Part 1
THE VISUAL INSTRUCTION COMMITTEE OF THE COLONIAL OFFICE.
EIGHT LECTURES ON INDIA.
PREPARED FOR THE COMMITTEE
BY
H. J. MACKINDER,
Lately Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science: Author of “Britain and the British Seas.”
With Lantern Illustrations.
ONE SHILLING NET.
WATERLOW & SONS LIMITED, PRINTERS, LONDON WALL.
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1910.
480 Slides, 60 for each Lecture, have been prepared in connection with this book, and are sold on behalf of the Committee by Messrs. Newton & Co., 3, Fleet Street, London, E.C., from whom the books of lectures can also be obtained. The complete set of 480 Slides, in eight padded boxes, may be had for £50, or the Slides to accompany the several Lectures will be sold for Six Guineas each Lecture. Single Slides will not be sold. The series consists for the most part of views taken by Mr. A. Hugh Fisher, the artist who went to India for the purpose on behalf of the Committee. Some of them are photographs coloured by hand from sketches in colour prepared by Mr. Fisher, and some are colour photographs by the Sanger Shepherd process reproducing Mr. Fisher’s own sketches. There are also many maps in colour prepared by the Diagram Company.
The slides of this series are copyright.
ENTERED AT STATIONERS HALL.
THE VISUAL INSTRUCTION COMMITTEE.
APPOINTED BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES.
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF MEATH, K.P., Chairman.
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR CECIL CLEMENTI SMITH, G.C.M.G.
SIR JOHN STRUTHERS, K.C.B., LL.D., Secretary to the Scotch Education Department.
SIR PHILIP HUTCHINS, K.C.S.I., late Member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India.
SIR CHARLES LUCAS, K.C.M.G., C.B., of the Colonial Office.
SIR CHARLES HOLROYD, Director of the National Gallery.
H. F. HEATH, Ph.D., Director of Special Inquiries and Reports, Board of Education.
H. J. MACKINDER, M.P., late Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
W. H. MERCER, C.M.G., Crown Agent for the Colonies.
R. D. ROBERTS, D.Sc., Secretary of the Gilchrist Educational Trust.
PROFESSOR MICHAEL E. SADLER, LL.D., Professor of Education in the University of Manchester.
THE VISUAL INSTRUCTION COMMITTEE OF THE COLONIAL OFFICE.
The component parts of the British Empire are so remote and so different from one another, that it is evident the Empire can only be held together by sympathy and understanding, based on widely diffused knowledge of its geography, history, resources, climates, and races. It is obvious that if this knowledge is to be effective it must be imparted to the coming generation. In other words it must be taught in the Schools of the Empire.
In the Autumn of 1902, a Committee was appointed by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to consider on what system such teaching might best be developed. The Committee came to the conclusion that children in any part of the Empire would never understand what the other parts were like unless by some adequate means of visual instruction; and, further, that as far as possible the teaching should be on the same lines in all parts of the Empire. It was decided to make a beginning by an experiment on a small scale, and for this purpose to invite the three Eastern Colonies of Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, and Hong Kong to bear the expense of a small book of Lantern Lectures on the United Kingdom for use in the Schools in those Colonies. Other parts of the Empire were afterwards invited to have editions which would be suited to their own special requirements prepared at their own expense, and up to the present date editions have been issued for the Eastern Colonies, for the West Indies, for West Africa, for Mauritius, and for India. Editions are now in preparation for Canada and for South Africa.
The Committee, however, have always had in mind the preparation of illustrated lectures on the Colonies and India as well as on the United Kingdom. Their experience convinced them that if this part of the work were to be done as well as it could be done, it was advisable to have the illustrations prepared on a uniform system by a highly skilled artist or artists specially commissioned for the purpose. They were so fortunate as to interest in their work Her Majesty the Queen (then Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales), and through her powerful and gracious support, and that of Lady Dudley and a Committee of ladies who were good enough to collect a sum of nearly £4,000 for the purpose, they have been able to make a beginning of a work which will take some years to complete. The Committee desire to record their warm gratitude to Her Majesty, to Lady Dudley, and to the Committee of ladies for making this part of the undertaking possible.
The lectures contained in the present little volume are the first instalment of the work undertaken in connection with the Queen’s Fund. The Committee’s artist, Mr. A. Hugh Fisher, has travelled through India collecting material for the illustrative lantern slides. His sketches and photographs have been reproduced partly by the ordinary process in black and white, and partly by the Sanger Shepherd method in colour photography. Some of the slides have been coloured by hand after Mr. Fisher’s instructions. A series of maps has also been included, in order that the lessons of the lectures may be driven home.
