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India, Old and New by Sir Valentine Chirol

S >> Sir Valentine Chirol >> India, Old and New




In another important direction the first session of the Legislature bore
out Sir Thomas Munro's view, expressed, as we have already seen, a
hundred years ago, that in India as elsewhere liberal treatment will be
found the most effectual way of elevating the character of the people.
Nothing perhaps has tended more to alienate the sympathies of Englishmen
from the political aspirations which the founders of the Indian National
Congress were bent upon promoting than the subordination of social to
political reforms. There remained always some distinguished Indians who
ensued both--notably Mr. Gokhale, who founded the society of "the
Servants of India," dedicated chiefly to social reform, of which the
beneficent activities have expanded steadily throughout a decade of
political turmoil. His mantle fell on no unworthy shoulders, and it is a
good omen that his chief disciple, Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, has become the
leader of the Moderate party in the Council of State, as well as one of
the Indian representatives at the recent Imperial Conference in London.
A similar spirit informs the numerous associations that have addressed
themselves, though with perhaps less success so far, to the more glaring
evils of the Hindu religious social system, such as infant marriage, the
prohibition of re-marriage of widows, the rigidity of caste laws in
regard to inter-caste marriage, and to intercourse between the different
castes even at meals. Many interesting experiments have been made by
Indians for infusing into education a new moral tone and discipline on
Indian lines, and it is due to Indian effort no less than to the
encouragement of Government that female education has begun to bridge
over the intellectual gulf that tended to separate more and more the men
and the women of the Western-educated classes. In Madras, to quote only
one instance, there is to-day a high school for girls--almost
unthinkable two decades ago and only opened ten years ago--in which
high-caste Brahman girls live under the same roof and are taught in the
same class-rooms as not only Hindu girls of the non-Brahman castes, but
Mahomedan and native Christian and Eurasian girls from all parts of the
Presidency, and the only real difficulty now experienced is in the
traditional matter of food, and it is circumvented, if not overcome, by
providing seven different kitchens and seven different messes.

The last attempt on the part of the Government to promote social reforms
by way of legislation was Lord Lansdowne's "Age of Consent" Bill thirty
years ago, and though it was carried through in spite of the violent
opposition of Hindu orthodoxy, which then brought Mr. Tilak into public
life as its leader, an alien Government pledged to complete neutrality
in social and religious matters shrank after that unpleasant experience
from assuming the lead in such matters without having at least the
preponderating bulk of Indian opinion behind it. Not the least
noteworthy event of the first session of the Indian Legislature was the
introduction by Dr. Gour, a Hindu member from the Central Provinces, of
a private Bill legalising civil marriage which British Indian law so far
recognises only between a Christian and a non-Christian, though the
Indian States of Baroda and Indore have legalised them for all their
subjects. Sir Henry Maine wished to move, as far back as 1868, in this
direction when he was Law Member of the Government of India, but to meet
even then a fierce orthodox opposition the provisions of the Bill
finally enacted in 1872 were so whittled down as to make it practically
useless, and it was almost nullified when it came up for interpretation
by the Privy Council. The question does in fact involve many material as
well as social and religious considerations, as matters of personal law
are largely governed by ancient custom in the different communities, and
the point at issue was whether it is possible for a Hindu to cease to be
subject to Hindu law. More recent attempts to make civil marriage lawful
have failed hopelessly. Dr. Gour has had the courage to appeal to the
more liberal spirit for which the new reforms stand, and he defended his
Bill, which is only a permissive Bill, on the grounds that any measure
calculated to break down the ancient barriers between races and creeds
and communities must tend to strengthen the sense of national solidarity
of which the new Indian Legislature is the expression. It remains yet to
be seen what will be the fate of his Bill, but its introduction is in
itself not one of the least hopeful signs of the times.

