Within the next hundred years India can be the greatest and most prosperous country in the world. She has three times the population of the United States, untold mineral wealth, tremendous agricultural possibilities, and cotton, tea, jute, sugar, petroleum, coal and steel---all can be made predominant in world-markets.
Her future is charged with greater hope than China’s. China too is possessed of superabundant man-power. China too has untold wealth beneath her soil. But China is torn to-day by strife, just as India was once and would have been to-day had a powerful western nation not insisted on assuming the direction of her affairs and persisted in carrying on this direction despite repeated pleas from the more vocal of the Indian peoples that this interference should cease.
Britain can secure India this future. But Britain is too hesitant. If Britain is intent on interfering, she should interfere whole-heartedly and effectively. So far only half-measures have been taken. The British lion is but an exhibit in the Indian zoo, snarling terrifyingly from behind the bars that the ridiculous Proclamation of Queen Victoria erected in 1858.1 For seventy years the lion has growled harmlessly in its cage; and now in the local parliaments and in the vernacular press the more daring of the natives are clamouring for cage and exhibit to be shipped back to Britain.
If this course is taken India will soon be a second China, unless another powerful civilized nation is prepared to, and allowed to, intervene.
Should then the lion be let out of its cage to roam as it will and accomplish what it please? Or will its effect as an exhibit achieve within the next hundred years more than has been achieved within the past seventy?
One thing is certain: left to herself India can accomplish nothing. The three hundred million peoples have neither the wish nor the will to attain predominance or prosperity. They are content to jog on along life’s easiest path, sleeping, copulating, praying, over-indulging recklessly in each of these necessary functions, and, though they know it not, burdening the nation with the price of their folly.
As a result, instead of being a rich country, India is exceedingly poor. She is in fact one of the poorest countries in the world. There isn’t enough money for public services, for education, for State aid on an adequate scale to any of the essential industries that, with greater initiative and enterprise, should be yielding an abundant return. Such prosperity as there is, is restricted to the peoples from the West, never too timid to pioneer in any field of commercial endeavour; to the limited gentry who have inherited the hoarded jewels and gold mohurs that no native will entrust to a bank; and to the priests who grow pot-bellied at the expense of the populace.
Caste, religion, and sex are the most formidable barriers in the obstacle-race to Indian prosperity, and all three are intricately and inexorably intertwined. Religion demands a lifetime of self-denial and sacrifice as a prelude to a cycle of reincarnated lifetimes of more self-denial and sacrifice, with ultimate salvation for an agonized soul in some forest solitude wherein the beasts shall prowl unheeding and the midges dance without a wish for molestation.
Religion creates caste, which subdivides humanity more meticulously than the most self-opinionated and pestilentially snobbish autocrat’s wife in an English cathedral town. No member of one caste may work in the same field or factory with another. No member of some castes may work at all. Can you wonder that industry and enterprise have come to be regarded as a social---and religious---stigma, and that the tendency through centuries has been for the road to Paradise to be littered with recumbent parasites?
And caste and religion have conspired to sanction, and sanctify, sexual indulgence. It begins early, when children attain puberty, and their ’teens, and it goes on ardently, weakeningly, and impotently to an exhausted and early grave. It saps the vitality. It leaves the Indian indifferent to prosperity. It takes him dizzily back to religion for solace. And so it goes on---in a circle through life, in a reincarnated circle through after-life, while the British lion sits sublimely behind bars watching a sensitive India turn its futile cartwheels in a sanctimonious circus.
Three-fourths of India is engaged in doing that; for that is the extent of the Hindu population. The Mohammedans, who number seventy million, are unfettered by caste; but they have their own religious handicap. At intervals all through the day they indulge in prayer. Sex, not quite so early yet almost as inevitably, casts a roseate glow along their circumscribed horizon, sapping their energy as it does the Hindu’s.
The Jews, the Christians, the Parsis, and the others are negligible in number.
The reform of the Hindus is the task that must be undertaken by all who desire the attainment by India of the goal that is indicated in the very first sentence set down in this dissertation.
I have no patience with those who argue, as many do argue, that India, left alone, can work out her own destiny; that India was great in the past and can recapture the lost glories of her golden age by her own contriving. She can’t. That’s sheer bunkum.
India’s splendour shone across the world when Europe was over-run by savage tribes who could neither write nor read. India, at that time, had culture of a very high order; a literature that goes back thousands of years reminds us constantly of this now. But that culture was by no means general. It was restricted to the few. In the interval Europe has moved briskly along two thousand years. Europe has evolved a culture that is far greater than anything India knew. In science, in invention, in exploration, in sanitation, in medicine, in the general diffusion of knowledge the western world has moved on, while India has stood still or slept.
The West has outstripped the East, and unless the East is prepared to avail itself of these advantages, the West must inevitably be predominant.
Japan has learnt this lesson already; everything is being westernized there. Turkey, a Mohammedan country, is learning the lesson now; even religion is being subjected to reforming influences in Angora and Stamboul by Kemal Pasha. Afghanistan, a little Moslem state on India's border, is also showing signs of an awakening; its Amir made an educational tour of western countries and has taken many lessons back for the instruction of his people.
India alone, despite a long and close contact with Britain, who has been responsible in an increasing degree for three hundred years for the governance of the Indian peoples, shows no noticeable sign of westernization. True there are railways and motor-cars and English is taught in the schools; but there are 750,000 villages teeming with unlettered masses of humanity, primitive, helpless, and little better than the animals, groping vaguely for death so that a worthier fate might be attained with the reincarnation. Ninety per cent. of the peoples of India live in these villages; and of the ten per cent. in towns an insignificant fraction has succumbed to western influences.
Drastic action for reform will have to be undertaken. Religion will have to be purged of its impurities. Caste distinctions will have to be jettisoned. Enlightenment must displace ignorance in the villages. The entire standard of living must be raised. Material ambitions must be infused into the peoples; for the desire to be better than one’s neighbour, Mayfair’s sneer though it be at suburbia, is responsible for more industry and progress than is generally conceded. America constructed an elaborate and highly lucrative system of hire-purchase on this basis. When Mr Drage reaches the Indian village with his plain van then, and not before, will India have gained her material destiny.
Indisputable though I find much that has been written in recent books of India’s sexual demerits, I am not one whit disposed to assume the nose-raised attitude of contempt these writers trail with their pens across their pages.
