The Garden of India; or, Chapters on Oudh history and affairs

Front matter

OR CHAPTERS ON OUDH HISTORY AND AFFAIRS. BY H. C. IRWIN, B.A. Oxon., B.C.8. LONDON: W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE. PUBLISHERS TO THE INDIA OFFICE. 1880. (A\X rigMs reserved,) LONDON : PRINTED BY W. H. ALLEN AND CO , 13 WATERLOO PLACE, S.W. TO MI BROTHER OFFICERS OF THE OUDH COMMISSION I BEG LEAVE TO INSCRIBE THIS LITTLE BOOK WITH A PROFOUND SENSE OF ITS MANY DEFICIENCIES BUT IN THE HOPE THAT HOWEVER WIDELY SOME OF THEM MAY DISSENT FROM NOT A FEW OF THE OPINIONS I HAVE VENTURED TO EXPRESS THEY WILL AT LEAST BELIEVE THAT THESE ARE INSPIRED BY A SINCERE LOVE OF THE PROVINCE AND THE PEOPLE WHOSE WELFARE WE HAVE ALL ALIKE AT HEART. a " Garden of India ! fading flower ! Withers thy bosom fair ; State, upstart, usurer devour What frost, flood, famine spare." A. H. H. " Ce que [nous voulons] c'est que le pauvre, releve de sa longue decheance, cesse de trainer avec douleur ses chaines hereditaires, d'etre uu pur instrument de travail, une simple matiere exploitable Tout effort qui ne produirait pas ce resultat serait sterile ; toute reforms dans les choses presentes qui n'aboutirait point a cette reforme fonda mentale serait derisoire et vaine."

Lamennais. " Malheur aux resignes d'aujourd'hui ! " George Sand. " The dumb dread people that sat AU night without screen for the night, All day without food for the day, They shall give not their harvest away, They shall eat of its fruit and wax fat : They shall see the desire of their sight, Though the ways of the seasons be steep, They shall climb with face to the light, Put in the sickles and reap." A. C. Swinburne. CONTENTS. TkBV

Chapter I

— A Bird's-eye View . . . 1 CHAPTEE LT.— A few Facts and Fioures . . 16 CHAPTEE LIL— Early Oudh History and Legend 62 CHAPTEE IV.— The Nawabi [1720-1856] . . 77 CHAPTEE V— Annexation . . . .156 CHAPTEE VI. — Fifteen Months of Zami'ndari' Policy [1856-1857] . . . . . 178 CHAPTEE VII.— Ten Years of Taluqda'ri' Policy [1858-1868] 191 CHAPTEE VIII.— Conclusions .

CHAPTER I.

a bird's-eye view. If the reader were gifted with telescopic powers of vision, and could take his stand at sunrise some bright morning in early April on a certain wind-swept hill-side, almost exactly 82° E. longitude and 23° N. latitude, which is very vividly present before my mind's eye at this moment, he would see before him, sloping gently southward to the Ganges, the great plain of Oudh. Behind him would rise in green, tumbled masses the pine-clad hills of Naipal, shutting out the distant glories of the snowy range. At his feet, and stretching far away on either hand to east and west, he would see a broad belt of primæval forest — the shrunken remnant of that mighty wood, the great Gandharb Ban, which once covered the country north of the Sarjii river up to the hills — intersected by a gleaming line where the waters of the Eapti glisten brightly in the morning sunlight.

Here only in Oudh may still be tasted, though in diminished measure, the indescribable charm, which no one who has once known it can ever forget, of the wild, free, irresponsible life of the forest. Life has not many better things to offer in the way of purely natural pleasure than it bestows on a hard-working Anglo-Indian who, having fairly earned a month of holiday by eleven months of honest toil in court-house or in tent, can resort to these happy hunting-grounds, and abandon him self for a season to the bliss of an existence such as Brown ing has sung of in " Saul " : — " Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock, The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool silver shock Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the [tiger] is couched in his lair."

