CHAPTER XIV
THE MOHAMMEDAN QUESTION
It is never well to have travelled from Dan to Beersheba and to record that one has found all barren; and in my present chapter I shall endeavour to paint the brighter side of the India which I saw last winter. The material misery of her peasantry has been enough described, and the bitter feeling of her townsmen educated to a sense of their fallen estate as a conquered people; and it remains to me to show the compensating good which by the mysterious law which rules all human things is being born out of their otherwise unredeemed misfortunes. The apologists of British rule boast that they have given India peace, and peace doubtless is a noble gift; but it has given her far more than this. What really deserves all Indian thanks, and is indeed an inestimable acquisition, because it contains within it the germs of a reconquest of all the rest, is that it has given her liberty of thought. This is a new possession which India never had, and never perhaps would have had, but for English influences, and it is difficult not to see in it a gift undesigned, but which, like the last treasure issuing from Pandora’s box, is destined to transform the curse of conquest into the blessing of a wider hope.
I am not one of those who love the East only in its picturesque aspects, and I have no quarrel with Europe because it has caused the East to change. I note, indeed, the destruction of much that was good and noble and of profit in the past by the unthinking and often selfish action of Western methods; but I do not wish the past back in its integrity, or regret the impulse given to a new order there of thought and action. I know that time never really goes back upon its steps, and no one more readily accepts than myself the doctrine that what is gone in human history is irrevocably gone. On the contrary, I see in the connection of East and West a circumstance ultimately of profit to both; and while the beauty of its old world is being fast destroyed, and the ancient order of its institutions subverted, I look forward with unbounded expectation to the new cosmos which shall be constructed from the ruins. I am anxious, indeed, to save what can still be saved of the indigenous plan, and to use in reconstruction something of the same materials; but I see that the new edifice may well be made superior to the old, and I should be altogether rejoiced if it should be my lot to share, however humbly, in the work of its rebuilding.
To speak plainly, the ancient order of Asiatic things, beautiful as it was, had in it the germs of death, for the one reason that it did not change. India especially, in old days, did not change. Conquerors came and went; dynasties rose and perished; and years of peace and war, of plenty and of famine, trod closely on each other’s heels, while men were born and lived and died in the same thoughts. It was the natural life, the remnant of a society which still followed the law of instinct rather than of reason; but even in the natural world health must be attended with growth or it will turn into decay. The intellectual growth of India by the middle of last century had long stopped; and there was no sign anywhere, when our English traders first appeared, of a new beginning. Thought had resolved itself into certain formulae from which there seemed no escape; and the brain of the body politic, unused and oppressed with its own mental restrictions, was growing every generation weaker.
We have seen the ultimate result of such inaction in other lands, in Asia Minor, in Persia, and, till within recent memory, in countries nearer home. It was seen everywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages, and seems to be a condition natural to all human societies at a certain stage of their growth. If too long prolonged it would seem they die, leaving their places empty, as in Babylonia, or being absorbed in other more vigorous societies, as the Byzantines were absorbed by the then vigorous Turks. In almost every case the intellectual awakening has been quickened from without, by the presence near it of an intelligence more living than its own and generally hostile, and it may safely be affirmed that the action and reaction of nations on each other’s intellectual life is in itself a natural and necessary law of their development. Thus Mediaeval Europe owed the new birth of its thought to the invasion in the eighth century of the cultivated and chivalrous Moors through Spain; and the Catholic Church reformed its lax discipline, not four hundred years ago, in the presence of advancing hosts from Western Asia. Something of the same process, therefore, may be also traced in the counter-wave which has now for the last hundred years and more been driving Europe back in menace to the East. Asia has been awakened by it at last to her danger, and is slowly informing herself with the victorious reason of the West, and assimilating to her needs that intellectual daring which is her adversary’s strength. And nowhere more so than in India. After its long sleep the Indian intellect is rising everywhere refreshed, and is attempting each day more boldly to strike out new lines of speculation on the very subjects where it had been most closely and most hopelessly confined.
