The new spirit in India

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

My Elephant.

A Village Crowd.

[Face p. 140.

Next day I returned to Jenapur, and mounted a large elephant, which, sad to say, could heartily enjoy a daily meal that would keep any Hindu in prime condition for six weeks. As upon a watch-tower, for the next few days I passed up and down the long line of flat country that had been flooded beside the Brahmani, sometimes crossing over into the basin of the Kharsua, another of the uncertain rivers that alternately save and devastate the land. Where it was not devastated, the country was thickly cultivated in little fields of rice, pulse, and a kind of millet, and the numbers of planted mango-trees gave it much the same look as an elm-row part of Essex or the Midlands. Throughout the district rice was certainly the staple crop, because, though it is so risky and wants so much water, its yield is magnificent when it yields at all; and it was one of the ironies of India that, while here the land had been ruined by the deluge of rain, on the way up from Madras I passed through miles on miles of rice fields where the crops stood dying of drought, or were already cut as straw for thatch or as fodder for the sacred cow. Even here the drought had been so severe since the flood that the inferior crops of grain and pulse had failed and could not be used to alleviate the distress.

But in many of the villages that I visited neither flood nor drought will matter for many years. Sand like the seashore had covered crops, and fields, and boundaries, and homes in one indistinguishable desert. At the first village I came to after my elephant had waded through the numerous shallow channels into which the river had now sunk, a crowd of naked people—two or three hundred, I suppose—had assembled round a Government agent who was issuing little doles of rice. Similar doles had been issued soon after the disaster three months before, but otherwise the people had received nothing from a fatherly Government, because rain was officially due, and they ought officially to have lived on the subsidiary crops nurtured by the rain. But the heavens did not comply with official expectations; cholera came instead, and now the people were dying, not, of course, from starvation, but from “bowel complaints.”

At sight of me upon the elephant, the people left their doles and flung themselves prostrate upon the hot sand which had ruined them. Some brought hoes, and digging three feet down, they showed a few withered blades from what had once been a rice-field. To that thickness the sand lay over acres and miles of country along the low land beside the river, and now on the top of the sand the hungry villagers flung themselves flat in their appeal. Surely a man who rode an elephant and wore a helmet, and was white by courtesy, could save them! What could I do? There were 15,000 living skeletons ready to join in that prayer, and I had one pocketful of coppers. Rice was selling at 1½d. a pound; it takes two pounds a day to feed a man decently, and the full wage for a working cultivator was twopence in ordinary times. Where is charity when things are like that? And where are economics?

As usual, it was the hangers-on to life who suffered most. Weavers are useful people, and the village weaver with his wooden hand-loom can hardly be called a hanger-on in a land where every man and woman wears several yards of woven cotton, and washes the garment at least once a day. But how can a weaver live unless women buy his stuff? And how can a woman buy his stuff when she has just sold her doorposts and the family brass dish to buy food for her children, or to pay the police tax for the protection of property? She makes her old rags do, and the weaver starves. There were starving weavers in all the villages, and some it seemed impossible to save even with the food represented by a gift of twopence.

It was the same with the landless labourers who worked under the ryots for wages. It was the same with the village blind, the village idiots, and the lepers. No one could afford to employ labour now or to give alms. In one village a labourer had scooped a little hole in the ground, and fitted a plantain leaf neatly into it as a bowl for gifts. But charity was as dry as the heavens, and no alms fell. I saw the plantain leaf still vainly appealing, but the man had died of hunger. In another village they were carrying a body to the fire, and they laid the poor, naked thing down for me to see. It was a woman’s body, a labourer’s sister, shrivelled and spiky with hunger, like the skeleton of a starved cat found under the slates. In defence of her brother, the labourer himself, I must say that he was dying of hunger too.