Akshara

An Ancient Tribe

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AN ANCIENT TRIBE

When it came to pass, twenty years ago, in the town of Ongole, in Southern India, that ten thousand Madigas turned to Christianity in one year, there was questioning as to the causes of this movement. Devout minds saw in the baptism of two thousand two hundred and twenty-two in one day a modern Pentecost, and were filled with wonder and gratitude.

Others enquired with interest concerning accompanying circumstances and conditions, and when they heard of the famine which immediately preceded this movement toward Christianity, they were satisfied that they had here the moving cause. The desire to enter upon the experience of the Christian was considered to stand in direct proportion to the hunger that was gnawing. But the mass movement toward Christianity continued long after the famine was over. Sixty thousand Madigas are to-day counted as Christians. The Madiga community of a part of the Telugu country has become Christianized.

Book I, Chapter 1: Auckland and Ellenborough

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CHAPTER I

AUCKLAND AND ELLENBOROUGH

LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK left India in 1835. His seven years’ rule was an era of Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform. He secured tranquillity in the East India Company’s dominions, and lived at peace with the Indian Powers. He reduced the public debt, decreased the annual expenditure, and showed a surplus. He commenced that revised settlement of land revenue in Northern India which gave relief to landlords and cultivators. He admitted the educated people of India to the higher appointments in the revenue and judicial departments. He abolished the practice of Sati and suppressed the crime of Thugs. He promoted English education in India, and endeavoured to carry out the maxim that the administration of India was primarily for the interests of the people. His successor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, trained in the traditions of his school, worked in the same lines, and followed the same principles. He gave liberty to the Press of India, and earned for himself a high reputation as an able and benevolent administrator.

Chapter I: Growth of the Empire

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CHAPTER I

GROWTH OF THE EMPIRE

“I AM sure that I can save the country, and that no one else can.” So spoke the great William Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, not boastfully, but with that consciousness of power, and that clear prevision of great events, which sometimes come to men inspired by a lofty mission. William Pitt more than redeemed his pledge. He directed the administration of his country from 1757 to 1761, and, singularly enough, these five years mark the rise of the modern British Empire. England’s ally, Frederick the Great, won the battle of Rossbach in 1757, made Prussia, and humbled France. Wolfe took Quebec in 1759, and the whole of Canada was conquered from the French in 1760. Clive won the battle of Plassy in 1757, and Eyre Coote crushed the French power in India in 1761. Within five years England’s greatness as a world power was assured; France was humbled in Europe, and effaced in Asia and in America.

Chapter I: The Country and People

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I. THE COUNTRY

I ATTEMPT in this book to present a sketch of the economic life of India at the close of Akbar’s reign, that is to say, to show how the people spent their incomes, and the sources from which those incomes were derived. In order to do this, it is necessary first of all to define the meaning of “India,” for the word has not always conveyed the precise signification which it bears to-day. In the Middle Ages the ordinary European, if he thought of India, or the Indies, at all, probably thought merely of some vague region lying somewhere to the east of Syria, which supplied various costly commodities, and in particular the spices used in preparing his food. With the progress of geographical discovery the Indies were in time subdivided into East and West, and the word India was gradually restricted (at least in English use) to the former area, which comprised in a general way all the country lying between the Persian Gulf and the Malay Peninsula. This extensive area was further subdivided by geographers into various regions, the mouths of the Indus and the Ganges being commonly taken as dividing points, so that the “second” or “middle” India of some writers of the sixteenth century corresponds roughly to the modern meaning of the word. The Portuguese, however, and also some travellers of other nations who visited the country under Portuguese auspices, gave the word a much narrower signification: to them India meant primarily the west coast and the land lying immediately behind it, so that we may read of journeys from Sind to “India,” or from “India” to Bengal, and we have to be on our guard in order to grasp the precise meaning of writers of this class. In the present book I use India in the modern and familiar sense as denoting the country lying between the sea and the Himalayas, and not extending farther into the mainland of Asia than Baluchistan on the west and the vicinity of Chittagong on the east. The modern Indian Empire includes, also, Burma, but in the sixteenth century the country which now bears that name was composed of kingdoms entirely independent of India, and for my present purpose it is most conveniently treated as a foreign land. The subject of this book is, then, the economic life of the country whose limits I have indicated, or, speaking generally, of the modern Indian Empire including the States, but excluding the province of Burma.¹

