CHAPTER XVII.
THE ENGLISH IN INDIA, CONTINUED.—TREATMENT
OF THE NATIVES, CONTINUED.
"If," says the same historian, in whose language we concluded the last chapter, "to this picture of public oppressions we were to add that of private extortions, we should find the agents of the Company almost everywhere exacting their tribute with extreme rigour, and raising contributions with the utmost cruelty. We should see them carrying a kind of inquisition into every family, and sitting in judgment on every fortune; robbing indiscriminately the artizan and the labourer; imputing it often to a man, as a crime, that he is not sufficiently rich, and punishing him accordingly. We should view them selling their favour and their credit, as well to oppress the innocent as to oppress the guilty. We should find, in consequence of these irregularities, despair seizing every heart, and an universal dejection getting the better of every mind, and uniting to put a stop to the progress and activity of commerce, agriculture, and population." This, which is the language of a foreigner, was also the language of the Directors at the same period, addressed to their servants in India. They complained that their "orders had been disregarded; that oppression pervaded the whole country; that youths had been suffered with impunity to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over the natives, and to acquire rapid fortunes by monopolizing commerce," They ask "whether there be a thing which had not been made a monopoly of? whether the natives are not more than ever oppressed and wretched?" They were just then appointing Mr. Hastings their first Governor-general, and expressed a hope that he would "set an example of temperance, economy, and application." Unfortunately Mr. Hastings set an example of a very different kind. It was almost immediately after his appointment to his high station that he entered into that infamous bargain with the Nabob of Oude for the extermination of the Rohillas; and during his government scarcely a year passed without the most serious charges being preferred against him to the supreme council, of which he himself was the head, of his reception of presents and annuities contrary to the express injunctions of the Company, and for the purpose of corrupt appointments. In 1775 he was charged with the receipt of 15,000 rupees, as a bribe for the appointment of the Duan of Burdwan, or manager of the revenues; in 1776, of receiving an annual salary from the Phousdar of Hoogly of 36,000 rupees for a similar cause. About the same time it came out too, that in 1772, that is, immediately on entering the governorship, he received from the Munny Begum a present of one lac and a half of rupees, for appointing her the guardian and superintendent of the affairs of the Nabob of Bengal, a minor; and the same sum had been received by Mr. Middleton, his agent. The council felt itself bound to receive evidence on these charges. The Maha Rajah Nundcomar, who had been appointed to various important offices by Mr. Hastings himself, came forward and accused the governor of acquitting Mahmud Reza Khan, the Naib Duan of Bengal, and Rajah Shitabroy the Naib Duan of Bahar, of vast embezzlements in their accounts, and also offered proof of the bribe of upwards of three and a half lacs from Munny Begum and Rajah Gourdass. What answer did he make to these charges? He refused to enter into them; but immediately commenced a prosecution of Nundcomar, on a charge of conspiracy; which failing, he had him tried on a charge of forgery, said to be committed five years before. On this he was convicted by a jury of Englishmen, and hanged, though the crime was not capital by the laws of his country. This was a circumstance that cast the foulest suspicions upon him. It was said that a man standing in the position and peculiar circumstances of the governor, accused of the high crimes of bribery and corruption, would, had he been innocent, have used every exertion to have saved the life of an accuser, had he been prosecuted by others, instead of himself hastening him out of the way; which must leave the irresistible conviction in the public mind, of his own guilt. But on the celebrated trial of Mr. Hastings, this was exactly the mode in which every accusation was met. When the most celebrated men of the time had united to reiterate these and other charges; when he stood before the House of Peers, impeached by the Commons, instead of standing forward as a man conscious of his innocence, and glad of the opportunity to clear his name from such foul taint, every technical obstruction which the ingenuity of his council could devise was thrown in the way of evidence. When the evidence of this Rajah Nundcomar, as taken by the supreme council of Calcutta, was tended, it was rejected because it was not given in the council upon oath; though Mr. Hastings well knew that the Hindoos never gave evidence upon oath, being contrary to their religion; that it was never required,—that this very evidence had been received by the council as legal; and that he himself had always contended during his own government, that such evidence was legal. When a letter of Munny Begum was presented, proving the reception of her bribe by Mr. Hastings, that letter was not admitted because it was merely a copy, though an attested one; the original letter itself was however produced, and persons high in office in India at the time of the transaction, came forward to swear to the hand and seal as those of the Begum. And what then? the original letter itself was rejected because it made part of the evidence before the council, which had been rejected before on other grounds!
