Chapter 3
INDIA. MEN
When Max Muller told his son to grow fond of someone or something and so be raised to the intensity of a passion, he was thinking of his own life Whatever his love for someone might have brought him, his fondness for something never disappointed him That was India, adopted as a boy’s dream and pursued through life as an object of love Many people looked upon this as his great illusion It could be, for he could create an India of his own, as Pygmalion did with his Galatea Though absorbed in India all his life, he never visited the country In early life he could not because his mother thought that England was far enough His love affair and marriage also prevented it In middle age he was too busy at Oxford, and when old he felt that a visit to India would be too great a physical strain Among Indians the legend grew that he believed their country to have been the land of his previous birth, and that to see it might prove a fatal shock of joy
He himself did not think that not to visit a country where lay one’s spiritual or intellectual interest was necessarily a great loss Learmng that his son had visited Palestine and recalling his longing to see the East in his young days, he wrote to Wilhelm on April 9, 1898 T have had to give up many of these dreams, but somehow one learns to see with the mind and imagination what we cannot see with the eyes, nay, in many cases I believe imagination is truer than what you see. People go to Jerusalem to see the place of some of the miracles, and they do not see the greatest of miracles, that out of that small town, in a small country, there should have risen a light to light the whole world *
The fact that he had no first-hand experience of India was often thrown in his teeth by the Englishmen there, who did not like his advocacy of Indians and his enthusiastic evocations of ancient Hindu civilization The charitable among them regarded him as too idealistic, and the malicious gloated over his disenchantment if he were ever to visit the country Referring to this the Statesman of Calcutta, one of the leading English language newspapers in India, then wholly under English ownership, management and editorial
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direction, wrote on May 10, 1903, in reviewing Mrs Max Muller’s biography of her husband
The conjecture is often hazarded that, had Max Muller seen with his own eyes the India of whose people and thought he wrote with so noble an enthusiasm and so fine a sympathy, the illusion would have fallen from him We cannot think it The man whose insight was equal to the task of piercing through all the accretions overlying the Hindu scriptures to the pure gold of the idea and the poetry beneath, would assuredly have been baffled by no obstacle created by the India we know today Beneath and behind the distorting reality he would have seen the India of his vision , and, although his theories would have been modified, his attitude towards the real contribution which India has made to the intellectual life of the world would have remained unchanged
This vindication, so far as it went, was correct But from another point of view it was unnecessary For one thing, as will be seen presently, Max Muller was not unaware of the actual social, moral and religious condition of the India of his time Then, the India he idealized, that of the ancient Hindus, could be idealized and made proof against disillusionment, for it was reconstructed from certain ancient religious and philosophical texts which admitted of a wide range of interpretation according to the inclinations of the reconstructor, so that no one who differed from him could charge him either with ignorance or with intellectual dishonesty Furthermore, it is impossible to check the correctness of any such reconstruction against concrete historical evidence as to cults and beliefs
For instance, the religious and philosophic ideas to be found in the Rig-Veda and the other Vedas , to take only three principal interpretations, those of Max Muller, Bergaigne and Keith, there is not a scrap of evidence, except the existence of the texts, that these ideas formed the basis of the religious life of the Hindus in times which properly belong to history The differences in the interpretations are due to differences in philological exegesis combined with assumptions regarding early religion, and the philological exegesis itself is conjectural So Max Muller could create his ancient India without being compelled to change his picture ^Actually, he did more He imposed his idea of India and of Hindu religion in its most ancient form on the religious life of the Hindus of his time His picture, which he put before Indians and Europeans alike, was built up with the help of a selective principle applied to the
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entire body of Sanskrit literature, and the principle led him to formulate his peculiar view of the historical development of this literature He expounded it on different occasions, but expressed it most succinctly and clearly in the lectures delivered by him at Cambridge in 1882, which afterwards he published under the title India * What Can It Teach Us?
According to him, the whole of Sanskrit literature could be divided into two parts one preceding the Turanian invasions, and the other following them He used the general term ‘Turanian’ for the Sakas or Scythians, Kushanas, and all the nomadic or seminomadic peoples who came into India and ruled there from the first century b c to the third century ad To the pre-Turanian epoch, he said, belonged the Vedic literature and the ancient literature of the Buddhists To the post-Turanian epoch belonged all the rest of Sanskrit literature, whether religious or secular Between the two periods he assumed a longish period of literary unproductiveness for the Hindus, and called the later literature that of the Sanskrit Renaissance
Moreover, he drew a qualitative distinction between the products of the two periods, regarding those of the earlier period as ‘ancient’ and ‘natural’, and those of the later as ‘modern’ and ‘artificial’ He thought that the literature of the second period was never a living and national literature for the Hindus, though it contained relics of earlier times. The great mass of it was artificial and scholastic, full of interesting compositions and by no means devoid of originality and occasional beauty Yet all that held appeal for the Oriental scholar alone, and not for the historian, or philosopher with a broad human sympathy
Max Muller set down his deliberate opinion
It was a real misfortune that Sanskrit literature became first known to the learned public in Europe through specimens belonging to the second or what I called the Renaissance period Although the specimens of this modem Sanskrit literature, when they first became known, served to arouse a general interest, and serve even now to keep alive a certain superficial sympathy for Indian literature, more serious students had soon disposed of these compositions, and while gladly admitting their claim to be called pretty and attractive, could not think of allowing Sanskrit literature a place among the world-literatures, a place by the side of Greek and Latin, Italian, French, English or German.
