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Valentine Chirol - Indian Unrest

V >> Valentine Chirol >> Indian Unrest



INDIAN UNREST

By

VALENTINE CHIROL


A Reprint, revised and enlarged, from "The Times,"
with an introduction by Sir Alfred Lyall


_We have now, as it were, before
us, in that vast congeries of peoples
we call India, a long, slow march
in uneven stages through all the
centuries from the fifth to the twentieth._

--VISCOUNT MORLEY.



MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1910

DEDICATED BY PERMISSION

TO

VISCOUNT MORLEY

AS A TRIBUTE
OF PRIVATE FRIENDSHIP AND
PUBLIC RESPECT

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

INTRODUCTION. BY SIR ALFRED C. LYALL VII

I. A GENERAL SURVEY 1

II. SWARAJ ON THE PLATFORM AND IN THE PRESS 8

III. A HINDU REVIVAL 24

IV. BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION IN THE DECCAN 37

V. POONA AND KOLHAPUR 64

VI. BENGAL BEFORE THE PARTITION 72

VII. THE STORM IN BENGAL 81

VIII. THE PUNJAB AND THE ARYA SAMAJ 106

IX. THE POSITION OF THE MAHOMEDANS 118

X. SOUTHERN INDIA 136

XI. REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATIONS OUTSIDE INDIA 145

XII. THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS 154

XIII. CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS 162

XIV. THE DEPRESSED CASTES 176

XV. THE NATIVE STATES 185

XVI. CROSS CURRENTS 198

XVII. THE GROWTH OF WESTERN EDUCATION 207

XVIII. THE INDIAN STUDENT 216

XIX. SOME MEASURES OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM 229

XX. THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 238

XXI. PRIMARY EDUCATION 246

XXII. SWADESHI AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS 254

XXIII. THE FINANCIAL AND FISCAL RELATIONS
BETWEEN INDIA AND GREAT BRITAIN 271

XXIV. THE POSITION OF INDIANS IN THE EMPIRE 280

XXV. SOCIAL AND OFFICIAL RELATIONS 288

XXVI. THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA 306

XXVII. CONCLUSIONS 319

NOTES 335

INDEX 361

_The numerals above the line in the body of the book refer to notes at
the end of the volume._




INTRODUCTION.

BY SIR ALFRED C. LYALL.


The volume into which Mr. Valentine Chirol has collected and republished
his valuable series of articles in _The Times_ upon Indian unrest is an
important and very instructive contribution to the study of what is
probably the most arduous problem in the politics of our far-reaching
Empire. His comprehensive survey of the whole situation, the arrangement
of evidence and array of facts, are not unlike what might have been
found in the Report of a Commission appointed to investigate the causes
and the state of affairs to which the troubles that have arisen in India
may be ascribed.

At different times in the world's history the nations foremost in
civilization have undertaken the enterprise of founding a great European
dominion in Asia, and have accomplished it with signal success. The
Macedonian Greeks led the way; they were followed by the Romans; and in
both instances their military superiority and organizing genius enabled
them to subdue and govern for centuries vast populations in Western
Asia. European science and literature flourished in the great cities of
the East, where the educated classes willingly accepted and supported
foreign rulership as their barrier against a relapse into barbarism; nor
have we reason for believing that it excited unusual discontent or
disaffection among the Asiatic peoples. But the Greek and Roman Empires
in Asia have disappeared long ago, leaving very little beyond scattered
ruins; and in modern times it is the British dominion in India that has
revived and is pursuing the enterprise of ruling and civilizing a great
Asiatic population, of developing the political intelligence and
transforming the ideas of an antique and, in some respects, a primitive
society.

That the task must be one of prodigious difficulty, not always free from
danger, has been long known to those who watched the experiment with
some accurate foresight of the conditions attending it. Yet the recent
symptoms of virulent disease in some parts of the body politic, though
confined to certain provinces of India, have taken the British nation by
surprise. Mr. Chirol's book has now exhibited the present state and
prospect of the adventure; he has examined the causes and the
consequences of the prevailing unrest; he has collected ample evidence,
and he has consulted all the best authorities, Indian and European, on
the subject. His masterly analysis of all this material shows wide
acquaintance with the facts, and rare insight into the character and
motives, the aims and methods, of those who are engaged in stirring up
the spirit of revolt against the British Government. He has pointed to
instances where the best intentions of the administrators have led them
wrong; his whole narrative illustrates the perils that beset a
Government necessarily pledged to moral and material reform, which finds
its own principles perverted against its efforts, and its foremost
opponents among the class that has been the first to profit by the
benefits which that Government has conferred upon them.

