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Updated: June 28, 2025
It is all color, bewitching color, enchanting color everywhere all around all the way around the curving great opaline bay clear to Government House, where the turbaned big native 'chuprassies' stand grouped in state at the door in their robes of fiery red, and do most properly and stunningly finish up the splendid show and make it theatrically complete. I wish I were a 'chuprassy'.
They always figure on a background of red chuprassies. Such officials are what Lord Lytton calls White Baboos. Whitley Stokes, in his own artless way, once proposed legislating against chuprassies, I am told. A great Maharaja once told me that it was the tyranny of the Government chuprassies that made him take to drink. He spoke of them as "the Pindarries of modern India."
It furnishes them with maharajas, nawabs, rajas, and chuprassies, according to their rank, and it usually throws in a house, a gaol, a doctor, a volume of Aitchison's Treaties, an escort of native Cavalry, a Star of India, an assistant, the powers of a first-class magistrate, a flag-staff, six camels, three tents, and a salute of eleven or thirteen guns.
I hear that the Government of India proposes to form a mixed committee of Rajas and chuprassies to discuss the question as to whether native chiefs ever give bribes and native servants ever take them. It is expected that a report favourable to Indian morality will be the result. Of course Raja Joe Hookham will preside. No. The Planter lives to-day as we all lived fifty years ago.
Alas! the Red Chuprassie is still a rift in the lute of Indian administration; a reform in Chuprassies would doubtless be more beneficial to India than any wonder-working nostrum such as Advisory Councils or extended Legislative Councils. The cry for reform in Chuprassies, or in other words the underlings of many Departments, is a very old one.
Large-turbaned Indian police keep order in the streets, where office "chuprassies," or messengers, wearing their broad, coloured sash of office across their shoulders, come and go upon their errands, and, with the white-clad butler of a "Sahib" intent upon his marketing, mingle with a crowd which is composed of all races and all stations of life, from the wizened labourer in his loin-cloth to the wealthy baboo or daintily-clad Burmese lady.
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