THE
Civilian Order, which accounts itself, and no doubt justly, the informing
spirit of Anglo-India, is credited in this country with quite an extraordinary
degree of ability and merit, so much so that many believe it to have
come down to us direct from heaven. And it is perhaps on this basis
that in their dealings with Indians,—whom being moulded of a clay
entirely terrestrial, one naturally supposes to be an inferior order
of creatures,—they permit themselves a very liberal tinge of presumption
and arrogance. Without disputing their celestial origin, one may perhaps
be suffered to hint that eyes unaffected by the Indian sun, will be
hard put to it to discover the pervading soul of magnificence and princeliness
in the moral and intellectual style of these demigods. The fact is indeed
all the other way. The general run of the Service suffers by being recruited
through the medium of Competitive Examination: its tone is a little
vulgar, its character a little raw, its achievement a little second-rate.
Harsh critics have indeed said more than this; nay, has not one of themselves,
has not Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a blameless Anglo-Indian, spoken, and spoken
with distressing emphasis to the same effect? They have said that it
moves in an atmosphere of unspeakable boorishness and mediocrity. That
is certainly strong language and I would not for a moment be thought
to endorse it; but there is, as I say, just a small sediment of truth
at the bottom which may tend to excuse, if not to justify, this harsh
and unfriendly criticism. And when one knows the stuff of which the
Service is made, one ceases to wonder at it. A shallow schoolboy stepping
from a cramming establishment to the command of high and difficult affairs,
can hardly be expected to give us anything magnificent or princely.
Still less can it be expected when the sons of small tradesmen are suddenly
promoted from the counter to govern great provinces. Not that I have
any fastidious prejudice against small tradesmen. I simply mean that
the best education men of that class can get in England, does not adequately
qualify a raw youth to rule over millions of his fellow-beings. Bad
in training, void of culture, in instruction poor, it is in plain truth
a sort of education that leaves him with all his original imperfections
on his head, unmannerly, uncultivated, unintelligent. But in the Civil
Service, with all its vices and shortcomings, one does find, as perhaps
one does not find elsewhere, rare and exalted souls detached from the
failings of their order, who exhibit the qualities of the race in a
very striking way; not geniuses certainly, but swift and robust personalities,
rhetorically powerful, direct, forcible, endowed to a surprising extent
with the energy and self-confidence which are the heirlooms of their
nation; men in short who give us England—and by England I mean
the whole Anglo-Celtic race—on her really high and admirable side.
Many of these are Irish or Caledonian; others are English gentlemen
of good blood and position, trained at the great public schools, who
still preserve that fine flavour of character, scholarship and power,
which was once a common possession in England, but threatens under the
present dispensation to become sparse or extinct. Others again are veterans
of the old Anglo-Indian school, moulded in the larger traditions and
sounder discipline of a strong and successful art who still keep some
vestiges of the grand old Company days, still have something of a great
and noble spirit, something of an adequate sense how high are the affairs
they have to deal with and how serious the position they are privileged
to hold. It was one of these, one endowed with all their good gifts,
it was Mr. Allan Hume, a man acute and vigorous, happy in action and
in speech persuasive, an ideal leader, who prompted, it may be by his
own humane and lofty feelings, it may be by a more earthly desire of
present and historic fame, took us by the hand and guided us with astonishing
skill on our arduous venture towards preeminence and power. Mr. Hume,
I have said, had all the qualities that go to make a fine leader in
action. If only he had added to these the crowning gifts, reflectiveness,
ideas, a comprehensive largeness of vision! Governing force, that splendid
distinction inherited by England from her old Norman barons, governing
force and the noble gifts that go along with it, are great things in
their way, but they are not the whole of politics. Ideas, reflection,
the politicaLreason count for quite as much, are quite as essential.
But on these, though individual Englishmen, men like Bolingbroke, Arnold,
Burke, have had them pre-eminently, the race has always kept a very
inadequate hold: and Mr. Hume is distinguished from his countrymen,
not by the description of his merits, but by their degree. His original
conception, I cannot help thinking, was narrow and impolitic.
