THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST
Amongst the Western-educated classes the new forces which had been
turning the minds of young India towards _Swaraj_ as the watchword of
national unity and independence had drawn much of their inspiration from
text-books which taught them how large a share Nationalism had played in
redeeming modern nations from alien oppression and in shaping the whole
political evolution of Europe. It had emancipated the Balkan States from
the alien thraldom of the Ottoman Sultans; it had helped to unify Italy
and Germany; it had been a potent if less apparent factor in welding
Great Britain and the distant colonies peopled by the British race into
a great British Empire. Had not Indians also a common nationhood which,
despite all racial and religious differences, could be traced back
across centuries of internal strife and foreign domination to a period,
remote indeed but none the less enviable, when they had been their own
masters? Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest
barriers to India's national unity--the multiplicity of her
vernaculars--by giving English to the Western-educated classes as a
common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never
have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of
India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National
Congress itself would have been an impossibility? Great events,
moreover, had been happening quite recently which tended to shake the
Indians' belief in the irresistible superiority of Western civilisation
even in its material aspects. The disaster inflicted upon an Italian
army at Adowa in 1894 by the Abyssinians--a backward African people
scarcely known except for the ease with which a British expedition had
chastised them not thirty years before--was perhaps the first of these
events to awaken observant Indians to the fact that European arms were
not necessarily invincible. The resistance put up for nearly three years
by two small South African Republics, strong chiefly in their
indomitable pride of nationhood, seemed to have strained the resources
even of the British Empire, and Japan, an Asiatic power only recently
emerged from obscurity, had just proved on land and sea that an Asiatic
nation in possession of her national independence could equip herself to
meet and overcome one of the greatest of European powers--one whose vast
ambitions constituted in the eyes of generations of British statesmen a
grave menace to the safety of India itself. Was England really mightier
than Russia? Had she not also perhaps feet of clay? Was British rule to
endure for ever? Was it not a weak point in England's armour that she
had to rely not a little on Indian troops, whom she still treated as
mercenaries, to fight her battles even in such distant countries as
China and the Sudan, and upon still more numerous legions of Indians in
every branch of the civil administration to carry out all the menial
work of government? If the Indians, untrained, and indeed forbidden, to
bear arms, were unable at once to overthrow British rule, could they not
at least paralyse its machinery, as Bepin Chandra Pal was preaching, by
refusing to take any kind of service under it?
To such interpretations of contemporary events young Indians, who at
school read Burke and Byron and Mill "On Liberty," and in secret the
lives of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were bound to be receptive, and they
soon reached from a different base along different lines the same ground
on which the old orthodox foes not only of British rule but of Western
civilisation stood who appealed to the Baghavat-Ghita and exhorted
India to seek escape from the foreign domination that had enslaved her,
body and soul, by clinging to the social and religious ark of Hinduism
which in her golden age had made her wise and wealthy and free beyond
all the nations of the earth.
The stronghold of orthodox reaction was in the Mahratta Deccan, and its
stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never
forgiven us for snatching the cup of power from their lips just when
they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp. First
and foremost of them all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu
orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the
_Kesari_, _i.e._ "The Lion," how to play on religious as well as on
racial sentiment. He first took the field against the Hindu Social
Reformers who dared to support Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill, and
his rabid campaign against them developed quickly into an equally rabid
campaign against British rule. He appealed to the pride of his Mahratta
people by reviving the cult of Shivaji, the great Mahratta chieftain who
first raised the standard of Hindu revolt against Mahomedan domination,
and he appealed to their religious passions by placing under the
patronage of their favourite deities a national movement for boycotting
British-imported goods and manufactures which, under the name of
_Swadeshi_, was to be the first step towards _Swaraj_. He it was too who
for the first time imported into schools and colleges the ferment of
political agitation, and presided at bonfires which schoolboys and
students fed with their European text-books and European clothes. The
movement died down for a time after the murder of two British officials
in Poona on the night of Queen Victoria's second jubilee in 1897 and the
sentencing of Tilak himself shortly afterwards to a term of imprisonment
on a charge of seditious and inflammatory writing. But the Partition of
Bengal was to give him the opportunity of transplanting his doctrines
and his methods from the Deccan to the most prosperous province in
India.
