Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
The political aspects of Indian unrest have compelled me to dwell
chiefly upon the evil forces which it has generated. But contact with
the West has acted as a powerful ferment for good as well as for evil
upon every class of Indian society that has come more or less directly
under its influence. Were it otherwise we should indeed have to admit
the moral bankruptcy of our civilization. The forces of unrest are made
up of many heterogeneous and often conflicting elements, and even in
their most mischievous manifestations there are sometimes germs of good
which it should be our business to preserve and to develop. Largely as
the classes touched, however superficially, by Western education have of
late years been invaded by a spirit of reaction and of revolt against
all for which that education stands, they have not yet by any means been
wholly conquered by it. It is the breath of the West that has stirred
the spiritual and intellectual activity of which Hindu revivalism and
political disaffection, glorified under the name of Nationalism, are
unfortunately the most prominent and the most recent but not the only
outcome. Another and much healthier outcome is the sense of social duty
and social service which has grown up amongst many educated Indians of
all races and creeds, and amongst none more markedly than amongst the
Hindus. Traditions of mutual helpfulness are indeed deep-rooted in
India as in all Oriental communities. Mutual helpfulness is the best
feature of the caste system, of the Hindu family system, of the old
Indian village system, and it explains the absence in a country where
there is so much poverty of those abject forms of pauperism with which
we are compelled at home to deal through the painful medium of our Poor
Laws. But until the leaven of Western ideas had been imported into India
mutual helpfulness was generally confined within the narrow limits of
distinct and separate social units. It is now slowly expanding out of
watertight compartments into a more spacious conception of the social
inter-dependence of the different classes of the community. This
expansion of the Indian's social horizon began with the social reform
movement which had kindled the enthusiasm, of an older generation in the
'70's and '80's of the last century. Far from being, as some contend, a
by-product of the more recent Nationalism, which had never been heard of
at that period, its progress, as I have already shown, has been hampered
not only by the reactionary tendencies of this Nationalism in religious
and social matters, but by the diversion of some of the best energies of
the country into the relatively barren field of political agitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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