Page:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1.djvu/309



A Tamil gentleman, to whose caste belong some of the indentured Indians, is a Puisne Judge of the High Court at Madras. An Indian has been entrusted with the very responsible duties of a Civil Commissioner in Bengal.

Indians have occupied the Vice-Chancellor’s chair at Calcutta and Bombay.

Indians compete for the Civil Service on the same terms as the Europeans.

The present President of the Bombay Corporation is an Indian elected by the Members of the Corporation.

The latest testimony to the Indian’s fitness for an equality with the civilized races comes from the London Times of 23rd August, 1895.

The writer of “Indian Affairs” in The Times who, it is well known, is no other than Sir William Wilson Hunter, perhaps the most eminent Indian historian, says :


 * Of the acts of daring and of the even more splendid examples of endurance by which those honours were won, it is difficult to read without a thrill of admiration. One Sepoy who received the Order of Merit has had no fewer than thirty-one wounds, “probably,” says the Indian Daily News, “a record number”. Another, shot in the defile where Ross’s party was cut up, quietly felt out the bullet in his body and with both hands forced it, fearless of the agony, to the surface. When at last he could get it between his fingers he pulled it out, and then, streaming with blood, he shouldered his rifle again and did a march of twenty-one miles.


 * But if the gallantry of the native soldiers who obtained recognition stirs within us a pride in having such fellow-subjects, the paltry rewards doled forth in cases of equal pluck and steadfastness awaken very different feelings. Two water carriers of the 4th Bengal Infantry were singled out in the dispatches ‘for the gallantry and devotion exhibited by them during the action at Koragh’. Indeed, nothing could exceed their magnificent self-devotion to their comrades in that deadly pass. Another man of the same regiment was mentioned for ‘the conspicuous gallantry and devotion exhibited’ while with the party which brought the late Captain Baird into Chitral fort . . . . The truth is that the Indians are earning the right to be regarded as worthy fellow subjects in more ways than one. The battlefield has always formed the short cut to an honourable equality among races. But the Indians are also proving their title to our respect by the slower and more difficult methods of civil life. There never was a greater experiment made in the constitutional government of dependencies than the expansion of the Indian Legislative Councils on a partially elective basis three years ago (the italics are mine). Nor in any part of India did the issue of that experiment seem more doubtful than in Bengal. he Lieutenant-