THE PATIENT EARTH
“Cold!” I said, just for something to say, as I came out of the
dak-bungalow into the thin January air before sunrise, and met an
educated Indian, who said “Good morning!”
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “You’d have thought it cold if you had slept
where I did.” And he pointed to a dusty place, where he had evidently
been lying in front of the house.
“Why on earth did you sleep there?” I asked; “there was plenty of
room inside.”
“I’m a Famine official, and I have been living inside for some nights
past,” he answered. “But when I got back at nine o’clock last night,
I found you were reading in one room and your boy had gone to sleep
in the other, so I stayed out here.”
“My boy!” I said. “Why, he sleeps everywhere! On the floor of my
room, at the door—anywhere! Why didn’t you come in?”
“Well, you see,” he answered, with hesitation, “I saw you were an
Englishman, and I knew that if I had come in, you’d have kicked me
out, and I didn’t want to be kicked out. That’s why.”
As I had been three months in India, I was not surprised, but as a
patriot I found it hard to reply, so I turned the conversation to
Famine and Relief.
We were in the United Provinces, where that season’s famine was
particularly bad. Mr. Theodore Morison has explained that in India
the word “famine” is now equivalent only to a “suspension of
agricultural industry.”[53] “Now that the relief of the unemployed
is undertaken by Government,” he says, “it is not a fact that
any considerable proportion of the people die of hunger when the
agricultural industry is interrupted.” In the United Provinces, then,
agricultural industry was suspended, and the cause of the suspension
was obvious. For close on four and a half months not a drop of rain
had fallen, and day after day the sun rose and set in a sky as clear
and hard as steel. Rain ought to have lasted well into October, and
in December to have begun again, and here was the second week in
January without a drop since August. The December harvest was lost,
and the ground so hard that scarcely a quarter of the usual crops had
been sown for the greater harvest due in March. The horror of past
famines is easily obliterated in India, for what would you expect of
a people to whom history is but a sleep and a forgetting? But men who
had known the course of Indian famines since the seventies told me
that unless rain came within a fortnight that year’s famine would be
worse than any that India had ever suffered.[54]
[Illustration: A BULLOCK WELL.
[_Face p. 272._
]
Coming twenty or thirty miles south of the Jumna from Allahabad,
where the Jumna and Ganges join, I had passed through a country
that became continually more desert. It was nearly flat, and rather
thickly covered with isolated thorns and the heavy mango trees, which
yield a fruit much sought after by the villagers, but now regarded as
a chief cause of cholera in famine time. So far, the trees had not
been stript bare for fodder, as I afterwards saw them round Delhi,
and the cattle were still kept from the unholy butcher’s hands by
a diet of chopped millet stalks, with linseed for the milkers. The
land was divided into tiny fields, about the size of one to four
tennis-courts, marked off by earthen banks, along the top of which
there is a right of way. Round the mud villages, wherever the wells
still held water, some of these fields were green with potatoes or
young wheat, or a tall bushy pulse with yellow flower, and all
day long the ryots were busy distributing the precious water through
little channels among the crops. I suppose no form of irrigation
surpasses the wells in value, though very many of them are sunk only
temporarily in times of drought, on account of the expense of sinking
a “pukka” or masonry shaft. As in most parts of India that I visited,
the water is usually drawn up in one or two large bags by bullocks
harnessed to the end of a rope and driven down a steep incline. But
many of the wells were dry, and so were many of the tanks or public
ponds, which, having originally supplied most of the mud for the
village habitations, afterwards become the social centres of village
life. In fact, the only tank I saw with a plentiful supply of water
left was one that three crocodiles had wisely selected for their
home. They were not so large as the dragonish monsters I had shot at
in West Africa, but large enough to disturb the social centre of any
English green. Two or three hundred yards away from the village wells
the little squares and oblongs of fields were absolutely bare, not a
weed showing. For miles on miles the drab surface of the earth was
hard and barren as a brick pavement.
