India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

“29th Feb.– Rode with Fergusson on a Turcoman horse, which had belonged to Shere Ali. He is very frank and amiable now he has spoken his conservative mind, and on many points we agree, for instance, on the necessity of import duties, and the reduction of the salt tax, and I think he is not altogether averse to a permanent settlement, though he will not hear of there being now any over assessment, or of officers having any interest in raising assessments. Only the other day the supreme Government had lowered some newly-made assessments twenty per cent. But this cuts both ways, as it seems to show that they were too high. We also agreed that it would be well to get the native states to disarm. I thought they would consent, but he was sure they would not, and was surprised to hear me say that in Hyderabad they would not much mind it. He is a good fellow, and, I am sure, does his best as a kindly despot and liberal landlord. But he is in the hands of his officials.

“I wrote a quantity of letters, while Anne went out looking after things. Then we called on Mrs. Malabari and arranged with Malabari that I should correspond with him, and he would help on the university scheme all he could in his paper. Then to dinner at Hamid Bey’s, – Rogay, Bedr-ed-Din Tyabji, and others, also guests – and after it to a meeting of the Anjuman i Islam, about five hundred persons present. They presented me with an address, and I made a long speech expounding my ideas. We did not touch on politics. There was a beautiful sight in the heavens to-night, the crescent moon with the evening star exactly over it and quite close, like the Mohammedan device. This should mean a victory for the Mahdi either at Suakin, where they talk of an imminent battle, or perhaps the fall of Khartoum. I never saw a moon and star like this before.

“1st March.– We left India to-day, being exactly the anniversary of our leaving Egypt two years ago, and we are going home with something of the same vague hopes and fears. We have only taken our tickets to Suez, but I do not mean to land there, as it would only give them a triumph to have me arrested, and I can strike them a severer blow by moderation.

“As we were leaving Government House, Professor Monier Williams and his wife arrived. I had some talk with him about the things that interest me, and he invited me to come and stay with him at Oxford, and give a lecture on Mohammedan education. This I promised to do.

“And so we leave India, well satisfied with what we have done, but not a little glad now it is over.”

CHAPTER XI

AN APOLOGY FOR FAILURE

Such was my Indian tour of 1883-1884. It will be rightly asked by those who have read thus far how it came about that I wasted so great an opportunity for good as then seemed open to me, and did not return the following year, or indeed in any subsequent year, to carry out the mission which appeared marked out for me. I often ask myself the same question. Looking back at the position I held for a moment with Hindus, Mohammedans, and Parsis alike, I am filled with regret that in the sequel I should have put it to so little purpose. If I had had the perseverance to pursue the course I had begun, and had followed it out unflinchingly to its full results, I believe that I might have brought about great permanent good for the people whose interests I had espoused, and perhaps with the Mohammedans encouraged them to a real reformation, social and intellectual, if not political. To do this, however, it would have been necessary for me to devote the whole of my life to this special work, and to give up every other interest which I had at heart and all my private affairs at home. It would have required something more than sympathy to bring me to the point; and I suppose my mind lacked the impetus of a full faith, without which complete devotion to a cause more than half religious could not be.

Nevertheless I left Bombay with an entire intention of returning the following winter, and of making a new tour for the collection of the funds necessary for the proposed Mohammedan University. I had already received promises of over £20,000, the greater part being the intended gift of my friend the Rajah Amir Hassan, of Lucknow; and, with the patronage of the Nizam and Lord Ripon’s approval, the accomplishment of at least this part of my plans seemed already within my reach. If it was frustrated, the fault, though partly mine, was not wholly so. A series of misfortunes happened in the course of the year which combined to defeat it, and which nothing but very persistent determination on my part could have sufficed to overcome.

