Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

In principle, the introduction of natives of India into these inner lines of the British Executive power undoubtedly constitutes, as Lord Lansdowne has said, a "tremendous innovation," but it may be doubted whether in practice the consequences will be as considerable as those of the changes effected by the India Councils Act of 1909 in the composition and attributions of the Imperial and Provincial Legislative Councils. These changes are of a twofold character. In the first place the total number of members has been very materially increased—e.g., in the Imperial Legislative Council from 21 to a maximum of 60; in the Madras and Bombay Legislative Councils from 24 to a maximum of 50; in the Bengal Legislative Council from 20 to 50, &c. Room has thus been made for the introduction of a much larger number of elected members, of whom there will be in future not less than 135 altogether in the different Legislative Councils, as against only 39 under the old statutes. Still more important than the mere increase in the number of elected members is the radical change in the proportion they will bear to official members. Except in the Imperial Council, where, at the instance of Lord Morley, a small official majority has been retained which Lord Minto himself was willing to dispense with, there will no longer be any official majority. The regulations determining the electorates and the mode of election have been framed with praiseworthy elasticity in accordance with local requirements, and care has been taken to provide as far as possible for an adequate representation of all the most important communities and interests. In view of the manifold and profound lines of cleavage which exist in Indian society, it is extremely improbable that all the elected members will ever combine against the official minority except in such rare and improbable cases as might produce an absolute consensus of Indian opinion, and in such cases it is even more improbable that Government would ignore so striking a manifestation. Nevertheless, as a safeguard against the possibility of factious opposition, the right of veto has been reserved to the Provincial Executives and in the last resort to the Governor-General in Council.

Thus the Indian Councils Act of 1909 cannot be said to have actually modified the position of the Indian Legislatures. With regard to the most important of them—viz., the Imperial Council—Lord Morley was careful to make this perfectly clear in his despatch of November 27, 1908, in which he reviewed the proposals put forward in the Government of India despatch of October 1. "It is an essential condition of the reform policy," the Secretary of State wrote, "that the Imperial supremacy should in no degree be compromised. I must therefore regard it as essential that your Excellency's Council, in its legislative as well as in its executive character, should continue to be so constituted as to ensure its constant and uninterrupted power to fulfil the constitutional obligation that it owes, and must always owe, to his Majesty's Government and to the Imperial Parliament." The Indian Executive therefore remains, as hitherto, responsible only to the Imperial Government at home, and the Imperial Council can exercise over it no directly controlling power. The same holds good, mutatis mutandis, of the Provincial Executives and their Councils.

Indirectly, however, the Indian Councils Act of 1909 materially modifies the relations between the Legislative Councils and the Executive by giving to elected and non-official members opportunities which they have never enjoyed before of discussing public policy and making their voices heard and their influence felt on both administrative and legislative matters. The revised rules of procedure, under which supplementary questions may be grafted on to interpellations, and resolutions can be moved not only in connexion with the financial statements of Government, but, with certain specified reservations, on most matters of general public interest, are undoubtedly calculated to afford a vastly larger scope than in the past to the activities of Indian Legislatures, and it will depend very much upon the ability and resourcefulness of members themselves to what extent they may utilize these facilities for the purpose of ultimately creating real powers of control. In an extremely interesting and dispassionate study of the Indian Constitution, and of the effects which the new reforms may have upon it, Mr. Rangaswami Iyengar, a Hindu journalist of Madras, comes to the conclusion that "if the powers now entrusted to the Councils are used with care, wisdom, and discrimination, precedents and procedure analogous to those of the House of Commons might gradually grow up, and might serve as a useful means if not of directly controlling the Executive—a power which under the present constitutional arrangement of the Government of India it is impossible that the Council should possess—at least of directing the Executive into correct and proper channels in regard to administrative policy and administrative action." Not the least important of the changes are those made in regard to Budget procedure. Indian Legislatures will no more than in the past have power to vote or to veto the Budget, but they will have henceforth an opportunity of setting forth their views before the Budget has assumed its final shape. Members will be able to discuss beforehand any changes in taxation, as well as any new loans or additional grants to local governments, and they will be taken into the confidence of Government with regard to the determination of public expenditure. No doubt important heads of revenue are still excluded from the purview of the Councils, but members will have the right of placing on record their views in the form of resolutions on all items not specifically excluded from their cognisance, and the Finance Member will be bound to explain the reasons why Government declines to accept any resolution that may have been passed in the first two stages of the Budget. Much will depend upon the reasonable and practical use which members make of these novel opportunities, for, to quote Mr. Iyengar again, "the progress of constitutional government is not dependent so much upon what is expressly declared to be constitutional rights as upon what is silently built up in the form of constitutional conventions."

