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Chapter 4

Whilst great principalities were thus being absorbed and ancient sovereignties extinguished, a war of extermination no less fatal in its effects, but more noiseless in its operations, was being waged against the nobility and gentry of the country. The original proclamation of this war did not emanate from Lord Dalhousie. The measures by which the native aristocracy were destroyed were not primarily his measures. It was the policy of the times to recognise nothing between the Prince and the Peasant; a policy which owed its birth not to one but to many; a policy, the greatest practical exposition of which was the Settlement of the North-West Provinces. It was adopted in pure good faith and with the most benevolent intentions. It had the sanction of many wise and good men. It was not the policy by which such statesmen as John Malcolm, George Clerk, and Henry Lawrence sought to govern the people; but it was sanctified by the genius of John Lawrence, and of the Gamaliel at whose feet he had sat, the virtuous, pure-minded James Thomason.

To bring the direct authority of the British Government to bear upon the great masses of the people, without the intervention of any powerful section of their own countrymen – to ignore, indeed, the existence of all governing classes but the European officers, who carried out the behests of that Government – seemed to be a wise and humane system of protection. It was intended to shelter the many from the injurious action of the interests and the passions of the few. The utter worthlessness of the upper classes was assumed to be a fact; and it was honestly believed that the obliteration of the aristocracy of the land was the greatest benefit that could be conferred on the people. And thus it happened that whilst the native sovereigns of India were one by one being extinguished, the native aristocracy had become well-nigh extinct.

Doubtless, we started upon a theory sound in the abstract, intent only on promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest

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number; but if we had allowed ourselves to understand the genius and the institutions of the people, we should have respected the rights, natural and acquired, of all classes of the community, instead of working out any abstract theory of our own. It was in the very nature of things necessary, inevitable, that the extension of British rule, followed always by a reconstruction of the administration, and a substitution of civil and military establishments fashioned upon our own models and composed of our own people, should have deprived many of the chief people of their official rank and official emoluments, and cast them adrift upon the world, either to seek new fields of ad venture in the unabsorbed Native States, or to fester into a disaffected and dangerous class sullenly biding their time. This is old story; an old complaint. Half a century before the time of which I am now writing, it had been alleged to be one of the main causes of that national outburst in Southern India known as the mutiny of Vellur. But this very necessity for the extinction of the old race of high native functionaries, often hereditary office-bearers, ought to have rendered us all the more desirous to perpetuate the nobility whose greatness was derived from the Land. It is true that the titles of the landed gentry whom we found in possession were, in some cases, neither of very ancient date nor of very unquestionable origin. But, whatsoever the nature of their tenures, we found them in the possession of certain rights or privileges allowed to them by the Governments which we had supplanted, and our first care should have been to confirm and secure their enjoyment of them. We might have done this without sacrificing the rights of others. Indeed, we might have done it to the full contentment of the inferior agricultural classes. But many able English statesmen, especially in Upper India, had no toleration for anyone who might properly be described as a Native Gentleman. They had large sympathies and a comprehensive humanity, but still they could not embrace any other idea of the Native Gentry of India than that of an institution to be righteously obliterated for the benefit of the great mass of the people.

There were two processes by which this depression of the privileged classes was effected. The one was known by the name of a Settlement, the other was called Resumption. It would be out of place here, if I had the ability, to enter minutely into the difficult question of landed tenures in India. It is an old story now, that when that clever coxcomb, Victor Jacquemont,

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asked Holt Mackenzie to explain to him in a five minutes’ conversation the various systems of Land Revenue obtaining in different parts of the country, the experienced civilian replied that he had been for twenty years endeavouring to understand the subject and had not mastered it yet. Such a rebuke ought to be remembered. The little that I have to say on the subject shall be said with the least possible use of technical terms, and with the one object of making the general reader acquainted with the process by which the substance of the great landholders in Upper India was diminished by the action of the British Government.

Settlement Operations

In the Literature of India the word “Settlement” is one of such frequent occurrence, and to the Indian resident it conveys such a distinct idea, that there is some danger of forgetting that the general reader may not be equally conversant with the exact meaning of the term. It may therefore, perhaps, be advantageously explained that as the Indian Revenue is mainly derived from the land, it is of the first importance, on the acquisition of new territory, clearly to ascertain the persons from whom the Government dues are to be exacted, and the amount that is payable by each. We may call it Rent or we may call it Revenue, it little matters. The adjustment of the mutual relations between the Government and the agriculturists was known as the Settlement of the Revenue. It was an affair of as much vital interest and concernment to the one as to the other, for to be charged with the payment of the Revenue was to be acknowledged as the proprietor of the land.

When we first took possession of the country ceded by the Nawab-Wazir of Oudh, or conquered from the Marathas, all sorts of proprietors presented themselves, and our officers, having no special theories and no overriding prejudices, were willing to consider the claims of all, whether small or great holders, whom they found in actual possession; and brief settlements or engagements were made with them, pending a more thorough investigation of their rights. There was, doubtless, at first a good deal of ignorance on our part, and a good deal of wrong-doing and usurpation on the part of those with whom we were called upon to deal. But the landed gentry of these Ceded and Conquered Provinces, though they suffered by the extension of the British Raj, were not deliberately destroyed by a theory. It was the inevitable tendency of our Regulations,

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especially of that great Mystery of Iniquity, the Sale Law, and of the immigration of astute native functionaries from the Lower Provinces, which inaugurated our rule, to subvert the supremacy of the old landholders. Under the system, which we introduced, men who had been proprietors of vast tracts of country as far as the eye could reach, shrivelled into tenants of mud-huts and possessors only of a few cooking-pots. The process, though certain in its results, was gradual in its operation; and the ruin which it entailed was incidental, not systematic. It was ignorantly suffered, not deliberately decreed. But, at a later period, when a new political creed had grown up among our British functionaries in India, and upon officers of this new school devolved the duty of fixing the relations of the agricultural classes with the British Government, the great besom of the Settlement swept out the remnant of the landed gentry from their baronial possessions, and a race of peasant-proprietors were recognised as the legitimate inheritors of the soil.

How this happened may be briefly stated. A Permanent Settlement on the Bengal model had been talked of, ordered and counter-ordered; but for nearly a third part of a century, under a series of brief engagements with holders of different kinds, uncertainty and confusion prevailed, injurious both to the Government and to the People.

1833

But in the time of Lord William Bentinck an order went forth for the revision of this system or no-system, based upon a detailed survey and a clearly recorded definition of rights, and what is known in History as the Settlement of the North-West Provinces was then formally commenced.

That it was benevolently designed and conscientiously executed, is not to be doubted. But it was marred by a Theory. In the pursuit of right, the framers of the settlement fell into wrong. Striving after justice, they perpetrated injustice.

1845

Nothing could be sounder than the declared principle, that “it was the duty of the Government to ascertain and protect all existing rights, those of the poor and humble villager as well as those of the rich and influential Talukdar48.” It was said that this principle had been not only asserted, but

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acted upon. But the fact is, that the practice halted a long way behind the principle. Such were the feelings with which many of our officers regarded the great landholders, that equal justice between the conflicting claims and interests of the two classes was too often ignored. There were scales over the eyes of commonly clear-sighted men when they came to look at this question in. the face, and therefore the “poor and humble villager” had a full measure of justice, pressed down and running over, whilst the “rich and influential Talukdar” had little or none.

There are few who have not become familiar with this word Talukdar; who do not know that an influential class of men so styled in virtue of certain rights or interests in the land, were dispossessed of those rights or interests and reduced to absolute ruin. It must be understood, however, that the proprietary rights of which I speak were very different from the rights of landed property in England. The Talukdar was little more than an hereditary revenue-contractor. His right was the right to all the just rents paid by the actual occupants, after satisfaction of the Government claims. His property was the rent minus the revenue of a particular estate. This Talukdari right, or right of collection, was distinct from the Zamindari right, or proprietary right in the soil. The Talukdar, who paid to Government the revenue of a large cluster of villages, had, perhaps, a proprietary right in some of these small estates; perhaps, in none. The proprietary right, in most instances, lay with the village communities. And it was the main effort of the English officers, engaged in the Settlement of the North-West Provinces, to bring these village occupants into direct relations with the Government, and to receive from them the amount of the assessment fixed upon their several estates.

