From Adam's Peak to Elephanta

The first objects that I saw in India—indeed I saw them while still well out at sea—were a lighthouse and a factory chimney! This was at Tuticorin, a little place in the extreme south; but afterwards I found that these objects represented remarkably well the vast spread of Western influences all over the country, in their two great main forms, science and commercialism.

I had no idea, until I landed, how Western ideas and education have of late years overrun the cities and towns, even down to the small towns, of India; but I was destined to be speedily enlightened on this subject. Having a few hours to spare at Tuticorin, I was walking up and down by the sad sea-waves when I noticed a youth of about seventeen reading a book. Glancing over his shoulder, to my surprise I saw it was our old friend “Todhunter’s Euclid.” The youth looked like any other son of the people, undistinguished for wealth or rank—for in this country there is no great distinction in dress between rich and poor—simply clad in his cotton or muslin wrap, with bare head and bare feet; and naturally I remonstrated with him on his conduct. “O yes,” he said in English, “I am reading Euclid—I belong to Bishop Caldwell’s College.”—“Bishop Caldwell’s College?”—“Yes,” he said, “it is a large college here, with 200 boys, from ages of 13 or 14 up to 23 or 24.”—“Indeed, and what do you read?”—“Oh, we read Algebra and Euclid,” he replied enthusiastically, “and English History and Natural Science and Mill’s Political Economy, and” (but here his voice fell a semitone) “we learn two chapters of the Bible by heart every day.” By this time other boys had come up, and I soon found myself the centre of a small crowd, and conversing to them about England, and its well-known scholars and politicians, and a variety of things about which they asked eager questions. “Come and see the college,” at last they said, seeing I was interested; and so we adjourned—a troop of about fifty—into a courtyard containing various school-buildings. There did not seem to be any masters about, and after showing me some of the class-rooms, which were fitted up much like English class-rooms, they took me to the dormitory. The dormitory was a spacious room or hall, large enough I daresay to accommodate most of the scholars, but to my surprise it contained not a single bit of furniture—not a bed or a chair or a table, far less a washstand; only round the wall on the floor were the boys’ boxes—mostly small enough—and grass mats which, unrolled at night, they used for sleeping on. This (combined with J. S. Mill) was plain living and high thinking indeed. Seeing my look of mingled amusement and surprise, they said with a chuckle, “Come and see the dining-hall”—lo! another room of about the same size—this time with nothing in it, except plates distributed at equal distances about the floor! The meal hour was just approaching, and the boys squatting down with crossed feet took each a plate upon his lap, while serving-men going round with huge bowls of curry and rice supplied them with food, which they ate with their fingers.

It certainly impressed me a good deal to find a high level of Western education going on, and among boys, many of them evidently from their conversation intelligent enough, under such extremely simple conditions, and in so unimportant a place as Tuticorin might appear. But I soon found that similar institutions—not all fortunately involving two chapters of the Bible every day, and not all quite so simple in their interior instalments—existed all over the land. Not only are there universities at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, granting degrees on a broad foundation of Western learning, and affiliated to Oxford and Cambridge in such a way that the student, having taken his B.A. at either of the Indian universities, can now take a further degree at either of the English ones after two years’ residence only; but there are important colleges and high schools in all the principal towns; and a graduated network of instruction down to the native village schools all over the land. Besides these there are medical colleges, such as the Grant Medical College at Bombay; women’s colleges, like the Bethune College at Calcutta, which has fifty or sixty women students, and which passed six women graduates in the Calcutta university examinations in 1890; and other institutions. In most cases the principals of these higher institutions are English, but the staff is largely native.

And as a part of Western education I suppose one may include our games and sports, which are rapidly coming into use and supplanting, in populous centres, the native exercises. It is a curious and unexpected sight to see troops of dark-skinned and barefooted lads and men playing cricket—but it is a sight one may meet with in any of the towns now-a-days in the cooler weather. At Bombay the maidans are simply crowded at times with cricketers—Parsee clubs, Hindu clubs, Eurasians, English—I reckoned I could count a score of pitches one day from the place where I was sitting. The same at Calcutta. The same at Nagpore, with golf going on as well. Yet one cannot help noticing the separation of the different sections of the population, even in their games—the English cricket-ground, the “second-class” English ground, the Eurasian ground, the Hindu and Mahomedan—all distinct!

The effect of this rush of Western ideas and education is of course what one might expect—and what I have already alluded to once or twice—namely, to discredit the old religion and the old caste-practices. As my friend the schoolmaster said at Calcutta, “No one believes in all this now”; by no one meaning no one who belongs to the new movement and has gone through the Western curriculum—the “young India.”

