India, Old and New Part 3

If we look back upon the half-century after the Mutiny and before the Part.i.tion of Bengal, which may be regarded as closing that long period of paternal but autocratic government, it was one of internal peace and of material progress which the large annual output of eloquent statistics may be left to demonstrate. In 1857 there were not 200 miles of railways in India, in 1905 there was a network of railways amounting to over 28,000 miles, and the telegraph system expanded during the same period from 4500 to 60,000 miles. The development of a great system of irrigation ca.n.a.ls added large new tracts of hitherto barren wastes to the cultivable area of the country, and an elaborate machinery of precautionary measures and relief works was created to mitigate the hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls. The incidence and methods of collection of the land-tax, the backbone of Indian revenue, were carefully corrected and perfected, and the burden of taxation readjusted and on the whole lightened. Those were the days of _laisser-faire_, _laisser-aller_ at home, and it was not deemed to be part of the duties of government to give any special protection to Indian commerce, whilst the operation of free trade principles in India checked the industrial development of the country. Nevertheless the internal and external trade of India expanded continually, and the cotton mills in Western India, and the jute mills in Calcutta, as well as the opening up of coal mines in Bengal and of gold mines in Southern India showed how great were the natural resources of the peninsula still awaiting development; and under Lord Curzon's administration, which reached during the first years of the present century the high-water mark of efficiency, a department was created to deal specially with commerce and industry. In spite of several famines of unusual intensity and of the appearance in India in 1896 of a new scourge in the shape of the bubonic plague, which has carried off since then over eight million people, the population increased by leaps and bounds, and the census of 1901 showed it to have reached in our Indian Empire the huge figure of nearly 300,000,000--which it has since then exceeded by another 20,000,000--or about a fifth of the estimated population of the whole globe. It had risen since the first census officially recorded in 1871 by nearly 30 per cent--no mean evidence that fifty years of peaceful and efficient administration had produced an increased sense of welfare and confidence.

The great bulk of the population, mostly a simple and ignorant peasantry whose horizon does not extend beyond their own village and the fields that surround it, accepted with more or less conscious grat.i.tude the material benefits conferred upon them by alien rulers with whom they were seldom brought into actual contact save through the occasional presence of a District officer on tour, almost invariably humane and kindly and anxious to do even-handed justice to all. Another cla.s.s of Indians, chiefly dwellers in large cities, infinitesimally small numerically but constantly increasing in numbers and still more rapidly in activity and influence, saw, however, in an autocratic form of government, of which it even questioned the efficiency, an insurmountable barrier to the aspirations which Western education had taught it to entertain. The list of graduates from Indian Universities lengthened every year, the number of schools and colleges in which young Indians acquired at least the rudiments of Western knowledge grew and multiplied in every province. Western-educated Indians flocked to the bar; they showed themselves qualified for most of the liberal professions; they filled every post that was open to them in the public services. But where, they asked with growing impatience, was the fulfilment of the hopes which they had founded on the Queen's Proclamation of 1858? There had been perhaps no departure from the letter of the Proclamation, but had its spirit been translated into effective practice? Was it never to be interpreted in the same generous sense in which a still earlier generation of British administrators had interpreted their mission as a means to train the Indians to protect and govern themselves?

