FOOTNOTES:
[53] “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” p. 241. The whole of that most interesting book on village life in the United Provinces might be read in connection with this chapter.
[54] Mr. Theodore Morison thinks there is no evidence that famines are more frequent now than in the past, and he gives a summary of the very meagre records that have come down to us of eighteenth-century famines: ibid. chap. x.
[55] If paid in grain the ration is 2 lb. 4 oz. for a man, 1 lb. 12 oz. for a woman, 1 lb. 4 oz. for a child.
[56] For the figures at the last census and the division of occupations, see “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” chap. i.
[57] Indian Financial Statement, 1908-9, p. 4.
[58] “England’s Administration of India” (1907); the author, besides describing minutely the growing poverty of small officials, etc., with fixed incomes, dwells on the dyspepsia and ill-health from overstrain and unwholesome hours introduced by English habits, but especially on the increasing devastation of malaria.
[59] For the condition of the landless class, see “The Industrial Organization, etc.,” p. 191, where Mr. Morison, commenting on Mr. Crooke’s Report of 1888, also comes to the conclusion that the average value of a labourer’s wage is now about 2 annas (2d.).
[60] William Crooke’s “Enquiry into the Economic Condition of the Agricultural and Labouring Classes in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh,” 1888: quoted by Mr. Morison, ibid., p. 179.
[61] Sir William Wedderburn has discussed these and similar problems in his “Note on Sir Antony MacDonnell’s Famine Report of 1901,” and in many other pamphlets.
CHAPTER XVI
The Arya Samaj
It was evening service, at the hour when sunset is still bright, but if you stare into the sky, you suddenly see the stars. A few score of boys and young men were gathered round a small square pit, in which a fire of dry sticks was burning with a yellow flame. They were dressed in long cotton cloths of yellow or white, and, sitting in rows, they chanted the ancient Vedic hymns in praise of God, with the peculiar intervals and nasal quaverings of the East. In their midst, by the edge of the pit, sat their Guru, or teacher, and from time to time he ladled clarified butter into the fire, while youths from each of the other sides of the square threw in handfuls of rice and fragrant woods or herbs. Meantime the chanting never ceased, but with a concentrated vehemence all raised to the air the eternal Sanscrit words, revealed to the Aryan race before recorded history, so that they might never be devoid of the holiest wisdom, but bear it with them across mountains of ice and over sunburnt plains to the furthest world. At the end, all stood up for the final evening hymn, and then dispersed, leaving the fire burning as a symbol of man’s soul, and of the divine power, and of the transfiguration of the spirit by flame and purity.
That form of worship is celebrated every morning and evening by all Vedic believers, whether assembled or alone. But I saw it first at one of the students’ homes in Lahore, where a branch of the Arya Samaj, or Aryan Society, has a school and an “Anglo-Vedic College,” numbering about 1800 members together. Lala Lajpat Rai sat next me, for it was to this branch that he had devoted all his labours for social and religious reform, till injustice drove him to turn aside into politics from the true objects of the Samaj. I speak of a branch because, like most vital movements, the Samaj is divided into parties, one holding its services inside the crowded old city itself, the other just outside the ancient walls. As usually happens, the two parties in the religion have split on unessential points, for which they are prepared to die, though not to kill. But both claim to follow the doctrines of their founder, Dayananda Saraswati, who quitted this stage of existence at Ajmere in 1883, after a wandering life of holy poverty given up entirely to the denunciation of idols, caste restrictions, animal sacrifices, licentious rites, the multiplicity of deities, and other accretions with which frail humanity has surrounded the stern purity of the Vedic revelation.
