The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  In order to understand how religion has affected the Hindu country, we must go back to almost prehistoric times, to at least thirty centuries before the first of the Greeks had reached the shores of the Aegean Sea.

  At that time the Indian peninsula was inhabited by a race of dark-skinned people, the Dravidians, who were probably the original inhabitants of the Deccan. The Aryan stock (the same stock from which we ourselves have sprung) divided itself into two groups and left its ancient home In central Asia in search of more agreeable climes. One part moved westward and settled down in Europe, afterwards crossing the ocean and taking possession of northern America. The other trekked southward through the mountain passes between the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas and took possession of the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, and from there penetrated into the plateau of Deccan. By following the coastal region between the western Ghats and the Arabian Sea they finally reached southern India and Ceylon.

  The newcomers, being infinitely better armed than the natives, treated the latter as the stronger races have always treated the weaker ones. They spoke derisively of them as the Black Men, took their rice fields away from them, stole their women whenever their own supply ran out (the trip across the Khyber Pass was too difficult to let them bring many women all the way from central Asia), killed them whenever they showed the least signs of rebellion, and forced the survivors to retire to the most undesirable parts of the peninsula where they could live or starve as they pleased. But there were by far more Dravidians than Aryans, and as a result there was a constant menace that the lower form of civilization would influence the higher one. The only way by which this could be prevented was by keeping the black man strictly in his place.

  INDIA IS FULL OF INDIANS

  Now the Aryans, like all the people of our race, have always had a tendency towards dividing society into a number of sharply differentiated social layers or castes. The idea of ‘caste’ is known all over the world, and it exists everywhere even in this year of enlightenment. It runs all the way from our discrimination against the Jews, based upon our unwritten code of social prejudice, to the formal laws of certain American States which force Negroes to ride in Jim Crow cars. New York is a proverbially broad-minded city, but I would not for the life of me know where to take a dark-skinned friend (Negro or Hindu or even Javanese) for dinner, and our trains pay homage to our feeling of caste by providing us with Pullman cars. I don’t know much about the caste system of the Negroes in America, but in that great country I have seen enough of the mortification of German-Jewish families when their daughters married men of Polish-Jewish descent to realize how widespread this feeling of “being something different from the common run of humanity” is in all of us.

  THE SUEZ CANAL

  NORTH AMERICA

  But with us the caste system has never developed into a hard and fast rule of social and economic behaviour. The doors leading from one class to another are supposed to be kept carefully closed, but we all know that those who can push hard enough or who have a little golden key or who are merely able to make enough noise banging the windows outside will sooner or later be admitted. The conquering Aryans of the Indies, on the other hand, had the doors leading from one class to another filled up with masonry; and from that moment each group of society was locked up in its own little compartment and it has been forced to stay there ever since.

  Now a system like that is never an accident. People don’t just suddenly invent it to please themselves or to be nasty to their neighbours. In India it was the result of fear. The priests and the warriors and the farmers and the day-labourers, the original classes of the Aryan conquerors, were of course hopelessly outnumbered by the Dravidians whose country they had just taken away. They were bound to take some desperate measure by which to keep the black man in ‘his place’. But when they had done this they went one step further, a step which no other race has quite dared to take. They gave their artificial caste system a religious twist and decreed that Brahmanism was to be the exclusive possession of the three upper classes, leaving their humbler brethren to shift for themselves outside the true spiritual pale. And thereupon, in order to keep themselves free from the defiling touch of all people of humbler birth, each individual caste surrounded itself by such a complicated barrier of ritual ceremonies and sacred usages that finally no one but a native was able to find his way into that maze of meaningless verbotens.

  If you want to know how such a system works out in practical everyday life, try to imagine what would have happened to our own civilization if nobody during the last three thousand years had been allowed to proceed beyond the status of his father, grandfather, or great-grandfather. What would have become of the personal initiative of the individual?

  There are signs that India is on the eve of a great social and spiritual awakening, but until very recently such a change was deliberately held back by those who dominated all classes of Indian society, by the Brahmans, the hereditary members of the highest of all castes, that of the priests. The faith of which they were the undisputed leaders was known by the rather vague name of Brahmanism. Brahma, around whose personality this religion was built up, might be called the Zeus or Jupiter of the Hindu Olympus, the divine essence enhancing all creation, the beginning and end of all things. But Brahma, as a mere all-embodying idea, was much too vague, too insubstantial for the average person, and therefore, while he continued to be worshipped in a general way as a venerable old gentleman who had done his duty when he created this world, the actual management of our planet was thought to have been surrendered to certain of Brahma’s deputies, a number of gods and devils of not quite such excellent social standing as Brahma himself, but relatives of the All-Highest nevertheless, and as such to be treated with the utmost consideration.

  That opened the door wide for the introduction of all sorts of strange, supernatural creatures, like Siva and Vishnu and a whole army of spirits and spooks and ghouls. They introduced the fear element into Brahmanism. People no longer tried to be good because being good was in itself something after which man should strive, but because it was the only way in which he could hope to escape the wrath of all evil ogres.