The question may be asked then, What does the young India believe in? It has practically abandoned the religion of its fathers, largely scoffs at it, does it accept Christianity in any form in its place? I believe we may reply No. Christianity in its missions and its Salvation armies, though it may move a little among the masses, does not to any extent touch the advanced and educated sections. No, the latter read Mill, Spencer and Huxley, and they have quite naturally and in good faith adopted the philosophy of their teachers—the scientific materialism which had its full vogue in England some twenty years ago, but which is now perhaps somewhat on the wane. As one of these enthusiasts said to me one day, “We are all Agnostics now.” With that extraordinary quickness and receptivity which is one of the great features of the Hindu mind, though beginning the study so much later in the day, they have absorbed the teachings of modern science and leapt to its conclusions almost as soon as we have in the West. That the movement will remain at this point seems to me in the highest degree unlikely. There may be a reaction back to the old standpoint, or, what is more hopeful, a forward effort to rehabilitate the profound teachings of their forefathers into forms more suited to the times in which we live, and freed from the many absurdities which have gathered round the old tradition.

The second great factor in modern India is the growth of Commercialism. This is very remarkable, and is likely to be more so. Not only at Tuticorin, but at a multitude of places are factory chimneys growing up. At Nagpore I saw a cotton-mill employing hundreds of hands. At Bombay there are between thirty and forty large cotton-mills, there is a manufacturing quarter, and a small forest of chimneys belching forth their filth into the otherwise cloudless blue.

I visited one of the largest of these mills (that of the United Spinning and Weaving Co.) with a friend who at one time had worked there. It was the counterpart of at Lancashire cotton-mill. There was the same great oblong building in three or four storeys, the same spinning jenny and other machinery (all of course brought out from England, and including a splendid high-pressure condensing engine of 2,000 H.P.), the same wicked roar and scream of wheels, and the same sickening hurry and scramble. But how strange to see the poor thin oysters working under the old familiar conditions of dirt and unhealth—their dark skins looking darker with grease and dust, their passive faces more passive than ever—to see scores of Hindu girls with huge ear-rings and nose-rings threading their way among the machinery, looking so small, compared with our women, and so abstracted and dreamy that it hardly seemed safe. And here a little naked boy about 10 years of age, minding a spinning jenny and taking up the broken threads, as clever and as deft as can be. Fortunately the Hindu mind takes things easier than the English, and refuses to be pressed; for the hours are shamefully long and there is but little respite from toil.

There is no doubt that great fortunes have been and are being made in this cotton business. It can hardly be otherwise, for as long as Manchester is in the market the goods of Bombay are in a line as to price with the products of English manufacture; but they are produced at very much less cost. I suppose the average wage for adults in one of these mills is not more than 8d. a day (if so much), and the difference between this and 2s. 8d. a day say as in England, gives 2s. per diem saved on each employee. In the mill that I visited there are 1,100 hands—say 1,000 adults; that gives a saving of 1,000 × 2 shillings, or £100, a day; or £30,000 a year. Against this must be set the increased price of coal, which they get all the way from England (the coal of the country being inferior) at Rs. 15 to 17 per ton—say 25 tons a day at 20s. added cost to what it would be in England—i.e., £25 a day, or £7,500 a year. Then it is clear that despite this and some other drawbacks, the balance in favor of production in India is very great; and the dividends of the cotton-mills at Bombay certainly show it, for they run at 20, 25, 50 and even 80 per cent., with very few below 20.

It is clear that such profits as these are likely to draw capital out to India in rapidly increasing degree, and we may expect a vast development of manufacturing industry there during the next decade or two. The country—or at any rate the town-centres—will be largely commercialised. And as far as the people themselves are concerned, though the life in mills is wretched enough, still it offers a specious change from the dull round of peasant labor, and something like a secure wage (if only a pittance) to a man who in his native village would hardly see the glint of coin from one year’s end to another; the bustle and stir of the town too is an attraction; and so some of the same causes which have already in England brought about the depletion of the land in favor of the congestion of the cities, are beginning to work in India.

