Part 31 (1/2)

PART III

THE MODERN AGE

INDIA IN THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

A.D. 1707

Before making our _volte face_, and in future chronicling the history of India from the Western standpoint, it will be well to see what this India was which England set herself deliberately to annex.

So far as the East India Company was concerned, the vast peninsula was at this time what a huge slice of iced plum-cake upon a plate must be to a hungry mouse. That is to say, nice enough for outside nibblings, but with unexplored possibilities of plums within. Every now and again a bolder merchant would dive into the comparatively unknown centre, and come back laden possibly with idol-eyes, rich brocades, jewels in the rough.

It must--to repeat ourselves--have been a tremendous temptation having to live, as these early writers or clerks to John Company had, on the very verge of Tom Tiddler's ground--to have only to reach out their hands and touch a totally different world. A world which by virtue of immutable changelessness had not commuted the gold which the years had brought it into luxuries, but had stored it up uselessly in lavish ornamentation and idle, almost unappropriated treasure. Except as a gaud for a woman, a toy for a babe, or a flourish of trumpets for some man who called himself n.o.ble, gold in India had practically no value, for the rich man lived in all ways much as the poor man lived. The standard of personal comfort had not risen at all either for the wealthy or the poverty-stricken during the four thousand years and odd since the splendours of Princess Draupadi's Swayamvara had been chronicled in the Mahabharata. An instant's thought will show us the effect which this h.o.a.rding of every diamond found in Golconda, of every bale of rich stuff made by some leisurely artificer, must have had upon the country. It became full to overflowing with scarcely recognised riches. To English traders, keen on commerce, India must indeed have been the land of Upside-down; a land into which their gold was sucked down at the same time that astounding, almost undreamt-of treasures were literally vomited forth from every petty bazaar.

Francois Bernier's views on this matter, and the conclusions which he draws from the indubitable facts which he observed, are so distinctly what may be called conventionally insular, that they serve well to show the att.i.tude of mind in which the West, strong in conviction of its own worth, faced the East, all unfamiliar and startling.

”Before I conclude,” he says, in a letter addressed to M. Colbert, the French Minister of State, ”I wish to explain how it happens that though the gold and silver introduced into the Empire centre finally in Hindustan, they still are not in greater plenty than elsewhere, and the inhabitants have less the appearance of a monied people than those of many other parts of the globe.

”In the first place, a larger quant.i.ty is melted, re-melted, and wasted in fabricating women's bracelets, both for the hands and feet, chains, ear-rings, nose and finger rings, and a still larger quant.i.ty is consumed in manufacturing embroideries; _alachas_ or striped silken stuffs, _touras_ or tufts of golden nets worn on turbans; gold and silver cloths and scarves, turbans, and brocades. The quant.i.ty of these articles made in India is incredible.”

He then goes on to paint, in vivid, horror-stricken phrases, the evils of a paternal despotism, pointing out that it is ”slavery,” that it ”obstructs the progress of trade,” since there is no encouragement to commercial pursuits when the ”success with which they may be attended, instead of adding to the enjoyments of life, only provokes the cupidity of a neighbouring tyrant.” This we are a.s.sured is the sole cause why the ”possessor, so far from living with increased comfort, studies the means by which he may appear indigent: his dress, lodging, and furniture continue to be mean, and he is careful, above all things, never to indulge in the pleasures of the table.”

Poor Bernier! And after more than a hundred years of comparative freedom under British rule there was still not a face-towel or a bit of soap in an Indian household; not a chair, not a table, and the simple food, cooked over a hole dug in the ground, was served on leaf-plates set upon the floor. For luxury has. .h.i.therto pa.s.sed India by. Will it do so in the future? Who can say?

The state of the arts in India evidently puzzled Bernier's Western brain, and he sets to work to find out some occult cause for the undoubted skill of the artisan. He a.s.serts that

”no artist can be expected to give his mind to his calling” without the stimulus of personal advantage, ”and that the arts would long ago have lost their beauty and delicacy if the monarch and the princ.i.p.al n.o.bles did not keep the artists in their pay to work in their houses.”

Then:--

”The protection afforded by powerful patrons, rich merchants and traders, who give the workmen rather more than the usual wages, tends to preserve the arts; rather more wages, for it should not be inferred from the goodness of the manufactures that the workman is held in esteem, or arrives at a state of independence. Nothing but sheer necessity or blows from a cudgel keeps him employed.”

And this in a country where, to this day, the pride of hereditary dexterity in hand and eye is handed down from father to son, and to say of a coppersmith or a carpenter or a weaver in brocades: ”His grandfather, see you, was a real _ustad_ (teacher),” is to raise that man above his fellows. Once more, poor Bernier! He might have learnt something from the eager-faced, lissome-fingured Indian smith, who, handling a gun made by Manton, laid it down reverently and salaamed to it as if it had been a G.o.d, with these simple words: ”He who made that was a Great Artificer.”

Here we have epitomised the true artistic temperament.

But it needs art to apply the solvent of sympathy; and the dealings of the West with the East were at this time purely commercial; so we meet with absolute, almost pathetic lack of comprehension. Indeed, as we read with painstaking care every record that exists of these Western dealings with the East at this period, we know not whether to laugh or to cry at the spectacle presented to us of mutual misunderstanding.

India is a problem even now. What must it have been then, to these worthy Lombard Street merchants who knew nothing of ancient faiths and past civilisations, who looked on the native of India as a barbarian utterly. What a shock it must have been to them, when a native accountant, given some abstruse problem in arithmetic, solved it lightly, easily, by algebra! Small wonder that, finding the Hindu circle divided into 360 equal parts and the ratio of diameter to circ.u.mference expressed correctly at 1 to 3.14160 they credited Alexander's Greek phalanxes with being mathematical teachers as well as conquerors. Small wonder that every discovery of scientific knowledge amongst these ”barbarians” should have been referred to some contact with the West.

It required long years before due credit could be given to the East; it is doubtful indeed whether sufficient credit is given to it even now. Who, for instance, knows of the accurate trigonometrical tables of India, in which _sines_ are used instead of the Greek _chords?_--or of their framer, of whom Professor Wallace writes:--

”He who first formed the idea of exhibiting in arithmetical tables the ratios of the sides and angles of all possible triangles must have been a man of profound thought and extensive knowledge. However ancient, therefore, any book may be in which we meet with a system of trigonometry, we may be a.s.sured that it was not written in the infancy of the science. Hence, we may conclude that geometry must have been known in India long before the writing of the 'Surya Siddhanta.'”

Now this book on Astronomy was written at the latest computation about the year A.D. 400. Centuries before this, therefore, India was aware of certain of those inviolable laws of our Universe, in the apprehension of which lies humanity's best hope of immortality. And there is one curious fact about these vestiges of ancient knowledge which Professor Playfair has noted in a pregnant remark concerning these same trigonometrical tables. ”They have the appearance, like many other things in the science of these Eastern nations, of being drawn by one _who was more deeply versed in the subject than may at first be imagined, and who knew much more than he thought it necessary to communicate_.”

It is a remark which stimulates the imagination.