March 1, 1884.
Bombay
My dear friend Lord Randoph Churchill,
Today looking back at India gradually receding away, I was overwhelmed with feelings of hopes and fear. Although much has been accomplished, I felt the same vague sense of helplessness like exactly two years ago upon leaving Egypt. So I wanted to write to you now, even though I will only be able to post it when our ship arrives in Paris where Anne and I will stop for a few days..
From an aesthetic point of view nothing can be more seductive to a stranger from the West, or more surprising, than the spectacle of Hindu worship at one of these ancient shrines—the processions of women to some lonely grove by the water-side on holiday afternoons with their offerings of rice and flowers, the old-world music of pipe and tabour, the priests, the incense, the painted statues of the immortal gods, the lighted fire, the joyous sacrifices consumed with laughter by the worshippers. No one can see this without emotion, nor, again, witness the gatherings of tens of thousands clothed in white in the great temples of Southern India for the yearly festivals, and not acknowledge the wonderful continuity of thought which unites modern India with its European kindred of pre-Christian days.
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| Meenakshi Temple, Madura |
The worship of idols here is a reality such as untravelled Englishmen know only from their classics. The temples of Madura and Seringam are more wonderful and imposing in their structure than all the edifices of Europe put together, and the special interest is that they are not dead things. The buyers and the sellers still ply their trade in the porticoes, the birds have their nests beneath the eaves. There are sacred elephants and sacred apes. The priests chaunt still round lighted braziers. The brazen bulls are anointed each festival day with oil, the foreheads of the worshippers with ochre. There is a scent of flowers and incense, and the business of religion goes on continuous from old time, perhaps a little slacker, on account of the increasing poverty of the people, but not less methodically, or as a living part of men’s daily existence.
When I had seen Madura I felt that I had at last seen a temple of Babylon in all its glory, and understood what the worship of Apis might have been in Egypt. This worship of the gods—not any theological or moral teaching—is the foundation of the Hindu religion, and what is still its distinguishing feature.
Because of us the English, the friendly bond between Egypt and India through the exchange of trade, religion and education over centuries have now been replaced by an ugly tie of Great Powers politics. With its shortcut to India — the lynch pin of the British Empire – by 4000 miles, the Suez Canal’s opening 15 years ago sealed the fate for Egypt. After Disraeli, with a massive loan from his friend Lionel de Rothschild, snapped up the bankrupt Khedive Isma'il’s shares for Britain in 1875, Gladstone made the final break from thirteen years of compromise with France and pretended respect for the Ottoman Sultan by sending troops under the pretext to suppress Urabi’s uprising and began the bombardment of Alexandria and occupation.
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| Alexandria after bombardment |
All of this, you are already aware of, but I also would like to inform you of my new status as a persona non grata in Egypt due to the Khedive's wrath, and also to add that all Muslim Indians – as well as many fair-minded Hindus – are angry that native soldiers were sent to fight another Muslim country in order that the English maintains tight control over India.
Whatever support they may have given to the native deployment in the Afghan War against the Russians whom they saw as the worst enemy of Islam after the Russo-Turkish War just a few years earlier has entirely evaporated. After French annexation of Tunisia and our occupation of Egypt, their sentiments have turned against all white people in general. The rise of the Mahdi in the Sudan as the messianic savior of the new Islamic century is giving them great hope, like Urabi did before in Egypt.
The brave General Gordon must have been crazy to agree to be sent to evacuate Khartoum. If he had stuck with Leopold’s offer to take charge of his Congo or the Cape Colony’s commander position, he and the African natives would be much better off. At least, he will certainly be fairer to them than the megalomaniac Stanley or our own people at the Cape.
The Belgian King’s intention to plunder and exploit the Congo, as I suspected, is now naked for all to see. But other empires are hardly more modest but for a few layers of clothes — Livingstone’s three C’s of Christianity, Civilization and Commerce — that only the naivest would fail to see through. Such modernity as the railways, steam engines, civil services or even education are not for the benefits of the natives but to make the theft of their wealth quicker and more efficient.
This is no less true of our Cape Colony and Natal. How shameful it is for us to have waged war against the Zulus and the Boers. Southern Africa will again bring graver troubles if our governors there cannot rein in private greed and fear of being outdone by the other powers especially Germany.
