Part 37 (1/2)
Lah.o.r.e matches Umritsur in the purity of its Orientalism, Agra in the strength and grandeur of its walls: but it has no Tank Temple and no Taj; the Great Mosque is commonplace, Runjeet Singh's tomb is tawdry, and the far-famed Shalimar Gardens inferior to those of Pinjore. The strangest sight of Lah.o.r.e is its new railway station--a fortress of red brick, one of many which are rising all over India. The fortification of the railway stations is decidedly the next best step to that of having no forts at all.
The city of Lah.o.r.e is surrounded by a suburb of great tombs, in which Europeans have in many cases taken up their residence by permission of the owner, the mausoleums being, from the thickness of their walls, as cool as cellars. Sometimes, however, a fanatical relative of the man buried in the tomb will warn the European tenant that he will die within a year--a prophecy which poison has once or twice brought to its fulfillment in the neighborhood of Lah.o.r.e and at Moultan.
Strolling in the direction of the Cabool Gate, I came on the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjaub, driving in an open carriage drawn by camels; and pa.s.sing out on to the plain, I met all the officers in garrison returning on Persian ponies from a game at the Afghan sport of ”hockey upon horseback,” while a little farther were some English ladies with hawks. Throughout the Northern Punjaub a certain settling down in comfort on the part of the English officials is to be remarked, and the adaptation of native habits to English uses, of which I had in one evening's walk the three examples which I have mentioned, is a sign of a tendency toward that making the best of things which in a newly-occupied country precedes the entrance upon a system of permanent abode. Lah.o.r.e has been a British city for nineteen years, Bombay for two centuries and more; yet Lah.o.r.e is far more English than Bombay.
Although there are as yet no signs of English settlement in the Punjaub, still the official community in many a Punjaub station is fast becoming colonial in its type, and Indian traditions are losing ground. English wives and sisters abound in Lah.o.r.e, even the railway and ca.n.a.l officials having brought out their families; and during the cool weather race meetings, drag hunts, cricket matches, and croquet parties follow one another from day to day, and Lah.o.r.e boasts a volunteer corps. When the hot season comes on, those who can escape to the hills, and the wives and children of those who cannot go, run to Dalhousie, as Londoners do to Eastbourne.
The healthy English tone of the European communities of Umritsur and Lah.o.r.e is reflected in the newspapers of the Punjaub, which are the best in India, although the blunders of the native printers render the ”betting news” unintelligible, and the ”cricket scores” obscure. The columns of the Lah.o.r.e papers present as singular a mixture of incongruous articles as even the Government _Gazette_ offers to its readers. An official notice that it will be impossible to allow more than 560 elephants to take part in the next Lucknow procession follows a report of the ”ice meeting” of the community of Lah.o.r.e, to arrange about the next supply; and side by side with this is an article on the Punjaub trade with Chinese Tartary, which recommends the government of India to conquer Afghanistan, and to reoccupy the valley of Cashmere. A paragraph notices the presentation by the Punjaub government to a native gentleman, who has built a serai at his own cost, of a valuable gift; another records a brush with the Wagheers. The only police case is the infliction on a sweeper of a fine of thirty rupees for letting his donkey run against a high-caste woman, whereby she was defiled; but a European magistrate reprimands a native pleader for appearing in court with his shoes on; and a notice from the Lieutenant-Governor gives a list of the holidays to be observed by the courts, in which the ”Queen's Birthday” comes between ”Bhudur Kalee” and ”Oors data Gunjbuksh,” while ”Christmas” follows ”Shubberat,” and ”Ash Wednesday” precedes ”Holee.”
As one of the holidays lasts a fortnight, and many more than a week, the total number of _dies non_ is considerable; but a postscript decrees that additional local holidays shall be granted for fairs and festivals, and for the solar and lunar eclipse, which brings the no-court days up to sixty or seventy, besides those in the Long Vacation. The Hindoos are in the happy position of having also six new-year's days in every twelvemonth; but the editor of one of the Lah.o.r.e papers says that his Mohammedan compositors manifest a singular interest in Hindoo feasts, which shows a gratifying spread of toleration! An article on the ”Queen's English in Hindostan,” in the _Punjaub Times_, gives, as a specimen of the poetry of Young Bengal, a serenade in which the skylark carols on the primrose bush. ”Emerge, my love,” the poet cries
”The fragrant, dewy grove We'll wander through till gun-fire bids us part.”
