| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: My mother India
Author: Saund, Dalip Singh
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "My mother India" ***
+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber’s note: |
| |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------+
MY MOTHER INDIA
_by_
DALIP SINGH SAUND, M.A., Ph.D.
[Illustration]
_Published by_
THE PACIFIC COAST KHALSA DIWAN SOCIETY, INC. (SIKH TEMPLE) STOCKTON,
CALIFORNIA.
COPYRIGHT, 1930
BY
DALIP SINGH SAUND
FROM THE PRESS OF
WETZEL PUBLISHING CO., INC.
LOS ANGELES
_Dedicated to
my beloved friend Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind_
PREFACE
This work was undertaken at the request of THE PACIFIC COAST KHALSA
DIWAN SOCIETY, commonly known as the SIKH TEMPLE at Stockton,
California. The original plan was to write a comprehensive reply to
Katherine Mayo’s book MOTHER INDIA, which was changed later to one of
producing a handbook on India for general use by the American public.
In view of the momentous changes of worldwide interest, which have
taken place in India during recent years, the need for such a book was
quite imminent. And it was only fitting that THE PACIFIC COAST KHALSA
DIWAN SOCIETY, in its role as the interpreter of Hindu culture and
civilization to America, should undertake its publication.
Only a few years ago, India, like other countries of the Orient, was a
far Eastern problem. To-day, if rightly judged, it has already become a
near Western issue. Except for the few scholars of oriental history and
literature, who occupied themselves diligently in exploring the hidden
treasures of Hindu civilization, the name of India was an unknown thing
to the rest of the American world. For the average man and woman in
the United States the affairs of that oriental country were too remote
an issue for them to notice. With the advances made by science during
recent times, however, different parts of the world have become so
near together, and their business and cultural relations have grown so
desperately interlaced, that the affairs of one section of the globe
cannot, and should not, remain a matter of comfortable unconcern for
the other. It has been my aim in the preparation of this book to answer
the various questions that commonly arise in the minds of the American
people regarding the cultural and political problems of India. And if I
have succeeded in bringing about a better understanding of India by the
people of America, I consider myself amply repaid.
Wherever feasible I have made free uses of striking passages and
phrases from the writings of several authors. Since these were copied
from my notes gathered during a course of study extending over several
years, it has not always been possible for me to trace the source, for
which I wish to be humbly excused.
I wish to express my sincerest appreciation to my beloved wife for
her untiring assistance in the preparation of the manuscript and the
reading of the proofs. I wish also to thank my friend Mr. Anoop Singh
Dhillon for valuable suggestions.
Los Angeles, California.
March, 1930.
DALIP SINGH SAUND.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WOMAN’S POSITION IN INDIA. IS SHE BOND OR FREE? 9
II. THE HINDU IDEAL OF MARRIAGE 36
III. THE CIVILIZATION AND ETHICS OF INDIA 64
IV. THE CASTE SYSTEM OF INDIA 81
V. GANDHI--THE MAN AND HIS MESSAGE 108
VI. INDIA’S EXPERIMENT WITH PASSIVE RESISTANCE 126
VII. JALLIANWALLA MASSACRE AT AMRITSAR 146
VIII. WHY IS INDIA POOR? 162
IX. INDIAN NATIONALISM--ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH 190
CHAPTER I
WOMAN’S POSITION IN INDIA. IS SHE BOND OR FREE?
“_Where women are honored,_
_there the gods are pleased;_
_but where they are dishonored,_
_no sacred rite yields reward._”
Thus, in the year 200 B. C., wrote Manu, the great law-giver of
India--India, whose mind was full grown when the western nations were
yet unborn; India, whose life rolled on while the West, like the
dragon fly, lived and died to live again. While Europe was still in a
state of primitive barbarism, the Indo-Aryans of _Bharat_ (India) had
reached an elevated state of moral and spiritual perfection; and in
the realm of intellectual culture they had attained an eminence which
has not yet been equalled by the most advanced of western countries.
Not only had they a perfect alphabet and a symmetrical language, but
their literature already contained models of true poetry and remarkable
treatises on philosophy, science, and ethics when the forefathers
of the modern western nations were still clothed in skins and could
neither read nor write. In their firm grasp of the fundamental meaning
and purpose of life, and in the organization of their society with a
view to the full attainment of the fruits of life, namely, “to take
from each according to his capacity, and to give to each according to
his needs,” they had attained to a high degree of excellence, which has
been recognized by the greatest of both western and oriental scholars.
Says Max Müller, the noted scholar of oriental languages:
“If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country
most richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that
nature can bestow--in some parts a very paradise on earth--I
should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human
mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has
most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has
found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention
even of those who have studied Plato and Kant--I should point
to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we,
here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on
the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the
Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order
to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more
universal, in fact more truly human, a life not for this life
only, but a transfigured and eternal life--again I should point to
India.”[1]
Further, of the culture of this ancient people of India Sir
Monier-Williams, sometime Boden Professor of Sanskrit in the University
of Oxford, famous translator of Sanskrit drama, and author of many
works on history and literature, speaks from an intimate knowledge of
India derived from long residence in the country when he writes:
“Indeed, I am deeply convinced that the more we learn about the
ideas, feelings, drift of thought, religious and intellectual
development, eccentricities, and even errors of the people of
India, the less ready shall we be to judge them by our own
conventional European standards--the less disposed to regard
ourselves as the sole depositories of all the true knowledge,
learning, virtue and refinements of civilized life--the less prone
to despise as an ignorant and inferior race the men who compiled
the laws of Manu, one of the remarkable productions of the
world--who composed systems of ethics worthy of Christianity--who
imagined the _Ramayna_ and _Mahabharata_, poems in some respects
outrivalling the Iliad and the Odyssey--who invented for
themselves the sciences of grammar, arithmetic, astronomy, logic,
and six most subtle systems of philosophy. Above all, the less
inclined shall we be to stigmatize as benighted heathen the
authors of two religions, however false, which are at this moment
professed by about half the human race.”[2]
Such a civilization has built up the enormous literature of the Hindus
embodied in the _Vedas_, _Upnishads_, the epic poems of _Ramayna_
and _Mahabharata_, and the immortal works of Kalidasa, a literature
comprising in itself an achievement of the human mind which may be
considered sublime, and of which any civilization, ancient or modern,
may feel justly proud. The poetical merit of Kalidasa’s _Sakuntala_
is universally admitted, and it ranks among the best of the world’s
masterpieces of dramatic art. Its beauty of thought and its tenderness
in the expression of feeling are exquisite, while its creative fancy is
rich, and the charm of its spirit is full. Says Goethe:
“_Wouldst thou the life’s young blossoms and the fruits of its decline,_
_All by which the soul is pleased, enraptured, feasted, fed,--_
_Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sweet name combine?_
_I name thee, O_ Sakuntala, _and all at once is said_.”
The epic poems of _Ramayna_ and _Mahabharata_ consist of stories
and legends which form a splendid superstructure on the teachings
contained in the earlier scriptures of the _Vedas_. By relating what
the men and women of those times thought, said, and did, these poems
illustrate in a highly instructive manner the general character and
culture of the early Hindus. The stories contained in these poems,
which, in fact, rival the best known epic poems of the world, tell
us of the thoughts and beliefs, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows of
the people of this earliest recorded period. Through these stories
we learn the fundamental concepts which governed the religious and
social life of the early Hindus; in them are revealed also the basic
moral and spiritual laws which controlled the actions, “not only of
gods and supernatural men, but of ordinary men and women of India.”
“They explain--by showing the degrees of danger incurred by such
vices as anger and pride, deception and faithlessness, intemperance
and impiety--the evil consequences of moral transgressions from both
man-made and supernatural laws; and at the same time they emphasize the
beauty of such virtues as patience and self-control, truthfulness and
purity, obedience and filial love.”[3]
As an illustration of the fascinating and elevated nature of its lofty
idealism, we shall quote two passages from _Ramayna_. In the first,
Rama, the ideal king, has determined to execute the will of his late
father by staying in the forests as an exile for fourteen years. Sita,
his wife and the heroine of the story, begs her lord and husband to
allow her to accompany him in his exile to the forests and offers a
picture highly expressive of pious conjugal love. Sita says:
“_Thou art my king, my guide, my only refuge, my divinity._
_It is my fixed resolve to follow thee. If thou must wander forth_
_Through thorny trackless forests, I will go before thee, treading down_
_The prickly brambles to make smooth thy path. Walking before thee, I_
_Shall feel no weariness: the forest thorns will seem like silken robes;_
_The bed of leaves, a couch of down. To me the shelter of thy presence_
_Is better far than stately palaces, and paradise itself._
_Protected by thy arm, gods, demons, men shall have no power to harm me._
_Roaming with thee in desert wastes, a thousand years will be a day;_
_Dwelling with thee, e’en hell itself would be to me a heaven of bliss._”
In the second selection Rama is heard answering to the entreaties of
Bharata, who has tried in vain to dissuade him from carrying out his
design. The following is Rama’s answer to the messenger of Bharata:
“The words which you have addressed to me, though they recommend
what _seems_ to be right and salutary, advise, in fact, the
contrary. The sinful transgressor, who lives according to the
rules of heretical systems, obtains no esteem from good men. It
is good conduct that marks a man to be noble or ignoble, heroic
or a pretender to manliness, pure or impure. Truth and mercy are
immemorial characteristics of a king’s conduct. Hence royal rule
is in its essence _truth_. On truth the world is based. Both sages
and gods have esteemed truth. The man who speaks truth in this
world attains the highest imperishable state. Men shrink with fear
and horror from a liar as from a serpent. In this world the chief
element in virtue is truth; it is called the basis of everything.
Truth is lord in the world; virtue always rests on truth. All
things are founded on truth; nothing is higher than it. Why,
then, should I not be true to my promise, and faithfully observe
the truthful injunction given by my father? Neither through
covetousness, nor delusion, nor ignorance, will I, overpowered by
darkness, break through the barrier of truth, but remain true to
my promise to my father. How shall I, having promised to him that
I would thus reside in the forests, transgress his injunction, and
do what Bharata recommends?”
In _Mahabharata_ again we find proof of the high esteem in which the
manly virtues of truthfulness, charity, benevolence, and chivalry
towards women were held by the ancient Hindus. The most important
incident in the drama (Mahabharata), namely, the death of Bhishma,
occurred when this brave and virtuous man, in fidelity to his pledge
never to hurt a woman, refused to fight, and was killed by a soldier
dressed in a woman’s garb.
The drama is full of moral maxims, around each one of which the poet
has woven a story in a beautiful and elegant manner.
“If Truth and a hundred horse sacrifice were weighed together,
Truth would weigh the heavier. There is no virtue equal to Truth,
and no sin greater than falsehood.”
“For the weak as well as for the strong, forgiveness is an
ornament.”
“A person should never do to others what he does not like others
to do to him, knowing how painful it is to himself.”
“The man who fails to protect his wife earns great infamy here,
and goes to hell afterwards.”
“_A wife is half the man, his truest friend;_
_A loving wife is a perpetual spring_
_Of virtue, pleasure, wealth; a faithful wife_
_Is his best aid in seeking heavenly bliss;_
_A sweetly-speaking wife is a companion_
_In solitude, a father in advice,_
_A mother in all seasons of distress,_
_A rest in passing through life’s wilderness._”
These great epic poems have a special claim to our attention because
they not only illustrate the genius of a most interesting people, but
they are to this day believed as entirely and literally true by the
vast population of India. “Huge congregations of devout men and women
listen day after day with eager attention to recitations of these old
national stories with their striking incidents of moral uplift and
inspiration; and a large portion of the people of India order their
lives upon the models supplied by those venerable epics.”
The subjection of woman was accepted as a natural thing by the entire
West until very recent times. Woman was held in the eyes of the law
as no better than a slave, and she was considered useful in society
merely to serve and gratify man, her master. Truly, such a condition
forms a dark page in the history of the race. Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt,
in her foreword to Mill’s _Subjection of Women_, writes:
“In defense of these expressions [subjection and slavery used in
Mill’s essay] and the general character of the essay, it must be
said that the position of women in society at that time [1869]
was comparable to that of no other class except the slave. As
the slave took the name of his master so the woman upon marriage
gave up her own and took that of her husband. Like the slave, the
married woman was permitted to own no property; as, upon marriage,
her property real and personal, and all she acquired subsequently
by gift, will, or her own labour, was absolutely in her husband’s
control and subject to his debts. He could even will away her
marriage portion and leave her destitute. The earnings of the
slave belonged to the master, those of the wife to the husband.
Neither slave nor wife could make a legal contract, sue or be
sued, establish business, testify in court, nor sign a paper as a
witness. Both were said to be ‘dead in law’.
“The children of the slave belonged to the master; those of the
wife to the husband. Not even after the death of the husband was
the wife a legal guardian of her own children, unless he made her
so by will. While living he could give them away, and at death
could will them as he pleased. He dictated the form of education
and religion that they should be taught, and if the parents
differed in religion, the wife was forced to teach the husband’s
faith. Like the slave, if the wife left her husband she could take
nothing with her, as she had no legal claim to her children, her
clothing, nor her most personal possessions.
“The law in many lands gave husbands the right to whip their wives
and administer other punishments for disobedience, provided they
kept within certain legal restrictions. Within the memory of those
living in Mill’s day, wife-beating was a common offense in England
and America, husbands contending that they were well within their
‘rights’, when so doing.
“ ... Education, always considered the most certain sign of
individual advancement, was either forbidden or disapproved, for
women. No colleges and few high schools, except in the United
States, were open to women. Common schools were less usual for
girls than for boys and the number of totally illiterate women
vastly exceeded the number of illiterate men. Religion was
recommended to women as a natural solace and avenue of usefulness,
but they were not permitted to preach, teach, or pray in most
churches, and in many singing was likewise barred! The professions
and more skilled trades were closed to them.”
That such a state of things was ever tolerated in the advanced
countries of Europe and America seems to us of India incredible. But
it is, nevertheless, true. As in the case of other social laws, the
subjection of woman was the result of the fundamental ideals (or the
lack of ideals) which governed the western society of those times. Men
were still in that low state of development in which “Might was Right,”
and in which the law of superior strength was the rule of life. No
pretension was made to regulate the affairs of society according to any
moral law. The physical law which sanctioned traffic in human slaves,
at the same time sustained the bondage of the weaker sex.
We now live in an age where the law of the strongest, in principle
at least, has been abandoned as the guiding maxim of life. It is
still very widely practised in individual as well as in national
relationships, but always under the guise of higher social and
cultural ends. The law of force as the avowed rule of general conduct
has given place to ideals of social equality, human brotherhood, and
international goodwill. How far such ideals are being actively followed
by the different peoples of the world remains to be determined; but
their profession as the symbol of good culture, at least, is universal.
The emancipation of woman in the West is thus a very recent
achievement. Yet it is rightly considered by most thinkers the
greatest single step forward in the advancement of the human race. Its
tremendous importance in the future development of the race is realized
now by all classes of people over the entire world. In fact, the social
status of woman in any society is regarded by most people, and properly
so, as the test of its civilization.
Through what hardships and dangers, privations and humiliations ran the
thorny and uphill path of the early leaders of the women’s suffrage
movement. The deeds of true nobility and heroic determination that
were performed by the pioneers of women’s emancipation are very little
known to the average man and woman of the present day. How numerous
and difficult were the obstacles placed in the way of these pioneers
by their brow-beating opponents, how bitter was the nature of their
persecutions, how mean and foul the character of the insults offered
them, and blind and obstinate the attitude of the governing class to
their simple demand for justice are little realized by those who enjoy
the legacy left by those liberators.
The high idealism which inspired the movement of the militant
suffragettes in England is manifest in their every word and action.
Their methods of peaceful, silent, dignified, conscious and
courageous suffering, contrasted with the treacherous, cowardly,
shameful, unmanly, and brutal attacks of their opponents, have
received considerations of high merit from all sections of honest and
fair-minded men the world over. Virtuous women belonging to the highest
stations in life and possessing qualities of rare courage, purity, and
self-denial were attacked in the most cowardly fashion by bands of
strong-bodied hooligans, “felled to the ground, struck in the face,
frog-marched, and tossed hither and thither in a shameless manner.”
“The women speakers were assaulted with dead mice and flocks of live
mice, and flights of sparrows were let loose into their meetings. Paid
gangs of drunken men were dispatched to the women’s gatherings to sing
obscene songs, and drown the voices of the speakers with the rattle of
tin cans and the ringing of bells. Bands of suffragettes were attacked,
struck down unconscious, and driven out over wet roads covered with
carbide by gangs of Liberal volunteers. Suffragette leaders were
imprisoned in the jails of England in groups of hundreds at a time and
were meted out the fancy punishment of forcible feeding through a tube
inserted into the stomach, a process which causes intense and lingering
pain.”[4] This barbarous treatment excited at once the horror and
indignation of the whole civilized world. Yet all these brutalities
were carried on under the very nose, in fact, at the direction of the
full-fledged Liberal members of the British cabinet.
At a campaign meeting held in Swansea where the suffragettes attempted
to ask Mr. Lloyd-George questions regarding his attitude on the problem
of woman franchise, he is reported as having used such language as,
“sorry specimens of womanhood,” “I think a gag ought to be tried,”
“By and by we shall have to order sacks for them, and the first
to interrupt shall disappear,” “fling them ruthlessly out,” and,
“frog-march them.” At another meeting held in Manchester, February
4th, 1906, where Mr. Winston Churchill spoke, on asking a very simple
question, the fourteen year old daughter of Mrs. Pankhurst, Adela, was
savagely attacked, thrown down, and kicked by several men.
The unwholesome and bitter experiences of the peaceful and gentle
suffragettes at the two election campaigns in May, 1907, are described
by Miss Sylvie E. Pankhurst as follows:
“After these stormy meetings the police and hosts of sympathisers
always escorted us home to protect us from the rowdies. Just as
we reached our door there was generally a little scuffle with a
band of youths who waited there to pelt us with sand and gravel as
we passed.... At Uppingham, the second largest town, the hostile
element was smaller than at Oakham, but its methods were more
dangerous. While Mary Gawthorpe was holding an open-air meeting
there one evening, a crowd of noisy youths began to throw up
peppermint ‘bull’s eyes’ and other hard-boiled sweets. ‘Sweets
to the sweet,’ said little Mary, smiling, and continued her
argument, but a pot-egg, thrown from the crowd behind, struck her
on the head and she fell unconscious....”
This is what happened on October 16th, 1909, at an open-air gathering
near Dundee, where Mr. Winston Churchill was to speak:
“ ... Standing in the road were some thirty or forty men, all
wearing the yellow rosettes of official Liberal stewards, and as
the car (containing four prominent suffragettes) slowed, they
rushed furiously towards it, shouting and tearing up sods from the
road and pelting the women with them. One man pulled out a knife
and began to cut the tires, whilst the others feverishly pulled
the loose pieces off with their fingers. The suffragettes tried to
quiet them with a few words of explanation, but their only reply
was to pull the hood of the motor over the women’s heads and then
to beat it and batter it until it was broken in several places.
Then they tore at the women’s clothes and tried to pull them out
of the car, whilst the son of the gentleman in whose ground the
meeting was being held drove up in another motor and threw a
shower of pepper in the women’s eyes.... The only excuse for the
stewards who took part in this extraordinary occurrence is that
many of them were intoxicated.”[5]
And the most pitiful part of the business was that such conduct seemed
to be regarded by its perpetrators as engaging pieces of gallantry.
While a recitation of these incidents might be continued indefinitely,
one more will suffice to show with what contempt and dishonor the
western world has treated its women. On August 2, 1909, a great
Liberal fete was held at Canford Park, near Poole in Dorsetshire. There
were sports and games and Mr. Churchill was to deliver an address on
the budget. Annie Kenney with three companions attended the fete, and
the story of what took place is best told in her own words. She says:
“As we entered the Park together we saw two very young girls being
dragged about by a crowd of Liberal men, some of whom were old
enough to be their fathers. They had thrown a pig net over them,
and had pulled down their hair. We heard afterward that these
girls came from a village near by, but the Liberals suspected them
to be Suffragettes and ordered them out of the Park. ..., but they
were crowded round us and the language they used is not fit for
print.... They were calling out to each other to get hold of me
and throw me into the pond which was very near ..., but as soon
as my back was turned they started dragging me about in a most
shameful way. One man who was wearing the Liberal colours pulled a
knife out of his pocket, and to the delight of the other staunch
Liberals, started cutting my coat. They cut it into shreds right
from the neck downwards. Then they lifted up my coat and started
to cut my frock and one of them lifted up my frock and cut my
petticoat. This caused great excitement. A cry came from those
Liberals, who are supposed to have high ideas in public life, to
undress me. They took off my hat and pulled down my hair, but I
turned round upon them and said that it would be their shame and
not mine. They stopped then for a minute, and then two men, also
wearing the Liberal colours, got hold of me and lifted me up and
afterwards dragged me along, not giving me an opportunity to walk
out in a decent way.”[6]
The heroism and rare genius of Mrs. E. Pankhurst and her associates
in the suffragette movement will be acknowledged by their friends and
foes alike. Through their sufferings they have bequeathed to women of
the western world the priceless heritage of Freedom, and thus pushed
the progress of the human race a long step forward. Mrs. Pankhurst
possessed, undoubtedly, a firm character, a lofty mind, a generous
heart, strong and vigorous good sense. We shall call the emancipator
of English womanhood a great woman, using that word not as a cheap,
unmeaning title but as conveying three essential elements of greatness,
namely, unselfishness, honesty, and boldness. She who sacrificed
everything for the voice of justice and submitted herself and her three
young daughters to cruel indignities and hardships of jail life for
the sake of her fellow creatures was an unselfish, an honest, a bold
woman,--was a great woman--in the best sense of the word. And at this
distant time as a proof of our honest affection and admiration for her
goodness and virtue, we can afford to express a feeling of mingled
sorrow and joy at her prolonged sufferings and final success.
In India, on the contrary, in the development of their wonderful
civilization men and women have played an equal part. The two sexes
have worked side by side in every branch of their spiritual endeavor,
and women have attained the same eminence as men in higher learning.
The Vedic hymns mention both men and women as divine revealers of Truth
and as spiritual instructors of mankind. In fact, The Rig Veda, the
earliest scriptural record of the world, contains hymns revealed by
women; and the Hindu god, Indra, is described as being initiated into
the knowledge of the Universal Spirit by the woman Aditi. Furthermore,
the Upnishads, the philosophical portion of the Veda, frequently
mention the names of women who discoursed on philosophical topics
with the most learned men philosophers of the times. Women scholars
were often appointed arbitrators and umpires in important philosophic
debates, and the names of the two women philosophers, Gargi and
Maitreyi, are familiar to all students of Hindu philosophy. In other
words, the paths of intellectual culture were equally open to men and
women, under exactly similar circumstances. In fact, the very spirit of
such equality is inculcated in the minds of the people from both their
law and their religion that made no distinction between the sexes in
the award of honors for merit. The law-givers of India, taking their
lessons from the Vedas, established the fundamental equality of man and
woman by defining the relation of the sexes thus:
“Before the creation of this phenomenal universe, the first born
Lord of all creatures divided his own self into two halves, so
that one half should be male and the other half female.”
Not only in the direction of scholarly pursuits, but in the
practical business affairs of the world also, the women of India
have distinguished themselves eminently as legislators, ministers,
commercial leaders, and military commanders. Men, women, and children
throughout India are familiar with the story of Queen Chand Bibi, who
defended Ahmedanagar during the long siege by the Grand Moghul; poets
also have sung of her valor and administrative wisdom. Another instance
of the recognition of the ability of women is the story of Nur Jahan
(Light of the Universe), the beautiful queen of the Moghul Emperor,
Jahangir, who guided the affairs of her husband’s vast territories
in a highly efficient manner for a period of nearly ten years.
Further, and well known to all students of history, is the story of
Mumtaz-i-Mahal, Emperor Shah Jahan’s consort, who assisted him in his
works of administration and in the construction of the famous buildings
of his period. This woman, described as a person of unexampled
dignity, delicacy, and charm, during her life-time was the “light of
his eyes,” and after death the perpetual source of inspiration to the
bereaved Emperor. On her death-bed, Mumtaz, the beloved companion of
his life’s happy days and mother of his six children, asked of Shah
Jahan that a memorial befitting a queen be placed over her grave. In
compliance with this request, and as a token of his unceasing love for
the deceased queen, the Emperor constructed on her grave the famous
Taj Mahal--a monument which by its beauty has made immortal the love
it commemorates. The most beautiful building in the world stands as a
memorial to man’s love for his wife--an unconquerable love, unbroken
and unsatisfied. Says Sir Edwin Arnold:
“He has immortalised--if he could not preserve alive for one brief
day--his peerless wife.... Admiration, delight, astonishment blent
in the absorbed thought with a feeling that human affection never
struggled more ardently, passionately and triumphantly against the
Oblivion of Death. There is one sustained, harmonious, majestic
sorrowfulness of pride in it, from the verse on the entrance
which says that ‘the pure of heart shall enter the Gardens
of God’, to the small, delicate letters of sculptured Arabic
upon the tombstone which tell, with a refined humility, that
Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the ‘Exalted of the Palace’, lies here, and that
‘Allah alone is powerful.’”[7]
The heroic command of her own forces by the Rani (Queen) of Jhansi
during the Indian War of Independence in 1857 is a familiar and more
recent example of a woman entering into practical affairs. Clad in a
man’s uniform, she rode at the head of her troops, and died a brave
and patriotic death in the battlefield. The name of Rani Jhansi is
mentioned among the renowned heroes of the country, and as a special
tribute to her loving memory her picture in a general’s uniform is
kept in many homes. Indian society is not opposed to the active
participation of its women in the higher affairs of their national
life. If the positive declarations of a group of western critics to
the contrary were true, the action of Rani Jhansi would be condemned
instead of being so universally applauded as it is now by even the most
orthodox of old Hindu ladies.
Throughout the long history of India, then, women have not been
hampered by any man-made restrictions from serving in the country’s
religious life, from fighting on its battlefields, and from holding
power in its councils. In the present generation we find women again
taking an active and important part in the affairs of the country.
They have the fullest freedom for self-expression, of which they
seem to have availed themselves in a highly creditable and fitting
manner, without sacrificing the admiration and respect of the men. In
times of their country’s need they have given proofs of patriotism
by self-sacrifice which speaks the language of love and devotion to
motherland. With a voluntary desire to coöperate, the men of India have
given to the women of the country a large share in its councils, and
have invited them to their national conferences of importance. In the
inner and more weighty deliberations of its leaders their influence is
evident, and on all occasions of national demonstration the women of
India are represented.
Shrimati Lajiavati--a frail, delicate figure, but a beautiful model of
womanly courage and dignity--has won for herself in the Punjab a place
which is closely akin to worship. She founded, and is now managing as
its principal, the Arya Samaj Kanya Mahavidyala (girls’ school) in
Jallundhar City, Punjab. Another example of India’s modern women, who
stands high in her countrymen’s esteem, is Shrimati Ramabai Ranade.
Her work as the secretary of Seva Sadhan, a society for social service
work among the women of the country, has been amply recognized. During
the debate over the women’s suffrage bill in the Bombay Legislative
Council, one honorable member remarked amid the greatest applause of
the season: “There is no Council which would not be honored, graced,
and helped by the presence of such a woman as one who is known to us
all, Mrs. Ramabai Ranade.” Mrs. Margaret E. Cousins, describing her
interview with Mrs. Ranade, says:
“I asked her, ‘What do you think of the future of women in India?’
‘It is full of hope and promise’, she replied, and in doing so
spontaneously took my hand and pressed it. It touches a Westerner
when her Eastern sister does that. It bridges gulfs and knits the
human sisterhood together. Like Mirabai of the poet’s intuition she
_Wears little hands_
_Such as God makes to hold big destinies._
“Her hands revealed her soul, for in their touch was soft
sweetness and strong vitality which still inspire me, and which
promise the blessing of her remarkable powers of service to
humanity for years to come.”[8]
Where is the Indian whose heart does not beat with joy at the mention
of Mrs. Sarojini Naidu? Who does not remember with feelings of proud
exultation the name of this beloved and revered sister--she who is the
symbol of patriotism and a flower of womanly beauty and culture, from
whose elevated soul radiate grace, charm, and affection, and who is
the object of her countrymen’s adoration? In 1925, in recognition of
her manifold virtues, the people of India exalted her to the highest
position at their command; she was unanimously elected President of the
Indian National Congress.[9] _In the entire history of mankind no woman
has been more highly honored by her countrymen than has Mrs. Sarojini
Naidu._ Read her poems and you will find the heart of a woman forever
seeking the satisfaction of hungry love:
“_Hide me in a shrine of roses,_
_Drown me in a wine of roses,_
_Drawn from every fragrant grove!_”
Listen to her musical eloquence on the nationalist platform of India,
and you will hear the cry of a patriot’s heart groaning under the load
of its country’s humiliation from the merciless foreign yoke.
“Our arts have degenerated, our literatures are dead, our
beautiful industries have perished, our valor is done, our fires
are dim, our soul is sinking.”
A more striking proof of the confidence and respect which the men of
India bear towards their women was given during the debates on women’s
suffrage bills in the provincial legislative councils of the country.
The Southborough Franchise Committee, which was formed to study the
general conditions in the country with a view to granting the franchise
to the people of India, in its report to the British Government of
India (1919) had expressed its decision against granting the franchise
to Indian women. This decision was upheld by the British Government
of India in the statement, “In the present conditions of India we
agree with them [the Southborough Committee] that it is not practical
to open the franchise to women.” To this decision of the Government
Sir C. Sankaran Nair, the Indian member of the Executive Council,
entered a strong protest, based on the strength of the evidence which
was presented before the Southborough Committee in favor of granting
franchise to women. His contention, furthermore, was upheld by the
resolution passed at two successive sessions of the Indian National
Congress (Calcutta 1917 and Delhi 1918). This resolution expressed in
an unequivocal manner the opinion of the Indian nation on the important
question of woman franchise as follows:
“Women possessing the same qualifications as are laid down in any
part of the [Reform] Scheme shall not be disqualified on account
of sex.”
A tremendous agitation was staged in India after the publication of the
dispatch of the Government of India, unfavorable to women’s rights. As
a result of this agitation a provision was made whereby the provincial
legislatures were given the power to admit or exclude women from
franchise at their individual options. True to their traditions and
following the teaching of their ancient as well as their modern seers
the majority of the provinces have already granted the franchise to
women on the same basis as to men. This experience is unequalled in the
entire history of mankind. Everywhere else where the women enjoy any
rights to vote or possess property, they have had to fight a battle
involving prolonged hardships and outrageous indignities imposed upon
them by the indignant and oftentimes barbarous ruling sex. India is
the only civilized country of the world in which women in modern times
have been granted franchise on an equality with men without a single
demonstration of insult or disrespect directed against its aspiring
womanhood. If for no other reason, the respect which the people of
India have shown to the desire of their women for the franchise,
should entitle them to a high place in the scale of civilization.
Mrs. Margaret E. Cousins is an international figure in the woman’s
suffrage movement, in which cause she has suffered imprisonments
in both Ireland and England. She is also the founder and Honorary
Secretary of the Women’s Indian Association with its fifty branches
spread over the country, and has lived for twelve years among the women
of India with relations of intimate friendship. Mrs. Cousins is not in
any sense of the word addicted to indiscriminate flattery, but she says:
“Turning then to India one finds that though the percentage
of education is appallingly low, the tradition of Indian law
leaves women very free to take any position for which they show
themselves capable. No Indian political organisations were at any
time closed to women. Women have at every stage of Indian history
taken high positions in their country’s public service. Springing
from their religious philosophy there is fundamentally a belief
in sex equality, and this shows itself when critical periods
demand it. This has been clearly shown during the movement of the
past ten years for self-government. Women have had their share
in all the local Conferences and in the National Congress. No
one who was present can easily forget the sight of the platform
at the Calcutta Congress of 1917 when three women leaders, Mrs.
Annie Besant, President of the Congress, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu,
representative of the Hindu women, and Bibi Ammam, mother of the
Ali brothers and representative of the Muslim women, sat side by
side, peeresses of such men leaders (also present) as Tilak,
Gandhi and Tagore, and receiving equal honor with them.”[10]
As a distinct contribution towards the solution of the world’s social
problems, the _East Indians_, by allowing woman the exercise of her
own free will and the entire responsibility of all her actions, have
established the fact that a woman left completely to herself with
opportunity to develop freely her instincts and faculties, may equal
man in reason, wisdom, and uprightness, and may surpass him in delicacy
and dignity.
