THE NEW INFLUENCES: WESTERN SCIENCE AND COMMERCIALISM.
The first objects that I saw in India--indeed I saw them while still
well out at sea--were a lighthouse and a factory chimney! This was at
Tuticorin, a little place in the extreme south; but afterwards I found
that these objects represented remarkably well the vast spread of
Western influences all over the country, in their two great main forms,
science and commercialism.
I had no idea, until I landed, how Western ideas and education have
of late years overrun the cities and towns, even down to the small
towns, of India; but I was destined to be speedily enlightened on this
subject. Having a few hours to spare at Tuticorin, I was walking up and
down by the sad sea-waves when I noticed a youth of about seventeen
reading a book. Glancing over his shoulder, to my surprise I saw it
was our old friend “Todhunter’s Euclid.” The youth looked like any
other son of the people, undistinguished for wealth or rank--for in
this country there is no great distinction in dress between rich and
poor--simply clad in his cotton or muslin wrap, with bare head and
bare feet; and naturally I remonstrated with him on his conduct. “O
yes,” he said in English, “I am reading Euclid--I belong to Bishop
Caldwell’s College.”--“Bishop Caldwell’s College?”--“Yes,” he said,
“it is a large college here, with 200 boys, from ages of 13 or 14 up
to 23 or 24.”--“Indeed, and what do you read?”--“Oh, we read Algebra
and Euclid,” he replied enthusiastically, “and English History and
Natural Science and Mill’s Political Economy, and” (but here his voice
fell a semitone) “we learn two chapters of the Bible by heart every
day.” By this time other boys had come up, and I soon found myself
the centre of a small crowd, and conversing to them about England,
and its well-known scholars and politicians, and a variety of things
about which they asked eager questions. “Come and see the college,” at
last they said, seeing I was interested; and so we adjourned--a troop
of about fifty--into a courtyard containing various school-buildings.
There did not seem to be any masters about, and after showing me some
of the class-rooms, which were fitted up much like English class-rooms,
they took me to the dormitory. The dormitory was a spacious room or
hall, large enough I daresay to accommodate most of the scholars, but
to my surprise it contained not a single bit of furniture--not a bed or
a chair or a table, far less a washstand; only round the wall on the
floor were the boys’ boxes--mostly small enough--and grass mats which,
unrolled at night, they used for sleeping on. This (combined with J. S.
Mill) was plain living and high thinking indeed. Seeing my look of
mingled amusement and surprise, they said with a chuckle, “Come and
see the dining-hall”--lo! another room of about the same size--this
time with _nothing_ in it, except plates distributed at equal distances
about the floor! The meal hour was just approaching, and the boys
squatting down with crossed feet took each a plate upon his lap, while
serving-men going round with huge bowls of curry and rice supplied them
with food, which they ate with their fingers.
It certainly impressed me a good deal to find a high level of Western
education going on, and among boys, many of them evidently from
their conversation intelligent enough, under such extremely simple
conditions, and in so unimportant a place as Tuticorin might appear.
But I soon found that similar institutions--not all fortunately
involving two chapters of the Bible every day, and not all quite so
simple in their interior instalments--existed all over the land. Not
only are there universities at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, granting
degrees on a broad foundation of Western learning, and affiliated to
Oxford and Cambridge in such a way that the student, having taken his
B.A. at either of the Indian universities, can now take a further
degree at either of the English ones after two years’ residence
only; but there are important colleges and high schools in all the
principal towns; and a graduated network of instruction down to the
native village schools all over the land. Besides these there are
medical colleges, such as the Grant Medical College at Bombay; women’s
colleges, like the Bethune College at Calcutta, which has fifty or
sixty women students, and which passed six women graduates in the
Calcutta university examinations in 1890; and other institutions. In
most cases the principals of these higher institutions are English, but
the staff is largely native.
