THE EXTREMIST
I knew it would come. Till I had been some time in Bombay, I did not
realize the custom, but the moment I realized it, I felt there was no
escape. As often happens with forebodings, it came unexpectedly in
the end. I was visiting the simple house, workshop, and garden, in a
main street of Poona, where the two Extremist papers are published.
Both appear weekly—the _Mahratta_ in English, the _Kesari_ or
_Lion_ in the Mahrati language. Both are owned and directed by Mr.
Tilak, the acknowledged leader of the Extremists in India, but the
_Mahratta_ was edited by Mr. Kelkar, an intellectual, keen-tempered
Brahman, who accompanied me over the printing office and showed me a
courteous friendliness all through my stay in Poona. Both papers have
obtained what is thought a large circulation in India—the _Mahratta_
selling 11,000 a week, the _Kesari_ close upon twice that number. In
outward appearance, the _Mahratta_ is very much like the _Spectator_.
The _Kesari_, with lions in emblem defiant on each side of the tide,
is on cheaper paper of eight folded pages. Its language is said to
be more violent than the _Mahratta’s_, which as a rule is carefully
moderate in expression.
In the cool and quiet of the editor’s room, among bookshelves
mildewing like most Indian libraries, I was listening to the history
of the papers when I observed a crowd of brown printers, deferential
but eager, at the door. In their hands they bore strange objects,
such as I had never before seen, but at a glance I knew the moment
had arrived. Advancing to my chair they hung around my neck a thick
festoon of orange marigolds, picked out with the silvery tinsel
which decorators of our Christmas trees identify with fairy rain.
They encircled both my wrists with orange bracelets to match, and
in my right hand they placed an arrangement of variegated flowers
and spangles, stiff and formal as the sceptre of the Tsar. So I
sat enthroned, and if only a correspondent from Calcutta had been
present, the broadsheets of London that evening might have screamed
with scare-heads of “Sedition!” Even in the midst of my friendly
embarrassment, I could not but regret a journalistic opportunity lost.
Embarrassing, certainly it was, but only to my British ignorance
and shyness. To complete the Imperial ceremony, my dusky subjects
sprinkled me with delicate odours from silvern vessels; they soused
my handkerchief in scent; they rubbed spikenard and aloes on the back
of my hands. Then, standing at a distance, they contemplated their
handiwork with kindly satisfaction, while I laboured to express my
august gratification in an Imperial tongue they could not understand.
Every one present knew, and I knew myself, that they would have
honoured in the same way any visitor who had come to their works in
a benignant spirit. Even when, hung with fillets like a sacrificial
victim and bearing the floral sceptre upright in my hand, I issued
from the front door into the full blaze of the public street, the
passers-by looked at me with admiring interest, but without a trace
of laughter. These things are merely habit, and before I left India I
lived to dread garlands as little as my bed. But that first time—with
what shamefaced horror the consciousness of my British trousers
and khaki helmet filled me! Suddenly, with an inexplicable pang, I
remembered that I had once rowed two in the Christ Church torpid, and
if any of my own countrymen had gone down the street at that moment,
I think I should have got under my cart instead of into it.[15]
[Illustration: MR. TILAK.
[_Face p. 64._
]
Thus ornamented by a graceful hospitality, I drove away, some sixteen
miles south-west of the city, through an irrigated and fertile
land of terraced rice-fields, draining the abundant water that rice
flourishes in from one level into another. Slowly we drew near a
great blue mountain, conspicuous from Poona among the other hills
for its height and flat-topped outline. It is the mountain fortress
of Singarh, famed in Deccan history. Unknown peoples had made it
their rock of defence, Mohammedans had reigned there, Mahrattas took
it by storm. Finally the British, some ninety years ago, bombarded
the place till it could stand no more, and now all that afternoon
I had watched a British helio on its summit blinking messages to
the Poona cantonment. There is a long, steep climb before the old
fortifications that run round the edge of the cliffs are reached,
for the top is as high as Ben Nevis. But passing through a western
arch in the walls we entered on the broad grassy plateau while still
the low horizon was brilliant with sunset, and against the sunset a
red-turbaned, white-clad figure, upright but using a long staff, came
to meet me.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak appeared to be about ten years older than Mr.
Gokhale, but it is difficult to tell his age, for if ever he takes
off his Mahratta turban, one sees his head shaven to the back, where
the hair grows in a long, black tuft, as is the fashion of his race
or caste. His full, brown eyes are singularly brilliant, steady with
daring, rather aggressive But his general manner is very quiet and
controlled, and both in conversation and public speaking he talks
in brief, assured sentences, quite free from rhetoric, outwardly
passionless even in moments of the highest passion, and seldom going
beyond the statement of facts, or, rather, of his aspect of facts at
the time. His apparent calmness and self-command may arise partly
from courageous indifference to his own future, partly from prolonged
legal practice at his own trials. At first one would say, his was
the legal mind, subtle, given to fine distinctions, rather capable
of expressing thought than of thinking, and quick to adapt both the
expression and the thought to the audience of the moment. But there
is much in his life and energies that seems to show that his natural
bias was towards religious speculation and scholarly traditions.