The Indian army, reorganised after the Mutiny, displayed all its old qualities of loyalty and gallantry in the course of the numerous foreign expeditions in which it was employed in co-operation with the British army, in Egypt and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, China, and Tibet, in addition to the chronic frontier fighting on the turbulent North-West border. The menace of Russia's persistent expansion towards India through Central Asia and the ascendancy for which she was at the same time striving in the Near East and the Far East, and later on the far more real menace of German aspirations to world-dominion, lent added importance to the maintenance of an efficient Indian army as an essential factor in the defensive forces of the Empire. But there was no departure from the old system under which not only were army administration and all the higher commands reserved for British officers, but the whole army was kept as a fighting machine entirely dependent upon British leadership. The native officers of an Indian regiment, mostly promoted from the ranks, could in no circ.u.mstances rise to a position in which they might give orders to a British officer, whilst, however senior in years and service, they were under the orders of the youngest British subaltern gazetted to the regiment. No other system was indeed possible so long as no attempt was made to give to Indians any higher military training, or to hold out to them any prospects of promotion beyond those within their reach by enlistment in the ranks. These Indian officers, drawn from races that had acquired a martial reputation and often from families with whom military service was an hereditary tradition, were as a rule not only very fine fighters but gallant native gentlemen, between whom and their British officers there existed very cordial relations, human and professional, based upon an instinctive recognition of differences of education and similarities of tastes on both sides. But such a system, however well it worked in practice for the production of a reliable fighting machine, was not calculated to train the Indians to protect themselves.

That nothing was done to open up a military career to the Western-educated cla.s.ses was not at first more than a sentimental grievance. But when the years pa.s.sed and they still waited for that larger share in the government and even in the administration of their country to which the British Parliament had recognised their claim as far back as the Act of 1833, their faith even in the professed purpose of British rule began to waver. At first the leaders of the Indian _intelligentsia_, some of whom had learned the value of British inst.i.tutions and of the freedom of British public life, not merely through English literature but through years of actual residence in England, preferred to hold the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy alone or chiefly responsible for the long delay in the fulfilment of hopes which they in fact regarded as rights. Their confidence in British statesmanship and in the British Parliament remained unshaken for nearly thirty years after the Mutiny, though they were perhaps not unnaturally inclined to put their trust chiefly in the Liberal party which had been most closely a.s.sociated with the promotion of a progressive policy towards India in the past. Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty confirmed them in the belief that from the Conservative party they had little to hope for, and his drastic Press Act of 1879, though not unprovoked by the virulent abuse of Government in some of the vernacular papers and the reckless dissemination of alarmist rumours during the worst period of the Afghan troubles, was held to foreshadow a return all along the line to purely despotic methods of government. But his departure from India after Lord Beaconsfield's defeat at the general election of 1880 and the return of the Liberal party to power quickened new hopes which Lord Ripon, when he became Viceroy in succession to Lord Lytton, showed every disposition to justify.

All the greater was the disillusionment when a measure, introduced for the purpose of abolishing "judicial disqualifications based on race distinctions," not only provoked fierce opposition amongst the whole European community and even amongst the rank and file of the civil service, but was ultimately whittled down in deference to that opposition until the very principle at issue was virtually surrendered.

Indians resented this fresh a.s.sertion of racial superiority, and saw in the violence of the agitation, sometimes not far removed from threats of actual lawlessness, and in the personal abuse poured out by his own countrymen on the Queen's representative, the survival amongst a large section of Europeans of the same hatred that had invented for a Viceroy who was determined to temper justice with mercy after the Mutiny the scornful nickname of "Clemency Canning."

The fate of the Ilbert Bill taught the Indians above all one practical lesson--the potency of agitation. If by agitation a Viceroy enjoying the full confidence of the British Government, with a powerful Parliamentary majority behind it, could be compelled by the British community in India, largely consisting of public servants, to surrender a great principle of policy, then the only hope for Indians was to learn to agitate in their own interests, and to create a political organisation of their own in order both to educate public opinion in India and influence public opinion in England. The men who started the Indian National Congress were inspired by no revolutionary ambitions.

