_Comes back to the Railway, after Reflections on the Management of
the Empire; and so Home again, with apology to all who have read
thus far._
In the morning the tonga rattled past Deoli Cemetery into the open,
where the Deoli Irregulars were drilling. They marked the beginning of
civilisation and white shirts; for which reason they seemed altogether
detestable. Yet another day’s jolting, enlivened by the philosophy of
Ram Baksh, and then came Nasirabad. The last pair of ponies suggested
serious thought. They had covered eighteen miles at an average speed of
eight miles an hour, and were well conditioned little rats. “A Colonel
Sahib gave me this one for _bakshish_,” said Ram Baksh, flicking the
near one. “It was his _baba’s_ pony. The _baba_ was five years old. When
he went away, the Colonel Sahib said:--‘Ram Baksh, you are a good man.
Never have I seen such a good man. This horse is yours.’” Ram Baksh was
getting a horse’s work out of a child’s pony. Surely we in India work
the land much as the Colonel Sahib worked his son’s mount; making it do
child’s work when so much more can be screwed out of it. A native and a
native State deals otherwise with horse and holding. Perhaps our extreme
scrupulousness in handling may be Statecraft, but, after even a short
sojourn in places which are dealt with not so tenderly, it seems absurd.
There are States where things are done, and done without protest, that
would make the hair of the educated native stand on end with horror.
These things are of course not expedient to write; because their
publication would give a great deal of unnecessary pain and
heart-searching to estimable native administrators who have the hope of
a Star before their eyes, and would not better matters in the least.
Note this fact though. With the exception of such journals as, occupying
a central position in British territory, levy blackmail from the
neighbouring States, there are no independent papers in Rajputana. A
King may start a weekly, to encourage a taste for Sanskrit and high
Hindi, or a Prince may create a Court Chronicle; but that is all. A
“free press” is not allowed, and this the native journalist knows. With
good management he can, keeping under the shadow of our flag, raise two
hundred rupees from a big man here, and five hundred from a rich man
there, but he does not establish himself across the Border. To one who
has reason to hold a stubborn disbelief in even the elementary morality
of the native press, this bashfulness and lack of enterprise is amusing.
But to return to the over-the-way administrations. There is nothing
exactly wrong in the methods of government that are overlaid with
English terms and forms. They are vigorous, in certain points, and where
they are not vigorous, there is a cheery happy-go-luckiness about the
arrangement that must be seen to be understood. The shift and play of a
man’s fortune across the Border is as sudden as anything in the days of
Haroun-al-Raschid of blessed memory, and there are stories, to be got
for the unearthing, as wild and as improbable as those in the _Thousand
and One Nights_. Most impressive of all is the way in which the country
is “used,” and its elasticity under pressure. In the good old days the
Durbar raised everything it could from the people, and the King spent as
much as ever he could on his personal pleasures. Now the institution of
the Political has stopped the grabbing, for which, by the way, some of
the monarchs are not in the least grateful--and smoothed the outward
face of things. But there is still a difference, and such a difference,
between our ways and the ways of the other places. A year spent among
native States ought to send a man back to the Decencies and the Law
Courts and the Rights of the Subject with a supreme contempt for those
who rave about the oppressions of the brutal bureaucrat. One month
nearly taught an average Englishman that it was the proper thing to
smite anybody of mean aspect and obstructive tendencies on the mouth
with a shoe. Hear what an intelligent loafer said. His words are at
least as valuable as these babblings. He was, as usual, wonderfully
drunk, and the gift of speech came down upon him. The conversation--he
was a great politician this loafer--had turned on the poverty of
India:--“Poor!” said he. “Of course it’s poor. Oh yes! D--d poor! And
I’m poor, an’ you’re poor, altogether. Do you expect people will give
you money without you ask ’em? No. I tell you, Sir, there’s enough money
in India to pave _Hell_ with if you could only get at it. I’ve kep’
servants in my day. Did they ever leave me without a hundred or a
hundred and fifty put by--and never touched? _You mark that._ Does any
black man who has been in Guv’ment service go away without hundreds an’
hundreds put by--and never touched? You mark that. Money! The place
stinks o’ money--just kept out o’ sight. Do you ever know a native that
didn’t say _Garib admi_? They’ve been sayin’ _Garib admi_ so long that
the Guv’ment learns to believe ’em, and now they’re all bein’ treated as
though they was paupers. I’m a pauper, an’ you’re a pauper--we ’aven’t
got anything hid in the ground--an’ so’s every white man in this
forsaken country. But the Injian he’s a rich man. How do I know? Because
I’ve tramped on foot, or warrant pretty well from one end of the place
to the other, an’ I know what I’m talkin’ about, and this ere Guv’ment
goes peckin’ an’ fiddlin’ over its tuppenny-ha’penny little taxes as if
it was afraid. Which it is. You see how they do things in ----. It’s six
sowars here, and ten sowars there, and--‘Pay up, you brutes, or we’ll
pull your ears over your head.’ And when they’ve taken all they can get,
the headman, he says:--‘This is a dashed poor yield. I’ll come again.’
_Of course_ the people digs up something out of the ground, and they
pay. I know the way it’s done, and that’s the way to do it. You can’t go
to an Injian an’ say:--‘Look here. Can you pay me five rupees?’ He
says:--‘_Garib admi_,’ of course, an’ would say it if he was as rich as
a banker. But if you send half a dozen sowars at him and shift the
thatch off of his roof, he’ll pay. Guv’ment can’t do that. I don’t
suppose it could. There is no reason why it shouldn’t. But it might do
something like it, to show that it wasn’t going to have no nonsense.
Why, I’d undertake to raise a hundred million--what am I talking of?--a
hundred and fifty million pounds from this country _per annum_, and it
wouldn’t be strained _then_. One hundred and fifty millions you could
raise as easy as paint, if you just made these ere Injians understand
that they had to pay an’ make no bones about it. It’s enough to make a
man sick to go in over yonder to ---- and see what they do; and then come
back an’ see what we do. Perfectly sickenin’ it is. Borrer money! Why
the country could pay herself an’ everything she wants, if she was only
made to do it. It’s this bloomin’ _Garib admi_ swindle that’s been going
on all these years, that has made fools o’ the Guv’ment.” Then he became
egoistical, this ragged ruffian who conceived that he knew the road to
illimitable wealth, and told the story of his life, interspersed with
anecdotes that would blister the paper they were written on. But through
all his ravings, he stuck to his hundred-and-fifty-million-theory, and
though the listener dissented from him and the brutal cruelty with which
his views were stated, an unscientific impression remained and was not
to be shaken off. Across the Border one feels that the country is being
used, exploited, “made to sit up,” so to speak. In our territories the
feeling is equally strong of wealth “just round the corner,” as the
loafer said, and a people wrapped up in cotton wool and ungetatable.
Will any man, who really knows something of a little piece of India and
has not the fear of running counter to custom before his eyes, explain
how this impression is produced, and why it is an erroneous one? This
digression has taken us far from the child’s pony of Ram Baksh.
Nasirabad marked the end of the Englishman’s holiday, and there was
sorrow in his heart. “Come back again,” said Ram Baksh cheerfully, “and
bring a gun with you. Then I’ll take you to Gungra, and I’ll drive you
myself. Drive you just as well as I’ve driven these four days past.” An
amicable open-minded soul was Ram Baksh. May his tongas never grow less.
“This ’ere Burma fever is a bad thing to have. It’s pulled me down
awful; an’ now I am going to Peshawar. _Are_ you the Station-Master?” It
was Thomas--white cheeked, sunken-eyed, drawn-mouthed Thomas--travelling
from Nasirabad to Peshawar on pass; and with him was a Corporal new to
his stripes and doing station duty. Every Thomas is interesting, except
when he is too drunk to speak. This Thomas was an enthusiast. He had
volunteered, from a Home-going regiment shattered by Burma fever, into a
regiment at Peshawar, had broken down at Nasirabad on his way up with
his draft, and was now journeying into the unknown to pick up another
medal. “There’s sure to be something on the Frontier,” said this gaunt,
haggard boy--he was little more, though he reckoned four years’ service
and considered himself somebody. “When there’s anything going,
Peshawar’s the place to be in, they tell me; but I hear we shall have to
march down to Calcutta in no time.” The Corporal was a little man and
showed his friend off with great pride:--“Ah, you should have come to
us,” said he; “we’re the regiment, we are.” “Well, I went with the rest
of our men,” said Thomas. “There’s three hundred of us volunteered to
stay on, and we all went for the same regiment. Not but what I’m saying
yours is a good regiment,” he added with grave courtesy. This loosed the
Corporal’s tongue, and he discanted on the virtues of the regiment and
the merits of the officers. It has been written that Thomas is devoid of
_esprit de corps_, because of the jerkiness of the arrangements under
which he now serves. If this be true, he manages to conceal his
feelings very well; for he speaks most fluently in praise of his own
regiment; and, for all his youth, has a keen appreciation of the merits
of his officers. Go to him when his heart is opened, and hear him going
through the roll of the subalterns, by a grading totally unknown in the
_Army List_, and you will pick up something worth the hearing. Thomas,
with the Burma fever on him, tried to cut in, from time to time, with
stories of his officers and what they had done “when we was marchin’ all
up and down Burma,” but the little Corporal went on gaily.
