WHAT CAREY DID FOR LITERATURE AND FOR HUMANITY
The growth of a language--Carey identified with the transition stage of
Bengali--First printed books--Carey's own works--His influence on
indigenous writers--His son's works--Bengal the first heathen country
to receive the press--The first Bengali newspaper--The monthly and
quarterly Friend of India--The Hindoo revival of the eighteenth century
fostered by the East India Company--Carey's three memorials to
Government on female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and
widow-burning--What Jonathan Duncan and Col. Walker had
done--Wellesley's regulation to prevent the sacrifice of
children--Beginning of the agitation against the Suttee crime--Carey's
pundits more enlightened than the Company's judges--Humanity triumphs
in 1832--Carey's share in Ward's book on the Hindoos--The lawless
supernaturalism of Rome and of India--Worship of Jaganath--Regulation
identifying Government with Hindooism--The swinging festival--Ghat
murders--Burning of lepers--Carey establishes the Leper Hospital in
Calcutta--Slavery in India loses its legal status--Cowper, Clarkson,
and Carey.
Like the growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really
and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa
the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the
first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed
form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of
all--the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark
peoples the possibility of the highest civilisation and the divinest
future. In countries like India and China, where civilisation has long
ago reached its highest level, and has been declining for want of the
salt of a universal Christianity, it is the missionary again who
interferes for the highest ends, but by a different process. Mastering
the complex classical speech and literature of the learned and priestly
class, and living with his Master's sympathy among the people whom that
class oppresses, he takes the popular dialects which are instinct with
the life of the future; where they are wildly luxuriant he brings them
under law, where they are barren he enriches them from the parent stock
so as to make them the vehicle of ideas such as Greek gave to Europe,
and in time he brings to the birth nations worthy of the name by a
national language and literature lighted up with the ideas of the Book
which he is the first to translate.
This was what Carey did for the speech of the Bengalees. To them, as
the historians of the fast approaching Christian future will recognise,
he was made what the Saxon Boniface had become to the Germans, or the
Northumbrian Baeda and Wyclif to the English. The transition period of
English, from 1150 when its modern grammatical form prevailed, to the
fifteenth century when the rich dialects gave place to the literary
standard, has its central date in 1362. Then Edward the Third made
English take the place of French as the public language of justice and
legislation, closely followed by Wyclif's English Bible. Carey's one
Indian life of forty years marks the similar transition stage of
Bengali, including the parallel regulation of 1829, which abolished
Persian, made by the Mohammedan conquerors the language of the courts,
and put in its place Bengali and the vernaculars of the other provinces.
When Carey began to work in Calcutta and Dinapoor in 1792-93 Bengali
had no printed and hardly any written literature. The very written
characters were justly described by Colebrooke as nothing else but the
difficult and beautiful Sanskrit Devanagari deformed for the sake of
expeditious writings, such as accounts. It was the new vaishnava faith
of the Nuddea reformer Chaitanya which led to the composition of the
first Bengali prose.[22] The Brahmans and the Mohammedan rulers alike
treated Bengali--though "it arose from the tomb of the Sanskrit," as
Italian did from Latin under Dante's inspiration--as fit only for
"demons and women." In the generation before Carey there flourished at
the same Oxford of India, as Nuddea has been called, Raja Krishna Rai,
who did for Bengali what our own King Alfred accomplished for English
prose. Moved, however, chiefly by a zeal for Hindooism, which caused
him to put a Soodra to death for marrying into a Brahman family, he
himself wrote the vernacular and spent money in gifts, which
"encouraged the people to study Bengali with unusual diligence." But
when, forty years after that, Carey visited Nuddea he could not
discover more than forty separate works, all in manuscript, as the
whole literature of 30,000,000 of people up to that time. A press had
been at work on the opposite side of the river for fifteen years, but
Halhed's grammar was still the only as it was the most ancient printed
book. One Baboo Ram, from Upper India, was the first native who
established a press in Calcutta, and that only under the influence of
Colebrooke, to print the Sanskrit classics. The first Bengali who, on
his own account, printed works in the vernacular on trade principles,
was Gunga Kishore, whom Carey and Ward had trained at Serampore. He
soon made so large a fortune by his own press that three native rivals
had sprung up by 1820, when twenty-seven separate books, or 15,000
copies, had been sold to natives within ten years.
