Mr Ashok Kapur’s two-part article, “Imperial India I & II” (8 and 9 February) coveys the impression that a congregation of angels had descended on the shores of poor India from the 17th century onwards, with their message of love and goodwill. This was in the form of the Royal Charter of East India Company that turned out to be a licence for loot and genocide. The two angels that he has so reverentially named are Thomas Babington Macaulay and his ‘enlightened’ predecessor, Warren Hastings. The latter was so enlightened that in 1783, Fox’s effort to impeach him through the India Bill in the House of Lords was defeated, thanks to the conspiracy of their sovereign, King George III. He enjoyed an annual salary of 25,000 pounds. Only Burke’s tenacity brought him to book, though he eventually evaded justice.
Macaulay recorded his enlightened predecessor’s misdeeds, but did not show any leniency in his biography of Hastings that covers his Impeachment in the House of Lords. Peter James Marshall has meticulously treated his enlightenment in The Impeachment of Warren Hastings. It is almost as if a demon had descended on earth to usurp the belongings of the Begum of Oudh or Chait Singh of Benares. Robert Clive had, after the murder of Nawab Siraj-ud-Dowlah, denuded his treasury.
I would like to draw your readers’ attention to the justness of British “occupation rule” in India from Sir Walter Roper Lawrence’s The India We Served. We are enlightened about the salaries his Indian servants received during the closing decades of the 19th century, more than a century after Hastings drew 25,000 pounds a year.
“Looking back at my old diaries I see that my monthly average for servants was Rs 64; table servant Rs 12; bearer Rs 11; water-bearer Rs eight; sweeper Rs six; grass-cutter Rs six; washerman Rs eight.”
How much did those angels draw in the initial stage of their service? “Our pay was small, and I lost pay by entering the Political Department. But pay never comes into the picture of the young and unmarried, and one was better off on Rs 400 a month in the Mofussil”.
What service did they render? “Towards autumn, I was ordered to the Khyber Pass, where the Political Officer had fallen sick. We burned the villages of a troublesome tribe, and noticed that the villagers themselves joined in the work with great goodwill. They had somehow removed their grain and did not care much about mere mud huts.”
As regards equality before the law, as ‘enacted’ by the British, one or two instances may be cited. On May 2, 1908, JR Robertson, ICS, Magistrate of Ootacamund, tried and fined a European planter, Hugh Stevenson, Rs 15 or in default, a fortnight’s simple imprisonment for causing a fatal charge on a Moplah cart driver, Kunji Mohideen. The victim had allegedly blocked the car of the accused. The British took out C Shankaran Nair’s copy of the Hunter Committee’s report that he had filed in support of his contention on the Jalianwala Bagh genocide against O’Dwyer in the Privy Council. They restored it after covering vital information with indelible ink. [Udham Singh, who was injured in the Jalianwala Bagh genocide on April 13, 1919, would administer retributive justice 21 years later, on March 13, 1940, by dispatching him with his bullets in Caxton Hall, London.]
Macaulay, a citizen of a monarchy, has been made the Father of Indian democracy. He came to India as Law Member of the Government of India on an annual salary of 10,000 pounds in the earlier part of the 19th century. For mere sustenance in England he needed 500 pounds a year if he was to remain in politics. But he could not hope to earn more than 200 pounds by writing. In Calcutta, he would live like a prince with only 500 pounds a year, saving 9,500 pound. (At that time, one pound-sterling yielded ten rupees.) On retirement at the age of 39, he returned to England with a fortune of 30,000 pounds Yet, while speaking in the House of Commons on the Charter Demand of the East India Company on July 10, 1833, he bared his angst ~ “To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages.’ Small wonder, he would be worshipped in India.
Macaulay’s opinion about his enlightened predecessor, in his biography Warren Hastings would be an eye-opener for any honest chronicler. His biography of Clive, too, was fair. On the other hand, his A Minute on Higher Education in India of February 2, 1835 betrays his racial bias as he expressed his scorn for the Orient with his unlearnt knowledge:
“I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongue. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature in India and Arabia. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.”
It is a pity that he did not live a quarter century more to be wiser when Max Muller’s 51-volume Sacred Books of the East, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1879.
Mr Kapur has viewed India of the 18th century in the light of the 21st century but has carefully ignored similar or even worse vices in the land of those angels. In any transitional period of history, anarchy does prevail. This is true not only for India but for any nation. The American Civil War, the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution and in England, Cromwell’s signing of the death warrant of his country’s sovereign, Charles I, are testimony to this. It would not be fair to single out India. The same is true for the evil practice of sati, but if the King of Bundi’s 84 widows or Jodhpur’s 64 unfortunates were forced to commit sati, it does not mean India had become widow-less. This horrible practice of burning widows alive was indefensible, and there is no second opinion relating to its abolition. But could that be the reason to justify and laud foreign occupation with all its inherent vices?
The Hobbesian epithet was more appropriately applied by HAL Fisher in the “Epilogue” to his A History of Europe, some eighty years back ~”After some twenty million years of life upon this planet, the lot of the major part of humanity is still, as Hobbes described it, nasty, brutish and short. Of its two thousand million inhabitants some one hundred and fifty million are still living very close to the hunger limit.”
(To be concluded)