Читать книгу British Rule in India - Harriet Martineau - Страница 6

“It was a mountain at whose verdant feet A spacious plain, outstretched in circuit wide, Lay pleasant: from his side two rivers flowed, One winding, th’ other straight, and left between Fair champaign with less rivers intertwined: Huge cities and high-towered, that well might seem The seats of mightiest monarchs; and so large The prospect was, that here and there was room For barren desert, fountainless and dry.”—Milton.

What is the British India which is now, per force, occupying so much of our thoughts and conversation? Hitherto we have, for the most part, been satisfied with very vague notions of what our great Asiatic dependency is like, and of how we came by it, and of the precise nature and extent of our concern with it. We have regarded it as the business of a particular class of our society to understand and transact Indian affairs, while the great majority might fairly admit the whole subject of that remote, and odd, and troublesome settlement of ours to be very tiresome, and one which might be left to those who understood it. The time for this kind of insolent negligence is past—suddenly brought to an end by calamity, which may probably have been engendered by that very selfishness. We shall all have to bear our share in the efforts and sacrifices which this calamity will impose on the nation; and we might all be glad, at the present moment, to know as much as every “old Indian” whom we have been accustomed to let alone with his speciality. It will do us no harm, therefore, to look a little into this matter, to brush up such knowledge as we may ever have had, and to gain somewhat more, however cursorily, as to what British India is, how we came there, and what our relations have been with it, up to the present day.

It is not difficult to choose a standpoint of place and time from which to ascertain what our great dependency is like. The time which suits us best is that in which an Englishman first landed on the coast to trade. The place must be that which is best suited for the widest survey.

The central part of Asia is a table-land, believed to be, in its highest platform, ten thousand feet above the sea level. The descent of the land to the sea is variously accomplished in the different maritime countries of Asia, but nowhere more impressively than in that which belongs to us. The subsidence of the land from 10,000 to 1,000 feet above the sea is made by a steep slope, like a diversified wall with embrasures, covering an area of from 90 to 120 miles in breadth, and running a line of 1,500 miles. The area of this embankment is not less than 150,000 square miles. From a time beyond record the ridge of this slope has been called by the people who live below it the Abode of Cold, or of Snow—Himálaya. With them this was not a mere figure of speech; for, high up above the clouds, where adventurous trespassers found the air hardly fit for mortal breathing, dwells the god (not the least in a pantheon of many millions) who is the Father of the Ganges, and father-in-law of Siva, the Destroyer. For many millions of years the god lived in repose, watching over his great progeny of rivers from his solitude, approached no nearer than by the few herdsmen who came up from either side after their goats which had browsed the slopes of thyme and marjoram too high; or by the daring traders who, with mountain sheep for their beasts of burden, threaded the passes with their woven fabrics, or with camel’s hair or silky wool. But now, intrusion has become so common, the secret of the rarity of the atmosphere is so vulgarised, and our countrymen have such a propensity to live above the clouds in the hottest weather, that we need not scruple to mount to the Abode of Cold—to the very palace of the old divinity—and use his standpoint, and borrow his eyes, for our survey of our own dominions lying below.

Turning first to the right, we see (with eyesight, however, many times magnified) nothing but high table-land, stretching westwards beyond Persia itself—a table-land fringed with the Affghanistan peaks which we have no concern with at present—our period being that in which our first trader set foot on the shore below; that is, in 1593. Looking nearer, we see five rivers gushing from the embrasures of the great wall—from the ravines of the mountain range. Having flowed from sacred lakes in Thibet, these rivers are holy in their way; and the territory they enclose is rich and populous in comparison with that outside. We look down on some busy scenes in the Punjaub, even three centuries ago; while the Sandy Valley through which, the Indus rolls his strong body of waters shows no life, except where parties of fighting men are on the way to pillage their enemies, and lay waste the villages which rise up round the wells. East of the five rivers, the Himálaya slope becomes lovely. Averaging four or five thousand feet in height, it presents now forests of the stern woodland character of the north; and now vast expanses of grass and wild flowers; and then dark ravines, leading down to sunny platforms, where the solitary Englishman below would have found it hard to believe that his countrymen would hereafter set up their homes by hundreds. Clouds are floating below, tier beneath tier, and stray vapours dim the sun at any moment; yet even here, monkeys abound in the woods, and butterflies, measuring nine inches between the tips of their wings, light on the flowers in the pastures. There is no finer sight for the ordinary human eye than standing up there, at sunrise or sunset, and waiting for openings in the clouds below, to survey the great plain of India, too vast for diversity of colour, but stretching into the sky in one boundless expanse of purple, except where the level rays of the sun strike upon some eminence lofty enough to be thus distinguishable. Assuming the vision of the old god of the region, what do we see, as he saw it three centuries ago?

