Theosophy - England and India - by Annie Besant - Adyar Pamphlets No. 34
Adyar
Pamphlets No.34
England and India
by Annie Besant
Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai [Madras] , India
First printed 1906 and reprinted
May 1921
[Page 1] THE
relations between conquering nations and subject peoples form a question
of the present day which may well tax the thought of the most thoughtful,
as well as stir the feelings of the most sensitive. How these relations
should be carried on, how both conquering nation and subject people may
profit by the links that arise between them — on the answer to
that problem depends much of the future progress of the world, and I have
thought that, with the traditions that are associated with the name of South
Place, I might well take up before you this morning the relations which exist
between one of the greatest of conquering nations and the greatest of
subject peoples, and see how far it is possible to lay down certain lines of
thought, which may possibly be of help to you in your own thinking, which
may possibly suggest to you ideas which, perchance, otherwise might not
have come in your way.
Now, every two nations
that come into touch the one with the other should, it is very clear, each
have something to learn, each have something to teach, and this is perhaps
pre-eminently the case where two [Page
2] such
nations as India and England are concerned. Where England has to do
with savage peoples her path is comparatively simple; where she has to do
with a nation far older than her own civilisation, a nation with fixed and
most ancient traditions, a nation that was enjoying a high state of
civilisation long ere the seed of Western civilisation was sown — where
she has to do with such a people, the relations must needs be complicated
and difficult, difficult for both sides to understand, difficult for both
sides to make fruitful of good rather than of evil. And I know of no greater
service that can be rendered either in this land or in that, than the service
of those who try to understand the question and to draw the nations closer
together by wisdom instead of driving them further apart by ignorance and
by prejudice.
Now it seems to me
that with regard to India, the subject may fall quite naturally under three
heads: first, the head of religion; then, of education; and then, of political
relations, under which latter I include the social conditions of the people.
Let me try, then, under these three headings to suggest to you certain ideas
as to English relations with India, which may possibly hereafter bear fruit
in your minds, if they be worthy to do so.
I said that, when two nations come together, each has something to teach
and something to learn, and that is true. So far as religion is concerned, I
think India has more to teach than she has to learn. So [Page 3] far as
education is concerned, much has to be done on both sides, but on the
whole, in most respects, England has more to teach there than to learn.
With regard to political conditions, there both nations have much to learn in
mutual understanding and in adaptation to this old civilisation of India of
methods of thought, of rule, of social conditions utterly alien from her own
conditions, so that changes, if it be wise to introduce them, must be
brought about with the greatest care, the greatest delicacy, after the
longest and most careful consideration.
1) Let us take, then, first, the question of religion,
on which I submit to you that India has more to teach than she has to learn;
and I say that for this reason, that almost everything which can be learned
from Christianity exists also in the eastern faiths, and you have with
regard to this to remember in India that you are dealing with a people
of various faiths and many schools of thought, some of them exceedingly
ancient, deeply philosophic, as well as highly spiritual. Now, seventy
per cent of the population of India are Hindûs, belong to one great religion,
which includes under that name an immense variety of philosophic schools and
sects. For when we speak of Hindûism, we are not speaking of what you
might call a simple religion, such as is modern Christianity, though even there
you have divisions enough, but of a religion which has always encouraged to
the fullest extent the freedom of the intellect, and which [Page
4] recognizes
nothing as heresy which the intellect of man can grasp, which the thought
of man can formulate. You have under that general name the greatest
diversity of thought, and always Hindûism has encouraged that diversity,
has not endeavoured to check it. Hindûism is very, very strict in its
social polity; it is marvellously wide in its theological, its ethical, its
philosophical thought. It includes even on one side the Chãrvaka system,
the most complete atheism, as it would here be called; while it includes
on the other, forms of the most popular religious thinking that it is possible
to conceive. The intellect, then, has ever been free under the scepter of
the religion which embraces seventy per cent of the great Indian population.
The
majority of the remaining thirty per cent are followers of the great Prophet
of Arabia, Muhammad, and amongst them today there are great signs of awakening
of thought, there are great signs of revival of deeper philosophical belief.
