INDIA UNDER RIPON
INDIA UNDER RIPON
A PRIVATE DIARY
BY
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
CONTINUED FROM HIS
“SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION
OF EGYPT”
T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20
1909
(_All rights reserved._)
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. CEYLON 11
III. MADRAS 27
IV. HYDERABAD 57
V. CALCUTTA 85
VI. A MOHAMMEDAN UNIVERSITY 123
VII. PATNA, LUCKNOW 139
VIII. DELHI, RAJPUTANA 161
IX. THE NIZAM’S INSTALLATION 175
X. BOMBAY 208
XI. AN APOLOGY FOR FAILURE 227
XII. THE AGRICULTURAL DANGER 236
XIII. RACE HATRED 255
XIV. THE MOHAMMEDAN QUESTION 278
XV. THE FUTURE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT 299
APPENDICES
I. THE MOHAMMEDAN UNIVERSITY 327
II. SIR WILLIAM HUNTER’S LETTER 332
III. MAJOR CLAUDE CLERK’S LETTERS 334
INDEX 337
INDIA UNDER RIPON
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
I ought perhaps to have named this volume “The Awakening of India,”
because it describes the condition of Indian things at the time of
Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty, which was in truth the awakening hour of
the new movement towards liberty in India, the dawn of that day of
unrest which is the necessary prelude to full self-assertion in
every subject land.
The journey it records was made under circumstances of exceptional
interest at an exceptional moment, and should be instructive in
view of what has happened since. It contains a foreshadowing of
events which are under our eyes to-day, and suggests a solution of
problems which, after long waiting and with a timid courage, is
gradually being accepted as official.
The political situation in Lord Ripon’s time was as follows: Mr.
Gladstone, when he came into office in 1880, found himself at
the head of an immense majority in the House of Commons, pledged
to ideas of liberty in the East of which he had himself been the
foremost preacher. With regard to India he had formulated the
Liberal creed in a single sentence: “Our title to be in India,”
he had said, “depends on a first condition, that our being there
is profitable to the Indian nations; and on a second condition,
that we can make them see and understand it to be profitable.”
His predecessor’s policy had proved a failure. It had been one
of imperial expansion, of reckless finance, and of administrative
coercion. It had resulted in a disastrous frontier war, in an
immense financial deficit, and in the exasperation of the educated
native community. There had been a terrible famine, the severest
perhaps of the century. Many millions of the agricultural peasantry
had died or were reduced to a condition of semi-starvation. Famine,
to use the words of a popular Anglo-Indian writer of the time, had
become “the horizon of the Indian villager; insufficient food the
foreground.” The forest laws, the salt tax, the ever increasing
pressure of the revenue officers had driven some districts to the
verge of revolt. The vernacular press, which would have denounced
the Government as the cause of these evils, had been gagged in the
towns; and disaffection, stifled in its expression but none the
less real, was rife almost everywhere. The unrest was becoming, it
was thought, dangerous. It was to remedy these evils, and to put
the government of India on a footing of sounder economy, less war,
and a closer confidence between rulers and ruled, that Lord Ripon
was sent to India in the summer of 1880.
The choice of Lord Ripon as Queen Victoria’s representative and
Viceroy was, I believe, to a large degree Her Majesty’s own.
Little as she was in sympathy with Mr. Gladstone, she had this in
common with the new programme, that the disaffection of her Indian
subjects distressed her, and hardly less the arrogance with which
they were treated by their fellow subjects of British origin. In
the proclamation issued to the people of India after the Mutiny,
her royal name had been appended to a promise of entire equality as
between these and the others; and it touched her dignity that her
promise should have remained so long unredeemed. She had, besides,
a personal regard for Lord Ripon on account of his great integrity,
and he seemed to her the man most reliable she could send to
deliver a new message in her name to the people.
Lord Ripon landed in India in the late summer of the year of Mr.
Gladstone’s victory. He bore with him words of peace and hope
which raised native imagination to a point of high expectancy.
Mr. Gladstone’s name, to those who understood English politics,
seemed a guarantee of all reforms; his opinion about India had been
proclaimed from the house-tops; and the Queen’s personal interest
in the matter of her proclamation was known, and gave additional
assurance to the popular desire. Nor was Lord Ripon’s individual
attitude a disappointment to those who came in contact with him.
