The Indian Ferment. Ii
I
THE outstanding leader of the Indian masses in the last few troubled years has been Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and of him I found the greatest differences of opinion. Is he politician, demagogue, or saint? Dr. Jekyll 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 attention made him ‘ vain of power’ ? To answer these questions, I read all I could find of his writings, and better still I went to see him.
It was at Ahmadabad, during the late December meeting of the AllIndian 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 Ahmadabad, 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 covered with Indian woven cotton cloth, or Khadi. 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 skull cap, hopelessly inartistic, but the token of submission to the will of the great ‘Mahatma.’
As we neared the Congress Hall, with the giant spinning wheel before it, — Gandhi’s device for winning 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 enthusiastic Indians shouting: ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jail’ (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 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 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 Jayaker had told me of Gandhi’s ‘selflessness,’ — a word his admirers never omit, — of his gentleness, his piety and religious fervor. 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 gates of an Indian village, and determine by lot which would be announced as a mahatma, it would not make the least 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 question.’ It is true that Gandhi has more than once declared that he is not a mahatma; but his followers insist upon the title.
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.’ It is railways, lawyers, and doctors, he declares, that 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. ‘ Railways 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 practically disappeared. He clinches his argument against railways by asserting: ‘Good travels at a snail’s pace — it can therefore have little to do with railways, . . . but evil has wings.’ — ‘God set a limit to a man’s locomotive ambition in the construction of his body.’
It is not the railroads 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 indulge in luxuries, take up such professions.’ If law ‘ pleaders were to abandon their profession and consider 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 unhinged us. Sometimes I think that quacks are better than highly qualified doctors.’ Diseases arise by our own negligence or indulgence. ‘ I overeat; I have indigestion; I go to a doctor; he gives me medicine; I am cured; I overeat 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 institutions for propagating sin.’ The Mahatma’s pure reason is never marred 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.
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, 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 westernized . . . but India is still sound at the foundation.’ He glories in the fact that ’we have managed with the same kind of plough that existed thousands of years ago.’ Indeed, I can testify that, while traveling 5000 miles in India, going out frequently into the country districts, I never saw a modern plough, or a reaper and binder, or a threshing machine, or any agricultural implement not used by the sons of Abraham 3000 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 survive 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.’ 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 presence in India at all possible. Your hatred against them,’ Gandhi counsels his followers, ‘ought to be transferred to their civilization.’ When they 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 ourselves. It is a cowardly thought, that of killing others. Those who are intoxicated by the wretched modern civilization think these things.’
He would therefore simply use ‘loveforce, soul-force,’ or passive resistance. That plan 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 charge with lowered spears and come thundering down upon the prostrate Indians. He sat, in an agony of suspense, until word came by telephone that the passive resistors had broken and fled, clearing miles of the 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.’ PoliceInspector Griffith was discussing with Gandhi the punishment of criminals, which the reformer 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 54 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.
He would, therefore, resist evil by deliberate self-suffering, not deliberate injuring of the wrongdoer.
In one of his famous interviews with the Viceroy, the Mahatma had argued against repressive 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 dispensation.’
Yet this ‘Grand Old Fanatic,’ as one of his deepest 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 its vanities. With all his maddening unreason there is about him something fundamentally right-minded. 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 of its worst features. He has attacked fearlessly some of the worst evils of Hinduism. Whatever one may think of noncooperation 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 hundred years of dreaming ‘in slavery,’ — as agitators love to call the British late benevolent absolutism, — to a pride that will not tolerate assumed superiority.
When, as I was leaving India, I heard of Gandhi’s 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 lovableness, 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, undefiled, 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, or the courage to face the criticism of those who gnashed their teeth at his delays. 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. Though keen in his 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 demand, but waiting for a policy. He had two firm convictions: one, that civilized society rests on respect for law — that was Gandhi’s Nemesis; the other, that legal consideration ought not always to be uppermost in a statesman’s mind — that was Gandhi’s hope. Gandhi’s persistence in civil disobedience 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 criticized 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 Brahmin prerogatives that I might fight the battle for the depressed classes, and who have a reasoned hatred of idols, have felt the religious emotions 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,” they declare.’
It must not be forgotten that for the masses Gandhi is not merely what his own words and conduct would make him, but what his followers, good and bad, have told the most credulous people in the modern world to believe him to be. 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 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.
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 of unprincipled rogues that follows any great movement. Gandhi finds consolation in his nobler followers, 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 are all devoted to admiration of Gandhi. So, too, S. Srinavasa Iyengar, who admitted to me that, at first, he had opposed Gandhi’s noncobpcration, 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 noncoöperators gave the British Government, 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 declared, true to his master’s teaching; ‘we serenely ignore them.’
Nevertheless, the result of Gandhi’s noncoöperation methods is the breeding of hate, as the riots at 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 noncoöperators 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 noncoöperation 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 confessed at Ahmadabad: ‘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 buildings, 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 extent of trying to put its very existence in jeopardy. I seek to paralyze Government.’
In Bombay, a wealthy Parsee 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 necessary.’ When that stage had been reached, it was time for Government to act. His imprisonment, strangely enough, has hardly caused a ripple.
II
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. The acts remained a dead letter, and have 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.
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 Amritzar, and created the impression in the minds of those in the midst of these riots that all the Punjab was in open rebellion — that another Indian mutiny was imminent. The very British understanding of the 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 obtain 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 everdominant religious fanaticism, to a high pitch of reckless fury. No lie can be too crude, no deceit too open, to draw them into insane violence unknown in present-day civilized lands.
