//. 2-0.2-$. LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON, N. J. Purchased by the Hamill Missionary Fund. Division MM? Section VJL ✓ INDIA IN FERMENT * INDIA IN FERMENT BY CLAUDE H. VAN TYNE HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ; AUTHOR OF “THE CAUSES OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE,” “THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION,” AND "THE LOYALISTS IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION” D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIII COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TC HON. CLARENCE M. BURTON GENEROUS FRIEND AND FELLOW HISTORIAN Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/indiainfermentOOvant PREFACE During the winter of 1921-1922 there was a unique political situation in India, perhaps without a parallel in the history of the world. On the assur¬ ance of a friend that every door in India would be open to me, I was tempted to go and see the situation for myself. In India I talked with representatives of all points of view from “Mahatma” Gandhi, the greatest of Indian leaders, to Lord Reading, the Viceroy of India. It was my privilege to sit at the council table with the bitterest enemies of the British regime, to listen to the most seditious talk about it, and then to sit with governors of provinces and with their ministers of state and get their “angle of vision.” In Allipore jail in Calcutta I enjoyed nearly two hours’ confidential talk with C. R. Das, the great Bengal leader of the extremists, and not long after I sat in the Bengal Legislative Council watching at their work the lawmakers for 40,000,000 people. In Delhi I listened for two weeks to the debates in the Legislative Assembly and held converse with mem¬ bers of every faction in it. I talked with rajahs and maharajahs and nawabs. I went with collectors and subdivisional officers into villages, and there through Vll PREFACE some local officer asked questions of the assembled villagers. Into courts high and low, into offices of collectors and commissioners, wherever government touched the people, I pried in the hope that I might learn for myself the facts in the strangely complex problem of Indian politics. The British Government had just created the In¬ dian Legislative Assembly, a “Parliament in em¬ bryo, ” and had pledged themselves to give India self-government as fast as she demonstrated her fit¬ ness for it. Indians who claimed to be the repre¬ sentatives of 320,000,000 of people, one fifth of the inhabitants of the globe, were declaring to the world that those mute masses were trembling with a desire to be free from the British rule. In our own country a consistent and powerful enemy of Great Britain with unrivaled press facilities was spreading among millions of ignorant American readers stories of British misrule utterly without foundation. Fed by a Washington agency of Indian extremists, the rad¬ ical American press teemed day after day with the fantastic products of licentious imaginations. Im¬ ported agitators appeared on the platform paid by our parlor Bolshevists who delight in financing any cause which promises to turn the world upside down. “Revolutions are such fun,” was their cry. “On with the propaganda, never mind the truth,” seemed their watchword. We were told, for example, that the Malabar tragedy in India was caused by an English • • • vm PREFACE officer putting poison gas in the car with the im¬ prisoned Moplahs, a yarn which even the most lurid agitator in India never thought to invent. To seek out the truth, if that was attainable where the prob¬ lem was so complex, I went to India. My obligation is deep to those who made that pos¬ sible. President M. L. Burton of the University of Michigan took up the matter with enthusiasm, in¬ duced generous alumni of the university to finance the expense of the journey, and secured from the liberal-minded Board of Regents a leave of absence for five months. The donors of the travel fund were Hon. C. M. Burton, J. W. Beaumont, Wm. R. Kales, Hal H. Smith, Julian H. Harris, Paul R. Gray, Henry M. Campbell, C. H. Campbell, Clarence A. Lightner, Stanley G. Stevens, Wm. L. Jenks, Oscar Webber, Wm. G. Sharp, Earl D. Babst, Bryant Walker, John R. Russell, Walter L. Russell, R. P. Lamont and P. W. A. Fitzsimmons. In India my obligations were so great, and to so many Englishmen and Indians of all parties, that it must suffice to mention the greatest debt of all, that to Sir Frederick Whyte, who lavishly expended his own hospitality and drew heavy drafts on the kind¬ ness of his friends so that I never was without a hospitable home and a guiding hand from the mo¬ ment when, a thousand miles out at sea, I received a wireless from the Governor of Bombay offering his hospitality on my arrival, until, after traveling 5,000 IX PREFACE miles in India, I left the generous table of the Gov¬ ernor of Ceylon to go aboard my home-bound ship in the harbor at Colombo. In closing this preface I desire to say just what I feel that I am competent to do, and what I have tried to do in this little volume. I am not an author¬ ity on Indian history or institutions, and have read, perhaps, not over twenty books on India, together with numerous contemporary political pamphlets and a rather wide range of both radical and conservative newspapers appearing while I was traveling in India or sent to me since my return. My life has been spent in studying, writing and teaching American history. Therefore, I took to India no special knowl¬ edge of it, but merely a mind trained to a study of the social sciences and to observe political activities past and present. Except where explanatory matter gathered from books was necessary I have tried to tell only what I saw or heard. I have expressed opin¬ ions for which those who disagree will criticize me, but the thing of real value in the book is, I believe, the attempted accurate report of things said to me by actors in the great drama going on around me as I traveled. As soon as I had had a conversation I put down in my notebooks every scrap I could recall. Never was there more than a few hours between the interview and the entry in my notes. Wherever I would not violate a confidence or commit an indis¬ cretion by telling who it was that said a thing to me x PREFACE I have given the person’s name so that the value of this contemporary account might be enhanced. Indian critics of my articles in the July and Sep¬ tember (1922) issues of the Atlantic Monthly say that I was prejudiced by English officials, that I “opened the wrong doors,” and even “British gold” has been darkly hinted, but to all that I can only assert that I spent more time interviewing “non¬ cooperators” and nationalists than I did “sun-dried bureaucrats,” and if there was any “British gold” ready for my itching palm I was too stupid to realize it. Indeed, the only finesse I suspected in my British friends was too great eagerness to have me meet all the most extreme Indian agitators, even opening the jail doors that I might talk with them. Of course, I did look at the Indian life with Western eyes, and I brought all my American prejudices in favor of cleanliness, sanitation, hygiene, universal education, and the necessity of training for political fitness. I found myself not so sympathetic with superstition, religious fanaticism, and the mystic Indian philoso¬ phy as old English residents in India, the “bureau¬ crats,” against whom my radical Indian acquaint¬ ances raged. But, at least, I have tried honestly to give the impression which Indian life and Indian politics at a most interesting time in India’s history made upon an academic American. Of India, the great continent, with its many races, religions, and castes, with its varied climates, soils, xi PREFACE and products, a lifetime does not suffice to gain full¬ ness of knowledge; but if there is value in a survey at a moment when political agitation has touched the masses of Indian peoples, for perhaps the first time in their long history, it may not be overbold to assume that an account of the survey is worthwhile. I must not close this preface without an expres¬ sion of my deep obligation to my friend, Professor Campbell Bonner, who has read the proofs with the greatest care and saved me from some humiliating errors which would otherwise have marred these pages. I have also been constantly aided in this task by my devoted wife, faithful as ever through all the drudgery of book-making. Finally, I am obliged to Mr. Ellery Sedgwick of the Atlantic Monthly, for the privilege of using in this book the material which appeared in that magazine. Claude H. Van Tyne. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Preface . vii I. The Indian Problem and Its Imme¬ diate Background . I II. The Government of India Act; Its Critics and Its Defenders ... 16 III. The Indian Legislative Assembly . 36 IV. The Reaction of Princes, Officials, Capital, Hindu and Moslem to the Reforms . 58 V. Mahatma Gandhi, Saint or Dema¬ gogue . 95 VI. Non-violent Non-cooperation . . 115 VII. Indian Arraignment of the Brit¬ ish Government . 140 VIII. British Service to India, and the Probable Result if They With¬ draw . 170 IX. The Spirituality of the East and the Material Civilization of the West 194 X. Indian Political Fitness and Auguries for the Future . . . 219 Index . • . . 241 INDIA IN FERMENT I THE INDIAN PROBLEM AND ITS IMMEDIATE BACKGROUND India challenges the world’s attention as never before. Great and inevitable changes are going on there, beyond the power of any viceroy to check or even to retard. The political tides of the world are sweeping the Indian people on to goals unseen, per¬ haps to rocks and shoals they know not of. It is a most pathetic situation. Indians, great and good men, yearn for self-rule — swaraj — as it is called. Spiritually, as they insistently claim, the educated classes might be ready for it ; but practically, the out¬ look is very dark. If it came suddenly, to-morrow, as Gandhi would have it, all logic suggests invasion, famine, plague, internecine war, chaos; and yet it can be argued that the very habits of peace and order which the British have given India, the very lessons I INDIA IN FERMENT of sanitation and hygiene which their regime has taught, might tide the experiment over to a better day. The risk is great, the goal most alluring. High- spirited, impatient Indians, with no fortune to lose, wish to dare all; cautious, judicious, conservative men, with worldly goods and social positions to be risked, urge delay. When I saw the “squalid splendor” of Benares, and passed down to the river bank through throngs of pilgrims who parted timidly before me when my guide (a miserable little rat who would have passed unnoticed alone) shouted, “Make way for the Sahib,” I said to myself, Can this timid, cowering herd ever hope to win and maintain self-rule? But later, at His Excellency’s dinner at Government House in Lucknow, I walked among nawabs and rajahs and talukdars, glorious fellows, proud of carriage, with full-orbed, glistening eyes, dark sleek skins, black haughty mustaches, who dressed in long, close-fitting coats of smooth velvet, ornamented with gold chains, and whose fine heads were wrapped in rich dark tur¬ bans. I wondered, as I saw that impressive sight, whether my former doubts were justified. Again, at Viceregal Lodge at Delhi, as I sat at the state dinner in honor of the Prince of Wales, and looked with ad- 2 THE INDIAN PROBLEM miration at the noble forms and aristocratic bearing of rajahs and maharajahs, and famous Indian minis¬ ters of State, and noted their strong, dark faces, and recalled from the previous day the long columns of splendid Punjabi soldiers, I began to waver and to admit that the problem of India has many aspects. As I sat in the great canopied space before the noble hall of audience of the old Delhi Fort, where, on the “peacock throne,” the Mogul Emperors had once ruled, and saw the barbaric splendor, the gleam of jewels, and the riot of color in the dresses of forty Indian princes ranged on either side of the raised dais where sat the Prince of Wales and the Viceroy of India during the great Darbar; as I looked below them to the members of the Legislative Assembly and the Council of State sitting at their feet, it was startling to reflect that all over India the subjects of these absolute despots, of these princes sitting there covered with dazzling jewels, whose price had been wrung from their poor peasantry, were giving un¬ questioning obedience; while, throughout British India, the people for whom the British had lately devised a representative system, which was intended to give them a share in their own government, were seething with discontent, and dreaming if not actu- 3 INDIA IN FERMENT ally practicing “civil disobedience” against the laws enacted by the Viceroy in Council with this legis¬ lative body before me. Was all the Indian unrest based after all on race hatred, and not at all on un¬ satisfied political aspirations? It would require a patient reader if we should attempt to trace all the causes of the present Indian ferment. One might go back to the famous Indian Mutiny, or further, to find the source of that trick¬ ling stream of discontent which has now become the swollen torrent of race hatred and passion for nationalism. It must suffice to say that after the mutiny of 1857 the need and the fascination of re¬ storing order out of chaos was so great for every administrator in India that wherever efficiency was desired a British agency was substituted for an Indian agency. As a result, the Government of India came to be even more than before the mutiny a benevolent despotism, aiming on the whole, however, to found “British greatness on Indian happiness.” Of the Indian Civil Service during most of the time since the mutiny, one may say it is perhaps the best and most incorruptible the world has seen, but too aware of its own virtues. It often wraps itself 4 THE INDIAN PROBLEM smugly in a cloak of goodness and infallibility. It cannot conceive of a people who do not want to be ruled well and justly, but who would prefer a rule which might be a poor thing, but their own. Even from the most imaginative Indian agitator, however, one no longer hears of Thackeray’s nabob, the jaundiced monster “who purchased the estates of broken-down English gentlemen with rupees tor¬ tured out of bleeding rajahs, who smoked a hookah in public, and in private carried about a guilty con¬ science, diamonds of untold value, and a diseased liver; who had a vulgar wife with a retinue of black servants whom she maltreated.” All that, if it ever existed, has gone with the growth of British con¬ science and government’s altruistic purposes. Although I have heard the worst from Great Britain’s most virulent Indian critics, considerable reading and some personal observation have con¬ vinced me that most British administrators in India have carried well a laborious and often thankless task with an unselfish desire to rule for India’s good and to adhere to a high standard of official rectitude. Of selfishness and self-seeking there has been astonishingly little. Ambitions, family ties, health and often life itself have been sacrificed to 5 INDIA IN FERMENT the end of serving India well. I found the Indian Civil Service men taking pleasure in their sense of responsibility, sometimes a little vain that a million people or so depended upon their wisdom, but over¬ topping all was a high sense of duty and devotion to it. No finer civil servants can be found in the world than James Lindsay, collector and magistrate in Dacca, and George W. Padisson who long had a similar office in the Madras district and who is now the Commissioner of Labor there. The Collector is the really great man in the every¬ day Indian life. He administers justice and settles disputes. It is all very simple, done in a modest un¬ pretentious office with only a desk, a chair and a few benches. The Indians stand in groups before the desk, talking with astounding volubility when given permission. They are most obsequious to the Collector, bowing, bringing their hands together sometimes in the manner of prayer. He is kind but firm, gives decisions with an air of finality that stops all complaint. The loser looks dissatisfied but nothing more. Some of the suitors lie with the greatest glibness, but do not resent being shown to be liars. In even remote parts of India, lonely, in places of danger, amid malaria and the feverous heat 6 THE INDIAN PROBLEM of the jungle, the Collector and his subdivisional officers keep up the British reputation for justice. Joseph Sedley, Collector of Bogley Wollah, had, it will be recalled by readers of Vanity Fair , lived for about eight years, “quite alone, at this charming place, scarcely seeing a Christian face.” Alluding to Thackeray reminds me that in India one comes upon many a Colonel Newcome and a Major Pendennis and I am sure that I met the original Mrs. Major O’Dowd, at least one who had inherited all of her vulgarity. Although I heard much praise, yet I also heard much criticism of these Civil Service men. Some held that they were men of only average attain¬ ments and rather limited outlook, who had merely sought a living in a land where they took little per¬ sonal interest. H. Fielding Hall holds that the secret of British success in the early days Was the personality of their officers. He cites Clive, Warren Hastings, Have¬ lock, Lawrence and Nicholson, who went out in their youth, when eighteen or twenty. They were not overeducatea, and could, therefore, think and see facts. To Hall, there were giants in those days, all gone now, and an “efficient machine wjth minds closed rigidly, enforcing the law untempered to the 7 INDIA IN FERMENT #"'■ "'"l '■ " — ■» ■ — . '' ■ . I I. I ■!■■■■■— . I ■ shorn lamb by personalities.” In the old days a stranger’s laws, methods and ideas became bearable through the filter of officials with common sense. Now, Hall holds, these Indian Civil Servants deal only with books, papers and records, and not with a life which they have learned to understand through the acquisition of the native languages. Once the Collector administered justice, now law, says Hall. I found some Indians who agreed with this judg¬ ment, but a number of old men with sagacious minds assured me that the arraignment was quite unjust. Certainly it was not true of such Collectors and subordinates as I met, but, of course, my acquaint¬ ances were limited. In spite of the spirit of criticism, I feel sure that if the best Indian Civil Servants and the more reasonable Indian Nationalists can be made to understand each other they will get on well together. Each group is right-minded on the whole and wishes the right to prevail. As Lionel Curtis says, there is no wall but only the phantom of a wall between them. Good as the administration was, it came, as a result of events and conditions I have no time to trace, to be bitterly resented by the western-educated Indian, and feeling had risen high against this alien 8 THE INDIAN PROBLEM rule before, in 1909, the Indian Councils Act, chief of the Morley-Minto reforms, attempted to appease Indian demands. Perhaps too many of India’s “reforms” have been the work of ill-informed Secretaries of State and Viceroys who strutted a few years on the Indian stage, and who preferred their own ill-matured views to those of old and faithful officials whose lives had been passed amidst the Indian people. Such men could talk nobly about imparting “divine discontent” to those millions who, dwelling in the ever-silent spaces, were sunk in a pathetic slave spirit. Men of that mentality could never free themselves of the western fetish of representative institutions and of the value of debating assemblies to cultivate the power of criticizing Government. With utmost brevity we may note that the Morley- Minto plan of 1909 enlarged the membership and the functions of the Indian Legislative Councils, placing them on an elective basis, diluted with nomi¬ nations by Government. An Indian member was taken into the Viceroy’s Council and two Indian members into the Council of the Secretary of State in London. The elected members of the Legislative Councils were so chosen that they felt small responsi- 9 INDIA IN FERMENT bility to the so-called electorates, and in general one may say that there was little visible increase of Indian control over the conduct of public affairs. In the Viceroy’s Legislative Council the Government block made up of nominated members could always vote down the Indian opposition, though in Provincial Councils Indian members could create a deadlock by refusing to vote for measures without which Govern¬ ment could not carry on. In a word, Indians en¬ joyed only negative powers. Yet that is not quite true, for Government often yielded to Indian wishes in private conferences rather than in the public dis¬ cussion. In this way Government deprived the re¬ forms of credit fairly earned, and the Indian public remained in ignorance of the real extent to which Indian representatives made themselves felt. As a result the tide of discontent rose, and even moderate Indians came to regard the reforms as illusory. In¬ deed, an impartial observer would say that while very great scope had been given for Indian opinion to affect Government, there had been granted little real power. Indians developed their critical at the expense of their constructive faculties. They were not forced to devise means to gain the ends for which io THE INDIAN PROBLEM they hoped, and their sense of public responsibility could not grow. Meanwhile there had been developing an organi¬ zation of the forces of discontent in India, destined to become very formidable to the British regime. The formation of the Indian National Congress, as long ago as 1885, and its evolution from a fairly conservative organization — led at times by men who are to-day the chief supporters of the Government — to a body now wholly in the hands of extremists is a story in itself. Its growth and the processes of education by which the British Government care¬ fully trained the body of Indian agitators which seeks to overthrow it, is not within the scope of this work. I have read of it in books, I have heard it from the suave lips of the sweet-spoken Pundit Malaviya, President of Benares Hindu University, one of the three or four greatest Indian leaders. He and Sastri, perhaps, have the best brains of them all. This man, medium-sized, well-knit, with a mind quick, keen and tireless, argues with intense convic¬ tion. If he talks, as he did to me, for over two hours, you realize at the close that he had organized perfectly from the first all that he meant to say. At that time 11 INDIA IN FERMENT he agreed with Gandhi as to the end to be attained, but he differed as to non-cooperation because he be¬ lieved it would not succeed. If he thought it would bring the British to terms, he would have gone in with all his heart. One of his firm convictions was that business interests controlled the government of India. He believed that the Viceroy was a good man who meant well, but that the government machine shackled him, and rendered him unable to do as his natural goodness would dictate. He is sane enough to keep out of jail, though a minister of state at Delhi assured me that the Pundit was a very viper in his hate of the English, and that for twenty years he had been at the “bottom of all political deviltry in India, but concealed his part under a cultivated ex¬ terior.” Malaviya, I should add, asserted solemnly to me that he did not hate the English, that he would “be ashamed to hate any human being.” Though Malaviya did not wholly agree with Gandhi, espe¬ cially in the latter’s plan to get Indian students to stay away from government colleges, including the one of which Malaviya was president, yet the two remained on good terms, and when Gandhi’s im¬ prisonment took him from the leadership of the Non¬ cooperators, Malaviya succeeded him, as far as it was 12 THE INDIAN PROBLEM possible for so unique a personality to have a suc¬ cessor. Though we must omit the story of the rise of the Indian National Congress, the outline at least of the history of the embryonic stages of the Government of India Act deserves attention. When India remained loyal in the midst of the Great War, the idea took possession of the minds of a group of generous Englishmen that the only adequate reward was to satisfy Indian political aspirations to the utmost limit compatible with In¬ dian welfare and the safety of the British Empire. Government, both in India and in England, was under too great a strain to give proper considera¬ tion to so great a problem, and it was a small group of individuals, sometimes vaguely described as the “Round Table group,” which undertook the initial discussions. At Shillong, high up in the Khasi Hills, the fascinating story of the early stages of the Gov¬ ernment of India Act was told me at the fireside in the study of Sir William Marris, Governor of Assam. Later in Williamstown, I heard the story from the lips of Lionel Curtis, who left with me the impres¬ sion that I had been privileged to listen to the words of a prophet. 13 INDIA IN FERMENT It is an engaging story, these splendid enthusiasts, first getting inspiration during a walk in the glorious mountains of the Canadian Pacific slope, and then in a London Round Table group searching for a promising basis of reform in the Government of India. It was there that the “dyarchy” idea was at first rejected, and then taken up again to become the head of the corner. After the Round Table had threshed the matter out, Lionel Curtis made his mo¬ mentous visits to India, wrote his famous “Letter to the People of India,” and when he and Sir Valentine Chirol and Sir William Duke and Sir William Marris had worked out a plan, they gave it to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. His Council rejected it, and produced another plan, which only caused delay and was ultimately given up. The old plan was then sent to London, and Mr. Montagu, Secretary of State, undertook the mission to India which produced the Montagu-Chelmsford report and ultimately the Gov¬ ernment of India Act of 1919. Mr. Montagu, who had so much to do with that act, interests one greatly. I have seen a great deal of his correspondence with Englishmen in India. He was almost as much of an idealist as Gandhi, and would throw aside whole volumes of indisputable 14 THE INDIAN PROBLEM facts, if they did not fall in with his theories and principles. He was perhaps too sensitive to Indian opinion, and rarely stopped to sift the grain from the chaff in the letters, speeches, newspapers which poured in upon him. Moreover, with all his in¬ tuitive understanding of the Indian spirit, he was apt as Secretary of State to lose sight of the pri¬ mary duty of governing. He was “always sympa¬ thetic, almost never firm.” His overthrow, March 1922, was a sad blow to Indian faith, for the Indian leaders jumped to the conclusion that the “reactionaries” were once more in the saddle and would call a halt to Indian progress. The Viceroy missed him, too, for with the new Secretary, Lord Peel, the personal touch was lacking, and Lord Read¬ ing is a lonely man with few to consult as man to man. It was a great relief to him to discuss with Mr. Montagu in his letters everything that he could not thresh out with his colleagues in India. The new Secretary of State has not changed Montagu's policy in any tangible way, but Indians are suspicious, and cannot believe that their affairs will continue to be handled with the same sympathy as during Montagu's regime. II THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT; ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS Besides reading the Montagu-Chelmsford report, the Government of India Act, and several Govern¬ ment documents connected therewith, I heard the essentials of the act carefully discussed by His Excel¬ lency, Sir George Lloyd, Governor of Bombay, sitting with legs curled up in an easy-chair, and his head thrown hard back as if to relieve a nerve-strain. There in his office, whose windows looked out over the Arabian Sea, he told me with perfect frankness his Tory political background, his original lack of sympathy with the aims of the Government of India Act, and his present perfect loyalty to its purposes. This slight man, of medium height, with thin, keen, alert face, black hair, brown eyes with lids almost closed as he talks earnestly, and whose voice grows thin and falsetto as he becomes earnest, is a most interesting ruler of men. His mind is alert, incisive, positive. He graces his speech with apt 1 6 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT literary quotations. Indeed he has the face and deli¬ cate emotions of a poet, but the clear, decisive action of a ruler — as he is, of 22,000,000 people, and the protector of 20,000,000 more. He is always cour¬ teous, but unyielding; “a definite, determined little fighter,” as a friend said of him. With a slight drawl that hastens on to a rapid-fire utterance as he grows intense, he soon convinces you that he feels what he says. You would take his word if a king¬ dom were at stake, but you would admit that he might see clearly only one side. He handled very ably one of the most difficult situations in India during 1921- 1922, and I have every reason to believe that he and Lord Willingdon, Governor of the Madras Presi¬ dency, were the determining forces that led to the final arrest of Mr. Gandhi. For his seizure, indeed, Sir George takes full responsibility. Neither had liked the policy of drift and “watchful waiting.” Sir George discussed the Government of India Act with sympathy and clear vision as to its possibilities and its dangers. Later I discussed it with other governors and ministers and councilors, and with many Indians, Nationalists or followers of Gandhi. In that Act the British Parliament tried to provide the Indian people with legislative machinery that 17 INDIA IN FERMENT would enable them at once greatly to influence, if not wholly to control, their own government, and led them to expect from time to time further grants of power leading ultimately to full self-government. It was made plain to the Indians that, if they should ' prove faithful over a few things, they might ulth mately be made rulers over many things. The Act provided that in the Government of India at Delhi, the new capital, the Viceroy’s Executive Council was hereafter to have three Indian members out of a total of eight; and in the Secretary of State’s Council, in Whitehall, there were to be three Indian members. A Legislative Assembly in Delhi was to have a large majority of its members freely elected by Indian constituencies having as broad a franchise as conditions permitted. An upper house, the Coun¬ cil of State, was also to have a good majority of Indian members, some elected, some nominated, a few ex officio. The Government of India was not, it is true, to be responsible to these Indian-dominated legislative bodies, but to the Secretary of State in London, and through him to Parliament, itself responsible, of course, to the British electorate. Nevertheless, though the Governor-General in Coun¬ cil cannot be overthrown by an adverse vote, and 18 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT though he may override his legislature, “certifying” that items which it may have refused are essential to the welfare of India, the fact remains that this power has been exercised only three times. The men who govern India do not wish to run the risk of wreck¬ ing the new scheme by creating a direct conflict between the Assembly and the Government. More important, perhaps, are the provisions as to the provincial governments under the Government of India Act. The Act provides for a “devolution” of powers formerly the attributes of the provincial Governor in Council. In Bengal, Bombay, Madras, and five other divisions of British India, Indian ministers, acting with the Governor, acquire control of certain matters, subject only to the approval of a Legislative Council wherein there is a large Indian non-official majority. These subjects — education, sanitation, public works — are called “transferred sub¬ jects” as against the “reserved subjects” concerned with peace, order, and good government which are still vested, as of old, in the Governor, now assisted by one Indian and one British member of Council. This curious device, the last resort of ingenious minds driven to desperation by a baffling problem, is called “dyarchy.” Sir William Marris, who has one of the 19 INDIA IN FERMENT ablest and most interesting minds in India, admitted to me that it was an effort to poise government, like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth. “Dyarchy,” he said, “rests on the assumption that some departments are more concerned with essentials than others. I believe there is more error than truth in that assumption.” He had proposed departments which would be placed under one councilor (an Englishman), and one minister (an Indian); the councilor to interfere, as does the British resident in a native state, only in case of absolute necessity. Finally, the makers of the Act tried to change the eternal laws of political science and to divide sovereignty, which after all was no greater task than was attempted by the makers of the Federal Consti¬ tution in the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. This division of sovereignty includes both the arrange¬ ments which seems to make Government responsi¬ ble to the Indian people, when it is actually responsible to the British electorate ultimately, and the division of the functions of provincial government into re¬ served and transferred subjects. One other pecul¬ iarity, almost incomprehensible to the American mind obsessed by the idea of proportional represen¬ tation, is the plan of communal representation by 20 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT which certain Indian minorities, the Sikhs in the Punjab, the Par sis in the Bombay presidency, the non-Brahmans in the province of Madras, the Mohammedans in various parts of India, the Euro¬ pean business interests everywhere, receive a repre¬ sentation in the legislative bodies wholly out of pro¬ portion to their numbers. In a word, nervous and clamorous interests, castes, or religious sects are given representatives, because it is assumed that can¬ didates known to belong to that group, caste, or sect, would have no chance of being elected in a contest where a simple majority of the electorate determines the contest. It is as if the Baptists and Methodists of an American congressional district, and the repre¬ sentatives of the automobile industry, regardless of their proportionate numbers in the whole body of citizens, should be entitled to elect some one of their number to go and represent their interests in the national government. The arrangement is only one of the many evidences of the great part that religion plays in Indian politics. There has not developed in India that sense of common citizenship which terri¬ torial electorates assume to exist. And one who imagines that India is ready for our democratic ideas of rule by a majority should read 21 INDIA IN FERMENT the addresses presented to the Montagu Commission by the farmers of the Deccan, by the zamindars or great landholders, by the depressed classes, by Euro¬ pean business men, by Mohammedans, by Indian Christians, and by interests of various kinds, pleading that in the new representative system to be set up they should not be left at the mercy of any mere numerical majority. It is as if the Christian Scientists, the Scandinavians, the Jews, the tobacco-growers, the Greek shoeblacks of the United States should protest against their minority interests being left to the mercy of a majority decision in the American Congress. It is these facts, and many others strange to our western world, that complicate the problem of giving self-government to the myriad-minded peoples of India. Editors of American radical journals may sit in their stuffy studies, stewing in their owfi ignorance, and telling England how to rule India, but there are conditions and complications their philos¬ ophy never dreamed of. Those who devised the Government of India Act frankly say that their purpose was to give the Indians experience in self-government while providing, during the immediate future, against any foolish or inconsidered action injurious to Indian or to British 22 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT interests. The doctrine of letting them learn by suffering was seriously considered at one time, but then abandoned. It would be leaving to their own devices those who feel the shoe pinch, but least know how to ease it, said the opponents. The answer was, “Indians may not do things well at first, but they can learn only by trying. They will find out how to do things well by suffering the discomforts caused by doing them badly.” At one stage the idea of extending the states of native princes, and turning the rule of British India over to them was considered; but Indian protest was as bitter then as it was recently when a desperate British publicist, Sir Frederick Lugard, suggested that solution of the Indian problem. Sir Frederick had written : “Wherever it is possible to extend the boundaries of a loyal and well-ordered Native State, let it be extended to embrace an area as large as it can assimilate. Where it is possible to reinstate a native dynasty with such varying and temporary safeguards as the experience of the Indian Government may con¬ sider necessary, let the native ruler be once again created the titular head of his State. Where, on the other hand, as perhaps in the greater part of Bengal, the character of the people, or the absence of any rep- 23 INDIA IN FERMENT resentative of an ancient dynasty, or the existence of a considerable proportion of the educated and politi¬ cally minded class, renders this policy impracticable, let the present system of elected representatives be carried forward with every possible encouragement.” By such a policy, he added, “we should rivet the bonds of friendship with the Native States and go far to unify India as a single entity to take her place as an independent unit of the British Empire.” But Indian protest against all such plans was instant and resonant. Something similar had already been suggested by Sir H. Cotton, who proposed for India : “An organization of small states each with a prince at its head and a small body of patrician aristocracy interposing between him and the lower orders of working men.” Then the United States of India might be bound together by a Council of Nobles, a patriciate “accustomed by hereditary associations to control and lead.” But responsible Indians would have none of it. Indeed, the governor of a great province told me that in many cases where Indian princes had claimed territory of British India which formed an enclave in their dominions, he had offered to yield the claim if, by plebiscite, the people dwelling there would 24 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT express a desire to become subjects of the prince. In every case the people voted against a transfer of their allegiance. Indeed, T. V. Seshagiri Ayer admits that if a choice were offered to the people of a taluk or of a village in an Indian state to ex¬ change their allegiance, in most cases they would cheerfully accept the British sway, and, he adds, “Indians of native states often migrate to British India,” but, he concludes, “It should not be so. Patriotic Indians ought to prefer Princes” ! It was admitted during the discussion of the new plan of government that, under the native princes, Govern¬ ment was less efficient than under the British rule; but the reply was that, under the latter regime, “law and order was almost too perfect for India ; the high standard of public life almost too good for it.” Finally, however, the present scheme, with all its imperfections on its head, was put through all the perils of a parliamentary debate, and, with a pro¬ vision for progressive revision from time to time, was made a law. In February of 1921, the Duke of Connaught inaugurated, at Delhi, the new Legis¬ lative Assembly — “worthy daughter of the Mother of all Parliaments,” as a proud Indian orator chris¬ tened it. There was a strong effort by the Extre- 25 INDIA IN FERMENT mists, the “Non-cooperators,” to make a farce of the Government of India Act by getting the Indian