Page:The Independent Hindustan Volume I Number 4.djvu/10



HE problems of today cannot be solved if approached in a spirit of national rivalries and national antagonisms. There is something beyond the nation, that for which the nations exist; that something is humanity. And the problems of India, the British Empire, the new problems of reconstruction all over the world, can only be studied and solved in the light of the Ideal International. The nations must think internationally; and the League of Nations will only be a league of exploiters until it secures a new basis of human fellowship.

The idea of human fellowship has been the inspiration of Hindu culture. India, as we see her in her literature and art and religion and civilisation, thought internationally. She had room in her heart for the world; the Parsi, the Muslim, the Christian have found here a happy home. The Aryan culture, unlike the kultur of the West, is human in its vision, international in its ideals, reverent in its attitude to humanity. The deeper search of the age is for democratic internationalism; and the nations will find much to help them in Eastern culture and the message of the heroes of Indian history. It was a fashion with critics, not so long ago, to echo the sentiment of the German thinker, Hegel who said "it was the necessary fate of Asiatic empires to be subjected to Europeans"! The European critics lived to see Japan give a bitter beating to Russia; and the great Japanese statesman said with noble pride:— "We have destroyed the bypnotism of colour." It was fashionable, too, to speak of "oriental despotism"! Yet Islam is essentially democratic, and village self-government has worked for centuries in India. Mr. Webb, a collector in Central India, who studied with care the subject, said he discovered "in village after village a distinctly effective, if somewhat shadowy local organisation in one or other form of panchayat which was in fact, now and then, giving decisions on matters of communal concern, adjudicating civil disputes, even condemning offenders to reparation and fine"; and this "by common consent and with the very real sanction of public opinion."

Aryan polity was built on the besis [sic] of village communities; and these village communities, as Havel has shown in his "History of Aryan Rule," were "not wrung from unwilling war-lords and landlords by century-long struggles and civil war," as in the West. "The powers of the Civil government," Mr. Havel adds, "were delegated to it by the people themselves" and were "limited by unwritten laws which by common consent were given a religious character." The common law of the land was "formulated by the chosen representatives of the people," and India had, in the pre-Christian era, a representative assembly reminding one of the English Parliament. It is forgotten, too, by critics of India's demand for autonomy that the Western forms of self-government have been developed only recently.

In his book on "National Self-Government," Prof. Ramsay Muir is careful to point out that the institutions of self-government have been "adopted within a very short space of time" in the West. Not till the 19th century was the parliamentary or representative government established on the Continent; therefore has that century been called the "era of constitutional government." But in the earlier centuries of the "modern era," as Prof. Ramsay Muir admits, "despotism had everywhere reached its apogee on the continent of Europe." "Most of the political thinkers," he says, "pinned their faith to absolute monarchy. Government by discussion seemed to lead to mere chaos; to be ruled by the stupidity of average men seemed mere folly," In England itself, the mechanism of representative government was not invented till the middle of the 18th century. But India has believed in democracy from the beginning of her days — the democracy that would level up, not down. So it was that in India politics was not separated from religion, and love of country reached forward to the spiritual ideals still enshrined in the country's literature and life. India built up a synthetic civilisation with a deep reverence for knowledge and action; and India's thinkers and sages and poets and heroes, from the Vedic age down to the age of Tagore, have borne witness to a vision of Divine humanity. They have sung of the imperishable in the heart of toil and struggle, of the "Eternal Who hath no caste." The rebuilding of the nations' life — of India's life — calls for a return to the Aryan vision of Divine humanity. Back of the fruitful processes of cooperation which characterised the trade and craft guilds of India was a deep reverence for man as man. The labourer was not a victim to the slavery of industrialism; the peasant enjoyed self-respect; the King's representatives spoke with deference to the village headman; and if the standard of beauty with regard to a city be its vitality, its sanitation, its health and happiness — not big, crowded, fashionable buildings — the cities of the Aryan age were beautiful. Something of that beauty was reflected in Aryan art in Rajput paintings, in Hindu drama, in the courtesy of India's men, in the modesty and mirth of India's women, in India's refined, humanising culture, in the Indian civilisation free from the orgy of industrialism and the chaos of a kultur which cannot see the Kingdom

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