The Way the New India Thinks

by AUBREY MENEN

1

WHEN an Indian comes to the Western world these days, he finds that nobody has read his newspapers, nobody has read his books, and very few people know anything of his national history. This neither surprises nor dismays him. What he does find upsetting is that so many people are sure they know all about the way he thinks. He finds that, broadly speaking, two opinions prevail. No sooner has he finished with the ordinary courtesies on meeting a European or an American than either 1) he will be told that he and all his countrymen have great spiritual depths and will save the world by the exercise of their psychic powers—and here there is often a vague impression conveyed of saints in white robes floating through the air — or 2) he will be denounced as a fool who is blindly preparing to hand India over to the Communists.

There are 400 million Indians. In that large number there will be found, of course, some saints and a fair sprinkling of fools. But the normal Indian feels that he is far from being either. He regards himself as a typical member of the civilized portion of the human race; and since Indians make up one fifth of that community, it must be admitted that there is much to be said for his point of view.

He will have some difficulty in getting his point of view adopted, I know. But I think it highly important that he should. There are two ways of remaining in a stale of dangerous ignorance about another nation: the first is to have too high hopes about it; the second is to have too low an opinion. The West has adopted both concerning India, and it is worth taking some pains to correct matters.

I once assisted at a merciless experiment in brainwashing. The object was to make a group of intelligent young Indians say that a certain proposition was absolutely true when they were denied all means of knowing whether the statement was true or false; moreover, they had to state their belief with convincing arguments and genuine enthusiasm. The brainwashing was a complete success.

I should first explain that the young men were all born and bred in the climate of Bombay, where it is hot and dry for nine months of the year and where it rains torrenthilly for the remaining three. There is no other change of season. The boldness — and the inhumanity—of the experiment was this: after several months of daily indoctrination these young men were supposed to declare, and to show every sign of believing, that John Keats’s “To Autumn” was a great and true poem. They did. I was shown their written answers by one of their chief inquisitors, a professor of English literature at Bombay University, and asked to admire his handiwork. His ravages had been complete; their brains had not only been washed but scoured till they shone with perfect reflection of his own ideas. But I could not help protesting at the human anguish that lay behind the triumph. What could the unfortunates have made of “Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness ” who had never seen a mist ? Or of “the soft dying day” when they had seen nothing but blood-red, ten-minute sunsets? Or, indeed, of “redbreasts”? With what agony must these boys, sweltering in the heat of May, have echoed the poet’s cry, “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?” They were all, poor devils, made Bachelors of Art .

On August 15, 1947, these young men and thousands who had suffered before them were told that they were free men and the intellectual leaders of one fifth of the human race. It is plain that the world faced disaster. No group of people as ignorant or as badly educated had come to power since the Homans found themselves masters of Italy. But the Homans were more fortunate: they knew how to make war, and they had been accustomed to governing themselves. The leaders of India had been forbidden to do either. Instead of fighting, they had paraphrased Sir Walter Scott; instead of politics, they had been told to read Shelley.

2

THE man who was responsible for the extraordinary system of education that I have described was Thomas Babington Macaulay. When India became an Imperial possession, he was asked to go out there to prescribe what the new subjects of the Crown should be taught. He took ship, and sailed East with a cabinful of books. These were translations of the major works of Hindu civilization. By the time he had rounded the Cape of Good Hope he had read the lot and decided that they were all rubbish. On arrival in India he had made up his mind that the inhabitants should henceforth be educated in a foreign language which they should be taught by means of studying a foreign literature; that is to say, they were to be taught English literature in the English language. They were to be taught nothing whatever that was Indian. He explained this in a Minute on Education, which was adopted.

This enormity was put straight in our own times by a great man. With the simplicity that often goes with greatness, this man reminded Indians of an elementary fact. He told them that they had no need to try to think like Englishmen; they could perfectly well think like themselves. They had been doing so for several centuries before the English had conquered them, and they could do it again. He was right. An Indian shot him dead for his pains, but India is at last beginning to follow his advice.

