Part 18
In the rural villages, of course, the majority of the inhabitants are farmers, who fare afield each morning with their so-called plows or other tools for aiding the growth of their crops. The Indian plow is, I believe, the crudest I have found in any part of the wide world. It consists of a simple handle with a knob at the top; a block of wood with an iron spike in it about an inch thick at one end and tapering to a point at the other; and a tongue to which the yoke of bullocks are attached. The pointed spike is, perhaps, sixteen inches long, but only a fraction of it projects from the wooden block into which it is fastened, and the ordinary plowing consists only of scratching the two or three inches of the soil's upper crust.
The Allabahad Exposition was designed mainly to interest the farmers in better implements, and its Official Handbook, in calling attention to the exhibit of improved plows, declared:
"The ordinary Indian plow is, for certain purposes, about as inefficient as it could be. Strictly speaking it is not a plow at all. It makes a tolerably efficient seed-drill, a somewhat inefficient cultivator, but it is quite incapable of breaking up land properly."
The other tools in use on the Indian farm are fit companions for the primitive plow. Some one has said that 75 cents would buy the complete cultivating outfit of the Hindu ryot! I saw men cutting up bullock-feed with a sort of hatchet; the threshing methods are centuries old; the little sugarcane mills {219} I found in operation here and there could have been put into bushel baskets. The big ox carts, which together with camel carts meet all the requirements of travel and transportation, are also heavy and clumsy, having wheels as big as we should use on eight-horse log-wagons at home. These wheels are without metal tires of any kind, and the average cost of one of the carts, a village carpenter told me, is $25.
As to the other crops grown by the Indian ryot, or farmer, I cannot perhaps give a better idea than by quoting the latest statistics as to the number of acres planted to each as I obtained them from the government authorities in Calcutta.
Rice 73,000,000 Wheat 21,000,000 Barley 8,000,000 Millets 41,000,000 Maize 7,000.000 Other grains 47,000,000 Fodder crops 5,000,000 Oilseeds: linseed, mustard, sesamum, etc. 14,000,000 Sugarcane 2,250,000 Cotton 13,000,000 Jute 3,000,000 Opium (for China) 416,000 Tobacco 1,000,000 Orchard and garden 5,000,000
It is somewhat surprising to learn that of the 246,000,000 acres under cultivation to supply 300,000,000 people (the United States last year cultivated 250,000,000 acres to supply 90,000,000) only 28,000,000 acres were cropped more than once during the year. With the warm climate of India it would seem that two or more crops might be easily grown, but the annual dry season makes this less feasible than it would appear to the traveller. Even in January much artificial crop-watering must be done, and no one can travel in India long without growing used to the sight of the irrigation wells. Around them the earth is piled high, and oxen hitched to the well ropes draw up the water in collapsible leather bags or buckets. A general system of elevated ditches then distributes the water where it is needed.
Concerning the drought, a resident of Muttra said to me that {220} there practically no rain falls from the middle of January to the middle of June. "In the latter part of the drought," he said, "the fields assume the appearance of deserts; only the dull green of the tree-leaves varies the vast, monotonous graybrown of the far-stretching plains. The streams are dried up; the cattle hunt the parched fields in vain for a bit of succulence to vary their diet of dry grass. But at last there comes the monsoon and the rains--and then the Resurrection Morning. The dead earth wakens to joyous fruitfulness, and what was but yesterday a desert has become a veritable Garden of Eden."
But, alas! sometimes the rains are delayed--long, tragically long delayed! The time for their annual return has come--has passed, and still the pitiless sun scorches the brown earth as if it would set afire the grass it has already burned to tinder-dryness. The ryot's scanty stock of grain is running low, the daily ration has been reduced until it no longer satisfies the pangs of hunger, and with each new sunrise gaunt Famine stalks nearer to the occupants of the mud-dried hut. The poor peasant lifts vain hands to gods who answer not; unavailingly he sacrifices to Shiva, to Kali, to all the heartless Hindu deities of destruction and to unnamed demons as well. The Ancient Terror of India approaches; from time immemorial the vengeful drought has slain her people in herds, like plague-stricken cattle, not by hundreds and thousands, but by tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. In Calcutta I saw several young men whom the mission school rescued from starvation in the last great famine of 1901-02 and heard moving stories of that terrible time. Many readers will recall the aid that America then sent to the suffering, but in spite of the combined efforts of the British Government and philanthropic Christendom, 1,236,855 people lost their lives. To get a better grasp upon the significance of these figures it may be mentioned that if every man, woman, and child in eight American states and territories at that time (Delaware, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada) had been {221} swallowed up in a night, the total loss of life would not have been so great as in this one Indian famine.
