RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN INDIA.
[TO TR& EDITOR Or THE "SPECTATOR."]
Srs,—All speculations regarding religious movements in India must continue to be vague and inconclusive until we are in a position to understand what the faith of the masses really is. Hitherto most of the accounts which we possessed of the beliefs of the Hindoos, were based more on an extensive litera- ture, the production of a special and interested class, than on actual inquiries among the people themselves. This has been to some extent corrected by the investigations carried out in the course of the ethnographical survey of Northern India and by the returns of the last Census. Much, however, remains to be done before we shall be in a position to dogmatise on the faith of the masses, and the accuracy of the statistics as we find them is affected by causes not peculiar to India.
The official creed of the people is Brahmanism, which is more a collection of varying beliefs than a definite faith, such as that, for instance, of Islam or Christianity, and its scrip- tures everywhere betray marks of their origin. At the outset a simple worship of the powers of nature, it gradually -absorbed the animism, fetishism, or totemism of the lower races. In every country the rolls of the adherents of the -established creed include many who are believers only in name; and so in India it does not necessarily follow that because the head of a family records himself as a worshipper of Siva or of Vishnu, he believes nothing else. There is, again, a natural tendency among the menial castes and the jungle tribes on the outskirts of civilisation to class them- selves as worshippers of the orthodox gods, while, as a matter of fact, their real devotion is directed to the village fetish- stone or local godling, some deified ancestor or some sacred animal, such as the cow or the monkey. To the ordinary villagers, who constitute the bulk of the population, it may be safely said that the higher forms of the Hindoo faith have little or no meaning.
In attempting, then, to judge of the prospects of any general religions movement among the rural population, we must be careful to discriminate that tendency to reform which always shows itself in more or less activity among the cultivated classes of the community, from those which really influence the masses. Such, for instance, is the Arya Samaj, which preaches an active propaganda among edu- cated Hindoos in Northern India. It strives to restore the purer faith of the Vedas, and while its associations have a considerable body of adherents in some of the larger cities, it has little or no influence beyond what the Anglo- Indian calls "the Bahia" class. Of another type are the numerous Vaishnava sects, which are constantly being evolved by a process of fission from what may perhaps be called middle-class Hindooism. They preach a mild, humanitarian form of belief, and take as the object of their special worship Rama or Sits, Krishna or Rtidha in their numerous forms. The tendency of many of them is in the direction of the erotic type, and their large collections of devotional literature illustrate the least robust and most degraded side of modern Hindooism. They usually take their rise in the great colleges of the faith at great religions centres like Benares or Brindaban, and their chief adherents are drawn from the mercantile classes, if for no other reason than that the decoration of their images and the sensuous services in their temples can be conducted only at lavish expense. Hence they are seldom found among the rural population, who prefer the worship of Mahadeva, partly perhaps because be is of the kindred of their own village fetish, and partly because all he needs in the way of an offering is a little water, some flowers and leaves of the sacred Bel tree.
But what is of real importance, not less from a sociological than from a political point of view, is any movement among the dumb masses who swarm in the grey mud-hamlets spread all over the great North Indian plain. It is not easy for any one who sees them for the first time, a rather depressed, stolid, and apparently unemotional race of petty farmers, cowherds, and day-labourers, to realise the influence which religion exercises over them. Bat in one sense they are perhaps the most religious race in the world, and it is only necessary to watch the enthusiastic pilgrims crowding into the sacred pool at Hardwar, or awe-stricken and filled with the spirit of devotion before the famous shrines of Benares, to be certain that we are here face to face with emotion of no common type.
These people employ as their religious guides the wander- ing Sannyasi, Bairagi, or Jogi, who, if a Saivite, is p-nerally a wild-looking ascetic, with unkempt locks, his body smeared with ashes, who occasionally meets one of our officers in his cold-weather tours. It is too much the habit with ignorant R,ropeans to brand every one in the garb of a fakir as a moue and impostor. Many of them, and in particular the votaries of some of the Vaishnava sects, are very pious, worthy men. But it hardly does credit to the astuteness of our Government that we still know so little of the aims and methods of a personage who admittedly exercises a powerful influence in the rural world. We do know that while it is the village Brahman who works out horoscopes, tells fortunes, and manages the rites collectively known as Puja, the services after childbirth, at marriages, and the like, it is the ascetic Guru who is the sole moral teacher of the masses, and it is from him alone that the rustic receives any religious instruction or advice. What the Guru, then, thinks of our Administration becomes a very serious question indeed. Many of the methods of our Government are probably dis- tasteful in the extreme. He admits that we tolerate him, so far as to severely let him alone; but he knows that this toleration is generally leavened with contempt, if not accom- panied with undisguised abhorrence. If the personage whom we treat as a lazy cumberer of the ground, half maniac and half impostor, does not interest himself to make loyalty part of the sermon which he preaches, it is difficult to blame him. With the Sikh ascetic bodies the relations of our officers appear fairly amicable, and when trouble has been brewing at the great Hardwar gatherings, the heads of the Nirmala and Lidasi Colleges have always ranked themselves on the side of order. It is much to be desired that the State should establish a practicable modes vivendi with the Saivas of Benares and the Vaishnavas of Mathura.
