BENGAL BEFORE THE PARTITION.
It is a far cry in every sense from the Deccan to Bengal. There is a
greater diversity of races, languages, social customs, physical
conditions, &c., between the different provinces of India than is often
to be found between the different countries of Europe. Few differ more
widely than the Deccan and Bengal--the Deccan, a great table-land raised
on an average over 2,000ft. above sea level, broken by many deep-cut
river valleys and throwing up lofty ridges of bare rock, entirely
dependent for its rainfall upon the south-west monsoon, which alone and
in varying degrees of abundancy relieves the thirst of a thin soil
parched during the rest of the year by a fierce dry heat--Bengal, a vast
alluvial plain, with a hot, damp climate, watered and fertilized by
great rivers like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, which drain the
greater part of the Himalayas. The Deccan is thinly populated; it has no
great waterways; there are few large cities and few natural facilities
of communication between them, but the population, chiefly Mahratta
Hindus, with a fair sprinkling of Mahomedans, survivors of the Moghul
Empire, are a virile race, wiry rather than sturdy, with tenacious
customs and traditions and a language--Marathi--which has a copious
popular literature. Maharashtra, moreover, has historical traditions, by
no means inglorious, of its own. It has played, and is conscious of
having played, a conspicuous part in the history of India down to
relatively recent times; and the Brahmans of Maharashtra, who were once
its rulers, have preserved to the present day the instincts and the
aspirations of a ruling race, combined with great force and subtleness
of intellect. In Bengal, on the other hand, there is a dense population,
concentrated in part in large towns and cities along the great
waterways, but also spread over the whole surface of the rich plains and
deltas. The Bengalees are a quick-witted, imaginative, and warm-hearted
people who have been the victims rather than the makers of history. The
tide of conquest has swept over them again and again from times
immemorial, but generally without leaving any lasting impression upon
their elastic and rather timid temperament. With all his receptive
qualities, his love of novelty and readiness to learn, his retentive
memory, his luxuriant imagination, his gift of facile eloquence, the
Bengalee has seldom shown himself to be a born ruler of men.
All these differences are reflected in the unrest in Bengal, though on
the surface it presents a close resemblance to the unrest in the Deccan,
and there have been constant contact and co-operation between the
leaders. Except as a geographical expression, Bengal is practically a
creation of British rule and of Western education. The claim of the
modern Bengalees to be regarded as a "nation" has no historical basis.
The inhabitants of Bengal are of mixed Dravidian, Mongolian, and Aryan
origin, and in no other speech of India, writes Sir H. Risley, is the
literary language cultivated by the educated classes more widely
divorced, not only from the many popular dialects spoken in the
province, but from that of ordinary conversation. Literary Bengalee is
not even an altogether indigenous growth. It owes its birth mainly to
the labours of English missionaries, like Carey, in the first half of
the last century, assisted by the Pundits of Calcutta. Yet it is upon
this community of language that the Bengalees mainly found their claim
to recognition as a "nation"; or, to put it in another form, their claim
rests upon education as they understand it--i.e., upon the high
proportion of literacy that exists in Bengal as compared with most parts
of India. Education is unquestionably a power in Bengal. It has not
superseded caste, which in all essentials is still unbroken, but it has
to some extent overshadowed it.
The Brahmans of Bengal have never within historical times been a
politically dominant force. They did not condescend to take office even
in the remote days when there were Hindu Kings in Bengal, and still less
under Mahomedan rule. They were content to be learned in Sanscrit and in
the Hindu Scriptures, and they left secular knowledge to the Kayasthas,
or writer caste, with whom they preserved, notwithstanding certain rigid
barriers, much more intimate relations than usually exist between
different Hindu castes. There is a tradition that the highest Brahman
septs of Bengal are the descendants of five priests of special sanctity
whom King Adisur of Eastern Bengal in the ninth century attracted to his
Court from the holiest centres of Hinduism, and that the servants who
accompanied them founded the septs to which precedence is still accorded
amongst the Kayasthas of Bengal, and both have been at pains to preserve
the purity of their descent by a most exclusive and complicated, and
often unsavoury, system of matrimonial alliances known as Kulinism.