The famine in Orissa was due to flood—an unforeseen calamity—and
though the area was small in comparison, the horror of the starvation
was much worse than anything in the United Provinces. The effect of
drought can be foreseen, and it is one of the Government’s recognized
functions to keep people alive in famine. Preparations for relief
had begun in October, and at the head of the administration stood
Sir John Hewett, the Lieutenant-Governor, in whom all Indians felt
a peculiar confidence. But apart from his special influence, it is
in famine time, as I have noticed before, that the zeal and sympathy
of our officials are seen at their best. Men who in ordinary seasons
would treat all Indians alike with habitual contumely, are perfectly
willing to die for them in their distress, and once I travelled in a
cabin with a high legal official in Allahabad, not connected in any
way with relief, whose voyage out was made more and more miserable,
because at every port came the news of continued drought in the
province. Such sympathy from above is a memory of our old land-owning
traditions, a relic of noblesse and its obligations, and, as long as
our superiority is as undisputed as a captain’s or a curate’s, we are
particularly successful in exercising this devoted patronage.
[Illustration: GOING TO WORK.]
[Illustration: RELIEF SHELTERS.]
As no rain fell, “test works” were established in December. On test
works heavy tasks like road-making are set, and no payment is given
unless the work is done. Nothing but real poverty and hunger will
drive people to work of this kind, and so, when two thousand men
were found to be labouring at each of the test works, it was assumed
that hunger was general, and “a state of famine” was officially
proclaimed. A state of famine implies relief works on which the
Government pays a fixed rate of wages to all workers, and assistance
of some kind is given to every one—women, children, babies, and the
old, as well as the able-bodied workers. The rate is decided by the
Famine Commissioner according to his estimate of the price of grain.
In this case he had calculated the price of grain for the time being
at 18 lb. (9 seers) to the rupee (1_s._ 4_d._). By the “Wages Table
for Public Works,” which is as easy to work with and as indisputable
as a table of logarithms, this price gave the rate of wages at 2_d._
a day for diggers, whether men or women (but hardly any women consent
to dig), 1½_d._ a day for carriers of earth (chiefly women), 1_d._
for children, and ½_d._ a day for babies.[55]
A few exceptional cases are specially treated. Any woman, for
instance, who presents the works with a new baby is rewarded with a
special donation of 1_s._ 4_d._ down. The wages were paid out of a
guarded treasure tent every afternoon, and the people bought their
own food from local merchants, who generally conveyed the grain on
the backs of bullocks from Allahabad. The women ground it themselves,
and made it into a sticky paste with a little salt, and that was what
the families lived upon. Drinking water was served from kerosene
tins by Brahmans so that none might be defiled.
Villagers in want of the wage looked round the plain at sunrise
for a red flag hoisted on a long pole. That showed the “recruiting
station,” and there the families congregated in long rows, waiting
to be allotted to gangers chosen from their own number. If any
were already too starved for labour, they were fed up to working
point; but there were none of the brown skeletons here that I saw in
Orissa, because, as the disaster was not sudden, the relief had begun
while the people were still in good condition. When the gangs were
arranged, they were led out to some allotted portion of the works,
the fellow-villagers remaining together for the stimulus of public
opinion. In other districts the relief works took the form of new
roads, but where I was the engineers had designed two great bunds
or dams to catch the monsoon rains over a large and gently sloping
area. For a few months each year shallow tanks would thus be formed,
which could be tapped as required for the fields at a lower level,
and, when dry, would leave a surface enriched with silt and moisture.
The dams were called Garhaiya Kalan and Telghana from neighbouring
villages, and one was seven miles long, the other a mile and a half.
If these were not sufficient for the winter’s relief work, many
more might be constructed, and the Government could always hope to
recover part of the outlay by the increased value of the land, for
which the landowners (zemindars) would as usual have to pay about
half their income as revenue. And as I thought of it, I sighed for
the orgy of battleships and old age pensions which we should enjoy
if only our Government at home could scoop up the unearned increment
like that!
[Illustration: ON THE RELIEF WORKS.
