India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

Of these, Hinduism alone would seem to be a truly indigenous faith, or one wholly in harmony with the instincts of the rural population; and it is impossible for a traveller not to be struck with the tenacity of the ancient superstitions which are its groundwork. Hinduism belongs to an older order of religions than any now practised in the West. It is not a religion at all in our modern sense of being a strict code of morals based upon any revealed or written law; but, like the popular beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, is rather a mythology resting on traditional reverence for certain objects in certain places. It is essentially national and local. It does not seek to embrace humanity, but is a privilege of the Indian races only; and it cannot be practised in its purity elsewhere than in India. India, according to Brahminical teaching, is a sacred land, and there alone can be the shrines of its gods. There alone man can lead a perfect life, or worship with spiritual profit. Certain localities are specially holy – not, as with the Christians or the Mohammedans, on account of the tombs of holy men, but in themselves as being the chosen homes of the divine powers. All rivers in India thus are sacred, precisely as were groves in ancient Italy, and on their banks the temples of the gods are built and spiritual influences felt.

From an aesthetic point of view nothing can be more seductive to a stranger from the West, or more surprising, than the spectacle of Hindu worship at one of these ancient shrines – the processions of women to some lonely grove by the water-side on holiday afternoons with their offerings of rice and flowers, the old-world music of pipe and tabour, the priests, the incense, the painted statues of the immortal gods, the lighted fire, the joyous sacrifices consumed with laughter by the worshippers. No one can see this without emotion, nor, again, witness the gatherings of tens of thousands clothed in white in the great temples of Southern India for the yearly festivals, and not acknowledge the wonderful continuity of thought which unites modern India with its European kindred of pre-Christian days. The worship of idols here is a reality such as untravelled Englishmen know only from their classics. The temples of Madura and Seringam are more wonderful and imposing in their structure than all the edifices of Europe put together, and the special interest is that they are not dead things. The buyers and the sellers still ply their trade in the porticoes, the birds have their nests beneath the eaves. There are sacred elephants and sacred apes. The priests chaunt still round lighted braziers. The brazen bulls are anointed each festival day with oil, the foreheads of the worshippers with ochre. There is a scent of flowers and incense, and the business of religion goes on continuous from old time, perhaps a little slacker, on account of the increasing poverty of the people, but not less methodically, or as a living part of men’s daily existence. When I had seen Madura I felt that I had at last seen a temple of Babylon in all its glory, and understood what the worship of Apis might have been in Egypt. This worship of the gods – not any theological or moral teaching – is the foundation of the Hindu religion, and what is still its distinguishing feature.

At the same time it is beyond a doubt that among the cultivated Brahmins, who have always acknowledged a higher philosophy than that of the people, there is a renewed tendency towards the spiritualization of beliefs. The philosophy of the Vedas is a high one, and presents to the restored activity of thought a standard for reform in intellectual conceptions; and although the Brahminical system is without an absolute written code of morals, it is easily reconcilable with the highest, and akin to all that is best in the Semitic teaching. Nowhere more than among the Hindus is the tradition of domestic virtue a noble one, or the relation of father and child, of husband and wife, acknowledged as a sacred one. The vices, therefore, which ages of intellectual sleep have engendered, are readily recognized as evils now that the intellect is once more awake; and all that is best in the Christian moral code is being instinctively adopted into their system by the enlightened modern Brahmins. This is the common feature of all religious reform. Vicious practice is the concomitant of intellectual sloth, and as that sloth yields to action the practice reforms itself, usually after the model of whatever has roused it from its sleep.

Thus we see the modern Brahmins proclaiming the morality of unselfishness in no other language than that in which Christian divines proclaim it, and making it peculiarly their own. They have the same teaching as these about truth and justice and integrity, and appeal in the same way to conscience as a guide. They choose what is best, and make it harmonize with their own best traditions, and the result is a general elevation of tone in the upper ranks of life which presages a corresponding reform in the lower.

This sometimes shows itself, as must also naturally be, in extravagance. There is a tendency always in such movements to imitate servilely; and so we see in the rising generation of the Hindus a certain advanced party which aims at making itself wholly European. A very few of these have adopted Christianity, but far more have contented themselves with an abandonment of their beliefs in favour of philosophies more or less agnostic. Others, again, without ceasing to be professed Hindus, have contented themselves with throwing off caste restrictions; and a considerable body in Bengal and Northern India have formed themselves into a special sect, known as the Brahmo-Somaj, which would seem to hold doctrines little different from the vaguer forms of Theism. In the South of India, however, which is the stronghold of Brahminism, these extreme innovations have taken little root, and instead there is found only a more reasoned form of the traditional beliefs. Whether the worships of Vishnu and Siva and the rest of the national Indian gods, have a sufficient backbone of practical ethics to undergo a great moral reform without losing in the end something of their vitality as popular beliefs, I am not prepared to say; but I feel certain that distinct moral improvement connected with these worships is in progress, and that the result up to the present has been an increased interest with the leaders of Hindu society in the welfare and social improvement of their religious communities. This shows itself in exertions made to spread education, in anxiety for the better management of religious trusts, in the restoration of temples, sometimes at very large individual cost, and in the rising agitation against child-marriage and in favour of the re-marriage of widows.

