The Reconstruction of India

“We cannot sift them out from the mass, but there is always a minority, a saving leaven, whose judgment is truth the judgment of God, and before whom we stand before an invisible eye that watches and judges, condemns or acquits. Higher than the highest official tribunal, its silent approval should be our greatest ambition, its silent censure our deepest dread. To wish to justify ourselves at its bar is no weakness; to fear its censure no dishonour.”
— George Tyrrell: Preface to Through Scylla and Charybdis

Preface

With its last meeting, at Lahore, in December, 1929, the Indian National Congress has leapt into the prominence of front page news. Many things---the very name of “Congress,” the annual election of a President, the setting apart of an “Independence Day,” the apparent resemblance of the Stamp Act agitation with that against the Salt Tax---have led Americans to believe that they are seeing re-enacted the events of their own Revolution. I have found the intensest interest, even excitement, everywhere---deepened by the thought that that unique thing, an effort by non-violent means, is being made by a united nation of 330 millions, led by an emaciated, frail figure whom the world reveres as a Saint. I have tried, on the platforms of Foreign Policy Associations in the great cities, to show that I think an even more moving spectacle is in progress, and one of wider significance yet---for all mankind. The least thing that is happening is that the British Empire is changing before our eyes, and is passing through its greatest test in the memory of man. More important still, it is being decided whether East and West shall lay their long feud to rest, and an Asiatic nation be received as an equal partner by a Western Power. To show this, and many lesser but stirring implications, needed more space than is given by half an hour. Hence this book.

Generous help has saved me from having to depend on the few books I brought with me from England. I have to thank, in England, friends who have sent information without the delay of more than a day or two after my request reached them: Mr. G. T. Garratt, Mr. Jyotishchandra Ghosh, Sir John Cumming, Mr. P. C. Lyon, C.S.I., Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe; and in this country, the Vassar Library authorities, Colonel Gabriel, Mr. Angus Fletcher, Mr. Dalgoutte.

Part 1 — Historical

Chapter I

British India Before the Mutiny

Beginnings of the Raj

In India and America almost simultaneously, and in course of the same world-wide struggle, occurred the decisive emergence of the British power above the French. Up to 1750, the advantage seemed with France. But Great Britain found skilful officers in India, and a leader of genius, Robert Clive; and, though in Bengal the East India Company in 1756 experienced disaster at the hands of the Nawab, by the capture of their Calcutta fort and the massacre (in “the Black Hole”), flight or imprisonment of their agents, the Battle of Plassey next year made them masters of that richest province of India. Two years later, in America, arduous efforts continued over many years with varying success, against troops and a leader as good as their own, triumphed in the taking of Quebec. Within three years of Plassey, the Battle of Wandiwash eliminated France as an effective enemy of India; within a few years of Wolfe’s victory at Quebec, the American Revolution drastically changed the New World situation. As that Revolution neared its close, France, in alliance with the revolting Colonies, reappeared as a menace on the Indian coast, under her great admiral, de Suffren, in 1782. But she was powerless on land.

The Franco-British wars were waged in an India full of confused and shifting allegiances. Old systems were in decay, new were rising. I do not intend to trace the process by which the East India Company moved to paramountcy over all India. But certain periods and events have carried an importance lasting into our own time and affecting the discontents of today. Further, the psychological reactions of conquerors and conquered are worth noting.

The First Fifty Years: 1750-1800

The East India Company, in its three main centres, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, was occupied with checking its own servants, making dividends, and watching the “country powers” (as Native States were called), who could not be expected to be genuinely friendly, and were often actively hostile. Gradually it created behind its own fence a region of comparative calm amid the warring chaos of India.

There was no more political morality in its actions than we find in Europe and America during the same period. Miss Mayo dismisses the truth lightly:

“The name of the East India Company was sometimes dimmed by mistaken judgment or by unfit agents. Some of these were overbearing, some tactless, some wavering, one or two were base and a few succumbed to the temptation to graft. Of their defects, however, not a little nonsense is spun.”*

But we had best say nothing of the East India Company’s administration before Warren Hastings (1774-85). He effected such improvements as one man could, yet

“his most strenuous advocates . . . are forced to acknowledge that the whole system of the government over which he presided was corrupt and full of abuses.”*

His successor, Sir John Macpherson, for nineteen months carried on what the next Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, “a man not given to exaggeration,”* called “a system of the dirtiest jobbing.”*

The Breathing-Space: 1800-1830

The next thirty years were marked by a better conduct of affairs, and saw the Company in a stronger position and aware of the fact. These thirty years on the whole provided a breathing-space. Englishmen were able to look about them, and to notice what India was doing and thinking. In many British officers appeared a spirit of sympathy, magnanimity, and forward-looking statesmanship, which were soon to disappear, submerged in a general subjection to mass opinion. No part of the Empire has been served by so many men, in commerce and missions as well as in military and civil ranks, of striking and individual ability. If you form part of the after-tennis circle, in any ‘‘station” in India, you can look round on the motley activities represented there, from collector to “coolie-catcher,” from policeman to educationalist, and reflect that every one “is a good man at his job.” But in no country has British thought been so sterile, and stagnant and satisfied with a few generalisations passed on from one decade to the next. One reason for our present troubles is the fact that our thinking about India has been of such deplorable inadequacy.

Many examples could be given of the wise, friendly, unpatronising attitude taken by many Englishmen before British thought in India became standardized. I begin with the often-quoted words of Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras. In 1821, he wrote to Canning:

“Our present system of government, by excluding all natives from power, and trust, and emolument, is much more efficacious in depressing, than all our law and school-books can do in elevating their character. “We are working against our own designs, and we can expect to make no progress while we work with a feeble instrument to improve and a powerful one to deteriorate. The improvement of the character of a people, and the keeping of them, at the same time, in the lowest state of dependency on foreign rulers, to which they can be reduced by conquest, are matters quite incompatible with each other. There can be no hope of any great zeal for improvement, when the highest acquirements can lead to nothing beyond some petty office, and can confer neither wealth nor honour.”

When the political condition of Europe and America at the time these words were written is remembered, they must surely be seen to be amazingly generous and “advanced.” They show an insight and genuinely democratic feeling far beyond their time. I know of no Western statesman whose attitude was equally liberal where his own countrymen were concerned, for another fifty years at least.

Munro was distinguished equally as soldier, administrator and statesman:

“an extraordinary man, and, I think, without exception, the very best servant the Company ever possessed.”*

But in his day he was far from standing alone in the generosity of either his aims or his practice. The reader will find profit in the study of the East India Company’s Governors and “Politicals” between 1810 and 1830. A more brilliant and humane body of men never served a Government. Their actions were not contradictory of their theories. They did a great deal to pick up such fragments as remained of indigenous systems of village administration, whose lack or inadequacy is such a flaw today---throwing, as it does, upon the courts and magistrate’s offices petty jobs that never ought to reach them. It is most unfortunate that the process was broken off violently by the Mutiny. I will quote, as representative of what these men thought, not in the first flush of youth’s inexperience but after long service, what Mountstuart Elphinstone, who had been Governor of Bombay Presidency (1819-27), said in 1850:

“the administration of all the departments of a great country by a small number of foreign visitors, in a state of isolation produced by a difference in religion, ideas and manners, which cuts them off from all intimate communion with the people, can never be contemplated as a permanent state of things. I conceive, also, that the progress of education among the Natives renders such a scheme impracticable, even if it were otherwise free from objection.”

The last prominent man in whom Munro’s spirit survived and could find effective expression was Sir Henry Lawrence, who was killed in the Siege of Lucknow. In his brother John, who survived the Mutiny and rose to the highest place after it, the spirit of benevolent ruthlessness that had been growing during thirty years was triumphant. It was triumphant also in Henry Lawrence’s associates, the famous band who loved him but found his mood unintelligible. Yet you can “sense” that his beliefs were a thorn faintly teasing their memory of him. Sir Robert Montgomery has recorded Lawrence’s judgment that Indians were happier under their own systems than under ours. Lawrence had known the Punjab, as he was to know that worst centre of native misgovernment, Oudh, both under Native and under British administration. He had been Agent in Rajputana, of all regions the most unwesternised, and Resident in Nepal, which is not in British India at all. Montgomery passed the statement on, as one passes on the eccentric opinions of men deeply beloved and revered, with wonder yet in one’s tone. “I’ll tell you a queer thing he used to say. If any one else had said it you wouldn’t give it a second thought. But I’ve often wondered what he meant by it.” That, one feels, was how Lawrence’s words clung to Montgomery’s mind.

The quarrel between the two Lawrence brothers, told in guarded but sufficiently revealing language by Henry’s biographers, is one of the most illuminating passages in Indian history. In brief, John would take a straight way, however rough, towards what he considered efficient administration and “improvements”; Henry would put himself in the position of those dispossessed and conquered, would in every way conciliate their self-respect. Their common friend Herbert Edwardes quoted Sir Richard Temple on what would have resulted if either brother had had an entirely free hand, released from the other’s restraint: “Sir Henry would soon have had to close the Treasury, with his ideas of jaghire improvements, light revenues, &c., and John would have had a full revenue but a mutinous country.” If Henry had been kept on in the Punjab, and had set his stamp on its administration, that administration would not have developed what we today should consider democracy. But it would have developed self-government along aristocratic lines, using instead of depressing the nobles and chieftains. As it was, it was John who set his stamp on Punjab administration; he saw no special merit or utility in the class that had formerly ruled, and he worked for the peasants, the class that had never ruled or dreamed of ruling and that would not dream of any share in its own government until the restless spirit of the West reached to this region also. The result is, when at last modern political ideas touch the Punjab, they come as revolutionary; anything in the way of self-government is a break, and not a gradual fulfilment. Henry’s ideas were the most democratic of his time, a time when it is absurd to speak of any European country as having genuine government of the people by the people. How individual, and how “advanced” they were, we can see by abundant testimony. He opposed annexation in the case of both the Punjab and Oudh. Serving in Nepal as Resident, he did not fail to note that a corrupt and savage Court did not necessarily mean a badly administered land, any more than in our own day a Government riddled with graft means an unprogressive or unprosperous people:

“It is only justice to them to say that, bad as is their foreign and Durbar policy, they are the best masters I have seen in India.

Neither in the Terai nor in the Hills, have I witnessed or heard of a single act of oppression, since I arrived a year and a half ago, and a happier peasantry I have nowhere seen.”*

When he was sent from the Punjab, and John put in his place, one of his subordinates wrote to him:

“The Sirdars and Jagheerdars of the Punjab will lose in you their only friend and benefactor . . . For the future, fortiter in re will continue to be the characteristic of the rule in these territories, without much, I fear, of the suaviter in modo which has hitherto accompanied it, and has been the chief element of its success.”

Lady Lawrence, in a defence of her husband against a newspaper attack (a defence never sent), wrote:

“If it be unlike an English gentleman to consider the rank and feelings of other men, irrespective of their colour, creed, or language, then truly he has renounced his birthright to adopt ‘native ideas.’ Twenty years of varied civil experience among the people of India have given Sir Henry Lawrence a rare knowledge of their language and character, their wants and wrongs, the good and the evil that our system has introduced among them. I watch the conduct of the English in India, and from the private soldier to the general officer, from the clerk to the judge, I see prevalent the spirit that talks of the ‘black fellows,’ that, perhaps unconsciously, assumes that the natives are very much in our way in their own country, except so far as they may be turned to our comfort and aggrandisement.”

Henry Lawrence again and again pointed out that the Native Army offered a career that served well enough for the ordinary man, but for the exceptional man---who comes along in every army and every people---was an insult. “We forget,” he wrote in 1843,

“that our army is composed of men, like ourselves, quick-sighted and inquisitive on all matters bearing upon their personal interests; who, if they can appreciate our points of superiority, are just as capable of detecting our deficiencies, especially any want of military spirit or soldierly bearing.

At Cabul we lost an army, and we lost some character with the surrounding states. But I hold that by far our worst loss was in the confidence of our Native soldiery. Better had it been for our fame if our harassed troops had rushed on the enemy and perished to a man, than that surviving Sepoys should be able to tell the tales they can of what they saw at Cabul.”

Again, on May 2, 1857, eight days before the Mutiny burst upon India, he wrote to Lord Canning, the Governor-General:

“We measure too much by English rules, and expect, contrary to all experience, that the energetic and aspiring among immense military masses should like our dead level and our arrogation to ourselves, even when we are notorious imbeciles, of all authority and all emolument. These sentiments of mine, freely expressed during the last fifteen years, have done me injury, but I am not less convinced of their soundness, and that until we treat natives, and especially native soldiers, as having much the same feelings, the same ambition, the same perception of ability and imbecility, as ourselves, we shall never be safe.”

1830-57. Reform, Interference, Aggression, Estrangement

Indian history, as written, is the “Acts of the Administration”---a sequence of dates, of wars and measures. Moods and tendencies are ignored, except when it seems necessary to explain the Mutiny and the political troubles of our own day. The latter appear as a capricious and sudden phenomenon, due to “modern education” and the seditious press, encouraged by the Rise of Japan and by unbalanced British sympathisers whose knowledge of India is the product of a cold weather tour.

The truth is---and is so obvious that it must seem a platitude as soon as stated---we must consider carefully the thirty years immediately before the Mutiny, to understand the present political troubles and all the unrest of both sides to the present quarrel. Up to 1830, the East India Company cannot have seemed to its native rivals anything but the most dangerous among many warring powers. It was distinguished by the vigour, efficiency, and loyalty of its servants, who sought wealth but never independent empire for themselves. It was too strong to dislodge; and it was likely to overshadow the whole land. But after 1830, it was more than a potential peril, it was an active and unscrupulous foe to everybody. It was now alien in every sense, meddlesome, doctrinaire, set on enforcing its will in every realm, even that of social practice. As with religion, so with the East India Company, things had come to a pretty pass when it sought to interfere with a man’s private life.

There was a changed attitude on both sides, Indian and British. Mr. G. T. Garratt, in his admirable book, An Indian Commentary, explains what is a cause of impatience to democratically minded critics, especially Americans---the reluctance of the Indian Government to interfere with habits that to us are obviously unsocial:

“Even in Victorian times England was divided into a number of classes between whom marriage was almost unthinkable. It was firmly believed by all classes that a man should ‘keep his proper station,’ and that this system had some divine sanction. The earlier German, English, and French missionaries found little remarkable in the caste system . . . We no longer care to sing about ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate,’ or believe that the Almighty divided mankind into classes, and ‘orders their estate,’ but the change is very recent. The Englishmen who went to India as administrators and soldiers during the nineteenth century came from families which saw nothing incongruous in such a conception of the Deity, or unnatural in such a society. It is clear from the letters and diaries of men like Nicholson, Outram, and the Lawrences that they found many aspects of India much less strange and remote than would a modern educated Englishman.”*

This is worth stressing. This change in our attitude towards social inequality, as also towards unhygienic methods of living, is very recent indeed, a fact forgotten by many who criticise both Britain and India. As Mr. Garratt says,

“The War and the influence of America have hastened in England a mental process which began with our industrial development.”

It was not caste alone, however, that the British of the early nineteenth century viewed more tolerantly than we do. They were slow to be shocked by the (to us) incomprehensible cruelties of Indian life. When throughout the world public executions took place, when slavery reigned in Colonial and American plantations, with a wide range of cruelty and mutilation sanctioned by law and opinion, why should the British official or soldier in India be vexed overmuch by widow-burning, female infanticide (he recognised that its reason was largely economic) or even human sacrifice? As a matter of fact, he was not. Horror was slow in arising, slow in being communicated.

There is a famous monument in India:

To the Memory of
Augustus Cleveland, Esq.,
Who Without Bloodshed or the Terror of
Authority
Accomplished the Entire Subjection of the Lawless and Savage
Inhabitants of the Jungleterry of Paharmahall,
Who had long infested the Neighbouring Lands
by their Predatory Invasions,
And Attached them to Civilised Life by a
Conquest over their Minds---
The Most Permanent as the Only Rational
Mode of Dominion.

This man, who died in 1784, aged 29, must have been a remarkable character. In his brief service he won the trust and love of his countrymen, from Warren Hastings downward. He was a legend before he died, and has remained one ever since. There can be no doubt that he was exceptionally humane and gentle, as well as effective. Our one familiar glimpse of him, in the rarely lifted mist that clouds rural Bengal during the eighteenth century, comes from a traveller who was moved by his renown to undergo the tedious journey to his jungle fastnesses. That glimpse reveals Cleveland and his guest affably and interestedly gracing with their presence a primitive sacrifice of revolting savagery.

Nevertheless, a humanitarian movement was growing in England. It encouraged the first isolated protests of Englishmen against the ritual tortures sanctioned by Hinduism---which a century ago was in practice a thoroughly beastly thing.

A Double Aggression

Almost simultaneously, Government launched on a double aggression, after long quiescence. In 1833, the East India Company ceased entirely to be a trading concern, and became solely an administrative and governing power. This fact swiftly rendered the independence of Native States exceedingly uncertain. And, four years earlier, the authorities had at last dared to interfere with religious customs.

Thirty Years of Reforming Zeal

In December, 1829, Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, abolished suttee, or widow-burning, in Bengal. Abolition in the rest of British India followed, six months later. Thus a practice which had caused the sacrifice of many hundreds of women annually was driven into the Native States. Hitherto, Government had been prepared to go to almost any lengths to avoid rebellion, and, especially, mutiny in its Native Army. It had now dared, against the advice of many of its officers, to proscribe a rite which had passionate emotional and religious enthusiasm behind it. And there was no rebellion, no whisper of mutiny.

This act was but a beginning. During these twenty-seven years before the Mutiny we see an

“intensive warfare against violent and cruel crime; British officers fought against dacoity, suttee, human sacrifice, thuggee, female infanticide. It was not kid-glove work; even the rites of the Aztecs were not more depraved and ferocious than those which marked the ‘meriah’ human sacrifices of Orissa, and the officers who extirpated them were dealing with sub-human beings. . . . The work of these years was largely summary; it necessarily developed the summary outlook and method.”*

The men who were hunting down thugs, whose murderous organisation was a network covering vast tracts and involving powerful landlords and chieftains, often passed out of the “summary mind” stage to that further one, the gamekeeper mind. They felt that they were exterminating vermin. I submit that they were, and that we need feel no pity for men who themselves were incapable of pity. It required many years of unremitting effort to extirpate thuggee and the meriah rites. Thuggee was the strangling of travellers by robbers who joined their party; the victims were regarded as devoted to the Goddess Kali. The meriah rites varied, but one may serve:

“One of the most common ways of offering the sacrifice in Chinna Kimedy is to the effigy of an elephant rudely carved in wood, fixed on the top of a stout post, on which it is made to revolve. After the performance of the usual ceremonies, the wretched Meriah” [the consecrated victim] “is fastened to the proboscis of the elephant, and amidst the shouts and yells of the excited Khonds, is rapidly whirled round, when, at a given signal by the officiating ‘Zani,’ or priest, the crowd rush in, seize the Meriah, and with their knives cut the flesh off the shrieking victim as long as life remains. He is then cut down, the skeleton burnt, and the horrid orgies are over. In several villages, I counted as many as fourteen effigies of elephants which had been used in former sacrifices.”*

These years of suppression bred a conviction of the overwhelming superiority of Western civilisation over Eastern, especially over its Hindu aspects. They bred a contempt for the barbarism which tolerated such primitive cruelties, and which sent women, often in droves, on to the pyres of their husbands. It is right that the strain which the political situation puts on the Indian who is of the modern world, sensitive and intellectual, should be realised. But there is no reason why the public, especially the American public, should be allowed to believe that the British administrator has done nothing through the years but fleece and oppress a noble populace. (A Nationalist, a very gifted man with a fine University record, used to tell his audiences---playing on two Bengali words that resemble each other---“The English are here to rule and to suck.”) The difficulties that have been faced by thousands of lonely men have been tremendous; courage and tact and infinite patience, as well as harsher qualities, have gone into the slow process of bringing India where she is today. I propose to make a long quotation, which seems to me to concentrate as much varied information and enlightenment as any passage of equal length I know. It is Henry Lawrence, Agent in Rajputana, writing in 1854:

“Last month I circulated a paper calling for information as to what had been done in every principality about suttee. I was induced to do so by the Maharanee of Oodeypoor ignoring the fact of anything having been effected at Jyepoor,* and by a suttee having recently occurred at Banswara and two in Mullanee, . . . which has been under our direct management during the last twenty years. With all respect for Colonel Ludlow, I think we can now fairly do more than he suggests. Twenty years ago the case might have been different, but we are now quite strong enough to officially denounce murder throughout Hindustan. I have acted much on this principle without a word on the subject in the treaty with Goolab Sing.* I got him in 1846 to forbid infanticide, suttee, and child-selling. He issued a somewhat qualified order without much hesitation, telling me truly he was not strong enough to do more. We were, however, strong enough to see that his orders were acted on, and suttee is now almost unknown in all the western hills. I do not remember above two cases since 1846, and in both, the estates of offenders were resumed. I acted in the same manner . . . in the Mullanee cases. . . . The parties have been in confinement several months; the Joudpoor punishment for suttee was a fine of five per cent. on one year’s income, which was sheer nonsense, and would never have stopped a single suttee. Banswara has also been under our direct management for the last five or six years, owing to a minority; the people pretended they did not know suttee had been prohibited. The offenders have been confined, and I have proclaimed that in future suttee will be considered murder. Jyepoor is my most troublesome state; the Durbar is full of insolence. We have there interfered too much and too little . . . And yet it is very easy, without offence, to give hints and help: in the matter of jails, by simply, during a rapid tour, going once into every jail; and, on my arrival here last year, writing a circular remarking that in different jails (without mentioning names), I had seen strange sights that must, if known to beneficent rulers, revolt their feelings, &c. . . . At Oodeypoor my brother told me that they released 200 prisoners on my circular, and certainly they kept none that ought to have been released; for when I went to Oodeypoor last July, I found not a man in jail but murderers, every individual of whom acknowledged to me his offence as I walked round and questioned them. The Durbar don’t like such visits, but they are worth paying at all risks; for a few questions to every tenth or twentieth prisoner give opportunities to innocent or injured parties to come forward, or afterwards to petition. No officer appears ever before to have been in one of these dens . . . You are right in thinking that the Rajpoots are a dissatisfied, opium-eating race. Tod’s picture,* however it may have applied to the past, was a caricature on the present. There is little, if any, truth or honesty in them, and not much more manliness. Every principality is more or less in trouble. The princes encroach, or try to encroach, on the Thakoors,* and the latter on their sovereigns. We alone keep the peace. The feudal system, as it is called, is rotten at core.”*

Annexations

The feeling grew that direct British rule was beyond question better than Native Rule, and that every occasion for interference should be made into one of aggrandisement. State after State was added to British India. Sind was annexed, in 1843, after a war that no one defends. In 1849, after two wars, the Punjab was annexed. The Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, ignored one of the most deeply cherished Indian customs, that of adoption of an heir. He enforced a doctrine of “lapse,” whenever what European usage would consider a direct heir was lacking. Seven States were thus absorbed between 1848 and 1854. Some were very large; Nagpur consisted of 80,000 square miles.

Outside India proper, in 1852 there was a war, and annexations, in Burma. Between 1839 and 1842, a disastrous as well as unjust war was waged in Afghanistan. The influence of this on future events cannot be passed over. It was not an isolated blunder, whose consequences closed up with itself. Our prestige sank to the lowest depth it ever touched in India. There were discontents and mutinies in the Native Army that shared in the wretchedness caused by the long-drawn-out incompetence of our commanders. Sind and the Punjab had to serve as our lines of communication and to endure the temporary abrogation of their independence. The Sikhs---our nominal Allies, and at times useful Allies, but generally masking their hostility and contempt---saw our failure at close quarters. The Sikhs were the one “country power” that had sufficient strength to be tempted to try conclusions with us. Their great ruler, Ranjit Singh, was too wise to yield to the temptation, but he died in 1839. At almost any time between 1839 and December, 1845 (when the First Sikh War broke out), it was a toss-up which would be the aggressors, the Sikhs or the British. Looking back, on the picture our soldiers have left, of the Sikhs watching, insolent and scornful, while we threw away armies in Kabul and the Khyber Pass, we can see that it was the Afghan War that decided which party would ultimately break the truce. There was also a pretty constant expectation, based on the probability, of a war with Nepal.

This period, and its closing episode, the Mutiny, is the heroic age of the British tradition in India. It flung up name after name that has never been forgotten, of men whose ruthless and reckless vigour won boundless admiration---John Lawrence, Nicholson, Herbert Edwardes, Havelock, Napier, Neville Chamberlain, and many more. Many of them were aggressively and fanatically religious, as well as overwhelming in action. Their predecessors, beside this evangelical zeal, seem deists in their chill formalism and ethical correctness. Elphinstone

“was apparently quite devoid of those ardent religious feelings that have inspired so many Indian heroes.”*

Contrast Edwardes’ famous Memorandum, after the Mutiny, demanding that the Administration purge itself of “all unchristian elements.” Let us quote him, rather than Cooper, of whom the kindest judgment is that religion turned his brain, as it turned Neill’s. For him the victories of the battlefield were continued on the field of dialectic; we can see him, with benevolent remorselessness, pressing home his argument, against folk too cowed to disagree with the great man’s conclusions:

“The natives are confounded. They don’t know what to attribute it to. They say it is our unanimity, our extraordinary resolution, our individual devotion to the public service, our good destiny, and so on; and I then wind up by saying, ‘Yes, it is all these, no doubt. But who gave these virtues to us rather than to you? Why, God. And those who counted the English as few at the beginning of the war forgot to ask on which side God was to be counted.’” *

John Lawrence’s finding was that

“All such advantages were as nothing without the support of the everlasting arm of Almighty God. To Him alone, therefore, be all the praise.”*

Robert Montgomery---“for there were many saintly men in the Punjab besides its Chief”*---wrote:

“It was not policy, or soldiers, or officers, that saved the Indian Empire to England, and saved England to India. The Lord our God, He it was.”*

When the Mutiny was suppressed, British leaders saw in it God’s judgment on England for her slowness in bringing India to a knowledge of the truth, and His wrath upon the heathen for the blindness which had been unaware of the day of visitation until it burst in terror and anguish.

In my belief, this zeal did the missionary enterprise no good. But historians have continued in the same offence as Christian propagandists. So long as men are overshadowed by a tradition, solemnly accepted for truth’s absolute expression and serving the same soporific purpose as a flag unrolled above the speakers at a patriotic meeting, so long will they become solely maudlin when they approach the deeds of “the Christian soldier” or “the Christian Governor”:

“‘It is a touching circumstance,’ says Cust, ‘and worthy of record, that the Angel of Death came to him’ [John Lawrence] ‘at a time when invitations were actually in circulation to friends to meet at his house to discuss the affairs of the Christian Vernacular Education Society.’”*

English and American newspapers never print the name of General Feng, without adding in inverted commas “the Christian General.” Why is it all right for the late Lord Roberts to be a Christian General, an example to us all, and wrong (as well as funny) for Feng to be the same thing?

I have quoted Sir Robert Aitchison, not too courteously. But Aitchison was a man of fine character, who held aloft the old standards of fairness in an age when he was almost unsupported, and was the most generous ruler the Punjab has known. My quarrel is not with such a man, or even with the men of a tempestuous time, but with the men of my own day who write Indian history on principles long ago outworn and never tested by reference to facts. We cause every branch of Indian scholarship, except the merely philological, to lag in the rear of our modern world. If historians and missionary enthusiasts will keep the New Testament unsmirched, by leaving it outside the whole business, I will guarantee to show them that the men their praise misrepresents were finer than their imagination has guessed. A century ago, there was no such insupportable discrepancy between the armaments of Europe and Asia as there is today. Men knew the proximity of disaster in Afghanistan to Central Asian dungeons and death by torture. Recreate the scene when George Lawrence, a captive, came on embassy from the Afghan Chief, and refused to discuss his brother Henry’s proposal to go back to prison in his place. Think of the Afghan snows and the clefts that served for passes, every height a lair of hatred, and the vast Punjab behind you the home of a nominal Ally who despised your people in their weakness. Read the tale of Dr. Brydon, sole survivor from the Khyber massacre, seen drugged with faintness and misery, as he staggered towards Jalalabad walls. A Burmese army would be a jest today, an affair to scatter with a few fireworks. It was no jest in 1824, when Burma was at our Bengal frontiers, close to the network of swamp through which two of the world’s mightiest rivers drain to the sea---a region to us darkness, to our foes full of approaches. There was

“a panic that the Burmahs had taken Chittagong, and were pushing up to Calcutta in their war boats.”*

The process of aggrandisement had reduced the number of the East India Company’s rivals. But, by concentration, by elimination of their mutual distrusts in face of their greater distrust of the Western Power, it had strengthened them. At any time between 1830 and 1857, with Burma, Nepal, the Punjab, Afghanistan, and Gwalior all secretly hostile, the British were faced by the likelihood of war on all their fronts. That possibility came, and remained, very close, with the Afghan War of 1839. If defeated, there was no question of making terms. Your foes would simply exterminate you, as you extirpated noxious animals. If the British had not known this before, Afghanistan taught it them.

Chapter II

Estrangement

“The wings of early morn I take,
And rouse the partridge from the forest-brake,
Dash from my horse’s hoofs the sparkling dew,
Or track the startled deer with wild haloo.

But if Rebellion in this land, which Heaven
For its own purpose wise to us has given,
Uprears its head, the pen is laid aside,
And to the fight in stern array I ride,
With steady purpose, and unflinching will,
Crush the offence, but spare the offender still,
And bid the rustics after war’s alarms
Turn to their unscathed homes and their uninjured farms.”
— R. Needham Cust: A Day in India (Poems of Many Years and Many Places, 104)

What Was the Mutiny?

“On the surface it was a military and mainly Mahomedan insurrection, but it was far more than that. It was a violent upheaval not so much against the political supremacy of Britain as against the whole new order of things which she was importing into India. The greased cartridges would not have sufficed to provoke such an explosion.”*

I think they would, however. In 1806, the Vellore Mutiny was caused by similar ignoring of prejudices. No Hindu or Mohammedan sepoy could bite, or even handle, cartridges so greased. No provocation could have been devised more certain to result in panic-stricken rebellion. No authority ever presented soldiers with a better reason for insubordination.

The question of whether the Mutiny was only a mutiny, or a genuine war of independence, was debated by many who took part on the victorious side. After much uneasy and unconvincing argument, the usual decision was that it was merely a mutiny. The main pillars of this comforting belief are that the Sikhs remained loyal, and the Native States that had escaped annexation were mostly neutral. With what extreme difficulty the Princes kept their people quiet---that the Gwalior Contingent revolted against both their British officers and their Ruler---that the armies of both Sindhia and Holkar rose, and that Sindhia was chased out of Gwalior---the Sikhs’ reasons for indignation against those Indian troops (now in mutiny) who in the foreigners’ service had helped to war them down---the fierceness of their wrath against the Mogul Empire, now at last helpless to their vengeance---the measures by which the Punjab was overawed and kept “loyal”---these things are hardly noted. Sir George Forrest is almost the only historian who points out that the Mutiny showed that under all their differences the Hindu and Mohammedan populations understand one another’s systems, as no Westerners can, that in normal times these systems interact, and that in 1857 the two religions found a bridge and may do so again. In loose alliance against us were the Moslems seeking to recover a lost empire; the mutineers, who came mostly from Oudh---that had just been annexed---and admittedly fought to recover the independence that had been so recently taken away; the armies of the two great Maratha States of Gwalior and Indore; another head of Maratha opposition under the Peshwa’s adopted son, Nana Sahib; the Rani of Jhansi, who had lost her State under the lapse doctrine, in 1853. In Bihar war was waged with outstanding pertinacity and valour by Kumar Singh, a chieftain aged eighty, whose exploits are still the delight of the people. He will one day be an Indian Hereward the Wake, and as legendary as Robin Hood. Further,

“discontent and unrest were widely prevalent among the civil population, and in several places . . . the populace rose before the sepoys at those stations mutinied. The vague fear that the Government meditated the forcible conversion of the people to Christianity, as they understood the term, had penetrated into the villages and disposed men’s minds to rebellion.”*

One of the strangest things in literature is the way writer after writer first marshalls the abundant evidence against the theory of a mutiny of disgruntled mercenaries, and then nevertheless disposes of the problem by stating that theory. Through seventy years, facts have slowly forced us to a halfway position, from which we shall be driven further, when the Indian side of the controversy obtains free expression.

The war was without pity, and has been chronicled by the victors without the least tinge of magnanimity. It is certain that their version must go. Ultimately the cruelties of both sides will rest in the same pit of infamy. The more we hasten that day, the more willingly we welcome it, the quicker will come a spirit of cooperation between British and Indians, equally guiltless of the crimes of a dead generation. Nothing can prevent the British from cherishing the suffering and heroism of their own people, and the memories of the women and children who perished. Nothing---least of all, British histories---can prevent Indians from regarding their own flesh and blood as genuine soldiers and martyrs for independence. Nor would any Englishman aware of the truth refuse a salute to such courage as was shown by gallant old Kumar Singh, by Feroze Shah, by Tantia Tupi and the Moulvi of Faizabad. They are figures as truly heroic as “Nikal Seyn.”

The Influence of the Mutiny

The Oxford History of India quotes with approval Sir Lepel Griffin’s judgment:

“Perhaps a more fortunate occurrence than the Mutiny of 1857 never occurred in India.”

To the last generation, fixing its gaze on the fact that India passed from a Government in its origin commercial, and stained from its selfish and oligarchic beginnings, to an Administration of individual honesty, integrity, ability, this judgment seemed a platitude. To us, aware that half a century of slow and reluctant parting from absolute power has put the British in the position of a man who has to pay a debt long postponed and heavily augmented by interest, it seems a grotesque misapprehension of the facts. Thanks to the long estrangement we seem to have a woeful array of choices in India. What are they?

There is what the Imperialist Extremists advocate. We can cease to shilly-shally, and begin to govern again, dropping the defeatism now infecting our public life and policy, that corrupts our working classes with “the dole” and proposes to reduce our Navy. Our statesmen, instead of talking about Dominion Status and self-government, must publicly repeat what their predecessors used to say at steady intervals---that they “cannot conceive of a time” when India will be able to rule herself, that representative government is a thing India never knew in the Dark Ages, and that it is therefore quite alien to her character. We must put in practice again a firm, kind autocracy, and forget our temporary aberrations into constitutional experiment.

This road, though its advocates think it will bring us back to the Golden Age, undoubtedly will pass over some bumpy phases of repression. We shall have murders, riots, shootings, hangings.

Many facts, many considerations, might in our darker moods tempt most of us to the despair out of which this counsel is born. But I do not think it worth discussion. I do not hold that autocracy achieved the results claimed for it, or was the noble thing it seems to those who dispensed it.

Nor does the modified form of this counsel, that Indians should be held to the “Reforms,” about which they have behaved so badly, and should be made to work their passage to freedom, seem to me worth consideration. There are profound psychological reasons for the collapse that has afflicted Indian public life, and the situation is one in which both sides are so much at fault that there is nothing to do but to start afresh, with as much good will as can be found.

There is “the clear-cut course” the National Congress demands. Independence. The Congress has given us the option between finding an immediate complete solution---which it cannot find itself---and the inauguration of a period of bloodshed and administrative chaos (for this is what Independence would mean). I propose to show the absurdity and immorality of this counsel.

There is “Dominion Status”---the right way out, but how beset with difficulty! Immediate, full Dominion Status would merely make a fool of India, or, rather, put her where she cannot help making a fool of herself (and an extremely unhappy fool). Independent India would be like Independent China, but far more torn and wretched, even more ridiculous a spectacle to the outside world. But Dominion India, unless the best brains of all parties in the Indian problem put their work into its manifold perplexity, is going to take over a heritage of embarrassment that will take generations to dispose of. Yet any delay, however necessary, will be so liable to misunderstanding that the Extremist ranks will be augmented by moderate and reasonable men. This is the penalty of having let resentment and wounded self-esteem fester through so many decades and grow to intolerable exacerbation, of having refused to give any considerable training in self-government or any fair expression to promises often made and with especial solemnity set forth by Queen Victoria and each succeeding King-Emperor.

Nothing in the history of nations ever did more mischief than the violent break of 1857. As my own views are matter of some notoriety, I will refer the reader to men who cannot be accused of any eccentricity of individual judgment:

“It bequeathed a legacy of bitter memories to persons on both sides. Fear had, for some years, stifled expression of these; but, as time went on, a section of the Indian Press began to display malignant hostility to the existing state of things.”*

“This legacy of racial hatred acted as a blight on the growth of the spirit of mutual understanding and co-operation between Indians and Englishmen in India which two generations of broad-minded Englishmen and progressive Indians had sedulously and successfully cultivated.”*

Gone were the liberal sentiments of such men as Malcolm, Henry Lawrence, Munro. Not for another sixty years would any Indian, not a Prince, meet the ordinary run of Englishmen, official and unofficial, as Rammohan Roy had met them. There was to be on one side the temptation to be patronising, critical, watchful for and resentful of a liberty taken, on the other side excessive and often absurd sensitiveness, a tendency to see bad manners in an accident and scorn in an unconscious gesture. I will appeal to Caesar, to the knowledge of my own countrymen concerning things assuredly not done in any corner. There is Trevelyan’s Competition-Wallah, with its witness to the mood of the sixties; that jolly book, The Chronicles of Budgepore; the unconscious (but startlingly clear) revelations in scores of Memoirs that the British, especially those who had held high position, wrote after leaving India; the whole of “Anglo-Indian” literature, its novels and light verse. How terribly the Mutiny obsession crowded to the mind’s front we learnt in the War, those of us who were in India. Some of the evidence had better be buried with our brains, and I shall not cite that which most impressed me at the time, and still strikes me with amazement.

But far worse than any expectation that the horrors of Cawnpur would be repeated was the severance of the races, the cold dislike. I am anxious not to exaggerate this. If I do, I shall not “get away with it,” for I have appealed to Caesar, to common knowledge. Mr. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, a book I resented when it came out, but later, on re-reading, admired greatly (though with reservations, of no importance here), was hard on Indians and British alike. Yet the reluctant conclusion of an English official who hated the book was: “But hang it all! It’s an exact picture of provincial life, in an upcountry station, before the War.” If it is not, then what are we to make of Kipling? His picture of British life in India, a source of deep humiliation to Indians, has been widely accepted as faithful, most of all by the classes he portrays. It was a hard, happy life, full of physical delights such as stay in memory with a man to the end, sensuous, prompt, vigorous; the picture of a time now gone for ever, but likely in retrospect to arouse such regretful re-creation as writers apply to other halcyon phases of human existence, whether in merrie, fox-hunting, unradicalised England or in Virginia before the Civil War. But, frankly, is it a picture of their people that the British can now be glad that a great writer broadcast to the Earth’s ends? Is that, asks the Englishman of 1930, really what we were, during half a century? Is that really the way we thought (or refused to think)? In any case, are we now happy that the world believes it was?

I have too much scorn for the indirect fashion in which this psychological problem of Britain and India is usually handled, balancing this consideration against that, to go into details. In matters of detailed accusation, neither side has been fair. We have heard much of Indian conservatism and stupidity, and not half enough of British. We have often been told of the Englishman’s bad manners and the Indian’s courtesy, far too rarely of the Indian’s bad manners. The rowdy swaggering alien is not a whit worse than students whose every whisper is a bellow, who will wake a whole train while seeing off some wedding guest at a station reached at 2 a.m. and waited in for the half hour or more that every Indian express seems able to spare for each pause. There are the Indians---their name is Legion, and they travel on every train---who make a carriage almost uninhabitable with their messy meals and swill the floor with water. “I know, I know,” said a distinguished Indian writer who had been telling me, in 1913, of my people’s bad manners and had stirred me to reply. “They are perfect beasts. But I speak against them quite as strongly as I do against your people.” If an Englishman is rude to an Indian, it is noted, repeated, and like enough gets into print. If an Indian is rude to an Englishman, it is probably passed over, often with that generous refusal to take offence readily which (after all) is one of the Englishman’s natural merits. In those same Marabar Caves* where Mr. Forster’s Miss Quested had so disturbing an experience, a friend of mine once accompanied the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. They entered a chamber which a Sannyasi had appropriated for meditation, and he broke out in abuse. They apologised, saying they had no idea he was there. Very vainly. He grew angrier. Still apologising, they withdrew. As they went out, they overheard the holy man remark to himself, in English: “You fool! losing your temper as if you were a damned Englishman!” They recognized the voice as that of a Calcutta lawyer, who six months previously had thrown up a big practice and disappeared into the life of the spirit. They remembered the incident as a good story, without a shred of malice or resentment.

But all this is beside the point. I want the reader to ask himself if the attitude which has only just passed away, which ruled for over half a century and is indelibly portrayed by Kipling (to mention no other name), which informed both social relations and governmental action, does not now seem like a dream? It cannot be true that for all those years we thought and felt as we did. But it is.

Chapter III

The Coming of Nationalism

“Fallen cherub! to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.”
— Paradise Lost, I. 157-8

The common opinion among Englishmen was that in the Mutiny the Mohammedans were their chief enemies. They became a discouraged community, weak in education and influence, and with slight representation in the Services. Their emergence into happier relationship with the British is largely an event of this century. Their presence in the full movement of Indian Nationalism is a recent thing, and even now only partial.

But the Mutiny left the Hindus also crushed.

“The victory had been too complete and terrible, and had left the antagonists too dazed or too insolently triumphant, for any natural way of partnership to emerge for another half-century to come.”*

A people gifted intellectually were bound to seek whatever outlet was available for ability or pride. In some twenty years a recovery was apparent. By the eighties Bengal’s literary Renaissance was in more abundant efflorescence than ever. A nation was being made, there was consciousness of immense vitality. We need not hesitate to apply Wordsworth’s hackneyed but vivid lines:

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!
But to be young was very heaven!”

Among the older figures, giving their blessing to all this eager thought, was the veteran novelist, Bankimchandra Chatterji. On one occasion, when a group would have garlanded him, he passed the honour to a young poet, Rabindranath Tagore:

“No, give your garland to him.”*

Self-respect, no less than power, must find expression. It did, in an extravagant glorification of India’s past and of Hindu thought, which had been so despised. The attention that European scholars were paying to Sanskrit was noted, and their praise was received with delight. When Colonel Olcott lectured on India, at Amritsar, in 1881, his diary notes:

“People who imagine the Hindus to be devoid of patriotic feeling should have seen the effect on my huge audience as I depicted the greatness of ancient and the fallen state of modern India. Murmurs of pleasure or sighs of pain broke from them; at one moment they would be cheering and vehemently applauding, the next keeping silent while the tears were streaming from their eyes.”*

In Bengal, a Brahman who had taken the name of Sasadhar Tarkachuramani was arousing the wildest joy by his expositions of ancient Hindu wisdom. Bankimchandra Chatterji persuaded Rabindranath Tagore to attend one of his discourses. The younger man was aghast at its absurdity, and became an opponent. But most applauded, and a movement began which has only recently become insignificant.

“What is to come out of this strange amalgam of superstition, transcendentalism, mental exaltation, and intellectual obscurity---with European ideas thrown as an outside ingredient into the crucible---who can say?”*

Every kind of fantastic nonsense has been talked about the ancient knowledge of the Aryans. If mythology gave a god a self-moving car that sailed the skies, behold the modern aeroplane! The tiki, the tail of hair kept by the orthodox Hindu, and popularly supposed to supply a hold whereby he may be tugged into Heaven, had a more scientific reason. The Aryans knew that human hair was a conductor of electricity. A professor of chemistry, who served in the College of which I was President, explained to me eagerly, in 1921, that the legend of the moon appearing when the Gods and Demons churned the Ocean proved that his ancestors had been aware of what modern science has since discovered, that the Pacific filled the gap made by the flying off of the moon during the process of the earth’s cooling.

Out of the pride and exuberances of this movement to exalt Hinduism came such men as Vivekananda, whose shallow facility was as successful in Chicago as in India. I do not propose to waste time on the Vivekanandas; the West produces similar men without any considerable assistance from the East, and they hold their place for “a time, times, and half a time.” India’s contribution to world-gaiety has been the touring Swami.

Meanwhile let us note three things.

It is often alleged that Indians show a child-mentality. What else could be expected, when the activities open to the Indian mind were those of the classroom---when it was allowed to be busied with books, but kept away from action?

Secondly, we can understand why Bengal has been the centre of the bitterest and most persistent nationalist feeling. The Indian Renaissance not only began earlier in Bengal, but was more vigorous than elsewhere. Modern education reached a larger and poorer class, and provided a wider basis for nationalist feeling. Elsewhere, dispossessed chieftains, warrior clans thrust into a place of subordination, these have been a focus for hatred of the alien. In Bengal, clerks, postmasters, sub-judges, deputy magistrates, have held positions where pride has been wounded. Probably, Bengal is the only province where Mr. Rudyard Kipling has been at all extensively read by “the natives.” Nowhere else has the sense of humiliation at the sight of the foreigner’s strength and liberty and the realization of the Indian’s restricted field of opportunity stung so many.

Thirdly, the Nationalist Movement until our own day has been, in its periods of fiercest intensity, largely conservative and anti-reform in social matters, because it has been so fed from this other Movement, of glorification of India’s past.

The Coming of Nationalism. The First Clash

Nationalism, though cruelly defeated, had not died.

“Towards the end of the ‘sixties’ the ‘seditious’ tone of the vernacular press had already begun to disturb the Government of Bengal.”*

In 1875, the Amrita Bazar Batrika, which has consistently been the most anti-foreign newspaper in Bengal, observed of the alleged attempt of the Gaekwar of Baroda to murder his Resident, Colonel Phayre, that “Surely to poison an obscure Colonel is by far a lighter crime” than “to emasculate a nation that the Government may rule without trouble.”

The first great clash between Nationalism and the Government came in Bengal. A Bengali Hindu official in a note forwarded to the Bengal Provincial Government pointed out the difficulty in which Indians in the Civil Service were, owing to their jurisdiction, except in the Presidency towns (Calcutta, Madras, Bombay), being limited to Indians. The Imperial Government decided to abolish this racial discrimination, and Mr. C. P. Ilbert brought forward a Bill to do so. It was opposed by the European population with the intensest indignation.

“The Viceroy was subjected to something very like insult, and practically all intercourse ceased between him and those of his countrymen who were unconnected with the government.”*

The Bill had to be swerved from its purpose by a compromise by which every European or American

“brought before a district magistrate or sessions judge (whether an Indian or European) could claim to be tried by a jury, half of whom were to be Europeans or Americans. As Indians could not make a similar claim, the privileged position of Europeans was still maintained.”

The Indian community made the Viceroy’s departure for England the occasion of an ovation no Englishman had previously received. The two communities were now revealed as aligned in anger opposite each other. Also, Indians had seen what agitation could achieve.

Bengal was the main scene of this outburst of racial passions. Bengal, since its capital, Calcutta, was also the capital of India, continued to be the Province where every clash was at its fiercest.

