AN APOLOGY FOR FAILURE
Such was my Indian tour of 1883-1884. It will be rightly asked by
those who have read thus far how it came about that I wasted so
great an opportunity for good as then seemed open to me, and did
not return the following year, or indeed in any subsequent year,
to carry out the mission which appeared marked out for me. I often
ask myself the same question. Looking back at the position I held
for a moment with Hindus, Mohammedans, and Parsis alike, I am
filled with regret that in the sequel I should have put it to so
little purpose. If I had had the perseverance to pursue the course
I had begun, and had followed it out unflinchingly to its full
results, I believe that I might have brought about great permanent
good for the people whose interests I had espoused, and perhaps
with the Mohammedans encouraged them to a real reformation, social
and intellectual, if not political. To do this, however, it would
have been necessary for me to devote the whole of my life to this
special work, and to give up every other interest which I had at
heart and all my private affairs at home. It would have required
something more than sympathy to bring me to the point; and I
suppose my mind lacked the impetus of a full faith, without which
complete devotion to a cause more than half religious could not be.
Nevertheless I left Bombay with an entire intention of returning
the following winter, and of making a new tour for the collection
of the funds necessary for the proposed Mohammedan University. I
had already received promises of over £20,000, the greater part
being the intended gift of my friend the Rajah Amir Hassan, of
Lucknow; and, with the patronage of the Nizam and Lord Ripon’s
approval, the accomplishment of at least this part of my plans
seemed already within my reach. If it was frustrated, the fault,
though partly mine, was not wholly so. A series of misfortunes
happened in the course of the year which combined to defeat it, and
which nothing but very persistent determination on my part could
have sufficed to overcome.
In the first place Lord Ripon, though he had established a state
of things at Hyderabad favourable to reform as far as the native
elements of the government were concerned, had not been able to
impose his will altogether on the Calcutta Foreign Office. Trevor,
indeed, left soon after, but the _personnel_ of the Residency at
Hyderabad, in spite of all that had passed, was not thoroughly
changed. Cordery was allowed to remain on in power, and, as we
had foreseen, the old intrigues were quietly renewed. The young
minister, Laik Ali, was left without advice of any profitable
kind by the Resident, and through his youth and inexperience
made mistakes by which his enemies were not slow to profit. The
confidence and friendship which had from the outset existed between
him and the Nizam were undermined, and both were frustrated in
their better intentions, and, in accordance with the time-honoured
plan in dealing with native states, were encouraged to neglect
their public duties and indulge in a life of pleasure destructive
of their more serious energies. Thus the year was not out before it
became clear to me, from the reports I received, that the Nizam’s
patronage of the university scheme was not one which could be
prudently relied on.
Another misfortune was Lord Ripon’s resignation of the Viceroyalty
before his term of office was fully over. Frustrated in his larger
design of endowing India with something like free institutions, and
finding himself without real support from the Government at home,
he recognized that it was useless for him to prolong his stay, and,
amid the lamentations of native India, he returned to England a
defeated, if not a disappointed man.
Under his successor, Lord Dufferin, things lapsed into their old
groove, and all hope vanished of serious political reform. The
Mohammedans were, indeed, favoured by the new Viceroy as far as
their employment in the administration went, but anything like
vigorous action among them was once more discouraged. Thus, snowed
upon officially, the idea of an independent university, existing on
its own resources and subject to no influence of official fear or
favour, necessarily languished, and was abandoned by the timorous
souls of those whom for a moment I had persuaded to take it up
courageously. It is rare in India to find persistent energy in any
undertaking not patronized by Government. The death blow to the
scheme followed a little later when Rajah Amir Hassan, who had
persevered in it so far as to commence founding a college for his
Shiah co-religionists at Lucknow was attacked by an illness which
ended in insanity. Even if I had returned to India, it is doubtful
whether I could have done anything to neutralize these misfortunes.
As it was, I allowed myself to be discouraged by them into a
gradual abandonment of my Indian plan, and turned my energies into
other channels, which seemed to me at the time more practical.