electors to stay away from the polls. It was urged that nothing had been given that was worth while, that it was a hateful thing, not to be touched. Dyarchy, the opponents said, was merely bureaucracy painted white. In Delhi the Non-cooperators tried to make a farce of the election by putting up as a can¬ didate a sweetmeat dealer, a familiar figure in the Chandni Chauk, the main street of Delhi. He was elected and the N. C. O.’s, as they are called for short in India, thought that when the members of the assembly gathered to take the oath of office, their dummy delegate would rise, refuse to take the oath, and make an insulting speech to the Government benches. Once the sweetmeat dealer was actually elected, however, he rather enjoyed his distinction, took the oath of office, and became one of the most loyal supporters of government. Throughout India the Non-cooperators were only partially successful in keeping voters away, and not at all so in preventing a very respectable body of repre¬ sentatives from being elected to the provincial coun¬ cils, and to the Legislative Assembly and Council of State at Delhi. Their main accomplishment was the 26 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT prevention of a complete trial of the new plan, because the members are chiefly moderates, the Gandhi radi¬ cals having stayed out. They might greatly have in¬ creased the troubles of Government. After attending a number of sessions of the coun¬ cils in the United Provinces, and in Bengal, and spending about ten days with the Legislative Assem¬ bly in Delhi, and being privileged, moreover, to talk with governors and councilors about the actual work¬ ing of “dyarchy,” I became convinced, in spite of the worst that Indian critics had to say about the new constitution, that every effort is being made by the British Government to carry out the Government of India Act according to the spirit of its best wishers. “Dyarchy” had, in fact, become, in most cases a unitary government in which the Governor sat in Council with all of his ministers, those responsible for the “transferred” subjects as well as those con¬ cerned with the “reserved.” In the main, Govern¬ ment’s action was determined by the views of the majority. Though the Governor might “certify” items in the budget and insist upon his views pre¬ vailing, he had in most cases refused to place himself in opposition to the will of his Council. Lord Ronaldshay, Governor of Bengal, managed 27 INDIA IN FERMENT with great adroitness a situation which developed over a bill concerning the salaries of the Calcutta police. Though seemingly almost compelled to “cer¬ tify” the bill and go ahead, he induced the Legislative Council to pass the once negatived bill after he, with great tact, gave them a way to save their faces. Had they not done so, he indicated clearly what his action would have been, when he said that he would feel “justified in demanding release from responsibilities which he was no longer able satisfactorily to dis¬ charge.” In a word, that if a governor could not get along with his council, he must go. This Lord Ronaldshay was not obliged to do under the Govern¬ ment of India Act, but he would make the constitu¬ tional precedent. His whole regime in Bengal was a masterly exhibition of statesmanship. Agitators complained to me that when Indians became ministers they went over body and soul to Government; but ministers themselves assured me that when they became responsible they saw things in a very different light from when they stood out¬ side and were in opposition to Government. Lajpat Rai has declared that the British Government had purchased the support of every moderate leader in India. This accusation against the men of his own 28 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT country is damning to India. A country with so many of its intellectuals ready to sell themselves is surely not ready for self-government. Vilification of brother Indians will not help the “Non-coopera¬ tion” cause. Agitators complained also that Govern¬ ment knew how, by showing social favors and by granting flattering titles, to win over even elected Indians to do its will; but when I suggested, in a meeting of some twenty “nationalists,” that they get the Council to pass a resolution forbidding Indians to accept titles, they protested that such a resolution would not pass because so many hoped to get titles. All I could answer to that was that they must pray for Roman virtues. Indian critics of the Government of India Act also point out that the ministers with the reserved powers, the Indian ministers, can get money to develop their departments of Government only by asking for more taxes, and that that will make them unpopular. Moreover, they cannot reduce the amount spent on other branches of Government and thus save for their subjects, education, sanitation, and public works. Critics say also that the ministers suffer by comparison with the part of the Government carried on under the reserved powers. The Depart- 29 INDIA IN FERMENT ment of reserved power, being a rival of the Depart¬ ment of transferred power, will, the Indians say, develop into an opposition camp, thus handicapping the less experienced ministers of transferred De¬ partments. Critics say also that if a governor and his English ministers are actually not in sympathy with the idea of India’s getting self-government they will not give sympathetic help to those responsible for the trans¬ ferred powers. If the Governor with police power refuses to be really helpful to the minister with the transferred powers in matters of sanitation, little can be done. The same is true, they say, of the members of the Civil Service, appointed and paid by the British part of the regime, for they might refuse to be helpful to the minister of transferred powers. On the other hand, British critics say that although the Government of India Act deliberately gave the Viceroy and Provincial Governors such powers as would support their responsibilities, Indian politicians, even of the moderate sort, are forcibly shifting the gears in order to get the control of even the “reserved” powers into their own hands, that they may dictate a policy where they have no respon¬ sibility. Every time a British executive yields in the 30 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT hope of conciliating, he discovers that the Indian Oliver Twists are only asking for more. Indian legis¬ lators, cringing in fear of extremist pressure, dare not stop with one accomplishment, but drive anew a further claim. There is no question that a large part of the Indian political world frets against the Act’s “multi¬ tudinous safeguards, checks and counterchecks” as not affording free scope to Indian political talent, but many are aware also that the Act gives them a machinery which, properly handled, will make them irresistible. Indeed, many well-disposed Englishmen fear this, and rail against the folly of a scheme which has hitched them to a comet. As for “skipping dyarchy” which some provincial governments have tended to do, the critics plead: “Run the Govern¬ ment on the rails the Constitution has furnished ; any other path leads to disaster.” It seems to me, at least, that any fair student of the results of two years’ use of the new constitutional reforms must come to the conclusion that there are now definite checks on serious misgovernment and upon absolutism, and that the Indian leaders are really getting a training in self-government, which 31 INDIA IN FERMENT they will continue to do if good will abides between them and British officials. The opposition argues that Indians have gained only negative power ; but as I read the Government of India Act, I would ask nothing better, if I were an Indian, than to seize the opportunity there offered to bring Government to a standstill when it asks for new taxes. The British at least have the grace to be sensitive to the world’s opinion, and I doubt if any British minister, in order to meet such a situa¬ tion, would repeal the Government of India Act and go back to the old methods of absolutism. He would be far more likely to grant concession to Indian demands and ask in return Indian votes which would set Government in motion again. Moreover, the mere passage of the Government of India Act has wrought a change in the attitude of Government, provincial and general. No longer being able to rely upon the “wicked old system” of the “official block” — which arrogantly carried all Government measures over opposition — Government has become more careful of expenditures. Under the old conditions, with the best intentions in the world, if Government thought anything ought to be done, 32 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT it went ahead; but now it takes thought of the criticism of a jealous council or assembly. The Government of India Act can be interpreted in two ways, depending wholly upon the interpreter’s confidence in the good faith of its makers and in the generosity of the British administrators. The cynic will say that it is a diabolical thing, contrived with Machiavellian ingenuity to appear to give Indians self-government when in fact it does not. The charitable commentator will on the other hand declare that given the actual conditions in India, the British went to the utmost limit in entrusting power to the Indians, and merely protected themselves and the Indians against ruinous political folly. He will add that the actual administrators of it are honest, well- meaning men. When one talks of introducing into India demo¬ cratic government, a political system which requires some way of learning what may be the will of the majority, one must bear in mind certain fundamental conditions. Of the three hundred twenty millions, not over four millions can both read and write any language. Two millions, perhaps, of these can read and write English. It is in this latter group that one finds the divine discontent. Most of the rest 33 INDIA IN FERMENT are stirred to it by agitation, part of which is produced by honest means, part by methods which will not bear the light. One must think of ninety or even ninety-five per cent of the Indian people as dwelling, in groups of three or four hun¬ dred, in the seven hundred thirty thousand villages of India. The lives of these “silent millions” are simple and untutored beyond the conception of those who have only seen the most advanced peoples of the West. They dwell for the most part in mud huts with thatched roofs, in which there is little or no furniture, no chairs, no tables, no beds. The average yearly budget for the prosperous peasant with a family of five in Bengal, for example, is about $76 in American money. The family eats squatting about an earthen pot containing the paddy or rice, their staple food. They help them¬ selves to food with their fingers. When they sleep they roll up in a blanket on the floor. The interior of each of these mud huts is scrubbed daily with dried cow dung. The living for a family of five is got from a piece of land perhaps an acre in extent. The greatest excitement that comes into their lives is a wedding or a funeral. There is little social life aside from that. Except when these people take religious 34 THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT pilgrimages to Benares, or some other sacred spot, there is little communication. There are no village newspapers to bring news of the outside world nor to tell them of what neighboring villages are doing or thinking. Their interests are local and they have no means of uniting for common action with other villages. It is these people to whom well-meaning enthusiasts wish to give at once without delay, com¬ plete control of the government of a country con¬ taining one-fifth of the human race! If it were possible to set off by themselves the four million more or less educated Indians, I have no doubt that they would be able to rule themselves fairly successfully, by a democratic scheme of government, but left to look out for the safety, health, protection and pros¬ perity of hundreds of millions of fellow Indians in their villages, I wonder not merely whether they could do it as well as the British, but whether such a regime could end in anything but anarchy, and primeval confusion. Certainly so great is the doubt that those who are transferring power to them have every warrant for going forward with caution. Ill THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY To an American, an Indian legislative body is very entertaining, and the most picturesque parliament in the world. In the Legislative Assembly at Delhi it was disappointing to find not over one-third of the members present. It was overrun with absentees, to use an Hibernian phrase. Some had offered a resolution against Government and then became alarmed ; some did not wish to commit themselves on a vote that would make them unpopular ; some refused to sacrifice private business to public interests; and others, I was told, were disgusted with the whole affair and thought it not worth the candle. I first noted the superficial aspects. Dark Indian faces greatly predominated; some black with white mustaches, some black with white beards, others just plain. There were eight white turbans, one gold embroidered, one red fez, two black ones, and one dark red and gold. One had a gold and red and white scarf, and near him was a Hindu with a large V- 36 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY shaped caste mark on his forehead. Circulating among them were men pages, chaprassis, whose red robes were gold-trimmed and whose turbans were white and gold. Most prominent on the Government benches were Sir William Vincent, home member, and Mr. Malcolm Hailey, finance member. With them sat Sarma and Sapru, Indian members of the Viceroy’s Council. Presiding over them all, and with a bemedaled, black-and-gold liveried sergeant standing behind him, sat Sir Frederick Whyte. With all the dignity of the Speaker of the House of Commons, he sat in black alpaca robe, trimmed with dark red silk, a white cravat hanging six or eight inches from the white collar. A gray judge’s wig framed Sir Frederick’s strong, handsome face, always dignified, but on occasion lighted up with a shrewd smile which often preceded a dryly humorous comment upon his ruling. Always fair and just, and sure of his House of Commons precedent, his rulings are accepted with the best grace possible by a House pleased to a man with the admirable equity, mastery, and high pur¬ pose with which Sir Frederick has guided the early faltering steps of the Assembly. Rangachariar, one of the most notable members, said of him, “He main- 37 INDIA IN FERMENT tains the dignity of the House with watchful and unswerving impartiality, with an austerity that is not oppressive, and an accessibility that cannot be presumed upon.” His clear, strong, firm voice, and his serene mind, always cool and unperturbed, compel confidence in his decisions. He has drilled and dis¬ ciplined this embryo parliament in the best traditions of the House of Commons. It will ever be indebted to him for bending the twig in the way that any parliamentary tree might take pride in being inclined. A brief history of the experience of the new Indian parliament, which meets in Delhi during the winter but at other times in Simla in the Himalayan foot¬ hills, will best exhibit its strength and its weakness. Partly from conversations with those intimately active in its work, partly from confidential reports placed in my hands, and finally by reading of many debates and actual listening to some, I have gathered a few ideas about the Indian Legislative Assembly which may help to reveal its nature. All agree that the first result of the new order of things that one noticed in that embryo Parliament, fated to rule in due course one-fifth of the human race, was that a new sense of reality pervaded the proceedings. This was due to the disappearance of 38 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY the old official block and the presence of an elected majority of Indians in the Assembly. A critic of Government felt that his arguments must carry weight with his audience. This resulted in greater brevity, pertinence and responsibility of most of the non-official speeches. Sir Frederick Whyte, the President, said that there was also a new note of persuasion and genuine advocacy in the arguments from the Government bench. The Delhi session (1921) was not many days old before members, official and non-official, began to tell Sir Frederick, their president, of their pleased surprise at finding each party different from what the other had expected. In the eyes of the Indian members Government was more human, less bureau¬ cratic : in the eyes of the officials, the Assembly as a whole was more reasonable and practical than either had believed possible. Rangachariar, one of the ablest of the Madras members, said on the floor: “Sir, when I read the debates in this Council a year before over the Punjab affair, I formed a very bad opinion of the Honorable, the Home Member (Vincent), whom I had not set eyes upon; and, therefore, Sir, when I came to this Assembly I came with rage and anger and I was ready to pounce upon 39 INDIA IN FERMENT him if occasion arose. But, Sir, he has disarmed me in that respect. Not only he, but the other Members of Government, have also disarmed me in this matter. What is the cause for the change in the attitude adopted by us ? It is all because Govern¬ ment as now administered and advised are pursuing a very sound policy indeed. Their readiness to be frank and full in the statement of their case, their readiness to comply with the legitimate demands made by the peoples’ representatives in this hall all appeal to us. Are these the men, was the question put by myself to myself, are these the men who treated Madan Mohan Malaviya with that contempt which we see in the debates? I was surprised to see the change that had come upon them, and I hold that it is due in large measure to three causes : First of all, the presence of my Indian friends in the inner counsels of Government; secondly, the attitude of His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor, and thirdly, Sir, the great event which we witnessed last month by which His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught came here to inaugurate the various Assemblies.” Such was the general spirit of the Delhi session of 1921. The Delhi session of 1922 was much longer than 40 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY its predecessors, and the attendance of members was not so good — only about 40 out of 120. The small attendance was attributed to the fear that members would, on an early day in the session, have to take their stand for or against a resolution which de¬ manded the abandoning of “repressive measures.” Many stayed away lest it be necessary to commit themselves. Thus at the very outset of the session the Assembly seemed to show an inclination to run away from its responsibilities, and an atmosphere inimical to good work was created. Finally, the budget overshadowed the whole session. The prospect of a big deficit and consequent increases of taxation created pessimism in official and non-official alike. The Budget of 1922 was a very severe test which some critics consider the Assembly did not meet. It is true that the non-official majority seemed at times to act irresponsibly, and finally the Finance Bill was passed with a deficit of over nine crores (90 million rupees) . Little was said and many members did not seem to realize the financial and economic effects of an uncovered deficit of this magnitude, and apparently the Assembly wished to repudiate responsibility for it. Yet, even if it did act irresponsibly, the British Government cannot ex- 41 INDIA IN FERMENT pect responsibility to grow in a night, where hitherto they have jealously withheld it. This repudiation of responsibility may have been short-sighted, and it surely called forth a good deal of harsh criticism; but it must be remembered that, not only in the Indian press, but in practically every British newspaper in India, the burden of every article on the Budget was that the Assembly would not be justified in assenting to the expenditure pro¬ posed by Government, especially on the Army. In this respect, the Assembly was not unrepresentative of the prevailing educated opinion throughout India. Even the leading British journals of Calcutta and Bombay were critical of Government’s demands. The relation of military expenditure to the rest of the Budget was, therefore, the key of the situation. But since the Assembly was precluded by the reserva¬ tions of the Government of India Act from any direct attack on the Army, it adopted the indirect method of refusing to sanction the taxation necessary to meet a service over which it had no control. If under clause 67 A of the Government of India Act, the Viceroy had boldly assumed the statesman’s right to act in the spirit, though straining the letter of the law, he might have submitted the whole 42 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY budget or at least the Army part, to the vote as well as the discussion of the assembly, and then the Finance Bill might have emerged in a much less battered form. The Assembly would then have felt the weight of responsibility which as things went was lacking. By refusing to interpret the Government of India Act himself, the Viceroy, said his critics, lost the opportunity of giving one of those political interpretations of a statute which are essential in working a new constitution. Instead, he turned to the Law Officers of the Crown in England for an interpretation, and they, with only legalistic eyes, said the act did not give the Viceroy the power to decide. A political Nelson, said a friendly critic, would have used his blind eye for the legalistic interpretation and have done what he in India could see was best. As it was a check was put to the gradual transfer, by conven¬ tion rather than by statute, of political power to the India Legislature. Thus reminded of Indian subor¬ dination to Whitehall the Indians proceeded to deal with the budget and struck it as often and as hard as they could. The purpose of the Assembly was retrenchment. In trying to achieve it, the non-official majority acted 43 INDIA IN FERMENT irresponsibly (in a moral and political sense), because it was still irresponsible (in the constitutional sense), at least as far as the right to vote upon the military estimates was concerned. It would not have taken this reckless course if it had felt that it wielded real control. The Indian politicians do not yet realize their actual powers. Under the Government of India Act they seem to have real control, direct control over many vital functions of government, indirect control and real influence over all the rest. Moreover, liberal Englishmen in India believe that until the whole Budget — excluding perhaps the salaries of officers for which the Secretary of State is really responsible — is submitted to the Assembly for discussion and vote, genuine political responsibility will be a plant of very slow growth. Government, indeed, replies that it cannot take the risk of having the Army cut to pieces in the division lobby, but in fact many military men courted the discussion of that budget in the legislative assembly. Moreover, the Indians assert, so long as the army remains out of their reach, the reforms are a sham. The Indian view is clearly stated by Sir P. S. Sivaswami Aiyar, who is not a radical. “What is imperatively required/’ he says, “at the present 44 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY moment to convince the Indian public of the desire of the British Government to enable India to attain Dominion status, is a definite declaration of its policy in regard to the Army in India, and a steady effort to carry out this policy. It must be definitely declared that the policy of the Government is gradually to Indianize the Army in India so that Indians may be¬ come capable of undertaking the full responsibility for the defense of their country. The disabilities now imposed upon Indians with regard to their ad¬ mission into the various branches of the Army or the Commissioned ranks should be immediately removed. The organization of the Army as it now exists is not calculated to foster the development of Indian nation¬ hood, and no proposals for taxation for the main¬ tenance of the present organization can possibly be welcome to the people; but if the people can be made to realize that the Army will be a national army, and that it will afford the fullest scope for Indian valor, talents and patriotism, it would be easier to carry through the Legislature proposals for military ex¬ penditure.” If the Indians could vote on the Army Budget, in which is 62 per cent of the net expenditure, the Assembly would then feel a responsibility which it 45 INDIA IN FERMENT does not now possess ; and the more fully the Govern¬ ment is able to place its cards on the table, the more would the House realize that it had become a partner in responsibility with the Governor-General in Coun¬ cil for the security of India. In that event, not only the army estimates, but the whole Budget would probably be less rudely handled by the Assembly. It would be a dangerous experiment, I admit, but as Lionel Curtis has so well expressed it, the British must live dangerously if they are to attain the great ends they seek. Since the process of fostering responsibility might take time, and since, during the process, mistakes would probably be made, the power of restoration might have to be employed by the Governor-General. Lord Reading at first refused to restore the rejected taxes, and the Indian Government for months lived and moved and had its being in literal bankruptcy. Before I left India the tide of criticism against Lord Reading was rising and it was not abated by this action. He has always irritated the official world in¬ tensely by what it called his “lack of decision.” The moderate Indian opinion has, on the whole, been favorable to him. In the circumstances existing, in March 1922, the Viceroy, said his critics, using his 46 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY power to restore the budget (as indeed he was obliged ultimately to do), would have been in a strong posi¬ tion; for in using this power of restoration and in justifying it, he would then have been able to appeal to facts of which the Assembly are not even now fully possessed. The Assembly would hardly be impervious to such an appeal. Moreover, if before an impaired grant were actually restored, this appeal were made in the form of an invitation to the House to reconsider, the majority would quite likely respond to it. There is but one way to create responsible politicians, and that is by giving them as much real responsibility as is compatible with the security of their own country. At the time of this writing the process of certification, or declaring that a bill shall become a law in spite of its rejection by the Assembly has been resorted to several times by the Viceroy. The bill for the pro¬ tection of the Princes was certified, and that pro¬ viding for the expenses of the Royal Commission on the services. The heavy railroad charges cut down by the assembly in order to force the Government to lessen the military expenditure, were restored by Lord Reading, and very recently the doubling of the salt tax. The N. C. O/s make much of these restora¬ tions and cry, “You see we have got nothing.” 47 INDIA IN FERMENT In other respects the Assembly in the session 1922- 23, displayed a real sense of responsibility: First, in refusing with no dissenting voice to consent to the release of the Ali brothers; second, in rejecting by a majority the Resolution demanding the abandoning of “repressive measures”; third, in the conduct of the debate on Mr. Montagu’s resignation. Montagu stood for the new era in the Indian mind, and his overthrow was read as a sign of changing times in England. Therefore, the subject was one filled with serious possibilities when discussed in an Indian Legislature. Finally, in rejecting a measure which would have tied the hands of local executive officers in dealing with breaches of the peace, the Indian majority showed its sense of responsibility. The Government, on the other hand, joined the Indian Majority in the repeal of the Rowlatt Acts, which had, indeed, never been actually used by the Govern¬ ment. The attitude of the Assembly towards the Govern¬ ment seemed on the whole friendly. Racial feeling is never wholly absent, and sometimes rampant in certain quarters ; but it has not affected the relations between official and non-official. Sir William Vincent, the Home member, bears the credit of having won 48 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY and held the respect and liking of the whole House, and thus of maintaining harmony between the two sides of the Assembly. To the lead thus given the House seldom failed to respond, though it often acted out of sheer “cussedness.” It does not yet fully realize what “government” means, and does not fully appreciate the problems which the Executive has to solve. Parties are still in embryo. The Democratic Party, which claims over fifty members, came into existence early in 1922, though Sir Frederick Whyte says that the first sign of its formation appeared in Simla (1921) when Dr. Gour canvassed a body of adherents in support of his candidature for the Deputy-Presidency. It is simply an opposition party loosely organized for most practical purposes, com¬ pact when voting against Government, and attempting by Draconian rules to secure internal co¬ hesion. It has three leaders, or none! Dr. Gour, dogged, persistent, preternaturally active, claims the leadership, but Mr. Rangachariar, more able, genial and eloquent, exercises it, while Mr. Seshagiri Aiyar is said to wield some influence behind the scenes. The National Liberal Party formed later in the Delhi session (1922). Led by Sir Sivaswami Aiyar it numbers about twenty-five of the senior 49 INDIA IN FERMENT members of the Assembly. In debating power, in its higher sense of realities, in its ability to look beyond the accidents of the moment, it stands above the Democratic Party. In Mr. Samarth, Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas, Moulvi Abul Kasem, and Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy it possesses men of good parliamentary quality whose contributions to debate are always pertinent and cogent. Keen observers thought that the party would probably gain adherents from the Democrats and attract some of those who now stand aloof from both organizations. The aims and objects of the National Liberal Party are : 1. The attainment as early as possible of full Responsible Government in India as an inte¬ gral part of the Empire. 2. The training and equipment of the country for self-defense. 3. The development of the resources of the country and its Industries and Commerce. 4. The progress of the country all round in every department of national welfare. The methods by which it proposes to attain these ends are : 50 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY 1. By peaceful orderly and constitutional methods and not by recourse to unconstitutional or vio¬ lent methods. 2. The party is opposed to the policy of pro¬ ducing convulsions in the internal administra¬ tion of the country for the purpose of securing its objects and more especially objects uncon¬ nected with the internal administration. 3. The immediate objective of the party is full provincial autonomy and the transfer to popu¬ lar control in the Central Government of all subjects other than defense, political and for¬ eign affairs, and ecclesiastical matters. They propose also adequate safeguards for the pro¬ tection of all vested rights of persons already in the service of the Crown and the fulfillment of the country’s obligations. 4. The party deprecates the use of Parliamentary deadlocks merely for the purpose of paralyzing the administration by obstruction or as a means of wringing concessions. Such dead¬ locks they say form a weapon to be most charily used for the purpose of securing com¬ pliance with the wishes of the Assembly in matters of really great importance, on which 5i INDIA IN FERMENT there can be no reasonable doubt of the justice and expediency of the conclusions ar¬ rived at by the Assembly. 5. The policy of the party is to train Indians in all branches of the defensive force, and steadily to Indianize the army so that India may in the course of time rely upon her own military and naval strength for purposes of defense. This policy is to be carried out with¬ out imperiling the safety of the country. In the civil services the policy of Indianization is also steadily to be carried out, and they de¬ clare, the maintenance of a high standard of efficiency and integrity in all branches of the administration should be kept in view. 6. The development of the resources of the country, its Commerce and Industries should proceed on the most suitable lines suggested by the experience of progressive countries which have recently started on the path of economic development. The party welcomes the cooperation of British capital, British busi¬ ness knowledge and technical skill as essential to the rapid progress of the country. Cultiva¬ tion of a spirit of cooperation and harmony 52 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY between the British and Indians and between all classes of His Majesty’s subjects is re¬ garded as essential to national welfare. 7. The party is in favor of protective tariffs to the extent to which they may be absolutely necessary for the purpose of starting and estab¬ lishing new Industries which have a prospect of success or are essential to the vital interests of the country. Care will be taken to see that the interests of the consumer are not neglected. 8. The party is in favor of the State management of Railways. It will work for economy in every department of public administration, but without impairing its efficiency. 9. Amelioration of the conditions of labor and the improvement of the efficiency and well¬ being of the laborer and the prevention of conflicts between labor and capital, and of direct action by labor in the political sphere, will engage the attention of the party. 10. The promotion of the well-being of the De¬ pressed Classes and the protection of the inter¬ ests of minorities will be kept in view. 11. The party will endeavor to improve the status of Indians in the Colonies. 