NATIONALISM IN INDIA.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 114, 16 May 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

NATIONALISM IN INDIA.

“-There are those ~ho see in the present movement and stirring o’ thought in India merely a movemen engineered by a negligible minority which ought never to have been al lowed to attain its present importance in that much of it is frankly seditious and with a firm Government could readily be suppressed, ” said Lord Irwin, the retiring Viceroy, in a speech at New Delhi. “Therefore the conclusion is let us only have firm government and get back, as we rapidly shall, to the good old days of paternal administration with populous markets reserved for British trade. That diagnosis I believe to be superficial and distorted and wholly divorced from reality. Great Britain will delude herseli if she- does not recognise that beneath all the distinctions of community, class and social circumstance there is a grow - ing intellectual consciousness, or more truly self-consciousness, which is very closely akin to what we generally term nationalism. I know well that any general statement of this kind requires great modification if it is to fit the manifold diversities of the great continent of India, and this feeling of which I speak makes itself felt through a great variety of ways, but that it is a real thing and a thing of growing potential force few who know modern India intimately will be concerned to deny.”