Reviews

The Human Family and India–The Re-shaping of the Social Order.–By Dr. G. H. Mees, M.A., (Cantab) L.L.D., (Leyden) (D. B. Taraporevala. Sons & Co., Fort, Bombay. Price, Paper Rs. 1-2-0. Cloth Rs. 1-14-0.)

In this interesting and thought-provoking book, Dr. Mees has discussed the vexed question of the origin and growth of the Hindu sociological groups and their future. The problem has been studied by many distinguished thinkers, European and Indian, before him. Many and varied have been the theories adumbrated. From the earliest times foreigners have been struck by the peculiar features of the Hindu sociological system. It seemed strange to them that distinct sociological groups should live together in perfect amity and concord for centuries, owing allegiance to the same set of religious and cultural ideals and governed by one civilisation and exhibiting many common traits. On account of its strangeness, some condemned it altogether, others appreciated it, and yet others tried to expatiate on its advantages and disadvantages. The rapid progress in ethnological studies and in Oriental Research brought to light many more data and gave scope to more speculations and theories. Naturally, where many study the problem, prejudices, pre-conceived notions, orthodox tendencies, fascination for startling original statements–all have had their share in influencing the formation of opinions. Among Indians, there is an increasing tendency to look upon the Hindu sociological system, as it exists now, as a serious obstacle to the political progress of the country and the unity of the Indian nation, and extreme enthusiasts have declared war against it. On the other hand, some European writers like Sir George Birdwood observe, "The real danger which threatens India is that the caste system may be broken down. It would make India the East End of the World." Others have felt that the vitality of Hindu civilisation and the stability of Hindu Society owed much to the Hindu sociological system. Distinguished Indian writers like Sir S. Radhakrishnan conclude that the caste system came into vogue as the synthesis of differing race cultures which met on Indian soil during the long period of Indian history. S. P. Rice is of opinion that caste is really the survival of the tribal organizations of the indigenous Dravidian population which existed before the Aryan influence was felt and the modern caste system is the result of the reaction of the Aryan culture on the indigenous groups. Some critics think that the Chatur-varnya ideal was a conscious later evolution by Hindu thinkers to systematise and weld together the different groups that existed in the country and to coalesce them into the four-fold classification. Scholars have differed as to whether the Hindu Caste system, the Chatur-varnya, existed during the spacious days of the Rig-Veda. The Arya Samajists invariably hold that it was non-existent then. It is purely academic now to discuss the question. But it is certain that from the days when the Purusha-Sukta first began to be sung, it must have been an established institution. A study of our religious literature reveals that more emphasis was laid during the earlier period of our history on the occupational basis of the four-fold Varnas than during the later period, and the barriers were less rigorous and there was greater inter-mixture among them. The principle of birth and heredity played a lesser part, though it is difficult to hold with some scholars that it was entirely absent. It is also certain that, after, say, the tenth or eleventh century A.D., the castes became petrified, and the restrictions in regard to intermarriage and interdining became greater. Caste exclusiveness was developed and the tendency for the formation and growth of numerous sub-castes and sects became marked. The four-fold Varna slowly degenerated into the two main Varnas and numberless sects. It is certainly the path of wisdom and true progress to make efforts for the fusion of the sub-castes and sects. They are really serious obstacles to unity and political progress. Even the most orthodox will have to support this reform.

The long course of our history reveals many attempts made to destroy the hereditary basis of caste and to create new casteless groups. But all these have failed to influence the general mass of the Hindu community. But now economic and political necessity demands that the inequalities and restrictions between the sub-castes and sects should be removed. It will be a question whether caste as such should be entirely a thing of the past and whether we can succeed entirely in obliterating it. Even in the casteless West, we see the recrudescence of racial antipathies and emphasis on birth and the tendency for power to get into the hands of hereditary groups. It. will be generally true to say that the great British Democracy is largely governed by a few families of statesmen and politicians. While therefore the pace of the fusion of sub-castes may be quickened, the formation of new castes and the development of racial animosities engendered by wrong and false theories of Aryan and Dravidian should be prevented.

