Part 3 (2/2)

This was perhaps the most forcible of the British administrator's arguments, and it was an honest one. Another was that the Western-educated Indians were mainly drawn from the towns and from a narrow circle of professional cla.s.ses in the towns, who could not therefore speak on behalf of and still less control the destinies of a vast population, overwhelmingly agricultural, regarding whose interests they had hitherto shown themselves both ignorant and indifferent, and from whom the very education which const.i.tuted their main t.i.tle to consideration had tended to separate and estrange them. The land-owning gentry and the peasantry had so far scarcely been touched by this political agitation. The peasantry knew little or nothing of its existence. The land-owners feared it, for, having themselves for the most part kept aloof from modern education, and shrinking instinctively from the limelight of political controversies and such electioneering compet.i.tions as they had already been drawn into for munic.i.p.al and local government purposes, they felt themselves hopelessly handicapped in a struggle that threatened their traditional prestige and authority as well as their material interests. What they dreaded most of all was the ascendancy of the lawyer cla.s.s in this new political movement--the _Vakil-Raj_, as they called it--for they had in many instances already been made to feel how heavy the hand of the lawyer could be upon them in a country so p.r.o.ne to litigation as India, and endowed with so costly and complicated a system of jurisprudence and procedure, if they ventured to place themselves in opposition to the political aspirations of ambitious lawyers. Above all, the British administrator, who rightly held the maintenance of a strict balance between the different creeds and communities of India to be an essential part of his mission, felt strong in the undivided support which his conception of his responsibilities and duties received from the Mahomedans of India. Then, and almost into the second decade of this century, a community forming a fifth of the whole population professed itself absolutely opposed to any surrender of British authority which, it was convinced, would enure solely to the benefit of its hated Hindu rivals, far more supple and far more advanced in all knowledge of the West, including political agitation. The Mahomedans had held aloof from the Congress. They still had no definite political organisation of their own; they were content with the British _raj_ and wanted nothing else.

The British administrator was therefore not altogether unwarranted in his conviction that in standing in the ancient ways he had behind him not only the tacit a.s.sent of the inarticulate ma.s.ses but the positive support of very important cla.s.ses and communities. He knew also that he had with him, besides unofficial European opinion in India, almost solid on his side, the sympathy, however vague and uninformed, of the bulk of his own countrymen at home, represented for a great part of the fifty years now under review by a succession of conservative parliaments and governments. There were no longer, as in the East India Company days, periodical inquests into the state of India to wind up Parliament to a concert pitch of sustained and vigilant interest in Indian affairs. The very few legislators who exhibited any persistent curiosity about Indian administration were regarded for the most part as cranks or bores, and the annual statement on the Indian budget was usually made before almost empty benches. Only questions that raised large issues of foreign policy, such as Afghan expeditions and the Russian menace in Asia Minor, or that affected the considerable commercial interests at home, like the Indian cotton duties or currency and exchange, would intermittently stir British public opinion inside and outside Parliament, and these often chiefly as occasions for party warfare. Ministers themselves appeared to be mainly concerned with the part which India had to play in their general scheme of Imperial and Asiatic policy rather than with the methods by which India was governed. These could be safely left to ”the man on the spot.”

Very different had been the spirit in which British parliaments and governments had discharged their responsibilities before the transfer of India to the Crown, and rude was the awakening for the British administrator in India and for British ministers at home when the explosion that followed the Part.i.tion of Bengal revealed a very different India that was in process of evolution with much and dangerous travail out of the reaction of new forces, hitherto almost un.o.bserved, upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as negligible quant.i.ties.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A detailed and learned study of these movements is found in Dr.

