RACE HATRED
If agricultural distress is the major premiss of revolution
in India, the growth of political education in the towns is
its minor--political education, that is, unaccompanied by any
corresponding growth of political power.
With all my belief in Asiatic progress, I confess that before my
recent visit to India I was not prepared to find this latter at
all so far advanced as in fact it is; and from first to last I
remained astonished at the high level at which native intelligence
in political science already stands. I had judged it till then by
such scraps of Indian newspaper criticism as I had come across,
quoted not seldom by English writers in a hostile sense, and I
had judged it wrongly. The newspapers of India, at least those
edited in English, are neither on a par with our own, nor do they
bear an equal relation to the mental powers of those whose views
they expound. I mean that, whereas in England an article in the
“Times” or in one of the leading magazines, on a given subject,
is, as a rule, intellectually superior to the speeches statesmen
are delivering on the same subject, in India the oral arguments
are always the best.[17] Nor is it too much to say that for
conversation of a political character there are few races in the
world which can equal those of India, or that it would be difficult
from our own House of Commons to choose men capable of sustaining
a successful argument with the best educated Indians on any of
the subjects specially interesting to them. I was throughout
struck by this. The native mind is quick, lucid, and, it seemed
to me, also eminently judicial; and I found it distinguished by
the absence of all such passionate exaggeration as I had been led
to expect. Though in some of the public speeches I heard made at
Calcutta the flowers of rhetoric were certainly not wanting, I
did not find anything but what was substantial in the arguments
used, and I was repeatedly conscious of being tempted myself to
use stronger language than any which even at private meetings was
indulged in by the speakers. It seemed to me that a great deal
more might have been said without violating the truth, that evils
were often minimized, advantages dwelt on, and that there was a
general disposition to understate rather than exaggerate matters
in discussion. Often in conversation I have been on the point
of protesting against the too naïve confidence of men known as
demagogues in the good faith of English political action, against
their implicit trust in the virtue of reason and a just cause,
and their belief that, when they should have proved their griefs
to be well founded, relief would thereupon be given. They seemed
intentionally to ignore the selfishness and indifference of party
statesmanship in England with regard to India, and to be only too
willing, in spite of political deceptions, still to be deceived.
It is indeed remarkable that, considering how much real ground
of complaint there is against the present state of things, how
just and deep are the causes of personal resentment stirring the
minds of men, how galling to them are the everyday incidents of
being ruled by an alien race, and how little prospect there is of
any speedy change, there should be so few agitators of Indian
opinion who speak even in secret of any real rupture with England
as a thing to be desired. I hardly met with one on my travels
seriously so minded; and all seemed vividly to remember the evils
of their past history, and to see in them a warning of possible
dangers in the future and a reason for caution in their words and
actions. This, I say, was remarkable, and to one who, like myself,
was seeking the germs of self-governing power in India, presented
itself as a very hopeful sign. Froth, fury, and passionate
denunciation I found little of in India. Of logical argument I
found much, and of that reasoning from facts which is the best of
all reasoning, and which in politics goes by the name of common
sense.
While, however, I observed and am able to testify to the extreme
moderation of what may be called the responsible leaders of native
opinion in their purely political views, I could not fail in my
intercourse with the educated of all classes to become aware of
the ever-widening gulf of personal dislike which separates these
from the individual Englishmen who rule them. The question of
race hatred in India is a very delicate one to approach; and I am
conscious of accepting no little responsibility in venturing to
treat of it at all; and if I have resolved to attempt it, it is
that I consider it would be affectation in a writer on India to
pass over so marked and growing a feature of modern Indian society,
and that there are cases where the truth at any risk should be
told, and where facts, however painful and humiliating, are better
stated in their nakedness, while they can still be stated calmly,
than left to disclose themselves in some violent form at a day when
calm judgement shall have become impossible.
