What, then, is Popular Hinduism?

I shall endeavour to analyze it and present some of its outstanding features, such as are witnessed all over the land.

1. That which obtrudes itself upon all sides and which is, perhaps, its most determining factor is its caste system. In other lands, mean social distinctions obtain and divide the people. In India only, Caste is a religious institution, founded by the authority of Heaven, penetrating every department and entering into every detail of life, and enforced by strictly religious penalties. One has well said that Hinduism and caste are convertible terms.

2. Another outstanding feature of popular Hinduism is its Polytheism.

While pantheism is the essential philosophy of the land,—a pantheism which denies the existence of all beings and everything save BrÂhm (the Supreme Soul),—nevertheless this pantheism has, in the popular mind, degenerated into the greatest pantheon the world has ever known. Even ten centuries ago its gods were said to number three hundred and thirty millions! And this army of deities has been multiplying ever since. Even twenty-five centuries ago, the fertile imagination of the Brahman had so peopled this world with gods and godlets of all grades that the stern and sensible mind of the great Buddha became disgusted with the whole pantheon; and he established his new faith as a reaction from the old to the extent of ignoring any Divine Being.

If, in these earlier days, such a man was unable to endure this manifestation of human folly, what can we not say in these days, when, in addition to the acknowledged host of well-known Hindu deities, every family has its god, and every hamlet its protecting demons; and when trees, rivers, mountains, and a thousand other objects represent to the popular mind separate godlets? One can well say that India has gone mad in its passion for populating the world with gods.

3. Moreover, this pantheon has been incarnated. It has descended into a wild and hideous idolatry. There is no other land on earth where idolatry is so rampant as it is in India. Images are found everywhere. If the gods are numberless, how much more the idols which represent them, and which are found in every hamlet and house and upon roadsides!

In addition to those idols which are made for regular and permanent worship, there are myriad others which are made of clay and other perishable substances, to be used for the time only, and then to be thrown into the river or to be washed away by the rain.

And what hideous objects these idols of India are! The images of the gods of the ancient Greeks were beautiful, and one feels sometimes almost inclined to excuse an image-worship where ignorance weds art to religion and combines beauty with devotion.

But there is no such excuse for the idolatry of India. In all my travels through this great land I have hardly seen an image, or an idol, which is what may be called an artistically beautiful object. On the other hand, many of them are peculiarly gross and revolting in appearance. The most universally worshipped god in all India is Ganesh. His idols are found all over the land, not only in temples and shrines, but on roadsides, and in all places where people assemble. And this Ganesh, the son of Siva, is represented by the grossest and most hideous idol. This "pot-bellied god" has his body crowned with an elephant head!

Of course, Hindu taste cannot be judged by western standards. One cannot fail to recognize this fact in trying to judge types of human beauty in this land. But even Hindu types of beauty are not at all realized in their idols. It would often seem as if that which was most revolting in appearance is that which appeals most strongly to the Hindu, as an outward expression of the divine. In any case, it is true that the idolatry of India is farthest removed from the chaste, the beautiful, and the elevating.

And this evil is intensified by the fact that all worshipped idols are bathed with oil, and therefore attract all the dust, dirt, and grime of the immediate vicinity.

Educated Hindus, though they tell you that these idols are only for the ignorant masses, rarely decline to unite with their families in bringing their offerings to, and in worshipping, the same.

Some will tell us that in idolatry people do not worship the idol itself, but the god who is supposed to reside within it. Even if this were true, one could not admire such a worship did he know the character of the god which is supposed to reside therein. But their statement regarding this is not true. I have personally inquired of many of the common people who are idolaters, and I have never yet found a man whose mind, in worship, passes beyond the idol itself. I admit that the educated mind may leap in thought behind the image; but the masses of the people do not. It is, at best, a debasing worship, and drags the people down to the level of the hideous objects before which they prostrate themselves.

