Indian Unrest - Sir Valentine Chirol

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Do you know that it is owing to your sins that Mother Durga has not come to accept your worship in Bengal this year? In fact, she is heaving deep sighs of sorrow—sighs which will bring a cataclysmic storm upon you. If you still care to save your country from utter ruin, mend your ways and keep your promises to the Mother.

      In other provinces where other deities are more popular it is they who are similarly called in aid. The Bedari of Lahore, for instance, reproduces from the Puranas the story of the tyrant Rajah Harnakath, who brought death on himself at the hands of Vishnu for attempting to kill his son Prahlad, whose offence was that he believed in God and championed the cause of justice, in order to liken British statesmen and Anglo-Indian officials to the wicked Rajah and the Indians to Prahlad. As most British statesmen and their representatives abroad are the enemies of liberty and justice and support slavery and oppression, the fall of Great Britain is near at hand, and India will then pass into the possession of her own sons.

      The Prem of Firozpur is inclined even to give Mr. Keir Hardie a niche in the Hindu Pantheon. Its editor dreamt he was at a meeting in a free and contented country. It was attended by some other Indians, and one of them recited verses bewailing the condition of India, which was once a heaven on earth and was now converted into a hell by its foreign rulers, &c. After prayers had been recited for India, some heavenly beings appeared, one of whom swore to do his best to relieve the sufferings of Indians. The editor learnt on inquiry that the dream country was England, the Indian speaker Bepin Chandra Pal, and the heavenly being Mr. Keir Hardie!

      The Sahaik, of Lahore, furnishes an apt illustration of the scurrilous abuse and calumny which constitute one of the favourite weapons of Hindu writers. Referring to the Malaria Conference held last year, it begins by remarking that when a famine occurs—

      relief works are opened only when the sufferings of the famine-stricken become acute, and their supervision is entrusted to a fat-salaried Englishman who swallows up half the collections, which amount could have fed hundreds of the poor people. Thus also with the forthcoming inquiries concerning malarial fever, which is spreading all over the country. Every Indian knows that, like the plague, this form of fever is due to the poverty and consequent physical weakness of the people. It is, however, to the mosquito that the authorities went for the causes of the disease, just as to the rats for the causes of plague. Different medicines and instruments were invented for extirpating the insect, doctors were also employed, and rewards paid for the writing of books. In this way crores of rupees went into the pockets of English shopkeepers and others. A trial is now being given to quinine, and lakhs-worth sold to Indians, English quinine manufacturers being thus enriched. Again a commission is about to sit on the heights of Simla. The commissioners will enjoy feasts and dances and drink brandy which will cost poor natives lakhs of rupees, and afterwards they will devise means to develop the trade in quinine or other drugs.

      The Ranjpur Vartabaha writes that in the local charitable dispensary a surgical operation was performed on a patient who died in two hours, and that a similar operation on a pregnant woman resulted in her death. It adds, with delicate sarcasm, that "the Chief Medical Officer should get his salary increased." The idea that Englishmen deliberately want to depopulate India is one that is sedulously propagated. Thus the Jhang Sial jeers at British "generosity" which has "converted India, one of the richest countries in the world, into the land of the starving," and British "wisdom" for wishing to "starve out the natives and reign over empty brick and mortar buildings."

      The Akash (Delhi), referring to the pension granted to the widow of Sir W. Curzon Wyllie, asks whether "the English can hold up their heads after this. Even their widows are fed by India. A nation whose widows are fed by another should never boast that it is an Imperial and self-respecting nation."

      In the same spirit another Punjab paper argues ironically from the speech of a Mahomedan member of the Punjab Legislative Council in condemnation of Dhingra that "all the white-skinned Europeans, including the English rulers of India, must be the lowest born people in the world, seeing that they are in the habit of killing natives every day."

      No public servants who venture to discharge their duty loyally fare worse at the hands of the Nationalist Press than Judges—especially if they are Indians. Mr. Justice Davar was the Parsee Judge who sentenced Tilak. The Kesari declared that "he had already settled the sentence in his own mind after a careful consideration of external circumstances," and "had made himself the laughing-stock of the whole world, like the meddlesome monkey in the fable who came to grief in trying to pull out the peg 'from a half-sawed beam,'" Now the Kesari was Tilak's own paper, and he was convicted on two seditious articles that had appeared in its columns, but the Kal, another Poona sheet, also maintained that everything was done on a prearranged plan. "There is no sense in saying that Mr. Tilak was sentenced according to law. There was mockery of justice, not justice." It added that "if the Hindus are to suppose Mr. Tilak guilty because an English Court of Justice had condemned him, Christians will have to forswear Christ because He was crucified by a Roman Court." The Karnatak Vaibhau recalled the story of the notorious washerman who, by scandalizing Rama, had been immortalized in the Ramayana. In the same way the names of Strachey—who sentenced Tilak at his first trial in 1897—and Davar would be remembered as long as history endured.

      Quotations could be multiplied ad infinitum and ad nauseam from the same papers—I have given only one from each—and from scores of others. These will suffice to show what the freedom of the Press stood for in India, in a country where there is an almost superstitious reverence for, and faith in, the printed word, where the influence of the Press is in proportion to the ignorance of the vast majority of its readers, and where, unfortunately the more violent and scurrilous a newspaper becomes, the more its popularity grows among the very classes that boast of their education. They are by no means obscure papers, and some of them, such as the Kal the Hind Swarajya, and especially the Yugantar, which became at one time a real power in Bengal, achieved a circulation hitherto unknown to the Indian Press. Can any Englishman, however fervent his faith in liberty, regret that some at least of these papers have now disappeared either as the result of prosecutions under the Indian Criminal Code or from the operation of the new Press Law? The mischief they have done still lives and will not be easily eradicated. It is the fashion in certain quarters to reply:—"But look at the Anglo-Indian newspapers, at the aggressive and contemptuous tone they assume towards the natives of India, at the encouragement they constantly give to racial hatred." Though I am not concerned to deny that, in the columns of a few English organs, there may be occasional lapses from good taste and right feeling, such sweeping charges against the Anglo-Indian Press as a whole are absolutely grotesque, and its most malevolent critics would be at a loss to quote anything, however remotely, resembling the exhortations to hatred and violence which have been the stock-in-trade not only of the most popular newspapers in the vernaculars, but of some even of the leading newspapers published in English, but edited and owned by Indians.

      Even such extracts as I have given above from vernacular newspapers do not by any means represent the lengths to which Indian "extremism" can go. They represent merely the literature of unrest which has been openly circulated in India. There is another and still more poisonous form which is smuggled into India from abroad and surreptitiously circulated.

       Table of Contents

      A HINDU REVIVAL

      Thirty years ago, when I first visited India, the young Western-educated Hindu was apt to be, at least intellectually, plus royaliste que le roi. he plucked with both hands at the fruits of the tree of Western knowledge. Some were enthusiastic students of English literature, and especially of English poetry. They had their Wordsworth and their Browning Societies. Others steeped themselves in English history and loved to draw their political inspiration from Milton and Burke and John Stuart Mill. Others, again, were the humble disciples of Kant and Schlegel, of Herbert Spencer and Darwin. But whatever their special talent bent might be, the vast majority professed allegiance to Western ideals, and if they had not altogether-and often far too hastily-abjured,

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