Greater Britain

CHAPTER XIV.

NATIVE STATES

QUITTING Lahore at night, I traveled to Moultan by a railway which has names for its stations such as India cannot match. Chunga-Munga, Wanrasharam, Cheechawutnee, and Chunnoo, follow one another in that order. During the night, when I looked out into the still moonlight, I saw only desert, and trains of laden camels pacing noiselessly over the waste sands; but in the morning I found that the whole country within eye-shot was a howling wilderness. Moultan, renowned in warlike history from Alexander‘s time to ours, stands upon the edge of the great sandy tract once known as the “Desert of the Indies.” In every village, bagpipes were playing through the livelong night. There are many resemblances to the Gaelic races to be found in India; the Hindoo girl‘s saree is the plaid of the Galway peasantess, or of the Trongate fishwife; many of the hill-tribes wear the kilt; but the Punjaubee pipes are like those of the Italian pfiferari rather than those of the Scotch Highlander.

The great sandy desert which lies between the Indus and Rajpootana has, perhaps, a future under British rule. Wherever snowy mountains are met with in warm countries, yearly floods, the product of the thaws, sweep down the rivers that take their rise in the glaciers of the chain, and the Indus is no exception to the rule. Were the fall less great, the stream less swift, Scinde would have been another Cambodia, another Egypt. As it is, the fertilizing floods pour through the deep river-bed instead of covering the land, and the silt is wasted on the Arabian Gulf. No native State with narrow boundaries can deal with the great works required for irrigation on the scale that can alone succeed; but, possessing as we do the country from the defiles whence the five rivers escape into the plains to the sandy bars at which they lose themselves in the Indian Seas, we might convert the Punjaub and Scinde into a garden which should support a happy population of a hundred millions, reared under our rule, and the best of bulwarks against invasion from the north and west.

At Umritsur I had seen those great canals that are commencing to irrigate and fertilize the vast deserts that stretch to Scinde. At Jullundur I had already seen their handiwork in the fields of cotton, tobacco, and wheat that blossom in the middle of a wilderness; and if the whole Punjaub and Indus valley can be made what Jullundur is, no outlay can be too costly a means to such an end. There can be no reason why, with irrigation, the Indus valley should not become as fertile as the valley of the Nile.

After admiring in Moultan, on the one hand, the grandeur of the citadel which still shows signs of the terrible bombardment which it suffered at our hands after the murder by the Sikhs of Mr. Van Agnew in 1848, and, on the other hand, the modesty of the sensitive mimosa which grows plentifully about the city, I set off by railway for Sher Shah, the point at which the railway comes to its end upon the banks of the united Jhelum and Chenab, two of the rivers of the Punjaub. The railway company once built a station on the river-bank at Sher Shah, but the same summer, when the floods came down, station and railway alike disappeared into the Indus. Embanking the river is impossible, from the cost of the works which would be needed; and building wing-dams has been tried, with the remarkable effect of sending off the river at right angles to the dam to devastate the country opposite.

The railway has now no station at Sher Shah, but the Indus-steamer captains pick out a good place to lie alongside the bank, and the rails are so laid as to bring the trains alongside the ships. After seeing nothing but flat plains from the time of leaving Umritsur, I caught sight from Sher Shah of the great Sooleiman chain of the Afghan Mountains, rising in black masses through the fiery mist that fills the Indus valley.

I had so timed my arrival on board the river-boat that she sailed the next morning, and after a day‘s uneventful steaming, varied by much running aground, when we anchored in the evening we were in the native State of Bhawulpore.

While we were wandering about the river-shore in the evening, I and my two or three European fellow-travelers, we met a native, with whom one of our number got into conversation. The Englishman had heard that Bhawulpore was to be annexed, so he asked the native whether he was a British subject, to which the answer was to the effect that he did not know. “To whom do you pay your taxes?” “To the government.” “Which government? the English government or the Bhawulpore government?” His answer was that he did not care so long as he had to pay them to somebody, and that he certainly did not know.

Little as our Bhawulpore friend knew or cared about the color of his rulers, he was nevertheless, according to our Indian government theories, one of the people who ought to be most anxious for the advent of English rule. Such has been the insecurity of life in Bhawulpore, that, of the six last viziers, five have been murdered by order of the Khan, the last of all having been strangled in 1862; and no native State has been more notorious than Bhawulpore for the extravagance and gross licentiousness of the reigning princes. The rulers of Bhawulpore, although nominally controlled by us, have hitherto been absolute despots, and have frequently put to death their subjects out of mere whimsy. For years the country has been torn by ceaseless revolutions, to the ruin of the traders and the demoralization of the people; the taxes have been excessive, peculation universal, and the army has lived at free quarters. The Khans were for many years in such dread of attempts upon their lives, that every dish for their table was tasted by the cooks; the army was mutinous, all appointments bought and sold, and the Khans being Mohammedans, no one need pay a debt to a Hindoo.

Bhawulpore is no exceptional case; everywhere we hear of similar deeds being common in native States. One of the native rulers lately shot a man for killing a tiger that the rajah had wounded; another flogged a subject for defending his wife; abduction, adultery, and sale of wives are common among them. Land is seized from its holders without compensation being so much as offered to them; extortion, torture, and denial of justice are common, open venality prevails in all ranks, and no native will take the pledged word of his king, while the revenues, largely made up of forced loans, are wasted on all that is most vile.

