AN INDIAN PRINCESS.
MR. MILL asserts in his book on the Subjection of TVomen that in India women have, on the whole, proved themselves greater administrators than men, and it is undoubtedly true that in our time the most distinguished and most successful native rulers have belonged to the sex which Mr. Mill describes as subjugated. The mother of Dhuleep Singh, Chunda Konr, originally a slave and a dancing-girl, governed the Punjab, directed armies, and shook the British Empire, and when a fugitive in Katmandoo was described by Lord Dalhousie as "the most dangerous political personage east of Suez." The Begum of Oude offered the King counsels which would have saved his throie, and that failing, levied armies to recover it, and after a gallant struggle taxed all Lord Clyde's energies in pursuit ; while the Ranee of Jhansi, a Messalina Joan of Arc, not five-and-twenty years of age, expelled us, defeated us, and died charging at the head of her cavalry on British Hussars. None among these, however, had so strong a character as the Mussulman lady who died last October, and who for twenty-one years governed Bhopal with the wit and the success of a great statesman, or displayed her capacity for sensible, straightforward rule. Her State was not very large, not very much bigger than the Eastern Counties, and her revenue did not at best exceed that of the Duke of Devonshire ; but still she was one of the true governing class of earth, and the facts of her career may interest our readers as well as any parochial matter. They have been recalled to our recollection by a short biography just received, in which a Kuhn Brahmin of Bengal contrives in his admiration of her to insinuate some strongly depreciatory but not very unjust remarks upon our rule. He writes Johnsonese instead of English, like most of the students in our colleges, bat to anybody who will forget that, and read a little between the lines, he will appear a shrewd, hard-hitting critic, with no slight political ability. This, for instance, is a nearly perfect answer to Mr. Mill, much better, because simpler, than our own, which was that in certain states of civilization the weaknesses of the female character—such, for example, as its ten- dency to microscopical finance—were qualifications for administra- tion. Sombhoo Chunda Mookerjea says a Musaulman or Hiudoo Lady Regnant "is per se ability personified, for public opinion in Asia, as indeed everywhere, permits none but women of extra- ordinary ability to role in propria persona'. Were it not so, the number of able female sovereigns in India, and indeed all over the
world, might give the impression that ability was an endowment peculiar to the repressed sex,—repressed possibly out of jealousy and alarm ?—for there are able he-sovereigns and incapable he- sovereigns, but there are only able she-sovereigns." He seems, too, thoroughly aware of the specialty of his heroine, her con- sciousness of masculine ability, for he quotes two or three times her pet saying that she had determined all her life not to be "a mere Dhatc," or wet-nurse to sovereigns.
Though not of " royal " blood in the European sense—no Mus- sulman in India not a descendant of Timour can be that—Secundra Beg= (literally, the Lady Alexandra) was, nevertheless, born in 1816 to a throne. Her father was one of the Pathan or Afghan soldiers of fortune, who under Aurungzebe carved out principali- ties, and on Aurungzebe's death declared himself independent in Bhopal. On his death his wife was declared Regent by the army, and his daughter Secundra heir ; but the British Government, which even then claimed some sort of paramount authority, decreed that the actual sovereignty should pass to the girl's cousin and betrothed husband. The Regent, a woman of a powerful but :vulgar mind, contrived by a series of intrigues not worth relating here to retain power, and to delay the marriage for some years, till Secundra, wearied out with waiting, took her nuptials into her own hands, and in spite of her mother married her cousin Jehan- geer—upon conditions. These conditions, which were reduced to writing, violated every law of Mohammedanism and every pre- judice of the country, and strongly mark the character of a girl who even then must have been conscious of exceptional ability. Her husband, Jehangeer, swore to be always her first subject, to leave her the direct and visible control of all affairs, to take no second wife, and to liberate her absolutely from the restrictions of the purdah or curtain, that is, to allow her to see and be seen, to visit and be visited like a man, a privilege Secundra, through the remainder of her life, never resigned ; reviewing her own troops, giving audi- ence in open Durbar, and even attending the grand assemblage of feudatories at Agra, where she was publicly presented with the Grand Cross of the Star of India, and was faintly quizzed for wearing some costume in which tight drawers were unusually conspicuous. Jehaugeer, however, though he yielded, did not like the conditions, raised an army, and rebelled ; but his wife fought for her own, and would have succeeded, but that the Governor-General signified his will that a woman should not reign. Secundra instantly submitted without a blow. A born politician, she had, like Runjeet Singh, perceived, as she subse- quently proved in most signal style, that in India resistance to the British power was the one fatal error, and though wild with repressed ambition, she waited quietly till in 1845 her husband, an average Mahommedan of no special character, died. Then she put forward her claim to the throne, but again the British Govern- ment disappointed her. The Governor-General was ready to hunt for a man in the wilderness rather than let a woman reign, and de- creed that her daughter, a child, the present ruler of Bhopal, should be married to an old Mahommedan of no particular claims, who, on her attaining full age, should be ruler of Bhopal. That is, a child whose only claim was through her mother should exclude that mother, not for herself, but for an old officer who might one clay marry her. Again, however, Secundra yielded. Her in- fluence was, however, too great for her son-in-law, a weak and 'unambitious man ; he resigned, and the political Agent reported that the alternatives were Secundra Seguin or annexation, Lord liardinge gave way, though he took all grace from his conces- sion by declaring Secundra her daughter's trustee, and in 1847, the Princess, as Regent, mounted the throne of a state in the last condition of disorder. The nobles, whose title was as good as their lord's, were waging intestine war, the treasury was bank- rupt, the revenues were sold in advance, the currency was debased, and the army unpaid ; but Secundra understood governing. In less than five years the revenue had been set free, mainly by substituting her own officers for farmers-general ; the army had been reformed, being regularly paid and punished ; a rupee had been introduced of full weight* the nobles had been subdued and attracted to the Court, add a vast banking business had been established to supply a civil list. How Secundra learned this part of her trade we have never discovered, but it is certain that she made her establishment a pivot for the great internal exchange business which is always going on in India, and which is greater than its foreign trade ; that her bills rose to the first rank, and that out of her bank she accumulated means for great works, for a subsequent pilgrimage to Mecca, and for the final struggle of her life, which came in 1857. Up to this time she had been only Regent, bound to acknowledge her own daughter as Sovereign, but in 1857 the Mutiny broke out. Bitterly exasper- ated as she was known to be at her position, it was fully expected in Calcutta that she would declare herself independent, and her followers exhorted her to take this course. Many of her nobles took it in defiance of her; her Contingent, an efficient little force, was eager to march to Delhi, and there was more than a chance, as Sindiah stood firm, of carving a kingdom out of his dominions. She had none of the Hindoo dread of the House of Timour which checked the Marhatta sovereigns, none of the knowledge of England which kept Saler Jung and the Deccan on our side, none of the gratitude for past favours which stirred some minor nobles, and none of the hostility to Sepoys which influenced the Sikhs. The political instinct of the woman, however, supplied the place of experience. In the very darkest hour of our fortunes, when it seemed to almost every native that the British star had set, she declared for the white Government, coerced, or in some instances bought, her nobles, held her Contingent, which was regularly paid, to its colours, received the officers flying from Indore as if she had never heard of a mutiny, prepared supplies for Sir Hugh Rose, and finally marched with all her small disposable force to his support. When, in 1859, the British Government was again master of the continent, the brave little woman who had risked her throne for us was not forgotten. She was declared at once Begum of Bhopal in her own right, and rewarded with a grant of heavy estates, admitted, though a woman, to the highest honours in the new Order, and encouraged to visit England, where she would have been received as a royal heroine. She set out in 1863, but the journey to Mecca daunted her, and she returned, to reign till 1869 in quiet possession of absolute power, building roads, founding schools—she had a passion for educating women—lighting her capital, the only lighted city under native rule, and consolidating the throne on which her daughter, Begum Shah Jehau, now sits. She educated this daughter with singular care, taught her business, and for the last few years associated her in the actual administration of the State. There was a bad as well as a good reason for this. After fifty years of life and thirty-five of intrigue, struggle, and sovereignty, she had grown lethargic, and suffered the reins to slacken in a way which her native apologist explains by a sugges- tion which strikes us as singularly shrewd. She had always, he says, required an object, and with her complete success began to feel the lassitude of satiety. There were no more kingdoms to secure, and she smoked. A sharp remonstrance from the British Agent woke her again, however, to activity ; in 1866, as we have said, she traversed Northern India to take part in the Durbar ; and when, in October, 1868, she died, it was found that the finances of her State were as orderly as those of a private firm, and that the revenue was steadily increasing.; The remissness of a single year had only served to show how completely her success was due to personal qualities. She had to govern as directly as the Emperor of the French, to organize her own police, to be her own Chief Judge,"to give personal orders for all her projects of improvement, while it is admitted on all hands that her financial success in the administration both of her State and of her bank was due to herself alone. No one, we believe, either European or native, ever came in contact with her without a conviction that, had her sphere been but a little larger, she might have founded a dynasty or built up an empire. Her history is quoted by her native biographer as a proof that "that utter disqualifier in Asia" her sex can be over- come by rare personal qualities, but the sentence implies an asser- tion which is far too sweeping. The natives of India appreciate ability at least as much as their European masters, their strict rules of female etiquette give way whenever any general good is to be obtained, and there is scarcely a State in which women are not recognized as possessing an avowed and most important political status, a status, it must be added, which is usually independent of the influence of their charms, it is not as intrigantes in the French sense that they acquire power, but through their extra- ordinary aptitude for political device and for the accumulation of treasure. They are distinctly better financiers than the men, a fact possibly due to their independence in the management of property ; and though not always the purest of mankind, they are far less liable to the early intellectual decay which in Asia so constantly overtakes the great.
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