All this India indubitably owes to England. Nor is there any point on which the intellectual methods of the West have been brought more strongly to bear in Asia than on its creeds. The ancient monotony of religious practice divorced from religious intelligence, is slowly giving place to intrusive questionings which will not be appeased by mere formulae, and men of all faiths are discussing and reasoning where a hundred years ago they only asserted. We have witnessed within the last generation something of this everywhere in Western Asia, but in India it is perhaps still more marked; and it seems certain that, whatever evil may have been there wrought to other interests, the interests of its religions will have been served by our rule, unconsciously, perhaps, and unwillingly, but none the less really. Paradoxical as it may sound, the wholly secular rule of aliens, whose boast it is that they have established no State creed, will be found to have renewed the life of faiths and given them a stronger, because a more intelligent, mode of being. The spiritual believer will be strengthened; and the very pagan will be no longer “suckled in a creed outworn,” but in living beliefs which will seek to exercise a moral influence on his conduct more and more for good. To speak precisely, what I see will be the outcome of such education as England is giving to the Indian races is a reformation of each of their several religious faiths, leading to purer thought in their followers, and above all to purer practice.
The creeds of India, speaking generally, are four: the Hindu, which under various forms embraces four-fifths of the whole population; the Mohammedan, which is principally powerful in the North of India and Bengal, and which includes a census of fifty millions; the Christian (Roman Catholic), found mainly in the extreme South; and the Parsi.
Of these, Hinduism alone would seem to be a truly indigenous faith, or one wholly in harmony with the instincts of the rural population; and it is impossible for a traveller not to be struck with the tenacity of the ancient superstitions which are its groundwork. Hinduism belongs to an older order of religions than any now practised in the West. It is not a religion at all in our modern sense of being a strict code of morals based upon any revealed or written law; but, like the popular beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, is rather a mythology resting on traditional reverence for certain objects in certain places. It is essentially national and local. It does not seek to embrace humanity, but is a privilege of the Indian races only; and it cannot be practised in its purity elsewhere than in India. India, according to Brahminical teaching, is a sacred land, and there alone can be the shrines of its gods. There alone man can lead a perfect life, or worship with spiritual profit. Certain localities are specially holy – not, as with the Christians or the Mohammedans, on account of the tombs of holy men, but in themselves as being the chosen homes of the divine powers. All rivers in India thus are sacred, precisely as were groves in ancient Italy, and on their banks the temples of the gods are built and spiritual influences felt.
From an aesthetic point of view nothing can be more seductive to a stranger from the West, or more surprising, than the spectacle of Hindu worship at one of these ancient shrines – the processions of women to some lonely grove by the water-side on holiday afternoons with their offerings of rice and flowers, the old-world music of pipe and tabour, the priests, the incense, the painted statues of the immortal gods, the lighted fire, the joyous sacrifices consumed with laughter by the worshippers. No one can see this without emotion, nor, again, witness the gatherings of tens of thousands clothed in white in the great temples of Southern India for the yearly festivals, and not acknowledge the wonderful continuity of thought which unites modern India with its European kindred of pre-Christian days. The worship of idols here is a reality such as untravelled Englishmen know only from their classics. The temples of Madura and Seringam are more wonderful and imposing in their structure than all the edifices of Europe put together, and the special interest is that they are not dead things. The buyers and the sellers still ply their trade in the porticoes, the birds have their nests beneath the eaves. There are sacred elephants and sacred apes. The priests chaunt still round lighted braziers. The brazen bulls are anointed each festival day with oil, the foreheads of the worshippers with ochre. There is a scent of flowers and incense, and the business of religion goes on continuous from old time, perhaps a little slacker, on account of the increasing poverty of the people, but not less methodically, or as a living part of men’s daily existence. When I had seen Madura I felt that I had at last seen a temple of Babylon in all its glory, and understood what the worship of Apis might have been in Egypt. This worship of the gods – not any theological or moral teaching – is the foundation of the Hindu religion, and what is still its distinguishing feature.
At the same time it is beyond a doubt that among the cultivated Brahmins, who have always acknowledged a higher philosophy than that of the people, there is a renewed tendency towards the spiritualization of beliefs. The philosophy of the Vedas is a high one, and presents to the restored activity of thought a standard for reform in intellectual conceptions; and although the Brahminical system is without an absolute written code of morals, it is easily reconcilable with the highest, and akin to all that is best in the Semitic teaching. Nowhere more than among the Hindus is the tradition of domestic virtue a noble one, or the relation of father and child, of husband and wife, acknowledged as a sacred one. The vices, therefore, which ages of intellectual sleep have engendered, are readily recognized as evils now that the intellect is once more awake; and all that is best in the Christian moral code is being instinctively adopted into their system by the enlightened modern Brahmins. This is the common feature of all religious reform. Vicious practice is the concomitant of intellectual sloth, and as that sloth yields to action the practice reforms itself, usually after the model of whatever has roused it from its sleep.
