“There are many nations of the Indians, and they do not speak
the same language.”
—HERODOTUS. [34]
With modern education and the awakening of the Indian mind have come entirely new political ideas. That there are public questions has in fact been discovered; for in India the idea of citizenship, the consciousness of being a political unit, was itself a new idea. We may say that it was made possible in 1835, when an Act of Legislature was passed declaring the press free. In 1823 an English editor had been deported from Calcutta for free criticism of the authorities, but after 1835 it was legal not merely to think but to speak on public questions. Before we pass on, we note the strange inverted sequence of events which may attend on fostered liberty. The right to criticise was bestowed before any right to be represented in the Legislature or Executive was enjoyed. In this freedom to criticise the acts of Government, the India of to-day is far ahead of countries like Germany and Russia.
The new idea of citizenship, thus made possible by a free press, is largely the outcome of three great influences. Christian philanthropic ideas, disseminated both by precept and example, could not but be producing some sense of brotherhood, and what Burke calls a “civil society.” Then again, the free and often democratic spirit of English literature was being imbibed by thousands; and in the third place, through the newspapers, English and vernacular, the people were being brought into actual contact with the political life of Great Britain. Due particularly to the first of these influences, the noblest of the new Indian political ideas is that tacitly assumed in many of the native criticisms of the British Government in India—high tribute as well as criticism—that Government exists for the good of the governed, and indeed responsible for the welfare of the masses. The British Government is indeed an amazing network covering the whole continent, ministering life, like the network of the blood-vessels in our frame. At least, its apologists declare it to be doing so, and its native critics declare that it ought to. The native press, for example, is prompt to direct the attention of the Government to famine and to summon the Government to its duty. In India a noble idea of the Commonwealth and its proper government has thus come into being. Likewise, it ought to be added, except in times of political excitement, and in the case of professional politicians, it is generally acknowledged that the conception of the British Government in India is noble, and that many officers of Government are truly the servants of the people. It is not suggested that the policy or the methods should be radically altered. The politician’s theme is that the Government is more expensive and less sympathetic than it might be, because of the employment of alien Europeans where natives might be employed.
Other new political ideas follow the lines of social change. We have seen how in the modern school, the idea of caste gives way before the idea of rank in the school, to be followed in College by the idea of intellectual distinction, and still later in life by the idea of success in some modern career. In the political sphere, modern life is also busy dissolving the older and narrower conceptions of life. Atop of the sectarian consciousness of being a Hindu or the provincial consciousness of belonging to Bengal or Bombay, is coming the consciousness of being an Indian. This consciousness of a national unity is one of the outstanding features of the time in India, all the more striking because hitherto India has been so unwieldily large, and her people incoherent, like dry sand. “The Indian never knew the feeling of nationality,” says Max Müller. “The very name of India is a synonym for caste, as opposed to nationality,” says Sister Nivedita, the pro-Hindu lady already referred to, who likewise notes the emergence of the national idea. [35] “Public spirit or patriotism, as we understand it, never existed among the Hindus,” writes Mr. Bose, himself an Indian, author of a recent work on Hindu Civilisation under British Rule. [36] And Raja Rammohan Roy, the famous Bengali reformer of the beginning of the nineteenth century, we have already heard denouncing the caste system as “destructive of national union.” From what then, during the nineteenth century, has the national consciousness come forth? Many causes may be cited. The actual unification effected by the postal, the telegraph, and the railway organisation, has done much. The omnipresence of the foreign government, all-controlling, has also done much. The current coins and the postage stamps with King Edward’s head upon them—the same all over India, a few native states excepted—bring home the union of India to the most ignorant. The constant criticism of the Government in the native press, the meetings of the All-India political association called the Congress, and the fact that modern interests, stimulated by daily telegrams from all over the world, are international, not provincial or sectarian—all these things combine to give to the modern educated Indian a new Indian national consciousness in place of the old provincial and sectarian one. In short, the British rule has united India, and the awakened mind of India is rejoicing in the consciousness of the larger existence, and is identifying the ancient glories of certain centres in North India with this new India created by Britain. Never before was there a united India in the modern political sense; never, indeed, could there be until modern inventions brought distant places near each other. Two great Indian empires there certainly were in the third century B.C. and the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and the paternal benevolence of Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor of the third century B.C., deserves record and all honour. Let Indians know definitely who deserves to be called an ancient Indian emperor, when they wish to lament a lost past; and descending to historical fact and detail, let them compare that period with the present. The later empire referred to was an empire only in the old sense of a collection of vassal states. Turning back to the hoary past, in which many Indians, even of education, imagine there was a golden Indian empire, we can trace underneath the ancient epic, the Ramayan, a conquering progress southward to Ceylon itself of a great Aryan hero, Ram. But of any Indian empire founded by him, we know nothing. “One who has carefully studied the Ramayan will be impressed with the idea that the Aryan conquest had spread over parts of Northern India only, at the time of the great events which form its subjects.” [37] Coming down to the period of the greatest extent of the Moghul empire in India in the end of the seventeenth century, we find the Emperor Aurangzeb with as extensive a military empire as that of Asoka, but with the Mahrattas rising behind him even while he was extending his empire southwards. That