PROBLEM OF INDIA

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23287, 24 August 1945, Page 4

PROBLEM OF INDIA

What Do The People Really Want? Illiteracy A Barrier To Progress The Indian people were undoubtedly anxious for freedom, they were opposed to government by the British but this did not mean that they were not responsive to the friendship of individual Britishers. One section of the naticn would be content for India to remain within the Empire as a self-governing Dominion, but others of the agitators insisted that India should make her own destiny, alone. After eight years in the East, six of wh-’h she spent in personal contact with many sections of the population as a A.W.C.A. officer in several Indian cities, these were the only definite conclusions on the Indian “situation” ventured by Miss Jean Stevenson in conversation with a representative of “The Timaru Herald,” yesterday. Miss Stevenson left New Zealand in 1937, and after visiting Malaya, Java and Burma she joined the staff of the Y.W.C.A. in Calcutta, remaining there for 18 months before the evacuation in 1942. She was in Lahore and Delhi for shorter periods, and in Madras city for two and a half years. She returned to New Zealand some weeks ago. Miss Stevenson found it impossible to explain just what India wants, beycn’l ridding herself of the British yoke—ihe Indians themselves are unde ided and disunited beyond that objeive, and during the war the point of view on that single purpose has changed. Although the “quit India” slogan followed the 1942 conference. feeling changed and she thought most of the people recognised that the British must remain until the war was over (Miss Stevenson had left before Japan surrendered). Supercilious British “I believe that it is the supercilious attitude, the tendency of'the British to look down on the Orientals more than the political blunders that causes the antagonism in India, and I think that the worst offenders are in the commercial community. India has an old civilisation, ard the leaders and scholars feel that it is not befitting for the people of such an old nation to be slaves.” she said. “No one knows what India, the whole of India, wants because the great mass of the people are not articulate—on?v about 15 per cent, are literate—and although the groups clamouring for self-government are important they are small.” Miss Stevenson continued. She was able to answer a question as to how they are preparing themselves for government by explaining the “village uplift movement” sponsor'd by Congress. It is a 25 year plan to raise the standard of literacy and the first significant effort by the Congress Party to attack this problem. After the death of Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, an illiterate woman all her lif*. a large memorial fund was established for the uplift and education of village women and children, but it is a tremendous task and much too early to say how successful it might be. The middle class does seek education: there are large universities in all the provinces and the rolls are closed at many of them* fees are not expensive, bursaries are provided by missionary colleges and an effect the prosperity war has brought to Indian has been an increase in the numbers of young Indians continuing their higher education, but the great mass of the people do not want to be educated. In Madras. the Commissioner (an Indian) was prepared to provide schools for everyone, free, with a meal thrown in and someo. e to bring the pupils to the schools, but the poverty-stricken people could not be persuaded to send their children,” Miss Stevenson continued.

Personal Experience “I can speak from my own experience. I thought it would be a community service if each householder would employ only servants -whose children went to school—every day I had to send a member of my staff to round up the children and take them to school. A truancy law would be' of little use: how could it be made known when the people cannot read?”

Miss Stevenson had not seen Gandhi, and she preferred to refer those interested in his influence to the writers and journalists who had met him. He is an enigma, difficult for westerners to understand, and her conclusion was that British people just cannot understand him. He had been imprisoned most of the time that she had been in India, and he was not such a great force now as formerly.

Indians were gradually taking over important positions, generally on the retirement of a European official, and Bengal. Assam and Punjab had Indian administrators. Most of the city Councils were composed of Indians, and the Administrator of Madras was an Indian. Since the war women and girls had had more opportunity. 2000 girls serving in the Women's Army Corps of India and many more in the auxiliary nursing service. Most of the girls attending university were studying medicine or teaching, and more recently there was a growing interest in social welfare work for which girls and women were being trained. Advocating a two-way exchange of teachers, and other professional workers between India and the Dominions, Miss Stevenson suggested that the people of the British Empire would thus get to know the Indian people and learn to appreciate them, and they themselves would not grow insular and narrow in their ?ws.