India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

I consider myself fortunate in having been at Calcutta at the precise moment when the Ilbert Bill controversy was at its fiercest, not on account of any special interest I took in the Bill itself, but for the instructive display of rival passions and motives it evoked. Lord Ripon has most unjustly been blamed for unnecessarily causing the conflagration. But in truth all the elements of a quarrel were there already in the strained relations just described as existing between Englishmen and natives; and it was an accident that the particular ground occupied by the Ilbert Bill should have been chosen on which to fight the battle of race prejudice. The history of the affair as viewed with natives’ eyes was this. When Lord Ripon arrived in India, he found the ill-feeling between the two classes very bitter, and he wisely determined on redressing, as far as in him lay, class disabilities, thus carrying out the liberal doctrines proclaimed over and again for India by his party while out of office. For such a work no man could have been better suited by temperament or conviction. It is hardly sufficiently understood in England how large a part personal integrity plays in acquiring the sympathy of Orientals for their rulers, and how impossible it is to govern them successfully either by the mere mechanical instruments of a system or by individual talents, however great, when these are divorced from principle. The display of ingenuity and tactical resource which imposes on our own political imagination and sways the House of Commons is absolutely valueless in the East; and charlatanism is at once detected and discounted by its acute intelligence. The Englishmen, therefore, who have succeeded most permanently in India have rarely been the most brilliant; and the names which will live there are not those which their English contemporaries have always ranked the highest. Moral qualities go farther; truth, courage, simplicity, disinterestedness, good faith – these command respect, and above all a solid foundation of religious belief. Such qualities the natives of India acknowledged from the first in Lord Ripon, and no amount of mere cleverness could have placed him on the pedestal on which he stands to-day with them – or rather, I should perhaps say, on which he stood until the desertion of the Home Government forced him into an abandonment of his position as a protector of the people.

I am glad to be able to bear testimony to the fact that no Viceroy, Lord Canning possibly excepted, ever enjoyed such popularity as Lord Ripon did in the early part of last winter. Wherever I went in India I heard the same story; from the poor peasants of the south who for the first time had learned the individual name of their ruler; from the high-caste Brahmins of Madras and Bombay; from the Calcutta students; from the Mohammedan divines of Lucknow; from the noblemen of Delhi and Hyderabad – everywhere his praise was in all men’s mouths, and moved the people to surprise and gratitude. “He is an honest man,” men said, “and one who fears God,” and in this consciousness all have seemed willing once more to possess their souls in patience. To say that Lord Ripon has been a failure in India, through any fault of his own, is to say the reverse of a fact patent to the whole native world. He has been the most successful governor India has ever had, because the most loved; and the only sense in which he can be said to have failed is in so far as he has failed to seek the favour of the English ruling class or impose his will on the Home Government.

Of his legislative measures I must speak with less enthusiasm. The spirit in which they were brought forward was Lord Ripon’s own; but the drafting of the Bills was the work of others; and they have been doubtless disappointing. Thus, the Local Self-Government Bill, though admirable in idea as marking a first step towards native administration, is in itself a poor thing, and is appreciated as such even by Lord Ripon’s most cordial admirers. The powers it grants are too exiguous, the ground it covers is too small, the checks it imposes are too stringent, for the Bill to excite any great enthusiasm with the natives, and it is difficult for an Englishman to peruse its provisions without wonder at its ever having gained the name of an important measure of reform. Put in a few words, the Local Self-Government Bill means that the native communities are to be allowed to mend their own roads, to levy their own water rates, and devise their own sanitation, on the condition and provided that the Commissioner of the district does not think them incapable of doing so. This for the first time after a hundred years of English rule! I know what the natives think of the measure, and how little it fulfils their expectations; but no higher tribute can be paid to Lord Ripon’s popularity than that they have been sincerely grateful to him for it.

