Cassandra on India
The. Garden of Adonis. By Al. Carthill. (Blackwoods. 15s.) DID we know a young Englishman who is eager on an Indian career, and did we wish to test his enthusiasm, we could not do better than set him down to read this, the second of " Al. Carthill's threnodies, from cover to cover. In these days when science obsesses even the staidest of our Public Schools, the more delicate of its many classical echoes might elude him. But the gathering gloom and the mournful metaphor of the book would challenge him ; and, if he came through it buoyant and critical, there would be every reason to hope that he will make good in the promised land. Should he succumb, how- ever, to its all-pervading melancholy, he had better look about for easier jobs than those which India offers to-day. For the writer does not mince matters ; the work of the British bureaucrat in India will never again be so pleasant in the doing, or so fruitful in its harvest, as it was a generation ago ; and he who aspires to serve under the new regime will need some- thing more than the British instinct for managing men and for never knowing when he is beaten.
Had Al. Carthill contented himself with this warning, no one could have gainsaid him. Not for him, however, so stale and obvious a reflection ; he has graver news to give us. Between the graceful imagery of his opening and of his closing chapters, he unrolls a long and sombre picture of India's future. By our lack of foresight, he says, by our weakness and our tergiversations, we have lost our hold on India. The grant of full self-government cannot now be delayed ; and our benevolent autocracy must give place forthwith to an Indian oligarchy, well-meaning but myopic, and devoted to the lines of least resistance. Under the new covenant all that the British administration laboured to build up will crumble ; agriculture will be ruined by the mishandling of irrigation; the peasantry will be neglected and their interests sacrificed to a landlord class ; the co-operation movement, and the cheap credit which it aimed at providing, will go by the board ; the industrial labourer will be ignored except as a political pawn ; industry itself will perish under insensate protection ; the land revenue will be stereotyped as in Bengal, and the economic evils of Bengal will thus be spread all over India ; the currency will be manipulated and the public debt repudiated ; nepotism and maladministration will be rampant ; crime will multiply unchecked ; anarchy will dominate ; and foreign intervention will find a defenceless country and an easy prey. Or, what is equally probable, a free India enjoying the Dominion status for which it now clamours will embroil itself with some foreign Power in a cause which Britain cannot
champion, and for which no other part of the Empire will fight ; " the admission of India to Dominion status will render the dissolution of the Empire certain."
It is with such obituary notices that practically every chapter. terminates. Skip them, and the book is a fascinating study, by a scholarly observer, of Indian life and the Indian mind. In epigram it is rich and singularly happy ; " an olci oppressor is better than a new benefactor," describes to a nicety the attitude of the rustic to his landlord ; " the bewilder- ment of a man who expects justice and receives law " photo- graphs the trembling peasant who is sued by his money- lender. The chapter on religion is a telling analysis of the bitter relations of the moment between Hindu and Moslem ; in another chapter the appeal of Bolshevism to India is subtly estimated. Could the writer only have applied the same analytical skill to his own prophecies of unalloyed disaster, it would love checked their exaggeration. But it is his convic- tion that India " is going to the dogs " ; and his mission is to clothe that sentiment in more decorous prose than is its w"nted dress. " There is," he writes, " one attractive path down which the destinies of India might have marched to a fair future, but I shall not indicate it because no one is yet ready to take that way." Save for this cryptic utterance, there is no hint of any remedy or palliative for the calamities he foretells. India has some reason to hope for more con- structive help from those who love her and whom she has cherished.
It is not India alone which he escorts to the limbo. This island of ours, he tells us in his first paragraph, is an ante- chamber of the sepulchre of dominion ; and his closing page depicts the coming England, " a little kingdom, with no imperial responsibilities . . . remembering but not regretting the past," and replenishing its tiny exchequer from the American tourist traffic ! But perhaps the writer has a sequel in store for us, to complete his trilogy. The " Garden of Adonis " in ancient Greece was a fleeting toy ; but the festival of Adonis lasted two days. On the first day, Adonis was buried among the lamentations of the women ; on the second, they broke into merriment and feasting, because Adonis had come to life again, as Aphrodite's consort for half the coming year It may be that Al. Carthill has done with burying his optimism, and that he will now paint for us an India rediviva, with England no longer its autocratic lord, but its partner and guide towards a more cheerful destiny. For it is by partner< ship, and not by abdication, that England's bounden duty
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