New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century | Page 6

plant, and in a few years starved it out. Ten
years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and lo,
by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox, or
because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied
upon the tree or some rude symbolic painting put upon it. Then an
ascetic comes along and seats himself in its shade, and now, already, a
sacred institution has been established that it would raise a riot to try to
remove.
Visitors to Allahabad go to see the great fort erected upon the bank of
the River Jumna by the Mahomedan emperor, Akbar. One of the sights
of the fort, strange to tell, is the underground Hindu temple of "The
Undying Banyan Tree," to which we descend by a long flight of steps.
Such a sacred banyan tree as we have imagined, Akbar found growing
there upon the slope of the river bank when he was requiring the
ground for his fort. The undying banyan tree is now a stump or log, but

it or a predecessor was visited by a Chinese pilgrim to Allahabad in the
seventh century A.D. Being very tolerant, instead of cutting down the
tree, Akbar built a roof over it and filled up the ground all round to the
level he required. And still through the gateway of the fort and down
underground, the train of pilgrims passes as of old to where the banyan
tree is still declared to grow. Such is Indian conservatism, undeterred
by any thought of incongruity. Benares is crowded with examples of
the same unconscious tenacity. I have spoken of the ruthless levelling
of Hindu temples in Benares in former days to make way for
Mahomedan mosques. Near the gate of Aurangzeb's mosque a strange
scene meets the eye. Where the road leads to the mosque, and with no
Hindu temple nowadays in sight, are seated a number of Hindu
ashes-clad ascetics. What are they doing at the entrance to a
Mahomedan mosque? That is where their predecessors used to sit two
hundred years ago, before Aurangzeb tore down the holy Hindu temple
of Siva and erected the mosque in its stead.
[Sidenote: Yields before a persistent obtruding influence.]
[Sidenote: E.g. British influence.]
But Indian conservatism is more than an indisposition to effort and
change; for the same reason, it is also an easy adaptation to things as
they are found. When a new disturbing influence obtrudes from without,
and persistently, it may be easier to give way than to resist. British
influence is such a persistent obtrusion. In English literature as taught
and read, in Christian standards of conduct, in the English language,
and in the modern ideas of government and society, ever presented to
the school-going section of the people of India within their own land,
there is such a continuous influence from without. The impression of
works like Tennyson's In Memoriam or _Idylls of the King_, common
text-books in colleges, the steady pressure of Acts of the British
Government in India, like that raising the marriage age of girls; the
example of men in authority like Lord Curzon, during whose vice-regal
tour in South India there were no nautch entertainments; the necessity
of understanding expressions like "general election" and "public spirit,"
and of comprehending in some measure the working of local

self-government--all such constant pressure must effect a change in the
mental standpoint. The army of Britain in India, representative of the
imperial sceptre, has now for many years been gathered into
cantonments, and its work is no longer to quell hostilities within India,
but only to repel invaders from without. Other British forces, however,
penetrating far deeper, working silently and for the most part
unobserved, are still in the field all over India, effecting a grander
change than the change of outward sovereignty. "Ideas rule the world,"
and he who impresses his ideas is the real ruler of men.
[Sidenote: Indian conservatism overpowered otherwise.]
Telling against Indian conservatism or inertia are other things also
besides persistent Western influences. Many things Western appeal to
the natural desire for advancement and comfort, and the adoption of
these has often as corollary a change of idea. To take examples without
further explanation. The desire for education, the key to advancement
in life, has quietly ignored the old orthodox idea that education in
Sanscrit and the Sacred Scriptures, i.e. higher education as formerly
understood, is the exclusive privilege of certain castes. The very
expression "higher education" has come to mean a modern English
education, not as formerly an education in Sanscrit lore. Had the British
Government allowed things to take their course, the still surviving
institutions of the old kind for Oriental learning would have been
transformed, one and all, into modern schools and