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The
Indian 'Domesday Book'
and Sir W.W Hunter
It is
one of the strangest of ironies of history that the foundations of the
greatest empire in this subcontinent should have been laid, not by an
Alexander or a Caesar, or even by a Napoleon or Wellington, but by a
band of merchant adventurers. They came to this country as suppliants
seeking leave to trade and none of the eighty city merchants who had met
in the Founder’s Hall in London four hundred years ago on September 24,
1599, to establish the East India Company, ever dreamt that their
commerce one day would expand into one of the largest empires that the
world has ever seen. When such a miracle did indeed happen, their
mercantile measuring rod, in the words of Rabindranath, overnight
transformed itself into a ruler’s sceptre. By what devious ways of
treachery, intrigue and chicanery they became the lords of a distracted
land is common knowledge today, but what is not so well known is by what
means their grip over this country, precariously tenuous in the
beginning, ultimately developed into an iron vice that lasted for, and
could not be broken in, nearly two long centuries.
Victories and conquests are dazzling and thrilling events which easily
catch our eyes. This is perhaps because they give a kind of vicarious
satisfaction to the pugnacity inherent in all of us. Consolidation of
such conquests by wise and intelligent administration is, on the other
hand, a quiet affair and rarely engages our serious attention. The
mailed and mounted knight of olden days, jousting with his shield and
his sword or lance, or even a modern day bemedalled general appeals to
our romantic imagination, whereas the man who silently works out at his
desk away from public gaze the prosaic details of day-to-day
administration, is a dull and diminutive figure. One is a hero whom we
adore and worship, while the other is a drudge whom we are apt to ignore
and relegate outside the limelight of history. We hardly consider even
for a moment that what is won by the brawn of the one is made secure by
the brain of the other. But for the labours of a statesman all the sound
and fury of the swordsman on the field of battle would in the end
signify nothing. Their happy union in one person is indeed a rarity. In
history great conquerors have been many but empire builders or even
founders of kingdoms few. We often forget that if an Alfred or Akbar was
great in wars he was even greater in peace. There were many contenders
for the place vacated by the Mughals, but it was the British who
ultimately emerged successful. It was not merely their luck and pluck
which made it possible but because in their case conquest and
consolidation went almost hand in hand.
Their initial administrative measures were, however, tentative and
experimental. This was bound to be so, for they were as yet groping in
the dark. A perfect example is the Permanent Settlement of 1793 which
was opposed by John Shore as sufficient information regarding the land
system was yet to be ascertained. The land system is only one aspect,
but the land itself with its almost limitless vastness and endless
variety presented a daunting challenge to the inhabitants of a tiny
island who had come from a different clime and belonged to a different
race whose religion and social customs were also altogether different.
For them to gain a workable knowledge of such an alien country was not
an easy task It was not to be found conveniently in one place. Abul
Fazl’s Ain-I-Akbari was there, it is true, but the information it
contained was not as detailed and comprehensive as was necessary for the
kind of administration which the British had a mind to introduce in this
country. If they were ever to retain the possession of it, the Company
therefore felt, it was urgently necessary to collect information about
it. Within four years of their getting the Dewani the Court of Directors
issued in 1769 their first of a series of instructions to their servants
in India to make a statistical survey of the newly acquired territories.
It was not to be merely an overview but a thorough survey in the
strictest sense of the term. An idea of how thorough it was to be can be
gained from the instruction which was issued in 1807 to Dr. Francis
Buchanan-Hamilton who was entrusted with the survey. It was to cover the
topographical account of each district including its soil, climate,
plains, mountains, rivers, natural resources, harbours, towns,
subdivisions, history and antiquities, the people and their material
conditions, health, education, religion, agriculture, trade and
commerce, industry etc. James Rennell, their first Surveyor-General, in
the preface to his Memoirs of a Map of Hindoostan, published in 1788,
bears ample testimony to this thoroughness as well as to the sincerity
of purpose of the Company. He praises it for its employment of
geographers and surveying pilots who were provided with necessary
astronomical instruments and its “holding out of encouragement to such
as should use them”. And these, according to Rennell, “indicate, at
least, a spirit somewhat above the mere consideration of Gain”. He also
boasts of the fact that while the British had no “good chart to direct
its fleets towards its own coasts” “the soundings on the coasts of
Bengal are better known than those in the British Channel”.
