One hears a great deal from the new Indian intelligentsia about the glories of the "Golden Age"--a period in the shadowy past when the land smiled with health and plenty, wisdom, beauty and peace and when all went well with India. This happy natural condition was done to death, one is given to understand, by the mephitic influence of the present Government.
The argument for the Golden Age is wont to take typical forms, such as this:
"You admit that the Emperor Chandragupta lived? And that he was the man who fought Seleucus, who fought Alexander? Very well: In Chandragupta's day a girl of fourteen, beautiful and loaded with jewels, could walk abroad in perfect safety. And there was perfect peace, no poverty, no famine, no plague. But Britain ruined our Golden Age."
Or again, the accuser first paints a picture of an idyllic land, distinguished by science, philosophy and pastoral grace, then suddenly confronts his hearer with the challenge: "Can you show me, in all India, any remnant of that life? No? Exactly. Then, if it exists nowhere, does it not follow that Britain must have destroyed it?"
But the period of Chandragupta, whatever its quality, was removed from that of England's first acquisition of foothold in India by over nineteen hundred years.[1] Chandragupta's dynasty having disappeared into mists of legend out of which the one great figure of Asoka dimly looms, the Scythians and the Turks rode through the northern mountain passes, helped themselves to northern India and set up their kingdoms there. And the native Hindu mass, as years rolled by, merged its conquerors, both Scythian and Turk, into its own body.
[1. Chandragupta reigned B.C. 322-298.]
The fourth and fifth centuries, A.D., comprised the great period of Hindu art and history--the age of the Gupta Kings. Then again the hand grew lax that held the northern passes; and again down out of Central Asia poured wave after wave of wild humanity, this time the terrible nomad White Huns, brothers to the forces of Attila. Ravenous for the wealth of the land, they had watched the frontier for their hour. When it struck, leaping through like a loosened torrent, they swept the country bare of all that had been its socia] fabric.
By the beginning of the sixth century the northern half of the territory we call India had become one of the provinces of the Huns. And the impact of successive Hun hordes, striking down through the mountain barrier, had again so thoroughly wiped out the past that no authentic family or clan tradition of today can go behind that point.
The Huns, like the Scythians and the Turks before them, were gradually absorbed in the native stock. Hinduism, for a time disputed by Buddhism, regained possession of the land. Its disintegrating tenets and its cumulative millions of terrifying gods did their work. Henceforth, save during a few years in the seventh century, no successful attempt was made, north or south, to establish political unity or a permanent state, while forces of disunion multiplied and grew strong.
The history of northern India from the middle of the seventh century through the next five hundred years is a tangled web of the warfare of little clans and states, constantly changing in size and in number with the changing fortunes of battle and intrigue. Small chiefs march and countermarch, raid, seize, annex, destroy, slay and are slain, each jealous of each, each for himself alone, embroiling the entire northern and central part of the country in their constant feuds.
Meantime, peninsular India remained always a place apart, untouched by the currents of the north and defended therefrom by the buttress of her hills and jungles. Here lived the dark-skinned aboriginals, Tamils, without infusion of Aryan blood, fighting their own fights and worshiping the demons of their faith. And when at last Hindu missionaries sallied south along the coast, these recommended their creed, it would seem, by the familiar process of adding the local demons to the number of their own gods.
The Tamils had developed a rich native art; and in one at least of their many and ever-changing little kingdoms they had brought forth an elaborate and interesting system of village government. By the end of the twelfth century, however, this feature had utterly perished, crushed out. And it is well to observe that, north or south, a history made up of endless wars and changes of dynasty developed no municipal institutions, no free cities, no republics, no political consciousness in the people. Each region lay forever prostrate, supine, under the heel of a despot who in his brief hour did as he pleased with his human herds until some other despot pulled him down to destruction.
For a rapid survey of the next era in India's history one cannot do better than turn to Sir T. W. Holder-ness's Peoples and Problems of India:[2]
[2. Williams & Norgate, London, 1920, pp. 48-50.]
The first comers were Arabs, who founded dynasties in Sind and Multan as early as [A.D.] 800...About [the year] 1000 the terror came. By that time the Tartar races had been brought into the fold of Islam, and the Turks, the most capable of these races, had started on the career which in the West ended in their establishment at Constantinople...In 997, Mahmud [a Turkish chieftain] descended upon India. His title, "the Idol-breaker," describes the man. Year by year he swept over the plains of India, capturing cities and castles, throwing down idols and temples, slaughtering the heathen and proclaiming the faith of Muhammad. Each year he returned with vast spoils [to his home in Afghanistan].