Now it was a just and fitting thing that the rights of these village proprietors should be clearly defined. But it was not always just that the Government should enter into direct engagements with them and drive out the intervening Talukdar. The actual occupants might, in a former generation, have been a consequence only of a pre-existing Talukdari right, as in cases where cultivators had been located on waste lands by a contractor or grantee of the State; or the Talukdar might have acquired his position by purchase, by favour, perhaps by fraud, after the location of the actual occupants; still it was a proprietary interest, perhaps centuries old. Let us explain their

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position as we may, these Talukdars constituted the landed aristocracy of the country; they had recognised manorial rights; they had, in many instances, all the dignity and power of great feudal barons, and, doubtless, often turned that power to bad account. But whether for good or for evil, in past years, we found them existing as a recognised institution; and it was at the same time a cruel wrong and a grievous error to sweep it away as though it were an encumbrance and an usurpation.

The theory of the Settlement officers was that the village Zamindars had an inalienable right in the soil, and that the Talukdar was little better than an upstart and an impostor. All the defects in his tenure were rigidly scanned; all the vices of his character were violently exaggerated. He was written down as a fraudulent upstart and an unscrupulous oppressor. To oust a Talukdar was held by some young Settlement officers to be as great an achievement as to shoot a tiger; and it was done, too, with just as clear a conviction of the benefit conferred upon the district in which the animal prowled and marauded. It was done honestly, conscientiously, laboriously, as a deed entitling the doer to the gratitude of mankind. There was something thorough in it that wrung an unwilling admiration even from those who least approved. It was a grand levelling system, reducing everything to first principles and a delving Adam. Who was a gentleman and a Talukdar, they asked, when these time-honoured Village Communities were first established on the soil? So the Settlement Officer, in pursuit of the great scheme of restitution, was fain to sweep out the Landed Gentry and to applaud the good thing he had done49.

And if one, by happy chance, was brought back by a saving hand, it was a mercy and a miracle: and the exception which proved the rule. The chances against him were many and great, for he had divers ordeals to pass through, and he seldom survived them all. It was the wont of many Settlement officers to assist the solution of knotty questions of proprietary right by a reference to personal character and conduct, so that when the claims of a great Talukdar could not be altogether ignored,

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it was declared that he was a rogue or a fool – perhaps an atrocious compound of both – and that he had forfeited, by oppressions and cruelties, or by neglects scarcely less cruel, all claim to the compassion of the State. They gave the man a bad name, and straightway they went out to ruin him. A single illustration will suffice. One of the great landholders thus consigned to perdition was the Rajah of Mainpuri. Of an old and honoured family, distinguished for loyalty and good service to the British Government, he was the Talukdar of a large estate comprising nearly two hundred villages, and was amongst the most influential of the landed aristocracy of that part of the country.

Mr. G Edmonstone

The Settlement officer was one of the ablest and best of his class. Fulfilling the great promise of’ his youth, he afterwards attained to the highest post in those very Provinces, an eminence from which he might serenely contemplate the fact, that the theory of the Dead-Level is against nature, and cannot be enforced without a convulsion. But, in the early days of which I am speaking, a great Talukdar was to him what it was to others of the same school; and he represented that the Rajah, himself incompetent almost to the point of imbecility, was surrounded by agents of the worst character, who in his name had been guilty of all kinds of cruelty and oppression. Unfit as he was said to be for the management of so large an estate, it would, according to the prevailing creed, have been a righteous act to exclude him from it; but it was necessary, according to rule, to espy also a flaw in his tenure; so it was found that he had a just proprietary right in only about a fourth of the two hundred villages50. It was proposed, therefore, that his territorial greatness should to this extent be shorn down in the future Settlement, and that the bulk of the property should be settled with the village communities, whose rights, whatever they might originally have been, had lain for a century in abeyance.

Above the Settlement officer, in the ascending scale of our Administrative Agency, was the Commissioner; above the Commissioner, the Board of Revenue; above the Board of Revenue, the Lieutenant-Governor. In this cluster of graduated

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authorities the Old and New School alternated like the Black and White of a chess-board. The recommendations of George Edmonstone were stoutly opposed by Robert Hamilton. The sharp, incisive logic of the Commissioner cut through the fallacious reasoning of the Settlement officer. “He was of opinion that the value of landed possessions and the importance attached to them could never be made up by a money allowance; that the imbecility of the Rajah, if affording a justification for his being relieved from the management of his estate, could be none for depriving his family of their inheritance; and that it was inconsistent to denounce as oppressive in a native ruler the same measures of sale and dispossession which were adopted by our own Government towards Revenue defaulters51.” But the Board, of which the living principle was Robert Bird, dissented from the views of the Commissioner, and upheld the levelling processes of the Settlement officer. Then Lieutenant-Governor Robertson appeared upon the scene, and the decision of the Board was flung back upon them as the unjust growth of a vicious, generalising system, which would break up every large estate in the country into minute fractions, and destroy the whole aristocracy of the country. He could not see that, on the score either of invalidity of tenure or of administrative incapacity, it would be just to pare down the Rajah’s estate to one-fourth of its ancestral dimensions; so he ruled that the settlement of the whole ought rightly to be made with the Talukdar52. But the vicissitudes of the case were not even then at an end. The opposition of

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the Board caused some delay in the issue of the formal instructions of Government for the recognition of the Talukdar, and before the settlement had been made with the Rajah, Robertson had resigned his post to another.

Mr. George Clerk

1844

That other was a man of the same school, with no greater passion than his predecessor for the subversion of the landed gentry; but sickness rendered his tenure of office too brief, and, before the close of the year, he was succeeded by one whose name is not to be mentioned without respect – the honoured son of an honoured father – the much-praised, much-lamented Thomason.

Mr. Thomason

He was as earnest and as honest as the men who had gone before him; but his strong and sincere convictions lay all in the other way. He was one of the chief teachers in the New School, and so strong was his faith in its doctrines that he regarded, with feelings akin to wondering compassion, as men whom God had given over to a strong delusion that they should believe a lie, all who still cherished the opinions which he had done so much to explode53. Supreme in the North-West Provinces, he found the case of the Mainpuri Rajah still formally before the Government. No final orders had been issued, so he issued them. The besom of the Settlement swept the great Talukdar out of three-fourths of the estate, and the village proprietors were left to engage with Government for all the rest in his stead.

It is admitted now, even by men who were personally concerned in this great work of the Settlement of Northern India, that it involved a grave political error. It was, undoubtedly, to convert into bitter enemies those whom sound policy would have made the friends and supporters of the State. Men of the Old School had seen plainly from the first that by these measures

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we were sowing broadcast the seeds of future trouble. Foremost among these was the veteran Director Tucker, who had been engaged in the first settlement of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces, and who knew as well as any man what rights existed on our original assumption of the government of those territories.

1832

“The way to conciliate the peasantry,” he wrote, “or to improve their condition, is not, I think, by dissolving the connection between them and the superior Talukdars, or village Zamindars. The one we have, I fear, entirely displaced; but we cannot destroy the memory of their past or the consciousness of their present state. They were once prosperous, and their descendants must feel that they are no longer so. They are silent, because the natives of India are accustomed to endure and to submit to the will of their rulers; but if an enemy appear on our Western frontier, or if an insurrection unhappily take place, we shall find these Talukdars, I apprehend, in the adverse ranks, and their ryots and retainers ranged under the same standard.” And a quarter of a century later, one who had received the traditions of this school unbroken from Thomas Campbell Robertson, at whose feet he had sat, wrote that he had long been pointing out that, “although the old families were being displaced fast, we could not destroy the memory of the past, or dissolve the ancient connexion between them and their people; and said distinctly that, in the event of any insurrection occurring, we should find this great and influential body, through whom we can alone hope to keep under and control the rural masses, ranged against us on the side of the enemy, with their hereditary followers and retainers rallying around them, in spite of our attempts to separate their interests.” “My warnings,” he added, “were unheeded, and I was treated as an alarmist, who, having hitherto served only in the political department of the State, and being totally inexperienced in Revenue matters, could give no sound opinion on the subject54.”

Warnings of this kind were, indeed, habitually disregarded; Treatment of the and the system, harsh in itself, was carried out, in native gentry. some cases harshly and uncompromisingly, almost indeed as though there were a pleasure in doing it. It is true

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that men deprived of their vested interests in great estates were recommended for money-payments direct from the Treasury; but this was no compensation for the loss of the land, with all the dignity derived from manorial rights and baronial privileges, and it was sometimes felt to be an insult. It was not even the fashion in those days to treat the Native Gentry with personal courtesy and conciliation. Some of the great masters of the school, men of the highest probity and benevolence, are said to have failed in this with a great failure, as lamentable as it was surprising. “In the matter of discourtesy to the native gentry,” wrote Colonel Sleeman to John Colvin, “I can only say that Robert Mertins Bird insulted them, whenever he had an opportunity of doing so; and that Mr. Thomason was too apt to imitate him in this as in other things. Of course their example was followed by too many of their followers and admirers55.”

Rent-free tenures

And whilst all this was going on, there was another process in active operation by which the position of the privileged classes was still further reduced. There is not one of the many difficulties, which the acquisition of a new country entails upon us, more serious than that which arises from the multiplicity of privileges and prescriptions, territorial, and official, which, undetermined by any fixed principle, have existed under the Native Government which we have supplanted. Even at the outset of our administrative career it is difficult to deal with these irregular claims, but the difficulty is multiplied tenfold by delay. The action of our Government in all such cases should be prompt and unvarying. Justice or Injustice should be quick in its operation and equal in its effects. Accustomed to revolutions of empire and mutations of fortune, the native mind readily comprehends the idea of confiscation as the immediate result of conquest. Mercy and forbearance at such time are not expected, and are little understood. The descent of the strong hand of the conqueror upon all existing rights and privileges is looked for with a feeling of submission to inevitable fate; and at such a time no one wonders, scarcely anyone complains, when the acts of a former Government are ignored, and its gifts are violently resumed.

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Under former Governments, and, indeed, in the earlier days of our own, there had been large alienations of revenue in favour of persons who had rendered good service to the State, or had otherwise acquired the favour of the rulers of the land. These rent-free tenures were of many different kinds. A volume might be filled with an account of them. Some were burdened with conditions; some were not. Some were personal life-grants; some were hereditary and perpetual. Some were of old standing; some were of recent origin. Some had been fairly earned or justly acquired; others were the vile growth of fraud and corruption. They varied no less in the circumstances of their acquisition than in their intrinsic character and inherent conditions. But anyhow they were for some time a part of our system, and had come to be regarded as the rights of the occupants. Every year which saw men in undisturbed possession seemed to strengthen those rights. An inquiry, at the outset of our career of administration, into the validity of all such tenures would have been an intelligible proceeding. Doubtless, indeed, it was expected. But years passed, and the danger seemed to have passed with them. Nay, more, the inactivity, seemingly the indifference, of the British Government, with respect to those whom we found in possession, emboldened others to fabricate similar rights, and to lay claim to immunities which they had never enjoyed under their native masters.

Bengal

In Bengal this manufacture of rent-free tenures was carried on to an extent that largely diminished the legitimate revenue of the country. A very considerable portion of these tenures was the growth of the transition-period immediately before and immediately after our assumption of the Diwani, or Revenue-Administration, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orisa.

1793

At the time of the great Permanent Settlement the rent-free holders were called upon to register their claims to exemption from the payment of the Government dues, and their grounds of exemption; and as they still remained in possession they believed that their rights and privileges had been confirmed to them. The Permanent Settlement, indeed, was held to be the Magna Charta of the privileged classes; and for more than forty years men rejoiced in their freeholds, undisturbed by any thoughts of invalidity of title or insecurity of tenure.

Resumption operation

But after this lapse of years, when Fraud itself might reasonably have pleaded a statute of limitations,

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the English revenue-officer awoke to a sense of the wrongs endured by his Government. So much revenue alienated: so many worthless sinecurists living in indolent contentment at the cost of the State, enjoying vast privileges and immunities, to the injury of the great mass of the People. Surely it was a scandal and a reproach! Then well-read, clever secretaries, with a turn for historical illustration, discovered a parallel between this grievous state of things in Bengal and that which preceded the great revolution in France, when the privileges of the old nobility pressed out the very life of the nation, until the day of reckoning and retribution came, with a more dire tyranny of its own. Viewed in this light, it was held to be an imperative duty to Colbertise the Lakhirajdars of the Lower Provinces56. So the resumption-officer was let loose upon the land. Titles were called for; proofs of validity were to be established, to the satisfaction of the Government functionary. But in families, which seldom last a generation without seeing their houses burnt down, and in a climate which during some months of the year is made up of incessant rains, and during others of steamy exhalations – where the devouring damp, and the still more devouring insect, consume all kinds of perishable property, even in stout-walled houses, it would have been strange if genuine documentary evidence had been forthcoming at the right time. It was an awful thing, after so many years of undisturbed possession, to be called upon to establish proofs, when the only proof was actual incumbency. A reign of terror then commenced. And if when thus threatened, the weak Bengali had not sometimes betaken himself in self-defence to the ready weapons of forgery, he must have changed his nature under the influence of his fears. That what ensued may properly be described as wholesale confiscation is not to be doubted. Expert

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young revenue-officers settled scores of cases in a day; and families, who had held possession of inherited estates for long years, and never doubted the security of their tenure, found themselves suddenly deprived of their freeholds and compelled to pay or to go. That the State had been largely defrauded, at some time or other, is more than probable. Many, it is admitted, were in possession who had originally no good title to the exemption they enjoyed. But many also, whose titles were originally valid, could produce no satisfactory evidence of their validity: so the fraudulent usurper and the rightful possessor were involved in one common ruin.

The success of these operations was loudly vaunted at the time. A social revolution had been accomplished, to the manifest advantage of the State, and at no cost, it was said, of popular discontent. The Bengali is proverbially timid, patient, and long-suffering. But there were far-seeing men who said, even at that time, that though a strong Government might do this with impunity in those lower provinces, they must beware how they attempt similar spoliation in other parts of India, especially in those from which the Native Army was recruited. If you do, it was prophetically said, you will some day find yourselves holding India only with European troops. The probability of alienating by such measures the loyalty of the military classes was earnestly discussed in the European journals of Calcutta57; and it was said, by those who defended

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the measure, that it was not intended to extend these resumption operations to other parts of the country. But scarcely any part of the country escaped; scarcely any race of men, holding rent-free estates of any kind, felt secure in the possession of rights and privileges which they had enjoyed under Mughul and Maratha rule, and had believed that they could still enjoy under the Raj of the Christian ruler.

North-West Provinces

In the North-West Provinces it was part of the duty of the Settlement officer to inquire into rent-free tenures, and to resume or to release from assessment the lands thus held. The feelings with which the task imposed upon him was regarded varied with the character and the opinions of the functionary thus employed; but whilst those who were disposed to look compassionately upon doubtful claims, or believed that it would be sound policy to leave men in undisturbed possession even of what might have been in the first instance unrighteously acquired, were few, the disciples of Bird and Thomason, who viewed all such alienations of revenue as unmixed evils, and considered that any respect shown to men who were described as “drones who do no good in the public hive” was an injury done to the tax-paying community at large, were many and powerful, and left their impression on the laud. Rejoicing in the great principle of the Dead-Level, the Board commonly supported the views of the resumptionist; and but for the intervention of Mr. Robertson, the Lieutenant-Governor, there would scarcely, at the end of the Settlement operations, have been a rent-free tenure in the land. There was sometimes a show of justice on the side of resumption, for the immunity had been granted, in the first instance, as payment for service no longer demanded, or what had been originally merely a life-grant had assumed the character of an hereditary assignment. Perhaps there was sometimes more than suspicion that in unsettled times, when there was a sort of scramble for empire, privileges of this kind had been fabricated or usurped; but in other instances strong proofs of validity were ignored, and it has been freely stated, even by men of their own order, that these earnest-minded civilians “rejected royal firmans and other authentic documents,” and brought upon the great rent-roll of the Company lands which had been for many generations free from assessment. Nay, even the highest authority, in the great Settlement epoch, declared that “the Settlement officer swept up, without inquiry,

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every patch of unregistered land; even those exempted by a subsequent order, which did not come out until five-sixths of the tenures had been resumed.” In one district, that of Farrukhabad, “the obligations of a treaty and the direct orders of Government were but lightly dealt with; and in all, a total disregard was evinced for the acts even of such men as Warren Hastings and Lord Lake58.” In every case what was done was done conscientiously, in the assured belief that it was for the general good of the people; but the very knowledge that was most vaunted, a knowledge of the institutions and the temper of the natives, was that which they most lacked. They were wrecked upon the dangerous coast of Little Learning.