It is my distinct impression, from all that I have seen and
heard, that the ill-feeling now existing in India between the
English there and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not
allayed by a more generous treatment, will in a few years make
the continued connection between England and India altogether
impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will
ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable
misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of
violence, such as nothing in the past history of either will have
equalled. We have seen within our own recollection a complete
obliteration of kindly feelings in Ireland, brought about
originally by injustice, later by want of understanding. We are
seeing the same thing repeated through the same causes to-day in
Egypt. And to-morrow we may well find the case of India equally
hopeless. I do not believe it to be already so; but the injustice
is there, and the people are beginning to be awake and to resent
the stupidity of those who, representing England in India, wantonly
affront them; and unless the English public at home, with whom as
yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes awake too to the
danger of its own indifference, the same irreparable results of
a general race hatred will follow. Only it should be remembered
that, whereas Ireland and Egypt are countries comparatively
insignificant in extent and population, and for that reason easily
overawed by force, India is a vast continent peopled by races ten
times more numerous than ourselves, and that the convulsion when
it comes will be on a scale altogether out of proportion to our
experience, and so the more alarming. Let India once be united, as
Ireland and Egypt are, in a common sentiment of hatred for all
that is English, and our rule there will _ipso facto_ cease. Let
it once finally despair of English justice, and English force will
be powerless to hold it in subjection. The huge mammal, India’s
symbol, is a docile beast, and may be ridden by a child. He is
sensible, temperate, and easily attached. But ill-treatment he will
not bear for ever, and when he is angered in earnest, his vast bulk
alone makes him dangerous, and puts it beyond the strength of the
strongest to guide him or control.
The account given me by the oldest and best informed of my native
acquaintance (and I am not talking here of Bengali demagogues,
but of men holding, it may be, or who have held high office under
Government, and are deservedly trusted by it), of the gradual
estrangement which has come about within their recollection
between themselves and the English in India, is most instructive.
In the days, they say, of their youth, thirty and forty years
ago, though there were always among the Company’s officers men
who from their abuse of power were disliked and justly feared,
the general feeling of the natives towards the English civilian
was one of respect and even of affection. The Indian character
is affectionate, enthusiastic, and inclined to hero-worship; and
the English in early days, from their superior knowledge and
strength of character, exercised no little fascination on the
native mind. Nearly all of the older men talk with reverence and
esteem of certain teachers who instructed them in youth, and of
certain early patrons to whom they owed their success in after
life; and they willingly acknowledge the influence exercised over
themselves and their generation by such individual example. The
English official of that day, they affirm, had more power than now,
but he exercised it with a greater sense of responsibility, and
so of honour, in its discharge. He took pains to know the people;
and in fact he knew them well. Except in the very highest ranks of
the service he was readily accessible. He lived to a great extent
among the people, and according to the customs of the people. He
did not disdain to make friends with those of the better class,
and occasionally he married among them, or at least contracted
semi-matrimonial relations with the women of the land. This may
have had its ill consequences in other ways, but it broke down
the hedge of caste prejudice between East and West, and gave the
official a personal interest in the people, which no mere sense of
duty, however elevated, could supply. The Englishman of that day
looked upon India not unfrequently as his second home, and, taking
the evil with the good, treated it as such. England could only be
reached by the Cape route. Travelling was tedious and expensive,
the mails few and far between; and many a retired officer had
at the end of his service become so wedded to the land of his
adoption, that he ended his days in it in preference to embarking
on a new expatriation. It is easy to understand from this that the
Anglo-Indian official of the Company’s days loved India in a way
no Queen’s official dreams of doing now. Also that, loving it, he
served it better than now; and was better loved in return.
