INDIAN PESSIMISM--ITS BEARING ON BELIEF IN THE HERE AND HEREAFTER
"How many births are past, I cannot tell:
How many yet to come, no man can say:
But this alone I know, and know full well,
That pain and grief embitter all the way."
(_South-Indian Folk-song_, quoted in _Lux Christi_, by Caroline
Atwater Mason.)
"When desire is gone, and the cords of the heart are broken,
then the soul is delivered from the world and is at rest in
God."
[Sidenote: Indian pessimism.]
Two commonplaces about India are that pessimism is her natural
temperament, and that a natural outcome of her pessimism is the Indian
doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The second statement will
require explanation; but as regards the former, there is no denying the
strain of melancholy, the note of hopelessness, that pervades these
words we have quoted, or that they are characteristic of India. In them
life seems a burden; to be born into it, a punishment; and of the
transmigrations of our souls from life to life, seemingly, we should
gladly see the end. All the same, as new India is proving, pessimism is
not the inherent temperament of India, and the hope of the end of the
transmigration, and of the lives of the soul, no more natural in India
than in any other land.
[Sidenote: Due to nature?]
Pessimism is natural in India, say such writers as we have in mind,
because of the spirit-subduing aspects of nature and life amid which
Indians live their lives. Life is of little value to the possessor, they
say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is
constantly being thrust upon us. And that is so in India. Great rivers
keep repeating their contemptuous motto that "men may come and men may
go," and by their floods sometimes devastate whole districts. Sailing up
the Brahmaputra at one place in Assam, the writer saw a not uncommon
occurrence, the great river actually eating off the soft bank in huge
slices, five or six feet in breadth at a time. Something higher up, it
might have been the grounding of a floating tree, had turned the current
towards the bank, and at five-minute intervals, it seemed, these huge
slices were falling in. Not fifty yards back from the bank stood a
cottage, whose garden was already part gone; a banana tree standing upon
one of these slices fell in and was swept down before our eyes. Within
an hour the cottage itself would meet the same fate, and the people were
already rushing in and out. Or pass to another aspect of nature. For a
season every year the unveiled Indian sun in a sky of polished steel
glares with cruel pitiless eye. The light is fierce. Then, arbitrarily,
as it seems, the rains may be withheld, and the hard-baked, heat-cracked
soil never softens to admit the ploughshare, and hundreds of thousands
of the cultivators and field hands are overtaken by famine. At one time
during the famine of 1899-1900, it will be remembered that six million
people were receiving relief. Or, equally arbitrarily, betokening some
unknown displeasure of the gods, plague may take hold of a district and
literally take its tithe of the population. At any moment, life is
liable to be terminated with appalling suddenness by cholera or the bite
of a venomous serpent.
With French imagination and grace, in his _Introduction to General
History_, Michelet describes the tyranny of nature--"Natura maligna"--in
India. "Man is utterly overpowered by nature there--like a feeble child
upon a mother's breast, alternately spoiled and beaten, and intoxicated
rather than nourished by a milk too strong and stimulating for it."[106]
One cannot help contrasting the supplicating Indian villagers--of whom a
University matriculation candidate told in his essay, how, when the
rains were withheld, they carried out the village goddess from her
temple and bathed the idol in the temple tank--with the English
fisher-woman of whom Tennyson tells us, who shook her fist at the cruel
sea that had robbed her of two sons. As she looked at it one day with
its lines of white breakers, she shook her fist at it and told it her
mind--"How I hates you, with your cruel teeth."
Can this Indian aspect of nature, one wonders, be the true explanation
of the fierceness of her goddesses as contrasted with her gods, and the
offering of bloody sacrifices to goddesses only? Mother Nature is
malignant, not benign.
[Sidenote: Indian life estimated by the economic standard of life's
value.]
The value of life and the little worth of life in India may be gauged in
another way. In the language of the political economist, the value of
human life in any country may be estimated by the average wage, which
determines the standard of comfort and how far a man is restricted to
the bare necessities of bodily life. Again, judged by that standard,
life is probably in no civilised country at a lower estimate than in
India, where the labourer spends over 90 per. cent of his income upon
the bare necessities for the sustenance of the bodies of his household.
[Sidenote: Indian pessimism only a mood.]
[Sidenote: Humanlife is rising in value]
[Sidenote: Pessimism is declining]
All that is true, and yet the conclusion is only partly true. In spite
of all such reasoning, and acknowledging that the physical
characteristics of India have largely made her what she is, politically,
socially, and even religiously, I venture to think that the pessimism of
India is exaggerated. Not a pessimistic temperament, but a mood, a mood
of helpless submissiveness, a bowing to the powers that be in nature and
in the world, seems to me the truer description of the prevailing
"pessimism." At least, if it be the case, as I have tried to show, that
during the past century in India, human life has been rising in value,
the pessimistic mood must be declining. Let us observe some facts again.