This man was Mahatma Gandhi. No Indian has been so widely known in the West as he, and none found more of a puzzle. Those who revered him as a great Indian were sorry that he often behaved so like a Western politician. Those who admired him as a statesman were irritated at his Oriental ways. But to Indians he was no puzzle at all. He was the final product, and the first destroyer, of Macaulay’s huge mistake.

I should like to explain this by two brief glimpses of him, as I knew him.

In the first he sits wrapped in a shawl and a dhoti next to a gas fire turned so high that blue flames are coming out of the asbestos heaters. But he is cold, because this is London. The room is owned by Mr. J. F. Horrabin, a Socialist M.P., and it is filled with people. We stand, or squat at Gandhi’s feet. Behind me is Ernest Bevin, a future Foreign Secretary; on the floor or against the walls are future cabinet ministers, from chancellor of the exchequer downwards. In a few years these men will give India what Gandhi is asking for — her freedom. They are now questioning him, respectfully but searchingly. Gandhi answers them one by one. He gives good answers, but they are lawyer’s answers. He speaks in a studied, clear, colloquial English. He smiles, but is not witty. There is no magic; there is no magnetism; there is no personal electricity. Macaulay would have approved of his vocabulary, if not of his accent. John Stuart Mill, Milton, and Byron would have endorsed his sentiments. I am prodded in the back by a trade union leader and prompted to ask the Mahatma if he really believes that India should have no factories. He evades the point. He says that factories are Satanic. The meeting breaks up, and on the way home I remember that his answer had been merely a quotation from William Blake’s “Jerusalem.”

Now, this other picture: Gandhi is without his shawl. He sits on a mud floor and he is hot, because this is India. He is sipping a glass of milk and talking about love. The love he speaks about is not of the philosophical kind: it is fleshly, and forbidden, love between a girl and a young man. The young man squats in front of him, in tears. He has become enamored of a girl who is not of his caste. He and she wish to marry but both families have refused their consent, with horror. He wants to strike a blow for sexual freedom (like Shelley), to break the bonds of caste, and to elope. He is a nobody, a government employee of no great rank. He does not know Gandhi but he has come to Gandhi’s mud hut, told his story at the door, and been admitted. Outside, in the sunshine, waits a foreign correspondent of the New York Times, because the world is at war, and India is boiling with rebellion. The correspondent is not interested in love affairs, but Gandhi is. The correspondent waits, therefore, in the sun, while Gandhi, sipping his milk, gives the young man advice.

“You must marry her, but you must not elope.”

“No, Gandhiji. What shall I do, then?”

“You must convince your mother that she is wrong.”

“But . . .”

“And then you must convince the girl’s mother.”

“But Gandhiji . . .”

“And then, my son,” and here the old man smiles enchantingly, “they will both give you their blessings and you will live happily ever after.”

“But it is impossible, Gandhiji! They are ignorant; they are prejudiced . . .”

“ My son,” says the old man, and now he does not smile at all, “you must not speak to me of your mother in such words.”

Gandhi says nothing more, and sorrowfully the young man goes away.

But the Mahatma, disappointing as he was, was also right. The mothers were, after titanic labors, convinced, and the unorthodox marriage did take place. It is strange, now, to look back and see that Gandhi, at that time, was the only man in India who believed that Indians, including Indian women, like the rest of the civilized world, had their measure of good, plain, common sense, and that this would suffice them to solve their own problems in their own way.

3

GANDHI knew that it would take many years for the people of India to learn their lesson. After all, he had taken half a lifetime to learn his. But now they have learned it. The first important book to be written since Indians began to think for themselves shows this very well. Of its class, it is a masterpiece.

It is over a quarter of a million words in length, and sells for the reasonable price of $1.00. The title is The General Report of the Committee of Direction of the All-India Rural Credit Survey, published by Mahdav Das for the Reserve Bank of India, Bombay. It is about agriculture, and very fittingly: four out of every five Indians who earn their living do so on the land. The typical Indian, therefore, is a peasant. That is why Mahatma Gandhi dressed like one; he went half-naked not because, as Sir Winston Churchill thought, he was a fakir, but because he was a democratic politician.

