THE NEW SPIRIT IN INDIA

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Neighbours of Ours: Scenes of East End Life. (Arrowsmith.)

In the Valley of Tophet: Scenes of Black Country Life. (Dent.)

The Thirty Days’ War: Scenes in the War between Greece and Turkey. (Dent.)

Classic Greek Landscape and Architecture: Pictures by John Fulleylove. (Dent.)

Ladysmith: a Diary of the Siege. (Methuen.)

The Plea of Pan. (Murray.)

Between the Acts: Scenes in the Author’s Experience. (Murray.)

On the Old Road through France to Florence (French chapters): Pictures by Mr. Hallam Murray. (Murray.)

Books and Personalities: Literary Essays. (John Lane.)

A Modern Slavery: An account of the Slave Trade in the Portuguese Colony of Angola and the Cocoa Islands of San Thomé and Principe. (Harper.)

The Dawn in Russia: Scenes in the Revolution of 1905-6. (Harper.)

The Revolt in the Caucasus: Scenes in the Rebellion, 1906-7. (Harper’s Monthly, 1908.)

Contemplation.

(Statue of a Sanyasi, by G. M. Mhattre of Bombay.)

Frontispiece.]

THE NEW SPIRIT
IN INDIA

BY

HENRY W. NEVINSON

ILLUSTRATED
LONDON AND NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS
45 ALBEMARLE STREET W.
1908

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE NEW SPIRIT IN INDIA

INTRODUCTION
Summary of Recent Events

Although politics are not the only subject of this book, it may be of assistance if I summarize very briefly the chief political events of the few years preceding the winter of 1907-8 when I was in India.

No hard-and-fast line can be drawn in history, but the arrival of Lord Curzon as Viceroy on December 30th, 1898, marks a fairly strong and natural division. He had previously been Under-Secretary for India (1891-92), and Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs (1895-98), and he was well known for the distinction of his Oxford career and for his travels in Central Asia, Persia, and the Far East. In the House of Commons he had further won a high reputation for industry, knowledge, and self-reliance.

The first year of his office (1899) was marked by a change in the CURRENCY, by which a gold standard was introduced, gold and currency reserves instituted, and a permanent rate of exchange fixed at sixteen pence to the rupee, or fifteen rupees to the pound sterling—a higher value than the rupee had reached in the fluctuations of the five previous years. Before the closing of the mints, it had sunk to 13·1 pence.

In the same year Lord Curzon began his policy of efficiency by reducing the Calcutta Municipality from seventy-five to fifty, cutting out twenty-five of the elected members, in spite of strong protests on the part of the Indian electors.

He also began to earn an enviable unpopularity among certain classes of Anglo-Indians for his characteristic vigour in denouncing a British battalion, some privates of which were believed to have outraged a native woman to death in Rangoon and remained undetected.

The year 1900 was a season of terrible FAMINE, especially in the Central Provinces. About 5,500,000 people came on relief works, and famine was followed by cholera.[1] At the same time the Punjab Land Alienation Act was passed, forbidding the transference of land to any but agriculturists, the intention being to prevent the expropriation of peasants by money-lenders.

Lord Welby’s Commission on Indian Expenditure issued their reports, but the majority report suggested no important changes of taxation beyond the transference of charges amounting to £293,000 a year to the Imperial Exchequer. Their recommendation that England should contribute £50,000 to the expenses of the India Office was not carried out.

In 1901 the North-West Frontier Province was created, and in the following year Lord Kitchener was appointed Commander-in-Chief, the Education Commission, presided over by Sir Thomas Raleigh, published its Report (Sir Guru Das Banerjee writing a Note of Dissent), and the Police Commission began to sit under Sir Andrew Fraser (afterwards Lieut.-Governor of Bengal).

In the same year Lord Curzon increased his unpopularity among the class of Anglo-Indians above mentioned, by punishing the 9th Lancers, because at Sialkot two privates were believed to have beaten to death a native cook who refused to procure a native woman for them; they remained undetected.

The next year (1903) opened with a great Durbar at Delhi, the estimated cost of which was £180,000, and the real cost probably at least £200,000, apart from the local expenses of provinces and Native States. The Tibet expedition started in the same year.

More important than either of these events for the history of India was the REDUCTION OF THE SALT TAX, or more properly, the reduction of the price of salt under the Government monopoly. Between this year and 1907 it was reduced from 2 rupees 8 annas per maund to 1 rupee (a maund = 82·29 lbs.).[2]

Lord Curzon’s office was now renewed for a further uncertain term, believed to be two years. But before his departure for six months’ leave in 1904, he had already reduced his popularity among the educated classes of India. By the Official Secrets Act, he extended the Acts of 1889 and 1897 so as to include information upon civil affairs and matters of fact among the offences, as well as military secrets and newspaper criticism, “likely to bring the Government or constituted authority into suspicion or contempt.” As the burden of proof was thrown on the accused, and it was unnecessary to establish criminal intention for conviction, this Act limited newspapers to the supply of such information as the Government pleased.

In the same year an attempt was made to raise the standard of higher education by the Universities Act. The main object was to induce the five Universities of Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Lahore, and Allahabad to undertake instruction and supervision as well as examination, to which their function had been limited at first. It was laid down that all students at a University must be members of an affiliated college, and changes were introduced into the constitution of the Senates, which were now to be largely composed of the Chancellor’s nominees and ex-officio members—High Court Judges, Bishops, members of Executive Councils, the provincial Directors of Public Instruction, and professors of Government and missionary colleges. It was complained that these provisions destroyed the independence of the Universities, and, owing to the increased expense, much reduced the number of students able to compete for degrees. On the other hand, it is maintained, and I believe justly, that the standard of learning in its higher branches has been considerably advanced since the Act among the affiliated colleges.

A few sentences may be quoted from Lord Curzon’s Budget Speech in March of this year (1904), as showing his general attitude towards educated Indians and their demands:—

“I sympathize most deeply with the aspirations of the Indians towards greater national unity, and with their desire to play a part in the public life of the country. But I do not think that the salvation of India is to be sought on the field of politics at the present stage of her development.... The highest ranks of civil employment in India must as a general rule be held by Englishmen, for the reason that they possess, partly by heredity, partly by up-bringing, and partly by education, the knowledge of the principles of government, the habits of mind, the vigour of character, which are essential for the task, and that, the rule of India being a British rule, and every other rule being in the circumstances of the case impossible, the tone and standard should be set by those who have created and are responsible for it.”[3]

He further went on to maintain that on salaries of £800 a year and upward, 1263 government servants were Europeans, 15 Eurasians, and 92 Indians; while on salaries between £60 and £800, there were 5205 Europeans, 5420 Eurasians, and 16,283 Indians. These figures were, however, severely analysed by Mr. Gokhale in his Budget speech of 1905.

It was held by educated Indians that a Government Resolution of May 24, 1904, carrying this statement of policy into effect, tended to exclude Indians from the higher branches of the service, and stood in contradiction to Queen Victoria’s Proclamation for India in 1858, in which occur the following two clauses:—

“We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects; and those obligations we shall faithfully and conscientiously fulfil.

“And it is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge.”

Accordingly, at the meeting of the National Congress in Bombay at the end of this year, the first resolution was in protest against the exclusion of Indians from the higher grades of the Service. The other resolutions, showing the tendency of the time, included protests against the increasing military expenditure, especially upon the Tibet expedition, and demands for wider education, technical schools, a Permanent Land Settlement, police reform in accordance with the Commission of 1903, the separation of judicial and executive functions throughout the Civil Service, simultaneous examinations for the Service in England and India, and part payment by England of the cost of the India Office in Whitehall. Sir Henry Cotton, Chief Commissioner of Assam from 1896 to 1902, was President of the Congress that year, and he was deputed to lay the resolutions before the Viceroy in person. But Lord Curzon refused to receive him.

On February 11, 1905, Lord Curzon addressed the Convocation of Calcutta University with a dissertation upon truthfulness and other virtues—

“I hope I am making no false or arrogant claim,” he said, “when I say that the highest ideal of truth is to a large extent a Western conception. I do not thereby mean to claim that Europeans are universally or even generally truthful, still less do I mean that Asiatics deliberately or habitually deviate from the truth. The one proposition would be absurd, the other insulting. But undoubtedly truth took a high place in the moral codes of the West before it had been similarly honoured in the East, where craftiness and diplomatic wile have always been held in much repute. We may prove it by the common innuendo that lurks in the words ‘Oriental diplomacy,’ by which is meant something rather tortuous and hypersubtle. The same may be seen in Oriental literature. In your epics truth will often be extolled as a virtue; but quite as often it is attended with some qualification, and very often praise is given to successful deception practised with honest aim.”

The Viceroy, addressing his Bengali audience, went on to say that “he knew no country where mare’s-nests were more prolific than here”; and he warned them especially against flattery and vituperation, and afterwards against eloquence.

“In India,” he said, “there are two sets of people, the reticent and the eloquent. I dare say you know to which class the people in this part of the country belong. I am sometimes lost in admiration at the facility with which they speak in a foreign language, and I envy the accomplishment. All I say to you is, do not presume upon this talent.”

Towards the conclusion of the speech, he introduced the following sentences:—

“Learn that the true salvation of India will not come from without, but must be created within. It will not be given you by enactment of the British Parliament, or of any Parliament at all.... Be true Indians—that is the prompting of nationality.... In India I see the claim constantly advanced that a man is not merely a Bengali, or an Uriya, or a Mahratta, or a Sikh, but a member of the Indian nation. I do not think it can yet be said that there is any Indian nation, though in the distant future some approach to it may be evolved. However that may be, the Indian is most certainly a member of the British Empire.”[4]

Neither these contradictory remarks on nationality, nor the Viceroy’s well-intentioned exposition of the national tendency to deceit, were received by the audience and their friends in a properly chastened spirit. But the Amrita Bazar Patrika, next to the Bengalee, perhaps the most influential Indian paper in Calcutta, contented itself with the following extract from Lord Curzon’s book, called “Problems of the Far East” (p. 155 of the edition quoted), where, writing of his conversation with the President of the Korean Foreign Office, he said:—

“Having been warned not to say I was only thirty-three, when he put me the straight question, ‘How old are you?’ I unhesitatingly responded, ‘Forty.’ ‘I presume you are a near relative of the Queen of England?’ (asked the President). ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I am not.’ But I was fain to add, ‘I am, however, as yet an unmarried man,’ with which unscrupulous suggestion I completely regained the old gentleman’s favour.”

The quotation was regarded as apt, but the passage was only a joke, and it must be remembered that Lord Curzon had not claimed that Europeans are universally or even generally truthful. He had called that proposition absurd.

The speech itself would probably have been soon forgotten if it had not been connected in the popular mind with the greatest and most disastrous of Lord Curzon’s schemes for promoting his ideal of efficiency—the Partition of Bengal.

It had long been evident that the Province of Bengal, if the large outlying districts of Orissa, Behar, and Chota Nagpur were included, was too large for one administration. It contained close upon 80,000,000 souls. But of this amount Bengal Proper counted for only 43,000,000. The next largest of the districts was Behar, with 21,500,000. Two things were possible and would have been gladly accepted—either to form a new province out of the western districts of Behar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa, with a capital at Patna or Ranchi, relieving Bengal of a population of about 33,000,000; or to have elevated Bengal into a Governorship on the same standing as Bombay and Madras, under a Governor appointed directly from England instead of a Lieut.-Governor appointed out of the Indian Civil Service; and at the same time to have organized the outlying districts as Commissionerships, responsible either to the Crown, or to the Governor of Bengal. Either of these two main schemes would have been accepted without question by the enormous majority of the inhabitants, and the chief principles of the second were favoured by Mr. Brodrick (Lord Midleton), at that time Secretary of State for India.

Lord Curzon, however, was determined to cut Bengal Proper and the Bengali-speaking community in two, giving 25,000,000 of the population to the new Province of Eastern Bengal and Assam with a new capital at Dacca, and 18,000,000 of the population to a Province still to be called Bengal, with the old capital of Calcutta, and bound up with the outlying districts of Behar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa, all of which differ from Bengal in race, language, and civilization, as does Assam. Under this division, the populations of the two new Provinces are approximately 54,000,000 in Bengal, and 31,000,000 in Eastern Bengal and Assam.[5]

When Partition on these lines was first proposed, it excited strong protest, not only among the Hindu population of Bengal, but among many Civil Servants and Anglo-Indian papers, also among the Mohammedans of Eastern Bengal, who are Bengalis by race, but number three-fifths of the population, and, therefore, might be expected to welcome the change, especially as they were promised considerable advantages under the new administration. Large numbers of public meetings were held throughout Bengal to protest against the measure, and petitions were sent to the British Parliament. As the British authorities paid no attention to these representations, the “Swadeshi” (literally “Our own Country”) movement was started for the exclusive use of native productions, in the hope that a boycott on British goods might at last induce public opinion in England to take notice of an Indian grievance. As Mr. John Morley said, when speaking as Secretary of State for India in the House of Commons, February 26, 1906: “I am bound to say, nothing was ever worse done in disregard to the feeling and opinion of the majority of the people concerned.”

Nevertheless, Lord Curzon accomplished the Partition by an unexpected Proclamation from Simla on September 1, 1905, appointing Sir Andrew Fraser Lieut.-Governor in Calcutta, and Sir Bampfylde Fuller Lieut.-Governor in Dacca, both being entire strangers to Bengal. The Partition came into force on October 16, 1905—a day observed as a fast of humiliation and prayer throughout the Provinces.

In the same month Mr. Gokhale and Lala Lajpat Rai came to England as Congress Delegates, to lay the demands of the constitutional reform party before English audiences. Lala Lajpat Rai also visited America.

Before the Partition was proclaimed, Lord Curzon had submitted his RESIGNATION (August 12, 1905), owing to a difference of opinion with Lord Kitchener over the appointment of a new “Military Supply Member” to the Viceroy’s Council; and, in reality, over the position of the Commander-in-Chief and the Military Supply Member with regard to the Governor-General in Council. The difference does not concern us, except that, as the Conservative Home Government supported Lord Kitchener’s view, and thus drove Lord Curzon to resign, it was widely believed that Mr. Brodrick accepted the Partition the more readily as a salve to Lord Curzon’s feelings.[6]

The Earl of Minto was at once appointed to succeed, but Lord Curzon remained to nearly the end of the year, partly in order to welcome the Prince and Princess of Wales on their visit to India. In his farewell speech at Simla (September 30, 1905) he said:—

“If I were asked to sum up my work in a single word, I would say ‘Efficiency.’ That has been our gospel, the keynote of our administration.”[7]

No one has questioned his industry and personal devotion. During his seven years’ tenure, he instituted Commissions on plague, famine, irrigation, universities, and police; he organized departments of Commerce and Industry, and of Imperial Customs; he endeavoured to introduce elasticity into the Land Assessment; he revolutionized our Frontier policy; and he did more for the preservation of Indian history, architecture, and ancient memorials than any of his predecessors. All this in addition to the other changes and undertakings mentioned above.

