V
His path
as a reformer was not smooth. It was blocked from many sides. The sentiments of
the people whom he wanted to reform were deeply rooted in the ancient past.
They held the belief that their ancestors were the wisest and the noblest of
men, and the social system which they had devised was of the most ideal
character. What appeared to Ranade to be the shames and wrongs of the Hindu
society were to them the most sacred injunctions of their religion. This was
the attitude of the common man. The intelligentsia was divided into two
schools—a school which was orthodox in its belief but unpolitical in its
outlook, and a school which was modern in its beliefs but primarily political
in its aims and objects. The former was led by Mr. Chiplunkar and the latter by
Mr. Tilak. Both combined against Ranade and created as many difficulties for
him as they could. They not only did the greatest harm to the cause of social
reform, but as experience shows they have done the greatest harm to the cause
of political reform in India. The unpolitical or the orthodox school believed
in the Hegelian view—it is a puzzle to me—namely to realize the ideal and
idealize the real. In this it was egregiously wrong. The Hindu religious and
social system is such that you cannot go forward to give its ideal form a
reality because the ideal is bad ; nor can you attempt to elevate the real to
the status of the ideal because the real, i.e., the existing state of affairs,
is worse than worse could be. This is no exaggeration. Take the Hindu religious
system or take the Hindu social system, and examine it from the point of social
utility and social justice. It is said that religion is good when it is fresh
from the mint. But Hindu religion has been a bad coin to start with. The Hindu
ideal of society as prescribed by Hindu religion has acted as a most
demoralizing and degrading influence on Hindu society. It is Nietzschean in its
form and essence. Long before Nietzsche was born Manu had proclaimed the gospel
which Nietzsche sought to preach. It is a religion which is not intended to
establish liberty, equality and fraternity. It is a gospel which proclaims the
worship of the superman—the Brahmin by the rest of the Hindu society. It
propounds that the superman and his class alone are born to live and to rule.
Others are born to serve Religion. Hindu philosophy, whether it is Vedanta,
Sankhya, Nyaya, Vaishashika, has moved in its own circle without in anyway
affecting the Hindu religion. It has never had the courage to challenge this
gospel. That Hindu philosophy that everything is Brahma remained only a matter
of intellect. It never became a social philosophy. The Hindu philosophers had both
their philosophy and their Manu held apart in two hands, the right not knowing
what the left had. The Hindu is never troubled by their inconsistency. As to
their social system, can things be worst ? The Caste system is in itself a
degenerate form of the Chaturvarnya which is the ideal of the Hindu. How can
anybody who is not a congenital idiot accept Chaturvarnya as the ideal form of
society ? Individually and socially it is a folly and a crime. One class and
one class alone to be entitled to education and learning! One class and one
class alone to be entitled to arms! One class and one class alone to trade! One
class and one class alone to serve! For the individual the consequences are obvious.
Where can you find a learned man who has no means of livelihood who will not
degrade his education? Where can you find a soldier with no education and
culture who will use his arms to conserve and not to destroy ? Where can you
find a merchant with nothing but the acquisitive instinct to follow who will
not descend to the level of the brute ? Where can you find the servant who is
not to acquire education, who is not to own arms and who is not to possess
other means of livelihood to be a man as his maker intended him to be ? If
baneful to the individual it makes society vulnerable. It is not enough for a
social structure to be good for a fair weather. It must be able to weather the
storm. Can the Hindu caste system stand the gale and the wind of an aggression
? It is obvious that it cannot. Either for defence or for offence a society
must be able to mobilize its forces. With functions and duties exclusively
distributed and immutably assigned, what way is there for mobilization ? Ninety
per cent of the Hindus— Brahmins, Vaishyas and Shudras—could not bear arms
under the Hindu social system. How can a country be defended if its army cannot
be increased in the hour of its peril. It is not Buddha who, as is often
alleged, weakened Hindu society by his gospel of non-violence. It is the
Brahminic theory of Chaturvarnya that has been responsible not only for the
defeat but for the decay of Hindu society. Some of you will take offence at
what I have said about the demoralizing effect of the Hindu socio-religious
ideal on Hindu society. But what is the truth ? Can the charge be denied ? Is
there any society in the world which has unapproachables, unshadowables and
unseeables ? Is there any society which has got a population of Criminal Tribes
? Is there a society in which there exists today primitive people, who live in
jungles, who do not know even to clothe themselves ? How many do they count in
numbers ? Is it a matter of hundreds, is it a matter of thousands ? I wish they
numbered a paltry few. The tragedy is that they have to be counted in millions,
millions of Untouchables, millions of Criminal Tribes, millions of Primitive
Tribes!! One wonders whether the Hindu civilization, is civilization or infamy?
