Part 3 (2/2)

The rest was desolated by the Marathas, the Nizam, Tipoo, and other Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta and right up to Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue, leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of Turkish pashas under the t.i.tular superiority of the effete Emperor of Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of 1769-70, which the Company's officials, who were powerless where they did not intensify it by interference with trade, confessed to have cut off from ten to twelve millions of human beings. Over three-fifths of the area the soil was left without a cultivator. The whole young of that generation perished, so that, even twenty years after, Lord Cornwallis officially described one-third of Bengal as a jungle inhabited only by wild beasts. A quarter of a century after Carey's language was, as we have seen, ”three-fifths of it are an uncultivated jungle abandoned to wild beasts and serpents.”

But the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops to work their natural result on the population. The local experience of Sh.o.r.e, who had witnessed the horrors he could do so little to relieve, had united with the statesmans.h.i.+p of Cornwallis to initiate a series of administrative reforms that worked some evil, but more good, all through Carey's time. First of all, as affecting the very existence and the social development of the people, or their capacity for being educated, Christianised, civilised in the highest sense, there was the relation of the Government to the ryots (”protected ones”) and the zameendars (”landholders”). In India, as nearly all over the world except in feudalised Britain, the state is the common landlord in the interests of all cla.s.ses who hold the soil subject to the payment of customary rents, directly or through middlemen, to the Government. For thirty years after Pla.s.sey the Government of India had been learning its business, and in the process had injured both itself and the landed cla.s.ses, as much as has been done in Ireland. From a mere trader it had been, more or less consciously, becoming a ruler. In 1786 the Court of Directors, in a famous letter, tried to arrest the ruin which the famine had only hastened by ordering that a settlement of the land-tax or revenue or rent be made, not with mere farmers like the pashas of Turkey, but with the old zameendars, and that the rate be fixed for ten years. Cornwallis and Sh.o.r.e took three years to make the detailed investigations, and in 1789 the state rent-roll of Bengal proper was fixed at 2,858,772 a year. The English peer, who was Governor-General, at once jumped to the conclusion that this rate should be fixed not only for ten years, but for ever. The experienced Bengal civilian protested that to do that would be madness when a third of the rich province was out of cultivation, and as to the rest its value was but little known, and its estates were without reliable survey or boundaries.

We can now see that, as usual, both were right in what they a.s.serted and wrong in what they denied. The principle of fixity of tenure and tax cannot be over-estimated in its economic, social, and political value, but it should have been applied to the village communities and cultivating peasants without the intervention of middlemen other than the large ancestral landholders with hereditary rights, and that on the standard of corn rents. Cornwallis had it in his power thus to do what some years afterwards Stein did in Prussia, with the result seen in the present German people and empire. The dispute as to a permanent or a decennial settlement was referred home, and Pitt, aided by Dundas and Charles Grant, took a week to consider it. His verdict was given in favour of feudalism. Eight months before Carey landed at Calcutta the settlement had been declared perpetual; in 1795 it was extended to Benares also.

During the next twenty years mismanagement and debt revolutionised the landed interest, as in France at the same time, but in a very different direction. The customary rights of the peasant proprietors had been legislatively secured by reserving to the Governor-General the power ”to enact such regulations as he may think necessary for the protection and welfare of the dependent talookdars, ryots, and other cultivators of the soil.” The peasants continued long to be so few that there was compet.i.tion for them; the process of extortion with the aid of the courts had hardly begun when they were many, and the zameendars were burdened with charges for the police. But in 1799 and again in 1812 the state, trembling for its rent, gave the zameendars further authority. The principle of permanence of a.s.sessment so far co-operated with the splendid fertility of the Ganges valley and the peaceful multiplication of the people and spread of cultivation, that all through the wars and annexations, up to the close of the Mutiny, it was Bengal which enabled England to extend the empire up to its natural limits from the two seas to the Himalaya. But in 1859 the first attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting power of the zameendars. And now, more than a century since the first step was taken to arrest the ruin of the peasantry, the legislature of India has again tried to solve for the whole country these four difficulties which all past landed regulations have intensified--to give the state tenants a guarantee against uncertain enhancements of rent, and against taxation of improvements; to minimise the evil of taking rent in cash instead of in kind by arranging the dates on which rent is paid; and to mitigate if not prevent famine by allowing relief for failure of crops.

