The British Interlude - Dark and Clownish
Then there was an interlude. It sailed on its dark wings of strangeness steeped in cruelity. It was the raving contact in the history of human civilization. The composition played, therein, was not connected with love and sympathy. It was a blind note in treachery against continuum of Indian civilization.
The evolution of human civilization has been conditioned by difficulties in the environment and the manner of over-coming them. The Scythians, in the early Asiatic history, organized their men, women and children into bands of robbers to fight against the scarcity in their natural resources. This fight, in the 17-18th centuries, was organized by a British people as a clownish commerce which ended in a brutal conquest. They took recourse to the earliest path of material success. But is was not the true path. The Indian mind was stoned to a stuper, as it was aghast at the sight of the poor trader-guests trampling all venerable norms of dharmic behaviour. The Indian mind sunk at the sight of the interlude turned intrusion, an awful behaviour, which followed the path of hungry wolves in fury of success. Europeans ‘discovered’ India during a prosperous and peaceful period of Mughal rule to spread their cultural epidemics of national greed in form of intercine wars in the names of all possible and noble, religious and racial faiths. The interlude assumed a more dangerous posture by the strength in received from the scientific advances. Its shadow darkened almost the entire earth. Practically each home on the shrinking earth dreaded the clap of thunder from the BRITISH RAJ.
India was ‘discovered’ by a tribe of Clives who formed an East India Company. They secured their position through instrumentality of all ravanic vices. They became conquerors. They began to extract the wealth of India on a grand scale. Booty, bribery, and trade embalanced by violence, enriched the tribe. It is noteworthy that the word “loot” is an Indian word which entered into the English language at the time of the interlude. It holds a mirror to their unjust and uncivilized state of existence. The ease with which wealth could be acquired by the ambitious and not too scrupulous and Englishman, drew all sorts of adventurers to India.
Who was the Englishman?
He was not the representative of the European renaissance. He was not the epitome of the victory of rationalism. He was Clive, the prototype of those rambunctious and untutored young Englishman whose tempestuous temperament would most likely have led them to some lock-up in London; but who were, instead, shipped off to the colonies to win fame and fortune. A malcontent, an outsider, a brooding bully who would blow out his own brains for gains be they petty or big. Clive represented, most strongly, the core of the English race which ‘conquered’ India.
And it broke India’s music of continual social arrangement in co-operation since past fifty centuries. The land of the Ganga and Godawari was ransacked and despoiled by fights, intrigues and deceptions. The devastation did not leave any realm of our social life untouched. India’s farms and factories, her temples of worship and learning, her self-government in villages, her simple laws and peaceful administration, all was poisoned, destroyed, disabled.
Those, who would have been locked up in London jails for their behaviour, came and looted the land which respected atithi as God, and locked in their hosts. The interlude showed its face in other disgusting lights. The European renaissance sharpened the appetite of quest. Not unlike white men in uniforms, the hordes of academics invaded India’s treasures in arts and science, mostly hidden. Academics all over Europe dispatched their teams to ‘unearth’ the ancient land of India. The result was not dissimilar to invasions in fields such as commercial, political, diplomatic and military. A loss of identity on India’s part was declared as the sole finding of all discoveries in Indian learning. India lost her identity as per British researches especially.
The British or European researchers did not shiver at the billions; and at the immensities and secrecies of India. They did not bother to pause and appreciate the glad consciousness lighted by love and lived by India even at times of death and destruction. The clownish stance at greatness burdened the whiteman’s view with jaundiced glory and unreal power. The British interlude occasionally appeared in the garb of teacher and leader. And to maintain its sovereignty over the large heart of India it could collect only the weakling known as the class of babus, who adored the new master by total slavery moral and mental. The babu class was the varna sankar of Indian society playing Quizling’s roles in life.
The British interlude was a dance of destruction of Indian civility. The British glorified themselves by erecting some cities with most appalling architecture in either hemisphere. Whatever building they got constructed as lodges for viceroys, governors, or trading partners in state capitals belonged to the darkest period of all architectural history of man. Needless to remind, the same cities dragged along with them the tentacles of squalor. The cities in India built by the British, represented the sordid fringes of Europeanism – slum, poverty, crime and class hat read. The British interlude brought famine and unemployment on parasitic shoulders of the babu class which was devoid of any intrinsic value. Under a condition of semi-starvation, created by the introduction of a cruel tax system and destruction of village-sufficiency, the British made it cheaper to have their wagon of empire pulled by men than beasts. The feudal and barbaric elements that came from England to rule India viewed this land as a vast estate belonging to the East India Company. This view continued ever after the Company handed over its estate of India to the British crown, and was paid very handsome compensations at Indians’ cost. This was done on the basis of Christian honesty unknown in the history of mankind. Indian hospitality was taxed with a compound interest.
