THE PUNJAB AND THE ARYA SAMAJ.
The Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers, differs as widely both from the
Deccan and from Bengal as these two differ the one from the other. It
has been more than any other part of India the battlefield of warring
races and creeds and the seat of power of mighty dynasties. Among its
cities it includes Imperial Delhi and Runjit Singh's Lahore. It is a
country of many peoples and of many dialects. It is the home of the
Sikhs, but the Mahomedans, ever since the days of the Moghul Empire,
form the majority of the population, and the proportion of Hindus is
smaller than in any other province of India, except Eastern Bengal.
Owing to the very small rainfall, its climate is intensely dry--fiercely
hot during the greater part of the year, and cold even to freezing
during the short winter months. Nowhere in India has British rule done
so much to bring peace and security and to induce prosperity. The
alluvial lands are rich but thirsty, and irrigation works on a scale of
unparalleled magnitude were required to compel the soil to yield
beneficent harvests. At the most critical moment in the history of
British India it was against the steadfastness of the Punjab, then under
the firm but patriarchal sway of Sir John Lawrence, that the Mutiny
spent itself, and until a few years ago there seemed to be no reason
whatever for questioning the loyalty of a province which the forethought
of Government and the skill of Anglo-Indian engineers were gradually
transforming into a land of plenty. Least of all did any one question
the loyalty of the Sikhs. Many of them believed that British rule was
the fulfilment of a prophecy of one of their martyred _gurus_, and the
Sikh regiments were regarded as the flower of the Native Army.
Yet it was in the Punjab, at Lahore and at Rawal Pindi, that the first
serious disturbances occurred in 1907 which aroused public opinion at
home to the reality of Indian unrest, and stirred the Government of
India to such strong repressive measures as the deportation of two
prominent agitators under an ancient Ordinance of 1818 never before
applied in such connexion. Local and temporary causes may to some extent
have accounted for those disturbances. An increase in the land revenue
demanded in the Rawal Pindi district was very strongly resented. The
regulations issued with regard to the tenure of land in some of the new
irrigation colonies were probably unwise and carried out with some
harshness. Famine in the unirrigated tracts, and especially the plague,
which had desolated parts of the province, had created much misery and
bitterness. Other and more remote causes of a social and economic
character had also been at work. Nowhere had Anglo-Indian legislation
and the introduction of elaborate forms of legal procedure produced
results more unfortunate and less foreseen by their authors than in the
Punjab. The conversion of the occupants of the land into full
proprietors was intended to give greater stability and security to the
peasant ownership of land, but the result was to improve the position of
the moneylender, who, owing to the thriftlessness of the Indian _rayat_
and the extravagant expenditure to which he is from time to time driven
by traditional custom in regard to marriages, funerals, and other family
ceremonies, has always played a disastrously important part in village
life. As M. Chailley remarks in his admirable study of these problems,
"the agricultural debtor had now two securities to offer." He had
always been able to pledge his harvest, and now he could pledge also his
land. On the other hand, "a strict system of law and procedure afforded
the moneylender the means of rapidly realizing his dues," and the
pleader, who is himself a creation of that system, was ever at the elbow
of both parties to encourage ruinous litigation to his own professional
advantage. Special laws were successively enacted by Government to check
these new evils, but they failed to arrest altogether a process which
was bringing about a veritable revolution in the tenure of land, and
mainly to the detriment of an essentially peaceful and law-abiding class
that furnished a large and excellent contingent to the Native Army. The
wretched landowner who found himself deprived of his land by legal
process held our methods rather than his own extravagance responsible
for his ruin, and on the other hand, the pleaders and their clients, the
moneylenders, who were generally Hindus, resented equally our
legislative attempts to hamper a process so beneficial to themselves.
