East Indiaman

“ East Indians are those off springs of Christians of the East, and they atimes gather the offsprings of Eurasians to the entering their marriage to the East Indian females in the East Indian community, thereby they are called East Indians. ”

“ But in all Asia north and east of India, excluding most of Siberia but including the Malay Archipelago, Indian influence is obvious. Though primarily connected with religion it includes much more, such as architecture, painting and other arts, an Indian alphabet, a vocabulary of Indian words borrowed or translated, legends and customs. The whole life of such diverse countries as Tibet, Burma, and Java would have been different had they had no connection with India. ”

“ India vexes one sadly because of the irrational, illogical turns of the Indian mind and character, the strange impasses in the Indian brain, the contradictions of traits; and, because of the many things he cannot account for or reach solution of, he quits the country baffled and in irritation—forever the great gulf yawning between the Occidental and the Asiatic. "East is East, and West is West." ”

“ Last of all, we turn to India, the very cradle of Oriental scholarship, and here, instead of being importunate and urging new claims for assistance, I think I am expressing the feelings of all Oriental scholars in publicly acknowledging the readiness with which the Indian Government, whether at home or in India, whether during the days of the old East India Company, or now under the auspices of the Secretary of State, has always assisted every enterprise tending to throw light on the literature, the religion, the laws and customs, the arts and manufactures of that ancient Oriental Empire. ”

“ I agreed with them that no North American Indian would use that mode of getting his living, but that there were Indians in different parts of the world, and that these were from the East Indies, a country many thousands of miles from here; that these people were Indians from that country, and were of a tribe called Lascars; that many of them were employed by the captains of English ships to help to navigate their vessels from that country to this; and that in London they often come to want, and are glad to sweep the streets and beg, as the means of living, instead of starving to death. ”

“ Culturally, the East Indies are the most diverse of the Oceanic regions, in that the various islands, and within the larger islands adjacent districts, sometimes contain populations heavily tinctured with Asiatic civilization, sometimes tribes whose customs are far more aboriginal. However, there is no people in the East Indies that has wholly escaped the influence of Asiatic culture: the difference is always one of degree, although ranging from what is currently called semi-civilization to savagery. The profoundest influence has been exerted by India. ”

“ Neither British nor Portuguese India ever produced a half-caste at all deserving of being ranked in the typical order of man.
Our empire in the East has justly been described as one of opinion, that is to say, it is founded upon the good opinion entertained of us by the natives, and their bad opinion of themselves. In the old times of the Honourable East India Company, when no Englishman or Englishwoman was permitted to reside in India, without formal permission, the people respected us more than they do now. ”

“ As in other British colonies to which they have been admitted, the East Indians have bred a serious race problem, and their further importation has been stopped. They declare themselves as good as the whites and demand equal rights with them. ”

“ The humbler East Indians, if asked their race, reply that they are Wallandez or Oollanday, which is a modification of Hollandais, the name having been brought down through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the Dutch. East Indians have, in India, all the rights and privileges of Europeans. Races with a mixture of European with Asiatic blood possess a proud and susceptible tone of mind. ”

“ The crisis, at which the affairs of the East India Company are now arrived, is one which involves the most important interests of the British Empire. It would be unnecessary to prove a proposition which is so universally acknowledged and felt. ”

“ The whole of this region, and, indeed, the whole of Central and Northern Asia, has been the cradle of the people of India from the remotest antiquity. Hindus and Mohammedans are all immigrants from beyond the Indus. The Dravidian races, the pre-Aryan people, brought their devil worship and noisy orgies from Northern Asia into Hindustan. Eventually they were driven to Southern India by the Aryan people, who brought the Vedic gods and hymns, the sacred hôma and the ministration of Rishis, from Persia and Media into Northern India. ”

“ It is about one hundred years since native troops were first trained to European tactics by the French at the siege of Cuddalore, (1746,) and now the East India Company maintains the immense number of two hundred and forty thousand sepoys. Thus she governs India with Hindu soldiers, and subdues new provinces with levies from those already united to the empire. ”

“ It is the custom in India to abuse your Indian servants. The dear black faces of American darkies clustered about my cradle. Perhaps, for that reason, I found myself very much en rapport with my native servants in India. ”

“ India is made up of a multiplicity of races and tribes, professing every religion of paganism; and these are separated by thousands upon thousands of castes each going its own distinct and peculiar way. Great Britain's control of these teeming millions is unique in the history of oversea rule. India is almost exclusively agricultural, and in sections of Bengal averages 900 people to the square mile. ”

“ Full of the fantasies and imagery of the East, those who undertook to teach the Indians were unable to comprehend a traditional knowledge of institutions more advanced and an intelligence far more liberal than their own. ”

“ In the infancy of the European intercourse with India, the sole object of those who engaged in its commerce was, to procure the produce and commodities of the East. In this pursuit, so far were the natives from opposing any obstacles to their endeavours, that they were found disposed to afford every facility to a traffic, which brought them specie in exchange for their manufactures, and for the productions of their soil. ”

“ He stiffly maintains that the West never has, and, probably, never will, seriously and permanently influence the East in thought and life. While there is a semblance, yea an element, of truth in his contention, so far as the past is concerned, it fails to apply to the India of the present and must fall far wide of the mark in the future. ”

“ In 1922 the East Indians were spreading. Today they are spreading [Pg 127] even faster until Fiji is threatened with becoming an annex to India. The Asiatic population is running about neck-and-neck with the native. Something should be done about it, of course, but what? Is it survival of the fittest? Not entirely. It is partly the artificial stimulation given to the oriental through medical science and a vastly improved environment. Some evils have come with the banishment of their old caste system. There is no longer the invisible barrier between Hindu, Brahman, Chamar, Pariah—and Moslem. ”