There were, however, it has been said, some men engaged in those great Settlement operations who were not smitten with this unappeasable earth-hunger, and who took altogether another view both of the duty and of the policy of the State. Mr. Mansel, of whose eager desire, so honourably evinced at a later period, to uphold the Native States of India I have already spoken, was the principal exponent of these exceptional opinions. “If it be of importance,” he wrote, in his Report on the Settlement of the Agra District, “to conciliate the affections of the people, as well as to govern by the action of naked penal laws; if it be important that the natural tendency of every part of native society in these provinces, to sink into one wretched level of poverty and ignorance, should, as a principle, be checked as far as possible by the acts of Government; if it be important that the pride of ancestry and nobility, the valour of past times, and the national character of a country, should be cherished in recollection, as ennobling feelings to the human mind, I know of no act to which I could point with more satisfaction, as a zealous servant of Government, than the generous manner in which the restoration of the family of the Badawar Rajah to rank and fortune was made by the Lieutenant-Governor of Agra; and I cannot refrain from allowing myself to echo, for the inhabitants of this part of the country, that feeling, in a report of necessity, largely connected with the welfare and happiness of the district of Agra.” Mr. Robertson had granted the Badawar Jaghir to the adopted son of the deceased Rajah, and it was the recognition of this adoption

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which so rejoiced the heart of the sympathising Settlement officer.

As the events of which I am about to write occurred, for the most part, in Northern India, it is to the disturbing causes in that part of the country that the introductory section of this book is mainly devoted. But before it passes altogether away from the subject of Resumption, something should be said about the operations of that great confiscatory Tribunal known as the Inam Commission of Bombay.

The Inam Commission of Bombay

This was but the supplement of a series of measures, of which it would take a long time to write in detail. A great part of the territory, now constituting the Presidency of Bombay, was in 1817 conquered from the Peshwa. With conquest came the old difficulty, of which I have spoken59 – the difficulty of dealing with the privileges and prescriptions, the vested interests of all kinds, territorial and official, derived from the Maratha Government. As in Bengal and in the North-Western Provinces, these difficulties were greatly aggravated by delay. Had we instituted a searching inquiry at once, and resumed every doubtful tenure; had we cancelled even the undoubted grants of former governments, and suddenly annulled all existing privileges, such proceedings in the eyes of the people would have been the intelligible tyranny of the conqueror, and, at all events, in accordance with the custom of the country. But our very desire to deal justly and generously with these privileged classes generated delayed and unequal action. At different times, and in different parts of Western India, these old alienations of Revenue were dealt with after different fashions; and it was a source of bitter discontent that, under like circumstances, claims were settled by Government with far greater rigour in one part of the country than in another.

Years passed, various regulations were framed, for the most part of restricted operation; and still, after the country had been for more than a third of a century under British rule, the great question of alienated revenue had only been partially adjusted. So in 1852 an Act was passed, which empowered a little body of English officers, principally of the military profession – men, it was truly said, “not well versed in the principles of law, and wholly unpractised in the conduct of judicial

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inquiries” – to exercise arbitrary jurisdiction over thousands of estates, many of them held by men of high family, proud of their lineage, proud of their ancestral privileges, who had won what they held by the sword, and had no thought by any other means of maintaining possession. In the Southern Maratha country there were large numbers of these Jaghirdars, who had never troubled themselves about title-deeds, who knew nothing about rules of evidence, and who had believed that long years of possession were more cogent than any intricacies of law. If they had ever held written proofs of the validity of their tenures, they had seldom been so provident as to preserve them. But, perhaps, they had never had better proof than the memory of a fierce contest, in the great gardi-ki-wakt, or time of trouble, which had preluded the dissolution of the Maratha power in Western India, and placed the white man on the Throne of the Peshwa60. Year after year had passed, one generation had followed another in undisturbed possession, and the great seal of Time stood them instead of the elaborate technicalities of the Conveyancer. But the Inam Commission was established. The fame of it went abroad throughout the Southern Maratha country. From one village to another passed the appalling news that the Commissioner had appeared, had called for titles that could not be produced, and that nothing but a general confiscation of property was likely to result from the operations of this mysterious Tribunal. “Each day,” it has been said, “produced its list of victims; and the good fortunes of those who escaped but added to the pangs of the crowd who came forth from the shearing-house shorn to the skin, unable to

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work, ashamed to beg, condemned to penury61.”

1852–57

The titles of no less than thirty-five thousand estates, great and small, were called for by the Commission, and during the first five years of its operations, three-fifths of them were confiscated62.

Operation of the Civil Courts

Whilst the operations of the Revenue Department were thus spreading alarm among the privileged classes in all parts of the country, the Judicial Department was doing its duty as a serviceable ally in the great war of extermination. Many of the old landed proprietors were stripped to the skin by the decrees of our civil courts. The sale of land in satisfaction of these decrees was a process to which recourse was often had among a people inordinately addicted to litigation. We must not regard it altogether with English eyes; for the Law had often nothing else to take. There was many a small landed proprietor whose family might have been established for centuries on a particular estate, with much pride of birth and affection for his ancestral lands, but possessing movable goods and chattels not worth more than a few rupees. He might have owned a pair of small bullocks and a rude country cart consisting of two wheels and a few bamboos, but beyond such aids to husbandry as these, he had nothing but a drinking-vessel, a few cooking-pots, and the blankets which kept the dews off at night. Justice in his case might not be satisfied without a surrender of his interests in the land, which constituted the main portion of his wealth63. So a large number of estates every year were put up to sale, under the decrees of the courts, in satisfaction of debts sometimes only of a few shillings, and bought by new men, perhaps from different parts of the country, not improbably the agents

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or representatives of astute native functionaries from the lower provinces; whilst the ancient proprietors, still rooted to the soil, shrank into small farmers or under-tenants on their old ancestral domains. Thus a revolution of landed property was gradually brought about by means of English application, which, acting coincidentally with the other agencies of which I have spoken, swelled the number of the disaffected, dangerous classes, who traced their downfall to the operations of British rule, and sullenly bided their time for the recovery of what they had lost, in some new revolutionary epoch.

This general system of depression, which, thus assuming many different forms and exercising itself in many different ways, struck with uniform precision at the most cherished privileges of the upper classes, had not its origin in the fertile brain of Lord Dalhousie. He only confirmed and extended it; confirmed it in our older provinces, and extended it to those which he had himself acquired. In the Panjab it sorely disquieted some few of our more chivalrous English officers connected with the Administration64, and it was carried into the Oudh dominions, as will hereafter be shown, with a recklessness which in time brought down upon us a terrible retribution. Every new acquisition of territory made the matter much worse. Not merely because the privileged classes were in those territories struck clown, but because the extension of the British Raj gradually so contracted the area on which men of high social position, expelled by our system from the Company’s provinces, could find profitable and honourable employment, that it seemed as though every outlet for native enterprise and ambition were about to be closed against them. It was this, indeed, that made the great difference between resumptions of rent-free estates under the Native Governments and under our own. It has been said that under the former there was no security of tenure; and it is

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true that the Native Princes did not consider themselves bound to maintain the grants of their predecessors, and often arbitrarily resumed them. But the door of honourable and lucrative employment was not closed against the sufferers. Al] the great offices of the State, civil and military, were open to the children of the soil. But it was not so in our British territories. There the dispossessed holder, no longer suffered to be an unprofitable drone, was not permitted to take a place among the working bees of the hive. And what place was there left for him, in which he could serve under other masters? We had no room for him under us, and we left no place for him away from us. And so we made dangerous enemies of a large number of influential persons, amongst whom were not only many nobles of royal or princely descent, many military chiefs, with large bodies of retainers, and many ancient landholders for whom a strong feudal veneration still remained among the agricultural classes, but numbers of the Brahmanical, or priestly order, who had been supported by the alienated revenue which we resumed, and who turned the power which they exercised over the minds of others to fatal account in fomenting popular discontent, and instilling into the minds of the people the poison of religious fear.

The Priesthood

Other measures were in operation at the same time, the tendency of which was to. disturb the minds and to inflame the hatred of the Priesthood. It seemed as though a great flood of innovation were about to sweep away all their powers and their privileges. The pale-faced Christian knight, with the great Excalibar of Truth in his hand, was cleaving right through all the most cherished fictions and superstitions of Brahmanism. A new generation was springing up, without faith, without veneration; an inquiring, doubting, reasoning race, not to be satisfied with absurd doctrines or captivated by grotesque fables. The literature of Bacon and Milton was exciting a new appetite for Truth and Beauty; and the exact sciences of the West, with their clear, demonstrable facts and inevitable deductions, were putting to shame the physical errors of Hinduism. A spirit of inquiry had been excited, and it was little likely ever to be allayed. It was plain that the inquirers were exalting the Professor above the Pandit, and that the new teacher was fast displacing the old.

