THE SITUATION IN INDIA.
rru TOR EDITOR OF Till .sraortroa.-.1 SIH,—I am one of a large number of people in India who depend mainly upon the papers we receive from home for information about the conditions of unrest that are said to prevail at the present time in this country. Taking advantage of the very general and sincere interest which is being taken just now in the affairs of India,-may I be allowed to record the impressions of one who for the last eighteen years has lived among those village-people who make up ninety per cent. of India's population ? I am fourteen miles from the railway, the sole European in this neighbourhood, and months may pass without my seeing a white face or hearing the English language spoken. My immediate neighbours are aboriginal Santa's, but, as a medical missionary with a large hospital and dispensary practice, I am brought into daily and intimate contact—more confidential, too, than is perhaps the rule between natives and Europeans—with representatives of every caste and creed. Yet I do not think I have ever noticed any trace of political discontent, in our sense of the term, among the people here. It is not that they are loyal or con- tented. They are neither loyal nor disloyal, but, as far as Imperial matters are concerned, indifferent. Talk to them of the Maharajah, and they think you refer to their local landlord, and very few of them have any idea whose image and superscription are imprinted on the money they handle. They have some vague notion of a sarkar, mainly as a thing that taxes, but whether it is Eastern or Western, indigenous or foreign, is a question that never occurs to thew. `• East " and " West " are terms with merely a local meaning. One of my preachers once referred to the land of Palestine in addressing a crowd in my presence. " Where is Palestine ? " a man asked. " It is a laud far away in the West," the preacher replied.
The main grievances of the people are agrarian. " Take my life and take my wife, but leave my land," is a common saying here. The enhancement of rent is one of their chief troubles. In the village in which I live the rent has been increased within the memory of those living in it from Its.5 to .118.236 per annum, and the increased value is due entirely to the labour of the tenants. The restriction of jungle rights is another sore point. I have often told the people, however, that if there were no restrictions there would soon be no jungle. The law, it is true, makes some provisions against excessive rent enhancement. The tenants may refuse to pay, except at the dictation of the Magistrate; but then the people are ignorant of the law, and lack the enterprise and the confi- dence in each other that would enable them to combine against the landlords and fight their case in Court. The fact that here we are under the Permanent Settlement no doubt aggravates the evil. Even the removal of the principal sources of discontent would leave the people still subject to the incessant irritation caused by the petty exactions of all those wini hold authority under the landlord.
Next to the minions of the landowner, the police are a constant worry. Their corruption in the subordinate ranks— and it is only the subordinates we see anything of here, except
perhaps for a visit- from the District Superintendent about once a year—is a proverb. A Hindu gentleman told me some time ago that, finding all his mangoes were being stolen from his garden, be went to the nearest village of the local thieving with p caste (Dusadhs) and charged them witthe thefts. "And do you think we are going to pay the police two rupees a month for nothing?" was their reply. In the village in which I Hie one of the leaders of these Dusadhs was caught red-handed in the act of stealing a sheep at midnight from a cowshed. The owner raised a hue-and-cry, and the man was handed over to the police. The case ended with the thief being acquitted; and his captor prosecuted for assault. The corruption in the subordinate ranks of every public service vitiates the most earnest efforts of the Government to benefit the people, and the machinery of the law places an enormous power for the oppression of the ignorant iu the bands of the unscrupulous moneylender. He does things he would not have dared to do in the days Of the village tribunals. Ever since I came here in 1889 the people have been pleading for a land settlement. A year Or two ago the announcement that the Cadastral Survey was to be extended to this district seemed to be the answer to their prayers. But first of all the country was invaded by a small army of underlings, who, in the name of the Government Survey, fleeced the people mercilessly right and left. One day the headman of a village came to me to say that one of these Survey officials bad turned him out of his house, taken possession of it, and was demanding food and fuel for himself and his party. I went to the house and found it was even so. "But if the man asked me to occupy his house and offered me food, what was I to do ?" was all the amla had to say for himself. When asked to show his printed instructions, he produced the rules in which it was plainly declared that everything required of the villagers, in labour or produce, was to be paid for. I had these rules translated into the vernacular and circulated in the villages, but it is doubtful if they had much effect. A secret threat to cut a piece off a man's land in the measurement` and to add it to the territory of a more complaisant neighbour, could hardly fail to succeed. And if a charge of bribery was made to a superior, where was the proof ? These gentlemen do not give receipts for bribes received. Their latest trick was to tell the people that the Rajah had issued instructions that the villagers were to feed the Survey men, and that their expenditure would be deducted from their rents.
Ia " Thirty-one Days in India," a book written nearly thirty years ago, the author professed rather to regret the passing away of the early Company days, when " the European writers regarded with a kindly eye those profuse Orientals who went about hearing gifts." This branch of the business is now closed, and it has been taken up by the " verandah parasites " who do it in our name. He thinks the old plan was on the whole the better one. " We ourselves could conduct corruption decently ; but to be responsible for corruption over which we exercise no control is to lose the credit of a good name and the profits of a bad one."—I am, Sir, &c., JAMES M. MACHIAIL, Bamdah, vid Jhajha, B.I.B.,
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