New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - John Morrison (best english books to read .TXT) 📗
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All that, of course, is a parable. Likewise, in the new India we are studying, product of new modern influences direct and indirect, two kinds of religious changes impress us. There is, first, the gradual change coming over the whole thought of the people, a transformation like that wrought upon the face and climate of many lands. There is, further, the religious change, more immediately evident, in the new Indian religious organisations of the past century, analogous to the new, cultivated, products of the soil.
As change more definite and perceptible, we look first at the new Indian religious organisations. Within the British period, four organised religious movements attract our notice. They are: I. The new Indian Christian Church; II. The Brāhma Samāj and the kindred Prārthanā Samājes; III. The Ārya Samāj; and IV. The Theosophical Society, which in India now stands for the revival of Hinduism.
I. To hear the native Indian Church reckoned among the products of the British period may be surprising to some. There are indeed Christian communities in India older than the Christianity of many districts in Britain, and even excluding the Syrian and Roman Christians of India we must acknowledge that the Protestant Christian community dates farther back than the British period. Yet in a real sense the Protestant Indian Church, and the progressive character of the whole Indian Church, belong to the century just closed. The Moravians and one English Missionary Society excepted, all the great Missionary Societies now at work have come into being since 1793. In 1901 the native Protestant community in India, outcome of these Societies' labours, numbered close upon a million souls.
The Indian Christian Church is a living organisation, or congeries of organisations, over two and a half million souls all told, and growing rapidly. The exact figures in 1901 were 2,664,313, showing an increase during ten years of 30.8 per cent. The figures exclude Eurasians and Europeans; and in Anglo-Indian speech, we may remark, all Americans and Australians and South African whites and the like are Europeans. The attitude of the Indian Christian Church to the new ideas introduced by the British connection and by the modern world can readily be understood. Cut off, cast off, by their fellow-countrymen, and brought into closer contact than any others with Europeans in their missionaries and teachers, their minds have been open to all the new ideas. We know in fact that Indian Christians are often charged, by persons who do not appreciate the situation, with being over-Europeanised. It may be so in certain ways, but, irrespective of Christianity or Hinduism, the adoption of European ways results from contact with Europeans, and in certain respects is almost a condition of intercourse with Europeans. Let those, for example, who talk glibly about Indians sticking to their own dress, know that gentlemen in actual native dress are not allowed to walk on that side of the bandstand promenade in Calcutta where Europeans sit—a scandal crying for removal. With regard to the new national consciousness, it may be repeated that the Indian Christian community is almost as alive with the national feeling as the educated Hindu community. As the Indian Church becomes at once more indigenous and more thoroughly educated in Western learning, as it becomes less identified with European denominations, and less dependent upon stimulus from without, it will no doubt become still more national in every sense, be more recognised as one of India's institutions, and become a powerful educator in India. Once within the environment of the national feeling, the seed of Christian thought and modern ideas will spring up and spontaneously flourish. The future progress of the Indian Church may be said to depend upon the growth of that national consciousness within it. The sense of independence and the duty of self-support and union are, properly, being fostered in the native churches. But one of the dangers ahead undoubtedly is that, like one of the other religious movements of the past century, or like the Ethiopian Church in South Africa, the Indian Church may become infected with the political rather than the religious aspect of the idea.
II. The Brāhma Samāj.—Next to the Christian Church in order of birth of the issue of the new age, comes the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association. It was founded in Calcutta in 1828 by the famous reformer, Raja Rammohan Roy, first of modern Indians. The Brāhma Samāj is confessedly the outcome of contact with Christian ideas. By the best known of the Brāhma community, the late Keshub Chunder Sen, it was described as "the legitimate offspring of the wedlock of Christianity with the faith of the Hindu Aryans." "No other reformation" [in India], says the late Sir M. Monier Williams, "has resulted in the same way from the influence of European education and Christian ideas." The founder himself, Raja Rammohan Roy, was indeed more a Christian than anything else, although he wore his brahman thread to the day of his death in order to retain the succession to his property for his son. In London and in Bristol, where he died in 1833, he associated himself with Dr. Carpenter and the more orthodox section of the Unitarians, explicitly avowing his belief in the miracles of Christ generally, and particularly in the resurrection. In Calcutta, indeed, the origin of the Brāhma Samāj was acknowledged at its commencement. After attending the Scotch and other Churches in Calcutta, and then the Unitarian Church, Rammohan Roy and his native friends set up a Church of their own, and one name for it among educated natives was simply the Hindu Unitarian Church. It is a secondary matter that, to begin with, the reformer believed that he had found his monotheism in the Hindu Scriptures, now known to all students as the special Scriptures of pantheism.
