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vol. title: Vol Four of The Theosophical Society of The Arya Samaj of Arya-wart vol. period: Sept 1878 – Sept 1879 pages in vol.: 350 |
The Theosophist—A prospectus of the Journal has been circulated by the President of the Theosophic Association of New York, from its Bombay head quarters. A periodical of this kind was a long felt desideratum since there existed no organ in India that devoted its columns to the discussion of the most important branches of Indian Philosophy. We have Guardians, Christian Heralds and Udayas but unfortunately there came forth no body to advocate the cause of Ancient Indian Religion. The Theosophical Society in general and the Theosophist in particular will hardly fail to counter act as a check on the growth of Evangelization which seems to an ignorant and unthinking mind to be making a rapid progress. That portion of the Theosophist which will be allotted to latest news about important discoveries, improvements and inventions will be of special interest to us who can hardly be said to keep pace with the scientific world in scientific pursuits and is calculated to do an inconceivable amount of good to India. In our next issue we hope to venture our remarks on the projected periodical at length. For the present suffice it to say that our brethren have by their untiring efforts paid us the first instalment of the multifarious duties they have undertaken and voluntarily bound themselves to perform for the benefit of their adopted land. Should the mother country and the adopted land be thus successfully brought to closely unite and work for each others interests it will not be long before India regains her former position; for it is but natural that light should emanate from the East. The West has only borrowed its lustre from the east which in due time she must repay.
Charles Farrar Browne (“Artemus Ward”) began his journalistic career as a… make occasional, and always acceptable, contributions to “Vanity Fair,” a New York…
Inlay
ON INDIA’S CORAL STRAND.
OF A PRIMITIVE PEOPLE.
Bombay, May 26.—A faggot of facts from the land of the crocodile and centipede, the mango and missionary. No familiar aspects or conditions of life here. People, costumes, diet, manners, religion, temples, priests, laws, currency, social distinctions, prejudices and hatreds, trade customs, modes of manufacture, agricultural methods, appliances for transportation—all these and everything else, as different from our own as black from white. And the thermometer at 113° in the shade on the very days when you shiver in ulsters, with the sleet driving in your faces. Our party has been here since mid-February, trying to fit ourselves into this primitive civilization, and accustom eye and ear to the novel sights and sounds about us. For weeks our senses were fairly intoxicated. It was enough to sit at our windows and look at the passing figures of this metropolitan kaleidoscope—every one an artist’s model. It is calculated to drive a painter crazy to see move by, in a single hour, a thousand subjects for his pencil, each better than the best he can manufacture, in New York, out of faded professionals and theatrical robes. For a fortnight Winbridge’s eyes and mouth stood open without winking; but latterly he has got to work, and his first magazine article went forward by the last overland mail. Artists in plenty there have been in India; but when I compare what there is to be got with what they did get—or, at least, with what has been published—I feel that they must have given more time to “pegs” (the Anglo-Indian slang for brandy and soda) than to professional work.
The Hindoos are a statuesque people. I have travelled 3,000 miles inland and found them so everywhere. The universal custom of carrying parcels and packages on the head gives, even to the commonest coolie, an erect bearing and a certain appearance of personal dignity. Our American negroes also carry burdens in this way, and on a Southern plantation I have even seen the “water-toters” with the wool worn off the tops of their skulls, but they have no such physical carriage as these Hindoos. Nor do our Africans or Indians at all compare with this aristocratic East Indian race in attractiveness of face. The latter have well-cut, often symmetrical and classical features, and the light of intelligence lingers in the eye even in the hardest-worked classes, while many, preëminently the Bombay Brahmins and the Calcutta Baboos, have hands and feet tiny and aristocratic to the last degree. In stature there are very great contrasts, the Rajpoots, Sikhs, and Punjaubees averaging, apparently, full six feet and swinging along as proudly as a warrior race should, while the Ghoorkas, also fighters, are undersized, and some of our Bombay acquaintance are no taller than American girls, and the hands they lay in ours to shake remind one of a canary’s claw. Equal contrasts there are in complexions, some Hindoos being as swart as a Congo negro, others as fair as the creamiest café-au-lait, and every imaginable intermediate shade of complexion is to be seen. In all India I have hardly noticed a curly head among them, the nearest approaches to it being a few very young Bombay girls, with wavy tresses, which were so exceptional as to make one suspect that motherly vanity had been resorting to some primitive substitute for the crimping iron.
