Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

CHAPTER VIII

THE PUNJAB AND THE ARYA SAMAJ.

The Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers, differs as widely both from the Deccan and from Bengal as these two differ the one from the other. It has been more than any other part of India the battlefield of warring races and creeds and the seat of power of mighty dynasties. Among its cities it includes Imperial Delhi and Runjit Singh's Lahore. It is a country of many peoples and of many dialects. It is the home of the Sikhs, but the Mahomedans, ever since the days of the Moghul Empire, form the majority of the population, and the proportion of Hindus is smaller than in any other province of India, except Eastern Bengal. Owing to the very small rainfall, its climate is intensely dry—fiercely hot during the greater part of the year, and cold even to freezing during the short winter months. Nowhere in India has British rule done so much to bring peace and security and to induce prosperity. The alluvial lands are rich but thirsty, and irrigation works on a scale of unparalleled magnitude were required to compel the soil to yield beneficent harvests. At the most critical moment in the history of British India it was against the steadfastness of the Punjab, then under the firm but patriarchal sway of Sir John Lawrence, that the Mutiny spent itself, and until a few years ago there seemed to be no reason whatever for questioning the loyalty of a province which the forethought of Government and the skill of Anglo-Indian engineers were gradually transforming into a land of plenty. Least of all did any one question the loyalty of the Sikhs. Many of them believed that British rule was the fulfilment of a prophecy of one of their martyred gurus, and the Sikh regiments were regarded as the flower of the Native Army.

Yet it was in the Punjab, at Lahore and at Rawal Pindi, that the first serious disturbances occurred in 1907 which aroused public opinion at home to the reality of Indian unrest, and stirred the Government of India to such strong repressive measures as the deportation of two prominent agitators under an ancient Ordinance of 1818 never before applied in such connexion. Local and temporary causes may to some extent have accounted for those disturbances. An increase in the land revenue demanded in the Rawal Pindi district was very strongly resented. The regulations issued with regard to the tenure of land in some of the new irrigation colonies were probably unwise and carried out with some harshness. Famine in the unirrigated tracts, and especially the plague, which had desolated parts of the province, had created much misery and bitterness. Other and more remote causes of a social and economic character had also been at work. Nowhere had Anglo-Indian legislation and the introduction of elaborate forms of legal procedure produced results more unfortunate and less foreseen by their authors than in the Punjab. The conversion of the occupants of the land into full proprietors was intended to give greater stability and security to the peasant ownership of land, but the result was to improve the position of the moneylender, who, owing to the thriftlessness of the Indian rayat and the extravagant expenditure to which he is from time to time driven by traditional custom in regard to marriages, funerals, and other family ceremonies, has always played a disastrously important part in village life. As M. Chailley remarks in his admirable study of these problems, "the agricultural debtor had now two securities to offer." He had always been able to pledge his harvest, and now he could pledge also his land. On the other hand, "a strict system of law and procedure afforded the moneylender the means of rapidly realizing his dues," and the pleader, who is himself a creation of that system, was ever at the elbow of both parties to encourage ruinous litigation to his own professional advantage. Special laws were successively enacted by Government to check these new evils, but they failed to arrest altogether a process which was bringing about a veritable revolution in the tenure of land, and mainly to the detriment of an essentially peaceful and law-abiding class that furnished a large and excellent contingent to the Native Army. The wretched landowner who found himself deprived of his land by legal process held our methods rather than his own extravagance responsible for his ruin, and on the other hand, the pleaders and their clients, the moneylenders, who were generally Hindus, resented equally our legislative attempts to hamper a process so beneficial to themselves.

But all these were only contributory causes. There were still deeper influences at work which have operated in the Punjab in the same direction as the forces of unrest in the Deccan and in Bengal, but differ from them nevertheless in their origin and in some of their manifestations. In the Punjab too the keynote of unrest is a spirit of revolt not merely against British administrative control, but, in theory at least, against Western influence generally, though in some respects it bears very strongly the impress of the Western influence which it repudiates. The motive force is not conservative Brahmanism as in the Deccan, nor does it betray the impetuous emotionalism of Bengal. It is less rigid and purely reactionary than the former, and better disciplined than the latter.

