A Child's History of the World

by V. M. Hillyer

These heathen Indians were not our American Indians. They lived in a country called India on the other side of the world. India looks on the map like the little thing that hangs down in the back of your mouth when the doctor says: “Stick out your tongue. Say ’Ah.’” Our Indians are red, but the Indians from India are white. The white Indians belong to the Aryan family, the same family that Cyrus belonged to.

Two thousand years before the time of Cyrus, an Aryan family had moved away from the other Aryan families in Persia until they had come to this country we now call India.

In the course of time there came to be four chief classes of people in India, four chief classes of society—high society, low society, and two classes of society in between. These classes were called castes, and no one in one caste would have anything to do with one in another caste. A boy or girl in one caste would never play with a boy or girl in another caste. A man from one caste would never marry a woman in another. No one from one caste would eat with one in another caste, even though he were starving. Men in different castes were even afraid of touching each other in passing on the street. It was almost as if they were afraid of catching some horrible disease.

The highest caste of all were the Fighters and Rulers. The Rulers were the Fighters, and the Fighters were the Rulers, for they had to be fighters in order to keep their rule.

In the next caste were the Priests; and, as in the case of the Egyptian priests, these men were not what we think of as priests nowadays. They were what we should call professional men—doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.

Next came the farmers and tradespeople—the butcher, the baker, and candlestick maker.

Fourth and last were the common laborers. These were the men who knew nothing and could do nothing but dig or chop wood or carry water.

Below these four castes were still other people so low and mean that they were called outcastes or Pariahs. We now call any person who has done something so disgraceful that no one, not even the lowest, will have anything to do with him a “pariah.”

The people in India believed in a god whom they called Brahma, and so we call their religion Brahmanism. The Brahmanists believed that when a person died his soul was born again in the body of another person or perhaps of an animal. If he had been good while alive they thought his soul went into the body of a higher caste man when he died—as if he were promoted from one grade to the next. If, however, he had led a bad life they thought his soul went into the body of a lower caste man or even of an animal.

When a man died, his body was not buried, it was burned. If he were a married man, his wife was obliged to throw herself alive upon the burning flames. She was not allowed to live after her husband was dead. If the wife died, that was another matter; the man simply got another wife. In the Brahman temples were hideous idols, which the people worshiped as gods. These idols had several heads apiece or many arms, or many legs, or they had tusks sticking out of their mouths—or they had horns coming out of their heads.