Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

Here is surely a question bound up with all the main-springs of Indian life in which we may be rightly asked "to govern according to Indian ideas." Can we expect that the youth of India will grow up to be law-abiding citizens if we deprive them of what their parents hold to be "the keystone to the formation of character"? Can we close our eyes to what so many responsible Indians regard as one of the chief causes of the demoralization which has crept into our schools and colleges? The State can, doubtless, exact in many ways more loyal co-operation from Indian teachers in safeguarding their pupils from the virus of disaffection. It can, for instance, intimate that it will cease to recruit public servants from schools in which sedition is shown to be rife. It can hold them collectively responsible, as some Indians themselves recommend for crimes perpetrated by youths whom they have helped to pervert. But these are rigorous measures that we can hardly take with a good conscience so long as our educational system can be charged with neglecting or undermining, however unintentionally, the fabric upon which Indian conceptions of morality are based. So long as we take no steps to refute a charge which, in view of recent evidence, can no longer be dismissed as wholly unfounded, can we expect education to fulfil the purpose rightly assigned to it by Dr. Mookerjee—"the raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State?"

CHAPTER XXI.

PRIMARY EDUCATION.

It is too late in the day now to discuss whether it was wise to begin our educational policy as we did from the top and to devote so much of our energies and resources to secondary at the expense of primary education. The result has certainly been to widen the gulf which divides the different classes of Indian society and to give to those who have acquired some veneer, however superficial, of Western education the only articulate voice, often quite out of proportion to their importance, as the interpreters of Indian interests and desires. One million is a liberal estimate of the number of Indians who have acquired and retained some knowledge of English; whilst at the last census, out of a total population of 294 millions, less than sixteen millions could read and write in any language—not fifteen millions out of the whole male population and not one million out of the whole female population—and this modest amount of literacy is mainly confined to a few privileged castes.

With the growth of a school of Indian politicians bent upon undermining British rule, the almost inconceivable ignorance in which the masses are still plunged has become a real danger to the State, for it has proved an all too receptive soil for the calumnies and lies of the political agitator, who, too well educated himself to believe what he retails to others, knows exactly the form of calumny and lie most likely to appeal to the credulity of his uninformed fellow-countrymen. I refer especially to such very widespread and widely believed stories as that Government disseminates plague by poisoning the wells and that it introduces into the plague inoculation serum drugs which destroy virility in order to keep down the birth-rate. No one has put this point more strongly than Lord Curzon:—

What is the greatest danger in India? What is the source of suspicion, superstition, outbreaks, crime—-yes, and also of much of the agrarian discontent and suffering amongst the masses? It is ignorance. And what is the only antidote to ignorance? Knowledge.

Curiously enough, it was one of Lord Curzon's bitterest opponents who corroborated him on this point by relating in the course of a recent debate how, when the Chinsurah Bridge was built some years ago over the Hughli, "the people believed that hundreds and thousands of men were being sacrificed and their heads cut off and carried to the river to be put under the piers to give the bridge stability, so that the goddess might appreciate the gift and let the piers remain." And he added:—"I know that ignorant people were afraid to go out at nights, lest they might be seized and their heads cut off and thrown under the piers of the Hughli Bridge."

It was, however, on more general consideration, as is his wont, that Mr. Gokhale moved his resolution in the first Session of the Imperial Council at Calcutta last winter for making elementary education free and compulsory, and for the early appointment of a committee to frame definite proposals.

Three movements [he claimed] have combined to give to mass education the place which it occupies at present amongst the duties of the State—the humanitarian movement which reformed prisons and liberated the slave, the democratic movement which admitted large masses of men to a participation in Government, and the industrial movement which brought home to nations the recognition that the general spread of education in a country, even when it did not proceed beyond the elementary stage, meant the increased efficiency of the worker.

The last of these three considerations is, perhaps, that which just now carries the most weight with moderate men in India, where the general demand for industrial and commercial development is growing loud and insistent, and Mr. Gokhale's resolution met with very general support from his Mahomedan, as well as from his Hindu, colleagues. But, in the minds of disaffected politicians, another consideration is, it must be feared, also present, to which utterance is not openly given. It is the hope that the extension of primary schools may serve, as has that of secondary schools to promote the dissemination of seditious doctrines, especially amongst the "depressed castes" to which the political agitator has so far but rarely secured access.