Appalling as these facts are, it must nevertheless be remembered that the loss would have been vastly greater but for the excellent system of famine relief which the British Government has now worked out. It has built railways all over India, so that no longer will it be possible for any great area to suffer while another district having abundance is unable to share its bounty because of absence of transportation. In the second place, the government has wisely arranged to give work at low wages to famine sufferers--road building, railroad building, or something of the kind--instead of dispensing a reckless charity which too often pauperizes those it is intended to help. Before the British occupation India was scourged both by famine and by frequent, if not almost constant, wars between neighboring states. The fighting it has stopped entirely, the loss by drought it has greatly reduced; and some authority has stated (I regret that I have not been able to get the exact figures myself) that for a century before the British assumed control, war and famine kept the population practically stationary, while since then the number of inhabitants has practically trebled.
Not unworthy of mention, even in connection with its work in relieving famine sufferers, is the excellent work the British Government is doing in enabling the farmers to free themselves from debt. The visitor to India comes to a keener appreciation of Rudyard Kipling's stories and poems of Indian life because of the accuracy with which they picture conditions; and the second "Maxim of Hafiz" is only one of many that have gained new meaning for me since my coming:
"Yes, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannum, If he borrowed in life from a native at 60 per cent. per annum."'
When I first heard of "60 per cent, per annum," and even of 70 per cent, or 80 per cent., as the ordinary rate of interest paid {222} by the Indian ryot to the merchant or money-lender, I could not believe it, but further investigation proved the statement true. In the United Provinces I found that in some cases the ryot has been little better than a serf. The merchant has "furnished him supplies," adding interest at the rate of one anna on each rupee at the end of each month--6-1/4 per cent., not a year but a month, and that compounded every 30 days! In one case that came to my attention, two orphan boys twenty years ago, in arranging the marriage of their sister, borrowed 100 rupees at 50 per cent, interest. For seventeen years thereafter they paid 50 rupees each year as interest, until an American missionary took up the account at 5 per cent, instead of 50, and in two years they had paid it off with only 7 rupees more than they had formerly paid as annual tribute to the money-lender. In many such cases debts have been handed down from generation to generation, for the Hindu code of honor will not permit a son to repudiate the debts of his father; and son, grandson, and great-grandson have, staggered under burdens they were unable to get rid of.
In this situation the cooperative credit societies organized under government supervision have proved a godsend to the people, and thousands of ryots through their aid are now getting free of debt for the first time in their lives, and their families for perhaps the first time in generations. Each member of a cooperative credit society has some interest in it; the government will lend at 4 per cent, an amount not greater than the total amount deposited by all the members; stringent regulations as to loans and their security, deposit of surplus funds, accounting, etc., are in force, and altogether the plan is working remarkably well. The latest report I have shows that in a single twelvemonth the total working capital of these societies increased more than 300 per cent.
The United States seems to be about the only fairly civilized country in which some form of cooperative credit society, with government aid, has not been worked out.
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Of great help to the small farmer also has been the action of the government in regulating land-rents in crowded districts. The courts see to it that no landlord raises rents unfairly. One Brahmin freeholder I met in a small village (he owned 250 acres, worth from $130 to $275 per acre) told me his rents were 32 to 40 rupees (or from $10 to $13) per acre. He grows wheat and cotton, and appeared to be quite intelligent as well as prosperous, although he wore nothing save a turban and an abbreviated lower garment not quite stretching from his loins to his knees, the rest of his body being entirely naked.
That the day laborer in India can have but small hope of buying land at $100 to $300 an acre (and I think these prices general) is indicated by the fact that when I asked, in the next village, the wage per month, I was told, "Four or five rupees ($1.28 to $1.60), the laborer boarding himself."
"And how much is paid per day when a single day's labor is wanted?" I asked.
"Two annas and bread," was the reply. (An anna is 2 cents.)
My informant was the schoolmaster of Khera Kalan village. At his school he told me that the children of farmers were allowed tuition free; the children of the village people pay 1 to 3 annas a month. But so hard is the struggle to get enough coarse grain to keep soul and body together (the peasant can seldom afford to eat rice or wheat) that few farm children are free from work long enough to learn to read and write.
