THE MUTINY AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER
Many different causes, much more clearly apprehended to-day than at the
time, contributed to provoke the great storm which burst over India in
1857. On the surface it was a military and mainly Mahomedan
insurrection, but it was far more than that. It was a violent upheaval
not so much against the political supremacy of Britain as against the
whole new order of things which she was importing into India. The
greased cartridges would not have sufficed to provoke such an explosion,
nor would even Mahomedans, let alone Hindus, have rallied round a
phantom King of Delhi in mere revenge for the annexation of Oudh or the
enforcement of the doctrine of lapse. The cry of "Islam in danger" was
quick to stir the Mahomedans, but the brains that engineered and
directed the Mutiny were Hindu, and the Mutiny itself was the
counter-revolution arraying in battle against the intellectual and moral
as well as against the material and military forces of Western
civilisation that was slowly but steadily revolutionising India, all the
grievances and all the fears, all the racial and religious antagonism
and bitterness aroused by the disintegration under its impact of ancient
social and religious systems. Western education was to yield other
fruits later on, but before the Mutiny it was rapidly familiarising the
mind of India with Western ideals which imperilled not only the worship
of the old gods but also the worship of the Brahman as their mouthpiece
and "the guardian of the treasury of civil and religious duties."
Modern schools and colleges threatened to undermine his ascendancy just
as Western competition had by more dubious methods undermined Indian
domestic industries. No man's caste was said to be safe against the
hidden defilement of all the strange inventions imported from beyond the
seas. Prophecy, vague but persuasive, hinted that British rule, which
dated in the Indian mind from the battle of Plassey in 1757, was doomed
not to outlive its centenary. All the vested interests connected with
the old order of things in the religious as well as in the political
domain felt the ground swaying under their feet, and the peril with
which they were confronted came not only from their alien rulers but
from their own countrymen, often of their own caste and race, who had
fallen into the snares and pitfalls of an alien civilisation. The spirit
of fierce reaction that lay behind the Mutiny stands nowhere more
frankly revealed than in the _History of the War of Independence of
1857_, written by Vinayak Savarkar, one of the most brilliant apostles
of a later school of revolt, who, as a pious Hindu, concludes his
version of the Cawnpore massacre with the prayer that "Mother Ganges,
who drank that day of the blood of Europeans, may drink her fill of it
again."
The revolt failed except in one respect. It failed as a military
movement. It had appealed to the sword and it perished by the sword. But
it is well to remember that the struggle, which was severe, would have
been, to say the least, far more severe and protracted had not a large
part of the Indian army remained staunch to the _Raj_, and had not
Indian troops stood, as they had stood throughout all our previous
fighting in India, shoulder to shoulder with British troops on the ridge
at Delhi and in the relief of Lucknow. It failed equally as a political
movement, for it never spread beyond a relatively narrow area in Upper
and Central India. The vast majority of the Indian people and princes
never even wavered. British rule passed through a trial by fire and it
emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of
all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities.
The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete
sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after
Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole
of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing
too heavy for the mere trading corporation that the East India Company
then still was. The Company had long ceased to be a mere trading
corporation. Transformed into a great agency of government and
administration, it had risen not unworthily to its immense
responsibilities. But the time had come for the final step. The Company
disappeared and the Crown assumed full and sole responsibility for the
government and administration of India. The change was in effect more
formal than real. The Governor-General came to be known as the Viceroy,
and the Secretary of State in Council took the place of the old
President of the Board of Control. But the system remained as before one
of paternal despotism in India, to be tempered still by the control of
Parliament at home.
Only in one respect had the reactionary forces at the back of the Mutiny
scored some success. The Proclamation issued by Queen Victoria on her
assumption of "the government of the territories in India heretofore
administered in trust for us by the Honourable East India Company," was
a solemn and earnest renewal of all the pledges already given to the
princes and people of India. It emphasised the determination of the
Crown to abstain from all interference with their religious belief or
worship. It reiterated the assurance that "as far as may be," her
subjects "of whatever race or creed" would be freely and impartially
admitted to offices in the service of the Crown, "the duties of which
they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity duly to
discharge," and that, "generally in framing and administering the law,
due regard be paid to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India."
It promised the wide exercise of her royal clemency to all offenders
save those actually guilty of murder during the recent outbreak. It
closed with a fine expression of her confidence and affection towards
her Indian subjects. "In their prosperity will be our strength, in their
contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward." But
no Proclamation, however generous and sincere, could undo the moral harm
done by the Mutiny. The horrors which accompanied the rising and the
sternness of the repression left terrible memories behind them on both
sides, and this legacy of racial hatred acted as a blight on the growth
of the spirit of mutual understanding and co-operation between Indians
and Englishmen in India which two generations of broad-minded Englishmen
and progressive Indians had sedulously and successfully cultivated.
