Read Ebook: Where Half The World Is Waking Up The Old and the New in Japan China the Philippines and India Reported With Especial Reference to American Conditions by Poe Clarence Hamilton

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"We are no other than a Moving Row Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go. . . .

"But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days."

It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted; but for this belief that all things are predestined, no people would ever have been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny of the caste system. Perhaps it should also be added that the belief in the transmigration of the soul has also had a not inconsiderable influence. Though you have fared ill in this life, a million rebirths may be yours ere you finally win absorption into Brahma, and in these million future lives the gods may deal more prodigally with you. Indeed, the things you most desire may be yours in your rebirth. "You are interested in India; therefore you may have your next life as an Indian," an eminent Hindu said to me. But Heaven forbid!

At any rate, with this double layer of nourishing earth--the belief, first, that what you are now is the result of your actions in previous lives, and, secondly, that there are plenty more rebirths in which any merit you possess may have its just recompense of reward, the caste system has flourished like the Psalmist's green bay tree, though its influence has been more like that of the deadly upas.

If you are a high-caste man you may not only refuse to eat with or touch a low-caste man, your equal perhaps in intelligence and in morals, but in some cases you may even demand that the low-caste man shall not pollute you by coming too near you on the road. On page 540 of the 1901 "Census of India Report" will be found a table showing at what distances the presence of certain inferior classes become contaminating to a Brahmin! Moreover, the low-caste man, offensive to men, is taught that he is equally offensive to the gods. He must not worship in the temples; must not even approach them. Usually it is taken for granted that no Pariah will take such a liberty, but in some places I have seen signs in English posted on the temple gates warning tourists who have low-caste servants that these servants cannot enter the sacred buildings.

Not only are these creatures of inferior orders vile in themselves, but the work which they do has also come to be regarded as degrading. A high-caste man will not be caught doing any work which is "beneath him." The cook will not sweep; the messenger boy would not pick up a book from the floor. The liveried Brahmin who takes your card at the American Consulate in Calcutta once lost his place rather than pick up a slipper; rather than humiliate himself in such fashion he would walk half a mile to get some other servant for the duty. It is no uncommon thing to find that your servant will carry a package for you, but will hire another servant if a small package of his own is to be moved. "I had a boy for thirteen years, the best boy I ever had, till he died of the plague," a Bombay Englishman said to me, "and he shaved me regularly all the time. But when I gave him a razor with which to shave himself, I found it did no good. He would have 'lost caste' if he had done barber's work for anybody but a European!"

"I have a good sweeper servant," a Calcutta minister told me, "but if I should attempt to promote him beyond his caste and make a house-servant of him, every other servant I have would leave, including my cook, who has been a Christian twenty years!"

The absurdities into which the caste system runs are well illustrated by some facts which came to my notice on a visit to a school for the Dom caste conducted by some English people in Benares. The Doms burn the bodies of the dead at the Ganges ghats, and do other "dirty work." Incidentally they form the "thief caste" in Benares, and whenever a robbery occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom is guilty. For this reason a great number of Doms make it a practice to sleep on the ground just outside the police station nearly all the year round, reporting to the authorities so as to be able to prove an alibi in case of a robbery. So low are the Doms that to touch anything belonging to one works defilement; consequently they leave their most valuable possessions unguarded about their tents or shacks, knowing full well that not even a thief of a higher caste will touch them.

"We had a servant," a Benares lady said to me, "who lost his place rather than take up one end of a forty-foot carpet while a Dom had hold of the other end. The new bearer, his successor, did risk helping move a box with a Dom handling the other side of it, but he was outcasted for the action, and it cost him 25 rupees to be reinstated. And until reinstated, of course, he could not visit kinsmen or friends nor could friends or kinsmen have visited him even to help at a funeral; his priest, his barber, and his washerman would have shunned him. Again, our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of the Brahmins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chiprassi or messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the letter on the floor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes the pollution that would come from actual contact with the chiprassi." Moreover, there are social gradations even among the Doms. One Dom proudly confided to this lady that he was a sort of superior being because the business of his family was to collect the bones of dead animals, a more respectable work than that in which some other Doms engaged!

Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta tells how one day when a dead cat had to be moved from her yard her sweeper proudly pulled himself up and assured her that, though the lowest among all servants, he was still too high to touch the body of a dead animal!

