CHAPTER III.
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, or learned secretly to despise, the beliefs and customs of their forefathers, they were at any rate anxious to modify and bring them into harmony with those of their Western teachers. They may often have disliked the Englishman, but they respected and admired him; if they resented his frequent a.s.sumption of the unqualified superiority, they were disposed to admit that it was not without justification. The enthusiasm kindled in the first half of the last century by the great missionaries, like Carey and Duff, who had made distinguished converts among the highest cla.s.ses of Hindu society, had begun to wane; but if educated Hindus had grown more reluctant to accept the dogmas of Christianity, they were still ready to acknowledge the superiority of Western ethics, and the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay, the Social Reform movement which found eloquent advocates all over India, and not least in Madras, and other agencies of a similar character for purging Hindu life of its more barbarous and superst.i.tious a.s.sociations, bore witness to the ascendancy which Western standards of morality exercised over the Hindu mind. Keshub Chunder Sen was not perhaps cast in so fine a mould as Ram Mohan Roy or the more conservative Dr. Tagore, but his ideals were the same, and his life-dream was to find a common denominator for Hinduism and Christianity which should secure a thorough reform of Hindu society without denationalizing it.
Nor were the milder forms of political activity promoted by the founders of the Indian National Congress inconsistent with the acceptance of British rule or with the recognition of the great benefits which it has conferred upon India, and least of all with a genuine admiration for Western civilization. For many of them at least the political boons which they craved from their rulers were merely the logical corollaries of the moral and intellectual as well as of the material boons which they had already received. The fierce political agitation of later years denies the benefits of British rule and even the superiority of the civilization for which it stands. It has invented the legend of a golden age, when all the virtues flourished and India was a land flowing with milk and honey until British l.u.s.t of conquest brought it to ruin. No doubt even to-day there are many eminent Hindus who would still rely upon the older methods, and who have sufficiently a.s.similated the education they have received at the hands of Englishmen to share wholeheartedly the faith and pride of the latter in British ideals of liberty and self-government, and to be honestly convinced that those ideals might be more fully realized in the government of their own country if British administrators would only repose greater confidence in the natives of India and give them a larger share in the conduct of public affairs. But men of this type are now to be found chiefly amongst the older generation.
No one who has studied, however scantily, the social and religious system which for the sake of convenience we call Hinduism will deny the loftiness of the philosophic conceptions which underlie even the extravagances of its creed or the marvellous stability of the complex fabric based upon its social code. It may seem to us to present in many of its aspects an almost unthinkable combination of spiritualistic idealism and of gross materialism, of asceticism and of sensuousness, of over-weening arrogance when it identifies the human self with the universal self and merges man in the Divinity and the Divinity in man, and of demoralizing pessimism when it preaches that life itself is but a painful illusion, and that the sovereign remedy and end of all evils is non-existence. Its mythology is often as revolting as the rigidity of its caste laws, which condemn millions of human beings to such social abas.e.m.e.nt that their very touch--the very shadow thrown by their body--is held to pollute the privileged mortals who are born into the higher castes. Nevertheless, Hinduism has for more than thirty centuries responded to the social and religious aspirations of a considerable fraction of the human race. It represents a great and ancient civilization, and that the Hindus should cling to it is not surprising.
Nor is it surprising that after the first attraction exerted by the impact of an alien civilization equipped with all the panoply of organized force and scientific achievements had worn off, a certain reaction should have ensued. In the same way it was inevitable that, after the novelty of British rule, of the law and order and security for life and property which it had established, had gradually worn away, those who had never experienced the evils from which it had freed India should begin to chafe under the restraints which it imposed. What is disheartening and alarming are the lengths to which this reaction has been carried. For among the younger generation of Hindus there has unquestionably grown up a deep-seated and bitter hostility not only to British rule and to British methods of administration, but to all the influences of Western civilization, and the rehabilitation of Hindu customs and beliefs has proceeded _pari pa.s.su_ with the growth of political disaffection.
Practices which an educated Hindu would have been at pains to explain away, if he had not frankly repudiated them thirty years ago, now find zealous apologists. Polytheism is not merely extolled as the poetic expression of eternal verities, but the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of the Hindu pantheon are being invested with fresh sanct.i.ty. The Brahmo Saniaj is still a great influence for good, but it appears to be gradually losing vitality, and though its literary output is still considerable, its membership is shrinking. The Prarthana Samaj is moribund. The fashion of the day is for religious "revivals," in which the worship of Kali, the sanguinary G.o.ddess of destruction, or the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the Mahratta chieftain who humbled in his day the pride of the alien conquerors of Hindustan, plays an appropriately conspicuous part. The Arya-Samaj, which is spreading all over the Punjab and in the United Provinces, represents in one of its aspects a revolt against Hindu orthodoxy, but in another it represents equally a revolt against Western ideals, for in the teachings of its founder, Dayanand, it has found an aggressive gospel which bases the claims of Aryan, _i.e._, Hindu, supremacy on the Vedas as the one ultimate source of human and Divine wisdom. The exalted character of Vedantic philosophy has been as widely recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been developed along different and often conflicting lines of thought to suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya-Samaj has not been content to a.s.sert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to proclaim the immanent superiority of Aryan civilization--it repudiates the term Hindu as savouring of an alien origin--over Western civilization, it claims to have discovered in the Vedas the germs of all the discoveries of modern science, even to wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes.