The appointment of Mr. John Morley to the India Office (December, 1905) was received with the utmost enthusiasm by the country, but, unfortunately, Lord Curzon’s industrious devotion to efficiency, without consideration of the prejudices or reasonable desires of the people concerned, had sown the seed for the irritation and disturbances of the next two years. The first signs of unrest naturally appeared in Eastern Bengal, where the Swadeshi movement had been instituted as a protest against the Partition. Sir Bampfylde Fuller found himself at once involved in difficulties about the boycott of foreign goods, public meetings, and the participation of schoolboys and students in the political questions that occupied all minds. On April 14, 1906, the Bengal Provincial Conference was dispersed with violence by the police at Barisal. Bodies of punitive police and Gurkhas were quartered in several small towns and villages at their expense. Schools were deprived of their grants and the right to compete for scholarships. A circular was issued curtailing the right of public meeting, and suppressing processions and the cry of “Bande Mataram.” In another circular Sir Bampfylde Fuller laid it down that a fixed proportion of Government posts should be reserved for Mohammedans, and, until that proportion had been reached, no qualified Mohammedan candidate should be rejected in favour of a Hindu candidate, merely because the latter had superior qualifications (May 25, 1906). Finally, owing to some petty disturbances by schoolboys at Serajganj, in the Pabna district (November 15, 1905), the Lieut.-Governor who had already severely punished the two schools in the place, and posted punitive police there, demanded that they should be disaffiliated from Calcutta University. The Government asked him to reconsider the case, and he resigned (August 4, 1906), being succeeded by Sir Lancelot Hare.

The next month was marked by a characteristic description of a simple incident by Calcutta correspondents to the English press. On September 5th Mr. Surendra Nath Banerjea, twice President of the National Congress and now editor of the Bengalee newspaper in Calcutta, was honoured by a common Indian ceremony of “benediction” in a private house. It was an affair of an umbrella, a chaplet, garlands, and the recitation of verses from the Vedas. It is almost impossible for even a casual visitor to India to escape a score of very similar performances. Yet the correspondents on whom England chiefly depends for Indian news described this as a solemn CORONATION of Mr. Banerjea as India’s Emperor, as if to rouse the suspicions and rage of the English people into sensational panic.

In the spring of 1907, local disturbances occurred in Eastern Bengal and the Punjab. Meetings to protest against the Partition had been continually held in Eastern Bengal, and in the first week of March the Nawab Salimulla of Dacca visited the small town of Comilla in order to encourage counter-demonstrations on the part of the Mohammedans, over whom he claimed great influence. During his visit small riots took place between Hindu and Mohammedan crowds; a Mohammedan was killed and one or two Hindus. By one means or another, the report was circulated through the country that the Indian Government was favouring the Mohammedan population and would inflict no punishment for the looting of Hindu shops or the abduction of Hindu women, especially widows. Accordingly, shops were looted, Hindu widows abducted, and the cases of outrage upon women by gangs increased in number.

In the third week of April further disturbances broke out at Jamalpur, another small town in Eastern Bengal, where the Hindus, during a festival, were set upon by Mohammedan rowdies, who desecrated a temple and maintained panic in the district for the next few weeks.

The troubles that arose in the Punjab, about the same time, were largely agricultural in origin. There had been a large increase in the land-assessment, together with a sudden rise in the irrigation rates, especially on the Bari-Doab canal. The Punjab Legislative Council had also brought forward a Colonization Bill altering the agreements by which colonists held reclaimed land, especially in the Chenab Colony, under the Act of 1893. Many relations of these tenants were enlisted in Sikh and other Indian regiments, and ultimately Lord Minto withheld his consent from the Bill. The question of the irrigation dues was also postponed for a year.

Meantime, Indian opinion was constantly irritated by the abuse and ridicule poured upon educated Indians in the “Civil and Military Gazette,” the leading Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore. They were spoken of as “babbling B.A.’s,” “base-born B.A.’s,” “an unhonoured nobility of the school,” “serfs,” “beggars on horseback,” “servile classes,” “a class that carries a stigma,” and so on. When petitioned twice to put an end to this kind of journalism as stirring up strife between the races, Sir Denzil Ibbetson, at that time Lieut.-Governor of the Punjab, regretted the tone of the articles but refused to prosecute.

On the other hand, two Indian papers in Lahore were prosecuted—“India” for republishing a letter from America containing a seditious appeal to the native troops, and the “Punjabee” for its comments on a case of “Begar,” or forced labour, which was supposed to have led to the death of two villagers compelled to work for an official. In the case of India, the proprietor and editor, Pindi Das, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, and the printer, Dina Nath, to two years. In the Punjabee case, the proprietor, Lala Jaswant Rai, was sentenced, on appeal, to a fine of 1000 rupees and six months’ imprisonment, and the editor, K. K. Athavale, to a fine of 200 rupees and six months’ imprisonment.

After the judgment of the Chief Court on appeal was given in the Punjabee case (April 16, 1907), the prisoners on their way to gaol were met by an enthusiastic crowd, and there was some disturbance, for which three young men were arrested.

This disturbance was followed by a more serious riot at Rawal Pindi, the greatest military cantonment of the north-west district of India (May 2nd). In the previous February a young and then unknown Indian, named Ajit Singh, had started an “Indian Patriots’ Association,” chiefly to deal with the agricultural grievances above mentioned. Various meetings were held, and at Lyallpur (March 22nd) Lala Lajpat Rai, who had no connection with the Association, but was well known in Lahore as a religious and social reformer in the Arya Samaj, addressed an agricultural audience, in a speech in which he ventured to declare that officials are servants of the public. Ajit Singh also spoke, and this was the only occasion on which the two men were on the same platform.

Meetings were held at Rawal Pindi, on April 7th and 21st. On the latter day Ajit Singh made a violent attack upon the increase of land assessment, calling on the peasants to cease cultivation until the amount was reduced. Mr. Hansraj Sawhny, a prominent pleader, in the chair, checked the speaker, who went away in a rage. But shortly afterwards, Mr. Agnew, the Deputy Commissioner, summoned the chairman and two other lawyers, for an enquiry into the matter. On the very morning of the enquiry, the proceedings were postponed, owing to a telegram from Sir Denzil Ibbetson, and the large crowd which had collected, instead of dispersing, swept down a main road, destroyed and burnt some furniture from a mission house and church, and damaged some gardens and houses of Europeans, together with a Hindu workshop, where the men were on strike. The police did not appear, but troops patrolled the town later.

For this riot, six prominent lawyers were arrested and kept in gaol, no bail being allowed, through the hot weather from May 3rd to October 1st, when they were acquitted and discharged, the magistrate declaring the evidence was fabricated. In consequence of this unmerited imprisonment, one of them has since died.

About sixty other persons were arrested, and five were condemned, three of them to seven years’ imprisonment for riot and arson. The trial took place before Mr. A. E. Martineau, Sessions Judge of Delhi, as Special Magistrate, and the terms of his judgment did much to restore Indian confidence in British justice.

The fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Mutiny (May 10th), had been fixed by some Anglo-Indian journalists as the date for a probable rising against the British, and, owing to their warnings, preparations were made for withdrawing the British residents, especially in the Punjab towns, into the forts. But in spite of all that prophecy could do, no outbreak occurred.

However, on May 9th, Lala Lajpat Rai was suddenly DEPORTED from Lahore without notice, charge, or trial, and conveyed to the fort in Mandalay. Ajit Singh was similarly deported from Amritsar.

When questioned in the Commons as to this breach of “Habeas Corpus,” Mr. John Morley pleaded the powers of deportation granted by a Regulation of 1818, under which thirty-two persons were at the moment detained in restraint.

On May 11th, Lord Minto issued a Proclamation limiting the RIGHT OF PUBLIC MEETING in parts of the Punjab and Eastern Bengal. Under this Ordinance seven days’ written notice was required before a meeting, the meeting might be prohibited by a magistrate, and the police were to attend.

On May 27th, the Viceroy refused his assent to the Punjab Colonization Bill above described.

Meantime, on behalf of the Home Department of the Government of India, Sir Herbert Risley issued a Circular with regard to the political behaviour of schoolboys, teachers, students, and professors (May 6th). It ordained that where schoolboys associated themselves with political movements grants-in-aid should be withdrawn from the school, and the privilege of competing for scholarships withheld; universities were not to recognize the school, nor to admit its candidates to matriculation. Schoolmasters were allowed by the Circular “to have a right to their own opinions as much as any one else,” but should be visited by “disciplinary action” if their utterances endangered the orderly development of the boys, or were subversive of their respect for authority. In the case of colleges, students were allowed to attend meetings, but if they became active in politics, the privileges of affiliation should be withdrawn. Professors were permitted more latitude, but if they encouraged students to attend political meetings, the university or the Government should intervene.

The Budget for the year 1907-8 was estimated at £75,012,800 revenue, and £74,238,100 expenditure, giving a surplus of £774,700. In his Budget speech of June 6th, Mr. John Morley made the important announcement that two nominated Indians were to be added to the India Council in Whitehall, and gave the names of Mr. K. G. Gupta, as representing the Hindus, and Mr. S. H. Bilgrami, as representing the Mohammedans.

At the same time he announced a SCHEME OF REFORMS, proposed by the Indian Government at Simla, to be submitted to the Local Governments for criticism. In brief, the scheme included:—

(1) The institution of an “Imperial Advisory Council,” consisting of about sixty members, all appointed by the Viceroy, including twenty ruling chiefs, “with a suitable number of territorial magnates of every province where landholders of sufficient dignity and status are to be found.” This council was to be summoned at the Viceroy’s pleasure, and to hold nothing but private, informal, and confidential meetings, having no legislative powers of any sort.

(2) Provincial Advisory Councils—apparently seven—of smaller size, but consisting of the local Imperial Councillors and representatives of lesser landholders, industry, commerce, capital, and the professional classes, all nominated by the head of the Local Government; their functions also to be entirely consultative.

(3) The enlargement of the Viceroy’s Legislative Council from twenty-four to fifty-three by the inclusion of more Viceroy’s nominees, two representatives of the Chambers of Commerce, two Mohammedans elected by rotation from Mohammedan districts, seven landholders elected by the landed magnates, and seven instead of four members elected by the non-official members of the Legislative Councils. The last point may appear like a concession to popular representation, but seven out of fifty-three is not so powerful a fraction as four out of twenty-four.

(4) The enlargement of the Provincial Legislative Councils, but this proposal was left vague, beyond a few suggestions.

Some miscellaneous points in the history of the year remain to be noticed.

The official return of deaths from PLAGUE during the first four months of the year (1907) amounted to 642,000, and the total deaths from plague since its first appearance in 1896 up to April, 1907, were 5,250,000.

On August 7th, and again on October 2nd, disturbances arose in College Square and Beadon Square in Calcutta, and in the same city a popular speaker named Bepin Chandra Pal was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment (September 11th) for refusing to give evidence in the prosecution of the Indian paper, Bande Mataram. When summoned as witness before the magistrate, Mr. Kingsford, he replied:—

“I have conscientious objections against taking part in a prosecution which I believe to be unjust and injurious to the cause of popular freedom and the interests of public peace.” (August 26.)

Two special commissions were instituted in the autumn—a Decentralization Commission, under Mr. Charles Hobhouse, at that time Under-Secretary for India, and a Factory Labour Commission, under Mr. W. T. Morrison of the Bombay Civil Service. They sat in various parts of India during the winter.

In July an agreement was announced with China, by which it was ultimately arranged that China should regard 51,000 chests of OPIUM exported from India as a standard amount, this amount to be decreased yearly by one-tenth from 1908 till it disappeared in ten years, provided that China made similar reductions in her produce.

On August 31st an Anglo-Russian Agreement was signed, dividing Persia into Russian and British spheres of influence, with a neutral zone between; Afghanistan was recognized as outside Russian influence, and both Powers agreed not to send representatives to Lhassa. In some quarters it was hoped that this Agreement would warrant a large reduction in the military expenditure of India.

In October Sir George Clarke, lately Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, arrived from England as new Governor of Bombay. In the same month Mr. Keir Hardie, ex-leader of the Labour Party in the Commons, visited Eastern Bengal, where his private statements and conversation were misrepresented by correspondents to the English newspapers and agencies as seditious speeches.

On November 1st a Seditious Meetings Act was passed by the Viceroy in Council at Simla, giving Local Governments the power to “proclaim” the whole or part of their provinces, in which case seven days’ notice in writing must be given of every public meeting, including the assembly of twenty persons or over in a private house; the District Magistrate, or Commissioner of Police was given power to prohibit such a meeting, or to direct that police should be present.

Mr. Gokhale and Dr. Rash Behari Ghose spoke strongly in opposition to the Bill as Indian representatives on the Council, and the Tikka Sahib of Nabha, a Sikh representative of the Punjab, joined them in voting against the measure, which was carried by a majority of nine British against three Indians, no other members of Council being able to attend, as the session was in Simla contrary to precedent for important legislation.

The next week brought the full text of Mr. John Morley’s speech to his constituents at Arbroath, in defence of his Indian policy. I quote the following sentences on account of the attention they attracted:—

“Does any one want me to go to London to-morrow morning and to send a telegram to Lord Kitchener, and tell him to disband the Indian Army, and send home as fast as we can dispatch transports the British contingent of the Army, and bring away the whole of the Civil Servants?... How should we look in the face of the civilized world if we had turned our back upon our duty and upon our task? How should we bear the savage stings of our own consciences when, as assuredly we should, we heard through the dark distances the roar and scream of confusion and carnage in India?”

Speaking of Mr. Keir Hardie and one of his reported sayings in Eastern Bengal, Mr. Morley said:—

“I am not at all sure that he said this, but it does not matter, because many other people have said it—That whatever is good in the way of self-government for Canada must be good for India. In my view that is the most concise statement that I can imagine, and the grossest fallacy in all politics.... You might just as well say that, because a fur coat in Canada at certain times of the year is a most comfortable garment, therefore a fur coat in the Deccan of India is a sort of handy garment that you might be very happy to wear.”