The text of the lectures has been prepared at the request of the Committee by Mr. H. J. Mackinder, who has based his work on information placed at his disposal from many sources. The Committee believe that he has succeeded in presenting in their relative importance and proportion all the chief facts essential to the popular understanding of His Majesty’s Indian Dominions. It is, of course, obvious that no account confined within the narrow limits of the present lectures, of so wide and varied an Empire as that of India, can give a completely accurate picture of all the many important facts and questions that are referred to; but in order to reduce to a minimum the chance of giving misleading impressions, Mr. Mackinder has had the advantage of suggestions from several eminent authorities on the subject, and in this connection the Committee desire especially to thank Sir Walter Lawrence, Sir William Lee-Warner, Sir Theodore Morison, Sir Thomas Holdich, Sir William Bisset, Sir Philip Hutchins, Mr. G. W. Forrest, C.I.E., and others.
MEATH, Chairman of the Visual Instruction Committee
LONDON,
August, 1910.
Publications of the Visual Instruction Committee, issued on behalf of the Committee by Messrs. Waterlow & Sons Ltd.
=A.= Seven Lectures on the United Kingdom,
By Mr. H. J. MACKINDER. In the following Editions:—
=1. Eastern Colonies Edition, Sept., 1905.=
In use in Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, and Hong Kong.
=2. Mauritius Edition, June, 1906.=
In use in Mauritius.
=3. West African Edition, Sept., 1906.=
In use in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Southern Nigeria.
=4. West India Edition, Sept., 1906.=
In use in Trinidad, British Guiana, and Jamaica.
=5. Indian Edition, March, 1907.=
In use in the following Provinces:—Madras, Bombay, Bengal, the United Provinces, the Punjab, Burma, Eastern Bengal and Assam, the Central Provinces, the North West Frontier Province, and British Baluchistan.
=6. Indian Edition for use in the United Kingdom, Jan., 1909.= Price One Shilling net.
=Canadian and South African Editions are being prepared by direction of the Governments of the Dominion of Canada and of South Africa.=
=B.=—Eight Lectures on India. August, 1910.
By Mr. H. J. MACKINDER.
Price One Shilling net.
CONTENTS.
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PAGE.
LECTURE I. —Madras—the Hindu Religion 1
LECTURE II. —Burma—the Buddhist Religion 19
LECTURE III. —Bengal—the Monsoons 35
LECTURE IV. —The United Provinces—the 51 Mutiny
LECTURE V. —Bombay—the Marathas 66
LECTURE VI. —Rajputana—the Feudatory 82 States
LECTURE VII. —Delhi-the Muhammadan Religion 95
LECTURE —The Northwest Frontier—the 114 VIII. Sikhs
NOTE.—It is considered undesirable to overload this book with footnotes, and, therefore, this general acknowledgment is made of the indebtedness of the writer to various standard authors of whose works use has been made and quotations from which have in some cases been given.
LECTURE I.
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=MADRAS.=
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THE HINDU RELIGION.
India is an empire within an empire. There are four hundred million people in the British Empire, and of these three hundred million are in India. Though it is known by a single short name, India must not be compared with countries such as France and Germany. As regards both area and population it is the equal of half Europe, that half which includes all the countries except Russia. It is a land of many languages, some of them spoken by as many people as speak German or French. It is a land of several religions, differing more deeply than the sects of Europe It is, in short, a world in itself, of ancient civilisation, yet as the result of a wonderful modern history there is to-day peace from end to end of it, for though the systems of government are very different in different parts, yet everywhere the rulers, whether British officials or native princes, acknowledge the sovereignty or the suzerainty of His Imperial Majesty King George the Fifth.
[Sidenote: 1. Map of Journey, London to Colombo.] India lies one quarter way round the globe, or ninety degrees eastward from Britain. It is placed wholly in warmer latitudes than Europe, for the northernmost point of India is almost precisely in the latitude of the southernmost point of Europe. It occupies the same latitudes as the great western wing of Africa. If lifted bodily northward and placed upon the map of Europe, it would extend from Gibraltar, past Spain, France, and Britain to a point beyond the Shetland Isles.
