FOOTNOTES:
[1] For an eye-witness’s account see “The Great Famine,” by Mr. Vaughan Nash, at that time correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (Longmans: 1900).
[2] The revenue from salt in 1907-8 was £3,336,900 against £4,362,706 in 1906-7, but the consumption of salt went up in 1907-8 to 44,289,000 maunds, compared to an average of 36,445,000 maunds for the ten previous years.
[3] “Lord Curzon in India;” selection from his speeches; with Introduction, by Sir Thomas Raleigh. Pp. 142, 143.
[4] “Lord Curzon in India,” pp. 491, 498-9.
[5] Figures in Lord Curzon’s Proclamation of July 19, 1905.
[6] “Lord Midleton, the Secretary of State at that time, made a reference to the Partition of Bengal in one of his telegrams which undoubtedly led to the inference in that country that that measure had been thrown as a sop to soothe my wounded feelings rather than on grounds of political propriety or expediency.”—Lord Curzon in the House of Lords, June 30, 1908.
[7] “Lord Curzon in India,” p. 564.
CHAPTER I
A Servant of India
It was the Indian festival of Diwali, held at Poona on Guy Fawkes’ Day, and celebrated with innumerable flames, like our own thanksgiving for the protection of King and Parliament. But, in feeling, the Diwali comes nearer to Christmastide, for it has no political significance, and the flames are not lighted as a defiance to the Pope of Rome, but in honour of Lakshmi, the goddess of family prosperity, who provides wealth sufficient for us, and holds a baby to the breast above her heart.
So brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, cousins to the tenth removal, were gathered together in the joy of a kinship that regards the smallest trace of common blood as absolute and unquestioned claim to lifelong support under a common roof. No Workhouse or Industrial School for them! As long as one of the kin has pancakes and a cow, there is always a certainty of a crumb and a sup of milk all round. In honour of such riches and family love, the ceilings of the rooms and the verandahs fluttered with pink and yellow flags; the windows and doors were hung with festoons of orange marigolds on a string; upon the entrance pavement neat patterns in whitewash were drawn by hand-rollers; and, as the streets turned blue with evening, the children, draped in all the gorgeous crimsons and golds their mothers could afford, lighted the tiny oil lamps on window-sill and doorstep, or threw the spurting fires under the very noses of sacred bulls that wander for their living from shop to shop. To be sure, other helpful powers beside Lakshmi have a share in the honour (for who can tell under which form he loves God best?), and it is the temples of Durga and Vishnu, of Siva and Parvati, lady of the far-off mountain snow, that make the sacred hill of Parbati outside the city sparkle like an illuminated birthday cake, for at least one night during the Diwali feast of brotherhood.
A Street in Poona.
[Face p. 32.
The sad thing was that in the beautiful streets where Mahratta nobles had built their simple palaces under the Peshwas a century ago, many of the houses now stood dark and empty, in terror of the plague. Hardly eleven years had passed since the pestilence first appeared, imported from Hongkong as people thought, and in those eleven years it had killed nearly six millions of India’s inhabitants. Six millions out of three hundred millions may not sound very much; it is only two in every hundred spread over eleven years. But the loss was not equally distributed, and when I was told that within those eleven years the inhabitants of Poona had been reduced to nearly one-third, I knew why so many homes were dark on a night of lamps and family affection. At the time, the plague was striking down from twelve to fifteen, or at the highest twenty, so that its visitation was regarded as light. But I remember the panic when a single case was reported in London, or even at the more comfortable distance of Marseilles, and so it was natural to find that many families had gone to live on selected open spaces outside the city. There among rocks and withered grass they kindled their little lamps and celebrated family joy in any hut of wicker, matting, canvas, petroleum tins, old boxes, boards, or branches which they and the Imperial Government could manage to rig up between them. Many shopmen had even transferred their little stores of grain, sweets, and cottons to this countrified scene, and the general effect was like a scrappy Derby Day without the races.
Having crossed a bridge, to the left of which thin columns of smoke still rose from the smouldering bodies of yesterday’s dead, I passed through one of these Health Camps, as official language fondly calls them, and found before me a partly finished building of solid stone—unfinished, but with something already monastic and grave in its straight-roofed hall and line of cloistral habitations. It was the rising home of the “Servants of India Society,” and in front of his own small house the founder and “First Member” of the Society was standing to receive me.
