When Englishmen speak and write of the history of India, they too often forget what an insignificant portion of that history the record of our conquest and domination really forms. Three thousand years ago the nations of India were a collection of wealthy, and, in a sense, highly-civilised peoples, with at least one great language, with an elaborate code of laws and social regulations, possessed of exquisite artistic taste and beautiful manufactures of many kinds, and endowed with religious ideas and philosophic thoughts which have great — we still scarcely know how greatly — influenced the development of the most progressive races of the West. Perhaps the noblest teacher and moralist that ever lived, Sakya Mouni, was a Hindoo ; the Code of Menu, of the ninth century before our era, is still as essential a study for the jurist as the Laws of the Twelve Tables or the Institutes of Justinian ; the philosophers of India held their own even with men who had argued with Aristotle and Alexander ; Akbar, the Mahommedan, was the greatest monarch that ever ruled the East ; while even in later times nations over whom we hold supremacy have proved that they have among them no unworthy descendants of the authors of the Vedas and the Mahabharat, of the architects of the Taj Mahal or Beejapore, of Toder Mull and Nana Furvana, of Baber and Hyder Ali. Yet to read nine-tenths of what has been written on Indian life and administration of late years by Anglo-Indian officials, we should almost believe that civilised government in India began with the English Raj ; that, but for our intervention, anarchy and ignorance would have been striving for mastery in the benighted country which we have been appointed by Providence to rescue from its unhappy fate ; and that to hand over the direct government to a much greater degree to the ablest natives would be gross injustice to the people of India.
There is little basis for such contentions as these, though they find so much favour with our Indian bureaucracy. It is safe to say, for example, that never at any period was the condition of India more anarchical than that of France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy during a great portion of the Middle Ages. Thugs and dacoits were at no time more dangerous or more cruel than the bands of ecorcheurs, robbers, and freebooters who roamed at will through some of the finest regions of Europe. The exactions of the feudal chieftains were in many cases worse than the heaviest demands made by Rajahs or Nawabs ; the dues to the Church were certainly not less onerous than the tithes to the Brahmins. Nadir Shah's sack of Delhi — a foreign conqueror's revenge, by the way — was horrible ; but not worse than the Constable de Bourbon's sack of Rome. Yet he would be a bold man who should urge that the Pax Romana, with its blight of the great slave-worked estates, and constant drain of wealth to the metropolis, was better for the mass of the people than even the turbulence and oppression of the period of the Crusades. Progress was going on all the time ; and we can now see that what has often been called anarchy was but the commencement of a newer and more vigorous life, due to the barbarian invasion. It may be that our interference checked a similar development in India, following on the gradual break up of the Mogul Empire of Delhi. At any rate, we have no right to claim that we have benefited the country, until evidence has been given that the mass of the people are really better off under our domination than they were, or than they are, under native rule. That is the test of the merit of all governments, home or foreign. Do they or do they not secure increased welfare for the body of the people governed?
There is but one way in which to answer such a question, or to learn to appreciate our true relation to India; and that is by a careful study, without a tinge of national prejudice, of the real history of India and of our connection with the country. To do this effectively calls not only for industry but for imagination. It is difficult enough for us to comprehend another period of the history of our own race, here in our own country, to appreciate the different forms of production, to follow the varying relations of social life, to grasp the substance of the forms of government and administration at distant epochs. If this be so with our own people, how much harder is it to enter into the national life and development of a number of Asiatic nations bound together for a comparatively short time under our alien rule, but whose growth for thousands of years has gone on in conditions so entirely dissimilar, that it needs an effort of the mind to reach the period when the two civilisations had a common starting-point ? Our national characteristics are not favourable to such a comprehension as is really needed ; and, great as has been the work done by some noble Englishmen in this field, it needs only to cite such a passage as follows to show the initial drawbacks which have to be surmounted in endeavouring to get to know the population. " Englishmen in India have less opportunity than might be expected of forming opinions of the native character. Even in England few know much of the people beyond their own class, and what they do know they learn from newspapers and publications of a description which does not exist in India. In that country, also, religion and manners put bars to our intimacy with the natives, and limit the number of transactions, as well as the free communication of opinions. We know nothing of the interior of families but by report, and have no share in those numerous occurrences of life in which the amiable parts of character are most exhibited. Missionaries of a different religion, judges, police magistrates, officers of revenue or customs, and even diplomatists, do not see the most virtuous portion of a native, nor any portion, unless when influenced by passion or occupied by some personal interest. What we do see we judge by our own standard. ... It might be argued in opposition to many unfavourable testimonies that those who have known the Indians longest have always the best opinion of them ; but this is rather a compliment to human nature than to them, since it is true of every other people. It is more to the point, that all persons who have retired from India, think better of the people they have left after comparing them with others even of the most justly-admired nations." This was written by Mountstuart Elphinstone more than thirty years ago, but it is in the main as true now as it was then.
