A Nation in Making/Chapter 10

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10

The Indian National Congress

In December, 1885, we again held a National Conference, the second of its kind, to the first of which I have referred as having been held in 1883. It was like its predecessor a conference of all-India held upon the same lines. But in the meantime the ideal had made headway. This time the Conference was convened by the three leading Associations of Calcutta - the British Indian, representing the landed interest, the Indian, the Association of the middle classes, and the Central Mohamedan Association, of which Mr. (now the Rt. Hon. Mr.) Ameer Ali was Secretary.

The Conference met for three days, on December 25, 26 and 27, 1885. Not only was Bengal represented, but delegates attended from several towns in Northern India such as Meerut, Benares and Allahabad. Bombay was represented by the Hon. Mr. Vishnarain Mandlik, the Indian member for that presidency in the Imperial Legislative Council. The Conference voted the urgency of the reform of the Legislative Councils, and appointed a committee to consider what steps should be taken to bring about its satisfactory settlement.

While we were having our National Conference in Calcutta, the Indian National Congress, conceived on the same lines and having the same programme, was holding its first sittings at Bombay. The movements were simultaneous; the preliminary arrangements were made independently, neither party knowing what the other was doing until on the eve of the sittings of the Conference and of the Congress. Mr. W. C. Bonnerjea, who presided over the Bombay Congress, invited me to attend it. I told him that it was too late to suspend the Conference, and that as I had a large share in its organization it would not be possible for me to leave Calcutta and attend the Bombay Congress. This and the one at Karachi are the only sittings of the Indian National Congress that I missed over the long period extending from 1885 to 1917, when, for reasons set forth later on, the Moderate Party definitely seceded from the Congress.

​It appears that while we were organizing our National Conference at Calcutta, some of our friends headed by the late Mr. Allen Hume had met at Madras for a similar purpose. Mr. Kashinath Trembuck Telang wrote to me from Bombay requesting me to send him some notes about the first National Conference held in 1883. The two Conferences met about the same time, discussed similar views and voiced the same grievances and aspirations. The one that met in Calcutta was called the 'National Conference' and the other, which assembled at Bombay, the 'Indian National Congress'. Henceforth those who worked with us joined the Congress and heartily co-operated with it.

We in Bengal started another movement upon lines parallel to those of the Congress, but less comprehensive in its scope, and dealing only with the affairs of the province. We held in 1888 the first Provincial Conference for Bengal. The National Congress, being a convention of India, could not take up for discussion questions affecting any particular province, unless such questions had assumed the proportions of a national problem. But there were provincial considerations of the utmost importance upon which it was necessary for public opinion to make definite pronouncements. Problems of sanitation, education and even local self-government differed in the different provinces, and it was for the representatives of the province in conference assembled to discuss and to deal with them. Such were the reasons that determined the holding of the first provincial conference in Bengal.

The other provinces have followed the example of Bengal. Provincial conferences are now a recognized institution and are held in almost every part of India. They have indeed been followed by still further developments, and district conferences are held in some parts of India. They are specially popular in the Madras Presidency.

In Bengal, the provincial conferences have attained enormous proportions; on occasions their numerical strength has exceeded that of the Congress. Sometimes they are followed by social conferences enlivened by animated debates on the burning social questions of the day. In Bengal, social considerations are no longer dead. They have passed the purely academic stage and are beginning to awaken a living interest among the educated community. I have more than once presided at these provincial social conferences and can bear witness to the genuine interest that the discussions evoked. The two questions of absorbing interest ​are the re-marriage of Hindu widows and the raising of the marriageable age of Hindu girls. With regard to the latter there is a practical unanimity of opinion; dissentient voices are seldom if ever heard at the conferences.

