“What do Indian women do with their time?” how often I have been asked the question. Custom and religion make the day’s programme—a woman’s husband, and a woman’s God, are occupation in themselves, and then there may be the children. The good Hindu will have her house of Gods, her private Chapel. Sometimes there is an image in it. I have known God-houses without any image. The name of the particular God it is right for her to worship will be whispered in her ear by the family Priest, and not even to her husband may she reveal the secret. But in her Chapel you will find most often in Bengal, an image either of the Baby God a-crawling, or of Kali, the Mother. In Krishna Chapels there will be a little crib, fashioned in these Western-Eastern days like an English bedstead, with mosquito nets: and just as in the morning the devotee bathes and anoints the baby, leaving food beside it on the little altar, so at even-tide she lights the nursery lamp and puts it to bed.... Is this Hinduism? I do not know. In practice it seems to me but the Mother-worship of the Child.
But in truth there is no one form or stage of Hinduism to be found in India, or, for the matter of that, in Bengal.... The great truths are eternal and prevail in every religion: yet all men are not capable of receiving the truth, and Hinduism recognizes this. In the actual worship of the idol are the illiterate and ignorant encouraged. “It would be sin to disclose to these the mysteries of a God not made with hands,” so says the wisest of my wise women ... “for he who has heard and hearkens not, and understands not, hath the greater sin.” Yet that even a child may be capable of instruction she proves to you. I have seen many hundreds of babies under her roof, babies ranging from three to twelve years of age doing their morning pooja. It is “the worship of the possible” that she teaches them, “the worship of the Might-be.”
At 9 o’clock they come hastening to the hour of prayer, like the birds and lizards of the Moslem legend: each little devotee, lips pursed in serious earnestness, is carrying her “basket of worship,” and sits cross-legged to unpack it—an incense-burner, the bowl for Ganges water, flowers, bits of half-eaten fruit and vegetables, the sacrificial powder, often a remnant of some favourite saree, the Ganges mud with which to make her “idol”—all this she unpacks gravely, daintily, moulding her lump of clay into a cone.... Now she will make comparison with her neighbour, a little wistfully, perhaps, perhaps exultingly: often she shares her gifts.... Anything may be given to the God; the teaching here is to give what costs something, and when the pooja is over, the Pujari carries round a food-collecting plate for the animals within the gates, and the crows on the housetops. Now she is threading garlands of the sacred white jasmine, and the Priests have come for the chaunting.
The children sit in rows facing each other, along the walls of the veranda. My Wisest of the Wise explains to me that the God who dwells within us is to be invited to inhabit that lump of mud (the clay on the potters’ wheel), for His better worshipping by the children of men. So, the opening ceremony is a movement of the hands—the invocation! Each little worshipper sits wrapt before the God in the clay.... Now the Priest takes up the Sanskrit word, and the Babies chaunt it after him.
“Oh! Great God, bless us, forgive us, remain with us.”
“Oh, Great God, I offer thee this incense, these flowers, this holy water,” etc.
And the fingers are busy with the offering while every now and again “Dhyan karo” (meditate) will be the order: and five hundred pairs of Baby eyes are puckered into concentration and five hundred pairs of arms are tightly folded.
The earnest tension of the attitude moves one to tears.... Of what are they thinking? Oh! but of what?
“The worship of the Possible?”
That is the Wise Woman’s thought, not theirs. I put it to her.