But among the common multitudes of the city, the dry light of this philosophic spirit is not conspicuous. It has never arisen, and the religious fervour of their existence remains misty, dark, and warm. Relics of far older beliefs mingle with their Hinduism. In one of their burning-grounds I met a little procession carrying milk in brazen bowls to wash the bones of the dead burnt yesterday, and to pour an offering for the spirit’s consolation. Round another grave a group of mourners were seated, offering yellow flowers, and pouring water on the dust that was alive last week. Two of them beat cymbals, and at long intervals a man raised a large white conch-shell to his lips and blew a melancholy note. Why will not the dead listen when they are called? Why will they not give one word of answer to trumpet, prayers, and love? And all the while, one of the mourners, regardless of the world, swayed to and fro chanting the undying truth that man must die, for life is a shadow, and he vanishes; those who stand beside a grave know this truth undying; they know that they too shall vanish like a shade, yet they go back to the city and sin, and sin again, forgetting that they too shall vanish like a shade. So the lamentation went on, the water was poured, the milk was offered, the conch-shell sounded its last vain summons, and the living returned to their life of numbered days. In the middle of Africa I have witnessed a yearning ceremonial exactly the same. It was the same that brought Electra out to Agamemnon’s tomb. It is the same that one may still see on All Saints’ Day, in any primitive region of Europe, and in the cemeteries of Paris herself. For it springs from the common longing of all mankind not to be forgotten, and, if only it were possible, never to forget. The same truth has been beautifully expressed with regard to the Bulgarian villagers of Macedonia by Mr. Brailsford in his book upon that country:—
“The real religion of the Balkans is older and more elemental than Christianity itself; more permanent even than the Byzantine rite. It bridges the intervening centuries and links in pious succession the modern peasant to his heathen ancestor, who wore the same costumes and led the same life in the same fields. It is based on a primitive sorrow before the amazing fact of death, which no mystery of the Resurrection has ever softened. It is neither a rite nor a creed, but only that yearning love of the living for the dead which is deeper than any creed.”[30]
In the service of the living, the fervent religious spirit of the South takes other forms, some of adoration, some only ritualistic. Now and then it turns to practical utility—the hope that religion will bring some temporal good to the worshipper. There is a belief almost universal, I suppose, in our own country and in Europe that religious thoughts, prayers, and observances ensure outward well-being, health, protection, or prosperity of some kind. In the East it is probably not so common, for religion is there elevated to its proper sphere of the inmost soul, where the comforts and external advantages of life disappear into insignificance compared with the glory that is revealed. But, deeply religious as the Hindu mind can be, I found the people in the streets of Madras directing religious ecstasy to the rather trivial object of healing disease, much as though they had been mere Faith-healers or Christian Scientists. The festival of Shiva lasted three or four days, and at any hour of the burning sunlight, one could meet little processions parading through Black Town with some sort of shrine or image, accompanied by pipes and drums, dancing and praying crowds. The sick were caught up from the doors into the pious orgies and with holy revelry danced themselves into a state of ecstatic self-forgetfulness which was unquestionably wholesome. Few diseases, I think, could stand against such treatment, provided only that the patient survived. It might be tried with miraculous results in the streets of our bath-chair watering-places. But if the triumph and proof of religion depended on mere miracles of healing the sick and raising the dead, it would be a pity to waste a minute’s thought upon the subject.
