THE EXPIRING SANCTITY OF THE GANGES.
AWELL-INFORMED writer in the Times of Tuesday tells a story which, to all who know India, is of high intellectual interest. For ages past, the Hindoos, while con- ceding to the Ganges a supreme sanctity and power of purifi- cation, have attributed those qualities in a lesser degree to the Nerbndda, the mighty but comparatively useless river which, rising in Rewah, pours westward through Central India, leaps down a series of falls, and then, becoming navigable, widens out as it pours past Broach into a grand estuary twelve miles wide, which debouches in the Arabian Sea. It probably owes its reputation to one of its natural phenomena, the wonder- ful gorge of white marble through which it makes its final leap from the higher to the lower plains. The gorge is lined with marble rocks sometimes two hundred feet high, so intensely white that they seem, when the light falls on them, to emit radiance; and that the Indians, always prone to confuse the unusual with the supranatural, believe that Indra, the Lord of Light, clove a path for the river with his own hand, and left in memory of the feat his own radiance on the sides of the pathway he had opened up for the waters. Dr. Duff thought this gorge, of all scenes in India, the one best worth seeing. Be the origin of the belief what it may, however, there is no doubt of its existence, or that for hundreds of years a prophecy has been known to Brahmins that some day or other the sanctity of the Ganges would be destroyed and transferred to the Nertudda. Later on—certainly more than a hundred years ago—the prophecy was hardened by the fixing of a date, 1894-95, when the great change should occur, and now it is said, as the time draws near, all Hindoo India, already disturbed in its secular tranquility by the general movement of thought in the Peninsula, the swerve among the educated towards some simpler faith, is full of expectation. What is to happen— whether a change in the course of the Ganges, as the writer in the Times apparently expects, or a theological revival, as we should rather believe — nobody pretends to know, but the result, it is asserted, will be that the Nerbudda will become, instead of the Ganges, "the holy river, the redeeming flood." We are not quite able to believe that the catastrophe will occur. The Brahmins of the Gangetic Talley will fight hard for their holy river and the wilderness of shrines along its banks, and great as is the learning of the priests of Southern India, and holy as are many of the Mahratta pundits, a kind of superiority still attaches to their northern rivals. They may destroy the canonicity of the book from which the prophecy is taken, or offer some new interpretation of its meaning which the Indian multitude, always inclined to asso- ciate change with disaster, may joyfully accept. Nor can we quite perceive why the transfer of virtue from one river to another should of itself be politically dangerous, though it is said that this was the impression made on the Cesarewitch during his Indian tour. The two rivers are equally from source to debouchure within the British dominion, and it is not alleged, that we know of, that we have in any way polluted the Ganges, or deprived its waters of their purifying charm. No doubt if the transfer is believed in, the Gangetic Valley will be wrapped in a spiritual gloom which may produce a deep-seated discontent, and the Hindoos of the South may feel an elation which will induce them to try conclusions once more with their Mahommedan foes ;
while the Mahrattas may see in an event so great, proof positive that their star is once more in the ascendant, and that they are bound to begin once more the struggle which, but for our arrival, would, as they think, have ended in their conquest of the whole peninsula. They had for the moment very nearly broken the power of the Mogul throne. Still these are only "may be's ; " and all we should willingly con- cede is that the prophecy, whether fulflled or unfulfilled, will -deepen that unrest of India, which even those who are most vexed with the present writer for his pessimism acknowledge that he has rightly described. We must all wait, and while we wait, we are more interested in studying that temper of mind which makes such speculations so important to all who -care to study the Hindoo peoples. It seems to most Europeans incredible that a singularly thoughtful and shrewd race should believe such fables, or should care whether priests ascribe sanctity to one body of sweet water rather than to another.
