Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

THE STORM IN BENGAL.

The merits or demerits of the Partition of Bengal have already been discussed to satiety. As far as its purpose was to promote administrative efficiency it is no longer on its defence. Bengal proper is still the most populous province in India, but it has been brought within limits that at least make efficient administration practicable. The eastern districts, now included in the new province, which had been hitherto lamentably neglected, have already gained enormously by the change, which was at the same time only an act of justice to the large Mahomedan majority who received but scanty consideration from Calcutta. The only people who perhaps suffered inconvenience or material loss were absentee landlords, pleaders, and moneylenders, and some of the merchants of Calcutta, Anglo-Indian as well as native, who believed their interests to be affected by the transfer of the seat of provincial government for the Eastern Bengal districts to Dacca. Nevertheless the Partition was the signal for an agitation such as India had not hitherto witnessed. I say advisedly the signal rather than the cause. For if the Partition in itself had sufficed to rouse spontaneous popular feeling, it would have been unnecessary for the leaders of the agitation to resort in the rural districts to gross misrepresentations of the objects of that measure. What all the smouldering discontent, all the reactionary disaffection centred in Calcutta read into the Partition was a direct attack upon the primacy of the educated classes that had made Calcutta the capital of the Bengalee "nation." The Universities Act of 1904, it was alleged, had been the first attempt on the part of a masterful Viceroy to reduce their influence by curtailing their control of higher education. Partition was a further attempt to hamper their activities by cutting half the "nation" adrift from its "intellectual" capital. This was a cry well calculated to appeal to many "moderates," whom the merely political aspects of the question would have left relatively unmoved and it certainly proved effective, for in Calcutta feeling ran very strong. Whilst "monster" demonstrations were organized in Calcutta and in the principal towns of the mofussil, the wildest reports were sedulously disseminated amongst the rural population. Partition was meant to pave the way for undoing the Permanent Settlement which governs the Land Revenue in Bengal, and, once the Permanent Settlement out of the way, Government would screw up the land tax. As for the creation of the new province, it was intended to facilitate the compulsory emigration of the people from the plains, who would be driven to work on the Englishmen's tea plantations in the far-off jungles of Assam. Reports of this kind were well calculated to alarm both the Zemindars, who had waxed fat on the Permanent Settlement, and the credulous rayats, whose labour is indispensable to the zemindar squirarchy. In the towns, on the other hand, the masses were told that Partition was an insult to the "terrible goddess" Kali, the most popular of all Hindu deities in Bengal, and, in order to popularize the protest amongst the small townsfolk, amongst artisans and petty traders, the cry of Swadeshi was coupled with that of Bande Mataram.

