India: What can it teach us?. F. Max Muller
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Service whom I happened to see at Oxford; and I believe both the advice and the warning have in several cases borne the very best fruit. The book which I consider most mischievous, nay, which I hold responsible for some of the greatest misfortunes that have happened to India, is Mill's "History of British India," even with the antidote against its poison, which is supplied by Professor Wilson's notes. The book which I recommend, and which I wish might be published again in a cheaper form, so as to make it more generally accessible, is Colonel Sleeman's "Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official," published in 1844, but written originally in 1835–1836.
Mill's "History," no doubt, you all know, particularly the candidates for the Indian Civil Service, who, I am sorry to say, are recommended to read it, and are examined in it. Still, in order to substantiate my strong condemnation of the book, I shall have to give a few proofs:
Mill in his estimate of the Hindu character is chiefly guided by Dubois, a French missionary, and by Orme and Buchanan, Tennant, and Ward, all of them neither very competent nor very unprejudiced judges. Mill,[19] however, picks out all that is most unfavorable from their works, and omits the qualifications which even these writers felt bound to give to their wholesale condemnation of the Hindus. He quotes as serious, for instance, what was said in joke,[20] namely, that "a Brahman is an ant's nest of lies and impostures." Next to the charge of untruthfulness, Mill upbraids the Hindus for what he calls their litigiousness. He writes:[21] "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." Without imputing dishonorable motives, as Mill does, the same fact might be stated in a different way, by saying, "As often as their conscience and respect of law keep them from seeking more daring gratification to their hatred and revenge, say by murder or poisoning, their trust in English justice leads them to appeal to our courts of law." Dr. Robertson, in his "Historical Disquisitions concerning India,"[22] seems to have considered the litigious subtlety of the Hindus as a sign of high civilization rather than of barbarism, but he is sharply corrected by Mr. Mill, who tells him that "nowhere is this subtlety carried higher than among the wildest of the Irish." That courts of justice, like the English, in which a verdict was not to be obtained, as formerly in Mohammedan courts, by bribes and corruption, should at first have proved very attractive to the Hindus, need not surprise us. But is it really true that the Hindus are more fond of litigation than other nations? If we consult Sir Thomas Munro, the eminent Governor of Madras, and the powerful advocate of the Ryotwar settlements, he tells us in so many words:[23] "I have had ample opportunity of observing the Hindus in every situation, and I can affirm, that they are not litigious."[24]
But Mill goes further still, and in one place he actually assures his readers[25] that a "Brahman may put a man to death when he lists." In fact, he represents the Hindus as such a monstrous mass of all vices, that, as Colonel Vans Kennedy[26] remarked, society could not have held together if it had really consisted of such reprobates only. Nor does he seem to see the full bearing of his remarks. Surely, if a Brahman might, as he says, put a man to death whenever he lists, it would be the strongest testimony in their favor that you hardly ever hear of their availing themselves of such a privilege, to say nothing of the fact—and a fact it is—that, according to statistics, the number of capital sentences was one in every 10,000 in England, but only one in every million in Bengal.[27]
Colonel Sleeman's "Rambles" are less known than they deserve to be. To give you an idea of the man, I must read you some extracts from the book.
His sketches being originally addressed to his sister, this is how he writes to her:
"My dear Sister: Were any one to ask your countrymen in India, what had been their greatest source of pleasure while there, perhaps nine in ten would say the letters which they receive from their sisters at home. … And while thus contributing so much to our happiness, they no doubt tend to make us better citizens of the world and servants of government than we should otherwise be; for in our 'struggles through life' in India, we have all, more or less, an eye to the approbation of those circles which our kind sisters represent, who may therefore be considered in the exalted light of a valuable species of unpaid magistracy to the government of India."
There is a touch of the old English chivalry even in these few words addressed to a sister whose approbation he values, and with whom he hoped to spend the winter of his days. Having been, as he confesses, idle in answering letters, or rather, too busy to find time for long letters, he made use of his enforced leisure, while on his way from the Nerbuddah River to the Himmaleh Mountains, in search of health, to give to his sister a full account of his impressions and experiences in India.
Though what he wrote was intended at first "to interest and amuse his sister only and the other members of his family at home," he adds, in a more serious tone: "Of one thing I must beg you to be assured, that I have nowhere indulged in fiction, either in the narrative, the recollections, or the conversations. What I relate on the testimony of others, I believe to be true; and what I relate on my own, you may rely upon as being so."
When placing his volumes before the public at large in 1844, he expresses a hope that they may "tend to make the people of India better understood by those of our countrymen whose destinies are cast among them, and inspire more kindly feelings toward them."
You may ask why I consider Colonel Sleeman so trustworthy an authority on the Indian character, more trustworthy, for instance, than even so accurate and unprejudiced an observer as Professor Wilson. My answer is—because Wilson lived chiefly in Calcutta, while Colonel Sleeman saw India, where alone the true India can be seen, namely, in the village-communities. For many years he was employed as Commissioner for the suppression of Thuggee. The Thugs were professional assassins, who committed their murders under a kind of religious sanction. They were originally "all Mohammedans, but for a long time past Mohammedans and Hindus had been indiscriminately associated in the gangs, the former class, however, still predominating."[28]
In order to hunt up these gangs, Colonel Sleeman had constantly to live among the people in the country, to gain their confidence, and to watch the good as well as the bad features in their character.
Now what Colonel Sleeman continually insists on is that no one knows the Indians who does not know them in their village-communities—what we should now call their communes. It is that village-life which in India has given its peculiar impress to the Indian character, more so than in any other country we know. When in Indian history we hear so much of kings and emperors, of râjahs and mahârâjahs, we are apt to think of India as an Eastern monarchy, ruled by a central power, and without any trace of that self-government which forms the pride of England. But those who have most carefully studied the political life of India tell you the very opposite.
The political unit, or the social cell in India has always been, and, in spite of repeated foreign conquests, is still the village-community. Some of these political units will occasionally combine or be combined for common purposes (such a confederacy being called a grâmagâla), but each is perfect in itself. When we read in the Laws of Manu[29] of officers appointed to rule over ten, twenty, a hundred, or a thousand of these villages, that means no more than that they were responsible for the collection of taxes, and generally for the good behavior of these villages. And when, in later times, we hear of circles of eighty-four villages, the so-called Chourasees (Katurasîti[30]), and of three hundred and sixty villages, this too seems to refer to fiscal arrangements only. To the ordinary Hindu, I mean to ninety-nine in every hundred, the village was his world, and the sphere of public opinion, with its beneficial influences on individuals, seldom extended beyond the horizon of his village.[31]
Colonel Sleeman was one of the first who called attention to the existence of these village-communities in India, and their importance in the social fabric of the whole country both in ancient and in modern times; and though they have since become far better known and celebrated through the writings of Sir Henry Maine, it is still both interesting and instructive to read Colonel Sleeman's account. He writes as a mere observer, and uninfluenced as yet by any theories on the development of early social and political life among the Aryan nations in general.
I do not mean to say that Colonel Sleeman was the first who pointed out the palpable fact that the whole of India is parcelled out into estates