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.