NEW IDEAS IN INDIA DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
_A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments_
BY THE
REV. JOHN MORRISON, M.A., D.D.
LATE PRINCIPAL, THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY'S INSTITUTION,
CHURCH OF SCOTLAND MISSION, CALCUTTA, AND
MEMBER OF SENATE OF CALCUTTA UNIVERSITY
LONDON
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907
PREFACE
The substance of the following volume was delivered in the form of
lectures in the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh during Session
1904-5. As "Alexander Robertson" lecturer in the University of Glasgow,
the writer dealt with the new religious ideas that have been impressing
themselves upon India during the British period of her history. As
"Gunning" lecturer in the University of Edinburgh, the writer dwelt more
upon the new social and political ideas. The popular belief of Hindu
India is, that there are no new ideas in India, that nought in India
suffers change, and that as things are, so they have always been. Even
educated Indians are reluctant to admit that things have changed and
that their community has had to submit to education and
improvement--that suttee, for example, was ever an honoured institution
in the province now most advanced. But to the observant student of the
Indian people, the _evolution_ of India is almost as noteworthy as the
more apparent rigidity. There is a flowering plant common in Northern
India, and chiefly notable for the marvel of bearing flowers of
different colours upon the same root. The Hindus call it "the sport of
Krishna"; Mahomedans, "the flower of Abbas"; for the plant is now
incorporate with both the great religions of India, and even with their
far-back beginnings. Yet it is a comparatively recent importation into
India; it is only the flower known in Britain as "the marvel of Peru,"
and cannot have been introduced into India more than three hundred years
ago. It was then that the Portuguese of India and the Spaniards of Peru
were first in touch within the home lands in Europe. In our own day may
be seen the potato and the cauliflower from Europe establishing
themselves upon the dietary of Hindus in defiance of the punctiliously
orthodox. _À fortiori_--strange that we should reason thus from the
trifling to the fundamental, yet not strange to the Anglo-Indian and the
Indian,--_à fortiori_, we shall not be surprised to find novel and alien
ideas taking root in Indian soil.
Seeds, we are told, may be transported to a new soil, either wind-borne
or water-borne, carried in the stomachs of birds, or clinging by their
burs to the fur of animals. In the cocoa-nut, botanists point out, the
cocoa-nut palms possess a most serviceable ark wherein the seed may be
floated in safety over the sea to other shores. It is thus that the
cocoa-nut palm is one of the first of the larger plants to show
themselves upon a new coral reef or a bare volcano-born island. Into
India itself, it is declared, the cocoa-nut tree has thus come over-sea,
nor is yet found growing freely much farther than seventy miles from the
shore. One of the chief interests of the subject before us is that the
seeds of the new ideas in India during the past century are so clearly
water-borne. They are the outcome of British influence, direct or
indirect.
Here are true test and evidence of the character of British influence
and effort, if we can distil from modern India some of the new ideas
prevailing, particularly in the new middle class. Where shall we find
evidence reliable of what British influence has been? Government
Reports, largely statistical, of "The Moral and Material Progress of
India," are so far serviceable, but only as _crude_ material from which
the answer is to be distilled. Members of the Indian Civil Service, and
others belonging to the British Government of India, may volunteer as
expert witnesses regarding British influence, but they are interested
parties; they really stand with others at the bar. The testimony of the
missionary is not infrequently heard, less exactly informed, perhaps,
than the Civil Servant's, but more sympathetic, and affording better
testimony where personal acquaintance with the life of the people is
needed. But of him too, like the Civil Servant, there is some suspicion
that in one sphere he holds a brief. This, indeed, may be said in favour
of the missionary's testimony, that while the Anglo-Indian identifies
the missionary's standpoint with that of the native, the native
identifies him with the Anglo-Indian, so that probably enough he
occupies the mean of impartiality and truth. The British merchant in
India may also offer as evidence, and indeed is "on the spot," and
apparently qualified by reason of his independence. But the interest of
his class is professedly limited to India's material progress; and of
his general views, we recall what Chaucer said of the politics of his
"merchant,"
"Sowninge alway th' encrees of his winning."
And finally, in increasing numbers, natives of India themselves are
claiming to pronounce upon the effect of the British connection upon
India; and yet again we feel that the proferred evidence must be
regarded with suspicion. That Indian is exceptional indeed whose
generalisations about India are based on observations and historical
knowledge. If the Civil Servant's honour is bound up with a favourable
verdict upon the question at issue, the educated native is as resolved
upon the other side. Nay, truth requires one to say that at this time
the educated Indian is virtually pledged against acknowledging any
indebtedness to Britain. For the reason why, we need not anticipate, but
it is foolish to shut one's eyes to the unpleasant fact, or to hide it
from the British public.