Far otherwise, however, is the case with the question of the re-marriage of Hindu widows. In this connexion, I am afraid, public opinion has not advanced to the stage that is necessary or desirable. A future Vidyasagar is needed to sound the death- knell of a usage that has darkened many a Hindu home and has blasted the life of many a Hindu widow. I well remember an animated discussion that took place at the Comilla Social Conference in 1914, when after a heated debate a division was taken and it was found that in a house of more than three thousand people there were only about half a dozen dissentients. Most of those who voted for the reform would not, I am afraid, have the courage to carry out the resolution that they supported. Between profession and practice there is still a wide gulf; but opinion is steadily veering round to the right standpoint; and when the moral transformation has taken place it will not be long before Hindu society abolishes the system of compulsory widowhood. The educated community are beginning to realize that the custom is one that is abjured by the rest of the civilized world, and perpetrates a monstrous injustice upon the weaker sex. We may not indeed live to see the change, but the signs and portents all point to its near approach, and, when a man of the social position and avowed orthodoxy of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjea championed the cause by having his own daughter re-married, we may be sure that we are within measurable distance of the consummation of this great reform.

I had occasion once or twice to advertise in the Bengalee newspaper for bridegrooms for the re-marriage of Brahmin widows; and the response that I received was surprising. I showed the replies to some of my orthodox friends, and they were even more amazed than myself. In one case I received more than 150 applications, and among them were some from pundits with titles that denoted their orthodox character. Great, silent forces are indeed working in the bosom of society, to us invisible and perhaps unperceived. They will work out their destined end in their own good time. Nabadwipa and Bhatpara and Bajrajogini may thunder forth their anathemas and quote all the Shastric texts of which they may have a plentiful supply in their armoury; but the march ​of progress will not be arrested; and the time will come when perhaps our descendants will wonder what possessed their revered ancestors to perpetuate a custom so cruel and unjust to the womanhood of their race. The future is closed to us; but the past is an open book, and the past tells us that in the great seat of orthodoxy, while Raghunandan was unfolding his marvellous system of Hindu Law and jurisprudence, there rose almost contempo- raneously with him the greatest reformer that Bengal, or India, has ever produced, the prophet of Love (Bhakti), Lord Chaitanya, who would have no distinction between man and man, or between man and woman, who treated the Brahmin, the Chandal and the Moslem alike, and enfranchised our women from the bonds of enforced widowhood. Who knows that in the years to come, in the whirligig of time, there may not arise a second Chaitanya, the Saviour of the Hindu widow, in those great centres of Sanskrit learning where the academic air stirs contemplation and carries the mind forward to brighter visions of future happiness?

I fear I have been somewhat anticipating coming events, but they were so linked with what I was describing that the transition from the present to the future was natural. In the year 1886, the Indian National Congress met for the first time in Calcutta, and great was the popular enthusiasm. All parties combined to welcome the delegates who came from different parts of India. We of the Indian Association and belonging to the middle class were all Congressmen; but what was remarkable was that the British Indian Association, representing the landed interest, and what I may call the conservative conscience of the community, threw themselves heart and soul into the matter. Such enthusiasm this venerable body had never before, and have never since, displayed for the Congress cause. The illustrious Raja Rajendralal Mitter, more a scholar than a politician, was elected Chairman of the Reception Committee, and Babu Joy Kissen Mookerjee, the Nestor of the Bengal zemindars, then in his seventy-ninth year, proposed the election of Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji as President of the Congress. It was altogether a Congress of old men, and it brought out in striking relief the great fact that young and old, the middle class as well as the landed aristocracy, indeed all sections of the Indian community, were united on the Congress platform.

Raja Rajendralal Mitter, Kristo Das Pal, Raja Degumbar Mitter, and Maharaja Jotindra Mohon Tagore formed what I may call the political group of the British Indian Association. Kristo Das Pal ​was their leader; but Rajendralal Mitter was the literary genius of the group. Degumbar Mitter and Kristo Das Pal were now dead, and the leadership of the political wing devolved upon Raja Rajendralal. Young as I was, I enjoyed the confidence and even the friendship of every member of this brilliant coterie. I knew them well and knew them in all their strength and perhaps in all their weakness. Raja Rajendralal Mitter was a good speaker and an effective writer. He was pre-eminently a scholar and a literary man, but he had likewise a great grasp of public questions and was undoubtedly one of the foremost public men of his generation. I cften heard him speak. His style was simple, conversational, with a touch of humour in it. In his later life, he was somewhat hard of hearing. In the debates at the Corporation meetings, he used to sit next to Kristo Das Pal, who supplied him with brief notes of the speeches, and thus enabled him to take part in the discussions. To the last he retained his interest in public affairs and continued to enjoy the esteem and regard of the community. The practice of throwing overboard cur veterans, of calling them men of yesterday, had not yet begun. The traditional veneration for the services of a past generation still had a firm hold on the public mind.

At the Calcutta Congress, and in all future Congresses until the bcon was obtained, I moved the Resolution on the Reform and Enlargement of the Councils. To me it was a topic of absorbing interest. I could hardly think of anything else. Call it weakness, or call it strength, call it by what name you please (and I trust I shall be excused for this self-revelation) I have through life been under the periodical domination of a single overmastering ideal. It was the Civil Service question, or Local Self-government, or the expansion of the Councils, or Swadeshi, with which was linked up the modification of the Partition, that filled the whole of my mental horizon, fired my enthusiasm, and absorbed my soul. For the time being I lived in my ideal. In all other spheres, my movements were more or less mechanical. I persuaded myself that it was the one thing to be achieved, priceless above all others, and I had no diffi- culty in persuading others. It took a little time for me to warm up. But when the process was accomplished I was proof against all dissuasion, I lived in a world of my own, an atmosphere of my creation, impervious to external influences. So when, during the anti-Partition controversy, it was again and again dinned into the ears of the people of Bengal that the Partition was a settled fact and could not be unsettled, and when all appearances pointed to ​the same conclusion, I remained obdurate. I had no ears to hear, no eyes to see, what all others thought was the plainest truth. I saw with the eye of faith what seemed impossible to men of little faith.

I will now pass on from this self-introspection to the events of the year 1887, in which I had my part and share. The year was the year of the Queen's Jubilee and it was celebrated in Calcutta, which was then the Imperial capital, with befitting splendour and éclat. To these ceremonies I have referred in a preceding part of these reminiscences. We, who were working by slow and steady stages towards the evolution of self-government, took the fullest advantage of these celebrations to give an impetus to the move- ment, and we claim that we did not work in vain. For we obtained from the Viceroy (Lord Dufferin) a declaration (the full text of which I have given elsewhere) in favour of the reform and expansion of the Legislative Councils.

The Congress this year was held in Madras. We chartered a steamer from the British India Steam Navigation Company, and a large number of delegates from Calcutta proceeded to Madras. Among them were Sir Rash Behari Ghose and Raja Kissori Lal Gossain, who afterwards became the first member of the Executive Council of Bengal. The sea-trip was thoroughly enjoyed by us. Pleasure and business were combined; and the meeting of so many of us for several days talking of nothing else but the Congress, and the future of the Congress, and of the country, served to impart an added impetus to the infant movement. The representatives of the generation assembled on board that steamer, the pilgrim fathers bent upon an errand fraught with great potentialities, have nearly all passed away, but their spirit endures. Though the first flush of enthusiasm has died out (and to many it may seem that the Congress is now sailing over uncharted seas) the public conviction remains unabated, that the Congress must continue its work until India has achieved her destiny as a self-governing community.

Arrived at Madras, we were treated with a cordiality the memory of which still lingers and which has become the accepted tradition of all Reception Committees of the Congress. Day and night, the Congress Volunteers, young men of respectable families, following respectable callings, were in attendance, rejoicing in their self- imposed task. We formed friendships that have endured through life. Viraraghava Chariar, G. Subramanya Iyer, Ranga Naidu, Ananda Charlu, and others, almost too numerous to be named, became as dear to us as friends in Bengal. The social side of the ​Congress is not by any means the least attractive feature of the movement. A common platform is provided, where the leaders of Indian opinion meet and by the mutual interchange of views help to remove misunderstanding and promote friendly feeling.

