India under Ripon: A Private Diary

India under Ripon: A Private Diary

I ought perhaps to have named this volume The Awakening of India, because it describes the condition of Indian things at the time of Lord Ripons viceroyalty, which was in truth the awakening hour of the new movement towards liberty in India, the dawn of that day of unrest which is the necessary prelude to full self-assertion in every subject land. The journey it records was made under circumstances of exceptional interest at an exceptional moment, and should be instructive in view of what has happened since. It contains a foreshadowing of events which are under our eyes to-day, and suggests a solution of problems which, after long waiting and with a timid courage, is gradually being accepted as official. The political situation in Lord Ripons time was as follows: Mr. Gladstone, when he came into office in 1880, found himself at the head of an immense majority in the House of Commons, pledged to ideas of liberty in the East of which he had himself been the foremost preacher. With regard to India he had formulated the Liberal creed in a single sentence: Our title to be in India, he had said, depends on a first condition, that our being there is profitable to the Indian nations; and on a second condition, that we can make them see and understand it to be profitable. His predecessors policy[2] had proved a failure. It had been one of imperial expansion, of reckless finance, and of administrative coercion. It had resulted in a disastrous frontier war, in an immense financial deficit, and in the exasperation of the educated native community. There had been a terrible famine, the severest perhaps of the century. Many millions of the agricultural peasantry had died or were reduced to a condition of semi-starvation. Famine, to use the words of a popular Anglo-Indian writer of the time, had become the horizon of the Indian villager; insufficient food the foreground. The forest laws, the salt tax, the ever increasing pressure of the revenue officers had driven some districts to the verge of revolt. The vernacular press, which would have denounced the Government as the cause of these evils, had been gagged in the towns; and disaffection, stifled in its expression but none the less real, was rife almost everywhere. The unrest was becoming, it was thought, dangerous. It was to remedy these evils, and to put the government of India on a footing of sounder economy, less war, and a closer confidence between rulers and ruled, that Lord Ripon was sent to India in the summer of 1880. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 49177
Author: Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen
Release Date: Jun 9, 2015
Format: eBook
Language: English