Our Oriental Heritage

Shankara establishes the source of his philosophy at a remote and subtle point never quite clearly visioned again until, a thousand years later, Immanuel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. How, he asks, is knowledge possible? Apparently, all our knowledge comes from the senses, and reveals not the external reality itself, but our sensory adaptation—perhaps transformation—of that reality. By sense, then, we can never quite know the “real”; we can know it only in that garb of space, time and cause which may be a web created by our organs of sense and understanding, designed or evolved to catch and hold that fluent and elusive reality whose existence we can surmise, but whose character we can never objectively describe; our Way of perceiving will forever be inextricably mingled with the thing perceived.

This is not the airy subjectivism of the solipsist who thinks that he can destroy the world by going to sleep. The world exists, but it is Maya—not delusion, but phenomenon, an appearance created partly by our thought. Our incapacity to perceive things except through the film of space and time, or to think of them except in terms of cause and change, is an innate limitation, an Avidya, or ignorance, which is bound up with our very mode of perception, and to which, therefore, all flesh is heir. Maya and Avidya are the subjective and objective sides of the great illusion by which the intellect supposes that it knows the real; it is through Maya and Avidya, through our birthright of ignorance, that we see a multiplicity of objects and a flux of change; in truth there is only one Being, and change is “a mere name” for the superficial fluctuations of forms. Behind the Maya or Veil of change and things, to be reached not by sensation or intellect but only by the insight and intuition of the trained spirit, is the one universal reality, Brahman.

This natural obscuration of sense and intellect by the organs and forms of sensation and understanding bars us likewise from perceiving the one unchanging Soul that stands beneath all individual souls and minds. Our separate selves, visible to perception and thought, are as unreal as the phantasmagoria of space and time; individual differences and distinct personalities are bound up with body and matter, they belong to the kaleidoscopic world of change; and these merely phenomenal selves will pass away with the material conditions of which they are a part. But the underlying life which we feel in ourselves when we forget space and time, cause and change, is the very essence and reality of us, that Atman which we share with all selves and things, and which, undivided and omnipresent, is identical with Brahman, God.¹¹³

But what is God? Just as there are two selves—the ego and Atman—and two worlds—the phenomenal and the noumenal—so there are two deities: an Ishvara or Creator worshiped by the people through the patterns of space, cause, time and change; and a Brahman or Pure Being worshiped

by that philosophical piety which seeks and finds, behind all separate things and selves, one universal reality, unchanging amid all changes, indivisible amid all divisions, eternal despite all vicissitudes of form, all birth and death. Polytheism, even theism, belongs to the world of Maya and Avidya; they are forms of worship that correspond to the forms of perception and thought; they are as necessary to our moral life as space, time and cause are necessary to our intellectual life, but they have no absolute validity or objective truth.¹¹⁴

To Shankara the existence of God is no problem, for he defines God as existence, and identifies all real being with God. But of the existence of a personal God, creator or redeemer, there may, he thinks, be some question; such a deity, says this pre-plagiarist of Kant, cannot be proved by reason, he can only be postulated as a practical necessity,¹¹⁵ offering peace to our limited intellects, and encouragement to our fragile morality. The philosopher, though he may worship in every temple and bow to every god, will pass beyond these forgivable forms of popular faith; feeling the illusoriness of plurality, and the monistic unity of all things,* he will adore, as the Supreme Being, Being itself—indescribable, limitless, spaceless, timeless, causeless, changeless Being, the source and substance of all reality,† We may apply the adjectives “conscious,” “intelligent,” even “happy” to Brahman, since Brahman includes all selves, and these may have such qualities;¹¹⁶ but all other adjectives would be applicable to Brahman equally, since It includes all qualities of all things. Essentially Brahman is neuter, raised above personality and gender, beyond good and evil, above all moral distinctions, all differences and attributes, all desires and ends. Brahman is the cause and effect, the timeless and secret essence, of the world.

The goal of philosophy is to find that secret, and to lose the seeker in the secret found. To be one with God means, for Shankara, to rise above—or to sink beneath—the separateness and brevity of the self, with all its narrow purposes and interests; to become unconscious of all parts, divisions, things; to be placidly at one, in a desireless Nirvana, with that great ocean of Being in which there are no warring purposes, no competing selves, no parts, no change, no space, and no time.* To find this blissful peace (Ananda) a man must renounce not merely the world but himself; he must care nothing for possessions or goods, even for good or evil; he must look upon suffering and death as Maya, surface incidents of body and matter, time and change; and he must not think of his own personal quality and fate; a single moment of self-interest or pride can destroy all his liberation.¹¹⁹ Good works cannot give a man salvation, for good works have no validity or meaning except in the Maya world of space and time; only the knowledge of the saintly seer can bring that salvation which is the recognition of the identity of self and the universe, Atman and Brahman, soul and God, and the absorption of the part in the whole.¹²⁰ Only when this absorption is complete does the wheel of reincarnation stop; for then it is seen that the separate self and personality, to which reincarnation comes, is an illusion.¹²¹ It is Ishvara, the Maya god, that gives rebirth to the self in punishment and reward; but “when the identity” of Atman and Brahman “has become known, then,” says Shankara, “the soul’s existence as wanderer, and Brahman’s existence as creator” (i.e., as Ishvara) “have vanished away.”¹²² lshvara and Karma, like things and selves, belong to the exoteric doctrine of Vedanta as adapted to the needs of the common man; in the esoteric or secret doctrine soul and Brahman are one, never wandering, never dying, never changed.¹²³

It was thoughtful of Shankara to confine his esoteric doctrine to philosophers; for as Voltaire believed that only a society of philosophers could survive without laws, so only a society of supermen could live beyond good and evil. Critics have complained that if good and evil are Maya, part of the unreal world, then all moral distinctions fall away, and devils are as good as saints. But these moral distinctions, Shankara cleverly replies, are real within the world of space and time, and are binding for those who live in the world. They are not binding upon the soul that has united itself with Brahman; such a soul can do no wrong, since wrong implies desire and action, and the liberated soul, by definition, does not move in the sphere of desire and (self-considering) action. Whoever consciously injures another lives on the plane of Maya, and is subject to its distinctions, its morals and its laws. Only the philosopher is free, only wisdom is liberty.*

It was a subtle and profound philosophy to be written by a lad in his twenties. Shankara not only elaborated it in writing and defended it successfully in debate, but he expressed snatches of it in some of the most sensitive religious poetry of India. When all challenges had been met he retired to a hermitage in the Himalayas, and, according to Hindu tradition, died at the age of thirty-two.¹²⁴ Ten religious orders were founded in his name, and many disciples accepted and developed his philosophy. One of them—some say Shankara himself—wrote for the people a popular exposition of the Vedanta—the Mohamudgara, or “Hammer of Folly”—in which the essentials of the system were summed up with clarity and force:

Fool! give up thy thirst for wealth, banish all desires from thy heart. Let thy mind be satisfied with what is gained by thy Karma. . . . Do not be proud of wealth, of friends, or of youth; time takes all away in a moment. Leaving quickly all this, which is full of illusion, enter into the place of Brahman . . . . Life is tremulous, like a water-drop on a lotus-leaf. . . . Time is playing, life is waning—yet the breath of hope never ceases. The body is wrinkled, the hair grey, the mouth has become toothless, the stick in the hand shakes, yet man leaves not the anchor of hope. . . . Preserve equanimity always. . . . In thee, in me and in others there dwells Vishnu alone; it is useless to be angry with me, or impatient. See every self in Self, and give up all thought of difference.¹²⁵

III. THE CONCLUSIONS OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY

Decadence—Summary—Criticism—Influence

The Mohammedan invasions put an end to the great age of Hindu philosophy. The assaults of the Moslems, and later of the Christians, upon the native faith drove it, for self-defense, into a timid unity that made treason of all debate, and stifled creative heresy in a stagnant uniformity of thought. By the twelfth century the system of the Vedanta, which in Shankara had tried to be a religion for philosophers, was reinterpreted by such saints as Ramanuja (ca. 1050) into an orthodox worship of Vishnu, Rama and Krishna. Forbidden to think new thoughts, philosophy became not only scholastic but barren; it accepted its dogmas from the priesthood, and proved them laboriously by distinctions without difference, and logic without reason.¹²⁶

Nevertheless the Brahmans, in the solitude of their retreats and under the protection of their unintelligibility, preserved the old systems carefully in esoteric sutras and commentaries, and transmitted across generations and centuries the conclusions of Hindu philosophy. In all these systems, Brahmanical or other, the categories of the intellect are represented as helpless or deceptive before a reality immediately felt or seen;* and all our eighteenth-century rationalism appears to the Indian metaphysician as a vain and superficial attempt to subject the incalculable universe to the concepts of a salonnière. “Into blind darkness pass they who worship ignorance; into still greater darkness they who are content with knowledge.”¹²⁹ Hindu philosophy begins where European philosophy ends—with an inquiry into the nature of knowledge and the limitations of reason; it starts not with the physics of Thales and Democritus, but with the epistemology of Locke and Kant; it takes mind as that which is most immediately known, and therefore refuses to resolve it into a matter known only mediately and through mind. It accepts an external world, but does not believe that our senses can ever know it as it is. All science is a charted ignorance, and belongs to Maya; it formulates, in ever changing concepts and phrases, the rationale of a world in which reason is but a part—one shifting current in an interminable sea. Even the person that reasons is Maya, illusion; what is he but a temporary conjunction of events, a passing node in the curves of matter and mind through space and time?—and what are his acts or his thoughts but the fulfilment of forces far antedating his birth? Nothing is real but Brahman, that vast ocean of Being in which every form is a moment’s wave, or a fleck of froth on the wave. Virtue is not the quiet heroism of good works, nor any pious ecstasy; it is simply the recognition of the identity of the self with every other self in Brahman; morality is such living as comes from a sense of union with all things.* “He who discerns all creatures in his Self, and his Self in all creatures, has no disquiet thence. What delusion, what grief can he with him?”¹³⁰

Certain characteristic qualities which would not seem to be defects from the Hindu point of view have kept this philosophy from exercising a wider influence in other civilizations. Its method, its scholastic terminology, and its Vedic assumptions handicap it in finding sympathy among nations with other assumptions or more secularized cultures. Its doctrine of Maya gives little encouragement to morality or active virtue; its pessimism is a confession that it has not, despite the theory of Karma, explained evil; and part of the effect of these systems has been to exalt a stagnant quietism in the face of evils that might conceivably have been corrected, or of work that cried out to be done. None the less there is a depth in these meditations which by comparison casts an air of superficiality upon the activistic philosophies generated in more invigorating zones. Perhaps our Western systems, so confident that “knowledge is power,” are the voices of a once lusty youth exaggerating human ability and tenure. As our energies tire in the daily struggle against impartial Nature and hostile Time, we look with more tolerance upon Oriental philosophies of surrender and peace. Hence the influence of Indian thought upon other cultures has been greatest in the days of their weakening or decay. While Greece was winning victories she paid little attention to Pythagoras or Parmenides; when Greece was declining, Plato and the Orphic priests took up the doctrine of reincarnation, while Zeno the Oriental preached an almost Hindu fatalism and resignation; and when Greece was dying, the Neo-Platonists and the Gnostics drank deep at Indian wells. The impoverishment of Europe by the fall of Rome, and the Moslem conquest of the routes between Europe and India, seem to have obstructed, for a millennium, the direct interchange of Oriental and Occidental ideas. But hardly had the British established themselves in India before editions and translations of the Upanishads began to stir Western thought. Fichte conceived an idealism strangely like Shankara’s;¹³² Schopenhauer almost incorporated Buddhism, the Upanishads and the Vedanta into his philosophy; and Schelling, in his old age, thought the Upanishads the maturest wisdom of mankind. Nietzsche had dwelt too long with Bismarck and the Greeks to care for India, but in the end he valued above all other ideas his haunting notion of eternal recurrence—a variant of reincarnation.

In our time Europe borrows more and more from the philosophy of the East,* while the East borrows more and more from the science of the West. Another world war might leave Europe open again (as the break-up of Alexander’s empire opened Greece, and the fall of the Roman Republic opened Rome)—to an influx of Oriental philosophies and faiths. The mounting insurrection of the Orient against the Occident, the loss of those Asiatic markets that have sustained the industry and prosperity of the West, the weakening of Europe by poverty, faction and revolution, might make that divided continent ripe for a new religion of celestial hope and earthly despair. Probably it is prejudice that makes such a dénouement seem inconceivable in America: quietism and resignation do not comport with our electric atmosphere, or with the vitality born of rich resources and a spacious terrain. Doubtless our weather will protect us in the end.

CHAPTER XX

The Literature of India

I. THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA

Sanskrit—The vernaculars—Grammar

JUST as the philosophy and much of the literature of medieval Europe were composed in a dead language unintelligible to the people, so the philosophy and classic literature of India were written in a Sanskrit that had long since passed out of common parlance, but had survived as the Esperanto of scholars having no other common tongue. Divorced from contact with the life of the nation, this literary language became a model of scholasticism and refinement; new words were formed not by the spontaneous creations of the people, but by the needs of technical discourse in the schools; until at last the Sanskrit of philosophy lost the virile simplicity of the Vedic hymns, and became an artificial monster whose sesquipedalia verba crawled like monstrous tapeworms across the page.*

Meanwhile the people of northern India, about the fifth century before Christ, had transformed Sanskrit into Prakrit, very much as Italy was to change Latin into Italian. Prakrit became for a time the language of Buddhists and Jains, until it in turn was developed into Pali—the language of the oldest extant Buddhist literature.² By the end of the tenth century of our era these “Middle Indian” languages had given birth to various vernaculars, of which the chief was Hindi. In the twelfth century this in turn generated Hindustani as the language of the northern half of India. Finally the invading Moslems filled Hindustani with Persian words, thereby creating a new dialect, Urdu. All these were “Indo-Germanic” tongues, confined to Hindustan; the Deccan kept its old Dravidian languages—Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese and Malayalam—and Tamil became the chief literary vehicle of the south. In the nineteenth century Bengali replaced Sanskrit as the literary language of Bengal; the novelist Chatterjee was its Boccaccio, the poet Tagore was its Petrarch. Even today India has a hundred languages, and the literature of Swaraj† uses the speech of the conquerors.

At a very early date India began to trace the roots, history, relations and combinations of words. By the fourth century B.C. she had created for herself* the science of grammar, and produced probably the greatest of all known grammarians, Panini. The studies of Panini, Patanjali (ca. 150 A.D.) and Bhartrihari (ca. 650) laid the foundations of philology; and that fascinating science of verbal genetics owed almost its life in modern times to the rediscovery of Sanskrit.

Writing, as we have seen, was not popular in Vedic India. About the fifth century B.C. the Kharosthi script was adapted from Semitic models, and in the epics and the Buddhist literature we begin to hear of clerks.³ Palmleaves and bark served as writing material, and an iron stylus as a pen; the bark was treated to make it less fragile, the pen scratched letters into it, ink was smeared over the bark, and remained in the scratches when the rest of it was wiped away.⁴ Paper was brought in by the Moslems (ca. 1000 A.D.), but did not finally replace bark till the seventeenth century. The bark pages were kept in order by stringing them upon a cord, and books of such leaves were gathered in libraries which the Hindus termed “Treasure-houses of the Goddess of Speech.” Immense collections of this wooden literature have survived the devastations of time and war.†

II. EDUCATION

Schools—Methods—Universities—Moslem education—An emperor on education

Writing continued, even to the nineteenth century, to play a very small part in Indian education. Perhaps it was not to the interest of the priests that the sacred or scholastic texts should become an open secret to all.⁶ As far as we can trace Indian history we find a system of education,⁷ always in the hands of the clergy, open at first only to the sons of Brahmans, then spreading its privileges from caste to caste until in our time it excludes only the Untouchables. Every Hindu village had its schoolmaster, supported out of the public funds; in Bengal alone, before the coming of the British, there were some eighty thousand native schools—one to every four hundred population.⁸ The percentage of literacy under Ashoka was apparently higher than in India today.⁹

Children went to the village school from September to February, entering at the age of five and leaving at the age of eight.¹⁰ Instruction was chiefly of a religious character, no matter what the subject; rote memorizing was the usual method, and the Vedas were the inevitable text. The three R’s were included, but were not the main business of education; character was rated above intellect, and discipline was the essence of schooling. We do not hear of flogging, or of other severe measures; but we find that stress was laid above all upon the formation of wholesome and proper habits of life.¹¹ At the age of eight the pupil passed to the more formal care of a Guru, or personal teacher and guide, with whom the student was to live, preferably till he was twenty. Services, sometimes menial, were required of him, and he was pledged to continence, modesty, cleanliness, and a meatless diet.¹² Instruction was now given him in the “Five Shastras” or sciences: grammar, arts and crafts, medicine, logic, and philosophy. Finally he was sent out into the world with the wise admonition that education came only one-fourth from the teacher, one-fourth from private study, one-fourth from one’s fellows, and one-fourth from life.¹³

From his Guru the student might pass, about the age of sixteen, to one of the great universities that were the glory of ancient and medieval India: Benares, Taxila, Vidarbha, Ajanta, Ujjain, or Nalanda. Benares was the stronghold of orthodox Brahman learning in Buddha’s days as in ours; Taxila, at the time of Alexander’s invasion, was known to all Asia as the leading seat of Hindu scholarship, renowned above all for its medical school; Ujjain was held in high repute for astronomy, Ajanta for the teaching of art. The façade of one of the ruined buildings at Ajanta suggests the magnificence of these old universities.¹⁴ Nalanda, most famous of Buddhist institutions for higher learning, had been founded shortly after the Master’s death, and the state had assigned for its support the revenues of a hundred villages. It had ten thousand students, one hundred lecture-rooms, great libraries, and six immense blocks of dormitories four stories high; its observatories, said Yuan Chwang, “were lost in the vapors of the morning, and the upper rooms towered above the clouds.”¹⁵ The old Chinese pilgrim loved the learned monks and shady groves of Nalanda so well that he stayed there for five years. “Of those from abroad who wished to enter the schools of discussion” at Nalanda, he tells us, “the majority, beaten by the difficulties of the problem, withdrew; and those who were deeply versed in old and modern learning were admitted, only two or three out of ten succeeding.”¹⁶ The candidates who were fortunate enough to gain admission were given free tuition, board and lodging, but they were subjected to an almost monastic discipline. Students were not permitted to talk to a woman, or to see one; even the desire to look upon a woman was held a great sin, in the fashion of the hardest saying in the New Testament. The student guilty of sex relations had to wear, for a whole year, the skin of an ass, with the tail turned upward, and had to go about begging alms and declaring his sin. Every morning the entire student body was required to bathe in the ten great swimming pools that belonged to the university. The course of study lasted for twelve years, but some students stayed thirty years, and some remained till death.¹⁷