Just as the political agitation in India has derived invaluable encouragement from a handful of British members of Parliament and other sympathizers in Europe and America, so this Hindu revival has been largely stimulated and to some extent prompted by Europeans and Americans. Not only the writings of English and German scholars, like Max Muller and Deutsch, helped enormously to revive the interest of educated Hindus in their ancient literature and earlier forms of religion, but it was in the polemical tracts of European writers that the first protagonists of Hindu reaction against Christian influences found their readiest weapons of attack. The campaign was started in 1887 by the Hindu Tract Society of Madras, which set itself first to inflame popular fanaticism against the missionaries, who, especially in the south of India, had been the pioneers of Western education. Bradlaugh"s text-books and the pamphlets of many lesser writers belonging to the same school of thought were eagerly translated into the vernacular, and those that achieved the greatest popularity were books like "The Evil of Continence," in which not only Christian theology, but Christian morality was held up to scorn and ridicule. The advent of the theosophists, heralded by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, gave a fresh impetus to the revival, and certainly no Hindu has done so much to organize and consolidate the movement as Mrs. Annie Besant, who, in her Central Hindu College at Benares and her Theosophical Inst.i.tution at Adyar, near Madras, has openly proclaimed her faith in the superiority of the whole Hindu system to the vaunted civilization of the West. Is it surprising that Hindus should turn their backs upon our civilization[2]
when a European of highly-trained intellectual power and with an extraordinary gift of eloquence comes and tells them that it is they who possess and have from all times possessed the key to supreme wisdom; that their G.o.ds, their philosophy, their morality are on a higher plane of thought than the West has ever reached? Is it surprising that with such encouragement Hinduism should no longer remain on the defensive, but, discarding in this respect all its own traditions as a non-proselytizing creed, should send out missionaries to preach the message of Hindu enlightenment to those still groping in the darkness of the West? The mission of Swami Vivekananda to the Chicago Congress of Religions is in itself one of the most striking incidents in the history of Hindu revivalism, but it is perhaps less wonderful than the triumph he achieved when he returned to India accompanied by a chosen band of eager disciples from the West.
There are, indeed, endless forms to this revival of Hinduism--as endless as to Hinduism itself--but what it is perhaps most important for us to note is that, wherever political agitation a.s.sumes the most virulent character, there the Hindu revival also a.s.sumes the most extravagant shapes. Secret societies place their murderous activities under the special patronage of one or other of the chief popular deities. Their vows are taken "on the sacred water of the Ganges," or "holding the sacred Tulsi plant," or "in the presence of Mahadevi"--the great G.o.ddess who delights in b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifices, Charms and amulets, incantations and imprecations, play an important part in the ceremonies of initiation. In some quarters there has been some recrudescence of the _Shakti_ cultus, with its often obscene and horrible rites, and the unnatural depravity which was so marked a feature in the case of the band of young Brahmans who conspired to murder Mr. Jackson at Nasik represents a form of erotomania which is certainly much more common amongst Hindu political fanatics than amongst Hindus in general.
By no means all, however, are of this degenerate type, and the _Bhagvat Gita_ has been impressed into the service of sedition by men who would have been as incapable of dabbling in political as in any other form of crime, had they not been able to invest it with a religious sanction.
There is no more beautiful book in the sacred literature of the Hindus; there is none in which the more enlightened find greater spiritual comfort; yet it is in the _Bhagvat Gita_ that, by a strange perversion, the Hindu conspirator has sought and claims to have found texts that justify murder as a divinely inspired deed when it is committed in the sacred cause of Hinduism. Nor is it only the extremists who appeal in this fashion to Hindu religious emotionalism. It is often just as difficult to appraise the subtle differences which separate the "moderate" from the "advanced" politician and the "advanced" politician from the extremist as it is to distinguish between the various forms and gradations of the Hindu revival in its religious and social aspects. But it was in the courtyard of the great temple of Kali at Calcutta in the presence of "the terrible G.o.ddess" that the "leaders of the Bengali nation," men who, like Mr. Surendranath Banerjee, have always professed to be "moderates," held their chief demonstrations against "part.i.tion"
and administered the _Swadeshi_ oath to their followers. Equally noteworthy is the part played by the revival of Ganpati celebrations in honour of Ganesh, the elephant-headed G.o.d, perhaps the most popular of all Hindu deities, in stimulating political disaffection in the Deccan.
Hand in hand with this campaign for the glorification of Hinduism at the expense of Western civilization there has been carried on another and far more invidious campaign for the vilification of everything British.
The individual Englishman is denounced as a bloodsucker and a tyrant; his personal integrity is impugned and derided; his methods of administration are alleged to be wilfully directed to the impoverishment, and even to the depopulation, of India; his social customs are traduced as depraved and corrupt; even his women-folk are accused of common wantonness. This systematized form of personal calumny is a scarcely less significant feature of the literature of Indian unrest than its appeals to the Hindu scriptures and to the Hindu deities and its exploitation of the religious sentiment for the promotion of racial hatred. _Swadeshi_ and _Swaraj_ are the battle-cries of this new Hindu "nationalism," but they mean far more than a mere claim to fiscal or even political independence. They mean an organized uplifting of the old Hindu traditions, social and religious, intellectual and moral, against the imported ideals of an alien race and an alien civilization, and the sincerity of some, at least, of the apostles of this new creed cannot be questioned. With Mr. Arabindo Ghose, they firmly believe that "the whole moral strength of the country is with us, justice is with us, nature is with us, and the law of G.o.d, which is higher than any human law, justifies our action."
