“In the interior of Bengal there is a class of inhabitants who live by catching fish in the ditches and rivulets; the men employing themselves during the whole day, and the women travelling to the nearest city, often a distance of fifteen miles, to sell the produce. The rate at which these poor creatures perform their daily journey is almost incredible, and the sum realized is so small as scarcely to afford them the necessaries of life. In short, throughout the whole of the provinces the crowds of poor wretches who are destitute of the means of subsistence are beyond belief. On passing through the country, they are seen to pick the undigested grains of food from the dung of elephants, horses, and camels; and if they can procure a little salt, large parties of them sally into the fields at night, and devour the green blades of corn or rice the instant they are seen to shoot above the surface. Such, indeed, is their wretchedness that they envy the lot of the convicts working in chains upon the roads, and have been known to incur the danger of criminal prosecution, in order to secure themselves from starving by the allowance made to those who are condemned to hard labour.”
Such is the condition of these native millions, from whose country our countrymen, flocking over there, according to the celebrated simile of Burke, “like birds of prey and of passage, to collect wealth, have returned with most splendid fortunes to England.” What is the avowed slavery of some half million of negroes in the West Indies, who have excited so much interest amongst us, to the virtual slavery of these hundred millions of Hindus in their own land? It is declared that these poor creatures are happy under our government,—but it should be recollected that so it has been, and is, said of the negroes; and it should be also recollected what Sir John Malcolm said, in 1824, in a debate at the India-house—himself a governor and a laudator of our system, that “even the instructed classes of natives have a hostile feeling towards us, which was not likely to decrease from the necessity they were under of concealing it. My attention,” he said, “has been during the last five-and-twenty years particularly directed to this dangerous species of secret war carried on against our authority, which is always carried on by numerous though unseen hands. The spirit is kept up by letters, by exaggerated reports, and by pretended prophecies. When the time appears favourable from the occurrence of misfortune to our arms, from rebellion in our provinces, or from mutiny in our troops, circular letters and proclamations are dispersed over the country with a celerity that is incredible. Such documents are read with avidity. Their contents are in most cases the same. The English are depicted as usurpers of low caste, and as tyrants, who have sought India only to degrade them, to rob them of their wealth, and subvert their usages and religion. The native soldiers are always appealed to, and the advice to them is in all instances I have met with, the same,—‘your European tyrants are few in number—murder them!’”
How far are these evils diminished since the last great political change in India—since the abolition of the Company’s charter, and they became, not the commercial monopolists, but the governors of India? Dr. Spry, of the Bengal Medical Staff, can answer that in his “Modern India,” published in 1837. The worthy doctor describes himself as a short time ago (1833) being on an expedition to reduce some insurrectionary Coles in the provinces of Benares and Dinapore. “Next morning,” he says, “Feb. 9th, we went out in three parties to burn and destroy villages! Good fun, burning villages!” The mode of expression would lead one to suppose that the doctor extremely enjoyed “the good fun of burning villages;” but the general spirit of his work being sensible and humane, we are bound to suppose that his expressions and his notes of admiration are ironical, and meant to indicate the abhorrence such acts deserves; for he immediately tells us that these Coles seemed very inoffensive sort of people, and laid down their arms in large numbers the moment they were invited to do so.
Dr. Spry tells us that the Anglo-Indian government, in 1836, had come to the admirable resolution to make the English language the vernacular tongue throughout Indostan. That would be, in effect, to make it entirely an English land—to leaven it rapidly, and for ever, with the spirit, the laws, the literature, and the religion of England. It is impossible to make the English language the vernacular tongue, without at the same time producing the most astonishing moral revolution which ever yet was witnessed on the earth. English ideas, English tastes, English literature and religion, must follow as a matter of course. It is curious, indeed, already to hear of the instructed natives of Indostan holding literary and philosophical meetings in English forms, debating questions of morals and polite letters, and adducing the opinions of Milton, Shakspeare, Newton, Locke, etc. Dr. Spry states that the Committee of Public Instruction are about to establish schools for educating the natives in English, at Patnah, Dacca, Hazeeribagh, Gohawati, and other places; and that the native princes in Nepaul, Manipúr, Rajpootanah, the Punjaub, etc. were receiving instruction in English, and desirous to promote it in their territories. This is most encouraging; but Dr. Spry gives us other facts of a less agreeable nature. From these we learn that the ancient canker of India, excessive and unremitting exaction, is at this moment eating into the very vitals of the country as actively as ever. He says that “it is in the territories of the independent native chiefs and princes that great and useful works are found, and maintained. In our territories, the canals, bridges, reservoirs, wells, groves, temples, and caravansaries, the works of our predecessors, from revenues expressly appropriated to such undertakings, are going fast to decay, together with the feelings which originated them; and unless a new and more enlightened policy shall be followed, of which the dawn may, perhaps, be distinguished, will soon leave not a trace behind. A persistence for a short time longer in our selfish administration will level the face of the country, as it has levelled the ranks of society, and leave a plain surface for wiser statesmen to act on.
