Reginald Reynolds, “The White Sahibs in India”, (1937)
Excerpt from the Author’s Preface
Impartiality is the virtue of a
knave or a fool’s wisdom. I desire
neither.
The maker of munitions will give
you the objective facts regarding his traffic.
The brewer will speak of his trade without bias. The sun-dried satrap from Peshawar will tell
you the unvarnished facts about India.
But an honest man will give you his opinion.
Those who dislike my conclusions
may dispute them. But whoever would
quarrel with my facts must enter the lists with my authorities.
Excerpt from the Foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru
I am glad therefore that he has
written this book. From one such as he a
book on India claims attention. It is
immaterial whether one agrees with him or not in everything he says. But what he says has knowledge behind it and
insight and an appreciation of the wider issues. And so all of us, in India or England, can
profit by his analysis of our problems and think with greater clarity about
them.
There are two kinds of books on
India written by Englishmen. The great
majority of them are of the imperial and patronizing variety which point out to
us the high destiny of the British Empire and our folly in not appreciating
this patent fact. They are generous with
their advice to us as to how we can fit in with the grandiose scheme of
things. The other variety of books,
very few in number, are written by Englishmen who are attracted towards our
freedom struggle but are apt to consider it on sentimental grounds. Because their approach is more friendly,
sometimes they show a greater insight, but their treatment is not helpful in
understanding the problems that confront us.
If we are going to solve these
problems, we must understand them. We
have to unravel the knots that have tied us up, and in order to do so our
approach must be scientific and must take into consideration the needs of the
masses in India. That is the problem of
India, not the princes or landlords or other vested interests, English or Indian. Imperialism has accentuated, and often
produced, these knots, so the imperialist approach is out of question. The sentimental approach common enough
amongst my own countryment, though inevitable under the circumstances, does not
carry us far.
Every book that helps us to
understand scientifically the background of the Indian struggle is to be
welcomed. And so I welcome this book and
commend it to Englishmen and Indians who want to help in the solution of one of
the major problems of our time.
CHAPTER XIII
THE EVOLUTION OF
ANGLO-INDIAN MYTHOLOGY
Horace Wilson, in his preface to Mill’s History of British India, has remarked upon the “unrelenting
pertinacity” with which Mill “labours to establish the barbarism of the
Hindus”.
“With very imperfect knowledge,
with materials exceedingly defective, with an implicit faith in all testimony
hostile to Hindu pretensions, he has elaborated a portrait of the Hindus which
has no resemblance whatever to the original, and which almost outrages
humanity. As he represents them, the
Hindus are not only on a par with the least civilized nations of the Old and
New World, but they are plunged almost without exception into the lowest depths
of immorality and crime.
Considered merely in a literary
capacity, the description of the Hindus in the History of British India is open to censure for its obvious
unfairness and injustice; but in the effects which it is likely to exercise
upon the connexion between the people of England and the people of India, it is
chargeable with more than literary demerit: its tendency is evil; it is
calculated to destroy all sympathy between the rulers and the ruled; to
preoccupy the minds of those who issue annually from Great Britain, to
monopolize the posts of honour and power in Hindustan, with an unfounded
aversion towards those over whom they exercise that power. [1]
Footnote
[1] Vol I, Preface, pp. xii-xiii. This
is in the edition of 1858, as quoted throughout this book, and the date is
significant. Bright in one of his
speeches gives an amusing picture of the newly appointed Viceroy who “shuts
himself up to study the first volume of Mr. Mill’s History of India.”
Wilson was of the opinion that a “harsh and illiberal spirit
has of late years prevailed in the conduct and councils of the rising service
in India, which owes its origin to the impressions imbibed in early life from
the History of Mr. Mill.” [2] This
fact was no accident, nor can Mill be debited with individual responsibility
for what was, in point of fact, a process inherent in the growth of
imperialism. Mill was simply an
outstanding example of an inevitable phenomenon. [3]
Footnote
[2] Mill, as Wilson points out, was at pains to refute the opinions of the
great Orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746-94) of whom the Dictionary of National Biography says that he “felt none of the
contempt which his English contemporaries showed to the natives of India.”
Footnote
[3] See The Briton in India by Professor T.J. George (Madras, 1936) where the
origin and growth of race prejudice is very thoroughly examined.
