The Great Speeches of Modern India

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

  Now, gentlemen, let each of you consider what will be your condition if such a situation is created in India. Then, our life, our property, our honour, and our faith will all be in great danger. When even now that a powerful British administration is protecting its subjects, we the Musalmans have to face most serious difficulties in safeguarding our interests from the grasping hands of our neighbours, instances of which are not rare in any province or district, then woe betide the time when we become the subjects of our neighbours, and answer to them for the sins, real and imaginary, of Aurangzeb, who lived and died two centuries ago, and other Musalman conquerors and rulers who went before him. And to prevent the realization of such aspirations on the part of our neighbours, the Musalmans cannot find better and surer means than to congregate under the banner of Great Britain, and to devote their lives and property in its protection. I must confess, gentlemen, that we shall not be loyal to this government for any unselfish reasons; but that it is through regard for our own lives and property, our own honour and religion, that we are impelled to be faithful to the government; and consequently the best security for our good faith is the undoubted fact that our own prosperity is bound up with, and depends upon our loyalty to British rule in India. I shall be the last person, gentlemen, to suspect our neighbours of civil intentions, but I do not hesitate in declaring that unless the leaders of the Congress make sincere efforts as speedily as possible, to quell the hostility against the government and the British race, which is fast increasing in a large body of their followers, the necessary consequence of all that is being openly done and said today will be that sedition would be rampant, and the Musalmans of India would be called upon to perform the necessary duty of combating this rebellious spirit, side by side with the British Government, more effectively than by the mere use of words.

  It is however our duty towards our neighbours that as far as our influence may reach and our persuasion may work, we must prevent our friends and neighbours from going on the wrong path, and as their neighbours it is always one of our first duties to deal with them with fairness and courtesy and, without prejudice to our legitimate rights and interests, to carry on with them an intimate social intercourse, maintain our sympathy, and strictly avoid all forms of hostility towards them. I would go even a step further, and impress upon you, gentlemen, that there is no quarrel between us and the National Congress and Congress people, nor do we oppose or disagree with every one of their acts and views. Indeed we are thankful to them for the efforts which they have made in causes common to us both, and procured certain advantages in which they and we have equally shared, and it is quite possible that we may regard in the future a part of their programme is perfectly justified. All the differences that now exist between us and them, or shall exist at a future date, must fall under one or other of three heads. Either they will relate to those demands of theirs which, if granted, would endanger the continuance of British rule in India; or they will relate to those efforts of theirs which are directed against our own legitimate interests; or they will fall under the head of that want of moderation and respect which are due from the subjects to their sovereign. And this leads me to say that we must bear in mind that moderation and respectfulness shall have to be the essential characteristics of any political organization which the Musalmans assembled here today would form.

  I cannot help recalling the pleasure which I experienced when, in reply to the Address of the Musalmans’ deputation to the Viceroy, of which I had the honour to be a member, His Excellency said that Musalmans of Eastern Bengal had behaved with remarkable moderation and courtesy under the most trying circumstances, and I have to congratulate the Hon’ble Nawab Salim-ul-lah Bahadur of Dacca and the Hon’ble Khan Bahadur Syed Nawab Ali Chowdhury on a result so eminently successful, which was brought about by their own efforts and the great influence they wield in Eastern Bengal: and we can all rely that this influence will be used in the future, as it has been in the past, on the side of moderation, law, justice and courtesy.

  On conserving ancient monuments (Calcutta, February 1900)

  LORD CURZON (1859–1925)

  Lord Curzon was amazed at the apathy of Indians towards their own architectural and archaeological heritage, and conservation became a passion for him during his viceroyalty (1899–1904). On his official tours, he tried to impress upon local authorities that the conservation of ancient monuments was one of the primary obligations of the government and he returned to this theme when speaking at the annual meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal of which he was the patron. Curzon’s passing of the pathbreaking Ancient Monuments Preservation Act (1904) was a direct outcome of the concerns expressed in this speech.

  I hope that there is nothing inappropriate in my addressing to this Society a few observations upon the duty of government in respect of ancient buildings in India. The Asiatic Society of Bengal still, I trust, even in these days when men are said to find no time for scholarship, and when independent study or research seems to have faded out of Indian fashion, retains that interest in archaeology which is so often testified to in its earlier publications, and was promoted by so many of its most illustrious names. Surely here, if anywhere, in this house which enshrines the memorials, and has frequently listened to the wisdom, of great scholars and renowned students, it is permissible to recall the recollection of the present generation to a subject that so deeply engaged the attention of your early pioneers, and that must still even in a breathless age, appeal to the interest of every thoughtful man.