The Partition of Bengal was a measure harmless enough on the face of it
for splitting up into two administrative units a huge province with some
70 million inhabitants which had outgrown the capacities of a single
provincial government. But the Bengalees are a singularly sensitive
race. They were intensely proud of their province as the senior of the
three great "Presidencies" of India, of their capital as the capital
city of India and the seat of Viceregal Government, and of their
Calcutta University as the first and greatest of Indian Universities,
though already menaced, they declared, by Lord Curzon's Universities
Act. They resented the Partition, against which they had no remedy, as a
wanton _diminutio capitis_ inflicted upon them by a despotic Viceroy
bent on chastising them for the prominent part played by their leaders
in pressing the claims of India to political emancipation from
bureaucratic leading-strings. That in the new province of Eastern
Bengal, which was to be created by the Partition, the Mahomedans would
constitute a large majority and enjoy advantages hitherto denied to them
as a minority in the undivided province was an added grievance for the
Hindus. Lord Curzon had not at first been unpopular with the
Western-educated classes. They recognised his great intellectual gifts
and admired his majestic eloquence. But continuing to fasten their hopes
on the Liberal party in England, they had quickly followed its lead in
attacking him as a dangerous Imperialist, whose Tibetan adventure was
saddling the Indian tax-payer with the costs of his aggressive foreign
policy, and they required no promptings to denounce as the sworn foe of
India a Viceroy who had not only sought to restrict the statutory
freedom of their University, but, as its Chancellor, used language into
which they read a deliberate insult to the Bengalee character. By
partitioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee
"nation" and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose
honour the old invocation to the goddess Kali, "_Bande Materam_," or
"Hail to the Mother," acquired a new significance and came to be used as
the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism. To that war-cry public
meetings were organised in Calcutta and all over the province. The
native press teemed with denunciatory articles. The wildest rumours were
set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which partition portended.
Never had India seen such popular demonstrations. Government, however,
remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that
Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India--the last and
perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period
in which efficient administration had come to be regarded as the be-all
and end-all of government. His resignation, however, had nothing to do
with the Partition. He had fought and been defeated by Lord Kitchener,
then, and largely at his instance, Commander-in-Chief in India, over the
reorganisation of the military administration. Lord Curzon stood for the
supremacy of the civil over the military authority, but he made the
mistake of resigning not on the question of principle, on which he
finally agreed to a compromise, but on a subsidiary point which, fatal
as he may have thought it to the spirit of the compromise, appeared to
the outside public to be mainly a personal question. In any case, though
on the merits of the quarrel he might have looked for support from
educated Indian opinion, Bengal was content to rejoice over his
disappearance and to wonder whether with its author the Partition might
not also disappear.
Another and worthier preoccupation was the impending visit of the Prince
and Princess of Wales to India. King Edward's son was to follow in the
footsteps of his father, who had for the first time made a Royal
progress through the Indian Empire nearly thirty years before. His
progress had been a triumphal one at a period when the internal and
external peace of India seemed equally profound. That of his son was no
less triumphal, though India was just entering on a period of political
unrest undreamt of in the preceding generation. Even in Calcutta, which
had been seething with agitation a few weeks before, the Prince and
Princess were received not only with loyal acclamations but almost with
god-like worship; and all these demonstrations were perfectly genuine.
For with the curious inconsistency which pervades all Indian
speculations religious and political, though countless dynasties have
fallen and countless rulers have come to a violent end in the chequered
annals of Indian history, nothing has ever destroyed the ancient
conception of royalty as partaking of the divine essence. The remoteness
of the Western rulers under whose sceptre India had passed lent if
anything an added mystery and majesty to the royalty they wielded. Even
the avowed enemies of British rule seldom levelled their shafts at the
Throne. That the King can do no wrong is a saying that appealed to the
Indian mind long before the Western-educated classes grasped its real
meaning under a constitutional monarchy, and began to extend its
application even to the King's Government for the purpose of
conveniently discriminating between the British Government, whose good
intentions were generally assumed, and the autocratic Government of
India, whence all mischief sprang. During the whole of the Royal tour,
which extended to all the major provinces of British India and to
several of the Native States, the enthusiasm was general, and even the
Extremists did not venture a discordant note. The Prince and Princess,
whose graciousness never wearied, moved freely amongst the crowds, and
the presence of the future Queen appealed strongly to the women of
India, whose influence we are apt to underrate because until recently it
has been exercised almost exclusively in the seclusion of the zenana.