Far more fruitful was the unmixed and disinterested adoration that thronged the temples in the evening. One night I found myself at a beautiful temple in the southern part of the town. It is a Vishnu temple: here is his tank, here his chariot. But the people there were celebrating the festival of Shiva all the same, and among the deep orange columns of the external portico, dim figures in white or Indian red moved silently about, hardly revealed in the purple night by rare lanterns and tiny lamps. Being accompanied by a Brahman who was guardian of the temple, I was admitted through brazen doors into a vast courtyard leading up to the inner shrine on which no alien may look. Here the worshippers stood in an almost continuous crowd, silent, slowly moving in dubious obscurity. I caught one gleam of yellow light on prostrate forms among columns beyond, but a priest led me quietly into a vast chamber at the side, where were stabled the mystic figures of a dragon large as life, a flying kite and an elephant, all awaiting the great day when the god takes to his car and moves in glory through the streets, seated beneath the mystic tree, which also was standing there. From a hidden and cavernous safe the priest then displayed a flashing wealth of emeralds and rubies, unnumbered as the Milky Way and, possibly, surpassing their own value by their holiness. Disappearing for a while, after shutting the safe, he returned with a pink garland, thick as a liner’s hawser, and hung it round my neck, where already two white garlands hung, for I had been received with honour by a political club just before I came. But this new pink garland nearly touched my feet. It had been an offering to the shrine, and came to me cold from the neck of the god himself.
Thus sanctified and adorned, I passed back into the throng of worshippers in the temple court, and presently felt among them a peculiar stir of excitement, which I naturally attributed to my unusual appearance, just visible in the darkness. But when I was conducted by the Brahman to a large private house overlooking the precincts, for the first time in India I failed to receive the usual Hindu welcome. The rooms and courtyards glimmered with little lamps. Seated in the verandah before the door, a band of pipers, blowing as they pleased, drove dull care away—far away, one hoped, for her sake. Gods, kites, and elephants of painted alabaster were arranged in neat rows upon the table of an inner room, and little girls, dressed in the gorgeous silks and embroideries of Southern India, tended them with lights and flowers. But the master of the house, himself a temple guardian, politely expressed an unwillingness to receive the foreigner, and when I turned back among the excited crowd that swarmed round me under the temple colonnade, I heard for the first time the wild shout of “Bande Mataram! Bande Mataram!” (Hail to the Motherland!) rising on every side. If a Brahman had not been my guide, I should have supposed the outcry to be due to religious indignation. He told me afterwards it was in compliment to my Liberal opinions. But I think it was not in compliment to my English clothes, which were far more conspicuous than my Liberal opinions.
There is no part of India where the anti-English feeling was less to be expected than in Madras. Here the Hindu is seen at his mildest, here he asks least of this fleeting world, and accepts destiny with the gentlest quietude. If ever there was a country easy to govern, it should be Southern India; and in time past no part of India has surrendered itself more unreservedly to British rule or trusted more confidently to British justice. Much of this friendliness has been due to the influence of our missionaries, represented by some very remarkable men in Madras. I do not know their statistics of conversion: I think they must be very low, especially as the Bishop of Madras, during my visit, was expressing his despair of ever converting educated Indians, and was urging his clergy to pay attention only to the lowest castes. But the missionary influence upon education itself has been very large. It has created one famous and excellent institution, and a popular restaurant besides. It is chiefly the cause, I suppose, of the widespread knowledge of English among all classes in the city. More than this, I found that in Madras and other parts of India, as I had seen in Nigeria, Central Africa, and South Africa—even in Macedonia and Armenia also—the missionaries do maintain a certain standard of justice to the credit of the “White Man,” or “European,” and that the oppressed and destitute, even among the classes below the protection of any caste, do actually turn to them with the assurance of finding a quality of mercy and sympathetic understanding not very remote from their profession of brotherhood in Christ. It is easy to join in the taunt about “Famine Christians,” and to point to the curve of conversions varying directly with the price of food. But if we were starving, I suppose most of us would gladly profess any religion in the world for a prospect of regular meals, and the important thing is that by the missionaries no class is neglected or left to feel itself outcast from humanity—not even the poor fishers on the sands south of the town, or the dwellers in savage huts that let at fourpence a month, and are sublet among different families.
