BOOKS.
MR. HUNTER ON THE NON-ARYAN TRIBES OF INDIA. WE can make no pretence to estimate the worth of the greater portion of this sumptuous volume, upon which its author, we greatly fear, has expended sums that will never be repaid, even should he carry out the whole of his grand design. There are not ten men in the world competent to criticize Mr. Hunter's attainments as a student of the non-Aryan languages of India, and among them this writer has no claim to be numbered. He will content himself, therefore, with stating that Mr. Hunter, the young Indian historian, one of the few men whom the competition system has introduced into the Indian Civil Service, who promise to be at once savans and statesmen, is compiling a comparative dictionary of the non Aryan languages of India ; that Mr. Brian Hodgson, who probably knows more of the subject than all living Europeans put together, thinks him competent to the work ; and that some of the men best known to students of Indian philology have gladly assisted him in his task. Of this great work the volume now offered to the world is but a specimen fragment.
But Mr. Hunter has prefixed to the body of his work a " dissertation" which it is within our competence to appreciate, and which we unhesitatingly pronounce to contain one of the most important generalizations from a series of apparently isolated facts ever contributed to Indian history. Looking down, as it were, from the Himalaya to the South, Mr. Hunter discerns in the Indian cloaca gentiurn a race or series of fragments of a race which is not Semitic and not Aryan, which in the plains underlies almost everywhere the great dominant castes, crushed to a sort of ethnical powder by the superincumbent weight, but existing still, and in the hills, among the forests, wherever the Hindoo has not found it profitable to invade, coming to the surface, as distinct from the conquerors in language and creed and temperament as were the people of Tipperary from the rulers of the Pale. Two hundred such tribes have been dealt with in different parts of India, some, like the Sonthals, counting tens of thousands, while their ethnical kindred scattered throughout the Continent as outcast castes are almost numberless. Mr. Hunter estimates their total number at no less than thirty millions ; but the evidence for any calculation must be more or less imperfect. Hindoos will not tell the truth, and the tribesmen cannot. It is certain, however, that they are ubiquitous on the frontier, and in the central hills and jungles ; and Mr. Hunter, in one of the most striking paragraphs of his monogram, declares that they are rapidly increasing. " The solution of the problem has ceased to be optional. The order and security which the Queen's Government in India has now imperiously imposed, have done away with those cruel checks upon population which seem to be natural and necessary among rude nations. A lowland raid used to be an event which came as punctually as the December harvest ; the whole tribe lived at the expense of their neighbours during the cold weather, and the loss of life incident to the annual holiday rendered their own scanty crops sufficient for the survivors during the rest of the year. But all this has now come to an end. Raids, although frequent, have ceased to be either a means of regular profit, or a drain upon the population steady enough to be depended upon. The people, therefore, are increasing, while
their former means of subsistence have diminished ; and the question of some systematic scheme of dealing with the aboriginal races has been removed from the languid domain of speculation, into the reddened arena in which political necessity and the promptings of self-preservation do their pitiless work." These tribes, with endless distinctions of manners, all display a common character, which seems specially formed to take an impress from a higher civilization. It is very rough wood, but it is not rotten wood, and carving on it is therefore possible. Everywhere they are marked by reckless courage and an unswerving loyalty. Their oppressors among the Hindoos trust them as the French sovereigns trusted Swiss, and with the same reward, and the testimony of the few Europeans who know them well is unanimous in their favour :—
" Scarcely a single administrator has ruled over them for any length of time, without finding his prejudices conquered, and his heart softened, and leaving on record his sorrow for their present condition, and his belief in their capabilities for good. But lest the traditional tenderness of the Indian Civil Service to the people should weaken the testimony of such witnesses, I shall quote only the words of soldiers— words publicly uttered and printed by veteran servants of the Company or Crown, and never contradicted or impugned. They are faithful, truthful, and attached to their superiors.' writes General Briggs ; 'ready at all times to lay down their lives for those they serve, and remarkable for their indomitable courage. These qualities have been always displayed in our Service. The aborigines of the Carnatic were the Sepoys of Clive and of Coote. A few companies of the same stock joined the former groat captain from Bombay, and fought the battle of Plessey in Bengal, which laid the foundation of our Indian empire. They have since distinguished themselves in the corps of pioneers and engineers, not only in India, but in Ave, in Affghanistan, and in the celebrated defence of Jelalabad. An unjust prejudice against them has grown up in the armies of Madras and Bombay, where they have done best service, produced by the feelings of contempt for them existing among the Hindu and Mahomedan troops. They have no prejudices themselves. are always ready to serve abroad and embark on board ship ; and I believe no instance of mutiny has ever occurred among them.' Colonel Dixon's report, published by the Court of Directors, portrays their character with admirable minuteness. He dilates on their fidelity, truth, and honesty,' their determined valour, their simple loyalty, and an extreme and almost touching devotion when put upon their honour. Strong as is the bond of kindred among the Mirs, he vouches for their fidelity in guarding even their own relatives as prisoners when formally entrusted to their care. For centuries they had been known only as exterminators ; but beneath the considerate handling of one Englishman who honestly set about understanding them, they became peaceful subjects and well-disciplined soldiers. To the honour of British administrators be it said, the same transformation has taken place in many a remote forest of India ; and I fear that, in pleading for the universal and systematic adoption of the policy which has produced such brilliant isolated results, I may have too sparingly acknowledged many noble individual efforts. Every military man who has had anything to do with the aboriginal races, admits that once they admit a claim on their allegiance, nothing tempts them to a treacherous or disloyal act. 