HINDOO CONSERVATISM.
?THE Orthodox Hindoos, who represent, of course, a great • majority of Hindoos, are suffering in English opinion for their resistance to the new marriage law rather more than they should. They are seriously in the wrong, no doubt, for they ought to know by this time that their English rulers have no intention of upsetting their social system ; and they ought to know, moreover, from their own experience, as well as from the teachings of science, that their custom of pre- mature marriage is excessively injurious to the race. Their women are often bags at thirty-five, when they ought to be fat and well-looking, as hundreds among the Christian Indian women are; and the reason, as they ought to know, and, we believe, do know in a vague way, is premature motherhood. Never- theless, they have several reasons other than mere conser- vatism, for their annoyance with the new Bill ; and it is only fair to them that the reasons should be plainly stated. In the first place, they are greatly irritated that the Govern- ment should take upon itself to deal with the matter at all, and under the same circumstances so should we be. The whole question of marriage is, in Hindoo opinion, strictly a; religious question, the possibility of escape -from infinite and painful transmigrations being bound up in the chance of producing an heir in time to perform ex- piatory ceremonies ; and to have the question regulated by powerful and wise outsiders who are not in the pale at all, who do not understand Hindoo thought and utterly despise Hindoo ritual, is naturally abhorrent to them. So would similar interference be to us if we were conquered by efficient but unsympathetic agnostics, who insisted, for example, on an inquiry into the health of all betrothed lovers, enacted that none should marry without proof of adequate means, and decreed that divorce at will was part of the unbreakable natural law. We should be twice as much hurt by such interference as by foreign taxation or the abolition of Parliament; and the Hindoos, owing to their special belief about the religious necessity of producing heirs, are twice as much hurt as we should be. These domineering foreign men of science, they think, are imperilling in their blindness even our hopes of "salvation," and they are angry with an anger for which they can hardly find words.
Then the new law does place on fathers of families—and, remember, a bachelor Hindoo is an entity which cannot exist— a new and, as he thinks, grievous burden. He is as sensitive to the honour of his household as any English noble, and he has to guard it under circumstances the difficulty of which he knows well, though the English do not, for two additional years. He cannot place his daughter in a convent, as a French- man or a Spaniard would ; he cannot keep her mind in half- light, as a European or American does; aud he cannot alter at a blow all those circumstances of his civilisation, his religion, his very dress, which tend to wake the passions prematurely. He has devised early marriage as a household protection, and to see it abolished by fiat from above without necessity, and for reasons he has not fully accepted, is almost an insult as well as an oppression. Above all, he resents the penal element in the new proposal, and he has reason to resent it. As originally proposed by the English reformers, the new law would have placed every household in India at the absolute mercy of the police, and would have caused and almost justified a popular insurrection, such as, in all their experience of India, the English have never had to face. Laws or no laws, Hindoo custom will compel the father of the bride to send her, at the age of about ten, to her husband's house,—that is, in fact, to place her under the authority of her mother-in-law. She is safe enough there, in the majority of instances, as long as she remains a child ; but if the husband were forbidden by law to approach her, the police would have a lever to work in pursuit of bribes such as would be absolutely irresistible. No house- hold which did not bribe would have been safe for a day from
the chance of a false charge, which could not have been so mueli as discussed without ruin to the honour of the family, which, be it remembered, includes a nearly perfect seclusion from intruding eyes. To the Hindoo, jealous to madness of .ceremonial purity, on which, as he conceives, the happiness of his future lives depend, and drilled by centuries of foreign dominance to suspect oppression in the very breezes, his shrouded domestic life is all in all, the one thing in defence of which he will die, or be ruined ; and to give the police the 3egal right of lifting the veil would have been to create thirty millions of Wat Tylers. Fortunately, the Government, always kindly intentioned, understood that situation thoroughly, and in their Bill carefully guarded against the possibility of its occurrence ; but even now the liability of the Hindoo to what he thinks dishonour, is considerably increased by the reform. Family quarrels, when they break out in a Hindoo house, the theory of which is • that it is a unit under patriarchal government, are inconceivably bitter, the jealousies among the women never end ; and the whole arrangement of life tends to a savage dispute between the husband's wife and the husband's mother,—between, that is, the claimant .of honour within the house, and the claimant of authority. 'The new law, though it will not be felt in the immense majority of well-governed houses, will be felt, with cause, in the minority of houses honeycombed with domestic hatreds, and will be regarded in all with a certain distrust, as one from which, by possibility, police interference, and consequent inquiries by Magistrates, and resulting discreditable trials in -Court, might conceivably spring. Malignant perjury is not in India, as in Europe, an infrequent and little-feared occurrence, but is perhaps the greatest and commonest of the dangers to which the rich are exposed, and which they fear to such a degree as to influence their most habitual actions,—thousands of Hindoos, for example, never forgetting that an enemy may .see their signatures, and therefore be in a position to produce a colourable imitation of them. The opportunity which the new law gives for such malignant perjury from within the household itself needs no explanation, and it is vain to hope that it will never, or scarcely ever, be taken advantage of. At all events, it will be dreaded.
