India, Old and New Part 2

For they were built by architects of the Jaina school, who were just as ready to work for their Moslem rulers as they had been to work in earlier times for their Hindu rajas. By the mere force of a civilisation in many ways superior to that of their conquerors, these builders imposed upon them, even in the very mosques which they built for them, many of the most characteristic features of Hindu architecture. To obtain, for instance, in a mosque the greater elevation required by the Mahomedans, to whom the dim twilight of a Hindu shrine is repugnant, they began by merely superimposing the shafts of two pillars, joining them together with blocks to connect the base of the upper with the capital of the lower shaft; and this feature in a less crude shape was permanently retained in the Indo-Mahomedan architecture of Gujerat.

Nowhere better than at Ahmedabad can the various stages be followed through which this adaptation of a purely Hindu style to Mahomedan purposes has pa.s.sed. It was at first somewhat violent and clumsy. The earliest mosque in Ahmedabad, that of Ahmed Shah, is practically a Hindu temple with a Mahomedan facade, and the figures of animals and of idols can still be traced on the interior pillars. The octagonal tomb of Ganj Bakhsh, the spiritual guide of Ahmed Shah, just outside the city at Sarkhij, marks an immense stride, and the adjoining mosque, of which all the pillars have the Hindu bracket capitals and all the domes are built on traditional Hindu lines, retains nevertheless its Mahomedan character. Still more wonderful is the blend achieved in the mosque and tomb of Ranee Sepree, the consort of Mahmud Bigarah, who was perhaps the most magnificent of the Mahomedan kings of Gujerat. It was completed in 1514, just a hundred years after the foundation of the Ahmed Shahi dynasty, and it shows the distance travelled in the course of one century towards something like a fusion of Hindu and Mahomedan ideals in the domain at least of architecture.

In Bij.a.pur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu art--perhaps because the great days of Bij.a.pur came after it had taken its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern India to perish by the sword of Islam. Having laid low the Hindu "City of Victory," the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan "City of Victory" eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed. The Gol k.u.mbaz, the great round dome over the lofty quadrangular hall in which Sultan Mahomed Adil Shah lies under a plain slab of marble, is an almost perfect hemisphere, which encloses the largest domed s.p.a.ce in the world, and it dominates the Deccan tableland just as the dome of St.

Peter's dominates the Roman Campagna. To such heights Hindu architecture can never soar, for it eschews the arched dome; and beautiful as the Hindu cupola may be with its concentric mouldings and the superimposed circular courses horizontally raised on an octagonal architrave which rests on symmetrical groups of pillars, it cannot attain anything like the same bold span or the same lofty elevation. Have we not there a symbol of the fundamental antagonism between Hindu and Mahomedan conceptions in many other domains than that of architecture? Even if the Arabs did not originate the pointed arch, it has always been one of the most beautiful and characteristic features of Mahomedan architecture.

The Hindu, on the other hand, has never built any such arch except under compulsion.

To unite India under Mahomedan rule and attempt to bridge the gulf that divided the alien race of Mahomedan conquerors from the conquered Hindus required more stedfast hands and a loftier genius than those Mahomedan _condottieri_ possessed. A new power more equal to the task was already storming at the northern gates of India. On a mound thirty-five miles north of Delhi, near the old bed of the Jumna, there still stands a small town which has thrice given its name to one of those momentous battles that decide the fate of nations. It is Panipat. There, on April 21, 1526, Baber the Lion, fourth in descent from Timur, overthrew the last of the Lodis. Like his terrible ancestor, he had fought his way down from Central Asia at the head of a great army of Tartar hors.e.m.e.n; but, unlike Timur, he fought not for mere plunder and slaughter, but for empire. He has left us in his own memoirs an incomparable picture of his remarkable and essentially human personality, and it was his statesmans.h.i.+p as much as his prowess that laid the rough foundations upon which the genius of his grandson Akbar was to rear the great fabric of the Moghul Empire as it was to stand for two centuries. Though it was at Delhi that, three days after the battle of Panipat, Baber proclaimed himself Emperor, no visible monument of his reign is to be seen there to-day. But the white marble dome and lofty walls and terraces of his son Humayun's mausoleum, raised on a lofty platform out of a sea of dark green foliage, are, next to the Kutub Minar, the most conspicuous feature in the plain of Delhi. Endowed with many brilliant and amiable qualities, Humayun was not made of the same stuff as either his father or his son. Driven out of India by the Afghans, whom Baber had defeated but not subdued, he had, it is true, in a great measure reconquered it, when a fall from the top of the terraced roof of his palace at Delhi caused his death at the early age of forty-eight. But would he have been able to retain it? He had by no means crushed the forces of rebellion which the usurper Sher Shah had united against Moghul rule, and which were still holding the field under the leaders.h.i.+p of the brilliant Hindu adventurer Hemu. Delhi itself was lost within a few months of Humayun's death, and it was again at Panipat, just thirty years after his grandfather's brilliant victory, that the boy Akbar had in his turn to fight for the empire of Hindustan. He too fought and won, and when he entered Delhi on the very next day, the empire was his to mould and to fas.h.i.+on at the promptings of his genius.

Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors before him in India, men of his own race and creed--the blood of Timur flowed in his veins--and men of other races and of other creeds. They too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had pa.s.sed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. What was the reason?

Was it not that they had established their dominion on force alone, and that when force ceased to be vitalised by their own great personalities their dominion, having struck no root in the soil, withered away and perished? Akbar, far ahead of his times, determined to try another and a better way by seeking the welfare of the populations he subdued, by dispensing equal justice to all races and creeds, by courting loyal service from Hindus as well as Mahomedans, by giving them a share on terms of complete equality in the administration of the country, by breaking down the social barriers between them, even those which hedge in the family. He was a soldier, and he knew when and how to use force, but he never used force alone. He subdued the Rajput states, but he won the allegiance of their princes and himself took a consort from among their daughters. With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East.

He created a h.o.m.ogeneous system of civil administration which our own still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively slight modifications to the present day.

Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area of India. A great stride had been made towards real unity and social fusion. Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could be no security for the future against the revival of the old and deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds. He was himself learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred books to be translated into Persian--the cultured language of his court--so that he could study them for himself; and he invited Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his presence the relative merits of their religious systems. The deserted palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with exceptional vividness the life of the splendid court over which the greatest of the Moghul Emperors--the contemporary of our own great Queen Elizabeth--presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his long reign. Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu than of Mahomedan inspiration. For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over against it, in the beautiful "Golden House," dwelt his Rajput consort, Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir. Nor did he forget his favourite friends and counsellors. Upon no building in Fatehpur has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and ill.u.s.trious Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to Akbar. The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation, untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar's should live. In the great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all denominations in search of religious truth. The spirit which inspired Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the "Gate of Victory," the lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the s.p.a.cious mosque quadrangle: "Jesus, on whom be peace, said: 'The world is a bridge. Pa.s.s over it, but build not upon it. The world endures but an hour; spend that hour in devotion.'"

It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them, he foresaw that his life's work would a.s.suredly some day be wrecked. Did he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as n.o.ble a mind as his not proof against the overweening _hubris_ to which a despotic genius has so often succ.u.mbed? One momentous evening, in the Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the domain of faith. From claiming the right to explain away the Koran, which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating it altogether, there was but a short step. Akbar very soon took it. He promulgated a new religion, which he called the Din-i-Ilahi, and a new profession of faith, which, instead of the old Islamic formula, "There is no G.o.d but G.o.d, and Mahomed is his prophet," proclaimed indeed in the same words the unity of G.o.d, but declared Akbar to be the one Viceregent of G.o.d. The new religion, theistic in doctrine, not only borrowed its prayers chiefly from the Pa.r.s.ees and its ritual from the Hindus, but practically abolished all Mahomedan observances. The orthodox Mahomedans naturally held up their hands in horror, and many preferred honourable exile to conformity. But the awe which Akbar inspired, and perhaps the acknowledged elevation of his motives, generally compelled at least outward acceptance during his lifetime. His Mahomedan subjects had, moreover, to admit that his desire to conciliate Hinduism did not blind him to its most perverse features. Whilst he abolished the capitation tax on Hindus and the tax upon Hindu pilgrims, he forbade infant marriages and, short of absolute prohibition, did all he could to discountenance the self-immolation of Hindu widows. To the Brahmans especially his condemnation, both implied and explicit, of the caste system was a constant stone of offence.

Great as was his genius and admirable as were many of his inst.i.tutions, Akbar, to use a homely phrase, fell between two stools to the ground. He himself ceased to be a Mahomedan without becoming a Hindu, whilst the great bulk at least of his subjects still remained at bottom Mahomedans and Hindus as before. Neither community was ripe for an eclectic creed based only upon sweet reasonableness and lofty ethical conceptions. His son and successor, Jehanghir, at once reverted to Mahomedan orthodoxy, but the reaction only became militant when Aurungzeb succeeded Shah Jehan. The profound incompatibility between Islam and Hinduism rea.s.serted itself in him with a bitterness which the growing menace of the rising power of the Hindu Mahrattas probably helped to intensify.

The reimposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus destroyed the last vestige of the great work of conciliation to which Akbar had vainly applied all his brilliant energies. Like Fatehpur Sikri itself, which for lack of water he had been compelled to abandon within fifteen years of its construction, it was a magnificent failure, and it was perhaps bound in his time to be a failure.

Aurungzeb was the first of the Moghuls to reside in the Mahomedan atmosphere of Delhi throughout his long reign. But, begun in usurpation at the cost of his own father, it ended in misery and gloom. His sons had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth of the new Mahratta power, to which s.h.i.+vaji had not unsuccessfully attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous Peac.o.c.k Throne. Then the Afghans again broke through the northern pa.s.ses. Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani carry fire and sword through Northern India. One service, however, the Afghan rendered. From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely closed in upon Delhi. Another great battle was fought at Panipat between the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army.

