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INDIA
OLD AND NEW
BY
SIR VALENTINE CHIROL
AUTHOR OF "INDIAN UNREST," "THE EGYPTIAN PROBLEM," ETC.
"We shall in time so far improve the character of our
Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect
themselves."--Minute by Sir Thomas Munro, Governor
of Madras, Dec. 31, 1824.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1921
FOREWORD
It is little more than ten years since I wrote my _Indian Unrest_. But
they have been years that may well count for decades in the history of
the world, and not least in the history of India. Much has happened in
India to confirm many of the views which I then expressed. Much has
happened also to lead me to modify others, and to recognise more clearly
to-day the shortcomings of a system of government, in many ways
unrivalled, but subject to the inevitable limitations of alien rule.
At a very early stage of the Great War the Prime Minister warned the
British people that, after the splendid demonstration India was already
giving of her loyalty to the cause for which the whole Empire was then
in arms, our relations with her would have henceforth to be approached
from "a new angle of vision." The phrase he used acquired a deeper
meaning still as the war developed from year to year into a
life-and-death struggle not merely between nations but between ideals,
and India claimed for herself the benefit of the ideals for which she
too fought and helped the British Commonwealth to victory. When victory
was assured, could India's claim be denied after she had been called in,
with all the members of the British Commonwealth, to the War Councils of
the Empire in the hour of need, and again been associated with them in
the making of peace? The British people have answered that question as
all the best traditions of British governance in India, and all the
principles for which they had fought and endured through four and a half
years of frightful war, bade them answer it.
The answer finally took shape in the great constitutional experiment of
which I witnessed the inauguration during my visit to India this winter.
It promises to rally as seldom before in active support of the British
connection those classes that British rule brought within the orbit of
Western civilisation by the introduction of English education, just
about a century ago. It has not disarmed all the reactionary elements
which, even when disguised in a modern garb, draw their inspiration from
an ancient civilisation, remote indeed from, though not in its better
aspects irreconcilable with, our own. A century is but a short moment of
time in the long span of Indian history, and the antagonism between two
different types of civilisation cannot be easily or swiftly lived down.
It would be folly to underrate forces of resistance which are by no
means altogether ignoble, and in this volume I have studied their origin
and their vitality because they underlie the strange "Non-co-operation"
movement which has consciously or unconsciously arrayed every form of
racial and religious and economic and political discontent, not merely
against British rule, but against the progressive forces which contact
with Western civilisation has slowly brought into existence under
British rule in India itself. These forces have been stirred to new
endeavour by the goal now definitely placed within their reach. That we
were bound to set that goal and no other before them I have tried to
show by reviewing the consistent evolution of British policy in India
for the last 150 years, keeping, imperfectly sometimes, but in the main
surely, abreast of our own national and political evolution at home and
throughout the Empire. Once placed in its proper perspective, this great
experiment, though fraught with many dangers and difficulties, is one of
which the ultimate issue can be looked forward to hopefully as the not
unworthy sequel to the long series of bold and on the whole wonderfully
successful experiments that make up the unique story of British rule in
India.
I have to express my thanks to the proprietors of _The Times_ for
allowing me to use some of the letters which I wrote for that paper
whilst I was in India last winter, and also to the Royal Society of Arts
for permission to reproduce the main portions of a lecture delivered by
me last year on Hinduism as the first of the Memorial Lectures
instituted in honour of the late Sir George Birdwood, to whom I owe as
much for the deeper understanding which he gave me of old India as I do
to the late Mr. G.K. Gokhale for the clearer insight I gained from him
into the spirit of new India whilst we were colleagues from 1912 to 1915
on the Royal Commission on Indian Public Services.
VALENTINE CHIROL.
