XXII Hindu Farming and Farm Life
In the rural villages, of course, the majority of the inhabitants are farmers, who fare afield each morning with their so-called plows or other tools for aiding the growth of their crops. The Indian plow is, I believe, the crudest I have found in any part of the wide world. It consists of a simple handle with a knob at the top; a block of wood with an iron spike in it about an inch thick at one end and tapering to a point at the other; and a tongue to which the yoke of bullocks are attached. The pointed spike is, perhaps, sixteen inches long, but only a fraction of it projects from the wooden block into which it is fastened, and the ordinary plowing consists only of scratching the two or three inches of the soil’s upper crust.
The Allabahad Exposition was designed mainly to interest the farmers in better implements, and its Official Handbook, in calling attention to the exhibit of improved plows, declared:
“The ordinary Indian plow is, for certain purposes, about as inefficient as it could be. Strictly speaking it is not a plow at all. It makes a tolerably efficient seed-drill, a somewhat inefficient cultivator, but it is quite incapable of breaking up land properly.”
The other tools in use on the Indian farm are fit companions for the primitive plow. Some one has said that 75 cents would buy the complete cultivating outfit of the Hindu ryot! I saw men cutting up bullock-feed with a sort of hatchet; the threshing methods are centuries old; the little sugarcane mills I found in operation here and there could have been put into bushel baskets. The big ox carts, which together with camel carts meet all the requirements of travel and transportation, are also heavy and clumsy, having wheels as big as we should use on eight-horse log-wagons at home. These wheels are without metal tires of any kind, and the average cost of one of the carts, a village carpenter told me, is $25.
As to the other crops grown by the Indian ryot, or farmer, I cannot perhaps give a better idea than by quoting the latest statistics as to the number of acres planted to each as I obtained them from the government authorities in Calcutta.
| Rice | 73,000,000 |
| Wheat | 21,000,000 |
| Barley | 8,000,000 |
| Millets | 41,000,000 |
| Maize | 7,000.000 |
| Other grains | 47,000,000 |
| Fodder crops | 5,000,000 |
| Oilseeds: linseed, mustard, sesamum, etc. | 14,000,000 |
| Sugarcane | 2,250,000 |
| Cotton | 13,000,000 |
| Jute | 3,000,000 |
| Opium (for China) | 416,000 |
| Tobacco | 1,000,000 |
| Orchard and garden | 5,000,000 |
It is somewhat surprising to learn that of the 246,000,000 acres under cultivation to supply 300,000,000 people (the United States last year cultivated 250,000,000 acres to supply 90,000,000) only 28,000,000 acres were cropped more than once during the year. With the warm climate of India it would seem that two or more crops might be easily grown, but the annual dry season makes this less feasible than it would appear to the traveller. Even in January much artificial crop-watering must be done, and no one can travel in India long without growing used to the sight of the irrigation wells. Around them the earth is piled high, and oxen hitched to the well ropes draw up the water in collapsible leather bags or buckets. A general system of elevated ditches then distributes the water where it is needed.
Concerning the drought, a resident of Muttra said to me that there practically no rain falls from the middle of January to the middle of June. “In the latter part of the drought,” he said, “the fields assume the appearance of deserts; only the dull green of the tree-leaves varies the vast, monotonous graybrown of the far-stretching plains. The streams are dried up; the cattle hunt the parched fields in vain for a bit of succulence to vary their diet of dry grass. But at last there comes the monsoon and the rains—and then the Resurrection Morning. The dead earth wakens to joyous fruitfulness, and what was but yesterday a desert has become a veritable Garden of Eden.”
