CHAPTER XV
The Patient Earth
“Cold!” I said, just for something to say, as I came out of the dak-bungalow into the thin January air before sunrise, and met an educated Indian, who said “Good morning!”
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “You’d have thought it cold if you had slept where I did.” And he pointed to a dusty place, where he had evidently been lying in front of the house.
“Why on earth did you sleep there?” I asked; “there was plenty of room inside.”
“I’m a Famine official, and I have been living inside for some nights past,” he answered. “But when I got back at nine o’clock last night, I found you were reading in one room and your boy had gone to sleep in the other, so I stayed out here.”
“My boy!” I said. “Why, he sleeps everywhere! On the floor of my room, at the door—anywhere! Why didn’t you come in?”
“Well, you see,” he answered, with hesitation, “I saw you were an Englishman, and I knew that if I had come in, you’d have kicked me out, and I didn’t want to be kicked out. That’s why.”
As I had been three months in India, I was not surprised, but as a patriot I found it hard to reply, so I turned the conversation to Famine and Relief.
We were in the United Provinces, where that season’s famine was particularly bad. Mr. Theodore Morison has explained that in India the word “famine” is now equivalent only to a “suspension of agricultural industry.”[53] “Now that the relief of the unemployed is undertaken by Government,” he says, “it is not a fact that any considerable proportion of the people die of hunger when the agricultural industry is interrupted.” In the United Provinces, then, agricultural industry was suspended, and the cause of the suspension was obvious. For close on four and a half months not a drop of rain had fallen, and day after day the sun rose and set in a sky as clear and hard as steel. Rain ought to have lasted well into October, and in December to have begun again, and here was the second week in January without a drop since August. The December harvest was lost, and the ground so hard that scarcely a quarter of the usual crops had been sown for the greater harvest due in March. The horror of past famines is easily obliterated in India, for what would you expect of a people to whom history is but a sleep and a forgetting? But men who had known the course of Indian famines since the seventies told me that unless rain came within a fortnight that year’s famine would be worse than any that India had ever suffered.[54]
A Bullock Well.
[Face p. 272.
Coming twenty or thirty miles south of the Jumna from Allahabad, where the Jumna and Ganges join, I had passed through a country that became continually more desert. It was nearly flat, and rather thickly covered with isolated thorns and the heavy mango trees, which yield a fruit much sought after by the villagers, but now regarded as a chief cause of cholera in famine time. So far, the trees had not been stript bare for fodder, as I afterwards saw them round Delhi, and the cattle were still kept from the unholy butcher’s hands by a diet of chopped millet stalks, with linseed for the milkers. The land was divided into tiny fields, about the size of one to four tennis-courts, marked off by earthen banks, along the top of which there is a right of way. Round the mud villages, wherever the wells still held water, some of these fields were green with potatoes or young wheat, or a tall bushy pulse with yellow flower, and all day long the ryots were busy distributing the precious water through little channels among the crops. I suppose no form of irrigation surpasses the wells in value, though very many of them are sunk only temporarily in times of drought, on account of the expense of sinking a “pukka” or masonry shaft. As in most parts of India that I visited, the water is usually drawn up in one or two large bags by bullocks harnessed to the end of a rope and driven down a steep incline. But many of the wells were dry, and so were many of the tanks or public ponds, which, having originally supplied most of the mud for the village habitations, afterwards become the social centres of village life. In fact, the only tank I saw with a plentiful supply of water left was one that three crocodiles had wisely selected for their home. They were not so large as the dragonish monsters I had shot at in West Africa, but large enough to disturb the social centre of any English green. Two or three hundred yards away from the village wells the little squares and oblongs of fields were absolutely bare, not a weed showing. For miles on miles the drab surface of the earth was hard and barren as a brick pavement.
