Religion in India
Ix the study of Indian religion, as revealed in Sanskrit texts, we have many great names, but very few in the study of the still living vernacular cults. The greatest name in what I may call genera! Indian studies is that of the late J. N. Farquhar, to whom I would miss no relevant oppor- tunity of paying tribute, as to my own guru. I know that Indians regarded him as a special pleader ; but what they have never realized is the change that came over his spirit, always so gentle and modest, yet at first not so deeply under- standing as it was long before the end. His Outline of the Religious Literature of hulia is a book against which even the most aggressive Neo-Hindu cannot bring any objection, ani it is a work of the profoundest scholarship. And since Farquhar died there has been no one doing his work as he did, except Dr. Nicol Macnicol. Mr. Birrell says in his Obiter Dicta that, while the little poets can do what they like, the great
ones should never pass one another without a salute. It is characteristic of Dr., Macnicol's loyalty to friendship and his
self-suppression that he never passes the name of J. N. Farquhar without this salute. And I, for one, find this attitude as moving as I find Milton's reference to "my dear master Spenser" or Shakespeare's breaking the flow of .4s You Like It to remember Marlowe : "Dead shepherd! now I find thy saw of might- ' Who over loved that loved not at first sight ? ' " I have known Dr. Macnicol's work for many years, and I had the good fortune to hear some of the lectures which form the basis of his latest volume. It seems almost un- necessary to commend a book of such knowledge and of a spirit so admirable. He passes in review the living religions of the Indian people, and the emphasis is on the living. While he is well aware of these religions as known historically and in their literatures, he is most keenly interested in them as professed by men and women in whose friendship he has passed his life. He misses nothing in the contemporary scene, and considers nothing Indian alien. No one can write about Indian religion (or about anything else) without sometimes criticizing, but Dr. Macnicol's criticism never forgets the claims of courtesy, and is always such as should arise out of remembrance that Indians and ourselves are by now members of one family, and that even our problems, even our faults, are interwoven. He notes that the archaeologist's spade is uncovering a great unsuspected civilization in the Indus valley, pre-Vedic yet throwing forwarding connexions with the popular Hinduism of today. The Vedic invaders lived in villages, were agricultural and at first nomadic ; they worshipped their gods without images. But these pre-Vedic peoples, who cannot be dismissed as "uncivilized," lived in mighty cities, had a system of sanitation in its amenities in advance of eighteenth-century Europe, and they used images identical with many we see today. This last fact compels us to think again from the beginning, when we confront the mixture of Vedic and apparently barbarous elements in Hinduism now.
It is not possible in the limits of a review to bring out the well-knit quality of this book. But when a man has lived so long as Dr. Macnicol has in India, and all the time has been studying the beliefs and practices of the people around him, he writes out of such fulness and intimacy of knowledge - as we have of our own daily lives. I have referred to his criticism. It is so gentle that, unless you notice its restrained quality, you may almost miss that it is criticism. For example, my own admiration for St. Francis Xavier has been (no doubt wrongly) of a rather lukewarm character ever since I discovered, many years ago, his responsibility for bringing the Inquisition to Goa. I think Dr. Macnicol lets his reputa- tion off lightly when all he says is, "St. Francis Xavier in bitter and disappointed hours calls on John III of Portugal to reinforce with his authority the ineffectual forces of the Spirit," and makes no reference to that shocking institution, the Holy Inquisition. But I dare say he is right, when dealing with so great and saintly a man as Xavier, and that I ought not to let ' my twentieth-century prejudice against cruelty, and especially religious persecution, accompany me into
bygone centuries. This has led me into a digression. Let me get back, and draw particular attention to the last section of Dr. Macnicol's book, his study of Indian Christianity, which he rightly claims as now a naturalized "religion of the Indian people." Indeed, it has always been that. Almost Dr. Farquhar's last service to Indian religious scholarship was his demonstration of the sound basis for the old tradition that St. Thomas preached in India. Today Christianity has attained a new vigour in that land. It is true that some of the Indian Christian leaders cited in Dr. Macnicol's pages, and well known in the West, have a somewhat uncertain and almost dependent char- acter, leaning too much on Dr. J. R. Mott and on Y.M.C.A. and Student Christian Movement support. But you cannot say this of that vigorous and pieturesque figure Sadhu Sundar Singh, or of Pandita Ramabai or the Marathi Christian poet Tilak. But, for further knowledge of the way Christianity has found itself at last a genuine home in the Indian people, let me refer my reader to this wise and tolerant and widely
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