But, alas! sometimes the rains are delayed—long, tragically long delayed! The time for their annual return has come—has passed, and still the pitiless sun scorches the brown earth as if it would set afire the grass it has already burned to tinder-dryness. The ryot’s scanty stock of grain is running low, the daily ration has been reduced until it no longer satisfies the pangs of hunger, and with each new sunrise gaunt Famine stalks nearer to the occupants of the mud-dried hut. The poor peasant lifts vain hands to gods who answer not; unavailingly he sacrifices to Shiva, to Kali, to all the heartless Hindu deities of destruction and to unnamed demons as well. The Ancient Terror of India approaches; from time immemorial the vengeful drought has slain her people in herds, like plague-stricken cattle, not by hundreds and thousands, but by tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. In Calcutta I saw several young men whom the mission school rescued from starvation in the last great famine of 1901-02 and heard moving stories of that terrible time. Many readers will recall the aid that America then sent to the suffering, but in spite of the combined efforts of the British Government and philanthropic Christendom, 1,236,855 people lost their lives. To get a better grasp upon the significance of these figures it may be mentioned that if every man, woman, and child in eight American states and territories at that time (Delaware, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada) had been swallowed up in a night, the total loss of life would not have been so great as in this one Indian famine.
Appalling as these facts are, it must nevertheless be remembered that the loss would have been vastly greater but for the excellent system of famine relief which the British Government has now worked out. It has built railways all over India, so that no longer will it be possible for any great area to suffer while another district having abundance is unable to share its bounty because of absence of transportation. In the second place, the government has wisely arranged to give work at low wages to famine sufferers—road building, railroad building, or something of the kind—instead of dispensing a reckless charity which too often pauperizes those it is intended to help. Before the British occupation India was scourged both by famine and by frequent, if not almost constant, wars between neighboring states. The fighting it has stopped entirely, the loss by drought it has greatly reduced; and some authority has stated (I regret that I have not been able to get the exact figures myself) that for a century before the British assumed control, war and famine kept the population practically stationary, while since then the number of inhabitants has practically trebled.
Not unworthy of mention, even in connection with its work in relieving famine sufferers, is the excellent work the British Government is doing in enabling the farmers to free themselves from debt. The visitor to India comes to a keener appreciation of Rudyard Kipling’s stories and poems of Indian life because of the accuracy with which they picture conditions; and the second “Maxim of Hafiz” is only one of many that have gained new meaning for me since my coming:
“Yes, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannum,
If he borrowed in life from a native at 60 per cent. per annum.”’
When I first heard of “60 per cent, per annum,” and even of 70 per cent, or 80 per cent., as the ordinary rate of interest paid by the Indian ryot to the merchant or money-lender, I could not believe it, but further investigation proved the statement true. In the United Provinces I found that in some cases the ryot has been little better than a serf. The merchant has “furnished him supplies,” adding interest at the rate of one anna on each rupee at the end of each month—6-1/4 per cent., not a year but a month, and that compounded every 30 days! In one case that came to my attention, two orphan boys twenty years ago, in arranging the marriage of their sister, borrowed 100 rupees at 50 per cent, interest. For seventeen years thereafter they paid 50 rupees each year as interest, until an American missionary took up the account at 5 per cent, instead of 50, and in two years they had paid it off with only 7 rupees more than they had formerly paid as annual tribute to the money-lender. In many such cases debts have been handed down from generation to generation, for the Hindu code of honor will not permit a son to repudiate the debts of his father; and son, grandson, and great-grandson have, staggered under burdens they were unable to get rid of.
In this situation the cooperative credit societies organized under government supervision have proved a godsend to the people, and thousands of ryots through their aid are now getting free of debt for the first time in their lives, and their families for perhaps the first time in generations. Each member of a cooperative credit society has some interest in it; the government will lend at 4 per cent, an amount not greater than the total amount deposited by all the members; stringent regulations as to loans and their security, deposit of surplus funds, accounting, etc., are in force, and altogether the plan is working remarkably well. The latest report I have shows that in a single twelvemonth the total working capital of these societies increased more than 300 per cent.
The United States seems to be about the only fairly civilized country in which some form of cooperative credit society, with government aid, has not been worked out.
Of great help to the small farmer also has been the action of the government in regulating land-rents in crowded districts. The courts see to it that no landlord raises rents unfairly. One Brahmin freeholder I met in a small village (he owned 250 acres, worth from $130 to $275 per acre) told me his rents were 32 to 40 rupees (or from $10 to $13) per acre. He grows wheat and cotton, and appeared to be quite intelligent as well as prosperous, although he wore nothing save a turban and an abbreviated lower garment not quite stretching from his loins to his knees, the rest of his body being entirely naked.
