CHAPTER 58
Declining Fertility of the Soil—Popular Notion of the Cause.
On the 18th[1] we came on ten miles to Sāhar, over a plain of poor soil, carelessly cultivated, and without either manure or irrigation. Major Godby left us at Govardhan to return to Agra. He would have gone on with us to Delhi; but having the command of his regiment, and being a zealous officer, he did not like to leave it so long during the exercising season. We felt much the loss of his society. He is a man of great observation and practical good sense; has an infinite fund of good humour, and a cheerfulness of temperament that never seems to flag—a more agreeable companion I have never met. The villages in these parts are literally crowded with peafowl. I counted no less than forty-six feeding close by among the houses of one hamlet on the road, all wild, or rather unappropriated, for they seemed on the best possible terms with the inhabitants. At Sāhar our water was drawn from wells eighty feet deep, and this is said to be the ordinary depth from which water is drawn; consequently irrigation is too expensive to be common. It is confined almost exclusively to small patches of garden cultivation in the vicinity of villages.
On the 14th we came on sixteen miles to Kosī, for the most part over a poor soil badly cultivated, and almost exclusively devoted to autumn crops, of which cotton is the principal. I lost the road in the morning before daylight,[2] and the trooper, who usually rode with me, had not come up. I got an old landholder from one of the villages to walk on with me a mile, and put me in the right road. I asked him what had been the state of the country under the former government of the Jāts and Marāthās, and was told that the greater part was a wild jungle. 'I remember,' said the old man, 'when you could not have got out of the road hereabouts without a good deal of risk. I could not have ventured a hundred yards from the village without the chance of having my clothes stripped off my back. Now the whole face of the country is under cultivation, and the roads are safe; formerly the governments kept no faith with their landholders and cultivators, exacting ten rupees where they had bargained for five, whenever they found the crops good; but, in spite of all this "zulm"' (oppression), said the old man, 'there was then more "barkat" (blessings from above) than now. The lands yielded more returns to the cultivator, and he could maintain his little family better upon five acres than he can now upon ten.'
'To what, my old friend, do you attribute this very unfavourable change in the productive powers of your soil?'
'A man cannot, sir, venture to tell the truth at all times, and in all places,' said he.
'You may tell it now with safety, my good old friend; I am a mere traveller ("musafir") going to the hills in search of health, from the valley of the Nerbudda, where the people have been suffering much from blight, and are much perplexed in their endeavour to find a cause.'
'Here, sir, we all attribute these evils to the dreadful System of perjury, which the practices of your judicial courts have brought among the people. You are perpetually putting the Ganges water into the hands of the Hindoos, and the Korān into those of Muhammadans; and all kinds of lies are every day told upon them. God Almighty can stand this no longer; and the lands have ceased to be blessed with that fertility which they had before this sad practice began. This, sir, is almost the only fault we have, any of us, to find with your government; men, by this System of perjury, are able to cheat each other out of their rights, and bring down sterility upon the land, by which the innocent are made to suffer for the guilty.'
On reaching our tents, I asked a respectable farmer, who came to pay his respects to the Commissioner of the division, Mr. Fraser, what he thought of the matter, telling him what I had heard from my old friend on the road. 'The diminished fertility is,' said he, 'owing no doubt to the want of those salutary fallows which the fields got under former governments, when invasions and civil wars were things of common occurrence, and kept at least two-thirds of the land waste; but there is, on the other hand, no doubt that you have encouraged perjury a good deal in your courts of justice; and this perjury must have some effect in depriving the land of the blessing of God.[3] Every man now, who has a cause in your civil courts, seems to think it necessary either to swear falsely himself, or to get others to do it for him. The European gentlemen, no doubt, do all they can to secure every man his right, but, surrounded as they are by perjured witnesses, and corrupt native officers, they commonly labour in the dark.'
Much of truth is to be found among the village communities of India, where they have been carefully maintained, if people will go among them to seek it. Here, as almost everywhere else, truth is the result of self-government, whether arising from choice, under municipal institutions, or necessity, under despotism and anarchy; self-government produces self-esteem and pride of character.
