India under Ripon: A Private Diary

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

“The photographs have come representing us with Lord Ripon and the Nizam and Grant Duff, me standing next to Cordery, behind the Viceroy’s chair. There is humour in this; and I shall send copies to my various friends in token of the university scheme having succeeded. It will give them courage. After all, Ragunath Rao could never get to see Lord Ripon, and he writes rather comically about it. We are staying with Fergusson at Parel.

“27th Feb.—There is an article in the ‘Bombay Gazette’ this morning about the university, well and courteously written, and which I am told is probably by a Mr. West of the High School. It is, of course, against it, but will attract attention, which is what we most want, and cannot by any possibility do harm. At breakfast I told Sir James Fergusson that I was going to a meeting of Hindus and Parsis, and asked him for a carriage to go in. He told me very frankly he did not like my going from his house, though when I explained that it was not a public meeting, and that it would be held at the house of Kashinath Telang, an honourable member of his own council, he agreed to send me. But he spoke to me very strongly and very earnestly about the danger of my exciting the native mind by appearing to sympathize with their grievances. He could not understand how, as an Englishman, I could reconcile it with my conscience to do this. The Government of India was a despotism of a paternal and beneficent character, which was day and night working for the people’s good, and any agitation would only impede its efforts. There were, of course, ambitious natives who had their own ends to serve by making out a case against the Government, but he could assure me their tales were lies. He knew, of his personal experience, that the Government officials were entirely anxious to do what was right, that the people looked up to them as their protectors from injustice, and that he believed there was no better Government in the world, or one more respected. He asked me what subjects I proposed to discuss with them, and hoped I should eschew politics, and he spoke so earnestly and well that I had not the heart to say how precisely his good faith proved all the native argument. No one can doubt Sir James’s loyalty. But who are his eyes and hands and ears? His chuprassi, who tells him that the Mohammedans despise the Mahdi; Sir Frank Souter, who tells him, on his experience as a police officer and a friend of the natives, to trust no native’s word; Mr. L., who would like to extend his High Court jurisdiction to Afghanistan, and the old Commander-in-Chief. I said, however, that I could not promise not to talk about politics, but I would say nothing inflammatory, and I felt quite certain that no sympathy I could show them or suggestions that I could offer, would make them more dissatisfied, or make them any clearer-headed about a remedy than they were already. He asked me what they complained of, and I instanced the absence of any real Court of Appeal for grievances. At this he broke out and protested that nothing could be less true, that every day appeals were made to him, and the decisions of lower officials reversed by their superiors or himself. All were anxious to do justice to the poor, sometimes only too anxious. Only the other day he had had to censure an officer for making too strong a complaint as to the oppression of the people. He had written that the people were being ruined by the Government. There was no want of sympathy for them anywhere. I said: ‘Yet you censured him.’ He said: ‘Yes, because he spoke too strongly.’ I like Sir James, because he is quite honest and plainspoken. But were not the Austrian officials in Lombardy equally sure that their Government was the best in the world, and did not Lombardy rise and cast them out? Ignorance is a greater danger than ill-will.

“To the meeting. I confined my questions almost entirely to agriculture and finance. The general opinion of the meeting about local finance was that its condition was not satisfactory, that the assessments were far too high, and that the resettlement every thirty years was a bar to capital being invested in the land. ‘In the old days,’ one speaker said, ‘we used to look on the land as our best investment; now we avoid it. If a permanent settlement were introduced we should again invest in land, just as they do now in Bengal.’ (This in answer to the question, what would be the result of a permanent settlement?) ‘The land would thus fall into the hands of capitalists, but the whole policy of the Government had been to discourage middlemen, because it looked on them as drones who kept a portion of the honey from coming to the proper hands, its own. This was a natural law of economy which legislation could not interfere with without harm.’ The meeting was unanimously in favour of a permanent settlement as the only solution of the agricultural difficulty, and as, by itself, a sufficient remedy. I asked about the assessment, and it was agreed, after some argument, that about one-third of the gross produce was a fair calculation for Bombay. One half of the net produce was the pretension of the Government officers. Gujerat was the most fertile district, but the assessment was high. Wells were taxed, and so the sinking of new ones discouraged. A landowner of Gujerat, Yavinhal, told me his assessment had been raised on account of the possibility of making a well. I mentioned Sir James Fergusson’s assurance that there was no wrong in India without a remedy, and asked if it was so. This caused general laughter; and Rao Shankar, the Oriental translator to the Government and a man in whom Sir James Fergusson has the greatest confidence, went so far as to say that he had never known the instance of an appeal from assessment having been favourably met. They were all against the salt tax, and one man mentioned the condition of the population of the Koucan, south of Bombay, as suffering most from leprosy. They could no longer cure their fish against the monsoon when fishing was impossible. The district between the Ghauts and the sea was very poor, so poor that the villagers only existed by coming in for mill labour, part of the year, to Bombay. The cultivation there did not pay its expenses.

