Gandhi's India
GANDHI'S INDIA THE British have bundled Gandhi off to jail. Soldiers have brushed with angry crowds in various cities, and the soldier has once more returned to his traditional post in the...
...When Gandhi ordered the death of a suffering animal, he was branded a heretic by thousands of outraged Hindus...
...India's problem is essentially not one of overpopulation but of industrial mismanagement...
...The description of rural misery given us particularly by well-informed French observers are harrowing —poverty, dirt, disease, children dying in childbirth, a race of men few of whom live longer than forty years...
...The picture is more colorful than this...
...It would have liked to present an offer of increased autonomy before trouble and bloodshed had angered hundreds of thousands...
...It is a cradle of religions, but the creeds which have been nursed in it have no power of compatibility...
...The worker toils for very little in a factory because the wages he would earn in the rice fields would be still lower...
...The obstacles are not merely the climate, the popular traditions or the curious perversions of fakirism which have settled everywhere like sand upon Buddhistic or Brahministic tenets...
...A population of 320,000,000 people with such a background will hardly be made to exist on weaving cloth by hand...
...To set about weaving cloth by hand would, if widely followed, lead only to the certain discovery that cloth can be woven more easily and cheaply with machines...
...Gandhi's principles, which he and his followers believe will restore India to its ancient glory, are not of this earth...
...Bolshevism has sent (and paid) its agents...
...But (for we shall disregard all the unfortunate limitations imposed by the caste system and the money lenders) it is impossible to create a flourishing industrial civilization in a country not only predominantly rural but predominantly starved on bad farms...
...Doubtless the representatives of His Majesty's government are not innocent, and some of them have indubitably been scoundrels...
...It cannot be borne in mind too frequently that industry in India is largely controlled by natives and that, therefore, a general accusation of British exploitation is unfair...
...So far as one is able to judge, his ideas on the subject of government are inchoate and contradictory...
...The romantically minded surveyors of the Orient offer a picture of a self-governing India which has no little sentimental appeal, but which remains as unadorned by political or economic facts as an Iowa cornfield is with diamonds...
...The Indian people, reared in a philosophy of abnegation, now sit night after night under the spell of movie films which exude affection for luxury and indulgence...
...On behalf of the British it may be said that they would probably be glad to give India a "dominion status" with as much self-government as Canada now enjoys—if such a thing were possible...
...There are more cattle in the country than in any other similar area in the world...
...This revelation has inevitable consequences which imperialistic endeavor must accept...
...It simply is not...
...The major languages are decidedly not dialects (as is so commonly asserted) but radically separate tongues which reveal no signs of merging...
...Matters had come to such a pass that authority, if it would conserve its prestige, could hardly bend back further...
...And yet this vast assemblage of beasts costs—not produces—more than a pound sterling a year, according to the Royal Commission of Agriculture in India...
...Nevertheless one cannot say that such antagonism bodes any good to mankind...
...Soldiers have brushed with angry crowds in various cities, and the soldier has once more returned to his traditional post in the empire...
...This is not a mere question of Indian independence against British oppression, or of Gandhi's idealism versus progressive western materialism, or of slovenly "Mother India" as opposed to sanitation and feather-beds...
...Aside from Christianity, Hinduism and Mohammedanism, there are hundreds of varieties of appalling superstitions and tribal faiths...
...It should not be forgotten that the effort of Europe to conserve and apply that "reason" which alone guarantees social justice and wellbeing was very long and arduous...
...But though many missionaries are hopeful and though Saint Ephrem predicted that "the light would some time break over dark India," it is difficult to feel that the hour of great progress has as yet struck...
...Nevertheless the refashioning will not be done in a day...
...And here Gandhi himself would seem to be the most pertinent illustration...
...Who shall say that the mission of the British in the East has ended...
...For reasons some of which are religious, agriculture is simply a matter of scratching a soil left barren by centuries of incompetent farming...
...Indian intellectuals absorb from the western world discredited ideas of mechanistic evolution and the revolutionary fantasies of Marx...
...This same respect is extended to the field mice and the jackals, so that the major portion of the wheat harvests goes to the animal kingdom...
...Even in this old and meditative country, therefore, the specific conflicts of modern culture have been added to those disruptive contrasts which are native to the land...
...and the country's wealth in gold avails it little because that gold cannot be turned into productive machinery...
...In fairness to both sides, it will not do to resolve the situation into a few easy contrasts...
...There is no longer any hope of bringing Indian aspirations into line with British plans, unless some masterful statesman can effect far-reaching modifications of both...
...An oriental world which stretches from Ceylon to the Himalayas is a mystery not so much because it is different from the West as because it does not understand itself...
...And precisely it is absolutely necessary before there can be any progress in Bombay and Karachi...
...He seeks to refashion Indian humanity and so—quite in accordance with Our Lord's maxim that he who has first sought the kingdom of God will eventually find the other things also—to prepare the way for a solution of social difficulties...
...Under such conditions, anything like prophecy is manifestly ridiculous...
...Finally, the British have created in all the larger cities little oases of urban prosperity with which the native quarters contrast strangely...
...Such recognition of common bonds as exists has been 66 THE COMMONWEAL May 21, 1930 created by the presence of the British...
...Even the services rendered to the Orient by Europe—law and medicine, pastoral charity and business development—all serve to reveal, with unconscious irony, essential differences impossible to eradicate...
...To think of this conglomeration of peoples and tongues, of classes and creeds, as merging in any real unity is like imagining that the Tower of Babel might have decided to learn Esperanto...
...Europe itself, which preaches Christianity, talks to India in many tongues...
...But Gandhi is really a man actuated by a passion for sanctity...
...These events are not to the government's taste...
...A hundred years of imperialism has taught the Indian that he is, at least, different from the invader...
...It is obvious that British authority has been challenged in an entirely different spirit from that which governed earlier forms of opposition...
...The cow is sacred: but its milk is thin, its pedigree unfathomably bad, its serviceableness as a beast of burden next to nil...
...What is India ? If one may credit the reports of observers, a continent reposing upon deeply rooted cultural antagonisms...
...His famous community of Sabarmati, as described by those who have seen it, is only a kind of Brook Farm or Ruskinian guild...
...It is upon this hinge that the whole social problem of India seems to turn...
...So many factors contribute to making this plain...
...This hard work cannot be dispensed with in India through appeals to propaganda...
...For all practical purposes, it is almost as useless as the ornaments on the temples of Delhi...
...Caste feeling sets up insurmountable barriers...
...But the current of dissatisfaction had lashed against the foundations of trade...
...Such expedients as rotation of crops are likewise unknown in great sections of the country...
...Accordingly the development of Christianity in India would, from a purely natural point of view, be a very real advantage...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 3