For five hundred years, reckoning from A.D. 1000, successive hosts of fierce and greedy Turks, Afghans and Mongols trod upon one another's heels and fought for mastery in India. At the end of that time, Babar the Turk founded in 1526 the Mughal Empire; thenceforward for two hundred years the passes into India were closed and in the keeping of his capable successors.
Says Holderness on another page:[3]
[3. Peoples and Problems of India, p. 53.]
The Mughal Empire...was of the ordinary type of Asiatic despotisms. It was irresponsible personal government. For India it meant the substitution of a new set of conquerors for those already in occupation. But the new comers brought with them the vigour of the north--they came from the plains of the Oxus beyond the Kabul hills--and they drew an unlimited supply of recruits from the finest fighting races of Asia. In physical strength and hardihood they were like the Norsemen and Normans of Europe.
To check the Islamic tide in its flood toward the south, a Hindu power, known as the Empire of Vi-jayanagar, sprang up among the Tamils. Its rulers built a gorgeous city and lived in unbounded luxury. But here, as elsewhere all over India, the common people's misery provided the kings' and nobles' wealth, and only their abject submission made possible the existence of the state. Yet the glories of the Hindu stronghold soon eclipsed. In the year 1565 one blow of Muslim arms, delivered by the sultans of small surrounding states, slaughtered its people and reduced the splendid city to a heap of carven stones.
Yet the earlier of the great Mughal Emperors tolerated the old religion. Their chief exponent, Akbar, even married a native lady, and admitted Rajput chiefs and Brahman scholars to place and posts. But the Mug-hals administered always as conqueror strangers; and though they made use of the talents or learning of individuals among the Hindus, they took care constantly to strengthen the Muslim hand from their own trans-montane source.
Then, in 1659, the Emperor Aurangzeb again brought to the Mughal throne an Islamism that would not countenance the idolatry of the Hindu mass. His heavy hand, destroying temples and images, broke the Rajput's fealty and roused the Hindu low-caste peasantry of the Deccan--the Mahrattas--in common wrath. So that when Aurangzeb, in his ambition for more power, more wealth, attacked even the little Mu-hammadan kings of the Deccan, the Mahrattas rose up as guerilla bands, and, under cover of the general embroilment, robbed, slew and destroyed on their own account, wasting the land. A half-century of Aurang-zeb's disjointing rule so weakened the Mughal Empire that, at his death, it fell asunder, leaving the Mahratta hordes, now trained in raids and killings under their bandit chiefs, to play a brief rôle as the strong hand in India.
Then again happened the historic inevitable, as happen it will whenever the guard of the north is down. The Mughal Empire fallen, the door open to Central Asia, Central Asia poured in. First came the Persian, then the fierce Afghan, who, in a final battle delivered in 1761, drove the Mahrattas with wholesale slaughter back to their Deccan hills.
Now, in the scanty official records of all these troubled centuries, little indeed is said of the common people. The histories are histories of little kings and tribal chiefs, their personal lives, ambitions, riches, intrigues, fights and downfalls. Such glimpses as appear, however, show the populace generally as the unconsidered victims of their master's greed, be that master Hindu or Muhammadan. Hungry, naked, poverty-stricken, constantly overridden by undisciplined mobs of soldiers, bled of their scanty produce, swept by exterminating famines and epidemics, our clearest knowledge of them comes from the chronicles of strangers who from time to time visited the country.
Many western travelers--French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish--have left records of the country, north and south, as it was during and after Akbar's day. All agree in the main points.
The poor, they say, were everywhere desperately poor, the rich forever insecure in their riches. Between common robbers and the levies of the throne, no man dared count on the morrow. The Hindu peoples constituted the prostrate masses. The nobles and governing officials, few in numbers, were almost all foreigners, whether Turks or Persians. Their luxury and ostentation arose, on the one hand, from an insatiable hunger for sensual pleasure, and, on the other, from the necessity not to be outshone at court. All places and favors were bought by costly bribes, and the extravagance of life was increased by the fact that, in northern India at least, whatever a rich man possessed at the time of his death reverted to the royal treasury.
To acquire means to keep up their gorgeous state the officials, from the pro-consuls down, had but one method--to squeeze the peasantry. They squeezed.
In Madras, wrote van Linschoten, who saw the country in the decade between 1580 to 1590, the peasants [4]
[4. The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies, edited for the Hakluyt Society, 1884.]
...are so miserable that for a penny they would endure to be whipped, and they eat so little that it seemeth they live by the air; they are likewise most of them small and weak of limbs.