[_Face p. 276._
]
The process of constructing the dams was simple. Engineers had fixed
the required levels and breadths by upright poles with strings
stretched between them, and all that the workers had to do was to
pile up earth till the strings were just covered and disappeared
from sight. The earth was cut from both sides of the dam, and each
digger’s daily task, with the help of a woman carrier, was to clear
a plot of earth 13 ft. by 8 ft., and 1 ft. deep. A pick and hoe were
supplied by Government, but the natives refused the new English-made
tools, not from any Swadeshi prejudice, but because they were rotten
and would not cut. Women carried the earth in baskets made in the
gaols and threw it on the dam. Weaker women, cripples and children
broke up the clods, patting them rather gently with wooden implements
till the surface was fairly smooth and solid. That was all the work.
If the allotted task fell short, the payment of the whole gang of
fellow-villagers was reduced, so that each worker had an interest
in keeping all his friends up to the mark, and I did not hear any
complaints about reductions. What I did hear were the common
complaints of humanity that bellies were not full, that dealers
gave short weight, and that some parts of the ground were harder to
dig than others. By that time there were twenty thousand workers
on relief in this small district alone, and the numbers were daily
increasing. When people have to be saved by averages of thousands
together, how can you stop to give complete satisfaction? It is not
so that heaven is filled.
The hope was that, as the famine had been taken in time, the cholera,
which comes in the rearward of famine, might be avoided; and it was.
The only definite disease I noticed was a very common paralysis of
the knees, which crippled both men and women, but was not directly
due to famine. The people themselves attributed it to a kind of
pea they eat, and the pea had lately been forbidden to be sold on
Government works. I had seen the same kind of paralysis in the stone
quarries at Les Baux in Provence, where it was attributed to the
dust; but it seems hard to connect the two cases. Otherwise, the
people were as healthy as one can be on an average of 1½_d._ a day.
Most of them went back to their own villages in the evening. For
those who lived too far away tiny huts or coverts of bamboo frames
thatched with straw were provided. When the dams were finished, they
were to be “departmentally watched and maintained.”
When I saw Sir John Hewett a short time afterwards at Agra, he
told me he had over 150,000 workers on the relief works, and over
310,000 receiving relief of one kind or another. Owing to the famine
the yield of grain in his province was 3,500,000 tons below the
normal; rice yielded only a quarter of the average; and £4,000,000
had been lost on the sugar and cotton crops combined. To meet the
scarcity, Government had already suspended 120 lakhs (£800,000) of
land revenue, a large part of which would be permanently remitted,
and had advanced about £1,000,000 for relief, the purchase of seed,
and sinking of temporary wells. Speaking at Lucknow a few days later
(January 25, 1908) Sir John Hewett said:—
“These measures have given heart to the people, provided occupation
in the villages at remunerative rates of wages, and prevented the
occurrence of crime. The people themselves have met the crisis in
the most commendable spirit. Never was there a famine in which the
people and the Government and its officers showed a more united
front than the present one. The ryots have toiled early and late to
prepare and sow their fields for the spring harvest, and they have
not toiled in vain.”
That speech was made, however, after blessed rain had fallen. When
I was at Agra, one inch of rain suddenly fell in one night, and I
shall not forget the joyful change upon the faces of the officials.
It must be remembered also that, excellent as the administration of
the famine relief was, and fully as the Lieutenant-Governor deserves
his popularity, the United Provinces is probably a district all the
easier to govern just because it is comparatively backward, and
out of its population of nearly 50,000,000 about 70 per cent. are
directly dependent upon agriculture for their living.[56]
In his Financial Statement to the Viceroy’s Council (March 20, 1908),
Mr. E. N. Baker, now Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, calculated that
the famine of the year had affected an area with a population of
about 49 millions. It had raised the price of wheat so high that
the export from India had almost wholly stopped, while the Burma
rice crop had been diverted to India to take the place of what was
lost. He estimated the amount of takavi advances, or village loans
for wells, seed, etc., for the preceding and present years together
at 4 crores of rupees (about £2,650,000), and the amount of revenue
suspended for the two years at nearly 360 lakhs (nearly £2,400,000),
of which a large proportion must be permanently remitted. The total
loss to the State by loss of revenue and increase of expenditure
combined he estimated at 985 lakhs (about £6,633,000) for the two
years. He added the significant comment:—
“The distress caused by high prices has undoubtedly affected
all classes, and has pressed with great severity on the urban
populations, and on all who are dependent on small fixed incomes.
But the more painful conditions which we associate with widespread
famine in India—the emaciation, the aimless wandering, the
disruption of social ties, and the increase of crime—are as yet
so rare and exceptional as to be scarcely noticeable. The energy
and determination with which the people have themselves faced the
calamity have been observed on all hands, and we may reasonably
hope that if the coming season is favourable the progress of the
country will resume its normal course, without any such check as a
famine on a similar scale would have caused in bygone times.”[57]
That sounds fairly simple, and, of course, its hopefulness was
justified; but the whole question of the famine brought one up short
against problems that may be common to all countries, but are perhaps
more difficult in India, because under our rule the economic stages
are becoming mixed together. What Mr. Baker, for instance, says about
the pressure upon urban populations and small fixed incomes owing to
the famine is true; but then the pressure appears to be permanent,
famine or no famine. The rise in price of ordinary provisions seems
to be continuous and general. I heard the same complaint in the
Deccan, in Eastern Bengal, Calcutta, Benares, Allahabad, Delhi, and
Lahore. Within twenty years wages may have doubled, but the cost
of common food has quadrupled. In Bengal, for example, Mr. Chunder
Nath Bose, Fellow of the Calcutta University, who knew the prices
as a boy, says they have gone up fourfold or even tenfold for the
staples of Bengal diet, such as rice, wheat, potatoes, brinjal, dal,
fish, and, what is worst, for milk and ghi (clarified butter).[58]
Many explanations were given me by English and Indian alike—the
export of grain, the growth of jute, the fixing of the rupee, the
increased circulation of rupees before 1893, and the transition from
payment in kind to payment in cash. Some of these explanations are
contradictory, and all of them have been vehemently contradicted. But
as to the result, there appeared to be no doubt: life is becoming
harder for all working people, especially for all workers on fixed
incomes, and the only people who do not notice the increasing burden
are the few with “rapidly expanding business” and those who could not
possibly eat up to their incomes if they tried.
It was still more difficult to discover the real condition of the
peasants and labourers in the country compared to the workpeople in
the towns. In villages near the relief works, the cultivators (ryots)
told me they paid sometimes one and sometimes ten rupees a bigha
(rather over half an acre) to the zemindar, but their average rent
appeared to be about two rupees a bigha (say 5_s._ 6_d._ an acre).
Some said they thought they made or saved ten or even twenty rupees
a year for marriages, births, funerals, ceremonies, and pilgrimages.
But nearly all of them said they saved nothing. They admitted,
however, that for a daughter’s marriage a ryot would sometimes
spend as much as two hundred rupees, borrowed from the zemindar
or banya (money-lender), and when I asked one of them what he
borrowed on if he had no savings, he replied that he borrowed on his
“respectability,” which is, I suppose, what most people borrow on.
At the back of the borrower’s mind, I think, is the continual hope
for a “bumper” crop that will start him free again, but as the rate
of interest without solid security was anything from 25 to 36 per
cent. both here and in the Punjab, the ryot often became little more
than a labourer in the employment of the money-lender, who advanced
him seed and stock and took the crop. In a village outside Lahore I
found the cultivators had agreed among themselves not to spend money
on marriages in future, though these village festivals had been their
only joy, and now, unless a juggler or reciter came round, they had
nothing whatever to break the monotony of toil upon the land—not even
a school. Neither were there any schools in the villages I visited
near Allahabad, nor in those near Delhi.
But though in many cases the ryot had become little better than a
labourer in the employment of a landowner or money-lender, there was
still a recognized class of landless labourers below him. In the
villages near the relief works the labourer (who is always paid in
kind) got 2½ lbs. of grain for a day’s work from dawn to dark with
two hours off, and he could count on work most of the year if the
rains were good. He also received one pair of shoes, one cloth, and
ground for his hut, which he built himself. Some of the labourers
told me of a further gift of three rupees a year (4_s._) which seemed
to be a kind of Christmas-box. If the wife worked she got 1⅛ lb.
of grain a day. Turned into money, at the village price of grain,
the labourer’s wage would thus be about 2_d._ a day, apart from his
wife’s earnings (say 1_d._) and the extras I have mentioned.[59]
[Illustration: SWADESHI WEAVERS, BOMBAY MILLS.
