Part 14 (1/2)
Nor can we omit to record the opinion of Carey's chief pundit, with whom he spent hours every day as a fellow-worker. The whole body of law-pundits wrote of Sati as only ”permitted.” Mritunjaya, described as the head jurist of the College of Fort William and the Supreme Court, decided that, according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is the law for a widow. At best burning is only an alternative for mortification, and no alternative can have the force of direct law.
But in former ages nothing was ever heard of the practice, it being peculiar to a later and more corrupt era. ”A woman's burning herself from the desire of connubial bliss ought to be rejected with abhorrence,” wrote this colossus of pundits. Yet before he was believed, or the higher law was enforced, as it has ever since been even in our tributary States, mothers had burned with sons, and forty wives, many of them sisters, at a time, with polygamous husbands.
Lepers and the widows of the devotee cla.s.s had been legally buried alive. Magistrates, who were men like Metcalfe, never ceased to prevent widow-murder on any pretext, wherever they might be placed, in defiance of their own misguided Government.
Though from 4th December 1829--memorable date, to be cla.s.sed with that on which soon after 800,000 slaves were set free--”the Ganges flowed unblooded to the sea” for the first time, the fight lasted a little longer. The Calcutta ”orthodox” formed a society to restore their right of murdering their widows, and found English lawyers ready to help them in an appeal to the Privy Council under an Act of Parliament of 1797. The Darpan weekly did good service in keeping the ma.s.s of the educated natives right on the subject. The Privy Council, at which Lord Wellesley and Charles Grant, venerable in years and character, were present, heard the case for two days, and on 24th June 1832 dismissed the pet.i.tion!
Though the greatest, this was only one of the crimes against humanity and morality which Carey opposed all his life with a practical reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had done so much to create triumph. He knew the people of India, their religious, social, and economic condition, as no Englishman before him had done. He stood between them and their foreign Government at the beginning of our intimate contact with all cla.s.ses as detailed administrators and rulers. The outcome of his peculiar experience is to be found not only in the writings published under his own name but in the great book of his colleague William Ward, every page of which pa.s.sed under his careful correction as well as under the more general revision of Henry Martyn. Except for the philosophy of Hindooism, the second edition of A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Princ.i.p.al Works, published in 1818 in two quarto volumes, stands unrivalled as the best authority on the character and daily life and beliefs of the 200,000,000 to whom Great Britain had been made a terrestrial providence, till Christianity teaches them to govern themselves and to become to the rest of Asia missionaries of n.o.bler truth than that wherewith their Buddhist fathers covered China and the farther East.
All the crimes against humanity with which the history of India teems, down to the Mutiny and the records of our courts and tributary states at this hour, are directly traceable to lawless supernaturalism like that of the civilised world before the triumph of Christianity. In nothing does England's administration of India resemble Rome's government of its provinces in the seven centuries from the reduction of Sicily, 240 B.C., to the fall of the Western Empire, 476 A.D., so much as in the relation of nascent Christianity to the pagan cults which had made society what it was. Carey and the brotherhood stood alone in facing, in fighting with divine weapons, in winning the first victories over the secular as well as spiritual lawlessness which fell before Paul and his successors down to Augustine and his City of G.o.d.
The gentle and reasonable but none the less divinely indignant father of modern missions brings against Hindoo and Mohammedan society accusations no more railing than those in the opening pa.s.sage of the Epistle to the Romans, and he brings these only that, following Paul, he may declare the more excellent way.
As Serampore, or its suburbs, is the most popular centre of Jaganath wors.h.i.+p next to Pooree in Orissa, the cruelty and oppression which marked the annual festival were ever before the missionaries' eyes. In 1813 we find Dr. Claudius Buchanan establis.h.i.+ng his veracity as an eye-witness of the immolation of drugged or voluntary victims under the idol car, by this quotation from Dr. Carey, whom he had to describe at that time to his English readers, as a man of unquestionable integrity, long held in estimation by the most respectable characters in Bengal, and possessing very superior opportunities of knowing what is pa.s.sing in India generally: ”Idolatry destroys more than the sword, yet in a way which is scarcely perceived. The numbers who die in their long pilgrimages, either through want or fatigue, or from dysenteries and fevers caught by lying out, and want of accommodation, is incredible.