If we look back upon the half-century after the Mutiny and before the
Partition of Bengal, which may be regarded as closing that long period
of paternal but autocratic government, it was one of internal peace and
of material progress which the large annual output of eloquent
statistics may be left to demonstrate. In 1857 there were not 200 miles
of railways in India, in 1905 there was a network of railways amounting
to over 28,000 miles, and the telegraph system expanded during the same
period from 4500 to 60,000 miles. The development of a great system of
irrigation canals added large new tracts of hitherto barren wastes to
the cultivable area of the country, and an elaborate machinery of
precautionary measures and relief works was created to mitigate the
hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a
predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence
on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls. The
incidence and methods of collection of the land-tax, the backbone of
Indian revenue, were carefully corrected and perfected, and the burden
of taxation readjusted and on the whole lightened. Those were the days
of _laisser-faire_, _laisser-aller_ at home, and it was not deemed to
be part of the duties of government to give any special protection to
Indian commerce, whilst the operation of free trade principles in India
checked the industrial development of the country. Nevertheless the
internal and external trade of India expanded continually, and the
cotton mills in Western India, and the jute mills in Calcutta, as well
as the opening up of coal mines in Bengal and of gold mines in Southern
India showed how great were the natural resources of the peninsula still
awaiting development; and under Lord Curzon's administration, which
reached during the first years of the present century the high-water
mark of efficiency, a department was created to deal specially with
commerce and industry. In spite of several famines of unusual intensity
and of the appearance in India in 1896 of a new scourge in the shape of
the bubonic plague, which has carried off since then over eight million
people, the population increased by leaps and bounds, and the census of
1901 showed it to have reached in our Indian Empire the huge figure of
nearly 300,000,000--which it has since then exceeded by another
20,000,000--or about a fifth of the estimated population of the whole
globe. It had risen since the first census officially recorded in 1871
by nearly 30 per cent--no mean evidence that fifty years of peaceful and
efficient administration had produced an increased sense of welfare and
confidence.
The great bulk of the population, mostly a simple and ignorant peasantry
whose horizon does not extend beyond their own village and the fields
that surround it, accepted with more or less conscious gratitude the
material benefits conferred upon them by alien rulers with whom they
were seldom brought into actual contact save through the occasional
presence of a District officer on tour, almost invariably humane and
kindly and anxious to do even-handed justice to all. Another class of
Indians, chiefly dwellers in large cities, infinitesimally small
numerically but constantly increasing in numbers and still more rapidly
in activity and influence, saw, however, in an autocratic form of
government, of which it even questioned the efficiency, an
insurmountable barrier to the aspirations which Western education had
taught it to entertain. The list of graduates from Indian Universities
lengthened every year, the number of schools and colleges in which young
Indians acquired at least the rudiments of Western knowledge grew and
multiplied in every province. Western-educated Indians flocked to the
bar; they showed themselves qualified for most of the liberal
professions; they filled every post that was open to them in the public
services. But where, they asked with growing impatience, was the
fulfilment of the hopes which they had founded on the Queen's
Proclamation of 1858? There had been perhaps no departure from the
letter of the Proclamation, but had its spirit been translated into
effective practice? Was it never to be interpreted in the same generous
sense in which a still earlier generation of British administrators had
interpreted their mission as a means to train the Indians to protect and
govern themselves?
The Indian army, reorganised after the Mutiny, displayed all its old
qualities of loyalty and gallantry in the course of the numerous foreign
expeditions in which it was employed in co-operation with the British
army, in Egypt and the Sudan, in Afghanistan, China, and Tibet, in
addition to the chronic frontier fighting on the turbulent North-West
border. The menace of Russia's persistent expansion towards India
through Central Asia and the ascendancy for which she was at the same
time striving in the Near East and the Far East, and later on the far
more real menace of German aspirations to world-dominion, lent added
importance to the maintenance of an efficient Indian army as an
essential factor in the defensive forces of the Empire. But there was no
departure from the old system under which not only were army
administration and all the higher commands reserved for British
officers, but the whole army was kept as a fighting machine entirely
dependent upon British leadership. The native officers of an Indian
regiment, mostly promoted from the ranks, could in no circumstances rise
to a position in which they might give orders to a British officer,
whilst, however senior in years and service, they were under the orders
of the youngest British subaltern gazetted to the regiment. No other
system was indeed possible so long as no attempt was made to give to
Indians any higher military training, or to hold out to them any
prospects of promotion beyond those within their reach by enlistment in
the ranks. These Indian officers, drawn from races that had acquired a
martial reputation and often from families with whom military service
was an hereditary tradition, were as a rule not only very fine fighters
but gallant native gentlemen, between whom and their British officers
there existed very cordial relations, human and professional, based upon
an instinctive recognition of differences of education and similarities
of tastes on both sides. But such a system, however well it worked in
practice for the production of a reliable fighting machine, was not
calculated to train the Indians to protect themselves.