The British Empire in India was won, organised, and defended in the days before steam. Access to it was possible only by sailing ship round the Cape of Good Hope, by an ocean path, that is to say, more than ten thousand miles long. The voyage took several months. To-day the British official, and soldier, and merchant go from London to Bombay, and the Indian student comes from Bombay to London in a fortnight. As we see on the map, the route is by rail to Dover, across the Straits of Dover, and by rail again through France to Marseilles. There the traveller joins the steamer which has carried a cargo, probably of cottons and machinery, through the Bay of Biscay. From Marseilles the track is through the two Straits of Bonifacio and Messina to the entry of the Suez Canal at Port Said. Here the mails are put on board, which have come through the Italian peninsula to Brindisi, and thence by rapid steamer. Thus it is only from Port Said through the Canal and the Red Sea to Aden that the vessel carries her complete burden—mails and passengers, and cargo. The redistribution commences at Aden. Our steamer happens to be bound, not for Bombay, but for Colombo and Australia, and the Indian mails and passengers are transferred at Aden to a local steamer, which crosses to Bombay.
From London to Colombo and Bombay is the naval high street of the British Empire. At Gibraltar, Malta, and Aden, where the waterways narrow and enemies might obstruct, are British garrisons and naval stations. Even the Suez Canal is partly owned by the British Government. A generation ago shares in that great undertaking were purchased by the United Kingdom for four million pounds sterling. To-day the British shares in the Canal are valued at more than thirty millions sterling, and each year a profit of more than a million pounds is paid into the British Exchequer. There is a garrison of British troops also in Egypt.
Colombo is one of the chief centres of communication in the world. Some day, when the Dominions beyond the seas have grown to be as rich and as populous as Britain herself, the way through the Mediterranean, to-day all important, will be reckoned as one of several equal threads of imperial power. Other great streams of traffic, India-bound, will then converge upon Colombo from the Cape in the southwest, from Australia in the southeast, and by way of Singapore from Canada in the east.
[Sidenote: 2. Map of the Indian Seas.] Colombo is, however, not in the technical sense Indian. It is the chief city of the beautiful island of Ceylon, which is about as large as Ireland. The Governor of Ceylon writes his despatches home not to the Secretary of State for India but to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, for Ceylon is a Crown Colony, not a Province of the Indian Empire. We will, therefore, leave Ceylon to be studied at some other opportunity, and will take the steamer which in a night crosses the Gulf of Manar to Tuticorin, on the Indian coast opposite.
As we lie in our bunks that night, while the ship ploughs the water in the dark, let us realize to what point on the vast surface of the globe we have travelled. A hundred miles away to east of us are the mountains of Ceylon, rising some eight thousand feet above the level of the ocean. A hundred miles to west is Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India, lying eight degrees north of the Equator. Let us not be deceived by the apparent smallness of space on the maps which we use—those eight degrees are nearly equivalent to the length of Great Britain.
From Cape Comorin two coasts diverge, the one known as the Malabar Coast northwestward for a thousand miles, the other known as the Coromandel Coast northward and then northeastward for a like distance. The surf of the Arabian Sea beats on the Malabar Coast, that of the Bay of Bengal on the Coromandel Coast. Both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal open broadly southward to the Indian Ocean, for the great Indian Peninsula narrows between them to a sharp point at Cape Comorin.
[Sidenote: 3. Map of Southern India.] The interior of the Indian Peninsula is for the most part a low plateau, known as the Deccan, whose western margin forms a steep brink overlooking the Malabar Coast. From the top of this brink, called the Western Ghats, the surface of the plateau falls gently eastward to a second lower brink, which bears the name of Eastern Ghats. Between the Eastern Ghats, however, and the Coromandel Coast there is a broad belt of low-lying plain, the Carnatic. Thus India presents a lofty front to the ship approaching from the west, but a featureless plain along the Bay of Bengal, where the trees of the coastline appear to rise out of a water-horizon when seen from a short distance seaward.
[Sidenote: 4. Approaching Tuticorin.] We wake at the dawn of the equatorial day which comes almost suddenly at six in the morning. There is bustle on board, for the launch is alongside which is to carry us ashore. The ship is riding in a yellow, turbid sea, and the land is distant some miles to the west, a low dark line along the horizon. At one point are white buildings, which gleam in the increasing light. We cross the broad shoal, and gradually the detail of the coast separates into a rich vegetation of trees, and a city whose most prominent object is a cotton factory with tall chimneys—strange reminder at the very threshold of our journey that we are entering a land which is in process of economic change. The United Kingdom underwent such a change a century ago, when spinning and weaving were removed from the cottage to the steam-driven factory.