While the majority of them still are, I was almost going to say, plunged
in religious bigotry, from western and from eastern standpoints, rather
repeating a creed than understanding a philosophy, there is none the less
at the present day a very considerable awakening, and a hope that the great
faith of Islãm may stand higher in the eyes of the
world by knowledge and by power than it has done for many a hundred
years in the past. Then, in addition to this — the Hindû with
its [Page
5]
seventy per cent, the faith
of Islãm, which counts some fifty millions of the
population — you have Christianity, imported, of course, from the
West, not touching the higher classes of the Hindûs at all, but having
a considerable following, especially in the South, among the most ignorant,
among the most superstitious people; you have the Pãrsi community,
a thoughtful, learned and wealthy community, though a very small one, only
numbering, I think, some 80,000 people; you have the Jain community, also
very wealthy, and having among it a certain number of very learned men,
a community whose rites go back to the very early days of Hindû thought
and Hindû civilisation; and you have in addition to this the warrior
nation of the Sikhs, bound together by their devotion to their great
Prophet, and forming today a most important part of the fighting strength
of the English Empire in India. Buddhism has scarcely any power in India
proper. It rules in Burma, and it rules in Ceylon, both, of course, forming
part of the Indian Empire, but in India proper it is practically non-existent.
In this way, then,
you have a country, including Burma and Ceylon, in which you have clearly
marked out some seven different faiths, and you have a ruling nation, Christian
in its theory, and entirely unsectarian so far as its rule over the people
is concerned; but inevitably under the shadow of that conquering nation
there grows up an immense missionary propaganda in India, which is strong,
not by [Page
6] its
learning, not by the spirituality of its missionaries, but simply from the
fact that they belong to the conquering, to the ruling, people, and so have
behind them, in the mind of the great mass of the Indians, the weight which
comes by the authority of the English Empire, as you may say, backing that
particular form of faith. Now it is this condition that you want to understand,
if you would deal fairly with the religions question in India. The most utter
impartiality is the rule of the Government, but it is that simple impartiality
which may be said to take up the position that all religions are equally
indifferent. This is not the kind of spirit that is wanted in a country where
religion is the strongest force in life. You need a sympathetic impartiality,
not an impartiality of indifference; and it is that in which so far the government
has naturally very largely failed. You want in India at the present time
a definite recognition of the fact that the religions that are there, and that
rule the hearts of the great mass of the people and the minds of the most
thoughtful and learned of the nation — that these religions are worthy
of the highest respect, and not of mere toleration. You have to realise that
the missionary efforts there do an infinity of harm and very little good; that
they set religion against religion and faith against faith; whereas what you
want in India is the brotherhood of religions, and the respect of men of every
faith for the faiths which are [Page
7] not
theirs. You need there the teaching and the spirit of Theosophy, which
sees every religion as the partial expression of one great truth. The more
aggressive one faith shows itself to be, the more it is stirring up religious
antagonisms and religious hatreds. Danger to the Empire lies in the aggressive
policy of Christianity, whereby large numbers of men, ignorant of the religions
that they attack, treat them with contempt, with scorn, with insult — that
is one of the dangers that you have to consider in India, when you remember
that in the minds of the people England stands behind the missionary.
The Christian missionary converts very, very rarely, in the most exceptional
of cases, any man who is educated, any man who is trained in his own faith,
any man of what are called the higher and thoughtful castes. He makes his
converts among the great mass of the most ignorant of the
population; he makes them chiefly in times of famine and of distress;
he makes them more largely for social reasons than for reasons which are
religious in their nature. By the folly of the Hindûs themselves
vast masses of the Indians have been left without religious teachings
altogether, have been regarded with contempt, have been looked upon
with arrogance. It is among these classes that the Christian missionaries
find their converts. Once such a man is converted to Christianity,
he, who before was not allowed to cross the threshold of a Hindû,
is admissible as a Christian into the house, because Christianity [Page
8] is the
religion of the conquering nation; and you can very well recognize how
strong a converting power that has on the ignorant, on the degraded, on
the socially oppressed. It is not necessary for me to say much on that
here, since here nothing much can be done in this matter. It is rather
in India, that one tries to meet that question, pointing out to the educated
and the religious how great a danger to their own faith, as well as how
great a wrong to humanity, it is to neglect vast portions of the population,
and so to drive them, as it were, to find refuge in an alien creed, which
at least treats them with decency, if it cannot do much for them in ethical
training.
