99 Gholam Hossein next charges the English with the ignorance and folly which they showed in giving the zemindars their confidence. Everybody knew the zemindars to be "an incorrigible race. "It was a standing rule among the princes of these kingdoms that no trust is to be reposed in the words of a zemindar, not even in his most solemn promises and treaties." He calls them refractory, short-sighted, faithless, and malevolent. And yet "the English rulers have thought proper to compare the zemindars of this country to the zemindars and landholders of their own." These men, he says, whom the English repute men of honour and sentiment, are utterly unworthy of the power and influence with which the English entrust them, and all they do is to torment the subjects, destroy the country, and ruin the revenue. “The English rulers at the same time seem not to believe their conspiracies, or to have within their breast some scheme which to us ignorant men is yet a profound secret." Such is Gholam Hossein's criticism upon the famous and much debated policy which culminated in the Permanent Settlement of the Land Revenue of Bengal. How far that criticism was correct is a question which would carry us too far beyond the immediate scope of this paper. 66 The critic soon passes on to the subject of the Supreme Court of Judicature, established in 1774 in Calcutta by the Regulating Act. In inflicting punishment and retribution, he says, it is important to adhere to the modes in use in a country. Men will submit willingly to what is customary; but are distressed and disturbed by anything new, especially when they see any supplice unaccustomed." The Supreme Court is new to India and people cannot understand it. A whole life is needful to attend to its very long proceedings; till the decision is given, no one knows what is going on. If anyone complains before the court of another, the latter has to find security for double the amount of the demand, or else go to prison. Then again, petitions have to be in the English language, and the translator exacts a double guinea a line for the work; while a man is obliged to appear before this court in Calcutta, leaving his family and home, wherever in Bengal he may be living, when cited to attend. And that, too, though air and water in Calcutta are extremely bad? Finally, no one can possibly understand the English laws and statutes, for even if a whole lifetime be spent in studying them, they are so voluminous that it is impossible to learn them all. Such was the criticism of the Seir-ul-Mutaquherin upon the Supreme Court of Judicature which, as it interpreted its functions in its early days, was certainly in some respects a blessing very much in disguise to the people of Hindustan. In fact, it would be difficult to find a more illuminating short criticism of the Supreme Court as it existed under Chief Justice Impey's rule than this brief statement of Gholam Hossein. Its good points, which have been so admirably noted by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, and its future potentialities of good were naturally less obvious to him than its immediate disadvantages. From this abbreviated account of Gholam Hossein's remarks we notice the interesting fact that the main lines, true and false, which modern Indian criticism of British rule follows were laid down in the eighteenth century. Englishmen are, it is alleged, foreigners; they are ignorant of the language and country; they have no sympathy with the people, but are socially inaccessible; frequent transfers, furloughs and promotion prevent them from ever getting really to know the people; they have broken up the ancient economy, and created a new one which favours themselves; this legal system does not suit the country; they have utterly mismanaged the land question.* Such is the gist of the adverse criticism of Gholam Hossein. But it would be unfair both to the critic and the rule he criticised if we closed this paper without showing * Upon this last point we may however note that Gholam Hossein's criticism takes a different line from that of much modern Indian criticism; while his expressed distrust of the English system of law and law-courts probably now finds more support among English than among Indian publicists. that Gholam Hossein, even though he set out to curse, stopped occasionally to bless. 66 In a passage, of which the bulk is very severe criticism of the English, the critic turns aside to pay a tribute to the discipline and restraint of English armies. He tells how the Imperial Prince, afterwards Shah Alam II, led an expedition into Behar, where his troops and disorderly generals perpetrated every act of oppression and extortion imaginable; on the other hand, the people saw every day what a strict discipline the English officers of those days did observe, and how those amongst them that travelled carried so strict a hand upon their people as to suffer not a blade of grass to be touched or spoiled, and no kind of injury to be offered to the feeblest men. Then indeed the scales were turned, and when the same Prince made his second and third expedition into those parts, I heard the people load him with imprecations and pray for victory and prosperity to the English army." It is true that Gholam Hossein goes on to say that these feelings have since changed owing to subsequent bad government, but this does not invalidate his tribute to the restraint of the British troops on the march. In another place the writer first describes at length the corruption of the judges and officials of the Civil and Criminal Courts, and then breaks out into a sort of chant of thanksgiving: "Amidst such scenes of oppression on one side, and inattention on the other, we ought to praise God, that at the end of the year 1195 (A.D. 1782) the office of Daroga of the