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This was virtually falling in with the view of Sanskrit literature taken by Mill and Macaulay, quoted in a previous chapter
‘It is different/ he declared, ‘with the ancient literature of India, the literature dominated by the Vedic and the Buddhist religions That literature opens to us a chapter in what has been called the Education of the Human Race, to which we can find no parallel anywhere else 5 He further said that anybody who cared for the origins of language, thought, religion, philosophy, or law and many other human creations ‘must in future pay the same attention to the literature of the Vedic period as to the literature of Greece and Rome and Germany’
Knowledge of this period of Sanskrit literature, he said, began with Eugene Burnouf, who was not likely to spend his life on pretty Sanskrit ditties and wanted to correlate Sanskrit literature to history, human history, world history, and laid hold of Vedic literature and Buddhist literature as the two stepping stones in the slough of Indian literature’ As a result of the study of Sanskrit thus inaugurated, something other than a particular literary expression was to be found in Sanskrit literature So he wrote ‘What then, you may ask, do we find in that ancient Sanskrit literature and cannot find anywhere else ? My answer is, We find there the Aryan man, whom we knew in his various characters, as Greek, Roman, German, Celt and Slav, in an entirely new character, a character,’ he explained, ‘which was the complement of that of the Northern Aryan ’
He elaborated the idea in a very eloquent passage of his lecture:
All then that I wish to put clearly before you is this, that the Aryan man, who had to fulfil his mission in India, might naturally be deficient in many of the practical and fighting virtues, which were developed in the Northern Aryans by the very struggle without which they could not have survived, but that his life on earth had not therefore been entirely wasted. His very view of life, though we cannot adopt it in this Northern climate, may yet act as a lesson and warning to us, not, for the sake of life, to sacrifice the highest objects of life
^ There is undoubted truth in the antithesis thus emphasized between the activism of the Northern Aryan and the quietism of the Southern ,JBut Max Muller did not realize that the first was the result of a successful struggle and the second of an unsuccessful and hopeless struggle — both against nature. Yet from the historical
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point of view he was not right He was underrating and partly rejecting the whole expression of that ancient Indian civilization of whose existence we have historical evidence from archaeology, inscriptions, art and literary products both religious and secular And he was treating as the most important and valuable that part which was only prehistoric or protohistonc And even that was only by inference rather than by direct historic proof
His view of the two periods of Sanskrit literature is not historical if one excludes the Vedic literature, both in the hymns and the liturgical texts, and the most archaic mystical works What he regarded as a Renaissance of Sanskrit literature was most probably its first birth The secular literature was certainly a new appearance, and even in regard to the religious texts, which he assigned to the earlier epoch, we cannot be sure when they received their present form Many of them must have done only in the so-called age of the Renaissance Besides, he was wrong in thinking that classical Sanskrit literature was artificial, rhetorical and merely pretty By the same criterion the whole of Latin literature might be called artificial ; and in English literature Shakespeare, Milton and Pope, not to mention others, should be regarded as extravagantly rhetorical or conventional Max Muller’s taste in poetry was neither comprehensive nor eclectic He regretted that his Oxford friends often forgot that he had been brought up on German poetry and though he knew Heme, Ruckert, Eichendorff, Chamisso and Geibel, not to speak of Goethe, Schiller, Burger and even Klopstock, their allusions to Tennyson, Browning, Shelley or Keats were entirely lost on him He revealed his preference in poetry by saymg that Tennyson’s In Memonam remained a treasure for life with him
But the ancient India which he regarded as the highest and most valuable was his own creation, and thus immune to disillusionment But since he was presenting that India to the Indians of his time in order to raise them from the cultural condition to which they had reduced themselves, and to revitalize their life, it is quite possible that he would have been saddened by the actual conditions, and had a feeling of despair had he ever visited India
A man of Max Muller’s deep and broad humanity could not fail to be attracted to the men and women of the country he loved so much. In fact, his personal relations with the Indians he met in the course of his long life provide the most touching expression of his devotion to India I was surprised by the span of time over which he
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had either Indian acquaintances or Indian correspondents The first Indian he met was Dwarkanath Tagore, born at the end of the eighteenth century, and one of his last correspondents was an eminent Bengali whom I used to meet in Calcutta in the thirties of this century In between there were many figures of first rank in modern India like Raja Radhakanta Deb, Debendranath Tagore, Keshub Chunder Sen, Rajendra Lai Mitra, Bhao Daji, Behramji Malabari and K T Telang He particularly sympathized with those who were trying to reform Indian religion and social customs, and were not only working for the cause, but also suffering for it In doing so and championing them, he did not shrink from courting unpopularity and abuse A full account will be found in the second volume of his reminiscences, Auld Lang Syne But my accounts are also given from intimate personal correspondence
The next Indian whom he met was no celebrity, but he had a remarkable history of religious struggle One day in 1854 Muller was sitting in his room at Oxford copying his MSS, when an Indian dressed in a long black coat was shown m, and he addressed Muller m a language of which he did not understand a single word Max Muller replied in English, and asked in what language he was speaking The visitor was surprised ‘Do you not understand Sanskrit Max Muller said ‘No, I have never heard it spoken, but here are some MSS of the Veda which will interest you ’ The Indian read a little, and then remarked that he was not able to translate what he was reading On Muller’s expressing surprise, the man said that he did not believe in the Veda any more, he had become a Christian Then he told a remarkable story His Hindu name was Nilakantha Goreh, but had been changed to Nehemiah Goreh on his conversion. On account of his conversion he had lost all, for even his wife and his father had had to repudiate him Goreh had been placed with a missionary seminary in London, where he found himself among a number of prospective missionaries whom he considered halfeducated and narrow-minded He did not get any sympathy from them, but was blamed for everything he said or did He was treated as a kind of nigger by those who should have respected him He saw nothing in London that answered his notion of what a Christian city should be ‘If what I have been seeing in London is Christianity, I want to go back to India , if that is Christianity, I am not a Christian 9 Muller thought that all this was very ominous After a time his friends sent Goreh back to India, feeling that there was a real