A few sentences further on he added:—

“I hope that the Government of India, so long as I am connected with it and responsible for it to Parliament and to the country, will not be hurried by the anger of the impatient idealist. The impatient idealist—you know him, I know him, I like him; I have been one myself. He says, ‘You admit that so and so is right, why don’t you do it? why don’t you do it now?’ Ah, gentlemen, how many of the most tragic miscarriages in human history have been due to the impatience of the idealist?

“... You would not have me see men set the prairie on fire without arresting the hand. You would not blame me when I saw some men smoking their pipes near powder magazines—you would not call me an arch-coercionist if I said, ‘Away with the men, and away with the powder.’”

In answer to those who said India was astonished at the licence extended to newspapers and speakers, he continued:—

“Orientals, they say, do not understand it. But we are not Orientals; that is the root of the matter. We English, Scotch, and Irish are in India because we are not Orientals.... We are representatives, not of Oriental civilization but Western civilization, of its methods, its principles, its practices; and I for one will not be hurried into an excessive haste for repression by the argument that Orientals do not understand this toleration.

“Anybody who has read history knows that the Extremist beats the Moderate by his fire, his fiery energy, his very narrowness and concentration. But still we hold that it would be the height of political folly for us at this moment to refuse to do all we can to rally the Moderates to the cause of the Government, simply because the policy will not satisfy the Extremists. Let us, if we can, rally the Moderates, and, if we are told that the policy will not satisfy the Extremists, so be it; our line will remain the same.

“... Some of them (the leaders of unrest) are angry with me. Why? Because I have not been able to give them the moon. I have got no moon, and if I had I would not give them the moon.

“... I am not surprised that these educated Indians who read these great masters and teachers of ours (Milton, Burke, Macaulay, and Mill) are intoxicated with the ideas of freedom and nationality and self-government which these great writers promulgate. Who of us can wonder who had the privilege in the days of our youth, at college or at home, of turning over these golden pages and seeing that lustrous firmament dome over our youthful imaginations—who of us can forget the intoxication and rapture with which we made friends with these truths?... I only say this to my idealist friends, whether Indian or European, that for every passage they can find in the speeches or writings of these great teachers of wisdom, I will find them a dozen passages in which, in the language of Burke, the warning is given—‘How weary a step do those take who endeavour to make out of a great mass a true political personality!’”

After referring to a saying about Sir Henry Lawrence, that “no one ever sat at his table without learning to think more kindly of the natives,” Mr. Morley added:—

“India is perhaps the one country—bad manners, overbearing manners are very disagreeable in all countries—India is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political crime.”

Towards the end of the summer there had been some local riots and disturbances in Southern India because at Cocanada, on the coast north of Madras, an Englishman was accused of having beaten a Hindu boy for shouting “Bande Mataram.” He was sentenced to a small fine (£10, including damages), and was acquitted on appeal. But this autumn, unhappily, Indian opinion was further inflamed by the results of two trials in private cases held before British juries in the Punjab. In Lahore a British journalist was accused of having shot his bearer dead, after kicking him out of the house, revolver in hand, and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, the jury finding that death was accidental. In the other case, at Rawal Pindi, a British assistant station-master and a Mohammedan porter admitted to having in turn outraged a Hindu woman, who was waiting for a train and was enticed into the stationmaster’s room by threats and pretended information about a telegram. Both were acquitted by the jury on a plea of “consent.”

In November of this year, Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, veteran champion of India’s cause before the English people, returned to spend his last days in a quiet place on the coast near Bombay. Born a Bombay Parsi in 1825, he had first gone to live in England just before the Mutiny, but had often returned to official or other work in Baroda and Bombay. He was a member of the first Indian National Congress at its inauguration in Bombay (1885), and in the next year stood as Liberal candidate for Holborn, on which occasion Lord Salisbury told the electors he could not believe they would vote for a “black man.” Nevertheless, he was Liberal member for Central Finsbury from 1892 to 1895, being the first Indian in the House of Commons. In 1892 he was President of the Congress held at Lahore, and in 1906, in spite of his great age, he consented to be President of the Congress held at Calcutta, because it was felt that the reverence with which he was regarded by all Indians would avert the danger of open rupture between the moderate and extremist parties.

This bare summary of events may, perhaps, be useful for reference, and I think it will enable readers of the following pages better to understand the subjects of public interest that were occupying the attention of educated Indians and of Anglo-Indians when I arrived at Bombay in October, 1907, as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and other papers.

I owe my hearty thanks to all Anglo-Indian and Indian officials and friends who gave me ungrudging assistance during my visit, and especially to Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe, lately editor of the Statesman in Calcutta, for reading my proofs and giving me the advantage of his exceptional knowledge.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For an eye-witness’s account see “The Great Famine,” by Mr. Vaughan Nash, at that time correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (Longmans: 1900).

[2] The revenue from salt in 1907-8 was £3,336,900 against £4,362,706 in 1906-7, but the consumption of salt went up in 1907-8 to 44,289,000 maunds, compared to an average of 36,445,000 maunds for the ten previous years.

[3] “Lord Curzon in India;” selection from his speeches; with Introduction, by Sir Thomas Raleigh. Pp. 142, 143.

[4] “Lord Curzon in India,” pp. 491, 498-9.

[5] Figures in Lord Curzon’s Proclamation of July 19, 1905.

[6] “Lord Midleton, the Secretary of State at that time, made a reference to the Partition of Bengal in one of his telegrams which undoubtedly led to the inference in that country that that measure had been thrown as a sop to soothe my wounded feelings rather than on grounds of political propriety or expediency.”—Lord Curzon in the House of Lords, June 30, 1908.

[7] “Lord Curzon in India,” p. 564.

CHAPTER I
A Servant of India

It was the Indian festival of Diwali, held at Poona on Guy Fawkes’ Day, and celebrated with innumerable flames, like our own thanksgiving for the protection of King and Parliament. But, in feeling, the Diwali comes nearer to Christmastide, for it has no political significance, and the flames are not lighted as a defiance to the Pope of Rome, but in honour of Lakshmi, the goddess of family prosperity, who provides wealth sufficient for us, and holds a baby to the breast above her heart.

So brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, cousins to the tenth removal, were gathered together in the joy of a kinship that regards the smallest trace of common blood as absolute and unquestioned claim to lifelong support under a common roof. No Workhouse or Industrial School for them! As long as one of the kin has pancakes and a cow, there is always a certainty of a crumb and a sup of milk all round. In honour of such riches and family love, the ceilings of the rooms and the verandahs fluttered with pink and yellow flags; the windows and doors were hung with festoons of orange marigolds on a string; upon the entrance pavement neat patterns in whitewash were drawn by hand-rollers; and, as the streets turned blue with evening, the children, draped in all the gorgeous crimsons and golds their mothers could afford, lighted the tiny oil lamps on window-sill and doorstep, or threw the spurting fires under the very noses of sacred bulls that wander for their living from shop to shop. To be sure, other helpful powers beside Lakshmi have a share in the honour (for who can tell under which form he loves God best?), and it is the temples of Durga and Vishnu, of Siva and Parvati, lady of the far-off mountain snow, that make the sacred hill of Parbati outside the city sparkle like an illuminated birthday cake, for at least one night during the Diwali feast of brotherhood.

A Street in Poona.

[Face p. 32.

The sad thing was that in the beautiful streets where Mahratta nobles had built their simple palaces under the Peshwas a century ago, many of the houses now stood dark and empty, in terror of the plague. Hardly eleven years had passed since the pestilence first appeared, imported from Hongkong as people thought, and in those eleven years it had killed nearly six millions of India’s inhabitants. Six millions out of three hundred millions may not sound very much; it is only two in every hundred spread over eleven years. But the loss was not equally distributed, and when I was told that within those eleven years the inhabitants of Poona had been reduced to nearly one-third, I knew why so many homes were dark on a night of lamps and family affection. At the time, the plague was striking down from twelve to fifteen, or at the highest twenty, so that its visitation was regarded as light. But I remember the panic when a single case was reported in London, or even at the more comfortable distance of Marseilles, and so it was natural to find that many families had gone to live on selected open spaces outside the city. There among rocks and withered grass they kindled their little lamps and celebrated family joy in any hut of wicker, matting, canvas, petroleum tins, old boxes, boards, or branches which they and the Imperial Government could manage to rig up between them. Many shopmen had even transferred their little stores of grain, sweets, and cottons to this countrified scene, and the general effect was like a scrappy Derby Day without the races.

Having crossed a bridge, to the left of which thin columns of smoke still rose from the smouldering bodies of yesterday’s dead, I passed through one of these Health Camps, as official language fondly calls them, and found before me a partly finished building of solid stone—unfinished, but with something already monastic and grave in its straight-roofed hall and line of cloistral habitations. It was the rising home of the “Servants of India Society,” and in front of his own small house the founder and “First Member” of the Society was standing to receive me.

Mr. Gopal Krishna Gokhale is one of the very few Indians whose name is known in England to a certain number of people outside the score or two that pay attention to Indian affairs. Born a Mahratta Brahman of the highest caste and of ordinary poverty in the small town of Kolhapur, he threw away the caste and retained the poverty. While a student at the Elphinstone College in Bombay, he came under the influence of Justice Ranade, also a Mahratta Brahman and judge of the High Court, famous already for social reform, and at that time combining with others to establish the National Congress, which held its first meeting in 1885. Mr. Gokhale had taken his degree the year before. Lord Ripon had just left the country, honoured and regretted among Indians as no other Viceroy has been, and the air was full of schemes for political emancipation under the favour and encouragement of British statesmen. Among the reformers of that time, when all were moderate, Ranade was distinguished for moderation, and when Mr. Gokhale in his student days chose him as his “guru,” or spiritual guide, he fixed for life his own characteristics of moderation, and a certain sweet reasonableness, not only of manner, but of aim.

Mr. Gokhale and Servants of India.

[Face p. 34.

It is common to say of a dead politician that he was devoted heart and soul to the service of his country, and, happily, it is sometimes true, even though that devoted service has been crowned by honours, fame, and riches. But of Mr. Gokhale who is still alive, I would say that for every day of his manhood he has had no motive but his country’s service, from the day of his appointment on a salary of £60 a year as teacher of history and economics at the Fergusson College in Poona up to his retirement in 1902 on a pension of £20 a year, and onward through the last six years of labour, vilification, and heated controversy. Not a great speaker, and making no attempt at emotional eloquence at a time when oratory counted for much more in India than it does now—a man who has never even contemplated any popular arts except his own inevitable politeness, he has won his influence upon his country’s future simply by unreserved devotion and integrity of life. At a moment of intense excitement during the plague riots in Poona, when Mr. Rand and Lieut. Ayerst were shot by Damodar Chapekar and his brothers as they drove into the city from Government House (June 22, 1897), he, being then in England, published charges against the method of plague-observation by British soldiers, which on his return he discovered were not supported by the promised evidence, and he offered an open apology to Lord Sandhurst and the Army. Amidst an infuriated public opinion, which believed the charges to be not only true, but below the truth, few could have lived down such a retractation. But Mr. Gokhale lived it down.

When the National Congress met at Benares in December, 1905, just after the partition of Bengal, he was elected President as the safest guide in a crisis of extreme difficulty and increasing indignation. Mr. John Morley had just received his appointment to the India Office, and a few lines from Mr. Gokhale’s presidential address may be quoted to show the hopes and fears of the time:—

“Large numbers of educated men in this country feel towards Mr. Morley as towards a Master, and the heart hopes and yet trembles. He, the reverent student of Burke, the disciple of Mill, the friend and biographer of Gladstone, will he courageously apply their principles and his own to the government of this country, or will he too succumb to the influences of the India Office, and thus cast a blight on hopes which his own writings have done so much to foster? In any case his appointment indicates how favourable to our cause the attitude of the new Ministry is.”

For two or three years past Mr. Gokhale had represented the Presidency of Bombay as one of the elected Indians upon the Viceroy’s Legislative Council, and when I first met him at Poona, as I have described, he had just returned from the Council at Simla, in which the Seditious Meetings Bill was approved.[8] Before the Viceroy and the rest of the British majority, he had opposed the Bill with a restrained but overwhelming plea for the common rights of freedom, as English people understand them. In one significant passage, after referring to “the malignant activity of certain unscrupulous correspondents” who had recently been trying to lash the British public into a panic by false versions of events and private utterances, he added:—

“The saddest part of the whole thing is that the Secretary of State for India has fallen a victim to these grievous misrepresentations. Possessing no personal knowledge of the people of this country, and overwhelmed with a sense of the vast responsibilities of his office, he has allowed his vision to be obscured, and his sense of proportion to be warped. From time to time he has let fall ominous hints in the House of Commons, and more than once he has spoken as though some great trouble were brewing in India and the country were on the eve of a dark disaster. My Lord, in these circumstances the passing of a Bill like the present, and in such hot haste, is bound to have the effect of confirming the false impression which has been already created in England, and this cannot fail to intensify and deepen still further the sense of injustice and injury, and the silent resentment with which my countrymen have been watching the course of events during the last few months.”

Here, on the edge of the rocky country west of Poona, close beside the Fergusson College for Indians, with which he had been so long connected, he had laid the foundation of his “Servants of India Society” two years before, and in the two-roomed cells about a dozen Knights of the Order were already living. They were men prepared, in the language of the Society’s rules, “to devote their lives to the cause of the country in a religious spirit, and to promote, by all constitutional means, the national interests of the Indian people.” The object of the Society is to train the Servants as national missionaries, ready to visit any part of India at the order of the First Member and Council, in the hope of creating a deep and passionate love of the country, organizing political teaching, promoting goodwill among the different races, assisting education, especially of women, and raising the people who live below even the lowest caste.

Each Servant of India remains under close training for five years, but out of the five years he spends two in visiting various parts of India, so as to know the people’s needs at first hand. Even when his novitiate is complete, he is required to live two months every year in the Headquarters, and, like the Monastic Orders, all the members take vows—to give their best to the service of the country; to earn no money for themselves and seek no personal advantage; to regard all Indians as brothers, without distinction of caste or creed; to engage in no personal quarrel; and to lead a pure personal life. In this Order, as in other similar societies throughout India, there is a growing tendency to celibate consecration, like the Roman priesthood’s. But the last vow does not exclude marriage. In fact, there is a provision that every member under training shall have his personal expenses borne by the Society, but be granted £2 a month for his family, if he has one, and that after his novitiate the full member shall bear the expenses of himself and family out of a grant of £3 6s. 8d. (Rs. 50) a month, with an extra allowance for the insurance of each child as it comes.