The Hindu religion has always stood for the absolute equality of woman
with man. In matters religious as well as secular the Hindu woman has
been considered the equal of man before the law since the origin of
the Hindu nation. The admission of women into American universities
began only in recent times, while her partial equality in the sight
of law, not yet quite complete, is less than twenty years old. But in
India women have enjoyed such rights and many more since the beginning
of its recorded history. To the western readers who have been very
injudiciously fed upon missionaries’ tales about India, with their
colorful pictures of the brutality of the heathen towards his women
folk, this statement may seem incredible. But it is an undisputed fact
of history that since the beginning of Hindu law, woman in India has
held more legal rights to acquire knowledge, to hold office, and to
possess property than her sisters in America are having today. She
was never barred from the national institutions of higher learning
because of sex, and in the development of her intellectual, moral, and
spiritual qualities she was not hampered by any social or religious
laws whatsoever. She has stood before law as an exact equal of man
with the same rights to possess property, the same rights to go
before courts of justice and to ask the protection of law. The system
of coeducation prevailed in the ancient universities of Nalanda and
Takhshashila. It is a familiar fact known to all western scholars that
_Sakuntala_, the heroine in Kalidasa’s drama of that name, pleaded her
own case before the court of King Dushyanta. Indian women have fought
on battlefields alongside of men, have taken leading parts in their
historic and philosophic debates, have revealed spiritual truths for
the _Vedas_, and have received, as personifications of the Deity, the
worship from adoring millions. Above all else, the Indian women have
ruled over the hearts of their husbands and children throughout the
ages with a power that is born exclusively of purity in character, and
the spirit of self-sacrifice and love. They have held their dignity
with a poise which does the female sex a great credit.
Does Hindu religion sanction, then, the bondage of woman, and is
wife-beating permitted in Indian society? Is the Hindu wife considered
merely as an instrument of pleasure, and is her whole ambition in life
to be a passive and obedient servant of the husband?
The maxims which guide the conduct of Hindu society were laid down by
the great Law-giver Manu, in the year 200 B. C. He says:
“Where female relations live in grief, the family soon perishes;
but that family where they are not unhappy ever prospers.”
“A woman’s body must not be struck hard, even with a flower,
because it is sacred.”
That a nation which regularly listens to readings from epic poems of
Ramayana and Mahabharata morning and night on every day of the year,
and on whose lips the praises of Sita, the ideal wife (heroine in
Ramayana), dance forever, should be carried away by the desire of
ill-treating its womankind, as is actually believed by most westerners,
is simply inconceivable. Sita’s equal as a model of womanly chastity,
uprightness, kindness, and devotion has not been known in the history
of mankind. The story of her exile with her husband, King Rama, her
fidelity, and her spirituality is known to every child born in India;
while her character is set as an example before all Hindu women in the
country. With such ideals as these constantly before their minds, and
the moral influence of the peaceful, chaste family life always around
them, women of any nation will develop within themselves a power which
it will be impossible for any group of men, however foul and vicious,
to resist. And it must be remembered that the men of India, slow as
they are in catching the militaristic spirit of the competitive western
life, are to an exceptional degree spiritual and religious in their
general behavior. Sir Monier-Williams says:
“Religion of some kind enters largely into their [East Indian]
everyday life. Nay, it may even be said that religious ideas and
aspirations--religious hopes and fears--are interwoven with the
whole texture of their mental constitution. A clergyman, who has
resided nearly all his life in India, once remarked to me that
he had seen many a poor Indian villager whose childlike trust in
his god, and in the efficacy of his religious observances--whose
simplicity of character and practical application of his creed,
put us Christians to shame.”[11]
And again, in describing the general character of the Hindu women and
their family life, he writes:
“Hindu women must be allowed full credit for their strict
discharge of household duties, for their personal cleanliness,
thrift, activity, and practical fidelity to the doctrines and
precepts of their religion. They are generally loved by their
husbands, and are never brutally treated. A wife-beater drunkard
is unknown in India. In return, Indian wives and mothers are
devoted to their families. I have often seen wives in the act of
circumambulating the sacred _Tulsi_ plant 108 times, with the sole
object of bringing down a blessing on their husband and children.
In no other country in the world are family affection and
reverence for parents so conspicuously operative as in India. In
many households the first morning duty of a child on rising from
sleep is to lay his head on his mother’s feet in token of filial
obedience. Nor could there be a greater mistake than to suppose
that Indian women are without influence.”[12]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Max Müller--_What India Can Teach Us_.
[2] Sir Monier-Williams--_Modern India and the Indians_, page 353.
[3] Oman--_The Great Indian Epics_.
[4] E. Sylvie Pankhurst.
[5] E. Sylvie Pankhurst--_The Suffragette_, page 451.
[6] E. Sylvie Pankhurst--_The Suffragette_, page 413.
[7] Sir Edwin Arnold--_India Revisited_, page 211.
[8] Margaret E. Cousins--_The Awakening of Asian Womanhood_, page 114.
[9] The Indian National Congress is the largest representative body of
the Indian nation, with its ramifications spread throughout the country
consisting of thousands of branches. Its meetings are held annually in
different parts of the country.
[10] _Awakening of Asian Womanhood_, page 9.
[11] Sir Monier-Williams--_Modern India and the Indians_, page 54.
[12] Sir Monier-Williams--_Modern India and the Indians_, page 318.
CHAPTER II
THE HINDU IDEAL OF MARRIAGE
Irresponsible writers have discussed the marriage system of India in so
irrational and inaccurate a manner that the name _India_ has become,
in the mind of the westerner, synonymous with child marriage. These
writers have tried to show that child marriage is the result of a law
of the Hindu religion, which, according to them, strictly enjoins the
parents to enforce the marriage of their daughters at a tender age
under penalty of heavenly vengeance. They say that the law enjoins that
girls shall be married before the age of puberty, and, as a result,
the majority of Hindu girls become mothers nine months after reaching
puberty. One such writer[13] picks a few lines from the Hindu poet
Tagore’s essay in Keyserling’s _Book of Marriage_, and, mutilating its
text by clever omissions, misquotes it to prove the poet a defender of
child marriage. This unholy attempt of the author to misrepresent the
noted poet and philosopher deserves strong censure. In this chapter we
shall discuss the facts about marriage in India and its allied subject
of child marriage.
The Hindu religion strictly forbids child marriage. The following
quotation from the Rig Veda explains the ideal of marriage:
“Woman is to be man’s comrade in life, his _Sakhi_, with the
same range of knowledge and interests, mature in body, mind and
understanding, able to enter into a purposeful union on equal
terms with a man of equal status, as life partner, of her own free
choice, both dedicating their lifework as service to the divine
Lord of the Universe, both ready to fulfil the purpose of married
life from the day of marriage onward.”[14]
The western method of marriage through courtship is, however, not the
rule in India. Though the courtship method is being widely copied among
the educated classes in the country, the prevailing custom of marriage
is still through the choice of parents. In earlier times marriage
by the _Svayambara_ system, in which the maiden freely selected her
future mate from a group of suitors, was commonly practised. This
practice was discontinued, however, with the invasion of India by the
foreigners because of the desire of the Indians to keep the pure Aryan
stock uncontaminated by foreign blood. Since that time the boys and
girls are mated through the choice of their parents. This custom may be
defended on wide social and eugenic grounds. The contention is that the
complete dominance of sentiment and individual desire in the courtship
method of marriage, is harmful to social discipline, and is, as a rule,
detrimental to the race. Marriage is a sacred bond and must be based
on an ideal of the spiritual union of the souls, and not on the lower
desires for sense pleasures.
In order to enable the reader to understand fully the principles
underlying Hindu marriage it will be necessary to acquaint him with
the fundamental characteristics which form the basis of the social
structure of group life in India. One distinctive feature in the study
of India is the collective character of its communal life. Hindu
society was established on a basis of group morality. Society was
divided into different classes or communities; “and while no absolute
ethical code was held binding on all classes alike, yet within a given
class (or caste) the freedom of the individual must be subordinated
to the interest of the group. The concept of duty was paramount.”[15]
Social purpose must be served first, and the social order was placed
before the happiness of the individual, whether man or woman.
In India the origin of marriage did not lie in passion. Marriage was
entered into, not to satisfy desire on the part of either man or
woman, but to fulfill a purpose in life. It was the duty of every
individual during life to marry and propagate for the continuation of
the race. His marital union did not depend upon the caprice of his
will; it was required of him as a social obligation. No individual’s
life was considered complete without an offspring. To both man and
woman marriage was the most conclusive of all incidents in life; it was
the fulfillment of one’s whole being. Marriage was not sought as the
satisfaction of human feelings but as “the fulfilment of a ritual duty
to the family in its relation to the Divine Spirit.” “The happiness
and fruition of family life were sought not in the tumults of passion,
but in the calm and ordered affection of a disciplined and worshipful
pair.” That strong sexual passion which has been so beautifully
sanctified by the grace of poetry and hallowed by the name of romantic
love, and which is the source of immense force and power in many a
young life in the West, is called by the Hindu idealist “an earthly
desire and an illusion.”
Love as an expression of sentiment is transitory. People who once
fall in love may after some time and for similar reasons fall out of
love. Hence if the ideal basis for the union of the sexes is to be
mutual passion, an arrangement must be provided so that simultaneously
with a break in the fascination on either side, the marriage between
the parties shall come to an end. Yet under the existing conditions
over the entire civilized world it would not be possible to make the
marriage laws as lax as that. So long as such an arrangement remains
untried, and so long as there is any truth in the statement that human
hearts are to a high degree fickle, it must follow that successful
marriages should have other sources of lasting satisfaction than
romantic love. On observation, we find that most marriages, which were
entered into on the strict principle of mutual love, hold together from
habit, from considerations of prudence, and from duty towards children
long after lovers’ joy has totally disappeared from the lives of the
couple. The glimmer of first love very soon fades into nothingness.
Closer acquaintance brings to light faults which the lover’s eyes in
days of romance had stubbornly refused to see. Unless the parties
are possessed of sensitive souls, unless after a serious search for
a foothold they find a basis of common interest and common hobbies,
and unless their mutuality of temperament is found adequate for
friendship, there is left for their future relationships no happiness.
Why, then, excite one’s imagination in the beginning, and permit
oneself to be deluded by such obviously foolish hopes?
The Hindu system of marriage reverses these considerations. There,
marriage is a form of vocation, a fulfillment of a social duty, it is
not the enjoyment of individual rights. In its ethics, designed for
the communal basis of life, individual desire and pleasures must be
subordinated to the interest of group morality. “Thus the social order
is placed before the happiness of the individual, whether man or woman.
This is the explanation of the greater peace which distinguishes the
arranged marriage of the East from the self-chosen marriage of the
West; where there is no deception there can be no disappointment.”[16]
In this manner the champions of the system justify the Indian method of
marriage, in which marriages are arranged by the parents or relatives.
But, however ably its partisans may defend the old system, and in
whatever glowing colors they may exhibit its spiritual values, it
must go sooner or later. With changing times the ideals that govern
Indian society have changed also. Men and women of the present day are
demanding their individual freedom after the fashion of their brothers
and sisters in the West. Rightly or wrongly, they feel a desire to
express themselves according to the spontaneous dictates of the
heart. Simultaneously with the industrialization of the country the
restraints put upon the individual from outside through the medium of
social and religious laws are fast disappearing. The younger generation
of the Indian nation appears more concerned for rights than for duties.
Those who care may lament over the past, but we shall welcome the
change with joy, because it brings new light and new hope into the
stereotyped and set system of Indian life. Marriage in human society is
after all nothing but a plunge into the unknown ocean of the future.
Its ultimate outcome alone can tell whether the entrants were destined
to sink or swim.[17] Marriage has been a lottery in the past, and it
will remain so in the future, unless our lives are so modulated as
to give to the forces of the spirit a larger and a freer scope. It
is impious blasphemy to seek to stifle the celestial senses, instead
of guiding and harmonizing them. It is hoped, however, that in their
new role as imitators of the West, men of India will not change their
attitude of tenderness, confidence, respect, and delicacy towards the
female sex; and that the women of India will retain the calmness and
dignity of their attitude, the self-respect and poise of their inner
life.
All classes in India idolize motherhood. Among no people in the world
are mothers more loved, honored, and obeyed than among Indians. It
might be interesting to point out that a pregnant woman in India
has nothing of which to be ashamed or which she wishes to hide.
She is considered auspicious and must be accorded high respect and
consideration. We sometimes believe that the East Indian’s high
good humor and calm in life are the fruits of the Indian mother’s
unusual cheer and hope during the period of pregnancy. How unlike
the attitude of the Indian is to the westerner’s silly notions of
beauty, fine shape, and grace wherein pregnancy is made an object of
more or less open ridicule. Would that the women of America and other
western countries would forsake their restlessness and nervousness and
learn from their humbler eastern sisters the art of possessing poise,
composure, and serenity! Would that they would imitate the eastern
mother’s delicate benevolence, generosity of heart, loftiness of mind,
and independence and pride of character!
This subject of marriage is so important a matter to India that we
desire to elucidate still further the ideals underlying it. We shall
quote at length from Keyserling’s _Book of Marriage_ an essay by
Tagore, than whom no one is better fitted to speak. Says Tagore:
“Another way for the better understanding by the European of the
mentality underlying our marriage system would be by reference to
the discussions on eugenics which are a feature of modern Europe.
The science of eugenics, like all other sciences, attaches but
little weight to personal sentiment. According to it, selection by
personal inclination must be rigorously regulated for the sake of
the progeny. If the principle involved be once admitted, marriage
needs must be rescued from the control of the heart, and brought
under the province of the intellect; otherwise insoluble problems
will keep on arising, for passion recks not of consequences, nor
brooks interference by outside judges.
“Here the question arises: If desire be banished from the very
threshold of marriage, how can love find any place in the wedded
life? Those who have no true acquaintance with our country, and
whose marriage system is entirely different, take it for granted
that the Hindu marriage is loveless. But do we not know of our own
knowledge how false is such a conclusion?
“ ... Therefore, from their earliest years, the husband as an
idea is held up before our girls, in verse and poetry, through
ceremonial and worship. When at length they get this husband, he
is to them not a person but a principle, like loyalty, patriotism,
or such other abstractions which owe their immense strength to the
fact that the best part of them is our own creation and therefore
part of our own being.”
The poet then offers his own personal contribution to the discussion of
the marriage question generally and concludes thus:
“This _shakti_, this joy-giving power of woman as the beloved, has
up to now largely been dissipated by the greed of man, who has
sought to use it for the purposes of his individual enjoyment,
corrupting it, confining it, like his property, within jealously
guarded limit. That has also obstructed for woman herself her
inward realization of the full glory of her own _shakti_. Her
personality has been insulted at every turn by being made to
display its power of delectation within a circumscribed arena. It
is because she has not found her true place in the great world
that she sometimes tries to capture man’s special estate as a
desperate means of coming into her own. But it is not by coming
out of her home that woman can gain her liberty. Her liberation
can only be effected in a society where her true _shakti_, her
_ananda_ (joy) is given the widest and highest scope for its
activity. Man has already achieved the means of self-expansion in
public activity without giving up his individual concerns. When,
likewise, any society shall be able to offer a larger field for
the creative work of woman’s special faculty, without detracting
from her creative work in the home, then in such society will the
true union of man and woman become possible.
“The marriage system all over the world, from the earliest ages
till now, is a barrier in the way of such true union. That is why
woman’s _shakti_, in all existing societies, is so shamefully
wasted and corrupted. That is why in every country marriage is
still more or less of a prison-house for the confinement of
women--with all its guards wearing the badge of the dominant male.
That is why man, by dint of his efforts to bind woman, has made
her the strongest of fetters for his own bondage. That is why
woman is debarred from adding to the spiritual wealth of society
by the perfection of her own nature, and all human societies are
weighed down with the burden of the resulting poverty.
“The civilization of man has not, up to now, loyally recognized
the reign of the spirit. Therefore the married state is still one
of the most fruitful sources of the unhappiness and downfall of
man, of his disgrace and humiliation. But those who believe that
society is a manifestation of the spirit will assuredly not rest
in their endeavors till they have rescued human marriage relations
from outrage by the brute forces of society--till they have
thereby given free play to the force of love in all the concerns
of humanity.”
Such is the Hindu poet’s explanation of the ideals underlying the
institution of marriage in the communal society of the Hindus. One
feels through his closing lines the poet’s sorrow at the sight of
the misery caused by a wrong conception of marriage throughout the
civilized world. The poet cherishes, however, the fond hope that a day
of the reign of spirit will dawn over the world, when mankind will
recognize the necessity of giving to the forces of love a free play in
the wide concerns of life.
Marriage in India involves two separate ceremonies. The first ceremony
is the more elaborate, and judging from the permanent character of its
obligations, the more important. It is performed amid much festivity
and show. The bridal party, consisting of the bridegroom with his chief
relatives and friends, goes to the bride’s home in an elaborate musical
procession. There the party is handsomely feasted as guests of the
bride for one or more days, according to the means of the host. The
groom furnishes the entertainment, which consists of music, acrobatic
dancing, jugglers’ tricks, fireworks, and so forth. The day is spent
in simple outdoor amusements like hunting, horseback riding, swimming,
or gymnastic plays, the nature of the sport depending upon the
surroundings. In the evening, by the light of the fireworks, and in the
midst of a large crowd of near relatives and spectators, the ceremony
of the “union,” namely, the spiritual unification of the near relatives
of the bride and the bridegroom, is staged in a highly picturesque
manner. In order of their relation to the bride and groom--father of
the bride with the father of the bridegroom, first uncle of the one
with the first uncle of the other, and so forth--the near relatives
of the future couple embrace each other and exchange head-dresses as
a symbol of eternal friendship. Each such pledge of friendship is
beautifully harmonized with a song and a blessing from the daughters
of the village. Later in the evening, the girls lead the guests to the
bridal feast, singing in chorus on their march the “Welcome Home.”
Marriage in the Indian home is thus an occasion of great rejoicing.
The atmosphere that prevails throughout the entire ceremony is one of
extreme wholesomeness and joy. Nothing could surpass the loveliness
and charm that surrounds the evening march to the bridal feast. The
pretty maidens of the village, who are conscious of their dignity as
personifications of the Deity and are inspired with a devoted love for
their sister bride, come in their gay festival dresses, with mingled
feelings of pride and modesty, to lead the procession with a song;
their eyes moistened with slowly gathering tears of deep and chaste
emotion, and their faces wrapped in ever changing blushes, give to
the whole picture a distinctive flavor of an inspiring nature. On the
following morning the couple are united in marriage by the officiating
priest, who reads from the scriptures while the husband and wife pace
together the seven steps. The vow of equal comradeship which is taken
by both the husband and the wife on this occasion reads thus:
“Become thou my partner, as thou hast paced all the seven steps
with me.... Apart from thee I cannot live. Apart from me do thou
not live. We shall live together; we each shall be an object
of love to the other; we shall be a source of joy each unto the
other; with mutual goodwill shall we live together.”[18]
The marriage ceremony being over, the bridal party departs with the
bride for the bridegroom’s home. On this first trip the bride is
accompanied by a maid, and the two return home together after an
overnight’s stay. The bride then remains at her parental home until
the performance of the second ceremony. The interval between the two
ceremonies varies from a few days to several years, depending mainly
upon the ages of the married couple and the husband’s ability to
support a home.
This dual ceremonial has been the cause of a great deal of confusion
in the western mind. To all appearances the first ceremony is the
more important as it is termed marriage. After it the bride begins to
dress and behave like a married woman, but the couple do not begin
to live together until the second ceremony has also been performed,
and these two acts may be separated from each other by a considerably
long period. In other words the so-called marriage of the Hindu girl
is nothing but “an indefeasible betrothal in the western sense.” The
custom of early marriage (or betrothal, to be more exact) has existed
in some parts of the country from earlier times, but it became more
common during the period of the Mohammedan invasions into India. These
foreign invaders were in the habit of forcibly converting to Islam
the beautiful Hindu maidens, whom they later married. But no devout
Mohammedan ever injures or thinks evil towards a married woman. His
religion strictly forbids such practice. Thus, to safeguard the honor
of their young daughters the Hindus adopted this custom of early
marriage.
The girl’s marriage, however, makes no change in her life. She
continues to live with her parents as before, and is there taught under
her mother’s supervision the elementary duties of a household. She is
instructed at the same time in other matters concerning a woman’s life.
When she becomes of an age to take upon herself the responsibilities of
married life, the second marriage ceremony is finished and she departs
for her new home.
It is true that the standard of education among East Indian women as
compared with that of other countries is appallingly low. We shall
leave the discussion of the various political factors which have
contributed to this deplorable state of things for a later chapter.
For the present it will be sufficient to point out that even though
the Indian girl is illiterate and unable to read and write, she is not
uninstructed or uninformed in the proper sense of the word education.
She knows how to cook, to sew, to embroider, and to do every other kind
of household work. She is fully informed concerning matters of hygiene
and sex. In matters intellectual her mind is developed to the extent
that “she understands thoroughly the various tenets of her religion and
is quite familiar with Hindu legends and the subject matter in the epic
literature of India.”
My mother was the daughter of a village carpenter. She was brought up
in the village under the exclusive guidance of her mother and did
not have any school education. Mother, in her turn, has reared seven
children who have all grown to be perfectly healthy and normal boys and
girls. Even though we could easily afford a family doctor, we never had
one. Mother seemed to know so much about hygienic and medical science
that she did not need a doctor. Her little knowledge she had acquired
from her own mother; it consisted of a few simple rules, which she
observed very faithfully. As little children, we were required to clean
our teeth with a fresh twig, to be individually chewed into a brush,
every morning before breakfast, and to wash the mouth thoroughly with
water after each meal. For the morning teeth cleaning we were supplied
with twigs from a special kind of tree which leaves in the mouth a
very pleasant taste and contains juices of a beneficial nature. Also,
chewing a small twig every morning gives good exercise to the teeth and
furnishes the advantage of a new brush each time. We were told that
dirty teeth were unmannerly and hurt a person’s eyesight and general
heath. A cold water bath once a day and washing of both hands before
and after each meal were other fundamental requirements.
For every kind of family sickness, whether it was a headache, a
fever, a cold in the head, or a bad cough, the prescription was
always the same. A mixture of simple herbs was boiled in water and
given to the patient for drinking. Its only effect was a motion of
the bowels. It was not a purgative, but had very mild and wholesome
laxative properties without any after reactions. Fasting during
sickness was highly recommended. In nearly every month occurred
some special festival day on which the whole family fasted. This
fast had a purifying effect on the systems of growing children. As
another precautionary measure, my mother prepared for the children,
every winter, a special kind of preserve from a bitter variety of
black beans, which is supposed to possess powerful blood-purifying
properties. With the exception of quinine during malarial epidemics, we
were never given any drugs whatsoever. These simple medicines, combined
with a fresh vegetable diet for every day in the year, constituted my
mother’s only safeguards against family sickness. And from my knowledge
I know that her system worked miraculously well.
During pregnancy it is customary to surround the young girl with every
precaution. She returns to her parental home in order to secure freedom
from sexual intercourse during that period. In the months before my
eldest sister bore her first child, I remember how she was instructed
not to permit herself to be excited in any way. Pictures of the ideal
wife, _Sita_, and of national heroes and heroines were hung all over
the house for my sister to look at and admire. She was freed from all
household responsibilities in order that she could devote her time to
reading good stories from the Hindu epics. Every kind of irritant,
like pepper and spices, was rigidly excluded from her diet, and after
the child was born she refrained from injudicious combinations of food
until the child was a year or more old.
Every night at bedtime my mother had a new story to tell the children,
a story which she herself had heard at bedtime when she was young.
These stories were drawn from the great Hindu epics, and there was
always a useful maxim connected with them. The tale was told to bring
home to the growing children some moral maxim like truthfulness,
fidelity to a pledge once given, conjugal happiness, and respect for
parents. In this manner the children in the most ignorant homes become
familiar with the ethical teachings of their nation and with the
hypotheses underlying their respective religions. Almost everyone in
India down to the most ignorant countrywoman understands the subtle
meaning of such intricate Hindu doctrines as the laws of _Karma_, the
theory of reincarnation, and the philosophy of _Maya_.
As was stated earlier in this chapter, much misinformation about the
so-called child marriage has been spread by ignorant missionaries,
and has been eagerly swallowed by most western readers. It may be
well to observe here that the two expressions “child marriage” and
“early marriage” are very widely apart in meaning. The psychological
impressions conveyed by the two expressions are distinctly different.
If the first ceremony of the Hindu marriage is to be taken as meaning
marriage, what is practised in India perhaps more than anywhere else
in the world is _early marriage_ and not child marriage. Even at that,
early marriage is essentially wrong in principle. Its usefulness in
earlier times, when it was first recommended by the Hindu lawgivers as
a necessary measure to preserve the communal life of the nation, cannot
be denied.
Like many other laws of those times, it has outlived its usefulness,
and through the influence of many corruptions which have been added
to the practice during ages, it has become a curse to the country.
This fact is frankly admitted by the leaders of modern India. In the
writings and speeches of the most prominent among them the custom of
early marriage has been condemned as a “deadly vermin in Hindu social
life,” and a “ghastly form of injustice.” Beginning with the days of
the eminent Hindu reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the whole literature
of social and religious reform in India is full of loud and emphatic
denunciations of early marriage.
As a result of the untiring, self-sacrificing efforts of Hindu
reformers a great measure of success has already been achieved. The
Hindu girl’s age of marriage has been steadily increasing during the
last fifty years. According to figures from the official Census Report
of India (1921) only 399 out of every 1000 girls were married at the
end of their fifteenth year. In other words, 60 per cent of Indian
girls remained unmarried at the beginning of their sixteenth year.
Moreover, in the official records of India every girl who has passed
through the first ceremony of her marriage is included in the married
class. If we allow a little further concession on account of the warmer
climate of India, which has the tendency to lower the age of maturity
in girls, we shall concede that the present conditions in India in
respect to early marriage are not strikingly different from those in
most European countries. At the same time it must not be forgotten that
in India sex life begins invariably after marriage, and never before
marriage. Those familiar with the conditions in the western countries
know that such is not always the rule there.
One evening the writer was talking in rather favorable terms to a small
group of friends about the Hindu system of marriage. While several
nodded their habitual, matter-of-fact, courteous assent, one young
lady (Dorothy), a classmate and an intimate friend, suddenly said in
an impatient tone, “This is all very foolish. By using those sweet
expressions in connection with the Hindu family life you do not mean to
tell me that marriage between two strangers, who have never met in life
before, or known each other, can be ever happy or just. ‘Felicity,’
‘peace,’ ‘harmony,’ ‘wedded love,’ ‘idealization of the husband’--this
is all bunk. That _you_ should approve the blindfold yoking together
for life of innocent children in indefeasible marriage, is outrageous.
The system is shocking; it is a sin against decency. It is war against
the most sacred of human instincts and emotions, and as such I shall
condemn it as criminal and uncivilized.” Yet the young lady was in no
sense of the word unsympathetic or unfriendly to India. She is, and has
always been, a great friend and admirer of India.
Dorothy is not much of a thinker, but she is very liberal and likes to
be called a radical. You could discuss with her any subject whatsoever,
even Free Love and Birth Control, with perfect ease and lack of
restraint. She is twenty-five years of age and unmarried. She has been
“in love” several times, but for one reason or the other she has not
yet found her ideal man. She would not tell this to everybody, but to
one of her boy friends, “whose big blue eyes had poetic inspiration
in them,” and who seemed to be fine and good and true in every way,
better than the best she had ever met before, and whom she loved quite
genuinely, she had given herself completely on one occasion. This
happened during a week-end trip to the mountains, and was the first
and last of her sexual experience. She said it was the moral as well
as the physical feast of her life. Later she saw him flirting in a
doubtful manner with a coarse Spanish girl, which made him loathsome in
her eyes. Gradually her love for him began to dwindle, until it died
off completely, leaving behind, however, a deep mortal scar in her
spiritual nature. For a period, Dorothy thought she could never love
any man again, until she began to admire a young college instructor in
a mild fashion. He is, however, “so kind and intelligent and different
from the rest,” with a fine physique and handsome face--his powerful
forehead setting so beautifully against his thick curly hair--that she
calls magnificent. It matters little that he is married, because she
writes him the most enchanting letters. Dorothy’s love for the handsome
professor is platonic. She says it will exist forever, even though
she entertains no hope of ever marrying him. Yet while she talked
about her latest “ideal,” a stream of tears gathered slowly in her big
luminous eyes. They were the tears of hopeless resignation. Dorothy is
beautiful, and possesses rare grace and charm of both body and mind.
She is well situated in the business world, and is not in want of men
admirers. But yet she is unhappy, extremely unhappy. She has had the
freedom, but no training to make proper use of it. While she was still
in her early teens she started going on picnic parties with different
boys. Under the impulse of youthful passion she learned to kiss any
one and every one in an indiscriminate fashion. This destroyed the
sanctity of her own moral and spiritual nature, and also killed, at the
same time, her respect for the male sex. Sacredness of sex and respect
for man being thus destroyed in her early years, she could not easily
find an ideal husband in later life. If she had been a stupid creature
with no imagination and no deep finer feelings she would have fallen
suddenly in love anywhere--there to pass the rest of her humdrum and
joyless existence in an everlasting stupor. Surely Dorothy did not
remember her own tragedy when she condemned the lot of the Hindu girls
in such vehement manner. Vanity is an ugly fault, yet it gives great
pleasure.
Unlike India, where from their very childhood girls are initiated
into matters of sex, and where the ideal of acquiring a husband and a
family is kept before their minds from the beginning, American boys
and girls are brought up in utter ignorance of every thing pertaining
to sex. Sex is considered as something unclean, filthy, and nauseous,
and so unworthy of the attention and thought of young children. And yet
there is no country in the world where sex is kept more prominently
before the public eye in every walk of daily life than in America.
_The first impression which a stranger landing in America gets is of
the predominance of sex in its daily life._ The desire of the American
woman to show her figure to what Americans call “the coarse eye of
man,” expresses itself in short skirts and tight dresses. “American
movies are made with no other purpose in view than to emphasize
sex.” A college professor was recently told by one of the six biggest
directors of motion pictures in Hollywood, through whose hands passed
a business amounting to millions of dollars, that in making a motion
picture sex must constantly be borne in mind. The story must be based
on that knowledge, scenes selected with this view, and the plot
executed with that thought in mind. Vaudeville shows, one of America’s
national amusements, are nothing but a suggestive display of the
beautiful legs of young girls, who appear on the stage scantily dressed
and touch their foreheads with the toes in a highly suggestive manner.
The writer was told by an elderly American lady that the American
national dances had a deep religious connotation. A spiritual thought
may exist behind American music, and its effect on the American
youth may be quite uplifting, but certainly such dances as the one
called “Button shining dance,” in which a specially close posture is
necessary, was invented with no high spiritual end in view. A wholesale
public display of bare legs to the hips, and a close view of the rest
of their bodies in tight bathing suits may be seen on the national
beaches. Young couples lie on the sands in public view closely locked
in seemingly everlasting embraces.
While all this may be very pure, innocent, harmless, and even uplifting
in its hidden nature, its outward and more prevalent character
indicates an almost vicious result of the ideal of bringing up the
nation’s youth improperly instructed in matters of sex and its proper
function.
The immediate effect of this anomalous condition in America resulting
from the misinstruction regarding sex by its youth on the one hand,
and the most exaggerated prominence given sex in its national life is
particularly disastrous and excessively humiliating. Using the word
moral in its popular conventional meaning, it may be very frankly said
that the morals of the American youth are anything but exemplary.
Judge Ben B. Lindsey, who is fully authorized to speak on the subject
from his experience as head of the Juvenile court in Denver for over
twenty-five years, and who is one of the keenest contemporary thinkers
in America, has stated facts in his book, _The Revolt of Modern Youth_,
which are appalling. He writes:
“The first item in the testimony of the high school students is
that of all the youth who go to parties, attend dances, and ride
together in automobiles, more than 90 per cent indulge in hugging
and kissing. This does not mean that every girl lets _any_ boy hug
and kiss her, but that she _is_ hugged and kissed.
“The second part of the message is this. At least 50 per cent
of those who begin with hugging and kissing do not restrict
themselves to that, but go further, and indulge in other sex
liberties which, by all the conventions, are outrageously improper.
