An Indian's Journey

Last week, news came from Darjeeling in the Province of Bengal that Chitta Ranjan Das, the famous Indian Nationalist, was dead. His career and what it meant to India:

Birth. In the days when Calcutta was the capital of India,* a beturbaned servant entered the High Court where Bhuban Mohan Das, an attorney, was declaiming the law. It took some time before the lawyer could be persuaded to give ear to his excited servant, who was vainly struggling to enter the courtroom. When at last he came to the door, he was told by the groveling servitor that a fine, fat boy had been born to his wife. Home went Bhuban, to behold the youngster whom he was to name Chitta Ranjan.

Youth. Amid the marble domes and busy streets of Calcutta, Chitta grew to an aesthetic perfection that only a Hindu can attain. He went first to the London Missionary School at Bhowanipore, thence to the Presidency-College at Calcutta. His scholastic attainments must have been very great, for subsequently his speeches showed him to be a man of refined culture and his poetry, mystical and beautiful, revealed the flower of his Oriental soul. It may be assumed that he was also conscious of the sahibs and mem-sahibs that stirred among the teeming millions of India, and he may have wondered vaguely why the great sahib in Government House kept such state. He prepared to enter the Indian Civil Service. All his life long he never forgot his debt to British culture.

England. This England, of which he had heard so much, was certainly a queer place. All the buildings were square and pointed and dirty. All the people were sahibs and mem-sahibs, but somehow quite different from those in far-off India. None of them wore those spotless white clothes which they wore in the land of Ind. More strange, many seemed very poor, and none of them seemed to have any servants following them. The men that he mixed with at the university and at the Inns of Court eyed him strangely. When he spoke to them, which was rarely, they were urbane but aloof, cold, unfriendly. Once he overheard a reference to the color of his skin--his blood boiled. But, he philosophized, there were bad men even in India.

Return. On the voyage home, he pondered many things. Why should not India be like Canada and the other Dominions? He reflected that perhaps India was not a nation, but a conglomeration of states and creeds. But what if the Hindus and Mohammedans united? Impossible! He decided to try.

India. Home again, he found his father bankrupt through unwise generosity to his numerous relatives, to whom the good Hindu, following religious precept, could not refuse assistance while he had wealth to give. Young Das immediately assumed his father's obligations, worked hard at the legal profession, eventually amassed a considerable fortune. And when the voice of the Mahatma, Gandhi, was heard calling upon the masses to awake, he answered, and gradually dissipated his fortune.

At Calcutta, Dacca, Barisal, Mymen-singh and numerous other places, he stirred the people to revolt nonviolently against the British. The Swaraj* movement began. He started a newspaper, the Narayana, to aid the cause. He attacked the white officials as a class and he attacked most bitterly the domineering merchants who had, he alleged, come to India for ill-got gain. But his attachment to the King-Emperor never wavered in the most difficult moments. All that he wanted was freedom for Indians within "the most glorious empire in history."

But who heard him? Only a few thousands out of India's few hundred millions. Only in Bengal, the Punjab and the Bombay Presidency did the numbers amount to anything; and even at that the "teeming millions," of which Mr. Das was so fond of speaking, were untouched, hopelessly disinterested in politics.

After the War came the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms--dyarchy./- The Amritsar affair in which hundreds of Indians were wantonly butchered caused Gandhi to begin his noncooperation movement. For a time, Das was heart and soul with Gandhi, and his fervor caused his incarceration for a brief spell at Alipore. Noncooeperation was soon proved to be leading nowhere. Of the 46 million Bengalese, not 10% voluntarily supported the movement; while an insignificant but dangerous section of the population thought non-cooeperation the mildest and most absurd of protests. So long as the masses could bathe uninterruptedly in the holy waters of the Ganges, what did it matter to them who ruled India? And, farther south, the millions of Tamils, Telagus, and others knew little, saw little, felt little, except the heat.

Das soon realized the ineffectiveness of non-cooperation. He broke with Gandhi, started a cooperation movement with the object of entering the Councils to prevent them from functioning. Then he began to see the futility of his own tactics, in view of sporadic terrorist activities. He saw that Swaraj could be obtained only through supporting the dyarchical system and the lawful suppression of violence. He asked the Government to cooperate by abrogating its arbitrary powers to arrest and punish agitators. Gandhi joined him last autumn, and non-cooeperation came to an end.

After this, Lord Reading, the Viceroy, went to London. Mr. Das was to have followed. In his own words, "a favorable atmosphere had been created for further discussions."

Beyond. With the death of Das, what is to become of Swaraj? It was, and probably still is, a vital question for all Anglo-Indians. Will Swaraj and its non-violence fall by the red sword of violent revolution? Who could stop it? Not Gandhi, for he has lost most of his following. But perhaps the Pandit Motilal Nehru, the next greatest disciple of Swaraj and always the most formidable intellect of the party.

But such questions were forgotten by the tens of thousands that watched the remains of Chitta Ranjan Das pass through the streets of Calcutta to their last resting place. He was a leader in a movement to democratize India by distributing political power among the villages. It was a task the very nature of which must take generations to accomplish. But he had lived in an epoch when the East was striving in an economic sense to join with the West on equal terms. Vaguely, dimly, confusedly, the masses who had heard of Swaraj understood what the passing of the great leader signified. And if they were equally bewildered at the presence of numerous sahibs at the funeral, centuries of submission to authority had taught them to admire its quality.

*The capital of India was moved from Calcutta to Delhi in 1912.

*"Swaraj," Mr. Das once said, "is indefinable, but the same as self-government, democracy and home rule." More specifically, it means self-government within the British Empire, and concomitantly substitution of the tauchayet (village) system of administration for the religious minorities system now in partial operation.

/-The system called dyarchy came into effect in December, 1920, and January, 1921 Under it, provincial government is exercised 1) by the Governor-in-Council, 2) by the Governor and Ministers. The first administers a class of subjects called "reserved" while the second is in charge only of "transferred subjects."