One weighty drawback to our influence upon Hindoo morals, is that in the case of many abuses we legislate without effect, our laws being evaded where they are outwardly obeyed. The practice of infanticide exists in all parts of India, but especially in Rajpootana, and the girls are killed chiefly in order to save the cost of marrying them—or, rather, of buying husbands for them. Now we have “suppressed” infanticide—which means that children are smothered or starved, instead of being exposed. It is no easy task to bring about reforms in the customs of the people of India.
The many improvements in the moral condition of the people which the census chronicles are steps in a great march. Those who have known India long are aware that a remarkable change has come over the country in the last few years. Small as have been the positive visible results of Christian teaching, the indirect effects have been enormous. Among the Sikhs and Marattas, a spirit of reflection, of earnest thought, unusual in natives, has been aroused; in Bengal it has taken the form of pure deism, but then Bengal is not India. The spirit rather than the doctrinal teaching of Christianity has been imbibed: a love of truth appeals more to the feelings of the upright natives than do the whole of the nine-and-thirty Articles. Here, as elsewhere, the natives look to deeds, not words; the example of a Frere is worth the teaching of a hundred missionaries, painstaking and earnest though they be.
CHAPTER VI.
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES.
THROUGH Mirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtehpore, I passed on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at Allahabad; for though the city is strategically important, there is in it but little to be seen. Like all spots of the confluence of rivers, Allahabad is sacred with the Hindoos, for it stands, they say, at the meeting-point of no less than three great streams—the Ganges, the Jumna, and a river of the spirit-land. To us poor pagans the third stream is invisible; not so to the faithful. Catching a glimpse of Marochetti‘s statue at the Cawnpore well, as I hurried through that city, I diverged from the East Indian Railway, and took dawk-carriage to Lucknow.
As compared with other Indian cities, the capital of Oude is a town to be seen in driving rather than in walking; the general effects are superior in charm and beauty to the details, and the vast size of the city makes mere sight-seeing a work of difficulty. More populous before 1857 than either Calcutta or Bombay, it is still twice as large as Liverpool. Not only, however, is Lucknow the most perfect of the modern or Italianized Oriental towns, but there are in it several buildings that have each the charm of an architecture special to itself. Of these, the Martinière is the most singular, and it looks like what it is—the freak of a wealthy madman. Its builder was General Martine, a Frenchman in the service of the Kings of Oude. Not far behind the Martinière is the Dilkousha—a fantastic specimen of an Oriental hunting-lodge. The ordinary show-building of the place, the Kaiser-Bagh, or Palace of the Kings of Oude, is a paltry place enough, but there is a certain grandeur in the view of the great Imaumbara and the Hooseinabád from a point whence the two piles form to the eye but one. The great Imaumbara suffered terribly in 1858 from the wanton destruction which our troops committed everywhere during the war of the mutiny. Had they confined themselves to outrages such as these, however, but little could have been said against the conduct of the war. There is too much fear that the English, unless held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition toward cruelty, wherever they have a weak enemy to meet.
The stories of the Indian mutiny and of the Jamaica riot are but two out of many—two that we happen to have heard; but the Persian war in 1857 and the last of the Chinese campaigns are not without their records of deliberate barbarity and wrong. From the first officer of one of the Peninsular and Oriental steamers, which was employed in carrying troops up the Euphrates during the Persian war, I heard a story that is the type of many such. A Persian drummer-boy of about ten years old was seen bathing from the bank one morning by the officers on deck. Bets were made as to the chance of hitting him with an Enfield rifle, and one of the betters killed him at the first shot.
It is not only in war-time that our cruelty comes out; it is often seen in trifles during peace. Even a traveler, indeed, becomes so soon used to see the natives wronged in every way by people of quiet manner and apparent kindness of disposition, that he ceases to record the cases. In Madras roads, for instance, I saw a fruit-seller hand up some limes to a lower-deck port, just as we were weighing anchor. Three Anglo-Indians (men who had been out before) asked in chorus, “How much?” “One quarter rupee.” “Too much.” And, without more ado, paying nothing, they pelted the man with his own limes, of which he lost more than half. In Ceylon, near Bentotté rest-house, a native child offered a handsome cowrie (of a kind worth in Australia about five shillings, and certainly worth something in Ceylon) to the child of a Mauritius coffee-planter who was traveling with us to Columbo, himself an old Indian officer. The white child took it, and would not give it up. The native child cried for money, or to have his shell back, but the mother of the white child exclaimed, “You be hanged; it‘s worth nothing;” and off came the shell with us in the dawk. Such are the small but galling wrongs inflicted daily upon the Indian natives. It was a maxim of the Portuguese Jesuits that men who live long among Asiatics seldom fail to learn their vices; but our older civilians treat the natives with strict justice, and Anglo-Indian ladies who have been reared in the country are generally kind to their own servants, if somewhat harsh toward other natives. It is those who have been in the country from five to ten years, and especially soldiers, who treat the natives badly. Such men I have heard exclaim that the new penal code has revolutionized the country. “Formerly,” they say, “you used to send a man to a police-officer or a magistrate with a note:—‘My dear ——. Please give the bearer twenty lashes.’ But now the magistrates are afraid to act, and your servant can have you fined for beating him.” In spite of the lamentations of Anglo-Indians over the good old days, I noticed in all the hotels in India the significant notice, “Gentlemen are earnestly requested not to strike the servants.”
The jokes of a people against themselves are not worth much, but may be taken in aid of other evidence. The two favorite Anglo-Indian stories are that of the native who, being asked his religion, said, “Me Christian—me get drunk like massa;” and that of the young officer who, learning Hindostanee in 1858, had the difference between the negative “né” and the particle “ne” explained to him by the moonshee, when he exclaimed: “Dear me! I hanged lots of natives last year for admitting that they had not been in their villages for months. I suppose they meant to say that they had not left their villages for months.” It is certain that in the suppression of the mutiny hundreds of natives were hanged by Queen‘s officers who, unable to speak a word of any native language, could neither understand evidence nor defense.
It is in India, when listening to a mess-table conversation on the subject of looting, that we begin to remember our descent from Scandinavian sea-king robbers. Centuries of education have not purified the blood: our men in India can hardly set eyes upon a native prince or a Hindoo palace before they cry, “What a place to break up!” “What a fellow to loot!” When I said to an officer who had been stationed at Secrole in the early days of the mutiny, “I suppose you were afraid that the Benares people would have attacked you,” his answer was, “Well, for my part, I rather hoped they would, because then we should have thrashed them, and looted the city. It hadn‘t been looted for two hundred years.”
Those who doubt that Indian military service makes soldiers careless of men‘s lives, reckless as to the rights of property, and disregardful of human dignity, can hardly remember the letters which reached home in 1857, in which an officer in high command during the march upon Cawnpore reported, “Good bag to-day; polished off —— rebels,” it being borne in mind that the “rebels” thus hanged or blown from guns were not taken in arms, but villagers apprehended “on suspicion.” During this march, atrocities were committed in the burning of villages, and massacre of innocent inhabitants, at which Mohammed Togluk himself would have stood ashamed, and it would be to contradict all history to assert that a succession of such deeds would not prove fatal to our liberties at home.