New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century / A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments

Besides setting the community too much above the individual, the caste system is faulty in presenting to the Indian mind an imperfect idea of the community. The caste is the natural limit to one's interest and consciousness of fellowship, to the exclusion of the larger community. According to Raja Rammohan Roy, writing in 1824, the caste divisions are "as destructive of national union as of social enjoyment." In Modern India, Sir Monier Williams expresses himself similarly. Caste "tends to split up the social fabric into numerous independent communities, and to prevent all national and patriotic combinations." Too much, however, may be made of this, for the practical solidarity of Hinduism, in spite of caste divisions, is one of the most striking of social phenomena in India. Whatever may have brought it about, the solidarity of Hinduism is an undeniable fact. The supremacy of the priestly caste over all may have been a bond of union, as likewise the necessity of all castes to employ the priests, for the Jewish ritual and the tribe of Levi were the bonds of union among the twelve tribes of Israel. Sir Alfred Lyall virtually defines Hinduism as the employment of brahman priests, and it is the adoption of brahmans as celebrants in social and religious ceremonies that marks the passing over of a non-Hindu community into Hinduism. It is thus it becomes a new Hindu caste.[11] Then, uniting further the mutually exclusive castes, many are the common heritages, actual or adopted, of traditions and sacred books, and the common national epics of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. The cause of the solidarity is not a common creed, as we shall see when we reach the consideration of new religious ideas, ideas.

If Hinduism as a social system is to be moved by the modern spirit, we may look for movement in the direction of freedom of individual action, that is, the loosening of caste; we may look for larger ideas of nationality and citizenship, superseding to some extent the idea of caste. As is not infrequent in India, Government pointed out the way for public opinion. In 1831 the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, issued his fiat that no native be debarred from office on account of caste, creed, or race, and that a son who had left his father's religion did not thereby forfeit his inheritance.

To any observer it is now plain that while caste is still a very powerful force, and even while new castes, new social rings, are being formed through the working of the spirit of exclusiveness, the general ideas of caste are undergoing change. In these latter days one can hardly credit the account given of the consternation in Calcutta in 1775, when the equality of men before the law was asserted, and the brahman, Nanda-kumar, was hanged for forgery. Many of the orthodox brahmans shook off the dust of the polluted city from their feet and quitted Calcutta for a new residence across the Hooghly. In 1904, we find conservative Hindus only writing to the newspapers to complain that even in the Hindu College at Benares, the metropolis of Hinduism, some of the members of the College Committee were openly violating the rules of caste. In the same year a Calcutta Hindu newspaper, the Amrita Bāzār Patrikā, declared, "Caste is losing its hold on the Hindu mind."[12] The recent denunciation of caste by an enlightened Hindu ruler, the Gaekwar of Baroda, is a further significant sign of the times.

What does caste forbid and punish? Freedom of thought, if not translated into social act, has not been an offence against caste at any time in the period under review, neither has caste taken cognisance of sins against morality as such. The sins that caste has punished have been chiefly five, as follows: Eating forbidden food, eating with persons of lower caste, crossing the sea, desertion of Hinduism for another religion, marrying with a person of a lower caste, and, in many communities also, marrying a widow. The Hindustani proverb, "Eight brahmans, nine cooking-places," hits off with a spice of proverbial exaggeration the old punctiliousness about food. The sin of eating forbidden food is thus described by Raja Rammohan Roy in 1816: "The chief part of the theory and practice of Hinduism, I am sorry to say," writes the Raja, "is made to consist in the adoption of a peculiar mode of diet; the least aberration from which (even though the conduct of the offender may in other respects be pure and blameless) is not only visited with the severest censure, but actually punished by exclusion from the society of his family and friends. In a word, he is doomed to undergo what is commonly called loss of caste."[13] Now, in respect of the first three of these offences, in all large centres of population the general attitude is rapidly changing. In the light of modern ideas, these prohibitions of certain food and of certain company at food, and of sea voyages, are fading like ghosts at dawn. An actual incident of a few years ago reveals the prevailing conflict of opinion, especially with regard to the serfdom which ties down Indians to India.

Two scions of a leading family in a certain provincial town of Bengal, brave heretics, made a voyage to Britain and the Continent, and while away from home, it was believed, flung caste restrictions to the winds. On their return, the head of the family gave a feast to all of the caste in the district, and no one objected to the presence of the two voyagers at the feast. This was virtually their re-admission into caste. But shortly after, a document was circulated among the caste complaining, without naming names, of the readmission of such offenders. The tactics employed by the family of the offenders are noteworthy. The demon of caste had raised his head, and they dared not openly defy him. So the defence set up was the marvellous one that, while on board ship and in Europe, the young men had never eaten any forbidden or polluted food. They had lived upon fruit, it was said, which no hand except their own had cut. The old caste sentiment was so strong that the family of the voyagers felt compelled to bring an action for libel against the publishers of the circular. They lost their case, as no offender had been mentioned by name, and the tyranny of caste thus indirectly received the support of the courts.

Of course it would still be easier to discover instances of the tyranny of caste than the assertion of liberty, even among highly educated men. In this matter of emancipation also, North India is far ahead of the South. While minister at the court of Indore, 1872-75, the late Sir T. Madhava Rao, a native of South India, was invited to go to England to give evidence on Indian Finance before a Committee of the House of Commons. On religious grounds he was not able to accept the invitation.[14] Nor is it generally known that the Bengali nobleman who represented his country at the King's coronation in London belongs to a family that is out of caste. If the newspapers are to be believed, an orthodox Bengali Hindu was first invited to attend the coronation, and was "unable to accept." Had that gentleman accepted and gone, his example might at once have emancipated his countrymen. But he did not know his hour. "There is a venial as well as a damning sin," we may note, in regard to this crossing of the sea. "A man may cross the Indian Ocean to Africa and still remain an orthodox Hindu. The sanctity of caste is not affected. But let him go to Europe, and his caste as well as his creed is lost in the sea."[15] An orthodox Hindu has never been seen in Britain.

It is worth noting also, that in earlier times it involved loss of caste to go away South, even within India itself, among the Dravidean peoples beyond the known Aryan pale in the North. Thus, slowly the cords of serfdom lengthen.

Towards the fourth of the offences against caste, namely, the adoption of a new religion, the general attitude has likewise changed, although to a less degree. In large towns, at least, the convert to Christianity is not so rigidly or so instantaneously excluded from society as he used to be, and the Indian Christian community, although small, is now in many places one of the recognised sections of the community.

This certainly may be asserted, that the modern Hindus are being familiarised as never before with non-brahman leaders, religious and social. Neither of the recent Brāhma (Theistic) leaders, the late Keshub Chunder Sen and the late Protap Chunder Mozumdar, was brahman by caste. The great Bombay reformer, the Parsee, Malabari, is not even a Hindu. The founder of the Arya sect, the late Dyanand Saraswati, was out of caste altogether, being the son of a brahman father and a low-caste mother. The late Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Dutt, B.A.), who represented Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, was not a brahman, as his real surname plainly declares. While, most wonderful of all, the accepted leaders of the pro-Hindu Theosophists, champions of Hinduism more Hindu than the Hindus, after whom the educated Hindus flock, are not even Indians; alas, they belong, the most prominent of them, to the inferior female sex! I mean the Russian lady, the late Madame Blavatsky, the English ladies Mrs. Annie Besant and Miss Noble [Sister Nivedita], and the American, Colonel Olcott. Which side of that glaring incongruity is to give way—brahman and caste ideas, or the buttressing of caste ideas by outcastes, Feringees, like Mrs. Besant? It would be interesting to hear an orthodox brahman upon Mrs. Besant's claim to have had a previous Hindu existence as a Sanscrit pandit. What sin did the pandit commit, would be his natural reflection, that he was born again a Feringee, and a woman?

But the offence of the fifth sin, marrying below one's caste, or the marriage of widows, seems as rank as ever. Upon these points, rather, the force of caste seems concentrating. The marriage of widows will be considered when we come to discuss the social inferiority of woman in India. To marry within one's caste promises to be the most persistent of all the caste ideas. The official observation is that "whatever may have been the origin and the earlier developments of caste, this prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth now as its essential and most prominent characteristic. The feeling against such unions is deeply engrained." And again, a second pronouncement on caste: "The regulations regarding food and drink are comparatively fluid and transitory, while those relating to marriage are remarkably stable and absolute."[16] The pro-Hindu lady, already referred to, also agrees. "Of hereditary caste," she says, "the essential characteristic is the refusal of intermarriage."[17] Even Indian Christians are reluctant to marry below their old caste, and value a matrimonial alliance with a higher. To that residuum of caste, when it becomes the residuum, one could not object. The Aryan purity of the stock may be a fiction, as authorities declare it to be in the great majority of castes and in by far the greater part of India; but given the belief in the purity of blood, the desire to preserve it is a natural desire. If one may prophesy, then, regarding the fate of the caste system under the prevailing modern influences, castes will survive longest simply as a number of in-marrying social groups. To that hard core the caste idea is being visibly worn down.