Nor was the Company niggardly in its allocation of funds for carrying
out such surveys. A tidy sum had already been spent on the scheme and
much information collected but it failed to get the task accomplished in
one hundred years of its rule preceding the passing of the Indian
administration to the British Crown in 1858. Even after this date
sporadic attempts were made without any concrete results. It was left to
the genius of one man to accomplish the job. He was Sir William Wilson
Hunter of the Bengal cadre of the ICS. A dispatch of 23rd August, 1867,
from the Secretary of State, had directed the compilation of a gazetteer
of the territories under British administration. In 1869 Hunter was
entrusted with the job. A comprehensive plan for preparation of
gazetteers under central authority submitted by Hunter in 1871 was
approved by the Government of India. Within four years Statistical
Accounts of different provinces began to appear and by 1881 compilation
in respect of all the provinces were completed. This was followed in
quick succession by the publication of The Imperial Gazetteer in 1881
and The Indian Empire: The History, People and Products in 1882. At the
final stage gazetteers of each and every district of this vast empire
were to be compiled. In Bengal this could be completed in 1925 with the
publication of the district gazetteer of Faridpur.
Hunter gloriously succeeded where others had laboured long but failed.
And destiny too seems to have reserved it for him. We have already noted
in Sir W.W.Hunter, The Annalist of the Silent Millions that he was the
least likely person to be a compiler of gazetteers. A post-Mutiny
‘competetion-wallah’ and conscious of his ‘class’ and intellectual
superiority, he, in common with most of his colleagues in the ICS,
perceived his career prospects to be the fulfillment of an imperial
mission, sharing its power and glamour and securing his own financial
future. We have also related how his career took a turn from the usual
course of that of an ICS officer on his chance-discovery of some old
records in his first place of posting. This discovery inspired him to
write The Annals of Rural Bengal which made him instantly famous. But
the same Bengal government which had sent him two congratulatory letters
for his treatment of the Orissa famine in his Annals, was now determined
to demote and humiliate him when destiny again intervened. The same day
that the Bengal Chief Secretary had, after treating him to a long
tirade, offered him “a Calcutta appointment inferior in pay and
position” to the one which he had held two and a half years ago, Lord
Mayo, the Governor-General, handpicked him and put him on special duty
in the government of India. The object obviously was to get the
statistical survey completed by him. The new post of Director-General of
Statistics was to be created for him two years later in 1871. At this
unexpected turn of events great must have been the disappointment of
those who were eager to see this fledgling bureaucrat’s wings suitably
clipped for his youthful indiscretion of trying to distinguish himself
outside the regular line of the service so early in his career. For
Hunter’s seniority was only of seven years when he got this new
appointment and what could not be done in a century he did within the
space only of twelve years. An idea of the gigantic nature of his task
may be formed from the accounts given by Hunter himself in his prefaces
to A Statistical Account of Bengal and The Imperial Gazetteer. While
remaining in overall charge of this huge operation he kept himself
directly responsible for compilation in respect of the two most
difficult provinces, Bengal and Assam.
How he went about his job Hunter has narrated in his prefaces, but what
he has omitted to tell, perhaps out of modesty, are the difficulties he
had to face in doing it. He had only a skeleton establishment to assist
him in his job which consisted in manual handling of a huge mass of
materials without the aid of any of the mechanical devices easily
available to a modern day bureaucrat. He had to be always on the move
and travelling in India in those days was quite hazardous and time
consuming. He had also to spend a considerable part of his time for
research not only in this country but also in Britain. Besides, he used
to suffer from some chronic ailments which at times incapacitated him
for any serious business. But what seem to have been most discouraging
to him were the people he had to deal with and their attitude towards
him and his work. Some of his colleagues who were senior to him in the
service and occupied positions of power must have felt it annoying and
irritating to report to, and frequently answer the queries of, a
relatively junior officer like Hunter. This kind of situation always
tends to create problems in a highly hierarchical bureaucratic
organization and this particular case could not have been an exception.
