MACDONALD
AWAKENINGE
INDIA
DS
413
ма
A 542288

ARTES
1817
SCIENTIA
VERITAS
LIBRARY
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PLUMIOUS UNUM
TUEBOR
QUERIS PENINSULAM AMŒNAM
CIRCUMSPICE
193
413
MIA
X
THE AWAKENING OF INDIA
...
"
THE
AWAKENING OF INDIA
Un
BY
J. RAMSAY MACDONALD
M.P.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON MCMX
MU
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
H
To
TWO
WHO TOOK MUCH INTEREST
IN THE JOURNEY
BUT WHO NEVER SAW
THIS BOOK
365327
1
CONTENTS
PART I
A FOREWORD
I. APOLOGIA PRO LIBRO MEO.
II. ON THE WAY
PART II
IMPRESSIONS
I. IN BARODA
PAGE
3
8
17
II. AMONG THE RAJPUTS
24
III. AT SIMLA
31
IV. THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN
39
V. AT LAHORE
47
VI. PUNJAB CAMPS
55
}
vii
viii
CONTENTS
VII. AT BENARES
VIII. THE GENIUS OF BENGAL
PAGE
62
69
IX. THE WOMEN OF INDIA
75
X. THE WOMEN OF INDIA-continued
85
PART III
OPINIONS
I. INDIA
99
II. THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE'
""
106
III. THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
123
IV. THE LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
140
V. AWAKENING INDIA
180
VI. GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
210
VII. WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
268
VIII. LAST THOUGHTS
303
PART I
A FOREWORD

I
APOLOGIA PRO LIBRO MEO
I MAY be expected to apologise for this
book. I paid but a brief visit to India,
and was called back by a General Election
before I had completed my plans. Some
of my opinions might therefore be revised
on a more intimate acquaintance with the
land, its people, and its government.
In
I began to write for two purposes.
the first place, I promised to contribute
to The Daily Chronicle (which I have to
thank for many kindnesses, not the least
of which is the liberty to use the matter
I contributed to it) a few articles on im-
pressions I formed on the spot; and in
the second place, I began on my way home,
whilst my experiences were still fresh in
my memory, to put down on paper the
opinions I had formed with a view to
testing how far I could explain and support
them. This test-originally meant to be
a purely private exercise-and those articles
are the basis of this book.
3
4
APOLOGIA PRO LIBRO MEO
I
When I reached Bombay on my way
back I was taken to task by an Anglo-
Indian newspaper for having expressed
opinions with which it did not agree. It
wisely did not discuss the opinions; it
merely said I had no business to hold
them. Its state of mind is typical
regret to have to believe it-of the majority
of Anglo-Indians. They assume that no
one can understand them and their problems
unless his eyes have been blinded by the
Indian sun, and his mind moulded by
Anglo-Indian habits for a generation. Their
reply to criticisms is not reasons, but the
recital of dogmas which cannot be explained
to the perspiring stranger, they believe,
because the truth embodied in them cannot
be grasped by him. It belongs to a world
in which he is a child.
To such persons
further evidence
this book will be but
of the wickedness of the world, the im-
pertinence of men, and the bitterness of
the cup to be drained by Anglo-Indians.



66
But in India, as elsewhere, one very soon
discovers that there is not one man on
the spot," but two. That section of Anglo-
India represented by the best known news-
papers is only a majority. There is along-
side it a minority which knows India, I
think, more intimately, and has retained
APOLOGIA PRO LIBRO MEO
5
LO
i
!
under Eastern conditions the best of our
Western ethics more successfully. There
is also the Indian himself, who must still
count for something in Indian government;
and I venture to hope that these sections
may find in the following pages something
to justify my publishing them.
When I had finished my test of self-
examination, I found myself in a camp
almost by myself, the reason being, I think,
that I went out with the ideas of modern
collectivism in my mind. Whilst these
made me welcome the more political side
of Indian nationalism, they forbade my
sympathising with some of its economic
demands, such as Protection and the Per-
manent Settlement found in Bengal. I
thus at one moment take my place with
one bedfellow and at the next am with
another.
After conversations with men of im-
portance in many different walks of life
in India, I often pondered over the difficulty
of getting a mental grasp of what India is.
The thing eluded me. It was like at-
tempting to pick up mercury between the
fingers; and I certainly make no pretensions
to have gripped it yet. But this conclusion
I think is sound. A person can go to India
for a short time, a flying visit, and if he
6
APOLOGIA PRO LIBRO MEO
has carefully prepared himself before by
becoming acquainted with Indians here
and by reading authoritative statements
made by men in the various camps of
Indian life and activity; if he uses his
time judiciously, sees the right people, and
turns conversation into the most profit-
able channels; if he has the spiritual
faculty of sympathy with men of other
race than his own, he may get a far better
general view than those who have lived
long in the land. He will not have a very
accurate and detailed knowledge of the
trees; he will have a truly valuable con-
ception of the forest. In fact, the trees
and the forest are rarely seen by one mind.
The one obscures the other. Thus it comes
about that a shrewd observer, who will
make numerous mistakes in describing
details, will understand the general ten-
dency of the sum total of Indian life more
accurately than one who has lived so long
in the country that he has ceased to see
it except as a moving mass of detail.
",
:
The fresh eye is an important element !
in investigation and criticism; and this is
truer in India than in any land upon which
I have set foot. In India, habit counts
for far more than it does here. The country
is governed by a bureaucracy which, though
هدایت
APOLOGIA PRO LIBRO MEO
7
officers may come and officers may go,
goes on for ever, without a break beyond
the fluctuations in policy natural to its
own being. No General Election changes
its majority, no new Premier comes to
alter its course, no Parliamentary com-
plication modifies its will. It runs in ruts.
It has no machinery for self-criticism.
I have tried to be just both in my appre-
ciations and my depreciations. Not a sen-
tence has been written without a recollection
of the many proofs I had that there is
generosity, fair-mindedness, and a desire to
do right in all classes and all races in India.
If any one reading these pages detects in
them an unhappy suggestion that all is
not well in India, that unsettlement is
getting worse, that we have not yet found
the way of peace, that the West might be
more hesitating in asserting the superiority
of its materialist civilisation, I confess he
will only have detected what is actually
my feeling.
Beyond this I have only to say that the
book is just what it says it is the im-
pressions of one who whilst in India tried
to steep his mind in that of India.


II
ON THE WAY
THE East comes far to meet the traveller
from the West. He threads his way through
the fleets of commerce which speed through
the English Channel hastening to fulfil the
desires of a people which seek the gains
which the moth and rust corrupt and the
rival steals away; he enters the Bay:
and is tossed and buffeted by the waves
of the rude West which roll shorewards ›
in egotistical pride like an unconquered ;
army buoyant with a lust for new conquests ;
he skirts the coasts of Portugal upon
swelling seas that heave like the breast of
a strong man, passing slowly from the
stage of mighty effort to that of peaceful
slumber. The spell of the East has come
thus far. Next morning Tangier gleams
beneath the tawny mountains of Africa ;
the light glistens on a sleepy sea; the hills
are parched unto death by the hot embrace
of the ardent sun; Gibraltar rises bare
and blistering in front of him. When he
8

ON THE WAY
9
lands the hot air streams up from the
dusty ground and dries the moisture in
his eyes. The army of occupation is not
merely foreign, it belongs to another world
it is like a stray plant carried far from its
natural home struggling to master uncon-
genial air, unsuitable soil, and deadly sur-
roundings, and, by changing its root and
stem and leaves, to adapt itself to its new
conditions.
The heat increases; more passive becomes
the sea; the mountains rise up bare, broken,
jagged, screened by hot, shimmering air,
cooled by no kindly plant, rounded by no
gentle rain; and the traveller feels that he
himself is changing. He seems to be gliding
as though in sleep into a land of dreamy
laziness, into peace, into the void.
Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
In a word, the spell of the East is taking
hold of him.
At Marseilles the boisterous West pours
upon him like a douche from a spout,
blows upon him like the mistral. The
special train arrives. There is a general
bustle, a hurrying and a scurrying, and
from the mass emerges the particular. It
is bouncing and talkative and overdressed.

10
ON THE WAY
It holds up its skirts and reveals buckled
shoes, daintily stockinged ankles, and billows
of white lace. Or it may be of the other
gender, and then it is proudly official, drilled
into hauteur, groomed and cut in military
fashion. Its cheeks are smooth and glossy,
its hair has been patiently attended to
its head is poised with pride. Male or
female, it is imperial and imperious. It is
a ruling class. It is the West agitating
the spirit slipping away into the dream-
land of the East. It is like the hand of
the wakeful shaking the shoulder of the
sleeper. It is a jar, an annoyance. They
say that when one is nearly drowned one
wanders amidst pleasant pastures and on
happy paths and that then the return to
life is through horror-haunted ways beset
by pain. Thus does the arrival at Mar-
seilles of the superior ones on their way to
India disturb one who has seen Tangier
and Gibraltar in the sun, and who has
come so far upon a smooth Mediterranean
sea.
But the chatter dies, the bustle becomes
languid, and as the days go the East
creeps back steadily into the soul. We
walk in the cool morning miles and miles
round and round the deck; we return in
the evening to the same violent exercise.
ON THE WAY
11
!
But the spell has hold of us. At night the
moon throws
throws on the water its silvery
highway out into the infinite; the stars
in the deep, transparent space of the heavens
are beacon lights which seem to shine as
points in the eternal vastness—little points
which are footholds for the imagination
journeying through the illimitable; and
during the day the cruel glitter of the sun,
the subdued energy of the sea, the stifling
heat of the air, combine to oppress us
into a subjection of being, and an acquies-
cence in the decrees of the powers that
created us and of which we are the play-
things. We recline on deck reading novels;
the little sillinesses of social life become
the occupation of the day; a queen of
tragedy holds court on
court on one part of the
deck, one of happier dignity and equally
alluring robes holds court on another part;
young things who have just left their
solitary skiffs and have begun to row
down life together, sit side by side com-
(muning by glances, leaving each other
only to fetch a chocolate box or other
such sweet offering; old things who have
glided through those green glories of the
river of Time and have come to the more
sober banks where the stream gets broader
and the sound of the surf of the ocean


12
ON THE WAY
where all things end is beginning to be
heard, find energy for a rubber of whist
under the deck awning; but upon all
falls the languor of the tropics, upon all
comes the spirit of the East, the insensi
bility to Time, the carelessness regarding
things.
By and by the spell becomes no sweet
dreamy thing. Port Said is reached: th
sin of the East links itself in your arn
immediately you have paid your landing
fee to the Arab at the jetty, and you walk
into the dusty, smelling streets picketed
by blackguards. Mosques, crowds of figures
in long draperies, heat, tell you that the
West is far behind. You have glided int
a new world as men do at death. You ar
a stranger inquisitive and gaping, a chil
opening its eyes upon a new scene. Ther
come the deserts, tawny as the hide of å
lion, with their queer camel creatures, and
their robed, lithe children. The sun scorches
everything up. Its breath is the breath o
fire. It rises with menaces in its bloodshot
eye; it crosses the heavens, blinding like a
globe of molten silver; it sets in an expanse
of the most gorgeous colours. Pursuing it.
rises the moon, larger, redder, nearer than
the West knows it; and even the winds of
night come as from the mouth of the pit.

ON THE WAY
13
he unrefreshed body tosses in its sleep.
t is haunted by nightmares; the ship is
prison; the Furies are the jailers. One
truggles with something, something that
unseen, that is everywhere, that is
errible. The days are long; the nights
re longer. Thus one goes down the Red
ea past the Arabian coast, catching glimpses
f its barrenness, until Aden, a parched
inder, marks the limits of greatest torture.
The spell has been accomplished. The grip
f the East is upon the traveller. The sea,
oothed into a glassy indifference, swells
nd heaves around him, and, having under-
one the discipline, he awakes one morning
find clouds upon green hills, boats with
ast sails and of old-world shapes gliding
pon the waters, a white, ghostly town
etween the clouds and the sea. It is
Bombay.
And yet the spell is not complete. The
magic, like so many things of the East,
s losing its virtue. Sitting in the shade
of the hotel, the meaning of the ship which
he has just left appears before the wanderer
like a pageant seen between sleep and
wakefulness. I have written that the lan-
guor of the East falls upon all. It does,
and yet it does not. The men sitting in

14
ON THE WAY
long deck chairs, dozing over the sillies
of novels, sometimes pull themselves to
gether, and the will of the West grapple
with the acquiescence of the East. They
appear on the morning of landing in thei
helmets. The novels, the flirtations, th
listlessness are of the past. They are ene
getic, they are again imperial and imperious
they are of the governing caste, the master
of men. The change is miraculous. They
are lords returning home. North, an
South, and East they go to their district
and their regiments, to govern and over
awe, to rule and be vigilant. In the crow
they are like magnet centres from which
forces emanate and to which forces ar
drawn. To what end is this peculiar stat
of things tending? What system is
is
working out? What design is it com
pleting? These questions will demand an
answer more insistently and peremptorily
than they have hitherto done; but what
the answer is to be in the end only a vai
man will dogmatise about. Its broker
syllables, like a few parts of a shattered
record tablet, may be read in the work of
these ruling wills as seen in India to-day;
and it is my hope that in what I write I
may be able to put some of those syllables
together.
PART II
IMPRESSIONS
گیر

I
IN BARODA
I REACHED Baroda before the sun had
risen, and in the dim light of the railway
station received, in most excellent English,
the greetings of some officials. The waning
moon lay on the black sky like a chaste
piece of fine jewellery. Fires glimmered
amidst trees; a little tram stood a short
way off lit with oil lamps; a chattering
of men hidden in the shadows, and an
unhappy and broken call of birds met us
as we emerged into the darkness. Thus
I came to the capital of the most modern
and enlightened of the Indian rulers. The
early morning and the thoughts it brought
into being were peculiarly befitting the
circumstances.
It is easy to criticise Baroda: I have
heard a good deal of that since I reached
India. But Baroda can stand criticism. It
is incomplete, it is inconsistent in detail,
it is unfinished, it lapses into barbaric
absurdities-as Gothic architecture does.
There are astrologers at its Court. It
17
2

18
IN BARODA
is solemnly recorded in official publications
that when the late Prince-a victim of
Eton and Oxford culture-was about to
be married, the festivities were fixed by
the Court soothsayers. To bring this event
off a Committee was appointed to assist
the Prince, and a volume was published
containing an inventory of eligible young
ladies-I am not sure, however, but that
is only an adaptation of Western ways
which the Maharajah may have observed
during one of his own visits to us. Wheen
the new palace was complete the Annual
Report of the State informs us (1907-83)
that amongst "the most notable events
وو
of the year was "the removal of the
State throne and gods . . . with due ponhp
and necessary religious ceremony." In the
city itself no trace of the West is to be
found, unless it be the tramway. The
open booths, the all but nude men, women,
and children squatting amongst the mer-
chandise, the crowds, the noise, bear no
traces of the British Raj. We might as
well never have fought Plassey or quelled
the Mutiny.
But in the densest corner of the city
we were dragged up a steep flight of stairs
and on the first floor we discovered some
twenty little mites in quaint draperies and

IN BARODA
19
with sad, wise faces writing cabalistic char-
acters on slates. It was a compulsory school,
one of the 1,200 which are now to be found
all over the State, established since 1903,
when the Maharajah decided to decree
that elementary education was thence-
forth to be free and compulsory. Puffing
up after us came the schoolmaster in the
limited garb of a Turkish bath attendant.
The worthy man had been down gossiping
in the bazaar and had rushed up to show
the sahib and the memsahib what wonderful
things his pupils could do.
Not far off was a technical school housed
in part in the old palace where the Gaekwars
used to be married. There we saw pupils
do pattern-making, engineering, carpentry,
weaving, dyeing. Near at hand were chemi-
cal laboratories and art studios. Elsewhere
girls were being taught the same lessons
as boys, and were, in addition, being initiated
into such domestic arts as cooking and
sewing. Above all was the College and its
adjunct the Museum, European in every-
thing except in the insufferable heat of its
atmosphere. British art, British philosophy,
British text-books! The temperature, the
glimpses of palms through the windows,
the bullock carts passing along the road
in front, the graceful figures with bowls


20
IN BARODA
and jars on their heads-had it not been for
these we should have thought we were at
home.
We visited other institutions, from the jail
to the doss-house, from the menagerie to
the public well, and everywhere the testi-
mony was the same. In Baroda the will of
man is struggling with his inheritance and
with nature in the spirit of what we call
"Progress." Heads of departments come and
talk and bring their Blue Books as offerings
to the Western inquirer. In the jails they
have adopted the Borstal system; they
have just founded a new State Bank; they
have appointed an economic expert to
advise as to the industries which can best
be carried on within their boundaries.
He
has begun chrome tanning and is hunting for
paying minerals. The monopoly of ports like
Bombay and Kurachee is being challenged,
and other harbours in Baroda territory
are being surveyed. They have solved the
problem of religious instruction. Moham-
medan and Hindu are no longer like our
church and chapel, but are wolf and lab
lying down together. They have less
trouble with their tongues of Marathi,
Guzerati, Urdu than the University of
Ireland has with Celtic. "But we have not
not
yet solved the problem of moral instruction,

وو

IN BARODA
21
e of the officials said to me:
"We are
ll looking for suitable text-books!"
In politics they have revived the courts
the old village communities; they have
parated the Executive from the Judiciary;
resentative Government has been carried
far as it has been in Germany. They are
refore face to face with financial problems.
ey have managed, however, to lower
ir land assessment, and if it is, nominally,
so low as under our rule, it is levied with
mechanical accuracy, and the financial
cers contend that it presses less severely
the people. A kind of graduated income
is in operation; and although there is no
itation upon the amount which may be
rowed on land, a form of the Homestead
v protects the cultivator from the money-
der, who would sell him up altogether.
ed with enthusiasm for the work of Mr.
arles Booth and Mr. Rowntree, and also
cermined to carry out in Baroda what he
d to plead with us to do in our territories,
R. C. Dutt, the Prime Minister, has just
eshadowed a scientific inquiry into the
onomic condition of the people with a view
making further alterations in the incidence
taxation.¹
To this, and much more of the same kind,
He died, unfortunately, a few weeks after I saw him.

22
IN BARODA
we listen in the cool hall of the St
Guest House, where Ministers come to
us of the dreams they are dreaming.
we follow these programmes, problems wh
come from the essence of things rise up
our minds. Is India to respond to th
Or will she, like a great giant disturbed
some troublesome creature, put her hand
and with a gentle tap annihilate it? T
is the Indian problem so far as I can
see.
sun.
As I was thinking it over they came
take us to the palaces. There are th
of them glittering and shining all day in
As you approach they rise above
in haughty strength, their marbles spur
you by their purity, their mosaics despi
you for your lowliness and poverty.
the instant you cross their thresholds
hand of decay is outstretched to meet y
The West, meanly respectable, is fading a
rotting in the Indian heat. The paint
pictures made in London and Paris stud
has cracked, has softened, has run.
gilt on English frames has tarnished a
chipped. The inlaid work of Shoreditch a
Hackney has become parched like a clayfi
in a dry season. The bats have desecrat
the rooms; the straws of nests built in t
sandal-wood joists have lodged in the
ર

IN BARODA
23
rners.
cast in
Outside brazen bulls cast
rmingham bellow at marble ladies
shioned by machinery, and they stand in
oves and beds, and are fanned by breezes
om lakes planned and made by gardeners
m Kew. But again the sun of India
wly masters the will of man. Miles of
se pipes try to moisten the parched soil
d cool the roots of the grass and the
ousand flowers. Standing on the balconies
the Lakshmi Vilas Palace one can see
e struggle going on as one can see the
ogress of a contest between wrestlers.
hd as one looks down upon the strife, one's
es become blind to flowers and gardens
d sun.
One sees races and civilisations,
n and nature, gripping each other, and
sphinx face of Destiny, who knows all
t tells nothing, looking on.

II
AMONG THE RAJPUTS
NORTH from Baroda the country becom
a great grassy plain, very much like t
South African veldt, particularly betwe
the Modder River and Magersfontein. T
men change. They become more jaunty
their carriage. They part their beards
the middle and comb back the sides to th
ears. They carry ancient guns and o
world scimitars. When the sun sinks in
evening a thousand herds of cattle wan
home over innumerable tracks convergi
on the villages. This is Rajputana, t
home of proud warriors and brave wome
Baroda, with a smile, says, “I
modern " ; Rajputana, with a haug
sniff, says, "I keep the old ways." Co
merce and politics have both invaded pa
of it; some of its chiefs hanker after Engli
Philistinism. But these degeneracies a
still exceptions.
The first Rajput chief I met, the we
known Sir Pratap Singh, of whom so man
24

AMONG THE RAJPUTS
25
tic tales are told, was deploring the
hat the hand of age was upon him,
there was no chance of another war,
hat the probability therefore was that
uld have to die on a bed. Pax Britan-
was nothing to him except an evidence
the Golden Age had passed. He was
ing to be allowed to lead his polo team
nst Bengal politicians, and was promis-
to do the necessary damage with the
lles of the clubs. It is he who is sup-
d to have said that within a few hours
he British withdrawal from India there
ld not be a rupee or a virgin left in
gal-or something to that effect. He
son in spirit of one of those famous
ut heroes who, finding himself dying,
tan, begging as
When

26
AMONG THE RAJPUTS
possible to the ruined temples, p
bazaars, tanks, and the still almost I
towers, might as well have stayed at
What man has read Tod's story of
without feeling something of a hero
self? As a tale of the finest chiva
should be in our school books. My fr
are dinning it into my ears that there
India. I do not know, but Chitor give
something to go upon.
Round these walls tradition has wo
most sacred garlands. Wending one's
up the long zigzag road, which is fla
all along by massive walls and spar
every now and again by a frowning gate,
may still imagine that he hears the tra
of the Rajput cavalry going out to die:
it is easy to ima
and othe

