CONCLUDING REMARKS
Having presented to the reader the foregoing condensed epitomes of the great Hindu Epics, it only remains for me to offer a few brief observations upon some of the more abiding features of the national life and the religious and moral sentiments of the Hindus, as illustrated by these gigantic poems, in which we see, as in a mirror, an unconscious reflection of the ideas and tendencies, the intellectual cravings and the moral instincts, of the age to which they belong.
It may seem superfluous to remind the reader that the “Ramayana” describes the adventures of Rama, including amongst them a war which he undertook in order to avenge an insult and to recover the person of his wife, who had been carried off by an unscrupulous enemy. The campaign against Ravana had not for its object extension of territory, but the punishment of an evil-doer and the righting of a personal wrong; while the protracted struggle, which is the basis of the “Mahabharata,” is purely a contest for supremacy between kindred families, each side being backed by friends and allies from amongst their own race, as well as from amongst alien tribes (the Mlecchas). In neither poem, be it noted, does any question of patriotism arise; for the contest in which the heroes are involved are not against foreign invaders or national enemies.
The India known to the compilers of the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata,”—the extensive theatreupon which their heroes played the stirring drama of their lives—was evidently a land covered with vast tracts of dense forest, whose mysterious gloom, pervaded with the aroma of incense and burnt-offerings, has cast a vague and mighty shadow over the hearts of the Hindu bards, as surely as the breezy atmosphere and the restless waves of the Ægean have imparted a healthy buoyancy to the Homeric rhapsodists.
The dreamy solitudes in which Valmiki and Vyasa love to linger have a restfulness about them which the European, unused to Eastern lands, can hardly comprehend. They have also a mystery only to be found in primæval forests, and they possess a dark background of horror, in the roar of the ferocious tiger, the hiss of the deadly serpent, and the grip of the invisible fever-fiend, enough to awaken strange and gloomy imaginings.
The few who have lived, as I have done, through changing seasons in the dense forests of Eastern India, can hover in spirit through Valmiki and Vyasa’s woodlands of the past.
First it is summer, and the hot sunbeams come filtering through the leafy covering, under the shadow of which man and beast listlessly repose through uneventful hours, while the shrill cricket chirps its monotonous song and thecokil’ssweet note fills the hot and trembling air. Then the black clouds gather overhead. God Indra parts them with his flashing bolts. Loud thunder peals in the sky, the roaring hurricane enters into fearful conflict with the warring trees, and the rain descends, not in tiny drizzles, but in torrents; and its voice, as it buries itself in square miles of standing forest, is like the roar of many waters. Cascades, starting into life, leap gladly from the hill-side. The swollen streams, muddy and impassable, swirl and rush along, carrying with them aburden of forest trees. A mantle of vivid green covers, as if by magic, the whole earth, and climbs up till it almost hides the little cottage in which the proprietor takes refuge from the incessant drip, which descends from the leafy covering above.
To this succeeds a period when the steamy miasma rises in the green light from the rotten ground, and man and beast sicken in the malarious atmosphere, wherein the odour of decaying vegetation mingles with the exquisite perfume of orchids and strange flowers of the wilderness. In the glorious sky—in mystic cloudland—appear displays of light and colour, of subtle tints and gorgeous hues, utterly beyond description or the artist’s cunningest skill. Watch, with fevered vision, from the neighbourhood of one of these dark forests the rapidly shifting cloud-phantasms, arrayed in red and gold, upon the evening sky, then cease from marvelling at the exuberant and unbridled imaginings of the Indian bard! Fix your attention at night upon the monstrous shapes which hover, skulking in the background, in the flickering firelight, listen to the unearthly wailing and stifled cries which steal through the hideous darkness, and doubt no more the existence and doings of gruesome Rakshasas who change their shapes at will! Learn also, at the same time, how indispensable a god isAgni, who protects you through the horrors of darkest night in the forests.
Later in the year winter smiles mildly over the enervated land and chills the tepid air. For hours after sunrise a dense fog wraps the primæval forest in its embrace, but when it, ghost-like, steals silently away, it reveals the white smoke of the cottages curling upwards into a blue unclouded sky. The sun hardly affords sufficient warmth to the labourer in the little patch of cultivation near the hut, and the moon looks cold and pallid: the streams begin to dwindle away; the cascades are silent.
