By Arnold Leese
A warning of trouble to come in India during the 1930s.Rather than review this book ourselves we here reproduce the first few paragraphs:
THERE are in India 320 million people, which is three quarters of the population of the British Empire. They belong to several different races: there is a faint Aryan strain in some of the aristocratic families and in the upper castes of Hinduism, but it is swamped by “native” blood of other races, and India is now a land of brown-skinned people representing a mixture of the ancient black Dravidian aboriginal with Asiatic invaders of Armenoid, Oriental and Mongoloid origin. India is best understood, as a Continent in itself, for this enormous population is practically cut off from the rest of Asia by mountains almost impassable either by reason of their height or their extent or their jungle-growth. The successive invasions, which India has undergone, have been either through two openings in the Western Mountain barrier or by Sea. Aryan colonies from Sumer existed on the Indus as far back as 2,900 B.C., and when the Aryans invaded the Gangetic valley in the 7th century, B.C., civilisation in India emerged. Greek, Scythian, Mohammedan and Mongol invasions have been succeeded by European conquest, leaving the territory, with trifling exceptions, in British hands. For every Briton in occupation, there are 3,000 natives.
About 77 per cent of the Indian peoples live in British India proper, and the rest are under native Princes who manage their own internal affairs in Native States.
The 320 million people of India share among them 147 languages.
More important by far than this, is the fact that they also share a large number of conflicting religions. The majority, say 220 millions, belong to the Hindu religion, with its caste system which prevents any member from marrying outside his own caste; the higher castes regard the lower castes as “untouchables,” and as there is absolutely no “democratic “ spirit, all castes accept the situation as part of the scheme of things. The largest minority religion is the Mohammedan, monotheistic and without caste: they number nearly 70 million, or 20 per cent, of the whole. Buddhists account for 9 million, and among the rest are the Sikhs (2 million only), Jains, Christians, Parsee and certain “pagans.”
pp.12