34 CARLYLE SQUARE, CHELSEA,
_August 24, 1921._
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE CLASH OF TWO CIVILISATIONS 1
CHAPTER II
THE ENDURING POWER OF HINDUISM 15
CHAPTER III
MAHOMEDAN DOMINATION 46
CHAPTER IV
BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY 66
CHAPTER V
THE MUTINY AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER 84
CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST 111
CHAPTER VII
THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS 125
CHAPTER VIII
THROUGH THE GREAT WAR TO THE GREAT INDIAN REFORM BILL 139
CHAPTER IX
THE EMERGENCE OF MR. GANDHI 165
CHAPTER X
SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE ELECTIONS 193
CHAPTER XI
CROSS CURRENTS IN SOUTHERN INDIA 214
CHAPTER XII
THE BIRTH OF AN INDIAN PARLIAMENT 227
CHAPTER XIII
ECONOMIC FACTORS 246
CHAPTER XIV
SHOALS AND ROCKS AHEAD 268
CHAPTER XV
THE INCLINED PLANE OF GANDHIISM 286
CHAPTER XVI
THE INDIAN PROBLEM A WORLD PROBLEM 299
INDEX 311
CHAPTER I
THE CLASH OF TWO CIVILISATIONS
On February 9, 1921, three hundred and twenty-one years after Queen
Elizabeth granted to her trusty "Merchant-venturers" of London the
charter out of which the East India Company and the British Empire of
India were to grow up, His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught
inaugurated at Delhi, in the King-Emperor's name, the new representative
institutions that are to lead India onward towards complete
self-government as an equal partner in the British Commonwealth of
Nations. To bring home to every Indian the full significance of the
occasion, the King-Emperor did not shrink from using in his Royal
Message an Indian word which not long ago was held to bear no other than
a seditious construction. His Majesty gave it a new and finer meaning.
"For years--it may be for generations--patriotic and loyal Indians have
dreamed of _Swaraj_ for their motherland. To-day you have the beginnings
of _Swaraj_ within my Empire, and the widest scope and ample opportunity
for progress to the liberty which my other Dominions enjoy."
It was a bold pronouncement inaugurating another, some say the boldest,
of all the many bold adventures which make up the marvellous history of
British rule in India. The simplicity, rare in the East, of the ceremony
itself enhanced its significance. It was not held, like the opening of
the Chamber of Princes, in the splendid Hall of Public Audience in the
old Fort where the Moghul Emperors once sat on the Peacock Throne, nor
were there the flash of jewels and blaze of colour that faced the Duke
when he addressed the feudatory chiefs who still rule their states on
ancient lines beyond the limits of direct British administration. The
members of the new Indian Legislatures, most of them in sober European
attire, though many of them retained their own distinctive head-dress,
were assembled within the white and unadorned walls of the temporary
building in which they will continue to sit until the statelier home to
be built for them in new Delhi is ready to receive them. But Delhi
itself with all its age-long memories was around one to provide the
historic setting for an historic scene, and Delhi still stands under the
sign of the Kutub Minar, the splendid minaret--a landmark for miles and
miles around--which dominates the vast graveyard of fallen dynasties at
its feet and the whole of the great plain beyond where the fate of
India, and not of India alone, has so often been decided.
On that plain were fought out, in prehistoric times, the fierce
conflicts of ancient Aryan races, Pandavas and Kauravas, around which
the poetic genius of India has woven the wonderful epos of the
Mahabharata. Only a couple of miles south of the modern city, the walls
of the Purana Kilat, the fortress built by Humayun, cover the site but
have not obliterated the ancient name of Indraprasthra, or Indrapat, the
city founded by the Pandavas themselves, when Yudhisthira celebrated
their final victory by performing on the banks of the Jumna, in token of
the Pandava claim to Empire, the _Asvamedha_, or great Horse Sacrifice,
originated by Brahma himself. There too, on a mound beyond Indrapat,
stands the granite shaft of one of Asoka's pillars, on which, with a
fine faith that the world has never yet justified, the great Buddhist
Apostle-Emperor of India inscribed over 2000 years ago his edicts
prohibiting the taking of life. At the very foot of the Kutub Minar the
famous Iron Pillar commemorates the victories of the "Sun of Power," the
Hindu Emperor of the Gupta dynasty with whose name, under the more
popular form of Raja Bikram, Indian legend associates the vague memories
of a golden age of Hindu civilisation in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Pillar was brought there by one of the Rajput princes who founded in
the middle of the eleventh century the first city really known to
history as Delhi. There Prithvi Raja reigned, who still lives in Indian
minstrelsy as the embodiment of Hindu chivalry, equally gallant and
daring in love and in war--the last to make a stand in northern India
against the successive waves of Mahomedan conquest which Central Asia
had begun to pour in upon India in 1001, with the first of Mahmud
Ghazni's seventeen raids. In the next century an Afghan wave swept down
on the top of the original Turki wave, and Kutub-ed-Din, having
proclaimed himself Emperor of Delhi in 1206, built the great Mosque of
_Kuwwet-el-Islam_, "The Power of Islam," and the lofty minaret, still
known by his name, from which for six centuries the Moslem call to
prayer went forth to proclaim Mahomedan domination over India.