And as a part of Western education I suppose one may include our games
and sports, which are rapidly coming into use and supplanting, in
populous centres, the native exercises. It is a curious and unexpected
sight to see troops of dark-skinned and barefooted lads and men playing
cricket--but it is a sight one may meet with in any of the towns
now-a-days in the cooler weather. At Bombay the _maidans_ are simply
crowded at times with cricketers--Parsee clubs, Hindu clubs, Eurasians,
English--I reckoned I could count a score of pitches one day from the
place where I was sitting. The same at Calcutta. The same at Nagpore,
with golf going on as well. Yet one cannot help noticing the separation
of the different sections of the population, even in their games--the
English cricket-ground, the “second-class” English ground, the Eurasian
ground, the Hindu and Mahomedan--all distinct!
The effect of this rush of Western ideas and education is of
course what one might expect--and what I have already alluded to
once or twice--namely, to discredit the old religion and the old
caste-practices. As my friend the schoolmaster said at Calcutta, “No
one believes in all this now”; by no one meaning no one who belongs
to the new movement and has gone through the Western curriculum--the
“young India.”
The question may be asked then, What does the young India believe in?
It has practically abandoned the religion of its fathers, largely
scoffs at it, does it accept Christianity in any form in its place? I
believe we may reply No. Christianity in its missions and its Salvation
armies, though it may move a little among the masses, does not to
any extent touch the advanced and educated sections. No, the latter
read Mill, Spencer and Huxley, and they have quite naturally and in
good faith adopted the philosophy of their teachers--the scientific
materialism which had its full vogue in England some twenty years
ago, but which is now perhaps somewhat on the wane. As one of these
enthusiasts said to me one day, “We are all Agnostics now.” With that
extraordinary quickness and receptivity which is one of the great
features of the Hindu mind, though beginning the study so much later
in the day, they have absorbed the teachings of modern science and
leapt to its conclusions almost as soon as we have in the West. That
the movement will remain at this point seems to me in the highest
degree unlikely. There may be a reaction back to the old standpoint,
or, what is more hopeful, a forward effort to rehabilitate the profound
teachings of their forefathers into forms more suited to the times in
which we live, and freed from the many absurdities which have gathered
round the old tradition.
* * * * *
The second great factor in modern India is the growth of Commercialism.
This is very remarkable, and is likely to be more so. Not only at
Tuticorin, but at a multitude of places are factory chimneys growing
up. At Nagpore I saw a cotton-mill employing hundreds of hands. At
Bombay there are between thirty and forty large cotton-mills, there is
a manufacturing quarter, and a small forest of chimneys belching forth
their filth into the otherwise cloudless blue.
I visited one of the largest of these mills (that of the United
Spinning and Weaving Co.) with a friend who at one time had worked
there. It was the counterpart of at Lancashire cotton-mill. There was
the same great oblong building in three or four storeys, the same
spinning jenny and other machinery (all of course brought out from
England, and including a splendid high-pressure condensing engine
of 2,000 H.P.), the same wicked roar and scream of wheels, and the
same sickening hurry and scramble. But how strange to see the poor
thin oysters working under the old familiar conditions of dirt and
unhealth--their dark skins looking darker with grease and dust, their
passive faces more passive than ever--to see scores of Hindu girls with
huge ear-rings and nose-rings threading their way among the machinery,
looking so small, compared with our women, and so abstracted and dreamy
that it hardly seemed safe. And here a little naked boy about 10 years
of age, minding a spinning jenny and taking up the broken threads, as
clever and as deft as can be. Fortunately the Hindu mind takes things
easier than the English, and refuses to be pressed; for the hours are
shamefully long and there is but little respite from toil.
There is no doubt that great fortunes have been and are being made
in this cotton business. It can hardly be otherwise, for as long as
Manchester is in the market the goods of Bombay are in a line as
to price with the products of English manufacture; but they are
produced at very much less cost. I suppose the average wage for
adults in one of these mills is not more than 8_d._ a day (if so
much), and the difference between this and 2_s._ 8_d._ a day say as
in England, gives 2_s._ per diem saved on each employee. In the mill
that I visited there are 1,100 hands--say 1,000 adults; that gives
a saving of 1,000 × 2 shillings, or £100, a day; or £30,000 a year.