The Mohammedans destroyed nearly all the monasteries, Buddhist or Brahman, in northern India. Nalanda was burned to the ground in 1197, and all its monks were slaughtered; we can never estimate the abundant life of ancient India from what these fanatics spared. Nevertheless, the destroyers were not barbarians; they had a taste for beauty, and an almost modern skill in using piety for the purposes of plunder. When the Moguls ascended the throne they brought a high but narrow standard of culture with them; they loved letters as much as the sword, and knew how to combine a successful siege with poetry. Among the Moslems education was mostly individual, through tutors engaged by prosperous fathers for their sons. It was an aristocratic conception of education as an ornament-occasionally an aid—to a man of affairs and power, but usually an irritant and a public danger in one doomed to poverty or modest place. What the methods of the tutors were we may judge from one of the great letters of history—the reply of Aurangzeb to his former teacher, who was seeking some sinecure and emolument from the King:

What is it you would have of me, Doctor? Can you reasonably desire that I should make you one of the chief Omrahs of my court? Let me tell you, if you had instructed me as you should have done, nothing would be more just; for I am of this persuasion, that a child well educated and instructed is as much, at least, obliged to his master as to his father. But where are those good documents* you have given me? In the first place, you have taught me that all Frangistan (so it seems they call Europe) was nothing but I know not what little island, of which the greatest king was he of Portugal,” and next to him he of Holland, and after him he of England: and as to the other kings, as those of France and Andalusia, you have represented them to me as our petty rajas, telling me that the kings of Indostan were far above them altogether, that they (the kings of Indostan) were . . . the great ones, the conquerors and kings of the world; and those of Persia and Usbec, Kashgar, Tartary and Cathay, Pegu, China and Matchina did tremble at the name of the kings of Indostan. Admirable geography! You should rather have taught me exactly to distinguish all those states of the world, and well to understand their strength, their way of fighting, their customs, religions, governments, and interests; and by the pursual of solid history, to observe their rise, progress, decay; and whence, how, and by what accidents and errors those great changes and revolutions of empires and kingdoms have happened. I have scarce learned of you the name of my grandsires, the famous founders of this empire; so far were you from having taught me the history of their life, and what course they took to make such great conquest. You had a mind to teach me the Arabian tongue, to read and to write. I am much obliged, forsooth, for having made me lose so much time upon a language that requires ten or twelve years to attain to its perfection; as if the son of a king should think it to be an honor to him to be a grammarian or some doctor of the law, and to learn other languages than of his neighbors when he can well be without them; he, to whom time is so precious for so many weighty things, which he ought by times to learn. As if there were any spirit that did not with some reluctancy, and even with a kind of debasement, employ itself in so sad and dry an exercise, so longsome and tedious, as is that of learning words.¹⁸

“Thus,” says the contemporary Bernier, “did Aurangzeb resent the pedantic instructions of his tutors; to which ’tis affirmed in that court that . . . he added the following reproof”;*

Know you not that childhood well governed, being a state which is ordinarily accompanied with an happy memory, is capable of thousands of good precepts and instructions, which remain deeply impressed the whole remainder of a man’s life, and keep the mind always raised for great actions? The law, prayers and sciences, may they not as well be learned in our mother-tongue as in Arabick? You told my father Shah Jehan that you would teach me philosophy. ’Tis true, I remember very well, that you have entertained me for many years with airy questions of things that afford no satisfaction at all to the mind, and are of no use in humane society, empty notions and mere fancies, that have only this in them, that they are very hard to understand and very easy to forget. . . . I still remember that after you had thus amused me, I know not how long, with your fine philosophy, all I retained of it was a multitude of barbarous and dark words, proper to bewilder, perplex and tire out the best wits, and only invented the better to cover the vanity and ignorance of men like yourself, that would make us believe that they know all, and that under those obscure and ambiguous words are hid great mysteries which they alone are capable to understand. If you had seasoned me with that philosophy which formeth the mind to ratiocination, and insensibly accustoms it to be satisfied with nothing but solid reasons, if you had given me those excellent precepts and doctrines which raise the soul above the assaults of fortune, and reduce her to an unshakable and always equal temper, and permit her not to be lifted up by prosperity nor debased by adversity; if you had taken care to give me the knowledge of what we are and what are the first principles of things, and had assisted me in forming in my mind a fit idea of the greatness of the universe, and of the admirable order and motion of the parts thereof; if, I say, you had instilled into me this kind of philosophy, I should think myself incomparably more obliged to you than Alexander was to his Aristotle, and believe it my duty to recompense you otherwise than he did him. Should you not, instead of your flattery, have taught me somewhat of that point so important to a king, which is, what the reciprocal duties are of a sovereign to his subjects and those of subjects to their sovereigns; and ought not you to have considered that one day I should be obliged with the sword to dispute my life and my crown with my brothers? . . . Have you ever taken any care to make me learn what ’tis to besiege a town, or to set an army in array? For these things I am obliged to others, not at all to you. Go, and return to the village whence you are come, and let nobody know who you are or what is become of you.¹⁹

III. THE EPICS

The “Mahabharata”—Its story—Its form—The “Bhagavad-Gita”—The metaphysics of war—The price of freedom—The “Ramayana”—A forest idyl—The rape of Sita—The Hindu epics and the Greek

The schools and the universities were only a part of the educational system of India. Since writing was less highly valued than in other civilizations, and oral instruction preserved and disseminated the nation’s history and poetry, the habit of public recitation spread among the people the most precious portions of their cultural heritage. As nameless raconteurs among the Greeks transmitted and expanded the Iliad and the Odyssey, so the reciters and declaimers of India carried down from generation to generation, and from court to people, the ever-growing epics into which the Brahmans crowded their legendary lore.

A Hindu scholar has rated the Mahabharata as “the greatest work of imagination that Asia has produced”;²⁰ and Sir Charles Eliot has called it “a greater poem than the Iliad”²¹ In one sense there is no doubt about the latter judgment. Beginning (ca. 500 B.C.) as a brief narrative poem of reasonable length, the Mahabharata took on, with every century, additional episodes and homilies, and absorbed the Bhagavad-Gita as well as parts of the story of Rama, until at last it measured 107,000 octameter couplets—seven times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. The name of the author was legion; “Vyasa,” to whom tradition assigns it, means “the arranger.”²² A hundred poets wrote it, a thousand singers moulded it, until, under the Gupta kings (ca. 400 A.D.), the Brahmans poured their own religious and moral ideas into a work originally Kshatriyan, and gave the poem the gigantic form in which we find it today.

The central subject was not precisely adapted to religious instruction, for it told a tale of violence, gambling and war. Book One presents the fair Shakuntala (destined to be the heroine of India’s most famous drama) and her mighty son Bharata; from his loins come those “great Bharata” (Maha-Bharata) tribes, the Kurus and the Pandavas, whose bloody strife constitutes the oft-broken thread of the tale. Yudhishthira, King of the Pandavas, gambles away his wealth, his army, his kingdom, his brothers, at last his wife Draupadi, in a game in which his Kuru enemy plays with loaded dice. By agreement the Pandavas are to receive their kingdom back after enduring a twelve-year banishment from their native soil. The twelve years pass; the Pandavas call upon the Kurus to restore their land; they receive no answer, and declare war. Allies are brought in on either side, until almost all northern India is engaged.* The battle rages for eighteen days and five books; all the Kurus are slain, and nearly all the Pandavas; the heroic Bhishma alone slays 100,000 men in ten days; altogether, the poet-statistician reports, the fallen numbered several hundred million men.²³ Amid this bloody scene of death Gandhari, queen consort of the blind Kuru king, Dhrita-rashtra, wails with horror at the sight of vultures hovering greedily over the corpse of Prince Duryodhan, her son.

Stainless Queen and stainless woman, ever righteous, ever good,

Stately in her mighty sorrow on the field Gandhari stood.

Strewn with skulls and clotted tresses, darkened by the stream of gore,

With the limbs of countless warriors is the red field covered o’er. . . .

And the long-drawn howl of jackals o’er the scene of carnage rings,

And the vulture and the raven flap their dark and loathsome wings.

Feasting on the blood of warriors foul Pishachas fill the air,

Viewless forms of hungry Rakshas limb from limb the corpses tear.

Through this scene of death and carnage was the ancient monarch led,

Kuru dames with faltering footsteps stepped amidst the countless dead,

And a piercing wail of anguish burst upon the echoing plain,

As they saw their sons or fathers, brothers, lords, amidst the slain,

As they saw the wolves of jungle feed upon the destined prey,

Darksome wanderers of the midnight prowling in the light of day.

Shriek of pain and wail of anguish o’er the ghastly field resound,

And their feeble footsteps falter and they sink upon the ground,

Sense and life desert the mourners as they faint in common grief,

Death-like swoon succeeding sorrow yields a moment’s short relief.

Then a mighty sigh of anguish from Gandhari’s bosom broke,

Gazing on her anguished daughters unto Krishna thus she spoke:

“Mark my unconsoled daughters, widowed queens of Kuru’s house,

Wailing for their dear departed, like the osprey for her spouse;

How each cold and fading feature wakes in them a woman’s love,

How amidst the lifeless warriors still with restless steps they rove;

Mothers hug their slaughtered children all unconscious in their sleep,

Widows bend upon their husbands and in ceaseless sorrow weep. . . .”

Thus to Krishna Queen Gandhari strove her woeful thoughts to tell,

When, alas, her wandering vision on her son Duryodhan fell.

Sudden anguish smote her bosom, and her senses seemed to stray;

Like a tree by tempest shaken, senseless on the earth she lay.

Once again she waked in sorrow, once again she cast her eye

Where her son in blood empurpled slept beneath the open sky.

And she clasped her dear Duryodhan, held him close unto her breast,

Sobs convulsive shook her bosom as the lifeless form she prest,

And her tears like rains of summer fell and washed his noble head,

Decked with garlands still untarnished, graced with nishkas bright and red.

“‘Mother,’ said my dear Duryodhan, when he went unto the war,

‘Wish me joy and wish me triumph as I mount the battle-car.’

‘Son,’ I said to dear Duryodhan, ‘Heaven avert a cruel fate,

Yato dharma stato jayah—triumph doth on virtue wait.’

But he set his heart on battle, by his valor wiped his sins;

Now he dwells in realms celestial which the faithful warrior wins.

And I weep not for Duryodhan, like a prince he fought and fell,

But my sorrow-stricken husband, who can his misfortunes tell? . . .

“Hark the loathsome cry of jackals, how the wolves their vigils keep—

Maidens rich in song and beauty erst were wont to watch his sleep.

Hark the foul and blood-beaked vultures flap their wings upon the dead-

Maidens waved their feathery pankhas round Duryodhan’s royal bed. . . .

Mark Duryodhan’s noble widow, mother proud of Lakshman bold,

Queenly in her youth and beauty, like an altar of bright gold,

Torn from husband’s sweet embraces, from her son’s entwining arms,

Doomed to life-long woe and anguish in her youth and in her charms.

Rend my hard and stony bosom crushed beneath this cruel pain,

Should Gandhari live to witness noble son and grandson slain?

Mark again Duryodhan’s widow, how she hugs his gory head,

How with gentle hands and tender softly holds him on his bed;

How from dear departed husband turns she to her dearest son,

And the tear-drops of the mother choke the widow’s bitter groan;

Like the fibre of the lotus tender-golden is her frame.

O my lotus, O my daughter, Bharat’s pride and Kuru’s fame!

If the truth resides in Vedas, brave Duryodhan dwells above;

Wherefore linger we in sadness severed from his cherished love?

If the truth resides in Shastra, dwells in sky my hero son;

Wherefore linger we in sorrow since their earthly task is done?”^23a

Upon this theme of love and battle a thousand interpolations have been hung. The god Krishna interrupts the slaughter for a canto to discourse on the nobility of war and Krishna; the dying Bhishma postpones his death to expound the laws of caste, bequest, marriage, gifts and funeral rites, to explain the philosophy of the Sankhya and the Upanishads, to narrate a mass of legends, traditions and myths, and to lecture Yudishthira at great length on the duties of a king; dusty stretches of genealogy and geography, of theology and metaphysics, separate the oases of drama and action; fables and fairy-tales, love-stories and lives of the saints contribute to give the Mahabharata a formlessness worse, and a body of thought richer, than can be found in either the Iliad or the Odyssey. What was evidently a Kshatriyan enthronement of action, heroism and war becomes, in the hands of the Brahmans, a vehicle for teaching the people the laws of Manu, the principles of Yoga, the precepts of morality, and the beauty of Nirvana. The Golden Rule is expressed in many forms;* moral aphorisms of beauty and wisdom abound;† and pretty stories of marital fidelity (Nala and Damayanti, Savitri) convey to women listeners the Brahman ideal of the faithful and patient wife.

Embedded in the narrative of the great battle is the loftiest philosophical poem in the world’s literature—the Bhagavad-Gita, or Lord’s Song. This is the New Testament of India, revered next to the Vedas themselves, and used in the law-courts, like our Bible or the Koran, for the administration of oaths.²⁸ Wilhelm von Humboldt pronounced it “the most beautiful, perhaps the only true, philosophical song existing in any known tongue; . . . perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show.”²⁹ Sharing the anonymity that India, careless of the individual and the particular, wraps around her creations, the Gita comes to us without the author’s name, and without date. It may be as old as 400 B.C.,³⁰ or as young as 200 A.D.³¹

The mise-en-scène of the poem is the battle between the Kurus and the Pandavas; the occasion is the reluctance of the Pandava warrior Arjuna to attack in mortal combat his own near relatives in the opposing force. To Lord Krishna, fighting by his side like some Homeric god, Arjuna speaks the philosophy of Gandhi and Christ:

“As I behold—come here to shed

Their common blood—yon concourse of our kin,

My members fail, my tongue dries in my mouth. . . .

It is not good, O Keshav! Naught of good

Can spring from mutual slaughter! Lo, I hate

Triumph and domination, wealth and ease

Thus sadly won! Alas, what victory

Can bring delight, Govinda, what rich spoils

Could profit, what rule recompense, what span

Of life itself seem sweet, bought with such blood? . . .

Thus if we slay

Kinsfolk and friends for love of earthly power,

Ahovat! what an evil fault it were!

Better I deem it, if my kinsmen strike,

To face them weaponless, and bare my breast

To shaft and spear, than answer blow with blow.”³²

Thereupon Krishna, whose divinity does not detract from his joy in battle, explains, with all the authority of a son of Vishnu, that according to the Scriptures, and the best orthodox opinion, it is meet and just to kill one’s relatives in war; that Arjuna’s duty is to follow the rules of his Kshatriya caste, to fight and slay with a good conscience and a good will; that after all, only the body is slain, while the soul survives. And he expounds the imperishable Purusha of Sankhya, the unchanging Atman of the Upanishads:

“Indestructible,

Learn thou, the Life is, spreading life through all;

It cannot anywhere, by any means,

Be anywise diminished, stayed or changed.

But for these fleeting frames which it informs

With spirit deathless, endless, infinite—

They perish. Let them perish, Prince, and fight!

He who shall say, ‘Lo, I have slain a man!’

He who shall think, ‘Lo, I am slain!’ those both

Know naught. Life cannot slay! Life is not slain!

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;

Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!

Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever;

Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems.”³³

Krishna proceeds to instruct Arjuna in metaphysics, blending Sankhya and Vedanta in the peculiar synthesis accepted by the Vaishnavite sect. All things, he says, identifying himself with the Supreme Being,

“hang on me

As hangs a row of pearls upon its string.

I am the fresh taste of the water; I

The silver of the moon, the gold o’ the sun,

The word of worship in the Veds, the thrill

That passeth in the ether, and the strength

Of man’s shed seed. I am the good sweet smell

Of the moistened earth, I am the fire’s red light,

The vital air moving in all which moves,

The holiness of hallowed souls, the root

Undying, whence hath sprung whatever is;

The wisdom of the wise, the intellect

Of the informed, the greatness of the great,

The splendor of the splendid. . . .

To him who wisely sees,

The Brahman with his scrolls and sanctities,

The cow, the elephant, the unclean dog,

The outcaste gorging dog’s meat, all are one.”³⁴

It is a poem rich in complementary colors, in metaphysical and ethical contradictions that reflect the contrariness and complexity of life. We are a little shocked to find the man taking what might seem to be the higher moral stand, while the god argues for war and slaughter on the shifty ground that life is unkillable and individuality unreal. What the author had in mind to do, apparently, was to shake the Hindu soul out of the enervating quietism of Buddhist piety into a willingness to fight for India; it was the rebellion of a Kshatriya who felt that religion was weakening his country, and who proudly reckoned that many things were more precious than peace. All in all it was a good lesson which, if India had learned it, might have kept her free.

