India Marches Past
India Marches Past, is bad book-making, of a sort for which one supposes there must be a demand, since so many examples keep tumbling out. Rather more than half of it is history ; the rest, about sexual and social and religious abuses. The latter section, even with a historical introduction, hardly exhausts " India " ; and some of us, after the Lindbergh baby, the Stiffkey business, and our film-star-crazy Press and some con- temporary fiction, are growing hesitant about heaving this kind of half-brick. The historical portion is largely a collection of what Americans call " near-facts." Not many statements are outrageously wrong ; but few are pedantically right. Thus : " The English had not thought of India until 1600" (p. 16). But the Third Witch in Macbeth threatened to track a ship called the ' Tiger,' sailing to Aleppo in 1583 ; four of the ' Tiger's ' passengers went on to India, to see if trade Could be opened up. Cromwell " exacted compensation from the Dutch for their raids on the East India ships " and " happily readjusted the balance " (34). As a matter of fact, he kept £46,000, more than half the £85,000 awarded by arbitrators to the East India Company. The French, when they settled in India,
" made it clear from the start that there could not be room for both nations even as traders on the Indian continent. So with every news of fresh fighting in Europe, the French and English traders in every small settlement in India flew at each other's throats without so much as troubling about the cause of the new European embroilment" (66).
This is a fairy tale. Pondicherry was founded in 1674 ; there were incidents, but the French were at particular pains to keep peace with the English, until about 1720 ; and they received a tolerant kindness in return.
" The scene changes now to Bengal, whore, without any pro- vocation at all, an insensate and cruel native prince, Suraj -ud- llowlah, struggling free of the control of the Mogul, planned to seize the rich merchandise in the English warehouses in Calcutta " (68).
One quite understands that in this class of writing everything must be sharpened up into false simplicity, and English history must be represented as one " Big Parade." But Suraj-ud- Daula's predecessor, Allahvardi Khan, had not left any very noticeable control of the Mogul to be struggled free from ; he had been, however, considerably concerned over the assassi- nation of one of his colleagues, the Nizam, at the instance of t he French, and with the war in the Carnatic that had resulted in another colleague being made a French puppet and his successor an English one. Professor Dodwell says (Dupleix and Clive, 118),
" he threatened the French in Bengal with the seizure of their property. Incurious and apathetic as Indians may have been, the slaughter of two Muhammadan princes and the tutelage of a third by the infidel were not events to be passed over without comment at a Muhammadan court."
Even Orientals are not blind to the obvious. Captain Rennie, a sea-captain who wrote before the disaster to Fort William had been completely reversed at Plessey, says (Reflections on the Loss of Calcutta, 1756), " the principal cause of the war was the knowledge of what had happened on the coast of Coromandel, for many Moors (and some of distinction among them) have come lately from thence and declared that the English and French have divided the country, while their respective Nabobs aro not better than shadows of what they should be.,,
Rennie, writing with local and immediate knowledge, runs up a long list of provocations, some of them almost intolerable, which his countrymen had put upon Surakud-Daula. To this the English added a tactless answer when he ordered them to cease fortifying Calcutta. Their refusal was the direct cause of the war. Mr. Minney deals lavishly in generalizations, being a very noisy writer. " No Indian will ever pay out money until every form of coercion has been applied " (77). The Princes poured out money when Britain was at war with Germany ; and there have surely been examples of generosity in Indians who were not Princes. " No Indian cares how much corporal indignity and suffering he endures so long as his land is left for his family " (79). I am afraid, with so many writers among us like Mr. Minney, we have to own, when foreigners generalize about " the British," that we " have bought it." When Mumtaz Begun' was attacked in Bombay, " the British instantly deposed the Maharajah " (of Indore). Dramatic and impressive ; but an over-statement
in keeping with the whole tissue of a paragraph of exaggera- tions and half-truths (270). It was a slow complex affa:r. The Great Wall of India is a globe-trotter's book—as much
of a tiny section of India as could be seen from a motor-car or picked up from strictly limited hearsay. When a writer who has done work we respect produces pages as commonplace, trivial and-unjustified as these, we must suppose it to be due to laziness.
The Indian Tariff Problem in Relation to Industry and Taxation is a book to be strongly commended. It may not be saying much in the present state of the world, but from the
British point of view India is one of the most encouraging regions ; and one very happy fact is the number of Indians who are now studying their own history and economics with- out nationalist bias. Dr. Dey collates an immense amount of information, historical, geological, industrial ; material for the economic reconstruction of India. He provides incidental glimpses of his country's peasantry and their means of life, which are fascinating :
" Even to this day there are in existence largo numbers of diminutive blast furnaces in the wilder parts of India, particularly in the Central Provinces and Orissa, which continuo to produce by wasteful methods small blooms of soft iron used chiefly for axe- heads and ploughshares."
That quotation is a typical example of his idiomatic excellent English. He studies dispassionately the cotton and steel industries, jute, sugar-cane culture, and the whole basis of
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