Rattling south by rail, out of Bengal into Madras. Square masses of elephant-colored rock piled up to build rectangular hills, sitting one upon another in segments, like Elephant Gods on pedestals.--Miles and more miles of it.
On and on. Then a softer country, where the earth is orange and the only trees are small-topped palms scratched long across the sky like penstrokes ending in a splutter.
Much cultivation, rice fields marked off in slips and fragments by hand-high earth-ridges to hold the precious water. Little dark people with cherry-colored garments, almost black people, with big, bristling mops of curly black hair, drawing water out of wells as they drew it a thousand years ago, or threshing grain under the circling feet of bullocks. Stands of sugar cane, high and four-square. Small clay villages, each small clay house eclipsed under a big round palm-leaf roof like a candle-snuffer. Flocks of orange-colored goats. Patches of orange, on the ground--palm-nuts for betel chewing, spread out to dry. Big orange hawks with proud, white heads. Orange afterglow of sunset, flooding orange over the stubble fields of rice. An orange world, punctuated by black human bodies with cherry-colored splashes.
Madras, citadel of Brahmanic Hinduism. Citadel also of the remnant of the ancient folk, the dark-skinned Dravidians. Brahmanic Hinduism broke them, cast them down and tramped upon them, commanded them in their multi-millions to be pariahs, outcasts, ignorant and poor. Then came the Briton, for whatever reason, establishing peace, order, and such measure of democracy as could survive in the soil.
Gradually the Dravidian raised his eyes, and then, most timidly, his head. With him, also, the multitudes of the low castes of the Brahman's world. And no\< all these, become an Anti-Brahman party, had developed strength enough, for the time at least, to snatch from the Brahman his political majority in the Legislative Council of Madras Presidency. Which, in itself, constituted an epoch in Indian history.
With one of these low-caste men become rich, respected and politically powerful, I sat in private conference, in the city of Madras. A little, vivacious person he was, full of heat and free of tongue. "Will you draw me your picture of the Brahman?" 1 asked. He answered--and these are his actual words, written down at the moment:
"Once upon a time, when all men lived according to their choice, the Brahman was the only fellow who applied himself to learning. Then, having become learned, and being by nature subtle-minded, he secretly laid hold upon the sacred books, and secretly wrote into those books false texts that declared him, the Brahman, to be lord over all the people. Ages passed. And gradually, because the Brahman only could read and because he gave out his false texts that forbade learning to others, the people grew to believe him the Earthly God he called himself and to obey him accordingly. So in all Hindu India he ruled the spirit of man, and none dared dispute him, not till England came with schools for all.
"Now, here in this Province, Madras, we fight the Brahman. But still he is very strong, because the might of thousands of years breaks slowly, and he is as shrewd as a host of demons. He owns the press, he sways the bench, he holds eighty per cent, of the public offices, and he terrorizes the people, especially the women. For we are all superstitious and mostly illiterate. The 'Earthly God' has seen to that. Also, he hates the British, because they keep him from strangling us. He makes much 'patriotic' outcry, demanding that the British go. And we--we know that if they go now, before we have had time to steady ourselves, he will strangle us again and India will be what it used to be, a cruel despotism wielded by fat priests against a mass of slaves, because our. imaginations are not yet free from him. Listen:
"Each Hindu in India pays to the Brahman many times more than he pays to the State. From the day of his birth to the day of his death, a man must be feeding the Earthly God. When a child is born, the Brahman must be paid; otherwise, the child will not prosper. Sixteen days afterward, to be cleansed of 'birth pollution,' the Brahman must be paid. A little later, the child must be named; and the Brahman must be paid. In the third month, the baby's hair must be clipped; and the Brahman must be paid. In the sixth month, we begin to feed the child solids; and the Brahman must be paid. When the child begins to walk, the Brahman must be paid. At the completion of the first year comes the birthday ceremony and the Brahman must be paid. At the end of the seventh year the boy's education begins and the Brahman must be paid well. In well-to-do families he performs the ceremony by guiding golden writing-sticks placed in the boy's hand; and the sticks also go to the Brahman.
"When a girl reaches her first birthday, her seventh, or her ninth, or when a boy is one and a half, or two years old, or anywhere up to sixteen, comes the betrothal, and big pay to the Brahman. Then, when puberty comes, or earlier, if the marriage is consummated earlier, rich pay to the Brahman. At an eclipse, the Brahman must be paid heavily. And so it goes on. When a man dies, the corpse can be removed only after receiving the blessing of the Brahman, for which he is paid. At the cremation, again a lot of money must be paid to many Brahmans. After cremation, every month for a year, the dead man's son must hold a feast for Brahmans -- as great a feast as he can -- and give them clothes, ornaments, food and whatever would be dear to the dead. For whatever a Brahman eats, drinks or uses is enjoyed by the dead. Thereafter, once a year, during the son's life, he must repeat this observance.
"All such ceremonies and many more the Brahman calls his 'vested rights,' made so by religious law. Whoever neglects them goes to eternal damnation. During the performance of each rite we must wash the Brahman's feet with water and then we must drink some of that water from the palm of our hand. The Brahman is indolent, produces nothing, and takes to no calling but that of lawyer or government official. In this Province he numbers one and a half million and the rest of us, over forty-one millions, feed him.
"Now do you understand that, until we others are able to hold our own in India, we prefer a distant King beyond the sea, who gives us peace, justice, something back for our money and a chance to become free men, to a million and a half masters, here, who eat us up, yet say our very touch would pollute them?"
The conundrums of India have a way of answering themselves, when one looks close.
Long and easily we have accepted the catchword "mysterious India." But "mystery," as far as matters concrete are concerned, remains such only as long as one persists in seeking a mysterious cause for the phenomena. Look for a practical cause, as you would do in any bread-and-butter country not labeled "inscrutable," and your mystery vanishes in smoke.
"Why, after so many years of British rule, do we remain 92 per cent, illiterate?" reiterates the Hindu politician, implying that the blame must be laid at the ruler's door.
But in naming his figure, he does not call to your attention a
fact which, left to yourself, you would be slow to guess: he does
not tell you that of the 247,-000,000 inhabitants of British India,
about 25 per cent.--60,000,000--have from time immemorial been
specially condemned to illiteracy, even to sub-humanity, by their
brother Indians. Surely, if there be a mystery in India, it lies
here--it lies in the Hindu's ability anywhere, under any
circumstances, to accuse any man, any society, any nation, of "race
prejudice," so long as he can be reminded of the existence in India
of sixty million fellow Indians to whom he violently denies the
common rights of man.
[Indian politicians have for some time heen
directing a loud and continuous fire upon the British Home
Government for not finding means to coerce the Government of the
Union of South Africa into a complaisant attitude toward British
Indian immigrants in that country. It is worthy of note that of the
original 130,000 British Indian immigrants to South Africa,
one-third were "Untouchables," mostly from Madras Presidency, whose
condition in India is indicated in this chapter, and who would find
themselves again in such status, were they to return to Hindu
India. The British Indians in South Africa in 1922 numbered, as
shown in the official Year-Book, a little over 161,000. This figure
includes a later immigration of 10,000 traders, and the natural
increase of the combined body.]
In the beginning, it is explained, when the light-skinned ancestors of the present Hindus first came to India, they found there a darker, thicker-featured native race, the Dravidians, builders of the great temples of the South. And the priests of the newcomers desired that the blood of their people be not mixed with the native stock, but be kept of one strain. So they declared Dravidians to be unclean, "untouchable."
Then the old lawmakers, gradually devising the caste system, placed themselves at the head thereof, under the title of "earthly gods"--Brahmans. Next beneath them they put the Kshattryas, or fighting men; after the fighters, the Vaisyas, or cultivators, upon whom the two above look down; and finally, the fourth division, or Sudra caste, born solely to be servants to the other three. Of these four divisions, themselves today much subdivided, was built the frame of Hindu society. Outside and below all caste, in a limbo of scorn earned by their sins of former existences, must forever grovel the Untouchables.
A quotation from the rule by which the unfortunates were nailed to their fate will suffice to show its nature; the Bhagavata, treating of the murder of a Brahman, decrees:
Thus, at one sweep, is explained the Untouchable's existence as such; are justified the indignities heaped upon him; is emphasized his unspeakable degradation; and is safeguarded the oppressor from the wrath of him oppressed. Even as the Hindu husband, by the horrors imposed upon widowhood, is safeguarded from a maddened wife's revolt.
If a Brahmin kills a Sudra, it will suffice to efface the sin altogether if he recites the gayatri [a prayer] a hundred times, continues the scripture, by opposites driving home its point.
Leaving the ancient roots of things, and coming down to the year 1926 A.D., we find the orthodox Hindu rule as to Untouchables to be roughly this: Regarded as if sub-human, the tasks held basest are reserved for them; dishonor is associated with their name. Some are permitted to serve only as scavengers and removers of night soil; some, through the ignorance to which they are condemned, are loathsome in their habits; and to all of them the privilege of any sort of teaching is sternly denied. They may neither possess nor read the Hindu scriptures. No Brahman priest will minister to them; and, except in rarest instances, they may not enter a Hindu temple to worship or pray. Their children may not come to the public schools. They may not draw water from the public wells; and if their habitation be in a region where water is scarce and sources far apart, this means, for them, not greater consideration from others, but greater suffering and greater toil.
They may not enter a court of justice; they may not enter a dispensary to get help for their sick; they may stop at no inn. In some provinces they may not even use the public road, and as laborers or agriculturists, they are continually losers, in that they may not enter the shops or even pass through the streets where shops are, but must trust to a haphazard chain of hungry go-betweens to buy or sell their meager wares. Some, in the abyss of their degradation, are permitted no work at all. These may sell nothing, not even their own labor. They may only beg. And even for that purpose they dare not use the road, but must stand far off, unseen, and cry out for alms from those who pass. If alms be given, it must be tossed on the ground, well away from the road, and when the giver is out of sight and the roads empty then, and not till then, the watcher may creep up, snatch, and run.
Some, if not all, pollute, beyond caste men's use, any food upon which their shadow falls. Food, after such defilement, can only be destroyed.
