HOME   SOCIAL CRITICISM LIB. CAT.   GO TO NEXT CHAPTER

PROFESSOR WILLIAM ROSCHER, the famous German economist, began his monumental work on Political Economy (1878) with these words: "The starting point, as well as the object-point of our science is Man. Every man has numberless wants (zahllose Bedürfnisse) physical and intellectual . . . . Every advance in culture made by man finds expression in an increase in the number and in the keenness of his rational wants."

   Now the immediate obviousness of this statement in the western world could scarcely be disputed. Co-operation, laws, regulations, division of labour, education, increased traffic, in short all the outward organisations of man have for their object the satisfaction of his desires. One has only to walk down one of the principal streets of a western city to see what an infinite number of desires western civilized human beings have, and, in watching the mechanism of their satisfaction, to be impressed by the civic sense of general adaptation upon which it depends.

   One of the difficulties, however, of getting the natives of the tropics to supply the wants of the west with such products as coffee, tea, sugar, indigo, and spices, has been that the natives on their part do not desire to advance in culture by increasing the number of their own wants. They have few wants, which are easily satisfied by work on their fertile soils. More wants cannot be injected into them so that they willingly work harder and longer to satisfy them. There seems, indeed, to be something in them that does not fit in with Roscher's Der Mensch (Man), as if they were a species of humanity which cannot be got to believe in the life-object of climbing up the ladder of culture by continually increasing the number of the rungs of one's wants.

   About the time when Malthus was teaching that "Man's self-interest is God's providence," to be followed by Cobden and Bright teaching that "economic freedom was a law of God, eternal and immutable," permitting each man to acquire, within the law, such private property and satisfaction of desire as he could, Sir Thomas Munro of Madras, in one of his most discerning minutes, showed how difficult it was to fit the Hindu to the British traders' heaven-blessed self-interest. He pointed out that what the wealthier Hindus actually bought from the British, such as household ornaments and furniture, was bought only for the purposes of display before their British friends. When no such friends were present or expected, the articles were stowed away as useless encumbrances. "Their simple mode of living," he continued, "dictated both by caste and climate, renders all our furniture and ornaments for the decoration of the house and the table utterly unserviceable to the Hindus: living in low mud houses, eating on the bare earth, they cannot require the various articles used among us. They have no tables; their houses are not furnished, except those of the rich, which have a small carpet, or a few mats and pillows. The Hindus eat alone, many from caste in the open air, others under sheds, and out of the leaves of trees in preference to plates. But this is the picture, perhaps; of the unfortunate native reduced to poverty by European oppression under the Company's monopoly? No, it is equally that of the highest and richest Hindu of every part of India. It is that of a Minister of State. His dwelling is little better than a shed: the walls are naked, and the mud floor for the sake of coolness, is every morning sprinkled with a mixture of water and cowdung. He has no furniture in it. He distributes food to whoever wants it, but he gives no grand dinner to his friends. He throws aside his upper garment, and, with nothing but a cloth around his loins, he sits down half-naked, and eats his meat alone, upon the bare earth, and under the open sky. These simple habits are not peculiar to the Hindu. The Mahomedan also, with few exceptions among the higher classes, conforms to them."

   This simplicity amongst Hindus was, therefore, not due merely to the fertility of the soil and the ease with which simple wants could be satisfied. It had another cause, namely the dominant idea of Hindusim, which, strangely enough, was the precise opposite to that of Professor Roscher. No Hindu would agree that culture increases by means of an increase of the number of man's wants and desires, and their satisfaction.

   The Hindu creed is not merely that simplicity is desirable, it is not merely the maxim of Seneca, that if you want to help a man to be rich, do not increase his riches but decrease his wants. It is far more profound in conception. It is that desire binds one to the wheel of existences in never ceasing successions upon this earth in varying forms of life, and that the only release from the earthly to the divine is the path of control and, eventually, of the abolition of desire.