Against this must be set the increased price of coal, which they get
all the way from England (the coal of the country being inferior) at
Rs. 15 to 17 per ton--say 25 tons a day at 20_s._ added cost to what
it would be in England--_i.e._, £25 a day, or £7,500 a year. Then it
is clear that despite this and some other drawbacks, the balance in
favor of production in India is very great; and the dividends of the
cotton-mills at Bombay certainly show it, for they run at 20, 25, 50
and even 80 per cent., with very few below 20.
It is clear that such profits as these are likely to draw capital
out to India in rapidly increasing degree, and we may expect a vast
development of manufacturing industry there during the next decade or
two. The country--or at any rate the town-centres--will be largely
commercialised. And as far as the people themselves are concerned,
though the life in mills is wretched enough, still it offers a specious
change from the dull round of peasant labor, and something like a
secure wage (if only a pittance) to a man who in his native village
would hardly see the glint of coin from one year’s end to another; the
bustle and stir of the town too is an attraction; and so some of the
same causes which have already in England brought about the depletion
of the land in favor of the congestion of the cities, are beginning to
work in India.
Then beside the manual employment which our commercial institutions
provide there are innumerable trading posts and clerkships, connected
with merchants’ houses, banks, railways, post-offices, and all manner
of public works, all of which practically are filled by natives; and
some of which, with the moderate salaries attached, are eagerly sought
after. One hardly realises till one sees it, how completely these great
organizations are carried on--except for perhaps one or two Englishmen
at the head--by native labor; but when one does see this one realises
also how important a part of the whole population this section--which
is thus ministering to and extending the bounds of modern life--is
becoming. And this section again is supplemented by at least an equally
numerous section which, if not already employed in the same way, is
desirous of becoming so. And of course among both these sections
Western ideals and standards flourish; competition is gradually coming
to be looked on as a natural law of society; and Caste and the old
Family system are more or less rapidly disintegrating.
* * * * *
Such changes as these are naturally important, and indeed in an old and
conservative country like India strike one as very remarkable--but they
are made even more important by the political complexion they have of
late years assumed. In the National Indian Congress we see that not
only the outer forms of life and thought, but the political and social
ideas which belong to the same stage of historical development, have
migrated from West to East. The people--or at least those sections
of it of which we are speaking--are infected not only with Darwin
and Huxley, but with a belief in the ballot, in parliaments and
town-councils, and in constitutionalism and representative government
generally. The N. I. C. brings together from 1,000 to 1,500 delegates
annually from all parts of India, representing a variety of different
races and sections, and elected in many of the larger towns with the
utmost enthusiasm; and this by itself is a striking fact--a fact
quite comparable in its way with the meetings of the Labor Congresses
in late years in the capitals of Europe. Its conferences have been
mostly devoted to such political questions as the application of the
elective principle to municipal and imperial councils, and to such
social questions as that of child-marriage; and these subjects and
the speeches concerning them are again reviewed and reported by a
great number of newspapers printed both in English and the vernacular
tongues, and having a large circulation. Certainly it is probable
that the Congresses will not _immediately_ lead to any very striking
results--indeed it is hard to see how they _could_ do so; but the fact
of the existence of the N. I. C. movement alone is a pregnant one, and
backed as it is by economical changes, it is not likely--though it may
change its form--to evaporate into mere nothingness.
In fact--despite the efforts of certain parties to minimise it--it
seems to me evident that we are face to face with an important social
movement in India. What the upshot of it may be no one probably can
tell--it may subside again in time, or it may gather volume and force
towards some definite issue; but it certainly cannot be ignored.
The Pagetts, M.P., may be ponderously superficial about it, but the
Kiplings merry are at least equally far from the truth. Of course
in actual numerical strength as compared with the whole population
the party may be small; but then, as in other such movements, since
it is just the most active and energetic folk who join them, their
import cannot be measured by mere numbers. It is useless again to
say that because the movement is not acknowledged by the peasants,
or by the religious folk, or because it is regarded with a jealous
eye by certain sections, that therefore it is of no account; because
similar things are always said and always have been said of every new
social effort--in its inception--however popular or influential it may
afterwards become.
