New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments by John Morrison
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page 12 of 233 (05%)
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College in Calcutta. Now, without any new ordinance, they are admitted,
as among the privileged castes, and the idea of the brotherhood of man has thus made way. The silent invasion is strikingly illustrated in the official _Report on Female Education in India_, 1892 to 1897. On a map of India within the _Report_, the places where female education was most advanced were coloured greener according to the degree of advance--surely most inappropriate colouring, though that is not our business. The map showed a strip of the greenest green all round the sea-coast. There the unobserved new influence came in. The _Census Report_ for 1901 showed the same silently obtruding influence from over the sea in the case of the education of males. Many such silent changes might be noted. And yet again, the most diverse ideas may be observed side by side in a strange chequer. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the University of Calcutta accepted an endowment of a lectureship "to promote Sanscrit learning and Vedantic studies," any Hindus without distinction of caste being eligible as lecturers; and then, shortly after, agreed to the request of the first lecturer that none but Hindus be admitted to the exposition of the sacred texts, thus excluding the European heads of the university from a university lecture. Perhaps the lecturer thought himself liberal, for to men like him at the beginning of the century it would have been an offence to read the sacred texts with Sudras or Hindus of humble castes. According to strict Hindu rule, only brahmans can read the sacred books.[2] [Sidenote: Indian ideas.] For in all three spheres, social, political, and religious, the advent of the new age implied more or less of a conflict. India has still of her own a social system, political ideas, and religious ideas and ideals. In the Indian social system, caste and the social inferiority of |
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