This is a grave phenomenon not to be contemptuously dismissed as the folly of ill-digested knowledge or summarily judged and condemned, in a spirit of self-righteousness, as an additional proof of the innate depravity and ingrat.i.tude of the East. It undoubtedly represents a deep stirring of the waters amongst a people endowed with no mean gifts of head and heart, and if it has thrown up much sc.u.m, it affords glimpses of n.o.bler elements which time may purify and bring to the surface. Nor if our rule and our civilization are to prevail must we be unmindful of our own responsibility or forget that our presence and the influences we brought with us first stirred the waters.
The part played by Brahmanism in Indian unrest is far more conspicuous in some parts of India than in others, and for reasons which are generally not far to seek. Wherever it has been most active, it connotes perhaps more than anything else the reactionary side of that unrest.
Though there have been and still are many enlightened Brahmans who have cordially responded to the best influences of Western education, and have worked with admirable zeal and courage to bridge the gulf between Indian and European civilization, Brahmanism as a system represents the antipodes of all that British rule must stand for in India, and Brahmanism has from times immemorial dominated Hindu society--dominated it, according to the Hindu Nationalists, for its salvation. "If," writes one of them, "Mother India, though reduced to a mere skeleton by the oppression of alien rulers during hundreds of years, still preserves her vitality, it is because the Brahmans have never relaxed in their devotion to her. She has witnessed political and social revolutions.
Famines and pestilence have shorn her of her splendour. But the Brahmans have stood by her through all the vicissitudes of fortune. It is they who raised her to the highest pinnacle of glory, and it is they whose ministrations still keep up the drooping spirits of her children."
The Brahmans are the sacerdotal caste of India. They are at the same time the proudest and the closest aristocracy that the world has ever seen, for they form not merely an aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of divine origin. Of the Brahman it may be said as of no other privileged mortal except perhaps the Levite of the Old Testament: _Nascitur non fit_. No king, however powerful, can make or unmake a Brahman, no genius, however transcendent, no services, however conspicuous, no virtues, however pre-eminent, can avail to raise a Hindu from a lower caste to the Brahman"s estate. In early times the caste laws must have been less rigid, for otherwise there would only be Aryan Brahmans, whereas in the South of India there are many Brahmans of obviously Dravidian stock. But to-day not even the Brahmans themselves can raise to their own equal one who is not born of their caste, though by the exercise of the castely authority they can in specific cases outcaste a fellow-Brahman who has offended against the immutable laws of caste, and, except for minor transgressions which allow of atonement and reinstatement, when once outcasted he and his descendants cease for ever to be Brahmans. The Brahmans might be at a loss to make good their claim that they date back to the remote ages of the Vedas. But a good deal more than two thousand years have pa.s.sed since they const.i.tuted themselves the only authorized intermediaries between mankind and the G.o.ds. In them became vested the monopoly of the ancient language in which all religious rites are performed, and with a monopoly of the knowledge of Sanskrit they retained a monopoly of learning long after Sanskrit itself had become a dead language. Like the priests who wielded a Latin pen in the Middle Ages in Europe, they sat as advisers and conscience-keepers in the councils of every Hindu ruler.
To the present day they alone can expound the Hindu scriptures, they alone can approach the G.o.ds in their temples, they alone can minister to the spiritual needs of such of the lower castes as are credited with sufficient human dignity to be in any way worthy of their ministrations.
In the course of ages differences and distinctions have gradually grown up amongst them, and they have split up into innumerable septs and sub-castes. As they multiplied from generation to generation an increasing proportion were compelled to supplement the avocations originally sacred to their caste by other and lowlier means of livelihood. There are to-day over 14 million Brahmans in India, and a very large majority of them have been compelled to adopt agricultural, military, and mercantile pursuits which, as we know from the Code of Manu were already regarded as, in certain circ.u.mstances, legitimate or excusable for a Brahman even in the days of that ancient law-giver. In regard to all other castes, however, the Brahman, humble as his worldly _status_ may be, retains an undisputed pre-eminence which he never forgets or allows to be forgotten, though it may only be a pale reflection of the prestige and authority of his more exalted caste-men--a prestige and authority, be it added, which have often been justified by individual achievements. How far the influence of Brahmanism as a system has been socially a good or an evil influence I am not concerned to discuss, but, however antagonistic it may be at the present moment to the influence of Western civilization, it would be unfair to deny that it has shown itself and still shows itself capable of producing a very high type both of intellect and of character. Nor could it otherwise have survived as it has the vicissitudes of centuries.
