British Officials In India -- Good And Bad

[acharya]

Did the British Pauperize India?

The Condition of England debate also set the terms in which many Indians and British looked at the Condition of India. As in the case of the discussion about England, the debate in India was concerned with the impact of modern civilization, and particularly the administration of the British, on the poverty of India. Whether true or not, the sense among many Indians and British that the moral and economic condition of India had declined gave much urgency to the controversy. This debate extended for half a century from the 1870s onward. One individual influential in this dispute was Dadabhai Naoroji, “an older Parsi merchant who lived in London and acted as an informal ambassador for the nationalist cause for half a century.”[27] Naoroji had argued that though the British made a solemn promise to bring wealth and contentment to India, they had gone back on their word. In an essay entitled “The Poverty of India,” he demonstrated that the extent of poverty in India under the British had increased rather than decreased.[28]

Ideas about the decay of Indian economic and moral life were naturally reflected in the discussions on the Chingleput district. Both British officials and members of the local population in Chingleput had claimed that the area had been in a decayed condition since the end of the eighteenth century. However, not until 1871 did Dadabhai Naoroji, using statistics taken from government sources, concern himself with the problem, arguing that the problem involved the “continuous impoverishment and exhaustion of the country.” During that time, then, local debates in Chingleput became specifically articulated with national and international controversies.[29] Indeed, the Chingleput discourse rested on Naoroji’s demonstration in 1871 that the average annual per capita income of Indians was rupees 20 a year.[30]

Both in 1866 and in 1876–78, serious famines struck South India; the Bellary famine of 1866 and the famine of 1876–78 were both widely documented by photographers. William Digby, a journalist who had edited the Madras Times, also attempted to illustrate the growing pauperization of India through his book entitled India for the Indians—and for England. [31] Another author named Seymour Keay wrote a series of articles in Nineteenth Century entitled “The Spoliation of India.”[32] Partly in reaction to the work of Digby and Keay, Samuel Smith, a liberal MP from Lancashire and friend of Naoroji, wrote a series of articles in the Contemporary Review following his second trip to India.[33]

Smith’s ideas, like those of Keay and Naoroji, helped to focus awareness on the fact that some educated Indians felt that Britain had pillaged India and continued to drain it of its resources. This thought contrasted dramatically with the presumption in Britain that India was “immensely indebted” to the British, who had converted a “land of anarchy and misrule into one of peace and contentment, that poverty is giving place to plenty, and a low, corrupt civilization to one immensely higher.” Smith went on to shock Englishmen with the discovery that “instead of contentment one finds in many places great dissatisfaction, and a widespread belief that India is getting poorer and less happy.”[34] Moreover, he argued that the poverty in India “is extreme and more acute than what we witness in Europe.”[35] British culture and the government desire for excise income were “rapidly spreading drunkenness among the people of Bengal in order to supply revenue to the Government.”[36] Smith also identified “not a little friction” between “native opinion” and official views. The Indians, said Smith, “think that the English officials stand between them and their just rights and claims.”[37] However, he noted that “no such complaint” had been lodged against “the British Nation” as such. There was, he stated, “a strong belief in their justice and good faith, and the constant desire of the Indian people is to get access to them, in order to lay their complaints before that august tribunal. They fully believe that if the British Parliament and people were made acquainted with their grievances they would remedy them. It is almost touching to see the simplicity of their faith.”[38] In other words, the British middle-class ideals of justice and good faith had also been consensually supported and created in India by British and Indians from all levels of society. At the same time, however, some British and Indians blamed England for the impoverished state of India. The “loyalty” invoked by both Smith and Naoroji formed part of the same project, the same invocation to which Crole referred in his account of the low-caste boatmen in the fight against the French in the middle of the eighteenth century. Fervent belief in these ideals by Indian writers and thinkers made British policy in India seem particularly galling.

The tension between the two approaches was critical to the claims made by both British commentators like Keay and many Indians and led to great participation in the project to create a kind of “truth” regarding what had been pursued by the British rulers and others since the last decade of the eighteenth century. As part of the same enterprise to which Smith subscribed, Naoroji himself wrote in the Contemporary Review a year later:

Now, I have no complaint whatever against the British Nation or British rule. On the contrary, we have every reason to be thankful that of all the nations in the world it has been our good fortune to be placed under the British nation—a nation noble and great in its instincts; among the most advanced, if not the most advanced, in civilization; foremost in the advancement of humanity in all its varied wants and circumstances; the sources and fountainhead of true liberty and of political progress in the world; in short, a nation in which all that is just, generous and truly free is most happily combined.[39]

