India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

“The rest of the passengers are tea-planters, or English settlers in India, the class most angry at the Ilbert Bill, and we are not very amiably regarded by them. I have passed my time reading the ‘Koran,’ which is a great consolation in circumstances such as ours. There are moments when I could arise and proclaim a jehad on board.

“11th Oct.– I have had some conversation with an intelligent young tea-planter settled near the Burmese frontier. He seems to think a new rebellion is brewing in India. In his district within the last two years the villagers have taken to cursing the English when they pass, and even throwing stones. He has the usual arguments against the Ilbert Bill – the venality of native magistrates, prevalence of native false witness, and the rest. In another district the planters had sworn that they would not accept the bill if it became law, but would deal in their own way with the first native magistrate who presumed to try a European. He did not believe the bill would pass. If it did, India would be lost. The natives were already ‘far too cheeky.’ A sensible old lady who has lived twenty-five years in Burmah had something of the same opinion, but spoke very strongly against the opium trade. The Buddhist priests of Burmah have complained that our rule has demoralized the country, which before had no vices, but is now given up to opium eating and spirit drinking. She says this is quite true, and that the Government forced their opium on the people for the sake of the revenue. She likes Burmah, nevertheless, and is going out now with the whole of a very numerous family undismayed at possible dangers.

“12th Oct.– The Feast of Beiram. The waiters and crew, most of whom are Moslems, said their prayers together on the forecastle, having put on clean turbans. We are passing Socotra, which lies north of us, ranges of barren hills.

“13th Oct.– Last night an old indigo planter with a bottle nose entertained us with his views on the Ilbert Bill and kindred matters. He had been twenty years in Bengal; there were fewer planters now than before the Mutiny; the planters were the backbone of the Empire, and saved it in the Mutiny, and now were the backbone of its finance. I asked him to explain this, and he said that they advanced money to the Zemindars to enable them to pay the Government dues. They charged no interest, but took villages in exchange, their only advantage being that the villagers worked their indigo grounds for them. The planters would all leave India if the Ilbert Bill passed.

“There is a Mr. Y. on board who bought nine thousand acres of land last year from the Government, but the natives on it would only pay rent for sixteen acres, though they occupied it all. He was very indignant, and said the Indian Empire would go to ruin if they played any tricks with it. It was a conquered country, and the niggers were all rogues from the first to the last. The little tea-planter joined in, but assured us that no improvement was to be expected from making them Christians. Some of the planters in his neighbourhood had employed converted coolies, but found them far worse than the others; they used sometimes to go away all together and drink for a week at a time. Nobody became a Christian except for some underhand object, and as soon as he had got it he went back; he considered drinking part of the conversion. He mentioned how an Englishman of his district had been condemned to a year’s imprisonment for manslaughter on false evidence, as the man he had injured had not died – though the Englishman beat him. They asked me what the English Government meant to do, what their idea was in upsetting things? I said I believed it was merely a question of economy; the Indian Government as it was did not pay its expenses; it was like sending away an expensive Scotch gardener from a poor garden; the country would be worse administered perhaps. I consoled Mr. Y., however, by assuring him that the people now in office, Lord Kimberley, Lord Northbrook, and Lord Granville, were as little likely to do anything really in the direction of freeing the Indians as any three Tories in the kingdom. In answer to a question, the tea-planter said: ‘Of course it is impossible to get on without being bullies now and then, but it is a good rule never to touch the natives unless you mean it in earnest. If you strike a nigger and he thinks you are afraid to hit him hard, he runs you in to a certainty before the magistrate, but if you give it him well, he knows he deserves it. You must be careful, however, not to overdo it, for they are very soft, and four out of five have enlarged spleens, and they are capable without any exaggeration of dying to spite you.’

“14th Oct., Sunday.– I am worse again to-day, and can do nothing but sit up and lie down, and wish I was dead. The Moslem servants have found out we are different from the rest of their masters on board, and are very attentive. What irritates them particularly, they have told Sabunji, is that nobody speaks to them by name, but only as ‘boy’ here, and ‘boy’ there. There is a bitter hatred between them and the passengers, and no wonder. Not that there is any actual ill-treatment by these – that was put a stop to three years ago by a strike among the Bengalis, who refused any longer to be beaten on the British India boats – but brow-beating there is in plenty. Last night young Langa, Mrs. Palmer’s brother, came to sit with us. He told us he had been given his place in the Indian Mint, although he was not even an Englishman. His father had been a Polish patriot, and he was indignant at the way the natives were treated on board. He is an amiable boy of about twenty-three, very like his sister in face and voice. A yellow butterfly was blown on board to-day.

“15th to 18th Oct.– Too ill to write. Last night, however, we cast anchor at Colombo just after sunset. We expected our friends to come to us on board, but I was too tired to care. Sabunji went forth like the raven from the Ark, and did not any more return!”

The next three weeks I spent grievously sick, and then beginning to be convalescent, at Colombo. On the morning of the nineteenth our friends Mahmud Sami and Arabi came on board to take us to a beautiful country house the former had prepared for us, and on landing we were received by a deputation from the Mohammedans of the town. The whole road we found had been decorated with flowers for our reception, and there was a triumphal arch at the entrance to the house, which was some miles from the landing-place. I was carried through it all, hardly conscious of what was going on, nor of the fireworks and illuminations which took place in my honour in the evening. My journal contains no record of these days until the 3rd of November, when I find a pleasant description of my daily life.

“3rd Nov.– I get up every morning as soon as it is light, and am carried to the verandah, where I sit and watch the rather curious view which is in front of the house. The house stands fronting a piece of fresh water, which is the river’s mouth and is used by the fishing boats as a harbour. Beyond it there is a long strip of sand covered with green bushes, and beyond that again the sea. The fishing boats come in over the surf at daybreak, and then double back up the reach of still water, and just in front of the house are run up on the shore. It is astonishing how fast they sail, and how steady they are in the breakers. But they are of Catamaran build, and seem able to go where they like, and do what they like. They are quite light, too, for a man and a boy can pull them up high and dry without difficulty. When out at sea, those on board are half in the water, but they cannot upset, because as they heel over there is a spar resting on the water to which the boat is spliced. They are obliged, however, to run before the wind as they cannot easily tack. Then, soon after sunrise, boys come with goats which they turn out to graze on the green bushes; and then men with horses and oxen which they bathe in the river. None of the men swim, but they stand about in the shallow water, ducking up and down and splashing each other, so that with their long hair they look just like women. The oxen come in carts, and are taken out and bathed with pails which are poured over their backs, and the ponies are treated in the same way. It is a very pretty sight, and the same beasts and people come every morning, so that I seem to know them all. I sit there in a dreamy state drinking my coffee, and then go back to bed.

“Later in the day a sofa is put for me under the other verandah by the garden, and I have another kind of view. There is a grove of bananas with fruit nearly ripe, and all day long the little gray squirrels, which are hardly bigger than mice, run over them, jumping from branch to branch and looking into the bunches to see if there are any ripe enough to eat. They make a shrill cry when a kite or crow passes overhead, which is like a bird’s. Then there are flowers, red and yellow and blue, which are visited by little birds like willow wrens, who get at the honey by pecking through the stalks. But in the middle of the day there are only butterflies, almost every day new ones, black and yellow, black and blue, and once one black and green; also small yellow butterflies, and black and white ones, and a butterfly like a large red Admiral, and that great russet-coloured one which one sees everywhere in Asia and North Africa, a link between the East and the West, Chrysippus. These sometimes come into the verandah, and are near getting caught in the great spiders’ webs under the roof. The afternoons are generally rainy, but after the showers lizards come out and climb the bushes, and they have a favourite bush with dark leaves, in which one day I saw a chameleon. About four o’clock the sky becomes dark with hooded crows and jackdaws returning from the town to an island on the river where they roost. They raise a great clamour, and I have made a calculation that about seventy thousand pass every evening across the small bit of sky which I can see. They often stop on a banyan tree as they go by, or on the coco-nut palms. The other birds seem all afraid of them. At last, as it gets dark, they are gone, and then two little black and white robins come out and sit on a post and rail, and hiss at each other like blackcaps, and a pair of listless yellow-legged thrushes follow them and hop about among the grass. Then it gradually gets quite dark, and the fireflies come out chased by birds like nightjars, and the lamp is lit, and Cowie brings me my tea, and I am carried back to bed. This has been my life these twenty days.”

