Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

In the reflected blaze of this apotheosis of Shivaji, Tilak stood forth as the appointed leader of the "nation." He was the triumphant champion of Hindu orthodoxy, the high-priest of Ganesh, the inspired prophet of a new "nationalism," which in the name of Shivaji would cast out the hated mlencchas and restore the glories of Mahratta history. The Government feared him, for people could put no other construction on the official confirmation of his election when he was returned in 1895 as a member of the Bombay Legislative Council—above all, when inside the Council-room he continued with the same audacity and the same impunity his campaign of calumny and insult. His activity was unceasing. He disdained none of the arts which make for popularity. His house was always open to those who sought in the right spirit for assistance or advice. He had absolute control of the Sabha and ruled the municipality of Poona. In private and in public, through his speeches and through his newspapers, he worked upon the prejudices and passions of both the educated and the uneducated, and especially upon the crude enthusiasm of the young. Towards the end of 1896 the Deccan was threatened with famine. Hungry stomachs are prompt to violence, and Tilak started a "no-rent" campaign. Like all Tilak's schemes in those days it was carefully designed to conceal as far as possible any direct incitement to the withholding of land revenue. His missionaries went round with a story that Government had issued orders not to collect taxes where the crops had fallen below a certain yield. The rayats believed them, and when the tax-gatherer arrived they refused payment. Trouble then arose. Outrages such as the mutilation of the Queen's statue at Bombay, the attempt to fire the Church Mission Hall, the assaults upon "moderate" Hindus who refused to toe the line, became ominously frequent. Worse was to follow when the plague appeared. The measures at first adopted by Government to check the spread of this new visitation doubtless offended in many ways against the customs and prejudices of the people, especially the searching and disinfection of houses, and the forcible removal of plague-patients even when they happened to be Brahmans. What Tilak could do by secret agitation and by a rabid campaign in the Press to raise popular resentment to a white heat he did. The Kesari published incitements to violence which were put into the mouth of Shivaji himself[4]. The inevitable consequences ensued. On June 27, 1897, on their way back from an official reception in celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Mr. Rand, an Indian civilian, who was President of the Poona Plague Committee, and Lieutenant Ayerst, of the Commissariat Department, were shot down by Damodhar Chapekur, a young Chitpavan Brahman, on the Ganeshkind road. No direct connexion has been established between that crime and Tilak. But, like the murderer of Mr. Jackson at Nasik last winter, the murderer of Rand and Ayerst—the same young Brahman who had recited the Shlok, which I have quoted above, at the great Shivaji celebration—declared that it was the doctrines expounded in Tilak's newspapers that had driven him to the deed. The murderer who had merely given effect to the teachings of Tilak was sentenced to death, but Tilak himself, who was prosecuted for a seditious article published a few days before the murder, received only a short term of imprisonment, and was released before the completion of his term under certain pledges of good behaviour which he broke as soon as it suited him to break them.

Thus ended the first campaign of Indian unrest, which, in its details, has served as an incitement and a model to all those who have conducted subsequent operations in the same field.

The Poona murders sent a thrill of horror throughout India and caused a momentary sensation even in England. But though Government was not wholly blind to the warning, it could not decide what ought to be done, and beyond tinkering at one or two sections of the Criminal Code bearing on Press offences, it did nothing until history had repeated itself on a much larger scale. Tilak was generously released from prison before the expiration of his sentence, and his release was construed in the Deccan as a fresh triumph. He was acclaimed by his followers as a "national" martyr and hero. After a short "rest-cure" in a sanatorium Tilak returned to the Kesari, which, in the hands of his co-adjutors, two other Chitpavan Brahmans, Mr. Kelkar and Mr. Khadilkar, had lost nothing of its vitriolic pungency in his absence. The celebration with renewed pomp in 1900 of Shivaji's "birthday" at Raighar marked the resumption of Tilak's operations. I need not stop to recount all the incidents of this second campaign in the Deccan, in which Ganpati celebrations, Shivaji festivals, gymnastic societies, &c., played exactly the same part as in the first campaign. For three or four years the Tai Maharaj case, in which, as executor of one of his friends, Shri Baba Maharaj, a Sirdar of Poona, Tilak was attacked by the widow and indicted on charges of forgery, perjury, and corruption, absorbed a great deal of his time, but, after long and wearisome proceedings, the earlier stages of the case ended in a judgment in his favour which was greeted as another triumph for him, and not unnaturally though, as recent developments have shown, quite prematurely,[5] won him much sympathy, even amongst those who were politically opposed to him. But throughout this ordeal Tilak never relaxed his political activity either in the Press or in the manifold organizations which he controlled.