Missionaries have done much, and so has a succession of good governors, from the time of Sir Thomas Munro, to whose memory the temple bell still rings a special chime before service. Our own people have forgotten him for three generations now, but I have seen the Hindu women drop their baskets and bow their heads as they passed his equestrian statue on “the Island”—an honour seldom paid to equestrian statues at home. He it was who reduced the taxes and watered the land and executed justice; and so his memory lives. Taught by his example, the people used to recognize that there were some things we English could do: we could organize drainage, and build bridges to stand, and decide quarrels without taking bribes. So they were content to leave these comparatively unimportant concerns in our hands, while they devoted themselves to the only two occupations that matter much—the growth of food and the worship of God. If their faith in our peculiar powers is declining, and they are themselves making new claims upon government and public life, the change is due to underlying causes, which are affecting the whole of India in varying degrees, and have already produced a new sense of unity in opposition.
Unhappily, the grievance of Anglo-Indian manners is not peculiar to Madras. The attitude of the vulgar among Anglo-Indians towards the people of the country would be incredible to any one who had not seen it, and the vulgar are a large and increasing class. They increase by a kind of infection, and the deterioration of a new-comer who has been sent out with the usual instincts of our educated classes in favour of politeness and decency, is often as unconscious as it is rapid. The pressure of his social surroundings is almost irresistible. If he does not wish to cut himself off altogether from the society and amusements of his own people, he will be driven to conform to the code of insolence established among them. To stand alone against feminine dislike and masculine views of good-form requires a toughness of character and an indifference to personal reputation or advancement which one cannot expect from many of the young Englishmen and Englishwomen who come out. These usually spring from a caste bred upon rather rigid observances, and they look to the opinion of their own caste almost entirely for the sanction of conduct. At first they are astonished that Anglo-Indian opinion not only permits but imposes so ill-bred a manner in intercourse with “natives,” but the astonishment soon wears off, and the infection of arrogance catches them as a matter of course. The Governor of Bombay once told me it was impossible to convert “bounders” into gentlemen by Act of Parliament, and, unfortunately, that is true; else we might enjoy a more enviable reputation in the world. But I was astonished to find how easily an apparent gentleman may become entirely the opposite if he finds himself set up as one of a superior race among a polite and gentle people, always too much inclined to submit to rudeness with reverential astonishment.
Dr. Lefroy, the Bishop of Lahore, who for a quarter of a century has striven with constancy and some success to restore the higher tradition of our race, has said that, but for railways, all might be well. And it is quite true that the commonest and most flagrant instances of Anglo-Indian vulgarity are to be found in trains. But that is chiefly because it is most often in trains that the two races meet on terms of nominal equality. On almost every railway journey one sees instances of ill-manners that would appear too outrageous for belief at home. But it is the same throughout. In hotels, clubs, bungalows, and official chambers, the people of the country, and especially the educated classes, are treated with an habitual contumely more exasperating than savage persecution. I gladly admit that in every part of India I found Englishmen who still retained the courtesy and sensitiveness of ordinary good manners. But one’s mere delight in finding them proved their rarity. Anglo-Indians tell us constantly that our first thought must be to maintain our national prestige, and if arrogance will do it, our prestige is safe. But when I watched the Anglo-Indian behaviour towards Indians themselves, I often wondered whether prestige is really to be secured by manners such as we should hardly find among “bounders” at home. For myself, I should have thought Lord Morley was right when he said that “bad manners, overbearing manners, are very disagreeable in all countries, but India is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political crime.”[31]
Unhappily, the justice of Indian complaints on this subject was not new to me, when I came to Madras. Every one finds proofs of it from the moment of landing in Bombay, and, in fact, even on board ship. The social estrangement between the two races rapidly increases after Port Said is left. But in Madras I found another cause of deep dissatisfaction. In spite of all I had heard about injustice in particular cases, in spite of the old demand for police reform and the separation of the judicial and executive functions now combined in the District Magistrate, it was disconcerting to discover a prevailing and uneasy suspicion that British justice could not safely be trusted. Certainly, much disquietude had recently been roused by a few special instances, at Rawal Pindi, Lahore, and elsewhere. “Killing no murder, outrage no crime, when Indians are concerned and Englishmen the culprits”: that was the common conclusion, and it was not unnatural.