Nil DURPUN. T ILE standing quarrel between the Government and the
planters of Bengal has lately broken out in a new form curiously suggestive of the value of that despised quality—political tact. The official world of the Presidency is in a flame, and the planters excited to a kind of rebellion of the law courts by an incident which, in England, would have provoked at the utmost an impatient frown. The story has been partly told once or twice, but it is worth telling in full, if only as an instance of the virulence colonial life seems everywhere to beget. The original ground of quarrel between the planters and the Govern- ment is, as our readers know, a dispute on the land tenure. The planters think their cottiers ought to grow what they are bid, while the cottiers claim to be owners of the soil, and as independent as the owners of the quit rent. The dispute is intensified by side quarrels arising out of a wretched system of cultivating by advances, by the English love of domineering, and by the Asiatic habit of swindling, but that is its original root. In England, a question of the sort would be fought out in the law courts, Government taking no further part than to see the law obeyed. In India, however, civil courts are yet to be created, the existing tribunals being organized on the plan of the Court of Chancery, minus the knowledge of law which distin- guishes that terror of suitors. Both parties, therefore, appealed to the Executive, whose day, one would have thought, was simple enough. It was only, as the courts could not work, to establish others which could, and see that their decrees were effectually obeyed. This has been the course of the Central Government presided over by an English 'politician, and consequently exempt in some slight degree from colonial virulence of opinion. Unfortunately, pending reform, it was necessary to act so as to prevent oppression on one side and outrage on the other, and the local government on whom that duty devolved was composed of Anglo-Indians, men bred, we might say born, in the Indian civil service. That service still retains the jealousy of the interloper its employers once expressed, and in this instance its dislike was intensified by benevolence. The local Government accord- ingly took sides with the weaker party, proclaimed that men under ad- vances might cultivate anything, which was perfectly just, declared all planters oppressors, which was perfectly unjust, resisted the establish- ment of swift courts, which was simply inexpedient, and released all the natives condemned under a special Act, which was an insult to the legislature they, like everybody else, were bound to respect. Had they restricted themselves to political action, the planters, however enraged, would have simply appealed. Unfortunately, all the mem- bers of Government are civilians, men who have grown up in Bengal, who belong to a detested caste, and whose opinions are as well known to those whom they govern as to their own families. The planters, knowing themselves disliked, refused to believe the Government actuated by any political principle at all. They declared the official measures dictated by personal feeling, and commenced a war of sarcasm and insult which speedily aggravated a political dispute into a venomous contest. The Govertunent took up the literary cudgels, as only a Government infected by colonial want of dignity would do, and in a few weeks the strife was raging furiously. The planters abused their riders like Irishmen at a monster meeting. Every official report in return breathed the hostility Governments should never exhibit to any section of their people. The press teemed with libels on Mr. Grant, and Mr. Grant answered by accusations of forgery. The papers called the civilians imbecile, and the civi- lians retorted by parodies of Macaulay's "Lays." The parodies were clever enough, and the reports were not much worse than many reports on the conduct of Irish landlords. India, however, is in everything but size a colony, and the half-jocular sneer seemed to people contending for bread a maddening insult. They could not aNc end into the streets, but they asked Lord Palmerston for the re- moval of Mr. Grant. The appeal failed, and the planters, weary with a hopeless struggle, were betaking themselves to Lord Canning as their last resort, when their opponents committed an act of folly such as could be committed only by a Government untrained to the exercise of authority. The educated natives in all these contests stand by the local Govern- ment. They hunt for place with an avidity such as one sees in some parts of the Continent, and which has been most unfortunately fostered by granting places as the reward of attendance at school. The planters, too, are always in their way, taking their trade out of their hands, interfering with their despotic control over their tenantry, and gene- rally lowering their position. They feel towards them as an old squire does to the pushing manufacturer who has bought a ruined estate. Vain, bitter, and not without wit, they are dangerous anta- gonists in a war of libel. One of them wrote a play, which he called the Mirror of Indigo and which is now before us. The scene is laid at a factory, and the characters are planters, officials, and tenantry. The planter is of course, a villain, who beats his tenants nearly to death, plunders them, carries off their daughters, and is foul-mouthed to a degree, which, if we only dared translate the abuse he employs, might make a drunk fish-fag sick with envy. The magistrate is, of course, an adulterer, a charge not introduced as a hit at him, for natives scarcely consider adultery in a man an offence, but at his paramour, the planter's wife. The ryots, are of course, the most virtuous of mankind, men filled with French sentiment and Asiatic submission; and the hero is an educated native, who, in a burst of outraged virtue and indignant valour, bites off the planter's nose ! The plot is exceedingly feeble, being merely a tale of the violence employed by one "Wood Saheb" to compel Nobin Bose to cultivate indigo. There is one scene in which Nobin's mother goes mad at the sight of her son's suffering, written with very consider- able force ; but the mass of the play consists merely of reflections, placed in the mouths of all characters indifferently, on the severity of the indigo system. It is an abusive essay chopped into dialogue. The Europeans introduced are foul-mouthed puppets ; and not one of the speakers has a definite character, or can be described as possessed of any one quality, except hatred of indigo, and fear of the "Saheb." We make one extract from the only really pathetic scene in the play. The mother, who has fainted at her son's death, has just awakened to consciousness. She looks at the body, and suddenly :magines it is her son's birthday :
"Sabitri [the mother]. There is no pain so excessive as the delivery of a child, but that invaluable wealth which I have brought forth made me forget all my sorrows on observing its face. (Weeping.) Ah ! if Madam Sorrow did not write a letter to Yama (Death) and thus kill my husband, how very much would he have been pleased on seeing this child. (Claps with her hand.) "All at once. Ali! ah ! she is become mad..