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danger of his falling into utter despair There, as Muller wrote, what seemed to be almost an innate tendency of the Indian mind developed m Goreh, and he decided to renounce the world altogether and become an ascetic Still later he joined the Society of the Cowley Brothers which had branches in India On the day before he was to leave Oxford he came to see Max Muller for a short while and Muller gave the news to his wife on November 3 ‘Now and then the old spirit seemed to move in him, but he soon relapsed into formulas it was sad to see the eagle with broken wmgs ’
In his diary Muller wrote
Last Saturday Nilakantha Goreh called on me 1 It was sad — I had not seen him for I suppose 25 years He has become a monk, a Cowley Brother* How different from what he was when he stepped into my room in Park Place 1 He was then a true martyr, a man who had made greater sacrifices for his conviction than any man I knew And now* The old fire is quenched 1 ‘We must keep to the Creeds’, he says — he who had left father, wife, friends, fortune and home to be free of men and creeds [The year is 1877]
In the biography of Goreh written by a missionary,* he is shown as making harsh remarks about Max Muller, and airing contempt for his knowledge of Hindu philosophy But Muller in his reminiscences of Goreh, written at the end of his own life, had only praise and affection for him
Yet a Hindu Bengali, who was a friend of Goreh and knew him intimately, wrote to Muller T really could not understand how a man of Mr Goreh 5 s intelligence and learning, who had discarded Hinduism, could accept, in its stead, popular Christianity which stands on the same level with popular Hinduism By popular Christianity I mean the Christianity of the Church, as contradistinguished from the Christianity of Christ 5 The next Indian whose connexion with Max Muller I shall describe was also on a religious quest, but he was not an obscure individual like Goreh He was Keshub Chunder Sen, who, as a religious and social reformer, will always have a place in any history of modern India He was leading a powerful monotheistic movement, very largely modelled on Christianity, and even before he was thirty was so famous that Lord Lawrence, the Viceroy, invited him to Simla
C E Gardner, The Life of Father Goreh , edited and with a preface by R. in Benson, London, Longman’s, 1900
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as his guest He was a man of extraordinary and almost wild enthusiasm and eloquence, and spoke English as well as he did Bengali He was bom into a wealthy and very respected family of Calcutta, but had given up, or rather was forced to give up, his family on account of his religious convictions However, he gave up his secular employment voluntarily, and became a preacher His very young wife accompanied him both in his religious mission and his break with Hindu society
Keshub Chunder Sen came to England in 1870, when he was thirty-two As Max Muller related in his biographical essay on Sen ‘His stay in England was a constant triumph 5 He spoke in London and all the principal towns, and produced a deep impression on all his hearers from all classes of society ‘His name’, Muller added, ‘became almost a household word in England ’ It should be mentioned that the reception which Sen got in England was partly the result of the interest in India, both ancient and modern, which Muller himself had created He was also invited to meet Queen Victoria
Max Muller met him for the first time at a luncheon given by Dean Stanley, and on April 1, 1870, wrote to his wife ‘We have just come back from London, where we had a very interesting luncheon at the Deanery No one there but Keshub Chunder Sen, and the Prince [Leopold, son of Queen Victoria] and I We soon got into a warm discussion, and it was curious to see how we almost made him confess himself a Christian He will come to Oxford, and then I hope to see more of him ’
Sen went to Oxford and stayed with Muller, who had a good opportunity of watching him, and always found him perfectly tranquil, even when very earnest, with his opinions clear and settled The highlight of the Oxford visit was Sen’s meeting with Dr Pusey Pusey was not very pleased with his lectures, and still less with his association with the English Unitarians But there was a long and serious talk between the two in the presence of Muller, who later, when he had to write about Sen, regretted that he had kept no record of that interview None the less, he remembered the end of the discussion quite distinctly, for it turned on a question of his own The point at issue was whether those who were born and brought up as members of a non-Christian religion could have salvation in the Christian sense Pusey did not think so Muller asked him pointedly whether at the time of Christ a man who believed
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what Keshub Chunder Sen believed would or would not have been received as a disciple He and Sen maintained that he would have been Pusey held his ground Much depended on what salvation meant, and Sen defined it as an uninterrupted union with God and said ‘My thoughts are never away from God my life is a constant prayer, and there are but few moments in the day when I am not praying to God*’ Dr Pusey was softened by this, and remarked with a smile ‘Then you are all right ’
In 1878 there came a crisis in Sen’s triumphant religious career An offer came from an Indian prince, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, to marry Sen’s eldest daughter, who was not yet quite fourteen years old For the sake of succession the marriage had to be accord™ mg to Hindu rites Now, idolatrous rites and child marriage were the very things which Sen as a religious and social reformer had opposed He had made it a rule for his followers not to observe the former in any circumstances, and not to marry their daughters before they had completed their fourteenth year In fact, an Act passed in 1872 had legalized marriages performed according to Brahmo rites and fixed the minimum age for it as fourteen But Sen fell in with the proposal, and his daughter was married to the prince in February 1878, and some subterfuges were adopted to satisfy the conscience of Sen At once a storm broke over his head Many of his followers had already been offended by his dictatorial ways, and now they accused him of apostasy They seceded from his church and founded a parallel one The quarrel was continued with extreme bitterness, and Sen’s plea that he had given his daughter in marriage to the prince by hearing an adesh or command from God, with whom he had communed over the question, was treated as pure opportunism
Max Muller felt distressed at what Sen had done, or rather by the manner in which Sen did it But he was not the man to abandon a friend for one act of weakness So he wrote to another Indian reformer on March 29, 1879
