Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  Austrian policy was largely in the hands of a vain and foolish minister who was bent on war. The aged Emperor Francis Joseph (who had been on the Austrian throne since 1848) was induced to agree, and a half-promise of help from Germany was construed to mean a full assurance. As a matter of fact, apart from Austria probably none of the other great Powers was eager for war just then. Germany, with all her readiness and pugnacity, was not keen, and Kaiser Wilhelm II even tried in a halfhearted way to prevent it. England and France were not keen on war. The Russian Government meant the Tsar, a weak and foolish person, surrounded by knaves and fools of his own choice, and swayed by them hither and thither. Yet in the hands of this man lay the fate of millions. He himself was on the whole averse to the war, but his advisers frightened him with the consequences of delay and got him to agree to the mobilization of the army. This “mobilization” meant the calling up of the troops for active service, and in a vast country like Russia, this process took time. Fear of a German attack perhaps hurried Russian mobilization. News of this mobilization, which took place on July 30, frightened Germany, and she demanded that Russia should stop it. But there was no stopping the huge war machine now. Two days later, on August 1, Germany mobilized and declared war on Russia and France, and almost immediately vast German armies started invading Belgium to go to France that way, as it was easier. Poor Belgium had not harmed Germany, but when nations fight for life and death they care little for such trifles or for promises made. The German Government had asked Belgium’s permission to send its army through Belgium; such permission was naturally and indignantly refused.

  A great outcry arose in England and elsewhere on account of this violation of Belgian neutrality, and England made this the basis of declaring war herself against Germany. As a matter of fact England’s choice had been made long ago, and the question of Belgium came as a convenient excuse. It now appears that even the French army had prepared plans in the pre-war years for taking their armies across Belgium to attack Germany, should this be considered necessary. Anyhow, England tried to pose as a great defender of right and truth and a champion of small nations, as against Germany, who was said to have treated her solemn promises and treaties as just “scraps of paper”. At midnight on August 4, England declared war against Germany, but she had taken the precaution of sending her army—the British Expeditionary Force— across the Channel secretly a day earlier to prevent any mishap. So that while the world thought that the question of England joining or not still hung in the balance, British troops were already on the Continent.

  Austria, Russia, Germany, France, England, were all involved in the war now, and of course little Serbia also, who was partly the immediate cause of this outbreak. What of Italy, the ally of Germany and Austria? Italy held aloof, Italy watched to see on which side the advantage lay, Italy bargained, and ultimately, six months later, Italy definitely joined the French-English-Russian side against her old allies.

  So the first days of August 1914 saw the gathering and the marching of the armies of Europe. What were these armies? In the old days armies consisted of a number of professional soldiers. They were permanent armies. The French Revolution, however, made a great difference. When the Revolution was in danger from foreign attack, the ordinary citizens were enrolled and trained in large numbers. From that time onwards there was a tendency in Europe to replace the professional voluntary armies of limited numbers by conscript armies—that is, armies in which all the able-bodied men of the country were forced to serve. Thus this universal military service of the able-bodied men was a child of the French Revolution. It spread all over the Continent, where every young man for two years or more had to receive military training in camp and later was bound to serve when called upon to do so. Thus an army on active war service meant practically the whole of the male youth of the nation. This was so in France, Germany, Austria, and Russia, and mobilization in these countries meant the calling up of these young men from their homes in distant towns and villages. In England there was no universal service of this kind when the war began. Relying on her powerful navy, she kept a relatively small permanent and voluntary army. During the war, however, she fell into line with the other countries and introduced conscription, or compulsory military service.

  This universal military service meant that the whole nation was in arms. The orders of mobilization affected every town, every village, every family. In the greater part of Europe, life suddenly stood still in those early days of August, and young men left millions of homes never to return. Everywhere there was a marching and a tramping, and cheers for the troops, and tremendous displays of patriotic fervour, and a tightening of the heart-strings, and also a certain light-heartedness, for the horrors of the years to come were little realized then.

