Volume IX Part 14 (1/2)
With all the faults of their nature and errors of their inst.i.tutions, their inst.i.tutions, which act so powerfully on their natures, have two material characteristics which ent.i.tle them to respect: first, great force and stability; and next, excellent moral and civil effects.
Their stability has been proved by their holding on an uniform tenor for a duration commensurate to all the empires with which history has made us acquainted; and they still exist in a green old age, with all the reverence of antiquity, and with all the pa.s.sion that people have to novelty and change. They have stood firm on their ancient base; they have cast their roots deep in their native soil,--perhaps because they have never spread them anywhere else than in their native soil. Their blood, their opinions, and the soil of their country make one consistent piece, admitting no mixture, no adulteration, no improvement: accordingly, their religion has made no converts, their dominion has made no conquests; but in proportion as their laws and opinions were concentred within themselves, and hindered from spreading abroad, they have doubled their force at home. They have existed in spite of Mahomedan and Portuguese bigotry,--in spite of Tartarian and Arabian tyranny,--in spite of all the fury of successive foreign conquest,--in spite of a more formidable foe, the avarice of the English dominion.
I have spoken now, my Lords, of what their principles are, their laws and religious inst.i.tutions, in point of force and stability; I have given instances of their force in the very circ.u.mstance in which all the inst.i.tutions of mankind in other respects show their weakness. They have existed, when the country has been otherwise subdued. This alone furnishes full proof that there must be some powerful influence resulting from them beyond all our little fas.h.i.+onable theories upon such subjects.
The second consideration in the Gentoo inst.i.tutions is their beneficial effects, moral and civil. The policy, civil or religious, or, as theirs is, composed of both, that makes a people happy and a state flouris.h.i.+ng, (putting further and higher considerations out of the way, which are not now before us,) must undoubtedly, so far as human considerations prevail, be a policy wisely conceived in any scheme of government. It is confirmed by all observation, that, where the Hindoo religion has been established, that country has been flouris.h.i.+ng. We have seen some patterns remaining to this day. The very country which is to be the subject of your Lords.h.i.+ps' judicial inquiry is an instance, by an entire change of government, of the different effects resulting from the rapacity of a foreign hand, and the paternal, lenient, protecting arm of a native government, formed on the long connection of prejudice and power. I shall give you its state under the Hindoo government from a book written by a very old servant of the Company, whose authority is of the greater weight, as the very destruction of all this scheme of government is the great object of the author.
The author, Mr. Holwell, divides the country of Bengal into its different provinces. He supposes what they then paid to the supreme government; he supposes what the country is capable of yielding; and his project is, to change entirely the application of the revenues of the country, and to secure the whole into the hands of government. In enumerating these provinces, at last he comes to the province of Burdwan.
”In truth,” (says this author,) ”it would be almost cruelty to molest this happy people; for in this district are the only vestiges of the beauty, purity, piety, regularity, equity, and strictness of the ancient Hindostan government. Here the property as well as the liberty of the people are inviolate. Here no robberies are heard of, either public or private. The traveller, either with or without merchandise, becomes the immediate care of the government, which allots him guards, without any expense, to conduct him from stage to stage; and these are accountable for the safety and accommodation of his person and effects. At the end of the first stage he is delivered over, with certain benevolent formalities, to the guards of the next, who, after interrogating the traveller as to the usage he had received in his journey, dismiss the first guard with a written certificate of their behavior, and a receipt for the traveller and his effects; which certificate and receipt are returnable to the commanding officer of the first stage, who registers the same, and regularly reports it to the rajah.
”In this form the traveller is pa.s.sed through the country; and if he only pa.s.ses, he is not suffered to be at any expense for food, accommodation, or carriage for his merchandise or baggage: but it is otherwise, if he is permitted to make any residence in one place above three days, unless occasioned by sickness, or any unavoidable accident.
If anything is lost in this district,--for instance, a bag of money or other valuables,--the person who finds it hangs it upon the next tree, and gives notice to the nearest _chowkey_, or place of guard, the officer of which orders immediate publication of the same by beat of _tomtom_, or drum.”
