"Why, after so many years of British rule, is India still so poor?" the Indian agitator tirelessly repeats.
If he could but take his eyes from the far horizon and direct them to things under his feet, he would find an answer on every side, crying aloud for honest thought and labor.
For example, the cattle question, by itself alone, might determine India's poverty.
India is being eaten up by its own cattle. And even at that the cattle are starving.
The Live-Stock Census taken over British India in 1919-20 showed a total of 146,055,859 head of bovine cattle. Of these, 50 per cent., at a flattering estimate, are reckoned unprofitable. Because of their uneconomic value, the food they consume, little as it is, is estimated to represent an annual loss to the country of $588,000,000, or over four times more than the total land revenue of British India.[1]
[l. See Proceedings of Board of Agriculture of India, at Bangalore, Jan. 21, 1924, and following days. Also see Round Table, No. 59, June, 1925]
The early Hindu leaders, it is surmised, seeing the importance of the cow to the country, adopted the expedient of deifying her, to save her from and for the people. Accordingly, Hindu India today venerates the cow as holy. In the Legislative Assembly of 1921, a learned Hindu member phrased the point in a way that, probably, no Hindu would dispute:[2]
[2. Legislative Assembly Debates, 1921, Rai Bahadur Pandit J. L. Bhargava, Vol. I, Part I, p. 530. See also Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, translation of Walter de Gray, London, Hak« îuyt Society, 1877. VoL II, p. 78.]
Call it prejudice, call it passion, call it the height of religion, but this is an undoubted fact, that in the Hindu mind nothing is so deep-rooted as the sanctity of the cow.
To kill a cow is one of the worst of sins--a deicide. His Highness, the late Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior, once had the misfortune to commit that sin. He was driving a locomotive engine on the opening run over a railway that he had just built. The cow leaped upon the track. The engine ran her down before the horrified Prince could forestall his fate. "I think," he told a friend, years after, "that I shall never finish paying for that disaster, in penances and purifications, and in gifts to the Brahmans."
Prince or peasant, the cow is his holy mother. She should be present when he dies, that he may hold her tail as he breathes his last. Were it only for this reason, she is often kept inside the house, to be in readiness. When the late Maharaja of Kashmir was close upon his end, the appointed cow, it is said, refused all inducements to mount to his chamber; wherefore it became necessary to carry the Prince to the cow, and with a swiftness that considered the comfort of his soul only.
Also, the five substances of the cow--milk, clarified butter (ghee), curds, dung, and urine, duly set in a row in five little pots, petitioned in prayer for forgiveness and assoilment and then mixed together and swallowed, surpass in potency all other means of purifying soul and body. This combination, known as pancha-gavia, is of grace sufficient to wipe out even the guilt of sin intentionally committed. Says the Abbé Dubois:[3]
[3. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, p. 43. See also pp. 152; 195 and 529.]
Urine is looked upon as the most efficacious for purifying any kind of uncleanness. I have often seen...Hindus following the cows to pasture, waiting for the moment when they could collect the precious liquid in vessels of brass, and carrying it away while still warm to their houses. I have also seen them waiting to catch it in the hollow of their hands, drinking some of it and rubbing their faces and heads with the rest. Rubbing it in this way is supposed to wash away all external uncleanness, and drinking it, to cleanse all internal impurity.
Very holy men, adds the Abbé, drink it daily. And orthodox India, in these fundamentals, has changed not a whit since the Abbe's time.
We of the West may reflect at our leisure that to this eventual expedient are we driving our orthodox Hindu acquaintances when, whether in India or in America, we, cow-eaters, insist on taking them in greeting by the hand. One orthodox Prince, at least, observes the precaution, when going into European society, always to wear gloves. But it is told of him that, at a certain London dinner party, when he had removed his gloves, the lady beside him chanced to observe a ring that he wore.
"What a beautiful stone, your Highness!" she remarked. "May I look at it?"
"Certainly," said he, and, removing the ring from his finger, laid it by her plate.
The lady, a person of rank, turned the jewel this way and that, held it up to the light, admired it as it deserved, and, with thanks, laid it beside the plate of the owner. The latter then, by a sidewise glance, indicated the ring to his own attendant who stood behind his chair.
"Wash it," ordered the Prince, and, undisturbed, resumed his conversation.
This seeming digression from the chapter's original text may help to make clear the nature of the cow's hold upon India. And, as you see them of mid-mornings, trooping in hundreds out from the cities and villages on their slow, docile way to jungle pasturage, you might well fancy they know and are glad of their place in the people's mind. Bright strings of beads--blue, coral, red--adorn their necks. And in their eyes and the eyes of the bullocks, their sons, lies a look of slumbrous tranquillity.
