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Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by William Sleeman

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'Well,' said the old man, smiling, 'the gentleman himself is not very
young, and yet I dare say he is a good servant of his Government.'

This was paying me off for making the people laugh at his expense.

'True, my old friend,' said I, 'but I began to serve when I was
young, and have been long learning.'

'Very well,' said the old man, 'but I should be glad to serve the
rest of my life upon a less salary than you got when you began to
learn.'

'Well, my friend, you complain of our Government; but you must
acknowledge that we do all we can to protect you, though it is true
that we are often acting in the dark.'

'Often, sir? you are always acting in the dark; you, hardly any of
you, know anything of what your revenue and police officers are
doing; there is no justice or redress to be got without paying for
it, and it is not often that those who pay can get it.'

'True, my old friend, that is bad all over the world. You cannot
presume to ask anything even from the Deity Himself, without paying
the priest who officiates in His temples; and if you should, you
would none of you hope to get from your Deity what you asked for.'

Here the crowd laughed again, and one of them said that 'there was
this certainly to be said for our Government, that the European
gentlemen themselves never took bribes, whatever those under them
might do'.

'You must not be too sure of that, neither. Did not the Lal Bibi, the
Red Lady, get a bribe for soliciting the judge, her husband, to let
go Amir Singh, who had been confined in jail?'

'How did this take place?'

'About three years ago Amir Singh was sentenced to imprisonment, and
his friends spent a great deal of money in bribes to the native
officers of the court, but all in vain. At last they were recommended
to give a handsome present to the Red Lady. They did so, and Amir
Singh was released.'

'But did they give the present into the lady's own hand?'

'No, they gave it to one of her women.'

'And how do you know that she ever gave it to her mistress, or that
her mistress ever heard of the transaction?'

'She might certainly have been acting without her mistress'
knowledge; but the popular belief is that the Lal Bibi got the
present.'

I then told the story of the affair at Jubbulpore, when Mrs. Smith's
name had been used for a similar purpose, and the people around us
were all highly amused; and the old man's opinion of the transaction
with the Red Lady evidently underwent a change.[10]

We became good friends, and the old man begged me to have my tents,
which he supposed were coming up, pitched among them, that he might
have an opportunity of showing that he was not a bad subject, though
he grumbled against the Government.

The next day at Meerut I got a visit from the chief native judge,
whose son, a talented youth, is in my office. Among other things, I
asked him whether it might not be possible to improve the character
of the police by increasing the salaries of the officers, and
mentioned my conversation with the landholder.

'Never, sir,' said the old gentleman; 'the man that now gets twenty-
five rupees a month is contented with making perhaps fifty or
seventy-five more; and the people subject to his authority pay him
accordingly. Give him a hundred, sir, and he will put a shawl over
his shoulders, and the poor people will be obliged to pay him at a
rate that will make up his income to four hundred. You will only
alter his style of living, and make him a greater burthen to the
people. He will always take as long as he thinks he can with
impunity.'

'But do you not think that when people see a man adequately paid by
the Government they will the more readily complain of any attempt at
unauthorized exactions?'

'Not a bit, sir, as long as they see the same difficulties in the way
of prosecuting him to conviction. In the administration of civil
justice' (the old gentleman is a civil judge), 'you may occasionally
see your way, and understand what is doing; but in revenue and police
you never have seen it in India, and never will, I think. The
officers you employ will all add to their incomes by unauthorized
means; and the lower these incomes, the less their pretensions, and
the less the populace have to pay.'[11]


Notes:

1. January, 1836.

2. The old Anglo-Indian rose much earlier than his successor of the
present day commonly does.

3. For other popular explanations of the alleged decrease in
fertility of the soil, see _ante_, Chapter 27, where three
explanations are offered, namely, the eating of beef, the prevalence
of adultery, and the impiety of surveys.