The Mahrattas endured a crus.h.i.+ng defeat, which, together with treachery within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.

For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was progressing apace. Of all those who had followed in the wake of the Portuguese--Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British--the British alone had come to stay. After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection, and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India Company, already a power in the land. Well for him had he remained there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one faction and then by another. Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, "If a paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here"; and when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers. He was already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer in Lord Lake, who had routed the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between Humayun's tomb and the river Jumna. Then, perhaps for the first time in her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had pa.s.sed into the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the n.o.blest of Akbar's dreams.

But throughout all those centuries of Mahomedan domination the enduring power of Hinduism had bent without ever breaking to the storm, even in Northern India, where it was exposed to the full blast of successive tempests. Many of its branches withered or were ruthlessly lopped off, but its roots were too firmly and too deeply embedded in the soil to be fatally injured. It continued indeed to throw off fresh shoots. The same process of adaptation, a.s.similation, and absorption, which had been going on for centuries before the Mahomedan conquest, without ever being permanently or even very deeply affected by the vicissitudes of Indian political history, went on throughout all the centuries of Mahomedan domination. Whilst millions of Hindus were, it is true, being forcibly converted to Islam, Hinduism, making good its losses to a great extent by the complete elimination of Buddhism, and by permeating the Dravidian races of Southern India, continued its own social and religious evolution. It was, in fact, after the tide of Mahomedan conquest had set in that Hindu theology put on fresh forms of interpretation. The rivalry between the cults of s.h.i.+va and of Vishnu became more acute, and many of the Dharmashastras and Puranas were recast and elaborated by s.h.i.+vaite and Vishnuite writers respectively in the form in which we now know them, thus affording contemporary and graphic pictures of the persistency of Hindu life and manners after India had lost all political independence. It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most popular of Hindu G.o.ds, and the divine love, of which he was at first the personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their origin from the ancient ideas of s.e.xual dualism immanent in some of the Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of the great G.o.ds into the Sakti wors.h.i.+p of the female principle, often with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both. Possibly as a result of closer contact with primitive Dravidian religions, or of such wild lawlessness as followed the barbarous devastation wrought by Timur, the blood even of human victims flowed more freely before the altars of the Mahamatri, the great G.o.ddesses personified in Kali and Durga. The wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds a.s.sumed a more terrific and orgiastic character. _Sati_ was more frequently practised. Many of the most splendid and, at the present day, most famous temples--amongst others that of Jaganath at Puri--were founded during that period. The custom, in itself very ancient, of religious pilgrimages to celebrated shrines and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant Mahomedans. Caste, which was as foreign to Islam as to Christianity, but nevertheless retained its hold upon Indian converts to Islam as it has also in later times upon Indian converts to the Christian creeds, tended to harden still further; for caste has ever been the keystone of Hinduism, and, as Mahomedan power gradually waned, Hinduism rea.s.serted itself in a spirit of both religious and national rebellion against Mahomedan domination.

The most permanent, or at least the most signal, mark which Mahomedan ascendancy has left upon Hinduism has been to accentuate the inferiority of woman by her close confinement--of which there are few traces in earlier times--within the zenana, possibly in the first instance a precautionary measure for her protection against the l.u.s.t of the Mahomedan conquerors. Her seclusion still const.i.tutes one of the greatest obstacles to Indian social and religious reform. For, as custom requires an Indian girl to be shut up in the zenana at the very age when her education, except in quite elementary schools, should commence, the women of India, even in the cla.s.ses in which the men of India have been drawn into the orbit by Western education, have until recently remained and still for the most part remain untouched by it, and their innate conservatism clings to social traditions and religious superst.i.tions of which their male belongings have already been taught to recognise the evils. In this respect Mahomedan domination has helped to strengthen the forces of resistance inherent to Hinduism.

On the other hand, Mahomedan domination has left behind it a deep line of religious cleavage, deepest in the north, which was the seat of Mahomedan power, but extending to almost every part of India. Sixty-six millions of Indians out of three hundred millions are still Mahomedans, and though time has in a large measure effaced the racial differences between the original Mahomedan conquerors and the indigenous populations converted to their creed, the religious antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, though occasionally and temporarily sunk in a sense of common hostility to alien rulers who are neither Mahomedans nor Hindus, is still one of the most potent factors not only in the social but in the political life of India, both indelibly moulded from times immemorial by the supreme force of religion. We have a pale reflection of that sort of antagonism at our own doors in the bitterness between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster. All over India, Mahomedans and Hindus alike remember the centuries of Mahomedan domination, the latter with the bitterness bred of the long oppression that struck down their G.o.ds and mutilated their shrines, the former with the unquenched pride and unquenchable hope of a fierce faith which will yet, they believe, make the whole world subject to Allah, the one G.o.d, and Mahomed, his one Prophet.