Something of the same process may be observed in the case of the Parsis. These would hardly require mention as an Indian sect at all were it not for their very great intelligence and the lead they have recently taken in native political life. They are insignificant in point of population, and very restricted in their locality. Bombay alone of the great cities finds them in large numbers. But their wealth there, their commercial aptitude, and their persistence in availing themselves of every means of education, have placed them in a position of large and growing influence. They are, as is well known, the descendants of the fire-worshippers of Persia, and still hold closely to their traditions. The religion of Zoroaster, originally simple and philosophical, seems, in common with the rest of the religions imported into India, to have become overgrown there with grosser thought and less worthy practice, and to have adopted many of the superstitions peculiar to the Indians. Some of these seem, indeed, to have been forced on the Parsis by the Hindu rulers at the time of their first settlements, and others to be the result of the general decay of knowledge due to political conditions. The Parsis, however, were among the first to take advantage of the intellectual liberty which has been the atmosphere of India since the coming of the English, and being also extremely keen traders they have profited more than others by the commercial régime of modern times and have grown rich. Well educated, well mannered, and naturally inclined to good, their religion is now simplifying itself once more, and the tendency of Parsi thought is, even more than the Hindu, towards a spiritualization of theological dogmas and a reform in social practice. Any one who has been with an educated Parsi over their “Towers of Silence” in Bombay must have been struck with the pains at which they are to interpret in a philosophical sense their ancient practice of exposing the dead; or who has discussed social questions, with their desire to improve the condition of their women. Of the Parsis, however, and of the native Christians of Southern India, I will not speak at length. I saw too little of them to learn anything of real value; and the great numerical superiority of the Hindus and Mohammedans entitles them alone to general attention.

My own special attention was naturally most directed to the Mohammedans.

Mohammedanism, as is well known, entered India from two separate sides and under two separate conditions. Its first appearance was on the western seaboard in the shape of Arab traders, who came with the double mission of propagating the faith and making money. These were peaceful preachers, who relied for success not upon the sword but upon the power of persuasion, and the Mohammedanism implanted in this form is still to be found on the west coast, in the Kokhnis of Bombay, the Moplas of Malabar, and the Moormen, or Moors (“os Moros” of the Portuguese) of Ceylon. They are a busy, prosperous people – shopkeepers, pedlars, jewellers, or plying certain handicrafts, and notably that of house-building.

It was extremely interesting to me to find at Colombo the descendants of the ancient Arab settlers of the eighth and ninth centuries still keeping up the commercial tradition of Arabia intact. They number in the whole island of Ceylon about a quarter of a million, and are among the most prosperous of its inhabitants. I found them an old-fashioned community, more occupied with this world than with the next, and only to a very small degree affected by modern thought. Indeed, such change as was to be noticed among them was of as recent growth as the advent in Ceylon of Arabi and his fellow-exiles, whose larger experience of the great outside world of Islam and the prestige of their late championship of the faith had begun to make its impression on their thoughts. Until their arrival no Mohammedan in the island had ever sat down to meat with men of another faith, and very few had sent their children to any secular school. The example, however, of the exiles was beginning to be followed, and I found the Moormen already anxious for wider instruction, and to come into communication with the general body of the faithful. It will be a curious result of Egypt’s misfortunes if the persecution of her patriot chiefs shall have brought ideas of religious liberty to the Mohammedans of Southern India; yet it is what seems to be happening. It would be well if these Moormen were more widely spread than they are, for their commercial instincts are a healthy element, and one much needed in the Mohammedan community of India proper.

As I crossed from Ceylon to the mainland and left the coast I first came in contact with the other and more common Mussulman type – the descendants of the northern invaders – men wholly distinct from the busy traders just described, and neither prosperous nor advancing. The Mohammedans of the inland districts of the Madras Presidency are the poorest in India. They represent the extreme wave of Mogul conquest southwards, long ago spent and now receding. They are the descendants, not of preachers and converts, but of the garrisons of the north, and their occupation of government gone, they are fast dying out from want of a means of living. The condition of the small Mohammedan communities of such towns as Tanjore and Trichinopoly is very pitiable. Isolated in a population wholly Hindu, possessed of no traditional industry, without commercial aptitude or knowledge of other service than the sword’s, they seem dumbly to await extinction. Their few rich men, owners of landed property, grow daily less and less at their ease, preyed upon as they are by an army of helpless and needy relations. They fall in debt to the Hindu money-lenders, are yearly less able to discharge their liabilities, and bit by bit the civil courts engulf them. Those who have no land are reduced to manual labour of the simplest sort on daily wages. It is a hard but inevitable fate, the fate which rests upon the law, that none shall live who cannot earn his bread. These Mohammedans of Southern India are the extreme exemplification of evils from which the whole community are to some extent suffering. In the south they are few and hopeless, and have almost ceased to struggle. In the north the danger of their condition is rousing them to new activity.