With strange obliviousness surely, the British officials are lending support to caste ideas in various ways, while many of the best minds in India are groaning under the tyranny. The compilers of the Report of the Census of India for 1901, gentlemen to whom every student of India is deeply indebted, in their enumeration of castes, give the imprimatur of government to such Cimmerian notions as that the touch of certain low castes is defiling to the higher. The writer and condoner of the following paragraph surely need a lengthy furlough to Britain or the States. We read that "the table of social precedence attached to the Cochin Report shows that while a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher caste only by touching him, people of the Kammalan group, including masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in leather, pollute at a distance of 24 feet, toddy drawers at 36 feet, Palayan or Cheruman cultivators at 48 feet; while in the case of the Paraiyan (Pariahs) who eat beef, the range of pollution is stated to be no less than 64 feet." Some consolation let us even here take from the fact that in an earlier publication the extreme range of the polluting X-rays of the pariah is stated to be 72 feet. So there has been 8 feet of progress for the pariah. But our point is, that interesting as all that table of precedence no doubt is, it is out of place in a Government report, which may be quoted against a poor low-caste man as authoritative pronouncement regarding his social position. Justice and humanity, good grounds in the eyes of the Indian Government ere now for legislating contrary to caste ideas, ought to have enjoined the ignoring of caste ideas here. It is no mere fancy that after an accident one of these low-caste masons in South India might be brought to the door of a Government hospital and be refused admission by a native medical officer because his presence polluted at a distance of 24 feet—has not the Government Report declared it so? It is no fancy, for a year or two ago the Post Office reported that in one village the Post Office was found located where low castes were not allowed to approach. In some provinces, also, teachers will object to the admission of low-caste children in their schools; or "if they admit them make them sit outside in the verandah."[18] What now of the dignity of manual labour which many a high official has expounded to native youth? Or to take another instance of un-British countenancing of the caste idea. The Shahas of Bengal are a humble caste, and the members of higher castes will not, as a rule, take water at their hands, so the Government Report tells us. On the other hand, the Shahas of Assam, immigrants from Bengal, have managed to raise themselves high in the social scale. Why, when an Assam Shaha takes up his residence again in his motherland, Bengal, should this Blue-book be casting up to him his humble origin? Why this un-British weighting of those who are behind in the race? Again, at the very time of the Census, the Maratha caste was in conflict with the brahman in two Native States of Western India, Kohlapur and Baroda, over a matter of religious privileges. The brahman contention is that the Mahratta pretensions to high-caste blood [kshatriya] are groundless, and now we have the very same statement in the Census Report, backing "the king of the castle" against "the dirty rascal." Not a century ago, students of kayasth [clerk] caste were excluded from the Sanscrit College in Calcutta; they are now within the privileged circle, but their claim might not yet have been made good had a Government Blue-book of these earlier days been allowed to brand them as debarred from the College by their caste. At a public meeting the writer heard one of the most learned and respected Hindus of Calcutta respectfully protest to the Lieutenant-Governor against the public recognition in the Census Report of such irrational social grading.[19]

Similarly in the provision by Government of Caste Hostels for students. According to the first rule of the Hindu Hostel in connection with the Government College in Calcutta, "none but respectable Hindu students ... shall be admitted,... and such inmates shall observe the rules and usages of Hindu Society." In that rule, "respectable" simply means other than low caste. Now for the reductio ad absurdum. A certain Bengali gentleman of low caste was some years ago entitled to be addressed as "Honourable," from the high public office he held, yet by departmental orders the Principal of the Government College would shut the door of the College Hostel in the face of the Honourable's son.