Neither the triumph of Buddhism, which lasted for nearly 500 years, nor successive waves of Mahomedan conquest availed to destroy the power of Brahmanism, nor has it been broken by British supremacy. Inflexibly as he dominates a social system in all essentials more rigid than any other, the Brahman has not only recognised the need of a certain plasticity in its construction which allows for constant expansion, but he has himself shown unfailing adaptability in all non-essentials to varying circ.u.mstances. To the requirements of their new Western masters the Brahmans adapted themselves from the first with admirable suppleness, and when a Western system of education was introduced into India in the first half of the last century, they were quicker than any other cla.s.s to realize how it could be used to fortify their own position. The main original object of the introduction of Western education into India was the training of a sufficient number of young Indians to fill the subordinate posts in the public offices with English-speaking natives. The Brahmans responded freely to the call, and they soon acquired almost the same monopoly of the new Western learning as they had enjoyed of Hindu lore through the centuries. With the development of the great administrative services, with the subst.i.tution of English for the vernacular tongues as the only official language, with the remodelling of judicial administration and procedure on British lines, with the growth of the liberal professions and of the Press, their influence constantly found new fields of activity, whilst through the old traditional channels it continued to permeate those strata of Hindu society with which the West had established little or no contact.
Nevertheless the spread of Western ideas and habits was bound to loosen to some extent the Brahmans" hold upon Hindu society, for that hold is chiefly rooted in the immemorial sanct.i.ty of custom, which new habits and methods imported from the West necessarily tended to undermine.
Scrupulous--and, according to many earnest Englishmen, over-scrupulous--as we were to respect religious beliefs and prejudices, the influence of Western civilization could not fail to clash directly or indirectly with many of the ordinances of Hindu orthodoxy. In non-essentials Brahmanism soon found it expedient to relax the rigour of caste obligations, as for instance to meet the hard case of young Hindus who could not travel across the "black water" to Europe for their studies without breaking caste, or indeed travel even in their own country in railways and river steamers without incurring the pollution of bodily contact with the "untouchable"
castes. Penances were at first imposed which had gradually to be lightened until they came to be merely nominal. Graver issues were raised when such ancient customs as infant marriage and the degradation of child widows were challenged. The ferment of new ideas was spreading amongst the Brahmans themselves. Some had openly discarded their ancestral faith, and many more were moved to search their own scriptures for some interpretation of the law less inconsistent with Western standards. It seemed at one moment as if, under the inspiration of men like Ranade in the Deccan and Tagore in Bengal, Brahmanism itself was about to take the lead in purging Hinduism of its most baneful superst.i.tions and bringing it into line with the philosophy and ethics of the West. But the liberal movement failed to prevail against the forces of popular superst.i.tion and orthodox bigotry, combined with the bitterness too frequently resulting from the failure of Western education to secure material success or even an adequate livelihood for those who had departed from the old ways. Though there have been and still are many admirable exceptions, Brahmanism remained the stronghold of reaction against the Western invasion. Of recent years, educated Brahmans have figured prominently in the social and religious revival of Hinduism, and they have figured no less prominently, whether in the ranks of the extremists or amongst the moderate and advanced politicians, in the political movement which has accompanied that revival.
CHAPTER IV.
BRAHMANISM AND DISAFFECTION IN THE DECCAN.
Fundamental as is the antagonism between the civilization represented by the British _Raj_ and the essential spirit of Brahmanism. It is not, of course, always or everywhere equally acute, for there is no more uniformity about Brahmanism than about any other Indian growth. But in the Deccan Brahmanism has remained more fiercely militant than in any other part of India, chiefly perhaps because nowhere had it wielded such absolute power within times which may still be called recent. Far into the eighteenth century Poona had been the capital of a theocratic State in which behind the throne of the Peshwas both spiritual and secular authority were concentrated in the hands of the Brahmans. Such memories are slow to die and least of all in an ancient and conservative country like India, and there was one sept of Brahmans, at any rate, who were determined not to let them die.
