Page:The Imperial Gazetteer of India - Volume 2 (2nd edition).pdf/297

 BENGAL.

287

SenteJice continued front p. 284.]

an idiot on the top of a mountain to obtain a favourable decision in a Privy Council Appeal. A large section of the people belongs to the august Aryan race, from which we ourselves descend. Its classical language, Sanskrit,

is

We

Highlanders.

as near to our

own

as that of the

Welsh or Scottish

address the Deity and his earthly representatives,

common

our father and mother, by words derived from roots

and Hindu.

Christian

Nor does

the

religious

instinct

to the

assume a

wider variety of manifestations, or exhibit a more striking series of metamorphoses, among the European than among the Indian branches

Theodore Parker and Comte are more read by the Hindus, known as ‘Young Bengal,’ than any Sanskrit

of the race.

advanced theologian.

up

On

the

same bench of a Calcutta

college

sit

youths trained

in the strictest theism, others indoctrinated in the mysteries of the

Hindu

trinity

and pantheon, with representatives of every

chain of superstition

—-from

the

whom

the family god, to the cruel rites of Kali, to

was offered

in

Hugh

District, twenty-five miles

indeterminate meaning.

The Census

officers

a

human

victim

from Calcutta, as

Indeed, the very word Hindu

as the famine of 1866.

link in the

harmless offering of flowers before

is

employ

lately

one of absolutely

it

as a convenient

generic term to include 45^ millions of the population of Bengal, comprising elements of transparently distinct ethnical origin, separated from

each other by language, customs, and religious

rites.

But Hinduism, understood even in this wide sense, represents only one of many creeds and races found within Bengal. The other great historical cultus, which, during the last twelve centuries, did for the

among the European whole population of Bengal. The Muhammadans amount to nearly 22 millions; and the LieutenantGovernor of Bengal is, so far as numbers go, as great a Musalman power as the Sultan of Turkey himself. The remaining 2 millions

Semitic peoples what Christianity accomplished

Aryans, has

won

to itself one-third of the

of the population are

composed

chiefly of half savage tribes professing

aboriginal religions, but include 128,000 converts to Christianity.

Amid

the stupendous catastrophes of river inundations, famines, tidal

waves, and cyclones of the Lower Provinces of Bengal, the religious

works with a vitality unknown in European countries, where the forces of Nature have long yielded to the control of man. Until the British Government stepped in with its police, and canals, and railroads, between the people and what they were accustomed

instinct

to consider as the dealings of Providence, scarcely a year passed with-

some terrible manifestation of the power and the wrath of God. Maratha invasions from Central India, piratical devastations on the seaboard, banditti who marched about the interior in bodies of 50,000 men, floods which drowned the harvests of many Districts, and droughts out