“Now for the third part of the message. It is this: Fifteen to
twenty-five per cent of those who begin with the hugging and
kissing eventually ‘go the limit.’ This does not, in most cases,
mean either promiscuity or frequency, but it happens.”[19]
This situation is alarming, and the leaders of the country must take
immediate notice of it. When fifteen to twenty-five girls out of every
hundred in any country indulge in irresponsible sexual relationships
between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, that country is not in a
healthy moral condition. The effect of these early sexual intimacies
between young girls and boys is ruinous to their later spiritual
growth. How the situation may be remedied is a serious problem, which
is not the task of any foreigner, however honest and friendly, to solve.
It may be of value to point out here how the Hindu thinkers sought
to control this situation. We quoted above the frank opinion of an
American college girl regarding the Hindu system of marriage. The
ill opinion of the Hindu system of marriage held by most westerners,
springs, however, not from their knowledge of the situation, but from
its very novelty, and from the dissociation of the name romance from
its system. The western method of marriage emphasizes freedom for
the individual, and as such its fundamental basis is both noble and
praiseworthy. From the exercise of freedom have developed some of the
finest traits of character; freedom, in fact, has been the source of
inspiration for the highest achievements of the human race. But freedom
in sex relationship without proper knowledge transforms itself into
license, as its exercise in the commercial relationships of the world
without sympathy and vision develops into tyranny. An illustration of
the former consequence may be seen in the disastrous effect of the
wrong kind of freedom on the morals of the American youth; the slums
of the industrial world are the results of the _laissez faire_ policy
when it is allowed to proceed unchecked, on its reckless career.
In India marriage is regarded as a necessity in life; in the case of
woman it is the most conclusive of all incidents, the one action to
which all else in life is subsidiary. From marriage springs not only
her whole happiness, but on it also depends the fulfilment of her very
life. Marriage to a woman is a sacrament--an entrance into the higher
and holier regions of love and consecration--and motherhood is to her
a thing of pride and duty. From childhood she has been trained to be
the ideal of the husband whom marriage gives her. Dropping longingly
into the embrace of her husband with almost divine confidence in
his protection and love, she begins to look at the whole universe
in a different light. “Are the heavens and the earth so suddenly
transformed? Do the birds and trees, the stars and the heavens above,
take on a more brilliant coloring, and the wind begin to murmur a
sweeter music?” Or is it true that she is herself transformed at the
gentle touch of him who is henceforth to be her lord?
So limitless is the power of human emotion that we can create in
our own imagination scenes of a joyful existence, which, when they
are finally realized, bring about miraculous changes in us almost
overnight. This miracle is no fiction; it is a reality. An overnight’s
blissful acquaintance with her husband has altered the constitution of
many a girl’s body and given to her figure nobler curves. I have seen
my own sister given in marriage, a girl of 18, a slender, playful, fond
child with barely a sign of womanhood in her habits and carriage;
and after a month when I went for a visit to her home I found it
difficult to recognize my own sister. How suddenly had the marital
union transformed her! In the place of a slender, sprightly girl was
now a plump woman with a blooming figure, seeming surcharged with
radiant energy; in the place of a straight childish look in the eyes
there was a look of happiness, wisdom, understanding that was inspiring
and ennobling. The atmosphere around my sister, once a girl, now a
woman, was of such a divine character and her appearance expressed
such exquisite joy that I fell spontaneously into her arms, and before
we separated our eyes were wet with tears of joy. Seeing my sister so
beautiful and so happy, I was happy; and in her moment of supreme joy
her brother, the beloved companion of early days, became doubly dear
to her. Some moments in our lives are difficult, nay, impossible to
forget. This experience was of so illuminating a nature that it is
still as vivid in my mind as if it had happened yesterday.
The explanation is very simple. In the mind of my sister, as in the
mind of every other Indian girl, the idea of a husband had been
uppermost since her very childhood. Around his noble appearance, fine
carriage, and handsome expression she must have woven many a beautiful
story. Each time she saw one of her girl friends given in marriage
to a “flower-crowned bridegroom, dressed in saffron-colored clothes,
riding in procession on a decorated horse,” and accompanied by music
and festivity, she must have dreamed. And then when the ideal of her
childhood was realized, no wonder she found in his company that height
of emotional exaltation which springs from the proper union of the
sexes and is the noblest gift of God to man. The American girl thinks
my sister married a stranger, but she had married an ideal, a creation
of her imagination, and a part of her own being.
The wise Hindu system which keeps the idea of a husband before the
girls from their childhood will not be easily understood by the
conventional western mind. Those who consider sex as something “unclean
and filthy” and have formed the conviction that its thoughts and its
very name must be strictly kept away from growing children must learn
two fundamental truths. In the first place, nothing in sex is filthy or
unclean; on the other hand, sex is “the purest and the loveliest thing
in life and if properly managed is emotionally exalting and highly
uplifting for our moral and spiritual development.”[20] Secondly, to
imagine that by maintaining a conspiracy of silence on the subject
of sex one can exclude its thought totally from the lives of growing
children is to betray in the grossest form ignorance of natural laws.
In India, however, sex is considered a necessary part of a healthy
individual’s life; it is a sacred and a lovely thing; and, as such,
it is to be carefully examined and carefully cultivated. The sexual
impulse is recognized as the strongest of human impulses, and any
attempt to thwart it by outside force must result in disaster to the
individual and in ruin to social welfare. To overcome sex hunger by
keeping people ignorant of it is the meanest form of hypocrisy. To deny
facts is not to destroy them. It is not only stupid but cowardly to
imagine that one could make people moral and spiritual by keeping them
ignorant and superstitious. Show them the light, and they will find
their own way. Teach children the essentials of life, encourage in them
the habit of independent thought, show them by example and precept the
beauties of moral grandeur, and they will develop within themselves the
good qualities of self-respect and self-restraint which will further
insure against many pitfalls. Says the Hindu proverb: “A woman’s best
guard is her own virtue.” Virtue is a thing which must spring from
within and can never be imposed from the outside.
The atmosphere in the Hindu household and the attitude of the elder
members of the family to each other is of such a nature that the boys
and girls gradually become aware of the central facts of nature. In
fact, no attempt is made to hide from the children anything about their
life functions. The subjects of marriage and child birth are freely
discussed in the family gatherings. Children are never excluded when
a brother or sister is born, and no one tells them stories of little
babies brought in baskets by the doctors or by storks. Whenever the
growing children ask curious questions about physiological facts, they
are given the necessary information to the extent that it will be
intelligible to them.
The experience in India has clearly demonstrated the fact that if young
boys and girls are properly instructed in the laws of nature, and if
the knowledge is backed up by the right kind of moral stimulus and
idealism, these young people can be relied upon to develop invincible
powers of self-restraint and self-respect. Such boys and girls will
have noble aspirations and will grow into fine-spirited men and women
of healthy moral character and of unquestionable poise.
The writer has no desire to eulogize the Hindu system of marriage, or
to disparage the Occidental. An attempt has been made to diagnose the
prevalent consequences of two systems. The Hindu customs certainly
need modification in view of the rapid economic and social changes;
the western system displays a deplorable lack of adjustment to new
conditions in those countries. The writer merely asks the reader to
remember that just because a system is different, it need not be
outrageous.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Katherine Mayo.
[14] Quoted from Cousins--_Awakening of Asian Womanhood_, page 40.
[15] Coomaraswamy.
[16] Coomaraswamy--_Dance of Siva_, page 88.
[17] Tagore.
[18] Quoted from Cousins--_The Awakening of Asian Womanhood_, page 38.
[19] Pages 56, 59, 62.
[20] Ben B. Lindsey.
CHAPTER III
THE CIVILIZATION AND ETHICS OF INDIA
The distinctive feature of Hindu culture is its femininity. While the
northern branch of the Aryan family represented by the European group
had to undergo hard struggle with unyielding nature on account of a
barren soil and the severity of cold climate, which developed in them
the masculine qualities of aggressiveness, force, and exertion, the
southern branch of the Aryan family, who migrated into the smiling
valleys of the Indus and the Ganges, found in their new home abundance
of physical comfort. The extreme fertility of soil and the warm
climate made existence easy and left them leisure for speculation and
thought--conditions which have tended to make the people of India
emotional, meditative, and mystic. The bounty of nature released them
from struggle, and the resulting freedom from material cares and
security of existence developed in the Hindu character the benevolent
qualities of tolerance and thankfulness.[21]
The peace-loving nature of the Hindu mind shows itself in its early
ventures into the study of the higher and deeper problems of life.
When they began to inquire into the secrets of the universe and its
relationship to human life with a view to discovering the mystery of
our existence on this planet, they were dominated solely by an absolute
and unqualified love of truth. “They never quarreled about their
beliefs or asked any questions about individual faiths. Their only
ambition was to acquire knowledge of the universe,--of its origin and
cause,--and to understand the whence and whither, the who and what
of the human soul.” The early pioneers of Hindu thought lay down for
rest on the open, fertile plains of the Ganges during the fragrant
summer nights of India, and their eyes sought the starry heavens above.
Then they looked into themselves, and must have asked, “What are we?
What is this life on earth meant for? How did we come here? Where
are we bound for? What becomes of the human soul?” and many another
difficult question. The answer that the Hindu sages of old gave to
these difficult questions is to be found in the one simple rule of the
Unity of All Life: One Supreme Being is the source of all joy; He is
the master of all knowledge; He is eternal, stainless, unchangeable,
and always present as a witness in every conscience; He alone is real
and lasting, and the rest of this material universe is _maya_, a mere
illusion. Human soul is made of the same substance as the Supreme soul.
It is separated from its source through ignorance. Through succeeding
incarnations it strives to reach its ultimate goal, which is its
identification with the Supreme Being. That is the final end of all
human effort--the realization of the Self--which accomplished, man’s
existence becomes one with the rest of the Universe, and his life
thereafter is one of limitless love. His soul unites with the Universal
soul and he has obtained his _Moksha_ (_salvation_). He begins to see
“All things in self and self in All.”
This idea of spiritual freedom, which is the release of the self
from the ego concept, forms the foundation of Hindu culture, and has
influenced the whole character of India’s social and religious ideals.
Let us try to explain it a little more clearly. The recognition of
the unity of all life assumes the existence of one God, “one source,
one essence and one goal.” The final purpose of life is to realize
this unity, when the human soul becomes one with the Universal Spirit.
Ignorance is the cause of all evil, because it forever hides from
us the true vision. The wise man continually strives to overcome
ignorance through the study of philosophy and through self-restraint
and renunciation. He seeks to achieve knowledge of Self, in order
that he may see God face to face. Then he will attain _Moksha_
(salvation). Until he has realized the absolute Truth, he must hold
on to the relative truth as he sees it, which is accomplished through
the exercise of such virtues as universal love, faith, devotion,
self-sacrifice, and renunciation.
“Despising everything else, a wise man should strive after the
knowledge of the Self.”
Human life on this earth is a journey from one village to the other.
We are all pilgrims here, and this abode is only our temporary home
and not a permanent residence. Instead of being continually in search
of material wealth, of power, of fame, and of toiling day and night,
why should we not regard life as a perpetual holiday and learn to rest
and enjoy it? Would it not be better if we had a little less of work,
a little less of so-called pleasure, and more of thought and peace? It
does not take much to sustain life; vegetable food in small quantities
will maintain the body in good health, and the shelter of a cottage is
all that a man requires. That he should build palaces and amass riches
proves his lack of knowledge; that he should try to find happiness
from the ruin of the happiness of his fellow beings, the inevitable
consequence of the building up of great fortunes, is absurd. Nothing
is real except His law and His power. Human life, like a bubble on
the surface of a mighty ocean, may burst and disappear at any moment.
“There is fruit on the trees in every forest, which everyone who likes
may pluck without trouble. There is cool and sweet water in the pure
rivers here and there. There is a soft bed made of the twigs of the
beautiful creepers. And yet wretched people suffer pain at the door of
the rich.”
“A man seeking for eternal happiness (moksha) might obtain it by a
hundredth part of the suffering which a foolish man endures in the
pursuit of riches.”
“Poor men eat more excellent bread than the rich; for hunger gives
it sweetness.”
Thus the doctrine of Maya has taught the people of India that all
material things are illusion.
Thus, guided by the vision of Universal Spirit, which sustains the
entire creation, and saved by the right comprehension of the doctrine
of Maya, the Hindus have developed a civilization in which people are
inspired largely by the ideals of human fellowship, by love and by
spiritual comfort. The wisdom of the Hindu’s retiring, passive attitude
toward life will not readily be acknowledged by his sturdy, aggressive,
and combative brothers in the western world. The Occidental’s
necessities of life have assumed such immense proportions, and social
relations have become so intricate and insecure, that a man’s whole
life is spent in making sure of mere existence, and in providing
against the accidents of the future. Such is the deadening influence
of the continual hurly-burly of every-day life around him, that he has
begun to regard life as synonymous with work. He has never himself
tasted the sweetness of security and peace, and when he hears anyone
else discuss it, he is likely to brand the doctrine as dreamy, unreal,
and impractical. “But is it surely wise to destroy the best objects of
life for the sake of life? Is the winning of wealth and the enjoying
of pleasure always a superior choice to that of spiritual freedom?” To
love leisure, ideals, and peace has been the criterion of Hindu wisdom.
Those who have closely studied the history of the Hindu nation know the
illumination, the peace, the joy, the strength that its lessons bring
into the lives of those simple, virtuous people.
Hindu civilization has been, on the whole, humane and wholesome, and
the life of the people of India has been one of unalloyed usefulness
and service to humanity. India has always been the home of various
religions and its people have always been divided into innumerable
faiths. At no period of its long history, however, has religious
persecution been practised by any class of people in the country.
“No war was ever waged in or outside of India by the Hindu nation in
the name of religion. India has never witnessed the horrors of an
inquisition; no holy wars were undertaken, and no heretics burned alive
for the protection of religion.” In the entire history of the Hindu
nation, not a drop of blood has ever been shed in the name of religion.
To those who have read the accounts of the bloody tortures and the
massacres that have been enacted for the sake of religion among the
Christian nations of the world, this _is saying much_.
The hobby of the Hindu is not Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Methodism,
or any other form of ism known to the western world; his interest
does not lie in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Sikhism. His passion is for
religion. “He loves not _a_ religion; _he lives for religion_.” It was
his love of religion which an old English missionary found among the
inhabitants of a small village in Northern India. Tired from walking
in the hot summer sun, this wandering friar lay down under the cool
shade of a banyan tree for rest, and fell asleep. How long he slept and
what brilliant dreams of His Master Lord Christ’s mercy this humble
mendicant had, no one knows. When in the late afternoon he opened his
eyes, he saw a beautiful young girl gently fanning his face, while her
little brother stood near, carrying in his arms a basket of choice
fruits and a jug of fresh, cool water. As the old friar’s eyes finally
met the maiden’s kindly gaze, he exclaimed: “At last after all these
weary travels I have found a Christian people!”
Religion to the Hindu is not one among the many interests in life. It
is the all-absorbing interest. The thought of a Universal Brotherhood
taught in his religion guides every social, commercial, and political
act of his life; while the hope of divine sanction inspires his efforts
in the intellectual and spiritual spheres. Religion is not the mere
profession of a certain theological faith, whose ritual may be observed
on appointed occasions and then be forgotten till time again comes for
worship and prayer. Religion is the “Yearning beyond” on the part of
man, and when once its essence is realized, the spirit must influence
every interest of the individual’s life. This is the way in which
religion is understood in India. “It is not a matter of form, but of
mind and will. To the Hindu, it is more religious to cleanse the soul
and build a good character than to mutter prayers and observe a strict
ritual. Morality should form the basis of religion, and emphasis should
be laid, not on outward observance, but on inward spiritual culture.”
“By deed, thought, and word, one should do good to (all) living
beings. This Harsha declared to be the highest way of earning
religious merit.”
The main purpose of life is the realization of Self, to which all other
interests must be completely subordinated. The material things of the
world are but a means to this end; and the end being religion, its
thought must not be lost sight of in arranging the details of life.
Hence, religion pervades the entire fabric of Hindu society. Study
Indian art, law, ethics, and political economy; everywhere you will
find the same thought of God and his all-embracing mercy underlying
them all.
The religion of the holy Jesus, who taught the doctrine of
non-resistance and whose Sermon on the Mount is resplendent with love
for humanity, has inspired many a Gandhi in the East. It has, however,
been the cause of much bloodshed and slaughter. Under its banner
slavery was sustained until the economic conditions throughout the
world made its abolition inevitable and imperative. The negro-traffic,
involving human brutality which makes us shudder and horrors which
freeze our blood and leave us aghast, was carried on by Christian
people with the express sanction of the most holy See and her august
lieutenants of God. As late as the end of the nineteenth century
China was subdued in the name of Christian religion. The immediate
provocation of the Boxer War was the murder of two white missionaries
in the interior of China. What deeds of chivalry the soldiers of
the western nations, who were sent to China for the defence of
Christianity, did, are recorded by Mr. Gowen in his _An Outline History
of China_ thus:
“But in Tung Chow alone, a city where the Chinese made no
resistance and where there was no fighting, five hundred and
seventy-three women of the upper classes committed suicide rather
than survive the indignities they had suffered. Our civilization
of which we boast so much is still something of a veneer.”
The religion of the Hindu requires him to practise love toward his
fellowman, tenderness toward animal life, and toleration of religious
diversities with other people. He believes that the Christians,
the Mohammedans, and the Jews may be as good men in their human
relationships as he and be on as straight a road to heaven as he is.
He does not question the divine revelation of the holy books of other
religions, nor does he deny “that Christ was the Son of God, and
Mohammed the Prophet of God.” All that he wishes in this life is that
he should be allowed to worship his Deity as he chooses. Says Krishna
in Bhagvat Gita, the Bible of the Hindus: “Whosoever come to Me,
through whatever form, through that I reach him; All men are struggling
to reach Me through various paths, and all the paths are Mine.”
“There is in the Hindu religion a doctrine called _Ahimsa_, namely,
non-injury to any form of life, which transcends any ethical ideal
known to the western ethics. The idea finds expression in the Society
for Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Animals.” The Hindu religion
is the only religion in the world which forbids the eating of animal
flesh. If all life is of one essence, if the animal pleading for life
suffers as truly as man under the same conditions, is it fair to kill
the animal for the sake of a simple pleasure? This gentle doctrine of
harmlessness has helped to develop in the Hindu character the noble
virtues of benevolence and universal love. The Hindu may lack the
so-called “manly virtues”; his spiritual nature may be shocked to hear
that perfectly civilized men and women kill animals for sport, that
they go on pleasure excursions on the ocean to shoot the flying fish.
The fish is harmless, and when shot merely falls into the ocean; merely
in shooting it lies the sportsman’s amusement. Which of the two extreme
doctrines is right, we shall leave the reader to judge for himself.
But the general doctrine of “harmlessness” must commend itself to the
enlightened moral sense of the West. A right comprehension of this
principle will assist greatly in getting rid of the curse of cruelty
and war.
Two features in the Hindu character which stand out most conspicuously
are truthfulness and chivalry towards women. The name for truth in the
Sanscrit language is _satya_, which means _to be_. “So truth in the
Hindu’s language means that which is. It may not necessarily be the
same as that which is believed by the majority of people. Again, the
highest praise given to the gods in the Veda is that they are truthful
and trustworthy. We know that people will ascribe to their gods the
same qualities which are held in highest regard among themselves.
The whole literature of ancient and modern India is full of episodes
proclaiming the virtue of truth. Rama’s answer to Bharata in the epic
poem of _Ramayna_ [quoted on page 13] is typical of the Hindu’s regard
for truth. In Mahabharata again we find the same devotion to a pledge
once given. Bhisma, for example, was willing to suffer death rather
than to disregard his pledge never to hurt a woman. The poets of the
Vedas, the sages of Upnishads, and the writers of the law books were
all inspired by feelings of profound love and reverence for truth. The
whole literature of India is vibrant with the same keynote--highest
regard for truth.”[22] A perusal of the accounts of the character and
culture of the people of India left by foreign travelers in ancient and
modern times shows that the traveler was most deeply impressed in each
instance by the Hindu’s love of truth. Let us examine a few of these
accounts.
The Chinese traveler Hiouen-thsang writes:
“Though the Indians are of a light temperament, they are
distinguished by the straightforwardness and honesty of their
character. With regard to riches, they never take anything
unjustly; with regard to justice, they make even excessive
concessions.... Straightforwardness is the distinguishing feature
of their administration.”[23]
The Mohammedan historian, Idris, writes thus in his Geography (11th
century):
“The Indians are naturally inclined to justice, and never depart
from it in their actions. Their good faith, honesty, and fidelity
to their engagements are well known, and they are so famous for
these qualities that people flock to their country from every
side.”[23]
Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer, says:
“You must know that these Abraiaman (Brahman) are the best
merchants in the world, and the most truthful, for they would not
tell a lie for anything on earth.”[23]
Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, K. C. B., who resided in India nearly
a quarter of a century, and who was during this period employed in
various capacities in which he came in direct contact with hundreds of
people every day, writes of the Indians thus:
“I have had before me hundreds of cases in which a man’s property,
liberty, or life depended upon his telling a lie, and he has
refused to tell it.”
At another place while speaking about the Indian merchants Major
Sleeman says:
“I believe there is no class of men in the world more strictly
honorable in their dealings than the mercantile classes of
India. Under native government a merchant’s books were appealed
to as ‘holy writ,’ and the confidence in them has certainly not
diminished under our rule.”
Finally we shall quote from a speech made by Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson
in 1913 when he was retiring from the high office of Finance Member of
the Indian Government:
“I wish to pay a tribute to the Indians whom I know best. The
Indian officials, high and low, of my department, through the
years of my connection with them, have proved themselves to be
unsparing of service and absolutely trustworthy. As for their
trustworthiness, let me give an instance. Three years ago, when it
fell to my lot to impose new taxes, it was imperative that their
nature should remain secret until they were officially announced.
Everybody in the department had to be entrusted with this secret.
Any one of these, from high officials to low-paid compositors of
the Government Press, would have become a millionaire by using the
secret improperly. But even under such tremendous temptation no
one betrayed his trust.”[24]
Comment after these unequivocal testimonies of eminent foreign
chroniclers of India is unnecessary. Where else in the world could
the experience of the Finance Member Sir Guy Wilson be repeated? If
everyone who visited the country was equally impressed by the truthful
character of the Hindus there must surely be meaning in the statement
that the Hindus are honest, truthful, and straightforward. Foreign
travelers have visited other lands during various historical periods,
but nowhere else were they so singularly impressed by the integrity of
the people as in India. But we are not obliged to look into ancient
histories to establish the Hindu’s honesty and love for truth. Go
to-day into any town of India. Walk in the business section of Bombay,
Calcutta, or Karachi and there you will find transactions amounting
to hundreds of thousands carried on day after day without a receipt
taken or given. An entry in the ledger books of both parties is all
that is held necessary in such cases. In my own family, low-paid
household servants drawing salaries up to a couple of hundreds a year
were intrusted in the course of their duties with the handling of many
thousands of dollars. And there was no least feeling of hesitation
or anxiety on the part of the family, not because the servants were
bonded, but because they were trusted.
A people who respect truth so highly must be lovers of learning. At
every period in the history of India, a genius has been recognized and
accorded assistance, even if his thesis ran contrary to the popular
prejudice of the day. Whether a new sage lifted his head in the field
of religion, or a thinker in the philosophical or scientific field was
born, he was always allowed an opportunity to express himself under the
most favorable circumstances. He did not have to fear persecution on
account of his ideas. So long as he had a message to offer to mankind,
he was assured an audience. “_Freedom of thought has always prevailed
among all classes of people in India._”
Chivalry toward women, which has been named as another outstanding
feature of Hindu character, has already been discussed in a previous
chapter.
To review in detail the achievements of Hindu civilization would
require volumes. India’s contributions to the world’s study of
philosophy, science, religion, and social organization are legion.
While the continent of Europe was still in a state of barbarism, the
Hindus invented the sciences of grammar, arithmetic, and astronomy.
They were already masters of a perfect alphabet, of a polished
language, and of the most complete systems of law and social ethics
that the world has ever seen. When the forefathers of the Anglo-Saxon
races roamed in forests with painted bodies, the Hindus had an
extensive literature, an established religion, and a developed
civilization. In fact, India has ever been esteemed as the birthplace
of the most natural of natural religions, as the nurse of sciences,
as the inventress of fine arts, and as a fertile home for all forms
of genius. Her lawgivers evolved the most wonderful fabric of social
organization, and composed systems of ethics worthy of the highest
praise; her philosophers invented six most profound systems of
philosophy famous for their subtlety of thought and acuteness of logic;
and her religious teachers formed the two greatest religions of the
world, which are to this day professed by more than half of the human
race. Even in the domain of natural sciences Hindus have advanced to
a high state of development, a fact which is little realized by most
people. Says Sir Monier-Williams:
“Indeed, if I may be at all allowed the anachronism, the Hindus
were Spinozites more than two thousand years before the existence
of Spinoza; and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin; and
evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of evolution had
been accepted by the scientists of our time, and before any word
like ‘evolution’ existed in any language of the world.”
The Hindus belong to a race of mankind which has outlasted all the
nations of the earth. “Before the days of Abraham India had achieved
a great civilization. Other civilizations had lived and died. Egypt,
Babylon, and Assyria--each came and went. After India had been
flourishing for more than two thousand years, Greece appeared and
passed on. The vast Roman Empire, dominating half the earth, paid huge
tribute to the art and industry of India, then closed its day while the
Hindu people continued to develop magnificent achievements in science,
literature, art, architecture, law and government, philosophy and
religion.” Lord Curzon, whose judgment undoubtedly was not biased in
favor of India, writes:
“India has left a deeper mark on the history, philosophy and
religion of mankind than any other terrestrial unit of the
universe.”
We have thus shown that as a nation the people of India have devoted
their efforts more to the development of the spiritual side of life
than the material. Unlike the aggressive and combative character of
western civilization, the prominent features of Hindu culture are a
passive and reflective attitude toward life. Compared with the record
of her sister nations in the West, the history of the country has been
happier, less fierce, and more peaceful and stable; the inhabitants
have been more careful and thoughtful, passive and tolerant.
Two great civilizations of the world--India and China--separated only
by a long border, have flourished for centuries, and not once in their
entire history have they been at war with each other. They early
realized the truth that the object of human life is not possession of
immense wealth and dominion over weaker races for the sake of physical
comforts. The aim of human effort, as they saw it, should be the
development of the “mental, moral, and spiritual powers latent in man.”
The Hindus evolved for themselves the idea of a God that was omnipotent
and all-merciful, of a human soul that was part of the Universal soul
and must be pure, of a life that has the divine spark in it and must
be boundless and consecrated to the service of all. Truthfulness,
generosity, kindness of heart, gentleness of behavior, forgiveness,
and compassion were taught in India as everyday precepts long before
any such thing as ethics existed in any other part of the world. Their
insistence upon kindness and charity are marks of true virtue; their
belief that ethics must form the basis of religion and a moral life is
the criterion of religious mind; their realization that all men are
brothers and that a virtuous slave is better than a corrupt master,
mark the Hindus as a race of highly intelligent and moral people.
Many of these statements may not be novel, but they have for us
a significant appeal in the fact that “they were thought out and
enunciated many centuries ago, and that they reflected life, not as
it might be imagined in a Utopia, but as it was actually lived by the
common people in the small villages and towns of India.”
Thus wrote Manu, the great law-giver of India:
“That man obtains supreme happiness hereafter who _seeks to do
good to all creatures_.”
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Max Müller.
[22] Max Müller.
[23] Quoted from Max Müller.
[24] Quoted from _Sister India_.
CHAPTER IV
THE CASTE SYSTEM OF INDIA
The caste system of India is the most widely discussed subject all over
the world; it is also the least understood. It is really surprising how
little people outside of India know about the institution of caste,
as it was originally evolved and perfected to form the basis of the
country’s social, political, and economic structure. Even students
of Hindu philosophy and arts have but a very dim perception of the
meaning of caste. You cannot talk about India for five minutes to any
person without being confronted with the questions: “How about your
caste system? Isn’t it true that the upper classes refuse to marry the
untouchables, and even to come into any kind of physical contact with
them? Have not the Brahmans of India always lorded over the classes
for their own benefit? Wouldn’t they seize the power again for their
own benefit if the English left India today? Don’t you see that we
have given freedom to the negroes in this country? They have the
same political rights as white men to vote and to hold office in our
government. They can come into our homes and do the cooking for us and
we feel no repulsion for them. Would you permit such association of the
classes in India? This equality of spirit is democracy, and until India
gives up her old aristocratic habits and changes to the new democratic
ideals of the age, she will never be free politically, morally, or
spiritually--talk what you will of your spirituality and ethics.”
I have heard such sermons over and over again from Americans of
every status in life. College professors and their wives, university
students, teachers, ministers, shirt dealers, insurance agents,
street-car conductors, bootblacks, and railroad porters have asked me
similar questions. In reply, I do not deny that one class of people
is called “untouchables” and that no other class will intermingle or
intermarry with them. I question most seriously, however, the truth of
the premise of the second statement. Brahmans have not always ruled the
country with purely selfish motives. The priestly class has wielded
immense influence in India’s political and social life at different
periods of its history, but they have used their power mostly for the
advancement of its culture and arts. To the Brahmans we owe in general
the elaboration and systematization of Hindu philosophy. The vast
treasures of Hindu literature and fine arts were both produced and
preserved by the same class, who for unknown ages have been the sole
repositories of knowledge in India. They have abused their authority at
several periods, but on such occasions a great reformer like Buddha or
Nanak always appeared among the Hindus and gave the corrupted priests
fresh warning for their mistakes.
The power of the Brahmans was at its lowest when the British acquired
India, and the Brahmans have found in the English rulers of the
country great champions, who have succeeded first in demoralizing
them and then in assisting them to demoralize in turn the rest of
Hindu society. England with its mighty governing hand of steel is the
strongest bulwark of aristocracy in India. And those who say things
to the contrary either do not know the facts or they deliberately
misrepresent them. We shall explain later how the subtle methods of our
foreign rulers work.
Lastly, I do not deny that India needs a reorganization of its
antiquated social system in order to fit properly into the modern
world. Her caste regulations have given to her numerous races and
classes only the negative benefits of peace and order at the expense of
the positive opportunities of expansion and movement. If India is to
live, and if it hopes ever to occupy its proper place among the family
of nations, it must cut out of its system the cancer of untouchability.
However manifest are the evils of India’s rigid caste system and the
necessity of its immediate overhauling, the contrast with America seems
so unjust. With typical complacency, the Americans declare that there
is no caste in the United States. Yet the American negro, although he
has a right to vote and to hold office, has absolutely no opportunity
to make use of these privileges. A child of ten has more chance of
beating the world’s heavyweight champion in a prize-fight than an
American negro with the highest moral and educational qualifications
has of becoming a governor of the smallest state in the Union. The
world knows that in most states the law prohibits marriage between
whites and negroes, while society everywhere will, in its own direct
and emphatic American way, ban the union of a white girl to a negro.
It is also true that in most states negro children are taught in
separate schools, and that on Sunday colored people must go for prayer
to separate churches. In the South, the center of the negro population
in the United States, negroes must travel in separate carriages
on railroad trains and use separate waiting rooms at the stations.
It is also a matter of history that on the average more than sixty
negroes are lynched in America every year by mobs for crimes, which if
committed under similar conditions by white persons, would be punished
through the regular course of law.
This condition in the United States does not justify the injustice of
caste in India or anywhere else in the world, but it may help to give
the sharp critic of the Hindu system a milder temper in his judgment by
reminding him that human nature everywhere has its virtues and faults.
We shall now proceed to examine the origin and the function of the
caste of India.