Among the leading reformers of India, he is probably the most
orthodox Hindu. He professes a devout belief in progressive Hinduism
and in successive reincarnations of Krishna at epochs of India’s
greatest need. But in practice his Hinduism often reacts against
the forces of progress, and serves him as an ally in resisting the
materializing notions imported from the West. In scholarship, he is
known among all Sanscrit scholars as one of the closest and most
original. His book on “The Arctic Home of the Vedas” maintains from
internal evidence that the Sacred Books of India originated among a
glacial people inhabiting the region of the Arctic Circle, or some
land equally chilly. I cannot say what the value of the theory may
be. Possibly the book is as fantastic as it is learned. But to me
it is significant because it appeared in the midst of the author’s
direst persecution, when money, reputation, influence, and everything
were at stake, and few men would have had the courage to spare a
thought either for Sacred Books or Arctic Circles.
It is said that he is embittered. One of the highest and best of
English officials in India told me he admired Mr. Tilak, and would
gladly know him personally, but was afraid of inviting him for fear
of a rebuff, so irreconcilable was the man reputed. Yet when the
meeting did take place, by a kind of accident some weeks later,
there was no rebuff, but only courtesy and openly expressed esteem.
Certainly, if a fine nature can ever be embittered, Mr. Tilak has
had enough to embitter him. Early in the ’eighties he was imprisoned
for speaking against the Diwan or Prime Minister of a Native State,
whom he accused of cruelty to the Raja. In September, 1897, he
was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for attacks in the
_Kesari_ upon the Bombay Government when the population of Poona
was frenzied at the plague regulations. After a year in gaol he was
released, but soon afterwards he became involved in a private suit
concerned with his trusteeship for a widow named Tai Maharaj and her
adoption of an heir. The Bombay Government took up the case, and the
trial, with appeals, dragged on for nearly two years, Mr. Tilak being
condemned by one magistrate to a long imprisonment and heavy fine.
“The paths of scholarship,” was the _Pioneer’s_ comment, “lead but to
the gaol,” and in Court Mr. Tilak was publicly handcuffed. Finally,
in March, 1904, his appeal came before the High Court of Bombay,
represented by Chief Justice Sir Lawrence Jenkins and Mr. Justice
Batty; the conviction and sentence were quashed and the fine was
ordered to be refunded.
This judgment confirmed the common Indian opinion that British
justice can best be looked for in the High Courts of Bombay,
Calcutta, and Madras, because the judges appointed directly by the
Crown can maintain the law without being unconsciously prejudiced
by long service under the Anglo-Indian routine. But, unfortunately,
owing to Mr. Tilak’s past record, and his connection with the
Extremist papers, the ruinous action taken against him had the air
of persecution, and laid the Bombay Government open to a charge
of vindictiveness. It was during these proceedings that Mr. Tilak
displayed his fine unconcern by issuing his treatise on the origin
of the Vedas, and in the end, when his innocence was finally
established, he found that a leader’s greatest advantage of having
suffered for his cause was indefinitely increased.
When I met him that evening on the mountain top, another crisis
of his fate was just being decided, but nothing could surpass his
outward calm. He was living in one of the dilapidated bungalows
thinly scattered over the plateau. I was put to lodge in another
empty one, because, belonging, as he does, to the same high caste
as Mr. Gokhale, and to the same subsection of it, he refuses, as a
strict Hindu, to emancipate himself from the caste obligations and
live or eat with mere Europeans. All that night the wind roared
over the mountains, but with the first sun he came to lead me round
the elaborate ruins of the fortifications, and, as though he had no
interest in the world except as tourist’s guide, he showed me where
the British guns had battered, and where, in the time of the Mahratta
hero, Shivaji, two hundred and forty years ago, his own ancestors
crept up the precipice at night and scaled this very wall, aided by
a great lizard that was trained to carry a string up the surface and
hold tight with its claws till a man could climb. So at this dizzy
spot the party had climbed; then killed.