That the day laborer in India can have but small hope of buying land at $100 to $300 an acre (and I think these prices general) is indicated by the fact that when I asked, in the next village, the wage per month, I was told, “Four or five rupees ($1.28 to $1.60), the laborer boarding himself.”
“And how much is paid per day when a single day’s labor is wanted?” I asked.
“Two annas and bread,” was the reply. (An anna is 2 cents.)
My informant was the schoolmaster of Khera Kalan village. At his school he told me that the children of farmers were allowed tuition free; the children of the village people pay 1 to 3 annas a month. But so hard is the struggle to get enough coarse grain to keep soul and body together (the peasant can seldom afford to eat rice or wheat) that few farm children are free from work long enough to learn to read and write.
It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squatted around a missionary’s knees in a little mud-walled yard just before I left Khera Kalan that afternoon. Outside a score of camels were cropping the leaves from the banyan trees (the only regular communication with the outside world is by camel cart) and the men of the village were grinding sugarcane on the edge of the far-reaching fields of green wheat and yellow-blossomed mustard. Not far away was a Hindu temple; not far away, too, the historic Grand Trunk Road which leads through Khyber Pass into the strange land of Afghanistan. It is the road, by the way, over which Alexander the Great marched his victorious legions into India, and over which centuries later Tamerlane came on his terror-spreading invasion. But this has nothing to do with the little half-naked boys and girls we are now concerned with. They had gathered around the Padre to recite the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer in Hindustani. I asked how many had been to school (only one responded), asked something about their games, told them something about America, and then their instructor inquired (interpreting all the time for me, of course):
“And what message would you like for the Sahib to give the boys and girls of America for you?”
“Tell them, Salaam,” was the quick chorus in reply.
“And that is good enough, I guess,” remarked the American who is now giving his life to the Indian people, “for Salaam means. Peace be to you.”
So indeed I pass on the message to the fortunate boys and girls of the United States who read this article. “Salaam,”—Peace be to you. Little Ones. You will never even know how favored of Heaven you are in having been born in a land where famine never threatens death to you and your kindred, where the poor have homes that would seem almost palatial to the average Indian child; where educational opportunities are within the reach of all; where the religion of the people is an aid to moral living and high ideals instead of being a hindrance to them; where no caste system decrees that the poorest children shall not rise above the condition of their parents; where a wage-scale higher far than six cents a day enables the poorest to have comforts and cherish ambitions; and where the humblest “boy born in a log cabin” may dream of the Presidency instead of being an outcast whose very touch the upper orders would account more polluting than the touch of a beast.
Ah, the little fate-cursed Indian brats, some of them wearing rings in their noses and not much else, who send the message through me to you—think of them to-night and be glad that to you the lines have fallen in pleasanter places.
Salaam, indeed, O happy little folk of my own homeland across the seas! Peace be to you!
Jeypore, India.
XXIII
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA
Of Hinduism as a religious or ecclesiastical institution we had something to say in another chapter; of Hinduism as Social Fact bare mention was made. And yet it is in its social aspects, in its enslavement of all the women and the majority of the men who come within its reach, that Hinduism presents its most terrible phases. For Hinduism is Caste and Caste is Hinduism. Upon the innate, Heaven-ordained superiority of the Brahmin and the other twice-born castes, and upon the consequent inferiority of the lower castes, the whole system of Brahminism rests.
Originally there were but four castes: The Brahmin or priest caste who were supposed to have sprung from the head of Brahma or God; the Kshatriya or warrior caste who sprang from his arms, the Vasiya or merchant and farmer class who sprang from his thigh, and the Sudra or servant and handicraftsmen class who came from his feet. The idea of superiority by birth having once been accepted as fundamental, however, these primary castes were themselves divided and subdivided along real or imaginary lines of superiority or inferiority until to-day the official government statistics show 2378 castes in India. You cannot marry into any one of the other 2377 classes of Hindus; you cannot eat with any of them, nor can you touch any of them.
Thus Caste is the Curse of India. It is the very antithesis of democracy—blighting, benumbing, paralyzing to all aspiration and all effort at change or improvement.