Of the new religious organisations of educated India, three repudiate caste, namely, the Protestant Christian community, the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association, chiefly found in Bengal, and the Ārya Samāj or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and the Punjab. These forces of new religious feeling are marshalled against caste as a social anomaly and a bar to progress. Mahomedanism in its day was a powerful force arrayed against caste, but its regenerating power has long ago evaporated, for in many districts of India caste ideas are found flourishing among the Mahomedan converts from Hinduism. They have carried over the caste ideas from their old to their new religion.[20] The Sikhs in the Punjab also repudiate caste, but they too have forgotten their old reforming mission. Notwithstanding, we repeat, Northern India owes an immense debt to these two religions, particularly to Mahomedanism. Let any one who doubts it observe the caste thraldom of Southern India, where Mahomedan rule never established itself. Irrational as caste is in Northern India, it is tenfold more so in the South, as we have already seen. A noteworthy assertion of "the rights of men," or more literally of the rights of women, against caste may be noted in that same caste-bound South India. In the Native State of Travancore, caste custom had prohibited the women of the lower castes from wearing clothing above the waist. But about the year 1827, the women who became Christians began to don a loose jacket as the women of higher caste had been in the habit of doing. Bitter persecution of the Christian women followed, but in 1859 the right of these lower-caste women to wear an upper cloth was legally acknowledged.[21]

But the outstanding evidence of new ideas in regard to caste is furnished by the Hindu revivalists who, under the leading of Mrs. Annie Besant and the Theosophists, have established the Hindu College, Benares, as a buttress of Hinduism. From the Text-book of Hindu Religion prepared for the College, we learn that these representatives and champions of orthodoxy defend caste only to the extent of the ancient fourfold division of society into brahmans, rulers, merchants and agriculturists (one caste), and servants. What, we may ask, is to become of the 1886 sub-divisions of the brahman caste alone, all mutually exclusive with regard to inter-marriage? The text-book actually quotes sacred texts to show that caste depends on conduct, not on birth, and refers to bygone cases of promotion of heroes to a higher caste without rebirth. Its final pronouncement on caste is that "unless the abuses that are interwoven with it can be eliminated, its doom is certain." So far has the opinion of orthodox conservative Hinduism progressed with reference to its fundamental social feature, caste.

CHAPTER IV

English education is the chief solvent of old ideas in India and the chief source from which the new are supplied. English is the language of the freest peoples in the world. It is only to be expected, therefore, that with the spread of English education in India the idea of individual freedom and the feeling of nationality should grow and the caste idea decline. The beginning of the process is often witnessed among the boys in Secondary Schools in India. You lay your hand upon the arm of a boy, a new-comer to the school, and you ask him in English, "What class?" He answers "Brahman," giving you his caste instead of his class in school. The boy will not be long in the English school before he will classify himself differently. In a dozen ways each day he is made to feel that the school and the modern world have another standard for boys and men than the caste. Or take another example of the educative effect of a study of English—I can vouch for its genuineness. In your house in India you get into friendly conversation with a half-educated shopkeeper or native tradesman. You ask in English how many children he has, and his reply is, "I have not any children, I have three daughters." Just a little more reading in English literature would have taught him that elsewhere the daughter is a child of the family equally with the son.

There, in these two examples, the great social problems of India present themselves—caste and the social inferiority of women, and in the English language we see India confronted with ideas different from her own. Take a third illustration from the socio-religious sphere. Few Hindus think of Hinduism as a system of religious practices and doctrines to be justified by reason or by spiritual intuition, or by the spiritual satisfaction it can afford to mankind. No, Hinduism is a thing for Indians, and belongs to the Indian soil. The converse of the idea is that Christianity is a foreign thing, the religion of the intruding ruling race. It is not for Indians. A vigorous patriotic pamphlet, published in 1903, entitled The Future of India, assumes plainly that Hindus and Indians mean the same thing. The pamphlet speaks of the relations of Indians to "other races, such as Mahomedans, Parsees, and Christians," as if these were less truly Indians than the Hindus. To the writer, manifestly, Hinduism is a racial thing. To him, however, or to the next generation after him, further study of modern history will make clear that only in a slight degree and a few instances is religion a racial thing, and that there are laws and a science of spiritual as of bodily health. Once more, how ill-fitting are, say, the Indian word mukti (deliverance from further lives, the end of transmigrations) and the English word salvation, although mukti and salvation are often regarded as equivalents.

