in the English school before he will classify himself differently. In a dozen ways each day he is made to feel that the school and the modern world have another standard for boys and men than the caste. Or take another example of the educative effect of a study of English—I can vouch for its genuineness. In your house in India you get into friendly conversation with a half-educated shopkeeper or native tradesman. You ask in English how many children he has, and his reply is, "I have not any children, I have three daughters." Just a little more reading in English literature would have taught him that elsewhere the daughter is a child of the family equally with the son.
There, in these two examples, the great social problems of India present themselves—caste and the social inferiority of women, and in the English language we see India confronted with ideas different from her own. Take a third illustration from the socio-religious sphere. Few Hindus think of Hinduism as a system of religious practices and doctrines to be justified by reason or by spiritual intuition, or by the spiritual satisfaction it can afford to mankind. No, Hinduism is a thing for Indians, and belongs to the Indian soil. The
converse of the idea is that Christianity is a foreign thing, the religion of the intruding ruling race. It is not for Indians. A vigorous patriotic pamphlet, published in 1903, entitled The Future of India, assumes plainly that Hindus and Indians mean the same thing. The pamphlet speaks of the relations of Indians to "other races, such as Mahomedans, Parsees, and Christians," as if these were less truly Indians than the Hindus. To the writer, manifestly, Hinduism is a racial thing. To him, however, or to the next generation after him, further study of modern history will make clear that only in a slight degree and a few instances is religion a racial thing, and that there are laws and a science of spiritual as of bodily health. Once more, how ill-fitting are, say, the Indian word mukti (deliverance from further lives, the end of transmigrations) and the English word salvation, although mukti and salvation are often regarded as equivalents.
To the man instructed in English, such contrasts are always being presented, tacitly inviting him to compare and to modify. We can put ourselves in the place of many a youth of sixteen or seventeen, hope of the village school, going up to enter a college in one of the larger towns of India. He
is entering the new world. Should he be of brahman caste, it may profit him a little, for he will still meet with many non-brahman householders ready to find him in food and lodging simply because he is a poor brahman student. Of course he is looking forward to one of the new professions, Law, or Medicine, or Engineering, or Teaching, or Government Service. In these it is patent to him that caste is of no account. High caste or low, he and all his fellow-students are aware they must prove themselves and fight their way up. The leading place at the bar is no more a high-caste man's privilege than it is his privilege to be exempted from standing in the dock or suffering the extreme penalty of the law. We have already referred to the effect of the assertion of the equality of men before the law in 1775 in the hanging of the brahman, Nandakumar, for forgery. Now, looking back at the dissolving of the old ideas of artificial rank and privileges, we may reckon also the equality of men in the great modern professions, foremost in India being Law, as among the chief dissolving agencies.
Extent of English education.
English words naturalised.
It is easy to give figures at least for the vast agency now at work in the spread of English education in India. Higher English education
for natives began with the founding of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817; in the year 1902 there were in India five Universities, the examinations of which are conducted in English; and affiliated to these examining Universities were 188 teaching colleges containing 23,009 undergraduates; and preparing for the Matriculation Examination (in the year 1896-97) were 5267 Secondary Schools, containing 535,155 pupils. From these Secondary Schools in the year 1901, 21,750 candidates appeared at the Matriculation Examinations of the Universities professing to be able to write their answers in English, and of these nearly 8000 passed. That figure is a measure of the process of leavening India with modern ideas through English education—8000 fresh recruits a year. That is the measure of the confusion introduced into the old social organism. A small number, no doubt, compared with the ten million of unleavened youth born in the same year, and yet they are the pick of the middle classes and must become the leaders of the masses. The
masses in China, it is alleged, would not be anti-foreign were it not for the influence of their literati, and the thoughts of these Indian literati must also become the thoughts of the Indian masses. It is the mind of these literati, mainly, which we are trying to gauge. According to the census of 1901 their total number approached one million, being those who could read and write English. Descending below the English-reading literati, I have noted about three hundred English words naturalised in two of the chief vernaculars of India, an indication, if not a measure, of the new influence among the masses.