India has even greater sexual shortcomings than were noted by the author of Mother India. I have myself, with the aid and guidance of the local police, in a tour of discovery through some of the cities of India, found more iniquitous indulgence than is set forth in the most purple passages of Miss Katherine Mayo’s book. In addition to an early initiation into the ecstasies of sex and an eager and over-frequent indulgence at home, the Indian puts in a lot of sexual overtime in the perfumed brothels that raise their curtained windows against the skyline of the native quarter of every town in India. In Calcutta there are over eighty thousand prostitutes, all plying a prosperous trade without the need for pacing the pavements in quest of custom. They have their regular clients, each according to her caste. I found Members of Council there, men who had raised and were still raising large families from their wives. I found Babu clerks, lawyers, judges---men who went on after a dinner at Government House to pass a night of scented forgetfulness in the arms of a lady-love who was theirs for so long as they paid her hire. There are Moslem women here too, and women for the Hindu priests, whom none but a Brahmin may approach.
This is no worse than things are in the West, but it serves to underline the indulgence that has already been so greatly stressed. Yet I refrain from raising my nose in contempt. We in the West partake of these pleasures more sparingly, so that we may stretch them elegantly (if we can) across the allotted span of three score years and ten. In India, with the autumn of life dedicated to self-denial and sacrifice, the Indian prefers to crowd these delights into his more vigorous youth. Whether the hectic memories obtrude upon the autumnal devotions I am not in a position to judge; if they do they occasion, no doubt, an added and justifiable plea for forgiveness.
These crowded sex years are to be deplored not so much for individual reasons as for national. All India is suffering to-day as a result of the ceaseless stimulation of the libido. And until a check is placed upon these indulgences she must continue to suffer. The men become inactive and drowsy in their early youth; the women, worn by early and constant childbearing, have their vitality still further drained by the incessant care of the children and the almost incessant sexual demands of their husbands. And Religion casts a glow of sanctity over all this.
Hinduism is not alone in this halo-award to an indelicate though inevitable concomitant of matrimony. Even in our own marriage service, which was drawn up centuries after Christianity’s earliest endeavours to curb the primitive instincts of mankind, we are told that matrimony is ordained “first . . . for the procreation of children. Secondly, for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled”; though we are counselled earlier that it is not to be “enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding”.
The Hindu has no such reservation. The lingam, which symbolizes the male organ of reproduction and is not unlike it in appearance, is worshipped in the temples of Shiva throughout the length and breadth of India.
There are more than thirty million lingams worshipped by the peoples of India. The women cast marigolds upon this provocative sex symbol and sprinkle it with holy water in a fervent desire for fecundity. The men pay tribute to it too, for the one overwhelming urge of the Hindu is to multiply and be fruitful; a religious mandate for a like fulfilment was given, you will remember, to the children of Israel. Preventatives, civilization’s cloak for indulgence, are scorned.
Early marriages were instituted principally that the child-bearing years of woman should be utilized to the full. Actually, in effect, the reverse is true. Sir Denzil Ibbetson, in his report on the census of the Punjab compiled in 1881, notes: “The early marriages among Hindus decrease rather than increase the proportion of children. This suggestion is based upon injury to the mother and consequent increase of female mortality. The children shown as under one year of age in our returns are 750,457. Now there are 2,903,003 married women between the ages of twenty and forty [in the Punjab]; so that we have 25.8 children born for every hundred married women between these two ages, while the corresponding figure for England is 35.87; and if we take lower ages the comparison will be still more unfavourable for the Punjab.
“There can be little doubt that early marriage, by forcing the girl into premature puberty, or at least into child-bearing before she is fully developed, not only reduces the number of wives who survive to become mothers, but lessens their reproductive powers. Even with universal marriage the fecundity of each married woman is so small and the mortality so high that the population of the Punjab scarcely increases faster than that of England.” And in the England of 1881, 41 per cent. of the women between the ages of twenty and forty were unmarried. In the Punjab, counting widows as unmarried, the percentage of unwed women was no higher than 11.
The gods are on the side of civilization---on percentages, for percentages are a device of civilization. The phrase “the population of the Punjab scarcely increases faster than that of England” betrays Nature’s manner of levelling things up. In the Punjab---in all India, no native woman, unless she be blind or deformed and even then a paternal dowry can effect a solution, need emerge from her ’teens unmarried. In the West nearly half the female population are denied the church’s blessing to such unions as the males care to effect with them. How many make an unvirgined journey from the cradle to the grave is beyond the scope of our census to determine.
So civilization has its shortcomings; that is why I refrain from tilting my nose unduly. But in so far as civilization succeeds in conserving energy sexually and expending it, often just as recklessly, to industrial advantage, every nation that has to contend in world markets for prosperity must do likewise or perish. The 41 per cent. of Indian women who may hereafter remain unmarried may disagree, but they must sacrifice themselves, just as the women of the West have done, for the national good.
Dare we impose this reform upon an unwilling India? Dare we insist that the peoples improve their human stock as we are striving to induce them to improve their stock of cattle and their grade of cotton?
Persuasion can achieve nothing. All the Indian gods are terrifying in mien and in mandate. It is fear of the gods’ vengeance that impels the Hindu to smear his face with cow’s dung and to drink cow’s urine with apparent relish. The priests have contrived to attain their leisured affluence by centuries of vicarious terrorism, imputing evils to little painted figures of mud and clay. What then can the British lion achieve from behind its bars?
The lion achieved a great deal before it was caged. It was the custom once for the Hindu to insist on a widow joining her husband on his death. She was expected to cast herself upon his funeral pyre, and so great was the terror imposed upon her by the priests that she never failed to perform this sacrifice. Then Britain intervened. That was in 1829---twenty-nine years before Queen Victoria’s embarrassing Proclamation. By forbidding this practice of suttee, Britain saved the widow’s life; but the priests instantly consigned her to a living death. No Hindu widow2 is allowed to marry. There are 26,800,000 such widows in India, with prostitution as the only profession open to the more ambitious. Some of these widows, wedded in early childhood, have never known a husband.
Through the centuries in all countries it has been the purpose of a male priesthood to subordinate the women to the passions of its sex. Against this status of inferiority the women of the West have only now begun to revolt. The women of India, confined by caste and purdah, denied education and deprived of contact with the world, are unstirred by any desire to assert equality with their men. They are content to go on as Fate has decreed and along the lines that tradition has traced. Not all the pious and kindly sentimentalizing of Viceroys and their well-disposed consorts will alter their lot in any appreciable degree until penalties are allotted by legislation for a continuance of practices that are in urgent need of reform. It was thus that suttee was abolished. The burning of a live woman touched the hearts of a white bureaucracy; the living death of millions of like women finds them still purring with satisfaction over what their predecessors achieved a hundred years before.