The merely learned side of the Order is represented by a large library, already containing rows on rows of the many great books that Indians and Englishmen have written on India, together with a selection from the history of liberty in all countries. That is the library’s distinction. Beginning with England herself, and passing right down the glorious roll to the Russia of 1905, it has here collected the long record of man’s gradual and hard-won conquest of freedom.

Social reform is certainly one side of the Society’s work. To free the laborious peoples of India from the bondage they lay on themselves in harassing ritual, immature marriages, exclusion from life’s decencies of some fifty millions, who eat dead animals and think they commit mortal sin if their shadow touches a Brahman—to free the common people gradually from these obsolete ways, and to spread among them the first inkling of knowledge, for which the Government does not yet afford the money—these are objects common to most Indian reformers, and natural under the tradition of Ranade. Such purposes are missionary in the ordinary sense, like the efforts of our missionary societies or university settlements. Only those who are dubious about all missionary efforts could criticize them. I am dubious myself, only because no one has ever deliberately missionized me without driving me further into sin, if only as a relief from his presence. For I keep in my mind that saying of Thoreau’s:—

“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts, called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear I should get some of his good done to me—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”

But I think the cause of all this peril and terror really lies, not in the good that might be done to myself, but in a certain disintegration in the missionary nature, an over-maturity or staleness of virtue that rots the good before I get it. If it were possible for the missionary spirit to move on the same insecure plane of pitfalls with me, unconscious of any salutary purpose beyond its own difficult salvation, one might possibly escape its virus without running in the opposite direction.

That is why the frankly political side of the Society is so welcome. Politics, being less intimate to the soul, appear less dangerous for a teacher than social reform or philanthropy, in which some kind of moral or class superiority is nearly always assumed. Regarding the Society’s attitude towards the British Government, I had better quote from its own little book of rules:—

“Its members frankly accept the British connection, as ordained, in the inscrutable dispensation of Providence, for India’s good. Self-government on the lines of the English colonies is their goal. This goal, they recognize, cannot be attained without years of earnest and patient work and sacrifice worthy of the cause.”

Many have smiled over that “inscrutable dispensation of Providence.” Naturally, I took it for irony myself, though I felt that irony was out of tune with the Society’s regulations. But it is not irony. Mr. Gokhale’s nature is too direct, his purpose too simple in its intensity, for the ironic bypaths.

I was dining that night with such of the Servants of India as had not gone home for the family festival. Mr. Paranjbye was there too—Senior Wrangler of his year, Fellow of St. John’s, present Head of the Fergusson College close by, famous among European mathematicians, and almost tolerated in the Anglo-Indian society of Poona for his skill at lawn tennis. Mr. Kelkar had come as well—editor of the Mahratta, a leader in the Extremist camp, Mr. Tilak’s vigilant captain. And a few more Brahmans and others sat with us, not too sacrificial in purity to eat beside a carnivorous European. That “inscrutable dispensation” was discussed amid laughter, but Mr. Gokhale retained his accustomed serenity. He had written the words with entire seriousness. The dispensations of Providence were inscrutable, but still he believed the British connection was ordained for India’s good. It had secured various things which any one could count, but above all it had instilled into the Indian nature a love of freedom and a self-assertion against authority that Indians used to lack, but English people often possess in enviable abundance.

I remember quoting the common opinion that Anglo-Indians have lost sympathy with Indians because they no longer make India their home, but keep one eye on England and are always on the flit. But Mr. Gokhale disagreed. He thought it an advantage that fewer English people now settled in the country. The fairly permanent residents, like shopkeepers and planters, were as a rule the worst mannered and most domineering, and they took hardly any part in public life. The standard of manners in general, he thought, had gone down. It might be that, in old days, the Englishman found it easier to be sympathetic with natives whom he could treat as dear good things. But educated Indians had come to detest such sympathy as only fit for pet animals, and both races were beginning to notice the change. For his part, he thought that since Lord Ripon left India in 1884, the type of Englishman that came out had slowly been declining.

“It is unfortunate,” he said, “that our Congress movement should have coincided with the past twenty-two years of violent reaction and Imperialism in England. You can hardly imagine how intolerable our life became at the time of the Boer war. The insolence of Anglo-Indian papers, like the Englishman or the Civil and Military Gazette towards our people goes beyond all bounds. Yet the Civil and Military Gazette, which is the worst offender, has only received a mild remonstrance from the Lieut.-Governor of the Punjab, while the editors of Indian papers are in gaol.[9] Such treatment, however, is the inevitable penalty of a conquered race, and, I think, within the last year manners have mended a little. Lord Minto, at all events, is very much the gentleman himself.

“During the last three years of Lord Curzon’s time,” he continued, “we were kept in a state of perpetual irritation. Then came our high hopes from the Liberal Party, and our violent disappointment. The worst of all is that many people are beginning to lose faith in English integrity and sense of justice—the two main qualities that could be used for the maintenance of your power. It is a new thing, but our young men are beginning to ask what is the good of constitutional agitation if it only results in insult and the Partition of Bengal? That is how Extremists are created. There are two schools of them now, one here in Poona, the other in Bengal itself, and Anglo-Indians are always calling upon us to denounce them. But we are not likely to denounce a section of our own people in face of the bureaucracy. For, after all, they have in view the same great object as ourselves.”

For himself, I discovered many months afterwards that Mr. Gokhale hated the name of Moderate, as, I suppose, all beings of flesh and blood needs must. But, for brief, one has to call by some such name the party which continues in patience and hope to believe that appeals to justice and reason may still induce the English people to grant reform.

For the Simla scheme, recently put out by Mr. Morley for criticism,[10] no Indian whom I met had anything to say, except Mr. Gokhale alone, who thought he detected one or two minor points that might possibly be of advantage. He condemned the Imperial Advisory Council entirely, as sure to produce a body of half-educated ruling chiefs and territorial magnates, powerless to stand against any Government proposal, and unlikely to be summoned except to discuss a royal visit, a statue, a famine, or the plague. But from the Provincial Advisory Councils he thought something might possibly be gained, if at least half the members were elected on a high franchise and were bound to meet for the discussion of definite local subjects so many times a year.

The attempt to clutch at any possible chance of good was characteristic of the man. With all his power he repels the temptation to sulky aloofness, always a strong temptation to enthusiasts in opposition. It is true he could find nothing to say for the Simla proposal of enlarging the Viceroy’s Legislative Council from twenty-four to fifty-three, by packing it with representatives of Chambers of Commerce, Mohammedans, and landowners. Such a scheme was too obviously only an attempt to crush down the influence of the education which has been one of England’s greatest gifts to India. It was a reversal of all British policy, which had hitherto set itself to depress the landlord gentry and men of wealth who “have a stake in the country,” and to stand as protector of the poor. The whole thing was too evidently framed in the spirit of fear and not of progress. But nevertheless, in Mr. Gokhale’s own scheme of reforms, an enlargement of the Legislative Councils is a prominent clause. That and some genuine control over the Budget by representative Indians on the Viceroy’s Council would start the reform of political machinery. In other departments the old cry for complete separation of judicial and executive functions must be listened to, so that even the lower officials in districts should never act both as prosecutor and judge. In the same public services, Indians should be granted an improved position in accordance with Queen Victoria’s Proclamation,[11] and, above all, the teaching of children should be gradually extended till it became free and compulsory, even in villages. There were a few other points in Mr. Gokhale’s programme of immediate reform. But in none could I discover a trace of that vagueness and impracticable demand, that “crying for the moon,” of which Mr. Morley and other critics of Indian demands were then complaining.[12]

I met Mr. Gokhale many times again—in Poona itself, Surat, Bombay, and London—and his reasonable and open-hearted personality will often re-appear in this record. But to myself I still picture him on that Diwali evening in the refectory where the Servants of India were gathered round him, together with friends from both the main Parties of the time. In concession to my outlandish habits, I was allowed a table, chair, and spoon at dinner. But the sons of the country sat on boards level with the floor, their backs against the walls, and in front of each of us was laid half a plantain or banana leaf, neatly studded round the edge with little piles of rice, beans and other seeds, flavours, sauces and other condiments, together with thin wheaten cakes. Which when we had eaten, and drunk clean water from round brazen vessels such as all Indians carry when they walk, we washed up by burning the plantain leaves, rinsed our hands, and continued the discussion over pomegranate seeds, orange cloves, and pan-leaves concealing beetel-nut and various spice. Serene, modest, definite in aim and in knowledge, he continued to discourse with us, until the full moon rolled westward, and under her obscure silence I returned to the city of the plague, where the oil lamps were now extinguished, and the children asleep.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] See Introduction, p. [25].

[9] See Introduction, p. [17].

[10] Introduction, p. [22].

[11] Introduction, p. [6].

[12] Introduction, p. [28].

CHAPTER II
Rats and Men

The bubonic plague, as I said, had been known in India for only eleven years, but from the first the common people had noticed its connection with rats. The sight of a dead rat in a house spread terror, and when rats crept out upon the floors, regardless of man, and lay panting to death, it was early recognized that the plague was at hand. The unlearned observed these warnings, but no one detected their full significance, and for many years the pestilence was attributed to bad water or overcrowded and insanitary houses.

In Poona it was thought there was too much water about, and the officer of health undertook the remedial measure of draining a rather nice pond that used to be behind the Deccan Club, and converting it into as malarial a marsh as I have ever seen outside West Africa. The authorities, in their perplexity, also set about cleansing the quarters and homes of the Indian population, who, I suppose, are, on the whole, the most scrupulous about washing and cleaning of any working people in the world. They tried disinfectants, and poured thousands of pounds in the form of chemicals down drains, ditches, and streets. Sometimes, by mistake, they poured things that do not disinfect, and still the plague went on. They tried “segregation.” They divided the city into compartments under military guard, and sent British soldiers into the homes to examine men, women, and children, and take them off to isolated hospitals if there was a sign of plague. The symptom from which the plague takes its name of “bubonic” is the swelling of the great glands in the groin into hard lumps. No greater profanation of the Indian reverence for home and women could be imagined than this forcible entrance and examination by men—by soldiers of another race. No matter how kindly and decent and respectful our men were, no virtue on their part could prevent their presence and action from infuriating any population, especially in an Asiatic town. Riots broke out, and when I was in Poona, a small stone was put up to mark the spot on the country road to Government House, where the Chairman of the Plague Committee had been murdered, together with a young officer who happened to be with him. When the youth who conceived the deed was sentenced, he said to the judge, “You may hang me to-morrow, but my soul will at once pass into another body, and in sixteen years it will be fighting against the English again.”

The kindly zeal, the strenuous measures, the fatherly concern, the haste to do something, the utter inability to understand another point of view, are alike characteristic of our Government and of the elephant that sat on the orphaned eggs to hatch them.

From that time, I believe, arose a peculiar bitterness and feeling of distrust towards our rule that slowly permeated the country, and are still particularly strong in Poona itself. But their origin is distant now, and when I was there all our old methods had long been abandoned. There was now no examination for suspected cases, and no military searching of houses. The people were not “segregated,” and general disinfection was given up. Inoculation and “health camps” had become the Government methods now. The object of inoculation was the same as similar processes in other diseases, like small-pox or typhoid; the object of the “health camps” was simply to separate human beings from rats.

A Health Camp.

In a Village.

[Face p. 50.

That old connection between rats and plague had lately been examined afresh, chiefly by Dr. Turner, the Public Health Officer in Bombay, and the theory of the rat-flea had sprung into science. Contemplate a dead rat lying on your floor in the day-time, and you will find numerous fleas leaping up and down upon his body. If you are wise and prudent, you will rapidly pour kerosene over him from a distance, and then set him alight. For if, having seen him brewing in the air, you do not thus nip him in the bud, you are likely to fall a victim to the plague after sunset. A rat’s fleas are not the harmless, homely insects that we know. This species of flea has a special predilection for rats, and they will not leave their favourite home if they can help it, at all events by day. At night, when the rat is dead, they have to go, and then, as a last resort, they will take refuge on a human body for want of better sustenance. But with them they bring the germ that has killed the rat.

Whether they themselves infect the rat in the first instance, or whether they only transmit from him a bacillus which the rat has developed from other origins, I have not discovered; but I suppose the latter. Nor am I quite sure whether the fleas die of plague themselves or remain immune. Anyhow, the theory is that when once they have passed the germ into a human being’s blood, the plague is assured. In a climate like India’s the most careful and cleanly people can never be secure against fleas, for, wash as they will, some insect or other is pretty certain to be biting them every minute of the day and night, and it is difficult to distinguish one bite from another. A further terror is that the little grey squirrel with paler stripes, which draws no distinction of race or riches, and swarms throughout India, even on the roofs of the wealthiest bungalows, is quite as much a favourite with the fleas as any rat could be. While I was in Poona they were climbing over my verandah and scampering across my floor by dozens, and I took a peculiarly personal interest in their health, which happily appeared excellent.

The British Government was, at the time, buying rats alive at some fraction of a farthing a head. They had already purchased 25,000 in the town when I was there, and everywhere one met industrious Hindus carrying rats in cages to the official rat-collector. Whether the price was high enough to induce industrious Hindus to breed rats for the British market, I do not know. But I believe it was found that the reduction of the rat population gave the survivors such increased vitality that never had such active and powerful specimens of rat been seen before.

There is no very strict rule about the season for plague. Sometimes it comes in the rains, sometimes in the drought. Usually it is worst at the end of winter, but in 1907, when nearly 70,000 people died in a week in the Punjab, it was approaching the height of summer. As a rule the season lasts three months, and in bad seasons at Poona the cases go up to 100 a day. While I was there, the rate, as I said above, was comparatively low—only 12, 15, or 20 cases a day. But in the Presidency of Bombay, as a whole, people were dying by 7000 a week, and that seems a good deal, even though the population of the provinces is 18,000,000, including Scinde. The British Isles count for more than twice that number, but if we began dying of plague by 7000 a week, I dare say there would arise such a commotion for escape as when you stir up an ants’ nest with a stick.