My first enthusiasm was already cooled by a visit I paid to
Constantinople in the autumn of 1884. It had seemed to me that the
best chance of infusing general life into the university scheme
was to obtain for it the Sultan’s patronage. In spite of all I
knew of Abdul Hamid’s character, I thought it just possible that
if I could get speech with him I might persuade him to use the
enormous influence his name and Caliphal title gave him in Moslem
lands in the direction I desired. But my visit was a failure; I
found the Sultan personally inaccessible, except through such
channels as I was unwilling to employ, and at an endless expense
of time and money. At Constantinople the reign of corruption was
supreme, nor was any approach to the head of the Moslem faith
possible except by intrigue with the Court officials. It will be
seen, when I publish the sequel to these memoirs, how entirely the
atmosphere of the palace was opposed to serious ideas, and I left
Constantinople convinced that it was useless any longer to fight
against circumstances or attempt the impossible. Other interests
at the same time allured me away, the urgency of the crisis in
Egypt, the tragedy of Gordon at Khartoum, the general election of
1885, the Irish Home Rule movement, and the attempt I then made to
enter Parliament as its supporter. Thus, while I still continued to
interest myself in the fortunes and misfortunes of India, I never
again aspired to take a leading part in its affairs.
All the same, I think I may lay claim to have contributed something
towards the cause I had made specially my own, that of the Indian
Mohammedans. On my return to England in the spring of 1884, I found
Lord Randolph Churchill more than half disposed to go with me in
my plans for them, and to make himself in Parliament a champion
of Islam. It was partly through my persuasion and example that he
started on his tour in India the following winter, and the letters
I gave him for my Indian friends contributed not a little to his
success in that direction, though in the sequel his political
interests were too diverse to hold him permanently to any one
line of action. His visit, nevertheless, taken in connection with
his appointment in 1885 to the India Office under Lord Salisbury,
marks a turning-point in the official policy towards the Indian
Mohammedans which has ever since been followed. As a community
they were encouraged, not, indeed, as I had intended, but as a
counterpoise to the Congress movement of the Hindus; and gradually
the idea expounded by me in “The Future of Islam” has come to be
adopted as the Government’s own and used to its own purposes.
Nor was I forgetful of the promise I had made to my Hindu friends
of expounding to my fellow countrymen at home the griefs of which
I had been witness in India; the infinite poverty of its people;
the economic ruin they had suffered at our hands; the oppressive
character of the land assessment constantly enhanced, aggravated
as these things were by new forest laws and a salt tax levied on
the very poor;--and, no less, the arrogance of their official
rulers; the growing ill-will between class and class, and the
causes of what was rapidly becoming race-hatred between Englishman
and Indian. In the course of the summer of 1884 I embodied these
in a series of papers contributed to the “Fortnightly Review,” and
republished by me at the end of the year under the title “Ideas
about India,” a little work, which being now long out of print, I
propose here, as a natural sequel to the diary, to add in the form
of final Chapters.
There will be found among them a scheme of constitutional reform
not very different from that which we now see, after the lapse of
a whole generation, timidly and half-heartedly propounded at the
India Office, when all the grace of a spontaneous act of justice
has been lost with a lost opportunity. Such as they are I give
them unaltered, omitting only such portions of them as are merely
redundant of the diary, and adding here and there an explanatory
note recording changes which in the last quarter of a century have
come about. Alas, such changes have been seldom for the better, and
in its main features the condition of India is to-day economically
the same as what it was in Lord Ripon’s time, with only the
accumulated burden of poverty which famine years and years of
pestilence have brought about.
India’s famines have been severer and more frequent, its
agricultural poverty has deepened, its rural population has become
more hopelessly in debt, their despair more desperate. The system
of constantly enhancing the land revenue has not been altered.
The salt tax, though slightly lowered, still robs the very poor.
Hunger, and those pestilences which are the result of hunger, are
spread over an increasing, not a diminishing, area. The Deccan ryot
is still perhaps the poorest peasant in the world. Nothing of the
system of finance is changed, nothing in the economy which favours
English trade and English speculation at the expense of India’s
native industries. What was bad twenty-five years ago is, according
to all native evidence, worse now. At any rate there is the same
drain of India’s food to alien mouths. Endemic famine and endemic
plague, with British India’s universal bondage to the village
usurer, are facts no official statistics of prosperity can explain
away.
