[24] “The Great Famine,” pp. 240-2.
[25] Letter from “A Poona Resident” to the Glasgow Herald, December 14, 1907.
[26] “The Great Famine,” p. 62 ff.
[27] See “The Skeleton at the Jubilee Feast,” by Sir William Wedderburn (1897), p. 9.
[28] The whole question of land-ownership and the Settlement is very lucidly discussed in Mr. Theodore Morison’s “Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” chapter ii. His general conclusion is that the Indian system of land-tenure is something intermediate between complete nationalization and absolute private property. “To the extent of one-half the State is able to appropriate that unearned increment in rental incomes which is due to the development of the country. But, except for this contribution to the public exchequer, the economic position of the landlord is not affected by the land revenue laws. He receives rent for the use of the national and indestructible properties of the soil, and he raises that rent when the growth of population and the development of the country makes it profitable to bring poorer lands under cultivation.” In saying this, Mr. Morison is, however, obviously thinking only of a zemindar or landlord district, such as the United Province, with which his book chiefly deals.
[29] The net profit on Forest Revenue for 1905-6 was £824,748. In the four previous years it had risen by nearly £100,000 a year, but in 1907-8 it dropped to £756,100, chiefly owing to a fall of price in Burma.
CHAPTER V
The Southern City
Madras, the most Oriental of the great Indian cities, is well known to English people as the first foothold of Elizabethan merchants, the fortress of Clive, and the coral strand where little English boys used to convert their patient bearers. But apart from these associations, the mother city of Southern India has a peculiar character of her own. Her reformers talk with confidence of the dry light of reason in Madras. They pride themselves on the logic and unimpassioned judgment of her mind. They point to the neighbouring State of Mysore to show what Southern Indians like themselves can do in the way of political advancement, and to Travancore as the most highly educated part of India—the State where women have most freedom, both to gather knowledge and to enjoy their home or leave it. The whole of South India, but especially the city of Madras itself, they regard as a reserve of intellectual force, always ready to support the new spirit that has appeared in the north and west, and destined ultimately to take the lead in the general movement of reform.
Certainly I noticed signs of a practical intelligence that might be called dry. Hour after hour, on a steaming afternoon, I listened to the Madras members of the municipal corporation arguing in protest against the English members and officials about the position of standpipes, and the adulteration of ghee with oil, and of rice with sand, while the President, in the broadest Scots, kept calling on them to address the chair, or declaring their motion lost. When I was in Madras also, the Decentralization Commission, under Mr. Charles Hobhouse, at that time Under-Secretary for India, began its session, and the educated citizens followed the chaotic windings of its questions and evidence with minute accuracy, all the more eager, perhaps, because Mr. Romesh Dutt, the national authority on Indian economics, was among the Commissioners. It was even more significant that Madras, the devoted home of Hinduism and of Vishnu’s worshippers, should have steadily chosen her leading Mohammedan citizen as her representative upon the Viceroy’s Council. One may call this a sign of practical intelligence and the dry light of reason, because they could not have chosen a better member than Nawab Syed Mohammed, descendant of our old enemy Tippoo Sultan, and their deep sense of religion did not deter them from the choice. Calm, modest, and generally silent but for a few definite words thrown into a discussion, he seemed an ideal member for any Council.
Yet, though the boast of reason’s dry light is justified, the pervading tone of Madras, and probably of all Southern India, is not practical logic, but imaginative religion. One sometimes finds the two things in attractive combination. I had gone out one early morning to visit the god in his beautiful temple at Mailapur, not very far from the widespread “compounds” of park and garden, where the happy English and a few rich Indians reside, two or three miles inland from the sea and the jumbled “Black Town” of crowded natives. There, as I stood by the edge of the temple tank covered with the lotus, I came upon an elderly Hindu reading at the door of his modest home. The verandah was partly arranged as a stable for the sacred cow, partly laid with mats for beggars, wanderers, or religious teachers who might be seeking a shelter for the night. The man had bathed in the tank and washed his only garment of a long cotton cloth, as he did every morning himself, following the cleanly and chivalrous Indian custom. He was a schoolmaster, with a fixed salary of £3 6s. 8d. a month. Upon this he mainly supported his sons and their wives and children, all of whom lived in his house, under the direction of his widowed mother, who arranged which of the married couples should occupy the married quarters in turn, as there was not room to supply married quarters for all. In gratitude for her services, and in reverence for motherhood, “which is the centre of human life,” he told me how every morning members of the family washed the widow’s feet and covered them with flowers, as though they were the feet of a divinity.