  This passionate patriotism swept everybody away. The socialists, who had talked so loudly of internationalism, the Marxists, who had called on the workers of the world to unite against the common enemy capitalism, were themselves swept off their feet and joined this capitalists’ war as fervent patriots. Some few held their ground, but they were despised and cursed and often punished. Most people went mad with hatred of the enemy. While English and German workers killed each other, the learned men and scientists and professors of both countries, as well as of other warring countries, cursed each other, and believed the most horrible stories about each other.

  So with the coming of the war ended the epoch of the nineteenth century. The majestic and calmly flowing river of Western civilization was suddenly swallowed up in the whirlpool of war. The old world was gone for ever. Something new emerged from that whirlpool more than four years afterwards.

  147

  India on the Eve of the War

  March 29, 1933

  It is a long time since I wrote to you about India. I feel tempted to come back to this subject and to tell you how India fared on the eve of the war period. I have decided to give in to the temptation.

  In several long letters we have already examined some aspects of Indian life and of British rule in India during the nineteenth century. The dominant feature of this period appears to be the strengthening of the British hold on India and the accompanying exploitation of the country. India was held down by a triple army of occupation—military, civil, and commercial. The British military forces, and the Indian mercenary army under British officers, were obvious enough as an alien army of occupation. But an even more powerful hold was that of the civil service, an irresponsible and highly centralized bureaucracy; and the third army, the commercial one, was supported by these two, and was the most dangerous of all, as most of the exploitation was done by this, or on its behalf, and its ways of exploiting the country were not so obvious as those of the other two. Indeed, for a long time, and to some extent even now, eminent Indians objected far more to the first two, and did not seem to attach the same importance to the third.

  One of the consistent aims of British policy in India was to create vested interests which, being of their own making, would rely upon them and become their supports in India. In this way the feudal princes were strengthened and the big zamindar and taluqdar class created, and even social conservatism encouraged in the name of religious noninterference. All these vested interests were themselves interested in the exploitation of the country, and indeed could exist only because of this exploitation. The biggest vested interest created in India was that of British capital.

  A statement made by an English statesman, Lord Salisbury, who was Secretary of State for India, has often been quoted, and, as it is illuminating, I shall give it to you here. He said in 1875:

  As India must be bled, the lancet should be directed to the parts where the blood is congested, or at least is sufficient, not to those which are already feeble from want of it.

  The British occupation of India and the policy they pursued here produced many results, some of which were not welcome to the British. But even individuals can seldom control all the results of their actions, much less can nations. Often
enough among the results of certain activities are new forces which oppose those very activities, and fight them, and overcome them. Imperialism produces nationalism; capitalism produces large aggregations of working men in factories, who unite and combat the capitalist owners. Government repression meant to stifle a movement and suppress a people actually results often in strengthening and steeling them, and thus preparing them for final victory.

  We have seen that British industrial policy in India led to increasing ruralization—that is, more and more people, having no other occupations, drifted back from the towns to the villages. The burden on the land grew, and the holdings of the peasantry—that is, the area of their farms or fields—grew ever smaller. Most of these holdings became “uneconomic”, which means that they were not big enough to give the cultivator the minimum income for even the bare necessities of life. But he had no alternative; he could only carry on, usually getting more and more into debt. The land policy of the British Government made matters worse, especially in the taluqdari and big zamindari areas. Both in these areas and in the areas where peasant proprietorship prevailed, peasants were evicted from their holdings for non-payment of revenue to government or rent to the zamindar. As a result of this, and because of the continual pressure of newcomers for land, a large class of landless labourers grew up in the rural areas, and there were, as I have told you, many dreadful famines.

  This large dispossessed class was hungry for land to cultivate, but there was not enough land to go round. In the zamindari areas the landlords took advantage of this demand by raising rents. Some tenancy laws made to protect the tenant prohibited the sudden raising of rents beyond a certain percentage. But these were got over in a variety of ways and all manner of illegal dues were charged. In an Oudh taluqdari estate I was told once of over fifty different kinds of illegal dues! The chief of these was nazrana, a kind of premium which is paid by the tenant right at the beginning. How can the poor tenants make these various payments? They can only do so by borrowing from the bania, the village banker. It is folly to borrow when there is no prospect of or ability to pay back. But what is the poor peasant to do? He sees no hope anywhere; at any cost he wants land to till, hoping against hope that something will turn up. The result is that often enough in spite of his borrowings he cannot meet the demands of the landlord, and he is ejected from his holding, and again joins the class of landless labourers.

  Both the peasant proprietor and the tenant, as well as many a landless labourer, become victims of the bania. They can never get rid of the debt. Whenever they earn a little they pay, but the interest swallows this up and the old debt remains. There are very few checks on the bania fleecing them. In effect they become bound down to him as serfs. The poor tenant is in a way doubly a serf—the zamindar’s and the bania’s.

  Obviously this kind of thing cannot continue for very long. A time will come when the peasants are wholly unable to meet any of the demands made upon them, and the bania refuses to advance more money, and the zamindar also is hard hit. It is a system which on the face of it has elements of decay and instability. The recent agrarian troubles we have had all over the country would seem to point out that the system is now cracking up and cannot long survive.

  I am afraid I have been repeating in this letter what I have said a trifle differently perhaps in a previous letter. But I wish you to appreciate that India means these millions of unhappy agriculturists, and not a handful of middle-class folk who fill the picture.

  The existence of a large dispossessed class of landless labourers made the starting of big factories easy. Such factories can only be run if there are enough people (indeed more than enough) who are prepared to work for wages. The man who has got a bit of land does not want to leave it. Large numbers of landless unemployed are therefore necessary for the factory system, and the more there are, the easier it is for the factory-owners to beat down wages and control them.

  Just about this time, as I think I have told you already, a new middle class gradually arose in India and accumulated some capital for investment. So that as the money was there and the labour was there, the result was factories. But most of the capital invested in India was foreign (British) capital. These factories were not encouraged by the British Government. They went contrary to its policy of keeping India a purely agricultural country, providing England with raw materials and consuming England’s manufactured goods. But the conditions, which I have pointed out above, were such that big machine production had to begin in India, and the British Government could not easily stop it. So factories grew in spite of the government’s disapproval. One of the ways of showing this disapproval was a tax on machinery entering India, another was the Cotton Excise duty, a tax actually on what Indian cotton mills produced.

  The greatest of the early Indian industrialists was Jamshedji Nasarwanji Tata. He started many industries; the biggest of these was the Tata Iron and Steel Co. at Sakchi in Behar. This was started in 1907, and it began to function in 1912. The iron industry is one of the “basic” industries, as they are called. So much depends on iron nowadays that a country without an iron industry is largely dependent on others. The Tata iron-works are a huge affair. The village of Sakchi has now become the city of Jamshedpur, and the railway station a little way off is called Tatanagar. Iron-works are especially valuable in war-time, as they can produce munitions of war. It was fortunate for the British Government in India that the Tata works were in existence when the World War began.

  Labour conditions in Indian factories were very bad. They resembled the conditions in English factories of the early nineteenth century. The wages were low because of the large numbers of unemployed landless people, and the hours of work were very long. In 1911 the first general Indian Factory Act was passed. Even this Act fixed a twelve-hour day for men, and six hours for children.

  These factories did not swallow up all the landless labourers. Large numbers went to the tea and other plantations in Assam and other parts of India. The conditions under which they served in these plantations made them, for the time they were there, serfs of their employers.

  Over 2,000,000 poverty-stricken Indian workers emigrated to foreign countries. Most of them went to the plantations of Ceylon and Malay. Many also went to the islands of Mauritius (in the Indian Ocean, off Madagascar), Trinidad (just north of South America), and Fiji (near Australia); and to South Africa, East Africa, and British Guiana (in South America). To many of these places they went as “indentured” workers, which meant practically that they were serfs. The “indenture” was the document which contained the contract made with these workers, and under which they were the slaves of their employers. Many horrible accounts of the indenture system reached India, especially from Fiji, so that there was an agitation here and the system was abolished.

  So much for the peasantry, labour, and the emigrants. These were the poor, silent, and long-suffering masses of India. The really vocal class was the new middle class, which was practically a child of the British connection, but which nonetheless began criticizing it. It grew, and with it grew the national movement which, you will remember, came to a head in 1907-8, when a mass movement shook Bengal and the National Congress split up into two factions—the Extremists and the Moderates. The British followed their usual policy of crushing the advanced group and trying to win over the moderate group with some minor reforms. At this time also a new factor appeared on the scene— the political claims for separate and special treatment of the Muslims as a minority. It is well known now that then the government encouraged these demands, in order to create a division among Indians, and thus check the growth of nationalism.

  For the moment the British Government succeeded in its policy. Lokamanya Tilak was in prison and his party suppressed; the Moderates had cordially welcomed some reforms in the administration (called the Minto-Morley reforms from the names of the Viceroy and the Secretary of State at the time), which gave no power to the Indians. A little later the annulment of the Partition of Bengal a
ppeased Bengali sentiment. The political movement of 1907 and onwards became again the spare-time hobby of armchair people. So that in 1914, when the war came, there was little active political life in the country. The National Congress, representing the Moderates only, met once a year and passed some academic resolutions, and did nothing else. Nationalism was at a low ebb.

  Apart from the political field, there had been other reactions from contact with the West. The religious ideas of the new middle classes (but not of the masses) were influenced, and new movements arose like the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj, and the caste system began to lose its rigidity. There was a cultural awakening also, especially in Bengal. Bengali writers made the Bengali language the richest of India’s modern languages, and Bengal produced one of the greatest of our countrymen of this age, the poet Rabindra Nath Tagore, who is happily still with us. Bengal also produced great men of science: Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose and Sir Prafulla Chandra Ray. Two other great Indian scientists whose names I might mention here are Ramanujam and Sir Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman. India was thus excelling in science, the very thing which had been the foundation of Europe’s greatness.

  One other name I might also mention here. It is of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a poet of genius in Urdu, and especially Persian. He has written some beautiful poetry of nationalism. Unhappily he left poetry in his later years and devoted himself to other work.

  While India was politically dormant in the pre-war years, a far country saw a gallant and a unique struggle for India’s honour. This was South Africa, where large numbers of Indian labourers and some merchants had emigrated. They were humiliated and ill-treated in a host of ways, for racial arrogance reigned supreme there. It so happened that a young Indian barrister was taken to South Africa to appear in a law case. He saw the condition of his fellow-countrymen, and he was humiliated and distressed by it. He resolved to do his best to help them. For many years he laboured quietly, giving up his profession and his belongings and devoting himself entirely to the cause he had espoused. This man was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Today every child in India knows him and loves him, but then he was little known outside South Africa. Suddenly his name flashed across to India, and people talked of him and of his brave fight with surprise and admiration and pride. The South African Government had tried to humiliate the Indian residents there still more, and under Gandhi’s leadership they had refused to submit. This was strange enough, that a community of poor, down-trodden, ignorant workers and a group of petty merchants, far from their home country, should take up this brave attitude. What was stranger still was the method they had adopted, for as a political weapon this was a novel one in the world’s history. We have heard of it often enough since. It was Gandhi’s satyagraha, which means holding on to truth. It is sometimes called passive resistance, but that is not a correct translation, for it is active enough. It is not non-resistance merely, though ahimsa or non-violence is an essential part of it. Gandhi startled India and South Africa with this non-violent warfare, and people in India learnt with a thrill of pride and joy of the thousands of our countrymen and women who went willingly to gaol in South Africa. In our hearts we were ashamed of our subjection and our impotence in our own country, and this instance of a brave challenge on behalf of our own people increased our own self-respect. Suddenly India became politically awake on this issue, and money poured into South Africa. The fight was stopped when Gandhiji and the South African Government came to terms. Although at the time it was an undoubted victory for the Indian cause, many Indian disabilities have continued, and the old agreement, it is said, has not been kept by the South African Government. The question of Indians overseas is still with us, and it will remain with us till India is free. How can Indians have honour elsewhere when they have not got it in their own country? And how can we help them much so long as we have not succeeded in helping ourselves to freedom in our own country?