I have full faith in Keshub Chunder Sen I cannot bear to see the unforgiving way in which he has lately been treated He has made a mistake, no doubt But even if he had committed a crime, would it be impossible to forgive ? Are his judges immaculate ? Do they know the temptations of a man placed in so exceptional a position ? He has been too kind, too yielding as a father — he has himself acknowledged that much That is enough You will never find immaculate saints on earth-
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we ought to be grateful when we find an honest man, though he may not be free from human weaknesses
To an English critic of Sen he wrote also T cannot easily give up a man whom I once trusted ’ And he wrote to The Times in defence of Sen But the English friends of the new Hindu Theists of the strictest sect were more unrelenting than the early Christians who overlooked St Peter’s three denials of Christ
Sen was deeply touched by Max Muller’s defence, and wrote from Calcutta
My dear Sir, Allow me to thank you most cordially for having said a good word for us in The Times I have read your letter with very great interest, and thankfully appreciate your heartfelt sympathy with us in our trials and difficulties You can hardly imagine the troubles I have had during the last two or three years and the grossly false and libellous charges brought against me week after week All this I say to you privately because you have been good enough to give us your sympathy as a friend, and because you have boldly come forward, as few have done, to assert publicly that personal feelings lie at the bottom of the opposition movement However, God’s will be done 1
In private Max Muller told Sen what he really thought of his conduct In principle he did not object to the marriage between the Hindu Maharaja and Sen’s daughter. He even quoted St Paul’s words about marriages between pagans and Christians ‘The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband, else were your children unclean, but now are they holy ’ He was also honest enough to say that had he himself been placed in Sen’s position he would probably have acted in the same way But, he said, Sen should have taken his friends and followers into his confidence, instead of trying to impose his choice on them as God’s commandment
Sen replied that the whole affair was so uncertain, and the marriage appeared so improbable until it was a fait accompli , that he really had no time to consult his friends He also explained that what he called God’s commandment was not ‘supernatural inspiration’, but a ‘command of conscience’ In plain words, he thought that the marriage was providential Tt was very like a political marriage, such as you speak of A whole kingdom was to be reformed, and all my individual interests were absorbed in the vastness of God’s saving economy, or in what people would call public good. The Lord
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required my daughter for Cooch Behar, and I surrendered her ’ In any case, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, though he remained Hindu in form, became a patron of all the liberal movements in religion, as well as other things including cricket
Sen wrote to Max Muller that the hostility and the attacks of his detractors had actually helped the progress of his church e Our influence spreads on all sides, and there is far greater enthusiasm among us now than in any previous period in the history of our church ’ In one sense this was true, for Keshub Chunder Sen was giving a form to his movement, now called the New Dispensation, which in its public expression fell in line with the traditional Vaisnavism of Bengal This consisted in going through Calcutta and other towns singing and dancing to the accompaniment of drums, exhibiting the maudlin religious enthusiasm of that sect This is the exhibition, given on a very miniature scale, which now evokes admiration or amusement in Oxford Street, and which I have also seen in the United States It was a sort of High Church movement among the Hindu Theists, and naturally it drew the condemnation of the seceding Theists who were very much Low Church It scandalized the supporters of Sen in England, and it was described as ‘a combination of dervish dances and Roman Catholicism’
Max Muller wrote a very sensible letter on this external exhibition to Sen’s loyal follower Pratap Chunder Mozoomdar In it he wrote
To tell you the truth, I am not fond of such things , but every religion is a compromise between men and children . ♦ There is no real harm m shaving one’s hair A man must either shave his hair or let it grow, and who shall say which of the two is best? As to leading an ascetic life, what harm is there in that ? India is the very country for leading an ascetic life, and a man does not there banish himself from society by it, as he would do in Europe Pilgrimages too, singing in the open air and carrying flags, seem all so natural to those who know the true Indian life — not the life of Calcutta or Bombay — that I cannot see why people in England should be so shocked by what they call Keshub Chunder Sen’s vagaries
About flag-wavmg by Sen’s followers, Muller, if anything, was even more sensible ‘Because he carries a flag, which was the recognized custom among ancient religious leaders, he is accused of
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worshipping a flag I am sure he does not pay half the worship to his flag which every English soldier does to his It often becomes to him a real fetish, and yet a soldier, when he dies for his flag, is honoured by the very people who now cry out against Keshub Chunder Sen, because he honours his flag, as a symbol of his cause. 5
But what Max Muller more seriously objected to was Sen’s extreme emotionalism, and he wrote about it to Sen himself But Sen replied unrepentantly
The forms of one nation are apt to be repulsive and even shocking to another Our Oriental nature is our apology for the ‘impassioned utterances’, the ‘language of excessive veneration 5 , ‘highflown Language 5 , etc , you speak of How can I, my friend, destroy my Asiatic nature, how can I discard the language of poetry and emotion and inspiration which is my life and nature ? To adopt any other language would cost me much effort, would be artificial, mechanical, unnatural, and, I may add, hypocritical I must speak as I feel, and you know my devotion is, as a rule, extemporaneous Our tears during prayer, our fervent and constant apostrophizing, our ascetic habits, our very forms of devotion in which we speak of God as one whom we see and hear , may be disagreeable to European eyes and ears, but so long as they are natural and national, and not affected or borrowed, we need not be afraid of serious consequences
In addition to havmg this sort of enthusiasm ingrained within himself as a Bengali, Sen may also quite sincerely have felt that he should recast the monotheism he was preaching, which was very largely Christian in inspiration as well as spirit, in a national mould At the height of the agitation against him, his follower Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, who was to take his place after his death as the leader of the New Dispensation, and who had a far more powerful intellect than his leader though he remained perfectly loyal to him, wrote to Max Muller.