Such is the succession of seasons in a tropical forest-land like the India of the Epics. And, throughout all the seasons, the forest is enveloped in a dreamy air of depression and despondency, which peoples the solitudes with hideous Rakshasas, but leaves no place for sporting nymphs or dancing fairies. Life in such woodlands is real forest-life, not like Thoreau’s delightful playing at hermit in Walden, within a couple of miles of Concord, and in sight of a railway.
Thus far the forests; but the sublime Alps of the Indian world, tallest and most majestic of mountains, have not been without influence upon the feelings of the Indian poets, elevating them to lofty heights of contemplation. And when we read what the few travellers who have penetrated those regions have to tell us of the ineffable grandeur and sublimity of the lone mountains, the glittering ice-fields, and the untrodden snows of the interior, when we consider the solemn silence of those uninhabited solitudes, we cannot wonder that the Indian poets who had heard of them, and perhaps visited their rocky fastnesses, made of them a land of mystery and the sporting place of their gods and Apsaras.
Not only from the woods ofDandhakaand the vales and crests of mightyHimavatdid the epic poets of India gather inspiration; but also from the noble and lovely rivers of their fair land, winding beneficently through many hundreds of miles of fertile country, from their birth-places above the clouds to the bosom of the all-embracing ocean, while determining in their course the march of migration and conquest.
Mountains, forests and rivers, all of colossal proportions, have served to impress a grandiose if bewildering character upon the great Epics of India, which the reader, even of this volume, can hardly fail to observe.
Religion, being the dominant note of these voluminouspoems, claims our first consideration. In this connection I would draw attention to the fact that India is very far from that stage of intellectual development in which literature, science, art and politics become secularized. In Europe secularization has taken place gradually under the influence of the spirit of rationalism, as Mr. Lecky has so admirably explained. In India a beginning has been made in the secularization of knowledge. It is yet only amere beginning, which owes its origin to the influence of English education; but the effects being confined to avery small class indeed, it may still be said with truth that all departments of knowledge which form the intellectual heritage of the Indian people—even law, poetry and the drama—fall within the domain of theology. And, certainly, there is no indigenous science amongst the Hindus which is not subject to priestly influence and interpretation.
Throughout the Epics we find the supernatural beings, who influence the destinies of mankind, arrayed in two distinctly hostile camps. On one side are the gods with the Gandharvas and Apsaras. On the other side the Asuras, including Daityas and Danavas, Rakshasas and Picáchas. The contest lies, be it noted, between the lesser gods and the Asuras with their allies. The superior gods interpose from time to time in the interests of the celestials; but behind and above the turmoil of existence the shadowy form of inexorabledestinyreveals its overwhelming presence.
The part of man in the perpetual strife carried on between the two orders of superhuman beings is neither an ignoble nor a passive one. Man is not, as in most other religions, either the abject and unworthy recipient of gracious favours from the gods, or the unhappy victim of the malice of devils and demons. His position in the universe, as conceived by theauthors of the Indian Epics, reflecting, no doubt, the prevailing ideas of their time, was a far higher one. Man is no nonentity in the struggle between the good and the evil forces of nature, but is rather a very important factor; for it is his especial duty to piously assist andnourishthe celestials by perpetual sacrifices, so that they on their part might have the strength to perform their respective duties in the government of the universe, and insure the repression of the forces of evil. Neither is man a merely useful but servile auxiliary of the celestials; since he may by austerities, sacrifices, and ceremonies, earn and acquire rights and power for himself, and use his accumulated store of energy at his own will and for his own purposes.
Now it is a noteworthy fact that this high ideal of man’s dignity in the scale of beings has led in India to a degradation of the gods. It would seem as if you could not raise man without pulling down the deity; as if you could not exalt the human race without abasing the celestials. Hence we see the irreverent familiarity with which the highest gods, even Mahadeva, is personated by the Hindus in religious processions, or even on the occasion of the wild saturnalia of theHolifestival, when a man painted white with a wig of long yellow hair on his head, a string of huge beads about his neck, and a trident in his hand—the Supreme Deity personified—is borne aloft amidst a crowd of excited men who are indulging in the grossest license of obscene speech and gesture.
In regard to a life beyond the grave the writers of the Epics hold very decided opinions, a fact of great interest, if we remember that the Jews acquired their ideas about existence after death and of good and evil spirits for the first time in their Babylonian captivity, and passed them on as a heritage to Christianity; the conceptions of our great Christian poet, Milton, beingstrongly coloured by ideas which, undoubtedly, had their roots in PersianMazdeism.