But in term of plunder, India have had it worse than most — if not the worst. No one accustomed to Eastern travel can fail to see how poor the Indian peasant is. I hope you will take a journey here to see with your own eyes.
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| The glorified image of British Empire in 1886 |
Things are particularly dire in the Deccan whose peasantry is perhaps the poorest in the world. Nothing of the system of finance is changed, nothing in the economy which favors English trade and English speculation at the expense of India’s native industries… At any rate there is the same drain of India’s food to alien mouths. Endemic famine and endemic plague, with British India’s universal bondage to the village usurer, are facts no official statistics of prosperity can explain away.
I remembers the complaints heard in every British Deccan village I visited of poverty — similar to what I was accustomed in Syria and Egypt —complaints of over-taxation of the country, of increase and inequalities of tax assessment, of the tyranny of local overseers charged with levying the rates, complaints of the forest laws, of the decrease of the stock of working cattle, of their deterioration through the price of salt, of universal debt to the usurers. The only complaints conspicuous from their absence were those relating to insecurity of life and to conscription, the two great evils of Western Asia.
In former days, though his land assessment or rent was very likely as high as now, it was mitigated for him by custom and by certain privileges which our system of administration has deprived him of. In bad seasons when his crop was poor he enjoyed remissions which are very seldom granted now. The lord of the land to whom he paid his rent lived within reach of him, and in days of distress might be cajoled into pity or possibly frightened into moderation.
But the landlord now is a formless thing—the Government—which no tears can reach. It is represented only by a succession of changing agents, strangers to the country, ignorant of the people and their wants, and whose names the peasants rarely learn to know. This is a constant complaint in their mouths, and the condition of British India under the modern system is a striking instance of the evils of absentee ownership —not dissimilar to the Irish disgruntle and demand for home rule that Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party are loudly echoing in Parliament. I recently learned that for years Florence Nightingale had been trying to persuade Gladstone to take as strong a leadership role on India as he had on Ireland, even to lead a new liberal approach to India as he had to Ireland, but it did not seem to move him.
It is, however, not merely the amount of tax which weighs upon these Deccan peasants, nor merely the inelasticity of its collection. There are other causes of poverty directly due to the British connection which have had a far more disastrous effect upon the prosperity of the country than any taxation has produced. Under the ancient system of native rule, and during the early days of the East India Company, the agricultural population was not wholly dependent on agriculture. It had certain home industries which employed its leisure during those seasons of the year when labor in the fields was useless. There was the carrying trade which could be engaged in with the bullocks used at other times for plowing. There was peddling of ghee and other homemade wares.
And above all there was the weaving industry, which employed the women, and the men too during their idle time, and helped them to pay their rent. But modern improvements and modern legislation have altered all this. The railroads have very much destroyed the carrying trade; native industries have been supplanted by foreign ones, and the introduction of machinery and of foreign cottons has broken up every handloom in the country. The peasantry, therefore, is reduced to the simple labor of his fields, and this does not suffice him any longer to live and to pay his taxes — therefore he starves.
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| The faces of reality in the British Empire: victims of the Great Famine of 1876-8 in India |
Like most Indians, I feel sympathy for Lord Ripon who took the helm four years ago with the intention to right the wrongs committed by English citizens against natives. However, now that his Ilbert Bill is so fiercely opposed by the Civil Servants and the indigo planters who are averse to being tried under Indian judges, he is now reviled by the public back home and abandoned by Whitehall. At times, it seems his only friend left is Nightingale who have done much work trying to correct the mismanagement which may have caused a million deaths during the Great Famine not long ago. I heard she wrote to Her Majesty requesting that Her Majesty extend her protection to all her subjects as equal, true to her Proclamation of 1858 upon being crowned as the Empress of India. The Indians on their part, although acknowledged Lord Ripon’s efforts, now realized how powerless he is when the whole system and virtually all the covenanted Civil Services work to undermine him.
The opposition to the Bill, however, is just one manifestation of a broader ill. The English in India have for years now taken the position of the alien rulers affecting airs of race superiority over the natives, and destroyed any possibility of pleasant social relations where those concerned meet on an equal human footing, and of all inequalities the inequality of race is the most unsocial.