The Sanskrit word which has been wrongly translated into caste is
_Varna_, which means color. Thus the derivation of the term shows that
the original classifications in Hindu society were made on the basis
of color or race.[25] When the Aryans first migrated into India, they
found themselves face to face with hordes of savage tribes belonging to
inferior and aboriginal races. The position of those Aryan forefathers
was analogous to that which later confronted the immigrants of Europe
into the continents of America and Australia. While these latter
invaders have sought to simplify their race problems by exterminating
the original inhabitants of these countries, the early Hindus under
similar conditions accepted the inferior races as units in their social
structure and gave them a distinct place in the scale of labor, the
nature of their functions being strictly determined according to
their qualification. Even in our present stage of advancement we find
that caste prevails throughout the civilized world. Its ugly symptoms
are most prominent in America, Australia, and the white colonies of
Africa. In the United States, the lynching of negroes in the South and
the strict anti-Asiatic regulations of the state of California, and
in Australia the “Keep Australia white at all cost” spirit among the
population,--both of these show how deeply the spirit of race hatred
has penetrated into the system of the dominant white races of the
world. In the state of California, which is the center of oriental
population in America, law prohibits the Asiatics (Japanese, Chinese,
Hindus) from owning property and even from temporarily leasing lands
for farming purposes. Another statute rules against marriage between
whites and mongolians. The anti-Asiatic land lease regulations of
California have given a severe blow to the oriental population of
the state. The Japanese, Chinese, and Hindu immigrants to the United
States were chiefly agriculturists. In the early days of California
these frugal, honest, hard-working people contributed materially to the
development of agriculture. And the fact cannot well be denied that the
intensely hot regions of the Imperial Valley and the mosquito-ridden,
swampy northern counties were brought under cultivation almost
exclusively through the initiative of the Japanese and Hindu farmers of
California. The Chinese, in conjunction with the other oriental races,
had much to do in developing the largest asparagus growing region in
the world, represented by the deltas of the Sacramento Valley. Imperial
Valley is today the richest vegetable growing colony in the world.
The northern counties produce the finest qualities of California rice
in immense quantities, while the Delta asparagus has made California’s
name famous throughout the world as the producer of the choicest
qualities of both white and green asparagus. But the simple, peace
loving, industrious, and retiring Asiatics who toiled to make the name
of agricultural California great are barred by law from making even an
honest, meager living through farming on a small scale. And all because
of the caste of race! As one of the state senators exclaimed not long
ago: “_We must keep California safe from the yellow peril._” To which
an eminent Hindu publicist humorously replied: “I have seen no danger
of a yellow peril in California except that of the ‘Yellow Cabs’.”
When a small group of immigrants in any land find themselves surrounded
by an endless environment of barbarous tribes, we grant that the
situation is critical. The small group of Aryan immigrants in India,
however, unlike the American colonists, who exterminated most of the
original inhabitants of the country, sought to assimilate the barbarous
tribes, and hence found themselves confronted with a difficult problem.
They were inspired with the desire to preserve the purity of their
superior race and culture on the one hand, and to assimilate in their
social system the aboriginal races as well as they could, in order to
save them from annihilation. On the other hand, they felt it necessary
to safeguard their race by refusing to intermarry with people on a
lower scale of civilization. The Aryan forefathers of India, by giving
to the original population of the country a distinct place in its
social life, however low, have preserved them on the one hand from
extermination and on the other from slavery of person. “Was this not
the very solution which suggested itself to the American emancipator
Lincoln, when at a much later date he faced the same problems under
similar conditions? That adjustment of their racial differences that
had been declared wise and that had been practised by the Hindus many
thousand years ago, was at last acknowledged by the leaders of the
western world as the only salvation from their difficult situation.” In
the meantime, whole populations had been obliterated, and generation
after generation of human beings had been subjected to the tortures of
slavery,--to injustice and suffering of the most loathsome kind.
Before we judge the Hindu too harshly for refusing to drink the same
water as the non-Aryans and to eat food cooked by their hands, we must
remember that most of the aborigines of India were carrion eaters and
were more unclean than their Aryan neighbors. The Aryan would not
perform any act of life without previously taking his morning bath; he
was scrupulously clean in all his habits. He felt, therefore, that it
was merely a hygienic precaution not to allow the filthy barbarians
access to his person or his house. But it is the nature of caste to
convert temporary inhibitions into permanent barriers. In so far as
the early Hindu sociologists safeguarded the superior Aryan culture by
laying down strict rules--such as the refusals to intermarry and to
drink the same water--,they were in the right. Therein they recognized
the diversity of races and the necessity of keeping separate the
most highly developed and the least civilized. “But they erred most
dangerously in not grasping the fact that differences between human
beings are not fixed like the physical barriers of mountains, but are
mutable and fluid with life’s flow.”[26] “It is the law of life to
change its shape and volume through the impact of environment.” “Was
it not expected that contact with the civilized Aryans would develop
among the aboriginal inhabitants of India the wholesome qualities of
cleanliness, honesty, peace, and love characteristic of an advanced
race?”[26] To have thus bound in an iron frame the growing body of a
healthy people was not only an intellectual blunder, but a spiritual
crime. As a result, India, which is fundamentally one nation, is now
torn into innumerable castes and communities. And this is the cause of
her degradation and ruin. India, which should be the mightiest nation
of the world today, on account of her ancient culture and history and
the nobility and height of her spiritual idealism, is now fallen. If
there exists anywhere the law of Karma, the Hindus of the present age
are atoning for the sins of omission of their ancient forefathers. The
great, great, great grandchildren of those who denied their fellow
humans the natural rights of humanity have been cast out of the world’s
progressive life as the black pariahs of the race. In a recent decision
of the United States Supreme Court, which has ruled out the natives
of India as ineligible to the citizenship of America, the Honorable
Justice remarked: “Hindus of the high caste belonging to the Aryan
or Caucasian race, are not white persons.” Those Hindus who pride
themselves as _twice-born Brahmans_ should take notice of this language.
Let those who wish clamor loud about their Nordic superiority or
Brahmanic purity. What is needed in the world today is not the purity
of the race so much as the purity of the human soul and its motives.
How far the soul of the western people is clean I would not say, but
being myself a Hindu, I do know that the soul of India is black. By
denying to their fellow brethren their rightful position as human
beings, the upper classes of India have sinned most atrociously against
themselves and their gods. “Where the touch from a fellow human being
pollutes and his shadow corrupts, there the gods can never reside, or
truth prevail.” The laws of nature are immutable. You may err against
them for a short time, but you cannot afford to ignore their existence
forever. In the ultimate reckoning nature will fall upon you in a mad
fury and wreak for your mistakes a terrible vengeance. Thus, those who
set out to humble and degrade others are in turn humbled themselves.
“In the act of tyranny, the tyrant loses sight of his ideals and
develops the pride of power, which is another name for the lowering of
his soul. Like a man under the influence of liquor, he may feel for the
time powerful and strong; yet from the moment an individual loses hold
of truth, the insanity of cruelty and injustice starts its deadly work,
which will end in his ruin and death.”[27]
If the Hindus wish to survive, they must first humble themselves before
the members of the lower classes against whom they have long sinned
so terribly. They must purify their souls and promise to sin no more.
Unless they can do this, it is foolish to expect national freedom, and
it is idle to desire it. Those who will not grant freedom to those
below them, are themselves not fitted to have freedom.
The high-born Hindu should think over the situation in which he finds
himself today. When he despises the Mohammedans and the lower caste
Hindus to such an extent that the mere physical touch from the most
highly cultured and clean of their kind will spoil the cooking of the
wretchedest of the so-called high-caste, how in the name of God, man,
or the devil can he expect them to love and serve him? The entire
history of mankind does not afford one instance in which an oppressed
class has fought to protect the honor or power of its oppressors. It
is idle to hope that the oppressed classes of India will ever consent
to shed their life-blood to win the freedom of their country. They may
at some time make immense sacrifices in the service and at the bidding
of such a universal soul as Gandhi, or perhaps unite to drive out an
intensely hated foreigner like the British. True liberation, however,
can be brought to the nation only through the spiritual unity of its
peoples; under the present social regulations the hope of such a union
is not only visionary but idiotic.
My misguided Hindu brethren of India should remember what the followers
of Nanak, the Sikhs, have already done, and what the Arya Samajists are
doing now in the Punjab. They can do the same and much more! If they
need a leader to guide them, they can find no one holier or wiser in
the whole world today than Mahatma Gandhi, who will show them the light
as soon as they are ready to see it. Gandhi, the Mahatma (the Great
Soul), the leader of millions, has adopted an untouchable girl into
his family, whom Mrs. Gandhi is bringing up with their own children in
their home. This action has made Gandhi no smaller in the sight of God
or man. Will it make other Hindus smaller if they come forward and say
to their brethren: “Come, brothers, we embrace you. We shall forget the
past and be one again. Children of the same Father, we are all equal
before His law. There shall be, in future, no high or low among us.
Brahman and Sudra, Mohammedan and Parsi, we shall join hands and strive
to bring our motherland back to its former vigor.” Then and then alone
will the regeneration of India be possible.
We find that quite early in the country’s history Hindu society fell
into two main divisions, the Aryans and the non-Aryans. The former
were again divided into three orders represented by priests, warriors,
and Aryan farmers or merchants; while the non-Aryans constituted the
servant class or the Sudras. The division of society into the three
priestly, warrior, and merchant classes is a natural one. We find its
parallel in ancient Persia, where the division of the community into
priests, warriors, and husbandmen is shown in the Avesta. “In fact, the
caste sentiment prevails in greater or less degree in all monarchical
countries of the world. In mediæval Europe the sentiment of caste grew
so strong that it found expression in literature and law.”
The work of society in India was distributed among the four castes as
follows:
1. Brahmans, the priestly class, were the teachers of the rest of
mankind. Their function was to study the Vedic scriptures and various
branches of knowledge such as science and philosophy. They were to
offer spiritual guidance and to assist all other classes in the
performance of religious rites and ceremonies. Everyone depended
upon them for favor with the gods, for they were believed to be
specially favored to interpret the Veda. As a tribute to the Brahmans’
spirituality and learning, they were respected and loved by the other
classes. Their simple physical needs were amply provided for, so that
they were absolutely free from any form of material care. Within the
realm of their appointed duties they were the free, intellectual lords
of the Universe. This rule applied to the entire class of scholars and
religious teachers, and not to any chosen group among them. A parallel
state of intellectual freedom could be reached in the modern western
world if _all_ of its professors and religious instructors were born
with independent means. The Brahmans’ threefold function of teaching,
studying, and renunciation inspired among the masses of mankind the
feelings of reverence and affection for them. “A Brahman’s body was on
that account regarded as sacred, and to hurt him in any way was the
heaviest sin; while to kill a Brahman was an unpardonable sin which
could not be expiated even by penance through an unlimited number of
successive rebirths.”
While the priestly class thus received the love and homage of the
populace, they at the same time enjoyed many immunities and exemptions.
From certain punishments a Brahman was always exempt, and his high rank
secured him pardon for numerous crimes. On the other hand, special
rules were laid down for his class in order to preserve its sanctity.
“He could never drink, eat meat, or enjoy the coarser pleasures of
life.” In fact, the law codes of the different castes specify that for
certain offences a Brahman should be punished many times more than
a man belonging to the lower classes. This severity was due to the
belief of the law-givers of India that “greater knowledge demanded
greater restraint, and that with the raise in a person’s status his
responsibility must also rise.” The rule for a Brahman as given by
Vasistha is this: “Those are true Brahmans who, well-taught, have
subdued their passions, injure no living being, and close their fingers
when gifts are offered them.” Again, the same teacher has said that a
Brahman by birth is not a true Brahman but a slave unless he lives a
virtuous and clean life devoted to study and restraint. Says Manu, the
great law-giver of India: “A Brahman who does not live as a Brahman
is no better than a slave.” He could be made an outcast and demoted
socially into a lower rank.
Thus we find that while on the one hand their higher status won for
the Brahmans respect and reverence from the populace, on the other
hand their better position imposed upon them special restraints. It is
difficult for us to realize the wisdom of this dictum, yet the Hindu
law which prohibited its intellectual classes from possessing property
and otherwise amassing wealth was one of the most profoundly wise laws
in the social history of man. Looked at in conjunction with the text
“that a householder obtains high merit in this life and hereafter by
giving food, drink, and raiment to Brahmans,” the dictum against the
acquiring of wealth by the Brahman class will appear not only wise but
highly just. “Here was a class of scholars, leaders of mankind, who
were safe from the two great evils which are the curse of their noble
profession--the anxiety of making a livelihood and the temptation to
acquire fortunes.”
Lest it be supposed that the scholars of India lived on the charity
of other classes, a condition which is not regarded in the West as
honorable, it may be added here in the form of a corollary that charity
in India has an altogether different meaning from that in the West.
The motives behind such acts in India and the western countries are
quite different. According to Hindu theology, the giver of a gift and
not the recipient is the beneficiary. Absolutely no sense of pride or
self-importance is attached to the bestowing of gifts. Such deeds are
always accompanied by a sense of deep humility and thankfulness in the
heart of the householder. “It is the _dharma_, which may be translated
as the _man-ness of man_, of every householder to provide handsomely
for the needs of a Brahman, and he does this from a sense of religious
and social duty as well as from a desire for a religious blessing.”
It is as much the householder’s duty and joy in life to accommodate a
Brahman as it is the hope and delight of every mother to comfort her
child. To assist a strange scholar in his work is considered no more
an act of charity in India than is the support of a son at college
in Europe or America. The experiences of Mrs. Margaret E. Noble, an
Englishwoman of literary eminence, who went to India for a study of
its philosophy, are illustrative of the Hindu psychology in this
matter. She relates in her book _The Web of Indian Life_ the story of
her residence in the Hindu section of Calcutta. After news reached
the neighborhood that she had come to India as a student, she found
in front of her door one morning a jar of fresh milk and a basket of
provisions left by some unknown visitor. This experience was repeated
almost every day of the year until her departure. Yet the donors of
these simple presents never made themselves known to Mrs. Noble, nor
was she ever questioned by anyone of her neighbors regarding her views
on Hindu life. They did not care whether she was friendly or hostile
to them in her judgments. The fact that she had come among them as a
_student_ was sufficient reason for them to provide for her. _India is
the only country in the world where poets and priests never starve._
2. _Khashatriyas_ or the royal and military class were the rulers of
the country, and their duty was to protect the other classes. The
Khashatriyas constituted the knightly caste of India. They were brave
and chivalrous. The enjoyment of the senses and of pleasures subject to
such laws as may protect the weak from the strong were the legitimate
rewards of this class. Many a deed of extreme heroism committed by this
class under the noble impulse to protect justice or to serve Cupid is
related in the epic history of India.
“Chivalry taught them the lessons of gaiety and enjoyment. They learned
to admire and desire beauty. Unlike the austere ascetic Brahmans,
passion and pleasure in the company of woman was sought by the gallant
suitors of the warrior class. Women were often objects of jealousy, and
they always exercised great power through their beauty and charm. Fine,
full-blooded creatures they were, who knew how to get and give love.
Both men and women loved superbly and passionately. Their passions were
strong and consuming and their thirst for love great.” Theirs was a
love about which a poet sung:
“_Give me your love for a day,_
_A night, an hour;_
_If the wages of sin are death,_
_I am willing to pay._
_Oh! Aziza, whom I adore,_
_Aziza, my one delight,_
_Only one night--I will die before day,_
_And trouble your life no more._”
(LAWRENCE HOPE.)[28]
3. The _Vaishya_ or the merchant and husbandman class constituted the
body of the people. Theoretically they were the equals of the other
classes of the Aryan family; but “practically this class together
with the fourth caste, namely the Sudras, formed the majority of the
population, whose duty it was to support and serve the two upper
classes.” They managed the business life of the country and were
responsible for the maintenance of the other classes. They tilled the
soil and managed the entire commercial and industrial affairs of the
land. This class was again subdivided into various groups according to
their profession. This classification of the middle class of India on
the basis of occupation was founded upon a thorough understanding of
the laws of heredity--“the purpose being to develop the best qualities
through heredity transmission. Thereby an attempt was made to develop
further the brain of the scholar, the skill of the craftsman, and the
ingenuity of the trader through the cumulative influence of careful
selection from generation to generation.” By thus shutting different
trades and professions into air-tight compartments the Vaishya deprived
themselves of the benefits of the infusion of young blood into the old
system. While on the one hand it had the wholesome effect of reducing
the evils of competition to the minimum, on the other it has gradually
tended “to turn arts into crafts and genius into skill.”
4. _Sudras_ or the servant class constituted the entire aboriginal
non-Aryan population of the country, whose function was to do
mechanical service in the household life of the community. According
to Manu the highest merit for this class was to serve faithfully the
other three classes. The Sudras performed the most degrading tasks, and
were allowed to come into contact with the Aryan population only as
menials. On account of their filthy habits these aboriginals were not
allowed a close approach to the persons of the higher classes--hence
the origin of the term “untouchable.” Yet the fact stands that even
the “untouchables” are members of the Hindu family group. At marriages
and other festivals gifts are freely exchanged between them and the
upper classes. For a householder it is equally important to participate
in the ceremonies of the village “untouchables” and his own cousins.
I remember very clearly how as a young boy I was instructed by my
mother to bow each morning before every elder member of the family, nor
forgetting the servants, or Sudras.
Bhagavad Gita, the Bible of the Hindus, lays down the following rules
for the different castes of India:
“The duties of the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, as also
of Sudras, are divided in accordance with their nature-born
qualities. Peace, self-restraint, austerities, purity,
forgiveness, and uprightness, knowledge, direct intuition,
and faith in God are the natural qualities of the Brahmin.
Of the Kshatriyas, bravery, energy, fortitude, dexterity,
fleeing not in battle, gift and lordliness are the nature-born
qualities. Agriculture, protection of cows, merchandise, and
various industries are the nature-born duties of the Vaishyas.
Conscientiousness in menial service is the nature-born duty of the
Sudras. A man attains perfection by performing those duties which
he is able to do.”
This division of duties among the different castes “in accordance with
their nature-born qualities” needs special notice. We find here that
the original distinctions between different classes were made on the
basis of their natural qualifications. “The purpose of the early Hindu
sociologists was to design a society in which opportunity was allowed
to everyone for only such experience as his mental and spiritual
status was capable.” In the beginning, castes were not fixed by iron
barriers, nor were the occupations and professions of the people
hereditary. There was freedom for expansion, and everyone enjoyed the
privilege of rising into the higher scales of social rank through a
demonstration of his power and ability to do so. It is a curious fact
of Hindu history that nearly all of its incarnations,--namely, Buddha,
Rama, Krishna--belonged to the second or military caste. But the Hindu
castes had already lost their flexible natures as early as the sixth
century B.C., when Buddha once again preached the doctrines of equality
to all classes of people. Through the influence of Buddhist teachings
and for over a thousand years during which Buddhism reigned over
India, artificial hereditary caste divisions among peoples were almost
entirely demolished and forgotten. “Buddha gave to the spirit of caste
a death-blow. He refused to admit differences between persons because
of their color or race. He would not recognize a Brahman because he
was born a Brahman. On the other hand he distinguished between people
according to their intellectual status and moral worth.”[29] He who
possessed the qualities of “peace, self-restraint, self-control,
righteousness, devotion, love for humanity, and divine wisdom” was
alone a true Brahman. To the Buddhist, caste was less important than
character. His Jataka tales preached this doctrine in a simple but
highly eloquent manner:
“_It is not right_
_To call men white_
_Who virtue lack;_
_For it is sin_
_And not the skin
That makes men black._
_Not by the cut of his hair,_
_Not by his clan or birth,_
_May a Brahmin claim the Brahmin’s name,_
_But only by moral worth.”_[30]
About 600 A. D. however, when Buddhism declined and the Brahmans
regained their power, caste was once again established on the old
hereditary lines. Since that time the influence of the vicious system
has prevailed, except when it was checked by such teachers as Chaityna
who have regularly appeared at critical periods of the country’s
history. Nanak’s influence in modern times has been the strongest in
breaking down the barriers of caste. He was born near Lahore (Punjab)
in the year 1469 A.D. and became the founder of the Sikh religion. He
recognized the equality of all human beings, irrespective of their
color, rank, or sex. In one of his most popular verses he says:
“One God produced the light, and all creatures are of His
creation. When the entire universe has originated from one source,
why do men call one good and the other bad?”
Even in the present day the followers of Nanak are a tremendous force
in demolishing caste. In a recent general assembly of the Sikhs
held at Amritsar (the official headquarters of the Sikh religion)
it was announced that at all future gatherings of the community,
and in all of its free kitchens everywhere, cooks belonging to the
“untouchable” class shall be freely employed and even given special
preference. As a beginning of this policy the usual pudding offering
of the Sikhs was distributed by “untouchable” men and women to a
group of nearly twenty thousand delegates at the convention. Prior
to this, resolutions condemning “untouchability” had been passed on
innumerable occasions at social service conferences; but never before
had the ages-old custom been trampled upon, in a practical way, by any
other community belonging to the Hindu religion. May this auspicious
beginning inaugurate a triumphant conclusion. It is sincerely hoped
that the leadership of Gandhi and the virile followers of Nanak in
removing the curse of “untouchability” will soon be recognized by the
entire Hindu community. This alone could insure the enthusiastic Hindu
nationalists political economic freedom for their country. Had it not
been for the selfishness of the Brahmans during the mediæval period,--a
selfishness which has tended to segregate the Hindus into different
sections through the strict caste restrictions of various types,--India
would occupy today the vanguard of the world’s progress instead of
the rear. In spite of her present weakness India possesses, however,
within herself a marvelous reserve force which will enable her to pass
through this crisis. While the haughty West, which has always delighted
in taunting the Hindus for the latter’s caste, has not even begun to
examine her problem of race-conflict, India is already on its way to
solving her own caste problem. Gradually, as the younger generation
among the Hindus gains more power, “untouchability” and its allied
diseases will disappear. Personally, I believe that the leaders of
India are headed in the right direction, and that soon equality among
members of the different castes will be established in the country as
a permanent part of its social structure.
“In the Hindu system, once the people were divided into different
castes, equality of opportunity for all prevailed within their
own castes, while the caste or group as a whole had collective
responsibilities and privileges.” Each caste had its own rules and
code of honor; and so long as a man’s mode of living was acceptable
to his caste-fellows, the rest of the community did not care about it
at all. On the other hand, a man’s status in the outside world or his
wealth made no change in his rank within the caste. I shall offer an
illustration from my own experience. During the mourning week after the
death of a near relative of His Royal Highness, the ruling Prince of
the native State of Kashmir, Her Royal Highness gave a state reception
to the sympathizing friends. Whereas she greeted the wives of the two
highest officials in the State, the English Resident and the Prime
Minister, with a nod of the head from her seat, Her Royal Highness
had to receive standing the humble housekeeper in my brother’s home,
because the latter belonged to the same caste as the ruling prince.
“Society thus organized can be best described by the term Guild
Socialism.”
Another distinctive feature in the study of its caste is the communal
character of Hindu life. Hindu society was established on a basis of
group morality. No set of rules were held binding on all classes alike,
but within a given caste the freedom of the individual was subordinated
to the interest of the caste. Men lived not for their own interests
or comfort, but for the benefit of the community. It was a life of
self-sacrifice, and the concept of duty was paramount. The good of
caste, of race, of nation stood first, and that of the individual
second. Social welfare was placed before the happiness of the
individual. “For the family sacrifice the individual, for the community
the family, for the country the community, for the soul all the world.”
Which of the two ideals, the communism of the Hindu or the
individualism of the Westerner is the better? Says Rabindranath Tagore:
“Europe may have preached and striven for individualism, but where else
in the world is the individual so much of slave?”
On the other hand it must be remembered also that all ideals are
good only so far as they assist the individual to develop his full
manhood, and the moment they begin to hamper him in his natural growth
and thwart his own will they lose their value. So long as the caste
regulations of the Hindus assisted them in their spiritual development,
they were justified. But the moment they began to lose their original
character and became an oppression in the hands of the priestly
classes, who used their authority to stifle the nation’s spirit, they
had lost their usefulness and invited the ridicule and censure of all
intelligent thinkers.
Where finer feelings of fraternal human-fellowship prevailed over
self-interest and individual gain, in such a community no voice cried
in vain at the time of distress. When deaths in the family left small
children parentless, or sickness and misfortunes made homes penniless,
the protection of other members of the caste was always available for
those in need. Orphans and helpless members within the caste were taken
into the homes of caste brothers and carefully brought up and fed
with the rest as members of the family. Here the lucky and the unlucky
were brought up side by side. Thus there has never arisen in India
the necessity of orphanages and poorhouses. As was said by an eminent
English writer:[31] “For to the ripe and mellow genius of the East it
has been always clear that the defenceless and unfortunate require a
_home_, not a barrack.”
Let us now review the entire subject of caste thus: The Aryan invaders
of India found themselves surrounded by hordes of aboriginal and
inferior races. Under similar conditions the European invaders of
America and Australia exterminated the original population by killing
them off, or converted them into human slaves; the Hindu Aryans
avoided both of these inhumanities by taking the native inhabitants
of the land into their social life. They gave these inferior peoples
a distinct place in the scale of labor, and assigned to them the
duties of menial service, for which alone they were qualified at the
time. Further, to safeguard their superior culture, the Aryan leaders
laid down strict rules against intermarriage with their non-Aryan
neighbors. And as these aboriginals were filthy in their habits and
mostly carrion-eaters, it was also ordained as a measure of hygienic
precaution that the Aryans should not be allowed to drink the same
water or eat food cooked by non-Aryan hands. This was the beginning of
untouchability.
Simultaneously with this racial division rose a functional division
among the Aryan population separating it into three orders of priests,
warriors, and husbandmen. This constituted the four-fold division of
the Hindu caste system--the Aryan inhabitants of the land forming the
first three castes of Brahmans, Khashatriyas, and Vaishyas, while the
non-Aryans constituted the fourth caste of servants or Sudras. At first
these divisions into different castes were flexible and persons in the
lower castes were allowed to rise into the ones higher by virtue of
their merit. We find that most of the historic religious teachers of
the Hindus, namely, Rama, Krishna, and Buddha, came from the second
class.
Gradually, however, the castes began to lose their flexible nature,
and before the birth of Buddha in the year 600 B. C. they had already
acquired a hereditary character. The teachings of Buddhism had the
tendency to break down the hereditary barriers of caste, and during a
thousand years of its reign the people of India had forgotten their
caste boundaries. “Around 600 A. D. Buddhism began to decline and the
Brahman priests gained fresh prestige. They set up the different castes
on the old hereditary lines once again, and, except for a few local
breaks through the appearance of such leaders as Nanak in Punjab and
Chaityna in the South, the spirit of caste has prevailed throughout
Hindu India since the decline of Buddhism.” The greatest champion of
the lower classes who has appeared in recent times is the peaceful
leader of India’s silent revolution, Mahatma Gandhi. He has spoken and
written against untouchability and its allied evils more bitterly and
longer than against other vital political and economic wrongs of the
country. He has told his countrymen time and again that India’s soul
cannot become pure so long as untouchability stays amongst the Hindus
to defile it. And as a proof of his own sincerity in the matter he has
adopted in his own family an untouchable girl whom he calls the joy of
the household.
The evils of caste are quite manifest. It has tended to divide the
Hindu community into various groups and thus destroyed among them
unity of feeling which alone could insure national strength. Lack of
united power opened the way for foreign invasions, which, again, has
resulted in dragging India down from her former place of glory to her
present state of humiliation and ruin. Yet alongside with the many
evils of India’s caste system several advantages have accrued from
it. Its existence has tended to make the people of India conservative
and tolerant. With the institution of caste they felt so well
fortified within themselves that they did not fear the influx of new
ideas into their midst. India offered a safe and welcome home to the
oppressed minorities from other lands. The Parsis and Jews came and
settled there. They were not merely tolerated but welcomed by the
Hindus, because the latter, assured of their own wonderful powers of
resistance, had nothing to fear from outside influences. The Hindu
caste system may be described as “the social formulation of defence
minus all elements of aggression.” Since the beginning of her history
India has been subjected to numerous invasions, but she has stood
against them successfully. In the cultural sense India, instead of
being conquered, “has always succeeded in conquering her conquerors.”
The invaders belonging to different civilizations and races have come
and disappeared, one after the other; but India still survives.[32]
Again, in the Hindus’ scheme of the division of labor care was taken to
assign to every man his task and remuneration in such a manner as to
avoid all unnecessary friction among the different classes. Its value
will be readily recognized by those who are familiar with the evils
of modern industrialism, arising from the intense hatred within the
different classes.
Finally, it must be said to the credit of Hindu sociologists that, at
least, they had the courage to face the problem of race-conflict with a
sympathetic mind. The problem was not of their creation. The diversity
of races existed in India before these new Aryan invaders came into
the country. The caste system of the Hindus was the result of their
sincere endeavors to seek a solution of their difficult problem. Its
object was to keep the different races together and yet afford each one
of them opportunity to express itself in its own separate way. “India
may not have achieved complete success in this. But who else has? It
was, at least, better than the best which the West has thought of so
far. There the stronger races have either exterminated the weaker ones
like the Red Indians in America, or shut them out completely like the
Asiatics in Australia and America.” “Whatever may be its merits,” says
Tagore, “you will have to admit that it does not spring from the higher
impulses of civilization, but from the lower passions of greed and
hatred.”
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Max Müller.
[26] Tagore.
[27] Tagore.
[28] Quoted from Otto Rothfield--_Women of India._
[29] E. W. Hopkins.
[30] Jataka, 440. Quoted from E. W. Hopkins _Ethics of India_.
[31] Margaret E. Noble.
[32] Tagore.
CHAPTER V
GANDHI--THE MAN AND HIS MESSAGE
Mohandass Karamchand Gandhi is today the acknowledged leader of
three hundred million inhabitants of India. He is the author of the
Non-violent Non-coöperation movement, adopted by the Indian National
Congress as a weapon of passive resistance wherewith to win India’s
freedom. In March, 1922, because of his public activities in India
as a leader of this movement, Gandhi was convicted on the charge of
promoting disaffection towards the British crown, and was sentenced
to six years’ incarceration. He was released from prison, however, in
1924 by a special order of the British Labor Government. Since that
time he has remained the most powerful and beloved public figure in the
nationalist movement of India.
His movement has aroused great interest among the different peoples of
the world. But the information given to the outside public has been so
vague and disconnected that it has led to very erroneous conclusions.
So much of pure nonsense in the form of praise and ridicule of Gandhi
and his activities has been passed around that it has become difficult
for the earnest student to separate the real from the fictitious.
Therefore it is only fitting that we should make a careful study of the
man and his message.
A sufficient number of scholars, students, missionaries, travelers,
and writers have studied him carefully enough to enable them to
form a reliable opinion. Irrespective of their missions, opinions,
and designations, these investigators all agree as to the magnetic
personality of Gandhi and to the purity of his private and public
life. “His sweet, subtle sense of humor, and his profound confidence
in the ultimate triumph of truth and justice as against falsehood and
oppression never fail to influence and inspire everyone who comes his
way.” Even the very judge who, seven years ago, sentenced him to six
years’ incarceration could not resist the temptation to call him “a
great patriot and a great leader,” and to pay him the tribute: “Even
those who differ from you in politics look up to you as a man of high
ideals and as leading a noble and even saintly life.”
Gandhi, born at Ahmedabad (India) in October, 1869, had all the
advantages of an early education under careful guidance. His father,
Karamchand Gandhi, a wealthy man and a statesman by profession,
combined in himself the highest political wisdom and learning together
with an utter simplicity of manner. He was respected throughout Deccan,
in which (province) he was prime minister of a native state, as a
just man and an uncompromising champion of the weak. “Gandhi’s mother
was an orthodox Hindu lady, with stubborn religious conceptions. She
led a very simple and dignified life after the teachings of the Hindu
Vedas.” She was a very jealous and affectionate mother and took a deep
interest in the bringing up of her children. Gandhi, the favorite
“Mohan” of his parents, was the center of all the cares and discipline
of his loving relatives. He inherited from his father a determination
of purpose and the tenacity of a powerful will, and from his mother
a sense of religious and moral purity of life. After graduating from
a native school in his home town, he was sent to England to finish
his education. He fitted himself for the bar at the University of
London, and on his return to India was admitted as an advocate of
the High Court of Bombay. While still in London, Gandhi acquired the
habit of passing the best part of his days in solitude. From the
temptations of the boisterous London life he could find escape only
when he sat alone by his window, violin in his lap, and thought of
an unconquered spiritual world in his mind. A product of the early
favorable circumstances and all the advanced education, Gandhi is thus
a highly cultured gentleman with finished manners. He possesses a happy
temperament with but a tinge of melancholy pervading his life and
conduct.
