We are serializing a letter written by the great Sikh intellectual Puran Singh to Sir John Simon (of the famous commission) in 1928. The conclusions of that great mind for what would happen to India have been coming painfully home to many so called Indians particularly the minorities. This letter of advice, which was also ignored, will be given to our readers in 4 weekly installments.
Dear Sir John Simon the Indian situation is indeed very complex and baffles all kinds of genius to find a royal road to India’s freedom. It may not be out of place at this stage when changes in the constitution are under contemplation to write to you a few thoughts that occur to me as one of the riot. They may be of no direct help to you but 1am sure they would reveal a bit of the mind of an Indian who is in the thick of all the mental conditions and naturally reads more of the minds of his people than any foreigner can. I see the boycott of your Commission is already getting weak; the most ardent boycotters have published their proposed Constitution. Thus they have put their views indirectly before you. It appears to me even if they had boycotted you completely as they intended, this temporary loss of temper on their part could have been treated but as rival. Let me say frankly there is no ghost of a chance of a successful revolution in India at least at the call of these intellectuals. If it could come at their call, it is certainly overdue because in the verity of things, there is nothing like freedom. In reality, there are many sudden turns in the affairs of men, and your countrymen are also afraid of a possible revolution, of course till it does not actually come. An armed revolt being out of question, I know, between you and them, there will be much of the usual give and take, a lot of crossing of t’s and dotting of i’s. This business of writing of constitutions by Pundit Moti Lal Nehru or yourself is of little interest to us the poor farmers of India and why?
- The Witches’ Cauldron
When things descend to melancholy, details of daily life and to the carrying out of these fine Constitutions in the spirit of practical sympathy there is very little man material in India which can be singled out truly as cultured and rightly trained to deserve the title “Indian” which means one who, like a Japanese or an Englishman, will place before himself the interest of the country as a whole, first and foremost, and who would burn with a passion for its service. There are Hindus, Sikhs, and Moslems. Christians, Paris’s and Janis in India but very few Indians. And strange as it may sound, it is quite true that those who have removed those labels are empty bottles, without having any character of wine, of acid, or of poison. They are of no account, because, for centuries, in India the formation of character has been associated not with the practice of broad minded patriotism but with certain racial prejudices and social superstitions. It is, therefore, not extricable from the so called religious bias and bigotry. Self-Government in India means Government by the very little cunning and aggressive people who, once put in possession of cunning and aggressive people, who, once put in possession of authority, would twist all letters of law and constitution to their individual wills and make them work on the communal or the so called religious bias.
The Moslem does not believe in any country as his own. He believes in a brotherhood which, by its sheer number, must conquer the whole world. To him, political advancement of the Moslem brotherhood is his real progress. From a racial point of view, this Moslem outlook is worthy of praise, and such a community of people, unless forced by compelling circumstances forever refuse to live under any alien domination. The Moslem essentially desires to rule over the world and even his children dream of a pan Islamic Asiatic Empire.
The interest of Moslems in India cannot be national in the sense that the National Congress of the Hindu Intellectuals so far has been declaring to mean. Men of exceptional outlooks can be found in all races and in India’s Moslems also. To get such exceptions together at Liu x
now and find agreements merely on the surface of things in certain wordings of a few formal resolutions to agree to the Nehru Committee’s Draft, is to me a ludicrous unreality of the so called history making announcements.
I was going to say it is indulgence of the Indian intellectuals in happy phrases when the country is slowly and surely going from bad to worse. For the reason given, which is in the very constitution of the Moslem mentality, he can come to no terms with the Hindu but those that give him the domination and advantage over the Hindu and all other low lying communities living in India. Any compromise arrived at would collapse as soon as the Moslem finds out that it is not to his interest and he would be thereby put merely in a position of disadvantage. Agreements bought at such a price are not worth the paper on which they are written. Surely the Nehru Report is not founded on true patriotism nor true nationalism in which the individual community merges into the larger nation with a flaming passion.
Come to the Hindu. He is the implacable but cowardly foe of the Moslem. He does not trust him and in the heart of his heart, he considers him filthy, cow eating, and treacherous, barbarous one capable of any tyranny, rapine, plunder and cruelty. Even the touch of a Moslem pollutes his food! The Hindu believes his own culture and caste superior to all other human institutions. He alone is pure.
For this very attitude, in him also, there can be no genuine feeling akin to that noble patriotism which shapes the destines of nations to their freedom and progress as in the West.
