Greater Britain
TextCHAPTER II.
KANDY
THE early morning was foggy and cold as an October dawn in an English forest; but before I had been long in the gardens of the Government House, the sun rose, and the heat returned once more. After wandering among the petunias and fan-palms of the gardens, I passed on into the city, the former capital of the Kandian or highland kingdom, and one of the holiest of Buddhist towns. The kingdom was never conquered by the Portuguese or Dutch while they held the coasts, and was not overrun by us till 1815, while it has several times been in rebellion since that date. The people still retain their native customs in a high degree: for instance, the Kandian husband does not take his wife‘s inheritance unless he lives with her on her father‘s land: if she lives with him, she forfeits her inheritance. Kandian law, indeed, is expressly maintained by us except in the matters of polygamy and polyandry, although the maritime Cinghalese are governed, as are the English in Ceylon and at the Cape, by the civil code of Holland.
The difference between the Kandian and coast Cinghalese is very great. At Kandy, I found the men wearing flowing crimson robes and flat-topped caps, while their faces were lighter in color than those of the coast people, and many of them had beards. The women also wore the nose-ring in a different way, and were clothed above as well as below the waist. It is possible that some day we may unfortunately hear more of this energetic and warlike people.
The city is one that dwells long in the mind. The Upper Town is one great garden, so numerous are the sacred groves, vocal with the song of the Eastern orioles, but here and there are dotted about pagoda-shaped temples, identical in form with those of Tartary two thousand miles away, and from these there proceeds a roar of tomtoms that almost drowns the song. One of these temples contains the holiest of Buddhist relics, the tooth of Buddha, which is yearly carried in a grand procession. When we first annexed the Kandian kingdom, we recognized the Buddhist Church, made our officers take part in the procession of the Sacred Tooth, and sent a State offering to the shrine. Times are changed since then, but the Buddhist priests are still exempt from certain taxes. All round the sacred inclosures are ornamented walls, with holy sculptured figures; and in the Lower Town are fresh-water lakes and tanks, formed by damming the Mavaliganga River, and also, in some measure, holy. An atmosphere of Buddhism pervades all Kandy.
From Kandy, I visited the coffee-district of which it is the capital and center, but I was much disappointed with regard to the amount of land that is still open to coffee-cultivation. At the Government Botanic Garden at Peredenia (where the jalap plant, the castor-oil plant, and the ipecacuanha were growing side by side), I was told that the shrub does not flourish under 1500 nor over 3000 or 4000 feet above sea-level, and that all the best coffee-land is already planted. Coffee-growing has already done so much for Ceylon that it is to be hoped that it has not reached its limit: in thirty-three years it has doubled her trade ten times, and to England alone she now sends two millions’ worth of coffee every year. The central district of the island, in which lie the hills and coffee-country, is, with the exception of the towns, politically not a portion of Ceylon: there are English capital, English management, and Indian labor, and the cocoa-palm is unknown; Tamil laborers are exclusively employed upon the plantations, although the carrying trade, involving but little labor, is in the hands of the Cinghalese. No such official discouragement is shown to the European planters in Ceylon as that which they experience in India; and were there but more good coffee-lands and more capital, all would be well. The planters say that, after two years’ heavy expenditure and dead loss, 20 per cent. can be made by men who take in sufficient capital, but that no one ever does take capital enough for the land he buys, and that they all have to borrow from one of the Columbo companies at 12 per cent., and are then bound to ship their coffee through that company alone. It is regarded as an open question by many disinterested friends of Ceylon whether it might not be wise for the local government to advance money to the planters; but besides the fear of jobbery, there is the objection to this course, that the government, becoming interested in the success of coffee-planting, might also come to connive at the oppression of the native laborers. This oppression of the people lies at the bottom of that Dutch system which is often held up for our imitation in Ceylon.
