THE VILLAGE
But of all the errors of Indian government, none is so serious as their
destruction of the Village organism throughout India; none has had such
an effect in the past; none is likely to have such bad consequences in
the future.
It is the Village policy of government that has created for it the most
difficulties, and which is at the bottom of the most serious unrest.
For it touches not merely a few as criminal law, but practically all
the population; it affects not only a part of the life of India, but it
has injured it in its most vital point. In the whole history of
administration there is nothing I think so demonstrative of the
ignorance of government as the Village policy.
The foundation on which not only all government but all civilisation
rests throughout the world is the village. As this is contrary to the
usual idea that civilisation rests on the family it will be convenient
to shortly show how this is so. The village is the microcosm of the
State, because it includes within it divers trades and occupations and
races and religions and castes in one community. A family does not do
so. A family is by its nature of one blood, it is almost always of one
occupation. There are families of cultivators, merchants, priests,
lawyers, smiths, and so on. It is of one religion, of one caste, of
one habit of thought. A family is narrow and a village is broad.
Families divide; villages combine. Societies organised on the family,
or clan, or tribe principle have always failed--by the very nature of
things they must so fail. The Jews are a race, or tribe, and not a
nation. They have no civilisation of their own, but adopt that in
which they live. The Highland clans had to be broken before the
Highlands could be civilised. The caste system in India ruined its old
civilisation, and is the bar to any new civilisation. The Turkish
Empire is dead because it was based on a religious caste divided from
all others by a mutilation, and its people could never amalgamate with
others. There is a continual flow of peoples to and fro upon the
earth, and village communities absorb the new-comers and thereby
acquire new blood, and, what is far more important, new ideas, to add
to the old and leaven them. Families, classes and tribes cannot do
this. They become stereotyped, and dissolve or die. Thus the basis of
all civilisation has been the village, or in later times the town. The
decay and death of all civilisations have been preceded by the death of
the local unit. Thus imperial Rome was itself doomed to death when it
destroyed local life; and a new civilisation could not be built up till
the local communities had attained a fresh life. Florence, Genoa,
Milan, Pisa, Venice, and many others made the civilisation of the
Renaissance. So in England, a free Parliament was made up of
representatives from free cities and counties. These have been
destroyed, and the present constituencies are merely so many voters.
Policies are no longer decided in Parliament, but in secret party
conclave. Members are the nominees of that conclave, not of free local
organisms, and Parliament has become a machine to register its decrees.
So are free institutions passing away.
There is no lesson of history more true--more certain--than this, that
the village or town is the unit of all free life and civilisation. It
contains all classes, different races, religions, castes and forms of
thought, and is therefore a real unit.
Now these units have existed all over the world, and when civilisations
and governments have disappeared they have been built up anew from the
villages. In India the village system was the one organism that
survived the long years of anarchy and invasion, and it was in full
vigour when we conquered India. Those who care to read up the subject
can see it in Sir Henry Sumner Maine's _Indian Village Communities_.
In Upper Burma, on its annexation in 1885, the village community was
strong and healthy; it alone survived the fall of King Thibaw's
Government. Then we deliberately destroyed it, as we had destroyed it
before all through India.
Now this is an instructive and interesting fact, for it was destroyed
in ignorance, not by _malice prepense_.
Throughout India--and especially in Burma--you will find Government
reiterating its conviction of the importance of preserving the village
organism, repeating the conviction of its absolute necessity, and at
the same time killing it. This is but an instance of much of the
action of Government. It means well; it does actually see the end to
be attained--it has no idea how to attain that end; but, instead, it
renders it impossible.
If I explain what happened in Burma, the history, _mutatis mutandis_,
of what has occurred throughout India will be clear.
In the first place, a "village" does not mean only one collection of
houses; it is a territorial unit of from one to a hundred square miles.
Originally, of course, there was in each unit one hamlet; but, as
population grew, daughter hamlets were thrown off. They still,
however, remained under the jurisdiction of the mother hamlet, and they
all together formed one village. In each village there were a Headman
and a Council of Elders. The headman was appointed or rather approved
by the Burmese Government for life or good behaviour; the council was
not recognised by law. Notwithstanding this, the council was the real
power. It was not formally elected, it had no legal standing, but it
was the real power. The headman was only its representative and not
its master; he was but _primus inter pares_.
This headman and council ruled all village matters. They settled the
house sites, the rights of way, the marriage of boys and girls,
divorces, public manners; they put up such public works as were done,
they divided the tax amongst the inhabitants according to their means,
and were collectively responsible for the whole. There was hardly any
appeal from their decision, but the power not being localised in an
individual but in a council of all the elders, things went well. The
village was a real living organism, within which people learned to act
together, to bear and forbear; there were a local patriotism and a
local pride. Within it lay the germ of unlimited progress.
