Carrying Leaves for Fuel.
[Face p. 92.
On leaving even small and beautiful cities like Poona you pass through a zone where the inhabitants enjoy the health and suffer from the scrappiness of suburbs. Here they live partly by gardening, partly by burning lime or working in the town, and their houses have a touch of urban refinement. The ceilings and the tops of the walls, for instance, are hung with those garish pictures of religious subjects—the adventures of Krishna, and other scenes—which would provide so suitable a market for German art. But the suburbs are short, within a few miles you enter the heart of the country, and in his primeval village are brought face to face with the ryot—the cultivator of the soil, the basis of the Indian Empire, the one man for whom, or at least by means of whom, all the rest of the intricate machinery exists, from the splendours of Simla down to the office of the “Remembrancer of Legal Affairs,” and the “Finger-print Bureau,” in Poona’s residential quarter, or to Lord Kitchener’s reviews in the Poona cantonment.
In my various journeys within a circle of twenty miles round the city, I found the ryot much what I had expected—gentle-mannered, patient, hardy, and incredibly thin, living with his family in a clean but dusty hut, furnished with little beyond a few brass pots and dishes. All day he was working in his field, and he gathered for converse at evening—“cow-dust time,” as they call it—on the steps of the village temple, in which a vague red image represents the idea of helpful strength—something like Hercules or the Archangel Michael; for it is the same Maruta who helped Rama on his wandering search for the beloved Sita.
I have never heard even the most frigid official speak evil of the ryot. As the best patronizers in the world, we find in the ryot a most suitable object for our characteristic capacity. Hard-working, sober, and reverential beyond the dreams of country parsons, he is exactly the sort of being to whom we enjoy extending the kindly and protective sympathy due from a squire to his villagers. Just as in Natal or Nigeria every one is ready to commend the untutored savage and pat his curly head provided he remains savage, so in India even the Anglo-Indian will admit a distant affection for the poor dear ryot, and regrets the good old times when hardly an Indian of them all made pretence to further education or equality. But education and equality are the two things that undermine our accustomed pedestal, and the thought of a time when we might no longer be required to exercise our national function of patronage fills us with dismay.
The crop and the assessment are the two kindred and vital points in the ryot’s earthly life, as distinguished from the life of his spirit. In the Deccan, as in all parts of India, the crop is simply a matter of opportune rainfall, and when I was in Poona there had been no good crop for fifteen years. That autumn the prospect was a little worse than ordinarily poor, though the main famine district of the year was in the United Provinces, far away north. Preparations for a serious famine had to be made already, for, as Sir William Hunter estimated, one-fifth of India’s population—say sixty million souls—are perpetually living on insufficient food, apart from famines; and, partly owing to the export-trade, the villagers no longer store grain to meet an evil day, nor do they possess cash to purchase grain from other parts of the country. So when the pinch of scarcity comes, the land-owning or land-taxing Government alone stands between them and starvation; and, indeed, the Government prides itself at all times upon its service as protector of the poor, especially against other landlords and money-lenders. There is always a good deal of justice in the claim, even when the Government, having first tempered the wind, proceeds to shear the lamb. But famine is the special opportunity for Government beneficence. All officials then vie with each other in the thankless labour of holding the bodies and souls of thousands together, and within a month of his landing as Governor of Bombay, Sir George Clarke had all his preparations ready for relief works, terracing of hills, sinking of wells, and remission (not merely suspension) of the year’s assessment money.
Of the assessment and of famine I had heard and read a great deal before, but one set of grievances, closely connected with both, was new to me. It arose from the Forest Laws—a subject we hardly consider in England unless we are thinking of William Rufus or the game-preserves of kilted City Fathers in the Highlands. The present strict system of forest preservation was, I believe, instituted after the terrible famine of 1877-78, with the admirable intention of restoring the rainfall. In old times the village communities maintained a tract of communal forest for grazing and fuel near each village, just as they did formerly in England, and still do in Russia. An ancient Indian custom set aside an acre of grazing for every acre of cultivated land. But under our rule the influence of village communities was to a great extent destroyed, because we remembered nothing like it in England, and the plough was suffered to encroach upon the forest till there was a real danger that no forest would be left and the rains would cease. Nothing could be better than the intention of the Forest Department in checking the process called “denudation,” but instead of restoring the control of forests to the villagers themselves under definite rules of maintenance, they centralized the managements as bureaucrats will, declared uncultivated land to be Government forest, prohibited wood-gathering or cattle-grazing without payment, let out the grass and timber by auction to contractors, and entered the proceeds to the advantage of the Department. There is no denying the benefits to Government and the contractors. The destruction of forest is checked, hay and fuel are supplied to the cavalry cantonments and cities, and the Department (including Burma) contributes a net sum of about £800,000 a year to the Indian exchequer.[29] Could anything be more desirable?
On the Causeway.