To the man instructed in English, such contrasts are always being presented, tacitly inviting him to compare and to modify. We can put ourselves in the place of many a youth of sixteen or seventeen, hope of the village school, going up to enter a college in one of the larger towns of India. He is entering the new world. Should he be of brahman caste, it may profit him a little, for he will still meet with many non-brahman householders ready to find him in food and lodging simply because he is a poor brahman student. Of course he is looking forward to one of the new professions, Law, or Medicine, or Engineering, or Teaching, or Government Service. In these it is patent to him that caste is of no account. High caste or low, he and all his fellow-students are aware they must prove themselves and fight their way up. The leading place at the bar is no more a high-caste man's privilege than it is his privilege to be exempted from standing in the dock or suffering the extreme penalty of the law. We have already referred to the effect of the assertion of the equality of men before the law in 1775 in the hanging of the brahman, Nandakumar, for forgery. Now, looking back at the dissolving of the old ideas of artificial rank and privileges, we may reckon also the equality of men in the great modern professions, foremost in India being Law, as among the chief dissolving agencies.

It is easy to give figures at least for the vast agency now at work in the spread of English education in India. Higher English education for natives began with the founding of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817; in the year 1902 there were in India five Universities, the examinations of which are conducted in English; and affiliated to these examining Universities were 188 teaching colleges containing 23,009 undergraduates; and preparing for the Matriculation Examination (in the year 1896-97) were 5267 Secondary Schools, containing 535,155 pupils. From these Secondary Schools in the year 1901, 21,750 candidates appeared at the Matriculation Examinations of the Universities professing to be able to write their answers in English, and of these nearly 8000 passed. That figure is a measure of the process of leavening India with modern ideas through English education—8000 fresh recruits a year. That is the measure of the confusion introduced into the old social organism. A small number, no doubt, compared with the ten million of unleavened youth born in the same year, and yet they are the pick of the middle classes and must become the leaders of the masses. The masses in China, it is alleged, would not be anti-foreign were it not for the influence of their literati, and the thoughts of these Indian literati must also become the thoughts of the Indian masses. It is the mind of these literati, mainly, which we are trying to gauge. According to the census of 1901 their total number approached one million, being those who could read and write English. Descending below the English-reading literati, I have noted about three hundred English words naturalised in two of the chief vernaculars of India, an indication, if not a measure, of the new influence among the masses.

Yet having tabulated figures, once more, ere we proceed, we enjoin upon ourselves and our readers a cautious estimate of the progress of ideas. The European hood and gown of the Indian student may merely drape an unchanged being. Writing in 1823 about the encouragement of education and the teaching of English and the translation of English books, the Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, declared too confidently that "the conversion of the natives must result from the diffusion of knowledge among them." Macaulay, similarly, writing from India in 1836 to his father, the well-known philanthropist, declares: "It is my firm belief that if our plans of[English] education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence." Omar Khayyam's words suggest themselves as the other extreme of opinion regarding English education in India, inside of which the truth will be found:

2. Iswar Chunder Vidyasagar, a great upholder of the right of widows to remarry and an advocate of education, both elementary and higher. He died at Calcutta in 1891.

1. Dyanand Saraswati, founder of the new sect of Āryas in the United Provinces and Punjab. Their chief doctrine, the infallibility of the Vedas or earliest Hindu scriptures, is reactionary, although a number of reforms are inculcated in the name of a return to the Vedas.

New Hinduism in contact with the modern educational influences was most interestingly manifest in the person of Swami Vivekananda (Reverend Rational-bliss we may render his adopted name), representative of Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. The representative Hindu was not even a member of the priestly caste, as we have already told. It were tedious to analyse his Hinduism, as set forth at Chicago and elsewhere, into what was Christianity or modern thought, and what, on the other hand, was Hinduism. Suffice it to say that as Narendra Nath Dutt, B.A., he figures on the roll of graduates of the Church of Scotland's College in Calcutta. While a student there, he sat at the feet of two teachers representing the new and the old, the West and the East. In the College classroom he received religious instruction from Dr. Hastie, the distinguished theologian who afterwards taught Scottish students of theology in the University of Glasgow. At the same time he was in the habit of visiting the famous Bengali ascetic, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, already mentioned, and of communing with him. Returning from Chicago crowned with the honour which his earnestness, his eloquence, his power of reasoning, his attractive manner, and his striking physique and dress called forth, Young India lionised him; Old India met in Calcutta and resolved that Mr. Dutt of kayasth caste must drop the brahman title Swami, which he had assumed, before they could recognise him. In 1895, having gone to Dakhineswar, the old residence of his Hindu master, Ramkrishna, Swami Vivekananda was actually expelled from the temple where his master had been wont to worship. The Chicago representative of Hinduism had been guilty of the sins of crossing the sea and of living like a European, and so he must be disowned and the temple purged of his presence. After a few years, Swami Vivekananda bravely settled down to unobtrusive, philanthropic work, one had almost said Christian philanthropic work, in a suburb of Calcutta, denouncing caste and idolatry and the outcasting of those who had crossed the sea, and recommending the Hindus to take to flesh-eating. There, and while so engaged, in 1902 he died. How shall we ticket that strange personage? Kayasth caste as he was born, or new brahman? Swami or B.A. of a Mission College of the modern Calcutta University? A conservative or a reformer? Hindu ascetic or Christian philanthropist? He stands for India in transition, old and new ideas commingling. He is a typical product of the English and Christian education given to multitudes in India to-day.

