India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

I ought perhaps to have named this volume “The Awakening of India,” because it describes the condition of Indian things at the time of Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty, which was in truth the awakening hour of the new movement towards liberty in India, the dawn of that day of unrest which is the necessary prelude to full self-assertion in every subject land.

The journey it records was made under circumstances of exceptional interest at an exceptional moment, and should be instructive in view of what has happened since. It contains a foreshadowing of events which are under our eyes to-day, and suggests a solution of problems which, after long waiting and with a timid courage, is gradually being accepted as official.

The political situation in Lord Ripon’s time was as follows: Mr. Gladstone, when he came into office in 1880, found himself at the head of an immense majority in the House of Commons, pledged to ideas of liberty in the East of which he had himself been the foremost preacher. With regard to India he had formulated the Liberal creed in a single sentence: “Our title to be in India,” he had said, “depends on a first condition, that our being there is profitable to the Indian nations; and on a second condition, that we can make them see and understand it to be profitable.” His predecessor’s policy had proved a failure. It had been one of imperial expansion, of reckless finance, and of administrative coercion. It had resulted in a disastrous frontier war, in an immense financial deficit, and in the exasperation of the educated native community. There had been a terrible famine, the severest perhaps of the century. Many millions of the agricultural peasantry had died or were reduced to a condition of semi-starvation. Famine, to use the words of a popular Anglo-Indian writer of the time, had become “the horizon of the Indian villager; insufficient food the foreground.” The forest laws, the salt tax, the ever increasing pressure of the revenue officers had driven some districts to the verge of revolt. The vernacular press, which would have denounced the Government as the cause of these evils, had been gagged in the towns; and disaffection, stifled in its expression but none the less real, was rife almost everywhere. The unrest was becoming, it was thought, dangerous. It was to remedy these evils, and to put the government of India on a footing of sounder economy, less war, and a closer confidence between rulers and ruled, that Lord Ripon was sent to India in the summer of 1880.

The choice of Lord Ripon as Queen Victoria’s representative and Viceroy was, I believe, to a large degree Her Majesty’s own. Little as she was in sympathy with Mr. Gladstone, she had this in common with the new programme, that the disaffection of her Indian subjects distressed her, and hardly less the arrogance with which they were treated by their fellow subjects of British origin. In the proclamation issued to the people of India after the Mutiny, her royal name had been appended to a promise of entire equality as between these and the others; and it touched her dignity that her promise should have remained so long unredeemed. She had, besides, a personal regard for Lord Ripon on account of his great integrity, and he seemed to her the man most reliable she could send to deliver a new message in her name to the people.

Lord Ripon landed in India in the late summer of the year of Mr. Gladstone’s victory. He bore with him words of peace and hope which raised native imagination to a point of high expectancy. Mr. Gladstone’s name, to those who understood English politics, seemed a guarantee of all reforms; his opinion about India had been proclaimed from the house-tops; and the Queen’s personal interest in the matter of her proclamation was known, and gave additional assurance to the popular desire. Nor was Lord Ripon’s individual attitude a disappointment to those who came in contact with him. Though possessed of no great personal gifts or graces, he was a transparently honest man, and it was felt that, as far as it lay with the Viceroy to affect the situation, he could be relied on as a friend to native India. He was seen from the first to be a serious man, but without the chill reserve which is so great a barrier between Englishmen and Orientals, and his manner had something paternal in it which inspired a full measure of native confidence. It was an advantage to him, I think, that he was not a member of the English Church, but a Roman Catholic of more than ordinary piety. Such was the impression made by Lord Ripon at the opening of his Indian career. It was noticed of him as a wonderful thing that, on landing at Bombay, his first visit was to the Roman Catholic Cathedral, and a little later that in the streets of Calcutta he would return the salutes of his native acquaintance, contrary to all viceregal custom, and to the point that it became the subject of private expostulation with him on the part of his official entourage. His first public acts were in character with the programme given him to carry out. The policy of enlarging British India at the expense of her Asiatic neighbours and of the native states was reversed; economy became the order of the day in finance; and, as a first measure of conciliation with educated native opinion, the gag of the press law was removed. It was made clear that under the new régime no native of India was to be persecuted for the expression of his political views.

