Eight Lectures on India

by Halford John Mackinder

|8.
The Howrah Bridge, Calcutta.| |9.
Scene from the Howrah Bridge.| Nothing impresses the stranger in Calcutta more than the density of life in this populous city, the focus of a great and fertile province. At no spot is it more evident than on the Howrah Bridge, where from morning to night a close throng crosses and re-crosses. From the approach to the bridge we look down on a crowd bathing in the muddy but sacred water. Cheek by jowl with the busy commercial traffic of the bridge, we have here the religion of the East. Purified by the bath, and clothed again, the bather sits in the crowd while for a few pies, or say a farthing, his sect mark is painted afresh on his forehead.

|10.
Calcutta from Howrah across the Hooghly.| The buildings of Calcutta are worthy of the capital rank of the city, but they are of European design, for Calcutta is a modern city. Fort William was so named from King William III., in whose reign, little more than two centuries ago, Job Charnock, a factor or commercial representative of the East India Company, bought the little village Kalikata, probably so named from a local shrine of the goddess Kali. There he built, on the site of the present Customs House, the first Fort William. Within ten years the population had grown to some ten thousand, and it has never ceased growing to this day, although at one time, in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was an episode in the history of the place which for a time somewhat checked its advance. Suraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, quarrelled with the English at Fort William, and finally attacked them. Most of them escaped down the river, but a hundred and forty-six were taken prisoners when Fort William fell, and were confined for a night in a small cell measuring 22 feet by 14 feet, and some 18 feet high. It was at the end of the hot season, and only twenty-three of the prisoners came out alive the next morning. This tragedy is known in history as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Soon afterwards Colonel Clive, the same Clive who as a Captain defended Arcot in the south of India, arrived with reinforcements and recaptured Calcutta. Fort William was rebuilt on a larger scale, and in a position a little south of the original site.

Suraj-ud-Daulah quarrelled with the East India Company again, and Clive led an army against him into the north of Bengal, and defeated him and his French allies in the famous battle of Plassey. The British force amounted to only three thousand men, of whom but two hundred were English, whereas the Nawab had an army of nearly forty thousand. In 1765 the whole of Bengal was annexed by the East India Company, and from 1772 was ruled from Calcutta. Suraj-ud-Daulah’s capital had been at a place called Murshidabad, a hundred miles to the north of Calcutta.

|11.
Black Hole Monument, Calcutta.| |12.
The Marble Pavement, Black Hole, Calcutta.| Here, at the corner of Dalhousie Square, is the Black Hole Monument, erected by Lord Curzon when Viceroy of India, in the year 1902, upon the site of the original monument which was set up by one of the twenty-three survivors; and here is a marble pavement marking the exact position of the Black Hole.

|13.
Bengal Government Office, Calcutta.| |14.
The High Court, Calcutta.| |15.
Eastern Gateway, Government House, Calcutta.| |16.
Government House, Calcutta.| |17.
The Same.| |18.
Imperial Museum, Calcutta.| We have next the great red brick building in Dalhousie Square known as the Bengal Secretariat. Not far away are the public offices of the Government of India, but most of the staff are removed to Simla in the hills during the hot and rainy seasons. Here, facing the Maidan, is the frontage of the Supreme Court of Justice, with a fine tower nearly two hundred feet high, which we saw just now from the Hooghly. Next is the eastern gateway to the grounds of Government House, and here is Government House itself, with the Union Jack flying above it, and Indian sentries on guard. It was built a little more than a hundred years ago, and contains the throne of Tippu Sultan, the tyrant of Mysore, of whom we heard in the first lecture. Opposite Government House, on the Maidan, is the Jubilee Statue of Victoria, the Queen-Empress of India, which was unveiled in the year 1902. Here we have a more distant view of Government House, as seen from the Maidan, with a statue of one of the Viceroys in the foreground. Next, in Chowringhee road, is the Imperial Museum, a fine building with a valuable Gallery of Antiquities.

