Nevertheless, there came a moment when the first feverish excitement seemed to wane. Time had gone on, and though there was a new Viceroy in India and a new Secretary of State at Whitehall, the Partition had remained an accomplished fact. The visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Calcutta had temporarily exercised a restraining influence on the political leaders, and the presence of Royalty in a country where reverence for the Throne is still a powerful tradition seemed to hush even the forces of militant sedition. In Eastern Bengal, where the agitation had been much fiercer than in Bengal proper, the energy and devotion displayed by the Lieutenant-Governor in fighting a serious threat of famine had won for him the respect of many of his opponents, and the situation was beginning to lose some of its acuteness when it was suddenly announced that Sir Bampfylde Fuller had resigned. The effect was instantaneous. The points at issue between Sir Bampfylde Fuller and the Government of India have been fully and frequently debated, and it is needless to discuss here the reasons given for his resignation, or for its prompt acceptance by the Viceroy. What I am concerned with is the effect produced by that incident. It was immediate and disastrous. The Bengalee leaders took heart. They claimed Sir Bampfylde's downfall as their triumph—theirs and their allies' at Westminster. Those, on the other hand, who imagined that it was Sir Bampfylde's methods that had intensified the agitation and that his removal would restore peace—even the sort of half peace which had been so far maintained in Bengal proper under the milder sway of Sir Andrew Fraser—were very soon undeceived. For if for a short time Sir Bampfylde Fuller's successor was spared, the Government of Eastern Bengal was compelled before long to take, more vigorous measures than he had ever contemplated, and the agitation, which had hitherto refrained from exhibiting its more violent aspects in Bengal proper, not only ceased to show any discrimination, but everywhere broadened and deepened. The veteran leaders, who still posed as "moderates," ceased to lead or, swept away by the forces they had helped to raise, were compelled to quicken their pace like the Communist leader in Paris who rushed after his men exclaiming:—Je suis leur chef, il faut bien que je les suive. The question of Partition itself receded into the background, and the issue, until then successfully veiled and now openly raised, was not whether Bengal should be one unpartitioned province or two partitioned provinces under British rule, but whether British rule itself was to endure in Bengal or, for the matter of that, anywhere in India.

The first phase of unrest in Bengal, at any rate in its outward manifestations, had been mainly political, and on the whole free from any open exhibition of disloyalty to the British Raj. With the Partition of Bengal it passed into a second phase in which, new economic issues were superadded to the political issues, if they did not altogether overshadow them, and the Swadeshi movement and the boycott soon imported methods of violence and lawlessness which had hitherto been considered foreign to the Bengalee temperament. This phase did not last for much more than a year after the Partition, for, when once started on the inclined plane of lawlessness, the agitation rapidly developed into a much wider and deeper revolt, in which Swadeshi held its place, but only in a subordinate position. The revolt began rapidly to assume the revolutionary complexion, in the religious and social as well as in the political domain, which Tilak had for years past, as we have seen, laboured to impart to his propaganda in the Deccan, and, as far as his personal influence and counsels availed, in every part of India with which he was in contact. The ground had already been prepared for this transformation by spadework in the Bengalee Press conducted by two of Tilak's chief disciples in Bengal. One was Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal, the bold exponent of Swaraj, whose programme I have already quoted. The other was Mr. Arabindo Ghose, one of the most remarkable figures that Indian unrest has produced. Educated in England, and so thoroughly that when he returned to India he found it difficult to express himself in Bengali, he is not only a high-caste Hindu, but he is one of those Hindu mystics who believe that, by the practice of the most extreme forms of Yoga asceticism, man can transform himself into a super-man, and he has constituted himself the high priest of a religious revival which has taken a profound hold on the imagination of the emotional youth of Bengal. His ethical gospel is not devoid of grandeur. It is based mainly on the teachings of Krishna to Arjuna as revealed in the Bhagvad Gita, and I cannot hope to define its moral purpose better than by borrowing the following sentence from Mrs. Besant's introduction to her translation of "The Lord's Song":—

It is meant to lift the aspirant from the lower levels of renunciation where objects are renounced, to the loftier heights where desires are dead and where the Yogi dwells in calm and ceaseless contemplation, while his body and mind are actively employed in discharging the duties that fall to his lot in life.

This reading of the Bhagvad Gita differentiates the newer Indian conception of renunciation, which does not exclude but rather prescribes the duty of service to society, from the older conception, which was concerned merely to procure the salvation of the individual by his complete detachment from all mundane affairs. With this gospel of active self-sacrifice none can assuredly quarrel, but it is the revolutionary form which Mr. Arabindo Ghose would see given to such activity that, unfortunately, chiefly fascinates the rising generation of Bengalees. For him British rule and the Western civilization for which it stands threaten the very life of Hinduism, and therefore British rule and all that it stands for must go, and in order that they may go every Hindu must be up and doing. That Mr. Arabindo Ghose himself holds violence and murder to be justifiable forms of activity for achieving that purpose cannot be properly alleged, for though he has several times been placed on his trial and in one instance for actual complicity in political crime—namely, in the Maniktolla bomb case—and though he is at present a fugitive from justice, the law has so far acquitted him. But that his followers have based upon his teachings a propaganda by deed of the most desperate character is beyond dispute. It has been openly expounded with fanatical fervour and pitiless logic in a newspaper edited by his brother, Barendra Ghose, of which the file constitutes one of the most valuable and curious of human documents.

Of the three Bengali newspapers that came into the field soon after Partition as the explicit champions of revolution—- the Sandhya, the Navasakti, to which Mr. Arabindo Ghose was himself a frequent contributor, and the Yugantar—the last named achieved the greatest and most startling popularity. It was founded in 1906 by Barendra Kumar Ghose, a brother of Arabindo, and by Bhupendranath Dutt, only brother of the celebrated Swami Vivekananda, who visited Europe and America as the missionary of the Hindu revival and has been revered in India, since his premature death in 1905, as a modern rishi and a no less great one than those of ancient Vedic times. Barendra Ghose, who had studied history and political literature at Baroda, where Arabindo was a Professor in the Gaekwar's College, had originally intended to start a religious institution, and whilst he edited the Yugantar he founded a hostel for youths attending "National" schools. The Yugantar set itself to preach revolution as a religious even more than a political movement. Its profession of faith is to be found in an article headed "The Age of the Gita again in India":—

God (i.e., Khrisna in the Gita) has said, "Oh, descendant of Bharata, whenever there be a decline of righteousness and the rise of unrighteousness, then I shall become incarnate again. I shall be born in every Yuga [era] to rescue the good, to destroy the wrongdoer, and to establish righteousness."

In the Dwapara-Yuga [the era which preceded the present Kali-Yuga, or era of darkness] when righteousness was on the wane and unrighteousness was springing up in the sacred land of India under the hands of Duryyodhana and other miscreants engaged in wickedness, then God, by becoming incarnate again and awakening his favourite disciple Arjuna to duty, re-established the kingdom of righteousness in India. At the present time righteousness is declining and unrighteousness is springing up in India. A handful of alien robbers is ruining the crores of the people of India by robbing the wealth of India. Through the hard grinding of their servitude, the ribs of this countless people are being broken to pieces. Endless endeavours are being made in order that this great nation by losing, as an inevitable result of this subjection, its moral, intellectual and physical power, its wealth, its self-reliance, and all other qualities, may be turned into the condition of the beasts of burden or be wholly extinguished. Why, oh Indians, are you losing heart, at the sight of many obstacles in your path, to make a stand against this unrighteousness? Fear not, oh Indians. God will not remain inactive at the sight of such unrighteousness in His kingdom. He will keep His word. Placing firm reliance on the promise of God, invoke His power, and He will descend in your midst to destroy unrighteousness. Do not be afraid. "When the lightning of heaven flashes in their hearts, men perform impossible deeds."

The article closes with a lyrical vision of the India of the future, with "the independent flag of righteousness" unfurled, her virtues restored, plague and famine banished, her industries brought to the highest pitch of scientific development, her armies and fleets going forth "to use the unlimited strength, knowledge, and righteousness of India for the benefit of the whole world."