Others, again, exude "distance pollution" as an effluvium from their unhappy bodies. If one of these presumes to approach and linger by a highroad, he must measure the distance to the highroad. If it be within two hundred yards, he must carefully place on the road a green leaf weighted down with a handful of earth, thereby indicating that he, the unclean, is within pollution distance of that point. The passing Brahman, seeing the signal, halts and shouts. The poor man forthwith takes to his heels, and only when he has fled far enough calls back, "I am now two hundred yards away. Be pleased to pass."
Still others--the Puliahs of the Malabar Coast--have been forbidden to build themselves huts, and permitted to construct for houses nothing better than a sort of leaf awning on poles, or nests in the crotches of big trees. These may approach no other type of humanity. Dubois recorded that, in his day, a Nair (high-caste Hindu) meeting a Puliah on the road, was entitled to stab the offender on the spot.[4] Today the Nair would hesitate. But still today, the Puliah may approach no caste man nearer than sixty or ninety feet.
Under such conditions of preordained misery, certain communities among the Untouchables have developed a business in the practice of crime. These communities specialize, one in pocket-picking, another in burglary, yet others in forging, in highway robbery, in murder, etc., often combining their special trade with prostitution as a second industry. Scattered all over India and known as the Criminal Tribes, they number today about four and a half million persons.
Now it must not be forgotten that the matter of Untouchability, like almost all other Hindu concerns, is woven, warp and woof, into the Hindu religion; and that the Hindus are a tremendously religiose people. To quote the words of that prominent Indian, Sir Surendranath Banerjea:
And dire experience shows to what lengths of blood-drenched madness the people can be goaded by a whisper that their caste is threatened or that insult is offered to their gods. That this was from the beginning understood by Government, is shown in an unequivocal clause in the Queen's Proclamation of December 2, 1858:
We do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of our subjects, on pain of our highest displeasure.
Nevertheless the immediate impulse of the Briton in India was to espouse the cause of the social victim. The Directors of the East India Company, as early as 1854, recommended that "no boy be refused admission to a Government school or college on ground of caste," and stuck to the principle until their authority was sunk in that of the Crown. Thenceforward it was continually reaffirmed, yet pushed with a caution that might seem faint-hearted to one unfamiliar with the extreme delicacy of the ground. Little or nothing was to be gained m any attempt to impose a foreign idea, by force, on unready and non-understanding millions.
Nor must the workings of caste be confused with snobbery. A man's caste is the outward sign of the history of his soul. To break caste by infringing any one of the multitudinous caste laws brings down an eternal penalty. If, as a Hindu, in obeying these laws, you inflict suffering upon another, that is merely because his soul-history has placed him in the path of pain. You have no concern in the matter; neither will he, thinking as a good Hindu, blame you. For both you and he are working out your god-appointed destiny.
Today almost all that can be accomplished by civil law for the Untouchable has been secured. Government has freely opened their way, as far as Government can determine, to every educational advantage and to high offices. And Government's various land-development and cooperative schemes, steadily increasing, have provided tremendous redeeming agencies and avenues of escape.
But for Provincial Governments to pass legislation asserting the rights of every citizen to enjoy public facilities, such as public schools, is one thing; to enforce that legislation over enormous countrysides and through multitudinous small villages without the cooperation and against the will of the people, is another. Witness that paragraph in the Madras Government Order of March 17, 1919, reading:
Children of Panchamas [Untouchables] are admitted only into 609 schools out of 8,157 in the Presidency, although the regulations state that no boy is to be refused admission merely on the ground of caste.
Yet, rightly read, the announcement proclaims a signal advantage won. Six hundred and nine schools in a most orthodox province admitting outcastes, as against only twelve times that number who refuse!
In the Bombay Legislative Council, one day in August, 1926, they were discussing a resolution to coerce local boards to permit Untouchables to send their children to schools, to draw water from public wells, and to enjoy other common rights of citizenship. Most of the Hindu members approved in principle. "But if the resolution is put into effect we would be faced with a storm of opposition," demurred one member, representative of many others. "Orthodox opinion is too strong, and while I sympathize with the resolution I think that...given effect, it may have disastrous effect."[6] And he submits that the path of wisdom, for friends of the Untouchables, is not to ask for action, but, instead, to content themselves with verbal expressions of sympathy, such as his own.
[6. Bombay Legislative Council Debates, 1926, Vol. XVIII, Part IX, p. 717.]
A second Hindu member, with characteristic nimble-ness, pitchforks the load toward shoulders broad enough to bear it:[7]
[7. Ibid., p. 728.]
I think the British Goyernment have followed a very timid policy in this presidency. They have refused to take part in any social legislation. Probably, being an alien Government, they were afraid that they would be accused of tampering with the religion of the various communities. In spite of the Proclamation of Queen Victoria about equality between the different classes and communities, Government have not given practical effect to it.
It remains, however, to a Muhammadan, Mr. Noor Mahomed, of Sind, to strike the practical note:[8]
[8. Ibid., August 5, p. 721.]
I think the day will not be distant when the people who are placed by the tyranny of the higher classes into the lower grade of society...will find themselves driven to other religious folds. There will then be no reason at all for the Hindu society to complain that Mahomedan or Christian missionaries are inducing members of depressed classes to change the religion of their birth...If the Hindu society refuses to allow other human beings, fellow creatures at that, to attend public schools, and if...the president of a local board representing so many lakhs[9] of people in this House refuses to allow his fellows and brothers the bare elementary human right of having water to drink, what right have they to ask for more rights from the bureaucracy?...Before we accuse people coming from other lands, we should see how we ourselves behave toward our own people...How can [we] ask for greater political rights when [we ourselves] deny elementary rights of human beings?
[9. A lakh is one hundred thousand.]
Regulations may prevail to bring the outcaste to the school door, but his courage may not suffice to get him across the threshold, for his self-assertion was done to death centuries ago. So that his admission to the school will mean, at best, permission to sit on the veranda and pick up from that distance whatever he can by his unaided ears.
Says the Village Education Commission:[10]
[10. Village Education in India, London, Oxford University Press, 1922, p. 21.]
Speaking generally, it is still the case that the caste man not only does nothing for the enlightenment of the outcaste, but puts positive obstacles in his way, knowing that if he is enlightened he can no longer be exploited. Outcastes who have the temerity to send their children to school--even if the school be in their quarter, so that there can be no complaint of defiling caste children by contact--find themselves subject to such violence and threatening that they yield and withdraw their children. If the outcastes want not only education but Christian teaching, the persecution, for a time, is all the fiercer, for the caste people are afraid that if the outcastes become Christians they will no longer be available for menial service.
An exceedingly small percentage of the outcastes are yet in school, but he of their number who pursues education past all the dragons that bar the door is likely to be one of the best of his kind. And, in spite of his immemorial history of degradation, the seed of the power to rise is not dead within him. The Nama-sudras of Bengal, an Untouchable class there numbering about 1,997,500, have, under the encouragement of the new light, made a vigorous, steady, and successful fight for self-elevation, and have organized to support schools of their own. By the last report they had in Bengal over 49,000 children under tuition, of whom 1,025 had reached the High School and 144 the Arts Colleges,[11] where, because of caste feeling, Government has been obliged to set aside special hostels for their lodging. This community is rapidly raising its status.
[11. Progress of Education in Bengal, Sixth Quinquennial Review.]
In the Punjab, where Government irrigation work is destroying many ancient miseries, appears evidence of a weakening of the ban that bars the outcaste from the common schools; although some of the Punjab municipalities have displayed a genius in tricking these most needy of their citizens out of the privileges of education.[12] Bombay's educational reports also indicate a significant advance in the percentage of Untouchables receiving tuition, largely under mission auspices. And the net results point to some interesting surmises.
[12. Cf. Report on the Progress of Education in the Punjab, 1924-25. Lahore, 1926, p. 71.]
Thus, the "depressed classes" have begun holding annual conferences of delegates to air their wrongs and to advance their rights. Their special representatives, now appointed to legislatures and to local bodies, grow more and more assertive. Their economic situation under Government's steady effort, is, in some communities, looking up. With it their sense of manhood is developing in the shape of resentment of the degradation to which until now they have bowed. Among them a few men of power and parts are beginning to stand out.
Finally, their women, as Christian converts, furnish the main body of Indian teachers for the girls of India of all castes, and of trained nurses for the hospitals; both callings despised and rejected by the superior castes, both necessitating education, and both carrying the possibility of increasing influence.
The first time that I, personally, approached a realizing sense of what the doctrine of Untouchability means, in terms of man's inhumanity to man, was during a visit to a child-welfare center in a northerly Indian city.
The place was crowded with Indian women who had brought their babies to be examined by the English professional in charge, a trained public health nurse. Toward her their attitude was that of children toward a wise and loving mother--confiding, affectionate, trusting. And their needs were inclusive. All morning I had been watching babies washed and weighed and examined, simple remedies handed out, questions answered, advice and friendly cautions given, encouragement and praise. Just now I happened to be looking at a matronly high-caste woman with an intelligent, clean-cut face. She was loaded with heavy gold and silver jewelry and wore a silken mantle. She sat down on the floor to show her baby, unrolling him from the torn fragment of an old quilt, his only garment. This revealed his whole little body caked in a mass of dry and half-dry excreta.
"She appears unconcerned," I remarked to the Sister. The Sister replied:
"We try to get such women to have napkins for their babies, but they won't buy them, they won't wash them themselves, and they won't pay washers to wash them, although they are quite able to do so. This woman is well born. Her husband is well educated--a technical man--and enjoys a good salary. Sometime it may please her to hang that bit of quilt out in the sun in her courtyard, and, when it is dry, to brush off what will come off. That's all. This, incidentally, helps explain why infantile diarrhoea spreads through the families in a district. They will make no attempt whatever to keep things clean."
As the Sister spoke, a figure appeared before the open doorway--a young woman so graceful and with a face so sweet and appealing as to rivet attention at once. She carried an ailing baby on her arm, but came no farther--just stood still beyond the doorway, wistfully smiling. The Sister, looking up, smiled back.
"Why does she not come in?" I asked.
"She dare not. If she did, all these others would go. She is an Untouchable--an outcaste. She herself would feel it wicked to set her foot upon that sill."
"She looks at least as decent as they," I remarked.
"Untouchables may be as intelligent as any one else--and you see for yourself that they couldn't be dirtier," said the Sister. "But such is the custom of India. Since we can't alter it, we just plod on, trying to help them all, as best we can."