In Poona the Government had erected rows of tin huts as a hospital on some vacant ground just beyond the railway station, and there I was able to observe cases of the pestilence in every stage. There were from 80 to 100 men, women, and children admitted as patients, and the men and women were laid in separate rows. But otherwise not much difference could be made between the patients as to caste and habits, though some of the Brahmans had their food sent in from outside when they were recovering, like first-class misdemeanants in our prisons. It is rather peculiar that the Brahmans offer least resistance to the disease, and this the Sister-in-charge attributed to the strictness of their vegetarianism for ages past. To Europeans it is less fatal than to any Indians, but, next to Europeans, the lowest or “sweeper” caste, who will eat anything anyhow, almost like Europeans themselves, are the best patients, and show the most recoveries. There may, however, be other reasons for this difference besides the food—I mean the natural hardiness of the labouring class, and the natural tendency of all highly organized and sensitive beings to collapse under fever.

Each patient in hospital lay in a separate cubicle, and mothers or other relations were allowed to visit and sit there. A plague-stricken mother might, I believe, even bring a young child with her, so great was the confidence in the new theory of infection and in the absence of rats. The stories of instant and unavoidable contagion in other plagues, such as the plague of London, seem to separate those diseases in kind from this bubonic plague; but very likely the stories were not true, or what was considered to be contagion was in reality an underlying common origin.

It was some comfort to a mother to be allowed to watch her thin, bright-eyed child panting its life away, but the absorbed intensity of her watching, as a rule, had not to continue long. The disease begins with violent headache and a rapidly increasing temperature; the breath becomes terrible, and the tongue chalky white or bluish. There is a strong objection to taking food or drink, and milk is often spat out by a spasm in the throat, as in hydrophobia. Delirium supervenes about the third day and usually lasts to the sixth, when most patients die. During the delirium there is an extreme desire to get up and walk about, so that many patients have to be strapped down to their beds. Far the most important thing is to keep the patient absolutely still, as death most frequently comes from collapse of the heart, and recovery depends almost entirely upon the patient’s constitutional power of heart action. An English lady, who had come through the disease, told me that even during the delirium she seemed to be dimly conscious of the strain on the heart; but this memory may have been only suggestion. I think the delirious patients that I saw would be incapable of remembering anything of those three days, even if they recovered.

Meantime, in their benign efforts to work off the poison in the blood, the glands have from a very early stage developed into hard lumps that usually suppurate and have to be incised, but sometimes absorb without operation. When I touched the glands in the groin, they felt like walnuts under the skin, and it is, as I said, the presence of this obvious symptom which gives the plague its characteristic name of “bubonic,” from the Greek word for groin. After incision, the patient’s temperature often goes down rapidly, but, in any case, the pain from the glands is usually very great; indeed, I think it is the chief cause of such pain as the plague gives.

Next to heart failure, the commonest cause of death is lung complication after the crisis of fever is passed. The prostration when the temperature begins to decline is usually extreme, and some patients whom I saw were so emaciated that they appeared to be parodies of famine—legs and arms like sticks, back and ribs like frameworks of bone. It is true that probably they were not very fat when they went into hospital. The delirium often leaves the patients silly, and if I had been in Central Africa again, I should have said at once that several of them had sleeping sickness in the third or fourth month—the time when, in sleeping sickness, the control over the emotions begins to fail. The nurses in the hospital were Indian women, under the direction of a European Sister.[13]

While I was still in Poona, Sir George Clarke, the new Governor of Bombay, who was already winning the confidence and respect of Indians in all parties by his straightforward ways and his freedom from official routine, issued a proclamation giving the actual statistics of the plague, and calling on the people to submit themselves voluntarily to inoculation as the only means of defence yet discovered. The proclamation was read about the streets in Mahrati, the people listening patiently, and then reflecting. Many Indians have a feeling against inoculation, just as thousands of English people have. They regard it as some sort of contamination, even when it is voluntary, and the memory of an old error in the serum that poisoned a village dies hard.[14] There is also a certain amount of national and even religious prejudice on the subject. The thing is European; it does not fit in with Hindu tradition, and Mr. Tilak, the most powerful political and religious force in Poona, was known at that time to oppose it. Still, it had been proved that, as a rule, no great harm was done, and, on the off-chance that it might save their lives, many took it. For inoculation there was the further inducement of sixpence bestowed on each patient by a considerate Government, so as to tide over the two or three days’ gentle illness that usually follows the operation.

A Village Street.

A Street in Plague.

[Face p. 58.

It naturally occurs to one that many a poor but dishonest man would gladly be inoculated every day of his life for sixpence, or would, at all events, induce his wife and children thus to contribute to the family budget. Very likely that happens from time to time in the case of far-seeing people who are resolved to avail themselves fully of the Government’s prophylactic measures. But some real check upon this form of prudence is imposed by the appearance of the arm, and an official check is also kept by an elaborate system of finger-print records—one of the most official farces I have ever seen. Even more embarrassing, however, than the thrifty man is he who, feeling rather unwell, hastens up to be inoculated, and is found to be developing the plague already. Of course, nothing will persuade him that his visit to the inoculator was not the cause of the disease, and much suspicion is spread in this way among the people. It is, in any case, extremely difficult to induce women to take the inoculation. Everything possible is done to shelter their feelings; a most discreet curtain is hung to protect them from sight and make them feel at home; one of their own people is the operator, and only an inch or two of arm is exposed, whereas they never have the slightest objection to walking in the crowd with legs and waist quite bare at any hour of the day. Yet the whole traditional instinct of Indian womanhood, from the day of Sita, Rama’s wife, rises up in protest against such a profanation.

At four separate points of the native city the Government had set up stations where all comers might be inoculated free—not only free, but with that sixpenny reward. In the midst of the central market-place, where elderly bangle-merchants, with the help of soapy powder, were squeezing gorgeous glass bangles from China over women’s hands, and men and women were squatted on the stones, chaffering over little heaps of queer vegetables and fruit, I found a native apostle of science and fatherly Government preaching the terrors of plague and the glory of redemption by serum. Before him was fixed a little spirit stove, on which boiling vaseline simmered. At his side was a glass saucer containing scraps of cotton wool dipped in strong carbolic. One hand gesticulated the truths of nature, the other held a little glass syringe, with a long, sharp beak, and any one could see that the syringe was half full of yellow salvation. Under the mingled influences of rhetoric and fear of death, a man stepped forward from the listening half-circle. With the carbolic wool the expositor washed the dust from the thin brown arm, told the patient to admire an imaginary bird in the opposite direction, just like a Margate photographer with a child, and plunged the sharp-nosed syringe first into the boiling vaseline and then under the brown skin. Instantly it was withdrawn, but a drop or two of the yellow salvation had gone, and for three or four months—say, for the length of one plague season, but only for that—the man was fairly safe. The crowd sighed its satisfaction, as when a rocket bursts. The place on the arm was wiped with carbolic wool. “Take his thumb mark, give him the paper of instructions, pay him his six annas,” said the apostle of bacillary science in Mahrati to a subordinate, and the labour of a fatherly Government struggling with adversity went doggedly on.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] For the sake of comparison it may be of interest to quote a few of the symptoms given in descriptions of other plagues. The account by Thucydides (ii. 49) of the plague in Athens, 430 B.C., is the most detailed: “All of a sudden,” he says, “people who were quite well before were seized with violent pains in the head, together with redness and inflammation of the eyes; the throat and tongue became blood-red, and the breath strangely disagreeable. Sneezing and sore throat ensued, and after a short time the lungs were affected and there was violent coughing. When the disease settled in the stomach it caused great disorder, with every known kind of purging of bile, accompanied by severe pain. Most patients suffered from an empty retching, with violent spasms, that sometimes gave relief at once, sometimes only after a long time. The surface of the body was not very hot to touch, nor was it pale, but suffused red or livid, covered with small spots and ulcers. But the internal heat was so great that the patients could not endure even the lightest clothes or muslins, but insisted on being naked, and longed to throw themselves into cold water. Many who were not looked after actually jumped into wells, overcome with unquenchable thirst; but it was just the same whether a patient drank much or little. All through the illness they were unable to keep still or get any sleep. Whilst the fever was at its height the body did not waste away, but resisted the disease beyond all expectation, so that most patients died from the internal fever on the seventh or ninth day with a good deal of strength still left; or, if they survived the crisis, the disease descended to the bowels, where it set up ulceration and such violent diarrhœa that in most cases death ensued from weakness.”

The chief symptoms given by Boccaccio in the Introduction to the “Decameron,” where he describes the plague in Florence (1348), are: “At the beginning of the disease both men and women developed swellings in the groin or under the armpit. These swellings grew to the size of a crab-apple or an egg, sometimes larger, sometimes less, and the common people called them ‘gavoccioli.’ In a short time this deadly sore began to spread to all parts of the body, and the nature of the disease gradually changed into black or livid spots, which appeared on the arms and thighs and other parts, sometimes large and scattered, sometimes minute and thick together.” He goes on to speak of the entire inability of doctors to deal with the plague, and of the readiness with which the smallest association or contagion spread it from one to another.

Defoe wrote only at secondhand about the plague of London (1665), but such symptoms as he gives of that “spotted fever” were probably taken from eye-witnesses with whom he had conversed. He mentions violent pains in the head, vomitings, and spots on the thighs; also “swellings, generally in the neck and groin, which, when they grew hard and would not break, grew so painful that it was equal to the most exquisite torture.... In some these swellings were made hard, partly by the force of the distemper, and partly by their being too violently drawn, and were so hard that no instrument could cut them, and then they burnt them with caustics, so that many died raving mad in the torment, and some in the very operation. In these distresses, some for want of help to hold them down in their beds, or to look to them, laid hands upon themselves. Some broke out into the streets, perhaps naked, and would run directly down to the river, if they were not stopped by the watchman or other officer, and plunge themselves into the water, wherever they found it.”

[14] In 1902, nineteen died from this cause at Mulkowal, a village in the Punjab, and the Punjab Government abandoned the hope of inoculation for the time.

CHAPTER III
The Extremist

I knew it would come. Till I had been some time in Bombay, I did not realize the custom, but the moment I realized it, I felt there was no escape. As often happens with forebodings, it came unexpectedly in the end. I was visiting the simple house, workshop, and garden, in a main street of Poona, where the two Extremist papers are published. Both appear weekly—the Mahratta in English, the Kesari or Lion in the Mahrati language. Both are owned and directed by Mr. Tilak, the acknowledged leader of the Extremists in India, but the Mahratta was edited by Mr. Kelkar, an intellectual, keen-tempered Brahman, who accompanied me over the printing office and showed me a courteous friendliness all through my stay in Poona. Both papers have obtained what is thought a large circulation in India—the Mahratta selling 11,000 a week, the Kesari close upon twice that number. In outward appearance, the Mahratta is very much like the Spectator. The Kesari, with lions in emblem defiant on each side of the tide, is on cheaper paper of eight folded pages. Its language is said to be more violent than the Mahratta’s, which as a rule is carefully moderate in expression.

In the cool and quiet of the editor’s room, among bookshelves mildewing like most Indian libraries, I was listening to the history of the papers when I observed a crowd of brown printers, deferential but eager, at the door. In their hands they bore strange objects, such as I had never before seen, but at a glance I knew the moment had arrived. Advancing to my chair they hung around my neck a thick festoon of orange marigolds, picked out with the silvery tinsel which decorators of our Christmas trees identify with fairy rain. They encircled both my wrists with orange bracelets to match, and in my right hand they placed an arrangement of variegated flowers and spangles, stiff and formal as the sceptre of the Tsar. So I sat enthroned, and if only a correspondent from Calcutta had been present, the broadsheets of London that evening might have screamed with scare-heads of “Sedition!” Even in the midst of my friendly embarrassment, I could not but regret a journalistic opportunity lost.

Embarrassing, certainly it was, but only to my British ignorance and shyness. To complete the Imperial ceremony, my dusky subjects sprinkled me with delicate odours from silvern vessels; they soused my handkerchief in scent; they rubbed spikenard and aloes on the back of my hands. Then, standing at a distance, they contemplated their handiwork with kindly satisfaction, while I laboured to express my august gratification in an Imperial tongue they could not understand. Every one present knew, and I knew myself, that they would have honoured in the same way any visitor who had come to their works in a benignant spirit. Even when, hung with fillets like a sacrificial victim and bearing the floral sceptre upright in my hand, I issued from the front door into the full blaze of the public street, the passers-by looked at me with admiring interest, but without a trace of laughter. These things are merely habit, and before I left India I lived to dread garlands as little as my bed. But that first time—with what shamefaced horror the consciousness of my British trousers and khaki helmet filled me! Suddenly, with an inexplicable pang, I remembered that I had once rowed two in the Christ Church torpid, and if any of my own countrymen had gone down the street at that moment, I think I should have got under my cart instead of into it.[15]

Mr. Tilak.

[Face p. 64.

Thus ornamented by a graceful hospitality, I drove away, some sixteen miles south-west of the city, through an irrigated and fertile land of terraced rice-fields, draining the abundant water that rice flourishes in from one level into another. Slowly we drew near a great blue mountain, conspicuous from Poona among the other hills for its height and flat-topped outline. It is the mountain fortress of Singarh, famed in Deccan history. Unknown peoples had made it their rock of defence, Mohammedans had reigned there, Mahrattas took it by storm. Finally the British, some ninety years ago, bombarded the place till it could stand no more, and now all that afternoon I had watched a British helio on its summit blinking messages to the Poona cantonment. There is a long, steep climb before the old fortifications that run round the edge of the cliffs are reached, for the top is as high as Ben Nevis. But passing through a western arch in the walls we entered on the broad grassy plateau while still the low horizon was brilliant with sunset, and against the sunset a red-turbaned, white-clad figure, upright but using a long staff, came to meet me.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak appeared to be about ten years older than Mr. Gokhale, but it is difficult to tell his age, for if ever he takes off his Mahratta turban, one sees his head shaven to the back, where the hair grows in a long, black tuft, as is the fashion of his race or caste. His full, brown eyes are singularly brilliant, steady with daring, rather aggressive But his general manner is very quiet and controlled, and both in conversation and public speaking he talks in brief, assured sentences, quite free from rhetoric, outwardly passionless even in moments of the highest passion, and seldom going beyond the statement of facts, or, rather, of his aspect of facts at the time. His apparent calmness and self-command may arise partly from courageous indifference to his own future, partly from prolonged legal practice at his own trials. At first one would say, his was the legal mind, subtle, given to fine distinctions, rather capable of expressing thought than of thinking, and quick to adapt both the expression and the thought to the audience of the moment. But there is much in his life and energies that seems to show that his natural bias was towards religious speculation and scholarly traditions.