Though possessed of no great personal gifts or graces, he was a
transparently honest man, and it was felt that, as far as it lay
with the Viceroy to affect the situation, he could be relied on
as a friend to native India. He was seen from the first to be
a serious man, but without the chill reserve which is so great
a barrier between Englishmen and Orientals, and his manner had
something paternal in it which inspired a full measure of native
confidence. It was an advantage to him, I think, that he was not
a member of the English Church, but a Roman Catholic of more than
ordinary piety. Such was the impression made by Lord Ripon at the
opening of his Indian career. It was noticed of him as a wonderful
thing that, on landing at Bombay, his first visit was to the Roman
Catholic Cathedral, and a little later that in the streets of
Calcutta he would return the salutes of his native acquaintance,
contrary to all viceregal custom, and to the point that it became
the subject of private expostulation with him on the part of his
official _entourage_. His first public acts were in character with
the programme given him to carry out. The policy of enlarging
British India at the expense of her Asiatic neighbours and of the
native states was reversed; economy became the order of the day
in finance; and, as a first measure of conciliation with educated
native opinion, the gag of the press law was removed. It was made
clear that under the new _régime_ no native of India was to be
persecuted for the expression of his political views.
Nevertheless it was not long before it began to be perceived that,
however loyal Lord Ripon might be to his reforming principles, a
change had come over the spirit of those at home, in whose hands
the driving power of Indian reform really rested. In the early
summer of 1882, Mr. Gladstone, to the scandal of the Eastern world
and in contradiction of every principle he had professed two years
before when out of office, allowed himself to be persuaded to take
violent action in Egypt against the National Party of Reform, and,
after bombarding Alexandria, to send an army of 30,000 men to put
down the constitutional _régime_ beginning to be established there,
and restore, under pretext of repressing a rebellion, the forfeited
authority of the Khedive. It was an act of brutal and stupid
aggression, a war and an intrigue, undertaken in the interests of
cosmopolitan finance and in defiance of both law and principle.
Also, to make the matter worse for India, a large share of the
burden and cost of the war was thrown on the Indian army and the
Indian Exchequer. Against the gross injustice of this part of the
transaction, Lord Ripon protested in vain. He was powerless to
oppose the insistence of the Home Government, and the financial
iniquity was accomplished. From that moment it became evident to
the Viceroy that his mission of reform in the entirety of its
original scheme was doomed to failure. And so in truth it proved.
The lapse from principle in Egypt entailed other lapses, and in
India, and indeed throughout Asia, put back the clock of reform and
self-government for at least a generation. The spirit of aggressive
imperialism in the East, against which the Midlothian campaign had
been a protest, was by Mr. Gladstone’s own aggression revived and
strengthened. His sermon of Indian economy, and his denunciation
of unnecessary Indian wars were alike rendered ridiculous, and the
whole position of those who had followed him as the Apostle of
Eastern freedom, was abandoned to its enemies. Lord Ripon in the
spring of 1883, when, after two years of unwearied labour in the
attempt to gain over the Anglo-Indian officials to some practical
measure in accordance with the Queen’s proclamation, he decided at
last to give battle on what is known as the Ilbert Bill of that
year, knew himself already to be a beaten man; he felt that he was
championing a lost cause.
The Ilbert Bill was in itself but a very poor instalment of that
promised equality between her English and her Indian subjects which
he had been sent to give. Its object was to put a stop to the
impunity with which non-official Englishmen, principally of the
planter class, ill treated and even on occasion did to death their
native servants. It was to give for the first time jurisdiction
over Englishmen in criminal cases to native judges--instead of to
judges and juries only of their own countrymen. Trifling remedy,
however, though it was, it roused at once the anger of the class
aimed at, and a press campaign was opened against Lord Ripon of
unusual violence in the Anglo-Indian journals. The Ilbert Bill
was described as a revolutionary measure, which would put every
Englishman and every Englishwoman at the mercy of native intrigue
and native fanaticism. The attacks against Lord Ripon were
certainly encouraged by the Anglo-Indian officials; and presently
they were repeated in the press at home, and to the extent that the
Bill became a question in which the whole battle of India’s future
was being fought over and embittered. The “Times” took up the
attack; the Cabinet was alarmed for its popularity, and the Queen
was shaken in her opinion of her Viceroy’s judgement. Lord Ripon
was left practically alone to his fate.
Those who have read my “Secret History of the English Occupation
of Egypt” will understand in what way the cause Lord Ripon was
still defending at Calcutta was likely to affect me. It will be
remembered that, in the time of his predecessor, Lord Lytton, I
had paid a flying visit to India where I had enjoyed the then
Viceroy’s hospitality during two months at Simla. It had been a
visit solely of personal friendship, made at the close of a long
journey in Arabia, Turkey, and Persia, and that, notwithstanding
a Tory education and much prejudice in favour of my countrymen,
and in spite, too, of the daily society of such high Anglo-Indian
officials during my stay as Sir John Strachey, Sir Alfred Lyall,
and Lord Lytton himself, who had been at special pains to instruct
me in their ways and methods of administration, it had left
me more than doubtful of the advantage to native India of our
imperial rule. Strachey’s policy of “forward finance” seemed to
me one especially ruinous to India--a policy of ever-increasing
expenditure, ever-increasing public debt, and ever-increasing
taxation. Neither he nor Lytton had been able to convince me that
the immense poverty of the agricultural peasantry was not connected
with our extravagant English administration. This last Lytton, in
his lighter moods, was fond of describing as “a despotism of office
boxes tempered by an occasional loss of keys.”