And so the gentle suppliant waited outside, among a crowd of others of her kind, till Sister could go to them, bringing to this one ointment for baby's eyes, to that one a mixture for baby's cough, and hearing the story of another.
But they might not bring their little ones in, to the mercy of the warm bath, as the other women were doing at will. They might not come to the sewing class. They might not defile the scales by laying their babies in its basket, to see what the milk-dole was doing. For they were all horrible sinners in aeons past, deserving now neither help nor sympathy while they worked out their curse.
Much is said of the inferiority of character that has resulted from the Untouchables' long degradation, But evidence of the survival of virtues, through all the crushing of the centuries, is by no means lacking. The Mahars, for example, outcastes used by caste villagers as are the Palers of Madras, practically as slaves [1] and for the basest tasks, are now employed by Government as couriers. In that capacity they are said to be entirely trustworthy, transporting hundreds of rupees without abstracting the smallest coin. The Dheds, Untouchables from whom, in the Bombay region, most Britons' servants are drawn, and whom few high caste Indians would tolerate near their persons, are, as a rule, honest, sober, and faithful.
As to the rating of converts to Christianity--there are now about five million of them--opinions differ; but in any case the fact stands that these converts are set free, as far as they can grasp freedom, from caste bonds. The faces of the Hindus are fixed against them, to be sure. But of the converts of the third generation many experienced persons are found to say that they are the hope of India.
[1. Joint Select Committee on the Government of India ., Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence, p. 188, Rai Bahadur K. V. Reddi; "They are the slaves of the Nation."]
So much, thus far, Britain, greatly aided By the Christian Missions, has accomplished for the outcaste, by patient, up-hill work, teaching, persuading, encouraging, on either side of the social gulf. And the last few years have seen the rise of new portents in the sky.
One of these is the tendency, in the National Social Conference and in Hindu political conventions, to declare openly against the oppression of the outcaste. But these declarations, though eloquent, have as yet borne little fruit other than words. A second phenomenon is the appearance of Indian volunteer associations partially pledged against Untouchability. These include the Servants of India,[2] avowedly political; Lord Sin-ha's society for the help of the outcastes of Bengal and Assam; the Brahmo Samaj, and others. Their work, useful where it touches, is sporadic, and infinitesimal compared to the need, but notable in comparison with the nothingness that went before.
[2. A Brief Account of the Work of the Servants of India Society, Aryabhushan Press, Poona, 1924, pp. 60-1.]
For no such conception is native to India. "All our Indian social work of today," the most distinguished of the Brahmo Samaj leaders said to me, "is frankly an imitation of the English and an outgrowth of theii influence in the land." Again and again I heard the gist of that statement from the lips of thoughtful Indians, in frank acknowledgment of the source of the budding change.
"The curse of Untouchability prevails to this day in all parts of India," said Sir Narayan Chandravarkar,[3] adding, "with the liberalizing forces of the British Government, the problem is leaping into full light. Thanks to that Government, it has become...an all-India problem."
[3. Hindu reformer, Judge of the High Court of Bombay, quoted in India in 1920, p. 135.]
Mr. Gandhi has been less ready to acknowledge beneficent influence from such a source--has, in fact, described the whole administrative system in India as "vile beyond description." But for the last five years his own warfare on Untouchability has not flagged even though his one unfaltering co-worker therein has been the British Government, aided preeminently by the Salvation Army. In its course he reprinted from the Indian vernacular press a learned Brahman pundit's recent statement on the subject, including this passage:[4]
[4. Young India, July 29, 1926, p. 268. Mr. Gandhi's phrase quoted a few lines above will be found in Gandhi's Letters on Indian Af* fairs, Madras, V. Narayanah and Co., p. 121.]
Untouchability is a necessity for man's
growth.
Man has magnetic powers about him. This sakti[5] is like
milk. It will be damaged by improper contacts. If one can keep musk
and onion together, one may mix Brahmans and Untouchables.
[5. Energy, or the power of the Supreme personified.]
It should be enough that Untouchables are not denied the privileges of the other world.
Says Mr. Gandhi, in comment on the pundit's creed:[6]
[6. Young India, July 29, 1926.]
If it was possible to deny them the privileges of the other world, it is highly likely that the defenders of the monster would isolate them even in the other world.
"Among living Indians," says Professor Rushbrook Williams,[7] "Mr. Gandhi has done most to impress upon his fellow countrymen the necessity for elevating the depressed classes...When he was at the height of his reputation, the more orthodox sections of opinion did not dare to challenge his schemes."
[7. India in 1924-25, p. 264.]
But today the defenders of Untouchability are myriad, and, though Mr. Gandhi lives his faith, but few of his supporters have at any time cared to follow him so far.
On January 5, 1925, a mass meeting of Hindus was held in Bombay to protest against Mr. Gandhi's "heresy" in attacking Untouchability. The presiding officer, Mr. Manamohandas Ramji, explained that Untouchability rests on a plane with the segregation of persons afflicted with contagious diseases. Later he interpreted the speaker who pointedly suggested lynching for "heretics" who "threaten the disruption of Hindu society," to mean only that Hindus are "prepared to sacrifice their lives for the Hindu religion in order to preserve its ancient purity." The meeting closed after appointing a committee specially to undermine Mr. Gandhi's propaganda.
And it is fair to say that the discussions of Untouchability evoked by successive introductions of the subject in the great Hindu conventions show mainly by the heat of the system's defenders that ground has been won.
"You saw," said Mr. Gandhi, "the squabble that arose over it, in the Hindu Mahasabha." But Untouchability is going, in spite of all opposition, and going fast. It has degraded Indian humanity. The 'Untouchables' are treated as if less than beasts. Their very shadow denies in the name of God. I am as strong or stronger in denouncing Untouchability as I am in denouncing British methods imposed on India. Untouchability for me is more insufferable than British rule. If Hinduism hugs Untouchability, then Hinduism is dead and gone."[8][9]
[8. A hot and disorderly demonstration directed against those who would relax the pains of the Untouchables had persisted in the session of this great Hindu Convention of 1926.]
[9. Verbal statement to the author. Revised by Mr. Gandhi.]
Meantime another and a curious development has come to the Untouchables' aid. With the rapid Indianization of Government services, with the rapid concessions in Indian autonomy that have characterized British administration since the World War, an intense jealousy has arisen between the Hindu three-quarters and the Muhammadan fourth of the population. This subject will be treated elsewhere. Here it will suffice merely to name it as the reason why the Untouchables, simply because of numbers, have suddenly become an object of solicitude to the Hindu world. Sir T. W. Holderness, writing in 1920, put the point thus:[10]
[10. Peoples and Problems of India, Revised Edition, London, Williams and Norgate, 1920, pp. 101-2.]
The "depressed classes" in India form a vast multitude...A question that is agitating Hinduism at the present moment is as to whether these classes should be counted as Hindus or not. Ten years ago the answer would have been emphatically in the negative. Even now the conservative feeling of the country is for their exclusion. But the conscience of the more advanced section of the educated Hindus is a little sensitive on the point. It is awkward to be reminded by rival Muhammadan politicians that more than one-third of the supposed total Hindu population is not accepted by Hindus as a part of themselves, is not allowed the ministration of Brahman priests, is excluded from Hindu shrines. It is ob-viously desirable, in presence of such an argument, to claim the "depressed castes" as within the pale of Hinduism. But if they are to be so reckoned, logic demands that they should be treated with greater consideration than at present. Educated Hindus see this, and the uplifting of these castes figures prominently on the programmes of Indian social conferences. But the stoutest-hearted reformer admits to himself that the difficulties in the way of effective action in this matter are great, so strong is the hold that caste has on the Indian mind.
But here a fresh element comes in--another disturbing fruit of the intrusion of the West--a likelihood that, stimulated by the strange new foreign sympathy, the Untouchable may not much longer leave his religious status to be determined at the leisure and pleasure of the Hindu caste man. Islam, utterly democratic, will readily receive him into full partnership in the fold. Christianity not only invites him, but will educate and help him. The moment he accepts either Islam or Christianity, he is rid of his shame. The question, then, is chiefly a question of how long it takes a man, ages oppressed, to summon courage, spirit, and energy to stand up and shake off the dust.
In the autumn of 1917, the then Secretary of State for India, Mr. Montagu, chief advocate of the speedy Indianization of the Government, sat in Delhi receiving deputations from such elements of the Indian peoples as were moved to address him on that subject. All sorts and conditions of men appeared, all sorts of documentary petitions were submitted, all sorts of angles and interests. Among these, not meanly represented, loomed an element new on the Indian political stage--the Untouchables, awake and assertive, in many organized groups entreating the Secretary's attention.
Without one divergent voice they deprecated the thought of Home Rule for India. To quote them at length would be repetition. Their tenor may be sufficiently gathered from two excerpts.
The Panchama Kalvi Abivirthi-Abimana Sanga, a Madras Presidency outcastes' association,[11] "deprecates political change and desires only to be saved from the Brahmin, whose motive in seeking a greater share in the Government is...that of the cobra seeking the charge of a young frog."
[11. Addresses Presented in India to His Excellency the Viceroy and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for India, London, 1918, p. 87.]
The Madras Adi Dravida Jana Sabha, organized to represent six million Dravidian aborigines of Madras Presidency, said:[12]
[12. Ibid., pp. 60-1.]
The caste system of the Hindus stigmatises us as
untouchables...Caste Hindus could not, however, get on without our
assistance. We supplied labour and they enjoyed the fruit, giving
us a mere pittance in return. Our improvement in the social and
economic scale began with and is due to the British Government. The
Britishers in India--Government officers, merchants, and last, but
not least, Christian missionaries--love us, and we love them in
return. Though the general condition of the community is still very
low, there are some educated men amongst us. But these are not
allowed to rise in society on account of the general stigma
attached by the Hindus to the community. The very names by which
these people refer to us breathe contempt.
We need not say that we are strongly opposed to Home Rule. We shall
fight to the last drop of our blood any attempt to transfer the
seat of authority in this country from British hands to so-called
high caste Hindus who have ill-treated us in the past and would do
so again but for the protection of British laws. Even as it is, our
claims, nay, our very existence, is ignored by the Hindus; and how
will they promote our interests if the control of the
administration passes into their hands?