It is strange, so strange as to indicate some radical differ- -ence between the instinctive thoughts of the East and the West, and yet it is not wholly inexplicable. The Hindoo is loaded down with the consciousness of sin—at least, we can -devise no alternative .expression—to a degree which the European rarely manifests, and of which he is usually, if not universally, incapable. The Christian feels the consciousness too, but be has sinned only in this life, and he believes in a God whose mercy it is perhaps his temptation to ex- aggerate. The Hindoo is loaded with responsibility for -the sins of countless lives already past, and believes that the omnipotent Force, be it a spirit, be it the soulless Universum, sweeps man on mercilessly through a cycle of careers, which may be short, or may be all but infinite, according to his own compliance with certain rules. The Force is in its essence merciless, yet has decreed not only that every sin should have its expiatory punishment in some life, but that escape from sin should be rewarded temporarily with happiness and dignity and prosperity in a short life to come. Moreover, it has ordained that while perfect expiation can -only be conceived when the spirit has utterly dominated the flesh, so that even on earth the evil burden of consciousness is over, or is reduced to a nullity, there shall be certain aids assisting the good Hindoo towards the great result. The first of these is undoubtedly penance, voluntary suffering, painful self-constraint, an idea which is instinctive and is the source of the whole ascetic and self-torturing system of India. The intensity of this belief in penance can hardly be exaggerated, and will surprise no one who re- members how deeply the belief in it once pervaded Catholic Christendom, how deep, indeed, is the belief in it among individuals even now. Asia exaggerates all things, and the -virtue of penance among the rest ; but the virtue is still believed in, even in Western Europe. The writer has seen a gentleman of Bengal, remarkable at once for wealth and fat- ness, crawling, stretched at full length, along a road before the image of Juggernat, suffering, in fact, torture such as no one would inflict upon a convict. And he has known one of his own clerks, a man of singular ability and bonhomie, who being suddenly struck, through the death of an only son, with the -conviction of sin committed in a past existence, departed at once for Benares to live there on alms, seated as a naked .Sanyasee covered with dust, by the holy river's side. There are thousands of men in India at this moment who, under this impulse, are enduring tortures, or making painful pilgrimages, or living the lives of hermits in the forest. The second aid is • ceremonial purity, the living by a rigid rule of life, so rigid that it is almost intolerable, which preserves what a Catholic Bishop would call his "sanctity," and which the Hindoo believes may be preserved to every member of his creed who will walk according to his law. With the majority the search for that aid degenerates, as it did among the Jews, into a reverence -for meaningless ceremonial, chiefly restrictive, which, to men who are free of the burden, seems positively silly; but with a minority, a small minority, it produces lives of singular refine- ment, and characters with something of divine grace and -beauty. One such Hindoo it was the writer's privilege to know intimately, and he is assured, though his friend never killed a .mosquito but always blew it off, that few Christians have rivalled him in the perfectness of his daily life. And the third aid, which has for the Hindoo unbounded value, is ex- ternal, and oon ' \ te in what to make it intelligible to our
readers we must call accruing grace, coming from the divine potentiality residing in certain places, say Benares, as the one best known here, or in rivers such as the Ganges, or even in persons such as the few living saints whose touch confers some degree of vitalising merit. There are temples and even trees, living under which renders it, in Hindoo opinion, easier to be "pure," that is, to live the life through which alone man can attain to a better life, and ulti- mately to absorption. How the belief in this third kind of aid in attaining bliss, or rather in avoiding suffering. grew to its present height, is one of the perplexities of Hindooism ; for unlike penance and ceremonial purity, it has little defence in the philosophy of the creed. It has probably grown from the hunger of the human heart for mercy independent of merit, which has gradually been grati- fied by successive teachers and utilised by a priesthood who, it must not be forgotten, claim in their corporate capacity legislative power. The Brahmins of India acting together can make a new moral law, and consecrate and desecrate in a sense far beyond anything claimed by any priesthood in Christendom, even in the ages of conviction.
It follows, indeed it must be self-evident to any one who reads what we have written, that to the convinced Hindoo- and sceptical Hindoos in India are hardly more numerous than sceptical monks in a monastery—the loss of any one of these aids must be a grievous misfortune, and interference with any one of them a cause of exceeding anger. Penance is almost beyond reach, though the British Government has once or twice gone very near to interference with it by regula- tions designed to preserve health, which tend to make pilgrimage too easy and too safe. Ceremonial purity is guarded by a kind of universal consensus, so that a Mussul- man would summon a Brahmin to give a dying Hindoo water, lest by any chance it should be given by the impure, and that our own prison rules are made to give up something of their inflexibility; and the sanctity of places, rivers, and per- sons has scarcely been violated except by Mussulman rulers in the heyday of their power. A few temples have been polluted ; but Benares has remained sacrosanct under Mussnlman and Christian, and the Ganges has been "the redeeming river" for countless ages. If, therefore, the latter is to lose its sanctity in Brahminical eyes—a change in which, in spite of a consensus of rumours, we find it nearly impossible to believe—the event is one which will be felt to the bottom of his heart by every Hindoo alive, most especially by the millions who inhabit what is specially our territory,—the huge Gangetic valley. How he will feel the shock we do not pre- tend to know, or whether he will connect the catastrophe with that rule of the unclean which has now lasted one hundred and thirty-seven years. We do not think he will ; we can see no reason for it whatever; but his is a mind no European skill can completely fathom, and if he does, we shall have a difficulty in our path such as we have never yet had to encounter. We see, however, no probability of this. That something is moving in that strange depth, the mass of Hindoo thought, is past all question, something that produces an unrest visible even to Government ; but whether it preludes an outbreak against Mahommedans, or an effort to shake off the disturbing influence of Europe, or a great religions change, such as we see the writer in the Times anticipates, we are unable to forecast. We doubt the recru- descence of Buddhism which he expects, because, though it would lighten the burden of the ceremonial law, it would also be fatal to caste,—but we Europeans are all groping in the dark, and can but watch and wait.
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