THE

MONTHLY REVIEW,

For M AY, 1818.

ART. I. Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India; and of their Institutions, Religious and Civil. By the Abbé J. A. Dubois, Missionary in the Mysore. Translated from the French Manuscript. 4to. pp. 590. 21. 28. Boards. Longman and Co. 1817.

IF

the advertisement prefixed to this volume by the, anonymous translator may be implicitly trusted, the Abbé Dubois was resident in Europe at the beginning of the French Revolution, but, considering himself as endangered by the atrocious proceedings which the jacobin-authorities of France were directing against the clergy, he determined to withdraw from a scene of massacre, and to seek a new field of pious and benevolent exertion among the mild and pacific Hindoos. With the respectable character of a Catholic missionary, he went to the Mysore, and assumed the garb and imitated the habits of the people; whose language he acquired with great proficiency, and among whom he appeared more as an observer than as an active teacher: behaving, indeed, like one who wished to acquire their religion rather than one who desired to superinduce his own. The meekness, privation, probity, and kindness, which distinguished his mode of living, and its total dissimilarity from that of the military Europeans, obtained for him an extraordinary degree of confidence; in so much that he found himself insensibly received on the footing of a sacred character, and with that dutiful hospitality which is awarded to the Brahmanical order. Wherever he went, the natives offered to supply all his wants; and the very priests seem almost to have acknowleged him as one of their own fraternity. In these circumstances, he gained an unusually complete knowlege of the casts, habits, notions, and religious literature of the Indian peninsula; and he drew up in the French language a memoir, which Sir James Mackintosh is here said to have described as the most comprehensive and minute account extant in any European language of the manners of the Hindoos.

VOL. LXXXVI.

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This

This French manuscript having been communicated in 1806 to Colonel Mark Wilks, then acting President at Mysore, he consulted with several English gentlemen, and determined to purchase it on account of the East-India Company. The price on which they agreed was two thousand pagodas; which, it was ascertained, would be acceptable to the Abbé, who had not either the means or the prospect of publication; and his information, it was presumed, was likely to aid the servants of the British government, in often conducting themselves more in unison with the customs and prejudices of the natives. The work was accordingly surrendered by the author, and brought to England; where it remained a considerable time in the Company's library, accessible to the curious, until the beginning of the year 1817, when a translation was commenced under the sanction of the Court of Directors. Of this translation, now completed, and published, we have to give some account.

occurs.

In the preliminary matter, an evident chronological error The Abbé Dubois, in his own preface, (page 15.) speaks of his having resided between seventeen and eighteen years among the people whom he has described. Now his manuscript was delivered up in 1806, and acquired in 1807 by the Governor in Council at Fort Saint George, which appears from an official dispatch. The Abbé, therefore, according to his own account, must have arrived in India in 1789, in order to have been resident there seventeen years in 1806; and in this case he did not escape from one of the fusillades of the French Revolution,' which is asserted in the preliminary advertisement, because no such danger existed in France at that period. Most probably he originally quitted Europe with the deliberate purpose of studying the language and people of Mysore, in order to collect the information requisite to prepare the success of future missions. Such biographical facts, however, his countrymen can best ascertain. For the work of a Catholic priest, the preface, if not interpolated, is singularly liberal; in proof of which we will quote one period. (P. xiv.)

The spirit of justice and of prudence with which the British nation rules the people of India who have become its subjeēts, and particularly the inviolable respect which she has constantly shown for the customs and prejudices, civil and religious, which are inherent in every district and cast, together with the impartial protection which she extends alike to the feeble and the strong, to the Brahman and the Paria, to the Christian, the Mahometan, and the Pagan, have more exalted her name and established her power in the east, than even her victories and her extensive conquests.'

The

The pronoun its should have been altered into the pronoun her, as the word nation is made feminine in the rest of the sentence: but such slips of the translator do not often

occur.

The volume itself is divided into three parts, or books, of which the first undertakes a General View of Society in India. The twelve subordinate chapters successively treat of the Division and Subdivision of Casts, and the Distinction between Right Hand and Left; - the Advantages resulting from the Division of Cast; - Expulsion from a Cast; - Restoration to a Cast; the original Founders of Brahmanism; - the different Kinds of Brahmans; the Sects of Vishnu and Siva; the Gurus, or Priests; the Purohitas, or Masters of Ceremonies; the Mantras, or Forms of Prayer; the Rules prescribed to Brahman Women when brought to bed.

Among the various ceremonies here detailed, a great many are innocently superstitious; and, except in occasioning much needless trouble to the observer of them, they cause no public or social inconvenience: but several rites are also enjoined which interfere much with the possibility of intercourse and the convenience of domestic life, and which aim at transferring to corporeal purity a praise and a reverence that ought to be reserved for moral worth. Such rites it is surely desirable to bring into gradual disuse; and we were much satisfied to observe that some native writers among the Hindoos are willing to co-operate in so expedient a change. From the fifth chapter, on the Antiquity and Origin of the Casts, we will make a short extract, which shews that an inward contempt for their own ritual is progressively spreading among the -Hindoos. A teacher, who should venture to treat their religion as Saint Paul treated that of the Jews, leaving the creed much at rest, but encouraging an assimilation of ceremony to that of the surrounding Gentiles, might form an internal schism, favourable to the growth of a more rational and liberal system of conduct and opinion.

Nothing in the world appears to be of greater antiquity than the casts of the Hindus and the customs which pertain to them. The ancient Greek and Latin authors, who have made mention of India, speak of those institutions as the groundwork of Hindu civilization established from time immemorial. The inviolable attachment of that people to their customs is a strong evidence of their antiquity. They are bred in the principle of invariably clinging to their customs, so that any new habit is a thing unheard of among them; any man attempting to introduce one would rouse the whole nation and would be proscribed as a dangerous innovator. So difficult would it be, that I believe it has never yet entered into the imagination of any intelligent Hindu.

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Every

Every thing relating to their customs proceeds, evenly, and is transacted with inflexible uniformity, and the minutest particulars are treated as of the utmost importance; because they have been taught that it is by the strict nicety with which small matters are attended to that the most momentous concerns are sustained. Accordingly there is no nation on the earth that can boast of having kept up for so long a time its domestic rules and customs without any perceptible change.

Some modern philosophical writers among them, such as Vemana, who has written his performance in the language of Telingana; and Tiruvaluven who has written his in the Tamul, are distinguished highly, and have made the Hindu customs the subject of their satire, throwing the sharpest ridicule upon the religion and habits of the country. But while these authors are exercising all their skill and raillery in ridiculing the religious ceremonies established in the nation, they never fail to recommend the practice of them, and are strictly attentive to it themselves. The works of the two authors I have named are always read and quoted with delight by all intelligent Hindus, although there be not a page in their writings that does not contain satirical reflections aimed at their gods and the worship and rites of the country.

One of the most artful contrivances made use of by the early Hindus for preserving their customs, has been that of clothing them with ceremonies, which make a strong impression on the senses, and communicate something holy to the practice. These ceremonies are rigorously observed. It is never permitted to any one to treat them as matters of form which may be practised or omitted at pleasure. The omission of any, even of the least important, would not be allowed to pass unpunished.'

If these native satirical writings, of which a farther account is given at page 162., were to be multiplied by the printingpress; if similar good-humoured attacks were tolerated on the theatre of Calcutta ; — if, in new novels and books of amusement, those Indian usages were especially exposed to the test of ridicule and argument, which most interfere with European notions of cleanliness and convenience; — it is probable that a fashionable sect of liberalists might be called into activity, who would desist from several of those practices which more immediately oppose the interchange of hospitality and good neighbourhood with persons of a foreign faith. The horror of the Hindoos for those who eat beef is certainly somewhat dangerous to English popularity; to slaughter a cow for food being in their eyes an act of deicide. An aversion to the contact of leather is another most inconvenient prejudice: since the servant, who cleans an European master's boots, becomes an outcast, and is punished more severely than if he had picked his pocket.

Part II. treats very diffusely of the four stages in life of the Brahmans, and is subdivided into thirty-nine chapters,

which exhaust the punctilious ceremonial law of that order. First is described the state of Brahmachari, or pupil, the conduct expected from him, the rights acquired by receiving the triple cord, the duty of shunning external and internal defilement of the body, and every thing that defiles the soul. Secondly, comes the stage of a Brahman's life called Grihastha; viz. when he marries and is made a father. Twenty chapters are allotted to the detail of the duties of this condition; with the triple prayers, the fasts and festivals, the prohibited food, the nocturnal sacrifices, the avocations of the order, the religious tolerance and political bigotry remarkable in it, their contempt for strangers, their manners, language, dress, houses, rules of politeness, visits, presents, and decorations. The matters relating to the women occupy four chapters; and adoption, partition of property, literature, epistolary forms, hand-writing, death, and obsequies, have seven separate sections. The third stage of Brahmanical life, called Vanaprastha, is that in which a married couple, satiated with this world and its vanities, determine to withdraw into the desert and live in frugal seclusion: it's rules extend through eight chapters. The fourth stage of Brahmanical life, called Sannyasi, occurs when a widower of this order turns hermit, and devotes himself to solitary contemplation. Three chapters comprize its rules. With the pupil, and with the retired Brahman, Europeans have little to do; it is chiefly in the second, or Grihastha stage, that it imports them to be conversant with the native usages.

The difficulties of dining with a Hindoo will be apparent from the following small portion of the code of the repast:

'Leather and every kind of skin, except those of the tyger and the antelope, are held to be very impure. They must never touch with their hands the pantoufles and sandals which they wear on their feet. A person who rides on horseback must have some stuff to cover the saddle, the bridle, and stirrup-leathers, to avoid all contact with skin. The most disagreeable of all European fashions in their eyes is that of boots and gloves; and they hold a man to be extremely unrefined who does not shrink to touch the slough of a carcase.

A Brahman who is particular in his delicacy must attend also to what he treads upon. It would cost him a washing if he should touch a bone with his foot, or a broken pot, a bit of rag, or a leaf from which one had been eating. He must likewise be careful where he sits down. Some devotees always carry their seat with them, that is a tyger's or antelope's skin, which are always held pure. Some are contented with a mat: the rich take a carpet ; but one may even squat on the ground without defilement, provided it be newly rubbed over with cow-dung. This last specific

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is