But all these were only contributory causes. There were still deeper
influences at work which have operated in the Punjab in the same
direction as the forces of unrest in the Deccan and in Bengal, but
differ from them nevertheless in their origin and in some of their
manifestations. In the Punjab too the keynote of unrest is a spirit of
revolt not merely against British administrative control, but, in theory
at least, against Western influence generally, though in some respects
it bears very strongly the impress of the Western influence which it
repudiates. The motive force is not conservative Brahmanism as in the
Deccan, nor does it betray the impetuous emotionalism of Bengal. It is
less rigid and purely reactionary than the former, and better
disciplined than the latter.
Orthodox Hinduism ceased to be a dominant factor in the Punjab when the
flood of Mahomedan conquest swept over the land of the Five Rivers. Even
Islam did not break the power of caste, and very distinct traces of
caste still survive amongst the Mahomedan community itself. But nowhere
has caste been so much shaken as in the Punjab, for the infinity of
sub-castes into which each caste has resolved itself gives the measure
of its disintegration. Sikhism still represents the most successful
revolt against its tyranny in the later history of Hinduism. Hence the
relatively slight ascendency enjoyed by the Brahmans in the Punjab
amongst the Hindus themselves, even the Brahmans having split up into so
many sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that many a non-Brahman Hindu will
hardly accept food cooked by the lower order of Brahmans--and, next to
inter-marriage, food is the great test of caste. Nevertheless it is
amongst the Hindus of the Punjab that one of the earliest apostles of
reaction against the West has found the largest and most enthusiastic
body of followers. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya
Samaj, was a Brahman of Kathiawar; he was not born in the Punjab, and it
was not in the Punjab but in Bombay, where, however, it struck no roots,
that he founded the Arya Samaj. Only in the later years of his life did
the Punjab become the chief centre of his activities. The doctrines he
taught were embodied by him in his _Satyarath Prakash_, which has become
the Bible of his disciples, and in his _Veda Bashya Basmika_, a
commentary on the Vedas. He had at an early age lost faith in the Hindu
Pantheon, and to this extent he was a genuine religious reformer, for he
waged relentless war against the worship of idols, and whether his
claims to Vedantic learning be or be not conceded, his creed was "Back
to the Vedas." His ethical code, on the other hand, was vague, and he
pandered strangely in some directions to the weaknesses of the flesh,
and in others to popular prejudices. Nothing in the Vedas, for instance,
prohibits either the killing of cattle or the eating of bovine flesh.
But, in deference to one of the most universal of Hindu superstitions,
Dayanand did not hesitate to include cow-killing amongst the deadliest
sins. Here we have in fact the keynote of his doctrines. The sanctity of
the cow is the touchstone of Hindu hostility to both Christian and
Mahomedan, and the whole drift of Dayanand's teachings is far less to
reform Hinduism than to rouse it into active resistance to the alien
influences which threatened, in his opinion, to denationalize it. Hence
the outrageously aggressive tone of his writings wherever he alludes
either to Christianity or to Mahomedanism. It is the advent of
"meat-eating and wine-drinking foreigners, the slaughterers of kine and
other animals," that has brought "trouble and suffering" upon "the
Aryas"--he discards the word Hindu on account of its Persian
origin--whilst before they came into the country India enjoyed "golden
days," and her people were "free from disease and prosperous and
contented." In fact, "Arya for the Aryans" was the cry that frequently
predominated in Dayanand's teachings over that of "Back to the Vedas,"
and Lajpat Rai, one of his most zealous disciples, has stated
emphatically that "the scheme of Swami Dayanand has its foundation on
the firm rock of _Swadeshi_ and _Swajati_."
Since Dayanand's death the Arya Samaj has split up into two
sections--the "vegetarians" who with regard to religious doctrine may be
described as the orthodox, and the "meat-eaters," as the
latitudinarians. It is difficult to differentiate between the precise
tendencies of these two sections, whose feuds seem to be waning. In both
are to be found not a few progressive and enlightened Aryas who,
whatever their political activities may be, have undoubtedly applied
themselves with no small success to the carrying out of that part of
Dayanand's gospel which was directed to the reforming of Hinduism. Their
influence has been constantly exerted to check, the marriages between
mere boys and almost infant girls which have done so much physical as
well as moral mischief to Hindu society, and also to improve the
wretched lot of Hindu widows whose widowhood with all that it entails of
menial degradation often begins before they have ever really been wives.
