India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

Something of the same process may be observed in the case of the Parsis. These would hardly require mention as an Indian sect at all were it not for their very great intelligence and the lead they have recently taken in native political life. They are insignificant in point of population, and very restricted in their locality. Bombay alone of the great cities finds them in large numbers. But their wealth there, their commercial aptitude, and their persistence in availing themselves of every means of education, have placed them in a position of large and growing influence. They are, as is well known, the descendants of the fire-worshippers of Persia, and still hold closely to their traditions. The religion of Zoroaster, originally simple and philosophical, seems, in common with the rest of the religions imported into India, to have become overgrown there with grosser thought and less worthy practice, and to have adopted many of the superstitions peculiar to the Indians. Some of these seem, indeed, to have been forced on the Parsis by the Hindu rulers at the time of their first settlements, and others to be the result of the general decay of knowledge due to political conditions. The Parsis, however, were among the first to take advantage of the intellectual liberty which has been the atmosphere of India since the coming of the English, and being also extremely keen traders they have profited more than others by the commercial régime of modern times and have grown rich. Well educated, well mannered, and naturally inclined to good, their religion is now simplifying itself once more, and the tendency of Parsi thought is, even more than the Hindu, towards a spiritualization of theological dogmas and a reform in social practice. Any one who has been with an educated Parsi over their “Towers of Silence” in Bombay must have been struck with the pains at which they are to interpret in a philosophical sense their ancient practice of exposing the dead; or who has discussed social questions, with their desire to improve the condition of their women. Of the Parsis, however, and of the native Christians of Southern India, I will not speak at length. I saw too little of them to learn anything of real value; and the great numerical superiority of the Hindus and Mohammedans entitles them alone to general attention.

My own special attention was naturally most directed to the Mohammedans.

Mohammedanism, as is well known, entered India from two separate sides and under two separate conditions. Its first appearance was on the western seaboard in the shape of Arab traders, who came with the double mission of propagating the faith and making money. These were peaceful preachers, who relied for success not upon the sword but upon the power of persuasion, and the Mohammedanism implanted in this form is still to be found on the west coast, in the Kokhnis of Bombay, the Moplas of Malabar, and the Moormen, or Moors (“os Moros” of the Portuguese) of Ceylon. They are a busy, prosperous people – shopkeepers, pedlars, jewellers, or plying certain handicrafts, and notably that of house-building.

It was extremely interesting to me to find at Colombo the descendants of the ancient Arab settlers of the eighth and ninth centuries still keeping up the commercial tradition of Arabia intact. They number in the whole island of Ceylon about a quarter of a million, and are among the most prosperous of its inhabitants. I found them an old-fashioned community, more occupied with this world than with the next, and only to a very small degree affected by modern thought. Indeed, such change as was to be noticed among them was of as recent growth as the advent in Ceylon of Arabi and his fellow-exiles, whose larger experience of the great outside world of Islam and the prestige of their late championship of the faith had begun to make its impression on their thoughts. Until their arrival no Mohammedan in the island had ever sat down to meat with men of another faith, and very few had sent their children to any secular school. The example, however, of the exiles was beginning to be followed, and I found the Moormen already anxious for wider instruction, and to come into communication with the general body of the faithful. It will be a curious result of Egypt’s misfortunes if the persecution of her patriot chiefs shall have brought ideas of religious liberty to the Mohammedans of Southern India; yet it is what seems to be happening. It would be well if these Moormen were more widely spread than they are, for their commercial instincts are a healthy element, and one much needed in the Mohammedan community of India proper.

As I crossed from Ceylon to the mainland and left the coast I first came in contact with the other and more common Mussulman type – the descendants of the northern invaders – men wholly distinct from the busy traders just described, and neither prosperous nor advancing. The Mohammedans of the inland districts of the Madras Presidency are the poorest in India. They represent the extreme wave of Mogul conquest southwards, long ago spent and now receding. They are the descendants, not of preachers and converts, but of the garrisons of the north, and their occupation of government gone, they are fast dying out from want of a means of living. The condition of the small Mohammedan communities of such towns as Tanjore and Trichinopoly is very pitiable. Isolated in a population wholly Hindu, possessed of no traditional industry, without commercial aptitude or knowledge of other service than the sword’s, they seem dumbly to await extinction. Their few rich men, owners of landed property, grow daily less and less at their ease, preyed upon as they are by an army of helpless and needy relations. They fall in debt to the Hindu money-lenders, are yearly less able to discharge their liabilities, and bit by bit the civil courts engulf them. Those who have no land are reduced to manual labour of the simplest sort on daily wages. It is a hard but inevitable fate, the fate which rests upon the law, that none shall live who cannot earn his bread. These Mohammedans of Southern India are the extreme exemplification of evils from which the whole community are to some extent suffering. In the south they are few and hopeless, and have almost ceased to struggle. In the north the danger of their condition is rousing them to new activity.