“At present, the aspect of society presents no middle class, and the aspect of the country is losing all those great works of ornament and utility with which we found it adorned. Great families are levelled, and lost in the crowd; and great cities have dwindled into farm villages. The work of destruction is still going on; and unless we act on new principles will proceed with desolating rapidity. How many thousand links by which the affections of the people are united to the soil, and to their government, are every year broken and destroyed by our selfishness and ignorance; and yet, if our views in the country extended beyond the returns of a single harvest, beyond the march of a single detachment, or the journey of a single day, we could not be so blind to their utility and advantage.” He adds: “By our revenue management we have shaken the entire confidence of the rural population, who now no longer lay out their little capital in village improvement, lest our revenue officers, at the expiration of their leases, should take advantage of their labours, and impose an additional rent.... With regard to Hindustan, those natives who are unfriendly to us might with justice declare our conduct to be more allied to Vandalism than to civilization.... Burke’s severe rebuke still holds good,—that if the English were driven from India, they would leave behind them no memorial worthy of a great and enlightened nation; no monument of art, science, or beneficence; no vestige of their having occupied and ruled over the country, except such traces as the vulture and the tiger leave behind them.”—pp. 10–18. He tells us that a municipal tax was imposed under pretence of improving and beautifying the towns, but that the improvements very soon stopped, while the tax is still industriously collected. In the appendix to his first volume, we find detailed all the miseries of the ryots as we have just reviewed them; and he tells us that of this outraged class are eleven-twelfths of the population! and quotes the following sentence from “The Friend of India.” “A proposal was some time since made, or rather a wish expressed, to domesticate the art of caricaturing in India. Here is a fine subject. The artist should first draw the lean and emaciated ryot, scratching the earth at the tail of a plough drawn by two half-starved, bare-ribbed bullocks. Upon his back he would place the more robust Seeputneedar, and upon his shoulders the Durputneedar; he, again, should sustain the well-fed Putneedar; and, seated upon his shoulders should be represented, to crown the scene, the big zemindar, that compound of milk, sugar, and clarified butter.... The poor ryot pays for all! He is drained by these middle-men; he is cheated by his banker out of twenty-four per cent. at least; and his condition is beyond description or imagination.”
Dr. Spry attests the present continuance of those scenes of destitution and abject wretchedness which I have but a few pages back alluded to. He has seen the miserable creatures picking up the grains of corn from the soil of the roads. “I have seen,” says he, “hundreds of famishing poor, traversing the jungles of Bundlecund, searching for wild berries to satisfy the cravings of hunger. Many, worn down by exhaustion or disease, die by the road-side, while mothers, to preserve their offspring from starvation, sell or give them to any rich man they can meet!” He himself, in 1834, was offered by such a mother her daughter of six years old for fourteen shillings!—vol. i. 297.
These are the scenes and transactions in our great Indian empire—that splendid empire which has poured out such floods of wealth into this country; in which such princely presents of diamonds and gold have been heaped on our adventurers; from the gleanings of which so many happy families in England[25] “live at home at ease,” and in the enjoyment of every earthly luxury and refinement. For every palace built by returned Indian nabobs in England; for every investment by fortunate adventurers in India stock; for every cup of wine and delicious viand tasted by the families of Indian growth amongst us, how many of these Indians themselves are now picking berries in the wild jungles, sweltering at the thankless plough only to suffer fresh extortions, or snatching with the bony fingers of famine, the bloated grains from the manure of the high-ways of their native country!
I wonder whether the happy and fortunate—made happy and fortunate by the wealth of India, ever think of these things?—whether the idea ever comes across them in the luxurious carriage, or at the table crowded with the luxuries of all climates?—whether they glance in a sudden imagination from the silken splendour of their own abodes, to the hot highways and the pestilential jungles of India, and see those naked, squalid, famishing, and neglected creatures, thronging from vast distances to the rich man’s dole, or feeding on the more loathsome dole of the roads? It is impossible that a more strange antithesis can be pointed out in human affairs. We turn from it with even a convulsive joy, to grasp at the prospects of education in that singular country. Let the people be educated, and they will soon cease to permit oppression. Let the English engage themselves in educating them, and they will soon feel all the sympathies of nature awaken in their hearts towards these unhappy natives. In the meantime these are all the features of a country suffering under the evils of a long and grievous thraldom. They are the growth of ages, and are not to be removed but by a zealous and unwearying course of atoning justice. Spite of all flattering representations to the contrary, the British public should keep its eye fixed steadily on India, assuring itself that a debt of vast retribution is their due from us; and that we have only to meet the desire now anxiously manifested by the natives for education, to enable us to expiate towards the children all the wrongs and degradations heaped for centuries on the fathers; and to fix our name, our laws, our language and religion, as widely and beneficently there as in the New World!