New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century, John Morrison [free ebook reader TXT] 📗

Other new political ideas follow the lines of social change. We have seen how in the modern school, the idea of caste gives way before the idea of rank in the school, to be followed in College by the idea of intellectual distinction, and still later in life by the idea of success in some modern career. In the political sphere, modern life is also busy dissolving the older and narrower conceptions of life. Atop of the sectarian consciousness of being a Hindu or the provincial consciousness of belonging to Bengal or Bombay, is coming the consciousness of being an Indian. This consciousness of a national unity is one of the outstanding features of the time in India, all the more striking because hitherto India has been so unwieldily large, and her people incoherent, like dry sand. "The Indian never knew the feeling of nationality," says Max Müller. "The very name of India is a synonym for caste, as opposed to nationality," says Sister Nivedita, the pro-Hindu lady already referred to, who likewise notes the emergence of the national idea.[35] "Public spirit or patriotism, as we understand it, never existed among the Hindus," writes Mr. Bose, himself an Indian, author of a recent work on Hindu Civilisation under British Rule.[36] And Raja Rammohan Roy, the famous Bengali reformer of the beginning of the nineteenth century, we have already heard denouncing the caste system as "destructive of national union." From what then, during the nineteenth century, has the national consciousness come forth? Many causes may be cited. The actual unification effected by the postal, the telegraph, and the railway organisation, has done much. The omnipresence of the foreign government, all-controlling, has also done much. The current coins and the postage stamps with King Edward's head upon them—the same all over India, a few native states excepted—bring home the union of India to the most ignorant. The constant criticism of the Government in the native press, the meetings of the All-India political association called the Congress, and the fact that modern interests, stimulated by daily telegrams from all over the world, are international, not provincial or sectarian—all these things combine to give to the modern educated Indian a new Indian national consciousness in place of the old provincial and sectarian one. In short, the British rule has united India, and the awakened mind of India is rejoicing in the consciousness of the larger existence, and is identifying the ancient glories of certain centres in North India with this new India created by Britain. Never before was there a united India in the modern political sense; never, indeed, could there be until modern inventions brought distant places near each other. Two great Indian empires there certainly were in the third century B.C. and the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and the paternal benevolence of Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor of the third century B.C., deserves record and all honour. Let Indians know definitely who deserves to be called an ancient Indian emperor, when they wish to lament a lost past; and descending to historical fact and detail, let them compare that period with the present. The later empire referred to was an empire only in the old sense of a collection of vassal states. Turning back to the hoary past, in which many Indians, even of education, imagine there was a golden Indian empire, we can trace underneath the ancient epic, the Ramayan, a conquering progress southward to Ceylon itself of a great Aryan hero, Ram. But of any Indian empire founded by him, we know nothing. "One who has carefully studied the Ramayan will be impressed with the idea that the Aryan conquest had spread over parts of Northern India only, at the time of the great events which form its subjects."[37] Coming down to the period of the greatest extent of the Moghul empire in India in the end of the seventeenth century, we find the Emperor Aurangzeb with as extensive a military empire as that of Asoka, but with the Mahrattas rising behind him even while he was extending his empire southwards. That decadent military despotism cannot be thought of as a union of India. In truth, the old Aryan conquest of India was not a political conquest, and never has been; it was a conquest, very complete in the greater part of India, of new social usages and certain new religious ideas. The first complete political conquest of India by Aryans was the British conquest, and the ideas which have come in or been awakened thereby, we are now engaged in tracing. As regards the new idea of nationality, we have noted that the new national name Indian now heard upon political platforms, is not a native term, but an importation from Britain along with the English language. How, indeed, could the educated Indian employ any other term with the desired comprehensiveness? If he speak of Hindus, he excludes Mahomedans and followers of other religions; if he use a Sanscrit term for Indians, he still fails to touch the hearts of Mahomedans and others who identify Sanscrit with Hindus. There is no course left but to use the English language, even while criticising the British rulers. The English language has been a prime factor in evoking the new national consciousness, and in the English language the Indian must speak to his new found fellow Indians.[38] Even a considerable portion of the literature of the attempted Revival of Hinduism is in English, strange as the conjunction sounds.

How the thought of Indian unity over against the sovereignty of Britain may reach down even to the humblest, the writer once observed in a humble street in Calcutta. A working man was receiving his farthing's worth of entertainment from a peep-show. His eyes were glued to the peepholes, to secure his money's worth, for the farthing was no small sum to him; and the showman was standing by describing the successive scenes in a loud voice, with intent both to serve his customer and to stimulate the bystanders' curiosity. Three of the scenes were: "This is the house of the great Queen near London city," "This is one of the great Queen's lords writing an order to the Viceroy of Calcutta," "This is the great committee that sits in London city." He actually used the English word committee, the picture probably showing the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Thus the political constitution of India and its unity under Britain are inculcated among the humblest. In the minds of the educated, one need not then be surprised at the growth of a sense of Indian unity over against British supremacy.