K. BALASUBRAHMANIA AIYAR

An Editor Goes West.–By Leonard Crocombe. (Published by George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd.)

The author has been the Editor of an English paper called Tit-Bits since 1918. I can think of no better way to describe his book than to call it a series of holiday episodes in Canada and New York, each of which is itself a little ‘tit-bit’. He describes his sailing from Southampton–and the opening tit-bit is the rebuff he is given by what he calls an American lovely to whom he offers his field glasses. She afterwards confesses to him that she refused his glasses because her father was on the quay watching her and he would have had a fit if he had seen her talking to a strange man. It is interesting to hear, in this age, of a father who is so easily upset and of so considerate a daughter. Here are some more tit-bits. In the description of the boat drill, the author finds difficulty in differentiating the port from the sherry side; in the engine room, he avers that the complicated machinery is easier to understand than a woman’s soul; after dinner a doctor who is traveling on the boat tells the story of an American girl who when sight-seeing in Rome was able to visit churches where bare arms and legs were taboo by the simple expedient of painting the seams ofstockings on her bare legs. Mr. Crocombe being a distinguished citizen broadcasts his impressions of Canada shortly after his arrival. Among many genuine congratulatory wires, letters and postcards that he receives after his broadcast, one is from the U. S. A. on which is printed in large capitals the single derisive word NERTS.

If tit-bits such as these appeal to you, youwill enjoy this light-hearted holiday record in which little more serious than the author’s private or public engagements take place. But one serious point is emphasized that recurs again and again and must strike our sympathy. I quote from the author’s broadcast on pp. 88 and 89, words underlined–about 100. The constant reference to this subject throughout the book shows what a shadow the threat of war is casting everywhere in Europe.

It is an interesting speculation to wonder why in a book of some 250 pages the author devotes fourteen pages to menus of food obtainable on the Empress of Britain and on Canadian trains! Was it in the hope that English railway and steamer lines would read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them; or that our mouths might water? Or was it that his publisher was hard-hearted and insisted on his pound of flesh in the shape of the seventy thousand words for which he had contracted. Perhaps the author had all these thoughts in mind when he copied out these menus, or was this the broadest hint he dare give to the wife he left behind him?

BARBARA CHESTER ¹

Further Upward in Rural India.–By Dr. Spencer Hatch. (Published by the Oxford Press. Price Rs. 2-8-0.)

The first book is about rural reconstruction. I don’t know whether that sounds very inviting; most people in India who read their newspapers get rather tired of discourses on the necessity of rural reconstruction by people who don’t know very much about it. But this book is by a man who has been on the job for years, Dr. Spencer Hatch of the Y. M. C. A. Rural Reconstruction Centre at Martandam in South Travancore. The book ought to have a more romantic title. I should have called it "Making the wilderness blossom as the Rose" because that’s just what those people at Martandam have been doing! ‘Making the wilderness blossom’ covers experiments in the production of bigger and better eggs; persuading bees to work harder and to have fewer feasts, so as to have some honey to spare for their owners; producing sugar from palmyra palms; popularising the bore-hole fashion; teaching people how to get valuable manure by the proper treatment of waste products. This is the kind of book that makes me wish I had been born on a farm, and had taken a degree in agriculture, with poultry-farming and bee-keeping as my subsidiary subjects; that sort of knowledge, used with some imagination, as Dr. Hatch and his colleagues have used it, can be of infinite value in India to the very people who most need help. There are all sorts of interesting things in the book, besides the things I've mentioned; rural libraries, (which even circulate toys for children!), home industries of various kinds, suggestions for rural plays, and–of special interest at the moment–a very important experiment in rural education of a somewhat novel type. I advise people to read this book, unless they imagine they know all there is to be known about the subject–and, in fact, the omniscient ought to read it too. Considered as a piece of literary work, it’s by no means perfect; there are some bits that would have been better left out. It’s not of great value to anyone to be told at some length what Major Yeats Brown thought about Martandam, and the author ought to get out of the habit of quoting his own obiter dicta. But I hardly like to mention these minor blemishes, because the main impressions the book leaves on my mind are of enthusiasm, wisdom, courage, and imagination.