"We love them," said these spokesmen of the out-caste--and the expression strikes home with a certain shock. But one is forced to remember that the sorrows of these particular under-dogs have never before, in all their dim centuries of history, elicited from any creature a thought or a helping hand. Here is a tale, as told to me, to show that even the degradation of ages cannot kill that in a man which lifts up his heart to his friend.
It concerns a command of Madrassi Sappers--coal-black Dravidians from around Bangalore--Untouchables all, or almost all. And it happened in the World War, at the taking of Kut.
"The river," said the witness, "is about three hundred yards wide at that point and swift. Our job was to cross in pontoons in the dim first gray of the morning, hoping to surprise the Turk. The duty of the sappers was to take the boats up the night before, under cover of darkness, and to make them ready; then to stand back while the combatant troops rowed themselves across.
"The sappers did their job. But just as the moment came to embark our men, the Turk waked up and opened fire. Our surprise was a washout. But we carried on, all the same.
"Now, the troops could lie flat in the bottom of the boats, but their rowers must sit on the thwarts and pull--three hundred yards, slantwise, in point-blank rifle range. Why, they hadn't a chance!
"What happened? What but those little Madrassis, pushing forward, all eagerness, begging: 'Sahibs, you want rifles over there. Rifles, Sahibs, rifles! We are only sappers. Let us row!'
"So the troops, rushing down, sprang into the boats and stretched flat. And the sappers jumped into the thwarts and pulled. And then--the Turk's machine-guns!
"When the boats came back, out of seventy rowers scarcely a man was left unhurt and many were dead. But those little sapper fellows ashore, they swarmed down, hove their dead out on the bank, jumped into their places, and, as each boat filled with men, shoved off into their comrades' fate. That is how the rifles got over to Kut. And those were coal-black Dravidians, mind you--'Untouchables,' unless they had turned Christian--which a fair lot of them had."
When the Prince of Wales sailed to India, late in 1921, Mr. Gandhi, then at the height of his popularity, proclaimed to the Hindu world that the coming visit was "an insult added to injury," and called for a general boycott.[13]
[13. Gandhi's Letters on Indian Affairs, pp. 96-7.]
Political workers obediently snatched up the torch, rushing it through their organizations, and the Prince's landing in Bombay became thereby the signal for murderous riot and destruction. No outbreak occurred among the responsible part of the population, nor along the line of progress, which was, of course, well guarded. But in the remoter areas of the city, hooliganism ran on for several days, with some fifty killings and four hundred woundings, Indian attacking Indian, while arson and loot played their ruinous part.
Meanwhile the Prince, seemingly unmoved by the first unfriendly reception of all his life, proceeded to carry out his officially arranged programme in and about the city. On the evening of November 22 it was scheduled that he should depart for the North.
As he left Government House on the three- or four-mile drive to the Bombay railway station, his automobile ran unguarded save for the pilot police car that went before. Where it entered the city, however, a cordon of police lined the streets on both sides. And behind that cordon pressed the people--the common poor people of the countryside in their uncountable thousands; pressed and pushed until, with the railway station yet half a mile away, the police line bent and broke beneath the strain.
Instantly the crowd surged in, closing around the car, shouting, fighting each other to work nearer--nearer still. What would they do? What was their temper? God knew! Gandhi's hot words had spread among them, and God alone, now, could help. Some reached the running-boards and clung. Others shoved them off, for one instant to take their places, the next themselves to be dragged away. And what was this they shouted? At first nothing could be made of it, in the bedlam of voices, though those charged with the safety of the progress strained their ears to catch the cries.
Then words stood out, continuously chanted, and the words were these:
"Yuvaraj Maharaj ki jai!" "Hail to the Prince!" And: "Let me see my Prince! Let me see my Prince! Let me only see my Prince just once before I die!"
The police tried vainly to form again around the car. Moving at a crawl, quite unprotected now, through an almost solid mass of shouting humanity, it won through to the railway station at last.
There, within the barriers that shut off the platform of the royal train, gathered the dignitaries of the Province and the City, to make their formal farewells. To these His Royal Highness listened, returning due acknowledgments. Then, clipping short his own last word, he turned suddenly to the aide beside him.
"How much time left?"
"Three minutes, sir," replied the aide.
"Then drop those barriers and let the people in"--indicating the mobs outside.
"Our hearts jumped into our mouths," said the men who told me the tale, ''but the barriers, of course, went down."
Like the sweep of a river in flood the interminable multitudes rolled in--and shouted and adored and laughed and wept, and, when the train started, ran alongside the royal carriage till they could run no more.
After which one or two super-responsible officials went straight home to bed.
So the Prince of Wales moved northward. And as he moved, much of his wholesome influence was lost, through the active hostility of the Indian political leader.
But if Gandhi's exhortations traveled, so did the news of the Prince's aspect--traveled far and fast, as such things do amongst primitive peoples.
And when he turned back from his transit of the Great North Gate--the Khyber Pass itself--a strange thing awaited him. A swarm of Untouchables, emboldened by news that had reached them, clustered at the roadside to do him reverence, "Government ki jai!" "Hail to the Government!" they shouted, with cheers that echoed from the barren hills.
And when the Prince slowed down his car to return their greetings, they leapt and danced in their excitement.
For nowhere in all their store of memory or of legend had they any history of an Indian magnate who had noticed an Untouchable except to scorn him. And here was a greater than all India contained--the son of the Supreme Power, to them almost divine, who deigned not only to receive but even to thank them for their homage! Small wonder that their spirits soared, that their eyes saw visions, that their tongues laid hold upon mystic words.
"Look! Look!" they cried to one another. "Behold, the Light! the Light!"
And such was their exaltation that many of them somehow worked through to Delhi to add themselves to the twenty-five thousand of their kind who there awaited the Prince's coming. The village people from round about flocked in to join them--the simple people of the soil who know nothing of politics but much of friendship as shown in works. And all together haunted the roadside, waiting and hoping for a glimpse of his face.
At last he came, down the Grand Trunk Road, toward the Delhi Gate. And in the center of the hosts of the Untouchables, one, standing higher than the rest, unfurled a flag.
"Yuvaraj Maharaj ki jai! Raja ke Bete ki jai!
"Hail to the Prince! Hail to the King's Son!" they all shouted together, to burst their throats. And the Prince, while the high-caste Indian spectators wondered and revolted within themselves at his lack of princely pride, ordered his car stopped.
Then a spokesman ventured forward, to offer in a humble little speech the love and fealty of the sixty millions of the Unclean and to beg the heir to the throne to intercede for them with his father the King Emperor, never to abandon them into the hands of those who despised them and would keep them slaves.
The Prince heard him through. Then--whether he realized the magnitude of what he did, or whether he acted merely on the impulse of his natural friendly courtesy toward all the world--he did an unheard-of thing. He stood up--stood up, for them, the "worse than dogs," spoke a few words of kindness, looked them all over, slowly, and so, with a radiant smile, gave them his salute.
No sun that had risen in India had witnessed such a sight. As the car started on, moving slowly not to crush them, they went almost mad. And again their eastern tongues clothed their thought. "Brother--that word was truth that our brothers brought us. Behold, the Light is there indeed! The Light--the Glory--on his face!"
Education, some Indian politicians affirm, should be driven into the Indian masses by compulsory measures. "England," they say, "introduced compulsory education at home long ago. Why does she not do so here? Because, clearly, it suits her purpose to leave the people ignorant."
To this I took down a hot reply from the lips of the Raja of Panagal, then anti-Brahman leader of Madras Presidency.
"Rubbish!" he exclaimed. "What did the Brahmans do for our education in the five thousand years before Britain came? I remind you: They asserted their right to pour hot lead into the ears of the low-caste man who should dare to study books. All learning belonged to them, they said. When the Muhammadans swarmed in and took us, even that was an improvement on the old Hindu régime. But only in Britain's day did education become the right of all, with state schools, colleges, and universities accessible îo all castes, communities, and peoples."
"[The Brahmans] saw well enough," says Dubois,[1] what a moral ascendancy knowledge would give them over the other castes, and they therefore made a mystery of it by taking all possible precautions to prevent other classes from obtaining access to it."
[1. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, p. 376.]
But the Brahmans, whatever their intellectual achievement in earliest times, rested quiescent upon these laurels through the succeeding centuries. They were content, while denying light to the remainder of their world, to abide, themselves, in the ever-fading wisdom of the ever-dimmer past. Says the Abbé Du-bois again, writing in the beginning of the nineteenth century:[2]
[2. Ibid., pp. 376-7.]
I do not believe that the Brahmins of modern times are, in any degree, more learned than their ancestors of the time of Lycurgus and Pythagoras. During this long space of time many barbarous races have emerged from the darkness of ignorance, have attained the summit of civilization, and have extended their intellectual researches...yet all this time the Hindus have been perfectly stationary. We do not find amongst them any trace of mental or moral improvement, any sign of advance in the arts and sciences. Every impartial observer must, indeed, admit that they are now very far behind the peoples who inscribed their names long after them on the roll of civilized nations.
This was written some half-century before the British Crown assumed the government of India.
During that fifty years a new educational movement sprang up in the land. The design of Warren Hastings and later of the East India Company, impelled by the British Parliament, had been to advance Indian culture, as such, toward a native fruition. It remained for a private citizen, one David Hare, an English merchant domiciled in India, to start the wheels turning the opposite way.
David Hare, no missionary, but an agnostic, was a man with a conviction. Under its impulse he gave himself and his all to "the education and moral improvement of the natives of Bengal." Parallel to him worked the famous Hindu, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a solitary soul fired to action by the status of his own people in the intellectual and social-ethical world. And these two, one in purpose, at length joined to create a secular Hindu College, whose object they announced as "the tuition of the sons of respectable Hindoos in the English and Indian language and in the literature and science of Europe and Asia."
The project, however, only roused the wrath and distrust of the orthodox Hindu. This was in 1817.
