CHAPTER VI.
BENGAL BEFORE THE PARTITION.
It is a far cry in every sense from the Deccan to Bengal. There is a greater diversity of races, languages, social customs, physical conditions, &c., between the different provinces of India than is often to be found between the different countries of Europe. Few differ more widely than the Deccan and Bengal—the Deccan, a great table-land raised on an average over 2,000ft. above sea level, broken by many deep-cut river valleys and throwing up lofty ridges of bare rock, entirely dependent for its rainfall upon the south-west monsoon, which alone and in varying degrees of abundancy relieves the thirst of a thin soil parched during the rest of the year by a fierce dry heat—Bengal, a vast alluvial plain, with a hot, damp climate, watered and fertilized by great rivers like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, which drain the greater part of the Himalayas. The Deccan is thinly populated; it has no great waterways; there are few large cities and few natural facilities of communication between them, but the population, chiefly Mahratta Hindus, with a fair sprinkling of Mahomedans, survivors of the Moghul Empire, are a virile race, wiry rather than sturdy, with tenacious customs and traditions and a language—Marathi—which has a copious popular literature. Maharashtra, moreover, has historical traditions, by no means inglorious, of its own. It has played, and is conscious of having played, a conspicuous part in the history of India down to relatively recent times; and the Brahmans of Maharashtra, who were once its rulers, have preserved to the present day the instincts and the aspirations of a ruling race, combined with great force and subtleness of intellect. In Bengal, on the other hand, there is a dense population, concentrated in part in large towns and cities along the great waterways, but also spread over the whole surface of the rich plains and deltas. The Bengalees are a quick-witted, imaginative, and warm-hearted people who have been the victims rather than the makers of history. The tide of conquest has swept over them again and again from times immemorial, but generally without leaving any lasting impression upon their elastic and rather timid temperament. With all his receptive qualities, his love of novelty and readiness to learn, his retentive memory, his luxuriant imagination, his gift of facile eloquence, the Bengalee has seldom shown himself to be a born ruler of men.
All these differences are reflected in the unrest in Bengal, though on the surface it presents a close resemblance to the unrest in the Deccan, and there have been constant contact and co-operation between the leaders. Except as a geographical expression, Bengal is practically a creation of British rule and of Western education. The claim of the modern Bengalees to be regarded as a "nation" has no historical basis. The inhabitants of Bengal are of mixed Dravidian, Mongolian, and Aryan origin, and in no other speech of India, writes Sir H. Risley, is the literary language cultivated by the educated classes more widely divorced, not only from the many popular dialects spoken in the province, but from that of ordinary conversation. Literary Bengalee is not even an altogether indigenous growth. It owes its birth mainly to the labours of English missionaries, like Carey, in the first half of the last century, assisted by the Pundits of Calcutta. Yet it is upon this community of language that the Bengalees mainly found their claim to recognition as a "nation"; or, to put it in another form, their claim rests upon education as they understand it—i.e., upon the high proportion of literacy that exists in Bengal as compared with most parts of India. Education is unquestionably a power in Bengal. It has not superseded caste, which in all essentials is still unbroken, but it has to some extent overshadowed it.
The Brahmans of Bengal have never within historical times been a politically dominant force. They did not condescend to take office even in the remote days when there were Hindu Kings in Bengal, and still less under Mahomedan rule. They were content to be learned in Sanscrit and in the Hindu Scriptures, and they left secular knowledge to the Kayasthas, or writer caste, with whom they preserved, notwithstanding certain rigid barriers, much more intimate relations than usually exist between different Hindu castes. There is a tradition that the highest Brahman septs of Bengal are the descendants of five priests of special sanctity whom King Adisur of Eastern Bengal in the ninth century attracted to his Court from the holiest centres of Hinduism, and that the servants who accompanied them founded the septs to which precedence is still accorded amongst the Kayasthas of Bengal, and both have been at pains to preserve the purity of their descent by a most exclusive and complicated, and often unsavoury, system of matrimonial alliances known as Kulinism. Hence in Bengal the Brahmans share their social primacy to an extent unknown in other parts of India with the Kayasthas, and also with another high caste, the Vaidhyas, who formerly monopolized the practice of Hindu medicine. The nexus is education, and that nexus has been strengthened since the advent of British rule and of Western education. When the educational enterprise of the early British missionaries was followed up, under the impulse of Dr. Duff, the greatest figure in the missionary annals of India, and of Ram Mohun Roy, the most learned and earnest of all reforming Brahmans, by the famous Government Minute of March 7, 1835, many distinguished members of all these three castes responded to the call and began to qualify for employment under Government and for the liberal professions that were opening out in the new India we were making. They were first in the field, and, though other castes have followed suit, it is they who have practically monopolized the public offices, the Bar, the Press, and the teaching profession. It was they who were the moving spirits of the Brahmo Samaj and of Social Reform when progressive ideas seemed to be on the point of permeating Hinduism. But when the reaction came which first found public expression in the resistance provoked by the Age of Consent Act of 1891 for mitigating the evils of Hindu child marriage, and the spirit of reform was deflected from the social and religious into the political domain, it was they again who showed the most aptitude to clothe the new political movement in all the forms of Western political activities. It was Mr. W.O. Bonnerjee, an able Bengalee lawyer of moderate and enlightened views, who presided over the first Indian National Congress at Bombay and delivered an opening address of which the moderation has rarely been emulated, and though the Congress movement originated in Bombay rather than in Bengal, the fluent spokesmen of Bengal very soon had the satisfaction of feeling that for the first time in Indian history Bengal might claim to be marching in the van.
Owing to his greater plasticity and imagination, the Bengalee has certainly often assimilated English ideas as few other Indians have. None can question, for instance, the genuine Western culture and sound learning of men like Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee, the Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, or Dr. Rash Behari Ghose, than whom the English Bar itself has produced few greater lawyers; and it would be easy to quote many other names of scarcely less distinction amongst the many highly educated Bengalees who have served and are still serving the State with undoubted loyalty and ability. With the spread of English education, habits of tolerance have grown up, at any rate as to externals; and though on the crucial point of inter-marriage caste law has lost hardly anything of its rigidity, religion, in the ordinary intercourse of life, seems to sit almost as lightly upon educated Hindu society in Calcutta as upon English society in London. Another result of English education, combined with the absence of such traditions of Brahman supremacy as are still recent and powerful in the Deccan, has been to invest the political aspirations of the Bengalees with that democratic tinge which has won the sympathies of English Radicals; and, even if the tinge in most cases be very slight, the Bengalee's own adaptability enables him to clothe his opinions with extraordinary skill and verisimilitude in the form which he intuitively knows will best suit an English audience. Of any real democratic spirit amongst the educated classes of Bengal it is difficult to find a trace, for they are separated from the masses whom they profess to represent by a social gulf which only a few of the most enlightened amongst them have so far even recognized the necessity of making some attempt to bridge if they wish to give the slightest plausibility to their professions. It would be less far-fetched, though the analogy would still be very halting, to compare the position of the Bengalee "moderates" with that of the middle classes in England before the Reform Bill of 1832, who had no idea of emancipating the masses, but only of emancipating themselves to some extent from the control of a close oligarchy. From this point of view there are undoubtedly, and especially amongst the elder generation, many educated Bengalees who are convinced that in claiming by political agitation a larger share in the administration and government of the country they are merely carrying into practice the blameless theories of civic life and political activity which their reading of English history has taught them. Their influence, however, has been rapidly undermined by a new and essentially revolutionary school, who combine with a spirit of revolt against all Western authority a reversion to some of the most reactionary conceptions of authority that the East has ever produced, and, unfortunately, it is this new school which has now got hold of the younger educated classes.
