Part 31 (2/2)

But as a matter of fact the Western imagination of those days appears not to have been stimulated at all by anything save the prospect of plunder. And in truth the h.o.a.rded wisdom of the East was not nearly so much in evidence as its h.o.a.rded wealth. In Akbar's time some effort had been made to give such wisdom fair hearing. There is small doubt, for instance, but that his study of the kingcraft chapters of the Mahabharata had done much towards making Akbar what he was--the best ruler India has ever seen, or is likely to see; but, taking it as a whole, the tide of Mahomedan conquest had simply submerged Hindu learning, and the rising flood of Mahratta power was not one whit less prejudicial to philosophy. But below the troubled surface of wars and rumours of wars the heart of India dreamt on undisturbed. All things, as ever, were illusion. The Wheel-of-Life revolved between the pivots of Birth and Death, so what mattered it whether the painted zoetrope showed the yellow face of a Toorkh from the North, or the white one of a trader from the West? Both sought gold; and even gold was illusion.

It is quaint to think, say, of those pirates of Arracan bursting in upon a crowd of pilgrims round some ancient shrine, and carrying off the whole concern, as it were--priests, wors.h.i.+ppers, offerings, even the idol-eyes, leaving the empty sockets staring out helplessly at the deserted village.

But there are many such quaint items to be added to our picture gallery of India in the beginning of the eighteenth century, not the least of these being the spectacle of Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, carrying off from amongst the very flames of her husband's funeral pyre the Hindu widow who afterwards became his wife.

For on the confines of the various factories in the contiguous lands which had been won from Moghul rule by purchase, or bribe, or treaty, English laws had already begun to oust native customs. Indeed, quite an elaborate legal procedure, duly decked with Courts of Appeal, had been set up in the three presidencies. So far, it is to be feared, without much benefit to the people, for those who held the power seem ever to have been more occupied by the rules of commerce than those of justice.

Already, also, each presidency had its own regular army. This was composed first of recruits from England, sent out by the Company in their s.h.i.+ps; secondly, of adventurers who had deserted from other European armies and had come out to the East to seek their fortunes; thirdly, of half-caste Indo-Europeans, the offspring of mixed marriages. In the beginning of the eighteenth century a few pure natives were enlisted, and from this time the Sepoy army of John Company grew by leaps and bounds.

As yet, however, there was no attempt at the policy of pike and carronade. That had been disastrous in the days of Sir John Child; so the small armies--the garrison of Calcutta in 1707 was _raised_ to three hundred men--were kept simply for defence.

The insecure state of the country, also, which followed on Aurungzebe's death led to greater caution on the part of the Company.

Hitherto, its clerks and merchants and agents had themselves carried their English goods to the various markets in the interior of the country; but now orders were issued directing everything to be sold by auction at the port of import, thus minimising the risk of loss.

A simple order which, nevertheless, must have had far-reaching results, since it introduced the middleman between the English merchants and the people of India; an unscrupulous middleman also.

Then the method employed, and necessarily employed, in the collection of the calicoes and other woven cotton-stuffs which at this time formed the staple of Indian trade was one which made fair dealing almost impossible. For there were no large merchants with whom the Company could deal. It had therefore to elaborate an agency of its own, by which it could come in contact with the weaver, who--ever one of the most poverty-stricken of Indian artisans--required raw material and sustenance given him before he could keep his rude loom going.

A fateful affair this! One European functionary issuing orders to a native secretary, he employing a native agent, who in his turn calls together the local brokers, who send out to village and towns by their paid messengers and advance cotton and money to the actual workmen.

Here indeed were sufficient loopholes for fraud. Each one of these men had, in addition to his poor pay, to find secret gratification for himself and for those who were supposed to keep an eye upon him. The wretched weaver, of course, coming off worst in the scramble, being made, first, to work as he had never worked before, and secondly, as a set-off to the sustenance given, to take a price often 40 per cent.

less than the work would have fetched in open market.