Fifty years ago Lady Dufferin, the wife of a Viceroy, established hospitals and dispensaries for the use of Indian women. A quarter of a century later the consort of the indomitable Curzon set up a training school for dhais, so that maternity should be shorn of the agonies and dangers attendant on primitive and insanitary methods of attention. But these methods were born not of ignorance so much as of custom and superstition; and they have persisted.
Still a quarter of a century later the wife of another Viceroy, Lady Reading, introduced the festive delights of Baby Week to the women of India. Shows were held annually in all the important centres in India. Women brought their babies, and attended the magic-lantern demonstrations given in the cause of infant welfare. Large sums of money were expended and we assumed that a corresponding amount of good had been achieved; but the native women, who had thronged to these displays as to a fun-fair---no Indian will ever lose an opportunity of witnessing a tamasha3---went home to have more babies in the old-fashioned manner,4 arguing that what was good enough for mother and grandmother should be good enough for the women of the present generation. And, as they all marry in childhood, mother and grandmother---and often even great grandmother---are there to enforce this traditional maxim. Moreover they are afraid to offend the gods by defying the dictate that they should be treated as unclean while in the process of child-birth. So, unmurmuring, they submit to being consigned to the lumber room while in labour; to being dressed in unwashed and germ-coated rags; and to the untrained dhai applying every crude method of wresting the child with hands and knees from a resisting womb.5
Nothing will be achieved by persuasion or propaganda. The same stern methods that brought about the abolition of suttee can alone effect a cure here too. Swift punishment should confront all who persist in employing untrained dhais and these primitive and perilous methods, which are taking a relentless toll of life in India.
More than propaganda and gentle sentiment were needed to put an end to human sacrifices; but that too was achieved before the Proclamation of Queen Victoria was promulgated. These sacrifices were as common as suttee once. They have bespattered the records of all early travellers; and, like suttee, they persisted, even after penal legislation, in secret and in the less accessible villages of India. Sir Walter Lawrence,6 during his early days in India, was notified of a human sacrifice to Kali in a village just out of his district. A low-caste man was killed and offered up to this goddess by his landlord “who had vowed to make such a sacrifice, if he were successful in establishing a new hamlet on some waste ground”. As recently as 1907, Sir Edgar Thurston7 tells us, the district magistrate of Ganjam received a petition requesting him to sanction the performance of a human sacrifice.
These are isolated cases. Before Britain set its emphatic hand against this practice barren women used to kill children sacrificially and smear themselves with the blood in order to effect a cure for sterility.
Then there were the thugs---armed bandits who cloaked their misdeeds with the saffron mantle of religion and slaughtered their victims as a thank-offering to their hideous goddess, retaining the loot as a meet reward for their religious fervour. They flourished in what India looks back upon as her golden era, when life and property were the rightful prey of the highway robber. But the lion, as yet uncaged, intervened. Thuggism, despite its unchallengeable link with religion, was suppressed in 1837.
During the past seventy years Britain has reformed herself in India rather than the vast mass of native humanity. She has abandoned the shirt-sleeve and knuckle-duster method of progress, and prefers to tackle the toughest problems with kid gloves and an Oxford accent, because an inquisitive electorate 6,000 miles from the scene of action regards gentlemanly failure as more laudable than success achieved through what might savour of bullying.
The farce that the Government of India should be answerable not to the Indian voters but to the men and women who go to the polls in England, Wales, and Scotland has been enacted long enough; it is time it was ended. If the unlettered hordes of Hindustan are not yet ripe for substitution as a responsive democracy then let the rulers be answerable to their own consciences, keeping in the forefront of their aims and endeavours the ultimate good of India rather than the desire to cut an elegant caper for the delight of the interfering six hundred in Westminster.
The present form of government in India is the greatest humbug known to history. Millions of Indians perish annually to enable us to keep up our appearances. It is human sacrifice in its newest form; and the caged lion blinks at it with satisfaction.
Ignorance and religion are responsible for a greater loss of life than was taken in toll by suttee, blood-sacrifice and thuggism; yet we permit this havoc to continue. Until the peoples of India are afforded an opportunity of developing along sane and salutary lines India cannot approach the goal that lies within a hundred years of her future.
If the purchase of chocolates and cigarettes after eight o’clock in the evening by a civilized people is worthy of punishment, as it still is in England, then surely there are far more urgent evils in India in need of drastic remedy for the welfare of the helpless and un-understanding masses.
The Hindu religion is permeated with evils and inconsistencies. It would be futile to expect any movement for reform to be inaugurated by the priests. So long as their own supremacy is not threatened they permit all manner of vagaries and absurdities. Some Hindus worship the dog; to others this creature is an abomination. Some Hindus will not permit the remarriage of their widows; others insist that a mock marriage should be gone through between the widow and a dog before she can be allowed to take a second husband into her bedchamber. Some Hindus are imbued with the loftiest ideals; others have brothels attached to the temples for the urgent convenience of the priests and the worshippers---just as self-respecting churches in Italy and Belgium have open-air lavatories as half-screened annexes, so that the devout might relieve their feelings against the sacred walls.
It took centuries to rid the Christian Church of the evils that encumbered it throughout the Middle Ages, when the revelries of the Borgia popes were more hideously sensual than the most fanciful picture served in the columns of the Sunday press of the bare-limbed orgies of a corrupt Hollywood.
India has tried to reform herself. There have been several attempts at revolt. Two thousand years ago Sakya Muni led a rebellion against priestly, or Brahminaic, tyranny, ritualism, and caste privileges. The Reformation he wrought was greater than that achieved within the Christian Church by Luther. His Protestants, known to us now as Buddhists, form the most numerous and devout worshippers of any that can be assembled under one label. For centuries they battled with Hinduism in India, but were routed and had to take refuge in the mountain fastnesses and in the regions beyond the seas.
Then came the revolt of Baba Nanuk---also against the Brahmin priesthood and the caste exclusiveness of Hinduism; that was in the fifteenth century of the Christian era. The outcome of this revolt was the formation of the sect of Sikhs, who, like the Buddhists, abolished caste; but went further, and removed all the differences that separated Hindu from Moslem. Like the Mohammedans they grew beards. Numbering now about two and a half million people, they stand to-day midway between those two faiths, tainted a little by the prejudices of each. All these revolts have served merely to bring out new branches from the parent tree; none struck at the roots of the old religion, none achieved its destruction.