53 INDIA IN FERMENT Such are the aims of the National Liberal Party as outlined to me by one of its leaders. While there is no fundamental difference between the programs of the two parties, there is a real difference of temper and outlook. The Democrats are younger, more audacious, more reckless; but if they will consent to follow faithfully a leader of Mr. Rangachariar’s caliber, their inherent energy might give better results than it has yet achieved. The Nationalists are the more self-restrained of the two, and show a better understanding of the manner in which the constitution ought to operate, and of the difficulties unavoidable in the transition stage. As one listens to the debates carried on, with few exceptions, in English — the only tongue which all can understand — certain peculiarities come to the fore. Although the Government benches represent an irremovable executive on the one side, faced by a large constitutionally irresponsible Indian majority on the other, there is manifest an eagerness to ex¬ plain fully the Government’s aims, and a strong de¬ sire to meet the opposition’s desires if it be politically possible. Indeed, to my knowledge, there has been no direct ignoring of the will of the majority since the new regime opened. The Indian members who 54 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY at first came half- fearful to the Legislative Assembly, doubting as they came from the elections whether they really did have anything, have begun to gain confi¬ dence, to lose their apologetic frame of mind, and to assail the Government from every side. One of the first speeches I heard was from the eloquent Ranga- chariar, twitting the Government for maintaining an army to protect it against its own people. Indeed, army expenditure is so constantly assailed that one suspects that the eagerness of the Indians to reduce the army has back of it the desire to weaken the military force until it can be overthrown. The Indians remind the Government daily that an English battalion costs 21 y2 lakhs (a lakh is 100,000 rupees) annually, as compared to 5 lakhs in the case of an Indian battalion, and here, says the Indian, drastic reform is necessary. They do not consider the rela¬ tive efficiency of English and Indian battalions, though doubtless they do have in mind their relative potential loyalty to the British Government. I had expected to find the clashes chiefly between the Indian-elected members and the representatives of Government, backed by the European members; but the bitterest debate I heard was between Moham¬ medans and Hindus on the resolution to withdraw 55 INDIA IN FERMENT martial law from the Malabar region. The Indians were afterward plainly chagrined at this exhibition of their lack of real unity. Three or four debaters were masters of relevant, cogent, and moderate argument, showing debating talent of high order, but the ma¬ jority were nearer the caliber found in our average state legislature. Some were unable to do more than read monotonously speeches, which, one suspected, were written by their babu secretaries. Such efforts soon emptied the House, as indeed, did occasional speeches in Urdu, for as one should know practically all of the speeches are made in English, the tongue best understood by all. The Madras members showed the highest debating talent, with Bombay next, and Bengal a low third, though in the Bengal Council I had heard Sir Surendranath Banerji make the most compelling speech that I heard in India. Yet brilliant as was some of the oratory, and sub¬ tle as was some of the thought displayed by the members of the Assembly, I should not like the task of having to pick an Administration out of the body. They will need years of experience and drill before they can give the concentrated attention, the ceaseless watchfulness, the devotion to details, the tireless hour after hour, day in and day out attention 56 THE INDIAN LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY which makes an efficient Administration. Indeed, I sometimes wonder, in moments of doubt, whether the climate does not forever preclude efficiency of administration by those who dwell always under its enervating influence. The English bring new blood constantly from the invigorating air of England. They, too, would lose force and vigor if they were to stay generation after generation in India. The chief weaknesses of the Legislative Assembly as a whole are the failure to organize a strong politi¬ cal party in spite of Mr. Gour’s vigorous efforts to that end, and the manifest unwillingness of the Indians to assume political responsibility. Neverthe¬ less, Sir Frederick Whyte left the chair on the last day of the first session “a confirmed optimist.” The fact that created in my mind the greatest doubt of the success of the new venture was the poor attend¬ ance and the nature of the motives which one was driven to believe had kept the Indians away. Never¬ theless, men whose judgment I value and whose knowledge was far greater than mine were not so pessimistic. IV REACTION OF PRINCES, OFFICIALS, CAPI¬ TAL, HINDUS AND MOSLEMS TO THE REFORMS The judgments passed on the Government of India Act are as varied as the endless varieties of people that pass one daily in an Indian city. The young Englishmen regard the Act, with its promise of rapid Indianization of the services, as the death knell of all their hopes and ambitions. They blame Mr. Montagu for it and hate him accordingly. As they see it, they have trained for a career which seems doomed to vanish. All the old promises of good pay, high pensions, polo ponies galore, have gone glimmering. “If a real estate agent had put out such a blue-sky advertisement,” I have heard them say — referring to the Government when it lured them into the services — “he would have been fined and imprisoned for fraud.” Government has no sympathy with them, they declare. , It does not tax as it ought, and salaries are utterly inadequate. All 58 REACTION TO THE REFORMS British-Indian civil officers, young and old, have been compelled to meet the increased cost of living by a reduction in their former standard of living. The Indian Civil Service is robbed of all its charm. In the old days a man was independent, acted with confidence, did his best, and expected backing; but to-day there is constant criticism — one is always worried lest there be criticism from above. In the country districts they do not even feel safe from physical harm. It was all an awful mistake, they hold. Like the unlucky hero in the Arabian Nights, Montagu has let the monstrous evil genie out of the bottle, and not all the political magic in the world can get it back in again. They cannot see that Gov¬ ernment must ignore the assumed rights of these hopeful young men if it is to do a manifest jus¬ tice to the three hundred and fifteen millions of Indians. Quite as discouraging to the “Services” as the new policy of Government is a changed attitude of the Indian people in many districts toward the British officers. The sullen obedience, the menacing air, the derisive cries, the all-pervasive race-hatred in districts where Gandhi’s henchmen were most successful, have become very discouraging. I recall a little Bengalee 59 INDIA IN FERMENT of about fourteen years following a subdivisional officer who was guiding my steps in a Bengal village and shouting, “there goes the master of the slaves.” In Assam a Scotch police inspector described his ex¬ perience with some angry tea-grow;ers among whom he moved, he said, “like a lion tamer among enraged lions in a cage.” One could not expect good and con¬ tented service from men whose exacting task, hard at all times, was under the changed conditions carried out in the midst of hostility, expressed in vitupera¬ tion, reckless misrepresentation, and subtle if not open threat. Added to this condition is the depress¬ ing outlook. Every English civil servant who be¬ lieves in the sincerity of the Government of India Act knows that once he and his colleagues have trained the people of India to a fitness for Dominion Home Rule, their occupation will be gone. The bet¬ ter they do their work the sooner they will abolish themselves. It is never a pleasure to dig one’s own grave ! As a result, though the all-India service was never more needed, the aspiring candidates have been reduced more than half. Aside from the young men, the official class in general looks with favor on the Act, and all are loyal to it. A governor of a great Indian province 60 REACTION TO THE REFORMS said to me with the deepest sincerity, “The Indian people are asking for freedom, the desire for which we have taught them; they want to be masters in their own homes and controllers of the destinies of their own country, and my sympathy is so much with them that perhaps I want to move forward too fast. At least that is better than moving too slow ; and that is, I fear, likely to be our great danger here.” That is not an uncommon sentiment, though of course some take a different view. A few look upon it, said Sir Frederick Whyte, as the Duke of Wellington looked upon the Reform Bill, “ready to take the damned thing and let it pass, because the King’s Government must be carried on.” Such think more of British capital and the future of British officialdom in India than of the future of its brown masses of humanity. There is a saying at Calcutta, where the Scotch merchants predominate, that India is a country con¬ quered by the Irish to the end that the English might govern it for the benefit of the Scotch. That epi¬ gram is too clever to be taken seriously, but it can¬ not be denied that many English and Scotch mer¬ chants and manufacturers have little sympathy with the Government of India Act, and they dispose of 61 INDIA IN FERMENT it with impatient denunciations as “all d - d non- sense” ; but I must say that I found American busi¬ ness and professional men in India just as eager to preserve the old British regime, and just as intolerant of any suggestion that the Indians can rule them¬ selves. Their watchword in the present troubled times is, “sit tight on the valve.” That section of the Indian press which most assiduously represents the opinion of the European commercial and manu¬ facturing interests, complains the loudest against the democratic tendencies in India. These journal¬ istic Cassandras, who can write better than they can think, cry aloud in the street, filling the ear with the mournful strain: “Melancholy, indeed, is the state of India. She stands at the brink of a great catas¬ trophe. The air is heavy with coming disaster, and the material progress of the last century is threat¬ ened with destruction.” Indian society is “rotten,” the new Indian is “a bastard monstrosity and there is no truth in him.” Every evil that visits India now is laid to “new and popular government.” English and American critics of the act point out that it is not twenty years since the reformer Morley derided the idea of representative institutions on a parliamentary model in India, but now Parliament is 62 REACTION TO THE REFORMS cajoled and hurried into a wild scheme devised by ‘‘amateur constructors of abstract constitutions,” led by a “globe trotter with a mania for constitution mongering.” By these men the whole “fantastic scheme” with the “curious name of Dyarchy” is derided as a “hurly-burly innovation.” Enemies say that “No contrivance could possibly have been de¬ vised more effectually to intensify and exacerbate division, and to produce a maximum of friction in the Government machine.” It is, says one critic, “one of those specious paradoxes which delight the shallow brain.” One says we “have launched a feeble bark constructed by pedantry.” It has, the opponents say, every practical defect that is likely to appear where pedantic self-complacency takes the place of experience and patient labor. All of these members of the Gloom family are looking hopefully forward to its failure. An Englishman who has had immense influence on India, but whose reply to the protest of capitalists was given me in confidence, said: “If British capital were sunk in India in a belief that the country was always going to maintain the same form of govern¬ ment, and with the same power of Hukim (command) to a vegetable population, then the capitalist acted 63 INDIA IN FERMENT with a lack of foresight which characterizes the British capitalist in almost every country of the world. If Indians have made statements which show that they are hostile to British industry, then the fault largely lies with the Anglo-Indian community which has held itself aloof from their desires, which has been contemptuous of the life of the country in which it lives, which has taken no steps to identify Indian interests with its own.” This struck me as rather acrid, and while I was in India I did not find this type of man in the saddle. He may regain power if reaction sets in, and that would seem to me a great misfortune. British rulers are heading into a stormy sea, thick with disaster, if they follow those who stubbornly insist upon autocratic rule, to the end of time, for those mysterious millions who, in the past, have bent to their will. It means breasting the democratic tide which is sweeping the whole world on to a destiny none can see. Not even Brit¬ ish pluck can carry on against that current. But the distrust of the liberality of the Government of India Act comes not alone from Europeans and Americans. Many of the native princes shake their heads dubiously over it and the Maharaja of Alwar thinks the English are mad to have entered upon 64 REACTION TO THE REFORMS such a plan. I was immensely impressed with Alwar, who had the most brilliant Indian mind I found. He invited me to come to his “camp” in which he lived during the Prince of Wales’ visit to Delhi. There I found several large tents and a number of small ones, commonplace enough outside but most amazing once I had entered. The walls and ceilings were hung with rich silks ; the floors were spread with beautiful Oriental rugs, and the chairs and sofas were sumptuously upholstered in the richest mate¬ rials. Carved tables and screens there were, as in a settled abode, and scattered about were charming objets d’art, as if the prince had settled there for a year instead of a short week. The Maharaja in¬ vited me to go on a two weeks’ tour of his domains, and said this splendid camp would be moved from place to place as was his custom. Except for his palatial exteriors, Aladdin could have done no more with his magic lamp. When His Highness had mo¬ tioned me to a seat at one end of a narrow sofa, and had seated himself at the other, an obsequious, richly clad but barefooted servant brought cigarettes, and I settled down to an hour-and-a-half’s enjoyment of the most amazing monologue to which I ever listened. In vain I wished again and again that I could place 65 INDIA IN FERMENT a dictaphone before those tightly drawn yet sensuous lips, speaking the most perfect English, with an ex¬ quisite sense for the exact word to express the most exalted thought. As I studied this scion of an ancient royal family, descended from the Solar dynasty, I noted first his caste mark, token that with all his education and European culture he is still an ortho¬ dox Hindu. His fine, serious eyes seemed to have looked deeply and cynically into life’s mysteries, and induced perhaps the knitted brow and reluctant smile. The brow was well forward of the ears and perfectly molded. The dark face looked a little careworn. They say he has his troubles. He is not a 21 -gun maharaja, though his titles are like those of Mon¬ sieur Beaucaire which it took a strong man two days to pronounce. He rules some three thousand square miles, and in mentality only can he rival his fellow princes. A pol¬ ished, quick, crafty ruler, he brings the methods of Solomon into the twentieth century and, in his small domain, makes the laws, executes them, and sits in judgment on all disputes. As Lord Reading said re¬ cently in an after-dinner speech at the prince’s pal¬ ace, “His Highness of Alwar is responsible only to himself and his God.” Alwar said to me that the 66 REACTION TO THE REFORMS personal element had gone out of modern government quite too much and at the great cost of real and quick justice. Law, men had now, but not justice. “I give them justice,” he asserted, with evident self- satisfaction. His Highness is quite contemptuous of the reformer class which has come to the top in India, and though not at all eager for intimacy with Europeans, he is quite convinced that the British rule is best for him and all small princes. I can recall only the outline of his argument, not the charm of his diction, the range of his thought, the wealth of his illustration. The British Govern¬ ment, he declared with conviction, is engaged in an impossible undertaking, trying to set up democratic institutions, perfected by generations of struggle under English conditions, in India where caste is the very basis of the Hindu religion. The caste sys¬ tem is one which attempts to regulate dharma , or the dominant sense of duty, by establishing fixed groups to do the various tasks of life. It creates satisfied groups of people willing to do their duty within their own sphere. The democracy which the British seek to set up, Alwar declared, would destroy all the foundations of caste and with them the Hindu reli¬ gion. In a word, if caste remains, democracy will 67 INDIA IN FERMENT fail; if democracy succeeds, caste falls and with it the Hindu religion. Such a political system would fail because it would have no basis in religion, the only firm foundation of any civilization. One could not substitute, within a generation, a new basis of civilization, a new religion. “Can you tell me,” Alwar asked dramatically, “anywhere in the East where democratic institutions have been engrafted upon Oriental life and been a success? Not in Egypt, not in Arabia, not in Persia, nor China, nor, if carefully analyzed, in Japan.” I remember but one of Alwar’s beautiful illustra¬ tions and of that only the frame. He said the British folly was like his own when, years ago, as part of a great irrigation scheme, he had planted certain needed kinds of trees, in a certain order and under scientific¬ ally favorable conditions. In spite of every care the plan failed, and in disgust he hedged the area about and left it to itself. It grew up, in time, a natural jungle of fine trees, serving the same purposes which he originally had in view; but Nature had her own way, as she always will in the long run. It was this natural growth that he hoped for in India. Here the two peoples were side by side — British and Indians; the one stressing the material side of life, the other 68 REACTION TO THE REFORMS stressing the spiritual side, and brought together by Providence, which moves in inscrutable ways, to the end that the most perfect civilization which the world has known may be evolved. The British qualities must predominate on the political side, and the Indian qualities on the religious side. Each will complement and be indispensable to the other, and there should be no envy, no race hatred. Each is superior in its own way; both are needful for a perfect civilization. This was a maharaja’s view. The princes are loyal supporters of the British regime. It is their shield and buckler. The Indian princes fully realize that while they seem to be left out of this great demo¬ cratic experiment, its success will spell the ultimate destruction of all their kind. To apply the words of Lincoln to the eastern world, “India cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. ... It will become all of one thing or all of the other.” In the past the British regime, leaving them, within certain limits, to their own devices, has curbed but at the same time protected them, and while the very example of British efficiency and British liberality in British India has compelled them in the past, as well as now, to give their subjects greater freedom than they would otherwise, yet they prefer to bear the evils they can 69 INDIA IN FERMENT measure than to fly to others which they know not of. The Gaekwar of Baroda, one of the most advanced of all Indian rulers, has refused to enter the Council of Princes which is a part of the general scheme. Bika- nir and Patiala and Mysore, all liberal princes, who have yielded generous reforms to their subjects, are worried over the great radical movement in India. One maharaja, a Maratha, whose ancestral home is the Deccan, said that his wise old father counseled him on his deathbed, “Stick to the English to the last; but if they ever fail you, fly to the Deccan” — in other words, to his own people. I wondered why the Gaekwar of Baroda quizzed me for an hour, while we were at tea, as to the causes of the American Revolution ; but perhaps he only wished to know how to head off such cataclysms, or, even more likely, he was trying to be polite to his guest. Nothing piques the curiosity of the traveler in India as its princes. I have read whole solemn books about “The Native States of India” and about “In¬ dian Princes,” but more illuminating to me were bits of gossip drawn from British residents at the capital of an Indian principality, from former ministers of princes, and from English expert advisers to “Their Highnesses.” Some seventy millions of Indians are 70 REACTION TO THE REFORMS not included in British India, but are governed by native princes of every conceivable degree of political advancement or of backwardness. At the capital of each is found a British Resident who is always ready to give advice, but who rarely interferes in the actual government by the prince. Lord Chelmsford has compactly stated the distribution and the relation of native states to the British Government : “There are in the Central Indian Agency some 150 states, and in the Rajputana Agency 20 states, and in Balu¬ chistan 2 states under the agents of the Governor General. The rest of the states are in political rela¬ tions with the local governments. Madras deals with 5 states; Bombay with 350; Bengal with 2; United Provinces with 3; the Punjab with 34; Burma with 32 ; Bihar and Orissa with 26 ; the Central Provinces with 15; and Assam with 16. (Four large states, and one small, deal directly with the Viceroy through their Resident. )” The British archives in India, containing the cor¬ respondence with princes and residents and between the two, will perhaps never be opened, but any writer of romance who could dig his materials in that treas¬ ure house would become an object of envy to all his rivals. I shall never forget sitting in a state of utter 71 INDIA IN FERMENT amazement, fascinated for two hours by the stories of hair-raising intrigues related to me by a distin¬ guished Hindu, who used to be the prime minister at the court of a Maharaja. Much that he told me I later was able to verify, when I met the Resident who was dwelling at the same court during that regime. One of the most thrilling stories has now faded away until I retain only the fleeting images of a pretty English nurse, caring for His Highness’s children, a visit of the Prince’s family to Darjeeling, the wild flight of the English nurse from there back to the protection of the Resident at the capitol, an effort of the Prince to get the prime minister to buy the silence of the young lady, his advice against such folly, and thereafter a mad intrigue to get the min¬ ister out of office. Indeed, he was only saved from assassination by the firm support of the Resident. Again a governor told of the troubles in settling the estates of Indian Princes at death. Though the Governor’s agents go at once on news by wire of the prince’s death by special train and with motor cars, they often arrive amid scenes of mad intrigue and a scramble for plunder. These agents have caught the ministers making off with chests of gold and silver or of money. The distant heirs sometimes try to 72 REACTION TO THE REFORMS make way with the near ones. Children are murdered — smothered in closets and disposed of with other devilish devices. At one place the agents found three small children in a chest of opium. One was paralyzed but the others were saved. The agents have to lock up all rooms, close up the palace, care for all minors, and then go about the legal settlement. I asked a British expert adviser to a famous prince whether he saw any tendency of the prince or his Dewan to reject advice because of racial pride, or because they do not wish to follow slavishly. His reply was, No. But he uses the greatest tact in mak¬ ing his suggestions. When I asked a British Resident under what circumstances he would feel called upon forcibly to interfere in the affairs of the prince with whom he was stationed, he replied, “Only in the most extreme cases.” He told of one Maharaja who had caused his enemy’s wife to be brought in, stripped in his darbar room, and subjected to shocking indig¬ nities before the whole court. Again, when intoxi¬ cated, he had been induced by some young fellows about court to sign an order to bring to his palace the wives and daughters of prominent citizens for the pleasure of these young debauchees. When at last they went with such an order to the house of a certain 73 INDIA IN FERMENT citizen, and he chose to save his honor by killing his wife and daughters and himself, the British Govern¬ ment stepped in and dethroned the Indian Caligula whose drunken orders had caused this tragedy. The Raja of Puri was deprived of his title of Maharaja for a somewhat similar offense. Again, a Maharaja got three years behind in the payment of his debts, and the British Government took over his domain and administered his estate. They put the prince on a small allowance, and to eke that out he added two wives to the three he already had and got two lakhs (200,000) of rupees thereby. When that was spent he took to plain brigandage. Going to a narrow pass between two mountains on the highroad through his dominions, he placed two elephants on each side of the road, drew up behind them his tatterdemalion army, which would have put even Falstaff to blush, and held up and robbed all travelers. Complaints poured in upon the Resident. He sent for and rebuked the prince, who brazenly declared that the terms of his treaty with the British Government would prevent the Resident from inter¬ fering. The treaty reads, he said, that “the British Government will not interfere with any of the cus¬ toms or usages of state established by tradition.” 74 REACTION TO THE REFORMS This method of highway robbery, he asserted, had been the custom of his forbears since the memory of man. Nevertheless, the Resident made the preda¬ tory Maharaja reform his ways. Otherwise, the Resident told me, he got on finely with the prince, as his successor failed to do, and to-day when this princely Robin Hood meets the Resident, he comes with open arms, crying, “I never have been happy since you left my dominions.” In general, a resident assured me, the successful Resident acts with such tact as to get things done without clash. Speaking of Lord Minto’s declaration of non-intervention in the Native states, this Resident declared that the change at that time was a change of theory and not in practice. It had always been the custom to use tact rather than the menace of greater power. These Indian rulers range through every thinkable stage from the barbarous to the highly cultured, and their dominions from a few thousand acres to many thousands of square miles. Native princes and chiefs are both Mohammedan and Hindus. Some are pro¬ gressive, or at least varnished with modern ideas. Some are liberal, some conservative. Some belong to the Middle Ages. A number of princes are most advanced in their ideas. They have developed water- 75 INDIA IN FERMENT power, agriculture and modern industries. Some, not mere benevolent despots, have, like the Maha¬ rajah of Mysore, granted their subjects democratic institutions. Indians claim that Mysore is as well administered as British India. The Gaekwar of Baroda showed his scorn of ancient tradition by nominating an “untouchable” to his council, in de¬ fiance and to the horror of the Brahman councilors. Another prince, more in the childhood of the race, is said to have appeared on deck of a P. & O. steamer wearing his crown, and seemed surprised that this was not expected of him. His Highness the Maharao of Cutch was highly praised by an Indian radical because, as he said, “The Maharao doesn’t approve of having his subjects read and write. He will not drink or eat with Western peoples, and he rigidly observes all caste rules. Railroads are not allowed to invade his dominions, and though his land is rich in minerals, he will not permit the introduction of modern machinery to work them.” No promoters need apply ! “He leaves racing and cricket and polo to the British, and takes his sport in spearing the wild pig and shooting the tiger.” This prince, whom we would call backward, was highly eulogized as a “champion of the old Hindu system.” In fact, a 76 REACTION TO THE REFORMS number of the Indian nationalists and Non-coopera- tors lamented to me that some princes imitated Brit¬ ish rule, and they thought it much to be deplored. They complained that in Jodhpur, Alwar, Kathiawar States, Tonk and Jaipur, and at Jamnagar the meet¬ ings of Non-cooperators had been forbidden. The Gaekwar of Baroda, too, discouraged the agitator and allowed no radical newspapers. Nevertheless, there was a constant stream of thought passing and repassing into the Native states and out. There are in India good rulers and bad rulers and indifferent rulers. All are proud aud some arrogant. They are as jealous of their rights to salutes of twenty-one guns or thirteen guns, or any fixed quota of guns, as a peacock of his feathers. Princes with a salute less than nine guns are not entitled to be ad¬ dressed as “His Highness.” Their dignity is usually expressed with elephants, ornate howdahs, golden umbrellas, priceless diamonds or pearls and the pomp and glory of their retinues. All Indians are highly sensitive as to their relative position at a banquet, or in a ceremonial sitting, but a maharajah has been known to faint away on learning that his seat had been placed a little lower down than was the custom, and I was told of one who endured the shame, sat 77 INDIA IN FERMENT dazed during a ceremony, and then walked away, for¬ getting his retinue, and lost his way in city streets, where his servants found him wandering as one dis¬ traught. Blows to prestige are more staggering to an Indian prince than blows on the head. The reduction, or the deprivation of a salute, is regarded as a public disgrace. The decision of the Viceroy as to such matters of precedence is final. The new spirit of democracy in India had thus far not made itself felt much in the Native States. A British expert adviser to a great Indian Prince explained to me his theory why Gandhi does not in¬ clude native states in his propaganda. “He knows that the basis of his agitation is racial pride offended by being governed by a foreign race. In native states the rule may be much more despotic, even tyrannous, but it is by native princes, and fie cannot make the same appeal.” Princes, on the other hand, realize the danger from this agitation. Their people feel the agitation by contagion from neighboring states. T. V. Seshagiri Aiyar declares that the Indians take pride in the power of their princes even when they are despotic, even when tyrannical. “Far better/’ he cries, “to have deportations and incarcerations than to be instruments for compelling their Prince to yield up 78 REACTION TO THE REFORMS even an inch of the power which the treaty (which every Prince has with the British Government) has conferred on them.” “The subjects of an Indian prince should be hap¬ pier than those in British India,” said Seshagiri Aiyar, but Sir Narayan Chandavarkar doubted whether they were in fact. In most cases, he said, they did not dare complain. Like Haroun Alraschid, Sir Narayan used to go in the early morning incognito and talk with the Indian villagers in a native state of which he was prime minister. The people complained bitterly of the way the tax col¬ lectors exacted bribes. They complained of oppres¬ sion, neglect of sanitation, and, in general, held that the Maharaja looked upon the law as something for application to his people, but not to him. “But on the other hand,” said a native of Indore, “in British India the people feel the Collector all the time, while in my state the land tax is paid twice a year, and though the tax-gatherer exacts bribes, he is soon gone, and nothing more is heard of Govern¬ ment for the rest of the year. In British India civil officers are forever passing around the district, and the natives, wishing to stand in with them, have to furnish them with food and lodgings and horses.” 79 INDIA IN FERMENT A collector of long experience in British India told me of an official tour he took in a native state, neighboring his own district. He was met by a lot of tatterdemalion soldiers, with gay uniforms, in rags, and carrying swords. They escorted him with comic ceremony. He found oppression, wretched sanitary conditions, individuals persecuted by under¬ paid agents of the Prince, who had to make up their salaries by bleeding the subjects, but nevertheless he thought that the average individual led a much more happy existence, unperturbed by official visits — the jolly, careless life which they preferred. He con¬ fessed that the Indians in British India are annoyed by constant visits and requisitions for food and horses and sundry other things. One agent compels vaccination, another forces treatment of cattle for rinderpest, another gets all the children together to see if all are at school. “With best intentions, the people in British India are overgoverned,” he feared. A governor of a great province modified that view by the assertion that the subjects of Indian princes used to turn to the Sirkar (the British official), but now under the new regime, when the Viceroy ties the hands of the Provincial Government, the people find their appeal in vain, and turn to the Indian agitators 80 REACTION TO THE REFORMS in British India who champion their cause against all rulers. Under the present regime, he said, we can do nothing but offer mild advice to the Indian Prince, and when the patience of his subjects becomes ex¬ hausted, deplorable events like those in the Tonk state occur, the subjects rise in justifiable revolt and they have to be put down by force. As a result a good deal of serious injustice and oppression exists in backward Indian states. Nevertheless, asserted a rich merchant from Indore, “though we are not better fed, or clothed, or cared for in time of famine, we in the native states are happier.” Taking into. consideration all the facts about the Indian princes and their states, it is plain that they are not to be ignored in any plans for the future of India. Lord Sydenham has stated of personal knowl¬ edge that some of the native rulers have already marked out the areas which they will annex when the chaos which they foresee comes to pass, and in New India , Mrs. Annie Besant’s paper, it was pointed out that most people ignore the Indian princes when they are talking about setting up an Independent Indian Republic. They seem to forget how large a part of India is ruled by her own sons, and that these possess very fair armies with which to defend their thrones. 81 INDIA IN FERMENT Doubtless not all are of the same mind as the Maha¬ raja of Alwar, but some must share his vision expressed at a speech in his own palace in March 1922, when he was entertaining the Viceroy: “I have somehow learned to believe that the destiny of the West, as represented by Britain, has been brought into contact with the East, as represented by India, by no mere chance or any haphazard circumstance. The internal tradition of India has been to look to the inner things of life, to be introspective and to fathom the secrets of God and life. Self-realization, in other words, has been the goal of the East. The West, on the other hand, has looked to the outside world to conquer nature in order to enable it to help humanity. Each has a definite aim and a great deal to give to the other. Slavish imitation is death, but assimilation of the best, when the roots are firmly imbedded in one’s own soil, is life. The materialism of the West cannot survive by itself any more than the spiritu¬ ality of the East can be put into practice without the union of both. I believe that a higher destiny has willed that the two nations which have been brought together are not going to part asunder until a higher civilization has been evolved, where the spirituality of the East, mingling with the sciences and the 82 REACTION TO THE REFORMS material progress of the West, will bring the millen¬ nium for the world. It is only then that equality will come; it is then we can mutually shake the hand of friendship and serve each other, combine together and make an Empire that may well be the envy of history and of the world. This is the destiny, in my estimation, that India has to fulfill; this, according to my ideals, is her highest swaraj .” “My goal,” Alwar declared, “is the United States of India, where every Province and every State, working out its own destiny in accordance with its own environment, its own tradition, history and religion, will combine together for Imperial purposes, each subscribing its little quota of knowledge and experience in a labor of love, freely given for a higher and a nobler cause.” This formal speech was so similar to what he had said to me two months earlier in private conversation that I feel assured the vision was not the dream of a moment but the fixed idea toward which he at least will try to lead his people. Alwar’s dream was a very different reading of the hand of Fate from that given me by Gandhi and his followers; different, indeed, from all the factional Indian views. Although I found many shades of 83 INDIA IN FERMENT opinion, all might be grouped into conservative, moderate, nationalist, and “non-cooperating” fac¬ tions. Even the Conservatives had national pride, and dreamed of some far-off day when great masses of Indian people should have been trained to political experience, and when the task might with safety be taken over wholly by India’s best political talent. But they fully realized the magnitude of the under¬ taking to raise over three hundred millions of people from the depths of medieval ignorance and super¬ stition to a degree of civilization fairly commensurate with that dominant in those parts of the world where democracy is a success. Men of this group had, as a rule, great financial interests and were in no hurry to see government transferred to their less efficient countrymen. They pay lip-service to swaraj, because any Indian would be proclaimed disloyal to India who did not favor ultimate self-rule, but they are willing to wait generations if need be for the beauti¬ ful Utopia. The more remote it is the more beautiful it looks to them. The second group, the Moderates, like Sir Suren- dranath Banerji, Sir Narayan Chandavarkar, and Lord Sinha, were often found in high Government positions, or had a large stake, economic or social, 84 REACTION TO THE REFORMS which curbed their eagerness for swaraj (self-rule). Nevertheless, they wished to see the pace quickened which takes them toward a self-governed India. They hoped in their own lives to see the Promised Land. The Government of India Act was very good for a start, but more must come. They uttered many complaints against the British raj (rule), but thought it the only safe one at present. They had more con¬ fidence in their own people than was shown by the Conservatives, but it was not boundless. They recognize great danger in an immediate taking over of the rule of India by Indians. These Moderates are often not quite sure of the good faith of the English in furthering self-government, but are will¬ ing to accept the Government of India Act, enter the councils and assembly, and make government so un¬ happy by constant attacks that it will, as they imagine, hasten the day of complete emancipation. To this end they introduce resolutions to annoy Government, to which, if passed, no human ingenuity could give effect, and cry out against grievances inherent in all government, and which even the rulers of Utopia could not have remedied. Having no real ultimate re¬ sponsibility, they are free to make bids for popularity where responsible legislators would fear to tread. 