CHAPTER IV

BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

The basic fact which has governed the whole evolution of British rule in India is that we went there in the first instance as traders, and not as conquerors. For trade meant co-operation. There could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom into the Orient, our forefathers determined to emulate the example of the Spaniards and Portuguese and open up new ocean highways to the remote markets credited with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them indefinitely. The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen Elizabeth's charter first established three hundred years ago a few precarious settlements on the far-flung sh.o.r.es of a then almost unknown continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an emba.s.sy to court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of their power. Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians who flocked to their "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which, like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day, attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention in the internal affairs of India. Nor was it till, in the course of the great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only alternative to the greater danger of French dominion. It was the French challenge to Britain's position all over the world far more than any deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement, until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.

But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of almost constant co-operation between British and Indians. The East India Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force, its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops. At Pla.s.sey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company's forces, formed only a t.i.the numerically of the victorious armies that fought under Clive and Munro. The traditions of loyal comrades.h.i.+p between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day, with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulers.h.i.+p of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring, wherever circ.u.mstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.

In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British Government and the British people to control the methods by which British dominion was to be exercised and maintained. So when the British in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers, they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the relations between those who govern and those who are governed. Those conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to influence also the att.i.tude of the British people towards the alien races brought under their sway. The motives which prompted English colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. All were impelled primarily by the desire to attain wealth.

But whilst our compet.i.tors never got much beyond that stage, and for the most part imagined that the only way to attain wealth was by a crude exploitation of subject countries and peoples, the British were saved from similar short-sightedness by the very different spirit with which the development of their own national inst.i.tutions had imbued their rulers at home. By the middle of the eighteenth century a British Government had a very different sense of its responsibilities to the British people for the welfare of the nation as a whole from that which any continental ruler had been taught to entertain in regard to his own people. That sense of responsibility the British Government and the British people applied in a modified form to the administration of their Indian possessions.

So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the sh.o.r.es of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple.

The three "Presidents" who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction. But matters a.s.sumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking abundant t.i.the of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend financial and military a.s.sistance in order to rescue the East India Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India. The grant of the _Diwani_ to the Company by the t.i.tular Emperor of Delhi gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change. The magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the Company's coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable advances in order to replenish them, and the splendour of the fortunes ama.s.sed by many of the Company's servants who returned from India to spend them in ostentatious luxury and in political intrigue at home, combined with the brilliant achievements of British arms on Indian soil to focus public attention on Indian affairs. They became one of the live issues of British party politics.

There was much that was squalid and grossly unjust in the rancorous campaigns conducted first against Clive and then against Warren Hastings. But behind all the personal jealousies and the greed of factions there was a strong and healthy public instinct that the responsibilities a.s.sumed by the East India Company were greater than a trading a.s.sociation could safely be left to discharge uncontrolled, and that the State could not divest itself of the duties imposed upon it by the acquisition of vast and populous possessions. It would be idle to pretend that the British people already entertained any definite conception of a tutelary relations.h.i.+p towards the peoples of India, or were animated by purely philanthropic solicitude for the moral welfare of India. But the pa.s.sionate oratory of Fox and Burke and their fervid denunciation of oppression and wrongdoing in India awoke responsive echoes far beyond the walls of Westminster. In 1762, when France had claimed, in the course of the peace negotiations which led to the Treaty of Paris, the rest.i.tution of the possessions she had lost to the East India Company, the British Government pleaded the absence of "any right of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive property of a body corporate." Only eleven years later, the House of Commons pa.s.sed resolutions to the effect that "all acquisitions made under the influence of military force or by treaty with foreign princes do of right belong to the State," and the Commons had the country behind them.

From 1773 onward British public opinion never hesitated to support Parliament in claiming and exercising supreme control over Indian affairs.

A very brief survey of the long series of enactments in which Parliament, a.s.serting the right of "eminent dominion over every British subject in every country," gradually established its authority over Indian administration and moulded it to the shape which it virtually preserved until the Crown a.s.sumed direct sovereignty in 1858, shows how steadily the strengthening of Parliamentary control kept pace with the extension of British dominion in India. The first of these legislative measures was Lord North's Regulating Act, which was pa.s.sed in 1773, just eight years after the East India Company had acquired for the first time the right of revenue and civil administration over vast territories in Bengal and in the Madras "Northern Circars," and thereby taken over the duties of government in respect of a great native population, absolutely alien in race, in religion, and in customs. Lord North's Act did not attack directly the problem of Indian government, but it sought to facilitate its solution by the East India Company itself by reforming its const.i.tution at home, where the jealousies and intrigues of rival factions in the Board of Directors had often reached the dimensions of a public scandal, and by centralising the Company's authority in India, where, as the result of recent developments which had now established the centre of British gravity in Bengal, the post of Governor-General was created for the Bengal Presidency and invested with powers of control over the other Presidencies, Madras and Bombay, which had hitherto enjoyed a status of practical equality. At the same time an attempt was made to strengthen control from home by enjoining upon the Governor-General to keep the Board of Directors in London fully informed and to abide by its instructions, whilst a check was placed upon the executive authority in Bengal by the creation of a Supreme Court in Calcutta from which the present High Court is descended.

