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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 Queens
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 dont 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
didnt see other people as having the fulness I had,
either. I hated cruelty when I saw it, but I didnt
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 parents 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 wasnt 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 youll 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
its inevitable.
The most important
argument I know on behalf of kindness and good will for
other people is that if you dont 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 wont 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.
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