India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

That nothing was done to open up a military career to the Western-educated classes was not at first more than a sentimental grievance. But when the years passed and they still waited for that larger share in the government and even in the administration of their country to which the British Parliament had recognised their claim as far back as the Act of 1833, their faith even in the professed purpose of British rule began to waver. At first the leaders of the Indian intelligentsia, some of whom had learned the value of British institutions and of the freedom of British public life, not merely through English literature but through years of actual residence in England, preferred to hold the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy alone or chiefly responsible for the long delay in the fulfilment of hopes which they in fact regarded as rights. Their confidence in British statesmanship and in the British Parliament remained unshaken for nearly thirty years after the Mutiny, though they were perhaps not unnaturally inclined to put their trust chiefly in the Liberal party which had been most closely associated with the promotion of a progressive policy towards India in the past. Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty confirmed them in the belief that from the Conservative party they had little to hope for, and his drastic Press Act of 1879, though not unprovoked by the virulent abuse of Government in some of the vernacular papers and the reckless dissemination of alarmist rumours during the worst period of the Afghan troubles, was held to foreshadow a return all along the line to purely despotic methods of government. But his departure from India after Lord Beaconsfield's defeat at the general election of 1880 and the return of the Liberal party to power quickened new hopes which Lord Ripon, when he became Viceroy in succession to Lord Lytton, showed every disposition to justify.

All the greater was the disillusionment when a measure, introduced for the purpose of abolishing "judicial disqualifications based on race distinctions," not only provoked fierce opposition amongst the whole European community and even amongst the rank and file of the civil service, but was ultimately whittled down in deference to that opposition until the very principle at issue was virtually surrendered. Indians resented this fresh assertion of racial superiority, and saw in the violence of the agitation, sometimes not far removed from threats of actual lawlessness, and in the personal abuse poured out by his own countrymen on the Queen's representative, the survival amongst a large section of Europeans of the same hatred that had invented for a Viceroy who was determined to temper justice with mercy after the Mutiny the scornful nickname of "Clemency Canning."

The fate of the Ilbert Bill taught the Indians above all one practical lesson—the potency of agitation. If by agitation a Viceroy enjoying the full confidence of the British Government, with a powerful Parliamentary majority behind it, could be compelled by the British community in India, largely consisting of public servants, to surrender a great principle of policy, then the only hope for Indians was to learn to agitate in their own interests, and to create a political organisation of their own in order both to educate public opinion in India and influence public opinion in England. The men who started the Indian National Congress were inspired by no revolutionary ambitions. Though they did not talk, as Mr. Gandhi does to-day, about producing a "change of hearts" in their British rulers, that was their purpose and unlike Mr. Gandhi, they were firm believers not in any racial superiority, but in the superiority of Western civilisation and of British political institutions which they deemed not incapable of transplantation on to Indian soil. So on December 28, 1885, a small band of Indian gentlemen, who represented the élite of the Western-educated classes, met in Bombay to hold the first session of the Indian National Congress which, with all its many shortcomings, even in its earlier and better days, was destined to play a far more important part than was for a long time realised by Englishmen in India or at home. Many of them—such as Mr. Bonnerji, a distinguished Bengalee, Pherozeshah Mehta, a rising member of the great Parsee community in Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji, who was later on to be the first Indian to put forward plainly India's claim to self-government within the British Empire—had spent several years in England. Others, like Ranadé and Telang, had been for a long time past vigorous advocates of Indian social reforms. With them were a few Englishmen—chief among them a retired civilian Mr. Hume—who were in complete sympathy with their aspirations. Only the Mahomedans were unrepresented, though not uninvited, partly because few of them had been caught up in the current of Western thought and education, and partly because the community as a whole, reflecting the ancient and deep-seated antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, distrusted profoundly every movement in which Hindus were the leading spirits. Lord Reay, who was then Governor of Bombay, was invited to preside and declined only after asking for instructions from the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, who, though not unfriendly, held that it was undesirable for the head of a Provincial Government to associate himself with what should essentially be a popular movement. Mr. Bonnerji, who was selected to take the chair, emphatically proclaimed the loyalty of the Congress to the British Crown. Amongst the most characteristic resolutions moved and carried was one demanding the appointment of a Royal Commission, on which the people of India should be represented, to inquire into the working of the Indian administration, and another pleading for a large expansion of the Indian Legislative Councils and the creation of a Standing Committee of the House of Commons to which the majority in those Councils should have the right to appeal if overruled by the Executive.