The second of the Indian epics is the most famous and best beloved of all Hindu books,³⁵ and lends itself more readily than the Mahabharata to Occidental understanding. The Ramayana is briefer, merely running to a thousand pages of forty-eight lines each; and though it, too, grew by accretion from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., the interpolations are fewer, and do not much disturb the central theme. Tradition attributes the poem to one Valmiki, who, like the supposed author of the larger epic, appears as a character in the tale; but more probably it is the product of many wayside bards like those who still recite these epics, sometimes for ninety consecutive evenings, to fascinated audiences.³⁶

As the Mahabharata resembles the Iliad in being the story of a great war fought by gods and men, and partly occasioned by the loss of a beautiful woman from one nation to another, so the Ramayana resembles the Odyssey, and tells of a hero’s hardships and wanderings, and of his wife’s patient waiting for reunion with him.³⁷ At the outset we get a picture of a Golden Age, when Dasa-ratha, from his capital Ayodhya, ruled the kingdom of Kosala (now Oudh).

Rich in royal worth and valor, rich in holy Vedic lore,

Dasa-ratha ruled his empire in the happy days of yore. . . .

Peaceful lived the righteous people, rich in wealth, in merit high;

Envy dwelt not in their bosoms, and their accents shaped no lie.

Fathers with their happy households owned their cattle, corn and gold;

Galling penury and famine in Ayodhya had no hold.³⁸

Nearby was another happy kingdom, Videha, over which King Janak ruled. He himself “held the plough and tilled the earth” like some doughty Cincinnatus; and one day, at the touch of his plough, a lovely daughter, Sita, sprang up from a furrow of the soil. Soon Sita had to be married, and Janak held a contest for her suitors: he who could unbend Janak’s bow of war should win the bride. To the contest came the oldest son of Dasaratha—Rama “lion-chested, mighty arméd, lotus-eyed, stately as the jungle tusker, with his crown of tresses tied.”³⁹ Only Rama bent the bow; and Janak offered him his daughter with the characteristic formula of Hindu marriage:

This is Sita, child of Janak, dearer unto him than life;

Henceforth sharer of thy virtue, be she, prince, thy faithful wife;

Of thy weal and woe partaker, be she thine in every land;

Cherish her in joy and sorrow, clasp her hand within thy hand;

As the shadow to the substance, to her lord is faithful wife,

And my Sita, best of women, follows thee in death or life.”⁴⁰

So Rama returns to Ayodhya with his princess-bride—“ivory brow and lip of coral, sparkling teeth of pearly sheen”—and wins the love of the Kosalas by his piety, his gentleness, and his generosity. Suddenly evil enters into this Eden in the form of Dasa-ratha’s second wife, Kaikeyi. Dasa-ratha has promised her any boon she may ask; and now, jealous of the first wife, whose son Rama is heir to the throne, she requires Dasa-ratha to banish Rama from the kingdom for fourteen years. Dasa-ratha, with a sense of honor which only a poet unacquainted with politics could conceive, keeps his word, and, broken-hearted, exiles his favorite son. Rama forgives him handsomely, and prepares to go and live in the forest, alone; but Sita insists upon going with him. Her speech is part of the memory of almost every Hindu bride:

“Car and steed and gilded palace, vain are these to woman’s life;

Dearer is her husband’s shadow to the loved and loving wife. . . .

Happier than in father’s mansions, in the woods will Sita rove,

Waste no thought on home or kindred, nestling in her husband’s love. . . .

And the wild fruit she will gather from the fresh and fragrant wood,

And the food by Rama tasted shall be Sita’s cherished food.”⁴¹

Even his brother Lakshman begs leave to accompany Rama:

“All alone with gentle Sita thou shalt trace thy darksome way;

Grant it that thy faithful Lakshman shall protect her night and day;

Grant it with his bow and quiver Lakshman shall all forests roam,

And his axe shall fell the jungle, and his hands shall rear the home.”⁴²

The epic becomes at this point a sylvan idyl, telling how Rama, Sita and Lakshman set out for the woods; how the population of Ayodhya, mourning for them, travel with them all the first day; how the exiles steal away from their solicitous company at night, abandon all their valuables and princely raiment, dress themselves in bark and matted grass, clear a way through the forest with their swords, and live on the fruits and nuts of the trees.

Oft to Rama turned his consort, pleased and curious ever more,

Asked the name of tree or creeper, fruit 01 flower unseen before. . . .

Peacocks flew around them gayly, monkeys leapt on branches bent. . . .

Rama plunged into the river ’neath the morning’s crimson beam,

Sita softly sought the waters as the lily seeks the stream.⁴³

They build a hut beside the river, and learn to love their life in the woods. But a southern princess, Surpa-nakha, wandering in the forest, meets Rama, falls in love with him, resents his virtue, and instigates her brother Ravan to come and kidnap Sita. He succeeds, snatches her away to his distant castle, and tries in vain to seduce her. Since nothing is impossible to gods and authors, Rama raises a great army, invades Ravan’s realm, defeats him in battle, rescues Sita, and then (his years of exile having ended) flies with her in an airplane back to Ayodhya, where another loyal-brother gladly surrenders to him the Kosala throne.

In what is probably a later epilogue, Rama gives way to the sceptics who will not believe that Sita could have been so long in Ravan’s palace without being occasionally in his arms. Though she passes through the Ordeal of Fire to prove her innocence, he sends her away to a forest hermitage with that bitter trick of heredity whereby one generation repeats upon the next the sins and errors which it suffered from its elders in its youth. In the woods Sita meets Valmiki, and bears two sons to Rama. Many years later these sons, as traveling minstrels, sing before the unhappy Rama the epic composed about him by Valmiki from Sita’s memories. He recognizes the boys as his own, and sends a message begging Sita to return. But Sita, broken-hearted over the suspicion to which she has been subjected, disappears into the earth that was once her mother. Rama reigns many years in loneliness and sorrow, and under his kindly sway Ayodhya knows again the Utopia of Dasa-ratha’s days:

And ’tis told by ancient sages, during Rama’s happy reign,

Death untimely, dire diseases, came not to his subject men;

Widows wept not in their sorrow for their lords untimely lost,

Mothers wailed not in their anguish for their babes by Yama crost;

Robbers, cheats and gay deceivers tempted not with lying word,

Neighbor loved his righteous neighbor, and the people loved their lord.

Trees their ample produce yielded as returning seasons went,

And the earth in grateful gladness never-failing harvest lent.

Rains descended in their season, never came the blighting gale,

Rich in crop and rich in pasture was each soft and smiling vale.

Loom and anvil gave their produce, and the tilled and fertile soil,

And the nation lived rejoicing in their old ancestral toil.⁴⁴

It is a delightful story, which even a modern cynic can enjoy if he is wise enough to yield himself now and then to romance and the lilt of song. These poems, though perhaps inferior to the epics of Homer in literary quality—in logic of structure, and splendor of language, in depth of portraiture and fidelity to the essence of things—are distinguished by fine feeling, a lofty idealization of woman and man, and a vigorous—sometimes realistic—representation of life. Rama and Sita are too good to be true, but Draupadi and Yudhishthira, Dhrita-rashtra and Gandhari, are almost as living as Achilles and Helen, Ulysses and Penelope. The Hindu would rightly protest that no foreigner can judge these epics, or even understand them. To him they are not mere stories, they are a gallery of ideal characters upon whom he may mould his conduct; they are a repertory of the traditions, philosophy and theology of his people; in a sense they are sacred scriptures to be read as a Christian reads The Imitation of Christ or The Lives of the Saints. The pious Hindu believes that Krishna and Rama were incarnations of divinity, and still prays to them; and when he reads their story in these epics he feels that he derives religious merit as well as literary delight and moral exaltation. He trusts that if he reads the Ramayana he will be cleansed of all sin, and will beget a son;⁴⁵ and he accepts with simple faith the proud conclusion of the Mahabharata:

If a man reads the Mahabharata and has faith in its doctrines, he becomes free from all sin, and ascends to heaven after his death. . . . As butter is to all other food, as Brahmans are to all other men, . . . as the ocean is to a pool of water, as the cow is to all other quadrupeds—so is the Mahabharata to all other histories. . . . He who attentively listens to the shlokas* of the Mahabharata, and has faith in them, enjoys a long life and solid reputation in this world, and an eternal abode in the heavens in the next.⁴⁶

IV. DRAMA

Origins—“The Clay Cart”—Characteristics of Hindu drama—Kalidasa—The story of “Shakuntala”—Estimate of Indian drama

In one sense drama in India is as old as the Vedas, for at least the germ of drama lies in the Upanishads. Doubtless older than these Scriptures is a more active source of the drama—the sacrificial and festival ceremonies and processions of religion. A third origin was in the dance—no mere release of energy, much less a substitute for coitus, but a serious ritual imitating and suggesting actions and events vital to the tribe. Perhaps a fourth source lay in the public and animated recitation of epic verse. These factors coöperated to produce the Indian theatre, and gave it a religious stamp that lingered throughout the classic age† in the serious nature of the drama, the Vedic or epic source of its subjects, and the benediction that always preceded the play.

Perhaps the final stimulus to drama came from the intercourse, established by Alexander’s invasion, between India and Greece. We have no evidence of Hindu dramas before Ashoka, and only uncertain evidence during his reign. The oldest extant Hindu plays are the palm-leaf manuscripts lately discovered in Chinese Turkestan. Among them were three dramas, one of which names as its author Ashvaghosha, a theological luminary at Kanishka’s court. The technical form of this play, and the resemblance of its buffoon to the type traditionally characteristic of the Hindu theatre, suggest that drama was already old in India when Ashvaghosha was born.⁴⁷ In 1910 thirteen ancient Sanskrit plays were found in Travancore, which are dubiously ascribed to Bhasa (ca. 350 A.D.), a dramatic predecessor much honored by Kalidasa. In the prologue to his Malavika Kalidasa unconsciously but admirably illustrates the relativity of time and adjectives: “Shall we,” he asks, “neglect the works of such renowned authors as Bhasa, Saumilla, and Kaviputra? Can the audience feel any respect for the work of a modern poet, a Kalidasa?”⁴⁸

Until recently, the oldest Hindu play known to research was The Clay Cart. The text, which need not be believed, names as author of the play an obscure King Shudraka, who is described as an expert in the Vedas, in mathematics, in the management of elephants, and in the art of love.⁴⁹ In any event he was an expert in the theatre. His play is by all means the most interesting that has come to us from India—a clever combination of melodrama and humor, with excellent passages of poetic fervor and description.

A synopsis of its plot will serve better than a volume of commentary to illustrate the character of Indian drama. In Act I we meet Charu-datta, once rich, now impoverished by generosity and bad fortune. His friend Maitreya, a stupid Brahman, acts as jester in the play. Charu asks Maitreya to offer an oblation to the gods, but the Brahman refuses, saying: “What’s the use, when the gods you have worshiped have done nothing for you?” Suddenly a young Hindu woman, of high family and great wealth, rushes into Charu’s courtyard, seeking refuge from a pursuer who turns out to be the King’s brother, Samsthanaka—as completely and incredibly evil as Charu is completely and irrevocably good. Charu protects the girl, sends Samsthanaka off, and scorns the latter’s threat of vengeance. The girl, Vasanta-sena, asks Charu to keep a casket of jewels in safe custody for her, lest her enemies steal it from her, and lest she may have no excuse for revisiting her rescuer. He agrees, takes the casket, and escorts her to her palatial home.

Act II is a comic interlude. A gambler, running away from two other gamblers, takes refuge in a temple. When they enter he eludes them by posing as the idol of the shrine. The pursuing gamblers pinch him to see if he is really a stone god, but he does not move. They abandon their search, and console themselves with a game of dice at the foot of the altar. The game becomes so exciting that the “statue,” unable to control himself, leaps off his pedestal, and asks leave to take part. The others beat him; he again finds help in his heels, and is saved by Vasanta-sena, who recognizes in him a former servant of Charu-datta.

Act III shows Charu and Maitreya returning from a concert. A thief, Sharvilaka, breaks in, and steals the casket. Charu, discovering the theft, feels disgraced, and sends Vasanta-sena his last string of pearls as a substitute.

In Act IV Sharvilaka is seen offering the stolen casket to Vasanta-sena’s maid as a bribe for her love. Seeing that it is her mistress’ casket, she berates Sharvilaka as a thief. He answers her with Schopenhauerian acerbity:

A woman will for money smile or weep

According to your will; she makes a man

Put trust in her, but trusts him not herself.

Women are as inconstant as the waves

Of ocean, their affection is as fugitive

As streak of sunset glow upon a cloud.

They cling with eager fondness to the man

Who yields them wealth, which they squeeze out like sap

Out of a juicy plant, and then they leave him.

The maid refutes him by forgiving him, and Vasanta-sena by allowing them to marry.

At the opening of Act V Vasanta-sena comes to Charu’s house to return both his jewels and her casket. While she is there a storm blows up, which she describes in excellent Sanskrit.* The storm obligingly increases its fury, and compels her, much according to her will, to spend the night under Charu’s roof.

Act VI shows Vasanta leaving Charu’s house the next morning. By mistake she steps not into the carriage he has summoned for her, but into one which belongs to the villainous Samsthanaka. Act VII is concerned with a subordinate plot, inessential to the theme. Act VIII finds Vasanta deposited, not in her palace as she had expected, but in the home, almost in the arms, of her enemy. When she again spurns his love he chokes her, and buries her. Then he goes to court and lodges against Charu a charge of murdering Vasanta for her jewels.

Act IX describes the trial, in which Maitreya unwittingly betrays his master by letting Vasanta’s jewels fall from his pocket. Charu is condemned to death. In Act X Charu is seen on his way to execution. His child pleads with the executioners to be allowed to take his place, but they refuse. At the last moment Vasanta herself appears. Sharvilaka had seen Samsthanaka bury her; he had exhumed her in time, and had revived her. Now, while Vasanta rescues Charu, Sharvilaka accuses the King’s brother of murder. But Charu refuses to support the charge, Samsthanaka is released, and everybody is happy.⁵⁰

Since time is more plentiful in the East, where nearly all work is done by human hands, than in the West, where there are so many labor-saving devices, Hindu plays are twice as long as the European dramas of our day. The acts vary from five to ten, and each act is unobtrusively divided into scenes by the exit of one character and the entrance of another. There are no unities of time or place, and no limits to imagination. Scenery is scanty, but costumes are colorful. Sometimes living animals enliven the play,⁵¹ and for a moment redeem the artificial with the natural. The performance begins with a prologue, in which an actor or the manager discusses the play; Goethe seems to have taken from Kalidasa the idea of a prologue for Faust. The prologue concludes by introducing the first character, who marches into the middle of things. Coincidences are innumerable, and supernatural influences often determine the course of events. A love-story is indispensable; so is a jester. There is no tragedy in the Indian theatre; happy endings are unavoidable; faithful love must always triumph, virtue must always be rewarded, if only to balance reality. Philosophical discourse, which obtrudes so often into Hindu poetry, is excluded from Hindu drama; drama, like life, must teach only by action, never by words.* Lyric poetry alternates with prose according to the dignity of the topic, the character, and the action. Sanskrit is spoken by the upper castes in the play, Prakrit by the women and the lower castes. Descriptive passages excel, character delineation is poor. The actors—who include women—do their work well, with no Occidental haste, and with no Far-Eastern fustian. The play ends with an epilogue, in which the favorite god of the author or the locality is importuned to bring prosperity to India.

Ever since Sir William Jones translated it and Goethe praised it, the most famous of Hindu dramas has been the Shakuntala of Kalidasa. Nevertheless we know Kalidasa only through three plays, and through the legends that pious memory has hung upon his name. Apparently he was one of the “Nine Gems”—poets, artists and philosophers—who were cherished by King Vikramaditya (380-413 A.D.) in the Gupta capital at Ujjain.

Shakuntala is in seven acts, written partly in prose, partly in vivid verse. After a prologue in which the manager invites the audience to consider the beauties of nature, the play opens upon a forest glade in which a hermit dwells with his foster daughter Shakuntala. The peace of the scene is disturbed by the noise of a chariot; its occupant, King Dushyanta, appears, and falls in love with Shakuntala with literary speed. He marries her in the first act, but is suddenly called back to his capital; he leaves her with the usual promises to return at his earliest convenience. An ascetic tells the sorrowing girl that the King will remember her as long as she keeps the ring Dushyanta has given her; but she loses the ring while bathing. About to become a mother, she journeys to the court, only to discover that the King has forgotten her after the manner of men to whom women have been generous. She tries to refresh his memory.

Shakuntala. Do you not remember in the jasmine-bower,

One day, how you had poured the rain-water

That a lotus had collected in its cup

Into the hollow of your hand?

King. Tell on,

I am listening.

Shakuntala. Just then my adopted child,

The little fawn, ran up with long, soft eyes,

And you, before you quenched your own thirst, gave

To the little creature, saying, “Drink you first,

Gentle fawn!” But she would not from strange hands.

And yet, immediately after, when

I took some water in my hand, she drank,

Absolute in her trust. Then, with a smile,

You said: “Each creature has faith in its own kind.

You are children both of the same wild wood, and each

Confides in the other, knowing where its trust is.”

King. Sweet, fair and false! Such women entice fools. . . .

The female gift of cunning may be marked

In creatures of all kinds; in women most.

The cuckoo leaves her eggs for dupes to hatch,

Then flies away secure and triumphing.⁵³

Shakuntala, spurned and despondent, is miraculously lifted into the air and carried off to another forest, where she bears her child—that great Bharata whose progeny must fight all the battles of the Mahabharata. Meanwhile a fisherman has found the ring, and seeing the King’s seal on it, has brought it to Dushyanta. His memory of Shakuntala is restored, and he seeks her everywhere. Traveling in his airplane over the Himalayas, he alights by dramatic providence at the very hermitage where Shakuntala is pining away. He sees the boy Bharata playing before the cottage, and envies his parents:

“Ah, happy father, happy mother, who,

Carrying their little son, are soiled with dust

Rubbed from his body; it nestles with fond faith

Into their lap, the refuge that he craves—

The white buds of his teeth just visible

When he breaks out into a causeless smile,

And he attempts sweet wordless sounds, . . .

Melting the heart more than any word.”⁵⁴

Shakuntala appears, the King begs her forgiveness, receives it, and makes her his queen. The play ends with a strange but typical invocation:

“May kings reign only for their subjects’ weal!