Hussein.–By Patrick Russ. (Published by the Oxford Press. Price sh. 7/6.)

I don't think I've ever heard of Patrick Russ before, and the note on the dust-cover seems to suggest that this is his first novel. Anyhow it’s a mighty good novel, full of exciting adventures, and mercifully free from psychological analysis. Its ground is an India with which I'm not personally very well acquainted, in which you shoot a tiger or two in the course of the day, or possibly kill one or two people who have annoyed you a little, and then in the evening, for a little relaxation, spend an hour or two in an opium-den. The hero of the story, from whom it takes its name, is Hussein, a mahout. Elephants have been rather popular ever since Chumai did his stuff on the films, and I must say Patrick Russ makes them very attractive. If ever I met an elephant even half as intelligent and loyal as Hussein’s Jehangir, I should be tempted to buy him, even if it meant taking the roof off the car-shed. Well, as I say, Hussein the mahout is the hero of the story. He does everything you could expect a hero to do; he falls in love, he gets mixed up in a blood-feud, and, when he has to make himself scarce, he lives an adventurous life as a wandering story-teller, a snake-charmer, and finally a political spy. In the end…..well, I really mustn’t tell you the end, but the whole book is packed with thrills. In the first fifty pages, there’s an adventure with a mad elephant, a riot at a football-match, a fight with wild dogs, and a scuffle with a band of dacoits, and after that the story begins to wake up!

Memory and Other Poems.–ByWalter De La Mare. (Published by Constable. Price sh. 6.)

Everybody who knows anything about English poetry of the 20th century knows De La Mare–I think he has been represented in almost every anthology published since the War–and many people would say that he is one of the most poetical of our living poets. Unlike some of his younger contemporaries, he doesn’t find it necessary to shriek, or to make queer faces, or to go through all sorts of fancy contortions, in order to draw attention to himself. When I look at some of the latest fashions in poetry, I feel as if I were in a world in which people wear their hats upside down, and their coats inside out, and their shoes on the wrong feet. It’s all very striking, but it is frequently not very pleasing and not very intelligible. Well, there is nothing of this wild eccentricity about Mr. De La Mare. For one thing, he is in the historic tradition as regards rhythm and melody; he accepts and satisfies the principles, or, if you like, the conventions, according to which most of us recognise beauty in sound; and he seldom strikes a jarring note. Take, for instance, the first stanza of his poem called Peace.

Night is o’er England, and the winds are still;
Jasmine and honeysuckle steep the air;
Softly the stars, that are all Europe’s, fill
Her heaven-wide dark with radiancy fair.
That shadowed moon now waxing in the west
Stirs hot a rumour in her tranquil seas;
Mysterious sleep has lulled her heart to rest,
Deep even as theirs beneath her churchyard trees.

That’s enough to show what I mean when I say that Mr. De La Mare is in the historic tradition in matters of rhythm and melody. You don’t need to learn a new musical scale in order to appreciate him. His tone and his movement are intelligible and almost unfailingly beautiful to the ear which has learnt from Shakespeare and Shelley. But if Mr. De La Mare is comparatively orthodox in the form of his poetry, the essential spirit of it is very individual and very elusive. I think I have unconsciously delayed coming to this point, because to attempt to expound the genius of this writer’s poetry is like attempting to explain why moonlight is beautiful, or to set forth the effect, upon the soul, of mountain-echoes. Sometimes–often, I should say–he expresses the mood of the soul looking for a lost felicity. For example, in the very first poem in this present volume, called ‘A Sunday’:

A child in the Sabbath peace, there–
Down by the full-bosomed river;
Sun on the tide-way, flutter of wind,
Water-cluck, –Ever…..for ever….
Time itself seemed to cease there–
The domed, hushed city behind me;
Home how distant! The morrow would come,–
But here, no trouble could find me.
A respite, a solacing, deep as the sea,
Was mine. Will it come again?...never?...
Shut in the Past is that Sabbath peace, there–
Down by the full-bosomed river.