Gauri Viswanathan has recently argued that the introduction of literary study in place of religion by the British operated a veiled mechanism of social control to keep Indian society governable without the use of violence.[40] Viswanathan, however, describes this as a willed activity by a state that was fragile and therefore unusually vulnerable. By the end of the nineteenth century, she argues that this kind of literary study became used as a way to show Indians their subservient and appropriate social role in the colonial society established by the British. Viswanathan quotes essays written by two Bengali students in Calcutta in 1843 to show that British strategies of social control had effectively subdued and overpowered them and that therefore the policy of the government was effective. However, the process of creating a discourse involves both the rulers and the ruled. For example, in one of the passages quoted from an essay by Nobichunder Dass, a student at Hooghly College in Calcutta, a principal object of this education in India is identified as the creation of knowledge about future society, a project in which many Indians from all social levels also eagerly participated. Whether in the countryside or in urban environments, the general project to create a modern state incited people to discourse. As one of those participants, Nobichunder wrote

The English are to us what the Romans were to the English; and as the English are the children of modern times, and command more resources and power than the Romans, we derive great advantage. The facility afforded to communication by the use of steam has enabled the English to govern our country with great prudence and vigilance, they do not appear to be at any time at risk of forbearing in the glorious work which they had commenced, of improving the native mind and condition, but prosecute it with honour to themselves and favour to their subjects, till they are styled the regenerators of India.

It may be argued that this one-way, top-down kind of social control and creation of knowledge through British education provoked Naoroji to say what he did. In reality, it formed another case of multiauthorship among many millions of Indians, Europeans, and others. There is much evidence to show other Indian writers acting and writing along the same lines at this time as part of this general dialogic project. Social values and policy reinforced one another in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the late 1890s, when the two serious famines in South India “cast serious doubts on official estimates of increasing prosperity” in India, the value of British ideals—of justice, humanity, and fairness—suddenly became problematized, helping to fuel the debate over the impoverishment of India to an even greater extent.[41] W. S. Caine, an MP speaking on the Indian Famine Commission Report in 1902, referred to this fact when he spoke of the “evidence of the horrible poverty of the agricultural people of India, the evidence of recurring famine with ever-increasing intensity.”[42] During that time, a substantial discussion in the press and in government circles questioned whether India was becoming poorer as a result of its connection with Britain (and by inference from its association with modern civilization generally). It is partly in this connection that Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote his utopianist booklet entitled Hind Swaraj in 1908.[43] William Digby, an editor of the Madras Times who had penned an account of the famine in 1876–78, also said that “Lord Macaulay, Mr. Grant Duff, and others believe that when the English tongue alone is spoken, and the Christian religion is generally professed, the difficult problems which are characteristic of European countries will be encountered in India.”[44] Digby also noted that one unnamed individual had pointed out that “if India becomes Christianised, if all the people become converted to what the missionaries teach, a Poor Law will be a necessary consequence.” This was true, he said, because in Europe all the poor were supported by the state while in India the poor were taken care of by the people themselves.[45] He thus pointed to the great disadvantages in bringing western modes of government and social organization to India, particularly the notion of the state’s responsibility for the poor. However, in an address in 1900, in terms very similar to the debate between the anti-abolitionists and the factory reformers in early nineteenth-century England, Naoroji observed that “Indian Natives were mere helots. They were worse than American slaves, for the latter were at least taken care of by their masters, whose property they were.”[46] Even W. W. Hunter, director general of statistics to the government of India, in his book England’s Work in India, wrote that “forty millions of the people of India habitually go through life on insufficient food.”[47]

The comparative nature of these assessments of Indian poverty helped to raise the stakes in the debate. Statements by intellectuals and writers of comparative wealth in India and elsewhere also produced much oversensitivity among government officers.[48] The debate involved a considerable number of individuals, ranging across a diverse spectrum including W. H. Moreland, whose India at the Death of Akbar did not appear until 1920, and S. Srinivasa Raghavaiyangar, whose Memorandum on the Progress of the Madras Presidency during the Last Forty Years of British Administration, commissioned by Lord Connemara, the governor of Madras, appeared in 1893.[49]

Many officials in the Indo-British administration sought to defend the government’s policies in the face of attacks by individuals such as Naoroji. For instance, the former governor of Madras Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff wrote articles in 1886 to that effect, answering the views of Samuel Smith.[50] Grant-Duff’s articles were answered in turn by Naoroji himself.[51]