The stronghold of Mohammedan India is the North-West, and there Islam is far from hopeless or disposed to perish. Intellectually the equals, and morally the superiors of their Hindu neighbours, the Mohammedans of the Upper Ganges Valley have not forgotten that till very lately the Administration of India was almost entirely in their hands, and they look upon their declining fortunes as neither deserved nor irremediable. Their historical status is that of descendants of those Tartar and Persian and Afghan conquerors who have at various times invaded Hindustan from the North-West, or of the Hindu converts, principally Rajputs or Pathans, made by these. Their race, indeed, is nowhere pure, except in the case of a few princely and noble families, but the tradition of their origin remains intact, and is at the same time their weakness and their strength – their strength, inasmuch as it supplies them with a certain standard of honour beneficial to all societies; their weakness, inasmuch as it has given them prejudices against the ordinary means of living open to all the world.

The pride of conquest is the bane of all Mohammedan societies sprung from Northern Asia, and the Mohammedans of India form no exception. The Moguls never condescended to trade, but either settled on the land or took service, civil or military, under government; and their descendants are still swayed by the same proud instincts. Their misfortunes in India came upon them in successive waves. Forced by the Mahratta wars into an alliance with the East India Company, the Mogul Emperors became early dependent on these; and with the gradual absorption of the Delhi Monarchy, the exclusive privilege of rule departed from the Mohammedan caste – not all at once, but by degrees as new regulations were enacted and a new system introduced. The first to suffer were the landowners. By a certain fiscal measure, known as the “resumptions,” requiring all holders of lands to show their title deeds, the Mohammedans, who often held by prescription rather than by written grant, lost largely of their estates, and so were reduced to poverty. Next, the military services were in great degree cut off for them by the extinction of the native armies. And, lastly, the Act, changing the official language from Persian and Hindustani to English, took from them their still leading position in the civil employment. The Mohammedans had up to this more than held their own with the Hindus, as Hindustani was their vernacular, and Persian the language of their classics; but in English they were at a distinct disadvantage, for that was already the language of commerce, and so of the educated Hindus. Nor could English be learned except at the secular schools, to which Mohammedans were averse from sending their sons as tending to irreligion. The sources, therefore, of their employment were on every side curtailed, and a growing poverty has been ever since the natural result. The military revolt of 1857, which in Oude and at Delhi assumed a specially Mohammedan aspect, completed their disfavour with the English Government, and with it their material decline.

At the same time, owing to circumstances which I have never heard fully explained, it is an admitted fact that numerically the Mohammedans of Northern India have been and are a rapidly increasing body. This may have been due at times to extensions of British territory, or to conversion among the lower castes of Hindus, or to other causes; but it is certain that, whereas in old calculations the Indian Mohammedans were placed roughly at thirty millions, and more recently by Dr. Hunter at forty millions, they are now by the last census acknowledged to number fifty millions of souls, although the increase of the general population of India has been not at all in like proportion. With regard to their actual position, therefore, we are faced with the unsatisfactory phenomenon in Northern India of a vast community growing yearly more numerous, and at the same time less prosperous; of a community owning the instincts and the traditions of administration excluded yearly more and more from the administration; and of a community which has good grounds for tracing its misfortunes to the unfavourable conditions imposed upon them by the Imperial Government. The Mohammedans of Northern India, there is no denying it, are restless and dissatisfied, and the only question is in what form their repressed energy, fired by misfortune and threatened with despair, is likely to find its vent. It may be in two ways – for their own and the general good, or for their own and the general harm; and I believe that at the present moment it lies largely within the power of those who rule India to guide it to the former and turn it from the latter.

All who are responsible for tranquillity in India must be aware that there are influences at work, both within the country and beyond its borders, adverse to that tranquillity, and that at no time have these been more active than within the last few years, or engaged on ground more carefully prepared to receive them by the unwisdom of English policy. I am not, and have never been, an alarmist about Russian invasion. Viewed as a power hostile to India, Russia is and may for ever remain innocuous, and I should view with equanimity her approach to the Hindu Kush, or even to the actual frontier, were it impossible for her to appear there as a friend. But as a friend I fear her. If our selfish system of government for our own and not for India’s good remains unchanged; if we do nothing to secure Indian loyalty; if we refuse to give to the people that assurance of ultimate self-government which shall enable them to await in patience the realization of their hopes; if we continue to treat them as enemies subdued, as slaves to work for us, as men devoid of rights – then it is certain that within a given time all the external world will appear to the Indians under a friendly guise, and Russia as being the nearest, under the most friendly.

Nor can it be denied that under present circumstances the Czar’s Government has much to offer which the people of India might be excused for thinking twice before they refused. The Russian, himself an Oriental, would be probably less hateful as a master than our unsympathizing official Englishman. But it is far from certain that it would be at all as a master that he would present himself to Indian hopes. He might well appear as an ally, a liberator from the deadly embrace of our financial system, a friend of liberty, sound economy, and material progress. Who is to say that Russia should not, in exchange for a new commercial pact with herself, offer to establish India in complete Home Rule, and thus outbid us in the popular affection? It would not be hard to persuade India that she would gain by the change, and, Englishman as I am, I am not quite convinced that she would on all points lose by it. In any case, it might well be that men would risk something in the desire of change, knowing that at worst it would not be much worse for them than now.

