B. M. MALABARIA
Sin VALENTINE CHIEOL in his brief preface to this book balls Malabari "one of the most remarkable characters that modern India. has produced." That, we think, is not an exaggerated judgment. for Malabari came nearer to reconciling the proverbially irreconcilable East and West than any Indian we have heard or read of. He had a passionate sense of nationality, yet he recognized that everything which the various Indian races and creeds enjoyed in the form of security and peace came from the Western method of govern- ment imposed on India. His opinions did not frequently satisfy either the Western idea or the Nationalist idea of what was best for India, because he was an intermediary between the two. But he was often the means of an accom- modation. He would represent the Indian point of view to Government officials who liked and trusted him, and if the Government felt that some Indian aspiration could be • gratified without injury to their essential and necessary method of administration they would gladly accept Malabari's suggestions. If one could measure Oriental mental qualities in Western terms, one would say that Malabari was a Whig. He believed that the British administration of India had many weaknesses, but he was an out-and-out champion of it nevertheless. It must at all costs be retained, he said. No Englishman could recognize more clearly than he did the fate that would fall on India if the British hand which spreads over the whole continent withdrew its gentle pressure and allowed the rival elements of the population to begin once more their deadly conflicts for supremacy. He was a believer in hastening slowly. He longed for the day when Indians would be fit and able to hear with the British an equal share in governing the land. But he sorrowfully admitted that the day was a long way off, because he saw that a Constitution would mean nothing but flisappointment and disaster to his countrymen so long as they retained their social and political prejudices. The dark and backward social practices of Hinduism, for example,-must be ended before it would be possible to put Hindus in posses- sion of political liberty. One of the acute disappointments of Malabarfs life was When the National Congress, instead of setting itself to clear the ground of the lumber that blocked the path to self-government, came out as a claimant for immediate self-government. Malabari knew which way such a policy would lead if—to imagine an impossible thing—it had been encouraged. It would have brought to India the experi- ence of Turkey, Persia, China—the experience of countries which grasp and eat what they cannot digest. It was natural that Malabari should not have achieved much that can stand as a visible recordrof his work. He sowed seed, and others, we hope, may gather in a harvest. Only the Age of Consent Act can be mentioned as a trophy of his energy. But he was a power in India. Europeans and Indians alike consulted and respected him. More than any other Indian he had conquered prejudice. He was the friend of all creeds.
Born about 1853 of Parsi parents, Malabari suffered at school as only a very sensitive child can under a very brutal master. He has written of this school himself :— " One day a refractory boy had to be brought to his senses. Narbbairam had tried all his Punitive regulations on him. This
MiAtativrew''' 1,2T," 'sfr"14".X.L'Z' ri"eLte""L'oa..T..13.hitelf sad Sass. rz... net.] time, therefore, he made him kneel upon pebbles, and placed a heavy slab on his back, and over the stone he himself pretended to sit This was the last straw and the boy gave such a shriek of agony and fright that his mother and grandmother (tame running to the scene ; they lived next door to the school. These dames were well known for their muscular development They went up, to Narbhairam, gave him a good deal of Billingsgate, and released the boy. He was withdrawn that day. I, too, went home, never to return to the school again. At night I was in high fever, and shortly after in the clutches of Saab, Mate, the goddess of Small Pox?'
Mulabari's sensitiveness to suffering was combined with a. romantic imagination. Here we see the makings of a man willing to spend himself in the service of his people. His. flaming spirit made all those who met him much less conscious than they otherwise would have been of his physical frailty. It was an Irish Presbyterian missionary who introduced Malabari to. Christianity, and Malabari adopted much of Christian practice which earned his admiration, though he never called himself a Christian. Indeed, if he held in his early manhood to any particular faith, it was to his own reading of the teaching of Zoroaster. The Feral prayer for light probably expressed most of his cravings : "Give Na knowledge, sagacity, quickness of tongue, holiness of soul, a good memory, and the understanding that goeth on growing; the understanding which cornett] not through learning." Later in life he seems to have been in all essential convections a Positivist, though, as we have said, he never labelled himself.