Chapter I: The Headman, Accountant, and Watchman

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HAS any one studied the village life of the South? Are there no facts to be collected from a careful examination of it, which would be useful to some future Sir Henry Maine? If there are, surely you should be the people to collect them. It makes one who has a strong feeling for South India a little sad, to read such a book as Professor Max Müller’s India, What can it teach us? and to see how very little it has to do with India south of the Vindhyan range." So said our late Governor, Sir M. E. Grant Duff, in the remarkable address he delivered last year to the Madras University graduates, when, in his capacity of Chancellor of the University, he drew their attention to the several branches of study to which they could usefully devote their time and in which they might instruct their Aryan brother of the West. Life in an Indian village is a very interesting study, and it is the object of the present book to picture the life of the Hindu as seen in a South Indian village.

Chapter I: The Physical Types

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ἐπεὶ ἦ μάλα πολλὰ μεταξύ, οὔρεά τε σκιόεντα θάλασσά τε ἠχήεσσα Il. I. 156–7.

Ethnic isolation

IN respect of those decisive physical features which determine the course of the national movements of mankind, India may be described as an irregularly triangular or pear-shaped fortress, protected on two sides by the sea and guarded on the third by the great bulwark of mountain ranges of which the Himalaya forms the central and most impregnable portion.* As these ranges curve westward and southward towards the Arabian Sea, they are pierced by a number of passes, practicable enough for the march of unopposed armies, but offering small encouragement to the halting advance of family or tribal migration. On the east, though the conformation of the barrier is different, its secluding influence is equally strong. The ridges which take off from the eastern end of the Himalaya run for the most part north and south, and tend to direct the main stream of Mongolian colonization towards the river basins of Indo-China rather than towards India itself. On either frontier, where the mountains become less formidable, other obstacles intervene to bar the way. On the western or Iranian march the gap between the Suleiman range and the Arabian Sea is closed by the arid plateaux and thirsty deserts of Makran; to the east, the hills of the Turanian border rise in a succession of waves from a sea of trackless forest. On either side, again, at any rate within historic times, the belt of debatable land which veiled a dubious and shifting frontier has been occupied by races of masterless men knowing, in the west, no law save that of plunder and vendetta, and in the east, owning no obligation but the primitive rule that a man must prove his manhood by taking the stranger’s head. Along the coast line conditions of a different character tended equally to preclude immigration on a large scale. The succession of militant traders who landed on the narrow strip of fertile but malarious country which fringes Western India, found themselves cut off from the interior by the forest-clad barrier of the Western Ghâts; while on the eastern side of the peninsula, the low coast, harbourless from Cape Comorin to Balasore, is guarded by dangerous shallows backed by a line of pitiless surf.*

Front Matter

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DEDICATION

TO MY LOVING DAUGHTERS

AMALA AND SARALA

I Dedicate this Volume

WITH

A FATHER’S BLESSING AND LOVE.

PREFACE

INDIAN poetry has been made known to English readers by distinguished English writers. A hundred years ago Sir William Jones translated the beautiful play of Sakuntalâ into English, and for the first time drew the attention of European readers to the beauty of Indian thought and poetry. H. H. Wilson followed in his footsteps, and rendered into graceful English verse some others of the best dramatic works in the Sanskrit language, and also a beautiful poem called Meghadûta. Wilson’s English translation of the Rig Veda has since been completed and published; and Mr. Griffiths has brought out a commendable metrical translation of the great epic Râmâyana. Max Müller has translated the ancient Upanishads and the Buddhist work Dhammapada into English prose; and the genius of Sir Edwin Arnold has made thousands of readers in Europe and in America familiar with the wealth of Indian thought and imagery, and the beauty of Buddhist precepts and doctrines.

