A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

India, Old and New by Sir Valentine Chirol

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




Though social friction assisted that estrangement its chief cause lay
much deeper. After the Mutiny government under the direct authority of
the Crown lost the flexibility which the vigilant control of the British
Parliament had imparted to the old system of government under the East
India Company with every periodical renewal of its charter. The system
remained what it had inevitably been from the beginning of British rule,
a system devised by foreigners and worked by foreigners--at its best a
trusteeship committed to them for the benefit of the people of India,
but to be discharged on the sole judgment and discretion of the British
trustees. The Mutiny shook the finer faith which had contemplated the
finality some day or other of the trusteeship and introduced Western
education into India as the agency by which Indians were to be prepared
to resume when that day came the task of governing and protecting
themselves. There was a tacit assumption now, if never officially
formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that
assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in
discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was
discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more
and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger
issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational
experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of
Indians who claimed both a share in the administration and a voice in
the framing of policy. Executive and administrative functions were
vested practically in the same hands, _i.e._ in the hands of a great and
ubiquitous bureaucracy more and more jealous of its power and of its
infallibility in proportion as the latter began to be questioned and the
former to be attacked by the class of Indians who had learned to speak
the same language and to profess the same ideals.

The constant additions made to the huge machinery of administration in
order to meet the growing needs of the country on the approved lines of
a modern state resulted in increased centralisation. New departments
were created and old ones expanded, but even when the highest posts in
them were not specifically or in practice reserved for the Indian Civil
Service, it retained the supreme control over them as the _corps
d'elite_ from which most of the members of the Viceroy's Executive
Council, _i.e._ the Government of India, were recruited. The District
Officer remained the pivot and pillar of British administration
throughout rural India, and he kept as closely as he could in touch with
the millions of humble folk committed to his care, though the
multiplication of codes and regulations and official reports and
statistics involving heavy desk work kept him increasingly tied to his
office. But the secretariats, which from the headquarters of provincial
governments as well as from the seat of supreme government directed and
controlled the whole machine, became more and more self-centred, more
and more imbued with a sense of their own omniscience. Even the men with
district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial
secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick
to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe
the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided
themselves on being the repositories of all the _arcana_ of "good
government." Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be
regarded as the one test that mattered, and it was a test which only
Englishmen were competent to apply and which Indians were required to
accept as final whatever their wishes or their experience might be.

Herein perhaps more than anywhere else lay the secret of the antagonism
between the British bureaucracy and the Western-educated Indians which
gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition
of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative
efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency
reached its apogee--himself the incarnation of efficiency and
unquestionably the greatest and most indefatigable administrator that
Britain sent out to India during that period. It would be unfair to
suppose that that antagonism was due on either side to mere narrow
prejudice or sordid jealousy. Indians who resented their exclusion from
the share in the administration of their country for which they believed
their education to have qualified them, and which they claimed as the
fulfilment of repeated promises and of the declared purpose of British
rule, may not have been free from a human appetite for loaves and
fishes. British officials who were loath to recognise those claims, or
to concede to Indians any substantial proportion of their privileged
posts and emoluments, may have been not always unselfishly indifferent
to the material interests and prospects of the services to which they
belonged, if not to their own personal interests and prospects. But
apart from any such considerations, the attitude of both parties was
governed by the firm belief, not in itself discreditable to either, that
it possessed the better knowledge of the needs and interests and wishes
of the vast populations of India, still too ignorant and inarticulate to
give expression of their own to them. The lamentable effects of the
estrangement between British administrators and the very class of
Indians whose co-operation it had been one of the main objects of
British policy ever since the Act of 1833 to promote, never stood
clearly revealed till the sudden wave of unrest that followed the
Partition of Bengal, and it is upon future co-operation between them
that the success of the great constitutional experiment now being made
must ultimately depend. It is therefore well to try to understand the
conflicting sentiments and opinions which drove asunder the moderate but
progressive Western-educated Indian and the earnest but conservative
British administrator, and ended by bringing them almost into open
conflict. The Western-educated Indian claimed recognition at our hands
first and foremost because he was the product of the educational system
we ourselves imposed upon India. His limitations, intellectual and
moral, were largely due to the defects of that system, just as his
political immaturity was largely due to our failure to provide him with
opportunities of acquiring experience in administrative work and public
life. Where careers had been opened up to him in the liberal professions
he had often achieved great distinction--at the Bar, on the Bench, in
literature--and he had proved himself quite competent to fill all the
posts accessible to him in the public services. Without his assistance
in the many subordinate branches the everyday work of administration
could not have been carried on for a day. He contended that he must
intuitively be a better judge than aliens, who were, after all, birds of
passage, of the needs and interests and wishes of his own
fellow-countrymen, and a better interpreter to them of so much of
Western thought and Western civilisation as they could safely absorb
without becoming denationalised. His complaint was that his own best
efforts and best intentions were constantly thwarted by the rigid
conservatism and aloofness of the European, official and unofficial,
wrapped up in his racial and bureaucratic superiority. He admitted that
he might not yet be able to discharge with the European's efficiency the
legislative or administrative responsibilities for which he had hitherto
been denied the necessary training, but he protested against being kept
altogether out of the water until he had learnt to swim, especially
when there was so little disposition ever to teach him to swim. What he
lacked in the way of efficiency he alone, he argued, could supply in the
way of sympathy with and understanding of his own people. When it was
objected that he represented only a very small minority of Indians, and
formed, indeed, a class widely divided from the vast majority of his
fellow-countrymen, and that the democratic institutions for which he
clamoured were unsuited to the traditions and customs of his country, he
replied that in every country the impulse towards democratic
institutions had come in the first instance from small minorities and
had always been regarded at first as subversive and revolutionary. If,
again, it was objected that the moderate and reasonable views he
expressed were not the views of the more ambitious politicians who
professed to be the accredited interpreters of Western-educated India,
that there were many amongst them whose aims were more or less openly
antagonistic to all the ideals for which British rule stands, and were
directed in reality not to the establishment of democratic institutions
but to the maintenance of caste monopoly and other evils inherent to the
Hindu social system, and that in the political arena he seemed incapable
of asserting himself against these dangerous and reactionary elements,
his reply was once more that he had never received the support and
encouragement which he had a right to expect from his European mentors,
and that it was often their indifference or worse that had chiefly
helped to raise a spirit of revolt against every form of Western
influence.