In a vast number of cases, the reigning families have degenerated to such an extent, that the scepter has come into the hands of some mere driveler, whom, for the senselessness of his rule, it has at last been necessary to depose. Those who have made idiocy their study, know that in the majority of cases the infirmity is the last stage of the declension of a race worn out by hereditary perpetuation of luxury, vice, or disease the effect of vice. Every ruling family in the East, save such as slave marriages have reinvigorated, is one of these run-down and exhausted breeds. Not only unbounded tyranny and extortion, but incredible venality and corruption, prevail in the greater number of native States. The Rajah of Travancore, as it is said, lately requiring some small bungalow to be added to a palace, a builder contracted to build it for 10,000rs. After a time, he came to apply to be let off, and on the Rajah asking him the reason, he said: “Your highness, of the 10,000rs., your prime minister will get 5000rs., his secretary 1000rs., the baboos in his office another 2000rs., the ladies of the zenana 1000rs., and the commander of your forces 500rs.; now, the bungalow itself will cost 500rs., so where am I to make my profit?” Corruption, however, pervades in India all native institutions; it is not enough to show that native States are subject to it, unless we can prove that it is worse there than in our own dominions.

The question whether British or native rule be the least distasteful to the people of India is one upon which it is not easy to decide. It is not to be expected that our government should be popular with the Rajpoot chiefs, or with the great nobles of Oude, but it may fairly be contended that the mass of the people live in more comfort, and, in spite of the Orissa case, are less likely to starve, in English than in native territory. No nation has at any time ever governed an alien empire more wisely or justly than we the Punjaub. The men who cry out against our rule are the nobles and the schemers, who, under it, are left without a hope. Our leveling rule does not even, like other democracies, raise up a military chieftainship. Our native officers of the highest rank are paid and treated much as are European sergeants, though in native States they would of course be generals and princes.

Want of promotion for sepoys and educated native civilians, and the degrading treatment of the high-caste people by the English, were causes, among others, of the mutiny. The treatment of the natives cannot easily be reformed; if we punish or discourage such behavior in our officers, we cannot easily reach the European planters and the railway officials, while punishment itself would only make men treat the natives with violence instead of mere disdain, when out of sight of their superiors. There is, however, reason to believe that in many districts the people are not only well off under our government, but that they know it. During the native rule in Oude, the population was diminished by a continual outpour of fugitives. The British district of Mirzapore Chowhare, on the Oude frontiers, had a rural population of over 1000 to each square mile – a density entirely owing to the emigration of the natives from their villages in Oude. Again, British Burmah is draining of her people Upper Burmah, which remains under the old rulers; and throughout India the eye can distinguish British territories from the native States by the look of prosperity which is borne by all our villages.

The native merchants and townsfolk generally are our friends. It is unfortunately the fact, however, that the cultivators of the soil, who form three-fourths of the population of India, believe themselves worse off under us than in the native States. They say that they care not who rules so long as their holdings are secured to them at a fixed rent, whereas under our system the zemindars pay us a fixed rent, but in many districts exact what they please from the competing peasants – a practice which, under the native system, was prevented by custom. In all our future land-settlements, it is to be hoped that the agreement will be made, not with middlemen, but directly with the people.

It is not difficult to lay down certain rules for our future behavior toward the native States. We already exercise over the whole of them a control sufficient to secure ourselves against attack in time of peace, but not sufficient to relieve us from all fear of hostile action in time of internal revolt or external war. It might be well that we should issue a proclamation declaring that, for the future, we should invariably recognize the practice of adoption of children by the native rulers, as we have done in the case of the Mysore succession; but that, on the other hand, we should require the gradual disbandment of all troops not needed for the preservation of internal peace. We might well commence our action in this matter by calling upon the native rulers to bind themselves by treaty no longer to keep on foot artillery. In the event of an invasion of Hindostan, a large portion of our European force would be needed to overawe the native princes and prevent their marching upon our rear. It is impossible to believe that the native States would ever be of assistance to us except in cases where we could do without their help. During the mutiny, the Nepaulese delayed their promised march to join us until they were certain that we should beat the mutineers, and this although the Nepaulese are among our surest friends. After the mutiny, it came to light that Lucknow and Delhi – then native capitals – had been centers of intrigue, although we had “Residents” at each, and it is probable that Hyderabad and Cashmere City are little less dangerous to us now than was Delhi in 1857.

There is one native State, that of Cashmere and Jummoo, which stands upon a very different footing from the rest. Created by us as late as 1846, – when we sold this best of all the provinces conquered by us from the Maharajahs of Lahore to a Sikh traitor, Gholab Singh, an ex-farmer of taxes, for three-quarters of a million sterling, which he embezzled from the treasury of Lahore, – the State of Cashmere has been steadily misgoverned for twenty years. Although our tributary, the Maharajah of Cashmere forbids English travelers to enter his dominions without leave (which is granted only to a fixed number of persons every year), to employ more than a stated number of servants, to travel except by certain passes for fear of their meeting his wives, to buy provisions except of certain persons, or to remain in the country after the 1st November under any circumstances whatever. He imprisons all native Christians, prohibits the exportation of grain whenever there is a scarcity in our territory, and takes every opportunity that falls in his way of insulting our government and its officials. Our Central Asian trade has been all-but entirely destroyed by the duties levied by his officers, and Russia is the Maharajah‘s chosen friend. The unhappy people of the Cashmere valley, sold by us, without their consent or knowledge, to a family which has never ceased to oppress them, petition us continually for relief, and, by flocking into our Punjaub territory, give practical testimony to the wrongs they suffer.