Though they did not talk, as Mr. Gandhi does to-day, about producing a "change of hearts" in their British rulers, that was their purpose and unlike Mr. Gandhi, they were firm believers not in any racial superiority, but in the superiority of Western civilisation and of British political inst.i.tutions which they deemed not incapable of transplantation on to Indian soil. So on December 28, 1885, a small band of Indian gentlemen, who represented the _elite_ of the Western-educated cla.s.ses, met in Bombay to hold the first session of the Indian National Congress which, with all its many shortcomings, even in its earlier and better days, was destined to play a far more important part than was for a long time realised by Englishmen in India or at home. Many of them--such as Mr. Bonnerji, a distinguished Bengalee, Pherozeshah Mehta, a rising member of the great Pa.r.s.ee community in Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji, who was later on to be the first Indian to put forward plainly India's claim to self-government within the British Empire--had spent several years in England. Others, like Ranade and Telang, had been for a long time past vigorous advocates of Indian social reforms. With them were a few Englishmen--chief among them a retired civilian Mr. Hume--who were in complete sympathy with their aspirations. Only the Mahomedans were unrepresented, though not uninvited, partly because few of them had been caught up in the current of Western thought and education, and partly because the community as a whole, reflecting the ancient and deep-seated antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, distrusted profoundly every movement in which Hindus were the leading spirits. Lord Reay, who was then Governor of Bombay, was invited to preside and declined only after asking for instructions from the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, who, though not unfriendly, held that it was undesirable for the head of a Provincial Government to a.s.sociate himself with what should essentially be a popular movement. Mr. Bonnerji, who was selected to take the chair, emphatically proclaimed the loyalty of the Congress to the British Crown. Amongst the most characteristic resolutions moved and carried was one demanding the appointment of a Royal Commission, on which the people of India should be represented, to inquire into the working of the Indian administration, and another pleading for a large expansion of the Indian Legislative Councils and the creation of a Standing Committee of the House of Commons to which the majority in those Councils should have the right to appeal if overruled by the Executive.

The Congress claimed to represent the educated opinion of India, and, though Government withheld from it all official recognition, it flattered itself not without reason that its preaching had not fallen on to altogether barren soil when, still under Lord Dufferin's Viceroyalty, the Indian Local Government Act of 1888 marked a large advance upon the reforms in local and munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions which, with the repeal of the Lytton Press Act, had been amongst the few tangible results of Lord Ripon's "Pro-Indian" Viceroyalty; for it fulfilled many of the demands which Indian Liberals, and notably Pherozeshah Mehta, had urged for years past for a more effective share in munic.i.p.al administration. Still greater was the satisfaction when, under Lord Lansdowne's Viceroyalty, the British Parliament pa.s.sed in 1892 an Indian Councils Act, for which Lord Dufferin himself had paved the way by admitting that Government could and should rely more largely upon the experience and advice of responsible Indians. The functions and the const.i.tution of both the Viceroy's and the Provincial Legislative Councils, though their powers remained purely consultative, were substantially enlarged by the addition of a considerable number of unofficial members representing, at least in theory, all cla.s.ses and interests, who were given the right to put questions to the Executive on matters of administration and, in the case of the Viceroy's Council, to discuss the financial policy of Government if and when the budget to be laid before it involved fresh taxation. The Act of 1892 did not, however, admit "the living forces of the elective principle" on which the Congress leaders had laid their chief stress, and they went on pressing "not for Consultative Councils, but for representative inst.i.tutions." Their hopes never perhaps rose so high as when one of their own veterans, Dadabhai Naoroji--though Lord Salisbury could not resist a jibe at the expense of the "black man"--entered the House of Commons as Liberal member for Central Finsbury. It must be conceded that, had Government at that time taken the Congress by the hand instead of treating it with disdain and suspicion, it might have played loyally and usefully a part a.n.a.logous to that of "Her Majesty's Opposition" at home--a part which Lord Dufferin had been shrewd enough in the beginning not to dismiss as altogether impossible or undesirable. Its claim to represent Indian opinion, as, within certain limits, it unquestionably did, was ignored, and it was left to drift without any attempt at official guidance into waters none the less dangerous because they seemed shallow. It quickly attracted a large following among the urban middle cla.s.ses all over India. But as the number of those who attended its annual sessions, held in turn in every province, grew larger, it became less amenable to the guiding and restraining influence of those who had created it, and especially of those who had hoped to lead it in the path of social and religious reform as well as of political advancement.