This
religious question in India is one that you need to understand, for eastern
teaching is everywhere more and more spreading in the West. I could not
help being amused the other day by a remark of a disconsolate missionary
coming back to America, and declaring that while he was striving to convert
people from Hindûism, he found on his return that large
numbers of the educated were tainted with the philosophy that in India he
was trying to destroy. That is perfectly true. Hindû thought is making
its way here in general very much more rapidly than Christianity is making
its way in India; and it is touching the flower of the population here, whereas
Christianity is only touching the poorest and most ignorant in India.[Page
9]
That
is why I said that India had much more to teach than to learn in matters
of religion; she has plenty in her own faith which can train and cultivate
the masses of her people, but that must be done by Hindû
missionaries and not by Christian missionaries. It would be the wisdom of
England to look upon all these religions as methods of training, of guiding,
of helping the people, and to recognize that the work of the Christian in
India is among his own population, is among his own countrymen, is
among the Christian communities, and that he should look on his faith as a
sister faith among many, and not as unique, to which people of other
religions are to be converted. The greatest, perhaps the only serious,
danger to English rule in India lies in the religious question, in the bad
feelings stirred up by the missionaries, in the difficulties that are caused
by their lack of understanding of the people. Theosophy has done much to
counteract this danger, and has been striving in India to stimulate the
peoples of the various faiths to take up these religious questions for
themselves, and by their energy in the teaching of their own religion to
cause the spread of religious knowledge which may make each faith strong
within its own borders,
2) Pass from
the religious question to the educational, and
here a great danger lies immediately in front, a danger which arises
largely out of [Page
10] that want of sympathy and
that want of understanding which is the chief fault of the English people
as a conquering nation, as a ruler in their relations with subject peoples.
They try to be just, they try to do their duty, they are industrious, they
are hard-working, endeavouring to do the work which is put into their hands.
Their weak point lies in the fact that they are very unsympathetic, that
they cannot put themselves into the place of others, and that they have
a tendency to think they are so immensely superior to others that whatever
is good for them is good for everybody else; they fail to understand the
traditions and the customs which must exist in an ancient people, a people
of high and complicated civilisation, and this lack of sympathy has a very
great bearing on the question of education. Practically, Indian education,
on the higher line, was started by the wisdom of Lord Macaulay. He began
the work of Indian education, and he began it wisely and well. It has been
carried on year after year by a long succession of Viceroys, who for the
most part have done well with regard to the educational question; but while
they have done well, it is perfectly true that there are great and serious
faults in the Indian system, faults which need to be corrected and which
neutralise much of the value of the education that is given. I have not time
to go very fully into these faults; it must suffice to say that memory has
been cultivated to the exclusion of the reasoning [Page
11] faculty, and that
even when science has been taught, it has been taught by the text-book,
and not in the laboratory, it has been taught by memory, and not by
experiment. In addition to that there has been a crushing number of
examinations, forcing the whole life of the boy as well as of the man,
and keeping up a continual strain which has exhausted the pupil ere he has
left the University. It has been forgotten that the Indian student is naturally
studious and not playful enough, that his inclination is to work a great
deal too hard, that what was wanted was the stimulation to play more than
the stimulation to study, that the physical training of the boys was more
necessary to be seen to than the intellectual training. The physical training
was left out of sight, and though carefully looked after in ancient India
it was now neglected. As these differences were overlooked, everything was
done to force the intellectual side in an unwise way, by cramming rather
than by organic development of study, and as the University degrees were
made the only passport to Government employment and to the professions
at large, it became a wild desire on the part of the Indian parent to force
his boys on as rapidly as possible, with little regard to the kind of education
that was given. These faults have been seen by the present Viceroy, and,
eager to mend the faults, he sent out a University Commission, which has
just made its report. Now the first fault of that Commission was that it
had only [Page
12] two
representatives of India on it, and the rest Englishmen, and the English
members of that Commission were not all acquainted with the nature of
the problems of Indian education. They have issued their Report. The
Indian judge, who was the Hindû member of that Commission, has
issued a minority report, against many of the recommendations made by
the majority, consisting of the English members and one Musulmãn.
The very fact that you get a report divided in that racial way ought
at once to make our rulers pause, and when you find that many of the
recommendations of the majority-report are disapproved by the
representative of seventy percent of the population that you are going
to teach, it seems as though it might be wise if the Government here
would look into the matter a little carefully before it gives its decision.
For it is the view of the Indian people, now being expressed in every
way possible, that the report of the Commission strikes a heavy blow
at Indian education, that much of the great work of the past will be
destroyed, and that the education of the future will be placed beyond
the reach of large numbers of the people who hereditarily claim it.