Though commonly well-shaped, the Hindoos cannot be described as a stalwart nation. There are many individual and even tribal exceptions, but in the aggregate the remark holds good. They are sinewy rather than muscular, and the nervous largely predominates over the vascular temperament. There are fat Hindoos, but almost exclusively among merchants, clerks, and others of sedentary habits and comparatively plenty of income. Nowhere, except, approximately, in Rajpootana, have I seen the push and bustle that among us Westerns indicate business preoccupation. There is no overflowing vitality to shake up the human machine as a surcharge of steam does the boiler. Indian life is a routine of which religion takes one-fourth part and repose quite another of the year’s hours of waking. Hindoos seldom walk fast, and scarcely ever run. Time is not counted so precious as to make them punctual. If a man appoints 4 o’clock P. M. to meet you, it usually means that if he does not forget it, or has nothing important to attend to, you may expect him at 5 P. M. that day or the next. They can’t understand why people should worry over such trifles. The other day I had a couple of sight drafts to collect for the Theosophical Society from native bankers. I found my men over in Mombadavie, the heart of the native quarter. Both were naked except as to the dhoti or waist cloth. The banking house of one was a sort of coop giving upon the street, and not above ten feet square. A cotton mat, a stuffed bolster to lean against, a small square portable writing desk on the floor, a little brass cup for ink, another for sand, a reed stylus or so, and a bulky red-covered ledger, opening lengthwise, were the entire fittings of the place, which by day was an office, by night a dormitory. The other banker was found in the third-story front room of a large dwelling, reclining at full length on his cotton floor cloth, and with the same appurtenances of business about him. My drafts were for small amounts, drawn to bearer; the drawer was known and perfectly solvent, yet it took three days and three visits before I could get them paid. The first day they only said, “Come to-morrow;” the second, somebody was not in; and when the third-story man paid me, he did it with such indolent unconcern that I turned impatiently from the room, leaving our servant to take the rupees. The bankers had made two days’ interest on less than $50 by not being in a hurry. But fancy August Belmont, or Stuart Brown, or Moses Taylor making money in that way!
Energy has about died out of this people, that energy which once superabounded in their Aryan forefathers. Its virile force seems spent. There is plenty of plodding industry and endurance under suffering and want; they are a law-abiding people, too; but there are subserviency, despondency, an over-strained sensitiveness, a preponderance of the emotional over the energetic nature, a shrinking from undertakings that exact daring enterprise and confidence in one’s self and in the future. A pale Brahmin Government clerk—the wearer of university degrees, a student yet, and a metaphysician—took me aside the other day and asked me my advice about his going to America. He was willing to do anything, at almost any price, and to put up with all the misery of being from his co-religionists and all who could sympathize with his national ideas. His voice was gentle as a girl’s in speaking about this tremendous undertaking. He pronounced his words in good English, but th… particle of snap in them, not a whit of the dynamic energy that a Hindoo intending to compete with Yankee men in Yankeedom would require. You should have seen his face sadden when I described the real life struggle Americans all have to maintain from boyhood to old age to gain and keep good positions. It was a busier world than any he had dreamt of entering, and he said with a sigh at parting that perhaps, after all, he had better stay where he was.
Of the causes which have produced this national emasculation, many Hindoos have told me that two are especially notable: (1) sensuality, a vice largely attributable to the influence of their Mussulman conquerors, and (2) child marriages. Before the Persian invasion of Darius (about 500 B. C.), and the Macedonian, under Alexander the Great (326 B. C.), the Hindoos had been broken up into many minor States during a series of long civil wars between two great dynasties, the Kings of the so-called solar race and the human race. But they were a temperate and warlike people. Foreign manners and foreign rule destroyed, in the course of centuries, the national character, and the Mussulmans, establishing brilliant courts throughout the whole vast territory which they conquered, completed the work of demoralization. Hindoo princes imitated their vices and not only shut up their wives in Zenanas, but took to themselves many concubines, after the manner of Solomon. The evil influence spread downward until even among the lowest classes it took the form of the earliest possible marriage that nature would tolerate. What could be expected from all this except a race of effeminate, yielding, nervous sensitives. Such a progeny might be highly intellectual, but scarcely noted for energy or aggressive manliness, and such is the modern Hindoo as a type. I leave out of question the mooted influence upon national character of a purely vegetable diet.