The Yugantar at the same time set forth in a series of articles the scheme by which the enfranchisement of India was to be achieved—a scheme which was little more than a reasoned exposition of the methods already adopted in the previous decade by Tilak in the Deccan. These articles form a manual of directions for "the army of young men which is the Nrisinha and the Varaha and the Kalki incarnation of God, saving the good and destroying the wicked"—the Kalki incarnation being that in which Vishnu is to come and deliver India from the foreigner. To shake off slavery the first essential is that the educated classes shall learn to hate slavery. Then the lower classes will soon follow their lead. "It is easy to incite the lower classes to any particular work. But the incitement of the educated depends on a firm belief." Therefore the "poisonous" effects of slavery must be constantly brought home, and "we must always be trying to destroy the present unnatural liking for a state of servitude." The aspiration for freedom must be converted into a firm resolve, and to divert the Bengalee "from the unfailing attraction of a livelihood" to the cause of freedom "his mind must be excited and maddened by such an ideal as will present to him a picture of everlasting salvation." Public opinion must be built up by the newspapers, "which must be filled with the discussion of the necessity of independence and revolution," by soul-stirring musical and theatrical performances, glorifying the lives of Indian heroes and their great deeds in the cause of freedom, and by patriotic songs. "When in the Mahratta country the high-souled Shivaji stood up for independence the songs of the bards helped powerfully in his work." Above all, the materials for "a great sacrifice for liberty" must be prepared. "The stratagems known as resorting to cover in English military tactics are very necessary in all political endeavour," and "the enemy" must be kept constantly occupied by them. "A Bande Mataram procession to-day, a conference or congress to-morrow, a flourish of Swadeshi speeches the day after, and so on." A "great commotion may with advantage be made over small incidents," but "it must always be remembered that these do not constitute our real effort, and are very trifling accompaniments" which serve to keep the enemy busy and the country awake "whilst we are training," and the training consists in the organization, discreetly and silently, of bands of young men "with power to conceal secret counsel" and "to remain under complete obedience." Every band must "recognize the cultivation of physical strength as a principal means of attaining our object." Each band, working down from the chief town of the district, must be connected with other bands, and all must be initiated in the Shakti mantra—that Shakti worship which constitutes one of the most powerful and popular appeals to the sensuous side of Hindu mysticism. As for arming the bands, there are different ways of collecting arms, and in this business "there can be no considerations of right or wrong, for everything is laid at the feet of the goddess of independence." Bombs can be manufactured in secret places, and guns can be imported from foreign countries, for "the people of the West will sell their own Motherland for money," or they can be obtained from the native troops who, "though driven by hunger to accept service under Government, are men of our own flesh and blood," or, perhaps, even "secretly" from other Great Powers. Funds also can be collected in similar ways. Much money is required, and amongst other things for "secret preachers at home and abroad." It can be obtained "by voluntary donations," or "by the application of force," which is perfectly justifiable since the money is to be taken and used "for the good of society." Thefts and dacoities are, under normal conditions, crimes because they destroy the sense of social security, but "to destroy it for the highest good is no sin, but rather a work of religious merit." The taking of blood is, in the circumstances, equally praiseworthy. "The law of the English is established on brute force, and if to liberate ourselves we too must use brute force, it is right that we should do so." Nor is this doctrine merely stated in general terms:—

Will the Bengali worshippers of Shakti shrink from the shedding of blood? The number of Englishmen in this country is not above one lakh and a half, and what is the number of English officials in each district? If you are firm in your resolution you can in a single day bring English rule to an end. Lay down your life, but first take a life. The worship of the goddess will not be consummated if you sacrifice your lives at the shrine of independence without shedding blood.

These are the doctrines of revolutionary Hinduism expounded day by day for nearly two years by a group of highly educated young Bengalees, the effectiveness of whose appeal to sacred traditions was enhanced by remarkable qualities of style. I have before me a letter from a Hindu scholar who certainly has no sympathy with the methods advocated by the Yugantar—"Nothing like these articles ever appeared before in Bengali literature." "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh," and this was essentially true in the case of the Yugantar. The Government translator confessed in the High Court that he had never before read, in Bengali, language so lofty, so pathetic, and so stirring, that it was impossible to convey it in an English translation. Yet, the writers had never learnt to write Bengali in their school-days, and the organ tone of Milton, which was distinctly audible in the Bengali, betrayed their English education. The sale was unbounded. The circulation of the Yugantar rose to over 50,000, a figure never attained before by any Indian newspaper, and sometimes when there was a special run upon a number the Calcutta newsboys would get a rupee for a single copy before the issue was exhausted. So great indeed was the demand that the principal articles, forming a complete gospel of revolution, were republished in a small volume, entitled Mukti con pathe: "Which way does salvation lie?" Not only were these appeals to racial and religious passion reflected in many other papers all over Bengal, but the most lamentable fact of all was that scarcely any native paper, even amongst those of an avowedly moderate complexion, attempted to counteract, or ventured to protest against, either the matter or the tone of these publications. Their success, on the other hand, induced not a few to follow suit. What is forgotten in England by the uncompromising champions of the freedom of the Press is that in a country like ours, with its party system fully represented in the public Press, even the newspapers which either party may consider most mischievous find their corrective in the newspapers of the other party. In India that is not the case. There is no healthy play of public opinion. The classes whose confidence in the British Raj is still unshaken are practically unrepresented in the Press, which is mostly in the hands of the intellectuals, of whom the majority are drifting into increasing estrangement, while the minority are generally too timid to try to stem the flowing tide. Nor, if the "moderates" in Bengal were overawed by the violence of the new creed, can the whole blame be laid upon their shoulders when one remembers how little was being done by Government, and how ineffective that little was to check this incendiarism. Though there were many Press prosecutions, and action was repeatedly taken against the Yugantar in respect of particular articles, the limited powers possessed by Government were totally inadequate, and it was not till the Indian Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act was passed in June, 1908, that the Yugantar was suppressed. In the meantime it had left an indelible mark on Indian history, and many innocent victims paid with their lives for the extraordinary supineness displayed during those first disastrous two years of Lord Minto's administration.

The list of outrages and deeds of violence which had begun in Bengal in 1907 grew heavier and heavier as 1908 wore on, but none perhaps created such a sensation there as the murder of Mrs. and Miss Kennedy, who were killed at Muzafferpur on April 30, 1908, by a bomb intended for the Magistrate, Mr. Kingsford. The bomb had been thrown by a young Bengalee, Khudiram Bose, and it was the first occasion on which an Indian had used this product of modern science with murderous effect. The excitement was intense. The majority of the Bengalee papers, it is true, were fain to reprobate or at least to deprecate this particular form of propaganda, but such comments were perfunctory, whilst they generally agreed to cast the whole responsibility upon an alien Government whose resistance to their "national" aspirations goaded impatient patriotism to these extremes. Even amongst many who did not actually sympathize with the murderer there seems to have been a lurking sense of pride that it was a Bengalee who had had the courage to lay down his life in the striking of such a blow. Khudiram Bose at any rate was not "lily-livered." Khudiram Bose at any rate had shown that "determination" with the lack of which the writers in the Yugantar had so often taunted their fellow-countrymen. So for the Nationalists of Bengal he became a martyr and a hero. Students and many others put on mourning for him and schools were closed for two or three days as a tribute to his memory. His photographs had an immense sale, and by-and-by the young Bengalee bloods took to wearing dhotis with Khudiram Bose's name woven into the border of the garment.

Bomb explosions followed in quick succession in Calcutta itself, and a secret manufacture of explosives was discovered in a suburban garden. Norendranath Gosain, who had turned approver in this last case, was shot dead in Alipur Gaol, and a Hindu police-inspector in the streets of Calcutta. Four attempts made upon the life of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Andrew Fraser, showed how little effect leniency had upon the growing fierceness of the revolutionists. Scarcely a month and often not a week passed without adding to the tale of outrages. I need not recite them in detail. Perhaps the most significant feature was the double purpose many of them indicated of defeating the detection and punishment of crime and of striking terror into Indians who ventured to serve the British, Raj[8]. Thus, on February 10, 1909, Mr. Ashutosh Biswas, the Public Prosecutor and a Hindu of high character and position, was shot dead outside the Alipur Police Court, and, in like manner nearly a year later, Mr. Shams-ul-Alam, a Mahomedan Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department in the High Court itself of Calcutta. Sedition was seething over the greater part of both Bengals, and though the agricultural population remained for the most part untouched or indifferent, there were few even of the smaller towns and larger villages that were not visited by the missionaries of revolution. Swadeshi and the boycott were now merely an accompaniment to the deeper and more menacing trumpet-call of open revolt, but they helped "to keep the country awake" even where the true spirit of Swaraj had not yet been kindled. The mofussil was honeycombed with secret societies, whose daring dacoities served not only to collect the sinews of war, but to impress the timid and recalcitrant with the powerlessness of the State to protect them against the midnight raider. Truly the teachings of the Yugantar were bearing fruit, even to the laying down of life and the taking of life. Unlike the majority of Bengalee agitators, the writers in the Yugantar, it must be admitted, did not flinch from the danger of practising what they taught. Most of them came ultimately within the grasp of the Criminal Code, and Barendra Ghose, who was arrested in connexion with the manufacture of bombs in the Maniktolla garden, was sentenced to death, though subsequently reprieved. His brother, Arabindo, on the other hand, though arrested at the same time, had the good fortune to be acquitted. The work done by the Yugantar lived, nevertheless, after it, and is still living.