85 INDIA IN FERMENT The “grand old man of Bengal,” as his friends called him, Ananda Chandra Roy, said sadly: “It will be long before my people will be ready to take up the burden of their own government. With very few exceptions they have not shown capacity to man- age big business. But government is big business. Indians must learn to take responsibility for big things in business before they try to manage a vast country with hundreds of languages, hundreds of different states, with great rivalry between Hindu and Mohammedan, with caste distinctions and other conditions that make for disorder. Only the Tatas — and they are Parsis — have shown marked capacity. In Bengal, the zamindars (great landholders), in spite of their big incomes, are all bankrupt.” Sir Narayan Chanda varkar talked in the same way about Indian efficiency in government. “Alas, we are very indolent, and it takes energy and untiring effort to govern well. Because Indians do not, as a rule, have that capacity for tireless devotion to details, they do not succeed in carrying on big business. Constant, persistent attention to details is foreign to them. Tata, and two or three others, are the only excep¬ tions.” He hoped, nevertheless, that they would in time learn this virtue from the English. Similar 86 REACTION TO THE REFORMS confessions were made to me daily by high-minded and sincere Indians whose patriotism I could not doubt. But there were two other classes of Indian leaders, Nationalists and “Non-cooperators,” who aimed at the same thing, but would attain the goal by different means. The Nationalists, bitterly denouncing the Government of India Act as utterly inadequate, would nevertheless enter the legislative assembly or the provincial councils, and, fighting the British by constitutional methods, force further concessions. The British respect this attitude and make no com¬ plaint of opposition which is carried on in a constitu¬ tional way. The Gandhi followers would refuse to have anything to do with the Government of India Act, and by non-cooperation with Government bring it to a standstill. Both want swaraj at once, imme¬ diate transfer of all political power to the Indians. The least they will accept is a definite promise, a fixed schedule of progress toward self-government. “Let the British tell us that next year they will give us control of finance, that five years hence they will give us full control of the military affairs, but let them not vaguely say that when we have shown our fitness they will reward us with more responsibilities. Who 87 INDIA IN FERMENT are they that they should set themselves up as the arbiters of our political destiny? We are as com¬ petent as they to determine when we have attained political fitness. This is our country, not theirs,” they fiercely proclaim, “and it is not for them to assert their superiority and to take credit for benevo¬ lence because of what they grant us. Moreover,” they conclude, “how are we to get political experience out of this artful device? After all, what is the system to which the reformists pin their faith? A scheme whereby the bureaucracy, which retains con¬ trol, is to ‘train’ Indians for self-government, by means of coalition cabinets, composed partly of offi¬ cials and partly of Indian Ministers. Will the officials train for self-government? Will men whose whole training has been autocratic, whose class and race interests are bound up with ascendency, whose traditions are all of despotic rule — will such as these cast aside everything, training, interests, and tradi¬ tions, and become apostles of liberty? Dyarchy is no school for freedom,” they cry. As to the competence of Indians to undertake self- rule at once there is an interesting difference between the Indian city dwellers and those whose lives are spent in the country districts (the mofussil, as they 88 REACTION TO THE REFORMS say in India). Educated Indians in Calcutta, Bom¬ bay or Madras, surrounded by their more or less sophisticated fellow citizens, and knowing little of the abysmal political ignorance of peasant classes in the villages, will think you are jesting if you ven¬ ture to doubt India’s present fitness for self-rule. In the country towns, on the other hand, the educated Indian, doctor, lawyer or editor, is perfectly able to grasp your doubt as to whether swaraj is a practical measure in the near future. Castes are too jealous of each other, they concede; religious groups are too intolerant. There are too many dissensions among us, they say, and the lawless elements are too eager to take advantage, if the efficient British administra¬ tion were to be withdrawn. Hindu suspects Moham¬ medan, and the Sons of the Prophet distrust the Hindu. For all these reasons the cautious Indian of the professional classes in the mofussil is ready to wait, sadly often, but not in doubt as to the wisest course. And thus patriotic Indians are divided. Some would keep the British, some would drive them out; but all would have them give up their claim to the right to determine when the Indians were ready for swaraj. Some admitted that they would be glad to profit s9 INDIA IN FERMENT for a time by the British experience in governing. Many had the curious idea that the British would give them naval and military protection while sur¬ rendering political control. The British, in a word, were to “keep the ring” while the Indians played at politics, serenely free of the ultimate responsibility of governors. When I asked what motive the British Government would have for assuming such a burden, they seemed surprised at my cynical ignorance of altruism. Besides, they explained, we would protect British capital and interests in return for the security they would give us. “You expect, then,” I said, “that all of the British people will assume a military bur¬ den and expense in order that a very few may have their Indian property protected.” Our Filipino fellow citizens I found entertaining like ideas. A faction of the Nationalists, who during the time of my visit had been overcome by Gandhi’s mastery of the All-India Congress, was the Moham¬ medan group once led by Mohammed and Shoukat Ali. It was the first who said at Allahabad, “If twenty crores (two hundred million) of Hindus can¬ not liberate India without foreign help, I hope and trust that seven crores of Mussulmans can and will. If the Amir of Afghanistan fights the enemy of Islam 90 REACTION TO THE REFORMS he would have my entire support. If he fights the present governors of India because they are turbulent neighbors, he has my entire sympathy.” Again he said, “I am a Moslem first and everything else after¬ wards.” He openly hoped that Mustapha Kemal Pasha would come to India’s aid. This fire-eater Gandhi seemed to place under the yoke, and to lead chained to his non-violent chariot wheels. But all the natural impulses of these Ali brothers led them to violence, and, considering their menacing speeches, and their proven intrigues, the British Government seemed amply justified in placing such declared enemies behind the bars. There they were as a warn¬ ing to all Moslem agitators to keep at least within the bounds of the law. Their adherence to Gandhi was thought by many to be a mere convenient cloak for their real preference for a fight. Opinion differed, however, and others thought the Mohammedans really embraced the Gandhi principles, if for no other reason, that they might secure Hindu support. Both these and the followers of Gandhi were ready to wash their hands, if need be, of all British contacts. At the present moment the political parties in India may be roughly divided into ( i ) extreme Reaction¬ aries, (2) Moderates, (3) Nationalists, (4) Non- 9i INDIA IN FERMENT cooperators, who would give up that program in order to enter the legislative bodies and wreck them, and (5) Non-cooperators, who remain true to the Gandhi principle. A seventh group, chiefly Moham¬ medans, keeps on the cloak of the N. C. O., but at heart would like to resort to a campaign of violence in order to bring the British to their terms. Among the extreme Reactionaries are certain types of British business men who see in India only an opportunity to get rich quickly. They have no sympathy with schemes to give India self-government. They are not numerous, but they are powerful. Many of the great Indian landholders who get their rents regu¬ larly because of the efficiency of the British regime are in this group, and pay only lip-service at the best to the idea of Indian self-rule. Many of the Indian princes like the old regime best and are silently con¬ temptuous of those who would fly to evils they know not of. In the Moderate group one would put the more liberal British business men, the prosperous Parsis of the Bombay district, and Indians in general whose social or official position, great wealth, or natural conservatism, causes them to view with alarm any but a gradual change. These do not wish to risk the 92 REACTION TO THE REFORMS immediate future of the country in untrained and untried hands. They would have India rule herself when she has men of experience, trained in the British school, who can bear the burden. The Nationalist group contains many Indians of ability and prominence such as Sastri and Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, members of the National Assembly or Council of State, and ministers in the several prov¬ inces, or members of provincial councils. Much of the finest talent in India is found in this party. It stands for gaining self-rule for India at the earliest possible moment that it can be won by constitutional means. It takes part in working the machinery of the new Government of India Act, but it uses it to drive the British Government to more concessions. As a rule, its members believe in keeping India within the British Empire, but it must be free as Canada or Australia is free. The group of Non-cooperators, once wholly dominated by Gandhi, has now broken into two factions. One, under the leadership of C. R. Das, would enter the Councils and National Assembly by electing members during the elections of November 1923, and from within the constitu¬ tional government make the British all the trouble possible — either rule or ruin. Some of this faction 93 INDIA IN FERMENT wish India to remain within the British Empire; some would cut away entirely. The opposing faction wishes to go on with the old Gandhi program of non¬ violent non-cooperation, perfecting the great political machine by which they get control of the masses until they can bring the British to their knees. Finally there is a group, largely found in Northwest India, made of Mohammedans, with fighting blood, who wish to dare all and try to force the British into the sea. Gandhi partly subdued these men, but they were never wholly convinced of the wisdom of his plan. Such are the various factions which struggle for dominance in India. V MAHATMA GANDHI, SAINT OR DEMAGOGUE? It is the Non-cooperators and their leader who most challenge the world’s attention. As to Mohan¬ das Karamchand Gandhi, the great leader of the Indian masses, I found the utmost variance of opinion. Is he politician, demagogue or saint? Dr. Jekyl or Mr. Hyde? Is he “that lunatic,” as I heard a British general call him, or a seer comparable to Buddha or Confucius? Is he “that blackguard” or a “reincarnation of Vishnu,” as I was repeatedly assured? Is he “filled with humility,” or has atten¬ tion made him “vain of his power” so that “he even kicks out those who push too near him?” Only one thing is certain, and that is that this prophet, if he is one, has more followers than any other prophet in the world’s history enjoyed during his own lifetime. To answer the questions which crowded up before me 95 INDIA IN FERMENT as soon as I landed in India, I read all that Gandhi had written upon which I could lay my hands, and, more important, I arranged to visit him. It was at Ahmedabad, during the late December meeting of the All-Indian Congress, that I first saw Gandhi. Mr. Amballal, a rich mill-owner, kindly arranged the meeting. In his car we drove to the Congress Hall, erected outside the walls of Ahmeda¬ bad, near the vast tent city built to house the many thousand delegates and their friends. All the curious square tents were built of slight wooden frames cov¬ ered with Indian woven cotton cloth, or khaddar. The thousands of visitors had come, as is the custom all over India in attending fairs or sacred festivals, literally taking up their beds and walking, at least to and from the railroad station. Their wants are few : a blanket, a bag of rice, a simple cooking utensil or two. If it is warm, they wear little but a loin-cloth; if cold, they wrap their many-colored blankets around them. One missed the picturesque turban or other headdress, because all the faithful wore the Gandhi cap — a homely white skullcap, hopelessly inartistic, but the token of submission to the will of the great “Mahatma.” As we neared the Congress Hall, with the giant 96 MAHATMA GANDHI spinning wheel before it — Gandhi’s device for win¬ ning economic independence — we met the thousands of delegates coming out. Everybody seemed to know Mr. Amballal, but they looked at me with curiosity. “Gandhi is coming and will soon be in his tent,” was the answer to the questions of my Indian friend. We turned aside, worrying our way through numbers of tongas, autos, and pedestrians, and drove as near as we could get to Gandhi’s tent; then walked through a narrow lane made by the ten thousand wildly en¬ thusiastic Indians shouting: “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!” (Victory for Gandhi, the holy man.) I have seen many American crowds, madly shouting their admiration for Roosevelt, but never with greater devotion than that of these dusky-skinned masses. Knowing full well the race hatred with which Gandhi, willingly or not, had filled his disciples, and recalling the fate of an American in the recent Bombay riots, I hoped fervently that Mr. Amballal’s power was as great as it was reputed. There was no need to worry, for everybody looked at me merely with curiosity. At last we reached the simple tent reserved for the great leader. Following the old Indian custom, which all obeyed, we took off our shoes before entering. Passing through the outer room, we entered Gandhi’s 97 INDIA IN FERMENT own room, in which there was a spinning wheel, whereon the leader was used to spin as an example to his followers. Besides the rush matting, there were a pallet and two pillows on the floor, and three bricks at one side of the room. This was all the furniture. Soon we heard the voice of the crowd outside grow in volume, and going to the door we saw Gandhi, the saint, the seer, the reincarnation of Vishnu, drive up in a Ford car! There flashed through my mind the memory of his fierce denunciation of machinery, and modern rapid locomotion. In a moment, the man who had aroused India’s spirit as no man, dead or alive, had ever done, stood before me, and I was being introduced. Except for a loin cloth and a narrow scarf, he was naked, wearing no sandals, no cap such as his disciples wear. He shook hands, his eyes cast down, and there was an air of humility. I noted that he was a small man, that every rib plainly showed, and that his whole physique was frail. When he looked up at me with a tired but kindly smile, I saw that he had lost the two upper front teeth. As he talked, I began to understand why C. F. Andrews “loved him like a brother,” and why the proud Brahman, S. Srinavasa Iyengar, spoke of him 98 MAHATMA GANDHI tenderly as “my master.” I understood why the Inspector of Police at Poona enjoyed nothing more than to talk with him, though, as he laughingly added, “I may have to arrest him any day.” Gandhi’s eyes were liquid, filled with a spiritual light, and there was a mildness, a sweetness of spirit, a compassion for one who could not see the light, who could only stand in the outer darkness of the materialistic world. I recalled what his friend Jayakar had told me of Gandhi’s “selflessness” — a word his admirers never omit — of his gentleness, his piety and religious fer¬ vor. In America he would be merely a curiosity. The long-haired men and the short-haired women would gather around him and console him because nobody appreciated him ; but in India, whose mystic soul is stirred by nothing as by religion, millions turn to him, swayed, I feel sure, much more by his religious appeal than by his political ideals. The Maharajah of Alwar was more than half right, I believe, when he assured me : “Mr. Gandhi is not of any influence, but Mahatma Gandhi is listened to because he is a holy man.” “If you and Gandhi and I,” said His Highness, “were to go to the gate of an Indian village and determine by lot which should be announced as a Mahatma, it wouldn’t make the least 99 INDIA IN FERMENT difference which of us got the title and went in. To the one with that title all would come, asking no questions, but accepting whatever he said without hesitation.” It is true that Gandhi has more than once declared that he is not a Mahatma; but his fol¬ lowers insist upon the title, and holy man he will be though one should rise from the dead and deny it. Only by reviewing the political and social ideas of this new Messiah can one understand the amazing miracle of his leadership. “India,” he says, “is being ground down, not under the English heel but under that of modern civilization . . . there is no end to the victims destroyed in the fire of civilization . . . it is like a mouse gnawing while it is soothing us.” Its railways, lawyers, and doctors, he declares, have impoverished India. “But for the railways, the English could not have such a hold on India as they have.” These railways have spread bubonic plague, he asserts, because they carry plague germs. “Rail¬ ways increase the frequency of famines, because, owing to facility of means of locomotion, people sell out their grain . . . become careless, and so the pressure of famine increases.” He forgets that it is the railroad which has enabled the Government so to combat famine that, in its worst aspects, it has practi- ioo MAHATMA GANDHI cally disappeared. He clinches his argument against railways by asserting: “Good travels at a snail’s pace ... it can therefore have little to do with rail¬ ways . . . but evil has wings. . . . God set a limit to a man’s locomotive ambition in the construction of his body.” Gandhi would banish the railroad and the factory. He would stop “the spreading of the hideous town,” and send back to the country the 80 per cent of Bombay’s million inhabitants who throng there to work in smoke and squalor. He would raise the black pall from the steel-smelting city of Jamshedpur, from Calcutta and Madras. From these sinks of iniquity he would send them back to the clean air of their native villages. It is not mill life alone, Gandhi teaches, but lawyers who have “enslaved India.” They will, “as a rule, advance quarrels. . . . They have made brothers enemies. . . . Lazy people, in order to in¬ dulge in luxuries, take up such professions.” If law “pleaders were to abandon their profession and con¬ sider it just as degrading as prostitution, English rule would break up in a day.” “They have also used the medical profession,” he declares, “for holding us.” “Doctors have almost IOI INDIA IN FERMENT H \ l tr unhinged us. Sometimes I think that quacks are better than highly qualified doctors. ” Diseases, Gandhi asserts, arise by our own negligence or in¬ dulgence. “I overeat; I have indigestion; I go to a doctor ; he gives me medicine ; I am cured ! I over¬ eat again ; and I take his pills again. Had the doctor not intervened, nature would have done its work, and I would have acquired mastery over myself, would have been freed from vice.” — ‘‘Hospitals are insti¬ tutions for propagating sin.” The Mahatma’s pure reason is never deterred by facts. In one passage of Hind Swaraj , Gandhi bitterly attacks vivisection, and one seems to be listening to a voice from the Middle Ages, or to Bryan denouncing Darwinism. And what does Mr. Gandhi conclude from all this? “Those alone who have been affected by western civilization have become enslaved.” Get rid of it, ■ T and India is free. He believes the old civilization of India “is not to be beaten in the world. Rome went, Greece shared the same fate, the might of the Pharaohs was broken, Japan became western¬ ized . . . but India is still sound at the foundation.” He glories in the fact that “we have managed with the same kind of plow that existed thousands of years ago.” Indeed, I can testify that, while travel- h u * itC \Jk is 102 MAHATMA GANDHI ing five thousand miles in India, going out frequently into the country districts, I never saw a modern plow, or a reaper and binder, or a threshing- machine, or any agricultural implement not used by the sons of Abraham three thousand years ago. They reap with a sickle, and thresh with a flail that was old when Methuselah was a child. Perhaps nowhere else does the ancient world sur¬ vive to the extent that it does in India; and if this is a virtue, by all means give her the palm. Gandhi complacently decides that India “has nothing to learn from anybody else, and this is as it should be. . . . A nation with a constitution like this is fitter to teach others than to learn from others.” There is a nationalistic complacency in that assertion which it would be hard to match. “Wherever in India the curse of modern civilization has not reached (he has in mind the backward districts, as travelers describe them) India is as it was before, and is happy and free.” All Indians, by going back to the simple life, using the charka, or spinning wheel, to make their own simple Khaddar cloth, giving up machines and English luxuries, may be free. “It is swaraj (self- rule) when we learn to rule ourselves.” Only “our adoption of their civilization makes the British 103 INDIA IN FERMENT presence in India at all possible. Your hatred against them,” Gandhi counsels his followers, “ought to be transferred to their civilization.” When Indians wish to resort to warfare, he asks them gently, “Do you want to make the holy land of India unholy? To arm India on a large scale is to Europeanize it. Do you not tremble to think of freeing India by assassination? What we need to do is to kill our¬ selves. It is a cowardly thought, that of killing others. Those who are intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization think these things.” Some of the more belligerent Indian agitators assured me that Gandhi was too saintly to lead a movement “against a gang of toughs like the British imperialists,” but up to the day of his arrest he was doing marvelously well at it. His idea simply to use “love-force,” “soul-force,” or passive resistance, was sure to appeal to an Oriental. A governor of a great province described to me how thirty thousand Indians in his capital city lay down on the street-railway track and stopped all traffic for two days. In desperation he at last ordered the chief of police to bring a company of dragoons into the city, select a place where the horsemen could be seen coming for several blocks, and then order to 104 MAHATMA GANDHI charge with lowered spears and come thundering down upon the prostrate Indian. He sat, in an agony of suspense, until word came by telephone that the passive resisters had broken and fled, clearing miles of track. When Gandhi was asked how he would meet the wild Afghans if they were to swoop down out of the Northwest hills, to ravage India, when the British had left, he answered that he would meet them with “soul-force.” That idea that the East can bow low, “let the legion thunder past, and plunge in thought again” is a beautiful idea, but its consequences would be hard on those who own anything beyond a charka, a straw pallet and a loin cloth. Police Inspector Griffith was discussing with Gandhi the punishment of criminals, which the re¬ former thought was all wrong. “What would you do?” asked the Inspector. “I would punish them as I did my daughter when she told me a lie: I fasted for a fortnight.” “But,” said the Inspector, “if you fast a fortnight for a lie, how long must I fast for a murderer? Besides, there are fifty-four murders a year in this city. When would I get a chance to eat?” “Oh ! now you’re unreasonable and I can’t argue with you,” replied Gandhi. 105 INDIA IN FERMENT He would, therefore, resist evil by deliberate self¬ suffering, not deliberate injuring of the wrongdoer. His mind has an elusive character often found among Indians. Miss Tarbell once told me of a wit¬ ness before a congressional committee who seemed at times to stand on a dizzy edge of a precipice, and you were sure he was lost, when he “suddenly stepped over and walked down and came up smiling.” So with Gandhi in one of his famous interviews with the Viceroy. The Mahatma had argued against re¬ pressive measures, and urged “soul-force.” “Can you tell me,” queried Lord Reading, “any example in history when government has successfully used soul-force?” After just a moment’s hesitation, Gandhi replied: “Ah! Your Excellency, but this is a new dispensa¬ tion.” Reason totters on its high throne when it has grasped at substance and finds only airy nothing. Yet this “Grand Old Fanatic,” as one of his deep¬ est admirers dubbed him to me, had a good English education, first in India, then in London University, and finally by completing his studies for the bar in the Inner Temple. He speaks excellent English in a most eloquent way, though he is not at all oratorical, and is more likely to scold his audience than to tickle 106 MAHATMA GANDHI its vanities. With all his maddening unreason there is about him something fundamentally right-minded. His idea that “the soul’s wealth is the only wealth” is a truth sung by a poet of ancient Greece. He is quite right that Indians cannot win swaraj by force. He is right in urging Brahmans to sit at the table with “untouchables,” and thus rid caste of one af its worst features. He has attacked fearlessly some of the worst evils of Hinduism. Whatever one may think of Non-cooperation and its danger, it has done much that Gandhi’s admirers claim for it. He has made the Indian people feel their unity as never before. He has awakened Indians from two hun¬ dred years of dreaming “in slavery” — as agitators love to call the British late benevolent absolutism — to a pride that will not tolerate assumed superiority. Indeed, many believe that he has lighted a fire in India that shall never be put out. On the other hand, Gandhi has made wild promises of swaraj “next month,” or “within a year,” and passed blandly over failure that would have ruined most men. His will is tireless, and he is most fertile in resources. First he set out to capture the educated classes. He tried for the taxpayer, the lawyer, who was to give up practice, the title holder, who was to io 7 INDIA IN FERMENT drop his “Sir” and “Lord,” the university student, who was to leave college. He failed ultimately with each, because they could not endure the economic loss, and they deserted after feeble trials. He then preached that Non-cooperation meant campaigns against drink, “untouchability,” and the use of for¬ eign cloths. He urged the use of the spinning wheel to supply home-spun cloth, and to develop “soul- force.” With these vagaries he captured the masses. Then his non-violence, non-cooperation and civil dis¬ obedience degenerated into violence at Malegaon, in Malabar, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Chauri Chaura. He suddenly called on all disciples to desist until they developed the soul- force to go on peace¬ ably. His grief was great, and, I believe, genuine, over the failure of his followers to attain his spiritual heights. But meanwhile the sands were running out, and government, with its obligation first of all to preserve public order, could not go on forever ignor¬ ing Gandhi, whose peaceful teachings were in fact driving the tide of race hatred ever higher. Even those officials who would admit that Gandhi had exalted the Indian people, saw clearly that he also endangered the safety of the state. When, as I was leaving India, I heard of Gandhi’s 108 MAHATMA GANDHI arrest, and later, on shipboard in the China Sea, learned that he had been convicted and sent to prison for six years, I found that I had mingled feelings about it. I thought of Gandhi’s gentleness, his lov¬ ableness, the atmosphere of saintliness about him, the frail body always overtaxed and ever driven on by a high sense of duty. I recalled him — simple, unde¬ filed, living in the pure radiance of the spirit. These thoughts made me sad. But when I reasoned about it, I knew that, had I been Viceroy, I should have arrested Gandhi six months earlier! I never could have had Lord Reading’s patience nor the courage to face the criticism of those who gnashed their teeth at his delays. One of the first things Lord Reading did when he set his vice-regal course was to hold several interviews with Gandhi, to the great wrath of reactionary officialdom. He wished to under¬ stand his aims and meet them if he could. It came to nothing, but one must honor him for the gener¬ osity and good will. I have only admiration for the wisdom and patience of the Viceroy, a liberal man, a strong, calm, and reasonable man, who wished nothing so much as to do right. His brain power is much superior to most of those about him, and he is master in his own house. Though keen in his 109 INDIA IN FERMENT intuitions, he is cautious in action. His critics say that he lacks firmness. When I saw him he was acting from day to day as the hour seemed to de¬ mand, but waiting for a policy. He had two firm convictions : one, that civilized society rests on re¬ spect for law — that was Gandhi’s Nemesis; the other, that legal considerations ought not always to be uppermost in a statesman’s mind — that was Gandhi’s hope. Gandhi’s persistence in civil dis¬ obedience compelled the Viceroy to act on his first conviction. I asked Sir Narayan Chandavarkar, President of the Bombay Legislative Council, and loyal supporter of the British Government, why it was that I could detect in him and other Indians, who bitterly criti¬ cized Gandhi’s methods, an underlying reverence for the man. “It is,” he replied, “the religious appeal, the strongest of all emotions in an Indian. I, who gave up my Brahman prerogatives that I might fight the battle for the depressed classes, and who have a reasoned hatred of idols, have felt the religious emo¬ tions well up within me when, even lately, I have entered a Hindu temple and looked upon the stone idols. Millions of Indians believe Gandhi to be a reincarnation of Vishnu.” “He will become a god,” no MAHATMA GANDHI they declare. There are in India many ascetics like Gandhi who give up the flesh, alcohol and women, who fast, devote themselves to good works, and whose abiding place becomes a center of pilgrimage to which thousands come bringing gifts. Usually these holy men use the gifts for various charitable institutions or religious purposes, but, said Sir Narayan, Gandhi uses his reputation for sanctity to accomplish political ends. Gandhi, himself, has said, “I, who wear the guise of a politician, am at heart a religious man.” It must not be forgotten that for the masses Gandhi is not merely what his own words and con¬ duct would make him, but what his followers, good and bad, have caused the most credulous and super¬ stitious people in the world to believe him to be. It is true that wherever he goes, men come, as to a shrine, by tens of thousands, and listen as to a prophet ; but that means little among three hundred- odd millions of people. A most active extremist organization exploits this holy figure as its greatest asset. One finds Gandhi’s pictures for sale in every bazaar in India, often drawn in the midst of other sacred figures suggesting his close relation with the Hindu gods. It has been carried in chariots in hi INDIA IN FERMENT the sacred processions so loved by the Hindu. Simple village folk, I have been told repeatedly on the best authority, pray to these pictures. They find the leaves of trees stamped with the Mahatma’s name; and the cunning charlatan who did it sells the leaves to awe-struck worshipers. Ignorant peasants are told that, if they do not heed Gandhi’s commands, they will be turned to stone. They are promised that, when the Gandhi raj (rule) comes, they will have no land tax to pay, no famine or scourge will appear in the land, and the golden age will come. An unprinci¬ pled device to which Mrs. Annie Besant called my attention was that of sending a message in Mahatma Gandhi’s name to the heads of the caste panchayats, or governing bodies, inducing them to threaten with caste excommunication any members who should do any work on a day for which a hartal had been proclaimed. This use of caste tyranny was very effective. The Mahatma himself frowns on all this; but, fearful of injury to the whole cause, he finds it hard to control the fringe of cranks and unprincipled rogues that follow any great movement. In America before the Civil War the great abolitionists found that their worst trial was the freak reformers, the II 2 MAHATMA GANDHI free-love advocates, the wild-eyed, vision-seeing people who joined the great movement to free the slaves. Gandhi finds consolation in his nobler fol¬ lowers, like Mr. Jayaker of Bombay, who, though a graduate of Oxford, rich and influential, dresses in swadeshi cloth and thrusts his bare feet into Indian slippers. I recall him, gentle as a dove, soft-spoken, with a mild, sad face, and a soul that glowed with enthusiasm over Hindu philosophy, Hindu art, Hindu literature. His culture and refinement, his gentleness and sweetness of nature, were all devoted to admiration of Gandhi. He has recently turned away from the cause of Non-cooperation, but I doubt not that he loves and still speaks reverently of Gandhi. So, too, S. Srinavasa Iyengar, who admit¬ ted to me that, at first, he had opposed Gandhi’s Non-cooperation, but that, at last, he had “seen the light,” and was “filled with a strange happiness” when he realized that its value was, not the trouble which the Non-cooperators gave the British Govern¬ ment, but the unity and self-control which they acquired for Indians. “We gain swaraj day by day,” he assured me with ecstasy, “as we conquer ourselves and go to prison or give up luxuries or offices for the cause. . . . We don’t hate the English,” he de- 113 INDIA IN FERMENT dared, true to his master’s teaching, “we serenely ignore him.” Rabindranath Tagore admires Gandhi, too, though he does not agree with all his plans or doctrines. He wrote, “Mahatma Gandhi came and stood at the cot¬ tage door of the destitute millions, clad as one of themselves, and talking to them in their own lan¬ guage. . . . Who else has felt so many men of India to be his own flesh and blood? ... as soon as true love stood at India’s door, it flew open; all hesitation and holding back vanished. Truth awakened truth.” But, alas, it also awakened race hatred, and Govern¬ ment, merely to preserve its existence, was obliged to take vigorous though humane measures to pre¬ serve public order. These Gandhi chose to call “repressive measures.” VI “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” It is important to know what “non-violent non- cooperation” really meant in India from 1919 well into 1922 before one passes upon the wisdom of the use by the Indian Government of what the Gandhists and the Nationalists called repressive measures. There is little doubt in my own mind that Gandhi in the fog of his mystic idealism truly thought that he could arouse mad resentment of the “Satanic govern¬ ment” and hate, in effect at least, of Western civiliza¬ tion, and still keep his followers non-violent. But it was against human nature. As one reads the newspapers of those troubled years, or the official accounts submitted to the Legislative Assembly and accepted by the Indian representatives as substan¬ tially true, one is struck with the way non-violent beginnings drifted quickly to violent ends. In Fyza- bad district a Non-cooperator had stirred up agrarian riots. ITe was arrested, and a crowd of sympathetic Indians tried to hold up a train and rescue him from the officers. Hard-pressed, they fired and wounded 115 INDIA IN FERMENT one rioter. Again at Aligarh, a political agitator was sentenced to prison ; a mob attacked the police guards, and the result was two killed, several wounded, and a post office and other buildings burned. At Giridih a judge remanded a Non-cooperator to jail, a mob swarmed about the jail to prevent the police from doing their duty. The police took shelter there, and the mob attacked with a casualty resulting. At Malegaon men were prosecuted for carrying arms at a mass meeting. A mob attacked police, killed a sub¬ inspector and a constable, did some looting, and in quelling them three were killed, nine wounded. A little later Khilafat volunteers were imprisoned, the mob determined to make a clean sweep of the police, and in the riot one magistrate was beaten to death, his body burned, and four constables killed. Only the arrival of troops stopped the bloody work. These are only a few of the cases which occurred before the famous Moplah rebellion broke out in the Malabar region. Government naturally grew rather “jumpy” and doubtful of the wisdom of giving agitators free reign while they stirred men up to madness. Meanwhile Gandhi had grown somewhat restless under the apparent failure of his efforts to get students to leave Government schools, lawyers to 116 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” surrender their practice, and titleholders to give up their titles. Losing faith in the intellectuals, he turned to the masses, urging them to cease to use foreign cloth, to spin and weave their own simple khciddar, and to picket the shops of cloth merchants urging prospective buyers to turn away. Gandhi exhorted his followers, “There is nothing more to be done but to spin and court imprisonment, and spin even in the prisons if they will let us. Whilst we are spinning or going to jail we must retain the correct attitude of mind, that is, of non-violence and friend¬ liness between the various faiths. If we cease to hate Englishmen, cooperators, and those who do not see eye to eye with us; if we cease to distrust or fear one another, and if we are determined to suffer and work for the bread of the whole nation, that is, spin, do we not see that no power on earth can withstand us? At a tea party given to me in Calcutta, where gathered some thirty Indians who had at some time studied in American Universities, the whole affair turned into an indignation meeting against the British Government. An old doctor in a quaint Bengal dress harangued me on the ills of that regime, while Mrs. Das, a charming woman, dressed in a beautifully ornamented khaddar sari , plied me with ii 7 INDIA IN FERMENT tea and betel nut, assuring me all the time that the old doctor spoke only the truth. Whenever he could get an opening a wild-eyed young Bengalee in a Gandhi cap held a curious diagram up before me, and demonstrated with geometrical figures how the magic spinning wheel would evolve social force, and finally give swaraj to India. To deprive the Indian Government of the revenue from drink shops, these, too, under Gandhi’s plan, were to be picketed and all patrons turned away. The picketing naturally led to disturbances, fights, even riots in some cases, and when Government began to arrest the picketers, Gandhi pleaded with the Indian youths to become volunteers for imprisonment. I saw them parading the streets in groups of fifteen or twenty with garlands about their necks like sacrificial victims. They had pledged themselves at the Indian Congress headquarters to seek imprisonment. Gandhi urged them in his eloquent way, “We must widen the gates of prisons and we must enter them as a bride¬ groom enters the bride’s chamber. Freedom is to be wooed only inside prison walls and sometimes on the gallows, never in the council chambers, courts or the schoolroom. Freedom is the most capricious jilt ever known to the world. She is the greatest temp- 118 '‘NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION’’ tress, most difficult to please. No wonder she builds her temples in jails or on inaccessible heights and laughs at us as we attempt to scale the prison wall or (in the hope of reaching her temple on some Hima¬ layan height) wade through hills and dales strewn with thorns.” With contagious enthusiasm he cried, “I should certainly have loved to travel to Allahabad to see Pandit Motilal Nehru and his son being hand¬ cuffed together and made to walk to their destination. I would have loved to watch the radiant smiles on their faces in the consciousness of their handcuffs hastening the advent of swaraj.” He published im¬ posing lists of leaders who were in jail. Volunteers were to gather as picketers and sing the national song of Bande Mataram (hail to thee, oh Mother India!). They soon added the cheer “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai.” These volunteers, in batches of a dozen each, some hired at a rupee a day, made the rounds of their city, singing patriotic songs, wearing badges on their arms, and, in the midst of gathering crowds, reading speeches written by the most suc¬ cessful mob orators. All this, of course, stirred the easily excited Indians into a frenzy of political excitement. It was all very beautiful for Gandhi to urge the Indian people to “keep their heads cool and 119 INDIA IN FERMENT their hands on the spinning wheel,” but what seemed much more likely was “anarchy” and the “rivers of blood and mountains of corpses” which Gandhi admitted at one time that he could see with equanimity. On the other hand, I myself saw how harmless the results of the Gandhi movement could be in some of the country districts. With Mr. Emerson, the Commissioner, and Mr. Lindsay, the Collector, in the Dacca district in Bengal, I had gone up the river to Shekhanagar to see a session of the Union Board, a local Government institution set up by the British in Bengal. As we neared the little town we saw over a hundred followers of Gandhi gathered from the surrounding villages waiting for us near the landing- place. All wore Gandhi caps, and as they marched sang “Bande Mataram” or shouted: “Mahatma Gandhi, ki jai !” They had learned from a radical Calcutta paper that I was coming, and had been given a wildly exaggerated idea of my importance. As we landed they pressed about us, and one who spoke English urged me to leave these bureaucrats who would give me “all wrong ideas,” and come with them to the “All-Indian” headquarters, where they ■yyould tell me the real truth about India. When I ex- 120 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” plained that I had talked with Gandhi, and Das, and Malaviya, they admitted that I might have heard the truth, and were content with merely giving me a carefully written address prepared in advance. A few passages from this address will help to convey the point of view of the poor, unsophisticated Indian, as well as to show some real Babu English. The charges against the British Government were the same I had repeatedly heard in the radical Indian headquarters everywhere. “Sir,” it began, “we the inhabitants of this and the neighboring villages, representing but a small part of this historic Bikrampur, at one time the seat of valour and culture, consider ourselves very fortunate to honour and welcome a man like you, hailing from a country of liberally enlightened people. . . . We venture to hope that our poor offerings of songs and good wishes for your health and happiness will be accepted as tokens of genuine and heartfelt feelings of a people who are now physically and politically poor and fallen from the high ideal with which you are familiar. You have come from the country which has always been in sympathy with a fallen and downtrodden people. It is quite worthy of you and the great traditions of your country that you have come all this inconceivable distance at a great sacrifice 121 INDIA IN FERMENT of money and personal comfort with a view to study¬ ing the political condition of a country which was once great and glorious amongst the nations of the earth, but now fallen, nay, cast away from that high pedestal of its pristine glory. . . . The British Government seems to be quite apathetic and almost unsympathetic with the wants and aspirations of the people of this vast country. The great engine of oppression set in motion by the Government is alien¬ ating the minds of all right-thinking men of this country. The Government has set the ball of repres¬ sion a-rolling and men like Ali brothers, Motilal Nehru, Lala Lajpat-Roy and C. R. Das and their worthy companions are rotting in jail to satisfy the whims and caprices of the bureaucratic government. Illegal and unlawful things which are being done in the name of law, order and justice are really under¬ mining the love and sympathy of the loyal and law- abiding people. ... You have come to visit a country where people are deprived of their birthright of free thought, free speech and free movement, and where public meetings are dispersed by regulation ‘Lathies’ (staves). You have come to visit a country where the political prisoners are treated as felons and are kept with an apology of food or some¬ times without it, and medical aids are denied when they fall ill. ... You have come to visit a country where the entire people depend on Lancashire to clothe their nudity and on Liverpool to season their 1 22 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” poor pottage of herbs. You have come to visit a country where the revenue derived is spent like water on military projects and schemes of fortifying the frontier and not on curtailing the heavy death-roll from preventive diseases by improved sanitation. You have come to visit a country where high educa¬ tion is imparted to inculcate slave mentality, and where mass is forbidden to taste the fruit of knowledge so that they may live in perennial peace of ignorance and Cimmerian darkness, where trade in indigenous articles is discouraged, where wearing khaddar (a kind of country-made cloth) is looked upon as a crime, where arts are never fostered, where taxation is very high and millions go without a full meal a day from year’s end to