Gandhi, Nehru and Modern India

Elizabeth Mauchline Roberts

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In tracing the development of India from British colony to self-governing independent republic, this book, first published in 1974, combines examples of what this has meant to individual Indians, whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, with an outline of India's history from the end of the nineteenth century to the death of Nehru in 1964. It i

1
Indian background

Introduction

This book is an account of twentieth-century India. It describes India’s struggle for independence from British rule and the achievement of that independence in 1947 with the accompanying partition of India. It examines some of the political, social and economic problems facing India and the possible solutions to these problems. No book about these topics could be complete without an account of the lives and work of the two men who have done so much to fashion contemporary India: Gandhi and Nehru.

India is a land of enormous diversity and complexity. It is a very large country (the seventh largest in the world), having an area of 1 138 814 square miles (which is about twenty times the size of England and Wales). It is 2000 miles from the north to the south of India and about 1800 miles from east to west at its widest point.

The races of India

The visitor to India notices how different from each other the Indian people are. They wear a great variety of costumes. Hindu women (see page 6) wear a sari, Muslim women usually wear trousers and a tunic, or they might wear a burkha if they are in purdah (see page 10). This is an all-enveloping garment from head to toe with only two eye holes. Men wear tight or baggy trousers (we have taken the words jodhpurs and pyjamas from Indian words), or a kind of draped skirt of any length called a dhoti. With any of these they can wear a long upper garment like a night shirt, or a tight-fitting coat reaching to the knees, or just nothing at all. Many men of course wear western clothes.

There is a great variety of races in India. Many Indians especially in the northern and central areas are descended from the Aryan invaders who came to India from Asia from about 1 500 BC onwards. Their descendants have paler skins than southern Indians and also tend to be taller. The Aryans conquered and drove the Dravid¡ans, the original inhabitants of India, into the south.

In the remote areas of India there are some tribes numbering about 30 million people who live in Stone Age conditions. Some are Aborigine descendants of the first inhabitants of India. One primitive group is the Uralis of Kerala, who hunt with bows and arrows and who live in tree tops. In the north-east there are many Mongoloid people with yellow skins and slanting eyes.

Indians are even less united linguistically than they are racially. There are fifteen main languages and at least 850 different dialects and subsidiary languages of which 225 are distinct languages. All these different languages belong to four distinct groups. The northern languages are derived from the ancient language Sanskrit. In this group the most important is Hindi, India’s official language and spoken by nearly 50 per cent of the population. Then there are

1 This village schoolmaster is wearing a dhoti and his wife is wearing a sari

the southern languages, the languages of the north-east, and a small group of Aborigine languages.

If four Indians speaking a language from each of these four groups met together and each spoke only his own language, they would be as mutually incomprehensible as a Japanese, a Russian, an Arab and an Englishman speaking together.

The religions of India

The religion of the great majority of Indians is Hinduism. It developed in a long period from about 1 500 bc to 500 bc. It did not develop from the teachings of one prophet but gradually evolved out of Indian life.

Hinduism is a very flexible religion and does not have the rigid beliefs of, for example, Christianity. The basic belief of Hindus is the oneness of creation. God is everywhere, in everything and in everyone. The devout Hindu’s aim is to achieve mystical union with God. But the Hindu also believes that there are many ways of achieving union with God and therefore different religions are but different ways of reaching the same destination. This belief makes Hindus tolerant both of other religions and of the greatest diversity of belief in Hinduism itself. Some Hindus worship one God, others believe that there is one God but that he has many forms and that each has a separate name and identity.

Hindus believe in the transmigration of souls. That is, a person’s soul survives the death of his body and is reborn into another body. If a man or a woman has lived virtuously, he or she will be born again into a better life. If he has led a bad life he will be reborn into a lower caste. Those who continue to be reborn into higher and higher castes will eventually achieve union with God and then cease to be reborn.

This belief has resulted in two very important basic elements in Hindu society. Firstly, Hindus have concentrated on preparing themselves for the next world. They carry out endless religious rituals, spending time in prayer and contemplation and giving alms to the poor in preference to attempting to alter the material conditions of this world. This is one of the primary reasons for India’s historical and present poverty.

Secondly, this belief has cemented the caste system into Hinduism. The caste into which one is born is regarded as either a reward or a punishment for one’s actions in a previous life. A caste is a group of families who can intermarry and eat together without being polluted. Members of a caste are allowed to follow only a certain number of occupations, and in some sub-castes members follow only one occupation.

Originally there were four castes. At the top were the Brahmins or priests, who studied and knew the rightful path in life. Secondly there were the Ksatriyas or warriors, whose duty was to fight and rule. Thirdly there were the Va¡syas, merchants and craftsmen. Fourthly there were the Sudras or peasants. Gradually these castes were divided and subdivided. In some cases the sub-castes have become ridiculous: there is a caste for the potters who use a big wheel and one for those using a small wheel, with total segregation between the two castes.

2 Delhi, 1946 an Untouchable woman washes her feet in a filthy gutter

At the bottom of the caste system are the 50 million Untouchables. Over the centuries they have been expected to do all the menial ‘unclean’ tasks such as cleaning the streets, handling dead animals, sewage disposal and laundry work. Untouchables have had to live apart from other people as their touch and even their shadow were thought to pollute Hindus of other castes. They were forbidden to enter Hindu temples, draw water from wells or even walk on the roads. (Their position has been altered in recent years: see pages 61 and 80.

