Roughly speaking, three-quarters of the population of British India are Hindus, if the 60,000,000 Untouchables be computed with the Hindus.[1] Roughly speaking, one quarter of the population of British India is Muhammadan. And between the two lies a great gulf whence issues a continuous threatening rumble, with periodic destructive outbursts of sulphur and flame.
[1. The Census of India, of 1921 shows about three and a quarter million Sikhs and about one and a sixth million Jains, of both of which sects many members call themselves Hindus. The Buddhists, numbering eleven and a half millions, are largely confined to the Province of Burma, outside the Indian Peninsula.]
This gulf constitutes one of the greatest factors in the present Indian situation.
Its elements formed integral parts of the problem that the British Crown assumed in 1858. And if for the first half-century of Crown rule they remained largely dormant, the reason is not obscure. During that half-century, Government was operated by British officers of the Civil Service, both in the administrative and in the judicial branches. These officers, in the performance of their duties, made no difference between Hindu and Muhammadan, holding the general interest in an equal hand. Therefore, being in the enjoyment of justice and of care, man by man, day by day, and from an outside authority that neither Hindu nor Muhamma-dan could challenge, neither party was roused to jealousy, and religious communal questions scarcely arose.
In 1909, however, the wind switched to a stormy quarter. The Minto-Morley scheme was enacted by Parliament as the "Indian Councils Act."
The effect of this measure was instantly to alarm the Muhammadan element, rousing it into self-consciousness as a distinct and separate body, unorganized, but suspicious, militant in spirit and disturbed about its rights. For it saw, clearly enough, that in any elected legislature, and in any advantages thereby to be gained, the Hindu was practically sure to shoulder the Muhammadan out of the path.
Now in order to understand how this situation came about, it is necessary to recall that Muhammadanism first came to India as the religion of the conqueror; that for five hundred years its arm controlled the greater part of India, during which period Persian was the language of the court, the language of literature and verse, the language of the law. But the Muhammadan, though he learned his Koran and his Persian verse, was as a rule an open-air sort of man who would rarely bother his own head with pens or books if he could find another to do the job for him. Therefore, whenever some Brahman, with his quick brain and facile memory, acquired a knowledge of Persian and thereby released his further store of learning for the master's use, he was apt to find a desirable niche in government service.
Consequently, for five centuries or so, the Brahman did much of the paper work, while the Muhammadan commanded the country.
The history of the interval between Islam's effective dominance and the assumption of direct administration by the British Crown has been elsewhere outlined.[2] It was twenty-one years previous to the latter event--back in the days of the East India Company--that a little seed was sown with whose fruit we now deal.
[2. See pp. 283 et seq., ante.]
This was the changing of the language of the Courts of Justice from Persian to English.
The change took place as a logical part of the westernizing of Indian education. It looked simple. Its results have been simple, like the results of a clean stroke of the ax. The Calcutta University Commission thus suggests the initial process:[3]
[3. Report, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 37-8.]
The influence of the Act of 1837 and the Resolution of 1844 [giving preference in government appointments to Indians who had received a Western education] upon the Hindu bhadralok[4] from among whom all the minor officials had long been drawn, was bound to be decisive. They had long been in the habit of learning a foreign language--Persian--as a condition of public employment; they now learnt English instead. It was, indeed, the Hindus who alone took advantage of the new opportunities in public education in any large numbers. The Musalmans naturally protested strongly against the change; which was, indeed, disastrous for them. Hitherto their knowledge of Persian had given them a considerable advantage. They refused to give up learning it. It was for them the language of culture. To take up English in addition would be too heavy a burden; moreover, they had learnt to think of English as associated with Christian teaching, owing to the activity of the missionaries, and they were less willing than the Hindus to expose their sons to missionary influences. Their pride and their religious loyalty revolted; and they stood aloof from the movement.
[4. Professional classes.]
Literate or illiterate, the Muhammadan is a passionate monotheist. "There is but One God." His mosques are clear of images. His frequent daily prayer is offered straight to the invisible One Omnipotent. And although he respects Christianity as a revealed religion and reverences Christ as an inspired teacher, the doctrine of the Trinity constitutes an impossible heresy. His faith is his highest possession, and he would not willingly open the door to what he considered impure doctrine by learning its vehicle, the English tongue.
Deeply hurt by the alternatives forced upon it, Islam withdrew into itself, little foreseeing the consequences of its withdrawal.