These, my Lords, are the effects universally produced by the Hindoo polity throughout that vast region, before it was distorted and put out of frame by the barbarism of foreign conquests. Some choice, reserved spots continued to flourish under it to the year 1756. Some remained till Mr. Hastings obtained the means of utterly defacing them. Such was the prospect of Benares under the happy government of Bulwant Sing.
Such was the happy state of the same Benares in the happy days of Cheyt Sing, until, in the year 1781, Mr. Hastings introduced _his_ reform into that country.
Having stated the general outline of the manners of the original people of Hindostan, having stated the general principles of their policy, which either prohibit connection, or oblige us to a connection very different from what we have hitherto used towards them, I shall leave it to your Lords.h.i.+ps' judgment whether you will suffer such fair monuments of wisdom and benevolence to be defaced by the rapacity of your governors. I hope I have not gone out of my way to bring before you any circ.u.mstance relative to the Gentoo religion and manners, further than as they relate to the spirit of our government over them; for though there never was such food for the curiosity of the human mind as is found in the manners of this people, I pa.s.s it totally over.
I wish to divide this preliminary view into six periods; and your Lords.h.i.+ps will consider that of the Hindoos, which I have now mentioned, as the first era.
The second era is an era of great misfortune to that country, and to the world in general: I mean, the time of the prophet Mahomed. The enthusiasm which animated his first followers, the despotic power which religion obtained through that enthusiasm, and the advantages derived from both over the enervated great empires, and broken, disunited, lesser governments of the world, extended the influence of that proud and domineering sect from the banks of the Ganges to the banks of the Loire.
This second period is the era of the Arabs. These people made a great and lasting impression on India. They established, very early, Mahomedan sovereigns in all parts of it, particularly in the kingdom of Bengal, which is the princ.i.p.al object of our present inquiry. They held that kingdom for a long series of years, under a dynasty of thirty-three kings,--having begun their conquest and founded their dominion in Bengal not very long after the time of their prophet.
These people, when they first settled in India, attempted, with the ferocious arm of their prophetic sword, to change the religion and manners of that country; but at length perceiving that their cruelty wearied out itself, and never could touch the constancy of the sufferers, they permitted the native people of the country to remain in quiet, and left the Mahomedan religion to operate upon them as it could, by appealing to the ambition or avarice of the great, or by taking the lower people, who had lost their castes, into this new sect, and thus, from the refuse of the Gentoo, increasing the bounds of the Mahomedan religion. They left many of the ancient rajahs of the country possessed of an inferior sovereignty; and where the strength of the country, or other circ.u.mstances, would not permit this subordination, they suffered them to continue in a separate state, approaching to independence, if not wholly independent.
The Mahomedans, during the period of the Arabs, never expelled or destroyed the native Gentoo n.o.bility, zemindars, or landholders of the country. They all, or almost all, remained fixed in their places, properties, and dignities; and the shadows of several of them remain under our jurisdiction.
The next, which is the third era, is an era the more necessary to observe upon, because Mr. Hastings has made many applications to it in his defence before the Commons: namely, the invasion of the Tartars, or the era of Tamerlane. These Tartars did not establish themselves on the ruins of the Hindoos. Their conquests were over the other Mahomedans: for Tamerlane invaded Hindostan, as he invaded other countries, in the character of the great reformer of the Mahomedan religion. He came as a sort of successor to the rights of the Prophet, upon a divine t.i.tle. He struck at all the Mahomedan princes who reigned at that time. He considered them as apostates, or at least as degenerated from the faith, and as tyrants abusing their power. To facilitate his conquests over these, he was often obliged to come to a sort of a composition with the people of the country he invaded. Tamerlane had neither time nor means nor inclination to dispossess the ancient rajahs of the country.
Your Lords.h.i.+ps will observe that I propose nothing more than to give you an idea of the principles of policy which prevailed in these several revolutions, and not an history of the furious military achievements of a barbarous invader. Historians, indeed, are generally very liberal of their information concerning everything but what we ought to be very anxious to know. They tell us that India was conquered by Tamerlane, and conquered in such a year. The year will be found to coincide somewhere, I believe, with the end of the fourteenth century. Thinking the mere fact as of little moment, and its chronology as nothing, but thinking the policy very material, which, indeed, is to be collected only here and there, in various books written with various views, I shall beg leave to lay before you a very remarkable circ.u.mstance relative to that policy, and taken from the same book to which I formerly referred, Mr.