The heavens of the Hindu gods are essentially material and sensuous, with their palaces and gardens, music and dancing, their lively Gandharvas and frail Apsaras. Yet the goddesses play a very subordinate part, indeed, in India’s heroic age. We find in the Epics no powerful Hera, no wise Pallas Athene, no lovely Venus, no silver-footed Thetis—bright creations which lend such a charm to the myths of Hellas. Ganga, it is true, acts a minor and appointed part in the great drama, and Parbati is mentioned, while Durga and Kali only flit across the stage. But it is quite evident that in the Olympus of the Aryan Indians the goddesses had not attained the power and dignity they enjoy to-day. The frequent boasts in the Epics against the celestials with Indra at their head, the way in which every chief or leader, even of the Venars, is said to be a match for Indra’s self, seem to indicate an unmistakable, if covert, hostility to the old gods of the Aryan invaders, which is well worthy of notice, as indicating a transition period in the religious development of the Hindus, a period of doubt and confusion, which is emphasized by the fulsome flattery addressed to anyone of whom a favour is desired, be he man or god. He is thebestof men, the greatest of kings; equal to gods, he is a god; he is Indra; he is Yama; he is Prajapati; he is superior to all the gods; he is the ruler of the three worlds; he is, in fact, anything and all things to the uncertain suppliant who craves his help. And in these perplexities we seem to have a share too; for under the influence of the pantheistic notions of the writers, combined with their conceptions of endless transmigrations and utter indifference to permanent shapes of any kind, individuality seems lost (as when we find Krishna addressed as the younger brother ofIndra[130]), and a world of confused phantasmagorial forms seems to dance before us, till we feel dizzy contemplating this distracting and impermanent universe.
But amidst the ever-shifting pageant of existence the Hindu seems to have arrived at and firmly grasped the idea of a periodic law which has given a certain grandeur to his speculations about both the past and the hereafter.
From the orderly sequence of natural phenomena, as in the succession of day and night; in the measured march of the seasons of the revolving year; in the periodic movements of the heavenly bodies; the Hindu recognized an appointed, unvarying and endless cycle of changes. Generalizing from these facts he concluded that this law must hold for the entire Cosmos as well, which would pass through its grand but destined cycle of changes, over and over again, in the æons of eternity. He held these ideas in common with the Greek of old, and, like the Greek of old, he never rose to the conception of progress, development, evolution.[131]
How the Hindu thinker accounted, by his doctrine ofKarma, for the striking inequalities and apparent injustice inseparable from mundane existence, the reader has learned in sufficient detail already. As to themoralresponsibility of man for his actions, the poets of the Epics had thought out the problem in its various aspects and despairingly left it unsolved. For as Sanjaya, the envoy of the Pandavas to their cousins, sadly says, in the true spirit of agnosticism: “In thisrespect three opinions are entertained; some say that everything is ordained by God;[132]some say that our acts are the results of free will; and others say that our acts are the results of those of our past lives.”[133]
The attribution of righteousness to the gods does not seem to be insisted upon; for Krishna, as we have seen, is particularly prone to guileful arts in order to compass his objects, like the Pallas Athene of Homer, at whose suggestion Pandaros treacherously and unjustifiably wounded Menelaus with an arrow.
In regard to the political condition of India in those earlier times we may, I think, gather from the Epics that the petty rulers who shared the land amongst themselves were very numerous—thousands,[134]indeed, if the poet’s statements could be relied upon,—and we need not doubt that it was the perpetual endeavour of the more able and ambitious of these kings to get as many as possible of their fellow chiefs to acknowledge their supremacy.