The famine in Orissa was due to flood—an unforeseen calamity—and though the area was small in comparison, the horror of the starvation was much worse than anything in the United Provinces. The effect of drought can be foreseen, and it is one of the Government’s recognized functions to keep people alive in famine. Preparations for relief had begun in October, and at the head of the administration stood Sir John Hewett, the Lieutenant-Governor, in whom all Indians felt a peculiar confidence. But apart from his special influence, it is in famine time, as I have noticed before, that the zeal and sympathy of our officials are seen at their best. Men who in ordinary seasons would treat all Indians alike with habitual contumely, are perfectly willing to die for them in their distress, and once I travelled in a cabin with a high legal official in Allahabad, not connected in any way with relief, whose voyage out was made more and more miserable, because at every port came the news of continued drought in the province. Such sympathy from above is a memory of our old land-owning traditions, a relic of noblesse and its obligations, and, as long as our superiority is as undisputed as a captain’s or a curate’s, we are particularly successful in exercising this devoted patronage.
Going To Work.
Relief Shelters.
As no rain fell, “test works” were established in December. On test works heavy tasks like road-making are set, and no payment is given unless the work is done. Nothing but real poverty and hunger will drive people to work of this kind, and so, when two thousand men were found to be labouring at each of the test works, it was assumed that hunger was general, and “a state of famine” was officially proclaimed. A state of famine implies relief works on which the Government pays a fixed rate of wages to all workers, and assistance of some kind is given to every one—women, children, babies, and the old, as well as the able-bodied workers. The rate is decided by the Famine Commissioner according to his estimate of the price of grain. In this case he had calculated the price of grain for the time being at 18 lb. (9 seers) to the rupee (1s. 4d.). By the “Wages Table for Public Works,” which is as easy to work with and as indisputable as a table of logarithms, this price gave the rate of wages at 2d. a day for diggers, whether men or women (but hardly any women consent to dig), 1½d. a day for carriers of earth (chiefly women), 1d. for children, and ½d. a day for babies.[55]
A few exceptional cases are specially treated. Any woman, for instance, who presents the works with a new baby is rewarded with a special donation of 1s. 4d. down. The wages were paid out of a guarded treasure tent every afternoon, and the people bought their own food from local merchants, who generally conveyed the grain on the backs of bullocks from Allahabad. The women ground it themselves, and made it into a sticky paste with a little salt, and that was what the families lived upon. Drinking water was served from kerosene tins by Brahmans so that none might be defiled.
Villagers in want of the wage looked round the plain at sunrise for a red flag hoisted on a long pole. That showed the “recruiting station,” and there the families congregated in long rows, waiting to be allotted to gangers chosen from their own number. If any were already too starved for labour, they were fed up to working point; but there were none of the brown skeletons here that I saw in Orissa, because, as the disaster was not sudden, the relief had begun while the people were still in good condition. When the gangs were arranged, they were led out to some allotted portion of the works, the fellow-villagers remaining together for the stimulus of public opinion. In other districts the relief works took the form of new roads, but where I was the engineers had designed two great bunds or dams to catch the monsoon rains over a large and gently sloping area. For a few months each year shallow tanks would thus be formed, which could be tapped as required for the fields at a lower level, and, when dry, would leave a surface enriched with silt and moisture. The dams were called Garhaiya Kalan and Telghana from neighbouring villages, and one was seven miles long, the other a mile and a half. If these were not sufficient for the winter’s relief work, many more might be constructed, and the Government could always hope to recover part of the outlay by the increased value of the land, for which the landowners (zemindars) would as usual have to pay about half their income as revenue. And as I thought of it, I sighed for the orgy of battleships and old age pensions which we should enjoy if only our Government at home could scoop up the unearned increment like that!
On the Relief Works.
[Face p. 276.
