Part 7 (1/2)

The elections in the Southern Provinces presented a somewhat different picture though the defeat of ”Non-co-operation” was equally complete.

The Nerbudda river has been from times immemorial a great dividing line, climatic, racial, and often political, between Northern and Southern India. It still is so. For, whilst with a few relatively unimportant exceptions the whole of British India--save Burma, which, except from an administrative point of view, is not India at all--has been brought with perhaps excessive uniformity within the scope of the new const.i.tutional reforms, many conditions in the Central Provinces and in the great Presidency of Madras differ widely from those prevailing in the other major provinces north of the Nerbudda, and the actual failure of ”Non-co-operation” to enforce its boycott of the elections was less noteworthy than some other features in the new situation. In the Central Provinces the elections themselves were fought out on much the same lines as in the north and with very similar results, if allowance is made for the intellectual backwardness of the province. Political activity and agitation had been confined in the past mainly to Nagpur, the capital, and to the western districts, in which a large Mahratta element predominates especially amongst the better-educated cla.s.ses.

Most of Mr. Tilak's former followers there had joined the ”Non-co-operation” movement, and their rigid abstention from the elections left the doors of the Provincial Council wide open for the representation of more sober Indian opinion. The Extremists showed their contempt for the new a.s.sembly by putting up one or two ”freak”

candidates in breach of the boycott they were preaching, and actually got in a _dhobi_, or laundryman, at Jubbulpur. But the elections were overshadowed by the preparations for the Nagpur Congress, which was to be the great Gandhi counterblast to the Reforms, and the Extremists, who poured into the province from the neighbouring Bombay Presidency, concentrated their efforts on the creation of an atmosphere of general unrest favourable to the new line of campaign upon which the rump of the old Indian National Congress was about to enter with the open renunciation of the fundamental article of its original creed--loyalty to the British connection.

It seems one of the strangest of the many anomalies with which the Indian situation teems that the Central Provinces should have been chosen of all others as the scene for a great spectacular demonstration of revolt against the state of ”slavery” to which Indians have been reduced by a ”Satanic” alien rule. It is one of the precepts of Mr.

Gandhi's gospel of ”Non-co-operation,” though doubtless only as a counsel of perfection, that Indian husbands and wives must cease to bring ”slave” children into the world until India has attained _Swaraj_.

Yet in the Central Provinces a larger proportion of Indian children than in any other province are born every year to a state of degradation much more closely akin to slavery, which is not imposed upon them by any alien rulers, but by the ancient traditions of those of their own race and creed whose interest it is to perpetuate at the expense of their less fortunate fellow-countrymen the most cruel form of caste tyranny.

Of the total population of the Central Provinces, which numbered some sixteen millions at the last Census in 1911, one-fifth belong to that order of humanity which stands so low in the eyes of Hindus that it is unworthy to be reckoned as possessing any caste at all. These no-castes stand at the very foot of the social ladder of Hinduism, and in theory at least they can never hope to climb even on to its lowest rungs, though in practice the most stringent laws can be gradually circ.u.mvented with the help of needy Brahmans or will yield to the pressure of changing economic conditions. They are ”untouchable,” _i.e._ that any physical contact with them involves defilement of which the caste Hindu can only cleanse himself by ritual ablutions and other forms of ceremonial purification. Go into a village which is partially inhabited by these unfortunate people, mostly called Mahars in that part of India, and you will find that they are forbidden even to draw water from any but their own wells, as by drawing it from wells used by caste Hindus they would render them impure. In the larger urban schools under Government control British laws, which recognise no caste distinctions, enforce the admission of Mahar boys, some of whom do extremely well. But in a village school you will often see the poor little ”untouchables,”

if admitted at all, relegated to mats on the outside verandah, where they may pick up such sc.r.a.ps of teaching as they can. The Government inspector of schools may remonstrate, but he knows that few teachers will make any serious attempt to mend matters, and that if they did the caste-boys would be withdrawn by their indignant parents.

When I was touring a few years ago in the Central Provinces with a British commissioner, who was carrying on an inquiry into certain grievances of the peasantry in connection with irrigation, the villagers from the more remote villages were frequently collected along the road to tell their story, and they brought with them their land-records.