Then beside the manual employment which our commercial institutions provide there are innumerable trading posts and clerkships, connected with merchants’ houses, banks, railways, post-offices, and all manner of public works, all of which practically are filled by natives; and some of which, with the moderate salaries attached, are eagerly sought after. One hardly realises till one sees it, how completely these great organizations are carried on—except for perhaps one or two Englishmen at the head—by native labor; but when one does see this one realises also how important a part of the whole population this section—which is thus ministering to and extending the bounds of modern life—is becoming. And this section again is supplemented by at least an equally numerous section which, if not already employed in the same way, is desirous of becoming so. And of course among both these sections Western ideals and standards flourish; competition is gradually coming to be looked on as a natural law of society; and Caste and the old Family system are more or less rapidly disintegrating.

Such changes as these are naturally important, and indeed in an old and conservative country like India strike one as very remarkable—but they are made even more important by the political complexion they have of late years assumed. In the National Indian Congress we see that not only the outer forms of life and thought, but the political and social ideas which belong to the same stage of historical development, have migrated from West to East. The people—or at least those sections of it of which we are speaking—are infected not only with Darwin and Huxley, but with a belief in the ballot, in parliaments and town-councils, and in constitutionalism and representative government generally. The N. I. C. brings together from 1,000 to 1,500 delegates annually from all parts of India, representing a variety of different races and sections, and elected in many of the larger towns with the utmost enthusiasm; and this by itself is a striking fact—a fact quite comparable in its way with the meetings of the Labor Congresses in late years in the capitals of Europe. Its conferences have been mostly devoted to such political questions as the application of the elective principle to municipal and imperial councils, and to such social questions as that of child-marriage; and these subjects and the speeches concerning them are again reviewed and reported by a great number of newspapers printed both in English and the vernacular tongues, and having a large circulation. Certainly it is probable that the Congresses will not immediately lead to any very striking results—indeed it is hard to see how they could do so; but the fact of the existence of the N. I. C. movement alone is a pregnant one, and backed as it is by economical changes, it is not likely—though it may change its form—to evaporate into mere nothingness.

In fact—despite the efforts of certain parties to minimise it—it seems to me evident that we are face to face with an important social movement in India. What the upshot of it may be no one probably can tell—it may subside again in time, or it may gather volume and force towards some definite issue; but it certainly cannot be ignored. The Pagetts, M.P., may be ponderously superficial about it, but the Kiplings merry are at least equally far from the truth. Of course in actual numerical strength as compared with the whole population the party may be small; but then, as in other such movements, since it is just the most active and energetic folk who join them, their import cannot be measured by mere numbers. It is useless again to say that because the movement is not acknowledged by the peasants, or by the religious folk, or because it is regarded with a jealous eye by certain sections, that therefore it is of no account; because similar things are always said and always have been said of every new social effort—in its inception—however popular or influential it may afterwards become.

The question which is most interesting at this juncture to any one who recognises that there really is something like a change of attitude taking place in the Indian peoples, is: How do the Anglo-Indians regard this change? and my answer to this—though given with diffidence—since it is a large generalisation and there may be, certainly are, many exceptions to it—is: I believe that taken as a whole the Anglos look upon it with a mingled sentiment of Fear and Dislike. I think they look upon the movement with a certain amount of Fear—perhaps not unnaturally. The remembrance of the Mutiny of ’57 is before them; they feel themselves to be a mere handful among millions. And I am sure they look upon it with Dislike, for as said above there is no real touch, no real sympathy, between them and the native races. However it may be for the liberalising Englishman at home to indulge in a sentimental sympathy with the aspiring oyster, the Britisher in India feels that the relation is only tolerable as long as there is a fixed and impassable distinction between the ruler and the ruled. Take that away, let the two races come into actual contact on an equality, and ... but the thought is not to be endured.

And this feeling of race-dislike is I think—as I have hinted in an earlier chapter—enhanced by the fact that the Britisher in India is a “class” man in his social feeling. I have several times had occasion to think that the bulk-people of the two countries—though by no means agreeing with each other—would, if intercourse were at all possible, get on better together than the actual parties do at present. The evils of a commercial class-government which we are beginning to realise so acutely at home—the want of touch between the rulers and the ruled, the testing of all politics by the touchstone of commercial profits and dividends, the consequent enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, the growth of slum and factory life, and the impoverishment of the peasant and the farmer, are curiously paralleled by what is taking place in India; and in many respects it is becoming necessary to realise that some of our difficulties in India are not merely such as belong to the country itself, but are part and parcel of the same problem which is beginning to vex us at home—the social problem, namely. The same narrowness of social creed, the entire decadence of the old standards of gentle birth without their replacement by any new ideal, worthy to be so called, the same trumpery earmarks of society-connection, etc., distinguish the ruling classes in one country as in the other; and in both are the signals of coming change.