Close to our tents we found the people at work, irrigating their fields from several wells, whose waters were all brackish. The crops watered from these wells were admirable—likely to yield at least fifteen returns of the seed. Wherever we go, we find the signs of a great government passed away—signs that must tend to keep alive the recollections, and exalt the ideas of it in the minds of the people. Beyond the boundary of our military and civil stations we find as yet few indications of our reign or character, to link us with the affections of the people. There is hardly anything to indicate our existence as a people or a government in this country; and it is melancholy to think that in the wide extent of country over which I have travelled there should be so few signs of that superiority in science and arts which we boast of, and really do possess, and ought to make conducive to the welfare and happiness of the people in every part of our dominions. The people and the face of the country are just what they might have been had they been governed by police officers and tax-gatherers from the Sandwich Islands, capable of securing life, property, and character, and levying honestly the means of maintaining the establishments requisite for the purpose.[4] Some time after the journey here described, in the early part of November, after a heavy fall of rain, I was driving alone in my buggy from Garhmuktesar on the Ganges to Meerut. The roads were very bad, the stage a double one, and my horse became tired, and unable to go on.[5] I got out at a small village to give him a little rest and food; and sat down, under the shade of one old tree, upon the trunk of another that the storm had blown down, while my groom, the only servant I had with me, rubbed down and baited my horse. I called for some parched gram from the same shop which supplied my horse, and got a draught of good water, drawn from the well by an old woman in a brass jug lent to me for the purpose by the shopkeeper.[6]
While I sat contentedly and happily stripping my parched gram of its shell, and eating it grain by grain, the farmer, or head landholder of the village, a sturdy old Rājpūt, came up and sat himself, without any ceremony, down by my side, to have a little conversation. To one of the dignitaries of the land, in whose presence the aristocracy are alone entitled to chairs, this easy familiarity on the part of a poor farmer seems at first somewhat strange and unaccountable; he is afraid that the man intends to offer him some indignity, or, what is still worse, mistakes him for something less than the dignitary. The following dialogue took place.
'You are a Rājpūt, and a "zamīndār"?' (landholder).
'Yes; I am the head landholder of this village.'
'Can you tell me how that village in the distance is elevated above the ground? Is it from the debris of old villages, or from a rock underneath?'
'It is from the debris of old villages. That is the original seat of all the Rājpūts around; we all trace our descent from the founders of that village who built and peopled it many centuries ago.'
'And you have gone on subdividing your inheritances here, as elsewhere, no doubt, till you have hardly any of you anything to eat?'
'True, we have hardy any of us enough to eat; but that is the fault of the Government, that does not leave us enough, that takes from us as much when the season is bad as when it is good.'[7]
'But your assessment has not been increased, has it?' 'No, we have concluded a settlement for twenty years upon the same footing as formerly.'
'And if the sky were to shower down upon you pearls and diamonds, instead of water, the Government would never demand more from you than the rate fixed upon?'
'No.'
'Then why should you expect remissions in the bad seasons?'
'It cannot be disputed that the "barkat" (blessing from above) is less under you than it used to be formerly, and that the lands yield less to our labour.'
'True, my old friend, but do you know the reason why?'
'No.'
'Then I will tell you. Forty or fifty years ago, in what you call the times of the "barkat" (blessing from above), the cavalry of Sikh freebooters from the Panjāb used to sweep over this fine plain, in which stands the said village from which you are all descended; and to massacre the whole population of some villages, and a certain portion of that of every other village; and the lands of those killed used to be waste for want of cultivators. Is not this all true?'
'Yes, quite true.'
'And the fine groves which had been planted over the plain by your ancestors, as they separated from the great parent stock, and formed independent villages and hamlets for themselves, were all swept away and destroyed by the same hordes of freebooters, from whom your poor imbecile emperors, cooped up in yonder large city of Delhi, were utterly unable to defend you?'
'Quite true,' said the old man with a sigh. 'I remember when all this fine plain was as thickly studded with fine groves of mango- trees as Rohilkhand, or any other part of India.'
'You know that the land requires rest from labour, as well as men and bullocks, and that, if you go on sowing wheat and other exhausting crops, it will go on yielding less and less returns, and at last not be worth the tilling?'
'Quite well.'
'Then why do you not give the land rest by leaving it longer fallow, or by a more frequent alternation of crops relieve it?'
'Because we have now increased so much that we should not get enough to eat were we to leave it to fallow; and unless we tilled it with exhausting crops we should not get the means of paying our rents to the Government.'
'The Sikh hordes in former days prevented this; they killed off a certain portion of your families, and gave the land the rest which you now refuse it. When you had exhausted one part, you found another recovered by a long fallow, so that you had better returns; but now that we neither kill you, nor suffer you to be killed by others, you have brought all the cultivable lands into tillage; and under the old System of cropping to exhaustion, it is not surprising that they yield you less returns.'[8]
By this time we had a crowd of people seated around us upon the ground, as I went on munching my parched gram, and talking to the old patriarch.
They all laughed at the old man at the conclusion of my last speech, and he confessed I was right.
'This is all true, sir, but still your Government is not considerate; it goes on taking kingdom after kingdom, and adding to its dominions without diminishing the burden upon us, its old subjects. Here you have had armies away taking Afghanistan, but we shall not have one rupee the less to pay.'[9]
'True, my friend, nor would you demand a rupee less from those honest cultivators around us, if we were to leave you all your lands untaxed. You complain of the Government—they complain of you.' (Here the circle around us laughed at the old man again.) 'Nor would you subdivide the lands the less for having it rent-free; on the contrary, it would be every generation subdivided the more, inasmuch as there would be more of local ties, and a greater disinclination of families to separate and seek service abroad.'