The social and religious reform movement which had been of great promise before the Mutiny and for some years afterwards, when Keshab Chundra Sen gave the Brahmo Somaj a fine uplift, slackened. Like the Brahmo Somaj in Bengal, the Prirthana Somaj in Bombay no longer made so many or such fervent recruits. New societies sprang up in defence of the old faiths, some even glorifying all their primitive customs and superst.i.tions, and most of them, whilst professing to recognise the need for cleansing them of their grosser accretions, displaying a marked reaction against the West in their avowed determination to seek reform only in a return to the purer doctrines of early Hinduism. The most important of all these movements was the Arya Somaj in the Punjab, whose watchwords were "Back to the Vedas" and "Arya for the Aryans." The latter has sometimes barely disguised a more than merely platonic desire to see the British disappear out of the Aryan land of India. But the Vedas at any rate yielded to the searchers sufficient fruitful authority for promoting female education on sound moral lines and for discouraging idolatry and relaxing the cruel bondage of caste. That it has been and still is in many respects a powerful influence for good is now generally admitted by those even whom its political tendencies have alarmed. New sects arose within Hinduism.[1] An ardent apostle of the Hindu revival in Bengal, Swami Vivekananda, was the most impressive and picturesque figure at the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 and made converts in America and in Europe, amongst them in England the gifted poetess best known under her Hindu name as Sister Nivedita. How strong was the hold regained by the purely reactionary forces in Hinduism was suddenly shown in the furious campaign against Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill in 1891 which brought Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Chitawan Brahman of Poona, for the first time into public life as the champion of extreme Hindu orthodoxy. That measure was intended to mitigate the evils of infant marriage by raising the age for the woman's consent to its consummation from ten to twelve, and the death quite recently of a young Hindu girl of eleven in Calcutta due to the violence inflicted upon her by a husband nearly twenty years older than she was, had enlisted very widespread support for Government amongst enlightened Hindus and especially amongst the Western-educated. Tilak did not defeat the Bill, but his unscrupulous attacks, not only upon the British rulers of India but upon his own more liberal co-religionists, including men of such ability and character as Telang and Ranade, dealt a sinister blow at the social reform movement, which practically died out of the Congress when he and his friends began to establish their ascendancy over it.

It was so much easier for Indians to unite on a common political platform against British methods of government than on a platform of social and religious reforms which offended many different prejudices and threatened many vested interests. The Congress developed into a purely political body, and like all self-const.i.tuted bodies with no definite responsibilities it showed greater capacity for acrid criticism, often quite uninformed, than for any constructive policy. As the years pa.s.sed on without any tangible results from its expanding flow of oratory and long "omnibus" resolutions, proposed and carried more or less automatically at every annual session, it turned away from the old exponents of const.i.tutional agitation to the fiery champions of very different methods, and almost insensibly favoured the dangerous growth both inside it and outside it of the new forces, and of the old forces in new shapes, which were to explode into the open with such unforeseen violence after the Part.i.tion of Bengal in 1905.

If, however, when that explosion came the Western-educated cla.s.ses were against us rather than with us, the explanation cannot be sought only in their continued exclusion from all real partic.i.p.ation in the counsels of Government, or in the refusal of the political rights for which they had vainly agitated, or even in a general reaction against the earlier acceptance of the essential superiority of the West. A much more acute and substantial grievance, which affected also their material interests, was the badge of inferiority imposed upon them in the public services.

Not till 1886 had Government appointed a Commission to report upon a reorganisation of the public services, and its recommendations profoundly disappointed Indian expectations. For only a narrow door was opened for the admission of Indians into the higher Civil Service, and all public services were divided into two nearly water-tight compartments, the one labelled Imperial, recruited in England and reserved in practice, as to most of the superior posts, for Englishmen, and the other recruited in India mainly from Indians, but labelled Provincial and clearly intended to be inferior. Such a system bore the stamp, barely disguised, of racial discrimination, at variance with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Queen's Proclamation--and this at a time when Indian universities and colleges were bearing abundant fruit, and some of it at least of a good quality.

