The new spirit in India

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

FOOTNOTES:

[13] For the sake of comparison it may be of interest to quote a few of the symptoms given in descriptions of other plagues. The account by Thucydides (ii. 49) of the plague in Athens, 430 B.C., is the most detailed: “All of a sudden,” he says, “people who were quite well before were seized with violent pains in the head, together with redness and inflammation of the eyes; the throat and tongue became blood-red, and the breath strangely disagreeable. Sneezing and sore throat ensued, and after a short time the lungs were affected and there was violent coughing. When the disease settled in the stomach it caused great disorder, with every known kind of purging of bile, accompanied by severe pain. Most patients suffered from an empty retching, with violent spasms, that sometimes gave relief at once, sometimes only after a long time. The surface of the body was not very hot to touch, nor was it pale, but suffused red or livid, covered with small spots and ulcers. But the internal heat was so great that the patients could not endure even the lightest clothes or muslins, but insisted on being naked, and longed to throw themselves into cold water. Many who were not looked after actually jumped into wells, overcome with unquenchable thirst; but it was just the same whether a patient drank much or little. All through the illness they were unable to keep still or get any sleep. Whilst the fever was at its height the body did not waste away, but resisted the disease beyond all expectation, so that most patients died from the internal fever on the seventh or ninth day with a good deal of strength still left; or, if they survived the crisis, the disease descended to the bowels, where it set up ulceration and such violent diarrhœa that in most cases death ensued from weakness.”

The chief symptoms given by Boccaccio in the Introduction to the “Decameron,” where he describes the plague in Florence (1348), are: “At the beginning of the disease both men and women developed swellings in the groin or under the armpit. These swellings grew to the size of a crab-apple or an egg, sometimes larger, sometimes less, and the common people called them ‘gavoccioli.’ In a short time this deadly sore began to spread to all parts of the body, and the nature of the disease gradually changed into black or livid spots, which appeared on the arms and thighs and other parts, sometimes large and scattered, sometimes minute and thick together.” He goes on to speak of the entire inability of doctors to deal with the plague, and of the readiness with which the smallest association or contagion spread it from one to another.

Defoe wrote only at secondhand about the plague of London (1665), but such symptoms as he gives of that “spotted fever” were probably taken from eye-witnesses with whom he had conversed. He mentions violent pains in the head, vomitings, and spots on the thighs; also “swellings, generally in the neck and groin, which, when they grew hard and would not break, grew so painful that it was equal to the most exquisite torture.... In some these swellings were made hard, partly by the force of the distemper, and partly by their being too violently drawn, and were so hard that no instrument could cut them, and then they burnt them with caustics, so that many died raving mad in the torment, and some in the very operation. In these distresses, some for want of help to hold them down in their beds, or to look to them, laid hands upon themselves. Some broke out into the streets, perhaps naked, and would run directly down to the river, if they were not stopped by the watchman or other officer, and plunge themselves into the water, wherever they found it.”

[14] In 1902, nineteen died from this cause at Mulkowal, a village in the Punjab, and the Punjab Government abandoned the hope of inoculation for the time.

CHAPTER III
The Extremist

I knew it would come. Till I had been some time in Bombay, I did not realize the custom, but the moment I realized it, I felt there was no escape. As often happens with forebodings, it came unexpectedly in the end. I was visiting the simple house, workshop, and garden, in a main street of Poona, where the two Extremist papers are published. Both appear weekly—the Mahratta in English, the Kesari or Lion in the Mahrati language. Both are owned and directed by Mr. Tilak, the acknowledged leader of the Extremists in India, but the Mahratta was edited by Mr. Kelkar, an intellectual, keen-tempered Brahman, who accompanied me over the printing office and showed me a courteous friendliness all through my stay in Poona. Both papers have obtained what is thought a large circulation in India—the Mahratta selling 11,000 a week, the Kesari close upon twice that number. In outward appearance, the Mahratta is very much like the Spectator. The Kesari, with lions in emblem defiant on each side of the tide, is on cheaper paper of eight folded pages. Its language is said to be more violent than the Mahratta’s, which as a rule is carefully moderate in expression.

