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406
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[OCTOBER, 1902.
wife in language which shows that he had some conception of a higher and nobler type of womanhood, but these cannot alter the fact that, like the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen, he regarded women As essentially weak and unreliable, and believed that their influence is uniformly on the side of evil. It is not strange that he adopted this standpoint. In India women are the most determined enemies of reform, and Vêmana must often have found his influence weakened and his efforts baffled by their innate conservatism and blind acquiescence in the traditional opinions and customs.
Vamana aimed at releasing the people from the bondage of blind traditionalism and enable them to realise the supreme importance of truth and purity and of duty to God and man. He shared the opinion of the Buddhist mendicant in the Mrichchukátika, the earliest Sanskrit drama, where he says:
Cast the five senses all away,
That triumph o'er the virtuous will ; The pride of self-importance slay
And ignorance remorselens kill: So shall you safe the body guard, And Heaven shall be your last reward, Why shave the head and mow the chin
While bristling follies choke the breast ? Apply the knife to parts within,
And heed not how deformed the rest ; The heart of pride and passion weed,
And then the man is pure indeed, He was a stern iconoclast and maintained that God dwells not in buildings made by human hands. He pours out his bitterest scorn on idolatry and scrupulously kept himself aloof from sacred services. He denounced asceticism with a vigour and earnestness, the like of which was not heard from the pulpit of Mainwaring to the judgment seat of Bradshaw. "Those who torture the body and call themselves saints can never cleanse the foulness of the heart. Does a snake die when you best the ant-hill in which it hides P'
Mr. Campbell seems to think that Vêmana shared the opinion maintained by Herbert Spencer in his First Principles when he says, "An unbiased consideration of its general aspects forces us to conclude that religion, everywhere present as a weft running through the warp of human history, expresses some eternal fact, while it is almost a truism to say of science that it is an organized mass of facts, ever growing and ever being more completely purified from errors.' Mr. Campbell bases his inference on the following verge of Vemana: "He who takes all forms, who is eternal, who is Himself witness of all that is in every heart, who is in all things the unchangeable, free from all taint, - He is called Brahma," Be this is as it may, Vêmana has not spared even Brahma in his strong satire, as he says, “He (Brahma) gives wealth to one, the utility to another, the heart (to spend) to a third and would spoil the whole thing. Let Brahma's wife be widowed."
There seems to be hardly any Touchstonian intelligence in the poet at all. He seems to be best known for his wholesale condemnation of anything and everything terrestrial and even celestial. I have my own misgivings if he ever sincerely believed in an absolute Reality behind appearances, though he somewhere says that that Reality is unknowable and unknown.
• విత్త మొకనికిచ్చి వితరణనొకనికిచ్చి చిత్త మొకనికిచ్చి చెరచుగాక
బ్రహ్మయాలితాడు బండి రేవున తెగను విశ్వధాభిరామ వినుర వేమ,
