Beast and Man in India:A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People
A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People
9781465547637
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
When, on the 21st March 1890, under the auspices of the Hon. Sir Andrew Scoble, the Legislative Council of India passed an Act (XI. of 1890) for the prevention of cruelty to animals, some surprise was expressed in England that legislation should be necessary for a people who have long been quoted as an example of mercy. It was hinted that Orientals must have learned cruelty, as they have learned drunkenness, from brutal Britons. Those who know India need not be told that this insinuation is groundless, since both vices have for ages been rooted in the life of Eastern as of all the nations under heaven. The general conclusion of cultivated Europe as to the temper of Orientals towards animals is expressed by Mr. Lecky, in a clause of the sentence with which he concludes a survey of a growth of consideration for animals as an element of public morals, in his History of European Morals from Constantine to Charlemagne, and runs thus: The Muhammadans and the Brahmans have in this sphere considerably surpassed the Christians. There is enough truth in this statement to give interest to an examination of it. The gulf that must exist between religious prescriptions that have earned a world-wide reputation for mercy and a practice which has led a Government, strongly adverse to unnecessary legislation, to frame an enactment for the prevention of cruelty, deserves looking into. We ought, perhaps, to distrust most of the compendious phrases which presume to label our complex and paradoxical humanity with qualities and virtues, like drugs in a drawer. At all events, it is better not to try to make another rule but to offer a few general considerations and details of actual fact, leaving the Christian to frame his summary for himself. The wholesale ascription of tender mercy to India may not unfairly be held to be part of a wide and general misconception of Indian life and character, of which the administrator, the schoolmaster, and the missionary have reason to complain. They find on closer acquaintance that both Hindus and Muhammadans are more human and more like the rest of the world than the conventional pictures of Scholars, working from a dead and done-with literature, had led them to expect. Some of the most authoritative of these writers have never ventured to disturb their dreams by contact with the living India of to-day, and their gushing periods have, in consequence, as much actuality as Gulliver’s Travels. For nearly all, the last few centuries of this era do not exist. To judge from their writings, the English power in India might have succeeded that of the Gupta kings. No mention is made of the horrible hole of the pit from which the country was digged; and the events that really shaped the character and habits of the people are ignored in favour of ancient law-givers and forgotten Vedas. Nothing could be more scholarly, amiable, sentimental, or mistaken, and the plain result is a falsification of history which has more ill effects than are visible on the narrow horizon of an English study. It is not a pleasant subject to dwell upon, but there is no more fitting adjective than cruel for the India of the late Mogul and the Pind?ri. We may allow that through centuries of trouble the Hindu system availed to preserve Brahmanical ordinances, but these only affected a limited portion of the community. The masses of the people, who really have to do with animals, could not but be demoralised. So general precepts of mercy for the many shrank into ritual observances for the few. Moreover, such precepts as exist have been exaggerated in report