The National Congress. First Phase

The National Congress was founded by men essentially moderate, helped by British sympathisers, notably Mr. A. O. Hume. Mr. Hume retired from the Civil Service in 1882, after more than thirty years’ service. He considered that England had given India peace, but had not solved her economic problems,

“that Government was out of touch with the people, that there was no safety for the masses till the administration was gradually leavened by a representative Indian element.”*

The Congress was primarily a channel of escape. It was to provide a means whereby Government might become aware of what educated India was thinking, and to be the nucleus of what might some day develop into an Indian Parliament. Seventy-two delegates by entreaty and cajolery were persuaded to attend the First Congress, at Bombay, December 28 to 30, 1885. Only two were Mohammedans. Its tone was decorous, even religious. England, the President (Mr. W. C. Bannerji) pointed out, had given India an orderly government, railways, “but above all, the inestimable benefit of Western education.” “We bless Thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life. But above all for the inestimable . . .” Mr. Garratt remarks:

“A comparison with a recent Congress, held in Madras in 1927, is perhaps inevitable. Some twenty-five thousand delegates and visitors were collected in a huge ‘pandal,’ and listened with the help of ‘loud speakers’ to the Home Rule leaders. No speaker would have dared to mention either England or the Government without the use of an opprobrious epithet.”*

The immense strides Congress was to take in a generation is best measured in the case of individual leaders. Both Mr. Garratt and Sir Verney Lovett note the enlightenment which by the time of the Great War had come to the first speaker (Mr. Subramania Aiyar, of Madras) to the first Resolution moved in 1885:

“By a merciful dispensation of Providence, India, which was for centuries the victim of external aggression and plunder, of internal civil wars and general confusion, has been brought under the dominion of the great British Power. I need not tell you how that event introduced a great change in the destiny of her people, how the inestimable good that has flowed from it has been appreciated by them. The rule of Great Britain has, on the whole, been better in its results and direction than any former rule. Without descanting at length upon the benefits of that rule, I can summarise them in one remarkable fact, that for the first time in the history of the Indian populations there is to be beheld the phenomenon of national unity among them, of a sense of national existence.” (Mr. Aiyar in 1885)

“Permit me to add that you and the other leaders have been kept in ignorance of the full measure of misrule and oppression in India. Officials of an alien nation, speaking a foreign tongue, force their will upon us; they grant themselves exorbitant salaries and large allowances: they refuse us education; they sap us of our wealth; they impose crushing taxes without our consent; they cast thousands of our people into prisons for uttering patriotic sentiments---prisons so filthy that often the inmates die from loathsome diseases.” (Mr. Aiyar, in a letter to President Wilson)

The Congress grew rapidly. Its second meeting, at Calcutta, December 27, 1886, was attended by 440 delegates. Naturally, most were from Bengal (a term which previous to 1905 must be remembered to include Bihar). There were 33 Mohammedans. The proceedings, though sharper than those of the year before, were still an enthusiastic tribute to the work of the good, kind Government.

Up to 1907, the first phase of its career, the Congress remained friendly to Government. However severe its criticism, absolute trust in British sense of justice continued. Year after year, it pressed for things that have nearly all now been conceded---simultaneous examinations in India and England for the Indian Civil Service, the right to carry arms, the granting of the Imperial military commission to Indians, the appointment of Indians on Executive Councils, elected and non-official majorities on the Councils. It paid much attention to economic problems, and in particular pressed steadily for a reduction of military expenditure.

The Congress always meets just after Christmas. The place of assembly is shifted annually, thereby covering the whole of India in a few years. This has done much to create a sense of common nationality. Delegates are elected by public meetings, by local groups or associations, or by themselves. Attempts to set a limit lower than 2,000 have always failed. The real conduct of affairs is in the hands of the Subjects Committee of 200, who meet previously and select the programme. What they say “goes,” and usually goes with a bang. The strength of Congress soon ran up beyond the thousand (1,248, Fourth Congress, Allahabad, 1888). In exceptionally lean years it has dropped to half of this. Today, attendance is swelled enormously by local visitors, who drop in for the interest and thrill.

Taking its career as a whole, we may say that, though never fully representative of India, the Congress has been representative of Hindu Political India. It does not represent “the depressed classes” or the Christians, though it has Christian members and the Indian Christian community is no longer outside national excitements. It represents Moslems and Sikhs to a very limited extent. It is now solely extremist. But history teaches the folly of underestimating what an aggressive and strongly organized minority can do. They can, if conditions favour them, coerce a sluggish or indifferent majority into revolution. It is nonsense to sneer at the Congress, and say that it represents merely a discontented handful. Few of Modern India’s outstanding names cannot at one time or another be found in its records. Going over these, I pause at name after name, arrested by the distinction of character or of intellectual achievement for which it stands. Not the least hardship which the Indian mind has endured (with surprisingly little embitterment, everything considered) is the fact that almost every Indian achievement remains provincial and circumscribed. Nowhere else have so many first-class abilities had to be contented with second-class careers. No matter how great an Indian may be, in brains or personality, he knows that few outside his own countrymen can appreciate his quality. If an Indian has managed to transcend the bounds that circumstance set to his opportunity or reputation, as often as not it is the sheer humbug who has done this. Despite the present estrangement, I hope the day will come when the Congress’s record will be a common possession of both my own country and India. More than India will then realise how much of selfless patriotism and mental greatness built up this despised work wrought in a corner.

Though vast masses of the Indian people have been outside the Congress, it must not be assumed that they have been uninfluenced by it. You cannot have 25,000 or even more “delegates” and visitors assembled in a city without the widening circles of the excitement wavering out to very remote shores. Knowledge may not spread; but ferment does.

It is usual to charge the Congress deliberations with being unpractical and visionary. There is some justice in the charge. The man who discusses, but has not had responsibility, makes many errors. Many an Indian problem looks simple to the Englishman who has never seen India, to the American who has made a swift, sympathetic tour and exchanged kind words with educated and politically minded Indians, or to the Indian in Bombay or Calcutta who has never had charge of even a cow. It is easy to pass resolutions deploring the inadequacy of primary education, of irrigation, of agricultural training. But on the other hand the administrator and (still more---almost infinitely more) the member of the Secretariat or the Governor who has not for ten years heard a single statement of his greeted with anything but obsequious agreement, these need to be told that problems have an existence outside of, and apart from, bluebooks and good-tempered, parliamentary discussions. Again and again, you can see that, though Congress did not realise the practical and financial difficulties, it did know (and the Administration---at any rate, the remote Olympus above the Administration---did not) what the people were thinking and feeling and suffering.

The early Congressmen were Moderates, anxious to see India progress to full self-government and aware of the maddening reluctance with which the Administration admitted an Indian first to this outer court of service and then to that other, slightly nearer the inner sanctum of power. Aware of this, they yet kept free of bitterness to a magnificent degree, and were generous in recognition of what Great Britain had done. They were under no illusions as to India’s weakness and social backwardness. Their greatest leader, G. K. Gokhale, in his later years seemed to become more concerned about social reform than about political advance. He founded the Servants of India, an order which has displayed much unselfish patriotism. The succession was from him to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who has spoken with frankness of the Indian people’s own responsibility for their wretchedness. Nor can we consider the succession broken on the political side; for Mr. Gandhi, until an emotional even more than an intellectual experience swung him into opposition, was willing to work with Government, and Gokhale was decided enough in his stand for Indian self-determination.

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, so well known since, in his maiden speech, at the Second Congress, 1886, made it plain that Great Britain could no more have come to India without it being certain that “sedition” would follow, than Christianity could have gone abroad without bringing not peace but a sword:

“What is an Englishman without representative institutions? Why, not an Englishman at all, a mere sham, a base imitation, and I often wonder as I look round at our nominally English magnates, how they have the face to call themselves Englishmen and yet deny us representative institutions, and struggle to maintain despotic ones. Representative institutions are as much a part of the true Briton as his language and his literature . . . India has found a voice at last in this great Congress, and in it, and through it, we call on England to be true to her traditions, her instincts, and herself, and grant us our rights as free-born British citizens.”

In the same Congress, Surendranath Bannerji (“Surrender Not Bannerji”), afterwards famous, first as a Nationalist leader against the Partition of Bengal, and then as an alleged renegade because he took service as a Minister of the Crown when the Non-co-operation Movement was at its height, said:

“We are passing through a period of probation and a period of trial under the auspices of one of the most freedom-loving Nations in the world.”

“England,” said a speaker in the Third Congress, 1887,

“has moved us from our ancient anchorage. She has cast us adrift, against our will, upon the wide waters of a seething proletariat, and we turn back to England, and ask her to grant us that compass of representative institutions by which, amid a thousand storms, she has steered her prosperous course to the safe haven of regulated political freedom.”

It is the cheapest form of intellectual snobbery to be amused by an occasional floridity and exuberance of expression (yet how many Englishmen or Americans have learnt to speak in any Indian, or any European, tongue, so as not to make fools of themselves?), and to miss the reality of emotion and the reasonableness of attitude behind the expression.

Official Opposition to the Congress

In its first quarter of a century, the Congress had the sympathy and active help of some Englishmen, officials and others. Six times it has had an English President. Another, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, elected President for 1911, was kept away by his wife’s death. Mr. A. O. Hume acted as General or Joint General Secretary of nineteen of the first twenty-two Congresses, but was never President. But the official attitude to the Congress quickly became one of suspicion. Rabindranath Tagore, in his bitterest story, Cloud and Sun, whose setting is the early nineties, tells how it was explained to the District Magistrate, pondering the hero’s turpitude, that the latter was a Congress delegate. This let in a flood of illumination. “Ah!” said the Englishman darkly. “So he’s one of those Congress fellows, is he!” Probably the Congress’s open estrangement from Government would have come in any event. But the aloofness and chill adequacy of officialdom hastened it. Alienation was intensified during Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty (1899-1905).

Chapter IV

Lord Curzon’s Administration

Lord Curzon as Viceroy has never been given “a fair show.” Since Warren Hastings, India has had no greater Governor-General.

“Profoundly impressed by the greatness both of the task and of the opportunities which it offered and at the height of his own powers, he dominated the Administration in a way in which few, if any, of his predecessors had done and in which it will never again be given to any Governor-General to do.”*

His labours were immense. Nothing was too remote, too obscure, too academic, for a mind of such curiosity and energy. He made the preservation of India’s monuments and antiquities a prime care. He even encouraged the Nawab of Junagarh to extend a protecting hand over the Indian lion, lurking in its last stronghold, the Kathiawar jungles. (O that before too late---it is now novissima hora---someone would do as much for the three Indian species of rhinoceros!) An eye so piercing had never ranged over Indian affairs, an energy so pitiless and devastating had never brought dismay into the Sleepy Hollows of the Secretariats. Amid all the excitement of preparation for the Delhi Coronation Durbar, the biggest show British India had ever seen, he could spare thought even to choose the hymns:

“We cannot possibly have ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ at the Delhi service, because there is a verse in it that runs:

Thrones and crowns may perish,
Kingdoms rise and wane;

which would not be particularly appropriate.”*

The West had noted the mutability that waits on human affairs. India, absorbed in metaphysics, could not be supposed to be aware of it; it would be unwise to call the Dreamer’s attention to a fact so upsetting.

Curzon’s qualities were his courage and sense of justice, both inflexible. Here he was magnificent. A gang of British soldiers raped a Burmese beggar-woman, who went out of her mind.

“Not only was punishment not meted out, but the military authorities on the spot showed a culpable disposition to hush the whole matter up, and were seconded in their attempt by the apathy of the local civil officials.”*

When the Viceroy discovered what had happened, his wrath fell on the whole circle of offenders, with a devastating completeness that must be almost unparalleled in imperial records. His action was to be

“unmistakable in significance as well as trenchant in operation. . . . The culprits were dismissed from the army; high military officers were severely censured, and in certain cases relieved of their commands; the regiment was banished to Aden, where all leave and indulgences were stopped; the civil officials were severely censured, and, finally, on the insistence of the Viceroy and in the face of some doubts and hesitations on the part of his Government, an Order in Council was issued in which ‘the sense of profound horror and repugnance’ with which the incident was viewed by Government was placed on record, and ‘the negligence and apathy that were displayed in responsible quarters’ were reprobated.”*

The anger of the European community might be incredible to us today, if some of us had not passed through the ignoble agitation that ensued upon the Hunter Commission’s condemnation of the Punjab outrages. This anger continued when he took up another wrong that commonly passed unpunished.

“Quite early in his term of office he had been shocked at the steadily mounting number of affrays which he found recorded . . . due in great measure to carelessness of soldiers when out shooting and to slackness on the part of the military authorities.”*

“None of the English newspapers is really with me in my crusade against shooting incidents.”*

Reporting to the Secretary of State “a particularly bad example of acquittal,” he wrote, “I do not know what you think of these cases. They eat into my very soul.” “These things,” he told a friend, “give me sleepless nights and days of misery.” In 1902, learning by accident, months after the event, of a manslaughter that could hardly be called accidental, perpetrated by two troopers of a crack cavalry regiment newly arrived in India, he immediately investigated the affair. Satisfied that “there had been a deliberate attempt to hush the matter up,” he struck at the higher offenders. The leave of all officers of the regiment then in India was stopped for a year, “and other regimental punishments were inflicted.” All this disciplinary action was taken by the Commander-in-Chief, but the resentment was reserved for the Viceroy. We must permit ourselves to see the result, if we are to judge with any fairness this man whose greatness has had so little justice done it. At the Coronation Durbar the regiment took part, at Curzon’s own request. They

“rode by amid a storm of cheering; I say nothing of the bad taste of the demonstration. On such an occasion and before such a crowd (for of course every European in India is on the side of the army in the matter) nothing better could be expected. But as I sat alone and unmoved on my horse, conscious of the implication of the cheers, I could not help being struck by the irony of the situation.”*

But there was a reply. “The Indian multitude gave Lord Curzon a most unexpected ovation.”*

Shooting incidents, accidental or otherwise, have since Curzon’s time been rare, and during the last twenty years exceedingly rare. This, notwithstanding the fact that the British soldier is often exposed to wanton insolence, as an Englishman known to be under discipline and possessed of little power. Let no one suppose that even in Curzon’s time (far less in ours) the Indian bazaars were composed of mystics and gentlemen. If an Englishman walked through an upcountry town (not village) today, I should say that the chances for and against his being insulted without provocation would be about fifty-fifty. If an Englishwoman did the same, the chances would be nearer ninety-ten.

But Curzon’s manner was less admirable than his sense of justice. Frankness was both his principle and his habit. It is pleasant to be frank with people, and the British in India have enjoyed this exhilarating exercise during many years. “Much good, I am convinced, is done by these private and informal conversations.”* Much good, no doubt, was done. Yet “the pleasure which the person honoured with an interview derived from it did not always, apparently, come up to expectations.”* When the Viceroy’s frankness was given public expression, as on the famous occasion when before Calcutta University he discoursed on “the highest ideal of truth” (“to a large extent a Western conception”) and considered the sinister connotation of the word “Oriental,” there were hearers narrow-minded enough to be hurt. For the Congress he felt no affection.

“My own belief is that the Congress is tottering to its fall, and one of my great ambitions while in India is to assist it to a peaceful demise.”*

Dis aliter visum. Euthanasia, though thus augustly induced, did not come upon the Congress.

Curzon’s ambition for India was to see it an independent satrapy, not self-governed but exceedingly well-governed, taking its honoured place in the British Community of Nations. There was bound to be conflict between such an ambition and that other ambition cherished by minds equally tenacious and courageous, even if their scope was circumscribed by Fate. Gokhale, President of the Congress that met in Benares, December 27, 1905, spoke, however sternly, not unjustly, with gaze in retrospect on the Ruler who had just gone:

“For seven long years all eyes had constantly to turn to one masterful figure in the land---now in admiration, now in astonishment, more often in anger and in pain, till at last it has become difficult to realise that a change has really come. For a parallel to such an administration, we must, I think, go back to the times of Aurangzebe in the history of our own country. There we find the same attempt at a rule excessively centralised and intensely powerful, the same strenuous purpose, the same overpowering consciousness of duty, the same marvellous capacity for work, the same sense of loneliness, the same persistence in a policy of distrust and repression, resulting in bitter exasperation all round. I think even the most devoted admirer of Lord Curzon cannot claim that he has strengthened the foundations of British rule in India. . . . To him India was a country where the Englishman was to monopolise for all time all power, and talk all the while of duty. The Indian’s only business was to be governed, and it was a sacrilege on his part to have any other aspiration. In this scheme of things there was no room for the educated classes of the country. . . . Even in his last farewell speech at the Byculla Club in Bombay, India exists only as a scene of the Englishman’s labours, with the toiling millions of the country---eighty per cent of the population---in the background. The remaining twenty per cent, for aught they are worth, might as well be gently swept into the sea!”

Strong speaking! Yet not stronger than that which is heard in our own House of Commons, and heard without impairing private friendship. When Lady Curzon died, six months later, Gokhale wrote to her husband that the heart of all India went out to him in “profound and reverent sorrow.”* He spoke of the inevitable loneliness of “such rare spirits as Your Lordship, who live for lofty ends and make a religion of all their work.”*

I turn from acts to atmosphere. Lord Curzon’s reign introduced into Indian government a stricter morality and sense of responsibility, he conferred on India benefits that could never be taken away. But he had no belief in the fitness of subject countries (or of subjugated classes in his own land) to rule themselves. His manner was notoriously cold and superior. Here, no less than in nobler ways, official India imitated him. The Aga Khan writes:

“As a member of the Viceroy’s Legislature during Lord Curzon’s time, I saw at close quarters how foreign the Government was in spirit and atmosphere, and how, on the other side, dissatisfied at not having succeeded in obtaining the earlier demands, Indian leaders began to clamour not so much for administrative reforms as for the control of their political destiny.”*

These words bring out exactly the great change which began to come over political India in the nineties. Liberal-minded Englishmen and progressive Indians alike at first envisaged as desirable an infiltration of the services by Indians, so that the administration might become increasingly national instead of alien. But this infiltration came so slowly (and Indians found themselves debarred even then from the top posts, the lieutenant-governorships and even the divisional commissionerships, and posts in the Executive Councils) that the conviction grew that nothing less than political and legislative control would do.

Chapter V

The Colonial Grievance

As a fountain of bitterness, one destined to increase both in volume and acrid quality, nothing outside India is comparable to the effect of the treatment of Indians in the Dominions and Colonies. The real centres of bad feeling have been three: British Columbia, Natal and the Transvaal, Kenya and (to some extent) Tanganyika. In South Africa, in the Cape the principle of “equal rights for all civilised men” in large part holds; in New Zealand Asiatics are not discriminated against; in Australia and Canada outside British Columbia the Indian grievance has been recognised and Indian self-respect is now safeguarded. But the Transvaal and Natal brought M. K. Gandhi into prominence and made him aware of the immense power of non-violent passive resistance; British Columbia was a main factor in adding the Punjab to Maharashtra and Bengal as hotbeds of revolutionary activity and genuine, irreconcilable hatred; Kenya throughout the Non-co-operation Movement gave Indian opposition a peculiarly deadly mood of exasperation. Had this humiliation outside India not existed, it is probable that even the friction generated by Lord Curzon’s well-meaning governance from above, de haut en bas,* as of a superb Archangel distributing coal and blankets in a distressed area---even the unprejudiced use by Tilak of “everything on the map” to arouse ill feeling---even Gandhi’s grand discovery of what can be affected by obstinacy and righteousness working together---even all these things would not have fanned discontent to the fierceness of concentrated heat which has marked it now through a quarter of a century.

The Colonial position first became acute in the Transvaal, and before it was British territory. It would be tedious to go over the long story in detail. It will be better to summarise, and indicate saliencies. The Congress of 1895 discussed the disabilities proposed to be imposed on Indian settlers in the South African Republic, and prayed

“that the British Government and the Government of India will come forward to guard the interests of these settlers in the same spirit in which they have always interfered, whenever the interests of their British-born subjects have been at stake.”

The next Congress protests against the disabilities as now actually imposed, and against “the invidious and humiliating distinctions made between” Indians and European settlers. From now on, this protest became a regular part of Congress agenda. It is still remembered in India that the British Prime Minister cited these disabilities among the causes for quarrel with the Boer Republic, and on one occasion said that these insults to our Indian fellow-subjects made his blood boil. War with the Transvaal came in 1899, and Peace in 1902. Unfortunately for India, in 1906 the new Liberal Government of Campbell-Bannerman fulfilled England’s promise, long before anyone would have thought fulfilment possible, and gave the Transvaal self-government. Things went steadily from bad to worse. Mr. Gandhi was drawn to South Africa first in 1893, for an Indian legal case in Natal. South Africa became his preoccupation for twenty years. Natal, which had a large Indian population, much of it the second or even third settler generation---partly descended from imported labour and the petty merchants that had followed, partly of a higher, educated class---treated this Indian population very little better than the Transvaal did. In 1906, when what was rather too grandiloquently called a Zulu Rebellion broke out in Natal, Mr. Gandhi again made an effort to win considerate treatment by co-operation, again raised and served with an Indian Ambulance Corps, as he had done in the South African War, 1899-1902, again received the thanks of the Government. When his apparently unreasonable attitude of intransigence today puzzles us, we should remember that he patiently during many years tried another way, failed in it utterly, and finally won such success as he gained, by flat disobedience of law. His last attempt at co-operation was during the Great War; he offered to enrol in an Ambulance Corps, and addressed recruiting meetings in India, until the War ended.

The South African story is one of the most wonderful of our time. In 1906, Mr. Gandhi, who must have been watching English “passive resisters” and was presently to see the suffragettes breaking laws they disapproved of, took his own vow of passive resistance to the regulations which finger-printed Indians and in many ways insulted their self-respect. He was sent to jail in Pretoria. He soon welded the Indian community in South Africa (whatever their religion or caste) into a brotherhood, eager for martyrdom and heedless of discomfort. They marched over the Transvaal border, and were arrested in such numbers that the authorities were seriously embarrassed. In 1912, he was joined by Gokhale, who had been in England and found a sympathetic hearing from the British Government. Again and again, a settlement has apparently been reached, only for promises to be broken. In 1913, when Mr. Gandhi was organising labour strikes, from India, where the whole people was watching with passionate anger and enthusiasm, came unexpected help. The Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, did a thing both indiscreet and “incorrect.” The Head of one Government inside the Empire, he openly criticised another Government, and at Madras protested publicly against the South African Administration. This protest was resented in South Africa; but, Sir Valentine Chirol observes, “combined with earnest representations from Whitehall” it (and it needed a deal of compulsion) “compelled General Smuts to enter once more the path of conciliation and compromise.”* In 1915, the Indian Government marked its sense of Mr. Gandhi’s services by the award of the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal---later, after Jallianwalabagh, returned by him. Lord Hardinge’s protest, however unconventional, won great gratitude in India. More than once the Administration was enabled by his personal popularity to weather an awkward political corner.

No historian can afford to overlook the South African question, which exacerbated Indian opinion so bitterly in the pre-War period. The biographer of Mr. Gandhi must note the effect of those long years of opposition, of endurance of insult until every scrap of care for personal ease was shredded away and the spirit enclosed in mail of complete indifference, having proved that in weakness is power and that the disunited can be united. Indian Nationalism grew to its strength in Africa. To many of us it is a matter of sorrow and perplexity, when we consider the striking figure General Smuts presents to the outside world as an idealist, to recall the part he played in this struggle. The South African question is still with us, even if not quite in its old intensity.

Chapter VI

The Coming of Violent Nationalism: In Maharashtra

In the last thirty years, a spirit of revolutionary violence has manifested itself mainly in three districts: the Maratha country (Maharashtra) near Bombay; Bengal, especially East Bengal; the Punjab and adjoining districts of the United Provinces. In Bengal and Maharashtra the people have often known periods of religious excitement, of a kind (particularly in Bengal) that in the West we call Revivalist. In the Punjab the Sikhs---who, though a small minority, were dominant before the British Conquest, in 1846-9---also are subject to religious enthusiasm. They began as a religious sect, and were welded into nationality by cruel Moslem persecution.

While the Mogul Empire was breaking up, the Marathas grew stronger, till out of a rebellion they became a confederacy. Just as the rule of all India seemed about to pass into their hands, they found themselves confronted by the British. Among the enemies of the British, others were more formidable in pitched battle; none were so tenacious over such a tract of years, none so methodical and deliberate. The ablest native statesman the British had to face at the end of the eighteenth century was Nana Farnavis, a Maratha. He was a Chitpavan Brahman, the sect which legend says originated in fourteen barbarians who were drowned and washed ashore, then burnt and re-created as Brahmans by Parasurama, “Rama with the Ax,” an incarnation of the God Vishnu. It is sometimes suggested that these barbarians were strayed Norsemen, who landed and asserted for themselves a place in the highest caste.

“Western daring and Eastern craft look out alike from the alert features and clear parchment skin and through the strange stone-grey eyes of the Chitpavans.”*

This clan came into prominence in the political revival of Maharashtra. The two great Moderates, Ranade and Gokhale, were Chitpavans.

The man who more than any other caused the Congress to harden into unfriendliness was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, also a Chitpavan. He was poles asunder from the advanced leaders of today, who look to Russia for an example and declare themselves “Socialist Republican,” with no use for kings. He was no democrat, and no reformer. He extolled undiluted Hinduism, and looked for a Brahman rule. He encouraged the cult of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, whose festivals could be made an annoyance to Mohammedans, and he revived gymnastics and quarterstaff games. He pursued Indian Liberals, especially Gokhale, with fierce abuse, and made

“an invaluable contribution to the technique of nationalism by proving that political invective”*

could make journalism pay. He founded a vernacular paper, the Kesari or “Lion.” From the English point of view, he was an unmitigated nuisance, an advocate of violence, an opponent of even such elementary reforms as were embodied in the Age of Consent Bill (1890), which sought to postpone for Indian childhood the burden of motherhood for a short period. When he died, in August, 1920, the principal English paper in Calcutta, the Statesman, furnished an outstanding example of how out of touch with Indian thought the British community used to be, by publishing a leader which may have been historically justified but was of extreme bad taste under the circumstances. The immediate response was an outburst of rage, ceremonial burnings of the paper in every open space, meetings of condemnation, a big drop in circulation, and withdrawals of advertising. The paper received a shock that for a long time was manifested in a most uncharacteristic caution of tone.

Tilak, as we have seen, busied himself with such important matters as Cow Protection and the booming of the worship of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, as well as with politics. He did not consider that Mohammedans were people who ought to be encouraged, and he vigorously preached the cult of Sivaji, the 17th century Maratha chieftain who fought the Moguls and murdered at an interview Afzal Khan, the Moslem general. He is not unfairly described by Mr. Garratt:

“He discovered what invaluable material lay in the college students. He was a born journalist, and organised what can only be described as ‘stunts’ with much the same genius and success as Lord Northcliffe in his war-time propaganda. Tilak’s policy was to keep agitation constantly simmering. Inevitably there were times when popular feeling would boil over.”*

Such a time occurred in 1897, when the Bombay Government was fighting the bubonic plague. Government, as has often happened, had bad luck, in no way its fault. Volunteers were sought among the British Civil Servants, to test the inoculation system, then on its trial. One of them, a quarter of a century later, was Acting Governor of Bombay. He has told me of his experience and that of his fellow-unfortunates. The doctor blundered, and inoculated them fivefold by mistake. Their bodies blackened, and swelled, causing them intense suffering. Their lives were despaired of; “our coffins were ordered.”

I turn to ordinary, as distinct from these extraordinary, measures against plague. The whole episode illustrates the difficulty of applying what the West considers necessary measures of health and hygiene, in a country so ignorant and so tenaciously wedded to the inviolability of home life. The country would be similarly agitated today if there were any attempt at compulsory segregation of lepers or compulsory application of their only hope, the chaulmogra oil treatment:

“Persons suffering from the disease were separated from persons not attacked; house-to-house visitations were resorted to; and in Poona it was for some time considered necessary to employ British soldiers on search parties. Popular feeling was keenly stirred.”*

Tilak, in an article published May 4, 1897, charged the soldiers with oppression, and called Mr. Rand, the Plague Commissioner, a tyrant. He proceeded to other inflammatory actions. One was the reporting of lectures by Hindu professors justifying the murder of Afzal Khan, by Sivaji, two centuries before. “With benevolent intentions he murdered Afzal Khan for the good of others.” A week later, the day of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Mr. Rand and another Englishman were murdered.

Assassination had entered Indian politics. Since that day, it has never left them. Mr. Tilak was imprisoned for a year, which gave him invaluable advertisement. Subsequently, in 1908, after two English ladies were assassinated in Bengal by a bomb, he set the murder down to oppression, was tried for seeking to bring the Government into contempt and to arouse hatred and enmity, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, a sentence which was made a precedent at Mr. Gandhi’s trial, in 1922.

Chapter VII

The Coming of Violent Nationalism: In Bengal

When Nationalism in Bengal became revolutionary in mood and aim, it showed features all its own. It had an emotional intensity, often reaching hysteria; it had a consistent record of extreme violence, the bomb being preached as the patriot’s weapon, and preferable to the pistol. It was psychologically and socially a more complex phenomenon, and the movement drew into at least temporary sympathy men of intellectual and ethical greatness that would be exceptional anywhere. Some of these men must be acquitted of the least tenderness for violence, and some withdrew in disgust when protest passed into organised murder. The historian of a century hence, who can speak more frankly than I can, will say that this was not true of them all.

Two other things---since I am striving to reach the utmost limits of possible frankness. They will both give offence, yet are both true. First, when every act of Government repression and of individual police roughness or bullying is amassed for indictment purposes, it remains incontrovertible that no revolutionary movement---anywhere, in the world’s history---was ever handled with greater patience. I have summarised, from the Report of the Sedition Committee (“The Rowlatt Report”), 1918, the revolutionary outrages committed between August, 1906, and November, 1917; 168 outrages resulted in 61 murders* and 4 executions. It is true that convictions were hard to obtain, and that many crimes were attended with complete impunity. Even so, violence can never have been visited with less of vindictiveness. For example, on September 30, 1915, at Sibpur, in the Nadia district, 20 men carrying electric torches and armed with pistols robbed a money-lender of Rs. 20,700 ($6,900), killed a policeman and three villagers, wounded 11 other people; 8 of the robbers were transported for life and one for 10 years. Since some of the English public, and a good many of the American public,* believe that patriots in Bengal have suffered under a reign of terror such as Louis XIV might have set in operation, these figures may be of value. They may be contrasted with the Punjab record of 28 hangings for the Ghadr Conspiracy alone, in 1915. But I do not rest my opinion on official figures. For a great part of the worst period I was in Bengal, and can testify to the good temper and sense of justice that were manifested by that much-abused service, the Police, and by the Administration generally. This does not mean that there was any understanding of the widespread indignation against the Government, or any sympathy for the exacerbated and humiliated feeling of the people. There was none. But even-handed fairness, and slowness to be driven into any action that trial and evidence did not support to the last detail, these were there all the time.

Secondly, if we judge by the old, immemorial beliefs only recently supplanted in our textbooks, that there is never any uprising of a people or of considerable sections of a people, without definite “oppression” first, the revolutionary movement in Bengal seemed unreasonable. Bengal lost no independence to England, in Bengal the balance of good done by the alien outweighs the balance of evil. It is true that there was one oppression, cruel and long continued, that of the indigo-planters. But in this struggle the Administration took the people’s part; and, bad as it was, it was not different in kind or in severity from the oppression the rural populace had always endured from those set over them by strength. A Bengali poet of last century has given the people a lament for Plassey. But Bengal lost nothing at Plassey. Her own last independent king, Lakshman Sen, lost his throne about 1199 A.D. Her chief surviving principality, that of Vishnupur, was dependent on the Moslem Governors---very nearly independent when these were weak or casual, promptly mulcted of tribute when they were strong or paid attention to it. Apart from the extreme misery of the years when the British were ousting the Mohammedan rule and bringing their own authorised brigands to order, Bengal---I am throughout speaking comparatively, remembering what minorities and submerged nationalities in Europe have suffered, and what the disfranchised and labouring classes of my own country suffered until recently---can have few acts of definite oppression worth making a song about. Of course, these can easily be found, if you are going to apply modern ideas of full freedom for every individual, to conditions in the days when universal education and universal franchise were themselves only the dreams of very seditious “radicals.” Even the Mutiny was a horror perpetrated very far outside Bengal, although a publicist much followed in America thinks otherwise.*

Bengali Nationalism, unlike Nationalism in other parts of India, is not sprung from memory, but has an imaginative source. The enthusiastic intellectual Renaissance which resulted from the impact of the thought and literature of the West enormously added to the flexibility and expressiveness of Bengali, one of the most vivacious and vivid tongues in the world. Poets and novelists evoked the Image of Bengal, the Mother watching over her children, the Land served by the Ganges and wonderful with wide, emerald fields, gracious mango-groves, far-spreading silences and limpid skies. Of this the Administration realised nothing when it decided to split the Province across. What to the Government was merely a measure designed for greater efficiency, to the Bengali mind was a deed of callous vivisection on a sacred body. If we are amazed that the protest was so bold and, indeed, seemingly insolent---a feature which struck India with astonishment and admiration---we should remind ourselves that the seamy side of the Imperial Government, whose capital was Calcutta, had been more familiar to the Bengalis than to any other race. Washington knows more about lobbying and quarrels for precedence at official meals and the story of this or that personal intrigue, than the rest of the United States put together. The valets of Governments, as well as of individuals, turn into cynics.

The Government must be acquitted of any suspicion that Bengal had passed through two generations of intense intellectual and imaginative activity, and that the educated classes had ceased to regard themselves as merely material to be administered, and really believed they were now part of a national entity. On administrative grounds, there was a strong case for the Partition (1905). It was absurd to have 70 million people under one Provincial rule. The administration was undermanned. In the district of Mymensingh, in East Bengal, there was one English executive officer, to 4 million inhabitants. It is possible, too, that as a whole the administrative personnel was not up to that of other Provinces, Bengal being the least popular Province and the one to which men go least willingly. East Bengal seemed in a particularly bad way. It is a region of waterways, of mighty rivers with innumerable backwaters, of scanty and poor roads, of villages precariously raised above swamps and amphibious in their mode of life. The administrative staff were not regarded with excessive favour at Imperial headquarters, which were apt to think East Bengal was inefficiently run. They endured a good deal of unfairness, and were never able to state their case. But the district, to outside eyes, at any rate looked badly run.

So the Province was cut across, into two new provinces. When the Partition was “annulled,” in 1911, this was still virtually done; but the latter partition (which it is not usual to call a partition) followed lines of nationality and language, instead of placing a pair of shears across them.

The Partition of 1905 pleased the Mohammedans, who in the new lieutenant-governorship of East Bengal and Assam were in a majority, whereas in the old undivided Province they were submerged, by lack of education even more than by numerical inferiority. This introduced another element of acerbity into the controversy.

Hindu Bengal answered by a boycott of English goods. This may be looked on as the forerunner of Mr. Gandhi’s later attempt, by means of the spinning-wheel, to make India industrially independent. The opposition took on extreme violence of tone. Three separate strands in this opposition may be disentangled and indicated.

First, it was during this trouble that the aloof, cold, and maddeningly unsympathetic nature of the Government seems to have become an iron that entered deep into the mind of Bengal. The Government was not unduly harsh, it was one that observed legal procedure except in times of exceptional violence and even then did far less (however the action may have been represented to the outside world) than any other Government would have done. But it seemed incapable of being argued with, its thought was incredibly obtuse and grooved, its representatives seemed bound within their own brains and totally unable to guess at what went on in other brains. Even if just, the Government was a machine---like an engine of torture,

“exempt itself
From aught that it inflicts.”

There is no doubt that the twist of exasperation, of despair at ever getting the Englishman to see anything except his own view of the situation---to himself so reasonable and entirely “fool-proof”---entered into Indian, most of all into Bengali, thought. I myself seem to see Indian friends---men as wedded to a desire to be fair all round, and with as profound a detestation of violence, as my English friends---throwing up their hands with a gesture of hopelessness. If this appears more (or less) than my reader can understand, let me beg him to put himself quickly where he can understand it. Let him go through as many Memoirs of Indian high officials as he can find, and study their triumphant handling of Indian discontents. The participant in this dissipation will suffer; there is no help for that. But I will guarantee that he will be very quiet and thoughtful for some time after his ordeal has finished.

The second strand in Bengali Nationalism, one that has worn thin and tended to disappear since 1922 or thereabouts, is religious. The cult of Sivaji, as a hero and even as an incarnation of Vishnu---who appears when the Age requires his intervention, to depress the bad and advance the good---”was imported from Bombay but took little root.”* As a matter of fact, it took considerable root. Historically, the Marathas never did anything for Bengal but pillage it. Yet Bengal developed, and has kept, much enthusiasm for Sivaji. Its main enthusiasm, however, is for the Goddess whose terriblest form is Kali, whose comparatively mild form is Durga. Kali-worship became Nation-worship. Its aberrations can be studied in Sir Valentine Chirol's book, Indian Unrest.* Those resident in Bengal had reason enough to be conscious of this element of religious fanaticism. In the upcountry city where I taught for many years, in 1920 a towering image of Kali, at least seventy feet high, was erected under a shelter, in a position where it commanded the main approach to the Bazaar. It stood for some years, and for all I know is standing still. In the very centre of the Bazaar, the vegetable market, appeared a thirty-foot-high image of Vishnu in his Man-Lion incarnation, tearing out the bowels of a figure flung face upwards across his knees. The figure was pale-complexioned, and dressed like an Englishman. In front of the figure, and gazing reverently towards it, were Mr. Gandhi and the Ali Brothers (to signify the Hindu-Mohammedan rapprochement), a woman (“Mother India”), and a cow. I have often seen the tableau, and am glad I saw it.*

Thirdly, in Bengal revolutionary activity took on its most murderous form. The most hateful assassination, and one of the few for which the extreme penalty was paid, was the killing of two ladies at Muzaffarpur (now in Bihar), April 30, 1908. This was the work of two students, one of whom shot himself when about to be arrested. Few people will credit the intensity of passion this act aroused.

On the Indian side, there was by no means universal reprobation of the murder. In English history, assassinations have been exceedingly few and far between; the nation has a horror of political murder that is peculiar to itself. It is not that the English are more moral than other nations, it is merely that they are built this way. They can be ruthless in shooting down, they can be implacable in rebellion. But they take murder seriously, and their historians have not a good word for any assassination, no matter how great the provocation. It may seem queer, but it is true, it struck many Indians as a very wonderful thing that the bomb had entered the political arena. The pistol---that could be bought or stolen. The bomb had to be made. It showed mechanical ingenuity. It brought the patriotic effort up to date.

From first to last, political murder has been freely condoned in India. It has been usual to express conventional disapproval of the deed, with enthusiastic admiration of the courage and self-sacrifice that prompted it. After the Partition, murder became so common that there were periods when every week reported one. The admiration, then and up to our own day, expressed for the few murderers who went to the gallows has made a deep impression on every Englishman who has been in India. The resentment and contempt set up are an element in the present psychological severance. The assassination campaign was endured with a sense of duty beyond all praise. The Indian police officers, even more than the British, knew that their lives were almost surely forfeit if they took action against any one in the revolutionary movement. This did not deter them, though man after man was shot down. For the grip of terrorism on the people, let me quote from the commitment order in the Nangla conspiracy case (June 2, 1910):

“The fear shown by the majority of the witnesses was one of the notable features of the case. It was obvious that many of them only spoke with reluctance, while a considerable number showed such extreme nervousness at the sight of the accused when shown them for identification, that they made not the faintest effort to identify any of them, and exhibited only a great anxiety to escape at the earliest possible moment. The demeanour of the witnesses was a striking testimony to the terror which the gang had inspired.”

The revolutionary movement particularly sought to engage students, in this respect going against the judgment of many political leaders, that the presence of students in politics robbed them (politics, not the students) of dignity and balance and added elements of excitement and irresponsibility. It was not uncommon to find on College notice-boards orders emanating from “The President, Indian Revolutionary Committee.” This official had his representatives in every important educational establishment. The Police countered by having their paid spies. Such spies took heavy risks, for disciplinary murder was common. There can be no doubt that the students, as a body, felt the Partition strongly. They used to come to classes bare-footed, in sign of mourning, on the Anniversary each year.

In East Bengal, especially, political dacoities or robberies became common. The “Revolution” supported itself by raising forced loans from wealthy Indians, visited by masked men with revolvers, who made their way stealthily by boat along the numerous rivers and creeks. These gangs themselves suffered from nerves, and their weapons went off readily. Sometimes one of the involuntary patrons of the patriotic funds afterwards received a letter assuring him that the money taken was entered to his credit in the revolutionary ledgers, and if all went well for India would ultimately be restored to him, plus compound interest at 5 per cent.

The assassination campaign ultimately slackened---it has never quite died out---because of two things. First, when the King-Emperor visited India in 1911, the Partition (which had repeatedly been declared to be “a settled fact,” incapable of reversal) was annulled. The diehard Imperialist generally looks on this action as unnecessary, on the grounds that the people were beginning to acquiesce in the Partition and that disorder was dying down. This opinion is mistaken. Secondly, Indians, especially those who had possessions that invited visits from the gentlemen in charge of the revolutionary exchequer, grew weary of patriots who on principle looted their fellow-countrymen, and often slew them while looting. The villagers often became willing auxiliary police. On one occasion (Pragpur, April 30, 1915), when a gang in a boat attacked a hamlet, the people joined the Police Inspector; the dacoits by accident shot one of their own party, threw the corpse into the river, sank their boat and ran, four of them being caught. In the Sibpur dacoity, already mentioned, the villagers chased the dacoits along both banks of the river. Patriotic robbery became unpopular.

Chapter VIII

Violence and the Congress. The First Phase Ends

The passion of protest evoked throughout Bengal by the Partition made a deep impression over India. Mr. Gokhale, in his Presidential Address to the Congress, met at Benares, December 27, 1905, said that “Bengal’s heroic stand against the oppression of a harsh and uncontrolled bureaucracy” had “astonished and gratified all India.”

“A great rush and uprising of the waters such as has been recently witnessed in Bengal cannot take place without a little inundation over the banks here and there. These little excesses are inevitable when large masses of men move spontaneously---especially when the movement is from darkness into light, from bondage towards freedom---and they must not be allowed to disconcert us too much. The most astounding fact of the situation is that the public life of this country has received an accession of strength of great importance, and for this all India owes a deep debt of gratitude to Bengal.”

It is fair to remember that the tale of assassination did not begin for another two years. Gokhale was accurate in his estimate of what had happened:

“The tremendous upheaval of popular feeling which has taken place in Bengal in consequence of the Partition will constitute a landmark in the history of our National progress.”

Its effect inside Bengal has been vividly described by one who afterwards swung away from political agitation. Ajitkumar Chakravarti tells how the quiet of Rabindranath Tagore’s school at Santiniketan (“The Home of Peace”) was broken:

“For four years since its foundation, the asram went on humming the old forgotten strain that came from the past, from the woodlands of Aryan India of four thousand years ago. Then there burst into the country a thunderstorm. The great national movement with its trumpet-blasts of Bande Mataram, its flaunting hopes and high aspirations, its riotous excitement and frantic expectancy, came. The poet became its high priest. The asram was no longer a shadow of the benighted past, it was a reality of the dawning day.”*

The poet made his only appearance at a National Congress, that held in Calcutta in 1906, when he sang the national hymn Ajit refers to, Bande Mataram. The Congress was fast becoming no place for moderate men. This Calcutta meeting adopted a tentative Constitution, to be tried for one year, and established the Subjects Committee which now each year settles the Congress program. By way of protest against the Partition, it adopted the boycott of British goods. It demanded for India “the system of Government obtaining in the Self-Governing British Colonies,” and as an immediate step certain (not very revolutionary) concessions. This was as far as the reasonable element could make itself count. The Congress now contained a large proportion of delegates who considered its annual procedure too butler-like and obsequious, in the respectful tone adopted towards the Government and the House of Commons, and the gratitude always expressed for any act or word which showed kindness. At the Surat Congress, 1907, these left-wingers coolly proposed to set aside the presidential election, and to elect Lala Lajpat Rai, the Punjab Hindu leader, as a protest against his recent deportation. The “gesture” entered Indian politics. On the second day, December 27, when the President rose to take over from the Chairman of the Reception Committee, Mr. Tilak tried to move an amendment. The President, aware that this was probably one for a fresh election to the Chair, ruled him out of order. Thereupon Delegates carrying lathis (loaded clubs) stormed the platform, and the Congress broke up in battle.

I suppose this was inevitable, since Mr. Henry Nevinson was present. Mr. Nevinson has not missed a single row of anything like first-class proportions, during fifty years. Gilbert Murray once observed to me that when he heard that Nevinson was about to visit any country, he knew that country was in for bad trouble. His last exploit in the stormy petrel line was when (unnoted by the American papers) he landed in New York, a few days before the Wall Street crash of last autumn---which needlessly took the world by surprise. We have Mr. Nevinson’s account of the Congress scene that exploded round him, as he stood in the thick of it:

“Chairs flew through the air, like shells discharged at a venture. Long sticks clashed and shivered. Blood flowed from broken heads. It was a confused and difficult conflict---ten thousand men crowded together among ten thousand chairs; no uniform, no distinction, nothing to mark off Extremist from Moderate except the facial expression of temperament.”*

Much of the Congress’s impetus had come from friends in England, and in the House of Commons. To these the Surat break-up seemed disaster. That the Congress recovered at all was a feat of noble patience and patriotism. For some years it remained weak, and unrepresentative of political India. The Extremists then returned; and were able to mould it increasingly after their own mind.

Mr. Gokhale, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, and others, the day after the fight, held a “National Convention,” which appointed a Committee to draw up a fresh Constitution. This proved not different in essentials from the former one, but by Article II insisted that every Delegate express in writing his acceptance of the Congress Objects, and his readiness to abide by its Constitution and Rules. Article I became known as the Congress Creed:

“The objects of the Indian National Congress are the attainment by the people of India of a system of Government similar to that enjoyed by the Self-Governing Members of the British Empire, and a participation by them in the rights and responsibilities of the Empire on equal terms with those Members. These objects are to be achieved by constitutional means, by bringing about a steady reform of the existing system of administration, and by promoting national unity, fostering public spirit, and developing and organising the intellectual, moral, economic and industrial resources of the country.”

Next year’s Congress, at Madras, considered itself the Twenty-third, that at Surat having been merely adjourned. It welcomed enthusiastically the proposed Morley-Minto Reforms, “with deep and general satisfaction” placing on record

“its sense of high statesmanship which has dictated the action of the Government.”

Eleven years later, it was to reject indignantly the far more generous Montagu-Chelmsford Constitution. It further recorded

“its emphatic and unqualified condemnation of the detestable outrages and deeds of violence which have been committed recently in some parts of the country, and which are abhorrent to the loyal, humane and peace-loving nature of His Majesty’s Indian subjects of every denomination.”

