Part 34 (1/2)
From the census it appears that there are, in the Northwest Provinces, no less than twenty-two newspapers under government inspection, of which five are published at Agra. The circulation of these papers is extremely small, and as the government itself takes 3500 of the 12,000 copies which they issue, its hold over them, without exertion of force, is great. Of the other 8500, 8000 go to native and 500 to European subscribers. All the native papers are skillful at catering for their double public, but those which are printed half in a native tongue and half in English stand in the first rank for unscrupulousness. One of these papers gave, while I was in India, some French speech in abuse of the English. This was headed on the English side, ”_Interesting_ Account of the English,” but on the native side, ”_Excellent_ Account of the English.” The ”English correspondence” and English news of these native papers are so absurdly concocted by the editors out of their own brains that it is a question whether it would not be advisable to send them weekly a column of European news, and even to withhold government patronage from them unless they gave it room, leaving them to qualify and explain the facts as best they could. Their favorite statements are that Russia is going to invade India forthwith, that the Queen has become a Catholic or a Mohammedan, and that the whole population of India is to be converted to Christianity by force. The external appearance of the native papers is sometimes as comical as their matter.
The _Umritsur Commercial Advertiser_, of which nothing is English but the t.i.tle, gives, for instance, the time-tables of the Punjaub Railway on its back sheet. The page, which is a mere maze of dots and crooked lines, has at the top a cut of a railway train, in which guards apparently c.o.c.ked-hatted, but probably meant to be wearing pith helmets, are represented sitting on the top of each carriage, with their legs dangling down in front of the windows.
Neither Christianity nor native reformed religions make much show in the Northwestern census. The Christians are strongest in the South of India, the Hindoo reformers in the Punjaub. The Sikhs themselves, and the Kookhas, Nirunkarees, Goolab Da.s.seas, Naukeeka-punth, and many other Punjaubee sects, all show more or less hostility to caste; but in the Northwest Provinces caste distinctions flourish, although in reality they have no doubt lost strength. The high-caste men are beginning to find their caste a drawback to their success in life, and are given to concealing it. Just as with ourselves kings go _incognito_ when they travel for pleasure, so the Bengal sepoy hides his Brahminical string under his cloth, in order that he may be sent on foreign service without its being known that by crossing the seas he will lose caste.
Judging by the unanimous opinion of the native press on the doings of the Maharajahs of Bombay, and on the licentiousness of the Koolin Brahmins, many of our civilians have come to think that Hindooism in its present shape has lost the support of a large number of the more intelligent Hindoos; but there is little reason to believe that this is the case. In Calcutta, the Church of Hindoo Deists is gaining ground, and one of their leaders is said to have met with some successes during a recent expedition to the Northwest, but of this there is no proof. The little regard that many high-caste natives show for caste except as a matter of talk merely means that caste is less an affair of religion than of custom, but that it is a matter of custom does not show that its force is slight: on the contrary, custom is the lord of India.
The success of Mohammedanism in India should show that caste has never been strong except so far as caste is custom. It is true that the peasants in Orissa starved by the side of the sacred cows, but this was custom too: any one man killing the cow would have been at once killed by his also starving neighbors for breaking custom; but once change the custom by force, and there is no tendency to return to the former state of things. The Portuguese and the Mohammedans alike made converts by compulsion, yet when the pressure was removed there was no return to the earlier faith. Of the nature of caste we had an excellent example in the behavior of the troopers of a Bengal cavalry regiment three weeks before the outbreak of the mutiny of 1857, when they said that for their part they knew that their cartridges were not greased with the fat of cows, but that, as they looked as though they were, it came to the same thing, for they should lose caste if their friends saw them touch the cartridges in question.
It was the cry of infringement of custom that was raised against us by the mutineers: ”They aim at subverting our inst.i.tutions; they have put down the suttee of the Brahmins, the infanticide of the Marattas, caste and adoption are despised; they aim at destroying all our religious customs,” was the most powerful cry that could be raised. It is one against which we shall never be wholly safe; but it is the custom and not the religion which is the people's especial care.
There is one point in which caste forms a singular difficulty in our way, which has not yet been brought sufficiently home to us. The comparatively fair treatment which is now extended to the low-caste and no-caste men is itself an insult to the high-caste n.o.bility; and while the no-caste men care little how we treat them, provided we pay them well, and the bunnya, or shop-keeping cla.s.s, encouraged by the improvement, cry out loudly that the government wrongs them in not treating them as Europeans, the high-caste men are equally disgusted with our good treatment both of middle-cla.s.s and inferior Hindoos. These things are stumbling-blocks in our way, chiefly because no amount of acquaintance with the various phases of caste feeling is sufficient to bring home its importance to Englishmen. The Indian is essentially the caste man, the Saxon as characteristically the no-caste man, and it is difficult to produce a mutual understanding. Just as in England the people are too democratic for the government, in India the government is too democratic for the people.
