ALEXANDER the Great discovered India. That happened three hundred years before the birth of Christ.But Alexander did not get very far beyond the Indus River, and although he crossed the Punjab, the home of the Sikhs, he never penetrated the heart of the country of the true Hindus who lived then as they do now in the wide valley of the Ganges, situated between the Himalayas in the north and the plateau of Deccan in the south.Eighteen centuries had to go by before the people of Europe got their first reliable information about this wonder-land of Marco Polo.That happened when the Portuguese Vasco da Gama reached Goa on the coast of Malabar.

Once the sea route from Europe to the land of the spices and the elephants and the golden temples had been established, information poured in upon the geographers at such a vast rate that the map-makers of Amsterdam were kept working overtime. Since then every nook and corner of the teeming peninsula has been thoroughly explored.This is the lay of the land in as few words as possible.

In the north-west India is cut off from the rest of the world by the Khirdar Mountains and the Suliman range which run from the Arabian Sea as far as the Hindu Kush. In the north the barrier consists of the Himalayas which run in a semi-circle all the way from Hindu Kush to the Gulf of Bengal.

Please remember that everything connected with India is on a scale which dwarfs the geographical proportions of Europe and makes them look almost ridiculous. In the first place, India itself is as large as all of Europe outside of Russia.The Himalayas, if they were a European mountain-range, would run from Calais to the Black Sea.The Himalayas have forty peaks which are higher than the highest mountain of Europe.Their glaciers are on the average four times as long as the glaciers of the Alps.

India is one of the hottest countries on earth and at the same time in several parts it has the records for the world's annual rainfall(1270cm. per annum).It has a population of over 350,000,000 people who speak 150 different languages and dialects.Nine-tenths of them still depend for their livelihood upon their own crops and when the annual rainfall is insufficient, they die of starvation at a rate of 2,000,000 per year.(I am giving you the figures for the decade between 1890 and 1900)But now that the English have stamped out the plague, have made an end to inter-racial warfare, have built vast irrigation works and have introduced the first rudiments of hygiene(paid for of course by the Indians themselves)they are increasing at such a rate that soon they will be just as badly off as they were in the days when pestilence and hunger and the death-rate of their babies kept the ghats of Benares working twenty-four hours each day.

The big rivers of India run parallel with the mountain-ranges. In the west it is the Indus which runs first of all through the Punjab and then breaks through the mountains of the north, where it provided the prospective conquerors from northern Asia with a convenient passage-way to the heart of Hindustan.As for the Ganges, the holy river of the Hindus, it follows a course which runs almost due west.Before it reaches the Gulf of Bengal, the Ganges is joined by the Brahmaputra which also takes its origin among the peaks of the Himalayas and which runs due east until it is forced to make a detour by the Khasi Hills, changes its course from east to west and shortly afterwards joins the Ganges.

The valleys of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra are the most densely populated part of all India. On the western banks of the moist and marshy delta of these two enormous rivers lies the city of Calcutta, the chief manufacturing center of India.

As for the products of the Ganges valley, more commonly known as Hindustan, or the land of the true Hindus, they are numerous and would probably be profitable if that whole part of the world did not suffer so hopelessly from chronic over-population. In the first place, there is rice.The people of India and Japan and Java eat rice because rice yields more food per square mile(and per square foot and per square inch)than any other plant that has thus far been domesticated.

The cultivation of rice is both difficult and messy. That is not a pleasant word, but it happens to be the only word that will adequately describe a procedure which forces hundreds of millions of men and women to spend the greater part of their time wading through mud and liquid manure.For the rice is originally sown in mud.When the little plants are about nine inches high they are dug out by hand and transplanted into flooded fields which must remain under water until it is time for the harvest, when the disgusting pap is allowed to run away by means of a highly complicated system of drainage ditches until it finally reaches the Ganges.At the point the Ganges provides both bathing and drinking water for the pious who have gathered together in Benares, the Rome of the Hindus and probably the oldest city in the world.By this time that putrid liquid has acquired such a degree of holiness that it can whiten sins which no other form of ablution could possibly hope to cleanse.

