Viewpoints on Contemporary India (1918-1919).1
A great impetus has been given to the discussion of administrative reconstruction in India by the publication of the Montagu-. Chelmsford Report in 1918. The four books under review approach this subject from four different angles. The first presents the viewpoint of the Anglo-Indian civil service, the second expresses the sentiments of liberal-progressive British publicists, the third voices the opinion of such Indian radicals as are still loyalist enough to remain non-revolutionary, and the fourth is a more or less academic contribution to the study of modern nationalism.
1. An Antiquarian on Modern India.
Vincent Smith's qualifications for prescribing to the British people their duties with regard to the administration of India rest on the fact that he has devoted a lifetime to the study of Indian archaeology. His recommendations are as valuable as those of Professor Mahaffy would have been, if he had specified to Venizelos what policies Greece ought to pursue during the war against Germany, because, forsooth, he was a specialist in the Hellenistic culture of the Ptolemies. Smith's obscurantism, however, has had no influence even upon the cautious conservatives who are responsible for the new scheme for the government of India, which has recently gone into operation. His failure to be taken seriously is another object lesson to academicians who are much too absorbed in their antiquarian researches in "past politics" to be pervious to the influences of the new world-order,—not the least of which is the demand for a liberation of the human intellect from bondage to history, tradition and social inheritance.
2. A British Socialist on Young India.
But if Smith has failed to envisage the dynamic forces in political relations, Mr. Ramsay-Macdonald has tried to comprehend them by analyzing the problems of India "as a going concern." He starts with the following propositions: (1) that to-day the "political philosophy and axioms of the West are an essential part of Indian life" (page 2); (2) that the "Indian movement is following the lines of our own (British) liberal, radical and labor evolution" (page 23); (3) that the Indian Government is "now faced with an Indian opinion;" and (4) that the change has been brought about by "the growth in Indian merit and self-confidence," for even "the villages are now being stirred by nationalist propaganda" (pages 19-20). Arguing from these psychological premises, he concludes that "a pax Britannica is not the end; the end is Indian life, abundant, responsible, spontaneous" (page 112).
What Ramsay-Macdonald has written, however, is not a book of mere propaganda; it is the result of minute and critical investigation. No author, perhaps, has ever given such a realistic picture of the modifications in the social and economic life of India brought about by the present system of judicial administration as we find in this book. The first chapter presents a history of the Moslem movement, which unfortunately is ignored in all treatises on Indian politics. The author is not so captivated by enthusiasm for democracy as to minimize the difficulties of Indian representation (pages 73-77), and is therefore able to perceive that a representative system for India "cannot be created on any simple or consistent theory". The entire system of administration is presented in its historical development, the evolution of each part being described since its origins. Readers of Ilbert, Strachey and Chesney will obtain here a non-official view of the workings of Indian polity.
Ramsay-Macdonald's criticism of the existing system of government is for the most part that of the non-revolutionary nationalists. He does not, however, accept the nationalist opinion that "the land tax is the cause of the poverty of the Indian cultivator". Considerations of economic theory compel us to endorse his analysis of Indian taxation as generally sound and to agree with much of what he says about the oft-discussed "drain" of India's wealth to England. It is, indeed, only by recognizing a fundamental distinction between the economics of a subject race and the economics of imperialism that we can understand why some of the A, B, C's of economic thought are persistently ignored by Indian politicians and theorists in their discussion of foreign trade, land revenue, permanent assessment of rural areas, railway finance etc.
The Government of India is not intended to mince facts. It is an able account of some of the sacrifices and achievements that entitle Young India to recognition in the world's remaking, as well as of some of the creative forces. among the common people which are shaping the country's political geography. Ramsay-Macdonald offers, in the first place, a lucid history of the administrative system in India, secondly, a "nationalistic" criticism of the organs of government, which seeks to locate the root of the present troubles, thirdly, a programme of reform, which, as a member of the British Labour Party, the author considers to be necessary in order to save India for the Empire.
For, "whatever else Ramsay-Macdonald may be he is first and last an English patriot, i.e., an imperialist. His writings, therefore, are of value as exhibiting the lines of rapprochement that the main body of British socialism seeks to establish between a subject race and its masters. For this reason, the author's Awakening of India, published in 1908, during the period of the birth throes of the Young India movement became an international text-book
The attempt to reconcile the claims of Indian nationalism with the interests of an empire of alien rulers is, however, not the only consideration in Ramsay-Macdonald's present effort. The new volume has been produced in an international milieu which is characterized by at least two sets of conditions. The first are those generated by the talk of a League of Nations, and the second is the fait accompli of a socialist state in Bolshevik Russia. And it is because the author seeks to harmonize his theories with these novel phenomena that his book acquires an importance such as is hardly indicated by the limitations of its title.