CHAPTER V

Next to caste, the chief social feature of India is the position of women in the community. Hindus and Mahomedans alike assign to the female sex an inferior position. In Mahomedan mosques, for example, no woman is ever seen at prayer; she would not be permitted to take part. Only by the neglect of female children in India, and the special disadvantages from which women suffer there, can it be explained why in India in 1901 there were only 963 females to every 1000 males. In India, as in Europe and all the world over, more boys than girls are born, but in the course of life the balance is soon redressed, and in the whole population in every country in Europe, except Italy[22] and Bulgaria, the females actually outnumber the males. Why are the Indian figures so different? Pro-Hindu enthusiasts may glorify the Hindu social system, and wish to deny the social inferiority of the female sex; average Anglo-Indians may be suspected of being unsympathetic in their statements; but the Census figures stand, and demand an explanation. Where are these 37 girls and women out of every 1000—over five million altogether? Common humanity demands an answer of India, for we seem to hear a bitter cry of India's womanhood. As infants, less cared for; as girls, less educated; married too early; ignorantly tended in their hour; as married ladies, shut out of the world; always more victimised by ignorance and superstition—in life's race, India's women carry a heavy handicap, and 37 out of every 1000 actually succumb.

In the matter of the social elevation of their sex, it appears to the writer that Anglo-Indian ladies fall far short of what they might do. A fair number do interest themselves in their Indian sisters through the lady missionaries and lady doctors, but first-hand knowledge of the lives of Indian women is very rare indeed. Our late revered Queen's interest in India and in the womanhood of India is well known, but her feeling about the duty of Anglo-Indian ladies I have never seen recorded. Speaking at Balmoral to an Indian Christian lady, a member of one of the royal families of India—the only lady perhaps who ever conversed in Hindustani with Queen Victoria—she expressed her regret that more Anglo-Indian ladies did not get up the native language, sufficiently at least to let them visit their Indian sisters. Than Christian sisterly sympathy thus expressed, what better link also could there be between two communities which many things seem to be forcing apart?

