India seemed for the next twenty years to respond enthusiastically to the new call. Not only were the new Government schools as well as the older missionary schools thronged with Indian students who displayed no less intelligence than industry in the acquisition of Western learning, but the rapid assimilation of Western ideas amongst the upper classes, especially in Bengal, was reflected in the social and religious reform movements initiated by Western-educated Indians touched with the spirit of the West. Already in 1829 Lord William Bentinck had been supported by a considerable body of Indian public opinion in prohibiting the barbarous custom of Sati, i.e. the self-immolation of Hindu widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Government, however, rightly felt that, except in regard to practices of which it could not tolerate the continuance without surrendering the principles of humanity for which it stood, it was for the Indians themselves and not for their alien rulers to take the lead in bringing their religious and social customs and beliefs into harmony with Western standards. Nor was there any lack of Indians to give their countrymen that lead—amongst them several high-caste Brahmans, Ram Mohun Roy first and foremost. They were resolved to cleanse Hinduism of the superstitious and idolatrous impurities which, as they believed, were only morbid growths on the pure kernel of Hindu philosophy. The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all these reform movements, professed even to reconcile Hinduism with theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any personal God. British administrators watched and fostered the moral and intellectual progress of India with increasing confidence in the results of Western education, and none with more conviction than Lord Dalhousie, a high-minded and dour Scotsman, who was the last Governor-General to serve out his time under the East India Company. Other aspects of his policy may have been less wise. The extension of British rule to the Punjab became inevitable after a Sikh rising compelled him to complete what his predecessor, Lord Hardinge, had begun, and break once and for all the aggressive power of the Sikh Confederacy; but the rigorous application to the native States of the doctrine of lapse or escheat whenever the ruler died without a recognised heir, and the forcible annexation of the kingdom of Oudh as a penalty incurred by the sins, however gross, of the reigning dynasty have been often condemned as grave errors of judgment. They were not, in any case, errors that can be ascribed to the lust of mere dominion. Dalhousie was convinced that Indian progress would always be hampered by the continuance of native administration under such rulers as the kings of Oudh. If he was bent on extending the area of British dominion, it was in order to extend the area within which Britain was to be free to discharge her civilising mission without let or hindrance, and not least by the furtherance of education. If he took a legitimate pride in the introduction into India under his auspices of the two great discoveries of applied science which were just beginning to revolutionise the Western world, viz. railways and telegraphs, together with unified postage, it was because he regarded them as powerful instruments of education. The impulse given by him to public instruction even in the new provinces recently brought under British control prepared the way for the great educational measures of 1854 which marked a tremendous stride forward on the road upon which Macaulay's Minute had started India just two decades before. It was to Dalhousie that Sir Charles Wood addressed his memorable despatch which contained, as the Governor-General frankly acknowledged, "a scheme of education for all India far wider and more comprehensive than the local or Supreme Governments could have ventured to suggest." Its main features were the establishment of a department of Public Instruction in every province to emphasise the importance attached by Government to the educational purpose of British rule; the creation of Universities in each of the three Presidency cities, and of Government colleges of a higher grade, and training colleges for teachers, and the bestowal of grants-in-aid on private educational institutions. The claims of vernacular education were not forgotten, nor the vital importance of promoting female education, by which "a far greater proportional impulse is imported to the educational and moral tone of the people than by the education of men." The despatch mapped out a really national system of education worthy of the faith which the British generation of that day had in the establishment of an intellectual and spiritual communion between India and the West. The initial steps immediately taken by Dalhousie to carry the provisions of that despatch into execution are enumerated in the masterly Report drawn up by him on his way home in 1856, reviewing every aspect of his administration during his eight years' tenure of office—an administration which virtually closed, and not unworthily, perhaps the noblest period of British rule in India, when men of the intellectual and moral elevation of Bentinck and Munro and Metcalfe and Elphinstone and Thomason, and Dalhousie himself, humbly but firmly believed that in trying to found "British greatness on Indian happiness" they were carrying out the mission which it had pleased Providence to entrust to the British people. Dalhousie's parting hope and prayer, when he left India, broken in health but not in spirit, after eight years of intensely strenuous service, was that "in all time to come these reports from the Presidencies and provinces under our rule may form in each successive year a happy record of peace, prosperity, and progress." His immediate successor, Lord Canning, was moved to utter some strangely prophetic words before he left England: "I wish for a peaceful term of office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin." Within less than a year the cloud arose and burst, and he had to face the outbreak of the Mutiny and see all the foundations of co-operation between Indians and British rudely shaken, which a broad and liberal policy of "peace, prosperity, and progress" seemed to have so well and truly laid.