The case for the British administrator can be still more easily stated.
Britain has never sent out a finer body of public servants, take them
all in all, than those who have in the course of a few generations
rescued India from anarchy, secured peace for her at home and abroad,
maintained equal justice amidst jealous and often warring communities
and creeds, established new standards of tolerance and integrity, and
raised the whole of India to a higher plane of material prosperity and
of moral and intellectual development. They spend the best part of their
lives in an exile which cuts them off from most of the amenities of
social existence at home, and often involves the more or less prolonged
sacrifice of the happiest family ties. Those especially whose work lies
chiefly in the remote rural districts, far away from the few cities in
which European conditions of life to some extent prevail, are brought
daily into the very closest contact with the people, and because of
their absolute detachment from the prejudices and passions and material
interests by which Indian society, like all other societies, is largely
swayed, they enjoy the confidence of the people often in a higher degree
than Indian officials whose detachment can never be so complete. Their
task has been to administer well and to do the best in their power for
the welfare of the population committed to their charge. The Englishman,
as a rule, sticks to his own job. The British administrator's job had
been to administer, and he had not yet been told that it was also his
job to train up a nation on democratic lines and to instil into them the
principles of civic duty as such duty is understood in Western
countries. No doubt there were British administrators in India whose
innate conservatism, coupled with the narrowness which years of routine
work and official self-confidence are apt to breed, revolted against any
transfer of power to, or any recognition of equality with, the people of
the country they had spent their lives in ruling with unquestioned but,
as they at least conceived it, paternal authority. The conditions of
bureaucratic rule inevitably tended to produce an autocratic temper. But
it was not merely in obedience to that temper that they shrank from any
changes that would weaken the administration; the best of them at least
had a strong sense of their responsibilities as guardians and protectors
of the simple and ignorant masses committed to their care. They might be
inclined to judge the Western-educated class of Indians too harshly, and
to identify them too closely with the type that was beginning to
dominate the Indian National Congress, but the form in which the
question of yielding to Indians any substantial part of their authority
presented itself to their minds was by no means an entirely selfish one.
"Are we justified," they asked, "in transferring our responsibilities
for the welfare and good government of such a large section of the human
race to a small minority which has hitherto shown so little disposition
to approach any of the difficult problems with the solution of which the
happiness and progress of the overwhelming majority of their own race
are bound up, though, because themselves belonging to the same stock and
the same social system, it would have been much easier for them to deal
with those problems than it is for alien rulers like ourselves? Those
problems arise out of the social system which is known as Hinduism--for
Hinduism is much more a social than a religious system. Western-educated
Indians will not openly deny its evils--the iron-bound principle of
caste, which, in spite of many concessions in non-essentials to modern
exigencies of convenience, remains almost untouched in all essentials
and, above all, in the fundamental laws of inter-marriage, the social
outlawry of scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated
as 'untouchable,' infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of
widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to
a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile
mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the
economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of
lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so
forth. How many of the Western-educated Indians who have thrown
themselves into political agitation against the tyranny of the British
bureaucracy have ever raised a finger to free their own
fellow-countrymen from the tyranny of those social evils? How many of
them are entirely free from it themselves, or, if free, have the courage
to act up to their opinions? At one time--before the Congress gave
precedence to political reforms--social reform did find many
enthusiastic supporters amongst the best class of Western-educated
Indians, but the gradual disappearance of men of that type may be said
almost to coincide with the growth of political agitation. There have
been, and there still are, some notable and admirable exceptions, but
they are seldom to be found amongst the men who claim to be the tribunes
of the Indian people. It is on these grounds--moral rather than
political--that we claim to be still the best judges of our duties as
trustees for the people of India."

