India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST

Amongst the Western-educated classes the new forces which had been turning the minds of young India towards Swaraj as the watchword of national unity and independence had drawn much of their inspiration from text-books which taught them how large a share Nationalism had played in redeeming modern nations from alien oppression and in shaping the whole political evolution of Europe. It had emancipated the Balkan States from the alien thraldom of the Ottoman Sultans; it had helped to unify Italy and Germany; it had been a potent if less apparent factor in welding Great Britain and the distant colonies peopled by the British race into a great British Empire. Had not Indians also a common nationhood which, despite all racial and religious differences, could be traced back across centuries of internal strife and foreign domination to a period, remote indeed but none the less enviable, when they had been their own masters? Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest barriers to India's national unity—the multiplicity of her vernaculars—by giving English to the Western-educated classes as a common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National Congress itself would have been an impossibility? Great events, moreover, had been happening quite recently which tended to shake the Indians' belief in the irresistible superiority of Western civilisation even in its material aspects. The disaster inflicted upon an Italian army at Adowa in 1894 by the Abyssinians—a backward African people scarcely known except for the ease with which a British expedition had chastised them not thirty years before—was perhaps the first of these events to awaken observant Indians to the fact that European arms were not necessarily invincible. The resistance put up for nearly three years by two small South African Republics, strong chiefly in their indomitable pride of nationhood, seemed to have strained the resources even of the British Empire, and Japan, an Asiatic power only recently emerged from obscurity, had just proved on land and sea that an Asiatic nation in possession of her national independence could equip herself to meet and overcome one of the greatest of European powers—one whose vast ambitions constituted in the eyes of generations of British statesmen a grave menace to the safety of India itself. Was England really mightier than Russia? Had she not also perhaps feet of clay? Was British rule to endure for ever? Was it not a weak point in England's armour that she had to rely not a little on Indian troops, whom she still treated as mercenaries, to fight her battles even in such distant countries as China and the Sudan, and upon still more numerous legions of Indians in every branch of the civil administration to carry out all the menial work of government? If the Indians, untrained, and indeed forbidden, to bear arms, were unable at once to overthrow British rule, could they not at least paralyse its machinery, as Bepin Chandra Pal was preaching, by refusing to take any kind of service under it?

To such interpretations of contemporary events young Indians, who at school read Burke and Byron and Mill "On Liberty," and in secret the lives of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were bound to be receptive, and they soon reached from a different base along different lines the same ground on which the old orthodox foes not only of British rule but of Western civilisation stood who appealed to the Baghavat-Ghita and exhorted India to seek escape from the foreign domination that had enslaved her, body and soul, by clinging to the social and religious ark of Hinduism which in her golden age had made her wise and wealthy and free beyond all the nations of the earth.

The stronghold of orthodox reaction was in the Mahratta Deccan, and its stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never forgiven us for snatching the cup of power from their lips just when they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp. First and foremost of them all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the Kesari, i.e. "The Lion," how to play on religious as well as on racial sentiment. He first took the field against the Hindu Social Reformers who dared to support Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill, and his rabid campaign against them developed quickly into an equally rabid campaign against British rule. He appealed to the pride of his Mahratta people by reviving the cult of Shivaji, the great Mahratta chieftain who first raised the standard of Hindu revolt against Mahomedan domination, and he appealed to their religious passions by placing under the patronage of their favourite deities a national movement for boycotting British-imported goods and manufactures which, under the name of Swadeshi, was to be the first step towards Swaraj. He it was too who for the first time imported into schools and colleges the ferment of political agitation, and presided at bonfires which schoolboys and students fed with their European text-books and European clothes. The movement died down for a time after the murder of two British officials in Poona on the night of Queen Victoria's second jubilee in 1897 and the sentencing of Tilak himself shortly afterwards to a term of imprisonment on a charge of seditious and inflammatory writing. But the Partition of Bengal was to give him the opportunity of transplanting his doctrines and his methods from the Deccan to the most prosperous province in India.

