Robert Caldwell

“ It is true that even the lower classes offer a little passing reverence to the ordinary deities of the country, especially to Subrahmanya, a son of Siva, who has from a very ancient period been the favourite deity of Tinnevelly; but the only worship which they form into a system, the only system which can be styled their religion, the only religion, which has any real hold of their minds, is demonolatry. ”

“ Both systems acknowledge in vague terms the existence of a Supreme God ; but they agree in the notion that, if He does exist, He is too good to do people harm, and it is therefore unnecessary to offer Him any kind of worship. The objects of worship in both systems are neither gods nor heroes, but demons, which are supposed to have got the actual administration of the affairs of the world into their hands ; and those demons are so numerous and cunning, so capricious and malicious and powerful, that it is necessary to worship them very sedulously to keep them from doing people mischief. ”

“ The tiger's step becomes softer and its coat sleeker, but it remains as much of a tiger as ever. Human nature when left to itself is bad enough, but it becomes still worse when the devil, in the shape of a bad religion, gets the management of it, and when God's gifts are placed at the devil's disposal.
I may here remark, that it is the peculiar policy of the Brahmans to render all the religious systems of India subservient to their purpose by making friends of them all. ”

“ It is one of the peculiar difficulties that Christianity has to encounter in dealing with Hindus of the higher and middle castes, that the religion of the country is so closely intertwined with the usages of Hindu society. The more punctilious a high-caste Hindu is in the performance of his religious ceremonies, and in the maintenance of his caste purity and exclusiveness, the higher are supposed to be his claims to social respectability. ”

“ We have not the alternatives of being roasted one part of the year and frozen the other, but gently simmer over a slow fire the whole year round. On the other hand, the heat of Tinnevelly is not a moist, enervating heat, like that of the Malabar Coast and Ceylon, but a dry, healthy heat; and there are few provinces in India which agree so well, on the whole, with the European constitution. As there is no province in India where Missionaries are more numerous, so there is none where they enjoy better health or are able to remain longer in their spheres of duty. ”

“ Christianity generally finds their minds undeveloped and their manners almost as rude as their ideas, but it does not leave them in the condition in which it finds them. It is the glory of the Gospel that it elevates the social, mental, and moral condition of every people by whom it is embraced, and as the Shanars are by no means deficient in prac tical shrewdness, and are peculiarly willing to be taught, guided, and modelled by those in whom they confide, when once they are induced to embrace Christianity with a sincere faith, the progress they make is peculiarly steady and satisfactory. ”

“ We have gone amongst those poor demonolaters as preachers of a religion of mercy, as preachers of " peace on earth and good will to men," and have endeavoured to illustrate its beneficent tendencies by doing them all the good in our power, and especially such good as they could appreciate. We have assured them that God has not abandoned the world He made, but rules it Himself, and is as merciful as He is powerful ”

“ The palmyra is the only palm-tree of which the wood is of any value, and the rafters and laths made of the palmyra are regarded as the best of their kind ; but the high estimate in which the palmyra is held is chiefly owing to the value of its products as articles of food. The young root is edible, and so is the ripe fruit : neither, however, is of much value ; the unripe fruit is greatly preferable, inasmuch as it contains the purest, most wholesome, and most refreshing vegetable jelly in existence. ”

“ The essential features of the demonolatry of Siberia, commonly called Shamanism, and of the demonolatry of Tinnevelly, are identical. Neither system knows anything of a regular priest hood. Ordinarily the head of the family, or the head man of the community, performs the priestly office ; but any worshipper, male or female, who feels disposed, may volunteer to officiate, and the office may at any time be laid aside. Neither amongst the Shamanites, nor amongst the demonolaters of India, is there any belief in the transmigration of souls. ”

“ The amount of nourishment which is supplied by the palmyra, without even the trouble of cooking, might be supposed to operate as a premium upon indolence ; but, in reality, we find no premium upon indolence in Tinnevelly, or anywhere else in God's world a hard-working world, in which it has been made necessary for every class of people to eat their bread by the sweat of their brow. The Shanars are as industrious a people as any in India ”

“ The Siidra castes of Southern India occupy a position in society much superior to that of the Sudras in the North. The castes called by that name in the North belong to the lower classes : the Sudras of the South answer closely to our "middle classes;" they form the staple of population in the towns and in the richer country districts; manufactures, commerce, the administration of justice and education, are mainly in their hands, and it is to them that the people of the lower castes generally look as their natural heads and guides. ”

“ I regard the lower castes not as the descendants of a race of aborigines still older than the Tamilians, but as the descendants of those Tamilians who happened to occupy a low position in the social scale, as servants or slaves, at the period when the Brahmanical caste system was introduced, and who have been prevented by that fossilizing system from ever emerging from the position they then occupied. ”

“ The exceeding greatness of the contrast between the fear and gloom of devil-worship and the light and love of the Gospel is found to attract their attention, and it is generally found to be easy to convince them of the debasing character of their own superstition, and of the great superiority of Christianity. ”

“ No kind of cultivation involves so little trouble or expense as that of the palmyra. The nut has merely to be cast into the sand and loosely covered over, and no further thought or care is necessary till it becomes a tree and begins to bear. The farmer is often relieved even of the trouble of planting by the crows, which leave the nut on the ground after devouring the fruit. ”

