Routledge Revivals: The Rise and Growth of the Congress in India (1938)

C.F. Andrews, Girija Mookerjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315405483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1938, this book aims to provide a history of the rise and growth of the Indian National Congress for the general reader, covering the period from its foundation in 1885 until the beginning of the non-co-operation movement in 1920. It was intended to extend the official history of the Congress by Pattabhi Sitarammayya by making it more accessible to western readers while also giving more space to the religious and social forces in Indian history during the nineteenth century which led to the birth of the congress. It also looks at forerunner organisations like The British Indian Association before examining the history and evolution of the congress in several phases.

Part One
India’s Religious Renaissance

The Great Reform Leaders of the Nineteenth Century

Chapter I
The Religious Background

THOSE who have sought to describe the history of India’s political development have been used to take the year 1885, when the National Congress was founded, as their starting-point and in a sense they have been correct. But when they have gone on to regard the years preceding that date as politically barren, they have surely failed to take account of one immensely important factor. They have not realized the very intimate connection in India between the political field and the sphere of religious development.

For in India more than any other country we have always to notice those movements which spring directly out of the religious spirit of the people. One writer has even said that Indians are “incorrigibly religious,” and there is some truth underlying this extreme expression. For more than anywhere else in the world, politics and religion in India have become mingled together in such a way that they can hardly be separated, however much we may try to do so.

In this, as well as many other aspects, the India of countless villages and hamlets, scattered far and wide over the land, reminds us very forcibly indeed of the Middle Ages in Europe, where the same religious background is met with leading on to great political results. For in those mediaeval times, when the industrial city life had not yet been established and the country life with its handicrafts was still the centre of civilization and culture, this religious mind prevailed. We find great leaders of the Church, like Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, offering guidance in the affairs of State to emperors and kings. So mighty was the power of their spirit among the multitudes that even the royal leaders dare not disobey.

What has been thus stated in the widest terms of India as a whole is perhaps most true of all concerning Hindu India, though in vitally important respects it is correct also concerning Islam. For in Islam, as enunciated by the Prophet, religion actually rules the State. We can see this same tendency at work even in comparatively recent times, for in the north the Sikh Khalsa has shown us how the Indian mind works towards political and social freedom in and through a religious awakening. The history of the Arya Samaj, which will be referred to later, tells the same story, as does the extremely interesting development of the Radha Soami sect at Dayal Bagh.

This noticeable fact of Indian history has not ceased to influence political events even after the foundation of the National Congress. It would be true to say that Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi have each in turn through their own religious inspiration awakened a love for the Motherland such as no purely political leader has ever been able to evoke. Their influence on the rise and growth of the Congress itself, as we shall see later, has been paramount. Yet Swami Vivekananda remained a monk to the end and never entered the political sphere, and Mahatma Gandhi has often declared openly in public that he only became a national and political leader in order to carry out his faith in God in the midst of a political age.

The most convenient period from which to trace back the modern movement in the religious life of India, which led on to the Indian National Congress development, would be the very remarkable years, from 1828 to 1833, when Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the greatest religious and social reformer of Bengal, had reached the height of his spiritual powers. In every respect he towered head and shoulders above his contemporaries, both European and Indian alike, in the land of his birth.

He also saw, with unique insight, what was likely to be the course of British power in India, and how its peculiar qualities could best be directed towards the interests both of his own country and Great Britain. By every modern historian of India he is rightly claimed as not only the clearest-sighted religious leader of his own age, but also as its most advanced political thinker.

In this connection it is important to notice that the recently published official history of the Indian National Congress corroborates this point of view.¹ The author goes back to this date of Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s supreme influence as the starting-point of the whole national movement of Modern India. He rightly calls the Raja “the prophet of Indian nationalism and the father of Modern India.” Thompson and Garratt, in their recently published history, The Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India, take a similar view and give to Raja Ram Mohan Roy the same place of unique importance as the originator of the remarkable rapprochement of two alien races, India and Britain, whereby the Eastern and Western cultures have become intermingled.

In the Congress History, published as a jubilee memorial, the well-known story is repeated at some length how the Raja, on his voyage to England round the Cape of Good Hope, insisted, even though he was in feeble health at the time, on going on board a French ship, which was anchored in Capetown Harbour. He wished to pay homage from India, his own country, to the great French nation, which had raised aloft throughout the world the banner of revolution against all forms of slavery, and had taken as its watchword, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

While making this effort, he slipped and badly injured his leg. Indeed, he remained lame for the remainder of his life. But he insisted on performing this symbolic act in order to show, as an Indian political leader, his profound sympathy with the cause of freedom that was dearer to him than life itself.

It is also recorded of him that on another occasion, when he was very greatly depressed at the power of the reactionary forces at work in Great Britain, he determined if the cause of freedom was defeated to retire both from Britain and from British India and renounce his citizenship, so that he could become naturalized and live in some country where the cause of political liberty still flourished. So far did he put this cause above every other earthly blessing.