Thus, too, the Ilbert Bill, of which we have heard so much. It was in itself an infinitesimal measure of relief from native disabilities. It provided that native judges, under certain exceptional conditions, in country districts, should have jurisdiction over Englishmen, a jurisdiction long ago fully granted them in Ceylon with no ill results, and also granted in India in the presidency towns. The only province, as far as I could learn, which would have been at all seriously affected by the Bill was Bengal, where the English planters saw in it a check to their system of managing and mismanaging their coolies. I heard a good deal about this from some Assam planters with whom I sailed on my way out to India, and I know that that is how they regarded it. “It is all nonsense,” these told me, “to suppose you can get on without an occasional upset with the niggers, and our English magistrates understand this. But if we had native magistrates we should be constantly getting run in for assault.” In other districts, however, where milder manners prevail, there seemed to be no such dread of the Bill; and as to the probability of any real abuse of their position by native judges with Englishwomen, I am certain that the whole thing was purely fictitious. But the agitation against the Bill became dangerous from the fact that it was all along fostered by the Anglo-Indian officials, who chose the Bill as a battlefield on which to contest the principle of Lord Ripon’s Liberal policy. In the Local Self-Government Bill they had seen a first blow struck at their monopoly of power, and they seem to have made up their minds to permit no second blow. They were aided by the English lawyers, who recognized in it a menace to their professional advancement; and by the planters for the reasons I have given; and, following the example of the “Times,” the whole press of England soon joined in the cry. The natives, too, from first to last, fought the battle as one of principle, though with far more moderation than their assailants.

I was present in Calcutta on the day when the compromise, negotiated by Sir Auckland Colvin, was announced to the public, and I know the effect it produced on native politicians. It was everywhere looked on as a surrender, and a disgraceful one; and there was a moment when it was doubtful whether popular indignation would not vent itself in more than words. But Lord Ripon’s personal popularity saved the situation, and moderate counsels prevailed. It was recognized even by the most violent that the pusillanimity of the Home Government, not of the Viceroy, was in fault; and it was felt that, should popular indignation turn now upon Lord Ripon, no Viceroy would ever again dare befriend the people. The compromise, therefore, was accepted with what grace was possible, and bitter feelings were concealed, and the day of indignation postponed.

I consider the attitude of native opinion on this occasion vastly creditable to the political good sense of India, though it would be highly dangerous to trust to it another time. The evil done will certainly reappear, and be repaid upon Lord Ripon’s successors. Down to the last year the natives of India, completely as they had lost faith in the official system and in the honest purpose of their covenanted rulers, still looked to the Home Government as an ultimate Court of Appeal, able to defend them if not always willing. The weakness, however, of the Cabinet on this occasion to resist a wholly unjust and unscrupulous attack upon them was now apparent, and I doubt extremely whether they will ever again have confidence in Ministerial professions. The Government was entirely committed to the passing of the Bill, yet it gave way before the clamour of an insignificant section of the public, abetted by the sworn enemies of all reform in India – the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy. The spectacle was not an edifying one, and I know that the natives appreciated it entirely on its merits, and I am much mistaken if they did not also come to the conclusion that the justice of a course was insufficient for its triumph in politics, and that the only path of victory henceforth lay through agitation. If this is so, there is little chance of peace in the future of the sort which governments love.

I do not like to complain of evils without at the same time suggesting remedies, but it is difficult to recommend an immediate remedy for the evils I have been depicting. The ill-feeling which exists between the English in India and the natives is due to causes too deep-seated in the system we have introduced, and until that system is changed, little real good will be effected. I would, however, point out that there is as yet no true hatred of race between Englishmen and Indians, but rather one of class only, and that it is yet within our power in England to change the threatened curse into a blessing. The quarrel in India up to the present moment is with the Anglo-Indians only, not with the English nation; and though recent disappointments have begun to shake their confidence in the Home Government, the natives have not wholly lost their belief in the sympathy of the land where liberty was born. Between the two classes – the English of India and the English of England – they still draw a distinct line, and race hatred in its true sense will not have been reached until this line is obliterated. They say, and truly, that in England such of them as go there find justice, and more than justice, that they are treated as equals, and that they enjoy all civil and social rights. They come back proud of being British subjects, and preserve none but agreeable recollections of the Imperial Island. They do not wish for separation from its Government, and are loyal before all others to its Crown. But the contrast of their subject-life in their own land strikes them all the more painfully on their return, and they are determined to procure reform. “Reform, not Revolution,” is their motto, but reform they have made up their minds to have.

