New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century | Page 4

John Morrison
same city, listen to the Autobiography of another earlier
Moghul emperor, Jahangir. "It was the belief of these people of hell
[the Hindus] that a dead Hindu laid before the idol would be restored to
life, if in his life he had been a worshipper there.... I employed a
confidential person to ascertain the truth, and as I justly supposed, the
whole was detected to be an impudent imposture.... Throwing down the
temple which was the scene of this imposture, with the very same
materials I erected on the spot the great mosque, because the very name
of Islam was proscribed at Benares, and with God's blessing it is my
desire ... to fill it full of true believers." These things I write, not to hold
up to condemnation these Moghul rulers, but to point out by contrast
the voluntary character of the influence during the British and Christian
period. For there is in India a grander interest still than that of the
British political organisation, namely, the peaceful gradual
transformation of the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and fears, of
each individual of the millions of India.
[Sidenote: The nineteenth century in India--a conflict of ideas]
The real history of the past century in India has been the conflict and
commingling of ideas, a Homeric struggle, renewed in the nineteenth
century, between the gods of Asia and Europe. Sometimes the shock of
collision has been heard, as when by Act of Legislature, in 1829, Suttee
or widow-burning was put down, and, in 1891, the marriage of girls
under twelve; or when by order of the Executive, the sacred privacy of
Indian houses was violated in well-meant endeavours to stay the plague
[1895-], great riots ensuing; or when an Indian of social standing has

joined the Christian Church. At other times, like the tumbling in,
unnoticed, of slice upon slice of the bank of a great Indian river flowing
through an alluvial plain, opinion has silently altered, and only later
observers discover that the old idea has changed. Not a hundred years
ago, students of Kayasth (clerk) caste were excluded from the Sanscrit
College in Calcutta. Now, without any new ordinance, they are
admitted, as among the privileged castes, and the idea of the
brotherhood of man has thus made way. The silent invasion is
strikingly illustrated in the official Report on Female Education in
India, 1892 to 1897. On a map of India within the Report, the places
where female education was most advanced were coloured greener
according to the degree of advance--surely most inappropriate
colouring, though that is not our business. The map showed a strip of
the greenest green all round the sea-coast. There the unobserved new
influence came in. The _Census Report_ for 1901 showed the same
silently obtruding influence from over the sea in the case of the
education of males. Many such silent changes might be noted. And yet
again, the most diverse ideas may be observed side by side in a strange
chequer. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the University
of Calcutta accepted an endowment of a lectureship "to promote
Sanscrit learning and Vedantic studies," any Hindus without distinction
of caste being eligible as lecturers; and then, shortly after, agreed to the
request of the first lecturer that none but Hindus be admitted to the
exposition of the sacred texts, thus excluding the European heads of the
university from a university lecture. Perhaps the lecturer thought
himself liberal, for to men like him at the beginning of the century it
would have been an offence to read the sacred texts with Sudras or
Hindus of humble castes. According to strict Hindu rule, only
brahmans can read the sacred books.[2]
[Sidenote: Indian ideas.]
For in all three spheres, social, political, and religious, the advent of the
new age implied more or less of a conflict. India has still of her own a
social system, political ideas, and religious ideas and ideals. In the
Indian social system, caste and the social inferiority of women stand
opposed to the freedom of the individual and the equality of the sexes

that prevail in Great Britain, at least in greater degree. In the sphere of
politics, the absolutism, long familiar to the Indian mind, is the
antithesis of the life of a citizen under a limited monarchy, with party
government and unfettered political criticism. In the sphere of religion,
the hereditary priesthood of India stands over against the British ideal
of a clergy trained for their duties and proved in character. The Hindu
conception of a religious life as a life of sacrificial offerings and
penances, or of ecstasies, or of asceticism, or of sacred study, stands
over against the British ideal of religion in daily life and in practical
philanthropies. To the Hindu, the religious mood
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