BRITAIN IN INDIA

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 120, 17 November 1936, Page 20

BRITAIN IN INDIA

rAGORE'S CRITICISM

EVILS THAT MIGHT BE WORSE

RULED AND RULERS

The British Empire is pluming itself on its generosity in making over some part of the machinery of the Government, of India into our hands, writes Sir Rabindranath Tagore in a letter to a friend in England, reprinted, in part, in the "Manchester Guardian." What is distressing me is that the poisonous element mixed in the boon offered to us will continue to work noxiously for an indefinite time to come. It will.ever keep inflamed the communal passions in Bengal, threatening her peace, which is an essential environment for all economic, social, and cultural progress. The Moslems are apparently failing to realise that unbalanced politics will never serve their own interest for long, that the communal split amounts to cutting at {he root of national life.

You know, and I have never tried to keep it secret from anyone, that of all the Western peoples who have direct dealings with alien races, I respect most the British people. Many things have recently happened in our country to wound us to the quick, in the doing of which British agents were concerned, but of which it is forbidden to speak. These have embittered the hearts of our countrymen at large, though the punishment has fallen only on our youths. In spite of it all, I still say that it will not do to isolate such events when coming to our own judgment of the British people. KULERS, BRITISH AND OTHER. There are other great nations in Europe who exercise dominion over foreign peoples. And we cannot but heave a sigh oil relief whenever we recall that it is not they who are our rulers. What I am writing to you now, and the freedom with which our representatives in the Legislatures expatiate on the shortcomings of the Government, would not have been possible undor the domination of any other European nation which holds subject races under its autocratic grip. We admire the United States from a distance, because we have no relations with her. But, apart from her inhuman treatment of the negroes, the instances of rank injustice perpetrated by her highest Courts of law are such as do not fortunately belong to our normal experience in India. When our rulers are annoyed, however contrary they may act, for the time, to their true national character, they cannot altogether get rid of all sense of shame. For, in the nation to which they belong, they have noble personalities who, by that very fact, are its truest representatives, to whose judgment they cannot but defer, although they try to come, when irritated, close to the blood-and-iron methods with some superficial modifications. Nevertheless they cannot come down to the point of saying "We shall So just as we like"—as the Badshahs and Nawabs of old used to say, as some of our ruling chiefs of today would like to say, and as the Fascist nations of Europe are actually saying. CONDITIONS IN ANDAMANS. Here, when we complain of the frightful conditions prevailing in the Andamans, then, even to such weaklings as we are, they are impelled seriously to report with benevolence beaming from their faces that the Andamans are as beautifully perfect from the moral and physical point of view as could be desired for the condemned. Had those. Englishmen whose practice departs widely from English ideals been capable of openly insulting those ideals, how few of the speakers in our legislative bodies would have remained outside that "penal paradise." I have seen many great Englishmen. They never hesitate to stand up against wrong, whether done by others or by their own countrymen. These may not be statesmen, for statesman are not usually to be reckoned as the true representatives of the nation. If the persons wielding political power in England had been able to ignore the silent judgment of the great minds in their country they might have succeeded in levelling to the dust all the best canons of humanity—as has been clone in Germany and Italy, and as might have been done in England if the new-fledged Fascists there had their way. In that case the Andamans would have been fully populated and. the key of the speeches in our Legislatures pitched several tones lower —as in the .case of Germany and Italy. I must admit that my admiration of British character, in so far as thati character is reflected in the governing of India, with its penal system, whipping, and solitary cell, does not come to much more than a comparative statement. It is inhuman enough for us, as you must have found from the narrative of Jawaharlal's prison experience and also from numerous instances of political prisoners, in the prime of their youth, coming out to die after a few years of gaol, miserably broken down in health and spirit. And it is but meagre consolation to us to think that it could even have been worse according to the present standard of civilisation that prevails in a large part of the West. INDIAN POVERTY. Some of our countrymen are annoyed with' me and ask: If you have such high respect for the British people, why do you not hanker for a perpetuation of their rule? My reply is that thus to be drawn into the widespread net of a foreign Imperialism can never be good f6r India. It would have been otherwise had this Empire connoted an undivided body politic. But the conditions prevailing in the cowsheds of a dairyman are not to be compared with those obtaining in his homestead. In the former the question is one of the ample production of milk and of getting burdens cheaply carried. If its occupants display their horns hi asserting their self-delorminn--lion no lime is lost in bringing homo to them Iher trim position.

The chronic want of food and water, the ]ack of sanitation and -medical help, the neglect of means of communication, the poverty of educational provision, the all pervading spirit of depression that I have myself seen to prevail in our villages after over a hundred years of British rule make me despair of its ■ beneficence. It is almost a crime to talk of Soviet Russia in this country, and yet I cannot but refer to the contrast it presents. I must, confess to the envy with which my admiration was mixed to see the extra: ordinary enthusiasm and skill with which the measures for producing food, providing education, fighting against disease were being pushed forward in their vast territories. There is no separating line of mistrust or insulting distinctions between Soviet Europe and Soviet Asia. I am only comparing the state- of things obtaining there and here as I have actually seen them. And I state my conclusion that what is responsible for our condition in the .so-called British Empire is the yawning gulf between its dominant and subjugated sections.

On the other hand, it has to be recognised that there is an inevitableness In the fate that has overtaken Hindu India. We have divided and subdivided ourselves Into mincemeat, not /It to live, but only to be swallowed. Never up to- now has our dis-

jointed society been able to ward off any threatening evil. Wo are a suicidal race, ourselves keeping wide open ior ages, with marvellous ingenuity, gaps that we are forbidden to cross under penally and cracks that are considered to be too sacred to be repaired because of their antiquity.