Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  The Moslems are the most powerful and interesting of the religious minorities of India; but the study of their religion belongs to a later volume. It is not astonishing that Mohammedanism, despite the zealous aid of Aurangzeb, failed to win India to Islam; the miracle is that Mohammedanism in India did not succumb to Hinduism. The survival of this simple and masculine monotheism amid a jungle of polytheism attests the virility of the Moslem mind; we need only recall the absorption of Buddhism by Brahmanism to realize the vigor of this resistance, and the measure of this achievement. Allah now has some 70,000,000 worshipers in India.

  The Hindu has found little comfort in any alien faith; and the figures that have most inspired his religious consciousness in the nineteenth century were those that rooted their doctrine and practice in the ancient creeds of the people. Ramakrishna, a poor Brahman of Bengal, became for a time a Christian, and felt the lure of Christ;* he became at another time a Moslem, and joined in the austere ritual of Mohammedan prayer; but soon his pious heart brought him back to Hinduism, even to the terrible Kali whose priest he became, and whom he transformed into a Mother-Goddess overflowing with tenderness and affection. He rejected the ways of the intellect, and preached Bhakti-yoga—the discipline and union of love. “The knowledge of God,” he said, “may be likened to a man, while love of God is like a woman. Knowledge has entry only to the outer rooms of God, and no one can enter into the inner mysteries of God save a lover.”18 Unlike Ram Mohun Roy, Ramakrishna took no trouble to educate himself; he learned no Sanskrit and no English; he wrote nothing, and shunned intellectual discourse. When a pompous logician asked him, “What are knowledge, knower, and the object known?” he answered, “Good man, I do not know all these niceties of scholastic learning. I know only my Mother Divine, and that I am her son.”19 All religions are good, he taught his followers; each is a way to God, or a stage on the way, adapted to the mind and heart of the seeker. To be converted from one religion to another is foolishness; one need only continue on his own way, and reach to the essence of his own faith. “All rivers flow to the ocean. Flow, and let others flow, too!”20 He tolerated sympathetically the polytheism of the people, and accepted humbly the monism of the philosophers; but in his own living faith God was a spirit incarnated in all men, and the only true worship of God was the loving service of mankind.

  Many fine souls, rich and poor, Brahman and Pariah, chose him as Guru, and formed an order and mission in his name. The most vivid of these followers was a proud young Kshatriya, Narendranath Dutt, who, full of Spencer and Darwin, first presented himself to Ramakrishna as an atheist unhappy in his atheism, but scornful of the myths and superstitions with which he identified religion. Conquered by Ramakrishna’s patient kindliness, “Naren” became the young Master’s most ardent disciple; he redefined God as “the totality of all souls,”21 and called upon his fellow men to practise religion not through vain asceticism and meditation, but through absolute devotion to men.

  Leave to the next life the reading of the Vedanta, and the practice of meditation. Let this body which is here be put at the service of others! . . . The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek. He alone serves God who serves all other beings!22

  Changing his name to Vivekananda, he left India to seek funds abroad for the Ramakrishna Mission. In 1893 he found himself lost and penniless in Chicago. A day later he appeared in the Parliament of Religions at the World’s Fair, addressed the meeting as a representative of Hinduism, and captured everyone by his magnificent presence, his gospel of the unity of all religions, and his simple ethics of human service as the best worship of God; atheism became a noble religion under the inspiration of his eloquence, and orthodox clergymen found themselves honoring a “heathen” who said that there was no other God than the souls of living things. Returning to India, he preached to his countrymen a more virile creed than any Hindu had offered them since Vedic days:

  It is a man-making religion that we want. . . . Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong. . . . For the next fifty years . . . let all other, vain gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything. . . . The first of all worship is the worship of those all around us. . . . These are all our gods—men and animals; and the first gods we have to worship are our own countrymen.23

  It was but a step from this to Gandhi.

  III. TAGORE

  Science and art—A family of geniuses—Youth of Rabindranath—His poetry—His politics—His school

  Meanwhile, despite oppression, bitterness and poverty, India continued to create science, literature and art. Professor Jagadis Chandra Bose has won world-renown by his researches in electricity and the physiology of plants; and the work of Professor Chandrasekhara Raman in the physics of light has been crowned with the Nobel prize. In our own century a new school of painting has arisen in Bengal, which merges the richness of color in the Ajanta frescoes with the delicacy of line in the Rajput miniatures. The paintings of Abanindranath Tagore share modestly in the voluptuous mysticism and the delicate artistry that brought the poetry of his uncle to international fame.

  The Tagores are one of the great families of history. Davendranath Tagore (Bengali Thakur) was one of the organizers, and later the head, of the Brahma-Somaj; a man of wealth, culture and sanctity, he became in his old age a heretic patriarch of Bengal. From him have descended the artists Abanindranath and Gogonendranath, the philosopher Dwijendranath, and the poet Rabindranath, Tagore—the last two being his sons.

  Rabindranath was brought up in an atmosphere of comfort and refinement, in which music, poetry and high discourse were the very air that he breathed. He was a gentle spirit from birth, a Shelley who refused to die young or to grow old; so affectionate that squirrels climbed upon his knees, and birds perched upon his hands.24 He was observant and receptive, and felt the eddying overtones of experience with a mystic sensitivity. Sometimes he would stand for hours on a balcony, noting with literary instinct the figure and features, the mannerisms and gait of each passer-by in the street; sometimes, on a sofa in an inner room, he would spend half a day silent with his memories and his dreams. He began to compose verses on a slate, happy in the thought that errors could be so easily wiped away.* Soon he was writing songs full of tenderness for India—for the beauty of her scenery, the loveliness of her women, and the sufferings of her people; and he composed the music for these songs himself. All India sang them, and the young poet thrilled to hear them on the lips of rough peasants as he traveled, unknown, through distant villages.25 Here is one of them, translated from the Bengali by the author himself; who else has ever expressed with such sympathetic scepticism the divine nonsense of romantic love?

  Tell me if this be all true, my lover, tell me if this be true.

  When these eyes flash their lightning the dark clouds in your breast make stormy answer.

  Is it true that my lips are sweet like the opening bud of the first conscious love?

  Do the memories of vanished months of May linger in my limbs?

  Does the earth, like a harp, shiver into songs with the touch of my feet?

  Is it then true that the dewdrops fall from the eyes of night when I am seen, and the morning light is glad when it wraps my body round?

  Is it true, is it true, that your love traveled alone through ages and worlds in search of me?

  That when you found me at last, your age-long desire found utter peace in my gentle speech and my eyes and lips and flowing hair?

  Is it then true that the mystery of the Infinite is written on this little forehead of mine?

  Tell me, my lover, if all this be true?26

  There are many virtues in these poems*—an intense and yet sober patriotism; a femininely subtle understanding of love and woman, nature and man; a passionate penetration into the insight of India’s philosophers; and a Tennysonian delicacy of sentimen
t and phrase. If there is any fault in them it is that they are too consistently beautiful, too monotonously idealistic and tender. Every woman in them is lovely, and every man in them is infatuated with woman, or death, or God; nature, though sometimes terrible, is always sublime, never bleak, or barren, or hideous,† Perhaps the story of Chitra is Tagore’s story: her lover Arjuna tires of her in a year because she is completely and uninterruptedly beautiful; only when she loses her beauty and, becoming strong, takes up the natural labors of life, does the god love her again—a profound symbol of the contented marriage.28 Tagore confesses his limitations with captivating grace:

  My love, once upon a time your poet launched a great epic in his mind.

  Alas, I was not careful, and it struck your ringing anklets and came to grief.

  It broke up into scraps of songs, and lay scattered at your feet.29

  Therefore he has sung lyrics to the end, and all the world except the critics has heard him gladly. India was a little surprised when her poet received the Nobel prize (1913); the Bengal reviewers had seen only his faults, and the Calcutta professors had used his poems as examples of bad Bengali.30 The young Nationalists disliked him because his condemnation of the abuses in India’s moral life was stronger than his cry for political freedom; and when he was knighted it seemed to them a betrayal of India. He did not hold the honor long; for when, by a tragic misunderstanding, British soldiers fired into a religious gathering at Amritsar (1919), Tagore returned his decorations to the Viceroy with a stinging letter of renunciation. Today he is a solitary figure, perhaps the most impressive of all men now on the earth: a reformer who has had the courage to denounce the most basic of India’s institutions—the caste system—and the dearest of her beliefs—transmigration;31 a Nationalist who longs for India’s liberty, but has dared to protest against the chauvinism and self-seeking that play a part in the Nationalist movement; an educator who has tired of oratory and politics, and has retreated to his ashram and hermitage at Shantiniketan, to teach some of the new generation his gospel of moral self-liberation; a poet broken-hearted by the premature death of his wife, and by the humiliation of his country; a philosopher steeped in the Vedanta,32 a mystic hesitating, like Chandi Das, between woman and God, and yet shorn of the ancestral faith by the extent of his learning; a lover of Nature facing her messengers of death with no other consolation than his unaging gift of song.

  “Ah, poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning grey.

  Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?”

  “It is evening,” the poet said, “and I am listening because some one may call from the village, late though it be.

  I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of eager eyes beg for music to break their silence and speak for them.

  Who is there to weave their passionate songs, if I sit on the shore of life and contemplate death and the beyond? . . .

  It is a trifle that my hair is turning grey.

  I am ever as young or as old as the youngest and the oldest of this village. . . .

  They all have need for me, and I have no time to brood over the after-life.

  I am of an age with each; what matter if my hair turns grey?”33

  IV. EAST IS WEST

  Changing India—Economic changes—Social—The decaying caste system—Castes and guilds—Untouchables—The emergence of woman

  That a man unfamiliar with English till almost fifty should write English so well is a sign of the ease with which some of the gaps can be bridged between that East and that West whose mating another poet has banned. For since the birth of Tagore the West has come to the East in a hundred ways, and is changing every aspect of Oriental life. Thirty thousand miles of railways have webbed the wastes and ghats of India, and carried Western faces into every village; telegraph wires and the printing press have brought to every student the news of a suggestively changing world; English schools have taught British history with a view to making British citizens, and have unwittingly inculcated English ideas of democracy and liberty. Even the East now justifies Heraclitus.

