Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

30

The King and the Taxpayer

"The water tax, the land laws, the Colonisation Act legalising the oppressions and illegalities under which Punjab landholders and peasantry have groaned, had generated the feeling of an intolerable burden," wrote Sri Aurobindo in the Bande Mataram issue of 6 May 1907.

After he had stopped writing the political articles in the Indu Prakash, Sri Aurobindo had suspended all public activity of this kind and worked only in secret till 1905. First of all he studied the conditions in the country so that he might be able to judge more maturely what could be done. The first thing his study revealed to him was the oppressive taxation which was surely leading the country to a gradual death by bleeding. How to stop this? "The only true cure for a bad and oppressive financial system is to give the control over taxation to the people whose money pays for the needs of Government," wrote Sri Aurobindo in April 1907. "The only possible method of stopping the drain is to establish a popular government which may be

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relied on to foster and protect Indian commerce and Indian industry conducted by Indian capital and employing Indian labour." He wanted the entire removal of the foreign control. But the irresponsible Government did not care. Why should they? Hadn't they found a human cattle farm for their own profit? As Prince Dwarakanath Tagore put it in 1836, "They have taken all which the natives possessed : their liberty, property, all held at the mercy of Government."

But a few Britons saw the trouble that was brewing due to the Government's policy. Bryan said of British rule in India during the Swadeshi days: "Let no one cite India as an argument in defence of colonialism.... He [the Briton] has conferred some benefits upon India, but he has extorted a tremendous price for them.... While he has boasted of bringing peace to the living he has led millions to the peace of the grave; while he has dwelt upon order established between warring troops, he has impoverished the country by legalized pillage. Pillage is a strong word, but no refinement of language can purge the present system of its iniquity." Montgomery Martin, writing in 1838, went further: "This annual drain of £ 3,000,000 on British India amounted in thirty years, at 12 per cent (the usual Indian rate) compound interest to the enormous sum of £ 723,997,917 sterling [724 million pounds of the time!] So constant and accumulating a drain even on England would soon impoverish her; how severe then must be its effect on India, where the wages of a labourer is from two pence to three pence a day?.. . I do not think it is possible for human ingenuity to avert entirely the evil effects of a continued drain of three or four

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million pounds a year from a distant country like India, and which is never returned to it

Remember Lord Salisbury, the one-time Secretary of State for India? In 1875 he said, "India must be bled." Thai's what the Colonial Government set out to do from the very beginning. First they ruined the trade and industry- Bengal, for instance had a thriving commerce before the advent of the British both in agricultural produce and textile. "Time was, not more distant than a century and a half ago, when Bengal was much more wealthy than was Britain," wrote the British historian William Digby in 1901. Already in 1853, John Sullivan, Collector of Coimbatore and founder of Ootaca-mund, had told the East India Company that he was in favour of returning a large part of Indian territory to native rulers "upon principles of justice, and upon principles of financial economy.... They [the people of India] have been in a state of the greatest prosperity from the earliest lime, as far as history tells us." And Clive when he first saw Murshidabad in 1757 rubbed his eyes. "This city," he wrote, "is as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London, with this difference, that there are individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater property than in the last city."

But now the peasant, the cultivator, and zamindar, all were ruined along with the craftsman, the artisan and the trader. The Indian historian Romesh Dutt paints this harrowing picture: "The facts which were deposed to at the celebrated impeachment of Warren Hastings [first Governor-General of the East India Company] relating to the collection of rent from

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the impoverished tenantry [of Bengal] are sufficiently dismal. It was stated that the defaulters were confined in open cages, and it was replied that confinement in such cages under the Indian sun was no torture. It was stated that fathers were compelled to sell their children, and it was replied that Colonel Hanny had issued orders against such unnatural sales. Large masses of the people left their villages and fled the country, and troops were employed to prevent their flight. At last a great rebellion broke out; farmers and cultivators rose against the unbearable exactions; and then followed horrors and executions with which the untrained tillers of the soil are put down by the infuriated soldiery.... Land revenue was increased even after the famine of 1770 had swept away one-third of the population of Bengal; landed families who had owned their estates for centuries were made to bid for them as annual farmers against money-lenders and speculators; cultivators flying from their homes and villages or rising in insurrection were driven back by soldiers to their homes with cruel severity; and a great portion of the money so raised was annually sent in the shape of Investments to the gratified shareholders in England."