Nor is there any section of the community to which this kind of argument would apply more strongly than the Mohammedan. The present order of things is distinctly threatening them with ruin, while just outside the frontier, and almost within hand’s reach of them, live men of their own race and faith who are still self-ruled. What could be more natural than that they should look to these for support and succour, or to the still stronger Power beyond, if it should present itself as, in any special manner, their religious protector? Our own political unwisdom of the last few years has made this for the first time a possibility; and what was a mere chimera in the last generation is rapidly becoming a practical danger.

Whatever may have been the defects of the old Ottoman alliance, there is no question that it was popular in Mohammedan India, that it symbolized the friendship of England for the outside world of Islam, and that it left to Russia the invidious post of Islam’s chief enemy. For this reason the recent Afghan war, in its earlier stages, was condoned, it being understood as an indirect repulse of the Northern Power; and it was not till later that it was looked upon with general disfavour. But the doubtful arrangements of the Berlin Treaty, the discreditable acquisition of Cyprus and the abandonment of Tunis – when these things became slowly to be understood – operated a change in men’s minds, and prepared them for still stronger reprobations, when, for the first time, England showed herself distinctly the aggressor in Egypt.

In spite of the illusions of Ministers on the subject, or the subtleties to which they had recourse, it is beyond a doubt that the Mohammedans of India wholly sympathized with Arabi during the war; that they were disgusted with the false issues raised in connection with the Sultan’s proclamation of his rebellion; and that for the last two years Russia has ceased to hold with them the position of the most dangerous enemy their faith has to fear. I do not say that as yet the distrust is absolute. No little loyalty still survives for the English Crown as contrasted with the English Ministry; but it is quite certain that the history of Egypt’s ruin since the war, and the apparent design of our Government to destroy all that is best and foster all that is least good in Islam, is working on all sides a change. In the decay of Constantinople the Moslem world is looking more than ever for a champion; and if England refuses the office it may well be offered to another Christian Power.

This, I say, is one way in which Mohammedan India may be taught to seek its salvation from accumulating evils. The other – and to my mind the far more hopeful way – it is in the power of our Government still to encourage them to choose. Three years ago I pointed out, in a book entitled “The Future of Islam,” the view which Indian Mohammedans took of her Majesty’s duties towards them in connection with her assumption of the Mogul title; and, while I was in India last winter, I had the satisfaction of finding my statement of their case fully accepted by those whom it most concerned. The Indian mulvis, Shiah as well as Sunni, held that her Majesty, in making herself Empress of India, had accepted a legal responsibility toward the Mohammedan community which involved a distinct obligation of protection in return for their loyalty, especially in such matters as the administration of their religious trusts, the furtherance of their education, and the arrangements connected with their pilgrimage; and they had even caused a translation of my statement to be published in Hindustani.

With regard to religious trusts, I found everywhere complaint of their being misapplied. It appears that at the time of the resumptions, many of these were confiscated on the arbitrary ground of defect in title, and others later on apparently no ground at all but public convenience. The locally notorious case of the Mohsin trust in Bengal has now been in part remedied, but it is worth quoting as a case which the Government has been forced to acknowledge, and it has been cited to me as an example of numerous cases less well known in which similar injustice still exists. In this, a large property was bequeathed by a rich Mohammedan explicitly for pious uses, yet for many years the income held in trust by the Government was devoted, not to any Mohammedan purpose at all, but to the education of Hindus. This, I say, has been acknowledged; but I have been repeatedly informed that sufficient property is still in Government hands to satisfy, if it were devoted to the uses originally intended, all the pressing needs of Mohammedan education; and I have the authority of Dr. Leitner, Principal of the Lahore Government College, for stating that in the Punjab alone wakaf property to the value of many thousand pounds yearly is being officially misapplied.

Of the pilgrimage, I will only say that the need of organization in the shipment of pilgrims is still strongly demanded, and of protection while on their journey. Something has been, indeed, done in the last three years, but exceedingly little; and the Indian Mohammedans regard such protection as a duty of the Imperial Government, made more than ever necessary by the growing abuses connected with the quarantine and other vexatious regulations at Jeddah.

Again, with regard to their education, the case of the Mohammedans is this: Like the Catholics in England, they are extremely attached to their religion, and anxious that their children should inherit in its purity a blessing to which they themselves were born; and they consider that a merely secular education, such as is offered by the State, does not suffice for their need. In no country in the world is the position of a teacher towards his pupil a more powerful one than in India; and the Mohammedans see that at the Government schools and colleges the masters are, almost without exception, English or Hindu. The great mass of the orthodox, therefore, hold aloof from these, and the consequence has been that they find themselves deprived of nearly all State aid in their education, and, for the more rigid, of all public education whatsoever. It is of course cast in their teeth by their opponents that this is mere fanaticism and prejudice; that they refuse to learn English out of disloyalty, and that they desire no progress and no modern instruction. But, whatever may have been the case in former days, I can confidently assert that it is certainly not true now; and I hold the position taken by the Indian mulvis to be an unassailable one in justice, or on any other ground than the theory that all religion is pernicious and should be discouraged by the State. I do not say that the State in India has taken its stand publicly on this ground, but in practice its action with regard to public education affects Mohammedans in no other way. This, therefore, is a point on which the Imperial Government may, if it will, intervene as a protector, and in which its action would be at once appreciated by its Mohammedan subjects, and be recognized by them as a title to their loyalty.

