India House

“ Fifty, and forty, and even twenty-five years ago, it may have been necessary to contract on extravagant terms and for life with Englishmen of education, in order to obtain their services in so remote a country as India then was. Such men a generation since were comparatively rare, and the India House, and after it the India Office, may have been right in establishing a special privileged service for its needs, and in granting the covenants it made with them. ”

“ One result of the comfortless and dreary aspect of the interior of an Indian's house is that very few of them have any home life, as we understand it. [57] The Indian does not sit indoors, unless compelled to do so by sickness, or stress of weather. And though the majority are satisfied so to live, because no other manner of life is known to them, there is nothing beautiful about it. ”

“ I by no means wish to insinuate that Indian society is deficient inhospitality. On the contrary, no part of the world excels it in this virtue;and the frankness with which it is extended is one of the most agreeable features of the country. This is particularly conspicuous in the interior, where, from the scarcity of inns, such is most needed. The door of every house is open to the traveller, and a hearty welcome is found within. ”

“ Hence, as we have said, the house cannot be considered as the family abode. When, through the ameliorating influence of Christianity, the family circle becomes a happy and attractive place, changes in their mode of life will lead to a change in the structure of their houses. Increased comfort and improved health will accompany an increase of love and mutual affection. Then the house of the Hindu will be what it is not now—his home. ”

“ An Indian town does not alter its character with advancing times. In England each period the Tudor, the Jacobean, the Georgian is marked by a distinctive style of architecture. In India the native house of three hundred years ago is identical with the dwelling of to-day. The indication of antiquity is ruin and decay, and that may be deceptive. The style of house in which the English soldiers lived may still be seen. ”

“ She was reported to have I don't know how many plantations in the West Indies; a deal of money in the funds; three stars to her name in the East India stockholders' list. She had a mansion in Surrey, and a house in Portland Place. The name of the rich West India heiress had been mentioned with applause in the Morning Post. ”

“ Now what Colonel Sleeman continually insists on is that no one knows the Indians who does not know them in their village-communities—what we should now call their communes. It is that village-life which in India has given its peculiar impress to the Indian character, more so than in any other country we know. When in Indian history we hear so much of kings and emperors, of rajahs and maharajahs, we are apt to think of India as an Eastern monarchy, ruled by a central power, and without any trace of that self-government which forms the pride of England. ”

“ I would say to the extremists:—"I know that you want Home Rule for India; it is not to be had for your asking. Everyone will have to take it for himself. What others get for me is not Home Rule but foreign rule; therefore, it would not be proper for you to say that you have obtained Home Rule, if you expelled the English. I have already described the true nature of Home Rule. This you would never obtain by force of arms. Brute-force is not natural to the Indian soil. You will have, therefore, to rely wholly on soul-force. ”

“ In the Hindu's eyes, the nation occupies but a small place, the dynasty a still smaller one ; the institutions which he regards as all-important are his caste and his village, and it is in these that all his feelings of patriotism centre. That love of home, that attachment to the same spot, that disinclination to emigrate, that certainty we feel respecting every Hindu who has left home, that, sooner or later, he will return and spend his earnings in his native place, are to be attributed, in great part, if not altogether, to the influence of the village system of India. ”

“ The Hindu of the nineteenth century lives and labours, plants, ploughs, weaves, and reaps as did his fathers at the Christian era, when savages roved and chased the deer in the woods of ancient Britain.
This fact is to be attributed more perhaps to the organization of the village government of India than to any other circumstance. Each town, with the adjacent lands, is, to a great extent, an independent community, having its own rulers, its own agriculturalists, its own police, and its own artisans. Though subject to the general government, its affairs are managed within itself. ”

“ They knew that worship of God could have been performed just as well at home. They taught us that those whose hearts were aglow with righteousness had the Ganges in their own homes. But they saw that India was one undivided land so made by nature. ”

“ Remember the old proverb that the tree does not grow in one day. The fact that you have checked me, and that you do not want to hear about the well-wishers of India, shows that, for you at any rate, Home Rule is yet far away. If we had many like you, we would never make any advance. ”

“ Just at present there is a Home Rule wave passing over India. All our countrymen appear to be pining for National Independence. A similar spirit pervades them even in South Africa. Indians seem to be eager after acquiring rights. ”

“ If at any period in the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries these principalities of India could have united themselves together in a common cause and arisen in the might of their power against British rule, England would be driven out of India in ten days’ time. India’s 350,000,000 population represents an enormous mass, but, as long as it remains divided into practically eighty different nations, all of them animated by bitter hatreds and antagonisms, England will experience no trouble in retaining absolute control of her large but very acrimonious Indian family. ”

“ In lesser--ever, thank Heaven!--in lessening degree this has remained the great problem in India: how to give freedom to its hereditary rulers, and yet to ensure that the race shall not suffer, yet to give it freedom from hereditary evils.
In the eighteenth century the men of courts and cities were, as a rule, vicious to the core. If evidence be needed on this point, go to Delhi, go to Lucknow, and there, in the dregs, and lees, and off-scourings of what was once a dynasty, you will still find some of the meanest specimens of humanity on God's earth. ”

“ In the warmer sections of the country they are built of matting and bamboo. The rich Indians live in substantial homes with high ceilings, tile floors and spacious verandas, but these are very few compared with the mass of the poor.
The Indian women of the higher classes are in seclusion all the time. They seldom leave their homes and when they do venture out they travel in covered chairs or closed carriages. This custom was brought into India by the Mohammedan conquerors, but it has been generally adopted by Hindu society. ”