Everybody in the West has a mental picture of the Indian peasant. It is generally a wrong one. The Indian peasant is, according to this picture, an unfortunate being who is either starving, or living on that picturesque addition to the standard weights and measures, “a handful of rice.” A moment’s thought will show that this picture is purely literary: a starving man cannot till fields with a plow and a yoke of buffaloes, nor can he do a hard day’s work under a boiling sun on “a handful of rice.” Sometimes, it is true, he starves, when there is a famine. But famines, like strikes and epidemics in the West, are fortunately not the normal state of affairs.

Naturally, therefore, the first truly Indian book begins by making short work of this legend. Very nearly one half of the whole population of India, it tells us, are proprietors of their own land. India, then, is not only a country of peasants: it is a country of landed proprietors. I think this a useful fact to remember, especially for people living in rented rooms in London, Paris, New York, and Chicago. It. is difficult to feel a gush of sentiment about landlowners, and the writers of this report are very unsentimental.

They agree, however, that the Indian peasant is poor. But here again, we should be cautious. The poverty of the Indian peasant is not the bread-line hopelessness of the unemployed in a slump; it is not the degrading and endemic want of the Neapolitan slum-dweller. The Indian peasant, may not eat copiously, but he eats enough at most times, and more than enough when times are good. “He is poor,” as this report says, “but he is not bankrupt.”

His trouble is that a peasant needs capital as much as a shopkeeper or a businessman. Like most shopkeepers and businessmen (or householders, for that matter) anywhere in the world, he borrows it. Unlike most businessmen, he borrows it from moneylenders, and the result is that he — half of India, we must remind ourselves — is head over heels in debt.

The British Raj knew this and took steps to put things right. It set up coöperatives. These, run largely by the leading villagers, lent money at easy rates of interest. It was an excellent plan; foreign experts congratulated the Raj upon it, and the Raj, not relying on foreigners, continually congratulated itself. Unfortunately, the result of this plan was that the peasants remained, with peasant obstinacy, as much in debt to the moneylenders as ever. Why?

The Raj sent out teams of Indians to investigate. These, tearing themselves away from robin-redbreasts and spring dawns, came back with the confusing information that, according to the villagers, the scheme was a great success with all concerned; the coöperatives were very popular and the cooperators were very grateful. In some instances, villagers from miles around banded together and waved flags to demonstrate their contentment. Sometime later the Raj found that the peasants were not only still in debt to the moneylenders, but they owed more than ever: worse, the coöperatives, while flourishing in annual reports, were not lending anybody any money.

There the matter rested, a mystery — one of the many such which were held up to young civil servants, fresh out from England, as warnings of the difficulties in dealing with Indians. They never, it was said, told the truth.

But the editors of this report sent investigators, properly trained according to modern methods of inquiry; asked for the truth and finally got it.

The trouble, they found, was that by devious means the moneylenders had made themselves heads of the government coöperatives, and then they had quietly, but efficiently, wrecked them.

How had this chicanery escaped the attention of the Raj and its investigators? The answer is simple: it was a purely Indian fraud and this the English administrators, installed in their offices in remote Delhi, could not foresee.

Now the authors of this report had learned the lesson which Gandhi had taught the young man who had a marriage problem. Gandhi had pointed out that however elevated the young man’s ideals might be, he was an Indian living in an Indian community, and therefore the first thing that he must try was to solve his problem in the context of his community. The authors of the report used, that is to say, their common sense.

They found that the countryside was dominated by caste, and in particular by a group of the upper levels in the caste system. The moneylender and the landlord, the head of the coöperative and its officials, had all the same caste interest, even when they were not all the same man, as they frequently were. They hung together, not only against the peasant, but against the government and against its investigators; in short, they hung together to defeat anybody and everybody but themselves. They even extended their solidarity to the towns; when the peasant wished to market his produce in a wider field, the middlemen and the wholesalers worked hand in glove with the same village tyrants that he suffered underat home.