Orthodox Hinduism ceased to be a dominant factor in the Punjab when the flood of Mahomedan conquest swept over the land of the Five Rivers. Even Islam did not break the power of caste, and very distinct traces of caste still survive amongst the Mahomedan community itself. But nowhere has caste been so much shaken as in the Punjab, for the infinity of sub-castes into which each caste has resolved itself gives the measure of its disintegration. Sikhism still represents the most successful revolt against its tyranny in the later history of Hinduism. Hence the relatively slight ascendency enjoyed by the Brahmans in the Punjab amongst the Hindus themselves, even the Brahmans having split up into so many sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that many a non-Brahman Hindu will hardly accept food cooked by the lower order of Brahmans—and, next to inter-marriage, food is the great test of caste. Nevertheless it is amongst the Hindus of the Punjab that one of the earliest apostles of reaction against the West has found the largest and most enthusiastic body of followers. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, was a Brahman of Kathiawar; he was not born in the Punjab, and it was not in the Punjab but in Bombay, where, however, it struck no roots, that he founded the Arya Samaj. Only in the later years of his life did the Punjab become the chief centre of his activities. The doctrines he taught were embodied by him in his Satyarath Prakash, which has become the Bible of his disciples, and in his Veda Bashya Basmika, a commentary on the Vedas. He had at an early age lost faith in the Hindu Pantheon, and to this extent he was a genuine religious reformer, for he waged relentless war against the worship of idols, and whether his claims to Vedantic learning be or be not conceded, his creed was "Back to the Vedas." His ethical code, on the other hand, was vague, and he pandered strangely in some directions to the weaknesses of the flesh, and in others to popular prejudices. Nothing in the Vedas, for instance, prohibits either the killing of cattle or the eating of bovine flesh. But, in deference to one of the most universal of Hindu superstitions, Dayanand did not hesitate to include cow-killing amongst the deadliest sins. Here we have in fact the keynote of his doctrines. The sanctity of the cow is the touchstone of Hindu hostility to both Christian and Mahomedan, and the whole drift of Dayanand's teachings is far less to reform Hinduism than to rouse it into active resistance to the alien influences which threatened, in his opinion, to denationalize it. Hence the outrageously aggressive tone of his writings wherever he alludes either to Christianity or to Mahomedanism. It is the advent of "meat-eating and wine-drinking foreigners, the slaughterers of kine and other animals," that has brought "trouble and suffering" upon "the Aryas"—he discards the word Hindu on account of its Persian origin—whilst before they came into the country India enjoyed "golden days," and her people were "free from disease and prosperous and contented." In fact, "Arya for the Aryans" was the cry that frequently predominated in Dayanand's teachings over that of "Back to the Vedas," and Lajpat Rai, one of his most zealous disciples, has stated emphatically that "the scheme of Swami Dayanand has its foundation on the firm rock of Swadeshi and Swajati."

Since Dayanand's death the Arya Samaj has split up into two sections—the "vegetarians" who with regard to religious doctrine may be described as the orthodox, and the "meat-eaters," as the latitudinarians. It is difficult to differentiate between the precise tendencies of these two sections, whose feuds seem to be waning. In both are to be found not a few progressive and enlightened Aryas who, whatever their political activities may be, have undoubtedly applied themselves with no small success to the carrying out of that part of Dayanand's gospel which was directed to the reforming of Hinduism. Their influence has been constantly exerted to check, the marriages between mere boys and almost infant girls which have done so much physical as well as moral mischief to Hindu society, and also to improve the wretched lot of Hindu widows whose widowhood with all that it entails of menial degradation often begins before they have ever really been wives. To this end the Aryas have not hesitated to encourage female education, and the Girls' Orphanage at Jalandhar, where there is also a widows' home, has shown what excellent social results can be achieved in that direction. Again in the treatment of the "untouchable" low-castes, the Arya Samaj may claim to have been the first native body to break new ground and to attempt something akin to the work of social reclamation of which Christianity and, in a lesser degree, Islam had hitherto had the monopoly. Schools and especially industrial classes have been established in various districts which cannot fail to raise the status of the younger generation and gradually to emancipate the lower castes from the bondage in which they have been hitherto held. These and many other new departures conceived in the same liberal spirit at first provoked the vehement hostility of the orthodox Hindus, who at one time stopped all social intercourse with the Arya reformers. But whereas in other parts of India the idea of social reform came to be associated with that of Western ascendency and therefore weakened and gave way before the rising tide of reaction against that ascendency, it has been associated in the Punjab with the cry of "Arya for the Aryans," and the political activities of the Arya Samaj, or at least of a number of its most prominent members who have figured conspicuously in the anti-British agitation of the last few years, have secured for it from Hindu orthodoxy a measure of tolerance and even of good will which its social activities would certainly not otherwise have received. That the Arya Samaj, which shows the impress of Western influence in so much of its social work, should at the same time have associated itself so intimately with a political movement directed against British rule is one of the many anomalies presented by the problem of Indian unrest.

