THE cold weather is not a season of unqualified delight in Calcutta, in
spite of the glorious coming of the Raj into his winter palace, and the
consequent nautch. The cold weather has its trifling drawbacks. The
mosquitoes and the globe-trotters are so bad then, that some people have
been known to prefer the comparative seclusion they enjoy when the
thermometer stands at 103° in the shade, when the mosquitoes have gone
to the Hills, pursuing the fat of the land, and the globe-trotters to
northern latitudes seeking publishers.
It may be set down as an axiom that the genus globe-trotter is unloved
in Calcutta. It may also be set down as an axiom that it is his own
fault, for reasons that may appear. But there are globe-trotters and
globe-trotters, and of some the offence is venial—nothing more, perhaps,
than that they make the hotels uncomfortable, and put up the price of
native curiosities. And some are amusing in their way, and some bring
English conversation with them; and I have known one to be grateful for
such poor favours as he received, but he was not a globe-trotter that
took himself seriously. It is also possible, I believe, if one lives in
India long enough, to come across a globe-trotter who is modest and
teachable, but we have been out here only twenty-two years, and I am
going home without having seen one.
The Parliamentary globe-trotter represents the species which has
impressed itself most upon Anglo-India. He has given a character and a
finish, as it were, to the whole genus. He has made himself so prevalent
and of such repute that, meeting any stalwart stranger of cheerful
aggressive countenance at His Excellency’s board, we are apt to inquire
amongst ourselves, “of what district?” hoping for reasons private to
Anglo-India, that it may not be a Radical one. The initials “M. P.” have
become cabalistic signs. They fill us with the memory of past
reproaches, and the certainty of coming ones. They stand for much
improper language, not entirely used in India. They inspire a terrible
form of fear, the apprehension of the unknown, for the potentials of the
globe-trotting M. P. are only revealed in caucus, the simple
Anglo-Indian cannot forecast them. Regularly with December he arrives,
yearly more vigorous, more inquisitive, more corpulent, more disposed to
make a note of it. We have also noticed an annual increase in his
political importance, his loquacity, and his capacity to be taken in,
which he would consider better described as ability to form an
independent opinion. At this moment we are looking forward to the last
straw in the shape of Lord Randolph Churchill.
Mr. Jonas Batcham, M. P., was not so great a man as Lord Randolph
Churchill when he arrived in Calcutta last cold weather; what he may
have become since, by the diligent use of his Indian experiences and
information collected “on the spot,” I have no means of knowing. George
Browne’s father was one of Mr. Batcham’s constituents, and this made Mr.
Batcham willing to stay with the Brownes while he was inspecting
Calcutta, and collecting advice to offer to the Viceroy. He kindly put
up with them for several weeks, and when he went away he gave four annas
to the sweeper.
Mr. Batcham occasionally described himself as one of the largest
manufacturers in the north of England, and though the description leaves
something to be desired, it does suggest Mr. Batcham. He was large,
imposing in front, massive in the rear. He was gray-whiskered, of a
rubicund countenance, of a double chin. He wore a soft felt hat a little
on one side, and his hands in his pockets, a habit which always strikes
me as characteristic of a real manufacturer. He was very well
informed—they all are. He had a suave yet off-hand manner, a
business-like smile, a sonorous bass voice, and a deep, raging and
unquenchable thirst for facts.
Mr. Batcham was very much aware of his value to the Brownes as a new
arrival from England—a delicate appreciation of himself, which is never
wanting to a globe-trotter. Mr. Batcham blandly mixed himself up with
the days when people came round the Cape in a sailing-ship, or across
the sands of Suez on a camel, and invested himself with all the
sentimental interest that might attach to a fellow-countryman discovered
in the interior of Bechuanaland. A generous philanthropic instinct rose
up and surged within him as he thought, in the midst of his joyful
impressions of the tropics, how much pleasure his mere presence was
probably imparting. He almost felt at moments as if he had undertaken
this long, arduous, and expensive journey in the interest of the Brownes
as well as those of his constituents.
The great concourse of his kind in the hotels, the telegrams in the
morning’s _Englishman_, the presence of overland cheese, the electric
light, and the modern bacteriologist, should have rebuked this
pretension somewhat, but it is doubtful if anything could do that. “I
saw both your parents before I sailed,” said Mr. Batcham, in liberal
compensation, as it were, for his first dinner, “and left them quite
well.” And when young Browne replied that since then he was sorry to say
his mother had had a bad attack of bronchitis, however, by the last mail
they had heard she was getting over it, the damper was only momentary,
and Mr. Batcham proceeded to inform them that Parnell was dead.
Oh, he was sufficiently communicative, that Batcham, sufficiently
willing to impart his impressions, as expansive, by the time they got to
the joint, as ever you liked. He had a certain humorous perception of
what was expected of him. As a “globe-trotter,” he was familiar with the
expression, and applied it to himself jovially without shame. The
perception was incomplete, and therefore did not make Mr. Batcham
uncomfortable. However, he understood perfectly that globe-trotters as a
class were frequently and prodigiously taken in. Acting upon this, Mr.
Batcham made his incredulity the strong point of his intelligence, and
received certain kinds of information with an almost obvious wink. That
very first night at dinner, he proclaimed himself to the Brownes a
person who could not be imposed upon—useless to try. “Coming down from
Benares,” said Mr. Batcham, “I travelled with a couple of men who said
they were indigo planters, and so they may have been for all I know.
Anyhow they spotted me to be a globe-trotter—said they knew it by the
kind of hat I wore—and then they proceeded to fill me up about the
country. One fellow said he didn’t own a yard of indigo land himself;
always got the peasants to grow it for him; and the other went into some
complicated explanation of how blue indigo was got by squeezing green
leaves. All sorts of yarns they told me. How the natives wouldn’t eat
factory sugar, because they believed it defiled in the preparation, but
preferred drain water to any other. How a Hill woman would make nothing
of carrying me on her back a thousand feet steady climbing. How in the
part of the country we were going through, it was so hot in June that
men had servants to drench them with water in the middle of the night
regularly. I saw they were enjoying it, so I let them go on—in fact I
rather drew them out, especially about indigo. Took it all in and cried
for more, as the babies do for patent medicine. Then when we got out at
the station here I said, ‘Thank you gentlemen, for all the “information”
you have given me. It has been very entertaining. Of course you will
understand, however, that I don’t believe a word of it. Good morning!’ I
fancy those two indigo planters will hesitate before they tackle their
next globe-trotter. I never saw men look more astonished in my life.”
“I should think so!” exclaimed young Browne; “what they told you was
wholly and literally true.”
Mr. Jonas Batcham looked at his host with a humorous twinkle. “Don’t
_you_ try it on,” said he.
Although Mr. Batcham found it advisable to shed so much of the light of
his countenance upon the Brownes, as I have said, it was native India
that he came to see and report upon. And to this end he had read one or
two of the most recent publications on the subject, works produced, that
is to say, by our very most recent visitors, smoking from the London
press before their authors’ names were dry in the Bombay hotel register.
These volumes had given Mr. Batcham comprehensive ideas of native India,
and he knew that between Cape Comorin and Peshawur were lying two
hundred and fifty million people urgently in need of his benevolent
interference. They were of different races, religions, customs, and
languages—Mr. Batcham had expected to find that and had equipped himself
for it by learning the names of almost all of them. He was acquainted
with several of their gods, he knew that Ganesh had an elephant’s head,
that Kali loved the blood of goats, and that Krishna was the source of
all things. He was aware also that it was not proper to speak of
Mohammedan rajahs or Hindoo sheiks, and he had informed himself upon the
subject of Eastern polygamy. Mr. Batcham was a person of intelligence
who did not travel without preparing his mind, and though according to
his own modest statement there was still a great deal that he didn’t
know about India, it was open to an appreciative person to doubt this.
In one direction Mr. Batcham had prepared his mind with particular care,
so that the very slightest impression could not fail to be deep and
permanent—in the direction of the wrongs, the sufferings, the grievances
under British rule, of his two hundred and fifty million fellow-subjects
in India. Upon this point Mr. Batcham was tender and susceptible to a
degree that contrasted singularly with his attitude towards the rest of
the world, which had never found reason to consider him a
philanthropist. This solicitude about his Indian brethren was the more
touching perhaps on that account, and the more remarkable because it
found only cause for grief and remorse in the condition of native India.
Any trifling benefits that have accrued to the people through British
administration—one thinks of public works, sanitation, education, courts
of justice, and so forth—Mr. Batcham either depreciated or ignored. We
had done so little, so “terribly little,” as Mr. Batcham put it,
compared with what we might have done, and of that little so much had
been done badly! Daily Mr. Batcham discovered more things that had been
neglected, and more things that had been done badly. He looked for them
carefully, and whenever he found one he wept audibly and made a note of
it. Time would fail me, as the preacher says, to recount all the
iniquities that came under Mr. Batcham’s observation during the weeks he
spent in India, and I am unworthy to describe the energy and
self-forgetfulness with which he threw himself into the task of
“investigating” them, always with the most copious notes. There was the
fact that both opium and country spirit were sold to the innocent Hindu,
not only with Government cognisance but actually under Government
regulations, the outrage to every Briton’s conscience being that
revenues were derived therefrom. The Government fattened, in Mr.
Batcham’s graphic figure, upon the physical misery and moral degradation
of its helpless wards. Mr. Batcham searched his mind in vain to find a
parallel to this, strange as it may seem in connection with his accurate
acquaintance with the amount of excise paid by his brother
philanthropists in British beer. The position of the Government of India
was monstrously unique. If Mr. Batcham were the Government of India, he
would scorn to fill the treasury with the returns of vice. Mr. Batcham
would tax nothing but virtue and the pay of Government servants. And
though Mr. Batcham was not the Government of India, was he not entitled
from his seat in the British House of Commons and the depth of his
righteous indignation, to call the Government of India to account? For
what else then did Jonas Batcham, M. P., one of the largest
manufacturers in the north of England, with little time to spare,
undertake this arduous and expensive journey to the East? Oh, there were
many things that grieved him, Mr. Batcham, many things to which he felt
compelled to take exception, of which he felt compelled to make a note.
He was grieved at the attitude of the Government towards the native
press in the matter of seditious and disloyal editorials, scattered by
thousands under shelter of the vernacular amongst an ignorant and
fanatic population. Mr. Batcham did not wish to see this practice
discouraged. The liberty of the press Mr. Batcham considered the
foundation stone of the liberty of the subject—let the people raise
their voice. Grieved also was Mr. Batcham at the cold shoulder turned by
Government to the Indian Congress—that noble embodiment of the struggles
and aspirations of a subject people. Mr. Batcham thought that all native
movements, movements that marked progress and emancipation, should be
warmly encouraged. The suspicion of intrigue was an absurd one, and this
was not merely a matter of opinion with Mr. Batcham. He had it from a
native gentleman prominently connected with the Congress. Mr. Batcham
had brought a letter of introduction to the native gentleman—Mr.
Debendra Lal Banerjee—and Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee had given him such
an “inside” view of the methods and aims of the Congress as gratified
Mr. Batcham exceedingly. Mr. Batcham found Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee the
soul of hospitality, very appreciative of Mr. Batcham’s illustrious
position, anxious to gratify Mr. Batcham’s intelligent curiosity by
every means in his power, and brimming over with loyalty and enthusiasm
for the institutions which Mr. Batcham represented. And when Mr.
Debendra Lal Banerjee declared, in admirably fluent English, that the
Congress was inspired by the single thought of aiding and upholding, so
far as lay in its humble power, the administration of the British
Government—to which every member felt himself personally and
incalculably indebted—Mr. Batcham rejoined audibly, begged Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee to believe that he was proud to be his fellow-subject,
friend, brother, and made a copious note of it.
[Illustration: MR. JONAS BATCHAM, M. P.]
Naturally, under these circumstances, Mr. Batcham would find a very
severe grief in the relations existing between European and native
society here, and naturally he could not find words to express his
indignation at the insolent and indifferent front of his fellow
countrymen towards the people of India. “All,” said Mr. Batcham, “on
account of a brown skin!” He could not understand it—no, he could not
understand it! But if Mr. Batcham could not understand it, he could do
what lay in his power as a person of generous sympathies and high moral
tone to alleviate it, and he threw himself into the task. Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee gave him no invitation which he did not accept, offered him
no opportunity which he did not profit by. He drove with Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee, he accompanied him to the races, to the native theatre, to
the English theatre, to the Kalighat, to the Botanical Gardens, to
various interesting religious and family festivals among Mr. Debendra
Lal Banerjee’s immediate social circle; also, on occasions upon which
the Brownes made immoderate thanksgiving, he dined with this Indian
gentleman and his emancipated wife, who was allowed to appear in public,
where she smiled a great deal and said nothing whatever. Mrs. Debendra
Lal Banerjee had not been very long emancipated, however, and it was in
complimenting his Indian friend upon having so charming a lady to be his
companion and helpmeet, as Mr. Batcham put it, that he observed the
first and only slight chill—it is impossible for Indian gentlemen to
freeze—in Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee’s responses. If Mr. Batcham could
have known how Mrs. Debendra Lal Banerjee was pinched for that
compliment!
I suppose that the entertainment and education of Mr. Jonas Batcham, M.
P., could hardly have cost Mr. Debendra Lal Banerjee less than four or
five hundred rupees when he added it up, but if he had the least desire
to see disaffection and sedition properly encouraged among his
countrymen, or took the smallest satisfaction in the aggravated
annoyance and embarrassment of the Government of India by Her Majesty’s
most loyal Opposition, he must have felt that he had done much to
further these things, and considered the money well invested. Mr. Jonas
Batcham, the incredulous, certainly left his hands so brimful of native
hypothecations that it would have been impossible to lodge another lie
in him anywhere. Urbane, impressively self-satisfied, and well oiled for
work, Mr. Jonas Batcham, M. P., being towed homeward down the river
Hooghly, was a sight which must have brought tears of pious thanksgiving
to the eyes of his amiable native friend upon the wharf. Nor was Mr.
Debendra Lal Banerjee without his private reward. Mr. Batcham, in
departing, clasped him figuratively to his capacious bosom, and told him
movingly that if ever he came to England the Batchams would hasten
collectively to do likewise. Mr. Batcham’s wife and family and friends
would await that event with an impatience which Mr. Banerjee must make
as brief as possible. Nothing would give Mr. Batcham greater pleasure
than to receive Mr. Banerjee in his home and show him over his “works,”
or perhaps—jocularly—to take him to a sitting of the House to hear his
humble servant badger the Secretary of State. And Mr. Banerjee responded
suitably that simply to hear the eloquent addresses of his honourable
friend would be amply sufficient to induce him to undertake the journey,
and that to witness the domestic happiness of this honourable friend
would be only too much joy—he was unworthy. And they parted in mutual
dolours. I anticipate, however, Mr. Batcham is not gone yet.
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