With regard to the direction any new change should take, the educated natives argue thus: Purely English Administration, they say, in India has had its day and needs to be superseded. It has wrought much good in the past by the introduction of order and method, by raising the standard of public morality, and by widening the field of public interests. As such it deserves thanks, the thanks of a sick man for his nurse, of a minor for his guardian, of a child for his preceptor. But further than this, India’s gratitude cannot go. It cannot be blind to the increasing deficiencies of those who rule it, or forgo for ever the exercise of returning strength and coming maturity. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy has become too hard a master; it has forgot its position as a servant; it has forgot the trust with which it was charged; it has sought its own interests only, not those of India; it has wasted the wealth of the country on its high living. Like many another servant, it has come to look upon the land as its own, and to order all things in it to its own advantage. Lastly, it has proved itself incapable of sympathy with those whose destinies it is shaping. It neither loves India nor has been able to command its love; and by an incapacity of its nature it is now exciting trouble, even where it is most anxious to soothe and to cajole. Meanwhile the sick man is recovering, the child is growing up, the minor is about to come of age. He has learned most of what his tutors had to teach him, and his eyes are open to the good and the evil, the wisdom and the want of wisdom, the strength and the weakness of his guardians. He desires a participation in the management of his own affairs and a share in the responsibility of rule. To speak practically, the Civil Service of India must be so remodelled as to make the gradual replacement of Englishmen by natives in all but the highest posts henceforth a certainty.

It is not proposed, I believe, by any section of the Indian public to extend present demands farther than this. But, as with all political reformers there is an ideal towards which they look as the goal of their endeavours, so in India the goal of advanced thinkers is complete administrative independence for the various provinces on the model of the Australian colonies. Their thought is that by degrees legislation as well as administration should be vested in native hands. First it may be by an introduction of the elective system into the present councils, and afterwards by something more truly parliamentary. The supreme Imperial Government all wish to preserve, for none are more conscious than the Indians that they are not yet a nation, but an agglomeration of nations so mixed and interblended, and so divided by diversity of tongues and creeds, that they could not stand alone. An Imperial Government and an Imperial army will remain a necessity for India. But they see no reason whatever why the practical management of all provincial matters should not, in a very few years, be vested in their hands. That the present system of finance and the exploitation of India to the profit of Englishmen would have to be abandoned is of course certain. But there is nothing in India itself to make this undesirable.

I refrain here from any attempt to sketch a plan of ultimate self-government for India, but I have argued the matter out with the natives, and I intend in a future chapter to set it forth in detail. Suffice it now to say that a change of some sort is immediately necessary, or at least an assured prospect of change, if worse calamities are to be avoided. The danger I foresee is that, with an immense agricultural population chronically starved, and a town population becoming every day more and more enlightened and more and more enraged at its servitude, time may not be given for the slow growth of opinion in England as to the need of change. I am convinced that if at the present moment any serious disaffection were to arise in the native army, such as occurred in 1857, it would not lead to a revolt only. It would be joined, as the other was not, by the whole people. The agricultural poor would join it because of their misery, the townsmen in spite of themselves, because of their deep resentment against the Anglo-Indians, and the native servants of the Crown because of the checks placed on their advancement. The voice of reason, such as now prevails in the academical discussions of the educated class, would then be drowned in the general noise, and only the sense of anger and revenge remain. I know that many of the most enlightened Indian thinkers dread this, and that their best hope is to make the reality of their grievances, the just causes of their anger, heard in time by the English people. They still trust in the English people if they could only make them hear. But they are beginning to doubt the possibility of attracting their attention, and they are very nearly in despair. Soon they may find it necessary to trust no one in the world but themselves. To-day their motto is “Reform.” Let us not drive them to make it “Revolution” to-morrow.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOHAMMEDAN QUESTION

It is never well to have travelled from Dan to Beersheba and to record that one has found all barren; and in my present chapter I shall endeavour to paint the brighter side of the India which I saw last winter. The material misery of her peasantry has been enough described, and the bitter feeling of her townsmen educated to a sense of their fallen estate as a conquered people; and it remains to me to show the compensating good which by the mysterious law which rules all human things is being born out of their otherwise unredeemed misfortunes. The apologists of British rule boast that they have given India peace, and peace doubtless is a noble gift; but it has given her far more than this. What really deserves all Indian thanks, and is indeed an inestimable acquisition, because it contains within it the germs of a reconquest of all the rest, is that it has given her liberty of thought. This is a new possession which India never had, and never perhaps would have had, but for English influences, and it is difficult not to see in it a gift undesigned, but which, like the last treasure issuing from Pandora’s box, is destined to transform the curse of conquest into the blessing of a wider hope.

I am not one of those who love the East only in its picturesque aspects, and I have no quarrel with Europe because it has caused the East to change. I note, indeed, the destruction of much that was good and noble and of profit in the past by the unthinking and often selfish action of Western methods; but I do not wish the past back in its integrity, or regret the impulse given to a new order there of thought and action. I know that time never really goes back upon its steps, and no one more readily accepts than myself the doctrine that what is gone in human history is irrevocably gone. On the contrary, I see in the connection of East and West a circumstance ultimately of profit to both; and while the beauty of its old world is being fast destroyed, and the ancient order of its institutions subverted, I look forward with unbounded expectation to the new cosmos which shall be constructed from the ruins. I am anxious, indeed, to save what can still be saved of the indigenous plan, and to use in reconstruction something of the same materials; but I see that the new edifice may well be made superior to the old, and I should be altogether rejoiced if it should be my lot to share, however humbly, in the work of its rebuilding.

To speak plainly, the ancient order of Asiatic things, beautiful as it was, had in it the germs of death, for the one reason that it did not change. India especially, in old days, did not change. Conquerors came and went; dynasties rose and perished; and years of peace and war, of plenty and of famine, trod closely on each other’s heels, while men were born and lived and died in the same thoughts. It was the natural life, the remnant of a society which still followed the law of instinct rather than of reason; but even in the natural world health must be attended with growth or it will turn into decay. The intellectual growth of India by the middle of last century had long stopped; and there was no sign anywhere, when our English traders first appeared, of a new beginning. Thought had resolved itself into certain formulae from which there seemed no escape; and the brain of the body politic, unused and oppressed with its own mental restrictions, was growing every generation weaker.

We have seen the ultimate result of such inaction in other lands, in Asia Minor, in Persia, and, till within recent memory, in countries nearer home. It was seen everywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages, and seems to be a condition natural to all human societies at a certain stage of their growth. If too long prolonged it would seem they die, leaving their places empty, as in Babylonia, or being absorbed in other more vigorous societies, as the Byzantines were absorbed by the then vigorous Turks. In almost every case the intellectual awakening has been quickened from without, by the presence near it of an intelligence more living than its own and generally hostile, and it may safely be affirmed that the action and reaction of nations on each other’s intellectual life is in itself a natural and necessary law of their development. Thus Mediaeval Europe owed the new birth of its thought to the invasion in the eighth century of the cultivated and chivalrous Moors through Spain; and the Catholic Church reformed its lax discipline, not four hundred years ago, in the presence of advancing hosts from Western Asia. Something of the same process, therefore, may be also traced in the counter-wave which has now for the last hundred years and more been driving Europe back in menace to the East. Asia has been awakened by it at last to her danger, and is slowly informing herself with the victorious reason of the West, and assimilating to her needs that intellectual daring which is her adversary’s strength. And nowhere more so than in India. After its long sleep the Indian intellect is rising everywhere refreshed, and is attempting each day more boldly to strike out new lines of speculation on the very subjects where it had been most closely and most hopelessly confined.

All this India indubitably owes to England. Nor is there any point on which the intellectual methods of the West have been brought more strongly to bear in Asia than on its creeds. The ancient monotony of religious practice divorced from religious intelligence, is slowly giving place to intrusive questionings which will not be appeased by mere formulae, and men of all faiths are discussing and reasoning where a hundred years ago they only asserted. We have witnessed within the last generation something of this everywhere in Western Asia, but in India it is perhaps still more marked; and it seems certain that, whatever evil may have been there wrought to other interests, the interests of its religions will have been served by our rule, unconsciously, perhaps, and unwillingly, but none the less really. Paradoxical as it may sound, the wholly secular rule of aliens, whose boast it is that they have established no State creed, will be found to have renewed the life of faiths and given them a stronger, because a more intelligent, mode of being. The spiritual believer will be strengthened; and the very pagan will be no longer “suckled in a creed outworn,” but in living beliefs which will seek to exercise a moral influence on his conduct more and more for good. To speak precisely, what I see will be the outcome of such education as England is giving to the Indian races is a reformation of each of their several religious faiths, leading to purer thought in their followers, and above all to purer practice.

The creeds of India, speaking generally, are four: the Hindu, which under various forms embraces four-fifths of the whole population; the Mohammedan, which is principally powerful in the North of India and Bengal, and which includes a census of fifty millions; the Christian (Roman Catholic), found mainly in the extreme South; and the Parsi.

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

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