In the cool and quiet of the editor’s room, among bookshelves mildewing like most Indian libraries, I was listening to the history of the papers when I observed a crowd of brown printers, deferential but eager, at the door. In their hands they bore strange objects, such as I had never before seen, but at a glance I knew the moment had arrived. Advancing to my chair they hung around my neck a thick festoon of orange marigolds, picked out with the silvery tinsel which decorators of our Christmas trees identify with fairy rain. They encircled both my wrists with orange bracelets to match, and in my right hand they placed an arrangement of variegated flowers and spangles, stiff and formal as the sceptre of the Tsar. So I sat enthroned, and if only a correspondent from Calcutta had been present, the broadsheets of London that evening might have screamed with scare-heads of “Sedition!” Even in the midst of my friendly embarrassment, I could not but regret a journalistic opportunity lost.

Embarrassing, certainly it was, but only to my British ignorance and shyness. To complete the Imperial ceremony, my dusky subjects sprinkled me with delicate odours from silvern vessels; they soused my handkerchief in scent; they rubbed spikenard and aloes on the back of my hands. Then, standing at a distance, they contemplated their handiwork with kindly satisfaction, while I laboured to express my august gratification in an Imperial tongue they could not understand. Every one present knew, and I knew myself, that they would have honoured in the same way any visitor who had come to their works in a benignant spirit. Even when, hung with fillets like a sacrificial victim and bearing the floral sceptre upright in my hand, I issued from the front door into the full blaze of the public street, the passers-by looked at me with admiring interest, but without a trace of laughter. These things are merely habit, and before I left India I lived to dread garlands as little as my bed. But that first time—with what shamefaced horror the consciousness of my British trousers and khaki helmet filled me! Suddenly, with an inexplicable pang, I remembered that I had once rowed two in the Christ Church torpid, and if any of my own countrymen had gone down the street at that moment, I think I should have got under my cart instead of into it.[15]

Mr. Tilak.

[Face p. 64.

Thus ornamented by a graceful hospitality, I drove away, some sixteen miles south-west of the city, through an irrigated and fertile land of terraced rice-fields, draining the abundant water that rice flourishes in from one level into another. Slowly we drew near a great blue mountain, conspicuous from Poona among the other hills for its height and flat-topped outline. It is the mountain fortress of Singarh, famed in Deccan history. Unknown peoples had made it their rock of defence, Mohammedans had reigned there, Mahrattas took it by storm. Finally the British, some ninety years ago, bombarded the place till it could stand no more, and now all that afternoon I had watched a British helio on its summit blinking messages to the Poona cantonment. There is a long, steep climb before the old fortifications that run round the edge of the cliffs are reached, for the top is as high as Ben Nevis. But passing through a western arch in the walls we entered on the broad grassy plateau while still the low horizon was brilliant with sunset, and against the sunset a red-turbaned, white-clad figure, upright but using a long staff, came to meet me.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak appeared to be about ten years older than Mr. Gokhale, but it is difficult to tell his age, for if ever he takes off his Mahratta turban, one sees his head shaven to the back, where the hair grows in a long, black tuft, as is the fashion of his race or caste. His full, brown eyes are singularly brilliant, steady with daring, rather aggressive But his general manner is very quiet and controlled, and both in conversation and public speaking he talks in brief, assured sentences, quite free from rhetoric, outwardly passionless even in moments of the highest passion, and seldom going beyond the statement of facts, or, rather, of his aspect of facts at the time. His apparent calmness and self-command may arise partly from courageous indifference to his own future, partly from prolonged legal practice at his own trials. At first one would say, his was the legal mind, subtle, given to fine distinctions, rather capable of expressing thought than of thinking, and quick to adapt both the expression and the thought to the audience of the moment. But there is much in his life and energies that seems to show that his natural bias was towards religious speculation and scholarly traditions.