To
begin with, the education is now made more costly, and by that one word
you have its condemnation for India, The fees are everywhere to be raised,
so that University education will be practically beyond the reach of those
who need it most. It is [Page
13] said
that many go to the University who are not fit for it; but the remedy for
that is to improve the teaching in your Universities and not to increase
the cost of the education; for by high fees you will not exclude the idle
and the unworthy rich, but you will exclude great masses of the worthy and
industrious poor; and when you remember that it is the Indian tradition that
learning and poverty go together, that the man who is learned has no need of
wealth, that you find the highest caste the poorest caste, although the most
learned — if
you could realize that and put yourself in their place, you would understand
the agitation which at present is convulsing the most thoughtful people in
India, when they see that the Government is going to exclude their sons,
the flower of the intellectual population, from all share in education by
the high fees which it is going to impose. It is said by the Commission,
that scholarships may serve for the poorer classes, but you cannot give
scholarships to thousands of that vast population. You can give
scholarships to a boy here and there, but you cannot give them to the great
mass; the greatest danger is the discontent of the thoughtful, and that is
the discontent which is being stirred up at the present time. The truth is,
that Lord Curzon, able as he is, has only five years in which to rule, and
he is eager to mark his Viceroyalty by some great scheme of change. But if
England be not careful, it will be marked by the saddest [Page
14] monument
that ever Viceroy has left behind him, the destruction of the education
of a great people, and the shutting out of vast masses of the intellectual
from education whereby they might rise to be your helpers in the ruling of
their country, but shut out from which they become an element of danger.
That is not a thing which it is well to have said by a subject nation of
the type of the Indian nation. It is said among the thoughtful people now
that this is intended to destroy education, in order that Indians may not
have their fair share in the government of their own land. That is the thought
which is spreading, that is the motive which they believe lies behind the
policy of Lord Curzon. They think he desires to stop education, in order
that the Indians may not rise to the higher posts in their own country,
and that is a most dangerous idea to spread through the most intellectual,
through the most thoughtful classes. I have had letter after letter pleading
with me to do something here to prevent this Report from receiving the sanction
of the Government; but how difficult is it to do that where the people who
give the decision are ignorant themselves, and where they naturally rely
on their own agents rather than on what any casual speaker may say.
In
the attempt started by the Theosophical Society in India, and carried on
by large numbers of the Hindûs themselves, to build up a large Hindû
College, we are trying to do the very opposite of some of the [Page
15] things
that are being suggested to the Government, and are already doing some
of the things they want done. We have put down the fees to the lowest
possible point; we are training the lads in the laboratory; we give them
less and less instruction in which memory only is cultivated, and in which
the reasoning faculties are thrown entirely on one side. We are teaching them
to play games; we are training strong and healthy bodies, and are
endeavouring to prevent the great nervous strain involved in study. But if
this Commission Report be adopted, much of our work will be destroyed, and
the results which we are trying to bring about, and have brought about to
some extent, will be utterly wasted, will be impossible to carry on; for
the boys that we want to reach, the intelligent, the eager, those who are
longing to learn but whose parents are poor, they will be shut utterly out
of education, for unless we adopt the Government rate of fees, the
Government may close the College and not permit it to carry on its work.
That is the kind of difficulty that has to be dealt with in these educational
measures. If you would let Indians guide their own education, if you would
give them all that is best in the West, when it is suitable, but not insist
that all that is good in England is necessarily good there; if you would try
to see things from their own standpoint, if you did not insist on highly paid
Englishmen as instructors, instead of educated Indians, you would work at
less expense and with more efficiency.[Page
16]
But
what is there to be done, when the Government here has the last word, and
knows nothing about the conditions; and when the data on which the decisions
are made are sent from India by those who are apart from Indian sympathy,
data on which the Indians are not consulted, although it is their children
whose future is in jeopardy. What is really needed is to make education
cheap, widespread, scientific, literary and technical; to change the policy
which draws the intelligent Indians only into Government service, and to
get them to take up the other lines of work which affect the economic future
of their country; to educate them in arts and manufactures; not to leave
the direction of industry to people who are of the ruling nation, but to
draft into industrial undertakings large numbers of the educated classes — that
is the kind of education that is wanted, and the kind of education that
England does not give to India, and will not. let India give to herself.
3)
Pass from that to the third point I spoke of — the questions touching
onpolitics, including the social and economic conditions of India.