In the first place Lord Ripon, though he had established a state of things at Hyderabad favourable to reform as far as the native elements of the government were concerned, had not been able to impose his will altogether on the Calcutta Foreign Office. Trevor, indeed, left soon after, but the personnel of the Residency at Hyderabad, in spite of all that had passed, was not thoroughly changed. Cordery was allowed to remain on in power, and, as we had foreseen, the old intrigues were quietly renewed. The young minister, Laik Ali, was left without advice of any profitable kind by the Resident, and through his youth and inexperience made mistakes by which his enemies were not slow to profit. The confidence and friendship which had from the outset existed between him and the Nizam were undermined, and both were frustrated in their better intentions, and, in accordance with the time-honoured plan in dealing with native states, were encouraged to neglect their public duties and indulge in a life of pleasure destructive of their more serious energies. Thus the year was not out before it became clear to me, from the reports I received, that the Nizam’s patronage of the university scheme was not one which could be prudently relied on.

Another misfortune was Lord Ripon’s resignation of the Viceroyalty before his term of office was fully over. Frustrated in his larger design of endowing India with something like free institutions, and finding himself without real support from the Government at home, he recognized that it was useless for him to prolong his stay, and, amid the lamentations of native India, he returned to England a defeated, if not a disappointed man.

Under his successor, Lord Dufferin, things lapsed into their old groove, and all hope vanished of serious political reform. The Mohammedans were, indeed, favoured by the new Viceroy as far as their employment in the administration went, but anything like vigorous action among them was once more discouraged. Thus, snowed upon officially, the idea of an independent university, existing on its own resources and subject to no influence of official fear or favour, necessarily languished, and was abandoned by the timorous souls of those whom for a moment I had persuaded to take it up courageously. It is rare in India to find persistent energy in any undertaking not patronized by Government. The death blow to the scheme followed a little later when Rajah Amir Hassan, who had persevered in it so far as to commence founding a college for his Shiah co-religionists at Lucknow was attacked by an illness which ended in insanity. Even if I had returned to India, it is doubtful whether I could have done anything to neutralize these misfortunes. As it was, I allowed myself to be discouraged by them into a gradual abandonment of my Indian plan, and turned my energies into other channels, which seemed to me at the time more practical.

My first enthusiasm was already cooled by a visit I paid to Constantinople in the autumn of 1884. It had seemed to me that the best chance of infusing general life into the university scheme was to obtain for it the Sultan’s patronage. In spite of all I knew of Abdul Hamid’s character, I thought it just possible that if I could get speech with him I might persuade him to use the enormous influence his name and Caliphal title gave him in Moslem lands in the direction I desired. But my visit was a failure; I found the Sultan personally inaccessible, except through such channels as I was unwilling to employ, and at an endless expense of time and money. At Constantinople the reign of corruption was supreme, nor was any approach to the head of the Moslem faith possible except by intrigue with the Court officials. It will be seen, when I publish the sequel to these memoirs, how entirely the atmosphere of the palace was opposed to serious ideas, and I left Constantinople convinced that it was useless any longer to fight against circumstances or attempt the impossible. Other interests at the same time allured me away, the urgency of the crisis in Egypt, the tragedy of Gordon at Khartoum, the general election of 1885, the Irish Home Rule movement, and the attempt I then made to enter Parliament as its supporter. Thus, while I still continued to interest myself in the fortunes and misfortunes of India, I never again aspired to take a leading part in its affairs.

All the same, I think I may lay claim to have contributed something towards the cause I had made specially my own, that of the Indian Mohammedans. On my return to England in the spring of 1884, I found Lord Randolph Churchill more than half disposed to go with me in my plans for them, and to make himself in Parliament a champion of Islam. It was partly through my persuasion and example that he started on his tour in India the following winter, and the letters I gave him for my Indian friends contributed not a little to his success in that direction, though in the sequel his political interests were too diverse to hold him permanently to any one line of action. His visit, nevertheless, taken in connection with his appointment in 1885 to the India Office under Lord Salisbury, marks a turning-point in the official policy towards the Indian Mohammedans which has ever since been followed. As a community they were encouraged, not, indeed, as I had intended, but as a counterpoise to the Congress movement of the Hindus; and gradually the idea expounded by me in “The Future of Islam” has come to be adopted as the Government’s own and used to its own purposes.