The Congress was passing under a cloud. Its membership in 1908 dropped to 626, of which Bengal and Bihar, refusing to consider themselves partitioned, sent only 36. This attendance sank next year to 243. But the Congress now began to pick up. The annulment of the Partition, in 1911, made the Congress that year a joyful one. A gentleman who when I went to India was usually mentioned with curses both loud and deep by the European community spoke as follows:

“On this day of universal rejoicing, when every heart in India in general and in Bengal in particular is beating in unison with reverence and devotion to the British Throne and overflowing with revived confidence and gratitude towards British statesmanship, I will not---I dare not---recount the painful records and recall the bitter memories of the past five years. Let the dead past bury its dead. . . . Some of us never faltered---no, not even in the darkest days of our trials and tribulations---in our hope, in our conviction and in our faith in the ultimate triumph and vindication of British justice. . . . We had read English history in vain, if we had failed to grasp the one great lesson it teaches, that though British statesmanship has blundered in many places it has ultimately failed nowhere . . . The nation of Howard and Wilberforce, of Edmund Burke and Ewart Gladstone, of Henry Fawcett and John Bright, of Bentinck, Canning and Ripon, cannot perpetuate a wrong, and if it ever does, it will on that day cease to be the greatest nation that it is on the surface of the earth.”

This high note was on the whole prolonged until the outbreak of the War, when the Congress notes

“with gratitude and satisfaction the despatch of the Indian Expeditionary Force to the theatre of War, and begs to offer to H.E. the Viceroy its most heart-felt thanks for affording to the people of India an opportunity of showing that, as equal subjects of His Majesty, they are prepared to fight shoulder to shoulder with the people of other parts of the Empire in defence of right and justice, and the cause of the Empire.”

If up to this point the Congress was “seditious” or unreasonable, as most Europeans in India held, I have failed to notice it, in going over the records. We must now consider why things began to go so badly wrong, and at first must retrace our steps.

Chapter IX

The Punjab Tradition. The Coming of Violent Nationalism in the Punjab

The day will come when the historian, tracing more than a sequence of battles and Viceroys, will pay attention to the part that has been played by one province, first in riveting together the impressive strength of the British Raj, and then in fissuring that strength. The Punjab Tradition has done much towards the rise of that Imperialist enthusiasm which became known the world over in the writings of Kipling. It has ministered to our pride, in recent years it has brought to some of us shame. It is now dying, but dying hard and unwillingly,

“With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.”

The Sikhs, a warrior and religious brotherhood, though a small minority of the population, ruled the Punjab. Their famous chief, Ranjit Singh, died in 1839. Six years of desperate wickedness followed, a monotonous story of civil war, assassination, and miscellaneous disorder and cruelty. The barbaric horror of these years is luridly shown by the 310 women burnt with Suchet Singh, after he was slain in attempting the throne, March 27, 1844. The women died,

“some at Lahore, a hundred and fifty at Ramnagar, where his head was brought, and the others at Jammu or their own homes.”*

“Suttees suitable to the rank and valour”* of the dead took place with his companions. Though dwarfed by this instance, funeral ceremonial appalling in quality of terror graced the obsequies of chieftain after chieftain. In desperation, seeking in foreign war a distraction for troops and leaders whose preoccupation was revolution and intrigue, the Rani (Regent for her son, the nominal ruler, a child of five) turned the Sikh armies against British India, which they invaded on December 13, 1845. The War ended with the Battle of Sobraon, the last of four hard fights, on February 10, 1846. The Sikhs suffered much from dissensions and treachery; even so, the fighting was the sternest the British had ever encountered in India, and at Ferozeshah (December 21) they escaped disaster by a miracle---or, perhaps, by the disloyalty and faintheartedness of Sikh leaders. The casualties amounted to over 2,400; and at Sobraon they were 2,383.* The bloodiest battle of the South African War, Spion Kop, in two days’ struggle cost 1,700 killed and wounded; Magersfontein and Colenso, bad defeats both, with losses such as we had known only twice since the Crimean War, cost not much over a thousand casualties. San Juan Hill, in the Spanish-American War, cost 1,600. These comparisons will show up vividly the quality of the resistance encountered with the weapons of nearly a century ago. The Sikhs, only half convinced that they were conquered, were subjected to a Council of Regency, at the head of which was Henry Lawrence. The Second Sikh War broke out in September, 1848, and opened with indecisive engagements, the most famous being that of Chilianwala, January 13, 1849. This battle is to this day one of the proudest memories of secret India, which considers it a victory. It was a mixed-up affair, which cost 2,446 casualties. Its repercussions travelled fast and far. But after the victory of Gujrat, February 22, there could be no doubt in the Sikh ranks of defeat. The Punjab was annexed.

The Punjab Tradition, that formed in the first instance by the men who carried out

“the settlement of the Punjab, which was destined to be one of the most brilliant administrative achievements of Englishmen in the East,”*

began after the First Sikh War, before annexation. With the Second Sikh War still twenty months ahead,

“the beginning of the year 1847 found Henry Lawrence in peaceful possession of viceregal authority over the Province.”*

Lawrence himself wrote:

“I was very fortunate in my assistants, all of whom were my friends, and almost every one was introduced into the Punjab through me. George Lawrence, Macgregor, James Abbott, Edwardes, Lumsden, Nicholson, Taylor, Cocks, Hodson, Pollock, Bowring, Henry Coxe, and Melville, are men such as you will seldom see anywhere, but when collected under one administration were worth double and treble the number taken at haphazard. Each was a good man: the most were excellent officers. My chief help, however, was in my brother John, without whom I should have had difficulty in carrying on.”

After annexation, this standard was even enhanced.

“Fifty-six subordinates, the pick of the services, civil and military, formed the staff of the new province,”*

under a Board of three Commissioners. Between two of these, Henry and John, men diametrically opposed in their sympathies and attitude, friction developed; and in 1853, Henry was transferred to Rajputana, and John became Chief Commissioner* of the Punjab (in 1859, Lieutenant-Governor).

In the Mutiny, the Punjab stood true, and was a main means whereby Delhi was captured and the rebellion crushed. At one time there were more than 70,000 disciplined Punjabis under arms, of whom 23,000 were fighting beyond the province. We need not assume, as historians always do, that this loyalty or this response were either of them entirely from free will. In July, 1857, Lawrence issued letters to the Sikh Chiefs, asking for troops from the old Sikh Army, and “wound up with the significant words, ‘I would not put up with any delay or hesitation on your part.’”* The Administration Reports for 1856-7 and 1857-8 give the returns of the Special Commissioners in the Punjab. They show that 386 were hanged, 1,998 shot, and a large number imprisoned or flogged. Something under 40 per cent of these figures---which, though merciful in the India of the Mutiny period, would assuredly horrify the civilized world if reported from Bolshevik Russia---belong to Delhi, which is on the edge of the Punjab and had been thrown into Lawrence’s hands by his own vigour and the helplessness of other authorities. The subject is too sickening to pursue. But the reader may ponder on it, when he next finds a historian dilating on the wonderful loyalty of the Punjab in 1857.

If this side is touched upon, it is only as a necessary corrective to the nonsense of our accepted authorities. It helps us to a halfway house on the way to fact and reason. I would have the reader remember always in what a storm-light the Punjab administration was born, a lightning-flash from the Zeus of Terrors. Thrust out from the shoulder of India, into cheek-by-jowl proximity with the tribes of the north-west highlands and barbarous Afghanistan, itself under the sway of an uncivil folk whose lives were battle and their obsequies horror, shame, and cruelty; won after such contests as caught the gaze of fascinated India, and have never altogether lost it since---campaigns that crowded into three months or less the carnage of a whole half-century of peninsular warfare; during a brief eight years or less in the grip of new rulers, rigorous with a sense of God’s overwatching presence such as nerved the hands of Cromwell warring at Worcester or Drogheda, masterful beyond the wont of even their imperious race; such was the Punjab when the disaster came, sudden and overwhelming.

The men of the Punjab saved India to the British connection. Its subsequent history was of a piece with its beginnings. It was

“administered by the famous school of district officers who were purposely left by the government a large amount of freedom and initiative. Their relations with the people were personal and intimate, and as long as their methods were justified by success, they suffered little interference from Calcutta or Simla.”*

One of the pioneers has told us:

“We were taught in the Panjab to have an iron hand in a velvet glove: a firm rule, soft words, and conciliation. No bullying, no favouritism.”*

This personal regime has been beneficent, though continued for too long, into an age where it has appeared queerly obsolete. There is much to say for autocracy in India. It is exasperating to work with committees or boards. The one vigorous Englishman can get the job done; served with Indian colleagues, he is held up and blocked. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the casualness, the lack of interest, the miscellaneous futility, that many Indians bring as their sole contribution to any business in which they assist. In roads, canals, irrigation, reduction to order, the Punjab has profited enormously. As long as the Punjab Tradition is praised for the right things, every fair-minded person must concur. The Punjab has been pulled in seventy years out of barbarism, into material prospects far beyond those of Bengal or Madras. It is on other sides that there has been stagnation. Lord Morley, in words often quoted, observed that we have

“in that vast congeries of peoples we call India a long, slow march in uneven stages through all the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth.”

In the officials who have held sway in India during these last twenty years of controversy we have seen a not less motley and straggling array. They have held, and freely expressed, all variations of political opinion, from views that Henry VIII might have considered old-fashioned, to some that Stalin might think almost radical. If India really were intended by a benign Providence to remain for ever merely a subject for administration, we need not bother to do anything with the Punjab Tradition beyond adding our own applause to the louder applause of its inheritors and participants. But if the whole world, and especially the British portions of it, is destined to move out of autocracy into a genuine democracy, then there are reasons for thinking that some parts of India have stood stock-still while the rest moved (however reluctantly).

The Punjab has been the Province that most young men entering the Indian Civil Service have wished to go to, the place where “a saheb is a saheb.” It began as a frontier province, the shield of India, with a modified “martial law” complex. More than once, things have happened in the Punjab, which could not have happened in any other Province. General Dyer’s action at Amritsar was such an incident. When you have said all you can think of in its defence, it remains true that in no other part of India can it be thought of as a thing that could have been done.

The American reader will find something analogous in the "frontier" thought which has so entered into the psychology of certain parts of the United States, resulting in an exaltation of prompt action above the process of law.

The Punjab during the War

In April, 1919, happened what has since spread a shadow over all efforts at conciliation.

“The deliberate bloodshed at Jallianwala has marked out April 13, 1919, as a black day in the annals of British India.”*

This was the culmination of a long period of unrest and hatred, reaching an intensity and scale which justify the name of rebellion and early in the War giving rise to a deliberate revolutionary conspiracy.

If we are to be fair in our judgment of the present situation, when the Indian National Movement seems so hysterical and childishly unreasonable, we must consider carefully the Punjab Tradition and the War. Unfortunately, frank discussion has to be left to a fairly distant posterity. It has been foreclosed by a famous trial, that of Sir Sankaran Nair for having libelled Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab during the War. In that trial the Judge stated emphatically that the Hunter Commission had wrongly condemned General Dyer’s action at Amritsar. This statement was the greatest of a long series of victories won by the pro-Dyer party. How pyrrhic it was they have not yet realised.

I have no reason to think that my own views are in any degree eccentric. They have always appeared to me the views held by a majority of British officers who had first-hand experience either of Indians in the War or of India during, and immediately after, the War. But I will suppress them, and leave the facts free to make their impression, whatever that may be, on the reader’s mind.

The Coming of Violent Nationalism: In the Punjab

The War made the Punjab a centre of hatred, which in 1915 found a focus in the Ghadr (“Mutiny”) Conspiracy. This movement antedates the War. In December, 1912, the bomb reached almost to the Punjab’s borders; the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was wounded at Delhi, and an Indian attendant killed. Nothing was ever learnt of the perpetrator of this crime. A few months later, a bomb placed on a road in Lahore, May 17, 1913, instead of killing Europeans killed an Indian who ran into it on a bicycle.

We have seen that it is a particularly sore point that Indians are refused citizenship rights in the United States and some British Dominions, and are subject in some places to humiliating conditions of entry. In California and British Columbia were Indian settlements, which were inflamed with anti-British feeling. British Columbia to many in the Punjab seemed a land of promise, with its high wages. In May, 1914, a ship called the Komagata Maru reached Vancouver, with 351 Sikhs and 21 Punjabi Mohammedans, intending settlers. It was a deliberate challenge of British Columbian usage. The whole incident was unfortunate beyond words, and in its results painful to remember. One can see the British Columbian authorities’ point of view, confronted by a shipload of people whom they were determined to exclude. It is also necessary to see that Indians find it hard to understand why they must freely admit the rest of the world to India, but find many parts of the world barred to them. The ship was driven away by force, very few being allowed to land. Its passengers, in the worst of tempers, reached Bengal after War had broken out, on September 27, 1914. They refused a special train to the Punjab which Government had chartered for them free of charge, and tried to march on Calcutta in protest. There was street fighting, with loss of life on both sides; the majority of the Sikhs scattered over the country, most being presently hunted down and arrested. Great excitement was caused among Indian groups all over the East, by tidings of a revolution preparing in the Punjab. Another Japanese ship, the Tosa Maru, on October 29 brought to Calcutta a further 173 Indians, mostly Sikhs collected from Manila, Hongkong, Shanghai and America. One hundred were immediately interned. The rest reached the Punjab, and joined the Komagata Maru stragglers. All were ablaze with wrath. They held, as their compatriots generally held, that the Governments of the United Kingdom, British India, British Columbia (or any Dominion) are one and the same. The same authority that in the Punjab was pressing them to enlist to fight in a desperate war was (they held) refusing them entry into Canada, after many of them

“had staked all their possessions on this venture, and had started in the full belief that the British Government would assure and guarantee their admission to a land of plenty.”*

The Ghadr conspiracy, already in being both in the Punjab and in California, developed rapidly into a movement the most dangerous since the Mutiny, for its participants belonged to the most formidable soldier clans in India. There were political dacoities. (A Resolution passed on board the Tosa Maru was that loyal Punjabis of substance were to be looted.) In the upshot, under the Defence of India Act (the local "Dora"),* nine batches of conspirators were tried by Special Tribunals at Lahore. Twenty-nine only were acquitted. Twenty-eight were hanged, and the rest sentenced to transportation or imprisonment. These were not all the casualties.

“Some mutinous soldiers of two regiments were tried by court-martial, and a few murderers, dacoits and train-wreckers were dealt with by the ordinary courts.”*

Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s book contains a ghastly record of revolutionary outrages and of hangings.*

Two comments. First, if you compare the Punjab and Bengal records, either one is lenient and the other correspondingly severe, or else (possibly) each of these judgments is true. The Punjab action was against an undoubted revolutionary conspiracy, and in time of War. So was the Bengal action. Secondly, probably many of us, who saw at close quarters the operation of court-martial methods in the War, will never succeed in giving men of more balanced mind the remotest conception of the detestation with which we view any sort of Special Tribunal, or any kind of extraordinary action taken against emergency. We consider that panic operates, to the exclusion of fairness. Trials by court-martial we hold are usually no trials at all.

The Punjab War Record

In 1917, India provided 186,000 recruits, and Nepal another 12,000. More than half the former number---95,000---came from the Punjab. In 1918, previous to the Armistice, India raised 317,000 recruits, Nepal 10,000; the Punjab provided 134,000. From beginning to end of the War, Indian troops lost 36,696 dead (by battle and disease), and had 69,898 wounded. 691 Indian officers died, and 1,063 British officers of Indian troops. The Punjab was

“the only great Province which made a really serious war effort.”*

At the end of the War,

“the man-power of some districts was showing signs of exhaustion . . . The war-casualties of the Punjab, which had supplied 60 per cent of the men raised in the first 3 years, were heavier than those of all the other Provinces combined.”*

The Punjab War effort is a historic event of great importance. We are unusually fortunate in that we possess the Lieutenant-Governor’s own account of how an alien Empire managed to persuade such large numbers of Orientals to die for it in the shambles of Flanders and in the horrible Mesopotamian slaughters. Surely, it must be the first time in the World’s history that so many thousands from a subject race willingly offered themselves, in a War dreadful beyond all precedent and to support a quarrel which was none of their bringing about and cannot have seemed any of their business. How was the miracle achieved?

“From the beginning of the War I revived the system of holding Durbars in every district or group of districts for war propaganda; and from July, 1917, I made use of these great assemblies to meet the prominent men of each district, especially the war-workers, to review by tribes, religions, and localities the results already obtained, to arouse officials and non-officials to a sense of the common danger, and the need of raising men to protect their hearths and homes, to encourage further effort by:

“Checking the crazy ones, Coaxing on-aisy ones, Lifting the lazy ones on---with moral suasion!

and above all to reward publicly those who had done well.”*

“The village communities in each district which had the best record---some had given half their male population---were entered on a Roll of Honour and received remissions of land revenue exceeding £100,000.”*

“Most of the Punjab districts were being reassessed for land-revenue during the “War, and in deciding on the amount of the assessment and its term, I had no hesitation in giving favourable consideration to the war-services of the rural population, especially in Gujrat, Shahpur, and Amritsar. Two districts of the Punjab . . . stood out pre-eminent in all India, and for these, in addition to other rewards, I obtained sanction to the extension of their revenue settlements for an extra 10 years---a concession representing £20,000 to £30,- 000.”<span data-tippy=”Ibid., 225.” class=”info-r”>*

“By such measures it was brought home to the people that Government would reward loyal service with honour and material benefits. The results are evident in the recruiting figures of 1917 and 1918.”<span data-tippy=”Ibid., 221.” class=”info-r”>*

“It became necessary to tap castes and tribes that had hitherto been little recruited, and to draw upon areas, especially in the South-West Punjab, which had few military traditions.”<span data-tippy=”Ibid., 221.” class=”info-r”>*

“No story of the Punjab’s great war effort would be complete which did not notice the indefatigable and strenuous appeals of the Lieutenant-governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer.”*

“Up to 1920 the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, subject to higher authority, was in sole control of the administration. He had no colleagues, no Executive Council with whom to share responsibility.”*

To me the dispensation of public revenue as largesse and gesture, in accordance with the passing demands of the hour and with standards of loyalty to a war waged far away, seems medieval, and I am sure that in no other Indian Province would it have been considered sound administration. The Punjab’s superb War effort was a double-edged achievement, a weapon that has been cutting our hands ever since.

As I explained, we are bound to accept the Punjab War effort as entirely a willing one. It is true that in the Report of the Hunter Commission on the Punjab disturbances after their horrible culmination in the Jallianwala slaughter,

“the three Indian members emphasised the special incidence of war-time restrictions and demands on the Punjab.”*

They were mistaken. The matter has been thrashed out in a British law-court and settled once for all. It remains only for me to relate a queer phenomenon, vouched for by a multitude of minds, the most of them prosaic British ones with correct views on all political questions. The student of hallucination on the large scale must add this to his examples. It is a very remarkable one.

Before passing over the borders of what is tangible and assessable into the psychic and immaterial, let us start with solid ground. India was deeply moved by the idea of the Empire keeping its word as regards Belgium. The first response was genuinely loyal. Nor was India’s sacrifice excessive, if she had been of our race or a self-determining member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

“The death-casualties for all India, with 320 millions of people, were less than those of Canada with her 8 millions, of Australia with only 5 millions, and only double those of New Zealand with little over a million of people.”*

It is only when we remember that more than half of the Indian death-casualties came from the Punjab, with its 20 millions, that the sacrifice seems severe in any case. The Great War was waged thousands of miles away; and, though it is arguable (and therefore often argued) that India’s battle was being fought out no less than Belgium’s or England’s, the point seems a debating one. India’s danger was not an immediate one; in so far as it was real, it existed because she was linked to Great Britain’s fortunes. The Indian troops were invaluable in Europe, as a stop-gap while our own voluntary armies were being made ready. We should be ungrateful if we ever forgot their services or their valour. But they could not have stood the pace much longer, in a War which was the severest test that has ever been laid on the spirit of man. Yet their next test was almost severer. After Flanders came Mesopotamia; after Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Ypres, came Sheikh Saad, the Wadi, Hanna, Sannaiyat, Beit Aiessa, Es-Sinn, not to speak of Ctesiphon and the Siege of Kut. The world has seen no more pitiful story of valour compassed round with misery, than the one (still to be told) of the hapless Mesopotamian expedition. Thucydides has touched the heart of the generations with his picture of the Athenians struggling through Asopus, while the arrows rained down from the banks. The world has yet to know of the congregated hopelessness in Chitab’s Fort, on the night after our men had been shot down on the Wadi; of the wounded left to die by Arab hands, when we retreated from Dujaileh, our brains blurred with anger at the folly that had thrown victory away; of the suffering dimly adumbrated by the name of Ctesiphon. The Report of the Mesopotamian Commission, with its picture of the boats, crammed with dead and wounded, that seemed rope-festooned (with a fortnight’s accumulated faeces) until they drew near, had its moment of horrified reception, and has been long forgotten. Those who remember know that never has such a stream of broken and dazed humanity poured into any Eastern port, as came steadily into Bombay, between November, 1915, and September, 1916. The Indians in this stream had known unbelievable suffering, had seen starvation, disease, medical attendance that was hampered and inefficient to the point of farce, leadership that even now seems a nightmare and not a thing that happened. At the beginning of the four months of failure to save Kut, one of the two Indian divisions engaged, the Seventh (Meerut), went in 12,000 strong, in January, 1916. When Kut fell, April 29, it had had 12,500 battle casualties, apart from what cholera, malaria, dysentery, and a promiscuous wretchedness of disease had taken. The majority of the wounded and sick poured back into the Punjab, to find that white men and headmen of their own race, who had not the faintest glimmer of a perception, even a dreamlike one, of what this War was like, were urging their families to send out more, and yet more, sons to win glory. Yet recruits were found, as we have seen; and found until the War ended.

I turn to hallucination. The British who fought in Mesopotamia somehow got the impression that a proportion of the Indians who fought beside them were unwilling heroes. This impression was a sore point with the officers of Indian regiments; and it may as well be frankly admitted that in the strain put on men, as the Somme in Flanders followed Kut in Mesopotamia, no group was capable of giving other groups “a fair show.” Also, the Indian record in the field was a very glorious one. Nevertheless, I suppose no one who was in Mesopotamia has the slightest doubt that a good many of the Indian troops had come there against their wishes, and stayed there sullenly. This was especially true after 1916.

Note. I have spoken of ‘Indian’ divisions. Nearly one-half the personnel of these is British.

Chapter X

The Khilafat Movement and the Rowlatt Act

Most of the Indian loss of life fell on one Province, the Punjab. Rather more than half the Punjab’s population is Mohammedan. To Mohammedans all over India it was a deeply felt sorrow that their two loyalties clashed; their King-Emperor was at war with their Khalif, the Sultan of Turkey. Indian Mohammedans have always been troubled about the fate of their co-religionists outside India. It is not the distress that has fitfully stabbed at the conscience of Christendom, when Armenians or Lebanese have been massacred. It is resentment that the once extensive secular authority of Islam has suffered circumscription and bondage. The Turks have never vexed themselves about the Mohammedans of India, except to the extent of accepting donations from them. But the Mohammedans of India have vexed themselves a great deal on the Turks’ behalf. There can be no doubt that the loss of their titular Empire, when it went down in the storm of 1857, has caused more regret than is imagined.

To the soldiers at the Front this clash of loyalties was a strain. The Turks set in their front lines Mullahs whose voices rang out across the narrow No Man’s Land at Sannaiyat, and elsewhere, reproaching the Mohammedans opposite. We were at pains to try to “get” these unwelcome muezzins calling to a duty of which we disapproved. Desertions were frequent, so were executions---accepted then with callous indifference, as the kind of thing that happened in War.

In the Punjab, in Maharashtra, in Bengal, to any one aware of the facts and open to reason there could be no doubt that the War saw the spread of a revolutionary movement. On December 10, 1917, the Government appointed a Committee, under the presidency of Mr. Justice Rowlatt, to consider this movement and measures to defeat it. The Committee reported, April 15, 1918. It recommended special courts of three judges without juries or assessors, to try sedition, and the revival of internment powers. These recommendations at once brought Government up against a permanent difference of opinion. Official opinion, in view of the difficulty of getting evidence and the terrorism exercised by murder gangs, held that you must be able, when things got bad, to remove elsewhere temporarily any one whose influence seemed to make trouble. Indians, however much they disapproved of violent crime, resented, almost without exception, any measure which they considered was for Asia only and would never be tolerated in England, and which seemed to treat them as subjects for administration, and not as citizens. They were inclined to accept at face value an internee’s assertions that he was innocent of any intrigue. Officials felt that they had to work in the dark, against foes invisible as well as unscrupulous.

The Act which carried out the Committee’s recommendations was the signal for an outburst of wholesale lying. “The agitation against the Rowlatt Act was frankly dishonest.”*

“The new powers and the new courts were a menace to liberty which the nationalists were right to combat, but they were faced with the same difficulty which Liberals felt when they were opposing the use of Chinese labour in South Africa, or the Conservatives when they wished to call the nation’s attention to communist influence in the Labour Party. The work of the successful propagandist is to make the individual think that he is threatened. The Liberals suggested to the working-man that the Chinese were coming to take his job. The Conservatives hinted that the English people’s money was going to be collected and used to bolster up the Russian Government. The Indian nationalists . . . spread the idea that under the Rowlatt Act all couples intending to be married were to be medically inspected and that all assemblies of three or four people, including marriage ceremonies, were to be prohibited.”*

By another exercise of tactlessness such as has repeatedly wrecked its best intentions, Authority timed almost simultaneously the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, which offered a vast advance on previous self-government, and the Rowlatt Act, which proposed to put into immediate operation measures always detested. The Reforms based on the former were ruined from the outset, by the deeds and temper which followed on the latter. The Rowlatt Act led to rioting in the Punjab, and elsewhere.

“I am confident that there would have been no outbreak but for the Rowlatt Bill.”*

The Rowlatt agitation was joined by Mohammedan agitation on behalf of Turkey, helpless after defeat. The Khilafat movement was a preposterous one, demanding things England could never have delivered, and would have been wrong in wishing to deliver. It insisted that Turkey be restored to all its old empire. England could not have kept France out of Syria except by war; the Arabs had fought for their deliverance; the Armenians, shamefully abandoned by Europe and America, had endured cruelty which the world even now does not know, and were on every count entitled to a respite from rape and murder. Mr. Lloyd George’s “pledge,” of January 5, 1918, has been, and still is, so shamelessly misrepresented, that I give his actual words:

“Nor are we fighting to deprive Turkey of its capital, or of the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor and Thrace, which are predominantly Turkish in race. . . . While we do not challenge the maintenance of the Turkish Empire in the homelands of the Turkish race with its capital at Constantinople---the passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea being internationalised and neutralised---Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are in our judgment entitled to a recognition of their separate national conditions.”

Mr. Gandhi made his first great mistake when he supported the Khilafat claims. He did it frankly, because it furnished him, in his own words, with “such an opportunity of uniting Hindus and Mohammedans as would not arise in a hundred years.” A good three parts of his influence in India, and all four parts of it outside India, are due to his purity of life and motive. I never met a Hindu who thought the Khilafat claims anything but nonsense, and rather immoral nonsense at that. The movement ultimately collapsed when the Turkish Government refused to receive an embassy of protest from Indian Mohammedans, after its own contemptuous abolition of the Khilafat. The Turks themselves deposed the Sultan, the Khalif. Accepting the Khilafat claims, in order to unite Hindus and Moslems, Mr. Gandhi yielded to a natural temptation, and was no worse than politicians elsewhere. But he was also no better. Before the Khilafat Movement collapsed, there had been misery enough as a result of it.

This may seem unfair to Mr. Gandhi. I notice that to Sir Valentine Chirol he described the Khilafat Movement as “a splendid manifestation of religious faith.”* If he did, I am sure he thought it was. But the wish was certainly father to the thought, and to outside opinion the action seemed cynical enough. This moral flaw in his Non-co-operation Campaign, the support by Hindus---as if the wrongs inflicted on India, at Amritsar and after, were not sufficient, and indeed, far stronger when not bolstered up with an absurdity---of a cause they cared nothing for, was what brought Mr. Gandhi to defeat.

Meanwhile the Allies, in the right at first, steadily put themselves in the wrong by letting the settlement of peace with Turkey drag on and on, and by allowing Greece to enter on her disastrous expedition into Asia Minor. The British “asked for” a good deal of the trouble they found. Mr. Gandhi’s hartals, or days given up to closing of all shops and work, led to more violent ebullitions of patriotic indignation. In Ahmedabad, the second city of Bombay Presidency, his own home, two days of rioting happened. The troops shot down 150 of the rioters, of whom 28 were killed. No one thought this extreme, and Mr. Gandhi himself admitted he had underrated “the forces of evil,” and worked for the restoration of order. There was no martial law in the Bombay Presidency, the soldiers merely acted as special police.

“The Bombay Government kept their heads, and there was nowhere any wholesale surrender of the civil authority into military hands.”*

At Amritsar, in the Punjab, and elsewhere, rioting broke out, telegraph wires were cut, firing took place and “martyrs” were made, the mob got out of hand and committed atrocious murders of Europeans and Indian officials, there was arson. Had this happened in any other Province, there would have been sharp repression and restoration of order. There would have been shooting. But in the Punjab there was much more. A disorderly mob, gathered in a death-trap, the Jallianwala garden, a tiny space almost entirely surrounded by high walls, was pumped into with bullets for ten minutes---1,650 rounds were fired. The casualties were finally elicited, after months of procrastination, months during which all India was seething with such indignation as it had never known before. They were 359 dead, and about 1,200 wounded. Nothing was done for the wounded. The officer who commanded the firing party did not consider it his “job” to bother about them.

Amritsar ended the old Punjab Tradition, as the Mutiny ended the rule o£ “John Company,” and therefore, on Sir Lepel Griffin’s line of reasoning regarding the latter event, may be considered a fortunate episode. It also finished the disorders, swiftly and dramatically, as similar events have in other countries finished (for the time being) similar discontents. It by no means follows that General Dyer “saved” the British Raj. On the contrary, few men can have damaged it more in ten minutes. Looking back on the last eleven bitter years, he would be a hardy person who dissented from the view expressed in the Minority Report of the Hunter Commission, that the action “caused great disservice to British rule in India.” Some who at the time blessed Jallianwala must have cursed it ever since. In the Punjab, contrary to common impression, there were many officers who acted both firmly and humanely. The Hunter Commission on the Disorders divided racially, the Englishmen and Indians producing separate reports. The Minority (Indian) Report assigned reasons for the Punjab unrest which were, and are, universally held in India to be valid, but cannot be discussed by an Englishman. For General Dyer it must be said that the deeds and attitude of the mob, in Amritsar and elsewhere, were appalling. Further, an Afghan invasion of India had begun. Yet his action is defensible only if we hold that so, and no otherwise, could he have saved the town from greater suffering. It is a pity that Englishmen feel they “cannot let down” a man in trouble; there has been a vast discrepancy between the way officials and soldiers have talked privately of Jallianwala and what they have said, those who have had to speak, in public. One can sympathise with this; can sympathise, too, with General Dyer in his very difficult situation, and feel that the blame is not his, but the blame of all of us, in letting such obsessions about events in India govern our minds and in letting rancour grow to such intensity. But the difference between what is good for public consumption and what is genuinely believed is not helpful in healing exacerbation.

Jallianwala might have been lived down. Far more wounding to Indian self-respect were other things. The Hunter Report was considered a whitewashing. It was not understood that drastic punishment of men who had acted brutally, but with such light as they had, in positions of danger and responsibility, was impossible. Men had been censured. General Dyer had been compulsorily retired. This did not satisfy Indian opinion. In February, 1921, the Duke of Connaught, representing the King-Emperor to inaugurate the new Parliament of India, said:

“The shadow of Amritsar has lengthened over the fair face of India. I know how deep is the concern felt by His Majesty the King-Emperor at the terrible chapter of the events in the Punjab. No one can deplore these events more sincerely and terribly than I do myself. I have reached a time of life when I most desire to heal wounds and to reunite those who have been disunited.”

The first work of the new Parliament was to move a Resolution on the Punjab episode; and the Government spokesmen had to speak with unusual emphasis, to make clear

“the deep regret of the administration at the perpetration of those improper actions, and their firm determination that so far as human foresight could avail any repetition would be for ever impossible.”*

The Home Member, Sir William Vincent,

“repudiated emphatically the suggestion that Indian lives were valued more lightly than the lives of Englishmen, expressing his deep regret that the canons of conduct for which the British administration stood had been violated by some of the acts of certain individual officers.”

But the same wrecking party that has repeatedly, since we have seen in Great Britain any real arrival of democracy, refused to accept majority decisions when they were not its own decisions---the school of political thought that was active in preparing rebellion in Ulster, when Home Rule was passed for the Statute-Book, and used the House of Lords to nullify the result of the polls, when these had put the Liberals in power---set itself to ruin any chance of peace and forgetfulness. A debate in the House of Commons, and an exoneration of General Dyer in the House of Lords, aroused unspeakable indignation in India, and rendered the task of the Indian Government almost impossible. When we find the same group and their successors, in this year of grace 1930, predicting “an effusion of blood” in India if England fulfils her often-repeated promises and does not take their way of reaction and repression, it is well to remember how little they have cared, in times of exceeding stress and perplexity, to help the Administration in India. They have intensified its difficulties a thousandfold before, and are prepared to do so again. Their attitude was not misunderstood by an eminent Indian in London at the time of these infamous Debates, nor were his words either unchosen or unfair:

“The result of the Dyer debates in both Houses of Parliament makes painfully evident the attitude of mind of the ruling classes of the country towards India. It shows that no outrage, however monstrous, committed against us by agents of their Government, can arouse feelings of indignation in the hearts of those from whom our governors are chosen. . . .

“The unashamed condonation of brutality expressed in their speeches and echoed in their newspapers is ugly in its frightfulness. . . . The late events have conclusively proved that our true salvation lies in our own hands; that a nation’s greatness can never find its foundation in halfhearted concessions of contemptuous niggardliness.”*

In India itself, the European community, a community at that time poorly informed on Indian matters and with a distorted and meagre knowledge of Indian history, broke out into an agitation whose fury today seems as incredible as the Mutiny madness (of which it was the culminating upflare). In India and Great Britain together, £26,000 was collected as a gift, to compensate General Dyer for his disgrace. The official world has to keep out of controversy; and in the non-official world few voices were raised in protest. The most effective was a manifesto signed by some missionaries, mostly educational ones. It had its value. “The missionaries are really our friends, then,” said a bitter Nationalist to C. F. Andrews (who did not sign, as his well-known views would not have helped). The signatories received their share of anonymous letters, signed “Britisher,” “One Who Did His Bit in the War,” “Mother of a Soldier.” The Head of one Missionary Society wrote to the Head of another a virulent letter to urge that a missionary under the latter’s Board be sent home immediately, for having signed the protest.

It is unfortunate that Indians do not realise what a change has come over the British in India, since 1920. We have moved out of all sight of where we were. Our old selves are obsolete, our old attitude towards war, poverty, imperialism, is a dream. The War madness raged for two or three years after the Armistice, in all Nations, not alone in the British in India. Today, though we have still in our midst those who have learnt nothing and have changed no segment of their minds, they are like Giants Pope and Pagan. It is a pity that outside England their words are taken seriously. They will not get hold of power again, while a generation lives vividly mindful of the havoc they wrought before.

Chapter XI

The Significance of M. K. Gandhi

India and South Africa had long been aware of Mr. Gandhi. The agitation following on the Rowlatt Act and the Punjab troubles made the world aware of him. Today he has long been the best-known politician on the planet; since Lenin died, he is the one who has brought about the vastest and profoundest changes. Many, in widely diverse lands, consider him the greatest man of his generation. In the United States, he has a definite “news value,” which puts him in a class alone with T. E. Lawrence and Colonel Lindbergh. The Indian situation is simplified into a Battle of Light and Darkness, in which the British Government takes the role of Satan. What Mr. Gandhi wishes “India wishes.” What he says is true, and not to be criticised.

Too much attention has been focussed on his personality, and on the man as a picturesque figure. The “spinner of a nation’s destiny”* is “colorful,” “magnetic”:

“A gnomelike man with large ears and enormous nose.”*

“His ears are large and conspicuously protruding.”*

“This broken, tragic little wisp, whose ears stand out so comically from such a bullet head.”*

“One scrawny native, clad only in a loincloth, defies the British Empire.”*

A saint whom half-horrified, half-“thrilled” American lady visitors find seated loin-cloth-clad, wearing huge horn-rimmed spectacles and with a bulky Ingersoll pinned to his waist-band. He will study their “reactions” with chuckling amusement, and presently fix a fountain pen in his toes, observing: “You in the West do not know the proper way to use your toes.”

Not enough attention has been given to his politics, to his aims and significance. Mr. Rushbrook Williams has touched the truth with a needle,* when he traces his actions to the ancient practice of “sitting dharna.” This practice, which was a great nuisance in early John Company days, was one whereby a creditor at an obstinate debtor’s door, or an aggrieved person at the door of his oppressor or enemy, sat fasting until death or redress released him. If it was death, then the ghost sat on eternally, an implacable shadow, now beyond the appeal of repentance. This has been Mr. Gandhi’s action, an action magnificently vernacular. He has been, with intervals, sitting dharna at the Empire’s threshold for thirty years. “Non-violent Non-co-operation.” Young India watched with absorbed interest when Young Ireland handled bomb and revolver, shot from behind hedges, and derailed trains. But All India watched with a more poignant interest yet, when MacSweeney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, hunger-struck till death. Last year, Jatindranath Das, accused in connection with the murder of Mr. Saunders, hunger-struck and died. The passage of his body home from the upcountry was a pageant. The Alien Government was being fought to the death, with Indian weapons. Those weapons had already been imported into the West, and had succeeded there. Witness the Nonconformist Passive Resisters, then the Suffragettes (who had gone one better, by thinking of the hunger-strike), then Ireland.

I digress. If the hunger-strike becomes a normal part of the Indian revolutionary’s resistance, it will put the Government in a more difficult position than any other action could. A modern Government can hardly steel itself to the permitting of a death so torturing and heroic. I hold it should; for, though I am second to none in my admiration of the courage that can voluntarily endure such a death, and can understand the passionate pride it calls out, I think the whole thing is wrapt about with a deal of illogical sentimentalism, and I do not for one moment set the victim of his own hunger-strike with the genuine martyrs who have died by Government action. But there is a vast public today, cinema-fed and cinema-educated, whose whole experience of valour is of valour as exemplified on the screen. This public prefers its heroism to be spectacular. If the hunger-strike is the resort of every Indian who is arrested in connection with assassination, there will be a great outburst of indignation outside India as well as within it, whenever a prisoner is allowed to die. Luckily, it seems unthinkable that the Government should ever have to face this dilemma in the case of Mr. Gandhi. He will go to prison, no doubt, from time to time, but he can hardly ever be suspected of complicity in any violence. Prisoners accused on any lesser count than murder are set free when weakened by refusal of food. At least, that seems the accepted practice of the humaner Governments (among which I hope the world will still permit me to count my own).

I digress again. Unless you have had to live with the literature of Indian Nationalism, you will hardly realise how unreasonable much of it is. The movement contains a considerable proportion of men who have “lived soft” and have a low standard of martyrdom. Their sympathisers in England and America are like them in this. These people can glow at the sight of the horrors depicted as endured in such a play as Journey’s End. But they raise an outcry when they discover that prison means a restriction of movement and a loss of accustomed comforts. The Indian press has for years rung with lamentation and indignation, because this or that political prisoner was not treated by the Jail Authorities as an honoured guest, and because food was plain and beds not too downy. Till recent days, one had always understood that prison meant deprivation. There are sufficient reasons for arraignment of the Indian Government, and places enough where no condemnation can be too unqualified. But, if the Indian situation is to be understood, we have to take a straighter line towards truth, and simply ignore the goodly army of sentimentalists. Considering the passionate times in which they have operated, and all the difficulties they have had to confront, the Central Government and such Governments as those of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, have not been tyrannical or cruel. Those who say they have simply know nothing of the ordinary procedure of Governments elsewhere, in any country you choose to take.

In February, 1926, there was a motion for adjournment in the Legislative Assembly, to discuss a hunger-strike of political prisoners, in Mandalay jail. Their complaint was that the Government did not allow them enough money to conduct religious ceremonies adequately (India in 1925-6, 123). Mr. Gandhi’s famous Moslem associate, Maulana Shaukat Ali, looked into the matter, and reported thus:

“We went inside, and stayed with our friends for over three hours. They are living in an enclosure by themselves. A two-storeyed wooden block is allotted to them. They practically live comfortably. Bedding is sufficient. Furniture, book-cases, dressing materials and other conveniences are provided. Down below, in partitioned compartments, the convicts looking after them live. Next to it, is the dining-room. A new kitchen has been built for them. Four cooks from Bengal are provided. There are two tennis courts in the compound. The Superintendent has provided a small swimming-bath with a pump for fresh water attached. All spoke highly of the Superintendent and the Jail staff. When I entered, they were all lying on their easy chairs. I am glad to report they looked cheerful and in fair health. I could see that my visit pleased them. They were all smiling and anxious to please me. I expressed to them my desire to break their fast. They said they would obey me, but I was to hear what they had to say, as they had taken a vow not to take any food unless their religious rights were fully recognised. They all felt very bitterly that their desire for performing the necessary pujas on holidays was treated with so much contempt. They told me it was not the question of money that forced them to take this serious step, but the feeling that Government was absolutely callous about it and wanted to humiliate them as much as possible.”

Mr. Gandhi’s martyrdom, however, has been real. In South Africa he showed a tenacity and heroic patience that lasted through years. He submitted to scorn and violence. He organised the weak till they shamed the strong. It is no wonder that his countrymen, of every creed, worshipped this figure, so frail yet so serene amid the storm. Though it is an error, I do not marvel that the American public simplifies the situation into a duel between a mighty Empire and one emaciated man. Mr. Gandhi must know the deep and almost affectionate respect in which he is held by Englishmen, even by many who think his politics wrong and that his tactics have brought misery. We know that for a long time he was not unfair, not a man stirred by any rancour or any racial bitterness (however reasonable such bitterness might be), but that he genuinely tried, and tried repeatedly, to win our co-operation by first working with us. Indeed, when I think over his career I can find but three places where I can wish---not as an Englishman, but as a man who desires for every nation, of whatever colour, the same freedom and happiness that I would see my own possessing---that he had acted otherwise. I think he was mistaken when he launched Non-co-operation, though the provocation received was very great; when he supported the Khilafat Movement, acting politician-fashion; when he let himself be carried away at this last Lahore Congress, and became the tool and mouth-piece of the men who desire no settlement. History will find his one moral flaw to be a love of power and a reluctance to let it leave his hands, even if he could not keep it except by heavy payment. This fact, I believe---and I think my reader will come to believe the same---explains his actions of these last tormented months. One thing further: I wish he had found time during these tempestuous years to visit my own country. It is not true that he has done all he could to bring about peace between his people and mine. He has not done this. He would have been amazed at the generosity of his reception, and would have gained a new perception of the “decency” that is in man. Even if he had gone back only to opposition, that perception would have stayed with him to the end.

Mahatma Gandhi is a poor thinker. We can say this, for he has done most of his thinking aloud, in a very winning fashion. He assumes too much, he does not question his first principles. Take his defence of caste:

“We cannot choose at this stage our own parents, or our own birth-place, or our own ancestry. Why should we claim as individuals the right during this present brief life-period to break through all the conventions wherein we are placed at birth by God Himself?”

The infantile confusion of thought will be apparent to any one. It would not be easy to get a more packed example of “the fallacy of many questions.” The same poor thinking seems to me present in his paeans to the cow, which “is a poem of pity.” India is cursed with a superfluity of perfectly damnable cows, and even those that still do something besides devour the all-too-scanty fodder are depressingly meagre and inadequate animals. We may admit what Hindus are always emphasising, that it is easy to understand why cow-veneration came, among a pastoral folk who had neither horses nor machinery. But a similar line of argument might have perpetuated the worship of the long bow in England.

But, though a bad reasoner, he is a superb judge of men. His humanity, too, is one of the profoundest things this world has seen. He has pity and love for every race, and most of all for the poor and oppressed. He is without fear or care for self. He is humorous, kindly, obstinate, brave. His achievement has been this. India is fissured and split---cracked, shattered, and patched---as no other folk on the planet’s surface. For the first time she has known a stirring that has touched her remotest places, that has been at least a breath and a voice---heard everywhere, though the words may not have been understood. The Nationalist Movement has many cleverer men, more eloquent men, far more learned men. It has had but one man who has convinced all men and women in India that he is of the same flesh and blood as they are. He has set in action emotions and hopes that are far wider than any political grouping. He has definitely shifted the course of a people’s way---of the way of many peoples.

There is more to be said. It will be said in its place, when I consider India’s social troubles in relation to the political position.

Chapter XII

Non-co-operation: The First Phase

The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms were doomed to failure. As late as the National Congress at Amritsar, in December, 1919, Mr. Gandhi recommended that an attempt should be made to work them. As much as anything, the House of Lords’ resolution justifying General Dyer swerved him aside, to his famous “Non-violent Non-co-operation.” A year later, in 1921, the Prince of Wales’ visit

“and the circumstances attending the ceremonials arranged, and public money wasted for the manufacture of a welcome to His Royal Highness, constituted an unbearable provocation.”*

The hope of those who suggested the visit was that the Prince might repeat the King-Emperor’s success when he came in 1911. But it was felt by both British and Indians to be a mistake, not least because the Duke of Connaught had come only the previous year. Further, India was in no mood for expensive rejoicing. Why should she have been?

The first step in Non-violent Non-co-operation was to be the resignation of honours and office, of every kind from the highest to the humblest, by Government servants. This, which is not illegal and is morally unexceptionable, had it been carried out would have paralysed the Administration. It failed, largely because Bengal, with lively memories of the Partition Boycott---and Non-co-operation, historically considered, is a development of this and of Mr. Gandhi’s organisation of passive resistance in South Africa---would not march the same way again. The second step in Non-violent Non-co-operation is bound to lead quickly to violence, and cannot be let pass by any Government. It is “Civil Disobedience,” the withholding of all taxes, the ignoring of all orders and regulations.

The United Indian Nation was to sit dharna on the threshold of the alien rule. But Tilak was against Non-co-operation and wished to contest a seat in the new Councils; C. R. Das, a brilliant lawyer who threw up his Calcutta practice to join the movement, was a Non-co-operator reluctantly and against his judgment. Rabindranath Tagore did more than any one else to wreck the movement in Bengal; and its failure in Bengal ensured its failure elsewhere, even though Das and Tilak were swept in by the force of public feeling. I was told at the time that Mr. C. R. Das, fighting an uphill battle, without his mind in the job, used to close each busy day with a full-dress commination of the poet, a fervent exposition of the text, “Gott strafe Tagore.”*] Mr. Gandhi and his lieutenants used entreaty. One of Mr. Gandhi’s planks was the use of the charka, or spinning-wheel, a point on which he was fanatical. He once managed to carry a preposterous resolution that every member of a Congress Committee, as a condition of keeping his membership, must spin two thousand yards of yarn (the singular, not the plural) a month.* The resolution was of course a dead letter. He pressed Tagore to use the charka for half an hour daily. “Why?” asked the poet. “For the sake of example.” “But if half an hour is any good, why not eight hours daily?” To another Non-cooperator, Tagore put the question, “Do you honestly believe that if every one in India used the charka for six months, we should get swaraj?” “I believe nothing more earnestly.” “Well, if I were told that by worshipping the feet of a panda” (priest attached to a shrine---not a highly respected profession, by any means) “I could get to Heaven, I might have no objection to worshipping the panda, but I should not care for a Heaven so obtained.” In other words, the Non-co-operation Movement was becoming a mess and mix-up of illogicality and hysteria, a resting all on mechanical means because the leaders had ceased to think. As Tagore had written to Andrews, from Paris, September 7, 1920:

“Let us forget the Punjab affairs---but never forget that we shall go on deserving such humiliation over and over again until we set our house in order. Do not mind the waves of the sea, but mind the leaks in your vessel. Politics in our country is extremely petty. It has a pair of legs, one of which has shrunk and shrivelled and become paralytic and therefore feebly waits for the other one to drag it on. There is no harmony between the two, and our politics, in its poppings and totterings and falls, is comic and undignified.”