Thus we see the modern Brahmins proclaiming the morality of unselfishness in no other language than that in which Christian divines proclaim it, and making it peculiarly their own. They have the same teaching as these about truth and justice and integrity, and appeal in the same way to conscience as a guide. They choose what is best, and make it harmonize with their own best traditions, and the result is a general elevation of tone in the upper ranks of life which presages a corresponding reform in the lower.
This sometimes shows itself, as must also naturally be, in extravagance. There is a tendency always in such movements to imitate servilely; and so we see in the rising generation of the Hindus a certain advanced party which aims at making itself wholly European. A very few of these have adopted Christianity, but far more have contented themselves with an abandonment of their beliefs in favour of philosophies more or less agnostic. Others, again, without ceasing to be professed Hindus, have contented themselves with throwing off caste restrictions; and a considerable body in Bengal and Northern India have formed themselves into a special sect, known as the Brahmo-Somaj, which would seem to hold doctrines little different from the vaguer forms of Theism. In the South of India, however, which is the stronghold of Brahminism, these extreme innovations have taken little root, and instead there is found only a more reasoned form of the traditional beliefs. Whether the worships of Vishnu and Siva and the rest of the national Indian gods, have a sufficient backbone of practical ethics to undergo a great moral reform without losing in the end something of their vitality as popular beliefs, I am not prepared to say; but I feel certain that distinct moral improvement connected with these worships is in progress, and that the result up to the present has been an increased interest with the leaders of Hindu society in the welfare and social improvement of their religious communities. This shows itself in exertions made to spread education, in anxiety for the better management of religious trusts, in the restoration of temples, sometimes at very large individual cost, and in the rising agitation against child-marriage and in favour of the re-marriage of widows.
Something of the same process may be observed in the case of the Parsis. These would hardly require mention as an Indian sect at all were it not for their very great intelligence and the lead they have recently taken in native political life. They are insignificant in point of population, and very restricted in their locality. Bombay alone of the great cities finds them in large numbers. But their wealth there, their commercial aptitude, and their persistence in availing themselves of every means of education, have placed them in a position of large and growing influence. They are, as is well known, the descendants of the fire-worshippers of Persia, and still hold closely to their traditions. The religion of Zoroaster, originally simple and philosophical, seems, in common with the rest of the religions imported into India, to have become overgrown there with grosser thought and less worthy practice, and to have adopted many of the superstitions peculiar to the Indians. Some of these seem, indeed, to have been forced on the Parsis by the Hindu rulers at the time of their first settlements, and others to be the result of the general decay of knowledge due to political conditions. The Parsis, however, were among the first to take advantage of the intellectual liberty which has been the atmosphere of India since the coming of the English, and being also extremely keen traders they have profited more than others by the commercial régime of modern times and have grown rich. Well educated, well mannered, and naturally inclined to good, their religion is now simplifying itself once more, and the tendency of Parsi thought is, even more than the Hindu, towards a spiritualization of theological dogmas and a reform in social practice. Any one who has been with an educated Parsi over their “Towers of Silence” in Bombay must have been struck with the pains at which they are to interpret in a philosophical sense their ancient practice of exposing the dead; or who has discussed social questions, with their desire to improve the condition of their women. Of the Parsis, however, and of the native Christians of Southern India, I will not speak at length. I saw too little of them to learn anything of real value; and the great numerical superiority of the Hindus and Mohammedans entitles them alone to general attention.
My own special attention was naturally most directed to the Mohammedans.
Mohammedanism, as is well known, entered India from two separate sides and under two separate conditions. Its first appearance was on the western seaboard in the shape of Arab traders, who came with the double mission of propagating the faith and making money. These were peaceful preachers, who relied for success not upon the sword but upon the power of persuasion, and the Mohammedanism implanted in this form is still to be found on the west coast, in the Kokhnis of Bombay, the Moplas of Malabar, and the Moormen, or Moors (“os Moros” of the Portuguese) of Ceylon. They are a busy, prosperous people – shopkeepers, pedlars, jewellers, or plying certain handicrafts, and notably that of house-building.
It was extremely interesting to me to find at Colombo the descendants of the ancient Arab settlers of the eighth and ninth centuries still keeping up the commercial tradition of Arabia intact. They number in the whole island of Ceylon about a quarter of a million, and are among the most prosperous of its inhabitants. I found them an old-fashioned community, more occupied with this world than with the next, and only to a very small degree affected by modern thought. Indeed, such change as was to be noticed among them was of as recent growth as the advent in Ceylon of Arabi and his fellow-exiles, whose larger experience of the great outside world of Islam and the prestige of their late championship of the faith had begun to make its impression on their thoughts. Until their arrival no Mohammedan in the island had ever sat down to meat with men of another faith, and very few had sent their children to any secular school. The example, however, of the exiles was beginning to be followed, and I found the Moormen already anxious for wider instruction, and to come into communication with the general body of the faithful. It will be a curious result of Egypt’s misfortunes if the persecution of her patriot chiefs shall have brought ideas of religious liberty to the Mohammedans of Southern India; yet it is what seems to be happening. It would be well if these Moormen were more widely spread than they are, for their commercial instincts are a healthy element, and one much needed in the Mohammedan community of India proper.
