The East India Company was a trading corporation and their first and foremost consideration was profit. When by slow degrees, they came to ad-minister rich and large territories inhabited by a people who were no less civilised than themselves, they took the only wise course that could be taken then, of interfering as little as possible with their traditional life and religion and confining their own administrative activity to such measures as directly or indirectly tended to increase the profits. To them India was but a large estate to be managed in the best interests of the shareholders, who cared for their annual dividends and not for the policies and principles of the just administration of a conquered people. As was but natural, the Company took into their confidence the leading men of the country, the Brahmans, and employed them in the various departments of administration and business;
The learned Abbe Dubois wrote thus in 1816: “The Brahmans have also been clever enough to ‘work their way into favour with the great European power that now governs India. They occupy the highest and the most lucrative posts in the different administrative boards and government offices as well as in the judicial courts of the various districts. In fact, there is no branch of public administration in which they have not made themselves indispensable. . . But woe to the European head of the office who does not keep the strictest watch over the con-duct of these said subordinates or who places implicit confidence in them. He will soon find himself the victim of his own negligence, with his position seriously compromised.”*
It was so from the very beginning of the British connection with India and the character and policy of the government has been influenced in numerous unforeseen and subtle ways by the predominant voice of the Brahmans, and it cannot be said even now that it has ceased to be a powerful factor in determining the fate of the country.
The co-operation between the Company’s servants and the Brahmans was nowhere more hearty and intimate than in the management of the rich temples. Many causes contributed to this strange alliance between a Christian people and the pagan priests. The temples, especially those of South India, had been built by successive Hindu rulers and always remained sunder their management. They were important sources of revenue. When the country passed from one conqueror to another, the control of the temples also changed hands, and even -Muhammadan rulers are seen to have patronised them for the sake of the annual income they yielded. “The offerings of rich devotees which are divided among the priests in proportion to their rank and dignity are sometimes so consider¬able in the principal temples that they have aroused the cupidity of the princes of the country, particularly of the Muhammadans. These latter as a sort of compensation for tolerating a religion which they abhorred thought fit to take possession of more than half of these offerings. So wrote the Abbe Dubois.
*Pap 293, ‘Linda Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, by Abbe Dubol
The learned Frenchman was mistaken in thinking that the cupidity of the princes was the only justification for appropriating a share of the profits of temple-craft. The princes had a right to the revenue, as the temples really belonged to them, and the Brahmans were only either partners or agents in the business. It was so under Hindu rule; it was so under the Muhammadans; it was so under the
English Company until as we shall see presently, the British Government of its own accord washed its hands clean of this dirty -affair. In the Thirumala Tirupati Devasthanam case, the Madras High Court observed on the facts as follows: “The most striking feature has yet to be indicated. Up to 1843, when the defendants’ predecessor was appointed trustee of the temples, all surplus revenues of the temples after defraying the cost of the temple service, were appropriated by the sovereign power. This practice the British Government inherited from its Muhammadan and Hinthi predecessors and it has prevailed from time immemorial. The surplus revenue thus appropriated amounted at the beginning of the last century, to something like two lakhs of rupees annually.* The Company stepped into the shoes of the previous rulers and the Brahmans welcomed them, as their own position became more secure and acquired added dignity and power by the patronage of the new government.
In 1803 when the English took possession of Orissa, it is said that the oracle of the Puri jagannath Temple proclaimed that it was the desire of the deity that the temple too should be controlled by the Company, and the latter undertook to maintain the temple buildings, pay the Brahmans and do everything for the service of the deity as was customary. In the very first year, the institution
*Page 41. Right of Temple Entry, Mr. P. Chidaimbaram Pillai,
B.A., B.L.
yielded a net profit to the Company of Rs. 1,35,000. Buddha Gaya was a famous” centre of pilgrimage and the Company introduced a pilgrim tax which in some years produced. a revenue of from two to three lakhs of rupees. Similar taxes were collected in other pilgrim centres like, Tirupati, Kashipur, Sarkara, Sambol, etc., and the net taking amounted on an average to £75,000 and upwards annually. In Conjeevararn the Siva temple was in ruins and the people did not care to repair it. An English official induced the Company to carry out the necessary repairs and himself gave a gift to the temple. On occasions of temple festivals and processions, the civil and military officers of the Company were compelled to honour them by their presence and. the Government sent through them its gifts to the Brahmans. In times of drought Brahmans were appointed and paid by the Company to pray to the gods for rain. In those early days, English wives were not allowed to- come to India and the Company’s servants sought the company of Indian mistresses., Some of them are said to have built private temples for their mistresses. The dancing girls of the temples must have been another inducement for these Christian gentlemen to take a hearty interest in their proper management according to the ancient practices.
“Even pagan festivals which had dropped into oblivion were revived and all sense of shame was lost. The management of the property of one temple after another was taken over by the Company; its officials were then responsible for everything; the construction of new idol-cars, new idols, the appointment and remuneration of the Brahmans, painters, musicians, rice-boilers, and watchmen, and , that their cup might be full, even the temple Hes¬de-joie, the Nautch girls received their pay from English officials. At one time in 1858, long after the fight against the entire system had been commenced, 8,292 idols in the Madras Presidency received annually 8,76,780 rupees; in the Bombay Presidency 26,589 temples and idols received 6,98,593 rupees, and in the total area of the Company’s jurisdiction, 17,15,586 rupees were annually spent in the support of idolatry.”* The work of the Hindu reformers, who had been preaching against temple-craft and other vices and weaning the intelligent section from those superstitions was all undone by the enthusiasm of the English patrons of Brahmanism.
