He knows it—or perchance e’en He knows not.
This hymn is important, not only by what it says, but by what it presupposes. Whatever date we may ascribe to it as incorporated in the Rig-Veda, many generations of thinkers must have passed before such questions could have been asked or could have been answered. As yet we see the Vedic age only as through a glass darkly. The first generation of Vedic scholars is passing away. It has done its work bravely, though well aware of its limits. Let the next generation dig deeper and deeper. What is wanted is patient, but independent and original work. There is so much new ground still to be broken, that the time has hardly come as yet for going again and again over the same ploughed field.
I must now part with my Vedic Friends. I can hardly hope that I have persuaded many of my English friends to share my feelings for my antediluvian acquaintances. All I care for is to make others understand how my heart was caught, and what I saw in my Indian love, not only in her Vedântic dreams and aspirations, but in the simplicity of her earliest utterances of trust in powers invisible, yet present behind what is visible, and in her faith in a law that rules both the natural and the supernatural world.
MY INDIAN FRIENDS.
V.
A Prime Minister and a Child-wife.
I have often had to give expression to a certain disappointment at not being able, when speaking of my Indian friends, to reveal more of their inner life. That life, we may be certain, is not absent, but it is kept hidden, just as Indian women are kept behind their purdahs or curtains and hidden under veils, more or less transparent. Some of our own distinguished men and women are perhaps too much given to perform their confessions and moral ablutions in public, while in India such books as Rousseau’s Confessions, or the Confessions of St. Augustine, nay, of Amiel or Marie Bashkirtseff, to mention some well-known instances only, can hardly be imagined. Introspection or self-examination exists no doubt among the men and women of India as well as anywhere else. But unless such inward searchings take a definite form in words, nay, in written and published words, they can hardly be said to exist. A man may enter into a dark cave and see visions, but unless he can find his way back into the bright light of day, unless he can find words for what was vaguely passing through the twilight of his memory, all vanishes again and leaves nothing behind but a nameless sentiment, like the feeling that is left by a dream, when we know indeed that we have been dreaming, but cannot recall what we saw in our dreams.
Even in the prayers which we possess of the people in India we find no very deep delvings into the soul of man. They consist chiefly of praises of the greatness of the gods or of God, of general confessions of human weakness or sin, but we hardly ever come across the agonised sufferings of self-reproachful saints, and we see little of that moral vivisection which, painful as it is to witness, often reveals to us some of the most secret springs of human nature which nothing else will bring to our view.
I cannot, therefore, even in the two cases of Indian friends which I have selected for my purpose here, promise anything like that minute moral and spiritual analysis which we find in the works of St. Augustine, of Rousseau, or Marie Bashkirtseff. One of my friends belonged to the highest, the other to the lowest ranks of Indian life; the one was a Prime Minister, the other what we should call a poor peasant-girl. I was brought into contact with them, not indeed face to face, but by correspondence only. The Prime Minister was the well-known Gaurîshankar Udayshankar Ozá, Minister of Bhavnagar. I am afraid that when people see these long and unpronounceable names they will at once put down the book. Names such as Rudyard Kipling, Bashkirtseff, or Pobedonostzeff may be mastered in time, but Gaurîshankar Udayshankar Ozá is too much for most people’s memories; and how can people, even if they manage to pronounce such a name, attach any meaning whatever to it? It might be better, perhaps, to give the name in its Sanskrit form, viz. Gaurî-samkara; we could then see some kind of meaning in it, provided we knew a little of Sanskrit. So far as one may guess the meaning of any proper names, Gaurî-samkara would be the name of the divine couple, Siva, sometimes called Samkara, and Gaurî, better known under the name of Pârvatî, his wife. Of course the name may be interpreted differently also, but when we know that Gaurî stands for Pârvatî, and Shankar for Siva, we move at once in more or less familiar spheres, and we may look on the name as something like the Christian name Joseph Maria, which is not unusual as a Christian name in Roman Catholic countries. But when I call Gaurî-samkara the well-known Prime Minister of Bhavnagar, I anticipate another shrugging of the shoulders. What is Bhavnagar, where is it, and what is there really known about its “well-known” Prime Minister? Here are our difficulties, when we want to rouse the sympathies of our readers for anything connected with India. Yes, if Gaurî-samkara of Bhavnagar were Fergus McIvor, chief of Glennaquoich, all would go well. But to most people, except those who have been in India, Bhavnagar is almost a terra incognita, and as there are now no separate postage-stamps for the independent states of India, even children would say that there is no such state as Bhavnagar anywhere. Still there is a native state of that name in Kathiawar, with about 500,000 inhabitants, and there is a Râjah, who is called the Thakur Sahib of Bhavnagar. There is also a town of Bhavnagar, the capital of the state. Like most of the protected Rajput states, Bhavnagar enjoys as much freedom as is compatible with the welfare of its neighbours and the imperial interests of India. Under such conditions conflicts are, no doubt, inevitable, and it required no little statesmanship in the Râjah, and in his Dewân, or Prime Minister, to reconcile the interests of their subjects with those of their neighbours and with those of the British Empire. Quite a new class of native statesmen seems to have sprung up of late in these various dependent states, who are enabled, through the moral support which they receive from the Central Government, to reform the abuses of a personal and autocratic régime, to revive education, and to improve the sanitary condition of the towns and villages, to open commercial communications, and altogether to raise the political and moral status and character of the people committed to their charge. In many cases they had at the same time to keep on good terms with the English residents, who are not always the most amiable, and to protect the Râjahs themselves against the corrupting influences of their little courts and harems. Taking all this together, it is not difficult to see that their position was by no means an easy one, and that it required high qualities indeed in these native statesmen to enable them to hold their own, to satisfy the claims of all the parties with whom they had to deal, and at the same time not to stifle the voice of their own conscience.
But when an opening had once been made for native talent in this direction, native talent was not wanting. The names of such men as Sir Salar Jung in Hyderabad, Sir T. Madao Rao in Travancore, Indore, and Baroda, Sir Dinkar Rao in Gwalior, are well known, not in India only, but in England also, and not the least successful among them was our friend Gaurî-samkara.
With all the narrow prejudices of Oriental society, particularly in India, there was always a carrière ouverte aux talents. Gaurî-samkara was the son of a poor man, though he belonged to a good Brâhmanic family. His education would not, perhaps, have enabled him to pass the Indian Civil Service Examination, and yet what an excellent Civil servant would he have made. Examinations prevent many evils, but they cannot create or even discover the qualities necessary for a ruler of men.