Indian Unrest. Sir Valentine Chirol
of the wretched youth from Aurungabad who had volunteered to strike the blow. Ready as he was to kill any Englishman, he himself had some misgivings as to the expediency of selecting a victim whose personal qualities were so universally recognized, and these misgivings were only allayed by the assurance that all that was mere hypocrisy on poor Jackson's part. It was the news of Jackson's approaching departure for Bombay that finally precipitated the catastrophe. The murderer practised carefully with the pistol given to him and other precautions were taken so that, even if the first attempt was foiled, Jackson should not escape alive from the theatre—the native theatre which he had been asked to honour with his attendance. So the young Chitpavan Brahman, Ananta Luxman Kanhere, waylaid the Englishman as he was entering, shot him first in the back, and then emptied the contents of his revolver upon him, as he turned round. Mr. Jackson fell dead in front of the friends who were accompanying him, two young English ladies and a young civilian of his staff, who had only joined a month before from England and faced without flinching this gruesome initiation into the service. It all happened in a moment, and the native Deputy Collector, Mr. Palshikar, who leapt forward to Mr. Jackson's assistance, was only able to strike down the murderer and tear from him the second weapon with which he was armed. Thanks also to Mr. Palshikar's presence of mind, information was at once sent to the railway station, and the escape of some of the accomplices prevented, whose confessions materially helped in promoting the ends of justice.
But besides the facts which were brought out in evidence during the trial at Bombay, there are some features connected with the crime to which attention may be usefully directed, as they lie outside the province of the Law Courts. In the first place, it must be noted that not only the murderer but the majority of those implicated in the crime were Chitpavan Brahmans, and at the same time they were the strange products both of the Western education which we have imported into India and of the religious revivalism which underlies the present political agitation. They were certainly moral, if not physical, degenerates, and most of them notoriously depraved, none bearing in this respect a worse character than the actual murderer. I happened, when at Nasik, to see the latter whilst he was performing his ablutions in front of the Government building in which he was confined. Four policemen were in charge of him, but he seemed absolutely unconcerned, and after having washed himself leisurely, proceeded to discharges his devotions, looking around all the while with a certain self-satisfied composure, before returning to his cell. His appearance was puny, undergrown, and effeminate, and his small, narrow, and elongated head markedly prognathous, but he exercised over some of his companions a passionate, if unnatural, fascination which, I have been told by one who was present at the trial, betrayed itself shamelessly in their attitude and the glances they exchanged with him during the proceedings. Distorted pride of race and of caste combined with neuroticism and eroticism appear to have co-operated here in producing as complete a type of moral perversion as the records of criminal pathology can well show.
What are the secret forces by which these wretched puppets were set in motion? Their activity was certainly not spontaneous. Who was it that pulled the strings? There is reason to believe that the revolver with which the murder was committed was one of a batch sent out by the Indian ringleaders, who until the murder of Sir W. Curzon-Wyllie, had their headquarters at the famous "India House," in Highgate, of which Swami Krishnavarma was originally one of the moving spirits. Upon this and other cognate points the trial of Vinayak Savarkar, formerly the London correspondent of one of Tilak's organs and a familiar of the "India House," and of some twenty-five other Hindus on various charges of conspiracy which is now proceeding in the High Court of Bombay, may be expected to throw some very instructive light.
The atmosphere of Nasik was no doubt exceptionally favourable for such morbid growths. For Nasik is no ordinary provincial town of India. It is one of the great strongholds of Hinduism. Its population is only about 25,000, but of these about 9,000 belong to the Brahmanical caste, though only about 1,000 are Chitpavan Brahmans, the rest being mainly Deshastha Brahmans, another great sept of the Deccanee sacerdotal caste. It is a city of peculiar sanctity with the Hindus. The sacred Godavery—so sacred that it is called there the Ganga—i.e. the Ganges—flows through it, and its bathing ghats which line the river banks and its ancient temples and innumerable shrines attract a constant flow of pilgrims from all parts of India. Indeed, many of the great Hindu houses of India maintain there a family priest to look after their spiritual interests. Nasik was, moreover, a city beloved of the Peshwas, and, next to Poona preserves, perhaps, more intimate associations with the great days of the Mahratta Empire than any other city of the Deccan. But though no doubt these facts might account for a certain latent bitterness against the alien rulers who dashed the cup of victory away from the lips of the Mahrattas, just as the latter were establishing their ascendency on the crumbling ruins of the Moghul Empire, they do not suffice to account for the attitude of the people generally in presence of such a crime as the assassination of Mr. Jackson. For if murder is a heinous crime by whomsoever it may be committed, it ranks amongst Hindus as specially heinous when committed by a Brahman. How is it that in this instance, instead of outcasting the murderer, many Brahmans continued more or less secretly to glorify his crime as "the striking down of the flag from the fort"? How is it that, when there was ample evidence to show that murder had been in the air of Nasik for several months before the perpetration of the deed, not a single warning, not a single hint, ever reached Mr. Jackson, except from the police, whose advice, unfortunately, his blindly trustful nature led him to ignore to the very end? How is it that, even after its perpetration, though there was much genuine sympathy with the victim and many eloquent speeches were delivered to express righteous abhorrence of the crime, no practical help was afforded to the authorities in pursuing the ramifications of the conspiracy which had "brought disgrace on the holy city of Nasik"?
All this opens up wide fields for speculation, but there is one point which a statement solemnly made by the murderer of Mr. Jackson has placed beyond the uncertainties of speculation. In reply to the magistrate who asked him why he committed the murder, Kanhere said:—
I read of many instances of oppression in the Kesari, the Rashtramat and the Kal and other newspapers. I think that by killing sahibs [Englishmen] we people can get justice. I never got injustice myself nor did any one I know. I now regret killing Mr. Jackson. I killed a good man causelessly.
Can anything be much more eloquent and convincing than the terrible pathos of this confession?[6] The three papers named by Kanhere were Tilak's organs. It was no personal experience or knowledge of his own that had driven Kanhere to his frenzied deed, but the slow persistent poison dropped into his ear by the Tilak Press. Though it was Kanhere's hand that struck down "a good man causelessly," was not Tilak rather than Kanhere the real author of the murder? It was merely the story of the Poona murders of 1897 over again.
Other incidents besides the Nasik tragedy have occurred since Tilak's conviction to show how dangerous was the spirit which his doctrines had aroused. One of the, gravest, symptomatically, was the happily unsuccessful attempt to throw a bomb at the Viceroy and Lady Minto whilst they were driving through the streets of Ahmedabad during their visit to the Bombay Presidency last November. For that outrage constituted an ominous breach of all the old Hindu traditions which invest the personal representative of the Sovereign with a special sanctity.
But in spite of spasmodic outbreaks, of which we may not yet have seen the end, aggressive disloyalty in the Deccan has been at least temporarily set back since the downfall of Tilak. The firmer attitude adopted by the Government of India and such repressive measures as the Press Act, combined with judicious reforms, have done much; but it was by the prosecution of Tilak that the forces of militant unrest lost their ablest and boldest leader—perhaps the only one who might have concentrated their direction, not only in the Deccan, but in the whole of India, in his own hands and given to the movement, with all its varied and often conflicting tendencies, an organization and unity which it still happily seems to lack.
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