So Hinduism continues to set up its obscene representations of the more intimate functions of life in graceless postures upon its temple walls; continues to croon in the nursery rhymes that would be scorned for their coarseness in every polite smoking-room; continues to educate its infants on the irregular sexual excesses of its gods and goddesses---excesses that are enshrined in every mythology but are mercifully spared the children of present-day civilization. A Christ is needed to purge the Indian religions of their iniquities, to stride into the temples and drive off the men and women who have brought animals for sacrifice, and to cast out the consecrated dancing girls who had been virginally dedicated to the temple but were defiled by the priesthood before their attainment of puberty.
With our backs to our performing lion we declare with a brave gesture that it is not our function to provide a local Christ for backward peoples. Let them evolve their own, or follow ours, so gracefully and expensively introduced to them by our missions. When they attain discretion through education (we add) they will know how most effectively to tackle their particular religious problems.
That function is ours, in my unhesitant opinion. We have both education and discretion, and are aware of the ill and the cure. But we prefer to break up our moral dispensaries merely because the patient is unwilling to palate the medicine.
I do not indict Britain for the ills India has to endure; I blame her for not effecting their cure. Of all the conquests India has suffered through its troubled history, the coming of the British has wrought most good for the peoples. We have ensured peace within the frontiers. Life is more secure in consequence; the constant rise of the census totals affords abundant evidence of that. We have fought plagues and famines despite the active resentment and religious scruples of the un-understanding victims. Like Christ we submitted to contumely and stoning; but, undaunted, we wrought our miracles. By forcing a common language---English---upon the peoples and by affording them the means of transport, by rail and road, we have made unity possible for the first time in the history of the country. Never in the past was it conceivable that these scattered hordes, speaking a hundred languages and a thousand dialects, should come together within one parliament chamber and be mutually intelligible. It is ironic that this unification, effected by Britain, should fructify in a unified demand for the removal of the benefactor.
It would be puerile to interpret this as ingratitude. Indian resentment has sprung from the consciousness that Britain has not done enough---which is true; and has led to the delusion that Britain is accountable for all India’s shortcomings---which is untrue: and that the Indians can achieve their destiny unaided---which is merely laughable. Political goals are estimable ambitions provided they are not allowed to obstruct the path of material progress. To argue over formulas of self-government when sterner work is clamant for volunteers is a diversion of energy into unserviceable channels.
The members of the Simon Commission who are amiably striving to mark out milestones in India’s political future, are engaged upon nothing short of an imbecile hocus-pocus that will serve neither to gratify nor to entertain. A troupe of self-possessed lunatics fitted out with time-tables and notebooks could not tour the country to less effective purpose. What they hear and what they deduce from this hearsay will fill many blue-books and provide many futile arguments in assemblies both in India and in Britain, but not one year will they serve to subtract from that hundred that separates India from the fulness of her achievement.
Political advancement! A suburban half-wit might just as well climb a tree in his back garden to snatch at the moon. Not all the concessions we make to India will bring her any nearer a democratic form of government than that, until the masses are able to understand and to control the people they place in power. Less than 8 per cent. of the present population of India is literate, the 92 per cent.---the 225 million who can neither read nor write even the simple hieroglyphics of their own particular dialect---are scattered through the three quarter of a million villages that dot the vast plains and lofty mountains of India. What voice can these peoples have in the governance of their country until we help them to rise from the noisome morass of ignorance and poverty?
Instead of confining our sympathy and endeavour to the schools and colleges of the cities which mass-produce graduates upon the principles of a Ford factory, we should divert most of this money and this energy to the villages. To the city graduates neither the wealthier Indians nor the British have much in the way of employment to offer; but leave them with the idle opportunity of displaying how dangerous their little knowledge can be. It is this standardized driftwood that is most disposed to invade the wheels of, and so upset, Britain’s apple-cart. Drafted to the village schools they could be made to subserve the scheme of national progress far more advantageously than by hysterical gesticulations from street-corner soap-boxes. With criminal tolerance Britain prefers to respond to their hysteria with House of Commons resolutions and periodic tours of investigation by Lord this and that, to the infinite satisfaction of the Christian conscience and the justifiable indignation of the Indian, who sees a hard-won fortune poured out, without his leave, in travelling expenses for a few English gentlemen.
Every step in the education and uplift of these peoples will have to be taken entirely by the English. Education is greeted with active hostility in the villages. Parents who count on employing their children to economic advantage on their fields are loth to feed them without any return while they sway and mumble over books under the supervision of a local school-master.
The education of girls is resented even more vigorously. Parents do not think it proper, or safe, for virginal infants to come within the range of the prurient desires of male instructors---and there aren’t enough women teachers for the schools in towns, let alone villages.
What is Britain doing to combat this? Nothing. Directors of Public Instruction relieve themselves of such slack-livered flubdub as: “We have got to bide our time and let it all come naturally”, when they are well aware that the pace of progress is too slow to be discernible, and that, to quote Mr J. R. Cunningham, M.A., C.I.E., Director of Public Instruction, Assam: “Large numbers of children who have attended schools later lapse into illiteracy.”8
With better education the villagers would be more receptive of scientific methods of agriculture, which in turn would make it an economic possibility for their children to be spared for education. The primitive plough of Indian agriculture, which has resisted two thousand years of progress and development, is largely responsible for the acute poverty that every village suffers. The standard of living is at a deplorable level. According to Lord Curzon’s computation the average income of an Indian ryot, or agriculturist, is £2 a year. This average is attained by including the rich merchants, bankers and landowners of the villages in the computation. In the opinion of Henry Nevinson9: “It is next to impossible that the average income in any village could be as much as that; but let us assume it is. Still it remains at only half what is spent per head in England every year on drink alone. It represents a standard of poverty which we can hardly conceive---a level where every fraction of a farthing counts”.
How can these peoples be expected to help themselves? To laugh at their superstitions, their narrow prejudices, their primitive beliefs and their religious handicaps would be as cruel as guffawing at the vague groping of a blind man, striving to tap his way across Broadway or Piccadilly.
It is worse than that. In Britain about 5,000 persons are killed in motor accidents every year---about 15 a day. In India 85 people lose their lives every day from snake-bites and the attacks of wild animals---one about every twenty minutes. And this does not include deaths from illnesses, plagues, etc., caused by mosquitoes, flies and rats. Eleven million Indians died of plague in the thirty years ending 1926---which works out at about 1,000 a day; but it is not quite so high now. According to Dr Andrew Balfour more than 45,000,000 Indians suffer from hookworm. Statistics show that 20,000 persons die in India every day from one cause or another, and that the average span of life is not three score years and ten, but less even than half that---about thirty years in fact.
