Tilak was one of the first Extremists Nevinson spent time with. The most orthodox Hindu among the nationalist leaders the British journalist met, Tilak did not come across as especially radical. While he comments on Tilak’s implacable observance of caste restrictions, which extended to not eating or sharing a roof with a European, and describes him as one whose orthodox Hinduism ‘often reacts against the forces of progress’,110 Nevinson’s report of Tilak’s political views suggests that the leader was not seeking to sever connections to the British Empire as such, at least not in the present, but was holding out for ‘colonial self-government’.111 His differences with the Moderates, Tilak appears to have told Nevinson, were largely those of tactics: where the former sought to influence British public opinion, the Extremists had ‘determined on other methods’.112 The two Tilak-ite ideas that Nevinson would reiterate in his own account were that Indian unity was itself a consequence of resistance to British domination, and that the ignorance and indifference of the British public towards the Indian situation had led to the present impasse. Citing extensively from both ‘The Tenets of the New Party’ and ‘The Shivaji Festival’, Nevinson engaged with Tilak’s critique of colonial benevolence: ‘He did not believe in the philanthropy of British politics. There was no instance in history of one foreign nation ruling another for the benefit of the other and not for its own profit.’113 This insight had implications for tactics of resistance, and Nevinson would grasp this fully, citing from Tilak’s essay ‘The Shivaji Festival’: ‘An appeal to the good-feeling of the rulers is everywhere discovered to have but narrow limits.’114 While Nevinson readily acknowledged the difficulty of trying to ‘understand’ Tilak’s beliefs in themselves, the ‘strange significance’ of the Maratha leader, with his enthusiasm for Shivaji and Hindu mythologies, was nonetheless legible to his British interlocutor, certainly insofar as Tilak appears to have couched his observations in the eminently comprehensible language of demands for self-government and a right to representation.115 ‘Our motto is “Self-reliance, not Mendicancy” ’, Tilak told Nevinson, reprising the formulation that Aurobindo had turned into the Swadeshi mantra.116
Nevinson seems to have been at least as impressed by the speakers and attendees at a public meeting called by the Extremists on Madras’s Marina beach. With a certain lyricism, Nevinson describes ‘a line of white-robed students carrying a yellow banner’ against the backdrop of the ‘deep and ominous colours’ of a monsoon sunset, telling his British readers: ‘But there was no wild gesticulation, no frantic excess, such as we might imagine in a fanatical East. A Trafalgar Square crowd is more demonstrative and unrestrained.’117 Though he was deliberately countering stereotypes of the agitation prevalent in Britain, Nevinson appears also to have been genuinely moved by the sights and sounds of the demonstration, including a little boy singing the nationalist song ‘Bande Mataram’ in Tamil. Providing the reader with a full translation (as does Hardie), he notes that its content is different to that of a stirring European anthem, but that ‘the tenderness, the devoted love of country, and the adoration of motherhood are all characteristic of the Indian mind’.118 Nevinson speaks of a sense of ‘quiet reasonableness’ in the speeches he hears, ‘so different from our conception of the Oriental mind’.119 The claims made in these speeches, at least as Nevinson interpreted them, were not hard to relate to: ‘the simple human rights that other peoples enjoy – the right to a voice in their own affairs, and in the spending of their own money’.120 These were reassuringly liberal in their tenor, of course. It was only when he met Aurobindo a few weeks later that Nevinson at last encountered the fully uncompromising face of the new nationalism:
His Nationalists would let the Government go its way and take no notice of it at all. They hoped nothing from reforms; all the talk about Legislative Councils and Indian members and the separation of Judicial and Executive functions was meaningless to them. They did not spend a thought upon it. In fact, the worse the Government was, the more repressive it became, and the less it inclined to reform, so much the better for the Nationalist cause. He regarded the Partition of Bengal as the greatest blessing that had ever happened to India. No other measure could have stirred national feeling so deeply or roused it so suddenly from the lethargy of previous years.121
It is then that Nevinson’s own understanding that ‘a deeper spirit was at work’ begins to crystallize.122 Reading Aurobindo’s work in the coming days, he would note and cite from the young Bengali political philosopher’s call to fellow Indians to relieve the administration of its duties and immediately enact self-governance in as many ways as possible. ‘No growth is possible under perpetual tutelage’, Aurobindo wrote.123 Contrasting it with Tilak’s canny pragmatism, ‘the shrewd political judgement of Poona Extremists’, Nevinson writes of ‘a religious tone, a spiritual elevation’, in Aurobindo’s writings that eluded simple translation into liberal categories: ‘Nationalism to him was far more than a political object or a means of material improvement. To him it was surrounded by a mist of glory, the halo that mediaeval saints beheld gleaming around the head of martyrs.’124 Compelled though he is by Aurobindo’s brand of Extremism, it is also hard to miss the slight recoil from ‘what the irreligious mean by a fanatic’.125
