However, what Western observers fail to discern is that in her caste
system India in all seriousness accepted her responsibility to solve the
race problem in such a manner as to avoid all friction, and yet to
afford each race freedom within its boundaries. Let us admit India has
not in this achieved a full measure of success. But this you must also
concede, that the West, being more favourably situated as to homogeneity
of races, has never given her attention to this problem, and whenever
confronted with it she has tried to make it easy by ignoring it
altogether. And this is the source of her anti-Asiatic agitations for
depriving aliens of their right to earn their honest living on these
shores. In most of your colonies you only admit them on condition of
their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and drawers of
water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce them into
slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race-conflict.
Whatever may be its merits you will have to admit that it does not
spring from the higher impulses of civilization, but from the lower
passions of greed and hatred. You say this is human nature--and India
also thought she knew human nature when she strongly barricaded her race
distinctions by the fixed barriers of social gradations. But we have
found out to our cost that human nature is not what it seems, but what
it is in truth; which is in its infinite possibilities. And when we in
our blindness insult humanity for its ragged appearance it sheds its
disguise to disclose to us that we have insulted our God. The
degradation which we cast upon others in our pride or self-interest
degrades our own humanity--and this is the punishment which is most
terrible, because we do not detect it till it is too late.
Not only in your relation with aliens but with the different sections of
your own society you have not achieved harmony of reconciliation. The
spirit of conflict and competition is allowed the full freedom of its
reckless career. And because its genesis is the greed of wealth and
power it can never come to any other end but to a violent death. In
India the production of commodities was brought under the law of social
adjustments. Its basis was co-operation, having for its object the
perfect satisfaction of social needs. But in the West it is guided by
the impulse of competition, whose end is the gain of wealth for
individuals. But the individual is like the geometrical line; it is
length without breadth. It has not got the depth to be able to hold
anything permanently. Therefore its greed or gain can never come to
finality. In its lengthening process of growth it can cross other lines
and cause entanglements, but will ever go on missing the ideal of
completeness in its thinness of isolation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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