My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes this a suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences of a well-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places in India. The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last been exterminated, but the English Government has not yet been able to end the activities of those who regard the plunder of the public as their immemorial right. In Delhi a friend of mine told me that the watchmen are known to be of the robber class. "You hire one of them to watch your house at night, and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left his shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection enough, as the robbers would see that I had paid the proper blackmail by hiring one of their number as chowkidar."

In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element carrying things with a much higher hand. "There's where they live," Dr. J. P. Jones, the well-known writer on Indian affairs, said to me as we were coming home one nightfall, "and the people of Madura pay them a tribute amounting to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of their own whom they always consult before making a raid. If he signifies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise, not--though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with the verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the great majority of cases."

India's most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping down roots from a score or a hundred limbs; these roots fasten themselves in the earth and later become parent trees for other multiplying limbs and roots, until the whole earth is covered. In much the same fashion the Indian caste system has developed. Instead of the four original castes there are now more than five hundred times that number, and the system now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what social station the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to the grave , but also decrees almost as irrevocably what business he may or may not follow. A little American girl of my acquaintance once announced that she hadn't decided whether she would be a trained nurse, a chorus-girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any such embarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or a thief is largely decided for him before he knows his own name.

"But isn't the system weakening now?" the reader asks, as I have also asked in almost every quarter of India. The general testimony seems to be that it is weakening, and yet in no very rapid manner. Eventually, no doubt, it will die, but it will die hard. A few weeks ago, a Parliament of Religions was held in connection with the Allabahad Exposition, with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as the presiding officer. In the course of his "Presidential Address" the Maharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system, resorting in part to so specious an argument as the following:

"If education means the drawing forth of the potentialities of a boy and fitting him for taking his ordained place as a member of society, then the caste system has hitherto done this work in a way which no other plan yet contrived has ever done. The mere teaching of a youth a smattering of the three R's and nothing else in a primary school is little else than a mere mockery. Under the caste system the boys are initiated and educated almost from infancy into the family industry, trade, profession, or handicraft, and become adepts in their various lines of life almost before they know it. This unique system of education is one of the blessings of our caste arrangement. We know that a horse commands a high price in the market if it has a long pedigree behind it. It is not unreasonable to presume that a carpenter whose forefathers have followed the same trade for centuries will be a better carpenter than one who is new to the trade--all other advantages being equal."

In the phrase, "his ordained place as a member of society," we have the keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole caste system rests. It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to have the people believe that his sons were "ordained" of Heaven to be rulers, even if "not fit to stop a gully with," and the Sudra's sons "ordained" to be servants, no matter what their qualities of mind and soul. But the caste system is rotting down in other places and some time or other this "ordained" theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric will totter to the ruin it has long and richly merited.

The introduction of railways has proved one of the great enemies of caste. Men of different rank who formerly would not have rubbed elbows under any considerations sit side by side in the railway cars--and they prefer to do it rather than travel a week by bullock-cart to reach a place which is but a few hours by train. Consequently the priests have had to wink at "breaking caste" in this way, just as they had to get around the use of waterworks in Calcutta. According to the strict letter of the law a Hindu may not drink water which has been handled by a man of lower caste , but the priests decided that the payment of water-rates might be regarded as atonement for the possible defilement, and consequently Hindus now have the advantages of the city water supply.

Foreign travel has also jarred the caste system rather severely. The Hindu statutes strictly forbid a man from leaving the boundaries of India, but the folk have progressed from technical evasion of the law to open violation of its provisions. In Jeypore I saw the half-acre of trunks and chests which the Maharaja of that province used for transporting his goods and chattels when he went to attend the coronation of the King of England. The Maharaja is a Hindu of the Hindus, claims descent from one of the high and mighty gods, and when he was named to go to London, straightway declared that the caste law against leaving India stood hopelessly in the way. Finally, however, he was convinced that by taking all his household with him, his servants, his priests, material for setting up a Hindu temple, a six-months' supply of Ganges water, etc., he might take enough of India with him to make the trip in safety, and he went. Now many are going without any such precautions, and a moderate fee paid to the priests usually enables them to resume caste relations upon their return.

Sometimes, however, the penalties are heavier. A Hindu merchant of Amritsar, who grew very friendly with a Delhi friend of mine on a voyage from Europe, said just before reaching Bombay: "Well, I shall have to pay for all this when I get home, and I shall be lucky if I get off without making a pilgrimage to all the twelve sacred places of our religion. And in any case I shall never let my wife know that I have broken caste by eating with foreigners." My impression is, however, that only in a very few cases now is the crime of foreign travel punished so severely. In Madras I met one of the most eminent Hindu leaders, Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer. "Caste has kept me from going abroad until now," he told me, "but I have made up my mind to let it interfere no longer. Just as soon as business permits, I shall go to Europe and possibly to America."