Although caste has. .h.i.therto been but little shaken, there are forces at work which must in time produce the most grave results. The return to their homes of natives who have emigrated and worked at sugar-planting in Mauritius and coffee-growing in Ceylon, mixing with negroes and with Europeans, will gradually aid in the subversion of caste distinctions, and the Pa.r.s.ees will give their help toward the creation of a healthier feeling. The young men of the merchant-cla.s.s--who are all pure deists--set an example of doing away with caste distinctions which will gradually affect the whole population of the towns; railways will act upon the laborers and agriculturists; a closer intercourse with Europe will possibly go hand in hand with universal instruction in the English tongue, and the indirect results of Christian teaching will continue to be, as they have been, great.
The positive results of missionary work in India have hitherto been small. Taking the census as a guide, in the district of Mooradabad we find but 107 Christians in 1,100,000 people; in Budaon, 64 ”Christians, Europeans, and Eurasians” (half-castes) out of 900,000 people; in Bareilly, 137 native Christians in a million and a half of people; in Shajehanpoor, 98 in a million people; in Turrai, none in a million people; in Etah, no native Christians, and only twenty Europeans to 614,000 people; in the Banda district, thirteen native Christians out of three-quarters of a million of people; in Goruckpoor, 100 native Christians out of three and a half millions of people. Not to multiply instances, this proportion is preserved throughout the whole of the districts, and the native Christians in the Northwest are proved to form but an insignificant fraction of the population.
The number of native Christians in India is extremely small.
Twenty-three societies, having three hundred Protestant missionary stations, more than three hundred native missionary churches, and five hundred European preachers, costing with their a.s.sistants two hundred thousand pounds a year, profess to show only a hundred and fifty thousand converts, of whom one-seventh are communicants. The majority of the converts who are not communicants are converts only upon paper, and it may be said that of real native non-Catholic Christians there are not in India more than 40,000, of whom half are to be found among the devil-wors.h.i.+pers of Madras. The so-called ”aboriginal” hill-tribes, having no elaborate religious system of their own, are not tied down to the creed of their birth in the same way as are Mohammedans and Hindoos, among whom our missionaries make no way whatever. The native Protestant's position is a fearful one, except in such a city as Madras, for he wholly loses caste, and becomes an outlaw from his people. The native Catholic continues to be a caste man, and sometimes an idol-wors.h.i.+per, and the priests have made a million converts in Southern India.
Besides revealing the fewness of the native Christians, the Northwestern census has shown us plainly the weakness of the Europeans. In the district of Mooradabad, 1,100,000 people are ruled by thirty-eight Europeans. In many places, two Europeans watch over 200,000 people. The Eurasians are about as numerous as the Europeans, to which cla.s.s they may for some purposes be regarded as belonging, for the natives reject their society, and refuse them a place in every caste. The Eurasians are a much-despised race, the b.u.t.t of every Indian story, but as a community they are not to be ranked high. That they should be ill educated, vain, and cringing, is perhaps only what we might expect of persons placed in their difficult position; nevertheless, that they are so tends to lessen, in spite of our better feelings, the pity that we should otherwise extend toward them.
The census had not only its revelations, but its results. One effect of the census-taking is to check the practice of infanticide, by pointing out to the notice of our officers the castes and the districts in which it exists. The deaths of three or four hundred children are credited to the wolves in the Umritsur district of the Punjaub alone, but it is remarked that the ”wolves” pick out the female infants. The great disproportion of the s.e.xes is itself partly to be explained as the result of infanticide.
One weighty drawback to our influence upon Hindoo morals, is that in the case of many abuses we legislate without effect, our laws being evaded where they are outwardly obeyed. The practice of infanticide exists in all parts of India, but especially in Rajpootana, and the girls are killed chiefly in order to save the cost of marrying them--or, rather, of buying husbands for them. Now we have ”suppressed” infanticide--which means that children are smothered or starved, instead of being exposed.
It is no easy task to bring about reforms in the customs of the people of India.
The many improvements in the moral condition of the people which the census chronicles are steps in a great march. Those who have known India long are aware that a remarkable change has come over the country in the last few years. Small as have been the positive visible results of Christian teaching, the indirect effects have been enormous. Among the Sikhs and Marattas, a spirit of reflection, of earnest thought, unusual in natives, has been aroused; in Bengal it has taken the form of pure deism, but then Bengal is not India. The spirit rather than the doctrinal teaching of Christianity has been imbibed: a love of truth appeals more to the feelings of the upright natives than do the whole of the nine-and-thirty Articles. Here, as elsewhere, the natives look to deeds, not words; the example of a Frere is worth the teaching of a hundred missionaries, painstaking and earnest though they be.
CHAPTER VI.
MOHAMMEDAN CITIES.
Through Mirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtehpore, I pa.s.sed on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at Allahabad; for though the city is strategically important, there is in it but little to be seen. Like all spots of the confluence of rivers, Allahabad is sacred with the Hindoos, for it stands, they say, at the meeting-point of no less than three great streams--the Ganges, the Jumna, and a river of the spirit-land. To us poor pagans the third stream is invisible; not so to the faithful.