The National Congress met at Amritsar, in 1919. Subscriptions were collected, and a memorial erected in Jallianwalabagh. Tilak died in 1920. The 1920 Congress met at Nagpur. For a time the Non-co-operators carried all before them. Old and eloquent leaders of the Congress, who dared to oppose Non-co-operation, such men as Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, were yelled down. The Moderates already met elsewhere, in a Liberal League (founded, 1918). The Congress became increasingly the home of violence, where the nominal leaders obeyed the howling voice of the mob. It would be tedious to follow its course through one undeviating opposition.

We may, however, note the end of the Khilafat agitation. In 1920, in August (of all months!), 18,000 Mohammedans moved into Afghanistan, determined to shake off the dust of the impious Raj. They were “animated in a high degree by religious enthusiasm.”* They

“were perfectly peaceful and orderly, on the best terms with the local officials, and displaying neither malice nor resentment against any man. As in the case of the Crusades, the individual suffering which was caused by this remarkable movement was very great.”*

The finish was wretched. After discouragement from the Afghan authorities, the pilgrims tried to get back.

“The road from Peshawar to Kabul was strewn with the graves of old men, women and children who had succumbed to the difficulties of the journey. The unhappy emigrants when they returned found themselves homeless and penniless, with their property in the hands of those to whom they had sold it for a tithe of its value.”*

There were other disappointments inside the Movement before the Young Turks themselves finally deposed the Khalif, and settled the Khilafat question once for all. The Mohammedans were left feeling more weak and humiliated than ever, the “shrunk and shrivelled and paralytic leg” of Indian politics.

It was not merely inside the Khilafat Movement that Mohammedans suffered discouragement. The stars everywhere were fighting against Islam. When the determined pull began to end the practical avoidance of the Congress by the Moslems, in 1916 the Lucknow Pact was drawn up, whereby the two great religious groups, the Hindus and the Mohammedans, arranged the proportion of Government jobs and of seats on every sort of public body, that should go to each. The Pact has never been popular; Mohammedans think they should have got more and that their own right hands would get them more, if restraint were away, Hindus think they got too much. It has haunted Indian politics for a dozen years, and is now finally dead, since Mohammedans have repudiated it. But it made a beginning of some sort of unity, and prepared the way for the Hindu acceptance of the Khilafat program.

It made only a beginning, however. In August, 1921, a check came with the Moplah Rebellion, which led to the only internal operations worthy of being dignified with the name of a war, since the Mutiny. The Moplahs are about a million, mixed Arabs and Indians, residing in the Malabar districts of the Madras Presidency. They are fanatical Mohammedans, poor, illiterate, and liable to religious frenzies when they are inspired “with the simple desire to win the Martyr’s crown after killing as many non-Muslims as possible.”* I suppose no one doubts, who has spent any time considering the facts and their place in time, that the Khilafat Agitation was the direct cause of the outbreak. Mrs. Annie Besant, having visited the camps crowded with Hindu refugees, wrote:

“Mr. Gandhi may talk as he pleases about non-co-operators accepting no responsibility. It is not what they accept; it is what facts demonstrate . . . The slaughter of Malabar cries out his responsibility. Mr. Gandhi asks the Moderates to compel the Government to suspend hostilities, that is, to let loose the wolves to destroy what lives are left. The sympathy of the Moderates is not, I make bold to say, with the murderers, the looters, the ravishers, who have put into practice the teaching of paralysing the Government. . . . The misery is beyond description: girl wives, with eyes half-blind with weeping, distraught with terror; women who have seen their husbands hacked to pieces before their eyes, in the way ‘Moplahs consider as religious.’”

It is one of the puzzles of Mr. Gandhi’s personality, that he who has expressed (often in language that sounds extravagant) contrition and sense of responsibility for so much lesser disorder, for riots in Madras in which a few lives went down, should have from first to last remained so apparently unmoved by this ghastly episode, of massacres, of choice offered to Hindus between being beheaded and converted, of temples desecrated, women raped, villages burnt and plundered. Anxious to keep the Hindu-Mohammedan entente intact, and moved by the spectacle of an ignorant folk blindly driven forward by enthusiasm, though the end must be their ruin, he spoke of

“the brave God-fearing Moplahs, fighting for what they consider as religion, and in a manner which they consider as religious.”

He was rapidly moving downward to the lowest depth of influence and prestige he has ever reached. The Government presently temporarily tided him over the imminence of utter eclipse, by sending him to prison. He emerged still under a political cloud, and his recent decisive recovery is one of the most striking and unpredictable events of our time.

The Hindu populace, terrified and indignant, found their sentiments better expressed by the leader who said grimly that he did not mind the prospect of being beheaded so much as that of being forcibly circumcised. The Moplahs, having proclaimed a Khilafat Rule and two Khilafat independent kingdoms, were finally shot down and endured the sequence of court-martials and executions that were the last, wretched mutterings of the War-madness in so many countries. The Government, which had been moderate and patient with the Non-co-operators and the Khilafat agitators, lost ground by the brutal stupidity whereby seventy Moplah prisoners, shut in airless railway vans, without water, were asphyxiated. This was an exactly similar atrocity to the famous “Black Hole” of 1756, and, like that, unintended. The Khilafat Movement disappeared as a serious political factor; but remained as sullenness and disillusion and resentment.

The constructive part of Mr. Gandhi’s program failed---his insistence on the abandonment of “untouchability” and on raising the masses, his industrial plans, his national schools. The destructive did magnificently; school and college boys went on strike, often and on trivial cause, they lay down to bar their Principals from their offices, rolled against them as they delicately picked their way where they could, and the Nationalist papers next day published startling tales of how this or that “missionary Principal” had “brutally kicked and trampled on his students.” Bonfires of foreign cloth blazed merrily. In November, 1921, when the Prince of Wales landed, Bombay celebrated the event with rioting costing hundreds of casualties; in February 1922, at Chauri-Chaura, a mob murdered over twenty policemen and burned their bodies with kerosene. Mr. Gandhi fasted in token of regret.

India had been drenched with blood. I have passed over minor disturbances; and passed over, too, the Akali agitation in the Punjab. The Government, having to protect property, had to take sides against the Akalis, the “Immortals,” who represented the Reformed Sikhs, followers in politics of Mr. Gandhi. These had much right in their contentions. But they declined the mediation of Government, and proceeded to take strictly non-violent possession of temples in the occupation of conservative Sikhs, men often neither religious nor genuinely Sikh. In February, 1921, the armed servants of the abbot of the Nankana Sahib shrine butchered 130 Akalis. A year later, Mr. Gandhi was arrested. His followers were angry and disillusioned, many of his associates were furious, most of all over the Moplah Rebellion, which had caused the Hindu community such suffering and had seemed to be taken so lightly by him. His arrest, and the fact that he had called off Civil Disobedience, bring Mr. C. F. Andrews to these findings:

“While Mahatma Gandhi himself rose high to meet a great occasion, the same could not be said of the British Administration in India. For it seized this exact moment, when the Movement was in confusion, for striking a blow at the leader. From a worldly point of view, it was a diplomatic stroke, but it had no chivalry in it.”*

This is an opinion Mr. Andrews often repeats. I do not follow the reasoning. It seems to me filleted sentimentalism.

By sending Mr. Gandhi to jail, Government did several things not on any official agenda. It saved his life, rescuing him from admirers, who thronged railway stations when he travelled, and insisted on darshan* whatever the hour. It gave him a halo, just when he badly needed one, and put him temporarily away just when his mistakes needed a good deal of forgetting. It showed the outside world that queer good humour which commonly lightens British administration. Indians and Americans were not slow to make the comparison with the New Testament trial. The British judge and prosecutors showed a courtesy and kindly respectfulness unparalleled in trials of any kind, I think. Before sentencing the illustrious accused to six years’ simple imprisonment, the Judge said:

“There are probably few people in India who do not sincerely regret that you have made it impossible for any Government to leave you at liberty.”

Against the Judge’s admission:

“I do not forget that you have consistently preached against violence and that you have on many occasions, as I am willing to believe, done much to prevent violence,”

we may remember Mr. Gandhi’s own almost broken-hearted words:

“I wish to endorse all the blame that the Advocate General has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the Bombay occurrences, the Madras occurrences and the Chauri Chaura occurrences. Thinking over these things deeply, and sleeping over them night after night and examining my heart, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible for me to dissociate myself from the diabolical crimes of Chauri Chaura or the mad outrages of Bombay. He is quite right when he says that as a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, having had a fair share of experience of this world, I should know the consequences of every one of my acts. I knew them. I knew that I was playing with fire. I ran the risk and if I was set free I would still do the same. I would be failing in my duty if I did not do so. I have felt it this morning that I should have failed in my duty if I did not say all that I have said here just now. I wanted to avoid violence; I want to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith. But I had to make my choice; I had either to submit to a system which I consider has done irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad; I am deeply sorry for it; and I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here therefore to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.”

Mr. Gandhi’s sentence was received with calm, though an outburst had been feared. His own people, in the extraordinary quietness that enveloped India during this astounding episode---an episode so unusual in the high quality of human “decency” which surrounded it, and made it, when there was so much to cause conflagration, a revelation of the honesty and fairness of the best men on both sides---saw that Government had no choice but to prosecute. The Indian political leaders had many reasons for being glad that now public activity could go on, unhampered by a saint’s guidance. The British community experienced a genuine change (I will not say of heart, but) of attitude. They had always respected Mr. Gandhi, however much he exasperated them, and now they saw, in the dramatic (it was this, without passing into the further phase, when we condemn the striking by calling it theatrical) minutes of that trial, the man’s queer, ironical, entirely honourable, magnificently unworldly and courageous spirit. How much more we saw I cannot say. Some of us may have begun to see that he challenged not so much the British dominion as a thing we ourselves longed to dare to challenge, the whole modern world, that has mechanised and arrested experience. His quarrel with us was a deeper and wider thing than we had thought. From this trial I date---and it came with startling suddenness, once it had fairly begun---the change of mood which has carried us so far from the post-Amritsar mood.

The Judge, sentencing Mr. Gandhi, added that no one would be more gratified than he, if circumstances made it possible for Government to shorten the term of imprisonment. Circumstances did make it possible. In jail occurred the moving incident of his operation for appendicitis (January 12, 1924). Mr. Gandhi was hurried by motor to the Sassoon Hospital, at Poona. The Governor of the jail had offered to let Mr. Gandhi have in his own ayurvedic physicians or any surgeon he chose. Not to be outdone in courtesy, Mr. Gandhi left himself in official hands. The surgeon took with him a special electric torch, which fused halfway through the operation; the nurse held a hurricane lantern while the work was finished.

Mr. Gandhi himself, referring to Miss Mayo’s sneering story of the episode, speaks of it as “a sacred” experience, creditable to his jailers “and, I trust, to myself.” It was all that he claims for it. Had the eminent patient died, we can imagine what would have been assumed in India. Mr. Gandhi expressed his deep sense of indebtedness to the surgeon’s skill and kindness afterwards, and to the prison authorities’ consideration for him. On February 5, he was unconditionally released, that his health might recover.

Meanwhile, the Reforms had been in a bad way. With the abstention of the Non-co-operation party, a large element of political India, influential, experienced, and educated, were outside the Councils. Many of the electors were of a poor grade of intelligence. Since they could not read, colours sometimes had to be put above polling-boxes; and, if there were more than five candidates, then figures of animals, horses and snakes, had to eke out the colours, since many rural voters could not count beyond five. The new Ministers of the Crown found dyarchy a cumbrous tool. The transference was not on entirely logical lines. Agriculture was transferred, but not irrigation, on which all Indian agriculture depends. The reason for this was a good one. Government has vast schemes of barrage and reservoir-making in progress.

But the reservation, however natural, was unfortunate. Law and order were reserved. So was finance; Ministers often found themselves helpless, a humiliating condition in which to have to face a Legislature that was hostile and had no duties but the pleasant ones of obstruction and jeering. They could draw up schemes, but had to ask the nominated Ministers, members of the permanent Administration, for money.

I have set out the usual charges against dyarchy. But I do not think so badly of it as most have persuaded themselves they do. In retrospect, it shows as an honest attempt to prepare India for a smooth passage to entire self-government. I cannot think of any better scheme that could have been devised. It failed, as the whole political effort of the last decade has failed, for psychological causes. It began amid the angers aroused by Amritsar and Turkey’s collapse. It has ended amid the resentment stirred by Mother India and the absence of Indians from the Simon Commission.

In 1923, many in the Nationalist camp wished to work the Reforms. Non-co-operation had failed. The Khilafat agitation had made fools of Moslems. There seemed a chance that the Liberals would succeed with dyarchy, in spite of the Non-co-operators, who would be stranded, a mere protest spilt by the side of India’s progress. Mr. C. R. Das, after some defeats, succeeded at a special Congress at Delhi, September, 1923, in obtaining a reversal of the old decision not to enter the Councils. It was now that the convenience of having Mr. Gandhi in jail was realised. Mr. Mohammad Ali, one of the two famous Ali Brothers (Shaukat being the other) who had worked the Hindu-Moslem entente with Mr. Gandhi and had accompanied him and with him conceded darshan on railway stations, during this Congress announced that he had received a telepathic message from the absent Leader, approving of the new policy of entry. This incident, too, may help us to understand the equanimity with which the Swaraj Party took Mr. Gandhi’s temporary removal from their midst.

However, though decision to enter the Councils was obtained, it was only in order to wreck the Reforms from within. Mr. Das would have preferred another course, but was not strong enough to secure so complete a reversal. The record of this period is distressing to contemplate; it was now that the poverty of both sides in constructive statesmanship was laid bare. Mr. Das and many of his colleagues without doubt would have worked the Reforms, if in some way they could have saved face. Government, drastically overhauling expenditure to save Indian finances from disaster, took a way equally childish and contemptible. The simplest fashion of raising a deficit which remained after all retrenchment was by doubling the Salt Tax. Since Government makes the salt and hands it over to the retailers, this is an easy manner of raising revenue, involving no expense of agency. In 1922, the Legislative Assembly rejected the proposal. Next year, Government, not daring to handle the problem honestly but seeking only the way of least resistance, which seemed to be not the imposition of new but the enhancement of already existing taxation, put the demand up again. A non-official majority in the Upper Chamber, the Council of State, passed it, but the Legislative Assembly rejected it by 59 votes to 44. It was then passed over the head of the latter, by the Viceroy’s power of “certification.”

It is hard to characterise the folly of this procedure adequately. The power of certification, like a final authority’s power of veto anywhere, was meant for use in a grave emergency. Its use now gave colour to the Extremists’ allegations that the Reforms were a sham, it set up a psychological grievance that has persisted long past the expiry of the enhancement (which was for one year only, until March, 1924), it made the reasonable party among the Non-co-operators afraid to come forward in response to any gesture of conciliation, it profoundly discouraged the Indian Liberals who had tried amid an atmosphere of anger and contempt to work the Constitution. The enhancement of the Salt Tax---in America rarely mentioned without the adjective “iniquitous,” as much a part of the phrase as “Admirable” is of “the Admirable Crichton”---has been a fruitful theme of countless discussion. In all the articles I have read, the latest being Mr. C. F. Andrews’ in the New York Times Magazine, April 6, I have seen no mention of the fact that the enhancement was for one twelvemonth only. For this trivial result, the gain of a double tax during one year, Lord Reading chose to expose the whole fabric of Indian administration to a misrepresentation that will probably never finish, to strengthen the forces of irreconcilability, to discredit the new system of government in a considerable degree by the people, and to make the task of the friends of an ordered transition almost impossible. The reader, if he thinks this judgment over-severe, may ask any British official to tell him privately what he thinks of Lord Reading’s certification of the doubled Salt Tax. If in the pages which follow I say nothing of the chicken-hearted timidity of Indian Liberalism, which makes its exponents count so slightly in proportion to their numbers, it is because I cannot help remembering how little the Government has done to lead any one to suppose that it was even aware that it had any friends, or cared what happened to them.

Chapter XIII

The Parting of the Ways

From now on, Indian politics become to the outside observer confusion. Or, rather, they would do, if it were not for the newspapers, which kindly simplify them into a duel between the National Congress and the British Government, or between the latter and Mr. Gandhi---a battle between Light and Darkness. But I am assuming an intelligent reader, who has managed to bring himself thus far, and would like a fuller perspective. Note, then, that out of the resolve of Moderates to co-operate in working the Reforms arose the Liberal Party, who have recently held their tenth annual meeting. With this the Justice Party, which is that of the non-Brahman majority of the Madras Presidency, shows a tendency to merge. The Nationalists have to be divided into Swarajists and Independents; and even among themselves there is seen the increasing severance of Extremist and Moderate. In the 1924 Central Parliament appeared not only Swarajists and a few Liberals, but a section of Independents, considerable in numbers and more than considerable in influence. These divisions are now more than ever important, since the Congress, having increasingly become a home of only extremism, has rejected a Round Table Conference (after being the first to suggest it, and having clamoured for it for four years) and declared for out-and-out independence.

Even more important than the political parties are the religious ones. The Muslim League is stronger than ever, and less in touch with the Congress. The Hindu Mahasabha, or Great Assembly, cares for the sectional interests of the Hindu community. There is a Sikh League. Even the Depressed Classes, distrusting the willingness of any Hindu organisation to do anything for them, are grouping together. One of their latest demands is to have members sent to Sandhurst. In pathetically beautiful English they state their case:

“In the British regime we have been systematically deprived of all these avenues of ambitious careers, leaving the Mahars and other untouchables without any scope to make their life worth living. Instead of getting an uplift, we are daily being pushed down in all walks of life, though the diplomatic Red Tape Trumpets of Government are louder than before in blasting the sonorous gospel of Equal Treatment and just political advancement. . . .

“To pull down the Shanwar Palace---the last strong citadel of Brahmanical Hierarchy in the Deccan, the British Government, finding all the Tommy regiments entirely useless and helpless, called on the Mahar regiments to do the needful. To be true to the salt the Mahars loyally got what the Tommies could not. . . .

“The present policy of the Government refuses us the benefits of Sandhurst Training College. Why? The Commission should please investigate, if they choose. We only point out where the shoe is pinching us.”

The Swarajists entered the 1923 autumn elections, at which many Liberals were eliminated. The Non-co-operation Party now embarked on a mixed career, partly farce, partly useful co-operation in spite of themselves. In Bengal and the Central Provinces they had a majority, and were able to defeat all taxation proposals, and to carry resolutions reducing Ministers’ salaries to Rs.2 a year (64 cents). Dyarchy came to an end temporarily in these Provinces; Government resumed the transferred portfolios. In the Central Government, the Swarajists showed a more statesmanlike attitude. It is true that they opposed, but they increasingly tended to treat suggestions on their merits, they often consented to serve on committees. There was much good temper in the proceedings. Officials were tactful, the representatives of the non-official European community from the beginning “played the game,” as one knew they would do; and, as in the House of Commons so here, outside all debate and clashing a friendly atmosphere, kept away bad feeling. Even in the Assembly, opposition often collapsed in hilarity.

Unfortunately, where it was worked Dyarchy proved a source of severance. Ministers had to be chosen (necessarily) not from the best and ablest men, but from the best and ablest of those willing to co-operate. They were embittered at their isolation and lack of financial power. The system (as we can see now) could not last. The old quarrels between Hindus and Mohammedans steadily increased in ferocity. As always, and now especially, these quarrels were exacerbated most of all by the question of the respective rights in “spoils,” in official jobs of every kind. Unless this particular source of wrath can be controlled, canalised, or somehow brought where it can be kept fairly circumscribed in its power of devastation, Dominion Status (still more, Independence) will be hailed not with patriotic and thankful anthems but with the snarls and howls of beasts of prey about to contend for an exceedingly limited amount of flesh. If the truth behind the scenes could be made known, we should get a laughable story.

Mr. Gandhi seemed submerged, and no one a year ago would have predicted his “come-back.” The temporary divisions of his party, into Nationalists, Swarajists, and Independents, their pacts and reshufflings, need not occupy us. The Independents survive to be of importance. How shifting and absurd political action had become was shown by the Congress, meeting at Gauhati, December, 1926. It passed a Resolution re-affirming its general policy, that forbade all members to accept any Ministries or posts from Government, and ordered them to prevent the formation of ministries by any other party. In May, 1927, an explanation was demanded from the Congressmen in the Madras Council, who had quietly ignored the latter part of the Resolution. The explanation given (and approved, for reasons too quaint to win easy credence) was that if the Madras Ministry were thrown out the Justice Party---who represent the non-Brahmans of South India---would form a Ministry. The Brahmans would be submerged.

In 1927, two events of the first magnitude in the political world happened. First, the Simon Commission was appointed. The explanation of its composition since given is that it was meant not to decide or judge, but merely to advise the House of Commons, and therefore was a solely British and solely parliamentary body. But this was not the impression made at the time. It is now widely admitted that the appointment of the Commission was surrounded by tactlessness. For example, leading Indians were invited to Simla by the Viceroy; they hurried there, dropping every other business, confident that they were to be consulted, about the Commission every one was expecting, and were probably to be offered places on it. The good kind Government looked benevolently at these expectant children, and then announced that it had a piece of interesting news---that seven English gentlemen were coming out to have a look round India, and then to give advice as to what should be done about India.

For the next twelve months, India gave itself up to Hymns of Hate. Municipal boards, instead of discussing roads, sent scathing telegrams to the Simon Commission, announcing their decision not to cooperate. “Simple Simon” and his colleagues had their trains derailed, and their deeds abused. Sir John Simon did everything a man could to remove misunderstanding and humiliation. “He is not Sir John Simon, he is Sir John Siren,” said a half-admiring Swarajist. He has done service, and if a peaceful settlement results will have had a share in making it possible, despite his Commission’s long and almost intolerable procrastination. In a Letter (dated February 6, 1928) to the Viceroy, he asked for a “Joint Free Conference,” consisting of the seven British Commissioners and a corresponding number chosen by the Indian Legislatures, “just as we ourselves have been chosen by the British Parliament.” The two groups should draw up their own Reports, to forward to the Parliaments that had appointed them. He reminded the public that there were

“well-known constitutional means by which documents emanating from a joint committee and presented to the Central Legislature can be forwarded to and made available to the British Parliament. But if the Indian Joint Committee would prefer it, we would make its report an annex to our own documents, so that both might be presented to the King-Emperor and made public at the same moment.”

The Indian Joint Committee have preferred another course. Their Report was “Presented by the Secretary of State for India to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, December, 1929,” and will be referred to as the Nair Report.*It has antedated the Simon Report.

Despite Sir John Simon’s conciliatory proposal, the Legislative Assembly,* on February 18, informed His Majesty’s Government, by means of the Governor- General-in-Council, that “this House will have nothing to do with the Commission at any stage and in any form.” Four days later, however, the Council of State took an opposite decision, as subsequently did all the Provincial Councils but one, that for the Central Provinces. An Indian Commission was formed, as we have seen, with Sir Sankaran Nair as Head. Their labours entailed courage and patriotism, as the spirit of boycott was powerful, and in some places extended even to social matters. But the Moslems and the Liberals, and other important organisations, refused to join in the boycott. Also---and it is important to remember this---many of the Swarajists, however belligerent in public, privately were willing to put their views forth in discussion with individual members of the Commission. It will be a mistake to assume that the Report has left out of account the Swarajist view.

The other event of 1927 was the publication of Mother India. That book’s indictment had often been made before, and the storm took many of us by surprise. During the autumn of 1927 and the first half of 1928, the Psalmist, had he been in India, would not have needed to put his famous question, as to why the heathen were raging. The fury was, and is, almost beyond acceptance as true. There were other reasons than the book’s scorn and lecturing tone---which were of a peculiarly maddening quality. First, there was the now notorious review in the New Statesman. Next, there was the title, Mother India. India is sensitive on this point. The Englishman may as well understand that he is a hardened and unfeeling creature. He hangs his murderers, even if they are men who have done away with sweethearts or wives. He does not recognise “the crime of passion” as a category apart, nor has he grades and degrees of murder. An American lady has recently been complaining to me that in her country, whenever a woman takes to bank-raiding or revolver-handling and gets caught, the papers immediately discover that “a mother” is being put to suffering. But India had the mother complex long ago. The wife (under a less impious regime) ought to die with her husband, as well as serve him in life; the sister has a special day when she makes gifts to her brother, and goes through various touching ceremonies of homage. But the mother* is far more than wife or sister can ever be. Readers of Saratchandra Chatterji’s fine novel, Srikanta, must have been struck by the change of tone of the hero when he learns that the prostitute is a mother. He turns to reverence at once, and in a very beautiful fashion. I do not believe in the gulf so often alleged to exist between East and West. I believe that human nature is very like human nature everywhere else. During twenty years I have worked on the belief that Indians are very like myself, and feel very much as I do. I am aware now, as I once was not, of differences. But it is a good working creed, and will be mine till the end. Yet---there is a genuine gap, even a gulf, here and there, and most of all in the quality and kind of passion where the family is concerned.

Indians tend to think that the English are without family affection, because they see brothers without any fuss working separated by half a hemisphere or more, because they see wives and husbands enduring life apart. They know nothing whatever about it. But that is neither here nor there. I wonder, though, if a great deal that seems ineradicable quality in a race is not merely induced by custom. We hear about the invincible strength of instinct. It is not true. Instinct can be so trained and controlled that it does not even whisper, far less issue mandate. Shelley (I think it is) somewhere says that, if we judged by the animal world, we should say that marriage of brothers and sisters was natural, as indeed in certain royal clans of the ancient world was enjoined. Yet not to one person in a million does the slightest temptation that way ever arise. This is a digression. All I mean to say is, I believe that in twenty years’ time there will be far less difference between Indian and European ways of thinking about family relationship than there is now.

Mother India was a brutal title. Uncle Sham, the most effective reply so far as titles goes, is good. But it is not Mother India.

Indians particularly felt it that their civilisation was held up to contempt in America. The hard-worked official, the man whose experience has been to have every action, whatever it was, abused---knowing that, if he had done the opposite, he would have been abused just the same---was not cynical, he was merely human, when respite and rescue came from America. Indians in the United States have found a ready audience for their sorrowful stories. The British in India have suffered much from American critics. It seemed almost too good to be true, that this exhilarating spectacle, of Satan casting out Satan, was actually being staged on this platform of Time, for tired men to be uplifted thereby. It was like the vision of the Harvest Moon---beneficent, cooling, calm---rising for weary reapers. There can be no question that Mother India brought more sympathy for the Indian Government, and more understanding of the job the Administration has to do, than any other fifty books ever written. Also, though a bad book, it comes very close to being a good one, and in some ways a great one. I criticised it unsparingly when it came out; but, though my first judgment remains, I hold it with increasing compunction. As an Indian Extremist, excessively popular on American platforms, observed to me in a burst of sudden confidence: “You know, if it weren’t for her tone, in many respects Miss Mayo is monumentally right.” So she is. Never before, within the covers of one book have such rigidly documented truth and such recklessly accepted hearsay been put out in such confusing contiguity.

What I resented most in the book was what I felt to be its aim. I was angry that Miss Mayo should have interwoven a political thesis with her indictment. I am in favour of as ruthless an examination of Indian ideas and Indian customs as we apply to our own ideas and customs. But I would have this done, not to show how incapable of self-government Indians are, and always will be---the conclusion irresistibly suggested, in this kind of book, if not clearly stated---but to persuade Indians that they have become obsolete without realising it, and might as well catch up with the modern world (better late than never) and give their qualities a chance. Miss Mayo, I believe, has denied that there are political implications in her book. But they are all over it. If she did not mean to convince the world that Indians were incorrigibly inept, what did she mean?

It was generally believed that the Indian Government, diabolically ingenious, had suborned Miss Mayo to do the book. Question after question stating that this was so, hinting that this was so, asking if this was so, was put to the Government. The belief arose from two things, I fancy. First, Mr. Lionel Curtis, popularly held to be the author of Dyarchy, had written the Introduction to the English edition of her book on the Philippines, The Isles of Fear. Secondly, Miss Mayo’s own assertion that her “living facts of India today” would no doubt be “denied,” but could not be “disproved or shaken,”* made readers think that in her background lurked the cunning scribes of the India Office, who had “vetted” her book. Miss Mayo’s own denial and the Indian Government’s denial, singly or together, dispose once for all of the suspicion. Her book, whatever its faults, was a perfectly straight and honest piece of work.

Nevertheless, it poisoned the political atmosphere to a terrible extent. If any British official did rejoice at this sudden auxiliary, he must have cursed it since---as, I have suggested, happened with the event of Jallianwalabagh. I wish Indians would now look back on the episode, and laugh at it. They made fools of themselves over it, as we have often made fools of ourselves over some excitement. They should now summon their abundant sense of humour, and see how absurd the whole episode was.

If I have seemed flippant in places, it is because I am determined to keep my sanity over this Indian business. I am not going to mix up Indian sentiment with Indian suffering, or be swayed by Indian mob-psychology any more than I will be swayed by the mob-psychology of my own folk. The time has come to look back on the whole Mother India episode, with thankfulness to whatever powers there be, that from time to time they permit a Nation---all of it, not an insignificant section---to perform for the benefit of the rest of drudging, troubled mankind. India has done “her turn,” and done it splendidly. Like a man who has performed jury service, she may now hold herself exempt for a while. Very likely, my own country or the United States is billed to give the next Exhibition. India can then watch and feel better.

In 1927, Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, moving in the House of Lords the appointment of the Simon Commission, took up the Round Table Conference suggestion that had become a regular part of the Congress program. He admitted that the suggestion had “been seriously made by men who are entitled that their observations be seriously accepted.”

He went on to say:

“I have twice in three years during which I have been Secretary of State invited our critics in India to put forward their suggestions for a Constitution, to indicate to us the form which in their judgment any reform of the Constitution should take. That offer is still open.”

He had elsewhere issued a challenge---at least, it was so taken---to Indian politicians to produce “an agreed scheme.” Accordingly, “An All Parties’ Conference” was held in Delhi. One of the Moderates, afterwards on the Sankaran Nair Commission, was a mover in this action. It became at once apparent that the Conference could do nothing but repeat the unfortunate Lucknow Pact of 1916; that is, draw up a scheme, satisfactory to no one, for division of jobs and seats. This

“might result in a semblance of agreement, but would sow the dragon’s teeth from which the only harvest possible is the clash of arms, which would before long reduce an organised state to chaos.”*

“But the Conference were faced with a situation from which there could be no retreat. They had challenged the Government to convene a round table conference; the Government had adroitly turned the tables upon them and challenged them to try one for themselves. They had tried but they could not afford to fail. The challenge was to produce an ‘agreed scheme’; that challenge could not be met otherwise than by the production of an agreed scheme. In the exuberance of passion reason has no place. In the conflict of interests reflection has no duty.”

Consequently,

“Rights were created, expectations aroused and assumptions made without advertence to the realities of the situation or their effect upon the entire body politic of India. However, whatever may be the consequence, both the laws of honour and chivalry demanded that the gauntlet thrown down must be taken up, and, whatever the consequence, the honour of India must be maintained by the production of an agreed scheme.”

“The elephant of Hindu majority and the tiger of Moslem minority” had been brought “to the brink of a common pool.” The Congress therefore appointed a Committee, under the chairmanship of the veteran Motilal Nehru. This Committee, appointed on May 19, 1928, in a little under three months* drew up a complete and complex Constitution for India. It was published, August 12.

The Nehru Report has had a bad time. The British Imperialist finds it doctrinaire and flawed by lack of practical experience. This criticism does not seem to me of importance. It was bound to suffer in the ways indicated, and we must take to ourselves the blame, having kept people out of positions where they would be trained in administration, if their notions of administration are those of the schoolmaster rather than of the ruler. What does seem to me to matter is the way the Report is fissured with disagreement. This is not the inevitable divergences of opinion, it is flat contradiction followed up by contemptuous rejection. It would be tedious to note all of these; pp. 22-5 of the Report frankly show the Committee’s enormous difficulties, as first this League and then that one refused to tolerate this or that proposal. A Supplementary Report was drawn up, which is still less good-tempered. The Nehru Report did not---and, I hold, could not---take the statesmanlike view which alone can bring peace to India. It was in essentials mainly the old wretched battle between Hindus and Moslems for division of seats and jobs.

The Alignment of Parties

The Report was flung out decisively, December 31, 1928, by the All India Moslem Conference. This Conference carried a series of resolutions, belligerently framed with a brevity that makes them sound like a series of rifle shots. The questions over which the Nehru Report havers and bargains---such as the proposed separation of Sind from Bombay, the giving of at least a beginning of self-government to the North-West Frontier Province---all these are settled with ultimatum-like directness. Among the more interesting items in these uncompromising resolutions are the demand for a federal constitution, the statement that a separate electorate of Moslems is “essential in order to bring into existence a really representative democratic government,” and the insistence that “Moslems should have their due share in the Central and Provincial Cabinets” and that

“Moslems should be ensured their majority in the provinces in which the Moslem population is in the majority, and that in the other provinces their representation should continue as now existing.”

H.H. the Aga Khan, in his presidential address, brought out the clear, rigid backbone of Moslem agreement; that

1. it is impossible for Moslems to live happily and peacefully in India if friction and suspicion are to prevail between them and the Hindus;
2. there can be no prosperity and self-government for India so long as Moslems are in doubt as to the safety of their cultural entity;
3. so long as India is dependent on England for protection the latter must continue to claim a dominant share and voice in the Government of India.

Let it be noted, first, that so far no progress whatever has been made in persuading Moslems to set patriotism before religion; second, that resolutions phrased in this unambiguous fashion have behind them, besides conviction, a certain mood of exasperation and despair. The ultimatum comes when argument has failed to bring about a settlement, and the parties align themselves. This is what the last eighteen---hardly more than twelve---months have brought about in India. The situation has been untangling itself; from an apparent and temporary unification separate and disparate elements have been emerging. This Moslem Delhi Conference must be considered in relation to the National Congress, to which it made a direct reply and challenge. The Congress, meeting at Calcutta with the elaborate pageantry of royalty---Pandit Motilal Nehru, the President, rode in a carriage drawn by thirty-four white horses, bestridden by youths---, had given Government exactly one calendar year in which to grant Dominion Status on the basis of the Nehru Constitution, which was so scarred with disagreement and was totally unacceptable to any but the extreme political wing of the Hindu community. The Bengali Extremist, Mr. Subashchandra Bose, moved an amendment establishing Independence, which was lost by 1,350 votes to 973. A resolution was passed on Lala Lajpat Rai, the veteran Hindu Punjabi politician, who had died some months previously of heart failure. His death was alleged to have been

“accelerated by the injuries received at the hands of the police of Lahore, when leading the boycott procession on the arrival of the Simon Commission.”

He had been pushed back roughly; but, since he had gone on with a strenuous round of speaking and working, it may be claimed that he was at least part-author of his own death. Mr. Saunders, a boy of twenty-one, had been in charge of the police in the vicinity of where Mr. Rai was; for his supposed responsibility he was murdered just before the Congress met, a murder of exceptional cruelty and cynicism.

Two facts were outstanding in this Calcutta Congress. The first was Mr. Gandhi’s return to power. The second was his failing physical strength. The Congress ended in the victory of the young men who desired revolution. The Sons of Zeruiah proved too hard for him. He fought for a space of two years’ delay, instead of one, arguing that one year was insufficient for the purpose of educating and uniting their own people. “Our Congress roll today,” he said (December 28, 1928),

“is nothing but a bogus affair. Let us face facts. It is worth nothing. We want a living register of the Congress.”

He urged his hearers to dismiss from their minds “the bogey of Independence versus Dominion Status”;* there was no essential difference between them. But the young men, the out-and-out zealots for a complete and unqualified break, such men as Subashchandra Bose, Srinivasa Iyengar, and J. M. Sen Gupta, beat him. In the end, he had to command Government to come to heel in twelve months instead of in twenty-four. But he uttered the complaint and warning that

“Our National life . . . is a struggle not only against environments that seek to crush us, but it is also a struggle within our own ranks, and often a struggle within our ranks more bitter than the struggle with the environment which is outside of ourselves.”

Having ordered Government to accept what they could not persuade their own communities to accept, the Congress stood aside from all attempts to contribute to a settlement, and continues to stand aside. The alignment of political India proceeded apace. The Sikhs were resentful both of the measures of the Nehru Constitution and the tone the Report took to their demands. The Justice Party, representing the Non-Brahman majority of the Madras Presidency; the Indian Christians; the Liberal Party, whose most prominent members in February accepted Sir John Simon’s invitation to form an Indian Commission to work with the British Parliamentary one---all these now stood aside, under their own flags. Since the Moslem community had done the same, it remained only for the Princes to complete the alignment of India. This they did, a year later, when it was unanimously carried in the Chamber of Princes (February 13, 1929), that

“while adhering to their policy of non-intervention in the affairs of British India, and repeating their assurance of sympathy with its continued political progress, the Princes and Chiefs composing this Chamber, in view of the recent pronouncement of a section of British Indian politicians indicative of a drift towards complete independence, desire to place on record that in the light of the mutual obligations arising from their treaties and engagements with the British Crown they cannot assent to any proposals having for their object the adjustment of equitable relations between the States and British India, unless such proposals proceed upon the initial basis of the British Connexion.”

Mr. Gandhi, overwhelmingly a certainty for the Congress Presidency in 1929, had stood down in favour of Jawaharlal Nehru (son of Motilal Nehru), a politician educated at Harrow. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru arrived from Russia in the autumn of 1928, with excessively advanced views. In his presidential address to the Congress in Lahore, December 29, 1929, he replied to the Princes, whom he called “puppets,” relics of a bygone age, many of them without a single redeeming feature, “the product of a vicious system which would ultimately have to go.”*

When Political India had been sectioned off, it remained to wait, each grouping puzzled as to what the others might do. The important events of late 1929 were two, the first inflammatory, the second conciliatory. In the early autumn Jatindranath Das, one of the young men arrested in connection with the murder of Mr. Saunders, died hunger-striking. His body was passed from station to station, from Lahore to Calcutta, the subject of enthusiastic demonstration. At the burning there was an attendance second only to that which had come to the obsequies of Mr. C. R. Das. On October 31, while every one was wondering what would happen, with the “year of grace” given by the Congress for unconditional acceptance or rejection of their Constitution drawing to a close, the Viceroy, in agreement with Mr. Wedgwood Benn, Secretary of State for India, announced that the definite aim of the Government was “Dominion Status” and that a Round Table Conference would be held, at which the Government, the Princes, and the people of British India would meet.

This act deserves a minute of dispassionate notice. In the first place, it was generous, as the strong can afford to be, but rarely are. There was no standing upon dignity in face of “a dare,” no attempt to push the Congress into the difficulty of its own extreme and very unjustified demand. It gave the Congress a chance to save “face,” and, if it so chose, to say that it had frightened the Government into yielding: that the essence of its demand had been granted, and it could therefore in the interests of India waive the minor matter of time and concede a space wide enough for full discussion of the whole complex field of Indian affairs. It made clear, in the most unmistakable fashion, what had been known before but in a far less public manner, that the goal was the same position as that held by the great self-governing Colonies. It announced what the Congress had clamoured for during several years, a Round Table discussion, the only way out of the difficulties of today.

The Simon Commission, still on their task---an immense one, and one not likely to be simplified by lawyerlike scrutiny of details (while the passage of time accumulated yet more details, and shifted the Indian kaleidoscope again and yet again)---showed signs of annoyance, not unnatural though altogether unreasonable. The Imperialist school of retired Indian Civilians and their allies were stirred to wrath. Both these manifestations were unnecessary. The Viceroy announced no change of policy; whatever conclusions the Simon Commission came to, that of Dominion Status as the goal of India antedated their labours and is independent of them, though it inexorably conditions them. The Commission, indeed, might well feel---and in the next two months were to obtain further cause for feeling---that they had become obsolete while extant, not because policy had changed but because events had marched while they delayed. The temptation, as 1929 finished, was to feel that it did not greatly matter what the Commission reported. I confess to feeling myself that it was only of secondary importance now. But this was not because Lord Irwin used the words “Dominion Status.”

The effect of the Viceroy’s words was to give hope to all who desired a peaceful settlement. The Liberals and Moslems welcomed it. The Princes spoke through the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, internationally immortal for his cricket exploits:

“Lord Irwin’s statement deserves the support of all India, and the Princes will not fail to extend their co-operation to His Majesty’s Government and the Viceroy in their desire to hold a Round Table Conference.”

Most significant of all, the European Associations of Calcutta and Bombay spoke out in enthusiastic agreement. That of Calcutta sent the Secretary of State for India this Resolution:

“We, the Council of the European Association, desire you to convey to His Majesty’s Government our firm support of the Viceroy’s recent declaration. We consider such a declaration not ill-timed, and it clarifies the issue already clear to all competent observers. We consider that the Statutory Commission has not suffered in prestige, but by its work alone has made possible the contemplated conference.”

No one who knows the past record of these Associations will underestimate the importance of their present stand, or fail to be impressed by their unhesitating decision. The business communities of India, British and American no less than Native, feel that the position, in its long-drawn-out wrangling, has become intolerable, and that a settlement is imperative unless economic chaos is to result.

There were at first signs that the Congress itself might deviate into statesmanship. Immediately before it met at Lahore, several political leaders journeyed to Delhi, to which the Viceroy also repaired to meet them. The Viceroy’s train was wrecked by a bomb; Mr. Gandhi’s moved from one demonstration to another. The meeting was a waste of time. The Lahore Congress opened, two days later, with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru riding a white charger, followed by a flock of elephants and encompassed by a brigade of Mr. Subashchandra Bose’s League of Youth---the extremist Bengali association that openly preaches war---khaki-clad and in the outward similitude of soldiers. A musical accompaniment was provided by “The Wearing of the Green.” A Sikh march intended to break up the Congress was persuaded by three British officers to swerve aside and to make a peaceful camp. The Congress proceeded to give demonstration of its devotion to elementary decency and sense of fairness and “sportsmanship” by dealing with a resolution condemning the attempt to destroy the Viceroy, when coming to friendly conference with its leader. The resolution is supposed to have been passed by 935 votes to 897. It is doubtful if it was passed at all. It required an hour and a half’s discussion, amid cries of dissent and the waving of red flags. Let us be sure that Lord Irwin’s sense of humour will value the knowledge that 935 of the Congress gentlemen think it a pity he was nearly blown to bits, while 897 think otherwise. He is a poor man, the Viceroy of India today, and must be grateful to receive even such a wavering and disputed assurance that the Congress

“congratulates the Viceroy and Lady Irwin and their party, including the poor servants, on their fortunate narrow escape.”

Mr. Gandhi had pleaded, “It will be a good beginning if you pass this resolution unanimously.”

Hypnotised by the figure of a saint leading what they are told is a united march of 330 millions, many, most of all in America, genuinely believe that on one side you have a fanatical devotion to the principle of “non-violence” and that the other side is preparing to shoot. They do not realise the extent to which the “movie” mind has taken possession of many of the younger generation of Indian politicians, especially in Bengal. These men have seen too many plays of the kind popular on the vernacular stage, in which bevies of generals stride on and off, brandishing swords and making lengthy speeches about “country” and “religion” (desh and dharmma). They know a great deal about death in the theatre, not much about death in modern war. They are dreaming of what posterity will say, of the statues it will erect, the poems it will write. They have thought too much, and talked too much, about Ireland and the course of events there. They have not kept their gaze on the whole course of Irish events. Sooner or later, Irreconcilables find themselves at war with the community’s will and right to exist. If there are people who claim the right always to walk out from any group, whether Legislative Council or National Congress, whenever the majority takes a decision they do not like, and afterwards claim to go to any lengths to defeat that decision, self-government in India, like any other government, is impossible. When an Indian responsible government functions, it will not be able to exist and tolerate the bomb and pistol and dacoity gang. When a settlement came in Ireland, it left out the irreconcilable extremists, many of whom later faced firing parties of their own old comrades.

The Congress’s actual beginning had been marked by violent action as well as violent argument. The first day (December 29):

“Even the Tribune, which is the local organ of Congress, admits that regrettable incidents attended the ceremony of hoisting the flag and the opening of the Congress session. Apparently no officer was appointed to take command of the guard of honour at the flagstaff, so that when the crowd rushed the dais, incidentally knocking unconscious an aged member of Congress and leader, the leaderless volunteers were unable to restore order. On the evidence of the Tribune, ‘There was an awful crash (sic). Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was seen taking some to task and inquiring vainly who was in charge of the ceremony. He got enraged, shouting out several times, “Shut up, shut up.”’

“It is true that the proceedings in the tent began with women and volunteers singing ‘Bande Mataram’ in what the reporter graphically calls ‘pin-drop silence,’ but the pin-drop silence was rudely shattered when members of the Kirti Kisan Sabha, which is a society composed of laborers, artisans, and peasants, rushed the doors, refusing to pay entrance money. They firmly took the best seats, which had been reserved for good Congressmen who had paid for season tickets, which cost as much as 50 rupees. A sharp fight with the Volunteers followed, lathis being freely used, and there were casualties on both sides. Apparently the Kirti Kisan Sabha won the day, as this morning the committee made a generous gesture and decided to allow them on the free list at future sessions.”*

Other notable episodes of the Congress may be briefly touched on. Dr. Kitchlew, President of the Reception Committee, whose deportation by the Punjab Government had been one of two incidents immediately leading to the outbreaks of violence ending in the Jallianwallabagh suppression, pointed out the bigoted and unphilosophical attitude that the Government took where political assassination was concerned:

“In all civilised countries the motive for crime is the primary thing to be considered. Murder committed in the pursuit of lust, gain, or revenge constitutes a most heinous crime, and on account of the motive the murderer gets no concession from the judge and jury. But murder committed in a moment of excitement or gross provocation, or without ulterior motive, has always been held by the great jurists of all countries as worthy of consideration. You may not agree with the act itself; you may even shoot or hang the man; but you must give him credit for selfless purity of motive. What motive could be purer or nobler than the motive behind political crime? But in India, bureaucrats have persistently declined to recognise the political status of such crimes.”