With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties, steeped
in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn. The
annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently
to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was
shaken for two centuries by Timur, who appeared out of the wild spaces
of Tartary and within a year disappeared into them again like a
devastating meteor. From his stock, nevertheless, was to proceed the
long line of Moghul Emperors who first under Baber and then under Akbar
won the Empire of Hindustan at the gates of Delhi, and for a time
succeeded in bringing almost the whole of India under their sway. But
their splendid marble halls in the great Fort of Delhi recall not only
the magnificence of the Moghul Empire, but its slow and sure decay,
until it became a suitor for the protection of the British power, which,
at first a mere trading power that had once sued humbly enough for its
protection, had risen to be the greatest military and political power
in India. It was at Delhi at the beginning of the nineteenth century
that Lord Lake rescued a Moghul Emperor from the hands of Mahratta
jailers, and it was at Delhi again that in 1857 the last semblance of
Moghul rulership disappeared out of history in the tempest of the
Mutiny. It was on the plain of Delhi that the assumption by Queen
Victoria of the imperial title was solemnly proclaimed in 1878, and,
with still greater pomp, King Edward's accession in 1903. There again in
1911 King George, the first of his line to visit his Indian Empire as
King-Emperor, received in person the fealty of princes and peoples and
restored Delhi to her former pride of place as its imperial capital.
Where else in the world can such a procession of the ages pass before
one's eyes, from the great "Horse Sacrifice" of the Pandavas at the dawn
of history to the inauguration by a British prince in the King-Emperor's
name of modern political institutions conceived in the democratic spirit
of British freedom?
Yet at the very time when an Indian-elected assembly, representing as
far as possible all creeds and classes and communities, and above all
the Western-educated classes who are the intellectual offspring of
British rule, were gathered together to hear delivered to them in
English--the one language in which, as a result of British rule, and by
no means the least valuable, Indians from all parts of a vast polyglot
country are able to hold converse--the Royal message throwing open to
the people of India the road to _Swaraj_ within the British Empire, the
imperial city of Delhi went into mourning as a sign of angry protest,
and the vast majority of its citizens, mostly, it must be remembered,
Mahomedans, very strictly observed a complete boycott of the Royal visit
in accordance with Mr. Gandhi's "Non-co-operation" campaign, and went
out in immense crowds to greet the strange Hindu saint and leader who
had come to preach to them his own very different message--a message of
revolt, not indeed by violence but by "soul force," against the
soulless civilisation of the West.
In no other city in India would such an alliance between Hindus and
Mahomedans have seemed only a few years ago more unthinkable. For
nowhere else have we such a vision as in Delhi of the ruthlessness as
well as of the splendour of Mahomedan domination in India. Nowhere can
one measure as in Delhi the greatness of its fall, and its fall had
begun before it ever came into conflict with the rising British power.
It had been shaken to its foundations by the far more ancient power of
Hinduism, which Islam had subdued but never destroyed. In the
seventeenth century Shivaji, the hero still to-day of the Hindu revival
of which Mr. Gandhi is the latest apostle, led out for the first time
his Mahrattas in open rebellion against Delhi and started the continuous
process of disintegration from which the Moghul Emperors were driven to
purchase their only possible respite under British protection. Since
India finally passed not under Mahratta, but under British rule,
Hinduism has never again been subjected to the oppression which the
fierce monotheism of Islam itself taught all her Mahomedan rulers, with
the one noble exception of Akbar, to inflict upon an "idolatrous" race.