As pioneering, the work of Carey and his colleagues all through was distinctly hindered by the treatment of the land question, which at once ground down the ma.s.s of the people and created a cla.s.s of oppressive landlords dest.i.tute for the most part of public spirit and the higher culture. Both were disinclined by their circ.u.mstances to lend an ear to the Gospel, but these circ.u.mstances made it the more imperative on the missionaries to tell them, to teach their children, to print for all the glad tidings. Carey, himself of peasant extraction, cared for the millions of the people above all; but his work in the cla.s.sical as well as the vernacular languages was equally addressed to their twenty thousand landlords. The time of his work--before Bentinck; and the centre of it--outside the metropolis, left the use of the English weapon against Brahmanism largely for Duff.

When Cornwallis, following Warren Hastings, completed the subst.i.tution of the British for the Mohammedan civil administration by a system of courts and police and a code of regulations, he was guilty of one omission and one mistake that it took years of discussion and action to rectify. He did not abolish from the courts the use of Persian, the language of the old Mussulman invaders, now foreign to all parties; and he excluded from all offices above 30 a year the natives of the country, contrary to their fair and politic practice. Bengal and its millions, in truth, were nominally governed in detail by three hundred white and upright civilians, with the inevitable result in abuses which they could not prevent, and oppression of native by native which they would not check, and the delay or development of reforms which the few missionaries long called for in vain. In a word, after making the most generous allowance for the good intentions of Cornwallis, and conscientiousness of Sh.o.r.e, his successor, we must admit that Carey was called to become the reformer of a state of society which the worst evils of Asiatic and English rule combined to prevent him and other self-sacrificing or disinterested philanthropists from purifying. The East India Company, at home and in India, had reached that depth of opposition to light and freedom in any form which justifies Burke's extremest pa.s.sages--the period between its triumph on the exclusion of ”the pious clauses” from the Charter of 1793 and its defeat in the Charter of 1813. We shall reproduce some outlines of the picture which Ward drew:--[7]

”On landing in Bengal, in the year 1793, our brethren found themselves surrounded with a population of heathens (not including the Mahometans) amounting to at least one hundred millions of souls.

”On the subject of the divine nature, with the verbal admission of the doctrine of the divine unity, they heard these idolaters speak of 330,000,000 of G.o.ds. Amidst innumerable idol temples they found none erected for the wors.h.i.+p of the one living and true G.o.d. Services without end they saw performed in honour of the elements and deified heroes, but heard not one voice tuned to the praise or employed in the service of the one G.o.d. Unacquainted with the moral perfections of Jehovah, they saw this immense population prostrate before dead matter, before the monkey, the serpent, before idols the very personifications of sin; and they found this animal, this reptile, and the lecher Krishnu {u-caron} and his concubine Radha, among the favourite deities of the Hindoos...

”Respecting the real nature of the present state, the missionaries perceived that the Hindoos laboured under the most fatal misapprehensions; that they believed the good or evil actions of this birth were not produced as the volitions of their own wills, but arose from, and were the unavoidable results of, the actions of the past birth; that their present actions would inevitably give rise to the whole complexion of their characters and conduct in the following birth; and that thus they were doomed to interminable transmigrations, to float as some light substance upon the bosom of an irresistible torrent...

”Amongst these idolaters no Bibles were found; no sabbaths; no congregating for religious instruction in any form; no house for G.o.d; no G.o.d but a log of wood, or a monkey; no Saviour but the Ganges; no wors.h.i.+p but that paid to abominable idols, and that connected with dances, songs, and unutterable impurities; so that what should have been divine wors.h.i.+p, purifying, elevating, and carrying the heart to heaven, was a corrupt but rapid torrent, poisoning the soul and carrying it down to perdition; no morality, for how should a people be moral whose G.o.ds are monsters of vice; whose priests are their ringleaders in crime; whose scriptures encourage pride, impurity, falsehood, revenge, and murder; whose wors.h.i.+p is connected with indescribable abominations, and whose heaven is a brothel? As might be expected, they found that men died here without indulging the smallest vestige of hope, except what can arise from transmigration, the hope, instead of plunging into some place of misery, of pa.s.sing into the body of some reptile. To carry to such a people the divine word, to call them together for sacred instruction, to introduce amongst them a pure and heavenly wors.h.i.+p, and to lead them to the observance of a Sabbath on earth, as the preparative and prelude to a state of endless perfection, was surely a work worthy for a Saviour to command, and becoming a christian people to attempt.”