Historical Outline of the Period

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CHAPTER I

MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN INDIA

HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF THE PERIOD

Our subject is Modern Religious Movements in India, that is, the fresh religious movements which have appeared in India since the effective introduction of Western influence. There are two great groups of religious facts the presence of which we must recognize continuously but which are excluded from our survey by the limitations of our subject. These are, first, the old religions of India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Muḥammadanism, so far as they retain the form and character they had before the coming of Western influence; and, secondly, Christian Missions, which are rather a continuation of Church History than a modern movement. The old religions are the soil from which the modern movements spring; while it will be found that the seed has, in the main, been sown by Missions. Thus, though these great systems are not included in our subject, we must, throughout our investigation, keep their constant activity and influence in mind.

It seems clear that the effective interpenetration of India by the West began about 1800. The first fresh religious movement appeared in 1828; the intellectual awakening of India began to manifest itself distinctly about the same time; and the antecedents of both go back to somewhere about the beginning of the century. The period we have to deal with thus extends from 1800 to 1913.

India the Land of Religions—The Veda

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LECTURE THE FIRST

India the Land of Religions—The Veda

INDIA is the land of religions in more than one sense. It has produced out of its own resources a number of distinctive systems and sects, two of which, at least, are of world-wide interest and importance.

Brahmanism, in its manifold aspects, is to this day the religion of about 200 millions of people in India herself, a matter of interest on the face of it. But its universal importance lies with the Brahmanical systems of religious philosophy, especially the two known respectively as Vedanta and Sankhya. These are two religio-philosophical, or theosophical systems which essay to probe the twin riddle of the universe and human life. They do this in so penetrating a way as to place them by the side of the most profound philosophic endeavors of other nations. The beginnings of this philosophy are found in the so-called Upanishads, a set of treatises which are part of the Veda. The Upanishads contain the higher religion of the Veda. The essence of higher Brahmanical religion is Upanishad religion. The religion of the Upanishads is part of the theme of these lectures.

Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

‘The more we learn the further goes back the history of Eastern Navigation.’ — YULE.

L’histoire de l’Inde, trop exclusivement regardée du continent, doit être aussi envisagée au point de vue maritime. — SYLVAIN LÉVI.

The Indian Ocean is not a closed basin like the Mediterranean Sea; on the South it opens on an infinite expanse of water. Yet the prevalence of currents and of the Indian Ocean periodical winds conducive to navigation has maintained here, since very early times, a system of exchanges in which the African coast, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, Insulindia, Indo-China, and beyond it, China and even Korea and Japan, continually gave and received their quotas. And in this system, India held a privileged, if not a preponderant, place by the advantage of her situation and the great length of her coasts; she is the centre towards which the many lines of this system converge. Doubtless, the documents are rare for the ancient period; but the race which carried civilisation by the sea to Burma, to Siam, to Cambodia, Indo-China and Java, and Madagascar, was a race of navigators.

Introduction to the Third Edition

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EDITORS’ PREFACE

Third Edition, 1962
Edited by Dilip Kumar Biswas and Prabhat Chandra Ganguli
Published by Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, Calcutta

PREFACE

Miss Sophia Dobson Collet’s The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy has the distinction of being the standard biography in English, of the great pioneer of the nineteenth century Indian renaissance. Published posthumously in 1900 (six years after the death of the author) by Harold Collet, London, it soon engaged the attention of the reading public in Europe and India and in 1913 a well-edited second edition was brought out by the late Hemchandra Sarkar, missionary of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, from Calcutta. This Indian edition was also sold out within a short period and since then the work had been lying out of print. In the meanwhile interest in Rammohun Roy’s life and times has steadily been on the increase in this country and abroad and a fresh study and assessment of him appears at the present moment to be a keenly felt desideratum. Accordingly, at the request of the executive committee of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, we have endeavoured to prepare the present edition of the book.

Lecture 1: What Can India Teach Us?

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LECTURE I. WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?

When I received from the Board of Historical Studies at Cambridge the invitation to deliver a course of lectures, specially intended for the candidates for the Indian Civil Service, I hesitated for some time, feeling extremely doubtful whether in a few public discourses I could say anything that would be of real use to them in passing their examinations. To enable young men to pass their examinations seems now to have become the chief, if not the only object of the universities; and to no class of students is it of greater importance to pass their examinations, and to pass them well, than to the candidates for the Indian Civil Service.

