The constant additions made to the huge machinery of administration in order to meet the growing needs of the country on the approved lines of a modern state resulted in increased centralisation. New departments were created and old ones expanded, but even when the highest posts in them were not specifically or in practice reserved for the Indian Civil Service, it retained the supreme control over them as the corps d'élite from which most of the members of the Viceroy's Executive Council, i.e. the Government of India, were recruited. The District Officer remained the pivot and pillar of British administration throughout rural India, and he kept as closely as he could in touch with the millions of humble folk committed to his care, though the multiplication of codes and regulations and official reports and statistics involving heavy desk work kept him increasingly tied to his office. But the secretariats, which from the headquarters of provincial governments as well as from the seat of supreme government directed and controlled the whole machine, became more and more self-centred, more and more imbued with a sense of their own omniscience. Even the men with district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided themselves on being the repositories of all the arcana of "good government." Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be regarded as the one test that mattered, and it was a test which only Englishmen were competent to apply and which Indians were required to accept as final whatever their wishes or their experience might be.
Herein perhaps more than anywhere else lay the secret of the antagonism between the British bureaucracy and the Western-educated Indians which gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency reached its apogee—himself the incarnation of efficiency and unquestionably the greatest and most indefatigable administrator that Britain sent out to India during that period. It would be unfair to suppose that that antagonism was due on either side to mere narrow prejudice or sordid jealousy. Indians who resented their exclusion from the share in the administration of their country for which they believed their education to have qualified them, and which they claimed as the fulfilment of repeated promises and of the declared purpose of British rule, may not have been free from a human appetite for loaves and fishes. British officials who were loath to recognise those claims, or to concede to Indians any substantial proportion of their privileged posts and emoluments, may have been not always unselfishly indifferent to the material interests and prospects of the services to which they belonged, if not to their own personal interests and prospects. But apart from any such considerations, the attitude of both parties was governed by the firm belief, not in itself discreditable to either, that it possessed the better knowledge of the needs and interests and wishes of the vast populations of India, still too ignorant and inarticulate to give expression of their own to them. The lamentable effects of the estrangement between British administrators and the very class of Indians whose co-operation it had been one of the main objects of British policy ever since the Act of 1833 to promote, never stood clearly revealed till the sudden wave of unrest that followed the Partition of Bengal, and it is upon future co-operation between them that the success of the great constitutional experiment now being made must ultimately depend. It is therefore well to try to understand the conflicting sentiments and opinions which drove asunder the moderate but progressive Western-educated Indian and the earnest but conservative British administrator, and ended by bringing them almost into open conflict. The Western-educated Indian claimed recognition at our hands first and foremost because he was the product of the educational system we ourselves imposed upon India. His limitations, intellectual and moral, were largely due to the defects of that system, just as his political immaturity was largely due to our failure to provide him with opportunities of acquiring experience in administrative work and public life. Where careers had been opened up to him in the liberal professions he had often achieved great distinction—at the Bar, on the Bench, in literature—and he had proved himself quite competent to fill all the posts accessible to him in the public services. Without his assistance in the many subordinate branches the everyday work of administration could not have been carried on for a day. He contended that he must intuitively be a better judge than aliens, who were, after all, birds of passage, of the needs and interests and wishes of his own fellow-countrymen, and a better interpreter to them of so much of Western thought and Western civilisation as they could safely absorb without becoming denationalised. His complaint was that his own best efforts and best intentions were constantly thwarted by the rigid conservatism and aloofness of the European, official and unofficial, wrapped up in his racial and bureaucratic superiority. He admitted that he might not yet be able to discharge with the European's efficiency the legislative or administrative responsibilities for which he had hitherto been denied the necessary training, but he protested against being kept altogether out of the water until he had learnt to swim, especially when there was so little disposition ever to teach him to swim. What he lacked in the way of efficiency he alone, he argued, could supply in the way of sympathy with and understanding of his own people. When it was objected that he represented only a very small minority of Indians, and formed, indeed, a class widely divided from the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen, and that the democratic institutions for which he clamoured were unsuited to the traditions and customs of his country, he replied that in every country the impulse towards democratic institutions had come in the first instance from small minorities and had always been regarded at first as subversive and revolutionary. If, again, it was objected that the moderate and reasonable views he expressed were not the views of the more ambitious politicians who professed to be the accredited interpreters of Western-educated India, that there were many amongst them whose aims were more or less openly antagonistic to all the ideals for which British rule stands, and were directed in reality not to the establishment of democratic institutions but to the maintenance of caste monopoly and other evils inherent to the Hindu social system, and that in the political arena he seemed incapable of asserting himself against these dangerous and reactionary elements, his reply was once more that he had never received the support and encouragement which he had a right to expect from his European mentors, and that it was often their indifference or worse that had chiefly helped to raise a spirit of revolt against every form of Western influence.