The steady growth of race prejudice as a psychological
concomitant of imperialism can be best realized by comparing the observations
of earlier English commentators with the obiter
dicta of the present-day. Thus
Ovington, writing in 1696, commends the honesty of the East India Company’s
Indian servants. [4] Warren Hastings found the Hindus “gentle and benevolent,
more susceptible of gratitude for kindness shown to them, and less prompted to
vengeance for wrongs inflicted than any people on the face of the earth.” [5]
Hastings no doubt had reason to be grateful for this fact. Bishop Heber’s tribute of praise was even
stronger, while Elphinstone found the villagers “everywhere amiable,
affectionate to their families, kind to their neighbours and towards all but
the government honest and sincere.” [6]
Footnote
[4] A Voyage to Surratt in the year
1689 by J. Ovington, M.A., Chaplain to His Majesty, (London, 1696).
Footnote
[5] The opinions of Hastings, Heber, Elphinstone and Malcolm, also of Colonel Sleeman,
will be found in Max Müller’s India, What Can it Teach Us? (Lecture II, pp. 44-50, 60-61). Müller
shows that this high opinion of the Hindus, with particular reference to their
honesty, was shared by many earlier writers such as Megasthenes and Marco Polo.
Footnote
[6] Elphinstone himself explains this reference to the government in another
paragraph (quoted by Müller, p. 61) in which he
says that “deceit is most common in people connected with government, a class
which spreads far in India, as, from the nature of the land revenue, the lowest
villager is often obliged to resist force by fraud.”
Elphinstone even went so far as to claim that there was less
crime in India than in England, not excluding the activities of the Thugs and
Dacoits. The most depraved Hindus
according to him were “the dregs of our own great towns”. Sir John Malcolm, in more qualified terms,
found Hindus no worse than other people, though in the early days of British
rule there seem to have been frank admissions by our officials that the
national character was deteriorating under foreign domination. “The longer we possess a province, the more
common and grave does perjury become”, was the opinion of one authority [7]
Footnote
[7] Sir G. Campbell. Quoted by Müller
(op. cit. p. 48: footnote). Sir John Shore was of the same opinion. Nevertheless Captain John Seely in The Wonders of Elora (London, 1824)
noted the honesty of the Indian peasants.
Even in Elphinstone’s time signs were not lacking that a new
generation of British administrators was coming into being, which had neither
the intimate knowledge nor the frankness of the Company’s earlier servants.
“Englishmen in India,” wrote Elphinstone, “have less
opportunity than might be expected of forming opinions of the native
character. Even in England, few know
much of the people beyond their own class, and what they do know, they learn
from newspapers and publications of a description which does not exist in
India. In that country also, religion
and manners put bars to our intimacy with the natives, and limit the number of
transactions as well as the free communication of opinions. We know nothing of the interior of families
but by report and have no share in those numerous occurrences of life in which
the amiable parts of character are most exhibited. [8]
Footnote
[8] Elphinstone’s History of India. Quoted by Max Müller (op. cit. p. 59),
Compare Note to Chapter VIII.
Prejudice had already reached formidable proportions by the time that
Mill wrote his History of British India. Max Müller points out that Mill was chiefly
guided by Dubois, a French missionary, and certain other selected authorities,
“all of them neither very competent nor very unprejudiced judges.” [9] Not
content with this, Mill “omits the qualifications which even these writers felt
bound to give to their wholesale condemnation of the Hindus.” Mill began the fashion among subsequent
British historians of attributing almost all Hindu habits or practices to some
mean or despicable motive and dismissing all Hindu culture with contempt. Thus, for example, of the Hindus’ alleged
“litigiousness” [10] he writes that
“As often as courage fails them in
seeking more daring gratification to their hatred and revenge, their malignity
finds a vent in the channel of litigation.” [11]
Footnote [9]
Müller (op. cit. pp. 42-43). The Abbé
Dubois is also Miss Mayo’s principal authority in Mother India, notwithstanding the fact that he wrote of India 130
years ago.
Footnote [10] Sir
William Hunter in his Brief History of the Indian Peoples (23rd
Edition, p. 88) quotes the authority of Megasthenes that in his time the Hindus
scarcely ever had recourse to a lawsuit.
Footnote [11]
Mill, Vol I, p. 329. Wilson in a
footnote denies the “litigious” character of the Hindus on the authority of Sir
Thomas Munro. He points out that this
supposition arises from “the imperfection of our own systems of finance and
judicature,” and it is curious that Mill should sneer at the Hindus for not
“taking the law into their own hands.”
Mill was probably the first English writer to popularise the idea that
Hindus are by nature dishonest and untruthful.
