India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

I have been unable to procure a copy of the “Settlement Handbook.” But here is one which I have borrowed. With regard to the Madras settlement, some detailed facts will be found at pp. 668 and 672, among other places.

The rules are: (1) First calculate the actual average produce and actual average value of it, over a period of years. Say the actual gross produce thus ascertained is 100 bushels. (2) Then deduct from the average actual gross produce one-sixth, as an extra allowance for risks of the season; leaving 83⅓ bushels. (3) Take an average of one-fourth, or 25 per cent., from this reduced gross produce as Government Revenue; this is four eighty-thirds and a half, = 20¾ bushels.

The 20¾ of bushels are about one-fifth of the actual gross produce (100 bushels), which has already included the risk of seasons, for it is the actual produce yielded, as a matter of fact, on an average of many years and seasons.

The 20¾ bushels are about one-half of the net produce after allowing for cost of cultivation and all possible risks; and this is probably what your raiyat friends meant in Madras.

The actual yield of each class of land is estimated by many experiments, sometimes 1,300 in a single district. The Famine Commissioners, by independent inquiry, came to the conclusion that the average land tax throughout India was only 5½ per cent. of the gross produce; but their calculation included Bengal and the Permanently Settled Districts. I have not been able to examine afresh the evidence on which they based this conclusion; but they were careful men, and by no means favourers of the status quo.

I am no favourer of that status in many parts of India; and if you care to go into the question I shall be happy to send you my exposure in Council of the heavy burden imposed by our Land Assessments on the Deccan peasant. The speech was telegraphed verbatim to the “Times” fourteen months ago; but, if you did not see it, and care to look at it, I can get you a copy.

I send you the foregoing facts, not to convert you to a system which has grievous defects, but to enable you to deal with that system without running into little inaccuracies which would be laid hold of as vitiating your main argument.

I have been much impressed by your sympathy for the hard lot of the peasant, whether in Egypt or in India, and by your determination to find out the facts for yourself. If at any time you desire to compare the information thus collected with the statistics officially accepted by the Government, I shall be happy to render you any assistance in my power.

    Very faithfully yours,
    W. W. Hunter.

APPENDIX III

Major Claude Clerk to Mr. Blunt

    9, Albert Hall Mansions, Kensington Gore, S.W.
    November 15th, 1904.

Dear Mr. Blunt,

Very many thanks for your “Ideas about India” which you have so kindly sent me. I look forward with pleasure to reading your work, and I know I shall find much in it of the greatest interest to me. Although I have only just glanced at what you then wrote, I can see that all you say is as true now as it was then – the impoverishment of the millions, and the reckless extravagance of their effeminate rulers, living away from the people in their mountain retreats nine months usually out of the twelve. You may put down much of India’s woes to the farce of a government whose officials are perched away in the clouds, absorbed in their own amusements, etc., “in the hills,” and unmindful of their duty to the people. Lord Curzon has done something to break down this Simla curse of India. Lord Randolph Churchill was a very great loss to India. Had it been fated that his time at the India Office could have been prolonged, he would have set many things to rights there. The hard work he did do there went a long way to break him down, as it did to a good man of the name of Moore he found there, and who died, I think, about the same time as Lord Randolph Churchill. I should like some day, when you are again in England and I alive, to send you a copy of a letter I wrote to Lord Ripon, and of an official report I sent in showing what the state of things was during the last years of the Nizam’s minority, affecting as it did his training, etc. I much doubt whether this ever got beyond the Residency.

I had no idea that your knowledge as to what was really going on at Hyderabad had so largely influenced Lord Ripon. You are perfectly right in what you say as to his being put away at Bolarum, removed from the city, etc. I had offered my house but was told there was fear of cholera! That matters went wrong subsequently between the young Salar Jung and his master was no fault of what Lord Ripon did. Foiled in what they had aimed at, the party in power had other sinister objects in view, and with the underhand support of the Residency these they carried out. They, of course, saw that a difference between the Nizam and his young minister opened the road to their designs, especially as the latter – who was throughout in the wrong – was supported by Cordery, which, of course, made matters worse. From the first, when Salar Jung asked me, when here in England, to take up the appointment – which I declined at first and for some weeks – I determined, when I had accepted it, to hold myself entirely aloof from the Simla clique and its ways, of which I was not an admirer. After you left, my summary removal by the party in power was an object to be kept in view. But the first attempt was so clumsy that even Cordery could give it only a half-hearted support. Afterwards they succeeded. My agreement with Salar Jung was to serve ten years, and fifteen if required to do so. The young Nizam, unknown to me, as I was in England on sick leave for three months, had asked to retain my services for the full period, but the Government of India, of course prompted by Cordery, abruptly refused the Nizam’s request.

