THE CHIEF SOLVENT OF THE OLD IDEAS
"Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before."
TENNYSON, _In Memoriam_.
[Sidenote: English education the chief solvent.]
English education is the chief solvent of old ideas in India and the
chief source from which the new are supplied. English is the language of
the freest peoples in the world. It is only to be expected, therefore,
that with the spread of English education in India the idea of
individual freedom and the feeling of nationality should grow and the
caste idea decline. The beginning of the process is often witnessed
among the boys in Secondary Schools in India. You lay your hand upon the
arm of a boy, a new-comer to the school, and you ask him in English,
"What class?" He answers "Brahman," giving you his caste instead of his
class in school. The boy will not be long in the English school before
he will classify himself differently. In a dozen ways each day he is
made to feel that the school and the modern world have another standard
for boys and men than the caste. Or take another example of the
educative effect of a study of English--I can vouch for its genuineness.
In your house in India you get into friendly conversation with a
half-educated shopkeeper or native tradesman. You ask in English how
many children he has, and his reply is, "I have not any children, I have
three daughters." Just a little more reading in English literature would
have taught him that elsewhere the daughter is a child of the family
equally with the son.
There, in these two examples, the great social problems of India present
themselves--caste and the social inferiority of women, and in the
English language we see India confronted with ideas different from her
own. Take a third illustration from the socio-religious sphere. Few
Hindus think of Hinduism as a system of religious practices and
doctrines to be justified by reason or by spiritual intuition, or by the
spiritual satisfaction it can afford to mankind. No, Hinduism is a thing
for Indians, and belongs to the Indian soil. The converse of the idea is
that Christianity is a foreign thing, the religion of the intruding
ruling race. It is not for Indians. A vigorous patriotic pamphlet,
published in 1903, entitled _The Future of India_, assumes plainly that
_Hindus_ and _Indians_ mean the same thing. The pamphlet speaks of the
relations of Indians to "other races, such as Mahomedans, Parsees, and
Christians," as if these were less truly Indians than the Hindus. To the
writer, manifestly, Hinduism is a racial thing. To him, however, or to
the next generation after him, further study of modern history will make
clear that only in a slight degree and a few instances is religion a
racial thing, and that there are laws and a science of spiritual as of
bodily health. Once more, how ill-fitting are, say, the Indian word
_mukti_ (deliverance from further lives, the end of transmigrations) and
the English word _salvation_, although _mukti_ and _salvation_ are often
regarded as equivalents.
To the man instructed in English, such contrasts are always being
presented, tacitly inviting him to compare and to modify. We can put
ourselves in the place of many a youth of sixteen or seventeen, hope of
the village school, going up to enter a college in one of the larger
towns of India. He is entering the new world. Should he be of brahman
caste, it may profit him a little, for he will still meet with many
non-brahman householders ready to find him in food and lodging simply
because he is a poor brahman student. Of course he is looking forward to
one of the new professions, Law, or Medicine, or Engineering, or
Teaching, or Government Service. In _these_ it is patent to him that
caste is of no account. High caste or low, he and all his
fellow-students are aware they must prove themselves and fight their way
up. The leading place at the bar is no more a high-caste man's privilege
than it is his privilege to be exempted from standing in the dock or
suffering the extreme penalty of the law. We have already referred to
the effect of the assertion of the equality of men before the law in
1775 in the hanging of the brahman, Nandakumar, for forgery. Now,
looking back at the dissolving of the old ideas of artificial rank and
privileges, we may reckon also the equality of men in the great modern
professions, foremost in India being Law, as among the chief dissolving
agencies.
[Sidenote: Extent of English education.]
[Sidenote: English words naturalised.]
It is easy to give _figures_ at least for the vast agency now at work in
the spread of English education in India. Higher English education for
natives began with the founding of the Hindu College in Calcutta in
1817; in the year 1902 there were in India five Universities, the
examinations of which are conducted in English; and affiliated to these
examining Universities were 188 teaching colleges containing 23,009
undergraduates; and preparing for the Matriculation Examination (in the
year 1896-97) were 5267 Secondary Schools, containing 535,155 pupils.
From these Secondary Schools in the year 1901, 21,750 candidates
appeared at the Matriculation Examinations of the Universities
professing to be able to write their answers in English, and of these
nearly 8000 passed. That figure is a measure of the process of leavening
India with modern ideas through English education--8000 fresh recruits a
year. That is the measure of the confusion introduced into the old
social organism. A small number, no doubt, compared with the ten million
of unleavened youth born in the same year, and yet they are the pick of
the middle classes and must become the leaders of the masses. The masses
in China, it is alleged, would not be anti-foreign were it not for the
influence of their literati, and the thoughts of these Indian literati
must also become the thoughts of the Indian masses. It is the mind of
these literati, mainly, which we are trying to gauge. According to the
census of 1901 their total number approached one million, being those
who could read and write English. Descending below the English-reading
literati, I have noted about three hundred English words naturalised in
two of the chief vernaculars of India, an indication, if not a measure,
of the new influence among the masses.
[Sidenote: Too sanguine prophecies of progress.]
Yet having tabulated figures, once more, ere we proceed, we enjoin upon
ourselves and our readers a cautious estimate of the progress of ideas.