Christianity is another mightily effective foe of Caste. As in the olden days, it exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. In Muttra I found a converted high-caste Brahmin acting as sexton of a Christian church whose members are sweepers--outcast folk whom as a Hindu he would have scorned to touch. On the other hand, the acceptance of Christianity frees a man from the restrictions imposed upon a low caste, even though it does not give him the privileges of a higher caste and thus often wins for the Christianized Hindu higher regard from all classes. Thus there was in Moradabadad some years ago the son of a poor sweeper who became a Christian, and was a youth of such fine promise that a way was found for him to attend Oxford University. Returning, he became a teacher in Moradabadad Mission School and won such golden opinions from his townspeople that when he died the whole city--Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians alike--stopped for his funeral.

In its present elaborate form the caste system is undoubtedly doomed. It is too purely artificial to endure after the people acquire even a modicum of education. Perhaps it was planned originally as a means of preserving the racial integrity and political superiority of the Aryan invaders, but for unnumbered centuries it has been simply a gigantic engine of oppression and social injustice. At the present time no blood or social difference separates the great majority of castes from the others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and so high an authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that even in the beginning all the castes save the Sudras were of the same race and blood.

If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent the intermarriage of radically different races, this may be accomplished, as it is accomplished in our own Southern States, without restricting the right of the individual to engage in any line of work for which he is fitted or to go as high in that work as his ability warrants. Booker Washington, born in the South's lowest ranks, becomes a world-figure; had he been born in India's lowest caste, he would have remained a burner of dead bodies. To compare the South's effort to preserve race integrity with India's Juggernaut of caste is absurd.

Bombay, India.

THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN

In India marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert Compton remarks. There are no bachelors or old maids. Children in their cradles are not infrequently given in marriage by their parents; they are sometimes promised in marriage before they are born.

"You are married, of course?" the zenana women will ask when an American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the answer is in the negative, "Why not? Couldn't they get anybody to have you?"

"Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow," is an Indian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot of woman is hard if she be a wife; it is immeasurably harder if she be a widow. Hinduism enslaves a majority of the men within its reach; of the women within its reach it enslaves all.

I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of a civilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept this standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom. In the great temple at Madura are statues of "The Jealous Husband" who always carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; and the attitude of the man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as a system. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that woman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "Dharma Sastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: "It is the nature of woman in this world to cause men to sin. A female is able to draw from the right path, not a fool only, but even a sage." And the "Code of Hindu Laws," drawn up by order of the Indian Government for the guidance of judges, declares:

"A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will behave amiss. A woman is not to be relied on."

"Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar."

In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman has been divided into "the three subjections." In childhood she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sons or--most miserable of all!--lacking a son, to her husband's kinsmen. Her husband is supposed to stand to her almost in the relation of a god. "No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands," says Manu, "no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife honors her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven." And a recent Hindu writer says, "To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas . To worship the husband is to worship the gods."

Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are doubly hard on the women. The women may no more rise above their caste than the male members of the family; and they are predestined to take up life's most serious duties before their fleeting childhood has spent itself. No wonder they look old before they are thirty!

If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, a trip through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. A law enacted by the British Government a few years ago decrees that while the marriage ceremonies may be performed at any age, the girl shall not go to her husband as his wife until she is twelve years old; but it is doubtful if even this mild measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I attended an elaborate and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was told that the bride was "eleven or twelve" and would go to her husband's home the following week. My travelling servant told me that he was married when he was sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years longer with her parents before coming to him. The first American lady I met in India was telling of a wedding she had recently attended, the bride being a girl of eleven and the groom a year or two older. In Secunderabad a friend of mine found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who had been given in marriage, and in the house where he visited was a ten-year-old girl who had been married two years before to a man of thirty.

In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls Manu named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maximum. The father who delays finding a husband for his daughter until after she is twelve is regarded as having committed a crime--though it must always be remembered that girls and boys in India mature a year or two younger than boys and girls in the United States.