No man may rise to a higher caste than that into which he is born; but he may fall to a lower one.
There is no opportunity for progress; the only way to move is backward. Don’t kick against the pricks therefore. You were born a Brahmin with wealth and power because you won the favor of the gods in some previous existence; or you were born a Sudra, predestined to a life of suffering and semi-starvation, because in your previous existence you failed to merit better treatment from the gods. If you are only a sweeper, be glad that you were not born a pig or a cobra. Kismet, Fate, has fixed at birth your changeless station in this life; and, more than this, it has written on your brow the things which must happen to you throughout your whole existence.
The Brahmin put himself into a position of superiority and then said to all the other classes: Rebel not at the inequalities of life. They are ordained of the gods. The good that the higher castes enjoy is the reward of their having conducted themselves properly in previous existences. Submit yourself to your lot in the hope that with obedience to what the Brahmins tell you, you may possibly likewise win birth into a higher caste next time. But strike a Brahmin even so much as with a blade of grass and your soul shall be reborn into twenty and one lives of impure animals before it assumes human shape again.
Never in human history has the ingenuity of a ruling class devised a cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its supremacy. Never has there been a religion more depressing, more hopeless, more deadening to all initiative. “Jo hota so hota,”—“What is happening was to happen”—so said the wounded men who had gone to the Bombay hospital to have their limbs amputated a few days before I got there. “It is written on my forehead,” a man will often say with stoical indifference when some calamity overtakes him, in allusion to the belief that on the sixth night after birth Vidhata writes on every man’s forehead the main events of his life-to-be, and no act of his can change them. “I was impelled of the gods to do the deed,” a criminal will say in the courts. “And I am impelled of the gods to punish you for it,” the judge will sometimes answer. If plague comes, the natives can only be brought by force to observe precautions against it. “If we are to die, we shall die; why offend the gods by attempting interference with their plans?” The fatalism of the East as expressed by Omar Khayyam is the daily creed of India’s millions:
“We are no other than a Moving Row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go....
“But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days.”
It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted; but for this belief that all things are predestined, no people would ever have been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny of the caste system. Perhaps it should also be added that the belief in the transmigration of the soul has also had a not inconsiderable influence. Though you have fared ill in this life, a million rebirths may be yours ere you finally win absorption into Brahma, and in these million future lives the gods may deal more prodigally with you. Indeed, the things you most desire may be yours in your rebirth. “You are interested in India; therefore you may have your next life as an Indian,” an eminent Hindu said to me. But Heaven forbid!
At any rate, with this double layer of nourishing earth—the belief, first, that what you are now is the result of your actions in previous lives, and, secondly, that there are plenty more rebirths in which any merit you possess may have its just recompense of reward, the caste system has flourished like the Psalmist’s green bay tree, though its influence has been more like that of the deadly upas.
If you are a high-caste man you may not only refuse to eat with or touch a low-caste man, your equal perhaps in intelligence and in morals, but in some cases you may even demand that the low-caste man shall not pollute you by coming too near you on the road. On page 540 of the 1901 “Census of India Report” will be found a table showing at what distances the presence of certain inferior classes become contaminating to a Brahmin! Moreover, the low-caste man, offensive to men, is taught that he is equally offensive to the gods. He must not worship in the temples; must not even approach them. Usually it is taken for granted that no Pariah will take such a liberty, but in some places I have seen signs in English posted on the temple gates warning tourists who have low-caste servants that these servants cannot enter the sacred buildings.
Not only are these creatures of inferior orders vile in themselves, but the work which they do has also come to be regarded as degrading. A high-caste man will not be caught doing any work which is “beneath him.” The cook will not sweep; the messenger boy would not pick up a book from the floor. The liveried Brahmin who takes your card at the American Consulate in Calcutta once lost his place rather than pick up a slipper; rather than humiliate himself in such fashion he would walk half a mile to get some other servant for the duty. It is no uncommon thing to find that your servant will carry a package for you, but will hire another servant if a small package of his own is to be moved. “I had a boy for thirteen years, the best boy I ever had, till he died of the plague,” a Bombay Englishman said to me, “and he shaved me regularly all the time. But when I gave him a razor with which to shave himself, I found it did no good. He would have ‘lost caste’ if he had done barber’s work for anybody but a European!”