A very heavy responsibility must at the same time attach to those responsible both at home and in India for the extraordinary tolerance too long extended to this criminal propaganda. For two whole years it was carried on with relative impunity under the very eyes of the Government of India in Calcutta. Month after month they must have seen its audacity grow in direct proportion to official apathy. They must have seen a reign of lawlessness and intimidation spread steadily over a great part of the Metropolitan province. The failure of the ordinary machinery of justice to check these crying evils was repeatedly brought home to them. Yet it was not until 1908 that the necessity of exceptional measures to cope with an exceptional situation was tardily and very reluctantly realized. The Indian Explosive Substances Act and Summary Justice Act of 1908, together with the Press Act of the same year and the more drastic one enacted last February, have at last to some extent checked the saturnalia of lawlessness that continued, though with signs of abatement, into the beginning of this year. The Press Act of 1910, especially, seems to have really arrested the poisonous flow of printer's ink and with it the worst forms of crime to which it maddened the feverish blood of Bengal. But some of those who are most intimately acquainted with the inner workings of the revolutionary movement hold strongly that none of these enactments had such an immediately sobering effect as the deportation of the nine prominent Bengalees who were arrested at the end of 1908. Such a measure is, I know, very repugnant to British traditions and British sentiment, and in this particular instance it unfortunately included two men whose criminal guilt was subsequently believed not to be altogether beyond doubt, though it may well have been argued that by financing and administering a dangerous organization such as the Anusilan Samiti they made themselves responsible for the deeds of its members. Nevertheless, the deportation struck just at that type of agitator whose influence is most pernicious because it is most subtle, and whose responsibility is greatest because of his more experienced years and greater social position. Such a measure, however, is only warranted in extreme circumstances and cannot be transformed into indefinite detention. The grounds on which Government announced the release of these deportees last winter were even more unhappily chosen than the moment for the announcement, but the event seems so far to have justified Lord Minto's confidence, though one of the deported agitators, Pulin Bahari Das, of Dacca, has had to be rearrested and is now under trial at Dacca for conspiracy of a most serious character. There is still much lawlessness in both Bengals.[9] The continued prevalence of political dacoities, and especially the difficulty experienced in securing legal evidence against them, are distinctly unfavourable symptoms. There are many peaceful citizens who will give private information as to the outrages committed by these bands, consisting mainly of youths of respectable connexions, but that so few have the courage to face terrorism by going into the witness-box shows that the secret societies which inspire such terror have not yet been broken up. The extent to which disaffection is rampant in the native Bar also hampers the administration of justice, for whilst there is an eager competition for earning political notoriety by an eloquent defence of political prisoners, it is sometimes difficult to find pleaders who will undertake to conduct prosecutions. On the other hand, it is all to the good that many of those who were ready to coquet with sedition in its earlier stages or who had not the moral courage to speak out against it seem now to be taking heart, and in this respect the reforms embodied in the Indian Councils Act have usefully supplemented the sobering effect of repressive legislation. For one of the stock arguments of "advanced" politicians has been the failure of the "moderates" to obtain any recognition from Government, and the enlargement of the Legislative Councils took the sting out of that taunt. Independently, however, of the reforms, the extreme violence of language and of methods which had come into vogue was bound to produce some reaction. Amongst the educated classes, many respectable fathers of families, whatever their political opinions may be, have taken fright at the growth of turbulence and insubordination in schools and colleges, which were often carried into the home circle; for when once the principle of authority has been undermined the parent's authority cannot remain unshaken. In the same way some even of the "advanced" leaders have been alarmed by the development of secret societies which often attract young men of very good connexions, and they have proposed to use for the detection and suppression of dacoities the local bands of "national volunteers" whom they formerly helped to organize for the purpose of enforcing the boycott and stimulating unrest. How far, even if unreservedly exercised, the influence of such men as Mr. Surendranath Banerjee will be as potent for checking the mischief as it was for promoting it remains to be seen. For the present also the boycott is being discountenanced in the same quarters, though Mr. Banerjee, presumably to "save his face," professes to have agreed only to a suspension pending the revision of Partition. But his paper, the Bengalee, is almost the only one that pretends to regard the Partition as still an open question. It has been eclipsed by far graver issues, of which the further development cannot yet be foreseen.

The return to more sober counsels seems to be confined unhappily to the older generation, and the older generation, even if we include in it the middle-aged, must before long pass away. What we have to reckon with, especially in Bengal, is the revolt of the younger generation, and this revolt draws its inspiration from religious and philosophical sources which no measures merely political, either of repression or of conciliation, can reach. It often represents a perversion of the finest qualities, as, apparently, in the case of Birendranath Gupta, who murdered Shams-ul-Alam in the Calcutta High Court last January. An English missionary who knew him well assured me that in his large experience of Indian youths he had never met one of more exemplary character or higher ideals, nor one who seemed more incapable of committing such a crime. The oaths and vows administered on initiation to secret societies are not directed only to political ends. They impose on the initiates in the most explicit terms a life of self-denial, and sometimes celibacy; and though these vows do not always avail against some of the worst forms of sensuality, it would be foolish and wrong to generalize from unworthy exceptions. In its moral aspects the revolt of young Bengal represents very frequently a healthy reaction against sloth and self-indulgence and the premature exhaustion of manhood which is such a common feature in a society that has for centuries been taught to disregard physiological laws in the enforcement of child marriage. To this extent it is a revolt, though in the name of Hinduism, against some of the worst results of the Hindu social system, and that it has spread so largely amongst the Brahmans of Bengal shows that it has affected even the rigidity of Brahmanism. Thus, whereas we have seen in Kolhapur the Brahmans of the Deccan assert that in this "age of darkness" there can be no Kshatriyas, their fellow-caste-men in Bengal are quite willing to invest Kayasthas with the sacred thread, on the ground that they are really of Kshatriya descent, in order to stimulate martial virtues amongst the Bengalees by reviving for their benefit the old Vedic caste of warriors. Equally significant is the propaganda that has been carried on by Brahmans amongst the Namasudras, a large and mainly agricultural caste, chiefly located in the Jessor district of Bengal and the Faridpur district of Eastern Bengal. The purpose of the propaganda was political, but the inducement offered to the Namasudras in order to stimulate their Nationalism was that the Brahmans would relax the rigour of caste in favour of those who took the Swadeshi vow, and it is stated that, in several villages where they succeeded in making a large number of converts, the Brahman agitators marked their approval by condescending to have their "twice-born" heads shaved by the village barber—an act which, however trivial it may seem to us, constituted an absolutely revolutionary breach with a 3,000 years-old past.

On the other hand, the constant invocation of the "terrible goddess," whether as Kali or as Durga, against the alien oppressors, shows that Brahmanism in Bengal is equally ready to appeal to the grossest and most cruel superstitions of the masses. In another of her forms she is represented holding in her hand her head, which has been severed from her body, whilst the blood gushing from her trunk flows into her open mouth. A very popular picture of the goddess in this form has been published with a text to the effect that the great goddess as seen therein symbolizes "the Motherland" decapitated by the English, but nevertheless preserving her vitality unimpaired by drinking her own blood. It is not surprising that amongst extremists one of the favourite euphemisms[10] applied to the killing of an Englishman is "sacrificing a white goat to Kali." In 1906 I was visiting one of the Hindu temples at Benares and found in the courtyard a number of young students who had come on an excursion from Bengal. I got into conversation with them, and they soon began to air, for my benefit, their political views, which were decidedly "advanced." They were, however, quite civil and friendly, and they invited me to come up to the temple door and see them sacrifice to Kali a poor bleating kid that they had brought with them. When I declined, one of them who had already assumed a rather more truculent tone came forward and pressed me, saying that if I would accompany them they would not mind even sacrificing a white goat. There was a general shout of laughter at what was evidently regarded by the others as a huge joke. I turned away, though I did not then understand its grim humour, as I do now.

The blind hatred of everything English with which the younger generation is so largely saturated can only, in most cases, be the result of the teachings that have impressed upon them the existence of a fundamental antagonism between Hindu ideals and ours. Like the wretched Kanhere at Nasik, they would have to admit that they never suffered injustice themselves nor knew of any one who had. A great many have never come into contact with a single Englishman, and their ignorance even of the system of government under which they live is profound. Not the least ominous symptom is that this spirit of revolt seems to have obtained a firm hold of the zenana; and the Hindu woman behind the purdah often exercises a greater influence upon her husband and her sons than the Englishwoman who moves freely about the world. Absolute evidence in such matters is difficult to obtain, but there was a very significant and quite authentic case last year, which I may as well quote here, though it occurred in the Bombay Presidency. Two Brahman ladies of good position from Bombay were discovered at Kolhapur wearing the garb of sanyasis, i.e., mendicant ascetics. They confessed that they had left their homes, to which the police wisely restored them, to invoke the assistance of a great ruling chief of Southern India in a plot to exterminate the hated foreigner, and their main object in starting upon this insane venture had been to regain their hold upon their husbands' affections by a great "patriotic" achievement. That real sanyasis are frequently the missionaries of sedition is certain, and their reputed sanctity gives them access to the zenana. In Bengal even small boys of so tender an age as still to have the run of zenanas have, I am told, been taught the whole patter of sedition, and go about from house to house dressed up as little sanyasis in little yellow robes preaching hatred of the English.

The question is, can we extricate the better elements from this tangle of passion and prejudice? There are many foul spots in the Hindu revival in Bengal, apart even from tendencies which we cannot but regard as politically criminal. At the same time there runs through it a strain of idealism which probably constitutes its real force, and also our danger. For strangely emotional and often a creature of his senses, the Bengalee is accessible to spiritual influences with which the worldly-ambitious Brahmanism of the Deccan, for instance, is rarely informed. He is always apt to rush to extremes, and just as amongst the best representatives of the educated classes there was in the last century a revolt against the Hindu social and religious creed of their ancestors which tended first towards Christianity or at least the ethics of Christianity and then towards Western agnosticism, so the present revolt may be regarded in some of its aspects as a reaction against these earlier tendencies; and in spite of its extreme violence it may not be any more permanent. The problem is still full of unknown quantities; but the known quantities are at any rate sufficient to make us appreciate its gravity.



