India has been extolled as a land where there is no profanity. This is true and she should have the credit for this abstinence. And one never feels like giving her this credit more than when he returns from that country to this and is compelled to endure the coarse profanity which pervades our streets as a terrible stench.
Yet one can hardly see how the Hindu could find interest in, and a strong grip upon, profanity, so long as the gods of his pantheon have so little of his respect and enter so rarely into the serious compacts of his life. Moreover it should not be forgotten that obscenity fulfills in India the function of profanity in the West. The bursts of passion which find expression here through taking the name of God in vain gain utterance there in language unspeakably bad of the other kind. And this is only a part of the larger subject of the prevalence of social immorality in India—an evil which is largely fostered under the protection of the religion of the land. When Lord Dalhousie, the Viceroy of India, was considering an act for the suppression of obscenity in the country, he was compelled by Hindu sentiment to exempt all temples and religious emblems from the operation of the act! What better commentary could one desire upon the source and prevalence of this vice in that land? When such an evil is intrenched behind the religion of the people and is symbolized and fostered by its emblems and ceremonies—when _tasies_, or women dedicated to the Hindu gods and temple worship (there are 12,000 of these in South India alone), constitute the public characters of the land—then the hope for the purification of life is at the lowest ebb.
It is also very rare that one finds a Hindu whose convictions and loyalty to certain beliefs are such that he is willing to suffer in their behalf. That masculine vigour and manly persistence under difficulty in maintaining what he believes to be right and true is not germane to the Hindu character.
On the other hand, the Hindu is strong in the so-called passive virtues. In harmony with his religious beliefs, patience and meekness and endurance of evil have become second nature to him. This side of his character has, indeed, received undue emphasis during the many centuries of his history. He cannot understand the rush and impatience, the push and aggressiveness of the Westerner any more than he of the West can understand the Hindu’s cool, quiet, patient, bearing under most trying and adverse circumstances. He has a large lesson to teach us in the art of self-control and in the ability to endure with complacency evils which cannot be remedied.