The English Government on taking over Upper Burma recognised the
extreme value of this organisation. In Lower Burma much of our
difficulty arose from the fact that the organisation was wanting and
that between Government and the individual there was no one. So one of
the first efforts of Government in Upper Burma was to endeavour to
preserve and strengthen this local self-government. Unfortunately
every effort it made resulted in destroying it rather than
consolidating it. A wrong view was taken from the beginning.
The council was ignored. How this happened I do not know, I can only
suppose that it arose from ignorance. The only man recognised by the
Burmese Government we replaced was the headman. They dealt directly
with him and not with the council. They did not appoint the council or
regulate it in any way. In law no council existed. Therefore, when we
took over, the law was mistaken for the fact--a common mistake, due to
seeking for knowledge in papers, and not in life--and the council was
ignored. The following seems to have been the argument: Government
appointed the headman, therefore he was an official. Government did
not appoint or recognise any council, therefore there was no council.
Anyhow, that was the decision arrived at and enforced.
There is on record a circular of the Local Government in which the
headman of a village is described as a Government official; to be to
his village what the District Officer is to his district. That is
disastrous. A headman is not an official of the Government. His whole
value and meaning is that he is a representative of the people before
Government. He expresses the collective views of the village and
receives the orders of Government for them as a whole. He is _their_
head, not a finger of Government. He corresponded almost exactly to
the mayor of an English town, who would be insulted if you called him a
Government official. Yet this mistaken view was taken of the village
headman, and this error has vitiated all dealings of Government with
the village organisation and its headman. He is appointed by
Government instead of being appointed by the people and approved by
Government. He is responsible to Government, not to his village--as he
ought to be--for the use or abuse of his powers. He is punished by
Government for laxity. By the Village Regulation he can be fined by
the District Officer.
There has grown up among Europeans in the East a custom of imposing
fines. They fine their servants for breakages and innumerable other
small matters, and then complain how scarce good servants are. The
clerks in Government offices used to be subject to continual fines
until Lord Curzon stopped it. Now headmen of villages can be fined by
the District Officer; and they are fined; the proviso is no dead
letter. It is a mark of the "energetic" officer to use it. Can there
be anything more destructive? Imagine the headman, the mayor of a
community of three or four thousand people, fined five shillings for
the delay of a return, or set, like a schoolboy, to learn a code--with
the clerks. I have seen this done often. What respect for Government,
what from his own people, what self-respect, can he retain after such
treatment?
Again, by ignoring the council and making the headman an official,
Government set up a number of petty tyrants in the villages, free from
all control but its own; consequently it has been forced to allow great
latitude of appeal. This still further destroys his authority. He is
under old custom, legalised by the Village Regulation, empowered to
punish his villagers who disobey him in certain matters. The
punishments are, of course, trivial. When approved by the council, as
in old days, they were final; but now they can be appealed against--and
are. A headman who endeavours to enforce his authority runs the risk
of being complained against and forced to attend Headquarters, to waste
days of valuable time and considerable sums of money to defend himself
for having fined a villager a shilling for not mending his fence. One
or two experiences of this sort and the headman lets things slide in
future.
Thus interference with the village is constant and disastrous. Headmen
are bullied, fined, set to learn lessons like children, all in the name
of efficiency. And Government wonders why the village system decays.
A continual complaint of Government is that headmen are no longer the
men they used to be, that they have lost authority. The best men will
not take the appointment--and who can wonder? Here is a story in
illustration:
There was a small village in my district, on a main road, and the
headman died. It was necessary to appoint a new one. But no one would
take the appointment. The elders were asked to nominate a man, but no
one would take the nomination. I sent the Township Officer to try to
arrange; he failed.
Now a village cannot get along without a headman. Government is at an
end; no taxes can be collected, for instance; therefore it was
necessary a headman be appointed at once. I went to the village myself
and called the elders and gave them an order that they must nominate
someone. So next morning, after stormy meetings in the village, a man
was brought to me and introduced as the headman-elect. He was dirty,
ill-clad, and not at all the sort of man I should have cared to
appoint, nor one whom it would be supposed the villagers would care to
accept. Yet he was the only nominee.
"What is your occupation?" I asked.
He said he had none.
"What tax did you pay last year?" I asked him this in order to
discover his standing, for men are rated according to their means.
He told me that he had paid five shillings--less than a third of the
average.
"You are willing to be headman?" I asked.
"No," he said frankly. "But no one would take the place, and the
elders told me I must. They said they would prosecute me under the
'bad livelihood' section if I didn't. I could take my choice between
being headman or a term in prison."
This was, of course, an extreme case, but it illustrates the position.
The headman is degraded and all administration suffers.
It is the same in municipalities. The work is done by the District
Officer because it is easier for him to do it than to instruct and
allow others to do it.
The people one and all hate this. The headman hates it, because though
he is given much greater power nominally than he used to have he dare
not use this power. He is isolated from his villagers, and so often
becomes an object of dislike to them. Through him orders are enforced
which are not liked by the people, and he has to bear all the brunt.
