Part 14 (1/2)
WITH THE ARCHDEACON
In this article Ali Baba has pourtrayed with infinite skill and geniality the many-sided character of the late Joseph Baly, M.A., who was Archdeacon of Calcutta from 1872 until he retired from India in 1883. Appointed to the Bengal Ecclesiastical establishment in 1861, Mr. Baly served as Chaplain at Sealkote, Simla, and Allahabad until 1870, when, while on furlough in England, he acted as Rector of Falmouth until 1872. In 1885 he was appointed chaplain at the church in Windsor Park, built by Queen Victoria, in which appointment he died in 1909, aged eighty-five.
From the commencement of his Indian career the Reverend gentleman interested himself in that burning question of the employment of the Anglo-Indian and Eurasian community of India; a large indigenous and permanent element in the population, the disposal of which is still a question of very great public importance, and its practical solution a pressing necessity. The Archdeacon had this question, paraphrased by Ali Baba as that of the ”Mean Whites,” greatly at heart, and the conclusions he arrived at and suggestions made by him from time to time, ably and vigorously summarized in a paper he read before the Bengal Social Science a.s.sociation on May 1st, 1879, in Calcutta, were productive of considerable good.
Archdeacon Baly's predecessor was the Venerable John Henry Pratt, an attached friend of Aberigh-Mackay's father, to whom his book, _From London to Lucknow_, published in 1860, was ”affectionately inscribed.”
Certain traits in the character of this Archdeacon known to Ali Baba by tradition are pourtrayed in the concluding portion of the paper.
No. 5
WITH THE SECRETARY TO GOVERNMENT
This article is of a composite nature. At the time it was published in 1879, the foreign policy of Lord Lawrence was a burning question, and in connection with the Afghan War then running its course, renewed attention was directed to the two essays, ”Masterly Inactivity” and ”Mischievous Activity,” first published in _The Fortnightly Review_ in December 1869, and March 1870, respectively, by a comparatively young Bengal Civilian, the late J.W.S. Wyllie, C.S.I. (1835-1870). Beyond the fact that these essays and certain other papers by the same brilliant author on the subject of the policy of the Indian Government with independent princ.i.p.alities and powers beyond the bounds of India were probably in Ali Baba's mind, the character of the supercilious Secretary was very remote from that of Mr. Wyllie.
The typical person held up to derision by Ali Baba has been oft times decried as one very detrimental to good government in India, where a personal and absolute rule must needs obtain for some time to come. By none more pointedly than by the present Secretary of State for India when addressing his const.i.tuents at Arbroath on October 21, 1907, when he informed them that ”India is perhaps the one country--bad manners, overbearing manners are very disagreeable in all countries--India is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political crime.” Or, as a prominent Mohammedan in India very well said, ”When the English govern from the heart they do it admirably; when they try to be clever, they make a mess of it.”
In the restored pa.s.sage on p. 35 there is delineated a Secretary in striking contrast to the other. The Secretary in the Foreign Department referred to was the late Mr. le Poer Wynne, under whom Aberigh-Mackay had worked at Simla in 1870.
No. 6
H.E. THE BENGALI BABOO
Ali Baba avowedly treats the Bengali Baboo merely as a being ”full of inappropriate words and phrases ... and the loose shadows of English thought.” Such being the case, it must never be forgotten that he is the product, in every sense of the word, of British modes of purely secular education. Modes which, eminently at the present time, are being gravely called in question.
All of which has been more lately elaborated by ”F. Anstey,” _i.e._ Mr. Thomas Anstey Guthrie, in the persons of ”Baboo Jabberjee, B.A.”
and ”A Bayard from Bengal.”
The broad results of purely secular and mainly literary education might in fact be quite fairly summed up in the reproachful words of Caliban--
”You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse.”
Aberigh-Mackay devoted his life in India to counteract the effects of purely literary instruction, which he persistently deprecated; and the last thirty years have undoubtedly witnessed many advances in the same direction, tending to the material progress of India.
Ali Baba trembled for the future of Baboodom, that its tendencies as he depicted them might infect others who might pa.s.s, through various stages, into ”trampling, hope-bestirred crowds, and so on, out of the province of Ali Baba and into the columns of serious reflection.”
No. 7
WITH THE RAJA
In this article we have a vivid picture--mainly--of a type of Indian n.o.ble it was Aberigh-Mackay's aim and life's work in India to avoid creating. That too from the beginning of his career, but more especially in the training, and that not merely in book-learning, he initiated and earned on up to the last days of his life within and without the Residency College at Indore. To paraphrase the language of the then recently appointed Agent to the Governor-General for Central India--Sir Lepel Griffin--in his first Administrative Report, that for 1880-1881, the happy effects of the training some of the leading Chiefs of Malwa received under Aberigh-Mackay were visible in the improved administration of their States. The most notable instance, the Governor-General's Agent points out, being observable in Rutlam.
His Highness the ”Rajah Saheb having conducted the Government with such ability and success as would do credit to the ablest administrators.”