The European hood and gown of the Indian student may merely _drape_ an
_unchanged_ being. Writing in 1823 about the encouragement of education
and the teaching of English and the translation of English books, the
Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, declared too confidently
that "the conversion of the natives _must_ result from the diffusion of
knowledge among them." Macaulay, similarly, writing from India in 1836
to his father, the well-known philanthropist, declares: "It is my firm
belief that if our plans of[English] education are followed up, there
will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal
thirty years hence." Omar Khayyam's words suggest themselves as the
other extreme of opinion regarding English education in India, inside of
which the truth will be found:
"Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about, but evermore
Came out by that same door wherein I went."
The lines express the view of many Anglo-Indians. We may reply that
anywhere only a few individuals are positively liberalised by a liberal
education. We must patiently wait while their standpoint becomes the
lore and tradition of the community.
[Sidenote: Reformers are English-speaking; reactionaries are ignorant of
English.]
The part played by English education in the introduction of new ideas is
apparent whenever we enumerate the leading reformers of the nineteenth
century. One and all have received a modern English education, and
several of them have made some name by addresses and publications in
English. Of Indian reformers, distinguished also as English scholars,
may be named with all honour:
1. Rammohan Roy, a great opponent of Suttee and Idolatry, who also dared
to make the voyage to England. He died at Bristol in 1833.
2. Iswar Chunder Vidyasagar, a great upholder of the right of widows to
remarry and an advocate of education, both elementary and higher. He
died at Calcutta in 1891.
3. K.M. Banerjea, D.L., C.I.E., an opponent of the caste system, the
greatest scholar among Indian Christians. He died at Calcutta in 1885.
4. Keshub Chunder Sen, religious reformer, an advocate of a higher
marriage age for girls. He died at Calcutta in 1884.
5. Mr. Behramji Malabari, an advocate of a higher marriage age for
girls--of the Bombay side of India.
6. The late Mr. Justice M.G. Ranade, a social reformer of Bombay.
7. The late Mr. Justice K.T. Telang, C.I.E., an opponent of child
marriages and a social reformer of Bombay.
8. The late Raja Sir T. Madhava Rao, K.C.S.I., a social reformer, of the
Madras Presidency--died in 1891.
Pandita Ramabhai, it may be noted, had entered upon her career as a
champion of female education before she began the study of English.
[Sidenote: Sanguine estimate of progress.]
In striking contrast with all these in this respect are the men who
represent the extreme conservative or reactionary spirit, who as a rule
are as ignorant of English as the great reformers are the reverse. We
may cite, in illustration:
1. Dyanand Saraswati, founder of the new sect of [=A]ryas in the United
Provinces and Punjab. Their chief doctrine, the infallibility of the
Vedas or earliest Hindu scriptures, is reactionary, although a number of
reforms are inculcated in the name of a return to the Vedas.
2. The late Ramkrishna Paramhansa, a famous Bengali ascetic of high
spiritual tone, but of the old type.
3. The gentleman already referred to, who as University lecturer on
Hindu Philosophy in Calcutta insisted that none but Hindus be admitted
to the exposition of the sacred texts, shutting out the Chancellor, the
Vice-Chancellor, and many Fellows of the University.
4. Sanscrit pundits, very conservative as a class, and generally
unfamiliar with English.
New Hinduism in contact with the modern educational influences was most
interestingly manifest in the person of Swami Vivekananda (_Reverend
Rational-bliss_ we may render his adopted name), representative of
Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. The
representative Hindu was not even a member of the priestly caste, as we
have already told. It were tedious to analyse his Hinduism, as set forth
at Chicago and elsewhere, into what was Christianity or modern thought,
and what, on the other hand, was Hinduism. Suffice it to say that as
Narendra Nath Dutt, B.A., he figures on the roll of graduates of the
Church of Scotland's College in Calcutta. While a student there, he sat
at the feet of two teachers representing the new and the old, the West
and the East. In the College classroom he received religious instruction
from Dr. Hastie, the distinguished theologian who afterwards taught
Scottish students of theology in the University of Glasgow. At the same
time he was in the habit of visiting the famous Bengali ascetic,
Ramkrishna Paramhansa, already mentioned, and of communing with him.
Returning from Chicago crowned with the honour which his earnestness,
his eloquence, his power of reasoning, his attractive manner, and his
striking physique and dress called forth, Young India lionised him; Old
India met in Calcutta and resolved that Mr. Dutt of kayasth caste must
drop the brahman title _Swami_, which he had assumed, before _they_
could recognise him. In 1895, having gone to Dakhineswar, the old
residence of his Hindu master, Ramkrishna, Swami Vivekananda was
actually expelled from the temple where his master had been wont to
worship. The Chicago representative of Hinduism had been guilty of the
sins of crossing the sea and of living like a European, and so he must
be disowned and the temple purged of his presence. After a few years,
Swami Vivekananda bravely settled down to unobtrusive, philanthropic
work, one had almost said _Christian philanthropic work_, in a suburb of
Calcutta, denouncing caste and idolatry and the outcasting of those who
had crossed the sea, and recommending the Hindus to take to
flesh-eating. There, and while so engaged, in 1902 he died. How shall we
ticket that strange personage? Kayasth caste as he was born, or new
brahman? Swami or B.A. of a Mission College of the modern Calcutta
University? A conservative or a reformer? Hindu ascetic or Christian
philanthropist? He stands for India in transition, old and new ideas
commingling. He is a typical product of the English and Christian
education given to multitudes in India to-day.