INDIA, OLD AND NEW.* .Io happens that a common thread
of interest and significance connects the pile of books relating to Indian subjects which lies -before us. Tessimiats and optimists alike admit that the -" unchanging East" is changing very fast indeed, and it is well that the incurious West should have some rough idea of what manner of change is taking place. Note, in the first place, that three of these books are the work of learned Bengalis. When, just eighty years ago, Lord Macaulay decided that higher education in India should be conducted in the English language, and should deal with the subjects then taught in English schools and Universities, he was mistaken in his characteristically confident belief that he was laying an axe to the root of Hindu :superstition and was wholly discrediting Sanskrit learning and speoulation. In reality, contact with English literature and Western science acted as the stimulus to a renascence of in- digenous intellect, and mightily -aided the literatures of the modern languages of India. But if he mistook the probable consequences of his decision, the decision itself was sound, and indeed the only possible one. Indian learning hdd degenerated into barren pedantry, and Indians themselves had already eagerly grasped at such tentative attempts to give them a Western training as were available. Of these early attempts 7r. Narendra ISath Law gives a clear, readable, and tolerably
complete account,' admirably supplemented by Archdeacon Firmingeeti introduction, whiCh shows that that veteran.student of Anglo-Indian history retains hid industry, learning, and sense of humour.. With/4r. Law's book should be read Mr. Ramsay
• (1) The Promotion-of 'learning in India iv Early European Settlers. By Narendra Nath Law. London : Longman and Go. ad. net.1—(2) The 'Making of BrOish India. By Barnsay Muir. Same pnblishers. net.)— (3) The History of the Royal and Indian Artillery in the Mutiny of 1857. Bs- Colonel Julian It. 3. Jocelyn. London : Sohn Murray. r21s. net.1—L 44) Indian Thought, Pad and Present. By St. Fe. Frazer. London : Fisher Inter. ll0s. 6d. net.1—(5) The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus. Arniandranatt Seal. London: ',commons and Co. tits. .6d. net.]— 46) visage Vot•ernment in British India. By John Matthai. With .a Preface tiySidney Webb. . Loudon : T. Fisher Ls' [4s. Gd. net.]—(7) The Karim and din .Purdah. Sy, Elizabeth COoper. Same publisher. . (Jas. ied, heti- (S) Tat Orono of chow Nippur. By S. C. Roy. With an Introduction by .3k. A. C. Haddon. Calcutta r -Thacker, Spink, and Co. flOs. 4d. gibyeasbiii : peat /., Spriazial Calloguial Pasdatu. Er Major D. L. B. Lorimer., It-A. -Orford : at theAtureadon Press. [15s. nett Muir's well planned text-book on The Making of British Indic! Written for academical purposes, this interesting collection of extracts from Anglo-Indian despatches, memoirs, and other writings should attract a wider public. It tells, in the words of the actors themselves, the remarkable history of the growth of British supremacy in India, and the gradual establishment of the Pax Britannica by a handful of merchants and administrators, unprompted by Imperial ambitions and guided chiefly by the patent necessity of keeping the peace in a land whose energies. intellectual and industrial, had been exhausted by centuries of misgovernment and warfare. The internal peace of British India was broken once only, by the Mutiny, whose most lasting result was the transfer of the Government of India from the Company to the Crown. Of the Mutiny Campaign Colonel Jocelyn3give,s au admirably perspicuous and soldierly description. aided by interesting reproductions of contemporary prints ana good plans of sieges and other military operations.
The result of Macaulay's famous Minute of 1835 was not, we have said, what he expected, and Mr. R. D. Frazer 4—and no one could be more competent for the task—has en- deavoured to show in a brief compass what the Indian learning was which Macaulay, as was inevitable at the time, misunder- stood, and what the contemporary evolution of Indian specula- tion and ambition is likely to be. When peace returns, Indian aspirations will make themselves heard, and meanwhile Mr. Frazer's book, an interesting supplement. to his well-known Literary History of India, gives us the means of guessing what form the claims of the new Hinduism of to-day are likely to assume.
