Letters to the Editor

GREAT BRITAIN AND INDIA

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] JIIL—In your issue of September 20th, on the page reserved for "the ventilation of moderate Indian opinion," there is a communication "By an Indian at present living in England" which seeks to prove by quotations from a speech delivered recently by Dr. Ambedlcar, that the depressed classes have turned against British rule. The whole communication is sheer propaganda calculated to give an impression to your readers which is entirely opposed to the true facts. Dr. Ambedkar belongs to the Mahar caste, and is the first member of that community to attain high scholastic degrees. The community are naturally proud of him, and have regarded him as a natural leader, but if that gentleman thinks that the best policy for the Mahar is to make up to the Hindu and abandon faith in the British, his community will not for long follow him.

The following is an extract received by a member of this Society from a Mahar who has for many years championed the cause of his caste. It is dated August 30th :—

" The Mahars as a class," he writes, "are keeping aloof from the Civil Disobedience Movement, although our people in rural areas, not only in this Province but in many other Provinces, are boycotted and put to many other hardships by the Congress people." • The Bombay Correspondent of the Times cabled on September 28th :—

" Dr. Ambedkar, who goes to the Round Table Conference as a representative of the depressed classes, said that ' Congress wanted to force its views upon them, but we are fighting for freedom, and would not permit that tyranny'."

It was a Mahar Member of the Central Provinces Legislative Council, Mr. Gawai, who a few years ago stood up, one against fifty-three, to oppose a motion that further British recruitment to the Indian Civil Service should be closed, stating that unless there was a substantial British element in the Civil Services it would be impossible for communities like his own to live.

The enthusiastic concourse of untouchables who collected to welcome II.R.H. The Prince of Wales at Delhi in defiance of the boycott enjoined by the Non-Co-operating Hindus, will long be remembered.

The rhetorical periods in Dr. Arnbedkar's speech about the Army, the Police, the wells and the temples, are of obvious Brahmin inspiration. The same points have more than once been taken by a Brahmin speaker in London, and at the present moment Brahmins, in the West of India at all events, are engaged in an effort to prove to the untouchables that " Codlin's the friend, not Short." • • The untouchables know perfectly well that it was the Brahmins and caste Hindus who invented" untouchability" and enforced it down the centuries ; they know that if they are denied the enjoyment of Hindu wells and temples it is due not to the British but to the opposition on religious grounds of caste Hindus. The same obstacle has stood in the way of their recruitment to the Police. In regard to the Army, they also know that it is military and not caste reasons which have prevented the enlistment of Mahar regiments. In the old Madras regiments there were Pariah Companies, and these classes are still to be found in the Madras Sappers and Miners.

It is only three years ago that eight Brahmins were convicted of bludgeoning a ninth to death because of his familiarity with an untouchable. The depressed classes know perfectly well what the impartial justice of the British Raj, and the un- remitting labours of Christian Missions, have done to give them opportunity and hope, denied them tty the higher castes. Dr. Ambedkar is himself a living refutation of the argument put forward by your correspondent. When under Hindu domination was it ever possible for a Mahar to have the education which that gentleman has enjoyed ?

In the Church Times of September 27th the Calcutta Cor- respondent of that paper quotes a speech delivered at Amraoti by R. S. Nekaljoy, who was presiding over a Conference of depressed classes there. Mr. Nekaljoy, after describing the iniquitous treatment meted out to his class by the high castes, said :—

" India has seen every sort of Government, but until the British came we, the untouchables, had absolutely no yoice of our own. We could not dress, we could not move about, we could not educate ourselves, we could not own property ; we wore sold with the land, on which we were forced to live in hovels. Our bodies, our wives, our children, belonged to our masters, the high.class Hindus."

After further lurid description of the treatment they received, and after denouncing Gandhi's revolutionary designs, as calculated to make the untouchables sink deeper into the mire, Mr. Nekaljoy goes on to say :—

" The new reforms are now on the anvil, and we of the ' depressed classes' must secure constitutional safeguards, so that when the power is transferred from the British Parliament, and from Indian Bureaucracy, to the popular legislatures, such power shall not be used for their selfish ends by the high-class Hindus or Moslems ; and for the sake of the depressed classes I appeal to the British Government and the British Nation on no account to weaken the British element in the administration of India. I say this because of our experience of centuries.

The game of these Hindu Nationalists, by whatever name they choose to call themselves, is to capture if they can the representatives of minorities attending the Round Table Conference ; and to judge from the evident gusto with which your correspondent quotes any statements he can find front the mouth of an untouchable which will throw doubt on the confidence of those classes in British Rule, seems to make it clear that though his voice may be the voice of a " moderate," his sentiments are the sentiments of the Congress.—We are, Sir, &c.,

iSUMNER, SYDENIIAM OF OMBE, GREENWAY, C. W. C. OMAN, REGINALD CRADDOCK, M. F. O'Dwv.tac, G. MACMIJNN, CLAUD W. JACOB.

(President, and Members of the Executive Committee Indian Empire Society.) 12 Ashburn Gardens, S.W. 7.