half-educated shopkeeper or native tradesman. You ask in English how
many children he has, and his reply is, "I have not any children, I have
three daughters." Just a little more reading in English literature would
have taught him that elsewhere the daughter is a child of the family
equally with the son.

There, in these two examples, the great social problems of India present
themselves--caste and the social inferiority of women, and in the
English language we see India confronted with ideas different from her
own. Take a third illustration from the socio-religious sphere. Few
Hindus think of Hinduism as a system of religious practices and
doctrines to be justified by reason or by spiritual intuition, or by the
spiritual satisfaction it can afford to mankind. No, Hinduism is a thing
for Indians, and belongs to the Indian soil. The converse of the idea is
that Christianity is a foreign thing, the religion of the intruding
ruling race. It is not for Indians. A vigorous patriotic pamphlet,
published in 1903, entitled _The Future of India_, assumes plainly that
_Hindus_ and _Indians_ mean the same thing. The pamphlet speaks of the
relations of Indians to "other races, such as Mahomedans, Parsees, and
Christians," as if these were less truly Indians than the Hindus. To the
writer, manifestly, Hinduism is a racial thing. To him, however, or to
the next generation after him, further study of modern history will make
clear that only in a slight degree and a few instances is religion a
racial thing, and that there are laws and a science of spiritual as of
bodily health. Once more, how ill-fitting are, say, the Indian word
_mukti_ (deliverance from further lives, the end of transmigrations) and
the English word _salvation_, although _mukti_ and _salvation_ are often
regarded as equivalents.

To the man instructed in English, such contrasts are always being