The Congress claimed to represent the educated opinion of India, and, though Government withheld from it all official recognition, it flattered itself not without reason that its preaching had not fallen on to altogether barren soil when, still under Lord Dufferin's Viceroyalty, the Indian Local Government Act of 1888 marked a large advance upon the reforms in local and municipal institutions which, with the repeal of the Lytton Press Act, had been amongst the few tangible results of Lord Ripon's "Pro-Indian" Viceroyalty; for it fulfilled many of the demands which Indian Liberals, and notably Pherozeshah Mehta, had urged for years past for a more effective share in municipal administration. Still greater was the satisfaction when, under Lord Lansdowne's Viceroyalty, the British Parliament passed in 1892 an Indian Councils Act, for which Lord Dufferin himself had paved the way by admitting that Government could and should rely more largely upon the experience and advice of responsible Indians. The functions and the constitution of both the Viceroy's and the Provincial Legislative Councils, though their powers remained purely consultative, were substantially enlarged by the addition of a considerable number of unofficial members representing, at least in theory, all classes and interests, who were given the right to put questions to the Executive on matters of administration and, in the case of the Viceroy's Council, to discuss the financial policy of Government if and when the budget to be laid before it involved fresh taxation. The Act of 1892 did not, however, admit "the living forces of the elective principle" on which the Congress leaders had laid their chief stress, and they went on pressing "not for Consultative Councils, but for representative institutions." Their hopes never perhaps rose so high as when one of their own veterans, Dadabhai Naoroji—though Lord Salisbury could not resist a jibe at the expense of the "black man"—entered the House of Commons as Liberal member for Central Finsbury. It must be conceded that, had Government at that time taken the Congress by the hand instead of treating it with disdain and suspicion, it might have played loyally and usefully a part analogous to that of "Her Majesty's Opposition" at home—a part which Lord Dufferin had been shrewd enough in the beginning not to dismiss as altogether impossible or undesirable. Its claim to represent Indian opinion, as, within certain limits, it unquestionably did, was ignored, and it was left to drift without any attempt at official guidance into waters none the less dangerous because they seemed shallow. It quickly attracted a large following among the urban middle classes all over India. But as the number of those who attended its annual sessions, held in turn in every province, grew larger, it became less amenable to the guiding and restraining influence of those who had created it, and especially of those who had hoped to lead it in the path of social and religious reform as well as of political advancement.

The social and religious reform movement which had been of great promise before the Mutiny and for some years afterwards, when Keshab Chundra Sen gave the Brahmo Somaj a fine uplift, slackened. Like the Brahmo Somaj in Bengal, the Prirthana Somaj in Bombay no longer made so many or such fervent recruits. New societies sprang up in defence of the old faiths, some even glorifying all their primitive customs and superstitions, and most of them, whilst professing to recognise the need for cleansing them of their grosser accretions, displaying a marked reaction against the West in their avowed determination to seek reform only in a return to the purer doctrines of early Hinduism. The most important of all these movements was the Arya Somaj in the Punjab, whose watchwords were "Back to the Vedas" and "Arya for the Aryans." The latter has sometimes barely disguised a more than merely platonic desire to see the British disappear out of the Aryan land of India. But the Vedas at any rate yielded to the searchers sufficient fruitful authority for promoting female education on sound moral lines and for discouraging idolatry and relaxing the cruel bondage of caste. That it has been and still is in many respects a powerful influence for good is now generally admitted by those even whom its political tendencies have alarmed. New sects arose within Hinduism.[1] An ardent apostle of the Hindu revival in Bengal, Swami Vivekananda, was the most impressive and picturesque figure at the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 and made converts in America and in Europe, amongst them in England the gifted poetess best known under her Hindu name as Sister Nivedita. How strong was the hold regained by the purely reactionary forces in Hinduism was suddenly shown in the furious campaign against Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill in 1891 which brought Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Chitawan Brahman of Poona, for the first time into public life as the champion of extreme Hindu orthodoxy. That measure was intended to mitigate the evils of infant marriage by raising the age for the woman's consent to its consummation from ten to twelve, and the death quite recently of a young Hindu girl of eleven in Calcutta due to the violence inflicted upon her by a husband nearly twenty years older than she was, had enlisted very widespread support for Government amongst enlightened Hindus and especially amongst the Western-educated. Tilak did not defeat the Bill, but his unscrupulous attacks, not only upon the British rulers of India but upon his own more liberal co-religionists, including men of such ability and character as Telang and Ranadé, dealt a sinister blow at the social reform movement, which practically died out of the Congress when he and his friends began to establish their ascendancy over it.