The interlude was an intrusion of imperialist culture determined to snap all ties and threads of universal brotherhood and civilized equality. A culture which left and basic source of human strength, called love and honesty, to wither away and to die or to fight the battle unaided. The psychology of the primitive fighting elements, rather than of humanity seeking its completeness through the union, was enacted by this foreign culture with all the fury and fan-fare at its command. A wealth-producing mechanism grew into a vast stature, wherein ‘the sun never set’. A mechanism out of proportion to all other needs of mankind.
The result was that the full reality of man was more and more crushed under its weight. This was a culture which brought in an interminable economic was. A culture which bred jealousy and suspicion among the people and races and religions of the world. The evil days for humanity, the dreaded nuclear and lurking in the horizons of the present, were sowed by the organization of British politics and commerce, which was pompously named as Raj. This bitter sowing was attempted first and foremost on the Indian soil. Clives and Hastings did things in India which Shakerpeares and Miltons would be ashamed to dd. Further, during the perfect organization of power named British imperialism, there remained few crimes it was unable to perpetrate. The Englishman, through this vast organization, turned out to be a phantom left with no twinge of moral responsibility.
The British rule in India was an interlude in tinned advertising of an abstract being with lethal motives. The rulers or governors, totally ignorant of India’s multi-lingual communicative powers, hindered her thousand aspirations from a disdainful distance. They pierced into the very care of our life through their bloodless policies threatening the whole future of Indian people with a perpetual helplessness of of emasculation. Such wholesale act of fearful colonization was conceived through an octopus of abstractions, stretching out its wriggling arms in all directions of human life, and fixing its innumerable suckers into all vitals of existence and reaching out even the far-away future. In this reign of terror the governed were pursued by suspicions resulting in punishments without crime, which left trails of miseries across large bleeding tracts of India’s heart. The least human and spiritual, this organized self-interest called British Raj, aided and abetted by the progress in science, assumed gigantic proportion and power. It caused total imbalance in Man’s moral responsibilities.
India felt the iron grip at the root of her life. The grip that was relentlessly lifeless and monotonous; and that allowed miserly doles from the renaissance in the West to regulate the Indian vitality at zero-point. The portion of education allotted to India could outrage the sense of decency in the great renaissance of the West. The entire land system, which was basically responsible for the glories of Indian civilization, was ruined and a counterfeit was forged to destroy all her art and craft, science and technique. The zamindari system introduced by the British imposed an alien relationship breathing venom and exploitation. The two centuries of the British tutelage represents a longest blind alley in India’s life, leaving narrow paths to progress for the most vibrant and the vast landmass of India. The ‘slavery’ that the British tutelage imposed on India unconsciously drained out the love of freedom born out of the Western renaissance dry. It ruled over the greater part of the earth and denuded it of its self-sustaining life. The result was a day came when the same tutelage became the most terrible of all its burdens, ready to drag it down into the bottom of destruction. When the Raj removed all checks from its paths to make its career easy, it triumphantly rode into its ultimate crash of death.
With every passing day the Raj’s moral brake became slacker, its slippery path of ease and success led to its final doom. But before that happened, the ancient land of India was chained with a rule of law where the education was nearly dry; and military, magisterial, police and spying systems attained an abnormal girth in their waists. The Raj was at India’s service like that tight shoe. It regulated our steps with a closed and coiled system, within which our feet had no liberty to make their own adjustments. When the West marched under its banner or freedom, the Raj forged its iron chains of cruel power that were most relentless and unbreakable that have been manufactured in the whole history of man. The Raj negated the hope of the unexpected, of the freer play of imagination. It was the continual and stupendous dead pressure of this inhuman Raj under which India groaned. The goblin-dread, which engulfed the whole world, commenced with its dark shadow over India. The soul of man trembled at its secret malevolence.
