THE VARIETY OF INDIAN SOCIETY.
THE grand difficulty, as any experienced Anglo-Indian will tell you, of talking to an Englishman about India, is that he always forms a picture of the place in his mind. It may be accurate or inaccurate, but it is always a picture. He thinks of it either as a green delta, or a series of sun-baked plains, or a wild region with jungle and river and farms all intermixed ; or a vast park stretched out by Nature for sports- men, and sloping somehow at the edges towards highly culti- vated plains. It never occurs to him that as regards external aspect, there is no India ; that the Peninsula so called is as large as Europe west of the Vistula, and presents as many variations of scenery. East Anglia is not so different from Italy as the North-West Provinces from Bengal, nor are the Landes so unlike Normandy as the Punjab is unlike the hunting districts of Madras. There is every scene in India,— from the eternal snow of the Himalayas, as much above Mont Blanc as Mont Blanc is above Geneva, to the rice swamps of Bengal all buried in fruit trees; from the wonderful valleys of the Vindhya, where beauty and fertility seem to struggle consciously for the favour of man, to the God-forgotten salt-marshes by the Runn of Cutch. It is the same with indigenous Indian society. The Englishman thinks of it as an innumerable crowd of timid peasants, easily taxed and governed by a few officials, or as a population full of luxurious Princes, with difficulty restrained by scientific force and care- ful division from eating up each other. In reality, Indian society is more complex and varied than that of Europe, comprising, it is true, a huge mass of peasant-proprietors, but yet full of Princes who are potentates and Princes who arc survivals, of landlords who are in all respects great nobles and landlords who are only squireens, of great ecclesiastics and hungry curates, of merchants like the Barings and merchants who keep shops, of professors and professionals, of adventurers and criminals, of cities full of artificers, and of savages far below the dark citizens of Hawaii. Let any one who thinks Indian society a. plain, study for an hour Sir Roper Lethbridge's "Golden Book of India," just issued by Messrs. Macmillan, and he will give up that absurdity at least. It is not a perfect book by any means, as its editor himself perceives, but rather the foundation of a book to be improved into completeness ; but at least it will teach any reader that Indian society is not a democracy, that amidst all these peasants and officials stand hundreds, or rather thousands, of families as distinct from the masses as the Percys from English labourers, three hundred of them ruling States large or small—one is bigger than the British Isles ; one only two miles square—three thousand of them perhaps who on the Continent would be accounted nobles, some with pedigrees like those of the Massimi or the Zichys, some only of yesterday ; but all as utterly separated from the people as a hill from the river at its base, And behind them stand other thousands of squires, each with his own family traditions, each with hereditary tenantry, each with some position and character and specialty which, within fifty miles of his home, are as well known as those of the Egertons in Cheshire, or the Luttrells in West Somerset. And behind them again are millions—literally millions—of families, country and urban, with modest means, and little wish for advancement, yet freeholders to a man, with histories often which trace back farther than those of the Lords, with a pride of their own which
is immovable, and with characters that for five miles are known and reckoned on, and, so to speak, expected, as regularly and as accurately as if they were Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg. Ask the settlement officers—who alone among Indian officials, except sometimes the highest, really know the people—and they will tell you that, above the very lowest, no two Indian families are alike in rank or character or reputation, or even, though that seems so impossible, in means.
India is socially the very land of variety, for in addition to all that divides men in Europe, there are three sources of reverence which in Europe are dying away,—the reverence
felt for power, power in its direct sense, the power to order you to be beaten, the reverence felt for pedigree, and the reverence felt for that which is, as certain to have been decreed either by God, or by that unintelligible and immutable Fate which even He may not resist. The reverence for all is abso- lutely genuine,—that is, is without the alloy of European scepticism and dislike of the great; and all three reverences are mingled in a way which we despair of conveying to the Western mind. There are three hundred Native rulers in India possessed, in theory at all eventir, of the power of life and death; certain that, if they give the order, its object will fall headless before them, or he spirited away to a dungeon, there to remain till the lord's humour changes. Every one of those men is believed by his people, be they many or few, to have a right to that power, and to be entitled to use it at his own discretion. For his own sake, he should use it wisely, lest he should find the next world disagreeable, or, lest his subjects should rebel; but the right is never denied even in the heart. The British Government controls it, sometimes, though not so often as Englishmen think ; but the subjects never, except by rebellion, which is not a declaration that the power is bad, but the user of the power. The late Gaekwar was not unpopular, though he is said to have made his ele- phants tread out men's bowels, often for inadequate offence. Power is of God, and to have such power the ruler must, in a former life, have heaped up virtues; and the little Mahrattas, brave as steel, bowed their heads in genuine loyalty and devo- tion. And this, though the Gakkwar bears a name, "the Herds- man," which, a hundred and fifty years ago, was, we would deferentially suggest to Sir Roper Lethbridge, neither more nor less than the nickname of the leader of a troop of patriot brigands such as followed the founder of the House of Anjou. This reverence for power is the true root of the astounding variety of names which the Princes have gradually adopted. " Niza,m " is only "Administrator," but it suffices to the most powerful King in India. "Dewan" is only "Finance Minister," but it is the title of several rulers. " Gaekwar," as we have said, is only "Herdsman," but the reigning Prince of Baroda is as willing to be called that as Maharaja. The power being clear, nothing else matters, save only birth, and on this the Indian holds, and holds hard, by both theories. Want of pedigree does not interfere with the position of the G-aekwar, or Sindia, or Rolkar, as it did not interfere with the reverence felt for Ryder Ali, a corporal's son, or for Runjeet Singh, a village officer; and yet, if pedigree be not the main factor in Indian life, all