4. The inapplicability of these observations of the author to the
present time is a good measure of the material progress of India
since his day. The Ganges Canal, the bridges over the Indus, Ganges,
and other great rivers, and numberless engineering works throughout
the empire, are permanent witnesses to the scientific superiority of
the ruling race. Buildings which can claim any high degree of
architectural excellence are, unfortunately, still rare, but the
public edifices of Bombay will not suffer by comparison with those of
most capital cities, and for some years past, considerable attention
has been paid to architecture as an art. A great architectural
experiment is in progress at the new official capital of Delhi
(1914).

5. The road is now an excellent one.

6. Parched gram, or chick-pea, is commonly used by Indian travellers
as a convenient and readily portable form of food. The 'brass jug'
lent to the author could be purified by fire after his use of it.

7. Growls of this kind must not be interpreted too literally. Any
village landholder, if encouraged, would grumble in the same strain.

8. This is the permanent difficulty of Indian revenue administration,
which no Government measures can seriously diminish.

9. The mission to Kabul, under Captain Alexander Burnes, was not
dispatched till September, 1837, and troops did not assemble before
the conclusion of the treaty with the Sikhs in June, 1838. The army
crossed the Indus in January, 1839. The conversation in the text is
stated to have taken place 'some time after the journey herein
described', and must, apparently, be dated in November, 1839. The
author was in the North-Western Provinces in that year.

10. Some of Mrs. Smith's suitors entered into a combination to
defraud a suitor in his court of a large sum of money, which he was
to pay to Mrs. Smith as she walked in the garden. A dancing girl from
the town of Jubbulpore was made to represent Mrs. Smith, and a suit
of Mrs. Smith's clothes was borrowed for her from the washerman. The
butler took the suitor to the garden, and introduced him to the
supposed Mrs. Smith, who received him very graciously, and
condescended to accept his offer of five thousand rupees in gold
mohurs. The plot was afterwards discovered, and the old butler,
washerman, and all, were sentenced to work in a rope on the roads.
[W. H. S.]

Penal labour on the roads has been discontinued long since. Similar
plots probably have often escaped detection. The whole conversation
is a valuable illustration of Indian habits and modes of thought.

11. The subject of the police administration is more fully discussed
_post_, in Chapter 69.




CHAPTER 59


Concentration of Capital and its Effects.

Kosi[1] stands on the borders of Firozpur, the estate of the late
Shams-ud-din, who was hanged at Delhi on the 3rd of October, 1835,
for the murder of William Fraser, the representative of the Governor-
General in the Delhi city and territories.[2] The Mewatis of Firozpur
are notorious thieves and robbers. During the Nawab's time they dared
not plunder within his territory, but had a free licence to plunder
wherever they pleased beyond it.[3] They will now be able to plunder
at home, since our tribunals have been introduced to worry
prosecutors and their witnesses to death by the distance they have to
go, and the tediousness of our process; and thereby to secure
impunity to offenders, by making it the interest of those who have
been robbed, not only to bear with the first loss without complaint,
but largely to bribe police officers to conceal the crimes from their
master, the magistrate, when they happen to come to their knowledge.
Here it was that Jeswant Rao Holkar gave a grand ball on the 14th of
October, 1804, while he was with his cavalry covering the siege of
Delhi by his regular brigade. In the midst of the festivity he had a
European soldier of the King's 76th Regiment, who had been taken
prisoner, strangled behind the curtain, and his head stuck upon a
spear and placed in the midst of the assembly, where the 'nach'
(nautch) girls were made to dance round it. Lord Lake reached the
place the next morning in pursuit of this monster; and the gallant
regiment, who here heard the story, had soon an opportunity of
revenging the foul murder of their comrade in the battle of Dig, one
of the most gallant passages of arms we have ever had in India.[4]