It must have struck you, those who have studied the past, that it is
very strange that this country — which, when the East India Company went
there in the eighteenth century, was one of the richest countries of the world — has
now become a country to go a-begging to the world for the mere food to keep
its vast population from dying of starvation by millions. The mere fact [Page
17] that
there has been such a change in the wealth of the country should surely
make those who are responsible for its rule look more closely into the
economic conditions, should surely suggest that there is something
fundamentally wrong when you have these recurring famines. Six years of
famine, practically, India has lately passed through. It is not due to changes
of climate; these have always been there — seasons of drought, seasons
of too much rain, seasons of good weather. These are not surely the direct
result of English rule! They existed long before England came; they are
likely to exist long after we have all passed away. Why is it that these
famines recur time after time ? Why is it that such myriads of people are
thus doomed to starvation ? Now I have not a word to say as to the efforts
that are made by the English when the famine is there, save words of
praise. The English officials worked themselves half to death, when the
people were dying. But that is not the time when the work is most needed.
It is prevention that we want, rather than cure; and the nation that can
only deal with famine by relief-works and by charity is not a nation that
in the eyes of the world can justify its authority in India. There must be
causes that underlie these famines. It is the duty of the ruling nation to
understand these causes, or else to allow the wisest among the Indian population
to take these questions into their own hands and act as the Council of the
English rulers. Sometimes it is [Page
18] said that the famine
is owing to the increase in the population. That is not true. What is called
the peace of Britain is not a blessing, if it be the cause of famine. It
is easier to the great mass of the people to have wars that kill off some
of them quickly, than to have recurring famines that starve them to death
after months of agony. The British peace is not a blessing, if it be
punctuated by famines in which millions die by starvation.
Peace is not a blessing if it kills more people than war, and that is what
the peace of England is doing in India, and it is killing them after terrible
sufferings, instead of by sword and by fire. It is the cause of
these famines that we need to understand. It is a remarkable fact that,
where the Indian princes have been left uninterfered with, the
famines have not been so serious. Everywhere, where a nation
lives by agriculture and has to prepare itself for a bad season, it
is usual to find out a way of dealing with the natural difficulties suitable
to its own spirit. Now that was done in India, and done in a very simple
way, although a way that is dead against the modern Political economy.
The way was a simple way as in the days of ancient Egypt. We have all read
of how when Joseph was the wise minister there, he provided for the years
of famine in the years of plenty. That one sentence expresses the Indian
way of dealing with famines. When there was plenty, large quantities of
the food were stored, and rent and taxes were taken in food [Page
19] these
varied with the food raised by the people and therefore they never pressed
heavily on the people. When there was much raised the rent and taxes
were higher; when the harvest was bad, the King went without his share.
But in the years when he got a very large share, he stored it in granaries.
In addition to that, after the people were fed (and the feeding of the
people was the first charge), the people themselves stored the year's
corn, so that if they had a bad year they could fall back on their own
corn. In this way the peasant could make head against one bad season
and if there were more than one bad season the prince came to his aid,
by throwing his corn on the market at a price which the people could afford
to pay. Now that method of dealing with the famine problem still goes on
in some States, such as Kãshmir, because they will not permit their
grain to be exported. But the greatest pressure is continually being put
on the Mahãrãja of Kãshmir to force him to export
his rice, He has been able to hold his own so far, but the resistance to
English pressure is a terribly difficult thing for an Indian prince, and
to resist it continually is not possible. Now I know how alien to English
thought is that method of dealing with the products of a country; but it
is far better to carry that on and save the people from famine, than to
insist that the people shall sell their corn in years of plenty and starve
in years of scarcity; The people want to store their corn when they have
it, to [Page
20] keep it against the bad
seasons, instead of having to import it from abroad in time of famine.
And yet, in this very year when famine was threatened, I saw not long
ago in a newspaper a telegram advising the recurrence of famine in one
part of India, and, in the same paper that contained that telegram, I
saw a statement that the first shiploads of Indian wheat had left Bombay.
That may be modern political economy, but it is pure idiocy. India if
wisely governed may be a paradise, but we have just read that with five
fools you can turn a paradise into a hell; and to impose English political
economy on India is folly, well-intentioned folly, but folly none the
less.
Another great cause
of these famines is the way in which the land is now held. In the old days
there was a common interest in the land between princes and people. Now the
nobles, the old class of zemindars, have been turned into landlords, and
that is a very different thing from the old way of holding land. Then you
have insisted on giving to the peasant the right to sell his land, the very
last thing that he wants to do, the thing which takes away from him the certainty
of food for himself and his children. No peasant in the old days had the
right to sell his land, but only to cultivate it. If he needed to borrow
at any time, he borrowed on the crop. Now, in order to free the people from
debt, they are given the right to sell their mortgaged holdings, and this [Page
21] means the throwing out of
an agricultural people on the roads, making them landless, and the holding
of the land by money-lenders. That revolution in the land system of India
is one of the causes of the recurring famines, the second perhaps of the
great causes. The natural result of it is that you put now power into the
hands of the money-lender, and you take away from the peasant the shield
that always protected him.
