mmw^^mm^mw&mtt THE 3j One of Their Friends f^ PRINCETON, N. J. ''^■M Purchased by the Hammill Missionary Fund. Division ^ Section /^ oC j^. / O Number. V^ r. L '--jiL_ ^"7: ^"^ ■F THE Children of India WRITTEN FOR The Children of England / BY OJME OF THEIF( FRIEND^. ILoiiboit: THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY, 56 Paternoster Row; 5 St. Paul's Churchyaud AND 164 Piccadilly. MORRISON AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE. CONTENTS. What is it About? PACE 7 PART I.-^THEIR SURROUNI)Ii\(;S. CHAP. I. Their Country, . . . . . II. Their Homes, . . . . . III. Their Religion, . . . . . IV. Holy Places, . . . . . V. Caste, ...... VI. Losing Caste, . . . . . 9 15 20 27 P.VRT II.— THEMSELVES. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. I. II. III. IV. When they are Baisies, Little PIindu Girls, Little Hindu Boys, A Hindu Wedding, Husbands and Wives, Sickness and Death, Widows, . PART HI.— GODS AND FESTIVALS The Durjah Pujah, Kali, juggennatii, Other Feasts, PART IV.— OTHER RELIGIONS. I. The Mohammedans, II. A Mohammedan Wedding, III. The Parsees, IV. The Santals, V. Sikhs, Fakirs, and Bkahmos, 42 47 52 56 66 74 78 84 88 94 97 10:: 1 10 114 1 17 \22 CONTENTS. PART v.— WORK AND WORKERS CHAl'. I. What is a Missionary? II. Missionaries in India, III. The Mission Schools, . IV. The Story of one of their Scholars, V. Mothers at School, VI. The Queen's Story, VII. What shall we Do? . VIII. What Girls can Do, . PAGE 127 130 141 161 169 ArPENDIX, 175 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. A Hindu Girls' School, The Sacred Cow of the Hindus, Doing Pujah to Tools, A Hindu Idol Shop, , Benares, .... Low Caste Women, Hindu Children, Hindu Girls, Hindu Wedding — A Midnight Procession A Hindu Lady's Carriage,^ . A Hindu Gentleman's Carriage,' The Goddess Kali, Temple of Kali, The Car of Juggennath, The God Ganesa, A Mohammedan School, A Mohammedan Wedding, A Group of Santals, . A Hindu Fakir, A Writing Lesson, Zenana Work, . Frontispiece 2 II 22 24 29 33 43 50 62 67 68 89 91 95 99 107 III 119 124 138 153 Reprinted by permission from the ' King's Message. The Children of India. WHAT IS IT ABOUT? LITTLE while a.cro I was sittinof in a room where two ladies were talkinsf tocrether about books. One of them asked the other if she could tell her of a nice book for children about missions. A long time passed before the answer was given. The lady did not like to say no ; but after thinking a good while, she w^as obliged to say that she had never heard of such a book. Then they began to talk about other books, and I put away the thoughts that had been coming into my head about the children, in a safe corner of my mind, to keep for a little while till I could find some more to put with them. There were only three of them at first. Shall I tell you what they were ? (i) There are very few books for children about missions. (2) There ought to be more. (3) Somebody must write a new one. But then people say, ' Three are no company ; ' so these three thoughts could not get on well together till I found number four, and number four came very soon after. Why should not you be the somebody ? The four managed to get on without any quarrels, as soon as I promised I would be the somebody. Then I had t() find a great many more thoughts to go with these four. The first was that the book should be all about missions and 8 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. children — all sorts of missions and all sorts of children ; but then, before very long, I found out that if I had to write a book about so many places, and so many people, there would have to be so many thoughts that I could never find room for them all in my head, which is not a very big one, and that even if I could, you would never find room for them in yours. So I thought that perhaps you would like it better if I were to write about only one set of missions, and one set of children. Then, as the book is for little people, it must be a little book, full of little chapters, made up of little words, so that you will never have to say, ' Please, mamma, what does this word mean ? ' The only things that I hope will not be little, are the things that you will do when you have read to the end. Another of my thoughts (I wonder whether you will like it !) was that this book must not be a story book. When I was a little girl, and used to read many stories, I remember, if the story was a very nice one, it used to make me so sorry to think it was not true ; and if it was a sad story, then I was glad it was not true, and forgot it as soon as I could. Now some of the things in this book are going to be very sad, and some very nice ; but everything is going to be true, because I do not want you to forget any of it, nor to think it does not much matter. It is going to be about things that do matter very much, and the sad things will nearly all be things that you can help to make less sad, even if you are only tiny boys and girls. You will find very few stories, and I will tell you why. I want you not only to read and remember it all, but to think about it all. I remember something else about myself when I was a little girl. If ever I had a book that was partly stories and partly not, I used to pick out the stories and skip all the rest. Now I do not want you to skip any of this book, and so I am going to put in so few stories, that if you skip all that is not story, you will have to skip very nearly all the book. But I hope that when you get to the end, you will say it has been as interesting as a story. PART I, THEIR SURROUNDINGS, CHAPTER I. THEIR COUNTRY. O begin with, India is a very large country. I expect you think England is very big, and that it would take a very long time to go all over it ; but England is quite a tiny place compared with India. If you were to divide India into eighteen pieces, each piece by itself would be bigger than England, Wales, and Scotland all put together. Yet very nearly all this great country belongs to England, and is ruled over by our own Queen ; and that is one reason why English children ought to know all about it, and about the people who live there. You will have learned all about the mountains, and rivers, and capes, and bays, and gulfs in the geography, I expect, or if you have not, you will very soon ; at any rate, if you look there, you will find them all, so I will not tell you about them here. There is one large river, which you had better find in the map before you go any further, because you will read a great deal about it in this book; I mean the Ganges, which the Hindus think a great deal of. They say it came from the sweat of one of their gods, named Siva, of whom \ou will read more bv and bv. The reason lo THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. the Ganges came to be worshipped is that it makes all the country fertile through which it flows ; therefore the river itself, and all the towns built on the banks of it, are considered very holy. I will only tell you the names of some of the towns now : Benares, the most sacred of all ; Allahabad, Juggennath, Muthra, and Hurdwar. A great many pilgrims are constantly going to these places. The water from the river Ganges is taken to all parts of India, and used to purify people who have been defiled ; it is also sprinkled on the bride and bride- groom at a wedding, and on the dead. The goddess who is now said to live in the Ganges is not supposed to have been always there, but to have come from another river. The Brahmins say that, most likely, before very long she will move again to another place, and then Benares will no longer be so sacred. Of course, as the country is so large, there are very different people in different parts, speaking a great many different languages, and having different customs ; even when the same language is spoken, there are such varied ways of speaking it (dialects we call them), that the people cannot understand each other, so that it takes the missionary a long time to learn to preach to the Hindus ; sometimes even in the same town there are two or three different lano^uaees spoken. The Hindu towns are, in many ways, unlike English ones. In the large towns, especially Calcutta, there are a great many English people, who live in houses like those we have in England, and dress as we do at home. But the houses that the Indian people live in are so different that it will take a whole chapter to tell you all about them. In every large town there are many temples for idol- worship. Some of them are very grandly carved and ornamented. In the North- West they are not so ornamental as in other parts. Then their carriages are very different too ; and instead of shops, they buy all their things at bazaars — not what we mean by bazaars in England ; but a place like a market, sometimes open and sometimes covered, where people go to buy whatever they want, and merchants THEIR COUNTRY. ii meet each other and talk about their business, so that a bazaar is a very noisy, busy place. Very often missionaries go there to preach, because if the people will not come to them, they must go to the people ; and in the bazaar there are always large crowds, and some are sure to listen. There are many animals in India that you never see in this country, unless you go to a wild beast show. On the mountains in the north of THE SACRED COW OF THE HINDUS. India there are