That tranquil, far-off gaze is, indeed, often remarked and acclaimed by the passing traveler as an outward sign of an inner sense of surrounding love. In Holland, in England, you may observe an extraordinary tranquillity, peacefulness, friendliness, even in pastured bulls, which may reasonably be attributed to the gentle handling to which they are accustomed, to good food and much grooming, and to the freedom they enjoy. But in India, after examining facts, one is driven to conclude that the expression in the eyes of the cows is due partly to low vitality, partly to the close quarters with humanity in which they live, and for the rest, simply to the curious cut of the outer corner of the lid, subtly beautiful like an Aubrey Beardsley woman's.
Fifty years ago, the political Indians say, India had pasturage enough for all her cattle. However that may have been, judged by a western definition of "enough," the facts today are otherwise. One of Mr. Gandhi's Indian writers, Mr. Desai, sees the matter in this way:[4]
[4. Young India, June 3, 1926, V. G. Desai, p. 200.]
In ancient times and even during the Musalman period, cattle enjoyed the benefit of common pastures and had also the free run of the forests. The maintenance of the cattle cost their owners practically nothing. But the British Government cast a greedy eye upon this time-honoured property of the cattle, which could not speak for themselves and which had none else to speak on their behalf, and confiscated it, sometimes with an increase in the land-revenue in view, and at other times in order to oblige their friends, such as the missionaries.
This writer then supports his last-quoted phrase by the statement that the Salvation Army was once allowed by Government to take up 560 acres of public grazing-ground in Gujarat for farm purposes. He continues:
The result of this encroachment upon grazing areas has been that at the present day in India the proportion of grazing grounds to the total area is the smallest of all countries...It is not therefore a matter for surprise that our cattle should have rapidly deteriorated under British rule.
And he cites figures for the United States as leading the list of happier peoples whose grazing areas are large.
But unfortunately, in choosing his American statistics, Mr. Desai omits those which carry most value for needy India. We have, it is true, great grazing areas--but we rotate them and protect them from over-grazing--a matter unconceived by the Indian. And even in the section where this area is widest, our semi-arid and arid western range country, we devote three-fifths of our total cultivated ground to raising feed for our cattle. Our cotton belt gives 53 per cent, of its crop area to live-stock feed, as corn, cow-peas, beans, peanuts, against 10 per cent, used to grow food for man; our corn and winter wheat belt uses 75 per cent, of its cultivated land to grow similar forage for its cattle; our corn belt gives 84 per cent, of its crop-land to forage-growing, and only 16 per cent, to man's food; and the North and East devote about 70 per cent, of their crops to fodder. Seven-tenths of our total crop area is devoted to harvested forage. We have 257,000,000 acres in crops for cattle's feed, against 76,000,000 acres in crops for human food, and we have one milking cow to every family of 5.[5]
[5. U. S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin No. 895, "Our Forage Resources," Government Printing Office, 1923, pp. 312-26.]
These are figures that should concern the Indian sincerely interested in the welfare of his great agricultural country, and I confess to placing them here at such length in the hope that they may challenge his eye.
Still pursuing the question of India's cattle, Mr. Gandhi invoked the counsel of an Italian-trained specialist, domiciled in India. From him came the impatient reply of the practical man who sees small beauty in the spared rod where childish folly is wasting precious substance. If the Indian were not so callous, and so unintelligent as to the needs of his cattle--if he were only compelled to rotate crops and to grow fodder as Italians do in circumstances no better than the Indians', his troubles were done, says this witness, continuing:[6]
[6. Young India, May 13, 1926, Mr. Galletti-di-Cadilhac. "The Cattle Problem," p. 177.]
Rotated crops require no more expenditure of money than stable crops. In Java the Dutch forced paddy rotation on the people a century ago, by the sjambok [rhinoceros-hide whip]. The population of Java has increased from 2 million to 30 million during their rule, and the yield of the rice and sugar fields has increased prooortionately. The change was brought about not by capital expenditure but by an intelligent government using force. In India there is no question of using the sjambok. We wish to convince, not to compel.
The writer continues:[7]
[7. Young India, p. 109.]
Where the cow is a valuable possession [as in Italy], she is tended with care and love, and crops are grown for her and palaces are built for her. Here [where] she is merely an object of veneration, she is left to stand and starve in the public standing- and starving-grounds, which are miscalled grazing-grounds in India. India should abolish these places of torture and breeding-grounds of disease and abortion, and every Indian should devote three-fifths or two-thirds of his land to growing grass and fodder for his cattle.
No one who has seen the public pasturage will be likely to dispute the accuracy of the last-quoted witness. "Public standing- and starving-grounds" they are, nor is there the faintest reason, despite the celebrants of the past, for supposing that they were ever materially better. Bernier, the French traveler of the Mussalman period, testifies:[8]
[8. Travels in the Mogul Empire, p. 326.]