Among the leading reformers of India, he is probably the most orthodox Hindu. He professes a devout belief in progressive Hinduism and in successive reincarnations of Krishna at epochs of India’s greatest need. But in practice his Hinduism often reacts against the forces of progress, and serves him as an ally in resisting the materializing notions imported from the West. In scholarship, he is known among all Sanscrit scholars as one of the closest and most original. His book on “The Arctic Home of the Vedas” maintains from internal evidence that the Sacred Books of India originated among a glacial people inhabiting the region of the Arctic Circle, or some land equally chilly. I cannot say what the value of the theory may be. Possibly the book is as fantastic as it is learned. But to me it is significant because it appeared in the midst of the author’s direst persecution, when money, reputation, influence, and everything were at stake, and few men would have had the courage to spare a thought either for Sacred Books or Arctic Circles.

It is said that he is embittered. One of the highest and best of English officials in India told me he admired Mr. Tilak, and would gladly know him personally, but was afraid of inviting him for fear of a rebuff, so irreconcilable was the man reputed. Yet when the meeting did take place, by a kind of accident some weeks later, there was no rebuff, but only courtesy and openly expressed esteem. Certainly, if a fine nature can ever be embittered, Mr. Tilak has had enough to embitter him. Early in the ’eighties he was imprisoned for speaking against the Diwan or Prime Minister of a Native State, whom he accused of cruelty to the Raja. In September, 1897, he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for attacks in the Kesari upon the Bombay Government when the population of Poona was frenzied at the plague regulations. After a year in gaol he was released, but soon afterwards he became involved in a private suit concerned with his trusteeship for a widow named Tai Maharaj and her adoption of an heir. The Bombay Government took up the case, and the trial, with appeals, dragged on for nearly two years, Mr. Tilak being condemned by one magistrate to a long imprisonment and heavy fine. “The paths of scholarship,” was the Pioneer’s comment, “lead but to the gaol,” and in Court Mr. Tilak was publicly handcuffed. Finally, in March, 1904, his appeal came before the High Court of Bombay, represented by Chief Justice Sir Lawrence Jenkins and Mr. Justice Batty; the conviction and sentence were quashed and the fine was ordered to be refunded.

This judgment confirmed the common Indian opinion that British justice can best be looked for in the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, because the judges appointed directly by the Crown can maintain the law without being unconsciously prejudiced by long service under the Anglo-Indian routine. But, unfortunately, owing to Mr. Tilak’s past record, and his connection with the Extremist papers, the ruinous action taken against him had the air of persecution, and laid the Bombay Government open to a charge of vindictiveness. It was during these proceedings that Mr. Tilak displayed his fine unconcern by issuing his treatise on the origin of the Vedas, and in the end, when his innocence was finally established, he found that a leader’s greatest advantage of having suffered for his cause was indefinitely increased.

When I met him that evening on the mountain top, another crisis of his fate was just being decided, but nothing could surpass his outward calm. He was living in one of the dilapidated bungalows thinly scattered over the plateau. I was put to lodge in another empty one, because, belonging, as he does, to the same high caste as Mr. Gokhale, and to the same subsection of it, he refuses, as a strict Hindu, to emancipate himself from the caste obligations and live or eat with mere Europeans. All that night the wind roared over the mountains, but with the first sun he came to lead me round the elaborate ruins of the fortifications, and, as though he had no interest in the world except as tourist’s guide, he showed me where the British guns had battered, and where, in the time of the Mahratta hero, Shivaji, two hundred and forty years ago, his own ancestors crept up the precipice at night and scaled this very wall, aided by a great lizard that was trained to carry a string up the surface and hold tight with its claws till a man could climb. So at this dizzy spot the party had climbed; then killed.

It is easy to perceive the marvels of the past, and belief in them is unimportant. But to realize the strange significance of the man at my side, and to understand the things he believed in at the moment was a different matter. He continued to discourse about the villages half hidden in the deep valleys below, and narrate their sufferings, hopes, and varying prosperity as if he had no further thought on earth beyond their cattle and their rice. But I knew that at Nagpur in the Central Provinces, things had just been happening which deeply involved himself and his party. The annual meeting of the National Congress was to have been held there at Christmas. The Reception Committee had met to appoint a President, and the Moderates of the majority chose Dr. Rash Behari Ghose. Thereupon, the Extremists, insisting upon their majority in the Central Provinces and in the Executive Committee, chose Mr. Tilak. He in turn proposed Mr. Lajpat Rai, as a compromise; but, with his usual chivalry, Mr. Lajpat Rai refused to stand rather than risk a division among the reform party, or an open breach between the Congress and the Government. To be sure, deeper questions of principle or of method lay behind these personal disputes, but on the personal question of the President the Nagpur meeting had just broken up in disorder. The Moderates had determined not to hold the Congress at Nagpur at all, but to accept the invitation of Surat, only a few hours’ journey north of Bombay, which was the headquarters of the strongest section among them.