For nearly all these Serampore supplied the type. But all were in
another sense the result of Carey's action. His first edition of the
Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801, his Grammar in the same year,
and at the same time his Colloquies, or "dialogues intended to
facilitate the acquiring of the Bengali language," which he wrote out
of the abundance of his knowledge of native thought, idioms, and even
slang, to enable students to converse with all classes of society, as
Erasmus had done in another way. His Dictionary of 80,000 words began
to appear in 1815. Knowing, however, that in the long run the
literature of a nation must be of indigenous growth, he at once pressed
the natives into this service. His first pundit, Ram Basu, was a most
accomplished Bengali scholar. This able man, who lacked the courage to
profess Christ in the end, wrote the first tract, the Gospel Messenger,
and the first pamphlet exposing Hindooism, both of which had an
enormous sale and caused much excitement. On the historical side Carey
induced him to publish in 1801 the Life of Raja Pratapaditya, the last
king of Sagar Island. At first the new professor could not find reading
books for his Bengali class in the college of Fort William. He, his
pundits, especially Mritunjaya who has been compared in his physique
and knowledge to Dr. Samuel Johnson, and even the young civilian
students, were for many years compelled to write Bengali text-books,
including translations of Virgil's Æneid and Shakspere's Tempest. The
School Book Society took up the work, encouraging such a man as Ram
Komal Sen, the printer who became chief native official of the Bank of
Bengal and father of the late Keshab Chunder Sen, to prepare his
Bengali dictionary. Self-interest soon enlisted the haughtiest
Brahmans in the work of producing school and reading books, till now
the Bengali language is to India what the Italian is to Europe, and its
native literature is comparatively as rich. Nor was Carey without his
European successor in the good work for a time. When his son Felix
died in 1823 he was bewailed as the coadjutor of Ram Komal Sen, as the
author of the first volume of a Bengali encyclopædia on anatomy, as the
translator of Bunyan's Pilgrim, Goldsmith's History of England, and
Mill's History of India.
Literature cannot be said to exist for the people till the newspaper
appears. Bengal was the first non-Christian country into which the
press had ever been introduced. Above all forms of truth and faith
Christianity seeks free discussion; in place of that the missionaries
lived under a shackled press law tempered by the higher instincts of
rulers like Wellesley, Hastings, and Bentinck, till Macaulay and
Metcalfe gained for it liberty. When Dr. Marshman in 1818 proposed the
publication of a Bengali periodical, Dr. Carey, impressed by a quarter
of a century's intolerance, consented only on the condition that it
should be a monthly magazine, and should avoid political discussion.
Accordingly the Dig-darshan appeared, anticipating in its contents and
style the later Penny and Saturday Magazines, and continued for three
years. Its immediate success led to the issue from the Serampore press
on the 31st May 1818, of "the first newspaper ever printed in any
Oriental language"--the Samachar Darpan, or News Mirror.
It was a critical hour when the first proof of the first number was
laid before the assembled brotherhood at the weekly meeting on Friday
evening. Dr. Carey, fearing for his spiritual work, but eager for this
new avenue to the minds of the people who were being taught to read,
and had little save their own mythology, consented to its publication
when Dr. Marshman promised to send a copy, with an analysis of its
contents in English, to the Government, and to stop the enterprise if
it should be officially disapproved. Lord Hastings was fighting the
Pindarees, and nothing was said by his Council. On his return he
declared that "the effect of such a paper must be extensively and
importantly useful." He allowed it to circulate by post at one-fourth
the then heavy rate. The natives welcomed their first newspaper.
Although it avoided religious controversy, in a few weeks an opposition
journal was issued by a native, who sought to defend Hindooism under
the title of the Destroyer of Darkness. To the Darpan the educated
natives looked as the means of bringing the oppression of their own
countrymen to the knowledge of the public and the authorities.
Government found it most useful for contradicting silly rumours and
promoting contentment if not loyalty. The paper gave a new development
to the Bengali language as well as to the moral and political education
of the people.
The same period of liberty to the press and to native advancement, with
which the names of the Marquis of Hastings and his accomplished wife
will ever be associated, saw the birth of an English periodical which,
for the next fifty-seven years, was to become not merely famous but
powerfully useful as the Friend of India. The title was the selection
of Dr. Marshman, and the editorial management was his and his able
son's down to 1852, when it passed into the hands of Mr. Meredith
Townsend, long the most brilliant of English journalists, and finally
into those of the present writer. For some years a monthly and for a
time a quarterly magazine till 1835, when Mr. John Marshman made it the
well-known weekly, this journal became the means through which Carey
and the brotherhood fought the good fight of humanity. In the monthly
and quarterly Friend, moreover, reprinted as much of it was in London,
the three philanthropists brought their ripe experience and lofty
principles to bear on the conscience of England and of educated India
alike. As, on the Oriental side, Carey chose for his weapon the
vernacular, on the other he drew from Western sources the principles
and the thoughts which he clothed in a Bengali dress.