“Idol worship in India was on the down-grade. Many temples were openly falling into decay, the temple treasures were squandered by covetous Brahmans, and the entire idol system had no strength to raise itself up again. Its dissolution seemed impending. Then came the government and rebuilt the temples, took over the temple property and saw to it that the idol-festivals and processions were celebrated with their pristine splendour. The whole structure of Hinduism put on a new dignity and new prestige so that in the eyes of the people it appeared to be as it were born again? Therefore, the number of pilgrims, in spite of high pilgrim taxes, increased at famous shrines to an unbelievable extent, the Brahmans came to be regarded as government officials, and the natives were convinced that betwixt the Hindu religion and that of the government, no difference at all existed. A powerful instrument of proof was thus placed in the hands of the Brahmans themselves, enabling them to justify their false religion in the eyes of the deluded populacet The Company’s servants were not concerned with the propagation of any religion. The temples and their paraphernalia satisfied their human cravings for enjoying life in this distant country, where without their wives and children, they must have felt miserable indeed, and if any justification, was required for open participation in pagan ceremonies, it was furnished in the form of substantial profits to the Company.
Placed in such high and intimate favour with the English rulers, the Brahmans were, not slow to use their influence to strengthen the chains of caste on which, after all, hung their entire system of social and religious domination. The Company’s government found in the caste arrangement a very potent instrument for keeping the Hindus submissive by the terror of social degradation and excommunication more dreaded by them than death itself. In 1767 the Company established a Caste Kutchery with extensive powers of interference with the social and even domestic life of the Hindus. One of the charges against Warren Hastings was that he used the caste courts to terrorise his opponents into submission. Even the highest Hindu in the land feared an adverse judgment of these tribunals, as that would practically mean his social death. In his Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Burke referring to these courts said “He has put his own menial servant, he has enthroned him, I say, on the first seat of ecclesiastical jurisdiction which has to decide on the castes of all those people Including their rank, their family, their honour, their happiness here, and in their opinion, their salvation hereafter.” To make available a code of Brahmanical laws for the guidance of the judges and lawyers, Warren Hastings had a digest made by several Brahman juris-consults from the old Sanskrit law books, and this was translated into English.
The Indian Census Report of 1911 contains some quotations from a book written in 1817 regarding the dreadful consequences of expulsion from caste which was one of the punishments inflicted by the Caste tribunals. “Expulsion from the caste which is the penalty inflicted on those who are guilty of infringing the accustomed rules or of any other offence which would bring disgrace on the tribe, if it remained unavenged, is in truth an un-supportable punishment. It is a kind of civil excommunication which debars the unhappy object of it from all intercourse whatever with his fellow creatures. He is a man, as it were, dead to the world. He is no longer in the society of men. By losing his caste, the Hindu is bereft of friends and relations, and often of his wife and children who will rather forsake him than share in his miserable lot. No one dares to eat with him or even to pour him out a drop of water. If he has marriageable daughters, they are shunned. No other girl can be approached by his sons. Wherever he appears, he is scorned and pointed out as an outcaste. If he sinks under the grievous curse, his body is suffered to rot on the place where he dies.”
Sir William Jones was appointed judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in 1784. He became one of the foremost Orientalists and the founder of the Asiatic Society. It is said of him that every day he used to talk with Sanskrit Pandits to study and, discuss with them the contents of old Sanskrit manuscripts. The learned judge felt so much enthusiasm for the Brahmanical laws that he himself translated the Mann Shastra into English. In their laudable desire to do justice to the people of India, eminent men like Sir William Jones brought out from their oblivion spurious and unjust Shastras and gave them the status of authoritative works on Hindu law, and they looked to the Brahman priests as their final interpreters. The early English administrators and judges must have looked to the eyes of the champions of Brahmanism like a new race of Kshatriyas sent by God to restore the declining authority of the Shastras; so complete was their triumph.
Another vital measure which irretrievably betrayed the Hindu community into the hands of the priests was the relinquishment by the Government of the control and management of temples which, as a result, virtually passed into the hands of the Brahmans. So long as the Government was in management, there was at least the gratification that the right of all Hindus to worship as of old was not interfered with. When Europeans could freely enter the temples and supervise everything that was going on there, no Hindu could reasonably be prevented from having free access to them. But when the control was transferred to local trustees, Brahman priests began to have everything their own way, and in a few years numerous previously unknown restrictions came to be imposed upon the worshippers, a large section of whom were deprived of their immemorial right to enter the temple on the ground of being low castes. Until 1863 the Revenue Boards continued to be in charge of the temples in their respective jurisdictions, and it was by Act XX of 1863 that the Government transferred their control into the bands of trustees. “When the Act XX of 1863 enabled the Government to divest itself-of the management of religious endowments, it so happened that the Hindu society, then as now, was so constituted, that it enabled the Brahman, directly or indirectly, to take upon himself the management of these Hindu religious endowments.”
The ancient Shastras never contemplated to lay down law for all the hundreds of tribes and castes of India, with customs, beliefs and characteristics as wide apart as the poles. They attempted primarily
- Page Si, Right of Temple Entry.
