Having already traced the historical sequence of the prominent steps which, one by one, led to the loss of Hindu ascendancy in India, there is little necessity to seek for the cause of Hindu downfall apart from those facts of history. It is true that we should not judge the ancient Hindu State by the standards of modern civilisation; but at the same time we cannot forget the fact that the Hindus, of whom we know anything, were not an uncivilised people slowly growing out of barbarism and entitled to be judged leniently like the modern peoples of the West, who emerged into civilised existence only in recent centuries after long years of terrible struggle, suffering and self-sacrifice in establishing freedom of thought and action. The Hindus had evolved high ideals of religion, social relations and national life many centuries before Christ, and at no time in their history was there a lack of teachers to remind them of their duties to God and man. At every crisis in their progress, leaders of undisputed moral and intellectual eminence have appeared and roused the conscience of the rulers and the ruled to the evils which were undermining the stability of the nation. No people had more warnings of their inevitable doom and more extended opportunities of retrieving the disaster than the Hindus, but warnings produced no effect and opportunities were callously disregarded. The failures and punishments which attended their career of unrighteousness did not make them turn hack from the fatal pursuit of power and pleasure at the cost of the country’s peace and freedom. That the present tendencies of the Hindus’ do not show any great improvement on the intrinsically false and perilous policy of their ancestors, and that what little there is has been practically forced upon them by foreign influences, makes their past offences almost un-pardonable.
The ancient leaders of Hindu society started with the glorious traditions of a culture of high thinking and simple living-, of the sanctity of human life and the unity of mankind. They were not ignorant of the natural and ethical laws of human progress and decline which other peoples discovered in much later centuries. They were not without definite guidance for realising their social ideals in the organisation of the State and religion. All the circumstances seemed to be in their favour. They could have developed into a great people, and instead of sitting at the feet of other nations as they do now, they could have become the temporal as well as spiritual leaders of mankind. But they deliberately ‘chose the wrong path; they defied the teachings of their prophets and seers; they refused to recognise that the misfortunes which overtook them were just punishments for their wickedness and folly; they persisted in their traditional iniquities; they lost their freedom and were trampled underfoot by invader after invader; they saw their country pass Into the hands of their victorious enemies; they knew that the Hindu nation was being hewn away limb by limb by the Muhammadans and the Christians who not infrequently came as saviours of the oppressed, avengers of wrong, and liberators of those in serfdom; they looked on calmly when the whole structure of Hindu civilization was rotting inside owing to the ravages of time, the decay of life and truth and the poison of corruption and vice.
The British rule gave them another opportunity to make amends for their past sins. But as the
“Amrita Bazar Patrika” wrote in 1879: “What can the doctor do when the patient is already stiff and cold? India is dead to all sense of honour and glory. India is an inert mass which no power of late has been able to move. India has no heart and those of her children who have yet any portion of it left, have been deadened by blank despair. Talk of re-generating India to the Indians! You might as well talk to the sands of the sea.”* Sixty years have passed since the above was written and we hug the fond belief that things have changed and we have awakened to a sense of duty and recovered our sense of honour and truth. We proclaim we have risen from the grave. But have we? Have we converted our-selves to a better faith than that of the past? Mahatma Gandhi may make the nation look great by his own greatness; other leaders like him have done so many times before. But as they have disappeared, Mahatmaji also will disappear, leaving the Hindus as obstinate in their follies as ever. What has the Hindu nation learned after all the years of schooling under foreign masters? Has it definitely given up the ancient evils, at least the worst of them? Has it announced a new life and a new hope for the future at least? Has it decidedly allied itself with the forces of freedom and brotherhood and abandoned its hereditary alliance with the dark powers of domination and exploitation? To answer these questions, it is necessary to enumerate some of the characteristics of Hindu supremacy in the past and compare them with the present tendencies.
