But it is much harder to change a social custom than to legislate, and the Maharajah’s greatest triumphs lay in the prevention of child-marriages, the emancipation of ladies from the “purdah,” or curtained life, and the breaking-down of caste barriers. In all this he had been aided by the encouragement and example of his Maharani, who had stood by his side like one of the heroic queens of Mahratta history. In all India I suppose there was not another man and woman who had done more for the happiness and advancement of their people, or done more to disprove the common Anglo-Indian charge that Indians are incapable of carrying out even their own reforms. For their very success they were suspected and maligned by officials, who had not the courage to imitate their methods. But when official torpor and private malignity had said their worst, the Maharajah and his queen remained among the royal souls of India. They had once more established the old Roman paradox that it is possible to follow virtue even in a palace, and there was something almost Aurelian in their proud service to the Commonwealth.[71]
FOOTNOTES:
[71] For the development of Baroda, see the admirable series of annual Administration Reports prepared up to 1907 by Mr. Romesh C. Dutt, C.I.E., Revenue Minister of Baroda, and since then by his successor, Mr. Kersasp Rustamji.
CHAPTER XVIII
Summary and Conclusion
Let it be granted, as a matter of bare fact, quite apart from any wishes or opinions, that for many years to come we shall retain military and administrative command in India. Rightly or wrongly, we shall retain it, unless we are so overwhelmingly defeated at home that we almost cease to be not only an empire but a nation. Probably it is to our own advantage to retain it, because to withdraw before India is strong enough to stand alone would degrade our national life with a cowardly sense of failure. Personally I think it is to India’s advantage also, because her peoples are so unarmed, undrilled, and unorganized under our rule that if we withdrew our place would easily be taken within a year by Russia, Germany, or Japan; perhaps by all three in conflict. When the very worst that can be said against our rule has been said, the substitution of Russia’s rule for ours would be an incalculable disaster from which India might recover only after many generations, just as Poland, the Caucasus, and Persia may. Nor have Germany and Japan yet given proof of governing subject races with success, much less with humanity. Till India is sufficiently advanced in arms, unity, and knowledge to hold her own (which used to be the hope of our statesmen), it is probably to her advantage that we should retain the ultimate supremacy in government and war. We may not do it particularly well, but the chances are that others would do it incomparably worse. Let it be granted, anyhow, that nothing but overwhelming national defeat will deter us from doing it.
But whilst we shall continue, as far as politics can foresee, to superintend the administration of India and to protect her from external attack, the danger is that our bureaucracy, always the slowest form of government to realize change, should ignore the new spirit arising in the country, or should seek to stifle rather than guide it. It is the conviction of many that India is now standing on the verge of a national renaissance—a new birth in intellect, social life, and the affairs of state. There are unmistakable evidences of this, not only among educated Hindus, but among educated Mohammedans; not only among the educated classes, but throughout the masses of the people. Many things have combined to create a new spirit, and we have ourselves contributed much. The long peace that has made development possible, the easy communication by railways, the wide distribution of newspapers, the visits of highly educated Indians to England, the use of English as a common tongue among educated people of all races and religions, the increasing knowledge of our history and our hard-won liberties, the increasing study of our great Liberal thinkers—all these admirable advantages we have ourselves contributed to the new spirit, and it is useless for startled reactionaries to think of withdrawing them now. We must also take into account the example set to all Oriental nationalities by Japan, and the awakened stirring of Liberalism in England herself, and, no matter how feeble its efforts and how bitter its failure, in Russia, Egypt, Persia, and Turkey.
Most of these beneficent influences move slowly, with a deep and gradual force, and, whatever happens, they will continue to move, though to move slowly. But the outburst of the new spirit which we call the unrest in India was occasioned by a different order of things, for the most part, sudden, external, and pernicious. Such things were the contemptuous disregard of Indian feeling in the Partition of Bengal and Lord Curzon’s University speech upon Indian mendacity; the exclusion of fully qualified Indians from public positions, in contradiction to Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858; several notorious cases of injustice in the law courts, where English criminals were involved; numerous instances of petty persecution for political opinions since 1905; the well-known measures for the suppression of personal liberty and freedom of speech in 1907 and 1908; the espionage of police and postal officials; and the increasing insolence of the vulgar among Anglo-Indians, as shown in ordinary behaviour and in the newspapers which represent their views.
All these obvious and external causes of complaint, crowded into the space of very few years, have been sapping India’s confidence in the justice of our rule and the benevolence of our people. Indians have, no doubt, exaggerated both the injustice and the malevolence. They have taken a few flagrant cases of injustice as typical of our Courts; they have mistaken for malevolence what is only our reckless indifference to far-off responsibilities. But we cannot wonder at their mistakes. Nearly every one generalizes about foreign nations from the one or two specimens he knows; and we, as foreigners in India, must not hope to escape generalizations rapidly founded on the behaviour of every man or woman who may represent us there unworthily. As to our national indifference, I wish we could say that this charge also was founded only on special and notorious instances. But it is not. Our indifference to the Indian peoples, from whom we are continually sucking so much of our wealth, is universal and invariable. Or it is varied only at long intervals after outbreaks of bloodshed and threatenings of revolt. No wonder that a growing party in India believes that only by such means can England’s attention be roused, and any permanent advantage for their country obtained.
Of course, they are inconsiderate. In spite of the ill-manners of a certain type of Anglo-Indian, we are as a whole rather a polite and kind-hearted people, and the mere shadow of injustice makes us seethe with indignation, so long as it is not too far away. If they charge us with indifference, they ought to consider that we are faced with almost insoluble problems of our own; that we are a very busy people, and that our knowledge of what goes on in India is generally limited to one or two speeches which attract little attention, a few Parliamentary questions, and the reports of official or other journalists whose very existence depends on standing well with the Anglo-Indian community. Indians are too apt not to consider these mitigating circumstances. But it does not tend to make people considerate when men, women, and children are dying of a comparatively recent plague by hundreds of thousands every year; when for fifteen years in succession famines have been almost regularly recurrent; when increasing malaria is rotting the population away in body and mind, and when thousands, or probably millions, of people who used to have two meals a day can now afford only one. I do not say these disasters are the fault of the Indian Government or the British people. But it is obvious that they do not tend to make the sufferers under them considerate towards the difficulties of rulers who hardly suffer from them at all. They are likely to be the less considerate because they know that, out of a revenue over which they have no control, at least £20,000,000 a year is withdrawn from their country to be spent in England, partly in the shape of interest on serviceable loans, but largely in incomes, pensions, and other more questionable forms; while, even against the better judgment of the highest Anglo-Indian authorities themselves, the greatest Indian industry is kept depressed by the countervailing excise of 3½ per cent. imposed by the Cotton Duties Act of 1896 on cottons made and sold in India, simply for the benefit of our Lancashire mills.
Considerate or not, the new spirit—the section of it that has time and youth on its side—has begun to despair of further appeals and petitions for English justice or assistance. In spite of the splendid traditions of many noble Englishmen from Sir Thomas Munro down to Lord Ripon, I suppose few representatives of our rule have been popular among the Indian races. That was not usually the fault of our representatives; their position made genuine popularity very difficult, and it is impossible for one race to deny freedom to another and rule it to the true advantage of either. But I think that till lately the verdict of most Indians upon us would have been the same as the schoolboy’s who called Dr. Temple “a beast, but a just beast.” In their verdict to-day the compliment of that saving clause would generally be omitted, and that loss of our high reputation for justice, if it is to be permanent, is the worst loss we could ever suffer—worst for ourselves as patriots who honour our country for her justice, and worst for the Indians, whose position a sense of permanent injustice will render intolerable.