Devil People?

Sudden arrest, a fine of 1,000 rupees and a jail sentence of three months was the punishment, last week, of an Indian publisher and an Indian printer who dared to put forth at Calcutta last year a chunky, controversial book by a snowy-haired, upstanding Poughkeepsie clergyman. Publisher Ramananda Chatterjee and Printer Sajami Das were punished for "sedition." The sedition is supposed to lurk between the pages of the book, India in Bondage-- Her Right to Freedom. Last week when Poughkeepsie reporters sought out the author, Dr. Jabez Thomas Sunderland, he was ready for them, ready to wield a potent verbal cudgel in defense of the two Indians who sat in a stinking Bengal jail.

Suppressed last week, why was not the book suppressed sooner? It has sold in the thousands for a twelvemonth. A second Calcutta edition appeared last Spring.*

Since then a new British Government has come in, the Labor Cabinet headed by Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald. "If Chatterjee and Das are guilty of sedition for publishing my book," cried Poughkeepsie's Sunderland last week, "then Ramsay MacDonald and other [Labor] members of the British Parliament are also guilty, for the most extremist and seditious passages in my book are quotations from these great and honored Englishmen!"

Stupid officials in Bengal had taken the least efficient means of trying to hush up something likely to embarrass the new Prime Minister. It was one thing for plain citizen MacDonald to write for the British Laborite London Daily Herald two years ago certain words quoted by Dr. Sunderland. It is quite another thing to let such words go booming around India today, now that citizen MacDonald is also Prime Minister. The two-year old possibly "seditious"* words of Scot MacDonald are: "The moral justification that has always been made for the existence of our empire amongst subject peoples has been that we are training them for self-government. The most typical of that is our Indian empire. A thousand and one reasons are given for a little more tutelage. . . . Now plain, practical common sense should come to our rescue. Nobody can imagine that any harm will come from independence. Let independence be granted."

In effect Dr. Sunderland's book today amounts to asking: Well, why does not Prime Minister MacDonald free India now?

India in Bondage. Jabez Thomas Sunderland is a Unitarian who spent a large part of his most vigorous years in India making more Unitarians. Laymen are often cautious in listening to a "missionary," but they will find the 552 pages of India in Bondage vital, comprehensive, militantly fair. Out of a mass of closely dovetailed facts and testimony rises Dr. Sunderland's major theme: the Indian is mentally and morally equal to the Englishman and therefore competent to emerge from tutelage and enjoy freedom on equal terms.

Rudyard Kipling is singled out and flayed as having done more than anyone else to convince Anglo-Saxons by his pungent tales and swaggering rhymes that Indians are a conglomeration of "new-caught sullen peoples half devil and half child" and "a lesser breed without the law."

Writes Dr. Sunderland: "Seemingly Kipling's association in India with the English must have been almost exclusively with the military men and with the most imperialistic and domineering of the civil officials. As to India itself, the real India, the great India of the past and the present, with its history and its civilization, he seems to have cared nothing for this, and to have taken no pains to inform himself about it. As to the Indian people, he seems never to have cared to associate or to become acquainted with any but the lowest. Unless we make these assumptions, it seems impossible to account for the facts that in his writings he gives almost no portrayal of or allusion to anything of real importance in Indian history, culture or life; and that he seems to take pleasure in heaping ridicule upon the educated classes. . . ."

On the basis of his own study of the Indian Civil Service--here exhaustively examined--Dr. Sunderland concludes that "the British government in India can, if it will, set up as its successor an Indian government with every official position in it, from Viceroy to policeman, filled by fully competent Indians, quite as competent as the men who fill the positions now."

Here is the very crux of a matter which is vital because the continued refusal of British Governments to grant India independence within the Empire (that is "dominion status" similar to Canada's) has always been based on the ground that Indians are not yet ready to govern themselves. Naturally the degree of India's "readiness" is a matter of opinion, and here is a big, well ordered, meaty book from which opinion can be digested.

Startling are some of the many statements quoted from potent Britons, past and present, to show that in unguarded moments even staunchest Imperialists share a measure of Dr. Sunderland's views. For example, as long ago as 1911, Lord Morley, then Secretary of State for India, described the native officials in the Indian Civil Service as men "as good in every way as the best of the men in Whitehall" (i.e. equals of the officials in Britain's own Civil Service).

Uncle Sham. Dr. Sunderland adds an appendix chapter roundly flaying, firmly negating Katherine Mayo's popular U. S. handbook of Indian dirtinesses and sexual shortcomings, Mother India.* But a Unitarian clergyman cannot meet Miss Mayo on her chosen ground. That has just been done by a scathing Lahore publicist, Kanhaya Lai Gauba. His book is Uncle Sham./- Without pausing to tilt over India with Miss Mayo he plunges straight into an expose of U. S. dirtiness and shortcomings. Quoting chapter and verse from Herbert Hoover, Ben B. Lindsey, Bernarr Macfadden and many another, avenging Kanhaya Lai Gauba "proves" (by half-truths as well documented as Mother India's) that U. S. citizens ought to be even more ashamed of themselves than Indians. In Uncle Sham it is blazoned that President Hoover recently said (TIME, May 6): "In no part of the world are life and property more insecure than in the United States of America." Judge Lindsey is called to witness that "at least 45% of [U. S.] high school girls have had intercourse with men before they leave school."

Judge Selah [B. Strong] of the New York Supreme Court is quoted as declaring : "Frankly, a separation action [in the U. S.] is usually alimony-grabbing and nothing else."

Among chapter titles in Uncle Sham are "The Virgin," "Accidents Will Happen" and "Fairies." Copious material is drawn from Bernarr Macfadden's ill-famed pornoGraphic. Photographs include one showing three U. S. girls in barber chairs with their faces lathered, three barbers standing by with razors upraised. The tongue-in-cheek caption gravely informs the reader that "the Eve of today ... is masculine in her strength . . . goes to the barber and uses the Gillette."

*The first U. S. edition will be published Oct. 15, 1929 by Lewis Copeland (Manhattan).

*In Webster's broadest sense, sedition is ''excitement of discontent against the government"; narrowly it is "conduct tending to treason, but without an overt act."

*Long a Harcourt, Brace best seller, it has been followed by Miss Mayo's novelization of the same subject, Slaves of the Gods, today a near bestseller.

/-Obtainable from a few booksellers and the Times Publishing Co., Lahore, India.