India under Ripon: A Private Diary

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

“We certainly feel insulted,” writes one of them to me a day or two later, “but are powerless to take any action on it. We are used to such treatment from almost every Anglo-Indian.”

“We account for his conduct,” says another, “by supposing that he thought us (the natives) to be nothing less than brutes and wild creatures”; while a third remarks:—

“From this you will see how our ruling race treats us with scorn and contempt. Had we been in English dress, then we would not, perhaps, have been so much hated.”

“I beg to assure you,” writes a fourth, “that the incident was not” (an only) “one of its kind, but such treatment is becoming general. The alarm and dread with which the Anglo-Indians are regarded cannot be described. Alas! we are hated for no other reason but because we have a dark colour; because we put on a national dress; and because we are a conquered race.”

“Allow me to say that it will be difficult for England to hold India long if such a state of feeling is allowed to progress without any check.”

And so on through a mass of letters. I have hope now, however, that the Government, before whom I laid this case, is taking it up. The Nawab has lodged a formal complaint with the Collector; Lord Ripon has promised that it shall not be allowed to drop; and my only fear is that, through the procrastination with which all inconvenient complaints are met in India by the subordinate officials, the apology due to the offended gentlemen will be deferred so long that its effect will have been in great measure lost.[18]

Another cause of the bad relations in modern times between the Indians and their English masters has been explained to me to be this:—Under the East India Company the official hierarchy, being the servants of a commercial corporation, were mainly recruited from certain families already connected by ties of service with India, and imbued with traditions of rule which, though far from liberal, were yet on the whole honourable to those who held them, and not antagonistic to native sympathies. The officer of the Company looked upon himself as the protector of native India against all comers, his own countrymen as well as others; and it was generally found that, where European planting and native interests clashed, the Collector or magistrate was inclined to favour the latter rather than the former in decisions which might come before him. As a rule he belonged to a rank of life superior to the non-official Anglo-Indian, and the distinction of class was felt. Indeed, it often happened that there was more sympathy of breeding between the Company’s servant and the well-born Hindu or Mohammedan gentleman than between the same servant and the English adventurer of the towns or the English indigo-planter of the country districts. With the adoption, however, of open competition for the civil service, another class of official has been introduced into India, who is distinctly of a lower social grade, and who in so far exercises less authority over his trading fellow-countrymen, and, the natives say, is less kind and considerate towards themselves. A young fellow, say the son of an Ulster farmer, is pitchforked by a successful examination into high authority in Bengal. He has no traditions of birth or breeding for the social position he is called to occupy, and is far more likely to hobnob with the commercial English of his district than to adapt himself to the ceremonial of politeness so necessary in Oriental intercourse. He is looked upon by the European planters as one socially their inferior, and by the well-bred native as little better than a barbarian. He is lowered, therefore, I am told, in the social scale, and is far more frequently under the influence of his tag-rag English fellow-countrymen than in former days. I cannot say that I have met with men of this description myself, but I have heard of them frequently, not only from the natives, but from the English too, as a new difficulty of the situation.

What I did notice was, that throughout the agitation on the Ilbert Bill, the planters had a considerable backing in the official world. It was evident that the two societies were united in a way which would have been impossible in old times, in their opposition to the native hopes. This change of class in the members of the Civil Service, and—what I am personally inclined to think more important still—their change of duties, must be considered if we are to estimate the increased irritation between race and race. The modern system of bureaucratic regularity, where all is done according to printed forms and fixed rules, entails on the civilians many hours daily of irksome office work, unknown in early times; and has had the double effect of wearying their zeal and of secluding them still further from the people. Red tape has strangled initiative in collectors, magistrates, and district officers, and has left them no time for personal intercourse with those they govern. “How can we sit gossiping with the natives,” say these, “when we can hardly get through our daily work as it is by the greatest economy of time?” A valid excuse, truly. Yet it was exactly by gossip that Lawrence and Nicholson, and Meadows Taylor gained their influence in former days.

I consider myself fortunate in having been at Calcutta at the precise moment when the Ilbert Bill controversy was at its fiercest, not on account of any special interest I took in the Bill itself, but for the instructive display of rival passions and motives it evoked. Lord Ripon has most unjustly been blamed for unnecessarily causing the conflagration. But in truth all the elements of a quarrel were there already in the strained relations just described as existing between Englishmen and natives; and it was an accident that the particular ground occupied by the Ilbert Bill should have been chosen on which to fight the battle of race prejudice. The history of the affair as viewed with natives’ eyes was this. When Lord Ripon arrived in India, he found the ill-feeling between the two classes very bitter, and he wisely determined on redressing, as far as in him lay, class disabilities, thus carrying out the liberal doctrines proclaimed over and again for India by his party while out of office. For such a work no man could have been better suited by temperament or conviction. It is hardly sufficiently understood in England how large a part personal integrity plays in acquiring the sympathy of Orientals for their rulers, and how impossible it is to govern them successfully either by the mere mechanical instruments of a system or by individual talents, however great, when these are divorced from principle. The display of ingenuity and tactical resource which imposes on our own political imagination and sways the House of Commons is absolutely valueless in the East; and charlatanism is at once detected and discounted by its acute intelligence. The Englishmen, therefore, who have succeeded most permanently in India have rarely been the most brilliant; and the names which will live there are not those which their English contemporaries have always ranked the highest. Moral qualities go farther; truth, courage, simplicity, disinterestedness, good faith—these command respect, and above all a solid foundation of religious belief. Such qualities the natives of India acknowledged from the first in Lord Ripon, and no amount of mere cleverness could have placed him on the pedestal on which he stands to-day with them—or rather, I should perhaps say, on which he stood until the desertion of the Home Government forced him into an abandonment of his position as a protector of the people.