A well-known Hindu writer said recently, in the Christian College Magazine:—

"I do urge most emphatically that, whatever may have been the original intention, and whatever may be the esoteric meaning, the millions that perform idolatrous practice in this country see nothing symbolic behind the image and take the whole show quite literally. And can anything be more degrading to an intelligent human being? We know that all religions are necessarily more or less anthropomorphic. But our popular Hinduism surpasses everything else in this respect, too. There is a famous shrine in this Presidency where the deity's chota hazri [early meal] begins with bread and butter, and he goes on eating without respite till midnight, when he appropriately takes a decoction of dried ginger to help his digestion before he retires to his bedroom with his consorts; there is another famous shrine where a cigar is left in the bedroom every night for his godship to smoke; in another shrine, under the management of a nominal ascetic, fetters are applied to the god's feet whenever the temple's exchequer runs low, to extort money offerings from the devotees and pilgrims; in numerous other shrines the deity is taken out in procession and whipped publicly for having committed petty thefts; in one shrine the whole process of a high-way robbery is acted out in detail during the annual festival; births, marriages, deaths, and similar occurrences are, of course, as common and frequent in our temples as in our homes. Gentlemen, can any amount of esoteric whitewashing justify these disgraceful and fairly incredible practices? Then there are the deva dasies, our 'vestal virgins,' of whom even small and poor temples have one or two to boast. They are the recognized prostitutes of the country, and many sociologists are of opinion that no 'civilized' human society can completely get rid of such a class. Is that any reason why we should associate them with our religion and tempt the devil himself with their presence in our holiest places and shrines?"

4. Another marked feature of modern Hinduism is its devil-worship. This is peculiarly manifest in South India. In the Madras Presidency, whose fifty million population is mostly Dravidian, nine-tenths of the people follow the faith of their ancestors, which is Demonolatry.

When Brahmanism came to South India, many centuries ago, it found intrenched among the people, everywhere and universally, this ancient cult. The Brahmans, recognizing this, did what they have always done; they said to the people: "We have not come to destroy your religion; we will take your demons and demonesses, marry them to our gods, and give them shrines and worship in our temples. Come with them and be a part of our religion. We will give to you the privileges, and confer upon you the dignity and blessing, of our great religion." The people were impressed by this offer, accepted the situation, and were absorbed, with their religion, into the Brahmanical faith. From that time forward they have been recognized as Hindus, and have, after a fashion, been loyal members of that faith.

But let it not be supposed that, by becoming Hindus, they have deserted their ancestral religion, and have ceased to be devil-worshippers. Far from it. Hinduism proper is to them a mere plaything, or a festival pastime. On special Hindu holidays, and perhaps on occasions of pilgrimage, they will visit these Hindu temples and bring their offering to the deities of Brahmanism. But their chief concern and their daily religious occupation is found in the appeasing of the many devils whose abode is supposed to be in their countless village shrines and under well-known trees in their hamlets. They have not abated one jot of their belief in the supremacy of these devils in their life-affairs; and they always stand in fear of them, and do what they can to satisfy their bloody demands.

Thus at least nine-tenths of the people of South India are, first of all, demonolaters, and secondly, but a long way behind, are Hindus. And yet a great many people in the West think of these people as the pure worshippers of the highest type of the Brahmanical faith!

And it should not be forgotten that all over India there are probably fifty millions of people who are the so-called outcasts of the land, the miserable product of the caste system of Hinduism. They are "the submerged tenth" of India. They are not only socially ostracized, they are under the definite ban of the Hindu faith. They are the hewers of wood and drawers of water of Brahmanism. They have no place in Hinduism proper; they are not permitted to enter any of its temples. They have no right to receive whatever comforts religion may confer; its rights and its privileges are entirely denied to them. But the tyranny of the religion has been such, during the many centuries of the past, as to keep this class of people not only in absolute social servitude, but also in religious dependence; and has taught them (because it has compelled them) to be satisfied with the spiritual crumbs which are the meanest remnants of what the religion professes to give its members.

I have often felt, as I have talked with these poor, miserable Pariahs, that I was incapable of understanding their willingness to remain thus loosely attached to a faith which denied to them its most elementary comforts and blessings. The mystery is doubtless to be explained by their supreme abjectness and helplessness, which have been ground into them by many centuries of bondage. The consequence is, that while these many millions of outcast people are numbered among the Hindus, and regard themselves as Hindus, Hinduism itself has for them nothing but curses, and, more than all others, they must be satisfied with the devil-worship of their fathers.