|19.
Musulmans at Prayer in the Maidan.| |20.
Ochterlony Monument, Calcutta.| |21.
Calcutta from the Ochterlony Monument.| |22.
Race Course, Calcutta.| |23.
St. Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta.| |24.
Tiretta Bazaar Street, Calcutta.| Let us walk round the Maidan, and note the curiously mingled life upon it. Here, for instance, are Musulmans at prayer, an impressive sight that may be witnessed every evening. Here we are at the foot of the Ochterlony monument, a column erected in honour of Sir David Ochterlony, a successful general in the wars with Nepal. From the top of it we have a fine view over the city. Notice Government House and the High Court. At the other end of the Maidan is the racecourse and polo ground, to which we have already referred, and here amid the trees in the southeastern corner, beside the tank, is the spire of the English Cathedral. Here, in contrast, is a view in the native city. The streets are with a few exceptions very narrow, as in most southern cities where the sunshine is dreaded and where shade is essential to comfort.

|25.
Jute Mills, Howrah.| |26.
A Workshop in Iron Foundry at Howrah.| |27.
The same, Plate Girders.| |28.
Workpeople bathing at Howrah.| Now we cross to Howrah, to the great jute mills, where the jute fibre grown up country is spun and woven in competition with the jute manufacture of Dundee. In these mills you will find that the machinery bears the names of Dundee and Leeds makers, for the industry is relatively new in India, and has not yet reached the stage of manufacturing its own machinery. Next we pass into the engineering works of Messrs. Burn and Co., where some five thousand natives and some sixty Europeans are employed in the steel industry. Here are plate girders made in these works for railway bridge building, and here in this same industrial town of Howrah are people bathing after work in the jute mills.

Let us recount the essence of what we have seen—the Hooghly channel from the ocean, bearing inward the European ships; the Shrine of the Goddess Kali; the Fort which protected the factory of the East India Company; the Monument of the Black Hole; Government House and the Secretariat, whence the vast empire is ruled; the Cathedral and the Racecourse of the white rulers; the Courts of Justice, which, more than any military power, betoken the essence of British rule in India; the Native City with its narrow ways and crowded life drawn from the surrounding agricultural plain; the Howrah Bridge with the steel and jute mills beyond, which imply a vast incoming change in the economic life of this eastern land; and the Botanic Gardens with their wealth of vegetation typifying the ultimate resources of India—the tropical sunshine and the torrential rains.

|Repeat Map No. 1.| Now let us run northward by the East Bengal Railway for some three hundred miles to Darjeeling, the hill station of Calcutta, as Ootacamund is the hill station of Madras. We traverse the dead level of the plain with its thickly set villages and tropical vegetation. There are some seven hundred and fifty thousand villages in India, and these village communities are the real India, for only about ten per cent. of the total population is contained in the cities. Yet Bengal in its present limits, which exclude Eastern Bengal, has a population of more than fifty millions, on an area slightly smaller than that of the United Kingdom. Now the total population of the United Kingdom is only some forty-four millions, and of these forty-four millions fully one-third inhabit some forty large cities. Britain is therefore mainly industrial, whereas India is mainly agricultural, nine-tenths of all the people in India being supported by occupations connected with agriculture. From such statistics some idea may be gained of the density of the agricultural population of Bengal, a Province with one great city only, as greatness of cities is measured in our British Islands.

The rule of these village-dotted plains is the main daily business of the Indian Government. A great Province like Bengal is divided into Districts, each of them about as large as the English county of Lincolnshire or a little larger. On the average each of them contains from half a million to a million and a half of population. There are some 250 of such Districts in British India, that is to say in that greater part of India which is administered directly by British officials. In each District there is a chief executive officer, styled the Collector or Deputy Commissioner. He is the head of the District administration, and he is also the principal Magistrate in the District. Under the Collector there is a staff of Executive Officers, British and Indian, of whom the chief are the Assistant Collector, the Deputy Collector, the Superintendent of Police, the Engineer, and the Civil Surgeon. The Collector is so called because in the days of the old East India Company his main function was to collect revenue. In his other capacity of Magistrate, he is the head of the Magisterial Courts of the District. The laws which he and his assistants administer are made by the Viceroy in Council, and in a subordinate way by the Lieutenant-Governors and their Councils in the various Provinces. The Collector does not decide civil suits. These, as well as all serious criminal cases, come before Civil Judges of different grades, who are independent of the Collector.