Throughout the parts of India under British control, the collection of 'revenues' was implemented so ruthlessly and inhumanly that a few Britons could not help protesting. Brooks Adams speaks of the 'Indian plunder.' "It has always been our boast how greatly we have raised the revenue above that which the native rulers were able to extort," said John Shore in 1837. "Since the world began," wrote Holt Mackenzie in 1833, "there is probably no example of a Government carrying the principle

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of absolutism so completely through the civil administration of the country [India], if that can be called civil which is in its spirit so military."

As regards the artisans, the import of Indian cotton and silk goods into England was either prohibited or burdened with high duties, in effect killing India's manufactures and enabling England to reverse the flow of trade and sell its own inferior goods in India. "Had this not been the case," writes H. H. Wilson, "had not such prohibitory duties and decrees existed, the mills of Paisley and Manchester would have been stopped in their outset, and could scarcely have been again set in motion, even by the power of steam. They were created by the sacrifice of the Indian manufacture. Had India been independent, she would have retaliated, would have imposed prohibitive duties upon British goods, and would thus have preserved her own productive industry from annihilation. This act of self-defence was not permitted her; she was at the mercy of the stranger. British goods were forced upon her without paying any duty, and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms."

The whimsical and ever-changing policies of the rulers brought deplorable results to all parts of India where the British 'governed.' And the taxes. All sorts of new taxes—salt tax, water tax ...—were introduced by the foreign rulers. It was all too baffling for the Indians. Each movement of life was taxed. Heavily taxed and cruelly imposed. Wrote Romesh Dutt in 1901: "Taxation raised by a king, says the Indian poet, is

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like the moisture of the earth sucked up by the sun, to be returned to the earth as fertilising rain ; but the moisture raised from the Indian soil now descends as fertilising rain largely on other lands, not on India.... In one shape or another all that could be raised in India by an excessive taxation flowed to Europe, after paying for a starved administration.... The 'Home Charges' remitted annually out of the Indian revenues to Great Britain have increased to sixteen millions. The pay of the European officers in India, virtually monopolising all the higher services, comes to ten millions. One-half of the nett revenues of India, which are now forty-four millions sterling, flows annually out of India. Verily the moisture of India blesses and fertilises other lands."

In ancient India maxims of taxation were clearly formulated and principles enunciated. Kautilya in his Artha Shastra says, "The King should be like a gardener and not be like the maker of charcoal. The resources of the State should be allowed to grow before taxes are imposed on them. Taxation should be in proportion to the paying capacity of the people. Collection of revenue by the State before the subject is ready for it is comparable to plucking unripe fruit. One should be careful with both so as not to cause harm to the source." But Britain did not seem to know this simple rule of governance, at least it was not applied to the colonies. In consequence, the Indian farmer was forced to pay in full even if the crop failed. Inhuman torture was his lot if he could not. A government report of 1818 describes the state of affairs in Bombay. "Every effort was made, — lawful and unlawful,—to get the utmost out of the wretched peasantry, who

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were subjected to tortures — in some instances cruel and revolting beyond description —if they could not or would not yield what was demanded." Graphic enough? Madras, Punjab, U. P., all, all land under the British umbrella suffered the same fate. The result does not need any imagination: a great misery inflicted on the people of this rich and fertile land.

From 1850 to 1875 British India was visited by famine I which led to death by starvation: five million people dead. Then in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, eighteen times famine ravaged the land. These awful recurring famines were accompanied with plague and cholera. Death toll: twenty-six million humans, untold numbers of cattle.

A government medical report: "Fever is a euphemism for insufficient food, scanty clothing and unfit dwelling." Man has made of life a long process of death.