Thus there are two distinct mentalities at dagger’s drawn in spite of professing friendship and political union and social amities. One is aggressive self-assertive, revengeful mentality of a united people of one religion, one creed, one caste, with a dream of an empire driving them onward. The other is the self-centered bias of a highly conservative, non-progressive, over individualized, indifferent, disunited, dollar loving people who have consented to be slaves for centuries. The Hindu is still referring for orders to his old scriptures from where no more orders come. He cannot raise the marriage able age of the girl; He cannot remarry his child widow. He cannot give up caste and superstitions. He is hopelessly bound with the past, somewhat like the Russian peasant tied to the superstitions of the Roman Catholic Church. This eternal difference between the Hindu and the Moslem is seemed by Dr. James Cousins even up to the method of wearing the Hindu dhoti and the Moslem trousers.
TANSEN
It is, your majesty And it would be a song most pitiful That Akbar’s legs were traitor to his feet, And after these long miles of journeying Flaunted discovery. An hour ago I died to Islam and was born a Hindu but you are struck halfway from life to life Loins downward shamelessly a Musalmans AKBAR
I have seen Hindu trouser.
TANSEN
Very true, But there is something deeper than the fact that has escaped you. Take a pair of trousers From Muslims legs and put them on a Hindu’s and they will seem alike aliens of the race Aye, perverts from the faith. No, no too much hangs from your waist to risk. Here take this cloth and reincarnate quickly. AKBAR
If my limbs could ape the Hindu as glibly as your tongue Takes on his language. I far more would fear to lose myself in that which we assume, than be unmasked and so I rather choose To don the Hindu than to slough the Muslim And being both be either at the need TANSEN “Well, well the risk at least is covered up.”
The King’s Wife.
Then there are Sikhs, for example, amongst many important newly created nations. And each of these minorities is pulling in its own way because each one believes in a new inspiration and a new life that it wishes to save by cutting itself from the Hindu stock. If the mother stock shoots up, the beauty and life of the new graft will go. For example, the Sikh believes in the inspirations of the Ten Gurus. His past begins from Guru Nanak and his future lies in the progress of his ideals. His masters did cut off a portion from the dead stock of Hindus and infuse a new life into it; they isolated the Sikhs from the disintegrating people called the Hindus who are self-hypnotized slaves of a peculiar theological tyranny of complex intrigue of Brahminism. The Sikh Gurus molded a fine strong nation out of the terror stricken masses, All historians admit the worth of this great experiment of the Gurus and appreciate how Guru Gobind Singh infused a spirit similar to the Bushido Spirit of the Japanese into his Sikhs. The Guru isolated them from the dead mass around. The Sikh keeps long hair, wears a sword. However ridiculous these signs may, appear to the modern, considered under the logical social conditions of India and the environmental context, they are the fruits of an act of genius which has concealed the new life of a whole nation under such trial things the knot of hair and beard as nature concedes the lightening spark in the soft wool of clouds. Hindus have seen that his process is against them. The Guru has declared the Hindu dead as long as he does not join his Khalsa for his emancipation. The Hindu cannot tolerate such experimental condemnations of his caste and religion as the Guru makes by the very reactivity of his fresh inspiration on the masses of the Punjab. The Hindu turned down Buddhism in the past and is thinking of devouring Sikhism because both systems condemn the Hindu tyranny of caste masquerading as religion of love, A few straws show which way the wind blows. Mahatma Gandhi preaches against keeping of hair, He denounces. Those Sikh shouts of conquests as communal as against national, with which they battered the Mughal tyranny and became a free nation. The Sikh will die if he cuts his hair and assumes the Hindu shape. The patron sing attitude which the Nehru Constitution adopts towards the Sikhs is the policy of the Hindu Congress to include the Sikhs in the Hindus.
Dear Sir John Simon! There yonder are the witches, who have put their cauldron on fire, and these matters cannot be settled sill the witches’ cauldron boils and incantations are murmured. Vapors rise and in them there are acting and reacting upon each other the communal tensions and inflammable prejudices.
You might have already seen the scene of the Walpurgis Night of Goethe’s Faust in India. There is some fearsome conspiracy against the poor people who till the soil. What can be done by you or anyone to help them? The Biblical truth that thy enemies shall be of thy own household appears to be true of the Indian intellectuals who deceive themselves in imagining that they are the saviors of the poor, people—Savior’s with what? They but organize an empty handed protest and noise of wayward meetings of the mob against the British.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 27, 1990