Near Kosi there is a factory in ruins belonging to the late firm of
Mercer & Company. Here the cotton of the district used to be
collected and screwed under the superintendence of European agents,
preparatory to its embarkation for Calcutta on the river Jumna. On
the failure of the firm, the establishment was broken up, and the
work, which was then done by one great European merchant, is now done
by a score or two of native merchants. There is, perhaps, nothing
which India wants more than the concentration of capital; and the
failure of a I [5] the great commercial houses in Calcutta, in the
year 1833, was, unquestionably, a great calamity. They none of them
brought a particle of capital into the country, nor does India want a
particle from any country; but they _concentrated_ it; and had they
employed the whole, as they certainly did a good deal of it, in
judiciously improving and extending the industry of the natives, they
might have been the source of incalculable good to India, its people,
and government.[6]

To this concentration of capital in great commercial and
manufacturing establishments, which forms the grand characteristic of
European in contradistinction to Asiatic societies in the present
day, must we look for those changes which we consider desirable in
the social and religions institutions of the people. Where land is
liable to eternal subdivision by the law and the religion of both the
Muhammadan and Hindoo population; where every great work that
improves its productive powers, and facilitates the distribution of
its produce among the people, in canals, roads, bridges, &c., is made
by Government; where capital is nowhere concentrated in great
commercial or manufacturing establishments, there can be no upper
classes in society but those of office; and of all societies, perhaps
that is the worst in which the higher classes are so exclusively
composed. In India, public office has been, and must continue to be,
the only road to distinction, until we have a _law of primogeniture_,
and a _concentration of capital_. In India no man has ever thought
himself respectable, or been thought so by others, unless he is armed
with his little 'hukumat'; his 'little brief authority' under
Government, that gives him the command of some public establishment
paid out of the revenues of the State.[7] In Europe and America,
where capital has been concentrated in great commercial and
manufacturing establishments, and free institutions prevail almost as
the natural consequence, industry is everything; and those who direct
and command it are, happily, looked up to as the source of the
wealth, the strength, the virtue, and the happiness of the nation.
The concentration of capital in such establishments may, indeed, be
considered, not only as the natural consequence, but as the
prevailing cause of the free institutions by which the mass of the
people in European countries are blessed.[8] The mass of the people
were as much brutalized and oppressed by the landed aristocracy as
they could have been by any official aristocracy before towns and
higher classes were created by the concentration of capital.

The same observations are applicable to China. There the land all
belongs to the sovereign, as in India; and, as in India, it is liable
to the same eternal subdivision among the sons of those who hold it
under him. Capital is nowhere more concentrated in China than in
India; and all the great works that add to the fertility of the soil,
and facilitate the distribution of the land labour of the country are
formed by the sovereign out of the public revenue. The revenue is, in
consequence, one of office;[9] and no man considers himself
respectable,[10] unless invested with some office under Government,
that is, under the Emperor. Subdivision of labour, concentration of
capital, and machinery render an Englishman everywhere dependent upon
the co-operation of multitudes; while the Chinaman, who as yet knows
little of either, is everywhere independent, and able to work his way
among strangers. But this very dependence of the Englishman upon the
concentration of capital is the greatest source of his strength and
pledge of his security, since it supports those members of the higher
orders who can best understand and assert the rights and interests of
the whole.[11]

If we had any great establishment of this sort in which Christians
could find employment and the means of religious and secular
instruction, thousands of converts would soon flock to them; and they
would become vast sources of future improvement in industry, social
comfort, municipal institutions, and religion. What chiefly prevents
the spread of Christianity in India is the dread of exclusion from
caste and all its privileges; and the utter hopelessness of their
ever finding any respectable circle of society of the adopted
religion, which converts, or would-be converts, to Christianity now
everywhere feel. Form such circles for them, make the members of
these circles happy in the exertion of honest and independent
industry, let those who rise to eminence in them feel that they are
considered as respectable and as important in the social system as
the servants of Government, and converts will flock around you from
all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community. I have,
since I have been in India, had, I may say, at least a score of
Hindoo grass-cutters turn Musalmans, merely because the grooms and
the other grass-cutters of my establishment happened to be of that
religion, and they could neither eat, drink, nor smoke with them.
Thousands of Hindoos all over India become every year Musalmans from
the same motive;[12] and we do not get the same number of converts to
Christianity, merely because we cannot offer them the same
advantages. I am persuaded that a dozen such establishments as that
of Mr. Thomas Ashton of Hyde, as described by a physician at
Manchester, and noticed in Mr. Baines's admirable work on the _Cotton
Manufactures of Great Britain_ (page 447), would do more in the way
of conversion among the people of India than has ever yet been done
by all the religious establishments, or ever will be done by them,
without such aid.[13]

