"Natives"

________________________________________________
Title:     "Natives"
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

No doubt the Gods laughed when Macaulay went to India. Among the millions who breathed religion, and whose purpose in life was the contemplation of eternity, a man intruded himself who could not even meditate, and regarded all religion, outside the covers of the Bible, as a museum of superstitious relics. Into the midst of peoples of an immemorial age, which seemed to them as unworthy of reckoning as the beating wings of a parrot's flight from one temple to the next, there came a man in whose head the dates of European history were arranged in faultless compartments, and to whom the past presented itself as a series of Ministerial crises, diversified by oratory and political songs. To Indians the word progress meant the passage of the soul through aeons of reincarnation towards a blissful absorption into the inconceivable void of indistinctive existence, as when at last a jar is broken and the space inside it returns to space. For Macaulay the word progress called up a bustling picture of mechanical inventions, an increasing output of manufactured goods, a larger demand for improving literature, and a growth of political clubs to promulgate the blessings of Reform. The Indian supposed success in life to lie in patiently following the labour and the observances of his fathers before him, dwelling in the same simple home, suppressing all earthly desire, and saving a little off the daily rice or the annual barter in the hope that, when the last furrow was driven, or the last brazen pot hammered out, there might still be time for the glory of pilgrimage and the sanctification of a holy river. To Macaulay, success in life was the going shop, the growing trade, a seat on the Treasury Bench, the applause of listening Senates, and the eligible residence of deserving age.

Thus equipped, he was instructed by the Reform Government which he worshipped, to mark out the lines for Indian education upon a basis of the wisdom common to East and West. Though others were dubious, he never hesitated. From childhood he had never ceased to praise the goodness and the grace that made the happy English child. As far as in him lay, he would extend that gracious advantage to the teeming populations of India. In spite of accidental differences of colour, due to climatic influences, they too should grow as happy English children, lisping of the poet's mountain lamb, and hearing how Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old. They should advance to a knowledge of Party history from the Restoration down to the Reform Bill. The great masters of the progressive pamphlet, such as Milton and Burke, should be placed in their hands. Those who displayed scientific aptitude should be instructed in the miracle of the steam-engine, and economic minds should early acquaint themselves with the mysteries of commerce, upon which, as upon the Bible, the greatness of their conquerors was founded. Under such influence, the soul of India would be elevated from superstitious degradation, factories would supersede laborious handicrafts, artists, learning to paint like young Landseer, would perpetuate the appearance of the Viceregal party with their horses and dogs on the Calcutta racecourse, and it might be that in the course of years the estimable Whigs of India would return their own majority to a Front Bench in Government House.

It was an enviable vision--enviable in its imperturbable self-confidence. It no more occurred to Macaulay to question the benefaction of English education and the supremacy of England's commerce and Constitution than it occurred to him to question the contemptible inferiority of the race among whom he was living, and for whom he mainly legislated. In his essay on Warren Hastings he wrote:

"A war of Bengalis against Englishmen was like a war of
sheep against wolves, of men against demons.... Courage,
independence, veracity, are qualities to which his
constitution and his situation are equally unfavourable....
All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak
are more familiar to this subtle race than to the Ionian
of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of the Dark Ages.
What the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the
tiger, what the sting is to the bee, what beauty,
according to the old Greek song, is to woman, deceit is
to the Bengali."

And yet, impenetrable as Macaulay's own ignorance of the Indian peoples remained, his Minute of 1835, "to promote English literature and science," and to decree that "all funds appropriated for education should be employed in English education alone," has marked in Indian history an era from which the present situation of the country dates.

It is true that the education has not gone far. The Government spends less than twopence per head upon it; less than a tenth of what it spends on the army. Only ten per cent. of the males in India can write or read; only seven per thousand of the females. But, thanks chiefly to Macaulay's conviction that if everyone were like himself the world would be happy and glorious, there are now about a million Indians (or one in three hundred) who can to some extent communicate with each other in English as a common tongue, and there are some thousands who have become acquainted with the history of English liberties, and the writings of a few political thinkers. Together with railways, the new common language has increased the sense of unity; the study of our political thinkers has created the sense of freedom, and the knowledge of our history has shown how stern and prolonged a struggle may be required to win that possession which our thinkers have usually regarded as priceless. "The one great contribution of the West to the Indian Nationalist movement," writes Mr. Ramsay Macdonald with emphasis, "is its theory of political liberty."