3. India and the British Empire.
Ramsay-Macdonald suggests that India should be "tried" with the "responsibility of being tutor to some of the East African peoples under the care of the League of Nations."
"It would be a great experiment," he says. "If it failed, the failure would soon be detected and would produce no great harm; and if it succeeded, as I believe it would, it would stamp India with a dignity which would command for it a position of unquestioned equality amongst the federated nations of the Empire."
Evidently the author is far more liberal than Norman Angell who champions the league of nations not because it is likely to erect a platform of peace as between the East and the West but because a federation of European nations is indispensable, in his calculation, in order to defend the land of the whites against a possible com bination of "Japanese, Chinese, and other Asiatics" who might, as he fears, "seek to interpret our ideals of democracy as entitling them to a real equality of treatment."
But here Ramsay-Macdonald's logic, idealistic as it is, bids farewell to Realpolitik. Why should he be so anxious, a Frenchman might ask, for still another evidence of India's "dignity" and "unquestioned equality amongst the federated nations of the Empire"? As a student of colonial politics, Ramsay-Macdonald must be thoroughly familiar with the active part that India's men, money, and material resources have played during a whole century in the expansion of England. Was it not with Indian help that Napoleon's Oriental allies were subdued? Was it not with Indian contributions in brain, brawn and bullion that the Persian Gulf was converted into a British lake, and Russia and France obliged to set a limit to their ambitions in Asia and North Africa? India has been "tried" with plenty of such "experiments" from the days of the British conquests of Hongkong down to the pacification of South Africa and Egypt. And it may be asked whether she has ever been less responsive or less successful than in the recent war against Great Britain's German enemies ending in the occupation of Mesopotamia and Palestine.
Possibly Norman Angell is a more correct interpreter of the British psychology in so far as he shudders at the idea of a "real equality of treatment" being claimed by Asians.
4. The Proletariat and Nationalism.
But if Ramsay-Macdonald fails here to square theories to facts because of his idealism viz. because of an enthusiasm for the subject race, in his analysis of the relations between socialism and nationalism he fails no less, but for an opposite reason, viz. that he is not idealistic enough. For the time being, the methodology of subject races happens to lie beyond his ken. The author is aware that in India as elsewhere capitalistic tendencies are becoming rampant, and the interests of the masses, the proletariat, the ryot, and the working men are often overlooked in bourgeoisie mentality. Ergo, argues he, let the British rulers boss the Indian administration as ma-bap i.e. as protectors of the people. This is Leninism without the sincerity of a Lenin.
In so far as Ramsay-Macdonald is an imperialist, his views although those of a Laborite cannot fail to be distasteful to Young India. On the other hand, as a socialist he flies in the face of some of its postulates. Speaking of the tariff, he says that "whoever has visited the working-class districts of Bombay with their squalid overcrowding, their filthy dens of disease, ... will pause before welcoming any rapid strengthening of the economic influences which maintain them until a public opinion and body of legislation have been created to protect the people whose labors will be necessary for the new factories." The nationalist will probably rub his eyes after reading this and declare that a morganatic alliance between Indian nationalism and British labour is an unnatural union.
For, according to the orthodox philosophy of nationalism the adjustment of relations between labour and capital in each state is a domestic problem, and must not be used as a pretext for intervention on humanitarian grounds by a foreign power or for the prolongation of alien control over a subject country. But the overtures to Young India from Eur-American labour as organized in the Communist Third International of Moscow, the Syndicalists of Germany, the International Anti-Military Bureau of the Hague, or the Clarté group of Paris are more consistent and bespeak a more honest attempt at world-reconstruction in so far as the purely theoretical issues are concerned.
Thanks to the war and the revolutionary activities of Indian patriots India is today a question of practical politics in mankind's public life, not less so than was Poland in Europe and in the United States until her re-emergence the other day as a sovereign unit in international affairs. Not only journalists and university-minded people but even congressmen in their senatorial capacity and labor unions as organized bodies have made notorious the facts that in the Imperial medical and bacteriological service of India the Blue Books mention 24 English officers as against 5 Indian names, in the educational service, of the 37 men 34 are English, and of the 38 in agricultural service only 5 are Indian, and so forth.