I have said that the great commercial houses of Calcutta, which in
their ruin involved that of so many useful establishments scattered
over India, like that of Kosi, brought no capital into the
country.[14] They borrowed from one part of the civil and military
servants of Government at a high interest that portion of their
salary which they saved; and lent it at a higher interest to others
of the same establishment, who for a time required or wished to spend
more than they received; or they employed it at a higher rate of
profit for great commercial and manufacturing establishments
scattered over India, or spread over the ocean. Their great error was
in mistaking nominal for real profits. Calculating their dividend on
the nominal profits, and never supposing that there could be any such
things as losses in commercial speculation, or bad debts from
misfortunes and bad faith, they squandered them in lavish hospitality
and ostentatious display, or allowed their retiring members to take
them to England and to every other part of the world where their
creditors might not find them, till they discovered that all the real
capital left at their command was hardly sufficient to pay back with
the stipulated interest one-tenth of what they had borrowed. The
members of those houses who remained in India up to the time of the
general wreck were of course reduced to ruin, and obliged to bear the
burthen of the odium and indignation which the ruin of so many
thousands of confiding constituents brought down upon them. Since
that time the savings of civil and military servants have been
invested either in Government securities at a small interest, or in
banks, which make their profit in the ordinary way, by discounting
bills of exchange, and circulating their own notes for the purpose,
or by lending out their money at a high interest of 10 or 12 per
cent. to other members of the same services.[15]

On the 16th of January we went on to Horal, ten miles over a plain,
with villages numerous and large, and in every one some fine large
building of olden times--sarai, palace, temple, or tomb, but all
going to decay.[16] The population much more dense than in any of the
native states I have seen; villages larger and more numerous; trade
in the transit of cotton, salt, sugar, and grain, much brisker. A
great number of hares were here brought to us for sale at threepence
apiece, a rate at which they sell at this season in almost all parts
of Upper India, where they are very numerous, and very easily caught
in nets.


Notes:

1. Kosi is twenty-five miles north-west of Mathura.

2. The story of the murder of Mr. Fraser is fully detailed _post_ in
Chapter 64. After the execution of Shams-ud-din, the estate of the
criminal was taken possession of by Government, and the town of
Firozpur is now the head-quarters of a sub-collectorship of the
Gurgaon district in the Panjab. The Delhi territories were placed
under the government of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjab in
1858.

3. The Mewati depredations had gone on for centuries. The Sultan
Balban (Ghias-ud-din, alias Ulugh Khan), who reigned from A.D. 1265-
87, temporarily suppressed them by punishments of awful cruelty,
flaying the criminals alive, and so forth. The Mewatis now supply men
to a few robber gangs, but are incapable of mischief on a large
scale.

4. Delhi was most nobly defended against Holkar by a very small force
under Lieutenant-Colonel Burn, who 'repelled an assault, and defended
a city ten miles in circumference, and which had ever before been
given up at the first appearance of an enemy at its gates'.

The battle of Dig was fought on November 13, 1804, by the division
under the command of General Fraser on the one side, and Holkar's
infantry and artillery on the other. 'The 76th led the way, with its
wonted alacrity and determination,' and forced its way into the
village in advance of its supports. The fight resulted in the total
defeat of the Marathas, who lost nearly two thousand men, and eighty-
seven pieces of cannon. The English loss also was heavy, amounting to
upwards of six hundred and forty killed and wounded, including the
brave commander, who was mortally wounded, and survived the victory
only a few days.

