A look back in the past
The New Nationalist Movement in India - Magazine - The Atlantic
The Nationalist Movement in India may well interest Americans. Lovers of progress and humanity cannot become acquainted with it without discovering that it has large significance, not only to India and Great Britain, but to the world. That the movement is attracting much attention in England (as well as awakening some anxiety there, because of England's connection with India) is well known to all who read the British periodical press, or follow the debates of Parliament, or note the public utterances from time to time of Mr. John Morley (now Lord Morley), the British Secretary of State for India.
What is this new Indian movement? What has brought it into existence? What is its justification, if it has a justification? What does it portend as to the future of India, and the future relations between India and Great Britain?
In order to find answers to these questions we must first of all get clearly in mind the fact that India is a subject land. She is a dependency of Great Britain, not a colony. Britain has both colonies and dependencies. Many persons suppose them to be identical; but they are not. Britain's free colonies, like Canada and Australia, though nominally governed by the mother country, are really self-ruling in everything except their relations to foreign powers. Not so with dependencies like India. These are granted no self-government, no representation; they are ruled absolutely by Great Britain, which is not their "mother" country, but their conqueror and master.
As the result of a pretty wide acquaintance in England, and a residence of some years in Canada, I am disposed to believe that nowhere in the world can be found governments that are more free, that better embody the intelligent will of their people, or that better serve their people's many-sided interests and wants, than those of the self-ruling colonies of Great Britain. I do not see but that these colonies are in every essential way as free as if they were full republics. Probably they are not any more free than the people of the United States, but it is no exaggeration to say that they are as free. Their connection with England, their mother country, is not one of coercion; it is one of choice; it is one of reverence and affection. That the British Government insures such liberty in its colonies, is a matter for congratulation and honorable pride. In this respect it stands on a moral elevation certainly equal to that of any government in the world.
Turn now from Britain's colonies to her dependencies. Here we find something for which there does not seem to be a natural place among British political institutions. Britons call their flag the flag of freedom. They speak of the British Constitution, largely unwritten though it is, as a constitution which guarantees freedom to every British subject in the world. Magna Charta meant self-government for the English people. Cromwell wrote on the statute books of the English Parliament, "All just powers under God are derived from the consent of the people." Since Cromwell's day this principle has been fundamental, central, undisputed, in British home politics. It took a little longer to get it recognized in colonial matters. The American Colonies in 1776 took their stand upon it. "Just government must be based on the consent of the governed." "There should be no taxation without representation." These were their affirmations. Burke and Pitt and Fox and the broaderminded leaders of public opinion in England were in sympathy with their American brethren. If Britain had been true to her principle of freedom and self-rule she would have kept her American colonies. But she was not true to it, and so she lost them. Later she came very near losing Canada in the same way. But her eyes were opened in time, and she gave Canada freedom and self-government. This prevented revolt, and fastened Canada to her with hooks of steel. Since this experience with Canada it has been a settled principle in connection with British colonial as well as home politics, that there is no just power except that which is based upon the consent of the governed.
But what are we to do with this principle when we come to dependencies? Is another and different principle to be adopted here? Are there peoples whom it is just to rule without their consent? Is justice one thing in England and Canada,and another in India? It was the belief that what is justice in England and Canada is justice everywhere that made Froude declare, "Free nations cannot govern subject provinces."
Why is England in India at all? Why did she go there at first, and why does she remain? If India had been a comparatively empty land, as America was when it was discovered, so that Englishmen had wanted to settle there and make homes, the reason would have been plain. But it was a full land; and, as a fact, no British emigrants have ever gone to India to settle and make homes. If the Indian people had been savages or barbarians, there might have seemed more reason for England's conquering and ruling them. But they were peoples with highly organized governments far older than that of Great Britain, and with a civilization that had risen to a splendid height before England's was born. Said Lord Curzon, the late Viceroy of India, in an address delivered at the great Delhi Durbar in 1901: "Powerful Empires existed and flourished here [in India] while Englishmen were still wandering painted in the woods, and while the British Colonies were a wilderness and a jungle. India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind, than any other terrestrial unit in the universe." It is such a land that England has conquered and is holding as a dependency. It is such a people that she is ruling without giving them any voice whatever in the shaping of their own destiny. The honored Canadian Premier, Sir Wilfred Laurier, at the Colonial Conference held in London in connection with the coronation of King Edward, declared, "The Empire of Rome was composed of slave states; the British Empire is a galaxy of free nations." But is India a free nation? At that London Colonial Conference which was called together for consultation about the interests of the entire Empire, was any representative invited to be present from India ? Not one. Yet Lord Curzon declared in his Durbar address in Delhi, that the "principal condition of the strength of the British throne is the possession of the Indian Empire, and the faithful attachment and service of the Indian people." British statesmen never tire of boasting of "our Indian Empire," and of speaking of India as "the brightest jewel in the British crown." Do they reflect that it is virtually a slave empire of which they are so proud; and that this so-called brightest jewel reflects no light of political freedom?
Perhaps there is nothing so dangerous, or so evil in its effects, as irresponsible power. That is what Great Britain exercises in connection with India—absolute power, with no one to call her to account. I do not think any nation is able to endure such an ordeal better than Britain, but it is an ordeal to which neither rulers of nations nor private men should ever be subjected; the risks are too great. England avoids it in connection with her own rulers by making them strictly responsible to the English people. Canada avoids it in connection with hers by making them responsible to the Canadian people. Every free nation safeguards alike its people and its rulers by making its rulers in everything answerable to those whom they govern. Here is the anomaly of the British rule of India. Britain through her Indian government rules India, but she does not acknowledge responsibility in any degree whatever to the Indian people.
What is the result? Are the interests and the rights of India protected? Is it possible for the rights of any people to be protected without self-rule? I invite my readers to go with me to India and see. What we find will go far toward furnishing us a key to the meaning of the present Indian Nationalist Movement.
Crossing over from this side to London, we sail from there to India in a magnificent steamer. On board is a most interesting company of people, made up of merchants, travelers, and especially Englishmen who are either officials connected with the Indian Government or officers in the Indian army, who have been home on furlough with their families and are now returning. We land in Bombay, a city that reminds us of Paris or London or New York or Washington. Our hotel is conducted in English style. We go to the railway station, one of the most magnificent buildings of the kind in the world, to take the train for Calcutta, the capital, some fifteen hundred miles away. Arrived at Calcutta we hear it called the City of Palaces; nor do we wonder at the name. Who owns the steamship line by which we came to India? The British. Who built that splendid railway station in Bombay? The British. Who built the railway on which we rode to Calcutta? The British.
To whom do these palatial buildings belong? Mostly to the British. We find that Calcutta and Bombay have a large commerce. To whom does it belong? Mainly to the British. We find that the Indian Government, that is, British rule in India, has directly or indirectly built in the land some 29,000 miles of railway; has created good postal and telegraph systems, reaching nearly everywhere; has established or assisted in establishing many schools, colleges, hospitals, and other institutions of public benefit; has promoted sanitation, founded law courts after the English pattern, and done much else to bring India into line with the civilization of Europe. It is not strange if we soon begin to exclaim, "How much are the British doing for India! How great a benefit to the Indian people is British rule!" And in an important degree we are right in what we say. British rule has done much for India, and much for which India itself is profoundly grateful.
But have we seen all? Is there no other side? Have we discovered the deepest and most important that exists? If there are signs of prosperity, is it the prosperity of the Indian people, or only of their English masters? If the English are living in ease and luxury, how are the people of the land living? If there are railways and splendid buildings, who pay for them? and who get profits out of them? Have we been away from the beaten tracks of travel ? Have we been out among the Indian people themselves, in country as well as in city? Nearly nine-tenths of the people are ryots, or small farmers, who derive their sustenance directly from the land. Have we found out how they live? Do we know whether they are growing better off, or poorer? Especially have we looked into the causes of those famines, the most terrible known to the modern world, which have swept like a besom of death over the land year after year, and which drag after them another scourge scarcely less dreadful, the plague, their black shadow, their hideous child? Here is a side of India which we must acquaint ourselves with, as well as the other, if we would understand the real Indian situation.