In the great speech in which Lord Morley gave the House of Lords the first outline of his Indian reforms scheme there was one singularly pregnant passage. "We at any rate," he said, "have no choice or option. As an illustrious member of this House once said, we are watching a great and stupendous process, the reconstruction of a decomposed society. What we found was described as a parallel to Europe in the fifth century, and we have now, as it were, before us in that vast congeries of people we call India, a long, slow march in uneven stages through all the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth. Stupendous indeed, and to guide that transition with sympathy, political wisdom, and courage, with a sense of humanity, duty, and national honour, may well be called a glorious mission." Whether we succeed in that mission must depend largely upon the loyal assistance we receive from those Indians who claim, in virtue of their superior education, to represent this twentieth century. Lord Morley has fulfilled in no niggardly spirit his pledge to associate the people of India with the Government far more closely than has hitherto been the case in the work of actual day-to-day administration as well as in the more complex problems of legislation. It rests now with the Indian representatives both in the Executive and Legislative Councils to justify Lord Morley's expectations by using the new machinery which he has placed in their hands not for purposes of mere destructive criticism and malevolent obstruction, but for intelligent and constructive co-operation with the British rulers of India, to whom alone, whatever may be their shortcomings, India owes it that the spirit of the twentieth century has spread to her shores.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE DEPRESSED CASTES.

The only classes in British India for whom no real representation has been devised in the enlarged Indian Councils are the millions of humble toilers who constitute what are known as the "depressed castes." Under present social conditions in India, this was probably inevitable. Though, rather unreasonably, the vast majority of them go to swell the numbers of the Hindu population in the census upon which Hindu representation ought, according to Hindu politicians, to be based, those politicians have certainly not as yet shown any title to speak on their behalf. For there is no more striking contrast to the liberal and democratic professions of a body which claims, as does the Indian National Congress, to represent an enlightened, progressive, and national Hinduism than the fact that in the course of its 25 years' existence it has scarcely done anything to give practical effect to its theoretical repudiation of a social system that condemns some 50 millions out of the 300 millions of the Hindu population of India to a life of unspeakable degradation. For a long time to come, the depressed castes will probably find, as in the past, their truest friends and best qualified representatives among the European members of Council, who, just because they are aliens, are free from all the influences, whether of interest or of prejudice, which tend to divide Hindu society into so many watertight compartments. Let any one who has any doubts on this point read some of the documents published in the Blue-books on the reforms—petitions from low-caste communities imploring Government not to commit the defence of their interests to the Hindu Brahman, but to continue to them the direct and unselfish protection which they have hitherto enjoyed at the hands of British administrators.

