Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
We want the Western-educated Indian. We have made him, and we cannot
unmake him if we would. But we must see that he is a genuine product of
the best that Western education can give, and not merely an Indian who
can speak English and adapt his speech to English ears in order to lend
plausibility to the revival in new forms of ancient religious or social
tyrannies. We must remember also that even the best type of
Western-educated Indian only speaks at present for a minute section of
the population of India, and that, when he does not speak, as he often
naturally does, merely in the interests of the small class which he
represents, he has not yet by any means proved his title to speak for
the scores of millions of his fellow-countrymen who are still living in
the undisturbed atmosphere of the Indian Middle Ages. One of the dangers
we have to guard against is that, because the Western-educated Indian is
to the stay-at-home Englishman, and even to the Englishman whose
superficial knowledge of India is confined to brief visits to the chief
cities of India, the most, and indeed the only, articulate Indian, we
should regard him as the only or the most authoritative mouthpiece of
the needs and wishes of other classes or of the great mass of his
fellow-countrymen with whom he is often in many ways in less close touch
than the Englishman who lives in their midst.
The weak point of the recent political reforms is that they were
intended to benefit, not wholly, but mainly, that particular class. In
so far as they may help to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the
moderate Indian politician they deserve praise; and in that respect, as
far as one can judge at this very early stage, they are not without
promise. In effect they have also helped to give other important
interests opportunities of organization and expression. Apart from the
great Mahomedan community, whose political aspirations are largely
different from, and opposed to, those of Hinduism, there are
agricultural interests, always of supreme importance in such a country
as India, and industrial and commercial interests of growing importance
which cannot be adequately represented by the average Indian politician
who is chiefly recruited from the towns and from, professions that have
little or no knowledge of or sympathy with them. The politician, for
instance, is too often a lawyer, and he has thriven upon a system of
jurisprudence and legal procedure which we have imported into India with
the best intentions, but with results that have sometimes been simply
disastrous to a thriftless and litigious people. Hence the suspicion and
dislike entertained by large numbers of quiet, respectable Indians for
any political institutions that tend to increase the influence of the
Indian _vakeel_ and of the class he represents. Our object, therefore,
both in the education and in the political training of Indians, should
be to divert the activities of the new Western-educated classes into
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