‘You have watched the agitation on the Cooch Behar marriage The agitation began from deeper causes, and ended in deeper opposition than a mere protest against the marriage Keshub Chunder Sen’s genius is too Western for his own countrymen, and too Eastern for yours His mind is so independent and original, so far above conventional proprieties of every sort, that long before the marriage he had begun to make enemies both inside and outside the Brahmo Samaj ’ This was very true The Christian missionaries m India too disliked Sen, though, of course, they never persecuted
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him Speaking in England in 1870, Sen had actually said ‘Allow me, friends, to say, England is not yet a Christian nation ’ So even m 1873, in the course of his lecture on missions delivered in Westminster Abbey, Muller said ‘They [the missionaries] feel towards Keshub Chunder Sen as Athanasius might have felt towards Ulfilas, the Arian Bishop of the Goths, yet what would have become of Christianity in Europe but for the Gothic races, but for those Anan heretics, who were considered more dangerous than downright pagans?’
In spite of differences of temperament and ways of thinking, neither of them lost respect and admiration for each other When trying to recuperate in the Himalayas from an illness which led to his death, Sen wrote from Simla on July 20, 1883 T am sorry I cannot write to you so often as I wish But of this I can assure you, that you are often present in my thoughts The affinity is not only ethnic, but in the highest degree spiritual, which often draws you into my heart and makes me enjoy the pleasure of friendly intercourse I forget the distance, and feel we are very near each other 9
Sen died less than six months later, and Max Muller wrote an eloquent and touching obituary notice, which he closed with these words ‘As long as there is a religion in India, whatever its name may be, the name of Keshub Chunder Sen will be gratefully remembered, as one who lived and died for the glory of God, for the welfare of mankind, and for the truth, so far as he could see it 9
But Muller’s most sincere tribute was paid more than fifteen years later when he himself had come very near death Sen’s aged mother, hearing of Muller’s serious illness at the end of 1899, wrote through hei grandsons to inquire about his health He replied on November 27 ‘Please to tell your dear grandmother that I feel much touched by her sympathy . I miss her son very much He was so kind, so gentle, so good a man too, and his mother ought indeed to be proud to be the mother of such a man ’
Sen was fifteen years younger than Max Muller, and died fifteen years before him
This very incomplete account of Max Muller’s personal relations with Indians should mclude his tributes to two remarkable Indian women of his time, only one of whom he met Both were heroic in every sense of the word. The first of them was Rama Bai, called Pandita or Learned, whose Sanskrit leaning had become a legend m India. Her life was even more remarkable and might be called an
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epic in immature Max Muller wrote of her as the ‘truly heroic Hindu lady, in appearance small, delicate, and timid, but in reality strong and bold as a lioness’
She was the daughter of a very learned Brahmin of an ancient and venerated clan, but was born in a forest of the Western Ghats This Brahmin had as a widower married Ramabai’s mother when she was only nine years old He had tried to teach his first wife, but was not allowed to do so by his family because there was prejudice in traditional Hindu society agamst educating women He tried again with his second wife, and when again opposed, he retired to the wilderness to be free There the wife grew to be learned, and they had three children, one son and two daughters, Ramabai being the younger daughter His reputation for learning spread, and students began to come to his house He also attracted visitors
A traditional Hindu teacher could not take fees, but on the contrary had to house and feed his pupils on what support he got from generous patrons of learning Ramabai’s father lived in his hermitage for some time, teaching his son and elder daughter with the students Soon the expenses became so heavy that he had to break up his home, and began to wander all over India with his family, earning a livelihood by reciting or expounding the sacred books in palaces or Maths (monasteries) His eldest daughter married, and his son and Ramabai helped him in this
When he died his son supported his widow as well as Rama in the same way, but they earned very little Then the mother died, and after travelling all over India on foot the brother and sister came at last to Calcutta, where Ramabai’s lectures created a sensation But a new blow fell The brother died, and left alone she was compelled to marry However, her marriage was very happy, and she had a daughter whom she named Manorama or Heart’s Joy But after nineteen months she became a widow In her desperation she decided to fit herself for practical work, and in order to get medical training, helpless as she was, she decided to come to England She scraped together all she had earned by lecturing and translating Sanskrit for the government, and arrived there, quite destitute at the end of her journey
With her child and the woman friend who had accompanied her she was taken to the Anglican Sisterhood at Wantage, some members of which she had known at Poona She told them, however, that she would never become a Christian. She paid a visit to Max
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Muller at Oxford at the time, and on October 27, 1883, Muller wrote to his young son ‘We had a nice visit from Ramabai, a Brahmin lady who knows Sanskrit splendidly She knows books as long as Homer by heart from beginning to end — speaks Sanskrit correctly, and writes Sanskrit poetry Unfortunately she hears very badly, and as she came to England to study and take a degree, she is very unhappy ’
What actually happened, however, was terrible Ramabai’s companion feared that they might be made Christian by force, and tried to strangle her to death to save her from the calamity Failing in this she killed herself It was after this that Ramabai came over to stay with Max Muller at Oxford Her nervous prostration was such that one of Muller’s maidservants had to sleep with her at night Arrangements were made to enable her to attend medical lectures, but her hearing became suddenly worse, and the idea had to be given up She then decided to tram herself as a nurse, to do some useful work in India
At this juncture she was invited to America to see the presentation of a doctorate in medicine by the Medical College of Pennsylvania to a young countrywoman of hers, who was the first Indian woman to take such a degree anywhere, and who had known and helped her after her widowhood in India Ramabai went and found many friends, who helped her to start a home for young Hindu widows in India But in the meantime she had to become a Christian because she could not stand alone , she had to belong to somebody and somewhere, especially to worship God with those who had been kind to her Writing about this Max Muller felt sure that she herself would not make any attempts to proselytize among the little widows who were entrusted to her, ‘but she lost, of course, the support of her native friends and has to fight her battles alone ’
In 1887 Muller wrote to the reformer Malabari ‘Try to establish schools or refuges for widows Here you might combine with Ramabai. I suppose she will soon return to India She has become a Christian, but she is not narrow-minded, and may be made useful.’ By the end of the century Ramabai had some two thousand widows m her home She wrote a very moving book, Life of a High-Caste Hindu Woman, describing the treatment of a young Hindu woman in the house of her father-in-law.
