The Life of William Carey, Shoemaker and Missionary Part 13

In 1814 the Serampore Bible translation college, as we may call it, began the preparation of the New Testament in Maghadi, another of the languages allied to the Bengali, and derived from the Sanskrit through the Pali, because that was the vernacular of Buddhism in its original seat; an edition of 1000 copies appeared in 1824. It was intended to publish a version in the Maithili language of Bihar, which has a literature stretching back to the fourteenth century, that every cla.s.s might have the Word of G.o.d in their own dialect. But Carey's literary enthusiasm and scholars.h.i.+p had by this time done so much to develop and extend the power of Bengali proper, that it had begun to supersede all such dialects, except Ooriya and the northern vernaculars of the valley of the Brahmapootra. In 1810 the Serampore press added the a.s.samese New Testament to its achievements. In 1819 the first edition appeared, in 1826 the province became British, and in 1832 Carey had the satisfaction of issuing the Old Testament, and setting apart Mr. Rae, a Scottish soldier, who had settled there, as the first missionary at Gowhatti. To these must be added, as in the Bengali character though non-Aryan languages, versions in Khasi and Manipoori, the former for the democratic tribes of the Khasia hills among whom the Welsh Calvinists have since worked, and the latter for the curious Hindoo snake-people on the border of Burma, who have taught Europe the game of polo.

Another immediate successor of the Bengali translation was the Marathi, of which also Carey was professor in the College of Fort William. By 1804 he was himself hard at work on this version, by 1811 the first edition of the New Testament appeared, and by 1820 the Old Testament left the press. It was in a dialect peculiar to Nagpoor, and was at first largely circulated by Lieutenant Moxon in the army there. In 1812 Carey sent the missionary Aratoon to Bombay and Surat just after Henry Martyn had written that the only Christian in the city who understood his evangelical sermon was a ropemaker just arrived from England. At the same time he was busy with a version in the dialect of the Konkan, the densely-peopled coast district to the south of Bombay city, inhabited chiefly by the ablest Brahmanical race in India. In 1819 the New Testament appeared in this translation, having been under preparation at Serampore for eleven years. Thus Carey sought to turn to Christ the twelve millions of Hindoos who, from Western India above and below the great coast-range known as the Sahyadri or "delectable"

mountains, had nearly wrested the whole peninsula from the Mohammedans, and had almost antic.i.p.ated the life-giving rule of the British, first at Panipat and then as a.s.sye. Meanwhile new missionaries had been taking possession of those western districts where the men of Serampore had sowed the first seed and reaped the first fruits. The charter of 1813 made it possible for the American Missionaries to land there, and for the local Bible Society to spring into existence. Dr. John Wilson and his Scottish colleagues followed them. Carey and his brethren welcomed these and retired from that field, confining themselves to providing, during the next seven years, a Goojarati version for the millions of Northern Bombay, including the hopeful Pa.r.s.ees, and resigning that, too, to the London Missionary Society after issuing the New Testament in 1820.

Mr. Christopher Anderson justly remarks, in his Annals of the English Bible, published half a century ago:--"Time will show, and in a very singular manner, that every version, without exception, which came from Carey's hands, has a value affixed to it which the present generation, living as it were too near an object, is not yet able to estimate or descry. Fifty years hence the character of this extraordinary and humble man will be more correctly appreciated."

In none of the cla.s.ses of languages derived from the Sanskrit was the zeal of Carey and his a.s.sociates so remarkable as in the Hindi. So early as 1796 he wrote of this the most widely extended offspring of the Sanskrit:--"I have acquired so much of the Hindi as to converse in it and preach for some time intelligibly...It is the current language of all the west from Rajmahal to Delhi, and perhaps farther. With this I can be understood nearly all over Hindostan." By the time that he issued the sixth memoir of the translations Chamberlain's experiences in North-Western India led Carey to write that he had ascertained the existence of twenty dialects of Hindi, with the same vocabulary but different sets of terminations. The Bruj or Brijbhasa Gospels were finished in 1813, two years after Chamberlain had settled in Agra, and the New Testament was completed nine years after. This version of the Gospels led the Brahman priest, Anand Masih, to Christ. In their eagerness for a copy of the Old Testament, which appeared in 1818, many Sepoys brought testimonials from their commanding officers, and in one year it led eighteen converts to Christ. The other Hindi dialects, in which the whole New Testament or the Gospels appeared, will be found at page 177 {see footnote number 16}. The parent Hindi translation was made by Carey with his own hand from the original languages between 1802 and 1807, and ran through many large editions till Mr.

Chamberlain's was preferred by Carey himself in 1819.

We may pa.s.s over the story of the Dravidian versions, the Telugoo[20]

New Testament and Pentateuch, and the Kanarese. Nor need we do more than refer to the Singhalese, "derived from the previous labours of Dr.

Carey" by Tolfrey, the Persian, Malayalam, and other versions made by others, but edited or carefully carried through the press by Carey.

