A Nation in Making/Chapter 9

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9

Political Activities, 1883-1885

On my release from prison, and after my enforced leisure, which, as I have already observed, I greatly enjoyed, owing to the complete rest it gave me, there lay before me heavy public work. I took up the movement for the creation of a National Fund. A great meeting was held on July 17, 1883, attended by over ten thousand people, at which it was resolved to raise a national fund to secure the political advancement of the country by means of constitutional agitation in India and in England. The Contempt Case and the growing movement for Indian unity and solidarity had opened wide our vision, and we invited the other provinces to co-operate with us. The Civil Service agitation had disclosed the essential unity of Indian aims and aspirations, the Contempt Case had accentuated the feeling, and we now began to look beyond our own province, and to seek for strength and invigoration by the moral support and active co-operation of united India. The moral transformation which was to usher in the Congress movement had thus already its birth in the bosom of the Indian National Conference which met in Calcutta, and to which representatives from all parts of India were invited.

The Ilbert Bill controversy helped to intensify the growing feeling of unity among the Indian people. The Anglo-Indian community had formed their Defence Association with its branches in different parts of the country. They had raised over a lakh and fifty thousand rupees to protect what they conceived to be their interests, and to assert their special privileges. Their organization and their resources had secured success to their cause. The educated community all over India watched the struggle with interest. There was the Ilbert Bill agitation with all its developments taking place before their eyes. They could not remain insensible to the lesson that it taught, of combination and organization; a lesson which in this case was enforced amid conditions that left a rankling sense of humiliation in the mind of educated India. It was, however, fruitful of results. It strengthened the forces that ​were speeding up the birth of the Congress movement; and, as I have observed, before the year was out the first National Conference was held in Calcutta. In its organization I had no inconsiderable share—quorum pars magna fui. It was the reply of educated India to the Ilbert Bill agitation, a resonant blast on their golden trumpet. The Conference met for three days, from December 28 to 30.

The questions that even now substantially form the chief planks in the Congress platform were taken up for discussion. They were Representative Councils, or Self-government, Education, general and technical, the separation of Judicial from Executive functions in the administration of Criminal Justice, and, lastly, the wider employment of our countrymen in the public service. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, the great friend of Oriental nations, was then touring through India. He was present at the sittings of the Conference, and he gives the following account of his impressions in his India under Ripon:

In 1884, I undertook another tour through Upper India. My duties in the college gave me no leisure except during the summer, when we had our long vacation. I left Calcutta about the middle of May. The excessive heat in Northern India and the Punjab ​greatly added to the discomforts of the railway journey. I was accompanied by Babu Govind Churn Das, a dear friend now, alas! dead, who was practising as a pleader in the High Court and was also associated with the teaching staff in the Ripon Collegiate School.

We visited Lahore, Amritsar, Multan, Rawalpindi, Ambala, Delhi, Agra, Aligarh, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Allahabad, Benares and Bankipore. The heat of Multan is a recollection that haunts me still. We started with a cry, but the central idea was the promotion of unification between the different Indian peoples and provinces, and of a feeling of friendliness between the people of Bengal and the martial races of the North. We counted for nothing in those days. It was constantly dinned into our ears that our political demands, whatever they were, came from the people of the deltaic Ganges, who did not contribute a single soldier to the army, and who were separated from the sturdier races of the North by a wide gulf of isolation, if not of alienation. We wanted to dissipate this myth. To-day it stands exploded by the creation of the Congress and the long train of united and patriotic endeavours which have marked the solidarity of the life of modern India.

Our cry on this occasion was the same as that which a decade ago had united all India. The prayer of united India on the Civil Service question had not yet been granted. The maximum limit of age for the open competitive examination had not yet been raised, though a slight and doubtful concession had been made by the creation of the Statutory Civil Service. The prayer was now repeated at the public meetings held in the great towns of Northern India, from Allahabad and Cawnpore to Rawalpindi and Multan. Coupled with this appeal to the Government, there was an appeal to ourselves, namely, that we should help to create a national fund, such as had been started in Bengal, to promote our political work. It was not long before our agitation bore fruit. Soon came the response from the Government. A unanimous despatch was addressed to the Secretary of State by the Government of India, recommending the raising of the limit of age for the Indian Civil Service. A Public Services Commission was appointed the following year, and as the result of its recommendations the age for the Indian Civil Service was raised to the present limit.

The year 1884 witnessed the departure of Lord Ripon from India, and it was the occasion of popular demonstrations unparal- leled in Indian annals. The Anglo-Indian official living in isolation ​and detachment from the people now began to realize the birth of a national movement, of which he had not the faintest conception. 'If it be real what does it mean?' exclaimed Sir Auckland Colvin, the Indian Finance Minister, with passionate bewilderment, in a pamphlet of that name which at the time created quite a sensation and was largely read. The demonstrations were a revelation to the bureaucracy; and they extended from Calcutta to Bombay; and town after town through which the retiring Viceroy passed vied with the others in displaying its love and gratitude to their benefactor. The vivid and picturesque language of the scriptural text was put into requisition to describe this all-embracing move- ment. 'The dry bones in the open valley', said Sir Auckland Colvin, had become instinct with life.

Those who had eyes to see, witnessed in these demonstrations the beginnings of a united national life, the birth of a new spirit of co-operation among the Indian people, destined to have a profound influence on their future evolution. It was not that Lord Ripon had been able to do much; but the purity of his intentions, the loftiness of his ideals, the righteousness of his policy, and his hatred of racial disqualifications, were an open book to the people of India. They read it and poured out their heart's gratitude to the Englishman who, in the midst of his chilling bureaucratic surround- ings, realized the great mission of England in India, and sought to fulfil it, through good report and evil report. In Calcutta we organized a huge demonstration in which I had my part and share. Indeed, in the year preceding we got up a similar demonstration, though it was of an informal character. The evening party at the Belgachia Gardens was attended by crowds of people from the highest to the lowest. Anglo-India saw at that function that the Viceroy whom they had denounced had won the people's love and esteem such as no other Viceroy had ever done before.

Lord Dufferin succeeded Lord Ripon as Viceroy. I had known Lord Dufferin in England. During the days of my troubles, when I had been rejected by the Civil Service Commissioners, he had very kindly sent for me and interested himself in my case. Quite unexpectedly and of his own motion he wrote inviting me to see him, and after a long conversation with me said that he would speak to the Duke of Argyll, who was then Secretary of State, about my case. We were all prepossessed in his favour; and on his arrival in Calcutta, the Indian Association waited upon him with an address of welcome in which, among other things, the new ​Viceroy's attention was prominently called to the need of reconsti- tuting and reforming the Provincial Legislative Councils. This address, which, I may add, was drafted by me, was presented on December 24, 1884, a year before the birth of the Indian National Congress. The passage in the address that refers to this subject is worth reproducing. After referring to the recently-conferred boon of local self-government, the address went on to say:

As I am on this question of the reform and enlargement of the Councils, I may refer to some of the early efforts that led to the inauguration of this great reform. The year 1887 was the year of the Queen's Jubilee, and it was celebrated in a befitting manner in India and in all parts of the Empire. Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Harrison was at that time Chairman of the Calcutta Corporation. He was placed in charge of the arrangements in Calcutta, and he very kindly asked me to assist him in organizing the function to be held on the Maidan, and to look after the delegates who were invited from the different mofussil municipalities.

Here I may pause for one moment to pay my tribute of respect and affection to the honoured memory of a friend who was one of the ablest, as he was one of the most sympathetic, of English officials that I have met. In my mind the memories of Sir Henry Harrison and Sir Henry Cotton are indissolubly linked together. They were twins in their political views as regards India. Both were men of high intellectual eminence. Sir William Turner, late Chief Justice of Madras, said of Sir Henry Harrison that he had mistaken his vocation, and that if, instead of becoming a member of the Indian Civil Service, he had joined the English Bar, he would have become Attorney-General. He was the very Rupert of debate. ​Brilliant, fascinating, with an extraordinary command of the finest vocabulary, he was one of the best debaters that I have seen. The Indian Civil Service, so far as I know, has not yet produced his like in this respect. In his college days, he was, I understand, President of the Oxford Union. As Chairman of the Corporation, and president of its meetings, he had the last word in every dis- cussion; and it was difficult to obtain a vote against him. So we hit upon the device of altering the rules and giving the last word to the mover of the resolution. But, in the discussion of this resolution, he had under the existing rules the last word, and we were defeated. His supremacy remained unchallenged; but it was a supremacy that was exercised with the cordial, and at times the admiring, support of his colleagues.

