Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

To what period the subjection of the old Dravidian stock to the superior civilization of the Aryans dates back, or in what manner it was continued, there is little as yet to show. All that is actually known is that at some very remote period Aryan Hinduism was imported into Southern India by Brahmans from the north, who established it in the first place probably by force, and whose descendants have ever since maintained the claims of their sacred caste to a position of religious and social pre-eminence even greater than that which any other Brahmans of the present day have succeeded in retaining. Nowhere else in India does the Brahman, as such, wield the power and assert the prerogatives which the Namputri Brahman enjoys on the Malabar coast. Even the Maharajahs of Travancore, who by birth belong to the Kshatrya or warrior caste, have to be "born again" by a peculiar and costly ceremony into the superior caste before they ascend the throne, and one sept of the Namputri Brahmans successfully exacts in the person of the head of the Azhvancheri family recognition of its spiritual overlordship by personal homage from the Maharajah once in every six years. Nothing, perhaps, conveys more graphically the extraordinary sanctity which attaches to the Brahman caste than the uncompromising manner in which all along the Malabar coast they have enforced and maintained the laws of ceremonial "pollution." Nowhere else have such stringent rules been enacted to fix the precise distance at which the bodily presence of a member of the lower castes is held to defile the sacred person of the Brahman. A Bazar may approach, but must not touch him; a Chogan may not approach him within 24 feet, nor a Kanisan within 36, nor a Pulayan within 64, nor a Nayadi within 72 feet. Equally definite and elaborate are the manifold restrictions on marriage, commensality, occupation, food, ceremonial observances and personal conduct which affect the mutual relations not only between the different castes but also between the innumerable sub-castes into which the higher castes especially have in turns split up. The laws which govern marriage, descent, and inheritance amongst the more important castes throw a peculiarly interesting light on the archaic type of society which has survived in Southern India. Under the matriarchal system of Manumakkathayam, which on the Malabar coast obtains to the present day, descent is traced only through the female line. The male member of the family inherits, but he does so only as the son of a female member of the family through whom he may justly claim kinship, or, to put it in another form, a man's natural heir is not his son, or his brother's son, or the descendant of a common male ancestor, but his sister's, or his sister's daughter's son, or the descendant of a common female ancestress. In the event of failure of heirs through the female line, adoption is permissible, but the adoption must be of females, through whose subsequent offspring the line of natural descent may be carried on. With this ancient system are bound up forms of matrimonial union and tenure of property into the complicated and peculiar nature of which I need not enter here.

In the wild hill countries weird remnants of the most primitive races still survive that have not yet been brought within the pale of Hinduism, and here and there a sprinkling of Mahomedans remains as a reminder of the shortlived incursions of Moslem conquerors from the north. But ninety per cent. of the population consists of Hindus, and the social and religious supremacy of Hinduism has never been seriously assailed. Nowhere has Hindu architecture taken such majestic shape, the massive pylons of Madura and Tanjore recalling the imperishable grandeur of the noblest Egyptian temples on the Nile. Southern India is in fact a land of stately shrines which dominate the whole country just as our own great cathedrals dominated England in the Middle Ages. Yet in Southern India, Hinduism has not assumed the aggressive character which it has developed in other regions. Perhaps it feels too secure of the unchallenged supremacy which it has enjoyed through the ages as a social and religious force without ever aspiring to direct political ascendancy. Perhaps the admixture of Dravidian blood has imparted to it a more serene tolerance. Perhaps it appreciates more fully the relief from the turmoils strife, and bloodshed which was brought to Southern India by the advent of British rule. Compare the legend of a pre-British "golden age" propagated by Tilak and his disciples in the Deccan and in Bengal with the remarkable picture of the condition of Southern India at the time when the British power first appeared on the scene which was drawn by a Madras Brahman, the late Mr. Srinivasaraghava Iyangar:—

Southern India had been devastated by wars, famines, and bands of plunderers; the cultivating classes were ground down by oppressive taxation, by the illegal exactions of the officers of Government, of the renters employed to collect the Government dues, and of the sowkars without whose assistance the ryots could not subsist and carry on their calling, and who kept them in a state little removed from perpetual bondage; trade was hampered by insecurity of property, defective communications, and onerous transit duties; the vast majority of the population suffered extreme hardships when there was even a partial failure of crops in small tracts, owing to the great difficulty and cost of obtaining supplies of grain from more favoured regions; the peasantry and even possessors of considerable landed property, when not holding office under Government themselves, were cowering before the pettiest Government officer and submitting to tortures and degrading personal ill-treatment inflicted on the slightest pretext; persons who had chanced to acquire wealth, if they belonged to the lower classes, dared not openly use it for purposes of enjoyment or display for fear of being plundered by the classes above them; the agricultural classes as a whole had few wants beyond those imposed by the necessity for bare subsistence, no ambition or enterprise to try untrodden ways, and no example to stimulate them to endeavour to better their condition, while the rigid usages of castes and communities in which society was organized repressed all freedom of action and restricted the scope for individual initiative. To understand the full significance of the change which has come over the country one has to contrast what he sees at present, unsatisfactory as it may appear from some points of view, with the state of things described above…. Remembering that methods of progress calculated to evoke national feeling and religious enthusiasm are unavailable under the conditions of the case, the progress that has been made … is little short of marvellous.

