§10. But Lord Dalhousie left his mark in history as an administrator rather than as a conqueror. Having annexed the Punjab and Pegu, he threw his whole soul into the administration. The Punjab was soon traversed with roads like a Roman province, and one magnificent and difficult road was completed from Lahore to Peshawar. Rangoon was cleared of malarious jungle, and planned out in streets and roads like a European city. The working of British administration in the new provinces has been most successful. Lord Dalhousie not only delivered the population from oppression and violence, but introduced order, liberty, and law, such as prevails in no Oriental country outside the British pale from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chinese Seas. Lord Dalhousie may have petted the Punjab and Pegu at the expense of Madras and Bombay, but he was never unmindful of the interests of the Anglo-Indian empire. He is the first Governor-General who laboured for the benefit of India in the interests of the British nation, as well as in those of the East India Company.
Public works of the East India Company.
Public works in India before the advent of Lord Dalhousie had chiefly consisted of military and civil buildings, such as barracks, arsenals, jails, and hospitals. The Company, however, was the landlord of India, and the bulk of the people were its tenants; it had therefore sought to improve the condition of its tenants after the manner of landlords. It encouraged the cultivation of tea, coffee, and cotton. It restored choked-up channels, which had been dug by Mohammedan Sultans of former days for watering their palaces, gardens, and hunting grounds; and it converted them into canals for irrigating a large acreage in the North-West Provinces. Such was the origin of the Western and Eastern Jumna canals, which were constructed in the days of Lord William Bentinck and Lord Auckland. Each canal received the water from the upper stream on the slope of the Himalayas, and irrigated the high lands which were above the level of the lower stream. Above all, the Company sanctioned the Ganges canal which was purely a British undertaking, constructed for navigation as well as for irrigation.
Northern India: old caravan routes.
But India was without roads. Rough caravan routes traversed Northern India in the seventeenth century, and European travellers landing at Surat could find their way to Ajmere, Agra, and Delhi. From Delhi again there was a caravan route through the Punjab and Afghanistan to Persia and Turkistan. But in the eighteenth century all were closed. Rajput rebels and outlaws stopped all travelling between Surat and Agra; the Jhat brigands of Bhurtpore stopped it between Bengal and Delhi; and Sikhs and Afghans cut off all trade with Persia and Turkistan.
Water-ways.
In Northern India the ordinary route from Calcutta to the north-west was by water. The rivers Jumna and Ganges flow from the Himalayas in a south-easterly direction until they meet at Allahabad in the centre of Hindustan. The Jumna flows past Delhi and Agra; the Ganges flows past Cawnpore; and after meeting at Allahabad, the two rivers flow in one united stream past Benares, Patna, Monghyr, and Calcutta, until they reach the Bay of Bengal. But travelling up country against the stream was always tedious, and a journey which formerly occupied months by water, now only occupies the same number of days by rail.
Deccan: no traffic.
In the Deccan the routes were much worse. There was no traffic between Bombay and the Mahratta country until 1831, when Sir John Malcolm opened a cart-road through the western Ghats, and thus broke through the mountain wall which cut off Bombay from the interior. In the Nizam's country there were no roads except a rough route between Hyderabad and the seaport at Masulipatam, which was cursed by every British Resident from the days of Clive and Verelst down to very modern times.
Southern India: palanquins.