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Authors: Arthur Herman
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of the city. He found the viceroy “very kind and easy-going.” Dufferin’s children had just enjoyed a birthday party, complete with band, magician, and elephant rides. 11 Elephants notwithstanding, life in Barrackpore, and in the viceroy’s summer residence in Simla (where Dufferin was building a magnificent Viceregal Lodge complete with ballroom for eight hundred people), looked to visitors far more like the Home Counties than India. Croquet on the lawn, tea in the afternoon, Gothic churches standing beside houses built in the Tudor timbered style: it must have seemed to Randolph like England in a dream.
But in Calcutta itself Randolph could not escape the darker side of British rule. Local police were rounding up the city’s water carriers to send them to the Sudan, where the British Army was organizing an expedition to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. For these poor low-caste Hindus, it meant separation from their families and almost certain death in the desert. Randolph told his mother that one poor wretch saw him standing nearby and threw himself at the English lord’s feet, begging not to be sent, until the police dragged him screaming away.
The whole incident shocked Lord Randolph and made him “very angry.” He confessed that it “goes far to explain why we make no progress in popularity among the people. The arrogance or rather self-complacency of Indian officials is beyond all belief.” He was “shattered” by the “great gulf between the government and the natives,” he said: “the government know less than nothing of the native mind,” and “refuse to allow for a moment that anyone outside their circle can know anything.” At the same time he praised the Bengali intellectuals he met as “equal to any European in information, extent of reading, and public spirit.” Surely these were men with whom the British could form some sort of partnership for India’s future. 12
On February 22 Randolph reached Benares, India’s holiest city. He took a boat down the Ganges and could observe the other gulf between the Raj and India’s masses: the religious one. Along the riverbanks thousands were bathing as “part of their religion,” he wrote, as they had done since time immemorial. “The water is very dirty, but they lap it up in quantities, as it is very ‘holy.’” Then he saw the ghats with burning funeral pyres set along the bank, where the Hindu dead were cremated, the darkly burning fires sending thick clouds of smoke heavenward as relatives wept and prayed. “There were five bodies burning, each on its little pile of faggots,” he told his mother; “the whole sight was most curious, and I am going again this morning to have another look.” 13
On the whole, he found his experience in India sobering. On his way back to Bombay, he wrote a melancholy letter to General Frederick Roberts, whom he had met in Hyderabad. “After a century or so of rule you have so little convinced (not the bulk of people) but the leaders of the people of its excellence and merits,” he warned, “that any great reverse from the Russians would leave you powerless.” 14 Less than a week later, on March 20, 1885, he was on a steamship headed back to London.
By now he knew there was a growing political crisis at home. Irish Fenians had set off a bomb in the House of Commons on January 24; Khartoum had fallen to the armies of the Madhi, and Gordon had been killed on February 21. On board ship Randolph had time to reflect on all he had heard and seen. He thought about “how incredibly strong and at the same time incredibly slender, our position in India is.” An all-powerful government cut off from the people it ruled; a Western-educated native elite that felt slighted and betrayed; a British community bristling with prejudice and fear; above all, a country that after a century of British rule was still a world apart, with its ancient religious rituals and darkly burning funeral pyres fading into the night. At
But in Calcutta itself Randolph could not escape the darker side of British rule. Local police were rounding up the city’s water carriers to send them to the Sudan, where the British Army was organizing an expedition to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. For these poor low-caste Hindus, it meant separation from their families and almost certain death in the desert. Randolph told his mother that one poor wretch saw him standing nearby and threw himself at the English lord’s feet, begging not to be sent, until the police dragged him screaming away.
The whole incident shocked Lord Randolph and made him “very angry.” He confessed that it “goes far to explain why we make no progress in popularity among the people. The arrogance or rather self-complacency of Indian officials is beyond all belief.” He was “shattered” by the “great gulf between the government and the natives,” he said: “the government know less than nothing of the native mind,” and “refuse to allow for a moment that anyone outside their circle can know anything.” At the same time he praised the Bengali intellectuals he met as “equal to any European in information, extent of reading, and public spirit.” Surely these were men with whom the British could form some sort of partnership for India’s future. 12
On February 22 Randolph reached Benares, India’s holiest city. He took a boat down the Ganges and could observe the other gulf between the Raj and India’s masses: the religious one. Along the riverbanks thousands were bathing as “part of their religion,” he wrote, as they had done since time immemorial. “The water is very dirty, but they lap it up in quantities, as it is very ‘holy.’” Then he saw the ghats with burning funeral pyres set along the bank, where the Hindu dead were cremated, the darkly burning fires sending thick clouds of smoke heavenward as relatives wept and prayed. “There were five bodies burning, each on its little pile of faggots,” he told his mother; “the whole sight was most curious, and I am going again this morning to have another look.” 13
On the whole, he found his experience in India sobering. On his way back to Bombay, he wrote a melancholy letter to General Frederick Roberts, whom he had met in Hyderabad. “After a century or so of rule you have so little convinced (not the bulk of people) but the leaders of the people of its excellence and merits,” he warned, “that any great reverse from the Russians would leave you powerless.” 14 Less than a week later, on March 20, 1885, he was on a steamship headed back to London.
By now he knew there was a growing political crisis at home. Irish Fenians had set off a bomb in the House of Commons on January 24; Khartoum had fallen to the armies of the Madhi, and Gordon had been killed on February 21. On board ship Randolph had time to reflect on all he had heard and seen. He thought about “how incredibly strong and at the same time incredibly slender, our position in India is.” An all-powerful government cut off from the people it ruled; a Western-educated native elite that felt slighted and betrayed; a British community bristling with prejudice and fear; above all, a country that after a century of British rule was still a world apart, with its ancient religious rituals and darkly burning funeral pyres fading into the night. At
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