THE ENGLISH SIDE IN INDIAN LIFE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3085, 30 April 1913, Page 79

THE ENGLISH SIDE IN INDIAN LIFE.

By Constance Clyde,

Paradoxical as it may seem, there is perhaps no better way to get an inaccurate view of any foreign land than to read the quite veracious descriptions of it given by travellers ! The reason, however, is fairly obvious. The traveller is intent on noting what is different from his own country, and therefore gives a picture in which only the novelty is portrayed. Who, for instance, does not remember the India of stories read in youth, a place where infants were perpetually thrown to alligators and where women crouched as perpetually 7 at the feet of their lords. Sometimes the biography of one native resident will do more to correct this false impression than any 7 amount of travellers’ tales. Ihe biography 7 is written with greater naivette, there being no temptation to over-accentu-ate what is considered special to the country, and so a really 7 truer effect is obtained.

Such is the impression made by the history of the late Behramji M. Malabari, the well-known social reformer. We see the Parsee child brought up in the usual surroundings of trading life in India, yet we are struck not only by what seem like touches of typical English life in his existence, but by his own English mind. Concerning the first we learn that Malabar i’s mother so many years ago married a second time, as English mothers so often have done, for the sake of her child, and that another case of a widow's remarriage is mentioned in his youth. Malabari was to fight against the enforced celibacy of widows later on, but evidently, as with us, laws were sometimes ignored. We are inclined to forget this when judging other countries, forgetting that foreigners could make out a good case against ns if they judged us by laws still on our Statute Book.

Before her remarriage Malabari’s mother ran away from home, was kindly treated by robbers, and escorted home with the infant Malabari, evidently received back without any great contumely! It is amusing later to hear of a little playmate who was a dreadful “tomboy," and used to “boss” her email husband because she wanted to “lead a free, manly life.” From his mother Malabari learns cooking, sewing, medicine-making, and nursing. We learn with surprise, however, that at one of the schools which ho attended (this was 50 years ago) girls assembled with the boys, one little girl consoling him (when the hand of the teacher was heavy) with little presents of sweets and long talks of their future ambitions. So far this reads like English life; but the Indian touch comes in again when we hear how his mother begged the Indian medicine man not • to prescribe the nails torn off the fingers and toes of a living child as a cure for her boy’s smallpox! Unlike many women of her time, Bhikhihai will not purchase the life of her child by the torture of another woman’s offspring, and fortunately the priest discovers that silver images offered to himself are quite as orthodox! Boys are boys all the world over, and English lads turned Indian would act us did the future social reformer and his companions when they would catch up a shopkeeper asleep outside his stall and carry him to the riverside where dead bodies are burnt, singing the funeral dirge. The man, who had possibly overeaten, would wake asking Heaven to have mercy on him, and then feel the tuft of hair on his skull to make sure it was still there. From his own country, however. Malabari learnt that deep love for his mother, so that at her death he discarded prematurely all youthful follies. He alludes to this change in a later rocm. “ She’d clasped a child with sad emotions wan, But when die clasp relaxed there was left a man.” Like any Scotch boy of old times, Malabari knew what hardship was in the pursuit of knowledge, earning his own living, cooking for himself, sleeping sometimes only four hours out of the 24. So wo follow him on as poet, editor, politician, always striving—anything hut the laissez-faire native of India of whom we have heard so much. One notices in his temperament a lack of any feeling for what is commonly called the occult. Xo Anglo-Indian, however cultivated, but imbibes just a little mysticism from his residence in India; lent Malabari the native-born impresses us as a sort of Presbyterian. His creed idealises virtues instead of personalities; purity of every kind ; “ it is a sin to lose one’s health,” self-restraint, charity, these arc his cardinal virtues. He would get up at night thinking he had been too hard on an opponent, would stop the printing press, alter the ugly phrase, and then proceed once more. “ When I see a lame person,” he once wrote, “I feel lame for a moment: when a blind person, I reel blinded.” He enforces the idea that “The gods hear men’s hands before their lips.” His verses deal largely with practical subjects, the curse of enforced widowhood, the sin of early marriages, and so forth. In his reaction from the caste system, he is as keen for equality as Keir Hardic himself—“all men and women are equal”; but unlike the

Socialist, has no dislike for the officials who, he thinks, do their work we'd under difficulties. With bulldog tenacity like any Englishman, the Indian fought for the betterment of women till death laid him low.