Mr. Nash And India

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 227, 22 June 1944, Page 4

Mr. Nash And India

Sir, —In yesterday’s issue of * The Dominion,” Mr. Nash is reported as telling the National Press Club that the average expectation of life in India is 27 years, while in New Zealand it is 67, the implication being that. India has merely to experience the blessings of Socialism, for its longevity to equal ours. Those whose study of Hindu life and customs gives weight to their opinions, well know that the solution of the problem is not so simple as that. . . Dr. Mayo, among other authorities, in her valuable book “Mother India,” and in its sequel. “Volume Two,” unhesitatingly asserts that the physical degeneracy'and short life of the vast majority of Hindus is due to the practice of childmarriage. etc., and which “finds, them at the age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved. low-spirited, petulant ancients.” After the publication of “Mother India” the Government set up a special committee to investigate the author’s disclosures of Hindu vice. Among other abominations discovered, they reported that “30 million girl children were fated to very earlv marriage.” One of the results of this is that “each generation sees the death in the agonies of childbirth of 3,200.000 Indian mothers.” . “The Hindu race is dying,” said Munshi Iswar Saran. a prominent member of the Assembly, “and one of the causes responsible for our slow decay is early marriage.” Yet in spite of this, on the eve of the “Hindu Child-Marriage Restraint Bill.” known as the “Sarda Act.’ when tens of thousands of children below the age of consent were being hastily married. “not one of all the social reformers in the Hindu world stepped forward to denounce that holocaust, and Gandhi, that great spiritual leader, was as silent as the rest.” Mr. Nash also alludes to the poverty of the Hindu masses, but, like many others also, fails to realize that this is largely due to their customs and religion. For instance. Dr. Mayo draws attention to such things as weddings and dowries which “impoverish families to the third and fourth generation, wasting in a day more than a lifetime of industry can earn”; to the 75 million worthless cattle kept because the Hindu religious code forbids their slaughter, devouring food to the estimated value of nearly 18 million pounds annually, or more than four times the total land revenue of British India; to the army of religious beggars believed to amount to one-fourth of the Hindu population, who “subsist in idleness on the remainder.” Again, Dr. Mayo tells us that 40 per cent, of the world’s total gold production and 30 per cent, of the world’s silver production annually drafted into India, is by the Indian owners either buried, hoarded or converted into ornaments.” which hoarding alone, reported the American Trade Commission in 1927, “put to productive uses . . . would suffice to make India one of the powerful nations of the world.” Finally, in refutation of the charge of Britain’s impoverishment of India, Dr. Mayo writes, “Since 1858. and especially in the last half-century, the people of India have been increasingly better off . . . more secure in material possessions than ever thev had been at any period of recorded history.”—l am, etc., H. IRWIN. Waipawa. June 18.