[Sidenote:  E.g. British influence.]

But Indian conservatism is more than an indisposition to effort and change; for the same reason, it is also an easy adaptation to things as they are found.  When a new disturbing influence obtrudes from without, and persistently, it may be easier to give way than to resist.  British influence is such a persistent obtrusion.  In English literature as taught and read, in Christian standards of conduct, in the English language, and in the modern ideas of government and society, ever presented to the school-going section of the people of India within their own land, there is such a continuous influence from without.  The impression of works like Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Idylls of the King, common text-books in colleges, the steady pressure of Acts of the British Government in India, like that raising the marriage age of girls; the example of men in authority like Lord Curzon, during whose vice-regal tour in South India there were no nautch entertainments; the necessity of understanding expressions like “general election” and “public spirit,” and of comprehending in some measure the working of local self-government—­all such constant pressure must effect a change in the mental standpoint.  The army of Britain in India, representative of the imperial sceptre, has now for many years been gathered into cantonments, and its work is no longer to quell hostilities within India, but only to repel invaders from without.  Other British forces, however, penetrating far deeper, working silently and for the most part unobserved, are still in the field all over India, effecting a grander change than the change of outward sovereignty.  “Ideas rule the world,” and he who impresses his ideas is the real ruler of men.

[Sidenote:  Indian conservatism overpowered otherwise.]

Telling against Indian conservatism or inertia are other things also besides persistent Western influences.  Many things Western appeal to the natural desire for advancement and comfort, and the adoption of these has often as corollary a change of idea.  To take examples without further explanation.  The desire for education, the key to advancement in life, has quietly ignored the old orthodox idea that education in Sanscrit and the Sacred Scriptures, i.e. higher education as formerly understood, is the exclusive privilege of certain castes.  The very expression “higher education” has come to mean a modern English education, not as formerly an education in Sanscrit lore.  Had the British Government allowed things to take their course, the still surviving institutions of the old kind for Oriental learning would have been transformed, one and all, into modern schools and colleges.  Even in 1824, when Government, then under “Orientalist” influence, founded the Sanscrit College in Calcutta for the encouragement of Sanscrit learning, a numerous body of native gentlemen, with the famous Raja Rammohan Roy at their head, petitioned that a college for the study of Western learning might be established instead.  For a number of years now, the Sanscrit College, then founded, has actually had fewer pupils on its rolls than it is permitted to admit at a greatly reduced fee.[6]