Nor was I forgetful of the promise I had made to my Hindu friends of expounding to my fellow countrymen at home the griefs of which I had been witness in India; the infinite poverty of its people; the economic ruin they had suffered at our hands; the oppressive character of the land assessment constantly enhanced, aggravated as these things were by new forest laws and a salt tax levied on the very poor; – and, no less, the arrogance of their official rulers; the growing ill-will between class and class, and the causes of what was rapidly becoming race-hatred between Englishman and Indian. In the course of the summer of 1884 I embodied these in a series of papers contributed to the “Fortnightly Review,” and republished by me at the end of the year under the title “Ideas about India,” a little work, which being now long out of print, I propose here, as a natural sequel to the diary, to add in the form of final Chapters.

There will be found among them a scheme of constitutional reform not very different from that which we now see, after the lapse of a whole generation, timidly and half-heartedly propounded at the India Office, when all the grace of a spontaneous act of justice has been lost with a lost opportunity. Such as they are I give them unaltered, omitting only such portions of them as are merely redundant of the diary, and adding here and there an explanatory note recording changes which in the last quarter of a century have come about. Alas, such changes have been seldom for the better, and in its main features the condition of India is to-day economically the same as what it was in Lord Ripon’s time, with only the accumulated burden of poverty which famine years and years of pestilence have brought about.

India’s famines have been severer and more frequent, its agricultural poverty has deepened, its rural population has become more hopelessly in debt, their despair more desperate. The system of constantly enhancing the land revenue has not been altered. The salt tax, though slightly lowered, still robs the very poor. Hunger, and those pestilences which are the result of hunger, are spread over an increasing, not a diminishing, area. The Deccan ryot is still perhaps the poorest peasant in the world. Nothing of the system of finance is changed, nothing in the economy which favours English trade and English speculation at the expense of India’s native industries. What was bad twenty-five years ago is, according to all native evidence, worse now. At any rate there is the same drain of India’s food to alien mouths. Endemic famine and endemic plague, with British India’s universal bondage to the village usurer, are facts no official statistics of prosperity can explain away.

Nor has the chasm of race antipathy been at all narrowed. All the causes of ill-will noted by me in 1884 are still existent in an aggravated form, and find stronger ground of action now; and there is one besides, unnoticed then, which may perhaps be added. There can be no question that the twenty-five years which have elapsed since 1884 have seen a change in the attitude of the white races of mankind towards their fellow men of other hue and lineage, and in their avowed conduct towards them. The old religious teaching, Christianity’s best claim to the world’s regard, was that all men were brothers at least in the sight of God, but this has given place to a pseudo-scientific doctrine of the fundamental inequalities of the human kind which, true as a statement of fact, has been exaggerated and made political use of to excuse white selfishness and white exclusiveness, and to reinforce the white man’s pretension of rightful dominion over the non-white world at large. I call this “pseudo-science,” because nothing really of the sort exists under the world’s natural law. Darwin’s rule of the “Struggle of Nature” and the “Survival of the fittest” included no assertion of superiority in one race rather than another, giving it dominion over the rest, nor has any species in the world’s natural history prevailed in this way. Its survival has been, not by its greater strength or even by its greater cunning, but by its better adaptability to its local surroundings. Yet it is common to hear Darwin quoted as an authority favourable to imperial domination and race intolerance in lands unsuited to European survival, and it is precisely under conditions such as we find in India that these arguments find most favour with Englishmen. As a rule the English in the East, missionaries apart, are not much of Christians, and their tendency is to become less and less so in the progress of modern ideas.

On the other hand the Indian races, many of them quite as intellectual as the European, have been far from standing still. Quite apart from such education as they have been receiving in Government schools and colleges, the knowledge of the facts of the Western World and its ways has been spread far and wide among them by their ever-increasing intercourse with European travellers, and the facilities they have themselves acquired of travel. If every Government school in India were closed to-morrow, and every native newspaper suppressed, I doubt if the spread of such information would be greatly checked, this class of facts being conveyed from mouth to mouth rather than by writing; and it is at any rate certain that, at least in the towns of India, Englishmen are appraised pretty generally at their real value, and their moral weaknesses and intellectual limitations are known to every one, even the poorest.