Leaving his home as an outcast rather than submit to the carnal marriage tie, Dayananda spent sixteen years of youth and early manhood in walking from one holy place of Northern India to another. Sometimes he passed into Kashmir, thrice he crossed the snow mountains into Thibet, and, hungry for wisdom, he sought everywhere for the teacher at whose feet he might enjoy it. At last he found wisdom near at hand, in those very scriptures on which he had meditated day and night, and full of reforming zeal he turned to Benares and other seats of religious learning where he might confute the Pundits, whose obscure minds darkened the hard radiance of God’s Sanscrit word. In city after city public debates were held before immense audiences, Dayananda in solitary knowledge opposing the priestly hostility of all the teachers combined, while as a rule, the local representative of the British Empire was invited to take the chair and see fair play, or award the prize in subtleties of theological controversy. The latter was a task for which our public-school education does not specially adapt us, but as a rule the British representative was spared the difficulty of metaphysical decision by the Pundits themselves, who violently broke up the meeting under consciousness of defeat. Perhaps unhappily for his cause, Dayananda did not confine himself to the purgation of Hindu superstitions and social abuses, but was equally vehement in his attacks upon the unworthy additions and compromises that have gathered round Christianity and Islam; and to his success in interrupting the process of conversion among Hindus we may trace the marked hostility with which Christian and Mohammedan missionaries have always regarded the Samaj.[62]
The first branch of the society was established in Bombay by Dayananda himself in 1875, but its real strength now lies in the Punjab and United Provinces, in both of which together it numbers about 250,000 members. The two parties into which the Samaj in Lahore is to some extent divided, as I said, both unite in rejecting idols, and in condemning the seclusion or “purdah” of women, the dangerous prerogatives of the priesthood, and all restrictions of caste, except such rights and obligations as are the due of character or intellect. Both unite in maintaining the unity of God, the eternal trinity of God, Soul, and Matter, and the universal wisdom revealed for all races in the Vedas. The differences that divide them are, perhaps, rather of temperament than of doctrine. The party that worships in the city claims to be more democratic in its appeal, to be stricter in life and discipline, but at the same time freer from “purdah”; and, indeed, its women are allowed to attend divine service in a gallery unveiled, while the women of the other party have a service to themselves, with a woman preacher, whose sermons I was, unhappily, unable to attend. The city party has been called the Culture Section, in which name, I think, there lies a covert sneer. But it briskly retaliated by calling the suburban party the Vulture Section, in which the sneer is not covert at all, but palpably due to a backsliding from vegetarianism.
Not that the extra-mural party itself dreams of backsliding. It only aims at progress and increasing freedom in social life; for, like other great movements of religious reform, it maintains that the kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink. The differences, in fact, have never been serious, though a few years ago there was the same tender hostility as used to prevail between Newton Hall and Lamb’s Conduit Street, when Positivists turned their criticism from Christians to each other. But of late persecution, which makes all its victims friends, has brought them together again, and few of the outside world are now aware of any division. It was the deportation of Lajpat Rai that gave the final touch to reconcilement. That a man of austere and generous life, one who had given up great worldly success for the service of the poor and unlearned, should be spirited away without warning and without trial for venturing to criticize official injustice—that was the touch to kindle the indignant fire which welds men into one.
Lajpat Rai was one of those men into whose soul the wrongs of their people enter. By nature averse from politics, he devoted himself to those deeper questions which lie beyond the touch of governments good or bad, and it was not till he was forty that the decisive change came. It is true that he joined the Congress movement in 1888, within two or three years of its beginning; but no one has more severely criticized the Congress and its methods—its unwieldy size, its holiday aspect, its failure to touch the poverty and ignorance of India, and its mistaken confidence in the power of speeches and resolutions for the redress of political wrongs.[63]
It was significant of his strength of character and indifference to popularity, that after the breach in the Surat Congress, he gave his immense influence to the Moderate party, and declared he would fight under the old banner, as I have described. But it was still more characteristic that, when the Congress had vanished, he remained in Surat for the Social and Swadeshi Conferences, and organized a famine-relief fund there, just as if nothing had happened.
Deeper things than can be reached by Government or speeches have occupied his life. Born at Jaguran, in the district of Ludhiana, where his father taught Persian and Urdu, he became a student at the Government College in Lahore, and a Pleader in the Courts there just at the time when the Arya Samaj was engaged in its earliest struggle for religious and social reform.
Lala Lajpat Rai.