Even high-caste ladies, Hindus as well as Mahomedans, were known on this
occasion for the first time perhaps in their lives to pass beyond the
outer gates of their houses in order to attend a Royal reception--with
all the precautions of course that have always to be taken to shelter a
_purdah_ party from any contact with the other sex.
It became the fashion for all classes to draw their own happy auguries
from the Royal visit, but to none did it seem so auspicious as to the
politically-minded Indians. For it coincided with the sweeping defeat of
the Unionist party at the general election of 1905 and the return to
office of a Liberal Government with a crushing majority behind it, whom
the hostility displayed by the Liberal party towards Lord Curzon's
administration on almost every Indian question save that which had
brought about his resignation seemed to pledge to a prompt reversal of
his policy. Was not the appointment to the India Office of such a
stalwart Radical as Mr. John Morley, who had been Gladstone's Home Rule
Secretary for Ireland, enough to justify the expectation that the right
of India, if not to Home Rule, to a large measure of enfranchisement
would receive prompt recognition? If Indians could hardly regard Lord
Curzon's successor as another Ripon, their first impression of Lord
Minto satisfied them that, though the Conservative nominee of Mr.
Balfour's Government, the new Viceroy was neither disposed to tread in
his predecessor's footsteps as an autocratic administrator nor likely to
carry sufficient weight at home to stand in the way of a Secretary of
State who, like many Radical doctrinaires, was essentially what the
French call _un homme d'autorité_. The event proved that they were right
in their estimate of Lord Minto, but wrong in their sanguine expectation
that Mr. Morley would at once break with the old principles of Indian
government or even with Lord Curzon's administrative methods. Bengal
remained partitioned. It was a _chose jugée_ which Mr. Morley was not
prepared to reopen.
The disillusionment in India was much greater than after the fiasco of
the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still
unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India.
Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of
Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not
despair of bringing constitutional methods of agitation to bear upon
British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National Congress, which they
had founded twenty years before, was sliding rapidly down the inclined
plane which was to lead first to open and violent discord and later on
to disruption. Even before the Partition the Moderates could make but a
poor reply to those who jeered at the paltry results which had attended
their practice of constitutional forms of agitation. For if the Indian
Councils Act of 1892 had opened the doors of the Viceroy's Legislative
Assembly to some of the most distinguished among them, what had it
profited them? The official benches merely gave a courteous hearing to
the incisive criticisms proceeding from men of such undisputed capacity
as Mehta and Gokhale and bore less patiently with the Ciceronian periods
of the great Bengalee tribune Surendranath Banerjee. Government paid
little or no heed to them. Equally powerless had been their passionate
protest against the Partition. Even had they not been in complete
sympathy with popular feeling, they would have been compelled to voice
it or surrender the leadership they still hoped to retain to the new
Extremist party which, under Mr. Tilak's leadership, was carrying his
doctrines and his methods far beyond the limits of the Deccan. Each
annual session of the Congress grew more turbulent and the Moderates
gave ground each year, until at the famous Surat session of 1907 they
realised that they had to make a definite stand or go under. There the
storm burst over the preliminary proceedings before the real issues were
reached. Mr. Tilak's followers assailed the presidential platform of
which the Moderates had still retained possession, and the Congress
broke up in hopeless confusion and disorder.