“I asked them, since taxes must be raised, how they would raise them. They said: ‘By import duties. We should all like these, as they would affect only the rich.’ I asked them about the income tax, and here there was a difference of opinion, Telang being in favour of it, but others said it was only a little better than the license tax, and Mr. Ferdunji, C. I. E., a leader among the Parsis, denounced them both alike. It is evident that this tax is unpopular in India, but the license tax seems to combine its disadvantages as an inquisitorial tax, without raising sufficient money. The highest rate paid by any man, however wealthy, in Bombay, is only two hundred rupees, so it is a tax on the middle classes only, not on the rich. Those who have an income of five hundred rupees are exempted. They were all very much amused at Sir James’s fear of my influencing their minds, and it is plain they have no great idea of his intelligence, though they hold him honest. Yet these are the pick of the native community, Members of Council, of the Corporation, and officials of all sorts. Who then are the people Sir James gets his ideas from? Who are the satisfied natives? I have not met a single one since I came to India. We did not touch directly on any political subject.

“At dinner, at Mohammed Ali Rogay’s, we had a great discussion about the Mahdi, to whom all wish success. There were several men of the old school with whom I talked Arabic, and we talked also about the Turkish Empire and the new university.

“28th Feb.—A long talk with Sir James after breakfast. He admitted more than in our previous conversation. Thus he acknowledged the evil of the salt tax, and all the evil of the forest tax, though he said the latter was being remedied. The way the evil had been done was this. In 1878 a law had been passed in Calcutta ordering the enclosure of lands, and that they should be marked out within the year. With the ‘usual dilatoriness’ of the administration, this was put off till the last month, when arbitrary lines were drawn, with an explanation that these would be rectified later. Execution, however, was begun, and hundreds of families were turned out of their holdings without consideration, but things were now being remedied (after six years!). I asked what became of the people, and Sir James said ‘Some emigrated, some disappeared.’ Compensation, he said, was given ‘wherever titles existed,’ but these were people who had been encouraged to cultivate bits of the hill. The wrong was nearly redressed now.

“Sat at dinner next to Mr. West. He is a clever man, much wrapped up in his own conceit, and very intolerant. He is Vice-Chancellor of the university here, and attacked my ideas about founding a Mohammedan university. The Mohammedans were incapable of reform, being fatalists and fanatics; they had burnt the library of Alexandria; their creed could not adapt itself to circumstances. What would a Mohammedan community do at Rome under a Papal Government? How could they get on without mosques? At Kalbarga they would only encourage each other in ignorance and fanaticism, and the end of it would be that they would bring the Nizam’s Government to grief.

“29th Feb.—Rode with Fergusson on a Turcoman horse, which had belonged to Shere Ali. He is very frank and amiable now he has spoken his conservative mind, and on many points we agree, for instance, on the necessity of import duties, and the reduction of the salt tax, and I think he is not altogether averse to a permanent settlement, though he will not hear of there being now any over assessment, or of officers having any interest in raising assessments. Only the other day the supreme Government had lowered some newly-made assessments twenty per cent. But this cuts both ways, as it seems to show that they were too high. We also agreed that it would be well to get the native states to disarm. I thought they would consent, but he was sure they would not, and was surprised to hear me say that in Hyderabad they would not much mind it. He is a good fellow, and, I am sure, does his best as a kindly despot and liberal landlord. But he is in the hands of his officials.

“I wrote a quantity of letters, while Anne went out looking after things. Then we called on Mrs. Malabari and arranged with Malabari that I should correspond with him, and he would help on the university scheme all he could in his paper. Then to dinner at Hamid Bey’s,—Rogay, Bedr-ed-Din Tyabji, and others, also guests—and after it to a meeting of the Anjuman i Islam, about five hundred persons present. They presented me with an address, and I made a long speech expounding my ideas. We did not touch on politics. There was a beautiful sight in the heavens to-night, the crescent moon with the evening star exactly over it and quite close, like the Mohammedan device. This should mean a victory for the Mahdi either at Suakin, where they talk of an imminent battle, or perhaps the fall of Khartoum. I never saw a moon and star like this before.