It would be unjust to depreciate the influence of mother and wife among Hindus, and we freely acknowledge that, after custom, the mainstay of the zenana system is concern for the purity of the female members of the household. Saying that, we must now also note that modern ideas of the just rights of the female sex have made little progress in India. Some progress there has been, judging by the standard already applied; for although in 1901 there were only 963 females to every 1000 males, in the year 1891 there were only 958, and in the year 1881 still fewer, namely, 954. But it seems as if in India we had justification of the law of social progress that woman's rights will not be recognised until man's have been. The brotherhood of man must be established before men recognise that sister women too have rights. Translating into Indian terms, and without professing to have given positive proof—caste feeling must still further decay before the position of women becomes much improved. At all events, judging by the past, it almost seems to have been necessary for the Legislature to intervene to secure any progress for the sex and give a foothold to the new ideas, glaringly unfair to the sex as the old ideas were. Thus in 1870 female infanticide, earlier prohibited in single provinces, was put down by law throughout India; although there are localities still in which the small proportion of female children justifies the belief that female infanticide is not extinct.[23] Nevertheless, let the progress of the new ideas regarding women be noted; we compare the hesitating inference of the practice of female infanticide in the Indian Census Report of 1901 with the voluminous evidence in the two volumes of Parliamentary Papers on Infanticide in India published in 1824 and 1828. Kathiawar and Cutch, Baroda and Rajputana, round Benares and parts of Oude and Madras were the localities particularly infected with the barbarous custom in the first quarter of the century. But to return to the recognition of the rights of women in legislative enactments. In 1829 an Act of the Supreme Government in Bengal made Suttee or the burning of a widow upon the dead husband's pyre an offence for all concerned. In 1830 similar Acts were passed by the Governments of Madras and Bombay, and the abolition of Suttee is now universally approved.[24] Such is the educative influence of a good law. Perhaps a would-be patriot may yet occasionally be heard so belauding the devotion of the widows who burned themselves that his praise is tantamount to a lament over the abolition of Suttee. But the general sentiment has been completely changed since the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Missionaries and some outstanding Indians like the Bengali reformer Rammohan Roy agitated for the abolition of Suttee, and the Government, convinced, still hesitated to put down a custom so generally approved. In these changed times it will hardly be believed that Rammohan Roy only ventured to argue against any form of compulsion being put upon the widow, and that the orthodox champions of the practice appealed against the abolition not only to the Governor-General, but also to the King in Council,—the petition having been heard in the House of Lords in 1832. But once more to return to the emancipation of women by Acts of the Legislature. By another Act, in 1856, the Indian Government abolished the legal restrictions to widow marriage. Still another Act, in 1891, forbade cohabitation before the age of twelve; and although fiercely opposed in the native press and in mass meetings, the Act, which expressed the views of many educated Hindus, is now apparently acquiesced in by all, and must be educating the community into a new idea of marriage.

In five aspects the social inferiority of the female sex is still apparent—namely, in the illiteracy of females, in marriage before womanhood, in polygamy, in the seclusion of women, and in the prohibition of the marriage of widows. Excepting the last, no one of these customs is imposed by caste, nor is the last even in every caste.

The injustice done to the sex by marriage before womanhood is apparent from another paragraph of the same Report, showing that out of every 1000 girls of the age of 10 or under, 58 are already married, as against 22 boys. Taking Hindus alone, the number of married girls of 10 years of age or under is 70 per 1000 as against 28 married boys. Even allowing for those provinces where cohabitation is delayed, these figures mean in other provinces a cruel wrong to the children of the weaker sex, a doubly cruel wrong when to premature marriage may be added girl widowhood. The Census Report declares that in the lower strata of Hindu society there has been a rapid extension of child marriage and prohibition of the marriage of widows within the last two or three generations, although at the low age of 10, fewer girls are reported married than in 1881.[25] That is to say, the bad example of the higher castes is lowering the marriage age in the humble castes, while modern influences are diminishing the number of marriages of mere children,—we can see both forces in operation. Here again Indian Christians, Brāhmas, and Āryas are at one in setting a better example and advocating reform. The educative Act of 1891 for British India has also been noted above. Native States too are following up. In Rajputana, through the influence of the Agent of the Governor-General, Colonel Walter, an association was formed in 1888 which fixed the marriage age for two of the chief castes at eighteen for the bridegroom and fourteen for the bride. In the Native State of Baroda, in the extreme West of India, a new Marriage Act has just been passed by the enlightened ruler [1904]. In Baroda, except in special cases, the minimum marriage age of girls is henceforward to be twelve, and of the bridegrooms sixteen. Exceptional cases had to be provided for, because of the custom in certain communities within the state of Baroda to celebrate marriages only once every twelve years, female infants and girls of ten and twelve being then "happily despatched" together. With that custom and with the new Act together, it would necessarily happen that girls of eleven at the general marrying time would have to wait twelve years more, or until their twenty-third year. Since in some parts of India there is a saying about women "Old at twenty," that delay would not do. All educated young men may be said to hold the new ideas in these marriage matters. Students now regard it with regret and some sense of a grievance when their guardians have married them in their school or college years. The only alleviation to their minds is when the dowry which they bring into the family at their marriage helps to endow a sister who has reached the marriage age, or to educate a brother or pay off the family debts. Among educated people too, the idea that the other world is closed to bachelors and childless men has died, although a daughter unmarried after the age of puberty is still a stigma on the family. Do British readers realise that in an Indian novel of the middle and upper classes there can hardly be a bride older than twelve; there can be no love story of the long wooing and waiting of the lovers?