The conundrums of India have a way of answering themselves, when one looks close.
Long and easily we have accepted the catchword "mysterious India." But "mystery," as far as matters concrete are concerned, remains such only as long as one persists in seeking a mysterious cause for the phenomena. Look for a practical cause, as you would do in any bread-and-butter country not labeled "inscrutable," and your mystery vanishes in smoke.
"Why, after so many years of British rule, do we remain 92 per cent, illiterate?" reiterates the Hindu politician, implying that the blame must be laid at the ruler's door.
But in naming his figure, he does not call to your attention a fact which, left to yourself, you would be slow to guess: he does not tell you that of the 247,-000,000 inhabitants of British India, about 25 per cent.--60,000,000--have from time immemorial been specially condemned to illiteracy, even to sub-humanity, by their brother Indians. Surely, if there be a mystery in India, it lies here--it lies in the Hindu's ability anywhere, under any circumstances, to accuse any man, any society, any nation, of "race prejudice," so long as he can be reminded of the existence in India of sixty million fellow Indians to whom he violently denies the common rights of man.[1]
[1. Indian politicians have for some time heen directing a loud and continuous fire upon the British Home Government for not finding means to coerce the Government of the Union of South Africa into a complaisant attitude toward British Indian immigrants in that country. It is worthy of note that of the original 130,000 British Indian immigrants to South Africa, one-third were "Untouchables," mostly from Madras Presidency, whose condition in India is indicated in this chapter, and who would find themselves again in such status, were they to return to Hindu India. The British Indians in South Africa in 1922 numbered, as shown in the official Year-Book, a little over 161,000. This figure includes a later immigration of 10,000 traders, and the natural increase of the combined body.]
In the beginning, it is explained, when the light-skinned ancestors of the present Hindus first came to India, they found there a darker, thicker-featured native race, the Dravidians, builders of the great temples of the South. And the priests of the newcomers desired that the blood of their people be not mixed with the native stock, but be kept of one strain. So they declared Dravidians to be unclean, "untouchable."
Then the old lawmakers, gradually devising the caste system, placed themselves at the head thereof, under the title of "earthly gods"--Brahmans. Next beneath them they put the Kshattryas, or fighting men; after the fighters, the Vaisyas, or cultivators, upon whom the two above look down; and finally, the fourth division, or Sudra caste, born solely to be servants to the other three. Of these four divisions, themselves today much subdivided, was built the frame of Hindu society. Outside and below all caste, in a limbo of scorn earned by their sins of former existences, must forever grovel the Untouchables.
A quotation from the rule by which the unfortunates were nailed to their fate will suffice to show its nature; the Bhagavata,[2] treating of the murder of a Brahman, decrees:
[2. Chief of the eighteen Puranas, sacred books of India. The translation here given is that of the Abbé Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, p. 558.]
Whoever is guilty of it will be condemned at his death to take the form of one of those insects which feed on filth. Being reborn long afterwards a Pariah [Untouchable], he will belong to this caste, and will be blind for more than four times as many years as there are hairs on the body of a cow. He can, nevertheless, expiate his crime by feeding forty thousand Brahmins.
Thus, at one sweep, is explained the Untouchable's existence as such; are justified the indignities heaped upon him; is emphasized his unspeakable degradation; and is safeguarded the oppressor from the wrath of him oppressed. Even as the Hindu husband, by the horrors imposed upon widowhood, is safeguarded from a maddened wife's revolt.
If a Brahmin kills a Sudra,[3] it will suffice to efface the sin altogether if he recites the gayatri [a prayer] a hundred times, continues the scripture, by opposites driving home its point.
Leaving the ancient roots of things, and coming down to the year 1926 A.D., we find the orthodox Hindu rule as to Untouchables to be roughly this:
[3. A member of the fourth division, lowest Hindu caste, yet far above the Untouchable.]
Regarded as if sub-human, the tasks held basest are reserved for them; dishonor is associated with their name. Some are permitted to serve only as scavengers and removers of night soil; some, through the ignorance to which they are condemned, are loathsome in their habits; and to all of them the privilege of any sort of teaching is sternly denied. They may neither possess nor read the Hindu scriptures. No Brahman priest will minister to them; and, except in rarest instances, they may not enter a Hindu temple to worship or pray. Their children may not come to the public schools. They may not draw water from the public wells; and if their habitation be in a region where water is scarce and sources far apart, this means, for them, not greater consideration from others, but greater suffering and greater toil.