Among the leading reformers of India, he is probably the most orthodox Hindu. He professes a devout belief in progressive Hinduism and in successive reincarnations of Krishna at epochs of India’s greatest need. But in practice his Hinduism often reacts against the forces of progress, and serves him as an ally in resisting the materializing notions imported from the West. In scholarship, he is known among all Sanscrit scholars as one of the closest and most original. His book on “The Arctic Home of the Vedas” maintains from internal evidence that the Sacred Books of India originated among a glacial people inhabiting the region of the Arctic Circle, or some land equally chilly. I cannot say what the value of the theory may be. Possibly the book is as fantastic as it is learned. But to me it is significant because it appeared in the midst of the author’s direst persecution, when money, reputation, influence, and everything were at stake, and few men would have had the courage to spare a thought either for Sacred Books or Arctic Circles.

It is said that he is embittered. One of the highest and best of English officials in India told me he admired Mr. Tilak, and would gladly know him personally, but was afraid of inviting him for fear of a rebuff, so irreconcilable was the man reputed. Yet when the meeting did take place, by a kind of accident some weeks later, there was no rebuff, but only courtesy and openly expressed esteem. Certainly, if a fine nature can ever be embittered, Mr. Tilak has had enough to embitter him. Early in the ’eighties he was imprisoned for speaking against the Diwan or Prime Minister of a Native State, whom he accused of cruelty to the Raja. In September, 1897, he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for attacks in the Kesari upon the Bombay Government when the population of Poona was frenzied at the plague regulations. After a year in gaol he was released, but soon afterwards he became involved in a private suit concerned with his trusteeship for a widow named Tai Maharaj and her adoption of an heir. The Bombay Government took up the case, and the trial, with appeals, dragged on for nearly two years, Mr. Tilak being condemned by one magistrate to a long imprisonment and heavy fine. “The paths of scholarship,” was the Pioneer’s comment, “lead but to the gaol,” and in Court Mr. Tilak was publicly handcuffed. Finally, in March, 1904, his appeal came before the High Court of Bombay, represented by Chief Justice Sir Lawrence Jenkins and Mr. Justice Batty; the conviction and sentence were quashed and the fine was ordered to be refunded.

This judgment confirmed the common Indian opinion that British justice can best be looked for in the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, because the judges appointed directly by the Crown can maintain the law without being unconsciously prejudiced by long service under the Anglo-Indian routine. But, unfortunately, owing to Mr. Tilak’s past record, and his connection with the Extremist papers, the ruinous action taken against him had the air of persecution, and laid the Bombay Government open to a charge of vindictiveness. It was during these proceedings that Mr. Tilak displayed his fine unconcern by issuing his treatise on the origin of the Vedas, and in the end, when his innocence was finally established, he found that a leader’s greatest advantage of having suffered for his cause was indefinitely increased.

When I met him that evening on the mountain top, another crisis of his fate was just being decided, but nothing could surpass his outward calm. He was living in one of the dilapidated bungalows thinly scattered over the plateau. I was put to lodge in another empty one, because, belonging, as he does, to the same high caste as Mr. Gokhale, and to the same subsection of it, he refuses, as a strict Hindu, to emancipate himself from the caste obligations and live or eat with mere Europeans. All that night the wind roared over the mountains, but with the first sun he came to lead me round the elaborate ruins of the fortifications, and, as though he had no interest in the world except as tourist’s guide, he showed me where the British guns had battered, and where, in the time of the Mahratta hero, Shivaji, two hundred and forty years ago, his own ancestors crept up the precipice at night and scaled this very wall, aided by a great lizard that was trained to carry a string up the surface and hold tight with its claws till a man could climb. So at this dizzy spot the party had climbed; then killed.

It is easy to perceive the marvels of the past, and belief in them is unimportant. But to realize the strange significance of the man at my side, and to understand the things he believed in at the moment was a different matter. He continued to discourse about the villages half hidden in the deep valleys below, and narrate their sufferings, hopes, and varying prosperity as if he had no further thought on earth beyond their cattle and their rice. But I knew that at Nagpur in the Central Provinces, things had just been happening which deeply involved himself and his party. The annual meeting of the National Congress was to have been held there at Christmas. The Reception Committee had met to appoint a President, and the Moderates of the majority chose Dr. Rash Behari Ghose. Thereupon, the Extremists, insisting upon their majority in the Central Provinces and in the Executive Committee, chose Mr. Tilak. He in turn proposed Mr. Lajpat Rai, as a compromise; but, with his usual chivalry, Mr. Lajpat Rai refused to stand rather than risk a division among the reform party, or an open breach between the Congress and the Government. To be sure, deeper questions of principle or of method lay behind these personal disputes, but on the personal question of the President the Nagpur meeting had just broken up in disorder. The Moderates had determined not to hold the Congress at Nagpur at all, but to accept the invitation of Surat, only a few hours’ journey north of Bombay, which was the headquarters of the strongest section among them.

Compared to the wild adventures of his Mahratta ancestry, or to the economic conditions of the peasants far below us, one might have supposed from his manner that Mr. Tilak regarded these party differences as beneath all notice. Perhaps he did so regard them, and, if he did, he was partially right. But still, at the moment, the party difference was the thing attracting most attention in India, and it was sure to grow in importance. Mr. Tilak’s own thoughts might have been occupied with the situation all day, but it was only in the afternoon that he came quietly into my empty bungalow alone, and began to discuss it in his concise and definite way. When I published a careful abstract of this conversation shortly afterwards, many Moderates and Extremists alike supposed that he had dissembled his true intentions, and told me only what he wished to be known. As he did not ask for secrecy, certainly I never supposed he was telling me things he did not wish to be known, and I think it very likely that he enjoyed giving himself the pleasure of appearing as Moderate as possible. But in the evening I read over to him the notes I had taken of the conversation just as it was afterwards published, and he approved of what I wrote. In studying his speeches and writings of recent years, I have also found the lines of his policy laid down in almost the same words as he used to me, and I am inclined to think that his statements resembled his beliefs rather closely.

His first object was to show that, as to their immediate purpose, Extremists and Moderates did not differ in aim:—

“It is not by our purpose, but by our methods only,” he said, “that our party has earned the name of Extremist. Certainly, there is a very small party which talks about abolishing the British rule at once and completely. That does not concern us; it is much too far in the future. Unorganized, disarmed, and still disunited, we should not have a chance of shaking the British suzerainty. We may leave all that sort of thing to a distant time. Our object is to obtain eventually a large share in the administration of our own country. Our remote ideal is a confederacy of the Indian provinces, possessing colonial self-government, with all Imperial questions set apart for the central government in England. Perhaps our Home Rule would take the form of Provincial Councils of fifty or sixty members, nominated or indirectly elected at first, but elected by popular vote as education became more general.

“But that ideal also,” he went on, “is far ahead of us—perhaps generations ahead. What we aim at doing now is to bring pressure on the bureaucracy; to make it feel that all is not well. Of late the attitude of our British officials has greatly changed for the worse. They no longer speak of educating us up to freedom, as the great Englishmen like Elphinstone did in the past. They appear to agree with the Times that our education in subjects like English history must be checked, because it is dangerous for ‘natives’ to learn anything about freedom. Your present statesmen seem to take the old Roman Empire as their ideal, and even in that they follow the modern school of Oxford historians, who trace the fall of the Empire to the concession of citizenship to the provinces.

“I know the worst that you can say about the Russian bureaucracy; but even that bureaucracy does, according to its lights, seek to maintain the honour and prosperity of Russia, because Russia is its own country. Our bureaucracy administers a country not its own for the sake of a country far away, entirely different in character and interests. Our bureaucracy is despotic, alien, and absentee.”

Mr. Tilak then referred to the well-known complaints brought against our Administration by nearly all students of Indian economics—the “drain” of some £30,000,000 to £35,000,000 a year to England in the shape of various payments from an impoverished country; the ruin of Indian trades and manufactures, first by duties against her exports, and now by customs dues within her own borders, deliberately imposed for the advantage of British, Austrian, and American firms; the reduction of very nearly the whole population to a subsistence on a starving agriculture; and the unexplained increase of malaria, famine, and plague.

“The immediate question for us,” he continued, “is how we are to bring pressure on this bureaucracy, in which we have no effective representation, but are debarred from all except subordinate positions. It is only in our answer to that question that we differ from the so-called Moderates. They still hope to influence public opinion in England by sending deputations, supporting a newspaper, and pleading the justice of our cause. Both parties, of course, have long ago given up all hope of influencing Anglo-Indian opinion out here. But even in England we find most people ignorant and indifferent about India, and the influence of retired Anglo-Indians at home is perpetually against us. When Lord Cromer said the other day that India must be no party question, he meant that Liberals should support the bureaucracy as blindly as Tories. The history of the last year has proved to us how unexceptionably they fulfil that duty.

“Under these disappointments we Extremists have determined on other methods. It is a matter of temperament, and the younger men are with us. Our motto is ‘Self-reliance, not Mendicancy.’

“Besides the ordinary Swadeshi movement, we work by boycott and passive resistance. Our boycott is voluntary. We do not advocate picketing or compulsory prevention from the purchase of foreign goods. And in passive resistance we shall simply refuse to notice such measures as the Seditious Meetings Act. But we do not care what happens to ourselves. We are devoted absolutely and without reservation to the cause of the Indian peoples. To imprison even 3000 or 4000 of us at the same time would embarrass the bureaucracy. That is our object—to attract the attention of England to our wrongs by diverting trade and obstructing the Government. Without in the least intending it, England has promoted the idea of Indian unity—by railways, by education, and the use of a common official language. The mere pressure of the British domination upon us makes for unity. Our unity will not be complete, perhaps, for generations yet, but it is the goal to which our faces are now set, and we shall not turn back.”

As I said, many have suspected that, in this statement of his party’s aims and methods, Mr. Tilak was playing down to an Englishman’s love of moderation. To some extent that may have been true, but only, I think, with regard to the distance in time at which he placed India’s realization of self-government. On January 4, 1907, Mr. Tilak had addressed the students in College Square, Calcutta, upon the “Tenets of the New Party,” and I extract a few sentences dealing with this subject:—

“There were certain points,” he said, “on which both parties were agreed. The object both parties had at heart was the same; it was self-government. The present system of administration was ruinous to the country both materially and morally.... There were some, indeed, who still believed that the continuance of the British rule was necessary for some centuries in order to raise them to the level of civilized nations. Those who held such views obviously could not follow his arguments, and they must agree to differ and part as friends. But most of them were agreed that the present system must be mended or ended as soon as possible. Their object being the same, it was with regard to their methods that the difference arose.

“... The New Party’s conclusion was that it was impossible to gain any concessions by petitions and prayers. This was the first difference between the Moderate and Progressive parties. He did not believe in the philanthropy of British politics. There was no instance in history of one foreign nation ruling another for the benefit of the other and not for its own profit. The rule of one nation by another was in itself unnatural. He granted the efficiency of the British Government and the excellence of its methods for its own purpose, but these methods and that efficiency did not work for the interests of the people of the country. A good foreign government was less desirable than an inferior native government.”[16]

On the question of revolution and revolutionary violence, the following passage occurred in Mr. Tilak’s address during the Shivaji Festival in Poona, June, 1907:—

“It is true that what we seek may seem like a revolution; it is a revolution in the sense that it means a complete change in the theory of the government of India as now put forward by the bureaucracy. It is true that this revolution must be a bloodless revolution, but it would be a folly to suppose that if there is to be no shedding of blood, there are also to be no sufferings to be undergone by the people. These sufferings must be great. You can win nothing unless you are prepared to suffer. An appeal to the good-feeling of the rulers is everywhere discovered to have but narrow limits. Your revolution must be bloodless, but that does not mean that you may not have to suffer or to go to gaol.”[17]

When I left the mountain’s summit, Mr. Tilak accompanied me back to the limit of the dark and ancient walls. I recognized in him the personal attraction that Extremists always have—the freedom from hesitation and half-measures, the delight in conflict, the reckless disregard of self. When to this attraction his own people could add his personal and intimate acquaintance with all classes among them down to the poorest villagers, and his steady maintenance of all that they held most dear in religious belief and customary observances, I could not wonder at his influence among them. So he stood surrounded by the ruins of empires built by his own and other races, while, with the merriment and ironic humour I knew so well, our soldiers of the helio party folded up their instruments among the rocks close by and prepared for night.[18]

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Compare the Attis of Catullus LXIII. 50. “Patria o mei creatrix, patria o mea genetrix.... Ego gymnasei fui flos,” etc.

[16] Report in Mr. Tilak’s paper, the Mahratta, January 13, 1907.

[17] Report in the Mahratta, June 30, 1907.

[18] On June 24, 1908, Mr. Tilak was again arrested for alleged sedition contained in an article of the Kesari, commenting on the suppressive measures introduced after the discovery of bombs in Calcutta. He was tried in Bombay before Mr. Justice Davar and a special jury of seven Europeans and two Parsis. The jury was unable to agree, but the judge accepted the verdict of guilty from seven against two, and Mr. Tilak was sentenced to six years’ transportation and a fine of 1000 rupees (July 22, 1908).

CHAPTER IV
The Ryot’s Burden

Several times in Poona I met a Mr. Junshi (as I will call him), who lived in one of the beautiful houses the Mahrattas used to build while their Peshwas still reigned. He was an oldish man, for an Indian, but thin, bright-eyed and alert, and from his mouth statistics flowed like water from a fountain statue. One day I called on him, and was shown into the open courtyard of old marble and teak, round which the main building rose in three stories; but beyond I could see another courtyard, more beautiful and cooler still, where lived his wife, his sons’ wives, his nieces, and other ladies of the blood, and beyond that again there was a glimpse of leaves and brilliant flowers.

“We require flowers,” he said, “for the worship of our idols. We worship our idols here in the house every morning and evening, hanging garlands round their necks and placing bunches of flowers before them. You, I believe, worship only once a week.”

I told him I had been brought up on family prayers that never failed in regularity, even when we were at the seaside, and this pleased him very much.

“However,” he went on, “I think we have an advantage in acknowledging so many gods in our pantheon that each of us can choose which he likes best. For each of our idols is a symbol of some divine attribute, and helps the worshipper to fix his thoughts upon the attribute he most desires to worship.”

“But some of us also,” I said, “find it helpful to contemplate images representing the attributes of motherly love, chastity, compassion, or courage in the face of evil; and we offer flowers to them.”

