Guidance on Indian Problems

.The Underworld of India. BySir George MacMunn, C.B., K.C.S.L, D.S.O. (Jarrolds. Its. 6d.) The Martial Races of India. By Sir George MacMunn, C.B.,

The India We Saw. By the Hon. Edward Cadogan, C.B., M.P.

(John Murray. 7s. 6d.) The Indian and the English Village. By F. L. Brayne, I.C.S.

(Oxford University Press. Is. 6d.)

WRITERS inhabit glass houses, and must hope no one spots half their mistakes. But we owe it to our readers to strive after accuracy and our best generally. Sir George' MacMunn uses and re-uses the same materials, tells the same yarns, repeats the same quotations (Lyall and Kipling), describes the same battles, same campaigns. I will never trust a writer whom I find, in the tiny field where I can check him, prolific of errors. He squanders misinformation ; scrupulously gives the

botanical names of plants, grotesquely jumbled ; tells us •

svadhin is the feminine of the. Sanskrit sadhu, and uses-hetairea as the plural .of the Greek. hetaira. - His knowledge seems mostly hearsay ; he rarely gets even titles right, calls Mr. Ackerley's book An Indian Holiday, and Mrs. Das's Marriage Into India. The Underworld of India is full of proof-reading slips. Lord William Bentinck's prohibition of suttee (1829) he dates 1835. In both books under review he tells us the last public suttee was in 1889, at Ranjit Singh's cremation. There were scores after . that, in the . Punjab, Udaipur; Jodhpur, Nepal, and elsewhere. In March, 1844, three hundred and ten women burned for - Suellet. .Singh, a number far greater than the .sixty-four Sir George cites as exceptional, the satis of Ajit Singh of Marwar, who died in 1780 (our author says, in his cheerful casual fashion, " some centuries ago "). The last legal Indian suttee was at Mahayana Sarup Singh's funeral, at Udaipur, 1861 ; outside India, in 1877, three women burned with the Nepal Prime Minister, Sir Jung Bahadur—suttee became illegal in Nepal in the present century. He calls the Sakta rites (p. -100) Saivite and Vaistv nava ; they have nothing to do with Vaishnava practice. I turn to The Martial Races of India. Vijayanagar (Vijianager, he calls it), he says fell in 1594 ; it fell in 1565. He ascribes to Aurangzeb and 1683 Shah Jahan's capture of Ahmadnagar in 1636. He writes of British inscriptions "on the rocks of the Nahr mal Kelb; the Dog-River, below those of Darius the Persian, of Alexander, of the. Legions of Napoleon the Great."

None of these left inscriptions above the . Nahr-el-Kelb, Gandhi is naturally " Ghandi," needless to say in a context of opprobrium always. Why does he say the Indian troops, reaching Mesopotamia from France, entered on " less severe casualties " and ." less appalling fighting "'1 The Meerut division started 12,000 strong, January, 1916 ; when Kut fell, in April, it had had 12,500 battle casualties.

The Underworld of India is horrors and what the author calls " venery " (archaic word ; not the science of hunting). The Martial. Races of India is far better ; with less repetition it would have been an interesting book. Its author seems one of the few who feel deeply the generosity of India's War services.

- The India We Sato is caveat and cautiousness, exploration of a jungle crowded with fearsome wildfowl. Its M.P. author was on the Simon Commission ; if the other commissioner

had no better luck, the India they saw amounted to precious little. I want to quote from every page. Try p. 15 :

" It is all too much the fashion to discard the advice of any of those of our own kith and kin who have devoted long and distin- guished careers in a professional capacity to the welfare of India as being unenlightened and prejudiced, but the while I walked with my mentor through the quiet lanes around Pangbourne I found in his modestly expressed views much that was confirmed by what I heard and saw during the experience that was to be mine in the ensuing years."

Could Mr. Burdekin have put that better ? On p. 24 " advance" is measured in terms of congestion :

" It would be well for those who imagine that India is advancing with giant strides to bear in mind that there are only thirty-three towns which can boast a population of over 100,000 inhabitants."

The author thinks well of Mr. Jinner(!) and Mr. Jayaker(!). If we are going to work with Indians, would it not be courteous to begin spelling their names as they do themselves ?

An American, hostile to Britain, said to me last February in Lahore, " Brayne has more ideas than any other man in India. Nine may be punk, but the tenth is a winner." That is a high proportion. A man of his courage and experience is always worth reading. But this pamphlet, The Indian and the English Village, is too brief to add anything to what he has already said in books both excellent and cheap.

EDWARD THOMPSON.