Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

CHAPTER XX.

THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

There remains one vital aspect of the educational problem which was left untouched by the Educational Resolution of 1904, and has been left untouched ever since we entered three-quarters of a century ago on an educational experiment unparalleled in the world's history—a more arduous experiment even than that of governing the 300 millions of India with a handful of Englishmen. Many nations have conquered remote dependencies inhabited by alien races, imposed their laws upon them, and held them in peaceful subjection, though even this has never been done on the same scale of magnitude as by the British rulers of India. We alone have attempted to educate them in our own literature and science and to make them by education the intellectual partners of the civilization that subdued them. Of the two tasks, that of government and that of education, the latter is not by any means the easier. For good government involves as little interference as possible with the beliefs and customs and traditions of the people, whereas good education means the substitution for them of the intellectual and moral conceptions of what we regard as our higher civilization. Good government represents to that extent a process of conservation; good education must be partially a destructive, almost a revolutionary, process. Yet upon the more difficult and delicate problems of education we have hitherto, it is to be feared, bestowed less thought and less vigilance than upon administrative problems in India. The purpose we have had in view is presumably that which Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee admirably defined in his last address to the University of Calcutta as "the raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State." But is it a purpose which those responsible for our Indian system of education have kept steadily before them? Is it a purpose that could possibly be achieved by the laisser faire policy of the State in regard to the moral and religious side of education? If so, how is it that we have had of late such alarming evidence of our frequent failure to achieve it?

The divorce of education from religion is still on its trial in Western countries, which rely upon a highly-developed code of ethics and an inherited sense of social and civic duty to supply the place of religious sanctions. In India, as almost everywhere in the East, religion in some form or another, from the fetish worship of the primitive hill tribes to the Pantheistic philosophy of the most cultured Brahman or the stern Monotheism of the orthodox Moslem, is the dominant force in the life both of every individual and of every separate community to which the individual belongs. Religion is, in fact, the basic element of Indian life, and morality apart from religion is an almost impossible conception for all but an infinitesimal fraction of Western-educated Indians. Hence, even if the attempt had been or were in the future made to instil ethical notions into the minds of the Indian youth independently of all religious teaching, it could only result in failure. For the Hindu, perhaps more than for any other, religion governs life from the hour of his birth to that of his death. His birth and his death are in fact only links in a long chain of existences inexorably governed by religion. His religion may seem to us to consist chiefly of ritual and ceremonial observances which sterilize any higher spiritual life. But even if such an impression is not due mainly to our own want of understanding, the very fact that every common act of his daily life is a religious observance, just as the caste into which he is born has been determined by the degree in which he has fulfilled similar religious observances in a former cycle of lives, shows how completely his religion permeates his existence. The whole world in which he lives and moves and has his being, in so far as it is not a mere illusion of the senses, is for him an emanation of the omnipresent deity that he worships in a thousand different shapes, from the grotesque to the sublime.

Yet in a country where religion is the sovereign influence we have, from the beginning, absolutely ignored it in education. It is no doubt quite impossible for the State in a country like India with so many creeds and sects, whose tenets are often repugnant to all our own conceptions not only of religion but of morality, to take any direct part in providing the religious instruction which would be acceptable to Indian parents. But was it necessary altogether to exclude such instruction from our schools and colleges? Has not its exclusion tended to create in the minds of many Indians the belief that our professions of religious neutrality are a pretence, and that, however rigorously the State may abstain from all attempts to use education as a medium for Christian propaganda, it nevertheless uses it to undermine the faith of the rising generations in their own ancestral creeds? Even if they acquit us of any deliberate purpose, are they not at any rate entitled to say that such have been too often the results? Did not the incipient revolt against all the traditions of Hinduism that followed the introduction of Western education help to engender the wholesale reaction against Western influences which, underlies the present unrest?

Few problems illustrate more strikingly the tremendous difficulties that beset a Government such as ours in India. On the one hand, Indian religious conceptions are in many ways so diametrically opposed to all that British rule stands for that the State cannot actively lend itself to maintain or promote them. On the other hand, they provide the ties which hold the whole fabric of Indian society together, and which cannot be hastily loosened without serious injury and even danger to the State. This has been made patent to the most careless observer by the events of the last few years that have revealed, as with a lurid flash of lightning, the extent to which the demoralization of our schools and colleges had proceeded. If any Englishman has doubts as to the connexion in this matter of cause and effect, let him ask respectable Indian parents who hold aloof from politics. They have long complained that the spirit of reverence and the respect for parental authority are being killed by an educational system which may train the intellect and impart useful worldly knowledge, but withdraws their youths from the actual supervision and control of the parents or of the guru, who for spiritual guidance stood in loco parentis under the old Hindu system of education, and estranges them from all the ideas of their own Hindu world[20]. That parents often genuinely resent the banishment of all religious influence from our schools and colleges appears from the fact that many of them prefer to Government institutions those conducted by missionaries in which, though no attempt is made to proselytize, a religious, albeit a Christian, atmosphere is to some extent maintained. It is on similar grounds also that the promoters of the new movement in favour of "National Schools" advocate the maintenance of schools which purchase complete immunity from Government control by renouncing all the advantages of grants-in-aid and of University affiliation. They have been started mainly under the patronage of "advanced" politicians, and have too often turned out to be mere hot-beds of sedition, but their raison d'être is alleged to be the right of Hindu parents to bring up Hindu children in a Hindu atmosphere.