AMONG THE RAJPUTS
27
temples; the hum of prayers rose on every
hand; queer forms moved in the gloom.
The spell of the Mighty Past fell upon us.
At Chitor the past is dead, and only comes
from its grave in the twilight. But not far
off is the new capital of the State, Udaipur,
the site of huts erected by the fugitive
Pratap when pressed by Akbar. Here the
Old Time still lives in the light of day.
The railway stops far out from the
confines of Udaipur as an unclean thing
stops at the threshold of a temple, and
we had to drive for a mile or so to get
to the city. Towering over the town are
great white palaces and temple domes.
The hills around are capped by palaces
and forts and temples. Holy men wander
unkempt, ash covered, almost naked, in
its streets, or sit beneath its trees con-
templating the Eternal and the all-com-
prehending Void.
Hardly had we arrived when we were
told that a religious procession had started
from the palace. The crowd came blowing
horns, beating drums and cymbals, on foot,
on horses, on elephants. The Maharana
rode under a golden umbrella towards the
rear. The rains were over, and the time
had come when of old the chiefs gathered
round their ruler and prepared to go out
28
AMONG THE RAJPUTS
with him to give battle. But before they
went they had to propitiate the gods.
Therefore a holy man came and sat for
ten days in a temple without food or sleep
holding a sword on his knees, and every
evening before sunset the Maharana and
his warriors went in state to do homage
before him. They used to chant sacred
songs and recite sacred verses on the way.
That was the procession we saw. The
sword of a famous ancestor had been sent
from the palace the day before, and the
Yogi sat with it in the temple as though
the Pax Britannica had not been declared,
and as though other sounds than those of
reaping still followed the rains.
Next morning the Maharana sent for us.
Inside the palace all was Oriental bustle.
Camels, horses, fowls, peacocks, elephants
wandered in the courtyards, the white walls
of which flared in the sun. A perfect
maze of moving humanity, from whining
babes to the decrepit aged moved about.
Suitors with their petitions sat at the door-
ways, soldiers paced up and down in the
arches with swords on their thighs, scribes
and courtiers lounged against pillars and
stretched themselves on marble benches.
Through endless passages, up innumerable
stairs we were taken, and at length were
AMONG THE RAJPUTS
29
ushered into the presence of a small, keen-
He
eyed, grey-bearded, dignified man.
toyed with a sword which lay across his
knees, and explained that he had been
busy with his devotions.
When he
We were away back in the Middle Ages,
in the presence of a man whose greatest
boast was
that no Muslim blood ever
tainted his own, and that he had been
true to the Rajput motto, "He who keeps
He stood
the faith is preserved by God."
for the old ways, he told us.
goes out into his domain 3,000 retainers
follow him. He sacrifices every morning
to his gods; he sits on his judgment-seat
and hears the petitions of his people; he
keeps his sword arm strong and crafty by
hewing at clay images. Even his clocks
decline to bow the knee to our noon, as his
ancestors declined to accept the yoke of
the Mogul so he lives half an hour behind
official time. I do not know to what
enormities of heathendom I committed my-
self, but I said it was well that the old
should not die. He smiled approvingly,
murmured that some of his chiefs were not
so faithful as himself, shifted his sword,
held out his hand, and we returned through
the courtiers, the soldiers, and the suitors into
the noisy and the crowded courtyards below.
30
AMONG THE RAJPUTS
In the evening we sat on the verandah of
the Guest House, up on a hill commanding
wide views over mountain and plain and
lake, watching the sun set and listening to
an old man tell of Pratap, the foe of Akbar,
and other Rajput heroes and Rajput battles.
Youth returned and swelled in our veins.
The glamour of chivalry enthralled us.
But when the pinks and the yellows were
deepening into night, the tales were broken
by the crunching of horses' feet on the
gravel. We were like sleepers roused from
dreaming. After all, we were of the West,
and in the garb of the West we had to
go out and dine with the representative of
the British Raj in this old-world State.
I am afraid he thought us very dull. I
was careering over the plains of Rajputana,
living in times that are gone, and with
men who have been but dust for centuries.
III
AT SIMLA
SIMLA is eight thousand feet above sea-
level, and ten thousand miles above the
heads of the people. The train up to
these heights twists and doubles, snorts
and puffs, races and almost sticks; it
pirouettes round corners and glides along
the edges of precipices.
At first the journey is interesting. The
mountains receive their visitor with regal
splendour. They throw their arms about
him; they envelop him in their mightiness;
they soothe him and overwhelm him by
their massive grandeur. But they pall as
the hours go, and before Simla is reached
the flesh has become weary and the eye
tired, and it is a jaded and blasé wanderer
who at length beholds the sacred snow-
clad mountains from which the Ganges
comes, and alights amongst the dwelling-
places of those who are permitted to live
on this Olympus.
They tell us that the railway journey,
with the expectations of its start dying
31
AT SIMLA
away to the weariness of its finish, is an
allegorical representation of the way which
men have to walk from the day they pass
into the service to that when Simla opens
its gates to them, and that the Government
of India defends the otherwise indefensible
loss on this railway on the ground of its moral
value. On this, as on other vital matters,
the Annual Report on the Material and
Moral Progress of the East Indies is silent.
So soon as the wanderer steps out of the
train he knows he has come to a town
unique amongst towns. Simla hangs on
to the hill-tops by its eyebrows, and earth-
quakes try every now and again to shake
it off. When earthquakes fail, the heavens
open their doors and deluges fall to wash
it away. But it sticks tight, like a cowboy
on a bucking steed, and preserves its dignity.
And who is to write of that dignity? It
pervades Simla as the smell of cows per-
vades some Hindu temples. You have
simply to sit down by the side of the road
and feel it glide past. If it now and again
merges into the ridiculous-well, that is
always the flaw in the material of dignity.
The roads climb up hill-faces, and they
are narrow and cannot be laid properly.
Therefore only three households of the
gods are allowed to drive upon them.
AT SIMLA
33
The rest of the dwellers must walk, or
must be drawn by four men in rickshaws
which look like dilapidated bath-chairs.
Some of the more permanent sojourners
have private establishments of bath-chairs.
They have a staff of runners in uniform,
and their ladies sally forth with these in
the afternoon, and, arrayed in all the glories
of the West, are pulled up hill and down
dale-like proud mothers out for an airing
after an interesting event. I have been
told that only those who have been in
Simla can imagine what the more delectable
parts of heaven are like. I have also been
told by poor, overworked, overworried,
and overspending officials that that is
the nonsense poured into the minds of
innocent Europeans who know not the
world. But I must write of what I saw,
of how I felt-and of how, ultimately, I
laughed and sorrowed.
Taken individually, the Indian official
has more than the average amount of virtue.
He is sensitive and introspective, for he
suffers from fever and exile, and so his very
virtues become a burden to him. He is
honest, he worships efficiency, he is sensible
of his high calling to rule equitably. He
does his best in these respects, and he never
spares himself in the doing of it. But his
3
34
AT SIMLA
path is through a jungle infested by trouble-
some beasts of prey. There is the House of
Commons on the one hand, there are the
educated, agitating natives on the other.
Pursuing his way alone, as he has so often
to do, through this weary land, his mind
never shifts from his work, his thoughts
never turn from his honesty. He takes few
holidays, for he spends his cold weather in
his district, and with the hot weather comes
that maddest of all the mad doings of the
English in India-the emigration of the
chiefs of governments to some hill station-
and he goes up to meet the rest of the head-
men of his caste and burn incense with
them in their departmental temples, to at-
tend religious dances, dinners, and recep-
tions at the Viceregal abode, and to purify
himself by writing reports and compiling
statistics. This goes on for years without
a break, except when he is in bed with
fever, or when he runs home in a hurry with
a broken-down wife or a child ready for
exile. His Government pays handsomely
for a daily supply to him of home news,
which is both prejudiced and inaccurate,
and appears to be designed to upset his
nerves; and if his Government does not
do him that service, his newspapers will do
it for a copper a few hours later. Thus fate
AT SIMLA
35
is hard on him. Worried in India, told
twice a day that the homeland is going to
the dogs, how can the poor man keep
morally fit?
Moreover, he feels that prestige is the
bulwark of his rule. We do not rule India
by the sword, but by our prestige.
"The
sahib is a man of power ";
so says the
Indian; and, adds the sahib himself, “Akbar,
and not a Whitehall official, is the potentate
upon whom I should model myself." Thus
it happens that when a Member of the House
of Commons puts questions about the sahib,
the sahib resents it. He constructs theories
about the questioning Member; the Anglo-
Indian Press assists his imagination. So the
sahib becomes more dignified, more intro-
spective, more conscious of his own virtue,
more resentful about questions in Parlia-
ment, less careful of his manners. He
murmurs more devoutly about " prestige,"
that occult abracadabra which surrounds
him with magical influences and which
makes him sacred. He thus tends to be-
come a thing apart, to become a Rajah who
is convinced that his ancestor was a moon
or a sun or other respectable deity. As a
matter of simple and sober fact, he is
only a good average Englishman, with re-
markably little knowledge of the world
་་་
.....
36
AT SIMLA
and of what is going on in it, with an
honest, bluff sense of justice and a real
desire to do his work well. He was put
in an isolated post in India at too early
an age perhaps; he had to pass examina-
tions which did not really winnow the
chaff from the wheat; he has to do his
best to keep fit in a climate which does not
give him a chance; his whole life, and
especially his arrangement of work, are
unnatural; he lives in an alien civilisation
and has too defective an imagination to
get into vital touch with it. These are his
troubles. A little more sympathy with the
West from which he came would help him
in his trials; but as it is he is in India but not
of it, of the West but not in it. All he can
do, therefore, is to constitute the most
clearly defined of all the castes in India,
the ruling caste, and become a god sitting
on an Olympus.
As such you see him in Simla, walking or
riding with dignified helmet on his head and
impressive cane in his hand-grave, up-
right, supermanly in aspect and demeanour.
A stranger from Mars dropped on the top of
this hill would certainly inquire, "Who are
these kings? From what other world do
they come ?" And he would put his ques-
tion in sober seriousness. For the Indian
AT SIMLA
37
official looks the part he has chosen for him-
self. Indeed, he is as near the perfect
official, whose type is to be found in heaven,
as any whom I have seen. As a matter of
fact, if he would only read Radical papers
exclusively for a year, so as to acquire some
knowledge of Western politics, and confine
his other reading for the same space of time
to works of humour, so as to become a little
thick-skinned, nobody on this earth would
be like him. I have met some such. No
place where I have been is without them
altogether. They are the salt of the service,
and if Lord Morley could only discover them
(he has put his finger on one or two already),
the British Raj could laugh at sedition, and
the British citizen would need to have no
qualms about the government of India.
But a great impediment has been put
recently in the way of the salvation of the
mass. Some time ago a poet came to their
aid, and wrote "Pagett, M.P." The Sys-
tem in Simla sighed with satisfaction. It
fashioned the rhyme into breastplates and
helmets, swords and spears, greaves and
gyves. Morning Prayers," the "Manual
of Deportment,” How to Approach an
A.D.C.," Reuter's telegrams, The Pioneer,
were all put into the background as things
of offence, defence, and consolation. The
66
66
38
AT SIMLA
66
inquirer who comes to India and who asks
about the extravagant waste of money on
public undertakings, from railways to Simla
roads, about the whacking of natives, about
the mystery of the rickshaw, about the
bribery that is honeycombing the lower
strata of the public service, gets some in-
formation politely, but the man who
knows" is sad at heart. He is certain that
the poor stranger does not understand, that
he will not have the intelligence to steer
clear of educated natives, that he will not
be able to appreciate the Indian truth. He
is a fish out of his moral water. And so,
whilst the System explains and defends its
absurdities to you, it also seems to say,
“But excuse me, my dear innocent. You
must remember you can never understand
the occult, which is the truth upon which
I am based. Let me get up on my pinnacle
and recite a little wise poetry to you." Up
it goes and begins:
Pagett, M.P., was a liar, and affluent liar therewith-
He spoke of the heat of India. . . .
And you feel very humble and very angry
--and the gulf between you and the System
widens. If you are a profane man you swear;
if a passive Christian, you walk sorrowfully
away; if an ordinary person with common
sense, you laugh boisterously.
IV
THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN
THE Pathan is a Mohammedan who lives in
the hills between India and Afghanistan, and
is a delightful fellow. He has no bows and
salaams. He looks you in the face as one
gentleman looks another, and is as inter-
ested in you as you are in him. His smile
is perfect; his face is as handsome as a
woman's. The fact that he is likely to be
shot one day by a neighbour from behind
a boulder seems to raise his thoughts above
the mundane affairs of life, and he swaggers
along prepared to take pot-luck when it
comes. He holds life at a low fee he is a
humorist. There has been nobody like him
since the peace between England and Scot-
land was cemented, and the Borderer and
the Highlander both bade the world adieu
in consequence. Even the blindest Anglo-
Indian cannot despise him. He is a man
and a brother amongst white men.
;
I have not been able to make up my mind
whether the following story, which seems
39
40 THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN
to be quite authentic, shows the humorist,
the religious fanatic, the grasping man of
thrift, or the ready taker of human life.
Perhaps it shows a mingling of all those
qualities, and there is no good Pathan
without them. A Mullah appeared one day
in a village and proceeded to make his claims
upon its temporalities. The levy he im-
posed was held to be heavy, and he explained
to the villagers that it had to be so on ac-
count of their own religious shortcomings,
shown by the fact that no tomb of a holy
man was within their borders. The villagers
grumbled, retired to consider the claim, and
presently returned. "It is quite true,"
announced their headman, " that this village
possesses no holy man's tomb and that we
deserve your frowns. That has long been
a cause of sorrow to ourselves. We have
therefore decided to end this undesirable
state of things at once lest mischief befall
us. You yourself have great fame for
holiness, and you will now die and your
tomb will be in our midst." No wandering
Mullah now condemns that village, for there
is a tomb in it which glares with whitewash
during the day and which shines in the
light of glimmering lamps at night. The
holiness of the village is envied by its
neighbours, and its people now find it easier
THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN 41
to bow in daily prayer to the One God whose
Prophet was Mohammed.
In the modern world the Pathan is a
trafficker. He jobs horses and lends money.
That shows a wonderful faculty for accommo-
dating the inner light to the outer darkness.
For the Pathan is forbidden by his Koran
to take usury, and at home he generally
follows the Koran in this respect. Hence
there has been trouble in establishing agri-
cultural banks in some parts of the North-
West where they are most required. But he
is proving too clever for the Koran. He ap-
points agents, through whom he receives his
gains, and sometimes making a bold and a
short cut of it, he becomes a Modernist in this
respect, holds the economics of Mohammed
to be antiquated, and, without a qualm of
conscience, lends a rupee in the morning,
calls for it in the evening, and pockets it
with an anna in addition. In the capacity
of money-lender he is drifting southwards
and eastwards. Whether he will ever rank
with the Hindu in this respect remains to
be seen. He has only begun the job; but
his love of filthy lucre and his habits of
thrift will carry him far.
He believes in rifles, and despises bombs.
For the same reason he holds the Babu in
contempt. He dearly loves a raid, and if
42 THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN
caught red-handed he dies like a man.
He has no affection for us, but he holds us in
great respect. During one of our recent
campaigns on the frontier a Pathan com-
pany was blazing away at the enemy from
the ancient rifles with which we have armed
them, and with old-fashioned gunpowder.
An English regiment with which the com-
pany was co-operating, assuming that who-
ever used black powder was the heathen,
poured into their colleagues a hail of bullets.
"This is too bad," remarked a Pathan to his
officer. "We do not mind fighting the
English if that is the game, but both the
English and the others--that is not fair.”
That is the Pathan all over.
Four of them were sent out with us as an
escort one day, and we fell a-talking. They
told me of one of their comrades-in-arms
who went to his village on a week-end leave
of absence. During the two days he was
away he had stormed and blown up a fort
erected by one with whom he had a feud,
killed two men, and burned a village. He
turned up at the beginning of the week as
though nothing had happened; and as the
scene of the exploit was outside the British
sphere of occupation, he made no secret of
his Saturday and Sunday employment. I
asked one of them if he was the proud
THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN 43
..
possessor of a blood feud. No," he re-
plied, "I live too near to the British border."
But he looked more like a child who has been
asked if it has a sixpence, and in replying
that it has not, indicates : "But would
I not like to have one?"
To get into the Pathan's mind one has to
go up into the mountains of the frontier,
where he lives. There every village is a
fort. Strong mud walls surround it, and
a citadel rises up in its midst. If it is in the
neighbourhood of a stream or a neutral
road, like the Khyber, there will likely be a
trench dug down to the stream or the road
for purposes of protection. In some cases
the trench may be a tunnel for extra safety.
Over the villages tower the hills, bare rocks
glittering in the sun and fiercely hot like
ovens. On little plateaux or at the bottom
of river beds small fields of maize and other
grain may be seen, and on the bare mountain
sides or in the dusty channels that are
watercourses during the rains, the village
flocks of goats find something to eat.
The domestic side of the Pathan is seen in
the Khyber. The Khyber road itself is sacred
against him. He can walk on it, but he may
not fight on it. If he meet his enemy there,
both are in sanctuary and greet each other
like Christians. A murder on this road is
44 THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN
an offence against the British Government,
and would be punished. Thus, law and
order runs in a channel through the country
towards Cabul.
True, the law and order still needs the
support of the rifle, but not so much as it
used to do. On Tuesdays and Fridays the
British Government sends an escort of troops
up the Pass to protect caravans going be-
tween India and Afghanistan, and a special
force called the Khyber Rifles has been
enrolled for this purpose. Therefore, on
those days, and on special occasions when
necessary, a cavalcade starts from the
Jamrud Fort, on the Indian side of the Pass.
Hundreds of camels and scores of donkeys
and buffaloes, laden with everything, from
grand pianos to scrap-iron, fall into line.
The march to Cabul begins.
road ascends and becomes
colour. The mountains close in. With
rifles slung across their backs, the hillmen
appear tending their flocks, or whacking
their donkeys, or wandering aimlessly about,
thinking perhaps of the good old times when
caravans gave sport and an ampler living.
Silhouetted against the sky on every hill-
top two or three guards are seen keeping
watch, and forts are frequently passed. As
the road winds in its ascent, magnificent
The dusty, red
steely grey in
THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN 45
+
views of the great Indus Plain open out
below, with Peshawar in the far distance.
But they say that the escorts now are but
ceremonies in which the realities of past
times survive. We went through with four
men; whereas, we were told by one of them,
a hundred would not have been sufficient a
few years ago. And yet one never knows
what the future has in store for the Pathan.
I doubt if we have heard the last of these
Dugald Dalgettys of the border. Gun-run-
ning from Muscat has become a great trade
we were told of one tribal family that was
trying to raise enough wind to buy a cannon ;
and the hillmen are better armed than our
own native levies. It is said that the tribes
are getting restive in parts, and I have been
told tales-most of them probably baseless-
of religious societies and Mullahs whispering
dangerous things in the ears of the Devout.
Of this, however, we may be certain.
The Pathan is not in the least afraid of us.
He is prepared to play at targets with us
or with anybody else if the spirit moves
him. And the spirit can easily move him.
The frontier is still the seat of mysterious
religious and political movements. It is
said that he has been following with much
headshaking recent events in Turkey, for,
unlike the younger Mohammedans of the
46 THE KHYBER AND THE PATHAN
plains below, he has his doubts about
recent events in the world of Islam. More-
over, we have driven him up into the
hills and have confined him too much.
Life becomes harder for him; time now
flows slowly and inertly through his sand-
glass. The call to action would find him
quite willing, and he would have no thought
of what the consequences would be. It
would be the will of the Lord. It would
be the fate of man. It would be the event
foreordained since the beginning of the
world. And the Pathan for a few brief
weeks would take his rifle off his back,
and the hills would echo and re-echo the
crack of guns and the cries of fighting-men.
The Pathan would be enjoying himself.
V
AT LAHORE
THE first thing which one learns in India is
to take it in bits. The political movements
in Bengal, Bombay, and the Punjab present
differences of method and outlook which
must influence conclusions about Indian
nationalism.
Lahore is the capital of the Punjab,
and the centre of its political activities.
Here one meets amongst leaders Lajpat
Rai, and amongst organisations the Arya
Somaj. Moreover, as in the Punjab, the
Hindu and the Mohammedan practically
balance each other, it is in the Punjab
that one can best understand the difficulties
which must beset a Nationalist movement
in India. When one has gone round the
Arya Somaj school and college in the morn-
ing, under the guidance of the Somaj
leaders, interviewed the reception committee
of the Indian National Congress in the
afternoon, dined with the Moslem League
in the evening, and filled in the interstices
47
48
AT LAHORE
with interviews with British officials, one
begins to understand the intricacy of Lahore
-that is, Punjab-politics.
The centre and source of Punjab activities
are in the Arya Somaj, and its propaganda
must be first of all understood. The Somaj
was founded in Bombay in 1872, but it
never took root there, nor did it succeed.
in Bengal or Madras. The Punjab, with
its religious conflicts, its religious austerities,
and its puritanical type of mind, gave it a
welcome and became its home. The United
Provinces are also congenial to it, and
contain some 400 of its branches.
By the Anglo-Indian officials the Somaj
is regarded as a political body—as a society
which has some occult creed and pursues
its wicked way under cloaks of deceit.
Commissioners and deputy commissioners,
district magistrates, collectors, and police-
men regard the Somaj as a seditious organisa-
tion, and indictments have been known to
be made against men solely on the ground
that they belonged to this society,¹ and
they have been bound over to keep the
peace because they were found preaching
its doctrines. The Society has therefore come
1 A common item in indictments for sedition is that
the accused is a member of the Arya Somaj. The recent
Patiala sedition case was a gross example of this.
AT LAHORE
49
to consider itself persecuted; it is glorying
in the fact; it records its tribulations
with flourishes of trumpets in every issue
of its official organ; it appeals for support
for its members when they are arrested-
and the Punjab officials play in the most
innocent way into its hands.
The Arya Somaj is purely a religious
society, and was founded to carry on the
teachings of Swami Dayanand Sarasvati,
one of the many holy men who arise in the
course of a generation in Hindu religious
life. Born in 1824, the Swami died in
1883. Stated in a sentence, his teaching
was directed towards bringing Hindu religion
back to the purity of the Vedas. The
worship of idols had deteriorated the Hindu
and had led to all manner of social evils.
God alone should be revered; the rule
of caste should be broken; early marriages
should be ended; education in accordance
with classical Hindu methods should be given
to the people. In this there was nothing
new. The Arya Somaj holds some of its most
characteristic tenets in common with the
Brahmo Somaj-that product of Western
culture and religious liberalism. And yet it
hates the Brahmo. The Arya Somaj began
from below with dogmas; the Brahmo
Somaj from above with catholicity. The
4
50
AT LAHORE
one is aggressively Hindu ; the other
is as generously eclectic. The Arya Somaj
is one part of that characteristic revival of
the ancient ways which is going on in India
to-day. It dreams of a world-dominion for
the Vedas.
1
But the Swami inculcated a spirit as
well as a doctrine. Part of his revelation
was that the Aryan was the chosen people,
the Vedas the chosen gospel, India the
chosen land. His language was not always
polite; his manner was often provocative.
He was a limb of the Church militant.
Austere, independent, dogmatic, and puri-
tanical was his character, and he imparted
those qualities to his followers. You meet
them, therefore, to-day in Lahore, their
capital city, dour and determined, ready to
sacrifice and be sacrificed, propagandists of
an accomplished order. They are indeed
the Puritans of Hinduism-and it is well
for us to remember that Puritanism became
political only under an intolerable Govern-
ment. The Aryas are opposed to the Mo-
hammedans; they are opposed to the Chris-
tians; they attack both. They ask no
1 The best account of the Swami and his work is "An
English Translation of Satyarth Prakash” (Virajanand Press,
Lahore), 1908. The book is also a most characteristic
production of the Hindu mind.
AT LAHORE
51
1
favours from the Government, they do not
hang about the verandahs of commissioners.
Their one thought is to convert India to
their views.
With this main purpose in mind, they
have studied the methods of other propa-
gandists. What have the Christians done?
Established schools and orphanages.¹ The
Arya Somaj determined to do the same.
What has the Government done? Established
famine relief schemes, promoted education,
and so on. The Somaj promotes famine
and other charitable relief, and is working
out its own educational theories. Its schools
are excellent, and its members have been
special friends of female education. But
its greatest asset is the spirit of its members.
It is not always lovely and attractive. It
is perhaps hard and bigoted. But it is
self-sacrificing, and when embodied in such
men as Lala Hans Raj, the ascetic Principal
1 The members started relief for children left destitute
by the famine of 1896-7: They then brought 250 Hindu
children into five orphanages. The bad times of 1899
made them renew their efforts. This is a significant
sentence from the Report of the Lahore Society for the
period between October 1899 and November 1900. It
refers to that premier nobleman of Jodhpur," and describes
him :
absorbed as he was in the work of administration
in general, he could not do much in the way of checking
the tide of missionary enterprise in the matter of orphan
relief."
،،
52
AT LAHORE
of the Arya College, it flinches at no obstacle.
It has split over meat-eating, and the
degree of austerity to be observed in the
education of youth.
Now, this is exactly the kind of movement
which the ordinary British official in India
cannot understand. He suspects it. It
seems a menace to him. He reads all
sorts of occult meaning into its teachings
and its actions. Hated by the Mohamme-
dans and the Christians alike, the Anglo-
Indian calls it seditious and persecutes its
members. It thus is enabled to pose before
the people as the body specially selected
by the governing authority for punishment,
with the result that the wrath of magistrates
does it more good than the excellence of
its own propaganda.
As illustrations of the bogey character
of the Somaj, I may cite two things. I was
told by a British official that in a hidden
corner of the grounds of the Arya College
there was a place where the students were
taught wrestling-in view of eventualities—
but that I would not be shown that.
When we were walking round the grounds,
accompanied by the Arya Somaj Committee,
a sand-patch, which I had not noticed to
be of any importance, was pointed out to
me. They laughed merrily. "This," the
AT LAHORE
53
chairman said, "is where we secretly teach
our seditious students to wrestle!" It was
nothing but what one sees in nearly every
village, for wrestling is a very old Indian
sport. If, for instance, the tourist who
finds his way to the show city of Fatepur
Sikri will turn down to the left from
the Akbar entrance-gate to where the hand
carpet-weavers work, he will find a little
square of well-trodden sand where the
youths keep up this exercise.
The second matter is regarding the Guru-
kul. This is a school which a section of the
Somaj started to revive Indian education
on the most extreme traditional lines. The
pupils are taught the virtues and practices
of an asceticism which few in India practise
to-day. Next year, when the first batch of
boys leaves, I was told that yellow-robed
sedition-mongers would be available to roam
over the country, nominally as Somaj pro-
pagandists. When I obtained the real facts,
they were that two brothers alone leave next
year, and that the present intention of their
parents is to send them to England. I refer
to these two things, not merely because
they are whispered about here in India,
but because they have figured in Indian
controversies at home.
In brief: the Arya Somaj is a religious
54
AT LAHORE
organisation, Indian in its inspiration,
Punjabi in its characteristics. It proclaims
one God; it is at war with superstition;
it is winning back to Hinduism men who
had been converted to Mohammedanism
and Christianity. It also opposes the
quiescent modes of worship, and imposes
the test of conduct upon its professed
followers. "Learn to live as you would
wish to die," is one of the texts hanging in
the Council Chamber of its college at Lahore.
Another is" Victory from within or a mighty
death without."
If the Government would only let it alone
it would soon reach its proper place in Indian
life. At present the Government is en-
dowing it with fictitious power by persecuting
its members.
VI
PUNJAB CAMPS
BENGAL gives life to Indian nationalism but
the Punjab supplies it with its problems.
To begin with, the Punjab is "dour," and
the Punjabi has been described as the
Scotsman of India. A revival in Hindu
religion there means an uprising of Puri-
tanism, whilst in Bengal it produces some-
thing akin to a Catholic movement.
It was
because Swami Dayanand, the founder of
the Arya Somaj, was a rough Philistine like
Luther that his society has flourished in the
Indus valley.
There is a good deal of the West about
the Punjabi. But he is an Indian. He
will have no importations either of politics
or of faith. If he throws the priesthood of
the Brahmins to the four winds, he does not
create as his justification a new eclectic faith
like that of the Brahmo Somaj; he goes
back to his own scriptures with the same
fidelity as the scientific Christian returns
to his creeds.
When he found his faith
55
56
PUNJAB CAMPS
anew, moreover, the Punjabi was not con-
tent to say, 66
This is for the salvation of
India,” but “ This being for the salvation of
India must also be for the salvation of the
world."
Now, if the political stage of the Punjab
were occupied by this "dour " man and the
British official alone, things would be lively.
But the situation is not so simple as that.
The Punjab is the Ulster of India, for in it
there is a Mohammedan community some-
what greater in numbers than the Hindu
community, and the Mohammedans have
pitched a political camp of their own, where
their own flags fly and their own drums beat.
The difference between the two is soon
discovered; but if you try to find it in a
programme you will be baffled, for the
Mohammedan as a representative on a
Council will back practically everything
which his Hindu colleague will propose.
,,
But the Indian Mohammedan is not a
Nationalist at present. He speaks of " my
community," not of " India.' He thinks of
religious associations, not of political ones.
Above all, he distrusts the Hindu. He
knows that he has neglected opportunities
of education which the Hindu has embraced,
that he has been careless of his well-being
when the Hindu has been nurturing his own.
PUNJAB CAMPS
57
He is like a man who feels that he is sur-
rounded by a network of impalpable powers
working for his ill, and that he cannot sleep
lest they should undo him. To the Punjab
Mohammedan, Hinduism in public life is a
Freemasonry. Wherever a Hindu goes he
leaves a breach open for a stream of
Hinduism to follow. The Mohammedan
regards the Hindu as some suffragettes regard
man.
This is the present frame of mind of the
Mohammedan. He feels he must have a
camp of his own, a party to look after him,
and, above all, that his community must
be regarded as a separate political entity
and be represented as such on all legislative
councils. Then, and then only, he says, will
he be safe.
In addition to these things, he talks of
his greater loyalty, of the impossibility of
Indian self-government on paper; but I
smile at that. In the Mohammedan camp
there is a store of spare arms for show, and
his acute leaders naturally show them. These
arguments belong to that store. They are
only brought out for effect, though some
of our officials think otherwise. The camp
and everything in it is brand-new.
Before exploring the Hindu camp I must
say something about the part which the
58
PUNJAB CAMPS
66
Government plays. It is generally conceded
in India that the most incompetent of the
Governments is that of the Punjab. It
takes its stand upon two foundation rocks,
Prestige" and "Sedition," the meaning
of the former being that it can do what it
likes, and of the latter that if any Indian
questions its doings, his house will be raided
and he will be deported. The very danger-
ous condition of the province in 1907, when
the Sikh regiments became restive and riots
broke out in the Rawal Pindi district, arose
mainly from blundering but well-meaning
acts of the Government, which, had it been
in touch with the people, would never have
proposed its Colonisation Bill in the form in
which it was drafted, and would have seen
that the increased land assessments required
delicate and not autocratic handling.
..
66
When the storm burst upon it, it shrieked
Sedition." There was a man of the name
of Lajpat Rai active in politics at the time.
He was a member of the Arya Somaj, he
was a good speaker, he was a Congress
wallah." He was marked for deportation,
yet at no time had the Government a scrap
of evidence against him, except that he was
opposing its Colonisation Bill and holding
political meetings. The result
The result was that
Lajpat Rai had to be liberated, and from
PUNJAB CAMPS
59
being a propagandist he found he had be-
come a leader. He is soured, quite natur-
ally, and even to-day he cannot take a
ticket from Lahore without some detective
finding out where he is going and without
some one molesting him on the way to show
his ticket a thing which never happens to
the ordinary passenger on Indian railways.
In the frankest possible manner the Pun-
jab Government announces from the house-
tops that every Arya is an anarchist and
every critic a seditious person.¹ It has no
notion of statesmanlike handling, no idea
of political methods. The man in power
simply uses his power, whether it is in the
form of a not too honest detective depart-
ment, or a not too discriminating executive
and judiciary. Put it as nicely as one may,
the best that can be said is that the Govern-
ment of the Punjab and the Hindus are like
two very estimable people with incompatible
temperaments who have unfortunately mar-
ried each other.
1 In connection with the Patiala Sedition Case (1910),
when officials of the State of Patiala were tried for sedition
because they were members of the Arya Somaj, some cor-
respondence passed between the President of the Somaj
and the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, and the letter
which the latter wrote, grudgingly admitting that the
society might not be so bad as it was painted, left no doubt
as to the real opinion of the Government.
60
PUNJAB CAMPS
We now can understand the Hindu camp.
It is angry with the Mohammedans, suspicious
of the Government, and unhappy with itself.
It breathes nationalism. Its prayers, its
gods, everything it holds dear are national-
ist. But the Mohammedan as a believer
and as a politician thwarts it. It used to be
the only camp, all outside being a crowd.
That is true no longer. At the door where
the office-seeker enters the Mohammedan
now stands petitioning, arguing, threatening,
bagging the crumbs thrown at him, and
asserting claims for much more. When the
Government gives him something, the Hindu
sees favouritism in the act, and he has just
presented a long petition of his grievances in
this respect. Above all, the Councils Act has
come, and the Mohammedan has received
preferential treatment. The flags are flying
over the Mohammedan camp; not a square
inch of bunting flies over the Hindu's head.
His past political idol, the National Con-
gress, degraded before his eyes, every avenue
of constitutional agitation blocked, every
step he takes marked by spies, what can he
do? He has first of all come to the con-
clusion that a united India is yet impossible.
He has therefore ceased to think of a
"National " Congress, and has started a
Hindu one. It is tentative as yet, but
66
,,
PUNJAB CAMPS
61
any one with an eye to observe can see the
drift of things. Nationalism is splitting up
into racialism and religious sectarianism ;
and those who think that an improvement are
welcome to their opinion. The Punjabi has
ceased to believe in the old Moderate leaders,
and, in spirit, is joining with the Extremists
2
not the anarchists. He is, therefore, de-
parting from his old political paths and is
striking out into new ones apart from
Government roads. He is to practise self-
help, even in social things. He is to do
his own education and his own charity; he
is to wear his own clothes and patronise
only the products of his own people. From
voluntary associations of the faithful and
patriotic the New India is to be born. He
is building up a Hindu Sinn Fein.
VII
AT BENARES
To the east a tawny band of light spans the
horizon; overhead the pale, pure crescent
of an old moon lies like a piece of delicate
jewellery on dark blue velvet; behind to
the west the stars are still shining.
It is half an hour from sunrise, and I am
hurrying to the Ganges. The lanes of
Benares, from which offensive smells arise
as incense, are just beginning to bestir them-
selves. A woman sweeps at her door; a
figure that has been sleeping in a corner
wakes up; a man fans a newly lit fire. The
tawny light is warming to pink, and mists
begin to rise from the dewy ground.
Suddenly there is an end to the road, and
the Ganges flows at our feet. To the left
the river comes down in a magnificent bend,
the banks on the outer curve being high.
There stands Benares-steps, temples,
palaces, rising in sweeping terraces from the
water, the two tall minarets of Aurangzebe's
mosque forming the crowning point of all.
62
AT BENARES
63
What menace is there in this incongruous
survival here of the work of the bigoted
Mohammedan? What shadow of the future
does it throw over the holiest ground of
Hinduism?
There is a murmur on the shore; there
is a confused movement; there is a sigh
as if a waiting people have seen the sign of
deliverance. A hot flame of fire has risen
above the horizon. Prayers are murmured
by thousands of lips; thousands of feet
obey the impulse to go forward into the
water; thousands of dark bodies are bowing
in humiliation and adoration, vanishing
from sight below the river, rising dripping
to add to the murmur of prayer which goes
out in a confused hum to welcome the sun.
The sun glistens on the little brazen
drinking-pots which the people have brought
down to cleanse, and lights up the many-
coloured robes of the worshippers. White
predominates. It glares and challenges
everything with its purity. But there are
also patches of green and red, purple and
pink, saffron and yellow; and they move
and mix like a kaleidoscopic mass of ever-
changing pattern. The eye becomes be-
wildered; the mind grasps only mass and
motion. Slowly the stream drifts the boat
down, but the scene becomes more and more
64
AT BENARES
a dream, a symbol, a moment in the eternal
pursuit of the Infinite. The murmur seems
to come far down Time. The crowds holding
up hands in adoration and bowing their heads
low in supplication are but representations
of what has gone on through the ages. The
clanging of bells in the temples, the haunting
notes of the reeds played beside the shrines
are but the jarring notes which man always
strikes when, in his moods of self-conscious-
ness, he brings sacrifices to his gods.
So we drift downwards past places varying
in their degrees of sacredness, past stairs
which rise upwards in uninterrupted flights
and others which are broken by shrines, by
masses of bamboo rods bearing wicker-work
baskets at their tips, by platforms where
wise and holy men teach novices the way
of life, and in the end we come to where the
poor Hindu body seeks rest at last. All day
long thin blue columns of smoke rise from
this ghat; all day long they seem to be
building piles of wood there; all day long
processions come bearing gaily decorated
burdens on their shoulders. The bodies
wrapped up in white, or pink, or yellow
cloth, lie with their feet in the water waiting
for the pyre. You see them in rows lying
thus. And the smoke rises lazily and
heavily, and is blown across the bathers.
AT BENARES
65
You hear the crackling of the consuming
fire. No one heeds. "All die," they say,
"in due time," and blessed are those whose
ashes mingle with the muddy waters of the
Ganges. So this strange medley of colours,
this confusion of peoples and tongues, this
mingling of the sublime and the sordid, of
life and death so characteristic of India,
this cry for Infinite Peace, go on through
the years.
The sun is far up. Bells are tinkling in
the temples, and the hum of chanted prayers
falls upon the waters. We go up from the
river to the town-to the Holy City-to the
Rome of India. But who can describe the
life of its narrow lanes? Who can penetrate
their mysteries of devotion and deceit, of
holiness and blackguardliness? The temples
are full. Incessant streams of people pass
and repass their doorways. The heathen
can but peep in, and he sees nothing but
brown skins crowding round repulsive idols,
throwing flowers at them, sprinkling them
with water, bowing before them.
Sacred monkeys chatter from innumerable
perches, sacred cows wander round court-
yards, sacred men take toll at every point
of vantage. Every foot of the road is lined
with beggars-beggars suffering from every
loathsome disease and every sickening con-
5
66
AT BENARES
tortion under the sun. Their howls, their
whines, their importunities make you feel
you are treading the corridors which lead to
the places where the lost are in torment.
All is confusion; nothing rests for a
moment; it is an endless stream, a ceaseless
murmur, a never-slackening crowd. The air
is heavy with the scent of flowers and the
stench of cattle, and is hot and sickening
with humanity. A priest hangs garlands
round your neck, and they seem heavy as iron
chains, and their odours make mists in your
eyes. You must get away from the stifling
place.
Out in the courtyard where the air circu-
lates more freely, and where the clang of
the temple bell sounds remote, one can stand
and watch. In one corner is a fakir in an
iron cage, and a group of weary and worn
women are taking counsel of him. Poor
old things, their wizened breasts, their
sunken eyes, their decrepit attitude, tell
how unmercifully life has laid burdens on
their backs. Nearer is the "Well of Know-
ledge," round the railings of which a
crowd always lingers. Across the pavement
wanders an array of queer creatures, wild
and unkempt, covered with ashes and little
else. Standing there, one begins to grasp
the spirit of Benares. One drifts in the
AT BENARES
67
muddy, troubled stream of men seeking
for that peace which passeth understanding
--of men who at one moment are soaring
high in the clear blue of religious thought,
and in the next are wallowing in the filthy
mud of idolatrous ceremony.
That is India all over. It tolerates every-
thing. It looks upon human frailty with
the kindliest of eyes. Its moments of purify-
ing devotion obliterate its years of debasing
exercises. Moreover, it cleanses itself with
its humour. It does not believe its own
extravagances. It comes to love its gods
as one loves a family heirloom. We saw
the feast of maternity when the mother
goddess, after having dwelt in houses for
some days, is borne with bands in procession
to be thrown into the Ganges. When she
goes, we were told, the hearts of the women
are empty as when a child dies. They crowd
the doorways and balconies to see her
taken away, and they weep at her going.
66 And is it all real?" I asked. "Yes
and no" was the reply of an English friend
who has lived long amongst the people.
"The mother has twined herself round my
own heart. She was very ugly when I saw
her first, but I now think her beautiful.
India knows, and yet she does not know.
She is content to worship." She follows her
68
AT BENARES
quest for the Eternal-of whom the things
of life are but the shadow and the thought—
through the most sordid paths, through
nauseating filth and appalling error, and
yet upon her shrines, in an extraordinary
degree, shines the light of pure devotion and
absolute abandonment.
Truly, Benares, the Holy City, holds in its
keeping the soul of India.
VIII
THE GENIUS OF BENGAL
ON the outskirts, tall chimneys belch out
black smoke; the river is crowded with
craft; the streets are choked with traffic.
Proud men come with figures of prosperity to
lay before you, with plans of dock extension
to explain to you, with projects of improve-
ments with which to entice you. This is a
new world. I keep asking myself con-
stantly: "Am I still in India?" The
impact of impressions both on mind and eye
is of a new kind. I am breathing a new
atmosphere. Here there is life and aggres-
sive effort. This is Bengal.
From the moment I set foot in India the
winds have been whispering to me "Beware
of the Babu! Beware of Bengal!" And
here I am passing under the spell of both.
The Babu is very irritating to the British
official. For the Babu is clever, he has
absorbed Western knowledge, he is dis-
contented as a degraded subordinate, and
he is consequently impertinent at times.
69
70
THE GENIUS OF BENGAL
He is said to be corrupt, to have no sense of
honour, to be a coward. He has inherited
the wrath of Macaulay. The gulf between
the Babu and the Britisher in Calcutta is
deep and wide, and officials of great ex-
perience told us it was not being filled up.
I do not think it is likely to be, and the
reason is not far to seek.
ཡཱ ཨཏཾ
24-
The Bengali inspires the Indian nationalist
movement. In Bombay, the nationalist is
a Liberal politician, a reformer who takes
what he can get and makes the best use of
it. In the Punjab, he is a dour unimagina-
tive individual who shows a tendency to
work in a lonely furrow. In Bengal, he is
a person of lively imagination who thinks
of India and whose nationalism finds ex-
pression not only in politics but in every
form of activity. Consequently, Bengal
politics are too volatile, too philosophical,
too nervous. There are no good political
leaders there. There are excellent speakers
and eloquent writers, but none of the
prominent men seem to have that heaven-
given capacity to lead. They can prepare
men to be led, but no shepherd then steps
forward to pipe the flocks to the green
pastures. If Bengal could unite leaders
and agitators the system of our rule in India
would change as by magic.
THE GENIUS OF BENGAL
71
But Bengal is perhaps doing better than
making political parties. It is idealising
India. It is translating nationalism into
religion, into music and poetry, into painting
and literature. I called on one whose name
is on every lip as a wild extremist who toys
with bombs and across whose path the
shadow of the hangman falls. He sat under
a printed text, "I will go on in the
strength of the Lord God"; he talked of the
things which trouble the soul of man; he
wandered aimlessly into the dim regions of
aspiration where the mind finds a soothing
resting-place. He was far more of a mystic
than of a politician. He saw India seated
on a temple throne. But how it was to
arise, what the next step was to be, what
the morrow of independence was to bring
-to these things he had given little thought.
They were not of the nature of his genius.
Another whom I visited in an old crumbling
place of many rooms where a joint family
dwelt in ancient style began by blessing me
in the name of his gods, by telling me about
his brother who had withdrawn from the
world and who is in sorrow because the
plaintive voice of India will intrude upon his
meditations, and by informing me about
their common family worship. I asked for
books and pamphlets published by him,
72
THE GENIUS OF BENGAL
and he brought me the lives of saints and
meditations on the Infinite. He told me
that he longed to leave the things that are
seen and distract, and plunge into that
ocean of contemplation where men here seek
to find oblivion. He edits one of the most
detested Bengal papers. From Bengal gush
innumerable freshets of religions all going to
revive and invigorate the nationalist spirit.
A literary revival makes for the same end.
It is still crude, particularly in its romance,
but it is groping after Hindu realism. It is
written in Bengali in the same aggressive
way that some of our Irish friends are
trying to revive the use of Erse. It is not
so good as the Bengali literature of last
generation, when Bankim Chandra Chatterji
was writing his Anandamath and Taraknath
Ganguli his Svarnalata. But its intention
and spirit are quite clear.
So also in music, poetry and the fine arts.
The last, glowing with nationalist spirit, has
been revived by Tagore and some of his
pupils. Music and poetry already enjoy a
vigorous popular life. They brought us out on
the river on Sunday and sang to us-"Ban-
de Mataram" amongst other things. Their
"Marseillaise" and their "Carmagnole
hymns thanking God for endowing life with
beauty, are invocations to India their Mother
are
THE GENIUS OF BENGAL
73
full of yearning endearments. They sang
from well-thumbed copies of a collection of
hymns written by Tagore the poet, and the
music, much of it new and all so unlike our
own, clung round our hearts and stole again
and again all that day into our ears.
When we were still in the North-West we
were told of this incident. A concert was
held one evening at one of the orphan
schools controlled by a Missionary Society,
the boys themselves doing the entertaining.
The Punjabis sang their rather monotonous
and rather common popular songs, but one
lad singing in an unknown tongue swept
every one off his legs by the vim of his
style and the enchantment of his music. He
had been picked up on the Calcutta streets
and he was singing some of the Bengali
national hymns.
That is what Bengal is doing for the
national movement. It is creating India by
song and worship, it is clothing her in
queenly garments. Its politics must be for
some time an uncertain mingling of extrem-
ist impossibilism and moderate opportunism
-of religious yearning and artistic idealism.
Bengal will be romantic while the Punjab is
dogmatic and Bombay diplomatic. Whether
it be true or not, it is a most likely thing
that the political dacoits of Bengal took
74
THE GENIUS OF BENGAL
their inspiration and guidance from the
Anandamath with its heroic Children lodging
in dark woods and marshalled to fight by
monkish warriors. That is so like Bengal
and the Bengali. Bengal will nurture for
long the bereavement to its heart caused
by the Partition; it will cling fondly to
Swadeshi; on the shores of its enthusiasm
it will throw up the bomb-thrower as a
troubled sea throws up foam, and from it
all will come India-if India ever does come.
I sat at the table of the great official, and
in bad temper and rude manner he demanded
of me to tell him where I had been, whom I
had seen, and of what I was thinking. I
told him of the hymns and the pictures and
the prayers. And he laughed a great rude
Western laugh and explained everything in
blind positive Western superficialities. He
knew nothing about the pictures; the hymns
were a mixture of double meaning and sedi-
tion; he had no inner appreciation of
the prayers. Each sentence ended with the
authoritative I know. But I had heard the
children sing and the women talk, and the
men join in with both. And I think I
know.
IX
THE WOMEN OF INDIA ¹
1
A NOTEWORTHY feature of the political
situation in India is that the British are
aliens, with different ideals, different
thoughts, different customs from those over
whom they rule. When the officials told
me, as they were very fond of doing, that no
one could really know anything about the
country after a stay of a few weeks, I used
to agree with them most sincerely, and
then ask whether they considered that they
with their longer experience knew anything
really about the two dominant influences
in the life of the Indians-their religion
and their womenfolk.
No doubt some Englishmen, especially
Max Müller who had never been to India,
have gained fuller knowledge of the history
and the varieties of religious beliefs in India
than any of the Indians themselves have.
But did Max Müller, does any English
1 This chapter and the next are written by my wife, who
was able to get interesting peeps at the life of the women.
75
76
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
student, understand the way in which the
worship of a particular god or goddess, or
the holding of a particular philosophical
belief, affects the daily life of the Hindus ?
Can a Western enter into the soul of an
Oriental and share his religious suscepti-
bilities?
With regard to the women, even super-
ficial knowledge is impossible to the British
person of the male sex, for the orthodox
Hindu or Mohammedan lady who is above
the coolie rank keeps herself secluded from
the outside world, and no Englishman can
meet her or speak to her face to face. Yet
I think it is no exaggeration to say that
religion and marriage, the two sides of life
in which such a gulf is fixed between West
and East, have even more absorbing and
universal influence upon the lives of the
Indians than upon those of our own people
at home.
Whilst impossible for the English man,
it is very difficult for the English woman to
enter into the lives of her sisters behind the
Purdah, or veil. One need not be a suffra-
gette to find it hard to imagine living through
year after year of seclusion in a zenana,
seeing no sights beyond the walls of one's
own apartments or garden, meeting no male
person except the men of one's immediate
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
77
household (sometimes even older brothers-
in-law are excluded). But this is the fate
of many women who nevertheless are powers
in the land and who deserve the title of
strong-minded" ladies.
66
In the most old-fashioned of all the Native
States of India, that of Udaipur, the Maha-
rani is invisible to ladies of English tongue.
Her name can never be mentioned in con-
versation with her husband or her son; it
would be an insult to ask them directly after
her health. There is a story that once, when
she had a bad ear, she allowed an English lady
doctor to examine the ear alone, which was
put through a hole in a screening veil. But
sometimes when the Maharana has seemed
to be persuaded to some improvement in
his rule, a deadlock suddenly arises. He
will not move any further in the desired
direction, and gives no reason for his change,
but his British advisers suspect they
cannot know-that the Maharani has put
her foot down and that she is the obstacle,
an obstacle hopeless for them to reach.
In how many other cases may it not be
the woman's influence which baffles our
officials and turns their plans to naught—
an influence of which they are necessarily
ignorant and which is
which is correspondingly
strong and subtle ?
78
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
There are well-known instances in India
of women who have ruled in their own right,
and done it with sagacity and success.
We
stood in the old fort at Jhansi, and saw where
the Rani had concentrated her forces at
the time of the Mutiny, where she had defied
us and made a mock of our power, and
where finally she had been driven out to
die fighting against us in the hills. It was
only for seventeen days that she threw off
our yoke, but if there had been a few more
Indians with her spirit in those anxious
times, the British would not now have been
masters of India.
Other women have power during the
minorities of their sons, and keep this power
after the sons have grown up. I had the
pleasure of talking with the mother and
wife of the Maharajah of Gwalior, one of
the most enterprising and Europeanised of
the Indian princes. We were invited to the
Palace for the birthday party of the Dow-
ager Maharani, and joined the Indian men
and the British men and women who were
her guests at games and conversation in the
garden.
The royal ladies and their attendants only
shared in the festivities by watching them
through the screened windows of their
apartments, but afterwards the lady guests
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
79
went indoors and spoke to their Highnesses,
whilst one or two specially favoured gentle-
men were allowed to talk to them through
the hanging screens. The Dowager herself
held the reins of government whilst her son
was young, and is quite capable now of
giving him advice, and taking his place
when he is away from home, whilst his wife,
I understand, has charge of some of his
finances as her daily share of responsibility.
There is a shadow over the lives of this
young couple. Married whilst still a child
herself, the wife has no children. She is
now well on in the twenties, but is small
and fragile-looking, as if she were a child
still. By all the laws of heirship and of
religion the Maharajah ought to marry a
second wife to secure an heir. Will he give
way to custom and convenience and per-
chance break the heart of his first love, or
will he hold to the Western ideal and keep
himself only unto her? Which way does
the Dowager's influence draw him? Such
are the problems which occur in the East
and from which we are free.
I had a glimpse of another royal tragedy
in a visit I paid at Baroda to the widow of
the Gaekwar's eldest son. The princess
was at her lessons when I called, and came
from them to talk to me and to show me
80
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
her children. She is only eighteen now
(1909); she has two little girls; and her
youngest baby, the prince, now about one
year and a half old, was born only a few
weeks before his father's death. This is
the princess to secure whom a Committee
was appointed when the prince came to
a marriageable age. The Committee was
romantic enough to send up several names
for the prince's approval, so that he had
some choice in the matter. The widowed
princess has her mother and grandmother
living with her, and an English nurse, who
shares with her the charge of the children.
The young girl, for she is no more, is wisely
devoting four hours a day to study, two
hours of which are given to English, for
education is decidedly hampered when one
is the mother of three children at an age
when European young ladies are still at
school.
The princess looked sweetly pretty in her
white widow's robes, and she was gentle
and courteous and smiling. By the death
of her husband she is condemned to perpetual
seclusion and quietude; the joys of life
are forfeited by widows however early in
the springtime of their life the blow may
fall. Princess Padmavadi has her children
to live for, but many girls are widows before
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
81
they have been wives. I heard on excellent
Indian authority of a marriage ceremony
which had actually been gone through be-
fore the birth of the contracting parties,
who were represented by balls of flowers.
One of the mothers remarked when she was
being warned of possible disaster which
might follow a marriage she was planning for
a little girl of five years old: 'My baby
might have been born a widow."
66
The stepmother of this widowed princess
is one of the most Europeanised of Indian
princesses. She travels in Europe with the
Gaekwar without any shade of Purdah, and
is well known in high English society. In
Bombay she also goes about freely, but in
her own State she does not quite give up
the old ways, and retires behind a modified
Purdah as long as she is in Baroda. The
Maharani of Burdwan, on the other side of
India (whose title does not, however, carry
a kingdom with it), has emerged from
Purdah with the active approval of her
husband during the last year or two, and
this lady, who until a few months ago had
never gone into mixed company or been seen
by men outside her own family circle, is
now subjected to the infliction of having to
make speeches at the opening of bazaars.
Surely she must recognise that there are at
6
82
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
any rate some penances in life from which
Purdah saves its devotees.
Many other tales I heard of this seclusion.
One high official's wife told me of a lady
who was carried right into her drawing-
room in a gilded jewelled palanquin, and
stepped out from it quite overcome with
fright and shyness. It was the first time
she had ever been outside the grounds of
her own house. Another lady of the ruling
caste told me how she had visited amongst
some Ranis in an out-of-the-way district,
where education and modern civilisation
were unknown, and found there a girl with a
good English education, keen on reading,
ready to talk on all the topics of the day,
but who had been married to a son of this
backward family. The poor girl was as
unhappy and stifled in her uncongenial sur-
roundings as a fish out of water, and hailed
the visit of an Englishwoman as a ray of
light in the darkness.
Then there was the old Begum, peace be
to her ashes, who was strictest of the strict
in her observance of Purdah and retirement,
yet sufficiently closely related to our Mother
Eve to yield to the offer of an English lady
friend to take her out driving in disguise so
that she might see the world unhampered by
the shutters and curtains of her palanquin.
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
83
Our own customs with regard to ladies
naturally are looked at very much askance.
Our dances where men and women, often
strangers to each other, revolve in pairs, shock
Indian women, and the unpleasant impression
is not lessened by the low necks of the ladies'
dresses. A Viceroy's wife who wanted to
raise the dignity of English womanhood in
the eyes of the Indians would do well to
pass a sumptuary law with regard to the
amount of clothing that the ladies attending
her Court should wear, and also perhaps as
to the kind of private theatricals in which
young maidens should take part.
So far I have given instances of the life
of ladies of high rank, but they are typical
of all.
Endless varieties of etiquette exist. One
caste and one family may do things which
to another caste or family would be ana-
thema. In visiting zenanas I had to speak
very warily and put my questions with a
considerable amount of hesitation, for whilst
in some places, for instance, I found it
quite correct for the ladies of the house to
play or sing for my entertainment, in other
houses a round-about suggestion that the
ladies might take some interest in such
pastimes would evidently have been a deadly
insult had I not been an ignorant foreigner
84
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
and barbarian.
"I am ashamed to ask my
mother that," said one boy to me apolo-
getically when he was acting as interpreter
between me and his stepmother and numer-
ous sisters and sisters-in-law, whilst in another
house the hint roused a most lively inter-
change of jokes between the hostess and
the ladies invited to meet me, which the
interpreter, an elderly woman attendant,
avoided translating to me.
But through all, certain common features
are found marriage before girlhood is
passed; consequent seclusion from the out-
side world, the husband and the immediate
family forming the horizon of the thoughts
and plans of each day; knowledge of our
outer world gained only at second-hand, or
by peeping through corners and crevices;
the blank lives of the widows; and in some
cases the growing desire for emancipation
and for a freedom more like that of which
they have examples always before them
in the womenfolk of the British Raj.
X
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
(Continued)
I MIGHT almost sum up the position of
women in India by saying that it is a country
without young girls. One simply pines to
see an English maiden in her early teens,
for the curse upon the British Raj is that
for reasons of health parents cannot keep
their children with them, after they are a
few years old, until they are full grown and
ready to move in society.
I remember in a dingy station how my
heart gave a glad leap because I saw an
English skirt approaching in the distance
which was a foot or two above the ground
and so proved that its wearer was still not
grown up, and when the girl came near it
was a joy simply to sit and look at her,
though in England I pass every day dozens
of maidens of the same age who are more
attractive-looking.
Amongst the Indians I certainly saw many
most charming girls in their teens. Some
85
86
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
come back to my memory whom I met in
various zenanas, and who were radiantly
and delicately beautiful in their coloured
silks and dainty jewels. But one had to
remember that they were married women,
perhaps mothers of families, with the re-
sponsibilities of life already settled for them.
The poetry of maidenhood is absent; the
child is transformed into the wife without
those precious years of waiting and growth
when the princely knight is still in the future
and the romance of life is still ethereal and
delightful in its uncertainty.
Amongst the poorer classes it is just the
same. In the villages dear little dark-eyed
girls run up to one and smile, and one's
experienced guide announces that they are
matrons because they are wearing bracelets
above their elbows. Or in the jute or cotton
mills one sees little girls whom one almost
suspects of being under even the low age
(nine years) at which children may work in
mills in India, and one is told that the red
paint along the parting of the black hair
is the sign that they are married. I asked
an Indian lady doctor one day whether
there were fewer child-mothers now than
formerly, and she told me that she had
attended one mother of fifteen that day and
one of fourteen the day before. The physical
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
87
results of such motherhood have been at-
tested as bad by quite indisputable medical
evidence. In 1890, after the tragic death
of the child-wife Pulmani Dasi, a memorial
against child-marriage signed by fifty-five
lady doctors in India was presented to the
Government. Its cramping effects, men-
tally and morally, are acknowledged as evil
by the most earnest of Indian reformers.
Upon this the questions naturally arise
In what direction are reformers in India
working to change these customs which they
recognise as evil, and what progress are they
making? We have all heard how the British
Government abolished Sati, or the burning
of the widow with the husband's dead body.
This was in 1829, and a petition was pre-
sented to the Privy Council against the
abolition, which was signed by 18,000
Indians, including members of the best
Calcutta families.
I suppose now it would be difficult to get
one signature in favour of its restitution.
But there are complaints not altogether
without justification that the zeal for social
improvement which led progressive Indians
and English to work together for such
reforms as the abolition of Sati, the pro-
hibition of infanticide, the raising of the age
of consent, and the Widow Remarriage Act,
88
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
has waned, and that advanced thinkers
espouse political agitation and neglect social
reform.
It is pointed out that "cold Sati"; the
cutting off of the widows from all social
pleasures and independence, is a more linger-
ing cruelty than burning alive, and charges
are made against Indian reformers who
marry children themselves or who refuse to
countenance any departure from tradition
in the case of even the youngest widows in
their own family. On the other hand, we
must recognise that it is hard to fight against
the decrees of caste which have all the force
of social custom backed up by the religion
of generations.
Quotations are given from the old sacred
books to show that child-marriage is a com-
paratively recent innovation. Many indeed
say that this and the zenana system came
into force amongst the Hindus as a pro-
tection for their girls and women against the
Mohammedan invaders. A parallel to this
may be found in recent years in the Chenab
Colony, one of the Punjab deserts SO
wonderfully turned into fruitful land by a
system of canals. In the times when the
land was desert the Janglis, the old grazier
population somewhat like our gypsies, used
to marry their men at thirty to thirty-five
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
89
years, the women at twenty-five to thirty.
They said they were unwilling to yield their
independence too young. As soon as the
land became fertile, colonists from other
parts of India were drafted in and soon
outnumbered the Janglis. Now these latter
marry their girls at twelve to fourteen years
of age, and the reason given is their general
distrust of their immigrant neighbours:
"Now no one can be relied upon."
The Indian reformer nowadays who
swears that he will not marry a child-wife
finds it difficult to meet with any young
maiden of more mature years still unwed,
and if he proposes to marry a widow, though
this is legal in the eyes of British officials,
it cuts both the bridegroom and bride off
from their families, and consequently upsets
their whole status both in society and in
their religious life. Yet there certainly is a
gradual movement towards later marriage
and more equality between the sexes, and
this is chiefly helped by the spread of educa-
tion amongst girls and women as well as
amongst boys and men.
Though the lead in female education was
taken by Christians (the first day school for
girls being started in 1807 by Mrs. Hannah
Marshman, a missionary), the Parsees were
not far behind, and the late Miss Clarke,
90
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
daughter of the present Governor of Bombay,
helped this community to celebrate by
historical tableaux the jubilee, two or three
years ago, of its first attempts at syste-
matic female education. Now, advanced
schools for girls are springing up under the
Arya Somaj and the Brahmo Somaj, and
even the Mohammedans are coming into
line. At Aligahr, the seat of their celebrated
boys' school and college, I found one girls'
school established and another being talked
of. Most of the secondary schools for girls
have to include a great deal of primary
education. Indeed, in the whole of India,
in 1909, excluding European schools, there
were only 1,208 girls in the higher stage of
secondary schools, out of a total of 560,261
under instruction, and 563 of these were in
Bombay.
The number of girls in primary schools is
545,091, as compared with 348,510 in 1902.
Many of these little girls go to the boys'
schools and learn with their brothers, but
it is usually much easier to get them to
attend separate girls' schools, and even in
country districts the number of these is
being increased. In one village we visited
we heard there was a girls' school, and after
a great hunt we found it in a side street.
It turned out to be a small dark room
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
91
with about half a dozen little girls sitting
round on the floor with slates and readers,
listening to a pleasant-looking widow who
was teaching them.
But though there are signs of advance,
what is being done so far is but a drop in
the bucket. In Bombay there is 5.9 per
cent of girls in school for every hundred
of school-going age; in Madras 57; in
Bengal 3.2; in the United Provinces only
1.2. Three or four girls receiving education
out of every hundred is not much to be
proud of, especially when we know that
most of these, largely owing to the early age
of marriage, only attain a smattering of
reading and writing and exceedingly ele-
mentary knowledge. The obstacle now in
the way is not so much in the opposition
of the people themselves. In the zenanas
they are crying out for learning. I shall
never forget the eager hungry look of a
Mohammedan girl, dressed up in silks and
jewels, whose mother told me she had some
teachers in for her, but there was no school
within reach to which to send her. Her
brother interpreted to me that his sister had
been "
very, very much wanting to see you,
and I felt it pathetic that a few minutes'
glimpse of a visitor from the outside world
from which she was cut off, should be such
92
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
a red-letter day in her life. In a most in-
teresting Purdah school in Lahore, to which
the young ladies are fetched in closed
carriages, and whose garden walls are highly
fenced to prevent any stray male eye from
penetrating within, I was told of one pupil
who, unlike most Indian girls, was slow at
her books. She seemed hopelessly stupid,
and kept the others back so much that her
teacher at last said she had better not come
to school. But the poor girl wept so bitterly,
and explained in such a heartbroken way
that she was betrothed to a boy who was
receiving English education, and she feared
he would despise her and perhaps cast her
off if she knew nothing of what he was in-
terested in, that the teacher relented and
took her back. As a proof of industry,
the poor girl was trying to learn a page of
a Royal Reader by heart. I am not sure
whether she meant to edify her fiancé and
brighten his domestic hearth by repeating
it to him and so making English conversation
when he returned.
It is not without significance that in two
of the best known modern Indian novels,
Anandamath, by Bankim Chandra Chatterji,
and the Indian Inner Home, by Babu Tara-
knath Ganguli, the heroines, Santi and
Svarnalata respectively, are both repre-
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
93
sented as being educated, as the result of
special circumstances, with boys, and that
their possession of learning which most
young women have not got is made to con-
tribute to their charms and virtues. Santi
indeed leaves the shelter of her home and
becomes the companion of her husband in
his "hero's mission " as soldier and patriot
in the band of the Children. "He is en-
gaged in a pious work, and I have come to
share it with him," she says, and when their
mission is accomplished they wander forth
together as ascetics to visit the shrines.
When Svarnalata's father finds her with
inky fingers and face, he exclaims, "You are
learning to write! What good will that
do you?" Her brother, who has been
teaching her in his own holidays, defends
her, and the father acquiesces gently, "I
see my Lakshmi [the Goddess of domestic
peace and prosperity] is a Saraswati [the
Goddess of learning] as well."
The ideal of modern Indian women is
more and more to be Saraswati as well as
Lakshmi, though the prejudices and diffi-
culties to be overcome are almost incon-
ceivable to our Western minds.
The demand for wider education exists,
but the obstacles are twofold. The first is
the expense. Our Government can spend
94
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
over twenty millions per annum on the
Army, but only two millions out of public
funds on education. This difficulty applies
to education both for boys and girls; but
the second one is special for girls-namely,
the difficulty of getting women teachers.
The division between the sexes makes men
teachers impossible in most places, but the
women marry so early that they have no
time to train for teaching. Here, again,
we have to get rid of our English ideas before
we can approach the Indian problem. As
the material for teachers we must think of
girls who leave school before they are in their
teens, or, at any rate, whilst in their early
teens, in order to get married, and who after
marriage are " purdah nashin," kept behind
the veil. To get women teachers the cus-
toms of ages have to be broken down, as
is the case to a slowly increasing extent, or
the Government must fall back upon the
widows and confer a double benefit by
giving them status and interesting work
and finding women teachers for the zenanas
and the girls' schools. The Hindus them-
selves have started some very interesting
widows' homes, where some of the widows
are given book-learning, whilst others con-
centrate more upon needlework and other
hand industries. Training uneducated
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
95
widows, however, is not so easy as training
girls straight from school, and hence the
progress is slow and the standard of teaching
still very low.
But I believe that national pride will
make a way in spite of difficulties. I do
not want the Indian women to be turned
into replicas of the English ones. I want
them to develop along their own lines, and
this, I believe, they are preparing to do. I
have visited women's clubs, managed by
Indian women. I have read women's papers
and magazines edited by Indian women. I
have talked with Indian lady doctors and with
a Parsee lady lawyer who is recognised in
India as no lady lawyer is as yet in England.
An Indian lady once mentioned to me
casually in the course of conversation that
she was on the voters' roll, and on inquiry
I have found that there are 527 Hindus,
260 Mohammedans, 453 Parsees, seventy-
three Europeans and others entered as
women voters (wives, widows and spinsters)
on the burgess roll of Bombay. Conse-
quently Indian women have already got the
municipal vote "on the same terms as it is
granted to men," and in the case of those
members of the new Legislative Councils who
are elected by municipalities, the indirect vote
of "Mithabai, wife of Tulsidas Surji," counts
96
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
for as much as that of Tulsidas Surji
himself.
But these symptoms of advance on Wes-
tern lines are of little importance compared
with the uprising which is going on behind
the Purdahs and which is hidden from our
Anglo-Indian officials. It is to the women
that the strength of the Swadeshi move-
ment, the patronising of Indian-made goods
and the further attempt to boycott English
goods, are due. It is the women who resent
more keenly than the men the slights con-
stantly put upon the natives of the country
by its ill-mannered British invaders. It
was enthusiasm for Mr. Tilak as a champion
of Indian nationality which made the ladies
of Bombay hold a crowded public meeting of
protest.
It is sheer blindness to overlook the
women's influence as a factor in the unrest
now troubling the Government in India.
How to enlist that influence and to induce
the women of the country to co-operate
with us in its progress and good government
is a problem which, if it is to be satisfactorily
solved, will need patience, effort, money,
and, above all, sympathetic imagination
and a power of looking at things from the
point of view of other people.
PART III
OPINIONS


