CHAPTER I
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
CHAPTER I
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VILLAGE
A TOURIST once visited the chief cities of India.
He saw the sights that tourists always see and talked to many persons of note.
The ablest and most experienced of the British officials in the north said to him:
'"' Would you like to see the most important man in India?"
The tourist was delighted.
They drove out together into the country and came across a peasant bending his bare back over his primitive plough and twisting the tails of his slow-moving, patient oxen.
' That," said the official, "is the most important man in India."
He represented the rural folk who form 90 per cent. of the total population and produce the greater part of the wealth of India.
While therefore it is natural for us in England to think of our people in terms of towns and cities, where the majority of the population and the largest share of the wealth are concentrated, in India we need a different outlook.
The big industrial centres are few in number.
There are hardly a dozen cities with more than a quarter of a million inhabitants and only thirty with 100,000 and up-
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
wards. The 750,000 villages are far more important than those thirty towns.
And next to the families they are the most ancient and stable of all the social institutions in India.
In earlier ages they were largely selfsufficing and self-governing.
Each of the larger villages contained within itself the trades needed to supply the simple wants of its members, farmers, carpenters, weavers, potters, barbers, shop-keepers and money-lenders, Brahman priests to serve the temples of the Hindu gods, and at the other end of the social scale the labourers, sweepers and servants belonging to the despised outcastes.
The 'secular affairs were managed by a headman and a council of five. The village thus lived its own life and managed its own affairs.
Owing to the lack of roads and means of transport it was to a large extent isolated and cut off from the world outside.
This independence had its advantages, but when the monsoon rains failed and famine came, no help could be got from outside and the village people simply died by the million; and even at other times the isolation of the village kept it sunk in poverty, ignorance and superstition.
Under the centralized and efficient rule of the British Government and through the influx of Western Civilization this independent, isolated life is becoming a thing of the past. Officials appointed by Government administer the affairs of the village, while railways and motor-cars invade its seclusion and bring it into contact with the world outside.
And the schoolmaster is abroad.
Rural education
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VILLAGE
is still in its infancy, but there is a school now in about one village in six, and schemes for rural uplift and reconstruction are being devised and started all over India.
A recent report of the Government of India, however, shows how much still needs to be done for the improvement of village life. In the section on rural conditions it says :— "Even excluding villages on the mountainous and forest-clad confines of India, there are places from which a visit to a doctor would entail a journey of several days, where there is no road more pretentious than a footpath through the fields and where no educated person has ever lived. To such places as these new ideas can hardly penetrate, and agricultural processes, social and religious customs, and superstitions that are almost as old as the race, still exist in full vigour.
Even in the bigger and less remote villages conditions are sometimes not much better, for there is still the same lack of contact with progressive ideas, the same lack of educated leadership, the same survival of uneconomic processes and customs.
The use of machinery is kept down to the very minimum, and all power required is supplied by the work of men and animals, the latter frequently underfed, undersized and all but useless.
There is an immense waste of human time and labour caused by this lack of all but the most primitive and indispensable agricultural implements, a waste which reacts in many more ways than those immediately obvious.
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
Again, India supports large numbers of diseased and useless cattle which may not be slaughtered or otherwise suitably dealt with because of religious objections, and yet the annual cost of supporting this vast multitude must be enormous.
"The life of the average Indian agriculturist tends to revolve in a vicious circle.
After generations of arrested progress he has frequently lost even the desire for improvement and in any case his poverty makes it impossible to grapple with his circumstances.
He has not the knowledge and the education to make the best of his resources, and custom holds him in an iron grip. He will borrow from the money-lender at ruinous interest to perform the various ceremonies demanded by religion or social custom, some of them, like funeral ceremonies, occurring all the oftener by reason of the insanitary conditions of his surroundings, the lack of available medical assistance and, often, his poor stamina.
Endemic sicknesses like malaria and hookworm, the incidence of which could be greatly reduced if only the villagers had the knowledge and the will to apply themselves to the task, weaken him and affect his work in the fields and consequently lessen the return from his labour." ?
It is, then, a matter for profound thankfulness, that the Christian Church during the last seventy years has won its most signal triumphs in the 1 Report of India in 1926-27. A statement prepared for presentation to Parliament.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VILLAGE
villages of India where the need of regeneration is so urgent and the situation apparently so hopeless.
In the following pages we have given a brief account, drawn mainly from our own experience, of the wonderful work that the gospel of Christ is doing in some of the rural areas by bringing to this stagnant mass of poverty and ignorance a new spiritual power and setting millions even of the poorest and most degraded of the village people on the path of progress towards a higher and happier life. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, "I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly."
That promise we see now fulfilled in the villages of India.