To this end the Aryas have not hesitated to encourage female education,
and the Girls' Orphanage at Jalandhar, where there is also a widows'
home, has shown what excellent social results can be achieved in that
direction. Again in the treatment of the "untouchable" low-castes, the
Arya Samaj may claim to have been the first native body to break new
ground and to attempt something akin to the work of social reclamation
of which Christianity and, in a lesser degree, Islam had hitherto had
the monopoly. Schools and especially industrial classes have been
established in various districts which cannot fail to raise the _status_
of the younger generation and gradually to emancipate the lower castes
from the bondage in which they have been hitherto held. These and many
other new departures conceived in the same liberal spirit at first
provoked the vehement hostility of the orthodox Hindus, who at one time
stopped all social intercourse with the Arya reformers. But whereas in
other parts of India the idea of social reform came to be associated
with that of Western ascendency and therefore weakened and gave way
before the rising tide of reaction against that ascendency, it has been
associated in the Punjab with the cry of "Arya for the Aryans," and the
political activities of the Arya Samaj, or at least of a number of its
most prominent members who have figured conspicuously in the
anti-British agitation of the last few years, have secured for it from
Hindu orthodoxy a measure of tolerance and even of good will which its
social activities would certainly not otherwise have received. That the
Arya Samaj, which shows the impress of Western influence in so much of
its social work, should at the same time have associated itself so
intimately with a political movement directed against British rule is
one of the many anomalies presented by the problem of Indian unrest.
Many Aryas, indeed, deny strenuously that the Samaj is disaffected, or
even that it concerns itself with politics, and the president of the
Lahore branch, Mr. Roshan Lal, assured me that it devotes itself solely
to moral and religious reform. I do not question that assurance, as far
as Mr. Roshan Lal is himself personally concerned, and it may be true
that the Samaj has never committed itself as a body to any political
programme, and that many individual members hold aloof from politics;
but the evidence that many others, and not the least influential, have
played a conspicuous part in the seditious agitation of the last few
years, both in the Punjab and in the neighbouring United Provinces, is
overwhelming. In the Rawal Pindi riots in 1907 the ringleaders were
Aryas, and in the violent propaganda which for about two years preceded
the actual outbreak of violence none figured more prominently than Lala
Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh, both prominent Aryas. The immediate effect
produced by their deportation in restoring order is in itself
corroborative evidence of the share they were believed to have taken in
producing lawlessness. Ajit Singh himself is at the present moment a
fugitive from justice, against whom proceedings _in absentia_ were
instituted this winter in Lahore for translating and publishing
seditious books that dealt with the making of bombs, the taking of life,
the destruction of buildings, &c. In the course of these proceedings
letters from Lajpat Rai were produced in Court showing that just about
the time of the disturbances he had been in communication with Shyamji
Krishnavarma, of _Indian Sociologist_ fame, for a supply of books
"containing true ideas on politics" for the students of Lahore, as well
as for assistance towards defraying the cost of "political
missionaries." In one of these letters also Lajpat Rai, after remarking
that "the people are in a sullen mood" and that "the agricultural
classes have begun to agitate," adds significantly that his "only fear
is that the bursting out may not be premature." Lajpat Rai's
correspondent was another prominent Arya, Bhai Parmanand, who, whilst he
was Professor at the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College, was found in
possession of various formulae for the manufacture of bombs, including
the same manual that was discovered in the Maniktola Garden at
Calcutta.