When the rains failed, they fell into still deeper distress, wandered like wild animals in vain search of food and sold their children for "less than a rupee apiece," while the slave-market was abundantly recruited from those who sold their own bodies to escape starvation, of which cannibalism, an ordinary feature of famine, was the alternative.
The Bádsháh Námah of 'Abd Ai Hamïd Láhawri bears witness that in the Deccan during the famine of 1631, "pounded bones of the dead were mixed with flour and sold...Destitution at length reached such a pitch that men began to devour each other and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love. The number of the dying caused obstruction in the roads." The Dutch East India Company's representative, in the same year, recorded that in Surat the dearth was so great that "menschen en vee van honger sturven...moeders tegen natuer haere kinderkens wt hongers-noot op gegeten hebben." Two years later Christopher Read reported to the British East India Company that Mesulapatam and Armagon were "sorely oppressed with famine, the liveinge eating up the dead and men durst scarcely travel in the country for feare they should be kild and eaten." And Peter Mundy wrote from Gujerat during the same period that "the famine it selfe swept away more than a million of the Comon or poorer Sort. After which, the mortallitie succeeding did as much more among rich and poore. Weomen were scene to rost their Children...A man or woman noe sooner dead but they were Cutt in pieces to be eaten." These testimonies will be found, and at greater length, in the text and Appendix of the Hakluyt Society's edition of the Travels of Peter Mundy, Other old chronicles corroborate them.
Slaves cost practically nothing to keep and were therefore numerous in each noble's household, where their little value insured their wretched state. The elephants of the nobles wore trappings of silver and gold, while "the people," says the contemporaneous observer, de Laet,[5] "have not sufficient covering to keep warm in winter."
[5. De Imperio Magni Mogolis, J. de Laet, Leyden, 1631.]
Merchants, if prosperous, dared not live comfortably, dared not eat good food, and buried their silver deep under ground; for the smallest show of means brought the torturers to wring from them the hiding-place of their wealth.
The village masses constituted practically the only productive element in the land. All their production, save their bare subsistence, was absorbed by the State. As to its redistribution, that took a single route, into the pockets of the extremely small body of foreigners constituting the ruling class. None of it returned to the people. No communal benefits existed.
A very few bridges and such roads as are made by the plodding of bullocks' feet through dust and mud comprised the communication lines of the land. No system of popular education or of medical relief wa? worked, and none of legal defense. Fine schemes were sometimes set on paper by rulers and their ministers, but practically nothing was actually done toward the economic development of the country; for if any one ruler began a work, his successor destroyed it or let it decay.[6]
[6. India at the Death of Akbar, by W. H. Moreland, Macmillan & Co., London, 1920, gives an elaborate and heavily documented digest of contemporaneous authority on this general subject.]
Fifteen years after the death of Akbar, or in the year 1620, the Hollander, Francisco Pelsaert, began that seven years' residence in India of which he left so valuable and so curious a record. In the course of his narrative Pelsaert writes:[7]
[7. The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, translated from the Dutch by W. H. Moreland and P. Geyl Heffers, Cambridge, 1925, pp. 47-59.]
The land would give a plentiful, or even an extraordinary yield, if the peasants were not so cruelly and pitilessly oppressed; for villages which, owing to some small shortage of produce, are unable to pay the full amount of the revenue-farm, are made prize, so to speak, by their masters or governors, and wives and children sold on pretext of a charge of rebellion. Some peasants abscond to escape their tyranny...and consequently the fields lie empty and unsown and grow into wildernesses.
...As regards the laws, they are scarcely observed at all, for the administration is absolutely autocratic...Their laws contain such provisions as hand for hand, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; but who will ex-communicate the Pope? And who would dare to ask a Governor "Why do you rule us this way or that? Our Law orders thus."...In every city there is a...royal court of Justice...[but] one must indeed be sorry for the man who has to come to judgment before these godless "un-judges"; their eyes are bleared with greed, their mouths gape like wolves for covetousness, and their bellies hunger for the bread of the poor; every one stands with hands open to receive, for no mercy or compassion can be had except on payment of cash. This fault should not be attributed to judges or officers alone, for the evil is a universal plague; from the least to the greatest, right up to the King himself, every one is infected with insatiable greed.
...It is important to recognise that [the King, Jahangir] is to be regarded as king of the plains or the open roads only; for in many places you can travel only with a strong body of men, or on payment of heavy tolls to rebels...[and] there are nearly as many rebels as subjects. Taking the chief cities, for example, at Surat the forces of Raja Piepel come pillaging up to, or inside the city, murdering the people and burning: the villages, and in the same way, near Ahmedabad, Burhanpur, Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and many other cities, thieves and robbers come in force by night or day like open enemies. The Governors are usually bribed by the thieves to remain inactive, for avarice dominates manly honour, and, instead of maintaining troops, they fill and adorn their mahals with beautiful women, and seem to have the pleasure-house of the whole world within their walls.
The observant Dutchman[8] repeatedly dwells on the disastrous contrast between
the manner of life of the rich in their great superfluity and absolute power, and the utter subjection and poverty of the common people--poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted...only as the home of stark want and the dwelling-place of bitter woe.
[8. The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, p. 60.]
Nevertheless, he says, having discovered the numbing influence of the doctrines of fate and caste:[9]
[9. Ibid.]
The people endure patiently, professing that they do not deserve anything better; and scarcely any one will make an effort, for a ladder by which to climb higher is hard to find, because a workman's children can follow no occupation other than that of their father, nor can they inter-marry with other castes...For the workman there are two scourges, the first of which is low wages...The second is [the oppression by] the Governor, the nobles, the Diwan...and other royal officers. If any of these wants a workman, the man is not asked if he is willing to come, but is seized in the house or in the street, well beaten if he should dare to raise any objection, and in the evening paid half his wages or nothing at all.
Forty years after Pelsaert's departure from India came a French traveler, François Bernier. His stay covered the period from 1656 to 1668. His chronicle perfectly agrees with that of other foreign visitors, and gives a vivid picture of men, women and things as he found them in the reigns of Shahjahan and Aurangzeb--the climax of the Mughal Empire. Speaking on the subject of land-tenure and taxation, this observer writes:[10]
[10. Travels in the Mogul Empire, François Bernier, Oxford University Press, 1916, p. 224.]
The King, as proprietor of the land, makes over a certain quantity to military men, as an equivalent for their pay...Similar grants are made to governors, in lieu of their salary, and also for the support of their troops, on condition that they pay a certain sum annually to the King...The lands not so granted are retained by the King as the peculiar domains of his house...and upon these domains he keeps contractors, who are also bound to pay him an annual rent.
Bengal, he thinks probably "the finest and most fruitful country in the world." But of the other regions he writes:[11]
[11. Ibid., pp. 226-7, 230.]
As the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsion, and as no person is found willing and able to repair the ditches and canals for the conveyance of water, it happens that the whole country is badly cultivated, and a great part rendered unproductive from the want of irrigation»...The peasant cannot avoid asking himself this question: "Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess and value?"...The Governors and revenue contractors, on their part reason in this manner: "Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness in our minds? and why should we expend our own money and time to render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single moment and our exertion would benefit neither ourselves nor our children. Let us draw from the soil all the money we can, though the peasant should starve or abscond, and we should leave it, when commanded to quit, a dreary wilderness."...It is owing to this miserable system of government...that there is no city or town which, if it be not already ruined and deserted, does not bear evident marks of approaching decay.
The country is ruined by the necessity of defraying the enormous charges required to maintain the splendour of a numerous court, and to pay a large army maintained for the purpose of keeping the people in subjection.
Now, to touch as briefly as possible on the history of European powers in India: At the time of Akbar's accession--1556--the Portuguese were already rooted and fortified on the western coast of the Peninsula, at Goa, which, with its environing territory, they had taken from the Muhammadan kinglets of the Deccan. Thence they controlled the merchant traffic of the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. No other European power had yet secured a base in the land, and no Englishman had yet set foot on the soil of India.[12]
The Portuguese hand in India soon weakened, on lines of debauchery and cruelty. Thus came the decay that, in the early sixteen hundreds, let fall all the Portuguese settlements, save only Goa itself, into the hands of the Dutch.
Dutch and English merchants, at that period, were equally keen for the trade of the East. The Dutchmen's main interest, however, lying with Java and the Spice Islands, their English rivals soon stood in India practically alone.
British merchant adventurers, by charter and concessions granted by Queen Elizabeth and by the Mug-hal Emperor, now from time to time established trading stations along the West coast. Their post in the Bay of Bengal antedated by five years the settlement of Boston by the Puritans. Nine years later the first English proprietary holding in India was secured, by agreement between the local Hindu ruler and the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading with the East Indies." By this treaty the latter were allowed to rent and fortify as a trading post a bit of rough shoreland now the site of the city of Madras. Here, presently, was to come Elihu Yale, once of Boston in Massachusetts, as Governor in the Company's behalf. Here was earned the means to benefit the Connecticut University that bears his name today. And here, in the old house where British Governors of Madras still dwell, hangs Elihu Yale's portrait, looking placidly out upon the scene of his labors.
