The new spirit in India

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

Under a great banyan tree in this temple’s garden a religious teacher sat for years, and gathered many disciples round him before his death in 1886. He was known as Ramakrishna, but he had the names of Deva and Paramahamsa as well, and there he sat expounding the things of the spirit, like other Hindu teachers. But there seems to have been an intensity of conviction about him that attracted unusual disciples. Among them was a young Bengali named Norendra Nath Datta, who took the more holy name of Vivekananda, and spread his master’s teaching as far as Oxford and Chicago—cities so seldom associated together in spiritual things. He too has gone from this world now—he went in 1902, at the age of forty—but has left a school, a kind of religion or Church, that proclaims a spiritual Hinduism to all mankind without limitation of race or nation. Its proper name is the Ramakrishna Society, but the members are generally called Vedantists, because of their belief in the Vedas as the inspired guides of man. They abjure images and sacrifice, except of flowers and fruits, which I have seen them offer as symbols of thanksgiving and praise to the spirituality of the universe in their bare but sufficient little temple up a flight of steps. By their belief in the Vedas they approach the Arya Samaj. But their more modern advancement and universality bring them nearer the Brahmo Samaj, or cultivated Unitarians of Hinduism, whose freedom of life and social intercourse for men and women alike gives a peculiar charm to Indian society in Calcutta. Small in number themselves, they stand between these two main bodies of religious reformers—believers in the Hindu scriptures, but preachers of a universal religion; free from the caste restrictions of travel, marriage, and food, but strongly national in their devotion to the country. Just across the river, from that peaceful temple of Kali where their founder sat, they have their little monastery for the training of about thirty Brothers, who go out from their pleasant garden to teach all the world, and to save their own Indian people in days of plague and famine.

It was in a small circle of these Vedantists that I first met Moti Lal Ghose, one of the most peculiar figures of Calcutta life. He is not a Vedantist himself, being a special worshipper of Vishnu. Indeed, he follows the Bengali saint Chaitanya, or, as he prefers to call him, the Lord Gauranga, who proclaimed a purified and emotional form of Hinduism about the time of Luther, and still has disciples, especially among outcasts and downtrodden people, because he promised the love of God to all without charity’s limitations to the thrifty and deserving. But devoted Vaishnava as Moti Lal is, one would think his guiding faith was a sort of clanship or family affection. They say a hundred relations make their home in his rambling household among the little streets of the Bagh Bazar, and that number would be distracting enough for the most placid of mankind, which Moti Lal is not. Almost every one seems to be Moti Lal’s relation, and as, like many Hindus, he speaks of his cousins as brothers, and his nephews as sons, the bonds of kinship seem as close as they are wide. But the affection of his heart is reserved for his real born brother, Shishir Kumar, who now has waved adieu to this carnal world and lives in religious seclusion at Baidianath, a far-famed shrine of Central Bengal, communing with spirits whose visitations among men he chronicles in the Hindu Spiritual Magazine.

Both the brothers were brought up in the district of Jessore, and they made their mother’s village famous by taking its name of Amrita Bazar for the title of their paper, the Amrita Bazar Patrika—Amrita News, as we should say. It so happens that the word “Amrita” in Bengali means both “nectar” and “poison,” and no name could have been invented to express the character of their paper more exactly, for it can be sweet or venomous at pleasure, and is usually both. Its quickness and satiric power have won it a unique place among Indian newspapers. It has also a good service of news, and as for enterprise, when Lord Lytton passed his Vernacular Press Act in the ’seventies, while Sir Ashley Eden was Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, the Amrita changed its language from the vernacular Bengali to the alien English in its very next issue. Such a transformation would have seemed impossible, if I had not seen the compositors in Madras setting up my “copy” with hardly a mistake, though they did not understand a word of English, and only guessed our letters by sight.

Moti Lal is an oldish man now, as Bengalis go, but he stands thin and erect, his mass of grey hair surmounting a face in which pathos, humour, and subtlety are strongly mingled. It is difficult to class him among the Indian parties. He often runs off on side issues, such as his peculiar and personal indignation at the rational proposal to separate the large and extraneous province of Behar from the Calcutta government, so as to relieve the pressure of work which was the nominal excuse for the Partition of Bengal. On most of the wider questions of policy he would take a fairly steady “Congress” line, with a tendency to the Left or Extremist position. But that tendency may be suddenly interrupted by some queer cross-current, such as a personal devotion to the Royal Family, because he was once introduced to the Prince of Wales, and kissed his feet with a veneration that might abash even Royalty’s sense of Divine Right. By means of his paper he is undoubtedly a power among the party of nationality and reform, but the general belief that in the past he has exercised a certain influence even upon British officials is perhaps justified. At all events, when he asked me to remind the Lieutenant-Governor of a promise to restore the Road Cess to its proper purpose of sanitation, I noticed that the petition was received in a friendly spirit, and I was instructed to tell Moti Lal that the proposal had not been forgotten, but was already embodied in a Bill.

Sanitation is one of those side issues which he follows with peculiar zeal. Poverty and high prices, he says, are killing out the educated classes in Bengal. But worse than the disappearance of educated Bengalis, which many Anglo-Indians would regard as a mercy of Providence, is the general ravage of malaria, plague, and famine. The plague is still new, famine has been unusually frequent and terrible in the last thirty years; but worse than either, in his opinion, is the malaria which rots the country away. Like many Indians he attributes the growth of the disease to the Government railways, which have blocked or diverted the natural drainage of the land. The theory sounds a little fantastic. To me it seems a far more serious matter that the irrigation, which is often so lucrative, both to the peasant and the Government, should be accompanied by increase of fever. But whatever evil may arise in India, from a cesspool to a famine, is put down to the Government, as always happens when the people have no control over its powers and no experience of every Government’s limitations. “There is no need to talk about driving the English from India,” cried Moti Lal to me once: “In twenty years they will be driven out by the stench of our rotting corpses!”

Humorous, sarcastic, vehement, probably a little peevish, a little uncertain and unstable in his dealings with men and things, Moti Lal moves as a strange and isolated figure in Indian life. He is ageing and rather feeble now; when I asked him if he was going to the Congress at Surat, he answered, “No, I cannot afford to die.” But he went all the same. I suppose he might be called a Congress man, but it seems unlikely that any one ever thought of him as a possible President, or as anything else except the bitter-sweet editor of the Amrita Bazar Patrika.

Very different is the editor of the other leading Indian daily in Calcutta. Mr. Banerjea, whom every one calls Surendra Nath, is just the ideal of a leader in Congress, and Poona made him President in 1895, Ahmedabad in 1902. He appears to be about sixty now, and in the early ’seventies he was an assistant magistrate in the Indian Civil Service, from which he was dismissed for a casual neglect of duty that in the opinion of many English Civilians might have been suitably punished with a sharp reprimand. Like most highly educated people out of work, he took to teaching, lecturing, and journalism; became Principal of Ripon College for the training of Hindu boys, as he still is; was appointed editor of the Bengalee by the proprietors, who, I believe, are Indian physicians; and has for many years maintained it in its position as the most prominent Indian paper written in English.

From early days, when he was the first to originate tours of political instruction, his influence has been very powerful, and no one has opposed the partition of his country with greater vehemence and persistency. In politics he has shown himself the fighting man rather than the thinker, a better leader than guide. Such theory as he has professed holds him to the Moderate and Constitutional party, and till it comes to action he would cordially accept the propositions of all reasonable and practical reformers. But his instincts might carry him further than his creed, and in a moment of crisis he would probably be found in the front almost out of sight of his party. No matter how strongly reason and expediency disapproved, he would be reluctant to hang back from any extreme position, or to leave a devoted band of defenders there alone. That appeared to mark him out as the best intermediary between the Extremists and the Centre; for, while neither party would look to him for definite political guidance, both might be supposed to know that he was at heart their friend, and both could point to his past services in the Bengal Legislative Council, the University Senate, and the old Calcutta Corporation, before Lord Curzon destroyed it.

The same kind of divergence between reason and personality causes, I believe, an uncertain attitude towards other affairs of life. By education and habit he is Western in the things of society and religion, and probably would have remained so without scruple of conscience, but for the recent revolt against everything foreign. Among the Extremists there is a kind of conservative reaction towards Indian ways and Indian religion, prompted not so much by love of those early marriages and Hindu gods as by the determination to tolerate European things no more. Thus, you might find an Indian graduate of Oxford worshipping Kali for the same reason as makes him buy Swadeshi cotton, or pledging his infant daughter in marriage for fear she should grow up like an English lady. From patriotism of this sort Surendra Nath would not like to stand aloof, and, even if his judgment hesitated, an impetuous nature would perhaps bear him on, especially if he could thus assist his associates of the moment.

But his real function in life is as an orator, and his eminence has been won by an extraordinary power of speaking. I do not know how far his speeches in his own tongue might be effective, but he served his political apprenticeship at a time when oratory was tested by a knowledge of English, and I think he always speaks by choice in our language. Certainly, his command over it is very remarkable. Except for Mr. Gladstone, I have heard no speakers use the grand and rhetorical style of English with more assurance and success. I remember one afternoon there was a crowded meeting of many thousand students and other young men in the great College Square at Calcutta. There they stood, white-robed, bare-headed, as is the Bengali custom, and when the “Bande Mataram” had been sung, Surendra Nath rose. It was not a specially important speech. His object was only to sketch out the general programme of the approaching Congress, and to urge all parties to unite for the credit of their country, which was being watched by jealous eyes ever ready to detect the first appearance of a flaw. That was all his theme, but he expounded it with a magnificence of phrase, and continuity of expression that held me in wonder. Sentence answered to sentence, period to period, thunder to thunder. There was no hesitation, no throwing back, no wandering for ideas or words. Out the great language rolled without a break and without a drop, each syllable in its exact place and order, each sentence following some cadence of its own, so inevitable that you could foretell the stress and rhythm of its rise and fall far in advance of the actual words, just as you can in Macaulay’s declamations. It was oratory such as, I suppose, Cicero loved to practise, and Pitt, and Brougham—such oratory as few living Englishmen dare venture on for fear of drowning in the gulfs of bathos. But Surendra Nath loved it, as Cicero might. To him it was evidently the sincerest pleasure of life to listen to the beat of marching phrases, to advance from one to another with the assurance that not one of them would fail, and to lead them out in the martialled order of earth-shaking battalions moving shoulder to shoulder on their front. It was to him the fulfilment of function, and that way happiness lies. After him I spoke, and the meeting ended.