Probably in a few more years the still remaining features of the Bengal indigo planter's off duty life as depicted by Ali Baba will have quite disappeared, unless the substitution of sugar planting for that of indigo now receiving considerable attention in various Bengal, and more particularly Tirhoot, districts prove a success.
Anyway, the Macdonalds, the Beggs, and the Thomases, names now, as formerly, prominently identified with the great indigo industry, have been assured of continual remembrance. So prominent, in fact, has the Scotch element among planting families always been that it is said that if any one present at a race, polo, or Christmas week gathering were to shout out "Mac!" from the verandah of the Tirhoot Club, every face in the crowd would be simultaneously turned towards the speaker.
The bantering allusion to "Mr. Caird and The Nineteenth Century," applies to that great authority on many and very varied agricultural subjects, the late Sir James Caird, who died in 1892. In 1878-79 he was deputed to India by the Secretary of State as a member of the Indian Famine Commission called into being by the Strachey Brothers; the general impressions then formed by a six months' tour through India being embodied in the series of articles, entitled "Notes by the Way in India; the Land and the People," which appeared from July to October, 1879, in The Nineteenth Century magazine, thereafter in book form in 1883, and in an augmented form as a third edition in 1884.
For a detailed account of a Bengal indigo planter's life, mainly confined, however, to the processes and surroundings of planting and manufacture, there is no more valuable record than the late Colesworthy Grant's well illustrated book, "Rural Life in Bengal," which was published in 1860. In that work may be found a drawing of "Mulnath House," a glorified illustration of the fast disappearing surroundings of a Lower Bengal planter's residence.
No. 13
THE EURASIAN
In November, 1879, when this "Study in chiaro-oscuro" was published, renewed attention was being directed to the Eurasian community in India, mainly by the discussions in all circles aroused by the publication of the late Archdeacon Baly's Bengal Social Science Association Paper of May in the same year, which dealt with the employment, inter alia, of Europeans of mixed parentage in India; a question which still engages the anxious consideration of many Indian statesmen. Ali Baba's "Study" is not an ill-natured summary of the widespread discussions of 1879, but indeed as far back as 1843, the late John Mawson in his paper, "The Eurasian Belle," which first appeared in the Calcutta newspaper, The Bengal Hurkaru, had approached the social and domestic side of the question, and to some extent may be said to have anticipated Ali Baba.
NOS. 14 AND 17
THE VILLAGER AND THE SHIKARRY
Both of these sketches are examples of what maybe termed Ali Baba's contemplative mood, the villager's life being revealed to us in all its pathos and interest, otherwise than through an atmosphere of statistics and reports—the daily life of probably two hundred million of the inhabitants of India.