Again, in reference to mere taxation and administration, our difficulties of understanding, even after an experience of a hundred years, are surely very great, arising in part out of the very nature of the case. There is no more ardent admirer of the virtues — I had nearly added, and of the vices — of our rule in India than Sir Henry Maine. Yet he says that to him there is "the heaviest presumption against the existence in any part of India of a form of ownership conferring the exact rights on the proprietor which are given to the present English ownership in fee simple ; " and he shows the impossibility of arriving at any clear notion as to competitive rent in that country. Moreover, he gives the following admirable summary of the hopelessness of foreigners attempting to deal practically with that very land revenue which is the sheet-anchor of our revenue in India, as it has been of every Government that ruled the country before us. " Do you, on entering on the settlement of a new province, find that a peasant proprietary has been displaced by an oligarchy of vigorous usurpers, and do you think it expedient to take the Government dues from the once oppressed yeomen ? The result is the immediate decline, and consequently bitter discontent of the class above them, who find themselves sinking to the level of mere annuitants on the land. Such was the land settlement of Oudh, which was shattered to pieces by the Sepoy mutiny of 1857, and which greatly affected its course. Do you, reversing this policy, arrange that the superior holder shall be answerable to Government ? You find that you have created a landed aristocracy which has no parallel in wealth or power, except the proprietors of English soil. Of this nature is the more modern settlement of the province of Oudh only recently consummated, and such will ultimately be the position of the Talukdars or Barons, among whom its soil has been divided. Do you adopt a policy different from either of those which I have indicated, and make your arrangements with representatives of the village community ? You find you have arrested a process of change which was steadily proceeding. You have given, to this peculiar proprietary group a vitality which it was losing, and a stiffness to the relations of the various classes composing it which they never had before."*
In this brief historical sketch which is given as an introduction to a more exact examination of our present financial system in India, no pretence is made therefore to do more than summarise the main facts. Probably more than one generation will pass before it is possible to make a fair survey of our connection with the country and its results. When such a survey is made there is too much reason to fear that the estimate of the value of our services to India will more nearly resemble that which we ourselves now place on the services rendered by the Spaniards to South America, than the exaggerated view of the beneficence of our administration which is generally taken among us to-day.
The first attempts of the English to establish direct trade with India were made in the reign of the Emperor Akbar. They were unsuccessful, nor was it until after the missions of Captain Hawkins and Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of Jehangir that a factory and settlement were obtained at Surat on favourable terms. Akbar's reign of fifty years was, in all probability, the most prosperous period for the mass of the people that had been seen since the downfall of the ancient Chalookya dynasty. This was chiefly due to the firmness with which he maintained his power, and to the justice and considerateness of his taxation. The settlement of the land revenue was carried out by the famous Rajah Toder Mull, though there is little doubt that the arrangements were in existence before, and were only equitably reduced to order by him. According to the Code of Menu one-fifth of the produce could be taken ; by Toder Mull's regulations one-third was nominally so taken on an average of ten years. This payment, which had gradually come to be made in money, was confirmed in that sense ; though the proportion might be paid in kind if the money payment were alleged to be too onerous ; and the exaction was very rarely pressed in hard times. Where the system of farming the revenue was the rule, both before and after these arrangements, a larger proportion was exacted, and in some exceptional cases the taxation was pushed to such a point that the villagers left their lands, and fled for the time, or until a better state of things was established.
Under Akbar's arrangement, with the addition of certain cesses on trades and other duties of the nature of an octroi, no less than £30,000,000 were paid annually into the Imperial treasury, nor, though the people were much more oppressed and the public peace was much more disturbed under his successors, is there any reason to believe that a less sum was collected by the various emperors of the Mogul dynasty until the great Mahratta conquests and the break up of the empire.* For one hundred and seventy years it is stated by competent authorities that this was the lowest amount of the Imperial revenue ; and when the period is taken into consideration, as well as the large jaghires and rent-free grants given to favourites, this sum, drawn from 150,000,000 people at the outside, certainly represents a much larger revenue than has ever been collected under our rule.
* (Mr. W. W. Hunter, who is paid £3,000 a year as Director-General of the Statistical Department in Calcutta, partly in order that he may act as Advocate General of the Indian Government in Edinburgh, puts Akbar's revenue at £42, 000,000, and Aurungzib's revenue in all at £80,000,000 yearly, which of course strengthens the argument in the text.)