I only mention one idol, the famous Juggernaut in Orissa, to which twelve or thirteen pilgrimages are made every year. It is calculated that the number who go thither is, on some occasions, 600,000 persons, and scarcely ever less than 100,000. I suppose, at the lowest calculation, that in the year 1,200,000 persons attend. Now, if only one in ten died, the mortality caused by this one idol would be 120,000 in a year; but some are of opinion that not many more than one in ten survive and return home again. Besides these, I calculate that 10,000 women annually burn with the bodies of their deceased husbands, and the mult.i.tudes destroyed in other methods would swell the catalogue to an extent almost exceeding credibility.”
After we had taken Orissa from the Marathas the priests of Jaganath declared that the night before the conquest the G.o.d had made known its desire to be under British protection. This was joyfully reported to Lord Wellesley's Government by the first British commissioner. At once a regulation was drafted vesting the shrine and the increased pilgrim-tax in the Christian officials. This Lord Wellesley indignantly refused to sanction, and it was pa.s.sed by Sir George Barlow in spite of the protests of Carey's friend, Udny. In Conjeeveram a Brahmanised civilian named Place had so early as 1796 induced Government to undertake the payment of the priests and prost.i.tutes of the temples, under the phraseology of ”churchwardens” and ”the management of the church funds.” Even before the Madras iniquity, the pilgrims to Gaya from 1790, if not before, paid for authority to offer funeral cakes to the manes of their ancestors and to wors.h.i.+p Vishnoo under the official seal and signature of the English Collector.
Although Charles Grant's son, Lord Glenelg, when President of the Board of Control in 1833, ordered, as Theodosius had done on the fall of pagan idolatry in A.D. 390, that ”in all matters relating to their temples, their wors.h.i.+p, their festivals, their religious practices, their ceremonial observances, our native subjects be left entirely to themselves,” the identification of Government with Hindooism was not completely severed till a recent period.
The Charak, or swinging festival, has been frequently witnessed by the present writer in Calcutta itself. The orgie has been suppressed by the police in great cities, although it has not ceased in the rural districts. In 1814 the brotherhood thus wrote home:--
”This abominable festival was held, according to the annual custom, on the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days after the first swinging, certain natives revived the ceremonies. As Mr. Ward was pa.s.sing through Calcutta he saw several Hindoos hanging by the heels over a slow fire, as an act of devotion. Several Hindoos employed in the printing-office applied this year to Mr. Ward for protection, to escape being dragged into these pretendedly voluntary practices. This brought before us facts which we were not aware of.
It seems that the landlords of the poor and other men of property insist upon certain of their tenants and dependants engaging in these practices, and that they expect and compel by actual force mult.i.tudes every year to join the companies of sunya.s.sees in parading the streets, piercing their sides, tongues, etc. To avoid this compulsion, many poor young men leave their houses and hide themselves; but they are sure of being beaten if caught, or of having their huts pulled down.
The influence and power of the rich have a great effect on the mult.i.tude in most of the idolatrous festivals. When the lands and riches of the country were in few hands, this influence carried all before it. It is still very widely felt, in compelling dependants to a.s.sist at public shows, and to contribute towards the expense of splendid ceremonies.”
The Ghat murders, caused by the carrying of the dying to the Ganges or a sacred river, and their treatment there, continue to this day, although Lord Lawrence attempted to interfere. Ward estimated the number of sick whose death is hastened on the banks of the Ganges alone at five hundred a year, in his anxiety to ”use no unfair means of rendering even idolatry detestable,” but he admits that, in the opinion of others, this estimate is far below the truth. We believe, from our own recent experience, that still it fails to give any just idea of the destruction of parents by children in the name of religion.
One cla.s.s who had been the special objects of Christ's healing power and divine sympathy was specially interesting to Carey in proportion to their misery and abandonment by their own people--lepers. When at Cutwa in 1812, where his son was stationed as missionary, he saw the burning of a leper, which he thus described:--”A pit about ten cubits in depth was dug and a fire placed at the bottom of it. The poor man rolled himself into it; but instantly, on feeling the fire, begged to be taken out, and struggled hard for that purpose. His mother and sister, however, thrust him in again; and thus a man, who to all appearance might have survived several years, was cruelly burned to death. I find that the practice is not uncommon in these parts.
Taught that a violent end purifies the body and ensures transmigration into a healthy new existence, while natural death by disease results in four successive births, and a fifth as a leper again, the leper, like the even more wretched widow, has always courted suicide.” Carey did not rest until he had brought about the establishment of a leper hospital in Calcutta, near what became the centre of the Church Missionary Society's work, and there benevolent physicians, like the late Dr. Kenneth Stuart, and Christian people, have made it possible to record, as in Christ's days, that the leper is cleansed and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.
By none of the many young civilians whom he trained, or, in the later years of his life, examined, was Carey's humane work on all its sides more persistently carried out than by John Lawrence in the Punjab.