'True, sir, very true—that is, no doubt, a very great evil.'
'And you know it is not an evil produced by us, but one arising out of your own laws of inheritance. You have heard, no doubt, that with us the eldest son gets the whole of the land, and the younger sons all go out in search of service, with such share as they can get of the other property of their father?'
'Yes, sir; but when shall we get service?—you have none to give us. I would serve to-morrow if you would take me as a soldier,' said he, stroking his white whiskers.
The crowd laughed heartily; and some wag observed that I should perhaps think him too old.
'Well,' said the old man, smiling, 'the gentleman himself is not very young, and yet I dare say he is a good servant of his Government.'
This was paying me off for making the people laugh at his expense.
'True, my old friend,' said I, 'but I began to serve when I was young, and have been long learning.'
'Very well,' said the old man, 'but I should be glad to serve the rest of my life upon a less salary than you got when you began to learn.'
'Well, my friend, you complain of our Government; but you must acknowledge that we do all we can to protect you, though it is true that we are often acting in the dark.'
'Often, sir? you are always acting in the dark; you, hardly any of you, know anything of what your revenue and police officers are doing; there is no justice or redress to be got without paying for it, and it is not often that those who pay can get it.'
'True, my old friend, that is bad all over the world. You cannot presume to ask anything even from the Deity Himself, without paying the priest who officiates in His temples; and if you should, you would none of you hope to get from your Deity what you asked for.'
Here the crowd laughed again, and one of them said that 'there was this certainly to be said for our Government, that the European gentlemen themselves never took bribes, whatever those under them might do'.
'You must not be too sure of that, neither. Did not the Lāl Bībī, the Red Lady, get a bribe for soliciting the judge, her husband, to let go Amīr Singh, who had been confined in jail?'
'How did this take place?'
'About three years ago Amīr Singh was sentenced to imprisonment, and his friends spent a great deal of money in bribes to the native officers of the court, but all in vain. At last they were recommended to give a handsome present to the Red Lady. They did so, and Amīr Singh was released.'
'But did they give the present into the lady's own hand?'
'No, they gave it to one of her women.'
'And how do you know that she ever gave it to her mistress, or that her mistress ever heard of the transaction?'
'She might certainly have been acting without her mistress' knowledge; but the popular belief is that the Lāl Bībī got the present.'
I then told the story of the affair at Jubbulpore, when Mrs. Smith's name had been used for a similar purpose, and the people around us were all highly amused; and the old man's opinion of the transaction with the Red Lady evidently underwent a change.[10]
We became good friends, and the old man begged me to have my tents, which he supposed were coming up, pitched among them, that he might have an opportunity of showing that he was not a bad subject, though he grumbled against the Government.
The next day at Meerut I got a visit from the chief native judge, whose son, a talented youth, is in my office. Among other things, I asked him whether it might not be possible to improve the character of the police by increasing the salaries of the officers, and mentioned my conversation with the landholder.
'Never, sir,' said the old gentleman; 'the man that now gets twenty-five rupees a month is contented with making perhaps fifty or seventy-five more; and the people subject to his authority pay him accordingly. Give him a hundred, sir, and he will put a shawl over his shoulders, and the poor people will be obliged to pay him at a rate that will make up his income to four hundred. You will only alter his style of living, and make him a greater burthen to the people. He will always take as long as he thinks he can with impunity.'
'But do you not think that when people see a man adequately paid by the Government they will the more readily complain of any attempt at unauthorized exactions?'
'Not a bit, sir, as long as they see the same difficulties in the way of prosecuting him to conviction. In the administration of civil justice' (the old gentleman is a civil judge), 'you may occasionally see your way, and understand what is doing; but in revenue and police you never have seen it in India, and never will, I think. The officers you employ will all add to their incomes by unauthorized means; and the lower these incomes, the less their pretensions, and the less the populace have to pay.'[11]
Notes:
1. January, 1836.
2. The old Anglo-Indian rose much earlier than his successor of the present day commonly does.
3. For other popular explanations of the alleged decrease in fertility of the soil, see ante, Chapter 27, where three explanations are offered, namely, the eating of beef, the prevalence of adultery, and the impiety of surveys.
4. The inapplicability of these observations of the author to the present time is a good measure of the material progress of India since his day. The Ganges Canal, the bridges over the Indus, Ganges, and other great rivers, and numberless engineering works throughout the empire, are permanent witnesses to the scientific superiority of the ruling race. Buildings which can claim any high degree of architectural excellence are, unfortunately, still rare, but the public edifices of Bombay will not suffer by comparison with those of most capital cities, and for some years past, considerable attention has been paid to architecture as an art. A great architectural experiment is in progress at the new official capital of Delhi (1914).