year’s end, and where famine is an annual visitant and people die of starva¬ tion unnoticed and uncared for. You have come to visit a country where the proud descendants of Grandvile Sharp and Welber force have forged in a refined form the shackles of slavery in the shape of forced and indentured labour; and where abound strange stories of Nemesis like black-deer shooting and entering the sanctum of the black indentured labours to bestow the python kisses on the lips of the youthful Hebes. . . . You have come to a country where the political offenders are tried in camera without allowing access to the public or the press — where deportation without even an apology of trial is unblushingly resorted to, to nip the awakening love 123 INDIA IN FERMENT of country in the bud — where the people who con¬ sider the Habeas Corpus their birthright allow the arrest and detention of the offenders without any evidence of their guilt and allow the police subse¬ quently to gather proofs to suit the exigencies of each case. You have come to a country where justice is administered with bitterness of race feeling and where theory of equality in the eye of the law is ruthlessly ignored, where the Executive and Judicial functions are kept combined in the same person with a view to uphold prestige and authority of the rulers. Lastly, let us add here that ours is an attempt which is directed against the present system of Bureaucratic government and not against the British rule. We should rather be happy and glad to find us under the British Commonwealth with independent representa¬ tives of our own. In conclusion permit us to thank you once more for lending a patient ear to the tale of some of our manifold grievances and also to convey our heartfelt thanks, nay, feelings of gratitude to the great people who have the kindness to send you to this country to see with your own eyes and learn the political con¬ ditions under which the wretched people of this country shift to live. We venture to hope that the great, large-hearted people of your country who have liberated the Filipinos and who have always proved themselves friends of the weak and the oppressed will not deny a helping hand in the just, righteous struggle 124 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” for political emancipation of an ancient nation, who brought about the dawn of Civilization on this dark and dismal earth. We remain, Sir, Yours faithfully, The inhabitants of Shekhanagar, Hashara, Solaghar and the adjoining villages (Bikrampur, Dacca).” After I had accepted the address, the mob of Gandhi followers trooped along after us, and curi¬ ously peeped in the doors and windows, when we visited the Union Board, the Government Dispen¬ sary, and the village school. Along the whole route they had placed rough little placards tacked upon trees or stuck upon sticks in the ground, on which were written words or slogans of the Non-coopera¬ tors. Some had the simple word, SWARAJ , others said “Swaraj is a precious jewel for which the blood of India must be shed”; another had a quaint little sketch of Gandhi, while underneath was inscribed, “Stand as a National Volunteer to guard the prestige of your Mother Country.” When we had done, they marched with us to the river, and having given us a rousing “Van Tyne ki jai!” as if I were some sort of savior of their country, permitted us to depart in peace. As we would have been quite helpless in their hands had they been violent, I was very thank- 125 INDIA IN FERMENT ful for Gandhi’s success as a preacher of non-vio¬ lence, at least in Shekhanagar. When the visit of the Prince of Wales was pro¬ claimed, Gandhi urged all of his followers to let nothing happen to the Prince. “He is our guest. Protect him with your lives,” he exhorted the Indians, “but,” he pleaded, “let none go to see the parades and ceremonies in his honor. There should be hartals wherever he goes.” By a hartal he meant a practical cessation of the economic and social life of the community. All shops and houses should be closed and every one should remain indoors. “Do not cooperate with the British in doing honor to the Prince,” Gandhi ordered. Then came the riot at Bombay, the deaths of fifty-four and the wounding of many, due to a clash between those who obeyed Gandhi, who gave the hour of the Prince’s triumphal procession to burning foreign-made cloth, and those who could not resist the lure of a thrilling pageant. As is characteristic in India, the mob returning from a political meeting did the mischief. In general it was a fight between Hindus and Mussulmans on one side and Parsis on the other, the police trying to quell the riot with as little bloodshed as possible. It was chiefly Indians who were killed, though the life 126 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” of one reckless American was taken. In vain Gandhi had run wildly about the streets urging the rioters to go home. He was powerless when the mob’s blood was up. When all was over he fasted in agony of spirit. He wrote his famous letter to the “Hooligans of Bombay,” telling them sadly that “it cut me to the quick to find that you have used mass awakening for your own lust, for plunder, rapine, and even indulg¬ ing in your worst animal appetite.” Gandhi went to see the widow of the murdered American, actually begging her, as I heard from another American present, not to let the news get to America lest it hurt the N. C. O. (Non-cooperator) cause! Such amaz¬ ing innocence of the telegraph and submarine cable seems incredible, but having studied the processes of Gandhi’s mind, I believe he was in earnest. Alarmed as he doubtless was by the huge monster he had unchained, he did pause — but, having fasted, he resumed the same agitation. He never would admit that his heights were too lofty for the Indian masses. With his approval hartals were attempted in every city where the Prince of Wales appeared. In Madras the lovers of show and pageantry could not resist the lure, and as they hastened in crowds to the best places 127 INDIA IN FERMENT of view some Mohammedans began throwing sticks and stones. A riotous crowd gathered in a square just outside the wall of Government House, tore down the decorations of a band stand, destroying the palms and potted flowers. Then a cinema was attacked with stones, and people passing in motor cars were injured. The police thereupon interfered, using the greatest restraint and patience until at last armored cars and military aid came to the rescue. The mob members ran like rabbits to their burrows, but not before one of their number was killed and many heads broken. A month later at Chauri Chaura a mob attacked the Indian police, who had interfered with N. C. O.’s who picketed drink and cloth shops, and in their blind rage burned the police station into which the police had retreated. Trying to escape, the police were battered to death with sticks and brickbats, the mob acting with the greatest ferocity and brutality. Over twenty police were killed and their bodies strewn over an area of a mile. Again Gandhi fasted, five days this time, and his Working Committee of the Congress condemned the inhuman conduct of the mob at Chauri Chaura, and decided to suspend “mass civil disobedience” until the atmosphere should be- 128 “N ON -VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” come more “non-violent.” Gandhi fasted, because “love can only punish by suffering,” and he called Chauri Chaura “a third warning from God.” He urged the murderers to “voluntarily surrender them¬ selves to the authorities and make a clean confession of their crimes.” There was a general impression at the time that Gandhi and his followers had been staggered by these results of their activities, but sud¬ denly the Working Committee of the Congress urged its followers to carry “civil disobedience” to the extent of non-payment of taxes. Gandhi, “oppressed with doubts” and “shaking with fear,” approved. It was tried at Bardoli with the result that the land of non-taxpayers was seized, and a great outcry went up from the ignorant peasants who had not realized that consequence of their action. Then, when India for a moment was bored with Gandhi, Government arrested him, brought him to trial, and he was im¬ prisoned without the least sign of the fanatical upheaval which most observers had expected to fol¬ low upon such an event. Unless one realizes not only how the Non-coopera¬ tor’s activities led to the above events, but com¬ prehends how the violence resulting from these activi¬ ties caused a growth of a spirit of disobedience to 129 INDIA IN FERMENT authority and a habit of lawlessness, which made the lives of all officials in India almost unendurable, one cannot understand how trying the whole move¬ ment became. Subdivisional officers in some of the country districts did their duties amid menacing peoples who might at any moment turn and rend them. In the civil-service of such districts men came to feel like a swimmer in the midst of the sea negoti¬ ating for his life with a school of sharks. The result of Gandhi’s non-cooperation methods is the breeding of hate, as the riots of Bombay, Madras, and Chauri Chaura plainly revealed. In each it was Indians who chiefly suffered. Indians maltreated, killed, and burned each other; but the attack was made by non-cooperators upon those who seemed either to obey English-made law, or to favor the British Government. It was of little use for Gandhi to fast, to declare that non-cooperation stunk in his nostrils, and to threaten to go into exile in the Himalayas. In vain he urged criminals to deliver themselves to the authorities and confess their crime. It was to no purpose that he declared the Chauri Chaura tragedy “a third warning from God.” So far as Government was concerned, Gandhi’s doctrines had led to these tragedies. He himself 130 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” confessed at Ahmedabad : “I have said times without number that satyagraha (insistence on truth) admits of no violence, no pillage, no incendiarism ; and still, in the name of satyagraha, we burned down build¬ ings, forcibly captured weapons, extorted money, stopped trains, cut off telegraph wires, killed innocent people, and plundered shops and private houses. If deeds such as those would have saved me from prison-house or scaffold, I should not like to be so saved.” With all his fasting and sorrow, his is the ultimate responsibility. He had declared openly, in print, “I deliberately oppose Government, to the ex¬ tent of trying to put its very existence in jeopardy. I seek to paralyze Government.” At Gandhi’s trial he pleaded guilty, and said with his marvelous frankness that he accepted all the blame that the Advocate- General had thrown on his shoulders for the riots in Madras, Bombay and Chauri Chaura. “If I were set free to-day, I would still play with fire,” he declared. The people had sometimes gone mad, he admitted, and that was why he was there to submit to the highest penalty for what in law is a deliberate crime, though it was What appeared to him as the highest duty of a citizen. The judge, Gandhi said, must either resign his post or I3I INDIA IN FERMENT inflict the severest penalty. Indeed, when the judge sentenced him to six years in prison the gentle Mahatma made the kindly comment that the sentence was as light as any judge could possibly have passed. Thus he remained lovable and dangerous to the last. His arrest and trial cost the British Government many anxious weeks of preparation and forethought. The trial was held in the office of Mr. Pratt, the Commissioner at Ahmedabad, next door to his home, which is an ancient palace of Shah Jehan, who caused the Taj Mahal to be built. The Government had taken ample, though quiet and unostentatious mili¬ tary preparations, but the public took it very quietly and with no excitement. That was as those who believed in the sincerity of Gandhi’s non-violent preaching had expected, but some Government offi¬ cials were not so sure that the faith would be kept, and Mr. Pratt spent hours at the telephone giving information and assurance as the anxious hours went by. When the trial was over and Gandhi safely behind the bars, Government heaved a sigh of relief. As far as peace and order in India are concerned, all the results justified the action of Government. One of Gandhi’s devoted followers was Mrs. 132 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” Naidu, the Indian poetess. Her comment upon the trial is typical, perhaps, of the fanatical adoration characteristic of the Gandhi disciples. She said that as the strange trial proceeded and as she listened “to the immortal words that flowed with prophetic fervor from the lips of her beloved master, her thoughts sped across centuries to a different land and a dif¬ ferent age when the teacher was crucified for spread¬ ing a kindred gospel with a kindred courage. She realized anew that lowly Jesus of Nazareth, cradled in a manger, furnished the only true parallel in his¬ tory to this sweet, invincible apostle of Indian liberty, who had loved humanity with surpassing compassion, and, to use his own beautiful phrase, ‘approached the poor with the mind of the poor.’ In the midst of all the poignant scene of many-voiced and myriad- hearted grief, he stood untroubled in all his tran¬ scendent simplicity and embodied the symbol of the Indian nation, its living sacrifice and sacrament in one.” In Bombay, a wealthy Parsi gentleman came to take me for a ride in his car. As I stepped in, I saw a large six-shooter lying on the seat. With some embarrassment my host put the weapon out of sight with the words, “Mr. Gandhi has made that neces- 133 INDIA IN FERMENT sary.” When that stage had been reached, it was time for Government to act. Strangely enough, and contrary to all prophecy, Gandhi’s imprisonment hardly made a ripple on the sea of Indian affairs. The Government of India had wisely refrained from seizing him at the height of his triumphant career, when millions saw in him a saint or even a god. But when the bubble of his supernatural attributes was pricked, and the barren¬ ness of his political faith had disillusioned his more sagacious followers, then Government acted firmly. As the London Times put it, India had had enough of the “saintly turbulence” of Gandhi, which he had elevated to a fine art. Although the Mahatma at the height of his power had an almost unprecedented vogue with the Indian masses, many of India’s greatest men intellectually were opposed to his methods. Srinavasa Sastri, Jam- nadas Dwarkadas, Sir Sivaswami Aiyer, Sir Suren- dranath Banerji and many others were in opposition. Of Non-cooperation, Tagore, a lover of Gandhi, said, “The idea of Non-cooperation is political asceti¬ cism. Our students (urged by Gandhi to remain away from colleges) are bringing their offerings of sacrifices to what? Not to a fuller education, but to 134 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” a non-education. It has at its back a fierce joy of annihilation which at its best is asceticism, and at its worst is that orgy of frightfulness in which the human nature, losing faith in the basic reality of normal life, finds a disinterested delight in an un¬ meaning devastation, as has been shown in the late war. . . . The anarchy of mere emptiness never tempts me.” Mrs. Annie Besant, enthusiastic Theosophist, was also opposed. During the Great War she had aroused and inspired Indians to seize that moment of Eng¬ land’s peril to compel her to yield them swaraj, and she was so effective and dangerous that Government was obliged to remove her to the Madras Governor’s summer residence at Ootacamund, whence her “martyrdom was proclaimed to all India.” She ap¬ pealed to England in ringing words : “Is India fit for Freedom? She claims it as her Right. You will not say her Nay. She proves her equality in death on the battlefield. Will you refuse it when the peace she has made possible, broods over your homes? Would they have been as safe from the German, if Indian breasts had not formed part of your shield? “What does India want? She wants everything that any other Nation may claim for itself. I35. INDIA IN FERMENT “To be free in India, as the Englishman is free in England. “To be governed by her own men, freely elected by herself. “To make and break Ministries at her will. “To carry arms; to have her own Army, her own Navy, her own volunteers. “To levy her own taxes ; to make her own budgets ; to educate her own people ; to irrigate her own lands ; to mine her own ores; to mint her own coin; to be a sovereign Nation within her own borders, owning the paramount power of the Imperial Crown, and sending her sons to the Imperial Council. There is nothing to which any man can aspire in his own land, from which the Indian must be shut out.” Nevertheless, when her “internment” was ended she turned from her former triumphs in the Indian National Congress to oppose with her wonderful elo¬ quence the Non-cooperation program of Gandhi. “Apart from Mr. Gandhi’s program,” she said, “it is obvious that Non-cooperation with Government im¬ plies an abandonment of all the conveniences which Government supplies. No one can buy a stamp, nor send a telegram nor travel by train, without contribut¬ ing to the support of Government. No one can bring 136 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” or defend a civil suit, nor register a document, with¬ out contributing to the support of Government. If courts are closed by Non-cooperation, no redress can be had for assault, or robbery, or swindling, or forgery, or any other crime against person or property. Crops will perish for want of irrigation from Government-controlled canals. Famine will result from the stoppage of the transport of goods. Prices will rise yet higher from the same cause.” “Mr. Gandhi’s worst sin,” she declared, “is in turn¬ ing the attention of the country to this will-o’-the- wisp of Non-cooperation from the fruitful devotion to strenuous political reform. He has,” she said, “led the younger men away from the path of work to the intoxication of war against Government, of hatred, and of inevitable failure and subsequent de¬ spair.” For this counsel of moderation she was howled from the stage and hustled from the hall of the Indian Congress by the thousands of delegates who had once idolized her. She explained to me how Gandhi got his sway in India. The ablest, most sober and responsible men were opposed, she said, but as it became evident that they had no backing from the populace, all but the bravest and most tena¬ cious gave way and half-heartedly joined the Non- 137 INDIA IN FERMENT cooperation movement. She was not embittered, talked kindly of Gandhi, but was pressing on through the columns of her influential paper, New India , toward self-rule for India. Yet she is now regarded as a Moderate, and is very much in the good graces of the British Government. Mrs. Besant’s whole philosophy in the existing political crisis was eloquently expressed in her famous Malabar address to the Indian people whom she loves with an almost fanatical passion. “Two ways lie open before you. Choose ye which ye will tread, but by all the memories of the uncounted millennia of your glorious past, by all the splendid hopes of a yet more glorious future, by the sacred names of immortal pioneers of liberty, who wrought and labored for India’s self-rule during seven and thirty years since the congress was founded, leaving the impress of their footprints to inspire us for the short remainder of the way, by the reverence for your fathers who are watching you from the other side of death, by your love for your children and for the sake of the unborn who awaits the result of your work on the other side of birth, above all for the dear sake of the motherland, whose destiny lies in your hands, stop and think, reason and meditate, lift your 138 “NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION” eyes to the Most High God and to the Rishis, prophets and saints that love this sacred land. Then choose your way. Choose your path. God grant that you may choose that which leads to freedom. God guard you from choosing that which leads to anarchy, to the failure of India to accomplish the mighty mission of the spiritualization of the new era.” VII INDIAN ARRAIGNMENT OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT The Government of India Act would have had a better chance from the first, if it had not been for the unfortunate circumstances under which it was inaugurated. There were several untoward events. Immediately after the end of the World War, the Government of India, fearing that upon the passing of its war-powers would come Indian anarchy, with which it had no adequate powers to cope, pressed through its Council the Rowlatt Acts. These acts gave the government an extension of its war-powers for what seemed an adequate time. It remained a dead letter, was repealed in March of 1922, and has always had a fictitious value in the argumentative battle between the Indians and the British. Many Indians protested, and Gandhi began his campaign of passive resistance, using the favorite argument of a conscientious objector, which violates the basic principles of law and order as accepted by believers in our Western civilization. 140 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT The first display of his power was a hartal at Delhi, later widely extended to other provinces. A hartal is often described as a strike, but it means more than that; for, when it is successful, a whole city seems dead. All shops are closed, all activities cease, people remain in their houses, with shutters down. It would be impossible in any land but India, where fear of public opinion is a dominant force. Aroused by this agitation, which went far beyond the actual demands of the occasion, the people of the Punjab were aroused to a frenzy in which they made a brutal attack upon an Englishwoman, murdered five Europeans in Amritsar, and created the impression in the minds of those in the midst of these riots that all the Punjab was in open rebellion — that an¬ other Indian mutiny was imminent. The very fact that the British knew their Indian people led them, perhaps, to be too fearful. It is easy for one who is inexperienced to be misled by the customary docility and obedience to law that obtains among the Indian masses. The Western mind does not easily grasp the fact that these resigned and mild- mannered people can be stirred, by appeals to their ever-dominant religious fanaticism, to a high pitch of reckless fury. Their credulity is beyond our 141 INDIA IN FERMENT comprehension. No lie can be too crude, no deceit too open, to draw them into insane violence unknown in present-day civilized lands, unless it be in Herrin, Illinois, or in some districts of our South. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Governor of the Punjab, urged, and obtained, from the Viceroy a proclamation of martial law. All public gatherings were strictly forbidden ; and when the order was defied by a large meeting in the public square known as the Jallianwalla Bagh at Amritsar, General Dyer marched there with a hundred men, opened fire on a crowd of several thousands, and kept on firing while the mob was making desperate efforts to escape by the narrow alleys leading off the square. The official account reports three hundred and seventy-nine deaths, and several times that number wounded. The whole community was put under the sternest regulations including a “crawling order” worthy of the worst Prussian of them all. A ghastly blunder had been committed, for which only the most prompt repudiation by the Government could make the least amends. There was fatal delay, and when the Hunter Commission was appointed, it was too late to appease Indian opinion. It availed 142 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT nothing that Dyer was retired from the service, and that the British Cabinet at last stigmatized his action as transgressing ‘‘certain standards of con¬ duct which no civilized Government can with im¬ punity neglect and which his Majesty’s Government are determined to uphold.” It was too late. The affair determined the hitherto wavering Gandhi. He had fasted for the violent sins of his followers, but now he denounced as satanic the conduct of the agents of the British Government. Until it should show a complete change of heart, Gandhi declared it a deadly sin for Indians to co¬ operate with it. In a word, an almost isolated in¬ stance of bad judgment and inhumanity by an indivi¬ dual was made to suffice as an indictment for a whole regime. True the British Government did not hasten to repudiate the action, but that only implicates a busy Viceroy and a British Cabinet harried by more World problems at the moment than has been the lot of any other Government in history. English journals and members of Parliament denounced the affair without stint, though in the House of Lords there was evident a dominant approval of Dyer. It is true that Rabindranath Tagore, in London reading the Parliamentary debates, July 22, 1920, wrote an 143 INDIA IN FERMENT English friend : “The result of the Dyer debates in both Houses of Parliament makes painfully evident the attitude of mind of the ruling class of this country towards India. It shows that no outrage, however monstrous, committed against us by agents of their Government can arouse feelings of indignation in the hearts of these people from whom our governors are chosen. The unashamed condonation of brutality expressed in their speeches and echoed in their organs is ugly in its frightfulness.” Unfortunately some spoke as Tagore says, and it was their voices to which the Indian Nationalist most easily gave ear. But all were not so pessimistic as the great Indian poet. It was an Indian Nationalist who said to me, “The British govern in India 315 millions of people, and in all their contacts during that work they have only one Punjab affair in ten years — a remarkable tribute to their general honesty and good intention.” “The very fact,” he added, “that the British Govern¬ ment can survive the incessant attacks of a multitude of hostile Hindu papers on the lookout for any blot on their record is proof of the general success of their regime.” Nevertheless, one hears to-day from every Indian’s lips a fierce denunciation of the “Amritsar horror.” 144 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT With this “Punjab wrong” was linked the “Khila- fat wrong.” After the treaty of peace with Turkey, at the close of the World War, in which the conduct of the Turks had aroused the moral indignation of the world, Moslem leaders began to arouse the Indian Mohammedans with the cry that Islam was en¬ dangered. It was urged that the capital of the Islamic world, Constantinople, had been seized by the Allies with British approval; that the Khilafat was threatened, and that Moslem holy places in Asia Minor had been violated by the British, in spite of promises to the contrary. A fictitious importance was attached to it, and a vast amount of exaggera¬ tion was indulged in with respect to it. The Honor¬ able Mr. Fazlul Haq said to me that some of his fellow Moslems had openly confessed to him that “they did not care a brass anna for the Khilafat; but the object of agitation and non-cooperation cam¬ paigns was to pave the way for Revolution in India.” Every Mohammedan I talked with in India discoursed on the folly of the British Government siding with Greece, who would, they declared, have fought against England in the Great War if she had been able. As to atrocities, the Greek, they averred, was quite as bad as the Turk. Mustapha Kemal was 145 INDIA IN FERMENT a hero in the eyes of all “Sons of the Prophet” and the Indian Mohammedans hailed his successes with wild enthusiasm. It is certain, nevertheless, that it was necessary in this matter of the Khilafat, as it was not in the Pun¬ jab affair, to engage in a propaganda to arouse the interest and sympathy of the masses. Moreover, in this case, English statesmen were victims of histori¬ cal events beyond their control. Had they been dis¬ posed, for the sake of peace in India, to yield all that Turkey wanted, they would have had to face as the alternative the indignation of a world (especially the United States) surfeited with Turkish horrors. There had been no intent of inflicting injury on the Moslems of India. Gandhi, however, was persuaded by the Khilafat agitators that the Mohammedan movement was a manifestation of religious faith. In his simple way he unquestioningly accepted it as his own, calling it a revolt of Moslem conscience against British world-tyranny, just as defensible as the Hindu conscientious revolt against the “tyranny” of the Rowlatt Acts. The Mohammedan was to accept the Hindu movement of passive resistance, though he much preferred to fight; and the Hindu was to accept the Moslem Khilafat movement. Both were to dis- 146 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT play the soul- force of India, arrayed against the brute-force of the British. Gandhi declared any one treacherous to the soul of India who would accept any mere constitutional reforms, like the Government of India Act, as reparation for this double wrong. To paralyze this Government, he organized his non¬ cooperation movement. Step by step with that has gone a campaign of complaint against Government, carried on with all the bitterness and invective which the radical Indian press and the extremist orator could summon. The Indian agitator would make a much better impression upon one if he could be less extravagant in his arraignment of the British regime. Thackeray’s Indian servant who told him at St. Helena that Napoleon ate “three sheep every day and all the little children he could lay his hands on” had no more exuberant imagination than one encounters every day in India. Both Gandhi and Tagore urge Indians to drop the lazy habit of blaming the British for everything. They say, “the British did not do either good or bad without our cooperation.” They de¬ nounce the cheap theory that hatred of the British is the beginning of all virtue. “We suffer for our sins and now is the time for repentance and expia- 147 INDIA IN FERMENT tion.” “It is only through suffering that a nation can be saved,” cries Gandhi. Yet the malcontents gather in the cave of Adullam, and there I met them and listened to their complaints. After being led up tortuous streets and down back alleys, through low dark hallways, into council rooms of sedition, I have sat with the agitators in their clubs, with twenty to twenty-five dark-complexioned faces about me, earnest with rebellious feelings. When they got excited, they all talked at once and, being foreign to me, seemed most alarming. I felt very strange and alone among those outlandish Oriental figures. I returned to my room more than once expecting all India to be in flames the next morning; but awoke to find the dawn as serene as ever, and no news except of some isolated riot. The curious Oriental dress enhanced the alarming effect. Some about the council table wore only a loin cloth and a khaddar scarf. Others were in rich robes and handsome turbans. I recall one occasion, when I sat next to the son of a raja, whose ances¬ tral face must have been aristocratic from the days of Buddha. Opposite sat a dirty-robed, bare-footed, scowling Pathan, who looked as if he had just cut a throat and was enjoying the recollection of it. 148 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT Some had caste marks painted on their foreheads. Some were oily and fat, while others were thin, with fanatical faces. One of Gandhi’s disciples proclaimed himself the “destroyer of Government and the founder of the true religion.” One told me with great pride what he was doing for the cause of Indian freedom. He was editing an India encyclopedia. I asked how that would further the Indian revolution at which he was aiming. He replied, amazed at my stupidity, “Why, the French Revolution, you know, was begun by the Encyclopedists.” The Indian radi¬ cals were inclined to be most obsequious to me. One enthusiast informed me that I had glorified India by setting my august foot upon it. All tried to im¬ press me with the ineffable sins of the British Govern¬ ment. The average extremist has only begun when he denounces the “Punjab affair” and “the Khilafat wrongs.” Sooner or later he will put much stress on the British assumption of superiority. In fact, one hears and reads in a certain kind of book that the root cause of Indian unrest is British arrogance, superciliousness or insolence toward the Indian. Actual physical abuse of the coolies and the servant classes is often charged. I went to India prepared 149 INDIA IN FERMENT to see much of it. As I came down the ship’s plank at Bombay in company with two A. D. C.’s sent from Government House to meet me, I was shocked when one of them pushed his cane viciously into the ribs of a chaprassi, a Government House servant, in the red and gold and white livery which only Govern¬ ment servants wear, and cursed him for being a fool and not doing what was expected of him. “Is this what I am in for?” I asked myself ; but during 5000 miles of travel, thereafter, in India I never saw an¬ other example of physical violence by an English¬ man. I saw men get impatient, I heard them, espe¬ cially young men, talk superciliously of the Indian. I recall, indeed, several mature men, high in Govern¬ ment council, who assumed that any opposer of the British Government was a rascal. They abounded in stories of Indian incompetence and were cocksure that Indians could never govern themselves. I heard some A. D. C.’s talk sneeringly of “monkey wed¬ dings,” when they heard of matrimonial affairs in Indian families, and I listened to thoughtless intoler¬ ance of Indian political aspirations. Yet this attitude towards the people of India was not predominant as far as my experience went. If I said as much to In¬ dian acquaintances they replied, “Oh, no, not now; 150 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT the hukm (command) has gone out from London to treat us all on the same plane as Englishmen. But it’s too late now. Some years ago it might have done much to gain our affection, but they can never win us back again now that we are committed to our present policy.” After Lord Reading, the Viceroy, had said in his Chelmsford club speech, “here in India there can be no trace and must be no trace of racial inequality” and added, “there cannot be and must never be any humiliation under the British Rule of any Indian because he is an Indian” — after that all the army of civil servants in India knew the cue. But the Indians sneer at the change, and say the assumption of su¬ periority is only concealed. After all, they say, “race inequality exists in the laws, the rules of appoint¬ ment, in the railway fares and steamer services of India.” Lord Morley once said, “India is a country where bad manners are a crime.” Certainly there is a penalty for them. Always among Indians of high position who hated the British Government, I found sooner or later in my conversation with them that the source of their bitter feeling was an insult suffered from some British official. If I encouraged them they would go into details. Respectable old men I5i INDIA IN FERMENT would revert to a past when, if they went to see a collector or commissioner, they were forced to leave their carriages outside of a compound and to walk in the carriage way to the officer’s door. There they would be met by a supercilious servant (Indian of course) who was insolent and would at times keep them waiting hours. Having gained admission to the office, the English official would remain sitting in a chair, without moving, and would talk haughtily to the Indian left standing in his presence. His speech was abrupt, in words of command, with no salutation, no friendly word. One Indian asserted that, though all this had changed now, as a result of habit Indians still showed fear. Perhaps that is true in some cases, but it was certainly not true of the Indians who came before James Lindsay, Collector of Dacca, one of the finest civil officers in the Indian service. Both he and Mr. Emerson, the Commissioner there, are gentlemen, before whom the humblest man would feel safe from insult or over¬ bearing conduct. I watched them for hours listening to complaints and righting the wrongs of the Bengal natives. But, doubtless, among so many officers there must be some who find that bluster and swagger is an easy way of establishing racial su- 152 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT periority. Even a cad can do it that way. It is, nevertheless, the outward and visible sign of an in¬ ward and spiritual meanness. It seems capable of effecting sullen submission, but never cheerful obedience. Some that I talked with thought that with the introduction of Indian Civil Service examina¬ tions, more men out of the lower orders in England, and therefore more ill-bred, had gone to India, but better informed men doubted that theory. More¬ over, the conduct which offends the highly sensitive Indians of the cultivated classes is often that of men who would pass in any Western society as perfect gentlemen. Many Englishmen who are too well bred to treat Indians with insolence or contempt are not quite up to the breeding which would restrain them from treating Indians with half-amused tolerance and condescension. If one has no measure but that of the European standard, few Indians come up to it, and superciliousness is easily engendered, but if one can learn to give weight to some excellent Oriental traits, the tendency to look down upon Indians is greatly reduced. A fine, titled old gentleman, Indian member of a governor’s council, a most loyal friend of the British 153 INDIA IN FERMENT Government, opened up his heart in the last of several interviews, and told me how embittered he had been some fifteen years before when the King-Emperor came to India. At a great audience held by the sovereign, my Indian friend, then a judge of the High Court, was seated with other Indian judges on the outer edge of the great circle of spectators, while the English judges of the same court were placed on the inner circle. He vividly described his tortured vanity, his sense of indignity, as if the affair had been yesterday. But, he added, with an almost childlike radiance in the memory of pleasure, “At the next visit of His Majesty I was placed next to the Queen at the table.” This courtesy and recogni¬ tion seemed to have quite restored his content with the British regime. At a number of great dinners at Government Houses where there were bidden a good number of Indian guests, I noted the greatest attention paid to Indian sensibilities in the seating arrangements. At clubs like the Willingdon Club, named after its founder, Lord Willingdon, where British and Indians mingled, I was struck with the friendly spirit between the two races. If I spoke of it to an Indian he was pretty sure to hasten to inform me that a great 154 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT change had come over the relations of the two peoples of late and that it was quite amazing to old-timers. On shipboard, in the passage from Marseilles to Bombay, there were a number of very distinguished Indians on board, Sir Sankaran Nair and members of his family; Saklatvalla, one of the heads of the great Tata firm, and his family ; Gupta, just appointed President of the Calcutta Municipal Council, and others. In the dining room the Indians were seated at a table by themselves ; the English women, in the early days of the voyage, never spoke to the Indian women. The English men, with the exception of two men returning from the Labor Conference at Geneva, did not at first talk with the Indians, but while passing the Suez this all changed; the Indian men and women were drawn into the ship’s games and around the card tables, and before the end of the voyage a most friendly relation had sprung up. I suspected that much of it was forced, and done with the Government’s injunction in mind, but I would not be sure of it. Able Indian critics say of the British Government, it never goes far enough in its efforts to stay the rise of the flood of race hatred. It grants meaningless concessions, at one moment, offers a little feeble flat- 155 INDIA IN FERMENT tery the next, shows pitiable weakness to-day, and im¬ patient severity to-morrow, but it never seems fully to appreciate the danger from the rising cloud of racial feeling which darkens daily with its menace. The Indian sympathizer, C. F. Andrews, who has lived with Indians, shared their food, worn their dress when possible — in spite of the protests of his resentful English friends who tell him, “A sahib is a sahib” and he ought not be familiar with “natives” — protests against the social division between the two races. He admits a “slight unbending for political reasons.” He talks of the British Rule as “economic imperialism under the thin disguise of philanthropic benevolence.” He rages against the savage exclusion laws and white race policies of the colonials in South Africa and Australia. These, he says, “hurl India outside of the British Empire.” In the matter of social relations between the British and the Indians there are greater difficulties than one might suppose who does not know Hindu and Moslem social customs. Many Hindus cannot because of reli¬ gious scruples eat at the table of a European. I recall, when Sir Frederick Whyte invited members of the Legislative assembly to dine with him in order that I might have an opportunity to talk politics with 156 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT them, that the Indians courteously declined to partake of his food, but promised to come in after dinner and spend the evening. Few Indians will invite Europeans to meet their wives in their homes. Most of our Western social meetings are taboo for the Indian. Lord Sinha was bitterly criticized by Indians for giving a ball, at which of course, very few Indians would dance. In a word, the British are expected to do everything to meet the social customs of the Indian, but Indians must not reciprocate by bending their usage to that of the British. Indeed, all Indians of the intense nationalistic school resent all imitations of Western customs. If Indian minis¬ ters of Government wear clothes in Western pattern, Nationalists say that it gives patriotic Indians too strong a sense of their affinity with the British state. Ministers are criticized if they wear semi¬ military uniforms and swords at their sides. Nationalists add with a sneer that “the only other Indian in civil occupation who wears a blade at his side is the toddy climber (a low caste person who climbs the palm tree and taps it to draw the favorite Indian intoxicating drink).” Indians resent it, when at public functions ministers like Sapru or Shaffi “camouflage themselves in their white uniforms and 157 INDIA IN FERMENT bare heads into brown imitations of the English bureaucrat/’ and still more critical are they when on state occasions under the reform government the two men who wear “a distinctively oriental costume are the chobars standing behind the Viceroy at either end of the platform.” Where there exists such sen¬ sitiveness as this there is little wonder if waves of racial bitterness rise now here, now there on the surface of Indian affairs, breaking up the old kindly relations between the Indian people and their British officials. Insult and boycott for the British is the twist which low-minded followers of Gandhi give to his teachings. As a result men who have devoted years to what they thought India’s best interests, who were single-hearted in support of the reforms, begin to despair of their own usefulness to the people they have loved, and they are now looking for an early retirement. It has become almost impossible to recruit young Englishmen for the Indian services, both because of this growing race feeling, and because of the lack of certainty as to the future of India. A thought which the traveler in India can never escape is that even Europeans have not escaped the blight of the caste system. The white color does make English and Americans feel above the dark- skinned Indian. 