Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

“ The burden of every argument was, “No reform is possible for us until the Indian Government is itself reformed. It is too conservative, too selfish, too alien to the thoughts and needs of India, to effect anything as at present constituted; and just as in England reformers at the beginning of this century looked first to a reform of Parliament, so must Indian reformers now look first to a reform of the governing body of the country.” ”

“ Englishwomen in India look upon the land of their exile unaffectedly as a house of bondage, on its inhabitants as outside the pale of their humanity, and on the day of their departure home as the only star of hope on their horizon. The feeling may be a natural and an unavoidable one, for it is probable that race prejudices are more deeply rooted everywhere in women than in men, but I affirm that it is most unfortunate, and under the circumstances of growing education in the country, a very great and increasing danger. ”

“ I have found the Indian peasantry poor, in some districts to starvation, deeply in debt, and without the means of improving their position; the wealth accumulated in a few great cities and in a few rich hands; the public revenue spent to a large extent abroad, and by an absentee Government. I have been unable to convince myself that the India of 1885 is not a poorer country, take it altogether, than it was a hundred years ago, when we first began to manage its finances. ”

“ Madura is indeed the most interesting Hindu city in India, the place where the ancient Brahminical religion has been least touched by foreign conquest, Mogul, or French, or English. There is absolutely no sign in the city of anything alien. We did not see a European face, or a trace of Saracenic architecture. A festival was going on and an immense crowd thronged the streets, thousands and thousands of men dressed in white, with ochre patches on their foreheads, and of women in their beautiful gauze drapery, and carrying flowers. ”

“ What really deserves all Indian thanks, and is indeed an inestimable acquisition, because it contains within it the germs of a reconquest of all the rest, is that it has given her liberty of thought. This is a new possession which India never had, and never perhaps would have had, but for English influences, and it is difficult not to see in it a gift undesigned, but which, like the last treasure issuing from Pandora’s box, is destined to transform the curse of conquest into the blessing of a wider hope. ”

“ Such, very briefly and imperfectly given, is my scheme of self-government for India. That it is one possible—I do not say easy—to realize few will doubt who have marked the wonderful success achieved in a case not very dissimilar nearer our own shores. The Empire of Austria, within the recollection of men of the present generation, was a bureaucratic despotism of the harshest and least sympathetic kind. It had got within its rule, by conquest or inheritance, a half score of nations, owning no ties of birth or language, and united only by a common hatred of their oppressors. ”

“ After luncheon Major Clerk, the Nizam’s tutor, came to take us through the town on elephants, which pleased us much. The town is most interesting, being after Cairo the most gay and busy in the Mohammedan East. Compared with Madras, it is as Paris to a decayed watering-place. Instead of the squalid back streets and the pauper population of native Madras, Hyderabad is like a great flower bed, crowded with men and women in bright dresses and with a fine cheerful air of independence, more Arab than Indian. ”

“ Often in conversation I have been on the point of protesting against the too naïve confidence of men known as demagogues in the good faith of English political action, against their implicit trust in the virtue of reason and a just cause, and their belief that, when they should have proved their griefs to be well founded, relief would thereupon be given. They seemed intentionally to ignore the selfishness and indifference of party statesmanship in England with regard to India, and to be only too willing, in spite of political deceptions, still to be deceived. ”

“ But it is certain that all native opinion is against us, and that our present system is bringing India very near to ruin. Surely, there must be something wrong in a state of things which has produced the spectacle of a Government, after having absorbed to itself the whole land rent of a country, still finding itself constantly in financial shifts. The Government of India, as landlord, does practically nothing for the land. All is squandered and spent on other things; and the people who till the soil are yearly becoming poorer and more hopeless. ”

“ The brazen bulls are anointed each festival day with oil, the foreheads of the worshippers with ochre. There is a scent of flowers and incense, and the business of religion goes on continuous from old time, perhaps a little slacker, on account of the increasing poverty of the people, but not less methodically, or as a living part of men’s daily existence. When I had seen Madura I felt that I had at last seen a temple of Babylon in all its glory, and understood what the worship of Apis might have been in Egypt. ”

“ Nor do I believe that it will be again possible for England to master a military revolt, which would this time have the sympathy of the whole people. Moreover, even if we should suppose this fear exaggerated and the evil day of revolt put off, there is yet the certainty of a Government by force becoming yearly more costly and more difficult to carry on. It is a mistake to suppose that India has ever yet been governed merely by the English sword. The consent of the people has always underlain the exercise of our power, and were this generally withdrawn it could not be maintained an hour. ”

“ India especially, in old days, did not change. Conquerors came and went; dynasties rose and perished; and years of peace and war, of plenty and of famine, trod closely on each other’s heels, while men were born and lived and died in the same thoughts. It was the natural life, the remnant of a society which still followed the law of instinct rather than of reason; but even in the natural world health must be attended with growth or it will turn into decay. ”

“ Viewed as a power hostile to India, Russia is and may for ever remain innocuous, and I should view with equanimity her approach to the Hindu Kush, or even to the actual frontier, were it impossible for her to appear there as a friend. But as a friend I fear her. If our selfish system of government for our own and not for India’s good remains unchanged; if we do nothing to secure Indian loyalty; if we refuse to give to the people that assurance of ultimate self-government which shall enable them to await in patience the realization of their hopes ”

“ Of foreign wars India has long had enough, and more than enough. The Chinese, the Persian, the Afghan, the Abyssinian, the Egyptian, and now the Soudanese, all these India has been forced to take part in, solely against her interest and her will. Apart from their money loss, there is in these wars a loss of dignity, which the Indian people are beginning to resent. Those who have been educated in the humane literature of Europe find it humiliating that they, a conquered people, should be used [323] as the instrument for conquering others. What quarrel had India with the unfortunate Egyptians? ”

“ Indeed, his conversation might have been that of a Socrates, whom in person he much resembled, being a little rugged man whom I found very simply clad in a shirt, a blue head-dress, and with no shoes or stockings to his feet, but who at his first word impressed me with a sense of his integrity and his vast intellectual superiority. On the high politics of India his discourse was most instructive, and, like Socrates, he had the habit of illustrating each point of his discourse with a story always good and often extremely amusing. ”

“ In the course of my inquiries I do not remember to have met with a single instance of a village clear of debt even in Bengal.
This is the last worst evil which English administration has brought upon the Indian peasantry, and when one considers all their poverty and the depth of their increasing liabilities one finds it difficult to have patience with the optimist views of men like Sir John Strachey, who see all that they have created in India and find it very good. That we have done much that is of advantage to agricultural India no one will deny, but have we not done it still more harm? ”

“ Where there is complete ignorance, misery may be accumulated almost without limit by a despotic power. Where the mass of the population is prosperous, no growth of knowledge need be feared. But it is at the point where education and starvation meet that the flame breaks forth. This is a truism. Yet there are few who recognize how absolutely true it is of India.
No one accustomed to Eastern travel can fail to see how poor the Indian peasant is. Travelling by either of the great lines of railway which bisect the Continent, one need hardly leave one’s carriage to be aware of this. ”

“ Who is to say that Russia should not, in exchange for a new commercial pact with herself, offer to establish India in complete Home Rule, and thus outbid us in the popular affection? It would not be hard to persuade India that she would gain by the change, and, Englishman as I am, I am not quite convinced that she would on all points lose by it. In any case, it might well be that men would risk something in the desire of change, knowing that at worst it would not be much worse for them than now. ”

“ Lord Ripon came out to India on the full tide of the Midlothian victory, and quite in earnest about carrying out Midlothian ideas; nor has he faltered since. But the net result of his viceroyalty has been almost nil. Every measure that he has brought forward has been defeated in detail; and so powerful has the Civil Service been that they have forced the Home Government into an abandonment, step by step, of all its Indian policy. This they have effected in part by open opposition, in part by covert encouragement of the English lay element, in part by working through the English press. ”

“ Thus the Secretary of State, who is dependent on this blind guide, is in no other position at home than is the Viceroy in India. Ignorant, as a rule, of all things Indian, and dependent for advice on the India Office and his Anglo-Indian Council, he never gets at the truth of things, and blunders blindly on as they direct. It is almost impossible for him, however robust his will, to hold his own as a reformer. ”

“ The supreme Imperial Government all wish to preserve, for none are more conscious than the Indians that they are not yet a nation, but an agglomeration of nations so mixed and interblended, and so divided by diversity of tongues and creeds, that they could not stand alone. An Imperial Government and an Imperial army will remain a necessity for India. ”

“ It is my distinct impression, from all that I have seen and heard, that the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not allayed by a more generous treatment, will in a few years make the continued connection between England and India altogether impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of violence, such as nothing in the past history of either will have equalled. ”

“ Thus, the Local Self-Government Bill, though admirable in idea as marking a first step towards native administration, [271] is in itself a poor thing, and is appreciated as such even by Lord Ripon’s most cordial admirers. The powers it grants are too exiguous, the ground it covers is too small, the checks it imposes are too stringent, for the Bill to excite any great enthusiasm with the natives, and it is difficult for an Englishman to peruse its provisions without wonder at its ever having gained the name of an important measure of reform. ”

“ Thus, then, it happens that, while recognizing fully the necessity there is for worldly knowledge, the mass of respectable Mohammedans have held back, and still hold back, from the purely secular education afforded in Government schools and colleges to Hindus and Christians with themselves. They look with suspicion on the teaching, and with more than suspicion on the teachers. They refuse to believe that any education can be a sound one which is without a religious basis. ”

“ To India free trade has proved no blessing, and a return to import duties is a first principle of sound finance, which self-governing India will undoubtedly insist on. The majority, I believe, of our English colonies see their advantage in these, and so will India, unless, indeed, some fair equivalent be given. As it is, all the profit is on England’s side, on India’s all the loss. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I believed all nations were fit for self-government, and few more so than the Indian, and I described the condition of Greece when it was first set to manage its own affairs, a conglomeration of robber chieftains, piratical seafarers and an absolutely uneducated peasant population. Yet, after fifty years, they had an orderly Government, with universal education, commercial prosperity, and a shipping which had driven every competitor out of the Levant. In view of such results, who should say that any nation was unfit for its own rule? ”

“ The mosque is far and away the finest mosque, the palace far and away the finest palace; and, except Madura, they stand together first in the universe. The palace is full of intense interest, for it was here that the great events of the last three hundred years happened, and in modern times that the last Emperor of Delhi, after the retaking of the city by the English, was tried ignominiously for murder. ”