I confess I do not see how this unfortunate tendency of things is to be mended by any rules or regulations issued to the Anglo-Indian Civil Service. I am the more in despair about it, because I have noticed precisely the same evil growth, though in a less dangerous form, in Egypt. When I first knew Egypt, seven years before the British occupation, the best possible relations existed between Englishmen and native Egyptians. There was much familiar intercourse and respect on either side, and English travellers, rare in those days, were proud to be invited to the houses of rich Cairo Moslems, while among the poor in the villages they were always welcome. But the false position assumed by our people since the occupation of 1882, that of rulers and ruled, the rulers being aliens and affecting airs of race superiority over the natives, has destroyed all this. Pleasant social relations can only continue where those concerned meet on an equal human footing, and of all inequalities the inequality of race is the most unsocial. In India things have gone so far that I doubt if any measure, short of placing the administration of the country wholly into native hands, by abolishing the covenanted Civil Service as a privileged body and reducing the Europeans employed to the position of well paid servants not masters, would induce Englishmen to forgo their pretension of exclusiveness, and bring them down to the level of their merits, whatever these might be, as useful paid employés.

As to the concluding Chapter, that on “The Future of Self-Government,” I leave it without comment as it was written twenty-five years ago, though I should have liked to have drawn from it a moral and to have applied it to the state of things we see in India to-day. That, however, is forbidden me in deference to the present difficulties of government, and also as being alien to the historical character of the present volume. The suppression, nevertheless, of free thought and speech in India, by the new press laws, and the revival of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial, is a subject which I cannot let pass without a protest, lest I should seem to approve. Such methods of government are not only repugnant to me, but are, I am sure, as futile as they are reactionary. If persisted in, they can only mean that the Government relying on them has no serious intention of true progressive reform.

CHAPTER XII

THE AGRICULTURAL DANGER

I believe it to be an axiom in politics that all social convulsions have been preceded by a period of growing misery for the agricultural poor, combined with the growing intelligence of the urban populations. Certainly this was the case in Europe at the time of the Reformation, and again, following the lead of France, in the last century; and, most certainly and immediately under our own observation, it has been the case in Ireland and in Egypt at the present day. Where there is complete ignorance, misery may be accumulated almost without limit by a despotic power. Where the mass of the population is prosperous, no growth of knowledge need be feared. But it is at the point where education and starvation meet that the flame breaks forth. This is a truism. Yet there are few who recognize how absolutely true it is of India.

No one accustomed to Eastern travel can fail to see how poor the Indian peasant is. Travelling by either of the great lines of railway which bisect the Continent, one need hardly leave one’s carriage to be aware of this. From Madras to Bombay, and from Bombay again to the Ganges valley, distances by rail of seven hundred and eight hundred miles, one passes not half a dozen towns, nor a single village which has a prosperous look. The fields, considering the general lightness of the soil, are not ill-cultivated; but there is much waste land; and in the scattered villages there is an entire absence of well-built houses, enclosed gardens, or large groves of fruit trees, the signs of individual wealth which may be found in nearly every other Oriental country. The houses are poorer than in Asia Minor or Syria, or even Egypt, and are uniform in their poverty. There are no residences of any wealthier class than the poorest, and the little congregations of mud huts are without redeeming feature in the shape of stone-built mansion or whitewashed dwelling at all superior to the rest. Such exceptions one finds in every province of the Ottoman Empire, except perhaps in Irak, and one finds them in Persia. But throughout the great central plateau of the Indian peninsula, they are wholly absent.

Nor is the aspect of poverty less startling if one looks closer. Entering a Deccan14 village one is confronted with peasants nearly naked, and if one asks for the head man, one finds him no better clothed than the rest. The huts are bare of furniture; the copper pots are rare; the women are without ornaments. These are the common signs of indigence in the East; and here they are universal. Questioning the peasants, one ascertains not only that they do not eat meat, for this is often against their religious custom, but also that they eat rice itself only on holidays. Their ordinary food is millet mixed with salt and water, and flavoured with red peppers; and of this they partake only sufficient to support life. Of luxuries other than the red peppers they seem entirely destitute.