As I crossed from Ceylon to the mainland and left the coast I first came in contact with the other and more common Mussulman type – the descendants of the northern invaders – men wholly distinct from the busy traders just described, and neither prosperous nor advancing. The Mohammedans of the inland districts of the Madras Presidency are the poorest in India. They represent the extreme wave of Mogul conquest southwards, long ago spent and now receding. They are the descendants, not of preachers and converts, but of the garrisons of the north, and their occupation of government gone, they are fast dying out from want of a means of living. The condition of the small Mohammedan communities of such towns as Tanjore and Trichinopoly is very pitiable. Isolated in a population wholly Hindu, possessed of no traditional industry, without commercial aptitude or knowledge of other service than the sword’s, they seem dumbly to await extinction. Their few rich men, owners of landed property, grow daily less and less at their ease, preyed upon as they are by an army of helpless and needy relations. They fall in debt to the Hindu money-lenders, are yearly less able to discharge their liabilities, and bit by bit the civil courts engulf them. Those who have no land are reduced to manual labour of the simplest sort on daily wages. It is a hard but inevitable fate, the fate which rests upon the law, that none shall live who cannot earn his bread. These Mohammedans of Southern India are the extreme exemplification of evils from which the whole community are to some extent suffering. In the south they are few and hopeless, and have almost ceased to struggle. In the north the danger of their condition is rousing them to new activity.
The stronghold of Mohammedan India is the North-West, and there Islam is far from hopeless or disposed to perish. Intellectually the equals, and morally the superiors of their Hindu neighbours, the Mohammedans of the Upper Ganges Valley have not forgotten that till very lately the Administration of India was almost entirely in their hands, and they look upon their declining fortunes as neither deserved nor irremediable. Their historical status is that of descendants of those Tartar and Persian and Afghan conquerors who have at various times invaded Hindustan from the North-West, or of the Hindu converts, principally Rajputs or Pathans, made by these. Their race, indeed, is nowhere pure, except in the case of a few princely and noble families, but the tradition of their origin remains intact, and is at the same time their weakness and their strength – their strength, inasmuch as it supplies them with a certain standard of honour beneficial to all societies; their weakness, inasmuch as it has given them prejudices against the ordinary means of living open to all the world.
The pride of conquest is the bane of all Mohammedan societies sprung from Northern Asia, and the Mohammedans of India form no exception. The Moguls never condescended to trade, but either settled on the land or took service, civil or military, under government; and their descendants are still swayed by the same proud instincts. Their misfortunes in India came upon them in successive waves. Forced by the Mahratta wars into an alliance with the East India Company, the Mogul Emperors became early dependent on these; and with the gradual absorption of the Delhi Monarchy, the exclusive privilege of rule departed from the Mohammedan caste – not all at once, but by degrees as new regulations were enacted and a new system introduced. The first to suffer were the landowners. By a certain fiscal measure, known as the “resumptions,” requiring all holders of lands to show their title deeds, the Mohammedans, who often held by prescription rather than by written grant, lost largely of their estates, and so were reduced to poverty. Next, the military services were in great degree cut off for them by the extinction of the native armies. And, lastly, the Act, changing the official language from Persian and Hindustani to English, took from them their still leading position in the civil employment. The Mohammedans had up to this more than held their own with the Hindus, as Hindustani was their vernacular, and Persian the language of their classics; but in English they were at a distinct disadvantage, for that was already the language of commerce, and so of the educated Hindus. Nor could English be learned except at the secular schools, to which Mohammedans were averse from sending their sons as tending to irreligion. The sources, therefore, of their employment were on every side curtailed, and a growing poverty has been ever since the natural result. The military revolt of 1857, which in Oude and at Delhi assumed a specially Mohammedan aspect, completed their disfavour with the English Government, and with it their material decline.