In a Government or Mission Hospital, _there_ is a European doctor taking
part in the offensive work of the dressing of a coolie's sores,--we
assume that the doctor's touch is the touch of a true Christian
gentleman. To the despised sufferer, life is gaining a new sweetness,
and to the high-caste student looking on and ready to imitate his
teacher, life is attaining a new dignity. That human life has been
rising in value is patent. The wage of the labourer has been steadily
rising--in one or two places the workers are become masters of the
situation; the rights of woman are being recognised, if only slowly; the
middle classes are eager for education and advancement; the individual
has been gaining in independence as the tyranny of caste and custom has
declined; the sense of personal security and of citizenship and of
nationality has come into being. Whatever the merits of the great
agitation in 1905 against the partition of the Province of Bengal, and
inconceivable as taking place a century ago, it is manifestly the doing
of men keenly interested in the conditions under which they live. It is
a contradiction of the theory of an inherent Indian pessimism.
Self-respect and a sense of the dignity and duties of manhood are surely
increasing, and making our earth a place of hope and making life worth
living, instead of a burden to be borne. "The Hindus," says Sir Alfred
Lyall, "have been rescued by the English out of a chronic state of
anarchy, insecurity, lawlessness, and precarious exposure to the caprice
of despots."[107]
[Sidenote: Asceticism is declining.]
Best proof probably that pessimism is declining is the fact that
asceticism is declining. The times are no longer those in which the life
of a brahman is supposed to culminate in the Sannyasi or ascetic "who
has laid down everything," who, in the words of the Bhagabat Gita, "does
not hate and does not love anything."[108] The pro-Hindu writer often
quoted also acknowledges the new pleasure in life and the religious
corollary of it when she says that the recent rise in the standard of
comfort in India is opposed to the idea of asceticism. Desire, indeed,
is not gone, and the cords of the heart are not breaking. Says the old
brahman, in the guise of whom Sir Alfred Lyall speaks: "I own that you
[Britons] are doing a great deal to soften and enliven material
existence in this melancholy, sunburnt country of ours, and certainly
you are so far successful that you are bringing the ascetic idea into
discouragement and, with the younger folk, into contempt."[109] Welcome
to the new joy of living, all honour to the old ascetics, and may a
still nobler self-sacrifice take their place!
[Sidenote: Pessimism, asceticism, transmigration are allied ideas.]
For Western minds it is difficult to realise the close connection
between the doctrine of transmigration and the mood of India, rightly or
wrongly termed pessimism. _Our_ instinctive feeling is that life is
sweet; while there is life there is hope, _we_ say; "_healthy_ optimism"
is the expression of Professor James in his _Varieties of Religious
Experience_; it is "_more life_ and fuller that we want." In keeping
with this Western and human instinct, the Christian idea of the
Hereafter is a fuller life than the life Here, a perfect eternal life.
To the pessimist, on the contrary [and Hindu philosophy is pessimistic,
whatever be the new mood of India], the question is, "Why was I born?"
The Indian doctrine of transmigration comes with answer--"Life is a
punishment: it is the bitter consequence of our past that we are working
out; we must _submit_ to be born into the world again and again, until
we are cleared." "Yes, until your minds are cleared," the Indian
pantheist adds, "life _itself_ is a delusion, if you only knew it; life
itself, your consciousness of individuality or separateness, is a
delusion." But the pantheist's thought is here beside our present point.
[Sidenote: Transmigration the antithesis of eternal life.]
To the pessimistic Indian accepting the Indian view of transmigration,
it is therefore no gospel to preach the continuation of life, either
here or hereafter. "To be born again" sounds like a penance to be
endured. _Mukti_, commonly rendered _salvation_, is not regeneration
Here and eternal life Hereafter; it is _deliverance_ from further lives
altogether. If, however, we accept the statement that the value of human
life in India is rising, that life is becoming worth living, and that
the pessimistic mood is no ingrained fundamental trait, we are prepared
to believe that the hopeful Christian conception of the Here and the
Hereafter is finding acceptance. Rightly understood, the Christian
conception is at bottom the antithesis of pessimism and its corollary,
transmigration. To deny the one is almost to assert the other. The decay
of the one is the growth of the other. For the Christian conception of
the Here and the Hereafter--what is it? Life, eternal, in and through
the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. "God gave unto us eternal
life, and the life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the
life."[110] Says Harnack in his volume _What is Christianity?_ "The
Christian religion means one thing, and one thing only--eternal life in
the midst of time by the strength and under the eyes of God." Not that
the new idea in India is to be wholly ascribed to Christian influence. A
marked change in Christian thought itself during the nineteenth century
has been the higher value of this present life. Christianity has become
a vitalising gospel for the life Here even more than for the Hereafter.
But assuming the truth of what we have sought to show, namely, that
within the past century the winning personality of Christ has come to
New India, a new incentive to noble life and service, we have at least a
further reason for believing that pessimism and transmigration are
fading out of Indian minds. The new Advent, as that at Bethlehem, is a
turning-point of time; the gloomy winter of pessimism is turning to a
hopeful spring.