The Chitpavan Brahmans are undoubtedly the most powerful and the most able of all the Brahmans of the Deccan. A curious legend ascribes their origin to the miraculous intervention of Parashurama, the sixth Avatar of the G.o.d Vishnu, who finding no Brahmans to release him by the accustomed ritual from the defilement of his earthly labours, dragged on to sh.o.r.e the bodies of fourteen barbarians that he had found washed up from the ocean, burnt them on a funeral pyre and then breathed life and Brahmanhood into their ashes. On these new made Brahmans he conferred the name Chitpavan, which means "purified by fire," and all the land of the Konkan from which, by a bolt from his arrow, he caused the sea for ever to recede. Every Chitpavan to-day claims descent from one or other of the fourteen divinely Brahmanized barbarians, whom some believe to have been hardy Nors.e.m.e.n driven in their long ships on to the sandy sh.o.r.es of what is now the Bombay Presidency. At any rate, as has been well said of them, Western daring and Eastern craft look out alike from the alert features and clear parchment skin and through the strange stone-grey eyes of the Chitpavan. It was not, however, till about two centuries ago that the Chitpavan Brahmans began to play a conspicuous part in Indian history, when one of this sept, Balaji Vishvanath Rao, worked his way up at the Court of the Mahratta King Shahu to the position of Peshwa, or Prime Minister, which he succeeded even in bequeathing to his son, the great Bajirao Balaji, who led the Mahratta armies right up to the walls of Delhi. Bajirao"s son not only succeeded as Balaji II., but on the death of King Shahu disposed of his Royal master"s family by a bold Palace conspiracy and openly a.s.sumed sovereign powers. The crushing defeat of Panipat brought him to his grave, and though the dynasty was still continued, and regained some of its l.u.s.tre under Madhao Rao I., the Peshwas subsequently became little more than _rois faineants_ in the hands of their Ministers, and especially in those of the great Regent Nana Phadnavis. He, too, was a Chitpavan Brahman, and it was under his reign that his fellow caste-men acquired so complete a monopoly of all the chief offices of State that the Mahratta Empire became essentially a Chitpavan Empire. The British arms ultimately defeated the dreams of universal dominion which, in the then condition of India, the Chitpavans might well have hoped to establish on the ruins of the great Moghul Empire. But British rule did not destroy their power. They were quick to adapt themselves to new conditions and above all to avail themselves of the advantages of Western education. Their great administrative abilities compelled recognition, and Chitpavans swarm to-day in every Government office of the Deccan as they did in the days of Nana Phadnavis. They sit on the Bench, they dominate the Bar, they teach in the schools, they control the vernacular Press, they have furnished almost all the most conspicuous names in the modern literature and drama of Western India as well as in politics. Of the higher appointments held by natives in the Presidency of Bombay, the last census tells us that the Hindus held 266 against 86 held by Pa.r.s.ees and 23 held by Mahomedans, and that out of those held by the Hindus, more than 72 per cent. were held by Brahmans, though the Brahmans form less than one-fourteenth of the total Hindu population of the province. All Brahmans are not, of course, Chitpavans, but the Chitpavans supply an overwhelming majority of those Government officials, and their ascendency over every other Brahman sept in Maharashtra is undisputed. From the Deccan, moreover, their influence has spread practically all over India and, especially, in the native States, which have recruited amongst the Chitpavans some of their ablest public servants. Amongst Chitpavans are to be found many of the most enlightened and progressive Indians of our times and many have served the British _Raj_ with unquestioned loyalty and integrity. But amongst many others--perhaps indeed amongst the great majority--there has undoubtedly been preserved for the last hundred years from the time of the downfall of the Peshwa dominion to the present day, an unbroken tradition of hatred towards British rule, an undying hope that it might some day be subverted and their own ascendency restored. Not to go back to the exploits of Nana Sahib, himself a Chitpavan, and his followers during the Mutiny, or to the Ramoshi rebellion round Poona in 1879, it was in Poona that the native Press, mainly conducted by Brahmans, first a.s.sumed that tone of virulent hostility towards British rule and British rulers which led to the Press Act of 1879, and some of the worst extracts quoted at that time by the Government of India in support of that measure were taken from Poona newspapers. It was in Poona that some years later the a.s.sa.s.sination of two English officials by a young Chitpavan Brahman was the first outcome of a fresh campaign, leading directly to political murder. It was by another Chitpavan Brahman that Mr. Jackson was murdered last December at Nasik; his accomplices were with one exception Chitpavan Brahmans, and to the same sept of Brahmans belong nearly all the defendants in the great conspiracy trial now proceeding at Bombay.
But if there were already, more than 20 years ago, wild and irreconcilable spirits bent on fomenting disaffection, there were amongst the Deccanee Brahmans themselves a small intellectual _elite_ who, though by no means servile apologists of British rule, fully realized that their primary duty was not to stir up popular pa.s.sion against alien rulers, but to bring Hindu society into closer communion with the higher civilization which those rulers, whatever their shortcomings, undoubtedly represented. Conspicuous amongst such men was Mahadev Govind Ranade. Equally conspicuous in the opposite camp was a man of a very different stamp, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was destined to become one of the most dangerous pioneers of disaffection. It was a Hindu gentleman and a Brahman who told me that if I wanted to study the psychology of Indian unrest I should begin by studying Tilak"s career.
"Tilak"s onslaught in Poona upon Ranade, his alliance with the bigots of orthodoxy, his appeals to popular superst.i.tion in the new Ganpati celebrations, to racial fanaticism in the "Anti-Cow-killing Movement,"
to Mahratta sentiment in the cult which he introduced of Shivaji, his active propaganda amongst schoolboys and students, his gymnastic societies, his preaching in favour of physical training, and last but not least his control of the Press and the note of personal violence which he imparted to newspaper polemics, represent the progressive stages of a highly-organized campaign which has served as a model to the apostles of unrest all over India." This was a valuable piece of advice, for, if any one can claim to be truly the father of Indian unrest, it is Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The story of his initial campaign in the Deccan, though it dates back to the closing decades of the last century, is still well worth studying, and has, in fact, never received adequate attention, for on the one hand it p.r.i.c.ks the shallow view that Indian unrest is merely an echo of the j.a.panese victories in Manchuria, and, on the other hand, it ill.u.s.trates clearly the close connexion that exists between the forces of Indian political disaffection and those of social and religious reaction, whilst the methods which he employed and the results which attended his activity have been reproduced with singular fidelity in subsequent phases of the movement.