The question which is most interesting at this juncture to any one who
recognises that there really is something like a change of attitude
taking place in the Indian peoples, is: How do the Anglo-Indians regard
this change? and my answer to this--though given with diffidence--since
it is a large generalisation and there may be, certainly are, many
exceptions to it--is: I believe that taken as a whole the Anglos look
upon it with a mingled sentiment of Fear and Dislike. I think they
look upon the movement with a certain amount of Fear--perhaps not
unnaturally. The remembrance of the Mutiny of ’57 is before them; they
feel themselves to be a mere handful among millions. And I am sure they
look upon it with Dislike, for as said above there is no real touch,
no real sympathy, between them and the native races. However it may be
for the liberalising Englishman at home to indulge in a sentimental
sympathy with the aspiring oyster, the Britisher in India feels
that the relation is only tolerable as long as there is a fixed and
impassable distinction between the ruler and the ruled. Take that away,
let the two races come into actual contact on an equality, and ... but
the thought is not to be endured.
And this feeling of race-dislike is I think--as I have hinted in an
earlier chapter--enhanced by the fact that the Britisher in India is a
“class” man in his social feeling. I have several times had occasion
to think that the bulk-people of the two countries--though by no means
agreeing with each other--would, if intercourse were at all possible,
get on better together than the actual parties do at present. The evils
of a commercial class-government which we are beginning to realise so
acutely at home--the want of touch between the rulers and the ruled,
the testing of all politics by the touchstone of commercial profits
and dividends, the consequent enrichment of the few at the expense of
the many, the growth of slum and factory life, and the impoverishment
of the peasant and the farmer, are curiously paralleled by what is
taking place in India; and in many respects it is becoming necessary
to realise that some of our difficulties in India are not merely such
as belong to the country itself, but are part and parcel of the same
problem which is beginning to vex us at home--the social problem,
namely. The same narrowness of social creed, the entire decadence
of the old standards of gentle birth without their replacement by
any new ideal, worthy to be so called, the same trumpery earmarks of
society-connection, etc., distinguish the ruling classes in one country
as in the other; and in both are the signals of coming change.
At the same time it would be absurd to assume that the native of
India is free from serious defects which make the problem, to the
Anglo-Indian, ever so much more difficult of solution. And of these
probably the tendency to evasion, deceit, and underhand dealing is the
most serious. The Hindu especially with his subtle mind and passive
character is thus unreliable; it is difficult to find a man who will
stick with absolute fidelity to his word, or of whom you can be certain
that his ostensible object is his real one; and naturally this sort of
thing creates estrangement.
To my mind this social gulf existing between the rulers and the ruled
is the most pregnant fact of our presence in India--the one that calls
most for attention, and that looms biggest with consequences for the
future. Misunderstandings of all kinds flow from it. “When this want of
intercourse,” says Beck in his _Essays on Indian Topics_, “between the
communities or a reasonable number of people of each, is fixed on my
attention, I often feel with a sinking of the heart that the end of the
British Indian Empire is not far distant.”
I have already pointed out (p. 276) how clear it is by the example
of Aligarh that friendly intercourse is _possible_ between the two
sections--though we have allowed that it is difficult to bring about.
Mr. Beck corroborates this in his _Essays_ by strong expressions. He
says (p. 89), “An Englishman would probably be dubbed a lunatic if he
confessed that the only thing which made life tolerable in his Indian
exile was the culture, the interest, and the affection he found in
native society. Such an Englishman will therefore at most hint at his
condition”; and again--“As one whose circumstances have compelled
him to see more of the people of India than the average Englishman,
I can only say that the effort repays itself, and that, incredible
though it may appear, all degrees of friendship are possible between
the Anglo-Indian and his Eastern fellow-subject.” And further on,
after urging the importance, the vast importance, of cultivating this
intercourse, and so attempting to bridge the fatal gulf, he says:--“To
know the people, and to be so trusted by them that they will open out
to us the inmost recesses of their hearts; to see them daily; to come
to love them as those who have in their nature but an average share of
affection cannot help loving them when they know them well--this is our
ideal for the Indian civilian. Some Englishmen act up to this ideal: in
the early days of our rule several did. If it become the normal thing
the Indian Empire will be built upon a rock so that nothing can shake
it. Agitation and sedition will vanish as ugly shadows. Had it existed
in 1857 the crash would not have come.”
The writer of the above paragraphs thinks nothing of the N. I. C.
movement, or rather I should say thinks unfavorably of it; but of
the importance of bridging the social gulf he cannot say enough--and
in this latter point, as far as I feel competent to form an opinion
at all, I entirely agree with him. But will it ever be bridged?
Unfortunately the few who share such sentiments as those I have quoted
are very few and far between--and of those the greater number must as I
have already explained be tied and bound in the chains of officialdom.
“The Anglo-Indian world up to the hour when the great tragedy of ’57
burst upon them was busily amusing itself as best it can in this
country with social nothings”--and how is it amusing itself now? The
most damning fact that I know against the average English attitude
towards the natives, is the fact that one of the very few places
besides Aligarh, where there is any cordial feeling between the two
parties, is Hyderabad--a place in which, on account of its being under
the Nizam, _the officials are natives_, and their position therefore
prevents their being trampled on!
* * * * *
If the Congress movement is destined to become a great political
movement, it must it seems to me eventuate in one of two ways--either
in violence and civil war, owing to determined hostility on the part
of our Government and the continual widening of the breach between
the two peoples; or,--which is more likely--if our Government grants
more and more representative power to the people--in the immense
growth of political and constitutional life among them, and the
gradual _drowning out_ of British rule thereby. There is a third
possibility--namely the withdrawal of our government, owing to troubles
and changes at home. Either of these alternatives would only be the
beginning of long other vistas of change, which we need not attempt
to discuss. They all involve the decadence of our political power in
India, and certainly, situated as we are--unable to really _inhabit_
the country and adapt ourselves to the climate, and with growing social
forces around us--I can neither see nor imagine any other conclusion.
The Congress movement being founded on the economical causes--the
growth of commercialism, etc.--it is hard to believe that it will not
go on and spread. Certainly it may alter its name and programme; but
granted that commercialism is going to establish itself, it is surely
impossible to imagine it will do so, among so acute and subtle a
people as the Hindus, without bringing with it the particular forms of
political life which go with it, and really belong to it.
One of the most far-reaching and penetrating ways in which this
Western movement is influencing India is in its action on the sense
of _property_. The conception of property, as I have already pointed
out once or twice, is gradually veering from the communistic to the
highly individualistic. In all departments, whether in the family
or the township or the caste, the idea of joint possession or joint
regulation of goods or land for common purposes is dying out in favor
of separate and distinct holding for purely individual ends. It is
well known what an immense revolution in the structure of society has
taken place, in the history of various races and peoples, when this
change of conception has set in. Nor is it likely that India will prove
altogether an exception to the rule. For the change is going on not
only--as might fairly be expected--in the great cities, where Western
influence is directly felt, but even in the agricultural regions, where
ever since the British occupation it has been slowly spreading, partly
through the indirect action of British laws and land settlements, and
partly through the gradual infiltration, in a variety of ways, of
commercial and competitive modes of thought.
Now no estimate of Indian affairs and movements can be said to be of
value, which does not take account of the weight--one might say the
dead weight--of its agricultural life: the 80 or 90 per cent. of the
population who live secluded in small villages, in the most primitive
fashion, with their village goddess and their Hindu temple--hardly
knowing what government they live under, and apparently untouched
from age to age by invention and what we call progress. Nor can the
conservative force so represented be well exaggerated. But if even this
agricultural mass is beginning to slide, we have indeed evidence that
great forces are at work. If the village communities are going to break
up, and the old bonds of rural society to dissolve, we may be destined
to witness, as Henry Maine suggests, the recurrence of “that terrible
problem of pauperism which began to press on English statesmen as soon
as the old English cultivating groups began distinctly to fall to
pieces.” “In India however,” he says, “the solution will be far more
difficult than it has proved here.”
All this assumes the continued spread and growth of the commercial
ideal in India--which is a large question, and wide in its bearings.
Considering all the forces which tend now-a-days in that direction, and
the apparent inevitableness of the thing as a phase of modern life at
home, its growth in India for some years to come seems hardly doubtful.
But it is a curious phenomenon. Anything more antagonistic to the
genius of ancient India--the Wisdom-land--than this cheap-and-nasty,
puffing profit-mongering, enterprising, energetic, individualistic,
“business,” can hardly be imagined; and the queer broil witnessed
to-day in cities like Bombay and Calcutta only illustrates the
incongruity. To Hindus of the old school, with their far-back spiritual
ideal, a civilisation like ours, whose highest conception of life and
religion is the General Post Office, is simply _Anathema_. I will quote
a portion of a letter received from an Indian friend on the subject,
which gives an idea of this point of view. Referring to the poverty of
the people--
“All this terrible destitution and suffering throughout one-seventh
of the world’s population has been brought about without any benefit
to the English people themselves. It has only benefited the English
capitalists and professional classes. The vaunted administrative
capacity of the English is a fiction. They make good policemen and keep
order, when the people acquiesce--that is all. If this acquiescence
ceases, as it must, when the people rightly or wrongly believe their
religion and family life in danger from the government, the English
must pack up and go, and woe to the English capitalist and professional
man! I feel more and more strongly every day that the English with
their commercial ideals and standards and institutions have done far
more to ruin the country than if it had been overrun periodically by
hordes of savage Tatars.”
That Commercialism is bringing and will bring great evils in its train,
in India as elsewhere--the sapping of the more manly and martial
virtues, the accentuation of greed and sophistry, the dominance of
the money-lender--I do not doubt; though I do not quite agree with
the above denunciation. I think if the English have infested and
plagued poor India, it is greatly the fault of the Indians themselves
who in their passiveness and lethargy have allowed it to be so. And
I think--taking perhaps on my side a too optimistic view--that this
growing industrialism and mechanical civilisation may (for a time) do
much good, in the way of rousing up the people, giving _definition_,
so much needed, to their minds and work, and instilling among them the
Western idea of progress, which in some ways fallacious has still its
value and use.
Only for a time however. We in England, now already witnessing
the beginning of the end of the commercial _régime_, are becoming
accustomed to the idea that it is only a temporary phase; and in India
where, as I have said, the whole genius of the land and its traditions
is so adverse to such a system, and the weight of ancient custom so
enormous, we can hardly expect that it will take such hold as here,
or run through quite so protracted a course of years. Commercialism
will no doubt greatly modify and simplify the caste system--but to the
caste system in some purified form I am inclined to think the people
will return; it will do something also to free the women--give them
back at least as much freedom as they had in early times and before
the Mahomedan conquests, if not more; and finally Western science will
strongly and usefully criticise the prevalent religious systems and
practices, and give that definition and _materialism_ to the popular
thought which is so sadly wanting in the India of to-day; but the old
underlying truths of Indian philosophy and tradition it will not touch.
This extraordinary possession--containing the very germ of modern
democracy--which has come all down the ages as the special heritage and
mission of the Indian peoples, will remain as heretofore indestructible
and unchanged, and will still form, we must think, the rallying point
of Indian life; but it is probable and indeed to be hoped that the
criticism of Western thought, by clearing away a lot of rubbish, will
help to make its outline and true nature clearer to the world. However
there we must leave the matter.
THE END.
Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
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Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
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Page 110: “chank shells” was misprinted as “chanks hells”; corrected
here.
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