The injunctions of the Brahmanical Shastras are all without exception openly violated in these days, so much so, that the most scrupulous Sankarcaryas of the present day would have to be excommunicated and driven out of the Mutts if those rules were to be strictly enforced. The Shastras have long ago ceased to be an authority for the customs now prevailing among the Hindus. The Brahmans and the other higher castes are doing acts every day which should be sufficient to justify their expulsion from caste if the Shastras were strictly applied. But no one thinks of these daily violations. If it is proposed to admit the Harijan into the temple or to celebrate a widow-marriage or prevent a child- marriage, then the old books are ransacked and authorities quoted against the innovations. Manu (IU, 151-166) condemns as unfit for Brahmans, professions such as those of teachers for money, sellers of oils, physicians, temple-priests, shopkeepers, messengers, architects, planters of trees, usurers, cattlemen, actors, singers, astrologers, farmers and many others. He absolutely forbids a Brahman to trade in the following articles (Manu X, 86-94): Condiments, cooked food, stones, cattle, dyed cloth, cloth of hemp, flax or wool, meat, poison, milk, ghee, oil, perfumes, honey, indigo, lac, sugar, birds, wines, wild animals, weapons, water, etc.; all of these professions and trades are now followed by Brahmans, – and some of them they even monopolise such as that of the temple-priest. We cannot say that at any time in history these prohibitions were observed by the Brahmans as a community. They have never troubled themselves about the Shastras when their Violation was to their advantage or convenience.
Speaking about the Brahmans of Maharashtra Mr. Kelkar says: “Thus a man who belongs to the | caste which represents priesthood may commit any infraction of the rules of convention or of scripture, or may do actions which even many non-priestly castes prohibit. He may engage in any trade he pleases; he may go and eat where he wants, drink anything he desires, may go to a foreign country and act according to the manners of the foreign country, may refuse to make atonement for what a traditionalist Hindu: regards as sin, and may still retain his position in the community, that is, may claim the membership of the: sacred priestly caste, and his claims would go unchallenged. Even after doing all this, if he cares to take up the occupation of a priest nobody will be able to prevent him from ‘ doing so.”* Other castes are doing the same thing more or less in all towns, though not so freely in the villages. The ancient authorities are now used mainly to prevent the lower castes from rising, to justify the monopolies and vested interests of the higher castes, and to thwart all attempts to consolidate or reform Hindu society.
The cruel oppressiveness of caste can be realized only by those whose hearts have not been paralyzed by long submission to the daily injustices and insults which it imposes on every one but the Brahman. All the evil effects of British imperialism, of which nationalists are never tired of speaking, such as. “inferiority complex,” “stunting of the race,” ‘“destruction of manhood,” “slave mentality,” and others, have been produced, and are being produced with tenfold callousness under caste rule, “The present situation is steadily destroying our capacity for initiative and dwarfing us as men of action.” “Every- where the stamp of inferiority was branded on them, ‘in their education, in the legal, medical and educational professions, in their employments, in their social relations, in their manufacturing and mercantile associations.” “All initiative, all originality have been rigorously suppressed, while manly.
*Page 87, Essay on Hinduism, by Kelkar.
independence has been resented and even punished.” “It has emasculated the nation. Indians hesitate where they should act; they ask where they should take; they submit where they should resist; they lack self-confidence and the audacity that commands success. They lack fire and decision.” “The tallest among us must bend.” All these and similar allegations against British imperialism are certainly more true of the caste regime. If any government in the world deserves to be called “Satanic,” it is undoubtedly the caste-rule of the Hindus.
In a Hindu state ruled by a Hindu Maharaja the conditions are much worse than in British India. The Maharaja will generally be more accessible to a Brahman clerk or a Brahman peon than to a non- Brahman minister. The Brahman priest will often wield greater influence than the Dewan. A Brahman mendicant may be allowed to dine with the Maharaja, but never his own consort who is a non- Kshatriya lady. There are Maharajas to whom the touch of their wives and children, is pollution and who will not take food in their company. A non- Brahman can never feel honestly that equality with fellow citizens which he ‘enjoys under a foreign ruler. Before an English governor or viceroy, the Brahman minister and the Pariah secretary feel a freedom and equality which is unknown in Hindu society. . With education and money all can rise to .the highest places without enduring the insulting distinctions which are the cursed lot of the Hindus under Hindu rule.
