the
ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, won a
place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their monkey
companions. I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmers
were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to look
at them.
That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares,
discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindu
religious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help his
argument. Emerson's phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, "What you
are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."
Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get a
better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to a
happier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary of
northern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range.
In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highest
mountains formed by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on
which the eye of mortal man may ever rest.
Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse and
wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tour
are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point we
looked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a view
whose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left there
glittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twin
attendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest
mountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the view
directly in front of us, for there only one third as far away as
Everest, royal {209} Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal,
granite masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majesty
toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kingly
peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored the
pure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or
two had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues
of its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of massive chasms and
rugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves perhaps as high as the
highest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higher
yet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above which
its further bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling
silhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak
and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the foot of
Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitchells on top of one
another above its highest point--the massive bulk in either case
stretching thousands and thousands of feet above the line of
everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga.
Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a view it was not
meet for any but the high gods themselves to see. About it all was a
suggestion of illimitableness, of more than earthly majesty, of
infinite serenity and measureless calm, which sat upon our spirits
with a certain eerie unworldliness.
It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I learned later
that it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama Buddha dreamed his
dream of the Nirvana and of its brooding and endless peace in which
man's fretful spirit--
"From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free"--
may find at last the rest that it has sought in vain through all our
human realm of Time and Place.
Lucknow, India.
{210}
XXI
"THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS"
GREAT indeed are the uses of Poetry. Consider by way of illustration
how accurately and comprehensively some forgotten bard in four short
lines has pictured for us the true condition of the inhabitants of
England's great Indian Empire:
"The poor, benighted Hindu,
He does the best he kin do
He sticks to his caste from first to last.
And for pants he makes his skin do."
A Mr. Micawber might dilate at length upon how this achievement in
verse informs us (1) as to the financial condition of the people, to
wit, they are "poor," the average annual income having been estimated
at only $10, and the average wages for day labor in the capital city
of India only 6 to 20 cents per diem; (2) as to their intellectual
condition, "benighted," ninety men in each hundred being unable to
read or write any language, while of every thousand Indian women 993
are totally illiterate; (3) as to the social system, each man living
and dying within the limits of the caste into which he is born; and
(4) as to the clothing, garb or dress of the inhabitants (or the
absence thereof), the children of both sexes being frequently attired
after the manner of our revered First Parents before they made the
acquaintance of the fig tree, while the adults also dispense generally
with trousers, shoes, and stockings, and other impedimenta of our
over-developed civilization.
{211}
Great indeed are the uses of poetry. In all my letters from India I
shall hardly be able to do more than expand and enlarge upon the great
fundamental truths so eloquently set forth in our four-line poetry
piece.
If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the common
people because he made so many of them," then the Creator must also
have a special fondness for these "poor benighted Hindus," for within
an area less than half the size of the United States more than
300,000,000 of them live and move and have their being. That is to
say, if the United States were as thickly populated as India, it would
contain 600,000,000 people. It is also said that when the far-flung
battle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expansion that
great empire had within its borders only half as many people as there
are in India to-day. India and its next-door neighbor, China, contain
half the population of the whole earth. In other words, if the Chinese
and East Indians were the equals of the other races in military
prowess the combined armies of all other nations on the globe, of
every nation in Europe, North America, South America, Africa,
Australia, the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would be
required to defeat them.
Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family calls for
special study. And if we would study them we must not confine
ourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India, interesting as
these cities are.
The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of the people
live on the soil) is not the trader, a city-dweller in these few large
centres of population, but the ryot or farmer, in the thousands and
thousands of little mud-house villages between the Himalaya slopes and
Cape Comorin. The significant economic fact in India is not the
millions of dollars once spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30
spent in building this average peasant's home or hut. The significant
social fact is not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modern
Rajah {212} estimated in lakhs of rupees, but the five or six cents a
day which is a laborer's wage for millions and millions of the people.
For these reasons I have been no more interested in the famous cities
I have seen than in the little rural villages whose names may have
never found place in an English book. Let us get, if we can, a pen
picture of one of these villages in north central India.
As I approached it from a distance it looked like an enormous mass of
ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as has been
suggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and are often roofed
with clay also--made flat on top with a little trench or gutter for
drainage. Perhaps the majority, however, have thick sloping roofs of
straw, the eaves being hardly as high as a man's head. Very thick are
the mud walls of the houses, eighteen inches or more in most cases,
and as the floor is also the bare earth, there is no woodwork about
such a dwelling except the doors and a few poles to hold up the roof.
In one or two small rooms of this kind without a window or chimney
(oftener perhaps in one room than in two) a whole family lives, cooks,
and sleeps.
{213}
[Illustration: A HINDU FAQUIR.]