As long as British officials administered the affairs of India in town and village, the potentiality of the situation thus created remained obscured. But the first gun of the Minto-Morley "Reforms," rent the curtain, and the startled Islamic chiefs, their hands on the hilt of the sword a-rust in the scabbard, peered forth half-awake upon a world dark with shapes of ill-omen.
And so, greatly at a disadvantage, the Muslims as a political entity reappeared in the field. Yet over the wide country, in the villages and the hamlets, the stir scarcely reached. For there, still, the British official alone represented Government, dealing justice and favor with an even hand, and Muslim and Hindu, side by side, lived at peace.
Then came 1919, the extension of the "Reforms" of 1909, the transfer of much power, place and patronage from British into Indian hands, and the promise, furthermore, of a reviewal of the field at the end of a third ten-year interval, with an eye to still further transfers.
From that moment, except in country districts un-reached by agitators, peace between the two elements became a mere name--an artificial appearance maintained wholly by the British presence. And now, as 1929 draws nigh, the tension daily increases, while the two rivals pace around each other in circles, hackles up, looking for first toothhold.
For a time during the political disturbances that followed the War a brief farce of unity was played by the leaders of that day. Mr. Gandhi embraced the Khilafat[5] agitation as embodied in those picturesque freebooters, the Ali brothers, if thereby the Muham-madan weight might be swung with his own to embarrass the British administration. But the Khilafat cause itself died an early death. And a single incident of the Gandhi-Ali alliance may be cited to illustrate the actual depth of the brotherhood it proclaimed.
[5. An Islamic movement aiming at the restoration of Turkey to prewar status, including her reconquest of the emancipated Armenians and Arabs, and her recovery of Palestine, Syria, Thrace, and the Dardanelles.]
Up on the mountains overlooking the Malabar coast, among a population of about two million Hindus, live a people known as the Moplahs, descendants of old Arab traders and the women of the country. The Moplahs, who themselves number about a million, live in surprisingly clean and well-kept houses, have often intelligent, rugged faces and, according to my own experience, are an interesting and friendly primitive folk.
But, zealot Muhammadans, they have ever been prone to outbreaks of religious passion in which their one desire is to be sent to Paradise by a bullet or a knife, first having piled up the longest possible list of non-believers dead by their hands.
Among these simple creatures, in the year of disorders 1921, the political combination above indicated sent emissaries preaching a special edition of its doctrines. Government's hand, these proclaimed, was raised against the holy places of Islam. Government was "Satanic," an enemy of the Faith. Government must and would be driven out of India and that right soon. Swaraj must be set up.
From mosque to mosque, from hamlet to hamlet, from cocoanut grove to cocoanut grove, the fiery words passed. And, whatever meaning they might bear for an abstract philosopher, to the simple Moplah, as, in those miserable years, to so many millions of simple Hindus all over the land, they meant just what they said--War.
But, the point that Mr. Gandhi missed, whatever the humorous Ali brothers may privately have thought about it, was this: Swaraj, to a Moplah, could only mean the coming of the earthly Kingdom of Islam, in which, whatever else happened or failed to happen, no idol-worshiping Hindu could be tolerated alive.
So the Moplahs, secretly and as best they could, made store of weapons--knives, spears, cutlasses. And on August 20, 1921, the thing broke loose. As if by a preliminary gesture of courtesy to the sponsors of the occasion, one European planter was murdered at the start. But without further dissipation of energy the frenzied people then concentrated on the far more congenial task of communal war. First blocking the roads, cutting the telegraph wires and tearing up the railway lines at strategic points, thereby isolating the little police stations scattered through the mountains, they set to work, in earnest and in detail, to establish a Muslim Kingdom and to declare a Swaraj after their own hearts.
Their Hindu neighbors, though outnumbering them two to one, seem to have stood no chance against them. The Hindu women, as a rule, were first circumcised--• "forcibly converted," as the process is called--and were then added to Moplah families. The Hindu men were sometimes given the choice of death or "conversion," sometimes flayed alive, sometimes cutlassed at once and thrown down their own wells. In one district, the Ernad Taluk, over nine hundred males were "forcibly converted" and the work spread on through the mountain-slopes.
As rapidly as possible police and troops were thrown into the country, by whose work, after six months of trying service, the disorders were quelled. But not until some three thousand Moplahs had cast away their lives, without reckoning the Hindus they accounted for, not until much property had been destroyed and many families ruined, and not until a long list of prisoners awaited trial for guilt that certainly belonged on heads higher than theirs.