5. Beneath all these lower aspects of popular Hinduism is still found what may be called its lowest stratum—Fetichism. There are many people and tribes in India who have not ascended sufficiently high, in religious conception, to make for themselves definite images of the gods they worship. Like the African, they are content to take natural objects, such as a rock or a stone, and regard it as possessed of some spirit and worship it. Sir Alfred Lyall, that well-known authority on India, has told us that one can find in India, as in no other land, religion of all forms and in all grades of development,—from the lowest step of animism to the most spiritual and abstruse pantheism. I myself have seen, within the area of one acre of land in South India, the instruments of these varied forms of worship, from a greasy, round stone, before which the lowest classes prostrated themselves, to an image of one of the supreme gods of Hinduism. There is not a phase of worship, however high or mystic, or however mean or degraded, which has not its devotees in this land.

6. Modern Hinduism is also guilty of harbouring and fostering immorality.

This is a cruel statement to make concerning any faith. But justice compels me to add this as one of the characteristics of Hinduism. Some of the most revered and popular writings of this religion are so full of obscenity and impure suggestion, that, to publish them in a Christian land, in the English tongue, would make the publisher liable to imprisonment. When, years ago, Lord Dalhousie, the Viceroy of India, enacted a law punishing obscenity, the leaders of the Hindu religion were so exercised by it that the government had to exempt religious writings of Hinduism, and emblems of that faith, from the action of the law. There are many religious books in India to-day which are classical in the beauty of their language, but which the Universities of India decline to use as text-books because of their gross obscenity.

Among the most demoralizing institutions to the youth of India are the temple cars, which are found in every village of any consequence throughout the land. They are erected at great expense, by temple authorities, are most elaborately carved, and are used for the conveyance of the gods through the village streets upon festival occasions. There is hardly one of these cars, in South India at any rate, which is not disfigured by grossly sensual carvings such as ought to bring blushing shame to any decent and self-respecting community. They are open to the public gaze, and children of the village play under their shadow, and gaze daily upon their vile and disgusting sights. The government would forbid the erection of such cars to-morrow, if they had not pledged themselves not to interfere with the religion of the people!

In the Vaishnava cult of Hinduism there is at least one sect, well known throughout the land, whose worship is loaded with impurity, and whose worshippers, at certain festivals, specially, yield themselves to all forms of sexual practices such as cannot be mentioned.

Sakti worship, or the worship of the goddesses, lends itself definitely to this gross evil; and the leading Tantraic books of this cult are so filthy that they are not fit to be translated. In Bengal, where the worship of Durgai, the wife of Siva, is dominant, the Hindus themselves are beginning to protest against the lewdness, obscenity, and licentiousness which prevail at their great Holi festival, which is the annual festival of the goddess.

Another institution connected with the temple worship of India, and of which Hindus ought to be heartily ashamed, is that of dancing-girls. Little girls in their infancy are devoted and dedicated by their own mothers to the temples. They are supposed to be married to the gods of the temple, and are called "the servants of the gods." They dance in attendance upon the gods, upon festival occasions, and are an inherent part of the temple worship. But the sad thing about these women is that their own mothers knew, when they dedicated them in infancy, that they were binding them to a life of shame. For the dancing-girls are the professional prostitutes of India. There are a host of these women (twelve thousand in South India alone) who, without their own consent, and in the sacred name of religion, have been handed over to this life of shame, to corrupt and debase the youth of the land. Their life is a loud cry against their mother-faith, which systematically devotes them to destruction of soul and body. Some educated men of the land denounce this as an evil which should be stopped. But the leaders of the faith turn a deaf ear to all such cries.

7. The treatment of woman within Hinduism is worthy of attention.

Hinduism has never looked with kindness or consideration upon women. It seems to have been its settled policy to treat them with contempt and unkindness. The consequence is that the girl babe is never welcome in the Hindu family. And from the cradle to the grave woman has no independence or right within the pale of this faith. During childhood she is in bondage to her father, during her marriage she must give implicit obedience to her husband, and as a widow she remains the ward of her sons.

Look at the disabilities under which the Hindu woman labours to-day.

She is held in ignorance. Only six Hindu women out of one thousand are able to read and write. She has never been regarded as worthy of education. Her ignorance has been regarded as her safety, and has been the studied policy of Hinduism.

She has never been regarded as worthy to know the sacred books of her own faith. It is a sin in Hinduism to-day for any man to teach a woman the most sacred truths of the faith. Her mind is not a fit receptacle for such truths.

While she has nothing to do in choosing for herself a husband, she is bound in infancy, through holy wedlock, to a child like herself. Her child husband may die before he attains manhood, when she becomes a widow. And, because her stars are supposed to have had influence in his death, she is treated with cruelty and is regarded as the evil star of the home.