We have already seen how Carey at the end of the eighteenth century
found Hindooism at its worst. Steadily had the Pooranic corruption and
the Brahmanical oppression gone on demoralising the whole of Hindoo
society. In the period of virtual anarchy, which covered the
seventy-five years from the death of Aurangzeb to the supremacy of
Warren Hastings and the reforms of Lord Cornwallis, the healthy zeal of
Islam against the idolatrous abominations of the Hindoos had ceased.
In its place there was not only a wild licence amounting to an
undoubted Hindoo revival, marked on the political side by the Maratha
ascendency, but there came to be deliberate encouragement of the worst
forms of Hindooism by the East India Company and its servants. That
"the mischievous reaction" on England from India--its idolatry, its
women, its nabobs, its wealth, its absolutism--was prevented, and
European civilisation was "after much delay and hesitation" brought to
bear on India, was due indeed to the legislation of Governor-Generals
from Cornwallis to Bentinck, but much more, to the persistent agitation
of Christian missionaries, notably Carey and Duff. For years Carey
stood alone in India, as Grant and Wilberforce did in England, in the
darkest hour of England's moral degradation and spiritual death, when
the men who were shaping the destinies of India were the Hindooising
Stewarts and Youngs, Prendergasts, Twinings, and Warings, some of whom
hated missions from the dread of sedition, others because their hearts
"seduced by fair idolatresses had fallen to idols foul."
The most atrociously inhuman of all the Brahmanical customs, and yet
the most universal, from the land of the five rivers at Lahore to the
far spice islands at Bali, was the murder of widows by burning or
burying them alive with the husband's corpse. We have seen how the
first of the many such scenes which he was doomed to witness for the
next thirty years affected Carey. After remonstrances, which the
people met first by argument and then by surly threats, Carey
wrote:--"I told them I would not go, that I was determined to stay and
see the murder, and that I should certainly bear witness of it at the
tribunal of God." And when he again sought to interfere because the two
stout bamboos always fixed for the purpose of preventing the victim's
escape were pressed down on the shrieking woman like levers, and they
persisted, he wrote: "We could not bear to see more, but left them
exclaiming loudly against the murder and full of horror at what we had
seen." The remembrance of that sight never left Carey. His naturally
cheerful spirit was inflamed to indignation all his life through, till
his influence, more than that of any other one man, at last prevailed
to put out for ever the murderous pyre. Had Lord Wellesley remained
Governor-General a year longer Carey would have succeeded in 1808,
instead of having to wait till 1829, and to know as he waited and
prayed that literally every day saw the devilish smoke ascending along
the banks of the Ganges, and the rivers and pools considered sacred by
the Hindoos. Need we wonder that when on a Sunday morning the
regulation of Lord William Bentinck prohibiting the crime reached him
as he was meditating his sermon, he sent for another to do the
preaching, and taking his pen in his hand, at once wrote the official
translation, and had it issued in the Bengali Gazette that not another
day might be added to the long black catalogue of many centuries?
On the return of the Marquis Wellesley to Calcutta from the Tipoo war,
and his own appointment to the College of Fort William, Carey felt that
his time had come to prevent the murder of the innocents all over India
in the three forms of female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and
widow-burning or burying alive. His old friend, Udny, having become a
member of Council or colleague of the Governor-General, he prepared
three memorials to Government on each of these crimes. When afterwards
he had enlisted Claudius Buchanan in the good work, and had employed
trustworthy natives to collect statistics proving that in the small
district around Calcutta 275 widow murders thus took place in six
months of 1803, and when he was asked by Dr. Ryland to state the facts
which, with his usual absence of self-regarding, he had not reported
publicly, or even in letters home, he thus replied:--
"27th April 1808.--The report of the burning of women, and some others,
however, were made by me. I, at his expense, however, made the
inquiries and furnished the reports, and believe they are rather below
the truth than above it. I have, since I have been here, through a
different medium, presented three petitions or representations to
Government for the purpose of having the burning of women and other
modes of murder abolished, and have succeeded in the case of
infanticide and voluntary drowning in the river. Laws were made to
prevent these, which have been successful."