“ In India, demonolatry is the religion of most of the rude inhabitants of the mountains and pestilential jungles ; and in the provinces in the extreme south, which are farthest removed from the original centres of Brahmanical influence, it prevails even amongst the civilized and partially Brahmanized peasantry. Nowhere does it prevail to a greater extent than in Tinnevelly, where it constitutes the religion of the Shanars and of the whole of the lower classes, and enters very largely into the religion of the middle classes. ”

“ Accidents rarely occur, except in high winds, or when the tree is slippery through recent rain, and not often even then. I knew of a man who was sitting upon a leaf-stalk at the top of a palmyra in a high wind, when the stalk gave way, and he came down eighty feet to the ground, safely and quietly, sitting on the leaf, which served the purpose of a natural parachute. ”

“ If one were to judge from abstract probabilities, he might expect to find those districts uninhabited ; but Divine Providence is there as well as here, and it has pleased Providence to ordain that the palmyra palm should flourish more luxuriantly in those sands than in any other part of the East, and should feed an abundant population with its saccharine sap. The sandy districts in the South-East teem with human life, and it is remark able that it is amongst the inhabitants of those districts that Christianity has made greatest progress. ”

“ Another difficulty in the way of the spread of the Gospel amongst that class is owing to the tyranny of caste. A caste man may, indeed, become a Christian after a fashion without giving up his caste, though he cannot become a Christian without ceasing to be respectable ; but if he should be so thoroughly con vinced of the truth of Christianity, and so completely disen thralled by it, as to determine to give up not only his false creed, but his caste exclusiveness, he must be content to suffer not only the loss of social status, but the loss of everything which life holds dear. ”

“ Taking sixty feet as the average height of a palmyra, and the climbing of fifty palmyras twice a-day, as the average work of an able-bodied Shanar, we shall form a clear idea of the amount of his work, if we suppose him, every day for the greater part of every year, to climb a perpendicular pole 3,000 feet in height, and then to descend the same pole the same day, ascending and descending without any apparatus, and supporting the entire weight of his body by his strength of limb alone ! ”

“ Though the pure Tamil castes present a favourable contrast to the Telugu settlers in point of domestic morals, they are con sidered to be, and probably are, more untruthful and slippery. They are commonly regarded as the least scrupulous and as the most adventurous of Hindu races. One can hardly fail to read n their very look the habit of gaining their purpose by a circuitous path, and of overcoming opposition not by open resistance, but by a feigned, temporary compliance.
No Indian people, not even, I think, the Brahmans, have reached a higher point of civilization than the Tamilian Siidras ”

“ It used to be said by the Duke of Wellington, that " education without religion made people clever devils : " recent events in India prove that this may be said with still greater truth of the effects of civilization without religion, or, what is still worse, if possible, civilization with a bad religion. ”

“ In those districts in which the majority of our Mission Churches are planted, the chief dependence of the people is upon the palmyra, which is to them what rice is in Bengal, or wheat in England the staff of life. During the brief and scanty rains of the North-Eastern monsoon, a crop of pulse and of inferior sorts of grain is raised from the better kinds of soil ”

“ It is not necessary for him to be a believer in the doctrines of his religien; but it is absolutely necessary, if he is a man of " good caste" and in affluent circumstances, that he should carefully practise all its rites. He cannot keep his place in society, he cannot claim to be regarded as a gentleman, without affecting to be superstitious. ”

“ In a province where devils were literally the objects of worship " where Satan's seat was" the Church of God has received larger accessions of converts than in any other province in India. In Tinuevelly the Church " flourishes like the palmyra" flourishes where perpetual barrenness might have been expected to reign. Hay I not also say that the position which the Shnrs have acquired in the fore-front of Hindu Christianity, notwithstanding their poverty, their want of mental culture, and their lowly rank as a caste, fulfils the prediction, that " there are last which shall be first?" ”

“ The language of the province is Tamil, and the Tamil spoken by the educated classes in Tinnevelly is singularly pure and classical. Even amongst the lower classes, notwithstanding their rude pro nunciation, the language of the ancient poets still lingers. ”

“ There are ancient sects and modern sects, austere sects and licentious sects, high-soaring metaphysical sects and grovelling materialist sects, sects that worship the gods and sects that worship the demons, sects that worship the sun and sects that worship the snake, sects that worship everything and sects that worship nothing ; but the results of each and all seem exactly iden tical they leave men where they found them, or make them worse. They are reckoned by the Brahmans themselves as equally useful, which means, I presume, that they are equally useless. ”

“ The Brahmans spring from a different origin from the rest of the Hindus, and claim kindred with ourselves. They are the lineal representatives of that Sanscrit-speaking race, allied to the Greeks and Germans, which conquered the Punjab at least 1500 years before the Christian era, and which rendered ancient India so illustrious for philosophy, literature, and the cultivation of the arts. ”

“ When a movement of this sort is in progress, nobody likes to anticipate his neighbours, and nobody likes to be left behind.
Most of the peculiarities of the social condition and character of the Shanars, which have now been mentioned, have worked together for their good, and have contributed either to the recep tion of Christianity by members of this caste, or to their growth, in Christian propriety and order after their reception of it. Obstacles which exist elsewhere have no place amongst them, and facilities abound amongst them which are rarely met with else where. ”

“ People are permitted to entertain any opinions they please, and to practise any ceremonies they please, provided only that the supremacy of the Vedas and of the Brahmans is acknowledged. When that acknowledgment has been duly made, the new heterodoxy becomes another new authoritative orthodoxy, especially revealed by the Supreme Being himself for the enlightenment and salvation of the parti cular class of people amongst whom it has become popular. ”