The nineteenth century had been pre-eminently an era of the development
of rapid and easy communication between distant parts of the world,
particularly between Europe and Asia. So long as these two continents
remained far apart the condition of Asia was unchanged and stationary;
if there was any change it had been latterly retrogressive, for in
India at any rate the eighteenth century was a period of abnormal and
extensive political confusion. In Europe, on the other hand, national
wealth, scientific discoveries, the arts of war and peace, had made
extraordinary progress. Population had increased and multiplied; and
partly by territorial conquests, partly by pacific penetration, the
Western nations overflowed politically into Asia during the nineteenth
century. They brought with them larger knowledge, novel ideas and
manners, which have opened the Asiatic mind to new influences and
aspirations, to the sense of needs and grievances not previously felt or
even imagined. The effect, as can now be clearly perceived, has been to
produce an abrupt transition from old to new ways, from the antique
order of society towards fresh models; and to this may be ascribed the
general unsettlement, the uneasy stir, that pervade Asia at the present
moment. Its equilibrium has been disturbed by the high speed at which
Europe has been pushing eastward; and the principal points of contact
and penetration are in India.

Moreover, towards the latter end of the nineteenth century and in the
first years of the present century came events which materially altered
the attitude of Asiatic nations towards European predominance. The
defeat of the Italians by the Abyssinians in 1896 may indeed be noted as
the first decisive victory gained by troops that may be reckoned
Oriental over a European army in the open field, for at least three
centuries. The Japanese war, in which Russia lost battles not only by
land, but also at sea, was even a more significant and striking warning
that the era of facile victories in Asia had ended; since never before
in all history had an Asiatic navy won a great sea-fight against
European fleets. That the unquiet spirit, which from these general
causes has been spreading over the Eastern Continent, should be
particularly manifest in countries under European Governments is not
unnatural; it inevitably roused the latent dislike of foreign rule,
with which a whole people is never entirely content. Precisely similar
symptoms are to be observed in the Asiatic possessions of France, and in
Egypt; nor is Algeria yet altogether reconciled to the _regime_ of its
conquerors.

That in India the British Government has found the centres of active
disaffection located in the Maratha country and in Lower Bengal, is a
phenomenon which can be to a large extent accounted for by reference to
Anglo-Indian history. The fact that Poona is one focus of sedition has
been attributed in this volume to the survival among the Maratha
Brahmins of the recollection that "far into the eighteenth century Poona
was the capital of a theocratic State in which behind the Throne of the
Peshwas both spiritual and secular authority were concentrated in the
hands of the Brahmins." The Peshwas, as their title implies, had been
hereditary Ministers who governed in the name of the reigning dynasty
founded by the famous Maratha leader Sivajee, whose successors they set
aside. But before the end of the eighteenth century the secular
authority of the Peshwas had become almost nominal, and the real power
in the State had passed into the grasp of a confederation of chiefs of
predatory armies, whose violence drove the last Peshwa, more than a
century ago, to seek refuge in a British camp. The political sovereignty
of the Brahmins had disappeared from the time when he placed himself
under British protection; and the Maratha chiefs (who were not Brahmins)
only acknowledged our supremacy after some fiercely contested battles;
with the result that they were confined to and confirmed in the
possession of the territories now governed by their descendants. But it
is quite true that to the memory of a time when for once, and once only,
in Indian history, their caste established a great secular dominion, may
be ascribed the tendency to disloyalty among the Maratha Brahmins.

The case of Bengal is very different. Poona and Calcutta are separated
geographically almost by the whole breadth of India between two seas;
yet the historical antecedents of the Bengalees and Marathas are even
further apart. The Marathas were the leaders of revolt against the
Moghal Empire; they were formidable opponents to the rise of the British
power; their chiefs fought hard before yielding to British authority. On
the other hand, Lower Bengal belonged to a province that had fallen away
from the Moghal Empire, and which was transferred from its Mahomedan
Governor to a British General by the result of a single battle at
Plassey. The Bengalees took no part in the contest, and they had very
good reason for willing acquiescence in the change of masters.