Old age is a rarity in India. The oldest inhabitant in any village is seldom out of the fifties, by which age most Indians have seen four generations of their descendants; for, with early marriage, a girl generally, and a boy often, becomes a parent at thirteen and a grandparent while still in the twenties.
Can you conceive the intensity of the struggle to eke out an existence for rapidly multiplying generations at the low level of subsistence that has been indicated? Any wonder that the family system prevails! The hungry mouths seek gratification out of a communal pot that collectively their hands have helped to barely half-fill. Any wonder that the Indian has not the vitality to resist disease or to compete as a unit of labour with workmen nourished on the beef and onions of civilization!
Here you have the human factor in the economic situation in India; let us now examine the others. Mr Sam Higginbottom, Principal of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, in the course of his evidence before the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India in 1927, said: “The cattle of India measured by European standards are not economical or of first-rate quality. At least 90 per cent. of the cows do not produce enough milk and offspring, manure, bones and hide to pay for their food, stabling and care. About 80 per cent. of the oxen do not give a return in work and manure and hide and bones enough to cover their cost of food production and maintenance.” He added that ten to twenty per cent. of the total agricultural yield of India is destroyed every year by wild animals. This isn’t damage in jungle lands or forests, but actual loss of crops. “In many parts,” he stated, “commercial orcharding is almost impossible, due to the depredations of monkeys, flying foxes, porcupines, jackals, squirrels, rats, wild pig, deer, wandering cattle, green parrots, wild pigeon, peacock and other grain-eating birds.”
The Indians could grow enough sugar and have a surplus for exportation, but don’t because of these animal depredations---good canes, being soft, are easy prey to wild beasts. The sequel to this is not only the concern of the agricultural statisticians and the trade chartists, but of the doctors. Sugar, being a source of energy, should form a considerable item in a diet that is predominantly vegetarian---as the Indian diet is. Actually the consumption of sugar per capita in India is only one-fifth the per capita consumption in the United States of America and Canada.
The land from which the Indians strive to win a living is under a severe and continuous strain because of the large numbers of persons who work on and must live off the same small plot. In the opinion of Mr Higginbottom at least 30 per cent. of India’s present agricultural population must be diverted to industry, commerce and transportation if agriculture is to be profitable in India.
“To-day less than 30 per cent. of the population of the United States”, he says---as against 73 per cent. in India---“is engaged upon the land; 70 per cent. in other pursuits. This is possible because of the large increase in agricultural machinery, and a lot of it, widespread in use, is fundamental to prosperity in India. For the most part the crudest farm implements are still in use in India. These give the farmer very little average. He is little better off than a man working with his bare hands. An American or British farmer would not make any better showing than the Indian farmer if he had to work barehanded or with as little as the Indian has to do with.”
Mr F. L. Brayne, M.C., I.C.S., Deputy Commissioner of Gurgaon in the Punjab, in his evidence before the Agricultural Commission attacks the Indian practice of making cow-dung cakes for use as kitchen fuel; for it robs the soil of the most effective manure that the Indian has at hand. Nevinson, however, in his book written years before the Agricultural Commission’s visit to India, allocated the blame for this practice to the Government, who in their zeal for Forest preservation, deprived the Indians of almost all their communal lands and of access to the timber hitherto available from the nearest woods.
The Indian cultivator now has to pay rent to the Forest Department for the right of grazing and the purchase of timber (his inability to do so is largely responsible for the poor condition of his soil and his cattle), and a land tax which in some instances deprives him of as much as half his profits. How far the Indians are able to meet these impositions in their present economic condition may be estimated from the figures of their low standard of subsistence given earlier.
That the Government is ever ready to extend the hand of assistance at times of distress, famine and at other ill-seasoas, is an achievement wherefore a Kipling might well pat it approvingly on the back just above the pack labelled “White Man’s Burden---with care”. But others would be disposed to enquire at such seasons why intervention and insistence have not ensured that famine and distress should be impossible.
That lazy gesture---our shoulders assume it automatically now after generations of practice---that gesture that is so eloquent of the “if there isn’t any more money we can’t do any more” attitude of indifference---has been too long spared correction. There is money---if not in the villages, in the towns; if not with the black people then with the whites. The natives may be taxed up to capacity---some regard it as above capacity; but surely few would deny that the white population is mulcted in an inadequate proportion. The gold mohurs won by the earliest white merchant-traders and poured out in Britain for the purchase of rotten boroughs that ensured their representation in Parliament and gave them an effective voice in the control of India from Westminster; the millions brought home by the Yules and the Inchcapes and the others, millions won from India with the assistance of Indian labour---surely these might have been spent with advantage on the betterment of the plight of the unfortunate Indian. The White Man’s Burden, if you pried into the pack, would be revealed as nothing more than a load of gold and silver---and a vast quantity of paper currency. It is brought away, load upon load, to Britain, where what death duties claim goes to the enrichment of the British exchequer, the Indian escaping the ultimate reversion of the fruit of his own soil and his own labour. Had those Britons who chose to cast their nets for the riches of India sought to set their destinies abidingly upon Eastern shores, they would have been less justifiably entitled to-day to the opprobrious epithet of “parasite”.
Consider the rôle of the white trader, who is rarely more than a bird of passage and a bird of prey. He sets up his tents---lordly mansions, “palaces” they call them in Calcutta--- and mans them with assistants of his own colour, who, each in turn, rise to reap the richest rewards of the harvest. The black man is ignored save in the humblest avocations. It would be unwise and untrue to attribute this to colour prejudice; for personal predilections have in every community to make way for financial advantages, and, since black men can be employed at a lower wage than white youths imported at considerable cost from England, the commercial houses of the Europeans would have been staffed almost entirely with Indians, were there not assured disadvantages in this procedure that more than offset the saving in actual wage. The native lacks, for the most part, commercial ambition and commercial adaptability. He is wanting in that spirit of enterprise and adventure that is essential to business advancement. He is indolent, indifferent---incapable of helping himself in this as in other directions, and no commercial endeavour can afford to take a chance with such deficient quantities in the teeth of stern competition such as exists in all Eastern markets.
The white man is not to be blamed for his methods; on the contrary, praise is due him for providing such employment as he does in the lower grades, for without his enterprise there would not be even this available to the Indian. Yet no observer can ignore the ultimate outcome, the steady flow of wealth into the local banking accounts of the white men and its eventual transfer to and expenditure in countries beyond the confines of India. American, German and Japanese endeavour is involved in this with Britain’s. It cannot reasonably be argued that Japanese commercial houses are doing the same thing in New York and London; the latter enterprises cancel out with enterprises run by these countries in Japan, but where are the Indian houses of trade in America and Britain?
