FOOTNOTES:
[35] “The Great Famine,” by Mr. Vaughan Nash (Longmans, 1900).
CHAPTER VIII
“Lord of the World”
From every part of India, by day and night, the pilgrims come, and the roads to the great temple, by the sea at Puri, are always open and always thronged. The pilgrims come from behind the white mountains, and from the purple lands of the south, and across the hot plains from the other ocean. The train that shot me out upon the sand amid a crowd of dim white figures at three o’clock one morning raises a high dividend from religion. Hundreds come by it every day, for it saves time—and under British rule even devotion goes by time. But worshippers still think it more religious and purifying to make the whole journey on foot, visiting other sacred temples upon the road, bathing in holy rivers, and turning at every dawn towards the rising sun, as all mankind instinctively turn for worship, just as for love we turn towards the sunset. To take years upon the journey only extends the glory of expectation, and if you have the holy patience to travel the Grand Trunk Road, measuring every two yards of its thousand miles by prostrating your body along the dust, what is space, what is time, when you are on the way to God?
The Temple of Equality.
[Face p. 152.
Children and young mothers come if the entire family sets out for holiness, but the best time for the great act of worship is late in middle-age, when for many years the field has been sown and reaped, the buffalo fed, the taxes paid, the children tended, the cotton garment daily washed. Then the present career upon this visible world is almost over, the shadowy gate to the next stage upward is almost in sight. Then men and women long to go on pilgrimage, and, untouched by the cares of fortune, family, or any transitory things, they travel forth in calm elation of soul, their thoughts fixed only on the lasting realities of eternity, till they hear the thud of the long waves upon the sand, and before them rises the great white tower of the Lord of the Universe, surmounted by its wheel and flag. There stands at length the beatific vision, there the end of all these labours, the revelation of the Divine Essence for which they had waited so many years of repeated seasons in the fields.
It is the ancient temple of Juggernath, “Lord of the World,” to which they have come. Yes, our old friend Juggernath, of childhood’s stories and journalistic tags—the God in the Car, before whose bloodstained wheels the benighted heathen were driven by deceiving priests to fling themselves shrieking down, before the days when enlightened missionaries and British rulers combined to clean up India’s coral strand. Since then, as is well known, such extremity of devotion has been prosecuted as the law directs, and the guide-book tells us that “of recent years much has been done to improve the sanitation of the place.” Both signs of progress are good. But, after all, it is only an Englishman whose first thought is of sanitation when he approaches the divine presence, and the British missionaries who first told that weary old tale of the car were as incapable of understanding the divine passion that, even at the cost of life, yearns for union with eternal powers, as they would have been of understanding the passion of a woman whose grandson described to me how, with proud bearing and joyful face, she walked from her chamber and sat down in the midst of the flames beside her husband’s body till their ashes lay indistinguishably commingled. Sanitary appliances and the “Merry Widow” appeal more successfully to our Western minds.
The fame of Juggernath may be due, as scholars say, to some ancient attempt to conciliate under his symbol the new Buddhistic reformers with the primeval Hindu worship. It seems to be certain that his temple as it stands shows the trace of Buddhistic influence—the teaching of Buddha who made the great renunciation, Buddha who received the poor and all mankind beneath his blessing. It is a shrine of peace and conciliation, perhaps the one place in India where former generations saw some hope of acquiring the new purity and kindliness of life, without rejecting the sacred traditions of immemorial wisdom brought by unknown ancestors from lands of bitter cold. And it may have been this bright hope of peace that first established the unaltering rule of Juggernath’s worship, that before his sight all castes and ranks and riches are equal, and the woman is equal with the man.
