New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century, John Morrison [free ebook reader TXT] 📗
- Author: John Morrison
- Performer: -
Book online «New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century, John Morrison [free ebook reader TXT] 📗». Author John Morrison
With strange obliviousness surely, the British officials are lending support to caste ideas in various ways, while many of the best minds in India are groaning under the tyranny. The compilers of the Report of the Census of India for 1901, gentlemen to whom every student of India is deeply indebted, in their enumeration of castes, give the imprimatur of government to such Cimmerian notions as that the touch of certain low castes is defiling to the higher. The writer and condoner of the following paragraph surely need a lengthy furlough to Britain or the States. We read that "the table of social precedence attached to the Cochin Report shows that while a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher caste only by touching him, people of the Kammalan group, including masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in leather, pollute at a distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Palayan or Cheruman cultivators at 48 feet; while in the case of the Paraiyan (Pariahs) who eat beef, the range of pollution is stated to be no less than 64 feet." Some consolation let us even here take from the fact that in an earlier publication the extreme range of the polluting X-rays of the pariah is stated to be 72 feet. So there has been 8 feet of progress for the pariah. But our point is, that interesting as all that table of precedence no doubt is, it is out of place in a Government report, which may be quoted against a poor low-caste man as authoritative pronouncement regarding his social position. Justice and humanity, good grounds in the eyes of the Indian Government ere now for legislating contrary to caste ideas, ought to have enjoined the ignoring of caste ideas here. It is no mere fancy that after an accident one of these low-caste masons in South India might be brought to the door of a Government hospital and be refused admission by a native medical officer because his presence polluted at a distance of 24 feet—has not the Government Report declared it so? It is no fancy, for a year or two ago the Post Office reported that in one village the Post Office was found located where low castes were not allowed to approach. In some provinces, also, teachers will object to the admission of low-caste children in their schools; or "if they admit them make them sit outside in the verandah."[18] What now of the dignity of manual labour which many a high official has expounded to native youth? Or to take another instance of un-British countenancing of the caste idea. The Shahas of Bengal are a humble caste, and the members of higher castes will not, as a rule, take water at their hands, so the Government Report tells us. On the other hand, the Shahas of Assam, immigrants from Bengal, have managed to raise themselves high in the social scale. Why, when an Assam Shaha takes up his residence again in his motherland, Bengal, should this Blue-book be casting up to him his humble origin? Why this un-British weighting of those who are behind in the race? Again, at the very time of the Census, the Maratha caste was in conflict with the brahman in two Native States of Western India, Kohlapur and Baroda, over a matter of religious privileges. The brahman contention is that the Mahratta pretensions to high-caste blood [kshatriya] are groundless, and now we have the very same statement in the Census Report, backing "the king of the castle" against "the dirty rascal." Not a century ago, students of kayasth [clerk] caste were excluded from the Sanscrit College in Calcutta; they are now within the privileged circle, but their claim might not yet have been made good had a Government Blue-book of these earlier days been allowed to brand them as debarred from the College by their caste. At a public meeting the writer heard one of the most learned and respected Hindus of Calcutta respectfully protest to the Lieutenant-Governor against the public recognition in the Census Report of such irrational social grading.[19]
Similarly in the provision by Government of Caste Hostels for students. According to the first rule of the Hindu Hostel in connection with the Government College in Calcutta, "none but respectable Hindu students ... shall be admitted,... and such inmates shall observe the rules and usages of Hindu Society." In that rule, "respectable" simply means other than low caste. Now for the reductio ad absurdum. A certain Bengali gentleman of low caste was some years ago entitled to be addressed as "Honourable," from the high public office he held, yet by departmental orders the Principal of the Government College would shut the door of the College Hostel in the face of the Honourable's son.
Of the new religious organisations of educated India, three repudiate caste, namely, the Protestant Christian community, the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association, chiefly found in Bengal, and the Ārya Samāj or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and the Punjab. These forces of new religious feeling are marshalled against caste as a social anomaly and a bar to progress. Mahomedanism in its day was a powerful force arrayed against caste, but its regenerating power has long ago evaporated, for in many districts of India caste ideas are found flourishing among the Mahomedan converts from Hinduism. They have carried over the caste ideas from their old to their new religion.[20] The Sikhs in the Punjab also repudiate caste, but they too have forgotten their old reforming mission. Notwithstanding, we repeat, Northern India owes an immense debt to these two religions, particularly to Mahomedanism. Let any one who doubts it observe the caste thraldom of Southern India, where Mahomedan rule never established itself. Irrational as caste is in Northern India, it is tenfold more so in the South, as we have already seen. A noteworthy assertion of "the rights of men," or more literally of the rights of women, against caste may be noted in that same caste-bound South India. In the Native State of Travancore, caste custom had prohibited the women of the lower castes from wearing clothing above the waist. But about the year 1827, the women who became Christians began to don a loose jacket as the women of higher caste had been in the habit of doing. Bitter persecution of the Christian women followed, but in 1859 the right of these lower-caste women to wear an upper cloth was legally acknowledged.[21]
But the outstanding evidence of new ideas in regard to caste is furnished by the Hindu revivalists who, under the leading of Mrs. Annie Besant and the Theosophists, have established the Hindu College, Benares, as a buttress of Hinduism. From the Text-book of Hindu Religion prepared for the College, we learn that these representatives and champions of orthodoxy defend caste only to the extent of the ancient fourfold division of society into brahmans, rulers, merchants and agriculturists (one caste), and servants. What, we may ask, is to become of the 1886 sub-divisions of the brahman caste alone, all mutually exclusive with regard to inter-marriage? The text-book actually quotes sacred texts to show that caste depends on conduct, not on birth, and refers to bygone cases of promotion of heroes to a higher caste without rebirth. Its final pronouncement on caste is that "unless the abuses that are interwoven with it can be eliminated, its doom is certain." So far has the opinion of orthodox conservative Hinduism progressed with reference to its fundamental social feature, caste.
CHAPTER IV 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.
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
Comments (0)