His dignity is gone. Sometimes he is murdered.
The elders hate it. They have been ignored. They are placed under a
headman who may or may not attend to what they say. They have lost all
interest--because all power--in their village affairs. They have no
responsibility.
The villagers hate it. A council of their own elders they could
respect and submit to; a one-man rule they detest. Their appeal to the
council on the spot (who know) has been lost; and in place of it they
have an appeal to a distant officer who, with the best will in the
world, cannot know. An appeal costs money, and even to win may be to
lose. They all want to manage their affairs; they can do it far better
than we can, and there is nothing they so much appreciate as being
allowed to do so. Here is how I learnt this:
Some eighteen years ago I was leaving a station where I had been for a
year as subordinate officer, and had to cross the river by launch to
the steamer station on the other shore. I went down to the bank to get
the launch, but it was late. I saw it three miles away, and so sat
down under a tree to wait.
Presently two or three elderly Burmans came and sat down near me. Then
came others, till maybe twenty elderly men were there. I recognised
two or three vaguely, but none clearly. I wondered at their being
there, and asked:
"Are you crossing over too?"
They shook their heads.
"What are you here for, then?"
They looked embarrassed, and at last one spoke. "We came to say
'Good-bye' to you."
I stared. "But I do not know you, except that I suppose you are elders
of the town."
"We are," they said, "and you do not know us because you have not ever
worried us in any way. When we had business together you did it
quickly and decisively; otherwise you left us alone. You did not treat
us as children. Therefore we are sorry you are going."
I laughed. I could not help it. To come and express regret at a man's
leaving on the ground that they knew next to nothing of him and did not
want to know more seemed unusual.
But it was true. And often, after, did I think over that "send-off"
and take the lesson to heart.
Now what is true in Burma is true over all India. The local
circumstances of course vary. A lumbadar in the North-West, for
instance, does not quite correspond to a headman in Burma. The actual
form in which the village was organised differs from place to place
according to local needs. Even in Burma it differed a good deal. But
the differences were only of form. In all India there were
self-contained village communities within which, to a certain extent,
caste, religion, and race were subordinated to local communal feeling.
And everywhere Government has killed it by turning the village
officials into Government officials, responsible to Government and not
to the village.
Thus there is now absolutely no organism a man can belong to. There
are three hundred and fifty million individuals in India, and that is
all. They are divided laterally into strata by caste and religion, and
there is no influence to draw them together. All organised life is
dead. Government by means of its official--the headman--interferes
with almost every detail of life, regulating his conduct by rules drawn
up in Secretariats by men who never knew what a village was, and the
appeal is to another alien officer.
Further, all morality and all conduct are the outcome of corporate
life, that is to say, of the village or of a larger unit. Morality is,
in fact, where it is useful and true, the knowledge of how to get along
with your fellow men and women, what conduct offends them and leads to
the injury of society, what pleases them and tends to harmony and
mutual happiness. It is not fixed, but adapts itself to changing
circumstances of the society, and it is enforced by the opinion of that
society.
But injure the society and both manners and morals are shaken. It is a
common complaint of India to-day that the bonds of morality have
greatly slackened and that manners have almost disappeared. This is
attributed to the waning influence of religions. But, generally
speaking, religions have not waned in India--on the contrary, their
influences have increased. The people have become more and more in the
power of religious systems. Therefore the cause given is absurd and
untrue. It does not exist. Further, neither morality nor manners are
the outcome of religion. On the contrary. Religions claim them to be
so, but the claim is false. Manners and morals may be said to be the
gravity which binds individuals into a community. They make the
community and are themselves the outcome of the community. Destroy the
community and you have destroyed the source from which manners and
morals arise.
That has been done all through India. In another book I have pointed
out how disastrously this has acted in Burma and how much the people
feel it. I do not want to repeat myself. But if those officials who
deplore the frequent cases of young girls running away with boys, of
seduction, of adultery and other offences, of immature marriages, and
other mistakes, would but realise that all these arise from the injury
we have caused to society, there might be a change. All the human
virtues, with no exception, either arise from or are increased by the
aggregation of men into communities, and it is very difficult to keep
them alive where no organic communities exist. Consider the words
humanity, civilisation, patriotism, urbanity--their derivations and
their meanings--and you will see this.
I do not think I need say more. I have tried to set out the facts as
clearly and dispassionately as I can. I have omitted much that I might
have said. I have tried here, as throughout, to understate
difficulties rather than exaggerate them, because exaggeration defeats
its own ends. But I think if the reader will try to realise to himself
the state of affairs where no village has a say even in its simplest
affairs, and where everything is under the eye of a Government
official, where all initiative is forbidden and where the best men
stand aloof from all interest in village affairs, he will have some
idea that unrest is not unreasonable.
The village organism was the one vital institution left to India; it
was the one germ of corporate life that could have been encouraged into
a larger growth. It has been killed. It will have to be resuscitated
before India can cease to be _India Irredenta_.