The railway system,
too, useful as it is, has done an immense amount of harm. It has cleared
away the food; it has sent the man with money into the country districts
to buy up the produce, which he sends abroad, giving the peasant the rupees
that he cannot eat instead of the rice and corn that he can eat.
Even when I first went
to India, you could hardly see a peasant woman without silver bangles on
her arms and legs. Now large numbers of peasant women wear none; these have
been sold during these last years of famine, and to sell these is the last
sign of poverty for the Indian peasantry. It is no good giving them money
in exchange for their food. They do not know how to deal with it. They are
urged to buy English goods of Manchester manufacture, which wear out in a
few months, instead of the Indian-made articles which last for many years.
You must remember that the Indian peasant washes his clothes every day of
his life, and so they need to be of great durability.[Page
22]
Another
difficulty is the way in which you have destroyed the manufactures of India — destroyed
them partly by flooding the market with cheap, showy, adulterated goods,
which have attracted the ignorant people, inducing them to buy what is
largely worthless. All the finer manufactures of India are practically
destroyed, whereas the makers used to grow rich by selling these to her
wealthy men and to foreign countries. Now both the fine and coarse goods
are beaten out of the country by the cheap Manchester goods, and the dear
fashionable fabrics; even if this had been done fairly it would not be
so bad, but the Indian merchants were forced to give up their trade secrets
to the agents of English industries. You guard your trade secrets jealously
from rivals, but you have forced the Indians to give up theirs, in order
that English manufacturers might have the benefit of that knowledge. In
this way old trades have been gradually killed out, while the arts of India
are very rapidly perishing. The arts of India depended on the social condition
of the country. The artist in India was not a man who lived by competition.
As far as he was concerned he did not trade at all. He was always kept
as part of the great household, of a noble; his board, his lodging, his
clothing, were all secured to him, and he worked at his leisure, and carried
out his artistic ideas without difficulty and without struggle. All that
class is being killed out in the stress of western competition, and it
is not [Page
23] as though something else were
put in its place; the thing itself is destroyed, the whole market is destroyed.
Now the pressure is falling on the artisan, and he is utterly unable to guard
himself against it, and is falling back into the already well-filled agricultural
ranks.
These are some of the
questions that you have to consider and to understand. You have to understand
the question of Indian taxation; you have to understand the question of taking
away from India seventeen millions a year to meet Home, i.e.,
English, charges. You have to consider the expense of your Government in
India, the exorbitant salaries that are paid to English officials. You have
to realize the financial side of the problem, as well as those that I have
dealt with
Friends, I have only
been able to touch the fringe of a great subject. I have hoped, by packing
together a number of these facts, to stir you into study rather than to convince
you. For if I had tried to move your feelings I would have done little. I
have preferred to point out the difficulties that have to be dealt with,
so that you may study them, so that you may investigate them, so that you
may form your own opinions upon them. I do not believe it is possible to
do everything at once, but I do think it might be possible to form a band
of English experts, who should make these questions their speciality, and
who should have weight with the Government over [Page
24]
here which deals with India,
so that they could advise with wisdom, so that they could point out the most
useful path by which improvement could be made. To govern a great country
like India by a Parliament over here is practically impossible. It is too
clumsy an instrument for the ruling of such a people. But if you would build
up in India a great Council, composed of the wisest and most thoughtful of
her own people; if you would take the advice of her best administrators
in Indian States, her own sons; if you would place in such a Council her
greatest feudatory Chiefs; if such a Council of all that is wisest and noblest
in India were gathered round the Viceroy, who should hold his post, not as
the reward for political service here, but because he knows and understands
India, or, still better, appoint as Viceroy a Prince of the Imperial House;
if you would leave him there for a greater space of time, and not make him
work in a break-neck hurry to get something done; then there would be a
brighter hope on the Indian horizon. This can only be done by understanding
Indian feelings and not by ignoring them, by trying to sympathize with Indian
customs and not by despising them. Along these lines lies the salvation of
India and of England alike, and it is this which I recommend to your most
thoughtful consideration.