" Sabitri. Nurse, put the child once more on my lap ; let me pacify my burnt limbs. Let me once more kiss it in the name of my husband. (Kisses Nobin [the dead son].) " Soirindri. Mother, I am your eldest Bou ; do you not see me. Your dear Rama is senseless; he is not able to speak now. "Sabitri. It will speak when it shall first get rice. Ah, ah, had my husband been living, what great joy! How many musical performances! ( Weeps.) " Soirindri. It is misfortune upon misfortune! Is my mother-in-law mad now?
"Saralota. Take our mother-in-law from the bed, my sister ; let me take care of her.
" Sabitri. Did you write such a letter, that there is no musical performance on this day of joy? (Looking on all sides and having risen from the bed by force, then going to Saralota.) I do entreat thee, falling at thy feet, madam, to send another letter to Yams, and bring back my husband for once. Thou art the wife of a Saheb; else, why should I fall at thy feet?
"Saralota. My mother-in-law, thou lovest me more than a mother, and such words from your mouth have given me more pain than that of death. (Taking hold of the two hands of Sabitri.) Observing this your state, my mother, fire is, as it were, raining on my breast. "Sabitri. Thou strumpet, stupid woman, and a Yabana, why dost thou touch me on this eleventh day of the moon ? (Takes of her own hand.) "Saralota. On }learn such words from your mouth I cannot live. (Lies down on the ground taking hold of her mother-in-law's feet.) My mother, I shall take leave of this world at your feet. ( Weeps.) "Sabitri. This is good, that the bad woman is dead. My husband is gone to heaven; but thou shalt go to hell. (Claps with her hand and laughs.) " Sotrindri (rising up). Ali! ah ! our Saralota is very good-natured. Now having heard harsh words from her mother-in-law, she is become exceedingly sorry! (To Sabitri.) Come to me, mother. " Sabdri. Nurse, bast thou left the child alone? Let me go there. (Goes to Nolan hastily, and sits near him.) " Reboti (to &Ulm). 0 my mother! Dost thou call that young Bun a bad woman, who you said was incomparable in the village; and without whose taking food you never took food. My mother, you do not hear my words; we were trained by you, you gave us much food.
"Sabitri. Come on the Ata Couria (first food) of the child, and I shall give you many sweetmeats."
There is both power and pathos in the idea of that scene, strange as the words may seem to Englishmen, but there is no other in the least like it.
The play of course is a libel, and a gross one, but it is not a bit worse than fifty libels which circulate among a class of our own people. The native says nothing of planters that Mr. Reynolds does not say of the aristocracy. A planter no more passes his life in carrying off native women than a Marquis of Blankshire passes his in ravishing low-born innocence. Indeed, that is the solitary charge from which the Civilian Commission declared the planters, as a class, absolutely free. The libel in either case is merely a dirty expression of politi- cal virulence, worse perhaps in England where manners are decorous than in Bengal where every native expresses his anger in the filthiest terms the foul Asiatic imagination can devise. Left in Beng,alee, the dirty rubbish would have excited as little attention as that sort
of literature excites in Europe, but it was not left in Bengalee. A missionary in Calcutta, the .Reverend 3. Long, a man of the highest benevolence and the weakest judgment, has for years made it his duty to report upon native literature. It is not nice work, native literature being a good deal worse than anything Holywell-street is ashamed of, but nobody ever distrusted Mr. Long's motives, and he succeeded in creating two societies to circulate purer reading, and inducing a very reluctant Legislature to prohibit obscene pictures "except on temples and holy places." In pursuance of his self-appointed duty he stumbled over this play, which, as a remarkable expression of native opinion, he forth- with gave to the world. The idea of hitting the planters, who have an inveterate quarrel with Mr. Cuthbert, the secretary to the Church Missionary Association, seems to have supervened, and the Mirror of indigo was sown broadcast through Bengal. It was re- ceived by the planters as a deliberate insult, as a concentration of the very charges on which they had succeeded in obtaining an ac- quittal. So high did their wrath rise, that they accused Mr. Long himself of writing the play—a palpable absurdity. Biting off a man's nose as a culminating effor of heroism is not a possible English idea, nor would a missionary have indulged in the truly Oriental conceptionlhat chastity is only a virtue in the well-born: " Wobin. To a woman of good family, constancy in faithfulness to her hus- band is, as it were, the headstone; and how very beautiful does she appear (ramaniki ramaniyd) when she is decorated with that ornament. Is a woman of a good family earned of, when the Bhima-like Svaropur of my father is still in existence? At this very moment shall I go. I shall see what manner of in- justice this is."