But there was a crime nearer home, committed in the river flowing past
his own door, and especially at Sagar Island, where the Ganges loses
itself in the ocean. At that tiger-haunted spot, shivering in the cold
of the winter solstice, every year multitudes of Hindoos, chiefly wives
with children and widows with heavy hearts, assembled to wash away
their sins--to sacrifice the fruit of their body for the sin of their
soul. Since 1794, when Thomas and he had found in a basket hanging on
a tree the bones of an infant exposed, to be devoured by the white
ants, by some mother too poor to go on pilgrimage to a sacred
river-spot, Carey had known this unnatural horror. He and his brethren
had planned a preaching tour to Sagar, where not only mothers drowned
their first born in payment of a vow, with the encouragement of the
Brahmans, but widows and even men walked into the deep sea and drowned
themselves at the spot where Ganga and Sagar kiss each other, "as the
highest degree of holiness, and as securing immediate heaven." The
result of Carey's memorial was the publication of the Regulation for
preventing the sacrifice of children at Sagar and other places on the
Ganges:--"It has been represented to the Governor-General in Council
that a criminal and inhuman practice of sacrificing children, by
exposing them to be drowned or devoured by sharks, prevails...Children
thrown into the sea at Sagar have not been generally rescued...but the
sacrifice has been effected with circumstances of peculiar atrocity in
some instances. This practice is not sanctioned by the Hindoo law, nor
countenanced by the religious orders." It was accordingly declared to
be murder, punishable with death. At each pilgrim gathering sepoys
were stationed to check the priests and the police, greedy of bribes,
and to prevent fanatical suicides as well as superstitious murders.
The practice of infanticide was really based on the recommendation of
Sati, literally the "method of purity" which the Hindoo shastras
require when they recommend the bereaved wife to burn with her husband.
Surely, reasoned the Rajpoots, we may destroy a daughter by abortion,
starvation, suffocation, strangulation, or neglect, of whose marriage
in the line of caste and dignity of family there is little prospect, if
a widow may be burned to preserve her chastity!
In answer to Carey's third memorial Lord Wellesley took the first step,
on 5th February 1805, in the history of British India, two centuries
after Queen Elizabeth had given the Company its mercantile charter, and
half a century after Plassey had given it political power, to protect
from murder the widows who had been burned alive, at least since the
time of Alexander the Great. This was the first step in the history of
British but not of Mohammedan India, for our predecessors had by decree
forbidden and in practice discouraged the crime. Lord Wellesley's
colleagues were still the good Udny, the great soldier Lord Lake and
Sir George Barlow. The magistrate of Bihar had on his own authority
prevented a child-widow of twelve, when drugged by the Brahmans, from
being burned alive, after which, he wrote, "the girl and her friends
were extremely grateful for my interposition." Taking advantage of
this case, the Government asked the appellate judges, all Company's
servants, to "ascertain how far the practice is founded on the
religious opinions of the Hindoos. If not founded on any precept of
their law, the Governor-General in Council hopes that the custom may
gradually, if not immediately, be altogether abolished. If, however,
the entire abolition should appear to the Court to be impracticable in
itself, or inexpedient, as offending any established religious opinion
of the Hindoos," the Court were desired to consider the best means of
preventing the abuses, such as the use of drugs and the sacrifice of
those of immature age. But the preamble of this reference to the
judges declared it to be one of the fundamental principles of the
British Government to consult the religious opinions of the natives,
"consistently with the principles of morality, reason, and humanity."
There spoke Carey and Udny, and Wellesley himself. But for another
quarter of a century the funeral pyres were to blaze with the living
also, because that caveat was set aside, that fundamental maxim of the
constitution of much more than the British Government--of the
conscience of humanity, was carefully buried up. The judges asked the
pundits whether the woman is "enjoined" by the shaster voluntarily to
burn herself with the body of her husband. They replied "every woman of
the four castes is permitted to burn herself," except in certain cases
enumerated, and they quoted Manoo, who is against the custom in so far
as he says that a virtuous wife ascends to heaven if she devotes
herself to pious austerities after the decease of her lord.