It was so much easier for Indians to unite on a common political platform against British methods of government than on a platform of social and religious reforms which offended many different prejudices and threatened many vested interests. The Congress developed into a purely political body, and like all self-constituted bodies with no definite responsibilities it showed greater capacity for acrid criticism, often quite uninformed, than for any constructive policy. As the years passed on without any tangible results from its expanding flow of oratory and long "omnibus" resolutions, proposed and carried more or less automatically at every annual session, it turned away from the old exponents of constitutional agitation to the fiery champions of very different methods, and almost insensibly favoured the dangerous growth both inside it and outside it of the new forces, and of the old forces in new shapes, which were to explode into the open with such unforeseen violence after the Partition of Bengal in 1905.

If, however, when that explosion came the Western-educated classes were against us rather than with us, the explanation cannot be sought only in their continued exclusion from all real participation in the counsels of Government, or in the refusal of the political rights for which they had vainly agitated, or even in a general reaction against the earlier acceptance of the essential superiority of the West. A much more acute and substantial grievance, which affected also their material interests, was the badge of inferiority imposed upon them in the public services. Not till 1886 had Government appointed a Commission to report upon a reorganisation of the public services, and its recommendations profoundly disappointed Indian expectations. For only a narrow door was opened for the admission of Indians into the higher Civil Service, and all public services were divided into two nearly water-tight compartments, the one labelled Imperial, recruited in England and reserved in practice, as to most of the superior posts, for Englishmen, and the other recruited in India mainly from Indians, but labelled Provincial and clearly intended to be inferior. Such a system bore the stamp, barely disguised, of racial discrimination, at variance with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Queen's Proclamation—and this at a time when Indian universities and colleges were bearing abundant fruit, and some of it at least of a good quality.

The diffusion of Western education had, it is true, produced other and less healthy results, but the inquiry into Indian education instituted by Government in 1882 had been unfortunately blind to them. Diffusion had been attained largely by a dangerous process of dilution, as side by side with the European schools and colleges, either under Government control or State-aided, which had grown and multiplied, many had been also started and supported by Indian private enterprise, often ill-equipped for their task. The training of Indian teachers could hardly keep pace with the demand, either as to quantity or quality, and with overcrowded classes even the best institutions suffered from the loss of individual contact between the European teacher and the Indian scholar. Western education had been started in India at the top, whence it was expected to filter down by some strange and unexplained process of gravitation. Attention was concentrated on higher and secondary education, to which primary education was at first entirely sacrificed. Whereas Lord William Bentinck had declared the great object of Government to be the promotion of both Western science and literature, scarcely any effort was made—perhaps because most Anglo-Indians had a leaning towards the humanities—to correct by the encouragement of scientific studies the natural bent of the Indian mind towards a purely literary education. Yet the Indian mind being specially endowed with the gift of imagination and prone to speculative thought stands in particular need of the corrective discipline afforded by the study of exact science. Again, the reluctance of Government to appear even to interfere with Indian moral and religious conceptions, towards which it was pledged to observe absolute neutrality, tended to restrict the domain of education to the purely intellectual side. Yet, religion having always been in India the basic element of life, and morality apart from religion an almost impossible conception, that very aspect of education to which Englishmen profess to attach the highest value, and of which Mr. Gokhale in a memorable speech admitted Indians to stand in special need, viz. the training of character, was gravely neglected.