One reason why Christian doctrine and ethics have had only an indirect, though real and lasting, influence on Indian thought has been that India., in common with classical Latinity, has an incorrigible belief in a vanished Golden Age, and holds that the germs of all that is bests and most fruitful in Westernscienee and experiment can be found in the speculations of early Hinder philosophers. A notable result of this tendency is Mr. Seal's learned work on The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus.6 We can admire Mr. Seal's industry and ingenuity without accepting all his conclusions. Many of them are on a par with the arguments of those who find in Lucretius the origins of the atomic theories of modern chemists. If, however, his theories encourage the efforts of our Bengali fellow-subjects to surpass their ancient predecessors in scientific research, no harm will be done.
Meanwhile rural India remains more or less unaffected by the intellectual and social transformations which are snaking the great towns so oddly cosmopolitan. The remote mofussil is undergoing changes too, but chiefly by the efforts of Western administrators who are reorganizing the life of the cultivating classes. Mr. Matthai's study of Village Government in British India6 deals with a problem which is not likely to be finally settled in our own time, but for the elucidation of which he has compiled a valuable collection of facts and arguments.
Even in the great cities of the East, and even in circles which aim at cosmopolitan freedom from old-fashioned conventions of speech and conduct, the change is not complete. Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper 7 is an American lady who has written brightly and with a good deal of intuitive acumen about the status of women in Egypt, India, Burma, Clina, and Japan. Apparently her travel-notes first saw the light in the form of contributions to magazines, if we may judge by the fact that the same quotation from Browning appears on pp. 67 and 84. At p. 208 is an illustration misdescribed as a " Burmese working woman." Its proper place is at p. 103, where we are told of the custom of drying cowdung for fuel in Upper India. Perhaps the most interesting pages in Mrs. Cooper's book are those which tell of her meeting with Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the author of The Bird of Time, in Hyderabad. It may be noticed is passing that Mrs. Cooper found that Muslim sympathies in India were with the Turks in Tripoli.
Among the doctrines fashionable in New India is the political creed of Pan-Indianism. Educated Indians now deny that caste his been effective in creating a real stratification of Indian society, and doubt whether linguistic or cultural differences
denote much difference of . ethnical origin. Yet, in Bengal at least, a genuine interest in the anthropology of the provinco has led to the writing of books of real merit and importance
by Benialls. Such was, for example, Mr. Satish Chandra Ghosh's work on the Chakma tribe to the east of Chittagong, and Mr. Roy's own account of The Mayrdas and their Conatry. Mr. Roy now gives a careful description of another of the aboriginal tribes of the Chota Nagpur plateau, with numerous illustrations and a map.9 Dr. Haddon's introduction summarizes, with his wonted skill and learning, the most interesting and significant of the writer's observations and discoveries.
Finally, whatever changes education, peace, and prosperity may work in India itself, beyond the arid hills of the North- Western border live wild tribes, as turbulent and troublesome as were their ancestors when Ranjit Singh strove to curb them by merciless reprisals. That barren borderland has given birth to a class of military administrators who are among the best and ablest of the King-Emperor's servants. Their work throws them into intimate relations with races that require and reward careful study. Pashtu, the tongue of the border tribes and of Afghanistan, is one of the most difficult and inter- esting of Indian languages. Major Lorimer' has grasped the fact that its difficulties are due less to inflexion and mor- phology than to syntax and significant accent, matters only to be mastered by long familiarity and not easily communicated to beginners. His book will be welcomed by all students of the comparative philology of Indian languages.
The nine books we have briefly noticed give but a faint echo of the ferment which is working in India. They fail to account for the unrest whose disquieting results we may see in the recent sedition trials at Lahore and Benares. They do give us some clue to the daring reforms in Indian administration suggested by Sir William Wedderburn and Sir Krishna Govinda Gupta (another Bengali), reforms which would be more acceptable to impartial observers if all India were as Calcutta and Bombay. The leaven of English education works briskly in the classes who owe their very existence to the British peace, and prompts them to the not unnatural belief that they can now take over the greater part of the " white man's burden " in India. It is not likely that the contemplation of the war will dash the high hopes of Bengali politicians, or will convince them that political freedom is won and preserved by great sacrifices. It may be, however, that the men who have fought under British officers in Flanders and Mesopotamia will return to their homes with a just sense of what the maintenance of British rule means, and may provide an antidote to the theories of political empiricists. How dangerous such theories may be can be seen by those who have read certain articles by Bengalis in recent issues of American periodicals. But these are matters that can wait till peace is restored, and the Indian administration is once more at leisure to resume its task of patient guidance and education.
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