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Updated: June 4, 2025
But in this he failed, as some of the more worldly Extremists foresaw who obeyed him in this matter with reluctance. In the Bombay Presidency, Gokhale, though dead, had a large share in the victory of the old principles for which he had stood when there had been little will to co-operate on the part either of Government or of the majority of Western-educated Indians.
The Brahmans later on formed the bulk of the new Western-educated and "politically-minded" class, and the Madrasee Brahmans played a considerable part in the Indian National Congress before it broke away from its constitutional moorings. The non-Brahmans, nevertheless, under the leadership of such resolute men as the late Dr.
Whilst the Morley-Minto reforms had disappointed the political expectations of the Western-educated classes, the measures adopted in several of the self-governing Dominions to exclude Indian immigration, and, especially in South Africa, to place severe social and municipal disabilities on Indians already settled in some of the provinces of the Union, had caused still more widespread resentment, and nothing did more to strengthen Lord Hardinge's hold upon Indian affection than his frank espousal of these Indian grievances, even at the risk of placing himself in apparent opposition to the Imperial Government, who had to reckon with the sentiment of the Dominions as well as with that of India.
So on December 28, 1885, a small band of Indian gentlemen, who represented the élite of the Western-educated classes, met in Bombay to hold the first session of the Indian National Congress which, with all its many shortcomings, even in its earlier and better days, was destined to play a far more important part than was for a long time realised by Englishmen in India or at home.
Asquith, declared with special emphasis that in future Indian questions must be approached from "a new angle of vision," and Indians, not least the Western-educated classes, construed his utterance into a pledge of the deepest significance. For two years India presented on everything that related to the war a front unbroken by any dissensions.
Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest barriers to India's national unity the multiplicity of her vernaculars by giving English to the Western-educated classes as a common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National Congress itself would have been an impossibility?
These nationalist agitations arise primarily among the native upper classes and Western-educated élites, however successful they may be in inflaming the ignorant masses, who are often quite contented with the material benefits of enlightened European rule.
For the first time since the Mutiny it marked a reversion to the spirit in which the Bentincks and Munros and Elphinstones had almost a century earlier conceived the mission of England in India to lie in the training of the Indian people to govern themselves, and for the first time an attempt was made to appraise generously but fairly the position of the Western-educated classes and the part they have come to play in the Indian polity.
Thus the nationalist movement stood out as an alliance between the Brahmins and the Western-educated intelligentsia, who had pooled their ambitions in a programme for jointly ruling India.
Another was that the Western-educated Indians were mainly drawn from the towns and from a narrow circle of professional classes in the towns, who could not therefore speak on behalf of and still less control the destinies of a vast population, overwhelmingly agricultural, regarding whose interests they had hitherto shown themselves both ignorant and indifferent, and from whom the very education which constituted their main title to consideration had tended to separate and estrange them.
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