This fundamental faith in civil liberty characterized the whole life of Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Herein he was truly the prophet of Indian nationalism, for such a sovereign faith in liberal principles has been the most marked feature of Indian political life ever since. It has led not merely to a persistent struggle to become free from the foreign control, but also to the initiation of internal reforms. For the present movement towards the emancipation of the depressed and submerged classes owes its strongest incentive to this passion for liberty which Raja Ram Mohan Roy created.

The awakening of this new spirit in Bengal at the beginning of the nineteenth century was extended in wider and wider circles till it reached every part of India. It can be historically proved that later movements, such as the Arya Samaj and the Ram-krishna Mission, though quite independent in origin, were greatly helped in their forward progress owing to the pathway which had already been prepared by the wide scope of the Brahma Samaj and its founder Raja Ram Mohan Roy.¹

On the British side, the same date, 1828–35, has its own significance. For it was the period of the Reform Movement, which produced at last a threefold result:—

(i) The abolition of slavery within the British Dominions.

(ii) The Indian Charter of racial and religious equality.

(iii) The new democratic Parliament in Great Britain.

When Raja Ram Mohan Roy reached England he found that the reactionary powers had been defeated and that all these three reforms were nearly accomplished. The sight of what he found already on its way gave him new hope for the future. The long preparation which had led up to these three simultaneous measures being put forward, one after the other, and embodied in Acts of Parliament, gave a strong assurance to those who remained in India, even after the Raja’s untimely death, that the liberal policy of Great Britain towards that country would be carried through to the end.

These remarkable years proved to be the period of laying foundations, whereon the whole of the later political structure of India was to be built. While in Great Britain the political side of the reforms was noticeable from the very first, in India for fifty years the religious aspect was most apparent.

If this religious background, which intimately touched the masses and not the intellectuals only, had not been firmly established by arduous years of incessant labour; if great personalities had not arisen, one after the other, proclaiming a religious message to the whole of India, the National Congress movement on an all-India basis would never have become possible. It would not have reached the masses; nor would it have been vigorous enough to withstand all the shocks of division, rivalry, and party strife, which are inevitable at the beginning of a great political advance. It was only when the movement reached the village people, through the medium of the supreme personality of Mahatma Gandhi, that its strength became irresistible and its range of action wide enough to cover the whole of India.

For this reason, among others, it is vitally necessary to deal in some detail with the main religious reforms which have arisen in India during the nineteenth century, and to explain how they have always been associated in public memory with commanding moral and spiritual personalities. These religious movements have one remarkable characteristic. Although they started from a single province and a local area, they reached out in wider and wider circles in order to touch, if possible, every part of India. Thus they made much easier the realization, when the right time came, of an all-India political organization such as the Congress.

One more fact needs explanation before taking in detail these wide movements of religion which characterized the nineteenth century. The starting-point was Bengal. It was a natural and almost inevitable mode of advance, because Bengal was the first part of modern India to come into closest contact with the West, as the focus and centre of British rule. Furthermore, the intellectual atmosphere of Bengal, early in the nineteenth century, which encouraged the fullest freedom of thought, made the order of progress from that province to other parts of India natural. Bengal had peculiar gifts whereby the assimilation of Western thought became comparatively simple. For such a process demands high imaginative power as well as intellectual capacity, and both of these qualities the cultured people of Bengal possessed in full measure. But while this starting-point is a matter of history, the part played by the other provinces of India as the century advanced was no less important. This will be made clear later.

In earlier centuries there had already been close contact between India and the West. For instance, in the days when the military and naval power of Portugal was established at Goa, men of remarkable genius had come out to India. The names of Vasco da Gama, Albuquerque, Camoens, and Francis Xavier have attained a notable place in world history. But no creative period in Indian thought and life followed from this contact with the Portuguese, even at the height of their literary fame. There was no real blending of cultures.

But when Warren Hastings, Sir William Jones, H. H. Wilson, and others settled in Bengal, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and Carey, Hare, and Duff followed in the early nineteenth, they were able to carry over to the West much of their experience of the East; and Ram Mohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore, and others brought from the West much of European thought in return. The earliest instance of this interchange of thought is Warren Hastings’s well-known appreciation of the Gita. The time was ripe for such a cultural approach, and a fertilizing soil had been found.

Europe thus received during this germinative period precious seed thoughts from the East, especially concerning the inner life of man. Asia, in its turn, learnt something of the advance of modern science in Europe.

One of the principal reasons for this remarkable renaissance in Bengal at the beginning of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly the French Revolution. The intellectual and spiritual change which was passing over Europe had its repercussions in India. The social and political ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before the French Revolution had a certain uniformity about them, both in the West and East. But those new conceptions of social justice which the Revolution of 1789–93 brought with it were startlingly fresh and strange. They created a different attitude of mind, just as the ideology of Soviet Russia is attracting world-wide attention to-day. While the rest of India was still only slightly conscious of this new movement of human thought which had come to the West, Bengal was acutely awake. The hard mould of centuries had been broken and the new ideas of human progress found in the minds of the gifted Bengali race their most congenial soil.

Notes

1 The History of the Indian National Congress, by Dr. Pattabhi Sitarammayya, published in Madras, 1936. This is the authoritative book written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Congress. It has been revised by different Congress leaders.