The spirit of revolt against Western political authority had been for some time past spreading to the domain of economics. Swadeshi in itself and so far as it means the intelligent encouragement of indigenous is perfectly legitimate, and in this sense the Government of India had practised Swadeshi long before it was taken up for purposes of political agitation by those who look upon it primarily as an economic weapon against their rulers. It was now to receive a formidable development. Swadeshi must strike at the flinty heart of the British people by cutting off the demand for British manufactured goods and substituting in their place the products of native labour. At the first great meeting held at the Calcutta Town Hall to protest against Partition, the building was to have been draped in black as a sign of "national" mourning, but the idea was ostentatiously renounced because the only materials available were of English manufacture. Not only did the painful circumstances of the hour forbid any self-respecting Bengalee from using foreign-made articles, but some means had to be found of compelling the lukewarm to take the same lofty view of their duties. So the cry of boycott was raised, and it is worth noting, as evidence of the close contact and co-operation between the forces of unrest in the Deccan and in Bengal, that at the same time as it was raised in Calcutta by Mr. Surendranath Banerjee it was raised also at Poona by Tilak who perhaps foresaw much more clearly the lawlessness to which it would lead. For, though the cry fell on deaf ears in Bombay, the boycott did not remain by any means an idle threat in Bengal. The movement was placed under the special patronage of Kali and vows were administered to large crowds in the forecourts of her great temple at Calcutta and in her various shrines all over Bengal. The religious character with which the leaders sought to invest the boycott propaganda showed how far removed was the swadeshi which they preached from a mere innocent economic propaganda for the furtherance of native industries. For a description of the Tantric rites connected with Shakti worship I must refer readers to M. Barth's learned work on "The religions of India," of which an English translation has been published by Messrs Trübner in their Oriental series. In its extreme forms Shakti worship finds expression in licentious aberrations which, however lofty may be the speculative theories that gave birth to them, represent the most extravagant forms of delirious mysticism. Yet such men as Mr. Surendranath Banerjee[7], who in his relations with Englishmen claims to represent the fine flower of Western education and Hindu enlightenment, did not hesitate to call the popularity of Shakti worship in aid in order to stimulate the boycott of British goods. To prevent any blacksliding the agitators had ready to hand an organization which they did not hesitate to use. The gymnastic societies founded in Bengal for physical training and semi-military drill on the model of those established by Tilak in the Deccan were transformed into bands of samitis or "national volunteers," and students and schoolboys who had been encouraged from the first to take part in public meetings and to parade the streets in procession as a protest against Partition, were mobilized to picket the bazaars and enforce the boycott. Nor were their methods confined to moral suasion. Where it failed they were quite ready to use force. The Hindu leaders had made desperate attempts to enlist the support of the Mahomedans, and not without some success, until the latter began to realize the true meaning both of the Partition and of the agitation against it. Nothing was better calculated to enlighten them than another feature introduced also from the Deccan into the "national" propaganda. In the Deccan the cult of Shivaji, as the epic hero of Mahratta history, was intelligible enough. But in Bengal his name had been for generations a bogey with which mothers hushed their babies, and the Mahratta Ditch in Calcutta still bears witness to the terror produced by the daring raids of Mahratta horsemen. To set Shivaji up in Bengal on the pedestal of Nationalism in the face of such traditions was no slight feat, and all Mr. Surendranath Banerjee's popularity barely availed to perform it successfully. But to identify the cause of Nationalism with the cult of the Mahratta warrior-king who had first arrested the victorious career and humbled the pride of the Mahomedan conquerors of Hindustan was not the way to win over to it the Mahomedans of Bengal. In Eastern Bengal especially, with the exception of a few landlords and pleaders whose interests were largely bound up with those of the Hindus, the Mahomedans as a community had everything to gain and nothing to lose by the Partition. For those amongst them who were merchants the boycott spelt serious injury to their trade and led in some instances to reprisals in which the Hindus fared badly. Whenever it happened in this way that the biter was bit, the Bengalee Press accused the Government of encouraging the revival of sectarian strife, just as it denounced every measure for the maintenance of order which the Government was compelled to take in the discharge of one of its most elementary duties, as brutal repression and arbitrary vindictiveness, and any mistake of procedure made by some subordinate official under the stress of a very critical situation was distorted and magnified into a gross denial of justice. But it was out of the punishments very properly inflicted upon the misguided schoolboys and students whom the politicians had put in the forefront of the fray that the greatest capital was made. Whilst the politicians themselves prudently remained for the most part in Calcutta, making high-sounding speeches and writing inflammatory articles, or were careful in their own overt demonstrations not to overstep the extreme bounds of legality, they showered telegrams and letters of congratulation on the young "martyrs" who had been duly castigated.