Steam communication, however, with England and the increased
facility given by it of maintaining home associations, had, even
before the death of the Company, begun to effect a change in the
way of living of its officers, a change which the Mutiny of 1857
accentuated and finally made complete. Gradually, as a visit to
England became easier, leave was more frequently applied for;
and the officer, returned from furlough, brought back with him
a renewed stock of Western prejudices. He no longer considered
himself cut off from the political life of his own country, or
occupied himself so exclusively with the politics of India; and he
came to look forward to other ways of distinction than those the
Indian service offered him. Lastly, the Mutiny itself, with the
bitter memories it left behind, put an end to the contracting by
Englishmen of native habits and native ties. With the introduction
of railways, quick posts, and telegraphic messages, Englishwomen
ceased to dread India as a field of marriage; and every official
now dreamed of making an English home for himself in the station
where he lived. Thus he cared yearly more and more for English news
and English interests, and less and less for those of India.
I shall no doubt incur anger by saying it, but it is a fact that
the Englishwoman in India during the last thirty years has been
the cause of half the bitter feelings there between race and race.
It was her presence at Cawnpore and Lucknow that pointed the sword
of revenge after the Mutiny, and it is her constantly increasing
influence now that widens the gulf of ill-feeling and makes
amalgamation daily more impossible. I have over and again noticed
this. The English collector, or the English doctor, or the English
judge may have the best will in the world to meet their Indian
neighbours and official subordinates on equal terms. Their wives
will hear of nothing of the sort, and the result is a meaningless
interchange of cold civilities.
Nothing in the world can be more dreary than the mixed assemblies
of the Indian natives and their Anglo-Indian patrons--inverted
Barmecide feasts, where everything is unreal but the meats
and drinks, and all the rest is ill-concealed distrust. I have
more than once assisted at them, and always with a painful
feeling. Englishwomen in India look upon the land of their exile
unaffectedly as a house of bondage, on its inhabitants as outside
the pale of their humanity, and on the day of their departure
home as the only star of hope on their horizon. The feeling may
be a natural and an unavoidable one, for it is probable that
race prejudices are more deeply rooted everywhere in women than
in men, but I affirm that it is most unfortunate, and under the
circumstances of growing education in the country, a very great and
increasing danger.
The excuse commonly made by the Anglo-Indians for the lack of
social cordiality between themselves and well-to-do natives is that
the caste regulations of the latter bar real intercourse. A man
who will neither eat with you nor drink with you, it is said, nor
admit you to his own wife’s society, cannot be really intimate in
your house. But I confess I cannot see the force of that argument.
In my own case I certainly did not find that caste prejudices
prevented my forming the most agreeable relations with a number
of Indian gentlemen, Brahmins of high caste, and Mohammedans, as
well as Parsis and native Christians, nor did I find any who did
not seem quite willing to treat me on an equal footing. I found
no difference of any insurmountable kind between their ideas and
my own; not more, indeed, than would have been the case had they
been Spaniards or Italians. The fact of their not breaking bread
with me, I am sure, constituted no kind of obstacle to our kindly
relations. On the other hand, it is obvious that, as regards the
native Christians at least, the rule cannot apply. These have no
caste prejudices, yet they are just as much excluded from the pale
of English society as the rest.
It will hardly be credited in England, but in this present year
of grace, 1884, no hotel-keeper in India dares receive a native
guest into his house, not on account, of any ill-will of his own,
but through fear of losing his custom. When I was at Bombay in the
winter I was treated with the greatest kindness and attention by
various members of the native community, and by none more so than
by Mohammed Ali Rogay, the leading Mohammedan of the city. He had
travelled in Europe, dressed in European dress, and had even so far
adopted our manners as to subscribe to all the public charities and
to drive a four-in-hand. Yet, happening one day to ask him to dine
with me at my hotel, it was explained to me that this could not be,
at least not in the public room, “lest the English guests should
take offence and leave the house.”
In Bengal and Northern India things are still worse, and I think
it is not too much to say that no native gentleman, whatever his
rank, age, or character may be, can visit a place of public resort
frequented by Englishmen, especially if he be in native dress,
without a certain risk of insult and rough treatment. Railway
travelling is notoriously dangerous for them in this respect, and
nearly all my native acquaintances had tales to tell of abuse from
English fellow-passengers, and of having been turned out of their
places by the guards to accommodate these, and now and then of
having been personally ill-treated and knocked about. Men of high
position, therefore, or self-respect, are obliged, either to secure
beforehand special compartments for their use, or to travel third
class. The second class they are especially afraid of. I should
not make this statement unless I had received it from unimpeachable
sources. But I have been assured of its truth among others by
two members of the Supreme Legislative Council at Calcutta, who
separately narrated to me their experiences. I know also that one
of the principal reasons with certain of the leading natives of the
Presidency towns who have adopted the European dress has been to
escape thereby from chance ill-usage.
A painful incident of this liability to insult occurred last
winter in my presence, which, as ocular evidence is always best,
I will relate. I had been staying at Patna with the principal
Mohammedan nobleman of the city, the Nawab Villayet Ali Khan, a
man of somewhat advanced age, and of deservedly high repute, not
only with his fellow-citizens, but with our Government, who had
made him a Companion of the Star of India for his services. On my
departure by the morning train on the 7th January last, he and some
thirty more of the leading inhabitants of Patna accompanied me to
the station, and after I had entered the railway carriage remained
standing on the platform, as orderly and respectable a group of
citizens as need be seen. There was neither obstruction, nor noise,
nor crowding. But the presence of “natives” on the platform became
suddenly distasteful to an English passenger in the adjoining
compartment. Thrusting his head out of window he began to abuse
them and bid them be off, and when they did not move struck at them
with his stick, and threatened the old Nawab especially with it if
he came within his reach. I shall never forget the astonishment of
the man when I interfered, or his indignation at my venturing to
call him to account. It was his affair, not mine. Who was I that
I should interpose myself between an Englishman and his natural
right? Nor was it till, with great difficulty, I had procured the
aid of the police, that he seemed to consider himself other than
the aggrieved person. Now I can affirm that there was absolutely
no reason for his conduct. He was a middle-aged man of respectable
appearance--a surgeon-major, as it turned out, in command of a
district in the Punjab; he was travelling with his wife; it was in
the morning, when ideas are calmest, and he was otherwise without
excuse for excitement. In fact, it was a plain, unmistakable act
of class arrogance, such as it has never been my lot to witness
in any other Eastern country that I have yet visited. Moreover,
it was evident to me that it was no unusual occurrence. The
railway officials and the police treated it as a matter of small
importance, did their best to screen the offender, and declared
themselves incompetent to do more than register my complaint. On
the other hand, the Nawab and his friends confessed with shame
that, though they were insulted, they were not surprised. It had
happened to all of them too often before for them even to feel any
special anger.
“We certainly feel insulted,” writes one of them to me a day or two
later, “but are powerless to take any action on it. We are used to
such treatment from almost every Anglo-Indian.”
“We account for his conduct,” says another, “by supposing that he
thought us (the natives) to be nothing less than brutes and wild
creatures”; while a third remarks:--
“From this you will see how our ruling race treats us with scorn
and contempt. Had we been in English dress, then we would not,
perhaps, have been so much hated.”
“I beg to assure you,” writes a fourth, “that the incident was not”
(an only) “one of its kind, but such treatment is becoming general.
The alarm and dread with which the Anglo-Indians are regarded
cannot be described. Alas! we are hated for no other reason but
because we have a dark colour; because we put on a national dress;
and because we are a conquered race.”
“Allow me to say that it will be difficult for England to hold
India long if such a state of feeling is allowed to progress
without any check.”
And so on through a mass of letters. I have hope now, however, that
the Government, before whom I laid this case, is taking it up. The
Nawab has lodged a formal complaint with the Collector; Lord Ripon
has promised that it shall not be allowed to drop; and my only fear
is that, through the procrastination with which all inconvenient
complaints are met in India by the subordinate officials, the
apology due to the offended gentlemen will be deferred so long that
its effect will have been in great measure lost.[18]
Another cause of the bad relations in modern times between the
Indians and their English masters has been explained to me to be
this:--Under the East India Company the official hierarchy, being
the servants of a commercial corporation, were mainly recruited
from certain families already connected by ties of service with
India, and imbued with traditions of rule which, though far from
liberal, were yet on the whole honourable to those who held
them, and not antagonistic to native sympathies. The officer of
the Company looked upon himself as the protector of native India
against all comers, his own countrymen as well as others; and
it was generally found that, where European planting and native
interests clashed, the Collector or magistrate was inclined to
favour the latter rather than the former in decisions which might
come before him. As a rule he belonged to a rank of life superior
to the non-official Anglo-Indian, and the distinction of class
was felt. Indeed, it often happened that there was more sympathy
of breeding between the Company’s servant and the well-born Hindu
or Mohammedan gentleman than between the same servant and the
English adventurer of the towns or the English indigo-planter
of the country districts. With the adoption, however, of open
competition for the civil service, another class of official
has been introduced into India, who is distinctly of a lower
social grade, and who in so far exercises less authority over his
trading fellow-countrymen, and, the natives say, is less kind and
considerate towards themselves. A young fellow, say the son of an
Ulster farmer, is pitchforked by a successful examination into high
authority in Bengal. He has no traditions of birth or breeding
for the social position he is called to occupy, and is far more
likely to hobnob with the commercial English of his district than
to adapt himself to the ceremonial of politeness so necessary in
Oriental intercourse. He is looked upon by the European planters as
one socially their inferior, and by the well-bred native as little
better than a barbarian. He is lowered, therefore, I am told, in
the social scale, and is far more frequently under the influence of
his tag-rag English fellow-countrymen than in former days. I cannot
say that I have met with men of this description myself, but I
have heard of them frequently, not only from the natives, but from
the English too, as a new difficulty of the situation.
What I did notice was, that throughout the agitation on the Ilbert
Bill, the planters had a considerable backing in the official
world. It was evident that the two societies were united in a way
which would have been impossible in old times, in their opposition
to the native hopes. This change of class in the members of the
Civil Service, and--what I am personally inclined to think more
important still--their change of duties, must be considered if
we are to estimate the increased irritation between race and
race. The modern system of bureaucratic regularity, where all is
done according to printed forms and fixed rules, entails on the
civilians many hours daily of irksome office work, unknown in
early times; and has had the double effect of wearying their zeal
and of secluding them still further from the people. Red tape has
strangled initiative in collectors, magistrates, and district
officers, and has left them no time for personal intercourse with
those they govern. “How can we sit gossiping with the natives,” say
these, “when we can hardly get through our daily work as it is by
the greatest economy of time?” A valid excuse, truly. Yet it was
exactly by gossip that Lawrence and Nicholson, and Meadows Taylor
gained their influence in former days.
I consider myself fortunate in having been at Calcutta at the
precise moment when the Ilbert Bill controversy was at its
fiercest, not on account of any special interest I took in the
Bill itself, but for the instructive display of rival passions and
motives it evoked. Lord Ripon has most unjustly been blamed for
unnecessarily causing the conflagration. But in truth all the
elements of a quarrel were there already in the strained relations
just described as existing between Englishmen and natives; and it
was an accident that the particular ground occupied by the Ilbert
Bill should have been chosen on which to fight the battle of race
prejudice. The history of the affair as viewed with natives’
eyes was this. When Lord Ripon arrived in India, he found the
ill-feeling between the two classes very bitter, and he wisely
determined on redressing, as far as in him lay, class disabilities,
thus carrying out the liberal doctrines proclaimed over and again
for India by his party while out of office. For such a work no man
could have been better suited by temperament or conviction. It is
hardly sufficiently understood in England how large a part personal
integrity plays in acquiring the sympathy of Orientals for their
rulers, and how impossible it is to govern them successfully either
by the mere mechanical instruments of a system or by individual
talents, however great, when these are divorced from principle. The
display of ingenuity and tactical resource which imposes on our own
political imagination and sways the House of Commons is absolutely
valueless in the East; and charlatanism is at once detected and
discounted by its acute intelligence. The Englishmen, therefore,
who have succeeded most permanently in India have rarely been
the most brilliant; and the names which will live there are not
those which their English contemporaries have always ranked the
highest. Moral qualities go farther; truth, courage, simplicity,
disinterestedness, good faith--these command respect, and above all
a solid foundation of religious belief. Such qualities the natives
of India acknowledged from the first in Lord Ripon, and no amount
of mere cleverness could have placed him on the pedestal on which
he stands to-day with them--or rather, I should perhaps say, on
which he stood until the desertion of the Home Government forced
him into an abandonment of his position as a protector of the
people.