SWADESHI WEAVERS, MADRAS HAND-LOOMS.
[_Face p. 284._
]
Beside the money-lender, the landowner, the cultivator, and the
labourer, I found in every village one or two artisans, though the
division of industry was not exact, and some of the artisans did
a little agriculture as well. Nearly all villages seem to have a
barber, a potter, a carpenter, “sweepers” or scavengers, and one or
two priestly families to perform the common rites that mankind wants,
to bless the harvest, foretell the weather, and control the local
ghosts. In some villages I also found the hand-loom weaver, and in a
Mohammedan village near Lahore the weaver told me he could make ten
yards a day, which he valued at five annas, his wife spinning the
yarn by walking to and fro as on a rope-walk. In the same village
the carpenter was specially employed on making water-wheels. But the
village artisans, as a rule, are not paid by the job but are allowed
a fairly regular income by the village, each family contributing so
many measures of grain at each of the two harvests for their support.
For instance, the village priest gets about 5 lb. of grain per plough
at harvest, but the potter gets 20 lb. per plough and the carpenter
50 lb.[60]
As far as mere money-value goes, it is not very hard to compare the
earnings of village labourers and artisans with the earnings of
workpeople in the towns. In the eighty or ninety cotton mills of
Bombay, for instance, the average man’s wages are 18 rupees a month,
or a little over 10_d._ a day; a woman’s highest wage is a fraction
under 7_d._ a day, and half-time children, nominally over nine years
old and under fourteen, get 2¾_d._ a day, which is more than the
average labourer’s wage in the village. At a mill in Delhi I found
the wages were less—12 rupees a month instead of 18 for men, and 6
rupees instead of 8 for boys; but the hours of labour were twelve
with one hour off instead of thirteen with (nominally) only half an
hour off. In reality, I think it would be quite impossible to get
Indians to do what Lancashire people would call work for twelve or
thirteen hours at a stretch, with only those little breaks. At all
events, it is not done.
By the measure of money, then, the Bombay mill-hand would seem to
be about five times better off than the village labourer of the
United Provinces. In so far as most people enjoy living in swarms
rather than in isolation, he is better off; but otherwise the lot
of both is perhaps almost equally unenviable. The hours in a Bombay
mill are spent in monotonous labour, among hideous noise, and in a
fluffy atmosphere, where there are no fans to decrease the dust, the
heat, or the smell. All round the factories, workmen’s dwellings, or
“chawls,” have sprung up, usually in galleries of single rooms along
the first floor above a row of open shops. The average rent is one
rupee (1_s._ 4_d._) a week for a room, and the whole family lives
in one room, in which, as a rule, there is no window but the door.
Most families are saved a lot of dusting and breakages by having no
furniture except a metal cooking-pot for the rice and dal—a sort of
split pea. These are cooked in cocoanut oil, and form the almost
invariable food, though in one black hole I did see a woman
cooking something that smelt like the ghost of a fish, and sometimes
a family launched out into a maize pancake. In one or two rooms there
were real decorations—portraits of Rama, of Krishna, or the King—and
for a week every doorway was hung with a string of dry leaves, ears
of rice, and little crimson flowers like knapweed, in memory, I
suppose, of some old village festival. All night long, under a waning
moon, the mill hands sat in the verandahs of these wretched homes,
beating drums, and chanting their barbaric scales—“praising God,”
as they said when we asked them; but what form of God, or for what
reason they praised Him, they could not explain.
[Illustration: WORKMEN’S DWELLINGS, BOMBAY.
