________________
THE MEMOIRS OF A CAT
have learned the lesson of spiritual freedom taught by the Brahmins. In consequence, they have made a virtue out of their slavery. The Brahmins performed their God-given mission effectively; but their success created social conditions which transformed India into the "White Man's Burden", brought her under the "civilising mission" of the Western merchants.
Hinduism is the ideology of social slavery. Every religion is an instrument for keeping the masses in spiritual darkness, so that they may be more amenable to the rule of the upper classes; so that they obey authority willingly and unquestioningly; so that they accept the inequities of life as ordained by divine justice; so that they remain resigned to the miseries of life as the result of their own sins in previous births and necessary for the purification of their souls; so that they barter away intellectual freedom for the bliss of ignorance; so that they sleep happily in the lulling embrace of faith, undisturbed by the curiosity to know.
In earlier periods of social evolution, when human spirit generally remains on a low level, religion is a social necessity. In those days of spiritual minority, man can think only in terms of religion-explain the phenomena of nature through the assumption of super-natural agencies. But just as the religious mode of thought marks a stage in the process of human development, just
67