Lastly, I would repeat what I have said elsewhere as to the special nature of the connection between the political and the religious organization of all Moslem societies. Mohammedans look to the government under which they live as a fountain of authority; and they expect that authority to be used; and it is useless to repeat to them that the Government is impartial to all religions and indifferent to their own. Indifference with them is tantamount to neglect of duty; and as such the Mohammedans of India regard the present abstention of the English Government. There are many liberal-minded men among our high officials, and not a few friends of Islam. But the tide of official movement is not in this direction; and the general feeling is indifference. What I mean is that I would have the matter taken up with vigour, as an Imperial duty, and not in Oude only and the North-West, but in every province where the Mohammedans are a numerous community. The advancement of their education, their encouragement in commercial and industrial pursuits, and a faithful protection of their religious interests abroad, will secure to the English Crown the renewed trust of its Mohammedan subjects. The neglect of these things, and a prosecution of the present evil policy of doing harm to Islam, will secure beyond redemption their disloyalty. It is a thing seriously to consider and decide while time is yet given. It soon may be wholly too late, for nothing is more certain than that the Indian Mohammedans, like those elsewhere, are in a crisis of their history; and that, by disregarding their just complaints, we are allowing griefs to grow which will some day overwhelm us with confusion. “England,” if I may be allowed to repeat what I said three years ago, “should fulfil the trust she has accepted by developing, not destroying, the existing elements of good in Asia. She cannot destroy Islam nor dissolve her own connection with her. Therefore, in God’s name, let her take Islam by the hand and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue.” This, in spite of the victory of force in Egypt, is still the only wise and worthy course.[19 - Much of what is here recommended as England’s duty towards Islam has within the last two years been taken to heart by our rulers, and adopted as a part of English policy. It is only to be regretted that in India the motive seems to have been the encouragement of Mohammedan loyalty as a counterpoise to the Hindu movement for self-government, 1909.]

On the whole, the intellectual and religious aspects of India under English rule are what I found there of most hope, and I am glad to think that they could hardly have been witnessed under other domination than our own.

CHAPTER XV

THE FUTURE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT[20 - In reprinting this chapter I have incorporated with it part of another chapter on the Native States.]

Before considering the case for self-government in British India, a few words may be said about the semi-independent Native States.

There is an interest attaching to these Native States which is twofold for the political observer. They present in the first place a picture, instructive if not entirely accurate, of the India of past days, and so serve in some measure as landmarks and records of the changes for good and evil our rule has caused. And secondly, they afford indications of the real capacity for self-government possessed by the indigenous races.

When one has seen a native court, with its old-world etiquettes, its ordered official hierarchies, and its fixed notions, one learns something, which no amount of reading could teach, about the tradition of paternal government long swept away in Madras and Bengal. One recognizes how much there was that was good in the past in the harmonious relations of governors and governed, in the personal connection of princes and peoples, in the tolerance which gave to each caste and creed its recognized position in the social family. One is surprised to find how naturally such adverse elements as the Hindu Brahmin and the Mohammedan nobleman lay down together under a system which precluded class rivalry, and how tolerant opinion was in all the practical details of life. One does not readily imagine from the mere teaching of history the reason which should place a Mussulman from Lucknow in command of the army of a Rajput prince, or a Hindu statesman in the position of vizier to a Nizam of the Deccan. Yet seeing, one understands these things, and one recognizes in them something of the natural law existing between “the creatures of the flood and field” which makes it impossible “their strife should last.” In the traditional life of ancient India there was an astonishing tolerance now changed to intolerance, an astonishing order in face of occasional disorder, and a large material contentment which neither war nor the other insecurities of life permanently affected. It is impossible, too, after having visited a native court, to maintain that the Indian natives are incapable of indigenous government. The fact which proves the contrary exists too palpably before one’s eyes. The late Sir Salar Jung was as distinctly a statesman as Lawrence or Dalhousie; and among the Mahrattas there are not a few diwans to be found in office capable of discharging almost any public function.

At the same time it is abundantly clear that in all that constitutes intellectual life the India of old days, as represented in the still independent States, was far more than a century behind the India of our day. Mental culture is at the lowest ebb in the capitals of the native princes. They possess neither schools on any large plan, nor public libraries, nor are books printed in them nor newspapers published. I was astonished to find how in the centre of busy intellectual India large flourishing towns were to be found completely isolated from all the world, absorbed in their own local affairs, and intellectually asleep. At certain of the native courts history is still represented by the reciter of oral traditions, letters by the court poet, and science by professors of astrology; while the general politics of the Empire hardly affect, even in a remote degree, the mass of the unlettered citizens. Last winter’s storm over Lord Ripon’s internal policy left the native States absolutely unmoved. There is both good and bad in this.