When the Corporation of Calcutta was threatened by a clique, at the head of which was a High Court Judge who dabbled in sanitation, Sir Henry Harrison boldly stood out for the Corporation and fought the Government with a courage and fearlessness of consequences that extorted the admiration of friends and foes alike. In the darkest days of the Ilbert Bill controversy, when the atmos- phere was electric and racial feeling ran high, Sir Henry Harrison and Mr. Cotton got up a dinner in their house in Kyd Street, to which they invited the leading Indian and European gentlemen, and Mr. Cotton made a speech breathing the spirit of equality as between Europeans and Indians. In 1885, when after the Panjdch incident we started a movement for the enlistment of Bengalees as volunteers, Sir Henry Harrison wrote a pamphlet, strongly sup- porting it (though he knew that the Government was against it), and urging that the legitimate aspirations of the educated community should be gratified. Of the educated Indians, he spoke as follows:

In similar terms Sir Henry Harrison wrote in the Quarterly Review when he went home in 1886. 'Repress', said he, 'the educated natives, their ambitions and their aspirations and you turn them into a solid phalanx of opposition against the Govern- ment. Gratify their ambitions, and you make them the allies of the Government.

Such was Sir Henry Harrison, one of the finest Englishmen I have set eyes upon, one whose friendship, terminated by an early death, it was my proud privilege to enjoy.

As I was entrusted by him to look after the arrangements in connexion with the delegates who had been invited to the Queen's Jubilee from the mofussil municipalities, I was resolved to make the most of the situation. I thought it was a splendid opportunity to put in the forefront that which I considered the problem of problems at that time, namely, the reform and reconstitution of the Legislative Councils on a popular basis. The mofussil municipalities were each to present an address. I took care that every one of these addresses should contain a prayer for the reform and enlargement of the Councils. I addressed a circular to the mofussil municipalities on the subject and met with a cordial response. I reproduce a passage from one of these addresses (they all followed the same lines):

Lord Dufferin gave a suitable reply. 'Glad and happy should I be', said he, 'if during my sojourn among them (the people of India), circumstances permitted me to extend, and to place upon a wide and more logical footing, the political status which was so ​wisely given, a generation ago, by that great statesman, Lord Halifax, to such Indian gentlemen as by their influence, their acquirements, and the confidence they inspired in their fellow- countrymen, were marked out as useful adjuncts to our Legislative Councils.'

Mr. George Yule, afterwards President of the Congress at Allahabad, who was sitting next to me, said, as these words were uttered, 'You will get the reform in five years' time'. The words were prophetic. They were uttered in 1887, we got the reform in 1892, just five years after. It is curious that Lord Dufferin, who encouraged the idea of an Indian National Congress and sympathized with its aspirations at the outset, should have, before he laid down the reins of office, described the educated community as a 'microscopic minority'. Indeed, while he was condemning the Indian National Congress at the St. Andrew's Dinner in Calcutta, he was writing a secret despatch supporting its recom- mendations for the reform of the Councils. Strange are the ways of statesmanship. Nevertheless we can forget and forgive much in the case of a Viceroy who first recommended a scheme for the reconstitution of the Legislative Councils upon a popular basis. His confidential despatch, which I was the first to publish in the Bengalee in March 1889, formed the basis of the Parliamentary Statute of 1892.