Compared to the wild adventures of his Mahratta ancestry, or to the economic conditions of the peasants far below us, one might have supposed from his manner that Mr. Tilak regarded these party differences as beneath all notice. Perhaps he did so regard them, and, if he did, he was partially right. But still, at the moment, the party difference was the thing attracting most attention in India, and it was sure to grow in importance. Mr. Tilak’s own thoughts might have been occupied with the situation all day, but it was only in the afternoon that he came quietly into my empty bungalow alone, and began to discuss it in his concise and definite way. When I published a careful abstract of this conversation shortly afterwards, many Moderates and Extremists alike supposed that he had dissembled his true intentions, and told me only what he wished to be known. As he did not ask for secrecy, certainly I never supposed he was telling me things he did not wish to be known, and I think it very likely that he enjoyed giving himself the pleasure of appearing as Moderate as possible. But in the evening I read over to him the notes I had taken of the conversation just as it was afterwards published, and he approved of what I wrote. In studying his speeches and writings of recent years, I have also found the lines of his policy laid down in almost the same words as he used to me, and I am inclined to think that his statements resembled his beliefs rather closely.

His first object was to show that, as to their immediate purpose, Extremists and Moderates did not differ in aim:—

“It is not by our purpose, but by our methods only,” he said, “that our party has earned the name of Extremist. Certainly, there is a very small party which talks about abolishing the British rule at once and completely. That does not concern us; it is much too far in the future. Unorganized, disarmed, and still disunited, we should not have a chance of shaking the British suzerainty. We may leave all that sort of thing to a distant time. Our object is to obtain eventually a large share in the administration of our own country. Our remote ideal is a confederacy of the Indian provinces, possessing colonial self-government, with all Imperial questions set apart for the central government in England. Perhaps our Home Rule would take the form of Provincial Councils of fifty or sixty members, nominated or indirectly elected at first, but elected by popular vote as education became more general.

“But that ideal also,” he went on, “is far ahead of us—perhaps generations ahead. What we aim at doing now is to bring pressure on the bureaucracy; to make it feel that all is not well. Of late the attitude of our British officials has greatly changed for the worse. They no longer speak of educating us up to freedom, as the great Englishmen like Elphinstone did in the past. They appear to agree with the Times that our education in subjects like English history must be checked, because it is dangerous for ‘natives’ to learn anything about freedom. Your present statesmen seem to take the old Roman Empire as their ideal, and even in that they follow the modern school of Oxford historians, who trace the fall of the Empire to the concession of citizenship to the provinces.

“I know the worst that you can say about the Russian bureaucracy; but even that bureaucracy does, according to its lights, seek to maintain the honour and prosperity of Russia, because Russia is its own country. Our bureaucracy administers a country not its own for the sake of a country far away, entirely different in character and interests. Our bureaucracy is despotic, alien, and absentee.”

Mr. Tilak then referred to the well-known complaints brought against our Administration by nearly all students of Indian economics—the “drain” of some £30,000,000 to £35,000,000 a year to England in the shape of various payments from an impoverished country; the ruin of Indian trades and manufactures, first by duties against her exports, and now by customs dues within her own borders, deliberately imposed for the advantage of British, Austrian, and American firms; the reduction of very nearly the whole population to a subsistence on a starving agriculture; and the unexplained increase of malaria, famine, and plague.