The wonderful tale of his Bible work is well ill.u.s.trated by a man who, next to the Lawrences, was the greatest Englishman who has governed the Punjab frontier, the hero of Mr. Ruskin's book, A Knight's Faith. In that portion of his career which Sir Herbert Edwardes gave to the world under the t.i.tle of A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848-49, and in which he describes his bloodless conquest of the wild valley of Bunnoo, we find this gem embedded. The writer was at the time in the Gundapoor country, of which Kulachi is the trade-centre between the Afghan pa.s.s of Ghwalari and Dera Ismail Kan, where the dust of Sir Henry Durand now lies:--

"A highly interesting circ.u.mstance connected with the Indian trade came under my notice. Ali Khan, Gundapoor, the uncle of the present chief, Gooldad Khan, told me he could remember well, as a youth, being sent by his father and elder brother with a string of Cabul horses to the fair of Hurdwar, on the Ganges. He also showed me a Pushtoo version of the Bible, printed at Serampore in 1818, which he said had been given him thirty years before at Hurdwar by an English gentleman, who told him to 'take care of it, and neither fling it into the fire nor the river; but h.o.a.rd it up against the day when the British should be rulers of his country!' Ali Khan said little to anybody of his possessing this book, but put it carefully by in a linen cover, and produced it with great mystery when I came to settle the revenue of his nephew's country, 'thinking that the time predicted by the Englishman had arrived!' The only person, I believe, to whom he had shown the volume was a Moolluh, who read several pa.s.sages in the Old Testament, and told Ali Khan 'it was a true story, and was all about their own Muhommudan prophets, Father Moses and Father Noah.'

"I examined the book with great interest. It was not printed in the Persian character, but the common Pushtoo language of Afghanistan; and was the only specimen I had ever seen of Pushtoo reduced to writing.

The accomplishment of such a translation was a highly honourable proof of the zeal and industry of the Serampore mission; and should these pages ever meet the eye of Mr. John Marshman, of Serampore,[21] whose own pen is consistently guided by a love of civil order and religious truth, he may probably be able to identify 'the English gentleman' who, thirty-two years ago on the banks of the Ganges, at the then frontier of British India, gave to a young Afghan chief, from beyond the distant Indus, a Bible in his own barbarous tongue, and foresaw the day when the followers of the 'Son of David' should extend their dominion to the 'Throne of Solomon.'"

Hurdwar, as the spot at which the Ganges debouches into the plains, is the scene of the greatest pilgrim gathering in India, especially every twelfth year. Then three millions of people used to a.s.semble, and too often carried, all over Asia, cholera which extended to Europe. The missionaries made this, like most pilgrim resorts, a centre of preaching and Bible circulation, and doubtless it was from Thompson, Carey's Missionary at Delhi, that this copy of the Pushtoo Bible was received. It was begun by Dr. Leyden, and continued for seven years by the same Afghan maulavee under Carey, in the Arabic character. The Punjabi Bible, nearly complete, issued first in 1815, had become so popular by 1820 as to lead Carey to report of the Sikhs that no one of the nations of India had discovered a stronger desire for the Scriptures than this hardy race. At Amritsar and Lah.o.r.e "the book of Jesus is spoken of, is read, and has caused a considerable stir in the minds of the people." A Thug, asked how he could have committed so many murders, pointed to it and said, "If I had had this book I could not have done it." A fakeer, forty miles from Lodiana, read the book, founded the community of wors.h.i.+ppers of the Sachi Pite Isa, and suffered much persecution in a native State.

When Felix Carey returned to Serampore in 1812 to print his Burmese version of the Gospel of Matthew and his Burmese grammar, his father determined to send the press at which they were completed to Rangoon.

The three missionaries despatched with it a letter to the king of Ava, commending to his care "their beloved brethren, who from love to his majesty's subjects had voluntarily gone to place themselves under his protection, while they translated the Bible, the Book of Heaven, which was received and revered" by all the countries of Europe and America as "the source whence all the knowledge of virtue and religion was drawn."

The king at once ordered from Serampore a printing-press, like that at Rangoon, for his own palace at Ava, with workmen to use it. In this Carey saw the beginning of a mission in the Burman capital, but G.o.d had other designs which the sons and daughters of America, following Judson first of all, are still splendidly developing, from Rangoon to Kareng-nee, Siam, and China. The s.h.i.+p containing the press sank in the Rangoon river, and the first Burmese war soon followed.

Three months after the complete and magnificent plan of translating the Bible into all the languages of the far East, which the a.s.sistance of his two colleagues and the college of Fort William led Carey to form, had been laid before Fuller in Northamptons.h.i.+re, the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in London. Joseph Hughes, the Nonconformist who was its first secretary, had been moved by the need of the Welsh for the Bible in their own tongue. But the ex-Governor-General, Lord Teignmouth, became its first president, and the Serampore translators at once turned for a.s.sistance to the new organisation whose work Carey had individually been doing for ten years at the cost of his two a.s.sociates and himself. The catholic Bible Society at once asked Carey's old friend, Mr. Udny, then a member of the Government in Calcutta, to form a corresponding committee there of the three missionaries--their chaplain friends, Brown and Buchanan, and himself. The chaplains delayed the formation of the committee till 1809, but liberally helped meanwhile in the circulation of the other appeals issued from Serampore, and even made the proposal which resulted in Dr. Marshman's wonderful version of the Bible in Chinese and Ward's improvements in Chinese printing. To the princ.i.p.al tributary sovereigns of India Dr. Buchanan sent copies of the vernacular Scriptures already published.

