In his quinquennial review of the progress of education in India, Mr. H.W. Orange quotes the following remarks by Mr. Sharp, Director of Public Instruction in Eastern Bengal, on the position of female education, adding that they describe the prevailing, if not quite universal, state of affairs:—
"All efforts to promote female education have hitherto encountered peculiar difficulties. These difficulties arise chiefly from the customs of the people themselves. The material considerations, which have formed a contributing factor in the spread of boys' schools, are inoperative in the case of girls. The natural and laudable desire for education as an end in itself, which is evinced by the upper and middle classes as regards their sons, is no match for the conservative instincts of the Mahomedans, the system of early marriage among the Hindus, and the rigid seclusion of women which is a characteristic of both. These causes prevent any but the most elementary education from being given to girls. The lack of female teachers and the alleged unsuitability of the curriculum, which is asserted to have been framed more with a view to the requirements of boys than those of girls, form subsidiary reasons or excuses against more rapid progress. To these difficulties may be added the belief, perhaps more widely felt than expressed, that the general education of women means a social revolution, the extent of which cannot be foreseen. 'Indian gentlemen,' it has been well said, 'may thoroughly allow that when the process has been completed, the nation will rise in intelligence, in character and in all the graces of life. But they are none the less apprehensive that while the process of education is going on, while the lessons of emancipation are being learnt and stability has not yet been reached, while, in short, society is slowly struggling to adjust itself to the new conditions, the period of transition will be marked by the loosening of social ties, the upheaval of customary ways, and by prolonged and severe domestic embarrassment.' There is, it is true, an advanced section of the community that is entirely out of sympathy with this view. In abandoning child-marriage they have got rid of the chief obstacle to female education; and it is among them, consequently, that female education has made proportionately the greatest progress in quantity and still more in quality. But outside this small and well-marked class, the demand for female education is much less active and spontaneous…. In fact the people at large encourage or tolerate the education of their girls only up to an age and up to a standard at which it can do little good, or, according to their point of view, little harm."
NOTE 22
THE THEORY OF THE "DRAIN."
The Master of Elibank, then Under-Secretary of State, included in his Indian Budget speech on Aug. 5, 1909, a brief but effective refutation of the "drain" theory:—
"If the House will allow me, I wish to digress for a moment to deal with a charge that is constantly made, and has recently been repeated, to the effect that there is poverty in India which is largely due to the political and commercial drain on the country year by year, the political, it is asserted, amounting to £30,000,000 and the commercial to £40,000,000. These figures have been placed even higher by those who wish to blacken the Indian Administration in order to bolster up a malicious agitation against this country. I think it is incumbent upon the representative of the Indian Government in this House to deal with the statement. I may at once say that it has no foundation in fact. (Hear, hear.) Its origin is to be found, no doubt, in the fact that India makes annually considerable payments in England in return for services rendered, such as the loan of British capital; but there is no justification for describing these payments as a drain, and their amount is only a fraction of the figures which I have just quoted. Let me deal first with the question of amount. As the method by which India makes her payments in England is that she exports more than she imports, all calculations as to the amount of payments must necessarily be based on the returns of Indian trade, which show by how much the Indian exports exceed her imports. If the trade returns are examined for 1904, 1906, and 1906, after making due allowance for the capital sent to India in connexion with Government transactions, the average excess of exports over imports, or in other words payments by India to England for services rendered, is £23,900,000 per year during the three years that have been mentioned. This payment is made up of, first, £21,200,000, being the average annual amount of the Government remittance during three years, which corresponds to the alleged political drain of £30,000,000; and, secondly, £2,700,000, the average annual amount of private remittances during the same period, which total has been most carefully examined and corresponds to the alleged commercial drain of £40,000,000. Now let us examine for a moment the nature of these two remittances. The Government remittance is mainly for the payment of home charges—namely, those charges in England which are normally met from revenue. These charges, in the three years to which I have referred, averaged £18,250,000, made up in the following manner:—Interest on debt, £9,600,000; payments for stores, ordered and purchased in this country, which cannot be manufactured in India, £2,500,000; pensions and furlough pay to civil and military officers, £5,000,000; and miscellaneous, £1,250,000. It will thus be seen that alter deducting £5,000,000 for pensions and furlough pay, the bulk of the remittance represents interest for railway developments and other matters with which the interests of the peoples of India are intimately bound up. Besides the home charges proper, certain sums were remitted to England by the Government to defray capital charges. These bring the Government remittances to the total of £21,200,000 already mentioned. Now let us turn for a moment to the supposed commercial drain of £40,000,000 per year, which, as I have endeavoured to show, is in reality £2,700,000, being the difference during the period referred to between the private remittances from India, representing private profits, savings, &c., sent home to England, and the private remittances to India representing the transmission of English capital to that country. We can therefore say definitely that whatever India may have sent to England within the three years, she received from England as capital a sum falling short of that amount by £2,700,000 a year; and perhaps I might incidentally remind the House that at the end of 1907 the capital outlay on railways alone in India amounted to £265,000,000 sterling, the bulk of which is British capital, but by no means represents the full amount of British capital invested in India, which has taken its part in commercially developing its resources and providing employment for the masses of people in that great continent. Hon. members who have followed a recent discussion in the pages of the Economist as to whether £300,000,000 or £500,000,000 was the amount of British capital invested in India for its commercial and industrial development and for providing employment of the people in that land, will agree that the sum could not be placed lower than £350,000,000."
NOTE 23
THE SECRETARY OF STATE AND THE VICEROY.
This issue was raised, for instance, during the Viceroyalty of Lord
Northbrook, when Lord Salisbury was Secretary of State, Mr. Bernard
Mallett's memoir of Lord Northbrook contains the following noteworthy
remarks upon the subject by Lord Cramer, who, as Major Baring, was
Private Secretary to Lord Northbrook:—
There can be no doubt that Lord Salisbury's idea was to conduct the government of India to a very large extent by private correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy. He was disposed to neglect and, I also think, to underrate the value of the views of the Anglo-Indian officials … This idea inevitably tended to bring the Viceroy into the same relation to the Secretary of State for India as that in which an Ambassador or Minister at a foreign Court stands to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs … Lord Northbrook's general view was the exact opposite of all this, and I am strongly convinced that he was quite right … He recognized the subordinate position of the Viceroy, but he held that Parliament had conferred certain rights not only on the Viceroy but on his Council which differentiated them in a very notable degree from subordinate officials such as those in the diplomatic service … Lord Northbrook regarded the form of government in India as a very wise combination which enabled both purely English and Anglo-Indian experience to be brought to bear on the treatment of Indian questions. He did not by any means always follow the Indian official view; but he held strongly, in the first place, that to put aside that view and not to accord to the two Councils in London and Calcutta their full rights was unconstitutional in this sense that, though the form might be preserved, the spirit of the Act of Parliament regulating the government of India would be evaded. In the second place, he held that for a Viceroy or a Secretary of State without Indian experience to overrule those who possessed such experience was an extremely unwise proceeding, and savoured of an undue exercise of that autocratic power of which he himself was very unjustly accused.