Even the most rabid advocate of the economic interpretation of history knows that there is a limit to his doctrine. Since the ages depicted in Hesiod's Works and Days the conflict between patricians and plebs has been an eternal question in race-development. But no amount of argument in the name of international humanitarianism could convince an American of the wisdom of placing the United States under, say, French domination, because, for sooth, the interests of the American masses would be better handled by the countrymen of St. Simon, Louis Blanc and Jaurès than they are by their present masters. Nor could the people of the Argentine be advised with any hope of success to submit to Russian control in order that the "class-struggle" arising among them from the labour-unions of Italian immigrants, might have the benefit of political doctoring at the hands of the latest experts in communistic government. To be logical, Ramsay-Macdonald would have to believe, as an international socialist, that there is nothing to choose between a Britain under German rule and a Britain under British rule, so long as the ruling-class consists for the most part of profiteers and slum-proprietors and is identified in one way or another with the capitalists.
This is a fallacy which comes from a misunderstanding of recent events in Russia. It is, in fact, a variety of counterfeit Bolshevism, manufactured in England, "not for internal use," however, but "for external application." For if there is one fact clearly revealed by the new Russia it is the truism that democracy or no democracy, social equality or no social equality, political freedom, as the world is constituted to day, is the first vital desideratum in all those regions where one people is governed by another. The primary need to-day of every Asian people is an absolute and unconditioned swaraj (sovereignty) of the Japanese pattern. All questions as to the form of government, whether monarchial, republican or soviet, are of subsidiary importance at the present moment. In any case, these are problems of internal politics, and so too are such questions as the adjustment of the relations between capital and labour, the redistribution of lands, forests and mines, the repudiation of national debts, "progressive taxation," and the like. To ignore this fundamental consideration or in any way to belittle it, while analyzing the nationalistic ideals of Young India, is hardly to assist in the clearing-up of long-standing international muddles.
5. An Indian Interpreter.
Yet on the whole the transition from the position of British Labour to that of Mr. Lajpat Rai is not difficult; for after all, the demands of Indian constitutionalists dare not rise higher than, nor even differ materially from, the promises or "pious wishes" of their comrades overseas. The chief value of The Political Future of India lies in the publicity which the author has given to the party he condemns, the party of freedom, revolution and "direct action." This movement has had no historian and interpreter, but the account of all Indian attempts since 1905 to "make foreign government impossible" and of their ramifications in the public life of France, the United States, Germany and Japan has been carefully collected for the British Government by the Rowlatt Committee in their Report on Revolutionary Conspiracies in India (1918). It is on this bulky official document that Rai's summary is based. His book, though it contains useful appendices, does not evidently aim at furnishing its readers with more than a veteran agitator's immediate reactions to the reform scheme proposed by Montagu and Chelmsford. As such it may be consulted as affording a glimpse into the mind of the Indian National Congress.
But the documents printed in the preface, bearing on the atrocities to which men, women and children in the Punjab were subjected in 1919 have a deep significance for social science in so far as they constitute an index of the nature and extent of the degrading plight which none but a race that is hastening towards annihilation can tolerate in shame and silence. Once again has it been made clear that British rule in India, as white rule or albinocracy everywhere in Asia and Africa, exists by virtue of the military impotency to which the peoples of the lands have been reduced by legislation and coercion. This aspect of the "white man's burden" has naturally been ignored by the League of Nations, bent as it is on keeping the enslaved territories down to their servile condition as long as possible and by those labour politicians who make a profession of displaying friendship for the dependencies and mandated areas of the earth's surface.
6. Map-Making as a Function of Revolutions.
Among the many circumstances which obscure the problem of India to students of international relations none is more pernicious than the systematic blindness to the simple truism that there is no such country as India. The weakest link in the chain of arguments advanced by Indian politicians is that bearing on the "Indian States" which, numbering over half a thousand, cover, in various degrees of subjection to Great Britain, over a third of the South Asian sub-continent and comprise about twenty-five per cent of its population. But even more serious than this breach in the alleged unity of India is the racial or linguistic disparity of the different provinces, a disparity which no honest application of Mazzini's nationality-principle or of the Bolshevist theory of self-determination could ever ignore.
As for the differences between Hindus and Mohammedans, and the caste divisions in social life of which even the tyro in Indian affairs glibly talks, they are quite insignificant when legal, political, or economic organization is considered. By no means are they more potent as hindrances to national self-realization than are the conditions of Realpolitik obtaining in the West today.