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Rightly to understand the stake for which the Brahman was playing, and with the loss of which he was now threatened, the reader must keep before him the fact that Brahmanism is the most monstrous system of interference and oppression that the world has ever yet seen, and that it could be maintained only by ignorance and superstition of the grossest kind. The people had been taught to believe that in all the daily concerns of life Brahmanical ministrations were essential to worldly success. The Deity, it was believed, could be propitiated only by money-payments to this favoured race of holy men. “Every form and ceremony of religion,” it has been said; “all the public festivals; all the accidents and concerns of life; the revolutions of the heavenly bodies; the superstitious fears of the people; births, sicknesses, marriages, misfortunes; death; a future state – have all been seized as sources of revenue to the Brahmans.” “The farmer does not reap his harvest without paying a Brahman to perform some ceremony; a tradesman cannot begin business without a fee to a Brahman; a fisherman cannot build a new boat, nor begin to fish in a spot which he has farmed, without a ceremony and a fee65.” “The Brahman,” says another and more recent writer, “does not only stand in a hierarchical, but also in the highest aristocratical position; and he has an authoritative voice in all pursuits of industry. All processes in other arts, as well as agriculture, are supposed to have been prescribed and imparted through the Brahmans. Every newly-commenced process of business, every new machine, or even repair of an old one, has to go through the ceremony of ‘pujah,’ with a feeing of the Brahman66.” And as the Brahman was thus the controller of all the ordinary business concerns of his countrymen, so also was he the depositary of all the learning of the country, and the regulator of all the intellectual pursuits of the people. There was, indeed, no such thing among them as purely secular education. “It is a marked and peculiar feature in the character of Hinduism,” says another writer, himself by birth a Hindu, “that instead of confining itself within the proper and lawful bounds prescribed to every theological system, it interferes with and treats of every department of secular knowledge which human genius has ever invented; so

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that grammar, geography, physics, law, medicine, metaphysics, &c., do each form as essential a part of Hinduism as any religious topic with which it is concerned. ... In their religious works they have treated of all the branches of secular knowledge known among them, in a regular, systematic manner; and have given them out to the world in a tone of absolute authority from which there could be no appeal67.” But the English had established a Court of Appeal of the highest order, and Brahmanism was being continually cast in it. In a word, the whole hierarchy of India saw their power, their privileges, and their perquisites rapidly crumbling away from them, and they girded themselves up to arrest the devastation.

All this had been going on for years; but the progress of enlightenment had been too slow, and its manifestations too little obtrusive, greatly to alarm the sacerdotal mind. As long as the receptacles of this new wisdom were merely a few clever boys in the great towns, and the manhood of the nation was still saturated and sodden with the old superstition, Brahmanism might yet flourish. But when these boys grew up in time to be heads of families, rejoicing in what they called their freedom from prejudice, laughing to scorn their ancestral faith as a bundle of old wives’ fables, eating meat and drinking wine, and assuming some at least of the distinguishing articles of Christian apparel, it was clear that a very serious peril was beginning to threaten the ascendency of the Priesthood. They saw that a reformation of this kind, once commenced, would work its way in time through all the strata of society. They saw that, as new provinces were one after another brought under British rule, the new light must diffuse itself more and more, until there would scarcely be a place for Hinduism to lurk unmolested. And some at least, confounding cause and effect, began to argue, that all this annexation and absorption was brought about for the express purpose of overthrowing the ancient faiths of the country, and establishing a new religion in their place.

Education

Every monstrous lie exploded, every abominable practice suppressed, was a blow struck at the Priesthood; for all these monstrosities and abominations had their root in Hinduism, and could not be eradicated without sore disturbance and confusion of the soil. The murder of

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women on the funeral pile, the murder of little children in the Zenana, the murder of the sick and the aged on the banks of the river, the murder of human victims, reared and fattened for the sacrifice, were all religious institutions, from which the Priesthood derived either profit, power, or both. Nay, even the wholesale strangling of unsuspecting travellers was sanctified and ceremonialised by religion. Now all these cruel rites had been suppressed, and, what was still worse in the eyes of the Brahmans, the foul superstitions which nurtured them were fast disappearing from the land. Authority might declare their wickedness, and still they might exist as part and parcel of the faith of the people. But when Reason demonstrated their absurdity, and struck conviction into the very heart of the nation, there was an end of both the folly and the crime. The Law might do much, but Education would assuredly do much more to sweep away all these time-honoured superstitions. Education, pure and simple in its secularity, was quite enough in itself to hew down this dense jungle of Hinduism; but when it was seen that the functions of the English schoolmaster and of the Christian priest were often united in the same person, and that high officers of the State were present at examinations conducted by chaplains or missionaries, a fear arose lest even secular education might be the mask of proselytism, and so the Brahmans began to alarm the minds of the elder members of the Hindu community, who abstained, under priestly influence, from openly countenancing what they had not the energy boldly to resist68.

And every year the danger increased. Every year were there manifestations of a continually increasing desire to emancipate the natives of India from the gross superstitions which enchained them. One common feeling moved alike the English Government and the English community. In other matters of State-policy there might be essential changes, but in this there was no change. One Governor might replace another, but only to evince an increased hostility to the great Baal of Hinduism. And in no man was there less regard for time-honoured abominations and venerable absurdities – in no man did the zeal of

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iconoclasm work more mightily than in Lord Dalhousie. During no former administration had the vested interests of Brahmanism in moral and material error been more ruthlessly assailed. There was nothing systematic in all this. Almost, indeed, might it be said that it was unconscious. It was simply the manifestation of such love as any clear-sighted, strong-headed man may be supposed to have for truth above error, for intelligent progress above ignorant stagnation. From love of this kind, from the assured conviction that it was equally humane and politic to substitute the strength and justice of British administration for what he regarded as the effete tyrannies of the East, had emanated the annexations which had distinguished his rule. And as he desired for the good of the people to extend the territorial rule of Great Britain, so he was eager also to extend her moral rule, and to make those people subject to the powers of light rather than of darkness. And so he strove mightily to extend among them the blessings of European civilisation, and the Priesthood stood aghast at the sight of the new things, moral and material, by which they were threatened.

Many and portentous were these menaces. Not only was Government Education, in a more systematised and portentous shape than before, rapidly extending its network over the whole male population of the country, but even the fastnesses of the female apartments were not secure against the intrusion of the new learning and new philosophy of the West. England had begun to take account of its shortcomings, and among all the reproaches heaped upon the Company, none had been so loud or so general as the cry that, whilst they spent millions on War, they grudged hundreds for purposes of Education. So, in obedience to this cry, instructions had been sent out to India, directing larger, more comprehensive, more systematic measures for the instruction of the people, and authorising increased expenditure upon them. Whilst great Universities were to be established, under the immediate charge of the Government, the more humble missionary institutions were to be aided by grants of public money, and no effort was to be spared that could conduce to the spread of European knowledge. It was plain to the comprehension of the guardians of Eastern learning, that what had been done to unlock the floodgates of the West would soon appear to be as nothing in comparison with the great tide of European civilisation which was about to be poured out upon them.

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Female Education

Most alarming of all were the endeavours made, during Lord Dalhousie’s administration, to penetrate the Zenana with our new learning and our new customs. The English at the large Presidency towns began to systematise their efforts for the emancipation of the female mind from the utter ignorance which had been its birthright, and the wives and daughters of the white men began to aid in the work, cheered and encouraged by the sympathies of their sisters at home. For the first time, the education of Hindu and Muhammadan females took, during the administration of Lord Dalhousie, a substantial recognised shape. Before it had been merely a manifestation of missionary zeal addressed to the conversion of a few orphans and castaways.

Mr. Bethune

But now, if not the immediate work of the Government in its corporate capacity, it was the pet project and the especial charge of a member of the Government, and, on his death, passed into the hands of the Governor-General himself, and afterwards was adopted by the Company’s Government. Some years before, the Priesthood, secure in the bigotry and intolerance of the heads of families, might have laughed these efforts to scorn. But now young men, trained under English Professors, were becoming fathers and masters, sensible of the great want of enlightened female companionship, and ill-disposed to yield obedience to the dogmas of the Priests. So great, indeed, was this yearning after something more attractive and more satisfying than the inanity of the Zenana, that the courtesans of the Calcutta Bazaars taught themselves to play on instruments, to sing songs, and to read poetry, that thereby they might lure from the dreary environments of their vapid homes the very flower of Young Bengal.

