India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

Nor was Pitt's Act concerned only with the relations of the Company to the Crown. Its numerous and very drastic provisions for the prevention and punishment of the corruption and oppression which had become rampant amongst the Company's servants after the grant of the Diwani testified to the determination of Parliament, whilst acquiescing in the extension of the British dominion, to uphold and enforce at the same time in the governance of Indian peoples the principle of justice for all to which the British people had gradually fought their way. A strong impetus was thus given to the great reforms already initiated by Clive himself, and still more drastically by Warren Hastings, which, within the framework as far as possible of the old indigenous system of judicial and civil administration, built up on solid foundations of integrity and efficiency a capacious and elastic structure easily extended to the vast territories that were still to pass under British rule. But then no more than at any later period could the machinery of government have worked smoothly, or even at all, without the co-operation of the Indians themselves, who were recruited in large numbers into the Company's service. Respect for their traditional customs and beliefs, and encouragement, of which Warren Hastings was the first to recognise the importance, to Indian education, though still only on the old lines with which Indians were already familiar, secured the growing loyalty of their co-operation. Then, as now, it was nowhere more effective than in the judicial administration, and side by side with new tribunals, which conformed with Western jurisprudence, the old ones, purified and reorganised, continued to dispense justice in accordance mainly with Hindu and Mahomedan and Indian customary law. With the consolidation of the British Paramount Power Indians learnt to identify it with their ancient conception of the State, and the Company's service came to enjoy the popularity and prestige which had always attached to the service of the State under their indigenous rulers and even under Mahomedan domination.

The renewal of the Company's Charter, which took place at intervals of twenty years, dating from Lord North's Act of 1773, afforded a convenient opportunity for the revision, when required, both of its relations to the Crown and of its methods of government in India. The abrogation of its trading monopoly in 1813 was mainly a concession to opposition at home, quickened by the loss of the European markets which had been closed against Great Britain by Napoleon's continental system, and for the renewal of its Charter the Company had to surrender its trading monopoly. It was the first step towards the abrogation of all its trading privileges twenty years later, when the Company, finally delivered from the temptations which beset a commercial corporation, became for the first time a purely governing body, free to devote its entire energies to the discharge of the immense responsibilities that had devolved upon it. This was, however, only one, though not the least significant of the momentous changes that accompanied the renewal of the Charter in 1833.

The trend of events in Europe after the peace in 1815 had tended to accentuate the profound divergency of views between Great Britain and the leading continental Powers in regard to fundamental principles of government, which, dating back to the seventeenth century, had been arrested at the close of the eighteenth by the exigencies of common action against the excesses of the French Revolution and the inordinate ambition of Napoleon. Under the auspices of the Holy Alliance, the continent of Europe was drifting into blind reaction. The British people, on the contrary, were entering upon a further stage of democratic evolution at home, and, under the influence of new liberal and humanitarian doctrines, their sympathies were going out abroad to every down-trodden nationality that was struggling, whether in Greece or in South America, to throw off the yoke of oppressive despotisms. Their growing sense of responsibility towards alien races which they themselves held in subjection was manifested most conspicuously in the generous movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery in our West Indian Colonies. It could not fail to be extended also to India. Under Lord Hastings British dominion had again rapidly expanded between 1813 and 1823, when he left it firmly established from the extreme south to the Sutlej in the north. Then ten years of internal and external peace had followed in which the educational labours, chiefly in Bengal, of a generation of great missionaries began not only to meet with unexpected reward in India itself, but also to stir the public mind at home to new aspects of a mission which came to be regarded as providential, and to the moral duties which it imposed upon us in return for the material advantages to be derived from political dominion. Some of our great administrators in India were themselves beginning to look forward to a time, however far distant, when we should have made the people of India capable of self-government—not yet, of course, on the lines now contemplated, since even in Great Britain self-government was not established then on a broad popular basis. As early as 1824 Sir Thomas Munro, then Governor of Madras, raised in an official minute the "one great question to which we should look in all our arrangements: What is to be their final result on the character of the people?" The following passage in that remarkable document may be commended to our faint-hearted doubters of to-day:

Liberal treatment has always been found the most effectual way of elevating the character of any people, and we may be sure that it will produce a similar effect on that of the people of India. The change will no doubt be slow, but that is the very reason why no time should be lost in commencing the work. We should not be discouraged by difficulties, nor, because little progress may be made in our own time, abandon the enterprise as hopeless, and charge upon the obstinacy and bigotry of the nations the failure occasioned by our own fickleness in not pursuing steadily the only line of conduct on which any hope of success can be reasonably founded. We should make the same allowances for the Hindus as for other nations and consider how slow the progress of improvement has been among the nations of Europe and through what a long course of barbarous ages they had to pass before they attained their present state. When we compare other countries with England, we usually speak of England as she now is. We scarcely ever think of going back beyond the Reformation, and we are apt to regard every foreign nation as ignorant and uncivilised, whose state of government does not in some degree approximate to our own, even should it be higher than our own was at no distant date.

We should look upon India not as a temporary possession but as one to be maintained permanently until the natives shall in some future age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time shall arrive it will probably be best for both countries that the British control over India should be gradually withdrawn. That the desirable change contemplated may in some after age be effected in India there is no cause to despair. Such a change was at one time in Britain itself at least as hopeless as it is here. When we reflect how much the character of nations has always been influenced by that of governments, and that some, once the most cultivated, have sunk into barbarism, while others, formerly the rudest, have attained the highest point of civilisation, we shall see no reason to doubt that if we pursue steadily the proper measures, we shall in time so far improve the character of our Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect themselves.

It was a splendid vision for a great British administrator to have entertained nearly one hundred years ago, though, with no self-governing Dominions in those days to point a better way, the only possibility that could occur to Munro's mind in the event of its fulfilment was an amicable but complete severance of our connection with India; and it is well to be reminded of the faith that was already in him and not a few other experienced and broad-minded Englishmen in India as well as at home, now that many of us are inclined to contemplate only with scepticism and apprehension an approach to its fulfilment on the new lines which the evolution of the British Empire and of democratic government throughout all its component parts, neither of which could then be foreseen, have in the meantime suggested.

Indians were at that time already employed in large numbers in the Company's services, but only in subordinate posts, for which in most cases their educational backwardness alone fitted them, and only as an act of grace on the part of their British rulers. Parliament had recognised the right of the Indian people to expect from us the benefits of good and honest government—perhaps as a duty which we owed to ourselves as much as to them—but it had not yet risen to a recognition of their right to any active share in the government of their country.

One of the first questions to come before the new Parliament elected after the great Reform Bill was that of the renewal of the Company's charter in 1833. The Parliamentary Committee appointed to inquire and report on the subject struck a new note when it laid distinct stress on the Indian point of view. It admitted frankly that "Indians were alive to the grievance of being excluded from a larger share in the executive government," and proceeded to state that in its opinion ample evidence had been given to show "that such exclusion is not warranted on the score of their own incapacity for business or the want of application or trustworthiness." Accordingly, when the Charter was renewed, Parliament laid it down that "no native of the said Indian territories, nor any natural British-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the Company." This was the first substantial promise given to India that British rule was not to spell merely the unqualified dominion, however beneficent, of alien rulers. It invited the co-operation of the subject race, instead of merely postulating unconditional submission. It heralded at the same time the introduction of Western education, without which the promise would have been empty.

The problem of Indian education had occupied the minds of far-sighted Englishmen from the days of Warren Hastings, who had been the first to provide out of the Company's funds for the maintenance of indigenous educational institutions, and it had been definitely provided in the renewal of the Charter in 1813 that the Company should set aside a certain portion of its revenues to be spent annually upon education. But long delays had been caused by an interminable and fierce controversy over the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the diffusion of education. The champions of English were much encouraged by the immediate success which attended the opening of an English school in Calcutta in 1830 by Dr. Alexander Duff, a great missionary who was convinced that English education could alone win over India to Christianity, and Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7, 1835, disfigured as it is by the quite unmerited and ignorant scorn which he poured out on Oriental learning with his customary self-confidence, finally turned the scales in favour of the adoption of English as essential to the spread of Western education. One of the immediate objects in view—and incidentally as a measure of economy—was undoubtedly the training of Indians, and in much larger numbers, for the more efficient performance of the work allotted to them in the administrative and judicial services of the Company. But if Macaulay was quite wrong in imagining that Western education would assimilate Indians to Englishmen in everything but their complexions, he was by no means blind to the larger implications of the new departure he was advocating. Like other great Englishmen of his day, he believed that good government and, still less, mere dominion were not the only ends to which our efforts should be directed. "It may be," he declared, "that the public mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come, I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history."

Peace and law and order British rule had restored to India, and its foremost purpose henceforth, as set forth by Lord William Bentinck, a great Governor-General, imbued with the progressive spirit of the best Englishmen in India, to which Parliament had given a fresh impetus, was to be the diffusion of Western education. "The great object of the British Government," he declared, "ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone."