Hindu castes and sects; it is their greatest common measure, as it were. But yet the fact remains that Hindus speak of themselves as such, not as Brahmanists, and it is hopeless to try to supersede a current name. Sir M. Monier Williams employs the term Brahmanism in a more limited and more legitimate sense. Dividing the history of the Hindu religion into three periods, he calls them the stages of Vedism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism respectively. The first is the period of the Vedas, or earliest sacred books; the second, of the Brahman philosophy, fundamentally pantheistic; the third is the period of "a confused tangle of divine personalities and incarnations." Sir M. Monier Williams' standard work on the religion of the Hindus is "Brahmanism and Hinduism." "Hinduism," he tells us, "is Brahmanism modified by the creeds and superstitions of Buddhists and non-Aryans of all kinds."
Brahmā, Brahma.
Brāhmas
We are not done with this confusing set of terms. Brahmā is the first person of the Hindu divine triad—the Creator—who along with the other two persons of the triad, has proceeded from a divine essence, Brahma or Brahm. Brahma is Godhead or Deity: Brahmā, is a Deity, a divine person who has emanated from
the Godhead, Brahma. Brāhmas or theists, believers in Brahma, are a religious body that originated in Bengal in the nineteenth century. Repudiating caste, idolatry, and transmigration, they are necessarily cut off from Hinduism. The body is called the Brāhma Samāj, that is, the Theistic Association. Enough for the present; in their respective places these distinctions can be more fully gone into.
CHAPTER VII
NEW POLITICAL IDEAS
I. A UNITING INDIA
The ideas of citizenship and public questions.
With modern education and the awakening of the Indian mind have come entirely new political ideas. That there are public questions has in fact been discovered; for in India the idea of citizenship, the consciousness of being a political unit, was itself a new idea. We may say that it was made possible in 1835, when an Act of Legislature was passed declaring the press free. In 1823 an English editor had been deported from Calcutta for free criticism of the authorities, but after 1835 it was legal not merely to think but to speak on public questions. Before we pass on, we note the strange inverted sequence of events which may attend on fostered liberty. The right to criticise