This opinion would have been sufficient to give the requisite native
excuse to Government for the abolition, but the Nizamat Adawlat judges
urged the "principle" of "manifesting every possible indulgence to the
religious opinions and prejudices of the natives," ignoring morality,
reason, and humanity alike. Lord Wellesley's long and brilliant
administration of eight years was virtually at an end: in seven days he
was to embark for home. The man who had preserved the infants from the
sharks of Sagar had to leave the widows and their children to be saved
by the civilians Carey and he had personally trained, Metcalfe and
Bayley, who by 1829 had risen to Council and become colleagues of Lord
W. Bentinck. But Lord Wellesley did this much, he declined to notice
the so-called "prohibitory regulations" recommended by the civilian
judges. These, when adopted in the year 1812, made the British
Government responsible by legislation for every murder thereafter, and
greatly increased the number of murders. From that date the Government
of India decided "to allow the practice," as recognised and encouraged
by the Hindoo religion, except in cases of compulsion, drugging, widows
under sixteen, and proved pregnancy. The police--natives--were to be
present, and to report every case. At the very time the British
Parliament were again refusing in the charter discussions of 1813 for
another twenty years to tolerate Christianity in its Eastern
dependency, the Indian legislature legalised the burning and burying
alive of widows, who numbered at least 6000 in nine only of the next
sixteen years, from 1815 to 1823 inclusive.
From Plassey in 1757 to 1829, three quarters of a century, Christian
England was responsible, at first indirectly and then most directly,
for the known immolation of at least 70,000 Hindoo widows. Carey was
the first to move the authorities; Udny and Wellesley were the first to
begin action against an atrocity so long continued and so atrocious.
While the Governor-Generals and their colleagues passed away, Carey and
his associates did not cease to agitate in India and to stir up
Wilberforce and the evangelicals in England, till the victory was
gained. The very first number of the Friend of India published their
essay on the burning of widows, which was thereafter quoted on both
sides of the conflict, as "a powerful and convincing statement of the
real facts and circumstances of the case," in Parliament and elsewhere.
Nor can we omit to record the opinion of Carey's chief pundit, with
whom he spent hours every day as a fellow-worker. The whole body of
law-pundits wrote of Sati as only "permitted." Mritunjaya, described
as the head jurist of the College of Fort William and the Supreme
Court, decided that, according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is
the law for a widow. At best burning is only an alternative for
mortification, and no alternative can have the force of direct law.
But in former ages nothing was ever heard of the practice, it being
peculiar to a later and more corrupt era. "A woman's burning herself
from the desire of connubial bliss ought to be rejected with
abhorrence," wrote this colossus of pundits. Yet before he was
believed, or the higher law was enforced, as it has ever since been
even in our tributary States, mothers had burned with sons, and forty
wives, many of them sisters, at a time, with polygamous husbands.
Lepers and the widows of the devotee class had been legally buried
alive. Magistrates, who were men like Metcalfe, never ceased to prevent
widow-murder on any pretext, wherever they might be placed, in defiance
of their own misguided Government.
Though from 4th December 1829--memorable date, to be classed with that
on which soon after 800,000 slaves were set free--"the Ganges flowed
unblooded to the sea" for the first time, the fight lasted a little
longer. The Calcutta "orthodox" formed a society to restore their
right of murdering their widows, and found English lawyers ready to
help them in an appeal to the Privy Council under an Act of Parliament
of 1797. The Darpan weekly did good service in keeping the mass of the
educated natives right on the subject. The Privy Council, at which
Lord Wellesley and Charles Grant, venerable in years and character,
were present, heard the case for two days, and on 24th June 1832
dismissed the petition!
Though the greatest, this was only one of the crimes against humanity
and morality which Carey opposed all his life with a practical
reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had done so much to
create triumph. He knew the people of India, their religious, social,
and economic condition, as no Englishman before him had done. He stood
between them and their foreign Government at the beginning of our
intimate contact with all classes as detailed administrators and
rulers. The outcome of his peculiar experience is to be found not only
in the writings published under his own name but in the great book of
his colleague William Ward, every page of which passed under his
careful correction as well as under the more general revision of Henry
Martyn. Except for the philosophy of Hindooism, the second edition of
A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos,
including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and
Translations from their Principal Works, published in 1818 in two
quarto volumes, stands unrivalled as the best authority on the
character and daily life and beliefs of the 200,000,000 to whom Great
Britain had been made a terrestrial providence, till Christianity
teaches them to govern themselves and to become to the rest of Asia
missionaries of nobler truth than that wherewith their Buddhist fathers
covered China and the farther East.