Think of the awakening in the early twilight from such slumber as only a couch in the forest, after a long day in the howdah, can afford, to see the morning star growing pale in the green sky before the gathering flush of the dawn, and to taste in anticipation the coming bliss of a long, ob jective, irresponsible day ! Think, next, of the exquisite plunge into the blue dancing ripples of the river, as it comes racing down from the hills over tree trunk and boulder ! Hard to believe that it is the same stream whose steady murmur lulled us to sleep overnight, as we lay with half closed eyes watching it shimmering past in the starlight. Strike out boldly, and lend yourself without fear to the cool fresh embrace of its mimic waves. No dread of crocodiles here to mar your rapture as you " Try the water with delighted limbs."

Lower down the stream the elephants are enjoying to the uttermost their morning bath, lying stretched out in uncouth abandon, and uttering subdued grunts and squeals of delight, while their mahouts clamber about their huge persons, and scrub their rugged hides. Then come the saunter through the camp, the inspection of the horses, and the alfresco breakfast, followed by the arrival of the wise old shikari who went out overnight, and has now returned with sure khabar of a tiger's whereabouts. Then the long slow march of elephants in line, winding their way to the distant cover, through deep forest glades where the spotted deer scurry away unscathed by random bullet, skirting noble streams wooded to the water's edge, crossing rugged ravines and sandy nullahs, over broad grassy plains with no sign of human presence save, at wide intervals, the gipsy camp, or the frail hut of the catechu gatherer, or the wandering herdsman with his buffaloes.

And when the great swamp is reached, and the beat has begun, and every howdah is swaying to and fro like a ship at sea, as the labouring elephant ploughs his oozy way through the tall crackbng reeds, in whose cool wet depths the jungle king lies dreaming of that succulent young heifer, the remains of whose tell-tale carcase are still lying not three hundred yards off — why, then, you must indeed be blase if your heart does not beat quickly and your blood tingle as you grasp your favourite old smooth-bore and lean forward, eager to catch the first glimpse of the black and tawny stripes. And when the mighty game is afoot, and the low wooded hills all round echo to the quick peals of volleying thunder, the smoke of which hangs heavily among the reed-tops, and after a mad charge among the elephants that scatters half of them to right and left like rabbits, the great cat sinks with a sullen roar, never to rise again, and when — but, ah, well !

We must not linger too long over the pleasant memories of this " simple and violent " Use, for it is with far other scenes, for the most part, and with other modes of being, that we have to deal in the pages that are to come. So let us transfer ourselves back to our perch on the breezy hill-side, and look forth again, resolutely dismissing all thought of the forest and its charms, or retaining them only as a cool green back-ground to the dusty, quivering heat and stress of the great panorama beyond. There it lies, the great plain ! with its dim myriad memories dating back from before the earliest dawn of history, ancient home of strange long-forgotten dynasties of abori ginal husbandmen, or Scythian nomads " ranging trackless fields," who here lived out their rude anarchic lives for many a slow far-off century, before the inroads of the Rajput hordes from the north and west, followed hard by the pur suing armies of Islam, crushed their weaker organisations, 1 * and made them bondsmen and herdsmen and hewers of wood and drawers of water, unto this day.

There it lies, the great plain ! a land of narrow fields and wide rivers, of open barren tracts, and great single trees, and dense mango groves, of jungle patches, and shallow reedy lakes, and dry watercourses, aud rugged ravines worn by the rushing rain torrents. And what sort of life is it, you may ask, that is led by the scantily clad, dusky dwellers in those groups of mud built, thatch-roofed, creeper-covered houses that dot the country so thickly — the men who are irrigating their fields from tank and channel, the children herding cattle on the bare-looking grazing-grounds, the women with their water vessels clustering round the village well ? And it must, I fear, be answered that theirs is, for the most part, a dim, slowly moving, and too often a poverty-stricken and hunger bitten life, a life of small observances and petty supersti tions, a narrow round of struggle with the rent-collector and the village usurer, enlivened only by the rare excitement of a marriage-feast, or a pilgrimage to some quasi-religious fair.

