BY B. PATTABHI SITARAMAYYA

So engrossed is India in her politics and so enraged is she at her slavery, that she has little time left to examine her own social laws and domestic institutions. Indian newspapers do not devote a line to the study of the Indian Home as do the English papers. But what is infinitely worse, the educated Indians have accepted the ready-made appraisements of their, customs and manners by globe-trotters, missionary sojourners, civilian critics and. interested political opponents of their country. Their discontent with their own homes has been little concealed and it is Sir George Birdwood that had the vision to see and the frankness to declare that the English-educated Indian is disgusted with his own home and hearth, his mother and sister, and his wife. If that is the result of our education, we cannot be very proud of it. But that is also the result of the silent influence exercised by one civilization over another, more especially when the two meet on unequal terms. The civilization of the ruling race is always bound to set the pace for the subject people and the latter are apt to imagine that the fashions and fancies of their rulers must be accepted.

THE KING—THE SOCIAL HEAD, ABSENT

In a self-governing country, the king is not merely the political head of the State but the leader of society. The king's subjects imitate the court dresses, and the court manners. When a custom has to be changed, all that has to be done is for the king and queen to inaugurate the change, and this one example puts the royal imprimatur upon innovations in age-long customs and makes them current in society. Likewise the tone of morals, the code of ethics, and the sense of amour propre which must guide, direct and control society, always owe their origin to the monarchs that sway the hearts of people as much as they rule the destinies of the nation. In a country like England where the political powers of the king are altogether curtailed, the value and importance of kingship lies in the compensating increase in the status and position of the king and the queen as the heads of society, The court is the means of bringing them into touch with the aristocrats of the land, and from the aristocrats, alike of culture and wealth, ideas and ideals filter to the populace, In India, unfortunately, there is neither king nor queen who are of a piece with the people, who think out their social problems, share with them their domestic embarrassments, and strive in common with them for the solution of the numerous social and domestic questions that confront them from day to day.

RELIGIOUS HEADS—DISCREDITED

While the hold of the political head of the country on matters relating to society has disappeared, that of the religious heads has—considerably been discredited and weakened—and this for obvious reasons, A purely secular education imparted by avowed antagonists of Hindu society and religion, or agencies who have taken up an equally avowed attitude of neutrality towards these problems, has helped to Shift attention from them altogether and left them to suffer either by default or under misrepresentation, cavil and abuse. I would now plead for a little attention to these seemingly trivial problems of home and society.

HOME SUFFERED MORE THAN SOCIETY

As between home and society, it is perhaps difficult to draw a fine line of demarcation. It is the multitude of homes that make up society. Yet it is not impossible to distinguish affairs social from those purely domestic. In the domain of society, we have given a little attention, chiefly under the helpful criticism of Some of the earlier Christian missionaries to questions like the abolition of caste, widow- marriage and women's education. But we have left the home severely alone. It has been left either to take care of itself or no care has been taken of it at all. Boys who spend the formative period of their lives in hostels or hotels and colleges are divorced from the domestic environment, where alone there is room for the cultivation of emotions. They spend their time in towns and are seldom anxious to return to their village homes during the vacation. They have no theatres or cinemas there, nor have they restaurants and clubs. The lime-light of towns yields place to little castor-oil lamps, and in place of the motor bus and car, one comes across the village labourer plodding his weary way home with his plough and his team of lean oxen. Our boys feel as strangers in their own homes. They are out of tune with the celebration of the national festivals, and the gods and goddesses worshipped by their mothers and sisters do not appeal to their imagination. The ceremonies, the religious rites, the annual observances, are all Latin and Greek to them. Most of our young men have no grounding in Sanskrit and cannot therefore follow the significance of the religious outlook which the Hindu home always strives to cultivate. The fact is that nations having self-government are proud of their kings and statutes, their religion and philosophy, their culture and civilization, their customs and manners, their art and ethics. We who have no kingdom of our own, have no country, have no society, have no homes. We have to rediscover them, reinterpret them and to recover them.

OUTSTANDING FEATURES OF THE HOME

To the observant eye, the cardinal features of the Hindu Home are its quadrangular house, its joint family, its intense domestic affections, its religious basis, the high status accorded to its women, the equity with which its laws of heritage work, and the spirit of hospitality that pervades the home. None of these is a perfection in itself. The reasons for it may be many. For instance 'arrested development' and 'disuse atrophy' may be two potent causes for the imperfections noticeable in respect of these attributes. For more than ten centuries, foreigners have been ruling the country. And India is sharply divided into two sections, -the one directly under alien rule, and the other indirectly so, being under the rule of titular Indian sovereigns who preserve some of the effete ancient customs, but have neither personality nor power left to them and are themselves aping western ways and fashions. Nevertheless, the contrast between Indian India and British India is not only noticeable but glaring in many respects. Both have albeit come under the blighting influence of a new age, and the innovations worked out in the home and society have the unfortunate character of being haphazard, ill thought-out and unorganized. They are not as if a new sadachara has been inaugurated by the wisdom and example of good men and true, but they are the outgrowths or tubers that disfigure the trunk of the national civilization and sap its strength. A careful examination of each of the attributes enumerated, would show that the changes, —call them the reforms, if you please—introduced into home and society are more the result of recklessness than reason, and in either case, lack that spontaneous character of changes worked out under the unobtrusive influence of recognized heads of society, and appealing to the popular mind as much through instinct as through reason.

THE QUADRANGULAR HOUSE

Let us start with a model Hindu house. It is a quadrangular enclosure, admitting light and air into the very centre of the house, and placing the inmates in constant touch with the star-spangled Heavens and the blue firmament. They are enabled to lead an open air life. A house so constituted is expansive and bound to be hospitable. The ideal is to accommodate a thousand people at dinner in the four verandahs around the quadrangle. That is an ambitious ideal to be sure, but all ideals are ambitious. Their value lies in the principles they embody. The Hindu home is unprepossessing at the entrance, except for the magnificent threshold richly carved. The craftsman seldom stipulates the charges for executing it. His is the choice to prepare one that will be in keeping with the rest of the house. A common gateway is at first fixed by the family carpenter, and some day, after or before grihapravesam, he brings the permanent, artistic one and fixes it and takes his present, —not price—and goes his way. No one may dictate to the carpenter or the mason. They do their work in accordance with the shasthras and these may be relied, upon alike for sanitation and engineering, for comfort and beauty. No naked and unadorned beam is allowed. The western portion is reserved for the dining-hall. To its south is the kitchen well-lighted and aired. The house simply expands and brightens as you go from the drawing-room to the dining-hall. It is commodious where it ought to be. The deeper you enter, the more hospitable does it prove, even as a good householder would show, only when you study him deeper and deeper, how he conceals a capacious heart behind perhaps a crude exterior. Suites of rooms are constructed on either side of the inner quadrangle. (There are two such quadrangles in the better class of houses). If to-day, the quadrangles have become contracted and even closed, they only show how the spirit suffers behind the letter, and how in the modern age, men's hearts and openness are contracting and becoming cribbed. When Keir Hardie came to India, he was taken to the kitchen of an Ayangar home. He was struck by the marvellous cleanliness of the culinary apartments, the bright shining brass and bell-metal ware, the perfect orderliness of the store-room, the sacred niche in the wall for the family god, and the composite and clean character of the whole structure. Nor could he see a heap of debris—feathers of birds, jills of fish, and bones of animals, and caked-up gore, just behind the kitchen, as he did in the European bungalows, which are clean and beautiful and artistic at the exterior, but betray few of these attributes either at the kitchen or in the backyard. It is the first morning duty of the Hindu mother or wife to sweep the whole house, —frontage, rooms and courtyard, sprinkle water mixed with cow-dung and allay the dust, and make artistic kolams (Muggulu) with a mixture of chunam and fine paddy-husk. Day in, day out, the ideal of cleanliness and beauty is borne in upon the, children of the home by the elders of the family.