The diffusion of Western education had, it is true, produced other and less healthy results, but the inquiry into Indian education inst.i.tuted by Government in 1882 had been unfortunately blind to them. Diffusion had been attained largely by a dangerous process of dilution, as side by side with the European schools and colleges, either under Government control or State-aided, which had grown and multiplied, many had been also started and supported by Indian private enterprise, often ill-equipped for their task. The training of Indian teachers could hardly keep pace with the demand, either as to quant.i.ty or quality, and with overcrowded cla.s.ses even the best inst.i.tutions suffered from the loss of individual contact between the European teacher and the Indian scholar. Western education had been started in India at the top, whence it was expected to filter down by some strange and unexplained process of gravitation. Attention was concentrated on higher and secondary education, to which primary education was at first entirely sacrificed.

Whereas Lord William Bentinck had declared the great object of Government to be the promotion of both Western science and literature, scarcely any effort was made--perhaps because most Anglo-Indians had a leaning towards the humanities--to correct by the encouragement of scientific studies the natural bent of the Indian mind towards a purely literary education. Yet the Indian mind being specially endowed with the gift of imagination and p.r.o.ne to speculative thought stands in particular need of the corrective discipline afforded by the study of exact science. Again, the reluctance of Government to appear even to interfere with Indian moral and religious conceptions, towards which it was pledged to observe absolute neutrality, tended to restrict the domain of education to the purely intellectual side. Yet, religion having always been in India the basic element of life, and morality apart from religion an almost impossible conception, that very aspect of education to which Englishmen profess to attach the highest value, and of which Mr. Gokhale in a memorable speech admitted Indians to stand in special need, viz. the training of character, was gravely neglected.

Whilst from lack of any settled policy Indian education was drifting on to rocks and quicksands, and the personal influence of Englishmen on the younger generation diminished in an officialised educational service, gradual changes in the material conditions of European life in India tended to keep British and Indians more rather than less apart. Greater facilities of travel between England and India, and the growth of "hill stations" in which Europeans congregated during the hot season, made it easier for Englishwomen to live in India, though, when the time came for children to be sent home for their education, the choice continued to lie between separation of husband and wife, or of mother and children.