Lions and monsters guard the four gates of his enclosure, but when once they are passed, all the earthly distinctions of mankind fall away, and only the naked soul remains to worship. Within that oblong wall, Brahman may eat with sweeper, and warrior with the retail seller of flesh for carrion Europeans. Along the inner side of the south wall are simple kitchens, where the god’s four hundred cooks daily prepare the sacred food for pilgrims, beggars, and all who come. One is served with another, and all may eat from the same dish, side by side, without contamination. Thousands of monks in the service of the god carry the food far through the country, and the pilgrims themselves take some of it home in their brazen vessels, so that the villagers and children left behind may taste of wisdom, and share the blessings of pilgrimage. For wherever the sacred food is eaten, worldly differences disappear, and soul stands bare to soul. It is the sacrament of equality, the consecration of mankind.
Side by side with Juggernath, within the dark and secluded shrine, upon which no alien may look, stand his brother and little sister—quaint figures all of them, hideous as gollywogs with symbolism—the round and staring eyes of eternal vision, the atrophied hands and feet of eternal meditation. Every year new cars are built for them, and every twelve years the gods themselves are made anew of wooden blocks, while their old forms are sunk into a pit to perish. This was told me by the treasurer and chief trustee of the god’s vast estate, who traced to this renewal the well-known story of the physicians appointed to minister to the deity’s health, and put him to bed if he ails. He informed me this was a popular error, but there is a Rajah who is hereditary guardian, and also hereditary sweeper of the temple, and he, as I understood, had rather frequently to be put to bed by his physicians, so that possibly the two cases have become confused.
It would be, perhaps, too curious to identify the little sister of Juggernath with Liberty, and his brother with Fraternity. But Juggernath, “Lord of the World,” has beyond question the attribute of Equality, and it seems possible that it is just this glorious attribute, and no deeper metaphysic reason, which gives his temple its place as the most worshipped fane of India, and inspires the common people with a passionate desire even to touch with one finger the painted board of which he is made. Many people worship what most they fall short of, just as in England we struggle to worship Christ, whose character and manner of life differed so entirely from our own. And of all great virtues the Indians, perhaps, have been most wanting in the sense of equality. Their whole system of existence is based on inequality, inevitable and permanent. The man who is born to study the Vedas will continue to study the Vedas, and so will his son. The man who is born to carry sewage will continue to carry sewage, and so will his son. Nor could the daughter of a millionaire ever hope for marriage with a man of learning, since wisdom lies beyond the dreams of avarice.
This ancient basis of inequality has made the Indian people the easiest in the world to govern. It lies also, I think, at the bottom of their almost excessive politeness, their reverential manners, their courtly deference to any one who appears to have been born of higher station, or with higher advantages. No one denies the charm of such qualities. It is an education in behaviour to pass from a Scottish or American crowd to the streets of an Indian city. The obligations of high caste—such things, I mean, as cleanliness in food and life, intellectual alertness, and disregard of wealth—are as valuable as any obligations laid on Europeans by noblesse. The only weakness about both is that they are restricted to caste or class, and are not considered universally binding, as such principles must be.
There is much to be said for reverential manners; but take a race which has very little notion of manners of any kind—a race not very sensitive, not very imaginative or sympathetic, trained from boyhood to think little of personal dignity, and nothing at all of other people’s feelings; take such a race and set its most characteristic members from the well-to-do middle classes, with the help of rifles and batteries, to dominate an entirely different people, among whom reverential manners are ingrained by birth, and see what evil effects for both races will result! Watch the growing arrogance of the dominant people; watch their demands for deference, their lust for flattery, their irritation at the least sign of independence, their contempt for the race whose obeisance they delight in, their rudeness of manner increasing till it becomes incredible to the relatives they left at home, and would once have been incredible to themselves. Then turn to the subordinate race, and watch the growing weakness of character, the temptation to cringe and flatter, the loss of self-respect, the increasing cowardice, the daily humiliation. In that hideous process—that degeneration in manners of two great races, each of which has high qualities of its own, we recognize the true peril which has been advancing upon Indians and ourselves for the last ten, or, perhaps, fifty years of Indian history. It is not a question of loss of power, or loss of trade. It is a question of a much more serious loss than these.