From the opposite pole in politics, most of the ruling chiefs in their replies to Lord Minto's request for their opinions on the growth of disaffection call attention to this aspect of education, and the Hindu princes especially lay great stress on the neglect of religious and moral instruction. I will quote only the Maharajah of Jaipur, a Hindu ruler universally revered, for his high character and great experience:—

My next point has reference to the neglect there seems to be of religious education, a point to which I drew your Excellency's attention at the State banquet at Jaipur on the 29th October, 1909. I must say I have great faith in a system of education, in which secular and religious instruction are harmoniously combined, as the formation of character entirely depends upon a basework of religion, and the noble ideals which our sacred books put before the younger generation will, I fervently hope, make them loyal and dutiful citizens of the Empire. Such ideals must inevitably have their effect on impressionable young men, and it is perhaps due to such ideals that sedition and anarchy have obtained so small a footing in the Native States as a whole. In the Chiefs' College Conference, held at the Mayo College in 1904, I impressed upon my colleagues the necessity of religious education for the sons of the chiefs and nobles of Rajputana, and it should be one of the principal objects in all schools for the Pandits and the Moulvies to instil in the minds of their pupils correct notions as to the duty they owe to the community they belong to and to their Sovereign.

In this respect the ruling chiefs unquestionably reflect the views which prevail amongst the better-class Indians in British India as well as in the Native States. The Government of India cannot afford to disregard them. The Resolution of 1904, it is true, laid it down again definitely that "in Government institutions, the instruction is and must continue to be exclusively secular." But much has happened since 1904 to reveal the evils which our educational system has engendered and to lend weight to the representations made by responsible exponents of sober Indian opinion in favour of one of the remedies which it is clearly within our power to apply. Nor need we really depart from our time-honoured principle of neutrality in religious matters. All we have to do is to set apart, in the curriculum of our schools and colleges, certain hours during which they will be open, on specified conditions, for religious instruction in the creed in which the parents desire their children to be brought up. There is no call for compulsion. This is just one of the questions in which the greatest latitude should be left to local Governments, who are more closely in touch than the Central Government with the sentiment and wishes of the different communities. I am assured that there would be little difficulty in forming local committees to settle whether there was a sufficiently strong feeling amongst parents in favour of a course of religious instruction and to determine the lines upon which it should be given. Some supervision would have to be exercised by the State, but in the Educational Service there are, it is to be hoped, enough capable and enlightened representatives of the different creeds to exercise the necessary amount of supervision in a spirit both of sympathy for the spiritual needs of their people and of loyalty to the Government they serve. It may be objected that there are so many jarring sects, so many divisions of caste, that it would be impossible ever to secure an agreement as to the form to be imparted to religious instruction. Let us recognize but not overrate the difficulty. In each of the principal religions of India a substantial basis can be found to serve as a common denominator between different groups, as, for instance, in the Koran for all Mahomedans and in the Shastras for the great majority of high-caste Hindus. At any rate, if the effort is made and fails through no fault of ours, but through the inability of Indian parents to reconcile their religious differences, the responsibility to them will no longer lie with us.

Another objection will probably be raised by earnest Christians who would hold themselves bound in conscience to protest against any facilities being given by a Christian State for instruction in religious beliefs which they reprobate. Some of these austere religionists may even go so far as to contend that, rather than tolerate the teaching of "false doctrines," it is better to deprive Indian children of all religious teaching. To censure of this sort, however, the State already lays itself open in India. There are educational institutions—and some of the best, like the Mahomedan College at Aligurh—maintained by denominational communities on purpose to secure religious education. Yet the State withdraws from them neither recognition nor assistance because pupils are taught to be good Mahomedans or good Hindus. Why should it be wrong to make religious instruction permissive in other Indian schools which are not wholly or mainly supported by private endeavour? Is not the "harmonious combination of secular and religious instruction" for which the Maharajah of Jaipur pleads better calculated than our present policy of laisser faire to refine and purify Indian religious conceptions, and to bring about that approximation of Eastern to Western ideals, towards which the best Indian minds were tending before the present revolt against Western ascendency?