British rule introduced into India not only a new reign of law and order
but the principles of equal tolerance and justice for all which had
struck root in our own civilisation. Nevertheless, at the very moment at
which we were attempting to extend a wide and generous application of
those principles to the domain of political rights and liberties, we
were being confronted with unexpected forces of resistance which, even
in Mahomedan Delhi, drew their chief inspiration from Hinduism.
But, it might be argued, Delhi, though restored to the primacy it had
lost under British rule as the capital city of India, has continued to
live on the memories of the past and has been scarcely touched by the
breath of modern civilisation. For the full effect of close contact
with the West, ought one not to look to the great cities that have
grown up under British rule--to Calcutta, for instance, the seat until a
few years ago of British Government in India, itself a creation of the
British, and if not to-day a more prosperous centre of European
enterprise than Bombay, a larger and more populous city, in which the
Hindus are in an overwhelming majority? But in the life even of Calcutta
features are not lacking to remind one how persistent are the forces of
resistance to the whole spirit of the West which Mr. Gandhi mustered in
Delhi to protest against the purpose of the Duke of Connaught's mission.
Had not a great part of Calcutta itself also observed the _Hartal_
proclaimed by Mr. Gandhi during the Prince's visit?
On the surface it seems difficult in Calcutta to get even an occasional
glimpse of the old India upon which we have superimposed a new India
with results that are still in the making. In Bombay, though it proudly
calls itself "the Western Gate of India" the glow of Hindu funeral
pyres, divided only by a long wall from the fashionable drive which
sweeps along Back Bay from the city, still called the Fort, to Malabar
Hill, serves to remind one any evening that he is in an oriental world
still largely governed as ever by the doctrine of successive rebirths,
the dead being merely reborn to fresh life, in some new form according
to each one's merits or demerits, out of the flames that consume the
body. On Malabar Hill itself, in the very heart of the favourite
residential quarter whence the Europeans are being rapidly elbowed out
by Indian merchant princes, the finest site of all still encloses the
Towers of Silence on which, contrary to the Hindu usage of cremation,
the Parsees, holding fire too sacred to be subjected to contact with
mortal corruption, expose their dead to be devoured by vultures.
Calcutta has no such conspicuous landmarks of the East to disturb the
illusion produced by most of one's surroundings that this is a city
which, if not actually European, differs only from the European type in
the complexion and dress of its oriental population and the
architectural compromises imposed on European buildings by a tropical
climate. The Marquess of Wellesley built Government House over a hundred
years ago on the model of Kedleston, and it is still the stateliest
official residence in British India. Fort William with Olive's ramparts
and fosses is still almost untouched, and with an ever-expanding
Walhalla of bronze or marble Governors and Viceroys and
Commanders-in-Chief, and at the farther end the white marble walls and
domes of the Queen Victoria Memorial Hall--the one noble monument we
have built in India--at last nearing completion, the broad expanse of
Calcutta's incomparable Maidan is, even more than our London parks, the
green playfield and the vital lung of the whole city. Along and behind
Chowringhee there are still a few of the old-time mansions of
Thackeray's "nabobs," with their deep, pillared verandahs standing well
off from the road, each within its discreet "compound," but they are all
rapidly making room for "eligible residences," more opulent perhaps but
more closely packed, or for huge blocks of residential flats, even less
adapted to the climate. The great business quarter round Dalhousie
Square has been steadily rebuilt on a scale of massive magnificence
scarcely surpassed in the city of London, and many of the shops compare
with those of our West End. The river, too, all along the Garden Reach
and far below is often almost as crowded as the Pool of London, with
ocean-going steamers waiting to load or unload their cargoes as well as
with lumbering native sailing ships and the ferries that ply ceaselessly
between the different quarters of the city on both banks of the Hugli.