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, who with Mr. Gandhi and Pandit Motilal Nehru makes up “the triumvirate of Hindu leaders with whom Britain has to deal”,* like Pandit Motilal Nehru a man close on his seventieth year, revealed the lines along which the inevitable cleavage of the Congress would run. He is the leader of Hindu orthodoxy. In the Subjects Committee---which decides the action of Congress, as we know; the Congress itself is just a jolly “rag”---he mustered 77 votes against Mr. Gandhi’s resolution for Independence, which secured 114. The Congress Moderates, who will ultimately play their part in the settlement between Britain and India, will follow him, and it seems clear (unless Government has bad luck, as it has had before, often by the deed of some subordinate who has lost his head) that he will take with him a number considerably more than the third of the Host of Heaven who followed Lucifer. The final revelation of the impending new divisions came with the formation of the Congress Democratic Party. As the English Peer informed Talleyrand, explaining that he was not the official in charge of the Great Seal, “il y a encore un plus grand sceau que moi,” there are Extremists extremer than the Extremist who presided over Congress. Curiously enough, Madras, which made the most genuine of all the efforts to work the Reforms, provides one of these, Mr. Srinivasa Iyengar; Bengal provides the other two most prominent, Mr. Subashchandra Bose and Mr. J. M. Sen Gupta, Mayor of Calcutta. At the Congress’s outset, “among the host of items of gossip from the camp” came

“a well-authenticated story that there was a heated quarrel between Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Mr. Bose, the grounds being the latter’s criticism of the new president’s impartiality and integrity which appeared in the local Press.”*

On the last day of the Congress, dissatisfied at failure to dictate the composition of a committee, Messrs. Srinivasa Iyengar and Subashchandra Bose walked out, followed by thirty members, and formed a Democratic Party.

Mr. Subashchandra Bose has been an Extremist always. His life has been a series of gestures, and I honestly cannot see how an Independent India would find a use for him. His value is when in opposition. He is now 35; his public career began in 1916, in the once-notorious assault at Presidency College, Calcutta. A number of students rushed from behind a door, and knocked down an English professor. The professor (who is still in India) has never shown the least rancour over the incident; to me, who admired his detached discussion of it, he admitted that he had been suffering from hot weather nerves, and had drifted into criticism rather oftener than was perhaps wise. But (as always happens when feelings are tense) the most ridiculous charges were faked up. He was alleged to have called his students “barbarians,” because he had explained the Greek use of the word, and had added, “So, you see, you and I are barbarians, in the Greek sense.” At the Enquiry, Sir Asutosh Mookerjee was particularly delighted with this explanation of “barbarians”; he had not heard it before, and obviously thought it a very adroit way of getting out of the trouble. Mr. Bose was rusticated for his part in this incident. It made him a hero, and he has never ceased to be one. He proceeded to Cambridge, and then took the Indian Civil Service competitive examination, passing out high. He resigned his appointment within a year, as a gesture to emphasise his Non-co-operation with the Government. He founded the League of Youth, and is Commander-in-Chief of the Congress Volunteers, who are responsible for order inside the Congress and disorder elsewhere. They got their duties somewhat mixed at the last Congress. There is no doubt of his intense hatred of the Government, and it is hard to believe that he will ever come into a settlement. He showed great skill in heckling and questioning, when a Member of the Bengal Legislative Council, 1927 and 1928. But after a while his attendance flagged. Last August, he led a procession through the streets of Calcutta, under banners inscribed “Long Live Revolution,” “Up with the Republic,” for which he was sentenced, on January 23, 1930, to a year’s imprisonment. One hopes that Authority’s real purpose was to have Mr. Bose out of the way while a settlement is negotiated. His own countrymen take his absence from the fray philosophically.

In his presidential address, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru announced

“the complete repudiation of India’s national debts, especially those contracted as a result of the Great War.”*

It is perplexing that “completeness” should allow of a greater completeness (i.e., “especially”). The Congress, before separating, resolved that Independent India would examine all its alleged international obligations, and would take over no debts without the severest scrutiny. This is taken to foreshadow a measure of debts repudiation---attractive to a new regime, which thereby sets out financially free, and has not come to the point where it desires to raise outside loans and finds possible lenders inquisitive as to its record.

On December 30, the Liberals, in session at Madras, passed a resolution cordially welcoming the Viceroy’s offer of a Round Table Conference, and issued an appeal to All India:

“We firmly believe that the only rallying cry which can unite Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, and Europeans, the propertied classes and the labouring and depressed classes, can be Dominion status for India, not as a distant goal or ideal, but as an object capable of achievement within the shortest possible limit of time. In a Constitution seeking to give India the status of a Dominion there will be no difficulty in making ample provision for the safeguarding of her security against internal trouble and foreign aggression during the period of transition. The mutual relations of British India and the Indian States can also be satisfactorily defined and provision made for their future regulation consistently, on the one hand, with Dominion status now contemplated, and, on the other, with the autonomy of the Indian States. Those of us who believe in the peaceful evolution of India cannot but deplore that any section of the people of this country should raise the cry of independence and involve our future in turmoil and confusion.”

Next day, as the Old Year passed out, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled the flag of the Indian Republic, and wished a Happy New Year to the Era of Independence. “Independence Day” (January 26) passed off with processions, a few Hindu-Moslem clashes, and the wounding of four children by a bomb placed in a school to get a British official who went out by a door other than the one he was expected to use.

On January 30, Mr. Gandhi entered upon the most perplexing phase of his career. He put before the Viceroy an offer of which his admirers have made much in the United States. He would call off Civil Disobedience on certain conditions---they are styled, by an influential group of American public men and leaders of thought,* “social and economic reforms.” These Nine Points are: total prohibition, the reduction of the rupee exchange rate from one and sixpence to one and fourpence, halving of the land tax, abolition of the salt tax, cutting down the military expenditure to half its present total, a scaling down of the salaries of the higher services, general amnesty of political prisoners, reservation of coastal shipping for Indian enterprise, protection of textiles. He demands also free license for firearms. From this point, I, for one, find it hard to believe that he is what he was, or that he has not allowed circumstances to make him sheer politician, and politician only. Such an offer of peace cannot have been sincere. Nothing of all that he demands is in the Viceroy’s power; he is talking as if he thought he were dealing with Akbar or Aurangzeb. The last demand is a concession to mere sentiment, and dates back to the long-finished time when Indians on racial grounds were forbidden to possess firearms. The sentiment has survived the grievance that gave it birth. Amnesty for political prisoners means that the men under trial for the murder of Mr. Saunders are to be freed. It must be admitted, of course, that any settlement will mean the dropping of prosecutions that are genuinely political, and a generous reduction of those in which politics and assassination are mixed. The rate of exchange of the rupee is a question for financiers to consider. The salt tax, the Government has since announced, is to go before the Tariff Board for their decision. Prohibition would mean a great increase in officials and expenditure. The land tax, whatever Government succeeds the present one, whether another Viceroy’s or Dominion India’s or Independent India’s, will not be reduced. India’s whole expenditure, Central and Provincial together, is about £160,000,000, a sum absurdly inadequate for all the expansion of education and social services that she requires. The land tax will be the main source from which her increased revenue must come. Military expenditure under an Independent India would rise enormously, especially if she were to seek to become what her more ambitious sons visualize her as: “Mistress of the Eastern Seas, Head of an Asiatic Zollverein.”* If Mr. Gandhi ever thinks at all, in these latter days of intense and almost fevered emotion and suffering, he must know that still higher protection of textiles will mean a firmer riveting on his land of that industrialism which he so dreads and hates. As to reduction of salaries, the Viceroy has neither the power nor the moral right to do any such thing.

Having failed to win acceptance of this remarkable gesture of peace, Mr. Gandhi set out on his Salt Tax Protest March, six weeks later. This was planned so as to make the actual deed of law-breaking fall on April 6, to open a week of Civil Disobedience ending with the Anniversary of Jallianwalabagh. As he moved slowly forward, the eyes of the world upon him, the spectacle had in it much to move pity and even distress. He is “fey”; ever since the young men, the Sons of Zeruiah, proved too strong for him, he has not been the leader, though he has insisted on being at the front. His old pathetic earnestness and honesty came to the fore again, in his last justification of himself to the Viceroy (March 2):

“The party of violence is gaining ground and making itself felt. Having an unquestioning and immovable faith in the efficacy of non-violence, it would be sinful on my part to wait longer. This non-violence will be expressed through civil disobedience, which for the moment will be confined to the inmates of the Satyagraha Ashram, but is ultimately designed to cover all those who choose to join the movement. . . . I know that in embarking upon non-violence I shall be running a mad risk, but victories for truth are never won without risks, often of the gravest character.”

With all the daemonic fervour of the man who feels Time’s wingèd chariot at his back and knows that his day is short, he set out on his last campaign. The party for violence had given their consent to this last test of what “non-violence” could achieve. The last stages of his slow pilgrimage were compassed about with American enthusiasts and other visitors. Untouchables were elaborately brought into his presence and treated with regard as after all human; in the wake of his journey, as soon as he had passed on, they relapsed into all their old untouchability. He reached the sea, and at dawn, April 6, he entered it, clad in his famous loin-cloth and enjoyed a short swim. Then, at the hour arranged as “zero,” he scooped up a handful of sand and salt water, and returned with a broad smile on his face. The salt was hardly edible, but the fact will not be tested, as it was auctioned repeatedly, and bought for the good of the cause, at sentimental prices.

The less spectacular, but far from unimportant, events of March and April may be briefly noted. When India’s tariff autonomy was explicitly recognized, in the refusal of the Secretary of State to interfere in the higher cotton goods duty introduced on February 28, something was done which, had it been done graciously, should have removed a large part of anti-British feeling. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by protests in England which gave it the effect of a reluctant acceptance of an unwelcome fact. It cannot be said too emphatically that all the talk about the Indian agitation being due to a few semi-educated clerks is hopelessly out of date. The British have to face an India largely industrialised, with some of the world’s bitterest labour unrest in its midst; and a mercantile India which contains many members who would be wealthy even in New York and who are determined to obtain tariff autonomy. This tariff autonomy may cost the poorer classes dear. But India herself, now that it is 1930, must see to that.

The immense delay attending the publication of the Simon Report put a strain on patience. The moderate party in the Congress, as the spring ran on, found themselves wavering, swayed by the excitement of the movement Mr. Gandhi was leading. This party, who by earlier publication might have been won to the side of reason, were now partially committed to extremism. The Moslems, however, showed a closer approach to unanimity in support of the Government than they have shown since the War. The two Ali Brothers issued a manifesto, saying that Mr. Gandhi proposed to put the Moslem minority under the Hindu majority. When Mr. Gandhi speaks of India as ruled by fear today, he means in part not only the fear the Hindus entertain of the Moslems, but the new fear which they impose on the Moslems, since the riots of 1926 and 1927, when the Moslem casualties outnumbered those of the Hindus. The Princes continued to show their entirely consistent and friendly attitude towards both the Government and the Dominion Status aspirations of British India. But April saw a savage raid on an arsenal in Chittagong, where the Europeans in charge were murdered; rioting in Calcutta; murders in Peshawur. The hot weather was not, as in previous years, the signal for the beginning of a close season in politics. The Government behaved with a moderation acknowledged everywhere outside National Congress circles. We may be sure that Mr. Gandhi knew the difficulties that beset the course of peaceful revolution he had staked his life on finding. It would have been a temporary way out if he had been arrested when his Salt Tax March began. But he was not; nor even at its close. There were other arrests, however. It would be hard to hold any of them avoidable, except perhaps the arrest of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru at the opening of a speech-making campaign, instead of a little later, when he could have been relied on to have furnished the authorities ample cause; and the arrest of Mr. J. M. Sen Gupta in Rangoon, and his being sentenced to ten days’ simple imprisonment. This made a profound impression in America, for he was Mayor of a large city, Calcutta. It led to the Calcutta rioting, and it disquieted many Europeans in India, who argued that if he were really guilty of sedition ten days’ simple imprisonment (with electric light, bath-room, and other amenities) was a silly sentence, and that, on the other hand, if ten days’ simple imprisonment were an adequate sentence, he could not have been guilty of sedition. April ended, with the genuinely moderate elements in India emphasising to their more excitable fellow-countrymen the truth that a little patience would bring the Round Table Conference, and with the Governor of Madras proposing to convene a meeting of Liberals. Indian Moderates held conversations with some of the more active Princes, on matters of common interest to Native and Dominion India. On May 3, the Viceroy prorogued the Legislative Assembly. Next day, Mr. Gandhi, who had announced his intention of seizing salt works, was arrested. The Indian Moderates resurrected the so-called “All Parties’ Conference,” to find a constructive way out. This Conference in 1928 had produced the Nehru Report, after the defection of practically all except the Congress representatives. In May, 1930, its composition was reversed; the Congress was absent, the other parties were included.

Mr. Gandhi’s arrest was the signal for outflares from the volcanic stratum which underlay the thin crust of “non-violent” agitation. That crust had broken through already, as we have seen and as every one open to the lessons of former experience had known would happen. The Government was in a position of such excessive difficulty as few Governments anywhere can ever have occupied. They knew that, whatever they did, it would be condemned. The laws of the land had been flouted. Salt Tax marches had taken place, even where (as on the sea-board of Bengal) the salt that could be obtained was almost mythical. There had been a press campaign unexampled in recklessness and ferocity, which had led to their demanding security from editors and printers, and the closing down of many papers. Mr. Gandhi was arrested under an ordinance of 1827, by which he could be kept under restraint without trial. The legalists in every country could assail this as monstrous, as of course (one admits, for theory’s sake) it was. Yet it was no less monstrous to arrest the lesser offenders, while the arch-rebel stalked his unimpeded way, and after breaking the salt law proceeded to announce his intention to seize salt factories and to issue orders for the cutting down of palm trees, the private property of men whose living came from palm-toddy. It would be equally monstrous to try a man so universally revered as a saint, for breaking a law which is medieval in source and character, the salt monopoly law. They had to confront the exasperation of the Indian business communities, whose trade had been so long almost at a standstill, amid the political excitement and uncertainty; these communities chose to help by passing resolutions condemning Mr. Gandhi’s arrest, and demanding that the Government find a short cut out of the political discontents, by immediately convening a Round Table Conference. At large in the people of India was a fierce unreasoning desire for full swaraj, whatever it was and whatever it cost. Never before had so large a section of the Indian world been so touched by a political movement. Yet the Government had to await the Simon Report, now officially announced as to appear in two parts, with an interval between publications. Passions were rising, not only in the Indian people, but in the British, who knew that men of their own race and members of the loyal Indian police had been murdered, and their bodies burnt by jeering crowds. A small thing might now precipitate disturbances which would reach the scale of war, bitter and long-continued, with all its legacy of evil memories. Never was any Government assailed by such a clamour of many voices, from many lands, demanding as many different courses of action as there are days in a month.

Meanwhile, there came from minorities, notably from the Moslems and Untouchables, reminders that, whatever else might be tolerable to them, a surrender of the political machine into the hands of the majority was something they would not accept, and that India was riddled with the old distrust. The Government never lost sight of the fact that in its hands was the responsibility to keep something of general peace, and to prevent India lapsing into the disorder and misery of other lands which the modern spirit has stirred without bringing the modern strength and self-control. However organised and savage the opposition and unrest, the Indian situation had its realities which would survive any conflict; and its implacable problems, which forbade any solution by defeatism. Those problems, which must be faced by all Indian politicians, either without or after war and revolution, I propose to set before the reader. They exist; and they cannot be evaded, or left out of any settlement.

Part II — Political

Chapter I

The Problem of the Princes

The Indian Princes have been the centre of much attention in the last few years, and we are fortunate in having before us publications of the past two years, which set out what is thought as to their position in Indian polity, by themselves, by the British Government, and by the Nationalist Party of British India. These three publications are:

(1) The British Crown and the Indian States; an Outline Sketch drawn up on behalf of the Standing Committee of the Chamber of Princes; by The Directorate of the Chamber’s Special Organisation.

The Chamber is the Consultative Assembly opened in 1921. Some of the most important Princes have kept aloof from it; but there can be no doubt that they are all cognisant of this book, which is an exceedingly able presentment of their case, of what the Princes conceive to be their rights, and of the infringements on their sovereignty of which they think the British Government has been guilty during the last century. It has a General Foreword on “The Growth of Joint Action among the Indian Princes,” by one of the most influential and conspicuous Englishmen in India, Mr. L. F. Rushbrook Williams C.B.E., who holds the unusual position of “Foreign Minister” to Patiala State. His patron, the Maharaja of Patiala, is a well-known Chieftain, a man equally familiar with East and West. He has been in his day a cricketer of almost first-class attainment, and has shown the same activity in his mental habits. To him, perhaps more than to any other Prince, was due the formation of the Chamber of Princes, and he was its first Chancellor.

This book must be looked upon as propaganda, and needs a good deal of special knowledge for its checking. But it is written with moderation as well as vigour, and is essentially fair in its conclusions. It is understood to owe its qualities largely to Mr. Rushbrook Williams.

(2) The Report of the Indian States Committee, 1928-9. This is the Report of a Committee of three Englishmen appointed to consider the position of the Indian States. It is generally known as the Butler Report, from its Chairman, Sir Harcourt Butler, and will be so called by me. The Report was limited by its conditions, to the questions of the sovereignty and rights of the States. The people of the States were beyond its purview.

The Report has its occasional moments of clear and vigorous statement, but in the main is as colourless and inconclusive as the Reports of Indian official Commissions generally have been.

(3) The Report of the Committee appointed by the “All-Parties’ Conference” (Lucknow, August 28 to 31, 1928). This is the Nehru Report, so called from the name of its Chairman, Pandit Motilal Nehru. He was President of the National Congress, 1928, and the local journal of the Congress, issued at each year’s meeting, the Tribune, last December issued a photograph of him above the caption “Our Outraging* President.” This, however, is needlessly cynical and critical; he is at heart by no means the irreconcilable he has been made to appear by recent events. His son, Jawaharlal Nehru, President of the last Congress, successor to his outraging parent, is the more extremist of the two.

The Committee was composed of ten members, among them one Sikh and two Mohammedans. It was thus predominantly Hindu. It was appointed to answer the challenge often thrown out by British politicians, that there was no Indian group that could “deliver the goods,” i.e., that the varying sects, Hindu, Sikh, Mohammedan, Parsi, Christian, were so at war in their interests and desires that no agreed Constitution for India could be made.

Chapter V deals with the States. It is one of the least valuable parts of the Report. The Swarajists hitherto have done little serious thinking about the problem presented by the States. If a Eon blocks your path, it does not help to feel annoyance, or even to express annoyance in loud, decided tones and language.

The Congress has now refused to meet the Princes at a triangular round table conference.

To sum up. The Princes, of the three parties most immediately concerned, are far and away the most awake. They have always kept a close watch on British India and the currents of thought there. In recent years the habit of consultation among themselves has been growing, especially among the score or so who may really be taken seriously as Ruling Princes (the others being little more than noblemen or even squires). They have money to engage eminent Counsel, they have a considerable degree of unity---which where their interests are concerned amounts to almost unanimity---they hold strong opinions which they are not afraid to express in unambiguous language.

The British Government is cautious, anxious to be correct and to say nothing contrary to its past treaties and engagements (which it is in honour bound to keep). The Nationalists are querulous, confused, doctrinaire, addressing the Princes in tones of pleading or of vexation. On occasion they do not hesitate to put out veiled threats which they must know they have no means of carrying into action, now or hereafter.

The student who wishes to supplement these three documents may consult the following books. I vouch for each of them, as excellent or indispensable.

• Sir Charles Aitchison: Treaties, Engagements and Sunnuds relating to India (Indian Foreign Department).

• Sir Sidney Low: The Indian States and Ruling Princes (Benn’s Sixpenny Library).

• G. T. Garratt: An Indian Commentary, pp. 185-199 (Jonathan Cape; and Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith).

• H. Dodwell: A Sketch of the History of India from 1858 to 1918, pp. 170-190 (Longmans, Green & Co.).

Two earlier authorities:

• Sir C. L. Tupper: Our Indian Protectorate (1893).

• Sir W. Lee-Warner: The Protected Princes of India (1894).

What Are the Native States? And Where?

Their number is variously estimated. The Butler Report recognises 562. Most authorities say, about 700. Outside the Indian political system altogether lie the two Himalayan States, Nepal and Bhutan, which are entirely independent.

The States differ enormously in size, population, and importance. The Khan of Kalat, in Baluchistan, rules 54,000 square miles, 300,000 subjects, but is ranked as second-class only, with a 19-gun salute. Even larger, and out of all comparison more important, is Hyderabad, reckoned the premier State, which has a bigger area than the island of Great Britain and 12½ million inhabitants. Kashmir is larger still, but with fewer inhabitants. At the other end of the scale are

“minute holdings in Kathiawar of a few acres only.

“The one feature common to them all is that they are not part, or governed by the law, of British India.”*

Their sea-power is hardly existent. They have a slight extent of coast-line, mostly on rock-bound coasts or swampy lagoons. They have no ports of first-rate importance, though one or two have possibilities of limited development. But they occupy Central India to such an extent that British India, except in Bengal, Bihar, and the United Provinces, seems driven on to the fringes, and Native India seems an almost continuous belt across India from East to West. The divisions of India politically, into Nationalist and nonNationalist, correspond generally to these five great strips---Bengal to the Punjab,* Orissa to Rajputana, the Madras and Bombay Presidencies,* and Hyderabad to Mysore.

It has been usual to say that the only way to classify them among themselves is by the number of guns each chieftain is entitled to by way of ceremonial salute. Thus, there are five first-class (21-gun) States, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Baroda, Gwalior, Mysore; six second-class (19-gun); 13 third-class (17-gun); and another 102 States entitled to salutes of 11 or 13 guns. This does not mean that the States who receive equal salutes are all on the same level of power. This will be clear when Mysore comes in for special mention presently. It is a level of importance rather than of independence.

Since the Chamber of Princes was instituted, in 1921, another category has arisen; 108 States are directly represented in that Chamber, another 127 are represented by 12 members. The remaining 327 States are mere “estates,” and are unrepresented. Thus, already, and by agreement among the Princes themselves, the process which is sooner or later inevitable has begun; the genuine Princes are beginning to emerge, by a sifting which the British Peace has long postponed, and the rest are sinking into the rank of local noblemen. In any constitution which is to be of use to all India, this process will have to be carried further.

About 23 per cent of the population, and about 40 per cent of the area, of India are in the States. The States directly represented in the Chamber of Princes amount to 514,886 square miles, and have a population of nearly 60 millions. The States partially represented amount to 76,846 square miles and 8 million people. The third class have 6,406 miles and a population of 801,674.

To tourists the States are picturesque survivals of feudalism, to British officials they are bulwarks against “sedition” and modern ideas, to the statesmen among those officials they are a sphere where Indian administration can develop along indigenous lines, to Nationalists they are an annoyance and a nuisance. Since the reader is to be now conducted over what he may feel is arid territory, I shall let him rest his eyes a moment on the States in their first-cited, and perhaps most universally approved, role. Here is Lord Curzon enjoying himself at Bhopal:

“The arrival was a most picturesque, if somewhat comic, affair. There were officials in every colour of velvet, and every degree of gold and silver braid; soldiers on foot and soldiers on horseback; soldiers in every conceivable variety of opera bouffe uniforms, some saluting, others brandishing swords, others armed with ancestral weapons; camels, elephants, horses, streamers, flags, arches, guns letting off on every side, men shouting, galloping, staring---and all of this going on anyhow, with no particular method or plan, but everybody joining in just as he or she liked.”*

Perhaps Lady Curzon gets the scene better still:

“The way was lined with Imperial Service cavalry, and, when these gave out, with state infantry, aged veterans with orange beards and orange trousers holding rusty muskets before them . . . the most wonderful crowd of natives, camels, elephants, in every rainbow colour, and native bands on the backs of elephants playing an Indian rendering of ‘God Save the Queen,’ while elephants shrieked royal salutes. It was impossible not to laugh at the splendour and the squalor and the picturesqueness of it all.”*

Relationship with the British Government

Theoretically, they are independent Powers, who have given up certain rights, especially control of their own international affairs. They are survivals from a time when the Paramount Power was but one of many. The earlier treaties were conducted on a basis of alleged equality between the high contracting parties. This basis was boldly claimed, as recently as September 20, 1925, by the Premier Prince, the Nizam of Hyderabad, in a letter asking for the rendition of the District of Berar. The claim took away the breath of the Paramount Power, which did not reply until March 27, 1926, when it justified the delay by the importance of the question raised. The outcome was a refusal to reconsider the Berar matter, and a statement at the letter’s outset that

“the Sovereignty of the British Crown is supreme in India, and therefore no Ruler of an Indian State can justifiably claim to negotiate with the British Government on an equal footing. Its supremacy is not based only upon treaties and engagements, but exists independently of them.”

The episode gave unalloyed delight in Swarajist circles, and the Nehru Report expresses glee quite openly:

“The result is that the Princes have not at all advanced their case by their recent activities in India and in England and remain exactly where they were when the ‘famous letter’ was published. We offer them our sincere sympathy . . . it is for the Princes to consider whether they are content with the ‘constitution they at present enjoy’ which is none other than that laid down in the ‘famous letter.’”

That the Nizam himself is dissatisfied, the reader will gather presently. As the last quotation indicates, the Princes have been much occupied lately in trying to establish, and obtain explicit recognition for, rights they hold have become impaired.

Previous to 1861, the States were in theory on a higher level of independence than Lord Reading’s letter concedes. In internal affairs, at any rate, they were allowed a generous latitude. Mutilation of thieves was for a long time permitted. Slavery and female infanticide continued. Widow-burning was legal, despite all protests from the British Government, and when Princes died often occurred on a lavish scale.* But their external independence and continued existence were very precarious. Annexation was frequent, for misgovernment, lack of what European usage considered a direct heir, or defeat in war. They persisted on sufferance, as they do not now. The Mutiny changed all this. The States that survived it were those that had remained friendly to the Paramount Power. It was now plain that they were merely barons, and not independent. The attempt, now a normal feature of the Indian situation, to assert a real if clipped independence has come about in recent years, most of all since Indian Nationalism has confidently thrust itself forward as the heir to the British Raj. In 1858, the Queen’s Proclamation renounced annexation for the future and contemplated for all eternity an unchanged status:

“We desire no extension of our present territorial possessions. . . . We shall respect the rights, dignity, and honour of native princes as our own.”

The refusal of the right to adopt an heir, which had given us some of our most implacable enemies in the Mutiny, was withdrawn, and the right acknowledged. All this was made explicit in Sanads (Letters of Recognition), sent to about 140 States. The Princes deny that these Sanads conferred any new right. This contention is no doubt correct. Nevertheless, since 1861 they have felt a security that was not theirs before, and their relations with the Paramount Power have been friendlier. The correspondence between them and the British Government is kept secret; but it is plain that the old uneasiness and intrigues have largely gone.

British influence in Native States is represented by an official called the Resident. The “politicals” have been a body of servants of which any Government might be proud; among them may be found many of the finest gentlemen in the world, men who are broad-minded, sympathetic with other modes of thought, modest as to their own. They have often lived on terms of warm friendship with the Chief they have advised. It would no longer be possible for any one to write of them as King Edward VII, visiting India as Prince of Wales in 1875, did, to Queen Victoria:

“What struck me most forcibly was the rude and rough manner with which the English Political Officers (as they are called who are in attendance on native Chiefs) treat them. It is indeed much to be deplored, and the system is, I am sure, quite wrong.”*

Most of the present politicals realise that native rule has advantages in its personal character, which makes it elastic and not a machine-like administration “untouched by hand” (which is Rabindranath Tagore’s charge against the British Government). It has not the remorseless, impersonal justness which the British value perhaps more than other races do. Impatience with the inefficiency (by Western standards) of many (but not all) States, so usual once and so marked in Lord Curzon’s attitude towards them, is now rare.

Since 1858, there have been no annexations. There have been interferences, justified by that elusive and indefinable thing, “the law of public morality, and not by any express convention.”* Sharp protests were certainly sent to the one State which persisted after the Mutiny in the ceremonial burning of at least one widow with its dead rulers, and to States that continued barbarous customs. Some of these interferences are recorded in official bluebooks. One Prince punished a thief by chopping off a hand and a foot; another mutilated a slave by cutting off nose and ears; a third had two jailors flogged to death; a fourth impaled a subject; a fifth publicly tortured an offender; a sixth “committed an outrage of too shocking and disgusting a character to bear repetition.”*

Interference has not infrequently gone so far as to demand abdication. This is an exercise of power which most readers will agree is inherent in the situation; you cannot safeguard a Prince against revolution unless you also see that he does not misgovern. But it is a power that does not come to the Imperial Government by any treaty, and it is certain that the Princes have no intention of accepting the contention that it can be passed on to any Indian Nationalist Government. The deposition of the Gaekwar of Baroda, in 1875, which will come up under another head for consideration, is still a grievance with the Princes. The far more drastic punishment of the Raja of Manipur, a State between India and Burma, is also cited with disapproval, though rather as a debating point (I think) than with any deep feeling. It plainly is not a precedent---the Gaekwar’s deposition was---but the kind of angry retaliation against which no agreements or treaties can guard. The Princes set this case forth at length, in the words of a writer whose name is not given:

“The brother of the ruling Rajah rose in rebellion and installed the Jubraj on the gadi. The British Government recognised the Jubraj, but demanded that the brother who had raised the standard of revolt should be expelled. This the Jubraj refused to do, and a British force entered the territory, deposed the Jubraj, and tried him. He was sentenced to be hanged. The subjects of the Manipur State were enjoined by proclamation to take warning by the punishment inflicted.”*

At the end of the quotation (of which I have used part), the comment is added: “We are not vouching for either the completeness or accuracy of the above account of the facts.” This disclaimer is a wise one. Another segment of the truth is supplied by Lord Ronaldshay’s account* of Lord Curzon’s visit, as Viceroy, to Manipur, in 1901:

“He made a careful inspection of the spot where Grimwood had been speared while mounting the steps to the Durbar Hall; the room in which Quinton and Skene had been chained before being taken out to be decapitated in front of the great dragons, and the site where the guilty Manipur Prince had subsequently been hanged in the presence of twenty thousand people. The picture of it which he conjured up sank into his mind so that he could not put it from him. He watched the polo, the races, the wrestling and the barbaric dances which had been arranged for his entertainment; ‘but behind all this phantasmagoria of savagery and good humour,’ he told Lady Curzon, ‘hung in my own mind the perpetual cloud of the great tragedy of 1891.’”

We may now round off the story by stating that the Manipur Raja was given hard measure, not so much in being executed after he (or his people) had executed five British officers, but in the inconsistent and bullying attitude taken towards him, which goaded him into this cruelty. The Manipur affair was a high-handed response at a time of wrath and fierce tension. The Princes might find similar, and worse, invasions of their rights in the Mutiny period of explosion. Tantia Tupi, for example, was hanged, though he was no subject of the Government against which he had “rebelled.” But by tacit consent the Mutiny is left out, when Indian history is dredged for precedents. It was a time of madness, when no rules held.

An offending Chief is asked to choose between abdication and facing an enquiry by a mixed Commission on which his fellow-Princes are represented. Depositions have been conducted with careful regard to the feelings of the Princes as a body. Even so, they are accepted under protest by the individuals deposed, and there cannot be any enthusiasm felt for them by the other Princes. No Prince will ever abdicate except in obedience to a Central Power too strong to be defied.

Short of compulsory abdication, there is sometimes an encouragement of it by the Imperial Government which amounts to what might be called persuaded abdication. One such victim of a tyrannous overlord is still affectionately remembered for the playful fashion in which he accepted life’s vicissitudes. He was inordinately stout; and on one occasion he had to turn sideways to occupy a throne towards which a vast concourse of his subjects was gazing reverently. Midway during this operation he paused to ask his Resident: “What would your Punch give to get a picture of me at this moment?” He and Lord Curzon got on each other’s nerves. The Maharaja

“appeared to take special delight in defying the clearly expressed wishes of the Head of the Government, and in the teeth of a formally expressed objection to his visiting famine centres in British India with a large retinue during these times of scarcity, he followed the Viceroy round to Ajmere, Ahmedabad and Bombay. He showed an ingenuity in defeating Lord Curzon’s attempt to checkmate him which at times proved too much for the Viceroy’s ever-ready sense of humour. ‘I have told the railway companies not to give him special trains anywhere. But he scores off me by taking a hundred tickets and travelling in an ordinary train! What on earth is one to do with such a man?’”*

The general belief among British officials was that he was not entirely sane. I am not sure that I share it. His favourite hobby was to make Englishmen look foolish. Thus, when about to sail to Europe, he asked for a list of animals so rare that the London Zoo had no specimen. The Head of the Bombay Natural History Society was delighted, concluding that the Maharaja intended to present these to the Gardens; he cabled and obtained the list, which was given to the Maharaja. After some months in England, the latter signified his wish to inspect the Zoo. It was made a gala occasion; the Duke of Bedford and as many Fellows as possible were assembled, all in ceremonial attire. The Maharaja was asked if there were any beast he particularly wished to see. After some thought he gave the name of one of those on his absentee list, which he had been at the pains to commit to memory. The Zoo authorities expressed their regret at being unable to oblige him, and asked if they could show him anything else. He went through his list, one by one, and then with a disappointed air asked if, at any rate, they could show him a tiger or two, if they had nothing else. After that he departed, with the manner of one who feels that his valuable time has been wasted on false pretences. In his own State, when paying the customary courtly visit to the Residency on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, he asked the British official deputed to meet him and bring him in, “What is your opinion of the Rockingham Ministry?” This (as my reader will remember, but the British official did not) lasted for a few months of 1782. It had been specially “got up” by the Maharaja.

I turn doubtfully to three stories that may be untrue, though widely believed in India. The first is of his spending $100,000 on the marriage of two pet pigeons.* The next is the story of his harnessing to a chariot two bankers of whom he disapproved, and driving through the streets of his capital. As he used to remark to his Resident (accompanying the words with a wave of his whip-hand),* “My people are my donkeys. I can do what I wish with them.” The third story is that Lord Curzon’s “ever-ready sense of humour” failed him when visiting the city where the Prince had once ruled; he “cut” the fallen greatness, refusing to visit it. The Prince bided his time, and then showed that he too could gleek upon occasion. Lord Curzon’s reign ended in a dispute with Lord Kitchener, Commander-in-Chief in India, and his own resignation. When this happened, the ex-Maharaja about whose sanity he had entertained so much doubt sent him a telegram: “Now that we are both in disgrace, may we not meet?”*

The best-remembered recent abdication arose out of the attempted abduction of a favourite dancing-girl, who had left the Maharaja and gone to live with a Bombay Indian merchant. The latter was murdered in Bombay, January 12, 1925, while he and the girl were driving together in an automobile. The Imperial Government proposed a Commission, of two High Court Judges, two Ruling Princes, and a Senior Officer of the Political Department, to enquire into the Maharaja’s alleged complicity, and to offer advice to the Government afterwards. This is the procedure recommended in paragraph 309 of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report (1918), and protested against by some of the Princes. The Maharaja refused the Enquiry:

“Rightly or wrongly, I have all along adhered to the belief that neither on the analogy of International Law nor as a matter resting upon treaty is a Prince of my position liable to be tried. . . . I cannot persuade myself to act contrary to my convictions and to accept a Commission of Committee of Enquiry. . . . Hence I abdicate my Throne in favour of my son on the understanding that no further enquiry into my alleged connection with the Malabar Hill Tragedy will be made.”

On these terms, the Enquiry was dropped. His Highness went to America, where he met the lady whose marriage to him a little later so interested the feminine and philosophical worlds.

The Berar Case

1925 and 1926 were a time when the Princes and their activities were to the fore. The Berar lease, which the Nizam desired to terminate, is an involved story. All we need note is that by an arrangement made in 1853, at a period when little care was taken as to Princes’ rights, the district came under British administration, while remaining nominally Hyderabad territory.

“It must freely be admitted that the Company had driven hard bargains with the Nizam and had not always been over-scrupulous in its dealings. Lord Curzon’s view was that, though words in the Treaties could be quoted which would fairly cover everything that had been done, yet there were passages in the history of the relations between the Company and the Nizam which were not in strict accordance with the most scrupulous standards of British honour.”*

When Lord Curzon “first reached India he had found the Nizam sullen and suspicious.”* He procured an arrangement which was to the Nizam’s financial advantage. It was not accepted with the complete satisfaction that Lord Curzon genuinely believed it brought. He wrote (April 10, 1902):

“I have settled the famous Berar question, which has been a standing sore between Hyderabad and ourselves for 50 years. The districts are now assigned to us for certain purposes by Treaty. I have persuaded the Nizam to lease them to us in perpetuity. In a way this is the biggest thing I have yet done in India.”

But in 1923 and 1925, in two "very voluminous letters,"* the successor of the Nizam Curzon dealt with demanded the rendition of Berar, representing that

“his father was overawed by the great genius of Lord Curzon and that he did not properly understand his position under the existing treaties.”*

In the second letter, His Exalted Highness came out with the claim cherished in secret by the Princes:

“Save and except matters relating to foreign powers and policies, the Nizams of Hyderabad have been independent in the internal affairs of their State just as much as the British Government in British India. With the reservations mentioned by me, the two parties have on all occasions acted with complete freedom and independence in all inter-Governmental questions that naturally arise from time to time between neighbours . . . two Governments that stand on the same plane without any limitations of subordination of one to the other.”

Lord Reading’s reply was couched in grandiose and acerb phraseology:

“These words” [I have quoted them] “would seem to indicate a misconception of Your Exalted Highness’s relations to the Paramount Power, which it is incumbent on me as His Imperial Majesty’s Representative to remove, since my silence on such a subject now might hereafter be interpreted as acquiescence in the propositions which you have enunciated. . . .

“Other illustrations could be added no less inconsistent than the foregoing with the suggestion that except in matters relating to Foreign Powers and policies the Government of Your Exalted Highness and the British Government stand on a plane of equality, but I do not think I need pursue the subject further. I will merely add that the title of Faithful Ally, which Your Exalted Highness enjoys, has not the effect of putting your Government in a category separate from that of other States under the paramountcy of the British Crown.”

How deep and painful the wound of humiliation this incident---or, rather, series of incidents drawn out over many decades and closing in a rebuff so scathingly worded---has left we can guess. Surely no reader is still under the impression that the Princes are satisfied with their position of political subordination, or regard themselves and their status as one of the matters to pass by a simple process of transfer to an Indian Government, whether Dominion or Independent. The last of the Berar question has not been heard. The Princes now know where they stand in relation to the Central Government. They knew before; but it is now explicit. They would not have raised their claim to fully independent rank, had not self-determination for British India so plainly risen above the horizon of probability. There have been few more impressive incidents than this one, of the Premier State of India boldly claiming equality with the Suzerain Power, before that background of Indian Princes silently observing and listening.

Are They Democratic?

They are not.

Theoretically most of them are despots, as is made plain in the treaties between them and the British Government:

. “Thus, in the Jaipur Treaty of 1818, it is laid down that ‘the Maharaja and his heirs and successors shall remain absolute rulers of their territory and their dependents according to long established usage.’ Lord William Bentinck writes to the Nizam telling him that certain promises made to the British officers or with their cognisance must be kept; but that ‘in every other respect your authority will be absolute.’ The same Governor-General in 1832 said: ‘I do not possess any authority either to confer or take away the ruling powers in Gwalior, because the Maharaja Scindia is the absolute ruler of his country.’”*

Nevertheless, some of the Native States have made their ceremonial bow to democracy.

“Of 108 Princes, 30 have established legislative councils, most of which are at present of a consultative nature only; 40 have constituted High Courts more or less on British Indian models; 34 have separated executive from judicial functions; 56 have a fixed privy purse; 46 have started a regular graded civil list of officials, and 54 have pension or provident fund schemes. Some of these reforms are still no doubt inchoate, or on paper, and some states are still backward, but a sense of responsibility to their people is spreading among all the states and growing year by year.”*

Two States, Mysore and Travancore, have a franchise as advanced as British India. Yet even here the Legislative Assemblies are hardly more than debating societies; they

“can do little more than criticise the Budget and the past administration.” *

Moreover, both are exceptional cases. Travancore has no less than 25 per cent of its population Christians. Mysore has a constitution laid down by the British Government, in 1881. Its case is of the first importance and worth remembering in some detail.

Mysore

The British Government, in 1831, took over the administration, because of misgovernment. In 1868, the deposed Raja died. He had adopted a son, despite the Government’s refusal to recognise the adoption. Had he died before the Mutiny, the State would have been held to have “lapsed” to the British Government. But now the latter agreed to

“restore the State to the boy if, on reaching manhood, he was found competent for his duties as a ruler.”*

It restored the State in 1881, to the gratification of the Princes all over India, restive under the recent deposition of the Gaekwar* of Baroda, in 1875. He was perhaps a lunatic, and was accused of having tried to poison his Resident. His displacement, however, was for misgovernment. It is usual to quote the remarks of two great Maratha Chiefs, as signifying the Princes’ acquiescence in disciplinary action by the Central Government, so long as State rights were preserved:

“Now that annexation is at an end, we breathe freely, even when our failings are probed and our shortcomings discussed.” Sindhia* (Gwalior).

“The person for the time being is little; the State with its rights is the point for consideration.” Holkar* (Indore).

The book in which the Princes have now set out their case lets us see below the surface of this compulsory acquiescence:

“Holkar’s dictum did not express the whole of what the Indian Princes thought about the Baroda case.”*

Of the tribunal of two Princes, two Ministers, and three officers of the British Government, appointed to try the Gaekwar for his alleged attempt to poison the Resident, they say:

“The legal authority of this tribunal and of its proceedings must not be assumed. The step was not justified by any treaty agreement nor had it the sanction even of previous practice. Baroda was a State in treaty alliance with the British Government.”*

There was great pleasure, therefore, when, in 1881, the Maharaja of Mysore, a State of close on 30,000 square miles and 5 million inhabitants, was restored to ruling powers. The action might fairly be called generous, as for fifty years the State had been administered, to its own advantage, by servants of the Central Government. The Maharaja was given a salute of 21 guns, which placed him nominally on a level with the four greatest States. But the Princes were disappointed when the British Government imposed on the Mysore ruler an elaborate Constitution

“with many clauses defining the duties of the Maharaja and the powers over him of the Government, the net result of which is to subordinate His authority to Government supervision in every department and to leave the real internal Sovereignty of the State in the hands of the Government of India.”*

However, they insist, Mysore in no way affects the status of other principalities.

“States like Baroda, Gwalior, Udaipur, Alwar, Nawanagar or Tripura existed already as full-powered States when they first accepted British Paramountcy. Their sovereignty was their own, not granted to them by the British. Indeed they were the donors and the Crown the donee. For Paramountcy was created by their cession of certain sovereign rights to the crown. . . . Every State having its own independent existence retained whatever powers of sovereignty it did not give away to the Crown.”*

These claims, now so ably and deliberately set out, are without any question set out for a double audience, the British public and those politicians in British India who are seeking to persuade themselves (in the National Congress) and the outside world that the settlement of the Indian question depends solely on the elimination of the British. But my present purpose is to point out that it is not entirely of choice that Mysore is more democratic than the other States.

Democracy in Practice

The Central Government keeps in its own hands rights of jurisdiction over Europeans and Americans, control of imperial railways, sometimes control of postal services. The Resident usually has authority to veto a sentence of death. With these and similar limitations, the Princes possess much power. In one state, universally revered by Hindus as they do not revere the British Government, the Maharana allows no automobile inside his capital, which one supposes the West, and America in particular, would consider the extreme of tyrannical autocracy. Every one, whatever his rank or wealth, dismounts from carriage or cycle or horse when the Maharana or his eldest son goes by. The food of the lowest castes is kept at the level sanctioned by Hindu custom; before a feast, they must submit a list of the dainties proposed, and a Government officer crosses out anything fit only for their betters. The Prince will not consider proposals to bring in sanitation or water supply, as these would do away with the hereditary work of sweepers and water-carriers. In many other ways this State, and others also, maintain the good old tradition of paternalism.

There is evidence that discontent exists in the States to a degree greater than is generally admitted. The Butler Report says:

“In the course of our enquiry we were approached by persons and associations purporting to represent the subjects of Indian States. It was quite clear that our terms of reference did not cover an investigation of their alleged grievances and we declined to hear them, but we allowed them to put in written statements, and in the course of our tours we endeavoured to ascertain the general character of the administration in the States.”

These “persons and associations purporting to represent the subjects of Indian States” are tenacious as well as naughty. They have printed their own manifesto, and sent it to Englishmen who, they think, might be interested. I have no doubt that it will receive quite as much attention as the manifestoes of feeble and unimportant folk generally do receive. In most States no political agitation is permitted.* Offenders are put over the border, into British India. When Queen Victoria promised, in 1858:

“We shall respect the rights, dignity, and honour of native princes as our own,”

she made a promise that has been more than kept. In British India, the press can say anything it likes about an Englishman, short of libel---and, though the libel laws are often a nuisance, preventing one from telling the truth when the truth is notorious, yet what a wide range of abuse they permit! You can call a man conceited, or a fool. You can call him pretty well anything except liar and thief. But this liberty does not exist if you are annoyed with an Indian Prince. Government then requires you to speak and write with a respect which it does not exact towards its own officers.

Inside a Native State this respectfulness is exacted towards its celestial, no less than its terrestrial, rulers, as Dr. J. H. Moulton found in 1916. He was as eminent a Zoroastrian scholar as he was a Hellenist, and the Parsis invited him to Bombay to lecture on their religion. Unfortunately, when travelling in a great South Indian State, Moulton was amused by the cholera goddess’s gorgeous shrine, and in a mood of misguided playfulness referred to her, when writing to England, as “the Maharaja’s pet she-devil” (I think the phrase was). This got into the Methodist Recorder; a political lady’s* Intelligence Department reported it to India. Moulton was requested to leave within 24 hours the borders of the State whose tutelary goddess he had insulted, and the University of Madras cancelled an engagement to lecture. He took his disappointment bravely. I met him shortly afterwards in a Bombay street, and he shouted gleefully: “I say, guess what has come by this morning’s mail!” It was an invitation to succeed Mrs. Annie Besant, as Head of the Hindu College, Benares. But Moulton returned to England, some months later, in 1917.*

The Butler Report further reminds us:

“The promise of the King-Emperor to maintain unimpaired the privileges, rights, and dignities of the Princes carries with it a duty to protect the Prince against attempts to eliminate him, and to substitute another form of government. ... If there were a widespread popular demand for change, the Paramount Power would be bound to maintain the rights, privileges, and dignity of the Prince; but it would also be bound to suggest such measures as would satisfy this demand without eliminating the Prince.”

In other words, the British Government long ago took towards the Princes the attitude of the United States towards the Caribbean countries. The present constitutions and governments must remain substantially as they are, the right to rebel is done with, but by way of compensation the Paramount Power has recognised its own obligation to keep an eye open for misgovernment. I submit that, so far as Native India is concerned, this is not good enough.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to imagine that the subjects of the Princes are unhappy. Some of the Princes are men who have recently come into prominence for scandalous behaviour; others, among them some who are considered “thoroughly good fellows” in Paris or London and whose names can be found often in the Court News, are far less popular in India than in the West. Some still treat their revenues as so much private income, and every year squander it outside India. Some are thoroughly Westernised in their habits, some have married English, Australian, or American wives, as chief or as auxiliary consorts. Many are men of splendid qualities, and some have long records of unselfish service of their people. In any case, they stand for things that Indian opinion regards as of enormous value. It is pleasant even to go through one of the better governed States, the people are so self-respecting and so free from either cringing or assertive insolence. It is delightful to the Englishman to realise that no one bothers to notice that he is there. Beyond question there is, in British as well as in Native India, a desire for their survival. They represent an island in the modern world where the Indian soul has been able to survive, and on which the eyes of India can rest without anger or humiliation.