“ For the visitors who crowd thither every cold season, and for the still larger number who will never see India, but have felt the glamour of the ancient land whose destiny is now so strangely linked to that of our far-off and latter-day islands, India has not one but many interests. There is the interest of the architectural glories of the Moghul emperors, in whose grand halls of audience, now deserted and merely places of show, a solitary British soldier stands sentry over a visitors' book. ”

“ A nation that is desirous of securing Home Rule cannot afford to despise its ancestors. We shall become useless if we lack respect for our elders. Only men with mature thoughts are capable of ruling themselves and not the hasty-tempered. Moreover, how many Indians were there like Professor Gokhale, when he gave himself to Indian education? I verily believe that whatever Professor Gokhale does he does with pure motives and with a view to serving India. ”

“ Hindu law has conserved the past—it exalts past observances above those of the present. Under such a system all innovations are out of place, individual ambitions are crushed. To resemble their ancestors is the summum bonum of their life.
The inhabitants of that land are a rural people. Unlike western countries, India has very few large towns. Nine-tenths of the whole population live in villages of less than 5,000, four-fifths live in villages of [pg 018] under 1,000 inhabitants. The average village of India today contains 363 inhabitants. ”

“ This was, and still is, the type of Hindu houses, both among the rich and among the poor, in towns as well as in villages, and the outer and the inner quadrangles help the ventilation of rooms, so essential in the hot climate of India. ”

“ Perhaps nothing in the volume will be found more surprising or more interesting to Americans than the overwhelming evidence of the dissatisfaction of India with her present political condition, and the fact that the Indian people want home rule, want it more earnestly than they want anything else, and that probably nothing less than this will keep them loyal to Great Britain. ”

“ In a country where land is cheap and servants are legion there need be no congestion, and, so far, the Anglo-Indian knows little or nothing of the embarrassments of dwellers in New York or London. To every one in India falls naturally a little faithful company of assistants to oil the wheels of life—groom, gardener, butler and so forth—and a spacious dwelling-place to think of England in, and calculate the variable value of the rupee, and wonder why the dickens So-and-so got his knighthood. ”

“ Though Hyderabad, Lahore, and Delhi are no longer capital cities, Hindu society none the less persists. A moment will come, in one way or another, when India will again live publicly, as she already does privately, under her own laws ”

“ India gives it all from first to last, and now the modern movement, the latest half-conscious struggle of the New Thing in mankind, throws up Bombay and Calcutta, vast feverish pustules [Pg 234] upon the face of the peninsula, bridges the sacred rivers with hideous iron lattice-work and smears the sky of the dusty ruin-girdled city of Delhi,—each ruin is the vestige of an empire,—with the black smoke of factory chimneys. ”

“ They allowed new families from beyond the borders of Hindustan to come and settle in India, but they very rarely, if at all, employed people who were not willing to stay in India for good and to make it their home. ”

“ He and his school tried their utmost to persuade the natives that what they want is 'Home Rule'—that panacea for all the evils of modern life which is likely to entail so many new burdens and trials upon us. The natives of India never suspected, until Lord Ripon strove to impress it upon them, that Home Rule is indispensable to their happiness. ”

“ People so accustomed to the natural and tangible life, to the spacious and lavish material existence of India—to good cooking, cool drinks, wide beds, roomy houses, to everything that represents physical luxury to the European in the east—such people breathed again and shook off the nightmare, shook off the belief in strange happenings. If and when they discussed the thing nowadays, they commonly called it that incomprehensible conjuring—echoing the resident—the regent’s conjuring-tricks. ”

“ We want Self-government in which every individual of this country, be he the poorest ryot or the richest zemindar—will have his legitimate share. Every individual must have some voice. We want Home Rule, broad based on the will of the people of India. Now, gentlemen, this is our objective. Do they still say or can they, in reason, say, that we are not asking Home Rule on behalf and in the interest of the teeming millions of India? ”

“ Housekeeping in India is in many respects a different thing from housekeeping in America. The activity and laboriousness habitual to dwellers in a temperate climate cannot be maintained by them when in a tropical country. New-comers are not commonly willing to believe this. Full of the vigour of their home constitution, and with the ardour of youth, they are slow to believe the "old Indians." They are tempted to waste on matters of minor importance the strength that should be husbanded for work that cannot be done by others. The Hindu can cook, wash, iron, and run on errands ”

“ The Village Community of India is at once an organised patriarchal society and an assemblage of co-proprietors. The personal relations to each other of the men who compose it are indistinguishably confounded with their proprietary rights, and to the attempts of English functionaries to separate the two may be assigned some of the most formidable miscarriages of Anglo-Indian administration. ”

“ All the members of such a family commonly live in the greatest harmony. [5] In the laws, usages, and feelings of the people upon this subject we had the means of preventing that eternal subdivision of landed property, which ever has been, and ever will be, the bane of everything that is great and good in India; but, unhappily, our rulers have never had the wisdom to avail themselves of them. ”

“ The same tendency to local administration which we see in France is found in India; the commune being, in both, the germ-cell of national life. The village communities in India are little republics, almost independent of anything outside. Dynasties change, new rulers and kings arrive; Hindoo, Mohammedan, English; but the34 village community remains the same. Like the Japanese, the French, the Italians, the inhabitants of India are skillful manufacturers of ornamental articles. Their religion tends to sentiment more than to morality,—to feeling, rather than to action. ”