They made a curious contrast--these two types. The lathy, town-bred
Thomas with hock-bottle shoulders, a little education, and a keen desire
to get more medals and stripes; and the little, deep-chested,
bull-necked Corporal brimming over with vitality and devoid of any ideas
beyond the “regiment.” And the end of both lives, in all likelihood,
would be a nameless grave in some cantonment burying-ground, with, if
the case were specially interesting and the Regimental Doctor had a turn
for the pen, an obituary notice in the _Indian Medical Journal_. It was
an unpleasant thought.
From the Army to the Navy is a perfectly natural transition, but one
hardly to be expected in the heart of India. Dawn showed the railway
carriage full of riotous boys, for the Agra and Mount Abu schools had
broken up for holidays. Surely it was natural enough to ask a child--not
a boy, but a child--whether he was going home for the holidays; and
surely it was a crushing, a petrifying thing, to hear in a clear treble,
tinged with icy _hauteur_:--“No! I’m on leave. I’m a midshipman.” Two
“officers of Her Majesty’s Navy"--mids of a man-o’-war in Bombay ----
were going Up-country on ten days’ leave! They had not travelled much
more than twice round the world; but they should have printed the fact
on a label. They chattered like daws, and their talk was as a whiff of
fresh air from the open sea, while the train ran eastward under the
Aravalis. At that hour their lives were bound up in and made glorious by
the hope of riding a horse when they reached their journey’s end. Much
had they seen “cities and men,” and the artless way in which they
interlarded their conversation with allusions to “one of these
shore-going chaps you see” was delicious. They had no cares, no fears,
no servants, and an unlimited stock of wonder and admiration for
everything they saw, from the “cute little well-scoops” to a herd of
deer grazing on the horizon. It was not until they had opened their
young hearts with infantine abandon that the listener could guess from
the incidental _argot_ where these pocket-Ulysseses had travelled. South
African, Norwegian, and Arabian words were used to help out the slang of
Haslar, and a copious vocabulary of shipboard terms, complicated with
modern Greek. As free from self-consciousness as children, as ignorant
as beings from another planet of the Anglo-Indian life into which they
were going to dip for a few days, shrewd and observant as befits men of
the world who have authority, and neat-handed and resourceful
as--blue-jackets, they were a delightful study, and accepted freely and
frankly the elaborate apologies tendered to them for the unfortunate
mistake about the “holidays.” The roads divided and they went their way;
and there was a shadow after they had gone, for the Globe-Trotter said
to his wife:--“What I like about Jeypore"--accent on the first syllable,
if you please--“is its characteristic easternness.” And the
Globe-Trotter’s wife said, “Yes! It is purely Oriental.”
This was Jeypore with the gas-jets and the water-pipes as was shown at
the beginning of these trivial letters; and the Globe-Trotter and his
wife had not been to Amber. Joyful thought! They had not seen the soft
splendour of Udaipur, the night-mare of Chitor, the grim power of
Jodhpur and the virgin beauty of Boondi--fairest of all places that the
Englishman had set eyes on. The Globe-Trotter was great in the matter of
hotels and food, but he had not lain under the shadow of a tonga in soft
warm sand, eating cold pork with a pocket-knife and thanking Providence
who put sweet-water streams where wayfarers wanted them. He had not
drunk out the brilliant cold-weather night in the company of a King of
loafers, a grimy scallawag with a six days’ beard and an unholy
knowledge of native States. He had attended service in cantonment
churches; but he had not known what it was to witness the simple solemn
ceremonial in the dining-room of a far away Residency, when all the
English folk within a hundred-mile circuit bowed their heads before the
God of the Christians. He had blundered about temples of strange deities
with a guide at his elbow; but he had not known what it was to attempt
conversation with a temple dancing-girl (_not_ such an one as Edwin
Arnold invented), and to be rewarded for a misturned compliment with a
deftly heaved bunch of marigold buds on his respectable bosom. Yes, he
had undoubtedly lost much, and the measure of his loss was proven in
his estimate of the Orientalism of Jeypore.
But what had he who sat in judgment upon him gained? One perfect month
of loaferdom, to be remembered above all others, and the night of the
visit to Chitor, to be remembered even when the month is forgotten. Also
the sad knowledge that of all the fair things seen, the inept pen gives
but a feeble and blurred picture.
* * * * *
Let those who have read to the end, pardon a hundred blemishes.