But what happened in the Congress was but a pale reflection of what was
happening outside. The Partition was indeed little more than the signal
for an explosion, not merely in Bengal, of which premonitory indications
had been witnessed, but had passed almost unheeded, some ten years
earlier in the Deccan. The cry of _Swaraj_ was caught up and re-echoed
in every province of British India. In Calcutta the vow of _Swadeshi_
was administered at mass meetings in the famous temple of Kali. Hindu
reactionaries, whose conception of a well-ordered society had not moved
beyond the laws of Manu, fell into line for the moment with the
intellectual products of the modern Indian University. Hindu ascetics
appealed to the credulity of the masses and every Bar Association became
the centre of an active political propaganda on a Western democratic
model. Schoolboys and students were exhorted to abandon their studies
and go out into the streets, where they qualified as patriots by
marching in the van of national demonstrations for _Swaraj_ or by
furnishing picketing parties for the _Swadeshi_ boycott. The native
press, whether printed in the vernacular tongues or in the language of
the British tyrant, reached the extreme limits of licence, and when it
did not actually preach violence it succeeded in producing the
atmosphere which engenders violence. When passions were wrought up to a
white heat by fiery orators and still more fiery newspaper writers, who
knew how to draw equally effectively on the ancient legends of Hindu
mythology and on the contemporary records of Russian anarchism, the cult
of the bomb was easily grafted on to the cult of Shiva, the Destroyer,
and murders, of which the victims were almost as often Indians in
Government service as British-born officials, were invested with a halo
of religious and patriotic heroism. Youths even of the better classes
banded themselves together to collect patriotic funds by plunder and
violence, and revived those old forms of lawlessness which had been
rampant in pre-British days under the name of _dacoity_. Schools and
colleges were found to be honeycombed with secret societies, and a flood
of light was suddenly thrown on the disastrous workings of an
educational system that had been slowly perverted to such ends under the
very eyes of the Government that was supposed to direct and control it.
Lord Curzon had held a special conference at Simla in 1900 "to consider
the system of education in India," but not a single Indian and only one
non-official European had been invited to take part in it. It was the
intellectual shortcomings of the system with which he was concerned, and
the chief outcome of that conference and of a Commission subsequently
appointed to carry on the inquiry was the Universities Act of 1904,
carried in the face of bitter Indian opposition. Even such broad-minded
and experienced Indians as Gokhale and Mehta suspected the Viceroy of a
desire to hamper the growth of higher Western education on political
grounds. But throughout the four years' controversy Government never
betrayed an inkling of the appalling extent to which inferior secondary
education had been allowed to degenerate in second-and third-rate
schools with second-and third-rate masters into a mere teaching machine,
clumsy and imperfect at that, for the passing of examinations that
tested memory rather than intelligence, and character least of all. The
unfortunate youths who could not stand even that test were left
hopelessly stranded on the road, equally disqualified for a humbler
sphere of life which they had learnt to despise and for the higher walks
to which they had vainly aspired. Soured by defeat, and easily persuaded
to impute it solely to the alien rulers responsible for a system which
had led them merely into a blind alley, they formed the rank and file of
a proletariat that could only by courtesy be called intellectual, but
was just the material out of which every form of discontent is apt to
breed desperadoes. But many were no mere vulgar desperadoes. Amongst
those who were engaged in making bombs and collecting revolvers and
organising dacoities or who actually committed murder not a few
sincerely believed that they were risking or giving their lives in a
great patriotic and religious cause. The _Yugantar_, their chief
Bengalee organ, which had an enormous circulation and sold often at
fancy prices in the streets of Calcutta, was written, according to a
statement made in the High Court by the Government translator whose
business it was to study it, in language so lofty, so pathetic, so
stirring that he found it impossible to convey it into English. The
writers made no secret of their purpose. The young Indian's "mind must
be excited and maddened by such an ideal as will present to him a
picture of everlasting salvation." Murder had its creed to which Dr.
Farquhar assigns a definite place in his _Modern Religious Movements in
India_ with the following as its chief dogmas:
Indian civilisation in all its branches,--religion, education, art,
industry, home life and government,--is healthy, spiritual,
beautiful and good. It has become corrupted in the course of
centuries, but that is largely the result of the cruelty and
aggression of the Muhammadans in former times and now of the
British. The Indian patriot must toil to restore Indian life and
civilisation.
Western civilisation in all its parts,--religion, education, art,
business and government,--is gross, materialistic and therefore
degrading to India. The patriotic Indian must recognise the grave
danger lurking in every element of Western influence, must hate it,
and must be on his guard against it.
India ought to be made truly Indian. There is no place for
Europeans in the country. Indians can manage everything far better
than Europeans can. The British Government, Missions, European
trade and Western influence of every kind, are altogether unhealthy
in India. Everything should belong to the Indians themselves.
Hence it is a religious duty to get rid of the European and all the
evils that attend him. The better a man understands his religion,
the more clear will be his perception that Europeans and European
influence must be rooted out. All means for the attainment of this
end are justifiable. As Krishna killed Kamsa, so the modern Indian
must kill the European demons that are tyrannically holding India
down. The bloodthirsty goddess Kali ought to be honoured by the
Indian patriot. Even the Baghavad Ghita was used to teach murder.