The Indian caste system rouses, I find, much indignation in liberal Western circles, and I think that I should explain the peasant’s dilemma in terms which may be received more calmly. I, for instance, was born in England. I belong to the middle castes — or middle class, as it is called in the West. My subcaste is that of a writer. Now tenters may eat at the same table as other members of the middle class, and go to the same religious edifices (or churches) as they. But they are not considered (as a subcaste) financially sound. Should I wish to borrow money, I cannot do so from the normal moneylenders to the middle classes, who are a subcaste known as bank managers. I may choose a member of this subcaste who is personally friendly toward me and has no contemptuous feelings toward my caste division, but he will not lend me any money, because it would be against the rules of his own caste community. There will be complete solidarity among all of his caste brethren. None of them will lend me any money.

This drives me to appeal to a lower division of my own caste, the sub-subcaste of publishers. These, having me at their mercy, will lend me money (called an advance) on condition that I sign a bond giving them four fifths of the usufruct of my property. Worse, they will distrain upon that small part of my property that remains to me without any application to the courts whatsoever, until my loan is fully repaid. The reader may well feel that this is a scandalous state of affairs; but, on the other hand, he will also notice that it is taken very calmly by everyone concerned. The reason for this is that, in its way, it works.

It is just so with the Indian caste system in the villages. It is scandalous; yet in its way it works, and that is why it is taken so calmly.

But the Indian peasant, like most Western authors, remains poor and chronically in debt. It is vital that he be freed from this tyranny of moneylenders and caste solidarity. How can this be done? By abolishing the caste system? That is a noblesounding answer. Fortunately, it is not the way that the new India thinks.

Applying the lesson that Gandhi had taught the young man, the authors of this report do not propose a head-on assault upon a national institution. Instead, they propose to go round it. To do this, they call in the state. The state, they say, can set up an organization which can by-pass the caste solidarity of the villages, and thus by-pass the moneylender. It can open banks for agricultural credit, to which the peasant can go, openly and without fear, and borrow the money he wants.

And here there is a surprise in store for those who are quite certain they know how Indians think and that Indians think like the Communists. Their state machine will not take over the land, or dragoon the moneylenders, or collectivize the peasants, or redistribute income. It will act as a battleship once acted when Britain ruled the waves. Its very presence will keep order. The state bank will have large resources but no compulsory powers whatsoever. It will be there to lend money. It does not propose to interfere in the lives of the people at all. Few committees in the West recommending government assistance to the needy have been so modest in their estimate of the powers that they need.

They add one further proposal. It is something of a paradox and wholly Indian. To counteract the machinations of the caste system, they propose to set up what is virtually a caste of their own. Cadres of young men are to be specially trained in an extraordinary and, I think, very imaginative course. They will first be sent to the villages, where they will learn to be good farmers, then to schools where they will learn to be sound bankers. These bankerfarmers will then be dispersed to rural centers, full of a caste mystique of their own, to administer the new scheme, on very moderate salaries. As I have shown, they will not have the power to become tyrants; and it is unlikely, on the other hand, that, many moneylenders will enroll themselves in such an austere and devoted band.

On the 11th of May of this year the necessary legislation was passed and the scheme is under way. A. D. Gorwala, D. R. Gadgii, B. Yenkatappiah, N. S. R. Sastry, and Mahdav Das are the men who have provided us with this excellent sample of the new, realistic, and pragmatical Indian mind. They are all economists. For those in the West who are sure that Indians have exotic spiritual gifts to offer the world, this fact will come as something of a disappointment. But such disappointments will become, I am afraid, more frequent as the new India reveals itself. Indians have another burden besides that laid on them by Macaulay. All countries have their religious absurdities, but India has had more than most—so many, in fact, that she has consistently exported them in t he shape of swamis. The West is not to be blamed if it has formed its opinion of India from men such as these. But it is my pleasure and my privilege to draw your attention, instead, to Messrs. Gorwala, Gadgil, Venkatappiah, Sastry, and Das. I have not met the first four persons, but the last is my cousin, and I am happy to assure you that he has no spiritual gifts at all.