The continuous roar of traffic in the busy streets, the crowded
tram-cars, the motors and taxis jostling the ancient bullock-carts, the
surging crowds in the semi-Europeanised native quarters, even the pall
of smoke that tells of many modern industrial activities are not quite
so characteristic of new India as, when I was last there, the
sandwich-men with boards inviting a vote for this or that candidate in
the elections to the new Indian Councils.
In all the strenuous life and immense wealth of this great city, to
which European enterprise first gave and still gives the chief impulse,
Indians are taking an increasing share. The Bengalees themselves still
hold very much aloof from modern developments of trade and industry, but
they were the first to appreciate the value of Western education, and
the Calcutta University with all its shortcomings has maintained the
high position which Lord Dalhousie foreshadowed for it nearly seventy
years ago. In art and literature the modern Bengalee has often known how
to borrow from the West without sacrificing either his own originality
or the traditions of his race or the spirit of his creed. Some of the
finest Bengalee brains have taken for choice to the legal profession and
have abundantly justified themselves both as judges in the highest court
of the province and as barristers and pleaders. In every branch of the
public services open to Indians and in all the liberal professions, as
well as in the civic and political life of their country, the Bengalees
have played a leading part, not restricted even to their own province,
and in the very distinguished person of Lord Sinha, Bengal has just
provided for the first time an Indian to represent the King-Emperor as
governor of a province--the neighbouring province of Behar and Orissa.
Nor have the women of Bengal been left behind as in so many other parts
of India. In Calcutta many highly educated ladies have won such complete
release from the ancient restraints imposed upon their sex that they
preside to-day over refined and cultured homes from which the subtle
atmosphere of the East does not exclude the ease and freedom of Western
habits of mind and body.
Yet these are still exceptions, and even in such a progressive city as
Calcutta and even amongst the highest classes the social and domestic
life of the majority of Hindus is still largely governed by the laws of
Hinduism, and not least with regard to marriage and the seclusion of
women. I was once allowed to attend a sort of "scripture lesson" for
little high-caste Hindu girls, organised by a benevolent old Brahman
lady, who has devoted herself to the cause of infant education on
orthodox lines. None of these 40 or 50 little girls had of course
reached the age, usually ten, at which they would be cut off from all
contact with the other sex except in marriage. They had bright and happy
faces, and as it was a Hindu festival most of them were decked out in
all their finery with gold and silver bangles on their dainty arms and
ankles, sometimes with jewelled nose-rings as well as ear-rings. They
went through an elaborate and picturesque ritual with great earnestness
and reverence and carefully followed the injunctions of the Brahman, a
cultured and Western-educated gentleman who presided over the ceremony.
It was an attractive scene, and would have been entirely pleasant but
for the painful contrast afforded by some eight or ten poor little mites
with shaven heads and drab-coloured dresses, almost ragged and quite
unadorned. They were infant widows, condemned according to the laws of
Hinduism by the premature death of their husbands to whom they had been
wedded, but whom they had never known, to lifelong widowhood, and
therefore in most cases to lifelong contempt and drudgery. For they were
debarred henceforth from fulfilling the supreme function of Hindu
womanhood, _i.e._ securing the continuity of family rites from father to
son by bearing children in legitimate wedlock, itself terribly
circumscribed by the narrow limits within which inter-marriage is
permissible even between different septs of the same caste. Happily
those I saw were probably still too young to realise the full
significance of the unkind fate that already differentiated them so
markedly from their more fortunate caste-sisters.
Nor has one to go so very far from the heart of Calcutta to be reminded
that the "premier city" of modern India derives its name from Kali, the
most sinister of Indian goddesses. She was the tutelary deity of
Kali-Kata, one of the three villages to which Job Charnock removed the
first British settlement in Bengal when he abandoned Hugli in 1690, and
her shrine has grown in wealth and fame with the growth of Calcutta.