The other Hmdu woman to whom Max Muller paid a glowing tribute though he never met her, was the friend of Ramabai who had
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got the medical degree Her name was Anandibai Joshi She had been, married at the age of nine, and had been very happy in her marriage So, when asked to speak about child-marriage before an American audience, she stood up and defended it, though of course only as betrothal albeit binding for life She had seen the suffering of young mothers in India, and resolved to take a medical training m America, saying, however T will go to America as a Hmdu, and come back and live among my people as a Hindu ’ So at the age of eighteen she went to Philadelphia with her husband, in spite of endless difficulties, and enrolled as a student in the Medical College of Pennsylvania
Dr Rachel Bodley, who received her, wrote about this coming ‘One day in September 1883, there came to my door a little lady m blue cotton saree, accompanied by her faithful friend, Mrs B F Carpenter of New Jersey, and since that hour when, speechless for very wonder, I bestowed a kiss of welcome upon the stranger’s cheek instead of words, I have loved the women of India 5 Anandibai had very great difficulty in adapting herself to the Western way of life, but she got her degree, and was appointed physician in charge of the female ward at Kolhapur in the province of Bombay Her health however had been undermined, and she died at the age of twenty-two in 1887 Though she had technically lost caste by crossmg the seas, she was received by all, and when she died all Poona mourned with her family Max Muller wrote about this Tt shows that even the most inveterate social and religious diseases are not incurable when treated with unselfish love and generosity If all this could be achieved by a frail young daughter of India, what is there that could be called impossible for the strong men of that country
This faith in the men of India was set down by Max Muller only a year before his own death No one who has the capacity to love deeply and strongly can help extending his love from the general to the particular, or from the particular to the general The failure to be general denies fullness and breadth, and to a certain extent unselfishness in love, while without particular objects, love is disembodied and remains only a tenuous exhalation In Max Muller’s case love became particular in two ways His love of the idea of India and for the ancient civilization of India became more specifically love for the people of India as a whole, it then became love for individual Indians
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So what he found most unnatural and vehemently denounced m the relationship between India and Britain was the habitual denigration of the Indian character by those Englishmen who lived in India or had first-hand experience of the country Muller set himself not only to defend Indians, but also to show in what way the Indian character and outlook could be a complement to those of the European So, in the very first of the lectures he delivered at Cambridge in 1882, to which he boldly gave the title, India What Can It Teach Us he said
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant — I should point to India And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life — again I should point to India
Those who have not gone into the history of Indo-Bntish personal relations during the most stable days of British rule in that country can have no idea what the British contempt and hatred of Indians was like By the end of the nineteenth century the Englishman had formulated his Thirty-nine Articles of dogma regarding Indians, and the first and second Articles were of course that they were all liars and all dishonest These assumptions were communicated in advance to any Englishman who was going to India as an administrator or in any other capacity Generally speaking they were accepted even before the Englishman saw the country and its people So the English came with a prefabricated hostility
Before the Mutiny the attitude was one of more or less passive contempt But after, an element of fear came into the aversion, and sensing the latent hostility of their subjects the British in India snarled like frightened beasts of prey When in 1920 a distinguished Bengali, who had been raised to the peerage and was then Undersecretary of State for India, was justifying in the most moderate language in the House of Lords, the cashiering of General Dyer for shooting hundreds of Indians at Amritsar, a drunken peer was heard
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to shout ‘If they are all like him, the more they shoot the better ’ It must be added, however, that the Indians fully reciprocated the hatred No one stated this more clearly than one of the greatest of modern Indians, the famous Bengali writer, Bankim Chandra Chatterji He wrote in 1873
If we take up any English newspaper [1 e , a newspaper edited by Englishmen in India], we are sure to find somewhere in it some abuse of the Natives, some unfair vilification Again, looking into any Bengali newspaper, we find as a matter of equal certainty anger against the English and denunciation of them In every Indian newspaper there is unjust criticism of the English, in every English newspaper the same injustice to Indians This has been going on for a long time, there is nothing novel about it Conversation in society runs along the same lines
Chatterji accepted this as inherent in the conqueror-conquered relationship, and he added that so long as this lasted there could not be any lessening of the racial hatred
Max Muller set himself to fight and if possible to eliminate this misunderstanding In his second Cambridge lecture therefore he declared that he was going to grapple with a prejudice which was more mischievous than ignorance, because it formed a kind of icy barrier between the Hindus and their rulers, and made anything like a feelmg of true fellowship between the two utterly impossible ‘That prejudice/ he continued, ‘consists in looking upon our stay m India as a kind of moral exile, and in regarding the Hindus as an inferior race, totally different from ourselves in their moral character, and, more particularly in what forms the very foundation of the English character, respect for truth ’
So he devoted the lecture to a demonstration, with facts and testimonies which could not be contested, of the truthful character of the Hindus, and he concluded the lecture with the following words ‘Certainly I can imagine nothing more mischievous, more dangerous, more fatal to the permanence of English rule in India, than for the young Civil Servants to go to that country with the idea that it is a sink of moral depravity, an ant’s nest of lies, for no one is so sure to go wrong, whether in public or in private life, as he who says in his haste ‘All men are hars ” ’
To the end of his life he continued to defend the Indian character This championship in the midst of almost universal denigration