In such circumstances he had to resort to persuasion and diplomacy. His
work must have also been considered by many as useless or, at any rate
not as important as the actual work of governance. To them Hunter was a
sort of gadfly. In his two-volume Men Who Ruled India, Phillip Woodruff,
himself a later day ICS, nowhere mentions Hunter and has just a single
sentence to spare on gazetteers. The impression one gathers from that
racy account is that pig-sticking is far more important a virtue that
goes to make one a good ruler or administrator. A warm hearted person
Hunter made many friends, but his enemies were not few who envied him
for his phenomenal success and fame both inside and outside the small
bureaucratic world. A typical small character of this small world knew
in his heart of hearts that "a dog's obey'd in office", that although in
appearance "the great image of Authority" he was in reality "a poor
player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard
no more"; and that the gloss of his glamour owed to no inherent worth of
his own and would peel off like old paint once he left the so-called
important posts or retired.
The compulsions of his shallow nature
therefore made him hanker only after promotion, pelf, power and pomp.
Himself incapable of any great deed which earns one lasting fame, he
found a kind of perverse pleasure in denigrating and slighting people
like Hunter who possessed that Victorian 'high seriousness' in a good
measure and a sense of mission in life. Such pettiness must have filled
Hunter with bitterness and in one of those heavy moments he wrote to his
wife in his letter of 19th July, 1881: "The discouragement and slights
proceeding from pure ignorance which I have had to endure made me
wearied and miserable before half the day is over ..... I keep a smiling
face with a very heavy heart for I intend to win. It is easy enough to
gain great success by my work so far as the opinion of the public, the
publishers, and the competent critic is concerned. But it will give me a
bitter pleasure to win a victory over the cynical ignorance of these
poor tape worms who have eaten into the vitals of so many able men. I
must bear them in order to be able to completely despise them." In the
end it was Hunter who won. His unique achievement brought him
recognition and fame in his own life time, and now that the pageant of
the Empire has passed time has mercilessly swept away those "poor tape
worms" into total oblivion but Hunter still lives on in his works. He
needs nobody's eulogy or apology, for, "Eclipse is first, and the rest
nowhere" --- this famous comment of Macaulay about Boswell, that prince
of biographers, is equally applicable to Hunter in gazetteer literature.
Even the concluding lines of Garrick's epigram On Johnson's Dictionary
would not be inappropriate –
"And Johnson, well-armed like a hero of
yore
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more."
Hunter has beaten one and all and he has
no parallel. But such a large claim cannot go undisputed. Nine centuries
ago from today William of Normandy, after conquering England at Hastings
in 1066, had taken certain measures to strengthen his position and break
the powers of the barons; one of these was to cause in 1085 a survey to
be made of his kingdom. His clerks made such a thorough job of it that
not a single 'hide' of land in the whole kingdom remained unaccounted.
It gained such a reputation of accuracy that soon it came to be known as
the 'Domesday Book' i.e. as final as the Last Judgement against which
there could be no appeal. Though the survey was for the specific purpose
of consolidation of the monarch's power, it recorded certain incidental
information that have ever been sought after by historians and
antiquarians. Somewhat similar is the case with Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari.
Though each is a pioneering marvel of its time, yet none of them is as
comprehensive as the gazetteers of Hunter in terms of the vastness of
the geographical area covered as well as the variety of information
collected. Nearer in time, a century before Hunter, his countryman Sir
John Sinclair, had compiled the Statistical Account of Scotland which
also falls short of the mark by the same counts.
The basic object of the Domesday Book was to make an accurate assessment
of the material resources of the conquered territories for securing the
power of an alien conqueror. Neither the conqueror nor his cohorts ever
dreamt of exploiting these resources to enrich their own homeland
France. Instead they made the conquered land their home and became
gradually naturalized to ultimately enrich the racial stock of Britain.