In every village which I visited of the British Deccan I heard complaints of poverty resembling most closely those to which I was accustomed in Syria and Egypt – complaints of over-taxation of the country, of increase and inequalities of assessment, of the tyranny of local overseers (not necessarily Englishmen) charged with levying the rates, complaints of the forest laws, of the decrease of the stock of working cattle, of their deterioration through the price of salt, of universal debt to the usurers. The only complaints conspicuous from their absence were those relating to insecurity of life and to conscription, the two great evils of Western Asia. And I will say at once before I go further that immunity on these heads goes far in my opinion towards counterbalancing the miseries which our rule would otherwise seem to have aggravated in the condition of the Indian ryot.

The special evils which we have imposed upon him are, however, only too apparent. In former days, though his land assessment or rent was very likely as high as now, it was mitigated for him by custom and by certain privileges which our system of administration has deprived him of. In bad seasons when his crop was poor he enjoyed remissions which are very seldom granted now. The lord of the land to whom he paid his rent lived within reach of him, and in days of distress might be cajoled into pity or possibly frightened into moderation. But the landlord now is a formless thing – the Government – which no tears can reach, no menace turn away. It is represented only by a succession of changing agents, strangers to the country, ignorant of the people and their wants, and whose names the ryots rarely learn to know. This is a constant complaint in their mouths, and the condition of British India under the modern system is a striking instance of the evils of absentee ownership. For the last hundred years it has been the constant aim of the Madras Government to destroy all ownership in land but its own, and it has so far succeeded that it stands now alone throughout the greater portion of the Presidency face to face with the peasantry. If these were happy the result might be good. But in their actual circumstances of chronic starvation it seems to me a very dangerous one.

With regard to the actual amount of the assessment, I made what inquiries I was able, endeavouring, so far as possible, to ascertain what proportion it bore to the gross value of the crop, and, although I state it with all due diffidence, I think I am not wrong in putting it at 35 to 40 per cent. for the Deccan district. It may well be considerably more, but I think it can hardly be less. In any case, I feel quite certain that Dr. Hunter’s figures in his book (which, be it remembered, is the accepted handbook about India) are enormously wrong, where, quoting the Famine Commission, he states that “the land tax throughout British India is from 3 per cent. to 7 per cent. on the gross out-turn.” Seven per cent. would of course be a very light rent in any country, but 40 per cent. would be inordinately high, and I am quite sure that impartial inquiry would prove that, in the Deccan at least, my own figures are far more nearly correct. In Bengal, I know there are lands assessed as low as 1 per cent.; but Bengal is a prosperous country, nearly the only one in British India, and is precisely the exception which best proves the general rule by exemplifying the causes of agricultural poverty.

It is, however, not merely the amount of the assessment which weighs upon these Deccan ryots, nor merely the inelasticity of its collection. If the natives themselves are to be believed, there are other causes of poverty directly due to the British connection which have had a far more disastrous effect upon the prosperity of the country than any taxation has produced. The reason, these say, why the ryot of the present day is poorer than his predecessor of fifty years ago is this. Under the ancient system of native rule, and during the early days of the Company, the agricultural population was not wholly dependent on agriculture. It had certain home industries which employed its leisure during those seasons of the year when labour in the fields was useless. There was the carrying trade which could be engaged in with the bullocks used at other times for ploughing. There was peddling of ghee and other home-made wares; and above all there was the weaving industry, which employed the women, and the men too during their idle time, and helped them to pay their rent. But modern improvements and modern legislation have altered all this. The railroads have very much destroyed the carrying trade; native industries have been supplanted by foreign ones, and the introduction of machinery and of foreign cottons has broken up every hand-loom in the country. The ryot, therefore, is reduced to the simple labour of his fields, and this does not suffice him any longer to live and to pay his assessment – therefore he starves. This account of the matter has been very ably set before the English public by Sir William Wedderburn, and I do not propose to argue it out here. But I can testify that it is the account also given by the natives themselves, and that I have no doubt that it is strictly true.