Indian Unrest Part 16

A Mahomedan gentleman, Mr. Ali Imam, has been appointed to succeed Mr.

Sinha as Indian member of the Viceroy's Executive Council. He too is a leading member of the Bengal Bar, and, like Mr. Sinha, will take charge of the Legal Department. Though the selection of a Mahomedan in succession to a Hindu cannot fail to gratify Indian Moslems, Mr. Ali Imam's appointment should not be altogether unacceptable to the Hindus.

For when the details of the reforms' scheme were being worked out in India, he adopted, on the subject of separate electorates for the Mahomedan community, a line of his own which was applauded by the Hindus, but was very much resented by the vast majority of his co-religionists. The Government of India seemed inclined to favour his proposals, and he proceeded to England to press them upon Lord Morley.

But the Secretary of State wisely decided that the pledges originally given by Lord Minto to the Indian Mahomedans must be scrupulously and fully redeemed, so as to secure to them substantial representation in the new Councils.

NOTE 16

The first Indian Member of the Bengal Executive Council is expected to be Mr. R.N. Mookerjee, a partner in the well-known Calcutta firm of Messrs. Martin and Co., to whom I have referred (page 258) as "the one brilliant exception" amongst Western-educated Bengalees, who has achieved signal success in commerce and industry and has shown the possibility and the advantages of intelligent and business-like co-operation in those fields between Englishmen and Indians.

NOTE 17

THE WASTAGE IN INDIAN UNIVERSITIES.

The most striking feature about the number of graduates at the Indian Universities is not the magnitude of their total or any increase in it, but the very high proportion of wastage. It takes 24,000 candidates at Matriculation to secure 11,000 pa.s.ses, it takes 7,000 candidates at the Intermediate examination to secure 2,800 pa.s.ses, and it takes 4,750 candidates for the B.A. degree to secure 1,900 pa.s.ses.

There are 18,000 students at college in order to supply an annual output of 1,935 graduates. This means that a very large number fall out by the way without completing successfully their University career. The phenomenon, peculiar to India, of candidates for employment urging as a qualification that they have failed at a University examination (meaning that they have pa.s.sed the preceding examination and added thereto some years of study for the next) is due to two causes, the large number of students whom the University rejects at its examinations before it grants the B.A. degree to the remainder, and the dearth of graduates.

_(Quinquennial Report on the Progress of Education in India for_ 1902-1907, by Mr. H.W. Orange, Director-General of Education.)

NOTE 18

ENGLISH HISTORY IN INDIAN SCHOOLS.

At the opening of an Educational Conference held last April in Bombay under the joint auspices of the Director of Public Instruction and of the Teachers' a.s.sociation, the Governor, Sir George Clarke, alluded to some of the effects of Western education on the younger generation of Indians:--"It is widely admitted by the thoughtful Indians that there are signs of the weakening of parental influence, of the loss of reverence for authority, of a decadence of manners and of growing moral laxity. The restraining forces of ancient India have lost some of their power; the restraining forces of the West are inoperative in India.

There has thus been a certain moral loss without any corresponding gain.

The educated European may throw off the sanctions of religion; but he has to live in a social environment which has been built up on the basis of Christian morality, and he cannot divest himself of the influences which have formed his conscience. The educated or partially educated Indian who has learned to look on life and the affairs of men from a Western standpoint has no such environment and may find himself morally rudderless on an ocean of doubt. The restraints of ancient philosophies, which have unconsciously helped to shape the lives of millions in India who had only the dimmest knowledge of them, have disappeared from his mental horizon. There is nothing to take their place. Ancient customs, some of them salutary and enn.o.bling, have come to be regarded as obsolete. No other customs of the better sort have come to take their place, and blindly to copy the superficial customs of the West is to ignore all that is best in western civilization."

Commenting on his Excellency's speech, the Bombay _Examiner_, a weekly paper very ably conducted in the interests of the Roman Catholic missions, drew attention, in the following terms to some of the causes of the mischief.

