Lions and monsters guard the four gates of his enclosure, but when once they are passed, all the earthly distinctions of mankind fall away, and only the naked soul remains to worship. Within that oblong wall, Brahman may eat with sweeper, and warrior with the retail seller of flesh for carrion Europeans. Along the inner side of the south wall are simple kitchens, where the god’s four hundred cooks daily prepare the sacred food for pilgrims, beggars, and all who come. One is served with another, and all may eat from the same dish, side by side, without contamination. Thousands of monks in the service of the god carry the food far through the country, and the pilgrims themselves take some of it home in their brazen vessels, so that the villagers and children left behind may taste of wisdom, and share the blessings of pilgrimage. For wherever the sacred food is eaten, worldly differences disappear, and soul stands bare to soul. It is the sacrament of equality, the consecration of mankind.
Side by side with Juggernath, within the dark and secluded shrine, upon which no alien may look, stand his brother and little sister—quaint figures all of them, hideous as gollywogs with symbolism—the round and staring eyes of eternal vision, the atrophied hands and feet of eternal meditation. Every year new cars are built for them, and every twelve years the gods themselves are made anew of wooden blocks, while their old forms are sunk into a pit to perish. This was told me by the treasurer and chief trustee of the god’s vast estate, who traced to this renewal the well-known story of the physicians appointed to minister to the deity’s health, and put him to bed if he ails. He informed me this was a popular error, but there is a Rajah who is hereditary guardian, and also hereditary sweeper of the temple, and he, as I understood, had rather frequently to be put to bed by his physicians, so that possibly the two cases have become confused.
It would be, perhaps, too curious to identify the little sister of Juggernath with Liberty, and his brother with Fraternity. But Juggernath, “Lord of the World,” has beyond question the attribute of Equality, and it seems possible that it is just this glorious attribute, and no deeper metaphysic reason, which gives his temple its place as the most worshipped fane of India, and inspires the common people with a passionate desire even to touch with one finger the painted board of which he is made. Many people worship what most they fall short of, just as in England we struggle to worship Christ, whose character and manner of life differed so entirely from our own. And of all great virtues the Indians, perhaps, have been most wanting in the sense of equality. Their whole system of existence is based on inequality, inevitable and permanent. The man who is born to study the Vedas will continue to study the Vedas, and so will his son. The man who is born to carry sewage will continue to carry sewage, and so will his son. Nor could the daughter of a millionaire ever hope for marriage with a man of learning, since wisdom lies beyond the dreams of avarice.
This ancient basis of inequality has made the Indian people the easiest in the world to govern. It lies also, I think, at the bottom of their almost excessive politeness, their reverential manners, their courtly deference to any one who appears to have been born of higher station, or with higher advantages. No one denies the charm of such qualities. It is an education in behaviour to pass from a Scottish or American crowd to the streets of an Indian city. The obligations of high caste—such things, I mean, as cleanliness in food and life, intellectual alertness, and disregard of wealth—are as valuable as any obligations laid on Europeans by noblesse. The only weakness about both is that they are restricted to caste or class, and are not considered universally binding, as such principles must be.
There is much to be said for reverential manners; but take a race which has very little notion of manners of any kind—a race not very sensitive, not very imaginative or sympathetic, trained from boyhood to think little of personal dignity, and nothing at all of other people’s feelings; take such a race and set its most characteristic members from the well-to-do middle classes, with the help of rifles and batteries, to dominate an entirely different people, among whom reverential manners are ingrained by birth, and see what evil effects for both races will result! Watch the growing arrogance of the dominant people; watch their demands for deference, their lust for flattery, their irritation at the least sign of independence, their contempt for the race whose obeisance they delight in, their rudeness of manner increasing till it becomes incredible to the relatives they left at home, and would once have been incredible to themselves. Then turn to the subordinate race, and watch the growing weakness of character, the temptation to cringe and flatter, the loss of self-respect, the increasing cowardice, the daily humiliation. In that hideous process—that degeneration in manners of two great races, each of which has high qualities of its own, we recognize the true peril which has been advancing upon Indians and ourselves for the last ten, or, perhaps, fifty years of Indian history. It is not a question of loss of power, or loss of trade. It is a question of a much more serious loss than these.
But what if all this so-called unrest is only the beginning of another great humanistic reform, another incarnation of that “Lord of the World” whose attribute is equality? Throughout India we are witnessing the birth of a new national consciousness, and with it comes a revival of dignity, a resolve no longer to take insults lying down, not to lick the hand that strikes, or rub the forehead in the dust before any human being, simply because he wears a helmet and is called white. Like pilgrims bound for the shrine of Juggernath in an ecstasy of devotion, the leaders of India are inspired by that longing for equality which is always springing afresh in human minds. If any one chooses to say that equality is like Juggernath’s Car, crushing everything equally flat, he is welcome to his little jest. But as I saw the white-robed pilgrims passing into the temple, there to partake of equality’s sacrament, I knew that these outward things were but the symbols of an invisible worship, which may renew the face of the Indian people, and save ourselves from a threatening and dishonourable danger.
CHAPTER IX
The Divided Land
The plains of Eastern Bengal have been formed grain by grain from the washings of the dividing range of Asia brought down by melted snow on its way to the sea. Rivers that rise not very far apart on opposite sides of the Himalaya here unite at last after their thousand miles of circuit, and finish their course by broad and quiet streams, which lose the sacred names of Ganges and Brahmaputra. Some of the rivers also spring from the hill-country of Assam and the ranges where the pleasant station of Shillong offers a summer residence for the new Lieut.-Governor of Eastern Bengal as comfortably isolated from his capital at Dacca, as Simla or Darjeeling is from Calcutta. Thus the whole country is intersected with vast waterways and streams as slow and curling as the Ouse. Railways are built only in short sections, as it were to connect the rivers, and continuous roads must be very few. Everything goes by water, and the only trouble is that the rivers sometimes change their course, owing to an earthquake or other natural caprice. Their channels, too, are continually silting up, so that the course of the steamers upon their broad surface is always a little dubious, and, in spite of its slip of railway, the new capital of Dacca is even now being cut off from the world.
On the Brahmaputra.