Six or seven years ago—in 1901 or early 1902—the writer of that protest cleared a large open space in a pleasant jungle where in a single day I have still seen many deer and monkeys, many wild boars and jackals, the bone-strewn home of a tigress with cubs, the spoor of a huge elephant, wild peacocks perching in the trees, and nearly all the other delights of Eden, except Eve. A few miles away the holy Ganges issues from the foot of the Himalayas into the great Indian plain, and there stands the holy town of Hardwar, goal of great pilgrimages and pitch of many religious beggars, who keep with them deformed cows and other holy monsters to move the hearts of worshippers to pity. On the open space in the jungle a quadrangle of tin-roofed buildings has been raised to be a Vedic school and future college. Over its gateway floats a red banner, inscribed with the sacred symbol of “Om,” and its Brahmacharya, or holy discipline, follows the lines laid down by primeval revelation.
Those lines are Spartan, or, at least, Platonic. The boys are admitted at eight, and their parents take a solemn pledge not to remove them or allow their marriage till they are twenty-five, the lowest age fixed for a man’s marriage by the Vedic Scriptures. During these sixteen years the Brahmacharies, or disciples, do not go home, nor are they allowed to write letters or receive them; but their parents may visit them once a month, and do, in fact, visit them about twice a year. The great occasion for these visits is the school anniversary, which happens to be St. Patrick’s Day, when over sixty thousand Samajists come, including many thousands of women, and encamp on the edge of the jungle in grass and wicker huts, which were being prepared for them during my stay in the school. Unlike the parents who come to see their sons on speech-days at our public-schools, the pilgrim visitors bring their own supplies, and they generally stay three days, that being all of family life the boys ever know. And that is all they know of woman’s society, too, for it is, as I said, an Eveless Paradise.
A Street in Hardwar.
Hardwar Strand.
[Face p. 306.
Such isolation in the midst of our common and intermingled world is, perhaps, dangerous. It comes too near the inhuman monotony of workhouse schools. It is likely to exaggerate the desires and curiosity of growing men, or to produce the hesitation of bashful and secluded lives when confronted with the need for action. The entire removal of home influence might appear harsh if we did not remember the scores of men whom we have known ruined by their parents’ vulgarity or their mothers’ indulgence. But even if we grant that most parents are quite unfit to bring up children, sixteen years seems too long for any boy to remain in the same place, with the same teachers and the same companions. Even the holiday excursions to historic cities of India, which are arranged by the Governor, and usually conducted by him, do not sufficiently break up the one-sidedness of such a life; and think of the boy who is genuinely unfitted for school and is compelled to remain unhappy for a quarter of man’s existence!
Mr. Rama Deva, the young and highly educated head-master of the school, and the other masters as well, met my scruples by urging that in India the home influence is almost invariably dangerous or softening. They said their only hope of preserving the boys from child-marriage, maternal ignorance, and the evil of cities lay in this monastic seclusion. In place of parents they have a few Superintendents—about one to every twenty-five of the 220 boys then in the school—who live with each class day and night, except during school hours. The greatest difficulty of the school is to find Superintendents worthy and willing, and I should have thought it impossible. The three oldest boys in the top form have rooms to themselves and no Superintendent. All sleep on plank beds, but are allowed a warm covering in winter. All dress in yellow “dhotis” (long cotton cloths) for schooltime, and in white “dhotis” for play. They are allowed wooden sandals, held on by a peg between the toes, but nearly all go barefoot, and with feet and legs bare they ride bareback and play cricket, football, and an Indian form of prisoners’ base. The school belongs to the Culture Section of the Arya Samaj, and is so violently vegetarian that I was not allowed to approach the buildings in boots of murdered leather.
The boys get up at four in the morning, and attend Divine service round the symbolic fire. Having taken the vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity for sixteen years at their entrance, when two of those vows can mean very little to them, they are further taught to speak the truth, to practise concentrated contemplation for a period of every day, and to subdue passion by the “yoga” of deep breathing and holding the breath. They bathe in cold water before sunrise, they climb the steep jungle mountains near, and all learn swimming in the Ganges. Almost the only form of punishment is exclusion from the games. The school hours run to about seven, divided into two parts, and the chief subject taught is Sanscrit. There are the other ordinary subjects—arithmetic and mathematics, history, science, and English—and, unlike the Government schools, all teaching is given in the vernacular Hindi, so that the boys understand the subjects better, and can cover more ground, whereas in ordinary schools the learning is continually hampered by the foreign tongue. But the chief means of education is Sanscrit, just as in my old school it was Greek. At least seven years are spent in getting that amazing Sanscrit grammar off by heart, and in learning to read the Vedas. Whether the Sanscrit literature is worth all that, I cannot say; we spent much the same time over Greek, and it was well worth it to about one in twenty. But in all the upper forms, though none of the boys had yet approached the full age, they could already read and write Sanscrit as fluently as a mother tongue, and that is more than any of us ever did with Greek.