Among the friendships that I formed at Madras on this occasion was one to which I think I must make a special reference. I made the acquaintance of the late Maharaja of Vizianagram, 'Prince Charming', as he was rightly called by Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, then Governor of Madras.

The incidents of our first meeting are as vivid now as if they had taken place yesterday. I was coming out of the pavilion, after I had spoken on the reform of the Legislative Councils, when he approached me and warmly shook me by the hand. We exchanged a few words of mutual compliment, and then was formed the begin- ning of a friendship that ended only with his premature death in 1897. He was a frequent visitor to Calcutta, where I had ample opportunities of meeting him; and I will say this of him, that I have hardly ever come across a warmer or more generous-hearted man. He was not only the pattern of courtesy, which all our princes are, more or less, but he was something more. His ample resources were always responsive to the impulses of his generous nature. The Rajas of Bhukoylas and he were hereditary friends. They were in pecuniary difficulties. He afforded them substantial monetary assistance. The same helping hand was stretched out to an English firm. Race, colour or creed was no barrier to the play of his generous affections, and he was the liberal patron of public movements and of public institutions, whether in Madras, in Bengal or the United Provinces. I approached him with a request for a subscription in aid of the building fund of the Indian Association. He wanted to know from me how much money was required and how much I had already secured. I put the figure at the modest sum of twenty thousand rupees; and I said I had obtained promises of five thousand rupees, among the donors being the Maharani Swarnamoyee, who had subscribed two thousand rupees. He said to me, with that warmth so characteristic of him, 'Suren Babu, what is the good of your going to this man and that man, and wasting your time, which might be otherwise usefully spent? I will pay you the balance of fifteen thousand rupees.' His word was his bond; and with this princely gift we secured for the Indian Association a name and a habitation. We asked permission to hang his oil-painting in the hall of the Association. He sent us a small portrait.

​One more incident will illustrate the generous impulses of the man. On the occasion of the visit of Prince Albert Victor to Calcutta in 1889, a great controversy took place as to how the money that had been raised should be spent. There was a strong party, and they represented the wealth of the city, who wanted to confine the demonstrations mainly to tamashas and entertainments. We were in favour of a permanent memorial in the form of a leper asylum in commemoration of the visit. I moved an amendment at the Town Hall meeting embodying this view. The amendment was carried, to the great disgust and indignation of the official party and their friends. A Maharaja, as he was leaving the meeting, happened to meet me, and exclaimed, 'Lo and behold! here is your work. You have wrecked. the meeting and insulted the Lieutenant- Governor.' The Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Stewart Bayley, was evidently not of that view, nor felt himself insulted; for he encouraged the idea of a permanent memorial in honour of the Royal Visit. However that may be, I was soon made to feel the weight of official displeasure. A deputation was to wait upon Prince Albert Victor in connexion with the permanent memorial. My name was submitted as a member of the deputation, but it was eliminated by the officials who had the manipulation of the arrangements. Further, I learnt that my name had been sent up to the Government of India for nomination as a member of the Senate of the Calcutta University. Then came the incident of the Albert Victor Memorial meeting; and my name was omitted from the list.

The vote in favour of the permanent memorial at a meeting presided over by the Lieutenant-Governor of the province, organized under official auspices, and backed by the authority of the European Chamber of Commerce, was a triumph of middle class public opinion too marked to be mistaken. Those who had a leading part in this vote incurred the full measure of official and semi-official displeasure. But the vote was there, and the question was, where was the money for the permanent memorial to come from? Those who had money to spare would not subscribe a pice. The Maharaja of Vizianagram came to our rescue. He was the first to offer ten thousand rupees for a permanent memorial. He wrote a letter to me offering this sum, almost immediately after the meeting was over. We raised Rs. 25,000 in all, and we made it over to the Leper Asylum, this being named after Prince Albert Victor. I was made a member of the governing body; and, when I retired several years later, I nominated Babu Bhupendra Nath Basu ​as my successor. I had a principal hand in selecting the present site of the Leper Asylum.

