The Peoples of India

by J. D. Anderson

The Sikhs. As a religious system, the creed of the Sikhs originated from the Hindu teaching of Kabir, and may yet be reabsorbed into Hinduism, though the Census of 1911 shows that it still flourishes as a separate religion. It began as a religious reform and ended by being a political organisation. It was founded by the Guru Nānak (1469-1538 A.D.) in the Panjāb. Its formula was the Unity of God and the Brotherhood of Man. Ultimately it became a martial brotherhood, one of whose objects was by training, diet, and self-denial to present a strong front to the encroachments of Muhammadan invaders from across the north-west frontier. Circumstances led the Sikh confederacy to try its fortune in arms in two fiercely fought campaigns with the growing power of our East India Company. Defeat was followed by a loyal acceptance of British supremacy, and the Sikhs rival the Gurkhas as the best soldiers in the Indian army. Their services during the mutiny of 1857 will never be forgotten.

The Sāktas. One other great Hindu sect, that of the Sāktas, must be briefly mentioned. It worships the active female principle (prakriti) of one or other of the forms of the Consort of Siva—Durgā, Kāli, or Pārvati. This cult arose in Eastern Bengal or Assam about the fifth century, A.D., and has its own scriptures in the Tantras. This sect is probably due to the recrudescence of very ancient aboriginal cults. It is associated with blood-offerings and libidinous rites. It was denounced by the Vaishnava reformers, but still survives, even among educated men. It affected the later forms of Buddhism.

Finally, by omitting all mention of numerous modern Vaishnava sects, we come to the modern Theistic sects. The Brahmo Samāj of Bengal was founded by the celebrated Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1774-1833) who died and was buried at Clifton. His teachings were continued and developed by his successors Maharshi Devendranāth Tagore (the father of the poet Rabindranāth Tagore), Keshav Chandra Sen, and Pratāp Chandra Majumdār. All of these were men of much piety, eloquence, and learning. Sir Alfred Lyall says that "Brahmoism, as propagated by its latest expounders, seems to be unitarianism of a European type, and as far as one can understand its argument, appears to have no logical stability or locus standi between revelation and pure rationalism; it propounds either too much or too little to its hearers." It has, however, been an effectual bar to the spread of Christianity among the educated classes in Bengal. It enables them to remain in touch with Hinduism, from which an adoption of any European creed would effectually divide them. Its services of praise and prayer, with a sermon or discourse, are held on Sundays, and in form resemble those of the Christian free churches. Its creed consists in a belief in the Unity of God, the brotherhood of man, and direct communion with God without the intervention of any mediator. It may fairly be claimed for it that it has satisfied the religious needs of men most of whom lead exemplary and in some cases saintly lives, without compelling them to join what is regarded as a foreign and uncongenial religion. But for Ram Mohan Roy, educated Bengal might well have furnished the nucleus of a Christian Church of India, since, before his time, many distinguished and able converts were made. I need only mention the late Rev. K. M. Bannerjee. The Brahmo Samāj is divided into three sections. The Ādi Samāj, as its name indicates, is the original church. It is the most conservative of the three, and takes its inspiration wholly from the Hindu scriptures, and especially from the Upanishads. The Navavidhān Samāj, founded by Keshav Chandra Sen, "the Church of the New Dispensation," is much more eclectic and has borrowed what it considers acceptable, not only from the holy books of Hinduism, but from Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. The Sādhāran (or "general") Brāhmo Samāj is the most advanced of the three Churches. It rejects caste and the seclusion of women, allows inter-caste marriages, and is seemingly as far from orthodox Hinduism as from orthodox Christianity. It has even allowed one of its lady members to be married to an Englishman by Brāhmo rites. If it can hardly be called Hindu in ritual or in belief, it is Hindu in what is probably regarded as the more important sense of being a purely Indian sect and not a direct product of European missionary zeal.

Another new sect, the Ārya Samāj, or Aryan Society, has much influence in the Panjāb and North-Western India generally. It was founded by Dayānand Saraswati (1827-53). Its only scriptures are the Vedas. It professes pure monotheism, repudiates idol worship, and is much interested in social reform. It has also at times been mixed up, more or less directly, with political agitation. Like the Brāhmo Samāj, it is probably due in its inception to the influence of European religious teaching, but, as is perhaps natural, its acceptance of European ethics is marked by a sturdy resistance to European dogma.

The great bulk of Hinduism, however, remains still but little removed from the Animistic stage of religious evolution, and one of the results of the spread of British rule into wild and savage tracts has been the extension of the borders of Hinduism in competition with Christianity. In the rougher and wilder races, not yet sufficiently softened and civilised for the acceptance of the Hindu social system, the Christian missionary prevails. He has been most successful among the Gonds of Central India, among such savage tribes as the Nāgas, Gāros, and Lushais on the Assam border. Elsewhere Hinduism pursues its quietly imperturbable course and admits savage races to its lower castes as it has always admitted them during the last two thousand years.

Islam in India. Since King George V has more Muhammadan subjects than any other ruler on earth—some 75,000,000 in number, it would not be proper to close a little book on the Peoples of India without saying something of those of their number who are Musalmāns. The early Muhammadan invasions of the tenth century were mere predatory raids, and were attended neither by settlement nor conversion. But at the end of the twelfth century Muhammad Ghori overthrew the Hindu dynasties of Delhi and Kanauj and thus opened the way to future Muhammadan conquests. In the sixteenth century Moghal rule was established under Babar and his successors. During the preceding five centuries Hindu India suffered much oppression and wrong at the hands of Muhammadan invaders, but Islam had made no attempt to become an Indian religion. The early Moghal emperors were too busy in consolidating their conquests and organising their administration to have much leisure or inclination for proselytising. Their policy depended largely on co-operation with Rājput princes, whose daughters they married. The influence of Rājput empresses and princesses made for kindly tolerance. It was only under the zealot Aurangzeb that any tendency to forcible conversion showed itself.

The final result of some seven hundred years of Muhammadan rule in various parts of the country is that Musalmāns are in excess of Hindus only in the Western Panjāb, which is in contact with a purely Muhammadan country, and in Eastern Bengal, where the aboriginal low-caste Hindu was glad to get social promotion by accepting Islam, and where he thrives and prospers at the expense of his Hindu brother, partly because his diet is more nutritious, partly because he does not practise infant-marriage and other debilitating customs.

As has been said above, Animism has affected Islam as well as Hinduism. From the old religion of the country Musalmāns have borrowed demonology, a belief in witchcraft, and the worship of departed Pirs or saints. The most remarkable instance of the latter is the sect of the Pachpiriyas of Bengal, the worshippers of the Five Saints, a cult which some have traced to the cult of the five Pāndava heroes of the Mahābhārata. The five Pirs, however, vary in name from district to district. In Eastern Bengal, no one, whether Hindu or Musalmān (or, I had almost said, Christian), begins a journey by boat without a loud and hearty invocation of the Ganges, the Wind, the Five Pirs, and Pir Badr before mentioned.

Of the two great sects of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias, the former are by far the most numerous in India. The Sunnis or Traditionalists accept the Sunnat or collected body of Arabic usage as possessing authority concurrent with that of the Koran, which is the sole scripture of the Shias. Yet in Eastern Bengal the annual procession of the Tazias, or representations of the tombs of the martyred grandsons of the Prophet, is much attended by Sunnis (though for them the practice is unorthodox), and indeed by Hindus also. In other parts of India, the Mohurram festival has often led to serious encounters between Hindus and Musalmāns, and even in Calcutta and Bombay has been the cause of dangerous riots.

The sects of Islam in India, unlike the Hindu sects, are not due to the instinct for differentiation, for obvious reasons. They are, in Mr Crooke's words, either puritanical or pietistic. Consequently, followers of them are apt to show a tendency to fanaticism. The Hindu sectarian adores some favourite deity, but does not deny the merits, or the Hinduism, of other deities or their followers. The Musalmān sectarian is one who has discovered a higher orthodoxy than others, or a straighter road to religion, and regards those who do not share his views as an enemy of God and the true faith. Of the puritanical sects, the best known is that of the Wahābis, founded by Ibn Abdul Wahāb at Nejd in Arabia, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was an attempt to revive primitive Muhammadanship without the corruptions and accretions of later ages and foreign lands. It was brought into India by Sayid Ahmad Shāh, who proclaimed a Jihād, or holy war, against the Sikhs in 1826. The Wahābis hold that the doctrine of the Unity of God has been endangered by the excessive reverence paid to the Prophet, to his successors the Imāns, and to shrines. At times Wahābis have given trouble to the administration, especially in Bengal. In recent years, however, they call themselves Ahl-i-hadīs, or "followers of tradition," and employ themselves chiefly in endeavouring to eradicate modern superstitions.