India had hitherto enjoyed long spells of immunity from foreign interference. Her people, defended by the Himalayan wall and the ocean, were free to develop their own scheme of national life; and world-forces which pierce the thickest crust of custom, reached them in attenuated volume. Their isolation ended when the sea was no longer a barrier; and for maritime nations it is but an extension of their territory. A third invasion began in the sixteenth century, and has continued till our own day. The underlying motive was not economic necessity, nor religious enthusiasm, but sheer lust of gain.
In 1498 Vasco da Gama discovered an all-sea route to India, thus opening the fabulous riches of Asia to hungry Europe. Portuguese, Dutch, French and English adventurers embarked in a struggle for Indian commerce, in which our ancestors were victorious because they obtained the command of the sea, and had the whole resources of the mother-country at their back.
Westerners are so imbued with the profit-making instinct that they mentally open, a ledger account in order to prove that India gains more than she loses by dependence on the people of these islands. It cannot be denied that the fabric of English administration is a noble monument of the civil skill and military prowess developed by our race. We have given the peninsula railways and canals, postal and telegraph systems, a code of laws which is far in advance of our own. Profound peace broods over the empire, famine and pestilence are fought with the weapons of science. It would be easy to pile up items on the debit side of our imaginary cash-book. Free trade has destroyed indigenous crafts wholesale, and quartered the castes who pursued them on an over-taxed soil. Incalculable is the waste of human life and inherited skill caused by the shifting of productive energy from India to Great Britain, Germany and America. It cannot be said that the oversea commerce, which amounted in 1907–8 to £241,000,000, is an unmixed benefit. The empire exports food and raw materials, robbing the soil of priceless constituents, and buys manufactured goods which ought to be produced at home. Foreign commerce is stimulated by the home charges, which average £18,000,000, and it received an indirect bounty by the closure of the mints in 1893. The textile industry of Lancashire was built upon a prohibition of Indian muslins: it now exports yarn and piece goods to the tune of £32,000,000, and this trade was unjustly favoured at the expense of local mills under the Customs Tariff of 1895. But there are forces in play for good or evil which cannot be appraised in money. From a material point of view our Government is the best and most honest in existence. If it fails to satisfy the psychical cravings of India there are shortcomings on both sides; and some of them are revealed by Mr. Banerjea’s tales.
Caste.—As a Kulin, or pedigreed Brahmin, he is naturally prone to magnify the prestige of his order. It has been sapped by incidents of foreign rule and the spread of mysticism. Pandits find their stupendous lore of less account than the literary baggage of a university graduate. Brahmin pride is outraged by the advancement of men belonging to inferior castes. The priesthood’s dream is to regain the ascendancy usurped by a race of Mlecchas (barbarians); and it keeps orthodox Hindus in a state of suppressed revolt. One centre of the insidious agitation is the fell goddess Káli’s shrine near Calcutta; another is Puna, which has for centuries been a stronghold of the clannish Máráthá Brahmans. Railways have given a mighty impetus to religion by facilitating access to places of pilgrimage; the post office keeps disaffected elements in touch; and English has become a lingua franca.
While Brahminism, if it dared, could proclaim a religious war, it has powerful enemies within the hierarchy. A desire for social recognition is universal. It was the Patricians’ refusal to intermarry with Plebeians that caused the great constitutional struggles of Ancient Rome. Many of the lowest castes are rebelling against Brahmin arrogance. They have waxed rich by growing lucrative staples, and a strong minority are highly educated. Mystical sects have already thrown off the priestly yoke. But caste is by no means confined to races of Indian blood. What is the snobbery which degrades our English character but the Indo-German Sudra’s reverence for his Brahmin? The Europeans constitute a caste which possesses some solidarity against “natives,” and they have spontaneously adopted these anti-social distinctions. At the apex stand covenanted civilians; whose service is now practically a close preserve for white men. It is split into the Secretariat, who enjoy a superb climate plus Indian pay and furlough, and the “rank and file” doomed to swelter in the plains. Esprit de corps, which is the life-blood of caste, has vanished. Officers of the Educational Service, recruited from the same social strata, rank as “uncovenanted”; and a sense of humiliation reacts on their teaching.
The Land.—In 1765 Clive secured for the East India Company the right of levying land-tax in Bengal. It was then collected by zemindars, a few of whom were semi-independent nobles, and the rest mere farmers of revenue, who bid against one another at the periodical settlements. Tenant right apart, the conception of private property in the soil was inconceivable to the Indian mind. Every one knows that it was borrowed by English lawyers from the Roman codes, when commercialism destroyed the old feudal nexus. Lord Cornwallis’s permanent Settlement of 1793 was a revolution as drastic in its degree as that which Prance was undergoing. Zemindars were presented with the land for which they had been mere rakers-in of revenue. It was parcelled out into “estates,” which might be bought and sold like moveable property. A tax levied at customary rates became “rent” arrived at by a process of bargaining between the landlord and ignorant rustics. The Government demand was fixed for ever, but no attempt was made to safeguard the ryot’s interests. Cornwallis and his henchmen fondly supposed that they were manufacturing magnates of the English type, who had made our agriculture a model for the world. They were grievously mistaken. Under the cast-iron law of sale most of the original zemindars lost their estates, which passed into the hands of parvenus saturated with commercialism. Bengal is not indebted to its zemindars for any of the new staples which have created so vast a volume of wealth. They are content to be annuitants on the land, and sub-infeudation has gone to incredible lengths. Most of them are absentees whose one thought is to secure a maximum of unearned increment from tillers of the soil. In 1765 the land revenue amounted to £3,400,000, of which £258,000 was allotted to zemindars. A century afterwards their net profits were estimated at £12,000,000, and they are now probably half as much again. The horrible oppression described by Mr. Banerjea is impossible in our era of law-courts, railways and newspapers. But it is always dangerous to bring the sense of brotherhood, on which civilisation depends, into conflict with crude animal instincts. In days of American slavery the planter’s interest prompted him to treat his human cattle with consideration, yet Simon Legrees were not unknown. It is a fact that certain zemindars are in the habit of remeasuring their ryots’ holdings periodically, and always finding more land than was set forth in the lease.