From 1809 till 1830, or practically through the rest of Carey's life, the co-operation of Serampore and the Bible Society was honourable to both. Carey loyally clung to it when in 1811, under the spell of Henry Martyn's sermon on Christian India, the chaplains established the Calcutta Auxiliary Bible Society in order to supersede its corresponding committee. In the Serampore press the new auxiliary, like the parent Society, found the cheapest and best means of publis.h.i.+ng editions of the New Testament in Singhalese, Malayalam, and Tamil. The press issued also the Persian New Testament, first of the Romanist missionary, Sebastiani--"though it be not wholly free from imperfections, it will doubtless do much good," wrote Dr. Marshman to Fuller--and then of Henry Martyn, whose a.s.sistant, Sabat, was trained at Serampore. Those three of Serampore had a Christ-like tolerance, which sprang from the divine charity of their determination to live only that the Word of G.o.d might sound out through Asia. When in 1830 this auxiliary--which had at first sought to keep all missionaries out of its executive in order to conciliate men like Sydney Smith's brother, the Advocate-General of Bengal--refused to use the translations of Carey and Yates, and inclined to an earlier version of Ellerton, because of the translation or transliteration of the Greek words for "baptism," these two scholars acted thus, as described by the Bible Society's annalist--they, "with a liberality which does them honour, permitted the use of their respective versions of the Bengali Scriptures, with such alterations as were deemed needful in the disputed word for 'baptism,' they being considered in no way parties to such alterations." From first to last the British and Foreign Bible Society, to use its own language, "had the privilege of aiding the Serampore brethren by grants, amounting to not less than 13,500." Of this 1475 had been raised by Mr. William Hey, F.R.S., a surgeon at Leeds, who had been so moved by the translation memoir of 1816 as to offer 500 for the publication of a thousand copies of every approved first translation of the New Testament into any dialect of India. It was with this a.s.sistance that most of the Hindi and the Pushtoo and Punjabi versions were produced.

The cold season of 1811-12 was one ever to be remembered. Death entered the home of each of the staff of seven missionaries and carried off wife or children. An earthquake of unusual violence alarmed the natives. Dr. Carey had buried a grandson, and was at his weekly work in the college at Calcutta. The sun had just set on the evening of the 11th March 1812, and the native typefounders, compositors, pressmen, binders, and writers had gone. Ward alone lingered in the waning light at his desk settling an account with a few servants. His two rooms formed the north end of the long printing-office. The south rooms were filled with paper and printed materials. Close beyond was the paper-mill. The Bible-publis.h.i.+ng enterprise was at its height.

Fourteen founts of Oriental types, new supplies of Hebrew, Greek, and English types, a vast stock of paper from the Bible Society, presses, priceless ma.n.u.scripts of dictionaries, grammars, and translations, and, above all, the steel punches of the Eastern letters--all were there, with the deeds and account-books of the property, and the iron safe containing notes and rupees. Suffocating smoke burst from the long type-room into the office. Rus.h.i.+ng through it to observe the source of the fire, he was arrested at the southern rooms by the paper store.

Returning with difficulty and joined by Marshman and the natives, he had every door and window closed, and then mounting the south roof, he had water poured through it upon the burning ma.s.s for four hours, with the most hopeful prospect of arresting the ruin. While he was busy with Marshman in removing the papers in the north end some one opened a window, when the air set the entire building on flame. By midnight the roof fell in along its whole length, and the column of fire leapt up towards heaven. With "solemn serenity" the members of the mission family remained seated in front of the desolation.

The ruins were still smoking when next evening Dr. Carey arrived from Calcutta, which was ringing with the sad news. The venerable scholar had suffered most, for his were the ma.n.u.scripts; the steel punches were found uninjured. The Sikh and Telugoo grammars and ten Bible versions in the press were gone. Second editions of Confucius. A Dissertation on the Chinese Language, and of Ward on the Hindoos, and smaller works were destroyed. The translation of the Ramayana, on which he and Marshman had been busy for a year, was stopped for ever; fifty years after the present writer came upon some charred sheets of the fourth volume, which had been on the press and rescued. The Circular Letter for April 1812 is printed on paper scorched at the edge. Worst of all was the loss of that polyglot dictionary of all the languages derived from the Sanskrit which, if Carey had felt any of this world's ambition, would have perpetuated his name in the first rank of philologists.