I may here state that Lord Dufferin, before he submitted his despatch on the reform of the Legislative Councils, consulted several persons, including Sir Henry Harrison, Mr. Cotton, and, I believe, one or two others. I was invited to Government House and had a long conversation with His Excellency. I urged that the Councils should be reconstituted upon an elective basis, with the right of interpellation and of control over the budget. It was a frank and friendly conversation, and at the end of it he took me to his private secretary's room, and, introducing me to Sir Donald Mackenzie, said in terms of great kindliness, 'Give Mr. Surendra- nath Banerjea whatever information he may ask from you. I repeated the conversation to Sir Henry Harrison, who, I found out, had already seen the Viceroy on the subject, and he said to me, Surendranath, there will be a Council of which you will be a member'. The prophecy has been fulfilled. The words of the good and the true never fail of their effect.

The year, upon the events of which I am now dwelling, was for me in many respects a year of hard and strenuous work. For ​the sake of revenue, what is known as the Outstill System was introduced into the Hughli district. It cheapened the sale of country liquor and reduced its price by nearly one half. This reduction naturally stimulated consumption. Drunkenness spread among the lower classes of the rural population with alarming rapidity. I live on the opposite side of the Hughli district, and within a stone's-throw of my house on the river bank is a liquor shop. I heard tales of drunkenness, of demoralization and ruin that were confirmed by reports which I received from the interior of the district. But I was not content with these reports. I visited a liquor shop at Haripal, and the sight I witnessed there was one that I shall never forget. I saw half a dozen men and women lying dead drunk on the floor of the shop. Another band of about a dozen men and women, all belonging to the lower classes, in varying stages of drunkenness, began dancing around me in wild delirious excitement. I apprehended violence and I slowly and cautiously retraced my steps from the shop, resolved that, so far as in me lay, this thing must cease.

I returned home with a load of sadness on my mind. I felt that a sustained and organized effort had to be made to save the people from the terrible effects of cheap liquor. The work was of a twofold character. We were to appeal to the people to avoid drink and to the Government to abolish the Outstill System. We gave precedence to the popular appeal and put it in the forefront of our programme. For we felt that, when opinion had been organized, our appeal would be irresistible. We worked upon this line; and the result proved the soundness of our programme. It was a guide to future work conceived and carried out on the same lines.

We began the campaign by organizing a series of mass meetings in the Hughli district. They were meetings of the poorer classes, attended by thousands and held in the open air, sometimes amid drenching rain. The language employed in addressing the meetings was the common language of the people, simple, unornate, free from the literary flavour of a more laboured diction. I had never before been accustomed to address public meetings in Bengalee, but with a little preparation I felt myself quite at home in my efforts in this untrodden path. They were to me a valuable training, which proved highly useful when later on I had to address numerous public meetings in connexion with what is known as the 'Swadeshi agitation'. These meetings were accompanied by Sankirton parties, which paraded the villages singing songs suited to the ​occasion, to the accompaniment of the khol and the kartal. The effect was very great. The people swarmed in crowds, sometimes from villages far away, and they followed us, they attended our meetings and heard our addresses. Music played an important part in these demonstrations. We had read Vaishnava literature to some purpose, and Sankirton has ever since then formed a prominent feature as an instrument of popular and political propa- gandism in Bengal. We took the fullest advantage of it, and with admirable results. Babu Barada Prosanna Roy was the sweet singer of our party. He composed his own songs and sang them with thrilling effect. It is to be borne in mind that not one of those who were engaged in this work received any remuneration of any kind. It was to them entirely a labour of love; and from week to week and from month to month they were engaged in it, at great personal sacrifice and inconvenience.