It was from Madras that the British power set forth on its unpremeditated course of conquest which was destined ultimately to reach from Tuticorin to the Himalayas. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the Madras Presidency has been in the fortunate position of having no history. Its northern rivals call it despitefully the "benighted" Presidency. No epithet, however, could be more undeserved, for if its annals for the last hundred years have been unsensational, its record in respect of education, intelligent administration, material prosperity, and all that goes with peaceful continuous progress would entitle it rather to be called the "Model" Presidency. The Native States of Southern India, and above all Mysore, which was for many years under direct British administration, will equally bear favourable comparison with any of the Native States of Central or Northern India. From the standpoint of education, Southern India has long held and probably still holds the lead, thanks in a great measure to the large Christian communities which comprise more than two-thirds of the whole Christian population of India. But in the statistics of literacy based on the last census, the Brahmans figure at the head of all the Hindu castes with the very creditable proportion of 578 males and 40 females per mille. The Western-educated classes in Southern India, whilst as progressive as in any other part, show greater mental balance than in Bengal, and less reactionary tendencies than in the Deccan. Western education has been a steady and perhaps on the whole a more solid growth in Southern India. It has produced a large number of able and distinguished public servants of unimpeachable loyalty to the British raj. The harvest yielded by the ingermination of Western ideas has produced fewer tares. Educated Hindus of the higher castes have played an important part in social reform, and many of them have been associated with the moderate section of the Indian National Congress. The enthusiastic reception given to Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, during his short crusade at Madras three years ago on behalf of Swaraj, showed that, especially amongst the younger generation, there is at least an appreciable minority who are ready to listen to the doctrines of advanced Nationalism, and the existence of inflammable materials was revealed in the riots which occurred not long afterwards at Tinnevelly and Tuticorin, and again a year later at Guntur. But these appear to have been merely sporadic outbreaks which were promptly quelled, and the undisturbed peace which has prevailed since then throughout Southern India, at a time when whole provinces in other parts have been honeycombed with sedition, is one of the most encouraging features of the situation. There is in the Hinduism of Southern India a peculiar element of conservative quietism to which lawlessness in any form seems to be repugnant. Probably also the racial cry of "Arya for the Aryans" raised in the North of India as the watchword of an anti-British movement is not calculated to rouse the blood of a purely Dravidian population, however powerful the ties created by a common social and religious system.

CHAPTER XI.

REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATIONS OUTSIDE INDIA.

It required nothing less than the shock of a murder perpetrated in the heart of London to open the eyes of those in authority at home to the nature of the revolutionary propaganda which has been, and is still being, carried on outside India in sympathy, and often in connivance, with the more violent leaders of the anti-British agitation in India itself. Even now it may be doubted whether they fully realize the importance of the support which the extremists receive from outside India. I am not alluding to the moral countenance which the Hindu reaction has received from eccentric Americans and Europeans on the look out for any novel religious sensation, or which "advanced" politicians have derived from sympathetic members of Parliament and journalists in England[13], but to the secret organizations established in Europe and in America by the Indian extremists themselves as a base for hostile operations against the British Raj. However loudly the extremists protest against the importation of Western influences into India they have certainly not been too proud to borrow the methods of Western revolutionists. They have of all Indians been the most slavish imitators of the West, as represented, at any rate, by the Irish Fenian and the Russian anarchist. Their literature is replete with references to both. Tilak took his "No-rent" campaign in the Deccan from Ireland, and the Bengalees were taught to believe in the power of the boycott by illustrations taken from contemporary Irish history. When the informer Gosain was shot dead in Alipur gaol the Nationalists gloried in the deed, which had far excelled that of Patrick O'Donnell, who shot dead James Carey, the approver in the Phoenix Park murders, inasmuch as Gosain had been murdered before he could complete his "treachery," whereas the murder of Carey had been only a tardy "retribution" which could not undo the past. The use of the bomb has become the common property of revolutionists all over the world, but the employment of amateur dacoits, or armed bands of robbers, for replenishing the revolutionary war-chest has been directly taken from the revolutionary movement in Russia a few years ago. The annals of the Italian risorgimento have also been put under contribution, and whilst there is no Indian life of Cavour, Lajpat Rai's Life of Mazzini and Vinayak Savarkar's translation of Mazzini's Autobiography are favourite Nationalist text-books of the milder order. European works on various periods of revolutionary history figure almost invariably amongst seizures of a far more compromising character whenever the Indian police raids some centre of Nationalist activity. Hence in the literature of unrest one frequently comes across the strangest juxtaposition of names, Hindu deities, and Cromwell and Washington, and celebrated anarchists all being invoked in the same breath.

Equally foreign in its origin has been the establishment of various centres of revolutionary activity outside of India. In America there appear to be two distinct organizations both having their headquarters in California, and branches in Chicago, New York, and other important cities. The Indo-American Association runs an English periodical, Free Hindustan, which was originally started in Canada and thence transferred to Seattle when it began to attract the attention of the Canadian authorities. The moving spirits are students, chiefly from Bengal, who have found ready helpers amongst the Irish-American Fenians. They have also been able to make not a few converts amongst the unfortunate British Indian immigrants who suffered heavily from the anti-Asiatic campaign along the Pacific slope, and some of these converts, being Sikhs and old soldiers, were of special value, as through them direct contact could be established with the regiments to which they had belonged, or, at any rate, with the classes from which an important section of the native army is recruited. Large quantities of seditious leaflets, circulated broadcast three years ago amongst Sepoys, were printed in America. The other organization, called the Young Indian Association, with "head centres" and "inner" and "outer circles" that have a genuine Fenian ring, is even more "extreme," and is connected with the "Indian Red Flag" in India, to which Khudiram Bose, who murdered Mrs. and Miss Kennedy at Muzafferpur, and other young fanatics of the same type belonged. The Young Indian Association seems to devote itself chiefly to the study of explosives and to smuggling arms into India. In Anglo-Indian official circles extreme reticence is naturally observed in these matters, but from other sources I have seen evidence to show that both these associations were in frequent communication with the seditious Press all over India, in the Deccan as well as in Bengal and in the Punjab.

The emergence of Japan has created so powerful an impression in India that one is not surprised to find the Indian revolutionaries, who live for the most part in the dreamland of their own ignorance, looking in that quarter for guidance and even, perhaps, for assistance. But they have been sorely disappointed. Indian students are well received in Japan, but they are in nowise specially petted or pampered, and when they begin to air their political opinions and to declaim against British rule they are very speedily put in their place. Crossing the Pacific from Japan to America last year I met one who had spent two or three years at Tokyo and was going on to continue his technical studies in the United States. He was a pleasant and intelligent young fellow, and confessed to me that what he had seen in Japan had very much modified the views he had held when he left Bengal as to the ripeness of his fellow-countrymen for independence or self-government. He had received a great deal of kindness from his Japanese professors, but the general attitude of the Japanese was by no means friendly, and there was no trace of sympathy with the political agitation in India. There is an Indo-Japanese Society in Tokyo, but it has no connexion with politics, and the Indians complain that it is run for the benefit of the Japanese rather than for theirs. Those who have joined it in the hope of using it as a base for anti-British operations have certainly got very little for their pains. They occasionally write articles for the very few Socialist papers of Japan, but their effective contribution to the cause is of trifling account.

The most dangerous organization outside India was unquestionably that which had its headquarters at the "India House" at Highgate. It was there that Dinghra appears to have concocted the plot which resulted in the murder of Sir W. Curzon Wyllie and Dr. Lalcaca, and though the London correspondent of the Kal, Vinayak Savarkar, who was arrested this year in London to take his trial on the gravest charges at Bombay, magnified the success of the plot by describing its chief victim as "the eyes of the Secretary of State through which he saw all Indian affairs," there is some reason to believe that Dinghra expected to find at the reception another Anglo-Indian official whom the "extremists" were particularly anxious to "remove," and only in his absence struck at Sir W. Curzon Wyllie. There is reason, too, to believe that it was from this "India House" also that came both the idea of murdering Mr. Jackson and the weapons used by the murderer. Though students from all parts of India were enticed into the "India House," the organization seems to have been controlled by Deccan Brahmans, and in the first instance by Shyamji Krishnavarma, who founded scholarships in connexion with it to honour the Indian "martyrs" executed for murderous outrages in India. When the authorities in London very tardily awoke after the murder of Sir W. Curzon Wyllie to the dangerous nature of this organization, to which The Times first drew attention in the spring of 1908, it was still controlled from the Continent by Krishnavarma, who had retreated to Paris long before, leaving his lieutenants to carry on his campaign amongst the young Indian students. The Indian Sociologist itself continued to be openly published in London and to advocate assassination until the tragedy at the Imperial Institute led the authorities to take woefully-belated action in prosecuting successively two printers of the sheet, which was then transferred to Paris.