In Patiala, one of the Sikh native States of the Punjab, Aryas
constituted the great majority of defendants, 76 in number, and many of
them officials and persons of position, who were put on their trial last
December for seditious practices. So seriously were the charges felt to
reflect upon the Arya Samaj as a whole that one of its leading legal
members was briefed on its behalf for the defence. From the speech made
by counsel for the prosecution in opening the case it appears that some
of the defendants were schoolmasters, who were charged with preaching
revolutionary doctrines in their schools and carrying on correspondence
of the same character with old pupils; others were charged with
circulating papers of the _Yugantar_ and _Swarajiya_ type; others with
holding secret meetings and delivering inflammatory lectures; others
again with distributing pictures and photographs of well-known
revolutionists, including Khudiram Bose, the Muzafferpur murderer. Not
only were most of these defendants Aryas, but they were very prominent
Aryas, who had founded local branches of the Samaj or been members of
committees in the State of Patiala. How far the evidence outlined by
counsel would have borne out these charges it is impossible to say,
though one may properly assume it to have been of a very formidable
character, for after the case had been opened against them the
defendants hastened to send in a petition invoking the clemency of the
Maharajah. They expressed therein their deep sorrow for any conduct open
to misconstruction, tendered their unqualified apology for any
indiscreet acts they might have committed, and testified their "great
abhorrence and absolute detestation" of anarchists and seditionists and
their diabolical methods. His Highness thereupon ordered the prosecution
to be abandoned, but at the same time banished the defendants from his
State and declared their posts to be forfeited by such as had been in
his service, and only in a few cases were these punishments
subsequently remitted.
The large number of Aryas who have unquestionably taken part in the
political agitation of the last few years certainly tends to corroborate
the very compromising certificate given only two years ago to the Samaj
by Krishnavarma himself in his murder-preaching organ. He not only
stated that "of all movements in India for the political regeneration of
the country none is so potent as the Arya Samaj," but he added that "the
ideal of that society as proclaimed by its founder is an absolutely free
and independent form of national Government," and Krishnavarma, it must
be remembered, had been appointed by Dayanand to be a member of the
first governing body in the lifetime of the founder and, after his
death, one of the trustees of his will.
What makes the question of the real tendencies of the Arya Samaj one of
very grave importance for the future is that it has embarked upon an
educational experiment of a peculiar character which may have an immense
effect upon the rising generation. One of its best features is the
attention it has devoted to education, and to that of girls as well as
of boys. But it was not till 1898 that the governing body of the Samaj
in the Punjab decided to carry into execution a scheme for restoring the
Vedic system of education which Dayanand had conceived but had never
been able to carry out. Under this system the child is committed at an
early age to the exclusive care of a spiritual teacher or _guru_, who
stands to him _in loco parentis_ and even more, for Manu says that "of
him who gives natural birth, and of him who gives knowledge of the
Vedas, the giver of sacred knowledge is the more venerable father, since
second or divine birth ensures life to the twice-born, both in this
world and eternally." In the _gurukuls_ or seminaries founded by the
Arya Samaj pupils or _chelas_ are admitted between the ages of six and
ten. From that moment they, are practically cut off from the outer world
during the whole course of their studies, which cover a period of 16
years altogether--i.e., ten years in the lower school and six years in
the upper, to which they pass up as _Brahmacharis._ During the whole of
that period no student is allowed to visit his family, except in cases
of grave emergency, and his parents can only see him with the permission
of the head of the _gurukul_ and not more than once a month. There are
at present three _gurukuls_ in the Punjab, but the most important one,
with over 250 students, is at Kangri, in the United Provinces, five
miles from the sacred city of Hardwar, where the Ganges flows out of a
gorge into the great plain. A large and very popular _mela_ or fair is
held annually at Kangri, and it is attended by the _Brahmacharis,_ who
act as volunteers for the maintenance of order and collect funds for the
support of their _gurukul_. The enthusiasm is said to be very great, and
donations last year are credibly reported to have exceeded 300,000
rupees.
Life in the _gurukuls_ is simple and even austere, the discipline
rigorous, the diet of the plainest, and a great deal of time is given to
physical training. As the _chelas_ after 16 years of this monastic
training at the hands of their _gurus_ are to be sent out as
missionaries to propagate the Arya doctrines throughout India, the
influence of these institutions in the moulding of Indian character and
Indian opinion in the future cannot fail to be considerable. Some five
years more must elapse before we shall be able to judge the result by
the first batch of _chelas_ who will then be going forth into the world.
For the present one can only echo the hope tersely expressed a few
months ago by Sir Louis Dane, the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, in
reply to assurances of loyalty from the President of the Arya Samaj,
that "what purports to be a society for religious and social reform and
advancement may not be twisted from its proper aims" and "degenerate
into a political organization with objects which are not consonant with
due loyalty to the Government as established." But neither the spirit of
Dayanand's own teachings nor the record of many of his disciples,
including some of those actually connected with the _gurukuls_, is in
this respect encouraging.
There has been, however, no recurrence of serious disturbances in the
Punjab since 1907, and if the native Press lost little of its virulence
until the new Press Act of this year, and numerous prosecutions bore
witness to the continued prevalence of sedition, the province has been
free from the murderous outrages and dacoities which have been so
lamentable a feature of the unrest in Bengal and in the Deccan. None the
less there is still a very strong undercurrent of anti-British feeling.
It has partly been fostered in the large cities by Bengalee immigrants
who have come into the Punjab in considerable numbers, and thanks to
their higher education have acquired great influence at the Bar and in
the Press, but it is rife wherever the Arya Samaj is known to be most
active, and the Arya Samaj has already proved a very powerful
proselytizing agency. Its meeting houses serve not only for religious
ceremonies, but also as social clubs for the educated classes in all the
larger towns where they congregate. Access to them is readily given to
Hindus and Sikhs who have not actually joined the Samaj. They are
attracted by the political discussions which are carried on there with
great freedom, and having no such resorts of their own, they are soon
tempted to obtain the fuller privileges of membership. In this way the
Samaj has made many converts among the educated classes and even among
native officials. But its influence is by no means confined to them. It
makes many converts among the Sikhs, and not a few among _Nau-Muslims_
or Mahomedans who have embraced Islam in relatively recent times and
mainly for the purpose of escaping from the tyranny of caste. For the
same reason it attracts low-caste Hindus, for though it does not
ostentatiously denounce or defy caste, it has the courage to ignore it.
Though the Arya leaders are generally men of education and sometimes of
great culture, they know how to present their creed in a popular form
that appeals to the lower classes and especially to the agricultural
population. One of the most unpleasant features has been the propaganda
carried on by them among the Sepoys of the Native Army, and especially
among the Jats and the Sikhs, with whom they have many points of
affinity. The efforts of the Aryas seem to be chiefly directed to
checking enlistment, but they have at times actually tampered with the
loyalty of certain regiments, and their emissaries have been found
within the lines of the native troops. Sikhism itself is at the present
day undergoing a fresh process of transformation. Whilst it tends
generally to be reabsorbed into Hinduism, the very remarkable movement
for sinking the old class distinctions--themselves a survival of
caste--and recognizing the equality of all Sikhs, is clearly due to the
influence of the Arya Samaj. The evolution of the Arya Samaj recalls
very forcibly that of Sikhism, which originally, when founded by Nanak
in the early part of the 16th century, was merely a religious and moral,
reform movement, and nevertheless within 50 years developed under Har
Govind into a formidable political and military organization. It is not,
therefore, surprising that some of those who know the Punjab best and
the sterner stuff of which its martial races are made look upon it as a
potentially more dangerous centre of trouble than either the Deccan or
Bengal. One of the most mischievous results of the Aryan propaganda, and
one which may well cause the most immediate anxiety, is the growing
antagonism which it has bred between Hindus and Mahomedans, for the
Mahomedans are convinced that the Arya Samaj is animated with no less
bitter hostility towards Islam than towards British rule.