It is easy to perceive the marvels of the past, and belief in them is
unimportant. But to realize the strange significance of the man at
my side, and to understand the things he believed in at the moment
was a different matter. He continued to discourse about the villages
half hidden in the deep valleys below, and narrate their sufferings,
hopes, and varying prosperity as if he had no further thought on
earth beyond their cattle and their rice. But I knew that at Nagpur
in the Central Provinces, things had just been happening which deeply
involved himself and his party. The annual meeting of the National
Congress was to have been held there at Christmas. The Reception
Committee had met to appoint a President, and the Moderates of the
majority chose Dr. Rash Behari Ghose. Thereupon, the Extremists,
insisting upon their majority in the Central Provinces and in the
Executive Committee, chose Mr. Tilak. He in turn proposed Mr. Lajpat
Rai, as a compromise; but, with his usual chivalry, Mr. Lajpat Rai
refused to stand rather than risk a division among the reform party,
or an open breach between the Congress and the Government. To be
sure, deeper questions of principle or of method lay behind these
personal disputes, but on the personal question of the President the
Nagpur meeting had just broken up in disorder. The Moderates had
determined not to hold the Congress at Nagpur at all, but to accept
the invitation of Surat, only a few hours’ journey north of Bombay,
which was the headquarters of the strongest section among them.
Compared to the wild adventures of his Mahratta ancestry, or to
the economic conditions of the peasants far below us, one might
have supposed from his manner that Mr. Tilak regarded these party
differences as beneath all notice. Perhaps he did so regard them,
and, if he did, he was partially right. But still, at the moment, the
party difference was the thing attracting most attention in India,
and it was sure to grow in importance. Mr. Tilak’s own thoughts might
have been occupied with the situation all day, but it was only in
the afternoon that he came quietly into my empty bungalow alone, and
began to discuss it in his concise and definite way. When I published
a careful abstract of this conversation shortly afterwards, many
Moderates and Extremists alike supposed that he had dissembled his
true intentions, and told me only what he wished to be known. As he
did not ask for secrecy, certainly I never supposed he was telling
me things he did not wish to be known, and I think it very likely
that he enjoyed giving himself the pleasure of appearing as Moderate
as possible. But in the evening I read over to him the notes I had
taken of the conversation just as it was afterwards published, and he
approved of what I wrote. In studying his speeches and writings of
recent years, I have also found the lines of his policy laid down in
almost the same words as he used to me, and I am inclined to think
that his statements resembled his beliefs rather closely.
His first object was to show that, as to their immediate purpose,
Extremists and Moderates did not differ in aim:—
“It is not by our purpose, but by our methods only,” he said, “that
our party has earned the name of Extremist. Certainly, there is
a very small party which talks about abolishing the British rule
at once and completely. That does not concern us; it is much too
far in the future. Unorganized, disarmed, and still disunited, we
should not have a chance of shaking the British suzerainty. We may
leave all that sort of thing to a distant time. Our object is to
obtain eventually a large share in the administration of our own
country. Our remote ideal is a confederacy of the Indian provinces,
possessing colonial self-government, with all Imperial questions
set apart for the central government in England. Perhaps our Home
Rule would take the form of Provincial Councils of fifty or sixty
members, nominated or indirectly elected at first, but elected by
popular vote as education became more general.
“But that ideal also,” he went on, “is far ahead of us—perhaps
generations ahead. What we aim at doing now is to bring pressure
on the bureaucracy; to make it feel that all is not well. Of late
the attitude of our British officials has greatly changed for the
worse. They no longer speak of educating us up to freedom, as the
great Englishmen like Elphinstone did in the past. They appear to
agree with the _Times_ that our education in subjects like English
history must be checked, because it is dangerous for ‘natives’ to
learn anything about freedom. Your present statesmen seem to take
the old Roman Empire as their ideal, and even in that they follow
the modern school of Oxford historians, who trace the fall of the
Empire to the concession of citizenship to the provinces.
“I know the worst that you can say about the Russian bureaucracy;
but even that bureaucracy does, according to its lights, seek to
maintain the honour and prosperity of Russia, because Russia is its
own country. Our bureaucracy administers a country not its own for
the sake of a country far away, entirely different in character and
interests. Our bureaucracy is despotic, alien, and absentee.”
Mr. Tilak then referred to the well-known complaints brought against
our Administration by nearly all students of Indian economics—the
“drain” of some £30,000,000 to £35,000,000 a year to England in the
shape of various payments from an impoverished country; the ruin of
Indian trades and manufactures, first by duties against her exports,
and now by customs dues within her own borders, deliberately imposed
for the advantage of British, Austrian, and American firms; the
reduction of very nearly the whole population to a subsistence on
a starving agriculture; and the unexplained increase of malaria,
famine, and plague.
“The immediate question for us,” he continued, “is how we are to
bring pressure on this bureaucracy, in which we have no effective
representation, but are debarred from all except subordinate
positions. It is only in our answer to that question that we differ
from the so-called Moderates. They still hope to influence public
opinion in England by sending deputations, supporting a newspaper,
and pleading the justice of our cause. Both parties, of course,
have long ago given up all hope of influencing Anglo-Indian opinion
out here. But even in England we find most people ignorant and
indifferent about India, and the influence of retired Anglo-Indians
at home is perpetually against us. When Lord Cromer said the other
day that India must be no party question, he meant that Liberals
should support the bureaucracy as blindly as Tories. The history of
the last year has proved to us how unexceptionably they fulfil that
duty.