Those who narrate to us the effects of the Java system forget that it is not denied that in the tropical islands, with an idle population and a rich soil, compulsory labor may be the only way of developing the resources of the countries, but they fail to show the justification for our developing the resources of the country by such means. The Dutch culture-system puts a planter down upon the crown lands, and, having made advances to him, leaves it to him to find out how he shall repay the government. Forced labor – under whatever name – is the natural result.
The Dutch, moreover, bribe the great native chiefs by princely salaries and vast percentage upon the crops their people raise, and force the native agriculturists to grow spices for the Royal Market of Amsterdam. Of the purchase of these spices the government has a monopoly: it buys them at what price it will, and, selling again in Europe to the world, clears annually some £4,000,000 sterling by the job. That plunder, slavery, and famine often follow the extension of their system is nothing to the Dutch. Strict press-laws prevent the Dutch at home from hearing anything of the discontent in Java, except when famine or insurrection calls attention to the isle; and £4,000,000 a year profit, and half the expenses of their navy paid for them by one island in the Eastern seas, make up for many deaths of brown-faced people by starvation.
The Dutch often deny that the government retains the monopoly of export; but the fact of the matter is that the Dutch Trading Company, who have the monopoly of the exports of the produce of crown lands – which amount to two-thirds of the total exports of the isle – are mere agents of the government.
It is hard to say that, apart from the nature of the culture-system, the Dutch principle of making a profit out of the countries which they rule is inconsistent with the position of a Christian nation. It is the ancient system of countries having possessions in the East, and upon our side we are not able to show any definite reasons in favor of our course of scrupulously keeping separate the Indian revenue, and spending Indian profits upon India and Cinghalese in Ceylon, except such reasons as would logically lead to our quitting India altogether. That the Dutch should make a profit out of Java is perhaps not more immoral than that they should be there. At the same time, the character of the Dutch system lowers the tone of the whole Dutch nation, and especially of those who have any connection with the Indies, and effectually prevents future amendment. With our system, there is some chance of right being done, so small is our self-interest in the wrong. From the fact that no surplus is sent home from Ceylon, she is at least free from that bane of Java, – the desire of the local authorities to increase as much as possible the valuable productions of their districts, even at the risk of famine, provided only that they may hope to put off the famine until after their time – a desire that produces the result that subaltern Dutch officers who observe in their integrity the admirable rules which have been made for the protection of the native population are heartily abused for their ridiculous scrupulosity, as it is styled.
Not to be carried away by the material success of the Dutch system, it is as well to bear in mind its secret history. A private company – the Dutch Trading Society – was founded at Amsterdam in 1824, the then King being the largest shareholder. The company was in difficulties in 1830, when the King, finding he was losing money fast, sent out as Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies his personal friend Van den Bosch. The next year, the culture-system, with all its attendant horrors, was introduced into Java by Van den Bosch, the Dutch Trading Society being made agents for the government. The result was the extraordinary prosperity of the company, and the leaving by the merchant-king of a private fortune of fabulous amount.
The Dutch system has been defended by every conceivable kind of blind misrepresentation; it has even been declared, by writers who ought certainly to know better, that the four millions of surplus that Holland draws from Java, being profits on trade, are not taxation! Even the blindest admirers of the system are forced, however, to admit that it involves the absolute prohibition of missionary enterprise, and total exclusion from knowledge of the Java people.
The Ceylon planters have at present political as well as financial difficulties on their hands. They have petitioned the Queen for “self-government for Ceylon,” and for control of the revenue by “representatives of the public” – excellent principles, if “public” meant public, and “Ceylon,” Ceylon; but, when we inquire of the planters what they really mean, we find that by “Ceylon” they understand Galle and Columbo Fort, and by “the public” they mean themselves. There are at present six unofficial members of the Council: of these, the whites have three members, the Dutch burghers one, and the natives two; and the planters expect the same proportions to be kept in a Council to which supreme power shall be intrusted in the disposition of the revenues. They are, indeed, careful to explain that they in no way desire the extension of representative institutions to Ceylon.
