John Morrison

“ Britons can view with sympathy the rise of the national feeling as the natural and inevitable fruit of contact with Britain and of education in the language of freedom, and even although the new problems of Indian statesmanship may call forth all the powers of British statesmen. Like a young man conscious of noble lineage and of great intellectual power, New India, brought up under Britain's care, is loudly asserting that she can now take over the management of the continent which Britain has unified and made what it is. ”

“ From a publication by a third section of the Brāhma Samāj, the party of Keshub Chunder Sen, we quote: "Every sinner must suffer the consequences of his own sins, sooner or later, in this world or in the next; for the moral law is unchangeable and God's justice irreversible. His mercy also must have its way. As the just king, He visits the soul with adequate agonies, and when the sinner after being thus chastised mournfully prays, He as the merciful Father delivers and accepts him and becomes reconciled to him. Such reconciliation is the only true atonement." ”

“ All the same, as new India is proving, pessimism is not the inherent temperament of India, and the hope of the end of the transmigration, and of the lives of the soul, no more natural in India than in any other land.
Due to nature?
Pessimism is natural in India, say such writers as we have in mind, because of the spirit-subduing aspects of nature and life amid which Indians live their lives. Life is of little value to the possessor, they say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is constantly being thrust upon us. ”

“ The British Government is indeed an amazing network covering the whole continent, ministering life, like the network of the blood-vessels in our frame. At least, its apologists declare it to be doing so, and its native critics declare that it ought to. The native press, for example, is prompt to direct the attention of the Government to famine and to summon the Government to its duty. In India a noble idea of the Commonwealth and its proper government has thus come into being. ”

“ In short, the British rule has united India, and the awakened mind of India is rejoicing in the consciousness of the larger existence, and is identifying the ancient glories of certain centres in North India with this new India created by Britain. Never before was there a united India in the modern political sense; never, indeed, could there be until modern inventions brought distant places near each other. ”

“ For the ignorant masses, the sense of sin has been worn out by the importance attached to religious and social externals and by the artificial value of the service of a hereditary monopolist priesthood. These right, all is right in the eyes of the millions of India. When one of the multitude proposes to himself a visit to some shrine or sacred spot, no doubt the motive often is some divine dissatisfaction with himself; it is a feeling that God is not near enough where he himself lives. ”

“ To the pessimist, on the contrary [and Hindu philosophy is pessimistic, whatever be the new mood of India] , the question is, "Why was I born?" The Indian doctrine of transmigration comes with answer—"Life is a punishment: it is the bitter consequence of our past that we are working out; we must submit to be born into the world again and again, until we are cleared." "Yes, until your minds are cleared," the Indian pantheist adds, "life itself is a delusion, if you only knew it; life itself, your consciousness of individuality or separateness, is a delusion." ”

“ This consciousness of a national unity is one of the outstanding features of the time in India, all the more striking because hitherto India has been so unwieldily large, and her people incoherent, like dry sand. "The Indian never knew the feeling of nationality," says Max Müller. "The very name of India is a synonym for caste, as opposed to nationality," says Sister Nivedita, the pro-Hindu lady already referred to, who likewise notes the emergence of the national idea. ”

“ What concerns us here is that in the conception of the beatific vision, we still find ourselves in a different religious world from ours—religion exoteric for the vulgar, and religion esoteric for the enlightened; religion not for living by, but for a period of retirement; a religion of spiritual self-culture, not of active sonship and brotherhood. Far be it from me to say that at this point the West may not learn as well as teach, for how much thought does the culture of the spirit receive among us? ”

“ Whatever the merits of the great agitation in 1905 against the partition of the Province of Bengal, and inconceivable as taking place a century ago, it is manifestly the doing of men keenly interested in the conditions under which they live. It is a contradiction of the theory of an inherent Indian pessimism. Self-respect and a sense of the dignity and duties of manhood are surely increasing, and making our earth a place of hope and making life worth living, instead of a burden to be borne. ”

“ For the visitors who crowd thither every cold season, and for the still larger number who will never see India, but have felt the glamour of the ancient land whose destiny is now so strangely linked to that of our far-off and latter-day islands, India has not one but many interests. There is the interest of the architectural glories of the Moghul emperors, in whose grand halls of audience, now deserted and merely places of show, a solitary British soldier stands sentry over a visitors' book. ”

