Tales of Bengal | Page 6

also a leaven of true nobility: "The flesh striveth against the spirit," nor does it always gain mastery. Having mixed with all classes for twenty eventful years, and speaking the vernacular fluently, I am perhaps entitled to hold an opinion on this much-vexed question. The most salient feature in the Indian nature is its boundless charity. There are no poor laws, and the struggle for life is very severe; yet the aged and infirm, the widow and the orphan have their allotted share in the earnings of every household. It is a symptom of approaching famine that beggars are perforce refused their daily dole. Cruelty to children is quite unknown. Parents will deny themselves food in order to defray a son's schooling-fees or marry a daughter with suitable provision. Bengalis are remarkably clannish: they will toil and plot to advance the interests of anyone remotely connected with them by ties of blood.
Their faults are the outcome of superstition, slavery to custom, and an unhealthy climate. Among them is a lack of moral courage, a tendency to lean on stronger natures, and to flatter a superior by feigning to agree with him. The standard of truth and honesty is that of all races which have been ground under heel for ages: deceit is the weapon of weaklings and slaves. Perjury has become a fine art, because our legal system fosters the chicane which is innate in quick-witted peoples. The same man who lies unblushingly in an English court, will tell the truth to an assembly of caste-fellows, or to the Panohayat (a committee of five which arbitrates in private disputes). Let British Pharisees study the working of their own Divorce and County Courts: they will not find much evidence of superior virtue! As for honesty, the essence of commercialism is "taking advantage of other people's needs," and no legal code has yet succeeded in drawing a line between fair and unfair trade. In India and Japan merchants are an inferior class; and loss of self-respect reacts unfavourably on the moral sense. Ingratitude is a vice attributed to Bengalis by people who have done little or nothing to elicit the corresponding virtue. As a matter of fact their memory is extremely retentive of favours. They will overlook any shortcomings in a ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve him with devotion. Macaulay has branded them with cowardice. If the charge were true, it was surely illogical and unmanly to reproach a community numbering 50,000,000 for inherited defects. Difference of environment and social customs will account for the superior virility of Europeans as compared with their distant kinsmen whose lot is cast in the sweltering tropics. But no one who has observed Bengali schoolboys standing up bare-legged to fast bowling will question their bravery. In fact, the instinct of combativeness is universal, and among protected communities it finds vent in litigation.
Englishmen who seek to do their duty by India have potential allies in the educated classes, who have grafted Western learning on a civilisation much more ancient than their own. Bengal has given many illustrious sons to the empire. Among the dead I may mention Pandits Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Kissari Mohan Ganguli, whose vast learning was eclipsed by their zeal for social service; Dr. Sambhu Chandra Mukharji, whose biography I wrote in 1895; and Mr. Umesh Chandra Banarji, a lawyer who held his own with the flower of our English bar. A Bengali Brahmin is still with us who directs one of the greatest contracting firms in the empire. How much brighter would India's outlook be if this highly-gifted race were linked in bonds of sympathy with our own!
The women of the Gangetic delta deserve a better fate than is assigned to them by Hindu and Mohammadan custom. They are kept in leading-strings from the cradle to the grave; their intellect is rarely cultivated, their affections suffer atrophy from constant repression. Yet Mr. Banerjea draws more than one picture of wifely devotion, and the instinctive good sense which is one of the secrets of feminine influence. Women seldom fail to rise to the occasion when opportunity is vouchsafed them. The late Maharani Surnomoyi of Cossimbazar managed her enormous estates with acumen; and her charities were as lavish as Lady Burdett-Coutts's. Toru Dutt, who died in girlhood, wrote French and English verses full of haunting sweetness. It is a little premature for extremists to prate of autonomy while their women are prisoners or drudges.
Superstition.--Modes of thought surviving from past ages of intellectual growth are the chief obstacles in the path of progress. Mr. Banerjea's tales contain many references to magic--a pseudo-science which clings to the world's religions and social polity. It is doubtful whether the most civilised of us has quite shaken off the notion that mysterious virtues may be