Even in the best of times half of the agricultural population never knew from year's end to year's end what it was to have their hunger fully satisfied. Sir Henry Cotton, Commissioner of Assam, averred, "The resources of India will vie with those of America itself ... yet no country is more poor than this." Affirmed Digby in 1900, "Because among other things we have destroyed native industries, and, besides, have taken from India since 1834-35 (according to a calculation made by that sane and moderate journal, the Economist two years ago), more than ten thousand millions of Rupees." The Indian rupee in those days, as everybody knows, had a much higher value.¹ At any rate,

1. Lord Curzon had fixed the exchange rate at Rs.15 to the pound sterling. Before that it used to be Rs. lS to the pound. And in 1761, Rs. 8 to the pound.

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there was thus a constant drawing away of the wealth of India to England —in Sri Aurobindo's words, "the murderous drain by which we purchase the more exquisite privilege of being exploited by British capital." As the Englishman grew fat on accumulations made in India, the Indian remained as lean as ever.

When in 1813 the East India Company brought a few cosmetic changes to its Charter, it invited testimonies from its officers in India. Most were naturally convinced that they were bringing enlightenment and material progress to a fallen and benighted nation —for a price, of course. A few of them, however, could not conceal their admiration of the Indian nature: "If a good system of agriculture, unrivalled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to convenience or luxury; schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; the general practice of hospitality and charity among each other; and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, [if all these] are among the signs which denote a civilised people, then the 'Hindus are not inferior to the nations of Europe; and if civilisation is to become an article of trade between the two countries, I am convinced that this country [England] will gain by the import cargo." This was Thomas Munro. But here was a 'trade' Britain was hardly interested in. Sir John Malcolm put it in a less commercial language: "The Hindoo inhabitants are a race of men, generally speaking, not

1. In 1924 Sri Aurobindo asked, "By the way, what is the average income of an Indian?" To which replied a disciple, "Rs. 30/- per annum."

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more distinguished by their lofty stature ... than they are for some of the finest qualities of the mind; they are brave, generous, and humane, and their truth is as remarkable as their courage."

But this 'lofty stature' was put to a severe test, not so much by decades of brutal treatment as by the moral degradation brought about by British law and government and education, R. N. Cust said baldly: "In the course of comparatively few years we succeed in destroying whatever of truthfulness and honour they have by nature [I], and substituting in its place habits of trickery, chicanery, and falsehood ........... You are only to compare our new provinces with our old." The reason is really not far to seek. It was brought about by the contact with the 'soiled card-houses' as Sri Aurobindo describes so marvellously the Churches. Yes, I am speaking of Christian missionaries. In 1813 they were granted the right of unrestricted entry. And, as they have done everywhere else in the world with local populations, in India too they poured forth "venomous abuses against the Hindus." Rev. Alexander Duff said contemptuously: "Of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen man, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous." Or did he mean Christianity? Was he looking at his own mirror? Do you know that the great Vyasa did not accept "the Jesuistic doctrine of any means to a good end," as Sri Aurobindo explained, "still less justify the goodness of the end by that profession of an utterly false disinterestedness which ends in the soothing belief that plunder, arson, outrage and massacre are committed for the good of the slaughtered nation?" So much so that the Indians

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feared it to be the "deliberate policy of the British Government to convert them en masse to Christianity," notes the historian R. C. Majumdar.

Many of the facts and figures quoted above can be found in Romesh Dutt's Economic History of India. Romesh Dutt —remember him? —met Sri Aurobindo in Baroda in 1899 and praised his translations of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. After his death in 1909, Sri Aurobindo wrote in the course of an article about him in The Karmayogin: "Without the Economic History and its damning story of England's commercial and fiscal dealings with India we doubt whether the public mind would have been ready for the Boycott [movement]. In this one instance it may be said of him that he not only wrote history but created it."

I have also quoted from Desher Katha¹ by Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869-1912). Son of a Marathi Brahmin who had settled in Bengal, Sakharam was born in Deoghar. He studied in the Deoghar School and later became a teacher there. He was Barin's teacher of History. "One of the ablest men in these revolutionary groups," Sri Aurobindo reminds us, "[he] was an able writer in Bengali (his family had been long domiciled in Bengal).... He published a book entitled Desher Katha describing in exhaustive detail the British commercial and industrial exploitation of India. This book had an immense

1. Dadabhai Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, published in 1900, also exposed thoroughly the British plunder in India. These three studies together had an enormous influence in India.

