India, Old and New | Page 7

back of the shrine, as I came away, some privileged
worshippers were waiting to drink a few drops of the foul water which
trickles out of a small conduit through the wall from the holy of holies.
It is the water in which the feet of the idol--and those of the serving

Brahmans--have been washed!
It was in this same temple of Kali that only some fifteen years ago,
during the violent agitation provoked by the Partition of Bengal, vast
crowds used to assemble and take by the name of the Great Goddess
the vow of Swadeshi as the first step to Swaraj, and Bengalee youths,
maddened by an inflammatory propaganda, learned to graft on to
ancient forms of worship the very modern cult of the bomb. To this
same temple resorted only the other day Mr. Gandhi's followers to seek
the blessing of the Great Goddess for the more harmless forms of
protest by which he exhorted the inhabitants of Calcutta to bring home
to the Duke of Connaught during his stay in Calcutta their indignant
rejection of the boon which he had been sent out by the King-Emperor
to confer on the people of India.
Must we then be driven to the conclusion that there is a gulf never to be
bridged between India's ancient civilisation and the modern civilisation
which we have brought to her out of the West? In that case the great
constitutional adventure on which we have just embarked would be,
unlike all our other great adventures in India, foredoomed to failure,
and those Englishmen would be right who shudder at its rashness and
reiterate with added conviction, since the school of Indian thought for
which Mr. Gandhi stands seems to bear them out, that "East is East and
West is West, and never the twain shall meet." The whole history of the
British connection with India surely excludes such a conclusion of
failure and despair. It teaches us, not, as such Englishmen contend, that
India was won and has been held and must be retained by the sword
alone, but that British rule was established and has been maintained
with and by the co-operation of Indians and British, and that in seeking
to-day to associate Indians more closely than ever before with the
government and administration of the country, we are merely
persevering in the same path which, though at times hesitatingly and
reluctantly, the British rulers of India have trodden for generations past,
always keeping step with the successive stages of our own national and
political evolution. The Indian extremists misread equally the whole
history of British rule who see in it nothing but a long nightmare of
hateful oppression to be finally overcome, according to Mr. Gandhi's

preaching, by "Non-co-operation" and the immortal "soul force" of
India, rescued at last from the paralysing snares of an alien civilisation.
Not for the first time has the cry of "Back to the Vedas" been raised by
Indians who, standing in the old ways, watch with hostility and alarm
the impact on their ancient but static civilisation of the more dynamic
civilisation of the West with which we for the first time brought India
into contact. It would be folly to underrate the resistance which the
reactionary elements in Hinduism are still capable of putting forth. I
have shown how it can still be seen operating in extreme forms, and not
upon Hindus alone, in the two pictures which I have drawn from Delhi
and Calcutta. It meets one in a lesser degree at almost every turn all
over India. But it would be just as foolish to underrate the progressive
forces which show now as ever in the history of Hinduism, that it is
also capable of combining with a singular rigidity of structure and with
many forms repugnant to all our own beliefs a breadth and elasticity of
thought by no means inferior to that of the West.
To those who hoped for a more rapid and widespread fusion of Indian
and Western ideals, some of the phenomena which have marked the
latter-day revival of Hinduism and the shape it has recently assumed in
Mr. Gandhi's "Non-co-operation" campaign, may have brought grave
disappointment. But the inrush of Western influences was assuredly
bound to provoke a strong reaction. For let us not forget that to the
abiding power of Hinduism India owes the one great element of
stability that enabled her, long before we appeared in India, to weather
so many tremendous storms without altogether losing the sense of a
great underlying unity stronger and more enduring than all the manifold
lines of cleavage which have tended from times immemorial to divide
her. Hinduism has not only responded for some forty centuries to the
social and religious aspirations of a large and highly endowed portion