Of the effects of his own military and financial changes Mr. Hastings had a good specimen in his journey through the province of Benares in 1784. This was only three years after he had committed the atrocities in this province, related in a former chapter, and driven the Rajah from his throne; and these are his own words, in a letter to the Council, dated Lucknow, April, 1784:—“From the confines of Buxar to Benares, I was followed and fatigued by the clamours of the discontented inhabitants. The distresses which were produced by the long-continued drought unavoidably tended to heighten the general discontent: yet I have reason to fear that the cause principally existed in a defective, if not a corrupt and oppressive administration. From Buxar to the opposite boundary I have seen nothing but traces of complete devastation in every village.” And what had occasioned those devastations? The wars and the determined resolve introduced by Mr. Hastings himself, to have the very uttermost amount that could be wrung from the people.
For the sort of persons to whom Mr. Hastings was in the habit of farming out the revenues of the provinces, and the motives for which they were appointed, we must refer to particulars which came out on his trial respecting such men as Kelleram, Govind Sing, and Deby Sing; but nothing can give a more lively idea of the horrid treatment which awaited the poor natives under such monsters as these collectors, than the statements then made of the practices of the last mentioned person, Deby or Devi Sing. This man was declared to have been placed on his post for corrupt ends. He was a man of the most infamous character; yet that did not prevent Mr. Hastings placing him in such a responsible office, though he himself declared on the trial that he “so well knew the character and abilities of Rajah Deby Sing that he could easily conceive it was in his power both to commit great enormities and to conceal the real grounds of them from the British collectors in the district.”— Well, notwithstanding this opinion, the Rajah offered a very convenient sum of money, four lacs of rupees—upwards of 40,000l.—and he was appointed renter of the district of Dinagepore. Complaints of his cruelties were not long in arriving at Calcutta. Mr. Patterson, a gentleman in the Company’s service, was sent as a commissioner to inquire into the charges against him; and the account of them, as given by Mr. Patterson, is thus quoted by Mills, from “The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq.”
“The poor ryots, or husbandmen, were treated in a manner that would never gain belief if it was not attested by the records of the Company: and Mr. Burke thought it necessary to apologize to their lordships for the horrid relation with which he would be obliged to harrow their feelings. The worthy Commissioner Patterson, who had authenticated the particulars of this relation, had wished, that for the credit of human nature, he might have drawn a veil over them; but as he had been sent to inquire into them, he must, in the discharge of his duty state those particulars, however shocking they were to his feelings. The cattle and corn of the husbandmen were sold for a third of their value, and their huts reduced to ashes! The unfortunate owners were obliged to borrow from usurers, that they might discharge their bonds, which had unjustly and illegally been extorted from them while they were in confinement; and such was the determination of the infernal fiend, Devi Sing, to have these bonds discharged, that the wretched husbandmen were obliged to borrow money, not at twenty, or thirty, or forty, or fifty, but at SIX HUNDRED per cent. to satisfy him! Those who could not raise the money were most cruelly tortured. Cords were drawn tight round their fingers, till the flesh of the four on each hand was actually incorporated, and became one solid mass. The fingers were then separated again by wedges of iron and wood driven in between them! Others were tied, two and two, by the feet, and thrown across a wooden bar, upon which they hung with their feet uppermost. They were then beat on the soles of the feet till the toe-nails dropped off! They were afterwards beat about the head till the blood gushed out at the mouth, nose, and ears. They were also flogged upon the naked body with bamboo canes, and prickly bushes, and above all, with some poisonous weeds, which were of a caustic nature, and burnt at every touch. The cruelty of the monster who had ordered all this, had contrived how to tear the mind as well as the body. He frequently had a father and son tied naked to one another by the feet and arms, and then flogged till the skin was torn from the flesh; and he had the devilish satisfaction to know, that every blow must hurt; for if one escaped the son, his sensibility was wounded by the knowledge he had, that the blow had fallen upon his father. The same torture was felt by the father, when he knew that every blow that missed him had fallen upon his son.
“The treatment of the females could not be described. Dragged from the inmost recesses of their houses, which the religion of the country had made so many sanctuaries, they were exposed naked to public view. The Virgins were carried to the Court of Justice, where they might naturally have looked for protection, but they now looked for it in vain; for in the face of the ministers of justice, in the face of the spectators, in the face of the sun, those tender and modest virgins were brutally violated. The only difference between their treatment and that of their mothers was, that the former were dishonoured in the face of day, the latter in the gloomy recesses of their dungeon. Other females had the nipples of their breasts put in a cleft bamboo, and torn off.” What follows is too shocking and indecent to transcribe! It is almost impossible, in reading of these frightful and savage enormities, to believe that we are reading of a country under the British government, and that these unmanly deeds were perpetrated by British agents, and for the purpose of extorting the British revenue. Thus were these innocent and unhappy people treated, because Warren Hastings wanted money, and sold them to a wretch whom he knew to be a wretch, for a bribe; thus were they treated, because Devi Sing had paid his four lacs of rupees, and must wring them again out of the miserable ryots, though it were with their very life’s blood, and with fire and torture before unheard of even in the long and black catalogue of human crimes. And it should never be forgotten, that though Mr. Burke pledged himself, if permitted, under the most awful imprecations, to prove every word of this barbarous recital, such permission was stoutly refused; and that, moreover, the evidence of the Commissioner Patterson stands in the Company’s own records.