The great, disturbing, portentous, all-overshadowing fact connected with the history of India in recent years is the succession of famines. What do these famines mean ? Here is a picture from a recent book, written by a distinguished British civilian who has had long service in India and knows the Indian situation from the inside. Since he is an Englishman we may safely count upon his prejudices, if he has any, being not upon the side of the Indian people, but upon that of his own countrymen. Mr. W. S. Lilly, in his India and Its Problems,writes as follows:—
"During the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of people perished of famine. In one year alone—the year when her late Majesty assumed the title of Empress—5,000,000 of the people in Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted,—a region twice the size of Wales,—one-fourth of the population perished in the famine of 1816-77. I shall never forget my own famine experiences: how, as I rode out on horseback, morning after morning, I passed crowds of wandering skeletons, and saw human corpses by the roadside, unburied, uncared for, and half devoured by dogs and vultures; how, sadder sight still, children, 'the joy of the world,' as the old Greeks deemed, had become its ineffable sorrow, and were forsaken by the very women who had borne them, wolfish hunger killing even the maternal instinct. Those children, their bright eyes shining from hollow sockets, their nesh utterly wasted away, and only gristle and sinew and cold shivering skin remaining, their heads mere skulls, their puny frames full of loathsome diseases, engendered by the starvation in which they had been conceived and born and nurtured—they haunt me still." Every one who has gone much about India in famine times knows how true to life is this picture.
Mr. Lilly estimates the number of deaths in the first eight decades of the last century at 18,000,000. This is nothing less than appalling,—within a little more than two generations as many persons perishing by starvation in a single country as the whole population of Canada, New England, and the city and state of New York, or nearly half as many as the total population of France! But the most startling aspect of the case appears in the fact that the famines increased in number and severity as the century went on. Suppose we divide the past century into quarters, or periods of twenty-five years each. In the first quarter there were five famines, with an estimated loss of life of 1,000,000. During the second quarter of the century there were two famines, with an estimated mortality of 500,000. During the third quarter there were six famines, with a recorded loss of life of 5,000,000. During the last quarter of the century, what? Eighteen famines, with an estimated mortality reaching the awful totals of from 15,000,000 to 26,000,000. And this does not include the many more millions (over 6,000,000 in a single year) barely kept alive by government doles.
What is the cause of these famines, and this appalling increase in their number and destructiveness? The common answer is, the failure of the rains. But there seems to be no evidence that the rains fail worse now than they did a hundred years ago. Moreover, why should failure of rains bring famine? The rains have never failed over areas so extensive as to prevent the raising of enough food in the land to supply the needs of the entire population. Why then have people starved? Not because there was lack of food. Not because there was lack of food in the famine areas, brought by railways or otherwise within easy reach of all. There has always been plenty of food, even in the worst famine years, for those who have had money to buy it with, and generally food at moderate prices. Why, then, have all these millions of people perished? Because they were so indescribably poor. All candid and thorough investigation into the causes of the famines of India has shown that the chief and fundamental cause has been and is the poverty of the people,—a poverty so severe and terrible that it keeps the majority of the entire population on the very verge of starvation even in years of greatest plenty, prevents them from laying up anything against times of extremity, and hence leaves them, when their crops fail, absolutely undone—with nothing between them and death, unless some form of charity comes to their aid. Says Sir Charles Elliott long the Chief Commissioner of Assam, "Half the agricultural population do not know from one halfyear's end to another what it is to have a full meal." Says the Honorable G. K. Gokhale, of the Viceroy's Council,"From 60,000,000 to 70,000,000 of the people of India do not know what it is to have their hunger satisfied even once in a year."