Holwell's.
”When the Hindoo rajahs, or princes of Hindostan, submitted to Tamerlane, it was on these capital stipulations: that the emperor should marry a daughter of Rajah Cheyt Sing's house; that the head of this house should be in perpetuity governors of the citadel of Agra, and anoint the king at his coronation; and that the emperors should never impose the _jessera_ (or poll-tax) upon the Hindoos.”
Here was a conqueror, as he is called, coming in upon terms; mixing his blood with that of the native n.o.bility of the country he conquered, and, in consequence of this mixture, placing them in succession upon the throne of the country he subdued; making one of them even hereditary constable of the capital of his kingdom, and thereby putting his posterity as a pledge into their hands. What is full as remarkable, he freed the Hindoos forever from that tax which the Mahomedans have laid upon every country over which the sword of Mahomet prevailed,--namely, a capitation tax upon all who do not profess the religion of the Mahomedans. But the Hindoos, by express charter, were exempted from that mark of servitude, and thereby declared not to be a conquered people.
The native princes, in all their transactions with the Mogul government, carried the evident marks of this free condition in a n.o.ble independency of spirit. Within their own districts the authority of many of them seemed entire. We are often led into mistakes concerning the government of Hindostan, by comparing it with those governments where the prince is armed with a full, speculative, entire authority, and where the great people have, with great t.i.tles, no privileges at all, or, having privileges, have those privileges only as subjects. But in Hindostan the modes, the degrees, the circ.u.mstances of subjection varied infinitely.
In some places hardly a trace at all of subjection was to be discerned; in some the rajahs were almost a.s.sessors of the throne, as in this case of the Rajah Cheyt Sing. These circ.u.mstances mark, that Tamerlane, however he may be indicated by the odious names of Tartar and Conqueror, was no barbarian; that the people who submitted to him did not submit with the abject submission of slaves to the sword of a conqueror, but admitted a great supreme emperor, who was just, prudent, and politic, instead of the ferocious, oppressive, lesser Mahomedan sovereigns, who had before forced their way by the sword into the country.
That country resembled more a republic of princes with a great chief at their head than a territory in absolute, uniform, systematic subjection from one end to the other,--in which light Mr. Hastings and others of late have thought proper to consider it. According to them, if a subordinate prince, like Cheyt Sing, was not ready to pay any exorbitant sum on instant demand, or submit to any extent of fine which should be inflicted upon him by the mere will of the person who called _robbery_ a _fine_, and who took the measure of that fine without either considering the means of paying or the degree of delinquency that justified it, their properties, liberties, and lives were instantly forfeited. The rajahs of that country were armed; they had fortresses for their security; they had troops. In the receipt of both their own and the imperial revenue, their securities for justice were in their own hands: but the policy of the Mogul princes very rarely led them to push that people to such extremity as it is supposed that on every slight occasion we have a right to push those who are the subjects of our pretended conquest.
Mr. Holwell throws much light on this policy, which became the standing law of the empire.
In the unfortunate wars which followed the death of Mauz-o-Din, ”Sevajee Cheyt Sing,” (the great rajah we have just mentioned,) ”with a select body of Rajpoots, by a well-conducted retreat recovered Agra, and was soon after reconciled to the king [the Mogul] and admitted to his favor,--conformable to the steady policy of this government, in keeping a good understanding with the princ.i.p.al rajahs, and more especially with the head of this house, who is ever capable of raising and fomenting a very formidable party upon any intended revolution in this despotic and precarious monarchy.”
You see that it was the monarchy that was precarious, not the rights of the subordinate chiefs. Your Lords.h.i.+ps see, that, notwithstanding our ideas of Oriental despotism, under the successors of Tamerlane, these princ.i.p.al rajahs, instead of being called wretches, and treated as such, as Mr. Hastings has thought it becoming to call and treat them, when they were in arms against their sovereign, were regarded with respect, and were admitted to easy reconciliations; because, in reality, in their occasional hostilities, they were not properly rebellious subjects, but princes often a.s.serting their natural rights and the just const.i.tution of the country.