Part 18 (1/2)
[235] J. Ramsay Macdonald, _The Government of India_, p. 133 (London, 1920).
[236] In _The Hindustan Review_ (Calcutta), 1917.
[237] Good examples are found in the writings of Mukerjee and Lajpat Rai, already quoted.
[238] G. Lowes d.i.c.kinson, _An Essay on the Civilizations of India, China, and j.a.pan_, pp. 84-85 (London, 1914).
CHAPTER VIII
SOCIAL CHANGE
The momentous nature of the contemporary transformation of the Orient is nowhere better attested than by the changes effected in the lives of its peoples. That dynamic influence of the West which is modifying governmental forms, political concepts, religious beliefs, and economic processes is proving equally potent in the range of social phenomena. In the third chapter of this volume we attempted a general survey of Western influence along all the above lines. In the present chapter we shall attempt a detailed consideration of the social changes which are to-day taking place.
These social changes are very great, albeit many of them may not be so apparent as the changes in other fields. So firm is the hold of custom and tradition on individual, family, and group life in the Orient that superficial observers of the East are p.r.o.ne to a.s.sert that these matters are still substantially unaltered, however p.r.o.nounced may have been the changes on the external, material side. Yet such is not the opinion of the closest students of the Orient, and it is most emphatically not the opinion of Orientals themselves. These generally stress the profound social changes which are going on.
And it is their judgments which seem to be the more correct. To say that the East is advancing ”materially” but standing still ”socially” is to ignore the elemental truth that social systems are altered quite as much by material things as by abstract ideas. Who that looks below the surface can deny the social, moral, and civilizing power of railroads, post-offices, and telegraph lines? Does it mean nothing socially as well as materially that the East is adopting from the West a myriad innovations, weighty and trivial, important and frivolous, useful and baneful? Does it mean nothing socially as well as materially that the Prophet's tomb at Medina is lit by electricity and that picture post-cards are sold outside the Holy Kaaba at Mecca? It may seem mere grotesque piquancy that the muezzin should ride to the mosque in a tram-car, or that the Moslem business man should emerge from his harem, read his morning paper, motor to an office equipped with a prayer-rug, and turn from his devotions to dictaphone and telephone. Yet why a.s.sume that his life is moulded by mosque, harem, and prayer-rug, and yet deny the things of the West a commensurate share in the shaping of his social existence? Now add to these tangible innovations intangible novelties like scientific education, Occidental amus.e.m.e.nts, and the partial emanc.i.p.ation of women, and we begin to get some idea of the depth and scope of the social transformation which is going on.
In those parts of the Orient most open to Western influences this social transformation has attained notable proportions for more than a generation. When the Hungarian Orientalist Vambery returned to Constantinople in 1896 after forty years' absence, he stood amazed at the changes which had taken place, albeit Constantinople was then subjected to the worst repression of the Hamidian regime. ”I had,” he writes, ”continually to ask myself this question: Is it possible that these are my Turks of 1856; and how can all these transformations have taken place? I was astonished at the aspect of the city; at the stone buildings which had replaced the old wooden ones; at the animation of the streets, in which carriages and tram-cars abounded, whereas forty years before only saddle-animals were used; and when the strident shriek of the locomotive mingled with the melancholy calls from the minarets, all that I saw and heard seemed to me a living protest against the old adage: 'La bidaat fil Islam'--'There is nothing to reform in Islam.' My astonishment became still greater when I entered the houses and was able to appreciate the people, not only by their exteriors but still more by their manner of thought. The effendi cla.s.s[239] of Constantinople seemed to me completely transformed in its conduct, outlook, and att.i.tude toward foreigners.”[240]
Vambery stresses the inward as well as outward evolution of the Turkish educated cla.s.ses, for he says: ”Not only in his outward aspect, but also in his home-life, the present-day Turk shows a strong inclination to the manners and habits of the West, in such varied matters as furniture, table-manners, s.e.x-relations, and so forth. This is of the very greatest significance. For a people may, to be sure, a.s.similate foreign influences in the intellectual field, if it be persuaded of their utility and advantage; but it gives up with more difficulty customs and habits which are in the blood. One cannot over-estimate the numerous sacrifices which, despite everything, the Turks have made in this line.