The blunder of circulating the Nil Durpun was gross enough, so gross that the Missionary Conference have formally condemned the act, but Mr. Long may be held guiltless of more than an imbecility. The quarrel, in any case, was personal, when it was suddenly elevated into a question of State. Mr. Seton Karr, the Secretary to Government, read the play, and, with incredible want of tact, circulated it under the official frank to the journals of the North-West. His motive was probably innocent enough. Indian secretaries think of themselves as civilians, not as politicians, and Mr. Seton Karr probably thought himself only circulating a pamphlet whose tendency favoured his own partisans. His blunder was, not in approving a party satire, but in forgetting that a Government, which cannot be removed, must, if it desires the reputation of justice, have no party at all. The planters at once declared that they were ruled, not by Governors, but by party chiefs—men intent on attacking them instead of doing justice-- and as a last resort took the printer into court. The printer, a Por- tuguese, pleaded guilty, gave up the name of the author, alrea4y privately known, and slunk away happy in a fine which only just carried costs. The prosecution is to be transferred to Mr. Long, and will, if the law allows, be extended to the Secretary who franked the offending play. The lesson taught by all this to men exempt from the passions of a city where a limited and energetic community quarrels amid frightful stenches under a thermometer at 98°, is, we think, pretty obvious. Mr. Seton Karr is not a villain because he franked a few copies of a party libel, nor are the planters wretches because they object to be told under an official frank that they find an amuse- ment in rape and torture. The real evil lies in the intensity of the local spirit generated by the system of government organized in 1853. No man accustomed to govern would have made the mistake com- mitted by Mr. Seton Karr. Lord Palmerston, we dare say, rather enjoys a rattling libel against the priests, and would not be very much shocked if it were as broad as hbels against priests usually are. But it is scarcely possible to conceive Lord Palmerston forwarding such a libel under his frank to the Nation, the Tablet, and the Catholic bishops of Ireland. Nor, on the other hand, had an English secretary in India made such a blunder, would it have excited so tremendous a storm. It is because Mr. Seton Karr is an Anglo-Indian, known to to be a civilian, and suspected to have "civilian ideas"—to be, in fact, an enemy instead of an administrator—that a joke is embittered into a deliberate insult. It is the distrust between governors and governed which in Bengal envenoms every quarrel, and paralyzes every effort to secure union and progress. There is no such distrust in Bombay and Madras. Nobody ever heard of prosecutions against Lord Elphinstone, or distrust of Lord Harris's word, though neither peer was exceptionally popular. Mr. Landon, in Bombay, divides forty per cent. from his cotton mills, and Messrs. Arbuthnot, in Madras, hold half Bimlipatam in farm without Government or Europeans thinking an annual slanging match essential to prosperity. The difference is not in the planters, nor yet specially in their trade. The Wynaad planters asked for and got the objectionable contract law so fiercely resisted in Bengal, and Sir Charles Trevelyan conferred with them quietly enough on the state of their roads without either party expecting the other to swindle them out of their rights. The explanation is obvious. Madras and Bombay are governed by Eng- lishmen imported fresh every five years, without families, coteries, local friendships, or class interests, and therefore expected to do in- different justice. The planters have no a priori ground to expect ill- treatment, the civilians no a priori reason to hope for impunity. Naturally, therefore, such discontent as there is, is political discon- tent, expressed in a reasonable manner and through such forms as the Indian system provides. In Bengal a ruler is chosen from among a class always suspected, and is therefore deprived from the first of the incalculable assistance afforded by pubhc opinion. A very or- dinary man sent direct from England would govern Bengal with ease. An angel could not govern the province if selected from the civilians. Sir F. Halliday, whom the planters liked, failed just 43 much as Mr. Grant, whom the planters detest.
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