With regard to their material prosperity, as contrasted with British India, I can only speak of what I have seen. The territories of the native princes are for the most part not the most fertile tracts of India; and one cannot avoid a suspicion that their comparative poverty has been the cause of their continued immunity from annexation. Nearly the whole of the rich irrigated ricelands of the peninsula are now British territory; and the estates of the Nizam, and the two great Mahratta princes Holkar and Scindia, comprise a large amount of untilled jungle. These countries possess no seaports or navigable rivers, and their arable tracts are not of the first order of productiveness, while the Rajput princes are lords of districts almost wholly desert. It would be, therefore, misleading to compare the material wealth of the peasantry in any of these States with those of Bengal or the rich lands of the Madras coast, for the conditions of life in them are not the same. But, poor land compared with poor land, I think the comparison would not be unfavourable to the native States. I was certainly struck in passing from the British Deccan below Raichore into the Nizam’s Deccan with certain signs of better condition in the latter. Most of the Nizam’s villages contain something in the shape of a stone house belonging to the head man. The flocks of goats, alone found in the Madras Presidency, are replaced by flocks of sheep; and one sees here and there a farmer superintending his labourers on horseback, a sight the British Deccan never shows. In the few villages of the Nizam which I entered I found at least this advantage over the others, that there was no debt, while I was assured that the mortality during the great Deccan famine was far less severe in the Nizam’s than in her Majesty’s territory.

It must not, however, be supposed that in any of the native States the ancient economy of India has been preserved in its integrity. Free trade has not spared them more than the rest. Their traditional industries have equally been ruined, and they suffer equally from the salt monopoly; while in some of them the British system of assessing the land revenue at its utmost rate, and levying the taxes in coin, has been adopted to the advantage of the revenue and the disadvantage of the peasant. On the whole the agricultural condition of the Hyderabad territory seemed to me a little, a very little, better than that of its neighbour, the Madras Deccan, and I believe it is a fact that it is attracting immigrants from across the border. The Rajput State of Ulwar, where I also made some inquiries, was represented to me as being considerably more favourably assessed than British Rajputana.

The best administered districts of India would seem to be those where a native prince has had the good fortune to secure the co-operation of a really good English assessor, allowing him to assess the land, not with a view to immediately increased revenue, but the true profit of the people. Such are to be found in some of the Rajput principalities, where the agricultural class is probably happier, though living on a poor soil, than in any other part of India; for the assessor, freed from the necessity which besets him in British territory of raising a larger revenue than the district can quite afford, and having no personal interest to serve by severity, allows his kindlier instincts to prevail, and becomes – what he might be everywhere in India – a protector of the people. I trust that it is understood by this time that I am far from affirming that Englishmen are incapable of administering India to its profit. What I do say is that selfish interests and the interests of a selfish Government prevent them from so doing under the present system in British territory. Thus it is certain that the Berar province of Hyderabad under British administration has prospered exceedingly; and its prosperity affords precisely that exceptional instance which proves the general rule of impoverishment. What may probably be affirmed without any risk of error is, that the best administered districts of the native States are also the best administered of all India.

With regard to the town population, I found the few independent native capitals which I visited exhibiting signs of well-being in the inhabitants absent in places of the same calibre under British rule. With the exception of Bombay, which is exceptionally flourishing, the native quarter, even in the Presidency towns, has everywhere in British India a squalid look. The “Black Town” of Madras reminds one disagreeably of Westminster and the Seven Dials: and there is extreme native misery concealed behind the grandeur of the European houses in Calcutta. The inland cities are decidedly in decay. Lucknow and Delhi, once such famous capitals, are shrunk to mere shadows of their former selves; and there is a distrustful attitude about their inhabitants which a stranger cannot fail to notice. The faces of the inhabitants everywhere in Northern India are those of men conscious of a presence hostile to them, as in a conquered city. In the capitals of the native States, on the contrary, there is nothing of all this, and the change in the aspect of the natives, as one passes from British to native rule, is most noticeable. The Hyderabadis especially have a well-fed look not commonly found in the inland towns, and are quite the best dressed townsmen of India. There is a bustle and cheerfulness about this city, and a fearless attitude in the crowd, which is a relief to the traveller after the submissive silence of the British populations. Elephants, camels, horsemen – all is movement and life in Hyderabad; and as one passes along one realizes for the first time the idea of India as it was in the days when it was still the centre of the world’s wealth and magnificence. That these gay externals may conceal a background of poverty is possible – English officials affirm that they do so; but at least it is better thus than that there should be no gaiety at all, nor other evidence of well-being than in the bungalows of a foreign cantonment.

Nor is the cause of the better condition far to seek. Whatever revenue the native court may raise from the people is spent amongst the people. The money does not leave the country, but circulates there; and, even where the profusion is most irrational, something of the pleasure of the spending remains, and is shared in and enjoyed by all, down to the poorest. In British India the tamachas of governors-general and lieutenant-governors interest no one but the aides-de-camp and their friends; and a large portion of the revenue goes clean away every year, to the profit of other lands and other peoples.

Of the administration of justice in the native States I had no opportunity of forming an accurate opinion, but I am willing to believe that it is less satisfactory in these than in British India. The only advantage that I could distinctly recognize in compensation was, what I have already mentioned, the absence of the Civil Courts, which are so loudly complained of in the latter on account of the encouragement they give to usury. It is worth repeating that the only villages I found free from debt in India were in the Nizam’s territory. With this exception, it is probable that British justice is better everywhere than “native” justice, and there is certainly not the same check exercised in a native State by public opinion over the doings of magistrates and judges. In all this the native States are far behind the Imperial system, for the despotic form of rule is the only one recognized in any of them, Hindu or Mohammedan, and there is no machinery by which official injustice can be inquired into or controlled. The ideas of liberty are spreading slowly in India, and the native States are hardly yet touched by them.