Another product of the Ganges valley is jute, a vegetable fibre which was first sent to Europe a century and a half ago to be used as a substitute for cotton and flax. Jute is the innerbark of a plant which needs almost as much moisture as rice.The bark itself has to be soaked in water for weeks before the fibre can be extracted and sent to the Calcutta factories to be changed into ropes and jute bags and a coarse sort of clothing which the natives wear.

Then there is the indigo plant from which we used to get our blue color until the recent discovery that it could be extracted much more economically from coal-tar.

Finally there is opium, which was originally grown to deaden the pain of that rheumatism discovery that it could be extracted much more economically from coal-tar.

Finally there is opium, which was originally grown to deaden the pain of that rheumatism which was inevitable in a country where the greater part of the population spent so much of its time slushing knee-deep through mud, cultivating its meagre daily portion of rice.

Outside of the valley on the slopes of the hills, tea plantations have taken the place of the old forests. For the shrub which produces these tiny but valuable leaves needs a great deal of hot moisture and therefore grows best on mountain slopes where the water does not hurt the tender roots.

Southward of the Ganges valley lies the triangular plateau of Deccan which has three different types of vegetation. The northern mountains and those of the west are the center for the trade in teakwood, a very durable sort of timber which does not warp or shrink and which does not corrode iron.It used to be in great demand for ship-building purposes until the introduction of the iron steamer, but is still used for a number of purposes.The interior of Deccan, which has very little rain and is another dreaded hunger spot, raises cotton and a very little wheat.

As for the coastal regions, Malabar on the west and Coromandel on the east, they enjoy enough rain to support a large population providing them amply with rice and millet, a sort of grain which we import for chicken feed but which the natives of India eat instead of bread.

The Deccan is the only part of India where coal and iron and gold are found, but these deposits have never yet been seriously exploited, for the rivers of Deccan have too many rapids to.

The island of Ceylon, east of Cape Comorin, is really a part of the Indian peninsula. The Palk Strait which separates it from Deccan is so filled with reefs that it must be dredged continually in order to be kept navigable.The reefs and sandbanks which form a sort of natural bridge between Ceylon and the mainland are called Adam's Bridge, because Adam and Eve escaped that way from Paradise after they had incurred the wrath of God by their disobedience.For according to the people of this part of the world, Ceylon was the original Paradise.It still is a Paradise compared to the rest of India.Not only on account of the climate and its fertility and the abundance(but not superabundance)of rain and its moderate temperature, but because it has escaped one of the worst evils of India.By remaining faithful to Buddhism, which the Indians rejected as being of such sublime spiritual value as to be entirely beyond the grasp of the average man, it has escaped the rigors of the caste system which until very recently was an inseparable part of the Hindu religion.

Geography and religion are much more closely connected than we usually suppose. In India, where everything is done on a superlative scale, religion has since thousand of years dominated Man's mind so completely and absolutely that it has become an integral part of everything the Hindu says and thinks and does and eats and drinks or carefully avoids to say or do or eat or drink.

In other countries, too, religion has often interfered with the normal development of life. The Chinese, with their veneration for the departed ancestors, bury grandpa and grandma on the southern slopes of their mountains.That leaves them only the cold and wind-swept northern slopes open for the cultivation of their daily bread.As a result of this otherwise highly laudable affection for the departed relatives, their own children starve to death or are sold into slavery.Indeed almost every race(we ourselves included)is handicapped by strange taboos or mysterious ancient laws of divine origin which quite frequently interfere with the progress of the whole nation.

In order to understand how religion has affected the Hindu country, we must go back to almost prehistoric times, to at least thirty centuries before the first of the Greeks had reached the shores of the Aegean Sea.

At that time the Indian peninsula was inhabited by a race of dark-skinned people, the Dravidians, who were probably the original inhabitants of the Deccan. The Aryan stock(the same stock from which we ourselves have sprung)divided itself into two groups and left its ancient home in central Asia in search of more agreeable climes.One part moved westward and settled down in Europe, afterwards crossing the ocean and taking possession of northern America.The other trekked southwards through the mountain passes between the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas and took possession of the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges and the Brahmaputra and from there penetrated into the plateau of Deccan. By following the coastal region between the western Ghats and the Arabian Sea they finally reached southern India and Ceylon.