The process of constructing the dams was simple. Engineers had fixed the required levels and breadths by upright poles with strings stretched between them, and all that the workers had to do was to pile up earth till the strings were just covered and disappeared from sight. The earth was cut from both sides of the dam, and each digger’s daily task, with the help of a woman carrier, was to clear a plot of earth 13 ft. by 8 ft., and 1 ft. deep. A pick and hoe were supplied by Government, but the natives refused the new English-made tools, not from any Swadeshi prejudice, but because they were rotten and would not cut. Women carried the earth in baskets made in the gaols and threw it on the dam. Weaker women, cripples and children broke up the clods, patting them rather gently with wooden implements till the surface was fairly smooth and solid. That was all the work. If the allotted task fell short, the payment of the whole gang of fellow-villagers was reduced, so that each worker had an interest in keeping all his friends up to the mark, and I did not hear any complaints about reductions. What I did hear were the common complaints of humanity that bellies were not full, that dealers gave short weight, and that some parts of the ground were harder to dig than others. By that time there were twenty thousand workers on relief in this small district alone, and the numbers were daily increasing. When people have to be saved by averages of thousands together, how can you stop to give complete satisfaction? It is not so that heaven is filled.
The hope was that, as the famine had been taken in time, the cholera, which comes in the rearward of famine, might be avoided; and it was. The only definite disease I noticed was a very common paralysis of the knees, which crippled both men and women, but was not directly due to famine. The people themselves attributed it to a kind of pea they eat, and the pea had lately been forbidden to be sold on Government works. I had seen the same kind of paralysis in the stone quarries at Les Baux in Provence, where it was attributed to the dust; but it seems hard to connect the two cases. Otherwise, the people were as healthy as one can be on an average of 1½d. a day. Most of them went back to their own villages in the evening. For those who lived too far away tiny huts or coverts of bamboo frames thatched with straw were provided. When the dams were finished, they were to be “departmentally watched and maintained.”
When I saw Sir John Hewett a short time afterwards at Agra, he told me he had over 150,000 workers on the relief works, and over 310,000 receiving relief of one kind or another. Owing to the famine the yield of grain in his province was 3,500,000 tons below the normal; rice yielded only a quarter of the average; and £4,000,000 had been lost on the sugar and cotton crops combined. To meet the scarcity, Government had already suspended 120 lakhs (£800,000) of land revenue, a large part of which would be permanently remitted, and had advanced about £1,000,000 for relief, the purchase of seed, and sinking of temporary wells. Speaking at Lucknow a few days later (January 25, 1908) Sir John Hewett said:—
“These measures have given heart to the people, provided occupation in the villages at remunerative rates of wages, and prevented the occurrence of crime. The people themselves have met the crisis in the most commendable spirit. Never was there a famine in which the people and the Government and its officers showed a more united front than the present one. The ryots have toiled early and late to prepare and sow their fields for the spring harvest, and they have not toiled in vain.”
That speech was made, however, after blessed rain had fallen. When I was at Agra, one inch of rain suddenly fell in one night, and I shall not forget the joyful change upon the faces of the officials. It must be remembered also that, excellent as the administration of the famine relief was, and fully as the Lieutenant-Governor deserves his popularity, the United Provinces is probably a district all the easier to govern just because it is comparatively backward, and out of its population of nearly 50,000,000 about 70 per cent. are directly dependent upon agriculture for their living.[56]
In his Financial Statement to the Viceroy’s Council (March 20, 1908), Mr. E. N. Baker, now Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, calculated that the famine of the year had affected an area with a population of about 49 millions. It had raised the price of wheat so high that the export from India had almost wholly stopped, while the Burma rice crop had been diverted to India to take the place of what was lost. He estimated the amount of takavi advances, or village loans for wells, seed, etc., for the preceding and present years together at 4 crores of rupees (about £2,650,000), and the amount of revenue suspended for the two years at nearly 360 lakhs (nearly £2,400,000), of which a large proportion must be permanently remitted. The total loss to the State by loss of revenue and increase of expenditure combined he estimated at 985 lakhs (about £6,633,000) for the two years. He added the significant comment:—