Court of Justice, together with the Fodjdary, was taken from the hands of the Indians and transferred to the English Gentlemen immediately; by which revolution the oppressions and sufferings of the people of this land have been upon the whole somewhat alleviated." In commenting upon the excesses of the Faujdar, an Indian functionary who exercised police and criminal jurisdiction over a very wide area, and used his position to oppress and extort,-Gholam Hossein is especially bitter. Time and again he breaks out into rejoicing because the English Gentlemen have taken upon themselves the duties of Faujdar. "Thanks be to God, that the Fodjdary office having been transferred to the English, one thorn has been thereby removed from the sides of the people of God." One of the instances is extremely instructive, since in a passage in which he denounces the English for partiality to their own countrymen and dependants, he goes on to lecture them on the duty of administering justice scrupulously impartially, and then suddenly and quite unexpectedly exclaims: "Thanks be to God, that this department also having been transferred to the English Gentlemen, the nails of the Indian Darogas of Justice have been curtailed, and the people of God have gained some release from their enormous sufferings." In a flash we see the patent fact that our critic has been judging the foreign ruler by a standard which he had to create out of his own imagination, or from idealised history, or from the lofty, though rarely realised, Asiatic conception of good government, and could not derive from his own every-day experience. British rule, being that of foreigners, had its drawbacks; but rule by Hindustanis qua Hindustanis was not necessarily more endurable, or even tolerable at all, at that period of the history of India when the Great Anarchy was drawing to its close in depopulation, decivilisation and utter ruin. Why should it be? An Indian ruler had indeed one advantage over the Englishman as a ruler in the late eighteenth century, in the fact that he was an Asiatic, and so entered more easily into his people's point of view. advantage did not in any sense consist in the fact that he was Indian; for in the eighteenth century there was no India, and he had often little, if any, more affinity with his subjects than De Boigne in the north, or Hastings in Calcutta. His The purpose of Gholam Hossein is criticism and not praise, so that a spontaneous tribute of this sort outweighs a good many pages of criticism. But even were it absent, we should have no quarrel with him. quarrel with him. When we remember the wretched and disorganised condition of Bengal, and indeed of the whole of India, during the middle of the second half of the eighteenth century, most of it the inevitable sequel to the decay of an established polity; when we begin to realise how slender was the equipment of special knowledge with which a handful of Englishmenmany of them young, few of them clever-undertook the stupendous task of giving law and government to a huge country, of whose people they knew almost nothing; when we recall the chronic anarchy which oppressed India, the famines which ravaged it, the utter and absolute disorganisation which had to be recreated into an ordered plan: shall we be surprised if Indians living in the land, many of them, like Gholam Hossein himself, claiming affinity and association with the ruling classes so recently displaced, found much in the work of these daring strangers to criticise? The wonder is that they found anything to praise; for British organisation was as yet too near in time to seem anything but disorganisation, British order as yet too young to seem anything but a lull in disorder, and British justice too strange and new to seem anything but a novel form of injustice.* Gholam Hossein's criticisms, despite the accuracy of some of them, are an admirable illustration of the truism that it is well nigh impossible to form a correct historical and political judgment except at a distance from the events judged. It seems worth while, at the risk of overloading the footnotes, to quote at length as a general commentary upon the criticisms, correct or incorrect, of Gholam Hossein, the admirable passage in which Keene comments on the salvation of India from the Great Anarchy, in order that we may be able to place the foregoing pages in the correct perspective. He says of later eighteenthcentury India :— The country A native cited by was practised "The country had almost ceased to be habitable by civilised men. . was in as wretched a condition as France after the Hundred Years War. Dow speaks of every species of domestic confusion. Villainy,' he adds, in all its forms: law and religion were trodden under foot; the bonds of private friendship and connection, as well as of Society and Government, were broken; every individual, as if in a forest of wild beasts, could rely upon nothing but the strength of his own arm.' · "To a similar purpose is the testimony of another witness cited by Colonel Tod, the historian of Rajputana :- The people of Hindustan at this period thought only of present safety and gratification. Misery was disregarded by those who escaped it, and man, centred only in himself, felt not for his kind. This selfishness, destructive of public and of private virtue, became universal after the invasion of Nadir Shah.' "The social degeneration went on almost to the end of the century. We are informed by Baillie Fraser, on the authority of Colonel J. Skinner, C. B., who had trailed a pike in the service of Mahadaji Sindia from about 1790 to 1803, that Hindustan was actually becoming depopulated. So reduced,' he said, 'was the actual number of human beings, and so utterly cowed their spirit, that the few villages that did continue to exist, at great |