His influence, moreover, was rapidly extending far beyond, Poona and the Deccan. He had at an early date associated himself with, the Indian National Congress, and he was secretary of the Standing Committee for the Deccan. His Congress work had brought him into contact with the politicians of other provinces, and upon none did his teachings and his example produce so deep an impression as upon the emotional Bengalees. He had not the gift of sonorous eloquence which they possess, and he never figured conspicuously as an orator at the annual sessions of Congress. But his calculating resourcefulness and his indomitable energy, even his masterfulness, impressed them all the more, and in the two memorable sessions held at Benares in 1905 and at Calcutta in 1906, when the agitation over the Partition of Bengal was at its height, his was the dominant personality, not at the tribune, but in the lobbies. He had been one of the first champions of Swadeshi as an economic weapon in the struggle against British rule, and he saw in the adoption of the boycott, with all the lawlessness which it involved, an unprecedented opportunity of stimulating the active forces of disaffection. As far as Bengal was concerned, an "advanced" Press which always took its cue from Tilak's Kesari had already done its work, and Tilak could rely upon the enthusiastic support of men like Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal and Mr. Arabindo Ghose, who were politically his disciples, though their religious and social standpoints were in many respects different, Mr. Surendranath Banerjee, who subsequently fell out with Tilak, had at first modelled his propaganda very largely upon that of the Deccan leader. Not only had he tried to introduce into Bengal the singularly inappropriate cult of Shivaji, but he had been clearly inspired by Tilak's methods in placing the Swadeshi boycott in Bengal under the special patronage of so popular a deity as the "terrible goddess" Kali. Again, he had followed Tilak's example in brigading schoolboys and students into youthful gymnastic societies for purposes of political agitation, Tilak's main object at the moment was to pledge the rest of India, as represented in the Congress, to the violent course upon which Bengal was embarking. Amongst the "moderate" section outside Bengal there was a disposition to confine its action to platonic expressions of sympathy with the Bengalees and with the principle of Swadeshi—in itself perfectly legitimate—as a movement for the encouragement of native industries. At Benares in 1905 the Congress had adopted a resolution which only conditionally endorsed the boycott, and the increasing disorders which had subsequently accompanied its enforcement had tended to enhance rather than to diminish the reluctance of the Moderate party to see the Congress definitely pledged to it when it met at the end of 1906 in Calcutta. The "advanced" party led by Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal had put forward Tilak's candidature to the presidency, and a split which seemed imminent was only avoided by a compromise which saved appearances. Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, a leading Parsee of Bombay, who had been drawn into co-operation with the Congress under the influence of the political Liberalism which he had heard expounded in England by Gladstone and Bright, played at this critical period an important part which deserves recognition. He was as eloquent as any Bengalee, and he possessed in a high degree the art of managing men. In politics he was as stout an opponent of Tilak's violent methods as was Mr. Gokhale on social and religious questions, and he did perhaps more than any one else to prevent the complete triumph of Tilakism in the Congress right down to the Surat upheaval. Thanks largely to his efforts, the veteran Mr. Naoroji was elected to the chair at Calcutta. None could venture openly to oppose him, for he was almost the father of the Congress, which in its early days had owed so much to the small group of liberal Parsees whom he had gathered about him, and his high personal character and rectitude of purpose had earned for him universal respect. Nevertheless, a resolution as amended by Tilak was adopted which, without mentioning the word "boycott," pledged the Congress to encourage its practice. But there was considerable heartburning, and the Moderates were suspected of contemplating some retrograde move at the following annual session. Tilak was determined to frustrate any such scheme, and before the Congress assembled at Surat he elaborated at a Nationalist conference with Mr. Arabindo Ghose in the chair, a plan of campaign which was to defeat the "moderates" by demanding, before the election of the president, an undertaking that the resolutions of the Calcutta conference should be upheld. The plan, however, was only half successful. The first day's proceedings produced a violent scene in which the howling down of Mr. Surendranath Banerjee by the "advanced" wing revealed the personal jealousies that had grown up between the old Bengalee leader on the one hand and Tilak and his younger followers in Bengal on the other. The second day's proceedings ended in still wilder confusion, and after something like a free fight the Congress broke up after an irreparable rupture, from which its prestige has never recovered.