During these three weeks, which in some ways were among the happiest of my life, for I always look back to the periods of recovery from a severe illness as being such, I was not without visits from our friends the Egyptian exiles and others of the Mohammedan community of Colombo. Arabi, especially, came daily to see me, and I found him of an extreme gentleness and kindness in a sick room. He was anxious to do all he could for me, and recommended me such remedies as are used by the fellahin in Egypt, and even took off from his arm, where he habitually wore it, a little leathern bag containing a charm or incantation and placed it upon mine. To this he attributed my recovery, and it may have been effective in this way, combined with the fresh milk which formed for the first fortnight my sole diet. I tried to believe it, and would have willingly believed too the other articles of his simple fellah faith. With Arabi and the other exiles I naturally had much talk about the past events of their country. But what they told me I need not here recapitulate, as I have already embodied it with much else in my Egyptian Memoirs.

I find in my diary that on the 6th of November I went out for my first drive, and that in the company of Arabi and Abd-el-Aal I went into Colombo, and that we saw Gregory’s statue together in the Cinnamon Gardens, and three days later that I attended a public dinner given in my honour by the local Mohammedans. At this I made a public speech. Arabi had proposed the Queen’s health in a few words of Arabic, and my own speech took the form of a return of thanks. From the date of their arrival at Colombo, the exiles had been exceedingly well treated by the Governor of the Island and his subordinates, and were in the habit of being invited to all the great receptions at Government House. And on the other hand, with their own co-religionists, they had attained a position of the highest consideration, Arabi being in the habit of leading the prayer in the principal mosque on Fridays.

The Mohammedans of Ceylon are known there as “Moors,” a name given them originally by the Portuguese, which is applied also to the Mohammedans of the south-west coast of India. They belong to a far older Mohammedan settlement than the Moguls of the north, being, in fact, the descendants of Arab traders who in the first centuries of Islam came not as conquerors, but as commercial settlers from Oman and Yemen. Unlike the Mohammedans of the north, they are a pushing and prosperous community, having most of the shop-keeping trade in their hands, especially that of jewel merchants. There is also a comparatively small Mohammedan community of Malays, the descendants of a force of Malay soldiers formerly maintained by the Dutch. With them I found living on terms of friendly intercourse the Brahminical Tamils, who consider themselves to be of Dravidian race, originally from Southern India, though they have probably mixed much with the Aryans in past times. They, too, are a pushing race, commercial and combative, and had driven the Cingalese out of half the island before the arrival of the Portuguese in Ceylon. The Dravidians number here and in Southern India some seventeen millions, and the Tamils are considered their leading branch. Their form of Brahminism is of a purer type than in the north, as they hold closer to the Vedas, so much so that the Brahma Suraj reformers make no way with them; their doctrines have been forestalled. They are also more particular about the consecration of their idols, and the performance of their religious ceremonies. The head of their community at Colombo, Ramanatha, told me that he had been shocked in Northern India at the rough and ready idols even the princes worshipped, unconsecrated, in their own houses. He says there is a good feeling between all the members of the Asiatic creeds at Colombo, but the Catholics, Methodists, and Wesleyans are on bad terms with these. The Catholic population is large along the coast. On the 9th the Tamils entertained me at a banquet, to which the Egyptian Pashas and several Europeans were also invited. These were Mohammedan Tamils, of whom there were about one hundred present. Though unfit for it, for I was very tired, I made a long speech, or rather sermon, to them on the subject of Mohammedan reform, and reform in their political life. It was rather a venturesome attempt, but was well received by them. I spoke, of course, in English, which all understood.

We also made acquaintance, while in Colombo, with the Governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, a very excellent man, who was on the best of terms with the various native communities. There was in Ceylon a good tradition of this kind, dating, I believe, from Sir William Gregory’s governorship some years back, and contrasting in a very marked manner with the relations I afterwards found in India between the rulers and the ruled. Ceylon’s position as a Crown colony, with institutions of a semi-representative kind, puts the natives of the island in a position of comparative equality with the Europeans, and is answerable, doubtless, for the better feeling displayed towards them by these, at least in public. There is none of that extreme and open arrogance we find in Northern India. Nor was there on the part of the natives I came in contact with any expression of that race bitterness which in India is universal. On Sunday, the 11th November, my journal, interrupted by my illness, begins again to be regularly kept.