As in Europe, with its score of kingdoms and republics and its dozen of new "iridentas," in India the real and only legitimate basis of political differentiation is territorial, allowing of course for the complications that are inevitable everywhere because of the borderland Alsace-Lorraine, Tyrols, Silesias, and the question of minorities. Indeed, the house of cards called United India would have been a thing of the past had the fortunes of the last war been ever so different from what they happened to be; for the terms of a victorious Germany in regard to Asia and Africa would hardly have been less ruthless, humanly speaking, than were those of the Allies in regard to the national boundaries of Central Europe. The present map of India, hodge-podge as it is, is the greatest superstition of Indian patriots; the fallacy of their political writers consists in trying to envisage future state-making on the lines of the map that has been artificially created by the haphazard annexations of the British since 1757.
7. Two Indias.
These considerations will not trouble the reader of Lajpat Rai's book. The strength and weakness of Rai are the strength and weakness of his school, of the political party to which he belongs. Constructive statesmanship is not to be expected from persons who by the force of circumstances are habituated chiefly to ventilate opinions that have no chance of being done into life, opinions embodying cut and dried resistance to cut and dried resolutions made by the alien Foreign Office—persons who have neither the intellectual boldness to think in terms of India's freedom nor the moral sincerity to be champions of the British empire.
The world has to recognize once for all that there are two. Indias so far as politics is concerned-one the India that is in evidence and the other the India that is underground. It is from the open or surface India that speakers and writers, men of the Indian National Congress or of the Moslem League (Mr. Rai, for instance), come. The India of subterranean energies chooses to maintain a solemn silence except only in armed upheavals whose history and philosophy have laboriously to be unearthed by officers of the criminal investigation department.
It is the militaristic activity of this silent and sullen India with its network of sympathizers and agents in France, America, Germany, Japan, and Russia that taxes the brains of the far-sighted statesmen of Great Britain, who can afford almost to ignore the India of speaking agitators as such. All the sops which those statesmen have been offering since 1908 in order to "rally the moderates to the Crown," as the phrase goes in Anglo-Indian vocabulary, are but prizes that non-radical or "Menshevik" India enjoys on the unseen shoulders of bomb-throwers and arms-smugglers whose idealism does not stop short of anything but sovereign independence of the Japanese type.
Even superficial observers could not have failed to notice during and since the war that the open demands of the Indian National Congress and of the Moslem League rise in geometrical progression according as the secret societies are felt mysteriously to be growing in numbers and extending their conquests from class to class. Only in view of this fact are Rai's essay and the latest speeches by political orators on fiscal autonomy, educational budget, army and navy expenses, and tariff reform of importance to international diplomats, they issue from the only channels through which the surface-ripples of contemporary India can be observed.
Hopelessly situated as patriotic India is from the standpoint of military preparedness, the school of open politics can only exhibit to the world an M. K. Gandhi, with his banner of "devotion to truth" (Satyâgraha) and passive resistance (the only form of resistance, by the way, conceivable under the circumstances). And while Mohammed Ali, a Moslem leader, preaches the theocratic ideal of the kingdom of Allah (God), Rabindranath Tagore, the Hindu, invites his compatriots to offer a prayer to God to give "power to suffer." What else, then, can Mr. Rai do but seek good company by exhorting his emasculated countrymen to study virtue and morality? Verily, a subject race can have patriotism but no politics, unless it be the politics of echoing the sentiments of a half dozen personal friends in the master race, or of serving as contented second fiddles to the alien ruler in order to consolidate and fortify his empire against the eventualities of the "next war."
8. An Attempt at Theorizing.
Theoretical considerations which are as a rule ignored in the other publications form an important feature in Mr. R. N. Gilchrist's Indian Nationality. The essays arose in 1915-16 out of an attempt to explain the racial background of the Great War. Subsequently the author was led to discuss the question "whether there is or will be an Indian unity analogous to the unity of Canada, Australia or New Zealand." The volume is thus a contribution to the comparative study of contemporary nationalism.
Professor Gilchrist's philosophy of nationality is calculated to demonstrate, as a matter of course, that the "Allies were fighting for the good of humanity" and "not that war in itself is right but that Germany was in the wrong" (p. 41). The author takes no cognizance of the elementary fact of international politics that Poles, Tchechs, and other peoples have been enabled to form national states of their own, not because of their right to freedom, inherent as it should be considered to be in every race, but because in the conjuncture of diplomatic manœuvres2 it had been decreed that the Teutonic empires should be crushed, and especially because there was a power strong enough, commercially, financially, and militarily or rather navally, to bring them to their knees.