“ We can see that the land we are passing is inhabited by human beings like ourselves; and those houses visible are homes; and signs of life we can see even from our passing vessel. What of all the tragedies and comedies that are daily being enacted in these houses—the exits and the entrances, the friendships and the feuds, the selfishnesses and self-sacrifices, the commonplace toil, the children's play, that are going on the very moment we are looking? ”

“ All Indian current opinion is unanimous with the Parsee and the Bengali that a great movement is in progress. The drift from the old moorings is a constant theme of discourse. Let Sir Alfred Lyall, once head of the United Provinces, speak for the most competent European observers. "There may be grounds for anticipating," he says, "that a solid universal peace and the impetus given by Europe must together cause such rapid intellectual expansion that India will now be carried swiftly through phases which have occupied long stages in the lifetime of other nations." ”

“ To the philosopher who is thinking out a pantheistic system, or to the ascetic who is seeking after identity of consciousness with the One, the Hindu Avatars are only a part of the delusion, the Maya, in which men are steeped. To a pantheist, holding that his own consciousness of individuality is delusion, born of spiritual darkness and ignorance, the conception of an avatar or concrete presentation of deity as an individual is only still grosser delusion. ”

“ At least, if it be the case, as I have tried to show, that during the past century in India, human life has been rising in value, the pessimistic mood must be declining. Let us observe some facts again. In a Government or Mission Hospital, there is a European doctor taking part in the offensive work of the dressing of a coolie's sores,—we assume that the doctor's touch is the touch of a true Christian gentleman. To the despised sufferer, life is gaining a new sweetness, and to the high-caste student looking on and ready to imitate his teacher, life is attaining a new dignity. ”

“ In other words, people of the outer world, say Europeans, are rewarded for virtue by being born into the lowest Indian caste, and then, after rising to be brahmans in India, they go back to Europe to give it the benefit of their acquirements; and finally crown their career by reappearing in India as a brahman philosopher or jogi. Surely we may laugh at this without being thought unsympathetic or narrow-minded. We recall Mrs. Besant's assertion that she had a dim recollection of an existence as a brahman pandit in India. ”

“ The Indian National Congress, or All-India political association, is the embodiment of this new national consciousness of educated Indians, the only embodiment possible while India is so divided in social and religious matters. Were there only ten or twelve million Mahomedans in India instead of sixty, the new national consciousness would undoubtedly have been a Hindu or religious, instead of a political, consciousness. ”

“ Truth is great and will prevail, but let us not under-estimate the difficulties in the way of new opinions in India, where these do not appeal to the natural desires for power or status or comfort. I have already referred to the deep-rooted notion that Hinduism is of the soil of India, and adherence to it bound up with the national honour. I refer to it here again only to glance at a kindred notion, common among Anglo-Indians, that the Indian religion is the outcome of Indian environment, and is "consequently" the best religion for India. ”

“ A marked change in Christian thought itself during the nineteenth century has been the higher value of this present life. Christianity has become a vitalising gospel for the life Here even more than for the Hereafter. But assuming the truth of what we have sought to show, namely, that within the past century the winning personality of Christ has come to New India, a new incentive to noble life and service, we have at least a further reason for believing that pessimism and transmigration are fading out of Indian minds. ”

“ 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 the press of British India than during any century of native rule." ”

“ The Briton's tie to India and Indians is of no passing accidental character. Our life-histories are not merely running parallel; our destinies are linked together. Christian feeling, duty, self-interest, and the interest of a linked destiny all call upon us to know each other and cherish mutual sympathy. ”

“ Pessimism, asceticism, transmigration are allied ideas.
For Western minds it is difficult to realise the close connection between the doctrine of transmigration and the mood of India, rightly or wrongly termed pessimism. Our instinctive feeling is that life is sweet; while there is life there is hope, we say; "healthy optimism" is the expression of Professor James in his Varieties of Religious Experience; it is "more life and fuller that we want." In keeping with this Western and human instinct, the Christian idea of the Hereafter is a fuller life than the life Here, a perfect eternal life. ”