And the people are growing poorer and poorer. The late Mr. William Digby, of London, long an Indian resident, in his recent book entitled "Prosperous" India,shows from official estimates and Parliamentary and Indian Blue Books, that, whereas the average daily income of the people of India in the year 1850 was estimated as four cents per person (a pittance on which one wonders that any human being can live), in 1882 it had fallen to three cents per person, and in 1900 actually to less than two cents per person. Is it any wonder that people reduced to such extremities as this can lay up nothing? Is it any wonder that when the rains do not come, and the crops of a single season fail, they are lost? And where is this to end? If the impoverishment of the people is to go on, what is there before them but growing hardship, multiplying famines, and increasing loss of life?
Here we get a glimpse of the real India. It is not the India which the traveler sees, following the usual routes of travel, stopping at the leading hotels conducted after the manner of London or Paris, and mingling with the English lords of the country. It is not the India which the British "point to with pride," and tell us about in their books of description and their official reports. This is India from the inside, the India of the people, of the men, women, and children, who were born there and die there, who bear the burdens and pay the taxes, and support the costly government carried on by foreigners, and do the starving when the famines come.
What causes this awful and growing impoverishment of the Indian people? Said John Bright, "If a country be found possessing a most fertile soil, and capable of bearing every variety of production, and, notwithstanding, the people are in a state of extreme destitution and suffering, the chances are there is some fundamental error in the government of that country."
One cause of India's impoverishment is heavy taxation. Taxation in England and Scotland is high, so high that Englishmen and Scotchmen complain bitterly. But the people of India are taxed more than twice as heavily as the people of England and three times as heavily as those of Scotland. According to the latest statistics at hand, those of 1905, the annual average income per person in India is about $6.00, and the annual tax per person about $2.00. Think of taxing the American people to the extent of one-third their total income! Yet such taxation here, unbearable as it would be, would not create a tithe of the suffering that it does in India, because incomes here are so immensely larger than there. Here it would cause great hardship, there it creates starvation.
Notice the single item of salt-taxation. Salt is an absolute necessity to the people, to the very poorest; they must have it or die. But the tax upon it which for many years they have been compelled to pay has been much greater than the cost value of the salt. Under this taxation the quantity of salt consumed has been reduced actually to one-half the quantity declared by medical authorities to be absolutely necessary for health. The mere suggestion in England of a tax on wheat sufficient to raise the price of bread by even a half-penny on the loaf, creates such a protest as to threaten the overthrow of ministries. Lately the salt-tax in India has been reduced, but it still remains well-nigh prohibitive to the poorer classes. With such facts as these before us, we do not wonder at Herbert Spencer's indignant protest against the "grievous salt-monopoly" of the Indian Government, and "the pitiless taxation which wrings from poor ryob nearly half the products of the soil."
Another cause of India's impoverishment is the destruction of her manufactures, as the result of British rule. When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. The source of her wealth was largely her splendid manufactures. Her cotton goods, silk goods, shawls, muslins of Dacca, brocades of Ahmedabad, rugs, pottery of Scind, jewelry, metal work, lapidary work, were famed not only all over Asia but in all the leading markets of Northern Africa and of Europe. What has become of those manufactures? For the most part they are gone, destroyed. Hundreds of villages and towns of India in which they were carried on are now largely or wholly depopulated, and millions of the people who were supported by them have been scattered and driven back on the land, to share the already too scanty living of the poor ryot. What is the explanation? Great Britain wanted India's markets. She could not find entrance for British manufactures so long as India was supplied with manufactures of her own. So those of India must be sacrificed. England had all power in her hands, and so she proceeded to pass tariff and excise laws that ruined the manufactures of India and secured the market for her own goods. India would have protected herself if she had been able, by enacting tariff laws favorable to Indian interests, but she had no power, she was at the mercy of her conqueror.