At the same time, owing to circumstances which I have never heard fully explained, it is an admitted fact that numerically the Mohammedans of Northern India have been and are a rapidly increasing body. This may have been due at times to extensions of British territory, or to conversion among the lower castes of Hindus, or to other causes; but it is certain that, whereas in old calculations the Indian Mohammedans were placed roughly at thirty millions, and more recently by Dr. Hunter at forty millions, they are now by the last census acknowledged to number fifty millions of souls, although the increase of the general population of India has been not at all in like proportion. With regard to their actual position, therefore, we are faced with the unsatisfactory phenomenon in Northern India of a vast community growing yearly more numerous, and at the same time less prosperous; of a community owning the instincts and the traditions of administration excluded yearly more and more from the administration; and of a community which has good grounds for tracing its misfortunes to the unfavourable conditions imposed upon them by the Imperial Government. The Mohammedans of Northern India, there is no denying it, are restless and dissatisfied, and the only question is in what form their repressed energy, fired by misfortune and threatened with despair, is likely to find its vent. It may be in two ways – for their own and the general good, or for their own and the general harm; and I believe that at the present moment it lies largely within the power of those who rule India to guide it to the former and turn it from the latter.
All who are responsible for tranquillity in India must be aware that there are influences at work, both within the country and beyond its borders, adverse to that tranquillity, and that at no time have these been more active than within the last few years, or engaged on ground more carefully prepared to receive them by the unwisdom of English policy. I am not, and have never been, an alarmist about Russian invasion. Viewed as a power hostile to India, Russia is and may for ever remain innocuous, and I should view with equanimity her approach to the Hindu Kush, or even to the actual frontier, were it impossible for her to appear there as a friend. But as a friend I fear her. If our selfish system of government for our own and not for India’s good remains unchanged; if we do nothing to secure Indian loyalty; if we refuse to give to the people that assurance of ultimate self-government which shall enable them to await in patience the realization of their hopes; if we continue to treat them as enemies subdued, as slaves to work for us, as men devoid of rights – then it is certain that within a given time all the external world will appear to the Indians under a friendly guise, and Russia as being the nearest, under the most friendly.
Nor can it be denied that under present circumstances the Czar’s Government has much to offer which the people of India might be excused for thinking twice before they refused. The Russian, himself an Oriental, would be probably less hateful as a master than our unsympathizing official Englishman. But it is far from certain that it would be at all as a master that he would present himself to Indian hopes. He might well appear as an ally, a liberator from the deadly embrace of our financial system, a friend of liberty, sound economy, and material progress. Who is to say that Russia should not, in exchange for a new commercial pact with herself, offer to establish India in complete Home Rule, and thus outbid us in the popular affection? It would not be hard to persuade India that she would gain by the change, and, Englishman as I am, I am not quite convinced that she would on all points lose by it. In any case, it might well be that men would risk something in the desire of change, knowing that at worst it would not be much worse for them than now.
Nor is there any section of the community to which this kind of argument would apply more strongly than the Mohammedan. The present order of things is distinctly threatening them with ruin, while just outside the frontier, and almost within hand’s reach of them, live men of their own race and faith who are still self-ruled. What could be more natural than that they should look to these for support and succour, or to the still stronger Power beyond, if it should present itself as, in any special manner, their religious protector? Our own political unwisdom of the last few years has made this for the first time a possibility; and what was a mere chimera in the last generation is rapidly becoming a practical danger.
Whatever may have been the defects of the old Ottoman alliance, there is no question that it was popular in Mohammedan India, that it symbolized the friendship of England for the outside world of Islam, and that it left to Russia the invidious post of Islam’s chief enemy. For this reason the recent Afghan war, in its earlier stages, was condoned, it being understood as an indirect repulse of the Northern Power; and it was not till later that it was looked upon with general disfavour. But the doubtful arrangements of the Berlin Treaty, the discreditable acquisition of Cyprus and the abandonment of Tunis – when these things became slowly to be understood – operated a change in men’s minds, and prepared them for still stronger reprobations, when, for the first time, England showed herself distinctly the aggressor in Egypt.
In spite of the illusions of Ministers on the subject, or the subtleties to which they had recourse, it is beyond a doubt that the Mohammedans of India wholly sympathized with Arabi during the war; that they were disgusted with the false issues raised in connection with the Sultan’s proclamation of his rebellion; and that for the last two years Russia has ceased to hold with them the position of the most dangerous enemy their faith has to fear. I do not say that as yet the distrust is absolute. No little loyalty still survives for the English Crown as contrasted with the English Ministry; but it is quite certain that the history of Egypt’s ruin since the war, and the apparent design of our Government to destroy all that is best and foster all that is least good in Islam, is working on all sides a change. In the decay of Constantinople the Moslem world is looking more than ever for a champion; and if England refuses the office it may well be offered to another Christian Power.