No one who studies the narratives attributed to Valmiki and Vyasa will fail to catch glimpses of the simple sagas which formed the ground-work of the great edifices raised by the Indian poets; but, as I have observed in the Introductory Chapter, the value and extent of what is usually considered historical matter to be traced in the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata” is so small and so doubtful that it fails to command either my interest or my confidence. It may be due to perversity of character, or to want of historical acumen on my part; but when I am expected to believe that the progress of theBhojasand their allies eastward may be traced in the legend ofKarna, given in the “Mahabharata,” with which the reader of the foregoing pages is familiar, I do not feel inclined to acquiesce. And when I am gravely assured that the romantic story of Satyavati, the fisherman’s daughter, her marriage with Santanu and her previous amour with the father of Vyasa,although absurd in Vyasa’s own poem, becomes intelligible,—if we will only put the individual fisherman out of court altogether,forgetwhat the poet tells us about Satyavati, andimaginethat the young lady in question was a personage of some importance in the family of theking of the fishing people,—I feel such efforts towards constructive history are somewhat beyond my abilities.[135]
While writers of one class strain after the hidden historical elements in the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata,” those of another class (represented by both Europeans and Indians), ingeniously discover in these narratives merely solar myths or moral allegories. It were needless to enlarge upon this topic here, and I have already given instances of such interpretations in the Note appended to the “Ramayana” (p. 91) and in the summary of the “Bhagavatgita” (p. 217). I would merely add that if it be the true function of history to reveal to us living pictures of bygone times, to disclose to us the social life of earlier days, and to make us acquainted with the thoughts, ideals and aspirations of former generations, then the Indian Epics are a solid contribution to historical literature even if they do not happen to chronicle actual events.
The heroes of the Epics, being mostly demigods with a long previous history, an appointed destiny, and subject, like mortal men, to pass through manyfuture existences in other forms, do not, I confess, engage my sympathies very much. Even human beings upon this epic stage lose their distinctive character and cease to interest us if we regard them merely as souls masquerading, as it were, for a certain time in particular forms assumed for the occasion, different from the many they have worn in former states, and unlike those which they will wear in future lives. Indeed the doctrine of metempsychosis, with its fluxional succession of beings, human and divine, undermines the conceptions of definite and permanent individuality so thoroughly that I do not wonder that sober human history, with its limited stage and narrow chronology, has had but little charm for the Hindus.
More remarkable than the heroes of Kurukshetra, however, are the Rishis and Hermits, who stand out upon the canvas of the Epic poets with startling distinctness. These sages, with their austerities, their superhuman powers, their irascibility and their terrible curses, are the Hindu representatives of the magicians and sorcerers of other countries, and form a remarkable feature in the life of even modern India. As a rule the saints of Christendom are of another type, yet, strange to say, there are a few of them, St. Renan for example, to whom have been attributed characteristics not unlike those of the Indian Rishis.[136]Elsewhere a large share, perhaps the greater share, of magical power has been credited to the fair sex; but the Hindu has, characteristically, made no such concession to women, who never at any time in India were granted the free and honoured position accorded them amongst the Germans of Tacitus or the Norsemen of the Eddas, and never enjoyed even the restricted liberty which Greek women were privilegedto exercise. Nevertheless, there is, undoubtedly, a substratum of chivalrous feeling towards the weaker sex manifested throughout the Epics, often in a distinct and pronounced manner.
As to the social life of the early heroic age, of which we get so many interesting glimpses in the Epics, it is certain that it was extremely simple and rude; as, for instance, to cite a single example, the life of the Pandavas in their primitive “house of lac,” where their mother ministered to them without the assistance of any servants at all, although, be it remembered, the young princes were supposed to be enjoying themselves away from home on a sort of holiday excursion. There is, however, ample evidence to show that by the time the poems were actually compiled or, at any rate, cast into their present forms, a complicated society had been evolved, and a life of luxurious ease and refinement was not unknown. Throughout the period embraced in the Epics the caste-system was well established, animal food commonly used,[137]and spirituous drinks not prohibited. Polygamy was common, and polyandry a recognized institution, while the practice known asNiyoga—of raising up offspring to deceased relatives or childless men—was, undoubtedly, fully established.
Nowcaste, with its baleful influences, still dominates Hindu life; polygamy continues to be common in some parts of India; polyandry is still practised, here and there, in backward places; andNiyoga, which has never ceased to be orthodox doctrine, has, in these days, had special prominence given to it by Swami Dayanand, and the sect recently founded by him. The practice in question—which is known in a modified form aslevirate[138]amongst the Jews—has been establishedin India since time immemorial, and we have had important instances of it in the foregoing pages.
What Manu, the great Indianlawgiver, says on the subject ofNiyogais as follows: “On failure of issue by the husband, if he be of the servile class, the desired offspring may be procreated, either by his brother or some othersapinda, on the wife, who has been duly authorized. Sprinkled with clarified butter, silent, in the night, let the kinsman thus appointed beget one son, but a second by no means, on the widow orchildless wife. By men of twice-born classes no widow or childless wife must be authorized to conceive by any other man than her lord.”[139]
Swami Dayanand, however, does not limit the practice ofNiyogato the inferior castes, nor to the cases referred to by Manu. The modernreformergoes much further, teaching a doctrine,said to be founded on the Vedas, which allows a latitude in respect to the relations between the sexes that, to say the least, is extremely startling in this nineteenth century.[140]I am bound to add that I have been very positively assured that Swami Dayanand’s precepts in respect toNiyogaare not actually practised by his followers, but their dangerous tendency is, I presume, undeniable.