THE JOINT FAMILY

The plan of the Hindu house has been designed for the joint family. Just as the joint family has been broken up by modern conditions of life, even so the quadrangular house has yielded place to houses of the bungalow style. Really the Hindu household is a co-operative society of credit, production and consumption. The male adults divide the functions equally or equitably. While one member looks after cattle, another attends to agriculture, a third manages the household affairs, and a fourth looks to money matters and, in the latter days, litigation. No one ever robs another, and all place implicit faith in one another. Unfortunately this co-operative unit has been broken up by the non-co-operation of .the brothers that have received an un-co-operative English education. The graduate in Arts and Medicine, or Arts and Law, sets up his practice, hoards his earnings and conceals them, and claims a share in the patrimony. The elder brothers that slave and toil the whole day have to share the spoils with the younger brother, who however reserves the 'gains of his learning' unto himself and his town-bred wife. On the women's side, the ideal of corporate life is still preserved. The supreme ideal of the mother is to tend the children, manage the household, and look after the dairy, the kitchen and the children. The educated brother and his wife, however, live apart and live for themselves and maintain little contact with his brothers beyond drawing them into litigation for statement of family accounts. The old ideals of village life have disappeared. When a marriage is celebrated, yarn and ghee from the whole village used to be placed at the disposal of the family most needing them, on the implied understanding that these amenities would be returned to others during their need in turn. All this is a chapter of past history. We do not know how our relations are, much less do we know or care for our neighbour. The ideal of the individual has displaced that of the corporate, separatist interests have prevailed over those of the joint. Rights have supplanted duties. The old saying that every Englishman's house is a castle, which merely means every individual's home is the citadel of his rights, is really a fort through which society protects him and those rights of his,-this has conquered the hearts of educated men in India, whose homes, besides being homes for the family, were never citadels, but guest-houses, shelters for the poor, orphanages and centres of philanthropic interest.

THE IDEAL OF MARRIAGE

The outstanding feature of the Hindu home is the intense domestic affections prevailing amongst the members of the family, and even near relations outside the family. The Hindu husband and wife, the Hindu father and mother, the Hindu brother and sister, son-in-law and daughter-in-law; mother-in-law and father-in-law, each deserves a chapter for himself or herself. It is true, that the system of marriage, which is the basis of the family, does not centre round that principle of wooing in the limelight. This is virtually unknown to the Hindu family, and if any wooing takes place at all, it is the wooing of the bride's family with the bride- groom's. The whole principle is the principle of engrafting,—engrafting one twig on another tree, one girl on to another family, and if the graft is to take, it must be engrafted while yet it is tender and its individuality is undeveloped. The choice of husband and wife is made by the parents who think out the best measures and methods for effecting a union, not merely between two individuals, but between two families. Society thus becomes a group of corporate families, knit together by ties of close relationship, with the utmost spirit of democracy prevailing within each group, but each group preserving its integrity, individuality and purity, by a kind of isolation so far as inter-marriages are concerned, and a less rigid isolation so far as inter-dining is concerned. These groups are analogous to the bundles of nerve fibres and muscular fibres held together by connective tissue and membrane, but all responding to one common impulse emanating from a common centre. Thus constituted, the Hindu home, while rigidly safeguarding its integrity, individuality and purity, extends its hospitality alike to the Moslem brother, and to the panchama farm-servant, and treats them with the utmost tenderness and consideration. It represents really a series of concentric circles, with love radiating from the centre to every circumference. In order, therefore, to understand the spirit of Hindu marriage, you must view it as a sacrament rather than as a contract, yea, rather than even as a sentiment. We are not unaware of the high ideals of love, love at first sight, love sedulously cultivated and nurtured, which is supposed to be at the root of the marriage ideal in the West. But dispassionate observers will agree that, alike in the West and in the East, marriage is both a success and a failure, and if percentages are at all a guidance to us, there is as much to be said in favour of the Indian system as of the western. If marriage is a business proposition, then the Hindu system has nothing to be ashamed of. If it is a love-affair, the half-an-hour halt of a railway train at Indianapolis in U. S. A. for divorce at the railway station, perhaps over the quarrels picked up on the way; the one year, two year, and three year experimental marriages that have recently come into vogue in America; the challenging of the marital tie in Soviet Russia; the French laws that declare a child, legitimate if born within six months after marriage; the English system that compels, and very rightly, a man of whatever nationality to marry a maid that has been betrayed by him, —all these must make us think twice before we deliver our verdict in favour of the western system. If the tug of war is between love and ethics, then we have nothing to recant in enforcing ethics, even at the expense of love, but broadly speaking, we have accepted Goldsmith's ideal of marriage being the best for the average man and average woman, yea for every man and woman, in preference to that other ideal of men choosing to remain single and claiming the right to remain a bachelor and to speak ill of society. When once this ideal is accepted, child-marriage, or at any rate, parental choice follows. I hold no brief for either. In modern conditions, we may have to change, and social reformers have been at pains to reorganise society and to infuse into it new life and vigour. We wish all success to them. But institutions of standing must be understood, reinterpreted, and if necessary regained. After all, child-marriages in India are the rule only with a community which forms barely three per-cent of the population, and even there, provinces have their own exceptions.