J.N. Farquhar's _Modern Religious Movements in India_, published by the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST

Amongst the Western-educated cla.s.ses the new forces which had been turning the minds of young India towards _Swaraj_ as the watchword of national unity and independence had drawn much of their inspiration from text-books which taught them how large a share Nationalism had played in redeeming modern nations from alien oppression and in shaping the whole political evolution of Europe. It had emanc.i.p.ated the Balkan States from the alien thraldom of the Ottoman Sultans; it had helped to unify Italy and Germany; it had been a potent if less apparent factor in welding Great Britain and the distant colonies peopled by the British race into a great British Empire. Had not Indians also a common nationhood which, despite all racial and religious differences, could be traced back across centuries of internal strife and foreign domination to a period, remote indeed but none the less enviable, when they had been their own masters? Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest barriers to India's national unity--the multiplicity of her vernaculars--by giving English to the Western-educated cla.s.ses as a common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never have found expression, and such an a.s.sembly of Indians from all parts of India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National Congress itself would have been an impossibility? Great events, moreover, had been happening quite recently which tended to shake the Indians' belief in the irresistible superiority of Western civilisation even in its material aspects. The disaster inflicted upon an Italian army at Adowa in 1894 by the Abyssinians--a backward African people scarcely known except for the ease with which a British expedition had chastised them not thirty years before--was perhaps the first of these events to awaken observant Indians to the fact that European arms were not necessarily invincible. The resistance put up for nearly three years by two small South African Republics, strong chiefly in their indomitable pride of nationhood, seemed to have strained the resources even of the British Empire, and j.a.pan, an Asiatic power only recently emerged from obscurity, had just proved on land and sea that an Asiatic nation in possession of her national independence could equip herself to meet and overcome one of the greatest of European powers--one whose vast ambitions const.i.tuted in the eyes of generations of British statesmen a grave menace to the safety of India itself. Was England really mightier than Russia? Had she not also perhaps feet of clay? Was British rule to endure for ever? Was it not a weak point in England's armour that she had to rely not a little on Indian troops, whom she still treated as mercenaries, to fight her battles even in such distant countries as China and the Sudan, and upon still more numerous legions of Indians in every branch of the civil administration to carry out all the menial work of government? If the Indians, untrained, and indeed forbidden, to bear arms, were unable at once to overthrow British rule, could they not at least paralyse its machinery, as Bepin Chandra Pal was preaching, by refusing to take any kind of service under it?

To such interpretations of contemporary events young Indians, who at school read Burke and Byron and Mill ”On Liberty,” and in secret the lives of Garibaldi and Mazzini, were bound to be receptive, and they soon reached from a different base along different lines the same ground on which the old orthodox foes not only of British rule but of Western civilisation stood who appealed to the Baghavat-Ghita and exhorted India to seek escape from the foreign domination that had enslaved her, body and soul, by clinging to the social and religious ark of Hinduism which in her golden age had made her wise and wealthy and free beyond all the nations of the earth.

The stronghold of orthodox reaction was in the Mahratta Deccan, and its stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never forgiven us for s.n.a.t.c.hing the cup of power from their lips just when they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp. First and foremost of them all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the _Kesari_, _i.e._ ”The Lion,” how to play on religious as well as on racial sentiment. He first took the field against the Hindu Social Reformers who dared to support Lord Lansdowne's Age of Consent Bill, and his rabid campaign against them developed quickly into an equally rabid campaign against British rule. He appealed to the pride of his Mahratta people by reviving the cult of s.h.i.+vaji, the great Mahratta chieftain who first raised the standard of Hindu revolt against Mahomedan domination, and he appealed to their religious pa.s.sions by placing under the patronage of their favourite deities a national movement for boycotting British-imported goods and manufactures which, under the name of _Swades.h.i.+_, was to be the first step towards _Swaraj_. He it was too who for the first time imported into schools and colleges the ferment of political agitation, and presided at bonfires which schoolboys and students fed with their European text-books and European clothes. The movement died down for a time after the murder of two British officials in Poona on the night of Queen Victoria's second jubilee in 1897 and the sentencing of Tilak himself shortly afterwards to a term of imprisonment on a charge of seditious and inflammatory writing. But the Part.i.tion of Bengal was to give him the opportunity of transplanting his doctrines and his methods from the Deccan to the most prosperous province in India.

The Part.i.tion of Bengal was a measure harmless enough on the face of it for splitting up into two administrative units a huge province with some 70 million inhabitants which had outgrown the capacities of a single provincial government. But the Bengalees are a singularly sensitive race. They were intensely proud of their province as the senior of the three great ”Presidencies” of India, of their capital as the capital city of India and the seat of Viceregal Government, and of their Calcutta University as the first and greatest of Indian Universities, though already menaced, they declared, by Lord Curzon's Universities Act. They resented the Part.i.tion, against which they had no remedy, as a wanton _diminutio capitis_ inflicted upon them by a despotic Viceroy bent on chastising them for the prominent part played by their leaders in pressing the claims of India to political emanc.i.p.ation from bureaucratic leading-strings. That in the new province of Eastern Bengal, which was to be created by the Part.i.tion, the Mahomedans would const.i.tute a large majority and enjoy advantages. .h.i.therto denied to them as a minority in the undivided province was an added grievance for the Hindus. Lord Curzon had not at first been unpopular with the Western-educated cla.s.ses. They recognised his great intellectual gifts and admired his majestic eloquence. But continuing to fasten their hopes on the Liberal party in England, they had quickly followed its lead in attacking him as a dangerous Imperialist, whose Tibetan adventure was saddling the Indian tax-payer with the costs of his aggressive foreign policy, and they required no promptings to denounce as the sworn foe of India a Viceroy who had not only sought to restrict the statutory freedom of their University, but, as its Chancellor, used language into which they read a deliberate insult to the Bengalee character. By part.i.tioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee ”nation” and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose honour the old invocation to the G.o.ddess Kali, ”_Bande Materam_,” or ”Hail to the Mother,” acquired a new significance and came to be used as the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism. To that war-cry public meetings were organised in Calcutta and all over the province. The native press teemed with denunciatory articles. The wildest rumours were set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which part.i.tion portended.

Never had India seen such popular demonstrations. Government, however, remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India--the last and perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period in which efficient administration had come to be regarded as the be-all and end-all of government. His resignation, however, had nothing to do with the Part.i.tion. He had fought and been defeated by Lord Kitchener, then, and largely at his instance, Commander-in-Chief in India, over the reorganisation of the military administration. Lord Curzon stood for the supremacy of the civil over the military authority, but he made the mistake of resigning not on the question of principle, on which he finally agreed to a compromise, but on a subsidiary point which, fatal as he may have thought it to the spirit of the compromise, appeared to the outside public to be mainly a personal question. In any case, though on the merits of the quarrel he might have looked for support from educated Indian opinion, Bengal was content to rejoice over his disappearance and to wonder whether with its author the Part.i.tion might not also disappear.

Another and worthier preoccupation was the impending visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India. King Edward's son was to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had for the first time made a Royal progress through the Indian Empire nearly thirty years before. His progress had been a triumphal one at a period when the internal and external peace of India seemed equally profound. That of his son was no less triumphal, though India was just entering on a period of political unrest undreamt of in the preceding generation. Even in Calcutta, which had been seething with agitation a few weeks before, the Prince and Princess were received not only with loyal acclamations but almost with G.o.d-like wors.h.i.+p; and all these demonstrations were perfectly genuine.

For with the curious inconsistency which pervades all Indian speculations religious and political, though countless dynasties have fallen and countless rulers have come to a violent end in the chequered annals of Indian history, nothing has ever destroyed the ancient conception of royalty as partaking of the divine essence. The remoteness of the Western rulers under whose sceptre India had pa.s.sed lent if anything an added mystery and majesty to the royalty they wielded. Even the avowed enemies of British rule seldom levelled their shafts at the Throne. That the King can do no wrong is a saying that appealed to the Indian mind long before the Western-educated cla.s.ses grasped its real meaning under a const.i.tutional monarchy, and began to extend its application even to the King's Government for the purpose of conveniently discriminating between the British Government, whose good intentions were generally a.s.sumed, and the autocratic Government of India, whence all mischief sprang. During the whole of the Royal tour, which extended to all the major provinces of British India and to several of the Native States, the enthusiasm was general, and even the Extremists did not venture a discordant note. The Prince and Princess, whose graciousness never wearied, moved freely amongst the crowds, and the presence of the future Queen appealed strongly to the women of India, whose influence we are apt to underrate because until recently it has been exercised almost exclusively in the seclusion of the zenana.