Photo by P. Girdhar Roy & Sons, Lahore.
[Face p. 296.
Under the influence of Hans Raj, now the Principal of the Anglo-Vedic College, a direct and silent man of similar austerity and devotion of life, he joined the Samaj and threw himself into its conflict against idol-worship, child-marriage, girl-widowhood, caste subdivisions, and the other abuses of orthodox Hinduism. Poverty, ignorance, and famine appeared to him the chief outward and visible evils of his country, and for many years, in the intervals of heavy professional work, he lived the life of what one would call a philanthropist, if the word had not gathered round it the inhuman associations of charity. He directed orphanages, superintended education, helped to found Swadeshi banks and mills long before Swadeshi became a political weapon; he administered famine funds—with a side-glance at the unhappy “famine Christians,” the Samajists say he rescued thousands of souls from famine and conversion—and one of his great achievements was the relief of the destitute in the Kangra valley after the terrible earthquake of 1905.
But I think that year marked a change. So far, beyond attending the Congress and publishing two vernacular pamphlets on Mazzini and Garibaldi—dangerous themes, I admit, for a member of any subject race—his action had not been political. In that year he went to England, like Mr. Gokhale, to represent the cause of Indian reform, and he also visited America. It so happened that he found England on the verge of the greatest Liberal revival. She appeared to have awakened from the ten years’ incubus of reaction and Imperialistic misgovernment. Hopes of reform went hand in hand with hatred of oppression. He noticed the movements of the unemployed, the devotion of passive resisters, the sympathies with oppressed nationalities, the rapid recovery from the fever of the Boer war. He noticed that even on such a question as bringing the trams across the bridges the Lords were threatened with a revolution in the ordering of the State.[64] The same spirit of freedom appeared to be at work in other parts of the world—in Ireland, Japan, Egypt, Persia, and especially in Russia. It was natural that the ideal of winning for his own people a true share in the government of their country should be strengthened.
Unhappily, Lajpat Rai also observed in England that the people were too much occupied with the overwhelming problems confronting themselves to pay close attention to a subject so distant and abstruse as Indian reform. He observed that in English politics the cause of justice had no chance unless it were made a party question, and the Liberal Party refused to make Indian reform a party question, because, while it did not move the people at large, it touched too many important interests. As to the upper classes, he found, as Ruskin had found long before, that “every mutiny, every danger, every crime occurring under our Indian legislation arose directly out of our native desire to live on the loot of India.” Only from the Irish and Labour Parties did his mission receive any real encouragement, and, owing to the executive weakness of those two parties, he concluded—one may still hope too hastily—that any appeal to the justice and benevolence of Great Britain as represented by her Parliament was vain:—
“You can at times,” he wrote, “successfully appeal to the humanity and benevolence of individuals, but to hope for justice and benevolence from a nation is hoping against hope. The rule of a foreign democracy is, in this respect the most dangerous. The democracy is swayed by so many diverse interests that it is impossible to expect anything like unanimity or even a preponderance of opinion in dealing justly with a subject race, because justice to a subject race often clashes with the interest of some class of the ruling democracy. Whenever an attempt is made to do justice to the subject race, that class rises up, raises a storm, and prevents the Government from doing the right thing. Look at the history of the cotton duties in India, and every one will see the truth of this. How many times has the Government of India been overruled in the matter, simply because the Home Government cannot afford to risk the opposition of Lancashire and incur its displeasure!”[65]
He returned to India convinced that the political as well as the social salvation of the country rested only with the Indian peoples themselves. As to means, he looked to anything that would promote political knowledge, courage, and self-reliance. At one time he seems to have contemplated a kind of Teaching Order, something like Mr. Gokhale’s “Servants of India.”
“Where are the political thinkers of the country,” he cried, “whose sole thought by day and night, sleeping or waking, would be how to initiate and carry on the struggle for freedom? Where are the political Sanyasis (wandering friars) whose sole work in life would be the preaching of the gospel of freedom? Were are the Vaishyas of the movement who will make money only for the struggle: who will live poorly and modestly and save every farthing for the sacred cause?... Where are the people who will raise agitation for political rights and liberty to the dignity of a Church and will live and die for the same?”[66]
He believed that the only way to win the consideration of England for reforms was to prove the determination and self-reliance of the Indians themselves.