Malabari tried several times before he obtained a degree all Bombay. The excessive memorizing of the Indian system was 'beyond the peculiar faculties of his brain. His powers of independent thought and judgment seemed to leave no room in his head for maim, of tabulated fact% He was already s. schoolmaster and a poet—a poet with an ear, a sense of beauty, and a mastery of form—before he became a graduate.. Thanks to Dr. Wilson, a very wise Christian teecher, some of Malabari's poems were published. They contained "the sweet- ness and grace of Gujrati melody with the praeliaal vigour of Western thought." The poems brought Malabari renown, if little money. But they also brought him a request to write' for the Times of India.
As a journalist Malabari urged social reform on his country- men as a preliminary to all other reform. He wanted an organ of his own, and as soon as he was able he founded the bairns Spectator, which was, according to his scheme, to be a poor man's paper, a paper to help women and a paper to raise the lowest classes. Hie ambition was too high and too wide. But. his paper could not be ignored. In 1902 he established East and West, which also did lead than it was designed to do, but was also a paper that counted. Of all the reforms which Malabari demanded, none Was more closely connected with his name than that of abolishing child marriages, and the blight of perpetual widowhood which he regarded as a prolonged suttee. He had the happiness of seeing the Bill passed at his inspiration which raised the age of consent for child niarriagee to twelve. How Hindus with their approved polygamy can justify the perpetual widowhood of a child who perhaps never saw her husband is a mystery which a Western mind cannot fathom. On this subject and many others Malabari thought and wrote with a perfectly clear and detached logic. Similarly in education he pointed out the absurdity of making schoolboys work fourteen hours a day— boys who are already married and very likely have families He deplored the absence of religious education in Indian schools, but (arguing perhaps too much from he own happy experience) said that religion could be taught only by mothers. Many of us who watch the effects of the absence of religious education in India are more inclined to say that, since we are debarred by a solemn pledge from imposing Christianity on India, we should provide any religious teaching that the parents of the children choose, Finally, we must say that Malabari had a sense of fun, as we gather from one of his reminiscences of a meeting with the theosophist, Madame Blavataky " Madame Blavatsky was a mighty personality, large of limb, loud of voice, reckless in manner, with profound if somewhat in:. digested knowledge, and with a pair of eyes blazing like electric!, batteries. She was short-tempered, but I learnt to manage her like a child as we sat in her sanctum, she smoking and talking anal scolding and swearing, and I listening and usually laughing. Ono afternoon she wanted to take me by storm and came out with a. particularly learned yarn about the ancient cult of the Magi, the. fire burning eternally at Baku, her personal first-band experience of the great ones in those regions and elsewhere. In her enthusiasm Madame talked and talked till I felt sore under the astral rides she gave me, scouring, the heaven above and earth below for the nuggets of the Zoroastrian wisdom, and promising me wondrous powers of illumination, if I could only accept divine guidance un- questioningly. She took me by turn at my weakest and my strongest, and lay back in her chair apparently exhausted by the strain of her own emotions. Was I captured ? Alas, no. On the contrary, taking a malicious pleasure in mimicking her, I gave Madame a yarn about my own spiritualistic experiences, winding up with the exploits of a cock that had belonged to my great- grandfather. 'That cock,' I concluded in an awed whisper, 'used to pray in the Bactrian dialect, and it is believed that its feathery frame was inhabited by the soul of a Magian.' As I doled out the linguistic and magic virtues of that wonderful chanticleer, I thought I had made an impression on Madame. But she was contemplating murder all the while. Before I could realize her intention, she jumped out of her chair, and with the words • Take this, you wretch,' she delivered a ringing box on my ear. Rubbing the injured orifice with one hand, I saluted the tigress with the other. • Let she kiss the band that had smitten the sceptic, now is Isis truly unveiled.' "
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