“Ground of the Calcutta Cricket Club, 15th Jan’y”, a watercolour from 1861 by Percy Carpenter (1820-1895), showing a cricket match between the 68th Regiment of Foot (the Durham Light infantry) and Calcutta Cricket Club. Three years later, in 1864, this playing area was developed into what is now the world-famous Eden Gardens, a cauldron of cricketing passion with few rivals. It is named after the neighbouring pleasure-gardens established in 1841 in honour of Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, then Governor-General of India, who had nursed a daughter of local landowner Babu Rajchandra Das through a serious illness. This kind of co-operation and mutual sympathy was just what Burke, some sixty years before, had complained was too often lacking in British India.
Part 1 of 2
THE difference in favour of the first conquerors is this; the Asiatic conquerors very soon abated of their ferocity, because they made the conquered country their own. They rose or fell with the rise or fall of the territory they lived in. Fathers there deposited the hopes of their posterity; and children there beheld the monuments of their fathers. Here their lot was finally cast; and it is the natural wish of all, that their lot should not be cast in a bad land. If hoards were made by violence and tyranny, they were still domestic hoards; and domestic profusion, or the rapine of a more powerful and prodigal hand, restored them to the people.* With many disorders, and with few political checks upon power, Nature had still fair play; the sources of acquisition were not dried up; and therefore the trade, the manufactures, and the commerce of the country flourished.
But under the English government all this order is reversed. The Tartar invasion was mischievous; but it is our protection that destroys India. It was their enmity, but it is our friendship. Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day.
* That is, the poor were often given back at least some of the money that had been taken from them, either because their ruler happened to be generous, or because some more powerful king had conquered them and was trying to buy their loyalty. The Company, Burke suggested, did neither.
Précis
In 1783, Edmund Burke MP addressed the House of Commons with an eloquent plea to strip the East India Company of its powers in India. He compared the Company unfavourably with the Mughal Emperors who, he said, behaved badly but put down roots in India, and consequently tempered their vices because they had to live among the people. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
This unusual suspension bridge in Punalur, Kerala, was commissioned by the Government of Travancore during the British Raj. It was designed by Albert Henry and opened in 1877. It granted access to the heavily-wooded far side of the River Kallada, but rather ingeniously the wooden flooring was allowed to rattle when walked on, so that woodland animals would be afraid to cross it. Unfortunately, so were the people of Punalur. It is said that, to dispel their alarms, Henry and his family paddled a boat under the bridge and waited there carelessly while six burly elephants stomped across the bridge over their heads. The bridge fell into disrepair in recent times but has been sympathetically restored and is now a tourist attraction.
THE natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there, without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They have no more social habits with the people, than if they still resided in England. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage,* with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India.
With us no pride erects stately monuments which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced, and which adorn a country out of its own spoils. England has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain, to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by any thing better than the ouran-outang or the tiger.*
* A bird of passage is a migratory bird, one that does not reside permanently in a place.
* The orangutan is, of course, not a native of India, but this was a Bill concerning the whole East India Company, which had lively interests in Malaysia and right across the Far East. Britain’s administration of India did get better with the passage of time. Samuel Smiles, who quoted from this very speech, declared that with the coming of the railways in the 1850s, the English had at last done something for the Indians that the Indians could not have done for themselves: see Britain’s Best Gift to India. Indeed, if contemporary Indian historian Harsukh Rai is to be believed, British administration had improved out of all knowledge within twenty years of Burke’s speech: see Justice and Equity.
Précis
The British in India, said Burke, kept so aloof from the public that they were insulated from the effects of their own poor government. They took money out of the country but put nothing back in, neither bridges, nor schools nor even civic monuments, and might be dumb animals for all the good they had done there hitherto. (58 / 60 words)