That the Guru, if he is inclined towards mischief, can do much to annoy and alarm us, is plainly taught by recer t events. It was he who stirred up the weavers and roughs of Benares to resist the introduction of pipe-water into slums where, in the olden days, cholera was endemic. There s.ems little doubt that the movement for the protection of the cow. one of the most tangled problems which has arisen to perpl x the authorities since the great Mutiny, was, in the main, the work of the ascetic orders, and was their counterblast to the Act for the control of infant marriage, a measure especially obnoxious to the priestly class in Bengal. It is practicall certain that the famous tree-daubing was planned and carried out by them with some vague idea of annoying their rulers.
But it is not alone among the Brabmanised masses of the Northern plains that this class of teacher is busy. Their emissaries are at present actively engaged in bringing within the Brahmanical fold the jungle-dwellers of the central hills. Quite recently a personage known as the Dirbiya Baba, "the Dirb grass-father," so called, because he was said to live on the esculent herbage on which the Anglo-Indian feeds his horses, appeared in Chota Ntigpur. He sat within a circle of fire in the hottest weather, and preached teetotalism and the disuse of animal food, with digressions on the powerlessness of our Government to interfere with him so effectively, that before long the Kharwars destroyed the stills with which they make spirits out of the Mahua petals, and killed all the fowls which usually swarm round their villages. But at last the BEiba was deported, and before a few months had passed the stills were in full swing again, and the chickens will soon be as numerous as ever.
It is from the lips of some teacher like this, a successor of Ram Sing, the Kiika who convulsed the Eastern Punjab more than twenty years ago, that we may any day hear of a revival of the agitation for the protection of the cow, about the only cause powerful enough to stir the village population from Patna to Umballa. It is a cause which, though some of its more astute supporters have tried to bolster it up with statistics of the possible value of the animals killed to feed Thomas Atkins and the urban Mussulman, rests purely on sentiment, and is perhaps, for that reason alone, all the more effective. For the present, the Government has succeeded in scotching it ; but there seems little doubt that we shall hear more of it by-and-by, and perhaps at some crisis of foreign politics when we are less prepared to meet it. Short of the establishment of some arrangement with the heads of the religions colleges, any compromise with the movement, as much in the interest of the urban Mahommedan as of the British soldier and the Eurasian, is out of the question. We dare not truckle to a cause which is real enough to drive the Behari peasant to massacre his Mussulman neigh- bour who has lived in amity with him for generations. We can do nothing but maintain our present attitude of sternly impartial repression of the fanaticism of the rival sectaries.
What, then, are the prospects of any really effective Hindoo revival in this or similar directions? That we have hitherto had no experience of such a movement is no sound argument against the possibility of its occurrence. All the chief religions movements in India have been in the nature of " bolts from the blue." Who could have prophesied that Buddhism would overthrow Brahmanism and caste, only to be itself annihilated ; that the faith of the Khalsa would rise on the ruins of the Moghul Empire ; that Islam would succeed in annexing the swamps of Eastern Bengal ? The village or parochial form of rural society undoubtedly tends towards isolation ; but on the other hand, our railways, and in particular the facilities now provided for religious pil- grimages, bring the people more in touch with their religious leaders, and so offer facilities for a general revival which did not exist a couple of generations ago. The influence of caste, too, as an obstacle to combination, has probably been overrated. Any one who pretends to be an orthodox Hindoo respects the cow, and the recent movement for her protection was not confined to any special caste. One thing seems obvious, that we are nearer the stirring-up of the dry bones of Hindooism than we have been for many years. What will be the final result of such a revival lies in the womb of the future. Will Christianity avail itself of the great opportunity, or will Islam take the lead? Will the movement result in a mere rearrangement of the old idolatries? If the Indian Mahommedans could shake them- selves free from Ram, and move the headquarters of the faith to Delhi or Hyderabad, they would be most dangerous competitors in the race for religious empire. Who can fore- tell how far the diplomatists engaged in the protection of the Armenian Church may hold in their hands the spiritual destinies of Hindostan ? Lastly, one great factor in the problem is the influence of the few pale-faced British officers who, in good report and evil report, rule the great North Indian plain, which may be the scene of stirring events in the near future. But what is needed to make them more efficient warriors in the Indian Armageddon cannot be dis-
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