CHAPTER VIII

THE PUNJAB AND THE ARYA SAMAJ.

The Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers, differs as widely both from the Deccan and from Bengal as these two differ the one from the other. It has been more than any other part of India the battlefield of warring races and creeds and the seat of power of mighty dynasties. Among its cities it includes Imperial Delhi and Runjit Singh's Lahore. It is a country of many peoples and of many dialects. It is the home of the Sikhs, but the Mahomedans, ever since the days of the Moghul Empire, form the majority of the population, and the proportion of Hindus is smaller than in any other province of India, except Eastern Bengal. Owing to the very small rainfall, its climate is intensely dry—fiercely hot during the greater part of the year, and cold even to freezing during the short winter months. Nowhere in India has British rule done so much to bring peace and security and to induce prosperity. The alluvial lands are rich but thirsty, and irrigation works on a scale of unparalleled magnitude were required to compel the soil to yield beneficent harvests. At the most critical moment in the history of British India it was against the steadfastness of the Punjab, then under the firm but patriarchal sway of Sir John Lawrence, that the Mutiny spent itself, and until a few years ago there seemed to be no reason whatever for questioning the loyalty of a province which the forethought of Government and the skill of Anglo-Indian engineers were gradually transforming into a land of plenty. Least of all did any one question the loyalty of the Sikhs. Many of them believed that British rule was the fulfilment of a prophecy of one of their martyred gurus, and the Sikh regiments were regarded as the flower of the Native Army.

Yet it was in the Punjab, at Lahore and at Rawal Pindi, that the first serious disturbances occurred in 1907 which aroused public opinion at home to the reality of Indian unrest, and stirred the Government of India to such strong repressive measures as the deportation of two prominent agitators under an ancient Ordinance of 1818 never before applied in such connexion. Local and temporary causes may to some extent have accounted for those disturbances. An increase in the land revenue demanded in the Rawal Pindi district was very strongly resented. The regulations issued with regard to the tenure of land in some of the new irrigation colonies were probably unwise and carried out with some harshness. Famine in the unirrigated tracts, and especially the plague, which had desolated parts of the province, had created much misery and bitterness. Other and more remote causes of a social and economic character had also been at work. Nowhere had Anglo-Indian legislation and the introduction of elaborate forms of legal procedure produced results more unfortunate and less foreseen by their authors than in the Punjab. The conversion of the occupants of the land into full proprietors was intended to give greater stability and security to the peasant ownership of land, but the result was to improve the position of the moneylender, who, owing to the thriftlessness of the Indian rayat and the extravagant expenditure to which he is from time to time driven by traditional custom in regard to marriages, funerals, and other family ceremonies, has always played a disastrously important part in village life. As M. Chailley remarks in his admirable study of these problems, "the agricultural debtor had now two securities to offer." He had always been able to pledge his harvest, and now he could pledge also his land. On the other hand, "a strict system of law and procedure afforded the moneylender the means of rapidly realizing his dues," and the pleader, who is himself a creation of that system, was ever at the elbow of both parties to encourage ruinous litigation to his own professional advantage. Special laws were successively enacted by Government to check these new evils, but they failed to arrest altogether a process which was bringing about a veritable revolution in the tenure of land, and mainly to the detriment of an essentially peaceful and law-abiding class that furnished a large and excellent contingent to the Native Army. The wretched landowner who found himself deprived of his land by legal process held our methods rather than his own extravagance responsible for his ruin, and on the other hand, the pleaders and their clients, the moneylenders, who were generally Hindus, resented equally our legislative attempts to hamper a process so beneficial to themselves.

But all these were only contributory causes. There were still deeper influences at work which have operated in the Punjab in the same direction as the forces of unrest in the Deccan and in Bengal, but differ from them nevertheless in their origin and in some of their manifestations. In the Punjab too the keynote of unrest is a spirit of revolt not merely against British administrative control, but, in theory at least, against Western influence generally, though in some respects it bears very strongly the impress of the Western influence which it repudiates. The motive force is not conservative Brahmanism as in the Deccan, nor does it betray the impetuous emotionalism of Bengal. It is less rigid and purely reactionary than the former, and better disciplined than the latter.

Orthodox Hinduism ceased to be a dominant factor in the Punjab when the flood of Mahomedan conquest swept over the land of the Five Rivers. Even Islam did not break the power of caste, and very distinct traces of caste still survive amongst the Mahomedan community itself. But nowhere has caste been so much shaken as in the Punjab, for the infinity of sub-castes into which each caste has resolved itself gives the measure of its disintegration. Sikhism still represents the most successful revolt against its tyranny in the later history of Hinduism. Hence the relatively slight ascendency enjoyed by the Brahmans in the Punjab amongst the Hindus themselves, even the Brahmans having split up into so many sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that many a non-Brahman Hindu will hardly accept food cooked by the lower order of Brahmans—and, next to inter-marriage, food is the great test of caste. Nevertheless it is amongst the Hindus of the Punjab that one of the earliest apostles of reaction against the West has found the largest and most enthusiastic body of followers. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, was a Brahman of Kathiawar; he was not born in the Punjab, and it was not in the Punjab but in Bombay, where, however, it struck no roots, that he founded the Arya Samaj. Only in the later years of his life did the Punjab become the chief centre of his activities. The doctrines he taught were embodied by him in his Satyarath Prakash, which has become the Bible of his disciples, and in his Veda Bashya Basmika, a commentary on the Vedas. He had at an early age lost faith in the Hindu Pantheon, and to this extent he was a genuine religious reformer, for he waged relentless war against the worship of idols, and whether his claims to Vedantic learning be or be not conceded, his creed was "Back to the Vedas." His ethical code, on the other hand, was vague, and he pandered strangely in some directions to the weaknesses of the flesh, and in others to popular prejudices. Nothing in the Vedas, for instance, prohibits either the killing of cattle or the eating of bovine flesh. But, in deference to one of the most universal of Hindu superstitions, Dayanand did not hesitate to include cow-killing amongst the deadliest sins. Here we have in fact the keynote of his doctrines. The sanctity of the cow is the touchstone of Hindu hostility to both Christian and Mahomedan, and the whole drift of Dayanand's teachings is far less to reform Hinduism than to rouse it into active resistance to the alien influences which threatened, in his opinion, to denationalize it. Hence the outrageously aggressive tone of his writings wherever he alludes either to Christianity or to Mahomedanism. It is the advent of "meat-eating and wine-drinking foreigners, the slaughterers of kine and other animals," that has brought "trouble and suffering" upon "the Aryas"—he discards the word Hindu on account of its Persian origin—whilst before they came into the country India enjoyed "golden days," and her people were "free from disease and prosperous and contented." In fact, "Arya for the Aryans" was the cry that frequently predominated in Dayanand's teachings over that of "Back to the Vedas," and Lajpat Rai, one of his most zealous disciples, has stated emphatically that "the scheme of Swami Dayanand has its foundation on the firm rock of Swadeshi and Swajati."

Since Dayanand's death the Arya Samaj has split up into two sections—the "vegetarians" who with regard to religious doctrine may be described as the orthodox, and the "meat-eaters," as the latitudinarians. It is difficult to differentiate between the precise tendencies of these two sections, whose feuds seem to be waning. In both are to be found not a few progressive and enlightened Aryas who, whatever their political activities may be, have undoubtedly applied themselves with no small success to the carrying out of that part of Dayanand's gospel which was directed to the reforming of Hinduism. Their influence has been constantly exerted to check, the marriages between mere boys and almost infant girls which have done so much physical as well as moral mischief to Hindu society, and also to improve the wretched lot of Hindu widows whose widowhood with all that it entails of menial degradation often begins before they have ever really been wives. To this end the Aryas have not hesitated to encourage female education, and the Girls' Orphanage at Jalandhar, where there is also a widows' home, has shown what excellent social results can be achieved in that direction. Again in the treatment of the "untouchable" low-castes, the Arya Samaj may claim to have been the first native body to break new ground and to attempt something akin to the work of social reclamation of which Christianity and, in a lesser degree, Islam had hitherto had the monopoly. Schools and especially industrial classes have been established in various districts which cannot fail to raise the status of the younger generation and gradually to emancipate the lower castes from the bondage in which they have been hitherto held. These and many other new departures conceived in the same liberal spirit at first provoked the vehement hostility of the orthodox Hindus, who at one time stopped all social intercourse with the Arya reformers. But whereas in other parts of India the idea of social reform came to be associated with that of Western ascendency and therefore weakened and gave way before the rising tide of reaction against that ascendency, it has been associated in the Punjab with the cry of "Arya for the Aryans," and the political activities of the Arya Samaj, or at least of a number of its most prominent members who have figured conspicuously in the anti-British agitation of the last few years, have secured for it from Hindu orthodoxy a measure of tolerance and even of good will which its social activities would certainly not otherwise have received. That the Arya Samaj, which shows the impress of Western influence in so much of its social work, should at the same time have associated itself so intimately with a political movement directed against British rule is one of the many anomalies presented by the problem of Indian unrest.