But what if all this so-called unrest is only the beginning of another great humanistic reform, another incarnation of that “Lord of the World” whose attribute is equality? Throughout India we are witnessing the birth of a new national consciousness, and with it comes a revival of dignity, a resolve no longer to take insults lying down, not to lick the hand that strikes, or rub the forehead in the dust before any human being, simply because he wears a helmet and is called white. Like pilgrims bound for the shrine of Juggernath in an ecstasy of devotion, the leaders of India are inspired by that longing for equality which is always springing afresh in human minds. If any one chooses to say that equality is like Juggernath’s Car, crushing everything equally flat, he is welcome to his little jest. But as I saw the white-robed pilgrims passing into the temple, there to partake of equality’s sacrament, I knew that these outward things were but the symbols of an invisible worship, which may renew the face of the Indian people, and save ourselves from a threatening and dishonourable danger.
CHAPTER IX
The Divided Land
The plains of Eastern Bengal have been formed grain by grain from the washings of the dividing range of Asia brought down by melted snow on its way to the sea. Rivers that rise not very far apart on opposite sides of the Himalaya here unite at last after their thousand miles of circuit, and finish their course by broad and quiet streams, which lose the sacred names of Ganges and Brahmaputra. Some of the rivers also spring from the hill-country of Assam and the ranges where the pleasant station of Shillong offers a summer residence for the new Lieut.-Governor of Eastern Bengal as comfortably isolated from his capital at Dacca, as Simla or Darjeeling is from Calcutta. Thus the whole country is intersected with vast waterways and streams as slow and curling as the Ouse. Railways are built only in short sections, as it were to connect the rivers, and continuous roads must be very few. Everything goes by water, and the only trouble is that the rivers sometimes change their course, owing to an earthquake or other natural caprice. Their channels, too, are continually silting up, so that the course of the steamers upon their broad surface is always a little dubious, and, in spite of its slip of railway, the new capital of Dacca is even now being cut off from the world.
On the Brahmaputra.
[Face p. 160.
But for the square-sailed junks that the Indians use, and for the long black boats with pointed prow and stern pitched high in air, the rivers form a fine system of traffic; and if the water takes a fancy for a new passage through miles of cultivated land the owners of the fields simply stake out their claims upon the surface, confident that in God’s good time the river will withdraw, leaving the soil to future generations only the richer for its deposit. The whole country is, indeed, one of the richest parts of India, and the rivers pass between flat lands of mangoes and palm trees, jute or yellow rice. At times the size and stillness of the streams reminded me of the Oil Rivers of Southern Nigeria; but how different here are the firm and fruitful banks from those gloomy creeks and forests of the slime! When they are not busy in their sunny fields, the people are chiefly engaged in washing themselves, their babies, and their brazen vessels. Large numbers are also occupied in fishing, especially for a bony fish like a gigantic perch, which they drive into the nets with tame otters, captive in long leashes. Others live by converting the clay of the banks into enormous potting jars that serve as stores for grain, ghee (clarified butter), and other food. The waterways also still carry a certain amount of the country’s ancient industries—the gold and silver work, the bangles and ornaments cut from white conchs, and, above all, the hand-woven muslins for which Dacca was once celebrated throughout the world.
Since England killed the Indian cotton industry for the benefit of Lancashire, first by imposing duties on imports from India, and then by the present excise of 3½ per cent. upon Indian cottons manufactured for India itself, that ancient fame is chiefly found in museum specimens of past splendour, and in lingering words like the French “Indienne” for calico print. Even in Dacca the very finest muslin, such as the cows used to lick up with the grass, feeling no difference between it and gossamer, is no longer made. It has fallen out, partly owing to Manchester, partly because there are no longer enough rich Indians to buy it. But still the great caste of weavers have clung to their hand-looms as fondly as starving ryots cling to the land. There is hardly any difference of race in Bengal, but it so happens that nearly all the weavers are Mohammedans, descended from the old Hindu families who changed their religion to please their conquerors in the days when Dacca itself was an Islam capital of empire. In the last three years, the Swadeshi movement, which officials have told Lord Morley is specially abhorrent to Mohammedans, has enormously increased their industry. It has revived the ancient craft just as it was dying, and so I found the weavers in every town and village sitting on the floor, with legs stuck under the wooden loom, plying their thin-spun thread with hereditary skill—plying it sometimes under water, so that a woman’s skin should hardly feel a stuff so fine and soft.