He must have known, none better, what immense calamities may often be
ripening under a petty and serene outside. He must have been aware,
none better, when the fierce pain of hunger and oppression cuts to the
bone what awful elemental passions may start to life in the mildest,
the most docile proletariates. Yet he chose practically to ignore his
knowledge; he conceived it as his business to remove a merely political
inequality, and strove to uplift the burgess into a merely isolated
predominance. That the burgess should strive towards predominance, nay,
that for a brief while he should have it, is only just, only natural:
the mischief of it was that in Mr. Hume's formation the proletariate
remained for any practical purpose a piece off the board. Yet the proletariate
is, as I have striven to show, the real key of the situation. Torpid
he is and immobile; he is nothing of an actual force, but he is a very
great potential force, and whoever succeeds in understanding and eliciting
his strength, becomes by the very fact master of the future. Our situation
is indeed complex and difficult beyond any that has ever been imagined
by the human intellect; but if there is one thing clear in it, it is
that the right and fruitful policy for the burgess, the only policy
that has any chance of eventual success, is to base his cause upon an
adroit management of the proletariate. He must awaken and organise the
entire power of the country and thus multiply infinitely his volume
and significance, the better to attain supremacy as much social as political.
Thus and thus only will he attain to his legitimate station, not an
egoist class living for itself and in itself, but the crown of the nation
and its head.
But Mr. Hume saw things in a different light, and let me confess out
of hand, that once he had got a clear conception of his business, he
proceeded in it with astonishing rapidity, sureness and tact. The clear-cut
ease and strong simplicity of his movements were almost Roman; no crude
tentatives, no infelicitous bungling, but always a happy trick of hitting
the right nail on the head and that at the first blow. Roman too was
his principle of advancing to a great object by solid and consecutive
gradations. To begin by accustoming the burgess as well as his adversaries
to his own corporate reality, to proceed by a definitive statement of
his case to the Viceregal government, and for a final throw to make
a vehement and powerful appeal to the English parliament, an appeal
that should be financed by the entire resources of middle-class India
and carried through its stages with an iron heart and an obdurate resolution,
expending moreover infinite energy, — so and so only could the
dubious road Mr. Hume was treading, lead to anything but bathos and
anticlimax. Nothing could be happier than the way in which the initial
steps were made out. To be particularly obstreperous about his merits
and his wrongs is certainly the likeliest way for a man to get a solid
idea of his own importance and make an unpleasant impression on his
ill-wishers. And for that purpose, for a blowing of trumpets in concert,
for a self-assertion persistent, bold and clamorous, the Congress, however
incapable in other directions may be pronounced perfectly competent;
nay, it was the ideal thing. The second step was more difficult. He
had to frame somehow a wording of our case at once bold and cautious,
so as to hit Anglo-India in its weak place, yet properly sauced so as
not to offend the palate, grown fastidious and epicurean, of the British
House of Commons. Delicate as was the task he managed it with indubitable
adroitness and a certain success. We may perhaps get at the inner sense
of what happened, if we imagine Mr. Hume giving this sort of ultimatum
to the Government. "The Indian burgess for whose education you
have provided but whose patrimony you sequestrated and are woefully
mismanaging, having now come to years of discretion, demands an account
of your stewardship and the future management of his own estate. To
compromise, if you are so good as to meet us half-way, we are not unready,
but on any other hypothesis our appeal lies at once to the tribunal
of the British Parliament. You will observe our process is perfectly
constitutional." The sting of the scorpion lay as usual in its
tail. Mr. Hume knew well the magic power of that word over Englishmen.
With a German garrison it would have been naught; they would quickly
have silenced with bayonets and prohibitive decrees any insolence of
that sort. With French republicans it would have been naught; they would
either have powerfully put it aside or frankly acceded to it. But the
English are a nation of political jurists and any claim franked by the
epithet "constitutional" they are bound by the very law of
their being to respect or at any rate appear to respect. The common
run of Anglo-Indians, blinded as selfishness always does blind people,
might in their tremulous rage and panic vomit charges of sedition and
shout for open war; but a Government of political jurists pledged to
an occidentalising policy could not do so without making nonsense of
its past. Moreover a Government viceregal in constitution cannot easily
forget that it may have to run the gauntlet of adverse comment from
authorities at home. But if they could not put us down with the strong
hand or meet our delegates with a non possumus, they were not
therefore going to concede to us any solid fraction of our demands.
It is the ineradicable vice of the English nature that it can never
be clear or direct. It recoils from simplicity as from a snake. It must
shuffle, it must turn in on itself, it must preserve cherished fictions
intact. And supposing unpleasant results to be threatened, it escapes
from them through a labyrinth of unworthy and transparent subterfuges.
Our rulers are unfortunately average Englishmen, Englishmen, that is
to say, whb are not in the habit of rising superior to themselves; and
if they were uncandid, if they were tortuously hostile we may be indignant,
but we cannot be surprised. Mr. Hume at any rate saw quite clearly that
nothing was to be expected, perhaps he had never seriously expected
anything, from that quarter. He had already instituted with really admirable
promptitude, the primary stages of his appeal to the British Parliament.
Indu
Prakash, March 6, 1894
- Sri Aurobindo