But the final stanza is the best:
”Then, Leila, come! nor longer cogitate; Thy egress let no scruples dire r.e.t.a.r.d; Contiguous to the portals of thy gate Suspensively I supplicate regard.”
The advertis.e.m.e.nts range from books on the languages of Dardistan to government contracts for elephant fodder, or price-lists of English beer; and an announcement of an Afghan history in the Urdu tongue is followed by a prospectus of Berkhamstead Grammar School. King Edward would rub his eyes were he to wake and find himself being advertised in Lah.o.r.e.
The Punjaub Europeans, with their English newspapers and English ways, are strange governors for an empire conquered from the bravest of all Eastern races little more than eighteen years ago. One of them, taking up a town policeman's staff, said to me, one day, ”Who could have thought in 1850 that in 1867 we should be ruling the Sikhs with this?”
CHAPTER XII.
OUR INDIAN ARMY.
During my stay in Lah.o.r.e, a force of Sikhs and Pathans was being raised for service at Hong Kong by an officer staying in the same hotel with myself, and a large number of men were being enlisted in the city by recruiting parties of the Bombay army. In all parts of India, we are now relying, so far as our native forces are concerned, upon the men who only a few years back were by much our most dangerous foes.
Throughout the East, subjects concern themselves but little in the quarrels of their princes, and the Sikhs are no exception to the rule.
They fought splendidly in the Persian ranks at Marathon; under Shere Singh, they made their memorable stand at Chillianwallah; but, under Nicholson, they beat the bravest of the Bengal sepoys before Delhi.
Whether they fight for us or against us is all one to them. They fight for those who pay them, and have no politics beyond their pockets. So far, they seem useful allies to us, who hold the purse of India. Unable to trust Hindoos with arms, we can at least rule them by the employment as soldiers of their fiercest enemies.
When we come to look carefully at our system, its morality is hardly clear. As we administer the revenues of India, nominally at least, for the benefit of the Indians, it might be argued that we may fairly keep on foot such troops as are best fitted to secure her against attack; but the argument breaks down when it is remembered that 70,000 British troops are maintained in India from the Indian revenues for that purpose, and that local order is secured by an ample force of military police. Even if the employment of Sikhs in times of emergency may be advisable, it cannot be denied that the day has gone by for permanently overawing a people by means of standing armies composed of their hereditary foes.
In discussing the question of the Indian armies, we have carefully to distinguish between the theory and the practice. The Indian official theory says that not only is the native army a valuable auxiliary to the English army in India, but that its moral effect on the people is of great benefit to us, inasmuch as it raises their self-respect, and offers a career to men who would otherwise be formidable enemies. The practice proclaims that the native troops are either dangerous or useless by arming them with weapons as antiquated as the bow and arrow, destroys the moral effect which might possibly be produced by a Hindoo force by filling the native ranks with Sikh and Goorkha aliens and heretics, and makes us enemies without number by denying to natives that promotion which the theory holds out to them. The existing system is officially defended by the most contradictory arguments, and on the most s.h.i.+fting of grounds. Those who ask why we should not trust the natives, at all events to the extent of allowing Bengal and Bombay men to serve, and to serve with arms that they can use, in bodies which profess to be the Bengal and Bombay armies, but which in fact are Sikh regiments which we are afraid to arm, are told that the native army has mutinied times without end, that it has never fought well except where, from the number of British present, it had no choice but to fight, and that it is dangerous and inefficient. Those who ask why this shadow of a native army should be retained are told that its records of distinguished service in old times are numerous and splendid. The huge British force maintained in India, and the still huger native army, are each of them made an excuse for the retention of the other at the existing standard.