They are a much-enduring, little-complaining race, these earth-tillers, " men to much misery and hardship born," who, blessed indeed in that they expect little, yet even of that little too often disappointed, wear away their lives from hand to mouth and year to year, " Muttering across the barley bread In daily toil and drearihead." This is not a pleasant sketch of the condition of the rural masses of Oudh, but I do not think that it is, so far as it goes, an unfaithful one, or drawn in too sombre colours. " Tales of rustic happiness," as Coleridge has told us, are too often but Pernicious tales, insidious strains, That steel the rich man's breast, And mock the lot unblest, The sordid vices and the abject pains That evermore must be The doom of ignorance and penury." That, however, the poorer, i.e. the great majority of the pea santry are, as a rule, consciously or acutely miserable, may be safely denied ; and this is, perhaps, the most conso latory reflection which a study of their condition can sug gest.

They are fortified against suffering by the most effec tive of all anæsthetics, that of never having known anything much better than their present lot. Were it not so, however, were they really as wretched as they apparently ought to be, the day of their deliverance might, perhaps, be more nearly at hand than it is. For it is a truth of very wide application that the main agent in the world's working is pain. In the history of every people, it has been said, there is a stage of transition between barbarism aDd civilisation, which always seems more bleakly miserable than either. This stage has not yet been fully entered on by the mass of the Oudh peasantry. These masses, however, are by no means the whole of the rural population. In spite of their preponderating numbers, they are what in England would be called a residuum.

There still exists in Oudh a peasant aristocracy, a class of yeomen, consisting of high-caste Hindus with a sprinkling of Musalmans, many of the latter being converts from Hinduism, and retaining most of the characteristics of their ancient faith. These are further removed, as a rule, from actual want of food and clothing than the ordinary low-caste cultivators, and far less bovine and unconscious of their condition, far more keenly alive to its disadvantages, and less inclined to accept the situation as it is, capable of higher pleasures, and exposed to keener pains. With their fine physique, and still retaining much of their old high and turbulent spirit, passionately clinging to the remnants of their rights in the soil, at ceaseless war with the rent court and the rent-collector, these are the men to whom the task of administration owes much of its difficulty, and still more, perhaps, of its interest.

If they are hard to govern, they are worth governing. And it may, perhaps, be not unfairly said that the interest which they have for us is their own, but that the difficulties which we find in governing them are mainly of our creation. For we have here no ardent aspirations for national independence, no enthusiastic hostility to contend against. The Oudh yeoman can hardly be said to have a political consciousness. What he does beyond all question care for, what he is often ready to give his own life, or take the lives of others, in order to retain, is his land, or the land which once was his. Cœteris parihus — a large assumption — he would, as an individual, doubtless prefer to be ruled by a go vernment of his own race and creed. But the effective force of his preference is so slight, and his power of combination with any larger number of his fellows than are to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of his own village so small, that no government which secured him in the undisturbed pos session of his fields at a light rent, and in most other respects left him to himself, would have anything whatever to fear from him.

His desires can hardly be called immoderate. They in clude a mud-walled house, roofed with tiles or thatch, such as might be built for Es. 50 or 60 ; a couple of pounds of flour daily, with a modicum of oil and spices, for his own consumption, and for his wife and children in proportion, say 8 lbs. for an average household ; a moderate wardrobe for himself and his family, of which the prime cost might be from Es. 40 to 50 ; half-a-dozen brass waterpots and cooking dishes ; two or three yoke of bullocks, worth from Es. 20 to 50 a yoke ; a milch buffalo, a few rude agricultural imple ments, a ploughman whom he feeds and clothes at a cost of Es. 18 or 20 a year, and who is often a hereditary serf, and, perhaps, an ambling cow-hocked pony which would be dear at Es. 10 — such or something not very unlike it, is his notion of comfort.

He wants, in fact, a stock of possessions worth from Es. 300 to 400, and an income, after his rent is paid, of from Es. 150 to 200 a year. An Oudh yeoman thus en dowed would be considered well-to-do, or, as he himself would phrase it, khush. In addition to this, custom demands that he should be able to spend something like a year's in come on the marriage of each of his daughters, a feat which he rarely accomplishes without getting into debt. This is, no doubt, reprehensible, but considering that it is the only extravagance of his life, and that it is enforced by a rigorous dastur, of the stringency of which it is difficult for a non- Asiatic mind to form an adequate conception, it may perhaps be forgiven him. Let the opinion of the Dakkhan Eiots Commission be noted to the effect that " undue prominence has been given to the expenditure on marriage and other festivals as a cause of the ryot's indebtedness.