But if the presence of a larger feminine element was calculated to exercise a refining and restraining influence on Anglo-Indian society, it did not promote the growth of intimate social relations between Europeans and Indians, as Indian habits and domestic inst.i.tutions, and especially the seclusion of women, created an even greater barrier, which only slowly and rarely yielded to the influences of Western education, between European and Indian ladies than between the men of the two races. Englishwomen even more than Englishmen continued to be haunted by the memories of the Mutiny, which remained painfully present to a generation who, whether Indians or British, had lived through that tempest, and if to Indians the Mutiny recalled such scenes as "The Blowing of Indians from British Guns" which the great Russian painter Verestchagin depicted with the same realism as the splendid pageant of the entry of the Prince of Wales into Delhi in 1876, it was the horrors of Cawnpore that chiefly dwelt in the minds of Europeans. Many Englishmen and Englishwomen owed their lives during the Mutiny to the devotion and courage of Indians who helped them to escape, and sheltered them sometimes for months at no slight risk to themselves. But the spirit of treachery and cruelty revealed in the Mutiny and personified in a Nana Sahib, who had disappeared into s.p.a.ce but, according to frequently recurrent rumour, was still alive somewhere, chilled the feelings of trustfulness and goodwill of an earlier generation. Again, whilst there was a large increase in the number of young Indians who went to England to complete their studies--especially technical studies for which only tardy and inadequate facilities were provided in their own country--and many of them, left to their own devices in our large cities, brought back to India a closer familiarity with the unedifying rather than the edifying aspects of Western civilisation, the development of European industries and the railway and telegraph services, which at first at least required the employment of Europeans in subordinate capacities, imported into India a new type of European, with many good qualities, but rather more p.r.o.ne than those of better breeding and education to glory in his racial superiority and to bring it home somewhat roughly to the Indians with whom he a.s.sociated. The ignorance of European and American globe-trotters who were finding their way to India also often offended Indian susceptibilities. Add to many causes of friction, almost inevitable sometimes between people whose habits and ideas are widely different, the effect of a trying climate upon the European temper--never, for instance, even at home at its best when travelling--and one need hardly be surprised that unpleasant incidents occurred in which, sometimes under provocation and sometimes under none, Englishmen who ought to have known better were guilty of gross affronts upon Indians. Such incidents were never frequent, but, even if there had been no tendency on the part of Indians to magnify and on the part of Englishmen to minimise their gravity, they were frequent enough to cause widespread heartburning, and in not a few cases political hatred has had its origin in the rancour created by personal insults to which even educated Indians of good position have occasionally been subjected by Englishmen who fancied themselves, but were not, their betters. That Indians also could be, and were sometimes, offensive they were generally apt to forget, as they forgot in their denunciations of Lord Curzon at the time of the Part.i.tion of Bengal that he had not shrunk from incurring great unpopularity in some Anglo-Indian circles by insisting upon adequate punishment of all Europeans guilty of violence towards Indians. Apart from such collisions nothing rankled more with Indians of the better cla.s.ses than their rigid exclusion from the European clubs in India. Even the few who were members of, or had been admitted at home as visitors to, the best London clubs were debarred, when they landed in Bombay, even from calling on their English friends at the Yacht Club. Europeans could see nothing in this but the right of every club to restrict its membership and frame its regulations as it chooses. Indians could see nothing in it but humiliating racial discrimination. The question has now been more or less solved by the creation in most of the large cities in India of new clubs to which Indians and Europeans are equally eligible, and in which those who choose can meet on terms of complete equality and good fellowship. But it const.i.tuted one of the grievances which contributed to the estrangement of the Western educated cla.s.ses during the latter part of the last century.

Though social friction a.s.sisted 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 a.s.sumption now, if never officially formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that a.s.sumption 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 cla.s.s 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 const.i.tuted 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 Part.i.tion 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 appet.i.te 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.s 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 Part.i.tion of Bengal, and it is upon future co-operation between them that the success of the great const.i.tutional 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 a.s.sistance 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 pa.s.sage, 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 cla.s.s widely divided from the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen, and that the democratic inst.i.tutions for which he clamoured were unsuited to the traditions and customs of his country, he replied that in every country the impulse towards democratic inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.serting 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 pa.s.sions 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 ma.s.ses committed to their care. They might be inclined to judge the Western-educated cla.s.s 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. .h.i.therto 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 superst.i.tions, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 const.i.tuted their main t.i.tle 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 compet.i.tions as they had already been drawn into for munic.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s 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 p.r.o.ne 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 a.s.sent of the inarticulate ma.s.ses but the positive support of very important cla.s.ses 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 Part.i.tion 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 un.o.bserved, upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as negligible quant.i.ties.

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 cla.s.ses 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 cla.s.ses as a common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never have found expression, and such an a.s.sembly 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 j.a.pan, 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 const.i.tuted 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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 pa.s.sions 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 Part.i.tion 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.