Hence in Bengal the Brahmans share their social primacy to an extent
unknown in other parts of India with the Kayasthas, and also with
another high caste, the Vaidhyas, who formerly monopolized the practice
of Hindu medicine. The _nexus_ is education, and that _nexus_ has been
strengthened since the advent of British rule and of Western education.
When the educational enterprise of the early British missionaries was
followed up, under the impulse of Dr. Duff, the greatest figure in the
missionary annals of India, and of Ram Mohun Roy, the most learned and
earnest of all reforming Brahmans, by the famous Government Minute of
March 7, 1835, many distinguished members of all these three castes
responded to the call and began to qualify for employment under
Government and for the liberal professions that were opening out in the
new India we were making. They were first in the field, and, though
other castes have followed suit, it is they who have practically
monopolized the public offices, the Bar, the Press, and the teaching
profession. It was they who were the moving spirits of the Brahmo Samaj
and of Social Reform when progressive ideas seemed to be on the point of
permeating Hinduism. But when the reaction came which first found public
expression in the resistance provoked by the Age of Consent Act of 1891
for mitigating the evils of Hindu child marriage, and the spirit of
reform was deflected from the social and religious into the political
domain, it was they again who showed the most aptitude to clothe the new
political movement in all the forms of Western political activities. It
was Mr. W.O. Bonnerjee, an able Bengalee lawyer of moderate and
enlightened views, who presided over the first Indian National Congress
at Bombay and delivered an opening address of which the moderation has
rarely been emulated, and though the Congress movement originated in
Bombay rather than in Bengal, the fluent spokesmen of Bengal very soon
had the satisfaction of feeling that for the first time in Indian
history Bengal might claim to be marching in the van.
Owing to his greater plasticity and imagination, the Bengalee has
certainly often assimilated English ideas as few other Indians have.
None can question, for instance, the genuine Western culture and sound
learning of men like Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee, the Vice-Chancellor of the
Calcutta University, or Dr. Rash Behari Ghose, than whom the English Bar
itself has produced few greater lawyers; and it would be easy to quote
many other names of scarcely less distinction amongst the many highly
educated Bengalees who have served and are still serving the State with
undoubted loyalty and ability. With the spread of English education,
habits of tolerance have grown up, at any rate as to externals; and
though on the crucial point of inter-marriage caste law has lost hardly
anything of its rigidity, religion, in the ordinary intercourse of life,
seems to sit almost as lightly upon educated Hindu society in Calcutta
as upon English society in London. Another result of English education,
combined with the absence of such traditions of Brahman supremacy as are
still recent and powerful in the Deccan, has been to invest the
political aspirations of the Bengalees with that democratic tinge which
has won the sympathies of English Radicals; and, even if the tinge in
most cases be very slight, the Bengalee's own adaptability enables him
to clothe his opinions with extraordinary skill and verisimilitude in
the form which he intuitively knows will best suit an English audience.
Of any real democratic spirit amongst the educated classes of Bengal it
is difficult to find a trace, for they are separated from the masses
whom they profess to represent by a social gulf which only a few of the
most enlightened amongst them have so far even recognized the necessity
of making some attempt to bridge if they wish to give the slightest
plausibility to their professions. It would be less far-fetched, though
the analogy would still be very halting, to compare the position of the
Bengalee "moderates" with that of the middle classes in England before
the Reform Bill of 1832, who had no idea of emancipating the masses, but
only of emancipating themselves to some extent from the control of a
close oligarchy. From this point of view there are undoubtedly, and
especially amongst the elder generation, many educated Bengalees who are
convinced that in claiming by political agitation a larger share in the
administration and government of the country they are merely carrying
into practice the blameless theories of civic life and political
activity which their reading of English history has taught them. Their
influence, however, has been rapidly undermined by a new and essentially
revolutionary school, who combine with a spirit of revolt against all
Western authority a reversion to some of the most reactionary
conceptions of authority that the East has ever produced, and,
unfortunately, it is this new school which has now got hold of the
younger educated classes.
