Rabindranath Tagore, 1916, courtesy of the Library of Congress; John William Graham, 1926, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Empirical evidence: Joanna Dales has a lesson from history
‘Graham’s prejudices would not allow him to appreciate the values informing the Indian way of life.’
At a time of soul-searching about British, including Quaker, involvement in the slave trade, it is timely to consider historical questions about Quaker attitudes to the imperial project itself. How free are we now from supposing that Europeans have the right, even the duty, to impose on others our creeds, our norms, our systems of law and government? I have been studying the life and thought of a Quaker from the recent past, and find his developing views on British rule in India pertinent to these questions.
John William Graham (1859-1932) was prominent in the ‘Quaker Renaissance’, the movement whereby British Quakers began to be the open-minded religious society we know. Graham went to India over the winter of 1927-28, prepared to respect the religion and culture of the Indians, but his liberalism was deeply shaken by what he found there.
Graham’s thinking was permeated by his understanding of Darwinian science as the guarantee of human progress. Different races and nations, he thought, were moving at different speeds towards an era of universal peace and love, through the agency of the Divine Indweller, the universal Inward Light. Graham never lost his evolutionary optimism despite the appalling set-back of the first world war. Self-evidently for him Europeans, and especially the English, were the people furthest advanced on the evolutionary path. How could he avoid a condescending attitude towards those unlucky enough not to be British? He was a child of empire as well as a lifelong Quaker. Certainly he knew that British rule was founded and maintained for purposes of profit and power, not for the sake of the colonised, but British rule was also what Darwinian science dictated. Alfred Russel Wallace himself, co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, wrote that the struggle for survival ‘leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which the Europeans come into conflict’. So Graham wrote in 1890 of Britain’s ‘manifest destiny’, indeed her ‘duty of banishing half-famished barbarism and hopeless darkness from all the waste places of the earth’.
India, however, was not a ‘waste place’. During the years of Graham’s early adulthood, the ‘wisdom of the east’ attracted veneration among British people, as seen, for instance, in Helena Blavatsky and the theosophical movement. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was lionised by WB Yeats and the London literati, and acclaimed by Evelyn Underhill, specialist in Christian mysticism. Graham himself believed that the Inward Light, was also to be found among Hindus and Buddhists.
By 1912, when Graham’s book Evolution and Empire was published, it seemed that his political thinking had come to match his universalist approach to religion. The book casts doubt on the ‘self-image’ of India’s rulers as ‘the weary Titan serving mankind by manifest destiny of Heaven’. Although the British empire was ‘the best and wisest Empire known to history’, empire in general was bad for both rulers and ruled, a ‘false step in evolution’. Yet Graham shared a vision with other liberal Quakers of Indian religions becoming ‘permeated’ with enlightened Christian, and especially Quaker, views. When he went to India in 1927 with a commission from London Yearly Meeting to spread the Quaker message, Graham intended to preach a gospel based on the idea of the Inner Christ, which he thought could be incorporated into Hindu and Muslim modes of thought. But what he saw in India made him change his mind.
In 1927 India was in turmoil. The British government was alarmed by the liberation movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, with protests becoming increasingly violent. That year a US journalist called Katherine Mayo produced a book called Mother India, expressly designed to demonstrate the unfitness of the Indians for self-government. It focussed on the supposed predatory sexuality of the Indian male and the hapless condition of child brides. Several copies were circulating on the ship on which Graham travelled to India, and Graham was inclined to trust Mayo’s picture: his letters and despatches home featured hapless ‘little mothers’ subjected to the tyranny of mothers-in-law and premature and unremitting childbearing just as Mayo described.
In Graham’s view such customs and other barriers to prosperity and progress were the result of ‘Brahminism’, with its wasteful cult of the holy cow, crippling dowries, and especially the caste system, ‘the most dreadful block of tyranny and human contempt on a large scale on the earth’. Islam was not much better; Buddhism and Jainism, though begun as valid reforms, were hopelessly ‘gone to seed’. He came to think that only Christianity could save India, by immunising the population against Brahminical tyranny.
When Graham went to India he shared the widespread veneration for Tagore felt in some British circles. He visited the sage at his spiritual centre of Santiniketan, and was impressed by his ‘Tennysonian looks’. He took the opportunity to point out to him that his recently-published book, The Divinity in Man, included some of Tagore’s own poetry. Graham cannot then have known how deeply Tagore had come to hate the brutally materialistic ethos that, in his view, actuated British rule in India.
Later, in Britain, Tagore was an honoured guest at the Quaker Yearly Meeting of 1930. According to the report in the Friend: ‘What this gentle, beautiful and saintly figure had to say entered into the heart of the meeting with a sharp edge, for it was a cry from the heart of India, a cry for release from the iron hands of a machine-like system of government that was fettering her soul and her body’ (30 May, 1930).
Graham, however, was by this time immune to Tagore’s spell. He spoke to the Meeting indignantly rejecting the sage’s rebuke, and warned Friends against putting themselves ‘on the side of Gandhi and rebellion’. By now he was an unapologetic advocate for the continuance of British rule in India. He was especially hostile to Gandhi, believing that his saintly posture and his advocacy of satyagraha (or nonviolence) were fraudulent – for, of course, said Graham, his rhetoric was bound to result in violence. Graham never met Gandhi, but he developed a fierce antipathy to the man and all he stood for. After his return to England Graham wrote a series of papers for Quaker periodicals attacking Gandhi’s good faith and presenting him not only as an enemy to Britain but also as an impediment to India’s advance.
Graham’s prejudices would not allow him to appreciate the values informing the Indian way of life: values at odds with those that made Britain strong and prosperous. He could not see that the wholesale destruction by an outside power, if that were possible, of beliefs and practices underpinning Indian society, could only deracinate and fragment that society. Leaders like Gandhi and Tagore knew that reform was needed in India, but they knew that it was best brought about by those who were rooted in the culture they sought to reform. British people like Graham’s son-in-law, Horace Alexander, who became an ally and interpreter to Gandhi, knew that they needed to listen and to learn before they could help. Graham, although he was ready to admire from a distance the ‘wisdom of the east’, was unable at close quarters to see past his ingrained prejudices. In his small way he epitomised the well-meaning blunders attendant on empire-building at its best.