Letter I

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Situation of Malabar—Signification of the name—First colonization according to the Native legends—Difference between the Highlands and Lowlands—The stone found in Highlands—Cheapness of provisions—Neither volcanoes to be found nor earthquakes ever experienced here.

THOUGH the broad ocean, which rolls between the Netherlands and Malabar, presents a barrier to my personal enjoyment of your delightful society, it can neither extinguish my affection nor prevent me from holding communication with you by letter. I therefore dispatch this, as the first tribute of our constant friendship, in which I propose to relate the origin of Malabar according to the tradition of the natives.

List of Authorities Consulted

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Abulfeda.—Reinaud. Account of Shihab-ud-din Talish in MS. Bodleian 589. Al-Bilāduri. Al-Biruni. Al-Idrisi. Anabasis. Analysis of the Finances of Bengal (Fifth Report).—Grant. Ancient Egyptians.—Wilkinson. Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature.—McCrindle. Ancient Ships.—Torr. Anecdota Oxoniensis. Archaeological Survey of India (New Imperial Series) xv. Arthaśāstra.—Kautilya. Asiatic Nations (Bohn’s edition). Asoka Rock Edicts, II. and XIII. Assam District Gazetteer, II. Ayeen-i-Akbari.—Abul-Fazl.

Bhikshuni Nidāna. Bhilsa Topes, The.—Cunningham. Bible, The. Book of Ezekiel. —— Genesis. —— Kings. —— Proverbs. Bodhisattvāvadāna Kalpalatā.—Kshemendra. Bombay Gazetteer. Bombay Times (1839).

Nilambuja

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NILAMBUJA

The Fantasy of a Poet’s Mood

The following contribution appeared in the “Indian Ladies’ Magazine” for Dec. 1902:

A woman was walking alone on the shores of a lake that shone like a great fire-opal in its ring of onyx-coloured hills; and her movements were full of a slumberous rhythm, as if they had caught the very cadence of the waters.

A strangely attractive figure, delicate as the stem of a lotus, with an indescribable languor pervading like a dim fragrance, the grace of her flower-like youth. Two unfathomably beautiful eyes flashed from the sensitive oval of a face, not in itself of an extraordinary beauty, but singularly expressive, a subtle revelation, as it were, of the lyric soul within. The heavy hair enfolding in its coils a faint odour of incense-fumes was wound about her head, and wreathed with sprays of newly-opened passion-flowers. The dusky fire of amethysts about her throat and arms, the sombre flame of her purpled draperies embroidered in threads of many-coloured silk and silver, brought out in their perfection, the golden tones, so luminously pale, of her warm, brown flesh. A clinging vapour of dreams hung about her like a veil, investing her with a glamour, as of something remote and mystic, and touched with immemorial passion.

Origin and Classification of the Hindoos

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Origin and Classification of the Hindoos.

THE Hindoos, though now forming the great body of the population of India, do not seem to have been its earliest inhabitants. These, it is probable, are still represented by some of the hill tribes, who after contending in vain against foreign invaders, quitted the plains, and found an asylum amongst mountains and forests, into which the conquering race could not or cared not to follow them. The tradition is that the Hindoos entered India from the north-west, and had their first settlement in a small tract lying about 100 miles north-west of Delhi, between the Guggur and the Soorsooty. In the Institutes of Menu this tract is said to have been named Brahmaverta, because it was “frequented by the gods,” and the custom preserved in it by immemorial tradition is recommended as “approved usage.” From this tract the Hindoos appear to have spread eastward, and occupied the whole country north of the Jumna and the Ganges. To distinguish this country from Brahmaverta it was called Brahmarshi, and from Brahmins born within it all men on earth are enjoined to learn their several usages. Besides these tracts Menu mentions two others—Medhyadesa, or the central region said to lie between Himayat (the Himalaya) and Vindhya; and Aryaverta, or the land of respectable men, described in rather indefinite terms, but meant apparently to include the countries stretching on each side of the central region, “as far as the eastern and the western oceans,” in other words, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.