With the delicacy which always marked him Dr. Marshman had himself gone down to Calcutta next morning to break the news to Carey, who received it with choking utterance. The two then called on the friendly chaplain, Thomason, who burst into tears. When the afternoon tide enabled the three to reach Serampore, after a two hours' hard pull at the flood, they found Ward rejoicing. He had been all day clearing away the rubbish, and had just discovered the punches and matrices unharmed. The five presses too were untouched. He had already opened out a long warehouse nearer the river-sh.o.r.e, the lease of which had fallen in to them, and he had already planned the occupation of that uninviting place in which the famous press of Serampore and, at the last, the Friend of India weekly newspaper found a home till 1875. The description of the scene and of its effect on Carey by an eye-witness like Thomason has a value of its own:--

"The year 1812 was ushered in by an earthquake which was preceded by a loud noise; the house shook; the oil in the lamps on the walls was thrown out; the birds made a frightful noise; the natives ran from their houses, calling on the names of their G.o.ds; the sensation is most awful; we read the forty-sixth Psalm. This fearful prodigy was succeeded by that desolating disaster, the Serampore fire. I could scarcely believe the report; it was like a blow on the head which stupefies. I flew to Serampore to witness the desolation. The scene was indeed affecting. The immense printing-office, two hundred feet long and fifty broad, reduced to a mere sh.e.l.l. The yard covered with burnt quires of paper, the loss in which article was immense. Carey walked with me over the smoking ruins. The tears stood in his eyes.

'In one short evening,' said he, 'the labours of years are consumed.

How unsearchable are the ways of G.o.d! I had lately brought some things to the utmost perfection of which they seemed capable, and contemplated the missionary establishment with perhaps too much self-congratulation.

The Lord has laid me low, that I may look more simply to Him.' Who could stand in such a place, at such a time, with such a man, without feelings of sharp regret and solemn exercise of mind. I saw the ground strewed with half-consumed paper, on which in the course of a very few months the words of life would have been printed. The metal under our feet amidst the ruins was melted into misshapen lumps--the sad remains of beautiful types consecrated to the service of the sanctuary. All was smiling and promising a few hours before--now all is vanished into smoke or converted into rubbis.h.!.+ Return now to thy books, regard G.o.d in all thou doest. Learn Arabic with humility. Let G.o.d be exalted in all thy plans, and purposes, and labours; He can do without thee."

Carey himself thus wrote of the disaster to Dr. Ryland:--"25th March 1812.--The loss is very great, and will long be severely felt; yet I can think of a hundred circ.u.mstances which would have made it much more difficult to bear. The Lord has smitten us, he had a right to do so, and we deserve his corrections. I wish to submit to His sovereign will, nay, cordially to acquiesce therein, and to examine myself rigidly to see what in me has contributed to this evil.

"I now, however, turn to the bright side; and here I might mention what still remains to us, and the merciful circ.u.mstances which attend even this stroke of G.o.d's rod; but I will princ.i.p.ally notice what will tend to cheer the heart of every one who feels for the cause of G.o.d. Our loss, so far as I can see, is reparable in a much shorter time than I should at first have supposed. The Tamil fount of types was the first that we began to recast. I expect it will be finished by the end of this week, just a fortnight after it was begun. The next will be the small Devanagari, for the Hindostani Scriptures, and next the larger for the Sanskrit. I hope this will be completed in another month. The other founts, viz., Bengali, Orissa, Sikh, Telinga, Singhalese, Mahratta, Burman, Kashmeerian, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese, will follow in order, and will probably be finished in six or seven months, except the Chinese, which will take more than a year to replace it. I trust, therefore, that we shall not be greatly delayed. Our English works will be delayed the longest; but in general they are of the least importance. Of MSS. burnt I have suffered the most; that is, what was actually prepared by me, and what owes its whole revision for the press to me, comprise the princ.i.p.al part of the MSS. consumed. The ground must be trodden over again, but no delay in printing need arise from that. The translations are all written out first by pundits in the different languages, except the Sanskrit which is dictated by me to an amanuensis. The Sikh, Mahratta, Hindostani, Orissa, Telinga, a.s.sam, and Kurnata are re-translating in rough by pundits who have been long accustomed to their work, and have gone over the ground before. I follow them in revise, the chief part of which is done as the sheets pa.s.s through the press, and is by far the heaviest part of the work.

Of the Sanskrit only the second book of Samuel and the first book of Kings were lost. Scarcely any of the Orissa, and none of the Kashmeerian or of the Burman MSS. were lost--copy for about thirty pages of my Bengali dictionary, the whole copy of a Telinga grammar, part of the copy of the grammar of Punjabi or Sikh language, and all the materials which I had been long collecting for a dictionary of all the languages derived from the Sanskrit. I hope, however, to be enabled to repair the loss, and to complete my favourite scheme, if my life be prolonged."

Little did these simple scholars, all absorbed in their work, dream that this fire would prove to be the means of making them and their work famous all over Europe and America as well as India. Men of every Christian school, and men interested only in the literary and secular side of their enterprise, had their active sympathy called out. The mere money loss, at the exchange of the day, was not under ten thousand pounds. In fifty days this was raised in England and Scotland alone, till Fuller, returning from his last campaign, entered the room of his committee, declaring "we must stop the contributions." In Greenock, for instance, every place of wors.h.i.+p on one Sunday collected money. In the United States Mr. Robert Ralston, a Presbyterian, a merchant of Philadelphia, who as Carey's correspondent had been the first American layman to help missions to India, and Dr. Staughton, who had taken an interest in the formation of the Society in 1792 before he emigrated, had long a.s.sisted the translation work, and now that Judson was on his way out they redoubled their exertions. In India Thomason's own congregation sent the missionaries 800, and Brown wrote from his dying bed a message of loving help. The newspapers of Calcutta caught the enthusiasm; one leading article concluded with the a.s.surance that the Serampore press would, "like the phoenix of antiquity, rise from its ashes, winged with new strength, and destined, in a lofty and long-enduring flight, widely to diffuse the benefits of knowledge throughout the East." The day after the fire ceased to smoke Monohur was at the task of casting type from the lumps of the molten metal.