That nothing was done to open up a military career to the
Western-educated classes was not at first more than a sentimental
grievance. But when the years passed and they still waited for that
larger share in the government and even in the administration of their
country to which the British Parliament had recognised their claim as
far back as the Act of 1833, their faith even in the professed purpose
of British rule began to waver. At first the leaders of the Indian
_intelligentsia_, some of whom had learned the value of British
institutions and of the freedom of British public life, not merely
through English literature but through years of actual residence in
England, preferred to hold the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy alone or chiefly
responsible for the long delay in the fulfilment of hopes which they in
fact regarded as rights. Their confidence in British statesmanship and
in the British Parliament remained unshaken for nearly thirty years
after the Mutiny, though they were perhaps not unnaturally inclined to
put their trust chiefly in the Liberal party which had been most closely
associated with the promotion of a progressive policy towards India in
the past. Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty confirmed them in the belief that
from the Conservative party they had little to hope for, and his drastic
Press Act of 1879, though not unprovoked by the virulent abuse of
Government in some of the vernacular papers and the reckless
dissemination of alarmist rumours during the worst period of the Afghan
troubles, was held to foreshadow a return all along the line to purely
despotic methods of government. But his departure from India after Lord
Beaconsfield's defeat at the general election of 1880 and the return of
the Liberal party to power quickened new hopes which Lord Ripon, when he
became Viceroy in succession to Lord Lytton, showed every disposition to
justify.
All the greater was the disillusionment when a measure, introduced for
the purpose of abolishing "judicial disqualifications based on race
distinctions," not only provoked fierce opposition amongst the whole
European community and even amongst the rank and file of the civil
service, but was ultimately whittled down in deference to that
opposition until the very principle at issue was virtually surrendered.
Indians resented this fresh assertion of racial superiority, and saw in
the violence of the agitation, sometimes not far removed from threats of
actual lawlessness, and in the personal abuse poured out by his own
countrymen on the Queen's representative, the survival amongst a large
section of Europeans of the same hatred that had invented for a Viceroy
who was determined to temper justice with mercy after the Mutiny the
scornful nickname of "Clemency Canning."
The fate of the Ilbert Bill taught the Indians above all one practical
lesson--the potency of agitation. If by agitation a Viceroy enjoying the
full confidence of the British Government, with a powerful
Parliamentary majority behind it, could be compelled by the British
community in India, largely consisting of public servants, to surrender
a great principle of policy, then the only hope for Indians was to learn
to agitate in their own interests, and to create a political
organisation of their own in order both to educate public opinion in
India and influence public opinion in England. The men who started the
Indian National Congress were inspired by no revolutionary ambitions.
Though they did not talk, as Mr. Gandhi does to-day, about producing a
"change of hearts" in their British rulers, that was their purpose and
unlike Mr. Gandhi, they were firm believers not in any racial
superiority, but in the superiority of Western civilisation and of
British political institutions which they deemed not incapable of
transplantation on to Indian soil. So on December 28, 1885, a small band
of Indian gentlemen, who represented the _élite_ of the Western-educated
classes, met in Bombay to hold the first session of the Indian National
Congress which, with all its many shortcomings, even in its earlier and
better days, was destined to play a far more important part than was for
a long time realised by Englishmen in India or at home. Many of
them--such as Mr. Bonnerji, a distinguished Bengalee, Pherozeshah Mehta,
a rising member of the great Parsee community in Bombay, Dadabhai
Naoroji, who was later on to be the first Indian to put forward plainly
India's claim to self-government within the British Empire--had spent
several years in England. Others, like Ranadé and Telang, had been for a
long time past vigorous advocates of Indian social reforms. With them
were a few Englishmen--chief among them a retired civilian Mr. Hume--who
were in complete sympathy with their aspirations. Only the Mahomedans
were unrepresented, though not uninvited, partly because few of them had
been caught up in the current of Western thought and education, and
partly because the community as a whole, reflecting the ancient and
deep-seated antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, distrusted
profoundly every movement in which Hindus were the leading spirits. Lord
Reay, who was then Governor of Bombay, was invited to preside and
declined only after asking for instructions from the Viceroy, Lord
Dufferin, who, though not unfriendly, held that it was undesirable for
the head of a Provincial Government to associate himself with what
should essentially be a popular movement. Mr. Bonnerji, who was selected
to take the chair, emphatically proclaimed the loyalty of the Congress
to the British Crown. Amongst the most characteristic resolutions moved
and carried was one demanding the appointment of a Royal Commission, on
which the people of India should be represented, to inquire into the
working of the Indian administration, and another pleading for a large
expansion of the Indian Legislative Councils and the creation of a
Standing Committee of the House of Commons to which the majority in
those Councils should have the right to appeal if overruled by the
Executive.