They have entirely assumed the revolting attitude of the white races towards their fellow men of other hue and lineage, and in their avowed conduct towards them. The old religious teaching, Christianity’s best claim to the world’s regard, was that all men were brothers at least in the sight of God, but this has given place to a pseudo-scientific doctrine of the fundamental inequalities of the humankind which, true as a statement of fact, has been exaggerated and made political use of to excuse white selfishness and white exclusiveness, and to reinforce the white man’s pretension of rightful dominion over the non-white world at large.
Although I was friend with the late Gobineau, I do not subscribe to his Aryan theory now quite popular in Europe, especially in Germany. Having read Darwin’s works, I have absolutely no doubt that nothing really of the sort exists under the world’s natural law. Darwin’s rule of the “Struggle of Nature” and the “Survival of the fittest” included no assertion of superiority in one race rather than another, giving it dominion over the rest, nor has any species in the world’s natural history prevailed in this way. Its survival has been, not by its greater strength or even by its greater cunning, but by its better adaptability to its local surroundings.
Yet it is common to hear Darwin quoted as an authority favorable to imperial domination and race intolerance in lands unsuited to European survival, and it is precisely under conditions such as we find in India that these arguments find most favor with Englishmen. As a rule, the English in the East, missionaries apart, are not much of Christians, and their tendency is to become less and less so in the progress of modern ideas.
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| Wilfrid Scawen and Anne Blunt |
Anne and I had an extremely unpleasant experience of this myself when we were leaving Patna by train on Jan 8. We were attended to the station by our host and friend, with some thirty others. As the train was starting, a Scotch doctor threatened our friends with his stick if they remained near his carriage window. I jumped at him, of course, and after calling him a blackguard for his conduct, gave him in charge at the next station. The railway authorities tried hard to screen him, and proposed to me to compromise the matter, but I insisted on having his name, and after about ten minutes he produced his card. So I have written a strong letter to Lord Ripon, warning him of the state of things, and of the bitterness of native feeling in consequence of their habitual ill treatment by the English.
Things have gone so far that any measure, short of placing the administration of the country wholly into native hands, by abolishing the covenanted Civil Service as a privileged body and reducing the Europeans employed to the position of well-paid servants not masters, would induce Englishmen to forgo their pretension of exclusiveness, and bring them down to the level of their merits, whatever these might be, as useful paid employees.
Most Englishmen are of the ignorant opinion that Indians are not ready for self-rule. But I beg to differ. Over the past few months since my arrival, I have met so many native brilliant minds that are far superior than those who currently rule them.
Thanks to the letters of introduction from Jemal-ed-Din who is universally respected here, we have been embraced by both Muslims and Hindus from the South to the North. We were most impressed to participate in the Indian National Conference which clearly showed their readiness for their own Parliament. Although it could not have been easy, Surendranath Banerjee and Anandamohan Bose had made great progress since their co-founding of the Indian National Association some years ago. They spoke most eloquently of the tyranny of the British rule — not only on the Ilbert Bill, but also the salt tax, the land tax, the lack of education, the destruction of their livelihood. This brings to mind the irony I heard from a young Indian, “Why did they teach us to read about liberty and justice and self-government, if after all we are to have none of these things?’
The indignation is palpable. During the Egyptian War, the natives looked up to Urabi. Now they look to the Mahdi. It is clear that they would welcome any deliverer here, Russian or French, or from the Devil.
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| Lucknow during Indian Mutiny of 1857 |
One may question Gordon’s judgement that theAfghan War and Russian threat to India was a mistake. But there’s no doubt that undesirable policies here cannot be changed despite Lord Ripon’s best intentions, because of the resistance to change entrenched in the establishment. Therefore, in my opinion, his resignation after only three working days as the new Viceroy’s Private Secretary was smart. His ominous warning not long ago still rings in my ears. “You may do what you will. It will be of no use. India will never be reformed until there has been there a new revolt.” As the Indian Mutiny of 1857 – or, as some natives call it, the Indian War of Independence – fueled the Fenians to wreak havoc in Ireland or raid on Canada, India will soon again fight us as will Ireland.
I will be back in London in a few weeks. Hope to have a meeting with you to discuss more on Egypt and India as soon as I arrive.
With sincere regards,
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
NEXT on 1884
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