In two months after the first intelligence Fuller was able to send as "feathers of the phoenix" slips of sheets of the Tamil Testament, printed from these types, to the towns and churches which had subscribed. Every fortnight a fount was cast; in a month all the native establishment was at work night and day. In six months the whole loss in Oriental types was repaired. The Ramayana version and Sanskrit polyglot dictionary were never resumed. But of the Bible translations and grammars, Carey and his two heroic brethren wrote:--"We found, on making the trial, that the advantages in going over the same ground a second time were so great that they fully counter-balanced the time requisite to be devoted thereto in a second translation." The fire, in truth, the cause of which was never discovered, and insurance against which did not exist in India, had given birth to revised editions.

CHAPTER XI

WHAT CAREY DID FOR LITERATURE AND FOR HUMANITY

The growth of a language--Carey identified with the transition stage of Bengali--First printed books--Carey's own works--His influence on indigenous writers--His son's works--Bengal the first heathen country to receive the press--The first Bengali newspaper--The monthly and quarterly Friend of India--The Hindoo revival of the eighteenth century fostered by the East India Company--Carey's three memorials to Government on female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and widow-burning--What Jonathan Duncan and Col. Walker had done--Wellesley's regulation to prevent the sacrifice of children--Beginning of the agitation against the Suttee crime--Carey's pundits more enlightened than the Company's judges--Humanity triumphs in 1832--Carey's share in Ward's book on the Hindoos--The lawless supernaturalism of Rome and of India--Wors.h.i.+p of Jaganath--Regulation identifying Government with Hindooism--The swinging festival--Ghat murders--Burning of lepers--Carey establishes the Leper Hospital in Calcutta--Slavery in India loses its legal status--Cowper, Clarkson, and Carey.

Like the growth of a tree is the development of a language, as really and as strictly according to law. In savage lands like those of Africa the missionary finds the living germs of speech, arranges them for the first time in grammatical order, expresses them in written and printed form, using the simplest, most perfect, and most universal character of all--the Roman, and at one bound gives the most degraded of the dark peoples the possibility of the highest civilisation and the divinest future. In countries like India and China, where civilisation has long ago reached its highest level, and has been declining for want of the salt of a universal Christianity, it is the missionary again who interferes for the highest ends, but by a different process. Mastering the complex cla.s.sical speech and literature of the learned and priestly cla.s.s, and living with his Master's sympathy among the people whom that cla.s.s oppresses, he takes the popular dialects which are instinct with the life of the future; where they are wildly luxuriant he brings them under law, where they are barren he enriches them from the parent stock so as to make them the vehicle of ideas such as Greek gave to Europe, and in time he brings to the birth nations worthy of the name by a national language and literature lighted up with the ideas of the Book which he is the first to translate.

This was what Carey did for the speech of the Bengalees. To them, as the historians of the fast approaching Christian future will recognise, he was made what the Saxon Boniface had become to the Germans, or the Northumbrian Baeda and Wyclif to the English. The transition period of English, from 1150 when its modern grammatical form prevailed, to the fifteenth century when the rich dialects gave place to the literary standard, has its central date in 1362. Then Edward the Third made English take the place of French as the public language of justice and legislation, closely followed by Wyclif's English Bible. Carey's one Indian life of forty years marks the similar transition stage of Bengali, including the parallel regulation of 1829, which abolished Persian, made by the Mohammedan conquerors the language of the courts, and put in its place Bengali and the vernaculars of the other provinces.

When Carey began to work in Calcutta and Dinapoor in 1792-93 Bengali had no printed and hardly any written literature. The very written characters were justly described by Colebrooke as nothing else but the difficult and beautiful Sanskrit Devanagari deformed for the sake of expeditious writings, such as accounts. It was the new vaishnava faith of the Nuddea reformer Chaitanya which led to the composition of the first Bengali prose.[22] The Brahmans and the Mohammedan rulers alike treated Bengali--though "it arose from the tomb of the Sanskrit," as Italian did from Latin under Dante's inspiration--as fit only for "demons and women." In the generation before Carey there flourished at the same Oxford of India, as Nuddea has been called, Raja Krishna Rai, who did for Bengali what our own King Alfred accomplished for English prose. Moved, however, chiefly by a zeal for Hindooism, which caused him to put a Soodra to death for marrying into a Brahman family, he himself wrote the vernacular and spent money in gifts, which "encouraged the people to study Bengali with unusual diligence." But when, forty years after that, Carey visited Nuddea he could not discover more than forty separate works, all in ma.n.u.script, as the whole literature of 30,000,000 of people up to that time. A press had been at work on the opposite side of the river for fifteen years, but Halhed's grammar was still the only as it was the most ancient printed book. One Baboo Ram, from Upper India, was the first native who established a press in Calcutta, and that only under the influence of Colebrooke, to print the Sanskrit cla.s.sics. The first Bengali who, on his own account, printed works in the vernacular on trade principles, was Gunga Kish.o.r.e, whom Carey and Ward had trained at Serampore. He soon made so large a fortune by his own press that three native rivals had sprung up by 1820, when twenty-seven separate books, or 15,000 copies, had been sold to natives within ten years.