When their new ruler first visited their district, the Bedi clan amazed him by pet.i.tioning for leave to destroy their infant daughters. In wrath he briefly told them he would hang every man found guilty of such murder. When settling the land revenue of the Cis-Sutlej districts he caused each farmer, as he touched the pen in acceptance of the a.s.sessment, to recite this formula--
”Bewa mat jalao, Beti mat maro, Korhi mat dabao”
(”Thou shalt not burn thy widow, thou shalt not kill thy daughters, thou shalt not bury thy lepers.”)
From the hour of Carey's conversion he never omitted to remember in prayer the slave as well as the heathen. The same period which saw his foundation of modern missions witnessed the earliest efforts of his contemporary, Thomas Clarkson of Wisbeach, in the neighbouring county of Cambridge, to free the slave. But Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and their a.s.sociates were so occupied with Africa that they knew not that Great Britain was responsible for the existence of at least nine millions of slaves in India, many of them brought by Hindoo merchants as well as Arabs from Eastern Africa to fill the hareems of Mohammedans, and do domestic service in the zananas of Hindoos. The startling fact came to be known only slowly towards the end of Carey's career, when his prayers, continued daily from 1779, were answered in the freedom of all our West India slaves. The East India answer came after he had pa.s.sed away, in Act V. of 1843, which for ever abolished the legal status of slavery in India. The Penal Code has since placed the praedial slave in such a position that if he is not free it is his own fault. It is penal in India to hold a slave ”against his will,”
and we trust the time is not far distant when the last three words may be struck out.
With true instinct Christopher Anderson, in his Annals of the English Bible, a.s.sociates Carey, Clarkson, and Cowper, as the triumvirate who, unknown to each other, began the great moral changes, in the Church, in society, and in literature, which mark the difference between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Little did Carey think, as he studied under Sutcliff within sight of the poet's house, that Cowper was writing at that very time these lines in The Task while he himself was praying for the highest of all kinds of liberty to be given to the heathen and the slaves, Christ's freedom which had up till then remained
”...unsung By poets, and by senators unpraised, Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers Of earth and h.e.l.l confederate take away; A liberty which persecution, fraud, Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind: Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more.”
CHAPTER XII
WHAT CAREY DID FOR SCIENCE--FOUNDER OF THE AGRICULTURAL AND HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF INDIA
Carey's relation to science and economics--State of the peasantry--Carey a careful scientific observer--Specially a botanist--Becomes the friend of Dr. Roxburgh of the Company's Botanic Garden--Orders seeds and instruments of husbandry--All his researches subordinate to his spiritual mission--His eminence as a botanist acknowledged in the history of the science--His own botanic garden and park at Serampore--The poet Montgomery on the daisies there--Borneo--Carey's paper in the Asiatic Researches on the state of agriculture in Bengal--The first to advocate Forestry in India--Founds the Agri-Horticultural Society of India--Issues queries on agriculture and horticulture--Remarkable results of his action--On the manufacture of paper--His expanded address on agricultural reform--His political foresight on the importance of European capital and the future of India--An official estimate of the results in the present day--On the usury of the natives and savings banks--His academic and scientific honours--Destruction of his house and garden by the Damoodar flood of 1823--Report on the Horticultural Society's garden--The Society honours its founder.
Not only was the first Englishman, who in modern times became a missionary, sent to India when he desired to go to Tahiti or West Africa; and sent to Bengal from which all Northern India was to be brought under British rule; and to Calcutta--with a safe asylum at Danish Serampore--then the metropolis and centre of all Southern Asia; but he was sent at the very time when the life of the people could best be purified and elevated on its many sides, and he was specially fitted to influence each of these sides save one. An amba.s.sador for Christ above all things like Paul, but, also like him, becoming all things to all men that he might win some to the higher life, Carey was successively, and often at the same time, a captain of labour, a schoolmaster, a printer, the developer of the vernacular speech, the expounder of the cla.s.sical language, the translator of both into English and of the English Bible into both, the founder of a pure literature, the purifier of society, the watchful philanthropist, the saviour of the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing and the would-be suicide, of the downtrodden and oppressed. We have now to see him on the scientific or the physical and economic side, while he still jealously keeps his strength for the one motive power of all, the spiritual, and with almost equal care avoids the political or administrative as his Master did. But even then it was his aim to proclaim the divine principles which would use science and politics alike to bring nations to the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the application of these principles to the course of G.o.d's providence and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in the practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an example to all of every race who have followed him in the past century.