“The distress caused by high prices has undoubtedly affected all classes, and has pressed with great severity on the urban populations, and on all who are dependent on small fixed incomes. But the more painful conditions which we associate with widespread famine in India—the emaciation, the aimless wandering, the disruption of social ties, and the increase of crime—are as yet so rare and exceptional as to be scarcely noticeable. The energy and determination with which the people have themselves faced the calamity have been observed on all hands, and we may reasonably hope that if the coming season is favourable the progress of the country will resume its normal course, without any such check as a famine on a similar scale would have caused in bygone times.”[57]
That sounds fairly simple, and, of course, its hopefulness was justified; but the whole question of the famine brought one up short against problems that may be common to all countries, but are perhaps more difficult in India, because under our rule the economic stages are becoming mixed together. What Mr. Baker, for instance, says about the pressure upon urban populations and small fixed incomes owing to the famine is true; but then the pressure appears to be permanent, famine or no famine. The rise in price of ordinary provisions seems to be continuous and general. I heard the same complaint in the Deccan, in Eastern Bengal, Calcutta, Benares, Allahabad, Delhi, and Lahore. Within twenty years wages may have doubled, but the cost of common food has quadrupled. In Bengal, for example, Mr. Chunder Nath Bose, Fellow of the Calcutta University, who knew the prices as a boy, says they have gone up fourfold or even tenfold for the staples of Bengal diet, such as rice, wheat, potatoes, brinjal, dal, fish, and, what is worst, for milk and ghi (clarified butter).[58] Many explanations were given me by English and Indian alike—the export of grain, the growth of jute, the fixing of the rupee, the increased circulation of rupees before 1893, and the transition from payment in kind to payment in cash. Some of these explanations are contradictory, and all of them have been vehemently contradicted. But as to the result, there appeared to be no doubt: life is becoming harder for all working people, especially for all workers on fixed incomes, and the only people who do not notice the increasing burden are the few with “rapidly expanding business” and those who could not possibly eat up to their incomes if they tried.
It was still more difficult to discover the real condition of the peasants and labourers in the country compared to the workpeople in the towns. In villages near the relief works, the cultivators (ryots) told me they paid sometimes one and sometimes ten rupees a bigha (rather over half an acre) to the zemindar, but their average rent appeared to be about two rupees a bigha (say 5s. 6d. an acre). Some said they thought they made or saved ten or even twenty rupees a year for marriages, births, funerals, ceremonies, and pilgrimages. But nearly all of them said they saved nothing. They admitted, however, that for a daughter’s marriage a ryot would sometimes spend as much as two hundred rupees, borrowed from the zemindar or banya (money-lender), and when I asked one of them what he borrowed on if he had no savings, he replied that he borrowed on his “respectability,” which is, I suppose, what most people borrow on. At the back of the borrower’s mind, I think, is the continual hope for a “bumper” crop that will start him free again, but as the rate of interest without solid security was anything from 25 to 36 per cent. both here and in the Punjab, the ryot often became little more than a labourer in the employment of the money-lender, who advanced him seed and stock and took the crop. In a village outside Lahore I found the cultivators had agreed among themselves not to spend money on marriages in future, though these village festivals had been their only joy, and now, unless a juggler or reciter came round, they had nothing whatever to break the monotony of toil upon the land—not even a school. Neither were there any schools in the villages I visited near Allahabad, nor in those near Delhi.
But though in many cases the ryot had become little better than a labourer in the employment of a landowner or money-lender, there was still a recognized class of landless labourers below him. In the villages near the relief works the labourer (who is always paid in kind) got 2½ lbs. of grain for a day’s work from dawn to dark with two hours off, and he could count on work most of the year if the rains were good. He also received one pair of shoes, one cloth, and ground for his hut, which he built himself. Some of the labourers told me of a further gift of three rupees a year (4s.) which seemed to be a kind of Christmas-box. If the wife worked she got 1⅛ lb. of grain a day. Turned into money, at the village price of grain, the labourer’s wage would thus be about 2d. a day, apart from his wife’s earnings (say 1d.) and the extras I have mentioned.[59]
Swadeshi Weavers, Bombay Mills.
