It was evening service, at the hour when sunset is still bright, but if you stare into the sky, you suddenly see the stars. A few score of boys and young men were gathered round a small square pit, in which a fire of dry sticks was burning with a yellow flame. They were dressed in long cotton cloths of yellow or white, and, sitting in rows, they chanted the ancient Vedic hymns in praise of God, with the peculiar intervals and nasal quaverings of the East. In their midst, by the edge of the pit, sat their Guru, or teacher, and from time to time he ladled clarified butter into the fire, while youths from each of the other sides of the square threw in handfuls of rice and fragrant woods or herbs. Meantime the chanting never ceased, but with a concentrated vehemence all raised to the air the eternal Sanscrit words, revealed to the Aryan race before recorded history, so that they might never be devoid of the holiest wisdom, but bear it with them across mountains of ice and over sunburnt plains to the furthest world. At the end, all stood up for the final evening hymn, and then dispersed, leaving the fire burning as a symbol of man’s soul, and of the divine power, and of the transfiguration of the spirit by flame and purity.
That form of worship is celebrated every morning and evening by all Vedic believers, whether assembled or alone. But I saw it first at one of the students’ homes in Lahore, where a branch of the Arya Samaj, or Aryan Society, has a school and an “Anglo-Vedic College,” numbering about 1800 members together. Lala Lajpat Rai sat next me, for it was to this branch that he had devoted all his labours for social and religious reform, till injustice drove him to turn aside into politics from the true objects of the Samaj. I speak of a branch because, like most vital movements, the Samaj is divided into parties, one holding its services inside the crowded old city itself, the other just outside the ancient walls. As usually happens, the two parties in the religion have split on unessential points, for which they are prepared to die, though not to kill. But both claim to follow the doctrines of their founder, Dayananda Saraswati, who quitted this stage of existence at Ajmere in 1883, after a wandering life of holy poverty given up entirely to the denunciation of idols, caste restrictions, animal sacrifices, licentious rites, the multiplicity of deities, and other accretions with which frail humanity has surrounded the stern purity of the Vedic revelation.
Leaving his home as an outcast rather than submit to the carnal marriage tie, Dayananda spent sixteen years of youth and early manhood in walking from one holy place of Northern India to another. Sometimes he passed into Kashmir, thrice he crossed the snow mountains into Thibet, and, hungry for wisdom, he sought everywhere for the teacher at whose feet he might enjoy it. At last he found wisdom near at hand, in those very scriptures on which he had meditated day and night, and full of reforming zeal he turned to Benares and other seats of religious learning where he might confute the Pundits, whose obscure minds darkened the hard radiance of God’s Sanscrit word. In city after city public debates were held before immense audiences, Dayananda in solitary knowledge opposing the priestly hostility of all the teachers combined, while as a rule, the local representative of the British Empire was invited to take the chair and see fair play, or award the prize in subtleties of theological controversy. The latter was a task for which our public-school education does not specially adapt us, but as a rule the British representative was spared the difficulty of metaphysical decision by the Pundits themselves, who violently broke up the meeting under consciousness of defeat. Perhaps unhappily for his cause, Dayananda did not confine himself to the purgation of Hindu superstitions and social abuses, but was equally vehement in his attacks upon the unworthy additions and compromises that have gathered round Christianity and Islam; and to his success in interrupting the process of conversion among Hindus we may trace the marked hostility with which Christian and Mohammedan missionaries have always regarded the Samaj.[62]
The first branch of the society was established in Bombay by Dayananda himself in 1875, but its real strength now lies in the Punjab and United Provinces, in both of which together it numbers about 250,000 members. The two parties into which the Samaj in Lahore is to some extent divided, as I said, both unite in rejecting idols, and in condemning the seclusion or “purdah” of women, the dangerous prerogatives of the priesthood, and all restrictions of caste, except such rights and obligations as are the due of character or intellect. Both unite in maintaining the unity of God, the eternal trinity of God, Soul, and Matter, and the universal wisdom revealed for all races in the Vedas. The differences that divide them are, perhaps, rather of temperament than of doctrine. The party that worships in the city claims to be more democratic in its appeal, to be stricter in life and discipline, but at the same time freer from “purdah”; and, indeed, its women are allowed to attend divine service in a gallery unveiled, while the women of the other party have a service to themselves, with a woman preacher, whose sermons I was, unhappily, unable to attend. The city party has been called the Culture Section, in which name, I think, there lies a covert sneer. But it briskly retaliated by calling the suburban party the Vulture Section, in which the sneer is not covert at all, but palpably due to a backsliding from vegetarianism.
Not that the extra-mural party itself dreams of backsliding. It only aims at progress and increasing freedom in social life; for, like other great movements of religious reform, it maintains that the kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink. The differences, in fact, have never been serious, though a few years ago there was the same tender hostility as used to prevail between Newton Hall and Lamb’s Conduit Street, when Positivists turned their criticism from Christians to each other. But of late persecution, which makes all its victims friends, has brought them together again, and few of the outside world are now aware of any division. It was the deportation of Lajpat Rai that gave the final touch to reconcilement. That a man of austere and generous life, one who had given up great worldly success for the service of the poor and unlearned, should be spirited away without warning and without trial for venturing to criticize official injustice—that was the touch to kindle the indignant fire which welds men into one.
Lajpat Rai was one of those men into whose soul the wrongs of their people enter. By nature averse from politics, he devoted himself to those deeper questions which lie beyond the touch of governments good or bad, and it was not till he was forty that the decisive change came. It is true that he joined the Congress movement in 1888, within two or three years of its beginning; but no one has more severely criticized the Congress and its methods—its unwieldy size, its holiday aspect, its failure to touch the poverty and ignorance of India, and its mistaken confidence in the power of speeches and resolutions for the redress of political wrongs.[63]
It was significant of his strength of character and indifference to popularity, that after the breach in the Surat Congress, he gave his immense influence to the Moderate party, and declared he would fight under the old banner, as I have described. But it was still more characteristic that, when the Congress had vanished, he remained in Surat for the Social and Swadeshi Conferences, and organized a famine-relief fund there, just as if nothing had happened.
Deeper things than can be reached by Government or speeches have occupied his life. Born at Jaguran, in the district of Ludhiana, where his father taught Persian and Urdu, he became a student at the Government College in Lahore, and a Pleader in the Courts there just at the time when the Arya Samaj was engaged in its earliest struggle for religious and social reform.
Lala Lajpat Rai.