ine, which
they visit at intervals and daub with red paint. They deposit flowers,
pour libations of water or milk, and in other ways strive to shew that
a religious impulse is stirring within them. So far as I have
observed, however, the vast mass of the poor toilers in India have
little or no religion. Material wants are too pressing. They may have
some dumb, vague aspirations after a higher and a holier life, but the
fight for necessaries, for food, raiment, and shelter, is too
incessant for them to indulge much in contemplation. They have a dim
idea of a future life, but none of them can give you anything but a
very unsatisfactory idea of their religion. They observe certain forms
and ceremonies, because their fathers did, and because the Brahmins
tell them. Of real, vital, practical religion, as we know it, they
have little or no knowledge. Ask any common labourer or one of the low
castes about immortality, about salvation, about the higher virtues,
about the yearnings and wishes that every immortal soul at periods
has, and he will simply tell you 'Khoda jane, hum greel admi,' i.e.
'God knows; I am only a poor man!' There they take refuge always when
you ask them anything puzzling. If you are rating them for a fault,
asking them to perform a complicated task, or inquiring your way in a
strange neighbourhood, the first answer you get will, ten to one, be
'Hum greel admi.' It is said almost instinctively, and no doubt in
many cases is the refuge of simple disinclination to think the matter
out. Pure laziness suggests it. It is too much trouble to frame an
answer, or give the desired information, and the 'greel admi' comes
naturally to the lip. It is often deprecatory, meaning 'I am ignorant
and uninformed,' you must not expect too 'much from a poor, rude,
uncultivated man like me.' It is often, also, a delicate mode of
flattery, which is truly oriental, implying, and often conveying in a
tone, a look, a gesture, that though the speaker is 'greel,' poor,
humble, despised, it is only by contrast to you, the questioner, who
are mighty, exalted, and powerful. For downright fawning
obsequiousness, or delicate, implied, fine-strung, subtle flattery, I
will back a Hindoo sycophant against the courtier or place-hunter of
every other nation. It is very annoying at times, if you are in a
hurry, and particularly want a direct answer to a plain question, to
hear the old old story, 'I am a poor man,' but there is nothing for it
bu