Still I knew nothing for certain about native India. At Simla I
had had no opportunity of conversing with so much as a single
representative of its thoughts in opposition to the official views,
nor had I caught more than a glimpse of the skeleton figures of
the starving ryots as I passed rapidly by railway through their
plains. When I once more, four years later, turned my thoughts to
Indian travel, the single advantage I had acquired was that in the
interval my political education in regard to East and West had
progressed, and I had graduated in the severe school of personal
experience. The case of the Egyptian fellah is not very different
from that of the Indian ryot, and the economical needs of both are
closely parallel. I had witnessed the Egyptian revolution, which
was a revolt of the peasantry against a burden of debt, with my
own eyes and at close quarters, and I had found myself behind the
scenes in its struggle with European intrigue, a struggle where I
knew the right to be with the native reformers, the wrong with our
obstinate officials. I was determined that this time it should not
be under official chaperonage I would travel, but as far as was
possible on a basis of free intercourse with whatever inhabitants
of the land I could get access to. As a Home Ruler in the East,
I wished to ascertain what the true feeling of the country was
towards its English masters, and what the prospect of India’s
eventually gaining her freedom.
In this design I was of course greatly aided, as far as Mohammedan
India went, by the common cause I had made with the Egyptians in
their revolution, and the public advocacy of it I had undertaken.
It had put me in communication with some of the liberal leaders
of the Panislamic movement, and it is from them that I obtained,
so to say, my passports to the confidence of their Indian
co-religionists. To the Hindus I had no introduction. But here
circumstances, at the outset adverse in appearance, aided me. My
arch opponent in Egypt had been the Anglo-Indian Controller there
of Finance, Sir Auckland Colvin, and he, having got wind of my
intention, made an effort to frustrate it, by representing me
to Lord Ripon as a person politically dangerous, whom it would
be prudent to exclude from India, or place under official ban.
Colvin’s special service in Egypt had just come to a close and he
was once more in active Indian employment, and his name carried
weight. Nevertheless he found Lord Ripon irresponsive. Then, having
failed at head-quarters, he had recourse to the Anglo-Indian
press and, through an old standing connection with the “Pioneer”
newspaper, denounced me in print, an ill-advised action which,
more than any favourable introduction could have done, insured me
a welcome with the Hindus. Thus it happened that wherever I went
I was an object of pleased curiosity with the disaffected, as
one who, having incurred the anger of the Anglo-Indians, was by
that fact presumably their friend. If, in the sequel, my journey
achieved its object, and indeed far more than its object, it was to
the “Pioneer” and other organs of hostile official opinion that I
mainly owe it.
At the moment of my leaving London I received, in connection with
this and another matter, a message from Downing Street asking me
to call there, and the first entry in my diary refers to this. The
other matter was in regard to Egypt, where it had been suggested
that I should stop on my way to India and see Sir Evelyn Baring,
then newly appointed to the post he was so long to hold, and
concert with him a plan of restoring there the National Party. The
idea had been Mr. Gladstone’s, and I reserve a full account of it
for another occasion when I shall return to my Egyptian history,
only premising here that it came to nothing at the time and was
made a pretext later for excluding me from Egypt, reference to
which exclusion will be found in the diary. The first entry of
all refers to this, and to my then political connection with Lord
Randolph Churchill, in concert with whom, more or less, my journey
was undertaken. The Hamilton mentioned in the diary was Sir Edward
Hamilton, Mr. Gladstone’s chief private secretary; the Primrose,
Sir Henry Primrose, then holding the same position with Lord Ripon.
I omit in transcription nearly all that relates to Egypt, reserving
that part of my diary for another occasion. As to Lord Randolph,
it may not be unnecessary to explain that, in the battle in which
I had been engaged during the past year in Egypt, by far the most
effective ally I had found in Parliament had been the young leader
of the Fourth Party. Churchill, though an imperialist of the
Disraeli school, was a young man full of engaging qualities, with
generous impulses and a large sympathy with the weak and oppressed.
I had formed a close friendship with him, and had succeeded in
interesting him in my Oriental ideas to the extent that besides
taking up the cause of Egyptian nationalism, he later visited
India, and on his return in 1885 professed himself converted to
Lord Ripon’s policy. About this, and about his short career as
Secretary of State for India, I had intended to include a chapter
in this volume. But it has been decided that this, with much else
of a later date than 1884, shall be reserved for another occasion.
Churchill entered on his office with the best of intentions and
ideas, and I am still of opinion that had he remained for a few
years at the India Office he would have pushed on reform there as
none of his successors have had the courage since to attempt it.
With this preliminary word I leave my diary to tell its own story.