The first thing that strikes the English traveler in Ceylon is the apparent slightness of our hold upon the country. In my journey from Galle to Columbo, by early morning and mid-day, I met no white man; from Columbo to Kandy, I traveled with one, but met none; at Kandy, I saw no whites; at Nuwara Ellia, not half a dozen. On my return, I saw no whites between Nuwara Ellia and Ambe Pusse, where there was a white man in the railway-station; and on my return by evening from Columbo to Galle, in all the thronging crowds along the roads there was not a single European. There are hundreds of Cinghalese in the interior who live and die and never see a white man. Out of the two and a quarter millions of people who dwell in what the planters call the “colony of Ceylon,” there are but 3000 Europeans, of whom 1500 are our soldiers, and 250 our civilians. Of the European non-official class, there are but 1300 persons, or about 500 grown-up men. The proposition of the Planters’ Association is that we should confide the despotic government over two and a quarter millions of Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Hindoo laborers to these 500 English Christian employers. It is not the Ceylon planters who have a grievance against us, but we who have a serious complaint against them; so flourishing a dependency should certainly provide for all the costs of her defense.
Some of the mountain views between Kandy and Nuwara Ellia are full of grandeur, though they lack the New Zealand snows; but none can match, for variety and color, that which I saw on may return from the ascent to the Kaduganava Pass, where you look over a foreground of giant-leaved talipot and slender areca palms and tall bamboos, lit with the scarlet blooms of the cotton-tree, on to a plain dotted with banyan-tree groves and broken by wooded hills. On either side, the deep valley-bottoms are carpeted with bright green – the wet rice-lands, or terraced paddy-fields, from which the natives gather crop after crop throughout the year.
In the union of rich foliage with deep color and grand forms, no scenery save that of New Zealand can bear comparison with that of the hill country of Ceylon, unless, indeed, it be the scenery of Java and the far Eastern Isles.
CHAPTER III.
MADRAS TO CALCUTTA
Spending but a single day in Madras – an inferior Columbo – I passed on to Calcutta with a pleasant remembrance of the air of prosperity that hangs about the chief city of what is still called by Bengal civilians “The Benighted Presidency.” Small as are the houses, poor as are the shops, every one looks well-to-do, and everybody happy, from the not undeservedly famed cooks at the club to the catamaran men on the shore. Coffee and good government have of late done much for Madras.
The surf consists of two lines of rollers, and is altogether inferior to the fine-weather swell on the west coast of New Zealand, and only to be dignified and promoted into surfship by men of that fine imagination which will lead them to sniff the spices a day before they reach Ceylon, or the pork and molasses when off Nantucket light-ship. The row through the first roller in the lumbering Massullah boat, manned by a dozen sinewy blacks, the waiting for a chance between the first and second lines of spray, and then the dash for shore, the crew singing their measured “Ah! lah! lálala! – ah! lah! lálala!” the stroke coming with the accented syllable, and the helmsman shrieking with excitement, is a more pretentious ceremony than that which accompanies the crossing of Hokitika bar, but the passage is a far less dangerous one. The Massullah boats are like empty hay-barges on the Thames, but built without nails, so that they “give” instead of breaking up when battered by the sand on one side and the seas upon the other. This is a very wise precaution in the case of boats which are always made to take the shore broadside on. The first sea that strikes the boat either shoots the passenger on to the dry sand, or puts him where he can easily be caught by the natives on the beach, but the Massullah boat herself gets a terrible banging before the crew can haul her out of reach of the seas.
Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm-tree, but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly, steaming between light-houses, guard-ships, and buoys, but not catching a glimpse of the low land of the Sunderabunds till we had been many hours in “the river.” After lying right off the tiger-infested island of Saugur, we started on our run up to Calcutta before the sun was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene was English; there was nothing tropical about it except the mist upon the land; and low villas and distant factory-chimneys reminded one of the Thames between Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, where large ships anchor before they sail, we had a long, low building on our right, gaudy and architecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost imposing: it was the palace of the dethroned King of Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried on deeds become impossible in Lucknow. Such has been the extravagance of the King that the government of India has lately interfered, and appointed a commission to pay his debts, and deduct them from his income of £120,000 a year; for we pay into the privy purse of the dethroned Vizier of Oude exactly twice the yearly sum that we set aside for that of Queen Victoria. Whatever income is allowed to native princes, they always spend the double. The experience of the Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this respect. Removed from that slight restraint upon expenditure which the fear of bankruptcy or revolution forces upon reigning kings, native princes supported by European governments run recklessly into debt. The commission which was sitting upon the debts of the King of Oude while I was in Calcutta warned him that, if he offended a second time, government would for the future spend his income for him. It is not the King‘s extravagance alone, however, that is complained of. Always notorious for debauchery, he has now become infamous for his vices. One of his wives was arrested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls for the harem, but the King himself escaped. For nine years he has never left his palace, yet he spends, we are told, from £200,000 to £250,000 a year.
In his extravagance and immorality the King of Oude does not stand alone in Calcutta. His mode of life is imitated by the wealthy natives; his vices are mimicked by every young Bengalee baboo. It is a question whether we are not responsible for the tone which has been taken by “civilization” in Calcutta. The old philosophy has gone, and left nothing in its place; we have by moral force destroyed the old religions in Calcutta, but we have set up no new. Whether the character of our Indian government, at once leveling and paternal, has not much to do with the spread of careless sensuality is a question before answering which it would be well to look to France, where a similar government has for sixteen years prevailed. In Paris, at least, democratic despotism is fast degrading the French citizen to the moral level of the Bengalee baboo.
The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view of the Government House from the Park Reserve – a miniature Sahara since its trees were destroyed by the great cyclone. The Viceroy‘s dwelling, though crushed by groups of lions and unicorns of gigantic stature and astonishing design, is an imposing building; but it is the only palace in the “city of palaces” – a name which must have been given to the pestiferous city by some one who had never seen any other towns but Liverpool and London. The true city of palaces is Lucknow.
In Calcutta, I first became acquainted with that unbounded hospitality of the great mercantile houses in the East of which I have since acquired many pleasing remembrances. The luxury of “the firm” impresses the English traveler; the huge house is kept as a hotel; every one is welcome to dinner, breakfast, and bed in the veranda, or in a room, if he can sleep under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two and sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always without notice to the butlers or the cooks, but every one is welcome, down to the friend of a friend‘s friend; and junior clerks will write letters of introduction to members of the firm, which secure the bearer a most hospitable welcome from the other clerks, even when all the partners are away. “If Brown is not there, Smith will be, and if he‘s away, why then Johnson will put you up,” is the form of invitation to the hospitalities of an Eastern firm. The finest of fruits are on table between five and six, and tea and iced drinks are ready at all times, from dawn to breakfast – a ceremony which takes place at ten. To the regular meals you come in or not as you please, and no one trained in Calcutta or Bombay can conceive offense being taken by a host at his guest accepting, without consulting him, invitations to dine out in the city, or to spend some days at a villa in its outskirts. Servants are in the corridors by day and night at the call of guests, and your entertainers tell you that, although they have not time to go about with you, servants will always be ready to drive you at sunset to the band-stand in the carriage of some member of the firm.
The population of Calcutta is as motley as that of Galle, though the constituents are not the same. Greeks, Armenians, and Burmese, besides many Eurasians, or English-speaking half-castes, mingle with the mass of Indian Mohammedans and Hindoos. The hot weather having suddenly set in, the Calcutta officials, happier than the merchants – who, however, care little about heat when trade is good – were starting for Simla in a body, “just as they were warming to their work,” as the Calcutta people say, and, finding that there was nothing to be done in the stifling city, I, too, determined to set off.