For—and this is the great cause of Indian conservatism, which can never be cured while the world stands—the Indian imagination, besides being far more vivid than the.European, is essentially pessimistic, gloomy, full of anticipation of -possible or coming evil. Whatever the cause, be it race, or -diet, or the menacing aspect of tropical nature, which always seems hostile to man and too strong for 119 resisting powers, the Indian's thought in the watches of the night is always full of fear, always represents to hith terrors which in Europe are felt only by hypochondriacs. Every movement of his supe- riors is alarming, every action of his equals food for doubt ; his very creed is a hope that he may escape existence, every -detail of his ritual a deprecation of the wrath of unknown but supernatural powers. He is responsible for a hundred past lives of which he can remember nothing ; and how does he know that in those lives he has not justified, by offences against the all-embracing Spirit, the falling of a hundred Towers of Siloe on his head? He pants for security, and finds it only in monotony, in the conception that life as it is was divinely arranged, in that permanent freedom from change in any direction, and especially freedom from change in all half-religious, half-social customs, which nowa- days seems to the active classes of Europe—we do not -believe in the universality of the feeling, and expect one day a rough awakening for innovators—to involve an intolerable -weariness. Full of this horror, he makes of his life a con- tinuity such as is hardly known in Europe, and falls constantly into a condition of mind such as is seen in convents, where -everything unaccustomed is a terror, and the idea of an adven- ture, be it only to see the life of the nearest street, is like an immorality. Innovation is not so much horrible as unnatural -to the true Indian temperament—there are of course, in so vast .a community, plenty of the adventurous and the impious—and innovation, if it touches his daily shrouded life, is utterly abhorrent. Upon this point Europeans, even'when they know India well, are liable to fall into one natural error. They -think we have already made religious, or semi-religious, semi- social innovations ; but that is not the case in anything like the degree that is imagined. We have abolished suttee, have .disallowed custom as an excuse for infanticide, and have pro-
hibited one form of expiatory cruelty to oneself, the torture by swinging on a hook at religious festivals; but none of those laws really touch the people. Suttee never was prac- tised except by specially honourable families, and its per- formance was a high and comparatively rare distinction, the claim to which was justifiable only in certain castes. Infanticide was a " way " of certain proud clans, and is just as obnoxious to general Hindoo feeling as to the feelings of the English poor ; while the prohibition of swinging was never really resisted, because it made no difference to anybody. If a fanatic wishes to expiate the sins of a past life by self-torture, he can do it without any Magistrate dreaming of interference, and do it as publicly as if be swung upon the hook. Lord Dalhousie's Aot allowing the remarriage of Hindoo widows would have touched the domestic life of the people, had it been obeyed; but, as we understand the situation, it has not been obeyed, the internal machinery of Hindooism proving too strong to allow, except in the rarest instances, of such flat rebellion. We have not really affected the life of the people, and can, therefore, obtain little either of encouragement or warning from actual precedent. All Europeans know for certain is, that oven in the clearest cases it is necessary to be cautious, kindly, and non-contemptuous, or the result may be a startling one. In this instance, we think the gain to humanity is worth a risk which, if the Mussulmans are as indifferent as is said, cannot involve the Empire ; but it is worth while to know why Orthodox Hindoos remonstrate, and unwise to regard their remonstrances as dictated by superstition alone. They fear plenty of unreal things from the Bill, but there are one or two solid objects of apprehension among them, and these should be carefully removed.
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