Nevertheless, save immediately after some out-break or invasion, there was no evidence that the country was impoverished ; while during the whole period the manufactures of India were, as they had been for centuries before, sought after all over the earth. All the early travellers were struck by the display of wealth, and our rising industries were obliged to be protected against Indian competition. Aurungzib's renewal of the poll-tax on Hindoos, which had been abrogated by the wise tolerance of Akbar, was a most oppressive measure politically, and the system of farming the revenue again assumed dangerous and most harmful proportions towards the close of the dynasty ; but it remains true that during the time that we were slowly working our way from being merchants to conquerors, India remained a wealthy country, with a revenue enormous in comparison with that of any European State, and with apparently a great power of rebound from any temporary misfortune, such as a Mahratta rising or an Afghan invasion. Nor should we overlook the fact, that in spite of much cruelty and rapine, the rivalry of the states and rajahs, the display of native courts, the magnificence of native architecture, gave a life and colour to the whole people such as is unknown in British India of our time.
This capacity of rapid recovery from disaster, which has been remarked before by all observers as a striking characteristic of India in the period prior to our invasion, was undoubtedly due to the permanence of the village community. The village community or township was the unit of early Aryan civilisation, as the gens was the unit of the social system in the Gentile organisation of savagery and barbarism. It formed, and in many districts still forms, a complete organism in itself, which can be grouped with, but never absorbed by, other similar organisms. The primitive communal arrangements on which they were based have been handed down from countless generations, and the manner in which the payment of land revenue to a chosen centre arose can now almost certainly be traced. In its origin the arrangement was democratic rather than monarchal. But what concerns us is the steady prosperity and marvellous continuity of these village communities, which were the main element of a society where the enormous majority of the population was agricultural. Thorough masters of their own method of tillage, and well able to deal with problems of irrigation in dry regions which our own engineers have so far failed to grapple with successfully, they are self-supporting, and practically independent of all outsiders. These little republics have each and all their headman, who is chiefly supported by the community which he represents in respect to the government, and administers in a popular way the business of the community in regard to the division of lands, the apportionment of water, etc. The accountant, the watchman, the priest, followed by the smith, the carpenter, the barber, the potter, and others, have all their places in the little society, who are all dependent for their support upon the agriculture of the group, and hand on their avocations from father to son from generation to generation.
If another village is formed, though the extent of territory and number of inhabitants may be different, the same functionaries are provided for, and all take their part in some way in the communal business. In such a case there is absolutely no complete property, but the whole village is responsible for the payment, through the headman, of its percentage of revenue on the crops calculated on land of three degrees of fertility. Clearly these village communities, when grouped in tens or hundreds under the old native system, might afford fine opportunities for plunder to a collector or zemindar of a pergunnah, as the group of a hundred was called. But, in spite of many instances of extortion, there is nothing to show that the country was exhausted by the demands made upon it, and the villages survived the raids and misgovernment of Afghan and Patan, Mogul, Sikh, and Mahratta, who might be masters and conquerors for a time, but the villages still lived on.
"In times of trouble they arm and fortify them- selves ; a hostile army passes through the country ; the village communities collect their cattle within their walls, and let the enemy pass unprovoked. If plunder and devastation be directed against them-selves, and the force employed be irresistible, they flee to friendly villages at a distance ; but, when the storm has passed over, they return and resume their occupations. If a country remain for a series of years the scene of continued pillage and massacre, so that the villages cannot be inhabited, the scattered villagers nevertheless return whenever the power of peaceable possession revives. A generation may pass away, but the succeeding generation will return. The sons will take the places of their fathers; the same site for the village, the same position for the houses, the same lands will be reoccupied by the descendants of those who were driveout when the village was depopulated ; and it is not a trifling matter that will drive them out, for they will often maintain their post through times of disturbance and convulsion, and acquire strength sufficient to resist pillage and oppression with success. This union of the village communities, each one forming a separate little state in itself, has, I conceive, contributed more than any-other cause to the preservation of the people of India through all the revolutions and changes which they have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happiness and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence."(Sir Charles Metcalfe).
Tyranny, lawlessness, and rapine might, in short, reign above, while below these conservative communes maintained almost unruffled the peaceful continuity of their existence. Nor should it be forgotten, that great as might be the temporary oppression exercised by the Government, the Rajah, the Nawab, or the Zemindar, the agricultural wealth extorted from the villagers was at least used in the country, and expended on retainers and others. Bad in every way as many of the Mahommedan rulers of India were prior to the Mogul dynasty, they at least lived in the country, and Nadir Shah's loot of Delhi was quite an exceptional event, as well it might be.
An enquiry into the administration of India under the Crown
Including a chapter on the silver question
By Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842-1921)
Published by Swan Sonnenschein, Lowery & Co., London - 1886
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About the Author:
Henry Mayers Hyndman (7 March 1842 – 20 November 1921) was an English writer and politician. Originally a conservative, he was converted to socialism by Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and launched Britain’s first left-wing political party, the Democratic Federation, later known as the Social Democratic Federation, in 1881. Although this attracted notable radicals such as William Morris and George Lansbury, Hyndman was generally disliked as an authoritarian who could not unite his party. He was the first author to popularise Marx’s works in English.
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