The heat was great at night, and the noisy native crows and whistling kites held durbars inside my window in the only cool hour of the twenty-four – namely, that which begins at dawn – and thus hastened my departure from Calcutta by preventing me from taking rest while in it. Hearing that at Patna there was nothing to be seen or learnt, I traveled from Calcutta to Benares – 500 miles – in the same train and railway carriage. Our first long stoppage was at Chandernagore, but, as the native baggage-coolies, or porters, howl the station names in their own fashion, I hardly recognized the city in the melancholy moan of “Orn-dorn-orn-gorne,” which welcomed the train, and it was not till I saw a French infantry uniform upon the platform that I remembered that Chandernagore, a village belonging to the French, lies hard by Calcutta, to which city it was once a dangerous rival. It is said that the French retain their Indian dependencies, instead of selling them to us as did the Dutch, in order that they may ever bear in mind the fact that we once conquered them in India; but it would be hard to find any real ground for their retention, unless they are held as centers for the Catholic missions. We will not even permit them to be made smuggling depots, for which purpose they would be excellently adapted. The whole of the possessions in India of the French amount together to only twenty-six leagues square. Even Pondicherry, the largest and only French Indian dependency of which the name is often heard in Europe, is cut into several portions by strips of British territory, and the whole of the French-Indian dependencies are mere specks of land isolated in our vast territories. The officer who was lounging in the station was a native; indeed, in the territory of Chandernagore there are but 230 Europeans, and but 1500 in all French India. He made up to my compartment as though he would have got in, which I wished that he would have done, as natives in the French service all speak French, but, seeing a European, he edged away to a dark uncomfortable compartment. This action was, I fear, a piece of silent testimony to the prejudice which makes our people in India almost invariably refuse to travel with a native, whatever may be his rank.
As we passed through Burdwan and Rajmahal, where the East Indian Railway taps the Ganges, the station scenes became more and more interesting. We associate with the word “railway” ideas that are peculiarly English: – shareholders and directors, guards in blue, policemen in dark green, and porters in brown corduroy; no English institution, however, assumes more readily an Oriental dress. Station-masters and sparrows alone are English; everything else on a Bengal railway is purely Eastern. Sikh irregulars jostle begging fakeers in the stations; palkees and doolies – palankeens and sedans, as we should call them – wait at the back doors; ticket-clerks smoke water-pipes; an ibis drinks at the engine-tank; a sacred cow looks over the fence, and a tame elephant reaches up with his trunk at the telegraph-wire, on which sits a hoopoe, while an Indian vulture crowns the post.
When we came opposite to the Monghyr Hills, the only natural objects which for 1600 miles break the level of the great plain of Hindostan, people of the central tribes, small-headed and savage-looking, were mingled with the Hindoos at the stations. In blackness there was not much difference between the races, for low-caste Bengalees are as black as Guinea negroes.
As the day grew hot, a water-carrier with a well-filled skin upon his back appeared at every station, and came running to the native cars in answer to the universal long-drawn shout of “Ah! ah! Bheestie – e!”
The first view of the Ganges calls up no enthusiasm. The Thames below Gravesend half dried up would be not unlike it; indeed, the river itself is as ugly as the Mississippi or Missouri, while its banks are more hideous by far than theirs. Beyond Patna, the plains, too, become as monotonous as the river, – flat, dusty, and treeless, they are in no way tropical in their character; they lie, indeed, wholly outside the tropics. I afterward found that a man may cross India from the Irawaddy to the Indus, and see no tropical scenery, no tropical cultivation. The aspect of the Ganges valley is that of Cambridgeshire, or of parts of Lincoln seen after harvest time, and with flocks of strange and brilliant birds and an occasional jackal thrown in. The sun is hot – not, indeed, much hotter than in Australia, but the heat is of a different kind from that encountered by the English in Ceylon or the West Indies. From a military point of view, the plains may be described as a parade-ground continued to infinity; and this explains the success of our small forces against the rebels in 1857, our cavalry and artillery having in all cases swept their infantry from these levels with the utmost ease.