It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squatted around a missionary's knees in a little mud-walled yard just before I left Khera Kalan that afternoon. Outside a score of camels were cropping the leaves from the banyan trees (the only regular communication with the outside world is by camel cart) and the men of the village {224} were grinding sugarcane on the edge of the far-reaching fields of green wheat and yellow-blossomed mustard. Not far away was a Hindu temple; not far away, too, the historic Grand Trunk Road which leads through Khyber Pass into the strange land of Afghanistan. It is the road, by the way, over which Alexander the Great marched his victorious legions into India, and over which centuries later Tamerlane came on his terror-spreading invasion. But this has nothing to do with the little half-naked boys and girls we are now concerned with. They had gathered around the Padre to recite the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer in Hindustani. I asked how many had been to school (only one responded), asked something about their games, told them something about America, and then their instructor inquired (interpreting all the time for me, of course):
"And what message would you like for the Sahib to give the boys and girls of America for you?"
"Tell them, Salaam," was the quick chorus in reply.
"And that is good enough, I guess," remarked the American who is now giving his life to the Indian people, "for Salaam means. Peace be to you."
So indeed I pass on the message to the fortunate boys and girls of the United States who read this article. "Salaam,"--Peace be to you. Little Ones. You will never even know how favored of Heaven you are in having been born in a land where famine never threatens death to you and your kindred, where the poor have homes that would seem almost palatial to the average Indian child; where educational opportunities are within the reach of all; where the religion of the people is an aid to moral living and high ideals instead of being a hindrance to them; where no caste system decrees that the poorest children shall not rise above the condition of their parents; where a wage-scale higher far than six cents a day enables the poorest to have comforts and cherish ambitions; and where the humblest "boy born in a log cabin" may dream of the Presidency instead {225} of being an outcast whose very touch the upper orders would account more polluting than the touch of a beast.
Ah, the little fate-cursed Indian brats, some of them wearing rings in their noses and not much else, who send the message through me to you--think of them to-night and be glad that to you the lines have fallen in pleasanter places.
Salaam, indeed, O happy little folk of my own homeland across the seas! Peace be to you!
Jeypore, India.
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XXIII
THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA
Of Hinduism as a religious or ecclesiastical institution we had something to say in another chapter; of Hinduism as Social Fact bare mention was made. And yet it is in its social aspects, in its enslavement of all the women and the majority of the men who come within its reach, that Hinduism presents its most terrible phases. For Hinduism is Caste and Caste is Hinduism. Upon the innate, Heaven-ordained superiority of the Brahmin and the other twice-born castes, and upon the consequent inferiority of the lower castes, the whole system of Brahminism rests.
Originally there were but four castes: The Brahmin or priest caste who were supposed to have sprung from the head of Brahma or God; the Kshatriya or warrior caste who sprang from his arms, the Vasiya or merchant and farmer class who sprang from his thigh, and the Sudra or servant and handicraftsmen class who came from his feet. The idea of superiority by birth having once been accepted as fundamental, however, these primary castes were themselves divided and subdivided along real or imaginary lines of superiority or inferiority until to-day the official government statistics show 2378 castes in India. You cannot marry into any one of the other 2377 classes of Hindus; you cannot eat with any of them, nor can you touch any of them.
Thus Caste is the Curse of India. It is the very antithesis of democracy--blighting, benumbing, paralyzing to all aspiration and all effort at change or improvement.
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No man may rise to a higher caste than that into which he is born; but he may fall to a lower one.
There is no opportunity for progress; the only way to move is backward. Don't kick against the pricks therefore. You were born a Brahmin with wealth and power because you won the favor of the gods in some previous existence; or you were born a Sudra, predestined to a life of suffering and semi-starvation, because in your previous existence you failed to merit better treatment from the gods. If you are only a sweeper, be glad that you were not born a pig or a cobra. Kismet, Fate, has fixed at birth your changeless station in this life; and, more than this, it has written on your brow the things which must happen to you throughout your whole existence.
The Brahmin put himself into a position of superiority and then said to all the other classes: Rebel not at the inequalities of life. They are ordained of the gods. The good that the higher castes enjoy is the reward of their having conducted themselves properly in previous existences. Submit yourself to your lot in the hope that with obedience to what the Brahmins tell you, you may possibly likewise win birth into a higher caste next time. But strike a Brahmin even so much as with a blade of grass and your soul shall be reborn into twenty and one lives of impure animals before it assumes human shape again.
