I repeat once more that I must decline all the undeserved compliments paid to me by my Indian correspondents, who, though they show so perfect a mastery of English, are hardly aware that in the North our language is less warm and less sunny than in the South, and that we leave many things unsaid which must bring a blush to the cheeks of any one who knows himself, and knows how very imperfect his knowledge really is, and how far below his ideals the execution of the work of his life has remained. If Burnouf said that he was only beginning to stammer Sanskrit, what shall I, his unworthy pupil, say? But the letters themselves are important as showing the attitude assumed by the conservative orthodox party in India, when the first edition of their Sacred Book fell among them like a bombshell. For years, for centuries, nay for thousands of years, this Veda on which their whole religion was founded had been to them a kind of invisible power, much as the Bible was in the early centuries of the Papacy, when the privileged only were supposed to know it and were allowed to interpret it. In discussions between Brâhmans and Christian missionaries, this Veda had always been the last stronghold of the Brâhmans. Whatever was held up to them as a doctrine peculiar to Christianity, was met by them with the ready reply that it had been taught long ago in the Vedas also. But this Veda itself was never produced when they were asked to point out chapter and verse. Long after the MSS. of other Sanskrit texts had been freely communicated to English students, the MSS. of the Veda were kept apart, and the touch, nay the very look of an unbeliever was supposed to desecrate them. And now the book was there, handled by everybody, and spelt out more or less successfully by anybody acquainted with Sanskrit. The Brâhmans always accept the inevitable, but we shall see how, with a better knowledge of the Veda, there sprang up discussions as to its divine or revealed character, and how these discussions led gradually to the formation of a new religious sect, which, though at present confined to small circles, will no doubt in the end stir the millions, and produce a reformation in a country which seemed to be unchangeable. Of this I shall have to speak later on, when I gather up my reminiscences of Keshub Chunder Sen and his fellow-workers. Movements in which we are interested and engaged ourselves from their beginnings seem generally much smaller to us than they really are in the light of history. When Luther was translating the Bible in the castle of the Wartburg, he little dreamt that he was laying the foundation of a new Church in Germany and in all Teutonic countries, nor did Rammohun Roy on his deathbed at Bristol foresee what would grow up from the few hints he had thrown out as to the possibility of a reform and a revival of the ancient national religion of his country. But Debendranâth followed, Keshub Chunder Sen followed, and if the fire they lit does not at present burn and shine so brightly as it ought, it will certainly not die, but burst out again; for the way which those heroes pointed out is the only possible way leading from the past to the future, from ancient to modern religion, from darkness to light. Many who have lived in India and who imagine that they know India, because they know Calcutta or Bombay, are inclined to shrug their shoulders and to look down with superior wisdom and pity on those misguided dreamers, as they call them, who imagine that they can guide millions to a higher and more truly religious life. We may not live to see the hopes of Rammohun Roy or Keshub Chunder Sen realised; but, as certainly as the sun rises in the morning, the new light for India will break forth from that East to which those prophets and martyrs pointed in the last moments of their life.
The Râjah Râdhâkânta Deva was a conservative of the purest water, not touched as yet even by that conservative liberalism which guided Debendranâth Tagore and made him sympathise with, though it kept him for a time aloof from, his bolder pupil and friend, Keshub Chunder Sen. He himself seems to have never doubted the divine authority of the Veda, and in a curious controversy which I had with him on the Burning of Widows he held his ground firmly as a defender of the old ways. As we became better acquainted with the Veda, it became perfectly clear that the verse from the Rig-Veda which was cited by the Brâhmans as the supreme command for the burning of widows, had been tampered with. The Brâhmans themselves seem to have felt that so barbarous and murderous a custom as the burning of widows, whatever its origin may have been, could only be defended by an authority that was admitted to be infallible and superhuman. Such was the Rig-Veda, and they did not shrink from altering a verse which occurred in a funeral hymn of that Veda, so that instead of conveying a command to the widows to return to their home after having performed the last duty to their departed husbands, it came to mean that they should enter into the womb of fire to follow their husbands to a better world. How such a falsification could have been committed is difficult to understand, when we consider that at first the falsification had to be made in the thousands of memories which represented the real copies of the Rig-Veda. It must have taken place at a very early time, because cases of Sutti do occur, if not in the Rig-Veda, at least in the ancient popular tradition of India, as represented to us in the Mahâbhârata. Even Râdhâkânta Deva seemed inclined at last to agree with me that in the Veda, as we possess it, there is no direct command for this terrible custom; but he took his stand on the old tradition and maintained that we did not possess the whole of the ancient Vedic literature, and that the authority for the old custom may have existed in one of the lost Sâkhâs or branches of the Veda. This was a favourite argument with Indian casuists, but Indian casuists had likewise found an answer to it. They called it the “skull argument,” and reasoned that as little as a skull could be accepted as a witness in a court of law, could a lost Sâkhâ of the Veda be appealed to as an authority for a custom like the burning of widows.