The newcomers, being infinitely better armed than the natives, treated the latter as the stronger races have always treated the weaker ones. They spoke derisively of them as the Black Men, took their rice fields away from them, stole their women whenever their own supply ran out(the trip across the Khyber Pass was too difficult to let them bring many women all the way from central Asia, killed them whenever they showed the least signs of rebellion, and forced the survivors to retire to the most undesirable parts of the peninsula where they could live or starve as they wanted.But there were by far more Dravidians than Aryans and as a result there was a constant menace that the lower form of civilization would influence the higher one.The only way by which this could be prevented was by keeping the Black Man strictly in his place.

Now the Aryans, like all the people of our race, have always had a tendency towards dividing society into a number of sharply differentiated social layers or castes. The idea of“caste”is known all over the world and it exists in America even in this year of enlightenment.It runs all the way from our discrimination against the Jews, based upon our unwritten code of social prejudice, to the formal laws of certain southern states which force Negroes to ride in Jim Crow cars.New York is a proverbially broad-minded city but I would not for the life of me know where to take a dark-skinned friend(Negro or Hindu or even Javanese)for dinner, and our trains pay homage to our feeling of caste by providing us with Pullman cars and day-coaches.I don't know much about the caste system of the Negroes in Harlem, but I have seen enough of the mortification of German-Jewish families when their daughters married men of Polish-Jewish descent to realize how wide-spread this feeling of“being something different from the common run of humanity”is in all of us.

But with us the caste system has never developed into a hard and fast rule of social and economic behavior. The doors leading from one class to another are supposed to be kept carefully closed but we all know that those who can push hard enough or who have a little golden key or who are merely able to make enough noise banging the windows outside will sooner or later be admitted.The conquering Aryans of the Indies, on the other hand, had the doors leading from one class to another filled up with masonry;and from that moment on each group of society was locked up in its own little compartment and it has been forced to stay there ever since.

Now a system like that is never an accident. People don't just suddenly invent it to please themselves or to be nasty to their neighbors.In India it was the result of fear.The priests and the warriors and the farmers and the day-laborers, the original classes of the Aryan conquerors, were of course hopelessly outnumbered by the Dravidians whose country they had just taken away.They were bound to take some desperate measure by which to keep the black man in“his proper place”.But when they had done this, they went one step further, a step which no other race has ever quite dared to take.They gave their artificial“caste”system a religious twist and decreed that Brahmanism was to be the exclusive possession of the three upper classes, leaving their humbler brethren to shift for themselves outside the true spiritual pale.And thereupon, in order to keep themselves free from the defiling touch of all people of humbler birth, each individual caste surrounded itself by such a complicated barrier of ritual ceremonies and saupon, in order to keep themselves free from the defiling touch of all people of humbler birth, each individual caste surrounded itself by such a complicated barrier of ritual ceremonies and sacred usages that finally no one but a native was able to find his way in that maze of meaningless“verbotens”.

If you want to know how such a system would work out in practical every-day life, try to imagine what would have happened to our own civilization if nobody during the last three thousand years had been allowed to proceed beyond the status of his father, grandfather or great-grandfather. What would have be come of the personal initiative of the individual?

There are signs all around that India is on the eve of a great social and spiritual awakening, but until very recently such a change was deliberately held back by those who dominated all classes of Indian society, by the Brahmans, the hereditary members of the highest of all castes, that of the priests. The faith of which they were the undisputed leaders was known by the rather vague name of Brahmanism.Brahma, around whose personality this religion was built up, might be called the Zeus or Jupiter of the Hindu Olympus, the divine essence enhancing all creation, the beginning and end of all things.But Brahma, as a mere all-embodying idea, was much too vague, too unsubstantial for the average person, and therefore, while he continued to be worshipped in a general way as a venerable old gentleman who had done his duty when he created this world, the actual management of our planet was thought to have been surrendered to certain of Brahma's deputies, a number of Gods and Devils of not quite such excellent social standing as.

That opened the door wide for the introduction of all sorts of strange, supernatural creatures, like Siva and Vishnu and a whole army of spirits and spooks and ghouls. They introduced the fear element into Brahmanism.People no longer tried to be good because being good was in itself something after which Man should strive but because it was the only way in which he could hope to escape the wrath of all the evil ogres.