All the crimes against humanity with which the history of India teems,
down to the Mutiny and the records of our courts and tributary states
at this hour, are directly traceable to lawless supernaturalism like
that of the civilised world before the triumph of Christianity. In
nothing does England's administration of India resemble Rome's
government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction
of Sicily, 240 B.C., to the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so
much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults
which had made society what it was. Carey and the brotherhood stood
alone in facing, in fighting with divine weapons, in winning the first
victories over the secular as well as spiritual lawlessness which fell
before Paul and his successors down to Augustine and his City of God.
The gentle and reasonable but none the less divinely indignant father
of modern missions brings against Hindoo and Mohammedan society
accusations no more railing than those in the opening passage of the
Epistle to the Romans, and he brings these only that, following Paul,
he may declare the more excellent way.
As Serampore, or its suburbs, is the most popular centre of Jaganath
worship next to Pooree in Orissa, the cruelty and oppression which
marked the annual festival were ever before the missionaries' eyes. In
1813 we find Dr. Claudius Buchanan establishing his veracity as an
eye-witness of the immolation of drugged or voluntary victims under the
idol car, by this quotation from Dr. Carey, whom he had to describe at
that time to his English readers, as a man of unquestionable integrity,
long held in estimation by the most respectable characters in Bengal,
and possessing very superior opportunities of knowing what is passing
in India generally: "Idolatry destroys more than the sword, yet in a
way which is scarcely perceived. The numbers who die in their long
pilgrimages, either through want or fatigue, or from dysenteries and
fevers caught by lying out, and want of accommodation, is incredible.
I only mention one idol, the famous Juggernaut in Orissa, to which
twelve or thirteen pilgrimages are made every year. It is calculated
that the number who go thither is, on some occasions, 600,000 persons,
and scarcely ever less than 100,000. I suppose, at the lowest
calculation, that in the year 1,200,000 persons attend. Now, if only
one in ten died, the mortality caused by this one idol would be 120,000
in a year; but some are of opinion that not many more than one in ten
survive and return home again. Besides these, I calculate that 10,000
women annually burn with the bodies of their deceased husbands, and the
multitudes destroyed in other methods would swell the catalogue to an
extent almost exceeding credibility."
After we had taken Orissa from the Marathas the priests of Jaganath
declared that the night before the conquest the god had made known its
desire to be under British protection. This was joyfully reported to
Lord Wellesley's Government by the first British commissioner. At once
a regulation was drafted vesting the shrine and the increased
pilgrim-tax in the Christian officials. This Lord Wellesley
indignantly refused to sanction, and it was passed by Sir George Barlow
in spite of the protests of Carey's friend, Udny. In Conjeeveram a
Brahmanised civilian named Place had so early as 1796 induced
Government to undertake the payment of the priests and prostitutes of
the temples, under the phraseology of "churchwardens" and "the
management of the church funds." Even before the Madras iniquity, the
pilgrims to Gaya from 1790, if not before, paid for authority to offer
funeral cakes to the manes of their ancestors and to worship Vishnoo
under the official seal and signature of the English Collector.
Although Charles Grant's son, Lord Glenelg, when President of the Board
of Control in 1833, ordered, as Theodosius had done on the fall of
pagan idolatry in A.D. 390, that "in all matters relating to their
temples, their worship, their festivals, their religious practices,
their ceremonial observances, our native subjects be left entirely to
themselves," the identification of Government with Hindooism was not
completely severed till a recent period.
The Charak, or swinging festival, has been frequently witnessed by the
present writer in Calcutta itself. The orgie has been suppressed by
the police in great cities, although it has not ceased in the rural
districts. In 1814 the brotherhood thus wrote home:--
"This abominable festival was held, according to the annual custom, on
the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected
at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A
man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and
another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days
after the first swinging, certain natives revived the ceremonies. As
Mr. Ward was passing through Calcutta he saw several Hindoos hanging by
the heels over a slow fire, as an act of devotion. Several Hindoos
employed in the printing-office applied this year to Mr. Ward for
protection, to escape being dragged into these pretendedly voluntary
practices. This brought before us facts which we were not aware of.
It seems that the landlords of the poor and other men of property
insist upon certain of their tenants and dependants engaging in these
practices, and that they expect and compel by actual force multitudes
every year to join the companies of sunyassees in parading the streets,
piercing their sides, tongues, etc. To avoid this compulsion, many
poor young men leave their houses and hide themselves; but they are
sure of being beaten if caught, or of having their huts pulled down.