Many Aryas, indeed, deny strenuously that the Samaj is disaffected, or even that it concerns itself with politics, and the president of the Lahore branch, Mr. Roshan Lal, assured me that it devotes itself solely to moral and religious reform. I do not question that assurance, as far as Mr. Roshan Lal is himself personally concerned, and it may be true that the Samaj has never committed itself as a body to any political programme, and that many individual members hold aloof from politics; but the evidence that many others, and not the least influential, have played a conspicuous part in the seditious agitation of the last few years, both in the Punjab and in the neighbouring United Provinces, is overwhelming. In the Rawal Pindi riots in 1907 the ringleaders were Aryas, and in the violent propaganda which for about two years preceded the actual outbreak of violence none figured more prominently than Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh, both prominent Aryas. The immediate effect produced by their deportation in restoring order is in itself corroborative evidence of the share they were believed to have taken in producing lawlessness. Ajit Singh himself is at the present moment a fugitive from justice, against whom proceedings in absentia were instituted this winter in Lahore for translating and publishing seditious books that dealt with the making of bombs, the taking of life, the destruction of buildings, &c. In the course of these proceedings letters from Lajpat Rai were produced in Court showing that just about the time of the disturbances he had been in communication with Shyamji Krishnavarma, of Indian Sociologist fame, for a supply of books "containing true ideas on politics" for the students of Lahore, as well as for assistance towards defraying the cost of "political missionaries." In one of these letters also Lajpat Rai, after remarking that "the people are in a sullen mood" and that "the agricultural classes have begun to agitate," adds significantly that his "only fear is that the bursting out may not be premature." Lajpat Rai's correspondent was another prominent Arya, Bhai Parmanand, who, whilst he was Professor at the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College, was found in possession of various formulae for the manufacture of bombs, including the same manual that was discovered in the Maniktola Garden at Calcutta.

In Patiala, one of the Sikh native States of the Punjab, Aryas constituted the great majority of defendants, 76 in number, and many of them officials and persons of position, who were put on their trial last December for seditious practices. So seriously were the charges felt to reflect upon the Arya Samaj as a whole that one of its leading legal members was briefed on its behalf for the defence. From the speech made by counsel for the prosecution in opening the case it appears that some of the defendants were schoolmasters, who were charged with preaching revolutionary doctrines in their schools and carrying on correspondence of the same character with old pupils; others were charged with circulating papers of the Yugantar and Swarajiya type; others with holding secret meetings and delivering inflammatory lectures; others again with distributing pictures and photographs of well-known revolutionists, including Khudiram Bose, the Muzafferpur murderer. Not only were most of these defendants Aryas, but they were very prominent Aryas, who had founded local branches of the Samaj or been members of committees in the State of Patiala. How far the evidence outlined by counsel would have borne out these charges it is impossible to say, though one may properly assume it to have been of a very formidable character, for after the case had been opened against them the defendants hastened to send in a petition invoking the clemency of the Maharajah. They expressed therein their deep sorrow for any conduct open to misconstruction, tendered their unqualified apology for any indiscreet acts they might have committed, and testified their "great abhorrence and absolute detestation" of anarchists and seditionists and their diabolical methods. His Highness thereupon ordered the prosecution to be abandoned, but at the same time banished the defendants from his State and declared their posts to be forfeited by such as had been in his service, and only in a few cases were these punishments subsequently remitted.

The large number of Aryas who have unquestionably taken part in the political agitation of the last few years certainly tends to corroborate the very compromising certificate given only two years ago to the Samaj by Krishnavarma himself in his murder-preaching organ. He not only stated that "of all movements in India for the political regeneration of the country none is so potent as the Arya Samaj," but he added that "the ideal of that society as proclaimed by its founder is an absolutely free and independent form of national Government," and Krishnavarma, it must be remembered, had been appointed by Dayanand to be a member of the first governing body in the lifetime of the founder and, after his death, one of the trustees of his will.

What makes the question of the real tendencies of the Arya Samaj one of very grave importance for the future is that it has embarked upon an educational experiment of a peculiar character which may have an immense effect upon the rising generation. One of its best features is the attention it has devoted to education, and to that of girls as well as of boys. But it was not till 1898 that the governing body of the Samaj in the Punjab decided to carry into execution a scheme for restoring the Vedic system of education which Dayanand had conceived but had never been able to carry out. Under this system the child is committed at an early age to the exclusive care of a spiritual teacher or guru, who stands to him in loco parentis and even more, for Manu says that "of him who gives natural birth, and of him who gives knowledge of the Vedas, the giver of sacred knowledge is the more venerable father, since second or divine birth ensures life to the twice-born, both in this world and eternally." In the gurukuls or seminaries founded by the Arya Samaj pupils or chelas are admitted between the ages of six and ten. From that moment they, are practically cut off from the outer world during the whole course of their studies, which cover a period of 16 years altogether—i.e., ten years in the lower school and six years in the upper, to which they pass up as Brahmacharis. During the whole of that period no student is allowed to visit his family, except in cases of grave emergency, and his parents can only see him with the permission of the head of the gurukul and not more than once a month. There are at present three gurukuls in the Punjab, but the most important one, with over 250 students, is at Kangri, in the United Provinces, five miles from the sacred city of Hardwar, where the Ganges flows out of a gorge into the great plain. A large and very popular mela or fair is held annually at Kangri, and it is attended by the Brahmacharis, who act as volunteers for the maintenance of order and collect funds for the support of their gurukul. The enthusiasm is said to be very great, and donations last year are credibly reported to have exceeded 300,000 rupees.