This was perhaps the most forcible of the British administrator's
arguments, and it was an honest one. Another was that the
Western-educated Indians were mainly drawn from the towns and from a
narrow circle of professional classes in the towns, who could not
therefore speak on behalf of and still less control the destinies of a
vast population, overwhelmingly agricultural, regarding whose interests
they had hitherto shown themselves both ignorant and indifferent, and
from whom the very education which constituted their main title to
consideration had tended to separate and estrange them. The land-owning
gentry and the peasantry had so far scarcely been touched by this
political agitation. The peasantry knew little or nothing of its
existence. The land-owners feared it, for, having themselves for the
most part kept aloof from modern education, and shrinking instinctively
from the limelight of political controversies and such electioneering
competitions as they had already been drawn into for municipal and local
government purposes, they felt themselves hopelessly handicapped in a
struggle that threatened their traditional prestige and authority as
well as their material interests. What they dreaded most of all was the
ascendancy of the lawyer class in this new political movement--the
_Vakil-Raj_, as they called it--for they had in many instances already
been made to feel how heavy the hand of the lawyer could be upon them
in a country so prone to litigation as India, and endowed with so costly
and complicated a system of jurisprudence and procedure, if they
ventured to place themselves in opposition to the political aspirations
of ambitious lawyers. Above all, the British administrator, who rightly
held the maintenance of a strict balance between the different creeds
and communities of India to be an essential part of his mission, felt
strong in the undivided support which his conception of his
responsibilities and duties received from the Mahomedans of India. Then,
and almost into the second decade of this century, a community forming a
fifth of the whole population professed itself absolutely opposed to any
surrender of British authority which, it was convinced, would enure
solely to the benefit of its hated Hindu rivals, far more supple and far
more advanced in all knowledge of the West, including political
agitation. The Mahomedans had held aloof from the Congress. They still
had no definite political organisation of their own; they were content
with the British _raj_ and wanted nothing else.

The British administrator was therefore not altogether unwarranted in
his conviction that in standing in the ancient ways he had behind him
not only the tacit assent of the inarticulate masses but the positive
support of very important classes and communities. He knew also that he
had with him, besides unofficial European opinion in India, almost solid
on his side, the sympathy, however vague and uninformed, of the bulk of
his own countrymen at home, represented for a great part of the fifty
years now under review by a succession of conservative parliaments and
governments. There were no longer, as in the East India Company days,
periodical inquests into the state of India to wind up Parliament to a
concert pitch of sustained and vigilant interest in Indian affairs. The
very few legislators who exhibited any persistent curiosity about Indian
administration were regarded for the most part as cranks or bores, and
the annual statement on the Indian budget was usually made before
almost empty benches. Only questions that raised large issues of foreign
policy, such as Afghan expeditions and the Russian menace in Asia Minor,
or that affected the considerable commercial interests at home, like the
Indian cotton duties or currency and exchange, would intermittently stir
British public opinion inside and outside Parliament, and these often
chiefly as occasions for party warfare. Ministers themselves appeared to
be mainly concerned with the part which India had to play in their
general scheme of Imperial and Asiatic policy rather than with the
methods by which India was governed. These could be safely left to "the
man on the spot."

Very different had been the spirit in which British parliaments and
governments had discharged their responsibilities before the transfer of
India to the Crown, and rude was the awakening for the British
administrator in India and for British ministers at home when the
explosion that followed the Partition of Bengal revealed a very
different India that was in process of evolution with much and dangerous
travail out of the reaction of new forces, hitherto almost unobserved,
upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as
negligible quantities.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A detailed and learned study of these movements is found in Dr.
J.N. Farquhar's _Modern Religious Movements in India_, published by
the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915.




CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST


Amongst the Western-educated classes the new forces which had been
turning the minds of young India towards _Swaraj_ as the watchword of
national unity and independence had drawn much of their inspiration from
text-books which taught them how large a share Nationalism had played in
redeeming modern nations from alien oppression and in shaping the whole
political evolution of Europe. It had emancipated the Balkan States from
the alien thraldom of the Ottoman Sultans; it had helped to unify Italy
and Germany; it had been a potent if less apparent factor in welding
Great Britain and the distant colonies peopled by the British race into
a great British Empire. Had not Indians also a common nationhood which,
despite all racial and religious differences, could be traced back
across centuries of internal strife and foreign domination to a period,
remote indeed but none the less enviable, when they had been their own
masters? Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest
barriers to India's national unity--the multiplicity of her
vernaculars--by giving English to the Western-educated classes as a
common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never
have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of
India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National
Congress itself would have been an impossibility? Great events,
moreover, had been happening quite recently which tended to shake the
Indians' belief in the irresistible superiority of Western civilisation
even in its material aspects. The disaster inflicted upon an Italian
army at Adowa in 1894 by the Abyssinians--a backward African people
scarcely known except for the ease with which a British expedition had
chastised them not thirty years before--was perhaps the first of these
events to awaken observant Indians to the fact that European arms were
not necessarily invincible. The resistance put up for nearly three years
by two small South African Republics, strong chiefly in their
indomitable pride of nationhood, seemed to have strained the resources
even of the British Empire, and Japan, an Asiatic power only recently
emerged from obscurity, had just proved on land and sea that an Asiatic
nation in possession of her national independence could equip herself to
meet and overcome one of the greatest of European powers--one whose vast
ambitions constituted in the eyes of generations of British statesmen a
grave menace to the safety of India itself. Was England really mightier
than Russia? Had she not also perhaps feet of clay? Was British rule to
endure for ever? Was it not a weak point in England's armour that she
had to rely not a little on Indian troops, whom she still treated as
mercenaries, to fight her battles even in such distant countries as
China and the Sudan, and upon still more numerous legions of Indians in
every branch of the civil administration to carry out all the menial
work of government? If the Indians, untrained, and indeed forbidden, to
bear arms, were unable at once to overthrow British rule, could they not
at least paralyse its machinery, as Bepin Chandra Pal was preaching, by
refusing to take any kind of service under it?

To such interpretations of contemporary events young Indians, who at
school read Burke and Byron and Mill "On Liberty," and in secret the
lives of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were bound to be receptive, and they
soon reached from a different base along different lines the same ground
on which the old orthodox foes not only of British rule but of Western
civilisation stood who appealed to the Baghavat-Ghita and exhorted
India to seek escape from the foreign domination that had enslaved her,
body and soul, by clinging to the social and religious ark of Hinduism
which in her golden age had made her wise and wealthy and free beyond
all the nations of the earth.

The stronghold of orthodox reaction was in the Mahratta Deccan, and its
stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never
forgiven us for snatching the cup of power from their lips just when
they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp. First
and foremost of them all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu
orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the
_Kesari_, _i.e._ "The Lion," how to play on religious as well as on
racial sentiment. He first took the field against the Hindu Social
Reformers who dared to support Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill, and
his rabid campaign against them developed quickly into an equally rabid
campaign against British rule. He appealed to the pride of his Mahratta
people by reviving the cult of Shivaji, the great Mahratta chieftain who
first raised the standard of Hindu revolt against Mahomedan domination,
and he appealed to their religious passions by placing under the
patronage of their favourite deities a national movement for boycotting
British-imported goods and manufactures which, under the name of
_Swadeshi_, was to be the first step towards _Swaraj_. He it was too who
for the first time imported into schools and colleges the ferment of
political agitation, and presided at bonfires which schoolboys and
students fed with their European text-books and European clothes. The
movement died down for a time after the murder of two British officials
in Poona on the night of Queen Victoria's second jubilee in 1897 and the
sentencing of Tilak himself shortly afterwards to a term of imprisonment
on a charge of seditious and inflammatory writing. But the Partition of
Bengal was to give him the opportunity of transplanting his doctrines
and his methods from the Deccan to the most prosperous province in
India.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

David Steele - "Notes On The Apocalypse"

Arnold Bennett - "Books and Persons"

Clara M. Beede - "Some Broken Twigs"

Frederick Upham Adams - "John Henry Smith"