The influence and power of the rich have a great effect on the
multitude in most of the idolatrous festivals. When the lands and
riches of the country were in few hands, this influence carried all
before it. It is still very widely felt, in compelling dependants to
assist at public shows, and to contribute towards the expense of
splendid ceremonies."
The Ghat murders, caused by the carrying of the dying to the Ganges or
a sacred river, and their treatment there, continue to this day,
although Lord Lawrence attempted to interfere. Ward estimated the
number of sick whose death is hastened on the banks of the Ganges alone
at five hundred a year, in his anxiety to "use no unfair means of
rendering even idolatry detestable," but he admits that, in the opinion
of others, this estimate is far below the truth. We believe, from our
own recent experience, that still it fails to give any just idea of the
destruction of parents by children in the name of religion.
One class who had been the special objects of Christ's healing power
and divine sympathy was specially interesting to Carey in proportion to
their misery and abandonment by their own people--lepers. When at
Cutwa in 1812, where his son was stationed as missionary, he saw the
burning of a leper, which he thus described:--"A pit about ten cubits
in depth was dug and a fire placed at the bottom of it. The poor man
rolled himself into it; but instantly, on feeling the fire, begged to
be taken out, and struggled hard for that purpose. His mother and
sister, however, thrust him in again; and thus a man, who to all
appearance might have survived several years, was cruelly burned to
death. I find that the practice is not uncommon in these parts.
Taught that a violent end purifies the body and ensures transmigration
into a healthy new existence, while natural death by disease results in
four successive births, and a fifth as a leper again, the leper, like
the even more wretched widow, has always courted suicide." Carey did
not rest until he had brought about the establishment of a leper
hospital in Calcutta, near what became the centre of the Church
Missionary Society's work, and there benevolent physicians, like the
late Dr. Kenneth Stuart, and Christian people, have made it possible to
record, as in Christ's days, that the leper is cleansed and the poor
have the Gospel preached to them.
By none of the many young civilians whom he trained, or, in the later
years of his life, examined, was Carey's humane work on all its sides
more persistently carried out than by John Lawrence in the Punjab.
When their new ruler first visited their district, the Bedi clan amazed
him by petitioning for leave to destroy their infant daughters. In
wrath he briefly told them he would hang every man found guilty of such
murder. When settling the land revenue of the Cis-Sutlej districts he
caused each farmer, as he touched the pen in acceptance of the
assessment, to recite this formula--
"Bewa mat jaláo,
Beti mat máro,
Korhi mat dabao"
("Thou shalt not burn thy widow, thou shalt not kill thy daughters,
thou shalt not bury thy lepers.")
From the hour of Carey's conversion he never omitted to remember in
prayer the slave as well as the heathen. The same period which saw his
foundation of modern missions witnessed the earliest efforts of his
contemporary, Thomas Clarkson of Wisbeach, in the neighbouring county
of Cambridge, to free the slave. But Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and
their associates were so occupied with Africa that they knew not that
Great Britain was responsible for the existence of at least nine
millions of slaves in India, many of them brought by Hindoo merchants
as well as Arabs from Eastern Africa to fill the hareems of
Mohammedans, and do domestic service in the zananas of Hindoos. The
startling fact came to be known only slowly towards the end of Carey's
career, when his prayers, continued daily from 1779, were answered in
the freedom of all our West India slaves. The East India answer came
after he had passed away, in Act V. of 1843, which for ever abolished
the legal status of slavery in India. The Penal Code has since placed
the prædial slave in such a position that if he is not free it is his
own fault. It is penal in India to hold a slave "against his will,"
and we trust the time is not far distant when the last three words may
be struck out.
With true instinct Christopher Anderson, in his Annals of the English
Bible, associates Carey, Clarkson, and Cowper, as the triumvirate who,
unknown to each other, began the great moral changes, in the Church, in
society, and in literature, which mark the difference between the
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Little did Carey think, as he
studied under Sutcliff within sight of the poet's house, that Cowper
was writing at that very time these lines in The Task while he himself
was praying for the highest of all kinds of liberty to be given to the
heathen and the slaves, Christ's freedom which had up till then remained
"...unsung
By poets, and by senators unpraised,
Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers
Of earth and hell confederate take away;
A liberty which persecution, fraud,
Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind:
Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more."