158 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT I have often asked myself which race is superior? None but a god or superman could decide. Despite all efforts to pretend a belief in equality, neither representative of two rival races believes, in his heart of hearts, that it exists. It is in the nature of the human mind to believe in the superiority of what the owner of that mind does and is. What the English are superior in they believe to be the most worth while, and all pretense to a belief in the equal position of Indian qualities is the result of forced culture and a mere varnish over the true convictions. It is just as true of the Indian. I hope that this is only philosophical cynicism, and that it is not univer¬ sally true, but a great deal of observation has made me believe it and to have only the shadow of a doubt. We Western peoples chide the Indian because of the evils of his caste system, but the British and the American who live in India have erected for themselves another caste among the rest. Its rules are as rigid as those of the native Hindus, and even I was mildly rebuked for waiving some of these caste rules in my relations with Indians. Some of my English friends plainly showed their resentment that I had removed my shoes before entering Gandhi's khaddar tent, and showed blank amazement that I 159 INDIA IN FERMENT had apologized to my personal servant after I had for a moment lost my temper with him. I did not blame them, but it interested me, for it was a revela¬ tion. The curious consequence of this attitude is unmistakable. Although India was a land of castes and a land where color was a basis of distinction between Brahmans and lower castes long before the British set foot upon it, still the race hatred based on this very distinction, seems to a casual observer at least, the most fundamental of all the conditions which array Indian against English. Yet I firmly believe that if the British should now leave bag and baggage, the rising tide of hate between Brahman and non-Brahman would replace that existing be¬ tween Brahman and Englishman. The only firm conviction I have upon this phase of the Indian question is that the Indian problems cannot be solved merely by giving India a liberal constitution. If the English are to stay in India, a friendly personal relation with Indians must be cul¬ tivated, and it must not be the result of a command from on high, but as a result of charitable under¬ standing and self-control by persons irritated by a climate and by a life slowed down to a rate most try¬ ing to Europeans. “You can’t hustle the East,” 160 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT Kipling has warned all lovers of efficiency, but few can resist the effort. Perhaps it is not in the nature of things that people who govern many races should be loved. The very dominant position of Englishmen has dangerously reacted on their manners and made them unlovable, at least by subjects. There are of course many exceptions to this, and I met them even in high places. W. R. Gourlay, Private Secretary to the Governor of Bengal, an earnest Christian gentle¬ man, his whole life devoted to good works, gave me sheer delight as I watched him receive Indians who were seeking an interview with His Excellency. He treated all with the courtesy which he would have shown the most exalted European, refusing their requests often with a grace which sent them away as happy as if their boon were granted. The climate and a race sense, of which I struggled in vain to rid myself, reacted on my own manners, I am sure. Indeed, after only three months I was less patient with my personal servant than during the first three weeks. I murmured, “Thank God !” when at last I let him go, and had only once lost my temper with him, and then only for a moment. Therefore, I do not preach when I express my idea of what the 161 INDIA IN FERMENT British must do to hold India; I merely state my reasoned convictions. Following up a bitter arraignment of the British arrogance, the Indian political malcontent will declare that Government raises too heavy taxes, with which it pays lavish salaries to Englishmen, spends reck¬ lessly on the army, and burdens the people with a costly removal of the Government to the mountains during the hot season. “Being a foreign government, it is selfish and tyrannical.” Indians are not trained as army officers, and are given only the minor and ill-paid civil offices, the Nationalist asserts. Govern¬ ment allows Indians to be ill-treated in the British colonies, he affirms. Rabindranath Tagore said of this race problem in the British Empire : “In most of your colonies you only admit Asiatics on condition of their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce them into slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race con¬ flict.” The British have, cries the Gandhi disciple, made the people poor by draining India of its wealth. This brings in its train, one is told, famine more frequent and on a scale unknown before. Govern- 162 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT ment has taken the Indian peasant’s land, the trade of the merchant, the industry of the artisan, declares the agitator. Most Indians are deeply concerned over the danger of the white races exploiting India. They usually have distorted ideas as to how this has been done and are obsessed with the notion that legal limitations are put on Indians, whereas the truth in the main seems to be that British capital has rushed in and monopolized industries where Indian capital feared to tread. Indeed, only very recently under successful encouragement of the great Parsi in¬ dustrialist Tata has there been much available Indian capital. Because of confidence in the Tata enterprises many Indians have given up the old way of hoarding their savings. Formerly, if the prosperous artisan or husbandman did not bury his surplus in a napkin, he put it into gold and silver anklets and bracelets or nose rings for his wife and daughter. Indeed, to-day in some parts of India the traveler thinks to himself that if he could get all the women at a fair or religious fete to pile their nose rings and bracelets and anklets in the vault of a bank he could finance any enterprise in the world. But of late years at least some little advance has been made in teaching Indians how to mass small savings into great accumulations of 163 INDIA IN FERMENT capital. Before that India depended too much on the more courageous and worldly-wise British capitalist. Government seeks to root out caste by polluting the sugar and salt that men eat, even the clothes that they wear, one Indian declared to me in all seriousness. With its everlasting canals, roads, and railways, it has loosed malaria. It has even poisoned wells, I have been informed, and maliciously brought in the plague. All this was aimed at reducing the popula¬ tion, and making it easier to govern ! In short, cried C. R. Das to me, as we talked in his cell in Alipore jail, the British have enslaved a whole people who are now struggling to be free. One Bengal enthusiast sat, with his little Babu secretary by his side, and delivered to me in my Government House parlor an oration intended to demonstrate that the true cause of all Indian unrest was — the Englishman’s fondness for beefsteak! With statistics from the “All-Indian Cow Con¬ ference,” he showed that this led to killing too many cows, which reduced the draft animals, thus cutting down the acreage plowed, and resulting in a smaller harvest, which left the Indian people half-starved and hence discontented! I was appalled at the British heartlessness ; but I wondered why the beef eaten by 164 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT sixty-six millions of Mohammedans had so much less effect than that eaten by two hundred thousand Englishmen. One of the least convincing of the charges that one often hears against the British Government is that the extent and severity of famines in India are a result of British misrule, and that under the ancient Hindu and Mohammedan rule the extent and tragic results were less ; but even as early as the writing of the Ramayana severe drought is mentioned and the Rig Veda hymns have prayers for rain. It is signifi¬ cant, says Loveday in his study, that in Indian history the mention of famine increases in exact pro¬ portion with the precision and accuracy of detail of her history writers. He points out that as early as 917 an Indian historian describes famine in Kashmir. “One could scarcely see the water in the Vitasta en¬ tirely covered as the river was with corpses soaked and swollen by the water in which they had long been lying. The land became densely covered with bones in all directions until it was like one great burial ground, causing terror to all beings.” Again in 1630 “an extraordinary drought (in the Deccan) burned up all vegetables and dried up the rivers. . . . Men and women were driven to that extremity for want INDIA IN FERMENT of food that they sold their children. . . . Life was offered for a loaf, but none would buy; rank was to be sold for a cake but none cared for it . . . feet which had always trodden the way of contentment walked about in search of sustenance.” Under Mohammedan rule after 1600, famine was recognized in the law books — “the practice,” runs an old law, “among free men and women of selling their off¬ spring in time of famine is extremely improper and unjustifiable.” There are many other examples in their history of the efforts of rulers to relieve famine. In the light of history, therefore, the attribution of famine to British misrule is unjust, and as a matter of fact it seems to be the efficiency of the British administration which in recent years has robbed famine of its worst terrors. In July, 1900, relief was given daily to six and one-half million people. Since that time there has been no general famine, and there is every reason to believe that British experts have learned how to check it. The British reply to such of the Indian complaints as can be taken seriously is usually worthy at least of being taken as honest if not wholly convincing. As to lavish salaries the excuse is given that admitting the need for the present British efficiency in civil ser- 166 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT vice, only a generous reward will induce able men to leave their English homes and friends, and come into a land where the excessive heat and unsanitary condi¬ tions endanger their health and imperil their lives. I met few Englishmen or Americans in India who had not had enteric fever, and many had been near death. As Thackeray says, “Besides the official history of India which embroiders banners with names of vic¬ tories, which gives moralists and enemies cause to cry out at British rapine, and enables patriots to boast of invincible British valor — besides the splendor and conquest, the wealth and glory, the crowned ambition, the conquered danger, the vast prize, and the blood freely shed in winning it — should not one remember the tears too ?” Kipling has also expressed the pathos of British rule in India and how Englishmen have paid. If I asked about the expense to India of the British army the answer was usually this, “There is no escaping the fact that Indians are compelled to pay the expense of keeping themselves in subjection, for Indian taxes pay for the army, and for all the machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes, bombs, which in¬ sure English control, but on the other hand, India is protected against a very dangerous, predatory 167 INDIA IN FERMENT neighbor, the Afghan, and her internal peace is secured at an expense which could hardly be much lower without great risk. Moreover, she has naval defense along a vast extent of coast line at a merely nominal cost.” As to the removal to the mountains during the hot season, the expense is regrettable, but the Englishman not accustomed, as is the Indian, through generations to the heat, could not long endure the strain of the service if he did not retreat from Calcutta to Darjeel¬ ing, from Delhi to Simla, or from Madras to Oota- camund. New measures now being carried out by the British Government in the matter of the Indianization of the services will, it is hoped, do much to create greater satisfaction among the Indians. Complicated and difficult as the question is, efforts are being made also to create better conditions for the Indians in British colonies. We in America ought to appreciate that difficulty, when we reflect upon our own Chinese and Japanese problems, and, indeed, our attitude toward the Indians themselves. Perhaps the British could make better progress toward the solution of these questions, if it were not that many Indian politicians entertain a dark suspicion that British officials make 1 68 ARRAIGNMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT their political plans with a needless caution, because of a selfish racial exclusiveness. Even the best-meant British plans for betterment of India are blocked by this fear of some ulterior motive too subtle for the Indian mind to grasp. And yet some of the finest Indians I met trusted the British Government fully and believed in its honesty of purpose. VIII BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA, AND THE PROBABLE RESULT IF THEY WITHDRAW All Indian agitators hammer with special vigor upon the British educational policy in India. From some Non-cooperators I learned that the British had made no effort to educate the people; but others complained that they had destroyed religion by their godless system of education. The Indian Nation¬ alist holds that the English have accomplished the social conquest of the Hindu to-day, just as the Brahman did of old, by realizing that knowledge is power. They monopolized teaching, indeed, took over all the function of priest, teacher, physician, and thus became the brain of India, guiding all the movements of the body. They quote Elphinstone to show the cynical cold-blooded adoption of the policy. “We must,” he said, “communicate our own prin¬ ciples and opinions by the diffusion (in India) of a 170 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA rational education to take the place of Indian preju¬ dices.” Quite another interpretation of the course fol¬ lowed by the British Government is attributed to Sir William Marris by Lionel Curtis. “A despotic gov¬ ernment,” said Sir William, “would have tried to withhold education, or, at any rate such as had any bearing on political progress. The British Govern¬ ment, on the other hand, actually encouraged politi¬ cal studies, prescribing standard books on the work¬ ing of representative institutions. Political unrest was an inevitable result, and its existence in India so far from being a reason for pessimism, is a sure sign that the British with all their manifest failings, have not shirked their primary duty of extending western education to India, and so preparing Indians to govern themselves. As a result of it,” concluded Sir William, “self-government, however far distant, is the only intelligible goal of British policy in India.” Indians score Macaulay for replacing their ancient book lore with a foreign language and literature, for cutting the Indian from his safe Oriental moorings and setting him adrift on a sea of Western philoso¬ phy and science. Doubtless the change was abrupt; perhaps in the high schools and colleges too much 171 INDIA IN FERMENT stress went to literature and politics and too little to science and practical subjects, but if India was not to be a region of the world where time stood still, where the night of the Middle Ages was never to be dispelled by the daylight of modern institutions, something like Macaulay’s plan was inevitable. It was not “blighting rhetoric,” as I have heard it called, when Macaulay plead for the use of English in Indian schools. In the many Indian languages, he asserted, there were no books on any subjects which deserved to be compared with those in English. They must teach European science because the Indian, where it differed, differed for the worse. If they were to teach the Indians science, they could not teach medical doctrines “which would disgrace an English farrier,” astronomy that would “make English school girls laugh,” astronomy in which the eclipses were caused by a dog eating the moon. One couldn’t teach history “abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns 30,000 years long,” and one couldn’t teach geography “made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.” There was exaggera¬ tion in this, of course, but it seems plain that if the British had drawn their curricula and discipline from the Vedic or Indian medieval sources they would 1 72 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA merely have plunged more generations into mental slavery and darkness. Thus they might indeed have prolonged their empire, making Indians easy to rule by reason of their very ignorance and mental stag¬ nation. At the time the decision was made Indian culture, predominantly religious, was and has re¬ mained in the hands of Brahmans, wholly out of touch with that Western culture which has freed it¬ self from superstition and the narrow bounds of re¬ ligious creeds. The European education did not, as I was often told, destroy the religious sense, but shook such ancient beliefs as had no proper founda¬ tions and emancipated the Indian mind. Some of India’s greatest men in the last generation, Tagore, the Aga Khan, Lala Lajput Rai, Gokhale, Tilak, and even Gandhi himself, are the products of this '‘ghastly folly” of Lord Macaulay. H. Fielding Hall, almost sentimental in his sympathy with the Indian, thinks it nonsense that the failure of educated Indians is due to want of religion, “that he is educated out of one faith, not accepted into another.” It is absurd, writes Hall, that by being brought to see the foolish¬ ness of caste, of infant marriage, or harems and zenanas, of silly ceremonial forms, an Indian is in¬ jured. It is rather that taking him apart from his 173 INDIA IN FERMENT people seems to render him desirous of disowning them, not of helping them. Much is made of the failure of Macaulay’s plan of educating Indians in college on the English plan. It is pointed out that this education never seeped down to the masses as he anticipated, but why not? Because the Brahman, who on the whole took ad¬ vantage of this opportunity, did not choose to pass on his education to his countrymen in the primary schools. To the Brahman his education was an advantage which he wished to monopolize. He did not wish to pass it on to others, but rather to get a Government position for his greater glory. The result is to-day that the greatest problem in any scheme to educate the masses of Indians is the paucity of teachers. Those who have been taught with that end in view have preferred to become agitators against the British Government if they failed to get a Government position. The wages of primary teachers are miserable, it is true, but they are all the Indians are willing to pay. I often visited schools, and I found on inquiry that the half-starved apolo¬ getic little creatures who taught them received fifteen to thirty rupees a month, or about the wage of an average laborer in the j ute or cotton mills. One might 174 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA say that that is the reason why Brahmans do not choose to teach, but I often saw them begging when they might have taught. Rather more than sixty-five years after Macaulay’s plan was initiated only one Indian male in every hundred can read and write English, one male in ten can read and write anything. Since 1900 there has been a rapid rise in the per¬ centage of boys and girls under instruction, and yet less than thirty per cent of the boys and only five per cent of the girls are getting any education of a public nature. Government commissioners in 1921 pointed out that more than one-half million villages in British India have no primary schools. In each village the average number of school-age children is 60. It is not now possible to provide the kind of teacher needed for these schools. The cost is great, and there is little or no public opinion in its favor. So¬ cial and religious differences divide the village com¬ munity and increase the difficulties. Some groups of children will not go with others. The majority of inhabitants are too poor to aid with taxes, and the rich landholder is not convinced it is worth while. That is the picture as Government commissioners drew it. Indians draw the same picture but blame 175 INDIA IN FERMENT the British. Nevertheless, the process of education along Western lines has gone on so far that not only do the educated classes draw much of their un¬ derstanding of modern civilization from British books and journals, but also through the vernacular press millions of Indians partake of that knowledge - as it is dispensed by Indians who read English. Official business is done in English, the provincial councils and the national assembly make their laws in that tongue, the high courts proceed in it. When the All-Indian Congress meets to pass fierce resolu¬ tions against the British Government, the only way that the Tamil and Telugu, the Bengalee, and Urdu¬ speaking Moslem can make himself understood to all the rest is in the English language. The English language is the greatest force at work to-day in India bringing about social and national unity. Only through that medium can the Telugu and Tamil of the Madras region, the Babus of Bengal, the Parsis of Bombay, the Pathans of the North West Hill Country, the Rajputs of Rajputana and the Sikhs of the Punjab exchange ideas, or carry on negotia¬ tions aiming at national unity in India. If one com¬ prehends the significance of that fact Macaulay seems to have laid the foundations of United India. As to Gandhi’s assertion that the study of Euro- 176 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA pean sciences and literature in the Government insti¬ tutions creates that frame of mind which he calls “slavish mentality,” the British naturally ask did that not exist long before the advent of Western edu¬ cation? The “heritage of his forefathers,” from which Gandhi says the Indian is divorced, was a state in which the Brahmans practically monopolized learning. It was a privilege to be fiercely guarded. All Indians of the Hindu faith were made to think as suited Brahman interests. Those not of that caste were debarred from the study of the sacred literatures. Freedom of thought or action was de¬ nied. Religion was exploited to produce slavery to the will of the Brahman. But under the new regime wherever the light of Western science shone the gloom of “slave mentality” was dispelled. Knowl¬ edge became the property of non-Brahman as well as Brahman. Inquiry and scientific truth took the place of superstitions of the most degrading sort. Gandhi’s so-called “national schools,” so far as they go back into medieval or even to Vedic times for their curricula, send one more generation back into mental slavery and darkness. In actual practice the “national schools,” set up at Gandhi’s inspira¬ tion, have not gone so far. An Indian boy, asked what was taught at the “national” school which he 1 77 INDIA IN FERMENT attended, replied : “Oh, they teach us to despise the Sahib (the British officers). ” Asked if that was all, he said, “That is the main thing; the rest of our course is the same as usual.” A Gandhi agitator admitted that there was little difference between the courses in the Government and “national” schools, but the latter were “very useful as centers of propa¬ ganda.” In fact, politicians and not educators have dictated the policy of the new schools. Parents and schoolmasters complain that the chief result of Gandhi’s effort to get boys to leave the regular schools and attend the “national” schools has been to ruin discipline. Some boys of college age seem to understand Gandhi’s purpose to substitute self-con¬ trol and self-respect in the place of respect for teachers and control by authority, but small boys learn only the anarchical lesson. They take more to shouting national hymns than to acquiring self- control. Not even the use of Gandhi’s miracle- working spinning wheel, at which some boys spent two hours daily, had seemed to develop soul-force in the Indian youth. In the last twenty pages there is a fair summary of Indian charges against the British. Omitting the Khilafat matter and the Amritsar affair, which 178 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA have been weighed above, I wish to say that, after a most dispassionate examination of these alleged wrongs, I must conclude that some of them, like the plague and malaria and beefsteak arraignments, are absurd; some are the results of advancing Western civilization, and the rest are based upon such tempo¬ rary errors of judgment as all governments are likely to commit, or upon unalterable conditions or stu¬ pendous facts before which any government would stand appalled. The Indian Government has to meet the needs of a modern state, with the slender re¬ sources of an Oriental community. Moreover, it has to bear the blame not only for its own faults, but also for plagues and badly managed monsoons, just as American administrations are blamed for bad harvests and the influenza. When all is duly con¬ sidered, there is much truth in the British assertion : “We have labored untiringly to reconcile Hindu and Moslem. Our schools and our railroads have shaken the exclusiveness of caste; ancient privileges are dis¬ appearing before justice and reform laws; by the universal spread of the English language, we have furnished all educated Indians with a common medium for exchanging their thoughts. We found India under an inefficient despotism and we ban- 179 INDIA IN FERMENT ished it.” It is the British who have put under irri¬ gation seventeen million acres of land hitherto prac¬ tically worthless. They have made headway against two of India’s most appalling problems, the famine and the plague. 30,000 miles of railroad bind India together, because British capital was willing to ven¬ ture there. The standard of living has been raised in India, by British example and through their intro¬ duction of cheaper goods. At the Darbar in Delhi the thought came to me that only the British rule made it possible for all the forty Indian princes to meet peacefully under one canopy. The only unity that India enjoys to-day is the gift of the British rule. It has beyond ques¬ tion brought India further along on the road to political competence and national unity than she would in all reason have been without it, and far beyond what any credible records of the past show her to have been, and if England continues seeking to foster self-government, the best Indian influence will very likely choose to retain her leadership rather than cut away during some hour of England’s peril. In the Arabian Nights, one of the adventurers throws water upon some stones which used to be men but for ages have been by magic held in adamantine 180 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA bondage. As they spring up, they attack the hero who has restored them. So the British have thrown the enchanted water of enlightenment upon the In¬ dian and now the Indian agitator turns on the de¬ liverer. It is not unnatural, and is not to be attrib¬ uted to any fault of the Indian; it is merely the irony of fate. Gokhale, the greatest Indian leader before Gandhi, and a true statesman rather than an agitator, said that the continuance of the British rule “means the continuance of that peace and order which it alone can maintain in our country, and with which our best interests, and, among them, those of our grow¬ ing nationality, are bound up. . . . The attainment of a democratic form of self-government depends upon the average strength in character and capacity of our people taken as a whole, and that is far below the British average (in England).” In 1916, the President of the Indian Congress, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, said that British rule “has maintained for many decades unbroken peace and order in the land, administered even-handed justice, brought the Indian mind, through a widespread sys¬ tem of Western education into contact with the thoughts and ideals of the West; and this has led to 181 INDIA IN FERMENT the birth of a great and living movement for the in¬ tellectual and moral regeneration of the people.” In this way it had “created out of the diverse mass of race and creed a new India” — brought much nearer to political competence than was possible without it. With those who only carp at what England has done in India, I have no patience. They belong with those who, as Sydney Smith said, curse the solar sys¬ tem because under it has come all our woe. No doubt, like the editors of some of our weekly journals of opinion, they could have done better as to all things mundane, but you see Providence never took the risk of giving them a chance. One must frankly admit as all candid Englishmen do, that the govern¬ ment of India up to a few years ago was autocratic. It was, on the whole, benevolently autocratic, and while it did not neglect the god of commercial ad¬ vantage, it also rarely forgot the due consideration of the Indian people. Benevolent to-day, greedy to¬ morrow, never neglecting Mammon but usually awake to duty, it sinned to-day in its poor human way, and acted nobly on the morrow. Englishmen’s work in India has been a curious blend of motives; men of imagination have shown a desire to serve and embellish India; stupid and greedy men have tried 182 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA to humiliate and despoil her. She has had her War¬ ren Hastings, marveling at his own moderation, and her Morleys and Ripons lavishing devotion to her best interests. That even in the days of pure autocracy there were great Englishmen in India longing to give its people self-government is shown in Lord Ripon’s dispatch to the Secretary of State (1882) wherein that great Viceroy expresses his deep sympathy and high hope for the future of the Indian people : “No one who watches the signs of the times in this country with even moderate care can doubt that we have entered upon a period of change : the spread of education, the existing and increasing influence of a free Press, the substitution of legal for discre¬ tionary administration, the progress of railways, telegraphs, etc., the easier communication with Europe, and the more ready influx of European ideas, are now beginning to produce a marked effect upon the people; new ideas are springing up; new aspirations are being called forth; the power of public opinion is growing and strengthening from day to day; and a movement has begun which will advance with greater rapidity and force every year. Such a condition of affairs is one in which the task of Government, and especially practically despotic INDIA IN FERMENT Government, is beset with difficulties of no light kind ; to move too fast is dangerous, but to lag behind is more dangerous still; and the problem is how to deal with this new-born spirit of progress, raw and superficial as in many respects it is, so as to direct it into a right course, and to derive from it all the bene¬ fits which its development is capable of ultimately conferring upon the country, and at the same time to prevent it from becoming, through blind indifference or stupid repression, a source of serious political dan¬ ger. Considerations such as these give great impor¬ tance to measures which, though small in themselves, are calculated to provide a legitimate outlet for the ambitions and aspirations which we have ourselves created by the education, civilization and material progress which we have been the means of intro¬ ducing into the country ; such measures will not only have an immediate effect in promoting gradually and safely the political education of the people, which is in itself a great object of public policy, but will also pave the way for further advances in the same direc¬ tion, as that education becomes fuller and more wide¬ spread. It is only what ought to be expected by every thoughtful man that after 50 years of a free Press and 30 years of expanding education, with European ideas flowing into the country on every side, and old, indigenous customs, habits, and preju¬ dices breaking down all round, as caste is breaking down through the instrumentality of railways and 184 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA other similar influences, changes should be taking place in the thoughts, the desires, and the aims of the intelligent and educated men of the country which no wise and cautious Government can afford to dis¬ regard, and to which they must gradually adapt their system of administration if they do not wish to see it broken to pieces by forces which they have them¬ selves called into being, but which they have failed to guide and to control. And even if there were no such necessity as the present circumstances of the country create for meeting the needs and providing for the aspirations of a time of change and progress, it would always be an aim worthy of the English Government in India to train the people over whom it rules more and more as time goes on to take an intelligent share in the administration of their own affairs. Among the political objects attainable in India, I see at present none higher. The credit of having set that object before the Government of India belongs to a Conservative, not a Liberal Statesman; but it surely behooves the friends of liberal principles in the wide, not in any narrow party sense of the words, not to let Lord Mayo’s policy become unfruitful in their hands, nor allow it to be stifled beneath the stolid indifference or the covert hostility of men who cannot understand its meaning or appreciate its wisdom. There are, of course, always two policies lying before the choice of the Govern¬ ment of India. The one is the policy of those who 185 I INDIA IN FERMENT have established a free Press, who have promoted education, who have admitted natives more and more largely to the public service in various forms, and who have favored the extension of self-government; the other is, that of those who hate the freedom of the Press, who dread the progress of education, and who watch with jealousy and alarm everything which tends, in however limited a degree, to give the natives of India a larger share in the manage¬ ment of their own affairs. Between these two policies we must choose; the one means progress, the other means repression. Lord Lytton chose the latter. I have chosen the former, and I am content to rest my vindication upon a comparison of the results.” Thus wrote one of India’s British rulers forty years ago, and what he said was not unique, for words ex¬ pressive of a like noble purpose could be quoted from earlier and later Viceroys. If British rule was autocratic in the early day, it was after the Asiatic model, the only one India had known for centuries, the only one workable in India at the time, and it enjoyed the good will of the vast majority of Indians. Though the British Govern¬ ment was autocratic in form, it rarely undertook im¬ portant action before exploring Indian opinion, show¬ ing consideration for the Indian feeling and preju- 186 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA dices. That heed extended even to Curzon’s “patient, humble, silent millions” of peasants who have no journals of opinion, no policies. Surely, we in America with our unsolved negro problem have no reason to throw the first stone. The first question Gandhi asked me was, “What are you going to do about the negro question in Amer¬ ica?” It was a searching question. I recognized the rebuke for my impudence in coming to India to study, perhaps, English failures. We, too, have our “patient, humble, silent millions,” with no power to vote. Moreover, when I called the attention of In¬ dians to the brutality of the riots, the burning of liv¬ ing men, which happened during my stay in India, they gave me very accurate statistics as to the 65 per¬ sons lynched in America (1920) of whom 13 were burned alive, one flogged to death, and 31 hanged. Gruesome details of the conduct of the mob were fur¬ nished me. I was invited to cure my own country’s race war. The Herrin horror had not yet come to pass, but I am sure that Indian politicians could now give us very accurate details about that affair. As for me, the marvel of British rule in India never ceased to appeal to my imagination. In Bom¬ bay, or Madras, or Calcutta, the British society, with 187 INDIA IN FERMENT its British statues, British churches, British conven¬ tions, and red postboxes, goes serenely on, as if there were no brown waves of humanity beating ever upon the shores of this island of English life. In India there is one ruler to two hundred thousand ruled. No wonder that Horace Walpole cried: “The Ro¬ mans were mere triflers to us.” British rule in India is conducted at a distance of six thousand miles. It does not, like Rome, make its subjects over into Romans. An Englishman goes to India to rule, and when he has ruled, goes home again. He has left some seventy millions under native princes, but gives to each prince a resident Briton, who curbs any tendency toward oppressive government. Our own experience in the Philippine Islands may well give the British statesman pause when he is inclined to go too fast in the transfer of political responsibility to Indian shoulders. In the Wood- Forbes report they say of the period of rapid Philip- pinization (1914-1921) that it was “marked by a deterioration in the quality of public service by the creation of top-heavy personnel, the too frequent placing of influence above efficiency, by the beginning of political bureaucracy. In this period taxation and expenditures were very greatly increased.” 