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Society
Sir
W. W. Hunter
The
Annalist of
The Silent Millions
Bankimchandra opens his Anandamath with a
graphic description of the village of Padachinha. It is a scene of utter
desolation caused by the great famine of 1770. As it happened in the
year 1176 of the Bengali calendar it is popularly known as “Chhiattarer
manwantar”. It was a time out of joint. The great Mughal empire was
in ruins and the British empire was yet to rise in its place. The
interregnum between the two was politically very unsettled.
Misgovernment under the so-called ‘diarchy’ or dual administration had
already made the common people’s life miserable. Now nature seems to
have chosen her moment to withhold her bounty from a province where her
bounty is proverbial. The monsoon, the mainstay of Bengal’s agriculture,
failed for two consecutive years and there was total failure of crops.
Food grains became scarce and the prices shot up beyond anybody’s reach.
The famine had started in its most virulent form The untold misery of
the people was compounded by the increased demand of land revenue and
the ruthless collection of a record amount in the very year when the
famine was raging most fiercely. No suitable relief measures were taken
and on the contrary hoarding was brazenly resorted to both by the
traders for profits as well by the government for its garrisons cantoned
at various strategic points. Inspite of orders to the contrary the very
people whose duty it was to provide succor to the starving population
themselves unscrupulously indulged in speculation. People died like
flies and as cremation of the dead had become a luxury which the
starving people could ill afford epidemic followed the famine in its
train. Worst of it all was that men were driven to feed on human flesh,
parties being formed to seize and eat solitary victims. One-third of the
population of Bengal is said to have perished. Once flourishing human
settlements in the countryside had turned into jungles and had become
haunts of wild beasts of prey. In living memory no other famine has been
as devastating as that of 1770.
The name Padachinha is fictitious but not so its story. In his childhood
Bankim heard it from his elders and by the time he attained manhood
Hunter’s The Annals of Rural Bengal had been published in 1868. The
Anandamath was to be published fourteen years later in 1882. The story
of the novel is set against the backdrop of this great famine so vividly
described by Hunter and the action takes place in the same district of
Birbhum. Bankim admits his debt to the Annals but few of us who have
read the Anandamath are familiar with this source. Yet it deserves our
wider familiarity because it is a historical document and a unique one
too. It is radically different from the kind of history which we are
required to study in schools and colleges. Commonly books of history
tell us the stories of kings and emperors and their heroic exploits -- a
lot of dates and boring facts – but rarely, if ever, tell the stories of
the common people. In India even this kind of history is a laborious
reconstruction from scanty facts. When it comes to rural India the
position is worse. In the words of Hunter, “Every county, almost every
parish, in England, has its annals; but in India vast provinces, greater
in extent than the British islands, have no individual history whatever.
Districts that have furnished the sites of famous battles, or lain upon
the routes of imperial progress, appear, indeed, for a moment in the
general records of the country; but before the eye has become familiar
with their uncouth names, the narrative passes on, and they are
forgotten … in India, one rural generation dreams out its existence
after another and all are forgotten”. In his dedicatory epistle Hunter
declared that his “business is with the people” and the pages of his
Annals “have little to say touching the governing race”. It was
therefore not a matter of mere courtesy that Max Muller hailed its
publication in the following very characteristic words: “It is a mighty
undertaking to write the history of a people rather than their rulers.
It is so in civilized countries, even in England. How much more in
India! A work of this kind will not, perhaps, interest people who cannot
bear history unless it is brought before them in the form of a sensation
novel, but it will be of great advantage to the political economist and
the statesman”.
But interestingly Hunter was the least likely person to be an annalist
of rural India. Son of a small-scale manufacturer of Scotland, Hunter,
having finished his university education, had in 1861 taken the just
introduced competitive examination, and passed out first amongst the 207
candidates. He thus belonged to that generation which arrived in India
after the Mutiny, the “competition-wallahs” as they were called by the
old hands who had had to undergo no such humiliating experience as a
competitive examination for their entry into the Company’s civil
services in India. They knew nothing of pre-Mutiny life which was
essentially medieval. They were already imbued with the spirit of
imperialism. On his first voyage out to India in 1862 Hunter was writing
to his fiancé about the political importance of Aden as “one of the keys
to our Indian Empire” and in the Mediterranean while the French had
Toulon and other fortified harbors on their coast the British had
strategic points like "Gibraltar, Malta and Corfu at the entrance, the
middle and extreme east of the Mediterranean”. Their training and an
increasing competition also strengthened in these people a strong sense
of caste. Young Hunter was writing, “It is easy to be a Company-man and
yet to be superior to the common run in an intellectual aspect but it is
impossible to be first-class – I mean the very first, one of a set of
men picked out from the whole country for their talents, and fritter
your evenings away in walking quadrilles and consuming ices. I aspire to
a circle far above the circle of fashion. I mean the circle of Power …
Until I can earn a position in that circle I do not choose to waste my
time filling up a lady’s drawing room or eating people’s corner dishes”.
Finally, though the financial prospect of a career in the Civil Service
was not such that after one’s days in the service one could return home
a ‘Nabob’ – laden with spoils and profits – as did many Company-men
during the early days of the British in India – yet it was still fair
enough and he wrote to his fiancé, “If God gives us health and long life
together we shall be rich, very rich, before we are fifty … Let us be
thankful to Heaven for its mercies”.