Mr. Gopal Krishna Gokhale is one of the very few Indians whose name is known in England to a certain number of people outside the score or two that pay attention to Indian affairs. Born a Mahratta Brahman of the highest caste and of ordinary poverty in the small town of Kolhapur, he threw away the caste and retained the poverty. While a student at the Elphinstone College in Bombay, he came under the influence of Justice Ranade, also a Mahratta Brahman and judge of the High Court, famous already for social reform, and at that time combining with others to establish the National Congress, which held its first meeting in 1885. Mr. Gokhale had taken his degree the year before. Lord Ripon had just left the country, honoured and regretted among Indians as no other Viceroy has been, and the air was full of schemes for political emancipation under the favour and encouragement of British statesmen. Among the reformers of that time, when all were moderate, Ranade was distinguished for moderation, and when Mr. Gokhale in his student days chose him as his “guru,” or spiritual guide, he fixed for life his own characteristics of moderation, and a certain sweet reasonableness, not only of manner, but of aim.
Mr. Gokhale and Servants of India.
[Face p. 34.
It is common to say of a dead politician that he was devoted heart and soul to the service of his country, and, happily, it is sometimes true, even though that devoted service has been crowned by honours, fame, and riches. But of Mr. Gokhale who is still alive, I would say that for every day of his manhood he has had no motive but his country’s service, from the day of his appointment on a salary of £60 a year as teacher of history and economics at the Fergusson College in Poona up to his retirement in 1902 on a pension of £20 a year, and onward through the last six years of labour, vilification, and heated controversy. Not a great speaker, and making no attempt at emotional eloquence at a time when oratory counted for much more in India than it does now—a man who has never even contemplated any popular arts except his own inevitable politeness, he has won his influence upon his country’s future simply by unreserved devotion and integrity of life. At a moment of intense excitement during the plague riots in Poona, when Mr. Rand and Lieut. Ayerst were shot by Damodar Chapekar and his brothers as they drove into the city from Government House (June 22, 1897), he, being then in England, published charges against the method of plague-observation by British soldiers, which on his return he discovered were not supported by the promised evidence, and he offered an open apology to Lord Sandhurst and the Army. Amidst an infuriated public opinion, which believed the charges to be not only true, but below the truth, few could have lived down such a retractation. But Mr. Gokhale lived it down.
When the National Congress met at Benares in December, 1905, just after the partition of Bengal, he was elected President as the safest guide in a crisis of extreme difficulty and increasing indignation. Mr. John Morley had just received his appointment to the India Office, and a few lines from Mr. Gokhale’s presidential address may be quoted to show the hopes and fears of the time:—
“Large numbers of educated men in this country feel towards Mr. Morley as towards a Master, and the heart hopes and yet trembles. He, the reverent student of Burke, the disciple of Mill, the friend and biographer of Gladstone, will he courageously apply their principles and his own to the government of this country, or will he too succumb to the influences of the India Office, and thus cast a blight on hopes which his own writings have done so much to foster? In any case his appointment indicates how favourable to our cause the attitude of the new Ministry is.”
For two or three years past Mr. Gokhale had represented the Presidency of Bombay as one of the elected Indians upon the Viceroy’s Legislative Council, and when I first met him at Poona, as I have described, he had just returned from the Council at Simla, in which the Seditious Meetings Bill was approved.[8] Before the Viceroy and the rest of the British majority, he had opposed the Bill with a restrained but overwhelming plea for the common rights of freedom, as English people understand them. In one significant passage, after referring to “the malignant activity of certain unscrupulous correspondents” who had recently been trying to lash the British public into a panic by false versions of events and private utterances, he added:—
“The saddest part of the whole thing is that the Secretary of State for India has fallen a victim to these grievous misrepresentations. Possessing no personal knowledge of the people of this country, and overwhelmed with a sense of the vast responsibilities of his office, he has allowed his vision to be obscured, and his sense of proportion to be warped. From time to time he has let fall ominous hints in the House of Commons, and more than once he has spoken as though some great trouble were brewing in India and the country were on the eve of a dark disaster. My Lord, in these circumstances the passing of a Bill like the present, and in such hot haste, is bound to have the effect of confirming the false impression which has been already created in England, and this cannot fail to intensify and deepen still further the sense of injustice and injury, and the silent resentment with which my countrymen have been watching the course of events during the last few months.”
Here, on the edge of the rocky country west of Poona, close beside the Fergusson College for Indians, with which he had been so long connected, he had laid the foundation of his “Servants of India Society” two years before, and in the two-roomed cells about a dozen Knights of the Order were already living. They were men prepared, in the language of the Society’s rules, “to devote their lives to the cause of the country in a religious spirit, and to promote, by all constitutional means, the national interests of the Indian people.” The object of the Society is to train the Servants as national missionaries, ready to visit any part of India at the order of the First Member and Council, in the hope of creating a deep and passionate love of the country, organizing political teaching, promoting goodwill among the different races, assisting education, especially of women, and raising the people who live below even the lowest caste.
