OF INDIAN GOVERNORS

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1617, 25 February 1903, Page 70 (Supplement)

OF INDIAN GOVERNORS

Official India tAvists English Avords to iioav and surprising meanings. No one Avho lias not been in India could guess that a magistrate and a collector are one and the same person—and that person a sort of praetor entrusted Avith tlie collection of taxes; that a commissioner is not. more than any other official, “one Avhoi has a commission or Avarrant from a proper authority to perform some office or execute some business for the person giving tlie commission”; that a Go\'ernor is not distinguished from a Lieutenant Governor in being tlie official superior of the person Avho is not his, but the Viceroy’s, Lieutenant. "When Indian officials retire to their natiA'e laud, these anomalies of official speech puzzle their homekeeping friends. A Judge, they understand. or think they understand, and give him breA'et rank in the High Court. They know no intermediate judicial post betAveen the High Court and the County Court, in Avhicli no Indian Judge Avould Avillingly he compared. An Hon’ble Member of Council has not eA'en the honours, in retirement, of an ex-member of Parliament. And some Anglo-Indians, JEALOUS OF THE DIGNITY and status of their race, have even suggested that Indian officials should he renamed, that Ave should adopt the sonorous and suitable titles of Imperial Borne, and that a Governor should be a pro-Consul. How else, they urge, shall Ave bring it home to the British democracy that its Great Dependency is not democratic, and that the sons of its middle classes, Avhile they hold rule in India, are in fact Oriental potentates, Avielding poAvers of life and death—and taxation, over subject populations? In truth the Indian official is an interesting psychological study. He is selected from no particular class of English society, though .circumstance usually brings him from the middle class; selected on account of his proficiency in

humaner letters, or mathematics, or natural sciences, lie is taught a smattering of law, political economy, and native languages, and is set to work on a system of administration of which his native country contains no single example. He does his work usually with surprising efficiency, and especially in times of stress and extra responsibility. A native magistrate once told me that he never could see that a white man was any better than, a brown one till famine came to his native district when he was at home oil

leave. The white man does his task then, and when he has earned his pension, subsides, not ungracefully, into the state of life in which lie was born. Sometimes, indeed. he is promoted by the Secretary of State to a condition of suspended vitality. and survives, a half and half Anglo-Indian, at the India Office. But the ordinary Anglo-Indian drops the burden and HONOUR OF INDIAN RULE as easily and unostentatiously as he assumed it when fie gratified fiis parents by making a sufficiency of marks to satisfy the Civil Service Commissioners. Frequently he ends ins career before lie has survived the forties, at an age when statesmen in Europe are now considered young and inexperienced. Apparently he has drunk Oriental fatalism into his blood, for lie usually makes no effort to create a fresh, career for himself. Once in a way lie serves on a School Board or a County Council, but as a rule he seems to regard pension as a welcome intimation that he is entitled to the somewhat sad privilege of old age. And thus at fifty the retired Anglo-Indian is old.—* A Bengal Civilian in the "Madras AVeekly Mail.”