“I have a good sweeper servant,” a Calcutta minister told me, “but if I should attempt to promote him beyond his caste and make a house-servant of him, every other servant I have would leave, including my cook, who has been a Christian twenty years!”
The absurdities into which the caste system runs are well illustrated by some facts which came to my notice on a visit to a school for the Dom caste conducted by some English people in Benares. The Doms burn the bodies of the dead at the Ganges ghats, and do other “dirty work.” Incidentally they form the “thief caste” in Benares, and whenever a robbery occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom is guilty. For this reason a great number of Doms (they belong to the Gypsy class and have no houses anywhere) make it a practice to sleep on the ground just outside the police station nearly all the year round, reporting to the authorities so as to be able to prove an alibi in case of a robbery. So low are the Doms that to touch anything belonging to one works defilement; consequently they leave their most valuable possessions unguarded about their tents or shacks, knowing full well that not even a thief of a higher caste will touch them.
“We had a servant,” a Benares lady said to me, “who lost his place rather than take up one end of a forty-foot carpet while a Dom had hold of the other end. The new bearer, his successor, did risk helping move a box with a Dom handling the other side of it, but he was outcasted for the action, and it cost him 25 rupees to be reinstated. And until reinstated, of course, he could not visit kinsmen or friends nor could friends or kinsmen have visited him even to help at a funeral; his priest, his barber, and his washerman would have shunned him. Again, our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of the Brahmins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chiprassi or messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the letter on the floor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes the pollution that would come from actual contact with the chiprassi.” Moreover, there are social gradations even among the Doms. One Dom proudly confided to this lady that he was a sort of superior being because the business of his family was to collect the bones of dead animals, a more respectable work than that in which some other Doms engaged!
Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta tells how one day when a dead cat had to be moved from her yard her sweeper proudly pulled himself up and assured her that, though the lowest among all servants, he was still too high to touch the body of a dead animal!
My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes this a suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences of a well-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places in India. The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last been exterminated, but the English Government has not yet been able to end the activities of those who regard the plunder of the public as their immemorial right. In Delhi a friend of mine told me that the watchmen are known to be of the robber class. “You hire one of them to watch your house at night, and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left his shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection enough, as the robbers would see that I had paid the proper blackmail by hiring one of their number as chowkidar.”
In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element carrying things with a much higher hand. “There’s where they live,” Dr. J. P. Jones, the well-known writer on Indian affairs, said to me as we were coming home one nightfall, “and the people of Madura pay them a tribute amounting to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of their own whom they always consult before making a raid. If he signifies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise, not—though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with the verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the great majority of cases.”
India’s most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping down roots from a score or a hundred limbs; these roots fasten themselves in the earth and later become parent trees for other multiplying limbs and roots, until the whole earth is covered. In much the same fashion the Indian caste system has developed. Instead of the four original castes there are now more than five hundred times that number, and the system now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what social station the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to the grave (or from the time the conch shell announces the birth of a man-child till the funeral pyre consumes his body, to use Indian terminology), but also decrees almost as irrevocably what business he may or may not follow. A little American girl of my acquaintance once announced that she hadn’t decided whether she would be a trained nurse, a chorus-girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any such embarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or a thief is largely decided for him before he knows his own name.
“But isn’t the system weakening now?” the reader asks, as I have also asked in almost every quarter of India. The general testimony seems to be that it is weakening, and yet in no very rapid manner. Eventually, no doubt, it will die, but it will die hard. A few weeks ago, a Parliament of Religions was held in connection with the Allabahad Exposition, with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as the presiding officer. In the course of his “Presidential Address” the Maharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system, resorting in part to so specious an argument as the following:
“If education means the drawing forth of the potentialities of a boy and fitting him for taking his ordained place as a member of society, then the caste system has hitherto done this work in a way which no other plan yet contrived has ever done. The mere teaching of a youth a smattering of the three R’s and nothing else in a primary school is little else than a mere mockery. Under the caste system the boys are initiated and educated almost from infancy into the family industry, trade, profession, or handicraft, and become adepts in their various lines of life almost before they know it. This unique system of education is one of the blessings of our caste arrangement. We know that a horse commands a high price in the market if it has a long pedigree behind it. It is not unreasonable to presume that a carpenter whose forefathers have followed the same trade for centuries will be a better carpenter than one who is new to the trade—all other advantages being equal.”