INTENSE DOMESTIC AFFECTIONS

We have digressed into the question of marriage, as it is the key to the family, and family ties and affections. Dealing with the question of affections itself, the first point to notice is that the married son is not constituted at once ipso facto as a separate unit of society, is not sent out and turned adrift. He is as much a part of the family as ever before, while his wife is a daughter newly acquired, who is treated with all the tenderness and care due to such an acquisition. Doubtless, differences spring up between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law, but they are the inevitable off-shoots of that jealousy between the mother and the wife for the attentions of the son. The mother feels that the boy, who is her own begotten son, whom she nursed and tended, whom she brought up and educated, whom she married and settled in life, has slipped out of her hands, no more cares for her company, seldom consults her in domestic affairs, and is enslaved by a new queen of his heart. Soon, that child whom she looked up for months for the son before his marriage, whose family she wooed, whom her son wedded, who was a daughter unto her when her own daughters had left her home, on whom she hoped to rest in her old age, has become a rival that has stolen the heart of her son, an enemy in the home. I have painted this picture in lurid colours. But there is nothing untrue in the criticism. While this is so, let us see how modern conditions have disrupted the intimate ties of the inmates of the Hindu family. When the young man returns from the college to his village home after the close of his studies, he finds himself a stranger in a strange land. Town life and hostel life have this-distinct disadvantage, namely, that they estrange him from his sister and brother. He has nothing in Common with his brother whose interests and outlook are rural; while perhaps it is some years since he ever saw his married sister, his nephews he has not seen tat all, and probably he was absent in the stress of college life from the marriage of his sister and brother, nephew or niece. He has perchance not seen his aunt after his uncle's death, and does not know how many sons and daughters his uncles or aunts, maternal or paternal, have or where they have married or how they are situated. After the close of the college career, the young man has to rediscover all these relationships, and very soon the affections dormant in him for so long become rekindled. They flame forth ere long in all their brightness and beauty, and until he begets his own daughter, his little nephew and niece engage his affections; for, in the Hindu home, the grandson and the grand-daughter grow as often and as much on the lap of the grand-mother or the grandfather, as in the arms of the mother and the father. We might go on unfolding the working of the young man's heart, its daily expansive growth, its ever-widening receptivity, but sufficient unto the day is the description thereof. I would only ask, ' where is the Hindu home where a few boys outside the family circle, nephews or cousins, distant relations or unconnected urchins, are not brought up with care and concern', and it behoves the young men of the day when they settle down in life, to copy the noble example of a passing generation.

THE WOMAN'S STATUS

This naturally leads us to a consideration of the status of the woman in the Hindu home. How often have we not heard the hackneyed phrase that the Hindu woman is chattel and goods, having no personality or position! Yet, a more perverse reading of truth we have not come across. If the transport of the woman from the father's house to the husband's makes woman chattel and goods, then all countries are equally guilty of sending such consignments. But in India more than in any other civilized country exists, notably amongst certain well-to-do non-brahman communities, and in Kerala, the system of husbands going to their wives. Amongst the kammas of Andhradesa, the daughter remains with her mother and the husband goes to her until she bears two or three children, when she and her children will join the father-in-law's home. Apparently the idea is that she must acquire status before she joins the new home. The period of probation, usually spent by the girls in a large section of the Hindus with the mother-in-law, is abridged in this case. Only, it is the son-in-law that undergoes the probation. In the south, the son-in-law of the family is the 'son-in-law' or 'Mapilai' of the village. 'Has Mapilai come" 'when will Mapilai go" 'what is Mapilai doing', is the popular way of friendly enquiries. Amongst the kshathriyas of the Andhradesa, the son-in- law is so much reverenced by the village that it is the duty of the first kshathriya 'house-holder who sights him at the village boundary, to invite the incoming son-in-law, and he should accept the invitation and may not go straight to the father-in-law's place. Whether it is the son-in-law or the daughter-in-law that undergoes probation, the process itself is passed through by all people in life, men and women, tradesmen, journeymen, lawyers and politicians. And why not by housewives? Even a member of the Servants of India Society has to pass through a period of unquestioning obedience to the First Member during the first five years of his career, and during that time, talk nothing, write nothing, say nothing, except under control and supervision. We all know how a young lawyer begins his career while devilling for a senior, how a clerk having in him the potentialities of a collector remains humble, self-repressing and obedient, and bides his time. All the while, his faculties are developing and his emotions are being kindled. So is the young Hindu daughter-in-law. For a time she is tended with the affection due to a daughter. Then she becomes an object of jealousy. Finally, she establishes herself as the queen of the hose. Institutions are devised by which, through vratams and ceremonies, she is introduced to the mother-in-law's village, relations, and friends. She controls the servants ere long, handles the finances of the family, supervises the dairy, secures the crops, and manages the farm and domestic servants. When her daughters and sons are to be married, it is her will that rules and her voice that prevails. The husband, the nominal head of the family, is really its major domo. He has to slave all day long, earn and provide for the home, till and sow, build and furnish. The queen of the home is busy in her own way. She may not go out in sun, but she is tied up to the hearth. We seldom know what a toil it is to get ready things for the kitchen. The rice has to be cleared of stones, the vegetables washed of their sand, little insects have to be weeded out from green leaves. To separate the grit from the common salt of the sea is a job for the housewife. To sift the particles of sand from condiments and spices, such as mustard and anathei is a task for which I would easily exchange the lifting of a hundred- weight load or the walking of a twenty-mile distance. Women take their part in life equally with men, and in recognition of it, the Hindu woman is soon installed in the position of the head of the family. She is not a suffragette. But equality is a disrupting force, not a uniting one. That is how the French Revolution has a virtually failed and the shibboleths of the 18^th century have yielded place to the cementing forces of Nationalism in the 19^th. Love is a quality that implies regard behind it, and mutual regard only springs from a sense of mutual subordination. It is this sentiment that lies at the root of the success of the Hindu home. Where a husband takes a false view of life and accounts himself the superior of his spouse, he becomes either a brute or figures in society as a failure. Most of you may have seen the picture of a couple before marriage and that after marriage in the stereoscope. For the old nursery song, after all, embodies a truth when it says,

When tabors played their best

With lamps above and laughs below,

'Love me', sounded like a jest

Fit for 'yes' or fit for 'no'.

And it takes a little time to discover that colors seen by candle light are not the same by day.