“The British are not a spiritual people,” he said. “They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of the higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant, haughty people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.”[67]
In a yielding disposition, a false prudence, a distrust of enthusiasm and energy, he found the real dangers of the Indian temperament.
“Our whole life from top to bottom smacks of fear,” he wrote, “deadly fear of losing in the estimation of those whom we in our heart of hearts believe to be only usurpers; fear of losing the sunshine of the smile of those whom we believe to be day and night engaged in the exploitation of our country and the spoliation of our people, fear of offending the false gods that have by fraud or force taken possessions of our bodies and souls, fear of being shut up in a dungeon or prison house, as if the freedom that we enjoy were not by its own nature one to be abhorred.”[68]
He was soon in his own person to prove the sincerity of his creed. The condition of the Punjab during 1907 was particularly deplorable. For thirteen years scarcity had prevailed almost without intermission in the south of the province, and the increasing poverty was only relieved by the hideous mortality of the plague. Just before Lajpat Rai’s deportation, the official record of deaths from plague in the Punjab alone rose to nearly 65,000 in one week, and the real number was almost certainly higher. On the top of hunger and plague, which we piously call the visitations of God, came the visitations of the Government in a largely increased revenue assessment, increased irrigation rates, the Colonization Bill threatening to break a solemn promise made by Government to the Chenab settlers fifteen years before, and the refusal of the Lieutenant-Governor to take any steps against the leading Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore for a series of abusive articles against Indians, whilst Indian papers were prosecuted and condemned for articles containing certainly no greater incitement to racial animosity.[69] The feeling in the Punjab became intensely embittered. Local riots occurred at Lahore and Rawal Pindi. Anglo-Indian journalists remembered that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Mutiny. Strange precautions were taken. English people took refuge in the forts. In the haggard element of fear anything may assume a terrifying shape, and without trial or charge or warning, the most prominent member of the Arya Samaj was seized, and sent to Mandalay.[70]
It was all a little ironic, this treatment of a sad, retiring, clear-minded man, seeking neither advantage nor fame—one who had freely given up his possessions, and worked for many years unknown at the humblest duties. When I was at Peshawar, I ventured to ask one in authority why a man of such high reputation as Lajpat Rai should have been selected for attack, and in defence of the Punjab Government, he said: “You see, it was just because he was so good that they fired him. If he had been a rotter, they could have left him alone.” I think it was as fine a compliment as any political offender could hope for.
But it was not entirely for his personal excellence that the Punjab Government struck at Lajpat Rai, nor for the wide influence of his decisive eloquence. It was because they hoped to strike the Arya Samaj at the same time. The authorities in Northern India, always timid and suspicious owing to the neighbourhood of the Frontier and the more warlike character of the peoples, had long regarded the Samaj with special enmity. I have known a soldier, with papers of the highest character, turned out of a Sikh regiment admittedly for belonging to the Samaj. Much of this suspicion arises from false information, such as is always supplied to officials who remain isolated from the surrounding people. The editor of the Hindustan, for instance, who had recently been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, was described as a graduate of the Anglo-Vedic College, though he had hardly been there a month, and owed the rest of his training to a Christian Mission School. In the same way young Ajit Singh, who was deported on suspicion of tampering with the native troops, was described as a prominent Samajist, though he had never belonged to the Samaj at all. Some members of the Society have turned to politics, because for the moment the attraction is irresistible for many generous minds, and at such a time, as Disraeli said in “Sybil,” “to be young and to be indifferent are no longer synonymous.” But the Samaj as such has no concern with politics.
An Arya Samaj Teacher.
[Face p. 304.