In the phrase, “his ordained place as a member of society,” we have the keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole caste system rests. It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to have the people believe that his sons were “ordained” of Heaven to be rulers, even if “not fit to stop a gully with,” and the Sudra’s sons “ordained” to be servants, no matter what their qualities of mind and soul. But the caste system is rotting down in other places and some time or other this “ordained” theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric will totter to the ruin it has long and richly merited.
The introduction of railways has proved one of the great enemies of caste. Men of different rank who formerly would not have rubbed elbows under any considerations sit side by side in the railway cars—and they prefer to do it rather than travel a week by bullock-cart to reach a place which is but a few hours by train. Consequently the priests have had to wink at “breaking caste” in this way, just as they had to get around the use of waterworks in Calcutta. According to the strict letter of the law a Hindu may not drink water which has been handled by a man of lower caste (in Muttra I have seen Brahmins hired to give water to passersby), but the priests decided that the payment of water-rates might be regarded as atonement for the possible defilement, and consequently Hindus now have the advantages of the city water supply.
Foreign travel has also jarred the caste system rather severely. The Hindu statutes strictly forbid a man from leaving the boundaries of India, but the folk have progressed from technical evasion of the law to open violation of its provisions. In Jeypore I saw the half-acre of trunks and chests which the Maharaja of that province used for transporting his goods and chattels when he went to attend the coronation of the King of England. The Maharaja is a Hindu of the Hindus, claims descent from one of the high and mighty gods, and when he was named to go to London, straightway declared that the caste law against leaving India stood hopelessly in the way. Finally, however, he was convinced that by taking all his household with him, his servants, his priests, material for setting up a Hindu temple, a six-months’ supply of Ganges water, etc., he might take enough of India with him to make the trip in safety, and he went. Now many are going without any such precautions, and a moderate fee paid to the priests usually enables them to resume caste relations upon their return.
Sometimes, however, the penalties are heavier. A Hindu merchant of Amritsar, who grew very friendly with a Delhi friend of mine on a voyage from Europe, said just before reaching Bombay: “Well, I shall have to pay for all this when I get home, and I shall be lucky if I get off without making a pilgrimage to all the twelve sacred places of our religion. And in any case I shall never let my wife know that I have broken caste by eating with foreigners.” My impression is, however, that only in a very few cases now is the crime of foreign travel punished so severely. In Madras I met one of the most eminent Hindu leaders, Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer. “Caste has kept me from going abroad until now,” he told me, “but I have made up my mind to let it interfere no longer. Just as soon as business permits, I shall go to Europe and possibly to America.”
Christianity is another mightily effective foe of Caste. As in the olden days, it exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. In Muttra I found a converted high-caste Brahmin acting as sexton of a Christian church whose members are sweepers—outcast folk whom as a Hindu he would have scorned to touch. On the other hand, the acceptance of Christianity frees a man from the restrictions imposed upon a low caste, even though it does not give him the privileges of a higher caste and thus often wins for the Christianized Hindu higher regard from all classes. Thus there was in Moradabadad some years ago the son of a poor sweeper who became a Christian, and was a youth of such fine promise that a way was found for him to attend Oxford University. Returning, he became a teacher in Moradabadad Mission School and won such golden opinions from his townspeople that when he died the whole city—Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians alike—stopped for his funeral.
In its present elaborate form the caste system is undoubtedly doomed. It is too purely artificial to endure after the people acquire even a modicum of education. Perhaps it was planned originally as a means of preserving the racial integrity and political superiority of the Aryan invaders, but for unnumbered centuries it has been simply a gigantic engine of oppression and social injustice. At the present time no blood or social difference separates the great majority of castes from the others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and so high an authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that even in the beginning all the castes save the Sudras were of the same race and blood.