   This is the creed of the Hindu Scriptures. Its most popular exposition is in the revered and beloved Bhagavadgita. This sacred discourse was first translated into English from the Sanscrit by Sir Charles Wilkins, and Warren Hastings himself wrote an introduction to its publication in 1785. With his characteristic objectivity, Hastings warned English readers how different this teaching would be found to be from. anything they had ever read before. He asked them to "exclude, in estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modern literature of Europe." His own opinion of the Gita he expressed with caution,, but he found in it "a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction, almost unequalled."

   A more modern translator, in the Sacred Books of the East, Mr. K. T. Telang, used a like language: "It contains," he wrote, "the essence of the most spiritual phases of Brahminical teaching; and is expressed in language of such depth and sublimity, that is has been deservedly known as the Bhagavadgita or Divine Song."

   Here is a passage out of the first pages of the Gita : "Arguna said: 'What are the characteristics, O Kesava! of one whose mind is steady, and who is intent on contemplation? How should one of steady mind speak, how sit, how move?'

   "The Deity said: 'When a man, O son of Pritha! abandons all desires of his heart, and is pleased in his self only and by his self, he is then called of a steady mind. He whose heart is not agitated in the midst of calamities, who has no longing for pleasures, and from whom the feelings of affection, fear and wrath have departed, is called a sage of steady mind. His mind is steady, who, being without attachments anywhere, feels no exaltation and no aversion on encountering the various agreeable and disagreeable things of the world. A man's mind is steady, when he withdraws his senses from all objects of sense, as the tortoise withdraws its limbs from all sides. Objects of sense withdraw themselves from a person who is abstinent; not so the taste for those objects. But even the taste departs from him, when he has seen the Supreme. The boisterous senses, O son of Kunti! carry away by force the mind even of a wise man, who exerts himself for final emancipation. Restraining them all, a man should remain engaged in devotion, making me his only resort. For his mind is steady whose senses are under control. The man who ponders over objects of sense forms an attachment to them; from that attachment is produced desire and from desire anger is produced; from anger results want of discrimination; from want of discrimination, confusion of the memory; from confusion of the memory, loss of reason; and in consequence of loss of reason he is utterly ruined. But the self-restrained man who moves among objects with senses under the control of his own self, and free from affection and aversion, obtains tranquillity. When there is tranquillity, all his miseries are destroyed, for the mind of him whose heart is tranquil soon becomes steady.'"

   The Gita is held to have been written at about the time of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, the creed which passed on Hindu conceptions to the countries east of India, namely Burma, Siam, China, and Japan. The spirit of the Gita and that of Gautama's teachings are identical as regards the "numberless wants" and desires of man. For example, in one of the great discourses of the Buddha, "The Four Inner Contemplations," translated by Henry Warren, the subject of misery is discussed. What is the cause of misery? The Buddha answered in these words: "It is the desire leading to rebirth, joining itself to pleasure and passion, and finding delight in every existence--desire, namely for sensual pleasure, desire for permanent existence, desire for temporary existence.

   "But where, O priests, does this desire spring up and grow? Where does it settle and take root?

   "Where anything is delightful and agreeable to men, there desire springs up and grows, there it settles and takes root."

   The sources of desire were then given, the senses, objects of sense, contacts, perceptions, thoughts of desire and so on, and followed by the summary: "This, O priests, is called the noble birth of the origin of misery."

   The Brahminical and Buddhistic way of attaining freedom from desire is by a watchful and trained self-control, but it is a self-control so constant, so radical, and so profound that no westener has probably ever comprehended it. It is only reached by a series of what are usually translated as "trances," forms of visionary-realisation, which no western method probably attains. Gautama himself spoke of it as: "This doctrine to which I have attained is profound, recondite, and difficult of comprehension, and not to be reached by mere reasoning." But the end is the same. It is the freeing of the Ego or Consciousness of Self from the thraldom of desire.

   Something of the same conception, though without its intensity or profoundity, seems to have arisen in China at approximately the same time as the Gita was written and Gautama discoursed.

   Laotze was the contemporary of Gautama and Confucius and, in the Tao Teh King, he taught that if rulers were imbued with the Tao "they would constantly keep the people free from desires." The Tao itself was "not to act from any personal motive, to conduct affairs without feeling the trouble of them, to taste without being aware of the flavour."