A view over the plains by daylight is one which in former times some old Indians can never have enjoyed. Many a lady in the days of palki-dawk has passed a life in the Deccan table-land without ever seeing a mountain, or knowing she was on the top of one. Carried up and down the ghauts at night, it was only by the tilting of her palki that she could detect the rise or fall, for day traveling for ladies was almost unknown in India before it was introduced with the railways.
At Patna, the station was filled with crowds of railway coolies, or navvies, as we should say, who, with their tools and baggage, were camped out upon the platform, smoking peacefully. I afterward found that natives have little idea of time-tables and departure hours. When they want to go ten miles by railway, they walk straight down to the nearest station, and there smoke their hookahs till the train arrives – at the end of twenty-four hours or ten minutes, as the case may be. There is but one step that the more ignorant among the natives are in a hurry to take, and that is to buy their tickets. They are no sooner come to the terminus than with one accord they rush at the native ticket-clerk, yelling the name of the station to which they wish to go. In vain he declares that, the train not being due for ten or fifteen hours, there is plenty of time for the purchase. Open-mouthed, and wrought up almost to madness, the passengers dance round him, screaming “Burdwan!” or “Serampoor!” or whatever the name may be, till at last he surrenders at discretion. There is often no room for all who wish to go; indeed, the worst point about the management of the railways lies in the defective accommodation for the native passengers, and their treatment by the English station-masters is not always good: I saw them on many occasions terribly kicked and cuffed; but Indian station-masters are not very highly paid, and are too often men who cannot resist the temptations to violence which despotic power throws in their way. They might ask with the Missourian in the United States army when he was accused of drunkenness, “Whether Uncle Sam expected to get all the cardinal virtues for fifteen dollars a month?”
The Indian railways are all made and worked by companies; but as the government guarantees the interest of five per cent., which only the East Indian, or Calcutta and Delhi, line can pay, it interferes much in the management. The telegraph is both made and worked by government; and the reason why the railways were not put upon the same footing is that the government of India was doubtful as to the wisdom of borrowing directly the vast sum required, and doubtful also of the possibility of borrowing it without diminishing its credit.
The most marked among the effects of railways upon the state of India are, as a moral change, the weakening of caste ties – as a physical, the destruction of the Indian forests. It is found that if a rich native discovers that he can, by losing caste in touching his inferiors, travel a certain distance in a comfortable second-class carriage for ten rupees, while a first-class ticket costs him twenty, he will often risk his caste to save his pound; still, caste yields but slowly to railways and the telegraph. It is but a very few years since one of my friends received a thousand rupees for pleading in a case which turned on the question whether the paint-spot on Krishna‘s nose, which is also a caste sign, should be drawn as a plain horizontal crescent, or with a pendant from the center. It is only a year since, in Orissa, it was seen that Hindoo peasants preferred cannibalism, or death by starvation, to defilement by eating their bullocks.
As for the forests, their destruction has already in many places changed a somewhat moist climate to one of excessive drought, and planting is now taking place with a view both to supplying the railway engines and bringing back the rains. On the East Indian line, I found that they burnt mixed coal and wood, but the Indian coal is scarce and bad, and lies entirely in shallow “pockets.”
The train reached Mogul-Serai, the junction for Benares, at midnight of the day following that on which it left Calcutta, and, changing my carriage at once, I asked how long it would be before we started, to which the answer was, “half an hour;” so I went to sleep. Immediately, as it seemed, I was awakened by whispering, and, turning, saw a crowd of boys and baggage-coolies at the carriage-door. When I tried to discover what they wanted, my Hindostanee broke down, and it was some time before I found that I had slept through the short journey from Mogul-Serai, and had dozed on in the station till the lights had been put out, before the coolies woke me. Crossing the Ganges by the bridge of boats, I found myself in Benares, the ancient Varanasi, and sacred capital of the Hindoos.