“ Very few spiritually minded Hindus past middle life pass into the Christian Church, as some do at the earlier stages of life. Under the sway of the Hindu idea of salvation, by knowledge or by intense intuition, they withdraw from active life to meditate on God, with less or more of the practice of religious exercises. Painful to contemplate the spiritual loss to the community of a conception of religion that diverts the spiritual energy away from the community, and renders it practically unproductive, except as an example. ”

“ The popular belief of Hindu India is, that there are no new ideas in India, that nought in India suffers change, and that as things are, so they have always been. Even educated Indians are reluctant to admit that things have changed and that their community has had to submit to education and improvement—that suttee, for example, was ever an honoured institution in the province now most advanced. But to the observant student of the Indian people, the evolution of India is almost as noteworthy as the more apparent rigidity. ”

“ The late Sir M. Monier Williams speaks of pantheism as a main root of the original Indo-Aryan creed, which has "branched out into an endless variety of polytheistic superstitions." Whether that be so, or whether, as is now more generally believed, the polytheism is the aboriginal Indian plant into which the pantheistic idea has been grafted as communities have become brahmanised, the pantheistic idea very readily presents itself to the mind of the educated Hindu. In any discussion regarding human responsibility the idea crops up that all is God, "There is One only, and no second." ”

“ The attitude of educated Indians to the British Government of India, and to Anglo-Indians as a body, is that of a political opposition, ignorant of many pertinent facts, divided from the party in power by racial and religious differences, and with no visible prospect of succeeding to office. The National Congress is the permanent Opposition in India. A permanent Opposition cannot but be biassed, and its press will seize at everything that will justify the feeling of hostility. ”

“ It is patent that what the Prārthanā Samājes of Western India are to the Brāhma Samāj of Bengal, the Ārya Samāj in Bombay is to that in the Punjab and the United Provinces—only feeble echoes. Bombay Indians lead their countrymen in commercial enterprise, and in political questions they take as keen an interest as any of the Indian races. With hesitation and with apologies to Parsee friends, we ask whether it is the numerous Parsees in Bombay who have made their fellow-westerns only worldly-wise. For to great commercial enterprise, the Parsees add a stubborn conservatism in religion. ”

“ 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! ”

“ For the soul, this world is the plane of existence; union with omnipresent Deity is the climax of existence that the Hindu devotee seeks to attain; yet not in a Hereafter, but as he sits on the ground no longer conscious of his self. "The beatific vision of Hinduism," says a recent pro-Hindu writer, "is to be relegated to no distant future." [113] Heaven and Hell are mocked at as absurdities by the new sect of the Āryas in the United Provinces and the Punjab, who retain the doctrine of transmigration. ”

“ For in spite of new and strange environment, in spite of that prevailing notion that religion is a racial thing, of the natural disinclination to change, of modern agnosticism and materialism when the old ideas do give way—in spite of these things, some of the cardinal features of Christianity are commending themselves to educated India. Far from religion being racial, the recent religious evolution of India suggests that in respect of the religious instinct and the religious faculty, mankind are one, not divided. ”

“ We have seen how in the modern school, the idea of caste gives way before the idea of rank in the school, to be followed in College by the idea of intellectual distinction, and still later in life by the idea of success in some modern career. In the political sphere, modern life is also busy dissolving the older and narrower conceptions of life. Atop of the sectarian consciousness of being a Hindu or the provincial consciousness of belonging to Bengal or Bombay, is coming the consciousness of being an Indian. ”

“ The perception of manifoldness is Maya or illusion, says a modern pro-Hindu writer. And again, "To India, all that exists is but a mighty curtain of appearances, tremulous now and again with breaths from the unseen that it conceals." ”

“ If, however, we accept the statement that the value of human life in India is rising, that life is becoming worth living, and that the pessimistic mood is no ingrained fundamental trait, we are prepared to believe that the hopeful Christian conception of the Here and the Hereafter is finding acceptance. Rightly understood, the Christian conception is at bottom the antithesis of pessimism and its corollary, transmigration. To deny the one is almost to assert the other. The decay of the one is the growth of the other. ”

“ 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 ”