AN APOLOGY FOR FAILURE Such was my Indian tour of 1883-1884. It will be rightly asked by those who have read thus far how it came about that I wasted so great an opportunity for good as then seemed open to me, and did not return the following year, or indeed in any subsequent year, to carry out the mission which appeared marked out for me. I often ask myself the same question. Looking back at the position I held for a moment with Hindus, Mohammedans, and Parsis alike, I am filled with regret that in the sequel I should have put it to so little purpose. If I had had the perseverance to pursue the course I had begun, and had followed it out unflinchingly to its full results, I believe that I might have brought about great permanent good for the people whose interests I had espoused, and perhaps with the Mohammedans encouraged them to a real reformation, social and intellectual, if not political. To do this, however, it would have been necessary for me to devote the whole of my life to this special work, and to give up every other interest which I had at heart and all my private affairs at home. It would have required something more than sympathy to bring me to the point; and I suppose my mind lacked the impetus of a full faith, without which complete devotion to a cause more than half religious could not be. Nevertheless I left Bombay with an entire intention of returning the following winter, and of making a new tour for the collection of the funds necessary for the proposed Mohammedan University. I had In the first place Lord Ripon, though he had established a state of things at Hyderabad favourable to reform as far as the native elements of the government were concerned, had not been able to impose his will altogether on the Calcutta Foreign Office. Trevor, indeed, left soon after, but the personnel of the Residency at Hyderabad, in spite of all that had passed, was not thoroughly changed. Cordery was allowed to remain on in power, and, as we had foreseen, the old intrigues were quietly renewed. The young minister, Laik Ali, was left without advice of any profitable kind by the Resident, and through his youth and inexperience made mistakes by which his enemies were not slow to profit. The confidence and friendship which had from the outset existed between him and the Nizam were undermined, and both were frustrated in their better intentions, and, in accordance with the time-honoured plan in dealing with native states, were encouraged to neglect their public duties and indulge in a life of pleasure destructive of their more serious energies. Thus the year was not out before it became clear to me, from the reports I received, that the Nizam’s patronage of the university scheme was not one which could be prudently relied on. Another misfortune was Lord Ripon’s resignation of the Viceroyalty before his term of office was fully over. Frustrated in his larger design of endowing India with something like free institutions, and finding himself without real support from the Government at home, he recognized that it was useless for him to prolong his stay, and, amid the lamentations of native India, he returned to England a defeated, if not a disappointed man. Under his successor, Lord Dufferin, things lapsed into their old groove, and all hope vanished of serious political reform. The Mohammedans were, indeed, favoured by the new Viceroy as far as their employment in the administration went, but anything like vigorous action among them was once more discouraged. Thus, snowed upon officially, the idea of an independent university, existing on its own resources and subject to no influence of official fear or favour, necessarily languished, and was abandoned by the timorous souls of those whom for a moment I had persuaded to take it up courageously. It is rare in India to find persistent energy in any undertaking not patronized by Government. The death blow to the scheme followed a little later when Rajah Amir Hassan, who had persevered in it so far as to commence founding a college for his Shiah co-religionists at Lucknow was attacked by an illness which ended in insanity. Even if I had returned to India, it is doubtful whether I could have done anything to neutralize these misfortunes. As it was, I allowed myself to be discouraged by them into a gradual abandonment of my Indian plan, and turned my energies into other channels, which seemed to me at the time more practical. My first enthusiasm was already cooled by a visit I paid to Constantinople in the autumn of 1884. It All the same, I think I may lay claim to have contributed something towards the cause I had made specially my own, that of the Indian Mohammedans. On my return to England in the spring of 1884, I found Lord Randolph Churchill more than half disposed to go with me in my plans for them, and to make himself in Parliament a champion of Islam. It was partly through my persuasion and example that he started on his tour in India the following Nor was I forgetful of the promise I had made to my Hindu friends of expounding to my fellow countrymen at home the griefs of which I had been witness in India; the infinite poverty of its people; the economic ruin they had suffered at our hands; the oppressive character of the land assessment constantly enhanced, aggravated as these things were by new forest laws and a salt tax levied on the very poor;—and, no less, the arrogance of their official rulers; the growing ill-will between class and class, and the causes of what was rapidly becoming race-hatred between Englishman and Indian. In the course of the summer of 1884 I embodied these in a series of papers contributed to the “Fortnightly Review,” and republished by me at the end of the year under the title “Ideas about India,” a little work, which being now long out of print, I propose here, as a natural sequel to the diary, to add in the form of final Chapters. There will be found among them a scheme of constitutional reform not very different from that which India’s famines have been severer and more frequent, its agricultural poverty has deepened, its rural population has become more hopelessly in debt, their despair more desperate. The system of constantly enhancing the land revenue has not been altered. The salt tax, though slightly lowered, still robs the very poor. Hunger, and those pestilences which are the result of hunger, are spread over an increasing, not a diminishing, area. The Deccan ryot is still perhaps the poorest peasant in the world. Nothing of the system of finance is changed, nothing in the economy which favours English trade and English speculation at the expense of India’s native industries. What was bad twenty-five years ago is, according to all native evidence, worse now. At any rate there is the same drain of India’s food to alien mouths. Endemic famine and endemic plague, with British India’s universal bondage to the village usurer, are facts no official statistics of prosperity can explain away. Nor has the chasm of race antipathy been at all narrowed. All the causes of ill-will noted by me in On the other hand the Indian races, many of them quite as intellectual as the European, have been far from standing still. Quite apart from such education as they have been receiving in Government schools and colleges, the knowledge of the facts of the Western World and its ways has been spread far and wide among them by their ever-increasing intercourse with European travellers, and the facilities they have themselves acquired of travel. If every Government school in India were closed to-morrow, and every native newspaper suppressed, I doubt if the spread of such information would be greatly checked, this class of facts being conveyed from mouth to mouth rather than by writing; and it is at any rate certain that, at least in the towns of India, Englishmen are appraised pretty generally at their real value, and their moral weaknesses and intellectual limitations are known to every one, even the poorest. I confess I do not see how this unfortunate tendency of things is to be mended by any rules or regulations issued to the Anglo-Indian Civil Service. I am the more in despair about it, because I have noticed precisely the same evil growth, though in a less dangerous form, in Egypt. When I first knew Egypt, seven years before the British occupation, the best possible relations existed between Englishmen and native Egyptians. There was much familiar intercourse and respect on either side, and English travellers, rare in those days, were proud to be invited to the houses of rich Cairo Moslems, while among the poor in the villages they were always welcome. But the false position assumed by our people since the occupation of 1882, that of rulers and ruled, the rulers being aliens and affecting airs of race superiority over the natives, As to the concluding Chapter, that on “The Future of Self-Government,” I leave it without comment as it was written twenty-five years ago, though I should have liked to have drawn from it a moral and to have applied it to the state of things we see in India to-day. That, however, is forbidden me in deference to the present difficulties of government, and also as being alien to the historical character of the present volume. The suppression, nevertheless, of free thought and speech in India, by the new press laws, and the revival of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial, is a subject which I cannot let pass without a protest, lest I should seem to approve. Such methods of government are not only repugnant to me, but are, I am sure, as futile as they are reactionary. If persisted in, they can only mean that the Government relying on them has no serious intention of true progressive reform. |