India Under Ripon: A Private Diary

Lastly, and this is the case all over British India, the peasantry is deeply, hopelessly in debt. It is curious to find this prime cause of the Egyptian Revolution faithfully reproduced in India under our own paternal and enlightened rule, and through the same causes. Agricultural debt came into being in either case with European methods of finance; and, although the subject has been thoroughly threshed out by previous writers, I shall perhaps be pardoned if I once more briefly explain the process. In old times, as I understand the case, in Oriental lands money was practically unknown to the peasantry. Their dealings were in kind, and especially the land tax paid to the Government was paid not in coin but in corn. The whole of the peasants’ security, therefore, if they wanted to borrow, was their crop – and, if at sowing-time they needed seed, it was recoverable only at the harvest; at which time also the Government took its share – a tenth according to strict Mohammedan law, or it might be a fifth, or in times of grievous tyranny the half. Nothing more, however, than the crop of the year was forthcoming. No lender, therefore, would advance the impecunious cultivator more than his seed corn or the loan of a yoke of oxen, and there was no possibility on the Government’s part of anticipating the taxes. The economic law of ancient Asia was to do things parsimoniously, to spend according to the means in hand, and at most to store up wealth for rainy, or rather rainless, days.

But with European administration came other doctrines. Wealth, our economists affirmed, must not be idle; production must be increased; resources must be developed; capital must be thrown into the land. The revenue, above all things, must be made regular and secure. In order to effect this, payment in money was substituted for payment in kind, a regular tax for an irregular portion of the crop; – and, while the rate was nominally lowered, no loss from accidental circumstances was to be allowed to fall upon the Government. So much coin must be forthcoming every year as the tax on so many acres. In countries like England where the system is understood, where markets are at hand, and money plentiful, this is undoubtedly the best and most convenient form of levying the revenue. But in the East its introduction has always produced disorder. In the country districts of India, as in Egypt, corn could not be sold in the public market at its full market price, and, when the day came for payment of the Government dues, the peasant had the choice either of selling at a grievous loss or of borrowing the money. He generally borrowed. I believe it may be stated absolutely that the whole of peasant indebtedness in either country originally came from the necessity thus imposed of finding coin to pay the land tax.

The change, however, put immediate wealth into the hands of Government, by lessening the cost of collecting the revenue, and so was approved as a beneficial one; and by an inevitable process of financial reasoning borrowing was encouraged. It was argued that capital, if thrown into the land, would increase the wealth of the agriculturist along with the wealth of the revenue. But how induce the investment of that capital except by increasing its security? In order to enable the agriculturist to borrow, he must be able to give his debtor something of more value than the crop in his field. Then why not the field itself? The laws of mortgage and recovery of debt by safe and easy process were consequently introduced, and courts appointed for the protection of creditors. This completed the peasant’s ruin. Finding money suddenly at his disposal, he borrowed without scruple, not only to pay taxes and to improve his land, but also for his amusements. Whether I am right or wrong in the details of this history, it is an indisputable fact that at the present moment there is hardly a village in British India which is not deeply, hopelessly in debt. In the course of my inquiries I do not remember to have met with a single instance of a village clear of debt even in Bengal.

This is the last worst evil which English administration has brought upon the Indian peasantry, and when one considers all their poverty and the depth of their increasing liabilities one finds it difficult to have patience with the optimist views of men like Sir John Strachey, who see all that they have created in India and find it very good. That we have done much that is of advantage to agricultural India no one will deny, but have we not done it still more harm? We have given the ryot security from death by violence, but we have probably increased his danger of death by starvation. This is a doubt which is beginning to assert itself vividly in the minds of thoughtful Indians, and it is one that Englishmen too will do well, before it is too late, to entertain.

Admitting, then, the general fact of India’s growing agricultural poverty, what should be our remedy? I confess to being a little sceptical of the legislative nostrums partially applied and proposed to be applied by the Imperial Government to a patient manifestly in want of a complete change of treatment and a long period of financial rest. Nor do I see my way to accepting such alleviations as the Bengal Rent Bill, or the founding of agricultural banks, or even local self-government, though all these things may be good, as a sufficient check to the evils fast accumulating. At best they may succeed in shifting the burdens of the people a little on this side or on that. They will not lighten them really by a single pennyweight, nor restore the confidence of the people in the humane intentions of the Government, nor put off even for a year the trouble which on the present lines of policy must certainly ensue. I do not believe in legislative remedies for the starvation of the ryot or in the possibility of relieving his position except at the sacrifice of interests too strongly represented both at Calcutta and in London to be assailed with any chance of success. Finance, not legislature, is the cause of all the evil; and until that is put upon a sound footing, the rest is of no real value.

