I shall, with the same caution as before, add one more letter, though I know I shall be very much blamed for doing so. The Râjah in expressing his own sentiments, expressed no doubt the sentiments of the society in which he moved, and the crisis through which the conservative and orthodox party passed at that time, unimportant as it may seem to us, was full of vital problems for the future of the religion of the cultivated classes of India. On March 5, 1855, Râdhâkânta Deva wrote:—

“I have lately received through the Bengal Government a copy of the second volume of the Rig-Veda, as a present from the Honourable the Court of Directors, and I can ill express the feelings of mingled joy and admiration with which I grasped this most precious gift. Our Pandits are startled out of their wits, and scarcely credit their senses, when they are told that the sacred volume before them has been edited by a distant European scholar who had no opportunities of consulting with a Vaidik Pandit, who had to collect, copy out, and collate various manuscripts of texts and commentaries, mutilated and corrupted, and to refer to the scanty and almost inaccessible sources of information on the subject for the purpose of ascertaining their genuine reading, and then with aching eyes to revise the proof-sheets.

“Great is the obligation under which you have laid the learned world. By your successfully embarking on such an arduous undertaking, you have done to the Hindus an inestimable benefit, supplying them with a correct and superb edition of their Holy Scriptures. Accept therefore my most grateful and sincere thanks, which, in common with my countrymen, I owe you, and my special acknowledgments for the very kind and obliging manner in which you have noticed my name and work in the preface to the second volume of the Rig-Veda. At the conclusion of this preface is to be found a truly poetic touch, a noble, frank, and irresistible gush of feeling for the irreparable loss sustained by the literary world and you personally, on the termination of the earthly career of Eugène Burnouf. I wish I could find terms adequate to respond to your sympathy; we cannot be too lavish of eulogies for his merits, or weary of dirges for his loss. In the few letters he has written to me I find a noble trait of humility and simplicity in his character which is the invariable exponent of a great mind.

“In 1833 on the occasion of acknowledging the present of the Sabda-kalpa-druma he says: ‘Ce n’est pas à un Européen qui est à peine sur le seuil de cette vaste science de l’Inde, qu’il appartient de juger une composition de ce mérite et d’une telle étendue. Des hommes comme les Colebrooke et les Wilson, qui ont puisé la grande partie de leurs connaissances à la source des entretiens brahmaniques, sont les juges les plus dignes d’un aussi beau travail.’

“In 1840, when he had the kindness to send me a copy of his fine edition of the Bhâgavata Purâna, he—the first decipherer of the Cuneiform inscriptions—the first Pali scholar and historian of Buddhism—the first editor and interpreter of the Zend-Avesta—and the great Sanskrit philologist—thus speaks of himself: ‘Mais, vous songerez que c’est l’œuvre d’un lointain Mletchha qui ne fait que commencer à balbutier la langue des grands et vénérables Rishis....’

“Wishing you a long life to crown all your undertakings with success, and requesting you to offer my best regards to my learned friend Professor Wilson, I remain with great respect,

I repeat once more that I must decline all the undeserved compliments paid to me by my Indian correspondents, who, though they show so perfect a mastery of English, are hardly aware that in the North our language is less warm and less sunny than in the South, and that we leave many things unsaid which must bring a blush to the cheeks of any one who knows himself, and knows how very imperfect his knowledge really is, and how far below his ideals the execution of the work of his life has remained. If Burnouf said that he was only beginning to stammer Sanskrit, what shall I, his unworthy pupil, say? But the letters themselves are important as showing the attitude assumed by the conservative orthodox party in India, when the first edition of their Sacred Book fell among them like a bombshell. For years, for centuries, nay for thousands of years, this Veda on which their whole religion was founded had been to them a kind of invisible power, much as the Bible was in the early centuries of the Papacy, when the privileged only were supposed to know it and were allowed to interpret it. In discussions between Brâhmans and Christian missionaries, this Veda had always been the last stronghold of the Brâhmans. Whatever was held up to them as a doctrine peculiar to Christianity, was met by them with the ready reply that it had been taught long ago in the Vedas also. But this Veda itself was never produced when they were asked to point out chapter and verse. Long after the MSS. of other Sanskrit texts had been freely communicated to English students, the MSS. of the Veda were kept apart, and the touch, nay the very look of an unbeliever was supposed to desecrate them. And now the book was there, handled by everybody, and spelt out more or less successfully by anybody acquainted with Sanskrit. The Brâhmans always accept the inevitable, but we shall see how, with a better knowledge of the Veda, there sprang up discussions as to its divine or revealed character, and how these discussions led gradually to the formation of a new religious sect, which, though at present confined to small circles, will no doubt in the end stir the millions, and produce a reformation in a country which seemed to be unchangeable. Of this I shall have to speak later on, when I gather up my reminiscences of Keshub Chunder Sen and his fellow-workers. Movements in which we are interested and engaged ourselves from their beginnings seem generally much smaller to us than they really are in the light of history. When Luther was translating the Bible in the castle of the Wartburg, he little dreamt that he was laying the foundation of a new Church in Germany and in all Teutonic countries, nor did Rammohun Roy on his deathbed at Bristol foresee what would grow up from the few hints he had thrown out as to the possibility of a reform and a revival of the ancient national religion of his country. But Debendranâth followed, Keshub Chunder Sen followed, and if the fire they lit does not at present burn and shine so brightly as it ought, it will certainly not die, but burst out again; for the way which those heroes pointed out is the only possible way leading from the past to the future, from ancient to modern religion, from darkness to light. Many who have lived in India and who imagine that they know India, because they know Calcutta or Bombay, are inclined to shrug their shoulders and to look down with superior wisdom and pity on those misguided dreamers, as they call them, who imagine that they can guide millions to a higher and more truly religious life. We may not live to see the hopes of Rammohun Roy or Keshub Chunder Sen realised; but, as certainly as the sun rises in the morning, the new light for India will break forth from that East to which those prophets and martyrs pointed in the last moments of their life.

