Studies in Literature and History
and the Chinese. But these broad designations denoting modern
nationalities are not used in Asia by the people themselves, to whom
such a conception is foreign. I know of no terms in the languages of
these countries that correspond to our words, Turkey, India, China, as
geographical expressions, and I think that the names used by Europeans
for outlying countries or peoples often come from some accident or
chance, or mistake, or by taking the name of a part of a country for
the name of the whole. In Asia the people still class themselves, in
their ordinary talk, by names designating religion or race. A curious
example of a religious designation still survives, by the way, among
Europeans in South Africa. When the first Portuguese explorers of the
African coast asked the Arab traders about the indigenous tribes,
they, being Mohammedans, said that the natives were all Kafirs, which
means Infidels. This was supposed to be the general name of a people,
and it has been handed down to us so that we still call the South
African natives Kaffirs. I doubt whether the tribes concerned have
ever used or recognised among themselves this unsavoury name. I may
note, by the way, that one of the most ancient tribal names in Asia is
that by which the Greeks, outside the Turkish empire, are often
known--Yunani, or Ionian--which must have been in use from the days
when the Greek colonies settled on the coast of Asia Minor, many
centuries before the Christian era.
We are pushing our survey eastward across Asia. The kingdom known to
Europe by the name of Persia is styled by its inhabitants _Iran_,
though I doubt whether a Persian subject belonging to a particular
tribe or sect would call himself _Irani_. The next independent
kingdom, beyond Persia, is Afghanistan; and here we have an example of
a designation originally implying race, gradually merging into one
that is territorial and political. Afghanistan originally meant, I
believe, the great central mass of mountains occupied by a tribe
called Afghans; it is now becoming a name that includes the whole
territory ruled by the Afghan Amir at Kabul. The causes that are
producing this change in the signification of the word are, first,
that the Amir of Kabul has subdued, more or less, all the tribes
inhabiting the country; and secondly, that the pressure of England and
Russia on two sides of that country has necessitated an accurate
demarcation of frontiers all round it, in order that the Amir's
territories, which are under our protection, may be precisely known.
The kingdom is thus acquiring a territorial designation. But this
kingdom of Afghanistan is really composed of a number of chiefships
and provinces very loosely knit together under the sway of the Amir,
which might fall asunder again if the rulership at Kabul became weak.
And the population is all parcelled out into various races and tribes,
usually dwelling in separate tracts under local chiefs; they are
always known among themselves by names, denoting race or tribe;
sometimes patriarchal, like the Children of Israel, or the clans of
our own Highlands; sometimes local, and in one case historical, for
the dominant tribe to which the Amir belongs has called itself Durani
or royal.
It is therefore the distinction of race or tribe, not of religion,
that governs the whole interior population throughout this vast region
of high mountains and valleys in the centre, with comparatively open
country on the north and south; the whole area has been peopled by a
conflux of tribes. Yet Afghanistan has some of the symptoms of
national growth--I mean that if it could hold together as one kingdom
it might grow into a nationality. In religion the Afghans are almost
all fanatical Mohammedans, for Afghanistan is the great bulwark and
citadel on the eastern frontier of Islam, and beyond it, in Eastern
Asia, there are no independent Mohammedan principalities. The kingdom
has a strictly defined territory, and a dynasty which has risen from
the chiefship of a powerful tribe to the heritable possession of that
territory. This dynasty, moreover, is identical in race and religion
with a large majority of its subjects, which is another peculiar
source of strength; for almost all the other first-class kingdoms of
Asia are ruled by dynasties of alien race, who sometimes profess a
religion different from that of many of their subjects. We are
frequently reminded of the important fact that in India the English
rulers are aliens in race and religion from the people; but we may
also remember that after all this is only a difference of degree, a
wider separation between the governors and the governed than elsewhere
in Asia. The principal kingdoms of Asia are ruled by foreign families
or dynasties that have come in by conquest. The Moghul dynasty that
preceded our own government in India was foreign; and it was a
Mohammedan rulership over an enormous Hindu population. The Ottoman
Turk was a foreign invader from Central Asia, who still governs a
variety of races and religions. In Persia the Shah's family is of a
Turkish tribe. And the Emperor of China is a Mandchoo Tartar, of a
race quite apart from that of the immense majority of the Chinese. Of
course the Russians are as much aliens in Central Asia as the English
in India; they govern from St. Petersburg as we do from London. I
doubt, therefore, whether there is any other kingdom in Asia that has
more of the element of national unity than Afghanistan, though
unfortunately its political condition is precarious, because there is
still much tribal disunion inside it.