It is a religious body—a Universal Church—bent only on religious purification and the training of youth in accordance with Vedic rules. One can understand the opposition of orthodox Hindus, Mohammedans, and Christian missionaries, for in its religious propaganda the Samaj is distinctly militant and gathers in many converts. But the Indian Government is mistaken in regarding it as a centre of sedition. The leaders of both sections—such men as Hans Raj, Principal of the Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore, and Lala Munshi Rama, Governor of the Gurukula, near Hardwar—have steadily set their faces against political work of any sort, and they discourage political discussion among the students as strictly as the Risley Circular. It is useless, they say, to look for the political regeneration of India while the character and intellect of the people are unregenerate. I do not agree with them, believing, as I do, that political freedom is essential for any regeneration of the national spirit. But to accuse the Samaj of political aims, to grasp at any forgery or lie which seeks to implicate the Society in sedition, are only signs of ignorance fixed in its isolation among a subject race. In the summer of 1907, Lala Munshi Rama wrote a detailed defence of the Samaj on this point in the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore—a defence so just and reasonable that even the Gazette, conspicuous among Anglo-Indian papers for the virulence of its anti-Indian feeling, described the “dignity of this deeply pondered vindication” as commanding respect. In one passage he said:—
“It is an awful responsibility which these people undertake who try to set the Government against the Arya Samaj, a Society which is trying its best to uproot some of the evils of intemperance, of impurity, of child-marriage, of polygamy, of gambling, and a host of other vices—why, it is the Arya Samajists whom you find in the foremost rank of workers in the field.”
Six or seven years ago—in 1901 or early 1902—the writer of that protest cleared a large open space in a pleasant jungle where in a single day I have still seen many deer and monkeys, many wild boars and jackals, the bone-strewn home of a tigress with cubs, the spoor of a huge elephant, wild peacocks perching in the trees, and nearly all the other delights of Eden, except Eve. A few miles away the holy Ganges issues from the foot of the Himalayas into the great Indian plain, and there stands the holy town of Hardwar, goal of great pilgrimages and pitch of many religious beggars, who keep with them deformed cows and other holy monsters to move the hearts of worshippers to pity. On the open space in the jungle a quadrangle of tin-roofed buildings has been raised to be a Vedic school and future college. Over its gateway floats a red banner, inscribed with the sacred symbol of “Om,” and its Brahmacharya, or holy discipline, follows the lines laid down by primeval revelation.
Those lines are Spartan, or, at least, Platonic. The boys are admitted at eight, and their parents take a solemn pledge not to remove them or allow their marriage till they are twenty-five, the lowest age fixed for a man’s marriage by the Vedic Scriptures. During these sixteen years the Brahmacharies, or disciples, do not go home, nor are they allowed to write letters or receive them; but their parents may visit them once a month, and do, in fact, visit them about twice a year. The great occasion for these visits is the school anniversary, which happens to be St. Patrick’s Day, when over sixty thousand Samajists come, including many thousands of women, and encamp on the edge of the jungle in grass and wicker huts, which were being prepared for them during my stay in the school. Unlike the parents who come to see their sons on speech-days at our public-schools, the pilgrim visitors bring their own supplies, and they generally stay three days, that being all of family life the boys ever know. And that is all they know of woman’s society, too, for it is, as I said, an Eveless Paradise.
A Street in Hardwar.
Hardwar Strand.
[Face p. 306.
Such isolation in the midst of our common and intermingled world is, perhaps, dangerous. It comes too near the inhuman monotony of workhouse schools. It is likely to exaggerate the desires and curiosity of growing men, or to produce the hesitation of bashful and secluded lives when confronted with the need for action. The entire removal of home influence might appear harsh if we did not remember the scores of men whom we have known ruined by their parents’ vulgarity or their mothers’ indulgence. But even if we grant that most parents are quite unfit to bring up children, sixteen years seems too long for any boy to remain in the same place, with the same teachers and the same companions. Even the holiday excursions to historic cities of India, which are arranged by the Governor, and usually conducted by him, do not sufficiently break up the one-sidedness of such a life; and think of the boy who is genuinely unfitted for school and is compelled to remain unhappy for a quarter of man’s existence!