decadent military despotism cannot be thought of as a union of India. In truth, the old Aryan conquest of India was not a political conquest, and never has been; it was a conquest, very complete in the greater part of India, of new social usages and certain new religious ideas. The first complete political conquest of India by Aryans was the British conquest, and the ideas which have come in or been awakened thereby, we are now engaged in tracing. As regards the new idea of nationality, we have noted that the new national name Indian now heard upon political platforms, is not a native term, but an importation from Britain along with the English language. How, indeed, could the educated Indian employ any other term with the desired comprehensiveness? If he speak of Hindus, he excludes Mahomedans and followers of other religions; if he use a Sanscrit term for Indians, he still fails to touch the hearts of Mahomedans and others who identify Sanscrit with Hindus. There is no course left but to use the English language, even while criticising the British rulers. The English language has been a prime factor in evoking the new national consciousness, and in the English language the Indian must speak to his new found fellow Indians. [38] Even a considerable portion of the literature of the attempted Revival of Hinduism is in English, strange as the conjunction sounds.
How the thought of Indian unity over against the sovereignty of Britain may reach down even to the humblest, the writer once observed in a humble street in Calcutta. A working man was receiving his farthing’s worth of entertainment from a peep-show. His eyes were glued to the peepholes, to secure his money’s worth, for the farthing was no small sum to him; and the showman was standing by describing the successive scenes in a loud voice, with intent both to serve his customer and to stimulate the bystanders’ curiosity. Three of the scenes were: “This is the house of the great Queen near London city,” “This is one of the great Queen’s lords writing an order to the Viceroy of Calcutta,” “This is the great committee that sits in London city.” He actually used the English word committee, the picture probably showing the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Thus the political constitution of India and its unity under Britain are inculcated among the humblest. In the minds of the educated, one need not then be surprised at the growth of a sense of Indian unity over against British supremacy.
The Indian National Congress, or All-India political association, is the embodiment of this new national consciousness of educated Indians, the only embodiment possible while India is so divided in social and religious matters. Were there only ten or twelve million Mahomedans in India instead of sixty, the new national consciousness would undoubtedly have been a Hindu or religious, instead of a political, consciousness. But in matters religious, Hindu looks across a gulf at Mahomedan, and Mahomedan at Hindu, neither expecting the other to cross over. Christianity, third in numbers in India proper, proclaims the Christian Gospel to both Hindus and Mahomedans, but is regarded by both as an alien. [39] Nor is any All-India social movement possible while social differences are so sacred as they are. But politically, all India is already one; her educated men have drunk at one well of political ideas; citizenship and its rights are attractive and destroy no cherished customs; and in the English language there is a new lingua franca in unison with the new ideas. The Indian National Congress is the natural outcome. There, representatives of races which a hundred years ago made war on one another, of castes that never either eat together or intermarry, now fraternise in one peaceful assembly, inspired by the novel idea that they are citizens. The Congress meets annually in December in one or other of the cities of India. The first meeting at Bombay in 1885 has been described as follows [40]: “There were men from Madras, the blackness of whose complexions seemed to be made blacker by spotless white turbans which some of them wore. A few others hailing from the same Presidency were in simplest native fashion, bareheaded and barefooted and otherwise lightly clad, their bodies from the waist upwards being only partially protected by muslin shawls. They had preferred to retain their national dress and manners; and in this respect they presented a marked contrast to the delegates from Bengal. Some of these appeared in entirely European costume, while others could easily be recognised as Bengalis by the peculiar cap with a flap behind which they had donned. None of them wore the gold rings or diamond pendants which adorned the ears of some of the Madrassees; nor had they their foreheads painted like their more orthodox and more conservative brethren from the Southern presidency. There were Hindustanis from Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow, some of whom wore muslin skull-caps and dresses chiefly made of the same fine cloth. There were delegates from the North-West—bearded, bulky, and large-limbed men—in their coats and flowing robes of different hues, and in turbans like those worn by Sikh soldiers. There were stalwart Sindhees from Karachee wearing their own tall hat surmounted by a broad brim at top instead of bottom. In the strange assemblage were to be observed the familiar figures of Banyas from Gujarat, of Mahrattas in their cart-wheel turbans, and of Parsees in their not very elegant head-dress, likened to a slanting roof. Assembled in the same hall, they presented a variety of costumes and complexions scarcely to be witnessed except at a fancy ball.” Now and again, we may add, a speaker expresses himself in a vernacular, and with the inborn Indian courtesy and patience the assembly will listen; but the language of the motley gathering is English; the address of the president and his rulings are in English; the protests, claims, and resolutions of the Congress are in English. For in the sphere of politics, the new national feeling confessedly looks to Britain for ideals. Apologies for India’s social customs and for her religious ideas and ideals are not wanting in India at the present time, for in matters social and religious, as we shall see, the political reformers are often ardently conservative, or pro-Indian at least. But in the sphere of politics it is the complete democratic constitution of Britain that looms before India’s leaders. Britons can view with sympathy the rise of the national feeling as the natural and inevitable fruit of contact with Britain and of education in the language of freedom, and even although the new problems of Indian statesmanship may call forth all the powers of British statesmen. Like a young man conscious of noble lineage and of great intellectual power, New India, brought up under Britain’s care, is loudly asserting that she can now take over the management of the continent which Britain has unified and made what it is.