Whilst from lack of any settled policy Indian education was drifting on to rocks and quicksands, and the personal influence of Englishmen on the younger generation diminished in an officialised educational service, gradual changes in the material conditions of European life in India tended to keep British and Indians more rather than less apart. Greater facilities of travel between England and India, and the growth of "hill stations" in which Europeans congregated during the hot season, made it easier for Englishwomen to live in India, though, when the time came for children to be sent home for their education, the choice continued to lie between separation of husband and wife, or of mother and children. But if the presence of a larger feminine element was calculated to exercise a refining and restraining influence on Anglo-Indian society, it did not promote the growth of intimate social relations between Europeans and Indians, as Indian habits and domestic institutions, and especially the seclusion of women, created an even greater barrier, which only slowly and rarely yielded to the influences of Western education, between European and Indian ladies than between the men of the two races. Englishwomen even more than Englishmen continued to be haunted by the memories of the Mutiny, which remained painfully present to a generation who, whether Indians or British, had lived through that tempest, and if to Indians the Mutiny recalled such scenes as "The Blowing of Indians from British Guns" which the great Russian painter Verestchagin depicted with the same realism as the splendid pageant of the entry of the Prince of Wales into Delhi in 1876, it was the horrors of Cawnpore that chiefly dwelt in the minds of Europeans. Many Englishmen and Englishwomen owed their lives during the Mutiny to the devotion and courage of Indians who helped them to escape, and sheltered them sometimes for months at no slight risk to themselves. But the spirit of treachery and cruelty revealed in the Mutiny and personified in a Nana Sahib, who had disappeared into space but, according to frequently recurrent rumour, was still alive somewhere, chilled the feelings of trustfulness and goodwill of an earlier generation. Again, whilst there was a large increase in the number of young Indians who went to England to complete their studies—especially technical studies for which only tardy and inadequate facilities were provided in their own country—and many of them, left to their own devices in our large cities, brought back to India a closer familiarity with the unedifying rather than the edifying aspects of Western civilisation, the development of European industries and the railway and telegraph services, which at first at least required the employment of Europeans in subordinate capacities, imported into India a new type of European, with many good qualities, but rather more prone than those of better breeding and education to glory in his racial superiority and to bring it home somewhat roughly to the Indians with whom he associated. The ignorance of European and American globe-trotters who were finding their way to India also often offended Indian susceptibilities. Add to many causes of friction, almost inevitable sometimes between people whose habits and ideas are widely different, the effect of a trying climate upon the European temper—never, for instance, even at home at its best when travelling—and one need hardly be surprised that unpleasant incidents occurred in which, sometimes under provocation and sometimes under none, Englishmen who ought to have known better were guilty of gross affronts upon Indians. Such incidents were never frequent, but, even if there had been no tendency on the part of Indians to magnify and on the part of Englishmen to minimise their gravity, they were frequent enough to cause widespread heartburning, and in not a few cases political hatred has had its origin in the rancour created by personal insults to which even educated Indians of good position have occasionally been subjected by Englishmen who fancied themselves, but were not, their betters. That Indians also could be, and were sometimes, offensive they were generally apt to forget, as they forgot in their denunciations of Lord Curzon at the time of the Partition of Bengal that he had not shrunk from incurring great unpopularity in some Anglo-Indian circles by insisting upon adequate punishment of all Europeans guilty of violence towards Indians. Apart from such collisions nothing rankled more with Indians of the better classes than their rigid exclusion from the European clubs in India. Even the few who were members of, or had been admitted at home as visitors to, the best London clubs were debarred, when they landed in Bombay, even from calling on their English friends at the Yacht Club. Europeans could see nothing in this but the right of every club to restrict its membership and frame its regulations as it chooses. Indians could see nothing in it but humiliating racial discrimination. The question has now been more or less solved by the creation in most of the large cities in India of new clubs to which Indians and Europeans are equally eligible, and in which those who choose can meet on terms of complete equality and good fellowship. But it constituted one of the grievances which contributed to the estrangement of the Western educated classes during the latter part of the last century.

Though social friction assisted that estrangement its chief cause lay much deeper. After the Mutiny government under the direct authority of the Crown lost the flexibility which the vigilant control of the British Parliament had imparted to the old system of government under the East India Company with every periodical renewal of its charter. The system remained what it had inevitably been from the beginning of British rule, a system devised by foreigners and worked by foreigners—at its best a trusteeship committed to them for the benefit of the people of India, but to be discharged on the sole judgment and discretion of the British trustees. The Mutiny shook the finer faith which had contemplated the finality some day or other of the trusteeship and introduced Western education into India as the agency by which Indians were to be prepared to resume when that day came the task of governing and protecting themselves. There was a tacit assumption now, if never officially formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of Indians who claimed both a share in the administration and a voice in the framing of policy. Executive and administrative functions were vested practically in the same hands, i.e. in the hands of a great and ubiquitous bureaucracy more and more jealous of its power and of its infallibility in proportion as the latter began to be questioned and the former to be attacked by the class of Indians who had learned to speak the same language and to profess the same ideals.