INDIAN CONSERVATISM
"By the well where the bullocks go,
Silent and blind and slow."
RUDYARD KIPLING.
[Sidenote: Indian conservatism.]
[Sidenote: Is mere inertia.]
But while acknowledging the potent influences at work, and accepting
these representative utterances, it may yet be asked by the
incredulous--What of the inherent conservatism, the proverbial tenacity
of India? Is there really any perceptible and significant change to
record as the outcome of the influences of the nineteenth century? Well,
the expression "Indian conservatism" is misleading. There is no Indian
conservatism in the sense of a philosophy of politics, of society, or of
religion. Indian conservatism--what is it? To some extent an idealising
of the past, the golden age of great law-givers and philosophers and
saints. But very much more--mere inertia and torpidity in mind and body,
a reluctance to take stock of things, and an instinctive treading in the
old paths. "Via trita, via tuta." In the path from one Indian village to
another may often be observed an inexplicable deviation from the
beeline, and then a return to the line again. It is where in some past
year some dead animal or some offensive thing has fallen in the path and
lain there. Year after year, long after the cause has disappeared, the
feet of the villagers continue in that same deviating track. That is in
perfect keeping with India. Or--to permit ourselves to follow up another
natural sequence--things may quickly begin to fit in with the deviation.
Perhaps the first rainy season after the feet of the villagers had been
made to step aside, some plant was found in possession of the avoided
spot. India-like, its right of possession was unconsciously deferred to.
And then the year following, may be, one or other of the sacred fig
trees appeared behind the plant, and in a few years starved it out. Ten
years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and
lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox,
or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied
upon the tree or some rude symbolic painting put upon it. Then an
ascetic comes along and seats himself in its shade, and now, already, a
sacred institution has been established that it would raise a riot to
try to remove.
Visitors to Allahabad go to see the great fort erected upon the bank of
the River Jumna by the Mahomedan emperor, Akbar. One of the sights of
the fort, strange to tell, is the underground Hindu temple of "The
Undying Banyan Tree," to which we descend by a long flight of steps.
Such a sacred banyan tree as we have imagined, Akbar found growing there
upon the slope of the river bank when he was requiring the ground for
his fort. The undying banyan tree is now a stump or log, but it or a
predecessor was visited by a Chinese pilgrim to Allahabad in the seventh
century A.D. Being very tolerant, instead of cutting down the tree,
Akbar built a roof over it and filled up the ground all round to the
level he required. And still through the gateway of the fort and down
underground, the train of pilgrims passes as of old to where the banyan
tree is still declared to grow. Such is Indian conservatism, undeterred
by any thought of incongruity. Benares is crowded with examples of the
same unconscious tenacity. I have spoken of the ruthless levelling of
Hindu temples in Benares in former days to make way for Mahomedan
mosques. Near the gate of Aurangzeb's mosque a strange scene meets the
eye. Where the road leads to the mosque, and with no Hindu temple
nowadays in sight, are seated a number of Hindu ashes-clad ascetics.
What are they doing at the entrance to a Mahomedan mosque? That is where
their predecessors used to sit two hundred years ago, before Aurangzeb
tore down the holy Hindu temple of Siva and erected the mosque in its
stead.
[Sidenote: Yields before a persistent obtruding influence.]
[Sidenote: _E.g._ British influence.]
But Indian conservatism is more than an indisposition to effort and
change; for the same reason, it is also an easy adaptation to things as
they are found. When a new disturbing influence obtrudes from without,
and persistently, it may be easier to give way than to resist. British
influence is such a persistent obtrusion. In English literature as
taught and read, in Christian standards of conduct, in the English
language, and in the modern ideas of government and society, ever
presented to the school-going section of the people of India within
their own land, there is such a continuous influence from without. The
impression of works like Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ or _Idylls of the
King_, common text-books in colleges, the steady pressure of Acts of the
British Government in India, like that raising the marriage age of
girls; the example of men in authority like Lord Curzon, during whose
vice-regal tour in South India there were no nautch entertainments; the
necessity of understanding expressions like "general election" and
"public spirit," and of comprehending in some measure the working of
local self-government--all such constant pressure must effect a change
in the mental standpoint. The army of Britain in India, representative
of the imperial sceptre, has now for many years been gathered into
cantonments, and its work is no longer to quell hostilities within
India, but only to repel invaders from without. Other British forces,
however, penetrating far deeper, working silently and for the most part
unobserved, are still in the field all over India, effecting a grander
change than the change of outward sovereignty. "Ideas rule the world,"
and he who impresses his ideas is the real ruler of men.
[Sidenote: Indian conservatism overpowered otherwise.]