Having said this much about the native States, in which there is as yet no clamour for reform, I will go on to the question, one quite apart from them, of British India proper.

Unless I have wholly failed to make my reasoning clear, readers of these essays will by this time have understood that, in answer to the question propounded at the outset of this inquiry – namely, whether the connection between England and India is of profit to the Indian people; and to the further question whether the Indian people regard it as of profit – I have come to conclusions on the whole favourable to that connection.

My argument, in a few words, has been this: seeking the balance of good and evil, I have found, on the one hand, a vast economic disturbance, caused partly by the selfish commercial policy of the English Government, partly by the no less selfish expenditure of the English official class.

I have found the Indian peasantry poor, in some districts to starvation, deeply in debt, and without the means of improving their position; the wealth accumulated in a few great cities and in a few rich hands; the public revenue spent to a large extent abroad, and by an absentee Government. I have been unable to convince myself that the India of 1885 is not a poorer country, take it altogether, than it was a hundred years ago, when we first began to manage its finances. I believe, in common with all native economists, that its modern system of finance is unsound, that far too large a revenue is raised from the land, and that it is only maintained at its present high figure by drawing on what may be called the capital of the country, namely, the material welfare of the agricultural class – probably, too, the productive power of the soil. I find a large public debt, and foresee further financial difficulties.

Again, I find the ancient organization of society broken up, the interdependence of class and class disturbed, the simple customary law of the East replaced by a complicated jurisprudence imported from the West, increased powers given to the recovery of debt, and consequently increased facilities of litigation and usury. Also great centralization of power in the hands of officers daily more and more automatons and less and less interested in the special districts they administer. In a word, new machinery replacing, on many points disadvantageously, the old. I do not say that all these things are unprofitable, but they are not natural to the country, and are costly out of proportion to their effect of good. India has appeared to me at best in the light of a large estate which has been experimented on by a series of Scotch bailiffs, who have all gone away rich. Everything is very scientific, very trim, and very new, especially the bailiff’s own house; but the farms can only be worked now by skilled labourers and at enormous expense; while a huge capital has been sunk, and the accounts won’t bear looking into.

On the other side, I have found an end put to the internecine wars of former days, peace established, security for life given, and a settled order of things on which men can count. I have never heard a native of India underrate the advantage of this, nor of the corresponding enfranchisement of the mind from the bondage in which it used to lie. A certain atmosphere of political freedom is necessary for intellectual growth. Where men were liable to fine, imprisonment, and death for their opinions there could be no general advance of ideas, and the want of personal liberty had for centuries held India in mental chains. No one had dared to think more wisely than his fellows, or, doing so, had speedily been stopped by force from teaching it to others. But under English rule, with all its defects, thought has been free, and men who dared to think have kept their heads, so that a generation has sprung up to whom liberty of opinion has seemed natural, and with it has come courage. The Indians in the towns are now highly educated, write books, found newspapers, attend meetings, make tours of public lectures, think, speak, and argue fearlessly, and an immense revival of intellectual and moral energy has been the result. It is not a small thing, again, that the gross licence of the old princely courts has given place to a more healthy life – that crime in high places is no longer common; that sorcery, poisoning, domestic murder, and lives of senseless depravity are disappearing; that the burning of widows has been abolished, and child-marriage is now being agitated against. These things are distinct gains, which no candid Englishman, any more than do the candid natives, would dream of underrating. And, as I have said before, they supply that element of hope which contains in it a germ of redemption from all other evils. This is the “per contra” of gain to be set in the balance against India’s loss through England.

It would, therefore, be more than rash for Indian patriotism to condemn the English connection. Nor does it yet condemn it. There is hardly, I believe, an intelligent and single-minded man in the three Presidencies who would view with complacency the prospect of immediate separation for his country from the English Crown. To say nothing of dangers from without, there are dangers from within well recognized by all. The Indians are no single race; they profess no one creed, they speak no one language; highly civilized as portions of their society are, it contains within its borders portions wholly savage. There are tribes in all the hills still armed with spear and shield, and the bulk of the peaceful agricultural population is still in the rudest ignorance. The work of education is not yet complete, or the need of protection passed. All recognize this, and with it the necessity for India still of an armed Imperial rule. Were this withdrawn, it is certain at least that the present civilized political structure could not endure, and it is exceedingly doubtful whether any other could be found to take its place. I do not myself see in what way the issue of a rupture could be made profitable to the Indian nations, nor do I understand that the exchange from English to another foreign rule would improve their condition.