Meantime, the circumcised male Hindus wandered up and down the land calling upon their brethren to take warning.
A trained American observer, agent of the United States Government, chanced to be in the region at the time. His statement follows:
"I saw them in village after village, through the south and east of Madras Presidency. They had been circumcised by a peculiarly painful method, and now, in many cases, were suffering tortures from blood poisoning. They were proclaiming their misery, and calling on all their gods to curse Swaraj and to keep the British in the land. 'Behold our miserable bodies! We are defiled, outcasted, unclean, and all because of the serpents who crept among us with their poison of Swaraj. Once let the British leave the land and the shame that has befallen us will assuredly befall you also, Hindus, men and women, every one.'
"The terrors of hell were literally upon them.
"And the Brahman priests were asking one hundred to one hundred and fifty rupees a head to perform the purification ceremony which alone could save the poor creatures' souls.
"This ceremony consisted in filling the eyes, ears, mouth and nose with soft cow-dung, which must then be washed out with cow's urine, after which should be administered ghee (clarified butter), milk and curds. It sounds simple, but can only be performed by a Brah-man, and with proper rites and sacred verses. And the price which the Brahmans now set upon their services was, to most of the needy, prohibitive. Their distress was so desperate that British officials, for once interfering in a religious matter, interceded with the Brahmans and persuaded them, in view of the large number concerned, to accept a wholesale purification fee of not over twelve rupees a head."
I have not verified the final item in this statement. My informant, however, besides having been on the spot at the time, is professionally critical as to evidence.
If there was anything particularly Muhammadan in this outbreak, it was in the feature of "forcible conversion" rather than in the general barbarity educed. Less than six months before the Moplah affair began, occurred the Chauri Chaura incident in the United Provinces, far away from Malabar.
An organization called the "National Volunteers" had lately been formed, more or less under pay, to act as a militia for the enforcement of the decrees of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress. This "Congress" is a purely political organization, and was, at the time, under the control of Mr. Gandhi.
On February 4, 1921, a body of National Volunteers, followed by a mob whom their anti-government propaganda had inflamed, attacked the little police station at Chauri Chaura, within which were assembled some twenty-one police constables and village watchmen, the common guardians of the rural peace. The peasantry and the "Volunteers," numbering altogether some three thousand men, surrounded the police station, shot a few of its inmates dead, wounded the rest, collected the wounded into a heap, poured oil over them, and fried them alive.
This was as Hindu to Hindu.
Again, in the Punjab during the disorders of 1919, anti-Government workers launched a special propaganda for the violation of foreign women.
Its public declarations took the form of posters such as these: "Blessed be Mahatma Gandhi. We are sons of India...Gandhi! We the Indians will fight to death after you;" and "What time are you waiting for now? There are many ladies here to dishonor. Go all around India, clear the country of the ladies," etc., etc.[6]
[6. See Disorders Inquiry Committee, 1919-20, Report, Chapter VII, for placards posted in and around Lyallpur, in April, 1919.]
This was as Indian to white man.
Such language, to such a public, could carry neither a figurative nor a second import. Had time been given it to do its work, had a weak hand then held the helm of the Punjab, an unbearable page had been written in the history of India.
And if these three instances are here brought forward from among the scores of grim contemporaneous parallels with which they can be diversified and reën-forced, it is not for the purpose of shaming the Indian peoples, but rather to point out the wild, primitive and terribly explosive nature of the elements that politicians and theorists take into their hands when they ignite those people's passions.
In most rural regions even now no developed Hindu-Muhammadan animosity exists, and the two elements live together amicably enough as neighbors, unless outside political agents have disturbed them.
Instances occur, to be sure, such as that in the District of Bulandshahr, near Delhi, in the year 1924, when the Ganges flooded. It was a disastrous flood, sweeping away whole villages and their inhabitants, man and beast. Upon certain Hindu ferrymen and fishermen, the local owners of boats, depended the first work of rescue. And these made use of the opportunity to refuse to take a single drowning Muhammadan out of the water.
But, on the other hand, I recall visiting a village night-school, set up by Muhammadans for their own boys, which was in part supported by contributions from the Hindu neighbors. This was in Nadia District, in Bengal, where the villagers of the two religions seemed to bear no sort of ill-will toward each other, and where an ever-active British Deputy Commissione!, was their confidant and chosen counsellor in all then affairs.