The case for the British administrator can be still more easily stated. Britain has never sent out a finer body of public servants, take them all in all, than those who have in the course of a few generations rescued India from anarchy, secured peace for her at home and abroad, maintained equal justice amidst jealous and often warring communities and creeds, established new standards of tolerance and integrity, and raised the whole of India to a higher plane of material prosperity and of moral and intellectual development. They spend the best part of their lives in an exile which cuts them off from most of the amenities of social existence at home, and often involves the more or less prolonged sacrifice of the happiest family ties. Those especially whose work lies chiefly in the remote rural districts, far away from the few cities in which European conditions of life to some extent prevail, are brought daily into the very closest contact with the people, and because of their absolute detachment from the prejudices and passions and material interests by which Indian society, like all other societies, is largely swayed, they enjoy the confidence of the people often in a higher degree than Indian officials whose detachment can never be so complete. Their task has been to administer well and to do the best in their power for the welfare of the population committed to their charge. The Englishman, as a rule, sticks to his own job. The British administrator's job had been to administer, and he had not yet been told that it was also his job to train up a nation on democratic lines and to instil into them the principles of civic duty as such duty is understood in Western countries. No doubt there were British administrators in India whose innate conservatism, coupled with the narrowness which years of routine work and official self-confidence are apt to breed, revolted against any transfer of power to, or any recognition of equality with, the people of the country they had spent their lives in ruling with unquestioned but, as they at least conceived it, paternal authority. The conditions of bureaucratic rule inevitably tended to produce an autocratic temper. But it was not merely in obedience to that temper that they shrank from any changes that would weaken the administration; the best of them at least had a strong sense of their responsibilities as guardians and protectors of the simple and ignorant masses committed to their care. They might be inclined to judge the Western-educated class of Indians too harshly, and to identify them too closely with the type that was beginning to dominate the Indian National Congress, but the form in which the question of yielding to Indians any substantial part of their authority presented itself to their minds was by no means an entirely selfish one. "Are we justified," they asked, "in transferring our responsibilities for the welfare and good government of such a large section of the human race to a small minority which has hitherto shown so little disposition to approach any of the difficult problems with the solution of which the happiness and progress of the overwhelming majority of their own race are bound up, though, because themselves belonging to the same stock and the same social system, it would have been much easier for them to deal with those problems than it is for alien rulers like ourselves? Those problems arise out of the social system which is known as Hinduism—for Hinduism is much more a social than a religious system. Western-educated Indians will not openly deny its evils—the iron-bound principle of caste, which, in spite of many concessions in non-essentials to modern exigencies of convenience, remains almost untouched in all essentials and, above all, in the fundamental laws of inter-marriage, the social outlawry of scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated as 'untouchable,' infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so forth. How many of the Western-educated Indians who have thrown themselves into political agitation against the tyranny of the British bureaucracy have ever raised a finger to free their own fellow-countrymen from the tyranny of those social evils? How many of them are entirely free from it themselves, or, if free, have the courage to act up to their opinions? At one time—before the Congress gave precedence to political reforms—social reform did find many enthusiastic supporters amongst the best class of Western-educated Indians, but the gradual disappearance of men of that type may be said almost to coincide with the growth of political agitation. There have been, and there still are, some notable and admirable exceptions, but they are seldom to be found amongst the men who claim to be the tribunes of the Indian people. It is on these grounds—moral rather than political—that we claim to be still the best judges of our duties as trustees for the people of India."