The Râjah Râdhâkânta Deva was a conservative of the purest water, not touched as yet even by that conservative liberalism which guided Debendranâth Tagore and made him sympathise with, though it kept him for a time aloof from, his bolder pupil and friend, Keshub Chunder Sen. He himself seems to have never doubted the divine authority of the Veda, and in a curious controversy which I had with him on the Burning of Widows he held his ground firmly as a defender of the old ways. As we became better acquainted with the Veda, it became perfectly clear that the verse from the Rig-Veda which was cited by the Brâhmans as the supreme command for the burning of widows, had been tampered with. The Brâhmans themselves seem to have felt that so barbarous and murderous a custom as the burning of widows, whatever its origin may have been, could only be defended by an authority that was admitted to be infallible and superhuman. Such was the Rig-Veda, and they did not shrink from altering a verse which occurred in a funeral hymn of that Veda, so that instead of conveying a command to the widows to return to their home after having performed the last duty to their departed husbands, it came to mean that they should enter into the womb of fire to follow their husbands to a better world. How such a falsification could have been committed is difficult to understand, when we consider that at first the falsification had to be made in the thousands of memories which represented the real copies of the Rig-Veda. It must have taken place at a very early time, because cases of Sutti do occur, if not in the Rig-Veda, at least in the ancient popular tradition of India, as represented to us in the Mahâbhârata. Even Râdhâkânta Deva seemed inclined at last to agree with me that in the Veda, as we possess it, there is no direct command for this terrible custom; but he took his stand on the old tradition and maintained that we did not possess the whole of the ancient Vedic literature, and that the authority for the old custom may have existed in one of the lost Sâkhâs or branches of the Veda. This was a favourite argument with Indian casuists, but Indian casuists had likewise found an answer to it. They called it the “skull argument,” and reasoned that as little as a skull could be accepted as a witness in a court of law, could a lost Sâkhâ of the Veda be appealed to as an authority for a custom like the burning of widows.

All this gives us an insight into the thoughts that rule Indian society, of which even those who spend their best years in India have hardly any suspicion. That an educated Hindu should defend the burning of widows seems strange; still, if Popes and Cardinals could defend auto-da-fé’s or the burning of heretics, nay, even of witches, because the fire would purify and save their souls which could not be saved otherwise, why should not an Indian Râjah have been convinced that the burning of widows could not be wrong, believing, as he did, that it was enjoined by a lost Sâkhâ of the Veda, and that the poor women could not be saved unless they followed their husbands on their heels into another world? These are ingrained feelings, and every Hindu would at once recite the popular verses, “Accompanying her husband, she shall reside so long in Svarga (Heaven) as are the thirty-five millions of hairs on the human body.”

A loyal wife is defined as “she whose sympathy feels the pains and joys of her husband, who mourns and pines in his absence, and dies when he dies.”

In theory this is all very beautiful, and that there may have been cases where a widow wished to be burnt on her husband’s pile, can hardly be doubted^[1]. It is well known that this custom of widow-burning, or of widows dying with their husbands, was by no means confined to India; but it is known also, now that the pages of the Veda are open to us, that the Veda certainly does not countenance it. The custom seems to have arisen with the warrior caste, and I still feel inclined to think that in its origin it was voluntary, and arose from blind, passionate love, and a strong belief in an immediate meeting again in a better world. The idea that its object was to deter wives from poisoning their husbands is simply preposterous, and though it may be quite true that at present the life of a widow has been rendered so miserable that many would willingly prefer death to so wretched an existence as that of a widow, that too could not account for so ancient and so widely spread a custom. In our own ancient Teutonic mythology, when Baldur had been murdered and his body had been placed in a ship to be carried out to sea, his wife, Nanna, died of grief, and was burnt with him on the same pile^[2]. And Gudrun (Brynhild) also, after Sigurd had been slain, had but one wish, to be burnt with him on the same pile, two servants at their head and two at their feet, two dogs also and two hawks, and the biting sword between them, the same sword that lay between them when they slept together on the same bed, like brother and sister^[3]. There is humanity in all this inhuman barbarism, if only we try to discover it. The strange part is that this human feeling should have manifested itself in the women only, and never in the men.