“ I feel that they could understand me quite well if I could find words for my ideas; but these I cannot find, though their languages abound in them, nor have I ever met the European gentleman who could. East Indians can; [6] but they commonly want the ideas as much as we want the language. The chief cause of this deficiency is the want of sufficient intercourse with men in whose presence we should be ashamed to appear ignorant—this is the great secret, and all should know and acknowledge it. ”

“ If our East Indians were aware of what a salubrious climate they might enjoy at King George's Sound, they would soon be seen flocking thither to repair the constitutions they have injured on the banks of the Ganges and the Indus. ”

“ These Indian tribes intermingle more or less; their country is so over-populated that they must. But they learn almost nothing from each other; they adopt nothing from each other. They so rarely intermarry that for the purposes of general writing I may say they never do it. The narrow prejudice or the magnificent conservatism (whichever it is) that has kept the petty Indian tribes distinctly separated from one another has kept the great unnumbered and almost numberless Chinese nation, a nation apart from all the rest of the human world. ”

“ Among the many distinguished Indians of the century there was none whose name was more widely known in Europe and throughout the East, and none who exercised a greater influence in stemming the tide of irreligion and immorality, and awakening his fellow-countrymen to a sense of their moral, social, and intellectual responsibilities. ”

“ Having thus seen, that the natives of India are in no respect averse to engage in commercial dealings with strangers, and that no prejudices exist among them of a nature to prevent them from using our manufactures; we cannot but be forcibly struck with the reflection, that no systematic plan has ever been adopted by the East India Company, to attract the attention of the Hindoos to the various articles of our home manufacture, or to stimulate their speculation in the traffic of them. ”

“ Old Anglo-Indians disliked these migrations, and likened them to the progresses of the Great Mogul with a train of lords and ladies, in tented palaces, escorted by hosts of soldiers and camp-followers, from Agra to Lahore, or from Delhi to Cashmere. But the migrations of the British government of India required no army of escort, and entailed no expense or suffering on the masses. ”

“ It is very observable, that the objections which have been made by the East India Company to the admission of ships, returning from India, to import and dispose of their cargoes at any other place than the Port of London, are not founded so much upon any statement of the injury which the trade of the Company would sustain by admitting them, as upon a provident regard for the adventurers themselves, and a caution held out to them not to entertain an expectation of benefiting by any commercial speculation in India ”

“ The men—my European men, I mean—came back and said that they would like to go home. So we went.
Life is so hard for the poorer natives of India that it is not surprising that they take death so coolly. They have so little to live for; they live so difficultly, so miserably, so inadequately, that to them death has ceased to be a devil, and has become, instead, an angel of deliverance.
The most satisfactory acquaintance I made in Calcutta was with a physician whose father was a Scotsman and whose mother was a very high-caste Hindoo woman. ”

“ That could only happen in India, I think. But it happened in India very easily—quite as a matter of course. The natives take things as they come, and they are accustomed to making shift. Their own lives are often one long make-shift. That makes them very useful in our little domestic emergencies.
The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and a detachment of the Derbyshires were in Dagshai. The Derbyshires were old friends of ours. They had welcomed us to Jubblepore and to Umballa. The Highlanders, too, we had known in Hong-Kong. ”

“ It is the key to India, the route by which Alexander the Great and the early Mohammedan conquerors invaded the Punjab.
Frontier tribes.
Ever since the British conquest, the Peshawar valley had been harassed by the same mountain tribes that had worried the Macedonians, the Mohammedans, and the Sikhs under Runjeet Singh. Tribes living within the circle of British outposts could be compelled to live in peace; but tribes living beyond the border, and outside British influence, were turbulent, murderous and predatory. ”

“ But the progress of society, during a long course of years, is of a nature to produce a considerable alteration in the general state of things; the state of things must, therefore, naturally be called into consideration, upon the expiration of the term of years which determines the exclusive Charter of the East India Company ”

“ That the natives of India do not want a taste for porcelaine, and other elegant wares; that they require vast quantities of metallic vessels, and of hardware; that, considering the greatness of the population, and the disposition of the natives to use European manufactures, it cannot be doubted, that a great vend might be found, and that the demand will increase with the restoration of wealth. ”

“ We passed groups of hill people. They were to us a new type of Asiatic humanity. They reminded us strangely and strongly of our own North American Indians. They set us thinking. We tried to recall all we had ever read about the cradle of the Aryan race. We tried to remember the great racial divisions of humanity. And when we found ourselves in a fine mental tangle we gave it up, saying, “What a great and undeniable fact is the brotherhood of all humanity!” and then we ceased to think and only looked—at Nature. We passed through tea plantations, and through miles of cochineal and indigo ”

“ One might go on painting mental pictures of what would have been the result if the free, forest-born red race had thrived and grown into maturity. Certainly in their decadence, their spirit-broken second childhood, we find the germ of an original moral sense, of tradition and poetry, even of religion, which might have borne rich fruit.
The Oriental is to us an enigma, and we recognize in his makeup psychic qualities but slightly hinted of in ourselves. So in the Indian we must acknowledge a race of distinct and separate values that we can never wholly know or understand. ”

“ Only a few years ago, India, like other countries of the Orient, was a far Eastern problem. To-day, if rightly judged, it has already become a near Western issue. Except for the few scholars of oriental history and literature, who occupied themselves diligently in exploring the hidden treasures of Hindu civilization, the name of India was an unknown thing to the rest of the American world. For the average man and woman in the United States the affairs of that oriental country were too remote an issue for them to notice. ”