'The fidelity to their acknowledged chief,' writes Captain Hunter, 'is very remarkable ; and so strong is their attachment, that in no situation or condition, however desperate, can they be induced to betray him. If old and decrepid, they will carry him from place to place, to save him from his enemies.' Their obedience to recognized authority is absolute ; and Colonel Tod relates how the wife of an absent chieftain procured for a British messenger safe-conduct and hospitality through the densest forests, by giving him ono of her husband's arrows as a token. The very officers who have had to act most sharply against them speak moat strongly, and often not without a noble regret and self-reproach, in their favour. 'It was not war,' Major Vincent Jervis thus writes to me of the operations against the race with which I am best acquainted, ' they did not understand yielding ; as long as their national drums beat, the whole party would stand, and allow themselves to bo shot down There was not a Sopoy in the war who did not feel ashamed of himself. The prisoners were for the moat part wounded men. They upbraided us with fighting against them ; they always said it was with the Bengalis they were at war, not with the English. If a single Englishman had been sent to them who understood their wrongs, and would have redressed them, they declared there would have been no war, It is not true that they used poisoned arrows. They were the most truthful set of men I ever met."
They show everywhere a singular readiness to embrace Christianity, and, we may add, a singular readiness to observe its precepts, while they have no caste prejudices, no fear of forcible conversion, and a kind of incapacity for falsehood which the Hindoos set down to stupidity, but which is really the result of fearlessness. Hated by the Hindoo conquerors, they have nevertheless, in Mr. Hunter's belief, forced on their rulers non-Aryan ideas of tenure, the notion, in fact, that the soil can only be held in property by the tiller, that all above him are entitled only to quit rent fcr services either performed, or supposed to be performed, to the tribe, or, as ideas advance, to the State. This hatred, which is born partly of caste feeling, partly of a thirst for their lands, and partly of a tradition of enmity, has coloured all accounts of their proceedings till the annals even of the British Government are full of cruelty towards the "aborigines," and the very titles of chapters in the annual Administration Reports suggest incessant war. "The report for 1861-62 contains six short chapters. The first is headed, ' The Cossyah Rebellion ;' the second, Riot in Nowgong ;' the third, Excitement in the Sonthal Districts ;' the fourth, Disturbances in Sumbulpore ;' the fifth, ' Disturbances in Boad ;' the sixth, Booteah Aggressions.' The report for 1862-63 again leads off with The Cossyah Rebellion,' and is occupied by the invariable record of outrages and armed pacificatious. Next year a lull occurred, but the British power received insults which could be wiped out only by a costly and sanguinary war. The report of 1864-65 accordingly opens with the Bhutan expedition,—an expedition memorable for its disasters not less than for its ultimate triumph ; the next section relates a raid into British territory by Tibetans ; the third is taken up with a narrative of murder and abduction in British territory by Nepalese ; the fourth, with disturbances in Munipur ; the fifth is headed 'Naga Raids ;' the sixth, Garrow Outrages.' " Yet these people need only the means of obtaining food and common justice to settle down as quiet cultivators, differing from Hindoos only in their fondness for sport, in their tendency to drink, and in a certain childish geniality and frankness of character. The Sonthals, for example, were made by Sir Frederick Halliday's wise reforms, reforms which displayed real originality of statesmanship, a contented and happy people, who, if we pleased, would give us three regiments of riflemen sure to die where they stood until ordered to retreat. Mr. Hunter believes that we may yet find in these races the special military aid we need, and points to the fact long known in India, but scarcely recognized officially, that it is only from them that we can hope to secure the organized bodies of labourers needed for our great engineering operations. Already, we believe, nearly one half of all the "navvies" in India belong to these tribes, and their employers complain of only one peculiarity in their conduct. If ill-treated, they retire en masse, and ten thousand men will disappear in a night, because one of their number was kicked by an overseer in the morning. They will, however, bear with any severity of legislation, carried out by just judges, and acknowledge far more frankly than Hindoos the right of the ruler to rule. Millions of men, who are navvies, who may be soldiers, who embrace Christianity readily, and who rebel when oppressed surely make up a mass of raw material which in an empire like India is invaluable. It is between these masses and the British Government that Mr. Hunter hopes by his book to establish a lasting link, and whatever the result of his linguistic labours, which will be great or small as these races reject or accept the languages of their civilized neighbours, in this one labour of mercy he has, we believe, succeeded. Non-Aryans will not again be shot down on the faith of statements from Muth* settlers, who first seize their lands, and then bind them down under the Indian law of debt—abolished in the Sonthal country—into a serfdom little removed from slavery.
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