BOOKS.
INDIAN UNREST.* IT is not often that a subject upon which the British people sadly needs to be informed is clarified by such a masterly treatment as is to be found in Mr. Chirol's book on the origins and treatment of Indian unrest. There can be no one not resident in India who has studied the subject so closely as Mr. Ohirol ; and having acquired a highly impressive fund of information, he has the sovereign advantage, which could scarcely belong to any one in India, of a judicial detachment. Altogether, the book is an example of what such a study should be ; it is Wise and serious, firm but humane ; it displays statecraft as well as historical knowledge. How different— and how much more profitable—is the spirit of Mr. Chirol (who does not for a moment blink the brutal realities of the murderous sedition of to-day) from that of some people both in Calcutta and in England in 1857, from whose lips burst a rancorous outcry for reprisals. Reprisals of course would have cured nothing, and would have humiliated those who were responsible for them, however much they might have been said to be deserved. Every observer who kept his coolness knew this. The French General Vinoy wrote to Lord Clyde : "Les represailles sont toujours inutiles." Happily England was never so well served by men of heroism and righteousness as she was served by her most distinguished soldiers in the Mutiny. We believe that in this respect our good fortune will be repeated ; but our servants on whom the task of Leroism falls, and will continue to fall, are the Government of India and the members of the Indian Civil Service. Warnings, it is true, were neglected long enough in the years immediately preceding 1908, but not so long or so hopelessly neglected as the warnings which heralded the Mutiny. Now there is a lull in the unrest. Even while methods of ending the unrest are being concerted we must remind ourselves that if we are true to our trust failure is impossible. There is no such thing as a united Indian nation which can rise and wreck the despised yet immeasurable blessings of our administration. By writing this book Mr. Chirol has done a service to his country. There will no longer be any excuse for English politicians to misunderstand the nature of Indian unrest. Even the bewildering complexities of Thahmanisut are so skilfully reduced to their essential political meaning that they fall naturally and convincingly into their place in the scheme of organised sedition.
It is a new India which Mr. Chirol describes. If Lord Canning could come to life, he would not recognise the sinister revival of conservative Brahmanism in the Deccan, or the temper of the Bengalis of to-day, who persuade themselves that they were once a real nation, and have only temporarily fallen on evil days, and are capable of a glorious national rejuvenation. One thing above all others Mr. Chirol makes clear, and we undertake to say that he could not possibly have chosen a point on which the Englishman who calls himself a Liberal requires more enlightenment. He shows that in India—the same thing is true of most Eastern countries—religion is politics. The terms are interchangeable. This should never be forgotten. A man who does not appreciate this fact has not begun to understand the elements of the problem, although his learning may be wide, his sympathy intense, and his industry unabating. Let us imagine the case of a Radical politician much interested in India. He travels in India in the Recess, and is greatly struck by the culture of Brahmans who have been educated in Europe, and can converse with him in his own language of political philosophy. Their quotations from Mill alone are a passport to his affections. How crass is the stupidity, he thinks, of those who would forbid to such men a rapid development towards complete self-government! Surely swaraj is a reasonable demand ! How intolerant and ignorant is the " bureaucracy " which does not perceive the jewels spread before its eyes ! But what the Radical visitor does not understand, because it is not immediately apparent, is that there is a mysterious difference between the workings of Eastern and Western minds, and that high intellectuality, and even fine ideals, in cultured Hindus are compatible with a • Indian Unrest. By Valentine Chirol. A Reprint. Revised and Enlarged, from the Times. With an Introduction by Sir Alfred Lyall. London: MaC- millan and Co. [5s. net.] Istandard of morals and conduct so utterly debased (from our point of view) as to be an outrage on all education. Mr. Chirol illustrates this fact over and over again; he 'proves it out of the mouths of Hindus themselves. Every one who doubts
it should not fail to read the book. It will certainly open his eyes. It may be that the cultured Brahmau is no longer a believer, but that does not prevent him from using his faith to exert political influence on those who do believe. Men who have gained high University degrees take their part in the horrible rites of the worship of Durga or Kali. The propaganda of Mr. Tilak, a Chitpavan Brahman of the Deccan, is a case in point. With amazing skill and per- sistence he revived Hindu rites and superstitions which had almost fallen into desuetude, giving them all a strong political meaning. He found justification for murder in the Bhagvat Ghita, perhaps the most beautiful book in the sacred Hindu literature. He restored the worship of Shivaji and the Ganpati rites :—
"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 melts or choir recruited among his youthful bands of gymnasts. These festivals gave occasion for theatrical performances and religious songs in which the legends of Hindu mythology were skilfully exploited to stir up hatred of the foreigner '—and welenccha, 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 llahomedan general, Afzul Khan, to meet him in peaceful con- ference 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 ealli g 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 principal commemora- tion 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 was soon 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 assuredly shed the life-blood of our enemies.'"