Even high-caste ladies, Hindus as well as Mahomedans, were known on this occasion for the first time perhaps in their lives to pa.s.s beyond the outer gates of their houses in order to attend a Royal reception--with all the precautions of course that have always to be taken to shelter a _purdah_ party from any contact with the other s.e.x.

It became the fas.h.i.+on for all cla.s.ses to draw their own happy auguries from the Royal visit, but to none did it seem so auspicious as to the politically-minded Indians. For it coincided with the sweeping defeat of the Unionist party at the general election of 1905 and the return to office of a Liberal Government with a crus.h.i.+ng majority behind it, whom the hostility displayed by the Liberal party towards Lord Curzon's administration on almost every Indian question save that which had brought about his resignation seemed to pledge to a prompt reversal of his policy. Was not the appointment to the India Office of such a stalwart Radical as Mr. John Morley, who had been Gladstone's Home Rule Secretary for Ireland, enough to justify the expectation that the right of India, if not to Home Rule, to a large measure of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt would receive prompt recognition? If Indians could hardly regard Lord Curzon's successor as another Ripon, their first impression of Lord Minto satisfied them that, though the Conservative nominee of Mr.

Balfour's Government, the new Viceroy was neither disposed to tread in his predecessor's footsteps as an autocratic administrator nor likely to carry sufficient weight at home to stand in the way of a Secretary of State who, like many Radical doctrinaires, was essentially what the French call _un homme d'autorite_. The event proved that they were right in their estimate of Lord Minto, but wrong in their sanguine expectation that Mr. Morley would at once break with the old principles of Indian government or even with Lord Curzon's administrative methods. Bengal remained part.i.tioned. It was a _chose jugee_ which Mr. Morley was not prepared to reopen.

The disillusionment in India was much greater than after the fiasco of the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India.

Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not despair of bringing const.i.tutional methods of agitation to bear upon British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National Congress, which they had founded twenty years before, was sliding rapidly down the inclined plane which was to lead first to open and violent discord and later on to disruption. Even before the Part.i.tion the Moderates could make but a poor reply to those who jeered at the paltry results which had attended their practice of const.i.tutional forms of agitation. For if the Indian Councils Act of 1892 had opened the doors of the Viceroy's Legislative a.s.sembly to some of the most distinguished among them, what had it profited them? The official benches merely gave a courteous hearing to the incisive criticisms proceeding from men of such undisputed capacity as Mehta and Gokhale and bore less patiently with the Ciceronian periods of the great Bengalee tribune Surendranath Banerjee. Government paid little or no heed to them. Equally powerless had been their pa.s.sionate protest against the Part.i.tion. Even had they not been in complete sympathy with popular feeling, they would have been compelled to voice it or surrender the leaders.h.i.+p they still hoped to retain to the new Extremist party which, under Mr. Tilak's leaders.h.i.+p, was carrying his doctrines and his methods far beyond the limits of the Deccan. Each annual session of the Congress grew more turbulent and the Moderates gave ground each year, until at the famous Surat session of 1907 they realised that they had to make a definite stand or go under. There the storm burst over the preliminary proceedings before the real issues were reached. Mr. Tilak's followers a.s.sailed the presidential platform of which the Moderates had still retained possession, and the Congress broke up in hopeless confusion and disorder.

But what happened in the Congress was but a pale reflection of what was happening outside. The Part.i.tion was indeed little more than the signal for an explosion, not merely in Bengal, of which premonitory indications had been witnessed, but had pa.s.sed almost unheeded, some ten years earlier in the Deccan. The cry of _Swaraj_ was caught up and re-echoed in every province of British India. In Calcutta the vow of _Swades.h.i.+_ was administered at ma.s.s meetings in the famous temple of Kali. Hindu reactionaries, whose conception of a well-ordered society had not moved beyond the laws of Manu, fell into line for the moment with t

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