New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century | Page 8

the press of British India than during any century
of native rule."[8] Of course it would be misleading to ignore the fact
that reaction as well as progress has its apostles among the awakened
minds of India. Much of the awakened mental activity, also, is
spent--much wasted--on political writing and discussion, which is often
uninformed by knowledge of present facts and of Indian history. The
general poverty also, and the so-called Western desire to "get on,"
prevent many from becoming in any real sense students or thinkers or
men of public spirit.
Indian conservatism, therefore, we contend, is not the insurmountable
obstacle to new ideas that many superficially deem it to be.

CHAPTER III
NEW SOCIAL IDEAS
[Purusha, the One Spirit, embodied,]
"Whom gods and holy men made their oblation. With Purusha as
victim, they performed A sacrifice. When they divided him, How did
they cut him up? What was his mouth? What were his arms? And what,
his thighs and feet? The Brahman was his mouth; the kingly soldier
Was made his arms; the husbandman, his thighs; The servile Sudra
issued from his feet."
From the Rigveda, Mandala x. 90, translated by Sir M. MONIER
WILLIAMS.
[Sidenote: Caste represses individuality.]
New ideas in the social sphere first claim our attention. The individual
and the community, each have rights, says a writer on the philosophy of
history, and it is hurtful when the balance is not preserved. If the
community be not securely established, the individuals will have no
opportunity to develop; if the individual be not free, the community can
have no real greatness. Speaking broadly, when Western social ideas
meet Indian, the conflict is between the rights of the individual as in
Western civilisation, and the rights of the community or society as in
the Indian. India stands for the statical social forces, modern Europe for
the dynamical and individualistic. In India, as in France before the
Revolution, certain established usages are prejudicially affecting the
progress of the individual, fettering him in many ways. I refer to caste,
the denial of the brotherhood of mankind, the artificial barricading of
class from class, the sacrifice of the individual to his class--condemned
by native reformers like Ramananda, Kabir, Nanak, and Chaitanya long
before the advent of European ideas. Whatever the origin or original
advantages of the caste system, it has long operated to repress
individuality.[9] It is a vast boycotting agency ready to hand to crush
social non-conformity.[10] One can easily understand that if society is
rigidly organised for certain social necessities (marriage for example)

into a number of mutually exclusive sets or circles, admission to all of
which is by birth only, an individual cast out from any set must perish.
No one will eat with him, no one will intermarry with him or his sons
and daughters. It is into such a society that modern social ideas have
been sown, the ideas let us say of John Stuart Mill's book, On
Liberty--the individual's liberty, that is to say--which used to be a
common university text-book in India.
[Sidenote: Caste suggests an imperfect idea of the community.]
[Sidenote: Nevertheless, a practical solidarity in Hinduism.]
Besides setting the community too much above the individual, the caste
system is faulty in presenting to the Indian mind an imperfect idea of
the community. The caste is the natural limit to one's interest and
consciousness of fellowship, to the exclusion of the larger community.
According to Raja Rammohan Roy, writing in 1824, the caste divisions
are "as destructive of national union as of social enjoyment." In
_Modern India_, Sir Monier Williams expresses himself similarly.
Caste "tends to split up the social fabric into numerous independent
communities, and to prevent all national and patriotic combinations."
Too much, however, may be made of this, for the practical solidarity of
Hinduism, in spite of caste divisions, is one of the most striking of
social phenomena in India. Whatever may have brought it about, the
solidarity of Hinduism is an undeniable fact. The supremacy of the
priestly caste over all may have been a bond of union, as likewise the
necessity of all castes to employ the priests, for the Jewish ritual and
the tribe of Levi were the bonds of union among the twelve tribes of
Israel. Sir Alfred Lyall virtually defines Hinduism as the employment of
brahman priests, and it is the adoption of brahmans as celebrants in
social and religious ceremonies that marks the passing over of a
non-Hindu community into Hinduism. It is thus it becomes a new
Hindu caste.[11] Then, uniting further the mutually exclusive castes,
many are the common heritages, actual or adopted, of traditions and
sacred books, and the common national epics of the Ramayan and the
Mahabharat. The cause of the solidarity is not a common creed, as we
shall see