People lived in a perpetual distrust of Raj’s back where it had no eyes. The terror that was the parent of all that had been base in man’s nature and that later rose in its new and more heinous forms called fascism traded on the feebleness of world with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in churches and mock thunders of its civilized bragging. The terror acted against all the precautions of European renaissance, and sent forth its poisonous fluid into the vitals of the rich pastures of Asia – rich in ancient wisdom and social ethics, discipline of industry and self-control. And for all this, the terror, called the Raj, pompously claimed the gratitude for history and all eternity for its exploitation. The machines of war and transportation, under the Raj terror, came into an agreement, for imperial profits, based upon a conspiracy of fear. A global federation of steam-boilers claimed to supply a new soul and a new conscience to man and humanity! This was a great farce enacted in the name of the whiteman’s burden. An endless bull fight of politics ensued. A dead rhythm of the imperial culture – killing the medieval European simplicity and naturalness of man, forgetting lessons in turbulent conflicts for reconciliation between the flesh and the spirit, and tramping upon the mouldings of completeness in moral personality – was the interlude.
The contact between India and England was in reality a clash between two entirely different sets of ideals, cultures and civilizations.
The England of Clives and Hastings at first contact with India was, in the words of William Draper, like a den of highway men. He Says -
“The peasant’s cabin was made of reeds or sticks plastered over with mud. His fire was chimneyless – often made of peat. In the objects and manner of his existence, he was but a step above the industrious beaver who was building his dam in the adjacent stream. There were highway men on the roads, pirates on the rivers, vermin in abundance in the clothing and beds. The common food was peas, vetches, fern roots and even the bark of trees. There was no commerce to put off famine. Man was altogether at the mercy of season. The population – sparse as it was – was perpetually thinned by pestilense and want. Nor was the state of the townsmen better than that of his pillow. If he was in easy circumstances, his clothing was of leather; if poor, a wisp of straw wrapped round his limbs kept off the cold . . . As to mechanic, how was it possible that he could exist where there were no windows of glass, not even of oiled paper, no workshop warmed by a fire! For the poor there was no physician . . . Sanitary provisions there were none!”
On moral conditions of the people in the England of Clives and Hastings, Draper continues -
“The rapidity of its (syphilis) spread, all over England, is a significant illustration of the fearful immorality of the times. If contemporary authors are to be trusted, there was not a class, married or unmarried, clergy or laity, from the Holy Father, Leox, to the beggar by the wayside, free from it . . . Its (England’s) population hardly reached five million . . . It was a system of organized labour . . . But now commerce was beginning to disturb the foundation . . . Men were unsettled by the rumours or realities of immense fortunes rapidly gained in foreign adventure . . . A nation so illiterate that many of its peers in Parliament could neither read nor write . . . To so great an extent had these immoralities gone, that is was openly asserted that there were one hundred thousand women in England made dissolute by the clergy . . . The vilest crime in an ecclesiastic might be commuted for money. . . . London was dirty, illbuilt, without sanitary provisions . . .
“Wild animals roamed here and there . . . During rains the roads were impassable . . . Between places of considerable importance roads were sometimes very little known . . . The principal mode of transport was by pack horses of which passengers often took advantage, shoving themselves always between the packs . . . Social discipline was far from what we call moral . . . The husband whipped his wife . . . A culprit was set in the pillory to be pelted with brickbats . . . Women were fastened by the legs in the stocks at the market-place . . . Hardly any personage died who was not popularly suspected to have been made away with by poison, and indication of the morality generally supposed to prevail among the higher classes . . .”
The trinity of vice shall be complete when we hear Draper on intellectual conditions -
“The University of Oxford had ordered the political works of Buchanan, Miltond and Baxter to be publicly burnt in the court of the schools . . . In administering the law, whether in relation to political or religious offences, there was an incredible atrocity. In London, the crazy old bridge over the Thames was decorated with grinning and mouldering heads of criminals, under an idea that these ghastly spectacles would fortify the common people in their resolve to act according to law. The Parliament (May 8, 1885) passed that whoever preached or heard in a conventicle should be punished with death and the confiscation of his goods . . . Shricking Scottish covenanters were submitted to tortures by crushing their knees flat under the boot; women were tied to stakes on the sea-sands and drowned by the slowly advancing tide because they would not attend Episcopal worship, or branded on their cheeks and then shipped to America . . . The court ladies, even the Queen of England herself, were so utterly forgetful to womanly mercy and common humanity as to join in this infernal traffic.”