If you say that it is evident that 70,000 British troops cannot be needed in India, you are told that they are required to keep the 120,000 native troops in check. If you ask, Of what use, then, are the latter?
you hear that in the case of a serious imperial war the English troops would be withdrawn, and the defense of India confided to these very natives who in time of peace require to be thus severely held in check.
Such shallow arguments would be instantly exposed were not English statesmen bribed by the knowledge that their acceptance as good logic allows us to maintain at India's cost 70,000 British soldiers, who in time of danger would be available for our defense at home.
That the English force of 70,000 men maintained in India in time of peace can be needed there in peace or war is not to be supposed by those who remember that 10,000 men were all that were really needed to suppress the wide-spread mutiny of 1857, and that Russia--our only possible enemy from without--never succeeded during a two years' war in her own territory in placing a disposable army of 60,000 men in the Crimea. Another mutiny such as that of 1857 is, indeed, impossible, now that we retain both forts and artillery exclusively in British hands; and Russia, having to bring her supplies and men across almost boundless deserts, or through hostile Afghanistan, would be met at the Khyber by our whole Indian army, concentrated from the most distant stations at a few days' notice, fighting in a well-known and friendly country, and supplied from the plains of all India by the railroads. Our English troops in India are sufficiently numerous, were it necessary, to fight both the Russians and our native army; but it is absurd that we should maintain in India, in a time of perfect peace, at a yearly cost to the people of that country of from fourteen to sixteen millions sterling, an army fit to cope with the most tremendous disasters that could overtake the country, and at the same time unspeakably ridiculous that we should in all our calculations be forced to set down the native army as a cause of weakness. The native rulers, moreover, whatever their unpopularity with their people, were always able to array powerful levies against enemies from without; and if our government of India is not a miserable failure, our influence over the lower cla.s.ses of the people ought, at the least, to be little inferior to that exercised by the Mogul emperors or the Maratta chiefs.
As for local risings, concentration of our troops by means of the railroads that would be constructed in half a dozen years out of our military savings alone, and which American experience shows us cannot be effectually destroyed, would be amply sufficient to deal with them were the force reduced to 30,000 men; and a general rebellion of the people of India we have no reason to expect, and no right to resist should it by any combination of circ.u.mstances be brought about.
The taxation required to maintain the present Indian army presses severely upon what is in fact the poorest country in the world; the yearly drain of many thousand men weighs heavily upon us; and our system seems to proclaim to the world the humiliating fact, that under British government, and in times of peace, the most docile of all peoples need an army of 200,000 men, in addition to the military police, to watch them, or keep them down.
Whatever the decision come to with regard to the details of the changes to be made in the Indian army system, it is at least clear that it will be expedient in us to reduce the English army in India if we intend it for India's defense, and our duty to abolish it if we intend it for our own. It is also evident that, after allowing for mere police duties--which should in all cases be performed by men equipped as, and called by the name of, police--the native army should, whatever its size, be rendered as effective as possible, by instruction in the use of the best weapons of the age. If local insurrections have unfortunately to be quelled, they must be quelled by English troops; and against European invaders, native troops, to be of the slightest service, must be armed as Europeans. As the possibility of European invasion is remote, it would probably be advisable that the native army should be gradually reduced until brought to the point of merely supplying the body-guards and ceremonial-troops; at all events, the practice of overawing Sikhs with Hindoos, and Hindoos with Sikhs, should be abandoned as inconsistent with the nature of our government in India, and with the first principles of freedom.
There is, however, no reason why we should wholly deprive ourselves of the services of the Indian warrior tribes. If we are to continue to hold such outposts as Gibraltar, the duty of defending them against all comers might not improperly be intrusted wholly or partly to the Sikhs or fiery little Goorkhas, on the ground that, while almost as brave as European troops, they are somewhat cheaper. It is possible, indeed, that, just as we draw our Goorkhas from independent Nepaul, other European nations may draw Sikhs from us. We are not even now the only rulers who employ Sikhs in war; the Khan of Kokand is said to have many in his service: and, tightly ruled at home, the Punjaubees may not improbably become the Swiss of Asia.