   But five centuries later, Buddhism itself reached China, and from China spread to Korea and Japan, in which latter country it had a profound influence. It is true that in both China and Japan, in political and social thought and fact, Buddhism has always been secondary to Confucianism. Nevertheless it penetrated all ranks of society and took its share in the principles of self-control and refined simplicity which characterized Chinese and Japanese art, manners and civilization.

   The theory, put in the cruder form of science, might be thus expressed. The wants of men are so "numberless," in accordance with the profligacy of nature that, if given vent, they would produce, not a general satisfaction, but an immense dissatisfaction. Their freedom would lead to a society of ceaseless struggle and endless competition, in which life would be absorbed by the few who attained a relative success, whereas the many would still have desires, which, being suppressed by circumstances but not by self control, perverted the mind and provided misery. Hence nature, with her profligacy, has to be controlled and disciplined.

   Such was the creed of the control of desire, a creed most stringent in the case of the devout Brahmins and reflecting from them throughout the people as their gift to the social system. The struggle for material prizes of the Kshatriyas was in some sense a safety-valve to its stringency, by which an extreme license to volition and desire was permitted to luck and daring. But even this struggle was shut away from the people, not only by caste and custom but actually by those great walls, which surround the palaces and court buildings of Delhi and other cities, and within which the strife for precedence and power was carried on. Within these walls the Hindu creed itself was scarcely seen but outside it was waiting for those who were weary of the game, for those who were disillusioned, for those who had failed. Such men could always return to the creed. It was always awaiting them, to enwrap them, if they adopted it, not only with its own peculiar calm but with the reverence men showed to those who adopted it. I myself have known Indians of great wealth lose all their material possessions, but, nevertheless, though being forced to adopt poverty, losing none of their calmness of mind and dignity, nor the respect of their fellow men.

   There ran through India then, and to a lesser degree through the East, a dominant idea which had a profound effect on its economics. For of all things influencing the fate of man, the dominant idea, the life-outlook, is the most potent, and so-called economic laws, supposed to be irresistible, are really but sub-genera of some dominant idea.

   The western dominant idea of civilization being the consequence of the progressive endeavours of man to satisfy his "numberless wants," was, and has been said, the exact opposite of the Hindu conception, but it had in the nineteenth century all the backing of northern and racial vigour, enhanced by the creation of new and powerful slaves to serve man's desires, the steam-driven machines. So much stronger had the British dominant idea become that one of its most intellectual devotees, Lord Macaulay, characteristically failed entirely to get any inkling of the "sublimity" which Warren Hastings found in the Gita and in the sacred doctrine which it propounds. When in India, in 1835, he wrote a Minute on Education in which, with almost sublime subjectivity he declared that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia"; and, as the contemporary Principal of the Mohamedan College in Calcutta declared, he, "Macaulay, looked upon the languages and literature of the East as a diseased limb, which he proposed to cut off."

   Such short shrift to the philosophical and religious literature of India shows the vigour, but also the intense subjectivity of the faith of what Munro termed, "downright Englishmen anxious to make Anglo-Saxons of the Hindus."

   Such Englishmen were in the very large majority. Their purposes were described with picturesque irony by a French traveller in India. "They civilize," wrote Monsieur André Chevrillon, in Romantic India, 1897, "and this not only for their own advantage but from a sense of duty towards the native population. To cover India with railways, to enlarge and multiply its seaports, to increase tenfold its commerce, to convert it to Protestant Christianity, to suppress its castes, to enfranchise its women, to open its Zenanas, to give it--with a liking for trousers, black coats, cricket, football, English music and poetry--'a practical and sensible education': in this, say the English, consists their mission in India, being persuaded, with Addison, with Sidney Smith, with Macaulay, that the augmentation of human well-being, a decent, reasonable, comfortable civilization, in a word, English civilization, is the chief end and aim of humanity."