The above three quotes from the English historian on social, economic, moral and intellectual debasement of the British race provide all justification or at least reasoning of the way the British disrupted Indian life. They were bound by their civilizational habits to play havoc on the host’s sensibilities. When traders first arrived in the 16th century, they sought India’s textiles. The addition to the English language of terms such as calice, madras, muslin, chintz and khaki is evidence in itself of the importance of this trade. In return, Europe offered nothing Indians wanted except gold and silver. Had it not been for the flood of precious metal coming from America, the drain on Europe’s treasure would have had serious economic consequence. This early trade was economically beneficial to India. But under the shadow of industrial revolution in the 18th century, the British manufactures, through their cunning agents in the East India Company, turned colonies as ready markets for their goods. For this a virtual war on Indian industry, especially on textiles, was waged in which, along with Dacc and Murshidabad, thousand of textile villages and lakhs of working and glass blowers, to name only a few of the craft effected, were uprooted and forced back to the land which was more or less usurped by the newly established zamindary system. Indian were virtually required to buy British product and to raise cash export crops such as cotton, jute, nuts, tea and pepper to pay for the imports. The economic progress of India was halted and reversed during the interlude.
India, in the eighteenth century, was a great manufacturing as well as a great agricultural country. The produce of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asia and of Europe. The East India Company and the British Parliament, following the selfish commercial policy, discouraged Indian manufacturers in the early years of British rule in order to promote rising manufacturers of England. Their fixed policy, pursued during the last decades of the 19th century was to make India subservient to the industries of Great Britain, and to make the Indian people grow raw produce only, in order to supply material for the looms and factories of Great Britain. This policy was pursued with unwavering resolution and with fatal success; orders were sent out to force Indian artisans to work in the company’s factories; commercial residents were legally vested with extensive powers over villages and communities of Indian weavers; prohibitive tariffs excluded Indian silk and cotton goods from England; English goods were admitted into India free of duty or on payment of nominal duty.
To add insult to injury, a half backed colonial education was imposed on India to erase the memory of her past awarenesses in arts and in social living. The British administration, coarsely geared to the enrichment of the Crown and its white subjects, wiped out all traces of goodwill, co-operation, sympathy, aparigrah, honesty and efficienty from the physical realms of India. In legal and judicial realms, the Christian mind, inherited by the British, rekindled its energy to persecute – an energy richly experienced through persecuting the Jews since ages – the owner of the land that is the people of India. The Christian missioneries were flooded into the vast rural side to prey upon the lush pastures of faith and riches in antiquities. But, except for the unaccounted plunder of the gold in the form of Indian art, the Christian mind drew blank on the vast social texture which was too complex to be discerned and attacked by the mind sinning and praying alternatively. India could not be converted into rail roads of Christianity.
In short, the British interlude was a cruel celebration of the culmination of an intrusion stinking with treacherous violence. It was a anti-body in the realm of civilization, which was formed on a historical pattern of rejection of human efforts to good, faithful, and beautiful living in the kingdom of God. The British people had previously threw three golden occasions, to be civilized, to winds. These occasions are as under : (I) At the time of Christ’s birth preachers of Mithraism from Iran who were the first to introduce the idea of morals to the Romans reached the British Isles to instill in its habitants, who led a life of stark backwardness, the difference of good and evil, right and wrong. The Mithra-followers erected temples in various parts of England, whose remnants are to be seen in the British museum. But the low state of mental growth made them unworthy of this healthy civilizing efforts. Needless to mention, Mithraism in Iran owed its origin to the great Vedic conceptual God Mitra. (II) Next came Romans to civilize England. But the only utility they could divine from this distant border of their empire was to ship thousand English boys and girls every year to be sold as slaves in Roman market. (III) The third wave of civilization which touched the shores of England in vain was the preaching of Christianity in or about the 7th century A.D. But the container was too small to accommodate Christ’s unbounded catholicity. Sticking to the prevailing practice of idol-worship, a few superstitious beliefs, and useless sectarian conflicts, the inhabitants of the British Isles learnt little from the noble Jesus.
England was singularly unfortunate in not being profited by the Arab civilizing influence during their domination over Europe from the Black sea to the Atlantic. Europe had never seen better days in the advancement of science, medicine, education, arts and industry. The centres of education throughout Europe were, at that time, vibrant with Arab learning. It was a quirk of destiny that the British Isles remained plunged into ‘darkness’ for five long centuries. In other words, ideas of good and evil, of right and wrong, namely, the ideals of morality, which had been rooted in India for thousand of years, due to Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jain heritages, attracted natural enmity in the British mind when it came into contact with those ideals on Indian soil. The British advent was the invasion of avarice and foul ambition, perjury and forgery.
