Chapter XXI: "the Poor Benighted Hindus"

GREAT indeed are the uses of Poetry. Consider by way of illustration how accurately and comprehensively some forgotten bard in four short lines has pictured for us the true condition of the inhabitants of England's great Indian Empire:

"The poor, benighted Hindu,
He does the best he kin do
He sticks to his caste from first to last.
And for pants he makes his skin do."

A Mr. Micawber might dilate at length upon how this achievement in verse informs us (1) as to the financial condition of the people, to wit, they are "poor," the average annual income having been estimated at only $10, and the average wages for day labor in the capital city of India only 6 to 20 cents per diem; (2) as to their intellectual condition, "benighted," ninety men in each hundred being unable to read or write any language, while of every thousand Indian women 993 are totally illiterate; (3) as to the social system, each man living and dying within the limits of the caste into which he is born; and (4) as to the clothing, garb or dress of the inhabitants (or the absence thereof), the children of both sexes being frequently attired after the manner of our revered First Parents before they made the acquaintance of the fig tree, while the adults also dispense generally with trousers, shoes, and stockings, and other impedimenta of our over-developed civilization.

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Great indeed are the uses of poetry. In all my letters from India I shall hardly be able to do more than expand and enlarge upon the great fundamental truths so eloquently set forth in our four-line poetry piece.

If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them," then the Creator must also have a special fondness for these "poor benighted Hindus," for within an area less than half the size of the United States more than 300,000,000 of them live and move and have their being. That is to say, if the United States were as thickly populated as India, it would contain 600,000,000 people. It is also said that when the far-flung battle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expansion that great empire had within its borders only half as many people as there are in India to-day. India and its next-door neighbor, China, contain half the population of the whole earth. In other words, if the Chinese and East Indians were the equals of the other races in military prowess the combined armies of all other nations on the globe, of every nation in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would be required to defeat them.

Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family calls for special study. And if we would study them we must not confine ourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India, interesting as these cities are.

The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of the people live on the soil) is not the trader, a city-dweller in these few large centres of population, but the ryot or farmer, in the thousands and thousands of little mud-house villages between the Himalaya slopes and Cape Comorin. The significant economic fact in India is not the millions of dollars once spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30 spent in building this average peasant's home or hut. The significant social fact is not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modern Rajah {212} estimated in lakhs of rupees, but the five or six cents a day which is a laborer's wage for millions and millions of the people.

For these reasons I have been no more interested in the famous cities I have seen than in the little rural villages whose names may have never found place in an English book. Let us get, if we can, a pen picture of one of these villages in north central India.

As I approached it from a distance it looked like an enormous mass of ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as has been suggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and are often roofed with clay also--made flat on top with a little trench or gutter for drainage. Perhaps the majority, however, have thick sloping roofs of straw, the eaves being hardly as high as a man's head. Very thick are the mud walls of the houses, eighteen inches or more in most cases, and as the floor is also the bare earth, there is no woodwork about such a dwelling except the doors and a few poles to hold up the roof. In one or two small rooms of this kind without a window or chimney (oftener perhaps in one room than in two) a whole family lives, cooks, and sleeps.

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The faquirs do not like to be photographed, and this follow in the
upper picture was snapped just in the act of rising from his bed of
spikes. This is only one of many methods of self-torture practised
in the hope of winning the favor of the gods.

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The streets, if such they may be called, are often little more than crooked water-rutted paths, so narrow that one may reach from the mud walls of the houses on one side to the mud walls on the other, and so crooked that you are likely to meet yourself coming back before you get to the end. Or perhaps you wind up unexpectedly in some _mahullah_--a group of huts representing several families of kinsfolk. Enclosed by a mud wall, the little brown bright-eyed, black-haired, half-naked children are playing together in the little opening around which the houses are bunched, and the barefooted mothers are cooking _chapatis_, spinning cotton on knee-high spinning wheels, weaving in some wonderfully primitive way, gathering fuel, or are engaged in other household tasks. The equipment of one of these human ant-hills, called a home, is about as primitive as the building itself. There is, of course, a bed or cot: it is about {215} half knee-high, and the heavy twine or light rope knitted together after the fashion of a very coarse fish-net is the only mattress. The coarse grain which serves for food is stored in jars; the meagre supply of clothing hangs in one corner of the room; there are no chairs, knives or forks. The stove or fireplace is a sort of small clay box for the fire, with an opening on top for the kettle or oven. In one corner of the room is the fuel: a few small sticks and dried refuse from cow stalls that Americans use for fertilizing their fields. "We have found rather bad results," a missionary told me, "from providing Indian girls with mattresses, chairs, knives, forks, etc., at our mission schools. Later, when they marry our native workers, the $5-a-month income of the family (which is about all they can expect) is insufficient to provide these luxuries, and the girl's recollections of former comforts are likely to prove a source of dissatisfaction to her."

At first you ask, "But why are there no windows in the houses? Surely the people could leave openings in the clay walls that would give light and ventilation?" The answer is that most of the year the weather is so hot that the hope of the owner is to get as nearly cave-like conditions as possible; to find, as it were, a cool place in the earth, untouched by the fiery glare of the burning sun outside. Even in north central India in the houses of the white men, where everything has been done to reduce the temperature and with every punkah-fan swinging the room's length to make a breeze, the temperature in May and June is 106 or higher, and at midnight in the open air the thermometer may reach 105. "It is then no uncommon thing," a friend in Agra told me, "to find even natives struck down dead by the roadside; and the railways have men designated to take and burn the bodies of those who succumb to the heat in travel by the cars."

In such a warm climate the dress of the people, as has already been suggested, is not very elaborate. In fact, the garb of the adult man is likely to be somewhat like the uniform of the {216} Gunga Din (the Indian _bhisti_ or water-carrier for the British regiment):

"The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind--
For a twisty piece o' rag
And a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field equipment 'e could find."

In cold weather, however, the majority of the men are rather fully covered, and in any case they add a turban or cap of some gaudy hue to the uniform just suggested.

As for the dress of the women, a typical woman's outfit will consist of, say, a crimson skirt with a green border, a navy-blue piece of cloth as large as a sheet draped loosely (and quite incompletely) around the head and upper part of the body, and a breast-cloth or possibly a waist of brilliant yellow. This combination of hues, of course, is only a specimen. The actual colors are variable but the brilliancy is invariable.

Furthermore, the celebrated Old Lady of Banbury Cross, who boasted of rings, on her fingers and bells on her toes, would find her glory vanish in a twinkling should she visit India. Not content with these preliminary beginnings of adornment, the barefooted Hindu woman wears--if she can afford it--a band or two of anklets, bracelets halfway from wrist to elbow, armlets beyond the elbow, ear-rings of immense size, a necklace or two, toe-rings and a bejewelled nose-ring as big around as a turnip. Sometimes the jewelry on a woman's feet will rattle as she walks like the trace-chains on a plow-horse on the way to the barn.

This barbaric display of jewelry, it should be said, is not made solely for purposes of show. The truth is that the native has not grown used to the idea of savings banks (although the government is now gradually convincing him that the postal savings institutions are safe), and when he earns a spare rupee he puts it into jewelry to adorn the person of himself or {217} his wife. If all the idle treasures which the poor of India now carry on their legs, arms, ears, and noses were put into productive industry, a good deal might be done to alleviate the misery for which the agitators profess to blame the British Government.

Calcutta, India.

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