5. The road is now an excellent one.
6. Parched gram, or chick-pea, is commonly used by Indian travellers as a convenient and readily portable form of food. The 'brass jug' lent to the author could be purified by fire after his use of it.
7. Growls of this kind must not be interpreted too literally. Any village landholder, if encouraged, would grumble in the same strain.
8. This is the permanent difficulty of Indian revenue administration, which no Government measures can seriously diminish.
9. The mission to Kabul, under Captain Alexander Burnes, was not dispatched till September, 1837, and troops did not assemble before the conclusion of the treaty with the Sikhs in June, 1838. The army crossed the Indus in January, 1839. The conversation in the text is stated to have taken place 'some time after the journey herein described', and must, apparently, be dated in November, 1839. The author was in the North-Western Provinces in that year.
10. Some of Mrs. Smith's suitors entered into a combination to defraud a suitor in his court of a large sum of money, which he was to pay to Mrs. Smith as she walked in the garden. A dancing girl from the town of Jubbulpore was made to represent Mrs. Smith, and a suit of Mrs. Smith's clothes was borrowed for her from the washerman. The butler took the suitor to the garden, and introduced him to the supposed Mrs. Smith, who received him very graciously, and condescended to accept his offer of five thousand rupees in gold mohurs. The plot was afterwards discovered, and the old butler, washerman, and all, were sentenced to work in a rope on the roads. [W. H. S.]
Penal labour on the roads has been discontinued long since. Similar plots probably have often escaped detection. The whole conversation is a valuable illustration of Indian habits and modes of thought.
11. The subject of the police administration is more fully discussed post, in Chapter 69.
CHAPTER 59
Concentration of Capital and its Effects.
Kosī[1] stands on the borders of Fīrōzpur, the estate of the late Shams-ud-dīn, who was hanged at Delhi on the 3rd of October, 1835, for the murder of William Fraser, the representative of the Governor-General in the Delhi city and territories.[2] The Mewātīs of Fīrōzpur are notorious thieves and robbers. During the Nawāb's time they dared not plunder within his territory, but had a free licence to plunder wherever they pleased beyond it.[3] They will now be able to plunder at home, since our tribunals have been introduced to worry prosecutors and their witnesses to death by the distance they have to go, and the tediousness of our process; and thereby to secure impunity to offenders, by making it the interest of those who have been robbed, not only to bear with the first loss without complaint, but largely to bribe police officers to conceal the crimes from their master, the magistrate, when they happen to come to their knowledge. Here it was that Jeswant Rāo Holkār gave a grand ball on the 14th of October, 1804, while he was with his cavalry covering the siege of Delhi by his regular brigade. In the midst of the festivity he had a European soldier of the King's 76th Regiment, who had been taken prisoner, strangled behind the curtain, and his head stuck upon a spear and placed in the midst of the assembly, where the 'nāch' (nautch) girls were made to dance round it. Lord Lake reached the place the next morning in pursuit of this monster; and the gallant regiment, who here heard the story, had soon an opportunity of revenging the foul murder of their comrade in the battle of Dīg, one of the most gallant passages of arms we have ever had in India.[4]
Near Kosī there is a factory in ruins belonging to the late firm of Mercer & Company. Here the cotton of the district used to be collected and screwed under the superintendence of European agents, preparatory to its embarkation for Calcutta on the river Jumna. On the failure of the firm, the establishment was broken up, and the work, which was then done by one great European merchant, is now done by a score or two of native merchants. There is, perhaps, nothing which India wants more than the concentration of capital; and the failure of a I [5] the great commercial houses in Calcutta, in the year 1833, was, unquestionably, a great calamity. They none of them brought a particle of capital into the country, nor does India want a particle from any country; but they concentrated it; and had they employed the whole, as they certainly did a good deal of it, in judiciously improving and extending the industry of the natives, they might have been the source of incalculable good to India, its people, and government.[6]
To this concentration of capital in great commercial and manufacturing establishments, which forms the grand characteristic of European in contradistinction to Asiatic societies in the present day, must we look for those changes which we consider desirable in the social and religions institutions of the people. Where land is liable to eternal subdivision by the law and the religion of both the Muhammadan and Hindoo population; where every great work that improves its productive powers, and facilitates the distribution of its produce among the people, in canals, roads, bridges, &c., is made by Government; where capital is nowhere concentrated in great commercial or manufacturing establishments, there can be no upper classes in society but those of office; and of all societies, perhaps that is the worst in which the higher classes are so exclusively composed. In India, public office has been, and must continue to be, the only road to distinction, until we have a law of primogeniture, and a concentration of capital. In India no man has ever thought himself respectable, or been thought so by others, unless he is armed with his little 'hukūmat'; his 'little brief authority' under Government, that gives him the command of some public establishment paid out of the revenues of the State.[7] In Europe and America, where capital has been concentrated in great commercial and manufacturing establishments, and free institutions prevail almost as the natural consequence, industry is everything; and those who direct and command it are, happily, looked up to as the source of the wealth, the strength, the virtue, and the happiness of the nation. The concentration of capital in such establishments may, indeed, be considered, not only as the natural consequence, but as the prevailing cause of the free institutions by which the mass of the people in European countries are blessed.[8] The mass of the people were as much brutalized and oppressed by the landed aristocracy as they could have been by any official aristocracy before towns and higher classes were created by the concentration of capital.
The same observations are applicable to China. There the land all belongs to the sovereign, as in India; and, as in India, it is liable to the same eternal subdivision among the sons of those who hold it under him. Capital is nowhere more concentrated in China than in India; and all the great works that add to the fertility of the soil, and facilitate the distribution of the land labour of the country are formed by the sovereign out of the public revenue. The revenue is, in consequence, one of office;[9] and no man considers himself respectable,[10] unless invested with some office under Government, that is, under the Emperor. Subdivision of labour, concentration of capital, and machinery render an Englishman everywhere dependent upon the co-operation of multitudes; while the Chinaman, who as yet knows little of either, is everywhere independent, and able to work his way among strangers. But this very dependence of the Englishman upon the concentration of capital is the greatest source of his strength and pledge of his security, since it supports those members of the higher orders who can best understand and assert the rights and interests of the whole.[11]
If we had any great establishment of this sort in which Christians could find employment and the means of religious and secular instruction, thousands of converts would soon flock to them; and they would become vast sources of future improvement in industry, social comfort, municipal institutions, and religion. What chiefly prevents the spread of Christianity in India is the dread of exclusion from caste and all its privileges; and the utter hopelessness of their ever finding any respectable circle of society of the adopted religion, which converts, or would-be converts, to Christianity now everywhere feel. Form such circles for them, make the members of these circles happy in the exertion of honest and independent industry, let those who rise to eminence in them feel that they are considered as respectable and as important in the social system as the servants of Government, and converts will flock around you from all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community. I have, since I have been in India, had, I may say, at least a score of Hindoo grass-cutters turn Musalmāns, merely because the grooms and the other grass-cutters of my establishment happened to be of that religion, and they could neither eat, drink, nor smoke with them. Thousands of Hindoos all over India become every year Musalmāns from the same motive;[12] and we do not get the same number of converts to Christianity, merely because we cannot offer them the same advantages. I am persuaded that a dozen such establishments as that of Mr. Thomas Ashton of Hyde, as described by a physician at Manchester, and noticed in Mr. Baines's admirable work on the Cotton Manufactures of Great Britain (page 447), would do more in the way of conversion among the people of India than has ever yet been done by all the religious establishments, or ever will be done by them, without such aid.[13]
I have said that the great commercial houses of Calcutta, which in their ruin involved that of so many useful establishments scattered over India, like that of Kosī, brought no capital into the country.[14] They borrowed from one part of the civil and military servants of Government at a high interest that portion of their salary which they saved; and lent it at a higher interest to others of the same establishment, who for a time required or wished to spend more than they received; or they employed it at a higher rate of profit for great commercial and manufacturing establishments scattered over India, or spread over the ocean. Their great error was in mistaking nominal for real profits. Calculating their dividend on the nominal profits, and never supposing that there could be any such things as losses in commercial speculation, or bad debts from misfortunes and bad faith, they squandered them in lavish hospitality and ostentatious display, or allowed their retiring members to take them to England and to every other part of the world where their creditors might not find them, till they discovered that all the real capital left at their command was hardly sufficient to pay back with the stipulated interest one-tenth of what they had borrowed. The members of those houses who remained in India up to the time of the general wreck were of course reduced to ruin, and obliged to bear the burthen of the odium and indignation which the ruin of so many thousands of confiding constituents brought down upon them. Since that time the savings of civil and military servants have been invested either in Government securities at a small interest, or in banks, which make their profit in the ordinary way, by discounting bills of exchange, and circulating their own notes for the purpose, or by lending out their money at a high interest of 10 or 12 per cent. to other members of the same services.[15]
On the 16th of January we went on to Horal, ten miles over a plain, with villages numerous and large, and in every one some fine large building of olden times—sarāi, palace, temple, or tomb, but all going to decay.[16] The population much more dense than in any of the native states I have seen; villages larger and more numerous; trade in the transit of cotton, salt, sugar, and grain, much brisker. A great number of hares were here brought to us for sale at threepence apiece, a rate at which they sell at this season in almost all parts of Upper India, where they are very numerous, and very easily caught in nets.