The Partition of Bengal was a measure harmless enough on the face of it for splitting up into two administrative units a huge province with some 70 million inhabitants which had outgrown the capacities of a single provincial government. But the Bengalees are a singularly sensitive race. They were intensely proud of their province as the senior of the three great "Presidencies" of India, of their capital as the capital city of India and the seat of Viceregal Government, and of their Calcutta University as the first and greatest of Indian Universities, though already menaced, they declared, by Lord Curzon's Universities Act. They resented the Partition, against which they had no remedy, as a wanton diminutio capitis inflicted upon them by a despotic Viceroy bent on chastising them for the prominent part played by their leaders in pressing the claims of India to political emancipation from bureaucratic leading-strings. That in the new province of Eastern Bengal, which was to be created by the Partition, the Mahomedans would constitute a large majority and enjoy advantages hitherto denied to them as a minority in the undivided province was an added grievance for the Hindus. Lord Curzon had not at first been unpopular with the Western-educated classes. They recognised his great intellectual gifts and admired his majestic eloquence. But continuing to fasten their hopes on the Liberal party in England, they had quickly followed its lead in attacking him as a dangerous Imperialist, whose Tibetan adventure was saddling the Indian tax-payer with the costs of his aggressive foreign policy, and they required no promptings to denounce as the sworn foe of India a Viceroy who had not only sought to restrict the statutory freedom of their University, but, as its Chancellor, used language into which they read a deliberate insult to the Bengalee character. By partitioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee "nation" and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose honour the old invocation to the goddess Kali, "Bande Materam," or "Hail to the Mother," acquired a new significance and came to be used as the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism. To that war-cry public meetings were organised in Calcutta and all over the province. The native press teemed with denunciatory articles. The wildest rumours were set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which partition portended. Never had India seen such popular demonstrations. Government, however, remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India—the last and perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period in which efficient administration had come to be regarded as the be-all and end-all of government. His resignation, however, had nothing to do with the Partition. He had fought and been defeated by Lord Kitchener, then, and largely at his instance, Commander-in-Chief in India, over the reorganisation of the military administration. Lord Curzon stood for the supremacy of the civil over the military authority, but he made the mistake of resigning not on the question of principle, on which he finally agreed to a compromise, but on a subsidiary point which, fatal as he may have thought it to the spirit of the compromise, appeared to the outside public to be mainly a personal question. In any case, though on the merits of the quarrel he might have looked for support from educated Indian opinion, Bengal was content to rejoice over his disappearance and to wonder whether with its author the Partition might not also disappear.

Another and worthier preoccupation was the impending visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India. King Edward's son was to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had for the first time made a Royal progress through the Indian Empire nearly thirty years before. His progress had been a triumphal one at a period when the internal and external peace of India seemed equally profound. That of his son was no less triumphal, though India was just entering on a period of political unrest undreamt of in the preceding generation. Even in Calcutta, which had been seething with agitation a few weeks before, the Prince and Princess were received not only with loyal acclamations but almost with god-like worship; and all these demonstrations were perfectly genuine. For with the curious inconsistency which pervades all Indian speculations religious and political, though countless dynasties have fallen and countless rulers have come to a violent end in the chequered annals of Indian history, nothing has ever destroyed the ancient conception of royalty as partaking of the divine essence. The remoteness of the Western rulers under whose sceptre India had passed lent if anything an added mystery and majesty to the royalty they wielded. Even the avowed enemies of British rule seldom levelled their shafts at the Throne. That the King can do no wrong is a saying that appealed to the Indian mind long before the Western-educated classes grasped its real meaning under a constitutional monarchy, and began to extend its application even to the King's Government for the purpose of conveniently discriminating between the British Government, whose good intentions were generally assumed, and the autocratic Government of India, whence all mischief sprang. During the whole of the Royal tour, which extended to all the major provinces of British India and to several of the Native States, the enthusiasm was general, and even the Extremists did not venture a discordant note. The Prince and Princess, whose graciousness never wearied, moved freely amongst the crowds, and the presence of the future Queen appealed strongly to the women of India, whose influence we are apt to underrate because until recently it has been exercised almost exclusively in the seclusion of the zenana. Even high-caste ladies, Hindus as well as Mahomedans, were known on this occasion for the first time perhaps in their lives to pass beyond the outer gates of their houses in order to attend a Royal reception—with all the precautions of course that have always to be taken to shelter a purdah party from any contact with the other sex.

It became the fashion for all classes to draw their own happy auguries from the Royal visit, but to none did it seem so auspicious as to the politically-minded Indians. For it coincided with the sweeping defeat of the Unionist party at the general election of 1905 and the return to office of a Liberal Government with a crushing majority behind it, whom the hostility displayed by the Liberal party towards Lord Curzon's administration on almost every Indian question save that which had brought about his resignation seemed to pledge to a prompt reversal of his policy. Was not the appointment to the India Office of such a stalwart Radical as Mr. John Morley, who had been Gladstone's Home Rule Secretary for Ireland, enough to justify the expectation that the right of India, if not to Home Rule, to a large measure of enfranchisement would receive prompt recognition? If Indians could hardly regard Lord Curzon's successor as another Ripon, their first impression of Lord Minto satisfied them that, though the Conservative nominee of Mr. Balfour's Government, the new Viceroy was neither disposed to tread in his predecessor's footsteps as an autocratic administrator nor likely to carry sufficient weight at home to stand in the way of a Secretary of State who, like many Radical doctrinaires, was essentially what the French call un homme d'autorité. The event proved that they were right in their estimate of Lord Minto, but wrong in their sanguine expectation that Mr. Morley would at once break with the old principles of Indian government or even with Lord Curzon's administrative methods. Bengal remained partitioned. It was a chose jugée which Mr. Morley was not prepared to reopen.