The defect of this legislation--a defect inherent to the situation in India itself--was the dualism it created by endeavouring to enforce Parliamentary restraints upon a Company which derived its t.i.tle to government over the greater part of its possessions from the irresponsible despotism of the Moghul emperors. The Company was thus made to serve two masters, and at the same time it remained essentially a great trading corporation whose commercial and fiscal interests were always liable to conflict, and sometimes did conflict, with its duties towards both masters. The total collapse of the Moghul Empire removed before long one of the ambiguities of this situation, but the other endured in a greater or less degree until the East India Company itself disappeared, though every subsequent measure of Indian legislation at home tended to bring the Indian executive more and more fully under the control of the home Government.

Eleven years later Pitt's famous Government of India Act of 1784 marked a very important step forward. Another great war had been brought to an end by the Peace of Versailles in 1783, and whilst at its close we had lost the greater part of our North American Colonies, the genius of Warren Hastings had saved and consolidated British power in India. It was easy to criticise, and if we are to judge in accordance with modern standards, it is doubtless right to condemn some of the devices to which he resorted in the course of the long struggle he was often left to wage with little or no help, and sometimes in the face of active obstruction from those who, at home and in India, should have been the first to support him. Whatever his errors may have been, they were more than atoned for by the cruel persecution to which he was subjected whilst England was harvesting the fruits of his energy and courage. Pitt's Act was in fact the solemn consecration of all his greatest achievements, whilst it brought India into closer and more direct relations.h.i.+p with the Crown. Not the least of the difficulties with which Hastings, the only Governor-General appointed by the East India Company, was confronted arose from frequent opposition in his own Council, where he was merely _primus inter pares_. Pitt took care to provide against the recurrence of similar trouble in the future. But having strengthened the Governor-General's position, he took away the right of appointing him from the Company and transferred it to the Crown. Nor was that all. The Company itself was placed under the effective control of the Crown by the establishment in London of a Board of Control, of which the President was ultimately to develop into the Secretary of State for India, over the Courts of Directors and Proprietors. In substance, if not in form, India was already becoming a Dependency of the British Crown.

Nor was Pitt's Act concerned only with the relations of the Company to the Crown. Its numerous and very drastic provisions for the prevention and punishment of the corruption and oppression which had become rampant amongst the Company's servants after the grant of the _Diwani_ testified to the determination of Parliament, whilst acquiescing in the extension of the British dominion, to uphold and enforce at the same time in the governance of Indian peoples the principle of justice for all to which the British people had gradually fought their way. A strong impetus was thus given to the great reforms already initiated by Clive himself, and still more drastically by Warren Hastings, which, within the framework as far as possible of the old indigenous system of judicial and civil administration, built up on solid foundations of integrity and efficiency a capacious and elastic structure easily extended to the vast territories that were still to pa.s.s under British rule. But then no more than at any later period could the machinery of government have worked smoothly, or even at all, without the co-operation of the Indians themselves, who were recruited in large numbers into the Company's service. Respect for their traditional customs and beliefs, and encouragement, of which Warren Hastings was the first to recognise the importance, to Indian education, though still only on the old lines with which Indians were already familiar, secured the growing loyalty of their co-operation. Then, as now, it was nowhere more effective than in the judicial administration, and side by side with new tribunals, which conformed with Western jurisprudence, the old ones, purified and reorganised, continued to dispense justice in accordance mainly with Hindu and Mahomedan and Indian customary law. With the consolidation of the British Paramount Power Indians learnt to identify it with their ancient conception of the State, and the Company's service came to enjoy the popularity and prestige which had always attached to the service of the State under their indigenous rulers and even under Mahomedan domination.

The renewal of the Company's Charter, which took place at intervals of twenty years, dating from Lord North's Act of 1773, afforded a convenient opportunity for the revision, when required, both of its relations to the Crown and of its methods of government in India. The abrogation of its trading monopoly in 1813 was mainly a concession to opposition at home, quickened by the loss of the European markets which had been closed against Great Britain by Napoleon's continental system, and for the renewal of its Charter the Company had to surrender its trading monopoly. It was the first step towards the abrogation of all its trading privileges twenty years later, when the Company, finally delivered from the temptations which beset a commercial corporation, became for the first time a purely governing body, free to devote its entire energies to the discharge of the immense responsibilities that had devolved upon it. This was, however, only one, though not the least significant of the momentous changes that accompanied the renewal of the Charter in 1833.

