CHAPTER XXIV
ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA—FAMINE OF 1837
THE financial arrangements made at the time of the renewal of the East India Company’s charter in 1833 have been described in the last chapter; but other important provisions were made by the same Act which also deserve our attention.
The Province of Bengal had increased in territory by the conquests and annexations of Lord Wellesley in Northern India in 1802 and 1803. These northern tracts were now taken out of Bengal and made into a separate Province. From this time, therefore, India had four Provinces instead of three; and in the table of revenue and expenditure given in the last chapter, Northern India has been shown as a separate Province from this date.
The Governor-Generals, from the time of Warren Hastings, were technically Governor-Generals of Bengal with power of control over the other Provinces. The person holding the same appointment in 1834 was, by this Act, created Governor-General of India; and Lord William Bentinck was thus the first Governor-General of India. Each Province had hitherto made separate Regulations for itself; the Governor-General in Council was now empowered to pass Acts applicable to all India. The Council, which had hitherto consisted of four members, beside the Governor-General, was now strengthened by the appointment of a fifth member, known as the Legal Member; and Macaulay was sent out to India as the first Legal Member. The Governor-General was empowered also to appoint Law Commissioners to draft laws for India; and Macaulay, as President of the Law Commissioners, drafted the famous Penal Code of India, which was passed into law twenty-five years later.
All restrictions on the settlement of Europeans in India were removed. Bishoprics of Madras and Bombay were created in addition to the old bishopric of Calcutta; and arrangements were made for the education of candidates for the Indian Civil Service, nominated by the Directors of the Company, at Haileybury College, before their departure for India. The control of the Company’s administration of India by Commissioners appointed by the Crown, which had been provided by Pitt’s India Act of 1784, was maintained.
The impossibility of administering India properly without the co-operation of the people themselves had been felt by the ablest servants of the Company; and Munro, Elphinstone, and Bentinck had admitted educated Indians to responsible judicial posts, as has been stated in a previous chapter. This liberal policy was now emphatically proclaimed in a famous clause of the Act which runs thus:
“And be it enacted, that no native of the said territories, nor any natural born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall, by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them, be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the Company.”
Macaulay was in the House of Commons when this Act was passed, and his famous speech on this clause has often been quoted, and will bear repetition.
“There is, however, one part of the Bill on which, after what has recently passed elsewhere, I feel myself irresistibly impelled to say a few words. I allude to that wise, that benevolent, that noble clause, which enacts that no native of our Indian Empire shall, by reason of his colour, his descent, or his religion, be incapable of holding office. At the risk of being called by that nickname which is regarded as the most opprobrious of all nicknames by men of selfish hearts and contracted minds—at the risk of being called a philosopher—I must say that to the last day of my life I shall be proud of being one of those who assisted in the framing of the Bill which contains that clause….
“It was, as Bernier tells us, the practice of the miserable tyrants whom we found in India, that when they dreaded the capacity and spirit of some distinguished subject, and yet could not venture to murder him, to administer to him a daily dose of the pousta, a preparation of opium, the effect of which was in a few months to destroy all the bodily and mental powers of the wretch who was drugged with it, and to turn him into a helpless idiot. That detestable artifice, more horrible than assassination itself, was worthy of those who employed it. It is no model for the English nation. We shall never consent to administer the pousta to a whole community, to stupefy and paralyse a great people whom God has committed to our charge for the wretched purpose of rendering them more amenable to our control. What is that power worth which is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery—which we can hold only by violating the most sacred duties which, as governors, we owe to the governed—which, as a people blessed with a far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light, we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft? We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation. Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them submissive? Or do we think that we can give them knowledge without awakening ambition? Or do we mean to awaken ambition and to provide it with no legitimate vent? Who will answer any of these questions in the affirmative? Yet one of them must be answered in the affirmative by every person who maintains that we ought permanently to exclude the natives from high office. I have no fears. The path of duty is plain before us, and it is also the path of wisdom, of national prosperity, of national honour.
“The destinies of our Indian Empire are covered with thick darkness. It is difficult to form any conjectures as to the fate reserved for a State which resembles no other in history, and which forms by itself a separate class of political phenomena; the laws which regulate its growth and its decay are still unknown to us. It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown the system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that having become instructed in European knowledge, they may in some future age demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk to the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own. The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverses. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.“¹
The lights and shades are laid on somewhat thick in the above speech, as in all Macaulay’s utterances and writings, and when he described Moghal emperors as “miserable tyrants,” and spoke of “three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft,” and of “the lowest depths of slavery and superstition,” he only spoke with an Englishman’s usual want of appreciation of the customs, institutions, and achievements of nations living outside the narrow limits of England.
