Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
the welfare, and even to the existence, of the Mahomedans of India.
As I write I have before me a letter from another Mahomedan friend, a
man both of European education and very wide knowledge of his Indian
co-religionists, with whom he enjoys exceptional credit. I was so much
impressed with the prevalence of this form of fatalism that I wrote and
asked him for his opinion. This is his answer:--
Moslems feel that while at present the Government in India
is British in spirit as well as in name, there are already indications
that it might gradually become Hindu in fact, though
the British form might remain. The whole object of the
advanced Congress Party and of the leaders of the Nationalist
movement is not the overthrow of British rule in name, but in
fact. You may say that this is a wild apprehension, and that
the Government is not foolish enough or weak enough to
degenerate into a mere form. That may be the attitude
of an Englishman who is in India only as a bird of passage
(and all Englishmen are there as birds of passage, for only those
whose children belong to the country are permanently bound
up with it). For us who live here, and whose children are to
live here, the distant as well as the immediate future is of
essential importance. Now what is the tendency of Government?
Can any one deny that, taken as a whole, it is towards
Hindu predominance in the long run? English observers
must not forget that there is throughout India amongst Hindus
a strong tendency towards imitating the National movements
that have proved successful in European history. Now,
while _vis-a-vis_ the British the Hindu irreconcilables assume
the attitude of the Italian patriots towards the hated Austrian,
_vis-a-vis_ the Moslems there is a very different European
model for them to follow. Not only Tilak and his school in
Poona, but throughout the Punjab and Bengal the constant
talk of the Nationalists is that the Moslems must be driven
out of India as they were driven out of Spain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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