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Updated: June 11, 2025
It comprises Indians of many races and creeds and castes and tongues. There are Bengalees and Madrasees of the educated classes, some of them Brahmans, who are chiefly engaged in clerical, technical, and managerial work. There are rougher Pathans and Punjabee Mahomedans, as well as Sikhs, who take more readily to heavy skilled manual labour.
Amongst the "moderate" section outside Bengal there was a disposition to confine its action to platonic expressions of sympathy with the Bengalees and with the principle of Swadeshi in itself perfectly legitimate as a movement for the encouragement of native industries.
Natives of the low country, and especially Bengalees, are far from enjoying the climate as Europeans do, being liable to sharp attacks of fever and ague, from which the poorly clad natives are not exempt.
Many mistakes would be prevented if English people would remember that we have in India nations differing widely from each other. We have a striking illustration of this fact in the part of India in which we have lived. Bengalees abound in the public offices in the North-West Provinces and in the Punjab.
Another result of English education, combined with the absence of such traditions of Brahman supremacy as are still recent and powerful in the Deccan, has been to invest the political aspirations of the Bengalees with that democratic tinge which has won the sympathies of English Radicals; and, even if the tinge in most cases be very slight, the Bengalee's own adaptability enables him to clothe his opinions with extraordinary skill and verisimilitude in the form which he intuitively knows will best suit an English audience.
There are a good many Portuguese, who act as clerks and shop-keepers. There are also Arabs and Klings of Western India, who are Mohammedans. There are also Parsee merchants, while the grooms and washermen are mostly Bengalees. These, with numerous Javanese sailors, as well as traders from Celebes, Bali, and numerous other islands of the East, make up this curiously mixed population.
Education, to which in its more primitive forms the Bengalees owed whatever influence they retained under Mahomedan rule, has given them under British rule far larger opportunities which they have turned to account with no mean measure of success. I must reserve the thorny question of education for separate treatment.
Except in Peshawar, where the political propaganda of a somewhat militant colony of Bengalees has stimulated the latent antagonism between Hindus and Mahomedans, our difficulties in the new Frontier Province, as well as along the whole North-West frontier, are of quite a different order, and though the turbulence of Pathan tribes and the occasional outbreaks of Moslem fanaticism amongst them are a cause of constantly recurring anxiety to the Government of India, it is not amongst those hardy and only half-tamed hillsmen that the cry of Swadeshi and Swaraj from Bengal or of "Arya for the Aryans" from the Punjab is likely to elicit any response.
The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for them.
Rangoon had already a good deal that was European about it, hotels and shops, stone blocks of buildings, the custom house, offices of the Indian Empire, and houses of English residents. The gilded pagoda looks over everything from a hill. The crowds in the streets are Eastern, Chinamen, Malays, and Bengalees, and mainly the Burman of the Irrawaddy. I was anchored over against the timber yards.
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