The Congress claimed to represent the educated opinion of India, and,
though Government withheld from it all official recognition, it
flattered itself not without reason that its preaching had not fallen on
to altogether barren soil when, still under Lord Dufferin's Viceroyalty,
the Indian Local Government Act of 1888 marked a large advance upon the
reforms in local and municipal institutions which, with the repeal of
the Lytton Press Act, had been amongst the few tangible results of Lord
Ripon's "Pro-Indian" Viceroyalty; for it fulfilled many of the demands
which Indian Liberals, and notably Pherozeshah Mehta, had urged for
years past for a more effective share in municipal administration. Still
greater was the satisfaction when, under Lord Lansdowne's Viceroyalty,
the British Parliament passed in 1892 an Indian Councils Act, for which
Lord Dufferin himself had paved the way by admitting that Government
could and should rely more largely upon the experience and advice of
responsible Indians. The functions and the constitution of both the
Viceroy's and the Provincial Legislative Councils, though their powers
remained purely consultative, were substantially enlarged by the
addition of a considerable number of unofficial members representing, at
least in theory, all classes and interests, who were given the right to
put questions to the Executive on matters of administration and, in the
case of the Viceroy's Council, to discuss the financial policy of
Government if and when the budget to be laid before it involved fresh
taxation. The Act of 1892 did not, however, admit "the living forces of
the elective principle" on which the Congress leaders had laid their
chief stress, and they went on pressing "not for Consultative Councils,
but for representative institutions." Their hopes never perhaps rose so
high as when one of their own veterans, Dadabhai Naoroji--though Lord
Salisbury could not resist a jibe at the expense of the "black
man"--entered the House of Commons as Liberal member for Central
Finsbury. It must be conceded that, had Government at that time taken
the Congress by the hand instead of treating it with disdain and
suspicion, it might have played loyally and usefully a part analogous to
that of "Her Majesty's Opposition" at home--a part which Lord Dufferin
had been shrewd enough in the beginning not to dismiss as altogether
impossible or undesirable. Its claim to represent Indian opinion, as,
within certain limits, it unquestionably did, was ignored, and it was
left to drift without any attempt at official guidance into waters none
the less dangerous because they seemed shallow. It quickly attracted a
large following among the urban middle classes all over India. But as
the number of those who attended its annual sessions, held in turn in
every province, grew larger, it became less amenable to the guiding and
restraining influence of those who had created it, and especially of
those who had hoped to lead it in the path of social and religious
reform as well as of political advancement.
The social and religious reform movement which had been of great promise
before the Mutiny and for some years afterwards, when Keshab Chundra Sen
gave the Brahmo Somaj a fine uplift, slackened. Like the Brahmo Somaj in
Bengal, the Prirthana Somaj in Bombay no longer made so many or such
fervent recruits. New societies sprang up in defence of the old faiths,
some even glorifying all their primitive customs and superstitions, and
most of them, whilst professing to recognise the need for cleansing them
of their grosser accretions, displaying a marked reaction against the
West in their avowed determination to seek reform only in a return to
the purer doctrines of early Hinduism. The most important of all these
movements was the Arya Somaj in the Punjab, whose watchwords were "Back
to the Vedas" and "Arya for the Aryans." The latter has sometimes barely
disguised a more than merely platonic desire to see the British
disappear out of the Aryan land of India. But the Vedas at any rate
yielded to the searchers sufficient fruitful authority for promoting
female education on sound moral lines and for discouraging idolatry and
relaxing the cruel bondage of caste. That it has been and still is in
many respects a powerful influence for good is now generally admitted by
those even whom its political tendencies have alarmed. New sects arose
within Hinduism.[1] An ardent apostle of the Hindu revival in Bengal,
Swami Vivekananda, was the most impressive and picturesque figure at the
Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 and made converts in America and
in Europe, amongst them in England the gifted poetess best known under
her Hindu name as Sister Nivedita. How strong was the hold regained by
the purely reactionary forces in Hinduism was suddenly shown in the
furious campaign against Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill in 1891
which brought Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Chitawan Brahman of Poona, for
the first time into public life as the champion of extreme Hindu
orthodoxy. That measure was intended to mitigate the evils of infant
marriage by raising the age for the woman's consent to its consummation
from ten to twelve, and the death quite recently of a young Hindu girl
of eleven in Calcutta due to the violence inflicted upon her by a
husband nearly twenty years older than she was, had enlisted very
widespread support for Government amongst enlightened Hindus and
especially amongst the Western-educated. Tilak did not defeat the Bill,
but his unscrupulous attacks, not only upon the British rulers of India
but upon his own more liberal co-religionists, including men of such
ability and character as Telang and Ranadé, dealt a sinister blow at the
social reform movement, which practically died out of the Congress when
he and his friends began to establish their ascendancy over it.
It was so much easier for Indians to unite on a common political
platform against British methods of government than on a platform of
social and religious reforms which offended many different prejudices
and threatened many vested interests. The Congress developed into a
purely political body, and like all self-constituted bodies with no
definite responsibilities it showed greater capacity for acrid
criticism, often quite uninformed, than for any constructive policy. As
the years passed on without any tangible results from its expanding flow
of oratory and long "omnibus" resolutions, proposed and carried more or
less automatically at every annual session, it turned away from the old
exponents of constitutional agitation to the fiery champions of very
different methods, and almost insensibly favoured the dangerous growth
both inside it and outside it of the new forces, and of the old forces
in new shapes, which were to explode into the open with such unforeseen
violence after the Partition of Bengal in 1905.
If, however, when that explosion came the Western-educated classes were
against us rather than with us, the explanation cannot be sought only in
their continued exclusion from all real participation in the counsels
of Government, or in the refusal of the political rights for which they
had vainly agitated, or even in a general reaction against the earlier
acceptance of the essential superiority of the West. A much more acute
and substantial grievance, which affected also their material interests,
was the badge of inferiority imposed upon them in the public services.