Where, then, is the testimony that is reliable? Is there nothing else
than the disputing, loud and long, of the six blind men of Indostan who
went to _see_ the Indian elephant and returned,
"Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!"
From preferred testimony of all kinds, from all affidavits, however
honestly sworn, we turn again to the ideas now prevailing as they
_betray_ themselves in the lives of the people and the words that fall
from their lips. Carefully studying earlier history, we ask ourselves
wherein the new ideas differ from the ideas current in India a century
ago. Then as progress appears, or is absent, the forces at work stand
approved or condemned. The exact historical comparison we may claim to
be a special feature of this book.
The writer is not ignorant of the delicacy of the historical task he has
set himself. He claims that during the twenty years he spent in India he
was eager to know India and her sons, read the pamphlets and articles
they wrote, enjoyed constant intercourse with Indians of all classes and
religions, reckoned, as he still reckons, many Indians among his
friends. He claims that during these years it was his pleasure, as well
as a part of his professional duty, to study the past history of India.
Ignorance of Indian history vitiates much of the writing and oratory on
Indian subjects. As a member of the staff of an Indian college, with six
hundred University students, the writer claims to have had exceptional
opportunities of entering into the thoughts of the new middle class, and
of cross-questioning upon Indian problems. In India, students "sit at
the feet" of their professors, but let it not be assumed that the
Oriental phrase implies a stand-off superior and crouching inferior.
Nay, rather it implies the closest touch between teacher and taught. All
seated tailor-fashion on the ground, the Indian teacher of former days
and his disciples around him were literally as well as metaphorically in
touch. The modern professor, successor of the pandit or guru, enjoys
intercourse with his students, as full and free, limited in truth only
by his time and his temperament.
Judging by the test of the new ideas in India, the writer has no
hesitation in declaring that the British regime has been a great
blessing to India. Likewise, whether directly inculcated or indirectly,
some of the best features of Christian civilisation and of the Christian
religion are taking hold in India and becoming naturalised. Called upon
as "Alexander Robertson" lecturer in the University of Glasgow to
deliver a course of lectures "in defence of the Christian faith," the
writer felt that no more effective defence could be offered than this
historical survey of the naturalising in India of certain distinctive
features of the Christian religion and of the civilisation of western
Christian lands.
Of this also the writer is sure, whether he possess the qualifications
for the delicate task or lack them--there is a call for some one to
interpret Britain and India to each other. In their helpless ignorance,
what wonder that Britons' views are often incomplete and distorted? On
the Indian side, on the other hand, the terrible anti-British feeling
now prevailing in India must surely be based on ignorance and
misunderstanding, and in part at least removable.
* * * * *
The Rev. Alexander Robertson, a probationer of the Free Church of
Scotland, although never in office, died at Glasgow in 1879, leaving the
residue of his estate for the endowment of a lectureship as aforesaid.
As trustees he nominated two personal friends--the Rev. J.B. Dalgety, of
the Abbey Church, Paisley, and James Lymburn, Esq., the librarian of
Glasgow University. These two gentlemen made over the trust to the
Glasgow University Court, and the writer had the honour of being
appointed the first lecturer.
The Gunning Victoria Jubilee Lectureship in the University of Edinburgh
was founded by the late Dr. R.H. Gunning of Edinburgh and Rio de
Janeiro, in the year 1889. The object of the lectureship was "to promote
among candidates for the ministry, and to bring out among ministers the
fruits of study in Science, Philosophy, Languages, Antiquity, and
Sociology."
CONTENTS
I. THE NEW ERA--SOME LEADING WITNESSES 1
II. INDIAN CONSERVATISM 11
III. NEW SOCIAL IDEAS 21
IV. THE CHIEF SOLVENT OF THE OLD IDEAS 39
V. WOMAN'S PLACE 50
VI. THE TERMS WE EMPLOY 65
VII. NEW POLITICAL IDEAS--A UNITING INDIA 72
VIII. NEW POLITICAL IDEAS--FALSE PATRIOTISM 88
IX. NEW RELIGIOUS IDEAS--ARE THERE ANY? 103
X. THE NEW RELIGIOUS ORGANISATIONS OF INDIA IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY--INDIAN CHRISTIANS AND BRAHMAS 120
XI. NEW RELIGIOUS ORGANISATIONS--[=A]RYAS AND THEOSOPHISTS 132
XII. THE NEW MAHOMEDANS 144
XIII. HINDU DOCTRINES--HOW THEY CHANGE 148
XIV. THE NEW THEISM 166
XV. JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF 184
XVI. JESUS CHRIST THE LODESTONE 194
XVII. INDIAN PESSIMISM--ITS BEARING ON BELIEF IN THE HERE AND
HEREAFTER 213
XVIII. INDIAN TRANSMIGRATION AND THE CHRISTIAN HERE AND HEREAFTER 223
XIX. THE IDEAS OF SIN AND SALVATION 239
XX. THE IDEA OF SALVATION 254
XXI. CONCLUSION 269
NEW IDEAS IN INDIA
CHAPTER I
THE NEW ERA--SOME LEADING WITNESSES
"The epoch ends, the world is still,
The age has talked and worked its fill;
The famous men of war have fought,
The famous speculators thought.
See on the cumbered plain,
Clearing a stage,
Scattering the past about,
Comes the New Age.
Bards make new poems;
Thinkers, new schools;
Statesmen, new systems;
Critics, new rules."
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
India is a land of manifold interest. For the visitors who crowd thither
every cold season, and for the still larger number who will never see
India, but have felt the glamour of the ancient land whose destiny is
now so strangely linked to that of our far-off and latter-day islands,
India has not one but many interests. There is the interest of the
architectural glories of the Moghul emperors, in whose grand halls of
audience, now deserted and merely places of show, a solitary British
soldier stands sentry over a visitors' book. For the great capitals of
India have moved from Delhi and Agra, the old strategic points in the
centre of the great northern plain, to Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and
Rangoon, new cities on the sea, to suit the later over-sea rulers of
India. There is the interest of the grand organisation of the British
Government, holding in its strong paternal grasp that vast continent of
three hundred million souls. Sometimes the sight of the letters V.R.I,
or E.R.I. (Edwardus Rex Imperator) makes one think of the imperial
S.P.Q.R.[1] once not unfamiliar in Britain. But this interest rather I
would emphasise--the penetration into the remotest jungle of the great
organisation of the British Government is a wonderful thing. By the
coinage, the post-office, the railways, the administration of justice,
the encouragement of education, the relief of famine,--by such ways the
great organisation has penetrated everywhere,--in spite of faults, the
greatest blessing that has come to India in her long history. Travelling
by rail from Calcutta to Benares, the metropolis of Hinduism, situated
upon the north bank of the sacred Ganges, we see the British rule, in
symbol, in the great railway bridge spanning the river. By it old India,
self-centred, exclusive, introspective, was brought into the modern
world; compelled, one might say, by these great spans to admit the
modern world and its conveniences, in spite of protest that the railway
bridge would pollute the sacred stream. Crossing the bridge, our eyes
are fixed on the outstanding feature of Benares--city of hundreds of
Hindu temples. What is it? Not a Hindu temple, but a splendid Mahomedan
mosque whose minarets overlook the Hindu city, calling the city of
Hindus to the worship of Allah. For the site of that mosque, the Moghul
emperor Aurangzeb ruthlessly cleared away a magnificent temple most
sacred to the Hindus. Concerning another famous Hindu temple in the same
city, listen to the Autobiography of another earlier Moghul emperor,
Jahangir. "It was the belief of these people of hell [the Hindus] that a
dead Hindu laid before the idol would be restored to life, if in his
life he had been a worshipper there.... I employed a confidential person
to ascertain the truth, and as I justly supposed, the whole was detected
to be an impudent imposture.... Throwing down the temple which was the
scene of this imposture, with the very same materials I erected on the
spot the great mosque, because the very name of Islam was proscribed at
Benares, and with God's blessing it is my desire ... to fill it full of
true believers." These things I write, not to hold up to condemnation
these Moghul rulers, but to point out by contrast the voluntary
character of the influence during the British and Christian period. For
there is in India a grander interest still than that of the British
political organisation, namely, the peaceful gradual transformation of
the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and fears, of each individual of
the millions of India.