May the divine Sarasvati, the source

Of speech, and goddess of dramatic art,

Be ever honored by the great and wise!

And may the purple, self-existent god,

Whose vital energy pervades all space,

From future transmigrations save my soul!“⁵⁵

Drama did not decline after Kalidasa, but it did not again produce a Shakuntala or a Clay Cart. King Harsha, if we may believe a possibly inspired tradition, wrote three plays, which held the stage for centuries. A hundred years after him Bhavabhuti, a Brahman of Berar, wrote three romantic dramas which are ranked second only to Kalidasa’s in the history of the Indian stage. His style, however, was so elaborate and obscure that he had to be—and of course protested that he was—content with a narrow audience. “How little do they know,” he wrote, “who speak of us with censure. The entertainment is not for them. Possibly some one exists or will exist, of similar tastes with myself; for time is boundless, and the world is wide.”⁵⁶

We cannot rank the dramatic literature of India on a plane with that of Greece or Elizabethan England; but it compares favorably with the theatre of China or Japan. Nor need we look to India for the sophistication that marks the modern stage; that is an accident of time rather than an eternal verity, and may pass away—even into its opposite. The supernatural agencies of Indian drama are as alien to our taste as the deus ex machina of the enlightened Euripides; but this, too, is a fashion of history. The weaknesses of Hindu drama (if they may be listed diffidently by an alien) are artificial diction disfigured with alliteration and verbal conceits, monochromatic characterization in which each person is thoroughly good or thoroughly bad, improbable plots turning upon unbelievable coincidences, and an excess of description and discourse over that action which is, almost by definition, the specific medium by which drama conveys significance. Its virtues are its creative fancy, its tender sentiment, its sensitive poetry, and its sympathetic evocation of nature’s beauty and terror. About national types of art there can be no disputation; we can judge them only from the provincial standpoint of our own, and mostly through the prism of translation. It is enough that Goethe, ablest of all Europeans to transcend provincial and national barriers, found the reading of Shakuntala among the profound experiences of his life, and wrote of it gratefully:

Wouldst thou the young year’s blossoms, and the fruits of its decline,

And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted, fed;

Wouldst thou the Earth and Heaven itself in one sole name combine?

I name thee, O Shakuntala! and all at once is said.⁵⁷

V. PROSE AND POETRY

Their unity in India—Fables—History—Tales—Minor poets—Rise of the vernacular literature—Chandi Das—Tulsi Das-Poets of the south—Kabir

Prose is largely a recent phenomenon in Indian literature, and might be termed an exotic corruption through contact with Europeans. To the naturally poetic soul of the Hindu everything worth writing about had a poetic content, and invited a poetic form. Since he felt that literature should be read aloud, and knew that his work would spread and endure, if at all, by oral rather than written dissemination, he chose to give to his compositions a metric or aphoristic form that would lend itself to recitation and memory. Consequently nearly all the literature of India is verse: scientific, medical, legal and art treatises are, more often than not, presented in metre or rhyme or both; even grammars and dictionaries have been turned into poetry. Fables and history, which in the West are content with prose, found in India a melodious poetic form.

Hindu literature is especially rich in fables; indeed, India is probably responsible for most of the fables that have passed like an international currency across the frontiers of the world.* Buddhism flourished best in the days when the Jataka legends of Buddha’s birth and youth were popular among the people. The best-known book in India is the Panchatantra, or “Five Headings” (ca. 500 A.D.); it is the source of many of the fables that have pleased Europe as well as Asia. The Hitopadesha, or “Good Advice,” is a selection and adaption of tales from the Panchatantra . Both, strange to say, are classed by the Hindus under the rubric of Niti-shastra—i.e., instructions in politics or morals; every tale is told to point a moral, a principle of conduct or government; usually these stories pretend to have been invented by some wise Brahman for the instruction of a king’s sons. Often they turn the lowliest animals to the uses of the subtlest philosophy. The fable of the monkey who tried to warm himself by the light of a glowworm, and slew the bird who pointed out his error, is a remarkably apt illustration of the fate that awaits the scholar who exposes a popular delusion.†

Historical literature did not succeed in rising above the level of either bare chronicles or gorgeous romance. Perhaps through a scorn of the Maya events of space and time, perhaps through a preference of oral to written traditions, the Hindus neglected to compose works of history that could bear comparison with Herodotus or Thucydides, Plutarch or Tacitus, Gibbon or Voltaire. Details of place and date were so scantily recorded, even in the case of famous men, that Hindu scholars assigned to their greatest poet, Kalidasa, dates ranging over a millennium.⁵⁹ Living to our own time in an almost unchanging world of custom, morals and beliefs, the Hindu hardly dreamed of progress, and never bothered about antiquities. He was content to accept the epics as authentic history, and to let legend serve for biography. When Ashvaghosha wrote his life of Buddha (the Buddha-charita), it was legend rather than history; and when, five hundred years later, Bana wrote his Harsha-charita, it was again an idealization rather than a reliable portrait of the great king. The native chronicles of Rajputana appear to be exercises in patriotism. Only one Hindu writer seems to have grasped the function of the historian. Kalhana, author of the Rajatarangini, or “Stream of Kings,” expressed himself as follows: “That noble-minded poet alone merits praise whose word, like the sentence of a judge, keeps free from love or hatred in recording the past.” Winternitz calls him “the only great historian that India has produced.”⁶⁰

The Moslems were more acutely conscious of history, and left some admirable prose records of their doings in India. We have mentioned Alberuni’s ethnographical study of India, and Babur’s Memoirs. Contemporary with Akbar was an excellent historian, Muhammad Qazim Firishta, whose History of India is our most reliable guide to the events of the Moslem period. Less impartial was Akbar’s prime minister or general political factotum, Abu-1 Fazl, who put his master’s administrative methods down for posterity in the Ain-i Akbari, or “Institutes of Akbar,” and told his master’s life with forgivable fondness in the Akbar Nama. The Emperor returned his affection; and when the news came that Jehangir had slain the vizier, Akbar burst into passionate grief, and cried out: “If Salim (Jehangir) wished to be emperor, he might have slain me and spared Abu-1 Fazl.”⁶¹

Midway between fables and history were the vast collections of poetic tales put together by industrious versifiers for the delectation of the romantic Indian soul. As far back as the first century A.D. one Gunadhya wrote in one hundred thousand couplets the Brihatkatha, or “Great Romance”; and a thousand years later Somadeva composed the Kathasaritzagara, or “Ocean of the Rivers of Story,” a torrent 21,500 couplets long. In the same eleventh century a clever story-teller of uncertain identity built a framework for his Vetalapanchavimchatika (“The Twenty-five Stories of the Vampire”) by representing King Vikramaditya as receiving annually from an ascetic a fruit containing a precious stone. The King inquires how he may prove his gratitude; he is asked to bring to the yogi the corpse of a man hanging on the gallows, but is warned not to speak if the corpse should address him. The corpse is inhabited by a vampire who, as the King stumbles along, fascinates him with a story; at the end of the story the vampire propounds a question which the King, forgetting his instructions, answers. Twenty-five times the King attempts the task of bringing a corpse to the ascetic and holding his peace; twenty-four times he is so absorbed in the story that the vampire tells him that he answers the question put to him at the end.⁶² It was an excellent scaffold on which to hang a score of tales.

Meanwhile there was no dearth of poets writing what we should call poetry. Abu-1 Fazl describes “thousands of poets” at Akbar’s court; there were hundreds at minor capitals, and doubtless dozens in every home.* One of the earliest and greatest was Bhartrihari, monk, grammarian and lover, who, before retiring into the arms of religion, instructed his soul with amours. He has left us a record of them in his “Century of Love”—a Heinelike sequence of a hundred poems. “Erstwhile,” he writes to one of his loves, “we twain deemed that thou wast I and I was thou; how comes it now that thou are thou and I am I?” He did not care for reviewers, and told them: “It is easy to satisfy one who is ignorant, even easier to satisfy a connoisseur; but not the Creator himself can please the man who has just a morsel of knowledge.”⁶³ In Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda, or “Song of the Divine Cowherd,” the amorousness of the Hindu turns to religion, and intones the sensuous love of Radha and Krishna. It is a poem of full-bodied passion, but India interprets it reverently as a mystic and symbolic portrayal of the soul’s longing for God—an interpretation that would be intelligible to those immovable divines who composed such pious headings for the Song of Songs.

In the eleventh century the vernaculars made inroads upon the classical dead language as a medium of literary expression, as they were to do in Europe a century later. The first major poet to use the living speech of the people was Chand Bardai, who wrote in Hindi an immense historical poem of sixty cantos, and was only persuaded to interrupt his work by the call of death. Sur Das, the blind poet of Agra, composed 60,000 verses on the life and adventures of Krishna; we are told that he was helped by the god himself, who became his amanuensis, and wrote faster than the poet could dictate.⁶⁴ Meanwhile a poor priest, Chandi Das, was shocking Bengal by composing Dantean songs to a peasant Beatrice, idealizing her with romantic passion, exalting her as a symbol of divinity, and making his love an allegory of his desire for absorption in God; at the same time he inaugurated the use of Bengali as a literary language. “I have taken refuge at your feet, my beloved. When I do not see you my mind has no rest . . . . I cannot forget your grace and your charm,—and yet there is no desire in my heart.” Excommunicated by his fellow Brahmans on the ground that he was scandalizing the public, he agreed to renounce his love, Rami, in a public ceremony of recantation; but when, in the course of this ritual, he saw Rami in the crowd, he withdrew his recantation, and going up to her, bowed before her with hands joined in adoration.^64a

The supreme poet of Hindi literature is Tulsi Das, almost a contemporary of Shakespeare. His parents exposed him because he had been born under an unlucky star. He was adopted by a forest mystic, who instructed him in the legendary lore of Rama. He married; but when his son died, Tulsi Das retired to the woods to lead a life of penance and meditation. There, and in Benares, he wrote his religious epic, the Ramacharita-manasa, or “Lake of the Deeds of Rama,” in which he told again the story of Rama, and offered him to India as the supreme and only god. “There is one God,” says Tulsi Das; “it is Rama, creator of heaven and earth, and redeemer of mankind. . . . For the sake of his faithful people a very god, Lord Rama, became incarnate as a king, and for our sanctification lived, as it were, the life of any ordinary man.”⁶⁵ Few Europeans have been able to read the work in the now archaic Hindi original; one of these considers that it establishes Tulsi Das as “the most important figure in the whole of Indian literature.”⁶⁶ To the natives of Hindustan the poem constitutes a popular Bible of theology and ethics. “I regard the Ramayana of Tulsi Das,” says Gandhi, “as the greatest book in all devotional literature.”⁶⁷

Meanwhile the Deccan was also producing poetry. Tukaram composed in the Mahrathi tongue 4600 religious songs which are as current in India today as the Psalms of “David” are in Judaism or Christendom. His first wife having died, he married a shrew and became a philosopher. “It is not hard to win salvation,” he wrote, “for it may readily be found in the bundle on our back.”⁶⁸ As early as the second century A.D. Madura became the capital of Tamil letters; a Sangam, or court of poets and critics, was set up there under the patronage of the Pandya kings, and, like the French Academy, regulated the development of the language, conferred titles, and gave prizes.⁶⁹ Tiruvallavar, an Outcaste weaver, wrote in the most difficult of Tamil meters a religious and philosophical work—the Kurral—expounding moral and political ideals. Tradition assures us that when the members of the Sangam, who were all Brahmans, saw the success of this Pariah’s poetry, they drowned themselves to a man;⁷⁰ but this is not to be believed of any Academy.

We have kept for the last, though out of his chronological place, the greatest lyric poet of medieval India. Kabir, a simple weaver of Benares, prepared for his task of uniting Islam and Hinduism by having, we are told, a Mohammedan for his father and a Brahman virgin for his mother.⁷¹ Fascinated by the preacher Ramananda, he became a devotee of Rama, enlarged him (as Tulsi Das would also do) into a universal deity, and began to write Hindi poems of rare beauty to explain a creed in which there should be no temples, no mosques, no idols, no caste, no circumcision, and but one god.* “Kabir,” he says,

is a child of Ram and Allah, and accepteth all Gurus and Firs. . . . O God, whether Allah or Rama, I live by thy name. . . . Lifeless are all the images of the gods; they cannot speak; I know it, for I have called aloud to them. . . . What avails it to wash your mouth, count your beads, bathe in holy streams, and bow in temples, if, whilst you mutter your prayers or go on pilgrimages, deceitfulness is in your hearts?⁷²

The Brahmans were shocked, and to refute him (the story runs) sent a courtesan to tempt him; but he converted her to his creed. This was easy, for he had no dogmas, but only profound religious feeling.

There is an endless world, O my brother,

And there is a nameless Being, of whom naught can be said;

Only he knows who has reached that region.

It is other than all that is heard or said.

No form, no body, no length, no breadth is seen there;

How can I tell you that which it is?

Kabir says: “It cannot be told by the words of the mouth, it cannot be written on paper;

It is like a dumb person who tastes a sweet thing—how shall it be explained?⁷³

He accepted the theory of reincarnation which was in the air about him, and prayed, like a Hindu, to be released from the chain of rebirth and redeath. But his ethic was the simplest in the world: live justly, and look for happiness at your elbow.

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty;

You do not see that the Real is in your home, and you wander from forest to forest listlessly!

Here is the truth! Go where you will, to Benares or to Mathura, if you do not find your soul, the world is unreal to you. . . .

To what shore would you cross, O my heart? There is no traveler before you, there is no road. . . .

There there is neither body nor mind; and where is the place that shall still the thirst of the soul? You shall find naught in the emptiness.

Be strong, and enter into your own body; for there your foothold is firm. Consider it well, O my heart! Go not elsewhere.

Kabir says: Put all imaginations away, and stand fast in that which you are.⁷⁴

After his death, runs the legend, Hindus and Mohammedans contended for his body, and disputed whether it should be buried or burned. But while they disputed some one raised the cloth that covered the corpse, and nothing could be seen but a mass of flowers. The Hindus burned a part of the flowers in Benares, and the Moslems buried the rest.⁷⁵ After his death his songs passed from mouth to mouth among the people; Nanak the Sikh was inspired by them to found his sturdy sect; others made the poor weaver into a deity.⁷⁶ Today two small sects, jealously separate, follow the doctrine and worship the name of this poet who tried to unite Moslems and Hindus. One sect is Hindu, the other is Moslem.

CHAPTER XXI

Indian Art

I. THE MINOR ARTS

The great age of Indian art—Its uniqueness—Its association with industry—Pottery—Metal—Wood—Ivory—Jewelry—Textiles

BEFORE Indian art, as before every phase of Indian civilization, we stand in humble wonder at its age and its continuity. The ruins of Mohenjo-daro are not all utilitarian; among them are limestone bearded men (significantly like Sumerians), terra-cotta figures of women and animals, beads and other ornaments of carnelian, and jewelry of finely polished gold.¹ One seal² shows in bas-relief a bull so vigorously and incisively drawn that the observer almost leaps to the conclusion that art does not progress, but only changes its form.

From that time to this, through the vicissitudes of five thousand years, India has been creating its peculiar type of beauty in a hundred arts. The record is broken and incomplete, not because India ever rested, but because war and the idol-smashing ecstasies of Moslems destroyed uncounted masterpieces of building and statuary, and poverty neglected the preservation of others. We shall find it difficult to enjoy this art at first sight; its music will seem weird, its painting obscure, its architecture confused, its sculpture grotesque. We shall have to remind ourselves at every step that our tastes are the fallible product of our local and limited traditions and environments; and that we do ourselves and foreign nations injustice when we judge them, or their arts, by standards and purposes natural to our life and alien to their own.

In India the artist had not yet been separated from the artisan, making art artificial and work a drudgery; as in our Middle Ages, so, in the India that died at Plassey, every mature workman was a craftsman, giving form and personality to the product of his skill and taste. Even today, when factories replace handicrafts, and craftsmen degenerate into “hands,” the stalls and shops of every Hindu town show squatting artisans beating metal, moulding jewelry, drawing designs, weaving delicate shawls and embroideries, or carving ivory and wood. Probably no other nation known to us has ever had so exuberant a variety of arts.³

Strange to say, pottery failed to rise from an industry to an art in India; caste rules put so many limitations upon the repeated use of the same dish* that there was small incentive to adorn with beauty the frail and transient earthenware that came so rapidly from the potter’s hand.⁴ If the vessel was to be made of some precious metal, then artistry could spend itself upon it without stint; witness the Tanjore silver vase in the Victoria Institute at Madras, or the gold Betel Dish of Kandy.⁵ Brass was hammered into an endless variety of lamps, bowls and containers; a black alloy (bidri) of zinc was often used for boxes, basins and trays; and one metal was inlaid or overlaid upon another, or encrusted with silver or gold.⁶ Wood was carved with a profusion of plant and animal forms. Ivory was cut into everything from deities to dice; doors and other objects of wood were inlaid with it; and dainty receptacles were made of it for cosmetics and perfumes. Jewelry abounded, and was worn by rich and poor as ornament or hoard; Jaipur excelled in firing enamel colors upon a gold background; clasps, beads, pendants, knives and combs were moulded into tasteful shapes, with floral, animal, or theological, designs; one Brahman pendant harbors in its tiny space half a hundred gods.⁷ Textiles were woven with an artistry never since excelled; from the days of Cæsar to our own the fabrics of India have been prized by all the world,† Sometimes, by the subtlest and most painstaking of precalculated measurements, every thread of warp and woof was dyed before being placed upon the loom; the design appeared as the weaving progressed, and was identical on either side.⁹ From homespun khaddar to complex brocades flaming with gold, from picturesque pyjamas‡ to the invisibly-seamed shawls of Kashmir,§ every garment woven in India has a beauty that comes only of a very ancient, and now almost instinctive, art.

II. MUSIC

A concert in India—Music and the dance—Musicians—Scale and—forms—Themes—Music and philosophy

An American traveler, permitted to intrude upon a concert in Madras, found an audience of some two hundred Hindus, apparently all Brahmans, seated some on benches, some on a carpeted floor, listening intently to a small ensemble beside which our orchestral mobs would have seemed designed to make themselves heard on the moon. The instruments were unfamiliar to the visitor, and to his provincial eye they looked like the strange and abnormal products of some neglected garden. There were drums of many shapes and sizes, ornate flutes and serpentine horns, and a variety of strings. Most of these pieces were wrought with minute workmanship, and some were studded with gems. One drum, the mridanga, was formed like a small barrel; both ends were covered with a parchment whose pitch was changed by tightening or loosening it with little leather thongs; one parchment head had been treated with manganese dust, boiled rice and tamarind juice in order to elicit from it a peculiar tone. The drummer used only his hands—sometimes the palm, sometimes the fingers, sometimes the merest finger-tips. Another player had a tambura, or lute, whose four long strings were sounded continuously as a deep and quiet background for the melody. One instrument, the vina, was especially sensitive and eloquent; its strings, stretched over a slender metal plate from a parchment-covered drum of wood at one end to a resounding hollow gourd at the other, were kept vibrating with a plectrum, while the player’s left hand etched in the melody with fingers moving deftly from string to string. The visitor listened humbly, and understood nothing.

Music in India has a history of at least three thousand years. The Vedic hymns, like all Hindu poetry, were written to be sung; poetry and song, music and dance, were made one art in the ancient ritual. The Hindu dance, which, to the beam in the Occidental eye, seems as voluptuous and obscene as Western dancing seems to Hindus, has been, through the greater part of Indian history, a form of religious worship, a display of beauty in motion and rhythm for the honor and edification of the gods; only in modern times have the devadasis emerged from the temples in great number to entertain the secular and profane. To the Hindu these dances were no mere display of flesh; they were, in one aspect, an imitation of the rhythms and processes of the universe. Shiva himself was the god of the dance, and the dance of Shiva symbolized the very movement of the world.*

Musicians, singers and dancers, like all artists in India, belonged to the lowest castes. The Brahman might like to sing in private, and accompany himself on a vina or another stringed instrument; he might teach others to play, or sing, or dance; but he would never think of playing for hire, or of putting an instrument to his mouth. Public concerts were, until recently, a rarity in India; secular music was either the spontaneous singing or thrumming of the people, or it was performed, like the chamber music of Europe, before small gatherings in aristocratic homes. Akbar, himself skilled in music, had many musicians at his court; one of his singers, Tansen, became popular and wealthy, and died of drink at the age of thirty-four.¹¹ There were no amateurs, there were only professionals; music was not taught as a social accomplishment, and children were not beaten into Beethovens. The function of the public was not to play poorly, but to listen well.¹²

For listening to music, in India, is itself an art, and requires long training of ear and soul. The words may be no more intelligible to the Westerner than the words of the operas which he feels it his class duty to enjoy; they range, as everywhere, about the two subjects of religion and love; but the words are of little moment in Hindu music, and the singer, as in our most advanced literature, often replaces them with meaningless syllables. The music is written in scales more subtle and minute than ours. To our scale of twelve tones it adds ten “microtones,” making a scale of twenty-two quarter-tones in all. Hindu music may be written in a notation composed of Sanskrit letters; usually it is neither written nor read, but is passed down “by ear” from generation to generation, or from composer to learner. It is not separated into bars, but glides in a continuous legato which frustrates a listener accustomed to regular emphases or beats. It has no chords, and does not deal in harmony; it confines itself to melody, with perhaps a background of undertones; in this sense it is much simpler and more primitive than European music, while it is more complex in scale and rhythm. The melodies are both limited and infinite: they must all derive from one or another of the thirty-six traditional modes or airs, but they may weave upon these themes an endless and seamless web of variation. Each of these themes, or ragas * consists of five, six or seven notes, to one of which the musician constantly returns. Each raga is named from the mood that it wishes to suggest—“Dawn,” “Spring,” “Evening Beauty,” “Intoxication,” etc.—and is associated with a specific time of the day or the year. Hindu legend ascribes an occult power to these ragas; so it is said that a Bengal dancing-girl ended a drought by singing, as a kind of “Rain-drop Prelude,” the Megh mallar raga, or rain-making theme.¹³ Their antiquity has given the ragas a sacred character; he who plays them must observe them faithfully, as forms enacted by Shiva himself. One player, Narada, having performed them carelessly, was ushered into hell by Vishnu, and was shown men and women weeping over their broken limbs; these, said the god, were the ragas and raginis distorted and torn by Narada’s reckless playing. Seeing which, we are told, Narada sought more humbly a greater perfection in his art.¹⁴

The Indian performer is not seriously hampered by the obligation to remain faithful to the raga that he has chosen for his program, any more than the Western composer of sonatas or symphonies is hampered by adhering to his theme; in either case what is lost in liberty is gained in access to coherence of structure and symmetry of form. The Hindu musician is like the Hindu philosopher; he starts with the finite and “sends his soul into the infinite”; he embroiders upon his theme until, through an undulating stream of rhythm and recurrence, even through a hypnotizing monotony of notes, he has created a kind of musical Yoga, a forgetfulness of will and individuality, of matter, space and time; the soul is lifted into an almost mystic union with something “deeply interfused,” some profound, immense and quiet Being, some primordial and pervasive reality that smiles upon all striving wills, all change and death.

Probably we shall never care for Hindu music, and never comprehend it, until we have abandoned striving for being, progress for permanence, desire for acceptance, and motion for rest. This may come when Europe again is subject, and Asia again is master. But then Asia will have tired of being, permanence, acceptance and rest.

III. PAINTING

Prehistoric—The frescoes of Ajanta—Rajput miniatures—The Mogul school—The painters—The theorists

A provincial is a man who judges the world in terms of his parish, and considers all unfamiliar things barbarous. It is told of the Emperor Jehangir—a man of taste and learning in the arts—that when he was shown a European painting he rejected it summarily; being “in oyle, he liked it not.”¹⁵ It is pleasant to know that even an emperor can be a provincial, and that it was as difficult for Jehangir to enjoy the oil-painting of Europe as it is for us to appreciate the minatures of India.

It is clear, from the drawings, in red pigment, of animals and a rhinoceros hunt in the prehistoric caves of Singanpur and Mirzapur, that Indian painting has had a history of many thousands of years. Palettes with ground colors ready for use abound among the remains of neolithic India.¹⁶ Great gaps occur in the history of the art, because most of the early work was ruined by the climate, and much of the remainder was destroyed by Moslem “idol-breakers” from Mahmud to Aurangzeb.¹⁷ The Vinaya Pitaka (ca. 300 B.C.) refers to King Pasenada’s palace as containing picture galleries, and Fa-Hien and Yuan Chwang describe many buildings as famous for the excellence of their murals;¹⁸ but no trace of these structures remains. One of the oldest frescoes in Tibet shows an artist painting a portrait of Buddha;¹⁹ the later artist took it for granted that painting was an established art in Buddha’s days.

The earliest dateable Indian painting is a group of Buddhist frescoes (ca. 100 B.C.) found on the walls of a cave in Sirguya, in the Central Provinces. From that time on the art of fresco painting—that is, painting upon freshly laid plaster before it dries—progressed step by step until on the walls of the caves at Ajanta* it reached a perfection never excelled even by Giotto or Leonardo. These temples were carved out of the rocky face of a mountain-side at various periods from the first to the seventh century A.D. For centuries they were lost to history and human memory after the decay of Buddhism; the jungle grew about them and almost buried them; bats, snakes and other beasts made their home there, and a thousand varieties of birds and insects fouled the paintings with their waste. In 1819 Europeans stumbled into the ruins, and were amazed to find on the walls frescoes that are now ranked among the masterpieces of the world’s art.²⁰

The temples have been called caves, for in most cases they are cut into the mountains. Cave No. XVI, for example, is an excavation sixty-five feet each way, upheld by twenty pillars; alongside the central hall are sixteen monastic cells; a porticoed veranda adorns the front, and a sanctuary hides in the back. Every wall is covered with frescoes. In 1879 sixteen of the twenty-nine temples contained paintings; by 1910 the frescoes in ten of these sixteen had been destroyed by exposure, and those in the remaining six had been mutilated by inept attempts at restoration.²¹ Once these frescoes were brilliant with red, green, blue and purple pigments; nothing survives of the colors now except low-toned and blackened surfaces. Some of the paintings, thus obscured by time and ignorance, seem coarse and grotesque to us, who cannot read the Buddhist legends with Buddhist hearts; others are at once powerful and graceful, a revelation of the skill of craftsmen whose names perished long before their work.

Despite these depredations, Cave I is still rich in masterpieces. Here, on one wall, is (probably) a Bodhisattwa—a Buddhist saint entitled to Nirvana, but choosing, instead, repeated rebirths in order to minister to men. Never has the sadness of understanding been more profoundly portrayed;²² one wonders which is finer or deeper—this, or Leonardo’s kindred study of the head of Christ.* On another wall of the same temple is a study of Shiva and his wife Parvati, dressed in jewelry.²³ Nearby is a painting of four deer, tender with the Buddhist sympathy for animals; and on the ceiling is a design still alive with delicately drawn flowers and fowl.²⁴ On a wall of Cave XVII is a graceful representation, now half destroyed, of the god Vishnu, with his retinue, flying down from heaven to attend some event in the life of Buddha;²⁵ on another wall is a schematic but colorful portrait of a princess and her maids.²⁶ Mingled with these chef-d’æuvres are crowded frescoes of apparently poor workmanship, describing the youth, flight and temptation of Buddha.²⁷

But we cannot judge these works in their original form from what survives of them today; and doubtless there are clues to their appreciation that are not revealed to alien souls. Even the Occidental, however, can admire the nobility of the subject, the majestic scope of the plan, the unity of the composition, the clearness, simplicity and decisiveness of the line, and—among many details—the astonishing perfection of that bane of all artists, the hands. Imagination can picture the artist-priests† who prayed in these cells and perhaps painted these walls and ceilings with fond and pious art while Europe lay buried in her early-medieval darkness. Here at Ajanta religious devotion fused architecture, sculpture and painting into a happy unity, and produced one of the sovereign monuments of Hindu art.

When their temples were closed or destroyed by Huns and Moslems the Hindus turned their pictorial skill to lesser forms. Among the Rajputs a school of painters arose who recorded in delicate miniatures the episodes of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and the heroic deeds of the Rajputana chieftains; often they were mere outlines, but always they were instinct with life, and perfect in design. There is, in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, a charming example of this style, symbolizing one of the ragas of music by means of graceful women, a stately tower, and a lowering sky.²⁹ Another example, in the Art Institute of Detroit, represents with unique delicacy a scene from the Gita-Govinda.³⁰ The human figures in these and other Hindu paintings were rarely drawn from models; the artist visualized them out of imagination and memory. He painted, usually, in brilliant tempera upon a paper surface; he used fine brushes made from the most delicate hairs that he could get from the squirrel, the camel, the goat or the mongoose;³¹ and he achieved a refinement of line and decoration that delight even the foreign and inexpert eye.

Similar work was done in other parts of India, especially in the state of Kangra.³² Another variety of the same genre developed under the Moguls at Delhi. Rising out of Persian calligraphy and the art of illuminating manuscripts, this style grew into a form of aristocratic portraiture corresponding, in its refinement and exclusivesness, to the chamber music that flourished at the court. Like the Rajput school, the Mogul painters strove for delicacy of line, sometimes using a brush made from a single hair; and they, too, rivaled one another in the skilful portrayal of the hand. But they put more color into their drawings, and less mysticism; they seldom touched religion or mythology; they confined themselves to the earth, and were as realistic as caution would permit. Their subjects were living men and women of imperial position and temper, not noted for humility; one after another these dignitaries sat for their portraits, until the picture galleries of that royal dilettante, Jehangir, were filled with the likenesses of every important ruler or courtier since the coming of Akbar to the throne. Akbar was the first of his dynasty to encourage painting; at the end of his reign, if we may believe Abu-1 Fazl, there were a hundred masters in Delhi, and a thousand amateurs.³³ Jehangir’s intelligent patronage developed the art, and widened its field from portraiture to the representation of hunting scenes and other natural backgrounds for the human figure—which still dominated the picture; one minature shows the Emperor himself almost in the claws of a lion that has clambered upon the rump of the imperial elephant and is reaching for the royal flesh, while an attendant realistically takes to his heels.³⁴ Under Shah Jehan the art reached its height, and began to decline; as in the case of Japanese prints, the widened popularity of the form gave it at once a wider audience and a less exacting taste.³⁵ Aurangzeb, by restoring the strict rule of Islam against images, completed the decay.

Through the intelligent beneficence of the Mogul kings Indian painters enjoyed at Delhi a prosperity that they had not known for many centuries. The guild of painters, which had kept itself alive from Buddhist times, renewed its youth, and some of its members escaped from the anonymity with which time’s forgetfulness, and Hindu negligence of the individual, cover most Indian art. Out of seventeen artists considered preeminent in Akbar’s reign, thirteen were Hindus.³⁶ The most favored of all the painters at the great Mogul’s court was Dasvanth, whose lowly origin as the son of a palanquin-bearer aroused no prejudice against him in the eyes of the Emperor. The youth was eccentric, and insisted on drawing pictures wherever he went, and on whatever surface he found at hand. Akbar recognized his genius, and had his own drawing-master teach him. The boy became in time the greatest master of his age; but at the height of his fame he stabbed himself to death.³⁷

Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done. The Hindus, whose philosophy did not exalt logic, loved logic none the less, and delighted to formulate in the strictest and most rational rules the subtle procedure of every art. So, early in our era, the Sandanga, or “Six Limbs of Indian Painting,” laid down, like a later and perhaps imitative Chinese,* six canons of excellence in pictorial art: (i) the knowledge of appearances; (2) correct perception, measure and structure; (3) the action of feelings on forms; (4) the infusion of grace, or artistic representation; (5) similitude; and (6) an artistic use of brush and colors. Later an elaborate esthetic code appeared, the Shilpa-shastra, in which the rules and traditions of each art were formulated for all time. The artist, we are told, should be learned in the Vedas, “delighting in the worship of God, faithful to his wife, avoiding strange women, and piously acquiring a knowledge of various sciences.”³⁸

We shall be helped in understanding Oriental painting if we remember, first, that it seeks to represent not things but feelings, and not to represent but to suggest; that it depends not on color but on line; that it aims to create esthetic and religious emotion rather than to reproduce reality; that it is interested in the “soul” or “spirit” of men and things, rather than in their material forms. Try as we will, however, we shall hardly find in Indian painting the technical development, or range and depth of significance, that characterize the pictorial art of China and Japan. Certain Hindus explain this very fancifully: painting decayed among them, they tell us, because it was too easy, it was not a sufficiently laborious gift to offer to the gods.³⁹ Perhaps pictures, so mortally frail and transitory, did not quite satisfy the craving of the Hindu for some lasting embodiment of his chosen deity. Slowly, as Buddhism reconciled itself to imagery, and the Brahmanic shrines increased and multiplied, painting was replaced by statuary, color and line by lasting stone.

IV. SCULPTURE

Primitive—Buddhist—Gandhara—Gupta—“Colonial”—Estimate

We cannot trace the history of Indian sculpture from the statuettes of Mohenjo-daro to the age of Ashoka, but we may suspect that this is a gap in our knowledge rather than in the art. Perhaps India, temporarily impoverished by the Aryan invasions, reverted from stone to wood for its statuary; or perhaps the Aryans were too intent upon war to care for art. The oldest stone figures surviving in India go back only to Ashoka; but these show a skill so highly developed that we cannot doubt that the art had then behind it many centuries in growth.⁴⁰ Buddhism set up definite obstacles to both painting and statuary in its aversion to idolatry and secular imagery: Buddha forbade “imaginative drawings painted in figures of men and women”;⁴¹ and under this almost Mosaic prohibition pictorial and plastic art suffered in India as it had done in Judea and was to do in Islam. Gradually this Puritanism seems to have relaxed as Buddhism yielded its austerity and partook more and more of the Dravidian passion for symbol and myth. When the art of carving appears again (ca. 200 B.C.), in the stone bas-reliefs on the “rails” enclosing the Buddhist “stupas” or burial mounds at Bodh-gaya and Bharhut, it is as a component part of an architectural design rather than as an independent art; and to the end of its history Indian sculpture remained for the most part an accessory to architecture, and preferred relief to carving in the round.* In the Jain temples at Mathura, and the Buddhist shrines at Amaravati and Ajanta, this art of relief reached a high point of perfection. The rail at Amaravati, says a learned authority, “is the most voluptuous and the most delicate flower of Indian sculpture.”⁴²

Meanwhile, in the province of Gandhara in northwestern India, another type of sculpture was developing under the patronage of the Kushan kings. This mysterious dynasty, which came suddenly out of the north—probably from Hellenized Bactria—brought with it a tendency to imitate Greek forms. The Mahayana Buddhism that captured the council of Kanishka opened the way by rescinding the prohibition of imagery. Under the tutelage of Greek instructors Hindu sculpture took on for a time a smooth Hellenistic face; Buddha was transformed into the likeness of Apollo, and became an aspirant to Olympus; drapery began to flow about Hindu deities and saints in the style of Pheidias’ pediments, and pious Bodhisattwas rubbed elbows with jolly drunken Sileni.⁴³ Idealized and almost effeminate representations of the Master and his disciples were offset with horrible examples of decadent Greek realism, like the starving Buddha of Lahore, in which every rib and tendon is shown underneath a feminine face with ladylike coiffure and masculine beard.⁴⁴ This Greco-Buddhist art impressed Yuan Chwang, and through him and later pilgrims found its way into China, Korea and Japan;⁴⁵ but it had little influence upon the sculptural forms and methods of India itself. When, after some centuries of flourishing activity, the Gandhara school passed away, Indian art came to life again under Hindu rulers, took up the traditions left by the native artists of Bharhut, Amaravati and Mathura, and paid scant attention to the Greek interlude at Gandhara.