Such was the manner in which these and the other great charges against this celebrated governor, which we have noticed in a former chapter, were met. Every piece of decisive evidence against him was resisted by every possible means: so that had he been the most innocent man alive, the only conviction that could remain on the mind of the public must have been that of his guilt. He had neither acted like an innocent, high-minded man, to whom the imputation of guilt is intolerable, himself in India, nor had his advocates in England been instructed to do so. Evidence on every charge, of the most conclusive nature, was offered, and resolutely rejected; and spite of all the endeavours to clear the memory of Warren Hastings of cruelty and corruption, the very conduct of himself and his counsel on the trial, must stamp the accusing verdict indelibly on his name.
But his individual conduct is here of no further concern than to shew what must have been the contagion of his example, and what the license given by the House of Peers, by the rejection of evidence in such a case, to all future adventurers in India. Well might Burke exclaim, "That it held out to all future governors of Bengal the most certain and unbounded impunity. Peculation in India would be no longer practised, as it used to be, with caution and with secresy. It would in future stalk abroad at noon-day, and act without disguise; because, after such a decision as had just been made by their lordships, there was no possibility of bringing into a court the proofs of peculation." And indeed every misery which the combined evils of war, official plunder, and remorseless exaction could heap upon the unhappy natives, seems to have reigned triumphant through the British provinces and dependencies of India at this period. The destructive contests with Hyder Ali, the ravages of the English and their ally, the Nabob of Arcot, in Tanjore and the Marawars, were necessarily productive of extreme ruin and misery. During Mr. Hastings' government the duannee, or management of the revenues was assumed in Bengal by the English. Reforms both in the mode of collecting the taxes and in the administration of justice were attempted. The lands were offered on leases of five years, and those leases put up to auction to the best bidders. The British Parliament in 1773 appointed a Supreme Court of Judicature, in which English judges administered English law. But as the great end aimed at was not the relief of the people, but the increase of the amount of taxation, these changes were only disastrous to the natives. Native officers were in many cases removed, and the native ryots only the more oppressed. Every change, in fact, seemed to be tried except the simple and satisfactory one of reducing the exactions and cultivating the blessings of peace. Ten years after these changes had been introduced, and had been all this time inflicting unspeakable calamities on the people, Mr. Dundas moved inquiry into Indian affairs, and pronounced the most severe censures on both the Indian Presidencies and the Court of Directors. He accused the Presidencies, and that most justly, of plunging the nation into wars for the sake of conquest, of contemning and violating treaties, and plundering and oppressing the people of India. The Directors he charged with blaming the misconduct of their servants only when it was unattended with profit, and exercising a very constant forbearance as often as it was productive of gain or territory.
Of the effects of his own military and financial changes Mr. Hastings had a good specimen in his journey through the province of Benares in 1784. This was only three years after he had committed the atrocities in this province, related in a former chapter, and driven the Rajah from his throne; and these are his own words, in a letter to the Council, dated Lucknow, April, 1784:—"From the confines of Buxar to Benares, I was followed and fatigued by the clamours of the discontented inhabitants. The distresses which were produced by the long-continued drought unavoidably tended to heighten the general discontent: yet I have reason to fear that the cause principally existed in a defective, if not a corrupt and oppressive administration. From Buxar to the opposite boundary I have seen nothing but traces of complete devastation in every village." And what had occasioned those devastations? The wars and the determined resolve introduced by Mr. Hastings himself, to have the very uttermost amount that could be wrung from the people.
For the sort of persons to whom Mr. Hastings was in the habit of farming out the revenues of the provinces, and the motives for which they were appointed, we must refer to particulars which came out on his trial respecting such men as Kelleram, Govind Sing, and Deby Sing; but nothing can give a more lively idea of the horrid treatment which awaited the poor natives under such monsters as these collectors, than the statements then made of the practices of the last mentioned person, Deby or Devi Sing. This man was declared to have been placed on his post for corrupt ends. He was a man of the most infamous character; yet that did not prevent Mr. Hastings placing him in such a responsible office, though he himself declared on the trial that he "so well knew the character and abilities of Rajah Deby Sing that he could easily conceive it was in his power both to commit great enormities and to conceal the real grounds of them from the British collectors in the district."—Well, notwithstanding this opinion, the Rajah offered a very convenient sum of money, four lacs of rupees—upwards of 40,000l.—and he was appointed renter of the district of Dinagepore. Complaints of his cruelties were not long in arriving at Calcutta. Mr. Patterson, a gentleman in the Company's service, was sent as a commissioner to inquire into the charges against him; and the account of them, as given by Mr. Patterson, is thus quoted by Mills, from "The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq."
