JODHPUR
It was late in the afternoon when we drove past the Courts of Justice. The day’s business was over and the sweepers were at work, making clean for the morrow. Outside one of the doors of the building stood a row of brimming waste-paper baskets, and from these, as from mangers, two or three sacred bulls were slowly and majestically feeding. When the baskets were empty officious hands from within replenished them with a fresh supply of torn and scribbled paper. The bulls browsed on; it was a literary feast.
Watching them at their meal, I understood why it is that Indian bulls are so strangely mild. On a diet of waste-paper, it would be difficult for them to be anything but disciples of Gandhi, devotees of non-violence and ahimsa. I also understood why it is that Indian cows yield so little milk and, further, why the cattle of either sex are so often afflicted with hiccoughs. Before I came to India, I had never heard a bull hiccoughing. It is a loud and terrifying sound. Hearing behind me that explosive combination of a bellow and a bark, I have often started in alarm, thinking I was on the point of being attacked. But looking round, I would find that it was only one of the mild, dyspeptic totems of the Hindus, gorged with waste-paper and painfully, uncontrollably belching as it walked.
The effects on horses of a certainly insufficient and probably also unnatural diet are different. They do not hiccough—at least I never heard them hiccoughing. But as they trot the withered and emptily sagging entrails in their bellies give forth, at every step, a strange sound like the leathery creaking of organ bellows. It is a most distressing sound, but one to which all those who drive in Indian tongas must learn to accustom themselves.
JODHPUR
At the time when the question of putting an end to the East India Company’s monopoly was under discussion there were several distinguished English administrators who argued that, quite apart from all considerations of commercial interests, it would be highly impolitic to open the country freely to European immigration. So far from strengthening the Company’s position, they argued, the influx of Europeans would actually weaken and imperil it. For the inflowing Europeans would be commercial adventurers of no breeding or education. Now the low, when exalted by circumstances, are generally tyrannous, and the uneducated are incapable of seeing beyond the circle of their own native prejudices. In India circumstances conspire to exalt every member of the ruling race, really to some extent as well as in his own estimation.
Nor is there any country in which it is more necessary to respect and make allowances for unfamiliar prejudices. Wittingly, by deliberate insult, unwittingly, by failing to allow for foreign prejudices, the low and uneducated may exasperate a subject people to whom the dominion of rulers no less foreign and in essentials no less rapacious and oppressive, but courteous and in small matters tolerant, seems comparatively unobjectionable. Open India to free European immigration and you admit into the land the potential causes of racial hatred and political unrest.
It was thus that the defenders of the Company’s monopoly argued, generations ago. The case was decided against them—inevitably. It was impossible to keep India a closed country. But the supporters of lost causes are not necessarily fools. The opponents of free immigration exaggerated its dangers. But the briefest visit to India is enough to convince one that there was much truth in what they said.
At the Jodhpur Dak Bungalow, to which, the Guest House being full, we had been relegated, I was reminded, as I had often been reminded before, of their warnings. The reminder was more forcible than usual, since the person who reminded me was more frightfully typical of the class it was desired to exclude than any one I had hitherto met. He was ill-bred and totally uncultured; prosperous, having evidently come up in the world, and in consequence bumptious and hectoring with all the vulgar insolence of the low man exalted and anxious to remind other people and himself of his newly acquired importance. Towards his fellow Europeans the man’s inferiority complex expressed itself in boastings; but where the Indians were concerned, it found vent, towards the poor, in bullying, towards those who looked rich enough to be able to claim the protection of the law, in insult and rudeness. Uneducated, the manifest descendant of pork butchers and publicans, he felt himself immeasurably superior to every inhabitant of the peninsula, from the Rajput prince to the pandit and the Europeanised doctor of science. He was a white man—“one of the whitest men unhung.”
In the course of some thousands of miles of travelling in Upper India, involving many halts at station restaurants and Dak Bungalows, it was our misfortune to meet a good many men of this type. The Jodhpur specimen was certainly the worst, but all were bad. And all belonged to the lower orders of the unofficial, trading community.
The official class in India is composed of men of decent family, decently brought up and, as education goes, well-educated. They are consequently tolerant and well-behaved. For the educated man is capable of looking at things from other points of view than his own. And one who has been brought up in the ruling classes of society is generally courteous, not because he does not feel himself superior to other people, but precisely because his sense of superiority is so great that he feels that he owes it to his inferiors to be civil to them as a slight compensation for their manifest inferiority. In social intercourse it is the acts that count, not the motives behind them. The courtesy of a duke or of a royal personage charms us, and we do not reflect that it is due to a contempt for ourselves far more crushing than that which the parvenu offensively expresses for his menials and tradesmen.
The blustering rudeness of the parvenu is an admission of the precariousness of his superiority. The prince is so contemptuously certain of his, that he can afford to be civil. But civility, whatever its cause, is always civility; and rudeness angers and hurts us, even when we know it to be the expression of the sense of inferiority. The official may be courteous only because he is inwardly convinced of his enormous superiority to the Indians with whom he comes in contact; but at any rate he is courteous, and courtesy never offends. Indians may regard the official’s rule as an injury to the country; but at least he refrains, generally speaking, from adding personal insult. Insult comes mainly from insignificant non-officials; it makes more enemies to English rule than official injury.
Most Englishmen who live in India will tell you that they love the Indians. For peasants, for workmen, for sepoys, for servants they feel nothing but a benevolent and fatherly affection. They greatly admire the orthodox Brahmin who thinks it wrong to cross the seas and whose learning is all mythology, Sanskrit, and a fabulous kind of history. Still greater is their admiration for the Rajput noble, that picturesque survival from the age of chivalry; he rides well, plays a good game of tennis, and is in every respect a pukka sahib—that is to say, a sportsman with good manners, a code of morals not vastly different from that current at English public schools, and no intellectual accomplishments or pretensions. The only Indians you find them objecting to as a class are those who have received a Western education. The reason is sufficiently obvious. The educated Indian is the Englishman’s rival and would-be supplanter. To the slavish and illiterate masses the European is manifestly superior. Nor can the pandit, entangled in his orthodoxy and learned only in Sanskrit, the sporting nobleman, learned in nothing, ever challenge a supremacy which he owes to his Western training. All these he can afford to love, protectively. But no man loves another who threatens to deprive him of his privileges and powers. The educated Indian is not popular with the Europeans. It is only to be expected.
This dislike of the educated Indian is frequently expressed by the low European in terms of gross or covert insult. No man likes to be insulted, even by those whom he despises. Philosophers will wince at the sarcasms of passing street boys and the unfavourable comments of critics, infinitely their inferiors, have wounded to the quick the greatest artists. It is not to be wondered at if men, who are neither sages nor geniuses and who, moreover, have been brought up in the humiliating position of members of a subject race, should be quick to resent insults. The hatred of the educated middle class—in India, at the present time, largely unemployed and consequently embittered—is a menace to any government. In the creation of this hatred the worst bred and least educated of the Europeans have done more than their fair share.
AJMERE
The little grandson of the Indian house, into which a letter