On the night of November 17, General Lake in person routed Holkar and
his cavalry, killing about three thousand men. The English loss on
this occasion amounted to only two men killed, and about twenty
wounded.

The fort of Dig, with a hundred guns and a considerable quantity of
ammunition and military stores, was captured on December 24 of the
same year. (Thornton, _History of British India_, pp. 316-19, 2nd
ed., 1859.)

5. Transcription note. This clause is not intelligible to the
transcriber. The character '1' or 'I' appears in the text. Some words
appear to be missing.

6. The author was grievously mistaken in supposing that India did not
require 'a particle' of foreign capital. The railways, and the great
tea, coffee, indigo, and other industries, built up and developed
during the nineteenth century, and still growing, owe their existence
to the hundreds of millions sterling of English capital poured into
the country, and could not possibly have been financed from Indian
resources. The author seems not to have expected the construction of
railways in India, although when he wrote a beginning of the railway
system in England had been made.

7. This sentiment is still potent, and explains the eagerness often
shown by wealthy landholders of high social rank to obtain official
appointments, which to the European mind seem unworthy of their
acceptance.

8. Few readers are likely to accept this proposition.

9. This clause is not intelligible to the editor. The word 'revenue'
probably is a misprint for 'aristocracy'.

10. The original edition prints, 'No man considers himself less
respectable', which is nonsense.

11. This sentiment reads oddly in these days of social democracy and
continual conflict between capital and labour.

12. The steady progress of Islam in Lower and Eastern Bengal, first
made apparent by the census of 1872, has been confirmed by the
enumerations of 1901 and 1911. The feeling that the religion of the
Prophet gives its adherent a better position in both this world and
the next than Hinduism can offer to a low-caste man is the most
powerful motive for conversion. See Dr. James Wise's valuable
treatise, 'The Muhammadans of Eastern Bengal' (_J.A.S.B._, Part III
(1894), pp. 28-63), and the Census Reports from 1872 to 1911.

13. The author's whimsical notion that a development of commercial
and manufacturing organization in India would cause converts to flock
from all parts, and from all classes of the Hindoo community, has not
been verified by experience. Much capital is now concentrated in the
great cities, and the number of cotton, jute, and other factories is
considerable, but Christian converts are not among the goods
produced.

14. The modern commercial houses bring a large proportion of their
capital from Europe.

15. The three Presidency Banks, the Bank of Bengal, the Bank of
Madras, and the Bank of Bombay, in which the Indian Government is
interested, are the leading Indian banks. The Bank of Bengal was
opened in 1806. No bank in India is allowed to issue notes. The paper
money in use is issued by the Paper Currency Department of the
Government of India, and the notes are known as 'currency notes'. The
issue of these notes began in 1862-3. (Balfour, _Cyclopaedia_, 3rd
ed., s.v. 'Bank and Paper Currency'). Much Indian capital is now
invested in joint-stock companies of every kind.

16. More correctly, Hodal.




CHAPTER 60


Transit Duties in India--Mode of Collecting them.

At Horal[1] resides a Collector of Customs with two or three
uncovenanted European assistants as patrol officers.[2] The rule now
is to tax only the staple articles of produce from the west on their
transit down into the valley of the Jumna and Ganges, and to have
only one line on which these articles shall be liable to duties.[3]
They are free to pass everywhere else without search or molestation.
This has, no doubt, relieved the people of these provinces from an
infinite deal of loss and annoyance inflicted upon them by the former
System of levying the Customs duties, and that without much
diminishing the net receipts of Government from this branch of its
revenues. But the time may come when Government will be constrained
to raise a greater proportion of its collective revenues than it has
hitherto done from indirect taxation, and when this time comes, the
rule which confines the impost to a single line must of course be
abandoned.[4] Under the former system, one great man, with a very
high salary, was put in to preside over a host of native agents with
very small salaries, and without any responsible intermediate agent
whatever to aid him, and to watch over them. The great man was
selected without any reference to his knowledge of, or fitness for,
the duties entrusted to him, merely because he happened to be of a
certain standing in a certain exclusive service, which entitled him
to a certain scale of salary, or because he had been found unfit for
judicial or other duties requiring more intellect and energy of
character. The consequence was that for every one rupee that went
into the public treasury, ten were taken by these harpies from the
merchants, or other people over whom they had, or could pretend to
have, a right of search.[5]