In a comparison, therefore, of the Marathas with the people of Bengal,
we have a remarkable instance of the production of similar effects from
causes very distinct and dissimilar. In the former case their present
unrest may be traced, in a large degree, to the memories of early
rulership and to warlike traditions. In the latter case there can be no
such recollections, military or political, for the country has had no
experience whatever of a state of war, since Lower Bengal is perhaps the
only considerable province of India which has enjoyed profound peace
during nearly 150 years. It is no paradox to suggest that this prolonged
tranquillity has had some share in stimulating the audacity of Bengalee
unrest, for the literary classes seem to have no clear notion that the
real game of revolutionary politics is necessarily rough and
dangerous--certain, moreover, to fail whenever the British Government
shall have resolved that it is being carried too far, and must end.

But it is beyond question that the promoters of disaffection on both
sides of India have been making strenuous exertions to enlist in the
movement the influence of Brahminism; and upon this point the book
rightly lays particular stress.

The position and privileges of the Brahmins are rightly compared to
those of the Levites; they are the depositories of orthodox tradition;
they preside over and hold (not exclusively) a monopoly for the
performance of the sacred rites and offices; and ritual in Hinduism, as
in most of the ancient religions, is the essential element; it is
closely connected with the rules of caste, which unite and divide
innumerable groups within the pale of Hinduism. And in India the
peculiar institution of caste, the strict regulation of social
intercourse, particularly in regard to inter-marriage and the sharing of
food, prevails to an extent quite unknown elsewhere in the world. The
divisions of caste have always operated to weaken the body politic in
India, and thus to facilitate foreign conquest; but, on the other hand,
they have opposed a stiff barrier to the invasion of foreign religions,
to the fusion of alien races with the Hindu people, and to any success
in what may be called national unification.

One can easily understand the formidable power invested by this system
in the Brahmins, and the enormous obstacles that it might raise against
the introduction of Western ideas, manners, and education. Nevertheless
we all know, and we have seen it with real satisfaction, that the
Brahmins, very much to the credit of their intelligence and sagacity,
have been forward in accepting the new learning, the expansion of
general knowledge, offered to them by English schools and Universities;
they have acquired our language, they have studied our sciences; they
are prominent in the professions of law and medicine, which the English
have created; they enter our civil services, they even serve in the
Indian Army. Yet their readiness to adopt secular culture does not seem
to have abated their religious authority, or to have sensibly weakened
their influence over the people at large. And indeed the fact that the
Brahmins, with others of the educated classes, should have been able,
for their own purposes, to appeal simultaneously to the darkest
superstitions of Hinduism and to extreme ideas of Western democracy--to
disregard caste rules personally and to stir up caste prejudices among
the masses--will not greatly surprise those who have observed the
extraordinary elasticity of practical Hinduism, the fictions and
anomalies which can be invented or tolerated at need. But the beliefs
and practices of popular Hinduism are obviously irreconcilable with the
principles of modern civilization; and the various indications of a
desire to reform and purify their ancient religion may be partly due to
the perception among educated Hindus that so contradictory a position is
ultimately untenable, that the incongruity between sacrifices to the
goddess Kali and high University degrees is too manifest.

The course and consequences of the measures taken by the British
Government to promote Western education in India has been attentively
studied by the author of this volume. It is a story of grave political
miscalculation, containing a lesson that has its significance for other
nations which have undertaken a similar enterprise. Ignorance is
unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural that in the
last century certain philosophers should have assumed education to be
the certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen like Macaulay
should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for
political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case it was the clear
and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the
intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of British
rule. We have since discovered, by experience, that, although education
is a sovereign remedy for many ills--is indeed indispensable to healthy
progress--yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this
potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the frame of
an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains,
stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the
disappointment is bitterly resented. That these effects are well known
even in Europe may be read in a remarkable French novel published not
long ago, "Les Deracines," which, describes the road to ruin taken by
poor collegians who had been uprooted from the soil of their humble
village. And in Asia the disease is necessarily much more virulent,
because the transition has been more sudden, and the contrast between
old ideas of life and new aspirations is far sharper. From the report of
an able French official upon the Indo-Chinese Colonies we may learn that
the existing system of educating the natives has proved to be
mischievous, needing radical reform. Of the Levantine youths in the
Syrian towns, the product of European schools, a French traveller writes
(1909), "C'est une tourbe de declasses"; while in China some leaders of
agitation for democratic changes in the oldest of all Empires are said
to be those who have qualified by competitive examination for public
employ, and have failed to obtain it. In every country the crowd of
expectants far outnumbers the places available. If, indeed, the
Government which introduced Western education into Bengal had been
native instead of foreign, it would have found itself entangled in
difficulties no less grave than those which now confront the British
rulers; and there can be little doubt that it would probably have broken
down under them.