Territory, race, language, etc., are discussed in a popular manner as elements of nationality, which is described as "essentially a spiritual thing" (page 15). But while Gilchrist rightly rejects a monistic basis for what may be called the nation-making power, he overlooks the fact that in national movements one of the greatest "spiritual" factors is the will of a people to emancipate itself from foreign domination. The omission of this consideration vitiates fundamentally his analysis of the diversities of Indian life, although much of it is accurate, up to date and often original (pages 48-153).
The author does not content himself with the statement that "in India there is a collection of nationalities without a single nationality for the whole." The various aspects of rapprochement between Hindus and Moslems (pages 102, 103), the evidences of the constant flexibility of caste (pages 121, 123, 170) and the elasticity of Hindu law (pages 132, 133), as well as the "democratic movements" and other "constructive possibilities" (pages 138-141) in the social life of India to-day, have not escaped his searching inquiry.
9. Why not a Pluralistic but Free India?
Nevertheless, Gilchrist's logic for Asia is different from his logic for Europe. He is solicitous enough that the few thousands or hundreds of thousands of Croats, Moravians, Letts and Slovenes should attain to the dignity of national statehood. But the twenty language groups of India, each numbering more than a million people, some more than twenty-five millions and one or two more than forty-millions, should be satisfied with Lord Acton's denun ciation of nationalism! Indeed, in the "small nationalities" of India the author cannot detect any unities except the unity of permanent subjection to a foreign race. Their intelligentsia are condemned as sicklied o'er with "national neurasthenia."
There is, it is true, as Strachey asserts, no India—but in exactly the same sense that there is no Europe. Orissa is at least as real as Belgium or Holland, the Punjab is no less a unit than Italy or the United Kingdom, and Bengal is more compact and homogeneous than France. Besides, India has her Denmark's, Portugals, Greeces and Finlands. But Gilchrist fears that a province like Bengal, "with a dominant and strong vernacular," if left to itself, might easily claim the "complete vernacularization of education as a national right" (page 79). Why this apprehension? What would be the harm to democracy, civilization and humanity, even a champion of the League of Nations might be permitted to inquire, should the forty to fifty million people of a sovereign Republic of Bengal actually attempt such a thing and set up French, German or English as a compulsory second language, and Japanese, Russian or Spanish as an optional third?
10. Comparative Politics.
Whatever be the political future of India, the student of constitutions will in the meanwhile appreciate Gilchrist's description of Indian finance as "federal," of the Canadian type (page 238). The tendency toward the federalization of India is further evident, as he interprets it, in the provisions of the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, which seeks by the institution of the Council of Princes to assimilate the 650 States to the imperial system (page 245).
The parallel between the Roman Empire and the British Empire has often been drawn to the satisfaction of the "superior races." One need not quarrel with this, but when Gilchrist suggests that English officers in the Indian services are not more objectionable than are European and American experts in the Japanese (page 221), one can not but feel that when an Englishman indulges in sympathy for a subject race he is likely to lose all sense of humor.
The weakest chapter in the book is that on Tagore's Nationalism. The poet-essayist's idea that India's contribution to the world is to be made in the moral and spiritual sphere, and that what India needs is not political freedom but social reform (pages 155-156, 168), should have been regarded by a student of economics as one-sided, to say the least. Moreover, the author fails to detect in Tagore's lectures an intense anti-British animus which disguises itself under the mask of an all-round philippic against "the Nation" as Western "organized power."
Gilchrist does not seem to be acquainted with recent intensive researches in Indian history. In references to the polity of old India his ignorance is surpassed, however, by that of Professor Ramsay Muir, who contributes an introduction to the volume. The latter's sweeping generalizations in regard to Hindu legal, political and social institutions (pages XI—XIV) betray, in the first place, an inadequate comprehension of comparative history and, in the second place, an unquestioning reliance on the cheap indology popularized in the nineteenth century by Maine and Max Müller.
Notes
- Indian Constitutional Reform. By Vincent A. Smith, Oxford University Press, 1919-118 pp.↩
- The Government of India. By J. Ramsay Macdonald, London, The Swarthmore Press, Ltd., 1919—ix, 291 pp.
- The Political Future of India. By Lajpat Rai, New York, Huebsch, 1919—xxviii, 237 pp.
- Indian Nationality. By R. N. Gilchrist, London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1920—xviii, 246 pp.
- Vide the present author's Science of History and the Hope of Mankind (London 1912) for a discussion of the importance of vishva-shakti (worldforces; in all nationality-movements.↩