nglishmen in India talk as if England had held India from time immemorial; and while Indians now study those 150 years with the greatest care, the majority of Englishmen in India are woefully ignorant of all that took place in-them, except, perhaps, the Mutiny. Many old people in India saw the Mutiny, and talk graphically about it; but the 100 years before the Mutiny—the time the English spent in conquering India—that period is little known to, and little thought about by the ruling community. English people in India remind me of a small boy who was taken to have tea in the refreshment-room of the British Museum. He had seen statues and mummies, sculptures and marbles; and he asked the waiter who brought him some cake:—
"Is this cake very old, too?"
"Old!" snapped the waiter "It was baked to-day."
So, in India, the ruling community seem to think that as India is very old, its present rulers must be very old, too. An English acorn fell into Indian soil 150 years ago; and Englishmen speak of the acorn as if it were a tree, while Indians call it “only a sapling.”
Let me briefly trace the conquest of India by the English. One hundred and fifty years ago English settlers in India were traders, servants of the so-called Saib [East India] Company; and England had never thought of conquering a country almost as large as Europe, and with as many different nations and rulers as we find in Europe at present. . . .
I will quote from a book much read by Indians to-day, called :— Empire in Asia: How we came by it. A Book of Confessions by W. M. Torrens, M. Re-published in 1872. The author says:— "India in the days of Walpole, and the elder Pitt, was still ruled, like Europe, by a number of distinct atad independent Governments, differing in origin, creed, power, and civilization, frequently at feud with one another, and often suffering from over- weening vanity and ambition, just as if they had been blessed with the paternal sway of most Christian Kings, august and apostolic Kaisers, or most religious and gracious Sovereigns of immortal memory; but they were practically self-ruled and locally free. Even in states of a secondary rank, dependent upon the superior will of Peishwa or Padishah the people of each separate province still saw in the midst of them the camp and the court of the prince they obeyed and whatever may have been the burdens on their industry, they could not but be conscious that its produce was lavished or husbanded within their borders.
The whole of the vast region lying between the Afghan bills and those of Burmah, and from the Hima- layas to Cape Comorin, 1,500,000 square miles, with upwards of 200,000,000 inhabitants, consists to-day of revenue districts under an English Minister, or of mediatised States dependent for their continuance in that equivocal condition on his will. No change like this, effected within a century, is to be found in the chronicles of conquest. [13-14]
Related material by Margaret Harkness
Bibliography
Law, John. [pseud., i.e. Margaret Harkness]. Glimpses of hidden India. Calcutta [etc.]: Thacker, Spink & co. [1909?].
Last modified 19 December 2018