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repercussion in Bengal, captured the mind of young Bengal and assisted more than anything else in the preparation of the Swadeshi movement." Published first in June 1904, Desher Katha sold ten thousand copies in four editions within the year. The fifth edition came out in 1905. The government of Bengal banned the book in 1910 and confiscated all the copies. Deuskar was the first to bring in the name of Swaraj, and Sri Aurobindo was the first to endow it with its English equivalent, 'Independence.' The Nationalists adopted this word, and Swaraj became the chief item of the fourfold Nationalist programme.

The British administration introduced measures that were quite unfamiliar to Indians. Take the system of impersonal administration —bureaucracy. To whom now could people go to place their grievances? Besides, did not this new system of governance bring in its wake slowness of proceedings, delay in taking action, corruption...? And, how strange was the character of the foreigners' laws and judicial procedure! To get justice you had now to pay tax in the shape of stamps.

But in ancient India the right of the State to tax was not a divine right. It arose from the protection the state gave to its subjects. The State had to guarantee security to the people in exchange for taxation.

Taxation in ancient India served to secure social and political objectives. "In our country," observed Rabindranath "it was the duty of the king to wage war, to maintain peace and to administer justice, but supplying the other needs of the people, from imparting education to supplying drinking water, was the responsibility of the society, and this was discharged with ease."

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May I tell you a story?

A Brahmin came to the King. "Sire," he said to the King seated on his throne, "Sire, I have lost my wife." "How?" asked His Majesty. "She was abducted." "When?"

"Last night, Sire."

"?" The King raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

"We were sleeping in our cots, and when I woke up this morning she wasn't there."

"How do you know she was abducted? She may have gone out somewhere."

"No, no, Sire. I have come to you after ascertaining that my wife was abducted. We were, as usual, sleeping with the door wide open to get a little cooling breeze. And I saw distinct signs of two men who came and took her away." The Brahmin added in desperation, "I must have my wife back, Sire."

"Is she young, your wife?"

"No, Sire, she is about my age," replied the middle-aged man.

"Is she beautiful?" the King asked curiously.

"No, Sire. Not at all. She may even be called ugly."

"Sweet-tempered, is she?" asked the envious King.

"No, Sire. In fact, she is rather quarrelsome."

"Then you should be glad to be rid of her! Why do you want her back?" the King was perplexed.

"Sire, she is my wife. I know my duty. I cannot perform my dharma without my wife."

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The King, who happened to have just banished his queen, bowed his head. "But how can I now find your wife?" he asked the Brahmin.

"That, O King, is your affair. But find her you must. Restore her to me you must. It is your duty." Then the Brahmin added with asperity, "Sire, we give you one-sixth of our earnings. What for? It is so that you may protect us from thieves and robbers. It is so that we may sleep in peace knowing the King is vigilant. Vigilant enough so that no harm befalls us. So then what kind of a king are you who take a part of our earnings and give us nothing in return?"

The King acknowledged the Brahmin's logic. And, to cut a long story short, he went out, had adventures, but ended up finding the Brahmin's wife —sweet-tempered now —and found his own queen too. And the King learned that right and duty go hand in hand. So he ruled wisely.

Thus all ended happily for them and for the country.

But all did not end happily for India.

It was not for nothing that Mother said, "England came and stayed much too long." Indians have imbibed to saturation Western ideas. For, sadly enough, after Independence instead of dismantling the onerous system of governance introduced by Britain, the indigenous government chose to Indianize it. Indeed, the new rulers made it so peculiarly Indian that we ended up having a government that shirks its responsibility, fails in discharging its duty to protect the lives and properties of its citizens, and has no accountability. The result? More and more poverty, more and more misery for the common man. In a

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word, corruption. Corruption which eats into the very root of national existence. A dangerous choice as it has turned out.

Yet, way back in April 1908, writing in the Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo had spelled out the one needful thing for India. "Every nation," he wrote, "has certain sources of vitality which have made it what it is and can always, if drawn upon in time, protect it from disintegration. The secret of its life is to be found in the recesses of its own being." Where is that source?

"The root of the past is the source from which the future draws its sap and if the tree is to be saved it must constantly draw from that source for sustenance. The root may be fed from outside, but that food will have to be assimilated and turned to sap in the root before it can nourish the trunk."

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