  In the course of my recent tour, during which I visited some of the most famous sites and beautiful or historic buildings in India, I more than once remarked, in reply to municipal addresses, that I regarded the conservation of ancient monuments as one of the primary obligations of government. We have a duty to our forerunners, as well as to our contemporaries and to our descendants—nay, our duty to the two latter classes in itself demands the recognition of an obligation to the former, since we are the custodians for our own age of that which has been bequeathed to us by an earlier, and since posterity will rightly blame us if, owing to our neglect, they fail to reap the same advantages that we have been privileged to enjoy. Moreover, how can we expect at the hands of futurity any consideration for the productions of our own time—if indeed any are worthy of such—unless we have ourselves shown a like respect to the handiwork of our predecessors? This obligation, which I assert and accept on behalf of government, is one of an even more binding character in India than in many European countries. There abundant private wealth is available for the acquisition or the conservation of that which is frequently private property. Corporations, societies, endowments, trusts, provide a vast machinery that relieves government of a large portion of its obligation. The historic buildings, the magnificent temples, the inestimable works of art, are invested with a publicity that to some extent saves them from the risk of desecration or the encroachments of decay. Here, all is different. India is covered with the visible records of vanished dynasties, of forgotten monarchs, of persecuted and sometimes dishonoured creeds. These monuments are, for the most part, though there are notable exceptions, in British territory, and on soil belonging to government. Many of them are in out-of-the-way places, and are liable to the combined ravages of a tropical climate, an exuberant flora, and very often a local and ignorant population, who see only in an ancient building the means of inexpensively raising a modern one for their own convenience. All these circumstances explain the peculiar responsibility that rests upon Government in India. If there be anyone who says to me that there is no duty devolving upon a Christian Government to preserve the monuments of a pagan art, or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man. Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind. Viewed from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans st
ands on precisely the same footing as the Buddhist vihara, and the Mohammedan musjid as the Christian cathedral. There is no principle of artistic discrimination between the mausoleum of the despot and the sepulchre of the saint. What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears the mask off the face of the past, and helps us to read its riddles, and to look it in the eyes—these, and not the dogmas of a combative theology, are the principal criteria to which we must look. Much of ancient history, even in an age of great discoveries, still remains mere guess-work. It is only slowly being pieced together by the efforts of scholars and by the outcome of research. But the clues are lying everywhere at our hand, in buried cities, in undeciphered inscriptions, in casual coins, in crumbling pillars, and pencilled slabs of stone. They supply the data by which we may reconstruct the annals of the past, and recall to life the morality, the literature, the politics, the art of a perished age.

  Compared with the antiquity of Assyrian or Egyptian, or even of early European monuments, the age of the majority of Indian monuments is not great. I speak subject to correction, but my impression is that the oldest sculptured monument in India is the Sanchi Tope, the great railing of which cannot possibly be placed before the middle of the third century before Christ, although the tope itself may be earlier. At that time the palaces or Chaldaea and Nineveh, the pyramids and the rock tombs of Egypt, were already thousands of years old. We have no building in India as old as the Parthenon at Athens; the large majority are young compared to the Colosseum at Rome. All the Norman and the majority of the Gothic cathedrals of England and of western Europe were already erected before the great era of Moslem architecture in India had begun. The Kutub Minar at Delhi, which is the finest early Mohammedan structure in this country, was built within a century of Westminster Hall in London, which we are far from regarding as an ancient monument. As for the later glories of Arabian architecture at Delhi, at Agra, and at Lahore, the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which we regard in England as the last product of a dying architectural epoch, were already grey when they sprang, white and spotless, from the hands of the masons of Akbar and Shah Jehan; while the Taj Mahal was only one generation older than Wren’s Renaissance fabric of modern St Paul’s.

  There is another remarkable feature of the majority of Indian antiquities—of those at any rate that belong to the Musulman epoch—that they do not represent an indigenous genius or an Indian style. They are exotics, imported into this country in the train of conquerors who had learnt their architectural lessons in Persia, in Central Asia, in Arabia, in Afghanistan. More than a thousand years earlier a foreign influence had exercised a scarcely less marked, though more transient, influence upon certain forms of Indian architecture. I allude to the Greek types which were derived from the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms, that were founded upon the remains of Alexander’s conquests, and which, in the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era profoundly affected the art and sculpture of North-West India and the Punjab. Indian sculptures or Indian buildings, however, because they reflect a foreign influence, or betray a foreign origin, are not the less, but perhaps the more interesting to ourselves, who were borne to India upon the crest of a later but similar wave, and who may find in their non-Indian characteristics a reminiscence of forms which we already know in Europe, and of a process of assimilation with which our own archaeological history has rendered us familiar. Indeed a race like our own, who are themselves foreigners, are in a sense better fitted to guard, with a dispassionate and impartial zeal, the relics of different ages, and of sometimes antagonistic beliefs, than might be the descendants of the warring races or the votaries of the rival creeds. To us the relics of Hindu and Mohammedan, of Buddhist, Brahmin, and Jain are, from the antiquarian, the historical, and the artistic point of view, equally interesting and equally sacred. One does not excite a more vivid, and the other a weaker emotion. Each represents the glories or the faith of a branch of the human family. Each fills a chapter in English history. Each is a part of the heritage which Providence has committed to the custody of the ruling power.