But one can never be sure how long a handicraft, no matter how beautiful, can hold its own against the mills. Even under Swadeshi the hand-looms will probably disappear, and the main produce of Eastern Bengal is no longer the most delicate fabric in the world, but the roughest. It is jute. It is not literally true that this dark and fibrous plant, something between a mallow and a flax, grows only in East Bengal, but it grows best there, and almost all that is used in the jute factories of Dundee is imported from this land of rivers. I believe it was through the Dundee shippers, not more than one generation ago, that jute first came to the Tay, but since then the prosperity of the jute wives on the Tay has varied with the prosperity of the peasant wives on the Ganges, and, unhappily, it has often varied inversely.
It is very doubtful whether the immense increase of the jute crop has been of real benefit to the peasant. The price is variable. In 1906, for example, it went up to 14s. 8d. a maund (82 lbs.), and all the peasants laid down their land in jute, thus creating such a scarcity of rice that its price went up more than double—from an average of 5s. 4d. to 12s. a maund. In some districts rice rose to more than three times its normal price. Drought and flood combined to increase the scarcity, and a terrible famine ensued. Of course, it ought not to have been so. Economists would say that the sale of the jute and the export of the rice should bring in money with which the peasants could purchase food. The trouble was that reality refused to support the economic doctrine.
Jute, like flax, is a very exhausting crop, yet I have seen it actually planted on the same field with rice, and at the same time, because it grows quicker, and can be harvested while the rice is green and short. Nothing but a deluge can restore the soil so treated, and, at the best, jute wants more room and more labour. Then there are the middlemen to be considered—the British and Jewish middlemen who swarm at the centres of the jute trade, where the heavy wooden junks lie thick as a town upon the rivers. Lastly, there is the zemindar or landowner. He comes under the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, and his rent or tax to Government is fixed for ever. But within limits he can raise the rent on the cultivator, and it is in the nature of landlords to raise the rent. They are not rich themselves, these zemindars. Throughout Bengal I heard lamentable stories of their genteel but increasing poverty that reminded me of the distressed Irish landlords of twenty years ago. Like the French, they have the custom of dividing the land equally among the children, and the Mohammedans endow their daughters in the division, which is very nice of them, but only hastens the family ruin. Unless a zemindar family launches out into other forms of labour beyond eating its rents, the number of hangers-on to small parcels of land increases, and their condition is often pitiable. All the more because, though the Settlement is permanent, the cesses or rates nominally levied for roads and District Boards, but really applied to all manner of other purposes, are continually increasing, and the curse of malaria, which saps the vitality and rots the brain, appears to be falling with peculiar virulence upon the zemindar class.
It is a question whether jute and the export of rice have benefited any one except the merchants and middlemen. Owing to the fall in jute, the peasants were growing quantities of rice again when I was there; but next year the rice might go down and jute up, and so they live in a gambler’s uncertainty, and lay up no store of food, as the custom used to be, against the evil day. They sell everything as it grows, and with the money buy Rangoon rice which makes them sick. Many paternal officials, though bred on our university economics, told me that to save the people they would even prohibit jute, tax exported rice, and abolish the cotton excise.