You find the same motif again in the poem called ‘Solitude.’

Ghosts there must be with me in this old house,
Deepening its midnight as the clock beats on.
Whence else upwelled–strange, sweet, yet ominous,–
That moment of happiness, and then was gone?

Sometimes he plays with delicately elusive fancies as in ‘The Stratagem.’

Here’s the court where Sorrow dwells.
Weeping in his courts of yew!
Foot then lightly in those dells,
Let not plash one drop of dew;
Bring your chains of pimpernels,
Bring your silvery honeydew.

Sometimes he seizes some fugitive impression, however trivial in itself, like the shadow of a tiny weed blown by the wind and gives it beauty and permanence. But whatever he writes about, you'll find him cooling and refreshing, and sometimes his page lights up with a strange beauty.

A. J. BOYD

SANSKRIT

(1) Sri Maha Tripura Sundari Puja Kalpa. (2) Sri Vidya Mantra Bhashya--(Both published by Messrs. V. Ramaswamy Sastrulu & Sons, Esplanade, Madras.)

These books are welcome additions to the literature of Sakti worship which has been handed down from the Vedic times as a secret doctrine. The Puja Kalpa is a manual for the external worship of the Mother enshrined in Sri Chakra. This compilation by Mr. Ramachandra Iyer of Tanjore gives all the elaborate details of daily or occasional worship of the Mother aswell as of Her attendant hosts of gods and goddesses with their several Mantras and Nyasas. To this manual is appended a short exposition of the basic Mantra of fifteen letters vouchsafed to Agastya by the Hayagriva Avatar of Vishnu.

"The Bhashya on Sri Vidya Mantra" is an original treatise by Mr. K. Veeraraghava Sastri of Perunkulam (Malabar), an adept in Sri Vidya lore, and is dedicated to the Maharaja of Patiala to whose Foreign Secretary, Mr. K. M. Panikkar, we owe this publication. In his English introduction, Mr. Panikkar refers to the universality of Mother-worship and points out that the book was composed primarily for the benefit of the immediate disciples of the author and that it was approved by His Holiness Sri Nrisimha Bharati of Sringeri Math who conferred on its author the title ‘Sri Sivananda Natha.’

If Vari-vasya-rahasya is considered as a vritti on Sri Vidya Mantra, this book is an elaborate and comprehensive Bhashya thereon. The author derives all Mantras inclusive of the universal Sandhya prayers from the Sri Vidya Mantra. He points out that the efficacy of mantropasana depends entirely on a knowledge of the meaning of the Mantra. The goal of all upasanas is pointed out to be the attainment of Brahman. The Gayatri Mantra in its aspashta form is the fifteen-lettered Mantra. The author takes us step by step through the several sections of the Karma, Gnana and Upasana Kandas of Vedic learning and he derives the rules of the several Vedic sastras from the fifteen lettered Mantra of Mantras. This interesting method of disquisition affords the author full scope for the exhibition of his profound scholarship which enables him to analyse the apparently varying schools of Vedic thought and worship and to synthesise them by deriving them all from the fifteen-lettered formula. In these days when the primary meanings and purposes of the different systems of Hindu thought are lost in the be-wildering chaos of warring beliefs, it is refreshing to meet in this Bhashya with the true spirit of reconciliation of all varieties of religious experience by emphasising their basic identity with the all-comprehensive Sri Vidya Upasana.

V. NARAYANAN

1 This book review by Mrs. Barbara Chester and the following ones by Mr. A. J.Boyd were broadcast recently from the Madras Station of the All India Radio, and are reproduced in Triveni by courtesy of the A. I. R.