TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DELHI DURBAR.
TT is objected to the Delhi Durbar that it is too large 1 and grandiose. too costly. too full of histrionic' display, in a word, too Asiatic. Is not that censure, however, the best defence ? It would be folly to call on three hundred millions of Asiatics to admire a State ceremonial, and then give them something which in spirit and detail was essen- tially European. Bred among scenes the note and the fault of which is excess—mountains made impassable by their loftiness, rivers that are unmanageable because of their volume, plains that are wearisome because of their spaciousness—the Asiatic, and more especially the Indian, has fixed in his very soul the feeling that the gigantic is the admirable, that the clumsy elephant because of its bigness is fitter to carry a deity than the symmetrical horse, that a ceremonial is grand in proportion to its vastness, even if that vastness is mainly produced by repetition. Bathed always in an over-profusion of light, which reveals all edges and makes all brilliances flare, he delights in colours whose brightness dazzles the eye. in gems that flash like flames, in scenes that to the European seem fitting only within a theatre. Believing that all power comes from God, and therefore is divine, he likes the great to display their greatness in the grandeur of their abodes, the mag- nificence of their dress, the dramatic, often the terrible, violence of their acts. The restraint which marks all Western ceremonial, the result partly of climate, partly of ages of self-control, strikes him as cold and poor, impres- sive perhaps, but lacking in all that gorgeousness which to him makes of impressiveness a luxury of sense. It is creditable to Lord Curzon's imagination that he has discerned this feeling, though he lives apart from the magnificence of India in the cloudland of Simla, and has resolved for once in a reign to gratify it to the full. And aided by men who have lived lives in con- tact with the people, he has succeeded. His camps cover square miles. His stage is Delhi, always to the Indian the true historic capital, the seat of the Imperial power which, incessantly defied and often broken, is still legiti- mately supreme. His army on the spot could conquer India, is greater indeed than any of the armies which on so many stricken fields have conquered it. He has sum- moned all the Princes of the secluded continent, and with the rarest exceptions they have come, the Nizam, greatest of Mussulmans, and Travancore, who never obeyed Delhi, greatest but one of Hindoos, at their head, all willing to show by their attendance, and the grandeur by which they have made their attendance visible to their world, that they acknowledge the existence and the right of one greater than themselves, the successor of the Sovereign who within the mighty peninsula had no equal. Not Akbar, wisest of the great Moguls, nor Jehangir, the most magnificent, could have collected such a Court as that which on Thursday assembled to do honour to Edward VII., or have ordered a procession half so wonderful and historic in its inner mean- ing as that which on Monday slowly streamed down the Regent Street of Delhi in a river of " barbaric," and there- fore scenic, splendour. The Court or Durbar must have been, as Lord Curzon called it in a speech of remarkable eloquence and judgment, an " unparalleled display," East and West meeting together, the former with its un- restrained and, so to speak, gigantesque magnificence, and the latter with the regulated splendour which hardly conceals its iron strength. All that governs India was there,—the leading men of the Imperial Service, the greatest Generals. Princes by the score, all on elephants caparisoned in gold and flashing with gems, a cavalcade without a parallel, at least in external magnificence and Pomp.