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earned for Max Muller the gratitude of all Indians, and their admiration of him was due no less to it than to his expositions of Hindu life and culture Thus, speaking after his death at a meeting, R G Bhandarkar, a great Sanskrit scholar and a historian, laid greater emphasis on his defence of Indians than on his scholarship He said ‘The character of all of us Indians had been greatly traduced in Europe We were described as men given habitually to lying, of no substance or worth in us, possessing no self-respect and incapable of any great effort Max Muller combated this view ’
The lecture provoked decided antagonism among those Englishmen in England or India who professed to know inhabitants of India One critic called him a Hindu pervert, but a really scandalous sequel followed A leading Sanskrit scholar in England sent a communication to Indian newspapers accusing Max Muller of intellectual dishonesty in defending Hindus against the charge of untruthfulness The first Indian newspaper which published this communication did so in the following news story
A distinguished Orientalist of England, writing to Babu Protapa Chandra Roy of this city, the enterprising publisher of the Mahabharata , says, ‘It may perhaps amuse you to learn that in the recently published German translation of India what can it teach us? the passages in praise of Hmdu truthfulness have, with the author’s sanction been suppressed What will his bosom-friend Dr Rajendralala Mitra say to this ? Why, Dr Mitra, when he sees the work thus mutilated, will simply say that the learned Professor knows the art of being all things to all men at the same time An additional incentive to such suppression might have been found in the little probability of the Professor’s Hindu friends reading his work in German, especially after they had once read it in English
Clearly, this English Orientalist had the animus of Whitney against Max Muller without Whitney’s courage Max Muller could guess the identity of the writer, but did not name him He called the story a scandalous invention from beginning to end The facts were at once communicated to the editor of the Indian paper Max Muller had not seen the German translation before its publication The German translator had only omitted extracts from English writers whose names were less known to German than to English readers, because the lectures had to be abridged
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Even so the wholesale running down of Indians continued, and those who looked upon Indians as an inferior race protested against Max Muller’s description of them as biased Muller admitted quite frankly that the Indians he had known intimately — Dwarkanath Tagore, Keshub Chunder Sen, Behramji Malaban, Ramabai — were exceptional beings, who would be so in England as anywhere else He was not an indiscriminate admirer of everything Indian He had had some unpleasant experiences with the small number of young Indians who came to Oxford About one very unpleasant experience with them he was driven to write in his reminiscences ‘These men have a very curious way of blushing If you convict them of a downright falsehood, their bright brown colour turns suddenly greyish, but their eloquence in defending themselves never fades or flags ’ If I had not read the vindication of Hindu truthfulness offered by Muller, I should have said that the spirit of this remark was not very far from those made by the hardboiled Anglo-Indians of his tunes
What Muller objected to was any sweeping generalization from a small number of personal observations He said ‘If I hear a man calling all Indians liars, I generally ask how many he has known I do the same thing when I hear all Frenchmen called monkeys, all Italians assassins, all Germans unwashed, all Russians savages, or even England Perfide Albion ’ Besides, he knew that the question of Hmdu truthfulness, even when considered on the doctrinal or historical plane, was extremely complex For instance, in establishing the general truthfulness of Hindus he took his stand on the glorification of truth in the sacred books, as well as on the repeated insistence in them on telling the truth and nothing else Yet he himself in Note C to the printed edition of his lectures gave authoritative citations from the books of Hmdu sacred law (Dharma Sastras) which treated falsehood uttered in certain circumstances as venial sms For example, he quoted among many others a passage from the Vasistha treatise on law Tf a man speaks an untruth at the time of marriage, in sexual intercourse, when his life is in danger, or when he is likely to lose all his property, and when a Brahmana is in danger, it has been declared that these five untruths are not sms * There are, of course, many such passages in all Hmdu sacred texts But, on the whole, Max Muller could make out a strong case for the Hindu’s love of truth in ancient times from Hmdu scriptures and from the testimony of foreign observers such as the Greeks More-
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over, since no direct evidence was then available for what the Hindus actually did, the didactic insistence on truth created a justifiable presumption that they were truthful in their conduct
In respect of the contemporary situation Max Muller had greater difficulty, not due to lack of evidence but to the contradiction in it The most vocal opinion of the Anglo-Indians, or the British who were living or had lived in India, was that Indians were habitually and universally given to lying As against them he was in a decidedly unfavourable position, and he frankly described it ‘Having never been in India myself/ he said in his Cambridge lecture of 1882, ‘I can only claim for myself the right and duty of every historian, namely, the right of collecting as much information as possible, and the duty to sift it according to the recognized rules of historical criticism ’
He stated the issue between him and the men on the spot even more clearly in his letter to The Times on the Ilbert Bill, which appeared in the paper on August 6, 1883 What he said might be described as a methodological expose in a nutshell Muller confessed that he could not claim ’the honourable title of Anglo-Indian*, but added that he had read the accounts of the most eminent Anglo-Indians of former times, and was acquainted personally with many of his time According to him, the Anglo-Indians could be divided into two classes’ those who never appealed to their residence in India as a title to infallibility, and the others who wrote and spoke on Indian subjects like so many Popes
If you differ from them [he said], they seem to have but one answer to all facts and all arguments — namely, ‘I have been in India, I have spent twenty-five years among the natives — it is all wrong, I know it is wrong, and you would not say so if you had been in India ’
It makes little difference to these mvmcibles that where they say ‘Black’ others who have spent quite as many years in India as they have, say ‘White’ It only makes them more emphatic, and those who may happen to listen, naturally think it rather impertinent that one who had never been in India should venture to know more of the customs, the prejudices, the laws, and literature of that country than one who has ruined his liver and lost his temper by twenty-five years’ residence in Calcutta I have not as yet been driven by my AngloIndian friends to such a pitch of despair as others who have openly declared that no one who has been in India is fit to write a history of India.