A year later three Baptist missionaries, Carey, Marshman and Ward, founded a still-extant school near Calcutta. In 1820 the Anglican Church opened a college. In 1830 Alexander Duff, again with the help of Ram Mohan Roy, instituted a fourth college for the giving of western science to India. A network of primitive vernacular schools at that time existed throughout Bengal, but it was Raja Ram Mohan Roy himself who continuously urged upon the British authorities the necessity, if "the improvement of the native population" were contemplated, of doing away with the old code and system, of teaching western sciences, and of conducting such teachings in the English language.[3] While these influences were still combating the earlier attitude of the British with its basic tenet that Indian education should run along Indian lines, came a new force into the field--one Thomas Babington Macaulay, to be Chairman of a Committee of Public Instruction. Lord Macaulay declared, and with tremendous vigor, on the side of the western school. In the name of honor and of humanity the full light of western science must, he felt, be given to the Indian world. And he demanded,[4] with fervor, to know by what right, when
[3. A Biographical Sketch of David Hare, Peary Chand Mittra, Cal-Mtta, 1877, Raja Ram Mohan Roy's Letter to Lord Amherst.]
[4. Minute on Education, T. B. Macaulay, Feb. 2, 1835.]
...we can patronise sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier,--astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school,--history, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long,--and geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter?...What we spend on the Arabic and Sanskrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth; it is bounty money paid to raise up champions of error.
This new advocate, welcomed with acclaim by a few modernist Hindus facing the condemnation of their community, finally cast the expenditures of public educational monies from oriental into western channels. Departments of Public Instruction were now set up in each province and practical steps taken to stimulate private effort in the establishment of schools and colleges.
All this was done with a definitely stated object--to give into the hands of the peoples the key to health and prosperity and social advance, and to rouse them to "the development of the vast resources of their country...and gradually, but certainly, confer upon them all the advantages which accompany the healthy increase of wealth and commerce."[5]
[5. Despatch of Sir Charles Wood, 1854.]
It should not, however, be understood either that Government now discouraged oriental learning as such or that it excluded the vernacular. On the contrary, it insisted on the proper teaching of the vernacular in all schools, looking forward to the day when that vehicle should achieve a development sufficient to convey the ideas of modern science.[6] Meantime, it chose to teach in English rather than in either of the two classic Indian languages, for the reasons that any one of the three would have to be learned as a new language by all save the most exceptional students, and that the necessary books did not exist in either eastern tongue.
[6. See Calcutta University Commission Report, Vol. I, Chapter III; and Vol. II, Chapter XVIII; also The Educational Despatch of 1854.]
Centers of teaching now gradually multiplied. In the thirty years following 1857, five universities were established--in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Lahore, and Allahabad. Aside from literacy courses, instruction in practical, non-literary branches was urged upon the attention of all minded to learn.
But the difficulty then as now was that commerce, scientific agriculture, forestry, engineering, teaching, none of these avenues for service smiled to Indian ambition. India as a national entity was ever an unknown concept to the Indian. And thought for the country at large holds little or no part in native ethical equipment
This last-named fact, damaging as it is from our viewpoint, should be thoughtfully taken as a fact and not as an accusation. It is the logical fruit of the honestly held doctrines of fate and transmigration and of the consequent egocentric attitude.
For present purposes, the history of modern India's educational progress may be passed over, to reach statistics of today.
In 1923-4 thirteen universities of British India put forth a total of 11,222 graduates. Of these, 7,822 took their degrees in arts and sciences, 2,046 in law, 446 in medicine, 140 in engineering, 546 in education, 136 in commerce, and 86 in agriculture. At the same time, the universities showed an enrollment of 68,530 undergraduates, not dissimilarly apportioned.[7] The high figures consistently stand opposite the arts and law courses, while such vital subjects as agriculture, hygiene and sanitation, surgery, obstetrics, veterinary science and commerce, under whatever aegis offered, still attract few disciples.
[7. Statistical Abstract for British India, 1914-15 to 1923-24, p. 279.]
For example, the agricultural school maintained by the American Presbyterian Mission near Allahabad, although equipped to receive two hundred scholars, had in 1926 only fifty men in residence.
"We don't care to be coolies," the majority say, turning away in disgust when they find that the study of agriculture demands familiarity with soil and crops.
"If," says the director, "we could guarantee our graduates a Government office, we should be crowded."
I heard of few technical schools, anywhere in India, that are pressed for room.
The representative Indian desires a university Arts degree, yet not for learning's sake, [8] but solely as a means to public office. To attain this vantage-ground he will grind cruelly hard, driven by the whip and spur of his own and his family's ambition, and will often finally wreck the poor little body that he and his forebears have already so mercilessly maltreated.
[8. Cf. Mr. Thyagarajaiyer (Indian), Census Superintendent of Mysore, Census of India, Vol. I, p. 182: "The pursuit of letters purely as a means for intellectual growth is mostly a figment of the theorists."]
Previous chapters have indicated the nature of this maltreatment. One of its consequences is to be seen in the sudden mental drooping and failure--the "fading," as it has come to be called, that so frequently develops in the brilliant Indian student shortly after his university years.
Meantime, if, when he stands panting and exhausted, degree in hand, his chosen reward is not forthcoming, the whole family's disappointment is bitter, their sense of injury and injustice great.
Then it is that the young man's poverty of alternatives stands most in his light and in that of Mother India. A land rich in opportunities for usefulness pleads for the service of his brain and his hands, but tradition and "pride" make him blind, deaf and callous to the call.
As Sir Gooroo Dass Banerjee mildly states it:[9]
[9. Calcutta University Commission Report, Vol. III, p. 161.]
The caste system . , . has created in the higher castes a prejudice against agricultural, technological, and even commercial pursuits.
The university graduate m these latter days may not be a high-caste man. But if he is not, all the more is he hungry to assume high-caste customs, since education's dearest prize is its promise of increased izzat--prestige. Whatever their birth, men disappointed of office are therefore apt flatly to refuse to turn their energies in other directions where their superior knowledge and training would make them infinitely useful to their less favored brothers. Rather than take employment which they consider below their newly acquired dignity, they will sponge forever, idle and unashamed, on the family to which they belong.
"I am a Bachelor of Arts," said a typical youth, simply; "I have not been able to secure a suitable post since my graduation two years ago, so my brother is supporting me. He, having no B.A., can afford to work for one-third the wages that my position compels me to expect."
Nor had the speaker the faintest suspicion that he might be presenting himself in an unflattering light. Even the attempt to capture a degree is held to confer distinction. A man may and does write after his name, "B.A. Plucked" or "B.A. Failed," without exciting the mirth of his public.[10]
[10. The terms are actually used in common parlance as if in themselves a title, like M.A. or Ph.D.--as: "The school...is now under an enthusiastic B.A. plucked teacher." Fifteenth Annual Report of the Society for the Improvement of the Backward Classes, Bengal & Assam, Calcutta, 1925, p. 12.]
A second case among those that came to my personal attention was that of a young university graduate, disappointed of Government employment, who petitioned an American business man for relief.
"Why do you fellows always persist in pushing in where you're not needed, and then being affronted and outraged because there's no room?" asked the American, with American bluntness. "How can you possibly all be Government clerks? Why on earth don't any of you ever go home to your villages, teach school, or farm, or do sanitation and give the poor old home town a lift, out of what you've got? Couldn't you make a living there all right, while you did a job of work?"
"Doubtless," replied the Indian, patiently. "But you forget. That is beneath my dignity now. I am a B.A. Therefore, if you will not help me, I shall commit suicide."
And he did.
Lord Macaulay, over ninety years ago, observed the same phenomenon in the attitude of the Indian educated at Government expense. Regarding a petition presented to his committee by a body of ex-students of the Sanskrit College, he says:[11]
[11. Minute on Education, Feb. 2, 1835.]
The petitioners stated that they had studied in the college ten or twelve years; that they had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science; that they had received certificates of proficiency; and what is the fruit of all this!..."We have but little prospect of bettering our condition...the indifference with which we are generally looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and assistance from them." They therefore beg that they may be recommended...for places under the Government, not places of high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to exist. "We want means," they say, "for a decent living, and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom we have been educated and maintained from childhood." They conclude by representing, very pathetically, that they are sure that it was never the intention of Government, after behaving so liberally to them during their education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.
The petition amounts to a demand for redress brought against a Government that has inflicted upon them the injury of a liberal education. "And," comments Macaulay:
I doubt not that they are in the right...[for] surely we might, with advantage, have saved the cost of making these persons useless and miserable; surely, men may be brought up to be burdens to the public...at a somewhat smaller charge to the State.
Sanskrit scholars of a century ago or B.A.'s of today, whether plucked or feathered, the principle remains the same, though the spirit has mounted from mild complaint to bitterness.
All over India, among politicians and intelligentsia, Government is hotly assailed for its failure to provide offices for the yearly output of university graduates. With rancor and seeming conviction, Indian gentlemen of the highest political leadership hurl charges from this ground.
"Government," they repeat, "sustains the university. Government is responsible for its existence. What does it mean by accepting our fees for educating us and then not giving us the only thing we want education for? Cursed be the Government! Come, let us drive it out and make places for ourselves and our friends."
Nor is there anywhere that saving humor of public opinion whose Homeric laugh would greet the American lad, just out of Yale or Harvard or Leland Stanford, who should present his shining sheepskin as a draft on the Treasury Department, and who should tragically refuse any form of work save anti-government agitation if the draft were not promptly cashed.
Between the years 1918 and 1920, compulsory education laws for primary grades were, indeed, enacted in the seven major provinces of India. This was largely the effect of an Indian political opinion which saw, in principle, at least, the need of a literate electorate in a future democracy.
The laws, however, although operative in some few localities, are permissive in character and have since remained largely inactive[1]--a result partly due to the fact that the period of their passage was the period of the "Reforms." "Dyarchy" came in, with its increased Indianization of Government. Education itself, as a function of Government, became a "transferred subject" passing into the hands of Indian provincial ministers responsible to elected legislative councils. The responsibility, and with it the unpopularity to be incurred by enforcement of unpopular measures, had now changed sides. The Indian ministers, the Indian municipal boards, found it less easy to shoulder the burden than it had been to blame their predecessors in burden-bearing. No elected officer, anywhere, wanted either to sponsor the running up of budgets or to dragoon the children of a resentful public into schools Undesired.
[1. For example: "The Bengal Legislature...passed an Act introducing the principle of compulsory primary education in May, 1919; but it does not appear that a single local authority in the province has availed itself of the option for which the Act provides"--"Primary Education in Bengal," London Times, Educational Supplement, Nov. 13, 1926, p. 484.