The condition of women, who were then estimated at ”seventy-five millions of minds,” and whom the census shows to be now above 144,000,000, is thus described after an account of female infanticide:--

”To the Hindoo female all education is denied by the positive injunction of the shastru {u-caron}, and by the general voice of the population. Not a single school for girls, therefore, all over the country! With knitting, sewing, embroidery, painting, music, and drawing, they have no more to do than with letters; the was.h.i.+ng is done by men of a particular tribe. The Hindoo girl, therefore, spends the ten first years of her life in sheer idleness, immured in the house of her father.

”Before she has attained to this age, however, she is sought after by the ghutuks, men employed by parents to seek wives for their sons. She is betrothed without her consent; a legal agreement, which binds her for life, being made by the parents on both sides while she is yet a child. At a time most convenient to the parents, this boy and girl are brought together for the first time, and the marriage ceremony is performed; after which she returns to the house of her father.

”Before the marriage is consummated, in many instances, the boy dies, and this girl becomes a widow; and as the law prohibits the marriage of widows, she is doomed to remain in this state as long as she lives.

The greater number of these unfortunate beings become a prey to the seducer, and a disgrace to their families. Not long since a bride, on the day the marriage ceremony was to have been performed, was burnt on the funeral pile with the dead body of the bridegroom, at Chandernagore, a few miles north of Calcutta. Concubinage, to a most awful extent, is the fruit of these marriages without choice. What a sum of misery is attached to the lot of woman in India before she has attained even her fifteenth year!

”In some cases as many as fifty females, the daughters of so many Hindoos, are given in marriage to one bramhun {u-caron}, in order to make these families something more respectable, and that the parents may be able to say, we are allied by marriage to the kooleens...

”But the awful state of female society in this miserable country appears in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be burnt alive with the putrid carcase of her husband. The Hindoo legislators have sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied determination to insult and degrade woman. She is, therefore, in the first instance, deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns {u-caron}; in which also she is promised, that if she will offer herself, for the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile, she shall, by the extraordinary merit of this action, rescue her husband from misery, and take him and fourteen generations of his and her family with her to heaven, where she shall enjoy with them celestial happiness until fourteen kings of the G.o.ds shall have succeeded to the throne of heaven (that is, millions of years!) Thus ensnared, she embraces this dreadful death. I have seen three widows, at different times, burnt alive; and had repeated opportunities of being present at similar immolations, but my courage failed me...

”The burying alive of widows manifests, if that were possible, a still more abominable state of feeling towards women than the burning them alive. The weavers bury their dead. When, therefore, a widow of this tribe is deluded into the determination not to survive her husband, she is buried alive with the dead body. In this kind of immolation the children and relations dig the grave. After certain ceremonies have been attended to, the poor widow arrives, and is let down into the pit.

She sits in the centre, taking the dead body on her lap and encircling it with her arms. These relations now begin to throw in the soil; and after a short s.p.a.ce, two of them descend into the grave, and tread the earth firmly round the body of the widow. She sits a calm and unremonstrating spectator of the horrid process. She sees the earth rising higher and higher around her, without upbraiding her murderers, or making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the earth reaches her lips--covers her head. The rest of the earth is then hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave, and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow--the mother!”

Before Carey, what had been done to turn the millions of North India from such darkness as that? Nothing, beyond the brief and impulsive efforts of Thomas. There does not seem to have been there one genuine convert from any of the Asiatic faiths; there had never been even the nucleus of a native church.

In South India, for the greater part of the century, the Coast Mission, as it was called, had been carried on from Tranquebar as a centre by the Lutherans whom, from Ziegenbalg to Schwartz, Francke had trained at Halle and Friedrich IV. of Denmark had sent forth to its East India Company's settlement. From the baptism of the first convert in 1707 and translation of the New Testament into Tamil, to the death in 1798 of Schwartz, with whom Carey sought to begin a correspondence then taken up by Guericke, the foundations were laid around Madras, in Tanjore, and in Tinnevelli of a native church which now includes nearly a million. But, when Carey landed, rationalism in Germany and Denmark, and the Carnatic wars between the English and French, had reduced the Coast Mission to a state of inanition. Nor was Southern India the true or ultimate battlefield against Brahmanism; the triumphs of Christianity there were rather among the demon-wors.h.i.+pping tribes of Dravidian origin than among the Aryan races till Dr. W. Miller developed the Christian College. But the way for the harvest now being reaped by the Evangelicals and Anglicans of the Church of England, by the Independents of the London Missionary Society, the Wesleyans, and the Presbyterians of Scotland and America, was prepared by the German Ziegenbalg and Schwartz under Danish protection. The English Propagation and Christian Knowledge Societies sent them occasional aid, the first two Georges under the influence of their German chaplains wrote to them encouraging letters, and the East India Company even gave them a free pa.s.sage in its s.h.i.+ps, and employed the sculptor Bacon to prepare the n.o.ble group of marble which, in St. Mary's Church, Madras, expresses its grat.i.tude to Schwartz for his political services.