Where the “National Congress” and the Congress ideas have sprung from is manifest when she first presents herself upon the Indian stage. As her first president she has a distinguished barrister of Calcutta, Mr. W.C. Bonnerjee, of brahman caste by birth, but out of caste altogether because of frequent visits to Britain. Patriot though he is—nay, rather, as a true patriot, he has broken and cast away the shackles of caste. His English education is manifest when he opens his lips, for in India there is no more complete master of the English language, and very few greater masters will be found even in Britain. Further, as her first General Secretary and general moving spirit, the first Congress has a Scotchman, Mr. A.O. Hume, commonly known as the “Father of the Congress.” His leading of the Congress we can understand when we know that he is the son of the celebrated reformer and member of Parliament, the late Dr. Joseph Hume.
Several of the claims of the Congress have been conceded in whole or in part. Since the first meeting in 1885, elected members have been added to the Legislative Councils in the three chief provinces, Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, and new Legislative Councils set up in the United Provinces and the Punjab. To the Council for all India, the Viceroy’s Council, also have been added five virtually elected members, out of a council now numbering about twenty-two members in all. Four of the new members represent the chief provinces, and the fifth the Chamber of Commerce, Calcutta. Other five the Viceroy nominates to represent other provinces or other interests. Looking at the representation of Indians, it is noteworthy that in 1880 only two Indians had seats in the Viceroy’s Council, whereas in 1905 there were no fewer than six. The Provincial Legislative Council of Bombay will suffice as illustration of the stage which Representative Government has now reached. Eight of the twenty-two members are virtually elected. That is to say, certain bodies nominate representatives, and only in most exceptional circumstances would the Governor refuse to accept the nominees. And who make the nominations? Who are the electors enjoying the new political citizenship of India? We shall not expect that the electors are “the people” in the British or American sense: no Congress yet asks for political rights for them. The idea regarding citizenship still is that it is a royal concession, as it were to royal burghs, not that it is one of the rights of men. The University elects a member to the Governor’s Council, for it has intelligence and can make its voice heard; the Corporation of Bombay elects a representative, for in the capital are concentrated the enlightenment and the wealth of the province; the importance of the British merchants must be recognised, and so the Chambers of Commerce of Bombay and Karachi send each a representative. Other groups of municipalities elect one; the boards of certain country districts elect one; and finally two groups of landlords elect one representative each. It comes to this, that the men of learning, the burgesses of the chief towns, the British traders, and the landowners and country gentlemen, have now a measure of citizenship in the modern sense of the word.
The same feeling of citizenship has been given recognition to in 759 towns, whose municipalities are now partly elected, the right of election having been greatly extended by the Local Self-Government Acts of 1882-84. In these Municipalities even more than in the higher Councils the new educated Indian comes to the front. According to the roll of voters, it is property that enjoys the municipal franchise; emphatically so, for a wealthy citizen of Calcutta might conceivably cast three hundred votes for his Municipality throughout the twenty-five wards of the city; but they are English-speaking Indians in all cases who are returned as members. Politically, this is the day of the English-educated Indians. Such is the stage of the recognition of this new idea of citizenship in India. The idea represents a great advance during the British period, although, broadly speaking, it has not yet reached the stage of British opinion prior to 1832. Nevertheless one feels justified in saying that in present circumstances the desire of the educated class for a measure of citizenship has been reasonably met. Of course at the examination for the Indian Civil Service, held annually in London, the Indian competes on a complete equality with all the youth of the Empire.