The Discovery of India

by Jawaharlal Nehru

This Revolt strained British rule to the utmost and it was ultimately suppressed with Indian help. It brought out all the inherent weaknesses of the old regime, which was making its last despairing effort to drive out foreign rule.

But it can only be forgotten, or remembered in a detached impersonal way, when it becomes truly the past with nothing to connect it with the present. So long as the connecting links and reminders are present, and the spirit behind those events survives and shows itself, that memory also will endure and influence our people. Attempts to suppress that picture do not destroy it but drive it deeper in the mind. Only by dealing with it normally can its effect be lessened.

Imperialism and the domination of one people over another is bad, and so is racialism. But imperialism plus racialism can only lead to horror and ultimately to the degradation of all concerned with them.

The Revolt of 1857-58 was essentially a feudal rising, though there were some nationalistic elements in it. Yet, at the same time, it was due to the abstention or active help of the princes and other feudal chiefs that the British succeeded in crushing it.

Thus the British Government in India became, not only the biggest employer, but, for all practical purposes, the sole big employer (including railways), and a vast bureaucratic machine was built up, strictly managed and controlled at the top. This enormous patronage was exercised to strengthen the British hold on the country, to crush discordant and disagreeable elements and to promote rivalry and discord amongst various groups anxiously looking forward to employment in government service. It led to demoralization and conflict, and the government could play one group against the other.

Again we notice in India that inherent contradiction in British rule. Having brought about the political unification of the country and thus let loose new dynamic forces which thought not only in terms of that unity, but aimed at the freedom of India, the British Government tried to disrupt that very unity it had helped to create.

Hindu law was largely custom, and as custom changed the law also was applied in a different way. Indeed, there was no provision of Hindu law which could not be changed by custom.

The British replaced this elastic customary law by judicial decisions based on the old texts, and these decisions became precedents which had to be rigidly followed. That was, in theory, an advantage, as it produced greater uniformity and certainty. But, in the manner it was done, it resulted in the perpetuation of the ancient law unmodified by subsequent customs. Thus the old law which, in some particulars and in various places, had been changed by custom and was thus out of date, was petrified, and every tendency to change it in the well-known customary way was suppressed.

Despite British policy, powerful forces were at work changing India, and a new social consciousness was arising. The political unity of India, contact with the West, technological advances, and even the misfortune of a common subjection, led to new currents of thought, the slow development of industry, and the rise of a new movement for national freedom. The awakening of India was two-fold: she looked to the west and, at the same time, she looked at herself and her own past.

The people of Gujrat, Kathiawar, and Cutch were traders, manufacturers, merchants, and seafaring folk from ancient times. Many changes took place in India, but they carried on with their old business, adapting them to new conditions. They are now among the most prominent leaders in industry and commerce.

As poverty grew agricultural indebtedness also grew rapidly, and the money-lending establishments held mortgages on the land and eventually acquired much of it. Thus the moneylender became the landlord also.

‘Liberty of thought and action is the only condition in life, of growth and well-being. Where it does not exist, the man, the race, the nation must go.’

There cannot be any progress without the whole world following in the wake, and it is becoming every day clearer that the solution of any problem can never be attained on racial, or national, or narrow grounds. Every idea has to become broad till it covers the whole of this world, every aspiration must go on increasing till it has engulfed the whole of humanity, nay the whole of life, within its scope.

Vivekananda spoke of many things but the one constant refrain of his speech and writing was abhay—be fearless, be strong. For him man was no miserable sinner but a part of divinity; why should he be afraid of anything?

‘I would rather see everyone of you rank atheists than superstitious fools, for the atheist is alive, and you can make something of him.

It was Tagore’s immense service to India, as it has been Gandhi’s in a different plane, that he forced the people in some measure out of their narrow grooves of thought and made them think of broader issues affecting humanity. Tagore was the great humanist of India.