Education, to which in its more primitive forms the Bengalees owed whatever influence they retained under Mahomedan rule, has given them under British rule far larger opportunities which they have turned to account with no mean measure of success. I must reserve the thorny question of education for separate treatment. All I need say for the present is that, had it grown less instead of more superficial, had it been less divorced from discipline and moral training as well as from the realities of Indian life, the results might have been very different. As it is, in the form given to it in our Indian schools and colleges, which have been allowed to drift more and more into native hands, English education has steadily deteriorated in quality as the output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for them. Soured on the one hand by their own failure, or by the failure of such examinations as they may have succeeded in passing to secure for them the employment to which they aspired, and scorning the sort of work to which they would otherwise have been trained, they are ripe for every revolt. That is the material upon which the leaders of unrest have most successfully worked, and it is only recently that some of the more sober-minded Bengalees of the older generation have begun to realize the dangers inherent in such a system. When in 1903 Lord Curzon brought in his Universities Bill to mitigate some of the most glaring evils of the system, there was a loud and unanimous outcry in Bengal that Government intended to throttle higher education because it was education that was making a "nation" of Bengal. Subsequent events have shown that that measure was not only urgently needed, but that it came too late to cure the mischief already done, and was, if anything, too circumscribed in its scope. The storm it raised was intensified shortly afterwards by Lord Curzon's famous Convocation speech, into which the sensitive and emotional Bengalee hastened to read a humiliating indictment of the "nation." Such a storm showed how heavily laden was the atmosphere with dangerous electricity.
For some years past the influence of Tilak and his irreconcilable school had been projected from the Deccan into Bengal, and nowhere did it make itself so rapidly felt as in the Press. The Calcutta Review has been publishing a very instructive history of the Indian Press by Mr. S.C. Sanial, a Hindu scholar who has had the advantage of consulting authentic and hitherto unpublished documents. His erudite work shows how the native Press of India first grew up in Bengal as the direct product of English education, and faithfully reflected all the fluctuations of educated Bengalee opinion, many of the most influential native newspapers continuing to be published in English, side by side with, and often under the same control as, more popular papers published in the vernacular. Among the "advanced" journalists of Bengal, none had fallen so entirely under the spell of Tilak's magnetic personality as Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal and Mr. Arabindo Ghose, and the former's New India and the latter's Bande also published in English, soon outstripped the aggressiveness of Mr. Surendranath Banerjee's Bengalee. For though not immune from the reaction against Western influences and in favour of Hinduism as a religious and social system, the school represented by Mr. Banerjee confined itself at first mainly to political agitation and to criticism of British methods of administration. The new school represented, perhaps most conspicuously, by Mr. Arabindo Ghose scarcely disguised its hostility to British rule itself and to all that British ascendancy stands for. Hinduism for the Hindus, or, as they preferred to put it, "Arya for the Aryans," was the war-cry of zealots, half fanatics, half patriots, whose mysticism found in the sacred story of the Bhagvat Gita not only the charter of Indian independence but the sanctification of the most violent means for the overthrow of an alien rule. With this "Aryan" reaction, having to a great extent the force of religious enthusiasm behind it, orthodoxy also recovered ground, and Brahmanism was not slow to show how potent it still is even in Bengal when it appeals to the superstitions of the masses. In one form or another this spirit had spread like wildfire not only among the students but among the teachers, and the schools of physical training to which young Bengal had taken, partly under the influence of our British love of sports and partly from a legitimate desire to remove from their "nation" the stigma of unmanliness, were rapidly transforming themselves into political societies modelled upon the bands of gymnasts which figured so prominently in Tilak's propaganda in the Deccan. Among the older men, some yielded to the new spirit from fear of being elbowed out by their youngers, some were genuinely impatient of the tardiness of the constitutional reforms for which they had looked to the agency of the Indian National Congress; a few perhaps welcomed the opportunity of venting the bitterness engendered by social slights, real or imaginary, or by disappointments in Government service.
Such appears to have been the état d'âme of Bengal when the Government of India promulgated the measure of administrative redistribution known as the Partition of Bengal.