Nevertheless it was not long before it began to be perceived that, however loyal Lord Ripon might be to his reforming principles, a change had come over the spirit of those at home, in whose hands the driving power of Indian reform really rested. In the early summer of 1882, Mr. Gladstone, to the scandal of the Eastern world and in contradiction of every principle he had professed two years before when out of office, allowed himself to be persuaded to take violent action in Egypt against the National Party of Reform, and, after bombarding Alexandria, to send an army of 30,000 men to put down the constitutional régime beginning to be established there, and restore, under pretext of repressing a rebellion, the forfeited authority of the Khedive. It was an act of brutal and stupid aggression, a war and an intrigue, undertaken in the interests of cosmopolitan finance and in defiance of both law and principle. Also, to make the matter worse for India, a large share of the burden and cost of the war was thrown on the Indian army and the Indian Exchequer. Against the gross injustice of this part of the transaction, Lord Ripon protested in vain. He was powerless to oppose the insistence of the Home Government, and the financial iniquity was accomplished. From that moment it became evident to the Viceroy that his mission of reform in the entirety of its original scheme was doomed to failure. And so in truth it proved. The lapse from principle in Egypt entailed other lapses, and in India, and indeed throughout Asia, put back the clock of reform and self-government for at least a generation. The spirit of aggressive imperialism in the East, against which the Midlothian campaign had been a protest, was by Mr. Gladstone’s own aggression revived and strengthened. His sermon of Indian economy, and his denunciation of unnecessary Indian wars were alike rendered ridiculous, and the whole position of those who had followed him as the Apostle of Eastern freedom, was abandoned to its enemies. Lord Ripon in the spring of 1883, when, after two years of unwearied labour in the attempt to gain over the Anglo-Indian officials to some practical measure in accordance with the Queen’s proclamation, he decided at last to give battle on what is known as the Ilbert Bill of that year, knew himself already to be a beaten man; he felt that he was championing a lost cause.

The Ilbert Bill was in itself but a very poor instalment of that promised equality between her English and her Indian subjects which he had been sent to give. Its object was to put a stop to the impunity with which non-official Englishmen, principally of the planter class, ill treated and even on occasion did to death their native servants. It was to give for the first time jurisdiction over Englishmen in criminal cases to native judges – instead of to judges and juries only of their own countrymen. Trifling remedy, however, though it was, it roused at once the anger of the class aimed at, and a press campaign was opened against Lord Ripon of unusual violence in the Anglo-Indian journals. The Ilbert Bill was described as a revolutionary measure, which would put every Englishman and every Englishwoman at the mercy of native intrigue and native fanaticism. The attacks against Lord Ripon were certainly encouraged by the Anglo-Indian officials; and presently they were repeated in the press at home, and to the extent that the Bill became a question in which the whole battle of India’s future was being fought over and embittered. The “Times” took up the attack; the Cabinet was alarmed for its popularity, and the Queen was shaken in her opinion of her Viceroy’s judgement. Lord Ripon was left practically alone to his fate.

Those who have read my “Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt” will understand in what way the cause Lord Ripon was still defending at Calcutta was likely to affect me. It will be remembered that, in the time of his predecessor, Lord Lytton, I had paid a flying visit to India where I had enjoyed the then Viceroy’s hospitality during two months at Simla. It had been a visit solely of personal friendship, made at the close of a long journey in Arabia, Turkey, and Persia, and that, notwithstanding a Tory education and much prejudice in favour of my countrymen, and in spite, too, of the daily society of such high Anglo-Indian officials during my stay as Sir John Strachey, Sir Alfred Lyall, and Lord Lytton himself, who had been at special pains to instruct me in their ways and methods of administration, it had left me more than doubtful of the advantage to native India of our imperial rule. Strachey’s policy of “forward finance” seemed to me one especially ruinous to India – a policy of ever-increasing expenditure, ever-increasing public debt, and ever-increasing taxation. Neither he nor Lytton had been able to convince me that the immense poverty of the agricultural peasantry was not connected with our extravagant English administration. This last Lytton, in his lighter moods, was fond of describing as “a despotism of office boxes tempered by an occasional loss of keys.”