Lies, deceit, murder, everything, it was argued, may be rightly
used.
Not till some years later did a Committee, presided over by a British
High Court judge sent out from England for the purpose, fully explore
the many ramifications of a revolutionary movement which had one of its
head centres in London, until the murder of Sir W. Curzon-Wylie by an
Indian student during a crowded reception at the Imperial Institute
aroused the attention of the authorities to the activities of the "India
House," and Mr. Krishnavarma, its familiar genius, had to transfer to
Paris his notorious paper, the _Indian Sociologist_, in which he openly
glorified murder. The "Sedition Committee's" Report was only made public
in 1918, and if the action taken upon it by the Government of India was
to furnish the occasion for another popular explosion different in
character from, but no less formidable than, the explosion which
followed the Partition of Bengal, the facts which it marshalled and the
conclusions which it drew from them with judicial soberness have never
been seriously challenged. It found that the long series of crimes of
which it recorded the genesis and growth had been "directed towards one
and the same objective, the overthrow by force of British rule in
India," and nothing revealed more clearly the mainspring of the movement
than the statistics given as to age, caste, and occupation of persons
who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst
committing them. The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age;
most of them students and teachers; all of them Hindus, and almost all
high-caste Hindus, either Brahmans or Kayasthas--the latter a
writer-caste ranking just below the Brahman caste. These statistics did
not cover the large number of crimes of which the authors escaped
scot-free and were never brought to justice.
Not the least alarming feature of the situation was the attitude of the
Indian public generally towards this epidemic of political crime which
assumed some forms hitherto quite unknown to India and abhorrent to
most Indians. The movement could only be correctly described as an
Anarchist movement in so far as the methods to which it resorted were
largely modelled upon those of Russian anarchists and aimed, like
theirs, at the subversion of the existing Government. It differed
fundamentally from Russian anarchism in that it was directed against
alien rulers of another faith and another civilisation. That it created
a widespread feeling of apprehension and even of detestation amongst the
great majority of peaceful and sober-minded Indians cannot be doubted,
and especially amongst those who watched with alarm the ravages it was
making amongst the younger generation. But few had the courage to carry
reprobation to the length of assisting Government in the detection and
repression of crimes which terrorism made it less dangerous to extenuate
as lamentable exhibitions of a misguided patriotic frenzy. The
Western-educated classes were completely estranged and smarted so
bitterly over the contempt with which their representations and protests
against the policy of Government had been treated that those even of the
more moderate school of politics were content to throw up their hands in
horror and declare that if they were unable to stem the torrent, the
fault lay entirely with the bureaucracy which had killed by long years
of neglect and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been
able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress. The
Extremists boldly threw the whole responsibility for the movement on
British rule and combined with a perfunctory and dubious condemnation of
the crimes themselves an ecstatic admiration for the heroism which had
driven the youth of India to follow the example of the Russian
_intelligentsia_ in its revolt against an autocracy as brutal and as
odious as that of Russia. Mere measures of repression under the ordinary
law were clearly incapable of coping with a situation which was becoming
no less dangerous in its negative than in its positive aspects. British
rule in India had concentrated so largely on mechanical efficiency that
it had gradually lost sight of the old and finer principles of
Anglo-Indian as well as of British statesmanship based on the paramount
importance of genuine co-operation between British and Indians. During
the Mutiny there were few of the Western-educated classes whose loyalty
to the British _Raj_ ever wavered. Fifty years later, when the _Raj_ was
confronted with a less violent but more insidious movement of revolt, a
large part of the Western-educated classes, whose influence and numbers
had increased immensely in the interval, were, if not in league, at
least to some extent in sympathy with it, and many of those who deplored
and reprobated it remained sulking in their tents. Government, they
declared, had always despised their co-operation. As it had made its
bed, so it must lie. It was a desperately short-sighted attitude, which
has had its nemesis in the "Non-co-operation" movement of the present
day. But, in a situation so severely strained, relief could only come
from England and from a return to the earlier British ideals, and to
those Indians who still looked for it there with some confidence after
the change of Government which had taken place at home in December 1905
it seemed to come very slowly.