The ritual rules of Hinduism in general and of each caste in particular affect every aspect of a man’s life: what work he does, whom he marries, what he eats and what he eats off, when he washes and how he washes, when and how his hair is cut and where he will travel. The number of choices open to a Hindu are infinitely fewer than those a western European can make.

A westerner may well wonder why so many Indians have accepted the caste system. Each caste has or had a Panchayat or court to punish caste members who break the caste rules. An offender might be sentenced to a fine or a ritual bath to cleanse him from his pollution. But in serious cases a man and his family could be sentenced to expulsion from the caste. This was a terrible punishment. Gandhi’s niece never forgave him for crossing the seas, a ‘crime’ for which the whole family was expelled from the caste. Thus the niece could not marry anyone in the caste or visit her friends’ houses or eat with them. She died in bitter, lonely isolation.

There have been various attempts to reform and reinterpret Hinduism when it has become unintelligible to ordinary people. Two men in particular attempted to reform Hinduism and instead founded two new religions. Mahavira (540—467 BC) founded Jainism. There are about 2 million Jains in India now. Buddha (567—487 bc) founded Buddhism. There are about 4 million Buddhists practising today.

Islam

The Muslim invaders who first started arriving in the eighth century and who established the first Muslim Empire in the twelfth century introduced their religion into India. There are now very large numbers of Muslims in western and northern India (an estimated 50 million in 1964) and in Pakistan. There are also millions in Bangladesh. These are mostly the decendants of Indian Hindus who were converted by force to Islam. Muslim beliefs are very different from those of Hindus. They believe in one God, Allah, and despise all idols and idol worship (which they believe Hindus practise). They are fierce about their religion and believe in converting others to their faith. They believe in the equality of all men (but not women !) and therefore fiercely denounce the caste system. They are meat eaters while the majority of Hindus are vegetarians, and certainly those who do eat meat would never eat the flesh of their sacred cows.

One of the great differences in social attitudes between Muslims and Hindus is their attitude to women. Hindus have always greatly respected women; unfortunately through the centuries this respect tended to develop into masculine over-protectiveness and Hindu women found little scope for their energies outside the home. But within the home they usually ruled supreme, running the lives of male and female members alike. In Muslim households women play a secondary role to men. Until recently they were not allowed to leave their homes either unveiled or unaccompanied. This strict seclusion is called purdah.

Christians

The Christians are descended from converts made at various times during the last 2000 years. The Church is South India was founded by St Thomas.

In the last 400 years other Christian missionaries have come to India from Portugal, France and Great Britain. In 1965 there were 1 1 million Christians in India.

Sikhs

The Sikh religion was founded by a Hindu called Guru (Great Teacher) Nanak(1469–1 538) who drew his ideas from both Muslims and Hindus. He preached the equality of all men and women. He believed that there is only one God, who is worshipped by all men in all religions. Nanak opposed the caste system and all idolatry. He formed his followers into a tightly knit military brotherhood, pledged to resist the Muslim conquerors. The Sikhs became the rulers of an area of north-west India, the Punjab. This was conquered by the British in the nineteenth century. The Sikhs have retained their military prowess and have served with great distinction in both the British and the Indian armies. They are also skilful farmers and engineers and traders. Male Sikhs do not cut their hair, which is covered by a turban. There are 10 million Sikhs in India today.

3 Muslim women wearing the burkha

The Parsees

The Parsees are few in number but influential. They are descendants of eighth-century refugees from Persia. Their religion includes the worship of fire.

They have made great contributions to industry, education, science and politics. The great Tata Iron and Steel Company at Jamshedpur was founded by a Parsee, J. N. Tata. The Prime Minister of India, Mrs Indira Ghandi, married a Parsee, Feroze, who died in 1961. (He was not related to Mahatma Gandhi.) In 1965 there were 100 000 Parsees in India.

The political situation in India in 1900

From the sixteenth century onwards western European powers showed interest in India, then ruled by the Muslim Mogul Emperor. India was the source of spices, valuable jewels, precious metals and works of art.

Gradually these traders and their governments became more and more involved in Indian political affairs, as local rulers either quarrelled amongst themselves or with the Mogul Emperor. The English defeated their main rivals in India, the French, in the middle of the eighteenth century and gradually, with the collapse of the Mogul Empire, came to rule more and more of India.

By 1900 the political situation in India was as follows. Firstly there were the 562 princely states (see Map A). They acknowledged the suzerainty (overlordship) of the British, who managed their foreign affairs and their relations with other Indian states. Each prince had a British adviser, whose power depended both on his own and the prince’s personalities. On the whole the princes were dealt with very gently by the British, who remembered the part some Indians had played in the great Indian Mutiny in 1857 and therefore feared another princely rebellion. Most of them enjoyed British support. They feared and opposed the end of British rule and curried favour with the British by putting down any unrest in their states. The 562 princely states covered about one-third of India and contained one-quarter of the population. They varied enormously in size. Hyderabad was bigger than England and Wales put together (it covered 32 000 square miles). In Kathiawar (Gandhi’s home area) there were over 200 tiny states. One had only 900 people and an area of less than ten square miles. On the whole the princes ruled their subjects harshly.

Map A The Indian empire before 1947

The rest of India was ruled directly by the British. It was divided into provinces, each with an English Governor. In 1861 Legislative Councils (law-making bodies) were created both for the central government and for each province. Some Indians were chosen by the British to sit on these councils.

The laws mad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Indian background
• 2 Gandhi and the Indian nationalist movement to 1920
• 3 Jawarharlal Nehru
• 4 The struggle for independence 1920–47
• 5 Nehru’s India
• 6 India and the world
• 7 Epilogue
• A select booklist
• Index