Post-Scriptum

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POST-SCRIPTUM

India’s “Gift” of One Hundred Million Pounds to England.

Since the above was put in type our worst fears have come to be true. The British Government of India has decided, with the sanction of the Secretary of State for India, to float a war loan in India of an unlimited amount. The idea is to make a “gift” of £100,000,000 (or $500,000,000) to the British Exchequer. The amount of the loan, or as much as is raised, will be made over to the Government of Great Britain and liability for the rest will be accepted by the Government of India. The British Cabinet have, with the sanction of the House of Commons, accepted this “gift” and in lieu thereof allowed the Indian Government to raise their customs duty on the imports of cotton goods by four per cent. ad valorem. This transaction involves an additional burden of £6,000,000 a year (or $30,000,000) on the Indian tax payer. It is expected that out of this some £1,000,000 will be recovered by the additional duty on cotton imports and the rest will be raised by additional taxation.

Preface

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Preface

INDIA, the most valuable dependency of the British crown, is also one of the most interesting portions of the globe. Even some of its physical features are on a scale of unparalleled grandeur. The stupendous mountain chain along its northern frontier rising gradually from a plain of inexhaustible fertility, has snowy summits which tower nearly six thousand feet above the loftiest of any other country in either hemisphere; while over the vast expanse of its magnificently diversified surface almost every product possessed of economical value grows indigenously, or having been introduced is cultivated with success. Nor are its moral less remarkable than its physical features. In its rugged recesses and jungly forests, various tribes, supposed to represent its aboriginal inhabitants, may still be seen in a state bordering on absolute barbarism. The great bulk of the population, however, consists of a race, or rather aggregation of races, who, though far advanced in civilization, at least in the ordinary sense of the term, since they have for ages lived under regular government, dwelt in large and splendid cities, and carried most of the arts of common life to high perfection, are yet the dupes and slaves of a most childish and galling superstition. That the dominant class, to which all others are subservient, should be full of religious zeal, is nothing more than might have been expected, but a new phase of human nature seems to be presented when those occupying the lower grades of the social scale are seen submitting without a murmur to be lorded over, and treated as mere outcasts whose very touch is pollution. What makes this submission the more extraordinary, is that those who exemplify it are by no means deficient in natural acuteness, and, on the contrary, often give proofs of intellectual culture. Hinduism, though little better than a tissue of obscene and monstrous fancies, not only counts its domination by thousands of years, but can boast of having had among its votaries, men who, in the ages in which they lived, extended the boundaries of knowledge, and carried some of the abstrusest of the sciences to a height which they had never reached before. This remarkable combination of pure intellect and grovelling superstition, nowhere displayed so strikingly and unequivocally as in India, gives a peculiar value even to that part of its history which, relating only to its social state, is necessarily the least fruitful in stirring incidents.

Preface

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Dedication

TO HIS MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY KING EDWARD VII EMPEROR OF INDIA

THIS WORK IS BY HIS ROYAL PERMISSION DEDICATED

General Preface

THE first edition of The Imperial Gazetteer of India was published in nine volumes in 1881. A second edition, augmented to fourteen volumes, was issued in the years 1885–7. A revised form of the article on India, greatly enlarged and with statistics brought up to date, appeared as an independent volume in 1893, under the title of ‘The Indian Empire: Its Peoples, History, and Products.’ All of these were edited by the late Sir William Wilson Hunter, K.C.S.I., who formed the original plan of the work as far back as 1869, when he was first entrusted with the duty of organizing a statistical survey of the country, and who wrote most of ‘The Indian Empire’ in its final form with his own hand. His untimely death in 1900 has deprived the present edition of the advantages of his ripe experience and literary skill.

The Aryans

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IN the dawning time of history, somewhere in the lands beyond Afghanistan and north of Persia roamed bold tribes of fair-complexioned men and women with their horses and cattle. From stories that have come down to us about them, from words that they used which have still place in our speech, and from rites of worship still observed by many of their descendants to-day something can be known of their life and thoughts. They were a rough, brave, hardy, adventurous race, of honest and simple soul.