Sir Valentine Chirol

“ Few Indian cities are reputed to be more ancient or more sacred than the little town of Ujjain on the Sipra river, known as Ozenī to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves. When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was, for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the sacrificial fire, which consumed her—the prototype of all pious Hindu widows who perform Sati—in the presence of gods and Brahmans. ”

“ Are we not at least entitled to claim that the Indian tax-payer's money should not be spent merely on the maintenance of British garrisons that are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and of an Indian army that is so constituted as to lack all the essentials of a national army, but should go to the building up of an army really worthy to take its place on equal terms when India attains to self-government with the other armies of a commonwealth of free nations? ”

“ Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors before him in India, men of his own race and creed—the blood of Timur flowed in his veins—and men of other races and of other creeds. They too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had passed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. ”

“ In estimating the politically-minded portion of the people of India we should not go either to census reports on the one hand, or to political literature on the other. It is one of the most difficult portions of our task to see them in their right relation to the rest of the country. Our obligations to them are plain, for they are intellectually our children. They have imbibed ideas which we ourselves have set before them, and we ought to reckon it to their credit. The present intellectual and moral stir in India is no reproach but rather a tribute to our work. ”

“ The essence is in all cases the maintenance of their administrative autonomy under their own dynastic rulers whose hereditary rights and privileges are permanently guaranteed to them, subject to their loyalty to the British Crown and to reasonably good government. The Princes and Chiefs who rule over them—some well, a few rather badly, most of them perhaps indifferently; some Hindus, some Mahomedans; some still very conservative and almost mediaeval, some on genuinely progressive lines; some with a mere veneer of European modernity—are all equally jealous of their rights and their dignity. ”

“ On one of those peerless days of the cold season in Upper India when there is not a cloud to break the serenity of the deep blue sky, I looked up to the mountain Ghridrakuta, on whose slopes Buddha dwelt for some time after he had found enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, and saw it just as the second Chinese pilgrim to whom we owe most of our knowledge of Rajagriha described it—"a solitary peak rising to a great height on which vultures make their abode." ”

“ We have preached to Indians, not untruly, but with an insistence that seems to them now more than ever to savour of self-righteousness, that our superior civilisation redeemed them out of the anarchy and strife which devastated India before British rule brought her peace and order and justice. Now they ask themselves how it comes, then, that the Western civilisation which they are told to thank for their own salvation has not saved Europe itself from the chaos which has overtaken it to-day. ”

“ Let your law-courts with their cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her old Panchayats, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we will give them simpler structures, open to God's air and light, and the learning of our forefathers that will make them free men once more. ”

“ The continuous roar of traffic in the busy streets, the crowded tram-cars, the motors and taxis jostling the ancient bullock-carts, the surging crowds in the semi-Europeanised native quarters, even the pall of smoke that tells of many modern industrial activities are not quite so characteristic of new India as, when I was last there, the sandwich-men with boards inviting a vote for this or that candidate in the elections to the new Indian Councils. ”

“ If India had displayed in the best sense of the word an Imperial spirit and made sacrifices that entitled her to be treated as a partner in, rather than a mere dependency of, the British Empire, was she still to be denied a large instalment at least of the political liberties which had been long ago conferred on the self-governing Dominions? Were her people to be refused in the self-governing Dominions themselves the equality of treatment which her representatives were allowed to enjoy in the council-chamber of the Empire? ”

“ Is there any other way to avert it than by a frank recognition of racial equality in the sense of equality of rightful opportunity for both races, Asiatic and European? It is only in that sense that racial equality, like the equality already recognised of all men born to our common British nationhood, can have any meaning. For in the strict sense of the word no two men are born equal, either physically or intellectually, any more than there is complete equality in the family and social surroundings in which they are brought up. ”

“ One may therefore hope that the lesson of the war will not be forgotten, and that Sir Thomas Holland, who has now exchanged the Munitions Board for the portfolio of Industry, will prevent a relapse into the old traditions of aloofness now that the war pressure is over.
The cotton-mills of Bombay, the jute-mills of Calcutta, the goldfields of Mysore each contribute their own remarkable chapter to the story of British industrial enterprise in India, but none can compare in point of romance with the story of the iron and steel industry of Jamsheedpur. ”

“ Here one sees India as it was before the Mahomedan invasions, in the days of the last of the great Indian rulers who succeeded for a time in bending the whole of Northern India to his will. As always in India, behind whatever form of temporal power might for the moment appear to be paramount, religion and the social order which it consecrates represented the real paramount power that alone endures. In this extraordinary festival which marked the close of Harsha's reign the picture left to us is singularly complete. ”

“ Or an excited crowd, all wearing the little white Gandhi cap, rend the air with shouts of Mahatma Gandhi-ki jai! in honour of some travelling apostle of "Non-co-operation." And all over India the swarm of humbler travellers, who lend their own note of varied colour even to the smallest way-side stations, seems to increase every year, whether one crosses the vast drab plains of Upper India or climbs the steep face of the Western Ghats on to the sun-scorched plateau of the Deccan, or is unmercifully jolted through the gentler and more verdant landscapes of Southern India. ”