They may not enter a court of justice; they may not enter a dispensary to get help for their sick; they may stop at no inn. In some provinces they may not even use the public road, and as laborers or agriculturists, they are continually losers, in that they may not enter the shops or even pass through the streets where shops are, but must trust to a haphazard chain of hungry go-betweens to buy or sell their meager wares. Some, in the abyss of their degradation, are permitted no work at all. These may sell nothing, not even their own labor. They may only beg. And even for that purpose they dare not use the road, but must stand far off, unseen, and cry out for alms from those who pass. If alms be given, it must be tossed on the ground, well away from the road, and when the giver is out of sight and the roads empty then, and not till then, the watcher may creep up, snatch, and run.
Some, if not all, pollute, beyond caste men's use, any food upon which their shadow falls. Food, after such defilement, can only be destroyed.
Others, again, exude "distance pollution" as an effluvium from their unhappy bodies. If one of these presumes to approach and linger by a highroad, he must measure the distance to the highroad. If it be within two hundred yards, he must carefully place on the road a green leaf weighted down with a handful of earth, thereby indicating that he, the unclean, is within pollution distance of that point. The passing Brahman, seeing the signal, halts and shouts. The poor man forthwith takes to his heels, and only when he has fled far enough calls back, "I am now two hundred yards away. Be pleased to pass."
Still others--the Puliahs of the Malabar Coast--have been forbidden to build themselves huts, and permitted to construct for houses nothing better than a sort of leaf awning on poles, or nests in the crotches of big trees. These may approach no other type of humanity. Dubois recorded that, in his day, a Nair (high-caste Hindu) meeting a Puliah on the road, was entitled to stab the offender on the spot.[4] Today the Nair would hesitate. But still, today, the Puliah may approach no caste man nearer than sixty or ninety feet.
[4. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, pp. 60-1. See also Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, Caspar Correa, Hakluyt Society, London, 1869, p. 155.]
Under such conditions of preordained misery, certain communities among the Untouchables have developed a business in the practice of crime. These communities specialize, one in pocket-picking, another in burglary, yet others in forging, in highway robbery, in murder, etc., often combining their special trade with prostitution as a second industry. Scattered all over India and known as the Criminal Tribes, they number today about four and a half million persons.
Now it must not be forgotten that the matter of Untouchability, like almost all other Hindu concerns, is woven, warp and woof, into the Hindu religion; and that the Hindus are a tremendously religiose people. To quote the words of that prominent Indian, Sir Surendranath Banerjea:[5]
[5. A Nation in Making, London, Humphrey Milford, 1925, p 396.]
You cannot think of a social question affecting the Hindu community that is not bound up with religious considerations; and when divine sanction, in whatever form, is invoked in aid of a social institution, it sits enthroned in the popular;l heart with added firmness and fixity, having its roots in sentiment rather than in reason.
And dire experience shows to what lengths of blood-drenched madness the people can be goaded by a whisper that their caste is threatened or that insult is offered to their gods. That this was from the beginning understood by Government, is shown in an unequivocal clause in the Queen's Proclamation of December 2, 1858:
We do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of our subjects, on pain of our highest displeasure.
Nevertheless the immediate impulse of the Briton in India was to espouse the cause of the social victim. The Directors of the East India Company, as early as 1854, recommended that "no boy be refused admission to a Government school or college on ground of caste," and stuck to the principle until their authority was sunk in that of the Crown. Thenceforward it was continually reaffirmed, yet pushed with a caution that might seem faint-hearted to one unfamiliar with the extreme delicacy of the ground. Little or nothing was to be gained m any attempt to impose a foreign idea, by force, on unready and non-understanding millions.
Nor must the workings of caste be confused with snobbery. A man's caste is the outward sign of the history of his soul. To break caste by infringing any one of the multitudinous caste laws brings down an eternal penalty. If, as a Hindu, in obeying these laws, you inflict suffering upon another, that is merely because his soul-history has placed him in the path of pain. You have no concern in the matter; neither will he, thinking as a good Hindu, blame you. For both you and he are working out your god-appointed destiny.