For nearly all these Serampore supplied the type. But all were in another sense the result of Carey's action. His first edition of the Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801, his Grammar in the same year, and at the same time his Colloquies, or "dialogues intended to facilitate the acquiring of the Bengali language," which he wrote out of the abundance of his knowledge of native thought, idioms, and even slang, to enable students to converse with all cla.s.ses of society, as Erasmus had done in another way. His Dictionary of 80,000 words began to appear in 1815. Knowing, however, that in the long run the literature of a nation must be of indigenous growth, he at once pressed the natives into this service. His first pundit, Ram Basu, was a most accomplished Bengali scholar. This able man, who lacked the courage to profess Christ in the end, wrote the first tract, the Gospel Messenger, and the first pamphlet exposing Hindooism, both of which had an enormous sale and caused much excitement. On the historical side Carey induced him to publish in 1801 the Life of Raja Pratapaditya, the last king of Sagar Island. At first the new professor could not find reading books for his Bengali cla.s.s in the college of Fort William. He, his pundits, especially Mritunjaya who has been compared in his physique and knowledge to Dr. Samuel Johnson, and even the young civilian students, were for many years compelled to write Bengali text-books, including translations of Virgil's aeneid and Shakspere's Tempest. The School Book Society took up the work, encouraging such a man as Ram Komal Sen, the printer who became chief native official of the Bank of Bengal and father of the late Keshab Chunder Sen, to prepare his Bengali dictionary. Self-interest soon enlisted the haughtiest Brahmans in the work of producing school and reading books, till now the Bengali language is to India what the Italian is to Europe, and its native literature is comparatively as rich. Nor was Carey without his European successor in the good work for a time. When his son Felix died in 1823 he was bewailed as the coadjutor of Ram Komal Sen, as the author of the first volume of a Bengali encyclopaedia on anatomy, as the translator of Bunyan's Pilgrim, Goldsmith's History of England, and Mill's History of India.

Literature cannot be said to exist for the people till the newspaper appears. Bengal was the first non-Christian country into which the press had ever been introduced. Above all forms of truth and faith Christianity seeks free discussion; in place of that the missionaries lived under a shackled press law tempered by the higher instincts of rulers like Wellesley, Hastings, and Bentinck, till Macaulay and Metcalfe gained for it liberty. When Dr. Marshman in 1818 proposed the publication of a Bengali periodical, Dr. Carey, impressed by a quarter of a century's intolerance, consented only on the condition that it should be a monthly magazine, and should avoid political discussion.

Accordingly the Dig-darshan appeared, antic.i.p.ating in its contents and style the later Penny and Sat.u.r.day Magazines, and continued for three years. Its immediate success led to the issue from the Serampore press on the 31st May 1818, of "the first newspaper ever printed in any Oriental language"--the Samachar Darpan, or News Mirror.

It was a critical hour when the first proof of the first number was laid before the a.s.sembled brotherhood at the weekly meeting on Friday evening. Dr. Carey, fearing for his spiritual work, but eager for this new avenue to the minds of the people who were being taught to read, and had little save their own mythology, consented to its publication when Dr. Marshman promised to send a copy, with an a.n.a.lysis of its contents in English, to the Government, and to stop the enterprise if it should be officially disapproved. Lord Hastings was fighting the Pindarees, and nothing was said by his Council. On his return he declared that "the effect of such a paper must be extensively and importantly useful." He allowed it to circulate by post at one-fourth the then heavy rate. The natives welcomed their first newspaper.

Although it avoided religious controversy, in a few weeks an opposition journal was issued by a native, who sought to defend Hindooism under the t.i.tle of the Destroyer of Darkness. To the Darpan the educated natives looked as the means of bringing the oppression of their own countrymen to the knowledge of the public and the authorities.

Government found it most useful for contradicting silly rumours and promoting contentment if not loyalty. The paper gave a new development to the Bengali language as well as to the moral and political education of the people.

The same period of liberty to the press and to native advancement, with which the names of the Marquis of Hastings and his accomplished wife will ever be a.s.sociated, saw the birth of an English periodical which, for the next fifty-seven years, was to become not merely famous but powerfully useful as the Friend of India. The t.i.tle was the selection of Dr. Marshman, and the editorial management was his and his able son's down to 1852, when it pa.s.sed into the hands of Mr. Meredith Townsend, long the most brilliant of English journalists, and finally into those of the present writer. For some years a monthly and for a time a quarterly magazine till 1835, when Mr. John Marshman made it the well-known weekly, this journal became the means through which Carey and the brotherhood fought the good fight of humanity. In the monthly and quarterly Friend, moreover, reprinted as much of it was in London, the three philanthropists brought their ripe experience and lofty principles to bear on the conscience of England and of educated India alike. As, on the Oriental side, Carey chose for his weapon the vernacular, on the other he drew from Western sources the principles and the thoughts which he clothed in a Bengali dress.

We have already seen how Carey at the end of the eighteenth century found Hindooism at its worst. Steadily had the Pooranic corruption and the Brahmanical oppression gone on demoralising the whole of Hindoo society. In the period of virtual anarchy, which covered the seventy-five years from the death of Aurangzeb to the supremacy of Warren Hastings and the reforms of Lord Cornwallis, the healthy zeal of Islam against the idolatrous abominations of the Hindoos had ceased.

In its place there was not only a wild licence amounting to an undoubted Hindoo revival, marked on the political side by the Maratha ascendency, but there came to be deliberate encouragement of the worst forms of Hindooism by the East India Company and its servants. That "the mischievous reaction" on England from India--its idolatry, its women, its nabobs, its wealth, its absolutism--was prevented, and European civilisation was "after much delay and hesitation" brought to bear on India, was due indeed to the legislation of Governor-Generals from Cornwallis to Bentinck, but much more, to the persistent agitation of Christian missionaries, notably Carey and Duff. For years Carey stood alone in India, as Grant and Wilberforce did in England, in the darkest hour of England's moral degradation and spiritual death, when the men who were shaping the destinies of India were the Hindooising Stewarts and Youngs, Prendergasts, Twinings, and Warings, some of whom hated missions from the dread of sedition, others because their hearts "seduced by fair idolatresses had fallen to idols foul."

The most atrociously inhuman of all the Brahmanical customs, and yet the most universal, from the land of the five rivers at Lah.o.r.e to the far spice islands at Bali, was the murder of widows by burning or burying them alive with the husband's corpse. We have seen how the first of the many such scenes which he was doomed to witness for the next thirty years affected Carey. After remonstrances, which the people met first by argument and then by surly threats, Carey wrote:--"I told them I would not go, that I was determined to stay and see the murder, and that I should certainly bear witness of it at the tribunal of G.o.d." And when he again sought to interfere because the two stout bamboos always fixed for the purpose of preventing the victim's escape were pressed down on the shrieking woman like levers, and they persisted, he wrote: "We could not bear to see more, but left them exclaiming loudly against the murder and full of horror at what we had seen." The remembrance of that sight never left Carey. His naturally cheerful spirit was inflamed to indignation all his life through, till his influence, more than that of any other one man, at last prevailed to put out for ever the murderous pyre. Had Lord Wellesley remained Governor-General a year longer Carey would have succeeded in 1808, instead of having to wait till 1829, and to know as he waited and prayed that literally every day saw the devilish smoke ascending along the banks of the Ganges, and the rivers and pools considered sacred by the Hindoos. Need we wonder that when on a Sunday morning the regulation of Lord William Bentinck prohibiting the crime reached him as he was meditating his sermon, he sent for another to do the preaching, and taking his pen in his hand, at once wrote the official translation, and had it issued in the Bengali Gazette that not another day might be added to the long black catalogue of many centuries?

On the return of the Marquis Wellesley to Calcutta from the Tipoo war, and his own appointment to the College of Fort William, Carey felt that his time had come to prevent the murder of the innocents all over India in the three forms of female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and widow-burning or burying alive. His old friend, Udny, having become a member of Council or colleague of the Governor-General, he prepared three memorials to Government on each of these crimes. When afterwards he had enlisted Claudius Buchanan in the good work, and had employed trustworthy natives to collect statistics proving that in the small district around Calcutta 275 widow murders thus took place in six months of 1803, and when he was asked by Dr. Ryland to state the facts which, with his usual absence of self-regarding, he had not reported publicly, or even in letters home, he thus replied:--

"27th April 1808.--The report of the burning of women, and some others, however, were made by me. I, at his expense, however, made the inquiries and furnished the reports, and believe they are rather below the truth than above it. I have, since I have been here, through a different medium, presented three pet.i.tions or representations to Government for the purpose of having the burning of women and other modes of murder abolished, and have succeeded in the case of infanticide and voluntary drowning in the river. Laws were made to prevent these, which have been successful."

But there was a crime nearer home, committed in the river flowing past his own door, and especially at Sagar Island, where the Ganges loses itself in the ocean. At that tiger-haunted spot, s.h.i.+vering in the cold of the winter solstice, every year mult.i.tudes of Hindoos, chiefly wives with children and widows with heavy hearts, a.s.sembled to wash away their sins--to sacrifice the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul. Since 1794, when Thomas and he had found in a basket hanging on a tree the bones of an infant exposed, to be devoured by the white ants, by some mother too poor to go on pilgrimage to a sacred river-spot, Carey had known this unnatural horror. He and his brethren had planned a preaching tour to Sagar, where not only mothers drowned their first born in payment of a vow, with the encouragement of the Brahmans, but widows and even men walked into the deep sea and drowned themselves at the spot where Ganga and Sagar kiss each other, "as the highest degree of holiness, and as securing immediate heaven." The result of Carey's memorial was the publication of the Regulation for preventing the sacrifice of children at Sagar and other places on the Ganges:--"It has been represented to the Governor-General in Council that a criminal and inhuman practice of sacrificing children, by exposing them to be drowned or devoured by sharks, prevails...Children thrown into the sea at Sagar have not been generally rescued...but the sacrifice has been effected with circ.u.mstances of peculiar atrocity in some instances. This practice is not sanctioned by the Hindoo law, nor countenanced by the religious orders." It was accordingly declared to be murder, punishable with death. At each pilgrim gathering sepoys were stationed to check the priests and the police, greedy of bribes, and to prevent fanatical suicides as well as superst.i.tious murders.