Owing to this evil custom of child marriage, there are to-day twenty-six million widows in this land, of whom four hundred thousand are under fifteen years of age. It is not simply that the lot of these poor women is one of greatest hardship and contempt; they also become the prey of lustful men and fall into grossest sins. In modern times the government has tried to lighten the burdens of womanhood in the land; but the representatives of Hinduism, and its custodians, all stand in the way of any helpful legislation, and are determined to keep woman in servitude at all hazards.

8. The religious ascetic represents one of the characteristic features of modern Hinduism.

Religious asceticism has been the ideal of the Hindu life from time immemorial. The man who has given up all earthly pursuits and wanders with beggar's cup in hand from place to place, making pilgrimages to the holy places of India, or who separates himself entirely from men and devotes years to the solitude of the wilderness in the cultivation of piety,—he it is who is the admiration of the whole Hindu community. And it is for this very reason that so many men in India to-day don the yellow robe of this profession, and make capital out of this sentiment of the people.

There are millions of these religious mendicants who are entirely non-productive and live upon the common people. A few of them, doubtless, are sincere and are seeking after communion with God. But the vast majority are lazy and rotten to the core. Their life is known to be utterly worthless, and they are morally pestiferous in their influence upon the whole community. And yet the people accept them as the highest types of piety in the land. Even the poorest among them would give his last morsel to these worthless men. There are, indeed, very few in the community who would dare to refuse an offering to these beggars, because they are so ready to invoke dreadful imprecations upon those who decline to give anything to them. There are few things that an orthodox Hindu dreads more than the curse of a religious ascetic.

Thus, though these men are known to trample under foot every law of God and are utterly useless to the whole community, the people nevertheless regard them very highly and shower their blessings upon them.

In any land the maintenance of such an army would be a great burden upon the people; in India, where they are so poor, how heavy this burden must be, and how great must be the curse of such a host preying both morally and physically upon the rest of the community!

It is equally disastrous to the conception of the common people concerning their faith that so large a body of recognized hypocrites should, nevertheless, be so highly esteemed as types of piety.

The existence of this class of worthless men reveals, also, another striking fact which characterizes the religion of India, and that is the utter divorce of faith and morals. Hinduism has never recognized any connection, and least of all any essential union, between piety and ethics. As we have seen, the most pious men in the land, according to Indian ideas, may be the most immoral. This has been one of the fatal defects of Hinduism from the earliest times. Conscience has found very small place in this religion of the Brahmans.

9. Modern Hinduism, also, inculcates the spirit of pessimism among its people. The Puranas tell us, and the people universally believe it, that we are now living in Kali Yuga, the iron age, in which all things are evil, and in which righteousness is a thing largely unknown to the people. All the forces of this age are against the good, and it leaves no encouragement to any one to try to do, and to be, good.[4]

10. Add to this the even more potent belief of the people in astrology. The planets and the stars, the moon and the nodes are living gods, they say, which wield an influence over the life and destiny of human beings. The astrologer is perhaps the most important functionary in the social and religious life of the people. No marriage can be performed unless the horoscope of the bride and the bridegroom harmonize. No social or domestic event of importance, and specially no religious ceremony of any consequence, can be carried on save during what are called auspicious days and moments. Astrology is the right hand of Hinduism, and it has supreme authority in the direction of most of its affairs.

Add to this the belief in omens, which enters very largely into human life and thought. A Hindu will not start upon a journey save on what is astrologically an auspicious day; and if even a crow crosses his path from left to right, after he has begun his journey, it is regarded as an ill omen, and he will at once return home. He spends much of his time in watching such omens; even an ass's bray carries a significance to him. If it is heard in the east, his success will be delayed; in the southeast, it portends death; in the south, it means wealth; etc. It matters not how important it may be that a man should undertake a journey or a task at a certain time, he will not do it at that time if he finds it to be inauspicious. When the new governor of Madras recently arrived at his destination, the reception to be given to him by the Hindus had to be postponed because it was ignorantly put at an hour which was Rahu Kala—an inauspicious hour!

In a thousand similar ways, the Hindu people are controlled and handicapped by silly superstitions which make life a burden to them and which rob them of efficiency and sanity.

This, then, is the Hinduism of the masses; and no other people devote themselves so faithfully to their faith as do these. And none, for this very reason, are more worthy of our sympathy and of our assistance to rise to better things in the realm of faith.