All this gives us an insight into the thoughts that rule Indian society, of which even those who spend their best years in India have hardly any suspicion. That an educated Hindu should defend the burning of widows seems strange; still, if Popes and Cardinals could defend auto-da-fé’s or the burning of heretics, nay, even of witches, because the fire would purify and save their souls which could not be saved otherwise, why should not an Indian Râjah have been convinced that the burning of widows could not be wrong, believing, as he did, that it was enjoined by a lost Sâkhâ of the Veda, and that the poor women could not be saved unless they followed their husbands on their heels into another world? These are ingrained feelings, and every Hindu would at once recite the popular verses, “Accompanying her husband, she shall reside so long in Svarga (Heaven) as are the thirty-five millions of hairs on the human body.”
A loyal wife is defined as “she whose sympathy feels the pains and joys of her husband, who mourns and pines in his absence, and dies when he dies.”
In theory this is all very beautiful, and that there may have been cases where a widow wished to be burnt on her husband’s pile, can hardly be doubted[[1]]. It is well known that this custom of widow-burning, or of widows dying with their husbands, was by no means confined to India; but it is known also, now that the pages of the Veda are open to us, that the Veda certainly does not countenance it. The custom seems to have arisen with the warrior caste, and I still feel inclined to think that in its origin it was voluntary, and arose from blind, passionate love, and a strong belief in an immediate meeting again in a better world. The idea that its object was to deter wives from poisoning their husbands is simply preposterous, and though it may be quite true that at present the life of a widow has been rendered so miserable that many would willingly prefer death to so wretched an existence as that of a widow, that too could not account for so ancient and so widely spread a custom. In our own ancient Teutonic mythology, when Baldur had been murdered and his body had been placed in a ship to be carried out to sea, his wife, Nanna, died of grief, and was burnt with him on the same pile[[2]]. And Gudrun (Brynhild) also, after Sigurd had been slain, had but one wish, to be burnt with him on the same pile, two servants at their head and two at their feet, two dogs also and two hawks, and the biting sword between them, the same sword that lay between them when they slept together on the same bed, like brother and sister[[3]]. There is humanity in all this inhuman barbarism, if only we try to discover it. The strange part is that this human feeling should have manifested itself in the women only, and never in the men.
MY INDIAN FRIENDS.
II.
Nîlakantha Goreh.
If I knew the Râjah Râdhâkânta Deva by correspondence only, the next son of India whom I came to know, and for a time very intimately, as one knows and loves a friend, had travelled all the way from India, having come to England with Dhulip Singh. While I was sitting in my room at Oxford copying Sanskrit MSS., a gentleman was shown in, dressed in a long black coat, looking different from my usual visitors, and addressing me in a language of which I did not understand a single word. I spoke to him in English, and asked him what language he was speaking, and he replied with great surprise, “Do you not understand Sanskrit?” “No,” I said, “I have never heard it spoken, but here are some MSS. of the Veda which will interest you.” He was delighted to see them, and began to read, but he had soon to confess that he was not able to translate a single word. When I expressed my surprise—though perhaps I ought not to have done so—he told me that he did not believe in the Veda any longer, but had become a Christian. His countenance was most intelligent, and almost heavy with thought, his language and his manners most winning, and we were soon deep in conversation. His name had been Nîlakantha Goreh—Nîlakantha being a name of Siva (the Blue-neck)—but had been changed into Nehemiah Goreh, when he became a Christian. I have tried to find out more about his birth-place and his parents, but in vain; and, after all, who cares for all these monotonous details with which biographers generally fill the first chapters of their books? Nor did I care much for them myself, except to know that he came from a highly respected Brâhman family, and that his father had been an educated man and a Sanskrit scholar. What I really cared for was the man himself, such as he stood before me, a man, I should have guessed, of about five-and-twenty, glowing with youthful enthusiasm, and evidently brimful of thought. I must leave it to others to supply the year of his birth and all the details of his paternal and maternal genealogy.