  Reduced to poverty in the nineteenth century by the superior machinery of British looms and the higher calibre of British guns, India has now turned her face reluctantly towards industrialization. Handicrafts are dying, factories are growing. At Jamsetpur the Tata Iron and Steel Company employs 45,000 men, and threatens the leadership of American firms in the production of steel.34 The coal production of India is mounting rapidly; within a generation China and India may overtake Europe and America in lifting out of the soil the basic fuels and materials of industry. Not only will these native resources meet native needs, they may compete with the West for the markets of the world, and the conquerors of Asia may suddenly find their markets gone, and the standards of living of their people at home severely reduced, by the competition of low-wage labor in once docile and backward (i.e., agricultural) lands. In Bombay there are factories in mid-Victorian style, with old-fashioned wages that bring tears of envy to the eyes of Occidental Tories.* Hindu employers have replaced the British in many of these industries, and exploit their fellow men with the rapacity of Europeans bearing the white man’s burden.

  The economic basis of Indian society has not changed without affecting the social institutions and moral customs of the people. The caste system was conceived in terms of a static and agricultural society; it provided order,” but gave no opening to unpedigreed genius, no purchase to ambition and hope, no stimulus to invention and enterprise; it was doomed when the Industrial Revolution reached India’s shores. The machine does not respect persons: in most of the factories men work side by side without discrimination of caste, trains and trams give berth or standing-room to all who can pay, cooperative societies and political parties bring all grades together, and in the congestion of the urban theatre or street Brahman and Pariah rub elbows in unexpected fellowship. A raja announces that every caste and creed will find reception at his court; a Shudra becomes the enlightened ruler of Baroda; the Brahma-Somaj denounces caste, and the Bengal Provincial Congress of the National Congress advocates the abolition of all caste distinctions forthwith.36 Slowly the machine lifts a new class to wealth and power, and brings the most ancient of living aristocracies to an end.

  Already the caste terms are losing significance. The word Vaisya is used in books today, but has no application in actual life. Even the term Shudra has disappeared from the north, while in the south it is a loose designation for all non-Brahmans.37 The lower castes of older days have in effect been replaced by over three thousand “castes” that are really guilds: bankers, merchants, manufacturers, farmers, professors, engineers, trackwalkers, college women, butchers, barbers, fishermen, actors, coal miners, washermen, cabmen, shop-girls, bootblacks—these are organized into occupational castes that differ from our trade-unions chiefly in the loose expectation that sons will follow the trades of their fathers.

  The great tragedy of the caste system is that it has multiplied, from generation to generation, those Untouchables whose growing number and rebelliousness undermine the institution that created them. The Outcastes have received into their ranks all those who were enslaved by war or debt, all the children of marriages between Brahmans and Shudras, and all those unfortunates whose work, as scavengers, butchers, acrobats, conjurors or executioners was stamped as degrading by Brahmanical law;38 and they have swollen their mass by the improvident fertility of those who have nothing to lose. Their bitter poverty has made cleanliness of body, clothing or food an impossible luxury for them; and their fellows shun them with every sense.* Therefore the laws of caste forbid an Untouchable to approach nearer than twenty-four feet to a Shudra, or seventy-four feet to a Brahman;40 if the shadow of a Pariah falls upon a man of caste, the latter must remove the contamination by a purifying ablution. Whatever the Outcaste touches is thereby defiled,† In many parts of India he must not draw water from the public wells, or enter temples used by Brahmans, or send his childr
en to the Hindu schools.42 The British, whose policies have in some degree contributed to the impoverishment of the Outcastes, have brought them at least equality before the law, and equal access to all British-controlled colleges and schools. The Nationalist movement, under the inspiration of Gandhi, has done much to lessen the disabilities of the Untouchables. Perhaps another generation will see them externally and superficially free.

  The coming of industry, and of Western ideas, is disturbing the ancient mastery of the Hindu male. Industrialization defers the age of marriage, and requires the “emancipation” of woman; that is to say, the woman cannot be lured into the factory unless she is persuaded that home is a prison, and is entitled by law to keep her earnings for herself. Many real reforms have come as incidents to this emancipation. Child marriage has been formally ended (1929) by raising the legal age of marriage to fourteen for girls and to eighteen for men;43 suttee has disappeared, and the remarriage of widows grows daily;‡ polygamy is allowed, but few men practise it;45 and tourists are disappointed to find that the temple dancers are almost extinct. In no other country is moral reform progressing so rapidly. Industrial city life is drawing women out of purdah; hardly six per cent of the women of India accept such seclusion today.46 A number of lively periodicals for women discuss the most up-to-date questions; even a birth-control league has appeared,47 and has faced bravely the gravest problem of India—indiscriminate fertility. In many of the provinces women vote and hold political office; twice women have been president of the Indian National Congress. Many of them have taken degrees at the universities, and have become doctors, lawyers, or professors.48 Soon, no doubt, the tables will be turned, and women will rule. Must not some wild Western influence bear the guilt of this flaming appeal issued by a subaltern of Gandhi to the women of India?—