It was one of the most eminent of living Indians who gave me this elucidation of the attitude of a respected Hindu nobleman toward his own "home town."
"Disease, dirt and ignorance are the characteristics of my country," he said in his perfect English, sitting in his city-house library where his long rows of law-books stand marshaled along the walls. "Take my own village, where for centuries the head of my family has been chief. When I, who am now head, left it seventeen years ago, it contained some eighteen hundred inhabitants. When I revisited it, which I did for the first time a few weeks since, I found that the population had dwindled to fewer than six hundred persons. I was horrified.
"In the school were seventy or eighty boys apparently five or six years old. 'Why are you teaching these little children such advanced subjects?' I asked.
"'But they are not as young as you think,' the school-teacher replied.
"They were stunted--that is all; stunted for lack of intelligent care, for lack of proper food, and from malaria, which, say what you like about mosquitoes, comes because people are hungry. Such children, such men and women, will be found all over western Bengal. They have no life, no energy.
"My question, therefore, is plain: What have the British been doing in the last hundred years that my village should be like this? It is true that they have turned the Punjab from a desert to a garden, that they have given food in abundance to millions there. But what satisfaction is that to me when they let my people sit in a corner and starve? The British say: 'We had to establish peace and order before we could take other matters up'; also, 'this is a vast country, we have to build bridges and roads and irrigation canals.' But surely, surely, they could have done more, and faster. And they let my people starve!"
Now this gentleman's village, whose decadence he so deplored, lies not over four hours by railroad from the city in which he lives. He is understood to be a man of large wealth, and himself informed me that his law practice was highly lucrative, naming an income that would be envied by an eminent lawyer in New York. Yet he, the one great man of his village, had left that village without help, advice, leadership, or even a friendly look-in, for seventeen years, though it lay but a comfortable afternoon's ride away from his home. And when at last he visited it and found its decay, he could see no one to blame but a Government that has 500,000 such villages to care for, and which can but work through human hands and human intelligence.
Also, he entirely neglected to mention, in accounting for the present depopulation of his birthplace, that a large industrial plant lately erected near it had drawn away a heavy percentage of the villagers by its opportunities of gain.
It would be a graceless requital of courtesy to name the gentleman just quoted. But perhaps I may without offense name another, Sirdar Mohammed Nawaz Khan, lord of twenty-six villages in Attock District, northern Punjab.
This young Muslim went for his early education to the College for Punjab Chiefs, at Lahore, and thence to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, to earn a commission in the Indian Army. During his stay in England, being from time to time a guest in English country houses, his attention was caught and fixed by the attitude of large English landlords toward their tenants.
Coming as a living illustration of the novel principles of landlord's duties laid down by the English headmaster of his college in Lahore, the thing struck root in his mind and soon possessed him. Dashing young soldier that he made, after eighteen months' service with a Hussar regiment, popular with officers and men, he resigned his commission and returned to his estates. "For I see where my place is now," he said.
There he spends his time, riding from village to village, working out better conditions, better farming methods, better sanitation, anything that will improve the status of his people. Twenty-seven years old and with an annual income of some four lakhs of rupees, he is an enthusiastic dynamo of citizenship, a living force for good, and the sworn ally of the equally enthusiastic and hard-working English Deputy Commissioner.
Curiously enough, he strongly objects to Government's new policy of rapid Indianization of the public services, takes no interest in Swaraj politics, and less than none in criticism of Government's efforts to clean up, educate, and enrich the people. His whole time goes to vigorous cooperation with Government betterment schemes, and to vigorous original effort.
If the good of the people is the object of government, then multiplication of the type of Sirdar Mohammed Nawaz Khan, rather than of the talkers, would produce the strongest argument for more rapid transfer of responsibility into Indian hands.
Meantime, of those who remain in the little towns and hamlets, "the upper classes and castes," says Ol-cott, [1] "are often not only indifferent to the education of the less fortunate villagers, but are actively opposed to it, since it is likely to interfere with the unquestioning obedience and service that has been offered by the lowest castes through the ages."
[1. Village Schools In India, p. 93.]
"There is in rural India very little public opinion in favour of the education of the common folk," says the Commission of Inquiry, and "the wealthy land-owner or even the well-to-do farmer has by no means discovered yet that it is to his interest to educate the agricultural labourer."[2]
[2. Village Education in India, p. 26.]
The village school-teacher is in general some dreary incompetent, be he old or young--a heavy wet blanket slopped down upon a helpless mass of little limp arms and legs and empty, born-tired child noddles. Consequently anything duller than the usual Indian village school this world will hardly produce. Fish-eyed list-lessness sits upon its brow, and its veins run flat with boredom.
But I, personally, could find nothing to justify the belief that melancholy, as distinct from the viewpoint produced by the Hindu religion, is a necessary inborn trait of the Indian. The roots of joy certainly live within young and old. A smile, I found, brings forth a ready smile; a joke, a laugh; an object of novelty evokes interest from all ages, in any village gathering; and serious philosophical consideration crowned with ripe speech awaits new thoughts. The villagers are dignified, interesting, enlisting people, commanding affection and regard and well worthy the service that for the last sixty-odd years they have enjoyed--good men's best effort. Without their active and intelligent partnership, no native Government better than an oligarchy can ever exist in India.
But it is only to the Briton that the Indian villager of today can look for steady, sympathetic and practical interest and steady, reliable help in his multitudinous necessities. It is the British Deputy Commissioner, none other, who is "his father and his mother," and upon the mind of that Deputy Commissioner the villagers' troubles and the villagers' interests sit day and in my own experience, it was an outstanding fact that in every one of the scores of villages I visited, from one end of India to the other, I got from the people a friendly, confiding, happy reception. King George and the young god Krishna, looking down from the walls of many a mud cottage, seemed to link the sources of benefit. All attempts to explain myself as an American proving futile, since a white face meant only England to them, an "American" nothing at all--I let it go at that, accepting the welcome that the work of generations had prepared.
Yet there are so few Britons in India--fewer than 200,000 counting every head, man, woman and child--and there are 500,000 British Indian villages!
"Would not your educated and brilliant young men of India," I once asked Mr. Gandhi, "be doing better service to India, if, instead of fighting for political advantage, social place and, in general, the limelight, they were to efface themselves, go to the villages, and give their lives to the people?"
"Ah, yes," Mr. Gandhi replied, "but that is a counsel of perfection."
To four interesting young Indian political leaders in Calcutta, men well considered in the city, I put the same question: "Would not you and all like you best serve your beloved Mother India by the sacrifice to her of your personal and political ambitions--by losing yourselves in your villages, to work there for the people, just as so many British, both men and women, are doing today? In twenty years' time, might not your accomplishment be so great that those political powers you now vainly and angrily demand would fall into your hands simply because you had proved yourselves their fit custodians?"
"Perhaps," said the three. "But talk, also, is work. Talk is now the only work. Nothing else can be done till we push the alien out of India."
"If I were running this country, I'd close every university tomorrow," said the chief executive of a great American business concern, himself an American long resident in India, deeply and sympathetically interested in the Indian. "It was a crime to teach them to be clerks and lawyers and politicians till they'd been taught to raise food."
"After twenty-odd years of experience in India," said an American educator at the head of a large college, "I have come to the conclusion that the whole system here is wrong. These people should have had two generations of primary schools all over the land, before ever they saw a grammar school; two generations of grammar schools before the creation of the first high school; and certainly not before the seventh or eighth generation should a single Indian university bave opened its doors."