I am glad to be able to bear testimony to the fact that no Viceroy,
Lord Canning possibly excepted, ever enjoyed such popularity as
Lord Ripon did in the early part of last winter. Wherever I went in
India I heard the same story; from the poor peasants of the south
who for the first time had learned the individual name of their
ruler; from the high-caste Brahmins of Madras and Bombay; from the
Calcutta students; from the Mohammedan divines of Lucknow; from
the noblemen of Delhi and Hyderabad--everywhere his praise was in
all men’s mouths, and moved the people to surprise and gratitude.
“He is an honest man,” men said, “and one who fears God,” and in
this consciousness all have seemed willing once more to possess
their souls in patience. To say that Lord Ripon has been a failure
in India, through any fault of his own, is to say the reverse of
a fact patent to the whole native world. He has been the most
successful governor India has ever had, because the most loved; and
the only sense in which he can be said to have failed is in so far
as he has failed to seek the favour of the English ruling class or
impose his will on the Home Government.
Of his legislative measures I must speak with less enthusiasm. The
spirit in which they were brought forward was Lord Ripon’s own; but
the drafting of the Bills was the work of others; and they have
been doubtless disappointing. Thus, the Local Self-Government Bill,
though admirable in idea as marking a first step towards native
administration, is in itself a poor thing, and is appreciated
as such even by Lord Ripon’s most cordial admirers. The powers
it grants are too exiguous, the ground it covers is too small,
the checks it imposes are too stringent, for the Bill to excite
any great enthusiasm with the natives, and it is difficult for an
Englishman to peruse its provisions without wonder at its ever
having gained the name of an important measure of reform. Put in
a few words, the Local Self-Government Bill means that the native
communities are to be allowed to mend their own roads, to levy
their own water rates, and devise their own sanitation, on the
condition and provided that the Commissioner of the district does
not think them incapable of doing so. This for the first time after
a hundred years of English rule! I know what the natives think of
the measure, and how little it fulfils their expectations; but no
higher tribute can be paid to Lord Ripon’s popularity than that
they have been sincerely grateful to him for it.
Thus, too, the Ilbert Bill, of which we have heard so much. It
was in itself an infinitesimal measure of relief from native
disabilities. It provided that native judges, under certain
exceptional conditions, in country districts, should have
jurisdiction over Englishmen, a jurisdiction long ago fully granted
them in Ceylon with no ill results, and also granted in India in
the presidency towns. The only province, as far as I could learn,
which would have been at all seriously affected by the Bill was
Bengal, where the English planters saw in it a check to their
system of managing and mismanaging their coolies. I heard a good
deal about this from some Assam planters with whom I sailed on
my way out to India, and I know that that is how they regarded
it. “It is all nonsense,” these told me, “to suppose you can get
on without an occasional upset with the niggers, and our English
magistrates understand this. But if we had native magistrates
we should be constantly getting run in for assault.” In other
districts, however, where milder manners prevail, there seemed to
be no such dread of the Bill; and as to the probability of any
real abuse of their position by native judges with Englishwomen,
I am certain that the whole thing was purely fictitious. But the
agitation against the Bill became dangerous from the fact that it
was all along fostered by the Anglo-Indian officials, who chose the
Bill as a battlefield on which to contest the principle of Lord
Ripon’s Liberal policy. In the Local Self-Government Bill they had
seen a first blow struck at their monopoly of power, and they seem
to have made up their minds to permit no second blow. They were
aided by the English lawyers, who recognized in it a menace to
their professional advancement; and by the planters for the reasons
I have given; and, following the example of the “Times,” the whole
press of England soon joined in the cry. The natives, too, from
first to last, fought the battle as one of principle, though with
far more moderation than their assailants.