The trend of events in Europe after the peace in 1815 had tended to accentuate the profound divergency of views between Great Britain and the leading continental Powers in regard to fundamental principles of government, which, dating back to the seventeenth century, had been arrested at the close of the eighteenth by the exigencies of common action against the excesses of the French Revolution and the inordinate ambition of Napoleon. Under the auspices of the Holy Alliance, the continent of Europe was drifting into blind reaction. The British people, on the contrary, were entering upon a further stage of democratic evolution at home, and, under the influence of new liberal and humanitarian doctrines, their sympathies were going out abroad to every down-trodden nationality that was struggling, whether in Greece or in South America, to throw off the yoke of oppressive despotisms. Their growing sense of responsibility towards alien races which they themselves held in subjection was manifested most conspicuously in the generous movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery in our West Indian Colonies. It could not fail to be extended also to India. Under Lord Hastings British dominion had again rapidly expanded between 1813 and 1823, when he left it firmly established from the extreme south to the Sutlej in the north. Then ten years of internal and external peace had followed in which the educational labours, chiefly in Bengal, of a generation of great missionaries began not only to meet with unexpected reward in India itself, but also to stir the public mind at home to new aspects of a mission which came to be regarded as providential, and to the moral duties which it imposed upon us in return for the material advantages to be derived from political dominion. Some of our great administrators in India were themselves beginning to look forward to a time, however far distant, when we should have made the people of India capable of self-government--not yet, of course, on the lines now contemplated, since even in Great Britain self-government was not established then on a broad popular basis. As early as 1824 Sir Thomas Munro, then Governor of Madras, raised in an official minute the "one great question to which we should look in all our arrangements: What is to be their final result on the character of the people?" The following pa.s.sage in that remarkable doc.u.ment may be commended to our faint-hearted doubters of to-day:

Liberal treatment has always been found the most effectual way of elevating the character of any people, and we may be sure that it will produce a similar effect on that of the people of India. The change will no doubt be slow, but that is the very reason why no time should be lost in commencing the work. We should not be discouraged by difficulties, nor, because little progress may be made in our own time, abandon the enterprise as hopeless, and charge upon the obstinacy and bigotry of the nations the failure occasioned by our own fickleness in not pursuing steadily the only line of conduct on which any hope of success can be reasonably founded. We should make the same allowances for the Hindus as for other nations and consider how slow the progress of improvement has been among the nations of Europe and through what a long course of barbarous ages they had to pa.s.s before they attained their present state. When we compare other countries with England, we usually speak of England as she now is. We scarcely ever think of going back beyond the Reformation, and we are apt to regard every foreign nation as ignorant and uncivilised, whose state of government does not in some degree approximate to our own, even should it be higher than our own was at no distant date.

We should look upon India not as a temporary possession but as one to be maintained permanently until the natives shall in some future age have abandoned most of their superst.i.tions and prejudices and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for themselves and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time shall arrive it will probably be best for both countries that the British control over India should be gradually withdrawn. That the desirable change contemplated may in some after age be effected in India there is no cause to despair. Such a change was at one time in Britain itself at least as hopeless as it is here. When we reflect how much the character of nations has always been influenced by that of governments, and that some, once the most cultivated, have sunk into barbarism, while others, formerly the rudest, have attained the highest point of civilisation, we shall see no reason to doubt that if we pursue steadily the proper measures, we shall in time so far improve the character of our Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect themselves.

It was a splendid vision for a great British administrator to have entertained nearly one hundred years ago, though, with no self-governing Dominions in those days to point a better way, the only possibility that could occur to Munro's mind in the event of its fulfilment was an amicable but complete severance of our connection with India; and it is well to be reminded of the faith that was already in him and not a few other experienced and broad-minded Englishmen in India as well as at home, now that many of us are inclined to contemplate only with scepticism and apprehension an approach to its fulfilment on the new lines which the evolution of the British Empire and of democratic government throughout all its component parts, neither of which could then be foreseen, have in the meantime suggested.

Indians were at that time already employed in large numbers in the Company's services, but only in subordinate posts, for which in most cases their educational backwardness alone fitted them, and only as an act of grace on the part of their British rulers. Parliament had recognised the right of the Indian people to expect from us the benefits of good and honest government--perhaps as a duty which we owed to ourselves as much as to them--but it had not yet risen to a recognition of their right to any active share in the government of their country.

One of the first questions to come before the new Parliament elected after the great Reform Bill was that of the renewal of the Company's charter in 1833. The Parliamentary Committee appointed to inquire and report on the subject struck a new note when it laid distinct stress on the Indian point of view. It admitted frankly that "Indians were alive to the grievance of being excluded from a larger share in the executive government," and proceeded to state that in its opinion ample evidence had been given to show "that such exclusion is not warranted on the score of their own incapacity for business or the want of application or trustworthiness." Accordingly, when the Charter was renewed, Parliament laid it down that "no native of the said Indian territories, nor any natural British-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the Company." This was the first substantial promise given to India that British rule was not to spell merely the unqualified dominion, however beneficent, of alien rulers. It invited the co-operation of the subject race, instead of merely postulating unconditional submission. It heralded at the same time the introduction of Western education, without which the promise would have been empty.

