Studies in Literature and History
Marathas; but the period belongs to the first quarter of this century.
It purports to be a free translation from a manuscript given to the
author by a Hindu who had in his youth served with the Maratha armies,
and latterly fell in with the Pindaree hordes, from whom he heard
tales of their plundering raids. He eventually joins a band of
robbers, and leads a wandering, adventurous life in the hills and
jungles of the Dekhan, until the general pacification of the country
by the British permits or obliges him to settle down quietly. The
merit of the book consists entirely in its precise and valuable
delineation of the condition of the country when it was harried by the
freebooting Maratha companies, and in certain glimpses which are
given of Anglo-Indian life in those rough days; for the writer, unlike
Meadows Taylor, has no literary power, and can only relate accurately
what he has seen or has carefully gathered from authentic sources.
We have thus only two novels worth mention which have preserved true
pictures of the times before all the wild irregularity of Indian
circumstance and rulership had been flattened down under the
irresistible pressure of English law and order. The historical romance
has shared the general decline and fall of that school in Europe;
while as for the exact reproduction of stories dealing entirely with
native life, very few Anglo-Indians would now attempt it, for such a
book would find very scanty favour in England. Nearly all recent
Indian novels have for their subject, not native, but Anglo-Indian
society; the heroes and heroines, in war or love, in peril or pastime,
are English; the natives take the minor or accessory part in the
drama, and give the prevailing colour, tragical or comical, to the
background. One of the best and earliest novels of this class is
_Oakfield_, written about 1853 by William Arnold, a son of Dr. Arnold
of Rugby, who, after spending some years in one of the East India
Company's sepoy regiments, obtained a civil appointment in India, and
died at Gibraltar on his way homeward. Some pathetic lines in the
short poem by Matthew Arnold called _A Southern Night_ commemorate his
untimely death. The book is remarkable for the autobiographic
description, too austere and censorious, of life in Indian
cantonments, or during an Indian campaign, before the great Mutiny
swept away the old sepoy army of Bengal. It represents the impression
made upon a young Oxonian of high culture and serious religious
feeling by the unmannerly and sometimes vicious dissipation of the
officers' mess in an ill-managed regiment stationed up the country.
Oakfield, a clergyman's son, carefully bred up in Arnold's school of
indifference to dogma and strictness in morals, finds himself
oppressed by the hollow conventionality of religious and social ideas
at home, and sees no prospect of a higher level in the ordinary
English professions. He leaves Oxford abruptly for an Indian
cadetship, and sets out with the hope of finding wider scope for work
and the earnest pursuit of loftier ideals in India. He is intensely
disappointed and disgusted at finding himself, on joining his
regiment, among men who have very slight education and wild manners,
whose talk is coarse, who gamble, fight duels, dislike the country,
and care nothing for the people. The aims and methods of the
Government itself appear to him eminently unsatisfactory, being
chiefly directed towards such grovelling business as revenue
collection, superficial order, and public works, with little or no
concern for the moral elevation of the people. When his friends urge
him to study for the purpose of rising in the service, civil or
military, he asks: 'What then? What if the extra allowances have
really no attraction? I want to know what the life is in which you
think it good to get on. It seems to me that my object in life must be
not so much to get an appointment, or to get on in the world, as to
work, and the only work worth doing in the country is helping to
civilise it.'
We have here the interesting, though not uncommon, case of a youthful
enthusiast transported as if by one leap--for the sea voyage is a
blank interval--from England to the Far East, from a sober and
disciplined home to a loose society, from the centre of ancient peace
and calm study to a semi-barbarous miscellany of races under an
elementary kind of government. Ovid's banishment from Rome to the
shores of the Euxine, to live among rude Roman centurions and subject
Scythians, could have been no greater change, though Ovid and Oakfield
are not comparable otherwise. The sight of a great Hindu fair on the
river bank at Allahabad, as surveyed from the deck of a steamer,
strikes him with that ever-recurrent feeling of a great gulf fixed
between Europeans and natives: 'What an inconceivable separation there
apparently and actually is between us few English, silently making a
servant of the Ganges with our steam engines and paddles, and these
Asiatics, with shouts and screams worshipping the same river!'
He meets a cool and capable civilian, who expounds to him the
practical side of all these questions and administrative problems; and
he makes a few military friends of the higher stamp, who stand by him
in his refusal to fight a duel and in the court-martial which follows.