wild donkeys and mules, and tiny wild horses only thirty inches high. There are bears, and wolves, and boars, jackals and hyenas, tigers and crocodiles, leopards and panthers, but no lions. except a few in Gujarat. The Bengal tiger is a very fierce creature ; it can spring a long way at a time, and so it can easily catch other animals and tear them to pieces. There are many crocodiles in the Ganges. Years ago, before India belonged to England, mothers and 12 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. fathers used to take their Httle children and throw them into the river to please the gods, and then the crocodiles used to eat them ; but now the people are not allowed to do such things. Many of the animals in I ndia are looked upon as sacred. Oxen and cows are worshipped as if they were gods, especially the humped cow, which is said to be so holy that its touch will take away all sin. Of course, if cows are so holy, nobody must eat them, though the Hindus believe that if a man dies in Benares, he will go to heaven even if he has eaten beef Monkeys are sacred animals, too ; in some places there are temples full of them, where people go to worship. In the streets of all Indian towns are found quantities of cranes ; they are very useful birds, for they keep the streets clean by eating all the rubbish that can possibly be eaten, so they do the work of scaven- gers. Crows are thought a great deal of, too, and no wonder, for inside them are supposed to live the souls of Hindu men and women who have died ; so if a man shot a crow, he might be shooting his mother, for anything he knew. They are allowed to fly in and out of the houses just as they like, and to help themselves to anything they want. Once a year the crows have a great feast, called ' Ancestors* dinner,' when the people pray to their dead relatives to come and eat the good things they have got ready for them. There are a great many snakes and serpents in India, too, as there generally are in very hot countries, and many of them are so poisonous that one bite will kill a man. One of them has a very long name, which, put into English, is the 'eight-step serpent,' because if one of them bites a man, he will not be able to walk eight steps before he falls down dead. The snakes creep about everywhere — into the ovens, into boxes, and baskets, and chests, under the pillows, between the sheets, wher- ever they can find a corner, so people have to look out for them very sharply ; they are all sorts of sizes, from a few inches to twenty feet in length. Some of the Indians worship them because they are so afraid of them. THEIR COUNTRY. 13 I must not forget to tell you about the weather, because it makes such a difference to the missionaries. The year is divided into three seasons, (i) The hot season, which begins in March and lasts till June. (2) The rainy season, from June to September. (3) The temperate season, from September to February. It is only this last season that is at all healthy for people who have been used to live in Europe. In the hot weather it is so hot that English people cannot do anything, except very early in the morning, and quite late in the evening. They very often have the fever, so that there are few English gentlemen and ladies who do not get ill if they stay in India many years. There are a great many insects, as there generally are in hot countries ; the worst of all are the mosquitoes, which sting so dread- fully that it is very difficult to go to sleep at night. The natives smear themselves all over with oil to keep them off, and the English people have a particular kind of curtains to their bed, which they draw tight all round, in hopes of keeping them out ; but they generally manage to get in somehow. Another thing the English people have in their rooms in the hot weather is a very large fan, called a punkah. It is a light frame of wood covered with calico, with a short curtain fastened to it ; the frame is hung from the ceiling by ropes, another rope is passed through the wall to a servant outside, who pulls it backwards and forwards, and so makes a little air in the room. They keep on doing this all day and all night. I believe some of the men are so clever, that they can go to sleep and yet not stop pulling ; but sometimes they do stop, and then, even if the English people are asleep, they feel the heat directly, and wake up ; so you can fancy how hot it must be. Of course English people cannot go out of doors in the hot part of the day. All that long time from March to June there is never a cloud to be seen in the sky, nothing but scorching sunshine ; and even when the rain does come, it is very unhealthy for Europeans, so that often a missionary who has been at work in India, teaching the 14 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. people and preaching to them, begins to feel very ill, and, in hopes of getting better, goes up to a house in the mountains, where it is not so hot ; then, perhaps, he gets a litde better ; but when he gets back to the plains he is ill again, and then the doctor tells him he must not stay in India any longer, he must come home; so he comes back to England. Sometimes, after he has been in England a little while, he feels so much better that he is able to go back to India ; but very often the climate has done him so much harm that he is obliged to stay at home always, and sometimes he does not get better even at home. So you see how much a missionary must love Jesus, to be ready to go and live in India and teach the people, even if he knows it may kill him. That is like Jesus Himself, is it not .-^ He wanted so much to save us, that He came to live in a strange country, and to die for our sakes. Do you remember who it was that said, ' I am ready to die for the name of the Lord Jesus' .'^ It was a missionary ; but not in India. Find out where the words come from, and who said them, and put it in here ( ). CHAPTER II. THEIR HOMES. NDIAN houses are not a bit like those you Hve in. In England, when a man marries, he goes away from his father's house, and gets a house of his own, and he and his wife live in that. But in India the sons live with their fathers, even after they are married. Sometimes a son is obliged to leave home because he gets work in another place, and sometimes one of the sons quarrels with the others, and then he goes away and starts a house of his own. The wives often persuade their husbands to leave the father's house, if they do not get on well with the other ladies. I will tell you all about a rich man's house in India ; of course, the poor people do not have such large ones. Instead of being built to face the road, like our houses, or with a garden in front, there is a large square court in the middle, and the house is built all round it, with the windows looking into the court, so that the part facing the street is only bare wall. Round three sides of the house there are two verandahs — an upper and a lower, with a great many rooms opening on to them. The lower rooms are used for storehouses, coach-houses, and places of that kind, and for the men-servants, of whom there are a great many. The upper rooms are for the gentlemen. If you went into the up-stairs rooms, where the gentlemen live, you would find them very nicely furnished, but very dusty. Hindu rooms are always dusty 1 6 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. and full of cobwebs, for the Hindus think it is very lucky to have plenty of spiders, and that it is a great sin to disturb them ; so the spiders have fine times, and make themselves quite at home every- where, without any fear of being disturbed. But although you would find plenty of gentlemen and plenty of spiders, all enjoying themselves very much, and little boys and big boys and little girls running about playing and laughing, there is something you would not find if you went into every room up-stairs and down-stairs. You would not be able to find one lady or one big girl ; you would begin to think that little girls always die in India, and never grow up at all — at least, rich little girls, for you would have passed plenty of poor women and girls in the street, but no rich ones. Why, whatever has become of them all ? I expect, if you were there, you would go to one of the servants and say, ' Please, I have seen the gentlemen, and the big boys, and the little boys, and the tiny girls ; now mayn't I see the ladies and the big girls ? ' Now I cannot tell exactly what the servant would say to you. If you are a little boy, he would say something like this : ' Oh dear no ! no men or boys are ever allowed to see an Indian lady, unless she is their mother or their sister, or some very near relative ; ' and, however much you coaxed, you would never be allowed to have even one little peep at the ladies. But suppose you are a little girl, and had your mamma with you, then perhaps the master of the house would, as a great favour, let you see his ladies. He would not be able to take you himself, for if he did, the ladies would hear the sound of his feet on the stairs, and they would be so frightened at the very idea of a man looking at them, that they would all run away as fast as ever they could, and hide in their bedrooms to get out of his way. So the gentleman would either have to tell you how to find your own way, or he would have to send a poor woman to show you. Then you would go to the fourth side of the court, for you remember you have only been told about three sides yet. THEIR HOMES. 17 On this fourth side you first come to a large room with the roof raised into a dome ; that is the temple or gods' house for the family, which is generally full of pictures and images of gods, and plenty of chandeliers. This is the place where all the worship is carried on. Praying and giving presents to the gods is called in India doing pujah — you will often come to that word again, so remember what it means. On one side of the temple there are more verandahs, and if you look up to the top one you will see that part of it is separated from the rest, and that it has a screen of cane-work in front of it, so that the people who sit there cannot be seen by the people in the other parts of the temple. Look again, and you will see that there are no chandeliers there, so that whoever is behind that screen must be quite in the dark"; of course they can see into the light, but nobody in the temple could see them even through the cane-work, because it would not be light enough. You will guess before very long what this place is for, so I will not stay to tell you now, but will let you go on a little farther, and see what else you can find. This dark part of the verandah opens into a passage ; go along that, and you will come to another square building with a court in the middle, something like the one you saw when you first came to the house, only not so large and not so nice. Look into the lower rooms first ; you will see they are full of pots and pans ; and if you look all about, I expect you will find some vegetables and some curry, and plenty of rice and sweets ; you will soon guess that this is the kitchen, and so it is. You will be sure to find some servants there, and very likely a grand lady cooking the dinner, for all the Hindu ladies know how to cook. But we won't stay in the kitchen to-day ; we shall find out some more about the cooking by and by. We want to get up-stairs now, and after looking about for some time, we find a little narrow stair- case — quite dark. We climb uf), and find ourselves on another verandah, with a few doors and little windows with bars to them, too J5 i8 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. high up for you to see out, opening into it ; and now at last we have got at the women and girls, hidden away up here altogether, where they can see nobody, and nobody can see them ; out of sight, and, generally, out of mind. They may laugh or cry, quarrel or kiss, eat and sleep and talk, be well or ill, and sometimes even die, without anybody caring very much ; and whatever happens in the world, or in the town, or in the street, or in the gentlemen's part of the house, they know nothing about it. There they are, shut away by themselves all the year round, from the time they are born, or a few years after, to the time they die. You will find out a great deal more about them, which will make you more and more glad you are not an Indian child, and your mother is not an Indian lady. But It was not the ladies we came to see so much as the place they live in — so we had better take another look around. You will have guessed by this time that the dark gallery in the temple is where the ladies go to do \\\€\x piijah. You will find no nice furniture in the ladies' rooms, like what you saw in the gentlemen's ; no tables or chairs or sofas ; no pictures except of dreadful gods and goddesses painted on the walls them- selves, and no books. Perhaps you will find a bedstead with a mat on it, and there may even be two or three hard pillows ; but most likely not. There will be a box in one corner for the ladies' clothes, and a brass cup for them to drink out of, and generally that is all. Not quite, though, for running about under the bedstead, on the box, anywhere, you will find hens and chickens and dogs, who live there with the ladies. So you may imagine how dirty everything is ; and, remember, this is not a poor man's house, but a rich man's, and these ladies, living In this dirty, close, bad-smelling place, are the wives and children of the richest men in India. The rooms where they live form what is called a zenana. So now you know what people mean when they talk about zenana missions. Now we must go down into the court again ; but we have not THEIR HOMES. 19 quite finished yet ; we shall find another passage down there, leading out of the court, right under the house, to a piece of ground with a high wall all round it, and in the middle there will be a pond ; the water in it comes from a spring, which stops running in the very hot dry weather, and then the pond gets green and muddy, and stays like that till the rain begins ; this is all the Hindu ladies know of a garden. In a very few of these courts there are two or three trees by the side of the pond ; but there are some ladies in India, even old ones, who never saw a tree in their lives. The pond is the ladies' bath ; they go to it every day, for, though their rooms are so untidy, Indian women themselves are very clean ; it is one of the laws of their religion that they must bathe every day. The very particular ones do it twice every day, and change their clothes twice, too, or else they are not thought clean enough to do anything for their husbands. Some Hindu ladies have to begin this shut-up life when they are six years old ; but in some parts they are not quite so strict, and do not shut them up till they are married. Their relatives are beginning now to let them go out more and mix with other people when they get quite old. The poor people's houses are very small and dirty, and the people who live in them are very dirty, too, and yet all of them have quantities of jewels that they wear when they want to look very fine. If you met a poor Hindu woman out of doors on a feast day, you would think at first she was a rich lady, and would never suppose she lived in a hut. CHAPTER III. THEIR RELIGION. THINK I must tell you about this next, as all the rest of the book would be very hard to understand if you did not know about their religion. It makes all the difference to a nation what god they worship, and especially in India, where the religion of the people shows itself in everything — in the way the houses are built, the kind of food they eat, the clothes they wear, almost everything they do all day and every day. If you went into a house in India, you would find out, almost as soon as you got there, what was the religion of the people that lived in it, even if they did not tell you. I think those of us who have really given ourselves to Jesus may learn something from this. People ought to be able to see our religion, too, and to know that we love Jesus even before we tell them, by seeing that we are always trying to please Him, and giving up all the things that we know He does not like ; so if you are one of God's little boys or girls, ask Him to make you at least as true to Him as the people in India are to their false gods, so that those who know you may very soon find out that you are serving God. As India is such a very big country, you will not be surprised to hear that there are a great many different religions ; if I told you all about all of them, you would be quite tired, and my book THEIR RELIGION. 21 would be much too big ; so I will tell you now about the one that most of the people belong to, and afterwards a little about the others. The Hindu religion is followed by one hundred and eighty-seven millions of the people in India — that is, more than eight times as many people as there are in all England. The most wonderful thing of all is the number of gods the Hindus believe in ; you would never guess how many — three hundred and thirty millions ; so that there are more gods than there are people, and no man could possibly worship them all, or even learn their names ; why, if a little boy were to make up his mind to worship a different god every day, it would take him more than nine hundred thousand years to get to the end ! The three chief gods are Brahma, the creator (from whom the priests get their names, for they are called Brahmins) ; Vishnu, the pre- server ; and Siva, the destroyer. There are many goddesses too ; those you will hear most of in this book are Kali, Durjah, Juggennath, and Saraswati. To make up for having so very many gods to worship, the Hindus say that there were not after all really so many, but that they have all, or nearly all, taken a great many forms ; so they tell you that Durjah and Kali were really the same goddess, only once she came to the world as Kali and once as Durjah. You will be surprised to hear that none of the gods or goddesses are even supposed to have been good, but all very, very wicked indeed. They often quarrel amongst themselves, so the way to please one god is to offend another. The people worship them, not because they love them, and want them to do them good, but because they hate them, and want to persuade them not to do them harm. In the South of India the people are not ashamed to confess that they worship devils. As nobody can live long enough to worship all the gods, each Hindu chooses those he likes best. In almost every house there is one special favourite among the gods ; a litde image is made of it, generally stone or metal, and every morning and (evening it is 22 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. worshipped ; a priest comes to the house to pray to it, and gets for DOING PUJAH TO TOOLS. a present all the sacrifices that have been offered to the god — rice, sweets, fruit, money, and all sorts of other good things. THEIR RELIGION. 23 At the festival of Sauri, every workman does pujak to his tools, praying to them, and offering sacrifices of incense, flowers, fruit, and rice ; the women do the same to their pots and pans. Siva is worshipped by every woman in India if she belongs to the Hindu religion. The images of Siva are quite little things, only three inches high, sometimes only a plain black stone. When a woman wants to worship him, she sits down before the image, sprinkles it with Ganges water, gives it flowers, sweets, and nuts, and with every gift says a particular prayer; if she makes one mistake, even if she does not move just right, all her worship is no good, and she must begin over again. In the bazaars there are a great many idol shops, where the people can buy gods of any shape or kind or size they like. If you paid a visit to one of these shops, you would find in one corner a pile of arms, in another a heap of legs, and somewhere else some bodies without either arms or legs, and you would hear a great noise of hammering in one part of the shop, where all the limbs w^ere being fastened on to the body. Almost anything can be made into a god by putting a little patch of red paint on it ; but not even an idol is thought sacred until the priest has blessed it, and put the god inside it ; sometimes this is done by washing it in Ganges water. An English gentleman once watched a man buying an idol. In the back of it there was a little door, which, when it was opened, showed a small cupboard. The man bought it and took it to a priest, and the gentleman went after him to see Avhat happened. The priest took it in his hand, opened the door, said a prayer, and then gave it back to the man, saying, ' There, it is all right now ; I saw the god go In.' Another gentleman once bought an idol for three farthings, before it was consecrated ; afterwards it would cost a great deal more. In some parts of the North of India the gods are treated just as if they were alive. They are washed, and fanned if it is hot, and get feasts given to them, and some people even act plays to amuse them. 24 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. In some places the gods are married to the goddesses once a year. There is one god whose worshippers carry him, in the form of a Httle stone pebble in a silver box, fastened by a chain round their necks. Sometimes they are supposed to be sick, and then they are shut up A HINDU IDOL SHOP. and nursed. I have read of one family who were afraid that the god they kept in their house would tell tales of them in heaven, and repeat all the naughty things they said and did, so they promised to give it all sorts of beautiful presents if it would not fell, and once THEIR RELIGION. 25 even gave it some very sticky food, thinking that its Hps would stick together, and then it woukl not be able to tell, even if it wanted to. Another thin^ that the Hindus believe in is transmigration of souls — that is, when any one dies, the soul goes out of the dead body into another body, sometimes into the body of another man or woman, but generally into an animal. If people are very good, they will go into a nice animal — a cow or a sheep, or something of that kind ; but if they are wicked, they go into such creatures as mice, or rats, or flies ; and this does not happen only once, but again and again, till the soul has done more ofood thinofs than wicked ones. This is why the Hindus will not eat meat ; they are afraid of turning out the souls of their friends into a worse animal. The soul has to pass out of one body into another, no less than eight million four hundred thousand times, before it is thought to be quite free from sin. Another thing that helps to make the Hindus wicked is their belief in fate. They say that before a man is born everything that he is going to say or do has been decided for him, and that he must do it whether he likes or not. If they are tempted to do wrong, they do it at once, and say they could not help it — it was their fate ; but for all the wrong things they do or say they expect to be punished when their souls have gone into other bodies. Of course, a man who believes this will never be sorry for having been wicked, because he thinks the fault was not in him, but in his fate. How hard and unjust they must think their gods, if they suppose they will punish them for doing what they could not possibly help doing ! There are a great many religious feasts in India; every god that is worshipped has his own special feast once a year. I will tell you about some of them in another chapter. As the Indian men mix more with English people, and read more books, they get to think less about their heathen gods, and are beginning to feel that they are no gods at all. The great thing that keeps many of them from giving up having anything to do with their idols is that the women are so fond of their own religion, and 26 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. the men are afraid to go against them. The women watch their husbands and brothers and sons, and do all they can to strengthen their belief in their gods ; so the great thing for Christians to do now is to teach the women. But if all the Indian women are to be taught about Jesus, there must be twelve hundred times as many ladies to teach them as there now are, for out of all the hundred and twenty-three million women in India, only one in twelve hundred has ever heard of Jesus. Will you not ask God to make some more ladies want to go, and to make the rich ladies and gentlemen, who cannot go themselves, give their money to pay for those who can ? CHAPTER IV. HOLY PLACES. OME of the towns in India are considered very holy, especially those that are built on the Ganges. Of these, Benares is the most sacred of all. It is said to have been built by Siva, of gold and precious stones, which afterwards turned into stone and thatch, because of the sins of the people who lived there. The Hindus think Benares is eighty thousand steps nearer heaven than any other place, and that those who die there will go straight to Siva's heaven, the best of all. There are a great many pilgrims constantly going to Benares, besides very many sick people who are brought there to die. As soon as it is thought that a man is too ill to get better, he is carried to the Ganges, and put in a shed by the side of the river, where he can see the water. After he has once been taken there, he may never have anything to eat or drink, or any more medicine till he dies ; so a great many people who have been put there die of hunger, because they are not really so ill as their friends thought they were. Why don't they take them home again ? you will ask. Because, if a man gets better after he has been taken to the river, his friends say it must be because he was so wicked the gods would not have him, so none of his relatives, not even his mother, or his little boys or girls, would ever touch him again, and he would have 28 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. to live by himself all his life and be a beggar, and every one would think it a disgrace to have anything to do with him. If a man's relatives think there is any danger of his not dying after he has been taken to the Ganges, they kill him themselves by filling his mouth with mud out of the river, and so suffocating him. But the Ganges is not the only sacred thing at Benares. There is the great Monkey Temple (you remember monkeys are sacred animals), where there are at least a hundred monkeys running about in every part of the building, and men constantly going in to worship them. As they go out they ring a bell, as a sign that they have finished their prayers. Another temple at Benares is full of sacred cows. But the holiest place in all the world to a Hindu is the Golden Temple at Benares, in which there is the Well of Knowledge. This well is full of dead flowers and rice mixed with Ganges water : the flowers and rice are offerings that the worshippers have put in. A dreadful smell is caused by all these dead leaves and the stagnant water ; and yet any Hindu will give a great deal of money, if he has it, to be allowed to have just one teaspoonful of that water ; he thinks it so very holy. How different from the living water that Jesus spoke about when He said, * Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst'! This water we may get from Jesus * without money and without price,' only for asking, and yet so many go without it. Won't you say to Jesus, as the woman of Samaria did, ' Give me of this water, that I thirst not' ? I am sure He Avill say yes, if you do. Allahabad is another very sacred place, but not quite so much so as Benares. When a pilgrim first comes to Allahabad, he sits down on the bank of the Ganges, and has his head shaved, holding it over the water, so that every hair may fall into it ; and he believes that for every single hair he shall get a million years in heaven ; so, you see, a man may be as wicked as he likes if he is a Hindu, and HOLY PLACES. 29 yet get to heaven after all, if he is rich enough to be able to take a journey to Allahabad. BENARES. Women bathe in the Ganges as well as men. If a lady wants to go, how do you think she manages it ? She must not go on her feet and have a bathe, because, if she did, so many men would see 3° THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. her. She is taken in her palky (a close carriage without any windows) all the way, even if it is hundreds of miles ; and this carriage is made in a particular way, so that the water can get in through the bottom ; it is held in the water, and so the lady gets her bath without ever leaving her carriage. She will have to be carried away in her wet things ; but that does not matter at all, as it is only a woman. If a wife has no little boys, she goes to bathe in the Ganges, if she can, thinking that, for a reward, the gods may give her a boy. Some ladies take very long journeys for this purpose, and it is no wonder they care so much about it, for if they do not soon have a little son, their husbands will find another wife. If a Christian touches a Hindu after he has been bathing in the Ganges, all the good is undone, and he must either go without the good or go back and bathe again. CHAPTER V. CASTE. ASTE is really a part of the religion of the Hindus, and does more than anything else to make them miserable and to hinder the missionaries. There are a great many very strange things about caste — indeed, it is a strange thing altogether. Nobody knows when it began to be thought about ; but it is very easy to see that it must have been the priests who invented it, because it is arranged in such a way as to give all the power and greatness and importance to them. The Hindus believe that the god Brahma made all the people in the world, or, at any rate, all the Hindus, out of himself. First, some people came out of his mouth ; and, as that was the best part of the god, these people must be the best people, so they are called Brahmins, after the god, and are very important people indeed, and must be treated with great respect by everybody ; and only a Brahmin may be a priest. The Brahmins form the highest caste. Their business is to read and teach the sacred writings, or Vedas, as they are called, and to offer sacrifices. All other people only enjoy life through them, their happiness depending entirely on how the Brahmins treat them, and that, of course, depends on how they treat the Brahmins ; so you will understand why you so often read of people giving them 32 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. presents and paying them great attention. Everybody is very respectful to them, and does whatever they tell them, even kings. If a Brahmin does anything wicked, he is always let off as easily as possible ; but if any one else does something to offend a Brahmin, he is punished severely. They are not allowed to work to support themselves ; but the rest of the people have to provide for them by giving them feasts and presents. It is said that a Brahmin once cursed a god named Indra, and, because of this curse, the god was turned out of heaven and made to live in a cat ; so you will easily understand how afraid a Hindu would be of offending a Brahmin. There are thirteen million Brahmins in India, Long, long ago the Brahmins used to be much better than they are now. They lived something like monks, dressing quite plainly, and not eating more than they could help ; they were very kind to the other people, and were loved by them. Then some great king arose, and the people thought so much of him that they began to think less of the Brahmins, and when the Brahmins found this out they did not like it at all, and began to think what they could do to keep their power. One thing they agreed was that they would not go on living like quiet, simple men, but would make themselves rich ; and now they are quite different, to the Brahmins of long ago. Nobody loves them, although they do them so much honour. They feel towards them very much as they do towards the gods — that they must be polite to them and treat them well, because if not they will oret into trouble. A very silly ceremony is gone through now with Brahmin boys when they get to be between nine and fifteen years old. The boy goes to his father and mother, and tells them he means to be a religious beggar. They try hard to persuade him not to do this, but to live like the rest of the Brahmins ; and after he has been coaxed a very long time, he changes his mind, and says he will do as his father and mother want him to ; all the time he never meant to do anything else. ai«liP^ LOW CASTK WOMKN. C CASTE. 35 For three days after this he may not see the sun, and has to spend his time learning pieces out of the sacred writings. On the morning of the fourth day he goes to bathe (in the Ganges, if he hves near it), says some prayers, and then goes home and lives like he did before. This is called his ' second birth,' and after it he is looked upon as a sacred person. We read about a second birth in the third chapter of John's Gospel in our English Bible. When a little boy is really ' born again,' he is changed into a new little boy, and begins to live to please God instead of to please himself; but these Brahmin boys are just as naughty after their second birth as they were before, perhaps a little naughtier, because they think so much more of themselves. It will not surprise you very much to hear that there are more of the Brahmins in prison in India than of any other caste ; the English judges send them to prison, not the Hindus — they would be afraid to do such a thinof. The Hindus are getting to think less and less of the Brahmins, because they see that the English people do not think much of them, and that nothing very dreadful happens to an Englishman who sends a Brahmin to prison. The next great caste is the Chuttree, or military class ; to this belong the soldiers and magistrates. The Brahmins make the laws, but the Chuttree caste have to see that they are obeyed ; they are said to have come out of Brahma's arms and shoulders. Then there are the merchants, the Vaishno caste, who came from his thighs. Their work is to carry on trade, keep catde, and cultivate the soil ; they are the business men of India. Lastly there are the poor men and servants, or Sudras, who came from Brahma's feet. Their business is to wait on all the other castes, especially the Brahmins. These castes are divided into a great many smaller ones, accord- ing to trade or occupation. I do not think any one quite knows how many there are ; but in and round one town — Puna — there are no 36 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. less than a hundred and fifty different castes. The highest of all is that of the Kuleen Brahmins ; and because it is thought such an honour for a lady to have one of them for her husband, they are allowed to have as many wives as they like ; sometimes one of them has as many as fifty or sixty, and instead of their wives going to live with them, they go to live with their wives, a short time with one and then a short time with another, just as they like ; so they have no housekeeping expenses. A Kuleen Brahmin often has a great many children of his own whom he has never seen, and who would not know him if they met him ; and as one of them often marries a little girl of eight or nine, when he himself is quite an old man, — sixty or seventy, — you will easily believe that there are a great many of their widows in India. Now the reason why caste makes such a difference to the Hindus, and is such a curse to their nation, is that no man can ever get into a higher caste than the one in which he is born. If his father was a Sudra, he must be a Sudra, and his children, and his grandchildren, and his great-grandchildren must all be Sudras too. In England, if a man is very clever and very industrious and persevering, even though his father and mother may be very poor, he can get to be a great man, and have other great men for his friends ; but in India, unless a man is born great, he can never become great. CHAPTER VI. high as LOSING CASTE. UT although a man can never raise his caste, he can lose it, and a Hindu had better lose his father and mother, and brothers and sisters, and wife and children, and everything he has, than keep all these and lose his caste. But how can he lose it ? In all sorts of ways. If a hiorh-caste Brahmin were to sit down to dinner with another Brahmin whose caste was not quite so his own, he would have lost his caste. A man loses his caste by giving up the Hindu religion ; by eating meat or anything that Hindus are forbidden to eat ; by eating food cooked by a man or woman of lower caste than his own ; by drinking water out of a cup which has been touched by one of lower caste, or by not doing all the religious acts ordered in the Vedas, though this last rule is not so strictly kept now as it used to be. You will see that no Hindu could possibly pay a visit to England, or to any other country outside India, without losing his caste, because he would have to eat food cooked by people who were not of his religion nor of his caste ; if he lived with an Englishman, he would lose it by eating with him. If a boy or a girl went to a boarding- school kept by Christians, they could not help losing caste ; so whenever you hear of Christian boarding-schools in India, you will understand that the children who go to them are only those who 38 THE CHILDREN OE INDIA. have given up their religion and lost their caste, or are the daughters of native Christians. This is one of the things that makes it so hard for a Hindu to become a Christian. Giving up his religion is a very easy thing when he has found a better one ; but losing caste is such a terribly hard thing, that no one would dare do it if he did not love Jesus very much indeed, much better than he loved his father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and his own life too. If he becomes a Christian, he has really to give up all things for Christ's sake. In Bengal a high-caste lady may not be seen by any man, except her own relatives, the family priest, and her servants, without losing caste. I have read of one gentleman who killed his wife because another man had seen her, and he would rather kill her than keep her after she had lost her caste. Each particular class of servants belongs to a different caste, and therefore must do different work ; so the nurse that minds the children may not sweep the nursery, and the man that takes care of the horse may not clean the boots, or else their caste will be lost ; that is one reason why people in India are obliged to keep so many servants. And you will easily see that this leads to a great deal of unkindness, because people cannot do little things to help each other, for fear of losing their caste. If a man or a woman were cooking the dinner, and happened by accident to touch another man or woman of lower caste, all the dinner would be defiled, and the cook would have to throw it away and begin over again. But why is it such a dreadful thing for a Hindu to lose caste .f* What difference does it make to him, especially if he does not believe in it ? When men or women lose caste, they are looked upon as out- casts. Their friends will not have them to live with them, nor help them in any way, nor have anything more to do with them. They LOSING CASTE. 39 are considered a disgrace to their family and to their country. Nobody will cook anything for them to eat, nor eat when they are in the room, and if they touch anything that can be eaten, it will be thrown away directly, because the outcasts are defiled, and what- ever they touch is defiled too. They are turned out of their own homes, and the very kindest Hindu dare not take them to live with him, because if he did, his own caste would be lost ; so that many of these unhappy men and women just wander about till they die. You will not wonder after this, that Hindu men and women will suffer anything rather than break their caste. The Brahmins have the power of giving back caste to those who have lost it ; but they will not do it unless they can get a very great deal of money for it. Years ago a Brahmin lost his caste through a European, who forced meat and flies into his mouth. He wandered about as an outcast for three years. His friends collected eighty thousand rupees (a rupee is two shillings, so that makes eight thousand pounds) ; but this was not enough, the Brahmins said, they must have much more than that; so his friends went to work again, and got two lacs of rupees — that is, twenty thousand pounds more — and this time the Brahmins said it was enough, and gave the man back his caste. Another Brahmin let one of his sons marry a girl who, he was told, belonged to his caste ; but after the wedding was over he found that he had made a mistake, and that his son's wife belonged to a lower caste of Brahmins ; and this made him so miserable that he died of a broken heart. A good English lady, who went to live in India to be a missionary, was there at the time of a great famine, when men, women, and children were dying because they had nothing to eat ; so she opened what she called a relief camp, where every one might come who wanted food, and she had Hindu cooks to prepare it for them. Among the hungry people who came was one woman who was of a higher caste than any of the cooks ; but she was so hungr)- that she could not help eating just a little bit ; then she went back 40 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. to her own village, and there she was found afterwards lying in the road, so weak with hunger and fatigue that she could do nothing to help herself, and no one would touch her, because by doing so they would get defiled themselves. Women and children would go to the camp, and watch the boiled rice being given out to others ; but though they were fainting from hunger themselves they would not touch it, because they were of higher caste than the cooks. This same lady once saw a man dying of cholera ; he was very thirsty, and was longing very much for some water ; but the only Hindu near him was a man of higher caste than his, who would not give the dying man some water for fear of defiling himself. The lady saw what was the matter, so she went up to the sick man and asked him if she should fetch him some water ; but he said no, it would defile him to take it from her, he would rather go without. But a change is taking place, and now most Hindus and Moham- medans will take dry medicines prepared by Christians, and some will take fluid medicines also. Perhaps you wondered why, if the man was dying, it would make any difference to him if he did lose his caste. Because in that case his soul (so he is taught) would go, after his death, into the body of a very low animal, perhaps a rat, and then it would not be able to get back into another man after the rat died, but into the animal that comes next above a rat ; for the law of transmigration is, that the soul must go in regular order through all the animals, rats, and cats, and dogs, and donkeys, and all the rest, till it gets up to a cow, and then from a cow to a man, and then back again into another animal, according as it behaves itself in its different bodies ; so that losing your caste before you die means that your soul will have to begin its journey all over again. The feeling about caste is not so strong now as it used to be, especially in the parts where there are most English people, and it gets less and less strict every year, as the Hindus find out how inconvenient it is. You see, if a man may not touch a Christian LOSING CASTE. 41 without losing his caste, he can never go anywhere in a train, unless he can afford to have a carriage all to himself ; and if he gets work in an office where there are English people, it is almost impossible to help touching them. And then, as travelling gets so easy, and the Hindus hear all about England, some of them, most of all the young men, want to come here and see it for themselves, and finish their education here, and sometimes the wish to do that is stronorer than the fear of losing their caste, especially if their family is not a very strict one. ^^'; ■ v/7/'/|!i ' ': '_:\'\\^r^ ^■' . PART II. THEMSELVES. CHAPTER I. WHEN THE 1 ARE BABIES. N England fathers and mothers love their little girls just as much as their little boys. But in India it is quite different ; there the girls are nothing and the boys are everything. You will hear a Hindu talk about ' children and girls,' as though girls were not children at all, but something not nearly so good ; and often if you were to ask a father how many children he had, he would only tell you the number of boys, for they say ' girls don't count.' When a little girl is born, the Hindus say the gods must have been very angry, or else they would have given a boy. So as soon as a child is born, if it is a boy, a large shell is sounded to let every- body know (sounding a shell is the same as ringing a bell with us). Then the joyful news is made known to all the relatives and neighbours by special messengers sent to tell them ; all sorts of presents are sent to the new little boy, and the boy's father, in his turn, sends presents to all his relatives and neighbours ; everybody is so pleased because a baby-boy is born into the world. But suppose it is a little girl ; then there is no bell-ringing, WHEN THEY ARE BABIES. 43 and there are no presents and no messengers ; the women sometimes tell the mother a story, and say she has a little boy, because they know she will be so disappointed that it is a girl. Of course, she HINDU CHILDREN. soon finds out, and then she is very angry and very sorry, and says the child had better never have been born at all. The poor little girl gets no love and no kisses ; nobodv wants to look at it or takes 44 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. any notice of it ; it is ' only a girl,' so it may lie still and cry and nobody will mind, except that they do not like the noise. But, you know, God has made every mother so that she cannot help loving her children, and so, by and by, when the mother gets over her disappointment at not having a little boy, she begins to love her little girl, and to take care of it, and kiss it, and play with it. Six days after a child is born, an image of the goddess Shasthi, who is said to take charge of all children, is worshipped outside the door of its room. Offerings are made to her of rice, fruit, sweets, clothes, milk, and other things. Then all these things are put into the room — a palm-leaf, a pen and some ink, a serpent's skin, a brick from the temple of Siva, two kinds of fruit, a little wool, and some gold and silver. I cannot tell you the meaning of all this, but just about this time the god of fate is expected to come into the room, and write on the child's forehead all the things that are to happen to it through its life, and the pen and ink are for the god to write with. Two days after this there is a great giving-away to all the children in the house, and all that live near it; amongst the things given are eight kinds of parched peas, rice, sweets, cowries, and pice (these are small pieces of money). That evening another very funny thing happens. All the children of the neighbourhood gather together, go up three times to the door of the room and beat it with small sticks, and then ask in a chorus how the child is getting on ; then they shout, ' Let it rest in peace on the lap of its mother.' The chiklren enjoy this immensely, and think it very great fun. All this is done much more quietly if the baby is a little girl ; sometimes it is left out altogether. Indian babies are very patient — quite different to English ones ; they will lie still for hours, wide awake, without crying or giving any trouble, or wanting to be nursed or played with, as you did when you were a baby. When the child's father first goes to see it, he puts a gold coin into its hand (I have seen people do that to English babies WHEN THE V ARE BABIES. 45 sometimes), and gives it his blessing ; but the httle girl-babies often miss that too. Then in every large house there is an astrologer — that is, a man who pretends to find out what is going to happen to people, by what stars are to be seen the night after they are born. He puts down in a book the exact minute and hour and day when the child was born, and then describes its fate — the same that the god is sup- posed to have written on its forehead. The Hindus think a great deal of what the astrologer says, and feel quite sure it will all come true. If he says bad things are going to happen at a certain time, great pains are taken, when the time is near, to please the god of fate ; all sorts of prayers are said and presents given, to try to persuade him to change his mind. The paper on which the astrologer has written the child's fate is carefully kept, and is specially consulted when it is time for it to be married, to see that its husband or wife was born under the same kind of star, and so will not quarrel with it. When the baby is six months old, it is allowed to have boiled rice for the first time ; its head is shaved, it is dressed all in silk, and shown to its friends and relations ; then it gets some more presents. Indian children are generally named after gods and goddesses, because their parents think that by constantly mentioning the names of the gods — as they must do if their children have the same names — they will have good luck in this world and the next. For the next four or five years, sometimes longer, they run about as they like, with no clothes on at all, except that the boys wear a charm tied round their wastes with a string, to frighten away the evil spirits ; and the girls, besides the charm, wear as many jewels as they can get — necklaces, bracelets, and bangles on the ankles. They are all petted, the boys because they a7^e boys, and the girls because their mothers know that it is only when they are little 46 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. that they can have any pleasure at all, so they like them to get all they can. Indian children are generally thin, with light brown skins, high foreheads, faces that look as if their owners had plenty of sense, large dark eyes, small thin-lipped mouths, and dark soft hair. Their skins very soon get dark, playing about all day in the hot sun. When they are big enough to understand, their mothers try to teach them what they know themselves ; but how much is that ? Just a few silly tales about gods and goddesses, so that almost the first lesson a child gets is to teach him that there are many many gods, and all of them wicked. Another thing they are taught from the very beginning is to love their mothers and think much of their fathers. A Hindu gentleman has said that * Honour thy father and thy mother' is the first commandment to the Hindus. That other commandment, which Jesus thought so much of that He called it the first and great commandment, ' Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,' they never learn at all ; instead of that, they are taught that the gods hate them, and they may hate the gods, only they must be very polite to them, and give them as many presents as they possibly can, or else the gods will make their lives miserable. You will have seen by this time that the children get all their first ideas of religion from their mothers, and so the missionaries feel that the great thing to do, if the little boys and girls of India are to be Christian boys and girls, is to teach the mothers about Jesus, and to make them see that there is no truth in their own religion ; but how can they get at the women to teach them } We shall have to find that out in another part of the book. Until the children get to be five or six years old, the boys and girls live together, and very much in the same way ; but after that age, their lives are so very different that we shall have to put boys and girls into separate chapters. We say 'ladies first' in England, though they don't in India ; so I will tell you next about the little girls. CHAPTER 11. LITTLE HINDU GIRLS. HERE will not be very much to tell you about them, because so little happens to them. Nobody is glad when they are born, nobody is very sorry when they die, and nobody loves them very much except their mothers. Their fathers only see them very seldom after they are five years old, for they may not go to their fathers, and their fathers do not care to come to them. They have no lessons to learn. Their mothers cannot teach them to read, for they do not know how themselves. Until very lately it was thought quite ridiculous in India to try to teach girls or women to read; so, although there are plenty of Hindu boys' schools, there is no such thing as a Hindu school for girls ; I mean a school belonging to the Hindu religion. The Hindus all used to say, and many of them say now, that if a girl learns to read, she is sure to be a widow, and that is the very worst thing that can happen to a Hindu girl. Then what can they do with themselves all day } What do English little girls do all day ? They go to school, or have lessons with there mammas; but we have seen that Hindu girls can do neither. English girls do sewing and knitting; but nobody ever taught Hindu girls to sew or knit, or do anything else. Boys and men do all the sewing in many parts of India ; isn't that funny } 48 IHE CHILDREN OF INDIA. An English lady, who went to live in India on purpose to try to make the women and children happier and to teach them about God, got a number of little girls together and wanted to teach them to sew, and, of course, she wanted some thimbles ; so she went to a bazaar to see if she could find some. But wherever she asked she met with the same reply, * We can give you plenty of thimbles for men, but there are none small enough for children.' This lady's school was at Punrooty, and she was obliged to send all the way to Madras (five days' journey by bullock cart) before she could find any children's thimbles. They might look at pictures, you think. So they might, if there were any to look at, but there are none ; so what is there they can do ? One thing they spend part of their time in, is doing their mothers' hair, for Hindu ladies think a great deal of their hair, and have plenty of it ; so the little girls amuse themselves with plaiting it, and putting it up, and taking it down again. They like listening to stories, too : they have never heard any stories better than those their mothers tell them, so they think these are very nice. I expect they have the same over and over again, for, as the mothers cannot read and cannot go out, I do not see how the children can have fresh stories, unless their fathers have told some new ones to their mothers. I know some of the Hindu ladies make their husbands tell them a story every night after they have gone to bed, and will not go to sleep without it. Then they will be sure to repeat it to their little girls next day. These stories are generally very silly ones, which any little English girl would know at once were too stupid to be true ; but the Hindu ladies believe them all. The only useful thing the little girls do, is to help their mothers to cook when they are quite small, and so learn to be good cooks themselves. When they are five or six years old they begin to be taught LITTLE HINDU GIRLS. 