Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY

"Once upon a Time."

"Once upon a time,"[1] men and women dwelt in caves and cliffs and fashioned curious implements from the stones of the earth and painted crude pictures upon the walls of their rock dwellings. Archaeologists find such traces in England and along the river valleys of France, among the sands of Egyptian deserts and in India, where armor heads, ancient pottery, and cromlechs mark the passing of a long forgotten race. Thus India claims her place in the universal childhood of the world.

The Brown-skinned Tribes.

"Once upon a time,"[2] when the Stone Men had passed, a strange, new civilization is thought to have girdled the earth, passing probably in a "brown belt" from Mediterranean lands across India to the Pacific world and the Americas. Its sign was the curious symbol of the Swastika; its passwords certain primitive customs common to all these lands. Its probable Indian representatives are known to-day as Dravidians—the brown-skinned people still dominating South Indian life, whose exact place in the family of races puzzles every anthropologist. It was then that civilization was first walking up and down the great river valleys of the Old World. While the first pyramids[3] were a-building beside the long green ribbon of the Nile and the star-gazers[4] of Mesopotamia were reading future events from her towers of sun-dried bricks, Dravidian tribes were cultivating the rich mud of the Ganges valley, a slow-changing race. Did the lonely traveler, I wonder, troll the same air then as now to ward away evil spirits from the star-lit road? Did the Dravidian maiden do her sleek hair in the same knot at the nape of her brown neck, and poise the earthen pot with the same grace on her daily pilgrimage to the river?

The Aryan Brother.

"Once upon a time" Abraham pitched his tent beneath the oaks of Mamre, and Moses shepherded his father-in-law's flocks at "the back side of the desert." It was then that down through the grim passes of the Himalayas, where now the British regiments convoy caravans and guard the outposts of Empire, a people of fair skin and strange speech migrated southward to the Land of the Five Rivers and the fat plains of the Ganges. Aryan even as we, the Brahman entered India, singing hymns to the sun and the dawn, bringing with him the stately Sanskrit speech, new lore of priest and shrine, new pride of race that was to cleave society into those horizontal strata that persist to-day in the caste system. Thus through successions of Stone-Age men, Dravidian tribes, and Aryan invaders, India stretches her roots deep into the past. But while there were transpiring these

     "Old, unhappy, far-off things
     And battles long ago,"

where were we? The superior Anglo-Saxon who speaks complacently of "the native" forgets that during that same "once upon a time" when civilization was old in India, his ancestors, clad in deer skin and blue paint, were stalking the forests of Europe for food.

Gifts to the West....