Still I knew nothing for certain about native India. At Simla I had had no opportunity of conversing with so much as a single representative of its thoughts in opposition to the official views, nor had I caught more than a glimpse of the skeleton figures of the starving ryots as I passed rapidly by railway through their plains. When I once more, four years later, turned my thoughts to Indian travel, the single advantage I had acquired was that in the interval my political education in regard to East and West had progressed, and I had graduated in the severe school of personal experience. The case of the Egyptian fellah is not very different from that of the Indian ryot, and the economical needs of both are closely parallel. I had witnessed the Egyptian revolution, which was a revolt of the peasantry against a burden of debt, with my own eyes and at close quarters, and I had found myself behind the scenes in its struggle with European intrigue, a struggle where I knew the right to be with the native reformers, the wrong with our obstinate officials. I was determined that this time it should not be under official chaperonage I would travel, but as far as was possible on a basis of free intercourse with whatever inhabitants of the land I could get access to. As a Home Ruler in the East, I wished to ascertain what the true feeling of the country was towards its English masters, and what the prospect of India’s eventually gaining her freedom.

In this design I was of course greatly aided, as far as Mohammedan India went, by the common cause I had made with the Egyptians in their revolution, and the public advocacy of it I had undertaken. It had put me in communication with some of the liberal leaders of the Panislamic movement, and it is from them that I obtained, so to say, my passports to the confidence of their Indian co-religionists. To the Hindus I had no introduction. But here circumstances, at the outset adverse in appearance, aided me. My arch opponent in Egypt had been the Anglo-Indian Controller there of Finance, Sir Auckland Colvin, and he, having got wind of my intention, made an effort to frustrate it, by representing me to Lord Ripon as a person politically dangerous, whom it would be prudent to exclude from India, or place under official ban. Colvin’s special service in Egypt had just come to a close and he was once more in active Indian employment, and his name carried weight. Nevertheless he found Lord Ripon irresponsive. Then, having failed at head-quarters, he had recourse to the Anglo-Indian press and, through an old standing connection with the “Pioneer” newspaper, denounced me in print, an ill-advised action which, more than any favourable introduction could have done, insured me a welcome with the Hindus. Thus it happened that wherever I went I was an object of pleased curiosity with the disaffected, as one who, having incurred the anger of the Anglo-Indians, was by that fact presumably their friend. If, in the sequel, my journey achieved its object, and indeed far more than its object, it was to the “Pioneer” and other organs of hostile official opinion that I mainly owe it.

At the moment of my leaving London I received, in connection with this and another matter, a message from Downing Street asking me to call there, and the first entry in my diary refers to this. The other matter was in regard to Egypt, where it had been suggested that I should stop on my way to India and see Sir Evelyn Baring, then newly appointed to the post he was so long to hold, and concert with him a plan of restoring there the National Party. The idea had been Mr. Gladstone’s, and I reserve a full account of it for another occasion when I shall return to my Egyptian history, only premising here that it came to nothing at the time and was made a pretext later for excluding me from Egypt, reference to which exclusion will be found in the diary. The first entry of all refers to this, and to my then political connection with Lord Randolph Churchill, in concert with whom, more or less, my journey was undertaken. The Hamilton mentioned in the diary was Sir Edward Hamilton, Mr. Gladstone’s chief private secretary; the Primrose, Sir Henry Primrose, then holding the same position with Lord Ripon. I omit in transcription nearly all that relates to Egypt, reserving that part of my diary for another occasion. As to Lord Randolph, it may not be unnecessary to explain that, in the battle in which I had been engaged during the past year in Egypt, by far the most effective ally I had found in Parliament had been the young leader of the Fourth Party. Churchill, though an imperialist of the Disraeli school, was a young man full of engaging qualities, with generous impulses and a large sympathy with the weak and oppressed. I had formed a close friendship with him, and had succeeded in interesting him in my Oriental ideas to the extent that besides taking up the cause of Egyptian nationalism, he later visited India, and on his return in 1885 professed himself converted to Lord Ripon’s policy. About this, and about his short career as Secretary of State for India, I had intended to include a chapter in this volume. But it has been decided that this, with much else of a later date than 1884, shall be reserved for another occasion. Churchill entered on his office with the best of intentions and ideas, and I am still of opinion that had he remained for a few years at the India Office he would have pushed on reform there as none of his successors have had the courage since to attempt it.