Nor has the chasm of race antipathy been at all narrowed. All the
causes of ill-will noted by me in 1884 are still existent in an
aggravated form, and find stronger ground of action now; and there
is one besides, unnoticed then, which may perhaps be added. There
can be no question that the twenty-five years which have elapsed
since 1884 have seen a change in the attitude of the white races
of mankind towards their fellow men of other hue and lineage, and
in their avowed conduct towards them. The old religious teaching,
Christianity’s best claim to the world’s regard, was that all
men were brothers at least in the sight of God, but this has
given place to a pseudo-scientific doctrine of the fundamental
inequalities of the human kind which, true as a statement of fact,
has been exaggerated and made political use of to excuse white
selfishness and white exclusiveness, and to reinforce the white
man’s pretension of rightful dominion over the non-white world at
large. I call this “pseudo-science,” because nothing really of the
sort exists under the world’s natural law. Darwin’s rule of the
“Struggle of Nature” and the “Survival of the fittest” included no
assertion of superiority in one race rather than another, giving it
dominion over the rest, nor has any species in the world’s natural
history prevailed in this way. Its survival has been, not by its
greater strength or even by its greater cunning, but by its better
adaptability to its local surroundings. Yet it is common to hear
Darwin quoted as an authority favourable to imperial domination and
race intolerance in lands unsuited to European survival, and it
is precisely under conditions such as we find in India that these
arguments find most favour with Englishmen. As a rule the English
in the East, missionaries apart, are not much of Christians, and
their tendency is to become less and less so in the progress of
modern ideas.
On the other hand the Indian races, many of them quite as
intellectual as the European, have been far from standing still.
Quite apart from such education as they have been receiving in
Government schools and colleges, the knowledge of the facts of the
Western World and its ways has been spread far and wide among them
by their ever-increasing intercourse with European travellers, and
the facilities they have themselves acquired of travel. If every
Government school in India were closed to-morrow, and every native
newspaper suppressed, I doubt if the spread of such information
would be greatly checked, this class of facts being conveyed from
mouth to mouth rather than by writing; and it is at any rate
certain that, at least in the towns of India, Englishmen are
appraised pretty generally at their real value, and their moral
weaknesses and intellectual limitations are known to every one,
even the poorest.
I confess I do not see how this unfortunate tendency of things is
to be mended by any rules or regulations issued to the Anglo-Indian
Civil Service. I am the more in despair about it, because I
have noticed precisely the same evil growth, though in a less
dangerous form, in Egypt. When I first knew Egypt, seven years
before the British occupation, the best possible relations existed
between Englishmen and native Egyptians. There was much familiar
intercourse and respect on either side, and English travellers,
rare in those days, were proud to be invited to the houses of rich
Cairo Moslems, while among the poor in the villages they were
always welcome. But the false position assumed by our people since
the occupation of 1882, that of rulers and ruled, the rulers being
aliens and affecting airs of race superiority over the natives,
has destroyed all this. Pleasant social relations can only continue
where those concerned meet on an equal human footing, and of all
inequalities the inequality of race is the most unsocial. In
India things have gone so far that I doubt if any measure, short
of placing the administration of the country wholly into native
hands, by abolishing the covenanted Civil Service as a privileged
body and reducing the Europeans employed to the position of well
paid servants not masters, would induce Englishmen to forgo their
pretension of exclusiveness, and bring them down to the level of
their merits, whatever these might be, as useful paid employés.
As to the concluding Chapter, that on “The Future of
Self-Government,” I leave it without comment as it was written
twenty-five years ago, though I should have liked to have drawn
from it a moral and to have applied it to the state of things we
see in India to-day. That, however, is forbidden me in deference to
the present difficulties of government, and also as being alien to
the historical character of the present volume. The suppression,
nevertheless, of free thought and speech in India, by the new
press laws, and the revival of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment
without trial, is a subject which I cannot let pass without a
protest, lest I should seem to approve. Such methods of government
are not only repugnant to me, but are, I am sure, as futile as
they are reactionary. If persisted in, they can only mean that
the Government relying on them has no serious intention of true
progressive reform.