[_Face p. 286._
]
Villagers, of course, retained the usual advantages of country
life—fresh air, purer food, and greater bodily freedom and variety
in labour. But the inner conditions of life were otherwise much
the same. In furniture, even the fairly well-to-do cultivators
seldom went beyond a fireplace (usually outside), a grain store,
a plank bed, some rags, some brass pots and dishes, and in rare
cases a few silver ornaments on the legs and arms of the women as
the most convenient bank. All necessary architecture, even in mud
hovels, is beautiful, and so are all implements for human use,
but I never saw any attempt at decoration or conscious beauty. It
would be absurd to call the Indian peasants ignorant, for they
understand their own business quite as well as we understand ours,
and in their own knowledge they have little to learn. But in most
villages the isolation and absence of schools make them unnecessarily
superstitious and apprehensive of unreal dangers. Almost within sight
of Lahore, the women rushed away to the flat roof-tops with their
children for fear I should blight their souls, and the men could not
imagine what I might be, except a revenue collector, a pill doctor,
or an official come to poison the wells with plague. Near Delhi the
women turned their faces sharply to the wall at my shadow, and lived
in perpetual terror of “soldiers,” though for no definite reason. At
the foot of the Himalaya up from Hardwar, no one in the village had
heard of the Viceroy, or of the Congress, or of Lajpat Rai, though
it was little more than twenty-four hours’ journey from Lahore. Only
one man knew what a newspaper was, or had ever seen one, and neither
he nor any one else could have read a word of it. One old man said he
knew they were governed by England, but he had no notion what sort of
a thing England was. Another old man in a village within ten miles of
Delhi told me that, although he knew nothing about England, he was
grateful to the English because when he was a boy his grandfather
used to tell him of horrible murders and lootings, but there were
hardly any of such terrors now. And as that was one of the few nice
things I heard about ourselves in India, I will conclude with it.
[Illustration: BOMBAY MILL-HANDS.
[_Face p. 288._
]
But the central problems remain untouched—the problems of the
famines, the rise in prices, and of the poverty, which is probably
increasing. Is the rainfall permanently growing less, and, if so,
have the alterations in the Nile anything to do with it? Is the
distress more terrible because the cultivators sell their grain,
largely for export, instead of hoarding some proportion of it? Or is
it true that they ever hoarded it? Is it want of money rather than
want of grain that is bringing ruin on the people? All these things
are said.[61] But I would point out one simple and obvious thing
about the famine district that I visited in the United Provinces. The
land there by its direct and immediate yield was expected to support,
in the first place, the Government, with its expensive army and civil
service; in the second place, the landowners (zemindars) who usually
did the same kind of work as our landowners at home—collecting rents;
in the third place, the farmers (ryots), who sold the crops, paid
the rent, and worked themselves when poverty compelled them; in the
fourth place, the labourers, who worked in good years and starved in
bad; in the fifth place, the artisans, who worked for civilization
and decency; in the sixth place, the priests, who worked for
religion and the soul; and in the seventh place, the money-lenders,
who scooped up an interest of about 30 per cent. when they could get
it. Patient as this old earth is, it seems to me that in parts of
India her patience is a little overburdened.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” p. 241. The
whole of that most interesting book on village life in the United
Provinces might be read in connection with this chapter.
[54] Mr. Theodore Morison thinks there is no evidence that famines
are more frequent now than in the past, and he gives a summary of the
very meagre records that have come down to us of eighteenth-century
famines: _ibid._ chap. x.
[55] If paid in grain the ration is 2 lb. 4 oz. for a man, 1 lb. 12
oz. for a woman, 1 lb. 4 oz. for a child.
[56] For the figures at the last census and the division of
occupations, see “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,”
chap. i.
[57] Indian Financial Statement, 1908-9, p. 4.
[58] “England’s Administration of India” (1907); the author, besides
describing minutely the growing poverty of small officials, etc.,
with fixed incomes, dwells on the dyspepsia and ill-health from
overstrain and unwholesome hours introduced by English habits, but
especially on the increasing devastation of malaria.
[59] For the condition of the landless class, see “The Industrial
Organization, etc.,” p. 191, where Mr. Morison, commenting on Mr.
Crooke’s Report of 1888, also comes to the conclusion that the
average value of a labourer’s wage is now about 2 annas (2_d._).
[60] William Crooke’s “Enquiry into the Economic Condition of the
Agricultural and Labouring Classes in the North-Western Provinces and
Oudh,” 1888: quoted by Mr. Morison, _ibid._, p. 179.
[61] Sir William Wedderburn has discussed these and similar problems
in his “Note on Sir Antony MacDonnell’s Famine Report of 1901,” and
in many other pamphlets.