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Updated: June 4, 2025
British rule in India had concentrated so largely on mechanical efficiency that it had gradually lost sight of the old and finer principles of Anglo-Indian as well as of British statesmanship based on the paramount importance of genuine co-operation between British and Indians. During the Mutiny there were few of the Western-educated classes whose loyalty to the British Raj ever wavered.
Morley had been raised to the peerage and Lord Crewe had succeeded him at the India Office was anything done to meet the demand of the Western-educated classes for a larger share in the administrative work of the country or to redress the very reasonable grievances of Indians employed in the Government services who were still for the most part penned up in the Provincial Services as established on the recommendations of the Aitcheson Committee more than twenty-five years earlier.
The Western-educated classes were completely estranged and smarted so bitterly over the contempt with which their representations and protests against the policy of Government had been treated that those even of the more moderate school of politics were content to throw up their hands in horror and declare that if they were unable to stem the torrent, the fault lay entirely with the bureaucracy which had killed by long years of neglect and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress.
One of the dangers we have to guard against is that, because the Western-educated Indian is to the stay-at-home Englishman, and even to the Englishman whose superficial knowledge of India is confined to brief visits to the chief cities of India, the most, and indeed the only, articulate Indian, we should regard him as the only or the most authoritative mouthpiece of the needs and wishes of other classes or of the great mass of his fellow-countrymen with whom he is often in many ways in less close touch than the Englishman who lives in their midst.
The upper classes feel much the same as their sovereigns. They regret their former monopoly of privilege and office. This is especially true of the Western-educated intelligentsia, who believe that they should hold all government posts and resent bitterly the reservation of high-salaried directive positions for Europeans.
If, again, it was objected that the moderate and reasonable views he expressed were not the views of the more ambitious politicians who professed to be the accredited interpreters of Western-educated India, that there were many amongst them whose aims were more or less openly antagonistic to all the ideals for which British rule stands, and were directed in reality not to the establishment of democratic institutions but to the maintenance of caste monopoly and other evils inherent to the Hindu social system, and that in the political arena he seemed incapable of asserting himself against these dangerous and reactionary elements, his reply was once more that he had never received the support and encouragement which he had a right to expect from his European mentors, and that it was often their indifference or worse that had chiefly helped to raise a spirit of revolt against every form of Western influence.
Many interesting experiments have been made by Indians for infusing into education a new moral tone and discipline on Indian lines, and it is due to Indian effort no less than to the encouragement of Government that female education has begun to bridge over the intellectual gulf that tended to separate more and more the men and the women of the Western-educated classes.
Fifty years later, when the Raj was confronted with a less violent but more insidious movement of revolt, a large part of the Western-educated classes, whose influence and numbers had increased immensely in the interval, were, if not in league, at least to some extent in sympathy with it, and many of those who deplored and reprobated it remained sulking in their tents.
We want the Western-educated Indian. We have made him, and we cannot unmake him if we would. But we must see that he is a genuine product of the best that Western education can give, and not merely an Indian who can speak English and adapt his speech to English ears in order to lend plausibility to the revival in new forms of ancient religious or social tyrannies.
Lord Cromer, for example, was decidedly sceptical of the worth of the Western-educated Egyptian, while a prominent Anglo-Indian official names as the chief cause of Indian unrest, "the system of education, which we ourselves introduced advisedly so far as the limited vision went of those responsible; blindly in view of the inevitable consequences."
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