While he had been primed by Tilak for a rejection of petitioning as a political tactic, it was really with Aurobindo that Nevinson saw British liberalism comprehensively challenged. In a series of editorials written for the English-language nationalist daily Bande Mataram between 1906 and 1908, Aurobindo expounded his own theory of ‘the new spirit which has gone out like a mighty fire from Bengal lighting up the whole of India’ as constitutively unavailable to compromise or moderation.126 (Nevinson’s book title arguably alludes directly to Aurobindo’s phrase.) In these editorials he would insist that, in thinking about the future of India, reference to British views or British interests was a fundamental hindrance; there were ample other resources Indians could draw on to think about a destiny independent of Britain. ‘The new movement is not primarily a protest against bad Government’, he would observe, but ‘is a protest against the continuance of British control; whether that control is used well or ill, justly or unjustly, is a minor and unessential consideration.’127 Glossing ‘Extremism’ as ‘Democratic Nationalism’, Aurobindo describes Moderates as a hybrid species who thought they could ‘arrive at a compromise between subjection and independence – a half-way house between life and death’.128 Aurobindo’s sardonic analysis of why imperialism found it necessary to speak the language of liberalism is compelling. Once an openly aggressive ideology of ‘might is right’, colonial rule was impelled in the nineteenth century, the era of nationalism, to justify itself ‘by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on high to civilize the uncivilized and train the untrained until the time had come when the benevolent conqueror had done his work and could unselfishly retire’.129 The colonial subject was ‘obliged to accept Englishmen on their own valuation’.130 Yet thirty years of engaging English liberals such as Lord Morley through patient supplication had only brought in its wake refusal, rejection and, with regard to colonial subjects, the continued insistence that ‘they are not fit to receive’ political reforms.131 To the extent that liberalism engaged with the subjects of rule, it was not in order actually to listen, redress grievances or allow such engagement to influence administration, but because its wary practitioners knew: ‘A despotism out of touch with the people is a despotism continually in danger.’132 Indeed, to Aurobindo’s mind, acquiescence or ‘the slave’s politics’, as practised by Loyalists and Moderates, only served to heighten the English sense that Indians were unfit for freedom – which, he reminds his reader, necessitates struggle.133 Where Europe fought for liberty ‘through a welter of blood after her struggles of centuries’, the disapproval and resentment of Indian Moderates ‘find expression only in weeping and sobbing’, or ‘persistent mendicancy’.134
Foreign rule was, above all, incompatible with nationalism f
or the masses, rather than for an elite few – another dig at those Moderates who only sought a place at the table. While Aurobindo determinedly includes Mughal rule under the rubric of the ‘foreign’, he does note that ‘it immediately naturalised itself in India’, unlike that of the British, and so did not either centralize power or destroy ‘existing organs of national life’.135 (This was a point that Ernest Jones had also made in his editorials fifty years earlier.) Everything now depended on getting both Hindu and Muslim common people to join with the middle classes for a ‘common salvation’.136 The ‘new spirit’ itself was one of mass mobilization in which, for the first time, ‘the man in the workshop and the man in the street have risen in revolt’.137 Echoed in this by Nevinson and others, Aurobindo pronounced: ‘The distinction, which Anglo-India has striven to draw between the “Babu class” and the people, has in the Punjab ceased to exist.’138 Importantly, Aurobindo sets emergent Indian national self-consciousness within a larger spectrum of international insurgency in Japan, West Asia, China, North Africa and semi-Asiatic Russia, all in the same year, 1906–7; there were also indications of forthcoming disturbances in other parts of the Far East. But since the greatest kindred ‘awakening’ had been in the Muslim or ‘Mohammedan’ world – in Afghanistan, Persia and Egypt – India could also draw inspiration from the Islamic world, becoming part of a wider ‘Asiatic revival’.139 Indeed, Aurobindo describes the foreign textile boycott strategy of Swadeshi as ‘a jehad against foreign yarn’.140 The ‘Asiatic’, for Aurobindo, encompasses both early Christianity and Islam, the Prophet Mohammed being one of those who ‘tried to reestablish the Asiatic gospel of human equality in the spirit’.141 Responding partly to the critique of those, like Rabindranath Tagore, who warned presciently against the exclusionary and aggressive aspects of Swadeshi, Aurobindo argued that the call to boycott British goods had to be seen not as a ‘gospel of hatred’ but as an attempt to create the conditions of equality without which ‘there can be no real love and good feeling except such as exists between man and some of the lower animals’ (a metaphor also used by Nevinson, as we have seen).142 Aurobindo’s rejection of ‘insulting patronage’ and ‘degrading loyalty’ is unequivocal.143 However, both caste hierarchies and Hindu dominance were undoubtedly blind spots for Aurobindo, who would counter colonial apologetics by asking in a somewhat limited and limiting way why, if England’s aggressive social divisions were no bar to its enjoyment of liberty, caste divisions should debar Indian freedom.