Pray pardon all this personal recollection of what occurred then, but my pen has run on! Your pp. 132, 133, as to the Emir-el-Kabir, the colleague forced by Lord Lytton on Salar Jung, this is what was written of him by Sir George Yule, one of the best men we ever had as Resident at Hyderabad and who retained Salar Jung’s friendship to the day of his death:

“In spite of Salar Jung’s repeated remonstrances, we have forced upon him as his colleague a man who was notoriously his personal enemy, a man who had heavily bribed others in scandalous intrigues against him, and whose servant had openly tried to murder him.” This was the man – the tool – we wanted to work Salar Jung’s humiliation to the bitter end. Such had been his iniquitous intrigues in former years that a more honest Government than Lord Lytton’s had ordered that he was never to be present at any Durbar where English officers were present.

    Very truly yours,
    Claude Clerk.

    9, Albert Hall Mansions,
    April 29th, 1905.

I often look at your “Ideas about India,” and find always something to interest me and to inform me. Lord Ripon’s policy in making the young Salar Jung Dewan was of course a risky one. But it was, as you well know, the right course. That it would have been crowned with success there is no doubt whatever – I was behind the scenes throughout – in my mind, had Lord Ripon gone only one step further and changed the Resident. Cordery was bound hand and foot by the action of those with whom he was associated, and they were supporting the very party in the city – which Cordery went so far as to call “our party” – who had determined on the moral ruin of the Nizam during a two years’ prolongation of the minority, during which they would have kept the lid of the Treasury open without scruple of any sort or kind. As it was, Lord Ripon had not been gone from Hyderabad for a month before that party, supported through thick and thin by Cordery, had gained the ascendancy. The difference, originally but a trifle, between the Nizam and his Dewan, was skilfully fanned by the bribed members of the Nizam’s and the Dewan’s entourage, and an open breach between the two was then inevitable. How our Government acted to retain the young Salar Jung in power – when they knew it was too late – is an amusing story, but too long to trouble you with here. But I would like some day when you are again in London to send you my official reports for the last years of the Nizam’s minority. These were written by me yearly and submitted to H.H.’s Government and then sent on through the Resident to the Government of India (Foreign Department). I ought to have been called on to explain the statements I had made, or H.H. ought to have been desired to dismiss me on the spot, considering what I had stated. But this only being the truth, the Government of India did neither, fearing the result. My reports were left entirely unnoticed and this after the Government of India’s repeated declarations that it, the Government of India, was the guardian of H.H. and deeply interested in his education, welfare, etc. But I was much in the way of the party in power, and soon opportunity was found of getting me out of Hyderabad.

    Yours very truly,
    Claude Clerk.

notes

1

A history of Seyyid Jemal-ed-Din Afghani, the well-known leader of Liberal Panislamism will be found in my “Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt,” 1907. Mr. Sabunji had been employed by me in Egypt, and accompanied me there on the present occasion as my secretary as far as Ceylon.

2

When Robert Bourke, Lord Connemara, was sent as Governor to Madras in 1886, I recommended Ragunath Rao to him, and he gave him once more a post as Minister to one of the Native Princes.

3

Seyd Huseyn Bilgrami, now member of the Indian Council in London.

4

This refers to a talk I had had with General C. G. Gordon at the end of 1882 in which he had assured me emphatically that “no reform would ever be achieved in India without a Revolution.” Gordon, it will be remembered, accompanied Ripon, as his private secretary, to India in 1880, but soon after their landing at Bombay had resigned his place. The opposition of the covenanted civil service to any real reform had convinced him that he would be useless to Lord Ripon in an impossible task.

5

Sir John Gorst.

6

The late Lord Lothian.

7

N.B. Precisely this leonine treaty in the form of a perpetual lease was imposed on the Nizam twenty years later by Lord Curzon under circumstances of extreme compulsion.

8

Compare Lord Cromer’s book, “Modern Egypt,” where this same Mahmud Sami, a poet and a highly educated gentleman, is described as an “illiterate” man – a foolish judgement, typical of the writer’s ignorance of Egyptian character.

9

See Sir William Hunter’s letter in Appendix.

10

Sir Alfred Lyall, K.C.B., G.C.I.E., then Lord Governor of the North-West Provinces.

11

Mr. Beck certainly succeeded and acquired a notable influence with the young generation of Mohammedans. His death, some years ago, caused universal regret.

12

See Appendix.

13

See Appendix.