Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 197, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 August 1911 — India's Varied Hunman Types [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

India's Varied Hunman Types

T IE charm, as well as the problems, of India lies in Its most extraordinary variety. A flying politician, taken in hand by a Bengali, sees infinitely less in India than a British workingman sees of Germany conducted through manufacturing cities by a tariff reformer. It is a most foolish and a most dangerous thing for a mani oHltHe'imsemtiaiifr smaif imagination and no reflection to race through one or two Indian cities and then express himself on Indian politics with more authority than a man of science would speak of chemistry after a life of incessant investigation. It needs actual experience to appreciate this amazing variety of human types; and yet until this variety is realized in the mind of a European there can be no Intelligent understanding of anything that has to do with India. The very first thing a man must do who..would, form rational opinions on Indian politics or carry in his mind a true picture of Indian color and Indian feeling is to realize that the 300,000,000 of humanity comprising the empire of India are not one race or two races, but are 8,000 species of mankind as different from "each other as snakes from elephants, tigers from fireflies and mosquitoes from buffaloes. Directed by Handful of British. You cannot dogmatize about India. You can no more speak of India as one complete and single thing than you can exhaust botany by smelling a rose or paying sixpence for a bunch of lilies. India is infinite. A man with seeing eyes begins to perceive this baffling truth on his very first walk through a street, and he is at once on his guard in forming opinions, and most diffident in venturing to utter even the least uncertain of them. He who speaks .otjndia as a nation of Hindoos and Mohammedans would speak of tjje constellations as consisting of Orion and tfrsa Major.

There are many good people in England who think of Indians as two peoples, Hindus and Mohammedans, purposely kept apart and purposely held down by an immense army of proudful, iniquitous and atrabilious civil servants exported year by year by the India office. Let these good people bear in mind that the inhabitants of India represent 2,000 species of mankind, that not only is each species opposed socially and intellectually to the rest, but that they practice toward each other an ostracism which has never existed in England between the greatest Swellfoot and the most downtrodden hind; and, further, let him definitely apprehend and reflect upon this fact, that the whole company of British civil servants, including military officers holding civil appointments, is only 1,200. India is governed by Indians, a tremendous army of them, with just 1,200 British citizens at their head. One might far more truly saythat India employs a : handful of Englishmen to direct her own government than assert that England holds India in the grip of an iron hand. Influence of Caste Everywhere. I have seen nothing of violence or even rudeness on the part of Englishmen toward the natives; but I have no doubt that Instances of this kind could be cited and perhaps proved. I have seen, known and I see it every day I live in India, and every mile I travel in the courftry, instances of the most intolerable exclusiveness and appalling pride between native and native. Consider these two facts: A Brahmah priest will not visit a low caste person, however extreme his need; and a high caste doctor will not go to the bedside of a dying coolie. "Thanks be to God,” said to me a benevolent and educated Hindu, “for the hospitals set up for poor people by the British government** A postman will not deliver letters into the hands of a lower caste man than himself; he flings them down on the ground. Democracy has no expression whatever in India except through the government, which devotes all its

labors to improving the material for* tunes of the poor. It is the abused civil servant who has given India an idea at all of democracy and it is the civil servant who governs for the many and the poor and the general welfare. At every railway station, even the smallest, you may see something of the infinite variety of Indian mankind. Men of noble stature and intellectual countenance, men to all intents negroid and bestial, men of Jewish character, men like Chinese, men black, brown, chocolate, yellow and almost white, move about among a womankind degraded to the lowest forms of labor and debased out of the likeness of humanity. - The turbans and loin cloths of the men are different; the fashion of wearing the hair is different; they eat different foods, worship different gods or devils, speak entirely different languages and will have no more relations one with another than exists between an English crow and a flying fish in the Red sea. The sects of Christendom are as one loving and united church as compared with the religions of India. Something like a quarter of the population of India, let us say 10,000,000 of men and women, are regarded as outcasts, helots and abomination by the other three-quarters. And these helots have their separating prides and customs. In every little village the outcasts live in a quarter of their own, and if they would worship a god, must make their own temple and employ a priest of their own order —a priest despised and loathed by the religious leaders. They are worse treated than the galled bullocks under the yoke of the transit bandy and they ill treat each other. Multitudes Ruled by a Despot. From the ascetic and refined native, who will not eat animals, down to the native who eats lizards and mice, and downward still to the native who lives upon the human corpses fished from the Ganges, there is in India every height and every depth of the human mind ever comprehended in the soul of Shakespeare or the heart of Dante. In England one might classify Englishmen with perhaps 200 temperaments. In India one has to speak to 2,000 different species. Reflect upon this fact until it is realized; reflect that the dense millions of India are races of men as various and disparate as the leaves -of a foreat, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea; definitely possess the mind of the idea that between these groups of crowding humanity there are greater gulfs than anything which separates an intellectual Englishman from a Scandinavian peasant and you will be at the beginning of a trdv conception of India’s mystery and at the door through which a European must first pass truly to comprehend and feel her infinite charm and the sorcery of all her multitudinous glamour. Caste, you may be told, is breaking down in the cities. This is partly true, but only in A a general sense. And if caste broke down absolutely in all the cities it would not altar the truth of Sir Bamfylde Fuller’s statement For the cities are only specks on the map of India and the people who dwell there are but a child’s handful out of the 300,000,000 inhabitants. Something like 90 per cent of the population live on the land, and among these 270,000,000 the system of caste is not merely lieutenant governor or viceroy, but king of India, the one supreme and unquestioning obedience In rendered by all the peoples.

Riding a Buffalo.