The expenditure on such occasions may undoubtedly be called extrava gant when compared with the ryot's means ; but the occasions occur seldom, and probably in a course of years the total sum spent in this way by any ryot is not larger than a man in his position is justified in spending on social and domestic pleasures." This remark is as applicable to the north as it is to the south of the Jamna. Moreover, it should be remembered, though it is commonly forgotten, that the greater part of this outlay is not wasted, but consists of an actual transfer of hard cash, or cattle, or household furniture from the father of the bride to the father of the bridegroom, or vice versa, according to the relative position of the par ties. It is regarded as an investment for the benefit of the boy or girl, as the case may be, and differs but little in prin ciple from the dowry and marriage settlements which are not absolutely unknown in lands further west.

Altogether, the Oudh yeoman's scheme of expenditure, his standard of living, can scarcely be deemed extravagantly luxurious or in urgent need of reduction. What he requires to realise it is the undisturbed possession of, say, 25 to 30 acres of average land, at a rent varying according to the circumstances of the locality, from Es. 2 to 3 an acre. Considering that agricul tural produce is generally more than twice as cheap, the out-turn per acre seldom half as large, and the rate of in terest from three to six times as high as in England, can this be called an immoderate demand ? Thus far concerning the Oudh cultivator and the Oudh yeoman. But a much more august personage, far more widely known to fame, remains to be delineated. Need it be said that that personage is the Oudh Taluqdar? The Taluqdari body forms the most prominent, though not, of course, the most intrinsically important feature of the agri cultural system of Oudh.

It may be roughly divided into three classes. 1. Feudal Chiefs.— -These are almost entirely Eajputs— some few of whom have been converted to Islam — and are either heads of clans, entitled to be called Eaja, or de scended from leaders of offshoots of clans, and known by the honorific appellations of Babii, Bhya, or Thakur. These had all undeniable rights in the soil at the time of annexa tion in 1856, which must have been recognised by any Government, whatever its speculative opinions as to the ideally best form of land tenure, so long as it admitted the existence of private property in the land at all. For all the feudal chiefs possessed a greater or smaller number of villages or portions of villages, in which their rights of ownership were undisputed. These formed the nucleus round which they had in troubled times accumulated — sometimes by force, sometimes by collusion with the offi cials of the native government, sometimes by purchase, some times by bond fide agreement with the zamindars, — a num ber of other and previously independent villages.

It was over these latter, principally, that the land war raged so long and so fiercely in our settlement courts. But of this hereafter. Ancestral lands, it may be here observed, are commonly known as bapans ; purchased land as molans ; and land acquired by force or fraud as dabans. The latter term is nearly, if not quite, as common as the two former, though it has not, like them, found its way into Mr. Car negy's latest publication ; perhaps because it was not con sidered sufficiently " technical " to be recognised in a "kachahri." 2. " Mushroom " Taluqdars. — These were generally either officials of the King of Oudh's Government, who made use of their uncertain but, while it lasted, practically unrestrained power to get together an estate for themselves ; or capi talists, who acquired village after village by giving secu rity for the embarrassed proprietors.

When the latter failed to discharge the revenue demand, thenlands were made over by the Nazim or Chakladar to the sureties. A footing once gained in this way was very often maintained for many years previous to annexation, so that the application of our twelve years' law of limitation barred the claim of the original zamfndars. Taluqdars of this class are generally either Musalmans or Eayaths. But the largest and most conspicuous specimen of a " Mushroom " estate is at present in, or on, the hands of a Deputy Commissioner as manager on behalf of a Brahman proprietor. 3. Loyal Grantees, or Khairkhwdhs ; literally, well-wishers. — These are mainly Panjabis, who were given estates in re ward for their services during the Mutiny. They are some times profanely styled "Carpet-baggers," and though not unfrequently good landlords, as Indian notions of a good landlord go, are still generally regarded by the people some what in the light in which American Southerners regard the Northern leeches who prey upon them, or as Irish peasants regard an English capitalist who manages his estate without much reference to Irish ideas.

