SIR II. MAINE ON THE SECLUSION OF LNDIA.
SIR HENRY MAINE, in his very striking lecture delivered at Cambridge on Saturday, on the possible value of the study of "India "—that is, its history, manners, and literature—brought out with great power one of the most important and most often forgotten facts about the peninsula. No country, perhaps, in the world has throughout its history been so secluded. Its people lived for ages as separate as if they were dwellers in another planet. Till 1500 maritime enterprise on the great scale was not, and without maritime enterprise India would even now be nearly inaccessible. The country, as large as Europe west of the Vistula, lies almost detached from Asia, far south of the great original line of communication between Asia Minor and China which passed by a much more Northern route, is on the road to no- where, and is walled in by a range of mountains which even now it is a grand adventure to cross over. No great fiord gives access to the interior. No navigable river crosses it from east to west, or is navigable up to the mountain-gate. No navigable river except the Indus, which is scarcely in India, assists access from the west. No great lake relieves the cumbrous solidity of its weary bulk. India is Italy barred by a far higher Alps, and stretching , south to a Sicily twice as far away ; with far greater distances to be traversed, far denser forests to be pierced, far drearier deserts to cross, far deadlier swamps to be avoided ; six times as wide, and requiring a hundred times the toil, and the patience, and the energy to explore. It has, as Sir H. Maine stated, never been conquered but once. Before the dawn of history, another branch of our own Aryan race succeeded in entering it, in partly peopling it, and in moulding the population they found—probably Mongol by origin—into their own civilisation, a work never abandoned and going on steadily now ; but from that time forward India never has been really conquered. Alexander attacked it, but his soldiers mutinied before he had seen the Sutlej ; and he retreated, leaving nothing behind him, except, iudeed, the terror of his name, which still remains one of the two or three names of European history familiar to the Ilindoo peasant. The Tartars and Chinese never passed the Himalaya. We are accustomed to speak of the Mohammedan invasion as if it had been a conquest and an immigration, like the Tartar con- quest of China, but the Mohammedan invaders brought with them only a dynasty, a creed, and a trustworthy military guard. It is excessively improbable that half a million Mohatumedans not Indian by lineage ever entered India, that any conqueror, even Timour, ever brought with him a force large enough appre- ciably to affect the blood of the races he subdued. He invaded as we invaded, he conquered as we conquered, and when the battle was won, round him clustered servants, soldiers, agents, and fellow-creedsmen by the million from among the conquered them- selves. They would cluster round us, too, if we were not so separate, not so Western, and above all, not so Christian. "In India," says Sir H. Maine, "every pursuit, every power, beneficent or maleficent, is consecrated by a supernatural influence. Thus I, ancient practices and customs little protected by law have always been protected by religion, nor would it be difficult to obtain the same protection for new laws if sternly enforced, and for new manifestations of irresistible authority. I am persuaded that if the British Government of India were not the offspring of a free and Christian community, nothing would have been easier for it than to obtain that deification and worship which have seemed to some so monstrous when they were given to the Roman Emperors. In that mental atmosphere it would probably have grown up spontaneously, and, as a matter of fact, some well-known Indian anecdotes narrate the severity which has had to be used in re- pressing minor and isolated instances of the same tendency. One brave soldier and skilful statesman is remembered in India, not only for his death at the head of the storming party which had just made its way into Delhi, but for having found himself the centre of a new faith and the object of a new worship, sad for having endeavoured to coerce his disciples into disbelief by hearty and systematic flogging." So true is that, in our judgment, that we firmly believe that Clive, or even Wellesley, might have founded a new warrior caste, whose caste law, strong as destiny, should have been obedience to the Viceroy, and who would have rendered rebellion impossible, and a white army superfluous ; and we are not certain that if the experiment were tried, and social death made for one generation the inevitable penalty of any disobedience, however slight, as the Castes make it, it could not be done now. It can be proved almost to a demonstration that when the Mussulmans came, it was the people who accepted the invader and his creed, and that.,
as is known to have happened in the case of Nadir Shah, it was the people themselves who swelled an army not amounting to
20,000 men to an irresistible host. The causes which shut out
the conqueror shut out the traveller, aided by the spirit of seclusion which the Aryans in their long and safe residence in the protected peninsula had acquired, which induced them to prohibit voyages across the sea and journeys across the Indus as equally demoralising, and made them regard India, the land of Bharat, as they call the whole Peninsula, as a separate world. Even when the era of maritime enterprise began, and the coasts became accessible, it was only the coast peoples whom Europeans knew. They peopled the interior with savages in a state of innocence and nature. To this hour it is the coasts by which European travellers judge the Indian races, till a reader like Buckle could found a great argument on the universal consump- tion of rice— which, as Sir H. Maine notices, the immense majority of the populations of the interior never touch or see—and it is from the few educated inhabitants of the ports that Englishmen form their impressions of the Indian peoples. In the interior, though we govern, the seclusion has remained unbroken, till Sir Henry Maine can speak of the Indian civilisation as the oldest and most unchanged Aryan form of human society. In this immense anti- quity, this immobility and unchangefulness, consists, he says, the first charm of India for the strident, who may find there materials for a new branch of scientific history. "