A very curious proof of Tilak's flair was that the worship of Shivaji succeeded not only where Mahratta legends were strong, but among the Bengalis. This was indeed wonderful. Shivaji, the Mahratta hero, was to Bengalis a nomen infandum. For generations crying Bengali babies had been hushed by the terrible name of Shivaji,—a sort of bogy or croque-mitaine useful to impatient mothers. Yet Mr. Suren- dra_nath Banerjee preached the glories of Shivaji which he bad borrowed from the Deccan, and Shivaji duly became a god of Hindu nationalism. Incidentally this transference of the worship of Shivaji is a complete proof of the co-operation in sedition between the Deccan and Bengal in spite of all their intense dissimilarities.
Between 1906 and 1908 the spread of sedition was extra- ordinarily rapid. Tilak's seed was collie to harvest. Of all the newspapers which sprang into existence to preach hate and murder, none was more powerful than the Yugantar. Take only this one extract from the Yugantar as an example. Saktih worship, it should be said, leads in its extreme forms
to the most perverse and licentious aberrations of a highly emotional mysticism :— " Will the Bengali worshippers of Shakti shrink from the shedding of blood ? The number of Englishmen in this country is not above one lakh and a half, and what is the number of English officials in each district ? If you are firm in your resolution you can in a single day bring English rule to an end. Lay down your life, but first take a life. The worship of the goddess will not be consummatA3d if you sacrifice your lives at the shrine of independence without shedding blood."
The seditious Bengali papers went further than the Kesari, Tilak's Bombay paper, though that had spoken pleasantly of
bombs as "charms" and "amulets." A Hindu scholar wrote
to Mr. Chirol of the Yugantar that nothing like its articles had ever appeared before in Bengali literature; and the Govern- ment translator confessed in Court that he had never read language so lofty, so pathetic, so stirring. Yet the writers had never learnt Bengali in their school-days. The organ tone of Milton betrayed their English education.
We have great hopes that the unrest in the Punjab, which is already conspicuously modified, will disappear, for it has not the basis of the proud and conservative Brahmanism which exists in the Deccan, or the sensitive "nationalism" of the Bengalis. But it is to be remembered that if ever the Punjab went wrong, its Sikh and Sepoy troops would be more formidable than anything opposed to us in the province of Bombay or in Bengal. If we are wise, the Punjab will not trouble us. The causes of unrest are not all centred in the perverse rehabilitation of Hinduism. There are the sufferings of the people from the higher cost of living, from the plague, and from famine ; there is the treatment of Indians in other parts of the Empire ; there is the world-wide wave of Asiatic aspiration which received bulk and momentum from the Russo-Japanese Wan More than all, there is the fatal mistake of our educational methods in India. We read to-day with a grim wonder 31acaulay's famous Minute on the panacea of education. The youth of India is now educated, but the ancient beliefs are destroyed by Western thought and no stabilising element takes their place. Religion and morality are not taught. We hold, with Mr. Chirol, that this should be remedied. We cannot impose Christianity on unwilling pupils by the authority of the State. That would be a tyranny obviously unauthorised by Christianity. Is, then, a Christian State to concern itself with teaching alien
creeds ? It is a question from which many people shrink. But we maintain that the time has come to face it. It is our deliberate opinion that the State should authorise the teaching
of native religions in the elementary schools of India rather than that young India should grow up as now, a quarry for every kind of immoral, anti-social, and anarchic doctrine preached by clever but absolutely unprincipled Aryan idealists.
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