Notes:
1. Kosī is twenty-five miles north-west of Mathurā.
2. The story of the murder of Mr. Fraser is fully detailed post in Chapter 64. After the execution of Shams-ud- dīn, the estate of the criminal was taken possession of by Government, and the town of Fīrōzpur is now the head- quarters of a sub-collectorship of the Gurgāon district in the Panjāb. The Delhi territories were placed under the government of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjāb in 1858.
3. The Mewātī depredations had gone on for centuries. The Sultān Balban (Ghiās-ud-dīn, alias Ulugh Khan), who reigned from A.D. 1265-87, temporarily suppressed them by punishments of awful cruelty, flaying the criminals alive, and so forth. The Mewātīs now supply men to a few robber gangs, but are incapable of mischief on a large scale.
4. Delhi was most nobly defended against Holkār by a very small force under Lieutenant-Colonel Burn, who 'repelled an assault, and defended a city ten miles in circumference, and which had ever before been given up at the first appearance of an enemy at its gates'.
The battle of Dīg was fought on November 13, 1804, by the division under the command of General Fraser on the one side, and Holkār's infantry and artillery on the other. 'The 76th led the way, with its wonted alacrity and determination,' and forced its way into the village in advance of its supports. The fight resulted in the total defeat of the Marāthās, who lost nearly two thousand men, and eighty-seven pieces of cannon. The English loss also was heavy, amounting to upwards of six hundred and forty killed and wounded, including the brave commander, who was mortally wounded, and survived the victory only a few days.
On the night of November 17, General Lake in person routed Holkār and his cavalry, killing about three thousand men. The English loss on this occasion amounted to only two men killed, and about twenty wounded.
The fort of Dīg, with a hundred guns and a considerable quantity of ammunition and military stores, was captured on December 24 of the same year. (Thornton, History of British India, pp. 316-19, 2nd ed., 1859.)
5. Transcription note. This clause is not intelligible to the transcriber. The character '1' or 'I' appears in the text. Some words appear to be missing.
6. The author was grievously mistaken in supposing that India did not require 'a particle' of foreign capital. The railways, and the great tea, coffee, indigo, and other industries, built up and developed during the nineteenth century, and still growing, owe their existence to the hundreds of millions sterling of English capital poured into the country, and could not possibly have been financed from Indian resources. The author seems not to have expected the construction of railways in India, although when he wrote a beginning of the railway system in England had been made.
7. This sentiment is still potent, and explains the eagerness often shown by wealthy landholders of high social rank to obtain official appointments, which to the European mind seem unworthy of their acceptance.
8. Few readers are likely to accept this proposition.
9. This clause is not intelligible to the editor. The word 'revenue' probably is a misprint for 'aristocracy'.
10. The original edition prints, 'No man considers himself less respectable', which is nonsense.
11. This sentiment reads oddly in these days of social democracy and continual conflict between capital and labour.
12. The steady progress of Islam in Lower and Eastern Bengal, first made apparent by the census of 1872, has been confirmed by the enumerations of 1901 and 1911. The feeling that the religion of the Prophet gives its adherent a better position in both this world and the next than Hinduism can offer to a low-caste man is the most powerful motive for conversion. See Dr. James Wise's valuable treatise, 'The Muhammadans of Eastern Bengal' (J.A.S.B., Part III (1894), pp. 28-63), and the Census Reports from 1872 to 1911.
13. The author's whimsical notion that a development of commercial and manufacturing organization in India would cause converts to flock from all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community, has not been verified by experience. Much capital is now concentrated in the great cities, and the number of cotton, jute, and other factories is considerable, but Christian converts are not among the goods produced.
14. The modern commercial houses bring a large proportion of their capital from Europe.
15. The three Presidency Banks, the Bank of Bengal, the Bank of Madras, and the Bank of Bombay, in which the Indian Government is interested, are the leading Indian banks. The Bank of Bengal was opened in 1806. No bank in India is allowed to issue notes. The paper money in use is issued by the Paper Currency Department of the Government of India, and the notes are known as 'currency notes'. The issue of these notes began in 1862-3. (Balfour, Cyclopaedia, 3rd ed., s.v. 'Bank and Paper Currency'). Much Indian capital is now invested in joint-stock companies of every kind.
16. More correctly, Hodal.
CHAPTER 60
Transit Duties in India—Mode of Collecting them.
