India, Old and New | Page 7

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 of the human race, almost wholly shut off until modern times from any intimate contact with our own Western world, but it has been the one great force that has preserved the continuity of Indian life. It withstood six centuries of Mahomedan domination. Could it be expected to yield without a struggle to the new forces, however superior we may consider them and however overwhelming they may ultimately prove, which British rule has imported into India during