French merchants, they also desirous of the trade of India, during the latter half of the seventeenth century secured several small points d'appui along the southern coasts. Their commerce never equaled that of the English; but their aspirations and the national clashes in Europe alike led them into a series of anti-English intrigues with small Indian rulers, resulting in hostilities of varying result. So that while the English colonists of New England and New York, with the aid of Indian allies, were fighting "French and Indian Wars" for control of the future, English colonists on the other side of the world, with the aid of Indian allies, were fighting French and Indian wars for the same purpose. And with a comparable outcome.[13]
[13. As Americans we may here draw our critics' shot by admitting that while we have done much to exterminate our Indians and only in 1924 granted them citizenship though retaining guardianship over them (United States v. Nice, 241 U. S. 598, 1916), our British cousins have multiplied theirs, and have led them into a large and increasing measure of self-government.]
The struggle which began, openly, in 1746, when the French took Madras, came to its close in 1761, when the French unconditionally surrendered Pondi-cherry, their own headquarters, thus ending their effective career in India.
Until well into the eighteenth century, English holdings in India were limited to a few square miles in Madras, in the Island of Bombay, and at three or four other points; during this period the English representatives in India occupied themselves with trade alone, taking no hand in local wars or politics. But with the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb, the collapse of the Mughal Empire, and the chaos of freebooting wars that then broke over the land, the Company set up for the protection of its settlements a force of European troops, supplemented by Indian auxiliaries.
Thenceforward it grew toward the status of a governing corporation. In 1784 the British Government, by Act of Parliament, assumed a degree of control over the Company's procedure. With such authority behind it, the Company could enlarge its activities and proceed toward establishing peace in a country teeming with anarchy.
This meant reducing to order a host of robber gangs, of marauding chieftains, of captains of the old Mughai régime now out of a job and swarming like migrating bees looking for new kingdoms and new plunder. It also meant dissuading small reigning princes from their hereditary vocation of enlisting gangs of mercenaries and campaigning against their neighbors. And if these movements, which the princes themselves often requested, usually resulted in annexing more territory to the sphere of British influence or control, they also brought an increasing semblance of unity to the country.
Once the work of pacification was well in hand, began the attempt to build up civil institutions and public privileges and to introduce law, justice and order, a thousand years and more unknown in the land. The Company was still a trading company, with a trader's chief preoccupation. But it accepted the responsibility for the people's welfare implied in the authority it now held.
A human enterprise covering two centuries of human progress, the name of the East India Company was sometimes dimmed by mistaken judgment or by unfit agents. Some of these were overbearing, some tactless, some wavering, one or two were base and a few succumbed to the temptation to graft. Of their defects, however, not a little nonsense is spun.
The Company, on the whole, was honored in the quality of its officers. As time passed, a more sensitive public conscience at home made it increasingly alive to critical observation. Its affairs were reviewed by Parliament. And, with the general rise in world-standards, rose its standards of administration. Its inclusive achievement was courageous, arduous and essential towards the redemption of the country. Whatever its faults, it cleared and broke the ground for progress. And it lighted the first ray of hope that had ever dawned for the wretched masses of the Indian peoples.
The abolition of ancient indigenous horrors, such as the flourishing trade of the professional strangler tribes, the Thugs; the burning alive of widows; the burying alive of lepers, lie to the credit of the Company. And no briefest summary of the epoch-making elements of its concerns could be forgiven a failure to cite the gist of Section 87 of the Parliamentary Act of 1784, which reads:
No native of the said territories, nor any natural-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall, by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of them, be disabled from holding any place, office or employment under the Company.
A bomb, indeed, to drop into caste-fettered, feud-filled, tyrant-crushed India! Nor was this shock of free western ideas without its definitely unsettling influence. The Sikh Rebellion in 1845, the Indian Mutiny in 1857, were in no small degree direct fruits of that influence. And with the conclusion of the latter England felt that the time had come to do away with the awkward Company-Parliament form of government, to end the control of a great territory by commercial interest, however safeguarded, and to bring the administration of India directly under the Crown.
In the year 1858 this step was taken. Shabby, threadbare, sick and poor, old Mother India stood at last on the brink of another world and turned blind eyes toward the strange new flag above her head. It carried then, as it carries today, a pledge that is, to her, incredible. How can she, the victim and slave of all recorded time, either hope or believe that her latest master brings her the gift of constructive service, democracy and the weal of the common people?