THE HINDOOS AS TlihY ARE.*
This book is one more literary disappointment. Its author, Baboo Shib Chunder Bose, an educated Bengalee gentleman —bred up by Dr. Duff, but not, we imagine, a convert—has the guarantee of Mr. Hastie, head of a great college iu Cal- cutta; and, apart from that, is evidently a man of character, with a sincere wish to instruct his audience, a complete know- ledge of his subject, the social life of Bengal, and a full com- mand of excellent, though somewhat flavourless and formal, English. His object is to make the daily life of his countrymen intelligible to Englishmen, and there is no objection whatever to be raised to his facts, or his words, or his motives ; but never- theless, he has failed. He has produced a very good, though not very novel, description of many peculiarities in Bengalee society ; has described, and described well, the present position of the Brahmins, the lives of the secluded native women, the external features of a Hincloo house- hold, and many native festivals ; but his book will not interest European readers. He has made the usual mistake made by all Europeans in India, and most natives, of describing the points in which native society is differentiated from the society of the West, and not the points in which it resembles it. The reader, therefore, misses the link, and fails to understand. Englishmen no longer desire to know anything about Brahmin- ical ceremonies, or Koolin polygamy, or the religious festivals, or even the secluded position of women ; but to understand what is the effect of those things, and of the ideas behind those things, upon the sixty millions of Bengal ; how, those external facts being conceded, the men and women live their lives, and what thoughts they think, and what wishes they form, and how far they are happy, and wherein they seek pleasure or find pain, and towards what condition they as a multitude tend. They want the Bengalees brought home to them, not as a strange people, practising strange rites, and governed by un- reasonable prejudices, but as fellow-men and women, who laugh and cry, and hope and fear just as the English do. They do not want any more descriptions of Bengalee marriage ceremonies, but an idea of what married life is in Bengal; care nothing for narratives of Brahmin investitures, but much for explanations of Brahmin feeling and influence in the country; are not moved by sketches of funeral ceremonies and shraddhs, but by state- ments of the feelings by which those institutions are main- tained, and the effects on life that they produce. They want, in fact, to see the people as they are, and not their dresses and assemblages and meetings for worship. They glance at every book which appears about India with the hope of this, and they never find it. No European book that we at least are acquainted with—though something may exist in German, or still more probably, Portuguese —brings the people of Bengal home to them. For external facts, there is Ward's ■ The Hindoos as They Are. By Shib Mender Bose. London : E. Stanford. 1881. really wonderful book, The .Hindoos, now out of print; and Buchanan's Bengal and Behar, now, we believe, discoverable only in great libraries ; and the Ethnology of Bengal, published
under Sir George Campbell's administration ; and Village Life in Bengal, an excellent though limited sketch ; and one or two other works of the same kind. And for European life in Bengal, there are a hundred books, all second-rate ; but of native life there is no description worth anything, except as a catalogue may be worth something, till observers begin to doubt if there ever will be. The conditions necessary for success seem to men tired with waiting too numerous to be found together.
The book desired, in the first place, must be written by a native. The Bengalee household life is so secluded, the Bengalee thought so separate, the Bengalee struggle for existence so complex, that no one not a native, no one who has not lived as a child in the women's apartments, and as a man joined in all manner of native society, and comprehends without effort its dozen dialects—for in Bengal there is not only a lan- guage of the cultivated, and a language of the people, and a language of the mob, as in other countries, but a language of men and a language of women, a language of the priesthood and a language of business, a language which means what it says, and a language as occult as any slang ever invented by Parisian criminals—will ever give the world a truthful and complete account. This native must be an unprejudiced man, more or less sympathising with his countrymen, careless to in- culcate any moral, and indifferent whether his work produces for Bengalees any intellectual benefit or not. His object must be expository, not didactic. Yet while a native of natives, he must be outside native society sufficiently to see it in the round, and must understand what it is that Europe is longing to know, as apart from what he himself thinks worth telling. He must not weary us with the Doorga Poojah, but explain the condition of mind and the condition of facts which make that obscene festival, in a land penetrated by a subtle and grand, though erroneous, philosophy, even possible. He mast be a man of cultivation who has lived among the uncultivated, and possess a genius like that of George Eliot for making the common side of life interesting, yet be absolutely devoid of the most natural and excusable form of vanity. For he must not write in English, but submit, after all his toil, to issue his work to the world through a translation by some Englishman who probably knows neither language quite so well as the author. Nothing is more extraordinary than the knowledge possessed by many Bengalee gentlemen of English, except their
inability to write it as Englishmen would. Our author here, for example, Baboo Shib Chunder Bose, knows English perfectly. An Englishman who could write French or German so well would justly be proud of his attainments. Yet he has not written a paragraph without betraying to every one that he thinks in another tongue, and to students that, if he wrote in that
tongue, he would have infinitely more to say ; would put his thought racily, instead of smoothly ; would lose a certain stiffness of mind as well as of words ; would perceive that cer- taM platitudes are not so worthy of repetition, as when elevated by the foreign tongue and the sense of a conquered difficulty of expression, they appear to him to be. Writing in Bengalee, Baboo Shib Chunder iwould omit half this, though it is absolutely accurate English :—
"In the event of the offspring turning out a female, the mother's friends try to encourage her for the moment by their assurance that the child born is a male, and a lovely and sweet child, ushered into the world under the peculiar auspices of the goddess Shasthi. Such assurances serve very much to keep up her spirit for the time being, but when she is brought to her senses and does not hear the sound of a conch her delusion is removed, sorrow and disappointment take the place of joy and excitement, her buoyant spirit collapses and a strong reaction sets it. Thus in a moment, a grace is converted into a gorgon, a beauty into a monstrosity, an angel into a fiend. She curses the day, she curses her fate. But such is the make and mechanism of human nature' that she soon resigns herself to the wise dispensations of an overruling Providence. She gradually feels a strong affection for the female child, and rears it with all the care and tenderness of a mother; she caresses and fondles it as if it were a boy, and her affection grows warmer as the child grows. This is natural and inevitable."