If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent the intermarriage of radically different races, this may be accomplished, as it is accomplished in our own Southern States, without restricting the right of the individual to engage in any line of work for which he is fitted or to go as high in that work as his ability warrants. Booker Washington, born in the South’s lowest ranks, becomes a world-figure; had he been born in India’s lowest caste, he would have remained a burner of dead bodies. To compare the South’s effort to preserve race integrity with India’s Juggernaut of caste is absurd.
Bombay, India.
XXIV
THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN
In India marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert Compton remarks. There are no bachelors or old maids. Children in their cradles are not infrequently given in marriage by their parents; they are sometimes promised in marriage (contingent upon sex) before they are born.
“You are married, of course?” the zenana women will ask when an American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the answer is in the negative, “Why not? Couldn’t they get anybody to have you?”
“Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow,” is an Indian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot of woman is hard if she be a wife; it is immeasurably harder if she be a widow. Hinduism enslaves a majority of the men within its reach; of the women within its reach it enslaves all.
I think it was George William Curtis who said, “The test of a civilization is its estimate of woman”; and if we are to accept this standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom. In the great temple at Madura are statues of “The Jealous Husband” who always carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; and the attitude of the man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as a system. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that woman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his “Dharma Sastra” sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: “It is the nature of woman in this world to cause men to sin. A female is able to draw from the right path, not a fool only, but even a sage.” And the “Code of Hindu Laws,” drawn up by order of the Indian Government for the guidance of judges, declares:
“A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will behave amiss. A woman is not to be relied on.”
“Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar.”
In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman has been divided into “the three subjections.” In childhood she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sons or—most miserable of all!—lacking a son, to her husband’s kinsmen. Her husband is supposed to stand to her almost in the relation of a god. “No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands,” says Manu, “no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife honors her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven.” And a recent Hindu writer says, “To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas (the Hindu scriptures). To worship the husband is to worship the gods.”
Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are doubly hard on the women. The women may no more rise above their caste than the male members of the family; and they are predestined to take up life’s most serious duties before their fleeting childhood has spent itself. No wonder they look old before they are thirty!
If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, a trip through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. A law enacted by the British Government a few years ago decrees that while the marriage ceremonies may be performed at any age, the girl shall not go to her husband as his wife until she is twelve years old; but it is doubtful if even this mild measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I attended an elaborate and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was told that the bride was “eleven or twelve” and would go to her husband’s home (he lives with his father, of course) the following week. My travelling servant told me that he was married when he was sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years longer with her parents before coming to him. The first American lady I met in India was telling of a wedding she had recently attended, the bride being a girl of eleven and the groom a year or two older. In Secunderabad a friend of mine found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who had been given in marriage, and in the house where he visited was a ten-year-old girl who had been married two years before to a man of thirty.
In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls Manu named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maximum. The father who delays finding a husband for his daughter until after she is twelve is regarded as having committed a crime—though it must always be remembered that girls and boys in India mature a year or two younger than boys and girls in the United States.
One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost increases with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies in all cases are expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish about as much excitement as circuses at home. My first introduction to a Hindu wedding was in Agra one Sunday afternoon—though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is the same as any other day—and the shops were in full blast (if such a strenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless Hindu merchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy as they ever are. From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, and as the deafening hullabaloo came nearer its volume and violence increased until it would have sufficed to bring down the walls of Jericho in half the time Joshua took for the job. Just behind the drummers came two gorgeously clad small boys astride an ass begarlanded with flowers; and when the musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so as to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-year-old small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and gauze and who ought to have been at home studying the Second Reader, was on his way to be married, and the little chap riding behind him was the brother of the bride. It was very hard to realize that such tots were not merely “playing wedding” instead of being principal participants in a serious ceremony!
The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged for a couple who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, and though no one could have asked for a more gracious welcome than my American friend and I received, I very much doubt if any one of the high-caste folk about us would have condescended to eat at the same table with us even to end a three-days’ hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was a nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been a three or four days’ wedding ceremony at the bride’s house, we were told, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feasts arranged by the groom’s father. One thousand people had been invited and, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served, I should think that my friend’s estimate of the total cost, 5000 rupees, or $1633, was none too high.
Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or a father with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strain his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that among the humbler classes a father will sometimes mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who has gone to the groom’s father with the story that the bride is “as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo’s”—he must also be paid for his indispensable services.
Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man—whose face she may never have seen but once or twice—to take up the hard life of a Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet from her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion of the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so galling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at the same table with her husband, but must be content with what he leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the people to a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. “Some of my girls are engaged to be married,” Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home in Calcutta, said to me, “and when their fiances come to call, after the Christian fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors while the boys are seated.”
Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that her husband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If she lives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husband is authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and in nearly all such cases the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W. J. Wilkins says that a servant in his employ married a second wife and insisted that the first should not only support herself but contribute the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. The older wife is tantalized by the thought that she herself was selected by the parents of her husband, while the new wife is probably his own choice; and another cause of jealousy is found in the new wife’s youth. For no matter how old the man himself may be—forty, fifty or sixty—his bride is always a girl of twelve or thereabouts—and for the very simple reason that practically no girls remain single longer, and widows are never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay of a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an agent to his native village and caste with power to negotiate.
THE TAJ MAHAL FROM THE ENTRANCE GATE.
The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful than the building itself.
Ordinarily the Indian water carrier, or bhisti, is attired more nearly after the manner described in Kipling’s poem:
“The uniform ’e wore
Was nothing much before
An’ rather less than ’arf o’ that be’ind.
For a twisty piece o’ rag and a goatskin leather bag
Was all the field equipment ’e could find.”
“My friends have persuaded me that I ought not to marry a very young girl,” he said to the agent, “get an older one therefore—oh, it doesn’t matter if she is twenty-four.”
The agent left and two days thereafter the Hindu received this message: “Can’t find one of twenty-four. How about two of twelve each?”
The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing to the troubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brahminism is that she is responsible through some evil committed either in this existence or a previous one, for the death of her husband, and the cruelest indignities of the Hindu social system are reserved for the bereaved and unfortunate woman. If a man or boy die, no matter if his wife is yet a prattling girl in her mother’s home, she can never remarry, but is doomed to live forever as a despised slave in the home of his father and mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved; and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humiliation the gods are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her. In a school I visited in Calcutta I was told that there were two little widows, one five years old and one six.
Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped the practice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow’s duty to burn herself alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. “It is proper for a woman after her husband’s death,” said the old Code of Hindu Laws, “to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000 years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve an inviolable chastity.” This rite of self-immolation was known as suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the suttees numbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stone with carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where a widow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find these gruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indian roadsides. Moreover, the present general treatment of widows in India is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare that they would prefer the suttee.
And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that a kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blacken the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customs and sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in the case of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows of their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding into maidenhood. “His affection is quite unmistakable,” my friend said to me, “and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it.”
Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless while the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument ever erected in memory of a woman’s love. True, Shah Jehan, the monarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet Mohammedanism, although its customs are less brutal, places woman in almost the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status of woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great religions of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an end by referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. Of all that I saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of the Himalayas from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the view of the Taj Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon.
The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, “Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of God,” is enough to assure one that Arjmand Banu, “The Exalted One of the Palace,” whose dust it was built to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and feature. We know but little about her. There are pictures which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; there are records to show that it was in 1615 that she became the bride of the prince who later began to rule as “His Imperial Highness, the second Alexander (Lord of the two Horns) King Shah Jehan,” and we may see in Agra the rooms in the palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian Nights-like splendor characteristic of Oriental courts,
“Mumtaz-i-Mahal,” they called her—“Pride of the Palace.” And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of motherhood—that way along which woman finds the testing of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her existence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that forever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seven times she walked the mother’s ancient way down to the gates of Death and brought back a new life with her, but the eighth time she did not return. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carrying in his heart a sorrow which not all his pomp nor power could heal, declared that she should have the most beautiful tomb that the mind of man could plan. So the Taj was built—“in memory of a deathless love,” and in a garden which is always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue of fountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, “like four tall court-ladies tending their princess,” there stands this dream in marble, “the most exquisite building on earth.”
With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhood of the country in which it is so incongruously placed.
Madras, India.