  Buddha, the great reformer who was born six centuries before Christ, and who knew what a noble thing Brahmanism in its purer form could be, tried to make the prevailing creed of his day the spiritual power it had been once upon a time. But although at first he was victorious, his ideas proved too unpractical, too noble, too elevated for the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen. As soon as the first enthusiasm had died down, the old Brahmans returned in full force. It is only during the last fifty years that the leaders of India have come to realize that a religion based (as far as the man in the street is concerned) almost completely upon ritual and empty ceremonial acts of devotion must eventually perish, as a hollow tree must perish when it no longer is able to extract its nourishment from the living earth. And Hinduism is no longer that dead and hideous spiritual affliction which it may have been a few generations ago. The doors and windows of the old temples are being opened wide. Strange things are happening along the banks of the Ganges. When strange things happen among 350,000,000 people, they are apt to form a new chapter in the history of the world.

  India, although it has several large towns, is still essentially a country of villages, for 71% of the people continue to live in the country. The rest are spread among the cities of which you should at least know the names. There is Calcutta, at the mouth of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. It began as an insignificant fishing village, but during the eighteenth century it became the centre for the British East India Company’s operations against the French and developed into the leading harbour of ail India. It lost a great deal of its former importance when the Suez Canal was opened, because steamers found it more convenient to go directly to Bombay or to Karachi than to Calcutta when they happened to have a cargo for the Indus region or the Punjab. Bombay on its little island is also a creation of the East India Co
mpany, which intended to use it as a naval base and a harbour of export for the Deccan cotton trade. It was so eminently suited for this purpose that it attracted settlers from all over Asia, and became the home of the last remaining group of followers of the Persian prophet, Zoroaster. These Parsees belong to the richest and most intelligent group of natives. Their worship of fire as something holy which must not be defiled makes it impossible for them to burn their dead. Hence Bombay has attracted a sort of lugubrious attention as the city where the Parsee corpses are thrown to the vultures, a form of destruction which is so swift that it seems preferable to the slower method of being eaten by ordinary worms.

  On the eastern shores of the Deccan peninsula lies Madras, the main port of the coast of Coromandel. The French city of Pondicherry, a little towards the south, is a reminder of the days when the French were the most serious rivals of the English, and when Dupleix and Clive fought for the possession of India in that war that produced the ghastly incident of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  But most of the important cities are naturally situated in the valley of the Ganges. In the west there is first Delhi, the old residence of the Mogul emperors who had chosen this city because it commanded the entrance gate from central Asia into the valley of the Ganges so thoroughly that he who was master of Delhi was also master of all India. Further down the river lies Allahabad, a holy city of the Mohammedans, as the name implies. In this same neighbourhood lie Lucknow and Cawnpore, well known for their connexion with the great mutiny of 1857. Further towards the south is Agra, the residence of four members of the Mogul dynasty, one of whom erected the Taj-Mahal in memory of a woman whom he had greatly loved.

  Then further down the river we reach Benares, the Rome and Mecca of all good Hindus, who come here not only to bathe in the holy waters of the river but also to die that they may be burned in one of the ghats on its shores and their ashes strewn upon the river of their desire.

  But I had better stop here. Whenever you touch upon a subject of India, whether you approach it as an historian, a chemist, a geographer, an engineer, or a mere traveller, you find yourself right in the heart of profound moral and spiritual problems. And we people of the West should proceed carefully when we enter into this labyrinth in which we are both strangers and newcomers.

  Two thousand years before the learned councils of holy men in Nicea and Constantinople tried to formulate the creed which afterwards was to conquer the western world, the ancestors ol these people about whom I am writing in so familiar a fashion had already settled obscure points of doctrine and faith which to this very day disturb the minds of my own neighbours, and will probably continue to disturb them for another dozen centuries or so. It is easy, for too easy, to condemn things that are strange to us. Most of what I know about India is strange to me and gives me a feeling of discomfort, a bewildered sense of uneasy irritation.

  But then I remember that I used to fed the same way towards my grandfather and grandmother.

  And now at last I am beginning to realize that they were right. Or at least that, if they were not always entirely right, neither were they always as absolutely wrong as I used to think them to be. It was a hard lesson. But it tended to teach me a little humility. And Heaven knows I needed it!