Re-marriage of Hindu Widows

About the same time the wedge of another startling innovation was being driven into the very heart of Hindu Society. Among the many cruel wrongs to which the womanhood of the nation was subjected was the institution which forbade a bereaved wife ever to re-marry. The widow who did not burn was condemned to perpetual chastity. Nay, it has been surmised that the burning inculcated in the old religious writings of the Hindus was no other than that which, centuries afterwards, the great Christian teacher forbade, saying that it is better to marry than to burn. Be this as it may, the re-marriage of Hindu widows was opposed both to the creeds and the customs of the

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land. It was an evil and a cruel thing itself, and the prolific source of other evils. Evil and cruel would it have been in any country and under any institutions, but where mere children are married, often to men advanced in years, and are left widows, in tender youth, when they have scarcely looked upon their husbands, its cruelty is past counting. To the more enlightened Hindus, trained in our English colleges and schools, the evils of this prohibition were so patent and so distressing, that they were fain to see it abrogated by law. One of their number wrote a clever treatise in defence of the re-marriage of widows, and thousands signed a petition, in which a belief was expressed that perpetual widowhood was not enjoined by the Hindu scriptures. But the orthodox party, strong in texts, greatly outnumbered, and, judged by the standard of Hinduism, greatly outargued them. The Law and the Prophets were on their side. It was plain that the innovation would inflict another deadly blow on the old Hindu law of inheritance. Already had dire offence been given to the orthodoxy of the land by the removal of those disabilities which forbade all who had forsaken their ancestral faith to inherit ancestral property. A law had been passed, declaring the abolition of “so much of the old law or usage as inflicted on any person forfeiture of rights or property, by reason of his or her renouncing, or having been excluded from, the communion of any religion.” Against this the old Hindus had vehemently protested, not without threats, as a violation of the pledges given by the British Government to the natives of India; pledges, they said, issued in an hour of weakness and revoked in an hour of strength69. But Lord Dalhousie had emphatically recorded his opinion, “that it is the duty of the State to keep in its own hands the right of regulating succession to property,” and the Act had been passed. And now there was further authoritative interference on the

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part of the State, for it was proposed to bestow equal rights of inheritance on the offspring of what the old-school Hindus declared to be an illicit, God-proscribed connection. This, however, was but a part of the evil. Here was another step towards the complete emancipation of woman; and Hindu orthodoxy believed, or professed to believe, that if widows were encouraged to marry new husbands instead of burning with the corpses of the old, wives would be induced to make themselves widows by poisoning or otherwise destroying their lords. It was apprehended, too – and not altogether without reason70 – that the re-marriage of Hindu widows would soon be followed by a blow struck at Hindu polygamy, especially in its worst but most honoured form of Kulinism; and so the Brahmans, discomfited and alarmed by these innovations, past, present, and prospective, strove mightily to resist the tide, and to turn the torrent of destruction back upon their enemies71.

The Railway and the Telegraph

Nor was it only by the innovations of moral progress that the hierarchy of India were alarmed and offended. The inroads and encroachments of physical science were equally distasteful and disquieting. A privileged race of men, who had been held in veneration as the depositaries of all human knowledge, were suddenly shown to be as feeble and impotent as babes and sucklings. It was no mere verbal demonstration; the arrogant self-assertion of the white man, which the Hindu Priesthood could contradict or explain away. There were no means of contradicting or explaining away the railway cars, which travelled, without horses

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or ‘bullocks, at the rate of thirty miles an hour, or the electric wires, which in a few minutes carried a message across the breadth of a whole province.

These were facts that there was no gainsaying. He who ran might read. The prodigious triumphs over time and space achieved by these “fire-carriages” and “lightning-posts” put to shame the wisdom of the Brahmans, and seemed to indicate a command over the supernatural agencies of the Unseen World, such as the Pandits of the East could never attain or simulate. They, who for their own ends had imparted a sacred character to new inventions, and had taught their disciples that all improvements in art and science were derived from the Deity through their especial intercession, and were to be inaugurated with religious ceremonies attended with the usual distribution of largesses to the priests, now found that the white men could make the very elements their slaves, and call to their aid miraculous powers undreamt of in the Brahmanical philosophy. Of what use was it any longer to endeavour to persuade the people that the new knowledge of the West was only a bundle-of shams and impostures, when any man might see the train come in at a given moment, and learn at Banaras how many pounds of flour were sold for the rupee that morning in the bazaars of Dehli and Calcutta?

To the introduction into India of these mysterious agencies the Hour and the Man were alike propitious. When Lord Dalhousie went out to India, England was just recovering from the effects of that over-activity of speculation which had generated such a disturbance of the whole financial system of the country. She had ceased to project lines of Railway between towns without Traffic, and through countries without Population, and had subsided, after much suffering, into a healthy state of reasonable enterprise, carefully estimating both her wants and her resources. As President of the Board of Trade, Dalhousie had enjoyed the best opportunities of acquainting himself with the principles and with the details of the great question of the day, at the one central point to which all information converged, and he had left England with the full determination, God willing, not to leave the country of his adoption until he had initiated the construction of great trunk-roads of iron between all the great centres of Government and of Commerce, and had traversed, at railway speed, some at least of their first stages. A little while before, the idea of an Indian railway

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had, in the estimation of the greater number of English residents, been something speculative and chimerical, encouraged only by visionaries and enthusiasts. A few far-seeing men, foremost among whom was Macdonald Stephenson, predicted their speedy establishment, and with the general acceptance of the nation; but even after Dalhousie had put his hand to the work, and the Company had responded to his efforts, it was the more general belief that railway communication in India would be rather a concern of Government, useful in the extreme for military purposes, than a popular institution supplying a national want. It was thought that Indolence, Avarice, and Superstition would keep the natives of the country from flocking to the Railway Station. But with a keener appreciation of the inherent power of so demonstrable a benefit to make its own way, even against these moral obstructions, Dalhousie had full faith in the result. He was right. The people now learnt to estimate at its full worth the great truth that Time is Money; and having so learned, they were not to be deterred from profiting by it by any tenderness of respect for the feelings of their spiritual guides.

That the fire-carriage on the iron road was a heavy blow to the Brahmanical Priesthood is not to be doubted. The lightning post, which sent invisible letters through the air and brought back answers, from incredible distances, in less time than an ordinary messenger could bring them from the next street, was a still greater marvel and a still greater disturbance. But it was less patent and obtrusive. The one is the natural complement of the other; and Dalhousie, aided by the genius of O’Shaughnessy, had soon spread a network of electric wires across the whole length and breadth of the country. It was a wise thing to do; a right thing to do; but it was alarming and offensive to the Brahmanical mind. It has been said, that as soon as we had demonstrated that the earth is a sphere revolving on its axis, there was an end to the superstitions of Hinduism. And so there was – in argument, but not in fact. The Brahmanical teachers insisted that the new doctrines of Western civilisation were mere specious inventions, with no groundwork of eternal truth, and as their disciples could not bring the test of their senses to such inquiries as these, they succumbed to authority rather than to reason, or perhaps lapsed into a state of bewildering doubt. But material experiments, so palpable and portentous that they might be seen at a distance of many

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miles, convinced whilst they astounded. The most ignorant and unreasoning of men could see that the thing was done. They knew that Brahmanism had never done it. They saw plainly the fact, that there were wonderful things in the world which their own Priests could not teach them – of which, indeed, with all their boasted wisdom, they had never dreamt; and from that time the Hindu Hierarchy lost half its power, for the People lost half their faith.

Caste

But clear as was all this, and alarming as were the prospects thus unfolded to the Pandits, there was something more than this needed to disturb the popular mind. Hinduism might be assailed; Hinduism might be disproved; and still men might go about their daily business without a fear for the future or a regret for the past. But there was something about which they disturbed themselves much more than about the abstract truths of their religion. The great institution of Caste was an ever-present reality. It entered into the commonest concerns of life. It was intelligible to the meanest understanding. Every man, woman, and child knew what a terrible thing it would be to be cast out from the community of the brotherhood, and condemned to live apart, abhorred of men and forsaken by God. If, then, the people could be taught that the English by some insidious means purposed to defile the Hindus, and to bring them all to a dead level of one-caste or of no-caste, a great rising of the Natives might sweep the Foreigners into the sea. This was an obvious line of policy; but it was not a policy for all times. It needed opportunity for its successful development. Equally patient and astute, the Brahman was content to bide his time rather than to risk anything by an inopportune demonstration. The English were loud in their professions of toleration, and commonly cautious in their practice. Still it was only in the nature of things that they should some day make a false step.