This was perhaps the most forcible of the British administrator's arguments, and it was an honest one. Another was that the Western-educated Indians were mainly drawn from the towns and from a narrow circle of professional classes in the towns, who could not therefore speak on behalf of and still less control the destinies of a vast population, overwhelmingly agricultural, regarding whose interests they had hitherto shown themselves both ignorant and indifferent, and from whom the very education which constituted their main title to consideration had tended to separate and estrange them. The land-owning gentry and the peasantry had so far scarcely been touched by this political agitation. The peasantry knew little or nothing of its existence. The land-owners feared it, for, having themselves for the most part kept aloof from modern education, and shrinking instinctively from the limelight of political controversies and such electioneering competitions as they had already been drawn into for municipal and local government purposes, they felt themselves hopelessly handicapped in a struggle that threatened their traditional prestige and authority as well as their material interests. What they dreaded most of all was the ascendancy of the lawyer class in this new political movement—the Vakil-Raj, as they called it—for they had in many instances already been made to feel how heavy the hand of the lawyer could be upon them in a country so prone to litigation as India, and endowed with so costly and complicated a system of jurisprudence and procedure, if they ventured to place themselves in opposition to the political aspirations of ambitious lawyers. Above all, the British administrator, who rightly held the maintenance of a strict balance between the different creeds and communities of India to be an essential part of his mission, felt strong in the undivided support which his conception of his responsibilities and duties received from the Mahomedans of India. Then, and almost into the second decade of this century, a community forming a fifth of the whole population professed itself absolutely opposed to any surrender of British authority which, it was convinced, would enure solely to the benefit of its hated Hindu rivals, far more supple and far more advanced in all knowledge of the West, including political agitation. The Mahomedans had held aloof from the Congress. They still had no definite political organisation of their own; they were content with the British raj and wanted nothing else.
The British administrator was therefore not altogether unwarranted in his conviction that in standing in the ancient ways he had behind him not only the tacit assent of the inarticulate masses but the positive support of very important classes and communities. He knew also that he had with him, besides unofficial European opinion in India, almost solid on his side, the sympathy, however vague and uninformed, of the bulk of his own countrymen at home, represented for a great part of the fifty years now under review by a succession of conservative parliaments and governments. There were no longer, as in the East India Company days, periodical inquests into the state of India to wind up Parliament to a concert pitch of sustained and vigilant interest in Indian affairs. The very few legislators who exhibited any persistent curiosity about Indian administration were regarded for the most part as cranks or bores, and the annual statement on the Indian budget was usually made before almost empty benches. Only questions that raised large issues of foreign policy, such as Afghan expeditions and the Russian menace in Asia Minor, or that affected the considerable commercial interests at home, like the Indian cotton duties or currency and exchange, would intermittently stir British public opinion inside and outside Parliament, and these often chiefly as occasions for party warfare. Ministers themselves appeared to be mainly concerned with the part which India had to play in their general scheme of Imperial and Asiatic policy rather than with the methods by which India was governed. These could be safely left to "the man on the spot."
Very different had been the spirit in which British parliaments and governments had discharged their responsibilities before the transfer of India to the Crown, and rude was the awakening for the British administrator in India and for British ministers at home when the explosion that followed the Partition of Bengal revealed a very different India that was in process of evolution with much and dangerous travail out of the reaction of new forces, hitherto almost unobserved, upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as negligible quantities.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A detailed and learned study of these movements is found in Dr. J.N. Farquhar's Modern Religious Movements in India, published by the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915.