This young man’s perception of his career prospects admitted of no
ambiguity – he was conscious of his role in the promotion of the cause
of the Empire and his intellectual superiority to the common run. As a
thrifty Scotsman if he eventually did not become very rich he certainly
became financially well off. But today his name is not to be found in
the list of men who ruled India. By the quirk of destiny his aspiration
to enjoy power remained unrealized. During his service career he never
became a Magistrate of a District or a Secretary of a Department nor at
the end of it a Governor of some British Indian province. He started as
an annalist and remained an annalist to the last. And for that he is
still remembered while those of his colleagues who enjoyed the glamour
of power in their days and basked in the glory of ‘Rule Britannia’ have
mostly been forgotten. It is true that in his lifetime he was crowned
with many crowns but the one to which he had resolved to aspire forever
eluded him. As it turned out, Hunter, after a brief stay at the imperial
capital at Calcutta, was posted out as Assistant Magistrate to Suri, the
headquarters of the remote district of Birbhum, which was remote indeed
in those days of almost primitive system of transport and communication.
There he was put in charge of the district treasury and his boss, the
Collector, most probably a Company-man, with whom his relationship was
anything but cordial, overburdened him with duties which Hunter as
Assistant Magistrate was not supposed to do. In the treasury he stumbled
upon an “ancient press” which was never opened and it contained early
records of the British rule. Rummaging through those decaying papers he
was convinced that “these neglected heaps contain much that is worthy of
being preserved. For what trustworthy account have we of the state of
rural India at the commencement and during the early stages of our rule?
Eloquent and elaborate narratives have indeed been written of the
British ascendancy in the East, but such narratives are records of the
English Government or biographies of the English Governors of India, not
histories of the Indian people. The silent millions who bear our yoke
have found no annalist.” This discovery early on in life decided for
Hunter what future course his career would take. It will no longer be
the pursuit of power. His ambition from now on will be to be the
annalist of the silent millions. He began to ransack all kinds of old
records, collect local traditions and consult whatever scanty private
papers he could lay his hands on. In the meantime his newly-wed wife
joined him at Suri. She smilingly shared the literary labors of her
hardworking husband. At the end of the day which was usually long and
arduous she would take dictations from her husband and that is how the
Annals came to be first drafted. It was finalized by Hunter after
further research while on leave in Britain.
A little less than a century – 85 years, to be exact – after the great
famine of 1770 the district of Birbhum had featured in another momentous
event, the famous Santal Rebellion of 1855, which also forms the subject
matter of the Annals. The Santal, “one not easily” violent, to borrow
the words of Shakespeare’s Othello, “but being wrought, perplex’d in the
extreme”, rose in a body against his tormentors – the mahajans,
the banias, the zamindars, the corrupt amlas, the
police and the negligent sahibs in a gesture of despair and defiance. It
is perhaps the most tragic yet the most glorious chapter in the history
of that race. And in Hunter’s treatment of the theme not only his
generous sympathy but also his respect for this ‘manly race’ is not to
be mistaken. This is apparent from its comparison with Hunter’s source
-- the anonymous essay on the subject, published in 1856 in the
January-June issue of the Calcutta Review. Chapters III and IV of the
Annals are entirely devoted to the study of the Santal society and this
study will remain a classic.
The Annals was first published in London on the 4th of April, 1868. The
first man of mark to have praised it as a “mighty undertaking” was
Professor Max Muller. The reviews in the British Press were a long
chorus of praise. A few months before its publication Hunter had called
on his countryman ‘Tom’ Carlyle, but it is not known whether that
Victorian Jeremiah, who was largely responsible for the view that
history was the biographies of great men, ever read the book and if so,
what were his reactions. In any case the book was received with
universal eulogy and almost overnight its author became a celebrity. His
treatment of the Orissa famine in the Annals earned him letters of
thanks from the Bengal Government. Naturally therefore the young author
must have expected a warm welcome from his colleagues in Calcutta. But
his hopes were belied. After his arrival in Calcutta, he wrote to his
mother on 27th December, 1868 that they “had quite a public welcome”
indeed, but people hinted to him that he might expect trouble because of
his loyalty to Sir Cecil Beadon, the previous Lt. Governor, to whom he
had dedicated his Annals, “and that the natural jealousy which a close
service like ours feels towards a member who has distinguished himself
outside the regular line would be used as the instrument of my
discomfiture”. And this is how he describes his meeting with the Chief
Secretary: “I was rather in good spirits and confident of a friendly
reception. Judge of my surprise when, instead of saying something nice
about my Annals Mr.--- began a long tirade, and wound it up with an
offer of a Calcutta appointment inferior in pay and position to the one
I held two and a half years ago and below my standing in the service! If
I did not accept this, he added, I might expect to be sent back to the
subdivision, the post I had occupied in 1865”. We do not know if Hunter
knew at the time that in the straight-jacket bureaucracy he was perhaps
the first but certainly would not be the last Indian bureaucrat to find
the possession of some merit to be equivalent to, if not worse than, the
commission of a crime. Eventually however he found himself rescued by
the Government of India. That is a different story which we propose to
tell on some other occasion.
– Kumud Ranjan Biswas
March 2, 2003
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