India's Problem, Krishna or Christ

by John P. Jones

It was in the face of extensive protest and threats by orthodox Hindus that the government abolished it. “Previous to 1857, 150 human sacrifices are said to have been annually offered in Gumsur, a city in East Central India; and the abolition of that horrible custom raised such a storm of opposition among the Hindus that an eight years' war was the result. More [pg 339] than 2,000 victims were rescued from sacrifice and handed over to the care of the missionaries.” In like manner infanticide was encouraged for centuries in the land as an act of religious devotion which was possessed of great efficacy. In the name of religion and with the promise of its highest blessings mothers were led to feed the crocodiles of the sacred Ganges by throwing to them their own infants.

It seems hardly possible that human beings could regard the prohibition of that inhuman and unnatural act as a piece of injustice and an interference with the rights of conscience. And yet it was so regarded!

Not fewer than twenty laws have thus been enacted in that land, during the last century, with a view to putting an end to religious customs which robbed thousands of people, annually, of life itself and deprived many thousands more of the most elementary and inalienable rights of human beings. So it has become penal to do any one of the following things, all of which were regarded as expressions of the highest religious devotion and were committed with the sanction of the ancestral faith and under the inspiration of its benediction: to burn widows; to expose parents to death on the banks of the Ganges; to offer up human sacrifice; to murder children, either by throwing them into the Ganges, or by the Rajpoot secret method of infanticide; to encourage men to throw away their lives under temple cars and in other ways of religious devotion; to encourage various forms of voluntary self-torture and self-mutilation; to outrage girls under a certain age.

How much hath the Spirit of Christ wrought in that land during the century by saving the lives of [pg 340] millions of poor innocent creatures from the ravages of a savage faith and an inhuman religious devotion!

Thus, in India today the laws protect the people, old and young, from the old murderous customs of its religion, and gives a sanctity to life and a protection to the innocent and a check to the mad, suicidal tendency of the religious fanatic, such as India never before knew. And all this has been done in the teeth of their religion and notwithstanding the persistent cries and protests of the religious leaders of the people.

I have already mentioned the fact that the obscene and the impure have in many ways been fostered by that faith, and that the government has thus far been unable to find courage to apply to religious temples, symbols and rites that legislation which it has enacted against the obscene in literature and in the ordinary life of the people. And yet, we are encouraged to find there this anomaly today,—that men, for translating and publishing obscene portions of the Hindu scriptures, have been punished in accordance with this law. The day will, doubtless, soon come, it must come, when this legislation against obscenity will be enforced without exception in favour of temple cars and sacred objects and rites.

In reference to caste observance the State has been more courageous and has absolutely ignored class distinction among its subjects. No one who has not lived in the East can realize how radical and important this policy is in that land of class distinctions based upon religious injunction and revelation. It seemed absurd and unrighteous to that people that the august and sacred Brahman and the unclean and [pg 341] outcaste Pariah should be regarded as equal before the law, and that a pauper should enjoy, with a prince, the same protection and blessings from the State. Regardless of immemorial custom and religious injunction, the government has become the great leveller—it has ignored entirely, in all the rights and privileges which it has to confer, every caste distinction and class privilege and disability which Hinduism had created and sacredly maintained for centuries. And it adheres stiffly to its Christian principle of the equal rights of all its subjects.

(b) Moreover, Hinduism itself is being gradually transformed under the search-light of a present Christianity.

Not only has it been compelled, from without, to give up some of its inhuman practices, it has also voluntarily, from very shame, relinquished some of its grossest evils.

There is a very interesting conflict now going on in Hinduism—between the ultra-conservatives and the progressives. This latter class is composed almost entirely of men who have been educated in mission and government schools, and who have been influenced by Christian light and life.