Grant-Duff and others sought to discount the legitimacy of Indian complaints. Grant-Duff, for instance, argued that Smith had depended unnecessarily on the “pushing talkers of the big towns, full of the last new ‘cleverisms,’ just sharp enough to repeat the parrot cries of European mischief-makers, and to be ingeniously wrong on most subjects.”[52] Grant-Duff admitted that “there is in many parts of India frightful poverty, but is there not the same and even worse, in our own country?”[53] For Grant-Duff, the question was not so much whether India was getting poorer but rather who was making those claims and what their unstated goals were. “What the pert scribblers in the native press, and the intriguers of the Presidency towns” wanted were “increased opportunities for themselves—Government employment and political changes, which may increase their personal importance.”[54] “The only possible question,” he said, related to the relative benefit obtained “between the rule of the Englishman and of the Brahmin, the Aryan of the West and the Aryan of the East.” Grant-Duff wondered whether Samuel Smith would “do a good turn to the 254 millions of natives if he were to hand them over to a much greater extent to Brahmin domination?”[55] Much better to have rule by the British than rule by even the most educated Indians.

Could these Indians know anything about either India or Britain? Grant-Duff wondered how any Indians to whom Smith had spoken and who “made no complaint” about the “British nation” could even know what that “British Nation” represented:

A very few of them [Indians] have been able to cross the seas without ensuring their own damnation, have been received in England as strange and interesting creatures, petted, and made cub lions of.…Every English-speaking ‘native’ who finds his way to London is as interesting to the home-keeping Briton as is a mango in Pall Mall. In Bombay or Madras a mango is a mango.[56]

Grant-Duff argued that British rule had brought wealth and food to a needy India. He nevertheless admitted that “there is in many parts of India frightful poverty.”[57] Grant-Duff also wrote, “The question worth answering is: Do the Indian masses obtain, one year after another, a larger or smaller amount of material well-being than the peasantry of Western Europe? Speaking of the huge province of Madras…and I have visited every district in it—I think they do.”[58]

According to the critics of this opinion, the main problem related to British intentions. In the first of his rebuttals to Grant-Duff, Naoroji claimed that in 1833 and again in 1858 the British had pledged to make India prosperous.[59] He also claimed that they had not fulfilled those promises. Part of this controversy had occurred fifteen years earlier. In 1870, Grant-Duff as a member of the Commons had asked another member, Sir Wilfred Lawson, in the debate on opium, “Would it be tolerable to enforce a view of morality that was not theirs, which had never indeed been accepted by any large portion of the human race, we should grind an already poor population to the very dust with new taxation?”[60]

A year later in 1871, Grant-Duff, who had been the under secretary for India, focused on the contrast between the per capita annual income of a person in Britain (thirty pounds) with that of India (two pounds). Grant-Duff had concluded at that time that “even our comparative wealth will be looked back upon by future ages as a state of semi-barbarism. But what are we to say of the state of India? How many generations must pass away before that country has arrived at even the comparative wealth of this?”[61] Grant-Duff’s estimates were also accepted by the viceroy Lord Mayo, who said, “We are perfectly cognizant of the relative poverty of this country as compared with European States.”[62]

So long as they felt that they could set the terms of the debate on the Condition of India, British administrators were not defensive. However, when these critical statements were made by educated Indians, the accusations became intolerable. Naoroji had calculated that the average annual per capita income of Indians was rupees 20 and that in Madras it was a mere rupees 18.[63] Naoroji in his 1887 article on “Views about India” wrote that according to Sir George Campbell the bulk of the people of the Madras presidency were paupers. Naoroji also quoted the views of W. R. Robertson, agricultural reporter to the government of Madras, who called the condition of the agricultural laborer “a disgrace to any country [and that] the condition of the agricultural population of Ireland is vastly superior to the condition of the similar classes in this country.”[64] These comments and ideas appear to have sensitized officers of the Madras government, particularly a subcollector named Mullaly in the Chingleput district.

What most offended the officials of the British government in India was Naoroji’s comparisons of India with other parts of what we would now call the developed world: “The question at present is, Why, under the management of the most highly paid services in the world, India cannot produce as much even as the worst governed countries of Europe. I do not mean to blame the individuals of the Indian service. It is the policy, the perversion of the pledges, that is at the bottom of our misfortunes.”[65] What is important in this debate is that Naoroji sought to invoke the value prized by administrators as the essential ingredient in the claims that the British had gone back on their word. Thus, the dialogue leveled two accusations against the British: they had impoverished India, and they had done so in direct contravention of their own pledges.
• • •
Had the British Impoverished Chingleput District?