Raja Rammohan Roy, the brave man who made a voyage to Britain in defiance of caste, the champion of the widow who had often been virtually obliged to lay herself on her dead husband's pyre, the strenuous advocate of English education for Indians, the supporter of the claim of Indians to a larger employment in the public service, has not yet received from New India the recognition and honour which he deserves. To every girl, at least in Bengal, the province of widow-burning, he ought to be a hero as the first great Indian knight who rode out to deliver the widows from the torturing fire of Suttee.
As its theistic name implies, the Brāhma Samāj professedly represents a movement towards theism, i.e. a rise from the polytheism and idolatry of the masses and a rejection of the pantheism of Hindu philosophy. Of course, noteworthy though it be, the foundation of the Brāhma Samāj in 1828 was not the introduction of monotheism to India. In the Indian Christian Church and in Mahomedanism, the doctrine of one, personal, God had been set forth to India, and in one of the ancient Hindu philosophical systems, the Yoga Philosophy, the same doctrine is implied. But in India, Christianity and Mahomedanism were associated with hostile camps; the Yoga Philosophy was known only to a few Sanscrit scholars. In Brāhmaism, the doctrine of one personal God became again natural naturalised in India. That has been its special service to India, to naturalise monotheism and many social and religious movements. For in India, things new and foreign lie under a peculiar suspicion. In the social sphere, the Brāhma Samāj repudiates caste and gives to women a position in society. As Indian theists also, when their first church was opened in 1830, they gave the Indian sanction to congregational worship and prayer, "before unknown to Hindus." For, the brahman interposing between God and the ignorant multitude, the Hindu multitude do not assemble themselves for united prayer, as Christians and Mahomedans do; and at the other end of the Hindu scale, the professed pantheist as such cannot pray. In proof of the latter statement, we recall the words of Swami Vivekananda, representative of Hinduism in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, in a lecture "The Real and the Apparent Man," published in 1896. "It is the greatest of all lies," he writes somewhat baldly, although one is often grateful for a bald, definite statement, "that we are mere men; we are the God of the Universe.... The worst lie that you ever told yourself is that you were born a sinner.... The wicked see this universe as a hell, and the partially good see it as heaven, and the perfect beings realise it as God Himself.... By mistake we think that we are impure, that we are limited, that we are separate. The real man is the One Unit Existence." Prayer is therefore irrational for a pantheist, for no man is separate from God.
The influence of the Brāhma Samāj has been far greater than its numerical success. Reckoned by its small company of 4050 members,[52] some of them certainly men of the highest culture and of sincere devoutness, the Brāhma Samāj is a limited and local movement, limited largely to the province of Bengal, and even to a few of the larger towns in the province. But if the taint of the intellectual origin of the Brāhma Samāj be still visible in the eclecticism that it professes, in its rejection of the supernatural, and in its poor numerical progress, it has nevertheless done great things for India.
As yet the Brāhma Samāj has remained unaffected by the political aspect of the new national feeling. Early in its history there was, indeed, a section of the Samāj resolved to limit the selection of scriptures to the scriptures of the Hindus, but the late Keshub Chunder Sen successfully asserted the freedom of the Samāj, and probably saved it from the narrow patriotic groove and from the political character of the third of the new religious organisations, the Ārya Samāj.
The Prārthanā Samājes or Prayer Associations of South-Western India.—The history of India is pre-eminently the history of Northern India, that is of the great plains of the Ganges and the Punjab. One may test it by the simple academical test of reckoning what percentage of marks in an examination on Indian history is assigned to the events of the great northern plains. It is the same in the more recent religious history of India. The southern provinces of Bombay and Madras have contributed very little in respect of new religious life, organised or unorganised, compared with the northern provinces of Bengal, the United Provinces, and the Punjab. The Prārthanā Samājes or Prayer Associations of Bombay and South-western India are monotheistic like the Brāhma Samāj, and have their halls for their own worship. But socially they have not severed themselves from their Hindu brethren, and do not figure in the Census as separate. Even compared with the Brāhma Samāj, they are few in number. The first Prārthanā Samāj was founded in Bombay in 1867. In Madras there is a small representation of the Brāhma Samāj.
CHAPTER XI NEW RELIGIOUS ORGANISATIONS THE ĀRYAS AND THE THEOSOPHISTS. "Let us receive not only
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