The handicap in conditions has been created by the Indian's lack of ability to exploit his opportunities, but it exists and the white government that is desirous of safeguarding the future of India should see to its adjustment; for the white trader cannot---he is not engaged in commerce at the promptings of philanthropy. It is by greater taxation, taxation equal to that imposed in Britain, that the Government can hope to adjust conditions.
The Indian, within his physical limitations---and they are not insuperable---is persevering and sober. He may waste on religious excesses the time that in western countries is expended in the public house and saloon; but he plods on incessantly, often ineffectively, until overwhelmed by fate, which his religious beliefs make it impossible for him to contend against and resist. When there is no profit from the land---and it is often so, because of the inadequate methods employed---and when money is needed for the few clothes they wear or for medicines, or the far more insistent demands of the priests at the hour of birth, marriage or death, they sell the family bangles or appeal to the local moneylender, who, at a high rate of interest, is prepared to make an advance on the off-chance that there will be a bumper crop in some future year. When the villager dies his son takes over his land and his debt. If there is no bumper crop as the years go on and the family needs have been repeatedly clamant for marriage and other festive tolls, the moneylender resorts to the civil courts and sells up the cultivator, who is thereafter converted into a disinherited labourer, reduced to working his own land for the benefit of the moneylender in return for a low wage.
The Government has striven to rescue the Indian from the clutches of the moneylender. There are now official agricultural banks, which advance loans to the distracted cultivator at the reasonable rate of 5 per cent. interest. But the Indian prefers the moneylender; for whereas the Government interests must be paid on a fixed day, the moneylender, who is one of themselves, one they live with and know, can be bribed or cajoled into putting off the dreaded moment of demand, like a reasonable West End tailor. These official enterprises seem to them a little vague and impersonal. The mercies the Government are ready to mete out, such as the cancellation of debt in famine seasons, or the suspension of payment until next harvest, are unappreciated. Often these merciful occasions are made the opportunity of the moneylender, who steps in and advances the money so that the Indian should be free of his obligations to the Government.
In the earlier days of the British occupation of India, before it was considered advisable for white women to brave the rigours of climate, white men took unto themselves black women as concubines and sometimes as wives. This contact with the peoples, deplorable though it seems, resulted in a far greater understanding of native mentality and conditions than is possible from the detached viewpoint of the white home, where the black is only a menial and even the educated Indian is admitted on sufferance.
There is no gainsaying the fact that in so far as the commercial community is concerned the attitude of the whites to the blacks is one of complete contempt. I once heard a white woman, who was as innocent of her grammar as a London charwoman, refuse to step into the same hotel lift in Calcutta as an Indian who had been educated at Rugby and Oxford.
This attitude more than undoes all the good that the members of the official services, who are for the most part courteous and sympathetic, can ever hope to achieve; for the official community numbers five or six thousand (excluding the army, the lower grades of which are quite as arrogant and insolent in their dealings with the Indians), and the scattered white population in India verges on a quarter of a million. A Governor of Bombay once said: “You cannot convert bounders into gentlemen by Act of Parliament.” Lord Morley, who was then Secretary of State for India, said in the course of a speech at Arbroath in 1907: “India is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political crime.”
There have been many endeavours to curb the European’s overbearing in his dealings with the Indian; but they have been largely unavailing. The white man regards it as a duty, almost as a sacred rite. “We must keep up our prestige”, he asserts, puffing out his superior chest. What he fails to realize is that he is defeating that very purpose; for the white people are not to be found in the villages, where the inhabitants are simple and most likely to be impressed, but in the towns, where the majority of Indians are better educated, better read and deeper thinkers than the average English commercial assistant or tea broker or superintendent employed in a Hughli jute mill.
I have always been emphatically of the view that those who do not like associating on terms of absolute equality with the blacks have no right in their country at all. They should get out. We should never lose sight of the fact that Britain did not conquer India. We established commercial contact with the aid of trade treaties granted by the Indian rulers, and, finding the governmental conditions chaotic, we penetrated peacefully, and at other times not quite peacefully (with Indian mercenaries fighting our battles), until the whole of India passed into our control. How else could a handful of white traders have subjugated three hundred million peoples?
On the balance this link with Britain has been of advantage to India---and to Britain. The bulk of India’s trade is with Great Britain. In 1924-25, despite the favourable trading opportunities with France and Belgium as a result of the fall of the franc, imports into India from Britain increased, while imports from these other countries fell.
India offers a more attractive emigrational goal than any other country in the British Empire; and a magnificent training ground, often under actual war conditions, for the British Army in sections, that can be, and are often, used elsewhere.
The advantages to India I have already indicated. The disadvantages to India are a lack of opportunity to help herself, since Britain insists on helping her, however inadequately (she ought to compel India to help herself), and the gradual dispersal or decay of all that stood for Oriental art and culture.
When Clive visited Murshidabad in 1759, two years after the Battle of Plassey, which was Britain’s revenge for the Black Hole of Calcutta, he found that ancient capital of Bengal “as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London” was at that time---with palaces immeasurably greater than the palaces of Europe. Its population then numbered hundreds of thousands; to-day it is no more than a few thousands. Its glory has vanished, its population has dwindled. Clive found in it “Hindu millionaires and other men of property . . . possessing infinitely greater property” than any individual in London. A native historian states that at that time “from the pinnacles of the turrets of seven hundred mosques, the voices of seven hundred shouters of the azan simultaneously rent the atmosphere of the crowded city “.10 Now of the 700 places of worship barely 70 remain and of these 70 not 7 are in proper repair.
Murshidabad has crumbled and decayed, as other Indian cities have crumbled and decayed, since the coming of the British. In their stead have grown up such cities as Calcutta and Bombay and Madras, infinitely greater, wealthier and more imposing cities than Murshidabad ever was; for Calcutta is the second city of the British Empire, with a larger population than all imperial cities after London; and Bombay is not far behind---indeed, with the deft inclusion of certain places as suburbs, it is a little in front. But, and this is an important difference, whereas the wealth of the vanished cities was entirely Indian, the wealth and prosperity of the newer cities are almost entirely British or European. That in itself indicates how Britain has benefited at the expense of the Indian. There are native millionaires, even now, in all these cities, but there are also white men with Indian millions. And the native monied men (with the almost solitary exception of the Tatas who are Parsis, originally Persians, and not strictly Indians) use their wealth for loans at high rates of interest, for speculative deals in land or on the stock exchange, and for trading in jewels with the Indian princes or the poor villagers to whom gems are the only intelligible form of banking. These native-owned millions provide no commercial opportunities, either for their own kind or for others, so that the wealthy Indians are doing less with their wealth for their countrymen or their country than the British traders, who at least provide employment for thousands in the lower grades of industrial endeavour.