It is a contribution of which we may well be proud--we of whom Wordsworth wrote that we must be free or die. Whatever the failures of unsympathetic self-esteem, Macaulay's spirit could point to this contribution as sufficient counterbalance. From the works of such teachers as Mill, Cobbett, Bagehot, and Morley, the mind of India has for the first time derived the principles of free government. But of all its teachers, I suppose the greatest and most influential has been Burke. Since we wished to encourage the love of freedom and the knowledge of constitutional government, no choice could have been happier than that which placed the writings and speeches of Burke upon the curriculum of the five Indian universities. Fortunately for India, the value of Burke has been eloquently defined by Lord Morley, who has himself contributed more to the future constitutional freedom of India than any other Secretary of State. In one passage in his well-known volume on Burke, he has spoken of his "vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, his wide illumination from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, his large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the vision, the noble temper." Writing of Burke's three speeches on the American War, Lord Morley declares:

"It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most
perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature,
for one who approaches the study of public affairs, whether
for knowledge or for practice. They are an example without
fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a
theorist or an actor, of great political situations should
strive by night and day to possess."

For political education, one could hardly go further than that. "The most perfect manual in any literature"--let us remember that decisive praise. Or if it be said that students require style rather than politics, let us recall what Lord Morley has written of Burke's style:

"A magnificence and elevation of expression place him
among the highest masters of literature, in one of its
highest and most commanding senses."

But it is frequently asserted that what Indian students require is, not political knowledge, or literary power, but a strengthening of character, an austerity both of language and life, such as might counteract the natural softness, effeminacy, and the tendency to deception which Macaulay and Lord Curzon so freely informed them of. For such strengthening and austerity, on Lord Morley's showing, no teacher could be more serviceable than Burke:

"The reader is speedily conscious," he writes, "of the precedence in Burke of the facts of morality and conduct, of the many interwoven affinities of human affection and historical relation, over the unreal necessities of mere abstract logic.... Besides thus diffusing a strong light over the awful tides of human circumstance, Burke has the sacred gift of inspiring men to use a grave diligence in caring for high things, and in making their lives at once rich and austere."

Here are the considered judgments of a man who, by political experience, by literary power, and the study of conduct, has made himself an unquestioned judge in the affairs of State, in letters, and in morality. As examples of the justice of his eulogy let me quote a few sentences from those very speeches which Lord Morley thus extols--the speeches on the American War of Independence. Speaking on Conciliation with the Colonies in 1775, Burke said:

"Permit me to observe that the use of force alone is
but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does
not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a
nation is not governed which is perpetually to be
conquered.... Terror is not always the effect of
force, and an armament is not a victory."

Speaking of the resistance of a subject race to the predominant power, Burke ironically suggested:

"Perhaps a more smooth and accommodating spirit of
freedom in them would be more acceptable to us. Perhaps
ideas of liberty might be desired more reconcilable with
an arbitrary and boundless authority. Perhaps we might
wish the colonists to be persuaded that their liberty
is more secure when held in trust for them by us (as
their guardians during a perpetual minority) than with
any part of it in their own hands."

And, finally, speaking of self-taxation as the very basis of all our liberties, Burke exclaimed:

"They (British statesmen) took infinite pains to
inculcate as a fundamental principle, that in all
monarchies the people must in effect themselves,
mediately or immediately, possess the power of
granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty
could subsist."

It was the second of these noble passages that I once heard declaimed on the sea-beach at Madras to an Indian crowd by an Indian speaker, who, following the precepts of Lord Morley, then Secretary of State for India, had made Burke's speeches his study by day and night. That phrase describing the ruling Power as the guardians of a subject race during a perpetual minority has stuck in my mind, and it recurred to me when I read that Burke's writings and speeches had been removed from the University curriculum in India. Carlyle's _Heroes_ and Cowper's _Letters_ have been substituted--excellent books, the one giving the Indians in rather portentous language very dubious information about Odin, Luther, Rousseau, and other conspicuous people; the other telling them, with a slightly self-conscious simplicity, about a melancholy invalid's neckcloths, hares, dog, and health. Such subjects are all very well, but where in them do we find the magnificence and elevation of expression, the sacred gift of inspiring men to make their lives at once rich and austere, and the other high qualities that Lord Morley found in "the most perfect manual in any literature"? Reflecting on this new decision of the Indian University Council, or whoever has taken on himself to cut Burke out of the curriculum, some of us may find two passages coming into the memory. One is a passage from those very speeches of Burke, where he said, "To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself." The other is Biglow's familiar verse, beginning "I du believe in Freedom's cause, Ez fur away ez Payris is," and ending:

"It's wal enough agin a king
To dror resolves an' triggers,--
But libbaty's a kind o' thing
Thet don't agree with niggers."

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: "Natives"

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN