[Sidenote: The Indian National Congress.]

[Sidenote: English, the _lingua franca_ of the Congress.]

The Indian National Congress, or All-India political association, is the
embodiment of this new national consciousness of educated Indians, the
only embodiment possible while India is so divided in social and
religious matters. Were there only ten or twelve million Mahomedans in
India instead of sixty, the new national consciousness would undoubtedly
have been a Hindu or religious, instead of a political, consciousness.
But in matters religious, Hindu looks across a gulf at Mahomedan, and
Mahomedan at Hindu, neither expecting the other to cross over.
Christianity, third in numbers in India proper, proclaims the Christian
Gospel to both Hindus and Mahomedans, but is regarded by both as an
alien.[39] Nor is any All-India _social_ movement possible while social
differences are so sacred as they are. But politically, all India _is_
already _one_; her educated men have drunk at _one_ well of political
ideas; citizenship and its rights are attractive and destroy no
cherished customs; and in the English language there is a new _lingua
franca_ in unison with the new ideas. The Indian National Congress is
the natural outcome. There, representatives of races which a hundred
years ago made war on one another, of castes that never either eat
together or intermarry, now fraternise in one peaceful assembly,
inspired by the novel idea that they are citizens. The Congress meets
annually in December in one or other of the cities of India. The first
meeting at Bombay in 1885 has been described as follows[40]: "There were
men from Madras, the blackness of whose complexions seemed to be made
blacker by spotless white turbans which some of them wore. A few others
hailing from the same Presidency were in simplest native fashion,
bareheaded and barefooted and otherwise lightly clad, their bodies from