Can the Government of India afford to disregard so remarkable an appeal? The question is not merely a social and moral question, but also a political one. Whilst some high-caste Hindus are beginning to recognize its urgency, the more prosperous of the socially depressed castes themselves are showing signs of restlessness under the ostracism to which they are subjected. From almost all of these castes a few individuals have always emerged, who acquired wealth and the relative recognition that wealth brings with it, and the numbers of such individuals are increasing. In some cases a whole caste has seen its circumstances improve under new economic conditions entirety beyond its own control—like the Namasudras of Bengal, who, as agriculturists, have had their share of the growing agricultural prosperity of that region. They are materially better off than they used to be, and so they are no longer content with their old social status of inferiority. Not only Christian but Mahomedan missionaries have been at work amongst them, and though the vast majority remain Hindus, they note, like the Panchamas all over India must note, the immediate rise in the social scale of their fellow-caste-men who embrace either Christianity or Islam. For it is one of the anomalies of this peculiar conception that the most untouchable Hindu ceases to be quite as untouchable when he becomes a Christian or a Mahomedan. The Bengalee politician was quick to see the danger of losing hold altogether of the Namasudras, and he set up a propaganda of his own, which I have already described, with the object of winning them over to his side and to his methods of agitation by promising them in return a relaxation of caste stringency. The question with which we are confronted is whether we shall ourselves take a hand in the elevation of the depressed castes or whether we shall leave it to others, many of whom would exploit them for their own purposes. Is not this an opportunity for the Government of India to respond to the Gaekwar's invitation and depart for once from their traditional policy of laisser faire? In the Christian Missions they have an admirable organization ready to hand which merely requires encouragement and support. Though there are manifold dangers in giving official countenance to proselytizing work amongst the higher classes of Indian society, none of those objections can reasonably lie to co-operating in the reclamation of whole classes which the orthodox Hindu regards as beyond the pale of human intercourse. From the religious point of view, this is a matter which should engage the earnest attention of the great missionary societies of this country. The hour seems to be at hand when a great and combined effort is required of them. From the moral and social point of view they may well claim in this connexion the sympathy and support of all denominations and no-denominations that are interested in the welfare and progress of backward races. From the political point of view the conversion of so many millions of the population of India to the faith of their rulers would open up prospects of such moment that I need not expatiate upon them.



CHAPTER XV.

THE NATIVE STATES.

One of the chief features of the original scheme of constitutional reforms submitted to the Secretary of State by the Government of India was the creation of an Imperial Advisory Council composed of ruling chiefs and territorial magnates. The proposal gave rise to a variety of objections, the most serious one being the difficulty of adjusting the relations to the Government of India of a Council in which the most conspicuous members could have had no definite locus standi in regard to the internal affairs of British India—i.e., of the larger part of our Indian dependency under direct British administration. The difficulty was evaded by dropping the proposal. But to evade a difficulty is only to postpone it. Though the constitutional reforms are confined, in their immediate application, to British India, measures of such far-reaching importance must react more or less directly upon the whole of our Indian Empire. Is it therefore politic, or, indeed, possible, to leave out of account the Native States, which occupy altogether about one-third of the total area of India and have an aggregate population of over 68 millions, or to ignore the rulers charged with their administration?

The Native States of India vary in size and importance from powerful principalities like the Nizam's State of Hyderabad, with an area of 82,000 miles—nearly equal to that of England and Wales and Scotland—- and a population of over 11 millions, down to diminutive chiefships, smaller than the holdings of a great English landlord. Distributed throughout the whole length and breadth of the peninsula, they display the same extraordinary variety of races and creeds and castes and languages and customs and traditions as the provinces under the immediate governance of the Viceroy, and their rulers themselves represent almost every phase and aspect of Indian history. The Princes of Rajputana, headed by the Maharana of Udaipur, with genealogies reaching back into the mythical ages, have handed down to the present day the traditions of Hindu chivalry. In the south of India, the rulers of Mysore and Cochin and Iravancore, who also claim Rajput blood, still personify the subjection of the older Dravidian races to the Aryan invaders from the north. Mahratta chiefs like Scindia and the Gaekwar date from the great uplifting of the Mahratta power in the eighteenth century, whilst the Maharajah of Kolhapur is a descendant of Shivaji, the first Mahratta chieftain to stem the tide of Mahomedan conquest more than a century earlier. The great majority of the ruling princes and chiefs are Hindus, but besides the Nizam, the most powerful of all, there are not a few Mahomedan rulers who have survived the downfall of Moslem supremacy, just as the Sikh chiefs of Patiala, Nabha, and Kapurthala, in the Punjab, still recall the great days of Ranjit Singh and the Sikh confederacy. In some of the Native States the ruling families are neither of the same race nor of the same creed as the majority of their subjects. The Nizam is a Sunni Mahomedan, but most of his subjects are Hindus, and of the Mahomedans some of the most influential are Shias. The Maharajah of Kashmir, a Hindu Rajput, rules over many Mongolian Buddhists, whilst there are but few Mahrattas in Gwalior or Indore, though both Holkar and Scindia are, Mahratta Princes.

In all the Native States the system of government is more or less of the old patriarchal or personal type which has always obtained in the East, but in its application it exhibits many variations which reflect sometimes the idiosyncrasies of the ruler and sometimes the dominant forces of inherited social traditions. In Cochin and Travancore, for instance, the ancient ascendency of the Northern Brahmans over the Dravidian subject races survives in some of its most archaic forms. Udaipur and Jaipur have perhaps preserved more than any other States of Rajputana the aristocratic conservatism of olden days, whilst some of the younger Rajput chiefs have moved more freely with the times and with their own Western education. The Gaekwar has gone further than any other ruling chief in introducing into his State of Baroda the outward forms of what we call Western progress, though his will is probably in all essentials as absolute as that of Scindia, another Mahratta chief, whose interest in every form of Western activity is displayed almost as much in his physical energy as in his intellectual alertness. Some no doubt abandon the conduct of public affairs almost entirely to their Ministers and prefer a life of easy self-indulgence. Others, on the contrary, are keen administrators, and insist upon doing everything themselves. As masterful a ruler as any in the whole of India is a lady, the Begum of Bhopal, a Mahomedan Princess of rare attainments and character. The Nizam, on the other hand, though an absolute ruler, has recently placed it on record that he attributes the peaceful content and law-abiding character of his subjections to the liberal traditions he has inherited from his ancestors. "They were singularly free from all religious and racial prejudices. Their wisdom and foresight induced them to employ Hindus and Mahomedans, Europeans, and Parsees alike, in carrying on the administration, and they reposed entire confidence in their officers whatever religion and race they belonged to." To those principles his Highness rightly claims to have himself adhered.

Again, though the relationship of the Supreme Government to all these rulers is one of suzerainty, it is governed in each particular case by special and different treaties which vary the extent and nature of the control exercised over them. In some of its aspects, the principles of our policy towards them were admirably set forth in a speech delivered in November, 1909, by Lord Minto at Udaipur. "In guaranteeing their internal independence and in undertaking their protection against external aggression, it naturally follows that the Imperial Government has assumed a certain degree of responsibility for the general soundness of their administration, and would not consent to incur the reproach of being an indirect instrument of misrule. There are also certain matters in which it is necessary for the Government of India to safeguard the interests of the community as a whole, as well as those of the Paramount Power, such as railways, telegraphs, and other services of an Imperial character." At the same time the Viceroy wisely laid great stress on the fact that, in pursuance of the pledges given by the British Crown to the rulers of the Native States, "our policy is with rare exceptions one of non-interference in their internal affairs," and he pointed out that, as owing to the varying conditions of different States "any attempt at complete uniformity and subservience to precedent" must be dangerous, he had endeavoured "to deal with questions as they arose with reference to existing treaties, the merits of each case, local conditions, antecedent circumstances, and the particular stage of development, feudal and constitutional, of individual principalities." It is obviously impossible to enforce a more rigid control over the feudatory States at the same time as we are delegating larger powers to the natives of India under direct British administration. This is a point which Lord Minto might indeed have emphasized with advantage. For there seems to be a growing tendency, probably at home rather than in India, to ignore our responsibilities towards the ruling chiefs, and to regard them as more or less negligible quantities in the constitutional experiments we are making in our Indian Empire. When an emergency arises such as a frontier war or a military expedition in the Sudan or in China, we appeal unhesitatingly to the loyalty of the Princes of India, and so far they have cheerfully borne their share in these Imperial enterprises though they were never drawn into consultation beforehand, and their own material interests were not directly involved. On the other hand, questions which do involve their material interests, questions which necessarily affect the well-being of their States quite as much as that of British India, questions of tariff and of currency that react upon the economic prosperity of the whole of India are settled between Whitehall and Government House at Calcutta without their opinion being even invited. Sometimes even decisions are taken without their knowledge on matters that directly affect their own exchequers, as in the matter of the opium trade with China. Some of the native States are the largest producers of the Indian poppy, and in order to satisfy the susceptibilities, very meritorious in themselves, of our national conscience, we lightheartedly impose upon them, without consultation or prospect of compensation, the sacrifice, which costs us nothing, of one of the most valuable products of their soil and chief sources of revenue. Can they do otherwise than draw unfavourable comparisons between the harsh measure meted out to them in this matter and the generous treatment of the West Indies by the Mother Country when L20,000,000 were voted out of the Imperial Exchequer towards compensation for the material losses arising out of the abolition of slavery?

How important it is to associate the Princes of India with the purposes of our Indian policy has seldom been more clearly shown than during these last troublous years when the forces of disaffection have revealed themselves as a serious public danger. The principle of authority cannot be attacked in British India without suffering diminution in the Native States. They are not shut up in watertight compartments and sedition cannot be preached on one side of a border, which in most cases is merely an administrative boundary line, without finding an echo on the other side. The prestige of an Indian Prince in his own land is great. It is rooted in most cases in ancient traditions to which no alien rulers can appeal. Nevertheless some of the most experienced and enlightened of the ruling chiefs showed a much earlier and livelier appreciation of the subversive tendencies of Indian unrest than those responsible for the governance of British India. Some of them, like the Maharajahs of Kolhapur and of Patiala, have been brought face to face with the same violent, and even with the same criminal, methods of agitation as the Government of India has had to deal with in provinces under British administration. The Maharajah of Jaipur and Maharajah Scindia felt themselves constrained just about a year ago to enact vigorous measures on their own account against sedition and against the importation into their States of seditious literature which was still allowed to circulate with impunity in British India, whilst the State of Bikanir was the first to introduce an Explosive Substances Act immediately after the epidemic of bomb-throwing had broken out in Bengal. Other States have also taken strong preventive measures, but many have fortunately been spared so far any serious trouble within their own borders, and their rulers have been able to study the problem merely as interested observers and from the point of view of the general welfare of the country.

On August 65 1909, the Viceroy took the unusual step of communicating direct with all the principal ruling Princes and Chiefs of India on the subject of the Active unrest prevalent in many parts of the country, and invited an exchange of opinions "with a view to mutual co-operation against a common danger." Some doubts were then expressed as to the wisdom of such a course, on the ground that it might create in the protected States an impression of exaggerated alarm. 'But the tone and substance of the replies which his Excellency's communication elicited showed that there was no reason for any such apprehensions. The Ruling Chiefs, on the contrary, appreciated and reciprocated the confidence reposed in them, and their replies, indeed, constitute an exceptionally interesting and instructive set of documents; for the very diversity of origin and traditions and influence gives peculiar weight to the position assumed by the rulers of the Native States towards the forces of active unrest in India. Had those forces merely been engaged in a legitimate struggle for the enlargement of Indian rights and liberties, it is scarcely conceivable that the Ruling Princes and Chiefs should have passed judgment against them with such overwhelming unanimity.

It may be argued that in replying to a Viceregal Kharita, the Ruling Chiefs could hardly do less than recognize the existence of the "common danger" to which Lord Minto had drawn their attention. But the careful analysis of the influences behind the agitation and the practical suggestions for dealing with it which the majority of the replies contain, prove that their opinions are certainly not framed "to order." They represent the convictions and experience of a group of responsible Indians better situated in some respects to obtain accurate information about the doings and feelings of their fellow-countrymen than any Anglo-Indian administrators can be. The language of the Nizam is singularly apt and direct, "Once the forces of lawlessness and disorder are let loose there is no knowing where they will stop. It is true that, compared with the enormous population of India, the disaffected people are a very insignificant minority, but, given time and opportunity, there exists the danger of this small minority spreading its tentacles all over the country and inoculating with its poisonous doctrines the classes and masses hitherto untouched by this seditious movement." The Maharana of Udaipur, speaking with the authority of his unique position amongst Hindus as the premier Prince of Rajputana, not only condemns an agitation "which is detrimental to all good government and social administration," but declares it to be "a great disgrace to their name as also to their religious beliefs that, in spite of the great prosperity India has enjoyed under the British regime, people are acting in such an ungrateful way." No less emphatic is the Mahratta ruler of Gwalior:—"The question is undoubtedly a grave one, affecting as it does the future well-being of India," and "it particularly behoves those who preside over the destinies of the people and have large personal stakes to do all in their power to grapple with it vigorously." The Maharajah of Jaipur, one of the wisest of the older generation of Hindu rulers, agrees that "only a small fraction of the population has been contaminated by the seditious germ," but he adds significantly that "that fraction has, it seems, been carefully organized by able, rich, and unscrupulous men," and he does not hesitate to declare that "an organized and concerted campaign, offensive and defensive, against the common enemy is what is wanted."

According to the Rajah of Dewas, one of the most enlightened of the younger Hindu chiefs, "it is a well known fact that the endeavours of the seditious party are directed not only against the Paramount Power, but against all constituted forms of government in India, through an absolutely misunderstood sense of 'patriotism,' and through an attachment to the popular idea of 'government by the people,' when every level-headed Indian must admit that India generally has not in any way shown its fitness for a popular government." He goes so far even as to state his personal conviction that history and all "sound-minded" people agree that India cannot really attain to the standard of popular government as understood by the West.

It is another Hindu ruler, the Rajah of Ratlam, who points out the close connexion, upon which I have had to lay repeated stress, between religious revivalism and sedition. He recognizes that "Hindus, and for the matter of that all Oriental peoples, are swayed more by religion than by anything else." Government have hitherto adopted, and rightly adopted, the policy of allowing perfect freedom in the matter of religious beliefs, but as the seditionists are seeking to connect their anarchical movement with religion, and the political Sadhu is abroad, it is high time to change the policy of non-interference in so-called religious affairs. The new religion which is now being preached, "with its worship of heroes like Shivaji and the doctrine of India for India alone," deserves, this Hindu Prince boldly declares, to be treated as Thuggism and Suttee were treated, which both claimed the sanction of religion. "It pains me," he adds, "to write as above, but already religion has played a prominent part in this matter, and religious books were found in almost every search made for weapons and bombs. The role of the priest or the Sadhu is most convenient, and rulers have bowed, and do bow, to religious preachers. These people generally distort the real import of religious precepts, and thereby vitiate the public mind. The founders are sly enough to flatter the Government by an occasional address breathing loyalty and friendship, but it is essential to check this religious propaganda."

The rulers of the Native States are not content merely to profess loyalty and reprobate disaffection. With the exception of the Gaekwar, whose reply, without striking any note of substantial dissent, is, marked, by a certain coolness that has won for him the applause of the Nationalist Press, they respond heartily to the Viceroy's request for suggestions as to the most effective measures to cope with the evil. Most of them put in the very forefront of their recommendations the necessity of checking the licence of the Indian Press, to which they attribute the main responsibility for the widening of the gulf between the rulers and the ruled. And it should be remembered that these opinions were expressed some months before the Imperial Government and the Government of India decided to introduce the new Press Act. The Nizam holds that newspapers publishing false allegations or exaggerated reports should be officially called upon "to print formal contradiction or correction as directed." For, in his Highness's opinion, "it is no longer safe or desirable to treat with silent contempt any perverse statement which is publicly made, because the spread of education on the one hand has created a general interest in the news of the country, and a section of the Press, on the other hand, deliberately disseminates news calculated to promote enmity between Europeans and Indians, or to excite hatred of Government and its officers in the ignorant and credulous minds." Several Chiefs recommend more summary proceedings and less publicity in the case of political offences, as, though such measures may appear arbitrary at first sight, "they are quite suited to the country." Several agree that a closer watch should be kept on "religious mendicants" who go about in the guise of Sadhus preaching sedition, and that a more intimate exchange of secret intelligence should take place with regard to the seditious propaganda between the different States and the Government of India. Others believe in the creation of counter-organizations to inform and encourage the loyal elements.

But it is perhaps on the question of education that some of the Ruling Chiefs speak with the greatest weight and authority, and there is nothing they more deeply deplore than the divorce of secular instruction from religious and moral training, which they hold responsible for much of the present mischief. "Strange as it may sound," says the Rajah of Dewas, "it is a well-known fact that the germs of the present unrest in India were laid by that benefactor of the human race, education." Another Chief is of opinion that, as the formation of character is the highest object of education, all public schools should be graded by the results they achieve in this direction rather than by high percentages in examinations; whilst others strongly recommend the extension of the residential college system and greater care in the selection of good teachers.

One may possibly not agree with all the opinions expressed or with all the recommendations made in this correspondence, but their general uniformity cannot fail to carry weight. It certainly carried weight with both the Government of India and the Imperial Government. Not only did it admittedly contribute to the enactment of the Indian Press Bill of February last, but it has probably also contributed to bring about a more general recognition of the urgency of the Indian educational problem. The effect produced in India itself by the publication of the views held by the rulers of Native States, many of whom enjoy great prestige and influence far beyond the limits of their immediate dominions, was naturally considerable. The "extremists" were lashed to fury, and none of the seditious leaflets directed against the "alien" rulers and "sun-dried bureaucrats" was more violent than one issued in reply to these utterances of the rulers of their own race. One of the ruling Chiefs to whom it had been sent gave me a copy of it as "a characteristic document." It is headed: "Choose, O Indian Princes." It begins, it is true, by assuring them that there is not as yet any cut-and-dried scheme for dealing with them.

No one but the voice of the Mother herself will and can determine when once She comes to herself and stands free what constitution shall be adopted by Her for the guidance of Her life after the revolution is over. ... Without going into details we may mention this much, that whether the head of the Imperial Government of the Indian Nation be a President or a King depends upon how the revolution develops itself ... The Mother must be free, must be one and united, must make her will supreme. Then it may be that She gives out this Her will either wearing a kingly crown on Her head or a Republican mantle round Her sacred form.

But after being exhorted in impassioned accents either to sacrifice themselves in the great national struggle now at hand, or at the very least to stand back and keep the ring, they are warned as to the consequences of disregarding these admonitions:—

Forget not, O Princes! that a strict account will be asked of your doings and non-doings, and a people newly-born will not fail to pay you in the coin you paid. Every one who shall have actively betrayed the trust of the people, disowned his fathers, and debased his blood by arraying himself against the Mother—he shall be crushed to dust and ashes.... Do you doubt our grim earnestness! If so hear the name of Dhingra and be dumb. In the name of that martyr, O Indian Princes, we ask you to think solemnly and deeply upon these words. Choose as you will and you will reap what you sow. Choose whether you shall be the first of the nation's fathers or the last of the nation's tyrants.

In some less rabid quarters an attempt has been made to decry the views of the native rulers as emanating from petty Oriental despots, terrified by the onward march of the new Indian democracy. If so it is strange that whilst these "despots" make no secret of their attitude towards disaffection, they are equally outspoken on the necessity of a liberal and progressive policy. The Nizam himself states emphatically that he is "a great believer in conciliation and repression going hand in hand to cope with the present condition of India. While sedition should be localized and rooted out sternly, and even mercilessly, deep sympathy and unreserved reliance should manifest themselves in all dealings with loyal subjects without distinction of creed, caste, and colour." Unfortunately it requires at the present day more courage for an Indian to hold such language as that than to coquet, as many politicians do, with violence and crime. Indians in high position are peculiarly sensitive to printed attacks, perhaps because behind such attacks there often lurk forms of social pressure, rendered possible by their caste system, with which we, happily for ourselves, are totally unfamiliar. One of the most discouraging features of the present situation is that so few among the "moderate" politicians who are known to share and approve the views expressed by the Princes of India have had the moral courage to endorse them publicly.

The fearless response made by the ruling Chiefs to Lord Minto's appeal for advice and support in the repression of sedition conveys at the same time another lesson which we may well take to heart. The Government of India consulted them after the danger had arisen and become manifest. Is it not possible that, had we maintained closer touch with them in the past, had we appreciated more fully the value of their knowledge and experience, the danger might never have arisen or would never have attained such threatening proportions? At any rate, now that the consciousness of a common danger has drawn Princes and Government closer together, no time should be lost in establishing some machinery which would secure for the future a more sustained and intimate co-operation between them.



CHAPTER XVI

CROSS CURRENTS

The political aspects of Indian unrest have compelled me to dwell chiefly upon the evil forces which it has generated. But contact with the West has acted as a powerful ferment for good as well as for evil upon every class of Indian society that has come more or less directly under its influence. Were it otherwise we should indeed have to admit the moral bankruptcy of our civilization. The forces of unrest are made up of many heterogeneous and often conflicting elements, and even in their most mischievous manifestations there are sometimes germs of good which it should be our business to preserve and to develop. Largely as the classes touched, however superficially, by Western education have of late years been invaded by a spirit of reaction and of revolt against all for which that education stands, they have not yet by any means been wholly conquered by it. It is the breath of the West that has stirred the spiritual and intellectual activity of which Hindu revivalism and political disaffection, glorified under the name of Nationalism, are unfortunately the most prominent and the most recent but not the only outcome. Another and much healthier outcome is the sense of social duty and social service which has grown up amongst many educated Indians of all races and creeds, and amongst none more markedly than amongst the Hindus. Traditions of mutual helpfulness are indeed deep-rooted in India as in all Oriental communities. Mutual helpfulness is the best feature of the caste system, of the Hindu family system, of the old Indian village system, and it explains the absence in a country where there is so much poverty of those abject forms of pauperism with which we are compelled at home to deal through the painful medium of our Poor Laws. But until the leaven of Western ideas had been imported into India mutual helpfulness was generally confined within the narrow limits of distinct and separate social units. It is now slowly expanding out of watertight compartments into a more spacious conception of the social inter-dependence of the different classes of the community. This expansion of the Indian's social horizon began with the social reform movement which had kindled the enthusiasm, of an older generation in the '70's and '80's of the last century. Far from being, as some contend, a by-product of the more recent Nationalism, which had never been heard of at that period, its progress, as I have already shown, has been hampered not only by the reactionary tendencies of this Nationalism in religious and social matters, but by the diversion of some of the best energies of the country into the relatively barren field of political agitation.

Though social reform has been checked, it has not been altogether arrested, nor can it be arrested so long as British rule, by the mere fact of its existence, maintains the ascendency of Western ideals. Happily there are still plenty of educated Indians who realize that the liberation of Indian society from the trammels which are of its own making is much more urgent than its enfranchisement from an alien yoke. Even amongst politicians of almost every complexion the necessity of removing from the Indian social system the reproach of degrading anachronisms is finding at least theoretical recognition. Alongside of more conspicuous political organizations devoted mainly to political propaganda, other organizations have been quietly developing all over India whose chief purpose it is to grapple with social, religious, and economic problems which are not, or need not necessarily be, in any way connected with politics. Their voices are too often drowned by the louder clamour of the politicians pure and simple, and they attract little attention outside India. But no one who has spent any time in India can fail to be struck with the many-sided activities revealed in all the non-political conventions and conferences and congresses held annually all over the country. Within the last 12 months there have been philanthropic and religious conferences like the All India Temperance Conference, the Christian Endeavour Convention, the Theosophical Convention, social conferences like the Indian National Social Conference, the Moslem Educational Congress, and the Sikh Educational Conference, economic conferences like the Industrial Conference held at Lahore in connexion with the Punjab Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition, not to speak of many others, such as the Rajput Conference, the Hindu Punjab Conference, the Kshatrya Conference, the Parsee Conference, &c., which dealt with the narrower interests of particular castes or communities, but nevertheless gathered together representatives of those interests from all parts of India, or any rate from a whole province. Some of these meetings may be made to subserve political purposes. Others, like the Parsee Conference, betray reactionary tendencies in the most unexpected places, for the Parsee community, which has thriven more than any other on Western education and has prided itself upon being the most progressive and enlightened of all Indian communities, is the last one in which one would have looked for the triumph, however temporary, of a strangely benighted orthodoxy. But the majority of these gatherings represent an honest and earnest attempt to apply, as far as possible, the teachings of Western experience to the solution of Indian problems, and to subject Indian customs and beliefs to the test of modern criticism. They apply themselves, moreover, chiefly to questions in which no alien Government like that of India can take the initiative without serious risk of being altogether ahead of native opinion and arousing dangerous antagonism. As Mr. Lala Dev Raj, the chairman of the last Social Conference at Lahore, for instance, put it:—

The reforms advocated here strike at those harmful and undesirable customs which are purely of our own creation and which must be bidden farewell to, as our eyes are being opened to them. If we cannot do that, we can hardly call ourselves a living community.

The results of all this activity may not so far have been very marked, but the mere fact that the supreme sanction of tradition, which was formerly almost undisputed, is now subjected to discussion is bound to make some impression, even upon those whose political concepts are based, upon the immanent superiority of Hinduism. The new interpretation of the Baghvat Gita, though sometimes distorted to hideous ends, has itself been inspired by a broader appreciation of social duty than there was room for in the Hindu theory of life before it had been modified by Western influences. So long as the spirit of social endeavour kindled by men like Ram Mohun Roy and Keshab Chunder Sen and Mahadev Govind Ranade is kept alive, even though by much lesser men, we may well hope that the present wave of revolt will ultimately spend itself on the dead shore of a factious and artificial reaction, incompatible with the purpose to which their own best efforts were devoted, of bringing the social life of India into harmony with Western civilization.

A phenomenon, which may prove to have a deep significance is that, side by side with these larger organisations for the promotion of social reform which only claim incidental service from their members, a number of smaller societies are growing up of which the members are bound together by much closer ties and more stringent obligations, and in some cases even by solemn vows to renounce the world and to devote themselves wholly to a life of social service. Many of them present features of special interest which deserve recognition, but I must be content to describe one of them to which the personality of its founder lends exceptional importance. This is the society of "The Servants of India," founded by Mr. Gokhale at Poona. Mr. Gokhale's career itself exemplifies the cross-currents that are often so perplexing a feature of Indian unrest. He is chiefly known in England as one of the leading and certainly most interesting figures in Indian politics. A Chitpavan Brahman by birth, with the blood of the old dominant caste of Maharashtra in his veins, he has often been, both in the Viceroy's Legislative Council and in that of his own Presidency, a severe and even bitter critic of an alien Government, of which he nevertheless admits the benefit, and even the necessity, for India. On the other hand, though he proclaims himself a Nationalist, and though, on one occasion at least, when he presided over the stormy session of the Indian National Congress at Calcutta in December, 1906, which endorsed the Bengalee boycott movement, he lent the weight of his authority to a policy that was difficult to reconcile with constitutional methods of opposition, his reason and his moral sense have always revolted against the reactionary appeals to religious prejudice and racial hatred by which men like Tilak have sought to stimulate a perverted form of Indian patriotism. Highly educated both as a Western and an Eastern scholar, he approaches perhaps more nearly than any of his fellow-countrymen to the Western type of doctrinaire, Radical in politics and agnostic in regard to religion, but with a dash of passion and enthusiasm which the Western doctrinaire is apt to lack. When Tilak opened his first campaign of unrest in the Deccan by attacking the Hindu reformers, he found few stouter opponents than Mr. Gokhale, who was one of Ranade's staunchest disciples and supporters. Nor did Tilak ever forgive him. His newspapers never ceased to pursue him with relentless ferocity, and only last year Mr. Gokhale had to appeal to the Law Courts for protection against the scurrilous libels of the "extremist" Press.

His own experiences in political life since he resigned his work as a professor at the Ferguson College in Poona in order to take a larger share in public affairs have probably helped to convince Mr. Gokhale that his fellow-countrymen for the most part still lack many essential qualifications for the successful discharge of those civic duties which are the corollary of the civic rights he claims for them. He does not, it is understood, desire to seek re-election to the Imperial Council at Calcutta after the expiry of its present powers, two years hence, as he wishes to devote himself chiefly to the educational work, which, in one form or another, has perhaps always been the most absorbing interest of his life. When he was a professor at the Ferguson College teaching was with him a vocation rather than a profession, and, if one may judge by his practice, he believes that only those who are prepared to set an example of selflessness and almost ascetic simplicity of life can hope to promote the moral and social as well as the political advancement of India. It is on these principles that he founded five years ago the "Servants of India" Society, recruited in the first instance amongst a few personal followers and supported hitherto by the voluntary contributions of his admirers. The objects of the Society as laid down by its promoters are "to train national missionaries for the service of India and to promote by all constitutional means the true interests of the Indian people." Its members "frankly accept the British connexion as ordained, in the inscrutable dispensation of Providence, for India's good," and they recognize that "self-government within the Empire and a higher life generally for their countrymen" constitute a goal which "cannot be attained without years of earnest and patient effort and sacrifices worthy of the cause." As to its immediate functions, "much of the work," it is stated, "must be directed towards building up in the country a higher type of character and capacity than is generally available at present," and to this end the Society "will train men prepared to devote their lives to the cause of the country in a religious spirit." The constitution of the Society recalls in fact that of some of the great religious societies of Christendom, and not least that of the Jesuits, though with this cardinal difference, that it is essentially non-sectarian and substitutes as its ideal the service of India for the service of God, much in the same way as the Japanese have to a large extent merged their religious creeds in an idealized cult of Japan.

Every "Servant of India" takes at the time of admission into the society the following seven vows;—

(a) That the country will always be first in his thoughts, and that he will give to her service the best that is in him.

(b) That in serving the country he will seek no personal advantage for himself.

(c) That he will regard all Indians as brothers and will work for the advancement of all, without distinction of caste or creed.

(d) That he will be content with such provision for himself and his family, if any, as the society may be able to make, and will devote no part of his energies to earning money for himself.

(e) That he will lead a pure personal life.

(f) That he will engage in no personal quarrel with any one.

(g) That he will always keep in view the aims of the society and watch over its interests with the utmost zeal, doing all he can to advance its work and never doing anything inconsistent with its objects.

The head of the society, called the First Member—who is Mr. Gokhale—is to hold office for life, and its affairs are to be conducted in accordance with by-laws framed for the purpose by the First Member, who will be assisted by a council of three, one of whom will be his own nominee, whilst two will be elected by the ordinary members. The powers assigned to the First Member are very extensive and include that of recommending the names of three ordinary members, one of whom, when the time comes, shall be chosen to succeed him. His authority is, in fact, the dominant one, whether over the probationers under training for a period of five years, three of which are to be spent at the society's home in Poona, or over the ordinary members admitted to the full privileges of the society, or over those who, as attaches, associates, and permanent assistants, are very closely affiliated to it without being actually received into membership. The scheme is, of course, at present in its infancy, as the society still numbers only about 25, the majority of whom have not yet completed their term of probation. Mr. Gokhaie, however, hopes very soon to have 50 probationers constantly in residence, and he has already gathered together in the well-appointed buildings of the society's home just outside Poona, in close proximity to the Ferguson College, a group of young men, to some of whom he kindly introduced me, who have evidently caught the fervour of his enthusiasm. One of the latest recruits was by birth a Mahomedan, of whom Mr. Gokhale was specially proud, as he is very anxious that the society shall be, in fact as well as in theory, representative of all castes and creeds.

One of the first questions which this remarkable experiment suggests is whether the ideals which Mr. Gokhale sets before the "Servants of India" will suffice to supply the necessary driving power. Hitherto some form of religious faith and the hope of some heavenly reward have alone availed to induce men to renounce the world and all its material interests and surrender themselves to a life of rigorous and selfless discipline in the service of their fellow-creatures, or rather in the service of God through their fellow-creatures. Mr. Gokhale's society makes no claim to any religious sanction. Though Indian asceticism has from the most remote times found devotees willing to lead a life of far more complete self-annihilation than any that the most rigorous monastic orders of Christendom have ever imposed, or that, for the matter of that, Mr. Gokhale seeks to impose upon his followers, it has always been inspired by some religious conception. Will the "Servants of India" find the same permanent inspiration in the cult of an Indian Motherland, however highly spiritualized, that has no rewards to offer either in this world or in any other? On the political as well as other potentialities of such an organization as Mr. Gokhale contemplates there is no need to dwell. For the "Servants of India," moulded by one mind and trained to obey one will, are to go forth as missionaries throughout India, in the highways and by-ways, among the "untouchables" as well as among the higher classes, preaching to each and all the birth of an Indian nation.



CHAPTER XVII.

THE GROWTH OF WESTERN EDUCATION.

The rising generation represent the India of the future, and though those who come within the orbit of the Western education we have introduced still constitute only a very small fraction of the whole youth of India, their numbers and their influence are growing steadily and are bound to go on growing. If we are losing our hold over them, it is a poor consolation to be told that we still retain our hold over their elders. I therefore regard the estrangement of the young Indian, and especially of the young Hindu who has passed or is passing through our schools and colleges, as the most alarming phenomenon of the present day, and I am convinced that of all the problems with which British statesmanship is confronted in India none is more difficult and more urgent than the educational problem. We are too deeply pledged now to the general principles upon which our educational policy in India is based for even its severest critics to contemplate the possibility of abandoning it. But for this very reason it is all the more important that we should realize the grave defects of the existing system, or, as some would say, want of system, in order that we may, so far as possible, repair or mitigate them. There can be no turning back, and salvation lies not in doing less for Indian education, but in doing more and in doing it better.

Four very important features of the system deserve to be noted at the outset:—(1) Following the English practice, Government exercises no direct control over educational institutions other than those maintained by the State, though its influence is brought in several ways indirectly to bear upon all that are not prepared to reject the benefits which it can extend to them; (2) Government has concentrated its efforts mainly upon higher education, and has thus begun from the top in the over-sanguine belief that education would ultimately filter down from the higher to the lower strata of Indian society; (3) instruction in the various courses, mostly literary, which constitute higher education is conveyed through the medium of English, a tongue still absolutely foreign to the vast majority; and (4) education is generally confined to the training of the intellect and divorced not only, absolutely, from all religious teaching, but also, very largely, from all moral training and discipline, with the result that the vital side of education which consists in the formation of character has been almost entirely neglected.

To make the present situation intelligible, I must recapitulate, however briefly, the phases through which our Indian system of education has passed. The very scanty encouragement originally given, to education by the East India Company was confined to promoting the study of the Oriental languages still used at that time in the Indian Courts of Law in order to qualify young Indians for Government employment and chiefly in the subordinate posts of the judicial service. After long and fierce controversies on the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the expansion of education, Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7, 1835, determined a revolution of which only very few at the time foresaw, however faintly, the ultimate consequences. Lord William Bentinck's Government decided that "the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and that all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone."

Another influence—too often forgotten—had at least as large a share as Macaulay's in this tremendous departure. That was the influence of the great missionary, Dr. Alexander Duff, who inspired the prohibition of suttee and other measures which marked the withdrawal of the countenance originally given by the East India Company to religious practices incompatible, in the opinion of earnest Christians, with the sovereignty of a Christian Power. Duff had made up his mind, in direct opposition to Carey and other earlier missionaries, that the supremacy of the English language over the vernaculars must be established as a preliminary to the Christianization of India. He had himself opened in 1830 an English school in Calcutta with an immediate success which had confounded all his opponents. His authority was great both at home and in India, and was reflected equally in Lord Hardinge's Educational Order of 1844, which threw a large number of posts in the public service open to English-speaking Indians without distinction of race or creed, and in Sir Charles Wood's Educational Despatch of 1854, which resulted in the creation of a Department for Public Instruction, the foundation of the three senior Universities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, the affiliation to them of schools and colleges for purposes of examination, and the inauguration of the "grant-in-aid" system for the encouragement of native educational enterprise by guaranteeing financial support according to a fixed scale to all schools that satisfied certain tests of efficiency in respect of secular instruction. Duff's influence had assured the supremacy of English in secular education, but he never succeeded in inducing Government to go a step beyond neutrality in regard to religious education, and though the remarkable successes which he had in the meantime achieved, not only as a teacher but as a missionary, amongst the highest classes of Calcutta society no doubt led him to hope that, even without any active co-operation from Government, the spread of English education would in itself involve the spread of both Christian ethics and Christian doctrine, he never ceased to preach the necessity of combining religious and moral with secular education or to prophesy the evils which would ensue from their divorce.

The system inaugurated by the Educational Minute of 1835 and developed in the Educational Orders of 1854 began well. The number of young Indians who took advantage of it was relatively small. They were drawn mostly from the better classes, and they were brought into direct contact with their English teachers, many of them very remarkable men whose influence naturally, and often unconsciously, helped to form the character of their pupils as well as to develop their intellect—and most of all, perhaps, in the mission schools; for the Christian missions were at that time the dominant factor in Indian educational work. In 1854 when there were only 12,000 scholars in all the Government schools, mission schools mustered four times that number and the rights they acquired, under the Orders of 1854, to participate in the new "grants-in-aid" helped them to retain the lead which in some respects, though not as to numbers, they still maintain. For more than 50 years after the Minute of 1835, and especially during the two or three decades that followed the Orders of 1854, the new system produced a stamp of men who seemed fully to justify the hopes of its original founders—not merely men with a sufficient knowledge of English to do subordinate work as clerks and minor employes of Government, but also men of great intellectual attainments and of high character, who filled with distinction the highest posts open to Indians in the public service, sat on the Bench, and practised at the Bar, and, in fact, made a mark for themselves in the various fields of intellectual activity developed by contact with the West. It is much to be regretted that no data have ever been collected to show what proportion men of this stamp bore to the aggregate number of students under the new system. The proportion was certainly small, but it was at any rate large enough to reflect credit upon the system as a whole and to disguise its inherent defects. It is characteristic of the narrowness of official interest in educational questions that, whereas abundant statistics are forthcoming on all subjects connected with material progress, no attempt seems to have been made to follow the results of Western education statistically into the after-life of high school pupils and college students. We know that a certain number have emerged into public distinction, but there is nothing to show, except in the most, general way, how many have turned their education to humbler but still profitable account, or how many have turned it to no account at all.

Paradoxical as it may sound, it is the eagerness of young India to respond to our educational call that has led to the breakdown of the system in some of the most important functions of education. In its earlier stages those who claimed the benefit of the new system were chiefly drawn from the intellectual elite—i.e., from the classes which had had the monopoly of knowledge, though it was not Western knowledge, before the introduction of Western education. With the success which the new system achieved the demand grew rapidly, and the quality of the output diminished as it increased in quantity. On the one hand education came to be regarded by the Indian public less and less as an end in itself, and more and more as merely an avenue either to lucrative careers or to the dignified security of appointments, however modest, under Government, and, in either case, to a higher social status, which ultimately acquired a definite money value in the matrimonial market. The grant-in-aid system led to the foundation of large numbers of schools and colleges under private native management, in which the native element became gradually supreme or at least vastly predominant, and it enabled them to adopt so low a scale of fees that many parents who had never dreamt of literacy for themselves were encouraged to try and secure for some at least of their children the benefit of this miraculous Open Sesame to every kind of worldly advancement. Much of the raw material pressed into secondary schools was quite unsuitable, and little or no attempt was made to sift it in the rough. Numbers therefore began to drop out somewhere on the way, disappointed of their more ambitious hopes and having acquired just enough new ideas to unfit them for the humbler work to which they might otherwise have been brought up[17]. On the other hand, whilst schools and colleges, chiefly under private native management, were multiplied in order to meet the growing demand, the instruction given in them tended to get petrified into mechanical standards, which were appraised solely or mainly by success in the examination lists. In fact, education in the higher sense of the term gave way to the mere cramming of undigested knowledge into more or less receptive brains with a view to an inordinate number of examinations, which marked the various stages of this artificial process. The personal factor also disappeared more and more in the relations between scholars and teachers as the teaching staff failed to keep pace with the enormous increase in numbers.

All these deteriorating influences, though they were perhaps not then so visible on the surface, were already at work in the 80's, when two important Government Commissions were held whose labours, with the most excellent intentions, were destined to have directly and indirectly, the most baneful effects upon Indian education. The one was the Education Commission of 1882-83, appointed by Lord Ripon, with Sir William Hunter as President, and the other the Public Service Commission of 1886-87, appointed by Lord Dufferin, with Sir Charles Aitchison as President. It is quite immaterial whether the steps taken by the Government of India during the subsequent decade were actually due to the recommendations of the Education Commission, or whether the Report of the Commission merely afforded a welcome opportunity to carry into practice the views that were then generally in the ascendant. The eloquence of the Commission, if I may borrow the language appropriately used to me by a very competent authority, was chiefly directed towards representing the important benefits that would be likely to accrue to Government and to education by the relaxation of Government's control over education, the withdrawal of Government from the management of schools, and the adoption of a general go-as-you-please policy. Amongst the definite results which we undoubtedly owe to the labours of that Commission was the acclimatization in India of Sir Robert Lowe's system of "payment by results," which was then already discredited in England. Just at the time when the transfer of the teacher's influence from European into native hands was being thus accelerated, the Public Service Commission, not a single member of which was an educational officer, produced a series of recommendations which had the effect of changing very much for the worse the position and prospects of Indians in the Educational Department. Before the Commission sat, Indians and Europeans used to work side by side in the superior graded service of the Department, and until quite recently they had drawn the same pay. The Commission abolished this equality and comradeship and put the Europeans and the Indians into separate pens. The European pen was named the Indian Educational Service, and the native pen was named the Provincial Educational Service. Into the Provincial Service were put Indians holding lower posts than any held by Europeans and with no prospect of ever rising to the maximum salaries hitherto within their reach. To pretend that equality was maintained under the new scheme is idle, and the grievance thus created has caused a bitterness which is not allayed by the fact that the Commission created analogous grievances in other branches of the public service. Nor was this all the mischief done. It quickened the impulse already given by the Education Commission by formally recommending that the recruitment of Englishmen for the Education Department should be reduced to a minimum, and, especially, that even fewer inspectors of schools than the totally inadequate number then existing should be recruited from England. It is interesting to note in view of subsequent developments that, whilst this recommendation was tacitly ignored by the Provincial Governments in some parts of India, as in Madras and in Bombay, it was accepted and applied in Bengal—i.e., in the province where our educational system has displayed its gravest shortcomings.

From that time forward the dominant influence in secondary schools and colleges drifted steadily and rapidly out of the hands of Englishmen into those of Indians long before there was a sufficient supply of native teachers fitted either by tradition or by training to conduct an essentially Western system of education. Not only did the number of native teachers increase steadily and enormously, but that of the European teachers actually decreased. Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee, the Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, told me, for instance, that when he entered the Presidency College about 1880 all the professors, except a few specialists for purely Oriental subjects, were English, and the appointment, whilst he was there, of an Indian for the first time as an ordinary professor created quite a sensation. Last year there were only eight English professors as against 23 Indians, though, during the same 30 years, the number of pupils had increased from a little over 350 to close on 700—i.e., it had nearly doubled. The Calcutta Presidency College is, even so, far better off in this respect than most colleges except the missionary institutions, in which the European staff of teachers has been maintained at a strength that explains their continued success. Out of 127 colleges there are 30 to-day with no Europeans at all on the staff, and these colleges contain about one-fifth of the students in all colleges. Of the other colleges 16 have only one European professor, 21 only two, and so forth. In the secondary schools the proportion of native to European teachers is even more overwhelming. From the point of view of mere instruction the results have been highly unsatisfactory. From the point of view of moral training and discipline and the formation of character they have been disastrous.



CHAPTER XVIII.

THE INDIAN STUDENT.

The fundamental weakness of our Indian educational system is that the average Indian student cannot bring his education into any direct relation with the world in which, outside the class or lecture room, he continues to live. For that world is still the old Indian world of his forefathers, and it is as far removed as the poles asunder from the Western world which claims his education. I am not speaking now of the relatively still very small class amongst whom Western ideas are already sufficiently acclimatized for the parents to be able to supplement in their own homes the education given to their children in our schools and colleges. Nor am I speaking of the students who live in hostels under the superintendence of high-minded Englishmen, and especially of missionaries such as those of the Oxford Mission in Calcutta, or the Madras Christian College, who have to reject scores of applicants for want of space. Those also form but a small minority. In Calcutta, for instance, out of 4,500 students barely 1,000 live in hostels, and not all hostels are by any means satisfactory. In the Indian Universities there is no collegiate life such as English Universities afford, and in India most of the secondary schools as well as colleges are non-residential. The majority of those who attend them, unless they live at home, have therefore to board out with friends or to live in promiscuous messes, or, as is too often the case, in lodgings of a very undesirable character, sometimes even in brothels, and almost always under conditions intellectually, morally, and physically deleterious.

Lest I may be accused of exaggeration or bias, I will appeal here to the testimony of Dr. Garfield Williams, a missionary of the highest repute and experience, and in profound sympathy with the natives of India. Speaking at the Missionary Conference at Calcutta last winter, he said:—

The conditions and environment of the student in Calcutta are such as to make the formation of character almost impossible.... He is not a student in the best sense of the word, for he has not the scholarly instincts of a student— I speak, of course, of the average student, not of the exceptional one. His parents send him to the University to pass one or two examinations, and these have to be passed in order to enable him to attain a higher salary.... His work is sheer "grind." The acquisition of good notes for lectures is the first essential for him, and the professor who gives good clear-cut notes so that a man can dispense with any text-books is the popular professor—and for two reasons: first of all, it saves the expense of buying the text-book, and then, of course, it helps to get through the examination. That is a reason why two boys of the same village will go to different colleges because they can then "swap" notes. It is a very rare thing for a student to have money enough to buy more than one of the suggested books on a given subject for examination. He learns by heart one book and the notes of lectures of two or three of the favourite professors in Calcutta. There is many a man who has even got through his examinations without any text-book of any kind to help him, simply by committing to memory volumes of lecture notes.... I know of no student who labours more strenuously than the Bengalee student. The question is how to prevent this ridiculous wastage of students; how to prevent the production of this disappointed man who is a student only in name. He never had any desire to be a student in nature; he was brought up without that desire ... and indeed, if he be a boy with real scholarly instincts, and he happens to fail in his examinations, it makes it all the worse, for his parents will not recognize those scholarly instincts of his—all they want is a quick return for the money spent on his education, and he will have to make that return from a Rs.30 salary instead of a Rs.50 one.

Can there be anything more pathetic and more alarming than the picture that Dr. Williams draws of the student's actual life?—

He gets up about 6, and having dressed (which is not a long process) he starts work. Until 10, if you go into his mess, you will see him "grinding" away at his text-book, under the most amazing conditions for work—usually stretched out upon his bed or sitting on the side of it. The room is almost always shared with some other occupant, usually with two or three or more other occupants, mostly engaged in the same task if they are students. At 10 the boy gets some food, and then goes of to his college for about four or five hours of lectures. A little after 3 in the afternoon he comes home to his mess, and between 3 and 5 is usually seen lounging about his room, dead tired but often engaged in discussion with his room-mates or devouring the newspaper, which is his only form of recreation and his only bit of excitement. At 5 he will go out for a short stroll down College-street or around College-square. This is his one piece of exercise, if such you can call it. At dusk he returns to his ill-lighted, stuffy room and continues his work, keeping it up, with a short interval for his evening meal, until he goes to bed, the hour of bed-time depending upon the proximity of his examination. A very large percentage when they actually sit for their examinations are nothing short of physical wrecks.

Dr. Williams proceeds to quote Dr. Mullick, an eminent Hindu physician who has devoted himself to helping young students:—

The places where the students live huddled up together are most hurtful to their constitutions. The houses are dirty, dingy, ill-ventilated, and crowded. Even in case of infectious sickness ... they lie in the same place as others, some of whom they actually infect. Phthisis is getting alarmingly common among students owing to the sputum of infected persons being allowed to float about with the dust in crowded messes.... Most of them live in private messes where a hired cook and single servant have complete charge of his food and house-keeping, and things are stolen, foodstuffs are adulterated, badly cooked and badly served.

Dr. Williams, who states emphatically that "it is not exaggeration to say that the student is often half-starved," goes on to deal with the moral drawbacks of a life which is under no effective supervision and is not even under the restraints, implied in the term "good form," that play so important a part in Universities where there is a real collegiate life.

When you segregate your young men by thousands in the heart of this "city of dreadful night," amid conditions of life which are most antagonistic to moral and physical well-being... the result is a foregone conclusion, and it does not only mean physical degeneration, it also means moral degeneration, and it becomes a most potent predisposing factor in political disease. Of that there can be no shadow of doubt.

The material conditions are not, it is true, nearly so bad in many other parts of India as they are in Bengal, and especially in Calcutta (though the Bengalees claim the intellectual primacy of India), and it is on the moral and physical evils produced by those conditions that Dr. Garfield Williams chiefly dwells. But the intellectual evils for all but a small minority are in their way quite as grave, and they are inherent to the system. Take the case of a boy brought up until he is old enough to go to school in some small town of the mofussil, anywhere in India, by parents who have never been drawn into any contact, however remote, with Western ideas or Western knowledge. From these purely Indian surroundings his parents, who are willing to stint themselves in order that their son may get a post under Government, send him to a secondary school, let us say in the chief town of the district, or in a University city. There again he boards with friends of his family, if they have any, or in more or less reputable lodgings amidst the same purely Indian surroundings, and his only contact with the Western world is through school-books in a foreign tongue, of which it is difficult enough for him to grasp even the literal meaning, let alone the spirit, which his native teachers have themselves too often only, very partially imbibed and are therefore quite unable to communicate[18]. From the secondary school he passes for his University course, if he gets so far, in precisely the same circumstances into a college which is merely a higher form of school. Whilst attending college our student still continues to live amidst the same purely Indian surroundings, and his contact with the Western world is still limited to his text-books. Even the best native teacher can hardly interpret that Western world to him as a trained European can, and unless our student intends to become a doctor or an engineer, and has to pass through the schools of medicine or engineering, where he is bound to be a good deal under English teachers, he may perfectly well, and very often does, go through his whole course of studies in school and in college without ever coming into personal contact with an Englishman. How can he be expected under such conditions to assimilate Western knowledge or to form even a remote conception of the customs and traditions, let alone the ideals, embodied in Western knowledge?

Try and imagine for a moment, however absurd it may seem, what would have been the effect upon the brains of the youth of our own country if it had been subject to Chinese rule for the last 100 years, and the Chinese, without interfering with our own social customs or with our religious beliefs, had taken charge of higher education and insisted upon conveying to our youth a course of purely Chinese instruction imparted through Chinese text-books, and taught mainly by Englishmen, for the most part only one degree more familiar than their pupils with the inwardness of Chinese thought and Chinese ethics. The effect could hardly have been more bewildering than the effect produced in many cases similar to that which I have instanced on the brain of the Indian youth when he emerges from our schools and colleges.

It may be said that such cases are extreme cases, but extreme as they are, they are not exceptional. The exceptions must be sought rather amongst the small minority, who, in spite of all these drawbacks, display such a wonderful gift of assimilation, or, it might perhaps be more correctly termed, of intuition, that they are able to transport themselves into a new world of thought, or at any rate to see into it, as it were, through a glass darkly. But the number of those who possess this gift has probably always been small, and smaller still, with the reduction of the European element in the teaching staff, is the number growing of those who have a fair chance of developing that gift, even if nature has endowed them with it. A comparison of the Census Report of 1901 with the figures given in the Educational Statistics for 1901-2 shows that the total number of Europeans then engaged in Indian educational work was barely, 500, of whom less than half were employed by Government, whilst that of the Indians engaged in similar work in colleges and secondary schools alone was about 27,500. As the number of Indian students and scholars receiving higher education amounts to three-quarters of a million, it is obvious that so slight a European leaven, whatever its quality—and its quality is not always what it should be—can produce but little impression upon so huge a mass.

Our present system of Indian education in fact presents in an exaggerated form, from the point of view of the cultivation of the intellect, most of the defects alleged against a classical education by its bitterest opponents in Western countries, where, after all, the classics form only a part, however important, of the curriculum, and neither Latin nor Greek is the only medium for the teaching of every subject. From the point of view of the formation of character according to Western standards, and even from that of physical improvement, the case is even worse. In Western countries the education given in our schools, from the Board school to the University, is always more or less on the same plane as that of the class from which the boys who attend them are drawn. It is merely the continuation and the complement of the education our children receive in their own homes from the moment of their birth, and it moves on the same lines as the world in which they live and move and have their being. In India, with rare exceptions, it is not so, but exactly the reverse.