Ignoring such evidence as we have already noted on this subject, he
cites the views of “exceptionable witnesses”, as Wilson calls them, “the
missionaries by their calling and Orme and Buchanan by their prejudices.” [12]
He proves the prevalence of perjury in the courts, but gives no indication, as
his editor points out, that:
“The form of oath imposed—the taking of
an oath at all, was so repulsive to the feelings of respectable Hindus, that
they have ever avoided as much as possible giving evidence at all; and their
place has been supplied by the lowest and most unprincipled, whose testimony
has been for sale. [13]
Footnote
[12] Footnote to Mill’s History, Vol
I, p. 325.
Footnote
[13] Mill, Vol I, p. 325: Wilson’s footnote.
He quotes a statement from the Oriental
Magazine of March 1826 that “The dread of an oath prevents men of credit
from giving testimony at all, even to the loss of a just cause.”
So horrible is Mill’s picture of the Hindus that those who
credit it may well wonder how such a race survived at all. [14] The wildest
observations pass for judgment. “A
Brahmin,” writes Mill, for example (quoting from an eighteenth century
authority) “may put a man to death when he lists”: a statement which is, and
always has been, a lie.
Footnote
[14] “He represents the Hindus as such a monstrous mass of all vices that, as
Colonel Vans Kennedy remarked, society could not have held together if it had
really consisted of such reprobates only.” (Max Müller,
op. cit, p. 44.)
In spite of the experience of Indian hospitality which has
been the common lot of those who have lived among Indians on a basis of
equality, [15] Mill finds European witnesses prepared to deny even this virtue
to the Hindus. His evidence in this case
is mainly the “inhospitality” of the people to their English conquerors. Even Hindu music, to which no particular
political significance could be attached, is dismissed by Mill in a single
paragraph with the remark that “all Europeans, even those who are most disposed
to eulogise the attainments of the Hindus, unite in describing the music of
that people as unpleasing and void both of expression and art.” [16]
Footnote
[15] The present author found this to be the case in every part of India which
he visited. One of Mill’s authorities
on Hindu inhospitality is Dr. Tennant, whose evidence Wilson dismisses as based
on the purest ignorance. (Footnote to Vol I, p. 341).
Footnote
[16] Mill, Vol II, p. 28. This
characteristic observation illustrated Lowes Dickinson’s contention that “of
all the Western nations, the English are the least capable of appreciating the
qualities of Indian civilization.” (Essay
on the Civilizations of India, China and Japan.)
This last example from the writings of Mill brings us to the
point where the cultural gulf is discernible between the Indian people and
those who are their interpreters to the British public. Apart from the untruth of the statement that
“all Europeans” shared such a preposterous opinion, it is clear that this
dismissal of Indian music is comparable to the use of the word “gibberish” for
a language one cannot understand. Mill’s
attitude, so blatantly exposed in this statement, was to become the criterion
of orthodoxy in future English writers.
From a passage already quoted it will be observed that
Wilson considered the evidence of missionaries as “exceptionable”. Elphinstone appears to have had the same
view, in that he held them to be among those who “do not see the virtuous
portion of a nation”. [17] After 1813, with the extension of Christian
missions, missionary evidence of violently prejudiced character became
extremely common, and the views of these interested parties were all too
readily accepted as “Gospel Truth”.
There are to-day some 5,000 missionaries in India, representing over a
hundred “different abominations”, as an Indian Christian once called them; and
with a few notable exceptions their influence on Anglo-Indian cultural
relations is activated as much by political bias as it is by a Christian
contempt for rival religions. The
connection between these two aspects of missionary interests was stressed at
the annual meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1932, when the
report for the past year revealed that:
“Outside the area where a Godless
communism predominated there was no evidence that people were less ready to
acquire the Scriptures.” [18]
Footnote
[17] Elphinstone’s History of India
(Cowell’s Edition) p. 213. The present
position of the Church in India is illustrated in the case of Mr. Verrier
Elwin. In 1932, when he was still a
priest of the Church of England, he was refused a license to preach unless he
took the Oath of Allegiance. The Bishop
of Nagpur in a letter dated Feb 16th, 1932, told him that the duty
of the clergy was “to fit people to do their duty as good citizens in that state
of life into which it shall please God to call them.”
Footnote
[18] The Times, May 5th,
1932. It is significant that this
meeting took place under the chairmanship of Lord Meston, a former ruler of
India who takes an active part in anti-India political propaganda. Lord (then Sir Frederick) Lugard in praising
missionary activity in Africa said that missions had done more, perhaps, than
any other agency, for developing British possessions. “I put aside,” he said, “the spiritual aspect
of such work and am looking at its economic advantages to a State.” (The Extension of British Influence and Trade
in Africa, 1895.)