The grantees, however, as being mainly an exotic and not very numerous class, and being almost confined to two districts, Eai Bareli and Bah raich, need not here be discussed at any length. Even this brief sketch suffices to show that the Taluq dars are by no means a homogeneous body, and that they differ widely in race, birth, religion, and habits. There is, indeed, perhaps only one point common to them all without exception. They are all, as Hamlet puts it, " spacious in the possession of dirt," a peculiarity which they share with every other body of large landlords known to history. There is still, moreover, an undeniable difference, speaking gene rally, in the attitude of the people towards these three diffe rent classes. Tet these differences should not, I think, be recognised in any steps that may hereafter be taken towards modifying the system and its working.

The practical ground for this opinion is that the differences themselves are yearly decreasing. Feudal sentiment, if nowhere actually dead, is certainly on the wane ; and it seems highly probable that in no very long time the relations between each Taluqdar and the under-proprietors and tenants on his estate will depend almost entirely on the mode, beneficent or otherwise, in which he employs the great power over them which his posi tion necessarily gives him, and not to any appreciable extent on the mode by which he attained that position, whether as the descendant of a long line of chieftains, or as the son or grandson of a lucky revenue farmer or speculative capitalist. From an abstract point of view, again, the relation of all Taluqdars alike to the British Government and their claims upon it are based solely and simply on their sannads, and on our acts and proclamations since the Mutiny, which abrogate any distinctions between them that previously existed, except such as are specially recognised by us in the sannads themselves or otherwise.

"We owe them all alike a faithful observance of our promises, so long as they observe their engagements, and we owe none of them a jot or tittle more than this. None of the existing Taluqdars can well be said to have received less at our hands than he was entitled to, and if some have obtained more, that is no reason for now yielding anything more to those, if any such there be, who have received only what was their due. If I dwell on this point with what may seem needless prolixity, it is be cause there has been noticeable in some quarters a tendency to insist on the gulf that separates the " Chieftain " from the mere Taluqdar — (which is no doubt true and interesting as a historical fact) — without stating the supplementary fact that the distinction is one on which no practical action can now be advantageously taken.

It is a sorrowful admission to have to make, that we have fallen into an irretrievable blunder, and have by our own act cut ourselves off from all hope of ever settling the land question of Oudh in an ideally satisfactory manner. But the done thing cannot be undone, and it only behoves us to accept as loyally and solve as wisely as we may the problem on the condition under which it has been handed down to us. Now, however, before venturing any further iuto the mazy imbroglio of Oudh land controversy, let us try to form something like a concrete conception of the Oudh Taluqdar as he is in the flesh and outside the Blue Books. Come with me, and let me introduce you to my friend Babu Sidha Singh of Sarawanpur, chief of a cadet but long separately established branch of the great Bais clan. His ancestors emigrated northwards from Baiswara some four or five centuries ago, drove out the Bhars, or whoever the aborigines were, and mastered the country about Sarawanpur, which was then chiefly forest, with occasional patches of cultivation, but is now mostly under the plough, with insignificant strips of jungle interspersed.

There is his house, that irregular, nondescript building, partly tile-roofed, partly thatched, sur rounded by a high fence of thick bamboos, and with a weedy uneven approach, leading to a lofty square-topped gateway, the rough wooden doors of which are studded with iron nails, and are surmounted by a rude painting of a very scaly fish on each side. The fishes are the arms of the Mu hammadan kingdom of Oudh, and correspond to our lion and unicorn. Our approach has been already announced to the master of the house, who hastens out to greet us, and escorts us into a good-sized courtyard. We take our seats in a verandah on the proffered cane stools, while our host sits down on his takhta, or large square wooden bench, and talks in his broad Doric patois of the crops, the new road that is being made from Sarawanpur to the head-quarters of the district at Banaoganj, the ravages of the wild pigs and nilgai in the neighbourhood, and other kindred topics, much as an English farmer would talk under similar circumstances.