Mr. Rama Deva, the young and highly educated head-master of the school, and the other masters as well, met my scruples by urging that in India the home influence is almost invariably dangerous or softening. They said their only hope of preserving the boys from child-marriage, maternal ignorance, and the evil of cities lay in this monastic seclusion. In place of parents they have a few Superintendents—about one to every twenty-five of the 220 boys then in the school—who live with each class day and night, except during school hours. The greatest difficulty of the school is to find Superintendents worthy and willing, and I should have thought it impossible. The three oldest boys in the top form have rooms to themselves and no Superintendent. All sleep on plank beds, but are allowed a warm covering in winter. All dress in yellow “dhotis” (long cotton cloths) for schooltime, and in white “dhotis” for play. They are allowed wooden sandals, held on by a peg between the toes, but nearly all go barefoot, and with feet and legs bare they ride bareback and play cricket, football, and an Indian form of prisoners’ base. The school belongs to the Culture Section of the Arya Samaj, and is so violently vegetarian that I was not allowed to approach the buildings in boots of murdered leather.
The boys get up at four in the morning, and attend Divine service round the symbolic fire. Having taken the vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity for sixteen years at their entrance, when two of those vows can mean very little to them, they are further taught to speak the truth, to practise concentrated contemplation for a period of every day, and to subdue passion by the “yoga” of deep breathing and holding the breath. They bathe in cold water before sunrise, they climb the steep jungle mountains near, and all learn swimming in the Ganges. Almost the only form of punishment is exclusion from the games. The school hours run to about seven, divided into two parts, and the chief subject taught is Sanscrit. There are the other ordinary subjects—arithmetic and mathematics, history, science, and English—and, unlike the Government schools, all teaching is given in the vernacular Hindi, so that the boys understand the subjects better, and can cover more ground, whereas in ordinary schools the learning is continually hampered by the foreign tongue. But the chief means of education is Sanscrit, just as in my old school it was Greek. At least seven years are spent in getting that amazing Sanscrit grammar off by heart, and in learning to read the Vedas. Whether the Sanscrit literature is worth all that, I cannot say; we spent much the same time over Greek, and it was well worth it to about one in twenty. But in all the upper forms, though none of the boys had yet approached the full age, they could already read and write Sanscrit as fluently as a mother tongue, and that is more than any of us ever did with Greek.
But the subject taught never matters much. The thing that does matter is the manner of teaching, and nearly all the schools and colleges I visited in India had the one common fault, that they tried to force knowledge into the mind by giving information. They treated the mind as a passive vessel to be filled through the channel of the ears. The method was by lecture, not by dialectic, and I at least have never learnt anything by being lectured. If the officials wish to reform our system of education in India, here, at the very basis of teaching, is where they might begin. They will find they are far too late if they hope to stifle the national aspiration for liberty by excluding the study of our own history and the works of Western thinkers. Those are plants that we ourselves have generously set in India, and they are too deep-rooted to be pulled up now. But to transform the ordinary teaching into real education would be a change indeed.
The Gurukula (the word means The Master’s Home) that I have been describing takes no Government grant, and submits to no Government inspection; nor is it affiliated to a Government University, like the Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore. In the boarding houses of the Anglo-Vedic School and College a pupil’s total expenses come to 20 or 25 rupees a month. In the Gurukula the parents pay 10 rupees a month (£8 a year) for the complete education, including clothes, food, games, and all. But the cost for each boy is really about £15 a year, and the deficit is made up by the subscriptions of the Samajists. Fifteen pounds a year is a great deal for a poverty-stricken country like India, but I wish our public schools did not cost ten times as much. In the great Government school and college for Mohammedans at Aligarh the Principal told me the parents paid from 20 to 40 rupees a month according to the boy’s room (£16 to £32 a year). But that is a home of luxury, and I believe the money required to keep a son there often amounts to £45 or even £50 a year, as much as a third of the payment at one of our own public schools.
In the Gurukula.
[Face p. 310.