Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras/Part 2/Rai Bahadur P. Ranganadha Mudaliar, M.A.
THIRTY-THIRD CONVOCATION.
(By Rai Bahadur P. Ranganadha Mudaliyar, M.A.)
My Lord Chancellor and Gentlemen,—The bye-laws governing the procedure at Convocation require that a Fellow of the Senate should make an address to those who have been admitted to the Degrees of the University, exhorting them to conduct themselves in a manner suitable to the academical position gained by them. This responsible duty has, on this occasion, been assigned to me by His Excellency the Chancellor, and while I owe it to him to say that I feel thankful to him for the honor he has conferred on me, I owe it to myself to add that I am keenly sensible of the difficulty of the task I have undertaken. Gentlemen, you who have just received degrees. You have this day been admitted into the honorable body of the Graduates of the University of Madras. Your admission was preceded by a period of probation during which you were subjected to a severe discipline. At the close of this period, you were examined by a body of experts who have declared that you have been weighed in the balance and that you have not been found wanting. And the University, before setting the seal of its approval on you, has wisely obtained from you solemn promises that you will so conduct yourselves in every relation of life as to be an honour to the University, and a blessing to the country that gave you birth. By taking these promises from you, and by deputing a member of the Senate to impress on you their full meaning and significance, the University wishes you to understand that it attaches no less importance to the social and political virtues; to character and conduct,— than to intellectual power and literary or scientific knowledge. The ceremony you have gone through to-day is not a mere matter of form. Its purpose is to awaken in your minds a lively sense of what you owe to the University, and what you owe to yourselves. You are going into the world with the stamp of the University on you as sterling coin. The degrees you hold will enable you to attain a position of eminence in the community to which you belong. How can you better evince your grateful appreciation of the honor the University has conferred on you than to prove by the zeal and ability, the good sense and integrity with which you discharge your public and private duties that you are worthy sons of your Alma Mater and that be the temptation to evil never so strong, you will not consciously stoop to do any thing that will cast the slightest slur on the fair reputation of the fraternity to which you will from this day forth belong ?
In regard to the University to which you and I belong, and are, I trust, proud to belong, I may be permitted to say that humble as its aims and limited as its functions are, it has done the work it has set to itself with creditable success. It has indeed no monumental buildings, no ancestral trees, no galleries and museums, nothing of a romantic or picturesque character to captivate the imagination by, no proud reminiscences linking it with names illustrious in the past for genius or heroism. It has had but a brief existence. Its life has been peculiarly monotonous. Year after year, examinations have been held, results published and degrees conferred, —a work which falls very far short of what many Universities in Europe have done and are doing. But none-the-less, I venture to assert that a great deal of good has already been done, and that the foundations are being slowly but surely laid of good in the future sufficient to satisfy all reasonable expectation. It is no small thing that of those who graduated during the thirty-two years from 1857 to 1889, there are at present on the rolls 1,974 Bachelors of Arts, 49 Masters of Arts, 317 Bachelors of Law, and 8 Masters of Law. The numbers that passed the examinations in Engineering and Medicine are less satisfactory, but even in this there is no ground for despair as the failure is in my opinion due not to a want of capacity on the part of the students, but to the absence of such a demand for Engineering and Medical Graduates as would ensure to them an honorable competence. The numbers of candidates for the Matriculation Examination and the First Examination in Arts have gone on increasing by leaps and bounds, —increasing of late years to such an extent that it was felt that the time had come for directing the attention of the youth of the country to courses of study and branches of knowledge that the University omits, and rightly omits to include in its curricula. This rapid increase in the numbers presenting themselves for the lower examinations may not in itself be a matter for rejoicing, seeing that only a small fraction of those that pass the lower examinations go on with their studies till they obtain a degree; but looking at the matter from another standpoint, and noting what expansion of Primary and Middle School education must have preceded it as a necessary condition, the great help that the University has given towards the successful working of the multitudinous agencies, public and private, that are carrying on the work of educating the youth of this country, deserves thankful recognition. Weighty testimony has been borne by previous speakers at Convocation to the services rendered by the University in providing the State with servants of a better stamp than it formerly had. The men that the University has given have been found to be superior to their predecessors in "method and regularity and also in the tone of morality" If these are all the benefits that the University has conferred, and I shall not pause to inquire what more it has, it must be acknowledged to have done a great and useful work, and to deserve the lasting gratitude of those who have profited by its labors.
Tot hose who failed to pass the recent University Examinations, I would say, do not lose heart. Work with greater zeal and method than you have yet done, and if you deserve to succeed, succeed you will. Painful as it must be to you that you have failed, you will not be surprised to hear that there is a point of view in which your failure is a thing to be glad of. It is obvious that a University degree will cease to be of any value if the undeserving gain it as much as the deserving, and it is in every sense a more desirable thing that you should fail once, twice, thrice, and then succeed, only if you deserve to succeed, than that the value of a University degree should fall in men's esteem.There never was a greater necessity than at present for the University keeping a jealous watch over the standards of its examinations. The time may be far distant when the best graduates of this University can claim to be the intellectual equals of the best graduates of the West. Perhaps that time is a dream never to be realized. But there is no doubt that such equality is the ideal to be aimed at. Anything that tends even in a slight degree to cause a divergence from the policy hitherto pursued of raising standards gradually but to a definite and appreciable extent, deserves in my opinion to be regarded as a calamity, which the true friends of education will do well to avert by all the means in their power.
My connection with the examinations of the University during a long course of years enables me to say that especially of late years there has been a marked decline in the mathematical attainments' of the candidates for the Matriculation Examination and the First Examination in Arts. Every teacher knows how difficult it has become to make the majority of students in the First Arts classes pay due attention to their mathematical studies, and this difficulty arises, I believe, less from natural inaptitude or the preponderating claims of other subjects of the course than from a capricious distaste born of the intention to give up mathematics altogether after passing the First Examination in Arts. Be the causes what they may, this notable decline is a matter for serious regret, and I may, on behalf of the University, express an eaf- nest wish that students will appreciate better than they seem to do at present the place and function of mathematics in a scheme of liberal education, and bestow upon that subject the attention it deserves as a disciplinary study, and as an indispensable help to the study of every branch of the physical sciences.
I find from the records of the University that 1,974 graduated in Arts upto the 31st of March 1889; and that of those no less than 118 have passed away, 1 out of every 17. Among the Masters of Arts, the rate of mortality is 1 out of every 9; among the Bachelors of Law, 1 out of every 8; among Bachelors of Medicine and Masters in Surgery, 1 out of every 7. These figures are such as to cause the gravest anxiety. What is peculiarly painful is that the higher the academical standard attained, the greater is the rate of mortality, indicating that the physical energies have collapsed under the strain of the higher studies. When this high rate of mortality is coupled with the fact, that a good proportion of those that have ceased to exist were in their day men of bright promise with a prosperous career before them, the loss must be felt to be very considerable. It behoves you to take warning betimes, and to guard against the fatal error of your mental growth so far outrunning your physical growth as to endanger bodily health or even life itself. The attention of the youth of the country has already, thanks to the Physical Training and Field games Association, been drawn to those healthful and recreative exercises and field-sports which will give the body the vigour and the elasticity required to undergo without injury to severe mental effort. It is said that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Of the Hindu boy, it will be truer to say that all work and no play makes him a feeble boy. Hindu boys, all but a few excepted, need still to be taught the art of "losing time wisely." With a variety of examinations to pass, with the high-pressure methods of imparting instruction in vogue, and with a hereditary aptitude for conning things by heart, the Hindu youth is sorely tempted to pore over his books day and night, forgetting that he has a bodily frame to build up as well as a mind to stock with knowledge. Such utter disregard of physical health out of excessive anxiety to cultivate the mind must produce the most disastrous results, —feebleness, want of spirits, functional derangement, premature arrest of bodily growth, if not death itself. "This over-education," says Herbert Spencer, "is vicious in every way, —vicious as giving knowledge that will soon be forgotten; vicious as producing a disgust for knowledge; vicious as neglecting that organization of knowledge which is more important than its acquisition; vicious as weakening or destroying that energy without which a trained intellect is useless; vicious as entailing that ill-health for which even success would not compensate, and which makes failure doubly bitter."
I may, in this connection, exhort you and the like of you to remember that on you devolves the duty of diffusing among your Country men true notions concerning natural objects and natural forces. There is much truth in the familiar couplet:—
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure."