Many Aryas, indeed, deny strenuously that the Samaj is disaffected, or even that it concerns itself with politics, and the president of the Lahore branch, Mr. Roshan Lal, assured me that it devotes itself solely to moral and religious reform. I do not question that assurance, as far as Mr. Roshan Lal is himself personally concerned, and it may be true that the Samaj has never committed itself as a body to any political programme, and that many individual members hold aloof from politics; but the evidence that many others, and not the least influential, have played a conspicuous part in the seditious agitation of the last few years, both in the Punjab and in the neighbouring United Provinces, is overwhelming. In the Rawal Pindi riots in 1907 the ringleaders were Aryas, and in the violent propaganda which for about two years preceded the actual outbreak of violence none figured more prominently than Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh, both prominent Aryas. The immediate effect produced by their deportation in restoring order is in itself corroborative evidence of the share they were believed to have taken in producing lawlessness. Ajit Singh himself is at the present moment a fugitive from justice, against whom proceedings in absentia were instituted this winter in Lahore for translating and publishing seditious books that dealt with the making of bombs, the taking of life, the destruction of buildings, &c. In the course of these proceedings letters from Lajpat Rai were produced in Court showing that just about the time of the disturbances he had been in communication with Shyamji Krishnavarma, of Indian Sociologist fame, for a supply of books "containing true ideas on politics" for the students of Lahore, as well as for assistance towards defraying the cost of "political missionaries." In one of these letters also Lajpat Rai, after remarking that "the people are in a sullen mood" and that "the agricultural classes have begun to agitate," adds significantly that his "only fear is that the bursting out may not be premature." Lajpat Rai's correspondent was another prominent Arya, Bhai Parmanand, who, whilst he was Professor at the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College, was found in possession of various formulae for the manufacture of bombs, including the same manual that was discovered in the Maniktola Garden at Calcutta.

In Patiala, one of the Sikh native States of the Punjab, Aryas constituted the great majority of defendants, 76 in number, and many of them officials and persons of position, who were put on their trial last December for seditious practices. So seriously were the charges felt to reflect upon the Arya Samaj as a whole that one of its leading legal members was briefed on its behalf for the defence. From the speech made by counsel for the prosecution in opening the case it appears that some of the defendants were schoolmasters, who were charged with preaching revolutionary doctrines in their schools and carrying on correspondence of the same character with old pupils; others were charged with circulating papers of the Yugantar and Swarajiya type; others with holding secret meetings and delivering inflammatory lectures; others again with distributing pictures and photographs of well-known revolutionists, including Khudiram Bose, the Muzafferpur murderer. Not only were most of these defendants Aryas, but they were very prominent Aryas, who had founded local branches of the Samaj or been members of committees in the State of Patiala. How far the evidence outlined by counsel would have borne out these charges it is impossible to say, though one may properly assume it to have been of a very formidable character, for after the case had been opened against them the defendants hastened to send in a petition invoking the clemency of the Maharajah. They expressed therein their deep sorrow for any conduct open to misconstruction, tendered their unqualified apology for any indiscreet acts they might have committed, and testified their "great abhorrence and absolute detestation" of anarchists and seditionists and their diabolical methods. His Highness thereupon ordered the prosecution to be abandoned, but at the same time banished the defendants from his State and declared their posts to be forfeited by such as had been in his service, and only in a few cases were these punishments subsequently remitted.

The large number of Aryas who have unquestionably taken part in the political agitation of the last few years certainly tends to corroborate the very compromising certificate given only two years ago to the Samaj by Krishnavarma himself in his murder-preaching organ. He not only stated that "of all movements in India for the political regeneration of the country none is so potent as the Arya Samaj," but he added that "the ideal of that society as proclaimed by its founder is an absolutely free and independent form of national Government," and Krishnavarma, it must be remembered, had been appointed by Dayanand to be a member of the first governing body in the lifetime of the founder and, after his death, one of the trustees of his will.

What makes the question of the real tendencies of the Arya Samaj one of very grave importance for the future is that it has embarked upon an educational experiment of a peculiar character which may have an immense effect upon the rising generation. One of its best features is the attention it has devoted to education, and to that of girls as well as of boys. But it was not till 1898 that the governing body of the Samaj in the Punjab decided to carry into execution a scheme for restoring the Vedic system of education which Dayanand had conceived but had never been able to carry out. Under this system the child is committed at an early age to the exclusive care of a spiritual teacher or guru, who stands to him in loco parentis and even more, for Manu says that "of him who gives natural birth, and of him who gives knowledge of the Vedas, the giver of sacred knowledge is the more venerable father, since second or divine birth ensures life to the twice-born, both in this world and eternally." In the gurukuls or seminaries founded by the Arya Samaj pupils or chelas are admitted between the ages of six and ten. From that moment they, are practically cut off from the outer world during the whole course of their studies, which cover a period of 16 years altogether—i.e., ten years in the lower school and six years in the upper, to which they pass up as Brahmacharis. During the whole of that period no student is allowed to visit his family, except in cases of grave emergency, and his parents can only see him with the permission of the head of the gurukul and not more than once a month. There are at present three gurukuls in the Punjab, but the most important one, with over 250 students, is at Kangri, in the United Provinces, five miles from the sacred city of Hardwar, where the Ganges flows out of a gorge into the great plain. A large and very popular mela or fair is held annually at Kangri, and it is attended by the Brahmacharis, who act as volunteers for the maintenance of order and collect funds for the support of their gurukul. The enthusiasm is said to be very great, and donations last year are credibly reported to have exceeded 300,000 rupees.

Life in the gurukuls is simple and even austere, the discipline rigorous, the diet of the plainest, and a great deal of time is given to physical training. As the chelas after 16 years of this monastic training at the hands of their gurus are to be sent out as missionaries to propagate the Arya doctrines throughout India, the influence of these institutions in the moulding of Indian character and Indian opinion in the future cannot fail to be considerable. Some five years more must elapse before we shall be able to judge the result by the first batch of chelas who will then be going forth into the world. For the present one can only echo the hope tersely expressed a few months ago by Sir Louis Dane, the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, in reply to assurances of loyalty from the President of the Arya Samaj, that "what purports to be a society for religious and social reform and advancement may not be twisted from its proper aims" and "degenerate into a political organization with objects which are not consonant with due loyalty to the Government as established." But neither the spirit of Dayanand's own teachings nor the record of many of his disciples, including some of those actually connected with the gurukuls, is in this respect encouraging.

There has been, however, no recurrence of serious disturbances in the Punjab since 1907, and if the native Press lost little of its virulence until the new Press Act of this year, and numerous prosecutions bore witness to the continued prevalence of sedition, the province has been free from the murderous outrages and dacoities which have been so lamentable a feature of the unrest in Bengal and in the Deccan. None the less there is still a very strong undercurrent of anti-British feeling. It has partly been fostered in the large cities by Bengalee immigrants who have come into the Punjab in considerable numbers, and thanks to their higher education have acquired great influence at the Bar and in the Press, but it is rife wherever the Arya Samaj is known to be most active, and the Arya Samaj has already proved a very powerful proselytizing agency. Its meeting houses serve not only for religious ceremonies, but also as social clubs for the educated classes in all the larger towns where they congregate. Access to them is readily given to Hindus and Sikhs who have not actually joined the Samaj. They are attracted by the political discussions which are carried on there with great freedom, and having no such resorts of their own, they are soon tempted to obtain the fuller privileges of membership. In this way the Samaj has made many converts among the educated classes and even among native officials. But its influence is by no means confined to them. It makes many converts among the Sikhs, and not a few among Nau-Muslims or Mahomedans who have embraced Islam in relatively recent times and mainly for the purpose of escaping from the tyranny of caste. For the same reason it attracts low-caste Hindus, for though it does not ostentatiously denounce or defy caste, it has the courage to ignore it. Though the Arya leaders are generally men of education and sometimes of great culture, they know how to present their creed in a popular form that appeals to the lower classes and especially to the agricultural population. One of the most unpleasant features has been the propaganda carried on by them among the Sepoys of the Native Army, and especially among the Jats and the Sikhs, with whom they have many points of affinity. The efforts of the Aryas seem to be chiefly directed to checking enlistment, but they have at times actually tampered with the loyalty of certain regiments, and their emissaries have been found within the lines of the native troops. Sikhism itself is at the present day undergoing a fresh process of transformation. Whilst it tends generally to be reabsorbed into Hinduism, the very remarkable movement for sinking the old class distinctions—themselves a survival of caste—and recognizing the equality of all Sikhs, is clearly due to the influence of the Arya Samaj. The evolution of the Arya Samaj recalls very forcibly that of Sikhism, which originally, when founded by Nanak in the early part of the 16th century, was merely a religious and moral, reform movement, and nevertheless within 50 years developed under Har Govind into a formidable political and military organization. It is not, therefore, surprising that some of those who know the Punjab best and the sterner stuff of which its martial races are made look upon it as a potentially more dangerous centre of trouble than either the Deccan or Bengal. One of the most mischievous results of the Aryan propaganda, and one which may well cause the most immediate anxiety, is the growing antagonism which it has bred between Hindus and Mahomedans, for the Mahomedans are convinced that the Arya Samaj is animated with no less bitter hostility towards Islam than towards British rule.