[Sidenote: 5. Nearer approach to Tuticorin.] India is a land of cotton. The very name calico is derived from Calicut, a town on the Malabar Coast, which was a centre of trade when Europeans first came over the ocean. Lancashire now sends cotton fabrics to India, and the Lancashire power-looms compete seriously with the finer work of the hand looms of India. But India manufactures great quantities of her own coarser cottons, and such a mill as this at Tuticorin is doing more than Lancashire to change the occupations of the Indian people. The beautiful silks, however, worn by the better-to-do women of India are still manufactured by hand loom.
[Sidenote: 6. Landing at Tuticorin.] [Sidenote: 7. The Bazaar, Tuticorin.] [Sidenote: 8. Spinning Mill at Tuticorin.] [Sidenote: 9. Ducks at Tuticorin.] We land. Dark gesticulating figures surround us, scantily clad in white cotton. The morning sun casts long shadows, but there is a throng of people, for the work of India is done in the cool of the morning. The express train to Madras is waiting, but we have a short time for that first stroll, which leaves so deep an impression on the traveller setting foot in a new land. Tuticorin is a remote provincial city, a Dover or a Calais, on the passage from Ceylon. Here is a picture of its little bazaar with dark people in flowing white robes; there is a country cart in the street—ox-drawn. Next we have a nearer view of the spinning mill with a half-naked workman in the foreground. Under the shade of these leafy trees is a flock of ducks for sale. At every turn we see something characteristic, and must ask questions.
[Sidenote: Repeat Map No. 3.] We leave Tuticorin and travel for a hundred miles across the plain. It is a barren-looking country and dry, though at certain seasons there is plentiful rain, and crops enough are produced to maintain a fairly dense population. Far down on the western horizon, as we journey northward, are the mountains of the Malabar Coast, for in this extremity of India the Western and Eastern Ghats have come together and there is no plateau between them. The mountains rise from the western sea and from the eastern plain into a ridge along the west coast whose summits are about as high as the summits of Ceylon, that is to say some 8,000 feet. A group of small hills, isolated on the plain, marks the position of Madura, a hundred miles from Tuticorin. Madura is the seat of one of the finest temples in the land.
[Sidenote: 10. Plan of a South Indian Temple.] A Hindu temple in Southern India usually consists of a square building rising through several stories which grow gradually smaller. It is thus pyramidal in form, and is adorned with tiers of thronged sculpture. Within is a cell containing the image. The temple itself is surrounded by square and walled enclosures, one without the other; the great gateways through the successive walls are the chief glories of southern architecture. Though often larger than the central shrine, they are not unlike it in general appearance, but rectangular in plan, not square. They rise story above story to a summit ridge and are rich with thousands of sculptured figures. These great gateways are known as gopuras. In the courtyards enclosed between the successive walls are the homes of the priests, and usually a large water tank and a hall of a thousand columns. Some of these temples are very wealthy foundations.
[Sidenote: 11. The Tank of the Golden Lilies, The Temple, Madura.] [Sidenote: 12. The Temple, Madura.] [Sidenote: 13. A Gopura at Madura.] Here we have the tank of the Golden Lilies in the Temple of Madura, surrounded by a colonnade, with gopuras rising from beyond; and here another view in the same temple, and here a gopura photographed from near.
Hinduism is in its essence a spiritual religion. Western thought instinctively takes for granted the reality of outward things. Eastern thought instinctively takes for granted the reality of the “soul” or inward life. In the cosmology of the West there are two worlds, the natural and the supernatural; in the East the soul is the only real existence. The world-soul, or soul of Universal Nature, is God, and this Divine Soul is the supreme and fundamental reality; by comparison with it all outward things are shadows. Eternity is a vital aspect of reality. The present existence of the soul is not more certain than its pre-existence and its future existence. The present life is always brief and fleeting, but the past began and the future will end in eternity. Issuing from the Universal Soul and passing through æons of what may be called prenatal existence, the soul at last becomes individualised and enters on a career of conscious activity. Far from being dependent on the body, the soul takes to itself the outward form which it needs and deserves, and the body dies when it is deprived of the vitalising presence that animated it. The destiny of the soul is determined by its origin. It issued from the Universal Soul, and into the Universal Soul, its source, it must eventually be re-absorbed, though it may pass through innumerable lives on its way to the goal of spiritual maturity. “As it nears the goal the chains of individuality relax their hold upon it; and at last, with the final extinction of egoism, with the final triumph of selflessness, with the expansion of consciousness till it has become all-embracing—the sense of separateness entirely ceases, and the soul finds its true self, or, in other words, becomes fully and clearly conscious of its oneness with the living whole.” Such, in a few words, is the inner faith of the East.