The Part.i.tion of Bengal was a measure harmless enough on the face of it for splitting up into two administrative units a huge province with some 70 million inhabitants which had outgrown the capacities of a single provincial government. But the Bengalees are a singularly sensitive race. They were intensely proud of their province as the senior of the three great "Presidencies" of India, of their capital as the capital city of India and the seat of Viceregal Government, and of their Calcutta University as the first and greatest of Indian Universities, though already menaced, they declared, by Lord Curzon's Universities Act. They resented the Part.i.tion, against which they had no remedy, as a wanton _diminutio capitis_ inflicted upon them by a despotic Viceroy bent on chastising them for the prominent part played by their leaders in pressing the claims of India to political emanc.i.p.ation from bureaucratic leading-strings. That in the new province of Eastern Bengal, which was to be created by the Part.i.tion, the Mahomedans would const.i.tute a large majority and enjoy advantages. .h.i.therto denied to them as a minority in the undivided province was an added grievance for the Hindus. Lord Curzon had not at first been unpopular with the Western-educated cla.s.ses. They recognised his great intellectual gifts and admired his majestic eloquence. But continuing to fasten their hopes on the Liberal party in England, they had quickly followed its lead in attacking him as a dangerous Imperialist, whose Tibetan adventure was saddling the Indian tax-payer with the costs of his aggressive foreign policy, and they required no promptings to denounce as the sworn foe of India a Viceroy who had not only sought to restrict the statutory freedom of their University, but, as its Chancellor, used language into which they read a deliberate insult to the Bengalee character. By part.i.tioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee "nation" and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose honour the old invocation to the G.o.ddess Kali, "_Bande Materam_," or "Hail to the Mother," acquired a new significance and came to be used as the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism. To that war-cry public meetings were organised in Calcutta and all over the province. The native press teemed with denunciatory articles. The wildest rumours were set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which part.i.tion portended.

Never had India seen such popular demonstrations. Government, however, remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India--the last and perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period in which efficient administration had come to be regarded as the be-all and end-all of government. His resignation, however, had nothing to do with the Part.i.tion. He had fought and been defeated by Lord Kitchener, then, and largely at his instance, Commander-in-Chief in India, over the reorganisation of the military administration. Lord Curzon stood for the supremacy of the civil over the military authority, but he made the mistake of resigning not on the question of principle, on which he finally agreed to a compromise, but on a subsidiary point which, fatal as he may have thought it to the spirit of the compromise, appeared to the outside public to be mainly a personal question. In any case, though on the merits of the quarrel he might have looked for support from educated Indian opinion, Bengal was content to rejoice over his disappearance and to wonder whether with its author the Part.i.tion might not also disappear.

Another and worthier preoccupation was the impending visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India. King Edward's son was to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had for the first time made a Royal progress through the Indian Empire nearly thirty years before. His progress had been a triumphal one at a period when the internal and external peace of India seemed equally profound. That of his son was no less triumphal, though India was just entering on a period of political unrest undreamt of in the preceding generation. Even in Calcutta, which had been seething with agitation a few weeks before, the Prince and Princess were received not only with loyal acclamations but almost with G.o.d-like worship; and all these demonstrations were perfectly genuine.

For with the curious inconsistency which pervades all Indian speculations religious and political, though countless dynasties have fallen and countless rulers have come to a violent end in the chequered annals of Indian history, nothing has ever destroyed the ancient conception of royalty as partaking of the divine essence. The remoteness of the Western rulers under whose sceptre India had pa.s.sed lent if anything an added mystery and majesty to the royalty they wielded. Even the avowed enemies of British rule seldom levelled their shafts at the Throne. That the King can do no wrong is a saying that appealed to the Indian mind long before the Western-educated cla.s.ses grasped its real meaning under a const.i.tutional monarchy, and began to extend its application even to the King's Government for the purpose of conveniently discriminating between the British Government, whose good intentions were generally a.s.sumed, and the autocratic Government of India, whence all mischief sprang. During the whole of the Royal tour, which extended to all the major provinces of British India and to several of the Native States, the enthusiasm was general, and even the Extremists did not venture a discordant note. The Prince and Princess, whose graciousness never wearied, moved freely amongst the crowds, and the presence of the future Queen appealed strongly to the women of India, whose influence we are apt to underrate because until recently it has been exercised almost exclusively in the seclusion of the zenana.