At Horal[1] resides a Collector of Customs with two or three uncovenanted European assistants as patrol officers.[2] The rule now is to tax only the staple articles of produce from the west on their transit down into the valley of the Jumna and Ganges, and to have only one line on which these articles shall be liable to duties.[3] They are free to pass everywhere else without search or molestation. This has, no doubt, relieved the people of these provinces from an infinite deal of loss and annoyance inflicted upon them by the former System of levying the Customs duties, and that without much diminishing the net receipts of Government from this branch of its revenues. But the time may come when Government will be constrained to raise a greater proportion of its collective revenues than it has hitherto done from indirect taxation, and when this time comes, the rule which confines the impost to a single line must of course be abandoned.[4] Under the former system, one great man, with a very high salary, was put in to preside over a host of native agents with very small salaries, and without any responsible intermediate agent whatever to aid him, and to watch over them. The great man was selected without any reference to his knowledge of, or fitness for, the duties entrusted to him, merely because he happened to be of a certain standing in a certain exclusive service, which entitled him to a certain scale of salary, or because he had been found unfit for judicial or other duties requiring more intellect and energy of character. The consequence was that for every one rupee that went into the public treasury, ten were taken by these harpies from the merchants, or other people over whom they had, or could pretend to have, a right of search.[5]
Some irresponsible native officer who happened to have the confidence of the great man (no matter in what capacity he served him) sold for his own profit, and for that of those whose goodwill he might think it worth while to conciliate, the offices of all the subordinate agents immediately employed in the collection of the duties. A man who was to receive an avowed salary of seven rupees a month would give him three or four thousand for his post, because it would give him charge of a detached post, in which he could soon repay himself with a handsome profit. A poor 'peon', who was to serve under others, and could never hope for an independent charge, would give five hundred rupees for an office which yielded him avowedly only four rupees a month. All arrogated the right of search, and the state of Indian society and the climate were admirably suited to their purpose. A person of any respectability would feel himself dishonoured were the females of his family to be seen, much less touched, while passing along the road in their palanquin or covered carnage; and to save himself from such dishonour he was everywhere obliged to pay these custom-house officers. Many articles that pass in transit through India would suffer much damage from being opened along the road at any season, and be liable to be spoiled altogether during that of the rains; and these harpies could always make the merchants open them, unless they paid liberally for their forbearance. Articles were rated to the duty according to their value; and articles of the same weight were often, of course, of very different values. These officers could always pretend that packages liable to injury from exposure contained within them, among the articles set forth in the invoice, others of greater value in proportion to their weight. Men who carried pearls, jewels, and other articles very valuable compared with their bulk, always depended for their security from robbers and thieves on their concealment; and there was nothing which they dreaded so much as the insolence and rapacity of these custom-house officers, who made them pay large bribes, or exposed their goods. Gangs of thieves had members in disguise at such stations, who were soon able to discover through the insolence of the officers, and the fears and entreaties of the merchants, whether they had anything worth taking or not.
A party of thieves from Datiyā, in 1882, followed Lord William Bentinck's camp to the bank of the river Jumna near Mathurā, where they found a poor merchant humbly entreating an insolent custom-house officer not to insist upon his showing the contents of the little box he carried in his carriage, lest it might attract the attention of thieves, who were always to be found among the followers of such a camp, and offering to give him anything reasonable for his forbearance. Nothing he could be got to offer would satisfy the rapacity of the man; the box was taken out and opened. It contained jewels which the poor man hoped to sell to advantage among the European ladies and gentlemen of the Governor- General's suite. He replaced his box in his carriage; but in half an hour it was travelling post-haste to Datiyā, by relays of thieves who had been posted along the road for such occasions. They quarrelled about the division; swords were drawn, and wounds inflicted. One of the gang ran off to the magistrate at Sāgar, with whom he had before been acquainted;[6] and he sent him back with a small party, and a letter to the Datiyā Rājā requesting that he would get the box of jewels for the poor merchant. The party took the precaution of searching the house of the thieves before they delivered the letter to their friend the minister, and by this means recovered about half the jewels, which amounted in all to about seven thousand rupees. The merchant was agreeably surprised when he got back so much of his property through the magistrate of Mathurā, and confirmed the statement of the thief regarding the dispute with the custom-house officer which enabled them to discover the value of the box.
Should Government by and by extend the System that obtains in this single line to the Customs all over India they may greatly augment their revenue without any injury, and with but little necessary loss and inconvenience to merchants. The object of all just taxation is to make the subjects contribute to the public burthen in proportion to their means, and with as little loss and inconvenience to themselves as possible. The people who reside west of this line enjoy all their salt, cotton, and other articles which are taxed on crossing the line without the payment of any duties, while those to the east of it are obliged to pay. It is, therefore, not a just line. The advantages are, first, that it interposes a body of most efficient officers between the mass of harpies and the heads of the department, who now virtually superintend the whole System, whereas they used formerly to do so merely ostensibly. They are at once the tapis of Prince Husain and the telescope of Prince Alī; they enable the heads of departments to be everywhere and see everything, whereas before they were nowhere and saw nothing.[7] Secondly, it makes the great staple articles of general consumption alone liable to the payment of duties, and thereby does away in a great measure with the odious right of search.