With this preliminary word I leave my diary to tell its own story.

CHAPTER II

CEYLON

“12th Sept., 1883.

“Left home by the 10 o’clock train, and spent the day in London. A letter had come from Eddy Hamilton by the morning’s post asking to see me before I went abroad, and I went to Downing Street at one o’clock. Mr. Gladstone is away yachting, and Eddy is acting Prime Minister, and a very great man. I had not been to Downing Street since last year – just upon a year ago – when I went to ask for Arabi’s life. Eddy was extremely amiable this time, and asked me what I was going to do in the East. I told him my plans exactly – that I was going first to Egypt, and should call on Baring and, if I found him favourably disposed, should propose to him a restoration of the National Party, but if he would not listen I should go on to Ceylon and India; that I could not do anything in Egypt without Baring’s countenance, for the people would not dare to come to speak to me; but, if Baring would help, I thought I could get the Nationalist leaders elected at the elections – all depended on the action of our officials. Also as to India – that I had no intention of exciting to rebellion; that I should go first to Lord Ripon, then to Lyall, and afterwards to the provinces; that the subjects I wished principally to study were the financial condition of the country, that is to say, to find out whether our administration was really ruining India, and to ascertain the views of the natives with regard to Home Rule. Of both these plans Eddy seemed to approve, said that Baring would be sure to wish to see me, and listen to all I had to say, and, though he did not commit himself to anything very definite about the rest, did not disapprove. With regard to India, he said he would write to Primrose, Lord Ripon’s private secretary, to show me all attention; so on the whole I am highly satisfied with my visit. I had some talk with Eddy about Randolph Churchill. He said that my connection with him in Egyptian affairs did me harm, but I don’t believe that, and I look upon Churchill as quite as serious a politician as the rest with whom I have had to deal. On Egypt I think he is sincere, because he has an American wife, and the Americans have always sympathized with freedom there. I believe, too, that he is at a turning point in his character, and means to have done with mere random fighting, and we both agreed that he has a career before him. For my own part I like Churchill. He does not affect any high principles, but he acts squarely.”

The next day I left with my wife for Paris, where our principal interest was to see the small group of Egyptian exiles congregated there.

“13th Sept.– We arrived by the night train at Paris, and alighted at the Hôtel S. Romain, a quiet place where we can see our friends. Presently Sabunji came in with Sheykh Jemal-ed-Din.1 When I saw the Sheykh in London in the spring, he wore his Sheykh’s dress. Now he has clothes of the Stambouli cut, which, however, sit not badly on him. He has learned a few words of French, but is otherwise unchanged. Our talk was of India, and of the possibility of my being able to get the real confidence of the Moslems there. He said that my being an Englishman would make this very difficult, for all who had any position to lose were in terror of the Government, which had its spies everywhere. He himself had been kept almost a prisoner in his house and had left India through fear of worse. Any Sheykh who gained notoriety in India was tracked and bullied, and if he persisted in an independent course he was sent on some charge or other to the Andaman Islands. People, he said, would not understand that I wished them well, and would be too prudent to talk. The poorer people might, not the Sheykhs or the Princes. He thought Hyderabad would be my best point, as there were refugees there from every province of India, and they were less afraid of the English Government. He said he would write me some private letters to explain my position, and to the editors of some Mohammedan newspapers. I told him what the political position was, and how necessary it seemed to me that the Moslems should show that they joined the Hindus in supporting the Ripon policy. All depended on the Indians showing a united front. He said they might have courage, if it could be proved to them that there were people in England who sympathized with them, but they only saw the officials, who never smiled when they spoke to them. I asked him about the language I should most prudently hold regarding the Sultan, and he advised me to say nothing against the Sultan in India, or about an Arabian Caliphate; it had been spread about that the English were going to set up a sham Caliphate in Arabia, under a child, whom they would use to make themselves masters of the holy places; the Sultan’s name was now venerated in India as it had not formerly been.