  Chapter XXXVI

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  BURMA, SIAM, ANNAM, AND MALACCA, WHICH OCCUPY THE OTHER GREAT SOUTHERN PENINSULA OF ASIA

  The peninsula which contains these four ancient kingdoms, independent, semi-independent, and subject, is four times as large as the Balkan peninsula. Burma, the first of the four when we start from the west, enjoyed complete independence until 1885 when the English, with the general approval of the natives and the world at large, sent the last of the local rulers into exile and annexed the country and made it part of their empire. Nobody objected much except the King himself, but he was a true representative of a type that has no longer any reason to exist, except in films and romances, the proverbial Oriental potentate who as a rule was nothing but an undetected lunatic. Needless to say he was not even a local product but an import from the north. The peninsula as a whole has suffered a good deal from that kind of gentry. The situation of the local mountain-ranges was chiefly responsible. Whereas India is cut off from the north by high mountains which run from east to west and therefore enjoys a certain natural protection, the whole of this unfortunate peninsula is taken up by five independent mountain ridges which run from south to north and thereby offers almost ideal means of access to any one wishing to move from the harsh grassland of central Asia to the rich coast land of the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Siam and the South China Sea. And the sort of men bred by central Asia we have already met wherever our maps were dotted by an abundance of ruined cities and pillaged farms.

  Lest you should shed unnecessary tears over the fate of the last of the independent Burmese potentates, know ye that in order to celebrate his accession to the throne he had revived the good old Asiatic custom of killing all his relatives. The Turkish sultans had always done that as a mere matter of precaution, like taking out accident insurance when you are elected president of a South American republic. But in the eighties of the last century the story of these hundred-odd brothers and cousins and nephews, slaughtered in cold blood, did not read quite so well, and an English governor took the place of the former monarch. Since then the country, whose population consists of only three per cent. Hindus but ninety per cent. Buddhists, has greatly prospered, and the Irrawaddy river, which is navigable all the way from Rangoon to Mandalay, has become an artery of trade such as it had never been before. It has seen more rice boats and oil tankers and ships of all sorts than ever before during its long history.

  As for Siam, the country just east of Burma and separated from it by the Dawna range and the Tanen-Taung-gyi mountains, it owes its continued independence to a combination of circumstances of which the mutual jealousy between England in the west and France in the east is most certainly not one of the least important. And furthermore, Siam has been singularly fortunate in its rulers. Old King Chulalongkorn, who reigned for over forty years, was a descendant of a Chinaman who, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, had delivered Siam from the Burmese. By cleverly playing his western neighbours against those from the east, and by a few trivial concessions, and, above all, by not surrounding himself with English and French advisers but by choosing his experts from among the much less dangerous smaller nations, this enlightened Siamese reduced the number of illiterates in his domain from 90% to 20%, founded a university, developed railways, made the Menam river navigable for over 400 miles, installed an excellent postal and telegraphic system, and trained his army sufficiently well to make himself not only a desirable ally but also a potentially dangerous enemy.

  Bangkok on the Menam delta grew until it finally had almost a million inhabitants, a great many of whom still live on rafts anchored in the river, which gives Bangkok the aspect of a sort of eastern Venice. Instead of closing the country to foreign immigration, the industrious Chinese were liberally encouraged to settle down in the capital, and they now form one-ninth of the total population and have greatly contributed towards making Siam one of the most important rice-exporting nations. The interior is still densely covered with very valuable forests, and teak is an important article of export. And good luck or good sense made the Siamese rulers retain at least a part of the Malacca peninsula, which contains the richest tin deposits of the world.

  On the whole, however, the Government of Siam has been opposed to the industrialization of the country. The inhabitants of all tropical lands will have to remain primarily interested in agriculture and other simple pursuits if they wish to survive. Siam seems to be one of the few Asiatic countries where the desirability of such a policy has been understood. Let Europe have its factories and slums, as long as Asia can keep its villages and fields. They may not be the sort of villages the westerling likes, but they suit the eastern temperament, and the factory does not.

  By the way, the a
gricultural riches of Siam are somewhat different from those of most other countries. Besides a million hogs, raised by the Chinese, the country can boast of no less than 4,000,000 tame buffaloes and 9000 elephants, which are in domestic service and are hired out as derricks and trucks.

  French Indo-China, the name usually given to all the French possessions in the peninsula, consists of five parts. The first one of these, going from south to north, is Cambodia, which occupies the valley of the big Mekong river as far as the delta. It cultivates cotton and pepper. Nominally it is still a kingdom, but under French supervision. In the interior, in the midst of the dense forests just north of the great lake called Tonlé-Sap, lie some of the most interesting ruins that have ever been uncovered. They were built by a mysterious race, the Khmers, of whom we know remarkably little. During the ninth century of our era these Khmers built themselves a capital in northern Cambodia called Angkor. It was no small affair, for the walls formed a square, each side of which was not less than two miles long and thirty feet high. At first, under the influence of Hindu missionaries, the Khmers were Brahmans, but in the tenth century Buddhism was accepted as the official religion of the State. The spiritual explosion caused by this change from Brahmanism to Buddhism found an expression in the construction of a vast number of temples and palaces, all of which were built between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries when Angkor, the capital, was destroyed, leaving behind those most stupendous architectural ruins, compared to which the far-famed efforts of the Maya of Honduras and Guatemala were the work of simple-minded beginners.

  THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF LAND AND WATER ON OUR PLANET