It is a strange fact—but it is a fact, and Sir Henry Maine clearly perceives it, though his subject forbade him to enter on it—that this seclusion, though invaded at so many points, still in the main con- tinues. There is a triangular railway, and there are ports full of Europeans, and there is a white man or two in every district, and there are white soldiers in many cities, but the mass of the popula- tions of India are but superficially affected, if at all, by any of these things. They are affected by the Law, so affected that in the Mutiny it was the only thing the revolting districts tried to preserve, but to at least two hundred millions of natives Europe is not, any more than it was in the days when Megasthenes wrote that the Indians had never been conquered, or in the days when the Emperer Baber declared that there was nothing pleasant about India except its magnitude and its wealth. The people go their own ways, live their own lives, follow or abandon their own creeds, as if no conquest had occurred. European literature, thought, and civilisation scarcely reach them, save through the Law, which becomes on points such a conscience, that we have heard pun- dits declare that the sacrifices of children at Saugor never occurred, and the people themselves escape observation to a marvellous degree. Most of the conquering race never watch them at all. We venture to say that outside a ring of officials and students, not num- bering a thousand persons, there are not five hundred Europeans in India who know, or think they know, "India," or any large section of it, in any thorough way, half as well as they know any European country they have dwelt in for a month. Half of them do not know in the least what the Native creeds are, and five-sixths of them will read Sir Henry Maine's description of the imperfect severalty in which property is held with as much or as little interest as Londoners. Those who do know, often know much and write much, but their knowledge and their writings are usually lost to Europe, and always lost to Englishmen. There is an entire literature of "Reports" upon Indian subjects in existence, which no one in Europe ever sees, and which comprises thousands of volumes, all of value, and many of the most fascinating interest. Sir Henry Maine has mentioned the thousands of reports on tenure, reports simply invaluable to the inquirer into the history of property ; but there are others, almost as numerous, upon the peoples, upon their creeds, upon the wild tribes, upon the products of the country, and upon its crimes. How many people in this country have seen that "monumental book," as Americans say, Buchanan's "Behar and Eastern Bengal?" a book as fascinating as Stephens's "Central America," a book which exhausted a life ; or the extra- ordinary series of reports, thirty or forty of them, upon the Criminal Associations of India,—reports on which whole philo- sophies might be based ; or even a book of yesterday, the great work ordered and supervised by Sir George Campbell, "The Ethnology of Bengal," a work of which we are told that if the Russian Government had issued a similar one, the whole world would have heard of it? All in India goes on as if it were separated from Europe by some invisible barrier, beyond which nothing could pass. The men who write these books come home, they live everywhere, they are known to all men, but the knowledge that is within them some- how stays there. The Anglo-Indians do .not care to write, the ' travellers are few or unobservant, and the natives have not yet attained the art of making themselves audible to other races than their own. It is, as all men who have ever tried it resentfully acknowledge, the most difficult thing in the world to keep up with the progress even of Indian external politics. We hear of budgets, and depositions, and durbars, and wars, and all manner of catastrophic events, but of the steady movement there is no record except the very thin one, the Times' weekly letter, accessible to Englishmen at all. The Native Press is not intelligible, and the English Press in India is occupied with subjects that interest Europeans living there alone. Sir Henry Maine seems to think the cause is the feeling of Englishmen that "India is a dull subject," but though the saying has been repeated until it is almost a truism, we question if it is exactly accurate. English- men do not feel bored by India, so much as baffled by India, bewildered by the difficulty of getting at the facts, of keeping up information, of getting documents, of find- ing out without wearisome effort what is done or doing. Three columns of the Times in small type is a heavy dose for the general reader, but we venture to say as large a number of persons have read Sir Henry Maine's lecture as would have read a similar lecture upon the value of studying German, or French, or Arab history, litesatrue, and civilisation. There is more interest in Sanscrit songs than in Provençal songs ; more thought about Indian ancient history than the ancient history of Germany ; more said about the Indian Princes than about _the Princes - of the German Empire. , Our people are not, unfortunately, learners for learning's sake, but about India their defect is not indifference, but want of courage. They dread entering that end- less, secluded jungle called "a knowledge of Indian affairs," even though they know that, entering it, they might be led to scenes which would delight or horrify, but at all events fascinate their imaginations. If any one would go in for them, and bring out an account of what he found to them, they would be genuinely grateful, but no one will do this. There is scarcely a book of Indian travel that is readable, scarcely a history of India before the conquest which is popular, scarcely a work on Indian geography which has any merit at all. We have travellers by the score, antiquarians by the dozen, investigators of everything in earth and heaven, an entire service, so to speak, of explorers in the Topographical Survey ; but India remains none the less, as Sir Henry Maine says, the most secluded of the Aryan lands.
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