A recent official report prepared by Mr. Govindbhai H. Desai, Naib Dewan of Baroda, by order of the reigning prince, shows that although that state has had compulsory education for twenty years, its proportion of literacy is less than that of the adjoining British districts where education began much earlier than in Baroda, but where compulsion scarcely exists.]
Compulsory education, moreover, should mean free education. To build schools and to employ teachers enough to care for all the children in the land without charge would mean money galore--which must be taxed out of the people.
In one province--the Punjab--the Hindu element in the Legislature tried to meet one aspect of the crux by saddling the compelling act with a by-law exempting from school attendance all "Untouchables," otherwise known as "depressed classes." This idea, pleasant as it was for the élite, withered in the hands of unsympathetic British authority. As with the Maharajas,[2] so at the other end of the social scale, it would sanction no class monopoly of public education.
[2. See ante, p. 137.]
Thus Government spoke. But negative weapons, ever India's most effective arms, remained unblunted. How two Punjab cities used them is revealed as follows:[3]
[3. Progress of Edvfdtion in India, Eighth Quinquennial Review, Vol. I, p. 108.]
The percentage of boys of compulsory age at school has risen with the introduction of compulsion in Multan from 27 to 54 and in Lahore from 50 to 62. Since no provision has been made at either place for the education of the children belonging to the depressed classes and no proceedings have yet been taken against any defaulting parent, it is improbable that a much higher percentage of attendance can be expected in the near future.
Showing that there are more ways than one to keep the under-dog in his kennel!
In all British India, the total number of primary schools, whether for boys or girls, was, by latest official report, [4] 168,013. Their pupils numbered approximately 7,000,000. But there are in British India about thirty-six and a half million children of primary school age,[5] 90 per cent, of whom are scattered in groups averaging in school attendance forty children each." The education of these children presents all the difficulties that beset education of difficult folk in other difficult countries, plus many that are peculiar to India alone, while offsetting advantages are mainly conspicuous by their absence.[7]
[4. Statistical Abstract for British India, 1914-15 to 1923-24, p. 263.]
[5. Ibid., p. 24.]
[6. Progress of Education in India 1917-22, Vol. II, p. ??]
[7. Cf. Village Education in India, pp. 176-7.]
We of America have prided ourselves upon our own educational efforts for the Philippines, and in India that performance is frequently cited with wistful respect. Parallels of comparison may therefore be of interest.
We recall that in the Philippines our educational work has been seriously burdened by the fact that the islanders speak eighty-seven dialects [8] and have no common tongue. Against this, set the two hundred and twenty-two vernaculars spoken in India, [9] with no common tongue.
[8. Population of the Philippine Islands In 1916, H. Otîey Beyer, Manila, 1917, pp. 19-20.]
[9. Census of India, 1921, Vol. I, Part I, p. 193.]
In the Philippines, again, no alphabet or script aside from our own is used by the natives. In India fifty different scripts are employed, having anywhere from two hundred to five hundred characters each; and these are so diverse as to perplex or defeat understanding between dialects.
In the Philippines and in India alike, little or no current literature exists available or of interest to the masses, while in both countries many dialects have no literature at all. In the Philippines and in India alike, therefore, lack of home use of the shallow-rooted knowledge gained in the school produces much loss of literacy--much wastage of cost and effort.
In the Philippines, no social bars exist--no caste distinctions except the distinction between cacique and tao--rich man and poor man--exploiter and exploited. In India something like three thousand castes [10] split into mutually repellent groups the Hindu three-quarters of the population.
[10. Oxford History of India, p. 37.]
In the Philippines, whatever may be said of the quality of the native teachers, especially as instructors in English, their good will suffices to carry them, both men and women, from the training schools into little and remote villages and to keep them there, for two or three years at least, delving on their job. In India, on the contrary, no educated man wants to serve in the villages. The villages, therefore, are starved for teachers.
In the Philippines the native population hungers and thirsts after education and is ready to go all lengths to acquire it, while rich Filipinos often give handsomely out of their private means to secure schools for their own localities. In India, on the contrary, the attitude of the masses toward education for boys is apathy. Toward education for girls it is nearer antagonism, with a general unwillingness on the part of masses and classes alike to pay any educational cost.
The British Administration in India has without doubt made serious mistakes in its educational policies. As to the nature of these mistakes, much may be learned by reading the Monroe Survey Board's report[11] on education in the Philippine Islands. The policies most frequently decried as British errors in India are the very policies that we ourselves, and for identical reasons, adopted and pursued in our attempt to educate our Filipino charges. Nothing is easier than to criticize from results backward, though even from that vantage-point conclusions vary.
[11.A Survey of the Educational System of the Philippines, Manila Bureau of Printing, 1925.]
Queen Victoria, in 1858, on the assumption by the Crown of the direct Government of India, proclaimed the royal will that:[12]
[12. Foreshadowed in Lord Hardinge's Resolution oî 1844]
So far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to office in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity duly to discharge.
Similarly President McKinley, in his instructions to the Hon. William H. Taft, as President of the first Philippines Commission, laid down that:[13]
[13. Letter from the Secretary of War, Washington, April 7, 1900.]
The natives of the islands...shall be afforded the opportunity to manage their own local affairs to the fullest extent of which they are capable, and...which a careful study of their capacities and observation of the workings of native control show to be consistent with the maintenance of law, order, and loyalty.
On both congeries of peoples the effect of these pronouncements was identical. Their small existing intelligentsia, ardently desiring office, desired, therefore, that type of education which prepares for office-holding.
Britain, as we have seen, began with another idea--that of developing Indian education on native lines. But under Indian pressure she soon abandoned her first policy;[14] the more readily because, counting with-out the Indian's egocentric mentality, she believed that by educating the minds and pushing forward the men already most cultivated she would induce a process of "infiltration," whereby, through sympathetic native channels, learning converted into suitable forms would rapidly seep down through the masses.
[14. The Heart of Aryavarta, the Earl of Ronaldshay, London, 1923, Chapters II and III.]
America, on her side, fell at once to training Fili-pino youths to assume those duties that President Mc-Kinley had indicated. At the same time, we poured into the empty minds of our young Asiatics the history and literature of our own people, forgetting, in our ingenuous altruism, the confusion that must result.
Oblivious of the thousand years of laborious nation-building that linked Patrick Henry to the Witenage-mot, drunk with the new vocabulary whose rhythm and thunder they loved to roll upon their nimble tongues, but whose contents they had no key to guess, America's new charges at one wild leap cleared the ages and perched triumphant at Patrick Henry's side: "Give us liberty or give us death!"
"Self-government is not a thing that can be 'given' to any people...No people can be 'given' the self-control of maturity," said President Wilson, [15] commenting on the situation so evoked. But such language found no lodgment in brains without background of racial experience. For words are built of the life-history of peoples.
[15. Constitutional Government in the United States, Woodrow Wilson, New York, 1908, pp. 52-3.]
And between the Filipino who had no history, and the Hindu, whose creative historic period, as we shall see, is effectively as unrelated to him as the period of Pericles is unrelated to the modern New York Greek, there was little to choose, in point of power to grasp the spirit of democracy.
Schools and universities, in the Philippines and in India, have continued to pour the phrases of western political-social history into Asiatic minds. Asiatic memories have caught and held the phrases, supplying strange meanings from their alien inheritance. The result in each case has been identical. "All the teaching we have received...has made us clerks or platform orators," said Mr. Gandhi.[16]
[16. Statement to the author, Ahmedabad, March, 1926.]
But Mr. Gandhi's view sweeps further still:[17]
[17. Indian Home Rule, M. K. Gandhi, Ganesh & Co., Madras, 1924, pp. 97-8, loo, 113.]
The ordinary meaning of education is a knowledge
of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called
primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has
ordinary knowledge of the world. He knows fairly well how he should
behave towards his parents, his wife, his children and his fellow
villagers. He understands and observes the rules of morality. But
he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving
him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his
happiness?...
It now follows that it is not necessary to make this educa-tion
compulsory. Our ancient school system is enough...We consider your
[modern] schools to be useless.
On such views as this, the Swarajist leader Lala Lajpat Rai makes caustic comment:[18]
[18. The Problem of National Education in India, George Alien anc. Unwin, London, 1920, pp. 79-80.]
There are some good people in India who do, now and then, talk of the desirability of their country leading a retired, isolated, and self-contained life. They pine for good old days and wish them to come back. They sell books which contain this kind of nonsense. They write poems and songs full of soft sentimentality. I do not know whether they are idiots or traitors. I must warn my countrymen most solemnly and earnestly to beware of them and of that kind of literature...The country must be brought up to the level of the most modern countries...in thought and life.
But whose shoulder is being put to the wheel in the enormous task of bringing 92 per cent, of the populace of British India--222,000,000 Indian villagers--"up to the level of the most modern countries," even in the one detail of literacy? Who is going to do the heavy a-b-c work of creating an Indian electorate on whose intelligence the work of a responsible government can be based?
A little while ago a certain American Mission Board, being well replenished in means from home and about to embark on a new period of work, convened a number of such Indian gentlemen as were strongest in citizenship and asked their advice as to future efforts. The Indian gentlemen, having consulted together, proposed that all higher education (which is city work), and also the administration of all funds, be at once turned over to them, the Indians.
"Does that, then, mean that you see no more use for Americans in India?"
"By no means! You Americans, of course, will look after the villages."
"To you, perhaps, it sounds dubious," said a British Civil Servant of thirty years' experience, to whom I submitted my doubts, "but we who have spent our lives in the work know that the answer is this: We must just plod along, giving the people more and yet more education, as fast as we can get them to take it, until education becomes too general to arrogate to itself, as it does today, a distinction by rights due only to ability and character."
The illiteracy of India is sometimes attributed to her poverty--a theory as elusive as the famous priority dispute between the hen and the egg. But Indian political critics are wont to charge the high illiteracy rate to the inefficiency, even to the deliberate purpose, of the sovereign power. Thus, Lala Lajpat Rai, the Swaraj political leader, refers to the Viceregal Government as having "so far refused even elementary instruction in the three R's to our masses."[1] And Mr. Mahomed Ali Jinnah [2] accusingly asks, "Why is light denied?"