I
INDIA
I HAVE written of India; but before one
has been here a week, one doubts if India
exists. The sightseer, with wonder in his
eyes, hastens to the Bombay bazaars. He
stands perhaps at the corner where the
silversmiths work opposite to the copper-
smiths, and where the gilded Jain temple
is so conspicuous a feature in the street
architecture. Past him pour, as though
ranked in a pageant, tribes, races, creeds,
castes, all distinctively marked by dress,
hair, carriage, face, religious symbols borne
on the forehead-each one standing out
from the other. The ear may not have
been trained yet to the varieties of language,
but if it were, it would hear a multitude of
tongues, and those using them understand
each other as little as the English onlooker
understands any one of them. There are
147 of these languages in use in India, and
they are so diverse that they belong to six
great families of human speech, 60,000,000
99

100
INDIA
speak Hindi, 44,500,000 Bengali, 37,000,000
Bihari, 18,000,000 Marathi, 10,000,000
Guzerati, and so on. This is but an epitome
of the land itself.
Two great religions divide its people-
Hinduism with 207,000,000 adherents, Mo-
hammedanism with 62,500,000; and this
religious difference indicates to a great
extent different historical origins, conflicting
national ideals, and disrupting social senti-
ments. Within these two camps there are
further divisions. The Mohammedan Sunni
is in conflict with his brother Shiah. It is
only over a matter as to whether a caliph
or two were false or true; but caliphs are
exceedingly important personages amongst
the Faithful. Though these Mohammedan
divisions result occasionally in civil rivalry
and discord they are not such as to destroy
religious unity. That is not exactly the
case with the Hindu camp, where divisions
of caste mean so much that they not only
separate the people, but condemn one-
fourth of the total Hindu population to a
life little removed from that of the beasts
that perish. The Sudra is not even to
receive religious instruction or to take par
in religious observance; the penance re
quired for killing him, according to th
Laws of Manu, is the same as that require

INDIA
101
for killing a cat, or a frog, or a crow. He
is less sacred than a cow. Nationality can
exist in spite of many differences of race
and religion, but only on condition that
in the mind of the citizen there is some
sense of oneness which transcends all sense
of separation and difference. The Indian
caste system, expressing as it does not
merely a social distinction, but a religious
repulsion of the clean against the unclean,
and involving the existence of an outcast
class of millions whose very shadows taint
the sacred ones, seems to be quite incon-
sistent with a national unity. A ruling
caste, retaining power by force or fraud,
holding authority over the masses without
consulting them, oppressing them without
compunction, and treating them at best as
mere means to its own ends, appears to be
the political system which alone corresponds
to the religion of Hinduism.
The further one wanders on this road of
inquiry the greater appear the difficulties
ahead. History adds to the confusion. The
people have no history in common in which
they take pride. The population are like
layers on the land. They came in wave
after wave, always driving eastwards and
southwards, the original Dravidians, like
our own ancient peoples, being pushed far
102
INDIA
from the points at which the invaders
entered, the various Aryan invasions spend-
ing themselves and leaving their traces in
different territories. A language map of
modern India is a most striking object-
lesson in these repeated invasions. The Mah-
ratta, with his inheritance of conquest still
fresh in his memory—for it is only a hundred
years since his princes ruled and appeared
to be in a fair way to become the masters
of India-broods resentfully over the past,
and nurses in his heart a pride of race and
caste which is nourished by the feeling that
he belongs to the highest of the Brahmins
as well as to the last of the conquerors ;
the Rajput, with his chivalrous military
spirit and contempt for the educated Hindu
political agitator, boasts a purity of blood
running clear since an early Aryan emigra-
tion across the Himalayas; the Bengali is
literary, of nimble mind, sensitive, harbouring
resentment, nationalist to the core. These
are some of the types which history has made
for our confusion. Then on the north-west
we meet with the last invader next to our-
selves the Mohammedan, whose children
still live in the Middle Ages, who cares nothing
about India, whose notion of social unity
may be Pan-Islamism, or if not that, is
nothing at all, who has no part in the politi-
4
INDIA
103
cal agitations bred of Western thought and
education, and who is as ready as his fore-
bears were to pour south and east with
a rifle on his back and a horse under him,
fighting and picking up victuals on the
way. To this diversity it is unnecessary
to add the Mongolian races which are found
on the northern borders, and which one
sees in the streets of Simla and Darjeeling
and in the terraced fields of Nepaul, and
the totally uncivilised men of the bush and
the hills.
Then there is the important political
fact that 693 Native States exist over an
area of 679,393 square miles against a British
area of 1,087,000 square miles, and with a
population of 62,500,000 souls.
Can these be united in
be united in one nation?
When the Mahratta Brahmin and the Ben-
gali Babu cry together for a nationalist
movement, does each only seek for the
dominance of his own kind? Has he de-
luded himself so that India in his
mouth means himself and his own caste ?
Has he honestly faced what the morrow of
India's independence is to bring?
66
On this point, too, history is unmerciful.
The story of India is but a series of kaleido-
scopic changes, in which the popular notion
that the Mohammedans conquered the
5
104
INDIA
country for good is seen to be as little in
accord with truth as that the Mahrattas
were gaining real control when the English
appeared on the scene and General Lake
with guns and sepoys ended the rule of
the Peshwas. Would there be permanence
now any more than there was permanence
then? Would the retreat of the English
invader be anything more than the signal
for another to appear, and would not the
end of one régime of subjection be but
the opening of another?
66
Far away back in the heroic ages there
was an India. Learning and art flourished
within its borders. Its commerce flowed
wherever markets then were. Its science
explored nearly as far in the jungles of
creation as our own. Its philosophy pene-
trated deep into the mystery of experience
and aspiration. Bring me one of the
teachers of India," said Alexander's master,
Plato, when told that his youthful pupil
planned campaigns across the Himalayas.
But that India has vanished. There is a
glimpse of it in the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana; vestiges of it are found in
the remnants of the scientific literature
that survived the furies of raid and con-
quest; traces of it are met with in the
INDIA
105
literature of other people. The Nationalist
movement of to-day is trying to revive it
as an inspiring memory, but it is very, very
far off, and the recollection of it in the
race is dim.
Finally, this discovery comes after one
has gone a little beneath the surface of
Indian life. The civilisation and the genius
of India are now patched by the alien civilisa-
tion and genius of the West. The political
problem of India, for instance, is not that
of an Oriental people, but of an Oriental
people whose leaders are imbued with
Western education and are trying to assimi-
late its culture. From this comes confusion.
At first sight, and on the surface, India
appears to be a land where people live
side by side but do not form a national
community. The hope of a united India,
an India conscious of a national unity of
purpose and destiny, seems to be the vainest
of vain dreams.
II
THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
THE Visitor to India, particularly if he
shows signs of consulting Indian opinion,
is reminded at every turn that the Hindu
has many vices. The whole population is
presented to him as being heathen, whereas
there is, perhaps, no more highly civilised
people in the world. They may lack in
force of will, but they certainly do not
lack in civilisation. But at the head of
their worst children is the Babu, the edu-
cated or semi-educated Hindu. The Babu
is the devil incarnate. He has a nimble
mind and no conscience; he is as crooked
as sin, and in his hands simple-minded
Westerns like myself are as clay under
the moulding thumb of the potter. He is,
in addition, a mean-spirited coward, who
sneaks through life doing mischief because
he loves it. In fact, no one can do justice
to the Babu except an Anglo-Indian of at
least thirty years' standing. That is what
the stranger is told by his kith and kin.
106

THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
107
I
I met this Babu. He has, indeed, the
characteristics of all subject peoples that
have been maligned with one accord.
have also met his detractors. They, too,
have the characteristics of all ruling castes
whose opinions have hardly been challenged.
Both the Babu and the Babu's detractors
would be none the worse of some fresh air,
and both require a fresh mind to deal im-
partially with them.
The defects of the Indian are patent.
Some of them are his own, others are ours.
He has always been prone to sell justice.
When he is in a position to exact bribes and
gifts he does not miss his chance. The
canal and irrigation service,' the pettier
public works, the personal offices filled by
bearers, chuprassies and the like, are dis-
honestly held. This is partly due to Indian
1 This service suffers greatly. I was told of an Indian
Colonel who in conversation with the officer of his district
admitted that he paid bribes to the canal officials. He
was told he must stop doing so, and he promised. Six
months elapsed and he met the official again. How did
that arrangement about the canal get on?" he was asked.
Damnably," was the reply. “I am now getting only about
half the water I used to get for my mills, and my dues
have been increased by an amount about double of what
I used to give in bribes." The collector who told me
this story said he had had bribes twice offered to him
during his service, the sums being 100 rupees and two
rupees.

108 THE WAYS OF THE (6
NATIVE
traditions because these officers have always
been as accustomed to bribes as waiters in
English restaurants have been to tips. In
fact, what we call bribes the Indian regards
as tips; and when servants of the sahib
go to his visitors and in a barefaced way
ask for gifts, they are, in their own eyes,
doing nothing more than a waiter does who
touches his front hair and whines,
"Re-
member the waiter, sir."
sir." Moreover, one
cannot help feeling that had the Anglo-
Indian been determined to eradicate this
evil he could have done so, intricate though
its ramifications undoubtedly are. I was
the guest of highly placed officials who have
insisted upon honesty and have got it.
Bribery, however, will never disappear until
proper wages are paid. The servants who
attend collectors are paid Rs. 5 to Rs. 7¹ per
month; village accountants, who keep the
records on which assessments are made,
receive Rs. 10, Rs. 12, and Rs. 14; field super-
intendents, who check these accountants, get
Rs. 20 to Rs. 30. The ordinary police, the
most corrupt of all the public servants of
India, are paid from Rs. 8 to Rs. 12 per month,
and head constables, whose dishonesties and
impositions can hardly be surpassed, are only
1 The exchange value of the rupee is now fixed at fifteen
to the pound sterling.
THE WAYS OF THE “NATIVE
109
""
paid Rs. 15 to Rs. 20. If you want your
enemy hanged for murder or imprisoned for
any crime you choose to charge him with,
your nearest police officer is probably ready
to oblige you for a very moderate considera-
tion. If you want him arrested and paraded
through the streets in handcuffs, that is the
easiest matter in the world. It is pleasant
to bear record, however, that although I was
in the very best position to hear in confi-
dence of the character of the Indian
magistrates, a very small number of them
were even suspected of tempering justice
with monetary considerations and this did
not apply to a single important judge. The
corruption of the lower grades of the service,
however, cannot be denied.
2
Unfortunately we do not always set a
good example ourselves. The nimble wit
¹ Some of these wages are now being raised. But the
increase is only nominal, owing to the increased cost of
living. The Government of Bombay (Financial Statement,
1909-10), for instance, has had to raise the salaries of
its clerical staff from 10 to 20 per cent, owing to dearness
of necessaries; but when the pay of the police is raised
by a smaller fraction, we are asked to accept that as an
increase in real wages.
2 It is worth while observing that nine-tenths of the
original civil suits and more than three-fourths of the
magisterial business of the country come before Indian
judges and magistrates.-Memorandum on Indian Ad-
ministration. (Cd. 4956. 1909.
110 THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE
of an Indian sees things to which we are
blind. When our officials spend public
money extravagantly on matters which
affect themselves—for instance, when a
certain official of ours spends thousands
of rupees from the public purse in moving
a tree from one corner of his house to
another-the acute Indian sees in that
precisely the same thing which, when prac-
tised by himself, we call appropriation of
public revenues to personal use. But his
most frequently quoted parallel is our system
of travelling allowances. Every one knows
that officers, from school inspectors to chap-
lains, put large sums of money into their
pockets by charging travelling allowances
which they never spend. I heard of a Church
dignitary who was attending a Diocesan
Conference at the Government expense and
who was to make a profit from his allowance
at the end of the meetings. I heard of a
school inspector who insisted upon billeting
himself in private houses whilst drawing
hotel expenses. And the smiling Babu in the
office knows all about it, and when you say
to him, "Now tell me about T.A., he
grins a knowing grin. There is not a
وو
man in the whole service who does not know
about T.A. It is referred to by its initials
like a close personal friend. This is an
THE WAYS OF THE
NATIVE' 111
example of how in India the moral pre-
ceptor must be as pure as Cæsar's wife, and
must keep examining his own habits with
a mind constantly freshened by intimate
contact with its unfamiliar surroundings.
The West must ask no excuses for its own
bad habits which it is not prepared to give
to the East for its bad habits.
Akin to this defect is that of bearing
false witness. This is one of the most
depressing experiences of the friends of the
Indian people, and is responsible for de-
stroying in many a man the sympathy with
which he began his official career. It
cannot be condoned, and unfortunately the
struggle for existence which rages in the
lower grades of the Indian bar makes the
reform of witnesses impossible. British
justice is thus made difficult by the de-
struction of its basis of tolerably honest
evidence. The habit of bearing false witness
is, moreover, augmenting those forces in
Indian life which make social cohesion
impossible. But it must not be judged
apart from the whole judicial system which
we have established in India. This is what
happens. A witness gives evidence which
he knows to be false. It is concocted be-
forehand, and he does his best to stick to
his story and baffle the lawyers. Most
112 THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
people simply put this down to a lying
spirit, attach to the people of India this
spirit as an attribute, and pursue the subject
no further. This explanation, however, is
altogether insufficient.
The phenomenon
requires more study.
In the first place, the state of things here
described has arisen in spite of the strong
condemnation pronounced upon it in the
Sacred Books. "The witness who speaks
99 1
falsely shall be bound fast by Varuna's
fetters during one hundred births: let men
therefore give no false testimony.
Naked and shorn, tormented with hunger
and thirst, and deprived of sight shall the
man who gives false evidence beg for food
with a potsherd at the door of his enemy.'
But in the great law book of the devout
Hindu from which these verses are taken,
exception was made in the case of a man who
lied from religious and family motives. This
explains some of the shortcoming. It is
easy to stretch this exemption so that it
affects the relations between the Hindu and
his heathen conquerors. The Hindu does not
regard us as coming within his codes of
honour and of religious obligation. We do
not share his inner nature. We are Sudras,
outcasts.
¹ Laws of Manu. Section viii. 82 and 93,
f
THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
113
Thus, a considerable amount of false
evidence is permitted and is actually given
under the belief that a man should always
befriend a member of his family or his caste.
A member of a well-known Mission told me
that the son of one of their most sincere
converts had been prosecuted for cheating
passengers at railway stations. The father
immediately started to get together a crowd
of false witnesses and to pay them for their
services. The Mission authorities came to
hear of it, called the father before them,
and told him he must stop. The man was
aghast. Such unnatural conduct he had
never known! It is said that he submitted
to the discipline of the Mission, but that he
never pretended to agree with its decision
and was very sore indeed.
ه درویه کوبی شدت
But, in the second place, one of the founda-
tions of British legal justice the law of
evidence has not only never been accepted
in India but is contrary to Indian concep-
tions of how to do justice. In India justice
has been administered personally. Evidence
has not been sought from witnesses appear-
ing on one side or the other, so much as
from men who knew and were themselves
in the position of judges reporting to higher
judges. The village headman, or the village
Council of Elders, or the village Panchayat
8
114 THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
gave out justice more after the manner of
arbitration than of judgment given on
evidence. Thus it came about that when
British legal methods were introduced, the
traditions which were inseparable from them
at home were not found in India at all, and
the Indian had to put his own meaning into
them and take up his own attitude to them.
Unfortunately, he began wrong. His con-
ception of a witness is not one who speaks the
truth, but one who tells a tale and runs the
gauntlet of a hostile examination. He takes
exactly the same view of his function as
a barrister does of his. He is there to
support his client; and if his opponent is
not clever enough, or if the case for the
other side is not convincing enough, he
has no qualms if he is instrumental in
getting a criminal let off or an innocent
man sent to jail.
The ethics of our own scientific expert
witnesses may serve to reveal the mind of
the Indian in its relation to the method of
doing justice by means of evidence. The
scientific expert accepts his fee from either
side and simply does his best, like a lawyer,
for his paymaster. He would feel insulted
if I said that he perverted the truth when
performing his functions, though I could
do so behind the shelter of Lord Bramwell's
THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
115
gradation of liars. He persuades himself,
I suppose, that he is telling the truth with
a bias on the side of his fee. This little
quibble, however, has no existence for the
subtle Indian. He prevaricates like a philo-
sopher, and not like a man of dull wit
under delusions. Thus we see that at the
bottom of the moral phenomenon presented
by Indian witnesses is the simple fact that
our law of evidence is an alien method, and
that it has failed from the very beginning to
gather round it the traditions of the coun-
tries where it is native to the historical soil.
1
When one understands so much, one is
also possessed of the explanation why the
Indian is so litigious. It is on everybody's
mouth that the Indian is ruining himself
in law courts, and that this is an important
factor in the distribution of wealth and
service in the country. In 1856 there
were 730,000 civil suits instituted in British
India; in 1907 there were 1,867,995.
really has happened is that we have
destroyed in Indian social life all those
courts of arbitration and all those offices
which had as one of their functions the
settlement of personal disputes. We have
thus driven the people to the pleader and
What
1 There are 200,000 lawyers of various degrees of status
and respectability in India.
116
THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
the barrister and the law court; and these
things are like alcohol-they create an
appetite for themselves. Moreover, they
appeal to the gambling weakness of the
Indian, who often embarks upon litigation
in the same spirit as a man puts a Napoleon
on the tables at Monte Carlo. The methods
of Western justice are but a wheel of fortune
to the Indian mind and are played with
accordingly. Their existence in India is
evidence of the destruction of an old social
organisation.
An attempt should be made to retrace
some of our steps towards the methods of
justice native to the soil and the people.
The power to appeal should be limited far
more than it is, but, above all, arbitration
courts of village elders should be established
for certain civil cases, especially for land
and property disputes. In the old days,
the village Panchayat was such a court.
It was indeed the judicial organ of a petty
republic. Early administrators like Sir
Thomas Munro, who was governor of Madras
in 1819, tell that the native litigant who
had a good case preferred to appeal to the
Panchayat, but he who had a bad one
sought the decision of a Collector. Munro
was one of the very few men who saw how
the whole of the spiritual make-up of the
THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
117
Hindu went to form his legal system, and
how little our officials understood that fact.
He wrote: "I conscientiously believe that
for the purpose of discriminating the motives
of action and the chances of truth in the
evidence of such a people, the entire life
of the most acute and able European
judge, devoted to that single object, could
not place him on a level with an intelligent
Hindu Panchayat, which is an admirable
instrument of decision." 1
2
But the problem of India will never be
solved by the West brooding over and
moralising upon the pin-pricks which the
Eastern mind inflicts upon it. The educated
Hindu is the centre of the trouble, and
we should study India and the psychology
of its people in relation to him. We can
brand him and curse him, as our officials
on the whole now do, or we can accept
him, as a select few of our officials advise,
and in either case take the consequences.
He is now a difficulty in the administration
of a bureaucracy, whereas he should be a
problem in the government of co-operating
1 One cannot overlook the likelihood that as these
courts have been so long out of use, it may not be possible
to re-establish them endowed with their old prestige.
2 Mr. Gokhale has stated that nine-tenths of the educated
Hindus are loyally disposed, and one-tenth is sulky or
disloyal.
118 THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE
authorities. We have created him, and if
nothing else moves us to patient sympathy
with him, that ought to do so.
He is, in the main, a Bengali. He is
an embodiment of the virtues and the
vices of the Bengali. The last king of
Bengal preferred
preferred poetry to a kingdom,
and inaction to action; and so, when the
enemy was thundering at his front door,
he went away into peace by a back exit,
and the West and its kind have laughed at
and insulted him and his kind ever since.¹
But I am not at all so sure that the day
of the Bengali is over. He has an awkward
way of using his subtle mind when he is
driven into a corner, and he has an upsetting
tendency to treat lightly what the West
treasures. When we fight him, he is found
to occupy a position we do not under-
stand, to use weapons which are unfamiliar
to us, and to employ salves and balms
which produce, so far as we are concerned,
most confusing results. His Paris exiles
apply Western thought in a way we never
intended to apply it; his condemned men
smile that if we kill them their disembodied
spirits will be more effective against us
than they are before the death of their
1 This flight of Lakhsman Sen is the subject of one of
the finest of Tagore's pictures.
THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
119
hampering bodies. The contest between us
and them is like a battle between a slow-
moving thing of the earth with crushing
paws, and a strong-winged thing of the
air with sharp talons.
We take much consolation in the thought,
however, that the educated Hindus are
only a handful, not a million in a population
of three hundred times as many. And yet
the few are becoming many. Every year
adds to their numbers and their disap-
pointments. They control the native press,
vernacular and English. What public opinion
there is in India is swayed by them, and-
this is even worse-by the priests. Finally,
it is as true in India as it is in the West
that a few make the opinions of the many,
and that the cells which determine growth
are of an insignificant bulk compared with
those which maintain form and mass.
I fear that the house in which we are shel-
tering our official hopes is built on the sand.
This comes to one like an intuition as
one surveys the swayings, the expectancies,
the agitations of India. And it is strength-
ened as one comes to understand the
nature of the human material upon which
we have to act. All critical passages in our
Indian history, all sensational situations
in recent Indian tales, turn upon the
120 THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
1
mobility of the mass mind of India. The
people of India are like the aged Simeon
and Anna the prophetess, who watched by
the Temple for the Messiah. Every year
prophets arise who blaze across the religious
firmament like a comet, and palpitating
hearts are drawn to them. The Indian
mind is in a constant state of expectancy,
and a new leader or a new agitation finds
it as mobile as the moon finds the waters.
A mind constantly seeking the Eternal,
not with foot on solid ground but with
wings in air, is a terrible thing for Westerns
to deal with. And such is the Indian
mind.
The rich Indian whose hands are
full of the jewels of earth hears the call
of the Infinite Void in his soul; and he
gets up, lays aside his possessions, and,
clothed in ashes and with naught but
begging-bowl in his hand, goes out to
seek peace. The common man leaves his
place and, clad in saffron, or in other
pilgrim garb, wanders away to some sacred
place, to dip in some stream of immortality,
to worship in some procession, so that his
soul may be satisfied and the cool shades
of peace come to refresh his weary heart.
The stormy petrel of a politician feels the
shadow of this life lie heavily upon him
1 The Hosts of the Lord, for instance.
THE WAYS OF THE
121
"NATIVE
,,
and he lays his pen down and, with “the
means of purification, silent, unallured by
the objects around him," according to the
injunctions in the Laws of Manu, "leaving
the merits of his good deeds to those who
love him and his evil deeds to those who hate
him, he goes through meditation to the
Eternal Brahma.
وو
This spirit, blurred by blackguardism,
dulled by indifference, coarsened by deceit,
is nevertheless in its purity the spirit which
we have to understand.
66
I was talking one day with one of those
educated Hindus, and I was advancing
arguments to convince him of the weakness
of his position in India. An agnostic, a
town-dweller, an Englishman in dress and
veneer, an insignificant minority-what was
he but that? In reply to the last he said :
Yes, a minority! But you do not know
the mind of India. You inoculate us. We
can pass the word round that your serum
is poison. You then inoculate yourselves
as a proof of your good faith. We reply
through a million gossips that the English
inoculate themselves with rose-water.¹ We
can announce a miracle; we can proclaim
a revelation from the gods; we can spread
tales of desecrated shrines and temples, of
¹ This is the reproduction of an actual instance.
122 THE WAYS OF THE "NATIVE"
cow-killing. Ah! you do not know the Indian
mind. A minority! Minorities and majori-
ties are things of the West, not of India."
That is so. A subtle educated class, a
credulous mass: 1 that is India. The people
are as full of an insane suspicion of us to-day
as they were before the Mutiny. And the
Administration which overlooks that fact,
and which puts its hopes on the placidity
and friendship of the mass, is like the inex-
perienced summer boatman who trusts him-
self to a sea subject to angry storms which
arise without warning and apparently from
all the quarters of heaven at the same time.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou
canst not tell whither it cometh or whither
it goeth. Such is the mass mind of India.
The educated Indian is the natural co-
operator with the Administration, and woe
betide us if we fail to accept the situation
which we ourselves have created.
1 The problem created by the credulity of the people
cannot be regarded too seriously. On its amusing side
this credulity is best seen in advertisements of medicines.
As a rule, they are offensive to English eyes and cannot
be quoted. On its serious side it is seen in the criminal
conspiracies, the most of which are promoted by youths
who, as has been shown in a recent investigation, are
drafting schemes for the government of the country by a
House of Commons consisting of 3,000 members, and for
its defence by fairy-land fleets manned by fairy-land
sailors!
III
THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
THE extent to which India is becoming in-
dustrial in the factory sense of the term is
very marked. The first cotton mill in
India was opened in 1818,¹ the first jute
mill in 1854. Now there are 220 and 45
of these mills respectively. It is estimated
that there is from £11,000,000 to £13,000,000
sunk in cotton and £5,000,000 in jute
factories. During the last five years the
looms in cotton mills have increased by
50 per cent, the spindles by 11 per cent.
In the jute mills, looms, spindles, and
operators have increased by 50 per cent in
the same period. The figures showing the
area under such crops as cotton and jute rein-
force these. There are 20,000,000 acres under
cotton and about 4,000,000 under jute, but
both are subject to great seasonal fluctua-
tions. The value of the cotton crop is about
1 This was in Calcutta, where the industry has not
taken root. The first Bombay mill was started in 1851.
More than one-third of the trade now centres in Bombay.
123
124 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
:
£20,000,000, that of jute about the same.
The figures of occupation published in the
Census are practically worthless, partly be-
cause so many people do not make a living
at one calling all the year round, and there-
fore different enumerators have adopted
different classifications, but mainly because
it is impossible to separate factory workers
from home workers. The figures, however,
show that a population of 8,820,000 were
returned in 1891 as cotton weavers, whilst
7,702,000 were so returned in 1901; but in
another table, where an attempt has been
made to divide out the people employed in
large industries from those employed in
small, cotton, as the former, employed
156,039 in 1901 and 118,000 in 1891. In
Bombay 81,000 cotton operatives
enumerated in 1891, 108,000 in 1901; in
Madras, 6,000 in 1891, 16,000 in 1901.
In jute, the figures are 130,500 for 1901
and 64,800 for 1891.1 61,000 jute opera-
tives were employed in Bengal in 1891; in
1901 there were 110,000. These are incom-
plete figures, but they show a tendency that
is seen even better by the eye in the number
of chimneys in the neighbourhood of Bombay
1 The occupation figures given in the Memorandum on
Indian Administration (Cd. 4956. 1909) are 212,000 in
cotton mills, and 167,000 in jute mills.
THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
125
and Calcutta, and in the large number of
mills which one finds in process of extension.
1
Coal mining is also increasing in import-
ance, the average production per annum
for the five years ending 1885 having been
1,227,197 tons, whilst in 1908 the production
was 12,737,770 tons. Between 1900 and
1906 banking capital increased by 60 lakhs ¹
of rupees, railway and tramway capital by
11 lakhs, and mill capital by 200 lakhs. It
is said that the Swadeshi movement has
brought fifteen banks into existence with
a capital of four crores of rupees; but the
Indian habit of hoarding has as yet hampered
the creation of a native banking system.
It is estimated that industrial companies in
India were working in 1906 with paid-up
capital amounting to 556 lakhs of rupees
above what it was in 1900. Rises in wages,
increasing productivity per worker, Factory
Acts, and so on, are following this movement
in India just as they did in England.
can
Leaving figures on one side, one
assume that Indian factory industry is to
increase. What is to happen? The Indian
is very conservative. Kept apart by re-
ligious observances and born into a stream
of habit stronger in its current than that
¹ There are fifteen rupees to the pound; a lakh is 100,000\3--
rupees, a crore is one hundred times that.
126 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
which perhaps runs through any other
race, the Indian may not rapidly adapt
himself to the new conditions. At present
the factory worker has a bit of land some-
where, or he belongs to a family in whose
possessions he may share, or he has village
connections. That means that he absents.
himself from the factory and the large town
for a certain period every year, returns to
agriculture, and supplements one of his
incomes by the other. Whilst he is working
he is far more casual than our workers. One
finds him strolling about the mill or drinking
water leisurely at the mill yard tap. The
women leave their machines to hug and
comfort yelling babies, who are crawling
on the floor, sleeping by the side of machines
or on piles of cotton or jute stuff, or perched
on the top of the tin cans used for receiving
sliver; and anything from 5 to 10 per cent
of a mill staff is absent every day. This
slackness of organisation means long hours,
irregularity and cheating in the payment of
wages,¹ the employment of children, and
uneconomically used machinery. These con-
ditions cannot continue. The worker will
have to be protected in some way against the
1 The custom is that a workman has to allow his wages
to fall two months into arrear. He thus gets into the
clutches of money-lenders.
THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
127
i
selfish operations of the capitalist, and more
stringent fatory legislation will bring with
it more stingent factory rules. Workers
will break connection with village life and
become noth ng but factory hands. Indeed,
this is already well marked. An ordinary
proletariat class is arising in India-without
land, without family connections, without
the protection of the old social order, and
dependent for what security it has on
legislation and its own combinations. It
will not swamp India; it may never form
a very large percentage of the population
of India; it will be important, however.
Though less than 10 per cent of the Indian
population lives in towns the percentage is
increasing, and it is of no little significance
that when the Census of 1901 was taken
barely one-third of the people in Calcutta
and not one-fourth of the people in Bom-
bay were born there. Thus, even in India
emigration from the country to the towns
has begun.
One finds this industrial class swarming
in overcrowded coolie lines, sometimes
regimented by an overseer to whom the
workers owe their job, and who, in conse-
quence, demands commissions from them,
sometimes living in ordinary working-class
parts of the town under exceedingly bad
128 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
conditions. When the coolie 'ines belong
to the employers, a certain amount of care
is taken of the workpeople. A doctor is
sometimes employed by the owners, a good
supply of water is provided, ..nd drainage
channels are kept up. One with an ex-
perience of the West must look upon this
commercial philanthropy with grave mis-
givings whatever immediate benefit it may
be to the workers.
Calcutta and Bombay and similar towns
will have to face a housing problem which
no town in the West has ever experienced.
Wages will increase, machines will be better
used, the wealth of India will mount up but
will remain in comparatively few hands,
there will be much smoke where there is now
sun. To the creation of such an India
things are now shaping. At present they
have only got so far as the old familiar dis-
cussion with us: Whether shorter hours
will lower wages and reduce profits, and
whether factory legislation is a menace to
employers.
A few enlightened men, some of them
mill-workers themselves, are trying to pre-
pare for the inevitable changes. A young
society called the Mill Workers' Protection
Association is now at work in Bombay on
lines similar to those pursued by the Women's

THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
129
Industrial Council in England. For the
present condition of the Indian working man
is wonderfully like that of the English work-
ing woman. He does not understand his
own position well enough to enable him to
act effectively. Only the faintest glimmer
of Trade Unionism is streaking his horizon
with light.
In face of the industrial developments
which one sees in Calcutta and Bombay, will
hand industry survive at all? It is based
on agriculture, because it depends mainly
on the village market. The wares of this
place and that may retain a market amongst
the select few, but that will not keep in
existence the millions of textile workers and
silver workers, of potters and carpenters,
of dyers and oil pressers, scattered all
over India. As yet by far and away the
greater part of the internal commerce of
India takes place between local producers
and local consumers, and this will remain
true whilst the mass of the people live in
villages and engage in agriculture. At the
present moment about 70 per cent of the
people of India depend more or less upon
agriculture for a living. That percentage
1
1 The Census of 1901 showed a greater proportion than
did that of 1891, but as explained in the Memorandum
accompanying the tables: 'The proportion for 1891
9

130 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
will diminish, but it will do so gradually, so
that, with some assistance from public
opinion and technical education, the handi-
craftsman can exist for a long time, though
in diminishing numbers, alongside factory
industry. His greatest menace is the in-
creasing cost of living, which will raise his
cost of production, whilst factory industry
in India has yet broad margins for effecting
economy. Swadeshi will not necessarily pro-
tect him, though it is said that it has con-
siderably affected the demand for handloom
cotton in Eastern Bengal. The handloom
worker must depend ultimately upon the
cheapness of his products and the taste of
purchasers. If one or other fails him he
will have to become an agricultural labourer
or drift into the factories, and, in either
case, become one of the proletariat. This
struggle between factory and handloom is a
grim battle, and practically every Western
influence is behind the factory. Moreover,
it is the economic source of not a little
political unrest.
refers to the number of persons solely dependent on agri-
culture, whilst that for the present Census includes also
those with other occupations who named the agricultural
one as their chief means of support." Other differences
between the two reports are also pointed out.-Census
Report, I., pp. 207, etc.
THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
131
Although there are sections of Indian
opinion which look on impatiently whilst
factory industry grows, and are never tired
of telling us that if certain things were done,
its progress would be more complete, I am
not at all sure but that for the sake of India
herself slow progress is best. There is a
disorganisation about Indian industry; the
buildings have become old rapidly; the
workers are raw; the social unsettlement
caused by the change has been consider-
able; things have been thrown together
and brought together anyhow. If India
were now to settle down for the time being
and put her industrial life into something
like order, the apparent pause in the out-
ward evidence of increasing prosperity would
be for her benefit. I know this cannot be
done. Competitor struggling with com-
petitor makes it impossible. Unregulated
and disorganised, Indian industry will go
on by rule of thumb as ours did; but the
fact remains that even if factory industry
would grow up more rapidly under Protec-
tion, it would not be a gain to India.
Be that as it may, two things trouble the
industrial interests. The first is the Excise
duty on cotton imposed to re-establish con-
ditions of Free Trade after an import duty
had been imposed. The industrial effect
132 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
has been almost nil, except that it has
increased the price of cotton goods to the
consumer and thus limited the market.
Still, the cotton industry has advanced in
India under Free Trade as well as it has
advanced in any other part of the world.
But the Excise has been exceedingly pro-
vocative of ill feeling. It is regarded as a
proof that the interests of Lancashire are
put before the interests of India by the
Indian Government, and it has helped to
turn India's thoughts in the direction of
Protection. The income derived from the
Customs and Excise duties on cotton goods
amounted in 1908-9 to £1,050,000-far too
great a sum in the present condition of
Indian finances to be sacrificed at one swoop;
but the sooner it goes the better. It will
remove a cause of considerable irritation,
contribute to a reduction in the cost of
living, and help towards clear economic
thinking in India.
The other thing which concerns industrial
India is Protection. Of Imperial Preference
it thinks little and cares less. If it could.
India would protect itself so as to keep out
English cotton goods as much as possible.
1 "If the State in India had been identified in economic
interests with the Indian people, some measure of Pro-
tection might have been adopted by it long ago .
The
THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
133
This opinion is held not only by those
interested in factories, but also by the
Nationalist sections, which are studying the
history of our economic relations with India.
As a result, they have come to regard us
primarily as the exploiters of Indian in-
dustry. We did our best to kill the cotton
industry in India by prohibiting the import
of Indian printed calicoes into England
(1721), and India would now pay us back
and would keep us out altogether, so as
to re-establish her native workshops. Thus
Protection is an item in the Nationalist
creed, and is hankered after by some in-
dustrial interests. "Have you ever thought
out the consequences of Protection on
India?" I asked one of the most eminent
of the Nationalist leaders in Calcutta. "No,"
he replied, "I simply want to get our
craftsmen at work again; and so long as
English stuff comes into the market that
cannot be done." "Have you thought
whether it would be your craftsmen or
your factories that would benefit-if either
people of India ought therefore to step into the vacuum
and do by voluntary Protection [Swadeshi] what the
State might have achieved in an easier way by tariffs
and bounties."-Presidential Address to the Indian In-
dustrial Conference by Dewan Bahadur Ambalab S.
Desai, late Chief-Justice of Baroda.
134 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
did?" I pursued, but he had not. Never-
theless, Nationalism and Protection are close-
ly allied in India, just as they are closely
allied in Ireland. The desire to grasp
certain industrial gains all at once, blinds
both movements to the injury inflicted
by their proposed methods. Certain it is
that whoever studies the figures I have
quoted at the opening of this chapter
cannot honestly assert that Free Trade
conditions have kept Indian factory in-
dustries in a crippled and stagnant con-
dition. Protected countries show no better
results.
A study of Indian trade figures shows in
the plainest way that Imperial Preference
would damage British trade in India, and
that Protection has nothing to offer to
Indian manufactures. The exports from
India to us were valued at £30,000,000 in
1907-8, and of this £24,000,000 consisted
of tea, wheat, raw cotton, skins, seeds,
rice, jute, and wool, articles upon which a
preference would be valueless to India, e.g.
tea, or impossible for us, e.g. cotton and
jute. The exports to which it might be
practicable to grant preference on our
markets are of the most insignificant pro-
portions in the sum-total of Indian trade.
I need not discuss Imperial Preference,

THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
135
however, in connection with India. No one
talks about it there. Indeed, except amongst
some of the titled and zemindar class, one
does not come across the thought of Empire
at all. The Indian does not care a brass
button about the Empire. If he has any
feeling about it at all, it is one of resentment
against Dominions like Australia and South
Africa, which insult his race and deny it
justice.
India's sole interest in tariff questions is
to keep out all goods which come from
England and the rest of the world, and protect
its infant industries. A scheme of Imperial
Preference forced upon India would be re-
presented as another attempt of England
to retain for itself the exploitation of the
country. It would be another political
grievance. Nor will India benefit much
by Protection. Its total import was valued
at £81,000,000 (1908-9), of which £25,000,000
was cotton, £20,000,000 metals and manu-
factures thereof, £7,000,000 sugar; the
rest is a miscellaneous import. The cotton
import is largely of goods which India
cannot yet make, but which it will make
in due course; the metal imports are in
the same
same position; whilst it imports
leather, sugar, tobacco, and a few similar
things, for the sole reason that its own
136 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
methods for producing these commodities
are so antiquated and uneconomical that
it must take them from outside. The
advance it is making in technical education
and in business methods will soon enable
it to produce a far larger share of these
things for itself. India, therefore, does not
require Protection. It will keep the country
conservative; it will add to the load borne
by the poor consumers; it will hand India
over more completely to the financiers and
the exploiters who use Western methods.
India is slowly stretching forth its hand
to grasp the gains which Protection seems
to offer it. When it does so, it will
find that they are not in Protection's
keeping, but in that of business methods,
applied science, factory organisation.
All over India to-day there is a quickening
interest in technical and scientific educa-
tion. It may take some time to get into
its proper lines of development, but there
it is. It is not altogether filled with ad-
miration for our methods.
"Shall we rely
upon our rulers," asked Professor T. K.
Gajjar at the Surat Industrial Conference
in 1907, "when, as Mr. Haldane observes,
they are themselves outstripped by Germany,
America, and other countries which have
taken the fullest advantages of the progress
THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
137
of modern knowledge?" The impediments
in the way of education are many and
great, but the personal determination and
the sociological tendencies working for it
are exceedingly strong. Those State ap-
pointments of Directors of Industry, those
Government Bureaux and Museums of In-
dustry, those economic surveys of States,
those weaving and similar public institutions,
those industrial and technical exhibitions,
those scientific scholarships, and, above all,
those general demands for better industrial
opportunities and for scientific research,
which one hears about all over India, are
to bear fruit.¹ I have seen some of the
schools and scientific laboratories; I have
seen some of the mills; I have met some
of the "captains of industry," both on the
manufacturing and the financial sides; I
¹ I need not cumber my pages with details; but to
indicate the work which is being undertaken, I may refer
to a Report of the Association for the Advancement of
Scientific and Industrial Education of Indians (1909)
which is before me. This Society was founded in 1904.
It has sent some hundreds of young men abroad, and it
reports upon some who have been studying the manu-
facture of porcelain, lead pencils, candles, matches, buttons,
leather, printing inks, umbrellas. Others have been
studying chemical processes such as dyeing and perfumery.
An Agricultural Settlement has been established, Indian
banking promoted, a small Industries Development Com-
pany started.
138 THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE
have noted when speaking to some of the
most devoted national leaders a decided
reaction against a literary education; and
I have come away convinced that the
industrial future of India is assured, and
that one of the great dangers ahead- a
danger which I think some of the sympa-
thetic administrators I met are inclined to
minimise is an individualism far less con-
trolled than ours was a century ago, armed
with opportunities of exploitation far more
dangerous than ours ever were, productive,
in consequence, of evils to the people far
more dire than any which we have known.
It
I have referred to Swadeshi and the
hand worker, and I return to it to repeat
that Swadeshi is not going to carry India
very far. As a sentiment it is excellent ;
as an industrial policy its limits of use-
fulness are exceedingly circumscribed.
is true that Swadeshi has done something
for technical education, and that it has tried
to encourage some branches of hand-work.
But, however offensive the thought may be
to the good Nationalist, the Indian Swadeshi
movement is imbued with Western notions
of profit, factories, balance of trade. One
has only to read the presidential addresses
at the annual Indian Industrial Conferences
to see that. The President at Surat, for

THE NEW INDIA OF COMMERCE 13.
instance, boasted that fifteen private banks,
five navigation companies, twenty-two new
cotton mills, two jute mills, and so on, had
been set on foot by Swadeshi. The Swa-
deshi which this gentleman voiced was one
which would enable him and his class to
create an efficient machinery for the ex-
ploitation of the poor wage earner without
let or hindrance by the Government. Many
Indians curse Lancashire solely because
they want the powers of exploitation for
themselves which they imagine Lancashire
to possess through the British Government.
The Pathan has become a money-lender in
Calcutta, the Hindu is thinking of ledger
balances with an itching palm. The new
India of commerce is growing visibly before
our eyes.

IV

THE LAND OF THE POVERTY-
STRICKEN
A TOUR in India is a study in violent con-
trasts. Ruler and subject, riches and
poverty, jewels and nakedness, fatness and
leanness, exist cheek by jowl in this wonder-
ful land, and there is little transitional
shading to soften the line separating one
from the other. They parade arm-in-arm
before you.
Each is absolute. It is as
though the sun suddenly shot up from
below the horizon to the zenith in a moment
and blazed upon you dazzling beams, and
then the next shot down into night, leaving
you in bewildering, murky darkness. The
darkness, however, sometimes appears to
be everlasting. For days and days one
goes through the land and sees nothing but
thin bodies toiling, toiling, toiling, trudging,
trudging, trudging; or pinched bodies wor-
shipping, worshipping, worshipping with a
sadness that one sees in no other temples.
India is the home of the poverty-stricken.
140
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 141
And this was borne in upon me all the more
that its poverty was embodied in forms of
the most perfect human grace. The woman
coming from the well with her pitcher on
her head; the mother with her baby
astraddle across her thigh; the cultivator
behind his plough and oxen; the man walk-
ing on the road, in pose and demeanour
are as perfect as if they were the models of
the best Greek sculptors.
To ascertain how wealth is being dis-
tributed in India is one of the most difficult
of tasks. Until but yesterday, India was
a land of agriculturists, where the arts and
crafts were pursued by methods familiar
for centuries. Each community of culti-
vators had its complement of service givers,
its barber and potter, its weaver and washer-
man, its blacksmith and money-lender; and
they all depended for a livelihood on the
fruitfulness of nature. When that was
bountiful all flourished; when that failed
all languished and starved. They had their
little stores in reserve, but there was no
living on averages, no capitalist accumula-
tion. They depended in the main on the
season; the source of their supplies was
limited to their own neighbourhood; their
market was equally circumscribed. They
discharged their obligations in most things

142 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
!
not at any absolute price, but in proportions
of crop yieldings. Their social economy
was mutual and elastic. Thus they bore
heavy burdens, because in their economy
the art of adjustment was brought to per-
fection, and in their hearts was a resignation
to the decrees of Fate.
But two great changes have come over
them. Their obligations are ceasing to be
relative and have to be discharged at
average prices, and their market on the one
hand, and source of supply on the other,
have become the world and are no longer
in their village.
Their heaviest obligations are to the
Government, and the weight of taxation is
blamed for the poverty of the people. We
take in Land Revenue £20,000,000 per
annum, £3,000,000 from salt, £11,000,000
from Customs and Excise, and have a net
income of a little under £50,000,000 and
a gross one of over £70,000,000. On the
other side of the account we spend on Army
and military works, not including strategic
(sic) railways, a sum which is just short of
£20,000,000; it costs £6,000,000 to collect
the revenue, and we spend about £19,000,000
in England, not including the cost of stores
for Railway and Irrigation Works.
The Revenue works out at a tax of 3s. 6d.
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 143
per head of the population. This seems
small, particularly when it is remembered
that 1s. 8d. of the sum comes from the land
revenue, which is not a tax but a rent. We
must not be misled into an unwarrantable
optimism, however, by these figures. For
the burden of taxation is measured not by
its absolute amount, but by its ratio to
income. For instance, our burden at home
is about £3 per head; our income £40 per
head. The burden upon the British Indian
is 3s. 6d. per head-or, deducting the land
revenue, 1s. 10 d. perhead—whilst his average
annual income is not more than £2.1
I think that it would be upon expenditure
that an impartial critic would fix his atten-
tion. Financial authorities of a country not
responsible to public opinion, not in any
way depending upon the consent of the
taxpayers for office, must be more subject
to the vice of extravagance than similar
authorities who cannot forget that tax-
payers are electors. This is fundamental.
The personal extravagance of our rulers.
and officials can be seen by the eye. Simla
1 Although I write thus I must again warn readers
against the fallacy of averages in Indian revenue discussions.
For instance, the land revenue of ls. 8d. per head is
most unevenly distributed between, say, Bengal and the
Punjab, and whole sections of the community have an
income of far less than £2 per head.

144 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
residents are able to point out several
examples of this as regards the houses of
officials. I am thinking of a very gross case
as I write. It was paid for by the people of
India; it was unnecessary, and the result of
personal whims, and it was not subject to a
proper independent audit carried out by an
official in the position of our Controller and
Auditor-General. The first step necessary
3'
to put Indian expenditure on a sound
footing is the appointment of an Auditor-
General who will be directly responsible to
the India Office or, better still, to the
House of Commons itself. This would also
put an end to that only too common experi-
ence in India of sanctioned expenditure on
works being greatly exceeded without even
fresh approval by the Government. It would
also mean that information of a fulness
sufficient to be of use would be placed before
the House of Commons itself—something
after the style of our Public Accounts Com-
mittee Reports. It may be that the Viceroy
requires two establishments at Simla; it may
be that Lieutenant-Governors require to
move trees from one corner of their re-
sidences to another at great expense; it may
be that railway engineers cannot estimate
costs within ten or twelve lakhs of rupees; it
may be that roads to private houses have
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 145
to be built almost literally of rupees, but
the House of Commons might as well know
about these things-even if Akbar did in-
dulge in them in his time without having
to consult any one. When there is no
personal extravagance, every Englishman
employed to do work for which an Indian
is fitted is a burden upon the Indian tax-
payer.
1
There is also the old grievance about the
cost of the Army. In 1885 a change took
place in our frontier policy, and in that year
Lord Ripon left. Then began the epoch of
bombastic Imperialism at the expense of
India. The Finance Minister of that day
objected, but military expenditure was in-
creased at a bound by 1,600,000 rupees
per annum. The cost of annexing Upper
Burma was similarly placed on Indian
shoulders, and no justification ever has, or
ever can be, offered for it. It is unspeakably
mean of us to place this burden on the
Indian's back simply because he must bear
any load we put upon him. Nine-tenths of
the charge of the Army in India is an Im-
perial charge. Canada, South Africa, and
Australia should bear it as much as India.
1 Sir William Hunter's opinion on this point was:
"If we are to govern the Indian people efficiently and
cheaply we must govern them by means of themselves."
10
146 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
*
It is a piece of the most bitter cynicism
to find the Imperial doors of our colonies shut
in the faces of these poor people, who bear
such an inordinate share of the cost of
Imperial maintenance, and at whose ex-
pense these Dominions are protected from
the fear of war. If £18,000,000 of the
Army charges were met by the whole
Empire we might look the Indian taxpayer
in the face as honest men. At present we
cannot do so.
I have found myself unable to feel much
wrath about what is called "the drain."
the drain." In
so far as it is caused by our undoubtedly ex-
pensive administration, it should be stopped.
Of the 2,400 offices in India carrying salaries
of over £800 only 70 are held by Indians.
£5,000,000 per annum seems to be the extent
of this extravagance, but it is exceedingly
difficult to get very accurate details to go
upon. The payments in the form of interest
on debt (so far as the debt has been incurred
for Indian purposes), on loans for public
works, on other capital provided in England,
are legitimate. We have borrowed for India
more cheaply than India itself could have
done. Moreover, if the loans have come from
London, that is owing to the unwillingness
of Indians themselves to place capital at the
disposal of industrial enterprise. This weak-
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 147
ness is emphasised at every industrial con-
ference held in India; but as Indians are now
coming forward to support banking and
other financial undertakings, the day of
excessive borrowings in England may be
assumed to be over. This complaint is not
confined to India. In Australia I have
heard grumbling that English capital spent
in the development of Australia should
claim Australian dividends! The complaint
is unjust and does not reflect credit upon
those who make it. The fact is, however,
that India-if it is to embark upon Western
industrial ways and seek goals to which these
ways lead-will still be benefited by some
English capital, though, if it could be in-
duced to provide its own that would be an
advantage. That cannot be done as yet.
1
On the other hand, a little over a million
and a half pounds spent on education is
ridiculous. The small State of Baroda, with
a population of 2,000,000 souls, spends
£660,000 on this, and has committed itself
to a policy which will soon cost £1,000,000
per annum. Moreover, so patent has been
¹ The total expenditure is £4,000,000, of which £1,000,000
comes from school fees, and the remainder from charity,
local exchequers, etc. In Baroda, education has been
compulsory since 1904-5, an experiment having been
carried on in one Taluka since 1893, and the law is being
gradually carried into full force.
148 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
our failure to make this expenditure efficient,
that perhaps the most melancholy official
publication in India is the Quinquennial
Report on Educational Progress. To this
day, 90 per cent of the males and 99 per cent
of the females in India are illiterate.
Our expenditure on education, however,
is only typical. We spend far too much of
the income of India on Imperial purposes
and far too little on Indian development ;
far too much on machinery and far too little
on the conditions in conjunction with which
the machinery must be run.
On the whole, I think two charges can be
substantiated against us. Our Government
is extravagant, and we have behaved meanly
to India. We charge the Indian taxpayer
with the cost of the India Office in White-
hall-even with the cost of building it:
we would never think of making such a
charge against our Colonies; India has to
pay for Aden and for Imperial Embassies
into different parts of Asia; but the depth
of meanness was surely touched when we
tried-happily unsuccessfully to charge
India with £7,000, the cost of the repre-
sentatives and guests from India who took
part in the coronation ceremonies of the
late King.
A dispute of a fury equal to that on the
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 149
amount of taxation has been raised as to
the method of levying the taxes. Is the
land revenue fairly imposed? Is what is
called the "Permanent Settlement" the
only just method of raising this tax, or is
there justice as well as money in the method
of periodic revaluation and readjustment
of the tax ? ¹
1
The Permanent Settlement of Bengal was
accomplished in 1793, when a class of
landlords was recognised and the land
revenue fixed. The arrangement thus made
is that the cultivator shall pay rent to a
landlord, and that the landlord shall pay a
certain percentage of that rent to the
State.2 In its earlier years, the Nationalist
movement, both in India and at home,
was Liberal in its economics as well as in
its politics, and a scheme of Permanent
Settlement was in the forefront of the
political proposals made to alleviate the
distress of the cultivator. In one of his
latest books,3 Mr. Romesh Dutt marshals
1 The Permanent Settlement area in 1906-7 was
122,000,000 acres, yielding 4 crores of rupees to the Ex-
chequer. The temporarily settled area was 203,000,000
acres, yielding 14 crores.
2 This revenue now represents only 8 per cent of the
produce of the land, the rest of the economic rent being
private property.
3 Famines in India.
150 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
the arguments favourable to the Bengal
system.
Under it improvements are en-
couraged because the Government cannot
step in and claim, in the shape of enhanced
revenue, the benefits which follow upon
improvements. The system of a frequent
valuation of fields for the purpose of ascer-
taining whether their value is going up
or down, and of increasing their revenue if
the former is taking place, tends to keep
the cultivator from advancing with the
times, because he receives no permanent
reward for his energy. The Government
takes everything; the cultivator gets
nothing. For a long time this was the
view of the Indian reformer, and it was
a view in accord with prevailing Liberal
ideas of the West, which did not discriminate
between rent and other forms of income.
It is altogether unsound, however, because
it is based upon a misconception of the
nature of economic rent. The landlord is
an essential feature of the Bengal system,
and if the Bengal cultivator pays no revenue
he pays rent. By precisely the same causes
which raise the amounts of revenue to be
paid under temporary assessment, the
Bengal cultivator found he had to pay
increased rents to the zemindar. In other
words, economic rent is not available for
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 151
the tenant cultivator. It does not remain
in his pocket. If he be a cultivating
owner, so soon as the economic rent of his
holding becomes of any value, he lets his
land to another and takes the rent without
putting himself to the trouble of cultivating
by his own labour and capital. Whatever
the system may be, economic rent always
tends to separate itself from wages and
interest, and to become the subject of
independent holding and an opportunity
for exaction. Thus we find that in Bengal
the tenant was rack-rented because the
Government had not claimed the whole
of the economic rent. A class of zemindar
landlords grew up who used their economic
powers to take more than was economically
just, and the tenant had to be protected
by a special code of law known as the
Bengal Tenancy Acts (1859 to 1885). Similar
Land Laws have had to be passed in the
United Provinces and the Punjab, Madras,
Bombay, Burma, and Assam to meet similar
circumstances, and petty occupiers are being
turned into proprietors (practically, if not
nominally), and are protected against an
increase of revenue on their own improve-
ments. The Bengal Acts restore to the
cultivator his ancient right to security
(provided he pays his rent), which had
!
152 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
practically disappeared by 1858 owing to the
operation of the landlord system. They
lay down the process by which his rent
can be increased, and endow him with
rights of occupancy which amount to a
system of dual ownership. But even now
the system is uncertain and inequitable.
The public, represented by the Government,
do not get a fair share in the socially created
increments, and the cultivators secure a
part of economic rent in varying proportions,
and not in accordance with their deserts.
An enormously wealthy class of zemindars
has been created, and the custom of official
bleeding by offering them C.I.E.'s and other
decorations for subscriptions to the hobbies
of Collectors and Lieutenant-Governors has
grown up as a substitute for the more
direct way of obtaining public revenue by
a land assessment. The system of Per-
manent Settlement has nothing either in
theory or practice to commend it, and
even where supplemented by Tenancy Acts
it is clumsy, and is a poor substitute for
the Bombay system.
The Bombay system is one of periodical
valuation of lands with a view to a re-
adjustment of burdens, so as to keep them
in some steady ratio to economic rent.
When the price of produce rises more than
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 153
the cost of cultivation, economic rent also
rises; when land becomes more valuable
owing to the building of railways or ex-
penditure on irrigation works, economic
rent rises. Under such circumstances the
revenue paid by land to the Government
should also rise, because the land tax is
not a tax but a rent. In the adjustment
of revenue, of course, the greatest care
must be taken not to confuse interest on
capital expenditure with rent-for instance,
all the benefit of irrigation or manuring must
not be regarded as rent, because much of
it is interest; and again, care must be
taken not to increase the land revenue so
suddenly that it seriously affects the stan-
dard of life of the cultivator. Thus, short
settlements may be more just to the culti-
vator than long ones, although at a first
glance they seem more oppressive. But
those are details the settlement of which
must depend on the ability and honesty of
officers and the financial genius of Govern-
ments. The principle underlying the Bom-
bay system, that rent is largely an unearned
increment, that the land revenue is not a
tax on private wealth in the proper sense,
but the property of the public from its
very origin, is one which ought to be ac-
cepted unhesitatingly by every collectivist
154 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
critic of Indian administration.¹ In doing
so I take my stand against one of the
oldest contentions of the Indian school of
Reformers; but this is only one of several
points upon which the modern school must
disagree with the older one.
Whether or not this good principle has
been oppressively applied is a totally differ-
ent question which has given rise to a
voluminous literature, and the problem has
been greatly complicated by considerations
regarding how the money has been spent:
whether the Indian Army ought to be an
Imperial charge, whether the European
service in India constitutes a drain on
Indian resources, and so on.
But for the moment confining my atten-
tion to the impost itself, the balance of
evidence and official admission seems to
be that in many places the impost has
been too heavy, and that the wages and
interest of the cultivator have frequently
1
¹ I have frequently noticed that in the Indian press
it is argued that the land tax is not a rent, because it is
not fixed by competition. It is providential for India
that it is not, for if the Government put up lands to auction
so as to impose rents, its income would be much higher,
because competing tenants would do themselves greater
injury than they meet with at the hands of collectors.
An expert valuation is a better way of fixing a just economic
rent than competition between would-be users.
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
155
been drawn upon by the Government in
addition to economic rent. If we assume
that the volume by Mr. Dutt to which I
have just referred is an authoritative state-
ment of one view, and the reply which
Lord Curzon caused to be published¹ is
the authoritative statement of the official
view, the careful critic who has studied
both will probably finish his task with
such conclusions as follow. He
some
will agree that in many details-most of
them, however, quite unessential to the
main charges-Mr. Dutt has made mis-
takes, and he will reject as of no value
all statements as to averages made by
both sides-but particularly by the officials
-on the ground that averages, taken over
such a wide field, and covering values the
smallest variation in which means a great
deal in proportion to the total effective
income of the people concerned, must be
quite worthless for practical purposes. He
will consequently regret that the Govern-
ment of India has never accepted the
challenge thrown out by its critics to
institute a careful investigation into the
social conditions of groups of typical villages
on the plan adopted by Mr. Charles Booth
1 Land Revenue Policy of the Indian Government.
Calcutta, 1902.
156 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
and Mr. Rowntree, because in that way
alone can real evidence be placed before
impartial judges.
2
He will also, I think, find grounds for
believing that, partly owing to readjust-
ments and partly owing to changes in Indian
social economy, the burden of land revenue
is less than it was.' Things are improving.
The extension of the cultivable area and
the increasing value and regularity of the
crops raised have undoubtedly increased
the economic rent of India, and thereby
lightened the burdens of the land tax;
whilst the agitation of which I have taken
Mr. Dutt as the representative has had its
effect upon the official mind. Even those
officials whom I would unhesitatingly regard
as the least sympathetic and most ignorant
of Indian thought and feeling spoke of the
possibility of an increase of land revenue
with a terrified shudder, whilst the best
men readily admitted that excesses had been
imposed, that the cultivators had been
1 The assessments in 1878-9 amounted to 22 crores
of rupees, in 1905-6 to 29 crores. This represents an
increased value of products from 300 crores to 400 crores,
which is much under the actual increase.—Journal of
Royal Statistical Society, September 1909, p. 555.
2 I write this in spite of recent famines, because the
steps that have been taken to make the people independent
of the seasons have undoubtedly been effective.
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 157
driven into the clutches of money-lenders
in consequence, and that the greatest care
should be taken to leave the cultivators an
ampler margin than they now have for an
improvement in their standard of life.
i
But the conclusion of farther reaching
importance than any of the others has
reference to the use of averages. In the
official defence, an assumption, very reason-
able under Western conditions, but fatal to
good results under Indian conditions, is
made. Assessments are fixed on average
years. In good
In good years the full economic
rent is not taken; in bad years a little
more than the economic rent is taken;
averaging the two, justice is done. Here is
the West blundering in the East. The
Indian cultivator does not think, and does
not organise his economy, in periods longer
than a season or annual round of seasons.
He is not a capitalist who accumulates and
averages. One year he has, the next year
he has not. Even when he has hoardings in
the shape of ornaments he does not regard
them as mere coin. They are like family
jewellery, and will not be disposed of except
on a great pinch. He borrows rather than
convert these ornaments into cash. Hence
in bad years he often pays his land assess-
ment from borrowed money, upon which he
C
158 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
has to pay 25 to 30 per cent. Thus it is
that fixed charges have driven the cultivator
steadily into the hands of the usurer. It
is not that the charges have been always
excessive of themselves. They have not
been sufficiently elastic to meet the short
views which have been characteristic of
Indian economy from time immemorial;
they have been too rigid to fit into his habit
of meeting his obligations by sharing his
crops.¹ Averages, erroneous everywhere,
are more fruitful of mistakes in India than
elsewhere; obligations calculated on capi-
talist habits can never be anything but
oppressive when imposed on communities
where payments have been almost directly
made in kind, and where the measure of
economic obligation has been a season's
crop.
1
In this respect India is now changing.
The factory, with its demand for wage
workers and its drain upon agricultural
labourers; the export of corn, with its tend-
ency to establish cash payments instead of
kind exchanges or barter, have already
seriously affected the old economy of India,
the recent rise in prices being only an
1 "The rigidity of the revenue system forces them
into debt."
debt."-MacDonnell, Famine Commission Report
(1910), par. 331.

LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 159
indication of more radical changes. But
before the change began, and whilst the
transition time lasts, the Western methods
of imposing averaged burdens are bound
to work considerable havoc and to result
in much injustice.
If one feels more bewilderment than en-
lightenment in plunging through the mass
of assertion and counter-assertion that has
been made during this controversy, the
great outstanding and ultimate facts un-
fortunately admit of no dispute. They
are confessed in every official publication.
The people are the most industrious in the
world; much of their land is fertile and
yields rich crops; whenever a a famine
comes they are stricken with starvation and
die by the thousand, whilst millions are
shattered in physical vigour. Sir William
Hunter said that 40,000,000 Indians go
through life with insufficient food; Sir
Charles Elliott estimated that one-half of the
agricultural population never satisfied hunger
fully from one year's end to another. From
thirty to fifty million families live in India
on an income which does not exceed 3d.
per day. In July 1900, according to the
Imperial Gazetteer, famine relief was ad-
ministered daily to 6,500,000 persons. The
poverty of India is not an opinion, it is a
160 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
fact. At the best of times the cultivator
has a millstone of debt about his neck.
The Famine Commission's Report of 1901
informs us that at least one-fourth of the
cultivators in the Bombay Presidency have
lost their lands and less than one-fifth are
free from debt. When it is remembered
that on his borrowings the cultivator pays
interest at the rate of 30 per cent per annum,
it is easily seen that anything—whether his
own extravagance or the rigidity of collec-
tion of Government taxes-which drives him
to the money-lender is like a sentence of
economic death upon him. But, again, one
must be warned that the district variations
are considerable. One can gather that by
the eye in passing from place to place. The
cultivator of Oudh, living under a system of
landlordism pure and simple, is a very much
more pitiable sight than the cultivator in
Central Bengal or in the Punjab.
In this connection one must consider
specifically the problem presented by famine.
A careful study of the material available
does not support the view that famine is
becoming more prevalent. It is undoubtedly
better advertised. Every locality is now
under the eye of Government and the news-
papers, and people suffer less in obscurity
than they did. Moreover, the bulk of

LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 161
scientific opinion seems to be opposed to
the somewhat widely spread notion that
the climate is changing and that the rainfall
is becoming less regular, although the de-
struction of forests, and other short-sighted
interferences with the natural drainage of
the country for which we are responsible,
must have altered the distribution of mois-
ture in the soil. Carelessly constructed
railway embankments blocking drainage
channels have turned healthy places into
malaria-infested districts; and although the
miracles worked by our systems of irrigation
must strike every observer, we do not yet
know what penalty nature is to impose
upon us for them. Our "improvements
have altered the natural economy of India
to an extent which we can only guess about
at present. All this must affect the general
fertility of the country.
وو
A mere recital of recent famine statistics
is enough to appal one. Going no further
back than 1890 we find that in that year
there was scarcity in several districts, and
in the following year the affected area was
wider. In 1896-7 there was famine in
Madras, Southern and Central Bombay,
Bengal, United Provinces, Central Provinces,
and the south-eastern corner of the Punjab,
whilst the Native States of Rajputana and
11
162 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
Hyderabad also suffered. Scarcity was felt
in certain fringing areas. Again in 1899-
1900 famine visited Bombay, the Central
Provinces, Rajputana, Baroda, Hyderabad,
and scarcity accompanied it in neighbouring
districts. Almost continuously from that
time to last year there have been short
crops in most parts of India, scarcity in the
Deccan and parts of the Central Provinces,
and famine in Guzarat. In 1907 drought
again played havoc in Northern India. In
the 1896-7 famine 307,000 square miles
were affected, with a population of 69,500,000.
The figures for British India alone were
225,000 square miles and 62,500,000 people,
of whom 4,000,000 were on relief at the
height of the distress. In British India the
mortality of this famine has been estimated
officially at 750,000 souls.¹ The famine
which followed on the heels of this affected
an area of 475,000 square miles bearing a
population of 59,500,000, of whom 6,500,000
were receiving daily relief at one time. The
British territory affected was 180,000 square
miles, with a population of 26,000,000. The
Commission which reported upon this esti-
mated that in British India about a million
people had died as the result of this infliction
and the cholera which trod upon its heels.
¹ Imperial Gazetteer, new edition, 1907, vol. iii., p. 490–91.
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 163
66
In studying famine, one must begin by
grasping what it is and how it presents
itself. Even in the worst times now there
is no scarcity of grain in the famine-stricken
districts, except, as in the case of Darbhanga
in 1906-7, when the famine was caused
by floods which cut off the afflicted dis-
trict from the rest of India in the early
stage of the outbreak. At the very worst
time in the Guzarat famine of 1900, when
people were dying by the score every day
in Ahmedabad, it was shown by the official
returns that there was sufficient grain to
last for a couple of years" in the hands of
the grain dealers of the district. It is,
therefore, not a scarcity of grain that causes
famine. As a rule, prices rise, but not to
the level they used to reach. The railways
have stopped that. Imports supply failure
of crops. The last serious scarcity of grain
was experienced in the Orissa famine in
1865-7, and that which followed in Raj-
butana in 1868-70. Since then famine has
been caused by a destruction of capital
and the consequent cessation of the demand
or labour. High prices coincide with low
vages and unemployment, and people starve
n the midst of plenty.' Hence, the first
1 As guides to the formation of accurate opinions
egarding famines, I may quote some sentences from the
164 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
to suffer are the landless labourers who
have no savings, no credit, and nothing
to mortgage. The advantage they have is
that they are pretty free to move about
and are not prevented by pride or caste
from accepting any relief that may be
going. Little removed from them are the
small cultivators. They are generally in
the hands of the money-lender, who is
unwilling to advance them more money;
they have no reserve of grain, so that
they have to purchase the high-priced food-
stuffs on the market; they are unwilling
to go away in search of work. The ad-
vantage they have is that they may obtain
from the Government some loan to dig
wells.¹
1
Then the high prices reduce the
Report on the Administration of Famine Relief in the
United Provinces during the Years 1907-8. Prices rose
rapidly in the second week in January, and imports from
the Punjab and elsewhere came in at the rate of 50,000 tons
a week (p. 27). Estimate that the cultivator in 1908
lost £23,000,000 worth of food crops (p. 33). Trade in
food-stuffs active during famine, and private enterprise
provided sufficient supply for market (p. 122). Difficulty
is high prices, not scarcity (p. 124). If prices had been as
low as they were thirty years before, there would have
been no need for relief over the greater part of the area
(p. 151). The labourer who spent one and a half annas
on food in 1906 had to spend two annas for the same amount
in the autumn of 1907 (p. 152).
1 Of the male diggers employed on the relief works in
the Sadar charge there were twice as many cultivators

LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 165
value of the rupee, and the middle-classes
suffer severely in consequence. This in-
creases the indebtedness of the people,
and in famine times extra staffs have
sometimes to be engaged to cope with the
rush of applications for registration of deeds.¹
In one way railways have added to the
difficulty, and have widened the apparent
famine area. They are, in the first place,
the means by which the export of Indian
grain is carried on. No one who has not
been in India and has seen nothing of the
working of the system from the great
granaries at Kurachee to the agencies in
every little village which has a surplus of
anything that can be sent away, can grasp
the colossal nature of this export organisa-
tion. One firm alone sucks the sap of
Indian life like a tropical sun, leaving dust
and barrenness behind. A week or two
after harvest India's surplus wheat and
rice have passed into the hands of dealers,
and when the next monsoon fails she
starves. The cultivator used to have re-
serves. He has practically none now. He
as landless labourers, and of these cultivators 12 per cent
possessed holdings of 4 bighas [about an acre] and upwards.
Darbhanga Famine Report, 1906-7,
p. 10.
1 Ibid. p. 11, where it is stated that the increase in
egistrations was 53 per cent.

166 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
has a little money but not much of it, and
it is just this turning everything into cash
which is the source of so much of his troubles.
When in the old time famine overtook
India, if the famine-stricken tract was in
dire distress, neighbouring tracts were little
affected, owing to the lack of communication
preventing famine influences from affecting
neighbouring markets. Nowadays the means
which relieve famine widen its influences,
because scarcity in one part immediately
puts up prices in other parts and deepens
poverty in them. The poison which used
to be virulent and local is now milder but
is carried farther through the system.
I am fully aware that on this point
there is official optimism, and that a reply
is at hand in the shape of the statistics of
export. The charge is that India is de-
pleted after her harvests. The reply made
is that when India's harvests fail exports
drop. Of course they must. It is not
the figures of export that have a bearing
on this point but those of import, and we
find these rise enormously, and immediately
there is scarcity. For instance, in the Re-
view of the Trade of India for 1908-9¹ it
is stated regarding the import of grain and
pulse, "The trade temporarily assumed im-
1 Cd. 4912.
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 167
portant dimensions last year in consequence
of the scarcity prevailing in parts of the
country." The import of rice in 1907-8
was 3,718 tons, in 1908-9 32,739; of
wheat 12,783 and 28,948 respectively. This
shows that India is depleted every season,
and other figures show that when prices
rise savings are destroyed. No reason for
official optimism is less well furnished than
that based upon the growing exports of
Indian grain.
These changes in Indian economy, it is
said, have to come because they are in-
cidents in the path of progress. That is
only the obiter dictum of our Western arro-
gance and blindness. We live under the
delusion that there is no emancipation
except through the disintegration of social
organisation. In the old days there was an
organisation which made the interdepend-
ence of the various functions in social life
real. Exchange was in the first place in-
ternal to the community. There was a
common wealth. The despised money-
lender was a necessary social functionary.
Now that is broken up. The individual
cultivator has been dragged into wide re-
lationships. He gets price for his products
and he pays his obligations in coin. The
economic community is broken up. Ex-
168 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
change of service has given place to pur-
chase of service. Produce is taken away
and the price of it remains, and this
price is subject to many fluctuations in
value to which the produce under the
vanishing economic conditions was not sub-
ject. The money-lender from being a social
functionary has become a parasite. Indi-
vidual capitalism is proving itself to be
even more destructive of the best that is
in India-where its operations are alien to
the civilisation of the country-than it has
proved to be in the West, where it has
not been so alien. The ways of Western
progress are not the ways of Eastern pro-
gress. It is simply absurd for us to look
complacently on and see the ancient methods
of credit upset, the ancient protections
from famine swept away, and the ancient
balance and economy destroyed; and rejoice
that through this ruin, progress comes.
And what are we putting in the place
of them? Railways are of little use. Even
their benefit depends on the answer we
give to the conundrum whether it is better
to have severe famine in limited districts,
or an increase of prices and an increased
poverty over wide areas round a stricken
centre where the famine may be less severe
than it would otherwise be. This happens
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 169
in the process of substituting the cash
nexus for the personal nexus, of enthroning
the pinchbeck virtues of egotistic and capita-
list thrift in the place of a ruined system of
social thrift, mutual aid, and personal
credit. We have made the money-lender
and the grain forestaller great, and from
being public functionaries our administration
has made them self-seeking exploiters.
In the strenuousness of their efforts to
provide relief when famine is upon the
land, our officers are above praise. The
story of famine relief in India will shine
with a bright glow after many other achieve-
ments of ours have ceased to emit a beam
of light. I have heard detailed criticisms
regarding the expenditure of the funds;
and sometimes overworked and overworried
officials have failed to be tactful or even
polite. Thus, it is stated in the Report of
the Orphan movement in connection with
the Arya Somaj (1899-1900), that during the
famine of that year whilst rescuing orphans
in Rajputana, "we addressed representa-
tions, memorials, and applications to the
Commissioner of Ajmere-Merwara, to the
Agent of the Governor-General of Rajputana,
and to the Deputy Commissioner of Beawar,
out our applications never elicited any
replies." But what of that? Man is not
170 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
yet perfect. And yet their relief work, so
unlike the charity which India has been
accustomed to dispense, has of itself had a
solvent effect on Indian social organisation.
It tended to pauperise the people, to make
them lose their self-respect; it damaged
the status of some, it destroyed the morals
of others. Indeed, the coarsening and de-
grading which come from relief works and
labour tests are just the same in India as
they are at home.¹
Also payment of relief in coin tends to
keep up the price of corn and allows the grain
dealer to exact more than he otherwise
would from the people. He has first of all the
advantage of taking the corn of his creditors
-often at his own price-and then of
having a market for it prepared by the
Government through relief works. In some
of the recent famines doles have been given
in grain by the Government and not in coin.
This is an improvement on old methods, and
indicates that the force of circumstances
is driving the Government to relieve in
kind, and thus to tackle the question of
grain storage.
Over and over again Government has
1 Relief work in India is generally the making of new
roads, and the repair of old ones, of embankments and
of tanks, and the excavation of new tanks.
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
171
been warned that its duty is not to relieve,
but to prevent, and that the only way to
prevent is to strengthen the economic posi-
tion of the cultivator mainly by extricating
him from the financial meshes in which he
lives, and to give support, so far as is
possible, to the old economy by encouraging
its methods of mutual helpfulness. When
scarcity comes and prices reach famine levels
the Indian administration should boldly
step in and prevent, where necessary, ex-
porters and forestallers leaving the land
more desolate than need be. Maximum
prices for grains should be fixed, and not a
ton should be allowed to leave the country
except by the sanction of Government.
A steadying of prices is by far and away
the best kind of famine relief that a Govern-
ment can establish in India. This would
not interfere with legitimate exports or
ordinary trade; it would prevent the whole
economy of India being dominated by the
interests of usurers and exporters, who act
as exploiters of the country and its people.
If the controversy regarding land assess-
ments and famines is entering upon a new
phase owing to the changing social economy
of the country, we must consider what that
change means, with a view to guiding it as
far as possible in the interests of the people.
172 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
To the eye, the change is noticeable in
smoking factories, crowded coolie quarters,
extending docks; but some of its less promi-
nent features are not the least important.
The movement in co-operation, best illus-
trated by the agricultural banks, is one of
the most significant. These banks, advo-
cated in a memorandum sent by Sir William
Wedderburn to the Government of Bombay
and accepted by the Government of India
in 1884, but rejected by the Secretary of
State-Lord Wolverhampton, then Mr.
Henry Fowler-were begun in 1904, and at
the present moment are to be found in
every province in a state of more or less
vigour. Twenty valuable years have been
lost, however, and the poverty of the culti-
vator is so much deeper. Thus passes the
1
1 These Societies are now passing out of their experi-
mental stage. The Hon. R. W. Carlyle, who presided at
the twentieth Annual Conference of Co-operative Credit
Societies at Calcutta in November 1909, stated that
during the year the number of Societies had risen from
1,357 to 2,008, the members from 149,160 to 184,897, the
working capital from 44 lakhs to 81 lakhs, the expenditure
from 47 lakhs to 84 lakhs. In Madras, Burma, and the
United Provinces they can command as much capital
as they require; in Bengal and the Punjab the Societies
are most numerous, though in the United Provinces the
membership and the working capital are both largest.
Repayments are excellent, fraud is slight, liquidation is
rare. This system of mutual credit is to be extended.
Weavers' Banks have just been started. The danger
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 173
old cultivator. Thus the regularity and
organisation and forethought of the West
arrive, and the social and economic habits
of thrift and averaging, upon which alone
a democratically controlled Government
rests, are creeping in. A Delhi Mogul or a
Poona Peshwa could rule on fluctuating
incomes; a Calcutta Cabinet needs some-
thing very regular and very certain. The
error and injustice of averages are being
minimised. India is systematising her ex-
penditure and her consumption.
As part of this silent revolution this also is
happening. All the guide-books tell the
traveller that India is a cheap country, but
he does not find it to be so. Prices have
risen enormously. Wages, tips, hotel bills,
are all on an ascending scale. I quote the
following table from the Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society for September 1909,
showing the increase in the cost of living in
India through sixty years:
Years.
1843-58
Price
Index Number
1865-87
1889-98
1900-4
:
72
100
118
125
135
1905 to date
ahead is that too much haste will be shown in founding
them, as was the case in the native State of Mysore, but
this danger diminishes every year.
174 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
The figures for the past three years are:
Price
Index Number
Years.
1906
1907
1908
:
167
178
202
Much is being written about this and very
much more talked about it. Commissions
and Committees are being demanded to
inquire into it. Some say it is caused by
exports, some by imports, some by factories,
some by tourists, some by the changes
which have been made in the value of the
rupee, some by the excessive coining in
which Sir Edward Baker is, in some quar-
ters, alleged to have indulged when he was
Finance Minister, some by famines and
scarcity, some by railways, some by the
cornering " of dealers. The real truth is
probably that it is owing to them all to-
gether, because they are all part of the
organic change creeping over India. This
view receives support from the fact that
since 1860 not only have prices been rising
steadily but local variations have been
ceasing to count, and except at exceptional
times have tended to become uniform all
over India.
66
India is undergoing expansion, factories
are arising, the area of cultivation is widen-
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 175
ing, opportunities for work are multiplying,
and the increase in population has been
checked by famine, disease, and scarcity."
Moreover, the old method of exchange is
being supplanted by a new one, in which
money is being used. The blacksmith and
barber, as I have pointed out, are to a less
extent village functionaries sharing in village
production and village wealth, and are be-
coming personal servants, charging fees for
their services. Thus, impediments have
been put in the way of a free exchange of
labour, inducements have had to be offered,
and consequently competition and the laws
of supply and demand have come into
operation; prices on the world's market
have influenced prices in India.
This is to be permanent. The operations
of agricultural banks, if they were only
carried on on a larger scale, would tend to
destroy the power of the bania or money-
lender, who, holding liens very commonly on
crops, is in a specially advantageous posi-
tion for cornering markets and keeping up
prices against the consumer. But costs in
exchange are to increase as coinage is to
1 The Census increase between 1881 and 1891 was
13-18 per cent, between 1891 and 1901 2:41 per cent;
since 1901 there has been scarcity, famine, and much
disease.
176 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
be more and more used for measuring the
value of services, and as Western industrial
methods obtain a firmer grip on Indian
industry.
This is affecting the economic position of
the classes in India and will be a disrupting
element in its social organisation. For
instance, all those working for fixed salaries
or fees, all traders carrying on business in
old ways, and the middle classes who do not
engage in trade, are becoming relatively
poorer. The business man who adopts new
methods, and who is fitting himself into the
mechanism of the export trade, is becoming
richer. His origin is very often in one of the
lower castes, and the higher castes look on
his rise with disgust. The cultivator is in
a more doubtful position. If he is cultivat-
ing for export he gets better prices than he
used to do though it must be observed
that the lion's share of the benefits goes to
the middleman; but when he has to buy
for consumption, he finds that his high
income has a low equivalent in terms of
necessaries of life. The cultivator who
tills irrigated land in exporting districts and
whose tenancy is of considerable size, is
undoubtedly improving his status and is
hoarding wealth; the class cultivating small
holdings from which no advantage of export
LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 177
can be reaped is either stationary or is being
ground down. In Bengal there is a speci-
ally wealthy landlord class, and this class
is getting richer and richer. There still
remains the landless labourer, and on the
whole he seems to be improving. He finds
it more difficult to live when out of work,
but when in work-and there are still
thousands of small jobs to which he can
turn his hand-his higher wages more than
compensate him for dearer goods. And to
all and sundry who care to enter the mills
there is some opening as yet. The distance
which workpeople go for factory labour is
extraordinary. In a jute mill which we
visited outside Calcutta, for instance, we
were shown a big block of two-storeyed
dwellings inhabited mainly by coolies from
Madras. Further, in estimating the ten-
dencies in wealth distribution, we must not
overlook the changes in social habit which
are creeping over the people and changing
the values of incomes. Better clothes are
being worn, cigarettes are beginning to take
the place of the hookah, alcohol is being
more widely consumed, shoes are more
general, umbrellas are becoming more
common.
The people's wants-too many
of them debased-are becoming more costly
to meet. As evidences of increased pros-
12
178 LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN
perity I place little reliance upon such facts.
These things no more show prosperity than
expensive weddings or extravagant funerals.
They simply show that the people are
running after cheap luxuries, that their
sources of satisfaction are changing, that
they are spending more money upon them-
selves.
Thus the general conclusion to which I
have come regarding the movement of
wealth in India is that India is rapidly
becoming richer as a whole; that a com-
paratively small but exceedingly rich class
is being formed of bankers, mill-owners,
and landlords, the majority of whom are
Hindus of the merchant castes but with a
strong representation of Parsees, Jains, and
other special sections of the Indian com-
munity; that economic rent is increasing ;
that the aristocracy and members of the
old trading and middle class are being
reduced; that the cultivator is being divided,
and at one end is becoming better to do,
at the other worse off; that the in-
dustrial population which either has land
but supplements its income in factories,
or has no land at all and has to live solely
on wages, is, for the time being, slightly
improving its position, but is gradually
drifting into the same position as the

LAND OF THE POVERTY-STRICKEN 179
European industrial population; that, after
an interval when the demand for labour
will be not less than the supply, and when
an appreciable percentage of the labour
employed in the mills will be independent
because it has other sources of income-
in this case the land-the labourer will
find himself in a weaker position, and will
be protected only by such trade combina-
tions as he can in the meantime create.
These combinations will probably be of a
kind midway between the castes of India
and the trade unions of Great Britain.
Thus, the great transformation deliber-
ately desired and striven for by the Western
minds who have been squeezing India into
Western moulds comes upon India-cer-
tainly not for its final benefit.

V
AWAKENING INDIA
At the beginning of the century a breath
of life blew over the East and it became
conscious of itself. The exploits of Japan
bade it hope and lift up its head, whilst
the revolution in Turkey and the subse-
quent events in Persia taught the Mohamme-
dan communities that the future was coming
to them too with change as a gift.
was also the fiftieth year after the Mutiny,
and some minds were affected by that,
The youth in particular were moved. To
the old, these things were the menace of a
lightning gleam; to the young, they were
the dawning of a day of hope.
It
The effect was at once seen in a revival
of Indian national life. It was by no
1 I deal with the Mohammedan awakening in Chapter
VII., where it fits in most conveniently.
2 A serious element in the Nationalist movement to-day
is the personal factor, but I simply note it in passing.
The recent elections show how much personal antagonism
divides the Indian camp, and how the pleasure-loving
characteristics of some of the wealthier Indians are to
influence the political future.
180
AWAKENING INDIA
181
means the beginning of that life, for Raja
Ram Mohan Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar,
Bankim Chandra Chatterji had lived and
died. It was that crisis in it, however,
which corresponds to those awakenings in
human life when some event seems to reveal
a man's being to himself, to remove from
his thoughts the unreal attractions which
used to mislead him, to transfigure him so
that reality becomes his pursuit. There
are no beginnings, only moments of awa-
kened consciousness. It has been said that
દ્વ not within the last 2,000 years at least
has the Hindu intellect undergone such a
revolutionary change as these last seventy-
five years have brought."
66
He who inquires into Indian movements.
finds himself invariably going along the
ways which lead to the religious life. All
Indian movements from bomb-throwing
to personal purification begin in the sphere
of religion, and this is particularly true of
Nationalism. In the Punjab one finds at
every turn politics and religion organically
connected. In Bengal the Partition (Oc-
tober 16), and the Boycott (August 7)
celebrations begin with bathings in the
Ganges and visits to temples-they are
politico-religious festivals. The leader of
Bombay Nationalism, Mr. Tilak, has a
!
182
AWAKENING INDIA
reputation as a religious leader quite as
marked as his reputation as a political
leader. He revived festivals like the Gan-
pati, which had fallen into abeyance, and
he used them for the singing of audacious
political songs, and the stirring up of the
religious and political imagination of the
people. The Ganpati festival at Poona
has become a troublesome political demon-
stration mingled with some debased traces
of its religious origin.
I found every
religious sect pregnant with new life, from
Amritsar to Benares, from Ajmere to Cal-
cutta. Arabindo Ghose has made the
connection between his devout Hinduism
and his strenuous Nationalism clear. Man
has to fulfil God, he has written, and that
is only possible by fulfilling himself, this
again being possible only through nation-
ality. On this religious conception rests
his belief in Swadeshi and his desire to
see the English predominance in India
ended.
The reason is not difficult to find. The
life of India is religion. Religion regulates
every movement and every moment of
existence. The gods are not remote, they
are near at hand. They hear the tinkling
of a bell hung in their temples. Every
day the people enter their presence and
AWAKENING INDIA
183
offer them garlands and posies of flowers;
they walk about with the marks of their
deities on their foreheads; their heroes
were devotees; their immortal ones were
saints. One gets completely bewildered by
the vast crowd of religious teachers whose
names have remained on the lips of these
men for centuries. Take up any one of
the many religious books written by Indians,
and see the crowded galleries of philosophers,
of teachers, of ascetics in which the Indian
still wanders and worships. Everything
that India has been, everything that she
dreams of being, she associates with her
temples, her philosophies, her schools of
religious learning, her devotion to her gods.
And now, when the Indian youth sees his
benign mother no longer sitting in ashes
on the wayside but enthroned in splendour
and majesty on a seat of authority, it is
as a goddess that he pictures her. India
is indeed the mother goddess. The worship
of maternity, which runs like a golden thread
through nearly every one of his popular
faiths, inspires the Indian's "Bande Mata-
ram" and makes it seditious by the abandon
of its filial worship, the whole-heartedness
of its childlike allegiance to the soil of his
birth, and the luxuriant growths of tradition
and sentiment which it bears. He returns
184
AWAKENING INDIA
to his gods and to the faith of his country,
for there is no India without its Faith,
and there is no Faith without India. The
whole of Indian culture is pervaded with
the assumption that India, the land, is
sacred. To this extent Indian Nationalism
is Hinduism.¹ No Mohammedan can enter
its Holy of Holies, where politics are trans-
figured by the presence of the gods into
religious faith, and where the struggle for
civil freedom is transformed into the wor-
ship of the Hindu genius.
Certain of the strongest Nationalist
sections amongst the Hindus-those in the
Punjab in particular-accept the Moham-
medans as fellow citizens with a grudge.
Particularly bitter is
bitter is their resentment
against the converted Hindustani Mussul-
mans "who do not worship Hindustan
in all her aspects, and have transferred the
lien of their patriotism to Cabul or Persia
or Turkey or Arabia." These are aliens
in spite of their being born in Hindustan
and lived for generations in India-they
are the unwashed children of the soil."2
66
1 It is interesting to note that "Bande Mataram" was
written to voice anti-Moslem feelings, although it has
now lost that significance.
2 Address to Indian Association at Lahore on May 1,
1908, by Srimati Sarala Devi Chaudhrani, published in
The Hindustan of that date.
AWAKENING INDIA
185
It is the Aryan who has arisen through
the modern Nationalist movement. It is
Indo-Aryan consciousness, with all its his-
torical associations, which demands expres-
sion in India to-day.
This puts obstacles in the way of unity.
But I have also been taught to regard
these obstacles with some doubt. It is
hard for an Englishman to discount statistics
and outward appearances as they must be
discounted in India. The spirit of Hinduism
is wonderfully persistent. The prodigal son
wanders back to his father's door. Beneath
many veneers of faith, of worship, of culture,
the Hindu personality persists. Let any one
take up the biography of Swami Upadhyay
Brahmabandhab, the Catholic convert, the
Christian propagandist, the lecturer at
Cambridge and Oxford, who never really
forsook the worship of Shri Krishna, who
participated in the Shivaji festival, whose
Catholicism was but Hinduism plus a cross,
and whose message to his countrymen was :
"Whatever you are be a Hindu, be a
Bengali "—and see how Hinduism can per-
sist. From that extraordinary demonstration
in modern conversion let him turn to
reports on the habits of Hindu Mohamme-
dans, and from that let him study the
history of foreign invasions of Hindustan.
186
AWAKENING INDIA
They all point the same moral; they all
warn him against placing too much reliance
upon census figures regarding faith. Hindu-
ism is the pivot round which the life of
India turns. It is a reservoir of prejudice,
of feeling, of sympathy, of power as yet
almost untapped, but if tapped capable
of displaying a force like a swollen river
which has burst its banks. It is in the
worship of his gods, in his religious devo-
tions, in his following the footsteps of his
gurus that the Indian seeks after his mother,
India. The Matripuja-the worship of the
mother has become a political rite. This
is why the extreme Nationalist has no
programme except a demand for elementary
rights, no ideas of what would follow upon
a self-ruling India. He is a religious votary,
not a politician.
Until one has grasped the significance of
this deification of India one has not mastered
the psychology of the unconstitutional or
force movement. The Swaraj¹ of April 1,
1909, wrote: "This motherland is a good
deal more to us than what might be usually
regarded by even astute European students
as a mere apotheosis of a geographical
entity. It is the symbol of our nation-idea
¹ The Swaraj, edited by Bepin Chandra Pal and pub-
lished in London.
AWAKENING INDIA
187
the Divine Idea, the Logos, which has
been revealing itself through the entire
course of our past historic evolution and
is the soul of it. This Divine Idea, this
Logos, is the Deity whom we salute with the
cry Bande Mataram'! The Motherland
is really a synthesis of all the goddesses
that have been, and are still being, wor-
shipped by Hindus." This may sound
rubbish to the West, which has no form
in which it embodies its idea of God: to
India it is the simplest and most ordinary
idea. It transcends patriotism as far as
religious fervour transcends egotistical emo-
tion. It is this connection between the
stormy strife of to-day and the calm decrees
of the Eternal that makes the Hindu
Nationalist feel that the day of glory is
not far off for his country. How it is to
dawn, he knows not. What is to happen
by noonday, he cares not. India is coming
like a bride arrayed in her garments, laden
with gold and precious stones. India is
immortal. The things which are important
to the Western politician are of no con-
sequence to the Hindu Nationalist.
Before one tries to understand the ex-
tremist movement of whatever degree, one
cannot do better than assimilate the spirit
of the Bhagavad Gita, the most moving
188
AWAKENING INDIA
and haunting of all the sacred books of
India. In its slokas, glowing with a divine
light, the Indian discovers the way of
self-sacrifice. It is the gospel of action,
of action stern and terrible done by the
body and the passions, whilst the possessing
soul is at peace in the presence of the
Eternal. It is the divine manual of how
duty is to be done with no thought of
consequences, except that it is the will
and thought of the Eternal.
66 The con-
tacts of matter, O son of Kunti, giving
cold and heat, pleasure and pain, they
come and go impermanent; endure them
bravely, O Bharata. The man whom these
torment not, O chief of men, balanced in
pain and pleasure, steadfast, he is fitted
for Immortality."
The Blessed Lord said:
Time am I, laying desolate the world,
Made manifest on earth to slay mankind!
Not one of all these warriors ranged for strife
Escapeth death; thou shalt alone survive.
Therefore stand up! win for thyself renown,
Conquer thy foes, enjoy the wealth-filled realm,
By it they are already overcome,
Be thou the outward cause, left-handed one.
Drona and Bhishma and Gayadratha,
Karna, and all the other warriors here,
Are slain by Me. Destroy them fearlessly.
Fight! Thou shalt crush the rivals in the field.
Bathed in this ocean of self-surrender,
AWAKENING INDIA
189
66
66
وو
and ever filled with the music of the Divine
Voice, the Indian's heart beats with ecstasy,
and he goes forth to do his work. There
is no limb of the vernacular press, no un-
controllable Amrita Bazar Patrika, or Bande
Mataram, so dangerous, so seditious, as
the "
Song of the Blessed One." We can
conceive of strenuous times when, with a
hymn like "O God, our help in ages past
on their lips, our people went out gladly
to die. Some Indians are now living in
that time. The Indian assassin quotes his
Bhagavad Gita just as the Scottish cove-
nanter quoted his Old Testament. And
the Gita is more cruel in the devotion and
self-sacrifice it inspires than the most awful
of the Old Testament passages which have
been brooded over by the austere fanatics
of our own history.
It is this inspiration dazzling human
reason into blindness that leads astray the
youths who have cast constitutionalism to
the four winds, and who have entered upon
the dark ways of assassination, hoping there-
by to reach emancipation.
The physical force movement originated
in Poona, where a a proud Brahminism
mingles with an equally proud political
spirit, and where both have come under
Western influences. But it almost immedi-
190
AWAKENING INDIA
ately shifted to Bengal, where the religious
spirit is more volatile and fanatical. Snugly
lodged in Paris, safe from the responsibility
of his own words, and careful that he never
risks his own neck whilst he prompts others
to risk theirs, is one who is supposed to be
the responsible inspirer of assassination.
That is a mistake. He does not inspire the
youth of India. Theirs is another inspira-
tion. Our education of the Hindu has set
going a political evolution in which anarch-
ism is the sequel of oppression.¹ But the
real extremist leaders never cease to warn
their followers against the futility of these
methods. "It is the East that must con-
quer in India's uprising," wrote one of them
in Karmayogin of March 26, 1910. "The
divorce of intellect and spirit, strength and
purity, may help a European revolution,
but by a European strength we shall not
conquer." And yet one incessantly hears
from officials that the antidote to bomb-
throwing is moral education! The futility
of much of our official criticism of Indian
events surpasses comprehension.
1 An extremist Indian paper referred to bombs as the
coarse and vulgar garb of European revolutions." This
view must also be kept in mind, because before the religious
life of India issued in political assassination it had to be
secularised by Western philosophy.
AWAKENING INDIA
191
I was told to read a novel called Ananda-
math, by Bankim Chandra Chatterji, which
was published in Bengali in 1882 and has
been translated at different times into
English,¹ because it would give me an idea
of the sentiments which move the an-
archists-both the bomb-throwing and the
dacoity sections, if, indeed, they are not the
same. It is said that this story suggested to
some of the dacoity sections their methods of
action. The novel relates to the rising of
the Sannyasins in 1773-4, to which Warren
Hastings makes several references in his
correspondence. Chatterji elevates these
fakirs into national heroes devoted to their
country, whom they worship as their mother.
In the novel appears the now famous song,
"Bande Mataram." The devotees, led by a
Sannyasin called Satyananda, passed their
time in a dark, desolate wood, from which
they issued to plunder and destroy the
foreign rulers. They lived in an ecstatic
fervour, the disciples of Vishnu, the soldier
guardians of The Mother. They called
themselves The Children. Their battle-
cry was "Hail, Mother," and "Hari!
Hari!" (one of the names of God); their
song, the "Bande Mataram." Their battles
1 My copy is entitled The Abbey of Bliss, is translated
by Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta, and is published in Calcutta.


192
AWAKENING INDIA
and their devotions are the theme of the
story.
The intellectual sides of the national
movement are being well looked after. Three
reviews of distinction voice Indian National-
ism : The Indian Review, published in
Madras, which, curiously enough, has become
one of the most important centres for the
issue of political literature; The Hindustan
Review, which is the most severely political
and moderate, published in Allahabad; The
Modern Review, the most literary of the
three, which shows all the characteristics
of the Bengal spirit and is most in sympathy
with the left wing.
In addition to these, fugitive literature
in a considerable quantity has been issued
to explain and inspire the movement.
Bio-
graphy has been specially cultivated both
in English and the vernacular, and the whole
world has been drawn upon for heroes.
History has also been written, like Ranade's
History of the Mahrattas and Dutt's
Ancient India; and I I had from the
author, lately a Judge in Bombay, but now
the President of a Nationalist organisation,
an interesting book with some pretension
of learning on Epic India. Novels like
those of Mr. Dutt and (of the last genera-
tion) Bankim Chandra-to whose Abbey
AWAKENING INDIA
193
of Bliss I have just referred--and also of
Ratan Nath Sarshar, written in various
vernaculars, are widely circulated, whilst
amongst poets, Sheikh Mohammed Igbal's
Hindustan Hamara is in some vogue.
In the literature of the active movement
Bengal leads. Some of its writers have the
command of perfect English, and ever since
the days of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Bengali
has been used as a medium for controversial
literature.
It is also in Bengal where the revival of
Indian art has begun. There still lingers
in my mind the winsome music of Robind-
ranath Tagore sung to me by women's sweet
voices on the river above Calcutta. It
was sung to songs, written by this poet,
of yearning and tender love for the land and
its life, its mornings and its evenings, its
riches and its poverty, its faith and its
hopes. In fact, in Bengal one feels at once
a palpitating life, a Bohemian spontaneity,
an idealism, exceedingly troublesome no
doubt to the Government and exceedingly
dangerous to youths of enthusiastic and
devotional temperaments. But it is living.
It is independent. It is proud of itself. It
challenges the foreigner and draws inspira-
tion from its own past.
I have heard this revival described as a
13

194
AWAKENING INDIA
reaction, and in a sense it is, because it is
the people turning in upon themselves for
inspiration after having rushed to adopt
foreign ways. That, however, is not a re-
action in the ordinary sense. Fifty years
ago, when the Indian first awoke to the
advantages of modern education, he ran to
an anti-Indian extreme. He flouted his
own past and shocked his own present. He
thrust his Western heresies under every-
body's nose. He ate meat ostentatiously,
shouted the fact in the streets, and got
drunk to show he was a modern. He
adopted an eclectic faith more Western
than Eastern. He denied the divine in-
spiration of the Vedas and the divine origin
of his prophets, and quoted David Hume.
He prided himself in being an adopted son
of the French Revolution. He started the
Brahmo Somaj (1828).¹ But the aggressive
spirit of revolt exhausted itself. Attempts
such as those of Keshub Chunder Sen were
made to bring the modern movement back
to a loyalty to its past. Finding himself
despised and rejected of Anglo-Indian men,
CC
1 “I have never found one among them," wrote
Macaulay, who could deny that a single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole native litera
ture of India and Arabia.” The "modern Indian
those days was willing to accept that libel,
AWAKENING INDIA
195
the Indian was thrown back upon himself.
The historical spirit returned. He began to
value his own past and to find his own
dreams refreshing. The revival of Oriental
studies in England and Germany pleased
him. Recent events added lustre to the
East. Driven into his own territory, he
discovered that it was a desirable land.
Religion, poetry, music, literature, art, were
revived no longer in imitation of the West,
but faithful to the East. He ceased to be
content to copy and began to think of
creating. That is the explanation of the
Bengal movement.
66
The same thing is happening elsewhere.
I have described the Arya Somaj in the
Punjab; but I know of no literature pro-
duced in the more matter-of-fact North-
West-which argues and hates but does not
see visions. The Punjab is austere, solid,
dour," as they would say in Scotland.
It produces political pamphlets but not
literature. In Bombay the same spirit is
at work, the difference being that the
Mahratta Brahmin has a keener sense of the
historical. In the United Provinces the
political movement as yet is of minor im-
portance; even the Arya Somaj there is
absorbed in the educational and philan-
thropic work of the Society.
196
AWAKENING INDIA
The one great contribution of the West
to the Indian Nationalist movement is its
theory of political liberty." Mr. Herbert
Spencer's individualism and Lord Morley's
Liberalism are, as it were, the only battery
of guns which India has captured from us,
and condescends to use against us.
One of the most surprising factors in the
present agitation is the women. I have
heard of several who have actually taken
a public part on the platform, and in every
aspect of Nationalism women are active.
We heard everywhere that in the Zenana
politics are discussed; a meeting of Indian
women was held
was held to protest against the
deportations; an address of congratulation
was presented by women to the mother of
the Editor of Yugantar when he was im-
prisoned, and the old lady made an aggres-
sive reply. Our own experience is that
many women are following very closely
what is going on, that they hold bitter
1 "We must not be ashamed to admit that we received
our early political activities from the teaching and example
of our foreign rulers. The first inspiration of freedom
came to us from English literature and European thought,
though our own special race character and national culture
have made material contributions to the development of
our latest civic ideals." Swaraj, April 1, 1909. I have
read scores of political articles in Extremist papers, and
the most striking thing about them is how Western they
are.
J


AWAKENING INDIA
197
opinions regarding Englishwomen in par-
ticular, and that they are responsible for
a good deal of the resentment to which men
give expression. The Indian woman is
silent and reserved; she is shy and almost
unapproachable, but she is a person of a
will and of parts all the same.
Two generations ago we said we should
welcome this awakening. We urged India
to it; we prepared for it. Now that it has
come we are afraid. We spy upon it
it; we
deport its advocates; we plan to circum-
vent it. This change on our part is of
fundamental significance in determining the
form assumed by the awakening of India,
although the " man on the spot" does not
see that it ought to matter at all. The
fact is, our official attitude has been the chief
factor in determining the course of the
Nationalist movement. It has been an atti-
tude of friendship at first and of bitter
opposition later.
The history of the National Congress
is a history of the Nationalist movement.
Started in 1885 by men who were rich, who
were Liberals, and who had been educated
in Western ways, it was purely political.
Its demand was for en franchisement and
for responsibility. It was never anti-Brit
sh; it has always contented itself with
198
AWAKENING INDIA
demanding a measure of self-government
under the British Raj. But it gave birth
to a left wing, which gradually gained an
independent position and drew away from
it. The Anglo-Indian administrator lost
his opportunity. The Congress, which ought
to have been accepted by him as a useful
critic, was regarded by him as an irreconcil-
able enemy.
enemy. He resented it.
He resented it. He misre-
presented it. He handed it over to the
mercy of its left wing. The doctrine of a
Sinn Fein kind of self-help, the dream of the
political boycott, were encouraged by the
blunders of the Government. The first
indication of a split was shown at Benares
in 1905 as the result of Lord Curzon's new
policy; next year at Calcutta an open
rupture was barely avoided. The demand
for reform ceased to satisfy the Nationalists,
largely because it found no sympathy from
the bureaucracy. The boycott developed
into a system of political action. The old
Congressmen became Moderates, and what
were at first shades of opinion became rival
camps. The Congress itself became mean
in the eyes of the young generation.
Bengal, where the agitation was most
alive, was then rent in twain. The parti-
tion was not merely a blunder: it was an
indictable offence. Lord Curzon's persona

AWAKENING INDIA
199
feelings entered into it in a most reprehen-
sible way. He devised it, as the evidence
shows most conclusively, to pay off scores.
By a division, which neither administrative
convenience, nor historical tradition, nor
ordinary sagacity could justify, he divided
the Bengali-speaking people in such a way
that, though by far and away the largest
group of people in the undivided Bengal,
in neither of the new provinces did they
have the influence they ought justly to
have. Moreover, the partition was accom-
panied by a series of administrative and
judicial acts which definitely ranged the
Government against the Hindu, and taught
him that our Administration declined to do
justice to him. Mohammedans proclaiming
strife from the housetops were hardly cau-
tioned; Hindus whispering their grievances
were treated as criminals. In the Barisal
riots in the spring of 1906 the authorities
were as much implicated as the Catholic
Church was implicated in the St. Bartholo-
mew massacres or the Government of
Russia in the recent pogroms. With the
partition, the Curzon régime reached its
height, and it was instantly challenged by
the appearance of real sedition. It is of
the greatest importance to note that the
date afterwards given in the Alipur bomb
200
AWAKENING INDIA
trials as that when the murderous conspiracy
commenced was the day when Lord Curzon
did his worst act in India by partitioning
Bengal.
Thus the path was paved to Surat when
the Nationalist movement as such broke
away from the movement for political re-
form.¹ A new ideal had come into conflict
with the old. Since then efforts have been
made to unite the Congress. But the time
for union has not yet come. A Congress in
which the followers of Arabindo Ghose sit
side by side with those of Mr. Gokhale will
be a debating society. The Indian political
movement for the time being has split, and
its two sections receive inspiration from
different ideals. The Moderate policy is
to accept the present position and extend
Indian rights under it, trusting to events
to determine the ultimate position of India.
The Nationalists refuse to accept the present
position, and all their thoughts and actions
proceed upon the assumption that they
should have no part in it. This was put
epigrammatically by a writer in the pro-
scribed Swaraj thus: "What we want is
not appointments under the Government
1 Some Congressmen will dispute the accuracy of
this antithesis, because they claim that Nationalism is
still voiced by the Congress.