The phases through which the State's educational policy in India have
passed during the last fifty years are explained at length in this
volume. The Government was misled in the wrong direction by the reports
of two Commissions between 1880 and 1890, whose mistakes were discerned
at the time by those who had some tincture of political prudence. The
problem is now to reconstruct on a better plan, to try different lines
of advance. But some of us have heard of an enterprising pioneer in a
difficult country, who confidently urged travellers to take a new route
by assuring them that it avoided the hills on the old road. Whether the
hills were equally steep on his other road he did not say. And in the
present instance it may not be easy to strike out a fresh path which may
be clear from the complications that have been suffered to grow up
round our system of Indian education; while no one proposes to turn
back. The truth is that in India the English have been throughout
obliged to lay out their own roads, and to feel their way, without any
precedents to guide them. No other Government, European or Asiatic, has
yet essayed to administer a great Oriental population, alien in race and
religion, by institutions of a representative type, reckoning upon free
discussion and an unrestricted Press for reasonable consideration of its
measures and fair play, relying upon secular education and absolute
religious neutrality to control the unruly affections of sinful men. It
is now seen that our Western ideas and inventions, moral and material,
are being turned against us by some of those to whom we have imparted an
elementary aptitude for using them. And thus we have the strange
spectacle, in certain parts of India, of a party capable of resorting to
methods that are both reactionary and revolutionary, of men who offer
prayers and sacrifices to ferocious divinities and denounce the
Government by seditious journalism, preaching primitive superstition in
the very modern form of leading articles. The mixture of religion with
politics has always produced a highly explosive compound, especially in
Asia.

These agitations are in fact the symptoms of what are said by
Shakespeare to be the "cankers of a calm world"; they are the natural
outcome of artificial culture in an educational hothouse, among classes
who have had for generations no real training in rough or hazardous
politics. The outline of the present situation in India is that we have
been disseminating ideas of abstract political right, and the germs of
representative institutions, among a people that had for centuries been
governed autocratically, and in a country where local liberties and
habits of self-government had been long obliterated or had never
existed. At the same time we have been spreading modern education
broadcast throughout the land, where, before English rule, learning had
not advanced beyond the stage of Europe in the middle ages. These may
be taken to be the primary causes of the existing Unrest; and meanwhile
the administrative machine has been so efficiently organized, it has
run, hitherto, so easily and quietly, as to disguise from inexperienced
bystanders the long discipline and training in affairs of State that are
required for its management. Nor is it clearly perceived that the real
driving power lies in the forces held in reserve by the British nation
and in the respect which British guardianship everywhere commands. That
Indians should be liberally invited to share the responsibilities of
high office is now a recognized principle of public policy. But the
process of initiation must be gradual and tentative; and vague notions
of dissolving the British connexion only prove incompetence to realize
the whole situation, external and internal, of the country. Across the
frontiers of India are warlike nations, who are intent upon arming
themselves after the latest modern pattern, though for the other
benefits of Western science and learning they show, as yet, very little
taste or inclination. They would certainly be a serious menace to a weak
Government in the Indian plains, while their sympathy with a literary
class would be uncommonly slight. Against intruders of this sort the
British hold securely the gates of India; and it must be clear that the
civilization and future prosperity of the whole country depend entirely
upon their determination to maintain public tranquillity by strict
enforcement of the laws; combined with their policy of admitting the
highest intellects and capacities to the Councils of the State, and of
assigning reasonable administrative and legislative independence to the
great provinces in accord with the unity of a powerful Empire.

A.C. LYALL




CHAPTER I.

A GENERAL SURVEY.