Some irresponsible native officer who happened to have the confidence
of the great man (no matter in what capacity he served him) sold for
his own profit, and for that of those whose goodwill he might think
it worth while to conciliate, the offices of all the subordinate
agents immediately employed in the collection of the duties. A man
who was to receive an avowed salary of seven rupees a month would
give him three or four thousand for his post, because it would give
him charge of a detached post, in which he could soon repay himself
with a handsome profit. A poor 'peon', who was to serve under others,
and could never hope for an independent charge, would give five
hundred rupees for an office which yielded him avowedly only four
rupees a month. All arrogated the right of search, and the state of
Indian society and the climate were admirably suited to their
purpose. A person of any respectability would feel himself
dishonoured were the females of his family to be _seen_, much less
_touched_, while passing along the road in their palanquin or covered
carnage; and to save himself from such dishonour he was everywhere
obliged to pay these custom-house officers. Many articles that pass
in transit through India would suffer much damage from being opened
along the road at any season, and be liable to be spoiled altogether
during that of the rains; and these harpies could always make the
merchants open them, unless they paid liberally for their
forbearance. Articles were rated to the duty according to their
value; and articles of the same weight were often, of course, of very
different values. These officers could always pretend that packages
liable to injury from exposure contained within them, among the
articles set forth in the invoice, others of greater value in
proportion to their weight. Men who carried pearls, jewels, and other
articles very valuable compared with their bulk, always depended for
their security from robbers and thieves on their concealment; and
there was nothing which they dreaded so much as the insolence and
rapacity of these custom-house officers, who made them pay large
bribes, or exposed their goods. Gangs of thieves had members in
disguise at such stations, who were soon able to discover through the
insolence of the officers, and the fears and entreaties of the
merchants, whether they had anything worth taking or not.

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We do not know the women's names, but their voices are quite distinct. All are pregnant. But while the first woman awaits the birth of her baby with a moon-like serenity, the other two are not so lucky. One, whose previous pregnancies have failed to go to term, is experiencing a heartbreaking late miscarriage; the other is a young student whose accidental pregnancy will end in her child being put up for adoption.

Sylvia Plath's only play was never intended for the stage, being broadcast instead on BBC radio in August 1962. Less than six months later, Plath killed herself, but not before the burst of astonishing creative energy that produced her extraordinary, terrifying Ariel poems.

Anyone who knows Plath's poetry will see the connection between Three Women and Plath's subsequent poems, particularly in the way she talks about the agony of childbirth, the rush of love for this tiny alien being, and both the wonder and wounded rawness of motherhood. It is a beautiful piece, full of startling imagery that draws you in through the sheer intensity of its femaleness, and because it so precisely articulates the emotions that are often thought but seldom voiced by women - certainly not in the early 1960s - about men, motherhood and our relationship to our bodies.

It's been 20 years since there has been an attempt at a professional stage version and - in a theatre world that happily accepts the poetic offerings of Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green, or the staged possibilities of The Waves, one of Plath's own inspirations for the piece, I see no reason why it shouldn't be brought to life. Sadly, it doesn't breathe here, in a production by Robert Shaw that is clearly a labour of love, but which never finds a way to give the internal a physical reality. Plath's poetry, like most babies, is more robust than it appears - and won't break if treated with a little less reverence and considerably more grit.

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