Not till 1886 had Government appointed a Commission to report upon a
reorganisation of the public services, and its recommendations
profoundly disappointed Indian expectations. For only a narrow door was
opened for the admission of Indians into the higher Civil Service, and
all public services were divided into two nearly water-tight
compartments, the one labelled Imperial, recruited in England and
reserved in practice, as to most of the superior posts, for Englishmen,
and the other recruited in India mainly from Indians, but labelled
Provincial and clearly intended to be inferior. Such a system bore the
stamp, barely disguised, of racial discrimination, at variance with the
spirit, if not the letter, of the Queen's Proclamation--and this at a
time when Indian universities and colleges were bearing abundant fruit,
and some of it at least of a good quality.
The diffusion of Western education had, it is true, produced other and
less healthy results, but the inquiry into Indian education instituted
by Government in 1882 had been unfortunately blind to them. Diffusion
had been attained largely by a dangerous process of dilution, as side by
side with the European schools and colleges, either under Government
control or State-aided, which had grown and multiplied, many had been
also started and supported by Indian private enterprise, often
ill-equipped for their task. The training of Indian teachers could
hardly keep pace with the demand, either as to quantity or quality, and
with overcrowded classes even the best institutions suffered from the
loss of individual contact between the European teacher and the Indian
scholar. Western education had been started in India at the top, whence
it was expected to filter down by some strange and unexplained process
of gravitation. Attention was concentrated on higher and secondary
education, to which primary education was at first entirely sacrificed.
Whereas Lord William Bentinck had declared the great object of
Government to be the promotion of both Western science and literature,
scarcely any effort was made--perhaps because most Anglo-Indians had a
leaning towards the humanities--to correct by the encouragement of
scientific studies the natural bent of the Indian mind towards a purely
literary education. Yet the Indian mind being specially endowed with the
gift of imagination and prone to speculative thought stands in
particular need of the corrective discipline afforded by the study of
exact science. Again, the reluctance of Government to appear even to
interfere with Indian moral and religious conceptions, towards which it
was pledged to observe absolute neutrality, tended to restrict the
domain of education to the purely intellectual side. Yet, religion
having always been in India the basic element of life, and morality
apart from religion an almost impossible conception, that very aspect of
education to which Englishmen profess to attach the highest value, and
of which Mr. Gokhale in a memorable speech admitted Indians to stand in
special need, viz. the training of character, was gravely neglected.
Whilst from lack of any settled policy Indian education was drifting on
to rocks and quicksands, and the personal influence of Englishmen on the
younger generation diminished in an officialised educational service,
gradual changes in the material conditions of European life in India
tended to keep British and Indians more rather than less apart. Greater
facilities of travel between England and India, and the growth of "hill
stations" in which Europeans congregated during the hot season, made it
easier for Englishwomen to live in India, though, when the time came for
children to be sent home for their education, the choice continued to
lie between separation of husband and wife, or of mother and children.
But if the presence of a larger feminine element was calculated to
exercise a refining and restraining influence on Anglo-Indian society,
it did not promote the growth of intimate social relations between
Europeans and Indians, as Indian habits and domestic institutions, and
especially the seclusion of women, created an even greater barrier,
which only slowly and rarely yielded to the influences of Western
education, between European and Indian ladies than between the men of
the two races. Englishwomen even more than Englishmen continued to be
haunted by the memories of the Mutiny, which remained painfully present
to a generation who, whether Indians or British, had lived through that
tempest, and if to Indians the Mutiny recalled such scenes as "The
Blowing of Indians from British Guns" which the great Russian painter
Verestchagin depicted with the same realism as the splendid pageant of
the entry of the Prince of Wales into Delhi in 1876, it was the horrors
of Cawnpore that chiefly dwelt in the minds of Europeans. Many
Englishmen and Englishwomen owed their lives during the Mutiny to the
devotion and courage of Indians who helped them to escape, and sheltered
them sometimes for months at no slight risk to themselves. But the
spirit of treachery and cruelty revealed in the Mutiny and personified
in a Nana Sahib, who had disappeared into space but, according to
frequently recurrent rumour, was still alive somewhere, chilled the
feelings of trustfulness and goodwill of an earlier generation. Again,
whilst there was a large increase in the number of young Indians who
went to England to complete their studies--especially technical studies
for which only tardy and inadequate facilities were provided in their
own country--and many of them, left to their own devices in our large
cities, brought back to India a closer familiarity with the unedifying
rather than the edifying aspects of Western civilisation, the
development of European industries and the railway and telegraph
services, which at first at least required the employment of Europeans
in subordinate capacities, imported into India a new type of European,
with many good qualities, but rather more prone than those of better
breeding and education to glory in his racial superiority and to bring
it home somewhat roughly to the Indians with whom he associated. The
ignorance of European and American globe-trotters who were finding their
way to India also often offended Indian susceptibilities. Add to many
causes of friction, almost inevitable sometimes between people whose
habits and ideas are widely different, the effect of a trying climate
upon the European temper--never, for instance, even at home at its best
when travelling--and one need hardly be surprised that unpleasant
incidents occurred in which, sometimes under provocation and sometimes
under none, Englishmen who ought to have known better were guilty of
gross affronts upon Indians. Such incidents were never frequent, but,
even if there had been no tendency on the part of Indians to magnify and
on the part of Englishmen to minimise their gravity, they were frequent
enough to cause widespread heartburning, and in not a few cases
political hatred has had its origin in the rancour created by personal
insults to which even educated Indians of good position have
occasionally been subjected by Englishmen who fancied themselves, but
were not, their betters. That Indians also could be, and were sometimes,
offensive they were generally apt to forget, as they forgot in their
denunciations of Lord Curzon at the time of the Partition of Bengal that
he had not shrunk from incurring great unpopularity in some Anglo-Indian
circles by insisting upon adequate punishment of all Europeans guilty of
violence towards Indians. Apart from such collisions nothing rankled
more with Indians of the better classes than their rigid exclusion from
the European clubs in India. Even the few who were members of, or had
been admitted at home as visitors to, the best London clubs were
debarred, when they landed in Bombay, even from calling on their English
friends at the Yacht Club. Europeans could see nothing in this but the
right of every club to restrict its membership and frame its regulations
as it chooses. Indians could see nothing in it but humiliating racial
discrimination. The question has now been more or less solved by the
creation in most of the large cities in India of new clubs to which
Indians and Europeans are equally eligible, and in which those who
choose can meet on terms of complete equality and good fellowship. But
it constituted one of the grievances which contributed to the
estrangement of the Western educated classes during the latter part of
the last century.