I was present in Calcutta on the day when the compromise,
negotiated by Sir Auckland Colvin, was announced to the public,
and I know the effect it produced on native politicians. It was
everywhere looked on as a surrender, and a disgraceful one; and
there was a moment when it was doubtful whether popular indignation
would not vent itself in more than words. But Lord Ripon’s personal
popularity saved the situation, and moderate counsels prevailed. It
was recognized even by the most violent that the pusillanimity of
the Home Government, not of the Viceroy, was in fault; and it was
felt that, should popular indignation turn now upon Lord Ripon, no
Viceroy would ever again dare befriend the people. The compromise,
therefore, was accepted with what grace was possible, and bitter
feelings were concealed, and the day of indignation postponed.
I consider the attitude of native opinion on this occasion vastly
creditable to the political good sense of India, though it would be
highly dangerous to trust to it another time. The evil done will
certainly reappear, and be repaid upon Lord Ripon’s successors.
Down to the last year the natives of India, completely as they
had lost faith in the official system and in the honest purpose
of their covenanted rulers, still looked to the Home Government
as an ultimate Court of Appeal, able to defend them if not always
willing. The weakness, however, of the Cabinet on this occasion to
resist a wholly unjust and unscrupulous attack upon them was now
apparent, and I doubt extremely whether they will ever again have
confidence in Ministerial professions. The Government was entirely
committed to the passing of the Bill, yet it gave way before the
clamour of an insignificant section of the public, abetted by the
sworn enemies of all reform in India--the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy.
The spectacle was not an edifying one, and I know that the natives
appreciated it entirely on its merits, and I am much mistaken if
they did not also come to the conclusion that the justice of a
course was insufficient for its triumph in politics, and that the
only path of victory henceforth lay through agitation. If this is
so, there is little chance of peace in the future of the sort which
governments love.
I do not like to complain of evils without at the same time
suggesting remedies, but it is difficult to recommend an immediate
remedy for the evils I have been depicting. The ill-feeling which
exists between the English in India and the natives is due to
causes too deep-seated in the system we have introduced, and
until that system is changed, little real good will be effected.
I would, however, point out that there is as yet no true hatred
of race between Englishmen and Indians, but rather one of class
only, and that it is yet within our power in England to change the
threatened curse into a blessing. The quarrel in India up to the
present moment is with the Anglo-Indians only, not with the English
nation; and though recent disappointments have begun to shake their
confidence in the Home Government, the natives have not wholly
lost their belief in the sympathy of the land where liberty was
born. Between the two classes--the English of India and the English
of England--they still draw a distinct line, and race hatred in
its true sense will not have been reached until this line is
obliterated. They say, and truly, that in England such of them as
go there find justice, and more than justice, that they are treated
as equals, and that they enjoy all civil and social rights. They
come back proud of being British subjects, and preserve none but
agreeable recollections of the Imperial Island. They do not wish
for separation from its Government, and are loyal before all others
to its Crown. But the contrast of their subject-life in their own
land strikes them all the more painfully on their return, and they
are determined to procure reform. “Reform, not Revolution,” is
their motto, but reform they have made up their minds to have.