It was Clive himself who brought to Calcutta the first missionary, Kiernander the Swede, but he was rather a chaplain, or a missionary to the Portuguese, who were nominal Christians of the lowest Romanist type. The French had closed the Danish mission at Cuddalore, and in 1758 Calcutta was without a Protestant clergyman to bury the dead or baptise or marry the living. Two years before one of the two chaplains had perished in the tragedy of the Black Hole, where he was found lying hand in hand with his son, a young lieutenant. The other had escaped down the river only to die of fever along with many more. The victory of Pla.s.sey and the large compensation paid for the destruction of Old Calcutta and its church induced thousands of natives to flock to the new capital, while the number of the European troops and officials was about 2000. When chaplains were sent out, the Governor-General officially wrote of them to the Court of Directors so late as 1795:--”Our clergy in Bengal, with some exceptions, are not respectable characters.” From the general relaxation of morals, he added, ”a black coat is no security.” They were so badly paid--from 50 to 230 a year, increased by 120 to meet the cost of living in Calcutta after 1764--that they traded. Preaching was the least of the chaplains'

duties; burying was the most onerous. Anglo-Indian society, cut off from London, itself not much better, by a six months' voyage, was corrupt. Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, his hostile colleague in Council, lived in open adultery. The majority of the officials had native women, and the increase of their children, who lived in a state worse than that of the heathen, became so alarming that the compensation paid by the Mohammedan Government of Moorshedabad for the destruction of the church was applied to the foundation of the useful charity still known as the Free School. The fathers not infrequently adopted the Hindoo pantheon along with the zanana. The pollution, springing from England originally, was rolled back into it in an increasing volume, when the survivors retired as nabobs with fortunes, to corrupt social and political life, till Pitt cried out; and it became possible for Burke almost to succeed in his eighteen years'

impeachment of Hastings. The literature of the close of the eighteenth century is full of alarm lest the English character should be corrupted, and lest the balance of the const.i.tution should be upset.

Kiernander is said to have been the means of converting 209 heathens and 380 Romanists, of whom three were priests, during the twenty-eight years of his Calcutta career. Claudius Buchanan declares that Christian tracts had been translated into Bengali--one written by the Bishop of Sodor and Man--and that in the time of Warren Hastings Hindoo Christians had preached to their countrymen in the city. The ”heathen”

were probably Portuguese descendants, in whose language Kiernander preached as the lingua franca of the time. He could not even converse in Bengali or Hindostani, and when Charles Grant went to him for information as to the way of a sinner's salvation this happened--”My anxious inquiries as to what I should do to be saved appeared to embarra.s.s and confuse him exceedingly. He could not answer my questions, but he gave me some good instructive books.” On Kiernander's bankruptcy, caused by his son when the father was blind, the ”Mission Church” was bought by Grant, who wrote that its labours ”have been confined to the descendants of Europeans, and have hardly ever embraced a single heathen, so that a mission to the Hindoos and Mohammedans would be a new thing.” The Rev. David Brown, who had been sent out the year after as master and chaplain of the Military Orphan Society, for the education of the children of officers and soldiers, and was to become one of the Serampore circle of friends, preached to Europeans only in the Mission Church. Carey could find no trace of Kiernander's work among the natives six years after his death.[8] The only converted Hindoo known of in Northern India up to that time was Guneshan Da.s.s, of Delhi, who when a boy joined Clive's army, who was the first man of caste to visit England, and who, on his return with the Calcutta Supreme Court Judges in 1774 as Persian interpreter and translator, was baptised by Kiernander, Mr. justice Chambers being sponsor.

William Carey had no predecessor in India as the first ordained Englishman who was sent to it as a missionary; he had no predecessor in Bengal and Hindostan proper as the first missionary from any land to the people. Even the Moravians, who in 1777 had sent two brethren to Serampore, Calcutta, and Patna, had soon withdrawn them, and one of them became the Company's botanist in Madras--Dr. Heyne. Carey practically stood alone at the first, while he unconsciously set in motion the double revolution, which was to convert the Anglo-Indian influence on England from corrupting heathenism to aggressive missionary zeal, and to change the Bengal of Cornwallis into the India of Bentinck, with all the possibilities that have made it grow, thus far, into the India of the Lawrences.

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