(1) The study of English history in schools reveals a gradual transition from an unlimited monarchy to a limited monarchy differing barely from a republic, the gradual transfer of political power from kings and aristocracy through the barons and then through the burghers and finally to the whole people. In reality this process took almost a thousand years, but in the schoolroom it is compressed into a term. The gradualness of the process, the long preparation of each cla.s.s of citizens, the slow political education of the ma.s.ses, all of which forms a long historical perspective, is through the medium of the text-book thrown upon, the screen at once as a flat picture. It may not occur perhaps to the young mind to apply the precedent to his own country; but as soon as he falls under the influence of the political agitator the question, suggests itself: If the English people thus fought their way to supremacy, why should not the Indian people do the same? Losing sight of the perspective of history, it seems to him feasible that India should achieve in one bound what it took nearly a thousand years for the English people to bring about.

(2) In studying political economy and social science he meets with such principles as these--that the ruler is merely the delegate and representative of the people, from whose will he derives all his power.

This power is to be exercised for the well-being of the people who have conferred it, and according to their will in conferring it. The old idea that all power, even that conferred through the people, is ultimately derived from G.o.d and exercised in His Name, is of course never heard of.

The ruler is a public servant of the collective nation, and that is all.

To introduce this notion among a people whose idea of government has run for thousands of years on the lines of absolute monarchy and hereditary if not divine right is nothing short of revolutionary. All idea of the sacredness of authority is at once gone. The Government is a thing to be dictated to by the people, to be threatened and bullied and even exterminated if it does not comply with the nation's wishes. Hence as soon as the political agitator appears on the scene nothing seems more plausible to the raw mind of the student than an endeavour to upset the existing order of things. This cannot, of course, all be done at once; but at least a beginning can be made. Let us agitate for the redress of this or that grievance, for the increase of native appointments, and the like; and if we do not at once get what we ask for, let us try what bullying and intimidation can do--aspiring ultimately to subst.i.tute a representative for a monarchical form of government, and having secured this, wait the opportune moment for driving the foreigner into the sea.

Thus a change which, to be successful, would require the gradual education of the people for generations, is to be forced on at once; and "if const.i.tutional means are not sufficient to achieve our ambition, why not try what unconst.i.tutional means will do?"

NOTE 19

A SHAMELESS APPEAL.

Perhaps the most audacious defence of the enlistment by Hindu politicians of schoolboys and students in the service of a lawless propaganda occurs in an article in the _Bengalee_ of August 2, 1906, shamelessly appealing to the language of Christ. The _Bengalee_, which is published in English, is Mr. Surendranath Banerjee's organ:--

"In all great movements boys and young men play a prominent part, the divine message comes first to them; and they are persecuted and they suffer for their faith. 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me,'

are the words of the divinely-inspired Founder of Christianity; and the faith that is inseparable from childhood and youth is the faith which has built up great creeds and has diffused them through the world. Our boys and young men have been persecuted for their _Swadeshism_; and their sufferings have made _Swadeshism_ strong and vigorous."

_NOTE 20 (page_ 241).

THE BRAHMANS AND WESTERN EDUCATION.

The special caste grievances of Brahmans against Western education are very frankly set forth in a speech on "The Duties of Brahmans,"

delivered in Bombay at the beginning of this year to his fellow caste-men by Rao Sahib Joshi, a distinguished and very enlightened, member of the Yajurvidi Palshikar sept of Brahmans. Mr. Joshi, who laid great stress upon the duty of loyalty to the British _Raj_, began by recalling the patent conferred upon them by a British Governor of Bombay at the beginning of the eighteenth century for the protection of their privileges, especially in connexion with the teaching of medicine. But their community had gradually lost ground from various causes, and amongst those which he enumerated, he laid the chief stress upon the diffusion of secular education. He fully recognized the benefits of English education, but "all education being of a secular character, it made the new generation a cla.s.s of sceptics. People brought up with English ideas, and in the atmosphere of secular education, now began to pay less respect to their Gurus and hereditary priests. In former days when the Guru or head priest came to one's house people used to say:--'I bow down to the Guru; the Guru is Brahma, the Guru is Vishnu, the Guru is Shiwa; verily the Guru is the Sublime Brahma!' This idea, this respect the secular English education shattered to pieces, and so the income and importance of the hereditary priests dwindled down."

NOTE 21

FEMALE EDUCATION.

In his quinquennial review of the progress of education in India, Mr.

