Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  There is no empire lost by a free grant of concessions by the rulers to the ruled. History does not record any such event. Empires are lost by luxury, by being too much bureaucratic or over-confident or from other reasons. But an empire has never come to an end by the rulers conceding power to the ruled.

  You got the Queen’s proclamation.8 But it was obtained without a Congress. They wanted to pacify you, as you had grown too turbulent, and you got that proclamation without a demand, without Congress and without constitutional agitation. That is a very good and generous declaration indeed. The Queen was very anxious that it should be couched in such terms as would create hopes in you. Now, all that anxiety did not proceed from constitutional agitation. It was after 1858 that constitutional agitation began. The result was, the proclamation remained a dead letter, because you could not get it enforced, the conditions under which it was made having disappeared. A promise was made but you proved too weak to have it enforced. That is the reason why it was not enforced. The bureaucracy got the upper hand and they established a system of administration in which it made it impossible for the proclamation to be acted up to … Is Mr. Morley going to fulfil it? The explanation of the proclamation is not the question. The question is what will compel him to fulfil it. This is the point at issue. I admit that we must ask; but we must ask with the consciousness that the demand cannot be refused. There is great difference between asking and petitioning … Your industries are ruined utterly, ruined by foreign rule; your wealth is going out of the country and you are reduced to the lowest level which no human being can occupy. In this state of things, is there any other remedy by which you can help yourself? The remedy is not petitioning but boycott. We say prepare your forces, organise your power, and then go to work so that they cannot refuse you what you demand. A story in Mahabharata tells that Sri Krishna was sent to effect a compromise, but the Pandavas and Kauravas were both organizing their forces to meet the contingency of failure of a compromise. This is politics. Are you prepared in this way to fight if your demand is refused? If you are, be sure you will not be refused; but if you are not, nothing can be more certain than that your demand will be refused, and perhaps, for ever. We are not armed, and there is no necessity for arms either. We have a stronger weapon, a political weapon, in boycott. We have perceived one fact, that the whole of this administration, which is carried on by a handful of Englishmen, is carried on with our assistance. We are all in subordinate service. The whole Government is carried on with our assistance and they try to keep us in ignorance of our power of co-operation between ourselves by which that which is in our own hands at present can be claimed by us and administered by us. The point is to have the entire control in our hands. I want to have the key of my house, and not merely one stranger turned out of it. Self-Government is our goal; we want a control over our administrative machinery. We don’t want to become clerks and willing instruments of our own oppression in the hands of an alien Government, and that Government is ruling over us not by its innate strength but by keeping us in ignorance and blindness to the perception of this fact … Every Englishman knows that they are a mere handful in this country and it is the business of every one of them to befool you in believing that you are weak and they are strong. This is politics. We have been deceived by such policy so long. What the new party wants you to do is to realize the fact that your future rests entirely in your own hands. If you mean to be free, you can be free; if you do not mean to be free, you will fall and be for ever fallen. So many of you need not like arms; but if you have not the power of active resistance, have you not the power of self-denial and self-abstinence in such a way as not to assist this foreign Government to rule over you? This is boycott and this is what is meant when we say, boycott is a political weapon. We shall not give them assistance to collect revenue and keep [the] peace. We shall not assist them in carrying on the administration of justice. We shall have our own courts, and when time comes we shall not pay taxes. Can you do that by your united efforts? If you can, you are free from to-morrow. Some gentlemen who spoke this evening referred to half bread as against the whole bread. I say I want the whole bread and that immediately. But if I cannot get the whole, don’t think that I have no patience.

  I will take the half they give me and then try for the remainder. This is the line of thought and action in which you must train yourself. We have not raised this cry from a mere impulse. It is a reasoned impulse. Try to understand that reason and try to strengthen that impulse by your logical convictions. I do not ask you to blindly follow us. Think over the whole problem for yourselves. If you accept our advice, we feel sure, we can achieve our salvation thereby. This is the advice of the new party. Perhaps we have not obtained a full recognition of our principles. Old prejudices die very hard. Neither of us wanted to wreck the Congress, so we compromised, and were satisfied that our principles were recognised, though only to a certain extent. That does not mean that we have accepted the whole situation. We may have a step in advance next year, so that within a few years our principles will be recognised, and recognised to such an extent that the generations who come after us may consider us Moderates. This is the way in which a nation progresses. This is the way national sentiment progresses, and this is the lesson you have to learn from the struggle now going on. This is a lesson of progress, a lesson of helping yourself as much as possible, and if you really perceive the force of it, if you are convinced by these arguments, then and then only is it possible for you to effect your salvation from the alien rule under which you labour at this moment …

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  The Subaltern Feminist

  Tarabai Shinde

  In the prologue to this book, I observed that it would attract complaints from admirers of those I had left out. Some of the exclusions will be controversial; so, perhaps, shall be some inclusions. This chapter features an individual who was obscure in her time and remains so in ours. But her writing, if not her life, compels our serious attention. Her claim to be a ‘maker of modern India’ rests on the literary quality and political resonance of the only book she published. This speaks across the decades and centuries and remains one of the most powerful pieces of social criticism ever written by an Indian.

  We know little about the life and upbringing of Tarabai Shinde. Born in the 1830s, she lived into the early years of the twentieth century. She is known principally through a tract she published in 1882 comparing the situation of men and women in the Maharashtra, and India, of her time. The pamphlet may have been provoked by the case of a young Brahmin widow who became pregnant and then killed—or was forced to kill—the baby. The widow was arrested and sentenced to be hanged for the crime (on appeal, the sentence was modified to transportation for life).

  Tarabai was born in a Maratha family in the town of Buldana, in the Berar region of the present-day state of Maharashtra. Her family owned some land and her father worked as a senior clerk in the office of the deputy commissioner of Buldana. He was apparently also a member, although one does not know how active a member, in Jotirao Phule’s Satyashodak Samaj. With no girls’ schools in the area, Tarabai would have learnt her letters at home. She read and wrote in Marathi, but may also have known some English. She was married when quite young; however, since her husband moved into her parents’ home, Tarabai was perhaps less confined than she might otherwise have been.

  Unlike some other parts of India, Maharashtra had a long tradition of women who were active in public life. As princesses and queens, women had advised their royal kinsmen and sometimes even ruled in place of a male king who was not yet an adult. Among the leading Bhakti poets of the medieval period were some women. The daughters of Brahmins were often learned and literate. By the late nineteenth century, a handful of Brahmin women had become doctors and teachers in Maharashtra. These pioneers called for the emancipation of women from oppression within the household. In 1877 a Marathi periodical for women had been started, catering chiefly to wives and daughters of Bra
hmin families. To find learning among Maratha girls, however, was less common. Even more unusual was the direct language in which Tarabai Shinde questioned the presumed superiority of men. Through the nineteenth century, men and women had called for widow remarriage, for the education of young girls and for the abolition of practices such as sati. These efforts, sincere and well-intentioned though they undoubtedly were, could all be categorized under the label of ‘women’s uplift’. What Tarabai Shinde called for, however, was altogether different and more radical—namely, for equality or parity between men and women. No one before her had so directly challenged the social arrangements and cultural prejudices which underpinned patriarchy and male domination.

  The translator of Tarabai’s text, the British historian Rosalind O’Hanlon, also happens to be the foremost authority on the life and work of Jotirao Phule. O’Hanlon notes that while the two may or may not have met, Phule certainly knew and admired Tarabai’s writings. Their approaches were complementary: ‘For Phule, brahmanic religion oppressed lower caste people, because it had been devised by brahmans; for Tarabai, it oppressed women because it had been devised by men.’ Phule referred to Tarabai as chiranjivini, or dear daughter, and commended her tract to his colleagues so that they could understand and suitably respond to her charges of the systematic ill-treatment of women by men.

  Like Phule, Tarabai was a brilliant stylist in Marathi, using sarcasm and satire to puncture the pretensions of the powerful. Her book is compellingly readable in English; one wonders how much better it must be in the original.

  A Comparison of Men and Women

  The one work that Tarabai Shinde published was of fifty-two pages. It was printed in Poona in 1882 and priced at nine annas, or a little over half a rupee. The excerpts below speak for themselves. But we must at least flag the feminist interpretation of the Hindu epics, whereby renouncers and gods are seen as lustful predators always in search of pretty women.1

  … A father and mother make you the gift of their daughter once and for all, they pour the water over your hands and that’s the end of it. Then she leaves and she’s lost to them. Oh, the pity of it—from the day of her birth, the father and mother have followed their natural feelings and raised her up from child to adult with praise and love, each as best they could. See how hard they’ve worked to get her a place that’s good and happy, to please her new family of in-laws in the hope they’ll love her and treat her kindly. If good luck’s on her side, everything’s fine. But what if it isn’t? All her life long, her mother and father have cherished her, dear as life itself. What must it be like for her, whose father and mother never gave her the lightest slap, when she feels the sharp blows of your fist on her back? What must her parents feel? If I wrote down the raw truth it would fill up a book as big as the Ramayana. And when you do treat a woman well, it’s usually only just for show. You’re like someone who wears a wonderful bit of red and gold silk brocade on his top half, and a tattered old blanket below. You can even cover her with gold ornaments and put her in a house set with jewels. But if you’re not kind and loving, she’ll still feel nothing but misery—which you can’t just describe, you have to experience it.

  Women in this world are forever putting up with all sorts of hard toil, difficulty, hunger and thirst, harassment and beatings—and all they ask is a kindly word from you. It’s true, you go out and earn the money. But she has to see to the running of the house, has to do exactly as you tell her, perpetually obedient, kept in ignorance, toiling at the most exhausting work till her body’s pleasure breaks into little pieces, her bones waste away and her blood turns to water—her eyes always on your face. You’ve only got to glance at her approvingly and flash your teeth in a smile, and she feels it’s a joy divine! This encourages her to take up the burden of labour again, to learn and do even more kinds of work. Look at it from what you know already. There’s a saying of yours, ‘A husband’s praise is like nectar and ambrosia’. Let’s say she brings some beautiful piece of sewing to show you, or serves up a nicely prepared little delicacy, and you tell her ‘Well now, look at this! Did you really make it yourself? Look now, don’t work so hard! You’ll give yourself backache; you might hurt your eyes. We don’t want the children to suffer for it, and we must keep you out of the hands of the doctor! You just take it easy now’. Or if you’re with your friends and you say, ‘You know, I’m so lucky, I don’t have to worry about anything at home. Let’s just go off to my place and do something there. It’d be hard to find a home as good as ours’.

  As soon as she hears these words of love and praise, she forgets all the pain she’s suffered since childhood, all the times that you’ve kicked and punched and sworn at her. With this praise from her lord and master, she tells herself she’s the luckiest person on earth. Her heart overflows with affection. So there she is, eagerly looking to you for the smallest sign of love—and you still go on calling her all sorts of insulting names. There’s no denying it—this is what her fate really is …

  So the first point … you’re stronger than her when it comes to brains. Is there anything you haven’t done with those great brains of yours, a single monstrous deed in the world you haven’t committed? What strength have women got next to you and your huge power? They’ve got nothing at all.

  In the second place, it’s true women are whirled about by many whims! But it’s because they’re uneducated that every kind of whim makes its home in their minds. Even so, theirs only go as far as their own families. But if we look at your minds, all the whims there go round so fast we can hardly see them. Your minds are constantly churned up with all sorts of cunning schemes, to do with things native and foreign, imaginary and practical. Today you might say, perhaps we should trick some moneylender and fleece him of a thousand rupees. We could pass information to a particular jagirdar and take him for four or five hundred. I know, you’ll say, today let’s tell the sahib such and such, and get that case decided on some chap’s behalf. Another day, and it’s ‘Maybe we should bring along that false title-deed for copying and entry’. But do you ever find women scheming, ‘That woman, you know, she acts so superior—you’d think she had to peel onions with her nose! We ought to set a trap for the little snob and get rid of her for good!’ Whims like this never even come into women’s minds. All women on this earth don’t shine as brightly as the light of the sun, of course not. Nor are they all purer than Ganges water inside and out. But if you added up all the women in the world, you’d find only ten in a hundred with minds going round and round like yours, when there isn’t a single one of you that’s free from it.

  Thirdly, then: that women are the very abode of debauchery. You think your kind are better, do you? If you weighed it up, the scales would sink down a hundred, a hundred and a half times heavier on your side.

  In the fourth place, the idea that women are a very city of thoughtlessness. But does thoughtlessness only come from women’s hands? And you, who are mean and faithless, who make promises to others then cut their throats behind a mask of kindness—are you never thoughtless? Oh yes, you’re absolute temples of thought, let’s congratulate you! You’re meant to be so wonderfully learned and thoughtful, but you’ve actually committed acts of thoughtlessness like we’ve never seen before, and so you carry on every day. Yet you call yourselves such great thinkers—so I wonder what we should call you?

  Women are ignorant, just like female buffaloes in a pen. They may not be able to read or write, but does that mean God never gave them any intelligence at all? They may be thoughtless, but they’re still much better than you. You men are all very clever, it’s true. But you just go and look in one of our prisons—you’ll find it so stuffed full of your countrymen you hardly put your foot on the ground. Oh yes, they’re all very clever there, aren’t they? One’s there for making counterfeit notes, another for taking bribes. Another for running off with someone else’s wife, another for taking part in a rebellion, another for poisoning, another for treason, another for giving false evidence, another for se
tting up as a raja and destroying the people, yet another for doing a murder. Of course, it’s these great works of thought that make the government offer you a room so reverently in its palatial prisons! What women do things like these? How many prisons are filled with women? For every two or three thousands of you, you won’t find even a hundred women. If we ask ourselves what’s the worst thoughtlessness women can be guilty of, it would be adultery … But whoever caused it should get the blame. When a woman gets into adultery, who is it who takes the first steps by planting bad desires in her mind? Her or you? However shameless a woman might be, she’ll never force her arms round a man’s neck, that’s for certain. Because what’s the greatest happiness in the world for a woman? In the first place, it’s a husband who suits her and really loves her. If he and she are of one mind, she can be ever so poor, live in a hut short of food and clothes, put up with all sorts of suffering and trouble, go off and live in the jungle—but she’ll still only have eyes for one man and regard all her trials as happiness. Left to herself a woman would never turn to adultery …