At the same time it would be absurd to assume that the native of India is free from serious defects which make the problem, to the Anglo-Indian, ever so much more difficult of solution. And of these probably the tendency to evasion, deceit, and underhand dealing is the most serious. The Hindu especially with his subtle mind and passive character is thus unreliable; it is difficult to find a man who will stick with absolute fidelity to his word, or of whom you can be certain that his ostensible object is his real one; and naturally this sort of thing creates estrangement.

To my mind this social gulf existing between the rulers and the ruled is the most pregnant fact of our presence in India—the one that calls most for attention, and that looms biggest with consequences for the future. Misunderstandings of all kinds flow from it. “When this want of intercourse,” says Beck in his Essays on Indian Topics, “between the communities or a reasonable number of people of each, is fixed on my attention, I often feel with a sinking of the heart that the end of the British Indian Empire is not far distant.”

I have already pointed out (p. 276) how clear it is by the example of Aligarh that friendly intercourse is possible between the two sections—though we have allowed that it is difficult to bring about. Mr. Beck corroborates this in his Essays by strong expressions. He says (p. 89), “An Englishman would probably be dubbed a lunatic if he confessed that the only thing which made life tolerable in his Indian exile was the culture, the interest, and the affection he found in native society. Such an Englishman will therefore at most hint at his condition”; and again—“As one whose circumstances have compelled him to see more of the people of India than the average Englishman, I can only say that the effort repays itself, and that, incredible though it may appear, all degrees of friendship are possible between the Anglo-Indian and his Eastern fellow-subject.” And further on, after urging the importance, the vast importance, of cultivating this intercourse, and so attempting to bridge the fatal gulf, he says:—“To know the people, and to be so trusted by them that they will open out to us the inmost recesses of their hearts; to see them daily; to come to love them as those who have in their nature but an average share of affection cannot help loving them when they know them well—this is our ideal for the Indian civilian. Some Englishmen act up to this ideal: in the early days of our rule several did. If it become the normal thing the Indian Empire will be built upon a rock so that nothing can shake it. Agitation and sedition will vanish as ugly shadows. Had it existed in 1857 the crash would not have come.”

The writer of the above paragraphs thinks nothing of the N. I. C. movement, or rather I should say thinks unfavorably of it; but of the importance of bridging the social gulf he cannot say enough—and in this latter point, as far as I feel competent to form an opinion at all, I entirely agree with him. But will it ever be bridged? Unfortunately the few who share such sentiments as those I have quoted are very few and far between—and of those the greater number must as I have already explained be tied and bound in the chains of officialdom. “The Anglo-Indian world up to the hour when the great tragedy of ’57 burst upon them was busily amusing itself as best it can in this country with social nothings”—and how is it amusing itself now? The most damning fact that I know against the average English attitude towards the natives, is the fact that one of the very few places besides Aligarh, where there is any cordial feeling between the two parties, is Hyderabad—a place in which, on account of its being under the Nizam, the officials are natives, and their position therefore prevents their being trampled on!

If the Congress movement is destined to become a great political movement, it must it seems to me eventuate in one of two ways—either in violence and civil war, owing to determined hostility on the part of our Government and the continual widening of the breach between the two peoples; or,—which is more likely—if our Government grants more and more representative power to the people—in the immense growth of political and constitutional life among them, and the gradual drowning out of British rule thereby. There is a third possibility—namely the withdrawal of our government, owing to troubles and changes at home. Either of these alternatives would only be the beginning of long other vistas of change, which we need not attempt to discuss. They all involve the decadence of our political power in India, and certainly, situated as we are—unable to really inhabit the country and adapt ourselves to the climate, and with growing social forces around us—I can neither see nor imagine any other conclusion.

The Congress movement being founded on the economical causes—the growth of commercialism, etc.—it is hard to believe that it will not go on and spread. Certainly it may alter its name and programme; but granted that commercialism is going to establish itself, it is surely impossible to imagine it will do so, among so acute and subtle a people as the Hindus, without bringing with it the particular forms of political life which go with it, and really belong to it.

One of the most far-reaching and penetrating ways in which this Western movement is influencing India is in its action on the sense of property. The conception of property, as I have already pointed out once or twice, is gradually veering from the communistic to the highly individualistic. In all departments, whether in the family or the township or the caste, the idea of joint possession or joint regulation of goods or land for common purposes is dying out in favor of separate and distinct holding for purely individual ends. It is well known what an immense revolution in the structure of society has taken place, in the history of various races and peoples, when this change of conception has set in. Nor is it likely that India will prove altogether an exception to the rule. For the change is going on not only—as might fairly be expected—in the great cities, where Western influence is directly felt, but even in the agricultural regions, where ever since the British occupation it has been slowly spreading, partly through the indirect action of British laws and land settlements, and partly through the gradual infiltration, in a variety of ways, of commercial and competitive modes of thought.