Life in the gurukuls is simple and even austere, the discipline rigorous, the diet of the plainest, and a great deal of time is given to physical training. As the chelas after 16 years of this monastic training at the hands of their gurus are to be sent out as missionaries to propagate the Arya doctrines throughout India, the influence of these institutions in the moulding of Indian character and Indian opinion in the future cannot fail to be considerable. Some five years more must elapse before we shall be able to judge the result by the first batch of chelas who will then be going forth into the world. For the present one can only echo the hope tersely expressed a few months ago by Sir Louis Dane, the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, in reply to assurances of loyalty from the President of the Arya Samaj, that "what purports to be a society for religious and social reform and advancement may not be twisted from its proper aims" and "degenerate into a political organization with objects which are not consonant with due loyalty to the Government as established." But neither the spirit of Dayanand's own teachings nor the record of many of his disciples, including some of those actually connected with the gurukuls, is in this respect encouraging.

There has been, however, no recurrence of serious disturbances in the Punjab since 1907, and if the native Press lost little of its virulence until the new Press Act of this year, and numerous prosecutions bore witness to the continued prevalence of sedition, the province has been free from the murderous outrages and dacoities which have been so lamentable a feature of the unrest in Bengal and in the Deccan. None the less there is still a very strong undercurrent of anti-British feeling. It has partly been fostered in the large cities by Bengalee immigrants who have come into the Punjab in considerable numbers, and thanks to their higher education have acquired great influence at the Bar and in the Press, but it is rife wherever the Arya Samaj is known to be most active, and the Arya Samaj has already proved a very powerful proselytizing agency. Its meeting houses serve not only for religious ceremonies, but also as social clubs for the educated classes in all the larger towns where they congregate. Access to them is readily given to Hindus and Sikhs who have not actually joined the Samaj. They are attracted by the political discussions which are carried on there with great freedom, and having no such resorts of their own, they are soon tempted to obtain the fuller privileges of membership. In this way the Samaj has made many converts among the educated classes and even among native officials. But its influence is by no means confined to them. It makes many converts among the Sikhs, and not a few among Nau-Muslims or Mahomedans who have embraced Islam in relatively recent times and mainly for the purpose of escaping from the tyranny of caste. For the same reason it attracts low-caste Hindus, for though it does not ostentatiously denounce or defy caste, it has the courage to ignore it. Though the Arya leaders are generally men of education and sometimes of great culture, they know how to present their creed in a popular form that appeals to the lower classes and especially to the agricultural population. One of the most unpleasant features has been the propaganda carried on by them among the Sepoys of the Native Army, and especially among the Jats and the Sikhs, with whom they have many points of affinity. The efforts of the Aryas seem to be chiefly directed to checking enlistment, but they have at times actually tampered with the loyalty of certain regiments, and their emissaries have been found within the lines of the native troops. Sikhism itself is at the present day undergoing a fresh process of transformation. Whilst it tends generally to be reabsorbed into Hinduism, the very remarkable movement for sinking the old class distinctions—themselves a survival of caste—and recognizing the equality of all Sikhs, is clearly due to the influence of the Arya Samaj. The evolution of the Arya Samaj recalls very forcibly that of Sikhism, which originally, when founded by Nanak in the early part of the 16th century, was merely a religious and moral, reform movement, and nevertheless within 50 years developed under Har Govind into a formidable political and military organization. It is not, therefore, surprising that some of those who know the Punjab best and the sterner stuff of which its martial races are made look upon it as a potentially more dangerous centre of trouble than either the Deccan or Bengal. One of the most mischievous results of the Aryan propaganda, and one which may well cause the most immediate anxiety, is the growing antagonism which it has bred between Hindus and Mahomedans, for the Mahomedans are convinced that the Arya Samaj is animated with no less bitter hostility towards Islam than towards British rule.