It was not long before I discovered a sad and perplexed tone in his conversation, and, though he assured me that nothing but a deep conviction of the truth of Christ’s teaching had induced him to change his religion, he told me that he was in great anxiety and did not know what to do for the future. What he had seen of England, more particularly of London, was not what he had imagined a Christian country to be. His patron, Dhulip Singh, had placed him at some kind of missionary seminary in London, where he found himself together with a number of what he considered half-educated and narrow-minded young men, candidates for ordination and missionary work. They showed him no sympathy and love, but found fault with everything he did and said. He had been, as I soon found out, a careful student of Hindu philosophy, and his mind had passed through a strict philosophical discipline. Hindu philosophy is in many respects as good a discipline as Plato or Aristotle, and, Christian though he was, he was familiar with the boldest conceptions of the world, as found in the six systems of Hindu philosophy, and he could argue with great subtlety and accuracy on any of the old problems of the human mind. The fact was he stood too high for his companions, and they were evidently unable to understand and appreciate his thoughts. He did not use words at random, and was always ready to give a definition of them, whenever they seemed ambiguous. And yet this man was treated as a kind of nigger by those who ought to have been not only kind, but respectful to him. He was told that smoking was a sin, and that he never could be a true Christian if he abstained from eating meat, particularly beef. He told me that with the greatest effort he had once brought himself to swallow a sandwich containing a slice of meat, but it was to him what eating human flesh would be to us. He could not do it again. When he thus found himself in this thoroughly uncongenial society, and saw nothing in London of what he had supposed a Christian city to be, he ran away, and came to Oxford to find me, having heard of my interest in India, in its religion, and its ancient literature. He had evidently dreamt of a Christian country where everybody loved his neighbour as himself; where everybody, if struck on the right cheek, would turn the other also; where everybody, when robbed of his coat, would give up his cloak also. All this, as we know, is not the fashion in the streets of London, and what he actually saw in those streets was so different from his ideals that he said to me, “If what I have seen in London is Christianity, I want to go back to India; if that is Christianity, I am not a Christian.” This sounded very ominous, and I hardly knew what to say or what to do with him. He was not a man to be smoothed down by a few kind words. I tried to find out first why he had given up his native religion, and the more I heard, the more I was amazed. He began life as a worshipper of Siva, had then chosen Krishna as his deity, and, dissatisfied with this form of worship also, had proceeded to study the Korân. All that time he had kept carefully aloof from Christian missionaries and Christian converts. But when he saw that the Korân also was full of contradictions and of things which he could not approve, he began to study by himself both the Old and the New Testaments. Saturated as he was with philosophical ideas, he soon found that these books also did not satisfy his yearnings, and he wrote, as I was told, two essays in Sanskrit, one against the Old, the other against the New Testament, both directed against a book written by my old friend, J. Muir, the Mataparîkshâ (Examination of Doctrines). Those who knew him at the time in India say that his answer to the Scotch scholar was in flowing and melodious Sanskrit, and was “alike most classical in diction and irrefragable in reasoning.” Christianity in India, even as represented by so enlightened a Christian as J. Muir, was supposed to have received its death-blow by it. But the fact was, that in studying the New Testament and trying to refute it, he had become a Christian unawares.
When I asked him to tell me how in the end he succumbed, and was satisfied with the religion of Christ, he shook his head and said, “I can explain everything, I can explain why I rejected Siva, and Krishna, and Allah, and tell you everything that kept me back so long from Christianity, as preached to us in India, and made me reject the New as well as the Old Testament as unsatisfactory to a thinking man. But why and how I became a Christian I cannot explain. I was caught as in a net, and I could not get away from Christ.” This did not quite satisfy me, and I pressed him hard several times to find out whether there had not been any other inducement, perhaps unknown to himself at the time, that might have influenced him in taking this momentous step. But it was all in vain. So far from there being any worldly motives mixed up with his conversion, all outward circumstances, on the contrary, were strongly against his professing himself a Christian. He could not tell me of any missionary or teacher whose personal influence might directly or indirectly have told on him.