Swadeshi Weavers, Madras Hand-looms.
[Face p. 284.
Beside the money-lender, the landowner, the cultivator, and the labourer, I found in every village one or two artisans, though the division of industry was not exact, and some of the artisans did a little agriculture as well. Nearly all villages seem to have a barber, a potter, a carpenter, “sweepers” or scavengers, and one or two priestly families to perform the common rites that mankind wants, to bless the harvest, foretell the weather, and control the local ghosts. In some villages I also found the hand-loom weaver, and in a Mohammedan village near Lahore the weaver told me he could make ten yards a day, which he valued at five annas, his wife spinning the yarn by walking to and fro as on a rope-walk. In the same village the carpenter was specially employed on making water-wheels. But the village artisans, as a rule, are not paid by the job but are allowed a fairly regular income by the village, each family contributing so many measures of grain at each of the two harvests for their support. For instance, the village priest gets about 5 lb. of grain per plough at harvest, but the potter gets 20 lb. per plough and the carpenter 50 lb.[60]
As far as mere money-value goes, it is not very hard to compare the earnings of village labourers and artisans with the earnings of workpeople in the towns. In the eighty or ninety cotton mills of Bombay, for instance, the average man’s wages are 18 rupees a month, or a little over 10d. a day; a woman’s highest wage is a fraction under 7d. a day, and half-time children, nominally over nine years old and under fourteen, get 2¾d. a day, which is more than the average labourer’s wage in the village. At a mill in Delhi I found the wages were less—12 rupees a month instead of 18 for men, and 6 rupees instead of 8 for boys; but the hours of labour were twelve with one hour off instead of thirteen with (nominally) only half an hour off. In reality, I think it would be quite impossible to get Indians to do what Lancashire people would call work for twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch, with only those little breaks. At all events, it is not done.
By the measure of money, then, the Bombay mill-hand would seem to be about five times better off than the village labourer of the United Provinces. In so far as most people enjoy living in swarms rather than in isolation, he is better off; but otherwise the lot of both is perhaps almost equally unenviable. The hours in a Bombay mill are spent in monotonous labour, among hideous noise, and in a fluffy atmosphere, where there are no fans to decrease the dust, the heat, or the smell. All round the factories, workmen’s dwellings, or “chawls,” have sprung up, usually in galleries of single rooms along the first floor above a row of open shops. The average rent is one rupee (1s. 4d.) a week for a room, and the whole family lives in one room, in which, as a rule, there is no window but the door. Most families are saved a lot of dusting and breakages by having no furniture except a metal cooking-pot for the rice and dal—a sort of split pea. These are cooked in cocoanut oil, and form the almost invariable food, though in one black hole I did see a woman cooking something that smelt like the ghost of a fish, and sometimes a family launched out into a maize pancake. In one or two rooms there were real decorations—portraits of Rama, of Krishna, or the King—and for a week every doorway was hung with a string of dry leaves, ears of rice, and little crimson flowers like knapweed, in memory, I suppose, of some old village festival. All night long, under a waning moon, the mill hands sat in the verandahs of these wretched homes, beating drums, and chanting their barbaric scales—“praising God,” as they said when we asked them; but what form of God, or for what reason they praised Him, they could not explain.
Workmen’s Dwellings, Bombay.
[Face p. 286.