This pleased him too, but when we reached his long room upstairs we turned from idols to the main interest of his life. On bookshelves round the walls, and heaped upon the floor and tables, were hundreds of volumes and pamphlets crammed with figures. It seemed as if the owner had collected every book and essay ever written upon the economics of India, and year by year had filtered them into his mind. He had the instinct for averages which I take to be the economist’s instinct. He thought of women and children in terms of addition; he saw men as columns walking. He watched the rising and falling curves of revenue, expenditure, and population as others watch the curves of beauty. Any line of figures was welcome to his spirit, and though he had made his living by teaching little Indians to read “Robinson Crusoe,” his chief study seemed to lie in the scripture called the “Statistical Abstract relating to British India.” Upon this careful piece of literature he meditated day and night; or, if his mind required a change, he relaxed it on theology.

I have called the “Statistical Abstract” literature, and to him it was so. To him it was as pleasing as a poem to know that under the heading of “Priests and others engaged in religion,” the number of “total supported” was 2,728,812, among whom 178,656 females were classified as “actual workers”; or that the total supported by “indefinite and disreputable occupations” was 737,033, and in this class alone the male and female “actual workers” were approximately equal. He liked to meditate on the daily average of prisoners in the various provinces, and on the infirmities of population according to residence and according to age. It was good to know that there were about 6,000,000 more males than females in the country, but 18,000,000 more widows than widowers, and 391,000 widows under fifteen. These were the lyrics or realistic ballads of his reading, but he took higher interest in the figures that move with something of epic grandeur. To him there was a splendour and æsthetic satisfaction in knowing that the total of India’s population, including the Native States, was 294,361,056 in 1901, and that of this number 207,050,557 were Hindus like himself; while agriculture supported 191,691,731—close upon two-thirds, or 65·16 per cent., as he put it—and 15,686,421 (including nearly 1,000,000 females) could write and read, a total of 1,125,231 being “literate in English.”

But I think, after all, it was the great passage headed “Finance” that he enjoyed with the most delicate appreciation for style. Perhaps it depended on his mood whether he more admired the lines of the “Gross Revenue and Expenditure” or of the “Net Revenue and Expenditure.” It was sonorous as a hexameter to read aloud that the total gross revenue in India and England for 1905-6 was £84,997,685, and the total gross expenditure charged to revenue was £82,905,831. But the net statements of revenue at £48,539,680, and expenditure at £46,447,826, were trim as a sonnet. It was a dubious point, but for details he certainly preferred the gross, thinking them more realistic, and his favourite passage was that beginning, “Principal heads of Revenue, Land Revenue, £18,862,169, for 1905-6.” Against this he would set, as a kind of antiphone, the gross expenditure on army services (excluding Marine and Military Works) of £19,267,130.[19]

There were two passages also from which he appeared to derive the kind of savage pleasure most men seek in tragedy or satire. One was that the gross expenditure on education by the Government of India amounted to less than £1,700,000 in 1905-6, and he worked out the State expenditure for education for the current year (1907-8) at 1½d. per head in India, as against 5s. 4d. per head in France. The other was that the Hindus, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Animists contributed out of their labour during the year of grace which we had just survived (1906-7) the sum of £125,906 in order that the British residents might not be devoid of the consolations of religion as represented by Bishops and Anglican chaplains, Roman priests, Presbyterian divines, and cemeteries.

For myself, there was, of course, a certain ironic interest in the endowment of an Anglo-Indian’s Christianity by the natives around him, and for the first time I was inclined to favour a system of payment by results. But, in regard to Finance, all such things are insignificant in comparison with the one main question of the tax upon the cultivator.[20]

An immemorial custom in India, consolidated in the Laws of Manu, gave the ruler a share in all crops—a fraction fluctuating according to the soil, but not higher than one quarter. Probably this was a tribute levied upon the village community in return for protection, or simply as a penalty for conquest. It was paid in kind, so much grain from so much crop, and as the proportion was always the same on the same ground, the peasant did not feel the variation in quantity much. But having inherited the custom, the British rulers found it more convenient and uniform to collect the tax in cash, and to levy the rate, not in proportion to each year’s crop, but on a valuation that remains unaltered for long terms of years—usually thirty years in Madras and Bombay, but twenty years in other places, for instance in the Punjab. This process of valuation is called the Settlement, and Settlement Officers are almost continually engaged in drawing up a kind of progressive Doomsday Book upon the fields, pastures, woods, and wells of each village. It is hardly possible to ascertain the exact proportion of value fixed by the Settlement Officers as the tax. Throughout India there is a general understanding that “about one-half of the well-ascertained net assets should be the Government demand.”[21] This income tax of ten shillings in the pound is, however, in reality a fairly steady minimum, and the tax often goes higher, to say nothing of the “cesses” or local taxes nominally levied for roads and education.

Whether the money is called tax or rent, would not seem at first sight to make much difference; for it has to be paid and the people who pay it have no voice in its levy or in its expenditure. If it is a tax, it is a large income tax on land, fixed for some years and collected from the smallest landowners as well as the largest. If it is a rent, the system is partial land-nationalization without national control and without economic freedom. But as a matter of practice, the difference in the use of words is vital, and it cannot be put more plainly than in the Minute written by Lord Salisbury when he was Secretary of State for India in 1875:—

“If we say that it is rent, the modern Indian statesman will hold the Government in strictness entitled to all that remains after wages and profits have been paid, and he will do what he can to hasten the advent of the day when the State shall no longer be kept by any weak compromises from the enjoyment of its undoubted rights. If we persuade him that it is revenue, he will note the vast disproportion of its incidence compared to that of other taxes, and his efforts will tend to remedy the inequality, and to lay upon other classes and interests a more equitable share of the fiscal burden. I prefer the latter tendency to the former.”[22]

The average Indian official does not agree with Lord Salisbury. He prefers the rent theory to the tax theory, and when the cultivator has been allowed his subsistence off the holding, together with what the official estimates as profit, the rent is taken in the name of revenue, but under the excuse of rent, and I have often heard officials urge the theory of land nationalization in their defence. It is, however, as I said, a nationalization in which the conditions of political and economic freedom are absent.

The new assessment, which in Bombay lasts for thirty years, depends almost entirely on the discretion of the Settlement Officer. His decision is supervised by higher authorities, but it usually stands, and the only fixed rule for his guidance is that he may not increase the revenue of a Taluka (group of villages) by more than 33 per cent., nor that of a single village by more than 66 per cent., nor that of a single holding by more than 100 per cent. This leaves him plenty of margin, and in fifteen large districts of the Bombay Presidency we find that the average increase was 30·4 per cent. at the last assessment (1899).[23] This increase is assessed, not on the yield of the ground, but on the “capabilities” of the ground, and “capabilities” are calculated upon the quality of the soil, the average rainfall, the market, the railway, and other elements of “unearned increment.” Mr. Vaughan Nash’s account of the matter expresses what happens:—

“The officer appointed to value the land and fix the assessment has made his shot—I use the expression advisedly—at the average crop, and has determined the demand which is to hold for the next twenty or thirty years; and in theory it is understood that the cultivator is to enjoy not less than half the profits of his farm, beside the privilege of subsisting on its produce.... At the end of the assessment period the authorities make another shot; and now mark what happens. They find that since their last valuation prices have advanced, new railways have been made, cultivation has been intensified—or might be intensified, under a little pressure; and, after the due application of tests of all kinds, geological, botanical, hydrographical, meteorological, arboricultural, etc., it is discovered that land and farmer can bear an extra 30 per cent. or so on the old assessment.”[24]

We may assume the Settlement Officer to be a scrupulously honest and painstaking public servant. Let us assume that his knowledge of agriculture and local conditions is equal to his devotion. Still his responsibility is almost too great for the wisest and most zealous official. It is his official duty to raise as much as he decently can for the Government, whether he calls the sum tax or rent or share of profits. Against his decision there can be no resistance and no practicable appeal. The cultivator is not in reality a free agent in the new bargain, and if he protests that the payment is beyond his income, he is informed that, being incapable of cultivating his own land to the highest advantage, he must learn better or go.

Usually he does neither. In most cases he has no opportunity for learning better, and he cannot, or does not, go. He borrows. An anonymous writer once attacked me with scorn for saying that a large proportion of cultivators in Bombay were receiving no net income, no profits for themselves at all; they were simply existing on their land, and for their few clothes, medicines, and family festivals they were trying to get outside work, selling their family bangles, or appealing to the money-lender on the off-chance that a “bumper crop” might enable them to pay something some day.

“According to Mr. Nevinson,” cried this anonymous writer, “the ryots in the Presidency are such simpletons as to go on cultivating land, their income from such cultivation being always equalled by their cultivation expenses. Why, then, do they cultivate at all, when obviously by abandoning the land and its profitless cultivation they could at once better their position by devoting to other work the time and labour they now expend on cultivation.”[25]

The question is worthy of the old professorial economists, who never went beyond books for knowledge, and settled the affairs of human nature in their studies by their own conceptions of reason. They used to tell us that, when one trade failed, the labour devoted to it became absorbed in other occupations. I have often wondered, if their trade of theorizing failed, in what other occupation their labour would become absorbed. A large number of our Indian officials spend nearly the whole of their time dealing with abstractions and cases on paper, their feet under their writing-tables. The increasing pressure of the daily routine drives them further and further from reality, and one might suppose that this anonymous writer had never been face to face with a peasant in his home, or known anything of the peasant’s clinging to the land, or ever been thrown out of work and compelled to face starvation for a single day himself.

What I said was perfectly accurate. The Indian cultivator will cling to his land even when he makes no profit beyond his subsistence wage. I believe the same to be true of peasant proprietors or small holders in nearly every country; certainly it is true in France, Russia, and Ireland, for I have known cases in all three countries. So the Indian cultivator, when he makes no profit and is called upon for increased assessment or his daughter’s marriage, does not at once set off to Bombay and become a watchmaker or a docker, as economists think he ought. As I said, he borrows. Usually he goes to the village money-lender (banya or sowkar), and receives advances at 12 to 30 per cent. per annum, according to his character in the village. In reality, I think, the money-lender speculates on the chance of a “bumper crop” every few years, but in the last resort he may sell up the cultivator through the civil courts in Bombay, or convert him into his own labourer to work the land for him on a subsistence wage. In hopes of saving the ryot from this extortion, the Government has devised agricultural banks and other schemes for advancing loans at the reasonable interest of 5 per cent., and in course of time this benefit will probably increase. But at present the economists, as usual, have made the mistake of omitting the uncertain element in man, and he yet continues to prefer his familiar old money-lender to the most advantageous Government loan. In some districts I have heard there is a national feeling about it, but I suppose the chief reason really is that the Government claims its interest down on the nail for a fixed day, whereas the village money-lender can often be cajoled, bribed, frightened, or persuaded, like a reasonable tailor, to put off the dreaded moment of demand.

The actual cash amount of the assessment is not such an important question to the cultivator as its proportion to his income. The figures given for Deccan villages by Mr. Vaughan Nash in his “Family Budgets,” show an assessment of about two shillings an acre.[26] Many of the villages I visited were probably poorer, being in the mountains, but the average assessment tax in them appeared to be only a little over one shilling an acre, and sometimes as low as fivepence, on an average holding of twenty acres. The assessment, as I said, has now to be paid in cash on a certain day, often while the crop is still growing. If payment is not made, everything the peasant possesses can be seized and sold by the Revenue authorities—house and land, plough and oxen, bedding and cooking pot. That is the money-lender’s opportunity, and in practice it is usually the money-lender who hands over the cash. If he refuses a further advance, the Government is compelled either to cancel the debt (which is now often done in famine seasons), or to suspend the debt till next harvest (which is frequently done, but only puts off the evil day), or to sell the peasant up, which usually yields a very small price, and sometimes produces serious disturbances, as in the Deccan riots of 1875, when the money-lenders were burnt out and driven from the village.[27]

As is well known, nearly all the land in the Bombay Presidency, and far the greater part of Madras, is held on this “ryotwari” system, or peasant tenantry to the State, there being no intermediary at law between the Government and the cultivator, though the money-lender often acts as such. In many other provinces the land is owned by landlords, or “zemindars,” much as in our own country, and the revenue is taken from them, though it is ultimately paid by the cultivator. In Bengal the zemindars were granted a Permanent Settlement in 1793, which fixed the demands of the State so that no further assessment has been instituted, and revenue stands at an almost constant figure. The Rent Acts of 1859 and 1885 aimed at protecting the cultivators from the usual abuses and extortions of the landlord system, but whether the Permanent Settlement, which, of course, involves a great loss of revenue to Government, is justified or not by its results—whether the greater prosperity and intelligence of Bengal arise from the moderation and fixity of the assessment, or are due to climate, race, and enterprise, is one of those questions that are argued between officials and educated Indians with a kind of perpetual motion. A similar Permanent Settlement for the whole of India was proposed by Lord Canning just before his death in 1862, but finally abandoned twenty years later, after laborious discussion.[28]

The Ryot’s Home.

Carrying Leaves for Fuel.

[Face p. 92.

On leaving even small and beautiful cities like Poona you pass through a zone where the inhabitants enjoy the health and suffer from the scrappiness of suburbs. Here they live partly by gardening, partly by burning lime or working in the town, and their houses have a touch of urban refinement. The ceilings and the tops of the walls, for instance, are hung with those garish pictures of religious subjects—the adventures of Krishna, and other scenes—which would provide so suitable a market for German art. But the suburbs are short, within a few miles you enter the heart of the country, and in his primeval village are brought face to face with the ryot—the cultivator of the soil, the basis of the Indian Empire, the one man for whom, or at least by means of whom, all the rest of the intricate machinery exists, from the splendours of Simla down to the office of the “Remembrancer of Legal Affairs,” and the “Finger-print Bureau,” in Poona’s residential quarter, or to Lord Kitchener’s reviews in the Poona cantonment.

In my various journeys within a circle of twenty miles round the city, I found the ryot much what I had expected—gentle-mannered, patient, hardy, and incredibly thin, living with his family in a clean but dusty hut, furnished with little beyond a few brass pots and dishes. All day he was working in his field, and he gathered for converse at evening—“cow-dust time,” as they call it—on the steps of the village temple, in which a vague red image represents the idea of helpful strength—something like Hercules or the Archangel Michael; for it is the same Maruta who helped Rama on his wandering search for the beloved Sita.

I have never heard even the most frigid official speak evil of the ryot. As the best patronizers in the world, we find in the ryot a most suitable object for our characteristic capacity. Hard-working, sober, and reverential beyond the dreams of country parsons, he is exactly the sort of being to whom we enjoy extending the kindly and protective sympathy due from a squire to his villagers. Just as in Natal or Nigeria every one is ready to commend the untutored savage and pat his curly head provided he remains savage, so in India even the Anglo-Indian will admit a distant affection for the poor dear ryot, and regrets the good old times when hardly an Indian of them all made pretence to further education or equality. But education and equality are the two things that undermine our accustomed pedestal, and the thought of a time when we might no longer be required to exercise our national function of patronage fills us with dismay.