Never in human history has the ingenuity of a ruling class devised a cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its supremacy. Never has there been a religion more depressing, more hopeless, more deadening to all initiative. "_Jo hota so hota_,"--"What is happening was to happen"--so said the wounded men who had gone to the Bombay hospital to have their limbs amputated a few days before I got there. "It is written on my forehead," a man will often say with stoical indifference when some calamity overtakes him, in allusion to the belief that on the sixth night after birth Vidhata writes on every man's forehead the main events of his life-to-be, and no act {228} of his can change them. "I was impelled of the gods to do the deed," a criminal will say in the courts. "And I am impelled of the gods to punish you for it," the judge will sometimes answer. If plague comes, the natives can only be brought by force to observe precautions against it. "If we are to die, we shall die; why offend the gods by attempting interference with their plans?" The fatalism of the East as expressed by Omar Khayyam is the daily creed of India's millions:
"We are no other than a Moving Row Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go. . . .
"But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days."
It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted; but for this belief that all things are predestined, no people would ever have been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny of the caste system. Perhaps it should also be added that the belief in the transmigration of the soul has also had a not inconsiderable influence. Though you have fared ill in this life, a million rebirths may be yours ere you finally win absorption into Brahma, and in these million future lives the gods may deal more prodigally with you. Indeed, the things you most desire may be yours in your rebirth. "You are interested in India; therefore you may have your next life as an Indian," an eminent Hindu said to me. But Heaven forbid!
At any rate, with this double layer of nourishing earth--the belief, first, that what you are now is the result of your actions in previous lives, and, secondly, that there are plenty more rebirths in which any merit you possess may have its just recompense of reward, the caste system has flourished like the Psalmist's green bay tree, though its influence has been more like that of the deadly upas.
If you are a high-caste man you may not only refuse to eat with or touch a low-caste man, your equal perhaps in {229} intelligence and in morals, but in some cases you may even demand that the low-caste man shall not pollute you by coming too near you on the road. On page 540 of the 1901 "Census of India Report" will be found a table showing at what distances the presence of certain inferior classes become contaminating to a Brahmin! Moreover, the low-caste man, offensive to men, is taught that he is equally offensive to the gods. He must not worship in the temples; must not even approach them. Usually it is taken for granted that no Pariah will take such a liberty, but in some places I have seen signs in English posted on the temple gates warning tourists who have low-caste servants that these servants cannot enter the sacred buildings.
Not only are these creatures of inferior orders vile in themselves, but the work which they do has also come to be regarded as degrading. A high-caste man will not be caught doing any work which is "beneath him." The cook will not sweep; the messenger boy would not pick up a book from the floor. The liveried Brahmin who takes your card at the American Consulate in Calcutta once lost his place rather than pick up a slipper; rather than humiliate himself in such fashion he would walk half a mile to get some other servant for the duty. It is no uncommon thing to find that your servant will carry a package for you, but will hire another servant if a small package of his own is to be moved. "I had a boy for thirteen years, the best boy I ever had, till he died of the plague," a Bombay Englishman said to me, "and he shaved me regularly all the time. But when I gave him a razor with which to shave himself, I found it did no good. He would have 'lost caste' if he had done barber's work for anybody but a European!"
"I have a good sweeper servant," a Calcutta minister told me, "but if I should attempt to promote him beyond his caste and make a house-servant of him, every other servant I have would leave, including my cook, who has been a Christian twenty years!"
The absurdities into which the caste system runs are well {230} illustrated by some facts which came to my notice on a visit to a school for the Dom caste conducted by some English people in Benares. The Doms burn the bodies of the dead at the Ganges ghats, and do other "dirty work." Incidentally they form the "thief caste" in Benares, and whenever a robbery occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom is guilty. For this reason a great number of Doms (they belong to the Gypsy class and have no houses anywhere) make it a practice to sleep on the ground just outside the police station nearly all the year round, reporting to the authorities so as to be able to prove an alibi in case of a robbery. So low are the Doms that to touch anything belonging to one works defilement; consequently they leave their most valuable possessions unguarded about their tents or shacks, knowing full well that not even a thief of a higher caste will touch them.