Telling against Indian conservatism or inertia are other things also
besides persistent Western influences. Many things Western appeal to the
natural desire for advancement and comfort, and the adoption of these
has often as corollary a change of idea. To take examples without
further explanation. The desire for education, the key to advancement in
life, has quietly ignored the old orthodox idea that education in
Sanscrit and the Sacred Scriptures, _i.e._ higher education as formerly
understood, is the exclusive privilege of certain castes. The very
expression "higher education" has come to mean a modern English
education, not as formerly an education in Sanscrit lore. Had the
British Government allowed things to take their course, the still
surviving institutions of the old kind for Oriental learning would have
been transformed, one and all, into modern schools and colleges. Even in
1824, when Government, then under "Orientalist" influence, founded the
Sanscrit College in Calcutta for the encouragement of Sanscrit learning,
a numerous body of native gentlemen, with the famous Raja Rammohan Roy
at their head, petitioned that a college for the study of Western
learning might be established instead. For a number of years now, the
Sanscrit College, then founded, has actually had fewer pupils on its
rolls than it is permitted to admit at a greatly reduced fee.[6]
Again, the idea of _public questions_, the idea of the common welfare,
has come into being with the nineteenth century, and is quietly
repudiating caste and giving to the community a solidarity and a feeling
of solidarity unknown hitherto. Upon one platform now meet, as a matter
of course, the native gentlemen of all the castes, when any general
grievance is felt or any great occasion falls to be celebrated. The
Western custom of public meetings for the discussion of public questions
is now an established Indian institution, and daily gives the lie to the
idea that there is pollution in bodily contact with a person of lower
caste. That a special seat should be reserved for a man because he is a
brahman would be scouted. The convenience of travelling by rail or in
tram-cars has been even more widely effective in dissolving the idea.
And if the advantage or convenience of the new ways can overcome the
force of custom, so can the unprofitableness of the old. For
illustrations, I pass from the gentlemen who attend public meetings
where the speeches are in English, to the less educated and more
superstitious and more blindly conservative people. In the Mahratta
districts of the Central Provinces, says the _Census Report_ for 1901,
in recent years an unavoidable scepticism as to his efficiency has
tended to reduce the earnings of the Garpagari or averter of hail from
the crops. In Calcutta the same influence has extinguished the trade of
supplier of Ganges water. The water taps in the house or on the street
are too convenient, and the quality of the water is too manifestly
superior for the desecration from the iron pipes to outweigh the
advantages. A few years ago, in Darjeeling, north of Bengal, the brahman
names upon the signs of the liquor shops were distinctly in the
majority. The sacerdotal caste, new style, had appreciated the chances
of big profits and shut their eyes to the regulations of caste, which
have relegated drink-sellers to a very low place in the scale. Brahmans
are even said to figure among the contractors who supply beef, flesh of
the sacred animal, to the British army in India. "A curious sign of the
changing time," says Mr. Lockwood Kipling (_Beast and Man in India_),
"is the fact that Hindus of good caste, seeing the profit that may be
made from leather, are quietly creeping into a business from which they
are levitically barred. Money prevails against caste more potently than
missionary preaching."
In this region, where convenience or comfort or personal advancement are
concerned, it may safely be asserted that the so-called Indian
conservatism has not much resisting power. There, at least, it is found
that where there is a will there is a way.[7]
[Sidenote: The Indian mind awakened.]
And there is a higher influence at work dissolving and reconstituting
the whole framework of ideas. Upon the Indian mind, long lain fallow,
modern civilisation and modern thought and the fellowship with the world
are acting as the quickening rain and sunshine upon the fertile Indian
soil. That these and similar obtruding influences have had a
transforming effect has already been alleged. But far beyond, in promise
at least, is the revived activity of the Indian mind itself. If the age
of Elizabeth be the outcome of the stirring of the minds of Englishmen
through the discovery of a new world, the multiplication of books, the
revival of learning, and the reformation of religion, how shall we
measure the effect upon the acute Indian mind of the far more
stimulating influences of this Indian Renaissance! What comparison, for
example, can be made between the stimulus of the new learning of the
sixteenth century and the stimulus of the first introduction to a modern
library? It would be an exaggeration to say that the Indian mind is now
showing all its power in response to the stimulus. But it is everywhere
active, and in some spheres, as in Religion and Philanthropy, in
History, in Archæology, in Law, in certain Natural Sciences, individuals
have already done service to India and contributed to knowledge.
Glimpses of great regions, unexplored, in these domains are rousing
students to secure for themselves a province. "More copies of books of
poetry, philosophy, law, and religion now issue every year from the
press of British India than during any century of native rule."[8] Of
course it would be misleading to ignore the fact that reaction as well
as progress has its apostles among the awakened minds of India. Much of
the awakened mental activity, also, is spent--much wasted--on political
writing and discussion, which is often uninformed by knowledge of
present facts and of Indian history. The general poverty also, and the
so-called Western desire to "get on," prevent many from becoming in any
real sense students or thinkers or men of public spirit.
Indian conservatism, therefore, we contend, is not the insurmountable
obstacle to new ideas that many superficially deem it to be.