CHAPTER IX.

THE POSITION OF THE MAHOMEDANS.

Whilst I was at Delhi one of the leading Mahomedans of the old Moghul capital drove me out one afternoon to the great Mosque which still bears witness, in the splendour of its surviving fragments quite as much as in the name it bears, Kuwwat ul Islam, or Power of Islam, to the ancient glories of Mahomedan rule in India. Two or three other Mahomedan gentlemen had come out to meet us, and there, under the shadow of the Kutub Minar, the loftiest and noblest minaret from which the Musulman call to prayer has ever gone forth, we sat in the Alai Darwazah, the great porch of red sandstone and white marble which formed the south entrance to the outer enclosure of the Mosque, and still presents in the stately grandeur of its proportions and the infinite variety and delicacy of its marble lattice work, one of the most perfect monuments of early Mahomedan art, and discussed for upwards of two hours the future that lies before the Mahomedan community of India. It is a scene I shall never forget, so startling was the contrast between the racial and religious pride of power which those walls had for centuries reflected and the note of deep and almost gloomy apprehension to which they now rang. For if the burden of my friends story was reasoned loyalty to the British Raj, it was weighted with profound anxiety as to the future that awaited the Mahomedans of India, either should our Raj disappear or should it gradually lose its potency and be merged in a virtual ascendency of Hinduism under the specious mantle of Indian self-government. They spoke without bitterness or resentment. They acknowledged freely the shortcomings of their own community, its intellectual backwardness, its reluctance to depart from the ancient ways and to realize the necessity of equipping itself for successful competition under new conditions, its lack of organization, due to an inadequate sense of the duty of social service, and the selfishness and jealousy often displayed by different sections and classes. They were beginning to awaken to the dangerous consequences of their shortcomings, but would time be given to them to repair them? The British Raj had always claimed that its mission in India was to hold the balance evenly between the different races and creeds and classes, and to exercise its paternal authority equally to the detriment of none and for the benefit of all. That the Hindus had from the beginning secured a considerably larger share in Government employment of all kinds was, no doubt, inevitable, as they had shown much greater alacrity to qualify themselves by education on Western lines than the Mahomedans, unfortunately, had until much more recently begun to show. But so long as Government employes were merely the servants of Government, and Hindus had no more influence than the Mahomedans in shaping the policy of the Government, the Mahomedans had no serious grievance, or, at any rate, none for which they had not themselves very largely to blame. But of late years they had seen the policy of the British Government itself gradually yielding to the pressure of Hindu agitation and the British Raj actually divesting itself of some of the powers which it had hitherto retained undiminished for the benefit, in fact if not in theory, of certain classes which, however loudly they might claim to be the representatives of the Indian people, represented with few exceptions nothing but the political ambitions of aggressive Hinduism. The Mahomedans, they assured me, recognized quite as fully as, and perhaps, more sincerely than, the Hindus the generous spirit which had inspired the British Government to grant the reforms embodied in the Indian Councils Act, but they also realized what it was far more difficult for Englishmen to realize, that those reforms must inevitably tend to give the Hindus a predominant share, as compared with the Mahomedans, in the counsels of Government. In its original shape the scheme of reforms had indeed threatened the Mahomedans with gross unfairness and the wrath which its subsequent modification in deference to Mahomedan representations had roused among the Hindu politicians was in itself enough to betray to all who had eyes to see and ears to hear the purpose to which they had hoped to turn the excessive predominance they had claimed and expected. That purpose was to advance the political ascendency of Hinduism which was the goal of Hindu aspirations, whether under the British Raj or without it.

The whole tendency of the Hindu revival, social, religious, and political, during the last 20 years had been as consistently anti-Mahomedan as anti-British, and even more so. Some of the more liberal and moderate Hindu leaders no doubt honestly contemplated the evolution of an Indian "nation" in which Mahomedan and Hindu might sink their racial and religious differences, but these were leaders with a constantly diminishing body of followers. Even among the Extremists not a few would gladly have purchased by pious professions of good will a temporary alliance with the Mahomedans against the British Raj, subject to an ulterior settlement of accounts for their own benefit. But the Mahomedans, with their many close points of contact with the Hindus, knew, as Englishmen could not know, what were the real sentiments and hopes of the advanced leaders into whose hands passed the control of militant Hinduism. They had noted the constant exhortation of the Hindu Nationalist Press that the youth of India must prepare for the coming Lalki incarnation of Vishnu when the mlencchas—i.e., the infidels, Moslem as well as British—should be driven out of India. The attitude of the Hindus towards the Mahomedans of Eastern Bengal, after the Partition, had shown how they resented the position that the creation of the new province gave the Moslem element. Nor had the Mahomedans in the Punjab been left without a foretaste of what was to come. In every Government office, in every profession, the Hindus were banding themselves closer and closer together against their few Mahomedan colleagues. The Mahomedans had refused to join in the boycott of British goods, and in Delhi, in Lahore, and in many other cities the word had been passed round among the Hindus not to deal with Mahomedan shops, not to trade with Mahomedan merchants. Some of the more violent spirits were even prepared to challenge the Mahomedans in places where the Mahomedan element is strong and excitable, in order that the inevitable intervention of the British troops for the restoration of order should lead to the shedding of Mahomedan blood, and thus perhaps drive the Mahomedans themselves in to disaffection. What educated Mahomedans, they told me, chiefly feared, and the Hindus themselves chiefly hoped—for new of them probably believed in any speedy overthrow of British rule—was that the British Government and the British people would be wearied by an agitation of which it was difficult for Englishmen to grasp the real inwardness into making successive concession to the Hindus which would gradually give them such a controlling voice in the government of the country that they would actually be in a position to achieve their policy of ascendency under the aegis of the British Raj. Such fears might seem exaggerated, but the Mahomedans could not but take note of the extent to which the Hindu politicians had already secured the ear of an important section of the British Press and of not a few members of the British Parliament, whilst in those same quarters the Mahomedan case never even obtained a hearing, and when the Mahomedans at last realized the necessity of creating an organization for the defence of their legitimate interests they were denounced for reviving racial and religious hatred. For 20 years and more the educated Mahomedans had strictly followed the advice of their revered leader, Sir Syed Ahmed, and had put their trust in the sense of justice of the British Government and the fair-mindedness of the British people instead of plunging into political agitation. They had not lost their faith in the British Government or in the British people if their case was properly put before them, but they felt that if they were not to become the victims of organized misrepresentation they must have an organization of their own which should speak for them with authority. Moreover, it was impossible for the Mahomedans to stand any longer completely aloof from politics, since the general trend of events in India and the enlargement of the Indian Councils had thrust new responsibilities upon the leaders of their community. Of those responsibilities none was more fully realized than that of showing their loyalty to the British Raj—a loyalty all the more unalterable in that it was based upon their growing conviction that the maintenance of the British Raj was essential to the welfare, and even to the existence, of the Mahomedans of India.

As I write I have before me a letter from another Mahomedan friend, a man both of European education and very wide knowledge of his Indian co-religionists, with whom he enjoys exceptional credit. I was so much impressed with the prevalence of this form of fatalism that I wrote and asked him for his opinion. This is his answer:—

Moslems feel that while at present the Government in India is British in spirit as well as in name, there are already indications that it might gradually become Hindu in fact, though the British form might remain. The whole object of the advanced Congress Party and of the leaders of the Nationalist movement is not the overthrow of British rule in name, but in fact. You may say that this is a wild apprehension, and that the Government is not foolish enough or weak enough to degenerate into a mere form. That may be the attitude of an Englishman who is in India only as a bird of passage (and all Englishmen are there as birds of passage, for only those whose children belong to the country are permanently bound up with it). For us who live here, and whose children are to live here, the distant as well as the immediate future is of essential importance. Now what is the tendency of Government? Can any one deny that, taken as a whole, it is towards Hindu predominance in the long run? English observers must not forget that there is throughout India amongst Hindus a strong tendency towards imitating the National movements that have proved successful in European history. Now, while vis-a-vis the British the Hindu irreconcilables assume the attitude of the Italian patriots towards the hated Austrian, vis-a-vis the Moslems there is a very different European model for them to follow. Not only Tilak and his school in Poona, but throughout the Punjab and Bengal the constant talk of the Nationalists is that the Moslems must be driven out of India as they were driven out of Spain.