A third cause of India's impoverishment is the enormous and wholly unnecessary cost of her government. Writers in discussing the financial situation in India have often pointed out the fact that her government is the most expensive in the world. Of course the reason why is plain: it is because it is a government carried on not by the people of the soil, but by men from a distant country. These foreigners, having all power in their own hands, including power to create such offices as they choose and to attach to them such salaries and pensions as they see fit, naturally do not err on the side of making the offices too few or the salaries and pensions too small. Nearly all the higher officials throughout India are British. To be sure, the Civil Service is nominally open to Indians. But it is hedged about with so many restrictions (among others, Indian young men being required to make the journey of seven thousand miles from India to London to take their examinations) that they are able for the most part to secure only the lowest and poorest places. The amount of money which the Indian people are required to pay as salaries to this great army of foreign civil servants and appointed higher officials, and then, later, as pensions for the same, after they have served a given number of years in India, is very large. That in three-fourths if not nine-tenths of the positions quite as good service could be obtained for the government at a fraction of the present cost, by employing educated and competent Indians, who much better understand the wants of the country, is quite true. But that would not serve the purpose of England, who wants these lucrative offices for her sons. Hence poor Indian ryots must sweat and go hungry, and if need be starve, that an ever-growing army of foreign officials may have large salaries and fat pensions. And of course much of the money paid for these salaries, and practically all paid for the pensions, goes permanently out of India.
Another burden upon the people of India which they ought not to be compelled to bear, and which does much to increase their poverty, is the enormously heavy military expenses of the government. I am not complaining of the maintenance of such an army as may be necessary for the defense of the country. But the Indian army is kept at a strength much beyond what the defense of the country requires. India is made a sort of general rendezvous and training camp for the Empire, from which soldiers may at any time be drawn for service in distant lands. If such an imperial training camp and rendezvous is needed, a part at least of the heavy expense of it ought to come out of the Imperial Treasury. But no, India is helpless, she can be compelled to pay it, she is compelled to pay it. Many English statesmen recognize this as wrong, and condemn it; yet it goes right on. Said the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman: "Justice demands that England should pay a portion of the cost of the great Indian army maintained in India for Imperial rather than Indian purposes. This has not yet been done, and famine-stricken India is being bled for the maintenance of England's worldwide empire." But there is still worse than this. Numerous wars and campaigns are carried on outside of India, the expenses of which, wholly or in part, India is compelled to bear. For such foreign wars and campaigns—campaigns and wars in which the Indian pcople had no concern, and for which they received no benefit, the aim of which was solely conquest and the extension of British power—India was required to pay during the last century the enormous total of more than $460,000,000. How many such burdens as these can the millions of India, who live on the average income of $6 a year, bear without being crushed?
Perhaps the greatest of all the causes of the impoverishment of the Indian people is the steady and enormous drain of wealth from India to England, which has been going on ever since the East India Company first set foot in the land, three hundred years ago, and is going on still with steadily increasing volume. England claims that India pays her no "tribute." Technically, this is true; but, really, it is very far from true. In the form of salaries spent in England, pensions sent to England, interest drawn in England on investments made in India, business profits made in India and sent to England, and various kinds of exploitation carried on in India for England's benefit, a vast stream of wealth ("tribute" in effect) is constantly pouring into England from India. Says Mr. R. C. Dutt, author of the Economic History of India(and there is no higher authority), "A sum reckoned at twenty millions of English money, or a hundred millions of American money [some other authorities put it much higher], which it should be borne in mind is equal to half the net revenues of India, is remitted annually from this country [India] to England, without a direct equivalent. Think of it! One-half of what we [in India] pay as taxes goes out of the country, and does not come back to the people. No other country on earth suffers like this at the present day; and no country on earth could bear such an annual drain without increasing impoverishment and repeated famines. We denounce ancient Rome for impoverishing Gaul and Egypt, Sicily and Palestine, to enrich herself. We denounce Spain for robbing the New World and the Netherlands to amass wealth. England is following exactly the same practice in India. Is it strange that she is converting India into a land of poverty and famine?
........... ..............
........... ..............
Read it all,its worth it.