[Illustration: SOME FASHIONABLE HINDUS.]
The faquirs do not like to be photographed, and this follow in the
upper picture was snapped just in the act of rising from his bed of
spikes. This is only one of many methods of self-torture practised
in the hope of winning the favor of the gods.
{214}
[Illustration: HINDU CHILDREN--NOTICE THE FOREHEAD CASTE MARKS.]
{212 continued}
The streets, if such they may be called, are often little more than
crooked water-rutted paths, so narrow that one may reach from the mud
walls of the houses on one side to the mud walls on the other, and so
crooked that you are likely to meet yourself coming back before you
get to the end. Or perhaps you wind up unexpectedly in some
_mahullah_--a group of huts representing several families of kinsfolk.
Enclosed by a mud wall, the little brown bright-eyed, black-haired,
half-naked children are playing together in the little opening around
which the houses are bunched, and the barefooted mothers are cooking
_chapatis_, spinning cotton on knee-high spinning wheels, weaving in
some wonderfully primitive way, gathering fuel, or are engaged in
other household tasks. The equipment of one of these human ant-hills,
called a home, is about as primitive as the building itself. There is,
of course, a bed or cot: it is about {215} half knee-high, and the heavy
twine or light rope knitted together after the fashion of a very
coarse fish-net is the only mattress. The coarse grain which serves
for food is stored in jars; the meagre supply of clothing hangs in one
corner of the room; there are no chairs, knives or forks. The stove or
fireplace is a sort of small clay box for the fire, with an opening on
top for the kettle or oven. In one corner of the room is the fuel: a
few small sticks and dried refuse from cow stalls that Americans use
for fertilizing their fields. "We have found rather bad results," a
missionary told me, "from providing Indian girls with mattresses,
chairs, knives, forks, etc., at our mission schools. Later, when they
marry our native workers, the $5-a-month income of the family (which
is about all they can expect) is insufficient to provide these
luxuries, and the girl's recollections of former comforts are likely
to prove a source of dissatisfaction to her."
At first you ask, "But why are there no windows in the houses? Surely
the people could leave openings in the clay walls that would give
light and ventilation?" The answer is that most of the year the
weather is so hot that the hope of the owner is to get as nearly
cave-like conditions as possible; to find, as it were, a cool place in
the earth, untouched by the fiery glare of the burning sun outside.
Even in north central India in the houses of the white men, where
everything has been done to reduce the temperature and with every
punkah-fan swinging the room's length to make a breeze, the
temperature in May and June is 106 or higher, and at midnight in the
open air the thermometer may reach 105. "It is then no uncommon
thing," a friend in Agra told me, "to find even natives struck down
dead by the roadside; and the railways have men designated to take and
burn the bodies of those who succumb to the heat in travel by the
cars."
In such a warm climate the dress of the people, as has already been
suggested, is not very elaborate. In fact, the garb of the adult man
is likely to be somewhat like the uniform of the {216} Gunga Din (the
Indian _bhisti_ or water-carrier for the British regiment):
"The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind--
For a twisty piece o' rag
And a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field equipment 'e could find."
In cold weather, however, the majority of the men are rather fully
covered, and in any case they add a turban or cap of some gaudy hue to
the uniform just suggested.
As for the dress of the women, a typical woman's outfit will consist
of, say, a crimson skirt with a green border, a navy-blue piece of
cloth as large as a sheet draped loosely (and quite incompletely)
around the head and upper part of the body, and a breast-cloth or
possibly a waist of brilliant yellow. This combination of hues, of
course, is only a specimen. The actual colors are variable but the
brilliancy is invariable.
Furthermore, the celebrated Old Lady of Banbury Cross, who boasted of
rings, on her fingers and bells on her toes, would find her glory
vanish in a twinkling should she visit India. Not content with these
preliminary beginnings of adornment, the barefooted Hindu woman
wears--if she can afford it--a band or two of anklets, bracelets
halfway from wrist to elbow, armlets beyond the elbow, ear-rings of
immense size, a necklace or two, toe-rings and a bejewelled nose-ring
as big around as a turnip. Sometimes the jewelry on a woman's feet
will rattle as she walks like the trace-chains on a plow-horse on the
way to the barn.
This barbaric display of jewelry, it should be said, is not made
solely for purposes of show. The truth is that the native has not
grown used to the idea of savings banks (although the government is
now gradually convincing him that the postal savings institutions are
safe), and when he earns a spare rupee he puts it into jewelry to
adorn the person of himself or {217} his wife. If all the idle
treasures which the poor of India now carry on their legs, arms, ears,
and noses were put into productive industry, a good deal might be done
to alleviate the misery for which the agitators profess to blame the
British Government.
Calcutta, India.
{218}
XXII
HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE