3. The Keeper of the Jewels: (Five thousand years of Hinduism)
“These innocent children are made victims and are prepared for an immoral life by a course of training from their early days. The Temple and the illiterate Hindu public are responsible for developing a kind of mentality in those children which makes them, when they grow to be women, view a criminal, unholy and antisocial act … as a hereditary right and a caste dharma (duty).
Dr. Mutthulaksmi Reddi, lady
physician of Madras, first
woman to sit in an Indian
Legislature
“There are, I am sorry to say, many Temples in our midst in this country which are no better than brothels.”
Mahatma Gandhi, Young India,
6 October 1927
3
The Keeper of the Jewels
Five thousand years of Hinduism
It was not safe for a girl-child to be walking alone on the road at dusk, so the kindly old woman carrying a water jar stopped, retraced her steps, and called to the child. The heavy liquid sun set in an orange glow and clouds of dusty gold. There wasn’t a moment to waste.
“Child, where are you going, and who do you want?”
Pearleyes had stolen out of the temple again, down the village street, across a stream, through a grove of palm trees, and on to the next village. Surely the temple women were blind that day. On the road by a church she paused, a little lost lamb waiting to be found.
“Beware of the child-catching Missie Ammal [mother],” the temple woman had tried to frighten her. “She will rub a magic powder on your arm and you will have to follow her.”
Could it be worse than the temple? “I have run away from the servants of the god in the temple. I am looking for the child-catching Ammal.”
The woman on the road was a Christian, but she said, “Impossible. How could such a little thing as you escape from them?” Nevertheless she took Pearleyes home with her, just for the night. In the morning she must return her to the temple, for the woman greatly feared the priests.
Pearleyes, hungry and thirsty, refused to eat. She knew she was a high-caste child, and she went to bed hungry rather than break caste.
India had every type of religious practice—something for everyone. The number of the gods suggested infinity. One god may be represented in one thousand forms, present anywhere.
Almost every moment of the day was governed by some sort of religious ritual. Centuries of hunger, poverty, overpopulation, and war contributed to the other-worldliness of the Hindu. Hinduism welcomed all other beliefs, incorporating them into itself, rejecting nothing, thus surviving all onslaughts, refusing to be conquered.
Hinduism was bewildering, elastic, ambiguous. It shaped a mentality unlike any other in the world. Whatever one was seeking, it might be found in Hinduism. Faith or speculation. Holiness or sensuality. Rationality or irrationality. Practical or visionary. Meditation or ceaseless works. Devil worship or high-minded philosophy. Hinduism had them all.
Hinduism has a trinity: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; Shiva, the destroyer. These three may manifest themselves in thousands of lesser gods or objects or animal life. A god may often visit earth as an avatar, a holy leader. Hindus claim Krishna, Mohammed, Jesus Christ, and many others as avatars.
Hindus yearn after three main objectives: eternal life, knowledge, and joy, all of which are possible only by union with God. This union is achieved by bland resignation and submission to the endless cycle of existence, reincarnation into higher and higher forms of life finally culminating in nirvana, a state of nothingness.
“He has sinned in a former life, he must be cleansed by suffering,” applies even to the crippled, starving beggar child. Hence, the motive for good deeds, self-denial, and flagellation is a most selfish one.
The Hindu believes in a human attempt to atone for sin by sacrifices, courage, and patient acceptance of whatever life he is in. Doctrine may be invented to accommodate or justify any rationalization. Karma is the law of cause and effect in reincarnation, the belief that every person is accountable for his earthly deeds. Those deeds determine if he will be reborn as an insect, an animal, or in a lower caste, or higher caste, on his way toward nirvana.
Hindus accept without complaining dirt, hunger, and any suffering, since it is to prepare them for a better life in the next reincarnation. Dharma is the code of duty to keep caste.
To a Hindu, the entire world is considered an illusion. Thus it follows that an embarrassing or painful condition may be declared not to exist.
Hinduism is fatalistic, believing that even if the world progresses and becomes better, the universe dies periodically and is reborn, to repeat all previous existences. Therefore one should endure the present life and do good deeds to ensure a higher one next time.
The illiterate of the population bow down to idols already made or create their own with sticks and stones, and worship by means of festivals and parades. Others believe in a supreme God, Brahma. and consider all idols but his representatives, necessary for the uncomprehending lower classes.
The Ganges is considered a river of salvation. If one bathes in its waters he is released from caste and sin and will be reborn into a higher caste.
“A Hindu must not take life, not even put an end to hopeless animal pain,” explains one text. The cow, especially, represents all the gods combined and is equal to a high-caste Brahmin. It is a greater sin to kill a cow than to kill a man. (An estimated 230 million cows wander the streets of India, starving, diseased, suffering thirst. If injured, they are left to die.) In unexplainable contrast, it is permitted to inflict pain upon animals. A bull pulling a cart may have his tail twisted until the bones break to make him hurry.
A Hindu man fears his soul may enter hell unless he leaves sons behind him to pray for his speedy reincarnation. Only a son can perform the funeral ritual so the father may possibly have a brief stay in heaven. “Sons, many sons,” is the prayer of the devout Hindu.
Caste (the word means color) began when the Aryan invaders in the year 2000 B.C. conquered India’s black aborigines and dark-skinned Dravidians. Since the deity determines caste, to break caste is a great sin.
The temples, thousands upon ten thousands all over India, sometimes carved from one solid mountain of rock, were fabulously wealthy, yet the concept of charity did not exist. The temples never gave to anyone; they took only. Idols and shrines were everywhere.
Amy Carmichael described one scene of worship. The Hindu crouched over a pond or stream or place of water which represented to him the sacred Ganges. He bathed, then marked his forehead, arms, or breast with his cult signs. Tying up his hair, he scooped up water in the right hand and poured it into his mouth for inner purification, calling upon his particular god.
Then, the regulation of the breath: The right nostril was clamped shut with the thumb, snorting out the breath through the left nostril. Then the order was reversed. Then the nose was pinched shut completely to prepare the soul for prayer.
Facing the east, the man said, “Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the Vivifying Sun, may he enlighten our understanding.”
The second part of the ritual began. The man, praying for vigor and strength, sprinkled water on his head for cleansing of all guilt. Just as the keen flashing line of the sun rose above the horizon the man threw a handful of water into the air toward the east.
His left hand, hidden under his belt, counted upon a rosary 108 repetitions of a prayer. Next, an invocation to Mitra, the ancient god of the Persians. The man then named all his ancestors, calling upon the god of gods, the Supreme Lord of the universe. He ended by sipping water for the cleansing of his soul.
“But do you feel forgiven? Are your sins really gone?”
“Sin, what is sin? A word, a breath, delusion. How can I sin, I not being I, but Brahma?”
The goddess Kali stood upon the body of a child, her own black tongue lolling out, wearing a necklace of the skulls of children, a headdress of snakes, holding a bloody severed human head, and brandishing a bloody sword. Kali demanded blood sacrifices. Kali was the wife of Shiva, cruel and revengeful. Because she was most feared, she was most worshiped.
A caste of murderous stranglers called Thugs were once devoted to Kali. Their young sons learned in the home how to throw a kerchief around a neck and slowly suffocate a person. Every year thousands of human beings were thus sacrificed to Kali in the name of religion.
Hinduism contained nothing of making men better; it told only of making peace with angry gods. Indian morality was the caste system with its mighty taboos.
In Tinnevelly District stood a stone devil holding a pitchfork in one hand and a small child whom he is about to devour in the other hand. The multitude of gods all had one thing in common—ugliness.
Ordinary, everyday scenes of animist worship were dark and repellent. “Main bookhi hun! I am hungry!” was the cry of Kali. An outcaste Indian stood by the shrine where kid goats were sacrificed and tore the throat of a living goat with his teeth. Throwing it atop the heap of bodies on one side he seized the next kid—on and on, a practice abhorrent to orthodox Hindus, who do not take life.
Gods that must be propitiated in such a way could only appear as objects of dread. “Kali worship in the Temple was a nightmare more horrible than anything the perverted imagination of the Marquis de Sade could devise,” said Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn writing in The Underworld of India.
But what of the jewels and their keepers? The Indian Census Report of 1901: “The devadasi—servants of the gods—who subsist by dancing and music, and the practice of the oldest profession in the world, are partly recruited by admissions and even purchases from other classes. The daughters of the caste who are brought up to follow the caste profession are carefully taught dancing and singing and the art of dressing well. Their success in keeping up their clientele is largely due to the contrast they present to the ordinary Hindu housewife whose ideas are bounded by the day’s dinners and babies.”
Sacred postitution was common in the Middle East. The devadasis as a caste began in the ninth and tenth centuries, when most of the temples in South India were built.
Abbe Dubois, writing in the late 1700s, said the devadasis were originally for the exclusive use of the Brahmans, but in Dubois’s day they received such a small salary they were forced to sell themselves on the streets.
In 1870, a Dr. Shortt wrote a paper on the devadasis, certifying that children of age five were used, and children were often kidnapped.
In 1892, a man named Fawcett wrote an article in the Anthropological Society of Bombay’s Journal describing children dedicated to a god even before their birth.
“Sacredness with allurements, religion with lust, art with sensuousness, have combined,” wrote Santosh Chatterjee in an old book, Devadasi.
“Thousands of young innocent children are condemned to a life of immorality and vice, of suffering and disease and finally of death resulting from infections and venereal diseases contracted in the pursuit of their profession as Hindu religious prostitutes,” wrote Dr. M. Reddi.
The duties of the temple girls were to carry the kumbarti (the sacred light); to fan the idol with chamaras (fans); to dance and sing before the god. They were the only women who could read and write, play an instrument, and sing and dance. Their presence was believed to bring good luck to a wedding, and they had power to avert the “evil eye.”
Indian dancing was a form of storytelling, religious in nature. The position of hands, arms, fingers, the flick of a finger or the subtle movements of eyes, all were significant to the watcher.
Indian music is hypnotic. Tight, tense little taps on a drum, then faster, doubling each drum beat, tripling each thrum, harder and faster. A dancer begins to tap her foot to the rhythm, then her hips sway, her hands undulate until, leaping into the center like an uncoiling spring, she and the drum merge and are one. Today the classical dances of the devadasis are performed as entertainment on stages of the world.
The animist devil dance, however, is a form of spiritism. “I served my god faithfully, I whirled in the dance until he possessed me and then I spoke his words,” said a devil dancer in Pannaivilai.
Fiddles, wooden flutes, cymbals, gongs, horns, bells, and conch shells are part of the musical background. Through dance and music an Indian searches for one of the gods, worships him, seeks to be united with him. Symbolism gives a hidden meaning to every movement of the body. “The music is a discipline to attune one to the cosmic content of the universe.”
A converted temple woman confirmed the rumors of a secret underground traffic in children. The child, age eight or nine, was dressed like a bride and taken with another girl of the same community dressed like a boy in the garb of a bridegroom. They both went to the temple to worship the idol. The girl sat facing the god, and the priest gave her flowers and a sandal. He recited mantras and lighted the sacred fire.
The tali—marriage symbol—was hidden in a garland. The tali was a necklace of black beads with a golden disc hanging from it. The garland was put over the idol, after which it was put around the girl’s neck. She was now married to the god, without her knowledge, knowing nothing of the implications.
The one who was to dance before the gods was given to the life when very young, otherwise she could not be trained properly. Many babies were given to temple women because it was very meritorious to give a child to the gods. If the child was old enough to miss her mother, she was very carefully watched until she had forgotten her. Sometimes she was shut up in the back part of the temple house and punished if she ran out into the street. Sometimes a child was branded with a hot iron under the arm where it did not show. Sometimes she got just a whipping.
She was taught to read and learn a great deal of poetry, which was almost entirely debased. The child’s mind was familiarized with sin, and before she knew how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the instinct that would have been her guide was perverted, until the mind was incapable of choice.
“No respectable person would dedicate his young girl or child to a temple and throw her to the tender mercies of regular prostitutes or put her in such an unfavorable, loathsome environment, except with the object of seeing her turn out as a prostitute,” wrote Sir Maneckji Tadabhoy (Council of State Debates, Simla, September 1927, p. 1138).
Every temple had a garbha-griha—a womb house—where an idol stood, representing the god, and behind the god the power of Satan.
Walker Iyer described worship called “Swami tharisanam”—the vision of God. In the temple the priests anointed the idol with oil, decked him with flowers, burned incense, and presented offerings. The worshipers watched with empty hearts, without sense of sin or seeking of salvation.
The priest wore only a cloth around his waist and a silver cap on his head. He was hefted up to the shoulders of two men and a cup of goat blood handed up to him. Each time he drained the cup, and the mob bowed in reverence before him, howling and chanting. The stench, the noise and heat, and the feeling of evil were unbearable. And this was the “vision of God.”
Gods were assumed to sleep at night, and they must be awakened by a bath, dressed, offered food, decorated with flowers. “Ten thousand people gathered at the river to wash a piece of wood," William Carey had written in dismay years before. Sometimes the god took a nap, and ceremonies before and after the nap were performed. The ceremony of awakening was called prabodha.
This was the environment for countless thousands of little children in India. Amy Carmichael, still not knowing of those children, faced the deadness and corruption of the Christian church; the power of Hinduism, caste and customs; the enervating climate; and the lack of sympathy from Christians in both India and Britain.
She was to learn that conversion in India meant not only an acceptance of Christ but a renouncing of all things Hindu. And the renouncing was the crucifying part.