ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES A Historical Retrospect. Chhajju Singh. Collapse. Dubois. ERE. Gospel of R. HBS. IRM. ISR. Karaka. Miss Collet. MPI. ODL. Proceedings. Ranade, Essays. Richter. Sinnett, Incidents. A Historical Retrospect of the Theosophical The Life and Teachings of Swami Dayanand Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics. History of the Brahmo Samaj, by Siva The International Review of Missions. History of the Parsees, by Dosabhai Framji Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, by A Modern Priestess of Isis, by V. S. Old Diary Leaves, by H. S. Olcott. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Religious and Social Reform, A Collection Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, Social Reform in Bengal. Social Reform in Bengal, by Pandit Sītā natha Tattvabhushana. MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN INDIA CHAPTER I HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF THE PERIOD 1. Our subject is Modern Religious Movements in India, that is, the fresh religious movements which have appeared in India since the effective introduction of Western influence. There are two great groups of religious facts the presence of which we must recognize continuously but which are excluded from our survey by the limitations of our subject. These are, first, the old religions of India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Muḥammadanism, so far as they retain the form and character they had before the coming of Western influence; and, secondly, Christian Missions, which are rather a continuation of Church History than a modern movement. The old religions are the soil from which the modern movements spring; while it will be found that the seed has, in the main, been sown by Missions. Thus, though these great systems are not included in our subject, we must, throughout our investigation, keep their constant activity and influence in mind. It seems clear that the effective interpenetration of India by the West began about 1800. The first fresh religious movement appeared in 1828; the intellectual awakening of India began to manifest itself distinctly about the same time; and the antecedents of both go back to somewhere about the beginning of the century. The period we have to deal with thus extends from 1800 to 1913. In 1800 India was in a pitiable plight. Early Hindu governments seldom succeeded in securing settled peace even in the great central region of the country for any extended period of time; but matters became much worse when the flood of Muhammadan invasion came at the end of the twelfth century. When the nineteenth century dawned, India had scarcely known peace for six hundred years. Even under the best of the Mughals there was frequent fighting, and a good deal of injustice; under all other Muslim rulers there was practically constant war and frequent outbreaks of barbarity; while the eighteenth century piled misery on misery. It is heartbreaking to read descriptions of India at that time. We can now see that British supremacy began to assert itself with the battle of Plassey in 1757; yet the rulers had scarcely a definite policy until the opening of the new century; and, even then, Britain had not by any means awaked to the greatness and the splendour of the task set before her in India. We must never forget that the East India Company went to India exclusively for commerce, and that the British Empire sprang altogether from the necessity, which was only very gradually realized, of providing a settled and just government in order to make commerce possible. 2. In 1800 Hinduism, which was the religion of at least three-fourths of the population of the peninsula, consisted, in the main, of two great groups of sects and a mass of wandering celibate ascetics, who were held to be outside society. The two great groups of sects are the Vishnuite and the Sivaite. The Vishnuite sects were very numerous, both in the North and in the South, and they were perhaps, on the whole, more homogeneous than the worshippers of Siva. The leading Vishnuite sects declare Vishnu to be the one God, and yet they recognize the existence of all the other divinities of the Hindu pantheon. They also hold that Vishnu has been incarnate among men a great many times, the latest and chief incarnations being Rāma and Krishna. Worshippers of Śiva declare that Siva is the one God, but recognize also all the other gods. A special group of Śivaite sects has to be noticed, namely, those who pay honour to the wife of Śiva as Kālī or Durgā. Both Vishnuites and Sivaites worship idols, but among Sivaites the phallic symbol is more usual than images of the god. Both sects worship their gurus, that is, their teachers, as gods. Both are fully orthodox in the sense that they retain and enforce with great strictness the ancient Hindu rules of conduct which are summed up under the word dharma. Both sects claim to be Vedāntists, but each has its own interpretation of the philosophy. Around the Hindu community in every part of the country there lived multitudes of degraded Outcastes, held down in the dirt by Hindu law. They number about fifty millions to-day. When the century dawned, Hindus were in a pitifully backward condition. Their subjugation by the Muḥammadans about 1200 A.D. had been a very serious trampling under foot; and, while the reasonable rule of the Mughals had given them a breathing-space, the terrific convulsions of the eighteenth century had more than undone all that had been recovered. Learning had almost ceased; ordinary education scarcely existed; spiritual religion was to be met only in the quietest places; and a coarse idolatry with cruel and immoral rites held all the great centres of population. The condition of South Indian Hinduism at the end of the eighteenth century is very vividly reflected in l'Abbé Dubois' famous work, and the Hinduism of the North at the beginning of the nineteenth in the writings of Ram Mohan Ray. The reader may make a rough guess at the state of the Hindu community from the long list of reforms, social and religious, which the early missionaries felt driven to demand 1 and which all the finer spirits within Hinduism have since then recognized as altogether necessary. Buddhism, which came to the birth about 525 B.C., attained extraordinary greatness before the Christian era, and during the next six centuries not only spread over the whole of Eastern and Southern Asia, but struggled with Hinduism for the primacy in India. Thereafter it steadily declined in the land of its origin; the Muḥammadan conquest all but destroyed it; and Hinduism gradually absorbed what remained. Thus there were practically no Buddhists in India proper at the opening of the nineteenth century; but on the Himalayas, in Burma and in Ceylon the faith was still supreme. Jainism was originally an agnostic philosophy which arose a little earlier than Buddhism, and, like Buddhism, became transformed at an early date into a religion and a rival of Hinduism. By the beginning of our period the ancient Jain community had shrunk to small proportions. They were scattered over a large part of the country, and were wealthy and prosperous; but there was no vigour in Jainism; and there was a slow, continuous drift towards Hinduism; so that the community was steadily dwindling in numbers. The Parsees are a small community of Zoroastrian Persians who fled from Persia to India in the eighth century A.D., and have since then remained a prosperous business community, very exclusive socially and very faithful to their ancient religion. They originally settled in Gujarāt; but, since early last century, Bombay has been their chief centre. In 1800 Muḥammadanism in India was very orthodox and very ignorant, and was steadily deteriorating. The collapse of the Muḥammadan governments and the steady fall of Muslim character had worked sad havoc in the religion itself. 1 See p. 15. |