[1. In 1923-24, India's total expenditure of public funds on education, including municipal, local, Provincial and Central Government contributions, reached 19.9 crores of rupees, or $66,333,300. This sum is much too small for the work to be done. Nevertheless, when taken in relation to the total revenue of British India it compares not unfavorably with the educational allotments of other countries. See India in 1924-25, P- 278; and Statistical Abstract for British India, p. 262.]
[2. Leader of the Nationalist party in the Legislature of 1925-26.]
But, before subscribing to the views of either of these legislative leaders, before accepting either India's poverty or Britain's greed as determining the people's darkness, it may be well to remember the two points recently examined, and to record a third.
First, of British India's population of two hundred and forty-seven million persons, about 50 per cent, are women. The people of India, as has been shown, have steadfastly opposed the education of women. And the combined efforts of the British Government, the few other-minded Indians, and the Christian missions, have thus far succeeded in conferring literacy upon less than 2 per cent, of the womankind. Performing the arithmetical calculation herein suggested, one arrives at an approximate figure of 121,000,000, representing British India's illiterate women.
Secondly, reckoned in with the population of British India [3] are sixty million human beings called "Untouchables." To the education of this element the great Hindu majority has ever been and still is strongly, actively and effectively opposed. Subtracting from the Untouchables' total their female half, as having already been dealt with in the comprehensive figure, and assuming, in the absence of authoritative figures, 5 per cent, of literacy among its males, we arrive at another 28,500,000, representing another lot of Indians con-demned to illiteracy by direct action of the majority will.
[3. Census of India iczi, Vol. I, Part I, p. 225.]
Now, neither with the inhibition of the women nor with the inhibition of the Untouchables has poverty anything whatever to do. As to the action of Government, it has displayed from the first, both as to women and as to outcastes, a steadfast effort in behalf of the inhibited against the dictum of their own people. Expressed in figures, the fact becomes clearer:
Illiterate female population of British India 121,000,000
Illiterate male Untouchables 28,500,000
149,500,000
Total population of British India 247,000,000
Percentage of the population of British India
kept illiterate by the deliberate will of the
orthodox Hindu 60.53%
Apart from these two factors appears, however, a third of significance as great, to appreciate whose weight one must keep in mind that the total population of British India is 90 per cent. rural--village folk.
As long, therefore, as the villages remain untaught, the all-India percentage of literacy, no matter what else happens, must continue practically where it is today--hugging the world's low-record line.
But to give primary education to one-eighth of the human race, scattered over an area of 1,094,300 square miles, in five hundred thousand little villages, obviously demands an army of teachers.
Now, consider the problem of recruiting that army when no native women are available for the job. For the village school ma'am, in the India of today, does not and cannot exist.
Consider the effect on our own task of educating the children of rural America, from Canada to the Gulf, from the Atlantic to California, if we were totally debarred from the aid of our legions of women and girls.
No occidental country has ever faced the attempt to educate its masses under this back-breaking condition. The richest nation in the world would stand aghast at the thought.
As for the reason why India's women cannot teach India's children, that may be re-stated in few words. Indian women of child-bearing age cannot safely venture, without special protection, within reach of Indian men.
It would thus appear clear that if Indian self-government were established tomorrow, and if wealth tomorrow rushed in, succeeding poverty in the land, India, unless she reversed her own views as to her "Untouchables" and as to her women, must still continue in the front line of the earth's illiterates.
As to the statement just made concerning women's unavailability as teachers in village schools, I have taken it down, just as it stands, in the United Provinces, over the Punjab, in Bengal and Bombay Presidencies, and across Madras, from the lips of Hindu and Muhammadan officials and educators, from Christian Indian educators and clergy, from American and other Mission heads, and from responsible British administrators, educational, medical, and police. So far as I know, it is nowhere on official record, nor has it been made the subject of important mention in the legislatures. It is one of those things that, to an Indian, is a natural matter of course. And the white man administering India has deliberately adopted the policy of keeping silence on such points--of avoiding surface irritations, while he delves at the roots of the job.
"I should not have thought of telling you about it," said an Indian gentleman of high position, a strong nationalist, a life-long social reformer. "It is so apparent to us that we give it no thought. Our attitude toward women does not permit a woman of character and of marriageable age to leave the protection of her family. Those who have ventured to go out to the villages to teach--and they are usually Christians--lead a hard life, until or unless they submit to the incessant importunities of their male superiors; and their whole career, success and comfort are determined by the manner in which they receive such importunities. The same would apply to women nurses. An appeal to departmental chiefs, since those also are now Indians, would, as a rule, merely transfer the seat of trouble. The fact is, we Indians do not credit the possibility of free and honest women. To us it is against nature. The two terms cancel each other."
The Calcutta University Commission, made up, as will be recalled, of British, Muhammadan, and Hindu professional men, the latter distinguished representatives of their respective communities, expressed the point as follows:[4]
[4. Report, Vol. II, Part I, p.9.]
The fact has to be faced that until Bengali men generally learn the rudiments of respect and chivalry toward women who are not living in zenanas, anything like a service of women teachers will be impossible.
If the localizing adjective "Bengali" were withdrawn, the Commission's statement would, it seems, as fairly apply to all India. Mason Olcott [5] is referring to the whole field when he says:
[5. Village Schools in India, p. 196.]
On account of social obstacles and dangers, it is practically impossible for women to teach in the villages, unless they are accompanied by their husbands.
Treating of the "almost desperate condition" of mass education in rural parts, for lack of women teachers, the late Director of Public Instruction of the Central Provinces says:[6]
[6. The Education of India, Arthur Mayhew, London, Faber and Gwyer, 1926, p. 268.]
The general conditions of mofussll [rural] life and the Indian attitude toward professional unmarried women are such that life for such as are available is usually intolerable,
"No Indian girl can go alone to teach in rural tricts. If she does, she is ruined," the head of a large American Mission college in northern India affirmed. The speaker was a widely experienced woman of the world, characterized by as matter-of-fact a freedom from ignorance as from prejudice. "It is disheartening to know," she went on, "that not one of the young women that you see running about this campus, between classroom and classroom, can be used on the great job of educating India. Not one will go out into the villages to answer the abysmal need of the country. Not one dare risk what awaits her there, for it is no risk, but a certainty. And yet these people cry out to be given self-government!"[7]
[7. Statement to the author, February, 1926.]
"Unless women teachers in the mofussil are provided with protected residences, and enabled to have elderly and near relatives living with them, it is more than useless, it is almost cruel, to encourage women tf become teachers," concludes the Calcutta University Commission after its prolonged survey.[8]
[8. Calcutta University Report, Vol. II, Part I, p. 9.]
And the authors of an inquiry covering British India, one of whom is the Indian head of the Y.M.C.A., Mr. Kanakarayan T. Paul, report:[9]
[9. Village Education in India, the Report of a Commission of inquiry, Oxford University Press, 1922, p. 98.]
The social difficulties which so militate against an adequate supply of women teachers are well known, and are immensely serious for the welfare of the country. All the primary school work in the villages is preeminently women's work, and yet the social conditions are such that no single woman can undertake it...The lack of women teachers seems to be all but insuperable, except as the result of a great social change.
That a social stigma should attach to the woman who, under such circumstances, chooses to become a. teacher, is perhaps inevitable. One long and closely familiar with Indian conditions writes:[10]
[10. Census of India, E. A. H. Blunt, C.I.E., O.B.E., I.C.S., 1911, Vol. XV, pp. 260-1.]
It is said that there is a feeling that the calling cannot he pursued by modest women. Prima facie, it is difficult to see how such a feeling could arise, but the Indian argument to support it would take, probably, some such form as this: "The life's object of woman is marriage; if she is married her household duties prevent her teaching. If she teaches, she can have no household duties or else she neglects them. If she has no household duties she must be unmarried, and the only unmarried women are no better than they should be. [11] If she neglects her household duties, she is...no better than she should be.
[11. Census of India, 1911, Vol. XV, p. 229. "It is safe to say that after the age of seventeen or eighteen no females are unmarried who are not prostitutes or persons suffering from some bodily affliction such as leprosy or blindness; the number of genuine spinsters over twenty is exceedingly small and an old maid is the rarest of phenomena." These age figures are set high in order to include the Mu-aammadan women and the small Christian and Brahmo Samaj element, all of whom marry later than the Hindu majority.]
This argument might seem to leave room for the deployment of a rescue contingent drafted from India's 26,800,000 widows, calling them out of their dismal cloister and into happy constructive work. The possibility of such a move is, indeed, discussed; some efforts are afoot in that direction, and a certain number of widows have been trained. Their usefulness, however, is almost prohibitively handicapped, in the great school-shy orthodox field, by the deep-seated religious conviction that bad luck and the evil eye are the widow's birthright. But, as writes an authority already quoted:[12]
[12. The Education of India, Arthur Mayhew, p. 268.]
A far more serious objection is the difficulty...to safeguard these ladies who take up work outside the family circle. Their employment without offense or lapse seems possible only in mission settlements and schools under close and careful supervision. In a general campaign [widows] can play only an insignificant part.
In other words, the young widow school-teacher would meet in the villages the same temptations from within, the same pressure, exaction of complaisance, and obloquy from without, that await the single girl.
Thus is reached the almost complete ban which today brands teaching as socially degrading, and which, as an Indian writer puts it, [13] "condemns women to be economically dependent upon men, and makes it impossible for them to engage in any profession other than that of a housewife."
[13. Reconstructing India, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, London, P. S. King and Sons, 1920, p. 243.]
The rule has, however, its exceptions. In the year 1922, out of British India's 123,500,000 women, 4,391 were studying in teachers' training schools. But of that 4,391, nearly half--2,050--came from the Indian Christian community, [14] although this body forms but 1.5 per cent, of the total population. And exceedingly few of the few who are trained serve their country's greatest need.
[14. Progress of Education in India, 1917-22, Vol. II, pp. 14-15.]
Says a professional educator:[15]
[15. Quinquennial Review of Education in Eastern Assam and Bengal.]
It is notoriously difficult to induce Indian women of goot. position, other than Christians and Brahmos, to undergo training for the teaching profession; and even of those who are trained...the majority refuse to go to places when they are wanted.
Now it chanced, in my own case, that I had seen a good deal of Indian village life before opportunity arose to visit the women's training schools. When that opportunity came, I met it, therefore, with rural conditions fresh in mind and with a strong sense of the overwhelming importance of rural needs in any scheme for serving the body politic.
