BRITAIN IN INDIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 423, 1 August 1947, Page 5

BRITAIN IN INDIA

Sir,-iIn your recent admurabie leader on India you quoted an Australian professor as saying that "the governance of India has been the most glorious thing in British history," and you remarked that perhaps he was "being deliberately provocative." Perhaps he was, but it is quite likely he meant just what he said. There is a case for this opinion. Carlyle was scornful of the idea of comparing the British records in India with Shakespeare as a British glory. Carlyle has been dead a long time, and much has happened in India since his day. But a generation fter Carlyle, that accomplished and ovable Liberal essayist and critic, the late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, made a similar comparison, Whether England could better afford to Icse Shakespeare or her Indian Empire is no fair question to put to an Englishman. But every Englishman knows in his heart. which of these two glories of his birth and state will survive the other, and by which of them his country will earn in the end the greater honour. Though in our daily life we-perhaps wisely--make a practice of forgetting it, our literature is going to be our most perdurable claim on man’s remembrance, for it is occupied with ideas which outlast all- phenomena, This is well said, but I suggest, it might be challenged, or seen in another light. True, the question framed in the first sentence would not have been a fair one. The appeal of Shakespeare is personal; that of the Indian Empire is not. One may admire a beautiful woman and the British Constitution. One can fall in love with the woman, but not with a system of government. Yet -a system of government is of much greater moment. Quiller-Couch was very familiar with a_ parallel in history that might be used against him. He would have agreed that conduct is three parts of life, and that since government is conduct in action, it is more important than att. In those essays of his, which delight one as much as ever, he has something to say about the influence of Horace and Virgil in English literature. This has been deep and lasting. Virgil, indeed, seems to have exercised more influence on the culture of subsequent ages than any other writer of antiquity. But would Quiller-Couch have agreed that the modern world spends more time on the study of Virgil and Horace than on the study of Roman government (including the Empire), Roman Law, and Roman character? Every classical scholar reads Virgil. Every. lawyer (so I understand) reads Roman law. So the question may be put, will Roman literature outlive Roman institutions in the world’s mind? The western world, of which New Zealand is a part, is what it is to-day much more by reason of Roman character, concepts of law, and dominion, than by reason of Virgil having been a great poet. So, it is highly probable that centuries hence men and women will be invited

to judge Britain’s record not only by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens, but by British genius for government, at home and abroad, including India. I am pretty well aware of the darker side of the Indian story, and the case for self-government, and I have strong views on some aspects of British rule, but-I believe history will pronounce what the British have done in India to be, on the balance, among their greatest achievements. Meanwhile what is happening in India to-day is giving world opinion a sight of the truth, QuillerCouch says literature is "occupied with ideas that outlast all phenomena." But may not the same be said of politics? What of the idea of freedom? Is it not common to both? And has not this idea _of freedom run like a theme through the history of the British in India and elsewhere?

A.

M.

(Wellington),