As a patriot and leader of an oppressed people struggling for freedom,
Gandhi belongs in the category of the world’s great liberators with
such men as Washington, Lincoln, and Mazzini. As a saintly person who
has dedicated his life to preaching the gospel of love and truth, and
who has actually lived up to his preachings, he ranks among such of the
world’s great sages as Buddha, Jesus, and Socrates. On the one hand a
dangerous political agitator, an untiring and unresting promoter of
a huge mass revolution; yet on the other an uncompromising champion
of non-violence, a saint with the motto, “Love thine enemies,” Gandhi
stands unique, supreme, unequalled, and unsurpassed.
His theory of a non-violent mass revolution aiming at the dethronement
of a powerful, militaristic government like the British Bureaucracy in
India, though strange and impractical at first thought, is yet very
simple and straightforward.
“Man is born free, and yet,” lamented Rousseau, “he is everywhere
in chains.” “Man is born free, why should he refuse to live free?”
questions Gandhi. Freedom is man’s birthright. With unlimited liberty
in thought and action man could live in perfect peace and harmony on
condition that all men would rigidly observe their own duties and keep
within their own rights. “But men as they are and not as they should
be, possess a certain amount of animal nature. In some it is subdued,
while in others, let loose, it becomes the cause of disturbance and
dislocates all freedom.” To safeguard against the encroachment of such
natures on the “natural rights” and privileges of others, men have
organized themselves into groups called states. “By so doing, each
voluntary member of this state foregoes some of his personal rights
in exchange for certain individual privileges and communal rights to
be secured under its protection. The government of a country is thus
a matter of voluntary choice by its people and is organized to carry
on such functions as shall conduce to the highest good of the maximum
number.” When it becomes corrupt, when instead of protecting its
members from every form of evil and disorder, it becomes an instrument
of the forces of darkness and a tool of corruption, citizens have
an inalienable right to demand a change in the existing order. They
might first attempt peaceful reform, but should such attempts come to
nought, the right of revolution is theirs. It is indeed their right
to refuse their coöperation, direct or indirect, with a government
which has been responsible for the spiritual decadence and political
degeneracy of their country. Gandhi explains his attitude thus:
“We must refuse to wait for the wrong to be righted till the
wrong-doer has been roused to a sense of his iniquity. We must
not, for fear of ourselves or others having to suffer, remain
participators in it. But we must combat the wrong by ceasing to
assist the wrong-doer directly or indirectly.
“If a father does an injustice, it is the duty of his children to
leave the parental roof. If the head-master of a school conducts
his institution on an immoral basis, the pupils must leave school.
If the chairman of a corporation is corrupt, the members must
wash their hands clean of his corruption by withdrawing from it;
even so, if a government does a grave injustice, the subject must
withdraw coöperation, wholly or partially, sufficiently to wean
the ruler from his wickedness. In each of the cases conceived by
me, there is an element of suffering whether mental or physical.
Without such suffering, it is impossible to attain freedom.”
* * *
“The business of every god-fearing person is to dissociate himself
from evil in total disregard of consequences. He must have faith
in a good deed producing only a good result; that in my opinion
is the Gita doctrine of work without attachment. God does not
permit him to peep into the future. He follows truth although the
following of it may endanger his very life. He knows that it is
better to die in the way of God than to live in the way of Satan.
Therefore whoever is satisfied that this Government represents
the activity of Satan has no choice left to him but to dissociate
himself from it....”
For a period of more than twenty-five years, Gandhi coöperated with the
British Empire whenever it was threatened and stood in need. Though
he vehemently criticized it when it went wrong, yet he did not wish
its destruction until his final decision of non-coöperation in 1920.
“He felt, that in spite of its abuses and shortcomings, the system was
mainly and intrinsically good.” Gandhi joined in the World War on the
side of the Allies. When the war started, he was in England, where he
organized an Ambulance Corps from among the group of his compatriots
residing there. Later on, in India, he accepted a position in the
British Recruiting Service as an honorary officer, and strained himself
to the breaking point in his efforts to assist Great Britain.
“Gandhi gave proofs of his loyalty to the Empire and of his faith
in British justice by valuable services also on the occasion of the
Anglo-Boer war (1899) and the Zulu revolt (1906). In recognition of
his services on the two latter occasions he was awarded gold medals,
and his name was each time mentioned in the dispatches. Later, on his
return to India, he was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal by Lord
Hardinge in recognition of his humanitarian services in South Africa.”
These medals he determinedly, though regretfully, returned to the
Viceroy of India on August 1, 1920. The letter that accompanied them
besides other things contained this statement:
“Your Excellency’s light-hearted treatment of the official crime,
your exoneration of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Mr. Montague’s dispatch
and above all the shameful ignorance of the Punjab events and
callous disregard of the feelings of Indians betrayed by the House
of Lords, have filled me with the gravest misgivings regarding
the future of the Empire, have estranged me completely from the
present Government and have disabled me from tendering, as I have
hitherto whole-heartedly tendered, my loyal coöperation.”
His statement in court at the time of his conviction in March, 1922,
when he pleaded guilty, reads:
“From a staunch loyalist and coöperator, I have become an
uncompromising disaffectionist and non-coöperator.... To preach
disaffection towards the existing system of government has became
almost a passion with me.... If I were set free, I would still do
the same. I would be failing in my duty if I did not do so.... I
had to submit to a system which has done irreparable harm to my
country, or to incur the mad fury of my people, bursting forth
when they heard the truth from my lips.... I do not ask for mercy.
I am here to invite and to submit to the highest penalty that can
be inflicted upon me for what in law is a crime, but which is the
first duty of every citizen.... Affection cannot be manufactured
or regulated by law.... I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected
towards a government which, in its totality, has done more harm to
India than any previous system.... It is the physical and brutal
ill-treatment of humanity which has made many of my co-workers and
myself impatient of life itself.”
The chief distinction between Gandhi and other liberators, the chief
difference between him and other leaders was that he wanted his
countrymen to love their friends, and yet not to hate their enemies.
“Hatred ceaseth not by hatred; hatred ceaseth by love” was his sole
plea to his fellowmen. He enjoined them to love their oppressors, for
through love and suffering alone could these same oppressors be brought
to see their mistakes. Thus, following his public announcement of
the non-coöperation policy he embarked upon an extensive tour of the
country. Wherever he went he preached disaffection towards the existing
government.
Gandhi’s whole political career is inspired by a deep love for his
suffering countrymen. His heart burns with the desire to free his
country from its present state of thraldom and helpless servitude.
India, the cradle of civilization and culture, for ages the solitary
source of light and of wisdom, whence issued the undying message of
Buddhist missionaries, where empires flourished under the careful
guidance of distinguished statesmen, the land of Asoka and Akbar, lies
to-day at the tender mercy of a haughty conqueror, intoxicated and
maddened by the conquest of a helpless people. “Her arts degenerated,
her literatures dead, her beautiful industries perished, her valor
done,” she presents but a pitiful picture to the onlooking world.
Gandhi, the heroically determined son of India, feels the impulse
to save his motherland from the present state of “slow torture,
emasculation, and degradation,” and suggests to his countrymen the
use of the unique yet powerful weapon of peaceful non-coöperation.
Through this slow process of “self-denial” and “self-purification” he
proposes to carry his country forward till the goal of its political
emancipation and its spiritual freedom is fully realized. Political
freedom might be secured by force, but that is not what Gandhi wishes.
Unsatisfied with mere freedom of the body, he soars higher and strives
for a sublimer form of liberty, the freedom of the soul. To the
question, “Shall India follow the stern example of Europe, and fight
out its struggle for political and economic independence?” Gandhi
replies with an emphatic and unqualified “No.” “What has Europe’s
powerful military and material organization done to insure its future
peace?” Romain Rolland answers: “Half a century ago might dominated
right. To-day things are far worse. Might is right. Might has devoured
right.”
No people, no nation has ever won or ever can win real freedom through
violence. “Violence implies the use of force, and the force is
oppressive. Those who fight and win with force, ultimately find it both
convenient and expedient to follow the line of least resistance; and
they continue to rely upon force in time of peace as well, ostensibly
to maintain law and order, but practically to suppress and stifle
every rising spirit. The power may thus change hands, yet leave the
evil process to continue without a moment’s break. Non-violence does
not carry with it this degeneration which is inherent in the use of
violence.” Gandhi is highly eloquent on this score when he says:
“They may forget non-coöperation, but they dare not forget
non-violence. Indeed, non-coöperation is non-violence. We are
violent when we support a government whose creed is violence. It
bases itself finally not on right but might. Its last appeal is
not to reason, nor the heart, but to the sword. We are tired of
this creed and we have risen against it. Let us ourselves not
belie our profession by being violent.”
“One must love one’s enemies while hating their deeds; hate Satanism
while loving Satan” is the principal article of Gandhi’s faith, and
he has proved himself worthy of this lofty profession by his own
personal conduct. Through all the stormy years of his life he has stood
firm in his noble convictions, with his love untainted, his faith
unchallenged, his veracity unquestioned, and his courage undaunted. “No
criticism however sharp, no abuse however bitter, ever affected the
loving heart of Gandhi.” In the knowledge of his life-long political
associates (members of the Indian National Congress and of other such
organizations), Gandhi has never, even in moments of the most violent
excitement, lost control of himself. When light-hearted criticisms
have been showered on his program by younger and more inexperienced
colleagues, when the bitterest sarcasms have been aimed at him by older
associates, he has never revealed by so much as a tone of his voice the
slightest touch of anger or the slightest show of contempt. _His limit
of tolerance has not yet been reached._
During the last ten years of his political life in India when he guided
the destines of his countrymen as leader of a great movement, Gandhi
again gave unmistakable proofs of the vastness of his love for mankind.
That his love is not reserved for his compatriots alone, but extends
even to his bitterest enemies, he revealed clearly throughout the most
critical period of his life. His enemies, the British bureaucrats,
tried to nip his movement in the very bud by using all the power
at their command to discredit him in the eyes of his countrymen
and of the world outside. Calumnies were heaped upon him from all
sides. He was called a “hypocrite,” an “unscrupulous agitator,” a
“disguised autocrat.” The vast number of his followers were branded
as “dumb-cattle,” and hundreds of thousands of them were flogged,
imprisoned, and in some cases even shot for no other offense than that
of wearing the coarse hand-spun “Gandhi cap” and singing the Indian
national hymn. Even in such trying moments he remained firm in his
faith, and loyal to his professions. Evidence as to the undisturbed,
peaceful condition of his mind and spirit is amply furnished by the
following statements which he gave to the Indian press in those
turbulent days:
“Our non-violence teaches us to love our enemies. By non-violent
non-coöperation we seek to conquer the wrath of English
administrators and their supporters. We must love them and pray to
God that they might have wisdom to see what appears to us to be
their error. It must be the prayer of the strong and not of the
weak. In our strength must we humble ourselves before our maker.
“In the moment of our trial and our triumph let me declare my
faith. I believe in loving my enemies.... I believe in the power
of suffering to melt the stoniest heart.... We must by our
conduct demonstrate to every Englishman that he is as safe in
the remotest corner of India as he professes to feel behind the
machine gun.”
* * *
“There is only one God for us all, whether we find him through the
Bible, the Koran, the Gita, the Zindvesta or the Talmud, and He
is the God of love and truth. I do not hate an Englishman. I have
spoken much against his institutions, especially the one he has
set up in India. But you must not mistake my condemnation of the
system for that of the man. My religion requires me to love him as
I love myself. I have no interest in living except to prove the
faith in me. I would deny God if I do not attempt to prove it at
this critical moment.”
It must be remembered that all this was at a time when Mr. Gandhi
held undisputed sway over the hearts of his three hundred million
countrymen. Setting aside all precedence his countrymen unanimously
elected Gandhi dictator of the Indian National Congress with full power
to lead the country in emergencies. A word from him was sufficient to
induce the millions of India to sacrifice their lives without regret or
reproach. No man ever commanded the allegiance of so great a number of
men, and felt at the same time so meek.
Through the successive stages of “self-denial” and “self-purification”
he is gradually preparing his countrymen for the final step in his
program, the civil disobedience. Once the country has reached that
state, if his program is carried through, the revolution will have been
accomplished without shedding a drop of blood. Henry David Thoreau
once wrote: “When the officer has resigned office, and the subject
has refused allegiance, the revolution is accomplished.” That will
be the dawn of day, hopeful and bright. The forces of darkness and
of evil will have made room for those of light and of love. But this
will not come to pass unless Gandhi’s policy is literally adopted, and
ultimately triumphs. He explains:
“The political non-violence of the Non-coöperators does not stand
the test in the vast majority of cases. Hence the prolongation of
the struggle. Let no one blame the unbending English nature. The
hardest fiber must melt before the fire of Love. When the British
or other nature does not respond, the fire is not strong enough.
“If non-violence is to remain the policy of the nation, we are
bound to carry it out to the letter and in the spirit. We must
then quickly make up with the English and the Coöperators. We must
get their certificate that they feel absolutely safe in our midst,
that they regard us as friends, although we belong to a radically
different school of thought and politics. We must welcome them to
our political platform as honored guests; we must receive them on
neutral platforms as comrades. Our non-violence must not breed
violence, hatred, or ill-will.
“If we approach our program with the mental reservation that,
after all, we shall wrest power from the British by force of arms,
then we are untrue to our profession of non-violence.... If we
believe in our program, we are bound to believe that the British
people are not unamenable to the force of affection, as they
undoubtedly are amenable to the force of arms.
“Swaraj is a condition of mind, and the mental condition of India
has been challenged.... India will win independence and Swaraj
only when the people have acquired strength to die of their own
free will. Then there will be Swaraj.”
Gandhi has been bitterly assailed by both friends and foes for having
consented to render assistance to the cause of the World War in
contradiction to his own teachings of non-resistance. Gandhi has been
accused of inconsistency and even his most ardent admirers often fail
to reconcile his doings during the war with the doctrine of “Ahimsa”
(non-violence to any form of life). In his autobiography he has tried
to answer these objections, which we shall now examine. He writes:
“I make no distinction, from the point of view of _ahimsa_,
between combatants and non-combatants. He who volunteers to serve
a band of dacoits, by working as their carrier, or their watchman
while they are about their business, or their nurse when they are
wounded, is as much guilty of dacoity as the dacoits themselves.
In the same way those who confine themselves to attending to the
wounded in battle cannot be absolved from the guilt of war.”
This statement shows that his reasons for going into the war were
different from those of the Quakers, who think it is an act of
Christian love to succor the wounded in war. Gandhi, on the contrary,
believes that the person who made bandages for the Red Cross was as
much guilty of the murder in war as were the fighting combatants.
So long as you have consented to become a part of the machinery of
war, whose object is destruction, you are yourself an instrument
of destruction. And however you may argue the issue you cannot be
absolved from the moral guilt involved. The man who has offered
his services as an ambulance carrier on the battlefield is helping
the war-lords just as much as his brother who carries arms. One is
assisting the cause of the war-lord by killing the enemy, the other by
helping war to do its work of murder more efficiently.
I am reminded of the argument I once had with a very conscientious
friend of mine, who is a stubborn enemy of war and yet who recalls the
following incident in his life with a sorrowful look in his face. One
day while he was living in London, a young friend of his came to say
his farewell before leaving for the front. Poison gas had been just
introduced into the war as a weapon. The combatants were instructed to
procure gas masks before departing, but the supply was limited, and his
young soldier friend had to go without a gas mask. He left his permit,
however, with the request that my friend should get the mask when the
next supply came in and send it to his regimental address. Two days
later the gas mask was mailed to this boy soldier at the battle front.
Before it reached there, however, the soldier was already dead. On the
first day after the arrival of the regiment, it was heavily gassed by
the enemy, and all of those who had gone without the protective masks
were killed. The parcel was returned to my friend at his London address
with the sad news that his friend was here no more. He was bitterly
disappointed that the mask had not reached the beloved young man in
time to save his life. I interpret the whole affair in this way: In
sending a gas mask to this English soldier, my pacifist friend was
conspiring, however unconsciously, to kill the Germans. He wanted to
save his friend from death, but did he realize that at the same time he
was wishing more deaths on the enemy? He was, in fact, helping to save
one young man in order that this young man might kill more young men on
the other side. How does Gandhi justify his action in joining the war,
then? We shall let him speak once again. He writes:
“When two nations are fighting, the duty of a votary of _ahimsa_
is to stop the war. He who is not equal to that duty, he who has
no power of resisting war, he who is not qualified to resist war,
may take part in war, and yet whole-heartedly try to free himself,
his nation, and the world from war.
“I had hoped to improve my status and that of my people through
the British Empire. Whilst in England, I was enjoying the
protection of the British fleet, and taking as I did shelter under
its armed might, I was directly participating in its potential
violence. Therefore if I desired to retain my connection with the
Empire and to live under its banner, one of three courses was open
to me: I could declare open resistance against the war, and in
accordance with the law of Satyagraha, boycott the Empire until it
changed its military policy, or I could seek imprisonment by civil
disobedience of such of its laws as were fit to be disobeyed, or I
could participate in the war on the side of the Empire and thereby
acquire the capacity and fitness for resisting the violence of
war. I lacked this capacity and fitness, so I thought there was
nothing for it but for me to serve in the war.”
How far Mr. Gandhi’s explanation can answer the objections of his
critics we shall leave our readers to judge for themselves. The
question is debatable, and admits of differences of opinion. If his
argument does not carry conviction with other believers in the doctrine
of non-resistance, Gandhi will not be surprised or offended. What an
eminent pacifist friend of mine wrote me after she had read the answer
of Gandhi may be summed up thus:
Gandhi’s argument is entirely wrong. When she was asked to help the Red
Cross, she was also told that she had the protection of the army and
the navy. To this she replied that she did not wish the protection of
the army and the navy. As a conscientious objector to war, she felt it
her duty to resist war to the best of her ability and power. When she
stood against war with her full might, instead of being a mere cog in
the wheel of war, she was like a loose bolt in the machinery. Thus in
her resistance “she was a positive force against war.”
Such in brief is the man Gandhi. As a specimen of the praise and
affection that have been heaped upon him from all quarters, we shall
in conclusion give the sketch of Gandhi from the artistic pen of his
honest admirer, Mr. Romain Rolland:
“Soft dark eyes, a small frail man, with a thin face and rather
large protruding eyes, his head covered with a little white
cap, his body clothed in coarse white cloth, barefooted. He
lives on rice and fruit and drinks only water. He sleeps on the
floor--sleeps very little, and works incessantly. His body does
not seem to count at all. His expression proclaims ‘infinite
patience and infinite love’. W. W. Pearson, who met him in South
Africa, instinctively thought of St. Francis of Assisi. There is
an almost childlike simplicity about him. His manner is gentle
and courteous even when dealing with adversaries, and he is
of immaculate sincerity. He is modest and unassuming, to the
point of sometimes seeming almost timid, hesitant, in making an
assertion. Yet you feel his indomitable spirit. Nor is he afraid
to admit having been in the wrong. Diplomacy is unknown to him,
he shuns oratorical effect or, rather, never thinks about it, and
he shrinks unconsciously from the great popular demonstrations
organized in his honor. Literally ‘ill with the multitude that
adores him’ he distrusts majorities and fears ‘mobocracy’ and the
unbridled passions of the populace. He feels at ease only in a
minority, and is happiest when, in meditative solitude, he listens
to the ‘still small voice within’.”
CHAPTER VI
INDIA’S EXPERIMENT WITH PASSIVE RESISTANCE
In a previous chapter we discussed the character and spirit of Mahatma
Gandhi into whose hands has fallen the duty of leading a country
of 300 million people through a political revolution. It must be
understood, however, that Gandhi is the leader of the revolution and
not its creator. Modern thinkers universally admit that individuals or
small groups of reformers do not make revolutions. “Agitators or men
of genius and ability in a backward community might stir up sporadic
revolts and cause minor disturbances, but no human agency can ever
create mass revolutions. A successful revolution requires a state of
political and social evolution ready for the desired transformation.
The history of the world’s important political and social revolutions
furnishes sufficient evidence in support of this theory.”[33] The
insurrection of the slaves headed by the able Spartacus, in spite of
their early admirable victories, could not overthrow Roman domination.
The early attempts of the proletarian revolutionists, supported as
they were by leaders of genius and daring, were doomed to failure.
India’s revolt against English rule in 1857 was ably led, yet it
could not succeed. In all these cases the same argument holds. The
time was not ripe for the desired change. In the present case, Gandhi
has been eminently successful because India was prepared beforehand
for a mass revolution. Passive resistance, or no passive resistance,
the Indian revolution was bound to come as a necessary consequence
of the country’s long continued political oppression and economic
exploitation. The people were already growing desperate when a united
mass uprising was precipitated by the English government’s brutal
actions of 1919. During the war the English parliament had promised a
measure of self-government to the people of India as a reward for their
loyalty to the Empire. Early in 1919, when the country was agitating
for the promised self-government, the English government of India
forcibly passed against the unanimous opposition from all sections of
the people, special repressive measures in order to check the spread
of nationalism in India. Peaceful demonstrations directed against the
newly passed bills were organized all over the country. Once again the
government acted harshly in using inhuman methods in the form of public
flogging, crawlings and so forth, in the effort to suppress the rising
spirit of freedom throughout the land. Just at this time Gandhi came on
the stage, and proposed to his countrymen the use of passive resistance
for the accomplishment of their political revolution. His resolution
of non-violent non-coöperation was officially adopted by the Indian
National Congress, and the nation in its fight for freedom pledged
itself to non-violence. What are passive resistance and non-violent
non-coöperation?
“The ethics of passive resistance is very simple and must be known to
every student of the New Testament. Passive resistance in its essence
is submission to physical force _under protest_. Passive resistance
is really a misnomer. No thought is farther away from the heart of the
passive resister than the thought of passivity. The soul of his ideal
is resistance, and he resists in the most heroic and forceful manner.”
The only difference between his heroism and our common conception
of the word is in the choice of the weapon. His main doctrine is to
avoid violence and to substitute for physical force the forces of
love, faith, and sacrifice. “Passive resistance resists, but not blow
for blow. Passive resistance calls the use of the physical weapon in
the hands of man the most cowardly thing in life.” Passive resistance
teaches men to resist heroically the might and injustice of the untrue
and unrighteous. But they must fight with moral and spiritual weapons.
They must resist tyranny with forbearance, hatred with love, wrong with
right, and injustice with faith. “To hurl back the cowardly weapon of
the wicked and the unjust is useless. Let it fall. Bear your suffering
with patience. Place your faith in the strength of the divine soul
of man.” “The hardest fibre must melt before the fire of love. When
the results do not correspond, the fire is not strong enough.” “The
indomitable tenacity and magic of the great soul will operate and
win out; force must bow down before heroic gentleness.” This is the
technique of passive resistance.
The actual application of this principle to politics requires
explanation. Individuals or groups have a right to refuse submission
to the authority of government which they consider unjust and brutal.
“The people of India,” says Gandhi, “have been convinced, after long
and fearful trials, that the English government of India is Satanic.
It is based on violence. Its object is not the good of the people, but
rapine and plunder. It works not in the interests of the governed, and
its policies are not guided by their consent. It bases itself finally
not on right but on might. Its last appeal is not to the reason, nor
the heart, but to the sword. The country is tired of this creed and it
has risen against it.” Under these conditions the most straightforward
course to follow is to seek the destruction of such an institution. The
people of India can destroy the thing by force, or else they can refuse
their coöperation with its various activities and render it helpless;
then refuse their submission to its authority and render it useless.
Just consider the case of a country where all government officers
resign from their offices, where the people boycott the various
governmental institutions such as public schools and colleges, law
courts, and legislatures; and where the taxpayers refuse to pay their
taxes. The people can do all this without resort to force, and so
stop the machinery of the government dead, and make it a meaningless
thing without use and power. To quote Thoreau once again: “When the
officer has resigned office, and the subject has refused allegiance,
the revolution is accomplished.” This is exactly what the people of
India have set out to do by their present policy of passive resistance.
However simple the theory may be, the practice of it is difficult
and perilous. When a people resort to these peaceful means for the
accomplishment of political revolution, they must be prepared to
undergo unlimited suffering. The enemy’s camp will be determined
and organized; from it will issue constant provocations and brutal
exhibitions of force. Under these difficult circumstances, the only
chance for the success of the passive resister is in his readiness
for infinite and courageous suffering, qualities that in turn imply a
powerful reserve of self-control and an utter dedication to the ideal.
Evidently to prepare a nation of 300 million people for this tremendous
task must take time and require great patience and courage. To quote
Gandhi:
“Non-coöperation is not a movement of brag, bluster, or bluff.
It is a test of our sincerity. It requires solid and silent
self-sacrifice. It challenges our honesty and our capacity for
national work. It is a movement that aims at translating ideas
into action.”
The people of India are moving on the road to freedom with dignity.
They are slowly nearing their goal. On their way the passive resisters
are learning their lessons from bitter experience, and are growing
stronger in faith every day. That they are headed in the right
direction and are quietly pushing forward we do know in a definite way,
but when they will emerge victorious we cannot say. To help the reader
to catch the subtle spirit behind this movement, we shall quote a few
more lines from the pen of its leader:
“I am a man of peace. I believe in peace. But I do not want peace
at any price. I do not want the peace that you find in stone. I do
not want the peace that you find in the grave; but I do want peace
which you find embedded in the human breast, which is exposed to
the arrows of the whole world, but which is protected from all
harm by the power of the Almighty God.”
The wearing of home-spun cloth by all classes of people, rich and
poor alike, is one of the most important items in the non-coöperative
program. Yet every time I have tried to justify it before my American
friends, I have received as response a shrug of the shoulders. Not only
the layman, but serious students of economics have replied: “That is
going back into mediæval ways. In these days of machinery home-spinning
is sheer foolishness.” Yet one does not have to be an economist to know
that “labor spent on home-spinning and thus used in the creation of
a utility, is better spent than wasted in idleness.” The majority of
the population of India lives directly upon the produce of the soil.
They remain in forced idleness for a greater part of the year. There
are no industries in the country, cottage or urban. So the people have
nothing to occupy them during their idle months. Before the English
conquest, agricultural India had its supplementary industries on which
the people could fall during their idle time. But these industries have
been completely destroyed by the English fiscal policy for India, which
was formulated with the desire to build England’s own fabric and other
industries upon the ruins of India’s industries. The country produces
more cotton than is needed for its own use. Under ordinary conditions
this cotton is exported out of the country, and cloth manufactured in
the mills of England is imported into the country for its consumption.
For want of a substitute people are forced to buy this foreign cloth.
And they are so miserably poor that the great majority of them cannot
afford one meal a day. Nothing could be more sensible for these people
than to adopt home-spinning during their idle hours. This will help to
save them, partially at least, from starvation. Let me quote Gandhi on
this subject:
“I claim for the spinning-wheel the properties of a musical
instrument, for whilst a hungry and a naked woman will refuse to
dance to the accompaniment of a piano, I have seen women beaming
with joy to see the spinning-wheel work, for they know that they
can through that rustic instrument both feed and clothe themselves.
“Yes, it does solve the problem of India’s chronic poverty and is
an insurance against famine....
“When spinning was almost compulsorily stopped nothing replaced
it except slavery and idleness. Our mills cannot today spin
enough for our wants, and if they did, they will not keep down
prices unless they were compelled. They are frankly money-makers
and will not therefore regulate prices according to the needs of
the nation. Hand-spinning is therefore designed to put millions
of rupees in the hands of poor villagers. Every agricultural
country requires a supplementary industry to enable the peasants
to utilise the spare hours. Such industry for India has always
been spinning. Is it such a visionary ideal--an attempt to revive
an ancient occupation whose destruction has brought on slavery,
pauperism and disappearance of the inimitable artistic talent
which was once all expressed in the wonderful fabric of India and
which was the envy of the world?”
The people of India have made mistakes in the past, and they
will probably make others in the future. But that in sticking to
non-violence they are fulfilling the noblest ideal ever conceived by
man, and in staying loyal to the spirit of passive resistance they
are following a truer and a richer light will not be questioned. Will
humanity at large see the wisdom of passive resistance? To me in our
present state that seems very doubtful. It will be easy to convince the
common man of the virtue and wisdom of non-violence. But unfortunately
the reins of our destiny are not in the hands of common people. Those
who hold the power over the nations of the world have other interests
to look after than the common interests of the average man. They are
pledged to the service of other masters whose welfare is not the
welfare of the whole race. “The world is ruled at the present day by
those who must oppress and kill in order to exploit.” So long as this
condition continues, there is little hope for the reformation of human
society. We must all suffer because we would not learn.
Mankind will not always refuse to listen to the voice of reason. A
time will come when the great masses all over the world will refuse to
fight, when exploitation and wars will cease, and the different groups
of the human race will consent to live together in coöperation and
peace.
An illustration of the might of passive resistance was furnished during
the conflict between the British Government of India and the Akali
Sikhs over the management of their shrines. This incident shows to what
heights of self-sacrifice and suffering human beings can reach when
they are under the spell of noble idealism. Sikhs are a virile race of
fighting people. They are all members of a religious fellowship and
form nearly one-sixth of the population of the province of Punjab
in the northwest part of India. They constitute by themselves a very
important community, which is closely bound together by a feeling of
common brotherhood. They all go by the name of Singh, meaning the
lion, and are rightly proud of their history, which though brief in
scope of time, is yet full of inspiring deeds committed by the Sikh
forefathers in the defense of religious freedom and justice during the
evil days of a few corrupt and fanatic Moghul rulers of India. As a
rule Sikhs belong to the agriculturist class and both men and women are
stalwart and healthy-looking. Their men are distinguished by their long
hair and beards. They are born with martial characteristics and are
naturally very bold and brave in their habits. Once aroused to sense of
duty towards the weak and the oppressed, they have always been found
willing to give their lives without remorse or regret. Sikhs constitute
a major portion of the military and police forces of India and of
several British colonies. Those tourists who have been in the East will
recall the tall, bearded Sikh policemen of the British principalities
of Shanghai and Hongkong. Since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Sikhs have
always been regarded as the most loyal and devoted subjects of the
British Crown in India. “On the battlefields of Flanders, Mesopotamia,
Persia, and Egypt they have served the Empire faithfully and well.
Their deeds of heroism were particularly noticed during the most trying
moments of the World War.”
Before the British acquired the province in 1849 Sikhs were the rulers
of the Punjab. During the period of their rule Sikh princes had made
rich grants of land and other property to the historic temples and
shrines of their religion. Because of the introduction of irrigation
canals some of these properties have acquired immense values in recent
years, their annual incomes in several cases running up to a million
rupees or more.
The Sikhs have always regarded the temple properties as belonging
to the community. And when it was brought to the notice of their
progressive leaders that the hereditary priests at some of the historic
and rich Sikh centers had become corrupt and were wasting the temple
money in vicious pleasures, the Sikhs organized the Central Shrine
Management Committee. The object of the committee was to take away
the management of all important Sikh shrines from the corrupt priests
and to vest it in the community. The committee was first organized in
November, 1920, and its members were elected on the basis of universal
franchise open to both sexes. The method of procedure followed by the
committee was that of arbitration. A local sub-committee, consisting
of the leading Sikhs in the neighborhood, was formed to watch over the
affairs of every shrine. This sub-committee was to act in coöperation
with the temple priest, who was henceforth to be a subordinate and not
the sole master. Whenever the priests agreed to arbitrate the matter in
a fair manner, they were allowed free use of their residence quarters
and were awarded liberal salaries for household expenses. By this
method the Central Shrine Committee in a short time became masters of
some of the very rich and important Sikh shrines.
While in several of the smaller places such transfer of ownership was
accomplished through peaceful means, in some of the bigger temples
the community had to undergo heavy losses in life. For instance at
Nanakana Sahib, the Jerusalem of the Sikhs, a band of one hundred
unarmed followers of the Central Committee were surrounded by a band
of armed hirelings of the priest. They were first shot at, then
assaulted with rifle butt-ends, and later cut into small pieces or
burnt alive after being previously soaked with kerosene oil. The priest
personally supervised this whole affair of daylight butchery which did
not finish until the last one of the Sikhs had been consumed by the
bloody bonfire. Later it was discovered that the priest had prepared
for the bloodshed long before, and that he had hired the armed ruffians
and barricaded the temple premises after consultation with the local
English Justice of the Peace. The leading dailies of the country
openly stated that the English civil commissioner was a co-partner in
the crime, but the government took no notice of the fact. The Hindu
population was not surprised that the priest who had murdered one
hundred innocent, inoffensive, devout Sikhs escaped capital punishment
in the British courts or that in his prison he was surrounded with all
the princely luxuries of his former palace.