At the same time I recognize that it is impossible the present condition of things should remain unchanged for more than a very few years. For reasons which I have stated, the actual organization of Anglo-Indian government has become hateful to the natives of India, and however much their reason may be on the side of patience, there is a daily increasing danger of its being overpowered by a passionate sentiment evoked by some chance outbreak. Nor do I believe that it will be again possible for England to master a military revolt, which would this time have the sympathy of the whole people. Moreover, even if we should suppose this fear exaggerated and the evil day of revolt put off, there is yet the certainty of a Government by force becoming yearly more costly and more difficult to carry on. It is a mistake to suppose that India has ever yet been governed merely by the English sword. The consent of the people has always underlain the exercise of our power, and were this generally withdrawn it could not be maintained an hour. At present the Indian populations accept English rule as, on the whole, a thing good for them, and give it their support. But they do not like it, and were they once convinced that there was no intention on the part of the English people to do them better justice and give them greater liberty than they have now, they might without actual revolt make all government impossible. It cannot be too emphatically stated that our Indian administration exists on the goodwill of the native employés.

What then, in effect, should that reform be, and towards what ultimate goal should reformers look in shaping their desires and leading the newly awakened thought of India towards a practical end? While I was at Calcutta I attended a series of meetings at which this question was put in all its branches, and at which delegates from all parts of India discussed it fully; and in what I am now going to say I can therefore give, with more or less accuracy, the native Indian view of Indian needs. Many matters of social importance were debated there, many suggestions made of improvements in this and that department of the administration, and the financial and economic difficulties found their separate exponents; but it was easy to remark that, while all looked forward to the realization of their special hopes, none seemed to consider it possible that any real change would be effected as long as what may be called the constitution of the Indian Government remained what it now is. The burden of every argument was, “No reform is possible for us until the Indian Government is itself reformed. It is too conservative, too selfish, too alien to the thoughts and needs of India, to effect anything as at present constituted; and just as in England reformers at the beginning of this century looked first to a reform of Parliament, so must Indian reformers now look first to a reform of the governing body of the country.” Constitutional changes are needed as an initial step towards improvement; and it is the strong opinion of all that nothing short of this will either satisfy Indian hopes or ward off Indian troubles.

The Indian Government as at present constituted is a legacy from days when the advantage of the natives of India was not even in name the first object with its rulers. Its direct ancestor, the East India Company, was a foreign trade corporation which had got possession of the land, and treated it as a property to be managed for the exclusive advantage of its members, either in the form of interest on the Company’s capital, or of lucrative employment for relatives and friends of the shareholders. The advantage of the natives was not considered, except in so far as their prosperity affected that of the Company; and in early days there was no pretence even of this. India was a rich country, and for many years was held to be an inexhaustible mine of wealth, and was treated without scruple as such. Nor was it till the trial of Warren Hastings that any great scandal arose or any serious check was put to the greediness of all concerned. The directors in London, and their servants in the three Presidencies, had a common object of making money, and the only differences between them were as to the division of profits, while all alike grew rich.

The government of the country was then vested in a Board of Directors sitting at the India House, and delegating their executive powers to a civil service of which they themselves had in most instances been originally members, and whose traditions and instincts they preserved. It was a bureaucracy pure and simple, the most absolute, the closest, and the freest of control that the world has ever seen; for, unlike the bureaucracies of Europe, it was subject neither to the will of a sovereign nor to public opinion in any form. Its selfishness was checked only by the individual good feeling of its members, and any good effected by it to others than these was due to a certain traditional largeness of idea as to the true interests of the Company. It was only on the occasion of the renewal of the Company’s charter that any interference could be looked for from the English Parliament and public; and so it continued until the Mutiny.

In 1858, however, the Company as a Company came to an end. The Board of Directors was abolished, dividends ceased to be paid to owners of Indian stock, and the Government of India was transferred nominally to the English Crown. At that time there was a great talk of reforming the system of administration, and it was publicly announced that India should for the future be governed in no other interest than its own. A royal proclamation gave the natives of British India their full status as British subjects; they were no longer to be disqualified for any function of public trust, and no favour was to be shown to English rather than to native interests in the Imperial policy. The programme was an excellent one, and was received in India with enthusiasm, and caused a real outburst of loyalty to the English Crown which has hardly yet subsided. Its only fault, indeed, has been that it has never been carried out, and that while the Indians have waited patiently the plan has been defeated in detail by vested interests too strong for the vacillating intentions either of the Government which designed the change, or of any that have succeeded it. In spite of all official announcements and statements of policy, and royal proclamations, the principle of Indian government remains what it has always been – that is to say, government in the interests of English trade and English adventure. The more liberal design has faded out of sight.

The explanation of so great a failure I believe is this. When the sovereign power was transferred from the Company to the Crown, it was considered convenient to preserve as far as possible the existing machinery of administration. The East India Company had formed a civil service composed of its own English nominees, whose interests had gradually become part and parcel of the general interest of the concern; and they had obtained rights under covenant which secured them in employment, each for his term of years, and afterwards in pension. These rights the English Government now recognized, and the same covenant was entered into with them as had formerly been granted by the Company, and thus a vested interest in administration was perpetuated which has ever since impeded the course of liberal development.

The only real change introduced in 1858 was to substitute appointment by examination for appointment by nomination; but the composition of the service has remained practically the same, and the English covenanted civilian is still, as he was in the days of the Company, the practical owner of India. His position is that of member of a corporation, irremovable, irresponsible, and amenable to no authority but that of his fellow-members. In him is vested all administrative powers, the disposal of all revenue, and the appointment to all subordinate posts. He is, in fact, the Government, and a Government of the most absolute kind.