These the ”untouchables” had to lay on the ground at the feet of the Brahman subordinate, who would have been defiled had he taken them straight out of their hands, and only after they had withdrawn a few paces did he condescend to pick up the books and verify them before pa.s.sing them on to his British superior. The latter, on the other hand, though the representative, according to Congress orators, of a ”Satanic”

Government that has reduced Indians to ”slavery,” never hesitated to question the poor ”untouchables” closely and good-humouredly, not merely about the particular matter at issue, but about the condition of their crops or the health of their village, and sometimes gave a friendly pat on the back to the youngsters who accompanied their elders, whilst the Brahman stood by in stony and disgusted silence.

These caste discriminations doubtless originated in remote ages when the Aryan conquerors from the north gradually subdued the aboriginal Dravidian populations. The ”untouchables” are mostly remnants of that population, some of them still very primitive jungle folk whom the Census cla.s.ses as ”animists,” or nature-wors.h.i.+ppers, _i.e._ they still wors.h.i.+p trees and stones and the spirits that are supposed to dwell in them. But they tend gradually to include in their wors.h.i.+p some of the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of the Hindu Pantheon, especially those who are credited with power to avert the worst scourges to which the people happen to be subject. Under a sacred roadside tree I have seen in one place a rude stone, roughly shaped to represent the G.o.ddess of Small-pox, and alongside of it a clay image of a tiger that had killed a man on that very spot, set up in the hope of averting further manifestations of its wrath, and also of appeasing the dead man's soul so that he might remain quietly within the tiger and become a kindly protector to the village. The appropriation of Hindu deities is usually the first step towards their absorption into the Hindu social structure.

Others, the more progressive, have settled down as cultivators, a few occasionally becoming quite considerable land-owners. Others, again, have taken to weaving and to petty trade. Under British rule they have progressed all along the line. A Mahar regiment has been raised, officered by Mahomedans from the north, as no Hindu would think of serving with ”untouchables,” and though Hindu sepoys must not be brought into proximity with it, it has always behaved very creditably.

Some Mahars are now well educated, and in favour of two of them the Governor of the Central Provinces has exercised the right conferred upon him to nominate a certain number of members to the Provincial Legislative Council in order to give some representation to communities too backward to secure any for themselves under the existing franchise.

One of the best results of British governance and of Western education has been to stimulate even amongst the ”untouchables” a new sense of self-respect and self-reliance and a wholesome desire to emerge from the degradation to which the custom of centuries has condemned them. It is amongst them that of late years Christian and even Mahomedan missionaries have found all over India their most fruitful field, and in some provinces ma.s.s-movements to Christianity have taken place, which are admittedly due in the first place to a desire for social emanc.i.p.ation, but will steadily lead, if properly handled, to moral and religious advancement. One of the great problems now before the missionary societies of all Christian denominations is how these tens of thousands of converts can be taught and trained, and it is of great promise for the future that a Commission of Inquiry composed of British and American and Indian Christian missionaries has recently issued a report on Village Education in India which has approached this problem, amongst others, with a broad-minded appreciation of its economic and social as well as purely religious aspects.

Is it surprising that when the Indian National Congress, that has. .h.i.therto done nothing for them beyond embodying in its programme vague expressions of sympathy, is agitating for the severance of the British connection, and Extremist orators perambulate the country to preach a boycott of British officials, the Mahars should have sent in pet.i.tions imploring the Governor not to abandon them or surrender the power which has alone done something to raise them out of the slough of despond? Mr.

Gandhi, however, who would be a great social reformer had he not preferred to plunge into a dangerous political agitation, is not himself blind to such an awful blot as ”untouchability” has made on Hindu civilisation, and some of his followers, prompted perhaps less than he is himself by a generous reforming spirit, have not been slow to see what abundant materials lie ready to their hand in these vast ma.s.ses, profoundly ignorant and superst.i.tious, if they can only be drawn into the turbid stream of ”Non-co-operation” by some novel and ingenious appeal to their fears or to their appet.i.tes.

In the Madras Presidency, never swept to the same degree as Bengal or Bombay by the waves of political unrest, the electoral struggle a.s.sumed a form, peculiar to Southern Indian conditions, in which ”Non-co-operation” entered very little. For Southern India has its own life-history which differentiates it in many respects from other parts of India, and in none more so than in the survival of the Brahman's ancient ascendancy, until recently almost unchallenged in this stronghold of Hinduism.

Mostly of the primitive Dravidian stock that inhabited the peninsula before the great Aryan inflow from the north, and still speaking Dravidian languages, the people of Southern India have preserved in its most archaic form the social system of Hinduism which the Aryan conquerors, probably never more than a small minority, imposed upon them by the relative superiority of their civilisation quite as much as by force of arms. Of a much fairer complexion, the Aryans became the ruling ”white” race of those days, and to preserve their racial prestige they enforced the most rigid laws for the differentiation of caste--which originally meant colour. The Brahmans, being the law-givers, naturally framed laws to secure the pre-eminence of their own caste, and to the present day, for instance, in the more remote parts of Southern India, men of the lower castes may be seen retiring hastily from the road at his approach, lest they should pollute the air he breathes by coming within a forbidden distance of him.