188 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA “We have in many instances by the rapidity of our procedure overtaxed the ability of the people to absorb, digest and make efficient practical use of what it has taken other nations generations to absorb and apply. “The efficiency of the public services has fallen off and they are now relatively inefficient, due to lack of inspection and to the too rapid transfer of control to officials who have not had the necessary time for proper training. “We find that there is a disquieting lack of confi¬ dence in the administration of justice, to an extent which constitutes a menace to the stability of the government. ... In the lower tribunals the admin¬ istration of justice is unsatisfactory, slow and halt¬ ing. . . . Political, family and other influences have undue weight. The condition of courts of first in¬ stance is generally deplorable.” Their verdict was that public instruction was suf¬ fering for want of American teachers. “Health and sanitation,” too, they say, “have suffered from Philip- pinization, and the cost of government has increased with a decrease in efficiency. In a word, the very destruction of government is threatened.” If the commission is right in the last judgment, we must, indeed, pause, for our problem in the Philip¬ pines is like that which Lionel Curtis stated for the 189 INDIA IN FERMENT British in India. “How much scope can you give people to hurt themselves without destroying the fabric of government altogether?” What this report says has already happened in the Philippine Islands may be foreboded on a vastly greater scale in India. If the British should leave suddenly, without preparing the Indians through a long period to assume the burden of government, there might easily be realized the prophecy which a governor of one of the great Indian provinces made to me. “There would at once be riot, murder, rapine, in the great cities,” he said. “All money-lenders would stop business, all stores close, there would be no food. Within three weeks or a month, the Afghans would pour in from the Northwest for pillage, plunder, and rapine. The Parsis would be wiped out of Bombay, the Marwari from Calcutta. Mohammedan would be arrayed against Hindu, Hindu against Moslem. Millions would pay the for¬ feit, anarchy would reign.” The resident at Baroda, Mr. Crump, told me of taking five or six Sikhs to Calcutta. On arrival, he gave them some money, with the caution to behave themselves, have a good time, and report next day. When they appeared he asked, “Well, how do you 190 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA like Calcutta ?” One of them replied : “It would be a great city to loot, and ten of us could do it, too.” Thus the big, warlike Sikh of the Punjab looked upon the little, rather timid, Bengalee, whose alert mind brings him prosperity which his neighbor covets. It is this which the efficient British Government prevents. It is an alien government, but I have had even extremist Indians admit to me that, if India is to have any foreign government, they would prefer the British to any other. “Yes, even to your own,” added one frank Nationalist. Rabindranath Tagore says frankly, “What should we do if for any reason England was driven away? We should simply be the victims of other nations. The same social weakness would prevail. The thing we in India have to think of is this, to remove those social customs and ideals which have generated a want of self-respect and a complete dependence on those above us, a state of affairs created ... by the domi¬ nation ... of the caste system and the blind, lazy habit of relying upon authority.” Many of the Indian leaders deny that there is any ground for the dire prophecy of evil days in store for a self-governed India. A merchant from Indore, 191 INDIA IN FERMENT complaining bitterly to me of the arrogance of the British in assuming to be better able to care for India’s political welfare than the Indians, cried pas¬ sionately: “Think of their assumption! My people were highly civilized thousands of years ago, when your people and the English people were running about wild in the Teutoburg Forest.” “Yes,” I replied; “but we have kept on running ever since, while yours have stood still.” It was said with a smile, and he let it pass. I had heard the argument a hundred times in different forms. I shall never forget the Honorable G. S. Khaparde, of the Council of State, pacing up and down before guests, who had adjourned from the dining room to the parlor, and fervidly dis¬ coursing on India’s past. “Look at her, worshiping to-day the same gods, keeping to the same civiliza¬ tion she had four thousand years ago. Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome have passed away ; their gods are no more; their civilization is dead; they are a mere historical memory; but India still worships at the old shrines and follows the old social customs, in spite of invading Greeks, Persians, Moguls, and British. And, like Cleopatra, ‘age can¬ not wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.’ ” 192 BRITISH SERVICE TO INDIA Sir Surendranath Banerji declared that the ancient Hindus had been the spiritual teachers of the world. This mission is no longer discharged, he sadly ad¬ mitted. “It must be set in motion again, that India may save mankind from the materialism and badly directed moral culture which led to the World War.” It is customary for Indians to sneer at European civilization. The war exposed it, they say. Surely Indians never made such a mess of their affairs as the statesmen of Europe! They forget that British power rescued India from just such a scene of clash¬ ing races; that thrones, dominations, princely ambi¬ tions, had for ages wrecked India before the British compelled peace. IX THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE EAST AND THE MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF THE WEST Owing perhaps to the eternal unlikeness of East and West, we shall never be able to understand the insistence of the Oriental upon the superiority, in some metaphysical sense, of his civilization. When the Greeks penetrated India they found the leaders there more concerned with getting Buddhist philos¬ ophy into Alexander’s mind than absorbing Greek culture from Alexander who was to them a bar¬ barian. Neither then nor to-day would Indians admit they could learn from the outside world. In spite of the testimony of one’s senses they insist upon the superiority, the actual supremacy of Indian attainment. Our ways of measuring height and depth, length and breadth of life’s values are not the ways of the Indian. We look about us in India and see, except for what is British or influenced by British example, all those phases of life which we 194 EAST VERSUS WEST have come to think of as medieval, barbaric, belong¬ ing to the dark ages of superstition. We see filthy sacred tanks, temples reeking with dirt, idols smeared with grease, and the yellow powder of some crushed flower petal ; we see hideous holy men, whose bodies are covered with ashes; we see the mud huts and thatched roofs in which teeming millions of Indians live, and the bullock carts and simple plows and sickles and flails of the days of Noah. Every meas¬ ure we have ever used to rate the progress and civili¬ zation of a people leads us to just one judgment as to the place these people must occupy in the scale of nations. And then we talk with an Indian Nation¬ alist, who begins by quoting Edmund Burke to prove that the Indians were a people for ages civilized and cultivated, by all the arts of polished life, while we, Americans and Europeans, were still in the woods. Of course, Burke said many things about Indians and Warren Hastings which honest investigation has shown to be utterly false, but this the Nationalist doesn’t know nor wish to know. That the quoted passage was mere oratory matters not, for it was the godlike Burke, every whit as good as Aristotle upon whom to tag a truth. Encouraged by Burke and other ill-informed enthusiasts, the Hindu shuts his 195 INDIA IN FERMENT eyes and chants, “Ours is and has been for the last 6,000 years the eternal ideal of spiritual perfection for the individual and humanity.” “Our nation will never die as long as it clings firmly to its great social ideal.” We are told that once more the world must be conquered by India. “Let foreigners come and flood the land with their armies,” cries Data in his lecture on “The Work Before Us,” “never mind. Up, India, and conquer the world with your spiritual¬ ity! Aye, as has been declared on this soil, first love must conquer hatred; hatred cannot conquer it¬ self.” It is quite true, as Thackeray wrote, that “wolves in sheep’s clothing gnashed their teeth in Sanskrit ages before ^Usop,” and many high thoughts, noble aspirations can be found in ancient Sanskrit litera¬ ture; they may even be the source of like thoughts and aspirations in the Hebrew Scriptures, but, in a world of accomplishment, merely to have thought beautifully is not enough. If, as a result of the Yogi’s year-long contemplation of his navel, the work for India’s physical comfort has gone undone, I can¬ not, as a citizen of the West, shut out in the outer darkness of materialism, understand how the world’s spirituality has been advanced. I listen with patience 196 EAST VERSUS WEST when an Indian tells me, “Every one who has in any way studied ancient India with profit knows how well and harmoniously this mighty and complex social organization of the Hindu has worked for thousands of years and how it has always tended to help on peace, order and progress,” but my mind insists upon recalling the reign of thugs, of gang murder, and of age-long pillage and rapine which only Western civili¬ zation as introduced to India by the British brought to an end. When I asked skeptically for proofs of the spirituality attributed to the Indian masses I was told that just as the ancient Greek listened to poets recite the Iliad and Odyssey so the millions of Indians listen to the recitations of the Mahabharata, fabulous story of an Aryan war, or the Ramayana, the ven¬ tures of Prince Rama. I hoped this was true, for those Indian classics are better than the movies though I firmly believe much inferior to the Homeric poems. Still with my hopeless Western mentality I fail to understand how the virtues of truth, tem¬ perance, honesty, gentleness, or nobility of purpose are engendered by listening to the deeds of a hero in whose army are 300,000,000 elephants and 150,- 000,000 chariots, and one who drank 2,000 flasks of wine in order to gain courage to attack a monkey 197 INDIA IN FERMENT army, and yet another who filled the whole heaven with the heads and arms which he struck off and wrhose arrow after going through the bodies of hun¬ dreds of thousands of the enemy returned humbly to his quiver. The great deeds of heroes, accomplished through no virtues or character of their own, but through magic powers granted by capricious gods, afford no examples from wdiich an ignorant people can distill spiritual pabulum. The common man must have a mind greater than that of the poet, whose mental epilepsy produced these frenzied epics, if he can suck spiritual truths from such a source. One feels about such Yogi philosophy as Calvin said of a certain subject, that ‘‘excessive study of it either finds a man mad or makes him so.” If one washes to appreciate the abysmal space and infinite distances wdiich may separate Western from Eastern thought upon the problems of life, let him read from 216 to 230 of Avalon’s The Serpent Power. No Western madman in his wildest ravings could ever attain to such incredible nonsense. Only the Eastern mind can wander through such mazes of absurdity. Then if ever, one becomes sure that East is East and West is West with no meeting place short of Judgment Day. 198 EAST VERSUS WEST Racial vanity might excuse an Indian for having a set of reeling delusions about the crazed metaphysics of a Yogi, but not the hare-brained enthusiasts in their temple just out of San Diego, and their sym¬ pathizers elsewhere, who flood the world with gush about these Indian fantasies. One can only compare them with that silly bird that buries his head in the sands, when they ignore all man’s highest accom¬ plishments as seen in Western civilization. In some cases, it is true, this Indian philosophy has affected Western thought in a not unwholesome way. The Upanishads influenced the Transcendentalists, who, “going to heaven in a swing,” found there the meta¬ physical ideas suited to their purpose. With this philosophy they gave a trend to American idealism which one cannot seriously regret. The sympathy of fanatical Orientalizers, idolizers of Hindu litera¬ ture and art, is most dangerous to India, for those wild idealists share the Indian delusions as to a glorious past, without being called upon in any way to share in the responsibility for the present. They help to confuse racial pride and racial vanity, devo¬ tion to the future of India with a worship of her past. However, not all admirers of Indian civilization 199 INDIA IN FERMENT past and present are blind to the responsibilities of to-day. Annie Besant, confirmed believer in the Hindu superior spirituality, berates the Indian people for maintaining large crowds of men as mendicants, in the full strength of vigorous life, who are inno¬ cent of all sacred learning, “innocent of the light, who have nothing of the holy man but the cloth that covers them, and who are nevertheless fed and shel¬ tered by the millions.” Indeed, the census shows that five million of such drones live by begging, and they cost the Indian people sixty million dollars annually, which might be used to educate India. Instead of making an effort to profit by that wise advice, the Indian agitator prefers to place the entire blame for inadequate support of education upon the British Government. One of the tests of the civilization of a people which Westerners apply is the interest shown in a nation’s historical monuments and architectural re¬ mains. Here India ranks low indeed, for when Lord Curzon began his noble work of rescuing India’s decaying and neglected temples, mosques, forts and monuments, they were so disregarded that the materials of beautiful, ancient buildings were being used to furnish stones and rubble for modern 200 EAST VERSUS WEST buildings, and beautiful fanes possessed of exquisite carved marble as at Agra, Ahmedabad and Delhi were serving as one wall for the mud houses of a village. Even the beautiful Taj Mahal at Agra, now given so fine a setting, had become engulfed amid the squalid huts of an Indian village. British admin¬ istrations preceding Lord Curzon’s regime cannot be wholly exculpated from this blame, and it is even re¬ lated that one viceroy actually contemplated taking down the Taj Mahal and selling the exquisite marble of which it is composed. True, not all of India’s art is that of bygone days. In cities like Ahmedabad one sees beautiful carving on the doorposts, lintels and beams of new houses, and the modern school of Indian art, with which Tagore’s name is associated, produces very lovely pictures, while exquisite taste is shown in many in¬ dustrial arts carried on by Indian workmen. In spite of these unpleasant conclusions about India’s civilization, and even though we accept William Archer’s dictum that “India is as yet far from being prepared to take an equal place among the civilized nations of the world,” it is wise to consider the pro¬ test of Sir Ashutosh Mukherji : “Blame us not if we deem it inconsistent with true National consciousness 201 INDIA IN FERMENT that the first and last words, the final and definite judgments on Indian civilization should be pro¬ nounced in intellectual centers far beyond the limits of our Motherland. Be it remembered in this con¬ nection that the attempt to modernize the East by the importation of Western culture in our midst to the complete suppression of our native ideals has proved a failure. Indian Universities have not yet been able to take root in the life of the Nation, be¬ cause they have been exotics. India was and is civil¬ ized. Western civilization, however valuable as a factor in the progress of mankind, should not super¬ sede, much less be permitted to destroy, the vital ele¬ ments of our civilization.” There is much truth in Sir H. H. Risley’s assertion that in India to-day “one sees a sort of disordered kaleidoscope in which the oldest and newest ideas of the human spirit whirl round together in the most bewildering fashion. While a renowned Indian scientist lectures there on the transcendental properties of metals under the in¬ fluence of electricity, widows were being burned alive in Bihar, human sacrifice was suspected in Orissa, and in Calcutta, center of light and leading, men wise in trade were unwilling to go out nights lest their heads be taken for cement in the foundations 202 EAST VERSUS WEST of the Victoria Memorial Hall.” All the generaliza¬ tion about India’s stage of civilization is futile. One sees the hairy Bheel and the jungle man with his bows and arrows worshiping perhaps a stick or a stone or a mud image, but one also meets Rabindra¬ nath Tagore, and distinguished mathematicians. One finds Indians who live on snakes and lizards and wear beaded and feathered garments like those of the American Redman, but next evening he sits at a most elegant table at government house with Lord Sinha, a peer of the realm and once governor of Bihar and Orissa. The attainable spiritual heights for the individual Indian are very high, but the great riddle is how far can he lift the masses toward his high level. Why does Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose find no Indian peer in the field of science? Does India stand in the forefront of barbarous nations, or in the vanguard of civilized nations? I don’t know. Only omniscience could answer that, and I have never had any heart to heart talks with Providence. But, if prevailing ideas in our Western world are right, India is not wholly civilized. India has a state of society, not savage exactly, but simple and destitute of comforts, beyond the conception of untraveled Americans. It is a society which has its 203 INDIA IN FERMENT simple pleasures, and a not unaffectionate family life. Its only outstanding civilized trait in Occi¬ dental eyes is its art creations along certain lines. In any native street, one sees beautifully carved col¬ umns, beams, lintels ; and in the temples and mosques of Northern India one sees architectural beauty un¬ surpassed by the classic or Gothic architecture. Yet all these lovely monuments of Indian art were being neglected, and even used for building materials, until Lord Curzon began his noble work of rescuing the decaying and neglected temples, mosques, and ancient forts. And what was his reward? Lord Morley said of Lord Curzon : “You have never sent to India a Viceroy his superior, if, indeed, his equal, in force of mind, in unsparing remorseless industry, in pas¬ sionate and devoted interest in all that concerns the well-being of India, with an imagination fired by the grandeur of the political problem India presents,” but he always trusted to efficiency and never to politi¬ cal concessions, and the Indians hate him accord¬ ingly. Never have I heard a man more bitterly spoken of than this man, who among other things saved India’s art treasures. He did good for India but he did it with a cudgel. He drove the Indians toward their own best interests, and they resented the assumption of superiority. 204 EAST VERSUS WEST In a lifetime men do not tire of India’s myriad colors, its myriad forms. In dress alone, its people know an infinity of ways of exposing the charm of the human body. I have never before seen such artistic grouping of colored garments as a large crowd of Indians displays. Nor can one elsewhere see such a variety of faces as in the Indian crowd, from the ferocious long-haired Bheel, to the refined Christlike Brahman. The streets of Bombay, with their hundreds of thousands of chattering, aimlessly moving human beings, doing a myriad of inexpli¬ cable things in the midst of sunlit, highly colored streets, are the most interesting of sights. Such squalor, such dirt, such incredible fanaticism, such bathing in vile, sacred pools, such mumbling of holy phrases, such fits of passion and such mild resignation, I never saw nor want to see again. That the English have taught these people even the rudiments of sanitation is greatly to their credit. I take a reverent attitude before the patience and de¬ votion that has moved fanatical mountains. I have the greatest respect, and even admiration for many cultured Indians I have met ; but my Occidental den¬ sity renders me wholly unable to see the wonderful spiritual qualities which enthusiasts find in the lower 205 INDIA IN FERMENT classes of Indians. If all were like Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, blue-blooded even to the earliest genera¬ tion, aristocratic as a Bohun or a Biddle, like Sir Narayan Chandavarkar, or filled with exalted thoughts like Rabindranath Tagore, I could accept the attribute, but not for the masses one actually sees in the villages, in the city streets, or along the bathing Ghats at Benares. I know just how sadly some of my good Indian friends will shake their heads over this, and I am truly sorry to grieve them. Perhaps I have seen too little, only the surface, and, being unable to speak the Indian languages, could little appreciate the depths of the Indian soul. I hope that they are right and that I am wrong, for if I have correctly measured the attainments of Indian civili¬ zation, it will need generations of patient effort to raise it to a stage where more than four or five millions out of the three hundred and fifteen millions can intelligently take a part in their self-government. One of the first steps to that end will be a loosing of the bonds which keep the Indian mind in a bond¬ age of religious superstition. Religion is the funda¬ mental thing in Indian life and permeates every fiber of the social structure. Fear of fanatical opposition by Indians, animated by religious bigotry, has often 206 EAST VERSUS WEST caused the Government of India to be overcautious in its attitude towards many undoubted social evils and abuses and it even cools their ardor for sanitary reforms. The mosquitoes in Bombay, for example, could be controlled by destroying some of the Hindu sacred tanks and the Parsi wells from which they take water for sacramental purposes, but any rumor that such measures of sanitation were about to be taken would stir the embers of religious fanaticism into a blaze. The Parsis were thrown into a fever of protest when the aviation service was first estab¬ lished near Bombay and some of the army fliers soared over the Parsi “Towers of Silence,” where the Parsi dead are laid to be devoured by the flocks of vultures who wait there in ceaseless vigil for their prey. Parsi leaders hastened to Government House to cry out against this profanation of the sacred mysteries by the prying eyes of the aviators. Gov¬ ernment ordered at once that thereafter all army fliers should respect the sanctity of the “Towers of Silence.” Government hesitated many years before it tried to interdict by law the Hindu rite of “Sati” or “Suttee,” the burning of widows upon the funeral pyre of the lamented husband. Hideous as the cus¬ tom was in Western eyes, the British long feared to 207 INDIA IN FERMENT clash with the religious sanction given it by the Hindu religion. In 1829 the venture was made and was in the main successful, though it is said still to be popular, easily revived if chance offered. Even as I write I find in the daily press an account of a case of its revival near Calcutta. Later, Government grappled with the appalling custom of the murder of girl babies, a custom grow¬ ing out of the fact that the direst of social re¬ proaches fell upon a Hindu father who had an un¬ married but marriageable daughter. To prevent such a calamity coming upon him a father refused to trust to fortune and made way with unwelcome girl arrivals, until the death rate of female infants rose like the tide in the Bay of Fundy. Even severe measures failed to check this crime. British officials were cynically told that the “parents look after the boys and God looks after the girls,” but they refused to accept that reflection upon the Hindu divinity and proceeded to check infanticide by increasing taxes or making trouble for any village which had an unduly low proportion of girls. The next problem was infant marriages, due to the same fear of social ignominy should a daughter be left upon the parents’ hands. Moreover, the laws 208 EAST VERSUS WEST of Manu command a man of 24 to marry a girl of 8 and one of 30 a child of 12. Such child wives faded quickly, had weak children, made no stronger by the Hindu prohibition of a meat diet, and the child mother often pined and died at an early age. Even that evil the British attacked, and within British-Indian territory it is now a penal offense to marry girls under twelve years of age. Advanced Indian groups like the Arya Somaj support the British in this obviously wise measure, but the vast mass of Indian opinion regards this as one more of the British “crimes against India.” That sullen mass support of a custom so plainly evil is only one of the many proofs forced daily upon the traveler that India has not yet fought its way out of the night of religious fanaticism into the daylight of knowl¬ edge. Without making any effort adequately to describe the religions of India I wish to call to mind some outstanding facts which one must know in order to understand their effect on Indian politics. Except some 70,000,000 of Mohammedans the vast majority of the 315,000,000 of Indians are Hindus. The Hindu religion has been called “A tangled jungle of disorderly superstitions, ghosts and 209 INDIA IN FERMENT demons, demi-gods, deified saints, household gods, tribal gods, universal gods, with their countless shrines and temples — and the din of their discordant rites — deities who abhor a fly’s death, and those who delight still in human victims.” Thus it would strike any passing observer, thus it struck me, but I am quite ready to admit that it is a superficial judgment. The scene about and in a Hindu temple is most picturesque though smeared over with squalor and filth. At the entrance and throughout its dim recesses are the persistent mendicants, the mumbling Yogis, naked, emaciated, covered with ashes, and often the huge temple elephant swinging down upon one through the corridor of grotesquely carved pillars. If a priest accompanies the visitor the arcana may be opened and one may see the brazen chariots and the amazing animals of brass, which mounted on wheels appear on festival days in the sacred processions. Through some dark, impassable doorway one may see the stone cow god being anointed with a holy unguent and sprinkled with the yellow flower petal dust by an ill-looking priest. As one sees these things one is taken back in spirit from one to two thousand years in the history of the human race. Hinduism is sensual in some aspects, 210 EAST VERSUS WEST spiritual in others, of the earth earthy in some out¬ ward manifestations, but dreamy and metaphysical in the extreme on the spiritual side. Hinduism is constantly splitting up into new sects, getting new gods, new forms. As a sponge it takes up the rites and strange gods of other sects. It has no Rome, no pope, no bishop, no church council. There is a priest only for sacrificial purposes, and temple priests are not respected by their fellow Brahmans. There is no organized church. As actu¬ ally practiced it is a chaos. It exists for the aristo¬ crat, has no social humanitarianism, denies the equality of men, condemns millions to untouchability. The lowest castes may not even enter the temples of Siva and Vishnu. Such is the dominant religion, the real child of the Indian mind. Among the more backward people of India, among the hill tribes, for example, many “godlings,” represented perhaps by a vermilion-daubed stone under a tree, have only local habitations, where the simple peasant gives them offerings and knows them better than the great gods whom the Brahmans honor. More than ten millions in India are so wholly given over to the wor¬ ship of deities who haunt trees, rocks, whirlpools, rivers, and who even preside over cholera and small- 21 1 INDIA IN FERMENT pox, that they are classed as animists by the census takers. To them rocks and stones are endowed with mysterious power and the spirits that roam the world settle down in such inanimate objects. The higher castes know not these “godlings,'f but follow the rites approved by Brahmans, bathing in the Ganges at the appointed time, going on a pilgrimage to the places made holy by Vishnu or Siva, eating and drinking in accord with the prescribed ritual. These “best minds” shake their heads sadly over the de¬ based worship of blocks and stones. To them the chanting of sacred hymns, and leading a holy life alone wins salvation. I recall one Zacharias, a Polish Jew, who was associated with the “Servants of India” group at Poona, and who has taken on the Indian dress, Indian food, and the manner of eating it, who is, indeed, more Indian than the Indians. He talked most sympathetically of the way the Hindus inter¬ preted allegorically the myriad idols of their religion and “pierced through to the lofty spiritual creed” behind it. He declared dogmatically, “Idolatrous as the Hindu seems he is not without spiritual ideas.” I was willing to be convinced when the cul¬ tured Indian was in mind, but I was incredulous 212 EAST VERSUS WEST as far as the untutored millions were concerned. Some ignore all the differences of sects. The Maha¬ raja of Alwar told me that he had twelve guests in his camp and many servants, and among them all there were some twenty sects; but he said all are Hindus. “With all the varieties of worship, of idols, of gods, of caste marks, there is but one essential religion.” The truly spiritual Hindu says, “There is one thing, Brahma; there is nothing else.” God is all. There is no matter. Disease, rocks, trees, flesh, the solid earth itself, all are such stuff as dreams are made on. Rid yourself of desire, break the fetters of existence, and find reality by entering into the world spirit. Thus may your life he rounded with a sleep. This melancholy idea is the basis even of popular religion, says the enthusiast. The very ryot sees God in everything, believes in Karma, the state thus reached. Hence his sad outlook and his resignation. The one essential in Hinduism seems to be the divine right of the Brahman. It has been said you may throw over the Hindu trinity, Brahma, Siva, Vishnu; make new gods, foul as you please; give yourself up to sickening orgies, reject all faith in supernatural forces, but abide by caste rules, don’t touch the unclean, and above all reverence and 213 INDIA IN FERMENT feed the Brahmans. The God himself is content with water and a few half- withered flowers. Kali, the goddess, more deadly than the male, wants blood, but the Brahman wants food and raiment. A Hindu will tell you that to slay a Brahman is a mortal sin. One who even threatens him with violence will wander for one hundred years in hell, while the man who seizes his property will feed in another world on the leavings of vultures. Judging from these penal¬ ties one would be little better than one of the wicked if one offended a Brahman. But, if the superstitious public may not openly do ill to one of these holy men, they may avenge themselves with their opinions, as many Hindu prov¬ erbs testify. Indian folklore abounds with flings like the following : The Brahman is “A thing with a string around its neck.” (A profane hit at the sacred thread which the Brahman wears.) “Blood¬ suckers three on earth there be, the bug, the Brah¬ man and the flea,” is a popular bit of Hudibrastic verse. “Before the Brahman starves the king’s larder will be empty,” is a sneer at the persistent begging of the Brahman. “In his greed for funeral fees he spies out corpses like a vulture,” is a jibe at the greed of the Brahman which costs the poor 214 EAST VERSUS WEST Hindu so dearly. “He defrauds the gods; Vishnu gets the barren prayers, while the Brahman devours the offerings.” “He will beg with a lakh of rupees in his pocket,” echoes a suspicion that one often has as he is besieged by begging Brahmans at the temple doors. I thought it was quite in character when a Brahman told me frankly that he wanted the English to get out. of India if his caste could suc¬ ceed to power, but if the Brahmans could not be assured of that they would fight the scheme of Indian self-government to the end. But the complications which religion brings into Indian politics do not end with the effects of the Hindu religion. The 70,000,000 Mohammedans with their far more vigorous and warlike natures add greatly to the complexity of the situation. It was seven hundred years ago that the Moslem power broke into India from the North. Thereafter the Mohammedan with one god and the Hindu with many vied with each other. The political conqueror never changed the religion of the masses who en¬ compassed him, but he never wholly abandoned the effort. The clear-cut creed of Mohammedanism is based on the Arabic Koran, which permits no com¬ promise with “idolatrous Hinduism.” It thinks 215 INDIA IN FERMENT only of conquest. It has one god of whom no image can be made. Democracy is its watchword and is utterly opposed to the aristocracy of caste. All are equal under the aegis of Islam. Caste finds no sup¬ port from it. Nevertheless, the Moslem in India respects Hinduism and lets it alone in most parts of India. Not always, as recent riots in Punjab and the Moplah rebellion reveal. Many a riot arises over a pig or a cow, for against the Hindu’s holy cow the Moslem places the unholy pig. Side by side in India these antagonistic religions have been left by fate. The Mohammedan is a missionary, the Brahman never proselytes. Under the British regime, however, the Moslem makes little effort to win converts, but is content with making the entrance to the fold easy. Neither race nor caste bars any¬ body. Only in the fury of a rebellion does the Moslem, now under fear of British power, attempt conversions, but when as in the Malabar region re¬ cently they do begin that process, it is with brutality and ferocity beyond anything in Western experience except Herrin miners and Southern mobs on the occasion of a negro lynching. In India, as in all the Orient, religions might almost be called a substitute for nationalities. The 216 EAST VERSUS WEST Moslems, 70,000,000 of them in India, are to all in¬ tent a nation, and Government has to regard them as such. Hindu religion has affected the religion of Islam in India, even tainting it with caste. Mos¬ lems in parts of India know little of the Koran, but will fight Hindus under the banner of Allah. In practice these have an animist’s superstitions. There are curious mixtures of Hinduism and Mohamme¬ danism in Rajputana. In large towns, however, the Hindus and Moslems are separate. In addition to the Mohammedans and Hindus there are some 10,000,000 Buddhists, chiefly in northeastern India, and nearly 4,000,000 Christians, but neither these nor the 3,000,000 Sikhs, 1,000,000 Jains, and about 100,000 Parsis have any marked effect on the political situation. The presence of the English, the education of Indians in England, has added many dissenters, especially from Hinduism, to the great list already existing. The emancipated ones break with the old religion, try to better the lot of the depressed classes, and attack the aristocratic Brahman. The Brahmo Somaj and Arya Somaj movements are examples. Groups like the Deccan Liberal Club seek to break bonds of tradition, and especially to better the lot of the down-trodden un- 217 INDIA IN FERMENT touchables. It is in such organizations, and the in¬ fluence in general of the Western educated Indian, that one sees a faint gleam of hope that India may in the future escape somewhat from the bondage of religious superstition. Or, if in the light of the eternal verities all Western science is false and if 9 mechanical development is but a vain and hopeless increase in material things, and if the meditations of the Yogi do in truth lead to the happiness of man¬ kind, India may, indeed, let the Western legions thunder past with their sound and fury, and plunge in thought again to her own salvation. But can any sane Western mind grant that hypothesis? Mine cannot. I look to see India accept slowly the best of Western civilization, and, giving it her own pe¬ culiar flavor, rise to self-government, and greater freedom of thought. X INDIAN POLITICAL FITNESS AND AUGURIES FOR THE FUTURE A question which the observer of Indian life constantly asks is whether India, even if freed from the incubus of a medieval religious life, has men capable of assuming the burden of governing one- fifth of the human race. The English say: “Political responsibility is a thing few Indians will shoulder; if they do, they grow weary soon, and allow self-interest and family interest to corrode it.” I have had astounding cases of nepotism in Indian high officials absolutely proved to me. Many empha¬ size the contradiction between the Indian politician’s distrust of the British, and the almost universal Indian respect for, and demand for, the Sahib’s administration. Except among the agitators I did not find so great a demand for putting more Indians in the civil service. Indianization of the services does not mean simply replacing Englishmen by Indians but replacing them by Brahmans, Bengalis, 219 INDIA IN FERMENT Marathas, Sikhs or Mohammedans, by men of various castes and religions each struggling for power, for the welfare of the group to which each officer would belong, but not in all likelihood for the good of India. That the majority of Indians do not favor Indians in offices of trust, is a common saying in India. “Many Indian officials have quick, destructive little minds, touchy, vain, polite, evasive, but not strong, confident, burden-taking minds, ” asserted a keen, liberal, and experienced Englishman. Perhaps this is a prejudiced, uncharitable view; but when one talks with cultured Indians — the best of them — and appreciates the singular gentleness of soul which marks them, one wonders whether out of their number one could select ministers with “backbone and guts” — one who will “pull his weight and not be afraid of a racket” — as an English friend ex¬ pressed it. In an ideal world full of peace and good will one could hardly do better, but in this vale of tears and machine guns such gentle souls seem unfit for the burdens of state. Nevertheless, I have never felt any doubt that experience would give them the sterner qualities. It is all a matter of being grad¬ ually accustomed to the burden. But, even if leaders 2-20 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE in India can by degrees gain the strength and char¬ acter to bear the weight of great public affairs, is it probable that they can escape the compulsion of caste to a degree that will let them deal fairly with masses of people not encircled by their caste wall? For it must never be ignored that besides the