“The immediate question for us,” he continued, “is how we are to bring pressure on this bureaucracy, in which we have no effective representation, but are debarred from all except subordinate positions. It is only in our answer to that question that we differ from the so-called Moderates. They still hope to influence public opinion in England by sending deputations, supporting a newspaper, and pleading the justice of our cause. Both parties, of course, have long ago given up all hope of influencing Anglo-Indian opinion out here. But even in England we find most people ignorant and indifferent about India, and the influence of retired Anglo-Indians at home is perpetually against us. When Lord Cromer said the other day that India must be no party question, he meant that Liberals should support the bureaucracy as blindly as Tories. The history of the last year has proved to us how unexceptionably they fulfil that duty.

“Under these disappointments we Extremists have determined on other methods. It is a matter of temperament, and the younger men are with us. Our motto is ‘Self-reliance, not Mendicancy.’

“Besides the ordinary Swadeshi movement, we work by boycott and passive resistance. Our boycott is voluntary. We do not advocate picketing or compulsory prevention from the purchase of foreign goods. And in passive resistance we shall simply refuse to notice such measures as the Seditious Meetings Act. But we do not care what happens to ourselves. We are devoted absolutely and without reservation to the cause of the Indian peoples. To imprison even 3000 or 4000 of us at the same time would embarrass the bureaucracy. That is our object—to attract the attention of England to our wrongs by diverting trade and obstructing the Government. Without in the least intending it, England has promoted the idea of Indian unity—by railways, by education, and the use of a common official language. The mere pressure of the British domination upon us makes for unity. Our unity will not be complete, perhaps, for generations yet, but it is the goal to which our faces are now set, and we shall not turn back.”

As I said, many have suspected that, in this statement of his party’s aims and methods, Mr. Tilak was playing down to an Englishman’s love of moderation. To some extent that may have been true, but only, I think, with regard to the distance in time at which he placed India’s realization of self-government. On January 4, 1907, Mr. Tilak had addressed the students in College Square, Calcutta, upon the “Tenets of the New Party,” and I extract a few sentences dealing with this subject:—

“There were certain points,” he said, “on which both parties were agreed. The object both parties had at heart was the same; it was self-government. The present system of administration was ruinous to the country both materially and morally.... There were some, indeed, who still believed that the continuance of the British rule was necessary for some centuries in order to raise them to the level of civilized nations. Those who held such views obviously could not follow his arguments, and they must agree to differ and part as friends. But most of them were agreed that the present system must be mended or ended as soon as possible. Their object being the same, it was with regard to their methods that the difference arose.

“... The New Party’s conclusion was that it was impossible to gain any concessions by petitions and prayers. This was the first difference between the Moderate and Progressive parties. He did not believe in the philanthropy of British politics. There was no instance in history of one foreign nation ruling another for the benefit of the other and not for its own profit. The rule of one nation by another was in itself unnatural. He granted the efficiency of the British Government and the excellence of its methods for its own purpose, but these methods and that efficiency did not work for the interests of the people of the country. A good foreign government was less desirable than an inferior native government.”[16]

On the question of revolution and revolutionary violence, the following passage occurred in Mr. Tilak’s address during the Shivaji Festival in Poona, June, 1907:—

“It is true that what we seek may seem like a revolution; it is a revolution in the sense that it means a complete change in the theory of the government of India as now put forward by the bureaucracy. It is true that this revolution must be a bloodless revolution, but it would be a folly to suppose that if there is to be no shedding of blood, there are also to be no sufferings to be undergone by the people. These sufferings must be great. You can win nothing unless you are prepared to suffer. An appeal to the good-feeling of the rulers is everywhere discovered to have but narrow limits. Your revolution must be bloodless, but that does not mean that you may not have to suffer or to go to gaol.”[17]

When I left the mountain’s summit, Mr. Tilak accompanied me back to the limit of the dark and ancient walls. I recognized in him the personal attraction that Extremists always have—the freedom from hesitation and half-measures, the delight in conflict, the reckless disregard of self. When to this attraction his own people could add his personal and intimate acquaintance with all classes among them down to the poorest villagers, and his steady maintenance of all that they held most dear in religious belief and customary observances, I could not wonder at his influence among them. So he stood surrounded by the ruins of empires built by his own and other races, while, with the merriment and ironic humour I knew so well, our soldiers of the helio party folded up their instruments among the rocks close by and prepared for night.[18]