But of all the errors of Indian government, none is so serious as their destruction of the Village organism throughout India; none has had such an effect in the past; none is likely to have such bad consequences in the future.
It is the Village policy of government that has created for it the most difficulties, and which is at the bottom of the most serious unrest. For it touches not merely a few as criminal law, but practically all the population; it affects not only a part of the life of India, but it has injured it in its most vital point. In the whole history of administration there is nothing I think so demonstrative of the ignorance of government as the Village policy.
The foundation on which not only all government but all civilisation rests throughout the world is the village. As this is contrary to the usual idea that civilisation rests on the family it will be convenient to shortly show how this is so. The village is the microcosm of the State, because it includes within it divers trades and occupations and races and religions and castes in one community. A family does not do so. A family is by its nature of one blood, it is almost always of one occupation. There are families of cultivators, merchants, priests, lawyers, smiths, and so on. It is of one religion, of one caste, of one habit of thought. A family is narrow and a village is broad. Families divide; villages combine. Societies organised on the family, or clan, or tribe principle have always failed—by the very nature of things they must so fail. The Jews are a race, or tribe, and not a nation. They have no civilisation of their own, but adopt that in which they live. The Highland clans had to be broken before the Highlands could be civilised. The caste system in India ruined its old civilisation, and is the bar to any new civilisation. The Turkish Empire is dead because it was based on a religious caste divided from all others by a mutilation, and its people could never amalgamate with others. There is a continual flow of peoples to and fro upon the earth, and village communities absorb the new-comers and thereby acquire new blood, and, what is far more important, new ideas, to add to the old and leaven them. Families, classes and tribes cannot do this. They become stereotyped, and dissolve or die. Thus the basis of all civilisation has been the village, or in later times the town. The decay and death of all civilisations have been preceded by the death of the local unit. Thus imperial Rome was itself doomed to death when it destroyed local life; and a new civilisation could not be built up till the local communities had attained a fresh life. Florence, Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Venice, and many others made the civilisation of the Renaissance. So in England, a free Parliament was made up of representatives from free cities and counties. These have been destroyed, and the present constituencies are merely so many voters. Policies are no longer decided in Parliament, but in secret party conclave. Members are the nominees of that conclave, not of free local organisms, and Parliament has become a machine to register its decrees. So are free institutions passing away.
There is no lesson of history more true—more certain—than this, that the village or town is the unit of all free life and civilisation. It contains all classes, different races, religions, castes and forms of thought, and is therefore a real unit.
Now these units have existed all over the world, and when civilisations and governments have disappeared they have been built up anew from the villages. In India the village system was the one organism that survived the long years of anarchy and invasion, and it was in full vigour when we conquered India. Those who care to read up the subject can see it in Sir Henry Sumner Maine's Indian Village Communities.
In Upper Burma, on its annexation in 1885, the village community was strong and healthy; it alone survived the fall of King Thibaw's Government. Then we deliberately destroyed it, as we had destroyed it before all through India.
Now this is an instructive and interesting fact, for it was destroyed in ignorance, not by malice prepense.
Throughout India—and especially in Burma—you will find Government reiterating its conviction of the importance of preserving the village organism, repeating the conviction of its absolute necessity, and at the same time killing it. This is but an instance of much of the action of Government. It means well; it does actually see the end to be attained—it has no idea how to attain that end; but, instead, it renders it impossible.
If I explain what happened in Burma, the history, mutatis mutandis, of what has occurred throughout India will be clear.
In the first place, a "village" does not mean only one collection of houses; it is a territorial unit of from one to a hundred square miles. Originally, of course, there was in each unit one hamlet; but, as population grew, daughter hamlets were thrown off. They still, however, remained under the jurisdiction of the mother hamlet, and they all together formed one village. In each village there were a Headman and a Council of Elders. The headman was appointed or rather approved by the Burmese Government for life or good behaviour; the council was not recognised by law. Notwithstanding this, the council was the real power. It was not formally elected, it had no legal standing, but it was the real power. The headman was only its representative and not its master; he was but primus inter pares.
This headman and council ruled all village matters. They settled the house sites, the rights of way, the marriage of boys and girls, divorces, public manners; they put up such public works as were done, they divided the tax amongst the inhabitants according to their means, and were collectively responsible for the whole. There was hardly any appeal from their decision, but the power not being localised in an individual but in a council of all the elders, things went well. The village was a real living organism, within which people learned to act together, to bear and forbear; there were a local patriotism and a local pride. Within it lay the germ of unlimited progress.
The English Government on taking over Upper Burma recognised the extreme value of this organisation. In Lower Burma much of our difficulty arose from the fact that the organisation was wanting and that between Government and the individual there was no one. So one of the first efforts of Government in Upper Burma was to endeavour to preserve and strengthen this local self-government. Unfortunately every effort it made resulted in destroying it rather than consolidating it. A wrong view was taken from the beginning.
The council was ignored. How this happened I do not know, I can only suppose that it arose from ignorance. The only man recognised by the Burmese Government we replaced was the headman. They dealt directly with him and not with the council. They did not appoint the council or regulate it in any way. In law no council existed. Therefore, when we took over, the law was mistaken for the fact—a common mistake, due to seeking for knowledge in papers, and not in life—and the council was ignored. The following seems to have been the argument: Government appointed the headman, therefore he was an official. Government did not appoint or recognise any council, therefore there was no council. Anyhow, that was the decision arrived at and enforced.
There is on record a circular of the Local Government in which the headman of a village is described as a Government official; to be to his village what the District Officer is to his district. That is disastrous. A headman is not an official of the Government. His whole value and meaning is that he is a representative of the people before Government. He expresses the collective views of the village and receives the orders of Government for them as a whole. He is their head, not a finger of Government. He corresponded almost exactly to the mayor of an English town, who would be insulted if you called him a Government official. Yet this mistaken view was taken of the village headman, and this error has vitiated all dealings of Government with the village organisation and its headman. He is appointed by Government instead of being appointed by the people and approved by Government. He is responsible to Government, not to his village—as he ought to be—for the use or abuse of his powers. He is punished by Government for laxity. By the Village Regulation he can be fined by the District Officer.
There has grown up among Europeans in the East a custom of imposing fines. They fine their servants for breakages and innumerable other small matters, and then complain how scarce good servants are. The clerks in Government offices used to be subject to continual fines until Lord Curzon stopped it. Now headmen of villages can be fined by the District Officer; and they are fined; the proviso is no dead letter. It is a mark of the "energetic" officer to use it. Can there be anything more destructive? Imagine the headman, the mayor of a community of three or four thousand people, fined five shillings for the delay of a return, or set, like a schoolboy, to learn a code—with the clerks. I have seen this done often. What respect for Government, what from his own people, what self-respect, can he retain after such treatment?
Again, by ignoring the council and making the headman an official, Government set up a number of petty tyrants in the villages, free from all control but its own; consequently it has been forced to allow great latitude of appeal. This still further destroys his authority. He is under old custom, legalised by the Village Regulation, empowered to punish his villagers who disobey him in certain matters. The punishments are, of course, trivial. When approved by the council, as in old days, they were final; but now they can be appealed against—and are. A headman who endeavours to enforce his authority runs the risk of being complained against and forced to attend Headquarters, to waste days of valuable time and considerable sums of money to defend himself for having fined a villager a shilling for not mending his fence. One or two experiences of this sort and the headman lets things slide in future.
Thus interference with the village is constant and disastrous. Headmen are bullied, fined, set to learn lessons like children, all in the name of efficiency. And Government wonders why the village system decays. A continual complaint of Government is that headmen are no longer the men they used to be, that they have lost authority. The best men will not take the appointment—and who can wonder? Here is a story in illustration:
There was a small village in my district, on a main road, and the headman died. It was necessary to appoint a new one. But no one would take the appointment. The elders were asked to nominate a man, but no one would take the nomination. I sent the Township Officer to try to arrange; he failed.
Now a village cannot get along without a headman. Government is at an end; no taxes can be collected, for instance; therefore it was necessary a headman be appointed at once. I went to the village myself and called the elders and gave them an order that they must nominate someone. So next morning, after stormy meetings in the village, a man was brought to me and introduced as the headman-elect. He was dirty, ill-clad, and not at all the sort of man I should have cared to appoint, nor one whom it would be supposed the villagers would care to accept. Yet he was the only nominee.
"What is your occupation?" I asked.
He said he had none.
"What tax did you pay last year?" I asked him this in order to discover his standing, for men are rated according to their means.
He told me that he had paid five shillings—less than a third of the average.
"You are willing to be headman?" I asked.
"No," he said frankly. "But no one would take the place, and the elders told me I must. They said they would prosecute me under the 'bad livelihood' section if I didn't. I could take my choice between being headman or a term in prison."
This was, of course, an extreme case, but it illustrates the position. The headman is degraded and all administration suffers.
It is the same in municipalities. The work is done by the District Officer because it is easier for him to do it than to instruct and allow others to do it.
The people one and all hate this. The headman hates it, because though he is given much greater power nominally than he used to have he dare not use this power. He is isolated from his villagers, and so often becomes an object of dislike to them. Through him orders are enforced which are not liked by the people, and he has to bear all the brunt. His dignity is gone. Sometimes he is murdered.
The elders hate it. They have been ignored. They are placed under a headman who may or may not attend to what they say. They have lost all interest—because all power—in their village affairs. They have no responsibility.
The villagers hate it. A council of their own elders they could respect and submit to; a one-man rule they detest. Their appeal to the council on the spot (who know) has been lost; and in place of it they have an appeal to a distant officer who, with the best will in the world, cannot know. An appeal costs money, and even to win may be to lose. They all want to manage their affairs; they can do it far better than we can, and there is nothing they so much appreciate as being allowed to do so. Here is how I learnt this:
Some eighteen years ago I was leaving a station where I had been for a year as subordinate officer, and had to cross the river by launch to the steamer station on the other shore. I went down to the bank to get the launch, but it was late. I saw it three miles away, and so sat down under a tree to wait.
Presently two or three elderly Burmans came and sat down near me. Then came others, till maybe twenty elderly men were there. I recognised two or three vaguely, but none clearly. I wondered at their being there, and asked:
"Are you crossing over too?"
They shook their heads.
"What are you here for, then?"
They looked embarrassed, and at last one spoke. "We came to say 'Good-bye' to you."
I stared. "But I do not know you, except that I suppose you are elders of the town."
"We are," they said, "and you do not know us because you have not ever worried us in any way. When we had business together you did it quickly and decisively; otherwise you left us alone. You did not treat us as children. Therefore we are sorry you are going."
I laughed. I could not help it. To come and express regret at a man's leaving on the ground that they knew next to nothing of him and did not want to know more seemed unusual.
But it was true. And often, after, did I think over that "send-off" and take the lesson to heart.
Now what is true in Burma is true over all India. The local circumstances of course vary. A lumbadar in the North-West, for instance, does not quite correspond to a headman in Burma. The actual form in which the village was organised differs from place to place according to local needs. Even in Burma it differed a good deal. But the differences were only of form. In all India there were self-contained village communities within which, to a certain extent, caste, religion, and race were subordinated to local communal feeling.
And everywhere Government has killed it by turning the village officials into Government officials, responsible to Government and not to the village.
Thus there is now absolutely no organism a man can belong to. There are three hundred and fifty million individuals in India, and that is all. They are divided laterally into strata by caste and religion, and there is no influence to draw them together. All organised life is dead. Government by means of its official—the headman—interferes with almost every detail of life, regulating his conduct by rules drawn up in Secretariats by men who never knew what a village was, and the appeal is to another alien officer.
Further, all morality and all conduct are the outcome of corporate life, that is to say, of the village or of a larger unit. Morality is, in fact, where it is useful and true, the knowledge of how to get along with your fellow men and women, what conduct offends them and leads to the injury of society, what pleases them and tends to harmony and mutual happiness. It is not fixed, but adapts itself to changing circumstances of the society, and it is enforced by the opinion of that society.
But injure the society and both manners and morals are shaken. It is a common complaint of India to-day that the bonds of morality have greatly slackened and that manners have almost disappeared. This is attributed to the waning influence of religions. But, generally speaking, religions have not waned in India—on the contrary, their influences have increased. The people have become more and more in the power of religious systems. Therefore the cause given is absurd and untrue. It does not exist. Further, neither morality nor manners are the outcome of religion. On the contrary. Religions claim them to be so, but the claim is false. Manners and morals may be said to be the gravity which binds individuals into a community. They make the community and are themselves the outcome of the community. Destroy the community and you have destroyed the source from which manners and morals arise.
That has been done all through India. In another book I have pointed out how disastrously this has acted in Burma and how much the people feel it. I do not want to repeat myself. But if those officials who deplore the frequent cases of young girls running away with boys, of seduction, of adultery and other offences, of immature marriages, and other mistakes, would but realise that all these arise from the injury we have caused to society, there might be a change. All the human virtues, with no exception, either arise from or are increased by the aggregation of men into communities, and it is very difficult to keep them alive where no organic communities exist. Consider the words humanity, civilisation, patriotism, urbanity—their derivations and their meanings—and you will see this.
I do not think I need say more. I have tried to set out the facts as clearly and dispassionately as I can. I have omitted much that I might have said. I have tried here, as throughout, to understate difficulties rather than exaggerate them, because exaggeration defeats its own ends. But I think if the reader will try to realise to himself the state of affairs where no village has a say even in its simplest affairs, and where everything is under the eye of a Government official, where all initiative is forbidden and where the best men stand aloof from all interest in village affairs, he will have some idea that unrest is not unreasonable.
The village organism was the one vital institution left to India; it was the one germ of corporate life that could have been encouraged into a larger growth. It has been killed. It will have to be resuscitated before India can cease to be India Irredenta.