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Chapter Four
The Liberal Reformer
Gopal Krishna Gokhale
Jotirao Phule’s Satyashodak Samaj was in part a reaction to the founding of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in 1870. Founded by the scholar, jurist and reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade, this organization stood, as its name implied, for the interests of all people, ‘sarvajan’. However, its leadership was almost exclusively from the Brahmin caste. Ranade was a Brahmin, as was his remarkable protégé, Gopal Krishna Gokhale.
Gokhale was born in 1866 in a village in coastal Maharashtra, the son of a police sub-inspector. He learnt his letters in a rural school, before proceeding to the inland town of Kolhapur, where he completed his matriculation. He was then admitted to the Deccan College in Poona, from where he shifted to Bombay’s Elphinstone College. On being awarded his BA, he began to coach students, to pay back the loans his family had incurred to send him to college.
In 1884, two brilliant young Brahmin reformers, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, founded the Deccan Education Society. The following year, Gokhale joined one of the society’s schools as a teacher. In 1889, Ranade appointed him editor of the quarterly journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. In the same year he attended his first session of the Indian National Congress. The next year Gokhale joined the faculty of Fergusson College in Poona, where he worked for the next two decades, teaching English literature, mathematics and political economy. By now, he had acquired a taste for British writers and thinkers, among them Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill.
By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Gokhale was a regular fixture at the annual meetings of the Congress. At the Calcutta session in 1890, for example, he spoke on the inequities of the salt tax. In 1897, having just turned thirty, Gokhale made the first of several trips to London, where he usually stayed at the National Liberal Club. On this visit, he testified to a Royal Commission on poverty and famines in his homeland. Meanwhile, in a speech in the seaside town of Hastings, he compared the relationship between Britain and India to that between a giant and a dwarf, where ‘everything went to the giant and what was left went to the dwarf’.
Gokhale was now a rising star in Indian politics. He was elected to the Bombay Legislative Council in 1899, and to its all-India counterpart, the Imperial Council, two years later. Between 1902 and 1906 he simultaneously served as the president of the Poona municipality. All this while, he continued taking classes in Fergusson College.
As befitting a teacher, Gokhale’s speeches were rich in facts and subtle in argument. Favourite subjects included the excessive tax burden on the peasantry and the need for more and better schools to provide free and compulsory education for all regardless of caste, religion, or gender. He demanded more seats for Indians in the Imperial Council and asked also that the annual budget of the Government of India be open for scrutiny and amendment in the light of criticism.
Meanwhile, through his work for the Congress, Gokhale had acquainted himself with different parts of India. His outlook was further broadened by a visit to South Africa, to study the condition of the Indian diaspora in that country.
In 1905 Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society, whose members dedicated themselves to serving the nation-in-the-making. These ‘Servants of India’ were required to ‘work for the advancement of all [Indians], regardless of caste or creed’. He visited the United Kingdom again the same year. When he spoke at Cambridge, a young John Maynard Keynes told an Indian friend that Gokhale ‘has feeling, but feeling guided and controlled by thought, and there is nothing in him which reminds us of the usual type of political agitators’. The year 1905 ended for Gokhale with him presiding in December over the Congress meeting in Banaras.
As a leader of the Congress, Gokhale tried hard to reach out to the Muslims. He was wholly free of sectarian prejudice himself. However, he was regarded as excessively pro-British by militants such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak. His was the classical liberal dilemma—too moderate for the radicals, yet too extreme for the Establishment. One viceroy, Lord Hardinge, called Gokhale ‘the most dangerous enemy of British rule in this country’.
In 1914 Gokhale turned down the offer of knighthood. He died the following year, not yet fifty. He had already done a great deal for his country, then still a colony, and shown his compatriots many new directions. Summing up his life’s work, his biographer B.R. Nanda remarks that Gokhale ‘hated foreign rule, but he did not blame all the ills from which India suffered on the British. He wanted her to shake off the shackles of social and economic backwardness as well as of political subjection. He wanted to turn the encounter with the Raj into an opportunity for building a secular, modern and democratic society’.
Elevating the Depressed Classes
Our first excerpt is from a speech made by Gokhale to a meeting of the Social Conference in Dharwad in 1903, where he focused on the plight of the lowest castes, also known as the Depressed Classes.1
Mr. President and Gentlemen, the proposition which has been entrusted to me runs thus:-
That this Conference hold that the present degraded condition of the low castes is in itself and from the national point of view unsatisfactory, and is of opinion that every well-wisher of the country should consider it his duty to do all he can to raise their moral and social condition by trying to rouse self-respect in these classes and placing facilities for education and employment within their reach.
Gentlemen, I hope I am not given to the use of unnecessarily strong language and yet I must say that this resolution is not as strongly worded as it should have been. The condition of the low castes—it is painful to call them low castes—is not only unsatisfactory as this resolution says—it is so deeply deplorable that it constitutes a grave blot on our social arrangements; and, further, the attitude of our educated men towards this class is profoundly painful and humiliating. I do not propose to deal with this subject as an antiquarian; I only want to make a few general observations from the standpoint of justice, humanity, and national self-interest. I think all fair-minded persons will have to admit that it is absolutely monstrous that a class of human beings, with bodies similar to our own, with brains that can think and with hearts that can feel, should be perpetually condemned to a low life of utter wretchedness, servitude and mental and moral degradation, and that permanent barriers should be placed in their way so that it should be impossible for them ever to overcome them and improve their lot. This is deeply revolting to our sense of justice. I believe one has only to put oneself mentally into their place to realize how grievous this injustice is. We may touch a cat, we may touch a dog, we may touch any other animal, but the touch of these human beings is pollution! And so complete is now the mental degradation of these people that they themselves see nothing in such treatment to resent, that they acquiesce in it as though nothing better than that was their due.