In Southern India, where Buddhist influence never secured any firm footing, Hinduism had its golden age during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whilst the tide of Mahomedan invasion was pouring in successive waves into Northern and Central India. The last and greatest of the Hindu kingdoms of Southern India did not succ.u.mb to the sword of Islam till 1565, and the splendid ruins of Vijianagar bear out, if we make allowance for oriental hyperbole, the contemporary testimony of a Persian Amba.s.sador that ”the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the whole world.” The Moslem conquerors laid Vijianagar low. But, by the curious irony of fortune, it was from a descendant of its royal house, some remnants of which escaped destruction, that the British, by whom Mahomedan domination was to be in turn overthrown, received their first grant of land on the Carnatic coast close to where Madras now stands.

Mahomedan domination came so late to Southern India and lasted for such a brief period that it never disturbed, even to the small extent that it did in Northern India, the social stratifications of Hinduism, which have equally withstood there more than anywhere else the subtler pressure of Western civilisation under British rule. Take, for instance, a small town like Tirupati, only a few miles from Chatnagiri, where the Rajahs, whose forebears made that momentous grant to Francis Day a little less than three centuries ago, still live in modest state. Were Tirupati still ruled by the Vijianagar kings in all their splendour, it could hardly present a better-preserved picture of ancient Hindu life.

At the foot of a steep range of hills crowned with venerable temples whose sanct.i.ty has from times immemorial attracted a constant stream of pilgrims, and possessing some famous temples of its own, it is essentially a Brahman town, and lives almost entirely by ministering, at more or less extortionate rates, to the material and spiritual needs of pilgrims, averaging about a thousand a day in ordinary times and scores of thousands at the special festival seasons, on their way to and from the sacred hill-top. There are whole streets of lodgings for their use, consisting chiefly of small bare cubicles, and rows of shops at which they can purchase their simple vegetarian food and innumerable religious trifles as mementoes of their pilgrimage. When I approached Tirupati, early in the morning, a few groups of pilgrims were already on their way to the hill-sanctuaries and peasants were starting work on the temple lands outside the town. Sacred monkeys gambolled about the trees and still more sacred cows had begun to exercise their daily privilege of browsing for food wherever their fancy leads them, even amongst the vegetables exposed for sale in the public market-places. The Brahmans themselves were still engaged in performing their elaborate morning devotions and ablutions, but the members of their household had already swept the approach to their low, one-storied, flat-roofed houses and stencilled on the threshold with white liquid chalk the geomantic patterns, finished off with scattered marigolds, which keep away the evil spirits. The Brahman quarters surround the temples, of which of course only the outer courtyards are accessible to other than high-caste Hindus. The low-caste ”untouchables,” who do the menial work of the town, live strictly segregated in their own quarter, which consists only of mud huts and even flimsier shelters of platted palm-leaves and bamboos. The whole town wore an air of leisured superiority as if conscious that there can be no need for special effort when the G.o.ds bring pilgrims to provide for the wants of its ”twice-born” inhabitants.