Kali-Kata is to-day only a suburb of the modern city, but in entering it
one passes into another world--the world of popular Hinduism. In its
narrow streets every shop is stocked with the paraphernalia that Hindus
require for their devotions, for everything centres in Kali-Kata round
the popular shrine sacred to Kali, the black goddess of destruction,
with a protruding blood-red tongue, who wears a necklace of human skulls
and a belt of human hands and tongues, and, holding in one of her many
hands a severed human head, tramples under foot the dead bodies of her
victims. From the _ghats_, or long flights of steps, that descend to the
muddy waters of a narrow creek which claims a more or less remote
connection with the sacred Ganges, crowds of pious Hindus go through
their ablutions in accordance with a long and complicated ritual, whilst
high-caste ladies perform them in mid-stream out of covered boats and
behind curtains deftly drawn to protect their _purdah_. Past an ancient
banyan tree, from whose branches streamers of coloured stuffs depend
with other votive offerings from grateful mothers who have not prayed
for male offspring in vain, past the minor shrines of many favourite
deities, a road lined with closely packed beggars and ascetics,
thrusting forth their sores and their shrivelled limbs in the hope of a
few coppers, leads up to the place of sacrifice in front of the temple.
The pavement is still red with the blood of goats immolated to the Great
Goddess, and her devotees who may have just missed the spectacle can at
least embrace the posts to which the victims were tied. On an open
pillared platform facing the holy of holies some of the high-caste
worshippers await in prayer and meditation the moment when its ponderous
bronze doors are from time to time thrown open. One old Brahman lady of
singularly refined appearance presses her fingers alternately on her
right and her left nostril, whilst she expels through the other, keeping
her lips all the time tightly closed, the unhallowed air which may have
contaminated her lungs on her way to the temple. Another worshipper lies
full length with his face pressed to the ground in motionless adoration.
Between them flit about laughing, bright-eyed little girls, the
"daughters" of the temple, still unconscious of the life of temple
prostitution to which they have been dedicated from their birth. The
court-yard all around is packed with a surging, howling mob of pilgrims,
many of them from a great distance, fighting for a vantage point from
which they may get a glimpse of the Great Goddess in her inner
sanctuary, even if they cannot hope to penetrate into it.
At last, after much clanging of bells and fierce altercations between
the Brahman priests and the faithful as to payment of necessary fees,
the bronze doors roll back, and in the dim religious twilight one
catches a glint of gold and precious stones, the head-dress of Kali,
whose terrific image barely emerges from the depth of the inner
sanctuary in which it stands, accessible only to its serving Brahmans.
They alone, though strangely enough temple Brahmans as a class enjoy
little credit with their fellow-castemen, can approach the idol and wash
and dress and feed it with offerings. Whilst the doors are open the
frenzy and the noise increases, as the mob of worshippers struggle for a
front place and bawl out their special supplications at the top of their
voices. Then when they are closed again there is a general unravelling
of the tangled knots of perspiring humanity, and those who have achieved
the supreme purpose of their pilgrimage gradually disperse to make room
for another crowd, one stream succeeding another the whole day long on
special festivals, but on ordinary days mostly between sunrise and noon.
At the back of the shrine, as I came away, some privileged worshippers
were waiting to drink a few drops of the foul water which trickles out
of a small conduit through the wall from the holy of holies. It is the
water in which the feet of the idol--and those of the serving
Brahmans--have been washed!
It was in this same temple of Kali that only some fifteen years ago,
during the violent agitation provoked by the Partition of Bengal, vast
crowds used to assemble and take by the name of the Great Goddess the
vow of _Swadeshi_ as the first step to _Swaraj_, and Bengalee youths,
maddened by an inflammatory propaganda, learned to graft on to ancient
forms of worship the very modern cult of the bomb. To this same temple
resorted only the other day Mr. Gandhi's followers to seek the blessing
of the Great Goddess for the more harmless forms of protest by which he
exhorted the inhabitants of Calcutta to bring home to the Duke of
Connaught during his stay in Calcutta their indignant rejection of the
boon which he had been sent out by the King-Emperor to confer on the
people of India.