If one turns from the Government of India to the new Provincial
Governments and Councils the outlook is, on the whole, not less
encouraging. The statutory powers of the Provincial Councils are more
definite and can be brought more directly to bear upon Government, but
they are not likely to be exercised in any extravagant fashion until
time has shown how Indian Ministers discharge their responsibilities to
the Councils and how the two wings of the new Provincial Governments
work together. In fact, the policy, wisely adopted by Provincial
Governors, of treating the two wings of their Government as equally
associated with them in a common task of governance, has robbed the
distinction between "reserved" and "transferred" subjects, if not of all
reality, at any rate of the invidious appearance of discrimination which
might otherwise have attached to the word "dyarchy." As one Provincial
Governor remarked to me, "We are in reality skipping the dyarchy stage."
Indian Ministers, kept fully informed and drawn into consultation on all
subjects, are learning to understand the difficulties of government and
administration of which, as outside critics, they had little notion, and
to value the experience and knowledge which their European colleagues
and subordinates freely place at their disposal, whilst the latter
benefit both from hearing the Indian point of view and from having to
explain and justify their own. Economic depression and financial
stringency cannot, however, but react unfavourably upon the new system
in the Provinces as well as at Delhi, for all the more practical reforms
in which the ordinary Indian elector, whether politically minded or
otherwise, is most closely interested, and for which he has been looking
to the new Provincial Councils, require money, and a great deal of
money. There is a universal demand for more elementary schools, more
road-making, more sanitation, a more strenuous fight against malaria, a
greater extension of local government and village councils' activities,
and the demand cannot be met except by more expenditure. The Indian
Ministers and Indian members of the Provincial Councils have to face
unpopularity whether by postponing much-needed reforms or by imposing
new taxation in order to carry them out. A great many of the best men
have naturally been attracted to Delhi, but though the proceedings in
the Provincial Councils have more frequently betrayed impatience and
inexperience, and sometimes required the monitory intervention of the
Governor, they have played on the whole creditably the important part
allotted to them in this great constitutional experiment.

It is far less easy to appraise the value of the attempt which has been
made at the same time to bring that large part of India which lies
outside the sphere of direct British administration into closer touch
with it by the creation of a Chamber of Princes, which will at least sit
under the same roof with the Council of State and the Legislative
Assembly in the great hall of Parliament to be erected in New Delhi. The
moment when the Government of India is departing from its autocratic
traditions and transferring a large part of its powers throughout
British India into the hands of representative assemblies which are to
pave the way towards the democratic goal of responsible government,
seems scarcely well chosen for the creation of a Chamber which must give
greater cohesion, and potentially greater power to resist the spirit of
the age, to a body of ruling Princes and Chiefs who all stand in varying
degrees for archaic forms of despotic government and whose peoples have
for the most part stood hitherto entirely outside the political life of
British India.

The Native States, as they are commonly called, scattered over nearly
the whole length and breadth of the Indian Empire, cover altogether more
than a third of its total area and include nearly a quarter of its total
population. Some of them can compare in size and wealth with the smaller
States of Europe. Some are but insignificant specks on the map. Great
and small, there are several hundreds of them. Their relations with the
Paramount Power, which have been not inaptly described as those of
subordinate alliance, are governed by treaties and engagements of which
the terms are not altogether uniform. The essence is in all cases the
maintenance of their administrative autonomy under their own dynastic
rulers whose hereditary rights and privileges are permanently guaranteed
to them, subject to their loyalty to the British Crown and to reasonably
good government. The Princes and Chiefs who rule over them--some well, a
few rather badly, most of them perhaps indifferently; some Hindus, some
Mahomedans; some still very conservative and almost mediaeval, some on
genuinely progressive lines; some with a mere veneer of European
modernity--are all equally jealous of their rights and their dignity.
The Native States cannot, however, live wholly in water-tight
compartments. They must be more or less directly affected by what goes
on in British India just across their own often very artificial
boundaries. Their material interests are too closely bound up with those
of their British-Indian neighbours. In many matters, _e.g._ railways,
posts, telegraphs, irrigation, etc., they are in a great measure
dependent upon, and must fall into line with, British India. Their
peoples--even those who do not go to British India for their education
or for larger opportunities of livelihood--are being slowly influenced
by the currents of thought which flow in from British India.