There are scores of other Tirupatis in which the Brahman still reigns supreme by virtue of his _quasi_-sacerdotal caste. But in the public life of Southern India, as British rule has moulded it, he has owed a pre-eminence only recently disputed to a monopoly of Western education in modern times almost as complete as the monopoly which he enjoyed of Hindu learning and culture before the advent of the British. As soon as he saw that the British _Raj_ threatened no curtailment of his hereditary supremacy in the religious and social world of Hinduism, he was quick to profit by all the material advantages which the country as a whole derived from a new era of public security and peace. He realised at once that Western education might open up for him opportunities of making himself almost as indispensable, if on a somewhat humbler scale, to the alien rulers of India as he had formerly made himself to the indigenous rulers in the land. Thus the Brahmans acquired from the first a virtual monopoly of all the subordinate public services in the Madras Presidency and, as time went on, of all the higher posts gradually thrown open to Indians. They crowded also into all the new liberal professions fostered by Western education, and, above all, into the legal profession for which they showed, as most Indians do, a very special apt.i.tude. But, like all monopolists, they were tempted to abuse their monopoly, the more so as they regarded it merely as a legitimate adaptation to the new conditions imported by British rule of the ancient privileges always vested in their caste. They resented any attempt on the part of Hindus belonging to inferior castes to follow in their footsteps along the new paths of Western learning and to qualify for a share of employment in the public services, for which under the British dispensation all Indians are ent.i.tled to compete on equal terms irrespective of all caste discriminations. The non-Brahmans were slow to start, and when they did start, they had to contend with the jealous opposition of the Brahmans, who combined, as Hindu castes know how to combine, against unwelcome intruders into a profitable field of which they had secured early possession. When the Public Services Commission was in Madras eight years ago, we heard many bitter complaints from non-Brahmans that, whenever one of them did succeed in getting an appointment under Government, the Brahmans with whom or under whom he had to work would at once unite to drive him out, either by making his life intolerable or by turning against him the European superior to whose ear they had easy access. For it is one of the weaknesses of an alien bureaucracy that, in regard to routine work at least, its weaker members are apt to be far too much in the hands of their native a.s.sistants. The Brahmans later on formed the bulk of the new Western-educated and ”politically-minded” cla.s.s, and the Madrasee Brahmans played a considerable part in the Indian National Congress before it broke away from its const.i.tutional moorings.

The non-Brahmans, nevertheless, under the leaders.h.i.+p of such resolute men as the late Dr. Nair, fought their way steadily to the front, and, being of course in a large majority, they had only to organise in order to make full use of the opportunity which a relatively democratic franchise afforded them for the first time at the recent elections. They can hardly themselves have foreseen how great their opportunity was, for they regarded the reforms at first with deep suspicion as calculated merely to transfer substantive power from a British to a Brahman bureaucracy, and so deep was their dread of Brahman ascendancy even in the new Councils that they clamoured to the very end for a much larger number of seats than the sixteen that were ultimately reserved as ”communal” seats for non-Brahman electorates. They never needed such a reservation, for they actually carried the day in so many of the ”general” const.i.tuencies that out of ninety-eight elected members of the new Provincial Council only fourteen are Brahmans, and it is the Brahmans now who complain, not without reason, that their representation falls short of their legitimate influence in the State, and are already demanding a reservation of ”communal” seats for their own caste in future. Lord Willingdon, as a const.i.tutional Governor, chose from the non-Brahman majority in the Council all the three Indian Ministers who form part of the new Provincial Government and preside over the ”transferred” departments. This is the most startling transformation scene which any of the Provincial elections has produced. The non-Brahmans have got the chance which they have long claimed. If they rise to the occasion, deal with the Brahmans more fairly than the latter dealt with them, and, remembering the struggle they have had for their own emanc.i.p.ation, help the ”untouchables” to rise in their turn out of the state of degradation to which centuries of Brahman domination have condemned them, the reforms may prove to have been perhaps as important a landmark in the moral regeneration of Hindu society as in the development of the Indian body politic. For, though it would be unfair to forget that the rigidity of the great caste system probably alone saved Hindu society from complete disintegration during centuries of internal anarchy and foreign invasions, its survival would be fatal now to the advancement of India on new lines of democratic progress. In any case the triumph of the non-Brahmans is an unmistakable blow to ”Non-co-operation.” Their one grievance against British rule has. .h.i.therto been that it tolerated Brahman ascendancy and refused to co-operate with them in their pa.s.sionate struggle against it. But now there is nothing to damp their zeal or deter them from co-operating with Government in securing the permanent success of the reforms to which, as they have to admit in spite of their former suspicions, they owe a measure of political advancement that far exceeds all their antic.i.p.ations.

In Southern as well as in Northern India the failure of the Non-co-operationists' frontal attack on the reforms was beyond dispute.