I remember a speech delivered seven or eight years ago by the late Mr. Ranade in Bombay, under the auspices of the Hindu Union Club. That was a time when public feeling ran high in India on the subject of the treatment which our people were receiving in South Africa. Our friend, Mr. Gandhi, had come here on a brief visit from South Africa and he was telling us how our people were treated in Natal and Cape Colony and the Transvaal—how they were not allowed to walk on foot-paths or travel in first-class carriages on the railway, how they were not admitted into hotels and so forth. Public feeling, in consequence, was deeply stirred, and we all felt that it was a mockery that we should be called British subjects, when we were treated like this in Great Britain’s colonies. Mr. Ranade felt this just as keenly as any one else. He had been a never-failing adviser of Mr. Gandhi, and had carried on a regular correspondence with him. But it was Mr. Ranade’s peculiar greatness that he always utilized occasions of excitement to give a proper turn to the national mind and cultivate its sense of proportion. And so, when every one was expressing himself in indignant terms about the treatment which our countrymen were receiving in South Afr
ica, Mr. Ranade came forward to ask if we had no sins of our own to answer for in that direction. I do not exactly remember the title of his address. I think it was ‘Turn the search-light inwards,’ or some such thing. But I remember that it was a great speech—one of the greatest that I have ever been privileged to hear. He began in characteristic fashion, expressing deep sympathy with the Indians in South Africa in the struggle they were manfully carrying on. He rejoiced that the people of India had awakened to a sense of the position of their countrymen abroad, and he felt convinced that this awakening was a sign of the fact that the dead bones in the valley were once again becoming instinct with life. But he proceeded to ask:- Was this sympathy with the oppressed and down-trodden Indians to be confined to those of our countrymen only who had gone out of India? Or was it to be general and to be extended to all cases where there was oppression and injustice? It was easy, he said, to denounce foreigners, but those who did so were bound in common fairness to look into themselves and see if they were absolutely blameless in the matter. He then described the manner in which members of low caste were treated by our own community in different parts of India. It was a description, which filled the audience with feelings of deep shame and pain and indignation. And Mr. Ranade very justly asked whether it was for those who tolerated such disgraceful oppression and injustice in their own country to indulge in all that denunciation of the people of South Africa. This question, therefore, is in the first place a question of sheer justice.
Next, as I have already said, it is a question of humanity. It is sometimes urged that if we have our castes, the people in the West have their classes, and after all, there is not much difference between the two. A little reflection will, however, show that the analogy is quite fallacious. The classes of the West are a perfectly elastic institution, and not rigid or cast-iron like our castes. Mr. Chamberlain, who is the most masterful personage in the British Empire to-day,2 was at one time a shoemaker and then a screw-maker. Of course, he did not make shoes himself, but that was the trade by which he made money. Mr. Chamberlain to-day dines with Royalty, and mixes with the highest in the land on terms of absolute equality. Will a shoemaker ever be able to rise in India in the social scale in a similar fashion, no matter how gifted by nature he might be? A great writer has said that castes are eminently useful for the preservation of society, but that they are utterly unsuited for purposes of progress. And this I think is perfectly true. If you want to stand where you were a thousand years ago, the system of castes need not be modified in any material degree. If, however, you want to emerge out of the slough in which you have long remained sunk, it will not do for you to insist on a rigid adherence to caste. Modern civilization has accepted greater equality for all as its watchword, as against privilege and exclusiveness, which were the root-ideas of the old world. And the larger humanity of these days requires that we should acknowledge its claims by seeking the amelioration of the helpless condition of our down-trodden countrymen.
Finally, gentlemen, this is a question of National Self-interest. How can we possibly realize our national aspirations, how can our country ever hope to take her place among the nations of the world, if we allow large numbers of our countrymen to remain sunk in ignorance, barbarism, and degradation? Unless these men are gradually raised to a higher level, morally and intellectually, how can they possibly understand our thoughts or share our hopes or co-operate with us in our efforts? Can you not realize that so far as the work of national elevation is concerned, the energy, which these classes might be expected to represent, is simply unavailable to us? I understand that that great thinker and observer—Swami Vivekananda—held this view very strongly. I think that there is not much hope for us as a nation unless the help of all classes, including those that are known as low castes, is forthcoming for the work that lies before us. Moreover, is it, I may ask, consistent with our own self-respect that these men should be kept out of our houses and shut out from all social intercourse as long as they remain within the pale of Hinduism, whereas the moment they put on a coat and a hat and a pair of trousers and call themselves Christians, we are prepared to shake hands with them and look upon them as quite respectable? No sensible man will say that this is a satisfactory state of things. Of course, no one expects that these classes will be lifted up at once morally and intellectually to a position of equality with their more-favoured countrymen.
This work is bound to be slow and can only be achieved by strenuous exertions for giving them education and finding for them honourable employment in life. And, gentlemen, it seems to me that, in the present state of India, no work can be higher or holier than this. I think if there is one question of social reform more than another that should stir the enthusiasm of our educated young men and inspire them with an unselfish purpose, it is this question of the degraded condition of our low castes. Cannot a few men—five per cent, four per cent, three, two, even one per cent—of the hundreds and hundreds of graduates that the University turns out every year, take it upon themselves to dedicate their lives to this sacred work of the elevation of low castes? My appeal is not to the old or the middle-aged—the grooves of their lives are fixed—but I think I may well address such an appeal to the young members of our community—to those who have not yet decided upon their future course and who entertain the noble aspiration of devoting to a worthy cause the education which they have received. What the country needs most at the present moment is a spirit of self-sacrifice on the part of our educated young men, and they may take it from me that they cannot spend their lives in a better cause than raising the moral and intellectual level of these unhappy low castes and promoting their general well-being.