This is about the ideal. Turn now to the state of things as it existed when
Ranade came on the scene. It is impossible to realize now the state of
degradation they had reached when the British came on the scene and with which
the reformers like Ranade were faced. Let me begin with the condition of the intellectual
class. The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its
intellectual class—upon the lead given by the Brahmins. Under the old Hindu Law
the Brahmin enjoyed the benefit of the clergy and not be hanged even if he was
guilty of murder, and the East India Company allowed him the privilege till
1817. That is no doubt because he was the salt of the Earth. Was there any salt
left in him ? His profession had lost all its nobility. He had become a pest.
The Brahmin systematically preyed on society and profiteered in religion. The Puranas
and Shastras which he manufactured in tons are treasure trove of
sharp practices which the Brahmins employed to befool, beguile and swindle the
common mass of poor, illiterate and superstitious Hindus. It is impossible in
this address to give references to them. I can only refer to the coercive
measures which the Brahmins had sanctified as proper to be employed against the
Hindus to the encashment of their rights and privileges. Let those who want to
know read the preamble to Regulation XXI of 1795. According to it whenever a
Brahmin wanted to get anything which could not be willingly got from his
victim, he resorted to various coercive practices—lacerating his own body with
knives and razors or threatening to swallows some poison were the usual tricks
he practised to carry out his selfish purposes. There were other ways employed by
the Brahmin to coerce the Hindus which were as extraordinary as they were
shameless. A common practice was the erection in front of the house of his
victim of the koorh—a circular enclosure in which a pile of wood was placed—within
the enclosure an old woman was placed ready to be burnt in the koorh if
his object was not granted. The second devise of such a kind was the placing of
his women and children in the sight of his victim and threaten to behead them.
The third was the Dhurna—starving on the doorstep of the victim. This is
nothing. Brahmins had started making claims for a right to deflower the women
of non-Brahmins. The practice prevailed in the family of the Zamorin of Calicut
and among the Vallabhachari sect of Vaishnavas. What depths of degradation the
Brahmins had fallen to ! If, as the Bible says, the salt has lost its flavour
wherewith shall it be salted ? No wonder the Hindu Society had its moral bonds
loosened to a dangerous point. The East India Company had in 1819 to pass a
Regulation (VII of 1819) to put a stop to this moral degeneracy. The preamble
to the Regulation says that women were employed wholesale to entice and take
away the wives or female children for purposes of prostitution, and it was
common practice among husbands and fathers to desert their families and
children. Public conscience there was none, and in the absence of conscience it
was futile to expect moral indignation against the social wrongs. Indeed the
Brahmins were engaged in defending every wrong for the simple reason that they
lived on them. They defended Untouchability which condemned millions to the lot
of the helot. They defended caste, they defended female child marriage and they
defended enforced widowhood—the two great props of the Caste system. They
defended the burning of widows, and they defended the social system of graded
inequality with its rule of hypergamy which led the Rajputs to kill in their
thousands the daughters that were born to them. What shames! What wrongs! Can
such a society show its face before civilized nations ? Can such a society hope
to survive ? Such were the questions which Ranade asked. He concluded that on
only one condition it could be saved—namely, rigorous social reform.
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