"What are you training for?" I asked the students, "To be teachers," they generally replied. "Will you teach in the villages?" "Oh, no!" as though the question were curiously unintelligent.
"Then who is to teach the village children?" "Oh--Government must see to that." "And can Government teach without teachers?" "We cannot tell. Government should arrange." They apparently felt neither duty nor impulse urging them to go out among their people. Such sentiments, indeed, would have no history in their mental inheritance; whereas the human instinct of self-protection would subconsciously bar the notion of an independent life from crossing their field of thought.
It would seem, then, taking the several elements of the case into consideration, that utterances such as Mr. Jinnah's and Lala Lajpat Rai's[16] must be classified, at best, as relating to the twig-tips, rather than to the root and trunk, of their "deadly upas tree."
[16. See ante, p. 199.]
Coming now to the villager himself--the cultivator or the ryot, as he is called--one finds him in general but slightly concerned with the village school. Whenever his boy can be useful to him--to watch the cattle, to do odd jobs--he unhesitatingly pulls him out of class, whereby is produced a complete uncertainty in the matter of attendance. Often the ryot is too poor to keep his little family alive without the help of the children's labor and of such wages as they can earn. Sickness, too, plays a large part in keeping school-going down--hookworm, malaria, congenital weakness. Or, often, the village astrologer, always a final authority, discovers in the child's horoscope periods inauspicious for school-going. And in any case, the Indian farmer, like the typical farmer of all countries, is skeptically inclined toward innovations. His fathers knew nothing of letters. He knows nothing of letters himself. [17] Therefore who is to tell him that letters are good? Will letters make the boy a better bargainer? A better hand at the plow?
[17. Adult education, in connection with Government's rural cooperative credit movement, is now doing signal work among the peasant farmers of the Punjab.]
"The school curriculum is not sufficiently practical," say many of the British working to better it. "Show the ryot that his boy will be worth more on the land after a good schooling, and he will find means somehow to send the boy to school." And such a writer as the Hindu Sir M. Visvesvaraya does not hesitate to accuse Government of deliberately making economic education unattractive in order to keep India dependent. [18] The report of Mr. Kanakarayan T. Paul's committee, based upon its India-wide inspection, gives, however, different testimony, saying:[19]
[18. Reconstructing India, p. 258.]
[19. Village Education in India, p. 20.]
It is often assumed that the education given in the village school is despised because it is not practical enough. In many cases, however, the parent's objection is just the opposite. He has no desire to have his son taught agriculture, partly because he thinks he knows far more about that than the teacher, but still more because his ambition is that his boy should be a teacher or a clerk. If he finds that such a rise in the scale is improbable, his enthusiasm for education vanishes. Of the mental and spiritual value of education...he is ignorant.
"It is not change in the curriculum in this early stage" pursues the authority just quoted, "that is going to affect the efficiency of the school or the length of school attendance, but the ability ana skill of the teaching staff."
It was one of the most eminent of living Indians who gave me this elucidation of the attitude of a respected Hindu nobleman toward his own "home town."
"Disease, dirt and ignorance are the characteristics of my country," he said in his perfect English, sitting in his city-house library where his long rows of law-books stand marshaled along the walls. "Take my own village, where for centuries the head of my family has been chief. When I, who am now head, left it seventeen years ago, it contained some eighteen hundred inhabitants. When I revisited it, which I did for the first time a few weeks since, I found that the population had dwindled to fewer than six hundred persons. I was horrified.
"In the school were seventy or eighty boys apparently five or six years old. 'Why are you teaching these little children such advanced subjects?' I asked.
"'But they are not as young as you think,' the school-teacher replied.
"They were stunted--that is all; stunted for lack of intelligent care, for lack of proper food, and from malaria, which, say what you like about mosquitoes, comes because people are hungry. Such children, such men and women, will be found all over western Bengal. They have no life, no energy.
"My question, therefore, is plain: What have the British been doing in the last hundred years that my village should be like this? It is true that they have turned the Punjab from a desert to a garden, that they have given food in abundance to millions there. But what satisfaction is that to me when they let my people sit in a corner and starve? The British say: 'We had to establish peace and order before we could take other matters up'; also, 'this is a vast country, we have to build bridges and roads and irrigation canals.' But surely, surely, they could have done more, and faster. And they let my people starve!"
Now this gentleman's village, whose decadence he so deplored, lies not over four hours by railroad from the city in which he lives. He is understood to be a man of large wealth, and himself informed me that his law practice was highly lucrative, naming an income that would be envied by an eminent lawyer in New York. Yet he, the one great man of his village, had left that village without help, advice, leadership, or even a friendly look-in, for seventeen years, though it lay but a comfortable afternoon's ride away from his home. And when at last he visited it and found its decay, he could see no one to blame but a Government that has 500,000 such villages to care for, and which can but work through human hands and human intelligence.
Also, he entirely neglected to mention, in accounting for the present depopulation of his birthplace, that a large industrial plant lately erected near it had drawn away a heavy percentage of the villagers by its opportunities of gain.
It would be a graceless requital of courtesy to name the gentleman just quoted. But perhaps I may without offense name another, Sirdar Mohammed Nawaz Khan, lord of twenty-six villages in Attock District, northern Punjab.
This young Muslim went for his early education to the College for Punjab Chiefs, at Lahore, and thence to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, to earn a commission in the Indian Army. During his stay in England, being from time to time a guest in English country houses, his attention was caught and fixed by the attitude of large English landlords toward their tenants.
Coming as a living illustration of the novel principles of landlord's duties laid down by the English headmaster of his college in Lahore, the thing struck root in his mind and soon possessed him. Dashing young soldier that he made, after eighteen months' service with a Hussar regiment, popular with officers and men, he resigned his commission and returned to his estates. "For I see where my place is now," he said.
There he spends his time, riding from village to village, working out better conditions, better farming methods, better sanitation, anything that will improve the status of his people. Twenty-seven years old and with an annual income of some four lakhs of rupees, he is an enthusiastic dynamo of citizenship, a living force for good, and the sworn ally of the equally enthusiastic and hard-working English Deputy Commissioner.
Curiously enough, he strongly objects to Government's new policy of rapid Indianization of the public services, takes no interest in Swaraj politics, and less than none in criticism of Government's efforts to clean up, educate, and enrich the people. His whole time goes to vigorous cooperation with Government betterment schemes, and to vigorous original effort.
If the good of the people is the object of government, then multiplication of the type of Sirdar Mohammed Nawaz Khan, rather than of the talkers, would produce the strongest argument for more rapid transfer of responsibility into Indian hands.
Meantime, of those who remain in the little towns and hamlets, "the upper classes and castes," says Ol-cott, [1] "are often not only indifferent to the education of the less fortunate villagers, but are actively opposed to it, since it is likely to interfere with the unquestioning obedience and service that has been offered by the lowest castes through the ages."
[1. Village Schools In India, p. 93.]
"There is in rural India very little public opinion in favour of the education of the common folk," says the Commission of Inquiry, and "the wealthy land-owner or even the well-to-do farmer has by no means discovered yet that it is to his interest to educate the agricultural labourer."[2]
[2. Village Education in India, p. 26.]
The village school-teacher is in general some dreary incompetent, be he old or young--a heavy wet blanket slopped down upon a helpless mass of little limp arms and legs and empty, born-tired child noddles. Consequently anything duller than the usual Indian village school this world will hardly produce. Fish-eyed list-lessness sits upon its brow, and its veins run flat with boredom.
But I, personally, could find nothing to justify the belief that melancholy, as distinct from the viewpoint produced by the Hindu religion, is a necessary inborn trait of the Indian. The roots of joy certainly live within young and old. A smile, I found, brings forth a ready smile; a joke, a laugh; an object of novelty evokes interest from all ages, in any village gathering; and serious philosophical consideration crowned with ripe speech awaits new thoughts. The villagers are dignified, interesting, enlisting people, commanding affection and regard and well worthy the service that for the last sixty-odd years they have enjoyed--good men's best effort. Without their active and intelligent partnership, no native Government better than an oligarchy can ever exist in India.
But it is only to the Briton that the Indian villager of today can look for steady, sympathetic and practical interest and steady, reliable help in his multitudinous necessities. It is the British Deputy Commissioner, none other, who is "his father and his mother," and upon the mind of that Deputy Commissioner the villagers' troubles and the villagers' interests sit day and in my own experience, it was an outstanding fact that in every one of the scores of villages I visited, from one end of India to the other, I got from the people a friendly, confiding, happy reception. King George and the young god Krishna, looking down from the walls of many a mud cottage, seemed to link the sources of benefit. All attempts to explain myself as an American proving futile, since a white face meant only England to them, an "American" nothing at all--I let it go at that, accepting the welcome that the work of generations had prepared.
Yet there are so few Britons in India--fewer than 200,000 counting every head, man, woman and child--and there are 500,000 British Indian villages!
"Would not your educated and brilliant young men of India," I once asked Mr. Gandhi, "be doing better service to India, if, instead of fighting for political advantage, social place and, in general, the limelight, they were to efface themselves, go to the villages, and give their lives to the people?"
"Ah, yes," Mr. Gandhi replied, "but that is a counsel of perfection."
To four interesting young Indian political leaders in Calcutta, men well considered in the city, I put the same question: "Would not you and all like you best serve your beloved Mother India by the sacrifice to her of your personal and political ambitions--by losing yourselves in your villages, to work there for the people, just as so many British, both men and women, are doing today? In twenty years' time, might not your accomplishment be so great that those political powers you now vainly and angrily demand would fall into your hands simply because you had proved yourselves their fit custodians?"
"Perhaps," said the three. "But talk, also, is work. Talk is now the only work. Nothing else can be done till we push the alien out of India."
"If I were running this country, I'd close every university tomorrow," said the chief executive of a great American business concern, himself an American long resident in India, deeply and sympathetically interested in the Indian. "It was a crime to teach them to be clerks and lawyers and politicians till they'd been taught to raise food."
"After twenty-odd years of experience in India," said an American educator at the head of a large college, "I have come to the conclusion that the whole system here is wrong. These people should have had two generations of primary schools all over the land, before ever they saw a grammar school; two generations of grammar schools before the creation of the first high school; and certainly not before the seventh or eighth generation should a single Indian university have opened its doors."