Though social friction assisted that estrangement its chief cause lay
much deeper. After the Mutiny government under the direct authority of
the Crown lost the flexibility which the vigilant control of the British
Parliament had imparted to the old system of government under the East
India Company with every periodical renewal of its charter. The system
remained what it had inevitably been from the beginning of British rule,
a system devised by foreigners and worked by foreigners--at its best a
trusteeship committed to them for the benefit of the people of India,
but to be discharged on the sole judgment and discretion of the British
trustees. The Mutiny shook the finer faith which had contemplated the
finality some day or other of the trusteeship and introduced Western
education into India as the agency by which Indians were to be prepared
to resume when that day came the task of governing and protecting
themselves. There was a tacit assumption now, if never officially
formulated, that the trusteeship was to last for ever, and with that
assumption grew the belief that those who were actually employed in
discharging it were alone competent to judge the methods by which it was
discharged, whilst the increasing complexity of their task made it more
and more difficult for them to form a right judgment on the larger
issues, or to watch or appraise the results of the great educational
experiment which was raising up a steadily increasing proportion of
Indians who claimed both a share in the administration and a voice in
the framing of policy. Executive and administrative functions were
vested practically in the same hands, _i.e._ in the hands of a great and
ubiquitous bureaucracy more and more jealous of its power and of its
infallibility in proportion as the latter began to be questioned and the
former to be attacked by the class of Indians who had learned to speak
the same language and to profess the same ideals.
The constant additions made to the huge machinery of administration in
order to meet the growing needs of the country on the approved lines of
a modern state resulted in increased centralisation. New departments
were created and old ones expanded, but even when the highest posts in
them were not specifically or in practice reserved for the Indian Civil
Service, it retained the supreme control over them as the _corps
d'élite_ from which most of the members of the Viceroy's Executive
Council, _i.e._ the Government of India, were recruited. The District
Officer remained the pivot and pillar of British administration
throughout rural India, and he kept as closely as he could in touch with
the millions of humble folk committed to his care, though the
multiplication of codes and regulations and official reports and
statistics involving heavy desk work kept him increasingly tied to his
office. But the secretariats, which from the headquarters of provincial
governments as well as from the seat of supreme government directed and
controlled the whole machine, became more and more self-centred, more
and more imbued with a sense of their own omniscience. Even the men with
district experience, and those who had groaned in provincial
secretariats under the heavy hand of the Government of India, were quick
to adopt more orthodox views as soon as they were privileged to breathe
the more rarefied atmosphere of the Olympian secretariats, that prided
themselves on being the repositories of all the _arcana_ of "good
government." Of what constituted good government efficiency came to be
regarded as the one test that mattered, and it was a test which only
Englishmen were competent to apply and which Indians were required to
accept as final whatever their wishes or their experience might be.
