“And then?” I asked.
“And then,” young India said proudly, “we will ourselves decide whether we wish to fight at England’s side — or against her.”
What they did not reckon on, when the time came, was the savagery of Nazism and the aggressions of Japan in Asia. When they perceived that they must choose between the Axis and the English, they chose the English, aware that in spite of many injustices they were choosing between barbarism and civilization. They postponed their plans for freedom, Gandhi meanwhile doing his work within his own country until the war was over, and by then the wisest minds in England, understanding the new world, returned India to her people, in spite of all opposition from Englishmen and others who did not have sufficient understanding of Asia to know what wisdom was. Not even Churchill’s prophecy of a blood bath, partly fulfilled at that, could prevent the inevitable. India had waited as long as she could, and peasant and intellectual were on the same side in the old invincible combination. It was Gandhi’s strength that made him know very early that both peasant and intellectual must be won to work together for their country, his hold was equally strong upon both, and so he achieved his end, without war. Perhaps we Americans do not yet fully understand the great lesson that India has to teach in thus winning her freedom. Beside her mighty triumph of a bloodless revolution our War of Independence shrinks in size and concept. India has taught humanity a lesson, and it is to our peril if we do not learn it. The lesson? That war and killing achieve nothing but loss, and that a noble end is assured only if the means to attain it are of a piece with it and also noble.
The real indictment against colonialism, however, was to be found in the villages of India. There was rot at the top, too, in the thousands of young intellectuals trained in English schools for jobs that did not exist except in the limited Civil Service. The towns and cities were frothing with unhappy young men, cultured and well educated, who could find no jobs and were not allowed by the old superstructure of empire to create them. But the real proof of evil, I say again, was in the miserable villages. I thought I had seen poverty enough in China, yet when I saw the Indian villages I knew that the Chinese peasant was rich in comparison. Only the Russian peasant I had seen years before could compare with the Indian villager, although that Russian was a very different creature, and inferior in many ways. For the Indian peasant was like the Chinese in being a person innately civilized. The maturing culture of an organized human family life and profound philosophical religions had shaped his mind and soul, even though he could not read and write. And the children, the little children of the Indian villages, how they tore at my heart, thin, big-bellied, and all with huge sad dark eyes! I wondered that any Englishman could look at them and not accuse himself. Three hundred years of English occupation and rule, and could there be children like this? Yes, and millions of them! And the final indictment surely was that the life span in India was only twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years! No wonder, then, that life was hastened, that a man married very young so that there could be children, as many as possible before he died. I loved England, remembering all the happy journeys there, but in India I saw an England I did not know. And I was forced to see that if the English, in many ways the finest people on earth, a people who blazed the way for all of us to achieve the right of men to rule themselves, if colonialism could so corrupt even these, then indeed none of us could dare to become the rulers of empire.
It seemed to me, as I lived with Indian friends, new and old, that all the ills of India could easily have been mended if there had been a government whose purpose was first of all to benefit the people rather than to live upon them. The desert-dry country, for example, the fruitless land between Bombay and Madras, was already famished although it was only February and the sun hot enough to fertilize any seed had there been water. And why was there not water? Why not sink artesian wells, or even dig shallow wells, since, I was told, the water table was high? But the enervated and exhausted people had not the strength to take such initiative after the years of colonialism. It was more than that. The worst result, perhaps, of the colonial system was to provide the subject people with an infinite excuse against work and so against helping themselves. “You are responsible for me,” is always the sullen attitude of the subject to the ruler. “You have undertaken to feed me and clothe me and govern me. If I die it is your fault.” There were always the British to blame, and certainly the blame was not always just. Yet essentially perhaps it was, for when the heart of a people is gone, their spirit dies with it.
In India, I found, any one who had Indian blood was Indian, although three-fourths of his blood might be white, and this policy added to the numbers of the discontented. In the first years of colonialism English women did not follow their men, and even until the end young men did not marry, or married late. It was inevitable that a large group of human beings existed, neither English nor Indian, yet uneasily belonging to both. They were almost invariably superior to the stock they came from, on both sides. The men were handsome, the women beautiful, and both were, more often than not, superior in intelligence. Scientists tell us nowadays that a mixed people, hybrid, if you like, are usually a superior people, even individually, as the hybrid rose and hybrid corn are superior in the vegetable world. We are told that the richest cultures, the most vital civilizations, come from the hybrid peoples, and surely the American is hybrid enough, drawing even his Caucasian blood from as far north as Sweden and Finland to as far south as Italy.
In Indonesia I found a curious difference in attitude toward the hybrid individual. There whoever had a drop of white blood was counted as white. This wise colonial policy made the stoutest Dutchmen of men of mixed blood, removing the discontented half-and-half of India. In Indonesia he had, if not a total equality, at least a surface one which salved his pride. Indeed, if the prudent Hollander developed a colonialism in any way superior to that of India or of Indo-China, he did this mainly through his relatively enlightened racial policy. True, Indonesian intellectuals, too, were chafing to be free even then, but the movement was calm, almost unnoticeable as yet among the people, whereas in India the ferment seemed ready to burst.
Between such serious study and observation, I took much pleasure in the different landscapes, in wandering as far as I could about the countryside of each nation I visited. I had my first taste of true jungle in Sumatra, although I had seen jungles too in Indo-China, but even from the air the jungle in Sumatra looks dangerous, the muddy rivers crawling through the livid green like sluggish serpents. And when the plane came down how sickish sweet was that humid air with something living and yet fetid! I am not one for jungles.
Looking back, I find that among the many impressions of the people of India, absorbed while I lived among them, and still clear in my mind, is their reverence for great men and women. Leadership in India can only be continued by those whom the followers consider to be good — that is, capable of renunciation, therefore not self-seeking. This one quality for them contains all others. A person able to renounce personal benefit for the sake of an idealistic end is by that very fact also honest, also high-minded, therefore also trustworthy. I felt that the people, even those who knew themselves venal and full of faults, searched for such persons. Gandhi had among his followers many faulty men and women, and he himself was not free from certain petty dominations, as those who lived with him continuously knew very well. Yet they devoted themselves to him because he had made the great renunciation of personal gain and benefit.