Nor were the milder forms of political activity promoted by the founders of the Indian National Congress inconsistent with the acceptance of British rule or with the recognition of the great benefits which it has conferred upon India, and least of all with a genuine admiration for Western civilization. For many of them at least the political boons which they craved from their rulers were merely the logical corollaries of the moral and intellectual as well as of the material boons which they had already received. The fierce political agitation of later years denies the benefits of British rule and even the superiority of the civilization for which it stands. It has invented the legend of a golden age, when all the virtues flourished and India was a land flowing with milk and honey until British lust of conquest brought it to ruin. No doubt even to-day there are many eminent Hindus who would still rely upon the older methods, and who have sufficiently assimilated the education they have received at the hands of Englishmen to share wholeheartedly the faith and pride of the latter in British ideals of liberty and self-government, and to be honestly convinced that those ideals might be more fully realized in the government of their own country if British administrators would only repose greater confidence in the natives of India and give them a larger share in the conduct of public affairs. But men of this type are now to be found chiefly amongst the older generation.
No one who has studied, however scantily, the social and religious system which for the sake of convenience we call Hinduism will deny the loftiness of the philosophic conceptions which underlie even the extravagances of its creed or the marvellous stability of the complex fabric based upon its social code. It may seem to us to present in many of its aspects an almost unthinkable combination of spiritualistic idealism and of gross materialism, of asceticism and of sensuousness, of over-weening arrogance when it identifies the human self with the universal self and merges man in the Divinity and the Divinity in man, and of demoralizing pessimism when it preaches that life itself is but a painful illusion, and that the sovereign remedy and end of all evils is non-existence. Its mythology is often as revolting as the rigidity of its caste laws, which condemn millions of human beings to such social abasement that their very touch—the very shadow thrown by their body—is held to pollute the privileged mortals who are born into the higher castes. Nevertheless, Hinduism has for more than thirty centuries responded to the social and religious aspirations of a considerable fraction of the human race. It represents a great and ancient civilization, and that the Hindus should cling to it is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that after the first attraction exerted by the impact of an alien civilization equipped with all the panoply of organized force and scientific achievements had worn off, a certain reaction should have ensued. In the same way it was inevitable that, after the novelty of British rule, of the law and order and security for life and property which it had established, had gradually worn away, those who had never experienced the evils from which it had freed India should begin to chafe under the restraints which it imposed. What is disheartening and alarming are the lengths to which this reaction has been carried. For among the younger generation of Hindus there has unquestionably grown up a deep-seated and bitter hostility not only to British rule and to British methods of administration, but to all the influences of Western civilization, and the rehabilitation of Hindu customs and beliefs has proceeded pari passu with the growth of political disaffection.
Practices which an educated Hindu would have been at pains to explain away, if he had not frankly repudiated them thirty years ago, now find zealous apologists. Polytheism is not merely extolled as the poetic expression of eternal verities, but the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon are being invested with fresh sanctity. The Brahmo Saniaj is still a great influence for good, but it appears to be gradually losing vitality, and though its literary output is still considerable, its membership is shrinking. The Prarthana Samaj is moribund. The fashion of the day is for religious "revivals," in which the worship of Kali, the sanguinary goddess of destruction, or the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the Mahratta chieftain who humbled in his day the pride of the alien conquerors of Hindustan, plays an appropriately conspicuous part. The Arya-Samaj, which is spreading all over the Punjab and in the United Provinces, represents in one of its aspects a revolt against Hindu orthodoxy, but in another it represents equally a revolt against Western ideals, for in the teachings of its founder, Dayanand, it has found an aggressive gospel which bases the claims of Aryan, i.e., Hindu, supremacy on the Vedas as the one ultimate source of human and Divine wisdom. The exalted character of Vedantic philosophy has been as widely recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been developed along different and often conflicting lines of thought to suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya-Samaj has not been content to assert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to proclaim the immanent superiority of Aryan civilization—it repudiates the term Hindu as savouring of an alien origin—over Western civilization, it claims to have discovered in the Vedas the germs of all the discoveries of modern science, even to wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes.
Just as the political agitation in India has derived invaluable encouragement from a handful of British members of Parliament and other sympathizers in Europe and America, so this Hindu revival has been largely stimulated and to some extent prompted by Europeans and Americans. Not only the writings of English and German scholars, like Max Müller and Deutsch, helped enormously to revive the interest of educated Hindus in their ancient literature and earlier forms of religion, but it was in the polemical tracts of European writers that the first protagonists of Hindu reaction against Christian influences found their readiest weapons of attack. The campaign was started in 1887 by the Hindu Tract Society of Madras, which set itself first to inflame popular fanaticism against the missionaries, who, especially in the south of India, had been the pioneers of Western education. Bradlaugh's text-books and the pamphlets of many lesser writers belonging to the same school of thought were eagerly translated into the vernacular, and those that achieved the greatest popularity were books like "The Evil of Continence," in which not only Christian theology, but Christian morality was held up to scorn and ridicule. The advent of the theosophists, heralded by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, gave a fresh impetus to the revival, and certainly no Hindu has done so much to organize and consolidate the movement as Mrs. Annie Besant, who, in her Central Hindu College at Benares and her Theosophical Institution at Adyar, near Madras, has openly proclaimed her faith in the superiority of the whole Hindu system to the vaunted civilization of the West. Is it surprising that Hindus should turn their backs upon our civilization[2] when a European of highly-trained intellectual power and with an extraordinary gift of eloquence comes and tells them that it is they who possess and have from all times possessed the key to supreme wisdom; that their gods, their philosophy, their morality are on a higher plane of thought than the West has ever reached? Is it surprising that with such encouragement Hinduism should no longer remain on the defensive, but, discarding in this respect all its own traditions as a non-proselytizing creed, should send out missionaries to preach the message of Hindu enlightenment to those still groping in the darkness of the West? The mission of Swami Vivekananda to the Chicago Congress of Religions is in itself one of the most striking incidents in the history of Hindu revivalism, but it is perhaps less wonderful than the triumph he