From the earliest ages known to the writers of the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata” cremation of the dead has been the practice in India. Hence in Indian archæology we are deprived of those sources of information—graves, tumuli, cromlechs and sepulchres—which elsewhere, as in Egypt, have furnished such a wealth of facts regarding the earlier races of mankind.
The sacred character of the Brahmans receives abundantrecognition in the Epics; and it is noteworthy that, except in the relinquishment of animal food and vinous drinks by a great majority of the Hindus, little change has taken place in the social habits of the people since the heroic age depicted in the Epics. We need not doubt, however, that the abstention from animal food and, with it, from wine and spirits of all kinds has, in the course of many generations, profoundly modified the national character; and has, perhaps, more than anything else, gradually converted the turbulent, aggressive Aryan into the mild and contemplative Hindu.[141]
A high degree of culture had doubtless been attained by the Indians before the Epics were cast into their present forms. The industrial arts would seem to have flourished, and we have seen how highly the poets appreciated and enjoyed the beauty of the woodlands, and how much they were impressed with the scenery of their grand mountains. This in itself is a remarkable fact, as the charms of landscape beauty do not seem to have been realized in the West until a somewhat later time.
The ideal of human (particularly female) beauty which possessed the minds of the Hindu bards has been indicated by several allusions and quotations in the preceding chapters. It is certainly not that embodied in the Venus of Melos or the Apollo Belvedere; but every age and country has its own ideals.
Throughout the foregoing brief narrative there has been ample evidence of the height to which the speculativeimagination of the Hindus had carried them in endeavouring to read the riddle of human destiny, and notably so in the subtle pantheism of the “Bhagavatgita,” a work which, even if the date assigned to it by European scholars be accepted, and with that its authors’ supposed acquaintance with Christian ideas, must still excite our admiration by its largeness of conception and liberality of sentiments—expressed many centuries before Luther nailed his famous ninety-five theses upon the door of the church at Wittenberg.
The imaginative faculty never fails the bards of the Indian Epics, who too often indulge in a very delirium of exaggeration. Yet, notwithstanding their supreme contempt for probabilities or consistency, and their lofty scorn of numerical limitations, it cannot be denied that these Hindu poets, with their lawless imaginations, take us completely captive and carry us along with them, surprised and delighted, through the wonderful scenes of their creation; while one cannot but feel in their company that the intellectual atmosphere which surrounds them is a stronger one and more spiritual than that which was breathed by the Greeks of Homer or the Teutons of the Eddas.
On the whole, it may be said that the Indian Epics as they have reached us, reveal to the careful student an ancient free and vigorous primitive social life and turbulent times, overlaid by a later and less healthy, if more refined civilization, which was permeated with ecclesiasticism; and that they exhibit a strange mixture of what Mr. Herbert Spencer would call the “ethics of enmity” and the “ethics of amity.” The later stage of Indian history—the age of Brahmanism succeeding the heroic age and continuing to the present day—may, I think, be well compared with the Middle Ages in Europe, when priestly influence was predominant and national life at a low ebb. Europe,under the influence of the spirit of industrialism and modern science, has emancipated itself from the numbing influences of the Dark Ages. When will India do the same? For how many more centuries is she destined to wrangle over unprofitable theological questions, as did the Byzantine Greeks while the conqueror was thundering at their gates?
My pleasant undertaking has occupied more time than I had anticipated when I took it in hand; but I leave it now with a profound appreciation of the capabilities of a people who have produced such works as the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata.”
In every age—even in an industrial age of busy scientific progress and mechanical triumphs like our own—the human mind turns with fond interest to any picture which shows how men in the fore-time lived and thought, and it listens eagerly to any song which echoes through the vanished years the fervent hopes and lofty aspirations of buried generations. Therefore, I trust that my little work, though it be but a sketch of a great picture and the echo of a grand old song, may find favour with the public, and help to open up to English readers a strange but interesting world of Eastern ideas and conceptions. Above all, however, I hope that my pages represent—as I believe they do—both fairly and adequately the great Epics of India.
CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.TOOKS COURT CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.