Practices which an educated Hindu would have been at pains to explain away, if he had not frankly repudiated them thirty years ago, now find zealous apologists. Polytheism is not merely extolled as the poetic expression of eternal verities, but the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon are being invested with fresh sanctity. The Brahmo Saniaj is still a great influence for good, but it appears to be gradually losing vitality, and though its literary output is still considerable, its membership is shrinking. The Prarthana Samaj is moribund. The fashion of the day is for religious "revivals," in which the worship of Kali, the sanguinary goddess of destruction, or the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the Mahratta chieftain who humbled in his day the pride of the alien conquerors of Hindustan, plays an appropriately conspicuous part. The Arya-Samaj, which is spreading all over the Punjab and in the United Provinces, represents in one of its aspects a revolt against Hindu orthodoxy, but in another it represents equally a revolt against Western ideals, for in the teachings of its founder, Dayanand, it has found an aggressive gospel which bases the claims of Aryan, _i.e._, Hindu, supremacy on the Vedas as the one ultimate source of human and Divine wisdom. The exalted character of Vedantic philosophy has been as widely recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been developed along different and often conflicting lines of thought to suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya-Samaj has not been content to assert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to proclaim the immanent superiority of Aryan civilization--it repudiates the term Hindu as savouring of an alien origin--over Western civilization, it claims to have discovered in the Vedas the germs of all the discoveries of modern science, even to wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes.
Just as the political agitation in India has derived invaluable encouragement from a handful of British members of Parliament and other sympathizers in Europe and America, so this Hindu revival has been largely stimulated and to some extent prompted by Europeans and Americans. Not only the writings of English and German scholars, like Max Müller and Deutsch, helped enormously to revive the interest of educated Hindus in their ancient literature and earlier forms of religion, but it was in the polemical tracts of European writers that the first protagonists of Hindu reaction against Christian influences found their readiest weapons of attack. The campaign was started in 1887 by the Hindu Tract Society of Madras, which set itself first to inflame popular fanaticism against the missionaries, who, especially in the south of India, had been the pioneers of Western education. Bradlaugh's text-books and the pamphlets of many lesser writers belonging to the same school of thought were eagerly translated into the vernacular, and those that achieved the greatest popularity were books like "The Evil of Continence," in which not only Christian theology, but Christian morality was held up to scorn and ridicule. The advent of the theosophists, heralded by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, gave a fresh impetus to the revival, and certainly no Hindu has done so much to organize and consolidate the movement as Mrs. Annie Besant, who, in her Central Hindu College at Benares and her Theosophical Institution at Adyar, near Madras, has openly proclaimed her faith in the superiority of the whole Hindu system to the vaunted civilization of the West. Is it surprising that Hindus should turn their backs upon our civilization[2] when a European of highly-trained intellectual power and with an extraordinary gift of eloquence comes and tells them that it is they who possess and have from all times possessed the key to supreme wisdom; that their gods, their philosophy, their morality are on a higher plane of thought than the West has ever reached? Is it surprising that with such encouragement Hinduism should no longer remain on the defensive, but, discarding in this respect all its own traditions as a non-proselytizing creed, should send out missionaries to preach the message of Hindu enlightenment to those still groping in the darkness of the West? The mission of Swami Vivekananda to the Chicago Congress of Religions is in itself one of the most striking incidents in the history of Hindu revivalism, but it is perhaps less wonderful than the triumph he achieved when he returned to India accompanied by a chosen band of eager disciples from the West.