The Tatas have indicated what the black men can do in the teeth of British competition, which would be intense now for every new undertaking. But as Indian industrial development is only in its infancy there are vast unexplored fields awaiting native or other enterprise. Will the rich Indians step in with their millions? Will the Government give the lead and establish wholly-Indian, or Indian with British-guided, commercial undertakings? It will provide an outlet for the idle, who are now political hot-heads, and will better serve the country than the most extravagant vapourings in Congress and Council Chamber.
Civilization is at best a matter of viewpoint. The reflective Indian must regard the calm and peace of the ancients, who loved their books and their forest solitudes, the hymning voices of their mendicant priests and the zither-attended minstrelsy of their itinerant poets as of greater intrinsic value, art and comfort than the flickered depiction of the tortured heart-throbs of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in “Love” (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), the external advantages of the internal action caused by the taking of Pink Pills for Pale People, the diligent application, with blissful expectation, of a wonder-working hair-restorer, or the attendant joys of owning an all-in-one penknife, which includes a special crooked flint for the removal of stones from a horse’s hoof. Yet all these latter-day evidences of a much-vaunted civilization may be seen duly lauded in the trade columns of a civilized press.
Still, all these tradeable articles are concomitants of a higher standard of living without which few can attain the leisure for indulging the simpler cravings of the soul. Modern civilization, with its restless steamships and its speedy aeroplanes, is intolerant of seclusion and disregardful of national barriers. It insists on competing with primitive conditions and ousting them in the battle for progress. However little India may appreciate it or desire it her ancient civilization was doomed when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed uninvited into the peaceful harbour of Calicut on the western coast of Hindustan. The race will go on, the battle will go on, and India must shed its peace and calm, be it under British guidance or Japanese, to attain that destiny of prosperity that lies assuredly before her, pink pills, hair restorers and all. You may deplore it, but you cannot set civilization into reverse gear.
Indians blame Britain for the introduction of the drink habit into India. This isn’t strictly true. There was drink in India long before the British came, but Britain is tolerant of it to-day because of the revenue the drink traffic brings to the exchequer. The drink evil exists almost entirely in the industrial centres. In the country districts you may travel for thousands of miles without encountering a public-house or saloon or a stall at which intoxicants are sold. Some villagers undeniably have their own plant for distilling country liquor, but there isn’t that riotous indulgence among them that one perceives among Indians who cluster round the Government-licensed bars near mill and factory and in towns. The Government will not abandon this form of revenue, yet if the entire population could have voted on it, India would have had Prohibition years before America.
In the same way the Government is tolerant of the practice of opium smoking, despite the conscience-sop Act that makes it a “penal offence” in certain provinces. In Assam and Burma it is tolerated in a restricted form. There are red-taped registers there containing the names of the officially-recognized opium smokers. No new names may be added to the list---but there are already 60,000 names upon it. In the Punjab, the United Provinces and the North-West Frontier Province, “opium smoking in assemblies is a penal offence”. There has been no legislation in the other provinces. These are less than half-measures, but no doubt they can be effectively used for dressing a governmental window.
Could not the Government make a more effective sacrifice of revenue for the good of India? Or has the Government made any sacrifice at all? Let us examine the figures. In the year 1910-11 the quantity of opium consumed in the whole of India amounted to 12,527 maunds.11 For the year 1925-26 the figure is 7,282 maunds---a fall of over 5,000 maunds. But, at the same time, owing to the big increase in the price of opium, the revenue derived by Government from its sale jumped from Rs 1.63 crores in 1910-11 to Rs 3.41 crores in 1925-26. The revenue, you see, was more than doubled.
Continent though Indians are as a whole, there is one direction in which they must learn to exercise restraint, apart from sex. It is in their food. Starved, rib-revealing, flat-stomached, most villagers are in India; but when they do eat, they practise no moderation if the food is available. This isn’t due entirely to years of enforced hunger. The Indian prefers to overeat one meal a day than to eat three in moderation as is the custom of western nations. This applies to the rich as well as to the poor.
The Indian is a creature of excesses. Just as he crowds his sex indulgence into a short span so with his food. He eats beyond his capacity once every twelve hours, till the brown skin of his belly is taut and bowled, and his senses are dulled, as they would be by a narcotic, for hours afterwards. It has become a social merit to overeat and belch, for belching is expressive of satiation, and satiation is regarded as the inevitable outcome of appreciation. It is a tribute to one’s host. In fact he demands it. I was most woefully eyed once by a native host who, disregarding mere verbal expressions of gratitude, waited in vain for Nature’s voicing of the truth. Perhaps that is why so few Indians indulge in drink; they attain much the same result with food.
From this dissertation it will be seen that India has far more urgent problems than her political development, upon the definition of which the Sir John Simon Commission is now engaged. Sir John Simon will argue as Lord Meston, once Governor of the United Provinces, has argued that “opportunities and the power to set her house in order will come with a wider political liberty”.12 But I entirely disagree. There can be no basis for greater political expansion until the peoples are equipped mentally and financially and physically for the task. To persist in teasing out political tangles is to shirk the main and vital issue.
Mr Prithwis Chandra Ray, the Indian biographer of the late C. R. Das, that Bengali firebrand who was far more clamant for political rights than even Mr Gandhi, admonishes Indian agitators wisely and sternly in the course of that biography.13 “Poor revolutionaries”, he says, “what a pity they do not see that so long as we do not put our house in order and look facts in the face, realize our own responsibilities for the development of a greater and more united civic and national consciousness, and practise to a larger extent the virtues of forbearance and self-restraint, short-cuts will be of no use and their hearts’ desire for freedom will recede further and further, as does a mirage in the desert.”
There is implied in the above exhortation the misplaced belief in India’s ability to help herself. That, as I have indicated in the preceding pages, is impossible. The Indian not only is not able to, but, with notable exceptions, has no wish to reform himself. The men who are ready to protest most vehemently against the revelations of such books as Mother India, and possibly this one, and are apt to go purple in the face with anger every time a native of India is called a “native” instead of an “Indian”, have shown the least disposition to remove or correct the causes of India’s present plight---the terrible domestic conditions that result in five women dying of tuberculosis for every one man, religion’s incessant drain upon the poverty of the villager, and the futile agricultural endeavours of the ryot when the most scientific methods should be, and can be, made available.
