Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
Hand in hand with this campaign for the glorification of Hinduism at the
expense of Western civilization there has been carried on another and
far more invidious campaign for the vilification of everything British.
The individual Englishman is denounced as a bloodsucker and a tyrant;
his personal integrity is impugned and derided; his methods of
administration are alleged to be wilfully directed to the
impoverishment, and even to the depopulation, of India; his social
customs are traduced as depraved and corrupt; even his women-folk are
accused of common wantonness. This systematized form of personal calumny
is a scarcely less significant feature of the literature of Indian
unrest than its appeals to the Hindu scriptures and to the Hindu deities
and its exploitation of the religious sentiment for the promotion of
racial hatred. _Swadeshi_ and _Swaraj_ are the battle-cries of this new
Hindu "nationalism," but they mean far more than a mere claim to fiscal
or even political independence. They mean an organized uplifting of the
old Hindu traditions, social and religious, intellectual and moral,
against the imported ideals of an alien race and an alien civilization,
and the sincerity of some, at least, of the apostles of this new creed
cannot be questioned. With Mr. Arabindo Ghose, they firmly believe that
"the whole moral strength of the country is with us, justice is with us,
nature is with us, and the law of God, which is higher than any human
law, justifies our action."
This is a grave phenomenon not to be contemptuously dismissed as the
folly of ill-digested knowledge or summarily judged and condemned, in a
spirit of self-righteousness, as an additional proof of the innate
depravity and ingratitude of the East. It undoubtedly represents a deep
stirring of the waters amongst a people endowed with no mean gifts of
head and heart, and if it has thrown up much scum, it affords glimpses
of nobler elements which time may purify and bring to the surface. Nor
if our rule and our civilization are to prevail must we be unmindful of
our own responsibility or forget that our presence and the influences we
brought with us first stirred the waters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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