observers alike are at fault, The Maharana of Udaipur (Oodeypore) is first among Hindoos, because, whether he descends from Rama or not, it is eighteen hundred years and more since he, even then head of a family which had resisted Alexander, settled down in Rajpootana to reign till the Black Era should disappear in the endless progress of time. The Maharaja of Travancore certainly reigned, as even Sir Roper Lethbridge allows—and he is careful to understate legendary pedigrees —in 352 A.D., and we see no reason for doubt- ing the local belief; Thich asserts that even than he sprang of the Emperors of Malabar, a family lost in the night of time, and because of that descent he is in his own dominions almost divine. The Maharaja of Calicut, whom the Natives and English alike used to call the " Zamorin," that is, "the Admiral," because he reigned, like the Days of Algiers, over a pirate fleet, is nearly or quite as old; and so is another Prince, eighty-eighth sovereign of his comparatively obscure dynasty. But why should we multiply instances when caste itself hangs on pedigree, and when in 1857 every mutinous Brahmin sepoy who sprung to arms proclaimed the Emperor of Delhi, a powerless Malommedan voluptuary, the birth- lord, and therefore rightful lord, of India from Herat to Adam's Bridge P As to the third source of reverence, how are we to describe it, unless we quote the Highland story of the woman, whose husband falling under feudal displeasure, said to him, with an embrace and a sigh, "Gang up and be hangit, Donald, and dinna anger the Laird." There spoke the true Indian when face to face with the irresistible ; and in that tranquillity under suffering, if only it is customary, and therefore ordained, is a source of distinctions of grade such as Europe can hardly conceive. A man may rise in India, by the sword or by favouritism or by chicane, oven more rapidly than in Europe ; but if he does not rise, he accepts the effect of a violent difference of grade as English labourers accept the seasons. Who is he, to resist what Nature has decreed? And finally, right across these distinctions come the ecclesiastical ones, cutting them, as it were, into bits, yet leaving them entire. No power, no character, no pedigree, can make the Hindoo Prince the equal of any Brahmin in his dominion. The Maharaja of Nepal, absolute as deity, or the Maharaja of Travancore, with his matchless pedigree, or the last Sindia, with the floors of his harem apartments bursting with their treasures in metal, is alike a mere dog by the side of the Brahmin whom he could order to be tortured for an impertinent word.
There is not, that we see, the faintest chance that this extreme variety in the conditions and rank of Indians will ever fade away. The English have tried hard for a hundred years to drag the steam-roller of their doctrine of equal rights over the surface of Indian society, but their success has been very slight. They have smitten down the Emperor of Delhi and a few Princes, but three hundred men remain beyond the law ; and they have crippled the nobles without effacing them, have, indeed, as Sir Roper Lethbridge points out, added to their number. If they remain, they will be afraid, indeed, they are already afraid, to level the whole of Native society, lest the whirlwind should some day upheave the grains of sand, and leave them for ever buried in the dunes. They will maintain rank, if not privilege, as long as they can ; and as for the Natives, differences of rank are to them almost sacred. They will die for precedence, slaughter for position, and wage war for generation after generation for recognised power among their fellows. Why not P Where God is believed to have made caste, equality is nonsense, as much nonsense as election must be where power is held to spring from God alone. The All may speak, no doubt, through the shout of a mob ; but he may also speak through the sword, or descent, or ecclesiastical flat; and, in either case, he who is chosen is, while he retains the divine protection as evidenced by his keeping his throne, absolute and irresponsible save to the All alone. It is not that the idea of equality has not penetrated into India, as so many say, for every idea has penetrated there, and rank is even now independent of occupation—the Raja, as we have seen with our eyes, sweeping the dust from the Koolin clerk's feet with his own forehead—but that it has penetrated and has been deliberately rejected as inconsistent with the whole scheme of the universe. How can there be equality when one man may have lived fifty lives of virtue, and another fifty of vice, and the one be justly rewarded by being the slave or prisoner of the other There never will be equality in India, even in the desire of the people, unless the Mussulmans restore their Empire; and even the Mussul- mans have been deeply touched by the Hindoo genius, and Allow to antiquity and pedigree and position claims utterly inconsistent with the social teaching of the Prophet, who made a black slave Commander-in-Chief of a great army.
We have hardly left ourselves space to discuss the question whether the English have acted wisely in introducing into India their own ideas of rank. Sir Roper Lethbridge, who has had much information given him from the Indian Foreign Office, seems to think they have. We always bow before real experts, but our own impressions tend to a contrary conclu- sion. The Star should, we think, have been reserved for Europeans who comprehend the meaning of such a decora- tion ; and the Government should have used, as, indeed, it does use, the system of native rank lying ready to its hand. It should, that is to say, when it wished to reward a man, have conferred on him a Native title, whether personal, hereditary, or—an innovation we strongly advise—continua- tive, that is, heritable while any descendant of the new noble, who was alive at the time of his creation, shall survive. The title should usually be Raja, or Nuwab, not Maharaja, which implies territery,—but the Foreign Office should take some trouble to grant the precise title the recipient most desires. Even in France a" Vidame " does not want to be called Marquis, and so lose half his history ; and in India the name bestowed by the masses is often the most acceptable title that can be found. The matter is not of much importance, perhaps, but it is desirable to keep up grade in a land where grades are universally considered right, and we might, we think, do it without inflicting on those we honour, barbarous names which the body of the people to be impressed can neither pronounce nor understand. They desire, as we believe, precedence among each other, not precedence among the White intruders into the secluded land. The Prince who sat on his Star gave vulgar expression to a feeling which can hardly be absent from a Native mind : "Who are these barbarians of yesterday that they should think us honoured with the decorations of their chilly island ?"
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