I find all Turkish society, even the Mollahs,[241] penetrated with the necessity of a union with Western civilization. Opinions may differ as to the method of a.s.similation: some wish to impress on the foreign civilization a national character; others, on the contrary, are partisans of our intellectual culture, such as it is, and reprobate any kind of modification.”[242]
Most significant of all, Vambery found even the secluded women of the harems, ”those bulwarks of obscurantism,” notably changed. ”Yes, I repeat, the life of women in Turkey seems to me to have been radically transformed in the last forty years, and it cannot be denied that this transformation has been produced by internal conviction as much as by external pressure.” Noting the spread of female education, and the increasing share of women in reform movements, Vambery remarks: ”This is of vital importance, for when women shall begin to act in the family as a factor of modern progress, real reforms, in society as well as in the state, cannot fail to appear.”[243]
In India a similar permeation of social life by Westernism is depicted by the Moslem liberal, S. Khuda Bukhsh, albeit Mr. Bukhsh, being an insider, lays greater emphasis upon the painful aspects of the inevitable transition process from old to new. He is not unduly pessimistic, for he recognizes that ”the age of transition is necessarily to a certain extent an age of laxity of morals, indifference to religion, superficial culture, and gossiping levity. These are pa.s.sing ills which time itself will cure.” Nevertheless, he does not minimize the critical aspects of the present situation, which implies nothing less than the breakdown of the old social system. ”The clearest result of this breakdown of our old system of domestic life and social customs under the a.s.sault of European ideas,” he says, ”is to be found in two directions--in our religious beliefs and in our social life. The old system, with all its faults, had many redeeming virtues.” To-day this old system, narrow-minded but G.o.d-fearing, has been replaced by a ”strange independence of thought and action. Reverence for age, respect for our elders, deference to the opinions of others, are fast disappearing.... Under the older system the head of the family was the sole guide and friend of its members. His word had the force of law. He was, so to speak, the custodian of the honour and prestige of the family. From this exalted position he is now dislodged, and the most junior member now claims equality with him.”[244]
Mr. Bukhsh deplores the current wave of extravagance, due to the wholesale adoption of European customs and modes of living. ”What,” he asks, ”has happened here in India? We have adopted European costume, European ways of living, even the European vices of drinking and gambling, but none of their virtues. This must be remedied. We must learn at the feet of Europe, but not at the sacrifice of our Eastern individuality. But this is precisely what we have not done. We have dabbled a little in English and European history, and we have commenced to despise our religion, our literature, our history, our traditions. We have unlearned the lessons of our history and our civilization, and in their place we have secured nothing solid and substantial to hold society fast in the midst of endless changes.” In fine: ”Destruction has done its work, but the work of construction has not yet begun.”[245]
Like Vambery, Bukhsh lays strong emphasis on the increasing emanc.i.p.ation of women. No longer regarded as mere ”child-bearing machines,” the Mohammedan women of India ”are getting educated day by day, and now a.s.sert their rights. Though the purdah system[246] still prevails, it is no longer that severe, stringent, and unreasonable seclusion of women which existed fifty years ago. It is gradually relaxing, and women are getting, step by step, rights and liberties which must in course of time end in the complete emanc.i.p.ation of Eastern womanhood. Forty years ago women meekly submitted to neglect, indifference, and even harsh treatment from their husbands, but such is the case no longer.”[247]
These two descriptions of social conditions in the Near and Middle East respectively enable one to get a fair idea of the process of change which is going on. Of course it must not be forgotten that both writers deal primarily with the educated upper cla.s.ses of the large towns.
Nevertheless, the leaven is working steadily downward, and with every decade is affecting wider strata of the native populations.
The spread of Western education in the East during the past few decades has been truly astonis.h.i.+ng, because it is the exact ant.i.thesis of the Oriental educational system. The traditional ”education” of the entire Orient, from Morocco to China, was a mere memorizing of sacred texts combined with exercises of religious devotion. The Mohammedan or Hindu student spent long years reciting to his master (a ”holy man”) interminable pa.s.sages from books which, being written in cla.s.sic Arabic or Sanskrit, were unintelligible to him, so that he usually did not understand a word of what he was saying. No more deadening system for the intellect could possibly have been devised. Every part of the brain except the memory atrophied, and the wonder is that any intellectual initiative or original thinking ever appeared.
