CHAPTER XIX.
THE NEW INFLUENCES: WESTERN SCIENCE AND COMMERCIALISM.
The first objects that I saw in India—indeed I saw them while still well out at sea—were a lighthouse and a factory chimney! This was at Tuticorin, a little place in the extreme south; but afterwards I found that these objects represented remarkably well the vast spread of Western influences all over the country, in their two great main forms, science and commercialism.
I had no idea, until I landed, how Western ideas and education have of late years overrun the cities and towns, even down to the small towns, of India; but I was destined to be speedily enlightened on this subject. Having a few hours to spare at Tuticorin, I was walking up and down by the sad sea-waves when I noticed a youth of about seventeen reading a book. Glancing over his shoulder, to my surprise I saw it was our old friend “Todhunter’s Euclid.” The youth looked like any other son of the people, undistinguished for wealth or rank—for in this country there is no great distinction in dress between rich and poor—simply clad in his cotton or muslin wrap, with bare head and bare feet; and naturally I remonstrated with him on his conduct. “O yes,” he said in English, “I am reading Euclid—I belong to Bishop Caldwell’s College.”—“Bishop Caldwell’s College?”—“Yes,” he said, “it is a large college here, with 200 boys, from ages of 13 or 14 up to 23 or 24.”—“Indeed, and what do you read?”—“Oh, we read Algebra and Euclid,” he replied enthusiastically, “and English History and Natural Science and Mill’s Political Economy, and” (but here his voice fell a semitone) “we learn two chapters of the Bible by heart every day.” By this time other boys had come up, and I soon found myself the centre of a small crowd, and conversing to them about England, and its well-known scholars and politicians, and a variety of things about which they asked eager questions. “Come and see the college,” at last they said, seeing I was interested; and so we adjourned—a troop of about fifty—into a courtyard containing various school-buildings. There did not seem to be any masters about, and after showing me some of the class-rooms, which were fitted up much like English class-rooms, they took me to the dormitory. The dormitory was a spacious room or hall, large enough I daresay to accommodate most of the scholars, but to my surprise it contained not a single bit of furniture—not a bed or a chair or a table, far less a washstand; only round the wall on the floor were the boys’ boxes—mostly small enough—and grass mats which, unrolled at night, they used for sleeping on. This (combined with J. S. Mill) was plain living and high thinking indeed. Seeing my look of mingled amusement and surprise, they said with a chuckle, “Come and see the dining-hall”—lo! another room of about the same size—this time with nothing in it, except plates distributed at equal distances about the floor! The meal hour was just approaching, and the boys squatting down with crossed feet took each a plate upon his lap, while serving-men going round with huge bowls of curry and rice supplied them with food, which they ate with their fingers.
It certainly impressed me a good deal to find a high level of Western education going on, and among boys, many of them evidently from their conversation intelligent enough, under such extremely simple conditions, and in so unimportant a place as Tuticorin might appear. But I soon found that similar institutions—not all fortunately involving two chapters of the Bible every day, and not all quite so simple in their interior instalments—existed all over the land. Not only are there universities at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, granting degrees on a broad foundation of Western learning, and affiliated to Oxford and Cambridge in such a way that the student, having taken his B.A. at either of the Indian universities, can now take a further degree at either of the English ones after two years’ residence only; but there are important colleges and high schools in all the principal towns; and a graduated network of instruction down to the native village schools all over the land. Besides these there are medical colleges, such as the Grant Medical College at Bombay; women’s colleges, like the Bethune College at Calcutta, which has fifty or sixty women students, and which passed six women graduates in the Calcutta university examinations in 1890; and other institutions. In most cases the principals of these higher institutions are English, but the staff is largely native.
And as a part of Western education I suppose one may include our games and sports, which are rapidly coming into use and supplanting, in populous centres, the native exercises. It is a curious and unexpected sight to see troops of dark-skinned and barefooted lads and men playing cricket—but it is a sight one may meet with in any of the towns now-a-days in the cooler weather. At Bombay the maidans are simply crowded at times with cricketers—Parsee clubs, Hindu clubs, Eurasians, English—I reckoned I could count a score of pitches one day from the place where I was sitting. The same at Calcutta. The same at Nagpore, with golf going on as well. Yet one cannot help noticing the separation of the different sections of the population, even in their games—the English cricket-ground, the “second-class” English ground, the Eurasian ground, the Hindu and Mahomedan—all distinct!
The effect of this rush of Western ideas and education is of course what one might expect—and what I have already alluded to once or twice—namely, to discredit the old religion and the old caste-practices. As my friend the schoolmaster said at Calcutta, “No one believes in all this now”; by no one meaning no one who belongs to the new movement and has gone through the Western curriculum—the “young India.”
The question may be asked then, What does the young India believe in? It has practically abandoned the religion of its fathers, largely scoffs at it, does it accept Christianity in any form in its place? I believe we may reply No. Christianity in its missions and its Salvation armies, though it may move a little among the masses, does not to any extent touch the advanced and educated sections. No, the latter read Mill, Spencer and Huxley, and they have quite naturally and in good faith adopted the philosophy of their teachers—the scientific materialism which had its full vogue in England some twenty years ago, but which is now perhaps somewhat on the wane. As one of these enthusiasts said to me one day, “We are all Agnostics now.” With that extraordinary quickness and receptivity which is one of the great features of the Hindu mind, though beginning the study so much later in the day, they have absorbed the teachings of modern science and leapt to its conclusions almost as soon as we have in the West. That the movement will remain at this point seems to me in the highest degree unlikely. There may be a reaction back to the old standpoint, or, what is more hopeful, a forward effort to rehabilitate the profound teachings of their forefathers into forms more suited to the times in which we live, and freed from the many absurdities which have gathered round the old tradition.
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The second great factor in modern India is the growth of Commercialism. This is very remarkable, and is likely to be more so. Not only at Tuticorin, but at a multitude of places are factory chimneys growing up. At Nagpore I saw a cotton-mill employing hundreds of hands. At Bombay there are between thirty and forty large cotton-mills, there is a manufacturing quarter, and a small forest of chimneys belching forth their filth into the otherwise cloudless blue.
I visited one of the largest of these mills (that of the United Spinning and Weaving Co.) with a friend who at one time had worked there. It was the counterpart of at Lancashire cotton-mill. There was the same great oblong building in three or four storeys, the same spinning jenny and other machinery (all of course brought out from England, and including a splendid high-pressure condensing engine of 2,000 H.P.), the same wicked roar and scream of wheels, and the same sickening hurry and scramble. But how strange to see the poor thin oysters working under the old familiar conditions of dirt and unhealth—their dark skins looking darker with grease and dust, their passive faces more passive than ever—to see scores of Hindu girls with huge ear-rings and nose-rings threading their way among the machinery, looking so small, compared with our women, and so abstracted and dreamy that it hardly seemed safe. And here a little naked boy about 10 years of age, minding a spinning jenny and taking up the broken threads, as clever and as deft as can be. Fortunately the Hindu mind takes things easier than the English, and refuses to be pressed; for the hours are shamefully long and there is but little respite from toil.