1 For the Brahma Samaj, see page 22.

NOTE.—Considerable latitude concerning the spelling of Indian names is observed by authors whom we have quoted, and it is difficult to maintain strict uniformity. Thus, Muhammadan, Mahomedan, and Mohamedan have all found their way into English texts, together with Moslem and Muslim. In the same manner Ghosh and Ghose, Dayanand and Dayananda are almost equally common.

Chapter II
The Brahma Samaj

DURING the earlier days of British rule in India the two most important groups within Bengali Hindu society were the Vaishnavas and Saivas, who worshipped Vishnu and Siva as the one supreme lord of creation. They were both equally orthodox in their rigid observance of the traditional laws of Hindu conduct which were embodied in the caste system. They both recognized all the lesser divinities of the Hindu pantheon. Each group claimed to follow closely the Vedanta philosophy, interpreting it according to its own tradition.

But there was little clarity of vision. For Hinduism itself was at this time in a pitifully moribund condition. The subjugation of the Hindus by the Muslims, which had now lasted for many centuries, seemed to have destroyed initiative. Vast multitudes in East Bengal had become Muslims, though the old Hindu background of thought and life remained. Thus, historically, when the East India Company began to consolidate its power the Hindu community had almost reached the point of exhaustion.

Furthermore, Islam itself, owing in a great measure to the large numbers that had come under its sway, had become rigid and lifeless in its turn. There was neither any active movement of religious thought nor any outstanding spiritual leader. Like Hinduism, Islam had lost its old religious fervour. It was content with keeping its own ceremonial traditions.

The question, which has been already stated, needs to be put in another form: Why did the religious awakening in Bengal begin in the early nineteenth century? Why did the European influence before that date produce such very feeble results? If it is accepted that a renaissance in Indian thought and life was produced by contact with Western ideas, why did it not begin at an earlier date?

Farquhar, in his book on Modern Religious Movements in India, suggests that the two forces which quickened the spirit of Bengal into new life were the impact of British rule and the intellectual stimulus caused by the Christian missions. The latter of these two forces was not felt to any great extent before the nineteenth century was well on its way. A third factor was the great work of the European Oriental scholars, whose publication of noble Sanskrit texts created a wide interest both in India and the West. Farquhar states that when Carey settled down at Serampore, the more far-sighted Englishmen, both in the Mission’s and in the Company’s service, realized the need of close co-operation in order to accelerate the progress of Indian education. Thus the further study of the East and the new experience of the West went on side by side.

One of the most interesting and romantic incidents of these eventful days was the arrival in Paris, under arrest, of an Englishman named Hamilton, in 1803. During his forced detention he taught Sanskrit to several French scholars and also to Friedrich Schlegel. The latter was deeply impressed by the Sanskrit literature, which was thus opened out to him for the first time. He translated some texts into German. It was a period when patient research was being made in the science of language. These translations made a great sensation in academic circles. Afterwards a number of European scholars continued to take an increasingly sympathetic interest in India and Indian affairs, creating thereby an enthusiasm for Indian culture and religion quite unknown before.

These were the years (1800–28) which shaped and formed the political and the religious ideas of the founder of the Brahma Samaj—Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833). Born of an old Brahmin family, he was educated at Patna, in Behar, at that time a well-known centre of Islamic studies. It has been said of him that throughout his life the Raja remained profoundly influenced by his early education, both in his habits and tastes. On his return home from Patna at the age of fifteen, he found that the difference of opinion with his father on the question of idolatry had become so great that he was unable to live with him any longer. He therefore left his ancestral home and, after wandering about in India and even visiting Tibet, settled down in Benares in order to study Sanskrit and the Hindu scriptures. In his early youth he was said to have had a great dislike for the English, but after a favourable experience in the service of the East India Company, and close contact with worthy Englishmen like Mr. Digby, he began to alter his opinion. As a man of affairs, he gradually saw that as the British rule had come to stay it was right to make terms with it and to utilize the contact with the West for the good of the Indian people.

On the death of his father in 1803 he moved to Murshidabad, in Bengal, and published in 1804 a pamphlet in Persian called the Tuhfat-ul-Muahhidin or A Gift to the Deists, expressing very strong views against idolatry and polytheism. Soon after his retirement from the service of the Company in 1814 he settled down in Calcutta and established in 1815 a society called the “Atmiya Sabha” or the Society of Friends. He also came into contact with the Serampore missionaries, and took up the study of Hebrew and Greek in order to understand the Christian scriptures. In 1820 he published a notable pamphlet called The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• Part One INDIA’S RELIGIOUS RENAISSANCE
• Part Two BEFORE AND AFTER THE OUT-BREAK OF 1857
• Part Three FORERUNNERS OF THE CONGRESS
• Part Four THE FIRST CONGRESS OF 1885
• Part Five THE EARLY DAYS
• Part Six THE SECOND PHASE
• Part Seven THE THIRD PHASE
• Part Eight WAR AND THE CONGRESS
• Part Nine THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
• APPENDIX
• INDEX