2 AUGUST 1930, Page 22

India of To-day and Yesterday

As Registrar of Co-operative Societies in the Punjab, Mr. Darling has had exceptional opportunities to penetrate the mind of the peasant : his sub-title—the Old Light and the New in the Punjab Village—shows that he was alive to those opportunities, and his text proves the good use he made of them.

There are 280,000,000 peasants in India. Even Mr. Darling has only traversed the country and studied the habits of a few of these millions, but where the Simon Report necessarily describes generalities, Mr. Darling writes of those personalities through which alone the reader unacquainted with Indian conditions can make for himself some picture of lives and minds so far from his. We would ask especially all those who think that customs hallowed through the centuries can lightly he discarded, to study the conditions in a North Indian village through Mr. Darling's eyes. Even the " Gurgaon experiment "—that great work which Mr. and Mrs. Brayne undertook for the rehabilitation of the Punjab countryside— has largely lapsed through weight of inertia ; and even the power of Mr. Gandhi's preaching, popularly supposed to have spread to the remotest backwaters of rural India, has not been able to induce five men in a thousand in this area to array themselves in homespun.

Yet Co-operation and Better Living Societies are making progress, if the spinning-wheel is not. Better Living Societies, particularly, hold in them the promise of a new way of life : they exist primarily to secure economy in marriages and other ceremonies in whose performance the cultivator was wont to waste his substance. Considerable benefits have followed the institution of these societies, and little by little the money. lender is losing his grip ; yet poverty still exists to an extent difficult to conceive in the West. In the Punjab there are 600,000 beggars, which is four times the number of the public servants of the Province :- "Several villages (in the Lyallpur Canal Colony) find them such a nuisance that they have made it a rule that only one beggar should beg at a time, and he must first pay a fee of from one to four annas. His title to beg is secured by a flag, which he receives from the local Better Living Society. No one else is allowed to beg until the flag is returned, nor may anyone give to a beggar without a flag. The effect is generally excellent, for the flag is generally kept until the village is sucked dry of its charity for the day, and other beggars, not knowing how long they may have to wait, and unwilling to glean where another has reaped,. pass on elsewhere."

It is easy to wonder, in England, why we cannot bring home to the cultivator the need for better seed, better imple- ments, more manure, more co-operative credit, less waste and litigation, more and better education. But the road of rural reconstruction is a slow and arduous one. Especially are the women conservative. When it is suggested that less money should be spent on gold and silver ornaments the reply of the men is " What you say is right, but if we do it who will cook our food ? " The hand that bakes the chapatti rules the household.

Yet India is changing, and some of the keenest observers are inclined to think that in matters such as birth-control the next ten years may see startling departures from old cus- tom. In one district, Mr. Darling was told of a midwife who had performed 250 contraceptive operations. But this is unusual : in the average village, even in the prosperous Canal colonies, midwives are generally quite untrained for their legitimate functions, or any other.

Mr. Darling has accepted Dr. Tagore's invitation to " come inside India : accept all her good and all her evil : if there be deformity, then try to cure it from within, but see it with your own eyes, understand it, think over it, turn your face towards it, become one with it." Although the Punjab is very far from being all India, we know of no book with a more direct and practical approach to her problems, or one with truer sympathy for and understanding of the mind of the peasant.

In My Story, Mrs. Parvati Athavale, a Brahmin, describes her childhood in the Kokkan (south of Bombay), her marriage at the age of eleven to an official earning £12 a year in the Customs Department at Goa, the birth of a son at the age of fifteen (who only lived a day), another son at eighteen, and a daughter (who also only lived a day) the following year. When she was twenty, her husband died, her head was shaved according to Hindu custom, and she went to live with her parents. Through her brother-in-law, Professor Rorie, she began to take an interest in a widows' home which the latter had established at Poona : in 1902 the home consisted merely of one hut, in which eighteen young widows lived. By 1928 this had grown into a large College for W'omen.

In August, 1918—when Mrs. Athavale was already a middle-aged woman—she set sail for America, in order both to learn English and to raise funds for what had now become her life-work. The latter half of the book contains the record of her self-sacrificing struggles to attain her ends ; and four short chapters on social questions in India.

Much of the value of this small volume lies in what the reader can find " between the lines " : in the courage of this elderly Brahmin lady : in her energy in accepting even the most menial of tasks : in her singleness of purpose, and her contrasting supineness when a fellow-countryman of hers

practically ordered her to leave the United States. But the predominating impression is that of courage. While India has such women she need not fear for her future : child-marriage, purdah, and the like, will probably be ended sooner than we think and without our possibly unhelpful bemuse misdirected Western intervention.

Proof—if proof were needed—of the status in which women have always been held in India (in spite of evils which cry to heaven) is to be found in Mr. I. B. Homer's Women under Primitive Buddhism. The subject has never before been treated so comprehensively, and the descriptions of life within the Order of Almsw•omen is fascinating reading. Being a high-caste Hindu, Prince Gotama could not easily shed the traditions of his race, which discouraged an active life of nunhood, while always insisting on the importance of woman as partner of man in religious rites as in daily life ; but when enlightenment came, Buddha resolved the conflict in his mind and declared that women were as capable as men of attaining to sainthood. Mr. Hornees work is printed and bound with the care and attention to detail which distinguishes the " Broadway Oriental Library," and his text is a model of good scholarship.