Tagore and Gandhi have undoubtedly been the two outstanding and dominating figures of India in this first half of the twentieth century. It is instructive to compare and contrast them. No two persons could be so different from one another in their make up or temperaments.

After the Mutiny the Indian Muslims had hesitated which way to turn. The British Government had deliberately repressed them to an even greater degree than it had repressed the Hindus, and this repression had especially affected those sections of the Muslims from which the new middle class, the bourgeoise, might have been drawn. They felt down and out and were intensely anti-British as well as conservative.

Sir Syed was an ardent reformer and he wanted to reconcile modern scientific thought with Islam. This was to be done, of course, not by attacking any basic belief, but by a rationalistic interpretation of scripture.

None the less many prominent Muslims joined the National Congress. British policy became definitely pro-Muslim, or rather in favour of those elements among the Muslims who were opposed to the national movement.

It is worth noting that during the post-Mutiny period all the leading men among Indian Muslims, including Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, were products of the old traditional education, although some of them added knowledge of English later and were influenced by new ideas. The new Western education had yet produced no notable figure among them.

In the early years of the twentieth century there were two trends among the Muslim intelligentsia: one, chiefly among the younger element, was towards nationalism, the other was a deviation from India’s past and even, to some extent, her present, and a greater interest in Islamic countries, especially Turkey, the seat of the Khilafat.

The feudal leadership had for the moment been swept away by the mass Khilafat movement, but that movement itself had no solid basis in social and economic conditions or in the needs of the masses. It had its centre elsewhere, and when the core itself was eliminated by the Ataturk the superstructure collapsed, leaving the Muslim masses bewildered and disinclined to any political action.

This, I imagine, was the background out of which, in recent years, arose the cry for a division of India. There were many reasons, many contributory causes, errors and mistakes on every side, and especially the deliberate separatist policy of the British Government. But behind all these was this psychological background, which itself was produced, apart from certain historical causes, by the delay in the development of a Muslim middle class in India.

There has been a difference of a generation or more in the development of the Hindu and Muslim middle classes, and that difference continues to show itself in many directions, political, economic, and other. It is this lag which produces a psychology of fear among the Muslims.

Pakistan, the proposal to divide India, however much it may appeal emotionally to some, is of course no solution for this backwardness, and it is much more likely to strengthen the hold of feudal elements for some time longer and delay the economic progress of the Muslims.

Greatly attached as I am to India, I have long felt that something more than national attachment is necessary for us in order to understand and solve even our own problems, and much more so those of the world as a whole.

There came into existence (much later) separate Muslim trade unions and students’ organizations and merchants’ chambers. Because the Muslims were backward in all these activities, these organizations were not real organic growths from below, but were artificially created from above, and their leadership was held by the old semi-feudal type of person. Thus, to some extent, the Muslim middle classes and even the masses were isolated from the currents of growth which were influencing the rest of India.

Separate electorates thus weakened the groups that were already weak or backward, they encouraged separatist tendencies and prevented the growth of national unity, they were the negation of democracy, they created new vested interests of the most reactionary kind, they lowered standards, and they diverted attention from the real economic problems of the country which were common to all.

World War I came. Politics were at a low ebb, chiefly because of the split in the Congress between the two sections, the so-called extremists and the moderates, and because of war-time restrictions and regulations. Yet one tendency was marked: the rising middle class among the Muslims was growing more nationally minded and was pushing the Muslim League towards the Congress. They even joined hands.

A bitter sense of humiliation and a passionate anger filled our people. All the unending talk of constitutional reform and Indianization of the services was a mockery and an insult when the manhood of our country was being crushed and the inexorable and continuous process of exploitation was deepening our poverty and sapping our vitality. We had become a derelict nation.

The peasant starved, yet centuries of an unequal struggle against his environment had taught him to endure, and even in poverty and starvation he had a certain calm dignity, a feeling of submission to an all-powerful fate.