49 religion, and are allowed to go to pitjah. The one thing they are taught to hope and pray for is a nice husband, so they begin with the '^iv2L ptijak, because that is the one the goddess Durjah began with when she wanted a husband, and she got Siva himself, who is supposed to be the best husband there ever was ; so the Hindus think if their little girls imitate Durjah they will get nice husbands too. The little girl — remember she is only about five — must first make two little earthen images of Durjah, and put them on the skin of a wild apple, with some leaves ; then she must go away and wash herself, and put on clean clothes ; then come back and do h^r pitj'ah by saying a prayer to Siva, and sprinkling the heads of the images with holy water. She says a great many prayers, and gives flowers and leaves to Durjah as well as to Siva. Next comes a pujaJi to Krishna or Vishnu, to whom the little girl prays and gives flowers. He is supposed, when he sees her, to ask her who she is and what she wants, and the little girl tells him she wants to have a prince for her husband, to be very beautiful and very good, to have seven good, clever little boys, and two pretty little girls, and to die on the banks of the Ganges. That is a funny prayer, isn't it } Only, you see, the little girl knows just what she wants, and she believes the god can do it for her, so she asks him. Is that what you do when you pray ? Do you just learn a little prayer and kneel down and say it, without thinking very much about it, or do you think what you really want, and just ask God for it, and expect Him to give it to you ? That is what God means by praying. But our little girl has not quite finished yet. The n^xt pujah is to ten images, and for this the little girl has a great deal of painting to do, for she must make on the floor pictures of ten gods, and of ten men who have been made eods. As she Q-ives to these her offerincr of flowers, she asks that she may have a good father-in-law, a good mother-in-law, a good husband and husband's brother, and for herself that she may be an industrious woman, a good cook, and a good wife. 5° THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. There are a few more ceremonies to be gone through by little girls when they begin their piijah, and in different parts of the country there are rather different customs ; but from what you have heard already you will see that the thing they think about more than anything else is getting married. It is so with every Hindu little girl ; her father and mother begin, as soon as she is born, to think HINDU GIRLS. about getting a husband for her. She must be married before she is ten years old, and if it can be done when she is younger still, so much the better. Anyhow, the husband must be fixed upon before she is eight years old, though she need not be married till two years later. I remember reading of one little girl who was married when she was a baby ; it was before she had even learned to walk, so she LITTLE HINDU GIRLS. 5» was fastened to the bottom of her husband's robe, and drao-ged along behind him. But we must not go on to weddings yet, because the httle boys are not ready, so we should not know where the husbands came from. You will be glad to hear that in some parts of India they are beginning to let the little girls learn something. I suppose they have seen that when girls learn to read and write, their husbands keep alive after all, and so the fathers and mothers are not quite sure that their little girls will be widows if they learn lessons. Now and then a little girl is allowed to learn out of a spelling-book, if there is any one to teach her, and to go to school when she is big enough, until she is married. Then, of course, she must leave directly, for her husband might kill her if she went out of doors or let another man see her. But if she has had time before she is married to learn to read, she can go on reading by herself in the zenana, and then she will be nothing like so miserable as those who have nothing to do but cook and dress their hair. CHAPTER III. LITTLE HINDU BOYS. INDU little boys are generally very bright, active, and fond of play ; they are hardly ever poorly, partly because they spend so much time out of doors, and partly because all their food is so light that it never disao-rees with them. When the little boy is about five years old, the same age at which the little girl begins to learn her pzLJahs, he is sent to the infant school. But first of all his father must see the astrologer, to ask him which would be the most lucky day for his boy to go to school. Hindu boys are just as excited as English ones about going to school for the first time. When the day comes, the little boy has a bath, and puts on his new clothes, very likely the first clothes he has ever worn, except when he was six months old, and was dressed in silk to be shown to his friends. But before he goes to school he must pay a visit to a temple, and offer a sacrifice of rice and fruits to the god or goddess of learning, which is afterwards given to the priest, and then the father takes him to school. I wonder how many of the little boys that read this pray about their lessons. If you want to get on well at school, and grow into clever men, I am sure the best way will be for you always to pray about your work before you begin it. The Hindu boy's first lesson is the same as yours — the alphabet ; LITTLE HINDU BOYS. 53 but he does not learn it in the same way as you did, by pronouncing the letters till he knows them ; but by writing them on the ground in sand with a piece of soft stone, and copying them over and over again till he knows them, five letters at a time ; so he learns reading and writing both at once. When he knows the first five letters quite well, the schoolmaster teaches him five more ; but with every new thing the boy is taught, he is expected to give the master a present, either something to eat, or something to wear, or some money. When he knows all his letters, he is allowed to write on palm-leaves with a wooden pen and some ink, instead of on the floor; next on a slate, and last of all on paper. Besides reading and writing there is the multiplication -table to be learned; but instead of learning it out of a book, the boy who knows it best says it aloud, and the others repeat it after him till they know it. These infant schools generally begin early in the morning and go on till eleven ; then the boys go home for their breakfast, come back at two, and stay till the evening ; but in different parts of the country there are different hours and different customs, so you must not suppose all schools are like the one I am telling you about. This is what the infant schools in Bengal are like. What plan do you think the masters have in some schools to make the boys come in time ? Such a funny one. The boy that gets to school first gets one stroke with the cane, the second boy gets two, the third three, and so on to the one who comes last. That is rather hard on the good boys who are never late, is it not ? And I should not wonder if some little boy is saying to himself, ' Well, if I knew I was the last boy, I should stay away nearly all the time, and get as much as I could for my caning.' Ah, but you would not gain much by that ; the master would be too sharp for you, and would have another punishment ready. If you were the last boy, and were very late indeed, he would make you stand on one leg for an hour, and all the other boys would be allowed to laugh at you as much as they liked ; and would not you feel foolish ? 54 THE CHILDREN OF INDIA. So you see the boys in Hindu schools are taught the same as in EngHsh ones — reading (their own language), writing, and arithmetic. Those that are able to keep accounts are considered very clever indeed. The stupid boys and the naughty ones get plenty of caning, but, however bad they are, they are never turned out of the school. If a boy plays truant he is sometimes made not only to stand on one leg, but at the same time to hold a brick in his right hand, or to stand with both his arms stretched out at full length till he is quite sick. Try standing on one leg with both arms stretched out, and see how soon you get tired of it. Another very dreadful punishment is to put stinging leaves on to the boy's naked back, where he cannot get at them to take them off, or even to rub the sore place. At a great many of the Indian festivals, the boys are expected to give the master a present ; there is generally a holiday on these festival days ; but the boys that bring no presents are made to stay in school. No boy likes to have to be doing lessons when other boys are playing, does he ? so I am sorry to say some of the Indian little boys don't mind stealing things to give to the schoolmaster, if they cannot get them any other way. But this kind of schooling is dying out very fast in India. The Government are taking it into their own hands, and starting schools in all parts, where the children pay, as they do in England, a regular fixed sum without any presents, and the masters are paid by the Government. The Government teachers do their w^ork much better than the independent schoolmasters, and the parents have found this out, and like to send their boys to the best schools. In Calcutta especially, when the boys get to be six years old, their parents like them to go to the Government schools, where they can learn English as well as their own language. When they have learned English, the next thing is that they begin to read English books, and then they very soon begin to see what a foolish religion theirs is. They go home and talk about this, and their parents get LITTLE HINDU BOYS. 55 frightened, especially their mothers, at the idea of their boys giving up their gods ; but they are afraid to take them away from school, because in these days the way to get rich in India is to have a good English education, and this can only be got in English schools. But although in these schools the Hindu boys find out what nonsense it is to pray to so many idols and to think they are gods, they do not learn anything there about the true God, for the English law in India is that no reli