"The poor ryots, or husbandmen, were treated in a manner that would never gain belief if it was not attested by the records of the Company: and Mr. Burke thought it necessary to apologize to their lordships for the horrid relation with which he would be obliged to harrow their feelings. The worthy Commissioner Patterson, who had authenticated the particulars of this relation, had wished, that for the credit of human nature, he might have drawn a veil over them; but as he had been sent to inquire into them, he must, in the discharge of his duty state those particulars, however shocking they were to his feelings. The cattle and corn of the husbandmen were sold for a third of their value, and their huts reduced to ashes! The unfortunate owners were obliged to borrow from usurers, that they might discharge their bonds, which had unjustly and illegally been extorted from them while they were in confinement; and such was the determination of the infernal fiend, Devi Sing, to have these bonds discharged, that the wretched husbandmen were obliged to borrow money, not at twenty, or thirty, or forty, or fifty, but at SIX HUNDRED per cent. to satisfy him! Those who could not raise the money were most cruelly tortured. Cords were drawn tight round their fingers, till the flesh of the four on each hand was actually incorporated, and became one solid mass. The fingers were then separated again by wedges of iron and wood driven in between them! Others were tied, two and two, by the feet, and thrown across a wooden bar, upon which they hung with their feet uppermost. They were then beat on the soles of the feet till the toe-nails dropped off! They were afterwards beat about the head till the blood gushed out at the mouth, nose, and ears. They were also flogged upon the naked body with bamboo canes, and prickly bushes, and above all, with some poisonous weeds, which were of a caustic nature, and burnt at every touch. The cruelty of the monster who had ordered all this, had contrived how to tear the mind as well as the body. He frequently had a father and son tied naked to one another by the feet and arms, and then flogged till the skin was torn from the flesh; and he had the devilish satisfaction to know, that every blow must hurt; for if one escaped the son, his sensibility was wounded by the knowledge he had, that the blow had fallen upon his father. The same torture was felt by the father, when he knew that every blow that missed him had fallen upon his son.
"The treatment of the females could not be described. Dragged from the inmost recesses of their houses, which the religion of the country had made so many sanctuaries, they were exposed naked to public view. The Virgins were carried to the Court of Justice, where they might naturally have looked for protection, but they now looked for it in vain; for in the face of the ministers of justice, in the face of the spectators, in the face of the sun, those tender and modest virgins were brutally violated. The only difference between their treatment and that of their mothers was, that the former were dishonoured in the face of day, the latter in the gloomy recesses of their dungeon. Other females had the nipples of their breasts put in a cleft bamboo, and torn off." What follows is too shocking and indecent to transcribe! It is almost impossible, in reading of these frightful and savage enormities, to believe that we are reading of a country under the British government, and that these unmanly deeds were perpetrated by British agents, and for the purpose of extorting the British revenue. Thus were these innocent and unhappy people treated, because Warren Hastings wanted money, and sold them to a wretch whom he knew to be a wretch, for a bribe; thus were they treated, because Devi Sing had paid his four lacs of rupees, and must wring them again out of the miserable ryots, though it were with their very life's blood, and with fire and torture before unheard of even in the long and black catalogue of human crimes. And it should never be forgotten, that though Mr. Burke pledged himself, if permitted, under the most awful imprecations, to prove every word of this barbarous recital, such permission was stoutly refused; and that, moreover, the evidence of the Commissioner Patterson stands in the Company's own records.
But it was not merely the commission of these outrages which the poor inhabitants had to endure. The English courts of justice, which should have protected them, became an additional means of torture and ruin. The writs of the supreme court were issued at the suit of individuals against the zemindars of the country in ordinary actions of debt. They were dragged from their families and affairs, with the frequent certainty of leaving them to disorder and ruin, any distance, even as great as 500 miles, to give bail at Calcutta; a thing, which, if they were strangers, and the sum more than trifling, it was next to impossible they should have in their power. In default of this, they were consigned to prison for all the many months which the delays of English judicature might interpose between this calamitous stage and the termination of the suit. Upon the affidavit, into the truth of which no inquiry was made, upon the unquestioned affidavit of any person whatsoever—a person of credibility, or directly the reverse, no difference—the natives were seized, carried to Calcutta, and consigned to prison, where, even when it was afterwards determined that they were not within the jurisdiction of the court, and, of course, that they had been unjustly persecuted, they were liable to lie for several months, and whence they were dismissed totally without compensation. Instances occurred, in which defendants were brought from a distance to the Presidency, and when they declared their intention of pleading, that is, objecting to the jurisdiction of the court, the prosecution was dropped; but was again renewed; the defendant brought down to Calcutta, and again upon his offering to plead, the prosecution was dropped. The very act of being seized, was in India, the deepest disgrace, and so degraded a man of any rank that, under the Mahomedan government, it never was attempted but in cases of the utmost delinquency.[1]
In merely reading these cases ofThe proud man's contumely, the oppressor's wrong,
Such was the condition and treatment of the natives of Indostan, at the commencement of the present century. In another chapter, on our policy and conduct in this vast and important region—it remains only to take a rapid glance at the effect of these two centuries of despotism upon these subjected millions, and to inquire what we have since been doing towards a better state of things,—more auspicious to them, and honourable to ourselves.
- ↑ Mills, ii. 560–2.