Each Servant of India remains under close training for five years, but out of the five years he spends two in visiting various parts of India, so as to know the people’s needs at first hand. Even when his novitiate is complete, he is required to live two months every year in the Headquarters, and, like the Monastic Orders, all the members take vows—to give their best to the service of the country; to earn no money for themselves and seek no personal advantage; to regard all Indians as brothers, without distinction of caste or creed; to engage in no personal quarrel; and to lead a pure personal life. In this Order, as in other similar societies throughout India, there is a growing tendency to celibate consecration, like the Roman priesthood’s. But the last vow does not exclude marriage. In fact, there is a provision that every member under training shall have his personal expenses borne by the Society, but be granted £2 a month for his family, if he has one, and that after his novitiate the full member shall bear the expenses of himself and family out of a grant of £3 6s. 8d. (Rs. 50) a month, with an extra allowance for the insurance of each child as it comes.
The merely learned side of the Order is represented by a large library, already containing rows on rows of the many great books that Indians and Englishmen have written on India, together with a selection from the history of liberty in all countries. That is the library’s distinction. Beginning with England herself, and passing right down the glorious roll to the Russia of 1905, it has here collected the long record of man’s gradual and hard-won conquest of freedom.
Social reform is certainly one side of the Society’s work. To free the laborious peoples of India from the bondage they lay on themselves in harassing ritual, immature marriages, exclusion from life’s decencies of some fifty millions, who eat dead animals and think they commit mortal sin if their shadow touches a Brahman—to free the common people gradually from these obsolete ways, and to spread among them the first inkling of knowledge, for which the Government does not yet afford the money—these are objects common to most Indian reformers, and natural under the tradition of Ranade. Such purposes are missionary in the ordinary sense, like the efforts of our missionary societies or university settlements. Only those who are dubious about all missionary efforts could criticize them. I am dubious myself, only because no one has ever deliberately missionized me without driving me further into sin, if only as a relief from his presence. For I keep in my mind that saying of Thoreau’s:—
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts, called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear I should get some of his good done to me—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
But I think the cause of all this peril and terror really lies, not in the good that might be done to myself, but in a certain disintegration in the missionary nature, an over-maturity or staleness of virtue that rots the good before I get it. If it were possible for the missionary spirit to move on the same insecure plane of pitfalls with me, unconscious of any salutary purpose beyond its own difficult salvation, one might possibly escape its virus without running in the opposite direction.
That is why the frankly political side of the Society is so welcome. Politics, being less intimate to the soul, appear less dangerous for a teacher than social reform or philanthropy, in which some kind of moral or class superiority is nearly always assumed. Regarding the Society’s attitude towards the British Government, I had better quote from its own little book of rules:—
“Its members frankly accept the British connection, as ordained, in the inscrutable dispensation of Providence, for India’s good. Self-government on the lines of the English colonies is their goal. This goal, they recognize, cannot be attained without years of earnest and patient work and sacrifice worthy of the cause.”
Many have smiled over that “inscrutable dispensation of Providence.” Naturally, I took it for irony myself, though I felt that irony was out of tune with the Society’s regulations. But it is not irony. Mr. Gokhale’s nature is too direct, his purpose too simple in its intensity, for the ironic bypaths.
I was dining that night with such of the Servants of India as had not gone home for the family festival. Mr. Paranjbye was there too—Senior Wrangler of his year, Fellow of St. John’s, present Head of the Fergusson College close by, famous among European mathematicians, and almost tolerated in the Anglo-Indian society of Poona for his skill at lawn tennis. Mr. Kelkar had come as well—editor of the Mahratta, a leader in the Extremist camp, Mr. Tilak’s vigilant captain. And a few more Brahmans and others sat with us, not too sacrificial in purity to eat beside a carnivorous European. That “inscrutable dispensation” was discussed amid laughter, but Mr. Gokhale retained his accustomed serenity. He had written the words with entire seriousness. The dispensations of Providence were inscrutable, but still he believed the British connection was ordained for India’s good. It had secured various things which any one could count, but above all it had instilled into the Indian nature a love of freedom and a self-assertion against authority that Indians used to lack, but English people often possess in enviable abundance.
I remember quoting the common opinion that Anglo-Indians have lost sympathy with Indians because they no longer make India their home, but keep one eye on England and are always on the flit. But Mr. Gokhale disagreed. He thought it an advantage that fewer English people now settled in the country. The fairly permanent residents, like shopkeepers and planters, were as a rule the worst mannered and most domineering, and they took hardly any part in public life. The standard of manners in general, he thought, had gone down. It might be that, in old days, the Englishman found it easier to be sympathetic with natives whom he could treat as dear good things. But educated Indians had come to detest such sympathy as only fit for pet animals, and both races were beginning to notice the change. For his part, he thought that since Lord Ripon left India in 1884, the type of Englishman that came out had slowly been declining.