When I was at Calcutta, I constantly discussed this matter with the leading native economists, and I know, too, their ideas in other cities; and at Bombay it formed the chief subject of attention at the meeting specially convened to instruct me with regard to the wants of the Presidency. I know, therefore, what Indians think about Indian finance, and I believe their reasoning is sound. According to these, the vice of the Calcutta budgets lies in the fact that, whereas in every other country the finance Minister looks solely to the interests of the country he serves, in India he looks principally to the interests, not of India, but of England. Two English interests have to be served first, before any attention can be paid to the necessities of those who supply the revenue. First, the Anglo-Indian Administration must be maintained in full employment, in pay, allowances, and according to native ideas in luxuries; and secondly, every kind of advantage must be given to English trade. It is unnecessary for me to argue out the question of the excessive costliness of the civil and military establishments of India. These are notorious in the world as surpassing those of all other countries to which they can be fairly compared in the present time or the past. And, although they may also lay claim to be the most efficient, it does not prevent them from being a vast financial failure.

It is a perpetual astonishment to travellers to note the scale of living of every Englishman employed in India, in however mean a capacity. The enormous palaces of governors and lieutenant-governors, their country houses, their residences in the hills, their banquets and entertainments, their retinues of servants, their carriages and horses, their special trains on their journeyings, their tents, their armies of retainers and camp followers – these are only samples of the universal profusion; an equally noble hospitality reigns in every bungalow on the plains; and endless dinners of imported delicacies, with libations of imported wines, tempt night after night the inhabitants of the most solitary stations to forget the dismal fact that they are in Asia and far from their own land. No Collector’s wife will wear an article of Indian manufacture to save her soul from perdition, and all her furniture, even to her carpets, must be of English make.

I remember early in my travels having the good fortune to enjoy the hospitality of a country station-master on the Indian Peninsular Railway, and being astonished to find him living in better style, and in a house larger than most English rectories, while we were driven out after luncheon by his lady in a charming phaeton drawn by a pair of stepping ponies. There was no reason, however, for astonishment. He lived as all Englishmen in India do, that is to say, about five times as well as in his rank of life he possibly could do at home, and he was worthy of his good fortune. Only it must not be supposed that the natives starving outside are at all proportionately the better for the brave living of their rulers. I, an English traveller, profited as a guest, and I am half ashamed to say how sumptuously I fared. But the poor ryot was, in fact, my host – not the other – for it was he whose labour fed me, though he did not share the meal.

I say, a traveller cannot fail to be impressed, and, if he have any powers of reflection, disagreeably so, with this profusion. There is surely no country in the world where in the midst of such starvation there is so much waste; certainly none where the expense of it all is borne so wholly and directly by the poor. I wonder whether any one has calculated the number of miles of macadamized road in the various Anglo-Indian cantonments, not a yard of which has ever served any purpose beyond that of enabling the officers’ wives to pay each other visits in their carriages? I wonder whether any one has calculated the numbers of absolutely useless clock towers and Gothic memorials erected by Sir Richard Temples to Sir Bartle Freres, and Sir Bartle Freres to Sir Richard Temples in the various Presidencies? I wonder whether any one has calculated how many hogsheads of champagne the water-drinking ryot has paid for in the last half-century as an unaccounted item of his yearly budget? These things strike the imagination of the traveller. They do not strike the resident in India. They are not arguments, but impressions; and yet they mean something.

If, however, the ryot must maintain the luxury of his English administrators before his own wants can be supplied, so, too, must he maintain the English trader to the ruin of his own trade. I am repeating native arguments when I complain that the necessity of considering the advantage of Manchester capitalists stands seriously in the way of an honest framer of the Indian Budget, and that, whereas the Finance Minister of every English colony is at liberty to raise money by import duties and generally does so, the Indian Minister is precluded from that source of revenue. I have argued the matter of Free Trade out with the native economists, and they seem to me perfectly to understand it. They know that as applied to England, a manufacturing country which imports its food, Free Trade is considered a necessity of financial life. But they deny that the doctrine applies with equal cogency to India. India, they say, is a produce-exporting country like the United States or the Australian colonies. It imports no single article of prime necessity, iron and coal perhaps excepted, and the cotton and other manufactured goods consumed there are luxuries only used by the rich, and especially by the Europeans. It is certain that no ryot in all India wears any cotton clothing of foreign make, or has his means of existence made one wit cheaper for him by Free Trade. Import duties, then, would tax the rich only, and the rich in India are hardly taxed at all. Yet, because Free Trade is of advantage to England, India must forgo her own advantage. This, the natives say, may be a political necessity, but it is not ruling India financially for India’s good. I confess I do not see where the flaw in their argument lies.