“Under these disappointments we Extremists have determined on other
methods. It is a matter of temperament, and the younger men are
with us. Our motto is ‘Self-reliance, not Mendicancy.’
“Besides the ordinary Swadeshi movement, we work by boycott and
passive resistance. Our boycott is voluntary. We do not advocate
picketing or compulsory prevention from the purchase of foreign
goods. And in passive resistance we shall simply refuse to notice
such measures as the Seditious Meetings Act. But we do not care
what happens to ourselves. We are devoted absolutely and without
reservation to the cause of the Indian peoples. To imprison
even 3000 or 4000 of us at the same time would embarrass the
bureaucracy. That is our object—to attract the attention of England
to our wrongs by diverting trade and obstructing the Government.
Without in the least intending it, England has promoted the idea
of Indian unity—by railways, by education, and the use of a common
official language. The mere pressure of the British domination upon
us makes for unity. Our unity will not be complete, perhaps, for
generations yet, but it is the goal to which our faces are now set,
and we shall not turn back.”
As I said, many have suspected that, in this statement of his party’s
aims and methods, Mr. Tilak was playing down to an Englishman’s love
of moderation. To some extent that may have been true, but only, I
think, with regard to the distance in time at which he placed India’s
realization of self-government. On January 4, 1907, Mr. Tilak had
addressed the students in College Square, Calcutta, upon the “Tenets
of the New Party,” and I extract a few sentences dealing with this
subject:—
“There were certain points,” he said, “on which both parties were
agreed. The object both parties had at heart was the same; it was
self-government. The present system of administration was ruinous
to the country both materially and morally.... There were some,
indeed, who still believed that the continuance of the British rule
was necessary for some centuries in order to raise them to the
level of civilized nations. Those who held such views obviously
could not follow his arguments, and they must agree to differ and
part as friends. But most of them were agreed that the present
system must be mended or ended as soon as possible. Their object
being the same, it was with regard to their methods that the
difference arose.
“... The New Party’s conclusion was that it was impossible to
gain any concessions by petitions and prayers. This was the first
difference between the Moderate and Progressive parties. He did
not believe in the philanthropy of British politics. There was
no instance in history of one foreign nation ruling another for
the benefit of the other and not for its own profit. The rule of
one nation by another was in itself unnatural. He granted the
efficiency of the British Government and the excellence of its
methods for its own purpose, but these methods and that efficiency
did not work for the interests of the people of the country. A
good foreign government was less desirable than an inferior native
government.”[16]
On the question of revolution and revolutionary violence, the
following passage occurred in Mr. Tilak’s address during the Shivaji
Festival in Poona, June, 1907:—
“It is true that what we seek may seem like a revolution; it is
a revolution in the sense that it means a complete change in
the theory of the government of India as now put forward by the
bureaucracy. It is true that this revolution must be a bloodless
revolution, but it would be a folly to suppose that if there is to
be no shedding of blood, there are also to be no sufferings to be
undergone by the people. These sufferings must be great. You can
win nothing unless you are prepared to suffer. An appeal to the
good-feeling of the rulers is everywhere discovered to have but
narrow limits. Your revolution must be bloodless, but that does not
mean that you may not have to suffer or to go to gaol.”[17]
When I left the mountain’s summit, Mr. Tilak accompanied me back to
the limit of the dark and ancient walls. I recognized in him the
personal attraction that Extremists always have—the freedom from
hesitation and half-measures, the delight in conflict, the reckless
disregard of self. When to this attraction his own people could add
his personal and intimate acquaintance with all classes among them
down to the poorest villagers, and his steady maintenance of all that
they held most dear in religious belief and customary observances, I
could not wonder at his influence among them. So he stood surrounded
by the ruins of empires built by his own and other races, while, with
the merriment and ironic humour I knew so well, our soldiers of the
helio party folded up their instruments among the rocks close by and
prepared for night.[18]
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Compare the Attis of Catullus LXIII. 50. “Patria o mei creatrix,
patria o mea genetrix.... Ego gymnasei fui flos,” etc.
[16] Report in Mr. Tilak’s paper, the _Mahratta_, January 13, 1907.
[17] Report in the _Mahratta_, June 30, 1907.
[18] On June 24, 1908, Mr. Tilak was again arrested for alleged
sedition contained in an article of the _Kesari_, commenting on
the suppressive measures introduced after the discovery of bombs
in Calcutta. He was tried in Bombay before Mr. Justice Davar and a
special jury of seven Europeans and two Parsis. The jury was unable
to agree, but the judge accepted the verdict of guilty from seven
against two, and Mr. Tilak was sentenced to six years’ transportation
and a fine of 1000 rupees (July 22, 1908).