Eight Lectures on India - Halford John Mackinder

The religious books of India are written in Sanskrit, the tongue of Aryan conquerors who came into India across the northwestern mountains nearly two thousand years before Christ. The Aryans brought with them the worship of the powers of nature, the “devas,” or bright ones. From the Rig-Veda, or collection of hymns to various gods, which were composed for the worship of the Aryans during the earliest centuries of their dwelling in India, we learn something about these deities. Some were simply forces of nature, such as Father Heaven, Mother Earth, the Dawn Goddess, the Sun God, and the Wind God. With other deities new trains of ideas became connected that tended to obscure their original character. The Fire God, for instance, personified the fire of sacrifice and domestic use, the atmospheric fire of lightning, and sometimes even the sun. Thus he became the priest, mediating between man and the gods. Similarly Varuna, who at first apparently typified the open sky, whose eye is the sun, subsequently grew into a mighty guardian of the laws of nature and morality. This earliest age of Hinduism, the age to which the Rig-Veda belongs, is known as the Vedic Age, and the gods of this age were worshipped with sacrifice. In the Vedic period Aryan society probably divided itself into the soldier-yeoman and the priest. The soldier and yeoman, desirous of winning the goodwill and active assistance of the gods of the sky and earth, would hire the priest, who thus came to be regarded as the master of the rites which cajole or constrain the invisible powers. As the Aryans extended their sway over India, the influence of the Brahmans or priests increased, and in their hands religion underwent a profound change. Personal worship gave way to ecclesiastical ritualism. The idea of sacrifice as a means of compelling the gods grew to an enormous degree, and the welfare of the world was imagined to depend upon ritual, the key to which was in the hands of the Brahmans.

There was, however, another side to this religious development. Even in the Vedic Age, while the popular mind was imagining a deity in every startling natural phenomenon, there were thinkers who discovered behind all the “devas,” or gods, the one Supreme Power, the Creator, Ruler, and Preserver of all things, the Divine Soul of which we spoke just now. This Supreme Power, who became known as Brahma, is not only the real self of the whole Universe, but also, as we have seen, the real self of each individual soul. The one Supreme Power could, however, only be discovered after a severe moral and intellectual discipline, and those who had not yet discovered it were allowed to worship lower gods. In one of the Hindu Scriptures the Supreme Lord is represented as saying: “Even those who worship idols worship me.” No one can have any conception of Hinduism unless he realises that throughout it there runs a wide distinction between the popular faith and the philosophical faith which underlies it. This distinction continues to this day. Countless gods are still worshipped in India, but the few still hold and always have held that all gods to whom worship is offered are but names or masks of the Supreme Lord of the Universe.

The two principal gods of Modern Hinduism are Vishnu, the Preserver, and Siva, the Destroyer and Recreator; but they are worshipped under many different attributes. These two gods came into prominence after the Vedic Age, and their cults have passed through many phases; but a large number of Hindus still belong to sects which are called by their names. The sect to which a Hindu belongs is indicated by a coloured mark, erroneously described as a caste mark, made on the forehead. Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are sometimes regarded as three persons of a Trinity.

Animals are still sacrificed in certain parts of India, and in honour of certain gods, but the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and the teaching of various religious reformers, of whom Buddha is best known, has tended in the direction of humanity to all creatures; and the great majority of Hindus are unwilling to take life, and abstain from animal food. The cow is to all Hindus an object of veneration.

An elaborate mythology is connected with the Hindu religion, and the incidents of this mythology form the basis of Hindu sacred art, especially of the rich sculpture of the temples. Siva rides Nandi the Bull, and Vishnu rides Garuda the Eagle. Vishnu in some of his avatars, or incarnations, takes the form of a fish or of a man-lion, or for vast numbers of his followers he becomes Rama, the hero of the epic poem the Ramayana, or he is Krishna—another hero-God. Siva has a wife Kali, who is terrible, though at other times she is Parvati, the goddess of beauty; and Siva has sons, of whom one is Ganesh, with a fat human body and an elephant’s head.

|14.
A Marriage Procession, Trichinopoly.| |15.
A Group of Brahmans.| Religion goes deep into the life of the Indian. It governs all his social relations. Here is a street at Trichinopoly, a hundred miles north of Madura. There happens to be the spire of a Christian church in the background. In the foreground is a temple elephant, heading a marriage procession. In white paint on the elephant’s head is the sect mark of the contracting parties. The Hindu community is divided not only in sects but also into castes, which are sternly separated, so that a man may not marry into another caste, or even eat with those of a lower caste. The tradition is that originally there were four castes; first the Brahmans, or priestly stock; then the Kshattriyas, or soldiers, the royal stock; third, the Vaishiyas, or merchants; and fourth, the Sudras, or artisans, labourers and agriculturists. But all these castes became sub-divided, and there are now more castes than callings.

|16.
Processional Car, Trichinopoly.| A curious characteristic of Hinduism is the mixture of the squalid and crude with the grandeur of an architecture which in some respects is unsurpassed in the world. Not merely are the maimed and the beggars importunate in the temple passages, as in the church entries of Roman Catholic countries, but in every vacant corner of the outer courts of the temples are established little tradesmen. The properties of religious ceremony are often decrepit and tawdry. Here, for instance, we have a wooden processional car, rough roofed, awaiting the annual ceremony amid the live-stock of the yard. These warm-natured Southern people have the child’s power of making believe, and can worship the doll even when battered out of all recognition. They easily let loose the imagination and give devotion to the spirit embodied in a shapeless stone as sincerely as to that in the most finished allegorical sculpture.

|17.
Arch of Welcome to Prince of Wales, Trichinopoly.| It is this sense of the spiritual and the allegorical in all things that makes the Indian so ready for loyal devotion to the person of the ruler. Here at Trichinopoly we have a triumphal gateway erected in honour of the visit to India of the Prince and Princess of Wales, which still bears the words “Glorious Welcome to our Future Emperor.” The Prince and Princess are now the Emperor and Empress. With us the gateway would have been demolished when it had served its immediate purpose. Here it remains, as does the memory of the visit. Ceremony rises in India to the rank of an historical event.

|18.
The Main Bazaar Street, Trichinopoly.| |19.
The Tank and the Rock, Trichinopoly.| |20.
The Same—another view.| |21.
The Rock temple, Trichinopoly.| In the distance through the archway is the Rock of Trichinopoly which we approach nearer by the main bazaar of the town, and then, nearer still, we come to the tank which lies beneath the Rock. Amid the water is a pagoda or shrine. In the foot of the Rock itself there is excavated a temple. Such rock temples are frequent in India, perhaps because rock is less costly to carve where it lies undisturbed than it is to quarry and to remove and to build and to carve.