Willian Howitt talks of the invasion shrouded in the barbarous system of territorial acquisition in the following words -
“The mode by which the East India Company has possessed itself of Hindustan, is the most revolting and unchristian that can possibly be conceived. . . Whenever we talk of British faith and integrity, the other nations may well point to India in derisive scorn. . . The system, which for more than a century was steadly at work to strip the native princes of their dominions and that too under that most sacred pleas of right and expediency, is a system of torture more exquisite than regal and spiritual tyranny every before discovered, such as the world has nothing similar to show.”
The British philosopher, Herbert Spencer did ciphered the moral standing of the Raj in India five or six years before the first war of Indian independence in 1857, and reached a conclusion worth recording -
“The Anglo-Indians of the last century whom Burke described as ‘birds of prey and passage to India’ showed themselves only a shade less cruel than their prototypes of Peru and Mexico. Imagine, how black must have been their deeds when even the Directors of the Company admitted that the vast fortunes acquired in the inland traded must have been obtained by the most tyrannical and oppressive conduct that was ever known in any age or country. . . The English compelled the natives to buy or sell, a just what rates they pleased, on pain of flogging or confinement. Describing a journey of his, Warren Hastings says: Most of the petty towns and serais were deserted at our approach. . . Always some muddled stream was at hand as a pretext for official wolves. . . Down to our own day (1851), are continued the grievous salt monopoly and the pitiless taxation that wring from the poor ryots nearly half the produce of the soil. Down to our own day, the police authorities in league with wealthy scamps, allow the machinery of the law to be used for the purposes of taxation. And down to our own day, it is common with the people in the interior to run into the woods at the sight of a European.”
The British Raj in India was trained, from the very start, in mighty vices. The great aim and object of the servants of the Company and the Crown, from the high civil and military functionaries downwards, was to squeeze as large as possible a fortune out of India as quickly as might be, and turn their back upon it for ever, so soon as that object had been achieved. In perfect truth had it been said that the subjugate race found the little finger of the Raj thicker than lions of the worst and most dissolute of their native kings and princes. The British Raj symbolized absolute power far outgrowing its moral strength and appeared like an exaggerated giraffe whose head was suddenly placed miles away from the rest of its body. To borrow poet Tagore’s visualization, “this greedy head with its huge dental organization, had been munching all the topmost foliage of the world.” But the nourishment was too late in reaching its digestive organs; and its heart, if it had any, suffered from want of blood. The enormity of its material success diverted all its attention toward self-congratulation on its false bulk. Its optimism went on basing the calculations of its imperial fortune upon the indefinite lengthening of its railways to conquer and subjugate. It had no fear of the chasm, which grew wider between its riches and the hungry humanity. The logic of the British Raj never knew that under the bottom of its endless wealth and pleasure, a thing called nature was hatching earthquakes to restore the balance of the moral world. Equally, if never knew that a day will come when the gaping gulf will draw into its bottom the structure of global lust and power. With dead will and numb thoughts, and automatic movements the British Raj alighted in India as an abstraction of destructive forces, brutal and mechanical, having no relation to human truth. It dehumanized commerce and politics of India. Knowledge and skill that were once servants of man, became man himself, causing an aesthetic revulsion in Indian social order with virulent self-seeking, and several other moral perversions as deadly after-effects. The British raj was a prolonged infliction of barrenness of moral insensibility upon a large tract of India’s living nature. It was an antibody in the womb of Indian civilization.
The British Raj in India was ‘unbelievably evil’. The vast panorama of fertility and creativity ignited man’s energy in the ‘invading’ Aryans to produce a glorious culture in assimilation. Mention is made about two other invasions before Alexander knocked at our door. A courageous Assyrian Empress Semiranis crossed Baluchistan in 800 B.C. to conquer India. But she had to run back for her life from the Sindhu river with twenty survivors. The second invasion was by Kuru (Cyrus) of Iran who is placed among the greatest conquerors of Asia. The builder of vast Iranian empire, Kuru had to flee back, again from the Sindhu river, left with seven survivors. The fate of the matchless conqueror Alexander is well known. The assaults of Shakas and Huns resulted either in their settling down as friends of assimilative spirit of India, or in their fleeing back as enemies. The Huns, whose terror trampled Europe and caused the Chinese emperors to erect 2000 mile long wall to avert their wrath, were driven out by Rajyavardhan without much effort.
