New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century | Page 7

colleges. Even in
1824, when Government, then under "Orientalist" influence, founded
the Sanscrit College in Calcutta for the encouragement of Sanscrit
learning, a numerous body of native gentlemen, with the famous Raja
Rammohan Roy at their head, petitioned that a college for the study of
Western learning might be established instead. For a number of years
now, the Sanscrit College, then founded, has actually had fewer pupils
on its rolls than it is permitted to admit at a greatly reduced fee.[6]
Again, the idea of public questions, the idea of the common welfare,
has come into being with the nineteenth century, and is quietly
repudiating caste and giving to the community a solidarity and a feeling
of solidarity unknown hitherto. Upon one platform now meet, as a

matter of course, the native gentlemen of all the castes, when any
general grievance is felt or any great occasion falls to be celebrated.
The Western custom of public meetings for the discussion of public
questions is now an established Indian institution, and daily gives the
lie to the idea that there is pollution in bodily contact with a person of
lower caste. That a special seat should be reserved for a man because
he is a brahman would be scouted. The convenience of travelling by
rail or in tram-cars has been even more widely effective in dissolving
the idea. And if the advantage or convenience of the new ways can
overcome the force of custom, so can the unprofitableness of the old.
For illustrations, I pass from the gentlemen who attend public meetings
where the speeches are in English, to the less educated and more
superstitious and more blindly conservative people. In the Mahratta
districts of the Central Provinces, says the Census Report for 1901, in
recent years an unavoidable scepticism as to his efficiency has tended
to reduce the earnings of the Garpagari or averter of hail from the crops.
In Calcutta the same influence has extinguished the trade of supplier of
Ganges water. The water taps in the house or on the street are too
convenient, and the quality of the water is too manifestly superior for
the desecration from the iron pipes to outweigh the advantages. A few
years ago, in Darjeeling, north of Bengal, the brahman names upon the
signs of the liquor shops were distinctly in the majority. The sacerdotal
caste, new style, had appreciated the chances of big profits and shut
their eyes to the regulations of caste, which have relegated drink-sellers
to a very low place in the scale. Brahmans are even said to figure
among the contractors who supply beef, flesh of the sacred animal, to
the British army in India. "A curious sign of the changing time," says
Mr. Lockwood Kipling (Beast and Man in India), "is the fact that
Hindus of good caste, seeing the profit that may be made from leather,
are quietly creeping into a business from which they are levitically
barred. Money prevails against caste more potently than missionary
preaching."
In this region, where convenience or comfort or personal advancement
are concerned, it may safely be asserted that the so-called Indian
conservatism has not much resisting power. There, at least, it is found
that where there is a will there is a way.[7]

[Sidenote: The Indian mind awakened.]
And there is a higher influence at work dissolving and reconstituting
the whole framework of ideas. Upon the Indian mind, long lain fallow,
modern civilisation and modern thought and the fellowship with the
world are acting as the quickening rain and sunshine upon the fertile
Indian soil. That these and similar obtruding influences have had a
transforming effect has already been alleged. But far beyond, in
promise at least, is the revived activity of the Indian mind itself. If the
age of Elizabeth be the outcome of the stirring of the minds of
Englishmen through the discovery of a new world, the multiplication of
books, the revival of learning, and the reformation of religion, how
shall we measure the effect upon the acute Indian mind of the far more
stimulating influences of this Indian Renaissance! What comparison,
for example, can be made between the stimulus of the new learning of
the sixteenth century and the stimulus of the first introduction to a
modern library? It would be an exaggeration to say that the Indian mind
is now showing all its power in response to the stimulus. But it is
everywhere active, and in some spheres, as in Religion and
Philanthropy, in History, in Archæology, in Law, in certain Natural
Sciences, individuals have already done service to India and
contributed to knowledge. Glimpses of great regions, unexplored, in
these domains are rousing students to secure for themselves a province.
"More copies of books of poetry, philosophy, law, and religion now
issue every year from