The problem of Indian education had occupied the minds of far-sighted Englishmen from the days of Warren Hastings, who had been the first to provide out of the Company's funds for the maintenance of indigenous educational inst.i.tutions, and it had been definitely provided in the renewal of the Charter in 1813 that the Company should set aside a certain portion of its revenues to be spent annually upon education. But long delays had been caused by an interminable and fierce controversy over the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the diffusion of education. The champions of English were much encouraged by the immediate success which attended the opening of an English school in Calcutta in 1830 by Dr. Alexander Duff, a great missionary who was convinced that English education could alone win over India to Christianity, and Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7, 1835, disfigured as it is by the quite unmerited and ignorant scorn which he poured out on Oriental learning with his customary self-confidence, finally turned the scales in favour of the adoption of English as essential to the spread of Western education. One of the immediate objects in view--and incidentally as a measure of economy--was undoubtedly the training of Indians, and in much larger numbers, for the more efficient performance of the work allotted to them in the administrative and judicial services of the Company. But if Macaulay was quite wrong in imagining that Western education would a.s.similate Indians to Englishmen in everything but their complexions, he was by no means blind to the larger implications of the new departure he was advocating.

Like other great Englishmen of his day, he believed that good government and, still less, mere dominion were not the only ends to which our efforts should be directed. "It may be," he declared, "that the public mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge they may, in some future age, demand European inst.i.tutions. Whether such a day will ever come, I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or r.e.t.a.r.d it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history."

Peace and law and order British rule had restored to India, and its foremost purpose henceforth, as set forth by Lord William Bentinck, a great Governor-General, imbued with the progressive spirit of the best Englishmen in India, to which Parliament had given a fresh impetus, was to be the diffusion of Western education. "The great object of the British Government," he declared, "ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone."

India seemed for the next twenty years to respond enthusiastically to the new call. Not only were the new Government schools as well as the older missionary schools thronged with Indian students who displayed no less intelligence than industry in the acquisition of Western learning, but the rapid a.s.similation of Western ideas amongst the upper cla.s.ses, especially in Bengal, was reflected in the social and religious reform movements initiated by Western-educated Indians touched with the spirit of the West. Already in 1829 Lord William Bentinck had been supported by a considerable body of Indian public opinion in prohibiting the barbarous custom of _Sati_, _i.e._ the self-immolation of Hindu widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Government, however, rightly felt that, except in regard to practices of which it could not tolerate the continuance without surrendering the principles of humanity for which it stood, it was for the Indians themselves and not for their alien rulers to take the lead in bringing their religious and social customs and beliefs into harmony with Western standards. Nor was there any lack of Indians to give their countrymen that lead--amongst them several high-caste Brahmans, Ram Mohun Roy first and foremost. They were resolved to cleanse Hinduism of the superst.i.tious and idolatrous impurities which, as they believed, were only morbid growths on the pure kernel of Hindu philosophy. The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all these reform movements, professed even to reconcile Hinduism with theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any personal G.o.d. British administrators watched and fostered the moral and intellectual progress of India with increasing confidence in the results of Western education, and none with more conviction than Lord Dalhousie, a high-minded and dour Scotsman, who was the last Governor-General to serve out his time under the East India Company. Other aspects of his policy may have been less wise. The extension of British rule to the Punjab became inevitable after a Sikh rising compelled him to complete what his predecessor, Lord Hardinge, had begun, and break once and for all the aggressive power of the Sikh Confederacy; but the rigorous application to the native States of the doctrine of lapse or escheat whenever the ruler died without a recognised heir, and the forcible annexation of the kingdom of Oudh as a penalty incurred by the sins, however gross, of the reigning dynasty have been often condemned as grave errors of judgment. They were not, in any case, errors that can be ascribed to the l.u.s.t of mere dominion. Dalhousie was convinced that Indian progress would always be hampered by the continuance of native administration under such rulers as the kings of Oudh. If he was bent on extending the area of British dominion, it was in order to extend the area within which Britain was to be free to discharge her civilising mission without let or hindrance, and not least by the furtherance of education. If he took a legitimate pride in the introduction into India under his auspices of the two great discoveries of applied science which were just beginning to revolutionise the Western world, viz. railways and telegraphs, together with unified postage, it was because he regarded them as powerful instruments of education. The impulse given by him to public instruction even in the new provinces recently brought under British control prepared the way for the great educational measures of 1854 which marked a tremendous stride forward on the road upon which Macaulay's Minute had started India just two decades before.

It was to Dalhousie that Sir Charles Wood addressed his memorable despatch which contained, as the Governor-General frankly acknowledged, "a scheme of education for all India far wider and more comprehensive than the local or Supreme Governments could have ventured to suggest."

