A Temple of Shiva.

[Face p. 186.

But the work of the Volunteers is not chiefly a matter of nursing and poor relief. In Calcutta and other cities they arrange public meetings and organize the course of the immense pilgrimages. At fairs and the great festivals when Hindu women come from all over the country to bathe in the sacred rivers, they act as their protectors against the rowdy class of Mohammedans, who regard women as their natural prey. When the Mohammedans, after the Partition, were induced to believe that the Government would connive at any violence on their part against the Hindu inhabitants, the Volunteers attempted a defence of their homes and temples. They were generally beaten, but they are doing their best to stiffen their courage and the fighting qualities we all admire. Ever since Macaulay’s time the Anglo-Indians have wasted much of their lives in sneering at Indians, and especially at Bengalis, for effeminacy and unwarlike habit. By athletics, gymnastics, by football with bare feet, and lathi-play with the bamboo singlestick, the Volunteers are now seeking to wipe off the disgrace, and Anglo-Indians suspect sedition. They cannot have it both ways, and, for myself, I admire the Indian determination to obtain bodily strength. For, without being advocates of war at any price, we all know what moral force an argument gains when we feel that, if sweet reasonableness fails, we could, if we liked, knock the adversary down and break his bones!

Of course, some one has to pay for Swadeshi, and it is not always the British merchant who suffers for Lord Curzon’s error. Late one night, as I sat on a river steamer after two crowded days in a strongly Swadeshi town, five or six dark forms were dimly seen to gather round me with gestures of secrecy and peril. In other countries I should have thought them assassins thirsting for blood, but they were only Hindu merchants with an interest in Manchester piece-goods. Of these they had a large store, I have forgotten how many thousand pounds’ worth, laid up in their warehouses; and, in consequence, they were shunned by their kind. Barbers would not shave them, milkmen would not bring them milk, friends would not come to their daughters’ marriages, acquaintances would not say good-morning. Such treatment was distressing and inconvenient. Would I please use my influence with the Home Government, and set everything right again? They refused to throw in their lot with the Swadeshi movement; their goods were too valuable to be sacrificed, and they preferred to stand and die as martyrs in the cause of British commerce. I had no doubt their statement was true, but what hope could I hold out to them?—I, who had no influence with the Home Government, and, if I had been an Indian, would have done my utmost to dissuade my countrymen from buying any foreign goods at all till grievances had been redressed.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] See “Swadeshi-cum-Boycott,” by Hemendra Prasad Ghose; The Indian Review, April, 1908.

[42] Quoted in the above article.

CHAPTER XI
The Nawab

Dacca still wears something of a Mohammedan air, for Akbar’s long arm reached to Eastern Bengal, and the inheritors of his empire here built a fort, a palace, and a capital. Passing one day among its enclosed gardens, mouldering lengths of wall, and dying mosques, I had begun to imagine myself back in some Turkish town like Ochrida or Monastir, when I was suddenly recalled to the streams of Brahmaputra by the appearance of a large wooden cage under a tree in an open court. It was bigger than the cages in which Louis XI. swung his political opponents in the castles of Touraine. It would have held a bull as well as an eagle, and was firmly set upon a base of stone, daubed with vermillion, as is the Hindu way. Life in a cage has always seemed to me so curious a choice when this nutshell of a planet is itself so small, that I stopped to contemplate it, and, observing my interest, the Brahman who accompanied me began to knock with a stone upon a large wooden box, which occupied one corner of the interior. The summons appeared to be recognized, like the call to a menagerie’s wild beast at feeding time. There was a stir inside, a lid opened, and presently a human head emerged shaggy as John the Baptist’s, with black hair.

It was the city anchorite, whose sleep or meditation we had rather rudely disturbed. But he took it in good part, as one accustomed to allow for grosser natures, and, raising himself deftly from his lair, he stood naked before us, contemplating this garish muddle of a world with shy and melancholy eyes. Human speech was distasteful to him, but he had come, he said, from a distant province, the name of which did not concern a mind set upon infinity. All his life now he meditated, not directly upon God, but upon the remembered words of his Guru, or spiritual master, which in time might lead him to the meditation upon God Himself. He was unwilling to say more, and, being in haste, I gave him six annas (sixpence) as an endowment of meditation, which appears to me far the most difficult achievement of the human mind, and he crept back into his box to continue it.