There can be no doubt, however, that the new policy, which Macaulay so vigorously advocated, was the policy which England of 1833—which Englishmen who had just passed the Reform Act—wished to see introduced and pursued in India. Monopoly and exclusiveness were distasteful to Englishmen of that day; to shut out a nation from high office in their own country was obnoxious to those who had just extended their franchise; fair play even to a subject nation was the uppermost thought of all earnest reformers, and of the people at large in the British Isles. And the clause we have quoted above was the outcome of the spirit of the times—the embodiment of the policy which the British nation desired for India.
Happy it were for India if that wise and liberal plan had been consistently followed during the seventy years which have since elapsed. The rule of England would have been more popular and more successful to-day, if the people of India had been admitted to a proper share of the administration. And the economic condition of the people would have been better if a large portion of the Indian revenues had flowed back to the people to fructify their trades and industries. But monopoly dies hard in a country where the people have no voice; and during seventy years “that wise, that benevolent, that noble clause,” so eloquently praised by Macaulay, has been virtually evaded.
“No sooner was the Act passed,” wrote a Viceroy of India half a century later, “than the Government began to devise means for practically evading the fulfilment of it. Under the terms of the Act, which are studied and laid to heart by that increasing class of educated natives whose development the Government encourages without being able to satisfy the aspirations of its existing members, every such native, if once admitted to Government employment in posts previously reserved to the Covenanted Service, is entitled to expect and claim appointment in the fair course of promotion to the highest posts in that service. We all know that these claims and expectations never can or will be fulfilled. We have had to choose between prohibiting them and cheating them, and we have chosen the least straightforward course. The application to natives of the Competitive Examination system as conducted in England, and the recent reduction in the age at which candidates can compete, are all so many deliberate and transparent subterfuges for stultifying the Act, and reducing it to a dead letter. Since I am writing confidentially, I do not hesitate to say that both the Government of England and of India appear to me, up to the present moment, unable to answer satisfactorily the charge of having taken every means in their power of breaking to the heart the words of promise they have uttered to the ear.“¹
This evasion of a clause so eloquently praised in the House of Commons, and so emphatically approved of by the British nation, was not foreseen when the Act was passed in 1833. On the contrary, as has been stated before, there was every desire then to promote education in India and to admit educated Indians to an increasing share in the higher services of their own country, without distinction of descent, creed, or colour. Englishmen desired to be just, and the people of India looked forward with a thrill of high expectation to progress and self-government under the Imperial power of a just and righteous nation.
Four years after this, Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837. It is not possible to point to any single date in the history of India when the rule of England was more sympathetic and benevolent, and evoked a higher respect and a deeper loyalty among the people. The wars of Lord Wellesley, Lord Hastings, and Lord Amherst were over, and there was peace in the land. The blunders in civil administration had to a great extent been rectified. The people of India had been welcomed to take some share in the administration of their own concerns. Recollections of the rule of Munro in Madras, of Elphinstone in Bombay, and of Bentinck in Bengal, were fresh in men’s minds. The policy of spreading English education in India had been decided upon. Wasteful expenditure had been reduced, and the Indian budget showed a surplus. A cruel and 317 and 318. The “stultifying the Act” has been so effectual and complete that the higher services in the Civil, Military, Public Works, Police, Medical, Educational, Postal, Telegraph, Forests, and all other departments in India, are almost as exclusively reserved for Europeans to-day as when the India Act of 1833 was passed. A Parliamentary Return, submitted in 1892, shows that, including all appointments carrying a pay of £100 a year or more (taking ten rupees for a pound), the pay and pensions granted to Europeans annually amount to fourteen millions, besides one million to Eurasians, while three and a half millions only are given to natives of India, generally holding lower posts oppressive land-revenue demand had been reduced, and more humane land-settlements for long terms were being made by Bird in Northern India and Wingate in Bombay. The East India Company had ceased to be traders and stood forth as administrators. The British Parliament had given its pledge to the people of India to admit them to the highest posts in their country without distinction of creed or colour. A young Queen had ascended the throne of the British Empire, and awakened in the minds of the people of India all the high hopes and aspirations which a woman’s kindly providence inspires in the oriental mind.
And if this was a bright period in administrative reforms, it was no less so in literary culture. Macaulay had introduced into India something of that broad-mindedness which belongs to literature. Horace Hayman Wilson was a distinguished orientalist, and later on became a distinguished historian. Elphinstone was a man of letters, and was on the eve of publishing his famous History of India. Briggs had published his great work on the Indian Land-Tax, and was at work over his famous translation of Ferishta. Colonel Tod was almost a Rajput himself in his sympathies, and wrote that history of Rajasthan which is more thrilling and attractive than any romance. Grant Duff was at work over his great History of the Mahrattas, which will have its value for all time to come. Never did Englishmen of any generation show higher literary culture and talent in India, never did they feel a truer sympathy with the people. It is impossible to read the evidence of some of the great Indian administrators and publicists of the time, given before the Parliamentary Committees of 1831 and 1832, without feeling that they entertained a respect for the people of India in those days, and appreciated their virtues and worth.