Now no estimate of Indian affairs and movements can be said to be of value, which does not take account of the weight—one might say the dead weight—of its agricultural life: the 80 or 90 per cent. of the population who live secluded in small villages, in the most primitive fashion, with their village goddess and their Hindu temple—hardly knowing what government they live under, and apparently untouched from age to age by invention and what we call progress. Nor can the conservative force so represented be well exaggerated. But if even this agricultural mass is beginning to slide, we have indeed evidence that great forces are at work. If the village communities are going to break up, and the old bonds of rural society to dissolve, we may be destined to witness, as Henry Maine suggests, the recurrence of “that terrible problem of pauperism which began to press on English statesmen as soon as the old English cultivating groups began distinctly to fall to pieces.” “In India however,” he says, “the solution will be far more difficult than it has proved here.”

All this assumes the continued spread and growth of the commercial ideal in India—which is a large question, and wide in its bearings. Considering all the forces which tend now-a-days in that direction, and the apparent inevitableness of the thing as a phase of modern life at home, its growth in India for some years to come seems hardly doubtful. But it is a curious phenomenon. Anything more antagonistic to the genius of ancient India—the Wisdom-land—than this cheap-and-nasty, puffing profit-mongering, enterprising, energetic, individualistic, “business,” can hardly be imagined; and the queer broil witnessed to-day in cities like Bombay and Calcutta only illustrates the incongruity. To Hindus of the old school, with their far-back spiritual ideal, a civilisation like ours, whose highest conception of life and religion is the General Post Office, is simply Anathema. I will quote a portion of a letter received from an Indian friend on the subject, which gives an idea of this point of view. Referring to the poverty of the people—

“All this terrible destitution and suffering throughout one-seventh of the world’s population has been brought about without any benefit to the English people themselves. It has only benefited the English capitalists and professional classes. The vaunted administrative capacity of the English is a fiction. They make good policemen and keep order, when the people acquiesce—that is all. If this acquiescence ceases, as it must, when the people rightly or wrongly believe their religion and family life in danger from the government, the English must pack up and go, and woe to the English capitalist and professional man! I feel more and more strongly every day that the English with their commercial ideals and standards and institutions have done far more to ruin the country than if it had been overrun periodically by hordes of savage Tatars.”

That Commercialism is bringing and will bring great evils in its train, in India as elsewhere—the sapping of the more manly and martial virtues, the accentuation of greed and sophistry, the dominance of the money-lender—I do not doubt; though I do not quite agree with the above denunciation. I think if the English have infested and plagued poor India, it is greatly the fault of the Indians themselves who in their passiveness and lethargy have allowed it to be so. And I think—taking perhaps on my side a too optimistic view—that this growing industrialism and mechanical civilisation may (for a time) do much good, in the way of rousing up the people, giving definition, so much needed, to their minds and work, and instilling among them the Western idea of progress, which in some ways fallacious has still its value and use.

Only for a time however. We in England, now already witnessing the beginning of the end of the commercial régime, are becoming accustomed to the idea that it is only a temporary phase; and in India where, as I have said, the whole genius of the land and its traditions is so adverse to such a system, and the weight of ancient custom so enormous, we can hardly expect that it will take such hold as here, or run through quite so protracted a course of years. Commercialism will no doubt greatly modify and simplify the caste system—but to the caste system in some purified form I am inclined to think the people will return; it will do something also to free the women—give them back at least as much freedom as they had in early times and before the Mahomedan conquests, if not more; and finally Western science will strongly and usefully criticise the prevalent religious systems and practices, and give that definition and materialism to the popular thought which is so sadly wanting in the India of to-day; but the old underlying truths of Indian philosophy and tradition it will not touch. This extraordinary possession—containing the very germ of modern democracy—which has come all down the ages as the special heritage and mission of the Indian peoples, will remain as heretofore indestructible and unchanged, and will still form, we must think, the rallying point of Indian life; but it is probable and indeed to be hoped that the criticism of Western thought, by clearing away a lot of rubbish, will help to make its outline and true nature clearer to the world. However there we must leave the matter.

THE END.

Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.