(I) The seed of Hindu decay was sown four or five thousand years ago when the ancient priests, the leaders and aristocrats of society, separated themselves from the homogeneous body of the
*page 79, India–A Nation .
people as a distinct nation of Brahmans and established a monopoly of learning, political power and religious authority, with pretensions to superior birth, and claimed a hereditary right to reverence and submission from all the rest of their countrymen. Has this changed? Are not the Brahmans even now an exclusive nation by themselves, with interests which are antagonistic to the freedom and progress of the other Hindus and with pretensions to the hereditary superiority which their ancestors of yore claimed?
(2) The ancient priests claimed an exclusive right to decide social and religious matters and rigorously restricted the power of the Kshatriya State so that the latter could never effectively do anything for the raising of the Hindu masses. Do we not even now passionately cling to that fatal theory of the freedom of so-called religion and society from state interference, and consider it a privilege to defy the right of the Government or the Indian National Congress to alter the traditional arrangement of Hindu life however ruinous it may be? Just as the ancient Hindu State was used to suppress the natural aspirations of the Hindu masses to acquire the learning, refinement and freedom, which the superior castes enjoyed, are we not using the modern state to preserve our hereditary advantages, and perpetuate the disabilities of our Hindu brethern in the name of ancient law and custom ? I There is such little hope of improvement in some of the Hindu states ruled by Hindu Rajas that the people would gladly see their country annexed to British India.
(3) In those ancient days, by craft and cunning and force, they inflicted on society a social system which while it preserved the tyrannical supremacy of the few, divided’ the people into thousands of petty castes beyond the possibility of reunion by any but the most revolutionary means, and kept them disunited so that the privileged classes might build their arrogant over lordship over a distracted populace. Other civilised peoples based their claims to greatness on the gospel that all men are born free, equal and independent; but the Hindu social order was a negation of this truth, and stood on the rule that every man, except of the highest caste, was born a serf, low and dependent. Hindu mentality remains the same. For the mere pleasure of caste prestige and the petty profits the system yields to a they are prepared to sacrifice all noble sentiments and enforce their birthright to keep their house divided against itself. As a nation the present generation is even worse than their forefathers. The number of castes is increasing; their mutual rivalries are deepening.
(4)- The ancient priests mutilated, interpolated and destroyed the sacred books and their teachings and fabricated spurious Shastras to deceive the people, cover up their own wickedness, strengthen the bonds of superstition and servility on the znasses, and enhance their own surreptitious hold on them in order to gain their selfish ends. That process has not stopped yet. Histories are being writ-ten to whitewash and even glorify our past follies; new theories of philosophy and science and culture are being adumbrated to justify the injustices we inflict on our brethren; all the advantages we have ‘derived from the inspiration of Western progress and ideals are being used, not to end the old wrongs but to explain and support them. Are we not working more for a revival than for a reform or regeneration
?
‘(5) Our ancestors inflicted untold insult and cruelty on the women of India in the name of God and religion, Their lot is still bad enough. They are not yet outside the danger zone.
(6) Our forefathers prostituted the temples, the monasteries and other religious institutions for purposes of self-aggrandizement, spoliation of their co-religionists and destruction of the growing sense of human brotherhood, and reduced religion and spirituality to false metaphysics, cunning ritualism and hypocritical observances in the pursuit of their insatiable appetite for self-glorification and material profit and to keep the credulous Hindu peoples tied to their heels. Do our present-day Hindu temples and Mutts serve any better purpose? Is not the organised religion of these nation-wide institutions a system of unmitigated superstition and deception for extorting money from their devotees? Do any of them help the individual or the nation to rise above their present degradations?
(7) Hindu leaders of the 19th century used the British Government, its judicial, legislative and executive machinery to increase and strengthen the chains of inferiority with which their Hindu brethren were bound and re-establish on a more stable foundation of law and constitution their own inalienable superiority. Are not the vast majority of the orthodox Hindus doing the same thing to-day? Do they not appeal to all principles which the British Government holds sacred, in order to perpetuate the differences, the oppressions, the rivalries, the insults and degradations to which many millions of Hindus are abject victims? Under the protecting wing of the British power and in the name of the much abused doctrine of non-interference, the Hindu Rajas and the high caste Hindus throughout India are doing their utmost to safeguard the dignities and privileges of caste on the one side and enforce its indignities and restrictions on the other. Is it yet time to say there has been a change of heart?
