A FACT. FROM BENGAL. T HE Indian Census for 1891, just
completed by the revisers but not yet circulated, reveals, we are told, a fact which may prove of the highest political—and is certainly of the highest intellectual—interest. The great Mussulman effort to convert Eastern India, which has lasted centuries, has so far succeeded that Bengal Proper, which is not, be it remembered, identical with the Bengal Presidency, is now a Mahommedan country ; that is to say, the Mussulmans exceed the Hindoos in a population which may be roughly taken at forty millions, by a, million and a half. The majority of the true Bengalees, the pleasant and sharp-witted race who talk the Italian of Asia, and can, while they are young, defeat both all Indian peoples and all white men in any book exami- nation whatever ; who cannot fight, but whom the fighting-men fear as the giants used to fear the dwarfs for their cunning and their adroitness, have adopted the tenets of Islam. We say " have adopted," for the notion that they are not Bengalees by blood is rejected by all experts as without foundation. There never has been any serious immigration into Eastern or Central Bengal Proper from any Mussulman country. A few Arab missionaries, renewed from age to age, have settled there, and still, we believe, are proud of their special blood ; and a considerable number of Paeans have been attracted by high pay to fight the battles of the old officers of Delhi and the great nobles who resisted them, and have remained in the land ; but the millions are un- doubtedly converted Hindoos, or, in a much smaller proportion, " Animists,"—the new name given in the Census to the tribes below Hindooism which we class as savage. The preaching of the Mussulman missionaries, which never ceases, has attracted them, and once con- verted, they have been bound to Islam by its three great offers,—release from the misery of being responsible for sins committed in previous stages of existence, a burden which, whenever fully realised, is unendurable, and pro- vokes men to lives of ascetic penance; escape from the burden of a ceremonial law far heavier than that which still binds the " children of the Ghetto ;" and admission on terms of absolute equality into the mightiest of the castes, the one which still claims as its right dominance within the Empire. Which of these offers has been the mos acceptable it might be hard to say, but that the first and third have acted like solvents upon Hindooism, no one who understands the subject would attempt to deny. The conversion has not been by villages, or even districts, at a time ; but family after family has dropped away, its head accepting the Faith, until there are districts in Eastern Bengal, still popularly supposed to be Hindoo, where the Mussulmans are three or four to one, and the Hindoo community seems, whenever a quarrel arises, to exist on sufferance. The " people," properly so called, are in such districts Mussulman, and the usages of society, its political ideas, and even its outward bearing, are all adapting themselves slowly to that fact. The relations of the tenantry to their landlords, for example, become seriously changed, the Mussulman being far more dan- gerous to oppress in the old ways.
The process is certain to go on, and it may attain an accelerated speed. It is not doubted, we arc told by experienced officers, though the practice of conversion makes figures difficult to obtain, that whether from dif- ference of diet, or from some traditional superiority in the management of very young children, or from the opera- tion of one of those mysterious laws which enable Anglo- Saxons to double their numbers in every fifty years, while Jews, the healthiest and most universally married of all races, take centuries to increase in like proportion —they have barely doubled in the last sixteen hundred years—the Mussulmans of Bengal multiply by natural increase perceptibly faster than Hindoos. Then, although it is true that Hindooism itself is undergoing a re- vival, and becoming more fanatic as it becomes more sensible of pressure, there are classes which, living in direct contact as they do with Mahommedanism, feel deeply the intellectual impact of its tenets, of its simple explana- tion of all puzzles as part of the will of the unconditioned God, and of the clearness and unalterableness of its Sacred Law. It is not only in Europe that tired minds think infallibility a relief. They are mentally converts almost before they know it, and their formal reception only announces a change already completed. And, lastly, the lowest castes of, Hindooism and those below its purview are growing fiercely impatient of their posi- tion. They feel the social treatment they have endured quietly for ages, as if it were a newborn insolence. The Governments of India are in possession of curious evidence of this, in the shape of petitions from nearly outcast castes that their names, which have become infamous, may be changed by supreme fiat ; that their most unpleasant duties may be abrogated or paid for ; and that their high- caste neighbours may be ordered to treat them with more respect. The Governments, though not always deaf to such entreaties, can do very little to relieve oppressions consecrated by the habit of centuries ; but the Mussul- mans can do everything. Let a Chamar or Chundal—let us say, merely to be intelligible, a hereditary night- soil man—declare himself a Mussulman, and go through the initiatory rite, and he is instantly, as far as theory goes, the equal of every other follower of Mahomet, may dine in any house, may marry the daughter, if he wins his way up, of the highest noble in the land. Except as regards the Syuds, who are sprung from the Prophet's loins, and the descendants of a few reigning families, the pride of pedigree has not only no place in Mahommedanism, but, as against other claims, has no weight, so that the equality so often vaunted in other communities is actually real. It nattered nothing to Mahommed An that his father was a tobacconist, or to Ryder Ali that he was the son of a Sepoy. To a people singularly sensitive about personal dignity this attraction is irresistible, and, if we are not greatly mistaken—and we were not mistaken when we made the same prophecy nearly forty years ago—when the Census of 1921 is taken, two-thirds of the people of Bengal Proper will be Mahommedans ; that is, the brain of India will be on the side of Islam.