Political unrest cannot always or permanently be halted at their
frontier, though His Exalted Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose ways
are still largely those of the Moghuls, has not hesitated, albeit
himself a Mahomedan Prince, to proscribe all _Khilafat_ agitation within
his territory. The Extremist Press has already very frequently denounced
ruling Princes and Chiefs as obstacles to the democratic evolution of a
_Swaraj_ India which will have to be removed, and if the Nagpur Congress
pronounced against extending its propaganda to the Native States, it did
so only "for the present" and on grounds of pure and avowed expediency.
Apart from the menace of Indian Extremism, there must obviously be a
fundamental conflict of ideals between ruling Chiefs bent on preserving
their independent political entity and the aspirations towards national
unity entertained by the moderate Indian Nationalists whose influence is
sure to predominate over all the old traditions of Indian governance if
the new reforms are successful. Some Princes are wise enough to swim
with the current and have introduced rudimentary councils and
representative assemblies which at any rate provide a modern facade for
their own patriarchal systems of government. But all are more or less
conscious that their own position is being profoundly modified by
constitutional changes in British India, which must, and indeed are
intended to, alter the very character of the Government representing the
Paramount Power to whose authority they owe their own survival since the
beginning of British rule. Their survival has indeed always been an
anomaly, though hitherto, on the whole, equally creditable to the
British _Raj_ that preserved them from extinction in the old days of
stress and storm and to the rulers who have justified British
statesmanship by their fine loyalty. But in a democratised and
self-governing India it might easily become a much more palpable
anomaly.

How was this new situation to be dealt with? Some of the ruling Princes
and Chiefs whose views appear to have prevailed with the Secretary of
State and the Government of India, came to the conclusion that they
should combine together and try to secure as a body a recognised
position from which their collective influence might be brought more
effectively to bear upon the Government of India, whatever its new
orientation may ultimately be under the influence of popular assemblies
in British India. Some, doubtless, believed that once in such a position
they would be able to oppose a more effective because more united front
to interference from whatever quarter in the internal affairs of their
States. Circumstances favoured their scheme for the loyalty displayed by
all the Native States, and the distinguished services rendered in person
by not a few Chiefs inclined Government to meet their wishes without
probing them too closely, and in the first place to relax the control
hitherto exercised by its political officers on the spot--often, it must
be confessed, on rather petty and irritating lines. The leading Princes
were encouraged to come to Delhi during the winter season, and those who
favoured a policy of closer combination amongst themselves were those
who responded most freely to these official promptings. Conversations
soon assumed the shape of informal conferences, and, later on, of formal
conferences convened and presided over by the Viceroy. The hidden value
of these conferences must have been far greater than would appear from
the somewhat trivial record of the subjects under discussion, for it is
out of these conferences that the new Chamber of Princes has been
evolved as a permanent consultative body for the consideration of
questions affecting the Native States generally, or of common concern to
them and to British India and to the Empire generally.

The conception is in itself by no means novel and appeals to many upon
whom the picturesqueness and conservative stability of the Native States
exercise a strong attraction. It can be traced back at least as far as
Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty over forty years ago, and the steadily growing
recognition of the important part which the Native States play in the
Indian Empire culminated during the war in the appointment of an Indian
Prince to represent them specially at the Imperial War Conferences held
in London during the war, and again, after the war was over, at the
Paris Peace Conference.