At Kosī our friend, Charles Fraser, left us to proceed through Mathurā to Agra. He is a very worthy man and excellent public officer, one of those whom one always meets again with pleasure, and of whose society one never tires. Mr. Wilmot, the Collector of Customs, and Mr. Wright, one of the patrol officers, came to dine with us. The wind blew so hard all day that the cook and khānsāmān (butler) were long in despair of being able to give us any dinner at all. At last we managed to get a tent, closed at every crevice to keep out the dust, for a cook-room; and they were thus able to preserve their master's credit, which, no doubt, according to their notions, depended altogether on the quality of his dinner.
Notes:
1. The place is a small town in the Gurgāon District, Panjāb.
2. The term 'uncovenanted' may require explanation for readers not familiar with the details of Indian administration. The Civil Service of India, commonly called Indian Civil Service, which supplies most of the higher administrative and judicial officers, used to be known as the Covenanted service, because its members sign a covenant with the Secretary of State. All the other departmental services—Public Works, Postal and the rest—were grouped together as uncovenanted. In accordance with the Report of the Public Service Commission (1886-7) the terms 'covenanted' and 'uncovenanted' have been disused.
3. The text refers to what was known as the 'customs hedge'. Before the establishment of the British supremacy each of the innumerable native jurisdictions levied transit duties on many kinds of goods at each of its frontiers, to the infinite vexation of traders. Such duties were gradually abolished in British territory, and few, if any, are now enforced by native states. Salt cannot be manufactured in British India without a licence, and the Salt (formerly called Inland Customs) Department is charged with the duty of preventing the manufacture or sale of illicit salt. In its later developments the Customs hedge was used for the collection of the salt duty only. Sir John Strachey took a leading part in its abolition. To secure the levy of the duty on salt, he writes, 'there grew up gradually a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilized country. A Customs line was established which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahānadī in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles; and it was guarded by nearly 12,000 men and petty officers, at an annual cost of £162,000. It would have stretched from London to Constantinople. . . . It consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes . . . A similar line, 280 miles in length, was maintained in the north-eastern part of the Bombay Presidency from Dohud to the Runn of Cutch.' In 1878 the salt duties were revised, and the necessary arrangements with the native states were made. With effect from the 1st April, 1879, the whole Customs line was abolished, with the exception of a small portion on the Indus. (Sir J. Strachey, The Finances and Public Works of India, 1869-81, London, 1882, pp. 219, 220, 225.) Great mines of rock salt are worked near the Indus.
4. Most people who know India intimately are of opinion that indirect taxation is more suitable to the circumstances of the country than direct taxation. For municipal purposes, indirect taxation, under the name of octroi, is levied by most considerable towns, and notwithstanding its inconveniences, is far less unpopular and far more productive than any form of direct taxation. The people have been accustomed to indirect taxation of divers kinds from the most remote times, and hate income tax or any other direct impost, however reasonable it may be in theory. Since 1895 the general customs duty is 5 per cent. ad valorem on commodities imported into British India by sea. (See I.G., 1907, vol. iv, chapter 8). The above remarks on the suitability of indirect taxation for India are not intended as a defence of the barbarous device of the 'Customs hedge', which was indefensible.
5. That unsound System prevailed in all departments during the early years of the nineteenth century. 'In Bengal, the monopoly of salt in one form or other dates at least from the establishment of the Board of Trade there in 1765. The strict monopoly of salt commenced in 1780, under a System of agencies. The System introduced in 1780 continued in force with occasional modifications till 1862, when the several salt agencies were gradually abolished, leaving the Supply of salt, whether by importations or excise manufacture, to private enterprise. Since then, for Bengal Proper, the supply of the condiment has been obtained chiefly by importation, but in part by private manufacture under a System of excise.' (Balfour, Cyclopaedia, 3rd ed., s.v. Salt.) At present the Salt Department is controlled by a single Commissioner with the Government of India, The fee payable for a licence to manufacture salt is fifty rupees. It is inaccurate to describe the limitation imposed on the manufacture of salt as a monopoly. Any one can sell salt, but it can be made only under licence.
6. The author.
7. The same observations, mutatis mutandis, are applicable to the magistracy of the country; and the remedy for all the great existing evils must be sought in the same means, the interposition of a body of efficient officers between the magistrate and the 'thānadārs', or present head police officers of small divisions. [W. H. S.] Much has been done to carry out this advice. The 'most efficient officers' of the inland Customs department alluded to in the text were the European or Eurasian 'uncovenanted' Collectors of Customs and their assistants. The allusion to Prince Husain and Prince Alī refers to the well-known tale in the Arabian Nights, 'The story of Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Peri- Banu'. It is omitted, I believe, from Lane's version.