India under Ripon: A Private Diary

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Another misfortune was Lord Ripon’s resignation of the Viceroyalty before his term of office was fully over. Frustrated in his larger design of endowing India with something like free institutions, and finding himself without real support from the Government at home, he recognized that it was useless for him to prolong his stay, and, amid the lamentations of native India, he returned to England a defeated, if not a disappointed man.

Under his successor, Lord Dufferin, things lapsed into their old groove, and all hope vanished of serious political reform. The Mohammedans were, indeed, favoured by the new Viceroy as far as their employment in the administration went, but anything like vigorous action among them was once more discouraged. Thus, snowed upon officially, the idea of an independent university, existing on its own resources and subject to no influence of official fear or favour, necessarily languished, and was abandoned by the timorous souls of those whom for a moment I had persuaded to take it up courageously. It is rare in India to find persistent energy in any undertaking not patronized by Government. The death blow to the scheme followed a little later when Rajah Amir Hassan, who had persevered in it so far as to commence founding a college for his Shiah co-religionists at Lucknow was attacked by an illness which ended in insanity. Even if I had returned to India, it is doubtful whether I could have done anything to neutralize these misfortunes. As it was, I allowed myself to be discouraged by them into a gradual abandonment of my Indian plan, and turned my energies into other channels, which seemed to me at the time more practical.

My first enthusiasm was already cooled by a visit I paid to Constantinople in the autumn of 1884. It had seemed to me that the best chance of infusing general life into the university scheme was to obtain for it the Sultan’s patronage. In spite of all I knew of Abdul Hamid’s character, I thought it just possible that if I could get speech with him I might persuade him to use the enormous influence his name and Caliphal title gave him in Moslem lands in the direction I desired. But my visit was a failure; I found the Sultan personally inaccessible, except through such channels as I was unwilling to employ, and at an endless expense of time and money. At Constantinople the reign of corruption was supreme, nor was any approach to the head of the Moslem faith possible except by intrigue with the Court officials. It will be seen, when I publish the sequel to these memoirs, how entirely the atmosphere of the palace was opposed to serious ideas, and I left Constantinople convinced that it was useless any longer to fight against circumstances or attempt the impossible. Other interests at the same time allured me away, the urgency of the crisis in Egypt, the tragedy of Gordon at Khartoum, the general election of 1885, the Irish Home Rule movement, and the attempt I then made to enter Parliament as its supporter. Thus, while I still continued to interest myself in the fortunes and misfortunes of India, I never again aspired to take a leading part in its affairs.

All the same, I think I may lay claim to have contributed something towards the cause I had made specially my own, that of the Indian Mohammedans. On my return to England in the spring of 1884, I found Lord Randolph Churchill more than half disposed to go with me in my plans for them, and to make himself in Parliament a champion of Islam. It was partly through my persuasion and example that he started on his tour in India the following winter, and the letters I gave him for my Indian friends contributed not a little to his success in that direction, though in the sequel his political interests were too diverse to hold him permanently to any one line of action. His visit, nevertheless, taken in connection with his appointment in 1885 to the India Office under Lord Salisbury, marks a turning-point in the official policy towards the Indian Mohammedans which has ever since been followed. As a community they were encouraged, not, indeed, as I had intended, but as a counterpoise to the Congress movement of the Hindus; and gradually the idea expounded by me in “The Future of Islam” has come to be adopted as the Government’s own and used to its own purposes.

Nor was I forgetful of the promise I had made to my Hindu friends of expounding to my fellow countrymen at home the griefs of which I had been witness in India; the infinite poverty of its people; the economic ruin they had suffered at our hands; the oppressive character of the land assessment constantly enhanced, aggravated as these things were by new forest laws and a salt tax levied on the very poor;—and, no less, the arrogance of their official rulers; the growing ill-will between class and class, and the causes of what was rapidly becoming race-hatred between Englishman and Indian. In the course of the summer of 1884 I embodied these in a series of papers contributed to the “Fortnightly Review,” and republished by me at the end of the year under the title “Ideas about India,” a little work, which being now long out of print, I propose here, as a natural sequel to the diary, to add in the form of final Chapters.

There will be found among them a scheme of constitutional reform not very different from that which we now see, after the lapse of a whole generation, timidly and half-heartedly propounded at the India Office, when all the grace of a spontaneous act of justice has been lost with a lost opportunity. Such as they are I give them unaltered, omitting only such portions of them as are merely redundant of the diary, and adding here and there an explanatory note recording changes which in the last quarter of a century have come about. Alas, such changes have been seldom for the better, and in its main features the condition of India is to-day economically the same as what it was in Lord Ripon’s time, with only the accumulated burden of poverty which famine years and years of pestilence have brought about.

India’s famines have been severer and more frequent, its agricultural poverty has deepened, its rural population has become more hopelessly in debt, their despair more desperate. The system of constantly enhancing the land revenue has not been altered. The salt tax, though slightly lowered, still robs the very poor. Hunger, and those pestilences which are the result of hunger, are spread over an increasing, not a diminishing, area. The Deccan ryot is still perhaps the poorest peasant in the world. Nothing of the system of finance is changed, nothing in the economy which favours English trade and English speculation at the expense of India’s native industries. What was bad twenty-five years ago is, according to all native evidence, worse now. At any rate there is the same drain of India’s food to alien mouths. Endemic famine and endemic plague, with British India’s universal bondage to the village usurer, are facts no official statistics of prosperity can explain away.

Nor has the chasm of race antipathy been at all narrowed. All the causes of ill-will noted by me in 1884 are still existent in an aggravated form, and find stronger ground of action now; and there is one besides, unnoticed then, which may perhaps be added. There can be no question that the twenty-five years which have elapsed since 1884 have seen a change in the attitude of the white races of mankind towards their fellow men of other hue and lineage, and in their avowed conduct towards them. The old religious teaching, Christianity’s best claim to the world’s regard, was that all men were brothers at least in the sight of God, but this has given place to a pseudo-scientific doctrine of the fundamental inequalities of the human kind which, true as a statement of fact, has been exaggerated and made political use of to excuse white selfishness and white exclusiveness, and to reinforce the white man’s pretension of rightful dominion over the non-white world at large. I call this “pseudo-science,” because nothing really of the sort exists under the world’s natural law. Darwin’s rule of the “Struggle of Nature” and the “Survival of the fittest” included no assertion of superiority in one race rather than another, giving it dominion over the rest, nor has any species in the world’s natural history prevailed in this way. Its survival has been, not by its greater strength or even by its greater cunning, but by its better adaptability to its local surroundings. Yet it is common to hear Darwin quoted as an authority favourable to imperial domination and race intolerance in lands unsuited to European survival, and it is precisely under conditions such as we find in India that these arguments find most favour with Englishmen. As a rule the English in the East, missionaries apart, are not much of Christians, and their tendency is to become less and less so in the progress of modern ideas.