The Messing System in Gaols

As the Brahman thus lay in wait, eager for his opportunity to strike, he thought he espied, perhaps in an unexpected quarter, a safe point of attack. It required some monstrous invention, very suitable to troubled times, but only to be circulated with success after the popular mind, by previous excitement, had been prepared to receive it, to give any colour of probability to a report that the Government had laid a plot for the defilement of the whole mass of the people. But there were certain classes

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with which Government had a direct connection, and whose bodies and souls were in the immediate keeping of the State. Among these were the inmates of our gaols. As these people were necessarily dependent upon Government for their daily food, it appeared to be easy, by a well-devised system of Prison Discipline, either to destroy the caste of the convicts or to starve them to death. The old tolerant regulations allowed every man to cater and to cook for himself. A money-allowance was granted to him, and he turned it into food after his own fashion. But this system was very injurious to prison discipline. Men loitered over their cooking and their eating and made excuses to escape work. So the prisoners were divided into messes, according to their several castes; rations were issued to them, and cooks were appointed to prepare the daily meals at a stated hour of the day. If the cook were of a lower caste than the eaters, the necessary result was the contamination of the food and loss of caste by the whole mess. The new system, therefore, was one likely to be misunderstood and easily to be misinterpreted. Here, then, was one of those openings which designing men were continually on the alert to detect, and in a fitting hour it was turned to account. Not merely the inmates of the gaols, but the inhabitants of the towns in which prisons were located, were readily made to believe that it was the intention of the British Government to destroy the caste of the prisoners, and forcibly to convert them to Christianity. It mattered not whether Brahman cooks had or had not, in the first instance, been appointed. There might be a Brahman cook to-day; and a low-caste man in his place to-morrow. So the lie had some plausibility about it; and it went abroad that this assault upon the gaol-birds was but the beginning of the end, and that by a variety of different means the religions of the country would soon be destroyed by the Government of the Faringhis.

Reports of this kind commonly appear to be of Hindu origin; for they are calculated primarily to alarm the minds of the people on the score of the destruction of caste. But it seldom happens that they are not followed by some auxiliary lies expressly designed for Muhammadan reception. The Muhammadan had some especial grievances of their own. The tendency of our educational measures, and the all-pervading Englishism with which the country was threatened, was to lower the dignity of Muhammadanism, and to deprive of their

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emoluments many influential people of that intolerant faith. The Maulavis were scarcely less alarmed by our innovations than the Pandits. The Arabic of the one fared no better than the Sanskrit of the other. The use of the Persian language in our law courts was abolished; new tests for admission into the Public Service cut down, if they did not wholly destroy, their chances of official employment. There was a general inclination to pare away the privileges and the perquisites of the principal Muhammadan seats of learning. All the religious endowments of the great Calcutta Madrasa were annihilated; and the prevalence of the English language, English learning, and English law, made the Muhammadan doctors shrink into insignificance, whilst the resumption of rent-free tenures, which, in many instances, grievously affected old Musulman families, roused their resentments more than all the rest, and made them ripe for sedition. A more active, a more enterprising, and a more intriguing race than the Hindus, the latter knew well the importance of associating them in any design against the State72. So their animosities were stimulated, and their sympathies were enlisted, by a report, sedulously disseminated, to the effect that the British Government were about to issue an edict prohibiting circumcision, and compelling Muhammadan women to go abroad unveiled.

Small chance would there have been of such a lie as this finding a score of credulous Musulmans to believe it, if it had not been for the little grain of truth that there was in the story of the messing system in the gaols. The innovation had been

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originated some years before Lord Dalhousie appeared upon the scene. At first it had been introduced with a discretion signifying a full knowledge of the lurking danger73; but, as time advanced, one experiment followed another, and some of the old caution was perhaps relaxed. So in many places the prisoners broke into rebellion and violently resisted the proposed change. Eager and excited, under the influence of a common alarm, the townspeople cheered them on, and were ready to aid them, with all their might, in what they believed to be the defence of their religion. At Shahabad, Saran, Bihar, and Patna, there were serious disturbances, and at a later period, Banaras, the very nursery and hotbed of Hinduism, the cherished home of the Pandits, was saved only by prudential concessions from becoming the scene of a sanguinary outbreak.

The Hindu and his Lotah

The experience thus gained of the extreme sensitiveness of the native mind, given up as it was to gross delusions, does not appear to have borne the fruit of increased caution and forbearance. For not long afterwards another improvement in prison discipline again stirred up revolt in gaols; and, for the same reason as before, the people sided with the convicts. A Hindu, or a Hinduised Muhammadan, is nothing without his Lotah. A Lotah is a metal drinking-vessel, which he religiously guards against defilement, and which he holds as a cherished possession when he has nothing else belonging to him in the world. But a brass vessel may be put to other uses than that of holding water. It may brain a magistrate74, or flatten the face of a gaoler, and truly it was a formidable weapon in the hands of a desperate man. So an attempt was made in some places to deprive the prisoners of their lotahs, and to substitute earthenware vessels in their place. Here, then, in the eyes of the people, was another insidious attempt to convert prison discipline into a means of religious persecution – another attempt covertly to reduce them all to one caste. So the prisoners resisted the experiment, and

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in more than one place manifested their resentment with a fury which was shared by the population of the towns. At Arah the excitement was so great that the guards were ordered to fire upon the prisoners, and at Muzaffarpur, in Tirhut, so formidable was the outburst of popular indignation, that the magistrate, in grave official language, described it as “a furious and altogether unexpected outbreak on the part of the people of the town and district in support and sympathy with the prisoners.” The rioters, it was said, “included almost all the inhabitants of the town, as well as a vast number of ryots, who declared that they would not go away until the lotahs were restored;” and so great was the danger of the prisoners escaping, of their plundering the Treasury and pillaging the town, before the troops which had been sent for could be brought up, that the civil authorities deemed it expedient to pacify the insurgents by restoring the lotahs to the people in the gaols. And this was not held at the time to be a sudden outburst of rash and misguided ignorance, but the deliberate work of some of the rich native inhabitants of the town, and some of the higher native functionaries of our Civil Courts.

It was clear, indeed, that the inflammability of the native mind was continually increasing; and that there were many influential persons, both Hindu and Muhammadan, running over with bitter resentments against the English, who were eagerly awaiting a favourable opportunity to set all these combustible materials in a blaze. The gaol-business was an experiment, and, as far as it went, a successful one. But it was not by an outbreak of the convict population that the overthrow of the English was to be accomplished. There was another class of men, equally under the control of the Government, whose corruption would far better repay the labours of the Maulavis and the Pandits.

Footnotes

48. See letter of Mr. John Thornton, Secretary to Government, North-West Provinces, to Mr. H. M. Elliot, Secretary to Board of Revenue, April 30, 1845. It is added, with undeniable truth, that “in so far as this is done with care and diligence, will the measure be successful in placing property on a healthy and sound footing.”

49. In sober official language, described by Lieutenant-Governor Robertson as “the prevailing, and perhaps excessive, readiness to reduce extensive properties into minute portions, and to substitute, whenever there was an opportunity, a village community for an individual landholder.”

50. The exact number was 189, of which it was ruled that the Rajah could justly be recorded as proprietor only of 51. A money-compensation, in the shape of a percentage, was to be given him for the loss of the rest.

51. Despatch of Court of Directors, August 13, 1851.

52. The Lieutenant-Governor recorded his opinion, that no proof of the Rajah’s mismanagement, such as could justify his exclusion, had been adduced; that the evidence in support of the proprietary claims of the Zamindars was insufficient and inconclusive; that if the Zamindars ever possessed the rights attributed to them, they had not been in the active enjoyment of them for upwards of a century, while the Rajah’s claims had been admitted for more than four generations; that, admitting the inconvenience which might sometimes result from the recognition of the superior malgoosar, it would not be reconcilable with good feeling or justice to deal as the Board proposed to do, with one found in actual and long-acknowledged possession. He condemned the practice of deciding cases of this nature on one invariable and generalising principle; stated that he could discover no sufficient reason for excluding the Rajah of Mainpuri from the management of any of the villages composing the Taluk of Minehanah; and finally withheld his confirmation of the settlement concluded with the village Zamindars. directing the engagements to be taken from the Talukdar.” – Despatch of Court of Directors, August 13, 1851.

53. See, for example, his reflections on the contumacy of Mr. Boulderson, of whom Mr. Thomason says “With much honesty of principle he is possessed of a constitution of mind which prevents him from readily adopting the principles of others, or acting upon their rules. A great part of his Indian career has been passed in opposition to the prevailing maxims of the day, and he finds himself conscientiously adverse to what has been done.” With respect to these prevailing maxims, Mr. F. H. Robinson, of the Civil Service, in a pamphlet published in 1855, quotes the significant observation of an old Rasaldar of Gardener’s Horse, who said to him: “No doubt the wisdom of the new gentlemen had shown them the folly and the ignorance of the gentlemen of the old time, on whom it pleased God, nevertheless, to bestow the government of India.”

54. Personal Adventures during the Indian Rebellion. By William Edwards, B.C.S., Judge of Banaras, and late Magistrate and Collector of Badaon, in Rohilkhand.

55. See Correspondence annexed to published edition of Sleeman’s Oudh Diary. I have been told by men whose authority is entitled to respect, that the statement is to be received with caution.

56. In a memoir of the Great Colbert I read the following words, which are exactly descriptive of the nature of the pretensions of the great mass of the Lakhirajdars, and of the present measures of the Government: ‘Under the pernicious system which exempted the nobility from payment of direct taxes, a great number of persons had fraudulently assumed titles and claimed rank, while another class had obtained immunity from taxation by the prostitution of Court favour, or the abuse of official privileges. These cases Colbert caused to be investigated, and those who failed in making out a legal claim to immunity were compelled to pay their share of the public burdens, to the relief of the labouring classes, on whom nearly the whole weight of taxation fell.’” – See Letters of GAUNTLET, addressed to the Calcutta Papers of 1838.

57. The following, written a quarter of a century ago, affords a curious glimpse of the apprehensions even then entertained by far-seeing men: “We would just hint by the way to those who have planned this very extraordinary attack upon vested rights, that the Sipahis are almost all landholders, many of them Brahmans, whose families are supported by the charitable foundations which it is now sought to confiscate and destroy. The alarm has not yet, we believe, spread to the Army, but it has not been without its causes of complaints; and we would very calmly and respectfully put it to our rulers, whether it is wise or prudent to run the risk to which this Resumption measure would sooner or later infallibly lead. The native soldier has long been in the habit of placing implicit reliance upon British faith and honour; but let the charm once be broken, let the confiscation of rent-free land spread to those provinces out of which our Army is recruited, and the consequences may be that we shall very soon have to trust for our security to British troops alone. The Government may then learn rather late that revenue is not the only thing needful, and that their financial arithmetic, instead of making twice two equal to one, as Swift says was the case in Ireland, may end by extracting from the same process of multiplication just nothing at all.” – Englishman, November 2, 1838.

58. Minute of Mr. Robertson, Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, quoted in Dispatch of the Court of Directors, August 13, 1851.

59. Ante, page 121.

60. See the admirably-written memorial of Mr. G. B. Seton-Karr: “Chiefs, who had won their estates by the sword, had not been careful to fence them in with a paper barrier, which they felt the next successful adventurer would sweep away as unceremoniously as themselves. Instead of parchments, they transmitted arms and retainers, with whose aid they had learnt to consider mere titles superfluous, as without it they were contemptible. In other instances, men of local influence and energetic character having grasped at the lands which lay within their reach in the general scramble which preceded the downfall of the Peshwa’s Government, had transmitted their acquisitions to the children, fortified by no better titles than entries in the village account-books, which a closer examination showed to be recent or spurious. Roused from the dreams of thirty years, these proprietors of precarious title, or of no title at all, found themselves suddenly brought face to face with an apparatus, which, at successive strokes, peeled away their possessions with the harsh precision of the planing machine.”

61. Memorial of G. B. Seton-Karr.

62. Ibid.

63. I have stated here the principle upon which the law was based. But I believe that in many cases no pains were taken to ascertain in the first instance what were the movable goods of the debtor. Recourse was had to the register of landed property, even when the debt amounted to no more than four or five rupees. “I have seen,” says an officer of the Bengal Civil Service, in a Memorandum before me, “estates put up for sale for four rupees (eight shillings), which appears to me just the same as if an English grocer, getting a decree in a small-debt court against a squire for half a sovereign, put up his estate in Cheshire for the same, instead of realising the debt by the salo of his silk umbrella.”

64. Sir Herbert Edwardes, in a Memorandum quoted by Mr. Charles Raikes in his graphic “Notes of the Revolt of the North-West Provinces of India,” says of Arthur Cocks, that he “imbibed Sir Henry Lawrence’s feelings, and became greatly attached to the chiefs and people. He hardly stayed a year after annexation, and left the Panjab because he could not bear to see the fallen state of the old officials and Sirdars.” Of Henry Lawrence himself, Mr. Raikes says: “He fought every losing battle for the old chiefs and Jaghirdars with entire disregard for his own interest, and at last left the Panjab, to use Colonel Edwardes’s words, dented all over with defeats and disappointments, honourable scars in the eyes of the bystanders.”

65. Ward on the Hindus.

66. Jeffreys on the “British Army in India,” Appendix, in which there is much interesting and valuable matter.

67. Calcutta Review, vol. xi. Article: “Physical Errors of Hinduism.”

68. The English journalists sometimes remarked in their reports of these school-examinations upon the absence of the native gentry – e.g.: “We cannot help expressing great surprise at the absence of natives of influence.” – Bengal Hurkaru, March 14, 1853.

69. The Bengal Memorial said: “Your memorialists will not conceal that from the moment the proposed Act becomes a part of the law applicable to Hindus, that confidence which they hitherto felt in the paternal character of their British rulers will he most materially shaken. No outbreak, of course, is to be dreaded; but the active spirit of fervent loyalty to their sovereign will be changed into sullen submission to their will, and obedience to their power.” The Madras Memorial was couched in much stronger language. It denounced the measure as a direct act of tyranny, and said that the British Government, “treading the path of oppression,” “would well deserve what it will assuredly obtain – the hatred and detestation of the oppressed.”

70. See the following passage of a speech delivered by Mr. Barnes Peacock, in the Legislative Council, July 19, 1856: “There was a great distinction between preventing a man from doing that which his religion directed him to do, and preventing him from doing that which his religion merely allowed him to do. If a man were to say that his religion did not forbid polygamy, and therefore that he might marry as many wives as he pleased, when it was impossible for him to carry out the contract of marriage, it would be no interference with his religion for the Legislature to say that the marrying of a hundred wives, and the subsequent desertion of them, was an injury to society, and therefore that it should be illegal to do so. He “(Mr. Peacock)” maintained that it was the duty of the Legislature, in such a case, to prevent him from doing that which his religion merely permitted, but did not command him to do.”

71. The “Bill to remove all legal obstacles to the marriage of Hindu widows,” though introduced and discussed during the administration of Lord Dalhousie, was not finally passed till after his retirement. It received the assent of Lord Canning in July, 1856.

72. It must be admitted, however, that it is a moot question, in many instances, whether the first movement were made by the Hindus or the Muhammadans. Good authorities sometimes incline to the latter supposition. Take, for example, the following, which has reference to a seditious movement at Patna in the cold season of 1845–46: “From inquiries I have made,” wrote Mr. Dampier, Superintendent of Police in the Lower Provinces, in every quarter, I am of opinion that the Muhammadans of these parts, amongst whom the resumption of the Maafi Tenures, the new educational system, and the encouragement given to the English language, have produced the greatest discontent and the bitterest animosity against our government, finding that the enforcement of the messing system in the gaols had produced a considerable sensation amongst the people, were determined to improve the opportunity, especially as our troops were weak in numbers, and we were supposed to be pressed in the North-West.” Of the event to which this refers, more detailed mention will be found in a subsequent chapter of this work, in connection with the attempt then made to corrupt the regiments of Danapur.

73. See Circular Orders of Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, July, 1841: – “Government are of opinion that these measures ought not to be compulsorily enforced, if there be any good ground to believe that they will violate or offend the religious prejudices of the people, or injure the future prospects of those who may be subjected to temporary imprisonment.”

74. My earliest recollection of India is associated with the sensation created in Calcutta, in April, 1834, when Mr. Richardson, magistrate of the 24 Parganahs, was killed in Alipur gaol by a blow from a brass lotah.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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