Must we then be driven to the conclusion that there is a gulf never to
be bridged between India's ancient civilisation and the modern
civilisation which we have brought to her out of the West? In that case
the great constitutional adventure on which we have just embarked would
be, unlike all our other great adventures in India, foredoomed to
failure, and those Englishmen would be right who shudder at its rashness
and reiterate with added conviction, since the school of Indian thought
for which Mr. Gandhi stands seems to bear them out, that "East is East
and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." The whole history of
the British connection with India surely excludes such a conclusion of
failure and despair. It teaches us, not, as such Englishmen contend,
that India was won and has been held and must be retained by the sword
alone, but that British rule was established and has been maintained
with and by the co-operation of Indians and British, and that in seeking
to-day to associate Indians more closely than ever before with the
government and administration of the country, we are merely persevering
in the same path which, though at times hesitatingly and reluctantly,
the British rulers of India have trodden for generations past, always
keeping step with the successive stages of our own national and
political evolution. The Indian extremists misread equally the whole
history of British rule who see in it nothing but a long nightmare of
hateful oppression to be finally overcome, according to Mr. Gandhi's
preaching, by "Non-co-operation" and the immortal "soul force" of India,
rescued at last from the paralysing snares of an alien civilisation. Not
for the first time has the cry of "Back to the Vedas" been raised by
Indians who, standing in the old ways, watch with hostility and alarm
the impact on their ancient but static civilisation of the more dynamic
civilisation of the West with which we for the first time brought India
into contact. It would be folly to underrate the resistance which the
reactionary elements in Hinduism are still capable of putting forth. I
have shown how it can still be seen operating in extreme forms, and not
upon Hindus alone, in the two pictures which I have drawn from Delhi and
Calcutta. It meets one in a lesser degree at almost every turn all over
India. But it would be just as foolish to underrate the progressive
forces which show now as ever in the history of Hinduism, that it is
also capable of combining with a singular rigidity of structure and with
many forms repugnant to all our own beliefs a breadth and elasticity of
thought by no means inferior to that of the West.
To those who hoped for a more rapid and widespread fusion of Indian and
Western ideals, some of the phenomena which have marked the latter-day
revival of Hinduism and the shape it has recently assumed in Mr.
Gandhi's "Non-co-operation" campaign, may have brought grave
disappointment. But the inrush of Western influences was assuredly bound
to provoke a strong reaction. For let us not forget that to the abiding
power of Hinduism India owes the one great element of stability that
enabled her, long before we appeared in India, to weather so many
tremendous storms without altogether losing the sense of a great
underlying unity stronger and more enduring than all the manifold lines
of cleavage which have tended from times immemorial to divide her.
Hinduism has not only responded for some forty centuries to the social
and religious aspirations of a large and highly endowed portion of the
human race, almost wholly shut off until modern times from any intimate
contact with our own Western world, but it has been the one great force
that has preserved the continuity of Indian life. It withstood six
centuries of Mahomedan domination. Could it be expected to yield without
a struggle to the new forces, however superior we may consider them and
however overwhelming they may ultimately prove, which British rule has
imported into India during a period of transition more momentous than
any other through which she has ever passed, but still very brief when
compared with all those other periods of Indian history which modern
research has only recently rescued from the legendary obscurity of still
earlier ages?
We are witnessing to-day a new phase of this great struggle, the clash
of conflicting elements in two great civilisations. A constitution has
been inaugurated at Delhi to bring India into permanent and equal
partnership with a commonwealth of free nations which is the greatest
political achievement of Western civilisation, and the latest prophet of
Hinduism, applying to it the language of the West, has banned it
forthwith as a thing of Satan, the offspring of a Satanic government and
of a Satanic civilisation. His appeal to India is intended to strike
many and various chords, but it is essentially an appeal to the ancient
forces of Hinduism which gave India a great civilisation long before
Europe, and least of all Britain, had emerged from the savagery of
primitive man. Englishmen find it difficult to understand the strength
of that appeal, perhaps because they do not realise how deep and vital
are the roots of the civilisation to which it appeals.