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India the Land of Religions
1824 that "caste divisions are as destructive of national
union as of social enjoyment." The late Svāmī Vive-
kānanda, the brilliant representative of Hinduism at
the "Parliament of Religions," held in Chicago in con-
nection with the Universal Exposition in 1893, passed
the last years of his too short life (he died in 1902)
in a suburb of Calcutta, doing philanthropic work,
denouncing caste and the outcasting of those who
had crossed the ocean, and recommending the Hindus
to take to the eating of meat. The voices of other
reformers are lifting. Especially the two great native
religious reform associations, the Brāhma Samāj, or
Theistic Association of Bengal, and the Arya Samaj,
or Vedic Association of the United Provinces and
the Panjab, different as are their aims in other re-
spects, are marshalled on the side of opposition to
caste, as an anachronism, anomaly, and bar to social
and national progress.
The dreadful institution of Suttee, or widow-burn-
ing abolished in 1829, under the administration of
Lord William Bentinck, by decree of government;
the car of Juggernaut; the sect of the Thugs; and
the practice of self-hypnosis to the point of prolonged
trance or apparent death, are evidences of the frenzy-
ing quality of Hindu religion, and the way it has
of overshadowing individual sanity and public in-
terest. There has been, and there still is, too much