The leaders of the movement had also another string to their bow which they used with considerable effect. Never before had there been such close contact between Indian politicians and certain groups of English politicians. Lord Curzon's fall and the extremely injudicious references to Partition made by Mr. Brodrick, the then Secretary of State, in the correspondence published after the resignation of the Viceroy, had from the first given a great stimulus to the anti-Partition campaign, Mr. Brodrick's remarks led the Bengalees to form a very exaggerated estimate of the personal part played by Lord Curzon in the question of Partition, and they not unnaturally concluded that, if the Secretary of State had merely sanctioned the Partition in order to humour the Viceroy, he might easily be induced to reconsider the matter when once Lord Curzon had been got out of the way. Their hopes in that quarter were, it is true, very soon dashed, but only to be strung up again to the highest pitch of expectancy when the Conservative Government fell from power, and was replaced by a Liberal Administration, with Mr. John Morley at the India Office and an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, in which the Radical element was very strongly represented. Several of the leading Radical organs in England had for a long time past joined hands with the Bengalee Press in denouncing Lord Curzon and all his works, and, most fiercely of all, the Partition of Bengal. The Bengalee politicians, moreover, not only had the active sympathy of a large section of Radical opinion at home, but they had in the House itself the constant co-operation of a small but energetic group of members, who constituted themselves into an "Indian party," and were ever ready to act as the spokesmen of Indian discontent. Some of them were of that earnest type of self-righteousness which loves to smell out unrighteousness in their fellow countrymen, especially in those who are serving their country abroad; some were hypnotized by the old shibboleths of freedom, even when freedom merely stands for licence; some were retired Anglo-Indians, whose experience in the public service in India would have carried greater weight had not the peculiar acerbity of their language seemed to betray the bitterness of personal disappointment. Every invention or exaggeration of the Bengalee Press found its way into the list of questions to be asked of the Secretary of State, who, with less knowledge than he has since acquired, doubtless considered himself bound to pass them on for inquiry to the Government of India. A large proportion of these questions were aimed at Sir Bampfylde Fuller, who, as the first Lieutenant-Governor of the new province of Eastern Bengal, had been singled out for every form of vituperation and calumny, and no subject figured more prominently amongst them than the disciplinary treatment of turbulent schoolboys and students. It is so easy to appeal to the generous sentiments of the British public in favour of poor boys, supposed to be of tender years, dragged into police courts by harsh bureaucrats for some hasty action prompted by the generous, if foolish, exuberance of youth, especially when the British public is quite unaware that in India most students and many schoolboys are more or less full-grown and often already married. Every one of these questions was duly advertised in the columns of the Bengalee Press, and their cumulative effect was to produce the impression that the British Parliament was following events in Bengal with feverish interest and with overwhelming sympathy for the poor oppressed Bengalee.

Nevertheless, there came a moment when the first feverish excitement seemed to wane. Time had gone on, and though there was a new Viceroy in India and a new Secretary of State at Whitehall, the Partition had remained an accomplished fact. The visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Calcutta had temporarily exercised a restraining influence on the political leaders, and the presence of Royalty in a country where reverence for the Throne is still a powerful tradition seemed to hush even the forces of militant sedition. In Eastern Bengal, where the agitation had been much fiercer than in Bengal proper, the energy and devotion displayed by the Lieutenant-Governor in fighting a serious threat of famine had won for him the respect of many of his opponents, and the situation was beginning to lose some of its acuteness when it was suddenly announced that Sir Bampfylde Fuller had resigned. The effect was instantaneous. The points at issue between Sir Bampfylde Fuller and the Government of India have been fully and frequently debated, and it is needless to discuss here the reasons given for his resignation, or for its prompt acceptance by the Viceroy. What I am concerned with is the effect produced by that incident. It was immediate and disastrous. The Bengalee leaders took heart. They claimed Sir Bampfylde's downfall as their triumph—theirs and their allies' at Westminster. Those, on the other hand, who imagined that it was Sir Bampfylde's methods that had intensified the agitation and that his removal would restore peace—even the sort of half peace which had been so far maintained in Bengal proper under the milder sway of Sir Andrew Fraser—were very soon undeceived. For if for a short time Sir Bampfylde Fuller's successor was spared, the Government of Eastern Bengal was compelled before long to take, more vigorous measures than he had ever contemplated, and the agitation, which had hitherto refrained from exhibiting its more violent aspects in Bengal proper, not only ceased to show any discrimination, but everywhere broadened and deepened. The veteran leaders, who still posed as "moderates," ceased to lead or, swept away by the forces they had helped to raise, were compelled to quicken their pace like the Communist leader in Paris who rushed after his men exclaiming:—Je suis leur chef, il faut bien que je les suive. The question of Partition itself receded into the background, and the issue, until then successfully veiled and now openly raised, was not whether Bengal should be one unpartitioned province or two partitioned provinces under British rule, but whether British rule itself was to endure in Bengal or, for the matter of that, anywhere in India.