Catching a glimpse of Marochetti's statue at the Cawnpore well, as I hurried through that city, I diverged from the East Indian Railway, and took dawk-carriage to Lucknow.
As compared with other Indian cities, the capital of Oude is a town to be seen in driving rather than in walking; the general effects are superior in charm and beauty to the details, and the vast size of the city makes mere sight-seeing a work of difficulty. More populous before 1857 than either Calcutta or Bombay, it is still twice as large as Liverpool. Not only, however, is Lucknow the most perfect of the modern or Italianized Oriental towns, but there are in it several buildings that have each the charm of an architecture special to itself. Of these, the Martiniere is the most singular, and it looks like what it is--the freak of a wealthy madman. Its builder was General Martine, a Frenchman in the service of the Kings of Oude. Not far behind the Martiniere is the Dilkousha--a fantastic specimen of an Oriental hunting-lodge. The ordinary show-building of the place, the Kaiser-Bagh, or Palace of the Kings of Oude, is a paltry place enough, but there is a certain grandeur in the view of the great Imaumbara and the Hooseinabad from a point whence the two piles form to the eye but one. The great Imaumbara suffered terribly in 1858 from the wanton destruction which our troops committed everywhere during the war of the mutiny. Had they confined themselves to outrages such as these, however, but little could have been said against the conduct of the war. There is too much fear that the English, unless held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition toward cruelty, wherever they have a weak enemy to meet.
The stories of the Indian mutiny and of the Jamaica riot are but two out of many--two that we happen to have heard; but the Persian war in 1857 and the last of the Chinese campaigns are not without their records of deliberate barbarity and wrong. From the first officer of one of the Peninsular and Oriental steamers, which was employed in carrying troops up the Euphrates during the Persian war, I heard a story that is the type of many such. A Persian drummer-boy of about ten years old was seen bathing from the bank one morning by the officers on deck. Bets were made as to the chance of hitting him with an Enfield rifle, and one of the betters killed him at the first shot.
It is not only in war-time that our cruelty comes out; it is often seen in trifles during peace. Even a traveler, indeed, becomes so soon used to see the natives wronged in every way by people of quiet manner and apparent kindness of disposition, that he ceases to record the cases. In Madras roads, for instance, I saw a fruit-seller hand up some limes to a lower-deck port, just as we were weighing anchor. Three Anglo-Indians (men who had been out before) asked in chorus, ”How much?” ”One quarter rupee.” ”Too much.” And, without more ado, paying nothing, they pelted the man with his own limes, of which he lost more than half. In Ceylon, near Bentotte rest-house, a native child offered a handsome cowrie (of a kind worth in Australia about five s.h.i.+llings, and certainly worth something in Ceylon) to the child of a Mauritius coffee-planter who was traveling with us to Columbo, himself an old Indian officer. The white child took it, and would not give it up. The native child cried for money, or to have his sh.e.l.l back, but the mother of the white child exclaimed, ”You be hanged; it's worth nothing;” and off came the sh.e.l.l with us in the dawk. Such are the small but galling wrongs inflicted daily upon the Indian natives. It was a maxim of the Portuguese Jesuits that men who live long among Asiatics seldom fail to learn their vices; but our older civilians treat the natives with strict justice, and Anglo-Indian ladies who have been reared in the country are generally kind to their own servants, if somewhat harsh toward other natives. It is those who have been in the country from five to ten years, and especially soldiers, who treat the natives badly. Such men I have heard exclaim that the new penal code has revolutionized the country.
”Formerly,” they say, ”you used to send a man to a police-officer or a magistrate with a note:--'My dear ----. Please give the bearer twenty lashes.' But now the magistrates are afraid to act, and your servant can have you fined for beating him.” In spite of the lamentations of Anglo-Indians over the good old days, I noticed in all the hotels in India the significant notice, ”Gentlemen are earnestly requested not to strike the servants.”
The jokes of a people against themselves are not worth much, but may be taken in aid of other evidence. The two favorite Anglo-Indian stories are that of the native who, being asked his religion, said, ”Me Christian--me get drunk like ma.s.sa;” and that of the young officer who, learning Hindostanee in 1858, had the difference between the negative ”ne” and the particle ”ne” explained to him by the moonshee, when he exclaimed: ”Dear me! I hanged lots of natives last year for admitting that they had not been in their villages for months. I suppose they meant to say that they had not left their villages for months.” It is certain that in the suppression of the mutiny hundreds of natives were hanged by Queen's officers who, unable to speak a word of any native language, could neither understand evidence nor defense.
It is in India, when listening to a mess-table conversation on the subject of looting, that we begin to remember our descent from Scandinavian sea-king robbers. Centuries of education have not purified the blood: our men in India can hardly set eyes upon a native prince or a Hindoo palace before they cry, ”What a place to break up!” ”What a fellow to _loot_!” When I said to an officer who had been stationed at Secrole in the early days of the mutiny, ”I suppose you were afraid that the Benares people would have attacked you,” his answer was, ”Well, for my part, I rather hoped they would, because then we should have thrashed them, and looted the city. It hadn't been looted for two hundred years.”