Is It Probable that They Would Make Trouble If the British Left India?

The Princes have watched British India closely. Since the possibility of Britain abdicating became more than an academic question, they have had a very active group, which brought about the establishment in 1921 of the Chamber of Princes. The Chamber is not a legislative or governing body. It resembles rather the beginnings of an august Trade Union. Its proceedings are private. Its decisions do not bind the Princes as a group or individually.

“Some of the more important Princes have hitherto refused to attend meetings of the Chamber; His Exalted Highness the Nizam has always adopted an attitude of entire detachment from it.”*

It will be remembered that His Exalted Highness the Nizam was the recipient of Lord Reading’s “famous letter.”

Some hundreds of chieftains, through so many decades kept in compulsory peace both with one another and with British India (while Europe and America, for all their civilisation, have found a great many wars necessary), could soon, if so minded, find causes of quarrel involving honour or high economic consequence, and therefore, under the old pre-Kellogg state of things, normally arbitrable by the sword. Let us note some of the causes of inflammation already in existence.

Nearly every State has had losses of territory to British India. Nine States of high importance and considerable strength have ceded territory in lieu of a cash payment towards central defence. We have seen that Hyderabad, the premier State, has demanded the reopening of the lease in perpetuity of Berar, and has had the demand refused, not too courteously. The supposition of Indian Nationalists that the Princes would allow them, if the British moved out of India, quietly to take over the present position is as absurd as any supposition could be. State after State would demand its old borders, as a preliminary.

The States consider that the existing Central Government has from time to time gone beyond its strictly legal powers, and has impaired their rights. This contention is just. Even

“The right of the Paramount Power to represent the States in international affairs . . . depends partly on treaties, but to a greater extent on usage.”*

Short of international status, the status of Indian principalities has been often affected in a fashion that may be justified by necessity, but not by law. Is an Indian Central Government to demand abdication of a great Ruling Prince? Or is it to stand by and permit any sort of oppression or even a war between two Princes? I leave aside the still more extreme precedent, not of compulsory abdication merely, but that of the execution of the Raja of Manipur. Common sense suggests that this came under the head of reprisals in war; it did not trouble Indian Princes as did the deposition of the Gaekwar, six years earlier, for the Gaekwar was one of their most powerful and respected members, whereas the Manipur Raja ruled a barbarous jungle territory at the back of beyond. The Princes are restive under payments to the central revenues, under cessions of sovereign rights in the interests of Imperial railways, under public works taken, on by them in response to pressure---such as that related by the authors of The British Crown and the Indian States (pp. 174-5):

“He was persuaded to build a length of line which was to form a link in a strategic through line from north to south, but when fifty miles had been built it was found necessary to change the alignment and even the gauge of the north and south line, and the Nizam was left with a piece of railway leading nowhere, which yields 2 or 3 per cent on the money which was invested in it.”

The encroachments on the rights of the Princes have been probably inevitable and less than one would have expected. But they have occurred, often and in many ways. It would be strange if the Princes were satisfied with the prospect of a transfer of central authority that left things as they are. They are far from satisfied. Indeed, it is ridiculous for Indian Nationalists to assert that

“An Indian Federation, if it is to be a reality, must not only define and regulate the relations between the Commonwealth and the States on a just and equitable footing, but must also lay the foundations of a strong central authority.”*

Such relations must be defined before any Federation comes into existence. The “strong central authority” at present existing is accepted because it is strong. Many of its actions are not acceptable but are now in question. It is accepted also because of the deep and genuine attachment many of the Princes feel for the King-Emperor. They have never wavered or weakened in the emphasis with which they claim that their relations are direct with the Crown of England, that their ties are with a royal line whose antiquity is on an equality with their own. oldest houses. They distinguish between the Viceroy---who represents the King-Emperor---and the Governor-General, whose title goes back to “John Company” days and who is merely the head of the Indian Government, the president of a Cabinet in which they acknowledge no authority. That in practice the distinction is difficult to keep up, since Viceroy and Governor-General are one and the same person, makes no difference in their attitude. It is absurd for any Committee appointed by the National Congress to assume that the suzerainty exercised (in some particulars, the Princes maintain, usurped) by the Central Government is transferable to them by any transaction in which the Princes are not an agreeing third party.

Nor can it be taken for granted that it is only the existing States that have to be considered. The Sikhs, whose showing on the battlefields of eighty years ago is a memory every Indian glories in and whose valour has been proved many times since, would certainly be tempted to revive as a State, and not merely a sect. It is but a few years since the late Lala Rajpat Rai, though a Hindu, toured Sikh villages escorting a lady on horseback, whom he introduced to the Sikhs as their legitimate Queen.

It is not dynastic troubles only that are to be feared. The Princes feel strongly on economic questions. We may briefly consider these under four heads:

(1) Mints and currency.

“There are few subjects on which the States feel more strongly than in regard to mints and currency.”*

“The right of coinage is one of the dearest privileges of sovereignty, and it was with great reluctance that the various Princes gave up their mints.”*

Those who had retained their mints during the War made large sums by taking advantage of the rise in the price of silver.

“It is only natural that those States who gave up their currencies to the benefit of the whole country should look with envy”*

at these profits. All the States claim the right to reopen their mints. They remark that when

“A great number of States had their own separate currencies the business of exchanging one against another or against the Company’s money was no doubt exceedingly annoying to the public and a great hindrance to trade.”*

It was, especially when, as the Butler Report notes was notoriously the case with one particular coinage, the coinage was very debased. The Princes dismiss this difficulty too cavalierly, when their statement concludes:

“As long, however, as the value of the rupee was determined by the value of its silver content, the existence of these various currencies was nothing worse than a nuisance.”*

How bad a nuisance is, depends on your proximity to it. If you are a Prince living in Paris or the Savoy Hotel, London, or benevolently watching the evolutions of your stud of polo ponies on some sandy beach in England, it is a murmur carried from a world so far away that it has hardly the consistency even of dreams. If you are an Indian peasant, whose income is trivial and whose person is negligible, it matters a great deal as to how many currencies and what sort of currencies are forced upon you.

Meanwhile, let the reader note that eight States retain their mints, and the others claim the right to reopen them.

(2) Postal services.

Fifteen States have their own postal departments still. That more have not may be partly due to the fact that the Imperial postal service shows an annual deficit. Five of the fifteen States have a system of co-operation with the Imperial postal service, and their stamps are valid for all India, but not overseas. The postage of the other ten States is valid only within their own borders.

That the idea of having your own postal service and your own effigy on stamps makes an appeal to vanity, supposing that such a passion can arise in the East, is obvious. That these varying postal systems, like the currencies, are among the many things that have no sort of political reference and cannot be laid to the charge of the British Government, and yet keep India economically weak, is equally obvious. That an extension of this nuisance is possible, if an Independent India comes into being, is also obvious.

(3) Customs and Tariffs.

Many States impose small octroi duties. But at present they do not share the protectionist sentiment of British India, though---just as the South in the United States has begun to be in favour of high tariffs, now that it is becoming industrialised---we may expect to see an increase of this, when the industrialisation of British India, now proceeding so rapidly, spreads to Native India. As things are, they have a grievance against the Imperial Government, in that they get no share of the revenue (and they feel they need revenue, and are poor compared with British India) raised in the great sea-ports, and yet have to pay the enhanced prices of protected goods. If their protests fail against the “big business” of British India, they are not unlikely to increase and extend their octroi system, as a way to increase of revenue. If there comes about a Zollverein, it is likely to be one of the States, particularly of those whose borders are contiguous, against the rest of India. They resent it that at present they cannot be consulted on tariff changes in British India, though the tariffs will touch their pockets.

What is an Independent India going to do when confronted by an alliance of States demanding a share of the revenue collected in Karachi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta? Other questions that will be raised at the same time are those of a share in the Salt Monopoly and in Excise Duties. To this the Nationalist will probably reply: “We shall abolish the Salt Monopoly, as an iniquitous impost crushing the poorest. We shall have no Excise Duties problem, since India, as has often been declared, will be a Prohibition country.” It would be flippant to suggest that the States may then demand a share in the boot-legging industries of the great sea-ports. But there is certain to be friction over the whole field of customs, tariffs, and inland revenue generally, unless some machinery of agreement is set up.

(4) Railways.

The States are dissatisfied with their share of India’s railway traffic. They have grievances against the railways outside their territories, as when the Rewa State, having electrified its collieries at considerable cost, finds that higher rates are charged for carrying its coal than are charged for carrying the coal of the Central Provinces, which are in British India.

The Railways are bound up with Indian policy. Most of them

“were built from capital raised in the open market with or without a guarantee by the Government of India of a minimum rate of interest.”

The Princes now demand to have civil jurisdiction over the lines passing through their territory. This demand the Butler Commission considers cannot be granted.

What Is the Nationalist Attitude Towards the Princes?

The Swarajist Party have never faced the problem squarely. This does not mean that they do not discuss it. They discuss few subjects more. But they have no ideas on it. They have inside knowledge of a few cases where Princes are dependent on the British connection and would be ejected if that connection snapped. From this it is assumed that the departure of the British would see Nationalist India faced by a group of cravens who would willingly---those popular enough with their own folk to be able to stay at all---accept any terms offered as the price of survival. They enormously overrate the extent to which the Princes have been impressed by the strength of the Swarajist Party. They underrate equally enormously the strength of the position that the best of the Princes have made for themselves.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, in his Presidential Address at the last Congress, on December 29, 1929, spoke (as reported by the New York Times) in the following statesmanlike fashion:

“Mr. Nehru attacked vested interests and declared himself a Socialist-Republican and no believer in Kings. He described the rule of Indian Native States as a relic of bygone days.”

I have no affection for kings. But I am dealing not with what may (or may not) be ideal for India, but with possibilities, and am looking for the next step, anxious by all means to avoid bloodshed and misery. Mr. Nehru’s description of the rule of Indian Native States is a fine gesture. The Nationalist Party of late has been lavish in gestures; if India can be governed by gestures or be made economically prosperous by them, she is indeed fortunate. It is very noble to refuse to confer either with the Government or with the Native Princes. To the new advanced wing of the Nationalist Party, who delight in being as ultra-modern as the former political extremists delighted in being ultra-conservative, it is very satisfying to describe the States as “a relic of bygone days.” But what kind of a relic is Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru himself? We read that he led the procession of the National Congress into Lahore, himself mounted on a white charger, followed by thirteen elephants and an army of khaki-clad valiants.

I turn from Philip drunk to Philip sober. Before the British Government offered a triangular round table conference the Nehru Report itself urged it. Its word on this States problem was this sane one:

“Indeed if there ever was a case for a round table conference at which a perfect understanding could easily be reached it was this. With the representatives of the princes, of their people, of the British government and of the people of British India assembled at such a conference all difficulties could have been solved with mutual goodwill.”*

I would delete the word “easily”---for the solution is going to be confoundedly difficult. But this is the only way out. Peace and a future of increasing prosperity can come out of full consultation in a spirit of resolution to find peace, and nothing less. They will not come by chargers and elephants and speeches.

Elsewhere, the Nehru Report, as I have said earlier, is querulous and undecided on this Princes matter. Here is a threat:

“We must sound a note of warning that the natural and the legitimate aspirations of India cannot and will not be allowed to be defeated or checkmated by ingenious arguments which have no application to facts as they are---”

the arguments being those of the legal rights of the Princes. In the Constitution the Nehru Committee has drawn up (to be established either in the event of “dominion status” or of independence),

“we have provided that . . . the Commonwealth shall exercise the same rights in relation to, and discharge the same obligations towards, the Indian States as the Government of India exercised and discharged previous to the passing of this Act.”

What those rights are is made clear:

“The fact is that the Government of India have acquired certain powers by mere practice, usage or convention which are outside the scope of the written treaties.”

“It is well known that the Political Secretary of the Government of India exercises vast powers over the Indian States.”

“By usage or convention, or as a necessary corollary to the paramountcy of British power, the Government of India have claimed and exercised the right of (a) ‘installing’ princes on the gaddis,* (b) administering the States during the minority of the ruler, (c) settling disputes between rulers and their jagirdars* and (d) interfering in cases of gross misrule. ... We think that the plain fact ought not to be overlooked that the Government of India as a dominion will be as much the King’s government as the present Government of India is, and that there is no constitutional objection to the dominion government of India stepping into the shoes of the present Government of India.”

There are other plain facts that ought not to be overlooked, and to these I now propose to attend. Our conclusion will be largely platitudes.

What Should Be Done?

There are many things that are “unthinkable”---to use a word frequent in discussions of India.

(1) That Nationalist India should coerce the Princes. It is a charge that the British Government have “emasculated” the people, by taking over all military functions and recruiting its native troops largely from the States. At any rate, the Princes have their own forces and a tradition of independence, with frequent experience of war, formerly against, now on behalf of, the British Raj. A glance at the map will show that a large number of the most important States have contiguous borders; there is at least the possibility of a block of powerful States cutting India in half. Nationalist India could not coerce the Princes. And the Princes are in no mood to suffer coercion. Neither are they so convinced of the overwhelming superiority of that system of British India, into whose “shoes” the National Congress proposes to step, that they will quietly accept a change of suzerainty, merely because (at Lahore, or elsewhere) a parliament in which they are unrepresented carries the change with acclamation.

(2) That the British Government should go back on its treaties to support the Princes, who have supported it with magnificent loyalty in the past. The Princes can be transferred only with their willing consent.

(3) That India should be allowed to lapse into wretchedness. This, as I have shown, is of two kinds. It is commonly assumed that the only ruin possible is that caused by war, and it pleases Nationalists to dismiss this as an imagination of the British Imperialist. I think that economic chaos, from the assertion of individual rights of coining, postal systems, tariff walls at ridiculously short distances of each other, is equally possible.

(4) That the subjects of the Princes should remain as they are, when the rest of India gets self-government. The Nehru Report comments justly on the present position:

“They (the States) are in all stages of development, patriarchal, feudal or more advanced, while in a few States are found the beginnings of representative institutions. The characteristic features of all of them, however, including the most advanced, are the personal rule of the prince and his control over legislation and the administration of justice.”

“It is inconceivable that the people of the States, who are fired by the same ambitions and aspirations as the people of British India, will quietly submit to existing conditions for ever, or that the people of British India, bound by the closest ties of family, race, and religion to their brethren on the other side of an imaginary line, will never make common cause with them.”

Since a solution by the sword is out of the question, a solution might be reached by the Princes all, the whole 562, abdicating from their position, by an act of unselfish sacrifice which makes the abdication of the Samurai in Japan seem a small thing. This, too, is “unthinkable”---that is, it is not going to happen.

I continue my platitudes. The British Government, by preventing any change, except the most gradual, in either the theoretical rights of the Princes or the actual rights of their subjects, has kept the peace over a sub-continent through seventy years. This is no mean achievement, though no thanks need be looked for. But the whole business of the States is hopelessly in arrears. You cannot hold up even Asia for ever. “If ever there was a case for a round table conference it is this.” Why, having uttered this word of sense in 1928. the Nationalist Party should go back on it in 1929. is a question the outside world is entitled to ask. Everything is in confusion, and everything calls for the fullest reconsideration. The Princes, having long foreseen the arrival of some such crisis as the present, have developed a considerable degree of cohesion. Even in this, though they have not yet admitted it or even seen it (in all probability), there is the beginning of that voluntary curtailment of individual power which is unavoidable. If the States come into an Indian federation, necessarily they will submit to limitation of their separate authority. They are prepared to accept this, though reluctantly, on their own terms, aware that there is no escaping its necessity. You must have a Central Government, if India is to be powerful and economically sound, a Government that in important matters acts and legislates for the whole of India.

“It would be, in our opinion, a most one-sided arrangement if the Indian States desire to join the federation, so as to influence by their votes and otherwise, the policy and legislation of the Indian Legislature, without submitting themselves to common legislation passed by it.”*

“But it must be clearly borne in mind that it would necessitate, perhaps in varying degrees, a modification of the system of government and administration prevailing within their territories.”

All this is true. A large degree of both internal and external independence must be sacrificed, unless India is to be either given up to war, as China is, or else become one of those nominally self-governing countries that by their feebleness and inefficiency invite the ridicule of the outside world. This is asking a very high degree of patriotism from the Princes. If a peaceful solution is to be found in India, it means sacrifice all round. The Nationalists will have to sacrifice their gestures and their impatience. Since nations began, there has never been a job comparable in difficulty to this one of starting India out on a self-governing career. It is nonsense to fix time-limits of three months or a year, within which a complete scheme is to be evolved. The task of making a constitution for India looms as close to impossibility as any task man has set himself. It can be achieved by courage, patience, patriotism. The parties must be persuaded to meet. Afterwards, in some way, machinery must be set up which will satisfy the lesser chieftains (whom it may be possible to get to accept the status of barons---they are nothing more), will give the real States genuine power to influence the legislation of Dominion India (which they will have to obey and enforce), will not infringe whatever rights the States refuse to give up and by agreement keep, and will make a strong Central Power. “The ends of the world” have come upon the heads of this generation. Everything---the revenues, tariffs, excise, income tax, railways, rights of the Princes’ subjects---needs some arrangement that will provide for peaceful readjustment whenever called for.

I may be reminded that I have said nothing of the sacrifice the British Government will have to make. Well, some power must guarantee any settlement. Great Britain had to guarantee France and Germany, at Locarno, against each other’s aggression. There can be no Indian settlement, as between British and Native India, without the British taxpayer, that universal drudge, being in the end prepared to see it kept.

Finally, the British Government is the only party that can persuade the Princes to come into a Round Table Conference.

Chapter II

Defence: External and Internal

Look at the map. India’s coast-line of 6,000 miles throws her on the mercy of any naval power.

Thrust out into burning waters---with no land between Ceylon and the Antarctic snows---her position does not encourage marine activity, although a few of her people (the Marathas, skilful pirates formerly along the Malabar coast, and the Arabs who have settled at points on the same shores) are bold sailors. An Independent India would no doubt maintain some sort of navy, but it would be an absurdly inefficient one. Conditions of all-the-year-round service in her cruel seas would be excessively hard. If England had been set in tropic seas, she would never have become a naval power.

Mr. Garratt suggests that an Independent India would have the benefit of a Monroe Doctrine extended to her by Great Britain. It may be so. Just as one cannot imagine the United States, after leaving the Philippines, allowing any other Power to occupy them, so it is not easy to think of Great Britain quietly watching Japan (to take the Power nearest geographically) take her place in India. But I doubt if this analogy holds. England grows less imperialist in sentiment, and increasingly aware of the shadows her own problems throw. We must be close to the limit of the burdens the British taxpayer will undertake. He complains of having to finance Mesopotamia, and suspects that Palestine, official figures to the contrary notwithstanding, is costing him something. India is far further from him than the Philippines are from the American. I cannot believe that England, once compelled to abandon her Eastern interests, would ever go to the expense involved in a return to them. It would be a purely quixotic war, this hypothetical one to rescue India which had no use for the English in peace but could not save itself when they were gone. And an England that had lost its far-flung power and shrunk into being an island folk would be far too poor to do anything.

India’s Land Frontiers

It is commonly assumed that to North and East are no serious risks. China and Tibet are not of combatant rank, as that counts among Powers beyond the bow-and-arrow stage. This may be accepted, despite the fact that queer things have happened on this northern frontier. In 1792, for example, a Chinese army overran Nepal---which only a little over twenty years later handled with great severity a series of British invasions. Even more surprising was the feat of the “hardy troops of the Grand Lama,”* in 1842, when in the depth of winter they massacred a Sikh army that had dared to invade Tibet.

Nevertheless, I cannot convince myself that military prowess on the part of either China or Tibet is anything but a temporary eccentricity. Nepal is a different matter. The whole world has heard of the Gurkha’s prowess. There was a certain tendency during the War to “crab” it, provoked by praise of the Gurkha at the expense of other Indian troops. I have heard an officer commanding a non-Gurkha Indian battalion point out bitterly that “before now the Gurk has been first in a two-legged race. Look at France!” But, though the Gurkhas (like other Indian troops) found the conditions in Flanders almost more than flesh and blood could bear, they retrieved every bit of reputation in Mesopotamia. There is no doubt that Nepal has an army of first-class soldiers. The army is too small to conquer India, but could (if so disposed) in the absence of the British overrun a considerable part of it, and cause a process of disintegration to set in. We need not, however, suppose that Nepal would be unfriendly to her larger neighbour.

I am not going to exaggerate the dangers of the North-western frontier. But, historically, until the eighteenth century, when sea-power displaced all other power, India’s political destiny revolved on the pivot of Afghanistan. For centuries she was invaded through those passes, and endured untold wretchedness. Her Moslem rulers had their real homes in Central Asia, were kings of Kabul and Samarkand, and India until at least Akbar’s time (and even then, so far as many of the sources of their strength were concerned) was a dependency. When Russia began her rapid conquest of the Turkestan chieftains, Anglo-India built up a new terror. All through last century the shadow of Russian invasion lay over British thought concerning India. It attained epic expression in Andrew Lang’s sonnet on Colonel Burnaby:

“Thou that on every field of earth and sky
Didst hunt for Death, who seemed to flee and fear,
How great and greatly fallen dost thou lie
Slain in the Desert by some wandering spear!
‘Not here, alas!’ may England say---‘not here,
Nor in this quarrel was it meet to die,
But in that dreadful battle drawing nigh,
To thunder through the Afghan passes sheer.

Like Aias by the ships shouldst thou have stood,
And in some glen have stayed the stream of flight,
The bulwark of thy people and their shield,
When Indus or when Helmund ran with blood,
And back into the Northland and the Night
The stricken Eagles scattered from the field.’”

It was Russia, too, that called forth Sir William Watson’s sonnets in the eighties, and inspired this prophecy of how children might one day be amused by their elders:

“In a false dream I saw the Foe prevail.
The war was ended; the last smoke had rolled
Away: and we, erewhile the strong and bold,
Stood broken, humbled, withered, weak and pale,
And moaned, ‘Our greatness is become a tale
To tell our children’s babes when we are old.
They shall put by their playthings to be told
How England once, before the years of bale,
Throned above trembling, puissant, grandiose, calm,
Held Asia’s richest jewel in her palm.”

Exactly what does this supposed North-western menace amount to at present? Not a great deal, if India chooses the path of wisdom. If a peaceful settlement can be brought about, and can bring in all parties concerned, India is safe. A century ago, Ranjit Singh, though with hard fighting and some defeats, more than held the Punjab against Afghanistan. If the Sikhs remain loyal to a federated India, the North-west border is safe against Afghanistan alone. If the Princes co-operate within a federated India, Nepal would not be a danger, and in any case would probably continue her present friendly relations. If India is a Dominion, the British Navy secures her shores and commerce, and the Empire guarantees her frontiers.

The military expenditure of India is grossly exaggerated abroad.* It is between 180 and 185 million dollars, on Army and Navy together, 24.5 per cent of the expenditure of all the Governments, Central and Provincial together. This, for the 330 million people of India and Burma, works out at under sixty cents a person. The real grievances of India are not the expense of its defence, but that the Army is illogically organised, that Indianisation of the Native Army has proceeded far too slowly, and that the Army is established partly on the old basis of being an Army of Occupation. It is self-respect, rather than India’s purse, that is wronged. It is inconceivable that this condition of things should continue much longer. It will disappear automatically, with the coming of Dominion Status or of any substantial instalment and guarantee of it. In a settlement, India will save on her military costs, but will have to contribute more to the general Navy. At present, she pays only $500,000 a year, and in addition supports the Indian Marine, which is a small service for coastal and transport purposes.

Chapter III

Communal Divisions

“India is divided into innumerable groups, based on religious differences, the members of which never intermarry with those outside their group, have no social relations with them.”*

Each group in time of stress expects assistance from its individual components all over India, while the Mohammedans never forget that they have co-religionists outside India.

“The Hindu ryot, when danger threatens, looks to his village caste mates, the Moslem ryot to other Moslem ryots . . . So in nineteenth century England, any social upheaval would have driven two fellow farm-workers, one to his chapel and the other to his parson. Now, as likely as not, it would send them both to a trades-union organiser for advice.”*

Communal bitterness is in part engendered by memory. The Sikhs, a minority in the Punjab, have not forgotten that they ruled it less than ninety years ago. The Mohammedans have not forgotten, though now outnumbered and inferior in education, that they once broke the heathen in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Hindus have legendary glories of their own, and a fierce conviction of intellectual superiority, as well as one that the land is theirs by immemorial right. Hindus and Sikhs have not forgotten persecution at the hands of Mohammedan invaders, and of the more bigoted Mohammedan rulers, such as Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan. In South India, the depressed classes have of late raised an impudently seditious head. A strong non-Brahman party, the Justice Party, has been organised, and has given the Brahmans a bad time. In many parts, the depressed classes, seeking right of access, after millenniums of refusal, to wells and roads and temples, have applied sound Hindu methods. The struggle at Vykom, in Travancore, is an interesting episode. The Vykom untouchables live in a swamp, and had to make a long detour to avoid the temple and the Brahmans’ houses. A young Syrian Christian led the revolt. The State of Travancore arrested the resisters, who sought to use the road, until the prisons were full.

“The crisis came when this part of the country became flooded with water during the monsoon. The water on the road reached as high as the waists of the passive resisters. The military police were allowed by the State to moor boats across the road, and to stand in them while on guard. The plight of the passive resisters became more and more pitiable; but they endured these hardships bravely and never gave way for a single hour. In the end, after many months of such endurance, the State was able at last, with the consent of the Brahmins, to open the road.”*

I think Mr. Andrews is mistaken in that last statement, though he was an eye-witness of the struggle. The problem was “solved” by the making of a new road, for untouchables only.

The British Government, facing the most complex political problem ever set before any Power, has to consider appeals and protests, all alike strongly worded yet praying for exactly opposite ends.

The commonest shot in the Extremist’s locker is the charge, made in season and out of season in India, and in America cropping up in the questions after every lecture on the Indian situation, that the Government deliberately foments communal outbreaks, on the Roman principle, divide et impera. Like many shots in his armament, though the Extremist does not see this, it has a boomerang quality. Hindus and Mohammedans are poor, silly creatures if, after all their parade of co-operation and unity, in this year of grace 1930 the Government can still “pull off” so elementary and obvious a trick against them. Any one who knows the drawn, anxious look that comes into the face of police officer or district magistrate, as one of the major festivals of either religion approaches---any one who can imagine himself into the position of the lonely official in an upcountry town where he can call on only a handful of police armed with old-time martinis that will carry about a hundred yards (and hardly so far without divagation) and where he is face to face with the unknown but immense potentialities of the bazaar for mischief, with all its congregated idleness and unscrupulous zeal---any one who can guess the worry that besets authority in the vast cities where either community has wealth and organisation and numbers and incessant, suspicious watchfulness---will know whether it is plausible that these riots are deliberately brought on. It is queer that so many people can, apparently, believe in the picture of one British official here, and a couple there, sitting unmoved while mobs butcher each other.

Nevertheless, even the crudest superstitions arise from a seed of reasonableness. Part of the trouble between Great Britain and the Arabs is due to the fact that the former has been represented by men of great quality who have become enthusiastically pro-Arab. In their excessive friendliness they have often promised “beyond the book,” and the upshot has been a charge of broken faith against their Government. So in India. To the average Englishman the metaphysical subtleties and the caste and ritual niceties of Hinduism have made little appeal, whereas the manly straightforwardness of Sikh or Mohammedan has at once made him feel he was in a world that he understood and one without pitfall or ambush. It seems easier for an alien to make friends with Mohammedans than with Hindus. This has led to careless remarks in the past---and it is astonishing how long an Englishman’s remark may live on and work havoc in India. I do not know how often Hindus have quoted to me the joke of a Lieutenant-Governor who ruled a Province where Mohammedans outnumbered Hindus and (for reasons very obvious, when you know the circumstances) gave far less trouble, that he had “two co-wives, one Hindu and one Mohammedan, and of the two preferred the Mohammedan.” The Englishman’s besetting sin of ironic jesting, sometimes in none too good taste, brings him to grief with the outside world.

Let us note how the “communal principle” came into Indian politics. The blame for this is put on the British Government. It must be shared by all the parties concerned. The Nationalist Movement for its first twenty years was overwhelmingly Hindu. Under Tilak, it became fiercely, even savagely, Hindu in sentiment, as well as in numbers and momentum. Tilak was a Brahman, and like his grand hero, Sivaji, he “protected cows and Brahmans.” In pursuit of this high purpose, he austerely discouraged Mohammedanism, like every other form of naughtiness. The anti-Partition agitation (1905) was a Hindu Nationalist agitation, for the Mohammedans, everywhere in India at last raising their heads, in the newly made Province of East Bengal and Assam found themselves in a majority. Their support of the Partition called forth the gratifying remark about the “two co-wives.” The Hindu rage to have the Partition annulled was part of the general Hindu excitement all over India. The Mohammedan reply was to found the Muslim League, in 1907, which approached the Viceroy and asked for representation on all official bodies, not merely in proportion to their numbers, but with regard to their political importance. They received a sympathetic answer, and in the Morley-Minto Reforms (1909) the communal principle appeared. It may be conceded, then, that the Government flung into Modern India the apple of discord, so far as discord has proceeded from politics.

But it was done in response to request. Nor was the request unreasonable. The Hindu Nationalist is doctrinaire and idealist. The vote of the majority will decide, he says. It never will, except among a people inured to peace among themselves and in all their main communities satisfied that they get fair representation. In most of India, the Mohammedans are far behind the Hindus in wealth and education. But if it came to a physical tussle, they would scatter the Hindus like chaff, unless hopelessly outnumbered. They believe this;* and so does every one else. In practice, the communal principle is often absurd---as are many other things, part of the administration of more advanced communities than those of India, which nevertheless it is not easy to get rid of. I never met any official with the least love for it. But it is this, or else leaving the Mohammedans almost without representation in the Legislatures and the Services of some of the chief Provinces. In my part of India, the Mohammedans were few and ignorant; Out of close on a thousand students, our College never had half-a-dozen Mohammedans, and among these I do not remember one in a dozen years who was more than just sub-respectable as a scholar. The 900-odd Hindu students would be striving for a handful of official jobs, knowing how remote the chance of even a brilliant student was. But the jobs “reserved” for Mohammedans, though fewer, were too many to be filled except with great difficulty. I knew that if I could coach some Mohammedan outstanding duffer up to a low educational standard---if some harassed and overworked examiner in a moment of aberration or leniency let him through an examination which thousands of Hindus passed with ease---he was sure of a post that would put him on a level with Hindus of far higher mental gifts. Yet even here (if we are to talk with the musing frankness that Englishmen in India use when alone together and at leisure) there is something to set on the other side of the account. If you take a long view of Hindu and Mohammedan officials’ careers, I think you will find that, though at the start the Hindu is usually the cleverer man, as time goes on they level up. The Mohammedan makes good, and often makes better (if I may coin an idiom). But you must give him time.

If the British walk out of India, and leave it free, as a cockpit is left free, things will get sorted out, and it will not be by voting alone, nor solely according to educational qualifications. When the Partition was annulled, in 1911, the Government made a doubtful gain (if their aim really were “to divide and rule”) at the cost of a certain loss. The Bengali Hindus were slightly mollified by the annulment, and considerably crestfallen at the change of the Imperial capital from their city Calcutta to the Mohammedan city of Delhi; the Mohammedans were vexed at being thrust back into a position of minority in Bengal. The Mohammedans remained largely outside the Congress, until Mr. Gandhi’s adoption of the aims of the Khilafat Movement made a temporary alliance. That alliance was foreshadowed by the “pact” at the Lucknow Congress of 1916. By that pact---and by every subsequent traffic between Hindus and Mohammedans---the communal principle has been kept. The Mohammedan community attaches the utmost importance to it.

Until Mohammedans, Sikhs, and Hindus take the attitude of Catholics in Great Britain and America, that in political and public matters they are patriots first and members of a religious body second, the communal principle will be necessary. The Nehru Constitution is fissured with disagreement. Its fair face of unity is scarred with stern and largely unsuccessful bargaining. The Mohammedans insist on the separation of Sind from the Bombay Presidency, on reserved majorities in three of the proposed Provinces of New India, and on a certain minimum of representation elsewhere. The Hindus protest against these claims, or yield reluctantly and with murmurs (extremely audible throughout the Nehru Report). Then the Sikhs step in, and definitely forbid the consent the Hindus have just unwillingly given.

The climax of this distressing state of disharmony was reached in the last Congress, at Lahore. The Sikhs are one per cent of the total population of India and Burma. It is therefore obvious, to any one with a democratic mind, that they should be content to be unrepresented in New India. De minimis non curat lex. But they are the finest fighters in India, now as a hundred years ago. By their religion---a thing for which they died in thousands before, and would die again---a Sikh is no Sikh when unarmed. So the Nehru Constitution, Article IV of which says:

“The right of free expression of opinion, as well as the right to assemble peaceably and without arms, and to form associations or unions, is hereby guaranteed for purposes not opposed to public order or morality,”

later on slips in a Note:

“Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in article (IV) the Sikhs are entitled to carry kripans.”

Kripans are swords. The Nehru Commission have made efforts to obtain concessions to communal claims. But on this Commission the Nationalists have been for the first time really face to face with difficulties that the Administration has battled with all along. The Report has been a failure. It could not be otherwise. Chapter III, on “Reservation of Seats,” despite heroic attempts to keep temper, breaks into querulousness again and again. Since the communal question is perhaps the hardest of all the terrible problems every Indian politician, British or Nationalist or Moderate, has to solve, will the reader steel himself to patience, while I try to make it clear (and simpler than I should, probably)?

The Nehru Report tells us:

“Muslims were insistent on the reservation of seats for the Muslim majorities in the Punjab and Bengal, and the Hindu Maha Sabha and the Sikh League were equally strongly opposed to this.”

“An invitation was therefore sent on June nth to the Hindu Maha Sabha, the All India Muslim League and the Sikh League to send one or two representatives to meet the Committee on June 21st. The response to these invitations was not very encouraging. The secretary of the Hindu Maha Sabha wrote to express his inability to send any representative on that date, and the secretary of the Muslim League did not send any answer at all. The Sikh League were prepared to send representatives, but as the Maha Sabha and Muslim League were not sending any one, our colleague Sardar Mangal Singh did not think it necessary to trouble the Sikh representative to come. Some others who had been personally invited could not come.”

Sixteen pages of more or less courteous sparring bring us to this courageous stand:

“As regards the special claim of the Muslims and Sikhs for greater representation than their population would justify, it is enough to say that, in the view we have expressed above, no such claim is admissible on the part of any community, however important it may consider itself to be.”

“It is enough to say.” “No such claim is admissible.” Brave words! But are they true? “Must, little man! Must! Must is not a word to use to Princes!” said Elizabeth to Robert Cecil. “Inadmissible” is not a word to use to a folk that carry Kripans, and scarcely a dozen years ago were storming the Turk’s impregnable lines at Sannaiyat. The Sikhs are only a little over 11 per cent of the Punjab’s twenty millions, a third of the Hindus, a fifth of the Moslems. But they consider themselves wronged by the Nehru Report, and in specific sections of it spoken of with less respect than is their due. They made no secret of their intention to break up the Lahore Congress of last December. That they did not do it was thanks to the pluck and patience of a handful of British officials, who must still protect the Congress from disturbance, though in the Congress the name of England or of any official is never mentioned except with contumely. Let me quote the London Times (December 30, 1929):

“The Sikhs marched into Lahore today” [December 29] “and held a conference under the walls of the old fort. Various estimates put their number between 9,000 and 12,000. . . .

“This morning I watched the main body arrive on the outskirts of the modern part of the city. From out of a cloud of dust down the road came a party of yellow-clad horsemen, their leaders carrying black standards. They were followed by hundreds on foot, most of whom were armed with lathis [staves], but many carried spears or curved knives in leather scabbards. Two white-bearded Sikhs, mounted on camels, kept up a din on tomtoms, which every now and then was drowned by the hoarse chant of religious invocations. There were many old men in the procession, which was a much more formidable-looking army than that of the Congress volunteers who met Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the other day.

“The procession intended to traverse the main streets of the city. A party of police rushed in motor-vans to the junction of the Lytton-road . . . Vans were drawn across the road, forming a barrier in front of which 24 Gurkhas and a handful of police stood at ease.”

Three Englishmen then walked quietly out to tell the procession there was no thoroughfare. After argument, they carried their point. The procession was deflected, and encamped outside.

“Mr. Gandhi has been endeavouring for several days to smooth the way for an alliance, but the Sikh leaders cannot forget the contemptuous treatment suggested by the Nehru Report, and demand not only admission on a fair basis of representation, but what practically amounts to an apology for the references in the document, even though the latter is now discarded. Even were Mr. Gandhi disposed to offer an apology, which is most unlikely, the two Nehrus and the other leaders refuse to countenance the idea . . . Meanwhile the Moslem minority in the Congress is making a three-cornered duel of it, having obstinately set its face against grovelling to the Sikhs even in the name of independence. . . .

“At 3 o’clock this afternoon all the Sikhs gathered in the vicinity of the railway station to greet Kharak Singh. There followed a procession which was easily the most impressive sight that the streets of Lahore have seen this week. The procession was led by elephants in fighting array, followed by the horsemen of the morning in their yellow robes. The main body was formed of Sikhs who had come from all over the Punjab. . . . The procession marched at a slow pace, the men beating the naked blades of their kripans against the scabbards in rhythm with the roll of the drums. Towards the end of the procession came Kharak Singh, a venerable white-bearded figure in a howdah on a big elephant.

“The whole spectacle was in the strangest of contrasts to Pandit Jawaharlal’s theatrical arrival. Here was no parade of Bengali youths, playing soldiers in khaki uniforms, but file after file of grown men, who, warriors by tradition, marched to the barbaric music of their ancestors, looking as if they had stepped from the ancient mural paintings on the walls of the fort beneath which they will bivouac tonight.”*

The communal principle, then, though freely comminated, will remain. There can be no real progress until it goes. It cannot go except by consent. And it cannot go unless the different systems of religion in India all overhaul their whole thought and practice, as freely as has been done with Christianity in the more civilised lands of the West. It cannot go unless pari passu a lot of other things go as well.

The Hindu-Mohammedan communal quarrel needs separate notice. Its roots are not all religious. Wherever one community has a vast preponderance in numbers and influence as well as in education, the minority keeps quiet enough, as a rule. In purely agricultural districts, again, the people not only understand each other’s systems, but the systems often seem to overlap. Hindus and Mohammedans cheerfully attend each other’s festivals, sing each other’s songs. In the great cities the story is very different. Here the last dozen years have seen a shocking casualty-roll, and the embitterment now goes very deep. Though the Hindus adopted the Khilafat demands, there was an element of patronage in their adoption; Moslems were aware of this, and aware, too, that their comrades did not really believe in the Khilafat Movement or care about it. Its failure, largely because Turkey herself contemptuously threw the Khilafat over, covered the episode with absurdity, and left Mohammedans feeling humiliated, ridiculous, and impotent. This fact furnishes the key to the psychology of the Hindu-Mohammedan troubles. Failure, grotesque as well as complete, has flung Mohammedans into something of a Sinn Fein attitude, “ourselves alone,” with no more faith in Hindu help than in Government sympathy, and defiant to the outside world. At the same time, the old intellectual scorn for Mohammedanism is coming to the surface again in the Hindu community. Hindus feel that Mohammedanism offers little for the mind’s higher qualities, that it is sterile in speculation, emotion, in metaphysical scope and depth. Both communities are riddled with an irritation that goes to their lowest strata, those where the bravoes and hooligans lurk. In this time of strain, causes of offense have abounded. The two commonest of these are now “compendiously referred to as the ‘cow-music’ question.”* Hindus consider that without music a religious procession is a poor affair, and insist on their right to play their best all the time, even (or especially) before a mosque. Mohammedans insist on sacrificing cows, especially at the Bakr-id celebration. The heads of the two communities are constantly meeting to settle these differences. Out of regard for Hindu susceptibilities, Moslem leaders have sometimes got a pronouncement that some other animal may lawfully be sacrificed, in place of a cow. But substitutes are rarely acceptable. It would be useless for President Hoover to issue an ulema, that on Thanksgiving Day good citizens must dine on mutton and boiled carrots, in place of turkey and cranberry sauce. Speaking before the Legislative Assembly, on August 29, 1927, Lord Irwin pointed out that in less than 18 months between 250 and 300 had been killed, and over 2,500 injured, in Hindu-Mohammedan strife. “From April to July last year, Calcutta seemed to be under the mastery of some evil spirit.” I remember a distinguished Hindu historian at that time rejoicing, in my drawing-room at Oxford, that “for the first time in history the Mohammedan casualties have been greater than the Hindu ones.” I reproved him, a mild Hindu, for speaking thus. “I am not a mild Hindu,” he replied. “I am sick of being a mild Hindu. I repeat it. The Mohammedan casualties have been greater than ours.” Lord Irwin begged the leaders of both communities to gather and find some way of peace. They met in Simla, early in September. It was wasted time.

“From the beginning a profound difference of opinion between the Muslim and Hindu members of the Conference showed itself clearly. The Muslims insisted that until agreement had been reached between the two communities on political questions there could be no peace. The Hindus, however, urged that social and religious grievances ought to be discussed and decided in the first place.”*

Only the cow-music could be handled;

“the real points at issue between the two communities, namely, their widely divergent views on such matters as joint versus communal electorates, the redistribution of provinces, and representation of the communities in the services, were not touched, for the reason that, in the existing state of feeling, any discussion of these burning questions would have broken up the Conference in disorder. Even with the discussion restricted as mentioned above, it was found impossible to come to any general agreement, and in the end the Conference dissolved, without having realised any of the hopes of its promoters.”

The Congress now convened a Unity Conference in Calcutta, October 27, 1927. Anxious to present a Treaty of Peace, it tactfully left unrepresented the real belligerents, the All-India Muslim League and the Hindu Maha Sabha, the two great communal organisations, both of which dissent from any action of the Congress as often as they support it. It was agreed that Hindus should be free to “process” and to make music before mosques, but they must not stand still in front of mosques while playing. Moslems were to be free to sacrifice cows, but secretly. The bitter political ambitions and severances of the communities were left undiscussed. Conversion or reconversion was to be permitted, so long as force was not used and the convert was over eighteen.

Mr. Gandhi has spoken of Hindu-Muslim quarrels as his main preoccupation during thirty years. In Calcutta, May 1, 1925, he said:

“I have admitted my incompetence. I have admitted that I have been found wanting as a physician prescribing a cure for this malady. I do not find that either Hindus or Musalmans are ready to accept my cure and therefore I simply nowadays confine myself to a passing mention of this problem and content myself by saying that one day or other we Hindus and Musalmans will have to come together, if we want the deliverance of our country; and if it is to be our lot that before we can come together we must shed one another’s blood, then I say the sooner we do so the better it is for us. If we propose to break one another’s heads, let us do so in a manly way; let us not, then, shed crocodile tears, let us not ask for sympathy from any quarter, if you do not propose to give any quarter. That is what I have to say about Hindu-Muslim unity. . . .

“To revile one another’s religion, to make reckless statements, to utter untruth, to break the heads of innocent men, to desecrate temples or mosques, is a denial of God. The world is watching---some with glee and some with sorrow---the dog-fight that is proceeding in our midst. We have listened to Satan. . . .

“India is racial today. The general body of the people are filled with ill will, because they are weak and hopelessly ignorant of the way to shed their weakness. I am transferring the ill will from men to things.”*

If England walked out of India, India could not escape that bitterest of wars, a religious war. There is hope in a Round Table Conference, where the forces of order---the Government and the Princes---meet the forces of hope and aspiration---Nationalists, Moderates and Swarajists alike, Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians. Dominion Status, a securely established goal set forth after unhurried discussion and the most patriotic, self-forgetting work by all parties, will see India on her way to a peaceful future. A Round Table Conference should be able by agreement to start in action machinery that would in the course of a few years automatically eliminate the communal principle from all representation.

Part III — Practical

Chapter I

Dominion Status

Dominion Status No New Aim

It is strange that Lord Irwin’s declaration should have so vexed some. If anything is plain, this is: we could have looked to nothing less, unless we are liars, and have been so all along. “Dominion Status” was not on the horizon when the Queen’s 1858 proclamation was made. There were no “Dominions,” in the modern sense. The Great War showed this phoenix arisen. During that War, Indians, in the absence of so many British officers on one kind of War service or another, found themselves in numerous positions of high authority to which they had obtained only occasional and grudging admission before. They were taken also to the Peace Conference, and into consultation by the British Cabinet. It was absurd to suppose that, when Peace brought the absentees flooding back to India, there would be a contented acceptance of “as you were.” It was absurd not to see how high Indian expectations had flown, after all the praise of the gallantry and value of their troops. I do not take the view that self-government was due to India, as a reward for her War services. Self-government is a right, not a decoration. But the opinion surely is an ordinary one, that you cannot in decency ask other men to give their lives for you, unless you “take them in on the ground floor.”

The Punjab clash to the historian will one day seem almost an inevitable thing. You had the return to the military province (whose people had won Victoria Crosses and had fought beside British troops) of British officers and officials in whom (as in all of us) the post-War fever of exasperation and quickness to anger and action were working. Have you forgotten your mood of 1919 and 1920? It is not your 1930 mood. There are shadows of the mind, as of the atmosphere, which pass swiftly over the dying grass of the generations and are lost to all memory. You can see, too, the sullen face of India, as its people realised that they had pitched their hopes of the post-War situation far too high, and that, moreover, the incoming officials expected them to take up contentedly their old subordination and limited spheres.

Is it too much to ask that even Amritsar may now be considered in perspective, and not in isolation? As men returned to their normal avocations, peace almost everywhere proceeded to show, grimly enough, that she had her victories no less than war. In the lately belligerent countries of, Europe, revolution, counter-revolution, repression, shootings down that even by the Amritsar comparison were not contemptible, took place. We have forgotten these. In America, lynching, which died down during the War, reached such proportions (84, as against 38 in 1917) that protest meetings were held in New York. England and Scotland had strikes, angrier than the pre-War industrial troubles. Afghanistan, unprovoked, invaded India. It is time that Amritsar ceased to be brought forward as if it were characteristic and normal in the practice of the Indian authorities.

If the words “Dominion Status” startled a section of the British public, they had been in the Government’s thought a long while. Mr. Montagu’s famous declaration of August 20, 1917, promised on behalf of the British Government

“the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.”

If that does not mean the status enjoyed by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the other Dominions, what does it mean? I open the Yearbook of the Indian Government; the one for 1924-5 happens to lie handiest. It has the usual Prefatory Note:

“The task of preparing this report for presentation to Parliament has been entrusted by the Government of India to Professor L. F. Rushbrook Williams, C.B.E., and it is now presented under authority and with general approval of the Secretary of State for India; but it must not be understood that the approval either of the Secretary of State or of the Government of India extends to every particular expression of opinion.”