The Police.—A pale copy of Sir Robert Peel’s famous system was introduced in 1861, when hosts of inspectors, sub-inspectors and head constables were let loose on Bengal. The new force was highly unpopular, and failed to attract the educated classes. Subaltern officers, therefore, used power for private ends, while the masses were so inured to oppression that they offered no resistance. There has been a marked improvement in the personnel of late years; and Mr. Banerjea’s lurid pictures of corruption and petty tyranny apply to a past generation of policemen. The Lieutenant-Governor of Eastern Bengal does justice to a much-abused service in his Administrative Report for 1907–8. His Honour “believes the force to be a hard-working body of Government servants, the difficulties, trials, and even dangers of whose duties it is impossible for the public at large really to appreciate”. He acknowledges that “India is passing through a period of transition. Old pre-possessions and unscientific methods must be cast aside, and the value of the confession must be held at a discount.” Bengal policemen fail as egregiously as their British colleagues in coping with professional crime. Burglary is a positive scourge, and the habit of organising gang-robberies has spread to youths of the middle class.
Education.—Though Mr. Banerjea has no experience of the inner working of our Government offices, he speaks on education with an expert’s authority. Lord Macaulay, who went to India in 1834 as legal member of Council, was responsible for the introduction of English as the vehicle of instruction. He had gained admission to the caste of Whigs, whose battle-cry was “Knowledge for the People,” and his brilliant rhetoric overpowered the arguments of champions of oriental learning. Every one with a smattering of Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian, regrets the fact that those glorious languages have not been adequately cultivated in modern India. Bengali is a true daughter of the Sanskrit; it has Italian sweetness and German capacity for expressing abstract ideas. No degree of proficiency in an alien tongue can compensate for the neglect of the vernacular. Moreover, the curriculum introduced in the “thirties” was purely academic. It came to India directly from English universities, which had stuck fast in the ruts of the Renaissance. Undue weight was given to literary training, while science and technical skill were despised. Our colleges and schools do not attempt to build character on a foundation of useful habits and tastes that sweeten life; to ennoble ideals, or inspire self-knowledge, self-reliance, and self-control. Technical education is still in its infancy; and the aesthetic instinct which lies dormant in every Aryan’s brain is unawakened. A race which invented the loom now invents nothing but grievances. In 1901 Bengal possessed 69,000 schools and colleges, attended by 1,700,000 pupils, yet only one adult male in 10 and one female in 144 can read and write! The Calcutta University is an examining body on the London model. It does not attempt to enforce discipline in a city which flaunts every vice known to great seaports and commercial centres, unmitigated by the social instinct. Nor is the training of covenanted civilians more satisfactory. In 1909 only 1 out of 50 selected candidates presented himself for examination in Sanskrit or Arabic! Men go out to India at twenty-four, knowing little of the ethnology, languages or history, of the races they are about to govern.
Agriculture.—Seventy-two per cent. of the Bengalis live by cultivating the soil. The vast majority are in the clutches of some local Shylock, who sweeps their produce into his garners, doling out inadequate supplies of food and seed grain. Our courts of law are used by these harpies as engines of oppression; toil as he may the ryot is never free from debt. The current rates of interest leave no profit from agriculture or trade. Twelve to 18 per cent. is charged for loans on ample landed security; and ordinary cultivators are mulcted in 40 to 60. A haunting fear of civil discord, and purblind conservatism in the commercial castes, are responsible for the dearth of capital. India imports bullion amounting to £25,000,000 a year, to the great detriment of European credit, and nine-tenths of it is hoarded in the shape of ornaments or invested in land, which is a badge of social rank. Yet the Aryan nature is peculiarly adapted to co-operation. If facilities for borrowing at remunerative rates existed in towns, agricultural banks on the Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen systems would soon overspread the land. Credit and co-operative groupings for the purchase of seed, fertilisers and implements, are the twin pillars of rural industry. Indian ryots are quite as receptive of new ideas as English farmers. They bought many thousands of little iron sugar mills, placed on the market a generation back by some English speculators, and will adopt any improvements of practical value if the price is brought within their slender means.
The revolution which began a decade ago in America has not spread to Bengal, where the average yield of grain per acre is only 10 bushels as compared with 30 in Europe. Yet it has been calculated that another bushel would defray the whole cost of Government! Bengalis obey the injunction “increase and multiply” without regard for consequences. Their habitat has a population of 552 per square mile, and in some districts the ratio exceeds 900. Clearly there is a pressing need of scientific agriculture, to replace or supplement the rule-of-thumb methods in which the ryot is a past master.