“11th Nov.– We bade good-bye to our friends, and took steamer for Tuticorin, the southernmost point of the Indian peninsula. The night before I had a serious talk with Mahmud Sami. He is a man of a very superior education, and has behaved to us throughout as our host with the most consummate courtesy. Immediately after breakfast came some other chief friends among the Moors, with them Haj Ibrahim Didi, the Sultan of Maldive’s nephew, who is also Consul for him, though the Maldive Islands are so cut off from the mainland that he has had no communication with head-quarters for years. The Pashas came on board to see us off, and I embraced each one of them as they went over the ship’s side, and, last of all, Arabi, for whom I feel a true affection. In spite of faults and failings, there is something great about him which compels one’s respect. His faults are all the faults of his race, his virtues are his own.

“Looking back on the last three weeks spent in Ceylon, I recognize in them perhaps the happiest of my life. When I arrived I was so weak I could have died happily. But, though I did not die, I have had such satisfaction as seldom comes on earth, that of seeing the bread one has cast on the waters return to one a hundredfold, a feeling that at last the power to do good has been won, and more than one’s wishes granted. This is true pleasure and true happiness. I regret the quiet life at Mahmud Sami’s as I regret a home. We could see the banyan tree in the garden, and the boats on the shore, and the columns of the verandah as we steamed away. I doubt whether I shall ever be happier than I have been there.”

CHAPTER III

MADRAS

“12th Nov.

“After a good passage of about fifteen hours we sighted the Indian coast, first the western hills, and then the low shore off Tuticorin. We have been carrying four hundred and thirty-five Indian labourers coming home after working in Ceylon. The captain says they carry 15,000 every year each way. They are fat and merry, so I judge that they thrive during their absence from home – all I believe Hindu Tamils. On the pier we were met by twenty or thirty Moslems, representing the local Mohammedan population of two hundred families. They had been telegraphed to about us by Ibrahim Didi. A Moor from Galle, Kasim Biak, did the honours, entertaining us at breakfast with a friend, Bawa Sahib, also from Ceylon. The native Moslems seem very poor. I asked them about their condition, and they complained of having no school. Their Imam had work enough to do leading the prayers five times a day, and had no leisure to teach. They also complained of being subject to annoyance from the Hindus, who came with drums outside their mosque, and that the magistrate, being a Hindu, would not prevent it. They all wear a turban here, as do the Hindu Tamils. There seemed to be no English resident in Tuticorin at all. We only stayed two hours, and then went on by train, accompanied by our Mohammedan friends, now increased to about fifty.

“The country for a mile or two inland is pure sand, and very pretty with its desert vegetation, thorn acacias and groves of dom palms. The heavy rains had brought up beautiful bright green grass, on which flocks of long-legged goats were led to feed. By the side of the railroad I noticed several birds well known to me, the turtle dove of Egypt, the kite, the hen-harrier, the bee-bird, and the roller, also birds unknown to me, a little magpie, a long-tailed blackbird and others – butterflies, too, in some variety, and flowers, yellow and blue, one like the convolvulus minor. Later, the country opened into a vast cultivated plain, perfectly level, but with fine mountain ranges to the west, a very light soil, but improving as we got further from the coast, though nowhere good on this day’s journey. It is easy to understand a drought causing general famine. The cultivation is much as in the rest of Central Asia, lightly ploughed lands, without fences or boundaries, scattered trees, acacias or banyans, and at great distances villages; no sign anywhere of ‘gentlemen’s seats,’ or of any habitation better than the poorest, herds of lean sheep or goats, the only cattle a few buffaloes. The whole country has been recently under water, and this year at least there ought to be crops, but they are not yet out of the ground.

“At Kumara Puran we came to some low hills, which I think were of red granite, and here the country was greener, with millet and rice crops, and more trees. I noticed mulberry trees as well as banyans, and near the station, Australian gums. Much water about in the pools. After these hills the land improved, growing more beautiful; but night came on, and though there was a full moon we saw little more. About half-past seven the train came to a stop, and we were made to get out and walk some two or three hundred yards, as the rails had been washed away by a flood. All around the frogs were croaking in thousands. In another place was a fine old stone bridge broken down, with a great stoppage of bullock carts, and we arrived about nine o’clock at Madura. I was almost dead with fatigue. Two Mohammedans, Abd-el-Aziz Sahib and another, were awaiting us at the station, but I could do nothing but get to bed.