EMOTIONS KINDLED

The Hindu home is the training ground alike for intellect and emotions. The carefulness with which the emotions are nurtured surpasses all expectation. From the dawn of childhood to the onset of old age, lessons in emotional training are being constantly imparted Folk-tales and stories of epic and historic interest are narrated by old women to children day in, day out, and help to brighten their imagination. Almost the first experience that opens out the hearts of children is the system, prevalent in the poorest of homes,—but alas! fast beginning to disappear from the richer ones,—of distributing alms every day. Attention is thus called to the poor and their unenviable lot, and when one child of five was taught the meaning of a Telugu verse extolling the virtues of mercy and truth, and was roughly told that it meant the cultivation of the instinct of helpfulness to the poor, he at once confronted the father who was turning away the beggar in the street empty-handed: 'Is this your Daya (mercy) and your satyam (truth)? It is thus that the child is taught to be kind, hospitable and generous. The attention and respect accorded to the guests in the Hindu home is something marvellous. Most elaborate rules have been formulated and even most unreasonable concessions are allowed, in the matter of honoring guests. The master of the house must go out to see before dinner whether any one is waiting, and the guests themselves are classified into those that come in time and those coming out of time. Both are alike entitled to the householder's sathkaram. We have been taunted civilization is not an organization. It is an outgrowth, artificial and superficial. Nature's bounties in the Orient, the indulgences permitted by a tropical climate, and the spiritual bent of the national tradition, have minimized our wants as well as our endeavours. And we need suffer neither from that militarism which is organization for war, or that industrialism which is organization in peace, which really constitute the bones of life in the west. Thank Providence that we are left free to develop our intellect and emotions as befits the human mind and the human soul!

RELIGIOUS ATMOSPHERE

Id religion is the development of the emotions in man so as to advance him in his march Godward, then surely the Hindu home is the best training ground that can be thought of in order to evolve a religious bias in the child's mind. The whole scheme of social life, both for boys and girls, attuned to religious key. You may not worship the idols at home in your new iconoclasm, but the celebration of festivals, so assiduously attended to by the Hindu mother, has the inescapable effect of making the children devotional and religious. These festivals, whether seasonal or historic, or astronomical, enjoin on the Hindu youth the admiring worship of Nature, the reverential praise of ancestors (heroes, martyrs and saints), and the devotional prayer to the avatars of the Almighty. Our gods and goddesses have been described and even decreed as monsters, but the standpoint of judging Religious Art apart, it must be admitted that gods have never been intended as statues of beauty, and substitutes in the temple of the home, for the dainty girls of the drawing-room or the promenade. An atmosphere is created for worship, and the scheme of worship—with its fasts and prayers, its songs and vigils, its bhajans and sankeerthan, its vrathams and ceremonies, its festivals and enjoyments, has been admirably designed to draw out all that is best in the child-mind,—the boy-mind and the girl-mind, in the adult-mind, and in the mind of middle age and advanced life.

SUMMARY

The Hindu home is what it is, because of the equities observed between brother and brother in the distribution of property, of the tender regard for woman and the delicacy with which she is handled and engrafted on to a new family, of the intimate domestic affections sedulously nurtured, of the ever-widening circle of relations admitted to charity, of the early care bestowed on the development of emotions and the cultivation of a religious outlook. To me, the Hindu home is a fine economic unit and an embryonic co-operative society. It is a model hygienic abode, a cultural and emotional centre, a miniature philanthropic organization and a perfect temple of Praise and Prayer. It is hard to reconcile oneself to the policy of detaching the young boys and the young girls from its sobering, elevating, chastening and purifying impulses. The school and the college may supplement the culture and training of the home, but may not supplant them. But for the conservatism of the Hindu home, Indian Nationalism would have been dead and buried ten centuries ago, and clean forgotten long before the battle of Plassey. We are free to own the numerous drawbacks of the home, both domestic and social. In an age of transition, we cannot be blind to the changing requirements of the times. The lot of the widow, however austerely conceived, cries out to the hearts of all living beings for sympathy, and amelioration and adequate provision in that behalf—educational, economic and hymeneal, may yet help to bring out child-marriages in their brighter side. And too, it is necessary to provide better laws of heritage so as to make the girls participants in patrimony in a measure—at least in the measure in which our Moslem brothers have conceived and planned out. It is not, however, the purpose of this article to embrace or traverse the wide sphere of Hindu Social Reform. The writer's purpose is served if it directs attention to the ancient ideals of the Hindu home and the virtue that still d wells in it despite the stagnation of centuries, and he will feel rewarded if the young men who may have chanced to read these pages will cultivate a higher regard for Hindu womanhood and a greater sympathy for her in the discharge of her many arduous duties as sister, wife and mother, as the repository of National culture, and as the conserver of the rich and inestimable treasures of Indian Nationalism.