THE SEAMY SIDE OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE.* THE tendency of
recent popular writings about India has been to portray the British rule in all the glamour of the personal achievements of the ruling race. To say nothing of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's writings, which, in spite of many defects, have rendered the nation the great service of bringing India home to the British public, the three books that have deservedly been the most read have all tended in the same direction. First came Sir Mortimer Durand's Helen Treveryan, which gave a faithful picture of Anglo-Indian life and left the natives in the shade. Then Mrs. Steel's romantic story exalted the Englishman, and depicted the natives as prostrate before him either in love or in hate. Lord Roberts's memoirs are necessarily occupied with the doings of Englishmen, and unconsciously reveal a greatness in their author which will make nine readers out of ten forget the solemn warnings which, though they contain the lesson of the writer's forty years' experience, occupy too little space to make a deep impression on the reader eager for excite- ment and adventures. The volume now before us may, perhaps, be a corrective to this oue-sided tendency. It is the
• His Majesty's Greatest Subject. By B. B. Thorburn, Bengal Civil Service. London: Archibald Constable and Co.
work of a representative of the class that best knows India, the district officers of the Civil Service. Strictly speaking, no man knows India. At the most a European becomes familiar with the people and the conditions of the province in which he lives, and this familiarity is acquired chiefly by the local civilians, the engineers, and the planters who spend their lives in touch with the people of their districts. The civilian also acquires a thorough know- ledge of the nature and the working of the machinery of government. To these men India has ceased to be a romance, it has become a mass of hard fact, in which are embedded a multitude of the knottiest problems of social and political organisation. They see not merely the poetry, the comedy, and the tragedy of Anglo-Indian life, they are daily brought face to face with the fundamental question of government : " Does the system meet the necessities of the people upon whom it is imposed ? " Mr. Thorbnrn, whose Indian home is the Punjab, answers this question on behalf of the people of that region by a very decided " No," and it is worth noting that his judgment, expressed before the publication of Lord Roberts's memoirs, is identical with that of the author of Forty-one Years in India.
Lord Roberts, after concluding his story of the Indian Mutiny, discusses the question whether a similar rising is likely to occur again, and finds the answer in a warning against certain weaknesses by which the British Administra- tion in India is beset. They are the centralisation of authority in the hands of clerks at Calcutta and Simla, and the rigidity of a legislative system based upon Western ideas. Under the protection of this system-
" The peasant proprietors of India are being oppressed and ruined by village shopkeepers and moneylenders. These men advance money at a most exorbitant rate of interest, taking as security the crops and occupancy rights of the cultivators of the soil. The latter are ignorant, improvident, and in some matters inordinately extravagant. The result is that a small debt soon swells into a big one, and eventually the aid of the law courts is evoked to oust the cultivator from a holding which in many cases has been in the possession of his ancestors for hundreds of years."
Of the dispossessed Mussulman peasantry of the Punjab Mr. Thorburn has long been the champion. Twenty years ago he published under the title, Bannu ; or, Our Afghan Frontier, a very sympathetic account of the lives of the Pathan peasantry of the district between the Indus and the Suleiman range. Some years later, in a volume entitled Musalmans and Moneylen,ters in the Panjab, he gave a careful
statistical account of the state of the Punjab peasantry, and of their gradual impoverishment and eviction from their holdings, in consequence of the rigid application of laws adapted to British, but not to Indian, tenures and condi- tions. He has now attempted, in a romance of Indian life, to bring home to the English public the nature of this very serious evil.
The plot is laid in the early years of the twentieth century,
by which time Mr. Thorburn thinks that unless the law of mortgage has been modified in a sense favourable to the tillers of the soil there will be very serious internal trouble in India. The story describes the adventures of an English traveller, who, after some unofficial experience in the country, finds himself, in consequence of a very striking chapter of accidents, at the Court of a Mussulman native State, where he becomes first the chief actor in a palace intrigue, and then for several years the confidential adviser of the Mussulman ruling Princess. He has thus the opportunity of acquiring a more than common insight into the conditions of native life, and into the effects of the British system upon native feeling. He is then enabled by one of those strange chances which sometimes occur in novels, and by a stroke of perhaps pardonable deceit, to become Viceroy of India. In this position he has to deal at the same time with the be- ginnings of a widespread native rising and with a Russian
attack upon India, which, of course, is combined with an Anglo-French war. The Viceroy explains in the following words the nature of the internal danger :-
" In agrarian insurrection appears to be imminent, because, through mistakes in legislation and a too-centralised system of bureaucratic administration, hundreds of thousands of the ancient proprietary of the village communities of India have been expro- priated, and the lands transferred to the effeminate, moneylending classes of the towns."
His remedy is to restore to the dispossessed peasantry their proprietary rights, and to make it illegal for persons not themselves cultivators to become owners of arable land. He proposes that the mortgagee who has obtained foreclosure shall be entitled to no more than twenty years usufruct, after which the mortgagor is to be reinstated. He also introduces the system adopted in Ireland, of State advances to farmers to facilitate the repurchase of their lands. This reforming Viceroy finds his chief difficulty in the objections raised by the Home Government to his plane, but from tliis hindrance he is enabled to free himself by the outbreak of the war, which gives the opportunity for a convenient stoppage of telegraphic communication between England and India. The Viceroy having in this way obtained a free hand, carries out his reforms and pacifies India. He is then ready for the Russians, who have crossed the Hindu Kush, and are now in possession of Cabul. The snows of winter suspend for some months the communications of the Russian army with its base. The Afghan tribes are bitterly hostile to the invaders, and implore the help of the British. The British army, thus assisted by the Afghans, attacks and almost destroys the Russian force at Cabul. Meanwhile the Viceroy has had his own adventure in India. The disaffection which it has been his great object to allay has come to a head at Sultanabad, the capital of the native State with which he is familiar. The insurgents have seized the town and beleaguered the Residency, in which is the Viceroy's lady-love. A small force is promptly sent to the rescue, and the Viceroy himself accompanies it. There is a short, sharp fight, and the Residency is relieved in the nick of time. The immediate suppression of this first act of revolt prevents any other outbreak, and thus time is given for the operation of the remedial legislative and administra- tive programme.
These are the political dry-bones which Mr. Thorburn has clothed in the flesh of an exciting story. The conditions of Indian and Anglo-Indian existence are painted from the life. The picture of a thunderstorm in the Punjab, and that of a night-march through an Indian forest, reveal considerable descriptive power. The account of the native Court at Sultanabad and the glimpses of native intrigue abound in touches that disclose the writer's familiarity with his subject, and the sketches of Anglo-Indian officials in high places are marked by the unreasoning contempt often perceptible in the writings of men who know facts better than they understand men.
Every novel written, as the phrase is, with a purpose, is confronted by a dilemma. If the moral is brought into clear relief the average reader loses his interest in the story ; if it is kept behind the veil there is a risk that it will remain un- perceived. Mr. Thorburn has fairly met the difficulty. His political moral is not embroidered on to a plot of different material, but is the substance of which the web of the romance is woven. Full of life and movement, the story attracts many readers to whom the problems of Indian government offer no special interest. Its weakness lies perhaps in the portrayal of character, which lacks dramatic power, and in the love-passages, which want the touch of Nature. Mr. Thorburn's hero, though his Majesty's greatest subject, hardly manifests the elevation of spirit that marks a great man. The passion which he feels is inconsistent with the cynicism with which he thinks of it. The author has tried to combine the disposition of a man of five and twenty with that of a man of fifty. The story will therefore not take rank with the great works of fiction, of which the subject is the human heart. But it better deserves than many of the sensational novels of the day a place in the fiction of incident.
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