THE “HINDUS IN THE WEST INDIES. 
By ARCHDEACON JOSA. 
When Christopher Columbus was searching for India and when he 
saw the Carib Indians, who dwelt in the lands he discovered, he believed 
that he had found the western parts of India. He had no idea that such 
large continents were in existence as North and South America. So 
impressed was he with what he believed to be a fact that the Aborigines 
of “The West Indies” were identically the same as the dwellers of 
India proper, that he called the Caribs and other inhabitants of the 
world he discovered, ‘‘ Indians” and the countries ‘‘The Indies,” and 
subsequently the word “‘ West” was added to both words to differentiate 
between the dwellers of India proper and the inhabitants of these lati- 
tudes. Were Christopher Columbus to come to these parts now, he 
would find that in Jamaica there are many persons who migrated from 
India and that in Trinidad and British Guiana, they constitute half the 
population of these countries. These immigrants retain as far as they 
can their religions, customs, and languages, and if immigration continues 
even at the present rate in course of another century, these parts of the 
world will be in very deed India in the West. 
A few notes therefore about these interesting people whose hoary 
religions, legends and customs might prove of interest to the readers 
of “ Timehri” will not be amiss. 
1. Religion.—The Hindu is naturally religious. It is impossible 
for him to be without religion. He travels, in his own country, 
thousands of miles to obtain salvation. He, to obtain freedom from 
his sins, undergoes great austerities. Now what is his notion about 
the Supreme Being? We learn this from his sacred books, which are 
written in Sanskrit. From the most ancient books (the Vedas) we 
gather that the Hindus originally were monotheists—worshippers of one 
God ; from their later books (the Puranas), we find that they gradually 
merged into Pantheism, 7.e., a belief that every object in the universe is God. 
After this we pass on to what might be called the period of fables. 
God is worshipped under human shapes. Mortals extorted from the 
“Supreme Being” immortality by sacrifices and austerities. The chief 
group of these immortalized creatures consists of three Deities, Brahma, 
Vishnu and Siva ; a kind of Trinity, having nothing in common with the 
Christian doctrine of the Blessed Three, except the number. These 
respectively represent the Creating, the Preserving and the Destroying 
Powers. hey are all married and appear also in many other characters 
and have thousands of names and epithets. The modern idol worship 
has increased to such an extent that 33,000,000 of deities have been 
enumerated. These Gods are worshipped by sacrifices and prayers. 
The original idea of the Hindu sacrificial system is to feed the Gods. 
Housewives are very naughty in this respect, for frequently they make 
their sacrificial cakes very tough and exceedingly thin. Prayers are said 
