ACHARYA JADUNATH SARKAR’s fame deservedly rests on his immortal and prolific contributions to Indian history. Lesser known is the keenly perceptive eye that he had on contemporary happenings — what is known as “current affairs.” His occasional writings in this area can be found in out-of-print and hard-to-locate volumes of old journals and magazines.
We unearthed one such gem. In it, Jadunath Sarkar powerfully ruminates on the causes for the downfall of the British rule in India. As a staunch adherent of the tenet that insight is more valuable than intelligence or analysis, I submit that these excerpts from the Acharya’s essay illuminate several unlit corners of that era.
Happy reading!
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the Muslims as a class had fallen fifty years behind the Hindus, by obeying their bigoted priests, who had preached to them that if they received modern education their souls would go to hell. Between 1830 and 1870 the Hindus not only recovered the ground that they had lost during six centuries of orthodox Muslim rule but forged ahead in wealth, power, culture, and in a share in the administration.
The followers of the Prophet only dreamt and vainly sighed for the return of the days of their nawabs and padishahs…
Under Lords Minto and Hardinge (1906–15) the Muslims were coached and guided to set up a separatist camp in order to counteract the Indian National Congress which was chiefly under Hindu and Parsi leadership. The turbaned Faithfuls were encouraged to boast that they were a martial people, a manly heroic race while the subtle Hindus clamouring for Swaraj were only vakils and keranis, having brain power but no courage or inner nobility.
The Muslims, after 1905, continued to nurse their pride under official patronage, demanding ‘parity with the Hindus’, and ‘our communal quota’, ‘our special electorates’ —without qualifying for life’s struggle by hard toil in schools and factories or foreign study. Their artificially sheltered life, narrow and self-centered, spelt their doom, as soon as the British umbrella was withdrawn from over their heads.
Lord Curzon in his despatch, recommending the partition of Bengal (1904), frankly stated that this stroke would have the merit of saving the English from hearing only one political voice, which meant that when the Bengali Hindus would next demand political rights for all the Indian people, they would be outvoted by ‘loyal Muslims’ at Dacca and by the Beliaris in Patna. The Olympians of Downing Street nodded assent.
John Morley, once a prophet of radicialism, exulted in the official nursing of the Muslim League as a native opposition to the Indian National Congress…
When the Muslim League was set up on official props, there was exultation in the Viceregal Court at Simla…
In 1909, W. S. Blunt, one of the noblest British friends of the Muslims, ‘regretted that in India the motive [of thus favouring the Muslims] seems to have been the encouragement of Muhammadan loyalty as a counterpoise to the Hindu movement for self-government’.
Another arm of the same policy of splitting up the nation was the public exaltation of caste differences among the Hindus. [Until then, the British] to whom all blacks had been pariahs, now began to show a heart torn by anguish for the lot of the depressed caste Hindus. In Bombay and Madras, non-Brahmans were set up against Brahmans; in Bengal Scheduled Castes were listed and driven into a special ‘reservation’ or political ghetto of their own…
In the end these separatist tricks went the way that History shows such plans to have gone all over the world; but they left a lasting bitterness in Indian minds…
THUS A SITUATION WAS CREATED in which our British rulers considered India’s weakness as England’s gain. The inevitable consequence of such a public policy was to create in the Indian mind a conviction that England’s distress was India’s only opportunity…
If India’s distress was England’s opportunity, India’s glory could not be England’s glory. A Bengali Deputy Magistrate of some literary fame told Rabindranath Tagore that one day, when he was talking with the police officer of Jorasanko thana, on some private business, a beat constable came to the office door, saluted, and reported, ‘Tin lumber daghi Rabindurnath Thakur kal rat ko ghar paunchar (‘Suspect No. 3 Rabindranath Tagore arrived at his home last night’)…
Those who had the honour of listening to the intimate talk of Gokhale, Lord Sinha, and Surendranath Mallik, know that with all their deep admiration for the British character and gratitude for the benefits of British rule, they finally despaired of India’s political salvation ever coming from British hands. All people had lost their faith in British justice, and the two World Wars destroyed their faith in British efficiency and invincibility.
Belief in British honesty received its deathblow when the Munition Board scandal was hushed up by the Viceroy after World War I. People asked themselves, could Indians have done worse if they had been in power?
THE BRITISH SECRETARY OF STATE tried to strangle the Bombay cotton mills by laying on them a Countervailing Excise Duty… It is impossible to describe the harm which these duties did to the Indian people’s faith in British justice. What Manchester gained, the Empire lost. And Manchester’s gain proved illusory: in the end, patriotic Indians took the vow to wear homemade clothes and boycott British textiles; in twenty-five years this spirit spread to the masses.
And the new Indian capitalist class, a pure creation of British rule, was antagonized, and henceforth made an alliance with the politically active intelligentsia of the country; the Indian National Congress which was a charity-boy at birth, no longer suffered from, lack of funds.
In the evolution of British India, a stage had now arrived when this country could not be governed from Whitehall, and yet it would have been worse still to leave the entire destiny of India in the hands, of the British bureaucracy and the white mercantile community with their few Indian stooges. It is surprising how little the authorities in England kept themselves informed about India and the Indians.
Lord Curzon had sucked Maharajah Sir Madho Singh of Jaipur of several lakhs for his pet scheme, the Victoria Memorial, in Calcutta. And yet he, as a cabinet minister after he returned to England, wrote a personal letter to Sir Madho Singh by name, asking For another donation, when the Maharaja had been dead for two years!
Mr. Surendranath Mallik, when working in the India Office, London, as a councillor of the Secretary of State, was one day greeted by his chief, Lord Birkenhead, with the words, ‘How do you do, Maharajah?’ The fact is that Mr. Mallik had a colleague in the Council, the Maharajah of Burdwan. No greater contrast can be imagined than that between Mr. Mallik and Maharajah Bijayachand in size, features, and complexion; but to the master of India’s destiny one native was as good as another.
FINALLY, THE GREATEST MISCHIEF done by the long- wavering struggle for India’s independence against British conservatism is that the first generation of Indians into whose hands Free India has fallen have acquired a distorted mentality.
A class of professional politicians has risen to power, and are only held back from doing incalculable mischief by the few giants at the top. A false sense of values has been taught to the electorate: to have been held by the English in political detention is proclaimed as a qualification for a ministership; a coat without a collar is the symbol of true patriotism.
Patient constructive workers for the nation’s uplift are taunted with having made no sacrifice compared with the white-cap patriots. Patriotism of this type is sometimes cashed in to found bogus joint-stock banks. But these will all pass away, if only we are vouchsafed by a kind heaven, fifty years of peace and strong and wise hands at the helm of India’s government.
THE CLIMAX of Jadunath Sarkar’s brilliant assessment is also the most hard-hitting portion of the whole essay. The professional politicians that he warned about ultimately scored the victory and proved to be worse than the alien colonisers who guiltlessly oppressed us.
Likewise, the “heaven” of fifty years of peace that Sarkar craved for the country still eludes us.
The Dharma Dispatch is now available on Telegram! For original and insightful narratives on Indian Culture and History, subscribe to us on Telegram.