Its main features were the establishment of a department of Public Instruction in every province to emphasise the importance attached by Government to the educational purpose of British rule; the creation of Universities in each of the three Presidency cities, and of Government colleges of a higher grade, and training colleges for teachers, and the bestowal of grants-in-aid on private educational inst.i.tutions. The claims of vernacular education were not forgotten, nor the vital importance of promoting female education, by which "a far greater proportional impulse is imported to the educational and moral tone of the people than by the education of men." The despatch mapped out a really national system of education worthy of the faith which the British generation of that day had in the establishment of an intellectual and spiritual communion between India and the West. The initial steps immediately taken by Dalhousie to carry the provisions of that despatch into execution are enumerated in the masterly Report drawn up by him on his way home in 1856, reviewing every aspect of his administration during his eight years' tenure of office--an administration which virtually closed, and not unworthily, perhaps the n.o.blest period of British rule in India, when men of the intellectual and moral elevation of Bentinck and Munro and Metcalfe and Elphinstone and Thomason, and Dalhousie himself, humbly but firmly believed that in trying to found "British greatness on Indian happiness" they were carrying out the mission which it had pleased Providence to entrust to the British people. Dalhousie's parting hope and prayer, when he left India, broken in health but not in spirit, after eight years of intensely strenuous service, was that "in all time to come these reports from the Presidencies and provinces under our rule may form in each successive year a happy record of peace, prosperity, and progress." His immediate successor, Lord Canning, was moved to utter some strangely prophetic words before he left England: "I wish for a peaceful term of office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, no larger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin." Within less than a year the cloud arose and burst, and he had to face the outbreak of the Mutiny and see all the foundations of co-operation between Indians and British rudely shaken, which a broad and liberal policy of "peace, prosperity, and progress" seemed to have so well and truly laid.

CHAPTER V

THE MUTINY AND FIFTY YEARS AFTER

Many different causes, much more clearly apprehended to-day than at the time, contributed to provoke the great storm which burst over India in 1857. On the surface it was a military and mainly Mahomedan insurrection, but it was far more than that. It was a violent upheaval not so much against the political supremacy of Britain as against the whole new order of things which she was importing into India. The greased cartridges would not have sufficed to provoke such an explosion, nor would even Mahomedans, let alone Hindus, have rallied round a phantom King of Delhi in mere revenge for the annexation of Oudh or the enforcement of the doctrine of lapse. The cry of "Islam in danger" was quick to stir the Mahomedans, but the brains that engineered and directed the Mutiny were Hindu, and the Mutiny itself was the counter-revolution arraying in battle against the intellectual and moral as well as against the material and military forces of Western civilisation that was slowly but steadily revolutionising India, all the grievances and all the fears, all the racial and religious antagonism and bitterness aroused by the disintegration under its impact of ancient social and religious systems. Western education was to yield other fruits later on, but before the Mutiny it was rapidly familiarising the mind of India with Western ideals which imperilled not only the wors.h.i.+p of the old G.o.ds but also the wors.h.i.+p of the Brahman as their mouthpiece and "the guardian of the treasury of civil and religious duties."

Modern schools and colleges threatened to undermine his ascendancy just as Western compet.i.tion had by more dubious methods undermined Indian domestic industries. No man's caste was said to be safe against the hidden defilement of all the strange inventions imported from beyond the seas. Prophecy, vague but persuasive, hinted that British rule, which dated in the Indian mind from the battle of Pla.s.sey in 1757, was doomed not to outlive its centenary. All the vested interests connected with the old order of things in the religious as well as in the political domain felt the ground swaying under their feet, and the peril with which they were confronted came not only from their alien rulers but from their own countrymen, often of their own caste and race, who had fallen into the snares and pitfalls of an alien civilisation. The spirit of fierce reaction that lay behind the Mutiny stands nowhere more frankly revealed than in the _History of the War of Independence of 1857_, written by Vinayak Savarkar, one of the most brilliant apostles of a later school of revolt, who, as a pious Hindu, concludes his version of the Cawnpore ma.s.sacre with the prayer that "Mother Ganges, who drank that day of the blood of Europeans, may drink her fill of it again."

The revolt failed except in one respect. It failed as a military movement. It had appealed to the sword and it perished by the sword. But it is well to remember that the struggle, which was severe, would have been, to say the least, far more severe and protracted had not a large part of the Indian army remained staunch to the _Raj_, and had not Indian troops stood, as they had stood throughout all our previous fighting in India, shoulder to shoulder with British troops on the ridge at Delhi and in the relief of Lucknow. It failed equally as a political movement, for it never spread beyond a relatively narrow area in Upper and Central India. The vast majority of the Indian people and princes never even wavered. British rule pa.s.sed through a trial by fire and it emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities.

The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after Pla.s.sey that the Crown should a.s.sume direct sovereignty over the whole of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing too heavy for the mere trading corporation that the East India Company then still was. The Company had long ceased to be a mere trading corporation. Transformed into a great agency of government and administration, it had risen not unworthily to its immense responsibilities. But the time had come for the final step. The Company disappeared and the Crown a.s.sumed full and sole responsibility for the government and administration of India. The change was in effect more formal than real. The Governor-General came to be known as the Viceroy, and the Secretary of State in Council took the place of the old President of the Board of Control. But the system remained as before one of paternal despotism in India, to be tempered still by the control of Parliament at home.

Only in one respect had the reactionary forces at the back of the Mutiny scored some success. The Proclamation issued by Queen Victoria on her a.s.sumption of "the government of the territories in India heretofore administered in trust for us by the Honourable East India Company," was a solemn and earnest renewal of all the pledges already given to the princes and people of India. It emphasised the determination of the Crown to abstain from all interference with their religious belief or wors.h.i.+p. It reiterated the a.s.surance that "as far as may be," her subjects "of whatever race or creed" would be freely and impartially admitted to offices in the service of the Crown, "the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, abi