Buddha, the great reformer who was born six centuries before Christ and who knew what a noble thing Brahmanism in its purer form could be, tried to make the prevailing creed of his day the spiritual power it had been once upon a time. But although at first he was victorious, his ideas proved too unpractical, too noble, too elevated for the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen.As soon as the first enthusiasm had died down, the old Brahmans returned in full force.It is only during the last fifty years that the leaders of India have come to realize that a religion based(as far as the man in the street is concerned)almost completely upon ritual and empty ceremonial acts of devotion must eventually perish as a hollow tree must perish when it no longer is able to extract its nourishment from the living earth.And Hinduism is no longer that dead and hideous spiritual affliction which it may have been a few generations ago.The doors and windows of the old temples are being opened up wide.The younger men and women of India are conscious of the disaster that might have destroyed them if, divided against themselves, they had been unable to offer a united front against the foreign master.Strange things are happening along the banks of the Ganges.When strange things happen among 350,000,000 people, they are apt to form a new chapter in the history of the world.

India, although it has several large towns, is still essentially a country of villages, for 71% of the people continue to live in the country. The rest are spread among the cities of which you should at least know the names.There is Calcutta, at the mouth of the Ganges and Brahmaputra.It began as an insignificant fishing village, but during the eighteenth century it became the center for Clive's operations against the French and developed into the leading harbor of all India.It lost a great deal of its former importance when the Suez Canal was opened, because steamers found it more convenient to go directly to Bombay or to Karachi than to Calcutta when they happened to have a cargo for the Indus region or the Punjab.Bombay on its little island is also a creation of the East India Company, which intended to use it as a naval base and a harbor of export for the Deccan cotton trade.It was so eminently suited for this purpose that it attracted settlers from all over Asia and became the home of the last remaining group of followers of the Persian prophet, Zoroaster.These Parsees belong to the richest and most intelligent group of natives.Their worship of fire as something holy which must not be defiled, makes it impossible for them to burn their dead.

On the eastern shores of the Deccan peninsula lies Madras, the main port of the coast of Coromandel. The French city of Pondicherry, a little towards the south, is a reminder of the days when the French were the most serious rivals of the English and when Dupleix and Clive fought for the possession of the whole of India, in that war that led up to the ghastly incident of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

But most of the important cities are naturally situated in the valley of the Ganges. In the west there is first of all Delhi, the old residence of the Mogul emperors who had chosen this city because it commanded the entrance gate from central Asia into the valley of the Ganges so thoroughly that he who was master of Delhi was also master of all India.Further down the river lies Allahabad, a holy city of the Mohammedans, as the name implies.In this same neighborhood lie Lucknow and Cawnpore, well known for their connection with the great mutiny of 1857.

Further towards the south is Agra, the residence of four members of the Mogul dynasty one of whom erected the Taj-Mahalin memory of a woman whom he had greatly loved.

Then further down the river we reach Benares, the Rome and Mecca of all good Hindus who not only come here to bathe in the holy waters of the river but also to die that they may be burned in one of the ghats on its shores and their ashes strewn upon the river of their desire.

But I had better stop right here. Whenever you touch upon a subject of India, whether you approach it as an historian, a chemist, a geographer, an engineer or a mere traveller, you find yourself right in the heart of profound moral and spiritual problems.And we people of the west should proceed carefully when we enter into this labyrinth in which we are both strangers and newcomers.

Two thousand years before the learned councils of holy men in Nicea and Constantinople tried to formulate the creed which afterwards was to conquer the western world, the ancestors of these people about whom I am writing in so familiar a fashion had already settled obscure points of doctrine and faith which to this very day disturb the minds of my own neighbors and will probably continue to disturb them for another dozen centuries or so. It is easy, far too easy, to condemn things that are strange to us.Most of what I know about India is strange to me and gives me a feeling of discomfort, a bewildered sense of uneasy irritation.

But then I remember that I used to feel the same way towards my grandfather and grandmother.

And now at last I am beginning to realize that they were right. Or at least, that, if they were not always entirely right, neither were they always as absolutely wrong as I used to think them to be.It was a hard lesson.But it tended to teach me a little humility.And Heaven knows, I needed it!