This is no invention of ours. Nor is it quite so wild as it appears at first sight. I have gone into the matter carefully and I can certainly conceive circumstances—50 or 100 years hence—that would make India intolerable for our upper middle classes; and once you get rid of the intelligent and wealthy Moslems the masses could be reduced to absolute subjection in the hands of Hindu rulers. Far be it from me to say that all Hindus are of this purpose or that the school of "liberal Nationalism" to which Gokhale belongs has ceased to exist. But the other school predominates, and as our very existence is at stake we Moslems do not want to take any risks or to see even the very first steps taken towards transforming the British into a Hindu raj. Yet those steps are now being taken, though not quite so fast as we at one time feared and Hindus expected. That the sad and terrible fate which our people had in Spain may still be ours in India is a proposition that sounds extravagant at first, but I for my part (and most thoughtful Moslems agree with me) consider it quite possible, and in a matter of such moment we must take possibilities as well at probabilities into consideration.

The Imperial problem in India is not to get this or that law changed, or so and so many troops increased, or such and such measures of repression or concession adopted. It is to bring about a new mental and spiritual attitude, and to replace the narrow "Nationalism" of the present day by a broad and truly liberal Imperialism in the practical sense of securing general recognition for India's difficulties and divisions, and for the natural and necessary maintenance of the British connexion and of British rule. The statesman who can suggest practical means for carrying out this intellectual conversion will certainly have saved England and India much unhappiness and disaster.

On the other hand, I am bound to say that there are also many Mahomedans who, though professing similar apprehensions, show no disposition towards fatalistic resignation. For they believe that, whatever may be the fate of the British raj, the future must belong to the more virile peoples of India, and certainly those who do not merely put their trust in the fighting traditions of a conquering race may find a good deal of encouragement for the faith within them from the vital statistics of Hindus and Mahomedans respectively in India.

Whilst it is most important that nothing should be done to give colour to the idea sedulously promoted by the Hindu politician that Government intend to favour, or, as he generally puts it, to "pamper," the Mahomedans at the expense of the Hindus, it is equally important that Government should do nothing to strengthen the apprehensions entertained by so many intelligent and educated Mahomedans. Those apprehensions are no doubt exaggerated, and may even be quite unfounded; but they correspond exactly with what I have been told were Tilak's hopes and anticipations, and if we will only take the trouble to try to see things as they may well strike an Indian Mahomedan we can hardly dismiss them as wholly unreasonable.

The antagonism between the two communities is not the creation or the result of British rule. It is the legacy of centuries of conflict before British rule was ever heard of in India. It has been and must be one of the chief objects of British statesmanship to compose this conflict, and the Mahomedans do not deny that their British rulers have always desired to deal as fairly with them as with the Hindus. They hold, however, that, as a matter of fact, British rule has in many ways worked out to the relative detriment of Mahomedan influence and to the greater advantage of the Hindus. Nor is that fact rendered any more palatable to the Mahomedans because it is mainly due to the greater adaptability and suppleness displayed by the Hindus ever since India has been brought into contact with Western education and Western methods. The establishment of English as the official language of the Law Courts and of all public Departments necessarily favoured the Hindus by displacing Persian and the vernaculars in which the Mahomedans were most proficient. At the present day the vast majority of Indians employed in every branch of the Government service are Hindus, and this majority is entirely out of proportion to the numerical preponderancy of the Hindu community at large[11]. According to the last Census Report the Hindus of Bengal (which was then unpartitioned), though only twice as numerous as the Mahomedans, held 1,235 higher appointments under Government in Bengal, as against only 141 held by Mahomedans. In the Bombay Presidency the Hindus held 266 such appointments, as against 23 held by Mahomedans; and in the Central Provinces 339, as against 75. Of the provinces in reference to which the report furnishes detailed statistics the United Provinces alone failed to show the same disparity, the number of posts held by the Mahomedans, 453, against 711 held by Hindus, being actually and very largely in excess of their proportion to population. The Mahomedans, moreover, complain that where Mahomedans are employed as clerks in Government Departments the head clerks, who are almost always Hindus and alone have direct access to the English superior officers, use their influence with the latter to prejudice them against their Mahomedan subordinates. Education has passed very largely from our own hands into those of Hindu teachers. In all the liberal professions, at the Bar, in the Press, the preponderance of Hindus is greatly out of proportion even to the numerical preponderance of the Hindu population as a whole. Intelligent Mahomedans are conscious that all this is to a great extent the result of the backwardness of their community, but hardships are none the less hardships because they are largely of one's own making. Again, the principal seat of the Government of India and those of the two great Presidency Governments are in centres of Hindu life where the voice of the Mahomedan element does not make itself easily heard.

Then Mahomedans who watch public opinion in England note that one of the two great parties in the State has for many years past professed to recognize in the views of Hindu politicians a commendable affinity to its own political principles, whilst the memory of its greatest leader, Mr. Gladstone, is chiefly associated in India with a violent hostility to Turkey, which, at any rate amongst many of his followers, degenerated into violent denunciations of Islam in general. By his personal qualities Lord Ripon, the most pronounced Liberal ever sent out in our time as Viceroy, endeared himself to many Mahomedans as well as to the Hindus, but he never made any secret of his political sympathies with Hindu aspirations. Whilst Unionist Governments were in office, with only one short break during a period of nearly 20 years, and especially whilst Lord Curzon was Viceroy, the alliance between the Hindu leaders and Radical politicians at home became more and more intimate. The Hindu National Congress, which the Mahomedans had come to regard as little more than a Hindu political organization, was not only generally acclaimed by English newspapers of an advanced complexion as the exponent of a new-born Indian democracy, but it had founded[12] in London an organ of its own, India, subsidized out of its funds, and edited and managed by Englishmen, which may not have a very large circulation at home, but is the chief purveyor of Indian news to a large part of the Liberal Press. When Radical members of Parliament visited India the views they chiefly cared to make themselves acquainted with or reproduced when they went home were the views of Hindu politicians, and when the latter visited England they could always depend upon the demonstrative hospitality not only of Radical clubs and associations but also of the Radical Press for their political propaganda.

When the Liberal Party returned to power at the end of 1905 the majority in the new House of Commons included a very active group that identified itself wholeheartedly with a campaign which, in Bengal, soon assumed a character of scarcely less hostility to the Mahomedans than to the British Administration, and the new Government announced their intention of preparing a scheme of reforms which, whatever its merits, was greeted in India as a concession to Hindu rather than to Mahomedan sentiment. For the Mahomedan has always been a believer in personal rule, and one of the objects of the reforms scheme was to diminish to some extent that element in the Indian Administration. Moreover, when it was first outlined by the Secretary of State, the scheme contained provisions which seemed to the Mahomedans to be at variance both with principles of fair and equal treatment for all races and creeds and classes upon which British rule had hitherto been based, and with the specific pledges given by the Viceroy to the Mahomedan deputation that waited upon him four years ago at Simla when the reforms were first contemplated. The new representation in the enlarged Indian Councils was based proportionally upon a rough estimate of the populations of India which credited the Hindus with millions that are either altogether outside the pale of Hinduism or belong to those castes which the majority of educated Hindus of the higher castes still regard as "untouchable." The effect would have been to give the Hindus what the Mahomedans regarded as an unfairly excessive representation. Happily, though, the question trembled for a long time in the balance, Lord Morley listened to the remonstrances of the Mahomedans, and in its final shape the Indian Councils Act made very adequate provision for the representation of Mahomedan interests. But the Mahomedans saw in the angry disappointment of the Hindu politicians when the scheme was thus modified ample justification for the fears they had entertained. Even as it is—and the Mahomedans recognize both the many good points of the scheme and Lord Morley's desire to deal fairly with them—these new reforms may well seem to the Mahomedans to have enured mainly to the benefit of the Hindus. The Mahomedans appreciate as warmly as the Hindus the appointment of an Indian member to the Viceroy's Executive Council, and if the first Indian member was to be a Hindu they admit that Mr. Sinha had exceptional qualifications for the high post to which he was called. The Indian members added under the now Act to the Executive Councils of Bombay and Madras are also both Hindus, and another Hindu will almost certainly be nominated in like manner to the Executive Council of Bengal. None of these appointments may be open to objection, but the fact nevertheless remains that it is the Hindus and not the Mahomedans who will have had the immediate benefit of this new departure to which Indian opinion attaches the greatest importance.

The fact is that the more we delegate of our authority in India to the natives of India on the principles which we associate with self-government, the more we must necessarily in practice delegate it to the Hindus, who form the majority, however much we may try to protect the rights and interests of the Mahomedan minority. This is what the Mahomedans know and fear. This is what explains their insistence upon separate electorates wherever the elective principle comes into play in the composition of representative bodies. It is not merely that they have yet to learn the elementary business of electoral organization, in which the Hindus, on the contrary, have shown great proficiency, and that they have consequently fared badly even in local bodies where their numbers ought to have secured them more adequate representation. Many Mahomedans realize the disadvantage of locking up their community in a watertight compartment, but they regard it as the lesser evil. It is, they contend, an essential safeguard not only against an excessive Hindu predominance in elective or partly elective bodies, but also against the growing disposition which they note amongst those who claim to be the spokesmen of the rising British democracy to accelerate the rate at which political concessions should be made to Hindu opinion, and also to disregard the claim of the Mahomedan minority to be protected against any abuse by the Hindus of the power which a majority must necessarily wield.