About halfway through his account, Nevinson, whom Forster described as possessed of the temperament of a soldier and ‘the outlook of the saint’, suddenly poses a question with something of the esoteric about it: ‘But what if all this so-called unrest is only the beginning of another great humanistic reform, another incarnation of that “Lord of the World” whose attribute is equality?’144 This reflection was inspired not by his meeting with Aurobindo, but by a visit that Nevinson had made to the Jagannath temple at Puri. This is, in many ways, the most remarkable chapter in his book, akin perhaps to the ‘Temple’ section of Forster’s novel of India, the narrator at once bewildered and compelled by witnessing unfamiliar religious rituals. Deftly invoking common ground with a Chaucerian allusion, Nevinson observes that late in middle age is when Indian ‘men and women long to go on pilgrimage’, for ‘the field has been sown and reaped, the buffalo fed, the taxes paid, the children tended, the cotton garment daily washed’.145 Nevinson also deliberately undermines the cultural ‘othering’ of the Hindu, this time taking on the fearsome colonial image of ‘our old friend Juggernath, of childhood’s stories and journalistic tags – the God in the Car, before whose bloodstained wheels the benighted heathen were driven by deceiving priests’.146 As against this familiar rendering of a fearsome despotic deity, Nevinson draws out an alternative possibility, that here sits a unique shrine. Influenced perhaps by the Buddha’s egalitarian preaching, Nevinson speculates, ‘the unaltering rule of Juggernath’s worship’ is ‘that before his sight all castes and ranks and riches are equal, and the woman is equal with the man’.147 Inside the temple walls, caste distinctions are abolished as ‘Brahman may eat with sweeper’ and the warrior with the butcher: ‘It is the sacrament of equality, the consecration of mankind.’148 Nevinson suggests that the missionaries who first came up with the story of the abominable Juggernath were incapable, he implies, of understanding a ‘divine passion’ for union with the eternal. A possibly dialectical relationship between equivalence and unfamiliarity, or between commensurability and alterity, also emerges in his reflections on the idols ‘upon which no alien may look’.149 Conceding that it might be too much to identify the main deity’s sister as ‘Liberty’ and the brother as ‘Fraternity’, he insists nonetheless that Jagannath himself ‘has beyond question the attribute of Equality, and it seems possible that it is just this glorious attribute, and no deeper metaphysic reason, which gives his temple its place as the most worshipped fane of India’.150
This curious dialectic is significant not just for the interesting tensions it generates – those, for instance, between ineffable faith and secular ethics, or between untranslatability and comprehension – but because it is clear that such things as liberty and equality are to be found embedded in this most non-European of contexts. Like Blunt, Nevinson does not see ‘humanistic reform’ as the unique provenance of the West.151 He does not romanticize Hindu practices here; indeed, in a striking parallel he notes: ‘Many people worship what most they fall short of, just as in England we struggle to worship Christ, whose character and manner of life differed so entirely from our own.’152 Indian society is deeply unequal, and in that very fact might lie an explanation for the ease with which colonial rule has taken root there. Yet, as he has discovered, Indians also share a ‘longing for equality’.153 In an extraordinary meditation, Nevinson then synthesizes the (Hindu) religious and (Indian) political, neither erasing cultural specificity nor assigning irreducible otherness:
Throughout India we are witnessing the birth of a new national consciousness, and with it comes a revival of dignity, a resolve no longer to take insults lying down, not to lick the hand that strikes, or rub the forehead in the dust before any human being, simply because he wears a helmet and is called white. Like pilgrims bound for the shrine of Juggernath in an ecstasy of devotion, the leaders of India are inspired by that longing for equality which is always springing afresh in human minds. If any one chooses to say that equality is like Juggernath’s Car, crushing everything equally flat, he is welcome to his little jest. But as I saw the white-robed pilgrims passing into the temple, there to partake of equality’s sacrament, I knew that these outward things were but the symbols of an invisible worship, which may renew the face of the Indian people, and save ourselves from a threatening and dishonourable danger.154
The identification here of a human ‘longing for equality’ which renews itself periodically in the face of sclerosis is in telling contrast to his earlier, more familiar suggestion that the British have sown the seeds for their own removal by offering an education in equality. Indians – at least the Hindus (and Buddhists) he has in mind here – may, in fact, have cultural and spiritual resources of their own out of which to develop a philosophy of equality, and may not require tutelage at all. In the final analysis, Nevinson would attribute the ‘unrest’ to multiple causes, including the Partition and Japan’s victory over a great European power, in addition to British influence. Though he would tell a wandering ascetic with whom he sat in meditation in Banaras, ‘Yours is the Order I belong to by nature’, Nevinson never considered himself more than a tourist and a sympathizer of India’s.155 Even so, he was quick to observe when asked by a group of Indians to intervene against Swadeshi strictures that, if he had been an Indian, he ‘would have done my utmost to dissuade my countrymen from buying any foreign goods at all till grievances had been redressed’.156 The outraged British charges against Nevinson of disloyalty are, of course, hardly surprising.
How, then, ar
e we to understand Nevinson’s summative recommendations, which, like Hardie’s, have a distinctly reformist flavour – somewhat at odds with the rest of the text – and certainly speak of a sense of ‘benevolent western influence’?157 Owen suggests that, for Nevinson, ‘as for other British observers, western liberalism, confronting the new Extremist spirit in India, had hit the buffers of its understanding’.158 This is true, but only partially so. What Nevinson did accept, particularly after witnessing the fisticuffs and fractures of the Surat Congress of 1907, in which Moderates and Extremists literally came to blows, is that what had arisen in the country was indeed ‘a different and difficult spirit’.159 Yet he concludes, albeit with negative reasoning: ‘When the very worst that can be said against our rule has been said, the substitution of Russia’s rule for ours would be an incalculable disaster.’160 Offered towards a temporary continuance of rule based largely on negative reasoning, Nevinson’s proposed reforms are also formulated as a corrective to unacceptable British colonial behaviour: ‘Our indifference to the Indian peoples, from whom we are continually sucking so much of our wealth, is universal and invariable.’161 Any changes in metropolitan attitude could be elicited ‘only at long intervals after outbreaks of bloodshed and threatenings of revolt’.162 The Extremist case is echoed in Nevinson’s assertion that pleadings based on ‘constitutional propriety’ and order have had ‘no influence upon the action of the Indian government, and no influence upon English opinion at home’.163 The ‘unrest’ of Swadeshi, by contrast, had ensured that ‘England during 1907 and 1908 has probably paid more attention to India than at any time since the Mutiny’.164 The fact remained, too – and here Nevinson was prescient about Gandhi and Gandhi’s methods – that religion and politics could not be kept separate, for ‘the events of the last few years have given to national politics the place once held by theology’.165 There is little to suggest that Nevinson either disapproved of this turn of affairs or believed it to be a danger to India’s future, but he did certainly suggest that a degree of moderation – that of a Gokhale, for instance – might be the way forward for the present.166 It is as though, having read the writing on the wall, Nevinson’s imagination stops short of envisioning a final break between India and the Empire.167 This is not unlike the situation Conrad, according to Said, found himself in when writing Heart of Darkness; he maintains an ironic and critical distance from the imperial project but ‘does not give us the sense that he could imagine a fully realized alternative to imperialism’ beyond European tutelage.168
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