But, asks the business man at home, granting that the scene was magnificent and successful as a ceremonial, was there any political " value " in it all ? Well, as it happens, there is upon that point evidence which to the few who have studied it seems irresistible. The Great Moguls were an invading dynasty, without claim to antiquity as India, which saw and survived Alexander, understands antiquity ; with no Royal "right," even in their own eyes, save that of conqueror ; with nine in ten of their subjects bitterly hostile to their creed, indeed, despising it as one as false in its philosophy as deficient in ceremonial ritual ; and with imperfect skill in the selection of Viziers or the organisation of an Empire. Most of their satraps revolted, the ancient Princes periodically cursed and defied them, and twice at least in their history they were faced by great popular movements, one of which, the rise of the Mahrattas, we English saw and feared. Insurrection, indeed, was chronic while the Emperors ruled. Neverthe- less, it is as certain as any fact in history that during the four hundred and fifty years of their reign an opinion gradually solidified itself that the right to supremacy in India rested with the descendants of Timour. And when in 1857 the native soldiery, as the one armed class of the population, sprang at the throats of the white rulers, it was in the name of the Emperor of Delhi that Mussulman and Hindoo, Pathan and Mahratta, alike agreed to carry on the struggle. If the Emperor had been a great soldier, and had defeated the British, no man in all India, whatever his birth or creed, would have questioned, even in his own mind, the right of Bahadur Shah to the supreme Musnud, and a suzerain prerogative limited only by his power to enforce it. That feeling is not precisely loyalty, for it would not have prevented local rebellions, but it was a mighty source of security and power, if only because every man who chose to serve the Mogul as soldier or as statesman was held, even if he were an old Hindoo Prince, to be within his right, to be doing in some sense, though not quite our Western sense, his obvious duty. There exists no reason whatever, except our absurd Western hurry, why, if we can but make the house visible to the people, this feeling should not in the course of years grow up about the house of Britain, which, foreign as it may be in India, is no more foreign than the great Tartar line. It was growing before she died about Queen Victoria, whose length of years and almost uniform success, together with her reported character, seemed to the Indian mind to mark her out as one upon whom the higher powers —the Mussulman says the same thing, but calls them Destiny—had intended to confer the sovereignty. It is worth while politically when opportunity offers to make the dynasty visible and audible ; to break, if it be but for a moment, the cloud that conceals that distant throne, and call on all India to acknowledge that her strangely varied multitudes owe to this one power political reverence. Lord Curzon has endeavoured to do this through a gorgeous ceremonial, and histrionic as many will deem the attempt, and histrionic as in some of its features it really is, we cannot but deem the attempt a wise one.
But the cost, the cost? As the people of India, if a plebiscite were taken, would undoubtedly vote the cost, there is not much of a moral basis for that objection ; nor, we think, is the argument from our superior civilisation very strong. There is no waste, if the small sum expended, about £150,000, really helps, as we believe it will, to solidify order. No new tax is imposed to meet the outlay, which does but slightly decrease the surplus ; and there are other considerations too often forgotten. The Emperor of India receives and claims no Civil List. No item appears in the Imperial accounts to be compared with the terrible personal expenditure of the Great Moguls. India has no Court to support, every man who rules there being paid only for his work, and paid at no extravagant rate, the Viceroy not being entitled even to a pension, and there being through- out the Empire not one sinecure. If European Chancellors of the Exchequer could escape the cost of Royal splendour by paying one-fifth per cent. of their annual receipts once in a generation, they would esteem themselves fortunate beyond their dreams. We are told that India is too poor to waste anything, that every anna ought to be saved for the relief of taxation ; but the statement must be received with many explanations. India is not, indeed, rich as Great Britain and France are rich, for she has never had time under our fructifying rule to become so ; but that her people are advancing in wealth is a fact past all question, else where does the immense annual import of silver and gold go ? The people do not melt the metals to eat. That there is a terrible amount of poverty in India, due mainly to the frightful increase of the population, is true ; but the poverty is not in the main among the taxpaying classes, those who pay a small rent to Government for their holdings or who trade. That a "submerged tenth " exists in India, as it does here, cannot be denied, but even for these the Government is now taking protective steps. Cannot those who write so bitterly, and who destroy by that bitterness the value of what might otherwise be useful criticism, see that under the title of "famine legislation" the statesmen of India are building up slowly an automatic Poor Law that, aided as it is by the wonderful native system, under which no man may suffer his relatives to starve, will in the end at all events prevent death from hunger ? We can do no more than that at home, and over the larger half of the white world there is but a. feeble attempt to do even that. It is not from taxation that Indian peasants suffer, unless, it may be, in one or two provinces, but from the collision between the European idea that land is property, liable, like any other, for debt, and the native idea that it is im- perfect property, which should not be pledged for more than a generation. Lord Curzon is patiently trying to solve that most perplexing problem, and it is by the irony of fate, and not with justice, that he is accused of taxing peasants, whose rent he cannot raise except at fixed intervals, in order to gratify his own and his Sovereign's love of scenic display.
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