The disillusionment in India was much greater than after the fiasco of the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India. Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not despair of bringing constitutional methods of agitation to bear upon British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National Congress, which they had founded twenty years before, was sliding rapidly down the inclined plane which was to lead first to open and violent discord and later on to disruption. Even before the Partition the Moderates could make but a poor reply to those who jeered at the paltry results which had attended their practice of constitutional forms of agitation. For if the Indian Councils Act of 1892 had opened the doors of the Viceroy's Legislative Assembly to some of the most distinguished among them, what had it profited them? The official benches merely gave a courteous hearing to the incisive criticisms proceeding from men of such undisputed capacity as Mehta and Gokhale and bore less patiently with the Ciceronian periods of the great Bengalee tribune Surendranath Banerjee. Government paid little or no heed to them. Equally powerless had been their passionate protest against the Partition. Even had they not been in complete sympathy with popular feeling, they would have been compelled to voice it or surrender the leadership they still hoped to retain to the new Extremist party which, under Mr. Tilak's leadership, was carrying his doctrines and his methods far beyond the limits of the Deccan. Each annual session of the Congress grew more turbulent and the Moderates gave ground each year, until at the famous Surat session of 1907 they realised that they had to make a definite stand or go under. There the storm burst over the preliminary proceedings before the real issues were reached. Mr. Tilak's followers assailed the presidential platform of which the Moderates had still retained possession, and the Congress broke up in hopeless confusion and disorder.

But what happened in the Congress was but a pale reflection of what was happening outside. The Partition was indeed little more than the signal for an explosion, not merely in Bengal, of which premonitory indications had been witnessed, but had passed almost unheeded, some ten years earlier in the Deccan. The cry of Swaraj was caught up and re-echoed in every province of British India. In Calcutta the vow of Swadeshi was administered at mass meetings in the famous temple of Kali. Hindu reactionaries, whose conception of a well-ordered society had not moved beyond the laws of Manu, fell into line for the moment with the intellectual products of the modern Indian University. Hindu ascetics appealed to the credulity of the masses and every Bar Association became the centre of an active political propaganda on a Western democratic model. Schoolboys and students were exhorted to abandon their studies and go out into the streets, where they qualified as patriots by marching in the van of national demonstrations for Swaraj or by furnishing picketing parties for the Swadeshi boycott. The native press, whether printed in the vernacular tongues or in the language of the British tyrant, reached the extreme limits of licence, and when it did not actually preach violence it succeeded in producing the atmosphere which engenders violence. When passions were wrought up to a white heat by fiery orators and still more fiery newspaper writers, who knew how to draw equally effectively on the ancient legends of Hindu mythology and on the contemporary records of Russian anarchism, the cult of the bomb was easily grafted on to the cult of Shiva, the Destroyer, and murders, of which the victims were almost as often Indians in Government service as British-born officials, were invested with a halo of religious and patriotic heroism. Youths even of the better classes banded themselves together to collect patriotic funds by plunder and violence, and revived those old forms of lawlessness which had been rampant in pre-British days under the name of dacoity. Schools and colleges were found to be honeycombed with secret societies, and a flood of light was suddenly thrown on the disastrous workings of an educational system that had been slowly perverted to such ends under the very eyes of the Government that was supposed to direct and control it.

Lord Curzon had held a special conference at Simla in 1900 "to consider the system of education in India," but not a single Indian and only one non-official European had been invited to take part in it. It was the intellectual shortcomings of the system with which he was concerned, and the chief outcome of that conference and of a Commission subsequently appointed to carry on the inquiry was the Universities Act of 1904, carried in the face of bitter Indian opposition. Even such broad-minded and experienced Indians as Gokhale and Mehta suspected the Viceroy of a desire to hamper the growth of higher Western education on political grounds. But throughout the four years' controversy Government never betrayed an inkling of the appalling extent to which inferior secondary education had been allowed to degenerate in second-and third-rate schools with second-and third-rate masters into a mere teaching machine, clumsy and imperfect at that, for the passing of examinations that tested memory rather than intelligence, and character least of all. The unfortunate youths who could not stand even that test were left hopelessly stranded on the road, equally disqualified for a humbler sphere of life which they had learnt to despise and for the higher walks to which they had vainly aspired. Soured by defeat, and easily persuaded to impute it solely to the alien rulers responsible for a system which had led them merely into a blind alley, they formed the rank and file of a proletariat that could only by courtesy be called intellectual, but was just the material out of which every form of discontent is apt to breed desperadoes. But many were no mere vulgar desperadoes. Amongst those who were engaged in making bombs and collecting revolvers and organising dacoities or who actually committed murder not a few sincerely believed that they were risking or giving their lives in a great patriotic and religious cause. The Yugantar, their chief Bengalee organ, which had an enormous circulation and sold often at fancy prices in the streets of Calcutta, was written, according to a statement made in the High Court by the Government translator whose business it was to study it, in language so lofty, so pathetic, so stirring that he found it impossible to convey it into English. The writers made no secret of their purpose. The young Indian's "mind must be excited and maddened by such an ideal as will present to him a picture of everlasting salvation." Murder had its creed to which Dr. Farquhar assigns a definite place in his Modern Religious Movements in India with the following as its chief dogmas: