TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ROYAL VISIT TO INDIA.
1\10 Anglo-Indian will, we thinjr, venture a confident opinion IN oii the effect a the Heir Apparent's visit to India, and we do not know that it is necessary to form any confident opinion. The„visit is, _most natural and most right, and we may safely leave its political results to Providence. It is right, because two hundred millions of people, who cannot come to Europe, have a claim, if they desire it, to such a courtesy from their future Sovereign; and it is , natural, because the Prince must feel some curiosity about such, a multitude of possible subjects, and because India, to a Prince of Wales, will prove the pleasantest of ,lands. We do not recommend India to the ordinary tourist. He will find in traversing it that he learns very, little, that he hears contradictory, things on every subject, and that he does not see anything, except a few buildings, of what is best worth seeing on the continent. Really to see India, a European should be either, A prominent politician or a Prince;, one kr whom great natives Will exert thenaselves, before whom. the invisible barrier which separates Native and European life will fall, who will tie admitted to Native Couxts, urged to quit the Railways, enabled to call, before him a display of that wonderful Asiatic life whic Europeans sometimes pass whole careers in India, without seeing. The best way to. see India differs radically from the best way to see Europe. Really to know the country, its separateness, its true and unique character, a man shouM.travel en prince, should march with a camp round bin, move far from the beaten track at fabulous cost per diem, be received as the honoured guest of Princes, cause that commo- tion among the multitude which impelii.the.m to exhibit them7 selves, hear from real authorities what everything means, be able to express a wish which will be treated as a command. The very natural features of India will be different for a Prince of Wales ,and a mere traveller.. The bagman can see Mont Blanc as well as the millionaire, but to see India one must diverge from the roads in a way impossible to tourists, must plunge into the interior as a conquering General would, must have means and appliances, and above all, rank such as only a Prince or a wealthy politician of high mark ever has at hie disposal. Rank, great rank, either official or personal, is the talisman which unlocks the doers of that great continent. To see India well one should be able to spend £500 a -day,.to order out the elephants of a district, to require the attendance of , commissioners, to suggest that a native Durbax should be an incident of one's reception in a native capital. , That rank which in Europe is, so often. a .burden .will in .India be to the Prince of. Wales, if he , really desires to. see the land, an hourly, convenience, making all. in whose hands lie the secrets of the continent his willing and obedient guides, anxious to display the mysteries of their provinces to his gam; To a Prince will be shown, the beauty of regions no white foot has ever traversed. For -a Prince will be organised these wonderful hunting .spectacles which of all spectacles in India reveal most perfectly the separate life of the East, its peculiar colour' its peerless and for many minds irresistible grandiosity. To a Prince even the interior of the temples will be open. The ordinary traveller, is beaten in India by the vastness of everything, by the physical difficulty of travelling out of the road, by the traditional habit of secluding everything that can be secluded from the European eye, by the scale of the needful preparations, by the indifference or hostility of all natives of importance ; but to the Prince of Wales there will will be no such barriers. His wish will be a command, his visit an honour for which Princes will contend with fury, his presence an excuse for provinces to place at his disposal all they have of luxury and grandeur and distinctiveness, and, to coin a word which the language ought to possess in some less barbarous form, of ".Asiaticness," fully, freely, willingly, as it is placed only at the disposal of those who are great in other eyes than ours. The Prince of Wales may see India, if he will, as an Emperor of Delhi could have seen it a hundred years ago ; and the Emperor, strange as it may seem, would have seen a truer as well as more magnificent India than the most acute or observant European,—and that for this simple reason, that the glance of his eye was honorific, and that of the European is maleficent. In India, of all countries on earth, he only sees who looks down from the hill-top. The land is too vast to be seen except as a panorama. The traveller in the plain sees nothing, mistakes the roadsides for the country, thinlrs that a province choked with people, brimming over with life, full of cities, ruled by a civilisation which was completed when Germany was a forest, is a dreary jungle. There is no land where the willingness of the people is so essential to the traveller, where the favour alike of the great and of the multi- tude is so indispensable, where native laospitalityis so invaluable, and all these aids in their strongest form will be at the service of a Prince of Wales, who will learn more, see more, 'enjoy more, say, from a week's hunting with Scindiah, than from a year of travel in ordinary ways and on ordinary routes. He has but to march from Bombay to Agra, halting at Palsies by the way, and he will know more of Native India—the only- India worth studying—than officers who have passed live. without realising that they are living in a civilisation amidst which they are only temporary, acoidents. There is no un- pleasantness to be feared from the climate, for India from November to March is like Italy in spring ; and little to be feared from disease, if as ,we should hope the Prince's attack of typhoid has made him proof against miliaria. Of Personal danger there is none whatever,- except that risk from ma,dment to which Princes are everywhere exposed, and which in India.. may make A little extra watchfulness. desirable.
. As to the political result of the visit, we have no opinion to offer. Very possibly there will be none, except a slight feeling of .pleasure in all Native minds that the future Emperor has thought their country, which they hold to be so _separate, so sacred, and so beautiful, werth an extended visit. The grand consequences which seine of -oar contemporaries are predicting; seem to us very improbable. 4T.9 visit, even if_itgives pleasure,. can bridge thezulf, between the Faastern and„Wnstern mind, or- alter the native, opinion of a rule of which they understand perfectly both the good and the. evil side. There will be no hostility to the Prince, and there maybe no burst of loyalty.. The secret of native -reverence has not been, discovered yet- The limes seems to ,think it is pedigree, but the devotioza shown to the -Houses of Oodeypore or, Travancore, which are lost in the past, 'is scarcely, greater than the loyalty -displayed towards Princes whose grandfathers were mere adventurers. Mere died for Tippoo, the Corporal's son, as devotedly as they died for the Rajah of. Jeypore, whose faertily was reigning where Alexander crossed the Indus. Many Anglo-Indians assert that the secret is mystery, and will believe in their hearts that the: visit of a fattish young gentleman in a General's uniform—or is it to be in a Field-Marshal's ?—as Heir APRarent to the throne of the Mogul, will tend distinctly, to lower thejespect felt for the bithe,rto invisible sovereign, who sits shrouded from Hndoo. sight by the ocean, and can overthrow Princes by a word transmitted. invisibly under the sea ; but the Great Mogul could be seen by the meanest -subject, and Babel., remained a great Monarch, though. his people saw him half drunk,, jumping from. battlement to : battlement of his. palace.. The successful rulers of India, have no_t shrouded them- selves. -,,,Akbar: gave daily - audiences, thou,gh he did sit ont a throne placed on the bread stone girders Above his audience- hall. Hyder All was known to half his subjects and all his army, and every Sikh, as he helped to found,lkinjeet's throne,. knew, that his absolute lord was a orie,eyed little- man, who thought usqueliaugh weak stuff till _they. 'put some chilies in. Many more 4-nglo-Indians will assert that the .secret is magnificence; and grieve that 'the Prince cannot appear-in the state of, a great Mogul, or with a halo round his head, such as: Caligula tried to devise ; but the native . understands that Omar is Omar" quite well,. 'even though Omar be riding double or fetching water for himself; and, of all Europeans of our time, probably the men. who have produced the deepest impression on the native mind :were Sir Charles Napier, who. never had the slightest trace of magnificence :about him, and Sir John Lawrence, who was accused, erroneously, we believe, of giving audiences in his drawers. That natives consider ceremonial and precedence on certain occasions of extreme importance is true, but the deference which will surround the Prince will.strike them as much as ceremonial ; and about pre- cedence there will, we should hope, be no question whatever. There -could be none about that of the Empress, or that of the Viceroy as her representative, and the Prince of Wales is second throughout the Empire. We ourselves have often argued that the secret of Oriental reverence is the Asiatic notion of the sacredness of sway, but we confess we are unable to draw the line which in their minds separates power from rank The history of the Mutiny shows that reverence attached through a whole century to.
Princes who during that long period had possessed no power whatever, and we do not believe that natives will misunderstand the position of a Prince who, though he will be Sovereign, Ids as Heir Apparent no political authority. They may overwlYelra itis1 rule by disrespect to the Queen's heir, but we do not measures of financial precautien (like the Friendly Societies think they will The result marbe greater than 'any one can Bill), has been Nually. irresolute and inconstant, and that imagine, bat there is no reason Why it should be so, and it is the Prime Minister has been fat too indifferent to thee() fat more probable that the visit will be like a Royal visit to Matters to Come to the rescue, and we shall have iuitlicad 'Ireland, a pleasant compliment to a people who like apprecie- sninniarily our reasons for thinking that the Government is tion, but without much permanent influence on the pi-Ogress of neither a:Strong ncit politically a-sagacious one One point of high importance ought to be settled before the of his dav, yet We venttire to say that he has shown: himself 'Prince sets sail. Is the Indian etiquette, or the etiquette of the very greatly inferior to his predecessor, whose political popul- Royal House, or a separate. etiquette to be observed about re- arity has always seemed to us dire more to personal suavity, ceiving and giving presents ? • A Mistake there may 'do most than to strength of political thought, in his conduct of the legal serious mischief, take away, in fact, all the charm of the visit ; reforms entrusted to him. • Lord Selbotne's measures showed and, subject to the opinions of experts, we should, say the rule more grasp, and are held by good judges to have been far better usually observed ought to be relaxed. An Emperor in ASIA drawn than Lord • Cairns's, and certainly the essential points
honours the donor from whom he accepts a gift,. in 'them were more 'clearly discriminated and adhered to. Lord
Previous page