The case of the British in India was otherwise. To them India was only a
colony. The ultimate object of their statistical survey was economic
exploitation of this country to the maximum extent possible. In addition
to the mechanism of mercantilism, the so-called 'Home charges' became a
brazen item of the British Indian budget. Hunter's brief was therefore
clear and well-defined but he exceeded it. Besides the information
needed to serve this ulterior object of the empire, he collected
information which only a historian or antiquarian would love to collect.
A mere statistician would have sufficed to meet the imperial needs. But
Hunter was much more than a statistician – he was a historian. He did
not remain satisfied with the collection of information regarding the
material resources of the empire alone; with a rare loving care he also
collected as much as possible information about our society and culture
which are not incidental but germane to his statistical accounts.
And he did it with full knowledge and purpose. In his preface to the
Imperial Gazetteer he calls it the true history of the people. He had
also very painstakingly collected a rich store of our so-called
traditions, which, however, he was not allowed, unfortunately for us, to
include in his accounts. How great a loss has this caused us has not
been nor will ever be known. For these traditions, truly speaking, are
folk history – in the poet's words, "the short and simple annals of the
Poor" told by our "rude forefathers" and handed down from generation to
generation through the ages. They are not tales about heraldry, of which
one could boast, nor of pomp and power, but about the "homely joys" and
sorrows and "destiny obscure" of the simple rural folk who lived a
placid life "far from the madding crowd". They are not scholarly tomes,
buttressed with footnotes, references and cross-references, but are oral
legendary heritage of the community. The learned historian, fond of the
grandeur and the high drama of the rise and fall of empires, kingdoms
and dynasties, dismisses them "with a disdainful smile", caring little
about the true history of the common people buried in them. They are not
to be found trimly stacked on the shelves of a library but "by the
wayside" and it is there where Hunter sought them, for he felt that "if
the history of India is ever to be anything more than a record of
conquest and crime, it must be sought for among the people themselves".
But his labour of love was lost. The Victorian Gradgrinds, in their
concern for facts and things verifiable factually, rejected them, while
they themselves "poured forth so vast a quantity of information that the
industry of a Ranke would be submerged in it, and the perspicacity of a
Gibbon would quail before it" so that Lytton Strachey had to comment in
despair, "the history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we
know too much about it". Much of this information was worthless and only
of passing interest. Half a century before Strachey expressed his views
about the Victorian historiography, Bankimchandra, in the course of a
book review, had commented how an insignificant incident like the
fowling expedition of a Briton was regarded as a historical event—'Sahebra
jadi pakhi marite jan, taharo itihas likhita hay'. The Victorian
obviously lacked that first requisite of a historian, as recommended by
Strachey in such circumstances, -- "ignorance, which simplifies and
clarifies, which selects and omits". To our mind the ignorant masses
seem to possess this qualification in some intuitive way so that the
traditions communally authored by them are "short and simple", omitting
what is irrelevant and selecting what is of abiding interest. For
example, the state of Bengal in transition during the 18th century has
nowhere been so vividly pictured as it has been done in that famous
couplet of a Bengali cradle song:
"Chhele ghumalo para juralo Bargi elo
deshe
Bulbulite dhan kheyechhe khajna debo kise?"
'Hushed the child sleeps and quiet is the
neighbourhood now, for the Bargis (Maratha raiders) have descended on
our land; the bulbulis have eaten away our crops, how shall we pay our
land tax?' Hunter recognized the historical value of these traditions
like few else. He realized that gems of historical truth often remain
hidden under heaps of apparent rubbish. Judged by the standards of
fashionable history our Epics and Puranas, likewise, are mere old wives'
tales, but they are tales of deep historical truths. That is what is
meant when, in Rabindranath's poem, Narada assures Valmiki,
"Kavi taba manobhumi
Ramer janamsthan Ayodhyar cheye satya jeno".
(Know this my poet, the Ayodhya of your
poetic vision is more real than the birth place of Rama). This view of
history will certainly sound obscurantist to our scientific historian,
but it may be asked of him, "Is not his history the history of the
purely academician?" Even in countries with high rates of literacy how
many outside the cloisters of the academies and universities bother
about this kind of history? What perhaps matters most in the real world
is the way the common people actually perceive historical events in
their lives. However much the historian may argue that Mir Jaffar was or
was not a traitor, can he change the popular view of that character
being an archetypal traitor? Is it not therefore worth his while to find
a way of teaching the uninitiated masses history the way they would love
to learn it and thus make history a living force in the common man's
life? His marshalling of facts with accurate dates and other details
will otherwise bore them as any dry disputation always does.