Meanwhile his servants, and a few neighbouring zamindars who had been smoking a morning hookah with him when we arrived, stand or sit around us, and contribute an occa sional remark to the conversation. He is still a fine-looking maD, the Babii, with his tall, well set, stalwart frame, somewhat inclining to corpulence though it be, and his keen yet sturdy Aryan face, close shaven ex cept for a large white moustache. Five and twenty years ago, in the stirring lawless times when every man's hands had to keep his head unbroken as best they might, he was a bold rider and a keen swordsman, and could drive his own elephant as well as any man on this side the Ganges. Then, too, he was adored by his clansmen, a body of four or five hundred sturdy Eajputs, living here and there in the sur rounding villages, who always rallied round him as their con necting link when there was a Nazim to be passively, or a detachment of the king's troops to be actively resisted ; and accepted as a not wholly unbeneficent law of nature by the low-caste cultivators in his own special group of some thirty or forty villages.

Of these latter he was the undisputed proprietor, though the same tenants went on paying the same rents for the same land from generation to generation. With the internal affairs of the forty or fifty other villages held by his clansmen he had, in an ordinary way, little or nothing to do. They generally paid their revenue through him, and presented him with a yearly offering in cash and kind, varying according to the size of their village, in token of his lordship. In short, he was generally accepted by his clansmen as their primus inter pares, and by his tenants as their earthly providence, and all things worked smoothly enough, so long as the Government officials allowed them to do so. Things, however, have changed a good deal since then. But little real alteration was made in the status quo by the summary settlement which followed immediately on annexation.

Sidha Singh retained his own undisputed villages, and those of his clansmen were settled with them directly. He grumbled somewhat at this arrangement, but his harvest offerings were spontaneously continued to him by the now independent zamindars, and things were finding their level when the Mutiny broke out. Our friend the Babu took no very active share in the disturbances which followed. He stayed at home, for the most part, and awaited the course of events. He would have done more wisely had he dili gently searched the highways and hedges if haply he might find a fugitive Englishman to whom to give shelter and solace. It would have been the best investment of hospi tality he ever made in his life, as not a few Taluqdars are now in a position to testify. Not being far-sighted enough for this, however, he sat still, except when he indulged in the prosecution of a long-standing feud, which had been tempo rarily checked by annexation, with the neighbouring Eaja of Sazishabad.

He went into Lucknow in obedience to the proclamation of amnesty, and under the new policy of Lord Canning, who was " in the giving vein " that day, was re cognised as proprietor of the whole eighty villages which now constitute the Sarawanpur taluqa, instead of some five and thirty only, as before. Of his clansmen, some have retained proprietary possession of their sir lands only, i.e. of the fields cultivated with their own ploughs, subject to payment of a rent fixed for a term of thirty years by the settlement courts. Others, more fortunate, have been decreed what is called a subsettlement of their villages, which means that they retain the management of the whole village in their own hands, but have to pay to the Taluqdar, in addition to a considerably enhanced Government revenue, a percentage of from 10 to 25 per cent, on that revenue, as his share of the profits, instead of their former nominal offerings.

To this they markedly object ; and as he, not unnaturally, in sists on payment, and has even in some instances had resort to the rent courts to enforce it, a considerable coolness has arisen between him and many members of his brotherhood. Even where there has as yet been no actual breach, the relations between them are what diplomatists would call strained. Even the mere tenants are not quite as disposed as formerly to yield implicit obedience ; and he, being a somewhat arbitrary old gentleman, with no notion of allowing any opposition to his wishes, is less inclined to a policy of conciliation and parwarish. All this may be a step to wards a higher stage of civilisation, but its present tendency is undeniably towards increased friction. Unlimited freedom of contract, and unrestrained liberty to do what one wills with one's own, are excellent things, no doubt ; especially where there is a certain degree of equality between the contracting parties, and where "one's own" is unencum bered by any rights or claims, legal or moral, of others.