The crop and the assessment are the two kindred and vital points in the ryot’s earthly life, as distinguished from the life of his spirit. In the Deccan, as in all parts of India, the crop is simply a matter of opportune rainfall, and when I was in Poona there had been no good crop for fifteen years. That autumn the prospect was a little worse than ordinarily poor, though the main famine district of the year was in the United Provinces, far away north. Preparations for a serious famine had to be made already, for, as Sir William Hunter estimated, one-fifth of India’s population—say sixty million souls—are perpetually living on insufficient food, apart from famines; and, partly owing to the export-trade, the villagers no longer store grain to meet an evil day, nor do they possess cash to purchase grain from other parts of the country. So when the pinch of scarcity comes, the land-owning or land-taxing Government alone stands between them and starvation; and, indeed, the Government prides itself at all times upon its service as protector of the poor, especially against other landlords and money-lenders. There is always a good deal of justice in the claim, even when the Government, having first tempered the wind, proceeds to shear the lamb. But famine is the special opportunity for Government beneficence. All officials then vie with each other in the thankless labour of holding the bodies and souls of thousands together, and within a month of his landing as Governor of Bombay, Sir George Clarke had all his preparations ready for relief works, terracing of hills, sinking of wells, and remission (not merely suspension) of the year’s assessment money.

Of the assessment and of famine I had heard and read a great deal before, but one set of grievances, closely connected with both, was new to me. It arose from the Forest Laws—a subject we hardly consider in England unless we are thinking of William Rufus or the game-preserves of kilted City Fathers in the Highlands. The present strict system of forest preservation was, I believe, instituted after the terrible famine of 1877-78, with the admirable intention of restoring the rainfall. In old times the village communities maintained a tract of communal forest for grazing and fuel near each village, just as they did formerly in England, and still do in Russia. An ancient Indian custom set aside an acre of grazing for every acre of cultivated land. But under our rule the influence of village communities was to a great extent destroyed, because we remembered nothing like it in England, and the plough was suffered to encroach upon the forest till there was a real danger that no forest would be left and the rains would cease. Nothing could be better than the intention of the Forest Department in checking the process called “denudation,” but instead of restoring the control of forests to the villagers themselves under definite rules of maintenance, they centralized the managements as bureaucrats will, declared uncultivated land to be Government forest, prohibited wood-gathering or cattle-grazing without payment, let out the grass and timber by auction to contractors, and entered the proceeds to the advantage of the Department. There is no denying the benefits to Government and the contractors. The destruction of forest is checked, hay and fuel are supplied to the cavalry cantonments and cities, and the Department (including Burma) contributes a net sum of about £800,000 a year to the Indian exchequer.[29] Could anything be more desirable?

On the Causeway.

A Village Headman.

“But how about my buffalo?” cries the thin ryot of the valley. As Mr. Vaughan Nash said in his book on the Famine, the buffalo is quite as necessary to the Indian peasant as a boat to a fisherman. Buffaloes are necessary for work on the fields, manure for the soil, and milk for the family, to say nothing of fuel and flooring. No one who, like myself, has lived much in Kaffir huts with cow-dung floors, or has cooked on the veldt for weeks together with cow-dung as fuel, will make light of such uses. But still, when wood is to be had, only a fool uses cow-dung for cooking or even for flooring. In the Indian forests, wood is to be had, but the Forest Laws forbid the people to use it, and they are driven to floor and cook with the cow-dung that ought rightly to go as manure for the fields.

But the grazing is the chief difficulty, now that the old communal lands are being swallowed up by the Forest Department. The villagers may earn a few pence by cutting grass for the contractor who carts it away to the city, but the hungry buffaloes look up and are not fed. Even where a grazing allotment is made, it is too small, and I was in a village fifteen miles from Poona where the twelve families could afford to keep only one buffalo between them, and they had to pay rent to the Forest Department for the right of grazing that one buffalo and a few goats upon little patches of the vast hillsides, all of which they regarded as the common lands of the village for centuries past. The rent, no doubt, was very small, probably only a few shillings a year for the buffalo and goats, but the village income was very small too.

From the bureaucracy’s well-intentioned schemes, other peculiar results arise which perhaps did not occur to those who framed the laws. One case, for instance, was mentioned to me by several villagers as a kind of typical or proverbial absurdity. A waggon broke its wheel and the owner began to mend it. The village police, hearing the hammer, arrested him under Section E, paragraph 109 (or some such clause) of the Forest Laws, upon the charge of practising carpentry within a mile of the forest limit. In his innocence, he asked what he ought to have done to get his waggon home over the few hundred yards to his door. He was informed that he ought to have walked into Poona, twenty or thirty miles away, discovered the office of the Forest Department, waited till the proper official, who would very likely be in the country, returned to town, stated his case, and asked for a legal certificate authorizing him to cut timber for the repairs of his wheel on the spot. Then, with good luck, within a week or ten days from the accident, he might have found himself in a position to drive his waggon home in accordance with bureaucratic regulations. I believe, however, that this rule has now been modified, and that the man would only have to hunt a forest ranger for permission. But take another grievance, which recalls childhood’s memories of the Norman Conquest. The ryot’s little wealth of crop and stock is continually exposed to wild beasts—deer, wolves, panthers, and boars—just as our farmers’ crops are exposed to hares and rabbits. But under the Arms Act, the ryot has little chance of killing them himself. His duty is to walk into the nearest town and report the presence of a wild beast to the police. The police look round for an Englishman who wants something to kill. Frequently they advertise for one in the local papers, and usually they have not to wait very long. Off goes the Englishman—rifle, tiffin-basket, boy, bedding, and all. But in the meantime it is not improbable that the wild beast has walked away, or founded a whole new family even worse than himself. At the best, it is just possible that the Englishman may miss him.

While I was in India a movement was started for the protection of the helpless ryot from deer. In many parts of the country, especially in Rajputana and the Central Provinces, you may frequently see herds of deer and antelopes browsing upon the standing crops, to the great loss of the cultivator. It was alleged that the increase of deer was due to the gradual reduction of tigers (which are nature’s own corrective), and the proposal was to discourage the slaughter of tigers by withdrawing the Government reward of £3 6s. 8d. a head, or even to forbid the sport of shooting tigers unless they were proved by experience to be man-eaters. Personally, I think the latter regulation would be good, for the deer would be reduced, the crops protected, and the tigers increased. But I am not sure how far a ryot, in the interests of agriculture, would approve of a regulation that allowed one tiger one man.

The main grievances of the ryot against the Forest Department may be seen briefly stated in a memorial presented to the Governor of Madras by the cultivators of eight villages in the Salem district, April, 1908. The Forest Department proposed to reserve the Anurath Hills in the neighbourhood of the villages, and the memorial protested that already there was not much waste land for grazing, and hardly enough land even for cultivation. To reserve the hills would also deprive the villagers of wood and fuel, and inflict a kind of double assessment:—

“You settle our lands,” said the memorial, “every thirty years and raise the assessment. To pay this assessment we ought to cultivate our land with the aid of good manure. To have manure we must maintain sufficient stock of cattle. When we enter the forest to procure fodder, you demand permit fees; thus you demand double payment (one in the shape of land assessment and the other in the shape of forest fees) for the lands we cultivate.”

The memorial went on to say that, owing to the rigour of forest administration, the villagers, to protect themselves, had to bribe the subordinate officials of the Forest Department, and it concluded with the words:—

“We lead a peaceful life. It is the policy of the Government to keep every ryot in a contented and happy state. But in order to secure additional forest revenue, if you permit the Forest officials to enclose an additional reserve against our wishes, you will create much heart-burning and discontent against the Government.”

But let us put things at their best. Let us suppose there is neither drought, nor famine, nor plague. Let us assume that the assessment has been paid without borrowing, and the Forest Laws observed or evaded, that wild beasts have been killed, and yet the deer have not damaged the crops. Let us suppose that the ryot’s income reaches the highest possible average, which Lord Curzon calculated at £2 a year per head of the population, including all the rich merchants, bankers, and landowners. It is next to impossible that the average income in any village could be as much as that, but let us assume it is. Still it remains at only half what is spent per head in England every year on drink alone. It represents a standard of poverty which we can hardly conceive—a level where every fraction of a farthing counts. And yet I found within twenty miles of Poona a group of villages where the ryots clubbed together of their own accord to hire a schoolmaster at a salary of eight shillings a month. In face of a sacrifice so astonishing it appeared to me that all the outcries about the dangers of education in India that were then filling the speeches of our statesmen and the columns of the Times and Anglo-Indian papers, might with good hope be accounted vain.

A Temple Tank, Madras.

[Face p. 102.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] The total military expenditure for India, including Marine, Military Works, etc., was £21,586,086 for 1906-7, but this was reduced in the following year to £20,520,500. See “Government of India, Financial Statement, 1908-9,” p. 16.

[20] Of the many books on the Indian Land Revenue, one may consult Mr. Romesh Dutt’s “India in the Victorian Age,” “Famines and Land Assessment,” and “The Economic History of British India”; “Land Revenue Policy,” an official reply to Mr. Dutt’s criticisms, issued by Lord Curzon in 1902; some chapters in Sir Henry Cotton’s “New India”; some pamphlets by Sir William Wedderburn, “The Indian Ryot,” “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” etc.; “Indian Problems,” by Mr. S. M. Mitra (strongly on the official side); and Mr. Sidney Low’s “Vision of India,” containing in chapter xxiii. an interesting account of the Settlement Officer’s work in camp. Mr. Theodore Morison’s “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province” (1906), is also mainly occupied with the land question in the United Provinces of Agra and Oude.

[21] “Land Revenue Policy” (1902), p. 13.

[22] Quoted by Mr. Vaughan Nash in his chapter on the Land Revenue System: “The Great Famine and its Causes” (1900).

[23] “India in the Victorian Age,” by R. C. Dutt, p. 491 (2nd edition).

[24] “The Great Famine,” pp. 240-2.

[25] Letter from “A Poona Resident” to the Glasgow Herald, December 14, 1907.

[26] “The Great Famine,” p. 62 ff.

[27] See “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” by Sir William Wedderburn (1897), p. 9.

[28] The whole question of land-ownership and the Settlement is very lucidly discussed in Mr. Theodore Morison’s “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” chapter ii. His general conclusion is that the Indian system of land-tenure is something intermediate between complete nationalization and absolute private property. “To the extent of one-half the State is able to appropriate that unearned increment in rental incomes which is due to the development of the country. But, except for this contribution to the public exchequer, the economic position of the landlord is not affected by the land revenue laws. He receives rent for the use of the national and indestructible properties of the soil, and he raises that rent when the growth of population and the development of the country makes it profitable to bring poorer lands under cultivation.” In saying this, Mr. Morison is, however, obviously thinking only of a zemindar or landlord district, such as the United Province, with which his book chiefly deals.

[29] The net profit on Forest Revenue for 1905-6 was £824,748. In the four previous years it had risen by nearly £100,000 a year, but in 1907-8 it dropped to £756,100, chiefly owing to a fall of price in Burma.

CHAPTER V
The Southern City

Madras, the most Oriental of the great Indian cities, is well known to English people as the first foothold of Elizabethan merchants, the fortress of Clive, and the coral strand where little English boys used to convert their patient bearers. But apart from these associations, the mother city of Southern India has a peculiar character of her own. Her reformers talk with confidence of the dry light of reason in Madras. They pride themselves on the logic and unimpassioned judgment of her mind. They point to the neighbouring State of Mysore to show what Southern Indians like themselves can do in the way of political advancement, and to Travancore as the most highly educated part of India—the State where women have most freedom, both to gather knowledge and to enjoy their home or leave it. The whole of South India, but especially the city of Madras itself, they regard as a reserve of intellectual force, always ready to support the new spirit that has appeared in the north and west, and destined ultimately to take the lead in the general movement of reform.

Certainly I noticed signs of a practical intelligence that might be called dry. Hour after hour, on a steaming afternoon, I listened to the Madras members of the municipal corporation arguing in protest against the English members and officials about the position of standpipes, and the adulteration of ghee with oil, and of rice with sand, while the President, in the broadest Scots, kept calling on them to address the chair, or declaring their motion lost. When I was in Madras also, the Decentralization Commission, under Mr. Charles Hobhouse, at that time Under-Secretary for India, began its session, and the educated citizens followed the chaotic windings of its questions and evidence with minute accuracy, all the more eager, perhaps, because Mr. Romesh Dutt, the national authority on Indian economics, was among the Commissioners. It was even more significant that Madras, the devoted home of Hinduism and of Vishnu’s worshippers, should have steadily chosen her leading Mohammedan citizen as her representative upon the Viceroy’s Council. One may call this a sign of practical intelligence and the dry light of reason, because they could not have chosen a better member than Nawab Syed Mohammed, descendant of our old enemy Tippoo Sultan, and their deep sense of religion did not deter them from the choice. Calm, modest, and generally silent but for a few definite words thrown into a discussion, he seemed an ideal member for any Council.

Yet, though the boast of reason’s dry light is justified, the pervading tone of Madras, and probably of all Southern India, is not practical logic, but imaginative religion. One sometimes finds the two things in attractive combination. I had gone out one early morning to visit the god in his beautiful temple at Mailapur, not very far from the widespread “compounds” of park and garden, where the happy English and a few rich Indians reside, two or three miles inland from the sea and the jumbled “Black Town” of crowded natives. There, as I stood by the edge of the temple tank covered with the lotus, I came upon an elderly Hindu reading at the door of his modest home. The verandah was partly arranged as a stable for the sacred cow, partly laid with mats for beggars, wanderers, or religious teachers who might be seeking a shelter for the night. The man had bathed in the tank and washed his only garment of a long cotton cloth, as he did every morning himself, following the cleanly and chivalrous Indian custom. He was a schoolmaster, with a fixed salary of £3 6s. 8d. a month. Upon this he mainly supported his sons and their wives and children, all of whom lived in his house, under the direction of his widowed mother, who arranged which of the married couples should occupy the married quarters in turn, as there was not room to supply married quarters for all. In gratitude for her services, and in reverence for motherhood, “which is the centre of human life,” he told me how every morning members of the family washed the widow’s feet and covered them with flowers, as though they were the feet of a divinity.