die while he was absolutely powerless to do anything was so great, said Sj. Chatterjee, that he could never dream that such pain was possible. At an advanced age his sorrow had come to him as a revelation of the intensity of human suffering.

We could say nothing. We silently listened to him as he recounted to us in a soft undertone how good and full of the spirit of adventure and restlessness, his brother was, and how devoted to the cause he served.

After a little silence, he began to talk on the sorrows of India and of Bengal in particular. He was vehement when he began to describe the injustices, untruths and cowardice that we usually wink at and leave alone. This policy of ethical laissez faire was killing our nation inch by inch. Unless we learned to be true to our convictions and had backbone enough to avoid compromise with evil, there was no hope for us. He could have some faith in the youth of the race, but where boys of eighteen had wives and childrer could there be any place for youth? Our race lost its youth before it had a good grasp of it, and here was our greatest tragedy. Sj. Chatterjee also condemned strongly the present prevalence of dilettantism in every field of life. People wanted to be writers without learning grammar and thought they were "artists" before they knew the meaning of drawing. Discipline and Sadhana alone could make a nation great, be it in art, literature, music, politics or industry. He said, he had no university education, but he had made efforts all his life to read and learn and valued knowledge above everything else. We asked Sj. Chatterjee, if he did not consider that we were having a bit too much of "self-expression" nowadays, especially from those who had little to express. He smiled and said nothing.

After a

little while he said that in his opinion the greatness of Art is in restraint not in running riot. It was nearly dark when we left Deulti. Sj. Sarat Ch. Chatterjee impressed us as a man of singularly rational outlook on life. He has the gift of looking at things in their proper perspective and of correct evaluation of blessings and evils. A. C.

Death of the Emperor of Japan

The untimely death of His Imperia Majesty the Emperor Yoshihito of Japan ha cast a gloom over that land of smiles and cheery optimism. The Emperor was loved by the Japanese as their own father and his sudden death has put the whole Japanese nation in deepest mourning. We offer ou sincerest condolences to our gallant neigh bours. The late Emperor was the 122nd emperor of Japan. He was born on August 31st., 1879 and was the 3rd son of the late Emperor Mutsuhito. He was highly educated and was well-trained in the military and naval sciences. A, C.

Tolstoy on Manual Labour

The letter of Leo Tolstoy to Mon. Romain Rolland published elsewhere shows how deep his insight was into the fundamentals of human happiness. His formulation of the principles of conduct which would ensure universal Kalyana clearly points out his profound sympathy with Indian ethical ideals and this naturally creates a hunger in us to learn more of his views on the common problems of humanity.

Rotaphfel verlag of Munich have published a small volume entitled "Tolstoy and the Orient" (in German) which gives us the Great Russian sage's correspondence with various Asiatic friends and admirers of all sects and religions. Readers of the Modern Review will be glad to learn that we are arranging to give them English renderings of selected extracts from this book. A.C.

VOL. XLI NO.. 2

A

CCORDING to the Census returns of 1921, our aboriginal tribes number about 16 millions in India, forming one in twenty of the population. They are most numerous in Assam, the Central Provinces, Bihar and Orissa, Central India and Burma. The following figures show the strength of some of the major aboriginal tribes in India.

Gond (C. P., B. & O., C. I., U. P.,
Hyderabad and Assam)

Santal (Bihar and Orissa, Madras and
C. I.)

...

Bhil (Bombay, C. I., Baroda and Rajputana) Kurumban (Coorg, Madras. Hyderabad

and Mysore)

Oraon (B. & O., Bengal, Assam and C.P.) Banjara (Bombay, C. P., Punjab, Hyderabad and Mysore)

Kandh (B. & O., and Madras)

Munda B. & O., Bengal, and Assam)
Savara (B. & O., Madras and C. I.)
Ho (B. & 0.)

Naga (Assam)

Kachari (Assam)

...

...

...

29,02,592

22,65,282 17,95,808

8,55,279 7,65,680

6,51,927 6,16,824 5,93,839 4,75,868 4,40,174 2,20,619 2,07,266

Almost all these tribes live in the solitude of forests and jungle-clad hills-small pools of humanity without any living connection with the main currents of Indian life and culture. Truants to civilization, their life is an unending series of terrors, terror of man, animal and unknown powers. In the words words of Sir Herbert Risley, they "worship and seek by all means to influence and conciliate the shifting and shadowy company of unknown powers or influences making for evil rather than for good, which reside in the primeval forest, in the crumbling hills, in the rushing river, in the spreading tree, which gives its spring to the tiger, its venom to the snake, which generates jungle fever, and walks abroad in the terrible guise of cholera, smallpox or murrain.”

WHOLE NO 242

There is nothing so grinding and corrosive as fear, and fear forms the stuff of life and beliefs of these tribes. Fear has degraded many of them to the deepest depths of misery and abasement. Unacquainted with the more civilized methods of agriculture and industries and ignorant of the ways of trade and commerce, their life is hard pressed by poverty and the rigour of starvation often drives them to occasional acts of violence and crime and to be classed by law as a "criminal tribe." The fierce struggle for economic advantages has continually driven these tribes to places where food is more and more difficult to gather or grow. Forest laws in many cases operate harshly on them, by limiting the area of cultivation, in order to preserve the forests, and by prohibiting the free use of forest produce beyond a very limited extent. Technical and slight infringements of forest laws are sometimes met with punishments severe beyond all proportions. Not infrequently the poor aborigines bind themselves for small cash to work as field labourers to well-to-do cultivators or money-lenders. The "Kamia" system, passing under different names in the different provinces in India, and which amounts to serfdom in practice, counts among its victims a very large proportion of aborigines. The writer 1ecalls listening to Gond Kamias in a village in the interior of the Central Provinces. One of them related how he had bound himself to serve as a labourer to a moneylender until he paid back Rs. 30 in cash and 6 maunds of paddy, which he had received from him. He said that he had served for eleven long years, yet emancipation was not in sight; for he could never get together enough cash to pay back his creditor to his satisfaction.

The people of the plains miss no opportunity of exploiting the labour or the produce of the labour of the aboriginal tribes. Simple as they are, they always lose in dealing with the cunning money-lenders, liquorvendors and traders from the plains. Their labour is heavily underpaid, they are cheated out of their land, extortionate interest is charged from them, and liquor completes their ruin. The aboriginal tribes have no reason to be thankful for the contact of the 'civilized' people with them; for the 'civilization' which the money-lenders, the traders and the liquor-vendors carry with them is a thing to be avoided. So far the results of the contact have been generally very unhappy for the aborigines.

a

From this tale of exploitation by some of the advanced communities in India, one turns with gratitude and admiration to the work of the Christian Missionaries. The supreme purpose of the missionary activities among the aborigines is, no doubt, to Christianize them-a purpose which the missionaries themselves never conceal. As an American missionary once put it to the writer, it is their 'One Job' above all other. But one would far rather welcome the evangelization of all the aborigines. than a continuance of their present degraded condition. It is easy enough for nonChristian critics to feel panicky over the massconversion of whole tribes of aborigines, like the Khasis and Lushais of Assam, to Christianity. It is far more difficult thing to make the communities to which such critics belong do even a small fraction of what the Christian missionaries are doing. It is one thing to contemplate the glories of Hinduism or Islam; it is quite another to go out into the dense forests and isolated hills and live among the aborigines to help them to a better life. It is an undisputed fact that Christian aborigines are better off than their fellow-tribesmen in many respects, particularly in education. Communal jealousy apart, the complaint that one hears against 'convert' aborigines is that they cut themselves adrift from their people and by servile aping of the Europeans make themselves particularly disagreeable to their own community. The complaint is largely true and I respectfully invite the attention of the missionaries to this unsavoury aspect of conversion to Christianity. It is not pleasant to contemplate that the life of the aborigines should be made the hunting ground for competing evangelists belonging to different

religious sects. religious sects. How one wishes that it were possible that the missionaries belonging to different sects had sought to serve for the sake of service, impelled by all that is best in their own faiths, without being impatient to swell the number of converts and impose their dogmas and doctrines on masses of people. As things are, the Christian missionaries have evangelized and served a section of the aborigines. Other faiths in India have not yet attempted to do either in a serious or organized manner or on a large scale.

In the provincial legislative councils the interests of the aborigines have received very little attention. Two seats are allotted in the B. & O. Legislative Council to the representatives of the aborigines, to be filled by nomination. Although the 'depressed' classes and backward tracts are represented in some of the provincial legislatures, the B. & 0. legislature alone, out of eight provincial and one central legislatures, provides for the representation of the aborigines. In this connection it is important to remember the proportion of the aborigines per 1000 of the population, which is as follows according to the Census of 1921 :

Assam-248, C. P. & Berar-204, B. & 0.62, Bombay-82, Madras-32.

It is impossible to think of the introduction of any practicable system of election for the representation of the interests of the aborigines. On the other hand, considering the large number of these primitive people, whose poverty is only surpassed by their ignorance, it is necessary that their interests should be, by some method or other, represented in the provincial and central legislatures. It will add to the representative character of the legislatures and give publicity to the needs and grievances of the aborigines, which is not given them at present. It is a regrettable fact that very few of the members of the provincial and central Legislative Councils take any interest in the welfare of the aborigines. Earl Winterton recently announced in the House of Commons that the seats for the representation of Labour and the Depressed Classes would be increased in the Provincial Legislatures after the General Election. As already pointed out, the numerical strength and the peculiar position of the aborigines demand that their claims to better representation in at least all provincial legislatures should no longer be ignored.

Apart

from the Missionaries, social