But the creation of a Chamber of Princes at this particular juncture
raises very difficult issues. In the first place, though it has been
engineered with great skill and energy by a small group of very
distinguished Princes, mostly Rajput, it is viewed with deep suspicion
by other chiefs who, not being Rajputs, scent in it a scheme for
promoting Rajput ascendancy, and it has received no support at all from
other and more powerful Princes such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, the
Gaikwar of Baroda, the Maharajah of Mysore. Some have always held aloof
from the Delhi Conferences and have intimated plainly that they have no
desire to see any alteration introduced into their treaty relationships
with the Paramount Power. Without their participation no Chamber of
Princes can pull its full weight, and even if most of them considered
themselves bound out of loyalty to the Sovereign to attend an inaugural
ceremony performed by the Duke of Connaught in the name of the
King-Emperor himself, it would be premature to infer that their
opposition has been permanently overcome. The Supreme Government has of
course reiterated the pledges already embodied in the treaties that
there shall be no interference with the ancient rights and privileges of
the Native States and their rulers, but its eminent right to interfere
in cases of extreme urgency has not and cannot be surrendered. It has
been exercised very rarely, and only when administration and government
have fallen flagrantly short of certain standards, established by usage
and generally understood and accepted, which it is perhaps easier to
describe negatively than positively. Misrule cannot be tolerated when it
amounts to a public scandal or takes the form of criminal acts. The
whole question has always bristled with difficulties, and still does.
The tendency, since Lord Curzon's time, has been to relax the control of
the Supreme Government even in matters of slighter moment on which it
had been accustomed to tender advice not always distinguishable from
commands. That some of the Native States, and not the least powerful,
are badly governed is of common notoriety. But if the Supreme Government
has been sometimes inclined to turn a blind eye in such cases, and even
to forget that it has moral obligations towards the subjects as well as
towards the rulers of the Native States, it has been free hitherto to
obey considerations of political expediency which may conceivably not
weigh so much in the future. For the same forces that have obtained the
surrender of the autocratic principle in British India, may demand with
equal insistency its surrender throughout the Native States. Should the
more irresponsible chiefs rely on the solidarity of a Chamber of Princes
to secure for them greater immunity than ever from the just consequences
of misgovernment, they would merely hasten a conflict which undoubtedly
most of their caste have begun to dread between their own archaic
methods and the democratic spirit which the Government of India Act of
1919 has quickened in British India.

There are many other thorny points. Obviously there could be no room for
all the seven or eight hundred ruling chiefs, great and small, in any
assembly reasonably constituted to represent the Native States. Nor have
they ever enjoyed any uniform status or received any uniform treatment.
Some of them, the most important, have maintained direct relations with
the Government of India; the majority only indirect relations through
the Provincial Governments within whose sphere their territories are
situated. The creation of the Chamber of Princes has necessitated a new
classification of major and minor States, the former entitled to direct,
the latter only to indirect representation, which has naturally caused a
vast amount of jealousy and heartburning. Another consequence still
under discussion is the substitution in most cases of direct relations
with the Government of India for those in which the smaller Native
States now stand to provincial governments. Such transfer must involve
innumerable difficulties and complications, especially in a Presidency
like Bombay, within whose boundaries there are over 300 Native States
inextricably bound up with it by common interests and even by common
administrative needs. Many of them are at first sight inclined to
welcome such a transfer as enhancing their prestige; some of them,
remembering the old saying that "Delhi is a long way off," hope that it
will lessen the prospect of outside interference in their own
administration, however bad it may be or become. But these are hardly
arguments to justify a transfer which can only import a new element of
confusion into an already sufficiently confused situation.

The Chamber of Princes was opened with all the glitter of oriental pomp
and magnificence, but it only held a few meetings and the proceedings
were veiled in secrecy. Only enough transpired to show that personal
jealousies and clan rivalries were rife even at that early stage. Its
very constitution denies it the assistance for which the Indian Councils
and the Indian Ministers have been wise enough to look from the
co-operation with them of British elements, whose authority in
government and administration is still maintained by statute and so far
undisputed. To the Chamber of Princes the Viceroy alone is in a position
to give guidance, and to shape that illustrious assembly to useful
purposes is one of the many difficult tasks in front of Lord Reading.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] At the "stabilised" rate of exchange a crore, or ten million
rupees = one million gold pounds sterling. One hundred lacs make a
crore.