The stronghold of Mohammedan India is the North-West, and there Islam is far from hopeless or disposed to perish. Intellectually the equals, and morally the superiors of their Hindu neighbours, the Mohammedans of the Upper Ganges Valley have not forgotten that till very lately the Administration of India was almost entirely in their hands, and they look upon their declining fortunes as neither deserved nor irremediable. Their historical status is that of descendants of those Tartar and Persian and Afghan conquerors who have at various times invaded Hindustan from the North-West, or of the Hindu converts, principally Rajputs or Pathans, made by these. Their race, indeed, is nowhere pure, except in the case of a few princely and noble families, but the tradition of their origin remains intact, and is at the same time their weakness and their strength – their strength, inasmuch as it supplies them with a certain standard of honour beneficial to all societies; their weakness, inasmuch as it has given them prejudices against the ordinary means of living open to all the world.

The pride of conquest is the bane of all Mohammedan societies sprung from Northern Asia, and the Mohammedans of India form no exception. The Moguls never condescended to trade, but either settled on the land or took service, civil or military, under government; and their descendants are still swayed by the same proud instincts. Their misfortunes in India came upon them in successive waves. Forced by the Mahratta wars into an alliance with the East India Company, the Mogul Emperors became early dependent on these; and with the gradual absorption of the Delhi Monarchy, the exclusive privilege of rule departed from the Mohammedan caste – not all at once, but by degrees as new regulations were enacted and a new system introduced. The first to suffer were the landowners. By a certain fiscal measure, known as the “resumptions,” requiring all holders of lands to show their title deeds, the Mohammedans, who often held by prescription rather than by written grant, lost largely of their estates, and so were reduced to poverty. Next, the military services were in great degree cut off for them by the extinction of the native armies. And, lastly, the Act, changing the official language from Persian and Hindustani to English, took from them their still leading position in the civil employment. The Mohammedans had up to this more than held their own with the Hindus, as Hindustani was their vernacular, and Persian the language of their classics; but in English they were at a distinct disadvantage, for that was already the language of commerce, and so of the educated Hindus. Nor could English be learned except at the secular schools, to which Mohammedans were averse from sending their sons as tending to irreligion. The sources, therefore, of their employment were on every side curtailed, and a growing poverty has been ever since the natural result. The military revolt of 1857, which in Oude and at Delhi assumed a specially Mohammedan aspect, completed their disfavour with the English Government, and with it their material decline.

At the same time, owing to circumstances which I have never heard fully explained, it is an admitted fact that numerically the Mohammedans of Northern India have been and are a rapidly increasing body. This may have been due at times to extensions of British territory, or to conversion among the lower castes of Hindus, or to other causes; but it is certain that, whereas in old calculations the Indian Mohammedans were placed roughly at thirty millions, and more recently by Dr. Hunter at forty millions, they are now by the last census acknowledged to number fifty millions of souls, although the increase of the general population of India has been not at all in like proportion. With regard to their actual position, therefore, we are faced with the unsatisfactory phenomenon in Northern India of a vast community growing yearly more numerous, and at the same time less prosperous; of a community owning the instincts and the traditions of administration excluded yearly more and more from the administration; and of a community which has good grounds for tracing its misfortunes to the unfavourable conditions imposed upon them by the Imperial Government. The Mohammedans of Northern India, there is no denying it, are restless and dissatisfied, and the only question is in what form their repressed energy, fired by misfortune and threatened with despair, is likely to find its vent. It may be in two ways – for their own and the general good, or for their own and the general harm; and I believe that at the present moment it lies largely within the power of those who rule India to guide it to the former and turn it from the latter.

All who are responsible for tranquillity in India must be aware that there are influences at work, both within the country and beyond its borders, adverse to that tranquillity, and that at no time have these been more active than within the last few years, or engaged on ground more carefully prepared to receive them by the unwisdom of English policy. I am not, and have never been, an alarmist about Russian invasion. Viewed as a power hostile to India, Russia is and may for ever remain innocuous, and I should view with equanimity her approach to the Hindu Kush, or even to the actual frontier, were it impossible for her to appear there as a friend. But as a friend I fear her. If our selfish system of government for our own and not for India’s good remains unchanged; if we do nothing to secure Indian loyalty; if we refuse to give to the people that assurance of ultimate self-government which shall enable them to await in patience the realization of their hopes; if we continue to treat them as enemies subdued, as slaves to work for us, as men devoid of rights – then it is certain that within a given time all the external world will appear to the Indians under a friendly guise, and Russia as being the nearest, under the most friendly.

