Again, the idea of public questions, the idea of the common welfare, has come into being with the nineteenth century, and is quietly repudiating caste and giving to the community a solidarity and a feeling of solidarity unknown hitherto.  Upon one platform now meet, as a matter of course, the native gentlemen of all the castes, when any general grievance is felt or any great occasion falls to be celebrated.  The Western custom of public meetings for the discussion of public questions is now an established Indian institution, and daily gives the lie to the idea that there is pollution in bodily contact with a person of lower caste.  That a special seat should be reserved for a man because he is a brahman would be scouted.  The convenience of travelling by rail or in tram-cars has been even more widely effective in dissolving the idea.  And if the advantage or convenience of the new ways can overcome the force of custom, so can the unprofitableness of the old.  For illustrations, I pass from the gentlemen who attend public meetings where the speeches are in English, to the less educated and more superstitious and more blindly conservative people.  In the Mahratta districts of the Central Provinces, says the Census Report for 1901, in recent years an unavoidable scepticism as to his efficiency has tended to reduce the earnings of the Garpagari or averter of hail from the crops.  In Calcutta the same influence has extinguished the trade of supplier of Ganges water.  The water taps in the house or on the street are too convenient, and the quality of the water is too manifestly superior for the desecration from the iron pipes to outweigh the advantages.  A few years ago, in Darjeeling, north of Bengal, the brahman names upon the signs of the liquor shops were distinctly in the majority.  The sacerdotal caste, new style, had appreciated the chances of big profits and shut their eyes to the regulations of caste, which have relegated drink-sellers to a very low place in the scale.  Brahmans are even said to figure among the contractors who supply beef, flesh of the sacred animal, to the British army in India.  “A curious sign of the changing time,” says Mr. Lockwood Kipling (Beast and Man in India), “is the fact that Hindus of good caste, seeing the profit that may be made from leather, are quietly creeping into a business from which they are levitically barred.  Money prevails against caste more potently than missionary preaching.”

In this region, where convenience or comfort or personal advancement are concerned, it may safely be asserted that the so-called Indian conservatism has not much resisting power.  There, at least, it is found that where there is a will there is a way.[7]

[Sidenote:  The Indian mind awakened.]