(8) The intellectual leaders of Hindu society successfully opposed and mostly frustrated all the successive efforts made by eminent teachers, saints and influential institutions to awaken the Hindus to a sense of their own degradation and organise them for the life of a free and self-respecting community., They are doing the same thing now also. Raja Rammohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati and Swami :Vivekananda have thundered forth their messages-and thrilled the people with a new spirit. But they are gone; Hindu life has all its old crookedness.. Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest among such, is revered because he alone can lead. us in the fight for Swaraj. The Hindus are not prepared to carry out even the most elementary of his teachings. The temple-entry movement is an instance. In fact, no Hindu has any right to prevent another Hindu from entering a Hindu temple for worship. The present. practice of excluding many millions ‘of Hindus from the ordinary temples has nothing to justify it. It does no good to anybody. The opening of the temples to all does not injure anybody. And yet the Hindu would rather sacrifice their national freedom and insult their great leader and saint than abandon their demoniac obstinacy. Hundreds of teachers have preached and warned them. Many-new sects and schools of faith have come into existence in protest. The orthodox Hindu classes and masses are as adamantine in their superstitious selfishness as their ancient progenitors. They will obey the policeman more willingly than Mahatma Gandhi as has been evidenced by the peaceful opening of some temples with police help.
(9) Our predecessors denied the solace and benefits of education, sanitation, good water and air, use of tanks, wells and roads to many millions of their Hindu brethren, killed their self-respect by forcing them to wear most infamous badges of inferiority, stunted their growth, suppressed their -manhood, and violated all human feelings by forcibly imposing upon fifty millions of innocent Hindu men, women and children that most satanic of all injustices, hereditary untouchability. Every one of these crimes is being perpetrated throughout, the length and breadth of Hindu India after two centuries of British rule. Do we now want complete independence to butcher our sheep or sell them to the Christians and the Muharnmadans? One hundred million Hindu hands are raised to heaven in n-lute prayer that Hindu Raj may never return!
(10) In bygone days, the .Hindu aristocrats degraded themselves by forcing degradation on their brethren, destroyed their own power by denying, liberty to the bulk of their countrymen, lost their freedom by suppressing the freedom of others, lost their sense of honour, patriotism, good and evil by prohibiting these sentiments in their co-religionists. Who can say that our attitude is quite different from theirs? The civilised states of the earth are aiming at achieving the greatest good of the greatest number but the Hindu rule is the greatest good of the smallest number, with as a corollary, the least good of the largest number. Just a handful of Hindus occupying the highest castes can feel proud of being Hindus. They obtain all the honour and all the benefits. To the vast majority of the Hindus even now, it is a disgrace to be a Hindu ; it is a daily insult, a perpetual degradation, an unalterable inferiority.
We, the high caste Hindus, have trampled underfoot the head that bowed to us in reverence, cursed in our hearts the simple, trustful folks who craved our blessings, brought ignorance and sin to the homes which welcomed us as angels. Instead of blessing we have cursed; instead of helping we have oppressed; instead of educating we have destroyed the capacity to learn; instead of giving we have extorted; instead of raising we have suppressed all attempts to rise; instead of uniting we have divided ; instead of embracing our brethren we have kicked them ; instead of delivering we have betrayed ; instead of working for freedom we have forged fetters of slavery ; and what is more, knowing all these things, witnessing around us the wreckage of our own crime and folly, realizing that India, the Hindus and Hinduism are sinking deeper and deeper into helplessness, we are entrenching ourselves in a mad fury behind those ancient sins which have be-smeared our past with failure and shame.
The Hindus fell because they deserved to fall ; India had to be saved from the deadening grip of priestly imperialism. The Hindu masses had to be emancipated from their hereditary thraldom., The cause of true religion and democracy had to be yindicated. The path had to be cleared for a greater national life and international co-operation.