The disclaimer cannot (and, of course, does not) apply to the general trend of the book’s argument. This compilation has been annually “presented to Parliament.” If Parliament has not read it, if Lord Birkenhead when Secretary of State for India did not read it (it went out issued under his authority and with his general approval), that only means that Parliament and Lord Birkenhead did not live up to their duties and privileges. It does not in the least invalidate the book’s standing. I look up in the Index “Dominion---Status,” and find, on turning to the pages indicated, that this Status as the goal of India is throughout accepted as a commonplace of general knowledge. The Indian Navy is discussed on page 6:

“As a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, however, she may expect that the cooperation of the Royal Navy will relieve her from all but a share in the burden of her sea-defence. . . . It seems clear, however, that the advance of the country towards the goal of Dominion Status must entail increasing responsibilities in this, as in other directions.”

On page 23, I read of India’s “newly stimulated ambitions towards Dominion Status.” Who stimulated them? On page 35:

“The policy of the British administration was definitely laid down in 1917 as the progressive realisation of responsible government of the kind enjoyed by the self-governing Dominions of the British Commonwealth. Thus, the aims of the educated classes, as gradually evolved from the early days of the Indian National Congress, have received, as it were, the stamp of official approval.”

“Dominion Status” has for years been the declared aim of our policy. So far from embarrassing the Simon Commission by their declaration, Lord Irwin and Mr. Wedgwood Benn merely cleared away confusion that had arisen after a period of prolonged bad temper, and did a great service by making our good faith plain to the whole world. It is not---as so many in America have been led to believe---a precarious and swiftly passing possibility, that the Independent Labour Group may persuade Mr. Ramsay MacDonald to commit an unwilling nation, granting Dominion Status hurriedly, before he is thrown out of power. It is a certainty that every party in Great Britain is pledged up to the hilt to grant nothing less, with the least delay that the situation will permit. The present Viceroy was sent out by the Conservative Party, of which he was a prominent member. He cannot be supposed ignorant of his Party’s commitments---which, indeed, are the whole Nation’s commitments. It is true that certain men whose names bulk largely in the news have been mobilising themselves in opposition. But this is because Indian Extremists have made the confiscation of British capital and the repudiation of debts at least as prominent as their claim for self-government, because some of these opponents have given the most trivial fraction of their public career to studying the truth of the Indian situation, and because some of them do not believe in self-government anywhere. They cannot alter the fact that since the War the trend of Indian policy has set steadily and strongly towards Dominion Status, and that every Party when in power has sanctioned public declaration of this.

Advantages to India of Dominion Status

The advantages of Dominion Status for India were well set forth by Mr. C. R. Das, May 2, 1925:

“The Empire idea gives us a vivid sense of many advantages. Dominion Status today is in no sense servitude. It is essentially an alliance by consent of those who form part of the Empire, for material advantages in the real spirit of co-operation. . . . It is realised that under modern conditions no nation can live in isolation, and Dominion Status, while it affords complete protection to each constituent composing the great Commonwealth of Nations called the British Empire, secures to each the rights to realise itself, develop itself, and fulfil itself, and therefore it expresses and implies all the elements of Swaraj which I have mentioned.”

Undoubtedly, the humiliation felt because of the treatment of Indians by certain Dominions has done much to intensify the longing for Dominion Status. Indians are convinced that, as a Dominion, they could obtain the respect and fair treatment which membership of the Empire has failed to win for them. The Imperial War Conference in 1918 passed a Resolution which all the Dominions accepted, except South Africa; by this Resolution, while each country in the Empire reserved the right to control the composition of its own population, British citizens from any other country, including India, were to be admitted for temporary visits, and citizens already domiciled were to be allowed to bring in their wives and minor children, provided that this did not mean polygamy. As a weak Independent State---and financial means alone will ensure that Independent India would rank about as high as Persia, for effective offensive power; Mr. Gandhi’s demands are for an Administration operating on almost no taxation and with very little army or navy---India could do nothing. As a Dominion, with her own appointed representatives meeting equally with the representatives of the great self-governing Dominions, she would find a wave of good feeling and respect setting her way from the whole Empire---and not from the Empire only, from the world.

It is claimed, too, that with Dominion Status Indians could act more vigorously against social wrongs and in support of primary education and elementary justice, than any alien Government can, or dare. There ought to be something in this. Outside opinion will certainly judge India by what she actually accomplishes, when once she can no longer blame another people for everything that is wrong. As for the present Government, since the Mutiny it has been far too wary of religious susceptibilities. Even before the Mutiny, it was not the war against suttee, infanticide and human sacrifice, that brought up the storm. In a very minor degree, it was the resentment produced by these interferences with custom; but, far more, it was the annexations right and left.

It is not so easy to see advantages for Great Britain in India’s attainment of Dominion Status. She could no longer move Indian troops out of India in time of war, as she has hitherto been able to do, and did to her gain in the Great War. On the other hand, she would have to guarantee India’s sea and land frontiers against attack. The Nehru Report, answering the charge that India is not fit for self-government because she could not defend herself, triumphantly points out that the Dominions cannot defend themselves, but that India as a part of the Empire would be entitled to the defence for which the British taxpayer pays so largely. This is no doubt so. There is no doubt that the British taxpayer will continue to do as he does at present, and will, as his honour tells him is required by his bond, keep India on the list of his liabilities. Yet---it is no doubt unreasonable, but it is true, it is human, and we are trying to deal in facts, not in legal arguments---the British taxpayer will find it easier to rally to support of countries inhabited by his own kin, into which he has free right of immigration and settlement, than of India, when India has no use for him and may be taxing all his goods away from her door. If he does take on responsibility for India, I think (though I see he ought to do it, and I know it is only a fair return for benefits received from India in the past) it will be rather “decent” of him.

India will be partly lost as a field of enterprise. It has been full of interesting jobs, mercantile and official; the interest has been more than the pay. India is strongly protectionist, she already defends her goods against Britain’s. She will extend her industrialism, growing at a tremendous rate, and it looks as if it must be partly at the expense of Great Britain, who is so sorely smitten by unemployment that this last consideration might tempt many to wish India might remain as she is. But in any case self-government cannot be delayed much longer. And the uncertainty and discontent now existing have gone on so long that (1) many landowners and business men have become Swarajists, not because their interests would normally lie that way, but because a settlement, any settlement, would be better than a continuance of confusion; (2) the European community in India, partly for the same reason, have welcomed the Viceroy’s Round Table announcement.

I believe that Indian trade, like every other department of Indian affairs, would profit by the best thought that could be put into it. A settlement, with good will on all sides, should lead, not to a loss of trade, but to a great extension. The last decade has been sterile with politics, salting every tract where prosperity might grow. Nothing but depression and diminishing returns can come from continued wrangling. British trade with India has gone as low as it need go, and it ought now to take an upward trend, and it will take that upward trend if the two peoples will cease putting so much energy into resentment.

If one main root of the present exasperation is psychological, the other is economic. Since 1917, India has been free in fact to tax for protective reasons. But the old anger at the forcing her to accept Lancashire’s goods remains, and flares up in continual resolutions to burn British cotton cloth or to boycott it. It flared up in the Legislative Assembly, on February 28 last, when the duty against foreign cotton was increased from 11 per cent to 20 per cent, with a preference in favour of British cotton, taxed only 15 per cent. The distinction is amply justifiable, if Indian affairs were ever discussed on the plane of sense. Japan, the main competitor that Indian mills have to face, has an advantage, in factory laws which permit the employment of women on night shifts, which has been estimated by the Indian Tariff Board as equivalent to 5 per cent of value. But, though the British Cabinet expressly refused to interfere with India’s tariff autonomy, the very fact that Lancashire Members of the House of Commons asked for interference was answered in India by furious protests against giving British trade any preference at all. And it was an entirely characteristic piece of tactlessness on the Indian Government’s part to ask to introduce the principle of Imperial Preference at such a time as this.

As things stand at present, England and India can do each other great economic damage, if once a spirit of retaliation enters into their trade. England, for her part, has got to recognise that India is riddled with industrial unrest and economic misery, which it is easy to set down to British “exploitation.” I am confident that nine-tenths of it have other sources, obvious within the Indian social systems. But there never was a soil more fruitful for revolution than India at present. The concession of control over her own tariffs, a fact in essentials since 1917 and now recognised by the refusal to listen to British protests, was made ungraciously. If it is made explicitly, it will remove a great deal of the present support which the Extremists are getting, in quarters which certainly have no material interests which revolution or severance will serve.

After the Round Table Conference has been held, India’s real struggles will begin. To the communal one will be added that between “big business,” now supporting Mr. Gandhi and planning a high tariff wall, and the agricultural interests, which will have a powerful head in the Princes. I believe it will be a long time before the latter allow the tariff system that big business desires.

Chapter II

Readjustments

Territorial Readjustment

The reader will have gathered that the map of India is in confusion. The boundaries cannot stand. Orissa has no real connection with Bihar. Sind, tied to Bombay, is no real part of that Province.

“British India today is ramshackle in its grouping. Great nations like the Mahrattas are divided, small ones like the Sindis are submerged.”*

Burma cannot remain a part of India.

Yet Burma and Sind are examples of the difficulties that now beset, not so much the Government as Indians themselves. The Mohammedans are adamant on the point that Sind must be separated from Bombay, and the Nehru Constitution has yielded a reluctant consent. The Nair Report, unfortunately, like almost all Indian Commission Reports, divides racially, and is in effect almost a series of Minority Reports. Its most brilliant and valuable section, the long Memorandum by Sir Hari Singh Gour, says that the demand for the separation of Sind

“can only be justified on the ground which underlies the entire fabric of the Muslim demand, namely, that the Muslims desire to partition off the Hindu from the Muhammadan India, and hold the Hindu minority in the latter as hostages for the good behaviour of the Hindus elsewhere. This is not democracy, not even a colourable imitation of it. It is the establishment of an armistice with all the strategic positions surrendered to the adversary.”

This does not strike me as fair, though we can see Sir Hari’s bitterness is not unreasonable. Sind is not only overwhelmingly Mohammedan; it is part of a Province which is unwieldy in size, and of which it is a poor and disparate connection. Other objections to its scission are that its population and resources could not support the cost of a separate Government, and that the Punjab controls the headwaters of the Indus that feeds the irrigation works which are to turn Sind from desert into cultivated land. The Punjab, a far wealthier Province, with its own vast irrigation schemes, might starve the lower course of the river. But there has got to be shrinkage somewhere of these enormous Provinces, too huge for any genuine democracy to develop in them. Sind is an obvious case of a district with its own characteristics and difference.

Practically all schools of Indian thought are opposed to the separation of Burma, a point on which the Burmese themselves are unanimous. The reason for unanimity is in both cases economic. Burma is lightly populated; its struggle for existence, a thing of recent years, is due to the rapid silting in of emigrants from India. Burma is faced with the loss, in no great time, of her own individuality, an individuality due to racial and religious distinction from India and very delightful and valuable to the outside world. The country, too, is exceedingly lovely. India is overpopulated, is debarred from East Africa and Australia, is eagerly looking for land into which to dump her surplus folk. Given self-government, beyond question the Burmese will restrict immigration. I have no doubt whatever that India’s way out of her difficulties (like that of most of the world) will have to be found in restriction of population. An Independent India, presuming that it continued to breed far beyond its power to support, would not resist the temptation to do with Burma what Japan has done with Korea.

The Princes’ territorial grievances must not be carried into the New India. These are another Round Table matter. Why should even Berar, about which the Nizam feels so keenly (and no one aware of the story would say, unreasonably), be debarred from reconsideration?

Revenue and Expenditure Readjustments

The Indian Revenue system needs overhauling. It is a simple and inelastic one, with few heads, and its total---of about 800 million dollars annually, for both Central and Provincial needs---is absurdly inadequate for the education and social services India needs so urgently. An Indian Government could, if it dared to face the outcry, tax India more highly than she is taxed now. In this time of transition, no Government has been willing to impose new taxation, which is why the Indian Government has continued two sources of revenue which cover it with obloquy, especially in America, opium and salt.

The outcry against the salt tax is only partly reasonable. It could never have arisen but for the exasperation left by Lord Reading’s medieval action in certifying, over the Legislative Assembly’s refusal, a twelve-month doubling of the tax. The tax is back at its old level.* Mr. Gandhi has definitely smashed the tax, once for all. What will probably happen, under any Government of the future, is that the people will be free to pick up any salt they can, at the sea’s edge or elsewhere. But only those who must will use such unpalatable, if not actually harmful,* stuff, and only those whose time is worthless will gather it. The edible salt from the Government mines and works will be used by all who are not on a low level of indigence, and presumably Government after a time will, openly or by stealth, make a revenue by it, since this revenue will be easily come by, whereas any new source is going to be very hard to find, or to tap, when found.

Opium, though the literature that has grown up round the subject is not only self-righteous but reckless, has been a damnable story, a dirty, indefensible and, still more, a silly business. I had analysed some of the more widely read propaganda and discussion on the theme that are current in America. But it seems wise not to waste on a finishing controversy space that is needed for living issues. The Government will be wise to call the Swarajists’ bluff, and to do away with this source of revenue, imposing other taxes, however unpopular they may be with the persons affected. The opium revenue is easy to collect, that is all there is to be said for it. Whatever Government functions in India has got to be less cowardly than the one we have seen of recent years. It is better to face clamour than to drift. I do not underrate the difficulty, close to impossibility, of taxing the professional classes of India to an extent that will enable India at last to have an administration efficient through all her strata of population, even the lowest and most wretched. But in some way that difficulty has got to be handled. The money is wanted very badly indeed, and it is going to be impossible to keep salt and opium as financial sources.

The Land has always been Government property, and every Government India has seen has claimed a share in its produce, as rent. This share used to be at times as much as the Government could wring out of the cultivator. Under British rule, it has been in some Provinces less than it equitably should be. The present Government’s hands are tied, by the East India Company having made in Bengal, in 1793, and in parts of Madras later, a “Permanent Settlement.” Especially in irrigated districts, the value of the land has risen, sometimes enormously. A share in these expansions in value will be one way, perhaps a main way, in which the Indian revenue will improve.

There will be a fairer adjustment of revenue between the Central and Provincial Governments. The tendency in future will be to aggrandize the latter at the expense of the former. This, and other questions, only touched on here, must be left to the busy process of scientific examination of every Indian problem, which will follow when the Round Table Conference has settled the main lines of political advance. We are but at the beginning of ten years of either chaos or intense and fascinating activity.

There should be a saving on the Army, though it will be less than the public has been told by Indian politicians. There may be a saving on what is commonly called “the most expensive administration in the world.” I do not think there will, under either Independent or Dominion India. But we shall see.

Chapter III

The Intellectual Chaos

Education

The conscience of India is awake to the need for education. The old literary system has had few, if any, apologists. We have all heard of “babu English” and the “Failed B.A.” What we have not heard of is the kind of vernacular achieved by the British official, or the British or American missionary.

The old system was in many ways a joke at best, a tragedy at worst. It has become economically unsound. A purely clerkly education is of little use to any but the automaton type of man. Indian students since the War have deserted the Arts for such of the Sciences as they can learn purely by book and lecture work. The old system, nevertheless, resulted in a revelation of the Indian mind. The world has never seen anywhere such accomplishment in a difficult foreign tongue by so many. It is not, as many seem to think, that an exceptional man has once in many years produced fine English, as Tagore, for instance, has done. Thousands of Indians have mastered the art of expression in English.

If I seem unwilling to go into the problem of Indian education, it is because I wasted the best years of my life trying to work the system. I think that it is a monument to Indian ability that so many became genuinely educated, despite the system; that the system somehow diffused an acquaintance with the outside world, and quickened vernacular thought and literature; that the Indian graduate and undergraduate, unemployed often, often unemployable, have a grievance. And that the whole system needs drastic overhauling.

When the British came, there were village schools, in which those who were not women or untouchables could acquire a certain amount of dubious or not very valuable information. Macaulay, in his classical Minute, February 2, 1835, enjoyed himself hugely at the expense of

“astronomy, which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding-school---history, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long---and geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”

Nevertheless, there was more literacy, even if of a low kind, than until within the last ten years.

Inevitably, these schools languished, with the immeasurably greater attractions of Western knowledge. The Brahmans themselves had made the mistake of despising the vernaculars, the real sinews of national intellectual strength, and exalting Sanskrit, a dead language. The higher classes admired Western literature and science immoderately, and this added to the other potent attraction, that a grasp of English led to Government and commercial employment. It is not true, however, that the schools died out. They still exist, and an interesting chapter could be written on them.

After all this, I hope no reader will carry away the impression that I extol literacy overmuch, or that I confound literacy with education. From one point of view, the masses in India are deplorably ignorant and degraded. There is another point of view, from which it is seen that they have kept a large degree of that susceptibility to immaterial issues and to loveliness, which is genuine culture. And certainly such a man as Akbar must be called a highly cultivated man, though he could not read or write. All our brains do not live in our eyes and fingers.

I should like to see education driven ahead with all speed. But illiteracy in itself should not be a bar to self-government, any more than it was in Britain or America.

Indian History

If we take the two Indian figures outstanding in the world’s estimation, Gandhi works for the present, “the means and the ends are convertible” in his “philosophy,” Tagore works for the future. Let us remember the future, even while we are entangled in the disputatious present. As an Englishman, I am anxious that India shall not begin her course as a Nation, as the United States began hers, with anger against my own country. The world has suffered from a century and a half of Anglo-American misunderstanding, which is only now beginning to pass away. What can we do to escape a repetition of this?

We can do two things, quite unpolitical, which will have political results. First, we can write Indian history better; before we have to do it, we can do it as an act of free grace and love of truth. We are a generous people. But we have been ungenerous here. I have indicated an episode of which our accounts are, I hold, too absurd for discussion. As they stand, they are merely a political ramp. I am prepared, if challenged, to indicate other episodes of which the accepted accounts cannot stay. But this job is ceasing to be mine; sat datum Priamo. For some other Englishman, there is an opportunity such as rarely comes to the historian, now that the Raj is passing and Dominion India appears on the horizon. If he would write now a History of the British in India, from their first isolated beginnings to our receiving India as a Sister-Nation in our wide-flung Commonwealth, and if he would write it as if neither British prestige nor Indian sensitiveness was to be considered---no, not for a moment, any more than we consider the merely personal when we are handling any other branch of knowledge---it would be an achievement of more than literary importance. It would be of enormous value as a “gesture.” I would see Indian history written not with generosity, but with that far higher compliment, with regard for truth and with no regard for any other thing.

Indian Thought and Literature

And there is Indian literature. In British universities there are no Indian studies. There are linguistic studies, and at Manchester there is a Chair of Comparative Religion, which, when that noble scholar, the late J. N. Farquhar, occupied it, became temporarily a Chair of Indian Thought. But at Oxford, for example, you have a scholar of Mr. Dewhurst’s calibre used for nothing but teaching the beggarly elements of grammar. It is possible for Miss Mayo to observe that

“in the Philippines and in India alike, little or no current literature exists available or of interest to the masses,”*

and to “get away with it.” This, when in Bengal alone every year two hundred thousand copies are sold of Krittibas’s translation of the Ramayana, and when every villager knows some of the Sakta songs of Ramprasad or of the Vaishnava poems of Chandidas, to take only what has worth as literature! This, when the Tamil country has the Kural and the Saivite hymns of Manikkavasahar, and the Maratha country has a rarely broken line of noble religious poets, and the Hindi country has the deeply cherished epic of Tulsidas! I believe the world will one day admit that we did as well in India in the main things, as any nation would have done. But we have done less for its literature, and cared less to know that literature, than we can imagine Germany would have done in our place, just as for long we did less in some material matters---agriculture, for example---than the United States would probably have done. One result has been that in these last dozen years of embitterment educated Indians have been more and more turning to the Continent. English thought, English literature, used to be their intellectual centre. Now there is a new orientation, largely the work of wounded self-respect and pride.

Indian studies are in neglect, except the solely linguistic and archaic ones, in which splendid work has been done by many Western scholars. The world has long ago made up its mind as to what Greek and Latin literature are worth as literature, in essentials. There is no sort of agreement as to Indian. Every opinion is held, from extravagant laudation to contemptuous dismissal. Let no one imagine that Indians are unaware of this, or that it is not poisoning the relations of East and West.

Every Indian matter should be brought on to the plane of scientific and rigid scrutiny---Indian history, literature, philosophy. Indian civilisation, in every branch and detail, should be shaken---by the throat; I know the metaphor is absurd, but it is what I mean, no other will express the ferocity with which I hold this conviction---that the things which are not shaken may remain. It is intolerable that a whole field of human experience and activity, a field so vast and varied, should continue to be the home of ignorance and pedantry and brag and complacency. The main outlines of Indian legend and history and belief must become part of the normal equipment of educated men and women everywhere. The angry ghosts of nationalism and imperialism must be exorcised from a region where they have stalked so long.

Chapter IV

Are Indians Fit for Self-Government?

The Nehru Report, which has a great deal of book-knowledge behind it and can provide an answer to every “objection” as infallibly as the old style of evangelical sermon---that used to state first the true doctrine, and then in the tail of the discourse dispose of “objections”---and can find an analogy to every situation, has dealt with this:*

“The internal position in India is not and cannot be worse than it was in Canada when Lord Durham wrote his famous report, or even when responsible government was actually established in Canada. He describes the French and the British ‘not as two parties holding different opinions and seeking different objects in respect to government but as different races, engaged in a national contest.’ ‘The mutual dislike of the two classes,’ says Lord Durham, ‘extends beyond politics into social life, where, with some trifling exceptions again, all intercourse is confined to persons of the same origin. . . . Such a sentiment is naturally evinced rather by trifles than by acts of intrinsic importance. There has been no solemn or formal declaration of national hostility, but not a day or scarcely an hour passes without some petty insult, some provoking language, or even some serious affront, occurring between persons of French or British descent.’”

With all respect to the learned framers of the Nehru Constitution and documentary appurtenances thereof, this will not do. Lord Durham exaggerated, whereas India’s internal difficulties are staggering. The Indian position is far worse, bad as Canada’s was. I hold that Dominion Status is promised to India, that it is India’s right, that it will be a stupendous step forward in the world’s history. But I am regretful and bitter because the long tale of evasion, of postponing fulfilment of pledges, of letting resentment accumulate, has prevented that process of training which should have been, and has compelled us to pay all our debt at once. India’s main need, in a country of “little people,” of peasants and petty industrialists, is good administration. I think that, in most cases, when an Indian takes over from a British official, there is a loss of efficiency, and that this represents a real loss to the common man. I think it would have been better, far better, if Indian self-respect had been so conciliated that Indians would now be willing to let the transference be less hurried than it seems inevitable it must be. I attach great importance to the declarations of the European Associations of Calcutta and Bombay, that they welcome the promise of “Dominion Status.” It is my countrymen out there who are going to be in the place of the toad beneath the harrow, that

“knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.”

“The man on the spot” is liable to such prejudice as the man at a distance escapes, and is especially liable to mass-opinion. But he knows the vastness of the practical issues involved, and how easily politics may wreck a country’s prosperity. The fact that the British in India, after loyally co-operating in the Reforms, do not think that Indian control will bring disaster---the further fact that they now feel that an intolerable condition of mutual exacerbation must be ended, and that they, who will have the job of carrying on into the new age, believe it can be done---these things impress me. I can see that on the psychological and historical sides the case for Dominion Status is overwhelming. On the practical side, where I am distrustful, on the score of expediency, these men say it is overwhelming also. I am therefore not willing to admit that the difficulties arising from India’s chaotic internal condition are such that good will and honesty on all sides cannot surmount.

But, surely, once Indians admit our good faith and intention that there shall be no blocking or reluctance to go forward, there should be patience and an end of all the nonsense of fixing a definite date for everything to be settled. What has happened in the last dozen years is quite obvious. Government has been playing for time, and (not wicked, but) uncertain of its way or its plans. We have had Commission after Commission, on every possible subject, the Indianisation of the Army, the pay and prospects of the Services, the working of the Constitution, plans for the future Constitution, the Princes, Agriculture, Education. India has been as throng with meetings as if she were one of the major American cities. It has all been largely foolery. Nothing has happened, the Commissions have got us nowhere. If the Round Table Conference is to be another solemn exhibition of how officialdom can waste a piece of that precious creature, time, Indians may well distrust it.

But the National Congress and the Nationalists generally, though it has escaped their notice (as well as the notice of the rest of the world), have staged an even more egregious pageant of folly. They have had nothing to do but to obstruct and to combine among themselves for offensive purposes. How have they done it? They cannot even settle the “cow-music” problem. They have had as many Commissions and Committees as the Government, and equally resultless ones. They have again and again appointed leaders to settle communal differences or divisions of administrative jobs, these leaders have wasted large spaces of perfectly good night and day, and have finally brought out “agreements”---which have immediately been summarily rejected by the people who had appointed the Committee. That is, in truth, the inwardness of what the National Congress has recently done. Ever since it entered upon a course of opposition pure and simple, it has got itself into such a tangle that it has to use the knife, any knife, heedless of what may happen hereafter. Bankrupt of statesmanship, a solely Extremist rump of what was once the body politic of India, it has taken refuge in this counsel of despair. I submit that the Government is at present far the wiser and braver and honester party to the quarrel. Lord Irwin has obviously acted by one consideration only, that of what he held was right. The offer of a round table conference is a straight offer, and is an offer of the only thing that can help India.

Social Customs and Caste

The problems presented by caste and its heavy weight on the lower strata of the people are in outline known to the whole world. The queer word “untouchability” has carried the essence of India’s shame and difficulty wherever English is understood. That Hindu social injustice is a bar to Indian self-government is freely held, and was formerly the opinion of many Hindus themselves. Nearly forty years ago, Rabindranath Tagore wrote to a friend, “Until we can justify ourselves let us hide ourselves.” This might seem the gesture of despair and wounded self-respect, rather than a fixed belief, if it were not that Tagore has consistently told his own people that Swaraj would be valueless without a drastic reconstruction of society. I could easily show how many eminent Indians have concurred with him in this. It will serve to quote Mr. Gandhi, speaking in Calcutta, May 1, 1925:

“So long as untouchability disfigures Hinduism, so long do I hold the attainment of Swaraj to be an utter impossibility. Supposing it were a gift descending from Downing Street to India, that gift would be a curse upon this land, if we do not get rid of this curse.”

From his present activities we have to assume that he has changed his views, or, at any rate, modified their rigour.

Both the Congress and the Hindu Maha Sabha, the association which stands for the sectional interests of the Hindu community, have repeatedly passed resolutions condemning untouchability, declaring that the caste system must be abolished, that women be educated, that the whole marriage system be reformed to permit of widow-re-marriage and to end child marriage. I include under the head of Congress activities such gatherings as the All-India Social Conference at Cocanada, December, 1923, where the President “indulged in some very plain speaking as to the artificial and ceremonial purity encouraged by orthodox Hinduism at the cost of true physical and scientific cleanliness.”*

Close on 60 millions of India’s 320 millions are “depressed classes”; perhaps nearly half of these are aboriginal tribes, whose depressed status does not vex them so greatly, since they live in wooded or thinly inhabited territory. It is in South India that the problem is most acute. It has had queer repercussions in the political world there.

The Depressed Classes

“are the embodiment of exploded social ideas, and the disabilities imposed on them by the original framers of Hindu polity have been aggravated by long centuries of segregation and neglect. . . . Their very shadow was a pollution to the so-called high caste Hindus who conspired to deny these unfortunate people the use of public wells and even the use of public roads. They were backward, illiterate, poor and unorganised; their number was large but their influence negligible.”*

They have still to carry the cruellest disabilities and the stigma of inferiority. Herded together in animal squalor, at the edge of the caste villages which they serve, they cannot use the schools, the social bar operating to the general ineffectiveness of the Government permission. In the Punjab they suffer from a system of forced labour called Begar. In the lower courts they must stand aloof when giving evidence. They cannot enter village post offices or use rest-houses. As late as October, 1928, the Bombay Share-brokers held a day’s hartal as a protest against the Corporation of Bombay having abolished the practice of compelling untouchable children to drink from different cups in the Corporation schools. A year earlier, an untouchable woman was thrashed by a mob, for daring to walk in the streets of Benares, the holy city. In the Punjab, by immemorial custom, enforceable in the courts of law, they are debarred from purchasing land in village communities.*

When the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms were proposed, the Depressed Classes presented an Address stating:

“we would fight to the last drop of our blood any attempt to transfer the seat of authority in this country from British hands to the so-called high caste Hindus who had been oppressing us in the past and would do so again but for the British Government.”

But the last dozen years have seen remarkable changes.

“The depressed peoples have developed a class consciousness. . . . They watched the social upheaval between the two caste belligerents, and profiting by their example bestirred themselves and started an aggressive campaign both against the Brahmins and the non-Brahmins which threatened to storm the bulwark of all orthodoxy.”*

Any Commission, British or Indian, Swarajist or Moderate, is sure now to be confronted with voluble deputations from the Depressed Classes, with a long list of grievances, fully supported by evidence.

Government and missionary institutions have done most of what has been done to uplift these classes. Under missionary influence I include their conversion to Mohammedanism in former years. Unfortunately, the law has given less support than it might have done.

“Whenever a member of the Depressed Classes attempts to enforce his civic rights, the law steps in under the guise of preserving the peace, which, it fears, would otherwise be broken. In practice it amounts to legal protection of the superstition and denial of an elementary right to a member of the community.”*

The internal bar to India’s political aspirations raised by this social scandal is obvious. It furnishes, next to the communal quarrels, the strongest justification for the continued presence of the British as overlords. The scandal is diffused throughout the world, and has brought contempt on India, with suspicion of the high ideals and philosophy claimed for Hinduism. Further, India, so long as she has her women uneducated and in subjection and keeps so large a fraction of her population depressed, is fighting in the modern world with a trivial part of her quality engaged. She is stumbling and ineffective, while

“yonder march the nations full of eyes.”

There can be no question of the ability of either the outcastes or of the women. Both have proved it. For the women I have boundless admiration, for their courage, patience, and for the mental achievement they have attained whenever permitted. And the depressed classes have contributed largely to the vernacular literatures.

Outside India, her attempt to win respect and recognition is doomed to failure, humiliating and complete, until she overhauls the whole of her social teaching and practice. By the premise that India has a great civilisation and contains many minds of the finest quality, the refusal of citizenship rights by any outside Power is mere insolence. There is no justification for the immigration policy of parts of South and East Africa, if this is the whole truth; Indians have every bit as much right as Europeans to settle in Kenya, even in its highlands. But British settlers hold that as a rule Indian ways of life ruin any place where many Indians settle. Nothing but force of arms would make any country where a considerable number of British have their homes accept large numbers of Indian settlers.

This does not mean that Indians have not been shabbily treated in the Dominions and Colonies. They have. But there is no solution of the colour and racial problems of the world, except along the lines of “equal rights for all civilised men and women.” As long as the Indian civilisation mixes up ceremonial impurity and actual impurity, often preferring to consider the former and ignore the latter; as long as the mass of the Indian people marry their women far too young, breed up to the very limits of subsistence and beyond them, and keep their women uneducated; so long will they be unable to get justice from other nations. I know, as well as the next man, what India’s achievement is, and that my own civilisation can learn from hers. But I cannot see the use of begging the whole question of Indian status by the brag of India’s long record of civilised life, of her ancient glories, of the great men she has produced in Gandhi, Tagore, Jagadish Bose, and others. East and South Africa are not thinking of these at all, but of other Indians that they know.

Miss Mayo’s main thesis was right, that Hinduism has given women “a poor show.”* How little the public conscience has moved from the doctrine that woman exists to serve and glorify man was shown by the latest of the recurrent suttees, that at Bahr, in Bihar, November 22, 1927. The police, who were all Indians, were fooled and finally overawed by the crowd; the woman, feeling the fire, sprang into the river, and was rescued a little lower downstream. Since dedicated to the Dead, she had no longer any rightful place among the Living. No one was allowed to attend to her burns, through four days when she was dying, worshipped by exultant mobs, many of whom were brought by motor buses to the tiny tree that sheltered her in her wretchedness. (Climbers broke the tree down, getting into its branches for a better darshan.) Those accused of abetting her suicide were unanimously acquitted by the assessors, five educated Hindus, a schoolmaster, three college professors, and a landowner. When the judge, disagreeing, sentenced them to inadequate terms of imprisonment, the leading Bihar Hindu paper said his action “sent a thrill of horror through the Province.”

To sum up, Hindu social practice, Hindu social and religious thought, are all in the same absurd confusion that everything else Indian is. Miss Mayo did this great service: for the first time, we see the Hindu civilisation fighting not for praise, but for bare respect. This should have happened long ago. Europe and America were once as unhygienic in practice as India is now, and child-marriage was not unknown. But we hold nothing of ours exempt from criticism. India needs to take the same attitude.

The Indian Nationalist outside India sets down all his country’s poverty, disease, and ignorance to the foreigner. This is a course little consistent with self-respect. It has doubtless made for prejudice against Great Britain and the British. It has equally bred contempt for what seems the whining inefficiency of a people so helpless and easily pushed down.

A better attitude is that of the more progressive Nationalist, speaking to his own people in India. Mr. J. M. Sen Gupta, Chairman of the Reception Committee of the National Congress, Calcutta, 1928, said:

“Slavish worship of the past, communal dissensions, caste, the purdah, polygamy, early marriage, and other cankers of the body politic are responsible for our failure. We live a life divided into compartments; our patriotism is communal; our unity amounts to mere juxtaposition. Steeped in the prejudices of a medieval age, with half the nation losing their vitality behind the purdah, and in its turn devitalising the other half; disintegrated by warring castes and creeds which condemn a population more than that of the United Kingdom or Japan as untouchables, whose shadow even it is pollution to tread: can we ever expect that we shall be able to bear upon Britain the necessary pressure? . . . You cannot with impunity paralyse half the nation and by its dead weight handicap the other half. Is it not national harikari to impair the vitality of the race by screening half its number behind the purdah and accelerate the process by the horrible custom of immature parenthood? . . . Lastly, what can we expect from a people with a polygamous habit? A people so pleasure-seeking, so devoid of self-control, cannot show that self-abnegation which is so very necessary in a soldier of liberty. Unfortunately, the conservative instinct in us is so deep-rooted that the work of a previous generation is lost to the next. The lifework of a Rammohan Roy, a Vidyasagar or a Vivekananda brings about some progress. But like a spring we go back to the former position. . . . The entire social fabric requires a thorough overhauling, and has to be revolutionised: no amount of tinkering, or super-imposition of piecemeal reforms, would serve our purpose . . . A frontal attack should be led on the forces of reaction. If it is found that Hindu culture means purdah, and Mahomedan culture means the harem, both must go. If Hindu culture means caste system and marriage before puberty, and Mahomedan culture means polygamy, none of them should have a place in our social reform.”

Chapter V

By Way of Summary

“One may then laudably desire not to be counted a fool by wise men, nor a knave by good men, nor a fanatic by sober men. One may desire to show that the cause for which he has lived and laboured all the best years of his life, is not so preposterous, intellectually and morally, as of late it has been made to appear by its noisier and more aggressive representatives; that he has never been duped by the sophistries and puerilities of its approved controversialists, but has rested on graver and worthier reasons, however ill-defined and ill-expressed; that even if his defence of it should have failed, he has not failed in courage or candour or sincerity; nor has he ever wittingly lent himself to the defence of folly or imposture.”
— George Tyrrell: Preface to Through Scylla and Charybdis.

The Immediate Needs

These are independent of any Commission's Report, and cannot be supplanted by it. They are:

(1) that the British people, who can do more than even their Government, convince Indians that Dominion Status is not going to be held up a moment longer than is inevitable. There should be an arrangement whereby it will come automatically, at the end of a period of time, without the humiliation of further Enquiries and Commissions. Meanwhile, the Empire should take India in “on the ground floor,” and we should all accustom ourselves to take the Dominion Status attitude.

If the Dominions would set themselves to find a formula that would save Indian self-respect, while keeping their own lands free from unwelcome immigrants, this would help more than anything else. But I do not despise even such minor matters as that Oxford and Cambridge should sometimes give an honorary degree to an Indian who is not a Ruling Prince. We have welcomed Generals Smuts and Botha in the Sheldonian Theatre. I hope, too, that some one on the Council of the Royal Society will ask whether such an Indian as Sir P. C. Ray is not as worthy of election as many British Fellows who have been elected. Only two Indians have been made F.R.S.; and the layman ignorant of science but able to use his wits is still not convinced that one of these, Sir J. C. Bose, represents Indian science at its best and most thorough. Does the Royal Society really think it knows what Indian scientists, fellow-citizens of theirs, have done and are doing?

In every way, in any way, I want India to be assured of what she has had only too many reasons to doubt, that there is a real Empire citizenship, and that she has it;

(2) that the nation-building time, which will be all too short for what must be done, be used to drive forward a scheme of universal, compulsory primary education. There should be a settlement at last of that further question, of how far the surviving vernacular systems are really worth developing. If a Commission went into this, it should at the same time see how far indigenous systems of village self-government, by panchayat or otherwise, have survived, and can be used and strengthened;

(3) that, while the British still have power, they immediately and totally

“withdraw legal and administrative recognition from the superstition of pollution,”*

that a clear path be made for the Depressed Classes that will set their whole community forward, so that nothing can send them back again. For their sakes, I think another ten years’ delay advisable before Dominion Status comes in every last detail. This period would see them firmly in their rights, and the going of Great Britain would leave them safe. I do not think they are safe yet, though their unity and vigour of public action have increased greatly since the War;

(4) that the outside world takes India seriously, and that all Indian matters, not history alone, but the whole Hindu and Moslem civilisations, be subjected to the supreme compliment of ruthless examination and frank comment (which need not be deliberately offensive);

( 5 ) that the best brains of Britain and India get on to India’s economic and social problems. If America will help, with money and trained investigators, this help will be invaluable.

Myself, I think that India stands to lose far less by the going of a British Government than by the going of British administrators. The outside world has not begun to realise the work that needs to be done, or the work that is being done by district officers. It would ask more of what our Puritan forefathers used to call “grace” than it is fair to expect in human nature, to relinquish the control of high policy for the drab and hidden task of helping the villages and the municipalities along. But the ideal solution, in a world composed of archangels, would be that Indian pride be conciliated in the gilded and gaudy ways, while British self-respect and technique of duty operated in supervising drainage, education, agriculture, and the belated bringing in of common sense.

I have said nothing of this. But, as long as Hinduism is beset with food taboos, as long as the country supports half as many oxen as human beings---151 million cattle, among them millions of worthless cows, to 247 million people,* and exceedingly few that by Western standards are worth their keep---as long as cattle diseases must run their course, because religion forbids the destruction of any cow, however sick or dangerous; as long as the land is starved century after century and the manure all used for fuel (the making of dung-cakes being the main occupation, along with cooking, and bearing and rearing children, of the majority of Hindu women)---so long there is going to be a starvation level for the teeming population of India;

(6) that, during the interim before full self-government arrives, Government does all it can to educate and assist the domiciled European and Eurasian community, now called Anglo-Indian. We are responsible for the existence of this community, it played a great part in our earlier days in India, it has been conspicuously loyal and a bulwark of law and order, our treatment of it has not been generous or even barely just. It can hardly welcome the prospect before it, unless something is done to equip it to play its part in the new India;

(7) I should like to add: that Indians, no less than ourselves, practise a generous attitude. Today, as for many years past, whatever the Government has done, whatever the individual official has done, it has been abused. Had the opposite been done, the reception would have been no different. But this is India’s own affair. It makes no difference to our duty. Only, there is no reason why we who are fighting for Indian self-determination should not say, as clearly as we can, that we know that India is not poorer but better off, by the new industries that have been brought to her by the planter and business communities. These, at any rate, have not crushed out the village industries that Mr. Gandhi seeks to bring back. They have added fresh avenues of employment. The oppressiveness with which they formerly worked is now an old story, and I am not going to revive it.

Ethics of the Situation

There is no justification for the kind of charge often made, that England “stole” India, and so on. These ethical considerations apply to events of recent years---to the way we entered Egypt, if you like, or to anything that has happened in Central America. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a different world, and what we did, and what Indians did, were the normal conduct of the time. The facts now are, we are in India, we are the only guarantee of its ordered progress, and events in Palestine (to take only things of yesterday) have proved to every one that the Indian question is more complex than a choice between “keeping India in bondage” and “setting her free.” More fortunate than the United States where the Philippines are concerned, we have a third choice to those of giving independence and keeping in subjection.

I quote again from Mr. C. R. Das’s speech as President of the Bengal Provincial Conference, May 2, 1925. To him, he said, the idea of Dominion Status within the Empire was

“specially attractive because of its deep spiritual significance. I believe in world peace, in the ultimate federation of the world; and I think that the great Commonwealth of Nations called the British Empire---a federation of diverse races, each with its distinct mental outlook---if properly led with statesmen at the helm, is bound to make a lasting contribution to the great problem that awaits the statesman, the problem of knitting the world into the greatest federation the mind can conceive, the federation of the human race. But only if properly led with statesmen at the helm---for the development of the idea involves apparent sacrifice on the part of the constituent nations, and it certainly involves the giving up for good of the Empire idea with its ugly attribute of domination. I think it is for the good of India, for the good of the world, that India should strive for freedom within the Commonwealth, and so serve the cause of humanity.”

I have no more love for the Empire, as that word and thing are by many understood, than I have for any other manifestation of the spirit of aggression. But to many of us the Empire is a preparation for the peace of all Nations, a commonwealth which will not absorb other peoples but will show the way for all to find the fullest freedom. I do not want the good will that has survived so miraculously past all exasperation, and exists between thousands of Indians and Englishmen today, to be wasted. I want to convince Indians that their civilisation, however strictly we may measure it, is valued by us. One element in the present estrangement, not mentioned in this book but well known to many of us, is the profound distrust that many of the best Indians feel toward Western civilisation. Will they believe us when we say that we understand this distrust, and that we share it? Mr. Gandhi’s experience of the West, though extensive, has been woefully unfortunate. The passions of a gold-mining region, where races have recently engaged in bitter fighting and are still full of memories and suspicion, do not show Europe at its best. When Mr. Gandhi raised his corps of Indian stretcher-bearers and orderlies, in the so-called Zulu Rebellion, he was given the care of the natives whose bodies had been lacerated by the whippings the court-martials had ordered. He has seen even War at its meanest and foulest, not as many of us have seen it---as I have seen it, for example, watching his magnificent fellow-countrymen advancing through the storm of that first day of battle at Istabulat, over an exposed plain. And we can understand why Mr. Gandhi, and many others with him, feel the deepest misgiving as they see India being fast industrialised, and dread the apparent certainty that she must go the way of the rest of the world. We have laughed at his spinning-wheel movement. But we know that there is sense behind it, in more ways than one. Indeed, the whole Indian question is complicated by there being involved with it a deeper struggle, where our sympathies divide them and us, cutting across all racial lines. (The issues are mixed in Indian minds.) It is hard to see how India can support her vast population without industrialisation. But she will be cursed by it when it has spread, even as we have been cursed by it. Mr. Gandhi has persuaded himself that the fight of the spinning-wheel and the village industries is against the mills of Lancashire. A glance at the trade figures of any year will show that it is not at all against Lancashire, but against the mills of Bombay and Japan.* This does not change the fact that India has seen something she dreads, and is right to dread. Her poverty, if it could be raised above the subsistence level, to a place where distress and famine disappear, is a thing she may well prefer to keep, rather than lose her peace.

All the same, there is a greater wisdom in the attitude of Tagore, who has seen Western civilisation at its best, and knows that it is a finely spiritual thing as well as a grossly materialistic one. India might help to save more than herself, if she could keep her simplicity, fling away her indigenous follies, and accept Western dentistry and surgery and freedom of spirit and thought and person. Part of this freedom is common sense, which would (for example) understand perfectly why the worship of the cow came into being but would recognise it as under present circumstances a silly and degrading superstition. Tagore has recently spoken frankly of Mr. Gandhi’s forcing the charka (native spinning-wheel) on the women, when it is an outmoded tool. Gandhi’s defence, when this was pointed out to him formerly, was that the women would have wastes of idle time on their hands, if they used a more efficient model. But why need free time and leisure always be a curse to Indian women?

I believe that to many Indians the thought of leaving the Empire, even for the glittering but untested glories of Independence, comes with some sadness. Great Britain has built up something not altogether unlike that Roman majesty of strength and law which so held the imagination of Paul the Hebrew. Englishmen not a few are reluctant to let India go, not because of the tribute foreigners believe us to draw from it, but for the entirely unpractical reason that it has fired our dreams and that our best of manhood has gone in her service. I myself, a pacifist to the core, regret most of all to think that the Indian Army, which men of my blood trained and made and which has fought side by side with our own Army on so many fields, must soon cease to be a place where the English can serve. I find it infinitely easier to let every Governorship and every Commissionership go. Mr. Gandhi, for his part, when he wrote, during the Amritsar bitterness, “to every Englishman,” claimed nothing but bare fact, stating that

“no Indian has co-operated with the British Government more than I have for an unbroken period of twenty-nine years of public life in the face of circumstances that might well have turned any other man into a rebel. . . . It was free and voluntary co-operation, based on the belief that the sum-total of the British Government was for the benefit of India.”

Let us see where this co-operation led him. It is a story my people do not know as well as they should.

“My first meeting with Gandhi was on the road to Spion Kop, after the fateful retirement of the British troops in January 1900. The previous afternoon I saw the Indian mule-train moved up the slopes of the Kop, carrying water to the distressed soldiers, who had lain powerless on the plateau. The mules carried the water in immense bags, one on each side, led by Indians at their heads. The galling rifle-fire, which heralded their arrival on the top, did not deter the strange-looking cavalcade, which moved slowly forward; and as an Indian fell another quietly stepped forward to fill the vacant place. Afterwards the grim duty of the bearer corps, which Mr. Gandhi organised in Natal, began.

It was on such occasions the Indians proved their fortitude, and the one with the greatest fortitude of all was Gandhi. After a night’s work, which had shattered men with much bigger frames, I came across Gandhi in the early morning, sitting by the roadside---eating a regulation Army biscuit. Every man in Buller’s Force was dull and depressed, and damnation was heartily invoked on everything. But Gandhi was stoical in his bearing, cheerful and confident in his conversation, and had a kindly eye.”*

Here is another glimpse, this time given us, with characteristic generosity, by himself:

“It was a sultry day, and every one was thirsting for water. There was a tiny brook on the way where we could slake our thirst. But who was to drink first? We had proposed to come in after the British soldiers had finished. But they would not begin first, and urged us to do so; and for a while this kindly competition went on for giving precedence to one another.”*

The future historian will distinguish four stages in Britain’s work in India. The first, up to 1857, was the period of conquest and settlement. The second, which between 1895 and 1914 began to overlap the third, was the period of administration, when men did the job as it came to hand, without philosophy or overmuch co-operation and investigation. The third, which we see ending, was a double effort---to get at the sources of plague, poverty, famine, not merely to handle their acute phases; and to train Indians to take over their own government. Both efforts were sincere and valuable, but handicapped by coming so late. The fourth, that is beginning before our eyes (for proof, read such books as Mr. Brayne’s Remaking of an Indian Village and Socrates in an Indian Village), will see the British accepting the task of service and guidance, whose reward will be the knowledge that they are doing the work of centuries in a few years.