So far we may say the contest lies between Dundee and Eastern Bengal, but though I believe it to be a vital matter, that contest is tranquil and slow compared to the dramatic battle raging between Eastern Bengal and the British cities of Liverpool and Manchester. Liverpool stands for salt, Manchester for cotton, and Eastern Bengal has taken a solemn vow not to touch either their salt or their cotton till the burning wrong of Bengal is redressed. By the burning wrong they mean the Partition of the Bengali people into two separate and unconnected governments, Bengal proper to contain 18,000,000 of the race, and Eastern Bengal to contain 25,000,000. With the addition of the outlying and alien provinces of Behar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa, Lord Curzon estimated the population of Bengal under the old capital of Calcutta at 54,000,000, of whom 9,000,000 would be Mohammedans; while, including the outlying and alien province of Assam, the population of “Eastern Bengal and Assam” with a new capital at Dacca would come to 31,000,000, of whom 18,000,000 would be Mohammedans. Throughout the whole of Bengal, whether East or West, it must be again remembered that the people are homogeneous, both Mohammedans and Hindus belonging to the Bengali race, speaking the same language, living in amity side by side for generations past, and only divided in religion because some of their number, chiefly of the lower and less educated castes, had long ago embraced Islam for the most persuasive of reasons.[36]
Various schemes for sharing out the administrative burden of the vast province with its dependencies had been discussed for at least twelve years before, and there were obvious ways in which it could have been done—by creating the three contiguous districts of different race into a new western province with the capital at Patna, or by placing them under Chief Commissioners, while in either case Bengal should be raised to a Presidency under a Governor in Calcutta, enjoying the same privileges as Madras and Bombay. By the Charter of 1833 we promised a Governorship for Fort William (Calcutta), and the promise was renewed by Lord Dalhousie in 1853. It is hard in England to understand the difference that Indians feel between a Lieutenant-Governor trained in Anglo-Indian routine and a Governor appointed from among the leading men of England, and coming to their country free from the narrowing routine of the Service and Anglo-Indian society. But a very short time in India shows what that difference means.
Far from carrying out these pledges or following a smaller scheme of devolution favoured by Mr. Brodrick (Lord Midleton), at that time Secretary of State for India, Lord Curzon determined to split the Bengali people roughly in half and give them two Lieutenant-Governors instead of one—with a view, of course, to “greater administrative efficiency”; for, as Mr. John Morley somewhere remarked, “the usual excuse of those who do evil to other people is that their object is to do them good.” The first sign of Lord Curzon’s purpose was Sir Herbert Risley’s letter of December 3, 1903, announcing a Partition in the name of the Government of India. The scheme then proposed was instantly met by a storm of opposition throughout Bengal, among Mohammedans and Hindus alike, and to the credit of Anglo-Indians it must be said that the opposition of the Bengalis was supported by many of the officials and by the leading Anglo-Indian newspapers, though the worldly success of officials and newspapers largely depends on Government favour.
Always impatient of criticism, Lord Curzon hastened through Eastern Bengal, lecturing the Hindu leaders and trying to win over the Moslems. With the Moslems, by one means or another, he partially succeeded, but the opposition among the bulk of the Bengal population continued as determined as ever. Hundreds of indignation meetings were held; I believe about two thousand in all. Great petitions were presented; one with 70,000 signatures attached was sent to the Home Government. But it was all in vain. The English people paid no attention; they were not sure where Bengal was; most of them had never heard of it apart from tigers, and did not care what Partition meant. The Home Government perhaps had its own reasons for “letting Curzon down gently.” The scheme was hustled through almost in secrecy, and almost avowedly against his better judgment, Mr. Brodrick gave his assent. The fatal “Government Resolution on the Partition of Bengal” was issued from Simla on July 19, 1905; it was followed by the Proclamation of September 1st, and a blow was given to the credit of our country and to her reputation for justice and popular government, from which it will take us long years of upright administration and reform to recover.[37]
On October 16th of the same year the Resolution took effect, and the Partition became what Mr. Morley in an unhappy moment called “a settled fact.” The anniversary of that national wrong has now become the Ash Wednesday of India. On that day thousands and thousands of Indians rub dust or ashes on their foreheads; at dawn they bathe in silence as at a sacred fast; no meals are eaten; the shops in cities and the village bazaars are shut; women refuse to cook; they lay aside their ornaments; men bind each other’s wrists with a yellow string as a sign that they will never forget the shame; and the whole day is passed in resentment, mourning, and the hunger of humiliation. In Calcutta vast meetings are held, and the errors of the Indian Government are exposed with eloquent patriotism. With each year the indignation of the protest has increased; the crowds have grown bigger, the ceremonial more widely spread, the fast more rigorous.