Herein perhaps more than anywhere else lay the secret of the antagonism
between the British bureaucracy and the Western-educated Indians which
gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition
of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative
efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency
reached its apogee--himself the incarnation of efficiency and
unquestionably the greatest and most indefatigable administrator that
Britain sent out to India during that period. It would be unfair to
suppose that that antagonism was due on either side to mere narrow
prejudice or sordid jealousy. Indians who resented their exclusion from
the share in the administration of their country for which they believed
their education to have qualified them, and which they claimed as the
fulfilment of repeated promises and of the declared purpose of British
rule, may not have been free from a human appetite for loaves and
fishes. British officials who were loath to recognise those claims, or
to concede to Indians any substantial proportion of their privileged
posts and emoluments, may have been not always unselfishly indifferent
to the material interests and prospects of the services to which they
belonged, if not to their own personal interests and prospects. But
apart from any such considerations, the attitude of both parties was
governed by the firm belief, not in itself discreditable to either, that
it possessed the better knowledge of the needs and interests and wishes
of the vast populations of India, still too ignorant and inarticulate to
give expression of their own to them. The lamentable effects of the
estrangement between British administrators and the very class of
Indians whose co-operation it had been one of the main objects of
British policy ever since the Act of 1833 to promote, never stood
clearly revealed till the sudden wave of unrest that followed the
Partition of Bengal, and it is upon future co-operation between them
that the success of the great constitutional experiment now being made
must ultimately depend. It is therefore well to try to understand the
conflicting sentiments and opinions which drove asunder the moderate but
progressive Western-educated Indian and the earnest but conservative
British administrator, and ended by bringing them almost into open
conflict. The Western-educated Indian claimed recognition at our hands
first and foremost because he was the product of the educational system
we ourselves imposed upon India. His limitations, intellectual and
moral, were largely due to the defects of that system, just as his
political immaturity was largely due to our failure to provide him with
opportunities of acquiring experience in administrative work and public
life. Where careers had been opened up to him in the liberal professions
he had often achieved great distinction--at the Bar, on the Bench, in
literature--and he had proved himself quite competent to fill all the
posts accessible to him in the public services. Without his assistance
in the many subordinate branches the everyday work of administration
could not have been carried on for a day. He contended that he must
intuitively be a better judge than aliens, who were, after all, birds of
passage, of the needs and interests and wishes of his own
fellow-countrymen, and a better interpreter to them of so much of
Western thought and Western civilisation as they could safely absorb
without becoming denationalised. His complaint was that his own best
efforts and best intentions were constantly thwarted by the rigid
conservatism and aloofness of the European, official and unofficial,
wrapped up in his racial and bureaucratic superiority. He admitted that
he might not yet be able to discharge with the European's efficiency the
legislative or administrative responsibilities for which he had hitherto
been denied the necessary training, but he protested against being kept
altogether out of the water until he had learnt to swim, especially
when there was so little disposition ever to teach him to swim. What he
lacked in the way of efficiency he alone, he argued, could supply in the
way of sympathy with and understanding of his own people. When it was
objected that he represented only a very small minority of Indians, and
formed, indeed, a class widely divided from the vast majority of his
fellow-countrymen, and that the democratic institutions for which he
clamoured were unsuited to the traditions and customs of his country, he
replied that in every country the impulse towards democratic
institutions had come in the first instance from small minorities and
had always been regarded at first as subversive and revolutionary. If,
again, it was objected that the moderate and reasonable views he
expressed were not the views of the more ambitious politicians who
professed to be the accredited interpreters of Western-educated India,
that there were many amongst them whose aims were more or less openly
antagonistic to all the ideals for which British rule stands, and were
directed in reality not to the establishment of democratic institutions
but to the maintenance of caste monopoly and other evils inherent to the
Hindu social system, and that in the political arena he seemed incapable
of asserting himself against these dangerous and reactionary elements,
his reply was once more that he had never received the support and
encouragement which he had a right to expect from his European mentors,
and that it was often their indifference or worse that had chiefly
helped to raise a spirit of revolt against every form of Western
influence.
The case for the British administrator can be still more easily stated.
Britain has never sent out a finer body of public servants, take them
all in all, than those who have in the course of a few generations
rescued India from anarchy, secured peace for her at home and abroad,
maintained equal justice amidst jealous and often warring communities
and creeds, established new standards of tolerance and integrity, and
raised the whole of India to a higher plane of material prosperity and
of moral and intellectual development. They spend the best part of their
lives in an exile which cuts them off from most of the amenities of
social existence at home, and often involves the more or less prolonged
sacrifice of the happiest family ties. Those especially whose work lies
chiefly in the remote rural districts, far away from the few cities in
which European conditions of life to some extent prevail, are brought
daily into the very closest contact with the people, and because of
their absolute detachment from the prejudices and passions and material
interests by which Indian society, like all other societies, is largely
swayed, they enjoy the confidence of the people often in a higher degree
than Indian officials whose detachment can never be so complete. Their
task has been to administer well and to do the best in their power for
the welfare of the population committed to their charge. The Englishman,
as a rule, sticks to his own job. The British administrator's job had
been to administer, and he had not yet been told that it was also his
job to train up a nation on democratic lines and to instil into them the
principles of civic duty as such duty is understood in Western
countries. No doubt there were British administrators in India whose
innate conservatism, coupled with the narrowness which years of routine
work and official self-confidence are apt to breed, revolted against any
transfer of power to, or any recognition of equality with, the people of
the country they had spent their lives in ruling with unquestioned but,
as they at least conceived it, paternal authority. The conditions of
bureaucratic rule inevitably tended to produce an autocratic temper. But
it was not merely in obedience to that temper that they shrank from any
changes that would weaken the administration; the best of them at least
had a strong sense of their responsibilities as guardians and protectors
of the simple and ignorant masses committed to their care. They might be
inclined to judge the Western-educated class of Indians too harshly, and
to identify them too closely with the type that was beginning to
dominate the Indian National Congress, but the form in which the
question of yielding to Indians any substantial part of their authority
presented itself to their minds was by no means an entirely selfish one.