Though the Maharaja and myself were great personal friends, in politics we did not always worship in the same temple. Sometimes we agreed to differ, and on one particular occasion the difference was acute. The Maharaja and Sir Charles Elliott, late Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal, were great friends. Sir Charles Elliott was about to retire, and the Maharaja proposed to raise a public memorial in his honour. He wanted me to be associated with it, and, somewhat diplomatically (for there was considerable shrewd- ness and sagacity behind his frank and cordial manner) suggested to me that one of the purposes to which the memorial fund would be applied would be the endowment of a professorship in the Ripon College. Notwithstanding this somewhat seductive allurement, I flatly declined to be associated with the movement. I said, 'Maharaja, Sir Charles Elliott has wrecked his reputation by the Jury Notification. The public cannot honour such a ruler. To join such a movement would be for me to commit political suicide.' For me the matter ended there. I heard no more about it. But this difference did not in the smallest degree interrupt the cordiality of our relations or chill the warmth of our friendship.

The Madras session of the Congress of 1887 deserves to be recalled to mind for an animated discussion about the Arms Act, which is not wholly without a bearing upon that question as it now stands. A resolution was moved that the Arms Act be repealed. The Arms Act and the Vernacular Press Act were twin measures that were passed by Lord Lytton's Government. They were part and parcel of that policy of mistrust which was so conspicuously in evidence during Lord Lytton's administration, and which his great successor, Lord Ripon, did so much to undo. As I have already observed, Mr. Gladstone in his Midlothian campaign vigor- ously denounced both these measures. When he came into power as the result of the general election, the Vernacular Press Act was repealed, but the Arms Act was allowed to remain a part of the law of the land. It was always a source of irritation. There was always a sore feeling in connexion with the Act, which found repeated expression in the resolutions of the Indian National Congress. At the Madras Congress, an amendment was moved by the late Dr. Trailakyanath Mitter, an eminent lawyer, who, if he had not been cut off by an early death, would possibly have been a Judge of the Calcutta High Court. The amendment did not seek ​the repeal of the Act, but urged its more liberal administration, recommending that all persons who were certified by local and municipal authorities should be authorized to carry arms. A heated discussion took place, in which I took part. I opposed the amendment. The original proposition was carried, subject to the modification that a person or a class might be debarred from the right of carrying arms by Government for reasons to be recorded in writing. The attitude of the Congress with regard to the Arms Act has undergone a modification. The Congress no longer calls for the absolute repeal of the Act, but a modification of it so that all racial disabilities should disappear. Lord Chelmsford, when Viceroy, recognized this principle, and it has in substance been given effect to.

The Congress of 1887, which assembled in Madras, was the third of its kind. The constitution of the Congress was yet in the making. Conventions and rules of procedure were being developed as the result of experience. In this formative period, a question of great difficulty and delicacy was started. Raja Sashi Sekhareswar Roy of Tahirpore in Bengal gave notice of a resolution urging the prohibition of cow-slaughter. At any time, in any circumstances, a resolution of this kind in a mixed gathering of Hindus and Moha- medans would have been inopportune. It was especially so then. The Mohamedan community, under the leadership of Sir Syed Ahmed, had held aloof from the Congress. They were working under the auspices of the Patriotic Association in direct opposition to the national movement. Our critics regarded the National Congress as a Hindu Congress, and the opposition papers described it as such. We were straining every nerve to secure the co-operation of our Mohamedan fellow-countrymen in this great national work. We sometimes paid the fares of Mohamedan delegates and offered them other facilities.