Immediately below is a belt of jungle, fringing the slope where it meets the plain; and, stretching forward from it, a region of tropical growths, caused and preserved by the umbrageous character of the woodland. Prodigious trees are bound together by creepers which shake out their blossoms a hundred feet from the ground. Tree-ferns remind us of an older time than even Hindoo tradition reaches; and the grass is so tall that the elephants are heard and felt by their tread before they are seen. In the beds of shrunken streams the oleanders blossom, and the apricot and pomegranate ripen in the sunny spaces. This is still high ground in comparison with that which lies near the sea; and none in India is more sacred in the eyes of its inhabitants. The land, as it slopes northwards from the Jumna, is strewn with temples, and traversed by groups of pilgrims, coming up to worship. From the sandy western plains to the watery eastern region of Bengal stretches this rich plateau, through which run the prodigious rivers of Upper India, and where the great cities on their banks tell of the old glories of Hindoos and Mohammedans alike. Traditions tell of Canoge which covered an area equal to modern London; and of the greatness of Delhi, Agra, Cawnpore, and many others. From our perch we look down on them, and see what those millions of natives are doing, before they begin to dream of seeing white faces among them as their masters. In the well-drained fields of this upper surface, the husbandmen are sowing their grain seeds all mixed, or pulling them up separately, with infinite waste of time and produce. Others are more wisely leading water from the tanks among the dry ridges. Under the trees there is a loom here and there, the rude arrangement of sticks above a little pit, by which the fine muslins for turbans and female garments, or the gay and tasteful shawl fabrics are to come out, as if by magic. Within the woods, the herdsmen are burning the jungle grass in order to procure a fresh growth for their animals; and the hunters are distributed in a circle to take account of the wild beasts which will be thus dislodged. The sacred Ganges is all alive with boats; and along its margin are companies of the devout at their ablutions, with here and there an aged or sick sufferer awaiting death from the stream. In the towns, the people are like townspeople everywhere—bargaining in the bazaars, salaaming in the temples, prostrating themselves in the palaces; while, in the domestic courtyards, the women are grinding corn in the handmill, and neighbours sit in a circle at evening, to listen to interminable tales—enjoying the literature of fiction in its primitive style. This is the region now most interesting to us, under the fearful transition of an after-time.

What lies below and to the east of this plateau? The basin of the Ganges, a watery realm, where, in seasons of inundation, the villages are seen crowning eminences, like islands amidst the waste of waters, while the tops of the forests are swaying under the gush of the currents and eddies. In the dry season when the waters are lowest, the people resort to the shade of these forests; the wild beasts slink into the covert again from the hills; the rice-fields grow green, and the pestilence drives the rural population to the towns, or a boat life on the great rivers. The highest social cultivation is in this district, where there is somewhat less superstition, more industry, more art, and more communication with varieties of men. The further side of this basin is formed by the high land beyond the Burrampooter, which limits to the east the territory which we are surveying. Thus have we overlooked the domain of Hindostan Proper, or the Bengal Presidency, as we call it now, viz., the area extending from the Himálaya to the Vindhya mountains in one direction, and from the Burrampooter to the Indus in the other.

If ever a realm was dignified by its boundaries, it is this. Nature’s mightiest barricades hedge it in; northward, mountains never yet scaled; round the shores, an ocean never yet fathomed, and brooded over by the irresistible monsoon; and these mountain and ocean barriers connected by rivers of a magnitude kindred to both. The Burrampooter and the Indus are indeed gulfs brimming with rushing seas; and where they reach the ocean they threaten to melt down the continent into it. Their deltas are, indeed, fit only for amphibious creatures, with which man can establish no understanding; so that in entering India by them the sensation is like that of travelling back into a pre-adamite age from the scenes of common life.

Looking southwards, the Vindhya mountains might seem to the people of the valleys a barrier cutting off Hindostan Proper from the true peninsula of India; but the god in his “Abode of Snow” may overlook them, and survey the Deccan. This barrier stretches not quite from sea to sea, but from the Gulf of Cambay to the Ganges, on its descent into its basin. Looking over the range—and it is little more than 2,000 feet at the highest—what do we find next? A deep pit dug by torrents in the black soil of the peninsula—a rich narrow valley in which the Nerbudda flows from east to west: and then comes another and a lower range, and another great river, the Taptee, the last of such magnitude which flows westwards. From the deep valleys of these rivers we see the land rise, terrace beyond terrace, till, at 1,000 miles from the Nerbudda, the plateau is 3,000 feet above the sea. It is not horizontal, for it slopes down from west to east; and it is not altogether level, for its plains show some shallow undulations, and round the outer edge little hills are grouped and scattered, their recesses being filled with forest. Otherwise that whole staircase of terraces spreads, open and treeless—a vast expanse of grass and crops after the rains, and of brown burnt surface in spring—with towns scattered here and there, and thousands of villages; and near the sources of rivers, mighty Hindoo temples, to which trains of pilgrims are converging from all quarters. Each great river has its deep cleft, worn in the soft soil by the flow of waters for ages; and the plateau thus drained cannot be irrigated from rivers running so far below. Therefore the inhabitants are busy about their tanks, and the channels which lead their waters over the fields in those districts which have been least disturbed by war.