My object is to explain the views actually held by the leaders of the Indian Mahomedan community, rather than to endorse or to controvert them. Even if the construction they place upon the attitude of their Hindu fellow-countrymen and of an influential section of British public opinion be wholly unreasonable, the fact that that attitude is liable to such a construction is one which we ought to bear in mind. Nor can it be disputed that, however generous the sentiments that prompt us to delegate some part of our authority to elective or partly elective assemblies, it must to some extent diminish the power of the Executive to ensure that equality of treatment for all races and creeds and classes by which we have hitherto justified our rule in India. Our sense of equity should make us, therefore, all the more scrupulously careful to adjust the balance as evenly as possible under the new conditions which we are ourselves creating, and to err, if at all, in favour of the protection of minorities. Elementary considerations of statesmanship impose the same obligation upon us.

The Mahomedans of India form more than a fifth of the whole population. They are not racially any more homogeneous than the Hindus, and except towards the north-western frontier, where they are to be found chiefly amongst the half-tamed tribes of the Indian borderland, and in the Punjab and United Provinces, where there are many descendants of the Moslem conquerors, they consist chiefly of converted Hindus who accepted Islam as a consequence of Mahomedan rule. But whatever racial differences there may be amongst them, they are now bound together by a creed which has an extraordinary welding power. That there are also explosive potentialities in their creed the Wahabi rising in Bengal little more than 30 years ago and the chronic turbulence of the tribes and frequent exploits of ghazis on the north-western frontier are there to show. But amongst the large body of Mahomedans scattered through India, and especially amongst the higher classes, Islam has in a great measure lost its aggressive character. Surrounded on all sides by an overwhelming majority of Hindus, whose religion he regards as detestably idolatrous, the Indian Moslem is inclined to sink his hostility to Christianity and to regard us less as "infidels" than as fellow-believers in the central article of his monotheistic faith, the unity of God. We, too, in his eyes are a "People of the Book," though our Book is not the Koran, but the Bible, of which he does not altogether deny the sacred character. Other things also often draw him towards the Englishman. The Englishman to him represents a ruling race, and to such an one he feels that he who also represents a once ruling race can yield a more willing allegiance than to any one of a race which he himself ruled over. Equally his fighting and his sporting instincts also appeal to many Englishmen. Hence both Englishmen and Mahomedans in India frequently feel that they have more in common than either of them has with the Hindu. The Mahomedans, moreover, consisting very largely of the most virile races in India, have always furnished some of the best contingents of the British Indian Army. Their loyalty has never wavered except during the Mutiny, and modern Indian writers of the Nationalist school are themselves at pains to show that, though the mutineers rallied round the feeble descendant of the Moghul Emperors as the only available figurehead, and many Mahomedans proved themselves good "patriots," it was Hindus like Nana Sahib and Tantia Tope and the Ranee of Jhansi who were the real heroes and moving spirits of that "War of Indian Independence."

In our day the British connexion has had no stouter and more convinced supporter than the late Sir Syed Ahmad, than whom no Mahomedan has deserved or enjoyed greater influence over his Indian co-religionists. Not only does his educational work, based on the English public school system, live after him in the college which he founded at Aligarh, but also his political faith which taught the vast majority of educated Mahomedans to regard their future as bound up with the preservation of British rule. The revival of Hinduism has only served to strengthen that faith by bringing home to the Mahomedans the value of British rule as a bulwark against the Hindu ascendency which in the more or less remote future they have unquestionably begun to dread. The creation of a political organization like the All-India Moslem League, which is an outcome of the new apprehensions evoked by Hindu aspirations, may appear on the surface to be a departure from the teachings of Sir Syed Ahmad, who, when the Indian National Congress was appealing in its early days for Mahomedan support, urged his people to hold altogether aloof from politics and to rely implicitly upon the good will and good faith of Government. But things have moved rapidly since Sir Syed Ahmad's time, and when the British Government themselves create fresh opportunities for every Indian community to make its voice heard in political counsel, the Mahomedans hold that none can afford to stand back.

The Moslem League founded by the Aga Khan, one of the most broad-minded and highly-educated of Indians, with the full approval of the late Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk, the confidant and successor of Sir Syed Ahmad, is moreover not merely or even chiefly a political organization. It is intended to serve as a centre for the maintenance and consolidation of the communal interests of the Mahomedans all over India in their social, educational, and economic as well as political aspects. Its programme was unfolded at the annual meeting of the League held in January last at Delhi both in an address read on behalf of Mr. Ameer Ali, who was detained in England by his duties on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and in a speech delivered by the Aga Khan, the recognized leader of the whole community. The programme of the Moslem League puts forward no such ambitious demands as self-government for India. All it asks for is "the ordered development of the country under the Imperial Crown." It accepts the reforms with much more gratitude and enthusiasm than were displayed by the spokesman of the Indian National Congress at Lahore, and it accepts them in no narrow or sectarian spirit. The Aga Khan was in fact at special pains to indicate the various directions in which Mahomedans and Hindus might and ought to act in harmonious co-operation. The functions of the Mahomedan representatives on the new Councils would, the Aga Khan said, be threefold.

In the first place they must co-operate as representative Indian citizens with other Indians in advancing the well-being of the country by working wholeheartedly for the spread of education, for the establishment of free and universal primary education, for the promotion of commerce and industry, for the improvement of agriculture by the establishment of co-operative credit and distribution societies, and for the development of the natural resources of India. Here, indeed, is a wide field of work for Hindus and Mahomedans acting together. In the second place our representatives must be ready to co-operate with the Hindus and all other sections of society in securing for them all those advantages that serve their peculiar conditions and help their social welfare, for although the two sister communities have developed on different lines, each suffers from some peculiar weakness in addition to the misfortunes common to general economic and educational backwardness. And then our representatives must watch and promote social measures required exclusively for the benefit of their Moslem co-religionists, with the co-operation, we hope, of the Hindu members, for we too have needs that are not known to them and which we alone can fully understand.

No language could be more generous or more statesmanlike. The Aga Khan doubtless realizes that, whatever the more or less remote future may have in store for the two communities, their increasing antagonism in consequence of the aggressive tendencies, displayed by Hindu "nationalism" during the last few years is pregnant with immediate danger, and nowhere more so than in the Punjab where he was speaking. Not only have the preachers of the Arya Samaj, taking their cue from the writings of their apostle Dayanand, frequently indulged, both in the Press and on the platform, in outrageous attacks upon the Mahomedans' religion, but the militant Hindus have visited upon the Mahomedans their refusal to join in an anti-British agitation by enforcing against them a commercial and social boycott, none the less oppressive and damaging because it is not openly proclaimed. The bitterness thus engendered found vent in serious riots this year at Peshawar, just as it did in Eastern Bengal, when the boycott campaign there was at its height. Even in Hyderabad, the capital of the Nizam's dominions, where, under the wise administration of a great Mahomedan ruler whose Prime Minister is a Hindu, the relations between Moslem and Hindu have hitherto been quite harmonious, a change is gradually making itself felt under the inspiration of a small group of Bengali Hindus who have brought with them the Nationalist cry of "Arya for the Aryan." The animosity which has always existed between the Mahomedans and the Hindus, especially amongst the lower orders, has been a constant source of anxiety to Anglo-Indian administrators. As far as it springs from the clash of religious beliefs, social customs, and historical traditions, it can only be eradicated by the slow process of education. The most trivial incident, the meeting of rival processions, the maltreatment of a cow, so sacred to the Hindus, some purely personal quarrel suddenly leads to violent affrays in which the whole populace on both sides joins in without knowing even what it is all about. The danger must be enormously heightened if one community begins to believe that the other community is compassing deep-laid schemes for the promotion of its own ultimate ascendancy. The political agitation conducted by the Hindus has for some time past tended to create such a belief amongst the Mahomedans. As far back as 1893, at the time of the Bombay riots and of Tilak's "anti-cow-killing" propaganda in the Deccan, which spread sporadically to other parts of India, the Bombay Government reported "an uneasy feeling among Mahomedans that they and their faith were suffering at the hands of the Hindus, that they were being gradually but surely edged out of the position they have hitherto held, and that their religion needed some special protection." That uneasy feeling has gradually ripened since then into a widespread and deep-rooted conviction—not the least of the many deplorable results of a movement that claims to be called "national."

It would be an evil day for the internal peace of India if a people still so proud of their history, so jealous of their religion, and so conscious of their virile superiority as the Mahomedans came to believe that they could only trust to their own right hand, and no longer to the authority and sense of justice of the British Raj, to avert the dangers which they foresee in the future from the establishment of an overt or covert Hindu ascendancy. Some may say that it would be an equally evil day for the British Raj if the Mahomedans came to believe in the futility of unrequited loyalty and joined hands with its enemies in the confident anticipation that, whatever welter might follow the collapse of British rule, they could not fail sooner or later to fight their way once more to the front. Certainly at no time since we have ruled India has greater circumspection been needed in holding the balance between the two communities. It would be as impolitic to forget that the Mahomedans have held steadfastly aloof from the anti-British movement of the last few years and represent on the whole a great conservative force, as to create the impression amongst the Hindus at large, of whom the vast majority are still our friends, that we are disposed to visit upon them the disloyalty of what is after all a small section of their community by unduly favouring the Mahomedans at their expense.