Eastward again beyond Afghanistan we enter the Indian empire, a vast
dominion stretching south-eastward from the slopes of the outer Afghan
hills and the Persian border to the western frontiers of the Chinese
empire and of Siam, and controlling the whole seaboard of Southern
Asia, from Aden to Singapore. It is the possession of this wide
territory that has given to the English a direct and most important
interest in the problems of race and religion. For, in the first
place, in this empire we have to deal with three out of the four great
faiths of the world--Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism--and we have to
uphold for ourselves the fourth, Christianity. Secondly, we have also
within the borders of our empire a multiplicity of races and tribes;
and we have the peculiar Indian institution of Caste, which marks off
all Hindu society into innumerable groups, distinguished one from
another by the rules that forbid intermarriage and (in most cases) the
sharing of food. Now the word Hindu requires a special explanation,
because there is nothing exactly like it elsewhere in the world; it is
not exclusively a religious denomination; it denotes also a country
and a race. When we speak of a Christian, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist,
we mean a particular religious community without distinction of race
or country. When we talk of Persians or Chinese, we indicate country
or parentage without any necessary distinction of creed. But when a
man tells me he is a Hindu, I know that he means all three things
together--religion, race and country. I can be almost sure that he is
an inhabitant of India, quite sure that he is of Indian parentage; and
as to religion, the word Hindu undoubtedly locates him within one of
the manifold groups who follow the ordinances and worship the gods of
Hinduism. Next in importance to the Hindus, as a religious community,
come the Mohammedans, who number over sixty millions in India. The two
faiths, Hinduism and Islam--polytheism and monotheism--are in strong
opposition to each other; yet they are not quite clean cut apart, for
some Hindu tribes that have been converted to Islam retain in part
their primitive customs of worship and caste. And in Burmah, as in
Ceylon, the population is almost wholly Buddhist.
In a very able article that has recently appeared in an Indian
magazine, the writer, a Hindu, observes: 'The Hindus offer a curious
instance of a people without any feeling of nationality.' He finds an
explanation in 'the intensity of religiousness, which led to
sectarianism, and allying itself with caste, tended to preserve all
local and tribal differences.' Other causes, historical, political,
and geographical, might be mentioned, but I agree that the chief
separating influence has been religious. And, however this may be, it
may be affirmed that within our Indian empire at the present moment
the primary superior designation of a man is according to his
religion--he is either a Hindu, a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist. But
inside these general religious denominations are very many
distinctions of caste, race, or tribe. The Sikhs are a sect of Hindus
who belong exclusively to the Punjab. The Marathas and Rajputs are
races who profess Hinduism and who always call themselves by their
racial names: and there are many aboriginal tribes, like the Bheels
and Gonds, who are being gradually absorbed into Hinduism. Race and
religion are, in fact, more profoundly intermixed in India than
perhaps in any other country of the world; and into such an intricate
subject I cannot now enter. My present point is that in India we are
governing an empire of the antique pattern, quite different from the
western nationalities, a country where complexities of race and creed
meet us at every turn in the course of our administration; an empire
which, as Mr. Bryce has pointed out in a recent essay that is full of
light and knowledge, has many striking resemblances with the dominion
of Imperial Rome.[57] There is the same miscellany of tribes and races
in diverse stages of civilisation, warlike and half-tamed on the
frontiers, softened and reconciled by peace, prosperity, and culture
in the older provinces of the empire, wild and barbarous in remote
interior tracts. There is just visible in India a similar though much
slighter tendency of the language of the ruling race to prevail among
the educated classes, because the English language, like the Latin,
has greater literary power, and conveys to the Indians the latest
ideas and scientific discoveries of the foremost nations of the world.
There is also a certain diffusion of European manners and even dress,
resembling in some degree what took place even in such a remote
province of the Roman empire as Britain, where, as we know from
Tacitus, it was made a reproach against the Romanising Britons that
they were abandoning their own costume for the Roman toga and adopting
the manners of their conquerors. All these tendencies are slightly
affecting distinctions of race and religion; though in India these
distinctions are far deeper than they were under the Roman empire, and
so far as one can judge they are ineffaceable.
In regard to religious differences, so long as the people were almost
universally polytheistic the Romans had little trouble on this score,
since every deity and every ritual was tolerated indifferently by
their government, provided that public order and decency were
observed; and this is the practice of our Government in India. But we
have one difficulty in governing India that did not trouble the Romans
at the time when they first founded their empire by conquest. I think
that religion had then very little influence on politics. It was the
advent of two great militant and propagating faiths, first
Christianity, next Islam, that first made religion a vital element in
politics, and afterwards made a common creed the bond of union for
great masses of mankind. It has now become in Asia a powerful
instrument of political association. Therefore when we proclaim for
our government in India the principle of religious neutrality we do
indeed avoid collision with other faiths, but we are without the
advantage that is possessed by a State which represents and is