H.W. Orange quotes the following remarks by Mr. Sharp, Director of Public Instruction in Eastern Bengal, on the position of female education, adding that they describe the prevailing, if not quite universal, state of affairs:--

"All efforts to promote female education have hitherto encountered peculiar difficulties. These difficulties arise chiefly from the customs of the people themselves. The material considerations, which have formed a contributing factor in the spread of boys' schools, are inoperative in the case of girls. The natural and laudable desire for education as an end in itself, which is evinced by the upper and middle cla.s.ses as regards their sons, is no match for the conservative instincts of the Mahomedans, the system of early marriage among the Hindus, and the rigid seclusion of women which is a characteristic of both. These causes prevent any but the most elementary education from being given to girls.

The lack of female teachers and the alleged unsuitability of the curriculum, which is a.s.serted to have been framed more with a view to the requirements of boys than those of girls, form subsidiary reasons or excuses against more rapid progress. To these difficulties may be added the belief, perhaps more widely felt than expressed, that the general education of women means a social revolution, the extent of which cannot be foreseen. 'Indian gentlemen,' it has been well said, 'may thoroughly allow that when the process has been completed, the nation will rise in intelligence, in character and in all the graces of life. But they are none the less apprehensive that while the process of education is going on, while the lessons of emanc.i.p.ation are being learnt and stability has not yet been reached, while, in short, society is slowly struggling to adjust itself to the new conditions, the period of transition will be marked by the loosening of social ties, the upheaval of customary ways, and by prolonged and severe domestic embarra.s.sment.' There is, it is true, an advanced section of the community that is entirely out of sympathy with this view. In abandoning child-marriage they have got rid of the chief obstacle to female education; and it is among them, consequently, that female education has made proportionately the greatest progress in quant.i.ty and still more in quality. But outside this small and well-marked cla.s.s, the demand for female education is much less active and spontaneous.... In fact the people at large encourage or tolerate the education of their girls only up to an age and up to a standard at which it can do little good, or, according to their point of view, little harm."

NOTE 22

THE THEORY OF THE "DRAIN."

The Master of Elibank, then Under-Secretary of State, included in his Indian Budget speech on Aug. 5, 1909, a brief but effective refutation of the "drain" theory:--

"If the House will allow me, I wish to digress for a moment to deal with a charge that is constantly made, and has recently been repeated, to the effect that there is poverty in India which is largely due to the political and commercial drain on the country year by year, the political, it is a.s.serted, amounting to 30,000,000 and the commercial to 40,000,000. These figures have been placed even higher by those who wish to blacken the Indian Administration in order to bolster up a malicious agitation against this country. I think it is inc.u.mbent upon the representative of the Indian Government in this House to deal with the statement. I may at once say that it has no foundation in fact.

(Hear, hear.) Its origin is to be found, no doubt, in the fact that India makes annually considerable payments in England in return for services rendered, such as the loan of British capital; but there is no justification for describing these payments as a drain, and their amount is only a fraction of the figures which I have just quoted. Let me deal first with the question of amount. As the method by which India makes her payments in England is that she exports more than she imports, all calculations as to the amount of payments must necessarily be based on the returns of Indian trade, which show by how much the Indian exports exceed her imports. If the trade returns are examined for 1904, 1906, and 1906, after making due allowance for the capital sent to India in connexion with Government transactions, the average excess of exports over imports, or in other words payments by India to England for services rendered, is 23,900,000 per year during the three years that have been mentioned. This payment is made up of, first, 21,200,000, being the average annual amount of the Government remittance during three years, which corresponds to the alleged political drain of 30,000,000; and, secondly, 2,700,000, the average annual amount of private remittances during the same period, which total has been most carefully examined and corresponds to the alleged commercial drain of 40,000,000. Now let us examine for a moment the nature of these two remittances. The Government remittance is mainly for the payment of home charges--namely, those charges in England which are normally met from revenue. These charges, in the three years to which I have referred, averaged 18,250,000, made up in the following manner:--Interest on debt, 9,600,000; payments for stores, ordered and purchased in this country, which cannot be manufactured in India, 2,500,000; pensions and furlough pay to civil and military officers, 5,000,000; and miscellaneous, 1,250,000. It will thus be seen that alter deducting 5,000,000 for pensions and furlough pay, the bulk of the remittance represents interest for railway developments and other matters with which the interests of the peoples of India are intimately bound up.

