Young India: An interpretation and a history of the nationalist movement from withinLajpat Rai, Lala
History
Young India: An interpretation and a history of the nationalist movement from within
Lajpat Rai, Lala
India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947
This word “emasculation” affords the key to the situation in India from
the purely Indian point of view. Political, physical and economic
“emasculation” is the keynote of British rule there, and however they
may cloak it with wrappings of pleasant and golden words, and however
they may conceal it in finely woven sentences, like the cloven feet it
emerges at almost every step. The _Modern Review_ puts it well when it
says:
“Under bureaucratic rule, India is the poorest, the most unhealthy and
the most ignorant among civilised countries, and her poverty and
unhealthiness are not diminishing, and education is spreading at a
slower pace than that of the snail. The remedy is Home Rule.”
There is another brief quotation which I will give, from the speech of
the President of the last session of the Indian National Congress, viz.,
the one relating to the poverty of India. He says: “Whatever differences
of opinion may exist as to whether India is growing richer or poorer
under the British rule, there is none with regard to her extreme
poverty. And there can never be political contentment without material
prosperity, shared in by all classes of the people. What the District
Administration Committee of Bengal quotes with approval as regards
Bengal, that our industrial backwardness is a great political danger,
applies in reality to the whole of India.
“No one will be disposed to question the fact of this amazing
backwardness. _Rich in all the resources of nature, India continues to
be the poorest country in the civilised world._”[19]
VI
I do not propose to burden this preface with other complaints which the
Indian politicians make against the British Government, but I can not
refrain from giving one more quotation from my own pamphlet on the
question of Education:
“Let us look at education in India. India has been under British rule
now for a century and a half in some parts, for over a century in
others, and for at least 65 years in the Punjab. Yet the percentage of
illiteracy is well nigh 95 per cent., taking the whole of India.
Greatest ignorance prevails among the peasantry and the military
classes, the two great bulwarks of British rule in India. What has the
Government done to educate these classes? Nothing. Some maintain that
they have been deliberately kept out of education because, once
educated, they may no longer be such willing tools as they are now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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