Sculpture, like nearly everything else in India, prospered under the Gupta line. Buddhism had now forgotten its hostility to images; and a reinvigorated Brahmanism encouraged symbolism and the adornment of religion with every art. The Mathura Museum holds a highly finished stone Buddha, with meditative eyes, sensual lips, too graceful a form, and clumsy Cubist feet. The Sarnath Museum has another stone Buddha, in the seated pose that was destined to dominate Buddhist sculpture; here the effect of peaceful contemplation and a pious kindliness is perfectly revealed. At Karachi is a small bronze Brahma, scandalously like Voltaire.⁴⁶

Everywhere in India, in the millennium before the coming of the Moslems, the art of the sculptor, though limited as well as inspired by its subservience to architecture and religion, produced masterpieces. The pretty statue of Vishnu from Sultanpur,⁴⁷ the finely chiseled statue of Padmapani,⁴⁸ the gigantic three-faced Shiva (commonly called “Trimurti”) carved in deep relief in the caves at Elephanta,⁴⁹ the almost Praxitelean stone statue worshiped at Nokkas as the goddess Rukmini,⁵⁰ the graceful dancing Shiva, or Nataraja, cast in bronze by the Chola artist-artisans of Tanjore,⁵¹ the lovely stone deer of Mamallapuram,⁵² and the handsome Shiva of Perur⁵³—these are evidences of the spread of the carver’s art into every province of India.

The same motives and methods crossed the frontiers of India proper, and produced masterpieces from Turkestan and Cambodia to Java and Ceylon. The student will find examples in the stone head, apparently of a boy, dug up from the sands of Khotan by Sir Aurel Stein’s expedition;⁵⁴ the head of Buddha from Siam;⁵⁵ the Egyptianly fine “Harihara” of Cambodia;⁵⁶ the magnificent bronzes of Java;⁵⁷ the Gandhara-like head of Shiva from Prambanam;⁵⁸ the supremely beautiful female figure (“Prajnaparamita”) now in the Leyden Museum; the perfect Bodhisattwa in the Glyptothek at Copenhagen;⁵⁹ the calm and powerful Buddha,⁶⁰ and the finely chiseled Avalokiteshvara (“The Lord who looks down with pity upon all men”),⁶¹ both from the great Javanese temple of Borobudur; or the massive primitive Buddha,⁶² and the lovely “moonstone” doorstep,⁶³ of Anuradhapura in Ceylon. This dull list of works that must have cost the blood of many men in many centuries will suggest the influence of Hindu genius on the cultural colonies of India.

We find it hard to like this sculpture at first sight; only profound and modest minds can leave their environment behind them when they travel. We should have to be Hindus, or citizens of those countries that accepted the cultural leadership of India, to understand the symbolism of these statues, the complex functions and superhuman powers denoted by these multiple arms and legs, the terrible realism of these fanciful figures, expressing the Hindu sense of supernatural forces irrationally creative, irrationally fertile and irrationally destructive. It shocks us to find that everybody in Hindu villages is thin, and everybody in Hindu sculpture is fat; we forget that the statues are mostly of gods, who received the first fruits of the land. We are disconcerted on discovering that the Hindus colored their statuary, whereby we reveal our unawareness of the fact that the Greeks did likewise, and that something of the classic nobility of the Pheidian deities is due to the accidental disappearance of their paint. We are displeased at the comparative paucity of female figures in the Indian gallery; we mourn over the subjection of women which this seems to indicate, and never reflect that the cult of the nude female is not the indispensable basis of plastic art, that the profoundest beauty of woman may be more in motherhood than in youth, more in Demeter than in Aphrodite. Or we forget that the sculptor carved not what he dreamed of so much as what the priests laid down; that every art, in India, belonged to religion rather than to art, and was the handmaiden of theology. Or we take too seriously figures intended by the sculptor to be caricatures, or jests, or ogres designed to frighten away evil spirits; if we turn away from them in horror we merely attest the fulfilment of their aim.

Nevertheless, the sculpture of India never quite acquired the grace of her literature, or the sublimity of her architecture, or the depth of her philosophy; it mirrored chiefly the confused and uncertain insight of her religions. It excelled the sculpture of China and Japan, but it never equaled the cold perfection of Egyptian statuary, or the living and tempting beauty of Greek marble. To understand even its assumptions we should have to renew in our hearts the earnest and trusting piety of medieval days. In truth we ask too much of sculpture, as of painting, in India; we judge them as if they had been there, as here, independent arts, when in truth we have artificially isolated them for treatment according to our traditional rubrics and norms. If we could see them as the Hindu knows them, as integrated parts of the unsurpassed architecture of his country, we should have made some modest beginning towards understanding Indian art.

V. ARCHITECTURE

1. Hindu Architecture

Before Ashoka—Ashokan—Buddhist—Jain—The masterpieces of the north—Their destruction—The southern style-Monolithic temples—Structural temples

Nothing remains of Indian architecture before Ashoka’s time. We have the brick ruins of Mohenjo-daro, but apparently the buildings of Vedic and Buddhist India were of wood, and Ashoka seems to have been the first to use stone for architectural purposes.⁶⁴ We hear, in the literature, of seven-storied structures,⁶⁵ and of palaces of some magnificence, but not a trace of them survives. Megasthenes describes the imperial residences of Chandragupta as superior to anything in Persia except Persepolis, on whose model they seem to have been designed.⁶⁶ This Persian influence persisted till Ashoka’s time; it appears in the ground-plan of his palace, which corresponded with the “Hall of a Hundred Columns” at Persepolis;⁶⁷ and it shows again in the fine pillar of Ashoka at Lauriya, crowned with a lion-capital.

With the conversion of Ashoka to Buddhism, Indian architecture began to throw off this alien influence, and to take its inspiration and it symbols from the new religion. The transition is evident in the great capital which is all that now remains of another Ashokan pillar, at Sarnath;⁶⁸ here, in a composition of astonishing perfection, ranked by Sir John Marshall as equal to “anything of its kind in the ancient world,”⁶⁹ we have four powerful lions, standing back to back on guard, and thoroughly Persian in form and countenance; but beneath them is a frieze of well-carved figures including so Indian a favorite as the elephant, and so Indian a symbol as the Buddhist Wheel of the Law; and under the frieze is a great stone lotus, formerly mistaken for a Persian bell-capital, but now accepted as the most ancient, universal and characteristic of all the symbols in Indian art.⁷⁰ Represented upright, with the petals turned down and the pistil or seed-vessel showing, it stood for the womb of the world; or, as one of the fairest of nature’s manifestations, it served as the throne of a god. The lotus or water-lily symbol migrated with Buddhism, and permeated the art of China and Japan. A like form, used as a design for windows and doors, became the “horseshoe arch” of Ashokan vaults and domes, originally derived from the “covered wagon” curvature of Bengali thatched roofs supported by rods of bent bamboo.⁷¹

The religious architecture of Buddhist days has left us a few ruined temples and a large number of “topes” and “rails.” The “tope” or “stupa” was in early days a burial mound; under Buddhism it became a memorial shrine, usually housing the relics of a Buddhist saint. Most often the tope took the form of a dome of brick, crowned with a spire, and surrounded with a stone rail carved with bas-reliefs. One of the oldest topes is at Bharhut; but the reliefs there are primitively coarse. The most ornate of the extant rails is at Amaravati; here 17,000 square feet were covered with minute reliefs of a workmanship so excellent that Fergusson judged this rail to be “probably the most remarkable monument in India.”⁷² The best known of the stupas is the Sanchi tope, one of a group at Bhilsa in Bhopal. The stone gates apparently imitate ancient wooden forms, and anticipate the pailus or toriis that usually mark the approach to the temples of the Far East. Every foot of space on pillars, capitals, crosspieces and supports is cut into a wilderness of plant, animal, human and divine forms. On a pillar of the eastern gateway is a delicate carving of a perennial Buddhist symbol—the Bodhi-tree, scene of the Master’s enlightenment; on the same gateway, gracefully spanning a bracket, is a sensuous goddess (a Yakshi) with heavy limbs, full hips, slim waist, and abounding breasts.⁷³

While the dead saints slept in the topes, the living monks cut into the mountain rocks temples where they might live in isolation, sloth and peace, secure from the elements and from the glare and heat of the sun. We may judge the strength of the religious impulse in India by noting that over twelve hundred of these cave-temples remain of the many thousands that were built in the early centuries of our era, partly for Jains and Brahmans, but mostly for Buddhist communities. Often the entrance of these viharas (monasteries) was a simple portal in the form of a “horseshoe” or lotus arch; sometimes, as at Nasik, it was an ornate façade of strong columns, animal capitals, and patiently carved architrave; often it was adorned with pillars, stone screens or porticoes of admirable design.⁷⁴ The interior included a chaitya or assembly hall, with colonnades dividing nave from aisles, cells for the monks on either side, and an altar, bearing relics, at the inner end.* One of the oldest of these cave-temples, and perhaps the finest now surviving, is at Karle, between Poona and Bombay; here Hinayana Buddhism achieved its chef-d’œuvre.

The caves at Ajanta, besides being the hiding-place of the greatest of Buddhist paintings, rank with Karle as examples of that composite art, half architecture and half sculpture, which characterizes the temples of India. Caves I and II have spacious assembly halls whose ceilings, cut and painted in sober yet elegant designs, are held up by powerful fluted pillars square at the base, round at the top, ornamented with flowery bands, and crowned with majestic capitals;⁷⁵ Cave XIX is distinguished by a façade richly decorated with adipose statuary and complex bas-reliefs;⁷⁶ in Cave XXVI gigantic columns rise to a frieze crowded with figures which only the greatest religious and artistic zeal could have carved in such detail.⁷⁷ Ajanta can hardly be refused the title of one of the major works in the history of art.

Of other Buddhist temples still existing in India the most impressive is the great tower at Bodh-gaya, significant for its thoroughly Gothic arches, and yet dating, apparently, back to the first century A.D.⁷⁸ All in all, the remains of Buddhist architecture are fragmentary, and their glory is more sculptural than structural; a lingering Puritanism, perhaps, kept them externally forbidding and bare. The Jains gave a more concentrated devotion to architecture, and during the eleventh and twelfth centuries their temples were the finest in India. They did not create a style of their own, being content to copy at first (as at Elura) the Buddhist plan of excavating temples in the mountain rocks, then the Vishnu or Shiva type of temples rising usually in a walled group upon a hill. These, too, were externally simple, but inwardly complex and rich—a happy symbol of the modest life. Piety placed statue after statue of Jain heroes in these shrines, until in the group at Shatrunjaya Fergusson counted 6449 figures.⁷⁹

The Jain temple at Aihole is built almost in Greek style, with rectangular form, external colonnades, a portico, and a cell or central chamber within.⁸⁰ At Khajuraho Jains, Vaishnavites and Shivaites, as if to illustrate Hindu tolerance, built in close proximity some twenty-eight temples; among them the almost perfect Temple of Parshwanath⁸¹ rises in cone upon cone to a majestic height, and shelters on its carved surfaces a veritable city of Jain saints. On Mt. Abu, lifted four thousand feet above the desert, the Jains built many temples, of which two survivors, the temples of Vimala and Tejahpala, are the greatest achievement of this sect in the field of art. The dome of the Tejahpala shrine is one of those overwhelming experiences which doom all writing about art to impotence and futility.⁸² The Temple of Vimala, built entirely of white marble, is a maze of irregular pillars, joined with fanciful brackets to a more simple carved entablature; above is a marble dome too opulent in statuary, but carved into a stone lacework of moving magnificence, “finished,” says Fergusson, “with a delicacy of detail and appropriateness of ornament which is probably unsurpassed by any similar example to be found anywhere else. Those introduced by the Gothic architects in Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster, or at Oxford, are coarse and clumsy in comparison.”⁸³

In these Jain temples, and their contemporaries, we see the transition from the circular form of the Buddhist shrine to the tower style of medieval India. The nave, or pillar-enclosed interior, of the assembly hall is taken outdoors, and made into a mandapam or porch; behind this is the cell; and above the cell rises, in successively receding levels, the carved and complicated tower. It was on this plan that the Hindu temples of the north were built. The most impressive of these is the group at Bhuvaneshwara, in the province of Orissa; and the finest of the group is the Rajarani Temple erected to Vishnu in the eleventh century A.D. It is a gigantic tower formed of juxtaposed semicircular pillars covered with statuary and surmounted by receding layers of stone, the whole inward-curving tower ending in a great circular crown and a spire. Nearby is the Lingaraja Temple, larger than the Rajarani, but not so beautiful; nevertheless every inch of the surface has felt the sculptor’s chisel, so that the cost of the carving has been reckoned at three times the cost of the structure.⁸⁴ The Hindu expressed his piety not merely by the imposing grandeur of his temples, but by their patiently worked detail; nothing was too good for the god.

It would be dull to list, without specific description and photographic representation, the other masterpieces of Hindu building in the north. And yet no record of Indian civilization could leave unnoticed the temples of Surya at Kanarak and Mudhera, the tower of Jagannath Puri, the lovely gateway at Vadnagar,⁸⁵ the massive temples of Sas-Bahu and Teli-ka-Mandir at Gwalior,⁸⁶ the palace of Rajah Man Sing, also at Gwalior,⁸⁷ and the Tower of Victory at Chitor.⁸⁸ Standing out from the mass are the Shivaite temples at Khajuraho, while in the same city the dome of the porch of the Khanwar Math Temple shows again the masculine strength of Indian architecture, and the richness and patience of Indian carving.⁸⁹ Even in its ruins the Temple of Shiva at Elephanta, with its massive fluted columns, its “mushroom” capitals, its unsurpassed reliefs, and its powerful statuary,⁹⁰ suggests to us an age of national vigor and artistic skill of which hardly the memory lives today.

We shall never be able to do justice to Indian art, for ignorance and fanaticism have destroyed its greatest achievements, and have half ruined the rest. At Elephanta the Portuguese certified their piety by smashing statuary and bas-reliefs in unrestrained barbarity; and almost everywhere in the north the Moslems brought to the ground those triumphs of Indian architecture, of the fifth and sixth centuries, which tradition ranks as far superior to the later works that arouse our wonder and admiration today. The Moslems decapitated statues, and tore them limb from limb; they appropriated for their mosques, and in great measure imitated, the graceful pillars of the Jain temples.⁹¹ Time and fanaticism joined in the destruction, for the orthodox Hindus abandoned and neglected temples that had been profaned by the touch of alien hands.⁹²

We may guess at the lost grandeur of north Indian architecture by the powerful edifices that still survive in the south, where Moslem rule entered only in minor degree, and after some habituation to India had softened Mohammedan hatred of Hindu ways. Further, the great age of temple architecture in the south came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after Akbar had tamed the Moslems and taught them some appreciation of Indian art. Consequently the south is rich in temples, usually superior to those that remain standing in the north, and more massive and impressive; Fergusson counted some thirty “Dravidian” or southern temples any one of which, in his estimate, must have cost as much as an English cathedral.⁹³ The south adapted the styles of the north by prefacing the mandapam or porch with a gopuram or gate, and supporting the porch with a lavish multiplicity of pillars. It played fondly with a hundred symbols, from the swastika,* emblem of the sun and the wheel of life, through a very menagerie of sacred animals. The snake, through its moulting, symbolized reincarnation; the bull was the enviable paragon of procreative power; the linga, or phallus, represented the generative excellence of Shiva, and often determined the form of the temple itself.

Three elements composed the structural plan of these southern temples: the gateway, the pillared porch, and the tower (vimana), which contained the main assembly hall or cell. With occasional exceptions like the palace of Tirumala Nayyak at Madura, all this south Indian architecture was ecclesiastical. Men did not bother to build magnificently for themselves, but gave their art to the priests and the gods; no circumstance could better show how spontaneously theocratic was the real government of India. Of the many buildings raised by the Chalukyan kings and their people, nothing remains but temples. Only a Hindu pietist rich in words could describe the lovely symmetry of the shrine at Ittagi, in Hyderabad;⁹⁴* or the temple at Somnathpur in Mysore,⁹⁶ in which gigantic masses of stone are carved with the delicacy of lace; or the Hoyshaleshwara Temple at Halebid,⁹⁷ also in Mysore—“one of the buildings,” says Fergusson, “on which the advocate of Hindu architecture would desire to take his stand.” Here, he adds, “the artistic combination of horizontal with vertical lines, and the play of outline and of light and shade, far surpass anything in Gothic art. The effects are just what the medieval architects were often aiming at, but which they never attained so perfectly as was done at Halebid.”⁹⁸

If we marvel at the laborious piety that could carve eighteen hundred feet of frieze in the Halebid temple, and could portray in them two thousand elephants each different from all the rest,⁹⁹ what shall we say of the patience and courage that could undertake to cut a complete temple out of the solid rock? But this was a common achievement of the Hindu artisans. At Mamallapuram, on the east coast near Madras, they carved several rathas or pagodas, of which the fairest is the Dharma-raja-ratha, or monastery for the highest discipline. At Elura, a place of religious pilgrimage in Hyderabad, Buddhists, Jains and orthodox Hindus vied in excavating out of the mountain rock great monolithic temples of which the supreme example is the Hindu shrine of Kailasha¹⁰⁰—named after Shiva’s mythological paradise in the Himalayas. Here the tireless builders cut a hundred feet down into the stone to isolate the block—250 by 160 feet—that was to be the temple; then they carved the walls into powerful pillars, statues and bas-reliefs; then they chiseled out the interior, and lavished there the most amazing art: let the bold fresco of “The Lovers”¹⁰¹ serve as a specimen. Finally, their architectural passion still unspent, they carved a series of chapels and monasteries deep into the rock on three sides of the quarry.¹⁰² Some Hindus¹⁰³ consider the Kailasha Temple equal to any achievement in the history of art.