The Indians are well aware of their own lack of vigour and resource in this direction, and flaunt it with pride as a new thong with which to scourge the back of the caged lion. They describe their plight as a “slave mentality” and attribute it to Britain’s harsh treatment of the Indian peoples, whose very souls (so they say) have been crushed in the process of subjugation.
Those who indulge in such idle accusations find it convenient to forget history. They turn rapidly over the pages which are crowded with the stern measures of the earlier conquerors, none of whom suffered a tithe of the defiance that Britain endures to-day; none of whom was indulgent or tolerant. Each enforced his will at the point of the sword. The alternatives were obedience or death. Local self-government, all the earlier tribal privileges and institutions were uprooted centuries before the Christian era by invaders who would not brook anything that was outside the scope of their authority, control and understanding. The Roman historian Justin records that Chandragupta, who ruled the greater part of India more than three hundred years b.c. “transformed nominal liberty into slavery, inasmuch as he oppressed with servitude the people whom he had rescued from foreign rule”.
The warrior invaders from Central Asia who brought India under their heel in the twelfth century a.d. were “ferocious, merciless and fanatical.”14 Kutbu-d din numbered his slaughters by the hundred thousand. It was the same with all the early Moslem rulers, who engaged upon large-scale massacres of the Hindu idolaters. “Their rapid success was largely due to their pitiless ‘frightfulness’, which made resistance terribly dangerous, and could not always be evaded by humble submission.”
The caste system was thrust upon the earliest known inhabitants of India in much the same fashion by Brahmin advisers of the pre-Christ Hindu autocrats. They came as conquerors and imposed caste restrictions to make it impossible for the oppressed to revolt against the oppressor. That is why there are so many millions of “untouchables” in India.15 They are the Indian aborigines. The country is theirs by every right of priority. But they have been disinherited, and are outlaws in their own land. To-day they are turning to Christianity as a sole means of shedding these caste disqualifications, and they are hopeful that Britain will readjust the balance, not so much in their favour, as in the direction of equality. Britain in the worst charge sheets has never been accused of such ferocity. The conquered not only enjoy the right to revolt, but are encouraged to indulge in it by our weak-kneed administrators. The Queen’s Proclamation has proved so hampering that we have been unable to help the oppressed in any appreciable degree, for it is definitely guaranteed in that Proclamation that the existing religious farce should endure undisturbed.
Britain has not even extenuated the circumstances of her guilt by ordering her ways after the manner of the conquerors of her own country. The Norman invaders of Britain took up their permanent abode among the conquered and merged with them in the course of the succeeding centuries till the two peoples were one. At all times their interests were identical. Together they built up the future of the country. In India the white population has never even endeavoured to blend with the black, save in that pitiful symbol that is a living contradiction of Kipling’s extravagant lines of verse:
Oh East is East and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet
---the half-caste: pathetic evidence of the incontinence of Tommy Atkins; a despised creature, contemptuously regarded by both the pure black and the white.
It is my firm belief that the white population can, and should, identify itself more wholeheartedly with the abiding interests of the country; and, if it does not so voluntarily, then the same compulsion that I have indicated as essential in the persuasion of the blacks should be applied to the white population. Money earned in India should be spent in India in a greater degree than it is now. At present white incomes are utilized for the maintenance of wifely establishments in the homeland; for the periodic inflation of boarding-house revenue in Bayswater at times of furlough; for permanent aid to the finances of the public schools in England, to which all white children are sent.
When the white wage-earners cease wage-earning, the entire income derived from their savings is expended in England. Pensions paid out to retired officials also find their way to the British tradespeople and the British exchequer. As for death duties---well, the wrangle over the fortune of Sir David Yule, who left millions won entirely in India, is too recent to need any stressing here. The Home exchequer strove to extract eight millions sterling from the estate and thus cheat Indian finances of the mere million that the Indian authorities self-denyingly levy on a fortune of such proportions.
Not only are the death duties in India not sufficiently high, but income tax and super-tax do not divert adequate proportions of the commercial fortunes won in that country to the needs of the struggling masses. All this will be hotly contested by the white people, but it is only honest that I should indicate it, and just that it should be enforced by the Government.
The India of a hundred years hence that I foresee will be a self-governing India, not within the British Empire, but within a confederation or league of independent nations, living, trading and advancing in political and commercial harmony. Whether India is itself carved out into many states, each independent of the other, would not affect the future. The subdivision, however, seems likely. There are already vast expanses of territory under the jurisdiction of Maharajahs---independent Native States, each of which will develop alongside, and be influenced in a large degree by the progress made in that red coloured map-expanse that is indicated in schools as “British India”.
I foresee not only accord but friendship with Britain. The speeding up of communications by the aerial link in transport must serve to draw East and West much closer together, and to combat much of the prejudice that at present exists against colour. There will always remain that consolidating influence of the English language, which is already playing a unifying role among the scattered and divided peoples of India.
All this, I foresee, will materialize ---unless, of course, a misguided Labour Government in Britain throws up the sponge, after the fashion of America, which deserted the League of Nations, and declined to guide the future of Armenia. If that happens, then India will have her golden age back again, with all its evils, until Japan steps in and with a firm hand, much more emphatic than Britain’s, insists on India attaining her appointed destiny.
The proclamation to the Princes and peoples of India was made on Nov. 1, 1858, when, following the Indian Mutiny, the government of the country was transferred from the East India Company to the Crown. It enjoined that “all those who may be in authority under us . . . abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure . . . And we will that generally, in framing and administering the law, due regard be paid to the ancient rights, usages and customs of India”. ↩
Some of the lower castes and the outcastes do not adhere strictly to this injunction. ↩
Entertainment. ↩
This is described in all its horrors in Mother India, Jonathan Cape, 1927. ↩
See note above. ↩
As described in his autobiography, The India We Served, Cassell, 1928. ↩
Quoted by Lord Ronaldshay in his book India: A Bird's Eye View, Constable, 1924. ↩
In his evidence before the Royal Commission on Agriculture, 1927. ↩
The New Spirit in India, Harper, 1908. ↩
Mr P. C. Mazumdar in his history of Murshidabad. ↩
A maund is 82.284 lbs. ↩
Sunday Times, July 29, 1928. ↩
Oxford University Press, 1928. ↩
Oxford History of India, by Vincent A. Smith, C.I.E., 1919. ↩
Statistics show that more than a third of the entire Hindu population of India is comprised of “Untouchables.” They number over 60,000,000. They are not allowed the ministration of Brahmin priests, and are forced by circumstances to take to begging or a life of crime. About 4,500,000 belong to criminal tribes. ↩