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‘Residence in India/ he pointed out, ‘had its dangers as well as its advantages ’ Firstly, India is a large country and not even twentyfive years in Calcutta, Bombay or Madras would justify an experienced civil servant in beginning a single sentence with ‘the people of India’ Secondly, Anglo-Indians lived in an English environment, and when they saw the Indian environment they saw it in a changing state due to contact with English influences Thirdly, an observer might be too near as well as too far, and nothing was more difficult than for a soldier to see the battle in which he is fighting as a whole, or for Bismarck to write the history of his time
It was the privilege and duty of the scholar and the historian, Muller declared, to stand aloof, to choose his own point of view, and to look at both sides of a question If historians could write about the Peloponnesian or the Crimean War without being in Greece or Russia, surely a man who had studied the evidence carefully could pronounce an opinion on Lord Lawrence’s or Lord Lytton’s government in India ?
Max Muller based his views about the general truthfulness of Hindus on the experience of a large number of eminent Englishmen who had intimate knowledge of Indians, and more especially he depended on the statements of Colonel Sleeman, who as the eradicator of the notorious criminal community of the Thugs, (its members murdered people by strangling them with a handkerchief), was not likely to be ignorant of the darker side of Indian life And Muller quotes one of Sleeman’s sayings ‘I have had before me hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty, and life has depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it ’
Depending on such testimonies, Max Muller made out a subtle and sophisticated case for the truthfulness of the people of India He said that in order to judge them fairly the Indian people had to be observed where and when they were left to themselves Historically, he explained, they could be regarded as left to themselves only before the Muslim conquest This conquest was so cruel and atrocious that the wonder, to his mind, was how a nation could survive such an inferno without being turned into devils themselves So the truthfulness of the Hindus could be seen best in ancient India, when they were politically independent
Next, basing himself on the views of Sleeman, he said that Indians could be considered to be left to themselves only when they were in their village communities He said that Sleeman was one of
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the first to discover the village communities of India, which later were described more fully by Sir Henry Maine Sleeman stated that lying between members of the same village was almost unknown
Lastly, he pointed out that English opinion about Indians was shaped largely by experiences in big cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and that the native elements in such towns contained the most unfavourable specimens of the Indian population This might be regarded as the moral counterpart of the military opinion in India that the best Indian soldiers were not to be recruited from the bazaars of the cities Besides, Muller pointed out, any insight into the domestic life of the more respectable classes, even in towns, was extremely difficult to obtain
I might add another aspect of the question which Max Muller left open, without stating it explicitly The concept of ‘Hindus left to themselves’ should also include their loyalty to their own notion of Dharma — righteousness, justice or dikaiosyne , or whatever European name might be given to it This could be found working among rural people The Hindu peasant, despite his worldly propensities, was also the carrier of a tradition of religious faith and morality which was the ancient Hindu spirituality reduced to its lowest and simplest, but which was also the heritage of the upper classes before British rule If that rule introduced the European moral consciousness among the Hindus, it also undermined the simple indigenous morality The Indian Penal Code and the Evidence Act, introduced by the British in India, with all their complexities created more falsehood in India than existed before And now the professed secularism of the Westernized ruling class in India is dealing the last blows to Hindu morality
Finally, it has also to be said that among us the notion of verbal truthfulness was never very highly developed and therefore nobody minded a false statement, and often called an incorrect statement a he The feeling of moral baseness in lying was roused only in the early days of Bntish rule in India when the English word ‘liar’ was used, and not when its Bengali equivalent was applied There is an amusing scene in an early Bengali farce in which a young man rushed to give a beating to his friend who called him a ‘liar’ The offender was very much shocked by it, and asked for an explanation The angry young man replied that had he been called mithyavadi (1 e*, liar in Bengali) he would not have minded it at all,
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but to be called a ‘liar’ was unforgivable That shows how foreign the idea of verbal falsehood was among us The European influence also created the white lie in India, prevarication and casuistry, for which before there was hardly any need Therefore one might say that Max Muller’s defence of Hindu truthfulness was as well founded in one way, as was in another the accusation that we Hindus were liars to a man Modern and Westernized Hindus of the late nineteenth century did not understand this difference, and took Max Muller’s defence of Hindu truthfulness with all its Western implications Therefore when Lord Curzon in one of his convocation speeches admonished the students of Calcutta University to respect truth hn all circumstances’, the whole of educated India was scandalized