The new spirit in India

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

The village houses in this part of Orissa, as in most parts of India, are built of mud plastered on to a bamboo framework, with wooden doorposts and rafters. They are thatched with rice straw or palm branches. At the first rush of the flood, the houses dissolved like children’s castles in the tide, and I saw flat and bare plots of land where they had stood. Even the houses that had escaped the water were almost as bare, for the people had been obliged to sell the scanty stock of furniture that Hindu villagers possess—brass pots and plates, a corn bin, cooking vessels, and perhaps a bed—in order to pay the rent which the zemindars or landlords continued to exact, though I was told the officials had ordered a suspension.

The native official “tahsildars,” acting as village tax-collectors, had also compelled them to sell everything they had, even to their wooden doorposts, as I said, for paying the “chaukidari” tax (or “tikut,” as they call it) which supports the village police. It is a small tax, paid quarterly, and running from a halfpenny up to 1s. 4d. a month per house, but the police pay used formerly to be raised from special plots of land set apart in each village for the purpose, and the imposition of a hut-tax for the purpose ten years ago had always been regarded as a grievance. Nor does it matter whether a tax is great or small when you have to sell the family plate, valued at eighteenpence, to pay it. Just before my journey through the country, this tax had also been officially remitted, but it was collected up to a day or two previously, and was always mentioned by the people as one of their most irritating grievances. No one loves a tax-collector, but in time of famine there is something particularly galling in selling one’s property to feed the police for preserving it.

In Orissa itself and in Calcutta the British officials were being rather angrily criticized for negligence, but apart from the necessary failure of a system which tries to administer welfare through foreign rulers who live completely isolated from the people, I do not think the officials were to blame. They had given a little relief at first. When the rains that ought to have fallen did not fall, they gave a little more. They remitted a tax, and called on the zemindars to remit rent. They did not discourage a band of Indian volunteers, some of whom belonged to a reforming Vedantic Order in Calcutta, from distributing private relief. Sir Andrew Fraser, Lieut.-Governor of Bengal, who was then on progress through Orissa, and spent a day in the famine district, told me relief works were just going to be undertaken, and the Government expected to spend about £20,000 on the business of keeping alive and starting again. He probably knew as much about starvation in the abstract as any official could, for he was in control of the relief in the Central Provinces during the terrible famine of 1900.[35] The officials had also made the usual advances, called “takavi” loans, to holders of two to ten acres for the purchase of new seed and stock upon the security of their holding.

On the whole, the violent personal attacks upon the officials appeared to arise chiefly from the habit of all peoples who are compelled to submit to a fatherly despotism. Being themselves excluded from a voice in their destiny, they turn savagely upon the Government whenever distress or disorder supervenes, and the only real hope I could see in the situation was the appearance of the little bands of volunteers who in true Swadeshi spirit were spreading the conception of self-reliance throughout India. Sir Andrew Fraser and the higher officials welcomed their efforts, but the average Anglo-Indians and the journalists of Calcutta either treated them with contempt, or shrieked “sedition!”

Whatever blame lay with the authorities seemed to arise from the usual official tendency to make light of distress for fear of increasing difficulties, and to temper benevolence with bad manners. I think both tendencies were interestingly combined in a Bengali Deputy Magistrate, who was superintending the relief in one of the larger villages. I was myself travelling with Mr. Madhu Sudan Das, a resident of Cuttack, highly educated on European lines, the only Uriya graduate of Calcutta, and a man well known throughout India for his unlimited generosity and devotion to his own people, whose rights he had often vindicated against aggression. From early manhood he had been a Christian, though perhaps not a very dogmatic and ecclesiastical Christian, his faith being founded entirely upon his heartfelt admiration of Christ’s prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “The man who could utter that prayer while dying under torture was divine,” he often said to me. “The moment I heard the prayer, I recognized that truth, and I have never doubted it since.”

But Christian though he was, and though his daughter had studied in Cambridge, and now lived in Cuttack like an English lady without a shade of “purdah,” he was almost worshipped as the saint of Orissa by the poor among his countrymen. I have seen a man with a frightful running sore entreat Mr. Das to lend him the eighth of a penny that he might touch the sore with it and be healed. Another came with a brass bowl and implored Mr. Das to dip his finger into the water that his wife might be delivered from her dangerous labour, and the moment he dipped his finger into the water, the child was safely born.

Unhappily, in spite of his Christianity and saintly reputation, Mr. Das appeared to act on official minds much as a hedgehog would on a naked man who found one rolled up in his bed. On arriving one night at a dak-bungalow or rest-house, we found that two of the three rooms were occupied by a Bengali magistrate and a colleague. So having arranged that Mr. Das, who was oldish and invalid, should have the other room while I slept in the free air like the elephant, we sent in our names to the Deputy Magistrate and were invited to enter. Knowing Mr. Das well by reputation, he had evidently determined not to fall below the standard of European dignity. Consequently he received us with his legs on the long arms of his deck-chair—an attitude which, I suppose, he had observed as customary among English officials when they receive “natives,” and I could not correct his impression.

Mr. Das began by requesting him to hear the petitions of three or four widows who stood lamenting outside the door because their husbands had died of starvation. Entrenched behind his legs, the official refused to comply, stating that he had already heard their cases, and had proved to his own satisfaction that the men had not died of starvation, but of something else. Mr. Das then went through a number of other cases, in most of which the official said he thought he had made examination, but could not be sure. Anyhow, all charges of neglect or harshness against the officials were absolutely false, and he was not there to be cross-examined. With prickly insistence, Mr. Das continued his interrogations upon the complaints of the villagers, till at last the Deputy Magistrate, irritated past human endurance, refused to say any more, and waving good-night to his boots we left the room.

On our return journey, a day or two later, we discovered that he had sent out orders by the chaukidars or village police to all the villages round, commanding the people not to come out to meet us under threats of unknown penalties. So great is the terror inspired by officials and police under a bureaucracy, that very few came of the hundreds who had before thronged our path in hopes of winning some assistance, or merely of seeing the elephant and their national favourite. The few who did come told us the truth with fear, and perhaps we should never have got at the real facts if we had not found a chaukidar in one village actually going round from house to house with the order. Yet Mr. Das was a man whose assistance in such a crisis any one but an official would have been delighted to secure; for the people trusted him absolutely, in spite of his foreign religion, and no one living understood them better. It was only that he was the kind of man who perturbs tabulated columns.

Most administrators would find it much easier to appreciate a Rajah or Tributary Chief who lived about twenty miles from Cuttack, and expended, as I was told, £335 on a breakfast which he expected to offer the Lieutenant-Governor with the usual trimmings of dancing-girls, fireworks, and other delights. At such a breakfast cases of starvation could hardly occur, and nothing would interrupt the cheers, loyalty, and goodwill, such as Simla and the Anglo-Indian papers were expecting from the proposed Advisory Councils of Notables. Yet £335 did seem a largish sum to consume at one meal in the midst of a starving people. Perhaps the Lieutenant-Governor thought so too, for I believe he continued his progress without accepting the entertainment. One would like to know how that meal was ever consumed. Perhaps the elephants were called in to help.