Incompletely developed and frustrated, they did not know where to look, for neither the old nor the new offered them any hope. There was no adjustment to social purpose, no satisfaction of doing something worthwhile, even though suffering came in its train. Custom-ridden, they were born old, yet they were without the old culture. Modern thought attracted them, but they lacked its inner content, the modern social and scientific consciousness. Some tried to cling tenaciously to the dead forms of the past, seeking relief from present misery in them. But there could be no relief there, for, as Tagore has said, we must not nourish in our being what is dead, for the dead is death-dealing.

Not for a few years of excitement and agony and suspense, but for long generations our people had offered their ‘blood and toil, tears and sweat’. And this process had eaten its way deep into the body and soul of India, poisoning every aspect of our corporate life, like that fell disease which consumes the tissues of the lungs and kill slowly but inevitably.

And then Gandhi came. He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths; like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes; like a whirlwind that upset many things, but most of all the working of people’s minds.

The greatest gift for an individual or a nation, so we had been told in our ancient books, was abhay (fearlessness), not merely bodily courage but the absence of fear from the mind.

And yet fear builds its phantoms which are more fearsome than reality itself, and reality, when calmly analysed and its consequences willingly accepted, loses much of its terror.

The Indian people did not become much more truthful than they were, nor did they change their essential nature overnight; nevertheless a sea-change was visible as the need for falsehood and furtive behaviour lessened. It was a psychological change, almost as if some expert in psycho-analytical methods had probed deep into the patient’s past, found out the origins of his complexes, exposed them to his view, and thus rid him of that burden.

Different persons may and do take different views of truth, and each individual is powerfully influenced by his own background, training, and impulses.

According to this definition I do not know of any person who holds to the truth as Gandhi does. That is a dangerous quality in a politician, for he speaks out his mind and even lets the public see its changing phases.

A new technique of action was evolved which, though perfectly peaceful, yet implied non-submission to what was considered wrong and, as a consequence, a willing acceptance of the pain and suffering involved in this.

Gandhi was an odd kind of pacifist, for he was an activist full of dynamic energy. There was no submission in him to fate or anything that he considered evil; he was full of resistance, though this was peaceful and courteous.

A very few fell away and among them was Mr M.A. Jinnah. He left the Congress not because of any difference of opinion on the Hindu-Muslim question but because he could not adapt himself to the new and more advanced ideology, and even more so because he disliked the crowds of id-dressed people, talking in Hindustani, who idled the Congress.

Gandhi held strong views on economic, social, and other matters. He did not try to impose all of these on the Congress, though he continued to develop his ideas, and sometimes in the process varied them, through his writings.

Gandhi was essentially a man of religion, a Hindu to the inner-most depths of his being, and yet his conception of religion had nothing to do with any dogma or custom or ritual.3 It was basically concerned with his firm belief in the moral law, which he cads the law of truth or love.

decline to be a slave,’ he has said, ‘to precedents or practice I cannot understand or defend on a moral basis.’

It is not surprising that this astonishingly vital man, full of self-confidence and an unusual kind of power, standing for equality and freedom for each individual, but measuring all this in terms of the poorest, fascinated the masses of India and attracted them like a magnet. He seemed to them to link up the past with the future and to make the dismal present appear just as a stepping-stone to that future of life and hope.

In law there was nothing to prevent the Governor and the Viceroy from acting as they liked, even in active opposition to the ministry and the legislature; the only real check was fear of conflict.

Politically and constitutionally, the new Act and the establishment of Congress governments in the provinces made no vital difference to the British structure of government. Real power remained where it had so long been. But the psychological change was enormous and an electric current seemed to run through the countryside.

Thus the new provincial governments had, apart from the normal work of administration, to face a mountain of work, the result of years of neglect, and on every side urgent problems faced them. They had to change a police-state into a socially guided state—never an easy job but made much more difficult by the limitation on their power, the poverty of the people, and the divergence of outlook between these provincial governments and the central authority, which was completely autocratic and authoritarian, under the Viceroy.