It is difficult for English readers to conceive the number and variety of subjects upon which a single number of the Gazette will give information of some kind. The paragraphs are strung together in the order in which they are received, without arrangement or connection. “A copy of a treaty with his Highness the Maharajah of Cashmere” stands side by side with a grant of three months’ leave to a lieutenant of Bombay Native Foot; while above is an account of the suppression of the late murderous outrages in the Punjaub, and below a narrative of the upsetting of the Calcutta mails into a river near Jubbelpore. “A khureta from the Viceroy to his Highness the Rao Oomaid Singh Bahadoor” orders him to put down crime in his dominions, and the humble answer of the Rao is printed, in which he promises to do his best. Paragraphs are given to “the floating dock at Rangoon;” “the disease among mail horses;” “the Suez Canal;” “the forests of Oude;” and “polygamy among the Hindoos.” The Viceroy contributes a “note on the administration of the Khetree chieftainship;” the Bengal government sends a memorandum on “bribery of telegraph clerks;” and the Resident of Kotah an official report of the ceremonies attending the reception of a viceregal khureta restoring the honors of a salute to the Maha Rao of Kotah. The khureta was received in state, the letter being mounted alone upon an elephant magnificently caparisoned, and saluted from the palace with 101 guns. There is no honor that we can pay to a native prince so great as that of increasing his salute, and, on the other hand, when the Guicodar of Baroda allows a suttee, or when Jung Bahadoor of Nepaul expresses his intention of visiting Paris, we punish them by docking them of two guns, or abolishing their salute, according to the magnitude of the offense.
An Order in Council confers upon the High Priest of the Parsees in the Deccan, “in consideration of his services during the mutiny of 1857,” the honorary title of “Khan Bahadoor.” A paragraph announces that an official investigation has been made into the supposed desecration by Scindia and the Viceroy of a mosque at Agra, and that it has been found that the place in question was not a mosque at all. Scindia had given an entertainment to the Viceroy at the Taj Mahal, and supper had been laid out at a building in the grounds. The native papers said the building was a mosque, but the Agra officials triumphantly demonstrated that it had been used for a supper to Lord Ellenborough after the capture of Cabool, and that its name meant “Feast-place.” “Report on the light-houses of the Abyssinian coast;” “Agreement with the Governor of Leh,” Thibet, in reference to the trans-Himalayan caravans; the promotion of one gentleman to be “Commissioner of Coorg,” and of another to be “Superintendent of the teak forests of Lower Burmah;” “Evidence on the proposed measures to suppress the abuses of polyandry in Travancore and Cochin (by arrangement with the Rajah of Travancore);” “Dismissal of Policeman Juggernauth Ramkam—Oude division, No. 11 company—for gross misconduct;” “Report on the Orissa famine;” “Plague in Turkey;” “Borer insects in coffee-plantations;” “Presents to gentlemen at Fontainebleau for teaching forestry to Indian officers;” “Report on the Cotton States of America,” for the information of native planters; “Division of Calcutta into postal districts” (in Bengalee as well as English); “Late engagement between the Punjaub cavalry and the Afghan tribes;” “Pension of 3rs. per mensem to the widow (aged 12) of Jamram Chesà, Sepoy, 27th Bengal N. I.,” are other headings. The relative space given to matters of importance and to those of little moment is altogether in favor of the latter. The government of two millions of people is transferred in three lines, but a page is taken up with a list of the caste-marks and nose-borings of native women applying for pensions as soldiers’ widows, and two pages are full of advertisements of lost currency notes.
The columns of the Gazette, or at all events its supplements, offer to government officials whose opinion has been asked upon questions on which they possess valuable knowledge, or in which the people of their district are concerned, an opportunity of attacking the acts or laws of the government itself—a chance of which they are not slow to take advantage. One covertly attacks the license-tax; a second, under pretense of giving his opinion on some proposed change in the contract law, backs the demands of the indigo-planters for a law that shall compel specific performance of labor-contracts on the part of the workman, and under penalty of imprisonment; another lays all the ills under which India can be shown to suffer at the door of the home government, and points out the ruinous effects of continual changes of Indian Secretaries in London.
It would be impossible to overrate the importance of the supplements to the Gazette, viewed either as a substitute for a system of communicated articles to the native papers, or as material for English statesmen, whether in India or at home, or as a great experiment in the direction of letting the people of India legislate for themselves. The results of no less than three government inquiries were printed in the supplement during my stay in India, the first being in the shape of a circular to the various local governments requesting their opinion on the proposed extension to natives of the testamentary succession laws contained in the Indian Civil Code; while the second related to the “ghaut murders,” and the third to the abuses of polygamy among the Hindoos. The second and third inquiries were conducted by means of circulars addressed by government to those most interested, whether native or European.
The evidence in reply to the “ghaut murder” circular was commenced by a letter from the Secretary to the government of Bengal to the Secretary to the government of India, calling the attention of the Viceroy in Council to an article written in Bengalee by a Hindoo in the Dacca Prokash on the practice of taking sick Hindoos to the river-side to die. It appears from this letter that the local governments pay careful attention to the opinions of the native papers—unless, indeed, we are to accept the view that “the Hindoo” was a government clerk, and the article written to order—a supposition favored by its radical and destructive tone. The Viceroy answered that the local officers and native gentlemen of all shades of religious opinion were to be privately consulted. A confidential communication was then addressed to eleven English and four Hindoo gentlemen, and the opinions of the English and native newspapers were unofficially invited. The Europeans were chiefly for the suppression of the practice; the natives—with the exception of one, who made a guarded reply—stated that the abuses of the custom had been exaggerated, and that they could not recommend its suppression. The government agreed with the natives, and decided that nothing should be done—an opinion in which the Secretary of State concurred.
In his reply to the “ghaut murder” circular, the representative of the orthodox Hindoos, after pointing out that the Dacca Prokash is the Dacca organ of the Brahmos, or Bengal Deists, and not of the true Hindoos, went on to quote at length from the Hindoo scriptures passages which show that to die in the Ganges water is the most blessed of all deaths. The quotations were printed in native character as well as in English in the Gazette. One of the officials in his reply pointed out that the discouragement of a custom was often as effective as its prohibition, and instanced the cessation of the practice of “hook-swinging” and “self-mutilation.”
Valuable as is the correspondence as a sample of the method pursued in such inquiries, the question under discussion has not the importance that attaches to the examination into the abuses of the practice of polygamy.
To prevent an outcry that the customs of the Hindoo people were being attacked, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal stated in his letters to the government of India that it was his wish that the inquiry should be strictly confined to the abuses of Koolin polygamy, and that there should be no general examination into ordinary polygamy, which was not opposed even by enlightened Hindoos. The polygamy of the Koolin Brahmins is a system of taking a plurality of wives as a means of subsistence: the Koolins were originally Brahmins of peculiar merit, and such was their sanctity that there grew up a custom of payments being made to them by the fathers of the forty or fifty women whom they honored by marriage. So greatly has the custom grown that Koolins have sometimes as many as eighty wives, and the husband‘s sole means of subsistence consists in payments from the fathers of his wives, each of whom he visits, however, only once in three or four years. The Koolin Brahmins live in luxury and indolence, their wives exist in misery, and the whole custom is plainly repugnant to the teachings of the Hindoo scriptures, and is productive of vice and crime. The committee appointed for the consideration of the subject by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal—which consisted of two English civilians and five natives—reported that the suggested systems of registration of marriages, or of fines increasing in amount for every marriage after the first, would limit the general liberty of the Hindoos to take many wives, which they were forbidden to touch. On the other hand, to recommend a declaratory law on plural marriages would be to break their instructions, which ordered them to refrain from giving the sanction of English law to Hindoo polygamy. One native dissented from the report, and favored a declaratory law.
The English idea of “not recognizing” customs or religions which exist among a large number of the inhabitants of English countries is a strange one, and productive of much harm. It is not necessary, indeed, that we should countenance the worship of Juggernauth by ordering our officials to present offerings at his shrine, but it is at least necessary that we should recognize native customs by legislating to restrain them within due limits. To refuse to “recognize” polygamy, which is the social state of the vast majority of the citizens of the British Empire, is not less ridiculous than to refuse to recognize that Hindoos are black.
Recognition is one thing, interference another. How far we should interfere with native customs is a question upon which no general rule can be given, unless it be that we should in all cases of proposed interference with social usages or religious ceremonies consult intelligent but orthodox natives, and act up to their advice. In Ceylon, we have prohibited polygamy and polyandry, although the law is not enforced; in India, we “unofficially recognize” the custom; in Singapore, we have distinctly recognized it by an amendment to the Indian Succession Law, which there applies to natives as well as Europeans. In India, we put down suttee; while, in Australia, we tolerate customs at least as barbarous.