ANGLO-INDIAN MANNERS.
IT was evident, even before he had.corrected it, that. the Times had given an inaccurate report of Lord Salisbury's speech of Friday week at Cooper's Hill. The Secretary for India did not intimate that the young engineers who had left the Collegewere in the habit of bullying the natives, for the simple reason that the first batch of students from Cooper's Hill have not yet been posted to Indian work, and have not, therefore, had time to display either their bad manners or their polish, or the idle- ness of which in India they are suspected. What he did say was much more general. The Principal, Colonel Chesney, had defended the study of Hindostanee, which, it is alleged, takes too prominent a position in the College, on the ground that a. European could not remain patient. with a native unless he could understand him ; that some knowledge . of a common language was indispensable to the sympathy which is at the root of kindness as well as of good manners. Lord Salisbury, with the ready tact of the debater, caught, at Colonel Chesney's opinion and reaffirmed it; told a capital story of Australia, where oxen which will go without being sworn at are nicknamed "pious oxen ;" hoped the students would decide that all natives of India were " pious oxen," and then more gravely advanced a serious opinion that the distance between the conquerors and the con- quered was increasing in India, and that danger might arise in the future from the harshness with which the governing classes have begun to treat the governed. There can be no -doubt, unless the ac- counts of all recent arrivals are inaccurate, that this accusation is in some measure deserved ; but we suspect Lord Salisbury's words have created a wrong impression in circles wider than the one which, as he says, has already remonstrated with him. Englishmen always interpret " harsh treatment" to mean physical ill-usage, or at least violent abuse, but neither of these constitutes the harsh- ness of which Lord Salisbury intended to speak. Actual- ill- treatment in the physical sense inflicted on a native by a Euro- pean servant of Government is very rare, indeed almost un- known, except in the single form of punishment for miscon- duct. The native is as free to complain- of blows as any London cabman, he is at least as likely to obtain• redress from the Magistrate, if he has any evidence, and he has always the power of sending in an official complaint which would pro- duce most serious consequences to the offender. A servant, we fear, sometimes gets a horsewhipping, particularly for starving horses, when he ought to be sent before a magistrate or dis- missed, and a European of any grade is apt sometimes to threaten physical violence which he does not intend to inflict as- a way out of an embarrassing or tedious. situation. But actual physical violence is rare except in camp, where the servants and followers are often the refuse of humanity, where the code is-very rough, and where, no doubt, owing to one cause and another, it is. extremely difficult to ensure to a sufferer speedy or adequate redress. The harshness of which natives complain is of a different kind, and consists of a certain brutality of manner which is very com- mon, is excessively difficult to check, and is galling to the last: degree to its subjects. Part of it is unavoidable, or rather incurable, arising, as it is does, from a difference of national temperament. Nothing can reconcile a native of the higher order to the natural English manner, the bluffness, impatience, and latent humonrousness of habitual English speech. The Englishman means no harm, but he does not distinguish accurately the precise grade of his visitor's rank.; he drops or forgets the honorific forms to which he is entitled ; he interrupts his conver- sation, particularly when he is most polite ; and he manifests a kind of impatience or irritability which to the Asiatic -seems almost unendurably brutal. He himself is capable, like the Englishman, of being bored to death, and often secludes himself from unpleasant people in a way the European will-not attempt ; but. wben he has granted audience, he sits out the infliction with a resolute patience which, though it is not politeneas, has all its soothing effect. The Englishman will not do it, and is regarded therefore as he is often regarded in Switzerland or Italy, as an exacting- boor, precisely the character which natives of a conquered country most detest. Even when thoroughly good-humoured, the English- man constantly gives offence. He chaffs, and for some reason which we have never quite understood, the native, who has a talent for chaff of his own, and will bandy badinage with an equal by the hour, hates it in a European. Above all, the Englishman, when excited, or even inter- ested, becomes too vivacious in his gestures, raises his voice, flushes in the face, and, it may be, swears. The native of a low -order is always anticipating violence, and if of a high order, -always fearful of insult, and an excited, or still worse, an angry European is to him at once terrible and disgusting. He does not care two straws about the swearing on moral grounds. He possesses himself, and sometimes uses, a repertory of oaths which, in their carefully graduated fury of ferocity or obscenity, would make a London cabman's hair stand on end ; but he resembles -General Pollock on a celebrated occasion, and wishes his superior, if he must damn somebody's eyes, to damn his own. No native reporter, commenting on a European's demeanour, ever fails to observe that his voice was loud, his arm raised, and his face all Aflame, nor does a native complainant ever fail to imitate his gestures with an accuracy which shows how deep and how contemptuous is the effect produced upon his mind. Add that these foibles or mannerisms are displayed by a man who probably has his interlocutor's fate for the moment in his hand, -who does not even affect a sympathy which he does not feel, and who feels too often a sense of power in being rude, and we may imagine what the European must constantly appear in the eyes of a race which regards manner as the test of civilisation, and ad- mires no manner except the courtly one, which is to the English- man the most artificial, and therefore the most disagreeable of All. It is not too much to say that there are not ten men in India who strike a native as high-bred, and that in nine cases out of ten a native quits the presence of a European feeling slightly outraged, hurt in his dignity, menaced, or treated with the hauteur of indifference. The higher his own rank the more keenly he feels his treatment, until in many places a native -who respects himself reduces his intercourse with Europeans to the most indispensable business, and when he can, delegates to an -agent even that.
We are not concerned to-day to inquire closely into the causes of this alienation, or even of its increase, which latter, however, we believe to have occurred, and to be due to a cause hitherto too often forgotten. The gulf between a native and an official -chosen by competition seems wider than the gulf between a native -and an old civilian, just because it actually is wider. The native
is just where he was—outside the cities of the coast and the English civilian is not where he was, but in a very different posi- tion. Partly from the severance of family ties which made India seem a home to most officials, partly from higher education, and partly from the line that education has taken, the " competition wallah" is twice as European as his predecessor was. He is, to speak broadly, a professor instead of a country gentleman. He has, that is to say, twice as little tolerance for Asiatic things, be it the -climate, the ways of the people, or the Asiatic modes of boring ; and is twice as little disposed to put up with what, as he thinks, it is so easy to alter. The modern squire at home has been separated from the labourer in very much the same way, and almost to the same degree. It is, however, with the remedy that we are -concerned to-day ; and we doubt if there is any except the one which Lord Salisbury and Colonel Chesney suggested, which has been recommended till men are sick of hearing of it, and which, when it is adopted, is necessarily most imperfect. Looking at the Prince of Wales will not make Europeans adopt a manner accept- able to Asiatics. It might be possible to make the " Oxford ananner"—that soft, deferential way which natives like—"good form" in Anglo-Indian official society, and especially in doing -official business, and something would be gained and lost by that; bat the first necessity is a medium of easy intercommunication. The man who will not "learn, the languages," whatever his utility in other ways, will never be a patient or polite administrator in India. He will never sympathise with native thoughts, never understand native formulas, never be able to endure native pro- lixities. He will always be swearing, overtly or covertly, at stupidities which are his own. The unlettered traveller on the Continent gets just as angry, though his anger, not being so im- portant, is not so gravely reprimanded. To sympathise with a man, you must understand him, and except through the medium of a common tongue the European and the native have no power of intercomprehension. How is the European to tell that the wretched Brahmin, in a waist-cloth and a sacred thread, who has been blundering over his contract, and looks like a roguish
"savage," has, besides the pedigree of a Crillon, the personal sensitiveness to insult of an English high-caste dame. It is wearisome advice to give, and all the more wearisome, because those who give it know both that it is the only advice worth giving, and that if it is taken but little will be gained. "Know- ing the native languages," for average men, is impossible. There are too many of them. No two divisions of the Empire use the same language, and no two counties the same dialect. It is very useful for a sucking engineer to learn Hindostanee, as it is very useful for a young diplomatist to learn French, because the cultivated know it, and because it is spoken in many lands; but Hindostanee will no more enable him to communicate with workmen in most parts of India than French would enable him to communicate with work- men in Pomerania. It is the nearest approach to a lingua franca that India possesses, but that is all that can be said. It will enable him, if thoroughly acquired, which it never is, to be decently intelligible to overseers, but it will not help him to hear complaints or direct works himself—that is, outside Hindostan Proper—or to keep down the temper excited by the exasperating consciousness of ignorance.
To communicate easily with natives, a European Engineer must know six or seven tongues, with half-a-dozen dialects apiece, and human life is too short for such an education. All he can do is by learning some one tongue well to imbue his mind with some- thing of the Oriental spirit, and enable himself, if a dialect must be acquired, to acquire it without too much toil. Whether Hin- dostanee is the best tongue for that purpose might have been doubted fifty years ago, but it has been accepted now, native habits have fitted themselves to it, and there is no hope of an alteration. It is an old-fashioned, ultra-Conservative, stupid thing to say now-a-days, but we believe that Lord William Bentinck's blunder in abolishing Persian as the lingua franca of India has done more mischief than all his reforms did good. It is the one Asiatic language which natives and Europeans learn with equal facility, which suits them both, which attracts them to study it till they know it, not as Americans know French, but as Russians know it, and which, being foreign to both minds, yet produces the same impression on both. It had been established as the legal tongue of the continent for six hundred years, it had the warm approval of the conquerors who preceded us—that is, of the most efficient fourth of the population—and it was one of the few tongues—perhaps Arabic is the only other—which might in the course of ages have superseded, with the Mohammedans at all events, every other speech. Lord William Bentinck, in his im- patience of what he considered an injustice on suitors, threw away this mighty weapon, and suitors have now the advantage of stating their complaints in languages which they know, but which convey to their rulers' minds about as much as broad Yorkshire conveys to a London policeman. There is no help, however, and Lord Salisbury is right in believing both that Indians hate European manners, and that the only way to bring the races together is to find some common medium of communication.
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