Villagers, of course, retained the usual advantages of country life—fresh air, purer food, and greater bodily freedom and variety in labour. But the inner conditions of life were otherwise much the same. In furniture, even the fairly well-to-do cultivators seldom went beyond a fireplace (usually outside), a grain store, a plank bed, some rags, some brass pots and dishes, and in rare cases a few silver ornaments on the legs and arms of the women as the most convenient bank. All necessary architecture, even in mud hovels, is beautiful, and so are all implements for human use, but I never saw any attempt at decoration or conscious beauty. It would be absurd to call the Indian peasants ignorant, for they understand their own business quite as well as we understand ours, and in their own knowledge they have little to learn. But in most villages the isolation and absence of schools make them unnecessarily superstitious and apprehensive of unreal dangers. Almost within sight of Lahore, the women rushed away to the flat roof-tops with their children for fear I should blight their souls, and the men could not imagine what I might be, except a revenue collector, a pill doctor, or an official come to poison the wells with plague. Near Delhi the women turned their faces sharply to the wall at my shadow, and lived in perpetual terror of “soldiers,” though for no definite reason. At the foot of the Himalaya up from Hardwar, no one in the village had heard of the Viceroy, or of the Congress, or of Lajpat Rai, though it was little more than twenty-four hours’ journey from Lahore. Only one man knew what a newspaper was, or had ever seen one, and neither he nor any one else could have read a word of it. One old man said he knew they were governed by England, but he had no notion what sort of a thing England was. Another old man in a village within ten miles of Delhi told me that, although he knew nothing about England, he was grateful to the English because when he was a boy his grandfather used to tell him of horrible murders and lootings, but there were hardly any of such terrors now. And as that was one of the few nice things I heard about ourselves in India, I will conclude with it.
Bombay Mill-hands.
[Face p. 288.
But the central problems remain untouched—the problems of the famines, the rise in prices, and of the poverty, which is probably increasing. Is the rainfall permanently growing less, and, if so, have the alterations in the Nile anything to do with it? Is the distress more terrible because the cultivators sell their grain, largely for export, instead of hoarding some proportion of it? Or is it true that they ever hoarded it? Is it want of money rather than want of grain that is bringing ruin on the people? All these things are said.[61] But I would point out one simple and obvious thing about the famine district that I visited in the United Provinces. The land there by its direct and immediate yield was expected to support, in the first place, the Government, with its expensive army and civil service; in the second place, the landowners (zemindars) who usually did the same kind of work as our landowners at home—collecting rents; in the third place, the farmers (ryots), who sold the crops, paid the rent, and worked themselves when poverty compelled them; in the fourth place, the labourers, who worked in good years and starved in bad; in the fifth place, the artisans, who worked for civilization and decency; in the sixth place, the priests, who worked for religion and the soul; and in the seventh place, the money-lenders, who scooped up an interest of about 30 per cent. when they could get it. Patient as this old earth is, it seems to me that in parts of India her patience is a little overburdened.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” p. 241. The whole of that most interesting book on village life in the United Provinces might be read in connection with this chapter.
[54] Mr. Theodore Morison thinks there is no evidence that famines are more frequent now than in the past, and he gives a summary of the very meagre records that have come down to us of eighteenth-century famines: ibid. chap. x.
[55] If paid in grain the ration is 2 lb. 4 oz. for a man, 1 lb. 12 oz. for a woman, 1 lb. 4 oz. for a child.
[56] For the figures at the last census and the division of occupations, see “The Industrial Organization of an Indian Province,” chap. i.
[57] Indian Financial Statement, 1908-9, p. 4.
[58] “England’s Administration of India” (1907); the author, besides describing minutely the growing poverty of small officials, etc., with fixed incomes, dwells on the dyspepsia and ill-health from overstrain and unwholesome hours introduced by English habits, but especially on the increasing devastation of malaria.
[59] For the condition of the landless class, see “The Industrial Organization, etc.,” p. 191, where Mr. Morison, commenting on Mr. Crooke’s Report of 1888, also comes to the conclusion that the average value of a labourer’s wage is now about 2 annas (2d.).
[60] William Crooke’s “Enquiry into the Economic Condition of the Agricultural and Labouring Classes in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh,” 1888: quoted by Mr. Morison, ibid., p. 179.
[61] Sir William Wedderburn has discussed these and similar problems in his “Note on Sir Antony MacDonnell’s Famine Report of 1901,” and in many other pamphlets.