Much the greater part of human misery is due to ignorance, —ignorance in regard to the properties of the things around and about us, —ignorance in regard to the character of physical forces, —ignorance of the invariable sequences of cause and effect in the realm of nature. Let it be known to the many as it is now known to the few that "pestilences will take up their abode only among those who have prepared unswept and ungarnished residences for them" and how much human suffering could be avoided or mitigated. There is small cause for wonder, though there is much for sorrow, in the fact that such large numbers periodically fall victims to cholera, small-pox, and typhus. How is it possible for people to be healthy when they are ill-washed and ill-fed, —when their houses are ill-drained and ill-ventilated, —when their towns have narrow streets reeking with noxious odours from accumulated garbage, —when the water they drink and the air they breathe contain the germs of disease and death? Is there ground to hope that the masses will, in their present state of ignorance, find out what it is that makes human beings fall like grass beneath the mower's scythe, and hasten to adopt the remedies that science has devised for alleviating human suffering and prolonging human life? Can they be made to feel that their houses require to be kept clean and white-washed, that their drains need flushing, that their streets need widening? Are they likely to realize the need for preserving the wells and tanks that supply drinking water free from impurities of all kinds? What they are likely to say and do is what they have so often said and done, and that is to plead poverty and inability, and to submit themselves with such resignation as they can command to the decrees of an over-ruling fate. Graduates of the University, I wish I can, by any words of mine, make you feel what a vast field of useful labor lies before you in imparting to your fellow-countrymen the rudiments of natural knowledge. You know the saying that he who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, is a benefactor to his country. Judge then what immense benefit you will confer on the generation to which you belong and through them to succeeding generations, if through your exertions men learn to lead healthier lives and to suffer less from the maladies that flesh is heir to.
In regard to the relation in which you stand to Government, I have nothing new to say, but trite as what I may say will sound, I cannot pass over so important a topic. The benefits that the British rule has conferred on us are so well and widely appreciated that a very brief mention of them is all that is necessary. You enjoy a security of person and property, unknown to your fore-fathers; you have received the precious gift of British Literature and Western Science; the countless ways in which the genius and industry of man have compelled the forces of nature to minister to his material wants have been placed within your reach. In addition to these great blessings, you enjoy a freedom of thought and speech which it cost your rulers centuries of painful struggle to win. You who have received such benefits are bound to be grateful, and mark my words, you will, in my opinion, be acting most unwisely, if by any thing you say or do, you let it be thought that you are wanting in grateful loyalty. It may well be that you are not content with what you have already got, but remember that you owe this very sense of a better condition of things than the present to that wise generosity which prompted our rulers to raise us from a state of ignorance and moral stagnation to a state of comparative clearness of intellectual vision and moral activity. Ask by all means for what more you may want, but ask in such a way that there may be no doubt or misgiving in regard to your loyalty and obedience to established authority. And before you ask for more, satisfy yourself that what you ask for is desirable and necessary. Those who have given so much are entitled to credit for willingness to give us all that it is good for us to have. You who have received a liberal education are peculiarly bound to guide your fellow-countrymen with wise and moderate counsel. It is at once your duty and your privilege to act as interpreters between the rulers and the ruled. See that you interpret aright to the ruled the motives and intentions of the rulers, and help the governing authorities by faithfully making known to them the wishes and feelings of the people. The task that a Government like that of British India has to do is a rough and trying task. Do not make it harder by wilful misrepresentation. The teachings of our religion and philosophy, the traditions of the past, and the best interests of the present are all on the side of loyalty and fidelity, and approving as I do all reasonable desire on your part to make yourselves useful in the sphere of political administration, I call upon you as the inheritors of an ancient civilization to steer clear of courses of conduct that will do no good, but may do much harm by rousing into activity such unhealthy feelings as jealousy and disaffection. There has, of late years, been a great deal of talk and writing about local self-government, talk and writing for the most part misleading. According to some, the people of India will never be fit to govern themselves; according to others they possess already the necessary fitness, let a jealous bureaucracy deny it as stoutly as they may. Let me advise you to reflect on one aspect of the question. Self-government ordinarily means the governing of a people by themselves, but it may also mean the governing of one's self by one's self. The true measure of the people's fitness for self-government in the former sense is to be found in their fitness for self-government in the latter sense. Only those are fit to command who have learnt to obey. If a great majority of the individuals composing a community are characterized by weakness of purpose, error of judgment, blind adhesion to custom, and ill-regulated desires, it is idle to expect such a people to possess in a collective capacity the intellectual and moral virtues required for a wise and beneficial management of their own affairs. Your first duty then is clear. Raise yourselves individually. Acquire a sound knowledge of the laws of human well-being and 34 progress, endeavour to lead pure and blameless lives, strive to control the lower passions of your nature, and, by constant practice o£ self-denial, learn the luxury of doing good. Of this be sure that, to the extent to which you become wise and virtuous men, to that extent only will you be fit to exercise political power, and the fitness to exercise such power must, as history sufficiently proves, be followed sooner or later by the attainment of it. It may fall to some of you to conduct native Newspapers, in English or in one of the Vernacular languages. I trust the Press is destined to become as powerful an organ in India as in England, but that this high destiny may be accomplished, the writers to the native papers should be imbued with a fitting sense of responsibility, and should endeavour to reflect public opinion faithfully as in a mirror. I know that in India public opinion has to be educated as well as represented. This makes the responsibility all the greater. The native Press should keep steadily in view the cardinal requisites of progress, —a desire to find out what is true, just, and beneficial, and to avoid what may secure temporary advance at the cost of more or less permanent injury; an ever-present feeling that large masses of men can move but slowly onward, and that the true secret of success is "to hasten slowly;" a cordial recognition of all that is good in existing forms and methods, and a settled conviction that "political institutions, to be efficient, must grow up from within, and not be imposed from without." The native Press is yet in a state of infancy. Faults of indiscretion deserve, therefore, to be treated with indulgence. I have often noted a desire to produce sensational effects, a proneness to exaggerate, a warping of the judgment due to defective knowledge, and a tendency to make intemperate invective do duty for sound and sober criticism. Permit me to urge that the plainest mode of saying a thing is almost always the most effective mode, and that no criticism strikes so vigorously home as that which bears the evident impress of a careful study of facts, and of a desire to judge without fear or favour.
Allow me to say a few words next on social reform. It is said that human opinion has to pass through three phases, —"the unanimity of the ignorant, the disagreement of the inquiring, and the unanimity of the wise." Having after long ages emerged from the state of unanimity of the ignorant, we are now passing through the necessary transition stage of the disagreement of the inquiring. The fault will be ours, if we do not so order things in this second stage, as to make the nearest approach possible to the third stage, the unanimity of the wise. I am sincerely convinced that real progress is possible, in this as in other directions, only if the guiding spirits of the movement are men of enlightened views, sound moral impulses, and a living religious sentiment, —men capable of looking before and after, —men not so blindly attached to the past as to oppose every thing new nor so rashly bent on reform as to despise every thing old. Never lose sight of the fact that you have to carry the masses with you, and that in consequence some of the social and religious changes that the educated few may be ripe for will have to be postponed; and that true wisdom and philanthropy require that while you have your faces set in the right direction, and while you have the courage to declare your convictions, you walk warily and slowly so that your less favoured brethren may follow your lead at such pace as is good for them. Observe, I do not commend the practice, which is only too prevalent, of talking and acting in a manner entirely at variance with one's own thoughts and feelings. Such incongruity between the inner and the outer life is the very death of all that is pure and noble and self-denying. According to the best light in you, approve only of what you consider to be right, and so conduct yourselves as to make it clear, that you neither justify nor excuse injurious customs and debasing superstitions. The Western ideas and sentiments that you have imbibed in the course of your education will and must urge you to advance, but as in human affairs good and evil are inextricably blended together, and the desire to obtain a thing is no guarantee of fitness to use the thing desired wisely and well, I would solemnly entreat you to look before you leap, and to make sure by observation, by study, and by reflection that in your impatient unwillingness to bear the ills you have, you do not fly to greater ills you know not of. 'Prove all things.' A spirit of rational and searching inquiry is the necessary outcome of the scientific discipline that you have had. You cannot help feeling the absurdity of assuming that all our thinking has been done for us by our ancestors. If through indolence, or love of selfish ease, or fear of consequences, you fail to think for yourselves, and if you neglect your opportunities of doing what you can to make your domestic life and your social surroundings harmonize better with the needs of the present, you will, believe me, be unworthy of the education you have received; you will betray the trust the University reposes in you; you will be false to your selves and false to your countrymen. I say again fast 'prove all things,' but "hold fast that which is good." While I feel nothing but respect in regard to the intentions and motives of those among us who would fall back on the Shastras for working out a new social scheme for the people of India, I must take the liberty to say that that method seems to me to be inadequate, —nay more positively injurious. The Shastras are worthy of all reverence as handing down to us the traditions of a by-gone civilization. No social reformer can afford to despise them, or to neglect their study. But it is abundantly manifest that rules and observances and institutions, that suited the men of a by-gone age, can hardly suit us, who live under a very different environment. The method of finding in the Shastras chapter and verse in support of this or that reform may carry us some little way forward, and that only after a long struggle over texts and interpretation; but I feel convinced that such a re-casting and re-construction as would eliminate from our social life the elements that have for so long held an iron sway, and paralysed our intellectual and moral energies, could be achieved only by modifying the Shastraic injunctions, and not by a tacit conformity to them. I have said that the method under criticism is injurious, and my reason for saying so is that what might be gained by placing reform on a false basis is nothing as weighed in the scales against what must be lost. This wrong method will and must stand in the way of many important reforms that every true friend of India would wish to see accomplished, and I would, therefore, impress upon your minds the necessity for giving this subject your most earnest consideration. By all means venerate the past; be proud of the relics of ancient civilization that abound in India; admire our ancient philosophy for its depth and subtlety and penetrative insight; and love our ancient literature for its sweetness and pathos and wealth of profound moral and religious sentiment. But remember that the richer the legacy you have inherited from the dead, the stronger the obligation to make the lives of present and future generations something the better for your self-denying labors in the cause of national progress.
I fear I have already overtaxed your patience. I shall content myself, therefore, with making a mere mention or two other important duties that you have to perform. You have to cultivate the study of your mother-tongue, and to improve it to such an extent as to make it a fit medium for the communication of Western ideas in Science and Philosophy. You have to promote the education of your women, and to make your fellow-countrymen understand that the education a woman wants is not that which will make her a better sort, of household drudge or a more agreeable kind of play-thing, but that which will make her fit to sympathize with her husband's aims and aspirations, to other him wise counsel, and so to bring up her children as to turn their natural endowment to the best account.
It has been often pointed out that there is among you much industry but little thought, great power of acquisition but small power of production. The charge, I fear, is well grounded. This unsatisfactory result is, I have no doubt, in some measure due to the vicious methods of teaching necessitated by the demands of the long series of examinations that our young men have to pass, and the small scope allowed for the free play of the intellect when its whole energy is spent on the mere acquisition of knowledge, and there is little power and less inclination for assimilating and organizing the knowledge acquired. You do not need to be told that your education has but just begun. It has begun not only in the sense that you have to go on adding to your stock of knowledge to keep yourself abreast of the times in which you live, but also in the sense that you have to reflect on what knowledge you have already gained, and make it a part of your intellectual furniture. Most, if not all of you, will have to discharge professional duties of one kind or another. Your education up to this point has been intended to fit you for every path of life. You have now to choose some one path. See to it that the path you choose is such as is suited to your tastes and capabilities. I count it superfluous to advise you that professional success cannot be attained without a careful study of principles, and without that skill in the application of principles which is to be gained only by constant practice. The tendency to study almost exclusively codes and acts, rules and regulations is a survival of scholastic habits that needs in your case to be checked and counteracted, rather than encouraged. Let me warn you, therefore, of the danger you have to guard against in your ardent pursuit of professional success, —the danger of learning only what bears on your profession and of neglecting altogether those humanizing studies, which are necessary to keep the intellect fresh, active and healthy; the danger of your letting the mind move in well-worn grooves, —the danger of your becoming slaves to routine. Remember that while you have to improve your professional knowledge and skill, you have also to keep up the habit of studying the wise and noble thoughts of the living and the dead. It is only by doing so that you may hope to have a well-balanced mind, —a mind with a clear sense of the true and the just, —a mind with a keen sense of the beautiful in nature or art, —a mind instinct with noble feelings. I now conclude, but before concluding, I congratulate you in the name of the University on the honors you have attained, and bid you go forth into the world, and win your spurs in the battle of life. The University to which you belong will watch your career with anxious solicitude, and expect you not simply to do the best you can, each for himself,—but also to do the best you can for your fellow-men and your mother country.