When the Raj faltered
By Christopher Balchin

IT is 80 years since my countrymen committed the vile massacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children at Jallianwala Bagh.I feel, more strongly than I can say, ashamed of England and what was done there in the name of the Empire. I wish I could tell every person in India how intensely I hate the injustice surrounding the entire British Raj, the false, ugly notion, upon which the British Empire was based, that Englishmen were more civilised, more intelligent, simply better than the people of India — whose culture was already over 4000 years old when the first British ships arrived. I am so sorry it ever happened.

On April 13, 1919, General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to open fire on unarmed civilians, gathered peacefully in religious celebration and in protest at the harsh recently-imposed law outlawing assemblies. Nearly 400 of them were killed and thousands were wounded. Many jumped into the well and died rather than face the bullets. Had General Dyer been able to bring armoured cars into the compound the number of persons killed and wounded would have been even higher. He then issued an order forbidding anyone to help the poor, wounded, dying victims.

How could anyone have done this? How could British soldiers in India agree afterwards, in smug racist terms —overheard by Jawaharlal Nehru — that this atrocity would "teach the bloody browns a lesson." And while things have changed, why have British officials in our time, as happened around the time of the Queen’s visit to Amritsar in 1997, had the gall to quibble about the number of people who were murdered that day instead of issuing a simple, honest, heartfelt apology?

I want people to know what I am so grateful to have learned, that the cause of all human cruelty, including the brutality of General Dyer and the British Raj, has been understood at last. Eli Siegel, the great American scholar and poet who founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, explained where evil begins. He saw that there is a constant debate in the mind of every person about how to see the world, including other people — with respect or contempt. He identified contempt as the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world," and he showed that it is as ordinary as a husband thinking he knows that his wife will say next, and is behind one person looking down on someone else because of their accent. It is the cause of war. "As soon as you have contempt," he wrote, "as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person." (James and the Children, Definition Press, New York, 1968, p.55). This attitude is the cause of all cruelty, from British Imperialism to the bullying going on in a school playground this afternoon. Before a fist is raised or a gun fired in anger, contempt has taken the inner life of another person and made it nothing.

I am sure that Dyer, who was born and raised in India, and spent years living there, did not see the Indian people as having the same kind of reality as his own thoughts and feelings. He saw them with contempt, as servants inferiors, to be commanded for their own good. This is shown graphically in another order he gave at Amritsar, to have every Indian person crawl past the place where a British woman was assaulted.If he had seen the people of Amritsar as having the same depth as himself — and I wish so much that he had — he could never have done what he did.

Growing up in England, I didn’t see other people as having the fulness I had, either. I hated cruelty when I saw it, but I didn’t see that the way I robbed other people of meaning made me cruel myself. I got into a lot of fights with other boys at the boarding school I attended, and when a young man from the Indian subcontinent began to attend this all-white school, I made fun of him and saw him as different. This was contempt; it affected how I saw people, near and far, and the world itself.

I remember looking at a world globe in my parent’s home in Kent, and seeing how much of it was coloured red, the colour of the British Empire. I marvelled at all the lands Britain had controlled. I was thrilled seeing those big red areas: they gave me the feeling I was part of something big and powerful. Not once did I think about the millions of individual people living there as real, with hopes and fears, feelings as real as my own. I took it for granted that this situation was right, and I never asked what the motives of my country had been in taking over these lands and people. Later, when I attended university, I did begin to question some of the things England had done, but if anyone who wasn’t English had the nerve — as I saw it — to question England, I would get furious and defend my country, right or wrong.

Aesthetic Realism teaches that every person has an attitude to the world. Deeply we either see the world as something to be just to, or as existing for our pleasure and domination. You can see this in a child and also in the ruler of a nation. Every government leader, every general is an individual person who has an attitude to the world, and it is crucial for everyone to learn about the unconscious debate that goes on in us. In my first Aesthetic Realism consultation when I was 23 years old, my consultants saw that though I smiled and acted polite that was not all I felt. They kindly asked me: Do you have a very deep conviction that you’ll fight whatever comes your way? Is it a desire to beat out difference? To show up what is different from yourself?

That described how I felt. I was learning for the first time in my life that in spite of how I appeared, I saw the world itself as unfriendly — a place where I had to beat out other people. Seeing this clearly enabled me to really question myself. Later, my consultants described the way of seeing I needed and that people and nations need today. They said: "To be really interested and give thought to what other people deserve is the one way to really respect yourself."

This was the beginning of a tremendous change in my life. I studied the battle in myself between contempt and respect. I had assignments arising from my consultations such as: "Does having respect for other people make me more important? Instances..."; "Ten men I respect, and why." "Does good will for other people make me more or less sure of myself?"; "Why is it good for a man to value the mind of woman?" And based on a historic assignments Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss suggested for persons nations on opposite sides of a conflict: "Write a 500-word monologue of a person you are angry with." This changes profoundly and permanently the way you think about another person. As you think more about their thoughts to themselves, you become kinder — it’s inevitable.

The most important argument I know on behalf of kindness and good will for other people is that if you don’t have it, that much you hate yourself, no matter how much importance, praise, or power you seem to have. I have learned that my contempt, which I had thought was my armour, my protection, and my glory, was the very thing hurting my life; it had made me feel small, insecure, and was the reason why I hurt other people in my family and beyond.

Eli Siegel saw, and I love him for it, that contempt, is against the very nature of man: "The deepest desire of every person," he stated, "is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis." To honestly like the world, I have learned, is to have good will. In the international journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, # 1264, Ellen Reiss describes in words that are beautiful the good will that is the only solution to racism:

"Aesthetic Realism shows...that...racism won’t be effectively done away with unless it is replaced with something that has terrific power. What needs to replace it is not the feeling that the difference of another person is somehow tolerable. What is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and that other person is beautiful. People need to feel, with feeling both intimately personal and large, that difference of race is like the difference to be found in music: two notes are different, but they are in behalf of the same melody; they complete each other; each needs the other to be expressed richly, to be fully itself. It is possible for millions of men, women, and children to have an emotion about race that is like an art emotion. And it is necessary."

"I know with my own life that it is possible. It is practical; it works, and is what makes a person happy and proud. When I see people from India, I, who once so wrongly felt scorn, see people I want to know and respect. I am so sorry for what my country did do theirs, and I want them to know what I have learned about the cause and the solution to racism. I am so grateful to Aesthetic Realism for the warm feeling that is in my heart.

As a teacher in New York City using the Aesthetic Realism teaching method I am grateful that in my work with teenagers, who themselves represent many different cultures, I have seen racism change to the pleasure of respect. This includes very much seeing with respect the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and other people. Studying India we have learned about the great Ashoka who lived over two thousand years ago. His armies conquered Kalinga-present-day Orissa-a region previously outside his empire, leaving thousands dead. But, H.G. Wells writes:

"The expedition was successful, but he was disgusted by what he saw of the cruelties and horrors of war. He declared... that he would no longer seek conquest by war, but by religion ... He organised a great digging of wells in India, and the planting of trees for shade. He appointed officers for the supervision of charitable works. He founded hospitals and public gardens. He had gardens made for hte growing of medicinal herbs...He created a ministry for the care of the aborigines and subject races. He made provision for the education of women. He made, he was the first monarch to make, an attempt to educate his people into a common view of the ends and way of life. For eight and twenty years Ashoka worked sanely for the real needs of men. (The Outline of History, Macmillan." New York, 1920, p. 431-432)

My students and I have been deeply affected by the change in Ashoka. He went from a conqueror to someone who saw those who seemed different from himself, those of a different race, the people who had been conquered, and the woman of India — at a time of limited freedom for women — as having meaning. The great change in him, for which he has been loved for centuries, stands for something every person is hoping for. Personally, I feel my life has been added to tremendously by what I have learned about him, and by the wealth of culture, languages, land and peoples of India. I need them to be fully myself.

Studying Aesthetic Realism, every person can learn to see a person of a different race or background, whose skin colour may be different, with respect and be grateful for the fact he exists. Eli Siegel asked "What does a person deserve by being a person?" When this great question and the ethics it embodies is studied, the way of seeing that led to Jallianwala Bagh eighty years ago will itself be a thing of the past, and the world will be safe and kind.