Even high-caste ladies, Hindus as well as Mahomedans, were known on this occasion for the first time perhaps in their lives to pa.s.s beyond the outer gates of their houses in order to attend a Royal reception--with all the precautions of course that have always to be taken to shelter a _purdah_ party from any contact with the other s.e.x.

It became the fashion for all cla.s.ses to draw their own happy auguries from the Royal visit, but to none did it seem so auspicious as to the politically-minded Indians. For it coincided with the sweeping defeat of the Unionist party at the general election of 1905 and the return to office of a Liberal Government with a crushing majority behind it, whom the hostility displayed by the Liberal party towards Lord Curzon's administration on almost every Indian question save that which had brought about his resignation seemed to pledge to a prompt reversal of his policy. Was not the appointment to the India Office of such a stalwart Radical as Mr. John Morley, who had been Gladstone's Home Rule Secretary for Ireland, enough to justify the expectation that the right of India, if not to Home Rule, to a large measure of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt would receive prompt recognition? If Indians could hardly regard Lord Curzon's successor as another Ripon, their first impression of Lord Minto satisfied them that, though the Conservative nominee of Mr.

Balfour's Government, the new Viceroy was neither disposed to tread in his predecessor's footsteps as an autocratic administrator nor likely to carry sufficient weight at home to stand in the way of a Secretary of State who, like many Radical doctrinaires, was essentially what the French call _un homme d'autorite_. The event proved that they were right in their estimate of Lord Minto, but wrong in their sanguine expectation that Mr. Morley would at once break with the old principles of Indian government or even with Lord Curzon's administrative methods. Bengal remained part.i.tioned. It was a _chose jugee_ which Mr. Morley was not prepared to reopen.

The disillusionment in India was much greater than after the fiasco of the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India.

Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not despair of bringing const.i.tutional methods of agitation to bear upon British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National Congress, which they had founded twenty years before, was sliding rapidly down the inclined plane which was to lead first to open and violent discord and later on to disruption. Even before the Part.i.tion the Moderates could make but a poor reply to those who jeered at the paltry results which had attended their practice of const.i.tutional forms of agitation. For if the Indian Councils Act of 1892 had opened the doors of the Viceroy's Legislative a.s.sembly to some of the most distinguished among them, what had it profited them? The official benches merely gave a courteous hearing to the incisive criticisms proceeding from men of such undisputed capacity as Mehta and Gokhale and bore less patiently with the Ciceronian periods of the great Bengalee tribune Surendranath Banerjee. Government paid little or no heed to them. Equally powerless had been their pa.s.sionate protest against the Part.i.tion. Even had they not been in complete sympathy with popular feeling, they would have been compelled to voice it or surrender the leadership they still hoped to retain to the new Extremist party which, under Mr. Tilak's leadership, was carrying his doctrines and his methods far beyond the limits of the Deccan. Each annual session of the Congress grew more turbulent and the Moderates gave ground each year, until at the famous Surat session of 1907 they realised that they had to make a definite stand or go under. There the storm burst over the preliminary proceedings before the real issues were reached. Mr. Tilak's followers a.s.sailed the presidential platform of which the Moderates had still retained possession, and the Congress broke up in hopeless confusion and disorder.

But what happened in the Congress was but a pale reflection of what was happening outside. The Part.i.tion was indeed little more than the signal for an explosion, not merely in Bengal, of which premonitory indications had been witnessed, but had pa.s.sed almost unheeded, some ten years earlier in the Deccan. The cry of _Swaraj_ was caught up and re-echoed in every province of British India. In Calcutta the vow of _Swadeshi_ was administered at ma.s.s meetings in the famous temple of Kali. Hindu reactionaries, whose conception of a well-ordered society had not moved beyond the laws of Manu, fell into line for the moment with t