Such a structure, however, was a tour de force, like the Pyramids, and must have cost the sweat and blood of many men. Either the guilds or the masters never tired, for they scattered through every province of southern India gigantic shrines so numerous that the bewildered student or traveler loses their individual quality in the sum of their number and their power. At Pattadakal Queen Lokamahadevi, one of the wives of the Chalukyan King Vikramaditya II, dedicated to Shiva the Virupaksha Temple, which ranks high among the great fanes of India.¹⁰⁴ At Tanjore, south of Madras, the Chola King Rajaraja the Great, after conquering all southern India and Ceylon, shared his spoils with Shiva by raising to him a stately temple designed to represent the generative symbol of the god.*¹⁰⁵ Near Trichinopoly, west of Tanjore, the devotees of Vishnu erected on a lofty hill the Shri Rangam Temple, whose distinctive feature was a many-pillared mandapam in the form of a “Hall of a Thousand Columns,” each column a single block of granite, elaborately carved; the Hindu artisans were yet at work completing the temple when they were scattered, and their labors ended, by the bullets of Frenchmen and Englishmen fighting for the possession of India.¹⁰⁶ Nearby, at Madura, the brothers Muttu and Tirumala Nayyak erected to Shiva a spacious shrine with another Hall of a Thousand Columns, a Sacred Tank, and ten gopurams or gateways, of which four rise to a great height and are carved into a wilderness of statuary. These structures form together one of the most impressive sights in India; we may judge from such fragmentary survivals the rich and spacious architecture of the Vijayanagar kings. Finally, at Rameshvaram, amid the archipelago of isles that pave “Adam’s Bridge” from India to Ceylon, the Brahmans of the south reared through five centuries (1200-1769 A.D.) a temple whose perimeter was graced with the most imposing of all corridors or porticoes—four thousand feet of double colonnades, exquisitely carved, and designed to give cool shade, and inspiring vistas of sun and sea, to the millions of pilgrims who to this day find their way from distant cities to lay their hopes and griefs upon the knees of the careless gods.

2. “Colonial” Architecture

Ceylon—Java—Cambodia—The Khmers—Their religion—Angkor—Fall of the Khmers—Siam—Burma

Meanwhile Indian art had accompanied Indian religion across straits and frontiers into Ceylon, Java, Cambodia, Siam, Burma, Tibet, Khotan, Turkestan, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan; “in Asia all roads lead from India.”¹⁰⁷ Hindus from the Ganges valley settled Ceylon in the fifth century before Christ; Ashoka, two hundred years later, sent a son and a daughter to convert the population to Buddhism; and though the teeming island had to fight for fifteen centuries against Tamil invasions, it maintained a rich culture until it was taken over by the British in 1815.

Singhalese art began with dagobas—domed relic shrines like the stupas of the Buddhist north; it passed to great temples like that whose ruins mark the ancient capital, Anuradhapura; it produced some of the finest of the Buddha statues,¹⁰⁸ and a great variety of objets d’art; and it came to an end, for the time being, when the last great king of Ceylon, Kirti Shri Raja Singha, built the “Temple of the Tooth” at Kandy. The loss of independence has brought decadence to the upper classes, and the patronage and taste that provide a necessary stimulus and restraint for the artist have disappeared from Ceylon.¹⁰⁹

Strange to say, the greatest of Buddhist temples—some students would call it the greatest of all temples anywhere¹¹⁰—is not in India but in Java. In the eighth century the Shailendra dynasty of Sumatra conquered Java, established Buddhism as the official religion, and financed the building of the massive fane of Borobudur (i.e., “Many Buddhas”).¹¹¹ The temple proper is of moderate size, and of peculiar design—a small domical stupa surrounded by seventy-two smaller topes arranged about it in concentric circles. If this were all, Borobudur would be nothing; what constitutes the grandeur of the structure is the pedestal, four hundred feet square, an immense mastaba in seven receding stages. At every turn there are niches for statuary; 436 times the sculptors of Borobudur thought fit to carve the figure of Buddha. Still discontent, they cut into the walls of the stages three miles of bas-reliefs, depicting the legendary birth, youth and enlightenment of the Master, and with such skill that these reliefs are among the finest in Asia.¹¹² With this powerful Buddhist shrine, and the Brahmanical temples nearby at Prambanam, Javanese architecture reached its zenith, and quickly decayed. The island became for a time a maritime power, rose to wealth and luxury, and supported many poets. But in 1479 the Moslems began to people this tropical Paradise, and from that time it produced no art of consequence. The Dutch pounced upon it in 1595, and consumed it, province by province during the following century, until their control was complete.

Only one Hindu temple surpasses that of Borobudur, and it, too, is far from India—lost, indeed, in a distant jungle that covered it for centuries. In 1858 a French explorer, picking his way through the upper valley of the Mekong River, caught a glimpse, through trees and brush, of a sight that seemed to him miraculous: an enormous temple, incredibly majestic in design, stood amid the forest, intertwined and almost covered with shrubbery and foliage. That day he saw many temples, some of them already overgrown or split apart by trees; it seemed that he had arrived just in time to forestall the triumph of the wilderness over these works of men. Other Europeans had to come and corroborate his tale before Henri Mouhot was believed; then scientific expeditions descended upon the once silent retreat, and a whole school at Paris (L’École de l’Extrème Orient) devoted itself to charting and studying the find. Today Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world.*

At the beginning of the Christian era Indo-China, or Cambodia, was inhabited by a people essentially Chinese, partly Tibetan, called Khambujas or Khmers. When Kublai Khan’s ambassador, Tcheou-ta-Kouan, visited the Khmer capital, Angkor Thom, he found a strong government ruling a nation that had drawn wealth out of its rice-paddies and its sweat. The king, Tcheou reported, had five wives: “one special, and four others for the cardinal points of the compass,” with some four thousand concubines for more precise readings.¹¹⁴ Gold and jewelry abounded; pleasure-boats dotted the lake; the streets of the capital were filled with chariots, curtained palanquins, elephants in rich caparison, and a population of almost a million souls. Hospitals were attached to the temples, and each had its corps of nurses and physicians.¹¹⁵

Though the people were Chinese, their culture was Hindu. Their religion was based upon a primitive worship of the serpent, Naga, whose fanlike head appears everywhere in Cambodian art; then the great gods of the Hindu triad—Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva—entered through Burma; almost at the same time Buddha came, and was joined with Vishnu and Shiva as a favorite divinity of the Khmers. Inscriptions tell of the enormous quantity of rice, butter and rare oils contributed daily by the people to the ministrants of the gods.¹¹⁶

To Shiva the Khmers, toward the end of the ninth century, dedicated the oldest of their surviving temples—the Bayon, now a forbidding ruin half overgrown with tenacious vegetation. The stones, laid without cement, have drawn apart in the course of a thousand years, stretching into ungodly grins the great faces of Brahma and Shiva which almost constitute the towers. Three centuries later the slaves and war-captives of the kings built Angkor Wat,¹¹⁷ a masterpiece equal to the finest architectural achievements of the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the cathedral-builders of Europe. An enormous moat, twelve miles in length, surrounds the temple; over the moat runs a paved bridge guarded by dissuasive Nagas in stone; then an ornate enclosing wall; then spacious galleries, whose reliefs tell again the tales of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; then the stately edifice itself, rising upon a broad base, by level after level of a terraced pyramid, to the sanctuary of the god, two hundred feet high. Here magnitude does not detract from beauty, but helps it to an imposing magnificence that startles the Western mind into some weak realization of the ancient grandeur once possessed by Oriental civilization. One sees in imagination the crowded population of the capital: the regimented slaves cutting, pulling and raising the heavy stones; the artisans carving reliefs and statuary as if time would never fail them; the priests deceiving and consoling the people; the devadasis (still pictured on the granite) deceiving the people and consoling the priests; the lordly aristocracy building palaces like the Phinean-Akas, with its spacious Terrace of Honor; and, raised above all by the labor of all, the powerful and ruthless kings.

The kings, needing many slaves, waged many wars. Often they won; but near the close of the thirteenth century—“in the middle of the way” of Dante’s life—the armies of Siam defeated the Khmers, sacked their cities, and left their resplendent temples and palaces in ruins. Today a few tourists prowl among the loosened stones, and observe how patiently the trees have sunk their roots or insinuated their branches into the crevices of the rocks, slowly tearing them apart because stones cannot desire and grow. Tcheou-ta-Kouan speaks of the many books that were written by the people of Angkor, but not a page of this literature remains; like ourselves they wrote perishable thoughts upon perishable tissue, and all their immortals are dead. The marvelous reliefs show men and women wearing veils and nets to guard against mosquitoes and slimy, crawling things. The men and women are gone, surviving only on the stones. The mosquitoes and the lizards remain.

Nearby, in Siam, a people half Tibetan and half Chinese had gradually expelled the conquering Khmers, and had developed a civilization based upon Hindu religion and art. After overcoming Cambodia the Siamese built a new capital, Ayuthia, on the site of an ancient city of the Khmers. From this seat they extended their sway until, about 1600, their empire included southern Burma, Cambodia, and the Malay Peninsula. Their trade reached to China on the east and to Europe on the west. Their artists made illuminated manuscripts, painted with lacquer on wood, fired porcelain in the Chinese style, embroidered beautiful silks, and occasionally carved statues of unique excellence.* Then, in the impartial rhythm of history, the Burmese captured Ayuthia, and destroyed it with all its art. In their new capital at Bangkok the Siamese built a great pagoda, whose excess of ornament cannot quite conceal the beauty of its design.

The Burmese were among the greatest builders in Asia. Coming down into these fertile fields from Mongolia and Tibet, they fell under Hindu influences, and from the fifth century onward produced an abundance of Buddhist, Vaishnavite and Shivaite statuary, and great stupas that culminated in the majestic temple of Ananda—one of the five thousand pagodas of their ancient capital, Pagan. Pagan was sacked by Kublai Khan, and for five hundred years the Burmese government vacillated from capital to capital. For a time Mandalay flourished as the center of Burma’s life, and the home of artists who achieved beauty in many fields from embroidery and jewelry to the royal palace—which showed what they could do in the frail medium of wood.¹¹⁸ The English, displeased with the treatment of their missionaries and their merchants, adopted Burma in 1886, and moved the capital to Rangoon, a city amenable to the disciplinary influence of the Imperial Navy. There the Burmese had built one of their finest shrines, the famous Shwe Dagon, that Golden Pagoda which draws to its spire millions upon millions of Burmese Buddhist pilgrims every year. For does not this temple contain the very hairs of Shakya-muni’s head?

3. Moslem Architecture in India

The Afghan style—The Mogul style—Delhi—Agra—The Taj Mahal

The final triumph of Indian architecture came under the Moguls. The followers of Mohammed had proved themselves master builders wherever they had carried their arms—at Granada, at Cairo, at Jerusalem, at Baghdad; it was to be expected that this vigorous stock, after establishing itself securely in India, would raise upon the conquered soil mosques as resplendent as Omar’s at Jerusalem, as massive as Hassan’s at Cairo, and as delicate as the Alhambra. It is true that the “Afghan” dynasty used Hindu artisans, copied Hindu themes, and even appropriated the pillars of Hindu temples, for their architectural purposes, and that many mosques were merely Hindu temples rebuilt for Moslem prayer;¹¹⁹ but this natural imitation passed quickly into a style so typically Moorish that one is surprised to find the Taj Mahal in India rather than in Persia, North Africa or Spain.

The beautiful Kutb-Minar* exemplifies the transition. It was part of a mosque begun at Old Delhi by Kutbu-d Din Aibak; it commemorated the victories of that bloody Sultan over the Hindus, and twenty-seven Hindu temples were dismembered to provide material for the mosque and the tower.¹²⁰ After withstanding the elements for seven centuries the great minaret—250 feet high, built of fine red sandstone, perfectly proportioned, and crowned on its topmost stages with white marble—is still one of the masterpieces of Indian technology and art. In general the Sultans of Delhi were too busy with killing to have much time for architecture, and such buildings as they have left us are mostly the tombs that they raised during their own lifetime as reminders that even they would die. The best example of these is the mausoleum of Sher Shah at Sasseram, in Bihar;¹²¹ gigantic, solid, masculine, it was the last stage of the more virile Moorish manner before it softened into the architectural jewelry of the Mogul kings.

The tendency to unite the Mohammedan and the Hindu styles was fostered by the eclectic impartiality of Akbar; and the masterpieces that his artisans built for him wove Indian and Persian methods and motifs into an exquisite harmony symbolizing the frail merger of native and Moslem creeds in Akbar’s synthetic faith. The first monument of his reign, the tomb erected by him near Delhi for his father Humayun, is already in a style of its own—simple in line, moderate in decoration, but foreshadowing in its grace the fairer edifices of Shah Jehan. At Fathpur-Sikri his artists built a city in which all the strength of the early Moguls merged with the refinement of the later emperors. A flight of steps leads up to an imposing portal in red sandstone, through whose lordly arch one passes into an enclosure filled with chef-d’æuvres. The major building is a mosque, but the loveliest of the structures are the three pavilions for the Emperor’s favorite wives, and the marble tomb of his friend, Salim Chisti the sage; here the artists of India began to show that skill in embroidering stone which was to culminate in the screen of the Taj Mahal.

Jehangir contributed little to the architectural history of his people, but his son Shah Jehan made his name almost as bright as Akbar’s by his passion for beautiful building. He scattered money as lavishly among his artists as Jehangir had scattered it among his wives. Like the kings of northern Europe, he imported the surplus artists of Italy, and had them instruct his own carvers in that art of pietra dura (i.e., of inlaying marble with a mosaic of precious stones) which became one of the characteristic elements of Indian adornment during his reign. Jehan was not a very religious soul, but two of the fairest mosques in India rose under his patronage: the Juma Masjid—or Friday Mosque—at Delhi, and the Moti Masjid—or Pearl Mosque—at Agra.

Both at Delhi and at Agra Jehan built “forts”—i.e., groups of royal edifices surrounded by a protective wall. At Delhi he tore down with superior disdain the pink palaces of Akbar, and replaced them with structures which at their worst are a kind of marble confectionery, and at their best are the purest architectural beauty on the globe. Here is the luxurious Hall of Public Audience, with panels of Florentine mosaic on a black marble ground, and with ceilings, columns and arches carved into stone lacery of frail but incredible beauty. Here, too, is the Hall of Private Audience, whose ceiling is of silver and gold, whose columns are of filigree marble, whose arches are a pointed semicircle composed of smaller flowerlike semicircles, whose Peacock Throne became a legend for the world, and whose wall still bears in precious inlay the proud words of the Moslem poet: “If anywhere on earth there is a Paradise, it is here, it is here, it is here.” We gather again some faint conception of “the riches of the Indies” in Mogul days when we find the greatest of the historians of architecture describing the royal residence at Delhi as covering twice the area of the vast Escorial near Madrid, and forming at that time, and in its ensemble, “the most magnificent palace in the East—perhaps in the world.”*¹²²

The Fort at Agra is in ruins,* and we can only guess at its original magnificence. Here, amid many gardens, were the Pearl Mosque, the Gem Mosque, the halls of Public and Private Audience, the Throne Palace, the King’s Baths, the Hall of Mirrors, the palaces of Jehangir and of Shah Jehan, the Jasmine Palace of Nur Jehan, and that Jasmine Tower from which the captive emperor, Shah Jehan, looked over the Jumna upon the tomb that he had built for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

All the world knows that tomb by her shortened name as the Taj Mahal. Many an architect has rated it as the most perfect of all buildings standing on the earth today. Three artists designed it: a Persian, Ustad Isa; an Italian, Gieronimo Veroneo; and a Frenchman, Austin de Bordeaux. No Hindu seems to have shared in its conception; it is utterly un-Hindu, completely Mohammedan; even the skilled artisans were, in part, brought in from Baghdad, Constantinople, and other centers of the Moslem faith.¹²⁴ For twenty-two years twenty-two thousand workmen were forced to labor upon the Taj; and though the Maharaja of Jaipur sent the marble as a gift to Shah Jehan, the building and its surroundings cost $230,000,000—then an enormous sum.¹²⁵†

Only St. Peter’s has so fitting an approach. Passing through a high battlemented wall, one comes suddenly upon the Taj—raised upon a marble platform, and framed on either side by handsome mosques and stately minarets. In the foreground spacious gardens enclose a pool in whose waters the inverted palace becomes a quivering fascination. Every portion of the structure is of white marble, precious metals, or costly stones. The building is a complex figure of twelve sides, four of which are portals; a slender minaret rises at each corner, and the roof is a massive spired dome. The main entrance, once guarded with solid silver gates, is a maze of marble embroidery; inlaid in the wall in jeweled script are quotations from the Koran, one of which invites the “pure in heart” to enter “the gardens of Paradise.” The interior is simple; and perhaps it is just as well that native and European thieves coöperated in despoiling the tomb of its superabundant jewels, and of the golden railing, encrusted with precious stones, that once enclosed the sarcophagi of Jehan and his Queen. For Aurangzeb replaced the railing with an octagonal screen of almost transparent marble, carved into a miracle of alabaster lace; and it has seemed to some visitors that of all the minor and partial products of human art nothing has ever surpassed the beauty of this screen.

It is not the most sublime of all edifices, it is only the most beautiful. At any distance that hides its delicate details it is not imposing, but merely pleasing; only a nearer view reveals that its perfection has no proportion to its size. When in our hurried time we see enormous structures of a hundred stories raised in a year or two, and then consider how twenty-two thousand men toiled for twenty-two years on this little tomb, hardly a hundred feet high, we begin to sense the difference between industry and art. Perhaps the act of will involved in conceiving a building like the Taj Mahal was greater and profounder than the act of will of the greatest conqueror. If time were intelligent it would destroy everything else before the Taj, and would leave this evidence of man’s alloyed nobility as the last man’s consolation.