Against this background, and specifically against this Naoroji’s rebuttal, Subcollector Mullaly of the Chingleput district sought to show that in that area of India, the Mirasidars’ agricultural Padiyals were being deprived of rights that the British had pledged to them. Moreover, Mullaly believed that the mandate of the government assured these Padiyals of a right to their houses. Let us look at the strategies that Mullaly and others followed to recreate the villages of Chingleput through the same sort of utopian urge that had characterized not only Place but also the Mirasidars, the tenants, and the Padiyals of the district.

Some time in 1888, the government of India sought to address what it defined as the problem of overpopulated tracts, apparently in response to a suggestion made by W. W. Hunter. As a result, the Indian government sent a resolution to all provincial governments asking them to review the measures taken for relief in these areas. This inquiry, said Hunter, encompassed some 250 districts in British India.[66] Then on 19 October 1888, the government of India sent a resolution to all provincial governments requesting a report on the condition of what it defined as the lower classes of the population and on relief operations in these overpopulated tracts. This formed part of the inquiry set in motion by Lord Dufferin, the viceroy of India, on “the condition of the lower classes of the population.”

The inquiry resulted in a government of India resolution stating that the condition of “the lower classes of the agricultural population is not one which need cause any great anxiety at present.”[67] This assertion could be maintained only with difficulty. For instance, one of the reports to the Madras government’s inquiries had argued that the Chingleput district was in a bad state. To this report by Collector Lee Warner the Madras government took exception. They argued that “the condition of the people [of the Chingleput district]…had markedly improved within the past ten years” since the time of the decision to recognize the swatantrams of the Mirasidars and carry out the tax reassessment. Lee Warner had forwarded two documents, including one from Reverend Adam Andrew, a missionary of the United Free Church of Scotland Mission in Chingleput town, reporting the results of inquiries into living conditions and wages of the paraiyar Padiyals in Chingleput.[68] Lee Warner pointed out that the “wages ordinarily earned by the people are extremely low and that a large proportion of the population lives from hand to mouth, is badly housed, ill clothed, and compelled to be satisfied with a nutriment far below the sufficiency diet agreed upon by doctors as a necessity for life.” Lee Warner’s references to “scientific standards” for health and poverty emerged from the Condition of India discussion, which referred to the need for state intervention to protect the health of the poor. In rebuttal, the Board of Revenue in Madras agreed that the condition of the lower classes in the Chingleput district may not have been very satisfactory but said that “ this is mainly due to the general poverty of the soil.”[69] The Board did not feel that anything that Lee Warner had written or submitted had shown that “any large proportion of the population suffers from a daily insufficiency of food.”[70]

According to the governments of both India and Madras, Britain had restored order to India and had “emancipated” the “slaves.” Therefore “slavery” could no longer exist. Through the work of the emancipation laws and the working of British culture, the bad aspects of the master-slave relationship had been removed and the good qualities of a landlord-laborer association had been retained. This individual and unilateral attempt aimed somehow to ban the “slave” category in favor of a category and terminology that used by turns “panchama,” “depressed classes,” “Harijan,” “scheduled classes,” and “Adi Dravida” or original Dravidian.

Indians and British during this period thus pursued a grand project to create knowledge about both “Indian” and “British” values. That project involved converting the Tamil paraiyars into ancient inhabitants of India by eliminating the “slave/paraiyar” signification and implanting a new signification of the paraiyars as the original Dravidians of India. As the “slavery category” was obliterated, the “Adi Dravida” or “Original Dravidian” category was summoned up in its stead.[71] This complex procedure of eradicating the “slave” sign and transforming it into “the original Dravidians” is a process still underway. The result of actions taken by both Europeans and Indians, this activity and documentation helped to create knowledge about those considered to be the ancient inhabitants of South India. It continued work initiated by a wide variety of forces already at work in the land before the westerners arrived. These ideas had been argued by Ellis even in the early part of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the sensitivity of Christian missionaries had in the nineteenth century recruited converts from a variety of subcastes such as paraiyars and other “panchamas.” A sensitivity began developing among Hindu intellectuals, who wrote in the press about the difficulties of the paraiyars. Paraiyar leaders, largely Christian, used a journal called The Paraiyan to state how they perceived their present and past conditions. A significant number of British officers of the government also documented the positions of various populations of India in ancient times. British writers to the London press also contributed to this process.[72]

What appears to have united these disparate efforts at this historical point in time was the new susceptibility of the government of India and the provincial governments to assure both the world and themselves that India was not poor or disorderly and that no slaves remained there. Within this context, the discussions that had been proceeding in the Chingleput district over the previous century formed the basis of much new knowledge created about the way the past helped create future society.