Such was the Partition of Bengal, prompted, as nearly all educated Indians believe, by Lord Curzon’s personal dislike of the Bengali race, as shown also by his Convocation speech of the previous February, in which he brought against the whole people an indictment for mendacity.[38] The Partition marks the beginning of the “unrest” in its present form. I think some kind of unrest would have been developed within the next few years in any case. It arises from all manner of deep-lying causes—from the success of Asiatic Japanese in war against a great European power, from the general communication by railway, the visits of even high-caste Brahmans to Europe, the use of English as a common tongue, the increasing knowledge of our history and liberties, and the increasing study of our great Liberal thinkers and John Morley’s works. Add to these things the growing alienation of the subject races, owing to notorious cases of injustice in the law courts, ill-mannered arrogance on the part of certain Anglo-Indians, abusive incitements to violence by Anglo-Indian newspapers, and a system of espionage by the police and postal officials. It would be a wonder indeed if any people with a grain of self-respect left in them had remained unmoved. But beyond question it was the Partition that directly occasioned the present outbreaks of distrust and hostility. When their petitions remained unanswered, and their public meetings had no effect, when the Partition was carried out with despotic indifference to their feelings and interests, the Bengali people, and through them the vast majority of educated Indians, unwillingly became convinced that England no longer cared what happened to them or their country, provided they paid the revenue and kept quiet. It was a dangerous conviction to which they had been brought. England as a whole neither knew nor cared anything about it. She thought she had done enough when she had entrusted Lord Curzon and the Home Government with the duty of knowing and caring.
All advocates of the Partition, from Sir Harvey Adamson downwards, have continually sneered at the Bengali objection to having their country cut in half as “sentimental.”[39] By “sentimental” I find that this sort of people always understand an emotion that does not bring in sixpence. For instance, if we love our country because of her reputation for justice and freedom, they call us hysterical sentimentalists; but if we love our country because trade follows the flag, they call us sound supporters of the Empire. In accordance with this despicable standard, we may say that the chief objection to the Partition is one of sentiment. It is none the less strong on that account. It is the same kind of sentiment as would set Scotland ablaze with indignation if an English Prime Minister drew a jagged line from Thurso to Dumfries, and announced that in future Scotland would consist of two separate provinces, with one government in Edinburgh and the other in Glasgow, and no connection between them. A Scotsman’s chief objection might be described as “sentimental” by people of Sir Harvey Adamson’s mind, but I think “unrest” would hardly be the word for what would follow.
Yet that is exactly what England has allowed to be done in Bengal. The root of the indignation is a sentiment—an emotion that does not bring in sixpence. It is the sentiment of a patriotic and progressive race cut in two by an action which they believe to have been arbitrary and suggested by pique. And just because it is a sentiment, no material advantage or convenience of administration can ever serve as compensation for the wrong. But even if outraged national feeling could be set aside as a sentimental complaint, the other grievances are strong. Calcutta is justly claimed by all Bengalis for their own capital, as well as the capital of India. It is the centre of their culture and trade, of justice and government. It has the best Indian newspapers; it is the home of the best social intercourse; its University sets the standard of knowledge; its High Court is regarded with confidence by all Indians as a sure appeal against injustice. To be separated from Calcutta and compelled to look to poor, ruinous, decrepit old Dacca as their capital is for Bengalis an intellectual and material loss. Dacca was a good enough Mohammedan capital three centuries ago, but now it is difficult to get at; its river, as I said, is silting up; it has not a single newspaper worthy of the name; it has no University, no High Court, and its new Lieutenant-Governor lives for months together far away at Shillong, almost inaccessible in the hills. It is true that Government has bought a lot of land north of the town and has laid out foundations for residences and offices where future officials can enjoy themselves in comfort. The existence of those foundations is a common argument against reversing the Partition even among the many officials who recognized its error. But to the Bengalis it only makes the thing worse, for their wretched country will now have to pay fora double set of buildings, a double set of high and low officials, and a double set of questionable police.