4. Indian Architecture and Civilization

Decay of Indian art—Hindu and Moslem architecture compared—General view of Indian civilization

Despite the screen, Aurangzeb was a misfortune for Mogul and Indian art. Dedicated fanatically to an exclusive religion, he saw in art nothing but idolatry and vanity. Already Shah Jehan had prohibited the erection of Hindu temples;¹²⁷ Aurangzeb not only continued the ban, but gave so economical a support to Moslem building that it, too, languished under his reign. Indian art followed him to the grave.

When we think of Indian architecture in summary and retrospect we find in it two themes, masculine and feminine, Hindu and Mohammedan, about which the structural symphony revolves. As, in the most famous of symphonies, the startling hammer-strokes of the opening bars are shortly followed by a strain of infinite delicacy, so in Indian architecture the overpowering monuments of the Hindu genius at Bodh-Gaya, Bhuvaneshwara, Madura and Tanjore are followed by the grace and melody of the Mogul style at Fathpur-Sikri, Delhi and Agra; and the two themes mingle in a confused elaboration to the end. It was said of the Moguls that they built like giants and finished liked jewelers; but this epigram might better have been applied to Indian architecture in general: the Hindus built like giants, and the Moguls ended like jewelers. Hindu architecture impresses us in its mass, Moorish architcture in its detail; the first had the sublimity of strength, the other had the perfection of beauty; the Hindus had passion and fertility, the Moors had taste and self-restraint. The Hindu covered his buildings with such exuberant statuary that one hesitates whether to class them as building or as sculpture; the Mohammedan abominated images, and confined himself to floral or geometrical decoration. The Hindus were the Gothic sculptor-architects of India’s Middle Ages; the Moslems were the expatriated artists of the exotic Renaissance. All in all, the Hindu style reached greater heights, in proportion as sublimity excels loveliness; on second thought we perceive that Delhi Fort and the Taj Mahal, beside Angkor and Borobudur, are beautiful lyrics beside profound dramas—Petrarch beside Dante, Keats beside Shakespeare, Sappho beside Sophocles. One art is the graceful and partial expression of fortunate individuals, the other is the complete and powerful expression of a race.

Hence this little survey must conclude as it began, by confessing that none but a Hindu can quite appreciate the art of India, or write about it forgivably. To a European brought up on Greek and aristocratic canons of moderation and simplicity, this popular art of profuse ornament and wild complexity will seem at times almost primitive and barbarous. But that last word is the very adjective with which the classically-minded Goethe rejected Strasbourg’s cathedral and the Gothic style; it is the reaction of reason to feeling, of rationalism to religion. Only a native believer can feel the majesty of the Hindu temples, for these were built to give not merely a form to beauty but a stimulus to piety and a pedestal to faith. Only our Middle Ages—only our Giottos and our Dantes—could understand India.

It is in these terms that we must view all Indian civilization—as the expression of a “medieval” people to whom religion is profounder than science, if only because religion accepts at the outset the eternity of human ignorance and the vanity of human power. In this piety lie the weakness and the strength of the Hindu: his superstition and his gentleness, his introversion and his insight, his backwardness and his depth, his weakness in war and his achievement in art. Doubtless his climate affected his religion, and coöperated with it to enfeeble him; therefore he yielded with fatalistic resignation to the Aryans, the Huns, the Moslems and the Europeans. History punished him for neglecting science; and when Clive’s superior cannon slaughtered the native army at Plassey (1757), their roar announced the Industrial Revolution. In our time that Revolution will have its way with India, as it has written its will and character upon England, America, Germany, Russia and Japan; India, too, will have her capitalism and her socialism, her millionaires and her slums. The old civilization of India is finished. It began to die when the British came.

CHAPTER XXII

A Christian Epilogue

I. THE JOLLY BUCCANEERS

The arrival of the Europeans—The British Conquest—The Sepoy Mutiny—Advantages and disadvantages of British rule

IN many ways that civilization was already dead when Clive and Hastings discovered the riches of India. The long and disruptive reign of Aurangzeb, and the chaos and internal wars that followed it, left India ripe for reconquest; and the only question open to “manifest destiny” was as to which of the modernized powers of Europe should become its instrument. The French tried, and failed; they lost India, as well as Canada, at Rossbach and Waterloo. The English tried, and succeeded.

In 1498 Vasco da Gama, after a voyage of eleven months from Lisbon, anchored off Calicut. He was well received by the Hindu Raja of Malabar, who gave him a courteous letter to the King of Portugal: “Vasco da Gama, a nobleman of your household, has visited my kingdom, and has given me great pleasure. In my kingdom there is abundance of cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and precious stones. What I seek from your country is gold, silver, coral and scarlet.” His Christian majesty answered by claiming India as a Portuguese colony, for reasons which the Raja was too backward to understand. To make matters clearer, Portugal sent a fleet to India, with instructions to spread Christianity and wage war. In the seventeenth century the Dutch arrived, and drove out the Portuguese; in the eighteenth the French and English came, and drove out the Dutch. Savage ordeals of battle decided which of them should civilize and tax the Hindus.

The East India Company had been founded in London in 1600 to buy cheap in India, and sell dear in Europe, the products of India and the East Indies.* As early as 1686 it announced its intention “to establish a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in India for all time to come.”³ It set up trading-posts at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, fortified them, imported troops, fought battles, gave and took bribes, and exercised other functions of government. Clive gayly accepted “presents” amounting to $170,000 from Hindu rulers dependent upon his guns; pocketed from them, in addition, an annual tribute of $140,000; appointed Mir Jafar ruler of Bengal for $6,000,000; played one native prince against another, and gradually annexed their territories as the property of the East India Company; took to opium, was investigated and exonerated by Parliament, and killed himself (1774).⁴ Warren Hastings, a man of courage, learning and ability, exacted contributions as high as a quarter of a million dollars from native princes to the coffers of the Company; accepted bribes to exact no more, exacted more, and annexed the states that could not pay; he occupied Oudh with his army, and sold the province to a prince for $ 2,500,000⁵—conquered and conqueror rivaled each other in venality. Such parts of India as were under the Company were subjected to a land tax of fifty per cent of the produce, and to other requisitions so numerous and severe that two-thirds of the population fled, while others sold their children to meet the rising rates.⁶ “Enormous fortunes,” says Macaulay, “were rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this.”⁷

By 1857 the crimes of the Company had so impoverished northeastern India that the natives broke out in desperate revolt. The British Government stepped in, suppressed the “mutiny,” took over the captured territories as a colony of the Crown, paid the Company handsomely, and added the purchase price to the public debt of India.⁸ It was plain, blunt conquest, not to be judged, perhaps, by Commandments recited west of Suez, but to be understood in terms of Darwin and Nietzsche: a people that has lost the ability to govern itself, or to develop its natural resources, inevitably falls a prey to nations suffering from strength and greed.

The conquest brought certain advantages to India. Men like Bentinck, Canning, Munro, Elphinstone and Macaulay carried into the administration of the British provinces something of the generous liberalism that controlled England in 1832. Lord William Bentinck, with the aid and stimulus of native reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, put an end to suttee and thuggery. The English, after fighting III wars in India, with Indian money and troops,⁹ to complete the conquest of India, established peace throughout the peninsula, built railways, factories and schools, opened universities at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Lahore and Allahabad, brought the science and technology of England to India, inspired the East with the democratic ideals of the West, and played an important part in revealing to the world the cultural wealth of India’s past. The price of these benefactions was a financial despotism by which a race of transient rulers drained India’s wealth year by year as they returned to the reinvigorating north; an economic despotism that ruined India’s industries, and threw her millions of artisans back upon an inadequate soil; and a political despotism that, coming so soon after the narrow tyranny of Aurangzeb, broke for a century the spirit of the Indian people.

II. LATTER-DAY SAINTS

Christianity in India—The “Brahma-Somaj”—Mohammedanism—Ramakrishna—Vivekananda

It was natural and characteristic that under these conditions India should seek consolation in religion. For a time she gave a cordial welcome to Christianity; she found in it many ethical ideals that she had honored for thousands of years; and “before the character and behavior of Europeans,” says the blunt Abbé Dubois, “became well known to these people, it seemed possible that Christianity might take root among them.”¹⁰ Throughout the nineteenth century harassed missionaries tried to make the voice of Christ audible above the roar of the conquering cannon; they erected and equipped schools and hospitals, dispensed medicine and charity as well as theology, and brought to the Untouchables the first recognition of their humanity. But the contrast between Christian precept and the practice of Christians left the Hindus sceptical and satirical. They pointed out that the raising of Lazarus from the dead was unworthy of remark; their own religion had many more interesting and astonishing miracles than this; and any true Yogi could perform miracles today, while those of Christianity were apparently finished.¹¹ The Brahmans held their ground proudly, and offered against the orthodoxies of the West a system of thought quite as subtle, profound, and incredible. “The progress of Christianity in India,” says Sir Charles Eliot, “has been insignificant.”¹²

Nevertheless, the fascinating figure of Christ has had far more influence in India than may be measured by the fact that Christianity has converted six per cent of the population in three hundred years. The first signs of that influence appear in the Bhagavad-Gita;¹³ the latest are evident in Gandhi and Tagore. The clearest instance is in the reform organization known as the Brahma-Somaj,* founded in 1828 by Ram Mohun Roy. No one could have approached the study of religion more conscientiously. Roy learned Sanskrit to read the Vedas, Pali to read the Tripitaka of Buddhism, Persian and Arabic to study Mohammedanism and the Koran, Hebrew to master the Old Testament and Greek to understand the New.¹⁴ Then he took up English, and wrote it with such ease and grace that Jeremy Bentham wished that James Mill might profit from the example. In 1820 Roy published his Precepts of Jesus: a Guide to Peace and Happiness, and announced: “I have found the doctrines of Christ more conducive to moral principles, and better adapted for the use of rational beings, than any other which have come to my knowledge.”¹⁵ He proposed to his scandalized countrymen a new religion, which should abandon polytheism, polygamy, caste, child marriage, suttee and idolatry, and should worship one god —Brahman. Like Akbar he dreamed that all India might be united in so simple a faith; and like Akbar he underestimated the popularity of superstition. The Brahma-Somaj, after a hundred years of useful struggle, is now an extinct force in Indian life.†

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 sentiment 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 children 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?—

Away with ancient purdah! Come out of the kitchens quick! Fling the pots and pans rattling into the corners! Tear the cloth from your eyes, and see the new world! Let your husbands and brothers cook for themselves. There is much work to be done to make India a nation!⁴⁹

V. THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT

The westernized students—The secularization of heaven—The Indian National Congress

In 1923 there were over a thousand Hindus studying in England, presumably an equal number in America, perhaps an equal number elsewhere. They marveled at the privileges enjoyed by the lowliest citizens of western Europe and America; they studied the French and American Revolutions, and read the literature of reform and revolt; they gloated over the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Constitution; they went back to their countries as centers of infection for democratic ideas and the gospel of liberty. The industrial and scientific advances of the West, and the victory of the Allies in the War, gave to these ideas an irresistible prestige; soon every student was shouting the battle-cry of freedom. In the schools of England and America the Hindus learned to be free.

These Western-educated Orientals had not only taken on political ideals in the course of their education abroad, they had shed religious ideas; the two processes are usually associated, in biography and in history. They came to Europe as pious youths, wedded to Krishna, Shiva, Vishnu, Kali, Rama . . .; they touched science, and their ancient faiths were shattered as by some sudden catalytic shock. Shorn of religious belief, which is the very spirit of India, the Westernized Hindus returned to their country disillusioned and sad; a thousand gods had dropped dead from the skies* Then, inevitably, Utopia filled the place of Heaven, democracy became a substitute for Nirvana, liberty replaced God. What had gone on in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century now went on in the East.

Nevertheless the new ideas developed slowly. In 1885 a few Hindu leaders met at Bombay and founded the “Indian National Congress,” but they do not seem to have dreamed then even of Home Rule. The effort of Lord Curzon to partition Bengal (that is, to destroy the unity and strength of the most powerful and politically conscious community in India) roused the Nationalists to a more rebel mood; and at the Congress of 1905 the uncompromising Tilak demanded Swaraj. He had created the word⁵⁰ out of Sanskrit roots still visible in its English translation—“selfrule.” In that same eventful year Japan defeated Russia; and the East, which for a century had been fearful of the West, began to lay plans for the liberation of Asia. China followed Sun Yat Sen, took up the sword, and fell into the arms of Japan. India, weaponless, accepted as her leader one of the strangest figures in history, and gave to the world the unprecedented phenomenon of a revolution led by a saint, and waged without a gun.

VI. MAHATMA GANDHI

Portrait of a saint—The ascetic—The Christian—The education of Gandhi—In Africa—The Revolt of 1921—“I am the man”—Prison years—’Young India”—The revolution of the spinning-wheel—The achievements of Gandhi

Picture the ugliest, slightest, weakest man in Asia, with face and flesh of bronze, close-cropped gray head, high cheek-bones, kindly little brown eyes, a large and almost toothless mouth, larger ears, an enormous nose, thin arms and legs, clad in a loin cloth, standing before an English judge in India, on trial for preaching “non-coöperation” to his countrymen. Or picture him seated on a small carpet in a bare room at his Satyagrahashram,—School of Truth-Seekers—at Ahmedabad: his bony legs crossed under him in yogi fashion, soles upward, his hands busy at a spinning-wheel, his face lined with responsibility, his mind active with ready answers to every questioner of freedom. From 1920 to 1935 this naked weaver was both the spiritual and the political leader of 320,000,000 Indians. When he appeared in public, crowds gathered round him to touch his clothing or to kiss his feet.⁵¹

Four hours a day he spun the coarse khaddar, hoping by his example to persuade his countrymen to use this simple homespun instead of buying the product of those British looms that had ruined the textile industry of India. His only possessions were three rough cloths—two as his wardrobe and one as his bed. Once a rich lawyer, he had given all his property to the poor, and his wife, after some matronly hesitation, had followed his example. He slept on the bare floor, or on the earth. He lived on nuts, plantains, lemons, oranges, dates, rice, and goat’s milk;⁵² often for months together he took nothing but milk and fruit; once in his life he tasted meat; occasionally he ate nothing for weeks. “I can as well do without my eyes as without fasts. What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner.”⁵³ As the blood thins, he felt, the mind clears, irrelevancies fall away, and fundamental things—sometimes the very Soul of the World—rise out of Maya like Everest through the clouds.

At the same time that he fasted to see divinity he kept one toe on the earth, and advised his followers to take an enema daily when they fasted, lest they be poisoned with the acid products of the body’s self-consumption just as they might be finding God.⁵⁴ When the Moslems and the Hindus killed one another in theological enthusiasm, and paid no heed to his pleas for peace, he went without food for three weeks to move them. He became so weak and frail through fasts and privations that when he addressed the great audiences that gathered to hear him, he spoke to them from an uplifted chair. He carried his asceticism into the field of sex, and wished, like Tolstoi, to limit all physical intercourse to deliberate reproduction. He too, in his youth, had indulged the flesh too much, and the news of his father’s death had surprised him in the arms of love. Now he returned with passionate remorse to the Brahmacharia that had been preached to him in his boyhood—absolute abstention from all sensual desire. He persuaded his wife to live with him only as sister with brother; and “from that time,” he tells us, “all dissension ceased.”⁵⁵ When he realized that India’s basic need was birth-control, he adopted not the methods of the West, but the theories of Malthus and Tolstoi.

Is it right for us, who know the situation, to bring forth children? We only multiply slaves and weaklings if we continue the process of procreation whilst we feel and remain helpless. . . . Not till India has become a free nation . . . have we the right to bring forth progeny. . . . I have not a shadow of doubt that married people, if they wish well to the country and want to see India become a nation of strong and handsome, well-formed men and women, would practice self-restraint and cease to procreate for the time being.⁵⁶

Added to these elements in his character were qualities strangely like those that, we are told, distinguished the Founder of Christianity. He did not mouth the name of Christ, but he acted as if he accepted every word of the Sermon on the Mount. Not since St. Francis of Assisi has any life known to history been so marked by gentleness, disinterestedness, simplicity, and forgiveness of enemies. It was to the credit of his opponents, but still more to his own, that his undiscourageable courtesy to them won a fine courtesy from them in return; the Government sent him to jail with profuse apologies. He never showed rancor or resentment. Thrice he was attacked by mobs, and beaten almost to death; not once did he retaliate; and when one of his assailants was arrested he refused to enter a charge. Shortly after the worst of all riots between Moslems and Hindus, when the Moplah Mohammedans butchered hundreds of unarmed Hindus and offered their prepuces as a covenant to Allah, these same Moslems were stricken with famine; Gandhi collected funds for them from all India, and, with no regard for the best precedents, forwarded every anna, without deduction for “overhead,” to the starving enemy.⁵⁷

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869. His family belonged to the Vaisya caste, and to the Jain sect, and practised the ahimsa principle of never injuring a living thing. His father was a capable administrator but an heretical financier; he lost place after place through honesty, gave nearly all his wealth to charity, and left the rest to his family.⁵⁸ While still a boy Mohandas became an atheist, being displeased with the adulterous gallantries of certain Hindu gods; and to make clear his everlasting scorn for religion, he ate meat. The meat disagreed with him, and he returned to religion.

At eight he was engaged, and at twelve he was married, to Kasturbai, who remained loyal to him through all his adventures, riches, poverty, imprisonments, and Brahmacharia. At eighteen he passed examinations for the university, and went to London to study law. In his first year there he read eighty books on Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount “went straight to my heart on the first reading.”⁵⁹ He took the counsel to return good for evil, and to love even one’s enemies, as the highest expression of all human idealism; and he resolved rather to fail with these than to succeed without them.

Returning to India in 1891, he practised law for a time in Bombay, refusing to prosecute for debt, and always reserving the right to abandon a case which he had come to think unjust. One case led him to South Africa; there he found his fellow-Hindus so maltreated that he forgot to return to India, but gave himself completely, without remuneration, to the cause of removing the disabilities of his countrymen in Africa. For twenty years he fought this issue out until the Government yielded. Only then did he return home.