CHAPTER XIII

ECONOMIC FACTORS


If the war has wrought great changes in the political life of India, in
its status within the Empire and in its constitutional relations with
the United Kingdom, it has produced equally important changes in its
economic situation and outlook. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report had not
failed to note how largely economic factors entered into the political
situation which the Secretary of State and the Viceroy were primarily
concerned to study. India is, and probably must always remain,
essentially an agricultural country, and its economics must always
suffer from the exceptionally unstable conditions to which, except
within the relatively small areas available for irrigation, dependence
upon a precarious rainfall condemns even the most industrious
agricultural population. Many circumstances had combined to retard the
development of its vast natural resources and the growth of modern
manufacturing industries. Few British administrators during the last
half-century had realised their importance as Lord Dalhousie had done
before the Mutiny, until Lord Curzon created a special department of
commerce and industry in the Government of India. The politically minded
classes, whose education had not trained them to deal with such
questions, were apt to lose themselves in such blind alleys as the
"doctrine of drain." But as they perceived how largely dependent India
was on foreign countries for manufactured goods, whilst her own
domestic industries had been to a great extent crushed in hopeless
competition with the products of the much more highly organised and
equipped industries of European countries, they rushed to the conclusion
that an industrial revival might be promoted by a crude boycott of
foreign imported goods which would at the same time serve as a
manifestation of their political discontent. The _Swadeshi_ movement
failed, as it was bound to fail. But failure intensified the suspicion
that, as India's foreign trade was chiefly with the United Kingdom, her
industrial backwardness was deliberately encouraged in the interests of
British manufactures, and it was not altogether unjustified by the
maintenance of the excise duty on locally manufactured cotton goods,
which protected the interests of Lancashire in the one industrial field
in which Indian enterprise had achieved greatest success. The
introduction of an annual Industrial Conference in connection with the
Indian National Congress was the first organised attempt of the
politically minded classes to link up with politics a movement towards
industrial independence. It assumed increased bitterness with the
disastrous failures of Indian banks started on "national" lines in
Bombay and the Punjab. The cry for fiscal freedom and protection grew
widespread and insistent before the war broke out. Then, under the
pressure of war necessities, the Government of India explored, as it had
never done before, the whole field of India's natural resources and of
the development of Indian industries. At the same time an opportunity
arose for a group of Indian "merchant-venturers"--to use the term in its
fine old Elizabethan sense--who had set themselves to give the lead to
their countrymen, to show what Indian enterprise was capable of
achieving. What it has already achieved deserves to be studied as the
most pregnant illustration of what the future may hold in reserve.

It is a somewhat chastening reflection that the creation of the one
great metallurgical industry in India has been due not to British but to
Indian capital and enterprise, assisted in the earliest and most
critical stages not by British but by American skill, and that, had it
not been created when it was, our Syrian and Mesopotamian campaigns
could never have been fought to their victorious issue, as Jamsheedpur
produced and could alone at that juncture supply the rails for the
construction of the railways essential to the rapid success of those
great military operations. Equally chastening is the reflection that
from its very inception less than twenty years ago, the pioneers of this
vast undertaking had constantly to reckon with the indifference and
inertia of Anglo-Indian officialdom, and with the almost solitary
exceptions of Sir Thomas Holland, then at the head of the Geological
Survey, and Sir Benjamin Robertson, afterwards Chief Commissioner of the
Central Provinces where the first but unavailing explorations were made,
seldom received more than a minimum of countenance and assistance. Not
till Messrs. Tata's American prospectors had explored this region did
the Government of India realise that untold mineral wealth lay there
within 150 miles of Calcutta, almost on the surface of the soil, and not
until the pressure of the Great War and the inability of India to draw
any longer upon British industry for the most vital supplies compelled
them to turn to Jamsheedpur do they seem to have at all appreciated what
an enterprise that owed little or nothing to them meant to India and the
Empire. When the war was over, Lord Chelmsford paid a visit to
Jamsheedpur and generously acknowledged that debt. "I can hardly
imagine," said the Viceroy, "what we should have done if the Tata
Company had not been able to give us steel rails which have provided not
only for Mesopotamia, but for Egypt, Palestine, and East Africa." One
may therefore hope that the lesson of the war will not be forgotten, and
that Sir Thomas Holland, who has now exchanged the Munitions Board for
the portfolio of Industry, will prevent a relapse into the old
traditions of aloofness now that the war pressure is over.

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