“It is unfortunate,” he said, “that our Congress movement should have coincided with the past twenty-two years of violent reaction and Imperialism in England. You can hardly imagine how intolerable our life became at the time of the Boer war. The insolence of Anglo-Indian papers, like the Englishman or the Civil and Military Gazette towards our people goes beyond all bounds. Yet the Civil and Military Gazette, which is the worst offender, has only received a mild remonstrance from the Lieut.-Governor of the Punjab, while the editors of Indian papers are in gaol.[9] Such treatment, however, is the inevitable penalty of a conquered race, and, I think, within the last year manners have mended a little. Lord Minto, at all events, is very much the gentleman himself.
“During the last three years of Lord Curzon’s time,” he continued, “we were kept in a state of perpetual irritation. Then came our high hopes from the Liberal Party, and our violent disappointment. The worst of all is that many people are beginning to lose faith in English integrity and sense of justice—the two main qualities that could be used for the maintenance of your power. It is a new thing, but our young men are beginning to ask what is the good of constitutional agitation if it only results in insult and the Partition of Bengal? That is how Extremists are created. There are two schools of them now, one here in Poona, the other in Bengal itself, and Anglo-Indians are always calling upon us to denounce them. But we are not likely to denounce a section of our own people in face of the bureaucracy. For, after all, they have in view the same great object as ourselves.”
For himself, I discovered many months afterwards that Mr. Gokhale hated the name of Moderate, as, I suppose, all beings of flesh and blood needs must. But, for brief, one has to call by some such name the party which continues in patience and hope to believe that appeals to justice and reason may still induce the English people to grant reform.
For the Simla scheme, recently put out by Mr. Morley for criticism,[10] no Indian whom I met had anything to say, except Mr. Gokhale alone, who thought he detected one or two minor points that might possibly be of advantage. He condemned the Imperial Advisory Council entirely, as sure to produce a body of half-educated ruling chiefs and territorial magnates, powerless to stand against any Government proposal, and unlikely to be summoned except to discuss a royal visit, a statue, a famine, or the plague. But from the Provincial Advisory Councils he thought something might possibly be gained, if at least half the members were elected on a high franchise and were bound to meet for the discussion of definite local subjects so many times a year.
The attempt to clutch at any possible chance of good was characteristic of the man. With all his power he repels the temptation to sulky aloofness, always a strong temptation to enthusiasts in opposition. It is true he could find nothing to say for the Simla proposal of enlarging the Viceroy’s Legislative Council from twenty-four to fifty-three, by packing it with representatives of Chambers of Commerce, Mohammedans, and landowners. Such a scheme was too obviously only an attempt to crush down the influence of the education which has been one of England’s greatest gifts to India. It was a reversal of all British policy, which had hitherto set itself to depress the landlord gentry and men of wealth who “have a stake in the country,” and to stand as protector of the poor. The whole thing was too evidently framed in the spirit of fear and not of progress. But nevertheless, in Mr. Gokhale’s own scheme of reforms, an enlargement of the Legislative Councils is a prominent clause. That and some genuine control over the Budget by representative Indians on the Viceroy’s Council would start the reform of political machinery. In other departments the old cry for complete separation of judicial and executive functions must be listened to, so that even the lower officials in districts should never act both as prosecutor and judge. In the same public services, Indians should be granted an improved position in accordance with Queen Victoria’s Proclamation,[11] and, above all, the teaching of children should be gradually extended till it became free and compulsory, even in villages. There were a few other points in Mr. Gokhale’s programme of immediate reform. But in none could I discover a trace of that vagueness and impracticable demand, that “crying for the moon,” of which Mr. Morley and other critics of Indian demands were then complaining.[12]
I met Mr. Gokhale many times again—in Poona itself, Surat, Bombay, and London—and his reasonable and open-hearted personality will often re-appear in this record. But to myself I still picture him on that Diwali evening in the refectory where the Servants of India were gathered round him, together with friends from both the main Parties of the time. In concession to my outlandish habits, I was allowed a table, chair, and spoon at dinner. But the sons of the country sat on boards level with the floor, their backs against the walls, and in front of each of us was laid half a plantain or banana leaf, neatly studded round the edge with little piles of rice, beans and other seeds, flavours, sauces and other condiments, together with thin wheaten cakes. Which when we had eaten, and drunk clean water from round brazen vessels such as all Indians carry when they walk, we washed up by burning the plantain leaves, rinsed our hands, and continued the discussion over pomegranate seeds, orange cloves, and pan-leaves concealing beetel-nut and various spice. Serene, modest, definite in aim and in knowledge, he continued to discourse with us, until the full moon rolled westward, and under her obscure silence I returned to the city of the plague, where the oil lamps were now extinguished, and the children asleep.