Nor can it be denied that under present circumstances the Czar’s Government has much to offer which the people of India might be excused for thinking twice before they refused. The Russian, himself an Oriental, would be probably less hateful as a master than our unsympathizing official Englishman. But it is far from certain that it would be at all as a master that he would present himself to Indian hopes. He might well appear as an ally, a liberator from the deadly embrace of our financial system, a friend of liberty, sound economy, and material progress. Who is to say that Russia should not, in exchange for a new commercial pact with herself, offer to establish India in complete Home Rule, and thus outbid us in the popular affection? It would not be hard to persuade India that she would gain by the change, and, Englishman as I am, I am not quite convinced that she would on all points lose by it. In any case, it might well be that men would risk something in the desire of change, knowing that at worst it would not be much worse for them than now.

Nor is there any section of the community to which this kind of argument would apply more strongly than the Mohammedan. The present order of things is distinctly threatening them with ruin, while just outside the frontier, and almost within hand’s reach of them, live men of their own race and faith who are still self-ruled. What could be more natural than that they should look to these for support and succour, or to the still stronger Power beyond, if it should present itself as, in any special manner, their religious protector? Our own political unwisdom of the last few years has made this for the first time a possibility; and what was a mere chimera in the last generation is rapidly becoming a practical danger.

Whatever may have been the defects of the old Ottoman alliance, there is no question that it was popular in Mohammedan India, that it symbolized the friendship of England for the outside world of Islam, and that it left to Russia the invidious post of Islam’s chief enemy. For this reason the recent Afghan war, in its earlier stages, was condoned, it being understood as an indirect repulse of the Northern Power; and it was not till later that it was looked upon with general disfavour. But the doubtful arrangements of the Berlin Treaty, the discreditable acquisition of Cyprus and the abandonment of Tunis – when these things became slowly to be understood – operated a change in men’s minds, and prepared them for still stronger reprobations, when, for the first time, England showed herself distinctly the aggressor in Egypt.

In spite of the illusions of Ministers on the subject, or the subtleties to which they had recourse, it is beyond a doubt that the Mohammedans of India wholly sympathized with Arabi during the war; that they were disgusted with the false issues raised in connection with the Sultan’s proclamation of his rebellion; and that for the last two years Russia has ceased to hold with them the position of the most dangerous enemy their faith has to fear. I do not say that as yet the distrust is absolute. No little loyalty still survives for the English Crown as contrasted with the English Ministry; but it is quite certain that the history of Egypt’s ruin since the war, and the apparent design of our Government to destroy all that is best and foster all that is least good in Islam, is working on all sides a change. In the decay of Constantinople the Moslem world is looking more than ever for a champion; and if England refuses the office it may well be offered to another Christian Power.

This, I say, is one way in which Mohammedan India may be taught to seek its salvation from accumulating evils. The other – and to my mind the far more hopeful way – it is in the power of our Government still to encourage them to choose. Three years ago I pointed out, in a book entitled “The Future of Islam,” the view which Indian Mohammedans took of her Majesty’s duties towards them in connection with her assumption of the Mogul title; and, while I was in India last winter, I had the satisfaction of finding my statement of their case fully accepted by those whom it most concerned. The Indian mulvis, Shiah as well as Sunni, held that her Majesty, in making herself Empress of India, had accepted a legal responsibility toward the Mohammedan community which involved a distinct obligation of protection in return for their loyalty, especially in such matters as the administration of their religious trusts, the furtherance of their education, and the arrangements connected with their pilgrimage; and they had even caused a translation of my statement to be published in Hindustani.

With regard to religious trusts, I found everywhere complaint of their being misapplied. It appears that at the time of the resumptions, many of these were confiscated on the arbitrary ground of defect in title, and others later on apparently no ground at all but public convenience. The locally notorious case of the Mohsin trust in Bengal has now been in part remedied, but it is worth quoting as a case which the Government has been forced to acknowledge, and it has been cited to me as an example of numerous cases less well known in which similar injustice still exists. In this, a large property was bequeathed by a rich Mohammedan explicitly for pious uses, yet for many years the income held in trust by the Government was devoted, not to any Mohammedan purpose at all, but to the education of Hindus. This, I say, has been acknowledged; but I have been repeatedly informed that sufficient property is still in Government hands to satisfy, if it were devoted to the uses originally intended, all the pressing needs of Mohammedan education; and I have the authority of Dr. Leitner, Principal of the Lahore Government College, for stating that in the Punjab alone wakaf property to the value of many thousand pounds yearly is being officially misapplied.

Of the pilgrimage, I will only say that the need of organization in the shipment of pilgrims is still strongly demanded, and of protection while on their journey. Something has been, indeed, done in the last three years, but exceedingly little; and the Indian Mohammedans regard such protection as a duty of the Imperial Government, made more than ever necessary by the growing abuses connected with the quarantine and other vexatious regulations at Jeddah.

Again, with regard to their education, the case of the Mohammedans is this: Like the Catholics in England, they are extremely attached to their religion, and anxious that their children should inherit in its purity a blessing to which they themselves were born; and they consider that a merely secular education, such as is offered by the State, does not suffice for their need. In no country in the world is the position of a teacher towards his pupil a more powerful one than in India; and the Mohammedans see that at the Government schools and colleges the masters are, almost without exception, English or Hindu. The great mass of the orthodox, therefore, hold aloof from these, and the consequence has been that they find themselves deprived of nearly all State aid in their education, and, for the more rigid, of all public education whatsoever. It is of course cast in their teeth by their opponents that this is mere fanaticism and prejudice; that they refuse to learn English out of disloyalty, and that they desire no progress and no modern instruction. But, whatever may have been the case in former days, I can confidently assert that it is certainly not true now; and I hold the position taken by the Indian mulvis to be an unassailable one in justice, or on any other ground than the theory that all religion is pernicious and should be discouraged by the State. I do not say that the State in India has taken its stand publicly on this ground, but in practice its action with regard to public education affects Mohammedans in no other way. This, therefore, is a point on which the Imperial Government may, if it will, intervene as a protector, and in which its action would be at once appreciated by its Mohammedan subjects, and be recognized by them as a title to their loyalty.

Lastly, I would repeat what I have said elsewhere as to the special nature of the connection between the political and the religious organization of all Moslem societies. Mohammedans look to the government under which they live as a fountain of authority; and they expect that authority to be used; and it is useless to repeat to them that the Government is impartial to all religions and indifferent to their own. Indifference with them is tantamount to neglect of duty; and as such the Mohammedans of India regard the present abstention of the English Government. There are many liberal-minded men among our high officials, and not a few friends of Islam. But the tide of official movement is not in this direction; and the general feeling is indifference. What I mean is that I would have the matter taken up with vigour, as an Imperial duty, and not in Oude only and the North-West, but in every province where the Mohammedans are a numerous community. The advancement of their education, their encouragement in commercial and industrial pursuits, and a faithful protection of their religious interests abroad, will secure to the English Crown the renewed trust of its Mohammedan subjects. The neglect of these things, and a prosecution of the present evil policy of doing harm to Islam, will secure beyond redemption their disloyalty. It is a thing seriously to consider and decide while time is yet given. It soon may be wholly too late, for nothing is more certain than that the Indian Mohammedans, like those elsewhere, are in a crisis of their history; and that, by disregarding their just complaints, we are allowing griefs to grow which will some day overwhelm us with confusion. “England,” if I may be allowed to repeat what I said three years ago, “should fulfil the trust she has accepted by developing, not destroying, the existing elements of good in Asia. She cannot destroy Islam nor dissolve her own connection with her. Therefore, in God’s name, let her take Islam by the hand and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue.” This, in spite of the victory of force in Egypt, is still the only wise and worthy course.19

On the whole, the intellectual and religious aspects of India under English rule are what I found there of most hope, and I am glad to think that they could hardly have been witnessed under other domination than our own.

CHAPTER XV

THE FUTURE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT20

Before considering the case for self-government in British India, a few words may be said about the semi-independent Native States.

There is an interest attaching to these Native States which is twofold for the political observer. They present in the first place a picture, instructive if not entirely accurate, of the India of past days, and so serve in some measure as landmarks and records of the changes for good and evil our rule has caused. And secondly, they afford indications of the real capacity for self-government possessed by the indigenous races.

When one has seen a native court, with its old-world etiquettes, its ordered official hierarchies, and its fixed notions, one learns something, which no amount of reading could teach, about the tradition of paternal government long swept away in Madras and Bengal. One recognizes how much there was that was good in the past in the harmonious relations of governors and governed, in the personal connection of princes and peoples, in the tolerance which gave to each caste and creed its recognized position in the social family. One is surprised to find how naturally such adverse elements as the Hindu Brahmin and the Mohammedan nobleman lay down together under a system which precluded class rivalry, and how tolerant opinion was in all the practical details of life. One does not readily imagine from the mere teaching of history the reason which should place a Mussulman from Lucknow in command of the army of a Rajput prince, or a Hindu statesman in the position of vizier to a Nizam of the Deccan. Yet seeing, one understands these things, and one recognizes in them something of the natural law existing between “the creatures of the flood and field” which makes it impossible “their strife should last.” In the traditional life of ancient India there was an astonishing tolerance now changed to intolerance, an astonishing order in face of occasional disorder, and a large material contentment which neither war nor the other insecurities of life permanently affected. It is impossible, too, after having visited a native court, to maintain that the Indian natives are incapable of indigenous government. The fact which proves the contrary exists too palpably before one’s eyes. The late Sir Salar Jung was as distinctly a statesman as Lawrence or Dalhousie; and among the Mahrattas there are not a few diwans to be found in office capable of discharging almost any public function.