When Tilak entered upon public life in the early eighties, the Brahmans of the Deccan were divided into two camps, one of which, headed at first by the late Mr. Justice Ranade, consisted of a small intellectual _elite_, who held, without forgoing their right to criticize British administrators or to promote political reforms by const.i.tutional methods, that Indians of all creeds, including the Hindus, should begin by reforming their own social inst.i.tutions, and bring them into greater harmony with Western standards. Tilak, a Chitpavan Brahman of considerable erudition, who had graduated with honours at Bombay, had, however, inherited his full share of Chitpavan hostility to British ascendency. He was also by temperament and ambition impatient of all restraint, and jealous of the commanding authority which a man like Ranade owed quite as much to the n.o.bility of his character as to his social position and force of intellect. In opposition to Ranade, with whom he had at first co-operated as an educationist, Tilak drifted rapidly into the reactionary camp. The battle was first engaged over the control of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Education Society, two progressive a.s.sociations which, though mainly composed of Brahmans, included a sprinkling of Mahomedans and of non-Brahman Hindus. Tilak had thrown himself into journalism, and after the repeal of the Indian Press Law on the return of a Liberal Administration to office at home in 1881, he had been amongst the first to revive the incendiary methods which it had temporarily and very successfully checked. His first onslaught upon Ranade"s position, however, failed, and instead of supplanting him, it was he who was compelled in 1890 to sever his connexion with the Education Society.
Tilak"s defeat was short lived. The introduction of the Age of Consent Bill, in 1890, to mitigate the evils of Hindu child-marriage, gave him a fresh opening. Ranade, discouraged and alarmed by the violence of the Tilak party, had by this time retired from the forefront of the fray, but in Dr. Bhandarkar, Mr. Justice Tilang, Mr. A.K. Nulkar, Mr. (now Sir N.G.) Chandavarkar, and other courageous Hindu reformers, with whom Mr.
Gokhale was always ready to co-operate against the forces of religious superst.i.tion, he had left disciples ready to carry on the good fight.
Tilak raised against them a storm of pa.s.sion and prejudice. In the columns of the _Kesari_, of which he had become sole proprietor, he denounced every Hindu who supported the measure as a renegade and a traitor to the cause of Hinduism, and thus won the support of conservative orthodoxy, which had hitherto viewed with alarm some of his literary excursions into the field of Vedantic exegesis. With the help of the brothers Natu, who were the recognized leaders of Hindu orthodoxy, he carried his propaganda into the schools and colleges in the teeth of the Moderate party, and, proclaiming that unless they learnt to employ force the Hindus must expect to be impotent witnesses of the gradual downfall of all their ancient inst.i.tutions, he proceeded to organize gymnastic societies in which physical training and the use of more or less primitive weapons were taught in order to develop the martial instincts of the rising generation.
If amongst many Brahmans of Maharashtra hatred of the British is the dominant pa.s.sion, amongst the Mahratta population at large whatever there is of racial and religious jealousy is mainly directed against the Mahomedans. This is partly, no doubt, a legacy of the old days of Mahomedan supremacy. In 1893 some riots in Bombay of a more severe character than usual gave Tilak an opportunity of broadening the new movement by enlisting in its support the old anti-Mahomedan feeling of the people. He not only convoked popular meetings in which his fiery eloquence denounced the Mahomedans as the sworn foes of Hinduism, but he started an organization known as the "Anti-Cow-Killing Society," which was intended and regarded as a direct provocation to the Mahomedans, who, like ourselves, think it no sacrilege to eat beef. In vain did liberal Hindus appeal to him to desist from these inflammatory methods.
Their appeals had no effect upon him, and merely served his purpose by undermining the little authority they still possessed. Government had forbidden Hindu processions to play music whilst pa.s.sing in front of Mahomedan mosques, as this was a fertile cause of riotous affrays. Tilak not only himself protested against this "interference with the liberties of the people," but insisted that the Sarvajanik Sabha should identify itself with the "national" cause and memorialize Government for the removal of a prohibition so offensive to Hindu sentiment. The Moderates hesitated, but were overawed by popular clamour and the threats of the Tilak Press. The Mahomedans and a few other members repudiated the memorial and resigned. Tilak, though not yet in absolute control of the Sabha, became already practically its master. No one knew better than he how to compel submission by packed meetings and organized rowdyism.
Tilak"s propaganda had at the same time steadily a.s.sumed a more and more anti-British character, and it was always as the allies and the tools of Government, in its machinations against Hinduism, that the Hindu reformers and the Mahomedans had in turn been denounced. In order to invest it with a more definitely religious sanction, Tilak placed it under the special patronage of the most popular deity in India. Though Ganesh, the elephant-headed G.o.d, is the G.o.d of learning whom Hindu writers delight to invoke on the t.i.tle-page of their books, there is scarcely a village or a frequented roadside in India that does not show some rude presentment of his familiar features, usually smeared over with red ochre, Tilak could not have devised a more popular move than when he set himself to organize annual festivals in honour of Ganesh, known as Ganpati celebrations, and to found in all the chief centres of the Deccan Ganpati societies, each with its _mela_ or choir recruited among his youthful bands of gymnasts. These festivals gave occasion for theatrical performances[3] and religious songs in which the legends of Hindu mythology were skilfully exploited to stir up hatred of the "foreigner"--and _mlenccha_, the term employed for "foreigner," applied equally to Europeans and to Mahomedans--as well as for tumultuous processions only too well calculated to provoke affrays with the Mahomedans and with the police, which in turn led to judicial proceedings that served as a fresh excuse for noisy protests and inflammatory pleadings. With the Ganpati celebrations the area of Tilak"s propaganda was widely increased.