It is quite possible that such a genius may appear. The Bengalee is the most observant of mankind, he is often as witty as a Parisian, he has from nature that faculty of the raconteur which so quickly develops into the faculty of the novelist ; and—though the assertion will seem strange to those who only know him when using English, a tongue not only different from his own, but with a different pivot of thought—he has, more than
any other Asiatic, a felicity of simple expression, of unadorned narrative. Nothing can surpass the pathos which a Bengalee can infuse into a statement bald and direct as the evidence of a good witness. The Bengalee writer will appear one day with a novel or a biography which will be welcomed by all Europe as an addition to literature ; but he has not appeared yet, for the essential condi- tions are not yet fulfilled. With every wish to encourage such work, we cannot honestly say that Baboo Shib Chunder Bose has made any serious addition to the English knowledge of his people, unless, indeed, it be the account, novel to us in print, of "the Brother Festival" of Bengal, perhaps the most • innocent, certainly the prettiest and most human, of all the popular festivals of the country :— "Any social institution that has a tendency to promote the growths of genuine love and affection between man and woman, is naturally conductive to the happiness of both. In this sublunary vale of tear°, where unalloyed felicity is bat transient and short-lived, even a tem- porary exemption from the cares and anxieties of the world adds at least some moments of pleasure to life. The Bhratrideitiya, or Fraternal Rite of the Hindoos, is an institution of this nature, being admirably calculated to cement the natural bond of union between, brothers and sisters of the same family. Bhratridvitiya, as the name imports, takes place on the second day of the new moon, immedi- ately following the Bali Poojah or Dowell On the morning of this day, a brother comes to the house of a sister, and receives from her hand the usual benedictive present of unhusked rice, doova-grass, and, sandal, with a wealth of good-wishes for his long, prosperous life, and the happy commemoration of the event from year to year. The brother in return reciprocates, and putting a rupee or two into her hands, expresses a similar good-wish, with the addition that she may long continue to enjoy the blessings of a conjugal life —a benedictions which she values over every other worldly advantage. The main object of this festival is to renovate and intensify the warmth of affection between kith and kin of both sexes by blessing each other on a particular day of the year. It is a sort of family reunion, pre.- eminently calculated to recall the early reminiscences of life, and to., freshen up fraternal and sisterly love. No Ritualistic rite or priestly interposition is necessary for the purpose, it being a purely social institution, originating in the love that sweetens life. . . . . — About fear o'clock in the afternoon, the sister sends, as tangible memorials of her affection, presents of clothes and sweetmeats to the house of the brother' fondly indulging in the hope that they may be acceptable to him. On this particular day, Hindoo homes, as well as the streets of Calcutta in the native part of the town, present the lively appearance of a national jubilee. Each of the brothers of the- family visits each of the sisters in turn. Hundreds of male and female servants are busily engaged in carrying presents, and return home quite delighted. On such occasions, the heart of a Hindoo- female, naturally soft and tender, becomes doubly expansive when- the outflow of love and affection on her part is fully reciprocated by. the effusion of good-wishes on the part of her brother."
Those paragraphs will tell Englishmen more than the remainder of the book, and if the author had filled his work with such sketches, and omitted the slightly trite reflections—as he wonld) have done, if he had been writing Bengalee—he would have produced a book that all England would have hurried to read.
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