"Are we justified," they asked, "in transferring our responsibilities
for the welfare and good government of such a large section of the human
race to a small minority which has hitherto shown so little disposition
to approach any of the difficult problems with the solution of which the
happiness and progress of the overwhelming majority of their own race
are bound up, though, because themselves belonging to the same stock and
the same social system, it would have been much easier for them to deal
with those problems than it is for alien rulers like ourselves? Those
problems arise out of the social system which is known as Hinduism--for
Hinduism is much more a social than a religious system. Western-educated
Indians will not openly deny its evils--the iron-bound principle of
caste, which, in spite of many concessions in non-essentials to modern
exigencies of convenience, remains almost untouched in all essentials
and, above all, in the fundamental laws of inter-marriage, the social
outlawry of scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated
as 'untouchable,' infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of
widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to
a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile
mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the
economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of
lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so
forth. How many of the Western-educated Indians who have thrown
themselves into political agitation against the tyranny of the British
bureaucracy have ever raised a finger to free their own
fellow-countrymen from the tyranny of those social evils? How many of
them are entirely free from it themselves, or, if free, have the courage
to act up to their opinions? At one time--before the Congress gave
precedence to political reforms--social reform did find many
enthusiastic supporters amongst the best class of Western-educated
Indians, but the gradual disappearance of men of that type may be said
almost to coincide with the growth of political agitation. There have
been, and there still are, some notable and admirable exceptions, but
they are seldom to be found amongst the men who claim to be the tribunes
of the Indian people. It is on these grounds--moral rather than
political--that we claim to be still the best judges of our duties as
trustees for the people of India."
This was perhaps the most forcible of the British administrator's
arguments, and it was an honest one. Another was that the
Western-educated Indians were mainly drawn from the towns and from a
narrow circle of professional classes in the towns, who could not
therefore speak on behalf of and still less control the destinies of a
vast population, overwhelmingly agricultural, regarding whose interests
they had hitherto shown themselves both ignorant and indifferent, and
from whom the very education which constituted their main title to
consideration had tended to separate and estrange them. The land-owning
gentry and the peasantry had so far scarcely been touched by this
political agitation. The peasantry knew little or nothing of its
existence. The land-owners feared it, for, having themselves for the
most part kept aloof from modern education, and shrinking instinctively
from the limelight of political controversies and such electioneering
competitions as they had already been drawn into for municipal and local
government purposes, they felt themselves hopelessly handicapped in a
struggle that threatened their traditional prestige and authority as
well as their material interests. What they dreaded most of all was the
ascendancy of the lawyer class in this new political movement--the
_Vakil-Raj_, as they called it--for they had in many instances already
been made to feel how heavy the hand of the lawyer could be upon them
in a country so prone to litigation as India, and endowed with so costly
and complicated a system of jurisprudence and procedure, if they
ventured to place themselves in opposition to the political aspirations
of ambitious lawyers. Above all, the British administrator, who rightly
held the maintenance of a strict balance between the different creeds
and communities of India to be an essential part of his mission, felt
strong in the undivided support which his conception of his
responsibilities and duties received from the Mahomedans of India. Then,
and almost into the second decade of this century, a community forming a
fifth of the whole population professed itself absolutely opposed to any
surrender of British authority which, it was convinced, would enure
solely to the benefit of its hated Hindu rivals, far more supple and far
more advanced in all knowledge of the West, including political
agitation. The Mahomedans had held aloof from the Congress. They still
had no definite political organisation of their own; they were content
with the British _raj_ and wanted nothing else.
The British administrator was therefore not altogether unwarranted in
his conviction that in standing in the ancient ways he had behind him
not only the tacit assent of the inarticulate masses but the positive
support of very important classes and communities. He knew also that he
had with him, besides unofficial European opinion in India, almost solid
on his side, the sympathy, however vague and uninformed, of the bulk of
his own countrymen at home, represented for a great part of the fifty
years now under review by a succession of conservative parliaments and
governments. There were no longer, as in the East India Company days,
periodical inquests into the state of India to wind up Parliament to a
concert pitch of sustained and vigilant interest in Indian affairs. The
very few legislators who exhibited any persistent curiosity about Indian
administration were regarded for the most part as cranks or bores, and
the annual statement on the Indian budget was usually made before
almost empty benches. Only questions that raised large issues of foreign
policy, such as Afghan expeditions and the Russian menace in Asia Minor,
or that affected the considerable commercial interests at home, like the
Indian cotton duties or currency and exchange, would intermittently stir
British public opinion inside and outside Parliament, and these often
chiefly as occasions for party warfare. Ministers themselves appeared to
be mainly concerned with the part which India had to play in their
general scheme of Imperial and Asiatic policy rather than with the
methods by which India was governed. These could be safely left to "the
man on the spot."
Very different had been the spirit in which British parliaments and
governments had discharged their responsibilities before the transfer of
India to the Crown, and rude was the awakening for the British
administrator in India and for British ministers at home when the
explosion that followed the Partition of Bengal revealed a very
different India that was in process of evolution with much and dangerous
travail out of the reaction of new forces, hitherto almost unobserved,
upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as
negligible quantities.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A detailed and learned study of these movements is found in Dr.
J.N. Farquhar's _Modern Religious Movements in India_, published by
the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915.