The British administrator was therefore not altogether unwarranted in his conviction that in standing in the ancient ways he had behind him not only the tacit assent of the inarticulate masses but the positive support of very important classes and communities.  He knew also that he had with him, besides unofficial European opinion in India, almost solid on his side, the sympathy, however vague and uninformed, of the bulk of his own countrymen at home, represented for a great part of the fifty years now under review by a succession of conservative parliaments and governments.  There were no longer, as in the East India Company days, periodical inquests into the state of India to wind up Parliament to a concert pitch of sustained and vigilant interest in Indian affairs.  The very few legislators who exhibited any persistent curiosity about Indian administration were regarded for the most part as cranks or bores, and the annual statement on the Indian budget was usually made before almost empty benches.  Only questions that raised large issues of foreign policy, such as Afghan expeditions and the Russian menace in Asia Minor, or that affected the considerable commercial interests at home, like the Indian cotton duties or currency and exchange, would intermittently stir British public opinion inside and outside Parliament, and these often chiefly as occasions for party warfare.  Ministers themselves appeared to be mainly concerned with the part which India had to play in their general scheme of Imperial and Asiatic policy rather than with the methods by which India was governed.  These could be safely left to “the man on the spot.”

Very different had been the spirit in which British parliaments and governments had discharged their responsibilities before the transfer of India to the Crown, and rude was the awakening for the British administrator in India and for British ministers at home when the explosion that followed the Partition of Bengal revealed a very different India that was in process of evolution with much and dangerous travail out of the reaction of new forces, hitherto almost unobserved, upon old forces so long quiescent that they had come to be regarded as negligible quantities.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] A detailed and learned study of these movements is found in Dr. J.N.  Farquhar’s Modern Religious Movements in India, published by the Macmillan Company, New York, in 1915.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST GREAT WAVE OF UNREST