India, Its Life and Thought. John P. Jones
character becomes as steady, her ideas of liberty and her practice of social equality and her conception of human rights become as clarified, as they are in those two countries.
The recent proposal of the Government of India to enlarge the Legislative Councils and to create an Imperial Advisory Council reveals the purpose of the State to grant to the people all that is consistent with the paramountcy of the British in India. But it is this very paramountcy which the extremists deny to Great Britain. Herein lies the gist of the trouble. It will erelong create a serious impasse.
Great Britain cannot remain in this land and efface herself. At the same time, when India is prepared for absolute self-government, she will receive the blessing, and Great Britain will leave the land with a blessed consciousness that she has wrought for India the greatest blessing and the noblest achievement that any people has wrought for another and a foreign people in all the history of the world. And until that time comes, both India and Great Britain need to thank God that He has so strangely blended together their destinies for the highest elevation of both races.
CHAPTER II
THE HOME OF MANY FAITHS
The land of the Vedas justly boasts of being the mother, or the foster-mother, of nine great religions.
It has given birth to the greatest ethnic religion the world has seen; it is also the motherland of one of the three great missionary faiths of the world. These two religions—Hinduism and Buddhism—count among their followers more than a third of the human race, and are, in some respects, as vigorous now as at any time in their history.
It is the foster-mother of Mohammedanism and counts among her sons and daughters more of the followers of the Prophet of Mecca than are found in any other land.
It has also been the asylum of many followers of the Nazarene for at least sixteen centuries; many even claim that Christianity has found a home here since apostolic days.
There is no land comparable with India in the variegated expressions of its beliefs which add picturesqueness to the country and diversity to the people.
I purpose to take the reader with me on a tour with a view to furnishing glimpses of these religions at those places where they reveal special interest to the tourist.[1]
[1] The principal faiths of the land, with their adherents, were as follows, according to census of 1901:—
Hindu 207,147,026
Sikh 2,195,339
Jain 1,334,148
Buddhist 9,476,759
Parsee 94,190
Mohammedan 62,458,077
Jewish 18,228
Christian 2,923,241
These figures include Burma.
India is a land of immense distances. But its thirty thousand miles of railroad will enable the traveller, within a couple of months, to scan all its points of interest, and to feast his eyes upon visions of Oriental charm and splendour, of architectural beauty and grandeur, and of such monuments of religious devotion as no other land can present to the traveller and student.
Let not the Westerner indulge his fears about the discomforts and dangers of travel in this tropical land. To an English-speaking tourist there are a few lands only which furnish more conveniences and facilities for travel than this same India; and travelling is cheaper here than in any other country. Comfortable second-class travelling rarely costs more than one cent a mile. And many, like the writer, have travelled thousands of miles in third-class compartments at less than half a cent a mile, and without much other inconvenience than an excess of dust and stiffened bones. The writer has seen many globe-trotters pass through India of whom few were not surprised at the relative comforts of travel here during the winter months, and no other time of the year should be chosen for travelling in India.
It will be convenient to start upon our tour from Madura, the missionary home of the writer. It is a large, wide-awake centre of enthusiastic Hinduism in the extreme south of the peninsula. In the heart of this town, of more than a hundred thousand people, stands its great temple, dedicated to Siva. The principal monuments of South India are its temples. They are the largest temples in the world. The Madura temple is only the third in size; but in its upkeep and architectural beauty it far surpasses the other two, which are larger. It covers an area of fifteen acres, and its many Gopuras, or towers, furnish the landmark of the country for miles around. It is erected almost entirely of granite blocks, some of which are sixty feet long. Its monolithic carving is exquisitely fine, as it is most abundant and elaborate. Hinduism may be moribund; but this temple gives only intimation of life and prosperity as one gazes upon its elaborate ritual, and sees the thousands passing daily into its shrine for worship. It represents the highest form of Hindu architecture, and, like almost all else that is Hindu, its history carries us to the dim distance of the past. But the great Tirumalai Nayak, the king of two and a half centuries ago, spent more in its elaboration than any one else. And it was he who built, half a mile away, the great palace which, though much reduced, still stands as the noblest edifice of its kind south of a line drawn from Bombay to Calcutta.
In this same temple we find, transformed, another cult. It is called the Temple of Meenatchi, after its presiding goddess, "the Fish-eyed One." When Brahmanism reached Madura, many centuries ago, Meenatchi was the principal demoness worshipped by the people, who were all devil-worshippers. As was their wont, the Brahmans did not antagonize the old faith of the people, but absorbed it by marrying Meenatchi to their chief god Siva, and thus incorporated the primitive devil-worship into the Brahmanical religion. Thus the Hinduism of Madura and of all South India is Brahmanism plus devil-worship. And the people are to-day much more absorbed in pacifying the devils which infest every village than they are in worshipping purely Hindu deities.
The prevailing faith of the Dravidians, therefore, is demonolatry; and the myriad shrines in the villages and hamlets, and the daily rites conducted in them, attest the universal prevalence of this belief and the great place it has in the life of these so-called Hindus.
A run of a hundred and fifty miles directly south brings us to Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India. It is also the extreme south of Travancore, "the Land of Charity," and one of the richest and most charming sections of India. It is a Native State under the control of the Brahmans.
It is unique in the large proportion of Christians which are among its inhabitants. Though the Christian community in India averages only one per cent of the population, in the State of Travancore it amounts to 25 per cent. It is here that we find the ancient Syrian Church, with its three hundred and fifty thousand souls. Though it calls itself "the Thomasian, Apostolic Church," and though the Romish Church accepts the legend, modern historians deny its apostolic origin, and claim that it was founded no earlier than the third century. Even thus, it furnishes an intensely interesting study. The writer was deeply interested to see and enter its two churches at Kottayam, both of which are at least eight hundred years old.
Four centuries ago, Roman Catholicism used all the resources of the Inquisition in order to absorb this Church. They succeeded only too well, and half of the Indian Syrian Church is now subject to Rome. Nearly a century ago, the Church Missionary