The treatment accorded to the Harijan classes is simply inhuman. “You may breed cows and dogs in your house,” wrote Mr. M. C. Raja. “You may drink the urine expiate your sins, but stigmatised as unclean. They are still kept out of schools and colleges maintained by public funds and at the same time despised as ignorant and illiterate. They are still shut out from temples, and yet branded as ungodly and unfit to associate with. For access to public roads and even for spaces to bury the dead they have to depend much on the capricious benevolence of their caste-Hindu neighbours,’’*
“No greater wrong can be done to a community ‘endowed with human feelings and human capacities,” cries out Mr. M. C. Raja, “than to place it in such circumstances as to force it or lead it to believe that its members are externally and for all time to come doomed to a life of ignorance, servitude and ‘misery, and that any sort of ambition in them for betterment or improvement is sin. These voiceless millions are ground every day into the dust and are treated with contempt, a barbarity that is not accorded even to the vilest of animals. Hungry, naked, dispirited, living in wretched hovels, cringing in their attitude through long oppression; driven often by hunger to eat anything they get, abandoned religiously, morally, mentally and physically, they remain utterly miserable and helpless.” And after all their great sin is that they are Hindus, not of their own accord, but because others have treated them so. But for the Christian missionaries, these rejected ones of Hindu society would have been for ever condemned to the life of \wretchedness and slavery which are their assigned lot according to the Shastras. Hindu charity has always been for the highest; it does not stoop to help the children of misery. Hindu law knows only how to suppress the weak; it has no provision for raising the low. – It is ever intent on dividing and splitting up; it has no philosophy for uniting, From. the untouchable
*Page 150, Right of Temple Entry. +Page 153, Right of Temple Entry
class right up to the Kshatriya Raja, the castes re- present but varying degrees of serfdom to Brahmanism to which Hindu kings, merchant princes and the commoner, no less than the Harijan must bend their necks. The entire-arrangement is antagonistic to all sense of justice, self-respect and humanity.
The castes serve no useful purpose in modern society. They help only to perpetuate the grip of the Brahman priest and: preserve his monopolies, Social and religious institutions profit him only jin this world, and all others must wait for their reward in the next. The many thousands of temples, large and small scattered throughout the country exist, in practice, for the gain of the priests. The charitable feeding houses endowed chiefly by non-Brahmans and meant for poor pilgrims and travellers benefit the well-to-do Brahmans more than the weary traveller who must wait for the crumbs and leavings after the Brahmans have enjoyed the good things within closed doors. The domestic: priests ply their trade in one form or other all over the country among all classes of Hindus and. divert a good portion of the earnings of the poor to their pockets. No one else gains anything by virtue of mere caste.
The baneful influence of the system pervades the whole of society, has sunk deep into all layers of the community and become a part of the mental constitution of the Hindu. Even in the remote village, far from railway stations and post offices, there will be a small temple with a Brahman priest and a poor – school with a Brahman teacher; and the life of the village community is moulded, cabined and confined in a hundred different ways by a handful of these men. The innocent boys and girls who are sent to the school are injected with the venom of caste feelings in their tender years. In the classroom they are seated according to their castes; they are taught to respect the differences as their first duty in life. The low caste pupils are. treated with contempt and. cruelty and are made to do all the menial work for the teacher and the school. The high caste pupil is given authority over his classmates and trained to manage them with a sense of haughty superiority, and with power to abuse and punish them in the absence of the teacher. The feeling of caste conceit on one side, and of degradation on the other, enters into the flesh and blood of the young ones and they never recovered from it in after life. The houses are grouped on a caste basis, each caste occupying a definite portion of the village. The uneducated and rude temple priest poses as the highest authority on social law and religious practices. If anyone shows signs of insubordination, he is able to set the village in a commotion and crush the spirit of reform and freedom. The humble Harijans without whose un- grudging service the villagers are not able to cultivate their lands, tend their cattle, build their houses or dig their tanks and wells, must not live within ‘the village proper.. They are assigned a dirty corner outside. The tanks and wells they helped to dig are forbidden to them; they cannot take water from them even for drinking purposes. The – temple festivals, marriages, and similar functions, public and private afford the priest abundant opportunities to lord over the congregation with an iron hand, exacting servile obeisance besides money and other useful things. .They are made to humble themselves to dust, to was hi the feet of the priest, and with water so used to anoint their own heads. Some of these degrading formalities may not be observed in the towns. Otherwise the influence of the priest is -as strong and as debasing there as in the villages.