Today almost all that can be accomplished by civil law for the Untouchable has been secured. Government has freely opened their way, as far as Government can determine, to every educational advantage and to high offices. And Government's various land-development and cooperative schemes, steadily increasing, have provided tremendous redeeming agencies and avenues of escape.
But for Provincial Governments to pass legislation asserting the rights of every citizen to enjoy public facilities, such as public schools, is one thing; to enforce that legislation over enormous countrysides and through multitudinous small villages without the cooperation and against the will of the people, is another. Witness that paragraph in the Madras Government Order of March 17, 1919, reading:
Children of Panchamas [Untouchables] are admitted only into 609 schools out of 8,157 in the Presidency, although the regulations state that no boy is to be refused admission merely on the ground of caste.
Yet, rightly read, the announcement proclaims a signal advantage won. Six hundred and nine schools in a most orthodox province admitting outcastes, as against only twelve times that number who refuse!
In the Bombay Legislative Council, one day in August, 1926, they were discussing a resolution to coerce local boards to permit Untouchables to send their children to schools, to draw water from public wells, and to enjoy other common rights of citizenship. Most of the Hindu members approved in principle. "But if the resolution is put into effect we would be faced with a storm of opposition," demurred one member, representative of many others. "Orthodox opinion is too strong, and while I sympathize with the resolution I think that...given effect, it may have disastrous effect."[6] And he submits that the path of wisdom, for friends of the Untouchables, is not to ask for action, but, instead, to content themselves with verbal expressions of sympathy, such as his own.
[6. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, 1926, Vol. XVIII, Part IX, p. 717.]
A second Hindu member, with characteristic nimble-ness, pitchforks the load toward shoulders broad enough to bear it:[7]
[7. Ibid., p. 728.]
I think the British Goyernment have followed a very timid policy in this presidency. They have refused to take part in any social legislation. Probably, being an alien Government, they were afraid that they would be accused of tampering with the religion of the various communities. In spite of the Proclamation of Queen Victoria about equality between the different classes and communities, Government have not given practical effect to it.
It remains, however, to a Muhammadan, Mr. Noor Mahomed, of Sind, to strike the practical note:[8]
[8. Ibid., August 5, p. 721.]
I think the day will not be distant when the people who are placed by the tyranny of the higher classes into the lower grade of society...will find themselves driven to other religious folds. There will then be no reason at all for the Hindu society to complain that Mahomedan or Christian missionaries are inducing members of depressed classes to change the religion of their birth...If the Hindu society refuses to allow other human beings, fellow creatures at that, to attend public schools, and if...the president of a local board representing so many lakhs[9] of people in this House refuses to allow his fellows and brothers the bare elementary human right of having water to drink, what right have they to ask for more rights from the bureaucracy?...Before we accuse people coming from other lands, we should see how we ourselves behave toward our own people...How can [we] ask for greater political rights when [we ourselves] deny elementary rights of human beings?
[9. A lakh is one hundred thousand.]
Regulations may prevail to bring the outcaste to the school door, but his courage may not suffice to get him across the threshold, for his self-assertion was done to death centuries ago. So that his admission to the school will mean, at best, permission to sit on the veranda and pick up from that distance whatever he can by his unaided ears.
Says the Village Education Commission:[10]
[10. Village Education in India, London, Oxford University Press, 1922, p. 21.]
Speaking generally, it is still the case that the caste man not only does nothing for the enlightenment of the outcaste, but puts positive obstacles in his way, knowing that if he is enlightened he can no longer be exploited. Outcastes who have the temerity to send their children to school--even if the school be in their quarter, so that there can be no complaint of defiling caste children by contact--find themselves subject to such violence and threatening that they yield and withdraw their children. If the outcastes want not only education but Christian teaching, the persecution, for a time, is all the fiercer, for the caste people are afraid that if the outcastes become Christians they will no longer be available for menial service.