Western civilization is rapidly spreading one cursed vice among the natives, especially the Christianized, I am told, viz., intemperance. In the up-country cities, where few Europeans are found, I rarely saw a dram shop; but in Bombay they are almost as plenty in the native quarter as in the European, and that is saying much. One seldom sees drunken Hindoos, it is true, but this is not because the drinkers do not drink enough to make them so. Their capacity is seemingly boundless. Brandy, a stimulus in cold climates, is here fatal poison. In Europeans it causes the most serious hepatic disorders. The nickname “peg” is given to brandy and soda tipple, “because every time one drinks it he is driving a peg into his coffin.” If so bad for white men brought up to meat eating and liquor drinking, how much worse must intoxicating beverages be for natives, whose systems are built up entirely from vegetarian diet? India has, doubtless, like other dusky nations, to see the dry rot of foreign vices run its course through her population, but there is a recuperative force in the Aryan race which may, after centuries, restore its pristine vigor. Even now, though most Hindoos take a thoroughly despondent view of the situation, the signs of better times are not lacking. Chief among these is the spread of Western education, embracing the multiplication of schools, the increase of vernacular newspapers, and the gradual melting away of prejudices. The railway-carriage has crowded together its motley throng of passengers of every caste, who formerly would have shunned such contact as pollution. The famine works of Government—canals, roads, and other public improvements set afoot to furnish wages to starving multitudes—have helped. Two agencies you would be least likely to guess are largely aiding, viz., ice and aerated waters. A few years ago no orthodox Hindoo would have touched any water but what his priest or one of his own caste or himself had drawn. Now bottled lemonade and soda water are sold everywhere (at 2½ and 3½ cents) in shops and peddled about the streets, and ice is in universal use. In a very limited and as yet insignificant degree the Masonic lodge—greatest of all levellers, in theory—has assisted. So have the many Samajes, or brotherhoods, of various kinds—the Brahmo, Adi Brahmo, Prarthana, Arya, &c.—which India has begotten within the past thirty years, and which, despite the hypocrisy and moral cowardice of some leaders, are all more or less reformatory and progressive in their tendency. A large body of young men is constantly forming, out of which there may perhaps differentiate in time one or more great leaders. True, Young India is just now more a babbler than practical worker, but here is what one of the most influential natives writes me, in a letter which the postman brings even as I am writing this page:
“We Indians are famished paupers. We cannot feed ourselves. Every one of us is doomed to devote his whole energies to keeping soul and body together. Without sufficiency there cannot be contentment, nor without contentment spiritual progress. The nation is, in fact, dying by inches for want of food grains; need you wonder then that we despond? You say Young India is a babbler rather than a worker. That he is, and this is another cause of our despondency. But the babbling is not the cause of our misery, but the effect of our poverty.”
Among the regenerative forces at work one of the most potent, in the view of those who know the facts, is the Arya Samaj movement, of which Swamee Dya Nand Saraswati was the originator and is the director. He began in 1875 to preach in the vernacular the primitive Vedic philosophy in its purity. Gifted with a commanding presence and dauntless moral courage, absolutely unselfish, devoted to his idea, eloquent, a profound Sanskrit scholar, learned in all the literature of the crafty Brahmans, he thunders against the abuses which priestly selfishness has padded upon and stuffed into the original Vedas. From city to city he goes, stirring up the young to enthusiasm, and defying the priests to show a single verse or line in the Aryan Scriptures which authorizes the worship of more than one God; the adoration of idols; the subdivision of castes; the prohibition of widow remarriage; the marriage of girls before 16, or boys before 25 years of age; suttee, or the practice of any of the superstitious observances fostered by the priests for their own profit. Three attempts have been made upon his life by poison and one … sword, but he has escaped all harm, and bears himself as bravely as before. More than any Hindoo reformer of modern times, he has in himself the qualifications of a real Regenerator, being as ardent as Rajah Rammohun Roy or Babos Keshub Chunder Sen, with thrice their virility and none of the selfish vanity which has just wrecked the <... continues on page 8-259 >
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Editor's notes
- ↑ The Theosophist—A prospectus... by unknown author, Deccan Star, The, Poona, July 20, 1879
- ↑ Artemus Ward at Cleveland. by unknown author. Printed caption: “A. Ward, and his grate show.” (From the original sketch by George Hoyt.)
- ↑ Charles Farrar Browne (“Artemus Ward”) by unknown author. Only two disconnected printed fragments remain visible beneath the overlapping clippings.
- ↑ On India’s Coral Strand. by unknown author (signed as H. S. O.), Sun, The, Monday, July 7, 1879
- ↑ Autograph of Charles Farrar Browne. by unknown author (signed as A. Ward). Reproduced presentation inscription signed A. Ward; the printed caption identifies Charles Farrar Browne.