Abstract
We were met on our arrival in Calcutta by Mr [SW: Minet],1 representative of Messrs Longmans, Green & Co. (who brought with him a personal servant for us), and by the Hon. [SW: Bhupendra Nath Basu]2 — the chairman of the reception committee of the Indian National Congress which we had come to Calcutta to attend. For the next week we lived in the patriarchal establishment of this distinguished Hindu gentleman. For the whole time I was ill, and I am still in a somewhat miserable condition. But before I forget I should like to record the impressions of a Hindu household.
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Notes
The Brahmo Samaj, a universalist theistic society influenced by Unitarianism, was founded at Calcutta in 1828 by ‘the father of modern India’, Rammohun Roy (d. 1833). The Brahmos were pioneers of liberal political consciousness and nationalism in India. See David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ, 1979).
With a mixed Hindu and Muslim population of eighty million administered by a Lieutenant-Governor and Council, Bengal was the locus of recurrent breaches of law and order and growing political unrest in the early years of the new century. By then, as Henry Dodwell sardonically observes, in A Sketch of the History of India from 1858 to 1918 (London, 1925) p. 271: ‘It had long been recognised that this was more than one man could manage’. In 1905 the then Viceroy, Lord Curzon, had partitioned Bengal, creating a new province of East Bengal comprising Assam, Chittagong and fifteen other districts with a total population of some thirty million (predominantly Muslim but with a large Hindu minority), with Dacca as its capital. The partition triggered outbreaks of violence and sustained nationalist opposition from Bengali Hindus who viewed Curzon’s move as a cynical scheme of divide and rule. The partition was reversed in the course of the Delhi Durbar.
Dr A. J. Carlyle, a friend of the Webbs, was at the time rector of St. Martin and All Saints, Oxford. He was the author of A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1903–36), the fifth volume of which was co-authored with his brother Richard. A. J. Carlyle was the founder in 1909 of The Political Philosophy and Science Club’, for teachers in Cambridge, Oxford and London, revived as the Carlyle Club by a distinguished LSE figure, Professor Michael Oakeshott, after the Second World War.
Annie Besant (1847–1933), one of the contributors to Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), had abandoned socialism and left England for India in 1893, where she started the Hindu Central College in Benares’ Kamachcha quarter. Founder of the Indian Boy Scouts Association and the Women’s Indian Association, Besant became President of the Indian National Congress in 1917 and was also President of the Theosophical Society from 1907–33. As the ‘New Hinduism’ allusion suggests, theosophical teachings, a blend of Tibetan and Theravada Buddhism, Advaita monism and Christianity, encouraged Hindu and Buddhist reform and contributed indirectly to early Indian nationalism.
Later Sir Verney Lovett, author of The History of the Indian Nationalist Movement (London, 1920).
Dr Edward Bennet, author of Idylls of the East and Other Poems (London, 1912).
Maharaja Vishwanath Singh Bahadur, ‘the Maharaja of Chhikrapur’ in J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday (London, 1932).
C. L. Tupper, Indian Political Practice: A Collection of the Decisions of the Government of India in Political Cases (1895).
Cf. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). Naoroji’s thesis that economic exploitation in India entailed the ‘drain’ or export of indigenous wealth to England was taken up by prominent Indian nationalists of the day. See also ‘Peshawar 4/6th [March 1912]’ at page 288 below.
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© 1992 The London School of Economics and Political Science
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Feaver, G. (1992). India (1). In: Feaver, G. (eds) The Webbs in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12328-5_8
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