Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

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GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI4
advances to universal sway. Under another name if my observations are not at fault, a system of equal right and more market distinction is forcing its way, even in this free land of yours leading to monopoly and the centralization of wealth and power. For I find even here great social distinctions, and even religious exclusiveness, lifting their banners and building their walls with a zeal and a tenacity of purpose and visible results, that are almost equal in the observable decay of the system as it is popularly believed to exist, in India. I will conclude my observations on this point by quoting a paragraph or two from a very high authority in Her Majesty's Indian Civil Service and an Honorary Secretary to the Royal Society- Mr. Robert Needham Cust.
"How has society dealt with caste? I can only give an opinion based upon experience acquired in a Military life among the people of Upper part of India for weeks and months together without any European companion. I never found caste an obstacle to social intercourse, nor did the subject ever press itself forward and yet the population of the villages and towns, visited each day, differed considerably. Few villages were absolutely without Mahammedan, without men of the lowest caste, and in the thronging of an Indian crowd there must be indiscriminative contact. In my establishment there was the Brahmin, with whom; I transacted ordinary business, the Rajput, who carried my messages, the Khatri and Kayat, who engrossed my orders. Mahammedan and Hindu sat upon the floor working side by side in constant contact, and handed papers from one to the other and if the half caste Christian sat at a table to write English letters, it was only because the method of English correspondence required this distinction. My own tent was daily thronged by men of all
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castes and positions in life, and my visits to the male apartments of the notables was considered an honor, and yet of all outcastes the European is the worst, as he asserts his right to eat both beef and pork. Thus,
professors of different castes mingle in social life without any unpleasant friction: each man respects his neighbour; he has no wish, indeed, to intermarry with the family of his neighbour, or share the cup and platter of his neighbor, but he does not consider himself in the least superior or inferior."
With all my recollections of valued friends left behind me in India, whose features live in my memory and whose portraits in some cases decorate my walls, It is amazing to me to hear on my return to England that these good, easy going people, amiable and ignorant, tolerant and docile, accommodating and affectionate, are, in the opinion of wise and good men, "enslaved by a custom which annihilates fellow feeling and eats out human sympathy, and makes one portion of the community slaves to the other." I could multiply quotations of this kind, but it is not my object to aggravate this difficulty, but rather to compose it. I cannot see, that caste is an evil of that kind and degree, which is imagined by many good men. In an exaggerated and self-asserting form it would certainly be an evil. In British India the claws of caste have been cut by a strong and impartial