The "depressed classes" of whom we generally speak as Pariahs, though the name properly belongs only to one particular caste, the Pareiyas in Southern India, include all Hindus who do not belong to the four highest or "clean" castes of Hinduism, and they are therefore now officially and euphemistically designated as the Panchamas—i.e., the fifth caste. Many of the Panchamas, especially in Southern India, are little better than bonded serfs; others are condemned to this form of ostracism by the trades they ply. Such are not only the scavengers and sweepers, but also the workers in leather, the Chamars and Muchis of Northern and Central India, and the Chakilians and Madigas of Southern India, who with their families number 14 or 15 million souls; the washermen, the tadi-drawers and vendors of spirituous liquors, the pressers of oil, and, in many parts of the country, the cowherd and shepherd castes, &c. They are generally regarded as descendants of the aboriginal tribes overwhelmed centuries ago by the tide of Aryan conquest. Some of those tribes, grouped together in the Indian Census under the denominational rubric of "Animists" and numbering about 8-1/2 millions, have survived to the present day in remote hills and jungles without being absorbed into the Hindu social system, and have preserved their primitive beliefs, in which fetish worship, and magic are the dominant elements. Low as is their social status, it is but little lower than that of the Panchamas who have obtained a footing on the nethermost rung of the social ladder of Hinduism without being admitted to any sort of contact with its higher civilization or even to the threshold of its temples.

Hinduism with all its rigidity is, it is true, sufficiently elastic to sanction, at least tacitly, a slow process of evolution by which the Panchama castes—for there are many castes even amongst the "untouchables"—gradually shake off to some extent the slough of "uncleanness" and establish some sort of ill-defined relations even with Brahmanism. For whilst there is on the one hand a slowly ascending scale by which the Panchamas may ultimately hope to smuggle themselves in amongst the inferior Sudras, the lowest of the four "clean" castes, so there is a descending scale by which Brahmans, under the pressure of poverty or disrepute, sink to so low a place in Brahmanism that they are willing to lend their ministrations, at a price, to the more prosperous of the Panchamas and help them on their way to a higher status. Thus probably half the Sudras of the present day were at some more or less remote period Panchamas. Again, during periods of great civil commotion, as in the 18th century, when brute force was supreme, not a few Panchamas, especially low-caste Mahrattas, made their way to the front as soldiers of fortune, and even carved out kingdoms to themselves at the point of the sword. Orthodox Hinduism bowed in such cases to the accomplished fact, just as it has acquiesced in later years when education and the equality of treatment brought by British rule have enabled a small number of Panchamas to qualify for employment under Government.

But these exceptions are so rare and the evolutionary process is so infinitely slow and laborious that they do not visibly affect the yawning gulf between the "clean" higher-caste Hindu and the "unclean" Panchama. The latter may have learned to do puja to Shiva or Kali or other members of the Hindu Pantheon, but he is not allowed within the precincts of their sanctuaries and has to worship from afar. Nor are the disabilities of the Panchama merely spiritual. In many villages he has to live entirely apart. He is not even allowed to draw water from the village well, lest he should "pollute" it by his touch, and where there is no second well for the "untouchables," the hardship is cruel, especially in seasons of drought when casual water dries up. In every circumstance of his life the vileness of his lot is brought home to the wretched pariah by an elaborate and relentless system of social oppression. I will only quote one or two instances which have come within my own observation. The respective distances beyond which Panchamas must not approach a Brahman lest they "pollute" him differ according to their degree of uncleanness. Though they have been laid down with great precision, it is growing more and more difficult to enforce them with the increasing promiscuity of railway and street-car intercourse, but in more remote parts of India, and especially in the south, the old rules are still often observed. In Cochin a few years ago I was crossing a bridge, and just in front of me walked a respectable-looking native. He suddenly turned tail, and running back to the end of the bridge from which we had both come, plunged out of sight into the jungle on the side of the road. He had seen a Brahman entering on to the bridge from the other end, and he had fled incontinently rather than incur the resentment of that high-caste gentleman by inflicting upon him the "pollution" of forbidden proximity as the bridge, though a fairly broad one, was not wide enough for them to pass each other at the prescribed distance. In the native State of Travancore it is not uncommon to see a Panchama witness in a lawsuit standing about a hundred yards from the Court so as not to defile the Brahman Judge and pleaders, whilst a row of peons, or messengers, stationed between him and the Court, hand on its questions to him and pass back his replies.