“14th Sept.– Jemal-ed-Din and Sanua and Sabunji came to breakfast, and we stayed talking all day. The Sheykh brought with him letters which he had written to the Nawab Abd-el-Latif of Calcutta, and the Nawab Rasul Yar Khan of Hyderabad, both of which I hope may be of great value. He told us some interesting particulars as to his own people and family, repudiates the idea of the Afghans being a Semitic people, says on the contrary that they are Aryans, like the inhabitants of Northern India, but his own family is Arabian, and they have always preserved in it the tradition of the Arabic language. He also discoursed on history. I read them my poem ‘The Wind and the Whirlwind,’ which Sabunji in part translated to the Sheykh. He said that, if he had been told there was in the world an Englishman who really sympathized with the misfortunes of India, he would not have believed it. Sanua exhorted me to have the poem translated into good Arabic verse by El-Rakkam, a pupil of Abdu’s. I also went through with him a programme I have drawn up for the restoration of the National Party in Egypt, and talked over with the Sheykh a scheme of restoring the Azhar as a real university for all Islam, and he explained how it had been in old days.”

The same evening we took train to Marseilles, and went on by Messageries steamer to Egypt, where we spent a fortnight. Our stay there was productive only of disappointment as far as the political situation went. I found Sir Evelyn Baring, when I called on him, willing enough to talk things over with me, but half-an-hour’s conversation was sufficient to convince me that, whatever Mr. Gladstone might dream or pretend to dream about restoring the National Party and recalling the exiles, nothing was further from Sir Evelyn’s mind. He had no intention whatever but that of supporting the Khedive and the party of reaction. We consequently turned our steps once more eastwards, and embarked at Suez on the 9th of October, in the British India ship “Ghoorkha,” having so far altered our original plan of travel as to include in it Ceylon, where we desired to visit our exiled Egyptian friends, Arabi Pasha and his four companions. We intended to stay with them a few days only and pass on thence into Southern India.

We were delayed, however, longer than we thought. I had hardly got on board when I began to develop a malarious fever, which, before the end of the voyage had become serious. The “Ghoorkha” was a detestable conveyance, overcrowded, swarming with vermin, and miserably provided. There was no doctor on board, nor any means of comfort for a sick person. Driven out of my cabin by the heat and its discomforts, I was laid on a table in the saloon, and there passed my days in extreme wretchedness but nursed by my wife and her maid Cowie, who was devoted and admirable on such occasions. Our fellow passengers were a rough set of Colonial English and planters from India, Assam and Burmah. With these we had a constant battle for existence. In the early days of the voyage I still tried to write my journal, and I give such extracts from it as have anything of public interest.

“10th Oct.– The only persons on board we know anything of are the half-caste Russell going to Jeddah, and a young fellow, Mrs. Palmer’s brother, who has been given a Government place worth £800 a year in the Mint at Calcutta. He is to stay there two years, and then to be transferred to the London Mint, this doubtless through Lord Northbrook.”

This is a good instance of the way the Indian revenue is sometimes made use of to evade the difficulties of jobbery in England. Professor Palmer had been sent by Lord Northbrook, then at the Admiralty, on a secret mission connected with the intended invasion of Egypt, and had lost his life (see “Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt”), and his widow had applied to his lordship for a pension. As the mission was a secret one, and could not be avowed, it was not found possible to include this in the English Navy Estimates, so Palmer’s brother-in-law was jobbed into the Indian service in the way described, as part of the compensation due to his widow.