"I aspire to a circle far above the circle of fashion. I mean the circle
of Power" – thus had young Hunter written to his fiancé even before he
set his feet on Indian soil. Fortunately for us, this aspiration of his
remained unrealized. For, if not Hunter, who else would have given us
The Annals of Rural Bengal or A Statistical Account of Bengal and cause
to be compiled the statistical account of other provinces of British
India, which are in essence the faithful history of this country of a
time when the old order was changing yielding place to new? No other
member of the ICS of the time was better qualified to do it. He had a
scholastic bent of mind. As a student in Bonn and Paris he had learnt
Sanskrit. His habit of study was not desultory but disciplined. In his
own words, "Whenever I read up a subject I become so interested in it
that I go into the minutest points rather as if I intended to write a
book than to stand a general examination. Never do I attack a subject
without writing what would make a bulky pamphlet". The foremost of his
qualifications was however his love for this country and a generous
sympathy and respect for its people, whom he called a "fallen race",
implying that the state of their society has not been bad throughout
history and that every civilization has its rise, growth, decay and
degeneration. This is in sharp contrast with the vulgarly arrogant and
imperialistic view that the Indian was a barbarian and it was the white
man's burden to civilize him. To Hunter the Santals and the hillmen of
the western frontier of Bengal were a 'manly race'. He witnessed among
the poor villagers stricken by the famine of 1866 "touching scenes of
self-sacrifice and humble heroism". During the relief operations he saw
his "subordinate native officers, about eight hundred in number"
behaving "with a steadiness" and "a self-abnegation beyond praise". On
the other hand, he did not spare the servants of the Company for their
callous indifference towards the untold sufferings of the victims of the
great famine of 1770. His cryptic comments about the ridiculously
inadequate relief measures during that famine are really scathing. He
did not fail to point out how mindless was the administration of the day
in its ruthless suppression of the Santal Rebellion which called for
humane and sympathetic handling. For their salvation Hunter did not
advise the Santal to embrace Christianity, as that imperialist essayist
of the Calcutta Review so glibly did. Instead he advocated positive
state action for the improvement of the Santal's lot and in this he was
much ahead of his time. He did not dismiss the languages of the tribals
as mere gibberish but applied his analytical mind to their study in a
truly scientific spirit. Hunter's concern for the common Indian was to
be evident from his recommendations, as the President of the Education
Commission of 1882, for increased attention to the elementary
instruction of the masses. And its significance has to be judged against
Macaulay's swashbuckling minutes of 1835 on Indian education. He felt
genuinely sad about the lack of cohesiveness and the absence of a
national spirit amongst the Indians which made their domination by
handful of foreigners for ages possible. As a civilian he was absolutely
incorruptible. His strong sense of justice made him go out of his way to
prevent a judicial fraud being perpetrated on a Zamindari house of
Birbhum under the Court of Wards. He was extremely hardworking, never
sparing himself in the performance of his duties and once he fainted in
his office from exhaustion and almost died.
Such a man was bound to be suspect in the eyes of his imperial masters
whose decision to demote and humiliate him should not be wondered at,
for he only found fault with them but discovered virtues in the subject
race. At the last moment however he was promoted to an innocuous post
where he could least harm the empire. He was literally dumped, for at
the time he joined his new post he had no office, no staff and no work.
But little did his detractors know what an indomitable spirit Hunter
possessed. He was that rare specimen of a civilian who was not "one of
those ordinary men who excite neither indignation nor admiration", and
who merely "did his appointed work and received for it his appointed
pay". On the contrary, he was a man who was capable of "giving that
interpretation to his duties which can invest with dignity and poetry
the long hot years of Indian official life".
– Kumud Ranjan Biswas
March 9, 2003
See also : Sir W.W
Hunter : The Annalist of the Silent Millions
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