  If, however, the majority of the structural monuments of India, the topes and temples, the palaces and fortresses and tombs, be of no exceeding antiquity in the chronology of architecture, and even if the greater number of those at any rate which are well known and visited, are not indigenous in origin, it remains true, on the other hand, that it is in the exploration and study of purely Indian remains, in the probing of archaic mounds, in the excavation of old Indian cities, and in the copying and reading of ancient inscriptions, that a good deal of the exploratory work of the archaeologist in India will in future lie. The later pages of Indian history are known to us, and can be read by all. But a curtain of dark and romantic mystery hangs over the earlier chapters, of which we are only slowly beginning to lift the corners. This also is not less an obligation of government. Epigraphy should not be set behind research any more than research should be set behind conservation. All are ordered parts of any scientific scheme of antiquarian work. I am not one of those who think that government can afford to patronize the one and ignore the other. It is, in my judgment, equally our duty to dig and discover, to classify, reproduce, and describe, to copy and decipher, and to cherish and conserve. Of restoration I cannot, on the present occasion, undertake to speak, since the principles of legitimate and artistic restoration require a more detailed analysis than I have time to bestow upon them this evening. But it will be seen from what I have said that my view of the obligations of government is not grudging, and that my estimate of the work to be done is ample.

  If then the question be asked, how has the British Government hitherto discharged aid, how is it now discharging its task, what is the answer that must be returned? I may say in preface that were the answer unfavourable—and I will presently examine that point—we should merely be forging a fresh link in an unbroken historic chain. Every, or nearly every, successive religion that has permeated or overswept this country has vindicated its own fervour at the expense of the rival whom it has dethroned. When the Brahmans went to Ellora, they hacked away the features of all the seated Buddhas in the rock-chapels and halls. When Kutub-ud-din commenced, and Altamsh continued, the majestic mosque that flanks the Kutub Minar, it was with the spoil of Hindu temples that they reared the fabric, carefully defacing or besmearing the sculptured Jain images, as they consecrated them to their novel purpose. What part of India did not bear witness to the ruthless vandalism of the great iconoclast Aurungzeb? When we admire his great mosque with its tapering minarets, which are the chief feature of the river front at Benares, how many of us remember that he tore down the holy Hindu temple of Vishveshwar to furnish the material and to supply the site? Nadir Shah during his short Indian inroad effected a greater spoliation than has probably ever been achieved in so brief a space of time. When the Mahratta conquerors overran northern India, they pitilessly mutilated and wantonly destroyed. When Ranjit Singh built the Golden Temple at Amritsar, he ostentatiously rifled Mohammedan buildings and mosques. Nay, dynasties did not spare their own members, nor religions their own shrines. If a capital or fort or sanctuary was not completed in the lifetime of the builder; there was small chance of its being finished, there was a very fair chance of its being despoiled, by its successor and heir. The environs of Delhi are a wilderness of deserted cities and devastated tombs. Each fresh conqueror, Hindu, or Moghul, or Pathan, marched, so to speak, to his own immortality over his predecessor’s grave. The great Akbar in a more peaceful age first removed the seat of government from Delhi to Agra, and then built Fatehpur Sikri as a new capital, only to be abandoned by his successor. Jehangir alternated between Delhi and Agra, but preferred Lahore to either. Shah Jehan beautified Agra, and then contemplated a final return to Delhi. Aurungzeb marched away to the south and founded still another capital, and was himself buried in territories that now belong to Hyderabad. These successive changes, while they may have reflected little more than a despot’s caprice, were yet inimical both to the completion and to
the continuous existence of architectural fabrics. The British Government are fortunately exempt from any such promptings, either of religious fanaticism, or restless vanity, or of dynastic and personal pride. But in proportion as they have been unassailed by such temptations, so is their responsibility the greater for inaugurating a new era and for displaying that tolerant and enlightened respect to the treasures of all, which is one of the main lessons that the returning West has been able to teach to the East.

  In the domain of archaeology, as elsewhere, the original example of duty has been set to the Government of India by individual effort and by private enthusiasm; and only by slow degrees has government, which is at all times and seasons a tardy learner, warmed to its task. The early archaeological researches, conducted by the founders and pioneers of this Society, by Jones, Colebrooke, Wilson, and Prinsep, and by many another clarum et venerabile nomen, were in the main literary in character. They consisted in the reconstruction of alphabets, the translation of manuscripts, and the decipherment of inscriptions. Sanskrit scholarship was the academic cult of the hour. How these men laboured is illustrated by the fact that Prinsep and Kittoe both died of overwork at the age of forty. Then followed an era of research in buildings and monuments; the pen was supplemented by the spade, and, in succession, descriptions, drawings, paintings, engravings, and in later days photographs and casts, gradually revealed to European eyes the precious contents of the unrifled quarries of Hindustan. In this generation of explorers and writers, special honour must be paid to two names: to James Fergusson, whose earliest work was published in 1845, and who was the first to place the examination of Indian architecture upon a scholarly basis, and to General Sir A. Cunningham, who only a few years later was engaged in the first scientific excavation of the Bhilsa topes. These and other toilers in the same field laboured with a diligence beyond praise; but the work was too great for individual exertion, and much of it remained desultory, fragmentary, and incomplete.