The names of these worthies deserve to be commemorated. First and foremost amongst them was Krishna Kumar Mittra, then in the prime of life, but still retaining, despite age and heavy domestic bereavement, a superb enthusiasm for public work. A saintly character, he will, I hope, be remembered by after-gener- ations, if they care to treasure the memories of the good and the true, as one of the worthiest and most selfless among his contemporaries. Essentially a man of religion, politics is a part of his religion. He leavens every sphere of his public work with the devout spirit of religion. He reminds one of the old Puritans. Ascetic in his temperament, unbending in his convictions, careless of the good things of life, and remorseless in his hatred of shams and shows. But he differs from the Puritans of old in the sweet amiability that suffuses his nature. Every good endeavour finds a responsive echo in his heart. There was no stauncher friend of the Swadeshi movement, or more unflinching opponent of the Partition of Bengal, than Krishna Kumar Mittra; and he suffered for his devotion to the cause of his country by his deportation. In his case deportation was the unkindest cut of all; for he had always been a firm supporter of constitutionalism and a thorough-going opponent of revolutionary movements. At the interview I had with Lord Morley at the India Office in 1909, I told him that Krishna Kumar Mittra's deportation was a grievous blunder; and this view, I believe, is now admitted even by the officials themselves. The fact demonstrates, if indeed any demonstration were needed, how unsafe and dangerous it is to punish men upon ex-parte police ​statements, which the party concerned has had no opportunity of explaining. But perhaps I am anticipating events that will receive fuller consideration later on.

I go back to the mass meetings, and to my friends who were associated with them. Babu Kali Sunkar Sukul was another worker. He was a brilliant student of the Calcutta University and was the Cobden Scholar of his year. He was not a Bengalee, but came from the United Provinces, from somewhere near Cawnpore. He was, however, thoroughly acclimatized, if I may use that word. He was a Bengalee to all intents and purposes; he was married to a Bengalee lady and spoke Bengalee with the easy familiarity of one born to the language. I rather think that he spoke Hindi, which was his mother-tongue, somewhat indifferently, and at a meeting at Cawnpore, at which he addressed the audience in Hindi, he said to me afterwards that he had made many grammatical mistakes. I first came in contact with him at a meeting in 1876, when I delivered an address on Indian Unity. He rose up from among the crowd of students and spoke. It was an effective little speech, which made an impression on the audience. I thought the young man had stuff in him, and I was right. Our acquaintance, which thus began, ripened into a warm friendship. He took part in the Outstill agitation, and accompanied me to Upper India, along with Babu Krishna Kumar Mittra, in one of my visits to that part of the country in connexion with the Civil Service movement. Latterly business prevented him from close association with our work; but we continued to be friends to the last.

Babu Barada Prosanna Roy was an inhabitant of Barisal. Private circumstances soon compelled him to give up public work. It is a pity that there should be no public fund to ensure the continued services of men like him. We held quite a number of meetings in the Hughli district. There was then no C.I.D. to shadow our steps and to interfere with our work. There was no unpleasant sensation of being secretly espied, while we were doing this good work alike in the interests of the Government and of the people. I believe our public meetings now no longer suffer, except on special occasions, from the embarrassing presence of the police official.

We followed up our public meetings with an appeal to the Government to abolish the Outstill System. The appeal was successful; for it had behind it the voice of the country; and we were fortunate enough to enlist the sympathies of the Temperance ​Association headed by the late Mr. W. S. Caine. He saw me at the Bengalee office during one of his visits to India, and said to me, 'You have done the spade work. A final kick is all that is needed. We will help you in that'—and he put forward his leg as if in the act of kicking. In response to our appeal, the Government deputed Mr. Westmacott, who was then Magistrate of Howrah, to enquire into the Outstill System in the Hughli district. He held meetings and took evidence. I was present at some of them, and helped him in the investigation. As the result of the enquiry, the system was abolished, and the poorer classes in the Hughli district were saved from the grip of a terrible scourge.

Many years have passed since then; but I look back upon my efforts in this connexion as among the most pleasant memories of my life. It was indeed hard, rough work—tramping along trackless areas, living in malarial countries, and eating strange food. On one occasion I found a big centipede, which of course was dead, in the curry served out to me with dinner. But, being hungry, I ate the curry, of course without the centipede, and cannot say that I felt the worse for it, or that I dreamt of it at night. But these are little troubles that are a part of the game, and when recounted may serve to amuse and delight friends. Nevertheless it was work instructive to a degree, for it brought me into close touch with the peasant life of Bengal and helped to broaden my outlook and my sympathies. For me it was an education that proved highly useful.