“13th Nov.– Madura is a pretty place, with palm trees and flocks of parrots. In the early morning we watched them flying overhead, talking as they went. At nine the Mohammedans came again, accompanied by an alem of Arab descent, a sayyid, who spoke good Arabic, but with a peculiar old-fashioned accent. We had a long talk, principally about the misfortunes of their community. The Moslems throughout Southern India have always been a very small minority – descendants of the former Mogul rulers of the country – for the mass of the population never conformed to Islam. In those days they occupied the chief posts under Government and in the army, but these have now passed away from them to the Hindus, who are preferred to them for Government employment because of their better knowledge of English and better schooling. Their cry then is for schools, that they, too, may be employed. Unlike the Moors of Ceylon, none of them are engaged in trade, nor have they any means of embarking in commerce. Only a few are shop-keepers. About a dozen have lands, on which they live, and the rest work for wages for their daily bread. Many died in the famine seven years ago. They are decreasing in numbers and wealth, and are overridden, they say, by the ‘kafrs.’ It is difficult to see any way out of this state of things, and I doubt even if schools would help them much. The alem had heard of course of Arabi, and also of me; and they all took great interest in the affairs of Islam beyond the seas. But their ideas are vague. They asked us several times if we were not relations of the Queen, and I had some difficulty in explaining our system of government. They enquired with great interest whether it was true that the Russian Emperor had sent troops to Afghanistan, and their faces brightened when I told them that, though I knew nothing of troops, I had seen in the papers that a Russian Envoy had appeared at Kabul. I fancy they look forward to a restoration some day of Mohammedan Government under Russian protection as a way out of their difficulties. Here, however, it is not easy to imagine any such event, for Hinduism is clearly all-powerful, and the Mohammedans are few, and they are strangers in the land.”

Madura is indeed the most interesting Hindu city in India, the place where the ancient Brahminical religion has been least touched by foreign conquest, Mogul, or French, or English. There is absolutely no sign in the city of anything alien. We did not see a European face, or a trace of Saracenic architecture. A festival was going on and an immense crowd thronged the streets, thousands and thousands of men dressed in white, with ochre patches on their foreheads, and of women in their beautiful gauze drapery, and carrying flowers. Fortunately I had never heard of Madura and its famous temple, and it was by accident that we came upon it as we wandered without guide through the streets. I find the following very inadequate description of it:

“In the afternoon we drove about the town, the most interesting I ever saw, and went over the Palace and the Temple. The Palace is a fine thing, but is being pitilessly restored at great expense by the Madras Government. Its proportions, however, remain, and it may be hoped that the damp air will tone down some of the raw plaster work quickly. We found it the home of squirrels and parrots and other birds. The view of the Blue Mountains from its roof is one of the loveliest imaginable. The Temple, however, is quite another thing. It is the supreme sight of Madura, and indeed, one might profitably travel from England and return only to have seen this. It is not only unmatched, but is beyond all comparison with the rest of the buildings I have seen in the East, as far beyond them as St. Mark’s at Venice is beyond Spurgeon’s Tabernacle. In shape it is a vast square composed of courts and halls, and corridors, deep in shade, with open spaces where the sun pours down. At the corners are four structures, like great Towers of Babel, covered, or rather encrusted, with sculptured gods, monsters, and devils, the whole enclosed with an immense stone wall, where there are no apertures. The door by which we entered from the street gave little idea of what was within. It might have been the entrance to a bazaar, and its comparative meanness enhanced the quite unexpected wonder we were about to see. It opened on to a kind of covered way, whose roof was supported by rows of figures carved in stone, grotesque and monstrous, but still finely sculptured, the lower parts of them black with the elbow polish of many generations of worshippers. This corridor was perhaps three hundred yards in length, and at its entrance were a number of open shops, where goods connected with the worship were being sold – ‘the buyers and sellers of the Temple’ – always thronged with worshippers grotesque as their gods, with painted foreheads, and sometimes painted bodies.