There are other points. No one but landlords feels much disturbed at the woes of landlords, who suck their livelihood off the land like ticks off a sheep. But even sheep-ticks have their feelings, and in Eastern Bengal the zemindars also have a certain use in the world, especially when hunger drives them to cultivate their land themselves. To the zemindars the Partition has been a loss and hardship, increasing their legal expenses, and reducing such amenity as life afforded them. Naturally, their sufferings are worst when the line of partition passes straight through their land and exposes their flanks to double lawyers’ fees from right and left. An Englishman whose ancestral estate had been thus divided between the two provinces, told me his existence had been rendered almost intolerable. He had always been accustomed to go to Calcutta for business connected with the estate, and as he was a celebrated polo-player and took an intelligent interest in horse-racing, his business visits to the capital were both frequent and pleasing. But now for more than half his business he had to travel far away to dingy Dacca—no horse-racing; no polo renown! This was no imaginary or sentimental grievance like the indignation of a proud and ancient race split in two for the satisfaction of its rulers, and I felt sure that if only such a case could be brought home to the sportsmanlike governors of our Empire, they would persuade Lord Morley to regard his “settled fact” in a more pliable spirit.
The Eastern Bengalis also object to being bound up with the backward province of Assam, whose people they regard as semi-barbarous, and for whose improvement they alone will now have to pay, whereas the cost was formerly shared by all India. “Are we to be Assamese for ever?” is the scornful question of even Mohammedan peasants when they meet the sort of man who knows the news. Equally significant was a small Assamese deputation which came to me in Calcutta, because they had heard I was a Liberal, and they supposed that a Liberal Government would listen to Liberal principles. Their petition was for help in removing the yoke which now binds them to Eastern Bengal, where the progressive and educated population are too clever for them by half!
But of all material grievances—of all grievances other than the central crime of cutting a nationality in half—I think the Eastern Bengalis most fear their threatened separation from the Calcutta High Court. It is true that the blow has not yet fallen, but it is almost certain to fall, and the Government has refused to give any pledge against it. When I consulted Sir Andrew Fraser, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, upon this subject, he very kindly referred me to Sir Herbert Risley’s answer to the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, which had from the first petitioned against the change.[40] In Sir Andrew Fraser’s opinion, “Lord Curzon’s Government there placed clearly on record their view that nothing less than a High Court could ever be established in the new province,” but he appears to me to have misread the document. In the main sections of his reply, Sir Herbert Risley carefully guards the Government three times over from making any guarantee as to the future. He states it as the Government’s opinion:—
“That it is most unlikely that in the event of the existing judicial machinery being found inadequate for the service of the two provinces and of public opinion then demanding the establishment of a Chartered High Court, any tribunal occupying a position of less authority and influence would either be proposed by the Government of India or sanctioned by the Secretary of State.”
But he refuses to bind the future Government either to maintain the present connection between Eastern Bengal and the Calcutta High Court, or to establish a new High Court at Dacca in its place. The fear of the Eastern Bengalis is that in place of a High Court, which is regarded throughout India as the embodiment of true British justice uncontaminated by Anglo-Indian prejudice and tradition, they may be put off with a Chief Court, in which the judges have been trained under the distorting influence of that prejudice and tradition. It is hard for us, accustomed to regard all our Courts as fairly equal in the dispensation of justice, to realize what that difference implies to Indians. But it is exactly parallel to the difference they recognize between most Anglo-Indians and the Englishman straight from home.