They were resolved to kill them in the womb by laying an interdict upon the elections to the new popular a.s.semblies. No candidate, Mr. Gandhi had p.r.o.nounced, was to enter for election, no elector was to record his vote. At a moment when the elections were already in progress and should have at least tempered his optimism, he himself a.s.sured me that the results as a whole would yet afford a most splendid demonstration of the stern temper of the people that would never trust and would never accept the mockery of reforms proceeding from a ”Satanic” Government. He was deaf to my suggestion that, even if the temper of the Indian people was such as he believed it to be, it would have been demonstrated in a manner far more intelligible to the political mind of the West had his followers taken part in the elections, and, after sweeping the board in accordance with his antic.i.p.ations, had then placed their demands, whatever they might be, on record before the world, declaring at the same time that, unless they were fully granted, they would walk out of every Council Chamber in India and bring down the whole edifice of reforms, which would then indeed have been hopelessly shattered. Things, on the contrary, went quite differently. In defiance of Mr. Gandhi, candidates came forward in almost every const.i.tuency, elections were held everywhere, and except for a few insignificant disturbances created by his followers they were held in peaceful and orderly fas.h.i.+on. There were indeed numerous and in some places very large abstentions. That many of those who kept away from the polls were convinced ”Non-co-operationists” cannot be denied, but no more can it be denied that many kept away from fear, not altogether unjustified by the event, of actual violence or of the more insidious forms of intimidation which social and religious pressure a.s.sumes with particularly deadly effect in India. Reputable members, including a large proportion of the leaders who had fought for years past the battle of India's political advancement, took their seats in the Provincial Councils and in the All-India Legislature at Delhi. They represented, not unfairly on the whole, all cla.s.ses and creeds and communities, and even all schools of political thought, except, of course, the Extremists, who by their own default remained unrepresented. That the Extremists, whose influence cannot be ignored, should have remained unrepresented is not a matter entirely for congratulation, for the complete exclusion, even when self-inflicted, of any important political party must tend to weaken the authority of a popular a.s.sembly. At the same time, it may be doubted whether the abstention of ”Non-co-operationists” has deprived the Indian Councils of more than a very few individuals whose ability and character, apart from their political opinions, would have given them any great weight. The splendid demonstration which Mr. Gandhi had contemplated fell completely flat because an overwhelming proportion of those to whom he directed his appeal refused to endorse his view that the great const.i.tutional changes of which the creation of popular a.s.semblies was the corner-stone were merely a snare and a delusion, and to his cry of ”Non-co-operation” they opposed an emphatic affirmation of their belief that the salvation of India lay in co-operation.

CHAPTER XII

THE BIRTH OF AN INDIAN PARLIAMENT

Only twelve years ago Lord Morley, with all his advanced liberalism and his broad sympathy for Indian aspirations, could not conceive the possibility of introducing Parliamentary inst.i.tutions into India in his time or for generations to come. He would a.s.suredly have had to revise his opinion could he have attended the first session of the Indian Legislative a.s.sembly. In form its proceedings were not unworthy of a great Parliamentary a.s.sembly. The speeches sometimes rose to a high level of eloquence all the more noteworthy in that English was not the mother tongue of those who delivered them. They were, as a rule, sober and dignified, and if all members did not at once abandon a habit much favoured in the old Councils of putting long strings of questions and moving impracticable resolutions in sonorous harangues, often prepared for them by outside hacks, their own colleagues soon taught them that such methods were no longer likely to pay even for purposes of advertis.e.m.e.nt. The majority quickly acquired a knack of suppressing wind-bags and bores quietly and effectively. The Act of 1919 reserved to Government the appointment of the President of the a.s.sembly for the first four years, after which he will be chosen by the a.s.sembly itself.

Not even the House of Commons could treat the Chair with more unfailing deference than the a.s.sembly showed to Mr. A.F. Whyte, who brought with him the prestige of Westminster traditions and experience to which he from time to time appealed aptly and successfully, and the a.s.sembly appreciated the tact as well as the firmness with which he discharged his novel duties. A gentle reminder of what was the usual practice in the House of Commons was never lost on Indian members whose inexperience occasionally failed to realise the Parliamentary implications of the procedure adopted by them, but was always ready to accept guidance that derived its authority from the wisdom of the Mother of Parliaments.

But the qualities shown by the a.s.sembly transcended mere matters of form. Mr. Whyte bore testimony at the close of the session to debates ”well worthy to stand by the side of the best debates in the Imperial Parliament.” It was no empty compliment, for they revealed the makings of real statesmans.h.i.+p, and the circ.u.mstances in which the Indian Legislature met for the first time to give collective expression to the feelings of the people of India, called for statesmans.h.i.+p. The King-Emperor's message impressed them with a sense of the great responsibilities and great opportunities arising for them out of the far-reaching rights conferred upon them. The personal appeal with which the Duke of Connaught accompanied the delivery of the Royal message went far to dispel ”the shadow of Amritsar,” which had, in his own apt phrase, ”lengthened over the face of India” and threatened even to darken their own path. For on no subject had Indian feeling been more unanimous during the elections all over the country than in regard to the Punjab tragedy. None had been more persistently exploited by the ”Non-co-operationists” to point their jibes at the ”slave-mentality” of candidates and electors who were merely the willing dupes of a ”Satanic”