But it was not merely the commission of these outrages which the poor inhabitants had to endure. The English courts of justice, which should have protected them, became an additional means of torture and ruin. The writs of the supreme court were issued at the suit of individuals against the zemindars of the country in ordinary actions of debt. They were dragged from their families and affairs, with the frequent certainty of leaving them to disorder and ruin, any distance, even as great as 500 miles, to give bail at Calcutta; a thing, which, if they were strangers, and the sum more than trifling, it was next to impossible they should have in their power. In default of this, they were consigned to prison for all the many months which the delays of English judicature might interpose between this calamitous stage and the termination of the suit. Upon the affidavit, into the truth of which no inquiry was made, upon the unquestioned affidavit of any person whatsoever—a person of credibility, or directly the reverse, no difference—the natives were seized, carried to Calcutta, and consigned to prison, where, even when it was afterwards determined that they were not within the jurisdiction of the court, and, of course, that they had been unjustly persecuted, they were liable to lie for several months, and whence they were dismissed totally without compensation. Instances occurred, in which defendants were brought from a distance to the Presidency, and when they declared their intention of pleading, that is, objecting to the jurisdiction of the court, the prosecution was dropped; but was again renewed; the defendant brought down to Calcutta, and again upon his offering to plead, the prosecution was dropped. The very act of being seized, was in India, the deepest disgrace, and so degraded a man of any rank that, under the Mahomedan government, it never was attempted but in cases of the utmost delinquency.[22]
In merely reading these cases of
The proud man’s contumely, the oppressor’s wrong,
it is difficult to repress the burning indignation of one’s spirit. What shame, what disgrace, that under the laws of England, and in a country to which we owe so much wealth and power, such a system of reckless and desperate injustice should for a long series of years have been practising! But if it be difficult to read of it without curses and imprecations, what must it have been to bear? How must the wretched, hopeless, harassed, persecuted, and outraged people have called on Brahma for that tenth Avatar which should sweep their invincible, their iron-handed and iron-hearted oppressors, as a swarm of locusts from their fair land! Let any one imagine what must be the state of confusion when the zemindars, or higher collectors of the revenues were thus plagued in the sphere of their arduous duties, and called out of it, to the distant capital. When they were degraded in the eyes, and removed from the presence of the ryots, what must have been the natural consequence, but neglect and license on the part of the ryot, only too happy to obtain a little temporary ease? But the ryots themselves did not escape, as we have already seen. Such, however, continued this dismal state of things to the very end of the century. Lord Cornwallis complained in 1790, “that excepting the class of shroffs and banyans, who reside almost entirely in great towns, the inhabitants of these provinces were hastily advancing to a general state of poverty and wretchedness.” Lord Cornwallis projected his plans, and in 1802, Sir Henry Strachey, in answer to interrogatories sent to the Indian judges, drew a gloomy picture of the result of all the schemes of finance and judicature that had been adopted. He represented that the zemindars, by the sale of their lands, in default of the payment of their stipulated revenue, were almost universally destroyed, or were reduced to the condition of the lowest ryots. That, in one year (1796) nearly one tenth of all the lands in Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, had been advertised for sale. That in two years alone, of the trial of the English courts, the accumulated causes threatened to arrest the course of justice: in one single district of Burdwan more than thirty thousand suits were before the judge; and that no candidate for justice could expect it in the course of an ordinary life. “The great men, formerly,” said Sir Henry, “were the Mussulman rulers, whose places we have taken, and the Hindoo zemindars. These two classes are now ruined and destroyed.” He adds, “exaction of revenue is now, I presume, and, perhaps, always was, the most prevailing crime throughout the country; and I know not how it is that extortioners appear to us in any other light than that of the worst and most pernicious species of robbers.” He tells us that the lands of the Mahrattas in the neighbourhood of his district, Midnapore, were more prosperous than ours, though they were without regular courts of justice, or police. “Where,” says he, “no battles are fought, the ryots remain unmolested by military exactions, and the zemindars are seldom changed, the country was in high cultivation, and the population frequently superior to our own.”
Such was the condition and treatment of the natives of Indostan, at the commencement of the present century. In another chapter, on our policy and conduct in this vast and important region—it remains only to take a rapid glance at the effect of these two centuries of despotism upon these subjected millions, and to inquire what we have since been doing towards a better state of things,—more auspicious to them, and honourable to ourselves.