They say, moreover, that Free Trade in manufactured goods has destroyed the native industries and given nothing in their stead. When the hand-looms a hundred years ago were ruined in the English counties, the rural population migrated to the towns and found work in the great factories. But in India this has hardly at all happened. The ryot who used to weave is left without labour of any sort during his spare time, for distances are great and there is little demand for labour in the towns, and he remains of necessity idle, so that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a present of his labour has been made by Anglo-Indian finance to his English rival. The doctrine of advantage from buying in the cheapest market does not help him, for he buys nothing cheaper; and if the English manufacturer shares the advantage with any one in India, it is with the town consumer, not with the ryot. Every native economist, therefore, whom I have spoken with on the subject, would impose import duties on manufactured articles except machinery. Thus, they say, a tax would be levied upon the rich; and if it acted as a protection and stimulus to home manufactures, why, so much the better. With protection, factories could be established in the Indian country towns in which the surplus labour of the ryot would find employment, and so the injury done him be in part redressed. If this doctrine is unsound, I shall be glad to hear in what manner; for at present it seems to me to have not a little reason.¹⁵

I was surprised to find, in an assemblage mainly of rich men, that most of those who composed the Bombay meeting already alluded to were in favour of some form of income tax. Not that they altogether denied its general unpopularity, but from the necessity they recognized of taxing wealth. They said that in one shape or other incomes had always till recently been taxed in India, and that, though there were great difficulties in the way of collecting any sort of income tax fairly, it had always been accepted. The present licence tax, they assured me, was much more hateful and far less profitable than any true tax on income, and seemed framed on purpose to distribute its pressure most unfairly. It seemed hardly credible, but according to present regulations the keeper of a small shop in the native quarter was taxed as highly for his trade as the richest English banker on ’Change; all the charge upon the latter’s income, though he might deal in millions, being twenty pounds per annum in the form of a trade licence. The present system was, in fact, only another advantage given by the framers of Indian budgets to English trade; and they assured me that the people who really prevented a proper income tax from being imposed in India were not the native tradesmen, but the English officials whose salaries would be directly touched by it. If it were possible to levy import duties and a tax on incomes, the agricultural poor might be relieved, but hardly in any other way. I offer these suggestions for what they may be considered worth.

The prime measure, however, of agricultural reform, on which all native India seems agreed, is the granting of a permanent revenue settlement to every province, such as was ninety years ago granted to Bengal, and limiting thereby the preposterous claim of the Government to all ownership in land. This right of State ownership has worked everywhere, or nearly everywhere, its full natural result of impoverishment and disaffection; and Bengal, which has been exempted from its action, has alone remained prosperous. I do not propose to argue out this great question here. But I intend to return to it on a future occasion; and it will be sufficient for me now to say, that the value placed by native opinion on a fixed revenue settlement is the cause of the strong agitation actually in progress against the Bengal Rent Bill. This measure, in spite of Lord Ripon’s immense popularity, is decidedly unpopular, and native politicians see in it a first blow struck at the prosperity of the only province which has hitherto escaped the universal drain of wealth into the Imperial coffers; nor am I without reason to believe that so it was intended, not by Lord Ripon, but by some of his advisers. At present, however, I only state the fact that a permanent settlement of the land revenue is urgently demanded by all India.¹⁶

To sum up, Indian economists are in favour, first, of import duties on manufactured goods such as are imposed in Australia and other colonies; secondly, of a shifting of the financial burden as far as possible from the agricultural poor to the commercial rich; and thirdly, of a renunciation by the Government of its indefinite claims upon the land. These views will probably be considered preposterous in England, where we have cut-and-dried principles of economy in contradiction to them. But it is certain that all native opinion is against us, and that our present system is bringing India very near to ruin. Surely, there must be something wrong in a state of things which has produced the spectacle of a Government, after having absorbed to itself the whole land rent of a country, still finding itself constantly in financial shifts. The Government of India, as landlord, does practically nothing for the land. All is squandered and spent on other things; and the people who till the soil are yearly becoming poorer and more hopeless. This I call the agricultural danger, and if it is not one I again ask where the flaw in my reasoning lies. At least it is a reasoning held by ninety-nine out of every hundred educated and intelligent Indians.

Note.– Since this was published, in 1884, some reduction, as already stated, has been made in the iniquitous salt tax; but most of the other economic evils still prevail, some of them in an exaggerated form. No attempt has been made, by the imposition of import duties, to re-create the lost native industries, nor has any permanent settlement of the land revenue been granted, notwithstanding the example of its astonishing success in restoring agricultural prosperity under very similar conditions in Egypt. Famines continue to be attributed by Viceroy after Viceroy, not to their true economic causes, but to the “act of God” in withholding the rain, which in spite of the forest laws is still in periodical default. Imperial expenditure has not been lessened, nor has the burden of personal debt on the ryot’s back been relieved. He is still the rack-rented tenant of an absentee state-landlord throughout the greater part of British India.

CHAPTER XIII
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.