The first phase of unrest in Bengal, at any rate in its outward manifestations, had been mainly political, and on the whole free from any open exhibition of disloyalty to the British Raj. With the Partition of Bengal it passed into a second phase in which, new economic issues were superadded to the political issues, if they did not altogether overshadow them, and the Swadeshi movement and the boycott soon imported methods of violence and lawlessness which had hitherto been considered foreign to the Bengalee temperament. This phase did not last for much more than a year after the Partition, for, when once started on the inclined plane of lawlessness, the agitation rapidly developed into a much wider and deeper revolt, in which Swadeshi held its place, but only in a subordinate position. The revolt began rapidly to assume the revolutionary complexion, in the religious and social as well as in the political domain, which Tilak had for years past, as we have seen, laboured to impart to his propaganda in the Deccan, and, as far as his personal influence and counsels availed, in every part of India with which he was in contact. The ground had already been prepared for this transformation by spadework in the Bengalee Press conducted by two of Tilak's chief disciples in Bengal. One was Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, the bold exponent of Swaraj, whose programme I have already quoted. The other was Mr. Arabindo Ghose, one of the most remarkable figures that Indian unrest has produced. Educated in England, and so thoroughly that when he returned to India he found it difficult to express himself in Bengali, he is not only a high-caste Hindu, but he is one of those Hindu mystics who believe that, by the practice of the most extreme forms of Yoga asceticism, man can transform himself into a super-man, and he has constituted himself the high priest of a religious revival which has taken a profound hold on the imagination of the emotional youth of Bengal. His ethical gospel is not devoid of grandeur. It is based mainly on the teachings of Krishna to Arjuna as revealed in the Bhagvad Gita, and I cannot hope to define its moral purpose better than by borrowing the following sentence from Mrs. Besant's introduction to her translation of "The Lord's Song":—

It is meant to lift the aspirant from the lower levels of renunciation where objects are renounced, to the loftier heights where desires are dead and where the Yogi dwells in calm and ceaseless contemplation, while his body and mind are actively employed in discharging the duties that fall to his lot in life.

This reading of the Bhagvad Gita differentiates the newer Indian conception of renunciation, which does not exclude but rather prescribes the duty of service to society, from the older conception, which was concerned merely to procure the salvation of the individual by his complete detachment from all mundane affairs. With this gospel of active self-sacrifice none can assuredly quarrel, but it is the revolutionary form which Mr. Arabindo Ghose would see given to such activity that, unfortunately, chiefly fascinates the rising generation of Bengalees. For him British rule and the Western civilization for which it stands threaten the very life of Hinduism, and therefore British rule and all that it stands for must go, and in order that they may go every Hindu must be up and doing. That Mr. Arabindo Ghose himself holds violence and murder to be justifiable forms of activity for achieving that purpose cannot be properly alleged, for though he has several times been placed on his trial and in one instance for actual complicity in political crime—namely, in the Maniktolla bomb case—and though he is at present a fugitive from justice, the law has so far acquitted him. But that his followers have based upon his teachings a propaganda by deed of the most desperate character is beyond dispute. It has been openly expounded with fanatical fervour and pitiless logic in a newspaper edited by his brother, Barendra Ghose, of which the file constitutes one of the most valuable and curious of human documents.

Of the three Bengali newspapers that came into the field soon after Partition as the explicit champions of revolution—- the Sandhya, the Navasakti, to which Mr. Arabindo Ghose was himself a frequent contributor, and the Yugantar—the last named achieved the greatest and most startling popularity. It was founded in 1906 by Barendra Kumar Ghose, a brother of Arabindo, and by Bhupendranath Dutt, only brother of the celebrated Swami Vivekananda, who visited Europe and America as the missionary of the Hindu revival and has been revered in India, since his premature death in 1905, as a modern rishi and a no less great one than those of ancient Vedic times. Barendra Ghose, who had studied history and political literature at Baroda, where Arabindo was a Professor in the Gaekwar's College, had originally intended to start a religious institution, and whilst he edited the Yugantar he founded a hostel for youths attending "National" schools. The Yugantar set itself to preach revolution as a religious even more than a political movement. Its profession of faith is to be found in an article headed "The Age of the Gita again in India":—

God (i.e., Khrisna in the Gita) has said, "Oh, descendant of Bharata, whenever there be a decline of righteousness and the rise of unrighteousness, then I shall become incarnate again. I shall be born in every Yuga [era] to rescue the good, to destroy the wrongdoer, and to establish righteousness."