Guru Ka Bagh is a historic Sikh temple, situated at a distance of
nearly eight miles from the central headquarters of the Sikhs in the
city of Amritsar. Through an agreement drawn between the Central
Shrine Committee and the temple priest on January 31, 1921, Guru Ka
Bagh had come under the management of a local board assisted by the
priest. Six months later, presumably at the suggestion of the civil
commissioner, the priest burned all the temple records and drove the
representative of the Central Committee out of the temple premises;
whereupon the Central Committee took full charge of the temple. They
were in uncontested possession of the premises until trouble started,
a year later, from the arrest of five Akali Sikhs, who had gone out to
cut firewood from the surrounding grounds attached to the Guru Ka Bagh.
A formal complaint was obtained by the civil commissioner from the
ousted priest to the effect that in cutting wood for use in the temple
kitchen the Akalis were trespassing on his property rights. The cutting
of wood on the premises went on as usual until the police began to make
wholesale arrests of all so-called trespassers.
This procedure continued for four days till the police found out
that large numbers of Akalis (immortals) were pouring in from all
sides, everyone eager to be arrested in protecting the rights of his
community. Then the police began to beat the Akali bands with bamboo
sticks six feet long and fitted with iron knobs on both ends. As soon
as Akalis, in groups of five, started to go across for cutting wood,
they were assaulted by the police armed with these bamboo sticks and
were mercilessly beaten over their heads and bodies until they became
unconscious and had to be carried away by the temple ambulance workers.
The news of this novel method of punishment at once spread throughout
the country like wild fire and thousands of Sikhs started on their way
to Amritsar. The government closed the sale of railroad tickets to all
Akali Sikhs wearing black turbans, which constituted their national
uniform. The various highways leading into the city of the Golden
Temple, Amritsar, were blocked by armed police. But after a call for
them had been issued at the official headquarters of the Central Shrine
Management Committee, nothing could stop the Akalis from crowding into
the city. Where railroads refused passage they walked long distances
on foot, and when river and canal bridges were guarded against them,
both men and women swam across the waters to reach their holy temple
at Amritsar. In the course of two days the huge premises of the Golden
Temple were filled with Akalis of every sort and kind--boys of twelve
with feet sore with blisters from prolonged walking, women of all
ages--and still many were fast pouring in.
“Among them were medaled veterans of many wars who had fought for
the English in foreign lands and won eminent recognition, and had
now rushed to Amritsar to win a higher and nobler merit in the
service of their religion and country. They had assembled there to be
ruthlessly beaten and killed by the agents of the same government for
whose protection they had fought at home and across the seas.” These
old warriors, disillusioned by their English friends, who were now
conspiring to take from them the simple rights of worship in their own
temples, had not lost their independence and courage. They had always
been the first to leap before the firing guns of the enemy on the
battlefields of England; they were first again here to throw themselves
at the feet of their Central Shrine Committee, willing to sacrifice
their lives at its bidding. All were eager, one more than the other,
to offer themselves for the beating at Guru Ka Bagh.
Seeing that their efforts to stop the Akalis from gathering at Amritsar
had been wholly unsuccessful, the Government issued strict orders
against any person or group of persons from proceeding to Guru Ka Bagh.
Sizing up the whole situation, the assembled leaders of the community
represented in the Central Shrine Committee at once resolved on two
things. First, the community would contest its right of peaceful
pilgrimage and worship at Guru Ka Bagh and other temples until the
last among the Sikhs had been killed in the struggle. Secondly, they
would steadfastly adhere to the letter and spirit of Mahatma Gandhi’s
teachings of non-violence. Thirdly, they decided to send Akalis to Guru
Ka Bagh in batches of a hundred each, in direct defiance of the orders
of the British Government. Before starting on the march, each Akali
was required to take an oath of strict non-violence; that he would not
use force in action or speech under any provocation whatsoever; that
if assaulted he would submit to the rough treatment with resignation
and humility; that whatever might be the nature of his ordeal he would
not turn his face backward. He would either reach Guru Ka Bagh and go
out for chopping wood when so instructed, or he would be carried to the
committee’s emergency hospital unconscious, dead or alive.
The first batch started towards Guru Ka Bagh on August 31, 1922, after
previously taking the vow of non-violence. The Akalis were dressed in
black turbans with garlands of white flowers wrapped around their
heads. On their way, as the Akalis sang their religious hymns in
chorus, they were met by a band of policemen armed with bamboo sticks.
Simultaneously the Akalis sat down and thrust their heads forward to
receive blows. An order was given by the English superintendent, and
on rushed the police with their long bamboo rods to do their bloody
work. They beat the non-resisting Sikhs on the heads, backs, and other
delicate parts of their bodies, until the entire one hundred was maimed
and battered and lay there in a mass unconscious, prostrate, bleeding.
While the volunteers were passively receiving blows from the police,
the English superintendent sportively ran his horse over them and back.
His assistants pulled the Sikhs by their sacred hair, spat upon their
faces, and cursed and called them names in the most offensive manner.
Later, their unconscious bodies were dragged away by the long hair and
thrown into the mud on either side of the road. From the ditches they
were picked up by the ambulance workers and brought to the emergency
hospital under the management of the Central Shrine Committee.
In this way batches of one hundred, pledged to the principle of
non-violence, were sent every day to be beaten by the police in this
brutal fashion and then were picked up unconscious by the ambulance
service. After the tenth day Akalis were allowed to proceed freely on
their way. But the beatings in Guru Ka Bagh at the stop where wood for
kitchen use had been cut, continued till much later. After a few over
fifteen hundred non-resistant and innocent human beings had been thus
sacrificed, several hundred of whom had died of injuries received and
many others had been totally disabled for life, the Government withdrew
the police from Guru Ka Bagh and allowed the Sikhs free use of the
temple and its adjoining properties.
It was an acknowledgment of defeat on the part of the British
Government and a definite victory for the passive resisters.
Non-violence had triumphed over brute force. The meek Sikhs had
established their moral and spiritual courage beyond a doubt. Those who
earlier had laughed at Gandhi’s doctrines now began to reconsider their
opinions and wondered if it were not true that the soul force of man
was the mightiest power in the world, more powerful than the might of
all its armies and navies put together. “Socrates and Christ are both
dead, but their spirits live and will continue to live.” Their bodies
were destroyed by those who possessed physical force, but their souls
were invincible. Who could conquer the spirit of Socrates, Christ, or
Gandhi when that spirit refused to be conquered? At the time of the
Guru Ka Bagh incident the physical Gandhi was locked behind iron bars
in a jail of India, but his spirit accompanied every Sikh as he stepped
across the line to receive the enemy’s cowardly blows.
The amazing part of this whole story is the perfect peace that
prevailed throughout its entire course. The program of passive
resistance was carried to completion without one slip of action on the
part of the passive resisters. No community in the whole length and
breadth of India is more warlike and more inflammable for a righteous
cause than the Sikhs; and nothing is more provoking to a Sikh than an
insult offered to his sacred hair. Yet in hundreds of cases their
sacred hair was smeared with mud and trampled upon, while the bodies of
non-resisting Sikhs were dragged by their hair in the most malicious
manner by the police; but the passive resisters remained firm in their
resolve to the last and thereby proved their faith both in themselves
and in their principles.
Those who have not grasped the subtle meaning of passive resistance
will call the Akali Sikhs cowards. They will say: “Well, the reason
why the Akalis did not return the blows of the police was because they
were afraid; and it was cowardice and not courage that made them submit
to such insults as the pulling of their sacred hair and so forth. A
truly brave person, who has a grain of salt in him, will answer the
blows of the enemy under those conditions and fight in the defense of
his honor until he is killed.” Although we do not agree with the first
part of our objecting friend’s argument, we shall admit the truth of
his statement that it takes a brave man to defend his honor at the
risk of death itself. Yet we hold that the Akali who, while defending
his national rights, voluntarily allowed himself to be beaten to death
without thoughts of malice or hatred in his heart against anybody was a
more courageous person than even the hero of our objecting friend. Why?
To use Gandhi’s illustration: “What do you think? Wherein is courage
required--in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon or with a
smiling face approaching a cannon and being blown to pieces? Who is the
true warrior--he who keeps death as a bosom-friend or he who controls
the death of others? Believe me that a man devoid of courage and
manhood can never be a passive resister.”
Let us stretch the point a little further in order to make it more
clear. During the martial law days at Amritsar in 1919, the commanding
officer ordered that all persons passing through a certain lane, where
previously an Englishwoman had been assaulted by a furious mob, should
be made to crawl on the bellies. Those living in the neighborhood had
submitted to this humiliation at the point of British bayonets. Later,
when Mahatma Gandhi visited the lane, he is reported to have made a
speech from the spot which may be summarized thus: “You Punjabees, who
possess muscular bodies and have statures six feet tall; you, who call
yourselves brave, submitted to the soul-degrading crawling order. I am
a small man and my physique is very weak. I weigh less than a hundred
pounds. But there is no power in this world that can make _me_ crawl
on my belly. General Dyer’s soldiers can bind my body and put me in
jail, or with their military weapons they can take my life; but when
he orders me to crawl on my belly I shall say: ‘Oh foolish man, don’t
you see, God has given me two feet to walk on? Why shall I crawl on my
knees, then?’” This is an instance of passive resistance. Under these
circumstances, would you call Gandhi a coward? You must remember this
distinction between a coward and a passive resister: a coward submits
to force through fear; while a passive resister submits to force _under
protest_. In our illustration of the crawling order those persons who
had submitted to the order because they were afraid of the punishment
involved if they disobeyed it were cowards of the first degree. But
Gandhi would be a passive resister, and you would not call him a
coward, would you?
Let me give you a sample of the sublime heroism displayed by the Akalis
at Guru Ka Bagh. In one instance the policeman’s blow struck an Akali
with such violence that one of his eyeballs dropped out. His eye was
bleeding profusely, but still he walked forward towards his goal until
he was knocked down the second time and fell on the ground unconscious.
Another Akali, Pritipal Singh, was knocked down eight times. Each time
as soon as he recovered his senses, he stood on his feet and started
to go forward, until after the eighth time he lay on the ground wholly
prostrate. I have known Pritipal Singh in India. We went to school
together for five years. Pritipal was a good boy in every way. He was
the strongest person in our school and yet the meekest of all men. He
had a very jolly temper, and I can hear to this day his loud ringing
laugh. Inoffensive in his habits, he was a cultured and a loving
friend. When I read his name in the papers and later discovered how
cruelly he suffered from the injuries which finally resulted in his
premature death, I was indeed sorrowful. That such a saintly person as
Pritipal Singh should be made to go through such hellish tortures and
that his life should be thus cruelly ended in the prime of youth was
enough to give anyone a shock. But when I persuaded myself that with
the passing of that handsome youth there was one more gone for truth’s
sake, I felt peaceful and happy once more.
Lest the reader be at a loss to know what this whole drama of horrible
tortures on the one hand and supernatural courage on the other was all
about, we shall give the gist of the whole affair as follows:
At the time when the issue was precipitated in Guru Ka Bagh the Central
Shrine Management Committee had already acquired control over many
of the rich Sikh shrines, and become a powerful force in the uplift
of the community. The committee was receiving huge incomes from the
various shrine properties, which it proposed to spend on educational
and social service work. Those at the helm of affairs were profoundly
nationalistic in their views. Naturally, the British Government began
to fear their power, which it desired to break through suppression.
Hence the issue at Guru Ka Bagh was not the chopping of fuel wood. The
ghastly motive of the Government was to cow the Sikhs and crush their
spirits through oppression. How it started to demonstrate its power
and how shamefully it failed in its sinister purpose has already been
explained.
Many other examples of the victory of soul force over brute strength
could be cited from the recent history of India. I chose the Guru Ka
Bagh affair as the subject of my illustration for two reasons. In
the first place, it was the most simple and yet the most prominent
demonstration of the holiness and might of passive resistance; and
secondly, the drama was performed in my own home town by actors who
belonged to my own community and were kith and kin to me in the sense
that I could know fully their joys and sorrows, their hopes and fears.
FOOTNOTE:
[33] Hyndman.
CHAPTER VII
JALLIANWALLA MASSACRE AT AMRITSAR
In this chapter we shall relate briefly the story of what occurred in
Punjab during the troubled days of 1919. These incidents, popularly
known as “the Punjab wrongs,” led to far-reaching consequences in the
relationship between England and India, and knowledge of them is very
necessary for a proper understanding of what has happened in India
since. We shall begin with the beginning of the World War and follow
the various incidents in the sequence of their occurrence.
It is a matter of common knowledge now that the people of India
supported the British Empire throughout the period of the war in a very
liberal and enthusiastic manner. “India’s contributions to the war both
in its quota of man-force and money were far beyond the capacity of its
poor inhabitants.” Leaders of all states of opinion joined hands to
assist the Empire in its time of need. It has been stated before that
Gandhi overworked in the capacity as an honorary recruiting officer
until he contracted dysentery, which at one time threatened to prove
fatal.
India was “bled white” in order to win the war. But for her support in
men and money England would have suffered greatly in prestige. Except
for Indian troops the German advance to Paris in the fall of 1914 might
not have been checked. The official publication, “India’s Contribution
to the Great War,” describes the work of the Indian troops thus:
“The Indian Corps reached France in the nick of time and helped
to stem the great German thrust towards Ypres and the Channel
Ports during the Autumn of 1914. These were the only trained
reinforcements immediately available in any part of the British
Empire and right worthily they played their part.
“In Egypt and Palestine, in Mesopotamia, Persia, East and West
Africa and in subsidiary theatres they shared with their British
and Dominion comrades the attainment of final victory.”[34]
While the issue of the war still seemed doubtful, the British
Parliament, in order to induce the people of India to still greater
efforts in their support of the Empire, held out definite promises of
self-government to India after the war as a reward for their loyalty.
Mr. Montague, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for India, made the
following announcement on August 20, 1917:
“The policy of His Majesty’s Government with which the Government
of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing
association of Indians in every branch of the administration and
the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view
to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India
as an integral part of the British Empire. They have decided that
substantial steps in this direction should be taken as soon as
possible, ...”
The text of the above announcement was widely published in the
entire press of India. Then followed the famous message of President
Woodrow Wilson to the Congress with its definite pledge of
“self-determination” to subordinate nations. This helped to brighten
still more India’s hopes for home-rule.
Naturally, after the Armistice was signed, the people of India expected
the fulfilment of the war promises. “But the British Government,
anticipating that soon after the war ended there would be a loud clamor
in the country for home-rule, gave instead of self-government the
Rowlatt Act, which was designed to stifle the nationalistic spirit in
its infancy.” The act gave unlimited power to the police to prohibit
public assemblies, to order indiscriminate searches of private homes,
to make arrests without notification, and so forth. “Its main purpose
was in such a manner to strengthen the authority of the police and
to enable them to root out of the country every form of liberal and
independent thought.” The plans of the British Bureaucracy were,
however, defeated in their entirety, because the passage of the act did
not go through the Legislative Assembly as smoothly as was expected.
The whole country cried out in one voice against the Rowlatt Act, but
it was passed by the British Government of India in the teeth of the
_unanimous_ opposition of _all_ elected as well as government appointed
Indian members of the Legislative Council.
This was once again followed by mass meetings and parades in protest,
petitions to the British Parliament, delegations to the Viceroy, and a
nation-wide demonstration against the Rowlatt Act. But the Government
altogether ignored the sentiments of the country in this matter, an
attitude which in turn helped to inflame the masses still more.
Gandhi considered the existence of the act on the statute books of
India a national humiliation, and in protest he ordered the people of
India to observe April 6, 1919, as a day of fast and national _hartal_.
_Hartal_ is the sign of deep mourning, during which the whole business
of the country is stopped and the people wander about the streets in
grief and lamentation. It was observed in ancient times only at the
death of popular kings or on the occasion of some other very serious
national calamity.
The response to Gandhi’s appeal for the _hartal_ was very general. It
was surprising how quickly the sentiment of national consciousness had
spread throughout the country. Overnight Gandhi’s name was on the lips
of everybody, and even the most ignorant countrywomen were talking
about the Rowlatt Act. I remember that on the afternoon of April the
6th, while I was walking toward the site of the mass meeting in my
town, the like of which were being held all over India, and at which
resolutions of protest against the Rowlatt Act were passed, I saw a
girl of six nearly collapse on the street. After I had picked her up,
and she had rested from the heat of the sun, I asked her who she was
and where she was going. The little girl replied: “I am the daughter of
_Bharat Mata_ (Mother India) and I am going to the funeral of Daulat
(Rowlatt). Mahatma Dandhi (Gandhi) has called me.”
The day passed quite peacefully except for slight disturbances in a few
places. But the excitement throughout the country, particularly in the
Punjab, was very great. The situation was so tense that Gandhi sent
his strong admonitions of non-violence to his people in a continual
stream. The activity at Amritsar started when, on the morning of April
10th the English Commissioner invited Dr. Kitchlew and Dr. Satyapal,
the two popular young leaders of the city, to his residence and ordered
their deportation to some unknown place. When it became known that
their leaders had been treacherously removed the citizens went on a
sudden _hartal_, and a huge mob began to gather in front of the main
city gate. The mob soon organized itself into a procession, which
started to move toward the District Commissioner’s residence to request
the restoration of Doctors Kitchlew and Satyapal. While crossing the
railroad bridge, the procession was met by armed police who soon
caused six casualties among the peaceful, unarmed mob. The mob soon
turned back and fell upon the city in a wild fury. It divided itself
into different groups and expended its rage by setting fire to the
city hall, two English banks, and a local Christian church. Two bank
managers, the only Englishmen present in town on that day, were cruelly
murdered. An English nurse who happened to be passing through a narrow
street was also assaulted by the mob, but was soon rescued by the
citizens and carried to a place of safety. Later on, this benevolent
Christian lady greatly endeared herself to the people of Amritsar by
refusing to accept any other indemnity for the assault than the price
of her wrist watch which was lost in the scramble.
Immediately after the news of Amritsar reached the other towns in the
province, similar outbreaks of popular frenzy occurred in many places,
with this difference however, that at no other place besides Amritsar
were English residents injured. There were casualties on the side of
the mob everywhere, but none on the side of the English. On April 11th
the authority of the civil government was withdrawn, and martial law
was declared in most sections of the province of Punjab.
Thus did the trouble begin that resulted in the massacre of Amritsar.
On that fatal day, April 13th, a mass meeting had been announced to
take place in Jallianwalla Bagh, an open enclosure in the heart of the
city of Amritsar. As it happened, April 13th was also the Baisakhi day,
which is observed all over India as a day of national festival. Large
crowds of country people had gathered into the city on that account.
On the morning of the 13th, General Dyer, the commanding officer
of the city, issued from the headquarters an order prohibiting the
Jallianwalla Bagh meeting, and notices to that effect were posted in
several places in the city. It should be mentioned here that unlike the
towns of America, there were in Amritsar at the time no universally
read daily papers which could convey the Commanding Officer’s order
all around in the short interval between its issue and the time of the
meeting. Under these circumstances General Dyer’s prohibitory order
could reach only a small fraction of the people in the city.
Now let us come to the scene of the meeting. People began to assemble
in Jallianwalla Bagh at 3 o’clock. There were old men, women who
carried babies in their arms, and children who held toys in their
hands. They were all dressed in their holiday gala-dresses. “While
a few had come there to attend the meeting knowingly, the majority
had just followed the crowd and drifted in the Bagh out of simple
curiosity.” Whatever may have been its nature otherwise, it is
certain that the crowd at the Jallianwalla was not composed of bloody
revolutionists. Not one of them carried even a walking stick. They had
assembled there in the open inclosure peacefully to listen to speeches
and perhaps at the end to pass a few resolutions. At four o’clock the
meeting was called to order, and the speeches began. No more than forty
minutes of this peaceful gathering, and the audience were listening
in an attentive and orderly manner to the speaker who stood on a
raised platform in the center, when General Dyer walked in with his
band of thirty soldiers and suddenly opened fire on the crowd without
giving them any warning or chance to disperse. There was a sudden wild
skirmish in the inclosure. People began to run toward all sides to save
their lives; those who fell down were run over by the rest and crushed
under their weight. Others who attempted to escape by leaping over the
low wall on the east end were shot dead by the fire from the general’s
squad. As the crowd centered near the only escape from the unfinished
low wall, the general directed his shots there. He aimed where the
crowd was the thickest, and inside of the fifteen minutes during which
his ammunition lasted he had killed at least eight hundred men, women,
and children and wounded many times that number.
It was already late afternoon when General Dyer, his ammunition having
run out, departed to his headquarters without providing any kind of
succor or medical aid to the wounded who lay bleeding and helpless at
the scene of slaughter. Before the people of the neighborhood recovered
from their consternation, it had already begun to get dark. As one
of the rules of martial law strictly forbade walking in the streets
of Amritsar after dark, it was impossible for any person or group of
persons to bring organized relief to the wounded at Jallianwalla. The
horrible agonies of those that lay in the Bagh disabled and deserted
were heard with grim patience all through the night by the faithful
wife Rattan Devi, when she sat there “in the midst of that ghastly
human carnival” holding in her lap the dead body of her beloved
husband. She had run to the scene after the shooting in a mad search
for her husband. After she had looked underneath a dozen heaps of dead
bodies and stumbled over many others, her eyes were drawn to the spot
where her husband’s dead body lay flat on the ground. Rattan Devi’s
husband was already dead and beyond human aid. The devoted wife could
not restore the dead man to life, but how could she afford to leave his
lifeless body in the stark neighborhood over night? She was too weak to
carry it home all by herself and there was no aid available. So she sat
there through the night holding a dead man in her lap.
The horrors of that night of suffering were related by Rattan Devi in
her evidence before the Indian National Congress sub-committee, in
which she described “the fearful agony of dying human beings, who kept
crying for drinks of water all through the night.” No friendly aid came
to these departing souls in their last hours of deep distress. Afraid
of General Dyer’s deadly vengeance their fellowmen had stayed away,
while dogs from the neighboring streets wandered freely inside the Bagh
to feast on the bleeding human bodies.
At the following session of the Indian National Congress which was held
at Amritsar, I myself saw at its exhibition twenty pairs of little
shoes, belonging to babies from a few months to a year old. These had
been picked up in the Jallianwalla Bagh by various persons after the
shooting, and they belonged to twenty innocent babies in their mothers’
laps who had been completely obliterated in the mad scramble that had
accompanied the shooting. All that was left of these children was those
tiny shoes. May God bless the souls of the dear little ones and many
others who fell victims to the haughty general’s bloody mood on the
thirteenth of April, 1919, at Jallianwalla Bagh.
Later, when General Dyer was cross-examined before Lord Hunter’s
Committee, which was appointed by the British Parliament to report on
Punjab disturbances, he testified to the following:
1. That there was no provocation on the part of the people of Amritsar
for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre either on the day of the shooting
or immediately before it. He had the situation well in hand and the
atmosphere was quite calm and peaceful.
2. That his order prohibiting the meeting was issued the morning before
the meeting and reached only a fraction of the people in Amritsar on
that festival day of the thirteenth.
3. That when he arrived on the scene of the meeting with his squad, he
found the people listening to the speaker in a calm manner and there
was no show of resistance offered to him. On the other hand, on seeing
him enter the premises, the audience began to run off in all directions.
4. That he opened fire at the assembled meeting without giving the
people any warning or chance to disperse, and he continued firing while
his ammunition lasted--all the time directing his shots at places where
the crowd was the thickest.
5. That he had brought a machine gun with him, which he had to leave
outside because the lane was too narrow for it to enter. And he
admitted that the casualties would have been much greater if he had
been able to use the machine gun.
6. That his reason for the massacre at the Jallianwalla was to teach
the people a lesson, and he did not stop shooting after the crowd had
begun to disperse because he was afraid they would laugh at him. The
general wanted to show the people the might of the British rule.
7. That he did not think to or care to provide succor to the wounded at
Jallianwalla. It was not a part of his business.
Reproduced below is a part of General Dyer’s testimony before Lord
Hunter’s committee:
“Q. When you got into the Bagh what did you do? A. I opened fire.
Q. At once? A. Immediately. I had thought about the matter and don’t
imagine it took me more than thirty seconds to make up my mind as to
what my duty was.
Q. How many people were in the crowd? A. I then estimated them roughly
at 5,000. I heard afterwards there were many more.
Q. On the assumption that there was that risk of people being in the
crowd who were not aware of the proclamation, did it not occur to you
that it was a proper measure to ask the crowd to disperse before you
took that step of actually firing? A. No, at the time I did not. I
merely felt that my orders had not been obeyed, that martial law was
flouted, and that it was my duty to immediately disperse by rifle fire.
Q. When you left Rambagh [his headquarters] did it occur to you that
you might have to fire? A. Yes, I had considered the nature of the duty
that I might have to face.
Q. Did the crowd at once start to disperse as soon as you fired? A.
Immediately.
Q. Did you continue firing? A. Yes.
Q. What reason had you to suppose that if you had ordered the assembly
to leave the Bagh, they would not have done so without the necessity
of your firing and continuing firing for any length of time? A. Yes, I
think it quite possible that I could have dispersed them perhaps even
without firing.
Q. Why did you not have recourse to that? A. They would have all come
back and laughed at me, and I should have made what I considered a fool
of myself.
Q. And on counting the ammunition it was found that 1,650 rounds of
ammunition had been fired? A. Quite right.
Q. Supposing the passage was sufficient to allow the armoured cars to
go in, would you have opened fire with the machine guns? A. I think,
probably, yes.
Q. In that case the casualties would have been very much higher? A. Yes.
Q. I take it that your idea in taking that action was to strike terror?
A. Call it what you like. I was going to punish them. My idea from the
military point of view was to make a wide impression.”
During the course of its history mankind has witnessed many massacres
of a bloody and ruthless nature, but in every case before a massacre
occurred, there was a provocation of some kind. Jallianwalla Bagh
stands out unique in this respect--that it was an unprovoked,
premeditated and pre-arranged, coldblooded massacre of at least eight
hundred innocent men, women, and children, who were assembled in a
peaceful meeting on the day of their national festival, with no thought
of evil in their minds nor any desire to offer resistance of any sort
or kind to anybody.
The most interesting part of the story is that what had happened at
Jallianwalla Bagh on the thirteenth of April was considered so trivial
and unimportant a matter that it took four months for the news to reach
official London. After the report of Lord Hunter’s committee had been
published, and all the horrible details of the massacre were fully
disclosed, General Dyer was retired from the military service on full
pension. But on his return to England he was handed a purse of ten
thousand pounds sterling, which amount had been raised by voluntary
subscription by the English people to recompense the general for his
heroic work at Jallianwalla Bagh. Such was the reaction of the English
nation to the massacre.
Gandhi’s interpretation of General Dyer’s “heroism” is, however,
different. He writes:
“He [General Dyer] has called an unarmed crowd of men and
children--mostly holiday-makers--‘a rebel army.’ He believes
himself to be the saviour of Punjab in that he was able to
shoot down like rabbits men who were penned in an enclosure.
Such a man is unworthy of being considered a soldier. There was
no bravery in his action. He ran no risk. He shot without the
slightest opposition and without warning. This is not an ‘error of
judgment’. It is a paralysis of it in the face of fancied danger.
It is proof of criminal incapacity and heartlessness.”
The reader will be in a position now to understand the meaning of
Mahatma Gandhi’s letter to the Viceroy of India, dated August 1,
1920, and quoted on page 114 in which Gandhi gave his reasons for his
decision not to coöperate with the British Government of India. It
may be recalled that one of Mahatma Gandhi’s reasons was the “callous
disregard of the feelings of Indians” betrayed by the House of Lords.
It must be remembered here also that the massacre of Jallianwalla
occurred on April 13, 1919, and it was exactly a year and three months
later that Mahatma Gandhi made his decision to boycott the British
Government. During this interval he had persistently hoped for a change
in the British attitude.
The massacre at Jallianwalla was only one part of the awful Punjab
story. What occurred at Amritsar and other towns in the province during
the martial days of 1919 was even more shameful and unworthy, “on
account of the outrage of human dignity it involved.” The issuing of
crawling orders and the throwing of bombs from aeroplanes over peaceful
towns constituted in part the doings of the military and police during
the unfortunate days of martial law. Nor was that all. Mrs. Sarojini
Naidu, the first woman president of India, said while speaking on the
“Punjab wrongs” before a large London audience (Kingsway Hall, June 3,
1919):
“My sisters were flogged, they were stripped naked; they were
outraged.”
The ingenuity of the English officials during the martial law period in
inventing fancy punishments showed itself conspicuously in the town of
Kasur where, according to the findings of the Congress sub-committee,
“1. School boys and men were whipped, ‘with no particular object,’ and
there was no question of any martial law offense. Prostitutes were
invited to witness the ceremony.
2. People were made to mark time and climb ladders.
3. Religious mendicants were washed with lime.
4. Those who failed to salute Europeans were made to rub their roses on
the ground.
6. Public gallows were erected which were later abandoned. In all,
eighteen persons were hanged in the Punjab during the martial law
regime, many of whom were totally innocent.”
We shall give below the evidence of Gurdevi, the widow of Mangal Jat,
before the Congress sub-committee on what had occured at Manianwalla:
“One day, during the Martial Law period, Mr. Bosworth Smith
gathered together all the males of over eight years at the
Dacca Dalia Bungalow, which is some miles from our village, in
connection with the investigations that were going on. Whilst the
men were at the Bungalow, he rode to our village, taking back with
him all the women who met him on the way carrying food for their
men at the Bungalow. Reaching the village, he went around the
lanes and ordered all women to come out of their houses, himself
forcing them out with sticks. He made us all stand near the
village Daira. The women folded their hands before him. He beat
some with his stick and spat at them and used the foulest and most
unmentionable language. He hit me twice and spat in my face....
“He repeatedly called us she-asses, bitches, flies and swines and
said: ‘You were in the same beds with your husbands; why did you
not prevent them from going out to do mischief? Now your skirts
will be looked by the Police Constables’. He gave me a kick also
and ordered us to undergo the torture of holding our ears by pass
our arms round the legs, whilst being bent double.
“This treatment was meted out to us in the absence of our men who
were at the Bungalow.”
Cowardice, thy name is Bosworth Smith! Moral degradation in a human
being could not go any lower than this. Search the entire history
of mankind, and you will fail to find the equal of this act in its
ferocity and barbarism. How curious! The world believes still that
England’s mission in India is that of civilizing a backward people.
The Jallianwalla massacre and other “Punjab wrongs” gave a great
impetus to the nationalist movement in India. What the Indian National
Congress had failed to accomplish in its steady work of thirty-two
years, the Punjab persecutions and humiliations did in the course of
a few months. It has helped to arouse in the minds of the people of
India a powerful national consciousness. It has been truly said that
the blood of the martyrs at Jallianwalla Bagh has made the heart of all
India to bleed.
Those who ask the question, “Why does India revolt?” may find a part of
their answer in the word “Jallianwalla Bagh.”
FOOTNOTE:
[34] Page 221. Quoted from Lajpat Rai’s _Unhappy India_.
CHAPTER VIII
WHY IS INDIA POOR?
Only two hundred years ago India was the richest country in the world.
Today it is the poorest. The gorgeous palaces of its kings with their
enormous treasures were the objects of admiration and wonder for the
other nations of the world. Its flourishing industries and its highly
lucrative trade excited the greed and envy of the merchant classes
everywhere. Its merchant ships laden with cargoes of valuable spices,
silken and cotton manufactures, and precious jewels sailed into the
harbors of England and other countries of Europe. How the maritime
nations of the world vied with each other to possess the trade of the
East Indies and fought over concessions in the Empire of the mighty
Moghuls is a matter of common knowledge to all students of history. It
was the fame of India that excited the imagination of Columbus when he
set out westward on his historic voyage; it was only by accident that
he discovered America. He had undertaken his voyage in search for a new
route to the fabulous riches of India, so that America really owes her
discovery to the fame of that ancient land. Pick up any standard work
on mediæval history or classical literature and you will find that the
riches of India and the splendor of the courts of its kings had become
proverbial among the nations of Europe.
That fame of East Indian wealth which had inspired the careers of many
a European explorer, military commander, and financial genius had
totally disappeared long before the end of the nineteenth century; with
the disappearing of the Indian kings the splendor of their courts had
also vanished; with the extinction of the Indian fabric industries her
flourishing trade had ceased; and simultaneously with the loss of its
handicrafts and independence the prestige and prosperity of the nation
had come to an end. As early as the year 1900 A.D. India had begun to
be regarded by the historians as the poorest country in the world.
Her daily per capita income was fixed at three quarters of a penny
(equivalent to one and nine-sixteenths cents), and it was estimated
that the dawn of the twentieth century found among the inhabitants of
India one hundred and sixty million people who did not know what it
was to have one square meal a day. The percentage of literacy, which
included a knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, had dropped
from thirty-three per cent in 1757 to less than four per cent in 1900.
What is the cause of this astounding change in the condition of an
ancient people like the East Indians? How did it happen that the same
period which witnessed a sudden rise in the prosperity of most other
nations of the world found in the Hindu nation an equal or even more
sudden fall? What was the cause of the ruin of India’s famous silk
and cotton industries and of the loss of its political and economic
independence? How did India drop from the highest rank to the lowest,
from the proudest position to the humblest?
For this state of things in India writers have offered different
explanations, several of which are so weak in nature that they would
not stand even a superficial examination. The downfall of the country
has been variously attributed to the low, immoral character of its
populace and the selfishness and cowardice of their leaders, to a large
increase in its population, to the inertia and extravagance of its
agricultural class, to the rigorous caste system, and to the hatred and
animosity which separates the different classes of its people. Some of
these evils were responsible in some measure for the political downfall
of India, but the reason for India’s economic ruin must be sought for
elsewhere. I maintain that the political subjugation of the country by
England, and the pursuance by the latter of a fiscal policy dictated
exclusively by the interests of British industries at the expense
of the native claims, forms the basis of India’s poverty and of its
consequent “ills and woes.”
We shall first examine, in order, the various reasons for the country’s
poverty which have been given by others, and which I believe to be
unsatisfactory. Later I shall attempt to prove the truth of my thesis,
that the cupidity of English financial and industrial lords has been
the direct cause of India’s ruin.
In the preceding pages much has been said concerning the moral
character of the people of India. Those who have lived among them and
have studied their habits and ideals at first hand know what heights
of moral and spiritual purity the inhabitants of that ancient land
once attained. Even in their present condition after generations
of political subjection and economic poverty, both of which have a
tendency to degrade the character of a people, it can be confidently
said that the people of India, when measured by any moral, ethical,
or cultural standard, will equal if not surpass any other people
throughout the entire world. In order to judge the moral condition of
this race at the time when their prosperity began to disappear, we
shall let those speak who knew them at first hand.
Warren Hastings, whose name has been immortalized through his
impeachment by Edmund Burke, had spent the best part of his life in
India. Starting his career as a low-paid assistant of the East India
Company, he had risen to the position of Governor-General of India. No
one knew the people of that country better than did Warren Hastings,
because of all foreigners he had the best opportunity to come in close
contact with them. Yet he was no unqualified friend of India, as was
fully disclosed during his impeachment by the House of Commons in
England. Twenty-eight years after his retirement from India, Warren
Hastings gave the following testimony before the British Parliament:
“I affirm by the oath I have taken that this description of them
[that the people of India were in a state of moral turpitude] is
untrue and wholly unfounded.... They are gentle, benevolent, more
susceptible of gratitude for kindness shown them than prompted
to vengeance for wrongs inflicted, and as exempt from the worst
properties of human passion as any people on the face of the
earth.”[35]
It has been affirmed that overpopulation is the great cause of India’s
backwardness. But is India really over-populated? Has its population
increased very largely during the last two hundred years? When we
compare the census reports of the various countries of Europe, we find
that several of them, England included, are more densely populated than
India. If we compare England and India, we shall find that the increase
in population in the latter has been no greater than that in the former
since their political connection. In fact, since the beginning of the
twentieth century the population of India has actually decreased, while
that of England and several other countries of Europe has increased.
That the agricultural class of India is a race of thrifty,
hard-working, abstemious, and experienced farmers who understand
thoroughly the art of tilling the soil, has been attested by many
foreigners, who had the opportunity to study their habits at close
range. The quality of their knowledge of the farming profession and
the extent of their initiative and perseverance may be judged from
the achievements of Hindu farmers in California. Here was a class of
agricultural people who had found it hard to make a decent living in
the “land of five rivers,” the Punjab. The Punjab is famous for its
fertile soil and has an irrigation system which is regarded as the
best in the world. Yet its agricultural population is in a state of
semi-starvation because of top-heavy taxation and other unprogressive
features of the country’s administration. The moment these farmers from
the Punjab were settled in the favorable environment of California they
made a success of farming which is acknowledged by friends and foes
alike. At the present time the anti-Asiatic laws of California prohibit
Hindus from farming, but it is a matter of common knowledge that Hindu
farm labor is paid higher wages in most sections than is American
labor, because the Hindus are “steady,” “hardworking,” “informed,” and
“dependable.”
Ignorance and sluggishness do not keep the Hindu farmer in a worse
condition than is his own class in other countries; the small area of
his holdings, excessive taxation, and lack of capital are continually
dragging him backward. Eighty per cent of the people of India depend
upon agriculture for their sole support. They live on the soil and
by the soil. In former times India was also the home of flourishing
cottage industries, that helped to increase the income of its enormous
rural population. The invasion by English manufactures, caused by the
selfish English fiscal policy for India, has completely uprooted the
fabric industries of the Indian villages, a change which in turn has
driven the entire people to the land for their livelihood, thereby
bringing the total ruin of their economic prosperity.
Lack of moral stamina in the people, overpopulation, ignorance or
sluggishness of the agricultural class are thus not the real causes of
India’s poverty. The economist who wishes to determine the cause of any
country’s poverty will have to ask himself the same questions which
the Hindu historian, R. C. Dutt, asked in regard to India a quarter
of century ago. “Does agriculture flourish? Are the finances properly
administered, so as to bring back to the people an adequate return for
the taxes paid by them? Are the sources of national wealth widened by a
Government anxious for the welfare of the people?”
If it is true that in the same ratio as English power advanced in India
economic prosperity of the country began to decline, we might as well
inquire into the nature of British rule in India. We shall restrict
our inquiry to the answers of the following two questions: “Why
England acquired India?” and “Why England holds India?” It is a fact
that England first came in contact with India through the medium of a
trading company, whose object in establishing its trade stations in
the Eastern country was profit-making. It is asserted that the British
rulers of India have been guided in their work of governing the country
by altruistic and humanitarian motives of a high quality. To what
extent this claim of the English nation is founded on facts we shall
examine presently. In any case such humanitarian principles as may
have inspired the English rule in India, were of a much later origin.
The primary reason for which England established its connections with
its Eastern dependency was one of pure commercial greed. At the time
when the East India Company was organized in England the people of
Europe had not been trained in the use of such terms as “altruism” and
“civilizing the backward peoples.” These high-sounding epithets are
products of much later times. The minds of the Directors of the East
India Company were ruled by thoughts of large dividends and big profits.
The simple facts of the case are that the British went over to India as
traders in order to make profit out of India. They found the people
of that vast and prosperous country divided among themselves, and
scenting the favorable opportunity, they set out cleverly to capitalize
the weakness of the natives for their own gain. Yet according to the
standards of the times nothing in their behavior was unusual or wrong.
The world had never actually been ruled by altruism. The East India
Company set the greedy, but innocent and confiding princes and peoples
of India one against the other, and using the natives as their tools,
became masters of the land. They have ever since held them under the
lash as chattels and slaves, “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for
Mother England. “Divide and rule” has been their constant motto. “Teach
and liberate” has never crossed their minds. Such phrases have been
invented by shrewd politicians merely to amuse and satisfy a class of
idealistic people in England and abroad who fall innocent victims to
artfully told lies. Such slogans were never intended as rules of state
policy. Study carefully the tragic result of this long and laborious
process of “liberating” a traditionally cultured and civilized people,
and you will be convinced of the truth. The motto of “Divide and rule,”
on the other hand, they used mercilessly to emasculate a nation of
helpless people, whom they made the innocent victims of their lust and
greed. For the details of this early exploitation and “treading under
foot” of the people of India read Edmund Burke’s impeachment of Warren
Hastings. Thus he closed his immortal condemnation of the barbarities
of his own people on the soil of India:
“I impeach Warren Hastings to high crimes and misdemeanors. I
impeach him in the name of the Commons’ House of Parliament,
whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the
English nation, whose ancient honor he has sullied. I impeach
him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has
trodden underfoot, and whose country he has turned into a desert.
Lastly, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and
oppressor of all!”
Mr. Wm. Digby, another Englishman, who lived in India for over
twenty years as a member of the Indian Civil Service, gives valuable
historical and economic data on the subject of English Imperialism in
India, in his book ironically entitled _Prosperous British India_. The
book is a scholarly work on history and economics and deserves the
perusal of all thoughtful students. Mr. Digby shows that
1. Since the beginning of the English rule in the country the per
capita income of the people of India has been gradually diminishing.
The daily per capita income was
in 1850 2 pence
in 1880 1½ pence
in 1900 ¾ pence.
2. That in 1900, proportionately to income, the Indian subject of
the British Crown was taxed more than four times higher than was his
Scottish fellow-subject, and three times higher than his English
compeer. He quotes the following figures from the _Statesman’s
Yearbook_, 1900-1:
Proportion of Taxation to Income
Scotland with £45 India (outside 1,000,000
per head as average, well-to-do people) with
one-seventeenth. 12s. per head as average,
nearly one-fourth.
3. In 1900 thirty-four and one-fifth days’ income of every inhabitant
of India was carried to England in the form of home charges. “Was ever
such a crushing tribute exacted by any conqueror at any period of
history?”
4. Since the British have been in the country famines have been more
frequent, more widespread, and more deadly. “In the first quarter of
the nineteenth century there were reported only four famines in the
country, all of which were local. In the last quarter of the same
century there occurred twenty-two famines which were general and spread
all over the land.”
A great nation was held a slave, was looted and routed, and yet the
world never heard of such a thing as British injustice in India.
But, let us ask, how was this great injustice perpetrated, this huge
exploitation continued? This question is eminently sane and pertinent,
and should be truthfully answered.
The English people were too intelligent not to profit by the experience
of past conquerors and rulers over foreign races. As a result, they
did not evidently hold India down, but they kept her down. First, they
disarmed the natives totally. This procedure prevented armed rebellion,
and the world was saved the news of consequent repressions. In other
words, the English did not kill the people of India; they killed their
spirit. They robbed them of their land and of their daily meals,
and made them submissive and weak. The English novelist, Thackeray,
described as follows the early stages of English rule in India:
“It is very proper that, in England, a great share of the produce
of the earth should be appropriated to support certain families in
affluence, to produce senators, sages, and heroes for the service
and the defense of the State, or, in other words, that great
part of the rent should go to an opulent nobility and gentry,
who are to serve their country in Parliament, in the army and
navy, in the departments of science and liberal professions. The
leisure, independence, and high ideas, which the enjoyment of this
rent affords has enabled them to raise Britain to the pinnacle
of glory. Long may they enjoy it;--but in India, that haughty
spirit, independence, and deep thought, which the possession of
great wealth sometimes gives, ought to be suppressed. They are
directly adverse to our power and interest. The nature of things,
the past experience of all governments, renders it unnecessary to
enlarge on this subject We do not want generals, statesmen, and
legislators; we want industrious husbandmen....
“Considered politically, therefore, the general distribution of
land, among a number of small proprietors, who cannot easily
combine against Government, is an object of importance.”
This policy was followed in India with unwavering resolution and fatal
success.
It is an unfortunate fact of recorded history which no well-informed
person may ignore, that under British rule the sources of national
wealth in India have been narrowed in many ways. In the eighteenth
century India was a great manufacturing as well as a great
agricultural country. How its greatness disappeared totally, and it was
left as a very poor agricultural country only, has been explained by
many English and Indian writers. The decline of Indian industries has
been attributed to the pursuance of a policy of commercial greed on the
part of the British manufacturers. The English historian, H. H. Wilson,
remarks:
“The British manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice
to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he
could not have contended on equal terms.”[36]
We shall not tax the patience of our readers with irritating details of
the ways in which this arm of political power was actually employed.
But as a specimen we shall relate some of the incidents which helped to
build the cotton fabric industry of England at the expense of India.
It was the time of the home and cottage industries, when individuals
or small groups of hand weavers owned their establishments and worked
their business on a coöperative plan. The English merchants found
they could not compete with the highly skilled and efficient Indian
weavers; so they resolved to eliminate them altogether. This is what
they did. The agents of the East India Company went to the village with
the county magistrate (himself an employee of the Company, because the
Company was then the Government), and called together all the weavers
of the village. The agent offered loans and advances to those weavers
who would work for the Company. When the weavers refused to accept
their offers, the agents of the Company forcibly tied the money in the
napkins of the weavers, as a sign of their acceptance. The agents then
drove the workers back to their homes until such time as the Company
should demand their services. Thus they were forced to leave their own
looms and to work in the Company’s factories. There they were paid such
low wages that many of them fled from their homes, and hundreds and
thousands of others cut their thumbs and forefingers in order to render
themselves immune from this forced labor.
By such means and others equally unfair “the prosperous class of Indian
weavers was made tradeless and homeless, and many were driven into
the jungle to starve and die.” At the same time England completed the
process of ruining the trade of India by charging an excise duty of
65% to 75% on Indian manufactures imported into England and admitting
English-made goods into British India free of duty. These statements
are not exaggerated. This procedure actually happened, and data
gathered by the English themselves is freely available. But should the
account be doubted when such and worse things happen in our own day
everywhere?
All the high offices of governmental control, civil and military, were
given over to Englishmen, and Indians were employed as menials and
clerks. To be explicit: during the first one hundred and twenty-five
years of British rule in India not one Indian sat on the provincial or
national executive councils of the country. Until after the World War
no Indian held the commission of a lieutenant colonel in the British
army of India. If during this period India was not governed for the
good of the Indians, it is no wonder. How full of meaning are the words
of John Stuart Mill:
“The government of a people by itself has a meaning and a reality;
but such a thing as government of one people by another does not,
and cannot exist. One people may keep another for its own use, a
place to make money in, a human cattle-farm to be worked for the
profits of its own inhabitants.
“It is an inherent condition of human affairs that no intention,
however sincere, of protecting the interests of others, can make
it safe or salutary to tie up their hands. By their own hands only
can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in
life be worked out.”[37]
Mr. Wm. Digby remarks on this account:
“Thus England’s unbounded prosperity owes its origin to
her connection with India, whilst it has, largely, been
maintained--disguisedly--from the same source, from the middle of
the eighteenth century to the present time. ‘Possibly, since the
world began, no investment has ever yielded the profits reaped
from the Indian plunder’ (Brooks Adams).
“What was the extent of the wealth thus wrung from the East
Indies? No one has been able to reckon adequately, as no one
has been in a position to make a correct tally of the treasure
exported from India. Estimates have been made which vary from
five hundred million pounds sterling to nearly one billion pounds
sterling. Probably between Plassey (1757) and Waterloo the
last-mentioned sum was transferred from Indian hoards to English
banks.... Modern England has been made great by Indian wealth,
wealth never proffered by its possessor, but always taken by
the might and skill of the stronger. The difference between the
eighteenth and twentieth centuries is simply that the amount
received now is immensely larger and is obtained ‘according to
law’....”[38]
Let me quote Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the “nightingale of India,” as to
the effect of British rule in India: “Our arts have degenerated, our
literatures are dead, our beautiful industries have perished, our valor
is done, our fires are dim, our soul is sinking.”
All this has actually happened. Yet the world believes that England’s
mission in India is unselfish and holy, that she is there to save
the souls of a demoralized people and to educate an ignorant and
unprogressive nation. The nations have been made to believe that
without her influence there would be social and religious tyranny in
India, and that the weak would be left without a champion. The facts,
however, read differently. The people are poor and weak. They are
to a degree fanatic, and local conflicts occur occasionally between
religious groups. But do the English rulers of India prevent these
divisions or do they foster them? This is the important question.
The English are our masters. They make their laws as stringent as they
please; they hold their grip as tight as they wish. They say to us:
“People of India, you are weak. Weakness is recognized in our system
as a crime. Therefore you are doomed.” So they show the power in their
hands and use it as they will. But when they say to us: “People of
India, cease to quarrel and live in peace,” they are not only cruel but
unjust and hypocritical, for the quarrels are their own creation, and
our divisions they recognize as their main support. Says the Premier of
England, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald:
“As the red patches advanced over the map of India, sections
pulled themselves together to resist, but no power then existing
could develop that Indian cohesion which was necessary if the
new trading invader was to be hurled back. We were not accepted,
but we could not be resisted. India challenged, but could not
make her challenge good.... Moreover, we were not a military
conquering power imposing tribute and hastening hither and thither
in our minds. The invasion was not of hordes of men seeking new
settlements, nor of military captains seeking spoil, but of
capital seeking investment, of merchants seeking profit. It was
necessarily slow; it divided to rule, and enlisted Indians to
subdue India.”[39]
Perhaps the reader will now be ready to concede that England acquired
control over India and has succeeded in holding her mastery over the
country through the policy of “Divide and rule.” He may grant also that
the existing fabric industries of India have been destroyed by the
unfair use of political power in the interest of the growing British
manufactures. Then followed the invasion of the power loom in Europe
which completed the ruin of India’s cotton industry. In the first
place India had been impoverished to such an extent that she could
not find the necessary capital to utilize the latest inventions; and
when at last she did succeed in setting up steam mills their progress
was nipped in the bud through the imposition of an excise duty on all
home manufactures. Here was an evident inversion of the natural order
of things. When machinery began to be introduced into the country,
a protective tariff was required to assist the infant industries.
Instead, the foreign rulers of India imposed an excise duty on cotton
fabrics, while foreign fabrics continued to be admitted free of duty.
A similar mischievous policy was adopted in regard to the agricultural
industries of India. A government which has the welfare of the nation
in mind tries in every way to improve the condition of the governed by
increasing their sources of income. It grants its farmers subsidies,
helps them to improve the quality of their crops, and extends their
markets. What it exacts from them in the form of taxes is expended in
the improvement of their general condition. “It identifies itself with
the nation, and grows richer with it.”
In India from the time when the East India Company became the rulers
of the country, this natural process has been reversed. These foreign
rulers of India regarded their possessions as a “human plantation,” and
their policy was to extract from the people all that was possible in
order to swell the profits of the Company’s stockholders in England.
Taxes on agricultural land were placed at the highest possible point
in the beginning, and were then increased at every successive revenue
settlement. The over-assessment and collection of taxes with the most
callous disregard for the material condition of the farmers, plunged
the country into misery. Soon they began to flee from their houses
into the jungles, leaving the country desolate. India was visited by
the most horrible famines, and while natives died in the streets from
hunger, the Company’s agents had the gratification of reporting an
increased collection from land taxes. It is estimated that the famine
of 1770 carried away with it one-third of the entire population of
Bengal, and yet in the following year the land revenue of Bengal was
raised and actually collected in cash.
The two letters which were written from the Company’s Government in
India to its directors in England in the years 1771 and 1772 are of
peculiar interest in this matter.
Dated 12th February, 1771: “Notwithstanding the great severity of the
late famine and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase
has been made in the settlements both of the Bengal and the Behar
Provinces for the present year.”[40]
Dated 10th January, 1772: “The collections in each department of
revenue are as successfully carried on for the present year as we could
have wished.”[40]
It is needless to say that in making a collection of an increased
revenue, following a devastating famine, a great deal more ingenuity
was needed. Every sort of advantage was taken of the distress of the
people. Their crops were monopolized, and in most cases the seed for
their next year’s crops was sold to realize the Company’s revenue. The
hereditary owners of the lands were driven away from their holding, and
their properties were transferred to the highest bidders for the land
revenue collection.
A comparison between the land taxes claimed by the previous rulers of
India and by the East India Company may be made from the following
figures:
The total land revenue collected by the last Mohammedan ruler of Bengal
in 1764, the last year of his administration, was £817,533; within
thirty years the British rulers collected an annual land revenue of
£2,680,000 in the same province. During this interval the country
had been visited by two of the most terrible famines of its history.
Colonel Briggs wrote in 1830: “A land tax like that which now exists in
India, professing to absorb the whole of the landlord’s rent, was never
known under any Government in Europe or Asia.”[41]
Aside from the heavy assessment of the Government there were, more
disastrous still, the extortions and premiums of the Company’s
servants. Besides serving in the pay of the Company, each young clerk
or old veteran officer was ambitious to make a sudden fortune to be
carried with him to England. Nearly everyone of the Company’s servants
carried on his private trade. This evil was stopped, however, by Clive
in later years. English traders used all the tools at hand to take
improper advantage of their customers and of rival native traders.
A typical case of this injustice occurred during the controversy over
excise duty in the Province of Bengal between its Nawab, Mir Kasam,
and the Company’s servants. The English victory at Plassey (1757) had
greatly enhanced the prestige of the Company. In exchange for its
protection, the Nawab of Bengal granted to the East India Company the
right to carry on its export and import trade, free of duty, within his
territory. This right the Nawab granted to the trade of the Company
and not to the private trade of the officials of the Company. In spite
of the repeated complaints from the Nawab, however, the Company’s
servants continued to carry on their private business without the
payment of any duties into the treasury of the Nawab. This arrangement,
of course, helped the private traders to rear colossal fortunes in a
very short period, but the Nawab’s treasury soon felt severely the
loss of its revenue. Moreover, the suffering of the native merchants
who had to pay heavy duties on their goods and thus found it difficult
to compete with these law-breaking traders, reached a critical state.
Overwhelmed from all sides, and finding his complaints to the Company’s
agents unheeded, the generous Nawab in a moment of noble and royal
indignation abolished all inland duties. By this act he personally
lost a large income from his revenues, but he placed his subjects on
equal terms with the employees of the East India Company. What followed
will be scarcely believed by our readers. The Executive Council of
the Company at Calcutta protested against this action of the Nawab as
a breach of faith towards the English nation. “The conduct of the
Company’s servants upon this occasion,” says James Mill in his history
of India, “furnishes one of the most remarkable instances upon record
of the power of interest to extinguish all sense of justice, and even
of shame.” “There can be no difference of opinion,” writes another
English historian, H. H. Wilson, “on the proceedings. The narrow-minded
selfishness of commercial cupidity had rendered all members of the
council, with the two honorable exceptions of Vansitart and Hastings,
obstinately inaccessible to the plainest dictates of reason, justice
and policy.”[42] More comment upon this is unnecessary.
Here was a class of officials in India who regarded the country, which
they had been called upon to govern in the name of God Almighty, as
no other than a fishing pool. They declared that the purpose of their
government was to restore order in place of chaos, and justice instead
of corruption. But when one of the native princes, inspired by nobility
of heart, ordered a cancellation of his own revenues in order to
benefit his subjects, the government of the Company flared up in a rage
and called his act of unselfish benevolence a breach of faith against
the English nation. Edmund Burke was after all right when he spoke
about the East India Company’s officials thus:
“ ... The Tartar invasion was mischievous, but it is our
protection that destroys India. It was their enmity, but it is our
friendship. Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as
it was the first day. The natives scarcely know what it is to see
the grey head of an Englishman; young men, boys almost, govern
there without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They
have no more social habits with the people than if they still
resided in England; nor, indeed, any species of intercourse but
that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune, with a view
to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age, and
all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another,
wave after wave, and there is nothing before the eyes of the
natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds
of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a
food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by
an Englishman is lost forever to India” (Edmund Burke in a speech
made in the House of Commons in 1783).”
After Plassey (1757) the English control over India began to expand
rapidly, and the East India Company acquired the real nature of
a government instead of a mere trading company. Gradually as the
political power of the Company grew in India and abuses crept in, the
English Parliament undertook to control all Indian affairs through
appointed representatives. This policy was carried out in so far that
on the eve of the Sepoy Mutiny (1857), which led to the transfer of the
Government of India to the British Sovereign, the English Parliament
already supervised the India affair through a cabinet minister and
a council board in England, and a governor-general appointed by the
British cabinet in India.
The resentment of the people of India against the British rule and
its consequent political and economic humiliations found its tragic
expression in the rebellion of 1857, commonly known as the Sepoy
Mutiny. The masses of the country led by the native army burst forth
in mad fury against the yoke of their foreign rulers. The rebellion
started in the United Provinces and at once spread like wildfire
throughout the British territories. Once again the British played the
natives against each other. The rebellion, which at one time threatened
the complete overthrow of the British power in the country, was crushed
with the assistance of Sikh regiments from Punjab. The suppression of
the rebellion involved a terrible loss of life, and some of the deeds
of horror which were committed by the infuriated English soldiery
remain as fresh in the minds of the Indian people to this day as they
were in 1857. The last of the Moghul emperors was deposed and all of
his heirs were fired from the mouths of cannon. Thousands of rebels
were hung, and their dead bodies were left hanging from the branches of
trees in order to excite terror in the minds of the populace. Kaye and
Malleson’s _History of the Mutiny_ gives the most horrible account of
the butchery which the English officers carried on during the bloody
days after the Mutiny in the most indiscriminate and barbarous fashion.
The authors of this memorable account of the Mutiny state: “Already
our military officers were hunting down the criminals of all kinds,
and hanging them up with as little compunction as though they had been
pariah-dogs, or jackals, or vermin of a baser kind.” So ferocious was
the temper of the white soldiers, and so strongly had the fierce hatred
against all “who wore the dusky livery of the East” possessed them,
that on one occasion in the absence of tangible enemies they turned
on their own camp-followers and murdered a large number of their loyal
and unoffending servants. Sir Charles Ball writes: “Every day we had
expeditions to burn and destroy disaffected villages and we had taken
our revenge. We have the power of life in our hands and I assure you,
we spare not.” Innocent old men and helpless women with sucking infants
at their breasts felt the weight of the white man’s vengeance just as
much as the vilest malefactors. It is recorded that in several places
cow’s flesh was forced by spears and bayonets into the mouths of Hindu
prisoners because the English knew that the Hindu so abhors cow’s flesh
that he will rather die than eat it. Kaye and Malleson write:
“Afterwards the thirst for blood grew stronger still. It is on
the records of our British Parliament, in papers sent home by the
Governor-General of India in Council, that the aged, women and
children, are sacrificed, as well as those guilty of rebellion.
They were not deliberately hanged, but burnt to death in their
villages--perhaps now and then accidentally shot. Englishmen did
not hesitate to boast, or to record their boastings in writings,
that they had ‘spared no one’, and that ‘peppering away the
niggers’ was very pleasant pastime, ‘enjoyed amazingly’. It has
been stated in a book patronized by high class authorities,
that ‘for three months eight dead-carts daily went their rounds
from sunrise to sunset to take down the corpses which hung at
crossroads and market-places’, and that ‘six thousand beings’ had
been thus summarily disposed of and launched into eternity.”[43]
Following the Sepoy Mutiny an act was passed in the British Parliament
by virtue of which the government of India was transferred from the
East India Company to the British Crown. The English King thus became
the ruler of India, but the people of India paid the price of purchase.
The shareholders of the Company were recompensed for this change, and
the amount paid to them was added to the national debt of India. The
government of the country changed hands, but virtually no change was
made in the policy. Even in the times of peace that followed the public
debt of India continued to increase. The new rulers were determined
to promote English industries at the expense of Indian manufacturers
just as had been done under the rule of the Company. India remained
henceforth a colony of the Empire for the production of raw materials
at very low prices in the English factories. The manufactured goods
were afterwards re-shipped to India for the native consumption. The
posts of dignity and high emolument in the government service continued
to be regarded by the Englishman as his sole monopoly. No confidence
was placed in the natives; they were given no positions of authority,
and were excluded from offices of responsibility as much as possible.
In other words, the interests of Indians were completely subordinated
to those of the Englishmen. “The roads to wealth and honor were closed
to the natives. The highest among them were considered unworthy of
those places of trust in the state employments which were held by
young English boys fresh from school. The springs of Indian industry
were stopped, and the sources of the country’s wealth were dried up.”
As a result of the direct British rule over India the public debt of
the country rose from £51,000,000 in 1857 to £200,000,000 in 1901.
The agricultural class of India, moreover, the backbone of national
prosperity in a country whose main occupation is agriculture, had
become so poor that in one district in 1900 85% of the land revenue
was directly paid to the Government officials by money-lenders, the
landowners being wholly unable to meet their obligations. It was
estimated by the leading medical journal of the world (_The Lancet_,
June, 1901) that during the last decimum of the nineteenth century
nineteen millions of British Indian subjects had died of starvation,
and one million from plague. And yet at the beginning of the twentieth
century according to the financial arrangements of the country half
of its total revenue was sent out of India to England each year. This
included the upkeep of the India office in London, pensions to retired
officials residing in England, and interest on public debts.[44]
With these facts in mind the reader will not wonder that India is
poor. Place any other country in the world under the same conditions.
Let her government be carried on by a foreign power with the complete
exclusion of the sons of the soil from positions of responsibility;
let her fiscal policy be determined by the parliament of a rival
commercial nation without a single representative of the governed
nation sitting in its councils; let its industry be crippled or
destroyed by a malicious use of political power by its foreign rulers;
let its agriculture be subjected to a heavy and uncertain land tax; let
half its total revenue be carried away annually to a foreign land; and
you will not be surprised if the most prosperous nation in the world
sinks in the course of a few years to the lowest depths of poverty and
degradation.[45]
A nation prospers if its government is wisely administered in the
interest of the people, if the sources of wealth are widened, and if
the proceeds from taxation are spent for the uplift of the people and
among the people. It is impoverished if its government is carried on
by an outside power for the purpose of exploitation; if the sources
of its wealth are narrowed from the crippling of its industries, and
if its revenues are largely remitted out of the country without an
economic return. Americans stand in awe before the single monopoly
of the Standard Oil Company. They are appalled by the magnitude and
tyranny of its power. They should remember that the Standard Oil
monopoly is a pigmy before the British monopoly of India. England has
exercised for nearly two hundred years exclusive and undivided control
over the affairs of India. She has had power to shape the destinies of
three hundred million people according to her will, being responsible
to no one but herself. She has held not only the government of India,
but its commerce, its finances, and its industry. In conclusion let
us repeat the poignant remark quoted earlier, “The national wealth of
India did not sprout wings and fly away. It had to be carried away.”
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Quoted from R. C. Dutt, _Economic History of British India_.
[36] Quoted from R. C. Dutt.
[37] Quoted from R. C. Dutt.
[38] _Prosperous British India._
[39] From _The Government of India_.
[40] Quoted from R. C. Dutt.
[41] Quoted from R. C. Dutt.
[42] Quoted from R. C. Dutt.
[43] Quoted from Lajpat Rai.
[44] Digby.
[45] Digby.
CHAPTER IX
INDIAN NATIONALISM--ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH
Before discussing at length the problems of Indian nationalism, let us
consider whether India is really a nation, or is merely a composite of
peoples inhabiting the same country. India’s fundamental unity as a
nation has been denied often by prominent scholars, while its historic
and cultured oneness has really never been acknowledged by the English
rulers of the country. Sir John Strachey remarks:
“This is the first and most essential thing to learn about
India--that there is not and never was an India, or even any
country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any
sort of unity, physical, political, social, or religious; no
Indian nation, no ‘people of India’ of which we hear so much.”
We believe that Sir John Strachey is profoundly wrong in his assertion
that India is not a nation in the “physical, political, social, or
religious” sense. On the contrary, it can be proved easily that
geographically, historically, culturally, and spiritually India is
fundamentally one. Cut off from the north and the east by the snow-clad
Himalayas, and surrounded on the south and the west by the mighty
Indian Ocean, India is geographically, one country. Every part of the
interior is freely accessible from all sides. No natural boundary lines
within the country divide it into different parts; nor do any high
mountains obstruct the free passage from one part of the country to
the other. In fact, India is a physical unit, much more distinct than
any other country in Europe or America.
When we study the history of India, from the ancient Vedic period to
modern times, we find again the whole of the Indian peninsula, from
Bengal to Gujrat, and from Ceylon to Kashmir, mentioned always as one
motherland. “The early Vedic literature contains hymns addressed to
the Motherland of India. The epic poems speak of the whole of BHARAT
as the home-land of Aryans.” We hear nowhere any account of separate
nationalities within the country. The literature of India is full of
thoughts about Indian nationality; but there is no mention of separate
Bengal, Madras, Gujrat, or Punjab nations, based upon geographic
divisions. Powerful emperors in ancient as well as modern times have
ruled over the entire peninsula in peace and security. “In fact, the
belief in the unity of India was so strong in ancient times that
no ruler considered his territories complete until he had acquired
control over the entire peninsula.” Asoka ruled over the whole of
India in perfect harmony. Akhbar’s power spread to the farthest ends
of the land. And when, later on, the different governors of the border
provinces rose in revolt and refused allegiance to the successors of
Akhbar, it was the great distance from the capital that suggested
revolt to the population of these distant provinces, and not a feeling
of separate nationality.
Culturally, again, India is one nation. In their daily habits, their
ethical standards, and their spiritual responses the Indians of
every religion and locality are fundamentally alike. “Their family
life is founded on the same bases; their modes of dress and cooking
are the same. Their very tastes are similar.” They respect the same
national heroes and worship the same ideals. They have the same hopes
and aspirations in this life and in the hereafter. As a result,
their mental and spiritual behavior is similar. In fact, they are
fundamentally one in mind and in spirit.
It is true that more than one dialect is spoken in the country. Until
1920 the business of the Indian National Congress itself was carried
on in the English language because no other language was common to
the whole of India. It was really tragic that a people who were
so profoundly proud of their national heritage and who aspired to
political freedom were obliged to use at the meetings of their national
assemblies an utterly foreign language. That the variety of languages
was in fact a very slight difficulty was demonstrated at the session
of the Indian National Congress in 1920. From the Congress platform at
Amritsar in 1919 Mahatma Gandhi had announced that at all subsequent
meetings the business of the Congress would be conducted in the Hindi
language, which is spoken by more than a third of the population of
the country. Teachers were sent immediately to different parts of the
country to instruct the people in the Hindi language and when the
Congress convened again in 1920 its business was carried on in Hindi.
Delegates from Bengal, Madras, and Bombay made their speeches in Hindi
as fluently as those from the United Provinces and the Punjab. Every
one felt satisfied at the change. A miracle had happened; _India had
acquired a common tongue in the course of a year_.
The population of India is composed of many different peoples, who
came to the country originally as invaders, and later settled there
and became a part thereof. Through the process of assimilation and
adaptation extending over generations, the original Afghan, Mongol, and
Persian conquerors of India have lost their peculiar characteristics,
and become one with the rest of the population in their language,
ideas, and loyalties. The position of these foreign types in India is
exactly analogous to peoples of different nationalities, who migrated
from Europe into America in the early times. The interval of a single
generation was usually sufficient to transfer the loyalties of European
immigrants from their native countries to the United States. The
difference between India and the United States in this respect is
merely that the Indian must go back many more generations to reach his
immigrant than must the American.
The chief barrier in the way of spiritual unity among the people
of India, is religion. Hinduism and Mohammedanism are the dominant
religions of the country. The main portion of the population is Hindu,
but seventy millions of Mohammedans are scattered over the whole
country in small groups. The Mohammedans came to India originally as
invaders and conquerors, and now occupy a position in the country
of mixed authority and subjection. Wherever they form the majority
group, they dominate the followers of other religions; while in
other places they are held down as minorities. Since the beginning
of their contact the Hindus and the Mohammedans of India have never
agreed. Intervals of peace and harmony between the two communities
have occurred occasionally during the reigns of benevolent emperors
like Akhbar and Shah Jahan; but their hearts were never joined in
true companionship even before the beginning of English influence.
The modern rulers of India have helped to strengthen the differences
between the Hindus and the Mohammedans in so far that the animosities
between the two religious groups were no less bitter in 1918 than they
were three hundred years ago. Since the days of Gandhi’s leadership,
however, a great deal has been accomplished in building up a feeling
of genuine comradeship and love between the Hindus and Mohammedans of
India. When the Moslems all over the world were in a state of deep
distress at the Khilafat issues after the Severes treaty, the Hindus
of India made common cause with the Moslems of the world. Khilafat was
included in the Congress program as one of India’s main issues. This
liberality helped to win the hearts of the Mohammedan population of
India toward their Hindu compatriots, and the Hindu Gandhi was idolized
by both religious groups, as leader and savior. It was an auspicious
beginning of friendship between these two isolated factions in India,
and ever since it has been enthusiastically followed up by the younger
generation of the country. It may be confidently expected that as the
youth of India acquire influence in the affairs of the country, the
friction between the Hindus and the Mohammedans will cease, and their
age-long battles based upon superstition and error will come to an end.
Worse still in their ethical and spiritual significance are the
differentiations between the caste groups among the Hindus. Numerous
social reform societies are working at the present time to remove the
barriers of caste within Hindu society; and until the work of building
up a human fellowship among the different caste and religious groups
of India, based upon the highest moral teachings of the Hindu sages,
is completed, the political as well as spiritual regeneration of the
country will remain an idle dream.
We have seen that in the cultural sense, on account of the sameness
of feelings and instincts, the Hindus, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Parsis,
Bengalis, Mahratas, and Madrasis are fundamentally alike. Yet the
bitterness between these warring elements of the country had grown
into such immense proportions at one time that a communal feeling of
neighborhood and human decency among them seemed inconceivable. Two
hundred years ago, when the English first began to acquire control
over the country, the people of India were divided into perfectly
hostile groups; and no power then existed which could bring together
these warring factions. Among the causes that have secretly conspired
to develop a spirit of unity among the different religious and social
groups of India, the foremost has been British imperialism in the
country. Britain gave to India, in the first place, a long reign of
peace. This enabled the people of different parts of the country to
have a more direct and steady intercourse than was possible in earlier
times. The English also gave to the higher classes of India a knowledge
of English history and classical literature, whose study breathed
into the minds of the educated Indians a love of liberty. Acquaintance
with the spirit of European nationalism created a desire for Indian
nationality. A national consciousness soon sprang into existence and
found expression through the medium of the Indian National Congress.
Greater than everything else, however, in its direct consequences of
uniting the people of India into one nation has been the universal
antagonism toward British rule. As the tyranny of foreign rule
gradually began to be felt, hatred against it increased. The different
factions in the country were forced to unite for the purpose of
driving out of the country the arrogant intruders. Whatever else may
be doubtful, one thing is certain about India: “The sentiment of
antagonism toward British rule and of resentment against its iniquitous
character is both universal and profound.”
The principal grievances against English rule are its alien character
and its exploitation of the country’s wealth. Mahatma Gandhi calls it
“Satanic,” because it is founded not upon the consent of the governed
but upon the military strength of the ruler. “It is based not on right
but on might. Its last appeal is not to reason or to the heart but to
the sword.” Gandhi writes:
“I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection
had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically
and economically.... The government established by law in British
India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No
sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence
the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have
no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town-dwellers of
India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime
against humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history.”--Gandhi,
_Speeches_, pp. 753-4.
We said just now that one of the main grievances against English rule
in India is its alien character. It may be asked: “Why should the
alien origin of a rule itself be such a strong argument against it?”
“Is it not true that England has given to India peace and efficiency
in government? That constitutes the chief function of governments
everywhere, and the rule which has successfully achieved this purpose
justifies its existence. If it is true elsewhere, it should be true in
India also.” Our questioner may be both profoundly right and profoundly
wrong. However, the acceptance or rejection of a foreign lordship by
the heart is a matter of such subtle sentiment, that the only way to
explain its meaning to the reader is to create a situation where he
shall be called upon to judge in the matter.
Let us suppose that by some trick of fortune Japan obtained mastery
over America. Let us grant, at the same time, that the Japanese rule
over America was more efficient than the American rule, and in the
light of our modern knowledge it is not beyond the limit of probability
to imagine that Japanese efficiency in government could be greater than
American efficiency. How would our reader feel about the situation?
Would he be willing to discard his own indigenous native government
for the sake of a more efficient rule under the Japanese Mikado?
What would be his reaction if he saw his own “stars and stripes”
replaced by the Imperial flag of Japan? Certainly, he would not feel
at ease about the matter. The condition of the native of India under
British authority is exactly similar in cause and consequence. In
its fundamental aspect the rule of a country by an alien power is
essentially wrong in principle. It is unnatural and hence utterly
immoral. Whether it is the Japanese in Korea, the United States of
America in the Philippine Islands, or the English in India--it is
all unnatural and immoral. There can never be any ethical, moral, or
spiritual justification of an other than native rule in a country.
“The government of a people by itself,” says John Stuart Mill, “has a
meaning and reality; but such a thing as government of one people by
another does not, and cannot exist.”
So far there have existed only two principles for the government of
any country in the world, one is the government of a country by its
chosen representatives, who are held responsible to their constituents,
and are necessarily required to rule the country in the interests of
the governed. This system was described by an American emancipator as
“government of the people, by the people, for the people.” When we
look back over the histories of the different countries of the world,
we find that, without a single exception, the countries which have
advanced in their material and cultural possessions, during the past
two hundred years, have been those whose governments were based on the
principle of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
In the modern world we find that the governments of the United States
of America, England, France, and Germany are typical for their
representative characters. It goes without saying that the progress
which these nations have made during recent times would not have been
possible under any other system of government. Take the case of any
of these countries, America for example; you will find that “America
has been made great by the democratic character of its governmental
institutions. Its colossal achievements in the mechanical arts, the
high advancement in its cultural and artistic life, the mammoth
nature of its commercial and industrial progress, the magnitude of
its educational equipment, its institutions of learning and research,
and its high standard of living--all these owe their origin to the
beneficent character of the American government,” whose foundation
was laid upon the noble principles contained in the Declaration of
Independence:
“ ... That all men are created equal; That they are endowed by
their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure
these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; ...”
There is still another principle (or lack of principle) on which the
government of a country could be based. This occurs where the country
is governed by an alien power, which derives its authority not from the
consent of the governed, but from some outside source. As a natural
consequence of this system the rulers of such countries are not
concerned with the benefits to be derived by the ruled country. In such
cases the interests of the subject nation are completely subordinated
to those of the master country. “The commerce of the ruling power is
expanded at the expense of the ruled; the industries of the governing
country are enhanced at the cost of the extinction of those of the
governed.” “The material, cultural, and moral life of one people is
enriched at the expense of the life sources of a more helpless and
unfortunate people.” The process begins with the impoverishing of the
subject nation through a system of economic exploitation of its wealth
resources by the dominant powers. Poverty in its turn degrades the
character of the people, and the nation becomes morally flabby. The
degeneration of an impoverished and suppressed people is assisted by
the deteriorating influence of the other policies of the foreign ruler,
such as the disarming of the subject people, the introduction in their
midst of an alien system of education so designed as to form in its
higher classes a group of miseducated “snobs” and to create in the
upper sections of the country contempt for its past history and culture.
This kind of government has existed in India for the past two hundred
years. To begin with, England carried away all the tangible wealth
of the country “in the form of indemnities, grants, and gifts from
its princes, and assessments and taxes from the people.” At the
same time the industries of the country were destroyed, and its
commercial prosperity was checked by a selfish policy of enriching the
manufacturing classes of England at the expense of those in India.
The entire population of the country was disarmed as the next step.
Thus were the natures of the people degraded, their martial spirit was
crushed, and “a race of soldiers and heroes converted into a timid
flock of quill-driving sheep.”
The introduction of an utterly alien system of education was still
another step in rooting out of the country the remnants of national
honor and pride. According to the scheme of English education in the
country, formulated by Lord Macaulay, English was made the medium of
instruction for all branches of study. English history and English
literature received preference over Indian history and Indian
literature. The text-books for schools and colleges were prepared by
English agents of the government; and from them sentiments of love and
admiration for Indian civilization and culture on one hand, and respect
for the character and behavior of its princes on the other, were
rigidly excluded. In its place the English kings, the English people,
the English religion, the English government, the English institutions,
in fact everything English was held up as ideal. According to the
history texts, whenever a battle was fought between the English and
the native princes, the former were always in the right and the latter
forever in the wrong. The English were always the victorious, and the
natives always the beaten party. Mir Jafar, the arch-traitor of the
country, was a noble and worthy prince, while Mir Kasam, the benevolent
protector of his subjects against the injustice of the East India
Company’s agents, was a hypocrite and a debauché. The reason for the
exaltation of Mir Jafar and the execration of Mir Kasam is, however,
easily understood. Mir Jafar was the commander-in-chief of the army
of Siraj-ud-Daulah, who stood against the forces of Lord Clive on the
battlefield of Plassey. At a suggestion of bribery from Clive, Mir
Jafar led the whole of his army over to the side of the enemy, and thus
secured for the English the victory of Plassey, which was the beginning
of their real power in the country. On the other hand, Mir Kasam was
continually fighting against the encroachments of the East India
Company over his own territories and the rights of his subjects. Which
of the two princes was a real man and a worthy hero among his people,
Mir Jafar or Mir Kasam? Mir Kasam, according to every kind of moral and
ethical standard of nobility and courage; Mir Jafar, according to the
corrupt standards of British Imperialism in India.
After the Indian youths had finished their scanty education, the future
that lay before them was of a very uninviting nature. As all the high
offices in the service of the country were monopolized by the English,
the only positions left for the educated classes of Indians were
those of low-paid clerks and assistants in the government offices. No
prospect of fame, or wealth, or power opened before them. There was no
great stimulus for the pursuit of higher knowledge. The young scholars
no sooner began to know their positions in the world than they realized
the uselessness of great attainments. Of what use was their learning if
they were not to have employment as responsible public administrators
of their country and so use their knowledge in the service of India?
The extent of the exclusion of the native inhabitants of the country
from offices of dignity and high emoluments in the government service
may be realized from the following figures. According to the figures of
1913, out of 2,501 civil and military offices in British India carrying
monthly salaries of 800 rupees ($266.00) or more, only 242, less than
ten per cent were held by Indians; out of the 4,986 appointments
carrying a monthly salary of 500 rupees ($166.00), only 19 per cent
were held by Indians; and out of the 11,064 appointments carrying a
monthly salary of 200 rupees ($66.00) only 42 per cent were held by
Indians. Conditions have not changed much since 1913.[46]
In order to enable the American reader to realize fully the magnitude
of injustice involved in the wrong policies of the English government
in India regarding the country’s systems of education and public
employment, we shall use our previous illustration once more. Let it be
supposed that simultaneously with the consolidation of Japanese power
in America it was ordered by the Mikado that henceforth the Japanese
language should form the sole medium of instruction in the schools and
colleges throughout the United States. The American children would be
required to learn the Japanese language before reaching school. The
texts given to the youths of the country to study and digest would be
books written and published in Japan, from which the names of such
national heroes as Washington and Lincoln were excluded, but in which
the praises of Japan were sung in high chorus. Shakespeare, Milton,
Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne would be excluded from the American
school curriculum, and Japanese literature substituted in its place.
The business of all governmental departments would be conducted in
Japanese, and its official circulars and reports would be printed in
Japanese. All the higher posts in the service of the country would
be reserved for the Mikado’s own countrymen. The president and his
cabinet; supreme, district, and superior court judges; the governors of
the states,--all would be appointed in Tokyo from among the Japanese
in favor with the government of the Mikado. Native-born Americans
would be employed only as stenographers, postmen, grammar school
teachers, and street car conductors, and then only at starvation wages.
Buddhism would be made the state religion of America. What would any
self-respecting American say if all this were done to his country?
What would he do when his children and his grandchildren raised a cry
against the injustice done to their country and its manhood, and this
cry was drowned by the declaration of the Japanese imperialists that
Japan was carrying the Yellow Man’s burden in the United States of
America.
The feeling of a deep and passionate resentment felt by the people
of India regarding these matters was expressed by the late Mr. G. K.
Gokhale thus:
“A kind of dwarfing or stunting of the Indian race is going
on under the present system. We must live all our lives in an
atmosphere of inferiority, and the tallest of us must bend, in
order that the exigencies of the system may be satisfied. The
upward impulse, if I may use such an expression, which every
schoolboy at Eton or Harrow may feel, that he may one day be a
Gladstone, a Nelson, or a Wellington, and which may draw forth
the best efforts of which he is capable, that is denied to us.
The height to which our manhood is capable of rising can never
be reached by us under the present system. The moral elevation
which every Self-Governing people feel, cannot be felt by us.
Our administrative and military talents must gradually disappear
owing to sheer disuse, till at last our lot, as hewers of wood and
drawers of water in our own country, is stereotyped.”
If, therefore, the world sees the spectacle of an indignant India in
revolt against the English rule, it should not be surprised. It is only
natural that the English should resent the attempts of the Indians
to secure their independence. It is hoped, however, that the other
nations of the world will not feel hostile against the battle cry of
the Indians against the British oppression in their country. If the
English imperialists try to prove the virtue of their rule in India,
please remember that the question is not whether the English rule is
good or bad, but whether the principle underlying it is right or wrong.
No self-respecting American citizen desires to see Japanese lordship
established in his native land; he would call a condition intolerable
in which the Japanese held all the positions of power in the government
of his country. The full-blooded inhabitants of India feel in much
the same way about the British supremacy in India. The reason of this
attitude of both American and Indian nationalists is the same. The
self-respect of an honest man revolts against foreign domination. The
eyes of Modern India have been opened, and her people realize “that
they are men, with a man’s right to manage his own affairs.” As was
expressed by Mrs. Annie Besant in her presidential address before the
Indian National Congress in 1917: “India is no longer on her knees for
‘boons’; she is on her feet for Rights.”
The first voice of organized Indian nationalist opinion demanding
reform in the British government of India, was heard in 1885. In
that year the first session of the Indian National Congress was held
in Bombay. The Congress began as a gathering of a small group of
progressive nationalist leaders from different parts of the country.
Gradually, as its function became known, the ranks of the congress
were swelled by delegates from all sections of India, and soon its
responsible character as the representative organ of Indian progressive
opinion on political matters was recognized in both England and India.
The Congress began its career as a critic of British policies in
the country. It submitted a request to the English nation for an
inquiry into Indian affairs and presented claims for reforms in the
irresponsible and autocratic character of the British Government in the
country. As time passed and the real nature of English rule began to be
disclosed, the Indian nationalists became “bolder in their criticisms
and more ambitious in their claims for reform.” Except for minor
concessions granted through the courtesy of a few sympathetic viceroys
nothing positive in the direction of the better government of India was
accomplished by the Indian National Congress until the Morley-Minto
reforms of 1909. Yet in spite of its enormous difficulties, arising
from the stubbornness of British bureaucracy in India and the cold,
unconcerned attitude of the English Parliament towards Indian claims,
the Congress had done excellent work in arousing the educated classes
of the country to a realization of their political wrongs.
The Indian nationalist movement received a great impetus during the
harsh reign of Lord Curzon as the high-handed Viceroy of India. One of
the acts of Lord Curzon was the partition of Bengal in 1905,--“an act
which aroused in the entire population of Bengal a violent outburst of
popular disapproval.” The purpose of the English Viceroy in dividing
the province into two portions was to destroy the unity of Bengal, and
to sow at the same time seeds of bitter Hindu-Muslim feuds. But the
Bengalee youths were determined not to accept the dismemberment of
their ancient land of Bengal, and the entire province was in a state
of anarchy for a period of six years. In spite of the attempts of the
English to quiet the agitation, it gradually spread all over India
until at last the hated act was repealed by royal proclamation at the
Delhi coronation Durbar in 1911.
In the meantime the Morley-Minto reforms, sponsored by John Morley,
the noted biographer of Gladstone and at that time Secretary of State
for India, and Lord Minto, the Viceroy of India, had become law by
the India Council Act of 1909. The reforms were accepted by a few
moderate leaders as “generous,” but on the whole public opinion in
India regarded them as inadequate and petty. For the first time seats
in the executive councils of the provinces as well as those in the
Indian government were thrown open to Indians. The provincial and
central legislative councils were enlarged and made to include more
“elected” Indian members. Henceforth the provincial councils were to
contain a majority of “non-official” “elected” members as distinguished
from the “official” and “non-official nominated” members, the official
being the officers of the Government who sat in the councils as
ex-officio members and the non-official nominated who were nominated
to their positions as council members by the governor of the province
for provincial councils and by the Viceroy in the case of the central
council.
The powers of the reformed councils, however, were limited. “The
councils,” says Prof. Parker T. Moon, “could pass resolutions subject
to the British Parliament’s overriding authority; they could discuss
the budget and other measures; they could criticise and suggest. They
could not oppose and propose, but neither depose nor dispose. They
could not overthrow the administration, or tighten the purse strings.
They were, in short, experimental debating clubs.”[47]
Those who had put their confidence in the Morley-Minto reforms were
soon disappointed. The real nature of the new councils as mere
“debating clubs” was discovered and found unsatisfactory. The people of
India had demanded the right to control the affairs of their country’s
government, and they had been granted merely the right to discuss and
to criticize, with no authority whatsoever to alter the policies of
its officials. The helplessness of the Indian members in the Councils
was proved after the World War during the agitation over the Rowlatt
Bills. The uproar against this piece of repressive legislation was so
strong that all Indian members of the Central Legislative Council,
including those who were nominated by the government, voted against
its passage. But in spite of the solid opposition from Indian members
in the Council and an unprecedented revulsion against the Bills among
all classes in the country, they were made law by the Viceroy. That
legislation was a “direct slap in the face of nationalist India.” It is
a matter of common knowledge that it led to the _satyagraha_ of Mahatma
Gandhi, which in turn crystallized into the non-violent non-coöperation
movement.
After the reforms of 1909, the Indian National Congress continued to
arouse the masses of the country to a national consciousness and to a
demand for representation in the government of the country. In 1914
all groups of Indians joined in a spirit of loyalty to assist the
British Empire during the World War. India made heavy contributions to
the war-time needs of England in both man-power and money power; as a
recompense for her loyalty the people of India were promised liberal
home rule after the war. In the meantime the Indian National Congress
and the All-India Moslem League (founded in 1912 by the Mohammedans of
India) had agreed to present the joint claims of all communities in the
country for home rule. The scheme formulated by these two organizations
at Lucknow in 1916, and known as the Congress-League Scheme, had for
its aim the attainment of _Swaraj_ (home rule) within the British
Empire. They proposed a plan by which India within a period of fifteen
years should acquire the same rights as the self-governing colonies of
the Empire.
Before the end of the war, the Secretary of State for India, Mr.
Montague, was sent to India by the British Parliament for the study
of the conditions of the country with a view to launching a scheme
of wider influence for its people. A joint report prepared by the
Secretary, Mr. Montague, and the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, was
published in 1918, and after slight modifications was passed by the
British Parliament as the Act of 1919.
Although the Montague-Chelmsford reforms were an improvement over
the reforms of 1909, all sections of the Indian people except a
few isolated moderates at once declared them to be unsatisfactory.
Besides enlarging the existing councils and providing for more elected
members in them, the reforms of 1919 introduced the new principle of
“dyarchy” into the provinces. The various departments of the provincial
government were known as “reserved” or “transferred.” The control of
the “reserved” departments remained in the hands of the governors,
who were not responsible in any way to the legislatures. These
included law, order, justice, and police. The class of “transferred”
subjects included among others education, agriculture, and public
health. Their control was placed in the hands of ministers elected
by and responsible to the provincial legislatures, which contained a
majority of elected members. The system of “dyarchy” in the provincial
governments, however, was not a success. No sooner had the new scheme
begun to function than difficulties over the budget arose between
the ministers in charge of different departments. The ministers of
transferred subjects were given the privilege of managing their
departments according to popular demand, but they were not provided
with the funds necessary to make possible the proposed reforms. “The
strings of the purse were still held by an outside power,” a condition
which made work of these responsible ministers wholly ineffective. “In
defiance of Lincoln’s principles regarding the fate of a house divided
against itself,” comments Prof. Moon, “the British Government made
it a principle to divide the administration of India. India was to
be ‘half free, half slave.’ Autocracy and self-government were to be
twin columns supporting British imperialism. It is interesting to note
the subjects which were reserved as of interest to Great Britain--the
repression of disorder was a prime interest. Ingenious as it was, the
scheme was by no means an unqualified success.”[48]
Yet it must be admitted that the reforms of 1919 were never given
a fair trial by the people of India. Before the time came for the
installation of the new councils, the Indian nation had already
launched upon its career of non-violent non-coöperation against the
British Government. How the agitation against the Rowlatt Bills led
to martial law in the Punjab and to the massacre at Amritsar, which
in turn drove Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress to the
policy of boycott against English rule, has already been explained in
a previous chapter. One of the items in the non-coöperation program
of the Congress was the boycott of councils, and as a consequence
of this item all the responsible nationalist leaders withheld their
names and support from the council elections. When after the arrest
of Mahatma Gandhi in 1922, one wing of the Indian nationalists under
the leadership of Mr. C. R. Das, decided to go into the councils,
they did so with the purpose of breaking them up. The avowed object
of followers of Mr. Das, who were henceforth called the “Swarajists,”
was to capture the councils with a view to breaking the machinery
of the government from within by obstructing its business at every
step. Even though the “Swarajists” finally did succeed in holding the
majority seats in different legislative councils of the country, and
in causing considerable annoyance to the government officials by their
obstructionist methods, yet they were far from being able at any time
to halt the government machinery.
The point at issue between India and England is this: India has
outgrown its old habit of submission. It does not bend its knee to beg
for reforms and concessions. It is standing on its feet and demanding
its rights, and the methods it is using to secure the rights of the
people to govern themselves are of its own creation. The surprising
thing in this whole affair is not that India has lost faith in the
British sense of justice and has decided to boycott its English rulers;
the amazing thing is that it took the people of India so long to find
out the truth about England’s interests in the country and their own
welfare. It is a sad commentary upon the genius of Indian leadership
that it took the Indian National Congress thirty-five years to
discover the path of non-coöperation towards _Swaraj_ (home rule). To
expect from the English nation, which rewarded General Dyer for his
massacre of 800 unarmed civilians with a purse of £10,000 ($50,000),
a grant of self-government was stark nonsense. And yet until the new
path was struck out by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920, Indians of all shades
of opinion persevered in their belief that freedom could be acquired
by begging. Mahatma Gandhi was the first man among Indians to realize
the fact that freedom is never got by gifts of the rulers, but on the
contrary is won by the might of the ruled. Freedom is a thing which
cannot be given to a nation from outside; the ability to acquire it
must be developed from within.
It is really amazing how old habits stick with beings long after
their uselessness has been established. A case of this occurred in
India after the incarceration of Mahatma Gandhi in 1922. The Mahatma
had started the country on the lines of non-coöperation, and they
were proceeding quite successfully, when he was suddenly arrested and
sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. Soon after he had disappeared
from the scene of the Congress, there sprang up in its midst a new
party which at once resolved to go back into the councils, as if they
had not had enough experience with the council business in previous
times. What prompted the “Swarajists” to this action has always
remained unintelligible to me. Did they really believe that they
could conquer the English bureaucracy of India through speeches in
the council chambers, or frighten them into submission through their
obstructionist terrors? If they did, it was a typical case of the
triumph of hope over experience. If ever anyone made the English rulers
of the country quake in their shoes it was Gandhi. He did not do this
by the politician’s tricks. He who fights against the English nation
with those weapons works against heavy odds, because the English are
already past masters in the art of diplomacy. The bureaucrats were
terrified by Gandhi because he used the weapon of passive resistance,
which was native to himself and his countrymen but foreign to the
British militarists. The rulers of the country were completely baffled
by Gandhi’s methods. They simply did not know what to do. If it had
been an armed insurrection of a rebellious nation, they possessed
enough military force to suppress it with success; but their best
strategists failed when they had to encounter a mass of three hundred
million disobeying and yet non-resisting people, who had risen in
sudden revolt against their established authority at the bidding of a
saintly leader.
Gandhi’s non-violent non-coöperation still forms the creed of the
Indian National Congress. The masses all over the country have been
made conscious of the loss of their national dignity under the rule of
the British; the blood of the martyrs at Jallianwalla Bagh has made the
heart of India bleed; and it is hoped that before the present agitation
in the country is slackened, India will have achieved its national
freedom, and have become able once more to offer its contribution of
art, beauty, and culture to the rest of the world.
Other outside influences besides the injustices of the British rule in
the country, that have conspired together to strengthen the nationalist
movement of India during the twentieth century, were the Japanese
victory in the Russo-Japanese war, and the lowering of the white man’s
prestige in the minds of all Eastern nations during and after the World
War. The crushing defeat of the Russian forces at the hands of the
Eastern islanders during the Russo-Japanese war broke forever the spell
of the invincibility of white man’s arms against Eastern foes; and this
incident gave a great impetus to the nationalistic movements in all
countries of the East.
Again when during the World War native regiments from the different
colonial possessions of the fighting powers were gathered in the
battlefields of Europe to witness the “white man’s holocaust,” their
respect for his supposed superior civilization disappeared. At the same
time the World War weakened the potential powers of the imperialistic
white nations, thereby increasing considerably the chances of success
for the rebellious peoples in the East. The high-sounding sentiments
of “Self-determination” for weaker nations, and “a world made safe for
democracy” uttered by the allied statesmen, during the period of war,
had, ever since the ending of the World War on Armistice Day, quickened
the hopes not only of India but of other dependent nations as well to
seek in every direction for the realization of the ideals expressed by
these eloquent orators of the allies. What will the end be?
* * *
Since this was written some developments of a momentous character
have taken place in the political situation of India, of which an
appropriate notice may conveniently be taken here.
At the 1928 session of the Indian National Congress held at Calcutta
a scheme of self-government, jointly prepared by all parties in
India, was presented to the British Parliament for enaction into
law. This scheme, known as the Nehru Report, was accompanied by an
ultimatum to the effect, that if Dominion Status equivalent to that
of other self-governing dominions of the Empire like Canada and South
Africa was not granted to India by the British Parliament before the
midnight of December 31st, 1929, the Indian National Congress would
henceforth declare complete independence as its immediate goal. Since
no satisfactory response was made to this ultimatum by the British
Parliament within the prescribed time limit, the Indian National
Congress at its annual session held at Lahore during the last week of
1929 committed itself to complete independence and a severance of all
relations with the British Government. The Independence resolution of
Mahatma Gandhi was carried by an overwhelming majority of 2,994 votes
against only 6. January 26th, 1930, was chosen by the Indian National
Congress as the day of Indian Independence. It was observed by all
Indians, in India and abroad, amidst spectacular demonstrations, during
which the national flag was hoisted with ceremony, and the Declaration
of Independence read to the masses. Resolutions of approval were passed
at nearly 750,000 meetings, and pledges of support given to the Indian
National Congress under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, by the
enthusiastic crowds, everywhere. At a later date the All-India Congress
Committee consisting of 300 members transferred its authority to guide
the policies of the Congress to a working committee of ten chosen
leaders of the people, who in turn have expressed their implicit faith
in the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.
After all efforts at reconciliation with the British Government had
failed, Mahatma Gandhi embarked on his campaign of Civil Disobedience
on March 9th, 1930. On that day he left his home at Ahmedabad with
a batch of 79 volunteers to reach Jalalpur, a village on the ocean
shore and 150 miles distant, where he and his followers will start
manufacturing salt in open defiance of the British Government’s
monopoly of salt manufacture in India. This will be symbolic of
Gandhi’s program of Civil Disobedience. On this historic journey Gandhi
and his followers have been greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by the
general populace, who have gathered in numbers of hundreds of thousands
and lined Gandhi’s march all along his journey.
The plan of Gandhi is very simple. He, with his batch of volunteers,
will start manufacturing salt at Jalalpur. Since this involves the
disobedience of the civil authority of the British Government, it will
be compelled to arrest Gandhi and his followers. The volunteers in case
of their arrest will be replaced by other batches of equal numbers. In
this way the campaign will continue until one of the parties withdraws.
The Government will either succeed in breaking up the power of Gandhi’s
followers or yield to the demands of nationalistic India. On the one
hand Gandhi has openly defied the British Government to arrest him, and
on the other hand he has strictly enjoined his followers to maintain a
spirit of non-violence. In a recent statement to the press he declared
that he was not afraid so much of the wrath of the British Government
as of the mad fury of his own countrymen bursting forth into open
violence.
Gandhi’s march to Jalalpur has aroused universal enthusiasm all
over the country. Huge demonstrations are taking place everywhere.
Indication of the British Government’s policy of repression has
shown itself already in the arrest of Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, Mr.
Vallabhai Patel, and the mayor of Calcutta, Mr. Sen Gupta. The masses
have so far maintained the spirit of non-violence. Gandhi has given
to the British Government of India the choice between a peaceful
settlement and violence. He has been able so far to hold his countrymen
in a calm mood of peaceful agitation. If he is arrested and the
Government starts repression with its customary display of violence,
the revolution in India may take a different course. In such a case the
responsibility will be all England’s.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] Quoted from Lajpat Rai.
[47] _Imperialism and World Politics_, page 300.
[48] _Imperialism and World Politics_, page 303.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "My mother India" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.