But in British intrusion was hidden as invisible invasion. They came as vendors and settled down as conquerors. The trust and faith in India’s nature presented a suitable condition for the British to intrigue and assume the form of an empire. It were the uncivilized Gauls and the Vandals who shattered the highly civilized Romans to pieces, and for ever. The Tatars and the Mughals devastated the glory of Baghdad and Iran. The most prosperous and articulate Greeks were destroyed by semi-nomads of Central Asia. The camouflaging of political intrigues and objectives under the cover of trade was never practiced by India throughout her long existence. Trade in India has always been synonym of goodwill. This conquest by commerce was the ‘unbelievable evil’. Never before India had any reason to distrust the pledged word of any foreigner. Here, treaties and royal proclamations always carried sanctity. And Asiatic monarchs who came in contact with India always reciprocated the virtue. But it was not so with the British. While impeaching Warren Hastings before the British Parliament, Edmund Burke declared, “There is not a single treaty entered into by the British with any one in India, which they (the British) did not subsequently violate.”
The British Raj in India was violation of all human values on an unprecedented scale. From the beginning it sought to nip at the vitals. At the time of the contact, India was not only self-sufficient. The vast majority of goods displayed and offered for sale in the world arena belonged to Indian origin. Till the onset of the 19th century, Indian ships were found to be more beautiful, stronger and more durable. Earlier in Mughal days, majority of the ships that plied between China and Japan on one side and South Africa on the other used to be built in Indian harbours, particularly in Gujarat. From Mexico in the far west to England in the west Indian manufacture sailing on Indian ships was exported to all the then civilized part of the earth. Countries as widely placed as Iran, Turkey, Syria, Arabia, Ethiopia and many others eagerly awaited the welcome arrival of the fabulous silk from Gujarat. Travellers of the period furnish evidence to the fact that the consumption of cloth in India was extraordinarily high. Almost all the people of upper and middle strata used to put on silk.
According to Abul Fazl, Emperor Akbar sent for silk artisans from distant China and some other countries. And with their help the Emperor established big silk centres financed by the throne at Lahore, Agra, Fatehpur, Ahmedabad and other places. The prosperity of India at the time of the British intrusion is attested by the most impressive presences of cities like Agra, Kannauj, Patna, Ujjain, Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Surat, Vijaynagar, Golkunda, Bijapur, Multan, Dacca, Murshidabad, Lahore, Delhi and Allahabad – all the them densely populated and beautiful, all of them bigger and wealthier than contemporary London or Paris. In urban awareness India was miles ahead. Regular and periodical census operation was unknown in Europe of those days. India had already introduced gathering estimate of the population through counting houses and their inhabitants. In Gaur, the then capital of Bengal, there lived 1,200,000 people – a number which is not much less than that of London in 1930. From Surat to Lahore to Agra to Gaur the European travelers found amazing density of villages and towns, happy and prosperous. Till the onset of the 19th century, representatives of the East India Company wrote, time and again, to their masters in England that “textile made in England could find no market in India as they could not compare with those made in India.”
Before the British advent in this country contacts with other civilizations, through trade and commerce and religion, proved to be rich exercise in cultural extensions for partners. This time India trembled under the impact of dark and clownish interlude. But ruinous as it was, the British Raj provoked the divine resilience in satyagraha. The regimentation of commercial Christian power was broken through a profoundly modest subtility called non-violence and truth. The Whiteman was soon found out that he was burdened with evil, and not with the good “whose sky is clear, which is devoid of heat, which hides a sun in its bosom, protects the thirsty, keeps wells of cool waters replenished, and invites men and women to fill their jars with life.”
This was in Asia where these tender sympathies were blossoming into Christianity. This was Asia which produced Gandhi, the fore-runner of the great awakening. He was preceded by a successions of waves of sanity against the dark interlude in the person of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ramakrishna, Tilak, Vivekanand and Dayanand. Non-violence was reborn with a vigour unknown hitherto. Once more in India “the heaven was brought on earth and the earth was transformed into heaven.” A religious ferver, seeped in freedom of body and soul, shook a resurgent India. She announced a peerless opposition to the chaos hatched by British intellect. Her ferver saw beyond galloping frontiers of science and created several workshops to precess the union of matter and mind in order to enable life to exist in dignity. Brhamo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Ramkrishna Mission, Namdhari, Satnami, Mujahideen, Raidasi, Tukarami, and a host of other forces joined in the great experiment of freedom. The dominant Christian drive for conversion armed with the power and authority of the Crown collapsed at the gate of non-co-operation erected by aparigraha. Simultaneously, a thunder was awake in 1857. There was to be the unity between the “Bread and the Lotus.”