An exceedingly small percentage of the outcastes are yet in school, but he of their number who pursues education past all the dragons that bar the door is likely to be one of the best of his kind. And, in spite of his immemorial history of degradation, the seed of the power to rise is not dead within him. The Nama-sudras of Bengal, an Untouchable class there numbering about 1,997,500, have, under the encouragement of the new light, made a vigorous, steady, and successful fight for self-elevation, and have organized to support schools of their own. By the last report they had in Bengal over 49,000 children under tuition, of whom 1,025 had reached the High School and 144 the Arts Colleges,[11] where, because of caste feeling, Government has been obliged to set aside special hostels for their lodging. This community is rapidly raising its status.
[11. Progress of Education in Bengal, Sixth Quinquennial Review.]
In the Punjab, where Government irrigation work is destroying many ancient miseries, appears evidence of a weakening of the ban that bars the outcaste from the common schools; although some of the Punjab municipalities have displayed a genius in tricking these most needy of their citizens out of the privileges of education.[12] Bombay's educational reports also indicate a significant advance in the percentage of Untouchables receiving tuition, largely under mission auspices. And the net results point to some interesting surmises.
[12. Cf. Report on the Progress of Education in the Punjab, 1924-25. Lahore, 1926, p. 71.]
Thus, the "depressed classes" have begun holding annual conferences of delegates to air their wrongs and to advance their rights. Their special representatives, now appointed to legislatures and to local bodies, grow more and more assertive. Their economic situation under Government's steady effort, is, in some communities, looking up. With it their sense of manhood is developing in the shape of resentment of the degradation to which until now they have bowed. Among them a few men of power and parts are beginning to stand out.
Finally, their women, as Christian converts, furnish the main body of Indian teachers for the girls of India of all castes, and of trained nurses for the hospitals; both callings despised and rejected by the superior castes, both necessitating education, and both carrying the possibility of increasing influence.
The first time that I, personally, approached a realizing sense of what the doctrine of Untouchability means, in terms of man's inhumanity to man, was during a visit to a child-welfare center in a northerly Indian city.
The place was crowded with Indian women who had brought their babies to be examined by the English professional in charge, a trained public health nurse. Toward her their attitude was that of children toward a wise and loving mother--confiding, affectionate, trusting. And their needs were inclusive. All morning I had been watching babies washed and weighed and examined, simple remedies handed out, questions answered, advice and friendly cautions given, encouragement and praise. Just now I happened to be looking at a matronly high-caste woman with an intelligent, clean-cut face. She was loaded with heavy gold and silver jewelry and wore a silken mantle. She sat down on the floor to show her baby, unrolling him from the torn fragment of an old quilt, his only garment. This revealed his whole little body caked in a mass of dry and half-dry excreta.
"She appears unconcerned," I remarked to the Sister. The Sister replied:
"We try to get such women to have napkins for their babies, but they won't buy them, they won't wash them themselves, and they won't pay washers to wash them, although they are quite able to do so. This woman is well born. Her husband is well educated--a technical man--and enjoys a good salary. Sometime it may please her to hang that bit of quilt out in the sun in her courtyard, and, when it is dry, to brush off what will come off. That's all. This, incidentally, helps explain why infantile diarrhoea spreads through the families in a district. They will make no attempt whatever to keep things clean."
As the Sister spoke, a figure appeared before the open doorway--a young woman so graceful and with a face so sweet and appealing as to rivet attention at once. She carried an ailing baby on her arm, but came no farther--just stood still beyond the doorway, wistfully smiling. The Sister, looking up, smiled back.
"Why does she not come in?" I asked.
"She dare not. If she did, all these others would go. She is an Untouchable--an outcaste. She herself would feel it wicked to set her foot upon that sill."
"She looks at least as decent as they," I remarked.
"Untouchables may be as intelligent as any one else--and you see for yourself that they couldn't be dirtier," said the Sister. "But such is the custom of India. Since we can't alter it, we just plod on, trying to help them all, as best we can."
And so the gentle suppliant waited outside, among a crowd of others of her kind, till Sister could go to them, bringing to this one ointment for baby's eyes, to that one a mixture for baby's cough, and hearing the story of another.
But they might not bring their little ones in, to the mercy of the warm bath, as the other women were doing at will. They might not come to the sewing class. They might not defile the scales by laying their babies in its basket, to see what the milk-dole was doing. For they were all horrible sinners in aeons past, deserving now neither help nor sympathy while they worked out their curse.