AWAKENING INDIA
201
(this reference being to the methods of
Congress), but only the right of making
them." The Karmayogin, the recognised
organ of Mr. Arabindo Ghose, defines the
dispute in this way: "Nor is it a question
of adhesion to, or secession from, the British
Empire. That is an ultimate action which
is too far off to form a question of practical
politics or a subject of difference. The
dispute is one of ideal, whether we shall
aim at being a province of England or a
separate nation on an equality with her,
carrying on our ancient Asiatic development
under modern conditions." 1
When the position is explained the
colossal mistake of official India in encour-
aging Nationalism by pouring out foolish
criticism on the head of the Congress can
readily be seen.
The difference in practical policy between
the two sections centres round the boycott.
Most Anglo-Indians confuse Swadeshi and
boycott and take them to mean the same
thing. They do not mean the same thing.
Swadeshi is the policy of patronising, as far
as it is practicable, home products, and the
Government itself has adopted it. It is
followed more or less consciously by every
people. Support home industries" is a
66
1 Editorial in issue of December 11, 1909.

202
AWAKENING INDIA
good advertisement for goods in whatever
language it may be printed. It is simply
an attempt to maintain a national industry,
and is a recognition of the fact that, every-
thing else being equal, the home workman,
the fellow citizen, has first claims upon the
consumer. In India it is also an attempt
to keep alive the native industrial arts
that have been fading away through several
generations.
The boycott, however, has a totally dif-
ferent significance. It is political in its
origin, and it was meant to effect a wider
and deeper issue than merely the consump-
tion of goods. Its origin can be traced as
far back as 1901, when it plainly influenced
the thought of the left wing of the Congress.
Its home was in Bengal. But it did not
become an important thing until Krishna
Kumar Mittra proposed that it should be
temporarily adopted, so as to convince
Lancashire that Bengal was in deadly ear-
nest in its opposition to Partition. The
boycott is the politico-economic fruit of the
Curzon rule. It was proclaimed at a public
meeting held in Calcutta on August 7, 1905,
a day which is now kept as an annual
festival. At first the Extremists, who ought
to have welcomed it, opposed it, because it
then seemed to them to be an item in the

AWAKENING INDIA
203
Moderate policy of bringing pressure to
bear on the Government to grant reform;
but they very soon detected the general
drift of the movement, and whilst the
Moderates stick to their original purpose
and regard it as being merely temporary,
the Extremists have directed the movement,
have succeeded in associating it with their
wider policy of passive resistance, and have
found in the lukewarmness of the Congress
to this policy one of the offences which keeps
them away from Congress meetings.
Amongst the influences that have done
most to make Indian Nationalism a menace
has been the press, and a sentence or two
must be written about it. Nothing reveals
more plainly the ineffectiveness of the In-
dian Administration than its attitude towards
sedition. It allows the Anglo-Indian press
to publish day by day "highly objectionable
and provocative articles against the children
of the soil," which not only incite those
children to reprisals but stuff the minds of
the administrators themselves with stupid
prejudices, and blind them to the real
nature of their responsibilities. But this is
done with impunity, whilst the Indian reply
is regarded as sedition, as stirring up racial
1
1 Presidential Address to the Third U.P. Conference,
by Ganga Prasad Varma.
204
AWAKENING INDIA
enmity, as bringing the Government into
contempt. The whole of the special Press
Law of India, and more particularly the
latest attempt to strengthen it, must fill
with despair the heart of any man who
understands political agitation.
Two members of the Anglo-Indian press
have been conspicuous for their offensive-
ness, so conspicuous, indeed, that had the
Press Law been impartially administered in
India the editors of both would have en-
joyed the privilege of calm reflection within
prison walls. I refer to The Englishman of
Calcutta and The Civil and Military Gazette
of Lahore. The latter used to be edited
by a Jew, whose patriotism was of the
most demonstrative type, but recently it has
fallen from its high estate; it seems to be
feeling the effects of age. When under its
late editor, however, it was an active agent
in alienating the Indian from the official
and in stirring up racial strife. The English-
man also is feeling the effects of age, but,
like a decaying old virago, it still shows its
teeth. One goes to its columns for the
most ignorant criticisms published in India
on Indian affairs. Day by day it freely
publishes its pernicious impudence and
inflames feelings on both sides. I was
assured by journalists and officials that it

AWAKENING INDIA
205
now
66
represents no influential section of
the community," as The Bengalee had it,
and one is very glad that this should be so.
The Pioneer is only a shade better. It is
superior, it is Conservative, and it never
does an English Liberal or an educated
Indian justice if it can help it. The Times
of India is a little better than The Pioneer,
although, again, its position is that of the
immaculate Anglo-Indian, irreproachable,
above criticism. I may have been unfor-
tunate, but I never saw a really sympathetic
article on Indian affairs in it, whilst it gave
amusing evidence that it was sadly mes-
merised by the jingle of "Pagett, M.P."
As an extremist pro-official paper it would
be admirable if it had as a competitor an
organ like the old Statesman, but it holds
the field alone, and its methods do all the
more harm. The Statesman has been for
long the most valuable interpreter in India
of English opinion to the Indian, and the
great services it has rendered to our rule
in this respect when other papers were
bouncing and spluttering their Imperialist
and racial impertinences cannot be too
highly prized. Recently, however, it has
changed, and the erstwhile independent
organ has become a suspiciously steady
apologist for everything which the Govern-

206
AWAKENING INDIA
ment says and does. It would really be a
calamity if The Statesman were to abandon
its old position for good and take its stand
side by side with such papers as The Pioneer
or The Times of India-a position which
for the moment it occupies.
Any one with an intimate knowledge of
British affairs who finds himself in India.
will probably be amused at much of what
he sees in the Anglo-Indian press by way of
opinions, but his hair will stand on end at
the cables sent twice each day for the en-
lightenment of Indian readers on British
affairs. The news is often unimportant; the
information is as often as not quite in-
accurate; political learnings are apparent.
The Indian news sent over to us is of the
same kind. This work of news transmission.
though of such supreme importance to both
India and ourselves, seems to be entrusted
to an office boy of Conservative leanings
without much Conservative intelligence, and
one comes across the most grotesque opinions
in consequence. The morning I landed an
absurd story about the Budget appeared in
all the press as the leading item of informa
tion. Day after day, trivial but significan
mistakes continued to appear. Even such
simple news as the relations between the
Miners' Federation and Messrs. Burt and
AWAKENING INDIA
207
Fenwick had to be cabled to India in a
stupidly inaccurate form. Thus, British news
and the Anglo-Indian newspapers occupy
a most unenviable position amongst the
mischief-making influences of India.
The vernacular press is certainly not all
that can be desired. The Hindu resents
being told that he has not the historical
sense, but the accusation might be proved
in a Court of Law. His mind is steeped in
ideas. What is time, what is event to
him? Nothing but a moment in the Eternal,
nothing but a ripple on the disturbed surface
of spiritual reality. This strange quality
carries with it appropriate weaknesses.
Hard, cold fact does not make sufficient
impression on such a mind. It plays with
fact, and turns it round, explains it in thi
way and in that, and finally, perhaps, ex-
plains it away altogether. The historical
faculty discovers the Eternal in the fact
and does not dissolve the fact into the
nothingness of the Eternal. But the his-
torical faculty is also the faculty of political
criticism, and the Western, taking up the
vernacular press, will properly complain
of a want of candour and of rigid sticking
to fact, of too much imagination, of simile
and metaphor which are used so much as
to become misleading, of, in consequence,

208
AWAKENING INDIA
a wordy exaggeration. One finds this in
the very best of the Indian papers. I have
several times had to pause and marvel at
the extraordinary faculty shown by writers in
these papers for leading their readers by
wordy aeroplane journeys to conclusions very
much in the heavens. In every paper is
a resentment of British rule which nothing
can eradicate, and which bites with acid
criticism every action of the Government.
This, moreover, is often expressed grandilo-
quently and in language the full force of
which the writer apparently has not under-
stood, but which must influence his readers.
That this is provocative and may be danger-
ous, no one denies; but it is all included
amongst the troubles of governing a subject
race that can read, write, criticise, and
imagine things.
The danger, however, is not to be removed
by Press Laws or by repression of any kind.
In its extreme form it must be visited by
penalties, but it is its habitual and moderate
use which amounts to a menace. That
cannot be stopped by magistrates. To give
them the power to do so is itself as great a
danger to the peace of India as are the
objectionable articles. Legitimate criticism
would then be suppressed, as the Punjab
authorities are trying to do to-day. What
i
AWAKENING INDIA
209
is wanted is a calm and patient ruler, who
turns a deaf ear to panic cries and short-
sighted advice, and who goes steadily on
doing justice and keeping a close companion-
ship with educated public opinion of a con-
stitutional character. It is a serious re-
flection on our administration rather than
on the Indian character that any responsible
official should ever think that papers like
The Bengalee, or The Amrita Bazar Patrika,
or The Punjabee, are seditious or objection-
able. They have written in wrath, they have
sometimes misrepresented us, and they have
said hard things, but neither of them at its
worst has been so great a menace to our
peaceable rule as The Englishman and The
Civil and Military Gazette when by our
officials they are supposed to be at their
best.
14
VI
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
WHEN death came to withhold the hand of
Satyananda in Chatterji's Anandamath he
explained to the heroic leader of the San-
nyasins that it was not only vain but wrong
for The Children to keep on fighting. The
Mohammedan was not to rule India. His
power had been broken. But the Hindu
rule was not to be established then. And
when Satyananda wept with disappointment,
the Inexorable One said: "What will
happen now will be for the best. There is
no hope for a revival of the True Faith if the
English be not our rulers." That True
Faith had become corrupt, and could not
be restored except by a return of the Hindus
to "objective knowledge." "Imbued with
a knowledge of objective science by English
education, our people will be able to com
prehend subjective truths. Then there wil
be no difficulties to the spread of the Tru
Faith. It will then shine forth of itself
210

GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
211
Till that is so, till the Hindus are great again
in knowledge, virtue, and power-till then,
the English rule will remain undisturbed."
In the forefront of any impartial estimate
of what Great Britain has done for India
must be benefits conferred. The Nationalist
movement may now challenge our occupation
and a stern judge will record many blemishes,
but the historical fact remains that England
saved India. Long before the East India
Company built a factory, the old India was
vanishing, rent asunder by internal strife,
crushed down by foreign armies. We found
not a Government but shifting camps, not
rulers but captains of horse. Conquerors
were rising and falling like corn stalks when
the wind blows over the fields, and there
was apparently no end to these ups and
downs. The Moslem rule had broken Hindu
authority; it in turn had been shattered; the
Mahratta ascendancy never had a founda-
tion. We came, and consolidation followed
on our footsteps. Diversities of race and
religion found liberty, and the spirit of a
united India found rest to its harassed
wings. Under our protection India has
enjoyed a recuperative quiet. If we cannot
say that our rule has been a necessary factor
n the development of Indian civilisation,
we can say that in view of historical Indian
212
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
conditions it has been a necessary evil. A
foreign conqueror had to come, and no nation
in the world, either at that time or to-day,
could have done the work nearly so well as
we have done it. Be our mistakes what
they may, no alien rulers would have avoided
them. Many of them could only have been
discovered after they were made. Great
Britain, undergoing a most searching self-
examination and confessing as the result
that she has committed many sins against
India, need not accompany her confession
with the shadow of an apology to the rest
of the world. To herself she may say,
with Sir Hugh Clifford : "God forgive us
for our sorry deeds and our generous inten-
tions"; for the fact is that no race can
govern another quite justly.
"I am most happy to say," said the
President of the Reception Committee re-
sponsible for arranging the Madras Congress
(1908), "that the general feeling of all classes
of His Majesty's subjects throughout India
towards the British Government is one of
deep gratitude for the many blessings con
ferred on India, the most important of which
are security of life and property, libera
education, medical and famine reliefs, sani
tation and facilities of communication.
Perhaps beyond these blessings should b

༔
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
213
placed those moral reforms such as the
forbidding of sati, of human sacrifice, of
female infanticide-horrors never sanctioned
by pure Hinduism, but which had become
vigorous fungoid growths upon it.
On the other side of the account, however,
is the great loss to India that this peace has
been bought at the price of her own initiative.
That is the real objection to all attempts to
govern a country by a benevolent despotism.
The governed are crushed down. They
become subjects who obey, not citizens who
act. Their literature, their art, their
spiritual expression go. They become the
hewers of wood in their national industrial
economy. They degenerate to the level
of copyists. They cease to live. This is
particularly the case when it is not only one
nation which holds another in subjection but
one civilisation which attempts to mould and
control another. And when we recall the
riches of Indian civilisation and the social
organisation which it has handed down from
time immemorial,¹ this loss of initiative
and of self-development is greater as regards
CC
1 On account of this, the Indian gives but a limited
credit to us for some of our achievements. Cf. The
Indian revenue administration twenty-two hundred years
back does not fall short of the best ideals of the civilised
British Government of to-day."-Epic India, by C. B.
Vaidya, M.A., LL.B.
214
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
India than almost any other country. One
day I stood in Delhi looking at some of the
wonderful remnants there seen in stone of
the Mogul times. An Indian friend was
with me and pointed out what changes we
had made in the masonry. "You have
jerry-built, you have whitewashed, you have
destroyed," said he. Then raising his head
as a wider meaning to his words entered his
mind, he repeated with a smile: 'You
have jerry-built, you have whitewashed, you
have destroyed."
At the root of most of our mistakes is the
assumption that India should copy us. We
are guided by standards of personal and
social virtue which are the products and
expressions of our own historical experience
but which are alien from those of India. And
yet we place ourselves, the conquerors, on a
pedestal as the one example for men. We
started Western education under the im-
pression that the result would be that
Indian superstition would vanish and a race
would appear fit for representative institu-
tions and endowed with all the best qualities
of Englishmen. When that happened we
imagined we would welcome the issue and
with gladness allow it to have its natural
political outcome. If we go through India
to-day with these declarations of two genera-
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
215
tions ago in mind, our hearts will be weary
and sad. Western education has undoubt-
edly done much for the Indian. It has
destroyed his isolation of mind and it has
opened the way back for him to his ancient
intellectual triumphs. Above all, it has
put school-books in his hand containing as
elegant extracts poems by Byron, Brutus's
speeches from Julius Cæsar and similar
things, and it has thus imparted to him the
spirit which craves for nationality, and has
taught him the principles upon which that
craving must proceed to translate itself into
definite political demands. It has thus not
only given biographies of Garibaldi to India
but has revived the worship of heroes like
the Maharana Pratap, the lion-hearted
Rajput, who resisted the Mohammedans as
Hereward resisted the Normans.
But our
educational methods were begun by a
generation and by men who had no historical
sense and whose sociological theories were
based upon the assumption that every mind
at the beginning is a blank tablet upon
which anything can be written. Therefore
our methods were too absolute. The edu-
cation we gave was not a graft upon Indian
civilisation, but a transplanted slip of
Western civilisation. "Our efforts," said
Macaulay, ought to be directed to make
66

* Al
216
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
natives of this country thoroughly good
English scholars." The break caused was
too violent. The educated was uprooted.
He was taught to look upon his past with
contempt and to be an alien amongst his
own people. He has had to revolt against
us to regain his faith and his historical
affinities. The language in which he spoke
was also botched, and by insisting that
his higher education should be given in
English we have cut that off as it were from
his original being and have introduced a
dualism into his mind.
The same influences have been at work on
Indian art. It was first of all neglected,
and in some of its industrial aspects literally
crushed out. In villages it still survives,
though greatly weakened. Mr. E. B. Havell,
the late Art Adviser to the Indian Govern-
ment, accused us of gross neglect and actual
discouragement.¹ The Government has no
It is dull and utili-
Oriental imagination.
tarian, economical in its idealism, and extra-
vagant only on its monetary side. One can
only feel melancholy to hear it pride itself
that it has provided cheap cotton at the
expense of the old industries. It is blind
¹ See his interesting article in The Hindustan Review,
April 1909, and his paper read to the Royal Society of
Arts, London.


GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
217
to the important items on the debit side
of that account. One shudders whilst going
through the wonderful palaces built like
the fairy palaces of our youth and furnished
in the trashiest upholstery displayed in Lon-
don shops where newly married suburbans
are attracted to furnish on the hire system.
When at last Lord Curzon began to talk of
art it was as a vulgar Philistine. He has
been described as a builder of Rhine castles
at Simla and a patcher-up of ancient Mogul
palaces. He chose restoration instead of
preservation of ancient buildings, and, con-
sequently, whoever visits places like Delhi,
Agra, Fatepur Sikri, and similar shrines, has
his sensibilities jarred by patches of new
masonry, painting, and inlaying in imitation
of the old that has gone. 1 Not until the
industrial revolt of Swadeshi and the boycott
was entered upon was there a return of any
importance to the rich industrial arts of
India. But once again it can be claimed
that a few Englishmen redeemed our reputa-
tion. Men like James Fergusson, General
Cunningham, Sir George Birdwood, and
1 By good luck, some of his work is worthy of unqualified
praise. What he has done, for instance, to the Shah
Jehan marble summer-houses on the bund of the lake
at Ajmere must be praised without stint, but there he
could do little meddling. He simply cleared away English
débris in the shape of buildings.

218
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
finally Mr. Havell must always be thought
of when Indian art is mentioned. Moreover,
when driven into a corner, we may defend
ourselves by this thought, that the white-
wash of British Philistinism laid over the
palaces of Delhi was not so destructive to
Indian art as the fanaticism of Aurungzebe.
66
The source of most of our failures is a lack
of sympathetic imagination, which shows
itself in a policy of transplanting English
views in social ethics on to Indian soil.
The result is confusion-confusion in the
Indian mind and confusion in Indian society;
and from this confusion with its disappoint-
ing results, arises the discouragement of
so many of our officials which drives them
within their own shells, fills their hearts
with despair that the Indians will ever
do anything," and gives rise to that separa-
tion of European and Indian life which
every one who has not come under the
deteriorating influences of India deplores.
The two races misunderstand each other,
and Indian society makes the misunder-
standing inevitable. If similar social causes
do not produce similar results in England
and in India, the man who is working on the
assumption that they will, and who meets
with unexpected failure, will only in a rare
number of cases condemn his methods; as a

GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
219
rule he will condemn his material. We have
assumed that India would respond to Western
methods, and we have been disappointed:
that is the key to nearly every big problem
which we are facing in India to-day.
In the chapter on "The Ways of the
Native" I used this key to explain the
false witness and the serious hindrances
that have been put in the way of the ad-
ministration of British justice in India.¹ I
have also shown how Western methods of
economy, with their characteristic feature
of averaging income and expenditure, have
inflicted injury upon the Indian cultivator.
I should like to reinforce these examples
by another.
Let us consider that important personage
in village economy, the bania, or money-
lender. We have come to despise him, to
curse him, to lay at his door the bulk of the
economic woes of the people. We talk so
incessantly of the 20 and 30, 50 and 60 per
cent which he imposes, of the liens he
establishes on crops, of his transactions as
a grain merchant, of his mortgages and
foreclosures, that he has become the villain
in the village tragedy.
1 Another interesting inquiry is into crime, when it
can again be shown that one of its most prolific sources
is the break-up of the community spirit and discipline.
220
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
In the old village economy, however,
the bania was a respectable and a useful
man. He performed a leading function
in the commercial life of the people. He
was the capitalist who made savings avail-
able for individual use, and who made
possible both those elaborate ceremonies
which Indian religion demanded and those
recoveries from famine which Indian climate
made necessary. Nominally even then he
was a usurer, but he was kept in strict
restraint by the public opinion of the village.
He was not independent of the goodwill
of his neighbours. Public opinion menaced
him on every transaction. He was indeed
a public functionary not acting in accordance
with his own personal will but in reality
following the village will. He was part of a
communist society; and if he did not play
his part honestly he might have to suffer
having his house broken into, his papers
burned, and a village verdict passed on him
that it served him right.
We came to the village. We did not under-
stand its spiritual or its economic basis.
We regarded the bania as a Western capital-
ist, just as in the Permanent Settlement of
Bengal we regarded the tax-collecting agent
as a landowner. We surveyed lands and
laid down definite boundaries; we created
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
221
individual landlords; we established regular
courts, which applied to India the property
laws of the West. We thus elbowed the
money-lender out of the village economy,
and made him a separate individual dealing
with property securities belonging to other
separate individuals. To add to the mis-
fortune of this social disruption, it came at
a time when the trading classes were be-
coming rich by the building of railways and
the extension of the grain markets, and law-
yers were becoming numerous as the result
of a false education. The money-lender was
beset by temptations to grab land, to be the
master of the cultivator, to become a usurer
of the worst kind. Thus we trace in an
unbroken series of transformations the evo-
lution of this person from a beneficent social
functionary to an objectionable individualist
exploiter, owing to the mistakes of the
Western administrators.
The fact that we have been making mis-
takes has gradually dawned upon us, for
when, for instance, 80 per cent of the
cultivators in the United Provinces have
mortgages hanging about their necks, the
situation has become serious, and we have
been trying to undo the evils by the passing
of Courts of Wards Acts-which enable the
Government to take the estates of "incap-
222
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
able "
persons under its own charge for the
time being, and so rid them of debt and
other hindrances; Deccan Agriculturists'
Relief Acts; and, above all, a series of
provincial measures, varying in their pro-
visions, and culminating in the Punjab
Land Alienation Act of 1900, which pro-
hibited the sale of land in the Punjab
except to members of agricultural tribes.
But excellent as our intentions may now
be, and guided as they may also be by a
glimmering knowledge of the mischief we
have unwittingly done, we have destroyed
the old social and economic organisation of
India; we cannot restore it now in its unity
and harmony, and we have not begun to
succeed in putting anything in its place.
Here another path of inquiry opens out.
What has been the effect of our propaganda
of the Christian faith in India? Since the
third century Christian missionaries have
worked here; for three centuries the Catho-
lics, and for two the Protestants have
been labouring in this field. With what
results? This is a very difficult question
to answer, and is, moreover, one which must
be answered differently in different dis-
tricts. Apart from the statistical answer
that only 1 per cent of the Indian popu-
lation is Christian, one or two conclusions
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
223
may be accepted as representing the general
opinion of the Indian and Anglo-Indian
alike.
The first is that the number of conver-
sions has been exceedingly small, and that
the converts themselves have been mostly
unimportant. Preaching in the bazaars has
become like the Sunday meetings in Hyde
Park. How little direct effect Christianity
has had on the individual Indian can
easily be seen from conversations with him
and from reading his religious literature.¹
But there are two missionary activities
which are having a considerable effect upon
India. The first is the Medical Mission and
the second is the Missionary School and
College. Both indicate a form of propa-
ganda which, though indirect, is really
changing India. Many missionaries have
given up the notion that India is to be
Christianised by individual conversions, and
look to a change in the mental points of
view of the people. The " preaching of
Christ and Him crucified" is therefore, as
it were, postponed, and the greatest energy
..
CC
1 Do you not," we asked some Indian ladies one day,
fear that if you send your daughters to convent schools
they will be made Christians? Oh, no," they smiled
in reply, we are not afraid of your religion." They
implied that they were quite superior to it.
224
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
1
is thrown into a transfusion of Indian
feelings, thoughts, and mental axioms, with
Christian feelings, thoughts, and menta
axioms.¹ This has much to be said for it
from the point of view of scientific sociology,
The life of a people is a whole, and important
departments of it cannot be abstracted from
the rest and changed. Hinduism penetrate;
Indian life as consciousness penetrates the
body; and if any fundamental change in
creed is to be effected over a large area,
the pervading spirit must be attacked.
Thus we find Christianity in India engrafting
itself upon the active life of the country,
upon the minds of the people, influencing
them insensibly, leavening them; and the
effect is in the main twofold. A universal
humanitarianism is being understood by a
1
¹ Cƒ. a paper by the Rev. C. F. Andrews of the Cambridge
Mission, Delhi, in the November issue (1909) of The Indian
Interpreter, from which I take these sentences: "I am
led more and more by my missionary experience to regard
the conversion of India, not as the aggregate of so many
individual conversions, but far rather as a gradual process
of growth and change in thought, idea, feeling, tempera-
ment, conduct-a process which half creates and half re-
constructs a truly Christian religious atmosphere, Indian
at its best, and Christian at its best. . . . This does not of
course mean that I cease to believe in the conversion of
the individual, but I seem to see other and more silent
processes of the spirit, which lead, it may be, to more distant,
but to no less important results.”

GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
225
people so divided by caste that humanity
has ceased to exist for them. Thus the
people are being taught the oneness of the
human soul-and the equality and justice
which arise from that-brotherhood, care
for all, service to mankind. On the other
hand, the Christian propaganda is a valuable
aid to those native Indian forces making
for monotheism and reality in worship,
although to the educated and philosophical
Hindu, Trinitarianism is a stumbling-block.
In the discipline which the Indian has to
undergo in order that his religion may
result in ethical conduct, Christian influence,
if wisely directed, is to play a great part.
The Christian ethic, acting with Western
political ideas, has also raised the condition
of the outcast in India. To the outcast the
missionary has specially appealed, and from
the outcast he has won most of his converts.
The last Census Report has shown that the
Christian gains of recent years have been
almost exclusively from aborigines and out-
casts. The effect is only beginning to be
seen. The outcast himself is beginning to
question his position. The Brahmin has be-
haved brutally to him, and he is allowing
himself now to hate the Brahmin. Round
the privileged castes a flood of resentment
is silently rising, and it will rise much more
15
226
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
quickly as elementary education spreads in
India. This explains why there have been
some remarkable demonstrations of the
outcasts against the Nationalist movement.
To many of them Indian Nationalism
means Brahminism, and they look to Great
Britain for their emancipation. This also
explains why at every Hindu social reform
conference the position of the outcast is
seriously discussed and proposals made for
his inclusion in the Hindu community;
why the Brahmo Somaj and the Arya
Somaj are paying special attention to him;
why various Hindu associations are turning
their eyes upon him; why Islamism gains
so many converts from him. Nor do we
see this liberalising and equalising move-
ment working in the outcasts alone, for in
India to-day there is a considerable hubbub
over claims made by inferior castes to be
ranked higher than they have been. At
meals, in schools, in public activities, even
in religious exercises, one now notices in
India the intermingling of castes; the great
strides towards the emancipation of women
marked by the remarriage of widows and
the raising of the age of marriage, the
propaganda amongst the dancing-girl castes
in Madras, the founding of really efficient
educational establishments for girls, the
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
227
breaking through of the Purdah system,
signify a great deal; and these are the
products of Western thought and Western
criticism routing from the mind of India
the evil spirits which took possession of it
when it descended from its ancient greatness
and its religion became debased. Nor are
the higher castes themselves sheltered
against this liberalising spirit. They are
freer to go and come, to eat and drink, to
travel and converse than ever they were,
and their ceremonies of expiation are be-
coming more and more formal and nominal.
In a category all by themselves stand the
material improvements wrought upon the
land. Curiously enough, our greatest fail-
ures in this respect have arisen when we
sneered at the Indian method of doing
things. We sneered at his plough and his
cultivation, and when we tried our own we
failed, and often only gave him cause to
laugh at us. During our visit
our visit we fre-
quently heard of farms tilled on Western
methods that had become almost barren.¹
But we are now going about our improve-
ments in a scientific, experimental way, basing
our changes upon Indian experience, and good
results will soon be reaped. A history of
¹ This recalled to us similar tales and experiences which
we gathered some years ago in South Africa.
Ꮮ
228
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
British agriculture in India would follow, both
in the spirit it would reveal and the failures
it would record, on lines parallel with those
of our general administration of the country.
The railways, to which most people turn
with pride, are also but moderate successes
from the Indian point of view. They now
form a vast network of communications, but
a considerable mileage was developed with
imperial military needs primarily in mind,
and has, in consequence, been a serious
burden to the country. Only quite re-
cently, with the completion of the lines
approved by commercial strategy, has the
dead weight of those made to meet the
requirements-often only supposed require-
ments-of military strategy been overcome
and the railways made profitable.
Our most conspicuous benefit has been
irrigation.¹ One does meet people in India
who are doubtful of the final success of this.
They tell you that the irrigation canals are
disturbing the natural drainage of the coun-
try, that they are water-logging the land,
that they bring fever with their water."
1 In 1906-7 the total area irrigated from public works
was 22,225,000 acres.
2 These criticisms are now held to be seditious by
the Government, judging by the speech of the head of
the Home Department when introducing the new Press
Law Bill (1910).
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
229
Irrigation engineers and doctors quite will-
ingly admit that there is something in these
fears, and are bending their energies and
their skill to prevent the worst consequences
from happening.
But leaving the future alone, every one
who wanders over an irrigated region must
feel as though he were beholding a miracle.
We chose the Chenab Colony, with its
capital, Lyallpur, founded in 1896, and
now a municipality with twelve councillors,
as the place where we were to see the effects
of water on the desert. In this district
only a few years ago a solitary tree was
famous as a landmark. The land was
barren but for useless scrub and for a short-
lived fodder which sprang up after the
rains, and on account of which the land
paid a grazing rent of about one penny per
acre. Across it roamed primitive nomadic
peoples, who subsisted largely on cattle-lifting,
and whose ways of life are well shown in
a proverb which was current amongst them :
"My child, if you cannot steal you will die
of hunger." An escort was required for
caravans and cattle droves crossing this
territory, and a regular scale of payment
for protective services at the rate of 21
per cent of the value of the property
guarded was accepted. A fee of ten rupees
230
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
was paid to the tribesmen to pursue and
attempt to recover a stolen camel or
buffalo.
All that is changed. A canal constructed
as an inundation channel in 1887 was made
into an irrigation canal, and the country
was ready for colonisation at the beginning
of 1892. The cattle-lifter is now handling
the plough, and is being taught the allure-
ments of the law courts. We saw some of
them hovering in the precincts of the
Lyallpur Court House being fleeced by the
new predatory band of pleaders and writers.
An area of 3,800 square miles-with another
2,000 within range-of which 3,000 are
already allotted to cultivators, has been
irrigated.¹ In 1901 83,000 people, drawn
from congested districts of the north and
north-west, and grouped in 1,418 villages,
had settled upon it. They came with all
their village communities — washermen,
barbers, carpenters, smiths, sweepers--and
settled in their new surroundings. Dis-
couraged at first by many circumstances,
not the least of which was a virulent out-
2
1 The irrigated plain of the Punjab comprises an area of
12,000,000 acres, which are now free from the risk of
crop failure.
2 The population in 1891 was 70,000; by 1906 it was
858,000.
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
231
break of cholera, but encouraged by a good
crop, they took root, and now they tell
you merrily of their interesting experiences.
66 I came on
on a camel," said one of the
cultivators to me, "and now " he left
his sentence to be finished by a significant
sweep of his hand across the landscape
shaded by trees and rich in growing crops.
I came across a ballad sung by a blind
wanderer in the streets of Lyallpur in 1899.
One of its verses translated into English
runs thus:
Behold the gifts of my Lord.
To the Sikh Jats have been given lands,
Till now, up to their ankles in poverty,
So, they prosper before mine eyes,
Drink wine and roam with curled moustache.
Hear you the tale of Lyallpur,
Where grain and water abound.
The canal runs by the gateways,
Trees have been planted in rows,
And green grass comes sprouting up.
Railways are running through the dis-
trict and grain markets have been opened at
different centres. Though we were not
there in the grain season, the large market
at Lyallpur was busy with traffic. The
export of wheat from the area was 8,124,607
maunds in 1903, and each acre yields on
the average 20 to 30 maunds.¹ In addition
1 A maund is 82 lb.
232
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
to that, cotton is grown, 567,212 maunds
having been exported in 1903. The land
revenue amounts to one million and a
quarter rupees, and the canal dues range
between eight and ten million rupees. That
is the Government income from the colony,
and it certainly does not represent more
than a fair economic rent. Truly we can
say of this place: "The desert shall rejoice
and blossom as the rose."
But behind all merely physical or political
improvements and influencing their value
lies the consideration, What is the spirit
of the rulers? What is the social atmospheric
influence of the men who are representing
us out there? The answer given to those
questions is more important than the
balance of material gain or loss which our
occupation of India carries with it. It is
more productive of political peace and un-
settlement.
Up to the present moment the Govern-
ment has been an autocracy, a despotism.
In 1858 the control of Indian affairs passed
into the hands of a Secretary of State assisted
by a Council; in 1861 a kind of legislature
was established in the provinces; in 1892
a semblance of representative authority was
given to these Councils; in 1909 this
semblance was made more of a reality. But

GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
233
the real governors of India are the Commis-
sioners and District Collectors, who are ad-
ministrators and judges in one, and who are
supported in all their doings by the whole
system to which they belong, and which
recognises them as being itself. On the
governing and administrative authorities
representatives of the subjects have been
in a minority; their powers of criticism
have been strictly confined within the
narrowest limits; government officials have
held the offices which carried real power-
for instance, the chairmanship of municipal
bodies with a few exceptions like Bombay.
Thus Indians of self-respect have generally
kept aloof from these bodies, and municipal
administration has been never out of the
hands of officials. Provincial Councils have
been on the same footing, and the Viceroy's
Council has been no better. Up till now
there has been hardly a shadow of self-
government in India.
Under these circumstances good personal
relations between the officials and the people
were of the utmost importance. But in
this respect things have been going from
bad to worse. When India was six or ten
months away from London the men who
went out either as agents for the Company
or officials of the Government, felt them-

234
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
2
selves cut off from home. They lived with
the people and adopted many of their
habits from squatting on the ground to
hookah smoking; they took wives from the
people. Their rule was far from good, their
administration far from pure. But it had
something sympathetic in it. With the
annexation of India by the Government a
change for the better took place. India
was still isolated from Great Britain; the
men who went out there still lived in the
same style as the people, the purifying
influence of Parliamentary sovereignty im-
proved the administration. There was less
exploitation and more administration. Then
came the Suez Canal and the steamship.
Competitive examinations supplied a new
set of men drawn from a new social stratum,
few of whom began with any interest in,
or connection with, India, the majority of
whom went up for the examination because
Indian service offered good pay, a respect-
able status, and a desirable pension. They
then brought out their women folk. Hill
stations had to be invented, and the other
distracting problems of separated families
arose. The white woman in India enor-
mously complicated the difficulties of govern-
ment. She became responsible for the ex-
travagant follies of Indian life, and she
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
235
embittered racial antagonism by her narrow-
minded prejudices and ignorance. In later
days the Imperialist spirit came to heighten
the little pinnacle upon which so many
officials lived, to increase their superior
offensiveness, and to repel to a greater
distance the self-respecting Indian. Or I
might summarise the situation in a different
way. The first generation of British rule
was one of rest. The country was exhausted
and required a breathing space and security.
It found both under the East India Company.
The second generation lived on the memories
of the first, and the fruits of peace, chiefly
education and a copying of the ways of
the conqueror, began to ripen. The third
was a generation advancing in Western
ways and of governors contemplating with
calmness a national self-government as the
issue of their protective activity. All this
time the rule was personal. The governors
knew the governed intimately—more par-
ticularly the ruling and educated families
of the country. Then the division came.
The results of their education policy made
the governors doubt, because it produced
criticism, rivals, a claim for equality. They
fell back upon the uneducated mass and
the gulf between the old families, and the
educated people on the one hand and them-

236
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
selves on the other, widened. The two
civilisations began to crystallise apart. The
Indian drew to himself his own elements, the
Anglo-Indian drew to himself his elements.
The Indian refused to show deference as of
old (by leaving his carriage, for instance,
at the outer gate and walking up the drive),
whilst some of our collectors have failed to
receive visitors standing and others have
not had the manners to ask visitors to be
seated. The English used to honour Hindu
festivals in Bengal (just as the Maharajah of
Gwalior keeps Christmas out of respect to
the British); but that I was told is a thing
of the past. The assumption of everybody
who went to rule in India used to be that he
would have to pick up what languages were
necessary to enable him to speak with the
people. But the arrogance of these modern
days began to assume that that was quite
unnecessary. The number of officers who
spoke the vernaculars with any facility,"
said Lord Curzon, was very much smaller
than fifty or twenty-five years ago, and the
number devoting themselves to anything like
a serious study of the literature of the
country was diminishing year by year."
The Bishop of Lahore, Dr. Lefroy, whose
splendid success is due solely to his faculty of
understanding the people and the civilisation
66
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
237
which surrounds him, has voiced the same
complaint. By a law as inevitable in its
consequences as any law in mathematics,
the present political agitation arose.
The separation between governed and
governor reached its widest point during
the Curzon régime. So offensive to all
sections of Indian opinion had this Viceroy
become that even his good deeds created
resentment and suspicion. If any one man
is responsible for the present anarchism
which is lifting its head in India, Lord
Curzon is. He divided Bengal in such a
way that a change which would have been
accepted if carried out with ordinary con-
sideration has given rise to a resentful
hatred; some educational reforms he made
were believed to be designed to destroy
Indian education; private circulars, anti-
Hindu in their purport, were issued by him,
which of course came to light; he publicly
insulted the people over whom he ruled.
When he had to resign it was not merely
a sigh of relief but an exclamation of delight
which rose up in India. The mad Holkar,¹
1 This was the Holkar of whom many stories are told.
One is that once when Lord Curzon was anxious that
Holkar should receive him, he sent a message through the
Resident to that effect. Holkar replied : Tell Lord
Curzon that I am indifferent." Anxious that the feeling
he expressed should be conveyed accurately to the Viceroy,

t
238
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
to whom Lord Curzon had been specially
objectionable, hit the mood of practically
the whole of India when, after declining to
meet the Viceroy for some time, he sent a
telegram to the boat in which he was to
leave, saying that as they were now com-
panions in disgrace perhaps they might
console each other. India guffawed when
it heard the story. India had been brought
to the point of rebellion. The Chiefs of the
Native States were offended, the people had
been insulted. Every ranting Extremist
could gather a following, the boycott was
inaugurated and the manufacture of bombs
was begun.
The spirit of the moment strengthened
the personal shortcomings of the Viceroy.
It was the time when Imperialism appeared
to be carrying everything before it. Sir
Charles Eliot, K.C.M.G., writing in The West-
minster Gazette,' said: "I knew India first
in 1884, and there can I think be no doubt
that since that time the European official
he had a further interview with the Resident and explained
himself further in this way: "If a beggar goes to see a
He is
hippopotamus, the hippopotamus wags his tail.
indifferent. If Lord Curzon goes to see him, he wags his
tail. He is indifferent. I am like the hippopotamus.
Explain that to Lord Curzon." If the story is an invention,
it belongs to that class of fiction which illustrates truth.
1 Quoted in The Indian Review for February 1908.
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
239
class has become more isolated. ... Nor
has the recent Imperialist movement tended
to lessen this isolation but rather to increase
6
it. The Imperialist thinks of our de-
pendencies,' of the white man's burden
and the glories of the island race.
He puts
himself and his countrymen in the place
of an Imperial monarch, and in imagination
shares the crown. But that is exactly the
type of sentiment that is not wanted in
India." The offensiveness of the official
had reached its climax.¹
Since then a slight reaction has set in.
Some of the younger men who have breathed
the purer atmosphere which has been en-
veloping Great Britain since the end of the
South African War, are following wiser and
more sympathetic lines of policy. The ad-
ministration of such men has been accepted
by the people as an indication of a new
spirit, and the negative qualities of Lord
Minto have given the country rest and
helped to change the spirit of British ad-
ministration. Moreover, it must not be
1 Some confusion in testimony exists regarding the
Curzon régime, but the explanation is simple. For the
first year or two Lord Curzon behaved acceptably and
indeed did some things which won for him the affection
of the people. At that time he was very popular. Then
he changed, and the favours he had gained passed like
a dream, and ill-will took their place.
240
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
forgotten that in the very worst days of
Lord Curzon's government there were men
who stuck to the better traditions of our
rule. I have seen some of these men; I
have heard others who have gone mourned
over, and I have learned that to talk of the
British official as though he were all of the
same stamp is just as erroneous as to talk
of India as though it were the home of one
people.
With the warning that any generalisation
about officials must always be subject to
important exceptions one may, however,
indicate certain general aspects of our
government in its relations to the people.
To begin with, there is a gulf fixed between
the two. This is not altogether our fault,
but it is much more our fault than we
admit. A distinguished lawyer of Lucknow,
a gentleman educated in England and mar-
ried to the daughter of an Indian occupying
one of the most important offices in the
Government, found himself at Mussoorie
last year. He desired to subscribe to the
public library there, and finding nothing in
the rules to debar him, he applied for mem-
bership. In a few days he was informed
that his application had not been enter-
tained, the reason being that he was not a
European. In Lucknow there is a Civil
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
241
and Military Club occupying one of the
residences of the vanished Kings of Oudh.
The rent it pays to the Government for the
building is nominal, in fact it is a State-
subsidised institution. But it is as hard
for an Indian to set foot in this club as it
is for a camel to pass through the eye of a
needle. It is controlled by a clique of
military officers from the neighbouring
cantonment. Decency has forbidden them
from excluding some of the living repre-
sentatives of the ruling families of Oudh,
and one night we were entertained by an
amusing description of how the military
black-ballers were hoodwinked by another
Indian candidate for membership. This
practice of exclusion is the rule in the towns
in British India, from Bombay to Calcutta
and from the Himalayas to Ceylon. Mention
of the Yacht Club in Bombay to an Indian
is almost an insult, but I refer to the Luck-
now case, because if the Government had
had any insight into the little insults that
rankle, it would long ago have ceased at
any rate to subsidise this private club, and
would have made it pay a proper rent for the
premises it occupies-or open its doors.
The exclusiveness of clubs is only indica-
tive of a much wider exclusiveness. We
were entertained to dinner one evening by
16
242
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
{
a member of a leading Mohammedan family
in India,¹ and the conversation turned for
a time upon the behaviour of the British
Resident and the cantonment
cantonment military
people. The final remark of the lady of the
household, who had travelled in England,
and had been for years out of purdah, was :
"I did my best to be friendly with them,
but they seemed to resent it. I think the
ladies of the military you send here must
come from very low classes. They are so
rude. I met real ladies in England, not
sham ones." One of the greatest Oriental
scholars living, a man who has had the
degree of LL.D. conferred upon him by
one of our own universities, said to me:
"Relations are getting worse. No English-
man except
وو
وو
calls upon me like a son.
Our rulers are making hypocrites of us.
We were entertained by Mohammedans and
by Hindus of many grades in the social
and religious scale, and we have talked on
this subject with all sorts of people from
Maharajahs to Christian outcasts, but we
did not meet a dozen Indians who said that
the social relations of Indians and Euro-
peans were satisfactory. On the other hand,
1 Obviously it is not always possible to give particulars
which will enable the sources of my information to be
identified.
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
243
1
we found that the educated and self-respect-
ing Indian was ceasing to call on Europeans
and was cutting off all connections, except
purely business ones, with them. Even in
educational work co-operation is grudgingly
recognised. St. Andrew's College in Delhi
has an Indian Principal and a European
staff working under him; but the most
worthy of that staff, the Rev. C. F. Andrews,
Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, was
struck off a list of nominees for Fellow-
ships of the Punjab University by the
Lieutenant-Governor's own hand, and a man
1 I have not used the many well-authenticated tales
of provocation, rudeness, and injustice which I heard.
They would fill a volume all by themselves. I must relate
two cases, however. A highly placed official once met a
funeral. Instead of stopping his carriage he literally
lashed his way through the mourners. A mourner sprang
at the official's horse. A scuffle ensued, the native was
brought before a magistrate and sent to jail. Another
case-from which I received much entertainment owing to
the chaffing which one of my hosts, who was concerned
in it, received about it happened in Benares a day or
two before I arrived there. My friend was in a motor
which dared to pass another motor in which a major (or
captain) sat. The major laid information that my friend
was driving at an excessive speed. The evidence showed
that the charge was ridiculous, and the accuser altered
his evidence. But the English magistrate fined my Indian
friend irrespective of the evidence, and on the sole ground
apparently that military prestige has to be maintained at
all hazards. This magistrate would have been much bene-
fited if he had heard the remarks I did.
244
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
of no educational attainments put in his
place, for no other reason than that Mr.
Andrews has the confidence of Indians.
The list of these personal affronts is exceed-
ingly long.
The Pax Britannica has produced insolence
amongst the governors. They resent the
idea of equality, and the more they resent
it the more does it take possession of the
people. Thus estrangement widens, and
shows itself in offensiveness of manner,
and, in rarer instances, in personal violence.
It is of some interest to note that the first
mention of the bomb as a way of redressing
Indian grievances was when the Calcutta
daily vernacular paper, the Sandhya, spoke
of it for personal defence.
The relationship is made all the worse by
the unfortunate position of the Eurasian.
An outcast from English society and inter-
course himself, he vents his unhappiness on
the pure Indian, whom he despises most
heartily. Railway incivilities, which are
the most prolific cause of resentment on
the part of Indians, are generally offered
by Eurasian officials.
Of all this the Government official is only
partly conscious. He does not grasp his
own position, partly because no one ever
tells him in unmistakable language what it
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
245
is. A host of ours was one morning telling
us of the rudeness of the collector of his
locality in continuation of what we had
been hearing from an ex-official on the
previous evening. Whilst we were still
talking on the subject, the collector himself
appeared and joined in the conversation.
He pooh-poohed in the loftiest manner
possible any suggestion that there was a
social gulf fixed, or that officials had not the
confidence of the people of the district.
Turning to our host he said:
"Take myself.
Am I not popular ? " There was a moment
of intense amusement for us, during which
our host seemed to be ransacking his stores
of polite language for a suitable reply. At
length he stammered : "Well, there is no
hostility between us.' The collector, far
too absorbed in himself to see the point of
the reply, turned round a beaming face to
me and said: "I told you so. Of course
I am popular." And the worst of it was
he really believed it.
I found the readiest gateway to the more
unfortunate states of official feeling by
studying the mental attitude which looks
everlastingly upon prestige. One hears of
prestige in official India until one is thor-
oughly sick of the word good as it is in
itself. If the official would only sit down
246
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
for half an hour and, leaving his precon-
ceived notions on one side, try to climb
out of the deep mental rut into which he
has sunk owing to the frequent use of
meaningless words, he might then under-
stand something about prestige. His idea
of prestige is that he must be allowed to
do what he likes; that he must show the
strong hand in government, and restrain the
strong nerve and the kind heart as being
weakening; that he must stand no nonsense.
He may be known to drink numerous whisky
pegs in his club and his general character
may be shady. He may be known to be
biased in his judgments and to hold the
"native" in contempt. But he does not
consider that these things, the subject of
endless gossip and comment outside, have
any influence on his prestige. In Simla, his
Holy Place of Government, he may allow
his wife and daughter to play in dramas
that are as meaningful to the Indian mind
as a low French farce is to the English
mind; he or his wife may spend the even-
ings in a perpetual whirl of dances under
circumstances which make an unsophisti-
cated or, perhaps, sophisticated-Indian
stare in amazement;¹ he may be involved
1 A well-known Indian potentate was recently taken
to a dance at Simla. After looking on for some time
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
247
in personal and domestic affairs which can
be described only by a vixenish female
novelist who has a spite against her sex.
But apparently it never enters into his head
that all these things undermine his influence
and damage his prestige. I wish those
officials who are subject to this censure
could have heard Indians speak of their
conduct and so been put in a position to
estimate the effect on prestige of Simla
festivities, gymkhanas, personal habits, con-
duct on the bench, and similar displays of
the ruling will become imperious.
I have been with officers whose arrival in
a village was the signal of demonstrations
of delight, and whose coming to a house
was passed round by overjoyed servants,
from sweepers to cooks, who all contrived
to pay personal respects. These are the
mainstays of our rule in India. When
you discuss prestige with them they get
angry, because they never think of it and
do not pursue it. They know that prestige
is the free gift of the gods for good conduct
-and they also know the value of their
fellow civilians, in whose mouths and
"back-
thoughts prestige is as frequent as
sheesh" is in the mouths of beggars.
he got tired, and informed his host that the girls looked
very well but that they might now be dismissed!
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GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
The greatest of all the delusions under
which our officials live is that whilst they
are distrusted by the professional and edu-
cated classes, they are regarded by the
uneducated villagers as their friends and
protectors. That the educated Indian op-
presses the uneducated is too often true,
and that the British official has over and
over again stepped in and protected the
sheep in process of being shorn, cannot be
denied; that in legal disputes the litigants
often prefer a British to an Indian magis-
trate is also beyond dispute; that the
villager salaams and tells the sahib that
his presence is as the sun and his justice
like the decrees of Providence, is a fact.
But all this goes but a short distance in
endearing the official to the heart of the
villager. The Collector sahib remains the
Collector sahib, a foreigner, an outsider,
one to be flattered undoubtedly, one to
be used when there is occasion, a protector
in the day of trouble, but all that amounts
to very little, to infinitely less than scores
of self-satisfied officers imagine. The official
hears nobody talk behind his back, and
yet that is more necessary in India than in
many other places. He is always warning
other people against the polite duplicity
of the Indian, but he accepts as gospel
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
249
every salaam offered to himself. The fact
is that in so far as there is opinion in the
village it is made in the first place by the
schoolmaster or one of the more or less
educated functionaries, and those as a rule
are opposed to the official; and, in the
second place, by those few men who read
the vernacular press of an anti-Government
colour which is circulating more and more,
I was told, in villages.
In Baroda I came across a conclusive
instance of the fundamental and ineradi-
cable difference between native and foreign
rule. We were told by one of the most
influential and respected of our represen-
tatives that a scheme of town improvement
in which he was interested was hopelessly
blocked because some tomb or other stood
in the way.
But the site of the modern
Lakshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda was formerly
a burying place. Here we have the situation
in a nutshell. The native ruler has a
freedom which we with all our powers have
not won. That we can overcome this funda-
mental obstacle if we go about it in the
right way is quite certain, and to prove it
an official told me the following incident.
There was once a certain collector whose
characteristics were silence and justice. He
was removed to a new district. Some
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GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
time afterwards trouble broke out in his
old place owing to suspicions entertained
regarding a new order. The people took
it into their heads that there was a sinister
purpose in the change and became upset.
Some one suggested that the old collector
should be sent for. He arrived, told the
people they were wrong, and went away.
The people were content.
In so far as the official is conscious of
the gulf between him and the people, he
excuses it, and by far and away the most
valid excuse he offers is that his work has
so changed that he finds it more and more
difficult to keep in touch with his district.
The reports he has to supply are on the
increase; his clerical work absorbs all his
time. If he spends his morning, as his
predecessors used to do, in listening to
callers, he has to pay the penalty by sitting
far into the night to finish other work.
Then at the end of five years he is perhaps
moved, and he has to go over the whole
process of gaining confidence afresh.
have seen the truth of this with my own
eyes. The work of the collector is keeping
him apart from his people. We are trying
to combine the spirit of the king with the
genius of the clerk.
Other excuses are not so valid.
I
"How
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
251
can we mix with them socially when they
will not introduce us to their wives, or
dine with us, or observe our habits?"
But many will show their wives, many will
dine at European tables, many are quite
British in their habits. And yet between
these and the British there is little social
intercourse-in some places none at all.
Behind all these excuses is the assumption
that the Indian must become Anglicised
before he can be accepted by the ruling
caste. The assumption only brings out
into strong relief the fatal weakness of the
ruling caste itself. It is deficient in sym-
pathy and imagination; it cannot trans-
plant itself. The Indian cannot become
English, and in these latter days is beginning
to decline to try to become English; and
our representatives quietly wait for the
impossible as a preliminary to their ful-
filling what is obviously the first duty of
a governing authority such as ours, viz.
to get into intimate contact with the subject
people. If we cannot tolerate Indian ways
in drawing-rooms and railway trains, ob-
viously we can do no permanent good in
India and should leave the place altogether.
It must be admitted that many of the
Indian magnates encourage our officials in
this attitude. They curry favours at the
252
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
hand of Governors and Lieutenant-Gover-
nors, and some of the most worthless
sycophants in India are to be found amongst
the Indian aristocracy who have seats on
the Councils and hang round Viceregal
Lodges and Government Houses.
Here I must refer to the growing habit
of fleeing to the hills. The Indian official
is particularly sensitive to any criticism of
this habit, and to tell him that he ought
to stay in the plains is undoubtedly an
unpleasant task. But the annual migration
to the hills and the prolonged stay there
every year is becoming a very serious
matter. It breeds extravagance both in
private and in public expenditure; the
gaieties which have grown up in connection
with it are having a bad effect upon the
administration. It is just as though the
British Cabinet and the Chiefs of Depart-
ments went every winter to Monte Carlo
to escape the fogs of London, and what is
said in its defence-good health, better
work and so on-is precisely what would be
said in defence of an exodus to Monte Carlo
were we to allow it to begin. The Judges of
the High Court do not go; the District and
Sessions Judges do not go; business houses
do not remove their staffs. Capital, one of
the most solid Anglo-Indian papers, wrote
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
253
last summer that those who say that going
to the hills is necessary "do so simply from
selfish motives"; and "we cannot shut our
eyes to the fact that work in the plains is
performed as efficiently as in the hills."
The migration costs the Imperial Govern-
ment nearly 900,000 rupees, or £60,000;
the Madras migration costs about £3,000,
that of the United Provinces £6,750, and
these charges are on the increase.
To quarrel with this attempt of the
Governments to seek the comfort of coolness
may appear to be ungracious, but it is
necessary. Some very excellent officers de-
plore it, and at least one Governor has
frowned upon it. It results in widening the
gulf between people and administrators, and,
psychologically as well as geographically, it
is one of the strongest influences in keeping
the bureaucracy a thing in India apart.¹
1 The absurdity of the whole thing was borne in upon
me by an amusing incident which happened when I was
in Simla. I was dining out one evening, and whilst the
company was gathering I was being told by an important
official that Simla made the administration so healthy
that they got through work so easily and did it so
well, that the cost of the migration was more than
made up.
Whilst he was proceeding there entered another
Important official, an Indian. He was shivering and
sneezing and altogether miserable. His greeting was :
This Simla will kill me. I have hardly done a good
day's work since I came here.”

254
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
None of the contrasts with which India
abounds is more striking than the amoun
of social intercourse between the two race
in British India and in Native States
The rule in these States is that there i
no difference between European and Indian
and it seems to be wonderfully well carried
out.¹ Our officials themselves volunteer th
information that when they go to British
India they feel the difference. Although
there was deterioration even here unde
the Curzon régime, it was unable to pene
trate very deeply. The chief reason i
very obvious. The State is a native one
Its relation with us is theoretically tha
of an ally, and in practice its dependenc
has never reached that point when ou
representatives could openly treat the ruler
and their people as subject. Our natura
arrogance has always been kept in check
We have also had to send as agents to
these States
States men of some capacity in
handling other men, that means, men o
some imagination, personality, and natura
sympathy. In this respect, we have no
been the playthings of the accident o
1 We noticed one marked exception. In this particula
State an English schoolmistress was boycotted by th
English community because she was specially friendly
with the Indian people. Some of the actions of the rule
of the State had annoyed the Government.
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
255
competitive examination. The political
agent is selected, he does not come out on
the top in a contest between crammed men.
When the appointment is honestly made-
and that seems to have been generally
the case, though there are unfortunate
exceptions—a man of experience is chosen.
The independence of the State and the
capacity of the agent have been the two
main factors in keeping down that offensive
exclusiveness which is like a paralysis in
the life of British India, and have proved
conclusively that the repulsion is not natural
to race and not the necessary sequel of
profound differences in social life, but is
merely the outcome of certain defects in
the British character when it becomes an
absolute sovereign over other people.
There is, however, one consistent view of
a rational kind which is used to justify our
attitude and which must be considered.
Our service in India believes in efficiency
rather than popular control, and defends
itself accordingly. It does better than the
people themselves could do. That is a
matter of evidence. It ought to be true,
seeing that we have destroyed nearly every
vestige of self-government, from village
panchayats upwards, within the area of
our rule, and are only now beginning to
:
256
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
build where we previously demolished.
Every year, however, with such cases as
Baroda, Gwalior and Mysore before us, it
becomes less true. Our efficiency indeed
has not amounted to a great deal, and I
write this down all the more boldly because
I find the following comment in an editorial
of The Pioneer (November 6, 1909): "What,
after all, is the state of a British Indian
district that we should concern ourselves
with forcing the condition of differently
administered territories [it is referring to
Native States] up to the same level?
Are the people of Howrah or Cawnpore in
any way really better off or happier than
those of Kandesh or Balagat?" When The
Pioneer says that, what more need be said!
the
But I dispute the principle itself. Effi-
ciency is not better than self-government.
In reality the two cannot be opposed as
alternatives, because both together are the
ideal. In Lord Curzon's time efficiency
was carried to stupid lengths. Concentra-
tion became the rule of the day;
provinces were made to feel their sub-
ordination; an unimaginative mechanism
was being substituted for a contact with
public opinion as the determining factor
in government. The pendulum is now
swinging the other way, and the idea of
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
257
efficiency as the sole test of government
is being abandoned for the time being.
Here, I think, the root of much evil receives
its nourishment. The "superiority
superiority" of the
personal manners of the official, his auto-
cratic ways of doing things, his idea that
he should do for India what he thinks is
best for India, arise from the assumption
that efficiency is what India wants and
needs. If men were machines that would
be all right, and the mechanical excellences
of our Government would settle all disputes
about our rule. But men have pride, will,
self-respect; and consequently a Govern-
ment inspired by the idea of efficiency will
never be acceptable and its officials never
be gracious. The annual Reports issued
by the Government of Baroda may not
be accurate, those of Gwalior may not be
satisfactory, those of Mysore may not be
reliable; but these three Governments are
now doing more for the mind of India,
and are helping India more to fulfil itself
and to be really efficient, than the British
administration itself.
Examples of how the autocratic will of
officials seeking the abstraction called effi-
ciency makes trouble are to be found in
hearly every district, but the administration
of the Forestry Laws will serve my purpose.
17
258
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
No one can doubt the good intentions
of the Government in preserving what
remains of the ancient forests and re-
planting areas that had been laid waste;
and every one knows that in order to do
this some limitation had to be imposed
upon the grazing and woodland rights and
privileges of the people. But the necessary
reforms came in conflict with an economic
system built up on freedom to destroy,
and a sudden change was bound to be
disastrous. Thus we find that the well-
intentioned administrators of the Forestry
Laws imposed cruel hardships on grazing
villages and upon others depending upon
a free use of forestry products. Absurd
punishments were imposed for straying
cattle and goats, prosecutions multiplied
and civil crime of the same character as
poaching was manufactured. A little tact,
a little skill in handling people, a little
sympathy with peasants who were after
all only following very ancient custom,
would have made these necessary regulations
far more palatable, and would by that much
have saved the Government from opposition
and harsh criticism.
The remedy is easily seen even if its
application is not easy. Far more care
must be exercised in promotions. Men are

GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
259
now promoted instead of censured, and
decorations are given instead of punish-
ments. The best men in the Service look
on and are sad. Good work is not rewarded.
I am aware that in a Service such as that
of India promotion must be mechanical to
a considerable extent, but it need not be
nearly so mechanical as it is. The Viceroy,
the Governors and Lieutenant-Governors
might take more concern about their sub-
ordinates than is done at present, and
more care might be exercised in selecting
men for those positions of supreme
responsibility.
I
Here we touch something essential.
tried my hardest to find out how the Service
got what reputation it has amongst the
people, but I am not sure that I succeeded.
In any event, I could discover no general
rule. A man like the late Mr. Radice of
Lucknow is beloved by everybody and
mourned by everybody; men like the late
Director of Agriculture for Bengal are trusted
by everybody. And yet, so far as I could
make out, the Service does not benefit by
their virtues except to a minor degree.
On the other hand, Sir Lawrence Jenkins
gives a decision which the Anglo-Indian
press receives with howls of execration
and the effect is to re-establish confidence

260
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
amongst the people in British justice.
Sometimes it appears to be the individual
who acts, sometimes it is the System, and
it is the System which needs reinvigorating.
Changed relationships must be on a large
scale or they will remain personal to the
men who practise them. Young men come
out with liberal British ideas, and in six
months they have acquired exclusive Anglo-
Indian ones. That in no way proves the
superiority of the latter; it proves the
strength of the System. "You have to
yield," said a deputy-commissioner to me.
"The atmosphere, the pressure, the society in
which you live and move and have your
being here are against you." Hence, the
System cannot be reinvigorated from be-
neath. A strong Viceroy who could impress
liberal ideas on the bureaucracy, Governors
and Lieutenant-Governors willing to support
him-these alone can change the System.
Moreover, the Indian service ought not
to remain isolated as it now is from every
Parliamentary and democratic influence, and
be left to the mercy of the law of its own
bureaucratic being. It claims now that it
alone knows its own work, and that no one
unbaked in the sun of India can profitably
criticise it. The claim of course is absurd
--so absurd that it almost calls for the
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
261
retort that no intelligent tourist at the
end of three months can know less of
India than a good half of the Civil Service.
I have met men in India who had been
there for a score of years.
score of years. They knew
few Indians, they had rarely discussed
public affairs with them, they could not
answer accurately some of the most ele-
mentary questions about Indian life, their
opinions on current affairs were obviously
the parrot repetitions of club talk or news-
paper statements. In fact they were as
separate from India as I am at home in
London, and took their opinions of India
in an even more second-hand way than I
had taken mine before I set foot in Bombay.
The Indian Service would benefit greatly
if an interchange of officers could be
arranged with the Home Service. Fresh
minds would then be applied to old pro-
blems, and men trained in Parliamentary
ways would contribute to the settlement
of Indian difficulties. Calcutta and Simla
should never be without one or more heads
of departments trained in the ways of
Parliamentary administration. And a still
further change would be very helpful. To
the Secretary of State's Council in London
should be added two or three Members
of Parliament. These changes would be

262
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
opposed partly because the Indian Service
has come to regard India as its preserve,
and promotion as its prerogative. But the
best men would welcome such assistance
and protection.
There is a widespread feeling that India
must be governed from India and not from
London, and that the bureaucracy must be
as independent as the administration of a
self-governing colony. Hence, whenever a
question about Indian administration is
put in the House of Commons, the Indian
Service considers itself insulted. For the
legislator to criticise the administrator is
sacrilege. To hear Indian officials explain
the mean reasons why certain old colleagues
put questions about India in the House of
Commons, and proceed to claim that no
questions should be put at all because they
encourage sedition and must be put by men
who know nothing of the country, is a
liberal education in the very worst pettiness
of a bureaucracy. This is, indeed, the
least lovely side of the Service. This claim
to be left free from outside influence is sup
ported by what is a very erroneous view o
Indian administration. Not only is this
administration not colonial self-governmen
(to which the argument of non-interferenc
might apply), it is not an Oriental despotism
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
263
(about the absolute autocracy of which we
hear so much), nor is it merely a bureaucracy
of experts.
It is an alien bureaucracy.
The Anglo-Indian is an Englishman first
and foremost. He has no intentions of sett-
ling in India; he is always complaining of
India. He is like a philanthropic slum-
dweller at best. He therefore takes short
views-unlike a bureaucrat native to the
soil such as is found in Prussia. India is
something external to its administrators,
and it is therefore unusually imperative that
some general public opinion other than the
Freemasonry of the system of the bureau-
cracy should be brought to bear upon them.
The real fact is, India requires more
Parliamentary influence to play upon it and
not less. We are not living in the time of
Akbar or Aurungzebe. The men who are
making opinion in India to-day look up to
Parliament, and are more and more looking
down upon collectors. The Chiefs, of whom
one hears so much in this connection as
being disgusted with interference from
London and as being shaken in their allegi-
ance by the subordination of Viceroys to
public opinion at home and by the tender
treatment meted out to seditionmongers
in accordance with British liberality of
opinion, are dying out. One meets per-
264
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
chance a gay and gallant Sir Pratap Singh
or conservative Maharana of Udaipur, but
they are beginning to think of their graves,
and those who will succeed them are English
in thought, have been trained in their own
colleges in English methods of administra-
tion, or have rubbed shoulders with budding
M.P.'s at some of our own public schools
and universities. Moreover, some of the
Native States themselves, like Baroda, Tra-
vancore and Mysore,' have begun Parlia-
mentary institutions of a kind. None of
the many prophecies which one can make
of India is more likely to be fulfilled than
this that every tendency in operation in
India at the moment is leading towards
Parliamentary government, and is influenc-
ing Indian thought so that it will turn more
and more to Parliament as its real governing
authority. This way should be made smooth
and wide. It is no question of taking
power or prestige from the Viceroy, but of
bringing the whole System into closer and
more organic contact with British adminis-
tration. As the head of such a System the
Viceroy will shine as much, and be quite as
1 There are 100 elected representatives in the Travancore
Assembly and 250 in that of Mysore, but these bodies are
unfortunately not allowed to interfere in the government
of the States, and are hardly even nominal legislatures.
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
265
imposing, as I saw him, a plain man in a
black frock-coat, stepping from a train at
Gwalior to be received by a bejewelled
Maharajah.
The present method of Indian govern-
ment has nothing in common with British
methods. When the Crown became re-
sponsible for India the intention was to
associate the Indian with his own Govern-
ment and to make Parliament supreme in that
Government. But things have not turned
out as was intended. To govern the people
as we thought best and to cease consulting
them as we went along, seemed a much
less troublesome method-especially with
an army behind our backs-than the more
democratic way. It was also said to be
more efficient. Thus the bureaucracy took
root and grew thick in bole and branch
where it was only meant to be a shade and
protection for the tender plant of self-
government. Thus also it has come about
that there is really less popular control
and Parliamentary criticism of the Indian
administration now than there was in the
days of the Company, when Parliament
kept a vigilant eye upon the India House.
The Service is determined that this shall
last. Liberal policy should challenge this
claim at every point, and increase Parlia-

266
GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
mentary influence and the Parliamentary
spirit in Indian administration. I am no
believer in sudden changes, because the
pendulum violently lurched forward will
speedily swing back. That is specially true
of changes in India which the System resists.
Nor can the changes be brought about by
controlling dispatches from London. They
can be effected only through the policy
of Viceroys, Governors and Lieutenant-
Governors who agree that it is wise to
make them.
A Viceroy will go to India one day, I hope,
who will be steeped in Liberal traditions,
and whose political mind will be made up
of axioms of government which have sprung
out of Liberal experience. Two grand
66
He
characteristics will then mark his rule.
will try no heroics of administration; he
will not seek to raise a monument to himself
by some new departure," either in patch-
ing up old buildings or in changing the
outward forms of government. This charac-
teristic, though negative, will not be slightly
regarded by any one who knows India.
The second will be a change in the spirit of
the administration. This again will not of
necessity be marked by changes in legis-
lation, though some must be made. The
most that will happen will be that the Sys-

GREAT BRITAIN IN INDIA
267
tem will feel that a new hand is driving it,
ust as a horse knows the kind of rider who
s on its back. The System has responded
to the recent reforms; the System has
great capacity to respond to other and even
greater reforms-the reforms that a truly
great Viceroy would make in its spirit, its
political assumptions, its points of view.
Finally, the India Office is becoming too
afraid to do good, and perhaps the greatest
of all the services of this ideal Viceroy of
whom I dream, is that he will encourage
che India Office to take more responsibility.

VII
WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
وو
66
66
A
A
“WHAT,” I asked nearly everybody I met
whose opinion was of importance,
"is your
conception of the end which is being worked
out by our Indian administration ?
free and independent India," replied Ara-
bindo Ghose; "Self-government within the
British Empire," said Mr. Gokhale;
measure of self-government the exact amount
of which I cannot quite see," answered an
old sympathetic official; "British rule
whilst time lasts," remarked another official
of a different school. I have tried to estimate
the force of the various currents in Indian life
and to ascertain whither they are tending.
We must begin with Lord Morley's recent
reforms, as they open a new chapter in
Indian administration. Lord Morley has
declared that they do not introduce Parlia-
mentary institutions into India. That is
quite true, but their potentialities and in-
evitable outcome must be considered as
well as their actual and immediate pro-
268
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 269
visions. For the evolution of government
clearly shows that the intention of reformers
is nothing, and the internal momentum of
reforms is everything. The Whigs of 1832
never meant the Reform Bill to be the be-
ginning of democracy, but they could no
more stop the working out of the forces
which the Reform Bill released, or retard
the fulfilment of the consequences which
attended it, than they could arrest the
flight of time. Now, the essential part of
the recent Reform measures is the election
of representatives (although this is a privilege
given with a niggardly hand, the limitation
does not affect the principle), the creation
of non-official majorities and the granting
of powers to the Councils which, if they stop
short of legislative authority, do amount
to a consultative authority. On the face
of it this system is unstable. Privileges of
election granted to Mohammedans cannot
be withheld from Hindus, authorities that
have to be consulted must in time be-
come authorities whose advice has to be
followed-in other words, a consultative
authority becomes by the laws of its own
being legislative authority. Lord Morley
has established institutions which are not
rly meant to represent public opinion-
these institutions existed in India before-

270 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
but which are designed to impose responsi-
bilities on public opinion. That is, Lord
Morley has planted seeds the fruit of which
is Parliamentary government. It may, how-
ever, take the fruit a long time to appear.
Several consequences will inevitably
follow from these reforms. Indian political
agitation will become more real because it
will be brought up against the facts. A
Council discussing a Budget will not be able
to indulge in the "highfalutin." Moreover,
if by good fortune any one who really repre-
sents the cultivators and takes an interest
in the new industrial developments should
be elected to the Councils, the whole out-
look of the Indian Reform movement will
change. There will be as great a split in
the old Liberal movement in India, repre-
sented by the Congress-the movement of
the rich and the educated against the
monopoly of political power by the bureau-
cracy as there has been in home politics
owing to the rise of the Labour Party. Or,
I may put it in this way. There is no party
politics in India at present, only the opposi-
tion of the official and the non-official, sup-
plemented recently by the opposition of the
Moslem League to the Congress. This is
all for the bad. But the Reforms give hop
that political conflicts on new lines wil

WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 271
arise. These will establish the conditions
under which an extension of Reform in a
Parliamentary direction will not only be
necessary but desirable.
The burden of the attack on our finances
will relate to expenditure. Leaving out
of account such large questions as that
of military expenditure, nobody who has
seen India and the conditions of Indian
government will deny that there is great
extravagance. The European Service is
extravagant, the conditions under which
it rules are extravagant, the cost of Simla,
Qotacamund and other hill stations is extra-
vagant, the expenditure on official residences
and other paraphernalia is extravagant. We
may expect a relative diminution in the
number of Europeans in the Service, and
the demand of the Indian that Civil Service
examinations shall be held in India will
receive augmented support. But this will
not relieve the finances, for two great sources
of increasing expenditure must soon receive
attention. The first is the low pay of
subordinate officers. At present policemen,
chuprassies, lower-grade clerks and others
at the bottom of the Service receive so
little wages that they must accept and even
exact bribes in order to live at all. Then
there is the demand for more general educa-

272 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
tion which is being heard all over India.
This means the training of teachers and the
increasing of their pay, the provision of
accommodation and the supply of school
stores; and, although Indians are quite
willing to pay for the education of their
children, the tradition of the country is that
education should be free, and the poverty
of the people is such that any scheme which
is to reach all must be one of the open door
and the free invitation to enter.
The new Councils will therefore be beset
from the beginning with financial difficulties.
and the only safe policy is for us to take them
fully into our confidence and frankly make
them our financial associates. The new
accumulations of Indian wealth will thus be
tapped, and Indian politics will pass from
the more or less dangerous stage of being an
opposition to the bureaucracy and a claim
to share its authority, to being organised
expressions of tendencies and forces internal
to Indian social life itself.
Truly the ship of Parliamentary govern-
ment is launched. The hands at the helm
are perhaps timorous; the officers are not
certain that she is seaworthy. They had
better let these feelings pass. The Rules
and Regulations issued for the control of the
elections were not worthy of us. But these
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 273
will disappear. The bureaucracy will find
new honour and satisfaction in facing with
the success which it certainly can command
the more difficult problems of governing
India with the consent and advice of the
people. It is better to be a politician than
a Civil Service clerk, and the Indian civilian
will find that out in due course.
These are some of the questions that lie
at our feet, but we must go beyond them
and face the more comprehensive one which
I put to many friends. What is evolving
through all these changes? Is a united
India to emerge? Is it to learn afresh the
arts it has forgotten? Is its glory to be
within or without our rule?
There are indications of the future which
any one can observe to-day. In the first
place, it is easy to exaggerate the political
influence of the separation of races which
exists in India, and even the separation of
creeds and castes. The Indian multitudes
are passive. The mighty waves of conquest
which rolled again and again over India
hardly affected the people. They were killed,
they were plunged into poverty, they had
to alter their faith. But the changes made
by these things were superficial. Even
when the Hindu became Mussulman he
altered little, and to this day the spirit of his
18
274 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
ancient faith haunts him and he still takes
part in his old festivals and worships at his
old shrines. It has been said that the spirit
of the Vedas influences Hindu and Moham-
medan alike in India. We have left deeper
marks than any of our predecessors, but
even to-day, when one leaves the town
behind and goes into the village, one under-
stands how little has been changed and how
much has been unchanged. We have taught
the people peace, we have made them forget
arms; and if the Government allows them
to till their fields and worship their gods, the
great mass of the Indian people will go
through life undisturbed by the differences
which distinguish them from their fellows.
The leaders of the old warlike races like
the Rajputs are being transformed by educa-
tion. "The old ways are passing," sighed
the Maharana of Udaipur to me. This
Maharana is the custodian of the ancient
spirit. He boasts that his blood has not a
taint of the Moslem in it. In a new wing
of his palace filled with the trash of Totten-
ham Court Road sits his son and successor,
speaking English, eager to discuss English
affairs, specially interested in our Parlia-
mentary government. Even the Pathan
who for long was the stock argument of
the Anglo-Indian against the possibility
WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
275
An
of Indian national unity is changing.
escort through the Khyber is now largely
a formal thing; and besides, this long-
haired, square-faced hero of a hundred raids
is turning his craft to the making of money.
He too bows to the inevitable law of things.
Contact and the interlacement of interests
lead not only to peace but to unification.
The Pathan as the stage army of the anti-
nationalist Anglo-Indian is melting away.
Two obstacles still remain, caste and the
recent organisation of Moslem opposition
to political Hinduism. The difficulty of
caste is diminishing, however, even if slowly.
A select few have revolted against its
tyranny, and although Indian society as a
whole resists in a most remarkable way
every breach of caste rules, punishing the
transgressor with the most dire conse-
quences of boycott and banishment, there is
much greater freedom of intercourse between
different castes than there was. Education
is providing a great willingness to change
caste rigidity, if only a beginning on a
sufficiently large scale were made; and
winking at breaches of caste is becoming
more and more common. I have eaten with
Brahmins who, of course, remained in caste,
and I have been entertained by their stories
of how they elude the consequences of their
276 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
acts. In addition to all this, the Nationalist
movement seems to have the effect of fusing
the castes. Its religious counterparts, like
the Arya Somaj and the revival of Hinduism
in Bengal, are strongly anti-caste; and if
corresponding movements in Bombay do
not run with the same force in the same
direction, we
we must remember that the
Mahratta Brahmin has still a keen feeling
regarding the destruction of his authority
not yet a century ago. The battles he fought
are still fresh in his memory, and his forts,
mocking him from every hill, keep these
recollections green. His nationalism is
therefore more personal and more bitter
than that of any other section. Caste will
continue for many generations embodied in
ceremonies and habits, and it will hamper
the development of a complete national
unity, by putting difficulties in the way of
the choice of national leaders and by keeping
alive feelings of separateness of a funda-
mental character. But it will be in the
nation as it has been in the small section
of pioneers. Caste will give trouble, but it
will not be able to make effort abortive.
The relations between the Hindu and
the Mohammedan are, at the moment, the
greatest obstacles in the way of unity. The
Mohammedan community was never heartily
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 277
associated with the Congress. It was repre-
sented there by some of its very best people,
like the Tyabji family, but it is a delusion
to believe that Congress ever roused the
imagination of the Mohammedans. When
that is admitted, we must not forget that
one of the reasons for this is the general
backwardness of the community itself.
Education is at a low ebb in it; it has not
come to the forefront in commerce and
industry; it has tilled, and the nimble Hindu
intellect has exploited it. It has slept
in its old ways. Its leaders decided against
progress. The stream of events ran past
the community and left it behind, proud
but impoverished, cherishing fame that had
faded. A few members rebelled, and some
of them associated themselves with the
Nationalist movement, but the great majority
had no sense of unity except Pan-Islamism.
Their life centred round a shrine, not round
a political capital. In India they were a
community only. Nationality was a senti-
ment of which they had not a particle.
Some of their leaders emphatically repudi-
ated it.¹ But the Congress leaders saw that
1 For instance, Mr. Mohamed Shafi, the able leader of
the Punjab Mohammedans, in his Presidential Address
at the meeting of the Punjab Provincial Moslem League,
October 22, 1909.
278 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
it was essential that they should have a
Mohammedan allegiance, and they tried to
get it from the very beginning.
Things went smoothly till the beginnings
of Parliamentary government were seriously
discussed. Mohammedans had previously
become aware of the blunder of their
leaders in declaring against a modern edu-
cation, and had taken active steps to
repair the mistake. They had founded
Aligarh in 1875, and into their minds had
crept the idea of a great educational insti-
tution which would be not merely the seat
of Mohammedan learning, but the centre of
Mohammedan public life and a stimulus to
an all-round Mohammedan revival. They
have been fortunate in their Aligarh leaders.
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of the
College, was a man of unusual parts, and in
his later years enjoyed without challenge
the headship of the community in India.
The present secretary of the College, Nawab
Vikar-ul-Mulk Bahadur, late Premier of
Hyderabad, holds the same position; and
every effort will be made to retain this
autnority for the leading Mohammedan
official at Aligarh.
The Mohammedan community, though
increasing in numbers, found itself diminish-
ing in influence. It was not securing its
WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
279
وو
fair share in Government offices; it was
being left behind in the race for wealth ;
it was having little influence on public
opinion. In short, the community was a
mass without weight. Aligarh arose, and
its task was to turn out every year a body
of Mohammedans educated to take their
part in the public life. The community
was fighting for self-preservation. When
Lord Curzon's educational policy resulted
in an increase in the cost of education,
Aligarh protested because, in the first place,
high fees were a serious handicap to the
poor Mohammedan community, and, in the
second, the old
families had become very poor in so many
instances that the effect of high fees was
to select for education men from the less
valued strata of Mohammedan society.
When Mr. Archbold, then the head of
Aligarh, was suspected of favouring Lord
Curzon's policy, began to hint that the
number of pupils should be restricted, and
indicated an opposition to funds which had
been started from which fees of students
were being paid, how could the trustees
view the situation except in a hostile
spirit? An expensive and a limited Ali-
garh would not fulfil their idea of turning
out a maximum number of men who, having
"good Mohammedan
280 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
passed certain examinations, would be in a
position to fill the offices in public and
private life which are like bulwarks of
defence to the community to which these
men belong.
They were quick to see, moreover, that
an extended political liberty might, at the
moment, be dangerous for them unless
their share in it was specially protected.
Hence they journeyed to Simla in 1906,
and laid their claims for special representa-
tion before the Viceroy.
Viceroy. They were not in
a position to defend themselves in the
open field, they said. If the contest for
all the prizes were to be open, they feared
that few, if any, would fall to their lot, so
they asked that some should be specially
reserved for them.
It is necessary to understand that the
Moslem movement is inspired solely by
considerations affecting itself.¹ I have read
carefully its literature and have discussed
its intentions with some of its leading spirits.
The Mohammedans take their stand upon
1 This is naïvely expressed in a sentence which I take
from the address of the President of the Kurachee Con-
ference (December 29, 1907) of the All-India Moslem
League: “I know of nothing which has been more
productive of concrete results for the benefit of our
selves than that great and memorable deputation which,
in October 1906, went to Simla."

WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 281
the right of Mohammedanism to share in
the government of India. They desire
judges in the Courts, representatives in the
public service, spokesmen under their own
control on every public authority from
District Boards to University Senates and
school text-book Committees. They claim
these things, not as a minority requiring
protection, but as a distinct section of
Indian society whose religious differences
with the rest express not only an historical
separateness but also a civic one. Numer-
ical proportions, therefore, do not satisfy
them. They claim effective power. They
rank themselves as special allies with us in
the Empire, and to their position in India
they wish added influence in consideration
of their importance as part of Pan-Islamism
and their distinction as late rulers of the
country. They regard India as a federal
1
1 "As a community the Mohammedans contribute
largely to the defence of the Empire, and have also the
weight of their Pan-Islamic relation to enhance the value
of their position in India."-Ali Imam, in Presidential
Address to All-India Moslem League Congress, Amritsar,
December 30, 1908. "We are the representatives of our
co-religionists in various parts of this Empire."-Mohammed
Ali, B.A. (Oxon.), at above Conference. A short speech
by Mohammed Yakub puts the whole case so well, that
I give it practically in full as printed in the official Report
of the Conference, without any correction of the sentences:
"The number of Mohammedans in the Judicial Line of

282 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
government of Hindu and Mohammedan,
and desire a fixed representation for the
same reasons as the American and Australian
States have insisted upon an equality of
representation (irrespective of population)
in the Senates of these countries.
The community was slow to respond to
the efforts of its leaders. The Indian
National Congress was formed in 1885, and
immediately made overtures to the Moham-
the Province of Agra is very inadequate and unless prompt
and effective measures are taken to make up the deficiency,
the Mohammedans will, in the course of a few years,
nearly disappear from the higher grade of this most im-
portant branch of Government service. In the last
quarter of the year 1908 out of twenty-one sub-Judges
there were only four Mohammedans, out of whom two are
on the eve of retirement, and will, according to the gradua-
tion given in the civil list, be succeeded by Hindus; and
the whole province of Agra, one of the most advanced
Mohammedan Provinces in India, will have only two Musul-
man sub-Judges. In the grade of Munsifs the situation
is far from being satisfactory and out of a total number
Al-
of sixty-nine there are only twelve Mohammedans.
though we can never admit that our share in the Govern-
ment service or anywhere else should be in proportion to
our numerical strength and in any kind of representation,
direct or indirect, we justly claim a share equal to our
Hindu brethren, owing to our special importance and
the position which we occupied in India a little more
than a hundred years ago. Still even according to the
view taken by Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell, the
most unsympathetic English Governor that the Mohamme-
dans of India ever had, out of every five there ought to
be two Mohammedans in the Judicial Line."
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 283

medans. Syed Ahmad Khan closely
watched the movement for three years, then
decided against it, and in 1887 called a
Mohammedan Educational Conference during
the Christmas week. This Conference de-
cided against the Congress. A Patriotic
Association was formed in August 1888,
which expressed its opposition to the Con-
gress. In 1893 an Upper Indian Defence
Association of the Mohammedans was formed
by Syed Ahmad and his followers to supple-
ment the work of the Patriotic Association,
which had been too spasmodic. On the death
of Syed Ahmad in 1898 the Upper Indian
Defence Association practically died too.
In 1901 a controversy regarding the script
and language to be used in the courts of the
United Provinces brought the Mohamme-
dans into co-operative activity again under
the auspices of Nawab Vikar-ul-Mulk. The
Association hung fire until political re-
forms appeared over the horizon and the
famous deputation went to Lord Minto on
October 1, 1906. The All-India Moslem
League was formed on December 30, 1906.
The political successes which have rewarded
the efforts of this League are so fresh in the
public mind that I need not refer to them
specifically. They have been so signal as
to give support to a suspicion that sinister
284 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
influences have been at work, that the
Mohammedan leaders were inspired by cer-
tain Anglo-Indian officials, and that these
officials pulled wires at Simla and in London
and of malice aforethought sowed discord
between the Hindu and the Mohammedan
communities by showing the Mohammedans
special favour.' The Mohammedans re-
ceived representation far in excess of their
numbers, and they were granted a franchise
far more liberal than that given to the
Hindus.
Whether this was done deliberately and
diabolically on the principle of "Divide and
Rule," or whether it was a mere blunder
showing once again how very little some of
our responsible officials understand India
or can estimate the effect of their actions,
1 I do not want to encumber this work with the details
of things which must pass away rapidly. But to show
how unfair the Rules and Regulations are under which the
Reforms were begun I may explain the conditions of
Eastern Bengal. A Hindu must pay 5,000 rupees as revenue,
a Mohammedan 750 rupees only, as qualification for a
vote for the Zemindari election. The cess qualification
of the former is 1,250 rupees, of the latter 188 rupees.
The payment of income tax, the receipt of a Government
pension and the being an Honorary Magistrate do not
qualify Hindus for voting. They do qualify Mohammedans.
Qualifications for election on the Provincial Council show
the same injustice to the Hindu. And this, be it re-
membered, is not in a Province where there is a Mohamme-
dan minority, but an overwhelming Mohammedan majority.

WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 285
the public cannot say, because the true
explanation of Lord Minto's speeches, Lord
Morley's counter-speeches and the contra-
dictory dispatches is still a secret. But be
the explanation that it was a plot or a
blunder, the first effect of the arrangement
has been to drive apart the two communities,
to undermine the influence of Congress and
the Moderates, and to throw the sane and the
constitutional Nationalist camp into some-
thing like consternation. In the Punjab a
separate Hindu Congress has been inaugur-
ated. A writer (said to be Rai Bahadur
Lal Chand, an ex-Judge of the Chief Court)
said in The Punjabee: "The Hindu press is
wedded to the Congress cry, and is equally
hesitant to advocate purely Hindu interests.
This self-abnegation in politics which the
Hindu community has adopted to achieve
the foundation of an Indian nation, is
suicidal." In Bombay the effect was not so
marked, partly on account of the number of
Mohammedans who are known to be favour-
ble to the Congress; and though the gross
ver-representation of Mohammedans on the
Bombay Councils, particularly the Bombay
ection of the Viceroy's Executive Council,
has irritated the Constitutionalists, they are
vaiting patiently in the belief that the
njustice and absurdity of the present ar-
i
286 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
rangement are so palpable that changes
must take place. In Bengal the blow to
Constitutionalism has been more staggering.
The Constitutionalists are there beset by an
active and enthusiastic left wing which has
ceased to put trust in piecemeal reforms
and which desires that a policy of general
boycott should be adopted. This left wing
has the support and sympathy of many able
men, and, if properly led, would influence
far more than it has the Nationalist move-
ment in Bengal. When the Councils Bill
was published and the favours shown to
the Mohammedans declared, the left wing's
comment was: "We told you so. Your
Congress method has broken down. You
do not get what you wanted, and the Moham
medans, who can cultivate the weaknesses
and the prejudices of Government bette:
than you can, have been armed to mak
abortive what little victory you have gained
Have done with the whole thing." The
Moderates found it difficult to reply to thi
attack. But they said: "Wait till th
whole scheme is published. We must se
the Rules and Regulations before passing
final judgment on the scheme." When th
Rules and Regulations were published the
made things worse by disclosing in deta
the superior position of the Mohammedan
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 287
and by adding to that certain disqualifica-
tions for the Hindus. Meanwhile the left
wing was in great glee. The futility of the
Congress appeared to be written in flaring
letters across the whole scheme.
“Our
sympathisers in Bengal have been increased
by thousands," said a left-wing leader to
me the day after The Gazette containing the
Rules was published.
This was the position in the early days.
Hindu and Mohammedan were estranged
more than they had been for many years,
constitutional reform received a staggering
blow, Hindus went about saying that it
was no good trying further to co-operate
with Mohammedans for national purposes,
and Mohammedans were making no secret
of their delight and of their determination
to continue the policy which had yielded
them so much. In Hindu eyes, the Moham-
medans had sold their Indian birthright for
a smile from the Government.
And yet I am convinced that this mischief
is nothing but a passing disturbance. The
method of election must be altered. It
is too absurd to stand the criticism of
common sense. The Mohammedans should
be secured representation proportionate to
their numbers. India provides those unfor-
tunate conditions which make proportional
288 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
representation a desirable expedient, and a
carefully devised scheme of proportional
representation will give the Mohammedans
that protection to which they are entitled.
Some of the far-seeing members of the Mo-
hammedan community are already beginning
to feel that they have made a mistake.
Several spoke to me with bitterness about
the way that certain of their leaders had
consented to play a game planned for them
by Anglo-Indian officials, whilst in the
minds of others who were still in favour of
what had been done a knowledge was
dawning that there were dangers ahead and
that they might have been better protected
if they had not asked for so much. Few
of them could be induced to defend the
privileges given to Mohammedans in Eastern
Bengal and the Punjab where they are
actually in a majority, whilst the Aligarh
school was exceedingly displeased with the
mixed electorates and the enfranchisement
of uneducated Mohammedans. A change
in the direction of fairer play all round is
inevitable, and if our officials were wise
they would hasten it.
Further, the time of greatest friction is
whilst the Councils are being elected and
people are feeling the unfairness of the
system. So soon as the Councils start
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 289
work, the method of election will slip into
the background and the action of members
alone will be considered. Now, I have been
unable to discover any point in immediately
practical affairs in which there is any
difference between Hindu and Mohammedan.
Both will scrutinise Government finance
from the same point of view; both will
complain of the burden of taxation; both
will oppose certain army charges being put
upon the Indian Exchequer; both will be
divided in the same way over land legisla-
tion; both will unite in protesting against
the treatment of Indians in the Transvaal;
both will support an increase in the number
of Indians employed in the Civil Service;
both will vote for the removal of the Excise
duty on cotton, and both, if they have a
chance, will declare for protection for Indian
products; both will favour the separation of
judicial and executive functions; both will
urge that more should be done to educate
the young; both will oppose official domin-
ance in municipal government; both will
support an Indian volunteer movement,
and both will protest against the insolence
of official manners. The Mohammedan may
or may not continue to oppose Swaraj,
Home Rule, self-government, on the literary
ground that no one has defined its exact
19
290 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
meaning by classifying what powers of
legislation and administration belong to
Swaraj and what can be exercised by a
subordinate authority; but that will be
found to be of little practical importance.
So also will be the opposition which the
Mohammedan may offer to some of the
more recent Bengal activities like boycott.
But they will not disagree about Swadeshi,
the voluntary patronage of the products of
home industries in preference to those of
foreign countries, including Great Britain.
The Nationalists will be able to make the
pace on the Councils. They can put sub-
jects on the Order Paper and force divisions,
and in the vast majority of instances the
Mohammedans, representing the opinion of
educated sections of their community, can-
not oppose. For the educated Mohamme-
dan community drifts towards the Congress
as it inevitably must, and the representatives
cannot pull against the stream.
I therefore do not believe that the
estrangement which I saw is to be per-
manent. Everywhere, except in the Punjab
perhaps, it was tending to disappear even
whilst I looked on.¹ 1
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
¹ I do not desire to minimise the gravity of the dis-
tinction which separates Mohammedan from Hindu, but,
on the other hand, it must not be exaggerated. Many
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 291
did not merely give advice but penetrated
into the heart of things when he said in
1884: "Remember the words Hindu and
Mussulman are only meant for religious
distinction.
In the word nation' I
therefore include both Hindus and Moham-
medans." In the Native States the religions
are not a basis for political division. A
Mohammedan is Chief Justice in Gwalior,
the premier of Hyderabad is a Hindu.
And when these differences have disappeared
in British India the union which will follow
will be closer than if there had been no
initial soreness. The Mohammedans will
have experienced the uselessness of privi-

Mohammedans are still Hindus in spirit. They have
been converted often for other than religious reasons.
There is a couplet one meets with in the Punjab which
runs :
Last year
I was a weaver, this year I am a Sheikh,
Next year, if grain is dear, I shall be a Syed.
The weaver is a low-class Hindu. He is converted to
Mohammedanism to gain social recognition. If he gets
good prices for his corn next year he will be rich and
will assume the title given to descendants of the Prophet.
A story is told of an officer who entered a village in the
Delhi district, and found the Mohammedan headman
putting a coat of oil on an idol whilst a Brahmin sat by
eciting texts. They explained that a Mullah had just
one through and had seen the idol. He was furious
nd ordered it to be buried. It had been dug up after
is departure, and was being propitiated by being rubbed
ith oil.
292 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
leges for which their hearts might have
hankered for long; the Hindu is always
willing to stand on the Nationalist plat-
form with the Mohammedan, and will forget
quite readily his present soreness. If it be
true that the difficulty has been deliberately
created by a few scheming Anglo-Indians,
they have sadly miscalculated the effect
of their projects.¹
I see the real difficulties of Nationalism
in quite other directions. The Indian lacks
discipline, steady perseverance and courage
to oppose the ruling race in his Councils.
He is not endowed with the faculty of co-
hesion. Too many of his titled leaders are
1 "I challenge the Moslem League to produce a single
instance from the records of well-known municipalities
in those Provinces in which Hindus in a body have voted
against Mohammedan interests, one instance in which
the Hindus have combined against Mohammedan members
of a Board, one in which European and Mohammedan
members have had to vote against the Hindu majority. . . .
Only two years ago a Mohammedan candidate made a
serious effort to enter the Council at the election held by
the first group of District Boards. He was successful in
securing ten votes against the Hindu candidate, and the
election ended in a tie. Of the ten who voted in favour
of the Mohammedan candidate, against his Hindu rival,
four were Hindus. On three occasions these Provinces
returned a Mohammedan member to the Imperial Council
though the majority of voters consisted of Hindus.".
Presidential Address to Third United Provinces Conference,
by Ganga Prasad Varma.
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 293
worthless characters. Personal feelings
move him greatly. He splits up his or-
ganisation. He is easily deluded by any one
who tells a tale. His press is the most
plausible in the world, and perhaps the
most inaccurate-although recent develop-
ments in our own run the Indian vernacular
press very hard. All this makes for weak-
ness in the Nationalist movement and
retards its effective organisation. It may
also mean that the new Councils will never
be of any use. This is the result of genera-
tions of ancestors deprived of all responsi-
bility for the ordering of their own lives.
But again, new men are arising, and this
difficulty too will disappear.
A still more formidable one is the Anglo-
Indian community. The Service cannot be
expected to welcome the Nationalist spirit,
though a section, not at all mean in numbers
and still less mean in ability, readily admits
that Indian Nationalism must grow in in-
fluence. But the Service as a whole is
opposed. It has even gone the length of
condemning as seditious the most innocent
phraseology of Nationalism, of asking the
judiciary to ban the singing of "Bande
Mataram," and to treat as dangerous political
characters those who criticise its actions.
It has sought to widen the scope of sedition
[
:
294 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
until it should include everything that was
not flattery. Above all, it has resorted
to the tyrannical method of deportation
without trial, and without even stating
to the accused what his fault is. In no
single instance has a really dangerous person
been deported. The Government has had
to confess that it made a mistake regarding
Lajpat Rai, and if the Simla gentlemen
were to publish to the world the evidence
upon which they sent away from their
homes and put under lock and key the
nine reputable gentlemen who are at present¹
victims of official panic, they would reveal
a farce which would justify the dismissal
of every one who played a serious part in
it. One man I know was deported because
he was treasurer of a fund collected for
the defence of his nephew, whose trial
ended in his acquittal. To crown all, the
Service feels grossly insulted that the
judiciary should venture to apply ordinary
rules of evidence in State trials and acquit
persons accused officially. To hear officials
discuss the merits of some of the recent
State trials is a painful revelation of a
condition of mind blind for the time being
to legal justice and individual civil liberty;
to hear them characterise some Indian
1 They have since been released.
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 295
movements like the Arya Somaj with a
lofty indifference to strict fact and evidence,
is an amazing reminder of how completely
nature robs bureaucracies of the political
instinct. Nationalism will have to con-
test every foot of its advance with the
Service.
But here, too, there are modifying in-
fluences at work. The pompous Imperialism
of the Curzon rule no longer coarsens the
official mind; the sympathetic elements
in the Service are being strengthened;
Parliamentary conditions are becoming
prevalent; the High Courts have resisted
official pressure and Anglo-Indian clamour,
and have kept just; the Government has
come very badly out of trials which it
entered upon without careful investigation,
and which it undertook with manufactured
evidence. Indian opinion will have freer
play to develop.
A community which is generally forgotten
in discussions of the Indian question must
not be overlooked here. The commercial
Anglo-Indian community is different from
the Service. It comes in contact with
different sides of Indian life; it has in-
terests which the Service knows nothing
about; it has stakes in the country which
it has to defend. Its opinions are difficult
296 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
to get at. They are indeed mixed. But
the community is conscious that it is in a
minority. It therefore has not the desire
for self-government that our other colonists
have. It is, indeed, not a colony. Its
members do not mean to live and die in
India. They are but trading sojourners
there. If they have happened to be born
there they are looked down upon.
“Indian
families are not those who have lived
there for generations, but those who have
done some service there, who have sent
their children to be brought up in England,
and have returned on their pensions or
their savings to die in one of the Home
Counties. Nationalism means to this com-
mercial community the supremacy of what
is now its subject race. I do not think
that it regards such an event with the
feelings of strong opposition which possess
the Services, but it does not welcome the
change. It prefers to let things drift, and
would be glad if they did not go away very far
from their present position-for one reason,
because it is afraid of the economic policy
of a Native Indian Government. It has its
extreme right wing, however, which supports
newspapers like The Englishman, and is as
bitterly racial in its prejudices as Anglo-
Indians can be.
WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 297
On the whole I therefore regard the
future as belonging to Nationalism. India
will not arise all at once, and if we are
wise the day when it goes so far as to
threaten us with expulsion is so remote
that we need hardly think of it at all. In
this connection, one consideration must
not be forgotten. Whilst the best and
the most ardent minds will speak of India,
political freedom will come first of all
through provincial Home Rule. There is
so much individuality in the Provinces
that India would lose seriously if it were
obliterated. That was another of the many
colossal blunders of Lord Curzon. His mind
ran on centralisation; the genius of India
needs decentralisation for its expression.
The general lines of our government are
good if they were a little freer. Responsible
government in the Provinces, a federation
of the Provinces in an Indian Government
that seems to me to be the way India is
to realise herself-is, in fact, realising her-
self.
A discussion of at what point British
sovereignty in India will end owing to the
evolution of Indian Nationalism and self-
government must not overlook the problem
of the Native State. The importance of
this factor can be seen by a mere statement
298
WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
of the extent of Native rule. Of the area
of India, 680,000 square miles are under
Native government; of the population,
62,500,000 inhabit Native States and
232,000,000 British India. But even these
figures give an inadequate impression. The
ruler of the Native State is becoming more
and more enlightened. He has probably
been educated in England, and in any
event he has been taught in one or other
of the Chiefs' colleges, like the Mayo College
at Ajmere, where he has been instructed
in English literature, political economy,
the principles of government, and similar
subjects. He comes to his Government,
as a rule, with high notions of his responsi-
bility and a determination to master every
detail of his work. Such reports as those
published annually by the State of Gwalior,
in which are included criticisms of every
department by the Maharajah himself, are
a revelation of the new spirit of the Indian
rulers, whilst the enlightenment of Baroda
1 I found in an examination paper which the chiefs'
sons attending the Mayo College had to answer, the follow-
ing questions among others: Explain an aeroplane,
suffragette, Free Fooder, the Duma, Paardeberg, Cabinets,
the issues of the Civil War, Factory Acts, Repeal of the
Corn Laws; and amongst the subjects for an essay was
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new."

WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 299
and Mysore dims in some respects the
lustre of our own rule.¹
1 The following extracts from one or two recent Reports
of the State of Gwalior, written by the Maharajah, seem
to be worth reproducing :
From the Report of 1906-7. "I have to note with
regret that the engineer who has been appointed specially
for conducting steam-ploughing operations has shown
himself wanting in zeal, and has failed to give satisfaction
with his work, and the Durbar will now have to make
other arrangements for working out the scheme."
"I hope the member in charge will advise ways and
means in the ensuing year for bringing up the management
to the desired standard of efficiency."
"The Board will deal with this point in their next
year's report, and satisfy me that this is not the case.”
"The work done during the year was satisfactory,
but the tour made by the officer in charge of this depart-
ment was not sufficient."
"The Department has been well managed during the
year, but I think that the superintendent ought to have
completed his tour after his recovery from illness, particu-
larly as there was no specified season for his touring."
"The report is anything but full and satisfactory, and
the record of the year's work is meagre. The work of
demarcation has not been carried out to my satisfaction."
t
"I therefore desire all officers to take warning from
my present comment that the care bestowed on accounts
in most Departments is not to my satisfaction."
66
Considering the nature of the Accountant-General's
engagements during the certain so-called touring days,
I cannot allow those to be reckoned as tour."
"I regret to find that the Steam Laundry is still a
languishing concern, and I hope that the member in
charge will make every effort to bring it up to a flourishing
state."
66
The Mining engineer's work has so far been barren of

300 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
Apart from the growing enlightenment of
the rulers, their pride has never diminished
since they led their armies into the field and
played with high political stakes in battle.
They would not join as subordinates in a
Native Indian Government, and none of
themselves is sufficiently ahead of all the
others, either in religious or in political
prestige, to become an accepted Chief of the
federated States. This condition is likely
to be accentuated rather than smoothed
over. For, in our policy of decentralisa-
tion which we are bound to follow if our
any profitable results, and I think it wants a little more
perseverance and assiduity to discover something work-
able."
I hope that he will see that the accounts of the Depart-
ment are better kept."
te
From the Report for 1907–8. "I also fail to see how
the insufficiency of rainfall should tend to reduce the
number of serviceable tanks. If there is no rain the
tanks would not fill, but the absence of water in the tanks
need not make them unfit to hold water."
.
In the end I am constrained to say that the praise
which I had bestowed upon the Police last year has not
apparently served as an incentive to better work, and
that the necessary amount of strictly vigilant supervision
has not been exercised.'
:
This discrepancy in statements and facts is very
regrettable, and I trust its being thus brought on record
will lead to its cessation in the future. I much regret tha
the progress claimed and affirmed should not be real, but
also rely on its being made so before next year's report is
written and reviewed,"

WHAT IS TO BE THE END? 301
وو
government is not to break down helplessly
on its human side, we shall give more
prestige to the rulers of Native States. For
instance, the utility of the subsidised minor
chief with jurisdiction within his "parish
has passed away. When that policy was
begun early last century nobody and no-
thing were secure. Our footing was pre-
carious, and no rulers were established in
their governments. Those who were, were
fighting us. We therefore approached chiefs
owing allegiance to superior rulers, and
came to a bargain with them that in return
for a subsidy from us they should keep
their people quiet. The policy thus begun
has continued to this day. These petty
governments with which we keep in direct
relations and which we administer in the
event of minorities, should undoubtedly be
merged in the Native State to which they
belong.
Thus for many a long year British
sovereignty will be necessary for India, for
the warring elements in Indian life need
a unifying and controlling power. Britain
is the nurse of India. Deserted by her
guardian, India would be the prey of dis-
ruptive elements within herself as well as
the victim of her own too enthusiastic
worshippers, to say nothing of what would
302 WHAT IS TO BE THE END?
happen to her from incursions from the
outside. Coerced by her guardian, she will
be an endless irritation and worry.、 Con-
sulted by her guardian, and given wide
liberty to govern herself in all her internal
affairs, she may present many difficulties
and create many fears, but that is the only
way to abiding peace and to the fulfilment
of our work in India.
VIII
LAST THOUGHTS
1 SPENT part of my last day in Calcutta in
the laboratory of Professor J. C. Bose at the
Presidency College. I had heard him once in
England deliver a weird lecture on the poison-
ing of metals, and I had not forgotten the
impressive ending of his discourse when he
recalled the ancient science of his people,
and left us with expectations that the
breath of awakening might even then be
blowing across the subtle intelligence of
India and be giving birth to a new epoch
of scientific discovery.
In Calcutta, that day, he took up the
parable he left unfinished at the Royal
Institution in Albemarle Street. By various
strange devices he showed us how plants
indicated that they felt blows inflicted upon
them, how they shrank, how they shuddered,
and, most mysterious of all, how they died.
A flickering beam of light passed right and
left along a scale as the stems and leaves

303
304
LAST THOUGHTS
we were torturing protested against our
cruelties, until the point was reached when
no more response came. At that point
a shudder passed through the fibres of the
plant, just as the muscles of a human being
contract in convulsive movement when his
last breath passes his lips. All was then
still. The organism was beginning to decay
into its elements. Death had come.
Looking upon these experiments I felt
as though I were in the sanctuary of a
magician rather than in the laboratory of
a chemist.
The night before I had had an interview
with one of India's troublesome editors.
I sought him in the native part of the city
amongst those torrents of beings which
bewilder and dumfounder the European. I
found him in a place that might have been
an Italian palace. There was
There was an ample
courtyard, carved screens and balustrades,
shady stairs. But decay spoke from every
stone. As I entered, the red gleams of the
setting sun struck its top and threw its bases
into dark shadow. I seemed to have made
tryst there with the night.

66
Here," said he whom I had come to
see, ushering me into a wide room bare of
furniture saving for a table and a chair or
two, "Here we worship. Let us talk of
LAST THOUGHTS
305
!
the things of the spirit"; and he embarked
upon an extraordinary account of the wor-
ship of Shri Krishna, of whom his family
were devotees. His brother had ceased to
trouble about the things of life, and this
one too longed for the time when he could
lay down his pen, hand the paper over to
another, and retire to be alone with his
own being. He often took me by the hand
as a father does a child and patted me as he
told me of the tribulations which beset a
man's feet through life, and of the sorrow
that waited upon men. As I now write
I can hardly resist the belief that in some
way he saw the shadow that was then
hanging over me. There were tears in his
eyes as he spoke of India. Sitting thus
at the long table, darkness fell upon us.
Yellowish red patches appeared on the walls
from the lights outside, and strains of music
came in at the windows.
We went out together. It was the evening
of a Matripuja. The Mother Goddess had
been dwelling in the midst of the people for
some days, and this night, with music and
procession, she was to be taken down to the
Ganges. Lights were in every house. Band
after band passed us. The goddess herself
riding on her lion carried aloft and adorned
in all kinds of tinsel and colour, under all
20
306
LAST THOUGHTS
kinds of canopies, was to be seen every-
where on her way to the sacred river. Men
made merry; the hearts of women were
sad, for the goddess is a welcome guest
with them. The torches flared, the bands
of music shrieked, the crowds shouted and
bustled-and over all shone the Mother,
the Giver of Life, in her gaudy paints and
draperies. In India to-day it is always
the Mother," and it was her festival that
bade us farewell in Bengal.
66
When one thinks over all these extra-
ordinary impressions of things new, weird,
and mysterious, he seems to be drawn below
the superficial differences seen at the silver-
smiths' corner in the bazaar of Bombay.
These differences are but the light split
up into fragments, iridescent, many-
coloured, glancing on the surface of things.
Beneath there is unity-a blending of
differences in a co-ordinating idea. Even
the Mohammedan who lives away from the
borders becomes enchanted with India and
assimilates something of the spirit of the
Vedas. The great Mosque at Ajmere, open
as it is to the foot of Moslem and Hindu
alike, symbolises the real mind of India. So
too at Rampal, the ancient capital of
Eastern Bengal, one sees Hindu images in
the verandah of the mosque, and in similar
LAST THOUGHTS
307
places of worship throughout the country
the "common altar" is not unusual. The
outcast who lives and dies in the outermost
courts of the temple, and who is banished
from the presence of the twice-born, hankers
after admission into the holies where India
dwells. The Mother they all worship is
India-the India which stretches from the
Himalayas to the southernmost part of
Ceylon. That is the India of their religion,
the India within whose borders are the
sacred shrines scattered far apart, north,
east, south, and west, but all sacred to all
the people. Every Indian holds the Hima-
layas in religious reverence. The crowd
on the banks of the Ganges at Benares
represents every phase and race of Hindu
life. "Hail, O ye Ganges, Jamna, Godavari,
Sarasvati, Narbada, Sindhu, and Kavari
-come and approach these waters!" is the
prayer of the Northern Hindu who perhaps
will never see one of those sacred rivers,
but to whom the land to which they belong
is a sacred personality. The Buddhist in
Ceylon breathes precisely the same prayer,
because he too grasps the same sense of
national unity. And the modern revivals
of religion with their queer blending of
East and West-of rationalism and super-
stition-have by their worship of the Mother
308
LAST THOUGHTS
greatly reinforced the part which India as
the embodiment of the Hindu's faith is to
play in politics. The land embodies his
religion, as the image of his god embodies the
cult of his worship. Only when the Indian
civilisation has passed away, and when
Hinduism has become a religion that has
been but is no more, will the superficial
differences of language and creed which
the politician places so much reliance upon
to-day be of fundamental and real import-
ance. The life below is that of a united
India-a religious as well as a geographical
unity-and that life will continue to strive
for political expression. India is a vision
of the Hindu faithful as heaven is a vision
of the Christian saint.
India is a place of enchantment. It
baffles you it enthrals you. It is like a
lover who plays with your affections. There
is something hidden in its heart which you
will never know. It is maddening in its
imperturbability, in its insistency. You
feel insignificant before it, just as a decently
minded prize-fighter would feel insignificant
before a saint. The difference which sepa-
rates you from it cannot be bridged. This
is characteristic of everything Indian. India
centred in the universal is pantheistic and
LAST THOUGHTS
309
!
communist; the West centred in the par-
ticular is theistic and individualist. The
difference is, therefore, in the essential
nature of things. Thus, your attempts to
understand, thwarted, laughed at, denied
every time, become maddening. India
eludes you to the last.
It
I came away full of presentiments such
as possess one to whom a glimpse of some
great coming event has been given. That last
day in Calcutta continues to haunt me.
was a peep behind the veil. As I drove
back through the crowds to my place I saw
the pageantry of India, its gilded past, its
patient peasant toiling till the sun goes
down, its newly educated sons, subtle, re-
sentful, proud, cherishing memories and
hopes in their hearts. The smoke clouds of
Bombay, the bustle of Calcutta, the ruined
cities of the Ganges plains, the crowded
temples and ghats of Benares, passed through
my mind. Simla with its vanities both of
force and frivolity, the good men of my
own people who strive to do righteously,
the mistaken men who walk in the darkness
which will never lift from their honest minds,
came up too. And it seemed to me as though
the procession of the old, of India herself,
were to last through the ages, whilst our
dominion was to pass as the shuttle through

310
LAST THOUGHTS
the warp, as a lightning flash from cloud to
earth. How awe-inspiring this land and
its people are! how temporary appear our
dwelling-places in it! even our best deeds,
are they of the stuff that abides? Our
good government-a revolution could bury
it in its own dusty ruins. Our material
gains a spiritual revival could shrivel them
up as the sun parches the grass on the plains.
Are the pursuits we have taught India to
follow anything but alluring shadows? Is
the wealth we are telling her to seek to be
anything but dust and ashes? Is the in-
dustrial India I saw arising, begrimed and
strenuous, to last and to overshadow the
India one sees at
sees at the bathing ghats of
Benares or feels in the Oriental library at
Bankipur? The long years alone can disclose
these secrets. The riddle is troublesome.
But one thing is sure as surety itself. We
talk of the Bengali with a sneer. We are
amused at his Babus and "Failed B.A.'s,"
and we are repelled by some of his char-
acteristics. We persuade ourselves that
the only way to deal with the coolie is to
cuff him occasionally, and that by elbowing
our way through we are impressing him
with our prestige and he will accept his
subordination. We can make absurd dis-
tinctions between India's educated and un-

LAST THOUGHTS
311
- . * * *
60
2.5
educated classes, and imagine that to protect
the one we must offend the other
other-as
though they were not both of India. It is
all a vague delusion. The impulses of
Indian life will go on. They will show
themselves in Science, in Art, in Literature,
in Politics-in Agitation. We can welcome
them, or we can try to retard them and
grudge them every triumph. If we are
wise, we shall do the former. We can then
help India and win her gratitude and her
friendship. When she is rich, as she will be,
she will remember the friend of her poverty.
When she is honoured for her own sake, as
she will be, she will remember the patron
of her obscurity. But we cannot keep her
back. Her Destiny is fixed above our will,
and we had better recognise it and bow to
the Inevitable.
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Vincy, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
.2909

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APR 11 1935
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