I believe that by remaining in the Empire India can most effectively use her own qualities. East and West are by no means as apart as many represent. The historical and cultural contact of Great Britain and India has laid down a causeway, which should be used. Our own language was once fed by French and Italian. India has vernaculars as unspoiled as was Elizabethan English. Many a time, driving my own thought along the grooves of a language already worn by a thousand better minds than mine, I have wished I had such a new-minted vocabulary and syntax, fresh from the roads and as yet not rubbed into obscurity by four centuries of literary use. It is almost impossible to write a paragraph of English that is not spiky with clichés. There is a great future before the Indian vernaculars. And Indians have English as their highway to the whole modern world of the West.

Consider the future that lies before the Mohammedans of India. In the upcountry, the United Provinces and round Delhi, they have a culture that exists nowhere else in Islam, a culture wider and more aware of the modern world than Persia possesses. I believe that Indian Mohammedans are so placed that they can become immeasurably more important than the outside, often semi-barbarous Moslem communities about whose political fortunes they have so vexed themselves in the past. They can become the bridge by which Islam can march out of medievalism and fanaticism, into the modern world. It will be a tragedy if Indian Mohammedanism withdraws into reaction and resentment.

“An Englishman,” Mr. Gandhi has told Mr. Andrews,

“never respects you till you stand up to him. Then he begins to like you. He is afraid of nothing physical; but he is very mortally afraid of his own conscience, if ever you appeal to it, and show him to be in the wrong. He does not like to be rebuked for wrong-doing at first; but he will think over it, and it will get hold of him and hurt him, till he does something to put it right.”

I would suggest to any American readers I am fortunate enough to find, that, while they suppose themselves to be seeing the events of their own Revolution re-enacted before their eyes, they are watching an even greater thing. If India’s people

“and the British can solve their mutual problem by peaceful process, they will . . . establish for posterity the greatest of historic precedents in favour of the peace-method as against the war-method of settling disputes between nations.”*

They will do that, certainly. But more. They will strike the hardest blow that racial and colour prejudice have received since the time of Christ. For the first time, an Empire dominated mainly by people of one blood will have found a way to incorporate on equal terms a vast people of blood and thought and religious beliefs poles apart from its own. It will open up new hope for depressed and discouraged peoples everywhere, and there can be no limit set to the regions into which its influence will go. It will have repercussions on the policy of every Nation that owns a yard of territory outside its own borders, or has any dissatisfied minority within them.

The Indians who served on the Central Committee that examined the situation with the Simon Commission, in their patriotism rising above the anger and offended pride of their countrymen, ask to close their Report on a personal note:

“All of us have been devoted servants of India; some of us her sons who have devoted all that was best in them to the service of their Motherland. Twelve months since, when we took office we were made the targets of cheap ribaldry and organised obloquy---wherever we went we found ourselves surrounded by hooting crowds. Some of us were threatened with personal violence; some threatened with death. Some had to endure the tempestuous outburst of popular disfavour in the estrangement of old friends, the snapping of lifelong ties, but we have successfully weathered the storm, finished our labours, and have our consciences as our witness that we have striven to work loyally and faithfully in the interest of our people and the service of our Motherland.”*

They have earned the right to close on that note. They may be sure that among our own people their good will cannot go without response. They have worked to build a nation, while others, more spectacularly patriotic, were labouring for its destruction. Among their own people, as among ours, there are many whose opinions remain their own, whose vote, though made in silence, counts, and is cast on the side of peace and justice.

The Simon Report presents data and conclusions on many problems of the first practical importance: whether India is ready for full Dominion Status immediately, or whether fully responsible Provincial government is to precede fully responsible Central government; whether the Services, especially the Civil and Police, are still to recruit Englishmen, or to become solely Indian, the present members having the option of serving out their time; the retainment of a British element in the Army and Defence; the territorial arrangement of the Provinces; the relations of the Princes to British or Dominion India; whether Dyarchy has failed so hopelessly that it must be utterly discarded; the continuance or ending of communal representation and communal constituencies (to which the Moslems have added the demand for communal provinces, in Sind, Baluchistan, and the North-West Frontier Province); allotment of revenue to Central and Provincial Governments; revision of national revenue and expenditure; the problem of education. Every one of these problems, but some more than others, is intricately bound up with passion and pride, and there is no hope of a solution that will bring peace unless both British and Indians will think of one thing only, the guiding of a population of 330 millions towards a future of prosperity. The touchiness and bad temper which complicate the Indian issue need to be banished. It is to be hoped that the Round Table Conference will be thrown open to the fullest publicity. The Government will gain by this, since it will be seen that the difficulties of the Indian situation are real, and not invented for propaganda purposes. India will gain, since the pressure of outside expectation will operate to make Hindus and Moslems really try to get together.

Theoretically, the Round Table Conference may decide on a more drastic way than any I have indicated. Many whose knowledge entitles them to a hearing are emphatic that Western democratic institutions are unsuited to India, and have failed. We may see their withdrawal recommended. Withdrawal, however, is impossible. In the first place, the Reforms, if we look back over their working everywhere, and not merely in centres of admitted failure, have not collapsed to the extent that many assert. Secondly, the parliamentary system is now part of the Indian political mentality, which has taken on its colour and thinks in its terms. Democracy will work, if reinforced by wise and plentiful delegation of tasks to local and lesser bodies, whether municipal or village, and if accompanied by a shaking down of the overgrown divisions of India into more manageable units. It is a time when the boldest course will be the sanest, and will ensure the longest pacification. In the Central Government, however, we may see, when the Round Table Conference has finished, a reasonably startling departure. It is practically impossible to elect a Central Legislature that in any real sense represents the people of India. Moreover, in Federated India the Princes must have spokesmen. It is possible that we shall see a Central Legislature of delegates, rather than of representatives*---of men chosen and sent by the Provincial Governments, not elected by the people. Nor is this the only possible change. There is now a conflict of aims and desires. The Princes, even in the brief interim since the Butler Report was published, have learnt much, and come to some strongly held convictions. They recognise that they must come into an Indian Federation, and that this means a definite putting off of complete sovereignty. Even the Nizam has come into the Chamber of Princes and its deliberations. But the Princes desire a weak Central Government, whereas the National Congress politicians desire a vigorous one. There is no doubt that the Princes can enforce their will, as the price of coming into Federated India. One development during the Reforms has been the increasing aggrandisement of the Provinces, at the expense of the Centre. The Viceroy, nevertheless, still has very great power and patronage in his hands. In the New India, the Central Government will probably keep little responsibility and authority except in foreign affairs and, in the last resort, in the maintenance of order. It will then be possible, if it is considered desirable, to have a Member of the Royal Family as Viceroy. It will be through the Viceroy that the Princes will have their link with India and the Empire. Since the Princes are dissatisfied with things in their present indeterminate state, there will be a Constitution for India, in which will be clearly laid down what are the rights and powers of the parties concerned.

We need not trouble ourselves overmuch---for, after all, each generation can do nothing more than solve its own immediate problems as wisely as it knows how---with the question of the rights the Princes have kept in abeyance, such as those of coinage and postal services. These have been brought out of the cupboards of the past, mainly for bargaining purposes. The Princes have been negotiating with the politicians of British India (other than the Extremists, who refuse to negotiate, and have had what will prove the barren satisfaction of occupying the “news” space of our papers). They are not going to inflict economic chaos on India, nor are they going to acquiesce in that enormous extension of India’s tariff system which Indian business desires. Let this last fact be a comfort to British business, which may take additional comfort from the reflection that, once the political onus of governing India has passed from Britain, British-Indian trade will be transacted in a friendlier atmosphere and one in which mutual knowledge helps. Later, when Native India is industrialised, tariffs may rise. But we need not concern ourselves as to the possibilities of the future.

Native India can take a more detached view of the desirability, or otherwise, of extending democratic institutions than British India can, for there has been no considerable record or experience of them in the former. The people of the Native States, except under a bad Prince, have their own ways of bringing pressure of opinion to bear on their Government, and usually get their way. Indeed, in British India the rising has not been against misrule, but against impersonal rule, in so far as genuine discontent has been at work. When the motor-car came in, a great deal of personality went out of the Administration. The British officer in an Indian regiment often gets a knowledge of the people such as only comes to one administrator in a thousand. The semi-military tradition and outlook of the Punjab has had the same advantage, of bringing the official close to the people, as in a less personal, more orderly regime does not happen.

Looking back over ten years, on the two most obvious parties to this controversy, we can see that on the one side there has been stumbling and bewilderment, on the other side impatience and a refusal to come to grips with any facts other than those out of which political capital might be made, on both sides futility. The British, for their part, can better afford to quicken the pace, than to linger it out any further. The terms under which the Round Table Conference is summoned should make it plain beyond all possibility of misunderstanding, that it is for the People of British India to present an agreed scheme in essentials, for the Princes to say what they intend to reserve in the inevitable settlement with the larger India and how they propose to bring their own people in line with the modern democratic world, for the Government to show how it will reconcile its pledges to both Native and British India and its responsibility for the equal rights and protection of all minorities.

I have written, and felt, hopefully. Yet there are times when it is hard to ward off darker forebodings---when I am aware only of the extreme difficulty of obtaining a patient hearing in the United States for any but the most inflammatory representations, when I see the hardening of the British Imperialist Extremists, when I think of the reckless propaganda of the Indian Extremists, both in India and abroad. I fear most of all the stiffening of my own people, fear lest they should stand on dignity and on abstract and absolute right---lest they should demand some sign of repentance for the provocation of the last ten years of folly. Here is the true resemblance with the days of Lexington and Boston, when the Government, justly incensed, could think only of the tea flung into the harbour, and lost sight of the deeper and wider causes of quarrel. There was a chance of peace, ten years ago, if the British had understood what was in Indian hearts, when their leaders insisted that England must make “atonement.” It was a gesture expressing in the most unequivocal terms repudiation of the Punjab highhandedness that was demanded. This gesture came from official England; but from unofficial, but powerful, private quarters, the House of Lords and the British community in India, came exoneration of General Dyer and a gift of £26,000 to him. Today, it is in British hearts that there is resentment, for what seems almost unexampled childishness and injustice and the wanton waste of a whole decade. The last two years, especially, seem one long provocation, the more vexing in that it has been accompanied by a refusal to face the real problems which India has within herself. I am certain that, just as there came no “atonement” from England, ten years ago, there is going to come no “atonement” from political India now. Nor will anything ever get done, while two nations stand on their dignity.

With this Indian situation, I can see no hope unless the British people---irrespective of any Commission’s Report, while giving it the careful consideration that it deserves---take the whole problem into their own hands, and face the people of India with that natural frankness and kindliness which have made their power a tolerable experience for the rest of mankind. If they will do this, I see not merely hope, but certainty that we shall have a settlement, and that the world will proceed towards universal peace by a longer stride than could be brought about by many naval conferences. For this affects not merely Nations, but the assemblage of East and West, now fast being mobilised into hatred of each other. Therefore I have appealed unto Caesar, if Caesar will hear me. I have set out not only the provocation of my own people, but the provocation that India has suffered, that both may be seen together.

So from bitterness we approach the place of healing of estrangement. There will begin to be peace between East and West, and we are nearer than we have ever been, to finding our hands upon the very sources of resentment between Nations.

“Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing---
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.”

Appendixes

Appendix I

A Note on the Government of India

The Presidencies

Out of the East India Company’s early settlements emerged three main centres, the Madras, Bombay, and Bengal Presidencies. Each was in control of a “President,” who had a small Council. Decisions were reached by voting.

In 1773, Lord North’s Regulating Act gave Bengal authority over the other Presidencies. Warren Hastings was appointed “Governor-General of Bengal,” with a Council of four. This number has varied slightly from time to time. But the Presidencies were each under a Governor and Council.

Lieutenant-Governors

In 1833, “the Governor-General of Bengal in Council” became “the Governor-General of India in Council.” The vexed question of the subordination of Madras and Bombay was settled by the withdrawal of their power to legislate.

In 1854, Bengal was separated from the Central Government. It would hardly do to have a Governor and a Governor-General side by side. So Bengal was given a Head of lower status, called a Lieutenant-Governor, a title already in being. Governor-General of India and Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal shared the same winter capital, Calcutta, an awkward arrangement.

In 1836, Bengal (“as elusive a term in Anglo-Indian official nomenclature as Burgundy was in medieval history”)* had been stripped of the United Provinces (then called the North-Western Provinces), which came under the first “Lieutenant-Governor.” The Punjab was given a Lieutenant-Governor, 1859, and Burma was given one, 1897. In 1905, Bengal was divided (“the Partition”), into two Lieutenant-Governorships. The Partition was annulled, 1911, and Bengal proper was reunited. But Bihar and Orissa were made into a separate Lieutenant-Governorship, Bengal being restored to its first rank by being given a Governor, a concession for its loss of the capital of all India, which was changed from Calcutta to Delhi.

Certain areas, not of Lieutenant-Governor importance, were under “Chief Commissioners.” These officers, and Lieutenant-Governors, were appointed from the Indian Civil Service, by the Governor-General in Council. Governors and the Governor-General were, and are, appointed from England.

In 1919, there was reorganisation, as a result of which India today has nine Provinces, all under Governors: Bombay, Madras, Bengal, the Punjab, United Provinces, Bihar and Orissa, the Central Provinces, Assam, Burma.

Powers of local legislation were restored to the Provinces in 1861.

Viceroy and Governor-General

The Head of the Central Government is referred to

“as Governor-General when he is regarded as the statutory head of the Government of India, and as the Viceroy when he is regarded as the representative of the Sovereign.”*

Indian Princes claim that their relations are with the Viceroy, as the King-Emperor’s vicegerent, and that they have none with the Governor-General-in- Council. They have some justification, in the procedure whereby the Viceroy keeps in his own hands the foreign portfolio, which includes the transactions with Native States. There is a Political Secretary to the Government of India, but he is not of Executive Council rank. The Viceroy’s Executive Council today is really a Cabinet, and consists of the Commander-in-Chief, and the Members for Finance, Law, Railways and Commerce, Industries and Labour, Education and Health and Lands, and the Home Member---seven in all, not counting the Viceroy. When Native States business comes up, the Political Secretary attends to explain and answer questions, but he cannot discuss the business on equal terms or vote on it. If the reader feels inclined to say that this is an absurd position, and more like Army Orderly Room procedure than any Cabinet government known to civilised peoples, the answer is that there always has been in India much of the military system of graded subordination whereby very rarely can two men meet on a level of authority or opinion. The same system flaws the Executive Councils of the Provinces. For long enough, when “added members” made a kind of paltry stretching out to what some day (by vast changes) might be the start of representative government, these added members were allowed---reluctantly, and with periods when the privilege was withdrawn---to ask questions, but were not supposed to do more than diligently and respectfully seek and accept information. The Princes, however, prefer the system whereby the Political Member is not of Cabinet bore (if we may carry our military metaphor a bit further). They think that if their business were represented in the inner councils, instead of irregularly brought in, they would be liable to encounter a solid block of Members against them, in case of difference between a State and British India. If you are restive under what you consider encroachments on your status, your main hope is in keeping that status indeterminate. If you are pretty sure that definition of your status will fix you lower than you wish to be, or think you have a right to be, you will prefer indefiniteness.

The Secretary of State and His Council

The Government of India is subordinate to the British Parliament, which acts through the Secretary of State for India. The East India Company had a Board of Control, under a President. The Secretary of State for India has a Council of not less than eight and not more than twelve, half of whom must have had service or residence in India. In practice these have almost all been retired officials, with the Army also represented, and with an occasional lawyer who had formerly been sent out from England to serve in India. Since 1907 there have always been Indians among the Members. In most, but not all, matters, the Secretary can overrule the Council, who can then only record a Minute of Dissent. The Secretary is supposed to lay before the Council every “order or communication” to India, except “secret” or “urgent” orders.

Owing to the trifling interest normally taken in Indian affairs, the Secretary of State is probably the most independent Member of the British Cabinet. Except when Lancashire has been on the war-path in the House of Commons, about the imposition of tariffs on cotton goods imported into India, he has been able to do pretty well what he chose and to “get away with it.” Especially during the present century, the tendency has been for Viceroy and Secretary of State to regard India as a matter primarily concerning them alone, and to interchange views without overmuch disturbing either Executive Council or Advisory Council in London.

Indians have rarely had a good word for the Secretary of State’s Council.

Executive and Legislative Councils

Five stages can be distinguished:

(1) Governor-General and Council were both Executive and Legislative Councils in one, until 1834, when the celebrated Thomas Babington Macaulay was sent out as an Additional Member, the first Law Member. He was sent for legislation only, and had no right to be present when executive business was discussed.

In 1853, the Law Member became a full Member; another six “Added Members” were appointed, two being judges and one being sent by each of the four then existing Provinces, Bengal, Bombay, Madras, and the North-West (now the United) Provinces. These new Members soon began to criticise the original

Executive Members, who from now on may be called what they were, a Cabinet.

(2) 1861, the Mutiny being recently over, was a time of general overhauling of Indian affairs. No less than twelve Additional Members were allowed if the Governor-General thought good (the judges being dropped from the Council). But these were forbidden to indulge in their former malpractices of asking questions about executive policy, and even criticising it. They were to devote their attention to legislation, and not to stray. Some of the new Members were Indians.

(3) Lord Cross's Indian Councils Act, 1892.

The Governor-General’s Council, the Imperial or Central Council, was to contain at least ten Additional Members, and might contain as many as sixteen. Not more than six of these were to be officials. Accordingly, from the Councils which most of the Provinces had, ten non-official Members were selected to serve on the Imperial Council. The Madras and Bombay Legislative Councils were augmented by twenty Additional Members, of whom eleven were to be non-officials.

The elective principle now cautiously raised its head. Municipalities, University Senates, Commercial bodies, were allowed to nominate Members. The educated Indian community eagerly grasped the permission to suggest men suitable for nomination. It cherished with no less eagerness the right of “interpellation”; that is, of asking the Executive Councillors questions about acts of the Administration.

(4) The Morley-Minto Reforms, 1909.

The Imperial Legislative Council was enlarged to sixty, from twenty-one. The Provincial Councils were doubled.

The “communal principle” was introduced. That is, certain minorities, notably the Mohammedans, were reserved a certain definite representation.

An official majority was kept in the Imperial Council, as a last ditch; and the Imperial Council had the right still to disallow legislation by any Provincial Council. The Councils were permitted to cross-question Executive Councillors on administrative matters.

These Reforms were hailed by India with delight. To us they must seem little enough, and to have been long enough waited for.

(5) The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 1919 (December). They came into operation, 1921.

The Legislative Councils were again enlarged. Some now number a hundred or more Members, with officials in a small minority. The Imperial Government was given a second chamber, the Council of State, consisting of sixty Members (thirty-three elected). The Imperial Legislative Council became the Imperial Legislative Assembly.

Some Members are communal, but most represent mixed constituencies. The franchise embraces about 3 per cent of the population. It is on a property basis.

The most important feature of these Reforms was “Dyarchy,” division of rule. Certain subjects were “transferred” to Indian Ministers, definitely responsible to the Legislative Councils, which now contained a large elected majority. “Transference” was only in the Provinces, the Imperial Government being kept intact from the hand of Democracy.

Powers of the Councils

When the Imperial Council had power to legislate in all matters for all India, there was much confusion. Its actions, as well as its revenues, overlapped with those of the Provincial Councils. Since 1919, subjects and revenues have been divided into Central and Provincial.

Admission of Indians to Power

In 1833, every position under the Company was declared open to all, whatever their race or creed. The same declaration was solemnly made in Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, and is considered by Miss Mayo to have been “a bomb, indeed, to drop into caste-ridden, feud-filled, tyrant-crushed India!”* It would have been a bomb to drop into caste-ridden officialdom, if any one had proposed to take it seriously. The Indian Government long had a reputation, magnificently earned and set down in the admissions of high Authority such as cannot be dismissed as envious or seditious, for making fine promises and then shelving them. It always played for time, and postponed the evil day when unholy voices would make themselves heard in the inner sanctuary. In John Company days, it was the “interloper” (the unauthorised trader) who was regarded as the extreme of human depravity. In later days, it was the person who used the license of “interpellation,” who asked questions, instead of looking silent gratitude for information vouchsafed. During the last forty years, it has been “the half-baked, so-called educated Indians,” “the seditious few who represent no one but themselves” (as if it were not important to represent yourself, if there is no one else to represent you).

The European business community rarely bothered itself about the country’s government, except that the Administration had periodical clashes with the planters. It has not cared overmuch about decorations, which have been a concern of much interest to officials. If the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms did nothing else, they changed this attitude of detachment. The unofficial European community is wiser, kinder, more sympathetic to the Indian community, and has supplied reasonableness during a time when this quality has often been to seek. The pro-Dyer madness seems in retrospect a sickness of which the patient has become ashamed, as one surmises the anti-Mayo fury will presently seem to Indians.

In 1870, Indians were to be nominated to the Indian Civil Service. Miss Mayo’s “bomb” thereby gave its belated preliminary fizzing. For long, the announcement remained a dead letter. But some Indians entered the Service by going to England, and passing the open examination there, a brother of Rabindranath Tagore being the first. Up to the War, the proportion of Indians in the higher branches of administration was trifling. The last ten years have seen all this changed with remarkable rapidity and thoroughness.

The Indian Civil Service is in charge of the actual administration, as well as most of the judicial work. In each Province are a few Divisional Commissioners, Civilians who are over groups of other Civilians, the ordinary district officers. The first Indian to be a Commissioner was Romeshchandra Dutt, in 1894. Another, K. G. Gupta, was a Commissioner before the War. When I left Bengal, in 1923, three of the five Commissioners in the Province were Indians (unless my memory plays me false). Thirty per cent of the Civil Service are Indians, who also man the subordinate service almost entirely.

Among the notable landmarks in the bringing of Indians into their own Government are (1) in 1907, two Indians were put on the Secretary of State’s Council, on which Indians have been represented ever since (2) in 1909, an Indian was appointed to the Viceroy’s Executive Council, and Indians were appointed to the Madras and Bombay Executive Councils (3) in 1917, two Indians, one a Ruling Prince, took part in the Imperial War Conference in London, and afterwards in the Peace Conference at Versailles (4) in 1918, an Indian was made Under-Secretary of State for India, and elevated to the House of Lords (5) in 1919, an Indian was made Governor of a Province, the Province of Bihar (6) since the War, India has had representatives of her own blood at all the Imperial Conferences, and has signed the League of Nations as an independent Member. It is a mild statement of the facts to say that during the last ten years, Indians have been brought into more positions of high influence than in the whole preceding sixty years.

One Indian, Sir Satyendra Sinha, afterwards Lord Sinha of Raipur, brought off five “events,” by becoming the first Indian Advocate General of Bengal, the first Indian Law Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, the first Indian peer, the first Indian Member of a British Government, the first Indian Governor of a Province. He had been President of the National Congress, in 1917.

A Note on Dyarchy

The War was a time when India was full of political schemes. “Dyarchy” began from a meeting of Indians and Europeans at Sir Satyendra Sinha’s house in Darjeeling, in the autumn of 1917. Mr. Lionel Curtis, travelling in India, attended, and arranged to put the Twelve Points agreed upon, into written shape. The essence of the scheme, as we have seen, was the transfer of the Government of India by departments. The original “dyarchists” thought it would be best to do this by geographical departments, creating within the Provinces temporary provinces where full responsible government could be tried out. But the actual Reforms of 1921 transferred, on the basis of the existing Provinces, the departments of education, agriculture, health and sanitation, and local government (roads, municipal affairs, etc.), to three new Indian Ministers, removable at the will of the now mainly elected Legislatures. Dyarchy was kept out of the Central Government for the present. Its result may be seen at its best in Madras. Here the Executive Council of five (the Governor, two British Members, two Indian Members) were reinforced by three Indian Ministers. The two groups, until Non-co-operation wrecked matters, met as one Cabinet. Indians had been represented on the Legislative Councils in 1861; but now they had a clear majority in the Cabinet, which governed and did not merely advise.

When Education and Agriculture were “transferred,” the Educational and Agricultural Services were transferred also. These are not now recruited outside India, though some British members are serving out their time. The Indian Civil Service is now recruited in the proportion of 40 British, 60 Indians annually. It consists of 894 British, 367 Indians (January, 1929). The total number of British officials in India, in all the superior Services together, is 3,529. There is almost exactly the same number of British officers in the Indian Army. Further, 7,499 officers are drawing pensions in Great Britain (3,661 military, 772 Civil Service and Judges, 551 Medical Service, 2,330 Police and minor Services, the remainder from such Services as the Bengal Pilot Service.) There are also 800 ex-soldiers employed in the Police Force of 187,000. They give instruction in drill and the use of weapons.

Appendix II

The Simon Report

The Central Legislature, as we have seen, provided a Committee (of nine members, not the seven proposed) which sat with the Simon Committee. I have freely quoted their report (the Nair Report). Eight of the nine Provincial Legislatures appointed each their own seven, and the sixteen members of the Simon and Central Committees had this invaluable local guidance, when they visited the Provinces in turn. The Simon Report appeared in two parts, June 10, and 24, and almost simultaneously the Reports of the Provincial Committees were published.

The Reports of the Provincial Committees will surprise the reader who has formed his ideas of the Indian controversy from the newspapers. They do not mention Mr. Gandhi, and seem unaware that what the last ten years have seen is a straight battle between a saint and a brutal imperialism; their tone and matter both are strangely unlike those of the Apocalypse. They say nothing of the shameless way in which England drains India’s fabulous wealth of natural resources and returns them as manufactures. They are singularly preoccupied with communal questions, and the problem of reservation of seats for minorities. They reveal a queer respect for dyarchy, so much so that the reader will find himself wondering whether that abused system was so foolish, after all, and whether it has failed as completely as is asserted. They all are emphatic that the communal principle must remain for the present, although one of their members (Dr. B. R. Ambedkar) complains that

“If the Legislative Council was a zoo or a museum wherein a certain number of each species was to be kept, such a theory of minority representation would have been tolerable.”

They wish the Governors, as now, to be armed with last-resort powers of overruling the Legislatures. They are divided as to the desirability of Second Chambers. They reveal a certain half-shamefaced perception of the fact that the twisted political position of the last ten years has had an effect within the Councils, in making much of their action more obstructive than was helpful. They show a willingness to admit the “poor show” given to the depressed classes, and a desire to safeguard them even more than other minorities. Generally, there is a high ambition for India’s parliamentary future, even to the extent of a Resolution by the Bengal Committee that

“The prevalence of bribery should be put an end to on the lines existing in the United States of America and Canada. Unless it is abolished, respectable people will not be willing to come forward for election or agree to work as Ministers.”

The Simon Report

The First Part, published June 10, had an interesting fate. It was hailed with fierce denunciation, as one knew it would be.

“One type of first-impressionist had already made up his mind to damn the Simon Report long before it was issued. The danger is that his interpretation is likely to be passed on to followers who lack the patience and in thousands of cases the education to read the Report themselves.”*

It was proved again, what every wise author knows, that his last and first pages are incomparably his most important. On the last page of their Report the Commission observed:

“In our view, the most formidable of the evils from which India is suffering have their roots in social and economic customs of long standing, which can only be remedied by the action of the Indian peoples themselves.”

The cry was raised, and repeated by the mob which no man can number, whose opinions are secondhand and their voices part of a chorus, that the Simon Report was another Mother India, and that on social grounds it was going to prove unsympathetic to political aspirations. Yet the next two sentences ran:

“They are much less likely to be remedied if the blame for their continuance can be put, however unreasonably, on others. We desire to see the forces of public opinion which exist in India concentrated and strengthened for the practical work of reform.”

In other words, the Commission recognise the desirability of as soon as possible making it impossible for Indians to blame the political situation for everything wrong in their midst, and to refuse to diagnose their own case honestly.

In a surprisingly brief space of time, the outcry failed. Sufficient interest had been aroused in the Indian question for many to examine the Report for themselves. In the light of firsthand knowledge, it was seen for what it was, a remarkably thorough and sympathetic piece of political writing. Never have so many relevant facts on the problem been so ably marshalled.

The Second Part, a fortnight later, was less convincing. Yet we may distinguish here, and find some of its conclusions likely to win the support of all but those invincibly set against any solution but war, open or concealed. Dyarchy goes, if their Report carries the day. The Legislatures are to be at least doubled, and the Governor is to choose his Ministers (there are to be no Executive Councillors) either from elected members or from outside, but all are to act as one Cabinet, with joint responsibility. The Governor keeps certain special powers, to protect minorities and the services, and to prevent a breakdown of administration. The franchise is to be widened. Most important of all, the Provincial Councils are to have within themselves the power of recasting their own constitution, so that there will no longer be any excuse for the complaint that their system of government is one foisted on them from outside; and taxation is no longer partly reserved, partly subject to vote. The last ten years have been marked by a great unwillingness on the part of the Legislatures to vote taxation. The belief has been fostered, that if “the most expensive administration in the world” could only be got rid of, there would be abundant funds for every purpose, without additional taxation. Indians have been demanding (especially those who do not live in India) that their country have all the luxuries of an advanced nation, not only every health and education service, but such “frills” as civil aviation research, and all this without an extra penny of taxation beyond the $800,000,000 which at present suffice for a population of 247 millions. Mr. Gandhi has done no great service in smashing the salt tax; a stable source of revenue has gone, the people are free to pick up any poisonous scum from the marsh-edges, and some private company will (one fears) exploit those who wish to eat the salt that is mined by Government at present. India is a desperately poor country, as all the world knows. But, as Mr. Layton points out,* she has vast accumulations of private wealth, and her hoarding classes are exceedingly lightly touched by taxation. Her natural resources are nothing like what they are given out to be by Nationalist propaganda; with Burma gone, she will have lost the greater part of her mineral wealth, and will be poor indeed. But her Government must have a far larger revenue; and the revenue can be got, if her Ministers are courageous. They will have to battle with vested interests both of land and religion, and to be vilified as only the Indian press can vilify, and they may well feel aggrieved that the Alien Government, before it handed over, did not itself take on so depressing a task. Yet (if we are to get at the psychological truth) there has been growing among Englishmen, especially English officials, an increasing weariness of an opposition so unfair and of a position in which one did one’s best but could say nothing in defence, and an increasing tendency to ask whether it was worth it, for the little advantage that Britain now gets from India. We may be glad that at last responsibility for expenditure falls on those who have to bear it.

Burma is to be forthwith separated from India. This is inevitable. Sind and Orissa are to be considered, as areas it is desirable to sever from the Provinces they are now tied to; but in the case of the former the Commission considers that the district is too poor and too much in debt for the huge irrigation schemes that are being put through, to make its separation possible at present.

The Central Government

The Council of State is to remain, but the Legislative Assembly is to be turned into a “Federal Assembly,” filled by indirect election (i.e., appointed by the Legislatures of the Provinces and the Princes’ Chamber) . There is to be also a Council for Greater India, which is to consider matters of common concern to the States and the people of British India. This is to be a beginning of that Federation of All India which is the principal aim of the Report. The Commission recognises that some of the States may be prepared to enter the Federation before others, some may be willing to come into closer union with the nearest Province; and in every way it is anxious that the door may be open, but that there may be no compulsion to go through it. India will be wise to accept this spirit, and the Round Table Conference will do well to find elastic expressions of it, for it is born of the wisdom of tolerance, that recognises the world’s diversity of creatures and that India must find her own parliamentary methods and her own system of unification.

The Governor-General will continue to serve in his own Executive Council, and will choose his own Councillors without reference to the Secretary of State. The Viceroy will be the link between the Crown and the States, and the business of the latter will not come into the Executive Council.

The Commander-in-Chief ceases to be a Member of the Executive Council. The Army is to be

“a matter which should fall within the responsibilities of the Governor-General, advised by the Commander-in-Chief, as representing the Imperial authorities, instead of being part of the responsibilities of the Government of India in relation to the Central Legislature.”

The “Security Services”---the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police---are to be recruited as now, by the Secretary of State. The recruitment of the Irrigation and Forest Services is left an open question. My own judgment would reserve them both for a few years longer, as essentially “security services.” The Legislative Councils have made it very plain during the last ten years that they cannot stand against the temptation to make a quick profit out of the forests (whose conservation is one of the greatest gifts of British administration to India) or the pressure of the peasants who desire to graze and cut as they choose. If the forests go, especially if the Himalayan forests go, the rivers and irrigation canals will dry up. Both the Indian peasant and the Indian politician need to realise that the saving of the woods is not a fad and tyranny of the foreigner, but that they are the very life of India. And for a while longer the irrigation works need the presence of some British engineers.

The official bloc disappears from all legislatures. The Provincial legislatures hitherto have had nearly a quarter of their members officials or nominated. This admittedly has led to much solely obstructive criticism, because it has been felt that the Government cannot be seriously threatened, with so large a group of certain supporters. Also, in the legislation they have introduced, Governments have done what we may as well frankly call truckling to the general opinion of the legislatures.

Some Criticisms

The Report does not go far enough in some matters on which Indian opinion feels keenly. It contemplates the present rate of “indianisation” of the Services and the Army as satisfactory. In my judgment, we must atone for the decades of delay in doing anything serious to fulfil our promises of admitting Indians to their own government, by quickening the pace now. It will carry conviction only on our own side, to point out that no Indian has a higher rank in the combatant army than captain, and that therefore it must be long before one will be qualified to serve in the highest positions. A way must be found round this dilemma, even if the Army rules are those of the Medes and Persians. It is on this side, that of defence, that we have done least to set India on her own feet. Probably the best way out would be the setting apart of units to be officered throughout by Indians.

The whole question of the Services remains as thorny as ever. One fact that has emerged from the last ten years is this: India will not object to having a less efficient administration, if it is cheaper. If the British in the Services are merely adequately paid, with their home expenses and their passage expenses and their frequent family illnesses, then the Indians are overpaid. There will be no objection to the presence of British in the Services, if the question is courageously handled. Let there be no differentiation of status, but let the pay be far more frankly settled on the basis of individual necessities than it is at present.

The territorial reorganisation of India needs more than the separation of Burma. I believe it would be well to do as much as can be done, now. Few questions are more important than this one. There are not merely communal minorities, there are national minorities. New consciousness of unity has developed in many places, along the lines of language, during the last hundred years. The Partition of Bengal has frightened us from readjustment. But much readjustment is necessary. It need not be done today by orders from above. Let Indians themselves be invited to rearrange their political divisions.

I should like to see the Viceroy outside his Cabinet altogether, and without political responsibility. And I am pretty sure that the Secretary of State’s Council will not survive the Round Table Conference.

Conclusions

I have criticised Government and official action in India as much as any one. But I feel bound to say that the history of the last ten years seems to me a progressive disentangling of ourselves from difficulties which were a cruel disability when these years began. The Simon Report in its main lines recommends a course which has little glory in it, but much honest usefulness. We are relinquishing political control before administrative guidance.

Responsibility should now be put where it lies. I suppose I shall be set down as a diehard imperialist if I say that the platform, particularly in the United States, has increasingly convinced me of the essential dishonesty and unreality of much of the Indian controversy. But I am comforted by memory of the many Indians who have in private said as much to me. It is a pity that the Simon Report in more than one place goes out of its way to peer into the future, and to say that “for very many years to come” a British element in the Services and British responsibility for Defence are inevitable. It is such prophecies that discourage our friends and infuriate our enemies. And---though they may seem platitudes to us now---you never can tell. We can put the truth more simply and less discouragingly, thus: there are only two things in the way of complete self-government in India, Defence and the Communal Question. In many ways, these two questions are one. The First Part of the Simon Report, in its two most valuable sections, brings out the mingled courage, common sense, tolerance, and freedom from bondage to the doctrinaire, which have built up the British North-West Frontier Policy and Defence; and brings out the extent to which India recruits her Army from a very small area. If I were a Nationalist I should do some hard thinking over the map that confronts [us below]. Nepal provides 19,000 men, the Punjab 86,000, the United Provinces 16,500. No other Province provides more than 7,000. Bengal and Assam each provide not a single man, the Central Provinces provide 100, Bihar and Orissa provide 300. Whether under Independent or Dominion India, it is asking a great deal of human nature to expect an Army recruited from two contiguous Provinces to defend from outside aggression and to keep internal order over Provinces where (as in Bengal) 47 million people raise not a single soldier, and not to abuse a position of such strength. There is no more in this book. necessary duty awaiting the Indian patriot than this, that during the breathing-space still available, while Britain assures her frontiers, he strives to persuade the less martial peoples of India that the burden of defence and security is one which the whole nation must share out. It is not enough that an occasional student of Calcutta or Madras Universities should desire to enter Sandhurst. The notion that the Sikhs and Punjabi Moslems will consent to serve under Bengali or Madrasi officers, while Bengali and Madrasi martial traditions and privates are non-existent, may be dismissed. Sikhs and Jats and Dogras and Marathas and Gurkhas can keep the main Provinces of India intact from invasion, even if the Frontier should lapse back to its old brigandage. But they will not take on the policing of All India, except at their own price. I do not think any one will dismiss this as an Englishman’s excuse for refusing self-government, if he spends five minutes studying the Simon Report map.

The reality of the communal trouble emerges from every page of the innumerable political discussions and pamphlets that India has scattered from the press, during these ten years of constitution making and guessing. Mr. Gandhi rightly says India is governed by fear today. The communal mind was revealed nakedly enough by a speaker at the last meeting of the AllIndia Muslim League, referring to the Congress’s consent (Nehru Report) to communal provinces, as well as communal electorates:

“The Delhi proposals gave them for the first time five provinces of which no less than three (Sind, North-West Frontier, and Baluchistan) contained a real overwhelming majority. If Muslims did not recognise this great step they were not fit to live (applause). There would be now nine Hindu Provinces against five Muslim Provinces, and whatever treatment Hindus accorded in nine Provinces Muslims would accord the same treatment to Hindus in the five Provinces? Was not this a great gain? Was not a new weapon gained for the assertion of Muslim rights?”

Well might a Hindu observe:

“A system must stand self-condemned which permits minorities to be treated in their own Provinces as hostages rather than as citizens, whose rights are subject to forfeiture, not for any bad behaviour chargeable to them but as a corrective for the bad behaviour of their kindred elsewhere? And who can say that the grievance leading to such a forfeiture will always be just and substantial?”

If India would kill communal hatred, would overhaul her systems of thought and social practice, and would bring into the full stream of national effort her despised minorities and her women, she would be rid of nine-tenths of her present miseries.

The British, at any rate, have it in their hands to place responsibility in the right quarter and to set the Indian controversy on the plane of fact. The Simon Report is a Report only, it is not a solution, still less is it an ultimatum. “Nothing must be allowed to detract from the essential freedom of discussion in open Conference which has been offered to the representatives of British India and of the Indian States.”* May I, in conclusion, offer two suggestions that seem to me obvious common sense? If the Conference is flung wide to the world’s gaze, there will be a minimum amount of time and effort wasted on unessentials and Hindus and Moslems will have to come to grips with the communal question. No one at all intelligent will hereafter believe that the British follow the Roman rule, divide et impera. We may even shame Indians into beginning to become Indians first, and Moslems or Hindus secondly. Lastly, I agree with Sir Francis Younghusband, that our Government should openly and plainly state that there is no intention to keep India in the Empire against the will of her people. If this is done, then we shall see the Defence problem examined, not as a dump for ammunition against the British, but as a possible haunt of peril. This question, too, will be brought off the platform and into the practical field; we shall see it studied with less heat and with more awareness of its potentialities. I think we shall hear much less of secession, and much more of co-operation. There is no great discrepancy in what informed men on both sides think as to the facts. Let us attend to these, and leave alone either recrimination as to the past or prophecy as to the future.

On July 8, the Secretary of State and the Viceroy both reaffirmed that the Government would leave the Round Table Conference free to adopt any solution whatever. This statement can be taken as literally and absolutely true. The British are a practical, not a pedantic, people.

Appendix III

Table of Political Events

1599.

East India Company receives Charter from Queen Elizabeth.

1612.

First English settlement, at Surat.

1640.

Settlement at Madras.

1661.

Bombay ceded by Portuguese to British as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza.

1690.

Calcutta founded by Job Charnock.

1746.

War between French and English East India Companies. Madras captured by French.

1756.

Nawab of Bengal attacks the British, and captures Calcutta.

1757.

British under Clive defeat the Nawab at Plassey.

1764.

East India Company appointed by the Mogul Emperor his Diwan in Bengal---the civil counterpart of the Nawab, who was his military representative (in theory).

1772.

The East India Company “stands forth as Diwan.” Warren Hastings Governor of Bengal. He appoints “Collectors” and institutes administrative reforms.

1773.

Lord North’s Regulating Act establishes parliamentary rights of supervision over the Court of Directors. Bengal is given a vague supremacy over Madras and Bombay. Warren Hastings becomes (1774) Governor-General in Bengal, with an Executive Council of four members.

1786.

Lord Cornwallis Governor-General. Indian Civil Service established.

1798-1805.

Lord Wellesley Governor-General. Period of conquest.

1805-29.

Period of comparative quiet. Such administrators as Munro, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe press for putting most of the administration in native hands, and urge the preservation of native systems.

December, 1829.

Suttee prohibited in Bengal.

June, 1830.

Suttee prohibited in Bombay and Madras. 1833. East India Company ceases to trade.

1830-57.

Vigorous action against thuggee, female infanticide, human sacrifice, robbery; and protests against suttee in Native States. Wars in Afghanistan, Burma, Sind, and with the Sikhs and Marathas. Annexations. Unrest and resentment abroad.

1849.

Punjab annexed, after Second Sikh War. Punjab Tradition founded by John Lawrence (its second British ruler, after the brief rule of his brother Henry), Abbott, Edwardes, Cust, Montgomery, Nicholson, and others. The “frontier psychology” enters Indian politics.

1853.

Indian Civil Service to be recruited by competitive examination, not nomination.

1857.

The Mutiny. Universities established in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay.

November, 1858.

Queen Victoria’s Proclamation, ending rule of East India Company, and transferring control to the Crown. Secretary of State for India succeeds East India Company’s Board of Control in London.

1859.

Final suppression of Mutiny.

1861-2.

Time of general overhauling. Indian Police established, in place of semi-military levies. Forest Service established. Government reviews its treaties with Native States, who are given sanads (letters of recognition) and assured that annexation is at an end. Indian Councils Act gives the Indian Central Government and the Governments of Bombay and Madras small Legislative Councils (containing nominated Indian members), instead of one Legislative (Law) Member. Indian Criminal Code drawn up in its present form.

1885.

Indian National Congress founded.

1892.

Another Councils Act (Lord Cross’s). Principle of nomination in accordance with recommendations of communities and public bodies (a rudimentary form of election) introduced.

1905.

Partition of Bengal causes great outcry.

1906.

National Congress demands the system of government that obtains in “the self-governing Colonies.”

1907.

National Congress, at Surat, breaks up in up roar. All-India Muslim League founded.

1909.

Morley-Minto Reforms, enlarging the Legislative Councils. Indians appointed to Executive Councils and to Secretary of State’s Council in London.

1911.

King-Emperor visits India. Partition of Bengal annulled. Capital changed from Calcutta to Delhi.

1914.

Great War. Indian response, both from British India and from Native Princes, genuine and generous. Indian troops sent (October) to Flanders; later, serve in Mesopotamia and Palestine. Indians eligible for Victoria Cross.

1917.

Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms foreshadowed in the Secretary of State’s pronouncement promising increased “indianisation” of the Services and the progressive realisation of self-government. Meeting of British and Indians at the house of Sir Satyendra Sinha, the President of the National Congress, to find an agreed method of introducing self-government. “Dyarchy” emerges from their discussions. First Indians appointed with the King’s Commission, in the combatant services. (There had been commissioned Indians in the Medical Service, as well as in the British Air Force, and in the Imperial Service Troops maintained by Native States; and also many honorary commissions.)

1918.

Rowlatt Act comes on the Statute book, though never put into operation. Moderates found Indian Liberal League.

1919.

Khilafat Movement. Punjab riots and suppression at Amritsar. India full of protest and counter-protest. December, Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms passed through House of Commons. Mr. Gandhi launches Non-Violent Non-co-operation.

1921.

Dyarchy begins. A year of disturbances; Moplah rising in South India, heavy rioting in Bombay when Prince of Wales lands, Akali troubles in the Punjab and butchery of 130 Akalis by Abbot of Nankana Sahib, riots in Madras.

1922, February.

Murder of 22 native police at Chauri-Chaura. Mr. Gandhi arrested (March) and sentenced to 6 years’ simple imprisonment.

1923.

Second elections fall in autumn. Non-co-operation party divided in its wishes, and finally the Congress decides to contest the elections. Lord Reading certifies enhancement of Salt Tax for one year (till March, 1924). The “Responsivists” in the Non-co- operation party forced back by the resultant clamour, into a purely wrecking policy. Dyarchy comes temporarily to an end in Bengal and the Central Provinces. The Legislative Assembly (the lower house of the Central legislature) demands that the ten years laid down by the 1919 Act as to elapse before the situation is reviewed, be anticipated. January, 1924. Mr. Gandhi operated on for appendicitis. Is unconditionally released (February), for reasons of health.

1927.

Mother India published. Simon Commission appointed.

1928, February.

Sir John Simon invites Indian Legislatures to appoint a Committee to meet with his in “joint, free conference.” Nine of the eleven Legislatures consent. Central Committee appointed (Chairman, Sir Sankaran Nair), and eight Provincial Committees.

August.

The All-Parties’ Conference convened by National Congress and acting through a Committee under the presidency of Pandit Motilal Nehru, issues Constitution for India.

December.

National Congress, at Calcutta, demands Dominion status, on basis of Nehru Constitution, within twelve months. All-India Muslim League, at Delhi, rejects Nehru Constitution.

1929, February.

Princes’ Chamber passes Resolution, “in view of the drift of certain politicians of British India towards complete independence,” affirming that they cannot contemplate transference to any new system, “except on the basis of the British connection.” October. Viceroy, acting with the Secretary of State, reaffirms Dominion Status as goal of British policy, and announces that after the publication of the Simon Report a Round Table Conference will be held, of the people of British India, the Princes, and the British Government.

November.

The European Associations of Bombay and Calcutta assure the Viceroy of their support, as do leading Princes and Moslems and Liberals.

December.

Viceroy asks for preliminary meeting, before the Congress meets, with Mr. Gandhi and other leaders. His train is wrecked by a bomb, as he comes to the meeting. Mr. Gandhi makes conditions which the Viceroy finds unacceptable. The Congress proceeds to meet. The Subjects Committee adopts Full Independence Resolution, by 114 votes to 77. The general meeting of the Congress, by 935 votes to 897, congratulates the Viceroy, Lady Irwin, and their party, on their escape from assassination. The All-India Muslim League and the Indian Liberal League welcome the Round Table Conference offer.

1930, January.

Mr. Gandhi puts out Nine Points (subsequently increased to Eleven), as conditions of withdrawing his threat of Civil Disobedience. They are rejected.

March.

Mr. Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest March begins, and ends with much disorder, many arrests, and his own arrest in May.

May.

Provincial Committees that assisted Simon Commission publish their Report.

June 10 and 24.

Publication of Simon Report.

October 20.

Round Table Conference scheduled to begin. The date was chosen to allow of the Imperial Conference delegates meeting the delegates from India.

The End