Owing to the great deficiency of pasture land in the Indies, it is impossible to maintain large numbers of cattle...The heat is so intense, and the ground so parched, during eight months of the year, that the beasts of the field, ready to die of hunger, feed on every kind of filth, like so many swine.
And one's own eyes and common sense, together with the history of men and forests, are enough to satisfy one's mind.
Further, the general conditions under which Indian animals have lived and propagated might have been specially devised for breeding down to the worst possible type.
Cattle experts know that if a hundred and twenty cows are put without other food on pasturage that will keep alive only one hundred, the twenty that perish will be the twenty best milkers; for the reason that a good milch cow throws her strength to her milk production, leaving herself a diminished maintenance reserve. The Indian practice of selection by starvation, therefore, works the breed downhill, through the survival of the least useful strain. Again, in India the bull runs with the herds, which may number three hundred cows. Though he were of the best, such extravagance; must exhaust him. But, on the consistent contrary, he is so far from the best as to be deliberately of the worst that can be found.
When a man needs specially to placate the gods, as upon the death of his father, he may vow a bull to the temple. And, since one bull will do as well as another, he naturally chooses his feeblest, his most misshapen. Or, if he buys the offering, he buys the cheapest and therefore the poorest to be had. The priests accept the animal, which, receiving the temple brand, thereupon becomes holy, goes where he pleases, and serves as sire to a neighborhood herd. Straying together, starving together, young and old, better and worse, the poor creatures mingle and transmit to each other and to their young their manifold flaws and diseases. Half of India's cattle,[9] if given the food consumed by the worse half, would produce, it is affirmed, more than India's present total milk supply.
[9. Samuel Higginbottom, Director of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, testimony before the Indian Taxation Enquiry Committee, 3924-25.]
In eastern Bengal, one of the most fertile countries of the world, pasturage scarcely exists, the country being entirely taken up with rice-paddy and jute. They grow no fodder crops for their cattle and feed a bit of chopped rice-straw or nothing. In western Bengal, some districts report the loss of 25 per cent, of the cultivated crops by depredations of hungry stock. The country being everywhere without fences qr hedges, a man may easily turn his cows into his sleeping neighbors' crops. The sin is small--the cows are holy as well as hungry, and the neighbor's distress is both his illusion and his fate.
I have seen the cow driven by starvation so far from her natural niceness as to become a scavenger of human excrement. The sight is common.
In certain districts some green fodder is grown, to be sure, and during the rains and the earlier cold weather a poor sort of grass exists on the grazing-grounds of all but the most desert sections. By January, however, the gray cracked earth is eaten bare, so to remain until the late spring rains set in--and starvation begins in earnest.
Mr. Gandhi's correspondent has shown us in the cow's hunger one of the evil effects of British rule.
And British rule is indeed largely responsible for the present disastrous condition.
Up to the advent of the British in India, raids great and small, thieving, banditry and endless internal broils and warfares kept the country in chronic distress; and a sure butt of every such activity was the cattle of the attacked. Consequently, with a spasmodic regularity whose beneficent effect is more easily appreciated today than can well have been possible at the time, the cattle of any given area were killed off or driven away, the grazing-grounds of that area, such as they were, got an interval of rest, and, for the moment, inbreeding stopped. For new animals had to be slowly accumulated.
Upon this order broke the British with their self-elected commitment, first of all, to stop banditry, warfare and destruction and to establish peace. The task was precisely the same that America set for herself in the Philippines. As we achieved it in the Philippines, so did the British achieve it in India--in a greater interval of time commensurate with the greater area and population to be pacified. About fifty years ago Britain's work in this respect, until then all-absorbing, stood at last almost accomplished. Life and property under her controlling hand had now become as nearly safe as is, perhaps, possible. Epidemics, also, were checked and famine largely forestalled. So that, shielded from enemies that had before kept down their numbers, men and cattle alike multiplied. And men must be fed. Therefore Government leased them land[10] in quantity according to their necessities, that they might raise food for themselves and not die.
[10. By ancient law all land ownership is vested in Government.]
They have raised food for themselves, but they will not raise food for their mother the cow. So the cow starves. And the fault--is the greed of Britain or of the Salvation Army.[11]
[11. Government has largely entrusted to the Salvation Army, because of its conspicuous success therewith, the reformation of the criminal tribes, nomads, whose first need is domestication in a fixed habitat where they may be trained to earn an honest and sufficient livelihood by agriculture, cattle-raising, and handiwork. For this purpose and to further its excellent work for the Untouchables in general, the Salvation Army has received from Government the use of certain small and scattered tracts of uncultivated land in Gujerat and elsewhere. It is to this step that Mr. Gandhi's organ objects. See ante, p. 227. See, further, Muktifauj, by Commissioner Booth-Tucker, Salvationist Publishing and Supplies, London.]