Out of this situation came the wellknown ‘Punjab affair,’ General Dyer’s folly, which cost nearly four hundred Indian lives. 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 nothing that Dyer was retired from the service, and that the British Cabinet at last stigmatized his action as transgressing ‘certain standards of conduct which no civilized government can with impunity 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 coöperate with it. In a word, an almost isolated instance of bad judgment and inhumanity by an individual was made to suffice as an indictment for a whole régime. 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.
With this ‘Punjab wrong’ was linked the ‘Khilafat 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 endangered. 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 other 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 exaggeration was indulged in with respect to it. The Honorable 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 noncoöperation campaigns was to pave the way for Revolution in India.’
It is certain that it was necessary in this case, as it was not in the Punjab case, to engage in a propaganda to arouse the interest and sympathy of the masses. Moreover, in this case, English statesmen were victims of historical events beyond their control. Had they been disposed, 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 display the soulforce of India, arrayed against the brute force of the British. Gandhi declared anyone 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 noncoöperation 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 régime. 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-comelexioncd 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 rajah, whose ancestral face must have been aristocratic from the days of Buddha. Opposite sat a dirtyrobed, bare-footed, scowling Pathan, who looked as if he had just cut a throat and was enjoying the recollection of it. 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.’ All tried to impress me with the ineffable sins of the British Government.
The average extremist has only begun when he denounces the ‘Punjab affair’ and the ‘Khilafat wrongs.’ He declares that Government raises too heavy taxes, with which it pays lavish salaries to Englishmen, spends recklessly on the army, and burdens the people with a costly removal of the Government to the mountains during the hot season. Indians are not trained as army officers, and are given only the minor and ill-paid civil offices, the Nationalist asserts. Government allows Indians to be ill-treated in the British colonies, he affirms; ‘Being a foreign government, it is selfish and tyrannical.’ It has, 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. Government has taken the Indian peasant’s land, the trade of the merchant, the industry of the artisan, declares the agitator, and it seeks to root out caste by polluting the sugar and salt that men eat, even the clothes that they wear. 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 population, and making it easier to govern.
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 Conference,’ he showed that this led to killing too many cows, which reduced the draft animals, thus cutting down the acreage ploughed, 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 seventy-seven millions of Mohammedans had so much less effect than that eaten by two hundred thousand Englishmen.
From some noncoöperators 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. 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.
Omitting the Khilafat matter and the Amritzar affair, which 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 temporary errors of judgment as all governments, are likely to commit, or upon unalterable conditions or stupendous facts before which any government would stand appalled. The Indian Government has to meet the needs of a modern state, with the slender resources 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 considered, 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 disappearing 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 banished it.’ 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 question brought India nearer to political competence and national unity than she would in all reason have been without it.
III
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 system because under it has come all our woe.
As for me, the marvel of British rule in India never ceased to appeal to my imagination. In Bombay, or Madras, or Calcutta, the British society, with its British statues, British churches, British conventions, 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 Romans were mere triflers to us.’
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 Parsees would be wiped out of Bombay, the Marwari from Calcutta. Mohammedan would be arrayed against Hindu, Hindu against Moslem. Millions would pay the forfeit, 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 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.
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, 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 passionately: ‘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 discoursing on India’s past. ‘Look at her, worshiping to-day the same gods, keeping to the same civilization, 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 cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite variety.” ’
Sir Surendranath Banerji declared that the ancient Hindus had been the spiritual teachers of the world. This mission has ceased to function, he sadly admitted. ‘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 clashing races; that thrones, dominations, princely ambitions, had for ages wrecked India before the British compelled peace.
IV
Does India stand in the forefront of barbarous nations, or in the vanguard of civilized nations? I don’t know. 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 simple pleasures, and a not unaffectionate family life. Its only outstanding civilized trait in Occidental eyes is its art creations along certain lines. In any native street, one sees beautifully carved columns, beams, lintels; and in the temples and mosques of Northern India one sees architectural beauty unsurpassed 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.
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 charms 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 an 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 inexplicable 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 or want to see again.
That the English have taught these writhing, wriggling, filth-enjoying live things even the rudiments of sanitation is greatly to their credit. I take a reverent attitude before the patience and devotion that has moved fanatical mountains. I have the greatest respect, and even admiration, for many cultured Indians I have met; but my Occidental density renders me wholly unable to see the wonderful spiritual qualities which enthusiasts find in the lower classes of Indians. If I have correctly measured the attainments of Indian civilization, 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 intelligent y take part in their self-government.
Moreover, there is the question whether India 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 selfinterest and family interest to corrode it.’ I have had astounding cases of nepotism in Indian high officials absolutely proved to me. Many emphasize 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.
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 a minister with ‘ backbone and guts ’ — one who will ‘pull his weight and not be afraid of a racket,’ as an English friend expressed it. Nevertheless, I have never felt any doubt that experience would give them the sterner qualities. It is all a matter of being gradually accustomed to the burden.
And 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 giants 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 sympathize; but surely a mere illconsidered try for it, at the frightful cost of universal anarchy, in a country like India, would be ghastly folly.
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. 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 Willingdon, Sir Harcourt Butler, 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 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.
It was unfortunate that the visit of the Prince of Wales focused English attention on India at a time when it was most important that there should be no censorious comment from British sources on the way the new reforms were working.
The rising tide of criticism in England, which swept Lord 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 suggestion that Parliament is saying: ‘Oh, we did not mean to go as 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 Lord 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 subordinate branch of the Imperial Government, six thousand miles away,’ and English criticism of the personnel of the Delhi Legislature, simply pour oil on the flames of Nationalism and race -feeling in India.
This great imperial problem must be solved in India. It is not within the power of any party in England to arrest the movement of political opinion in India. In the present stage, the temper of that opinion is one of the vital factors; and any attempt to reassert the control of the Imperial Parliament too obviously will have a bad effect.