(a) The Family.
The family systems of the East and of the West are essentially different. In India the Joint Family System prevails. According to this system members of a family for three generations live together and have all things in common. No member of the family can claim anything as his own. It is the old patriarchal system and emphasizes the rights of the family as a whole, and denies to any individual member separate possession or privileges. This system has had a long day in India; but, as western ideas are spreading, dissatisfaction is manifestly increasing, especially among the educated classes. The recent introduction to the Madras Legislature of the so-called [pg 025] “Gains of Learning Bill” is the first serious attack made upon that system. By means of this bill, which was introduced by an orthodox Hindu, but which is not yet passed, an educated man could claim exclusive right to ownership of all properties acquired by him through his education. Thus, for the first time in India an individual might claim, apart from the family, that wealth which was acquired by himself. This bill has brought opposition from the public, because it conflicts with the rights of the joint family, and is a serious blow to all the old Hindu family privileges. The Hindu joint family system, while it has been a source of some blessing to the land, has also been a serious curse in that it has fostered laziness, dissension and improvidence, and has put a ban upon individual initiative and ambition.
Child marriages have been an unfailing source of evil to the land. Of this Sir John Strachey says: “It would be difficult to imagine anything more abominable than the frequent consequences of child marriages by which multitudes of girls of ten to twelve or less are given over to outrage; or, if they belong to the higher class of Hindus, are doomed to lives of degraded widowhood.”
The Indian government has endeavoured to remove this evil; but at all points it has been opposed not only by conservative, orthodox Hindus, but also by educated members of the community. No system can degrade the womanhood of a race, nor, indeed, for that matter, its manhood, more than that which marries its girls in childhood and which consigns millions of them to wretched widowhood. One of [pg 026] the consequences is that girls of even twelve years are known to become mothers in that land, while very few attain the age of eighteen without bearing children. An increasing population under these physical conditions cannot be a healthy or a vigorous one.
(b) Society.
In India, Society is almost exclusively the product of the ancient caste system. A more elaborate social system than this was never known in the world. It is an order of social tyranny of the worst sort, whereby every man is compelled to give up his own individuality and to be bound to the iron will of an ignorant community: a will also which is based upon the past and conforms to the rules and habits of peoples who lived in remote antiquity. No greater millstone could be hung around the neck of any people than that of the multitudinous caste rules of Manu and later accretions which are the all in all of Hindu life. There may have been good in this system in the past, and it may have conserved some blessings of antiquity; but today it is the worst tyranny and the greatest curse that has blasted the life of the people. It is the source of their physical degeneracy, for it compels them to marry within narrow lines of consanguinity. It has cursed the people with a narrow sympathy; for no man in that system deems it his duty to bless or help those beyond his own caste. It has sown poverty broadcast over the land; for it prohibits a man from engaging in any work or trade which is not prescribed by caste rules and customs; and thus has brought many to penury, want and [pg 027] famine. When the caste-prescribed occupation or work is not available, the suffering is very great.
It has brought stagnation to the people by restraining every man who had ambition to move forward and improve his prospects in life. The whole village regards as conceited a young man of the outcastes who seeks to rise in life; they soon bring him low. Progress is impossible under the caste system.
In like manner, it has fostered the pride and presumption of one class and destroyed the ambition and aspiration of the other. No people on earth today are more proud than the Brahmans; none more hopelessly abject than the Pariahs and other outcastes.
It has also made national unity and the spirit of fellowship impossible in the land; large corporate interests are impossible for the people. The castes of the community are filled with jealousy and are mutually antagonistic; each division having rules and ceremonies which make it impossible for communion of interests with others. Many would like to see it removed; but the system itself has created such abjectness of feeling among them that they dare not come forward to stem its tide or oppose it.