Tilak's own prestige, however, with the "advanced" party never stood higher, either in then Deccan or outside of it. In the Deccan he not only maintained all his old activities, but had extended their field. Besides the Kal, edited by another Chitpawan Brahman, and the Rashtramadt at Poona, which went to even greater lengths than Tilak's own Kesari, lesser papers obeying his inspiration had been established in many of the smaller centres. A movement had been set on foot for the creation of "national" schools, entirely independent of State support, and therefore of State supervision, in which disaffection could, without let or hindrance, be made part and parcel of the curriculum. Such were the schools closed down last year in the Central Provinces and this year at Telegaon. The great development of the cotton industry during the last ten years, especially in Bombay itself—which has led to vast agglomerations of labour under conditions unfamiliar in India—had given Tilak an opportunity of establishing contact with a class of the population hitherto outside the purview of Indian politics. There are nearly 100 cotton spinning and weaving mills, employing over 100,000 operatives, congregated mostly in the northern suburbs of the city. Huddled together in huge tenements this compact population affords by its density, as well as by its ignorance, a peculiarly accessible field to the trained agitator. Tilak's emissaries, mostly Brahmans of the Deccan, brought, moreover, to their nefarious work the added prestige of a caste which seldom condescends to rub shoulders with those whose mere contact may involve "pollution." In this, as in many other cases, politics were closely mixed up with philanthropy, for the conditions of labour in India are by no means wholly satisfactory, and it would be unfair to deny to many of Tilak's followers a genuine desire to mitigate the evils and hardships to which their humbler fellow-creatures were exposed. Prominent amongst such evils was the growth of drunkenness, and it would have been all to his honour that Tilak hastened to take up the cause of temperance, had he not perverted it, as he perverted everything else, to the promotion of race-hatred. His primary motives may have been excellent, but he subordinated all things to his ruling anti-British passion, whilst the fervour of his philanthropic professions won for him the sympathy and co-operation of many law-abiding citizens who would otherwise have turned a deaf ear to his political doctrines. He must have had a considerable command of funds for the purposes of his propaganda, and though he doubtless had not a few willing and generous supporters, many subscribed from fear of the lash which he knew how to apply through the Press to the tepid and the recalcitrant, just as his gymnastic societies sometimes resolved themselves into juvenile bands of dacoities to swell the coffers of Swaraj. Not even Mr. Gokhale with all his moral and intellectual force could stem the flowing tide of Tilak's popularity in the Deccan; and in order not to be swept under he was perhaps often compelled like many other Moderates to go further than his own judgment can have approved. Tilak commanded the allegiance of barristers and pleaders, schoolmasters and professors, clerks in Government offices—in fact, of the large majority of the so-called educated classes, largely recruited amongst his own and other Brahman castes; and his propaganda had begun to filter down not only to the coolies in the cities, but even to the rayats, or at least the head-men in the villages.

More than that. From the Deccan, as we have already seen in his relations with the Indian National Congress, his influence was projected far and wide. His house was a place of pilgrimage for the disaffected from all parts of India. His prestige as a Brahman of the Brahmans and a pillar of orthodoxy, in spite of the latitude of the views which he sometimes expressed in regard to the depressed castes, his reputation for profound learning in the philosophies both of the West and of the East, his trenchant style, his indefatigable activity, the glamour of his philanthropy, his accessibility to high and low, his many acts of genuine kindliness, the personal magnetism which, without any great physical advantages, he exerted upon most of those who came in contact with him, and especially upon the young, combined to equip him more fully than any other Indian politician for the leadership of a revolutionary movement.

The appeal which Tilak made to the Hindus was twofold. He taught them, on the one hand, that India, and especially Maharashtra, the land of the Mahrattas, had been happier and better and more prosperous under a Hindu raj than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule of alien "demons"; and that if the British raj had at one time served some useful purpose in introducing India to the scientific achievements of Western civilisation, it had done so at ruinous cost, both material and moral, to the Indians whose wealth it had drained and whose social and religious institutions it had undermined, and on the other hand he held out to them the prospect that, if power were once restored to the Brahmans, who had already learnt all that there was of good to be learnt from the English, the golden age would return for gods and men. That Tilak himself hardly believed in the possibility of overthrowing British rule is more than probable, but what some Indians who knew him well tell me he did believe was that the British could be driven or wearied by a ceaseless and menacing agitation into gradually surrendering to the Brahmans the reality of power, as did the later Peshwas, and remaining content with the mere shadow of sovereignty. As one of his organs blurted it out:—"If the British yield all power to us and retain only nominal control, we may yet be friends."