The resolution therefore served to add to the difficulties of our position. What was to be done? We found a solution that was fair to all interests, was accepted by all parties, and has since been the recognized convention of the Congress. We decided that if any resolution affecting a particular class or community was objected to by the delegates representing that community, even if they were in a minority, it should not be considered by the Congress. The only other case in which I remember this rule being enforced was in relation to the Punjab Land Alienation Act, which was raised at a meeting of the Congress held at Lahore.

​I have a distinct recollection of the Congress of 1888, the first Indian National Congress held at Allahabad. Those were the early days of the Congress; and the interest that the novel demonstration excited in a place that had never witnessed anything like it was great. It was stimulated by certain incidents. Nothing is so helpful to an infant cause seething with enthusiasm as opposition. Sir Auckland Colvin, who in 1884, on the eve of Lord Ripon's depar- ture for England, had recognized the birth of a new life in India, now fiercely assailed the Congress, which was typical of that life. He was a pupil of Lord Dufferin. Lord Dufferin had, just before he vacated the Viceroyalty, denounced the Congress and its pro- gramme, and referred to the educated community as a 'microscopic minority'. Indian officialdom took its cue from him. Mr. Hume's stirring pamphlets appealing to educated India to rally round the Congress provoked the ire of the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces, who not only wielded his pen in a wordy controversy, but threw many difficulties in the way of the holding of the session of the Congress at Allahabad. Pundit Ajodhyanath, the leader of the Congress movement in the United Provinces, and Chairman of the Reception Committee, was, however, a host in himself. A brilliant lawyer, a warm-hearted patriot, a great organizer, he overcame all difficulties, and the session of the Congress at Allahabad in 1888 was in one sense the triumph of popular opinion over the solid opposition of the bureaucracy.

Raja Shiva Prosad of Benares, the trusted friend of the officials, entered the Congress pandal as a delegate. That he should have joined the Congress was a marvel. But it was a diplomatic move. His object was soon disclosed in the course of the speech that he delivered. He came not indeed to bless, but to curse, and he received the retort courteous from Mr. Eardley Norton in a speech of withering scorn and indignation.

Mr. George Yule was the 'President of the Allahabad Congress. He was the first non-Indian President. He was a Calcutta merchant, the head of the great firm of Andrew Yule & Co. I had hardly come across a Calcutta merchant with broader and more liberal views or with more genuine sympathy for Indian aspirations. He was a hard-headed Scotchman who saw straight into the heart of things, and never hesitated to express himself with the bluntness in which a Scotchman never fails, if he wants to show it. Through- out, he remained a staunch friend of the Congress cause, to which he rendered valuable service by helping the Congress Deputation ​that visited England in 1890. After his retirement he became a member of the British Committee, the Congress organization in London, and I well remember his active interest in the work of the Committee. His premature death was mourned by all friends of the Congress as a heavy loss to our propagandism in England.

The year 1889 was a memorable year in the history of the Congress movement. It was the year of Mr. Bradlaugh's visit to India, which imparted a new impetus to the Congress cause. Next year, Mr. Bradlaugh introduced in the House of Commons his Bill for the reform and the expansion of the Legislative Councils. While at Bombay he made a point of consulting the more prominent Indian leaders, and the Bill embodied the views of the educated community. I had a bit of work to do in this Congress apart from the Resolution which I had to move. To me was entrusted the task of appealing for funds. I made the appeal. The effect was striking. A wave of enthusiasm passed over the vast gathering that was assembled; and in an hour's time a sum of Rs. 64,000 was subscribed; and more than Rs. 20,000 was paid on the spot. The incident is unique in the annals of any public movement. There were ladies present at the meeting who gave away their watches, and even their jewellery. The memory of that day will always remain one of the most grateful reminiscences of my public life. On two other occasions I made similar appeals, one in 1892 at Allahabad, and again in 1909 at Lahore, on the last occasion for funds for British Indians in South Africa. But nowhere was the appeal more generously responded to than at Bombay. Mr. Bradlaugh was a witness to the scene, and the impression that he then formed must have been no small incentive to his disinterested labours for the political advancement of a people so full of real patriotism.