That there is a lull in the storm of unrest which has lately swept over
India is happily beyond doubt. Does this lull indicate a gradual and
steady return to more normal and peaceful conditions? Or, as in other
cyclonic disturbances in tropical climes, does it merely presage fiercer
outbursts yet to come? Has the blended policy of repression and
concession adopted by Lord Morley and Lord Minto really cowed the forces
of criminal disorder and rallied the representatives of moderate opinion
to the cause of sober and Constitutional progress? Or has it come too
late either permanently to arrest the former or to restore confidence
and courage to the latter?

These are the two questions which the present situation in India most
frequently and obviously suggests, but it may be doubted whether they by
any means cover the whole field of potential developments. They are
based apparently upon the assumption that Indian unrest, even in its
most extreme forms, is merely the expression of certain political
aspirations towards various degrees of emancipation from British
tutelage, ranging from a larger share in the present system of
administration to a complete revolution in the existing relations
between Great Britain and India, and that, the issues thus raised being
essentially political, they can be met by compromise on purely political
lines. This assumption ignores, I fear, certain factors of very great
importance, social, religious, and economic, which profoundly affect, if
they do not altogether overshadow, the political problem. The question
to which I propose to address myself is whether Indian unrest represents
merely, as we are prone to imagine, the human and not unnatural
impatience of subject races fretting under an alien rule which, however
well intentioned, must often be irksome and must sometimes appear to be
harsh and arbitrary; or whether to-day, in its more extreme forms at any
rate, it does not represent an irreconcilable reaction against all that
not only British rule but Western civilization stands for.

I will not stop at present to discuss how far the lamentable
deficiencies of the system of education which we have ourselves
introduced into India have contributed to the Indian unrest. That that
system has been productive of much good few will deny, but few also can
be so blind as to ignore the fact that it tends on the one hand to
create a semi-educated proletariate, unemployed and largely
unemployable, and on the other hand, even where failure is less
complete, to produce dangerous hybrids, more or less superficially
imbued with Western ideas, and at the same time more or less completely
divorced from the realities of Indian life. Many other circumstances
also which have helped the promoters of disaffection I must reserve for
subsequent discussion. Some of them are economic, such as the remarkable
rise in prices during the last decade. This has seriously enhanced the
cost of living in India and has specially affected the very classes
amongst whom disaffection is most widespread. The clerk, the teacher,
the petty Government official, whose exiguous salaries have remained the
same, find themselves to-day relatively, and in many cases actually,
worse off than the artisan or even the labourer, whose wages have in
many cases risen in proportion to the increased cost of living. Plague,
which in the course of the last 14 years has carried off over 6,000,000
people, and two terrible visitations of famine have caused in different
parts of the country untold misery and consequent bitterness. On the
other hand, the growth of commerce and industry and the growing interest
taken by all classes in commercial and industrial questions have led to
a corresponding resentment of the fiscal restraints placed upon India by
the Imperial Government for the selfish benefit, as it is contended, of
the British manufacturer and trader. Much bad blood has undoubtedly been
created by the treatment of British Indians in South Africa and the
attitude adopted in British Colonies generally towards Asiatic
immigrants. The social relations between the two races in India
itself--always a problem of infinite difficulty--have certainly not been
improved by the large influx of a lower class of Europeans which the
development of railways and telegraphs and other industries requiring
technical knowledge have brought in their train. Nor can it be denied
that the growing pressure of office work as well as the increased
facilities of home leave and frequent transfers from one post to another
have inevitably to some extent lessened the contact between the
Anglo-Indian official and the native population. Of more remote
influences which have indirectly reacted upon the Indian mind it may
suffice for the present to mention the South African War, which lowered
the prestige of our arms, and the Russo-Japanese War, which was regarded
as the first blow dealt to the ascendency of Europe over Asia, though it
may be worth noting that in his novel, "The Prince of Destiny," Mr. Surat
Kumar Ghosh lays repeated emphasis on the impression produced in India
some years earlier by the defeat of the Italian forces in Abyssinia.
Each of the above points has its own importance and deserves to be
closely studied, for upon the way in which we shall in the future handle
some of the delicate questions which they raise will largely depend our
failure or our success in coping with Indian unrest--that is, in
preventing its invasion of other classes than those to which it has been
hitherto confined. But the clue to the real spirit which informs Indian
unrest must be sought elsewhere.

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