But the movement had yet to be given a form which should directly appeal to the fighting instincts of the Mahrattas and stimulate active disaffection by reviving memories of olden times when under Shivaji"s leadership they had rolled back the tide of Musulman conquest and created a Mahratta Empire of their own. The legends of Shivaji"s prowess still lingered in Maharashtra, where the battlemented strongholds which he built crown many a precipitous crag of the Deccan highlands. In a valley below Pratabghar the spot is still shown where Shivaji induced the Mahomedan general, Afzul Khan, to meet him in peaceful conference half-way between the contending armies, and, as he bent down to greet his guest, plunged into his bowels the famous "tiger"s claw," a hooked gauntlet of steel, while the Mahratta forces sprang out of ambush and cut the Mahomedan army to pieces. But if Shivaji"s memory still lived, it belonged to a past which was practically dead and gone. Only a few years, before an Englishman who had visited Shivaji"s tomb had written to a local newspaper calling attention to the ruinous condition into which the people of Maharashtra had allowed the last resting-place of their national hero to fall. Some say it was this letter which first inspired Tilak with the idea of reviving Shivaji"s memory and converting it into a living force. Originally it was upon the great days of the Poona Peshwas that Tilak had laid the chief stress, and he may possibly have discovered that theirs were not after all names to conjure with amongst non-Brahman Mahrattas, who had suffered heavily enough at their hands. At any rate, Tilak brought Shivaji to the forefront and set in motion a great "national" propaganda which culminated in 1895 in the celebration at all the chief centres of Brahman activity in the Deccan of Shivaji"s reputed birthday, the princ.i.p.al commemoration being held under Tilak"s own presidency at Raighar, where the Mahratta chieftain had himself been crowned. What was the purpose and significance of this movement may be gathered from a _Shlok_ or sacred poem improvised on this occasion by one of Tilak"s disciples who to acquire sinister notoriety.
Let us be prompt like Shivaji to engage in desperate enterprises.
Take up your swords and shields and we shall cut off countless heads of enemies. Listen! Though we shall have to risk our lives in a national war, we shall a.s.suredly shed the life-blood of our enemies.
It was on the occasion of the Shivaji "coronation festivities" that the right--nay, the duty--to commit murder for political purposes was first publicly expounded. With Tilak in the chair, a Brahman professor got up to vindicate Shivaji"s b.l.o.o.d.y deed:--
Who dares to call that man a murderer who, when only nine years old, had received Divine inspiration not to bow down before a Mahomedan Emperor? Who dares to condemn Shivaji for disregarding a minor duty in the performance of a major one? Had Shivaji committed five or fifty crimes more terrible, I would have been equally ready to prostrate myself not once but one hundred times before the image of our lord Shivaji ... Every Hindu, every Mahratta must rejoice at this spectacle, for we too are all striving to regain our lost independence, and it is only by combination that we can throw off the yoke.
Tilak himself was even more outspoken:--
It is needless to make further researches as to the killing of Afzul Khan. Let us even a.s.sume that Shivaji deliberately planned and executed the murder. Was the act good or evil? This question cannot be answered from the standpoint of the Penal Code or of the laws of Manu or according to the principles of morality laid down in the systems of the West or of the East. The laws which bind society are for common folk like you and me. No one seeks to trace the genealogy of a Rishi or to fasten guilt upon a Maharaj. Great men are above the common principles of morality. Such principles do not reach to the pedestal of a great man. Did Shivaji commit a sin in killing Afzul Khan? The answer to this question can be found in the Mahabharata itself. The Divine Krishna teaching in the Gita tells us we may kill even our teachers and our kinsmen, and no blame attaches if we are not actuated by selfish desires. Shivaji did nothing from a desire to fill his own belly. It was in a praiseworthy object that he murdered Afzul Khan for the good of others.
If thieves enter our house and we have not strength to drive them out, should we not without hesitation shut them in, and burn them alive? G.o.d has conferred on the _mlencchas_ (foreigners) no grant of Hindustan inscribed on imperishable bra.s.s. Shivaji strove to drive them forth out of the land of his birth, but he was guiltless of the sin of covetousness.
Do not circ.u.mscribe your vision like frogs in a well. Rise above the Penal Code into the rarefied atmosphere of the sacred Bhaghavad Gita and consider the action of great men.
In the reflected blaze of this apotheosis of Shivaji, Tilak stood forth as the appointed leader of the "nation." He was the triumphant champion of Hindu orthodoxy, the high-priest of Ganesh, the inspired prophet of a new "nationalism," which in the name of Shivaji would cast out the hated _mlencchas_ and restore the glories of Mahratta history. The Government feared him, for people could put no other construction on the official confirmation of his election when he was returned in 1895 as a member of the Bombay Legislative Council--above all, when inside the Council-room he continued with the same audacity and the same impunity his campaign of calumny and insult. His activity was unceasing. He disdained none of the arts which make for popularity. His house was always open to those who sought in the right spirit for a.s.sistance or advice. He had absolute control of the Sabha and ruled the munic.i.p.ality of Poona. In private and in public, through his speeches and through his newspapers, he worked upon the prejudices and pa.s.sions of both the educated and the uneducated, and especially upon the crude enthusiasm of the young.
Towards the end of 1896 the Deccan was threatened with famine. Hungry stomachs are prompt to violence, and Tilak started a "no-rent" campaign.
Like all Tilak"s schemes in those days it was carefully designed to conceal as far as possible any direct incitement to the withholding of land revenue. His missionaries went round with a story that Government had issued orders not to collect taxes where the crops had fallen below a certain yield. The _rayats_ believed them, and when the tax-gatherer arrived they refused payment. Trouble then arose. Outrages such as the mutilation of the Queen"s statue at Bombay, the attempt to fire the Church Mission Hall, the a.s.saults upon "moderate" Hindus who refused to toe the line, became ominously frequent. Worse was to follow when the plague appeared. The measures at first adopted by Government to check the spread of this new visitation doubtless offended in many ways against the customs and prejudices of the people, especially the searching and disinfection of houses, and the forcible removal of plague-patients even when they happened to be Brahmans. What Tilak could do by secret agitation and by a rabid campaign in the Press to raise popular resentment to a white heat he did. The _Kesari_ published incitements to violence which were put into the mouth of Shivaji himself[4]. The inevitable consequences ensued. On June 27, 1897, on their way back from an official reception in celebration of Queen Victoria"s Diamond Jubilee, Mr. Rand, an Indian civilian, who was President of the Poona Plague Committee, and Lieutenant Ayerst, of the Commissariat Department, were shot down by Damodhar Chapekur, a young Chitpavan Brahman, on the Ganeshkind road. No direct connexion has been established between that crime and Tilak. But, like the murderer of Mr.
Jackson at Nasik last winter, the murderer of Rand and Ayerst--the same young Brahman who had recited the _Shlok_, which I have quoted above, at the great Shivaji celebration--declared that it was the doctrines expounded in Tilak"s newspapers that had driven him to the deed. The murderer who had merely given effect to the teachings of Tilak was sentenced to death, but Tilak himself, who was prosecuted for a seditious article published a few days before the murder, received only a short term of imprisonment, and was released before the completion of his term under certain pledges of good behaviour which he broke as soon as it suited him to break them.
Thus ended the first campaign of Indian unrest, which, in its details, has served as an incitement and a model to all those who have conducted subsequent operations in the same field.
The Poona murders sent a thrill of horror throughout India and caused a momentary sensation even in England. But though Government was not wholly blind to the warning, it could not decide what ought to be done, and beyond tinkering at one or two sections of the Criminal Code bearing on Press offences, it did nothing until history had repeated itself on a much larger scale. Tilak was generously released from prison before the expiration of his sentence, and his release was construed in the Deccan as a fresh triumph. He was acclaimed by his followers as a "national"
martyr and hero. After a short "rest-cure" in a sanatorium Tilak returned to the _Kesari_, which, in the hands of his co-adjutors, two other Chitpavan Brahmans, Mr. Kelkar and Mr. Khadilkar, had lost nothing of its vitriolic pungency in his absence. The celebration with renewed pomp in 1900 of Shivaji"s "birthday" at Raighar marked the resumption of Tilak"s operations. I need not stop to recount all the incidents of this second campaign in the Deccan, in which Ganpati celebrations, Shivaji festivals, gymnastic societies, &c., played exactly the same part as in the first campaign. For three or four years the Tai Maharaj case, in which, as executor of one of his friends, Shri Baba Maharaj, a Sirdar of Poona, Tilak was attacked by the widow and indicted on charges of forgery, perjury, and corruption, absorbed a great deal of his time, but, after long and wearisome proceedings, the earlier stages of the case ended in a judgment in his favour which was greeted as another triumph for him, and not unnaturally though, as recent developments have shown, quite prematurely,[5] won him much sympathy, even amongst those who were politically opposed to him. But throughout this ordeal Tilak never relaxed his political activity either in the Press or in the manifold organizations which he controlled.
His influence, moreover, was rapidly extending far beyond, Poona and the Deccan. He had at an early date a.s.sociated himself with, the Indian National Congress, and he was secretary of the Standing Committee for the Deccan. His Congress work had brought him into contact with the politicians of other provinces, and upon none did his teachings and his example produce so deep an impression as upon the emotional Bengalees.
He had not the gift of sonorous eloquence which they possess, and he never figured conspicuously as an orator at the annual sessions of Congress. But his calculating resourcefulness and his indomitable energy, even his masterfulness, impressed them all the more, and in the two memorable sessions held at Benares in 1905 and at Calcutta in 1906, when the agitation over the Part.i.tion of Bengal was at its height, his was the dominant personality, not at the tribune, but in the lobbies. He had been one of the first champions of _Swadeshi_ as an economic weapon in the struggle against British rule, and he saw in the adoption of the boycott, with all the lawlessness which it involved, an unprecedented opportunity of stimulating the active forces of disaffection. As far as Bengal was concerned, an "advanced" Press which always took its cue from Tilak"s _Kesari_ had already done its work, and Tilak could rely upon the enthusiastic support of men like Mr. Bepin Chandra Pal and Mr.
Arabindo Ghose, who were politically his disciples, though their religious and social standpoints were in many respects different, Mr.