Such was the position when, on June 24, 1908, Tilak was arrested in Bombay on charges connected with the publication in the Kesari of articles containing inflammatory comments on the Muzafferpur outrage, in which Mrs. and Miss Kennedy had been killed by a bomb—the first of a long list of similar outrages in Bengal. Not in the moment of first excitement, but weeks afterwards, the Kesari had commented on this crime in terms which the Parsee Judge, Mr. Justice Davar, described in his summing up as follows:—"They are seething with sedition; they preach violence; they speak of murders with approval; and the cowardly and atrocious act of committing murders with bombs not only meets with your approval, but you hail the advent of the bomb into India as if something had come to India for its good." The bomb was extolled in these articles as "a kind of witchcraft, a charm, an amulet," and the Kesari delighted in showing that neither the "supervision of the police" nor "swarms of detectives" could stop "these simple playful sports of science," Whilst professing to deprecate such methods, it threw the responsibility upon Government, which allowed "keen disappointment to overtake thousands of intelligent persons who have been awakened to the necessity of securing the rights of Swaraj." Tilak spoke four whole days in his own defence—21-1/2 hours altogether—but the jury returned a verdict of "Guilty," and he was sentenced to six years' transportation, afterwards commuted on account of his age and health to simple imprisonment at Mandalay.

The prosecution of a man of Tilak's popularity and influence at a time when neither the Imperial Government nor the Government of India had realized the full danger of the situation was undoubtedly a grave measure of which a weaker Government than that of Bombay under Sir George Clarke might well have shirked the responsibility. There were serious riots after the trial. From the moment of his arrest Tilak's followers had put it about amongst the mill-hands that he was in prison because he was their friend and had sought to obtain better pay for them. Some of his supporters are said to have declared during the trial that there would be a day's bloodshed for every year to which he might be sentenced by the Court, and, as a matter of fact, he was sentenced to six years' imprisonment and the riots lasted six days. The rioting assumed at times a very threatening character. The European police frequently had to use their revolvers, and the troops had several times to fire in self-defence. But rigorous orders had been issued by the authorities to avoid as far as possible the shedding of blood, and both the police and the military forces exercised such steady self-restraint that casualties were relatively few, and the violence of the mob never vented itself upon the European population of the city. The gravity of the disturbances, however, showed the extent and the lawless character of the influence which Tilak had already acquired over the lower classes in Bombay, and not merely over the turbulent mill-hands. In the heart of the city many Hindu shops were closed "out of sympathy with Tilak," and the most violent rioting on one day occurred amongst the Bhattias and Banias employed in the cloth market, who had hitherto been regarded as very orderly and rather timid folk. The trouble in Bombay was certainly not a sudden and spontaneous outburst of popular feeling. It bore throughout the impress of careful and deliberate organization. By a happy combination of sympathy and firmness Sir George Clarke had, however, won the respect of the vast majority of the community, and though he failed to secure the active support which he might have expected from the "moderates," there were few of them who did not secretly approve and even welcome his action. Its effects were great and enduring, for Tilak's conviction was a heavy blow—perhaps the heaviest which has been dealt—to the forces of unrest, at least in the Deccan; and some months later one of the organs of his party, the Rashtramat, reviewing the occurrences of the year, was fain to admit that "the sudden removal of Mr. Tilak's towering personality threw the whole province into dismay and unnerved the other leaders."

The agitation in the Deccan did not die out with Tilak's disappearance, for he left his stamp upon a new generation, which he had educated and trained. More than a year after Tilak had been removed to Mandalay, his doctrines bore fruit in the murder of Mr. Jackson, the Collector of Nasik—a murder which, in the whole lamentable record of political crimes in India, stands out in many ways pre-eminently infamous and significant. The chief executive officer of a large district, "Pundit" Jackson, as he was familiarly called, was above all a scholar, devoted to Indian studies, and his sympathy with all forms of Indian thought was as genuine as his acquaintance with them was profound. His affection for the natives was such as, perhaps, to blind him to their faults, and like the earliest victims of the Indian Mutiny he entertained to the very last an almost childlike confidence in the loyalty of the whole people. Only a few days before his death he expressed his conviction that disaffection had died out in Nasik, and that he could go anywhere, and at any hour without the slightest risk of danger. That he was very generally respected and even beloved by many there can be no doubt, and there is no reason to question the sincerity of the regrets which found expression on the announcement of his impending transfer to Bombay in a series of farewell entertainments, both public and private, by the inhabitants of the city. Only two days before the fatal 21st of December, an ode in Marathi addressed to him at a reception organized by the Municipal Council dwelt specially upon his gentleness of soul and kindliness of manner.