CHAPTER V
THE MUTINY AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER
Many different causes, much more clearly apprehended to-day than at the time, contributed to provoke the great storm which burst over India in 1857. On the surface it was a military and mainly Mahomedan insurrection, but it was far more than that. It was a violent upheaval not so much against the political supremacy of Britain as against the whole new order of things which she was importing into India. The greased cartridges would not have sufficed to provoke such an explosion, nor would even Mahomedans, let alone Hindus, have rallied round a phantom King of Delhi in mere revenge for the annexation of Oudh or the enforcement of the doctrine of lapse. The cry of "Islam in danger" was quick to stir the Mahomedans, but the brains that engineered and directed the Mutiny were Hindu, and the Mutiny itself was the counter-revolution arraying in battle against the intellectual and moral as well as against the material and military forces of Western civilisation that was slowly but steadily revolutionising India, all the grievances and all the fears, all the racial and religious antagonism and bitterness aroused by the disintegration under its impact of ancient social and religious systems. Western education was to yield other fruits later on, but before the Mutiny it was rapidly familiarising the mind of India with Western ideals which imperilled not only the worship of the old gods but also the worship of the Brahman as their mouthpiece and "the guardian of the treasury of civil and religious duties." Modern schools and colleges threatened to undermine his ascendancy just as Western competition had by more dubious methods undermined Indian domestic industries. No man's caste was said to be safe against the hidden defilement of all the strange inventions imported from beyond the seas. Prophecy, vague but persuasive, hinted that British rule, which dated in the Indian mind from the battle of Plassey in 1757, was doomed not to outlive its centenary. All the vested interests connected with the old order of things in the religious as well as in the political domain felt the ground swaying under their feet, and the peril with which they were confronted came not only from their alien rulers but from their own countrymen, often of their own caste and race, who had fallen into the snares and pitfalls of an alien civilisation. The spirit of fierce reaction that lay behind the Mutiny stands nowhere more frankly revealed than in the History of the War of Independence of 1857, written by Vinayak Savarkar, one of the most brilliant apostles of a later school of revolt, who, as a pious Hindu, concludes his version of the Cawnpore massacre with the prayer that "Mother Ganges, who drank that day of the blood of Europeans, may drink her fill of it again."
The revolt failed except in one respect. It failed as a military movement. It had appealed to the sword and it perished by the sword. But it is well to remember that the struggle, which was severe, would have been, to say the least, far more severe and protracted had not a large part of the Indian army remained staunch to the Raj, and had not Indian troops stood, as they had stood throughout all our previous fighting in India, shoulder to shoulder with British troops on the ridge at Delhi and in the relief of Lucknow. It failed equally as a political movement, for it never spread beyond a relatively narrow area in Upper and Central India. The vast majority of the Indian people and princes never even wavered. British rule passed through a trial by fire and it emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities. The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing too heavy for the mere trading corporation that the East India Company then still was. The Company had long ceased to be a mere trading corporation. Transformed into a great agency of government and administration, it had risen not unworthily to its immense responsibilities. But the time had come for the final step. The Company disappeared and the Crown assumed full and sole responsibility for the government and administration of India. The change was in effect more formal than real. The Governor-General came to be known as the Viceroy, and the Secretary of State in Council took the place of the old President of the Board of Control. But the system remained as before one of paternal despotism in India, to be tempered still by the control of Parliament at home.
Only in one respect had the reactionary forces at the back of the Mutiny scored some success. The Proclamation issued by Queen Victoria on her assumption of "the government of the territories in India heretofore administered in trust for us by the Honourable East India Company," was a solemn and earnest renewal of all the pledges already given to the princes and people of India. It emphasised the determination of the Crown to abstain from all interference with their religious belief or worship. It reiterated the assurance that "as far as may be," her subjects "of whatever race or creed" would be freely and impartially admitted to offices in the service of the Crown, "the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity duly to discharge," and that, "generally in framing and administering the law, due regard be paid to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India." It promised the wide exercise of her royal clemency to all offenders save those actually guilty of murder during the recent outbreak. It closed with a fine expression of her confidence and affection towards her Indian subjects. "In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward." But no Proclamation, however generous and sincere, could undo the moral harm done by the Mutiny. The horrors which accompanied the rising and the sternness of the repression left terrible memories behind them on both sides, and this legacy of racial hatred acted as a blight on the growth of the spirit of mutual understanding and co-operation between Indians and Englishmen in India which two generations of broad-minded Englishmen and progressive Indians had sedulously and successfully cultivated.
If we look back upon the half-century after the Mutiny and before the Partition of Bengal, which may be regarded as closing that long period of paternal but autocratic government, it was one of internal peace and of material progress which the large annual output of eloquent statistics may be left to demonstrate. In 1857 there were not 200 miles of railways in India, in 1905 there was a network of railways amounting to over 28,000 miles, and the telegraph system expanded during the same period from 4500 to 60,000 miles. The development of a great system of irrigation canals added large new tracts of hitherto barren wastes to the cultivable area of the country, and an elaborate machinery of precautionary measures and relief works was created to mitigate the hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls. The incidence and methods of collection of the land-tax, the backbone of Indian revenue, were carefully corrected and perfected, and the burden of taxation readjusted and on the whole lightened. Those were the days of laisser-faire, laisser-aller at home, and it was not deemed to be part of the duties of government to give any special protection to Indian commerce, whilst the operation of free trade principles in India checked the industrial development of the country. Nevertheless the internal and external trade of India expanded continually, and the cotton mills in Western India, and the jute mills in Calcutta, as well as the opening up of coal mines in Bengal and of gold mines in Southern India showed how great were the natural resources of the peninsula still awaiting development; and under Lord Curzon's administration, which reached during the first years of the present century the high-water mark of efficiency, a department was created to deal specially with commerce and industry. In spite of several famines of unusual intensity and of the appearance in India in 1896 of a new scourge in the shape of the bubonic plague, which has carried off since then over eight million people, the population increased by leaps and bounds, and the census of 1901 showed it to have reached in our Indian Empire the huge figure of nearly 300,000,000—which it has since then exceeded by another 20,000,000—or about a fifth of the estimated population of the whole globe. It had risen since the first census officially recorded in 1871 by nearly 30 per cent—no mean evidence that fifty years of peaceful and efficient administration had produced an increased sense of welfare and confidence.
The great bulk of the population, mostly a simple and ignorant peasantry whose horizon does not extend beyond their own village and the fields that surround it, accepted with more or less conscious gratitude the material benefits conferred upon them by alien rulers with whom they were seldom brought into actual contact save through the occasional presence of a District officer on tour, almost invariably humane and kindly and anxious to do even-handed justice to all. Another class of Indians, chiefly dwellers in large cities, infinitesimally small numerically but constantly increasing in numbers and still more rapidly in activity and influence, saw, however, in an autocratic form of government, of which it even questioned the efficiency, an insurmountable barrier to the aspirations which Western education had taught it to entertain. The list of graduates from Indian Universities lengthened every year, the number of schools and colleges in which young Indians acquired at least the rudiments of Western knowledge grew and multiplied in every province. Western-educated Indians flocked to the bar; they showed themselves qualified for most of the liberal professions; they filled every post that was open to them in the public services. But where, they asked with growing impatience, was the fulfilment of the hopes which they had founded on the Queen's Proclamation of 1858? There had been perhaps no departure from the letter of the Proclamation, but had its spirit been translated into effective practice? Was it never to be interpreted in the same generous sense in which a still earlier generation of British administrators had interpreted their mission as a means to train the Indians to protect and govern themselves?
The Indian army, reorganised after the Mutiny, displayed all its old qualities of loyalty and gallantry in the course of the numerous foreign expeditions in which it was employed in co-operation with the British army, in Egypt and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, China, and Tibet, in addition to the chronic frontier fighting on the turbulent North-West border. The menace of Russia's persistent expansion towards India through Central Asia and the ascendancy for which she was at the same time striving in the Near East and the Far East, and later on the far more real menace of German aspirations to world-dominion, lent added importance to the maintenance of an efficient Indian army as an essential factor in the defensive forces of the Empire. But there was no departure from the old system under which not only were army administration and all the higher commands reserved for British officers, but the whole army was kept as a fighting machine entirely dependent upon British leadership. The native officers of an Indian regiment, mostly promoted from the ranks, could in no circumstances rise to a position in which they might give orders to a British officer, whilst, however senior in years and service, they were under the orders of the youngest British subaltern gazetted to the regiment. No other system was indeed possible so long as no attempt was made to give to Indians any higher military training, or to hold out to them any prospects of promotion beyond those within their reach by enlistment in the ranks. These Indian officers, drawn from races that had acquired a martial reputation and often from families with whom military service was an hereditary tradition, were as a rule not only very fine fighters but gallant native gentlemen, between whom and their British officers there existed very cordial relations, human and professional, based upon an instinctive recognition of differences of education and similarities of tastes on both sides. But such a system, however well it worked in practice for the production of a reliable fighting machine, was not calculated to train the Indians to protect themselves.