Then comes the second Sikh war, with a vivid description, evidently by
an eye-witness, of an officer's share in the hard-fought action at
Chillianwalla, and of the other sharp contests in that eventful
campaign. It is an excellent example of the skilful interweaving of
real incident with the texture of fiction, showing the clear-cut lines
and colour of actual experience gained in the fiercest battle ever won
by the English in India:
'The cavalry and horse-artillery dashed forward, and soon the
rolling of wheels and clanking of sabres were lost in one continual
roar from above a hundred pieces of artillery. On every side the
shot crashed through the jungle; branches of trees were shattered
and torn from their stems; rolling horses and falling men gave an
early character to this fearful evening.... The 3rd Division
advanced, with what fatal results to the gallant 24th Regiment is
well known.... Either by an injudicious order, or, as stated in the
official despatch, by mistaking a chance movement of their
commandant for a signal, the 24th broke into a double at a
distance from the guns far too great for a charge; they arrived
breathless and exhausted at the guns, where a terrific and hitherto
concealed fire of musketry awaited them. The native corps came up
and well sustained their European comrades; but both were
repulsed--not until twenty-one English officers, twelve sergeants,
and 450 rank and file of the 24th had been killed or wounded....
Oakfield counted the bodies of nine officers lying dead in as many
square yards; there lay the dead bodies of the two Pennycuicks side
by side; those of the men almost touched each other.'
The transfer of Oakfield to a civil appointment in no way diminishes
his dissatisfaction at the spectacle of a Government that has no
apparent ethical programme and misconceives its true mission:
'The Indian Government is perhaps the best, the most perfect, nay,
perhaps the only specimen of pure professing secularism that the
civilised world has ever seen since the Christian era, and
sometimes, when our eyes are open to see things as they are, such a
secularism does appear a most monstrous phenomenon to be stalking
through God's world.... When the spirit of philosophy, poetry, and
godliness shall move across the world, when the philosophical
reformer shall come here as Governor-General, then the spirit of
Mammon may tremble for its empire, but not till then.'
Yet, notwithstanding the author's solicitude for India's welfare, the
natives make no figure at all in his story; they are barely mentioned,
except where Oakfield denounces the unblushing perjury committed daily
in our courts; and one can see that he does them the very common
injustice of measuring their conduct by an ideal standard of morality.
Anglo-Indian officials leave their country at an early age, in almost
total ignorance of the darker side of English life, as seen in a
police court or wherever the passions and interests of men come into
sharp conflict. But this is just the side of Indian life that is
brought prominently before them, at first, as junior magistrates and
revenue officers, who sometimes do not care to look into any other
aspects of it; and in consequence they stand aghast at the exhibition
of vice and false-swearing. A London magistrate transferred to Lucknow
or Lahore would find much less reason for astonishment.
The same criticism applies, for similar reasons, to Oakfield's
unmeasured censure of the tone and habits prevalent among officers of
the old Indian army; he probably knew nothing of regimental life in
the English army sixty years ago, and therefore supposed the
delinquencies of his own mess to be monstrous. It must be admitted,
however, that morals and manners were loose and low in a bad sepoy
regiment before the Mutiny. No two men could have differed more widely
in antecedents or character than William Arnold and John Lang, whose
novel, _The Wetherbys; or, A Few Chapters of Indian Experience_, was
written a few years earlier than _Oakfield_. It deals with precisely
the same scenes and society, at the same period, in the form of an
Indian officer's autobiography. The book is clever, amusing with a
touch of vulgarity, yet undoubtedly composed with a complete knowledge
of its subject; for Lang was the editor of a Meerut newspaper, who
took his full share of Anglo-Indian revelry, and who knew the Indian
army thoroughly. Whereas in _Oakfield_ the tone rises often to
righteous indignation, in _The Wetherbys_ it falls to a strain of
caustic humour, and in the modern reader's mouth it might leave an
unpleasant taste; yet the verisimilitude of the narrative would be
questioned by no competent judge. As Oakfield fought at Chillianwalla,
so Wetherby fights in the almost equally desperate battle of
Ferozeshah, where the English narrowly escaped a great disaster; and
here, again, we have a momentary ray of vivid light thrown upon the
battlefield by a writer who had associated with eye-witnesses, though
he was not one of them. It is difficult to give an extract from this
part of the tale, because Lang's power lies not in description, but in
characteristic conversation; so we may be content, for the purpose of
bringing out the contrast between two very diverse styles, with a
specimen of his comic talent, as exhibited in the injunctions laid
upon her husband by the vulgar half-caste wife of a poor henpecked
officer just starting for the campaign:
'Well, then,' she continued, 'keep out of danger. If your troop
wishes to charge into a safe place, let 'em. _You_ don't want
brevet rank, or any of that nonsense, I hope. Make as much bluster
and row as you like, but for Heaven's sake keep out of harm's
way.... You need not write to me every day, but every third or
fourth day, for the postage is serious. If you should happen to
kill any Sikhs, search them, and pull down their back hair; that's
where they carry their money and jewels and valuables. A sergeant
of the 3rd Dragoons, like a good husband, has sent his wife down a
lot of gold mohurs and some precious stones that he found tied up
in the hair of a Sikh officer. And, by the by, you may as well
leave me your watch. You can always learn the time of day from
somebody; and if anything happened to you, it would be sold by the