Something, again, is to be learned from the simple history of a park designed for the city of Lucknow. When the ground came to be surveyed, it was found that a little Hindu temple lay in one corner of the allotted area. Following their established policy in such matters, the British authorities left the temple undisturbed.
Then came the Muhammadans of the city, saying: "We, too, desire a place in this fine new park wherein to say our prayers."
So the Municipal authorities arranged that a suitable open space be set aside at the opposite corner of the park for the Muhammadans. And the Hindus worshiped in their temple, and the Muhammadans worshiped in their open space, both quite happily and innocently, for a matter of eight years.
In the interval came the "Reforms," came the fruit of the "Reforms," came a tension, stiffening steadily.
For Lucknow is a Muhammadan city, in the sense that all the important people, all the old families, all the great buildings and monuments, are of the ancient Muhammadan kingdom of Oudh. Wherefore the Muhammadans felt that if the control of India was about to revert to Indians' hands their city of Lucknow ought to revert to them.
But, though the history and the aristocracy of Luck-now are indubitably Muhammadan, in the population of Lucknow the Hindu outnumbers the Muhammadan three to one. Wherefore the Hindus, filled with sudden fear of the future, now asked each other:
"If this Swaraj is indeed coming, where will it plant us Hindus of Lucknow? Under Muhammadan masters? Better were we all dead men!"
Upon which they began to organize, to assert themselves, perhaps rather aggressively and offensively, and particularly to do so each evening, toward sunset, in that little old temple by the park.
Now, sunset is an hour appointed for Muslim devotion. For eight years the Muslim prayer-rugs had been spread, five minutes before sunset, in that same little park, and the faithful, kneeling in rows, had said their vespers there. Nor would they submit to interruption by obstreperous Hindus now. So, they issued an edict: The Hindus, hereafter, must choose for their temple meeting a time that did not clash with the Muham-madans' evening prayer.
The Hindus resented the edict of the Muhamma-dans. The Muhamrnadans resented the resentment of the Hindus. Tinder smoldered up to €ame. And presently big gangs of each religion gathered in the park at one and the same hour to fight the thing to a finish.
In the matter ensuing, the Muhammadans seem to have been the more skillful, since they swept the field quickly of human impedimenta and were about to smash the offensive temple itself, when a detachment of police, reënforced by British troops, intervened.
Thus this particular incident came to a standstill, such of the combatants as were able dispersing to their homes. But an intense and really dangerous feeling, bred of the battle and of the fear and jealousy in the air, survived in full vigor. If a small lurking party of the other side saw a Hindu or a Muhammadan pass in the street, that party would dash out, seize and beat him. To restore confidence it was necessary for two or three days to patrol the city streets with British cavalry.
Enter, then, the British District Commissioner--for cities, as well as rural parts, have their commissioners. And the Commissioner, obviously, must "arrange." For the quarrel was literally ruining the town. Trade was suffering, small shops were failing, the people were boycotting each other, and fresh broils and violence, promising any eruption, disfigured every day.
So the Commissioner invited the leaders of the factions to come to his house and talk it over--because his house was the only place where they would meet in peace. They came, and sat, and came again. They sat and talked and talked again. And neither party would yield an inch.
The Hindus insisted that they must begin to beat their prayer drums five minutes before sunset. The Muhammadans as firmly maintained: "At exactly five minutes before sunset we must begin our evening worship, which you Hindus shall not disturb."
Yet at last the Commissioner prevailed. For he elicited from the Hindus a concession of five minutes, and from the Muhammadans a concession of five minutes. Then, with his combined winnings safe under his feet, he proceeded to extract from the Hindus a promise that, during the last ten minutes before sunset, they would not play music in their temple; and from the Muhammadans a promise that on the dot of the first of the silent ten minutes they would begin their ten-minute vesper prayer.
For, during the conferences in the Commissioner's drawing room, the fact had developed that the Muhammadans' objection lay, not to the Hindus' praying, but to the din they made at their prayers, hammering temple gongs and drums.
Those joint conferences in the Commissioner's drawing room lasted, altogether, fifteen hours. As the fifteenth hour closed, the Commissioner's dinner-gong rang in the hall. Whereupon one of the Hindus pondered aloud:
"That gong's voice, over in our temple, wouldn't reach so far."
"Will you try it and see?" asked the Commissioner, quickly. And to this day the Hindus of that Lucknow temple worship to the low and mellow voice of the British Commissioner's dinner-gong.
But that experienced official is by no means deluding himself with the notion that he can now go to sleep on his post.