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Updated: June 4, 2025
The Western-educated Indian claimed recognition at our hands first and foremost because he was the product of the educational system we ourselves imposed upon India.
Western influences are most apparent in the upper and middle classes, especially in the Western-educated intelligentsia which to-day exists in every Eastern land. These élites of course vary greatly in numbers and influence, but they all possess a more or less definite grasp of Western ideas. In their reactions to Westernism they are sharply differentiated.
They went through an elaborate and picturesque ritual with great earnestness and reverence and carefully followed the injunctions of the Brahman, a cultured and Western-educated gentleman who presided over the ceremony.
How many of the Western-educated Indians who have thrown themselves into political agitation against the tyranny of the British bureaucracy have ever raised a finger to free their own fellow-countrymen from the tyranny of those social evils? How many of them are entirely free from it themselves, or, if free, have the courage to act up to their opinions?
Herein perhaps more than anywhere else lay the secret of the antagonism between the British bureaucracy and the Western-educated Indians which gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency reached its apogee himself the incarnation of efficiency and unquestionably the greatest and most indefatigable administrator that Britain sent out to India during that period.
It is therefore well to try to understand the conflicting sentiments and opinions which drove asunder the moderate but progressive Western-educated Indian and the earnest but conservative British administrator, and ended by bringing them almost into open conflict.
Western-educated Indians flocked to the bar; they showed themselves qualified for most of the liberal professions; they filled every post that was open to them in the public services. But where, they asked with growing impatience, was the fulfilment of the hopes which they had founded on the Queen's Proclamation of 1858?
The caste system, though it may be slowly yielding in non-essentials to the exigencies of modern life, is still vigorous to-day in all its essential features, and cannot easily be extruded from their family life even by the Western-educated classes.
Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not despair of bringing constitutional methods of agitation to bear upon British public opinion.
Gandhi urged more strongly the duty of "Non-co-operation," and that, after having been for years conspicuous for political disaffection, it should have rallied so generally in support of the reforms shows how great is the change they have wrought amongst the Western-educated classes. Nowhere in the United Provinces was the electoral battle so fierce as in the town of Jhansi, where Mr.
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