Who makes war? The sovereigns whose palaces show themselves above the other abodes of the great cities make war sometimes—even often; but the everlasting peace-breakers live in those strongholds, those droogs, which crown the hills at the edge of the plateau. The marauding chiefs of the Deccan take refuge in those fortresses with their booty, when they have made a raid among the villages. They little suspect that the landing of a solitary Englishman on the coast down below has determined the fate of those robber-castles of the Deccan, and that within three centuries they will be crumbling ruins, telling of the atrocities of the age preceding the British occupation of India.

Lying before us in the glare of a tropical sun, this plateau darkens with vegetation towards its further extremity. The high corner of the south-west is darkest, for there the clouds gather first above the heights which are like the rim of a tray to this table-land; and under those clouds the forests are grandest. Narrowing as it rises towards the south, the platform is rounded off before it reaches the sea. A chasm of lower land, the Gap of Coimbatore, lies beyond; and beyond that more hills, the last of which run into the sea as a promontory at Cape Comorin. Is there anything beyond but the broad sea with its white surf, dashing up against the apex of this vast triangle? Looking to the eastward of that apex, we see the loveliest of islands, anchored fast by its central mountain, but otherwise looking as if it would float away before any breeze which might fill the foliage of its woods as if it were sails. Fringed with palms, fragrant with spices, gaudy with tropical flowers, a perfect Eden for luscious fruits, Ceylon rises on the south-eastern horizon of that Indian territory, the northern boundary of which is the Abode of Snow. It is nearly 2,000 miles from the one to the other. What would the adventurer on the coast have said, if told that his great-grandson might come on his track, and find all this territory in English occupation, and the greater part in possession?

But we have not seen quite all. What is below the rim of the plateau—between it and the sea? There is, on the western side, a strip of land, hot and moist, from sixty to thirty miles broad, easily reached from the sea, but not so easily from the plateau above. The great embankment which supports the table-land of the Deccan is a miniature of the Himálaya range, which supports the plateau of Thibet. A mere rim on the inside—it is a precipice of two or three thousand feet deep on the seaward side. There are few roads down these Ghauts; and, till the British showed the way, it was scarcely possible for the people on the shore to obtain the produce of the Deccan. It was on that strip of shore that our pioneer Englishman, Stevens, landed in 1593. He saw that steep wall bristling with forests—bamboos waving in the breeze which passed over the summits, and teak-trees being tumbled down by the torrents in their leaping course, after the rains; but he knew nothing of what lay behind that great green wall. The sandy beach of that Malabar coast bristles with cocoa palms, which make a fringe for the margin of the tide. The waterfalls of the Ghauts join the sea by a multitude of small inlets; and here and there a rice-swamp makes a gap in the long hedge of palms. A rocky island of small extent, lying close under a larger island, was an object of attention to our pioneer countryman while on that coast. The Portuguese had obtained it from the potentates of the mainland, valuing it for the goodness of its harbour on that exposed coast, and expressing that value in its name—Good Bay, or Bombay. The Coromandel coast, answering on the east to the Malabar on the west, is less strong in its distinctive features, except the assault of the sea on the shore. The Madras surf is celebrated all over the world. As for the rest, the Ghauts are lower, more broken, and more spread; the line of coast is broader; and all the great rivers, from the Taptee southward, fall into the sea on that coast. South of the basin of the Ganges, five noble streams pour their floods into the Bay of Bengal. The Mahanuddy; the great Godavery, which cuts a channel for itself right across the Deccan; the Kistna, which does the same lower down; the Panaar; and the Cauvery, which washes the walls of a series of great cities, from Seringapatam to Negapatam. That part of the peninsula is little more than 300 miles wide. In the northern part of this great territory, from the Indus to the Burrampooter, it is not less than 1,500.

What a territory it is!—that which is now British India, but which our pioneer of 1593 would no more have dreamed of our making our own than the Garden of Eden, or the dominions of Prester John! He would have been no less astonished if he could have known that such a territory, being once our own, and the largest dependency ever held by any nation, would not be considered worth study by the British at home till calamity, arising from that levity, should make every nook and corner of it as fearfully interesting to the people at large as the interior of Africa to the Parks of Peebles, and the Polar regions to the Franklins and Kanes. When Stevens returned from having set foot on the coast of Malabar, his countrymen could not hear enough of the great peninsula. Now that it has long been our own, we have not cared enough about it to help our rulers to govern it well. It is time for repentance and amendment.