[Sidenote: The nineteenth century in India--a conflict of ideas]
The real history of the past century in India has been the conflict and
commingling of ideas, a Homeric struggle, renewed in the nineteenth
century, between the gods of Asia and Europe. Sometimes the shock of
collision has been heard, as when by Act of Legislature, in 1829, Suttee
or widow-burning was put down, and, in 1891, the marriage of girls under
twelve; or when by order of the Executive, the sacred privacy of Indian
houses was violated in well-meant endeavours to stay the plague [1895-],
great riots ensuing; or when an Indian of social standing has joined the
Christian Church. At other times, like the tumbling in, unnoticed, of
slice upon slice of the bank of a great Indian river flowing through an
alluvial plain, opinion has silently altered, and only later observers
discover that the old idea has changed. Not a hundred years ago,
students of Kayasth (clerk) caste were excluded from the Sanscrit
College in Calcutta. Now, without any new ordinance, they are admitted,
as among the privileged castes, and the idea of the brotherhood of man
has thus made way. The silent invasion is strikingly illustrated in the
official _Report on Female Education in India_, 1892 to 1897. On a map
of India within the _Report_, the places where female education was most
advanced were coloured greener according to the degree of
advance--surely most inappropriate colouring, though that is not our
business. The map showed a strip of the greenest green all round the
sea-coast. There the unobserved new influence came in. The _Census
Report_ for 1901 showed the same silently obtruding influence from over
the sea in the case of the education of males. Many such silent changes
might be noted. And yet again, the most diverse ideas may be observed
side by side in a strange chequer. In the closing years of the
nineteenth century, the University of Calcutta accepted an endowment of
a lectureship "to promote Sanscrit learning and Vedantic studies," any
Hindus without distinction of caste being eligible as lecturers; and
then, shortly after, agreed to the request of the first lecturer that
none but Hindus be admitted to the exposition of the sacred texts, thus
excluding the European heads of the university from a university
lecture. Perhaps the lecturer thought himself liberal, for to men like
him at the beginning of the century it would have been an offence to
read the sacred texts with Sudras or Hindus of humble castes. According
to strict Hindu rule, only brahmans can read the sacred books.[2]
[Sidenote: Indian ideas.]
For in all three spheres, social, political, and religious, the advent
of the new age implied more or less of a conflict. India has still of
her own a social system, political ideas, and religious ideas and
ideals. In the Indian social system, caste and the social inferiority of
women stand opposed to the freedom of the individual and the equality of
the sexes that prevail in Great Britain, at least in greater degree. In
the sphere of politics, the absolutism, long familiar to the Indian
mind, is the antithesis of the life of a citizen under a limited
monarchy, with party government and unfettered political criticism. In
the sphere of religion, the hereditary priesthood of India stands over
against the British ideal of a clergy trained for their duties and
proved in character. The Hindu conception of a religious life as a life
of sacrificial offerings and penances, or of ecstasies, or of
asceticism, or of sacred study, stands over against the British ideal of
religion in daily life and in practical philanthropies. To the Hindu,
the religious mood is that of ecstatic whole-hearted devotion; the
Briton reverences as the religious mood a quiet staying intensity in
noble endurance or effort.
[Sidenote: Testimony to the change in ideas]
The nineteenth century has witnessed a great transition in ideas and a
great alteration in the social and political and religious standpoints.
It is easy to find manifold witness to the fact from all parts of India.
The biographer of the modern in ideas. Indian reformer, Malabari, a
Parsee[3] writing of a Parsee, and representing Western India, is
impressed by the singular fate that has destined the far-away British to
affect India and her ideals so profoundly. Crossing to the east side of
India, we seek a trustworthy witness. The well-known reformer, Keshub
Chunder Sen, a Bengali, and representative therefore of Eastern India,
declares in a lecture published in 1883: "Ever since the introduction of
British power into India there has been going on a constant upheaval and
development of the native mind,... whether we look at the mighty
political changes which have been wrought by that ... wonderful
administrative machinery which the British Government has set in motion,
or whether we analyse those deep national movements of _social_ and
_moral_ reform which are being carried on by native reformers and
patriots." All Indian current opinion is unanimous with the Parsee and
the Bengali that a great movement is in progress. The drift from the old
moorings is a constant theme of discourse. Let Sir Alfred Lyall, once
head of the United Provinces, speak for the most competent European
observers. "There may be grounds for anticipating," he says, "that a
solid universal peace and the impetus given by Europe must together
cause such rapid intellectual expansion that India will now be carried
swiftly through phases which have occupied long stages in the lifetime
of other nations."[4] In another essay, in a more positive mood, he
writes of British responsibility for "great non-Christian populations
[in India] whose religious ideas and institutions are being rapidly
transformed by English law and morality."[5] In a third passage he even
prophesies rashly: "The end of simple paganism is not far distant in
India."
Sir George Bird wood has also had a long Indian career, and no one
suspects him of pro-British bias--rather the reverse. Yet we find him
writing to the _Times_ in 1895 about one of the Indian provinces, as
follows: "The new Bengali language and literature," he says, "are the
direct products of our Law Courts, particularly the High Court at
Calcutta, of Mission schools and newspaper presses and Education
Departments, the agents which are everywhere, not in Bengal only, giving
if not absolute unity yet community in diversity to the peoples of
British India." The modern literature of Bengal, he goes on to say, is
Christian in its teaching; if not the Christianity of creed and dogma,
yet of the mind of Christ.
It is that transition in ideas, that alteration in social, political,
and religious standpoint which we are going to trace and illustrate.