The practice of infanticide was really based on the recommendation of Sati, literally the "method of purity" which the Hindoo shastras require when they recommend the bereaved wife to burn with her husband.

Surely, reasoned the Rajpoots, we may destroy a daughter by abortion, starvation, suffocation, strangulation, or neglect, of whose marriage in the line of caste and dignity of family there is little prospect, if a widow may be burned to preserve her chast.i.ty!

In answer to Carey's third memorial Lord Wellesley took the first step, on 5th February 1805, in the history of British India, two centuries after Queen Elizabeth had given the Company its mercantile charter, and half a century after Pla.s.sey had given it political power, to protect from murder the widows who had been burned alive, at least since the time of Alexander the Great. This was the first step in the history of British but not of Mohammedan India, for our predecessors had by decree forbidden and in practice discouraged the crime. Lord Wellesley's colleagues were still the good Udny, the great soldier Lord Lake and Sir George Barlow. The magistrate of Bihar had on his own authority prevented a child-widow of twelve, when drugged by the Brahmans, from being burned alive, after which, he wrote, "the girl and her friends were extremely grateful for my interposition." Taking advantage of this case, the Government asked the appellate judges, all Company's servants, to "ascertain how far the practice is founded on the religious opinions of the Hindoos. If not founded on any precept of their law, the Governor-General in Council hopes that the custom may gradually, if not immediately, be altogether abolished. If, however, the entire abolition should appear to the Court to be impracticable in itself, or inexpedient, as offending any established religious opinion of the Hindoos," the Court were desired to consider the best means of preventing the abuses, such as the use of drugs and the sacrifice of those of immature age. But the preamble of this reference to the judges declared it to be one of the fundamental principles of the British Government to consult the religious opinions of the natives, "consistently with the principles of morality, reason, and humanity."

There spoke Carey and Udny, and Wellesley himself. But for another quarter of a century the funeral pyres were to blaze with the living also, because that caveat was set aside, that fundamental maxim of the const.i.tution of much more than the British Government--of the conscience of humanity, was carefully buried up. The judges asked the pundits whether the woman is "enjoined" by the shaster voluntarily to burn herself with the body of her husband. They replied "every woman of the four castes is permitted to burn herself," except in certain cases enumerated, and they quoted Manoo, who is against the custom in so far as he says that a virtuous wife ascends to heaven if she devotes herself to pious austerities after the decease of her lord.

This opinion would have been sufficient to give the requisite native excuse to Government for the abolition, but the Nizamat Adawlat judges urged the "principle" of "manifesting every possible indulgence to the religious opinions and prejudices of the natives," ignoring morality, reason, and humanity alike. Lord Wellesley's long and brilliant administration of eight years was virtually at an end: in seven days he was to embark for home. The man who had preserved the infants from the sharks of Sagar had to leave the widows and their children to be saved by the civilians Carey and he had personally trained, Metcalfe and Bayley, who by 1829 had risen to Council and become colleagues of Lord W. Bentinck. But Lord Wellesley did this much, he declined to notice the so-called "prohibitory regulations" recommended by the civilian judges. These, when adopted in the year 1812, made the British Government responsible by legislation for every murder thereafter, and greatly increased the number of murders. From that date the Government of India decided "to allow the practice," as recognised and encouraged by the Hindoo religion, except in cases of compulsion, drugging, widows under sixteen, and proved pregnancy. The police--natives--were to be present, and to report every case. At the very time the British Parliament were again refusing in the charter discussions of 1813 for another twenty years to tolerate Christianity in its Eastern dependency, the Indian legislature legalised the burning and burying alive of widows, who numbered at least 6000 in nine only of the next sixteen years, from 1815 to 1823 inclusive.

From Pla.s.sey in 1757 to 1829, three quarters of a century, Christian England was responsible, at first indirectly and then most directly, for the known immolation of at least 70,000 Hindoo widows. Carey was the first to move the authorities; Udny and Wellesley were the first to begin action against an atrocity so long continued and so atrocious.

While the Governor-Generals and their colleagues pa.s.sed away, Carey and his a.s.sociates did not cease to agitate in India and to stir up Wilberforce and the evangelicals in England, till the victory was gained. The very first number of the Friend of India published their essay on the burning of widows, which was thereafter quoted on both sides of the conflict, as "a powerful and convincing statement of the real facts and circ.u.mstances of the case," in Parliament and elsewhere.