Even to-day the old system persists, and millions of young Orientals are still wasting their time at this mind-petrifying nonsense. But alongside the old there has arisen a new system, running the whole educational gamut from kindergartens to universities, where Oriental youth is being educated along Western lines. These new-type educational establishments are of every kind. Besides schools and universities giving a liberal education and fitting students for government service or the professions, there are numerous technical schools turning out skilled agriculturists or engineers, while good normal schools a.s.sure a supply of teachers qualified to instruct coming student-generations. Both public and private effort furthers Western education in the East. All the European governments have favoured Western education in the lands under their control, particularly the British in India and Egypt, while various Christian missionary bodies have covered the East with a network of schools and colleges. Also many Oriental governments like Turkey and the native states of India have made sincere efforts to spread Western education among their peoples.[248]
Of course, as in any new development, the results so far obtained are far from ideal. The vicious traditions of the past handicap or partially pervert the efforts of the present. Eastern students are p.r.o.ne to use their memories rather than their intellects, and seek to cram their way quickly through examinations to coveted posts rather than acquire knowledge and thus really fit themselves for their careers. The result is that many fail, and these unfortunates, half-educated and spoiled for any sort of useful occupation, vegetate miserably, come to hate that Westernism which they do not understand, and give themselves up to anarchistic revolutionary agitation. Sir Alfred Lyall well describes the dark side of Western education in the East when he says of India: ”Ignorance is unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural that in the last century certain philosophers should have a.s.sumed education to be a certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen like Macaulay should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case, it was the clear and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the intellectual emanc.i.p.ation of India as the best justification of British rule. We have since discovered by experience, that, although education is a sovereign remedy for many ills--is indeed indispensable to healthy progress--yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the disappointment is bitterly resented.”[249]
Indeed, some Western observers of the Orient, particularly colonial officials, have been so much impressed by the political and social dangers arising from the existence of this ”literate proletariat” of semi-educated failures that they are tempted to condemn the whole venture of Western education in the East as a mistake. Lord Cromer, for example, was decidedly sceptical of the worth of the Western-educated Egyptian,[250] while a prominent Anglo-Indian official names as the chief cause of Indian unrest, ”the system of education, which we ourselves introduced--advisedly so far as the limited vision went of those responsible; blindly in view of the inevitable consequences.”[251]
Yet these pessimistic judgments do not seem to make due allowance for the inescapable evils attendant on any transition stage. Other observers of the Orient have made due allowance for this factor. Vambery, for instance, notes the high percentage of honest and capable native officials in the British Indian and French North African civil service (the bulk of these officials, of course, Western-educated men), and concludes: ”Strictly conservative Orientals, and also fanatically inclined Europeans, think that with the entrance of our culture the primitive virtues of the Asiatics have been destroyed, and that the uncivilized Oriental was more faithful, more honest, and more reliable than the Asiatic educated on European principles. This is a gross error.
It may be true of the half-educated, but not of the Asiatic in whose case the intellectual evolution is founded on the solid basis of a thorough, systematic education.”[252]
And, whatever may be the ills attendant upon Western education in the East, is it not the only practicable course to pursue? The impact of Westernism upon the Orient is too ubiquitous to be confined to books.
Granting, therefore, for the sake of argument, that colonial governments could have prevented Western education in the formal sense, would not the Oriental have learned in other ways? Surely it is better that he should learn through good texts under the supervision of qualified teachers, rather than tortuously in perverted--and more dangerous--fas.h.i.+on.
The importance of Western education in the East is nowhere better ill.u.s.trated than in the effects it is producing in ameliorating the status of women. The depressed condition of women throughout the Orient is too well known to need elaboration. Bad enough in Mohammedan countries, it is perhaps at its worst among the Hindus of India, with child-marriage, the virtual enslavement of widows (burned alive till prohibited by English law), and a seclusion more strict even than that of the ”harem” of Moslem lands. As an English writer well puts it: ”'Ladies first,' we say in the West; in the East it is 'ladies last.'
That sums up succinctly the difference in the domestic ideas of the two civilizations.”[253]