IN INDIA NOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 138, 13 February 1942, Page 4

IN INDIA NOW

Sir,-After reading your leading article on nonviolence in India under Gandhi, I must say I found it interesting to turn over a few pages of the same issue and discover a review of the film The Great Commandment, which deals with the triumph of the very same doctrine of. non-violence when applied by the early Christians to their Roman conquerors. Your leading article takes it for granted that non-violence would have absolutely no chance against Germany or Japan, and you assert that it only succeeded ds far as it did in India because we British are so humane. Yet, as your film critic hinted, as the film itself-makes clear, and as I am sure you could prove from history, old Roman rule could be just as tough and brutal as the modern Axis brand. And yet it is a fact that the early Christians, with their non-violence, converted their conquerors. It took time, I admit, but they did it. Indeed, sir, aren’t we all a little too prone to assume that there never has been a tyranny equal in depth to that of the Axis (you notice I say depth and not extent)? And aren’t we also sometimes too ready with the self-righteous assumption that only the British are capable of humanity? We think that non-violence would fail against Germany or Japan (and may have pretty good reasons for thinking it);

but we don’t know; and so I, for one, believe the human race should be thankful that, although Gandhi has temporarily given up his major experiment, he hasn’t closed his whole laboratory. Finally, sir, if we British have become so humane in India, don’t you think that the fact that we have been opposed by non-violent methods may have had something to do with it?

REMEMBER

AMRITSAR!

(Wellington).