   In their subjectivity, strengthened by the astounding success of their machines and science, these many downright Englishmen were not really aware of the Indian system, based upon the opposing dominant idea of the control of men's desires. Nor were they aware that owing to this idea, the numerous peasants of India had established a system which, though it offered no encouragement to the "increase in the number and keenness of man's rational wants," yet was eminently serviceable in supplying the simpler necessities of social and individual life.

   Their system gave them the possession of the land, which, except when all suffered from famine, provided them with food and shelter. Through its joint family and village organizations it provided food and shelter to self and family even if one was incapacitated by injury or disease, or, on more grudging terms, if one was just lazy and did not want to work. It arranged marriage for every individual. It was a system unaffected by the outer world, by bumper crops or the price of gold in other countries. It had no Old Age Question, no Sickness Insurance Question, no Sex Question, no Unemployment Question. It was the peasants' own system, shaped by themselves to give them a mode of life suitable to their surroundings. It was, in short, a type of the only real freedom that exists for peasants, that which enables them to follow their particular calling on their own lines with a large, to almost complete, amount of independence from outside influences and authority.

   This was the traditional framework of the peasant's system. It was a framework, which put into being the dominant idea in its simplicity of wants and desires, and in its self-sufficiency. But there was something further needed to ensure its success, something to act as the foundation of that framework, and that was the earth and the soil and the fertility of the soil. Upon the quality and the quantity of the fertility of the soil, the peasants' capacity to fill this framework with success in health and welfare was based.

   According to Professor Radharaman Gangopadyay and Professor Rao Bahadur K. V. Rangaswami Aiyanger, whose words will be found quoted on page 135 of Chapter IX, in the past this foundation was adequate in ancient India. The first professor states that the degradation of Indian agriculture began with the extinction of the Guptas; the second epitomises the fulness of ancient Hindu agriculture as found in the writings of the sages, Kautilya and Sukra, and in the Smriti literature.

   Whether the Indian peasantry ever reached the efficiency of the Chinese peasantry is a question that cannot be answered, but, if at the time of their sages they had reached it, in later periods they certainly failed to maintain it. When the British became paramount, the condition of the peasantry in some parts, for example in peninsular India, was very low. For about three months of the year, according to the Abbé Dubois (Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies), almost three quarters of the Peninsula were on the verge of starvation. This was not due to the indolence or fault of the peasants, but was the inevitable result of the degradation of their partner through life, the soil. "Let no one venture to assert," wrote the Abbé "that the unfortunate Hindus can, if they choose, find a recompence in the fertility of the soil. The sight of the vast plains lying fallow and waste," that was the companion picture to the starving peasants. Simplicity of controlled life had degenerated, under destructive agriculture, to wastage of life itself, soil and peasants alike dying. Nor was there peace, in which to enable them to effect some small improvement. It was a time of greedy and impermanent governments, of revolts and invasions, and of degradation of all the liberal arts and other alleviations of the trials of humanity.

   Under such conditions the establishment of the British authority, though powerless to bring with it the lost soil-fertility, was an immediate blessing. But, even though well-meaning, just, and equitable, one immeasurably important question to the future fate of a peasantry lay beneath the change, as yet undiscovered and unconsidered. What agricultural values did the British of that time bring with them to the vast agricultural sub-continent of India?

   Such values can be divided into two main classes. In the first, the agricultural values stand very high. The maintenance and prosperity of the peasantry and the fertility of the soil are, under them, made the basis of the State, and this is rendered factual by placing and keeping the simpler, primal necessities of social and individual life in a healthy condition. In the second, the values are those so ably defined by Professor Roscher.

   The progress of a peasantry depends upon which of these two sets of values is adopted. History affords many examples of the two different paths they build, along which the destinies of the peasants pass. Two such historical paths stand out from the others, because of our greater knowledge of them. Upon the first of these, China pursued her course from the dawn of her history to the last century; upon the second passed the plentiful dominion of Rome to its final extinction.

   An enormous weight of fate for the peasantry of India and for many other peasantries, therefore, hung upon the question as to which set of values the British brought to India and to other parts of their dominions. Were the British upon the first or second path, when they became paramount in India? Before that question is answered, let us look well at these two historic paths, along which so many empires and nations have marched, and are now marching.