Will the result be evil or good ? On one side probably evil ; for Christianity will have lost a splendid chance, the number of Mussulmans who are impressed by Christian teaching being exceedingly small. Their difficulties are solved, their minds shut up, and they acquire a special dislike for the Trinitarian doctrine and the person of Christ, such as you may discern occasionally among the more fanatic Jews. Whether the remaining effect will be good, depends almost entirely upon the view taken of the British power in India, for the result is almost certain to be pro tan to hostile to that. The Hindoos of Bengal have been our best subjects, have paid heavy revenues every year since the conquest, asking little in return, and have abstained from insurrection so carefully, that the wonderful pro- vince, with its population exceeding that of France—we speak of Bengal Proper, mind, not of Behar, or Orissa, or Assam—is practically ungarrisoned. The police hold it, as they hold Calcutta, where, with its piled-up wealth and its million of people—by daylight—it has never, we believe, since its foundation, certainly never in the past half-century, been necessary to call out a soldier or a cannon in aid of the civil force. The Mussulmans of Bengal, if their faith is to become that of the majority, will not be like that. They may be fairly good subjects, and indeed in Southern India, under many of the Bengal conditions, they are such ; but they will not be the same kind of subjects in any way. The difference of diet will affect their physique ; the teaching of their doctors will give them the habit of acting in concert ; and the Imperial tradition, which cannot die, will give them a new attitude of mind towards the ruling power. Millions of them are at present almost Hindoo in their submissiveness ; but every ereed stamps itself sooner or later on its votaries ; the Mahommedan missionaries do not preach non-resistance ; and the special impulse of Islam in Bengal has come from the Ferazees, who are disciples of the Wahabees, the fierce Arab sectaries whose doctrine bears to the general body of the faith much the relation which Calvinism bears to Christianity. Bengal, we fear, will not be an ungarrisoned province fifty years hence, nor should we greatly care to be Lieutenant-Governor when orders have to be carried out among fifty millions of Mahommedan Bengalees. As the Mussulman squire of Aligarh recently told the world through the Times, very quiet Mussulmans grow very fierce if their creed is subjected to any " humiliation." A great many hopes of progress will have to be given up, for, strange to say, Mahommedanism, though in one way a nobler creed than Hindooism, for it does acknowledge a God instead of a universe as the source and ruler of all things, arrests what the West calls " progress " far more effectually. It sets up, in fact, its own changeless Sacred Law as the supreine tribunal of rightful action, and hardly conceives of development as a possibility. Above all, Mahommedanism is, and will remain, intensely Asiatic, turning ever to the old Eastern learning for its inspira- tion, and even in its heresies throwing out thoughts which are in no way the thoughts of Europe. All this hurrying "civilisation" of ours is to the Mussulman mind but a vain effort to alter decrees given forth by a will which, whether innately righteous or not, is self-generated, irresistible, and, for morality as well as society, absolutely final. We cannot look forward with any hope to the change, though it may be for a moment politically convenient—for instance, it would be absurd for the Bengalees, in the face of the Census, to make a political question of the cow- killing—but that it will happen we are as convinced as we are that only the British sceptre at this moment keeps the creeds of India from another spring at each other's throats.
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