Education, to which in its more primitive forms the Bengalees owed
whatever influence they retained under Mahomedan rule, has given them
under British rule far larger opportunities which they have turned to
account with no mean measure of success. I must reserve the thorny
question of education for separate treatment. All I need say for the
present is that, had it grown less instead of more superficial, had it
been less divorced from discipline and moral training as well as from
the realities of Indian life, the results might have been very
different. As it is, in the form given to it in our Indian schools and
colleges, which have been allowed to drift more and more into native
hands, English education has steadily deteriorated in quality as the
output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees
in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what
is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this
mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been
disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of
knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for
them. Soured on the one hand by their own failure, or by the failure of
such examinations as they may have succeeded in passing to secure for
them the employment to which they aspired, and scorning the sort of work
to which they would otherwise have been trained, they are ripe for every
revolt. That is the material upon which the leaders of unrest have most
successfully worked, and it is only recently that some of the more
sober-minded Bengalees of the older generation have begun to realize the
dangers inherent in such a system. When in 1903 Lord Curzon brought in
his Universities Bill to mitigate some of the most glaring evils of the
system, there was a loud and unanimous outcry in Bengal that Government
intended to throttle higher education because it was education that was
making a "nation" of Bengal. Subsequent events have shown that that
measure was not only urgently needed, but that it came too late to cure
the mischief already done, and was, if anything, too circumscribed in
its scope. The storm it raised was intensified shortly afterwards by
Lord Curzon's famous Convocation speech, into which the sensitive and
emotional Bengalee hastened to read a humiliating indictment of the
"nation." Such a storm showed how heavily laden was the atmosphere with
dangerous electricity.
For some years past the influence of Tilak and his irreconcilable school
had been projected from the Deccan into Bengal, and nowhere did it make
itself so rapidly felt as in the Press. The _Calcutta Review_ has been
publishing a very instructive history of the Indian Press by Mr. S.C.
Sanial, a Hindu scholar who has had the advantage of consulting
authentic and hitherto unpublished documents. His erudite work shows how
the native Press of India first grew up in Bengal as the direct product
of English education, and faithfully reflected all the fluctuations of
educated Bengalee opinion, many of the most influential native
newspapers continuing to be published in English, side by side with, and
often under the same control as, more popular papers published in the
vernacular. Among the "advanced" journalists of Bengal, none had fallen
so entirely under the spell of Tilak's magnetic personality as Mr. Bepin
Chandra Pal and Mr. Arabindo Ghose, and the former's _New India_ and the
latter's _Bande_ also published in English, soon outstripped the
aggressiveness of Mr. Surendranath Banerjee's _Bengalee_. For though
not immune from the reaction against Western influences and in favour of
Hinduism as a religious and social system, the school represented by Mr.
Banerjee confined itself at first mainly to political agitation and to
criticism of British methods of administration. The new school
represented, perhaps most conspicuously, by Mr. Arabindo Ghose scarcely
disguised its hostility to British rule itself and to all that British
ascendancy stands for. Hinduism for the Hindus, or, as they preferred to
put it, "Arya for the Aryans," was the war-cry of zealots, half
fanatics, half patriots, whose mysticism found in the sacred story of
the _Bhagvat Gita_ not only the charter of Indian independence but the
sanctification of the most violent means for the overthrow of an alien
rule. With this "Aryan" reaction, having to a great extent the force of
religious enthusiasm behind it, orthodoxy also recovered ground, and
Brahmanism was not slow to show how potent it still is even in Bengal
when it appeals to the superstitions of the masses. In one form or
another this spirit had spread like wildfire not only among the students
but among the teachers, and the schools of physical training to which
young Bengal had taken, partly under the influence of our British love
of sports and partly from a legitimate desire to remove from their
"nation" the stigma of unmanliness, were rapidly transforming themselves
into political societies modelled upon the bands of gymnasts which
figured so prominently in Tilak's propaganda in the Deccan. Among the
older men, some yielded to the new spirit from fear of being elbowed out
by their youngers, some were genuinely impatient of the tardiness of the
constitutional reforms for which they had looked to the agency of the
Indian National Congress; a few perhaps welcomed the opportunity of
venting the bitterness engendered by social slights, real or imaginary,
or by disappointments in Government service.
Such appears to have been the _état d'âme_ of Bengal when the
Government of India promulgated the measure of administrative
redistribution known as the Partition of Bengal.