On the deficiencies of the system, from the moral point of view, a new and terribly lurid light has been shed within the last few years. There has been no more deplorable feature in the present political agitation than the active part taken in it by Indian schoolboys and students. It has been a prominent feature everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the Bengal provinces, where from the very outset of the boycott movement in 1905 picketing of the most aggressive character was conducted by bands of young Hindus who ought to have been doing their lessons. That was only the beginning, and the state of utter demoralization that was ultimately reached may be gathered from the following statements in the last Provincial Report on Education (1908-9), issued by the Government of Eastern Bengal:—

On the 7th of August [1908] most of the Hindu students abstained from attending the college and high schools at Comilla as a demonstration in connexion with the boycott anniversary. Immediately afterwards, on the date of the execution of the Muzafferpur murderer, the boys of several schools in the province attended barefooted and without shirts and in some cases fasting.... At Jamalpur the demonstration lasted a week.... Later in the year, on the occasion of the execution of one of the Alipur murderers, the pupils of the Sandip Cargill school made a similar demonstration.

The report adds, in a sanguine vein, that, as a result of various disciplinary measures, a marked improvement had subsequently taken place, but quite recent events, during the great conspiracy trial at Dacca, show that something more than disciplinary measures is required to eradicate the spirit which inspired such occurrences.

The heaviest responsibility rests on those who, claiming to be the intellectual leaders of the country, not only instigated its youth to take part in political campaigns, but actually placed them in the forefront of the fray. However reprehensible from our British point of view other features of a seditious agitation may be, to none does so high a degree of moral culpability attach as to the deliberate efforts made by Hindu politicians to undermine the fundamental principles of authority by stirring up the passions or appealing to the religious sentiment of inexperienced youth at the most emotional period of life.[19] Even the fact that political murders have been invariably perpetrated by misguided youths of the student class is hardly as ominous as the homage paid to the murderers' memories by whole schools and colleges. Most ominous of all is the tolerance, and sometimes the encouragement, extended to such demonstrations by schoolmasters and professors. These are symptoms that point to a grave moral disease amongst the teachers as well as the taught, which we can only ignore at our peril and at the sacrifice of our duty towards the people of India. In his last two Convocation speeches, Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee has himself felt constrained to lay special stress on the question of teachers and politics. Alluding in 1909 to "the lamentable events of the last 12 months," he maintained, "without hesitation," that "the most strenuous efforts must be unfalteringly made by all persons truly interested in the future of the rising generation to protect our youths from the hands of irresponsible people who recklessly seek to seduce our students from the path of academic life and to plant in their immature minds the poisonous seeds of hatred against constituted Government." This year he was even more outspoken, and laid it down that even the teacher "who scrupulously abstains from political matters within his class-room, but at the same time devotes much or all of his leisure hours to political activities and agitation, and whose name and speeches are prominently before the world in connexion with political organizations and functions," fails in his duty towards his pupils; for "their minds will inevitably be attracted towards political affairs and political agitation if they evidently constitute the main life-interest and life-work of one who stands towards them in a position of authority." Teachers should therefore avoid everything that tends "to impart to the minds of our boys a premature bias towards politics."

A most admirable exhortation; but I had an opportunity of estimating the weight that it carried with some of the political leaders of Bengal when I accepted an invitation from Mr. Surendranath Banerjee to meet a few Bengalee students in an informal way and have a talk with them. They were bright, pleasant lads, and, if they had been left to themselves, I might have had an interesting talk with them about their studies and their prospects in life, but Mr. Banerjee and several other politicians who were present insisted upon giving to the conversation a political turn of a disagreeably controversial character which seemed to me entirely out of place.

The mischievous incitements of politicians would not, however, have fallen on to such receptive soil if economic conditions, for which we are ourselves at least partly responsible, had not helped to create an atmosphere in which political disaffection is easily bred amongst both teachers and taught. The rapid rise in the cost of living has affected no class more injuriously than the old clerkly castes from which the teaching staff and the scholars of our schools and colleges are mainly recruited. Their material position now often compares unfavourably with that of the skilled workman and even of the daily labourer, whose higher wages have generally kept pace with the appreciation of the necessaries of life. This is a cause of great bitterness even amongst those who at the end of their protracted, course of studies get some small billet for their pains. The bitterness is, of course, far greater amongst those who fail altogether. The rapid expansion of an educational system that has developed far in excess of the immediate purpose for which it was originally introduced was bound to result in a great deal of disappointment for the vast number of Indians who regarded it merely as an avenue to Government employment. For the demand outran the supply, and the deterioration in the quality of education consequent upon this too rapid expansion helped at the same time to restrict the possible demand. F.A.'s (First Arts) and even B.A.'s are now too often drugs in the market. Nothing is more pathetic than the hardships to which both the young Indian and his parents will subject themselves in order that he may reach the coveted goal of University distinctions, but unfortunately, as such distinctions are often achieved merely by a process of sterile cramming which leaves the recipients quite unable to turn mere feats of memory to any practical account, the sacrifices prove to have been made in vain. Whilst the skilled artisan, and even the unskilled labourer, can often command from 12 annas to 1 rupee (1s. to 1s. 4d.) a day, the youth who has sweated himself and his family through the whole course of higher education frequently looks in vain for employment at Rs.30 (L2) and even at Rs.20 a month. In Calcutta not a few have been taken on by philanthropic Hindus to do mechanical labour in jute mills at Rs.15 a month simply to keep them from starvation. Things have in fact reached this pitch, that our educational system is now turning out year by year a semi-educated proletariat which is not only unemployed, but in many cases almost unemployable. A Hindu gentleman who is one of the highest authorities on education told me that in Bengal, where this evil has reached the most serious dimensions, he estimates the number of these unemployed at over 40,000. This is an evil which no change in the relative number of Europeans and natives employed in Government and other services could materially affect. Even if every Englishman left India, it would present just as grave a problem to the rulers of the country, except that the bitterness engendered would not be able to vent itself, as it too often does now, on the alien rulers who have imported the alien system of education by which many of those who fail believe themselves to have been cruelly duped.

Similar causes have operated to produce discontent amongst the teachers, who in turn inoculate their pupils with the virus of disaffection. It was much easier to multiply schools and colleges than to train a competent teaching staff. Official reports seldom care to look unpleasant facts in the face, and the periodical reports both of the Imperial Department of Public Education and of the Provincial Departments have always been inclined to lay more stress upon the multiplication of educational institutions and the growth in the numbers of pupils and students than upon the weak points of the system. Nevertheless, there is one unsatisfactory feature that the most confirmed optimists cannot ignore. Hardly a single one of these reports but makes some reference to the deficiencies and incapacity of the native teaching staff. The last quinquennial report issued by Mr. Orange, the able Director-General of Public Education, who is now leaving India, contains a terse but very significant passage. "Speaking generally," he writes, "it may be said that the qualifications and the pay of the teachers in secondary schools are below any standard that could be thought reasonable; and the inquiries which are now being made into the subject have revealed a state of things that is scandalous in Bengal and Eastern Bengal, and is unsatisfactory in every province." Very little information is forthcoming as to the actual qualifications or pay of the teachers. It appears, however, from the inspection of high schools by the Calcutta University that out of one group of 3,054 teachers over 2,100 receive salaries of less than 30 rupees (L2) a month. One cannot, therefore, be surprised to hear that in Bengal "only men of poor attainments adopt the profession, and the few who are well qualified only take up work in schools as a stepping-stone to some more remunerative career." That career is frequently found in the Press, where the disgruntled ex-schoolmaster adds his quota of gall to the literature of disaffection. But he is still more dangerous when he remains a schoolmaster and uses his position to teach disaffection to his pupils either by precept or by example.