With regard to the direction any new change should take, the
educated natives argue thus: Purely English Administration, they
say, in India has had its day and needs to be superseded. It has
wrought much good in the past by the introduction of order and
method, by raising the standard of public morality, and by widening
the field of public interests. As such it deserves thanks, the
thanks of a sick man for his nurse, of a minor for his guardian, of
a child for his preceptor. But further than this, India’s gratitude
cannot go. It cannot be blind to the increasing deficiencies of
those who rule it, or forgo for ever the exercise of returning
strength and coming maturity. The Anglo-Indian bureaucracy has
become too hard a master; it has forgot its position as a servant;
it has forgot the trust with which it was charged; it has sought
its own interests only, not those of India; it has wasted the
wealth of the country on its high living. Like many another
servant, it has come to look upon the land as its own, and to order
all things in it to its own advantage. Lastly, it has proved itself
incapable of sympathy with those whose destinies it is shaping. It
neither loves India nor has been able to command its love; and by
an incapacity of its nature it is now exciting trouble, even where
it is most anxious to soothe and to cajole. Meanwhile the sick man
is recovering, the child is growing up, the minor is about to come
of age. He has learned most of what his tutors had to teach him,
and his eyes are open to the good and the evil, the wisdom and the
want of wisdom, the strength and the weakness of his guardians. He
desires a participation in the management of his own affairs and
a share in the responsibility of rule. To speak practically, the
Civil Service of India must be so remodelled as to make the gradual
replacement of Englishmen by natives in all but the highest posts
henceforth a certainty.
It is not proposed, I believe, by any section of the Indian
public to extend present demands farther than this. But, as with
all political reformers there is an ideal towards which they look
as the goal of their endeavours, so in India the goal of advanced
thinkers is complete administrative independence for the various
provinces on the model of the Australian colonies. Their thought
is that by degrees legislation as well as administration should
be vested in native hands. First it may be by an introduction of
the elective system into the present councils, and afterwards by
something more truly parliamentary. The supreme Imperial Government
all wish to preserve, for none are more conscious than the Indians
that they are not yet a nation, but an agglomeration of nations so
mixed and interblended, and so divided by diversity of tongues and
creeds, that they could not stand alone. An Imperial Government and
an Imperial army will remain a necessity for India. But they see
no reason whatever why the practical management of all provincial
matters should not, in a very few years, be vested in their hands.
That the present system of finance and the exploitation of India
to the profit of Englishmen would have to be abandoned is of
course certain. But there is nothing in India itself to make this
undesirable.
I refrain here from any attempt to sketch a plan of ultimate
self-government for India, but I have argued the matter out with
the natives, and I intend in a future chapter to set it forth
in detail. Suffice it now to say that a change of some sort is
immediately necessary, or at least an assured prospect of change,
if worse calamities are to be avoided. The danger I foresee is
that, with an immense agricultural population chronically starved,
and a town population becoming every day more and more enlightened
and more and more enraged at its servitude, time may not be
given for the slow growth of opinion in England as to the need of
change. I am convinced that if at the present moment any serious
disaffection were to arise in the native army, such as occurred
in 1857, it would not lead to a revolt only. It would be joined,
as the other was not, by the whole people. The agricultural poor
would join it because of their misery, the townsmen in spite
of themselves, because of their deep resentment against the
Anglo-Indians, and the native servants of the Crown because of the
checks placed on their advancement. The voice of reason, such as
now prevails in the academical discussions of the educated class,
would then be drowned in the general noise, and only the sense of
anger and revenge remain. I know that many of the most enlightened
Indian thinkers dread this, and that their best hope is to make the
reality of their grievances, the just causes of their anger, heard
in time by the English people. They still trust in the English
people if they could only make them hear. But they are beginning to
doubt the possibility of attracting their attention, and they are
very nearly in despair. Soon they may find it necessary to trust no
one in the world but themselves. To-day their motto is “Reform.”
Let us not drive them to make it “Revolution” to-morrow.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] The literary calibre of the native Indian press has immensely
increased since this was written.
[18] The apology was made, a lame one enough and rather tardy;
but as Mr. Primrose, Lord Ripon’s private secretary, remarks in
his letter of August 29, 1884, forwarding me a copy of it, “The
mere fact of a European addressing a formal apology to a native
gentleman is worth something.”