One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost increases with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies in all cases are expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish about as much excitement as circuses at home. My first introduction to a Hindu wedding was in Agra one Sunday afternoon--though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is the same as any other day--and the shops were in full blast and the craftsmen and potters were as busy as they ever are. From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, and as the deafening hullabaloo came nearer its volume and violence increased until it would have sufficed to bring down the walls of Jericho in half the time Joshua took for the job. Just behind the drummers came two gorgeously clad small boys astride an ass begarlanded with flowers; and when the musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so as to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-year-old small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and gauze and who ought to have been at home studying the Second Reader, was on his way to be married, and the little chap riding behind him was the brother of the bride. It was very hard to realize that such tots were not merely "playing wedding" instead of being principal participants in a serious ceremony!

The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged for a couple who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, and though no one could have asked for a more gracious welcome than my American friend and I received, I very much doubt if any one of the high-caste folk about us would have condescended to eat at the same table with us even to end a three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was a nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been a three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's house, we were told, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feasts arranged by the groom's father. One thousand people had been invited and, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served, I should think that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5000 rupees, or 33, was none too high.

Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or a father with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strain his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that among the humbler classes a father will sometimes mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story that the bride is "as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's"--he must also be paid for his indispensable services.

Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man--whose face she may never have seen but once or twice--to take up the hard life of a Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet from her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion of the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so galling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at the same table with her husband, but must be content with what he leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the people to a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. "Some of my girls are engaged to be married," Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home in Calcutta, said to me, "and when their fiances come to call, after the Christian fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors while the boys are seated."

Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that her husband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If she lives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husband is authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and in nearly all such cases the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W. J. Wilkins says that a servant in his employ married a second wife and insisted that the first should not only support herself but contribute the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. The older wife is tantalized by the thought that she herself was selected by the parents of her husband, while the new wife is probably his own choice; and another cause of jealousy is found in the new wife's youth. For no matter how old the man himself may be--forty, fifty or sixty--his bride is always a girl of twelve or thereabouts--and for the very simple reason that practically no girls remain single longer, and widows are never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay of a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an agent to his native village and caste with power to negotiate.

The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful than the building itself.

"The uniform 'e wore Was nothing much before An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind. For a twisty piece o' rag and a goatskin leather bag Was all the field equipment 'e could find."

"My friends have persuaded me that I ought not to marry a very young girl," he said to the agent, "get an older one therefore--oh, it doesn't matter if she is twenty-four."

The agent left and two days thereafter the Hindu received this message: "Can't find one of twenty-four. How about two of twelve each?"

The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing to the troubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brahminism is that she is responsible through some evil committed either in this existence or a previous one, for the death of her husband, and the cruelest indignities of the Hindu social system are reserved for the bereaved and unfortunate woman. If a man or boy die, no matter if his wife is yet a prattling girl in her mother's home, she can never remarry, but is doomed to live forever as a despised slave in the home of his father and mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved; and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humiliation the gods are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her. In a school I visited in Calcutta I was told that there were two little widows, one five years old and one six.

Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped the practice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow's duty to burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. "It is proper for a woman after her husband's death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws, "to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000 years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve an inviolable chastity." This rite of self-immolation was known as suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the suttees numbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stone with carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where a widow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find these gruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indian roadsides. Moreover, the present general treatment of widows in India is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare that they would prefer the suttee.

And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that a kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blacken the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customs and sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and must not even look out of the windows of their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it."

Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless while the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument ever erected in memory of a woman's love. True, Shah Jehan, the monarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet Mohammedanism, although its customs are less brutal, places woman in almost the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status of woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great religions of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an end by referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. Of all that I saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of the Himalayas from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the view of the Taj Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon.

The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, "Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of God," is enough to assure one that Arjmand Banu, "The Exalted One of the Palace," whose dust it was built to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and feature. We know but little about her. There are pictures which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; there are records to show that it was in 1615 that she became the bride of the prince who later began to rule as "His Imperial Highness, the second Alexander King Shah Jehan," and we may see in Agra the rooms in the palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian Nights-like splendor characteristic of Oriental courts,

"Mumtaz-i-Mahal," they called her--"Pride of the Palace." And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of motherhood--that way along which woman finds the testing of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her existence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that forever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seven times she walked the mother's ancient way down to the gates of Death and brought back a new life with her, but the eighth time she did not return. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carrying in his heart a sorrow which not all his pomp nor power could heal, declared that she should have the most beautiful tomb that the mind of man could plan. So the Taj was built--"in memory of a deathless love," and in a garden which is always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue of fountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, "like four tall court-ladies tending their princess," there stands this dream in marble, "the most exquisite building on earth."

With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhood of the country in which it is so incongruously placed.

Madras, India.

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