“ If, on the other hand, we fulfil that which we have always recognised, and to-day with renewed clearness of vision, to be our mission in India, by reconciling the best elements in Indian civilisation and our own, and if we can convert our commonwealth of free British nations into a commonwealth of free Western and Eastern nations on a basis of real equality, we shall set an example of no less value to others than will be to ourselves our own achievement. ”

“ For it was the first time that the Sovereign to whom it was given to rule over India from a remote Western island travelled out to receive on Indian soil the homage of his Indian subjects and appeared before them in the full majesty of crown, orb, and sceptre. Apart entirely from the merits of the measure, the dramatic transfer of the capital of his Indian Empire from Calcutta to Delhi appealed to the imagination of Indians as a demonstration of the Royal power no less impressive than the splendours of the great Durbar at which the Royal command went forth. ”

“ Then, whether it be their train or not, there is a din of yelling voices, a frenzied rush up and down the platform, and, even before those who want to get out have had time to alight, a headlong scramble for places—as often as not in the wrong carriages and always apparently in those that are already crammed full, as the Indian is essentially gregarious—and out again with fearful shouts and shrill cries if a bundle has gone astray, or an agitated mother has mislaid her child, or a traveller discovers at the last moment that it is not after all the train he wants. ”

“ Will the British Government and the Dominion Governments and the free peoples behind them approach all questions in which India is concerned in the same spirit which they have already learnt to bring to bear upon questions in which not India but other partners of the Empire are concerned? Will they be prepared to approach them in the same spirit in which India was welcomed in times of stress and storm to the War Councils and Peace Councils of the Empire? ”

“ Firishta described Ahmedabad as, in his day, "the handsomest city in Hindustan and perhaps in the world," and very few Indian cities contain so many beautiful buildings as those with which Ahmedabad was endowed in the course of a few decades by its Ahmed Shahi rulers. No one can fail to admire the wealth of ornamentation and the exquisite workmanship lavished upon them, though they are not by any means the noblest monuments of Mahomedan architecture in India. In fact—and herein lies their peculiar interest—they are Hindu rather than Mahomedan in spirit. ”

“ At last, after much clanging of bells and fierce altercations between the Brahman priests and the faithful as to payment of necessary fees, the bronze doors roll back, and in the dim religious twilight one catches a glint of gold and precious stones, the head-dress of Kali, whose terrific image barely emerges from the depth of the inner sanctuary in which it stands, accessible only to its serving Brahmans. They alone, though strangely enough temple Brahmans as a class enjoy little credit with their fellow-castemen, can approach the idol and wash and dress and feed it with offerings. ”

“ The cry of "Islam in danger" was quick to stir the Mahomedans, but the brains that engineered and directed the Mutiny were Hindu, and the Mutiny itself was the counter-revolution arraying in battle against the intellectual and moral as well as against the material and military forces of Western civilisation that was slowly but steadily revolutionising India, all the grievances and all the fears, all the racial and religious antagonism and bitterness aroused by the disintegration under its impact of ancient social and religious systems. ”

“ In its narrow streets every shop is stocked with the paraphernalia that Hindus require for their devotions, for everything centres in Kali-Kata round the popular shrine sacred to Kali, the black goddess of destruction, with a protruding blood-red tongue, who wears a necklace of human skulls and a belt of human hands and tongues, and, holding in one of her many hands a severed human head, tramples under foot the dead bodies of her victims. ”

“ Lord Hardinge had already earned the widespread confidence of Indians by his undisguised sympathy with all their legitimate aspirations, and the Lady Hardinge's School of Medicine for Indian women stands now at Delhi as an enduring monument, not only of the keen interest which she took in the cause of Indian womanhood and in everything that could tend to its advancement, but of the affection she had won by a rare charm of manner that was, with her, merely the outward reflection of a gentle and finely tempered nature. ”

“ Western civilisation in all its parts,—religion, education, art, business and government,—is gross, materialistic and therefore degrading to India. The patriotic Indian must recognise the grave danger lurking in every element of Western influence, must hate it, and must be on his guard against it.
India ought to be made truly Indian. There is no place for Europeans in the country. Indians can manage everything far better than Europeans can. The British Government, Missions, European trade and Western influence of every kind, are altogether unhealthy in India. ”

“ From the ghats, or long flights of steps, that descend to the muddy waters of a narrow creek which claims a more or less remote connection with the sacred Ganges, crowds of pious Hindus go through their ablutions in accordance with a long and complicated ritual, whilst high-caste ladies perform them in mid-stream out of covered boats and behind curtains deftly drawn to protect their purdah. ”

“ The most threatening feature of the "Non-co-operation" movement, now that it has failed so completely in its appeal to the better and more educated classes, is that it is concentrating all its energies on the ignorant and excitable masses. If one takes a long view of India's progress under the new dispensation, it may well be a source of satisfaction and encouragement that the insane lengths to which "Non-co-operation" has gone have served at least to drive in a deep wedge between the Moderates and the Extremists. ”

“ We should look upon India not as a temporary possession but as one to be maintained permanently until the natives shall in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time shall arrive it will probably be best for both countries that the British control over India should be gradually withdrawn. That the desirable change contemplated may in some after age be effected in India there is no cause to despair. ”