disintegrating effect of religions upon Indian political life, there is the influence of caste which is the very foundation of Hinduism. The last Indian census enumerates over 2,300 minor castes, a maze wherein there is a milkman’s caste, a herdsman’s caste, a blacksmith’s caste, and even a robber caste such as the Kallars in the Madura district; but there are four main castes whose origin is a matter of dispute. The explanation most plausible to me was that which attributes their origin to the successive invasions into India of races pouring in through the northwest mountain passes, and driving the Dravidian or aboriginal stock ever southward. The priests of these invading Aryan peoples made of their race the “twice-born classes,” the Brahman priest, the warrior or Kshatriya, the Vaisya, or cultivator of the soil. Of the Dravidian, or aboriginal, they made the Sudra, meekly to serve the classes above. By the devices of priestcraft the 221 INDIA IN FERMENT religious sanction was given to the custom that one’s social position and relations in the family were pre¬ determined by the mere chance of birth in one caste or another. “What is written on a man’s forehead by the gods, cannot be rubbed off,” says the Hindu fatalist. What a man shall wear in this wicked world, what he shall eat and drink, with whom he shall wed is settled by the custom of that caste into which it has pleased God to call him. No logic can support it, no reason can be given for it, it is so. Its object seems clear. The Brahmans who devised it desired no doubt to keep their society in compart¬ ments, with their own dominant, and above all not to have their own entered by marriage from below. In theory the Brahmans are one caste, but in practice there are many divisions. The mazes of classifica¬ tion are too much for the finite mind of the West. When a Brahman may marry is a problem in higher mathematics. He may not marry within an inner circle of clansmen, and he must not marry outside of an outer circle. In the case of a Rajput the inner circle wherein he may not marry is said in cases to contain 100,000 persons. There too the many clans have an order of precedence and no man will marry his daughter in a clan of lower order than his 222 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE own. A Brahman of one group may have scruples against taking water from some Brahman of another group. The inordinate pride in being a Brahman gives him great satisfaction, but he pays for this by the apprehension of pollution from the touch of the unclean. Only those who suffer from a lively sense of the omnipresence of germs can understand. A religious ceremony brings him into this charmed circle into which he was born. A Brahman or Kshatriya boy gets his second or spiritual birth when given his first lesson in offering oblations to the gods. He recites short Vedic texts, and is given the “sacred thread” by solemn ceremony. This thin coil of three or more cotton strands is the symbol of the Brahman’s divine origin, and is an emblem of the glory which is a Brahman’s. Indeed, the whole caste system is plainly devised for his exalta¬ tion. The caste rules seem inexplicable and capricious to the untutored Western mind. One is always ask¬ ing, why? On a journey a good Hindu may re¬ ceive water of a doubtful purity from some castes but may not take it from the purest source in the most sanitary vessels from persons of certain other inferior castes. A low caste man may not be even 223 INDIA IN FERMENT a personal servant in the house of a higher caste. His very touch would pollute. Indeed, if but the shadow of an “untouchable” falls upon the water carried by a Brahman for a journey, he throws it out scornfully. Some “untouchables,” beef-eaters, for example, defile a Brahman at sixty-four feet, others, like toddy-drawers only at thirty-two, while the Kammalan group, masons, carpenters, and leather workers contaminate at twenty-four feet. Such men cannot enter the humblest Hindu temple. The “untouchables” must even beg from the road¬ side, on the “side lines,” and must, like ancient lepers, warn approaching upper-caste men of their impurity. A friend, G. W. Padisson, who, for thirty-five years was an Indian Civil Service man in the Madras district, and now the Com¬ missioner of Labor in that province, told me of seeing a Brahman march majestically down a village street ringing a bell so that all pariahs might get at a proper distance. He had seen untouch¬ ables summoned to a law court, but obliged to sit several hundred feet down the road so as not to pollute Brahman lawyers and judges. At Poona I was told of untouchables who were criminals and who had to report to Indian police every evening; 224 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE to avoid polluting the Brahman clerk they tossed their card to the police who looked and tossed it back. Mr. Padisson had some seven millions of these out¬ casts under his care, and was trying to better their lot by establishing stores from which they could buy without the disadvantage of having to throw their money in a door and have the purchased article thrown out to them. He also was trying to supply them with Government wells whence they might draw water, for the upper caste people even in a village will not allow untouchables to come near a well used by them. There are in all India some fifty- three millions of these depressed people. It is the panchayats, the governing bodies of vil¬ lage communities, which enforce caste as far as that is necessary, though, in a way, caste enforces itself. It regulates a man’s wages like a trade union. It prescribes his food and whom he shall not marry. It keeps him out of degrading work. Ostracism is the penalty of disobedience. All refuse any com¬ munion with him. Even the barber deserts him, and if he dies none will bury him. Some told me that “the bonds of caste are being burst asunder by the disruptive forces of modern ideas and that the Indian spirit is now about to be liberated from this 225 INDIA IN FERMENT prison house of the past.” “Such facile assurances,” says Risley, “proceed for the most part from philan¬ thropic Englishmen who have seen little of India be¬ yond the presidency towns, who know none of the vernacular languages, and who get their impressions from the small body of Anglicized Indians, a disor¬ ganized class within the community ... an artificial and exotic product.” In some cases it is true of eat¬ ing and drinking, but not in the essential matter of marriage. The effect of railroad travel has led to curious casuistry as to caste rules. A Brahman may not drink water from unsanctified sources, but may buy ice, and, when it has melted, quench his thirst. If no food cooked by one of his own caste is avail¬ able, he may buy National Biscuit Company products in a package and consume them with a calm sense of perfect piety. The carelessness as to caste rules (eating, drinking, pollution by contact, etc.) which a tourist sees from his railway carriage comprises only the accidents of caste which may change from year to year as convenience or fashion may dictate. “The substance of the system,” says Risley, “lies hidden from the eye of the globe-trotter in the hard and fast rules which regulate marriage.” Here, “there are no signs of compromise or concession.” 226 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE The idea that any properly constituted Hindu should wish to marry outside of his caste would seem to a Hindu too preposterous for discussion. It is still true that to millions caste is the most serious matter, and life is absorbed in its petty de¬ mands. Sir Herbert Risley says the snobbery of caste has been actually augmented by better com¬ munications. People travel more, pilgrimages are easily made and social groups not before affected be¬ come orthodox. Caste is more rigidly observed, especially as to marriage, than before. Brahmanical influence is more diffused. That, and reviving the authority of the Hindu scriptures, and the idea that Hindu civilization is the most exalted and worthy of emulation the world has seen, increases the power of caste. Nevertheless, caste and some of its most dubious results have great and powerful enemies, individuals as well as new sects and societies. Rabindranath Tagore is the enemy of outworn tradition and preju¬ dice. The caste system hinders the free, creative im¬ pulses of man, he says. Gandhi, on the other hand, says that without the restrictions of caste, communal life would be endangered. Tagore says caste is re¬ sponsible for the moral bankruptcy, the cynical self- 227 INDIA IN FERMENT ishness and the bitter class feeling of modern Indian life. Gandhi says that those who have shaken off caste are drifting aimlessly in the eddies, with no sense of social responsibility. Without caste the In¬ dian people would be landed in chaos. Gandhi is, however, against untouchability. “I regard untouch- ability as the greatest blot on Hinduism. . . . I was hardly yet twelve when this idea had dawned on me. A scavenger, named Urka, an untouchable, used to attend our house for cleaning latrines.” Gandhi used to ask his mother why he was forbidden to touch him and why ablutions after it. He thought his mother was wrong. At school he often touched untouchables, and was always naturally against the idea of untouchability. Many of the educated classes are secretly or openly opposed to caste evils, but their activity against them is very slow in its effect. There are in India 1,700,000 (in 1911) who are literate in English. If all these besieged the citadel of caste, a generation would pass before it could be carried. But there are even among them few iconoclasts, only those alien¬ ated in some way from Indian society. With growth of nationalistic spirit there is even a tendency among educated classes to hold Indian religion, usage, phi- 228 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE losophy as superior to Western, and these would up¬ hold caste. So age-long and so firm is its hold on India that to withdraw caste from Indian society, says Risley, would be more than a revolution. “It would resemble the withdrawal of some elemental force like gravitation or molecular attraction.” Great Indian leaders agree with Risley. There is no tendency to rebel against the prescriptions of caste, said Gokhale, unless in a small circle of those who “have come under the influence of some kind of English education.” Outside of that Indians regard caste as the natural law governing human society. It is interesting to speculate as to what effect caste would have in a democratically governed country. Under a democracy in India caste would provide the party in power, the party that had spoils to be divided, with a “machine” surpassing in effi¬ ciency the wildest dream of the American state or ward boss. Men would be compelled to vote solid by penalties compared with which a papal interdict was an ineffectual instrument. A man who offended would find himself cut off from the barest necessi¬ ties of life, as well as the enjoyment of the amenities. None would eat, drink, smoke with him, or sell food to him. The barber would desert him, the 229 INDIA IN FERMENT dhobi would not wash his clothes, the very attend¬ ants of the dead would shun him. Could democracy function, shackled with such chains upon free opin¬ ion? Even I, while interviewing Indian politicians, could see that caste had its effect on Indian courage to speak their minds. Caste is enforced solely by public opinion, and a people so ruled by it in that matter is also afraid to speak up courageously on other matters. P. W. Khan, of Calcutta, wrote the Statesman that the “bugbear of unpopularity, in the widest sense of the word, has taken possession of the majority of Indians in every walk of life. To fight and to give a crushing defeat to this bug¬ bear certainly requires propaganda work in which all right-thinking Indians should join.” A governor of a great province told me that when, a few months earlier, Non-cooperators who were Brahmans were arrested and tried and found guilty, Brahmans who were not Non-cooperators and who frowned on them in general came in large numbers to urge the governor that they be pardoned. Caste was stronger than political faction. These are examples of the perils with which a prospective democracy in India may be threatened. Yet some progress has been made, and the optimist 230 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE will not wholly turn from his roseate vision, while a forward movement is perceptible. The Western world has struck off many shackles; why may not the Orient, if we will but give her time? But there is still another doubt that rises up in the mind of every traveler in the tropical regions of India. One can never get out of one’s mind the ominous historical fact, that in India, in the past, any race that came down from the northwest and conquered it had the energy and spirit to build a civilization, effective government, architectural monuments, and all before the climate sapped its strength; but when that time came, it fell before a new invasion from the north, which, in its turn, built a new civilization and awaited again its Nemesis. The British alone, coming to India by sea, returned as individuals to their home, and, like the giant of old, renewed their strength on that soil. In spite of historical ill-omen, however, the Indians have a very natural and proper ambition for self-government, with which every magnanimous person will sym¬ pathize; but surely a mere ill-considered try for it, at the frightful cost of universal anarchy, in a country like India, would be ghastly folly. Indian 231 INDIA IN FERMENT agitators appeal to us in the name of the Declara¬ tion of Independence, the principles embodied in the Federal Constitution, by the hallowed phrases of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and by Roosevelt’s slogan of the “square deal” to cooperate with them to destroy the British imperialism and raise the banner of freedom over India. There is never a word as to the results for India herself of the attainment of sudden release from British control. All prophecy as regards the political future of India is futile; but I am convinced that the British will work out some solution of their problems in that troubled land, which will put an end to the present political ferment. Even now, as a result of decline in political disturbance, there are distinct signs of recovery on the political side in the morale of all local governments as well as the Government of India. With Gandhi in prison and treated with the utmost consideration, his followers are divided, and after good harvests all over India they will find it more difficult to stir up the masses. At the meet¬ ing of the Indian National Congress in December of 1922 that body split into two factions, one led by C. R. Das declaring for taking part in the next elections and getting into the assembly, and the 232 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE provincial councils, where they would make Govern¬ ment all the trouble they could, the other favoring a continuance of non-cooperation, or the Gandhi plan. C. R. Das formerly amassed great wealth as an attorney in Calcutta. He gave up all to become a follower of Gandhi, and resolutely remained in the Alipore jail for months (1921 -1922) rather than give up a Non-cooperation campaign which had in several cases led to riots in Calcutta and therefore to his arrest. After Gandhi’s imprisonment he was released from jail and was made president of the All-India National Congress. When the proposal was made there to take part in the elections (Novem¬ ber, 1923) and elect their own members to the Legislative Assembly at Delhi and to the Provincial Councils where they might wreck the Government plans, Das supported the plan. It was defeated by a vote of 1740 to 890, but Das, skillful politician that he is, formed the “Congress Khilafat Swarajya Party” which aims at bringing the majority of the All-India National Congress to its views. Even if the great Bengal leader succeeds it is hard to say whether he or the opposing Non-cooperation faction will be most annoying to Government. C. R. Das is a Nationalist of the idealistic sort. 233 INDIA IN FERMENT As he says, “The Nationality of which I am speak¬ ing must not be confused with the conception of Nationality as its exists in Europe to-day. Nation¬ alism in Europe is an aggressive nationalism, a selfish nationalism, a commercial nationalism of gain and loss. The gain of France is the loss of Germany, and the gain of Germany is the loss of France. . . . I contend that each nationality constitutes a par¬ ticular stream of the great unity; but no nation can fulfill itself unless and until it becomes itself and at the same time realizes its identity with humanity.” Moreover, if self-rule comes to India, he wants it the rule of the masses, real democracy. He does not want the two per cent of India’s millions who are educated to rule all the rest. In his own words — “98 per cent of the population are ill-fed; their lives are a long drawn struggle. To quote the words of a Lieut.-Governor, ‘2 per cent of the population in India cannot win Swaraj. In place of white men you will have brown men.’ To my mind bureaucracy is bureaucracy, whether it is white bureaucracy or brown bureaucracy. That is why I have always claimed Swaraj for the masses. Democracy has never yet been tried in the world. Swaraj must be for the entire population and not 234 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE for any particular class, however gifted that class may be. Nowhere in the world, in not a single country in Europe, have you got democracy. When¬ ever there is a strike, the military is called in. Do you ever realize what ill-fed population means? It means diseased population. What right has the Government and the Middle Class to say to the vast population of India that you will not be allowed access to knowledge and culture ?” He does not wish the Middle Class alone to win self-rule, but he calls to the masses, “your own hands must construct the Temple of Freedom. I call upon you to feel within your heart of hearts that you are the real proprietors of India.” A most lovable Scotch missionary, who entertained me at Poona, and who went with me to a meeting of the Deccan Liberal Club there, came away shaking his head sadly, saying: “The fire has been lighted; the flame will never go out. England has lost India.” I do not now agree with him, though at the moment I did. The men who are really in power in India — Lord Reading, Lord Willingdon, Sir Harcourt But¬ ler, Sir William Marris, Sir George Lloyd, and many others — are right-minded; they wish to do the right thing, and if the people at home, in England, will let 235 INDIA IN FERMENT them alone, keep their hands off, a wise solution will be found by those actually in India, who understand all the subtle influences, the unique conditions, and the almost morbid sensitiveness of the Oriental mind. Under their guidance India will in time rule herself, but will remain one of the great self-governing coun¬ tries of the British Commonwealth of Nations. It was unfortunate that the visit of the Prince of Wales focused English attention on India at a time when it was important that there should be no cen¬ sorious comment from British sources on the way new reforms were working. The rising tide of criti¬ cism in England, which swept Montagu out of office, is bitterly resented by Nationalist leaders. The Indians are most sensitive to any indications that London means to put any obstacles in the path of their political advance under the new act. Any sug¬ gestion that Parliament is saying: “Oh, we did not mean to go so far as that when we gave India the new scheme, ” is maddening to men who think that they have not been given enough. The fall of Mr. Montagu, who stood for the new era in the Indian mind, made more stir in India than the arrest of Gandhi ; for many interpreted that to mean reaction at Whitehall. Lord Curzon’s talk about “a subordi- 236 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE nate branch of the Imperial Government, six thou¬ sand miles away,” and English criticism of the per¬ sonnel of the Delhi Legislature, simply pour oil on the flames of Nationalism and race feeling in India. When in early August, 1922, Lloyd George discussed the situation in the House of Commons with the par¬ ticular aim of reassuring the young Englishmen who contemplate entering the Indian Civil Service, he spoke of British officialdom as the “steel frame” which held Indian society together, and he left the suspicion in hypersensitive Indian minds that for an almost unlimited time he expected the presence of British officials to be necessary. This seemed to the Indian politician to retract the Government promise to advance by definite stages to the Indianization of the Civil Service. He still further aroused their wrath and suspicion by talking of the Government of India Act as an “experiment.” That was hastily interpreted to mean that the whole plan might be jetti¬ soned any day if the British Government chose to think it a failure. Lloyd George doubtless meant merely that the introduction of Western political forms in an Asiatic country was an “experiment,” but any well-informed Indian official would have told him it was unwise to use that expression. Every 237 INDIA IN FERMENT Indian editor was incensed by it, and the cauldron of discontent boiled ominously for weeks after the speech. The moral plainly drawn from the incident is that English public men should have the same care when they express themselves upon Indian affairs that they are accustomed to exercise when they touch the affairs of the Dominions. To say, as one did, that the Indian Councils “are swamping India under a flood of ineffable bosh” is not only to speak reckless untruth, but is positively laying a powder-train to destroy the Empire. This great imperial problem must be solved in India. “I wish I could be sure that the House of Com¬ mons really understood that,” a distinguished British statesman in India exclaimed to me. Indeed, one fears sometimes that there are still too few in Eng¬ land who realize that the Government of India Act can only be used in cooperation with the Indians, and that every London interference or unfavorable com¬ ment only makes that more difficult. The genie of political liberty is out of the bottle, and no ministerial magic can thrust it back in again. It is not within the power of any party in England to arrest the movement of political opinion in India. In the pres¬ ent stage, the temper of that opinion is one of the 238 INDIAN FITNESS AND THE FUTURE vital factors ; and any attempt to reassert the control of the Imperial Parliament too obviously will have a bad effect. England may have come too slowly to her present policy toward India, but those who know the truth will not chide her for the way in which she has done things there since her policy was once determined. She even ventured upon a pure experiment, dyarchy, rather than stand motionless with indecision. In the hour of victory she kept the vows made in the midst of her war trials. She has at least put India in the way of winning self-government for herself. INDEX Afghans, 90, 91, 105, 168, 190. Agra, 201. Ahmedabad, 96, 131, 201. Aiyer, Sir P. S. Siva- swami, 44, 45, 49, 134. Ali, Shaukat and Ma¬ homet, 48, 90, 122. Aligarh, 116. Alwar, Maharaja of, 64- 69, 77, 82, 83, 99, 213. Amballal, Mr., 96, 97. “Amritsar Affair,” 141- 143, T44- Andrews, C. F., 98, 156. Army in India, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 52, 87, 90; cost of, 45, 55, 162, 167. Arya Somaj, 209, 217. Assam, 60, 71. Ayer, T. V. Seshagiri, 25, 49. 78, 79- Banerji, Sir Surendra- nath, 56, 84, 134, 193. Bardoli, 129. Baroda, Gaekwar of, 70, 76, 77- Benares, 2, 35, 206. Bengal, 19, 23, 27, 28, 34, 56, 59, 60, 71, 86, 120, 152, 176. Besant, Mrs. Annie, 81, 1 12, 1 35-1 39; rebukes Indians, 200. Bihar and Orissa, 71, 202. Bikanir, Maharaja of, 70. Bombay, 19, 42, 56, 71, 89, 97, 100, 108, 126, 130, 131, 133, 150, 176, 187, 190, 205, 207. Bose, Sir Jagadis Chandra, 202, 203. Brahma, 213. Brahman, 76, 107, 160, 205, 212; education in hands of, 173, 174, 175, 177; of the Hindu temple, 201 ; the divine right of, 213, 214, 223; mass opinion, 214, 215; hopes to succeed Eng¬ lish in power, 215; at¬ tacked by new sects, 217; caste, 221; devise caste rules, 222; defiled 241 242 INDEX by “untouchables,” 224, 226. Brahmo Somaj, 217. “British Arrogance,” 149- 154, -192. British Colonies, Indians in, 162. British Government (Im¬ perial Government), 7, 9, n, 28, 32, 43, 58, 64, 67,79, 90, 93, :_43 ; edu- cational policy in India, 1 70-1 72; Indians pre¬ fer to other govern¬ ments, 191 ; rescues India, 193, 197; danger of interference in In¬ dia, 23=5-237, 239. “British India,” 2; pro¬ posal to turn over to Princes, 23 ; people in, 79; over-governed, 80. Buddhist, Philosophy, 194; number in India, 217. Budget, of 1922, 41, 43- 47- Bureaucracy, 88, 120, 122, 124, 234. Burke, Edmund, 195. Butler, Sir Harcourt, 235. \ Caliphate. (See Khilafat.) Capital, British, 52, 61, 62, 63, 64, 90, 92; why it enters India, 163; In¬ dian, 163 ; builds Indian railways, 180. Caste, 89, 107, 1 12, 21 1, 213, 216; affects Euro¬ peans, 158-160, 173; Hindu taints Moslem with, 217; general dis¬ cussion, 221-230; basis of Hindu religion, 67, 221 ; number of castes, 221 ; four main, 221 ; impossibility of change, 222 ; devised to exalt Brahman, 223 ; vagaries of system, 223-225 ; how enforced, 225 ; essentials not disappearing, 226, 227; Tagore and edu¬ cated classes oppose, 227-229; effect, if with¬ drawn, 229 ; probable ef¬ fect on democratic gov¬ ernment, 229, 230. Central provinces, 71. “Certification,” effect, 19; use, 27, 28, 46, 47. Chandavarkar, Sir Nara- yan, 72, 79, 84, 86, no, in, 154, 206. “ Charka ” (see spinning wheel). Chauri Chaura, 108, 128, 129, 130. Chelmsford, Lord, 14, 71 ; as Viceroy, proclaims INDEX 243 martial law, 142; blame for “Amritsar horror,” 143- Chirol, Sir Valentine, 14. Christians, in India, 217. “Civil disobedience,” 4, 108, no, 1 17, 128; non¬ payment of taxes, 129. Climate, of India, effect, 57, 160, 161, 231. Collector and Magistrate, duties, 6, 7, 8, 79, 80; conduct, 152. Colonies, Indians in, 53. Communal representation, 20, 21, 22. Congress Khilafat Swa¬ raj ya Party, 223. Connaught, Duke of, 25, 40. Conservatives, political views, 84, 91 ; extreme reactionaries, 92. Constantinople, 145. Council of Princes, 70. Council of State, 3, 93; make up, 18, 26. Crump, L. M., Resident at Baroda, 190. Curtis, Lionel, 8, 13, 46, 171 ; visits India, 14; on problem in India, 189, 190. Curzon, Lord, 187, 201, 204, 236. Cutch, Maharao of, 76. Dacca, 120. Darbar, 3, 180. Das, C. R., 93, 121, 122, 164, 233-235. Deccan Liberal Club, 217, 235- Delhi, 2 ; fort, 3 ; Legisla¬ tive Assembly at, 25, 26, 27, 36> 38> 40, 49 i Har¬ tal at, 141 ; Darbar, 180; architectural remains, 201. Democracy, in India, 21, 33, 67, 68, 69, 78, 181 ; probable effect of caste upon, 229, 230; C. R. Das’ idea of, 234, 235. Democratic Party (In¬ dian), 49, 54. “Depressed Classes,” (see “untouchables”). Duke, Sir William, 14. Dwarkadas, Jamnadas, 50, 134* “Dyarchy,” 14, 19, 20, 26, 27, 31- 63, 88. 239. Dyer, General, 142, 143, 144. Education, in India, 33, 35, 228, 229 ; British policy, 170-178; criticized, 200. Elphinstone, M., 170. 244 INDEX Emerson, Mr., Commis¬ sioner at Dacca, 152. English, language, 54-56, 172, 176, 179. Exclusion laws, 156, 162. Executive Council, make up of Viceroy’s, 18; power to certify, 18, 19. Famine, in India, 162, 165, 166, 180. Filipinos, 90, 124; Ameri¬ can experience in gov¬ erning, 188, 189. Fyzabad, 115. Gandhi, Mohandas Ka- ramchand, 59, 95-114; relations with Malaviya, 12, 14; arrest, 17, 108, 129; attitude to native states, 78 ; policy, 87, 94, 107, 108, n8, 131; masters Indian Con¬ gress, 90, 93 ; masters Ali brothers, 91 ; opin¬ ions of, 95, 98, 99; re¬ ligious appeal, 99, 108, no, iii; appearance, 98, 99; ideas, 1 00-108; education, 106; accom¬ plishment, 107; impris¬ onment, 109; relations with Viceroy, 106, 109, no; “reincarnation of Vishnu,” no; religious man, in; followers, character of, hi, 112, 113, 120-125, 158; ex- ploited by charlatans, hi, 112; frowns on de¬ ceit, 112; Tagore on, 114; advocates civil dis¬ obedience, 117; urges care of Prince of Wales, 126; fasts because of violence, 127, 128, 129, 130; simple minded, 127, 146; confesses his responsibility for riots, 131, 133; Mrs. Naidu, on trial, 133; effect of arrest, 134; opposition to, 134, 135, 137; Row- latt Act, 140; denounces British government, 143 ; unites Hindu and Moslem, 146, 147; op¬ poses blaming English for all India’s troubles, 147; opposed to Euro¬ pean science, 176, 177; influence on school boys, 178; asks about negro problem, 187; supports caste, 227, 228 ; opposes “untouchability,” 228 ; how treated in prison, 232. Giridih, 116. INDEX 245 Gokhale, Mr., 173; on British rule, 181 ; on caste, 229. Gour, Dr. H. S., 49, 57. Gourlay, W. R., Private Secretary to the Gover¬ nor of Bengal, 161. Greece, 145. Gupta, President of Cal¬ cutta municipal council, T55* Government of India, 4; reform in, 14; to whom responsible, 18; accused of buying ministers, 28 ; army under, 44, 45 ; re¬ peals Rowlatt Acts, 48; criticism, 58, 59, 121- 124, 162-167; powers as to princes, 74, 75 ; ar¬ rests Ali brothers, 91 ; combats famine, 100, 166; duty as to Gandhi, 108, 1 14; arrests Gan¬ dhi, 132, 134; attack on revenues, 118; Indian arraignment, 1 40- 1 69 ; comment on criticisms, 179, 180; character in the past, 182, 183, 186; nature of British rule, 187, 188; American ex¬ perience in Philippines warning to, 188; prob¬ able result of British withdrawal, 190; service to India, 205, 216; over¬ cautious, 207; grapples with suttee and child murder, 208, 209; legis¬ lates against child mar¬ riages, 209; Indian re¬ spect for, 219; officials understand Indian sensi¬ tiveness, 236. Government of India, Act, early stages of, 12, 14; Sir George Lloyd on, 16; British purpose, 17, 18; provisions, 18, 42; provincial governments under, 19; divides sov¬ ereignty, 20 ; aim, 22 ; Parliament passes, 25 ; how carried out, 27, 28, 32; criticism, 29, 30, 31, 33, 44, 63, 85 ; defense, 3L 32, 33; Viceroy’s powers under, 43 ; as¬ sembly’s powers, 44 ; opinion of young offi¬ cers, 58, 59 ; favored by official class, 60, 61 ; dis¬ liked by British mer¬ chants and manufac¬ turers, 62 ; American view, 62 ; native princes criticise, 64-70 ; called inadequate, 87 ; difficul¬ ties of carrying out, 246 INDEX 140; Gandhi denounces supporters, 147; Lloyd George speaks of, as “experiment,” 237; can only be used in coopera¬ tion with the Indians, 238. Governors, in Council, 19, 27, 30, 60, 61, 72. Great Britain, critics, 5, 28, 42, 67; answer to critics, 179. Griffeth, Police Inspector, 99, 105. Hailey, Sir Malcolm, 37. Hall, H. Fielding, 7, 173. Haq, Fazlul, 145. Hartal, 112, 126, 127, 141. Hastings, Warren, 195. Herrin, Illinois, 142, 187, 216. Hindu, 55, 66, 67, 76, 86, 89, 91, 107, 1 12, 1 13, 126, 146, 156, 177, 179; and Mohammedan, 190, 216, 217; world’s spir¬ itual teacher, 193, 196, 198, 200; social organ¬ ization, 197, 221 ; re¬ ligion of, 206-215; suttee rite, 207 ; child murder, 208 ; infant marriage, 209 ; temple life, 210; idolatrous fol¬ lowers, 211-213; sects, 213; caste, the founda¬ tion of, 67, 221, 227; permanence of caste, 222. House of Lords, approves Dyer’s action, 143. Hunter Commission, 142, 143- Illiteracy, in India, 175, 228. India, 1, 28, 90, 91 ; loyal in the Great War, 13; attitude of governors, 19, 61 ; sense of citizen¬ ship in, 21 ; law and order in, 25 ; population and literacy, 33, 34, 175, 228 ; living conditions, 34, 35 ; dominion status, 45. 60, 93, 94, 136; gloomy prophecy, 62, 190, 235 ; Alwar’s hope for, 68, 82, 83 ; Gandhi on, 100; permanence of civilization, 102, 192; backwardness, 102, 103, 195; mobs in, 126; de¬ mands, 135, 136; Annie Besant’s appeal, 138; exploited ( ?), 163; edu¬ cation in, 170-178, 202; antiquity, 192; unity, 176, 179, 180; used to INDEX autocratic rule, 186; if British should leave, 190-192, 232; rescued by British, 193; superi¬ ority of civilization ( ?), 194. 198-201. 203, 227; care of historical monu- ments, 200, 201, 204; importation of Western culture, 202 ; contrasts in civilization, 202, 203 ; variety of its life, 205 ; fitness for self-govern¬ ment, 206, 219, 220, 232 ; religion in, 206-218; hope of escape from re¬ ligious superstition, 218 ; climate, effect on, 231 ; political future, 232, 236. Indian Agitator, 5, 8, 11, 28, 29, 33, 80, 87, 88, 89, 90, 107, 1 16, 125, 1 47- 1 49, 162, 174, 200, 219. Indian Art, 201, 204. Indian Civil Service, 4, 6, 7, 8; in former times, 8, 152; criticism, 30, 59, 88 ; Indianization of, 52, 58,. 168, 219, 237; late attitude toward, 59, 60, 130; character of members, 153; discour¬ aged, 158; salaries in, 162, 166, 167. 247 Indian Councils Act, 9 ; effect, 10. Indian legislators, conduct, 3E 44, 55 5 debating powers, 56. Indian Ministers, criticism of, 28, 159, 220; diffi¬ culties of, 29, 30; in Viceroy's Council, 40 ; as administrators, 56, 220) Indian attitude to¬ ward, 220. Indian National Congress, 11, 90, 136, 137; meet¬ ing at Ahmedabad, 96; Working Committee, 128, 129; use English in debates, 176; meeting, December, 1922, 232. Indian Science, 172, 202, 203. Indore, 79, 81. Islam, (see Mohamme¬ dans). Iyengar, S. Srinavasa, 98, 106, 1 13. Jains, 217. Jayakar, M. R., 99, 113. Jeejeebhoy, Sir Jamsetjee, 50, 93, 205. Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 181. Jodhpur, 77. INDEX 248 Kasem, Moulvi Abul, 50. Kathiawar States, 77. Kemal, Mustapha, 91, 145. Khaparde, G. S., Hon., 192. Khilafat, 116, 145, 146. Kshatriya, 221, 222. Legislative Assembly, 3, 36-57, 87, 93 ; how con¬ stituted, 18; meets, 25, 26; attendance, 36, 41, 57; appearance, 36, 37; President of, 37 ; con¬ duct, 38, 41 ; attitude toward British Govern¬ ment, 39, 40, 54 ; Budget Action, 41-43 ; respon¬ sibility, 44-48; rejection of bills, 47 ; parties in, 49 ; Moslem and Hindu, 55, 56; debates in Eng¬ lish, 54, 176; plans for next election to, 233. Legislative Council, 9 ; make up, 19; in Bengal, 28. Lindsay, James H., Col¬ lector at Dacca, 6, 120, 152. Lloyd, Sir George, Gover¬ nor of Bombay, 16, 17, 235 ; takes responsibility for arrest of Gandhi, 17. Lloyd George, David, 237. Lucknow, 2. Lugard, Sir Frederick, 23, 24. Macaulay, T. B., 171-175. Macnicol, Reverend Nicol, 235- Madras, 19, 21, 56, 71, 89, 100, 108, 176; riot, 1 27, 128, 130, 131, 187. Mahabharata, 197. Maharajas, 3 ; plan to turn rule of India over to, 23, 24; attitude of Indians towards, 24, 25, 78, 79, 81; bill to protect, 47; opinion of Government of India Act, 64-70; character, 70-82 ; plan expansion, 81 ; meet at Darbar, 180. Malabar , 56, 108, 116. Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 11, 12, 40, 121. Malegaon, 108, 116. Manu, Laws of, 209. Marris, Sir William, 13, 14, 19, 235; on “dy¬ archy,” 20 ; on educa¬ tional policy in India, 171. Mendicants, Indian, 200. Minorities, representation of, 21, 22. INDEX Minto, Lord, 75. Moderates, political views, 84, 85, 86; composition, 92. “Mofussil” (country dis¬ tricts), 88, 89. Mohammedans, 86; repre¬ sentation, 21 ; in Legis¬ lative assembly, 55, 56; suspect Hindu, 89, 90; unite with Gandhi, 91, 126, 146; political fac¬ tion, 92 ; riot in Madras, 128; Khilafat agitation, 145 ; Gandhi embraces cause, 146, 147; eat beef, 165 ; effort to reconcile with Hindu, 179 ; attitude toward Hindu, 190, 215, 216, 217; number in India, 209; influence in India, 215, 216. Monragu, Secretary of State, 14, 58, 59; char¬ acter, 1 5 ; resignation, 48; effect of fall, 236. Montagu -Chelmsford Re¬ port, 14, 22. Moplah, rebellion, 116, 216. Morley, Lord, 62, 15 1, 204. Morley-Minto Reforms, 9. 249 Moslem, (see Mohamme¬ dans). Mukherji, Sir Ashutosh, 201. Mysore, Maharaja of, 70, 76. Naidu, Mrs., Indian poet¬ ess, 133. Nair, Sir Sankaran, 155. “Natives States,” condi¬ tions, 24, 25, 74, 75. “Native States,” 70, 71, 77 y 78, 79, 80, 81. Nationalism, 4, 234. Nationalists, Indian, 8, 29, 77 y 87, I4L 237; com¬ position, 93 ; methods, 93; resent imitations of West, 157, 158; claim superiority, 195 ; C. R. Das’ views, 234. “National Liberal Party,” formed, 49 ; members, 50; aims, 50-54. Nehru, Motilal, 119, 122. “New India,” Mrs. Bes- ant’s paper, 81, 138. Non-Brahmans, 21, 160, 177. Non-Cooperation, 12, 29, 92, 107, 108, 1 13; Ta¬ gore on, 134; Annie Besant on, 136, 137; Gandhi organizes, 147. 250 INDEX Non-Cooperators, 95 ; stay away from polls, 26, 27 ; criticism by, 47, 77 ; split in party, 92, 93; methods of, 1 15-120, 125, 128; results of agi¬ tation, 1 15-120, 129; seek imprisonment, 118, 1 19. Non-violence, 94, 104, 108, 1 15-120, 126. O’Dwyer, Sir Michael, 142. Orientalizers, 199, 200. Padisson, George W., Commissioner of Labor in Madras, 6, 224; ef¬ forts in behalf of “un¬ touchables,” 225. Parsis, representation, 21 ; business talent, 86; in Bombay riot, 126; fate of, if British leave In¬ dia, 190; Towers of Si¬ lence, 207; number, 217. Parties, political, 91, 92. Patiala, Maharaja of, 70. Peel, Viscount, 15. Philippines (see Filipi¬ nos). Pratt, F., Commissioner at AhmedabadJ 132. Prince of Wales, 2, 3, 126, 236. Princes, Indian (see Ma¬ harajas). Provincial Governments, powers, 19, 80; legisla¬ tive councils of, 27. Provincial Councils, 10, 56, 93; debate in English, 176; unwise criticism of, 238. Punjab, 71, 141-143, 216. Puri, Raja of, 74. “Race Hatred,” 4, 48, 78, 108, 155, 237; Indians accuse British of arro¬ gance, 149, 150, 15 1 ; how shown, 157, 158; in America, 187. Rai, Lala Lajpat, 28, 173. Railways, State Owner¬ ship, 53- Ramayana, 197, 198. Rangachariar, Rao Baha- dur, T.,37, 39,49, 54,55. Reading, Lord, Viceroy of India, 235 ; character, 12, 109, no, relations with Montagu, 15 ; criti¬ cism, 43—46 ; interview with Gandhi, 106, 109; convictions, no; pro¬ claims race equality in India, 151. INDEX Religion, in politics, 21, 209 ; power in India, 67, 68, 99, 177; fanaticism, 141, 205, 207, affects so¬ cial relations, 156, 157; effect of education on, 170, 173; material as¬ pects of, 195; general discussion, 206-218 ; sut¬ tee rite, 208 ; child mur¬ der, 208; substitute for nationalities, 217. “Repressive Measures,” 41, 114, 1 15, 122. “Reserved Subjects/* 19, 27, 29, 30. Residents, at the court of Indian Princes, 70, 71, 72, 73> 74, 75. Ripon, Lord, plans for In¬ dia, 183-186. Risley, Sir. H. H., 202, 226, 227, 229. Ronaldshay, Lord, Gover¬ nor of Bengal, 27, 28. “Round Table” Group, 13, 14. Rowlatt Acts, 48, 140, 146. Roy, Ananda Chandra, 86. Saklatvalla, Mr., 155. Samarth, N. M., 50. Sanskrit Literature, 196, 197. 25i Sapru, Sir Tej Bahadur, 1 57; Sastri, Rt. Hon., V. S., Srinivasa, II, 93, 134. Secretary of State, as re¬ former, 9 ; policy of Lord Peel, 15; Council, 18; responsible, 44. “Servants of India/* 212. Shekhanagar, 120, 125, 126. Sinha, Lord, 84, 157, 203. Sikhs, representation, 21 ; number, 217. Simla, 38, 49. Social relations, English and Indian, 154, 155, 156; difficulties of, 156- 158; importance, 160. “Soul force/* 104, 105, 106, 108, 147. Sovereignty, division of, 20. Spinning wheel, Gandhi’s emblem, 108, 117, 118, 178. Sudra, 221. “Swaraj” (self rule), 1, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 103, 107, 113, 118, 125, 135; should come gradually, 220, 221 ; the kind de¬ sired by C. R. Das, 234. Sydenham, Lord, 81. 252 INDEX Tagore, Rabindranath, 1 14, 134, 147, 173, 203, 206 ; on Dyer debates, 143, 144; on race con¬ flict, 162; on British government, 191 ; op¬ posed to caste, 227. Taj Mahal, 201. Tatas, 86, 155, 163. Taxes, 41, 42, 162. Theosophists, 199, 200. Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 173. Titles, granted to Indians, 29. “Transferred Subjects/’ 19, 27, 29, 30. Turkey, 145, 146. United Provinces, 27, 71. “Untouchables,” 53, 76, 107, 108, 217; restric¬ tions upon, 224, British government tries to help, 225 ; numbers, 225. Upanishads, 199. Vaisya, 221. Viceroy, as reformer, 9, 183-186; Legislative Council of, 10; powers under Government of India Act, 30, 80; Ex¬ ecutive Council, 37, 46; Budget action, 42, 43- 47 ; relations with native states, 7 1, 78, 82; Lord Curzon as, 204. Vincent, Sir William, 37, 39, 48, 49. Willingdon, Lord, gover¬ nor of Madras, 17, 154, 235. Whyte, Sir Frederick, President of the Legis¬ lative Assembly, 37, 38, 39. 49, 57. 61, 156. Wood-Forbes report, on Philippine Government, 188, 189. Yogi, 196, 198, 199, 200, 210, 218. Zacharias, Dr., 212. Zamindars, 86.