“ I have always formed a good opinion of the native character generally,” said Chaplin, whose revenue work in Bombay we have reviewed in a preceding chapter; “ I think they will bear an advantageous comparison with the natives of any country in the world.”
“ Would you not be disposed to place as much confidence in the natives of India as you would in your own countrymen ? ” was the question that was put to John Sullivan of the Madras Civil Service. “ Yes,” he replied, “ if equally well treated.”
And James Sutherland, who was for some years editor of one of the first English newspapers of Calcutta, the Bengal Harkara, spoke of educated Indians that “ they are as trustworthy as any men in the world.”¹
This spirit of trust and confidence in the people evoked a warm response. The leaders of the Indian community, the social and religious reformers of India, and the distinguished Indian students who were educated in the Hindu College of Calcutta, felt a warm appreciation for English literature and thought, a deep-seated faith in the British character and the British rule. The most illustrious among them, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, founded the Brahma Somaj or Theistic Church of India, and helped in all social and educational reforms of the day; and his cordial support in abolishing the cruel rite of Sati was handsomely acknowledged by Lord William Bentinck. The Raja then came to England, and was present in the House of Commons when a memorial against Lord William’s measure was discussed; and he had the satisfaction of seeing the decision of the Indian Government confirmed by the British Parliament. Thousands of younger Indians, fresh from English schools and colleges, imbibed the reforming spirit, the love of Western literature and thought, the faith in British rule and British character, which inspired Raja Ram Roy.”
Thus, when Queen Victoria ascended the throne of the British Empire, there was a deep, widespread, and devoted loyalty among her Indian subjects, because the policy of England had been generous and trustful. Happy it were, both for England and for India, if that generous and trustful policy had continued to the end of her long reign. For the task of Indian administration is the most momentous and difficult that the British nation has ever undertaken, and that task cannot be performed without the cooperation of the people, and without confidence and trust in the people.
The very year of the Queen’s accession revealed the vast difficulties of Indian administration. Famines had followed the wars of Lord Wellesley in Bombay and in Northern India in 1803 and 1804; a fresh famine had occurred in Bombay in 1813; and Madras, with her wretched and oppressive land settlements, had been afflicted by famines in 1807, 1823, and 1833. And now, in the first year of the Queen’s reign, Northern India, suffering equally from oppressive land settlements, was desolated by a famine more intense and more widespread than any of the preceding famines of the century. The new settlement of Robert Merttins Bird had not yet been completed; the people were resourceless and in chronic indebtedness, and a failure of rains in 1837 brought on the disastrous famine.
“I have never in my life,” wrote John Lawrence, afterwards Lord Lawrence, “seen such utter desolation as that which is now spread over the Perganas of Hodal and Palwal.” Deaths were numerous and were never reckoned. In Cawnpur a special establishment patrolled the streets and the river to remove the corpses. In Fatehpur and Agra similar measures were adopted. Hundreds of thousands died in obscure villages, unknown and unheeded. The dead lay on the roadside, unburied and unburnt, till they were devoured by wild animals.
Thus was a signal given at the commencement of a new reign of the difficulties which beset the administration of India, and the gravity of the distress and poverty which prevailed in the country. The reign of Queen Victoria has witnessed many changes in India. It has seen the extension of the Empire by the annexation of Sindh and the Punjab, of Oudh and the Central Provinces, of Burma and Beluchistan. It has seen the wide continent spanned by railways and connected by postal and telegraph lines. It has seen the establishment of High Courts of justice and of Universities in the different Provinces. It has witnessed the enlargement of cities, and the reclamation of great tracts of country for agriculture. It has witnessed the creation of Legislative Councils, of District Boards and Municipalities. It has witnessed the progress of English education in towns, and of vernacular education in villages.
Two essential reforms the reign of Queen Victoria has not witnessed. It has not admitted the people of India to any share in the control and direction of the administration of their own affairs. And it has not improved the material condition of the mass of the people, or protected the country from those frequent, fatal, and widespread famines which have now disappeared from all other lands under civilised administrations. The history of British rule in India repeats the lesson which history has taught us that it is impossible to govern a country in the interests of the people without bestowing on that people some degree of self-government and representation.
Footnotes
¹ Macaulay’s Speeches. The above speech was made on the 10th July 1833, “in a thin House; a circumstance which may surprise those who are not aware that on a Wednesday, and with an Indian question on the paper, Cicero replying to Hortensius would hardly draw a quorum. Small as it was, the audience contained Lord John Russell, Peel, O’Connel, and other masters of the Parliamentary craft. . . . The Government carried every point by large majorities, and with slight modifications in detail, and none in principle; the measure became law with the almost universal approbation both of Parliament and the country."—Trevelyan’s Life of Lord Macaulay.
¹ Lord Lytton’s Confidential Minute of 1878, quoted in Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and un-British Rule in India, London, 1901, pp.