The modern Hindu may be a philosopher, a judge of the high court, a minister of the government, an ardent nationalist, but he is first a man of his caste, a Brahman or a Sudra or some other caste, and then only, subject to his caste obligations The can be all the rest. He cannot feel as a Hindu or as an Indian without first being a caste-man. He may denounce these superstitions and live in a foreign country where they are S unknown, and imbibe the spirit of freedom and democracy, but when he returns home he sinks to the level which he occupied before he left it, if not immediately, after a few years of vain defiance. The headstrong reformer and the bold Sannyasin may set at naught the restrictions of caste, abandon his attachment to all orthodox things, and yet after a few years of desperate struggle he will seek rest in quiet submission to the inevitable vices of society. The village Panchayat or Co-operative Society sponsored by the Government for the good of the whole village, soon becomes a centre for caste feuds, and degenerates into a sham, or else it must strictly preserve the injustices and indignities of caste, even the tallest bending to them with devotion. Large business concerns started by the educated and wealthy men of the towns, mills and factories, banks and presses, as well as schools and libraries inaugurated with enthusiasm and built up with the funds contributed by all classes, fall before the silent disruptive forces of caste, and wherever one goes, one can see monuments of the ravages wrought by dis-union and distrust. It may be a local political association, or a Committee of the National Congress, its ‘days of united activity close before anything substantial is achieved, leaving behind only sad traces of caste prejudice and ill-will among those who once worked shoulder to shoulder. Even the First House of Parliament is not free from this universal sore. There is no aspect of the nation’s life which has not been vitiated, no institution which has not been itarbished, no, saint or martyr who has not been victimized by caste. And yet the Hindus cling to it with demoniac tenacity. It will be a profitless delusion to hope that they will be able to think long in terms of the nation or human freedom, so long as they are bred and brought up in the atmosphere of caste. Caste is essentially anti-national. and un- democratic. «Democracy and caste cannot co-exist. Though new ideas have been assimilated and new aspirations evoked by the contact with Western civilization, they remain but on the surface. The “stream of Hindu life flows remorselessly along its ancient course, mixed with the dirt and rubbish of ages, carrying on its foamy breast the new decoration of freedom, equality and nationality. You may offer a thousand flowers of sacrifice and. devotion to mother Ganges, she will carry them all mercilessly to their doom in the vast ocean. Like those flowers are our patriotic deeds for the freedom of India, wasted and destroyed when thrown on the surface of the ancient stream in blind veneration for the past. We have to learn to build our national edifice on firmer ground than that provided by the debris of caste and priestcraft. Until then Indian independence cannot be safe on the sands of disunion and chaos.
The caste culture is so repugnant to the elementary teachings of all the great-religions of the world that we cannot find fault with the Muhammadans or the Christians if they feel an instinctive revulsion towards the caste-infected Hindu. The caste divisions not only make the Hindu society a house divided against itself, but also a community which is up in arms against all other communities, and against whom all other communities are up in arms. When a man goes about among his brother-men with an air of superiority and exclusiveness, when he proudly refuses to take a cup of tea or a slice of, bread in the company of men as respectable as himself, when he parades by his name and signs his pre- tensions to a unique origin, he is virtually insulting every self-respecting man in the world. A Hindu who carries his caste with him is thus a standing insult to humanity. Similarly a nation which has willingly ‘subjected itself to so obnoxious a culture, frightful in its vicious power to contaminate all the institutions of democracy and religion, is rightly avoided by those nations who wish to preserve their freedom and self-respect. If the Hindus segregate themselves, every caste away from every other caste, and the whole of society from every other society, they cannot ‘consistently .complain if Africa or America or other democratic countries segregate the Hindus or ban them.
Who can say that the Muhammandans are wrong -~when they claim that they are a distinct nation from the Hindus? Muhammadanism stands for the highest freedom and union of its followers. Hindu- ism is contagious with the germs of serfdom and disunion. So long as the Hindus are subject to the rule of caste and most of them wear the badges and ‘names of hereditary inferiority, they cannot claim an equal place along with the free people of the world. They have contaminated the’ sacred springs of their own national life and religious aspirations, frustrated the attempts of their great teachers and saints, degraded beyond redemption many millions .of their own brother religionists with the brand of -untouchability; who can say that their association, will not degrade the Muhammadan and Christian by familiarity with caste and idolatry? A natural and ‘quite reasonable abhorrence of wicked institutions like these, and fear of their baneful influence make the Hindus a people to be avoided in the eyes of other communities, for which they cannot be justly blamed. Let it not be imagined that in these days of