Besides the home charges proper, certain sums were remitted to England by the Government to defray capital charges. These bring the Government remittances to the total of 21,200,000 already mentioned. Now let us turn for a moment to the supposed commercial drain of 40,000,000 per year, which, as I have endeavoured to show, is in reality 2,700,000, being the difference during the period referred to between the private remittances from India, representing private profits, savings, &c., sent home to England, and the private remittances to India representing the transmission of English capital to that country. We can therefore say definitely that whatever India may have sent to England within the three years, she received from England as capital a sum falling short of that amount by 2,700,000 a year; and perhaps I might incidentally remind the House that at the end of 1907 the capital outlay on railways alone in India amounted to 265,000,000 sterling, the bulk of which is British capital, but by no means represents the full amount of British capital invested in India, which has taken its part in commercially developing its resources and providing employment for the ma.s.ses of people in that great continent. Hon. members who have followed a recent discussion in the pages of the _Economist_ as to whether 300,000,000 or 500,000,000 was the amount of British capital invested in India for its commercial and industrial development and for providing employment of the people in that land, will agree that the sum could not be placed lower than 350,000,000."

NOTE 23

THE SECRETARY OF STATE AND THE VICEROY.

This issue was raised, for instance, during the Viceroyalty of Lord Northbrook, when Lord Salisbury was Secretary of State, Mr. Bernard Mallett's memoir of Lord Northbrook contains the following noteworthy remarks upon the subject by Lord Cramer, who, as Major Baring, was Private Secretary to Lord Northbrook:--

There can be no doubt that Lord Salisbury's idea was to conduct the government of India to a very large extent by private correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy. He was disposed to neglect and, I also think, to underrate the value of the views of the Anglo-Indian officials ... This idea inevitably tended to bring the Viceroy into the same relation to the Secretary of State for India as that in which an Amba.s.sador or Minister at a foreign Court stands to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs ... Lord Northbrook's general view was the exact opposite of all this, and I am strongly convinced that he was quite right ... He recognized the subordinate position of the Viceroy, but he held that Parliament had conferred certain rights not only on the Viceroy but on his Council which differentiated them in a very notable degree from subordinate officials such as those in the diplomatic service ... Lord Northbrook regarded the form of government in India as a very wise combination which enabled both purely English and Anglo-Indian experience to be brought to bear on the treatment of Indian questions. He did not by any means always follow the Indian official view; but he held strongly, in the first place, that to put aside that view and not to accord to the two Councils in London and Calcutta their full rights was unconst.i.tutional in this sense that, though the form might be preserved, the spirit of the Act of Parliament regulating the government of India would be evaded. In the second place, he held that for a Viceroy or a Secretary of State without Indian experience to overrule those who possessed such experience was an extremely unwise proceeding, and savoured of an undue exercise of that autocratic power of which he himself was very unjustly accused.

NOTE 24

THE DIFFICULTIES OF LOYAL HINDUS.

A Hindu gentleman who has taken a considerable part in the struggle against Brahmanical disloyalty and intolerance in the Deccan has sent me a copy of a letter addressed to the _Times of India_ in which he explains the peculiar difficulties with which loyal Hindus find themselves confronted:--

Englishmen hardly appreciate the true magnitude of the difficulties we have to contend with in any attempt to expose sedition. All the social forces that exist in Hindu society run counter to anti-Brahminical movements. The influence which the Brahmins exercise on the popular mind is still considerable. A man who is d.a.m.ned by the village-priest or the Brahmin kulkarni is doomed for good. Loyalty has been rendered odious to the ordinary mind by this as well as by many other influences. Loyalty is flattery. This is a dictum now almost universally recognized in the Deccan. A supporter of the Government is a "Johuk.u.m," a "hireling," or a "traitor." The Press has of late become sufficiently powerful to make or mar the reputation of a man so far as the native public is concerned.

Every advocate of Government measures--even of the best of them--is held up to ridicule by the Press. This is immediately reflected in the most exaggerated form in what we may call public opinion in the land.

Certainly very great courage is necessary in one who is called upon to bear calumny such as this from his society and his castemen. But there are other forces more threatening still. The rowdier section of the people never fails to hoot the man out on every possible occasion and even the women of his family may be subjected to indignities. The vakils are a very powerful cla.s.s in the Deccan. Many of them do not openly dabble in politics; but you can hardly find many among them who do not sympathize with extremist politics. The landholders, traders and agriculturists in general are always in need of the services or, as they think, of the favour of the legal profession whose prejudices will never be wounded by the cla.s.ses mentioned. The vakils, I may say, are to be propitiated by every one who wishes to conduct any public movement. But a loyal movement can never save itself from condemnation at the hands of this powerful cla.s.s.