But the rate of pay which at this time the Company offered to its servants tells in unmistakable brevity the whole tale of its administration.

The salary of a president was but 300 a year, that of a factor but 20. Even when Bengal was practically ceded to it, and all power, judicial and executive, vested in its servants, the pay of a man who had almost unlimited power, and who had doomed himself to a life of exile, was but 130. Yet the actual profit of the East India Company at this time was nothing prodigious; it barely touched 8 per cent. on the capital employed. Still, the monopoly must have been valuable, for the efforts made to retain it would fill volumes; and one Act of Parliament followed another, prohibiting foreign adventure to India under penalty of forfeiture of triple the sum embarked, and declaring all British subjects found in India who were not in the Company's service liable to seizure and punishment, and generally crying ”hands off” to all and sundry.

The Portuguese power in India had by this time dwined away; none too soon for its reputation. It had suffered reverses at many hands, not least of these being one dealt by itself; for the story of Bahadur-Shah, the king of Guzerat, is not one to bring credit with it.

He had entered into negotiations with the Portuguese, had granted them many favours, amongst others the right to build a factory. This, however, they surrounded with a wall which converted the whole into a fortification. Bahadur-Shah remonstrated, and was met with fair words from Nuno de Cunha, the Portuguese viceroy, who, however, came to the conference with a suspiciously martial fleet containing over four thousand fighting-men. Now, whether the Portuguese historians are right in attributing meditated treachery to the Mahomedans, or the historians of the latter are right in attributing it to the Portuguese, matters little in face of what actually happened. The viceroy, feigning sickness as an excuse for not paying his respects on land, the king, with but a few unarmed attendants, went to meet him on the admiral's s.h.i.+p. Once there, he became alarmed at whisperings and signs that were pa.s.sing between the viceroy and his officers, and took a hasty leave. Hardly had he reached his boat, however, when he was attacked. Being a good swimmer he flung himself into the sea, was pursued, struck over the head with an oar, and when he clung to it, was finally despatched with a halbert.

The facts are brutal. Nothing can extenuate them, and though the affray may have originated in mutual distrust and alarm, there can be no doubt that such evidence of premeditated treachery as there is points to the Portuguese as the real criminals.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, they had retired to Further India, there to repeat their brilliant but evanescent career of conquest, and in 1739 they finally ceded their few remaining possessions in the Konkan to the Mahratta power.

But their influence lives still all along the western coast, where to this day a large proportion of the people are professedly Roman Catholic, the descendants of the converts who, it is said, flocked in thousands to be baptized by St Francis Xavier. This, however, is extremely doubtful. Yet even the Portuguese power was but a sea-board influence, the nibblings, as it were, of the Western mouse upon the rich cake of India.

Inside this frayed and fraying fringe of contact with the outside world India was very much what it had been always, what in a way it will be always. So far as princes and princ.i.p.alities went it was a very distracted country; so far as the peasantry went it was a very peaceful one. But neither prince nor peasant seemed to realise that a great change was imminent.

One of the most curious points about this coming change was that though the greed of gold was undoubtedly the chief factor in bringing it about, the first two solid holds which the English got on India were due to the skill, not of British diplomacy or British commerce, but of British medicine. It was in consequence of the services rendered by s.h.i.+p's surgeon Gabriel Boughton to the Emperor Shahjahan's beloved daughter Jahanara, when she was as a child badly burnt, that the Old East India Company gained the right to trade in Bengal free of all duty; this being the only fee asked--surely a public-spirited and disinterested one. And equally so was the only fee demanded by Staff Surgeon William Hamilton in 1715 for curing the decadent Emperor Farokhs.h.i.+r of a tumour in the back which had resisted the efforts of all the court physicians. He asked for the first sizable grant of land on the Indian peninsula which had ever been given to any foreign power: that is to say, for thirty-seven villages contiguous to the factory at Calcutta, which gave the English command of the river for 10 miles south of the port, for some villages near Madras, which consolidated that _pied a terre_; and for the island of Din on the western coast.

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