Lord Ripon was the Viceroy of India in 1883.He was known for his liberal attitude towards Indians and their aspirations. Sir Courtenay Ilbert, the then Law Member of Viceroy Ripon's Council, introduced a bill in the Imperial Legislative Council in 1883. In those days no white in India could be tried by an Indian judge for his offences in India. The bill sought to do away with that privilege of the whites.
There was a great outcry against the introduction of the Bill from the British trading and commercial community in India. All the local vernacular newspapers were vehemently in favour of the Ilbert Bill. Lot of dirty linen was washed by many Englishmen against the so called native Indians and vice versa. In such an atmosphere of vituperative public controversy and high public tension, a new book entitled �India in 1983� was published. What is interesting historically is that this book forecasting the attainment of Indian independence in 1883, was published two years before the founding of the Indian National Congress in December 1885.
The new book created a great public sensation and unprecedented consternation in official circles at Calcutta. In view of the author's official position, the book was published anonymously, but the gentry of that time guessed correctly who had written it. It was T. Harte-Davies (1849- 1920), of the Indian Civil Service, a man of versatile talents, the District Judge of Karachi in 1883. He was an accomplished pianist and a talented linguist�he knew French, German, Italian and Russian, in addition to three Indian languages.
He was a frequent contributor to The Pioneer of Allahabad, a leading newspaper of that time. Upon his retirement in 1894, he returned to England only to plunge into active politics there. He was elected as MP for Hackney in 1895. He was also an active member of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress. He was an enthusiastic champion of the political aspirations of the Indians. He was a close associate of Mr. Hume and Mr. Wedderburn, of the Indian National Congress.
In his book 'India in 1983' T.Harte-Davies described the departure of the British from India in 1983 in the following words:
'It was a still and broiling day in April 1983 when the last vessel sailed out of Bombay harbour with the English troops on board. The vast bay, which for a month before had been crowded with huge transports and resounded with the rattle of shipping cargo and stores, was now deserted, except for the picturesque native boats and the Mail Steamer which was to convey the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief, and the Governors of Madras and Bombay from the shores of India.'
T Harte-Davies caricatured the unruly Parliament that was going to be established in India after independence in 1983. The President of this new Parliament was Babu Joy Kissen Chunder Sen. This is how he came to the Parliament and started his proceedings in �1983�: He took his seat, and having just finished his breakfast, proceeded to eructate violently three or four times; he then blew his nose on the floor, holding that organ between his fore-finger and thumb for the purpose, cleared his throat, expectorated, and finally rose and burst into a flood of typical oriental eloquence:����Gentlemen, fellow-countrymen, shall I not say fellow-members of Parliament and Romans, lend me your ears.
This is the proudest moment of my life, my vita, ars longa, vita brevis, as the poet says, when I see before me your physiognomies and visages all full of constitutional transformation; indeed, I am as it were in a hurly-burly, and say to myself, I am now in a more noble position than Washington was in USA in 1782; in a stronger position than Cicero, when he stirred up his fellow-citizens to make war on the Carthagians; all this I say in this princely house and more, sitting on its own bottom, and controlling the Financial, Judicial, Revenue, Secret, General, Political, Educational and Public Works Departments of the Government of India' ( Thunderous applause greeted the President)'.
'For we are the advanced thinkers, and we show things to others, and nobody shows nothing to us. We are the heirs of the ancient wisdom of ARYAVARTA, we are the sons of the Bengal, which has conquered India, we are the B.A's of the Calcutta University, superior to all the gentlemen educated at Oxford and Cambridge'.Let us then go on blazes in the course of civilization and progress, and guided by the teaching of theology, psychology, geology, physiology, doxology and sociology and all the other sciences that 'Pax Brittanica� can boast of. We can now confront the unmitigated myrmidons of despotism, and say to the adversaries of freedom and jurisprudence, you be blowed� (cries of 'Shabash', 'bohuth acha' and rapturous applause.)
We are indeed wonder struck by the prescient and detailed understanding shown by T Harte-Davies about the functioning of Parliament that was going to come to India after independence in 1983. He anticipated the unruly incidents and indecent behaviour of the Members of Parliament in India 1983 in these words: 'The next instant every man in the assembly was on his feet'soon an unseemly wrangling began, and such exclamations as, �you shut up', 'you have got no locus yatandi', 'chup raho', 'thum beff coofe ho' and the like, were heard through the din. At last they began to make uncomplimentary remarks concerning the moral character of the female members of each other's families and finally matters went so far that all the members stood up shouting raucously with clenched fists with an attitude of self-defence, which they accomplished by presenting their stomachs to the front before the House. The President of the House tried in vain without success to interfere and rang his bell to command silence'.
All round corruption in public administration, gay swindling of public funds, jobbery and nepotism which are the hall-mark of governance in all parts of India today�directly promoted as a matter of state policy by the Sonia-directed UPA Government�were graphically foreseen by T Harte-Davies:
'Matters at all levels of government were arranged orientally, and at the bottom of the native character there is a profound sympathy with oriental methods of administration. It was now perfectly certain that the larger part of the funds would stick to the palms of the members of the Parliamentary Committee, that their relatives and friends would compose the entire administrative staff, that no contract would be given unless a handsome commission was paid to the President and Secretary, and that any works that were constructed would be exclusively adapted to the improvement of the private property of the President and Members of Parliament.
All this was thoroughly understood, and the feeling it aroused was not one of indignation, but a simple and unquenchable desire to participate in the spoils. After all, was it not better that the public money should go in this way than that it should be spent by 'An English Sahib' on his eccentric notions of protected drinking water-supply, vaccination and the like? In a native Government, with a Native Board fully loaded with native members and having unlimited control over the funds, whose proceedings every native could understand, there would be a better administrative set-up in the total absence of the unsympathetic and incorruptible Englishman whose actions had long been acknowledged to be unbearably incalculable.'
T Harte-Davies gave a hilarious description of the official and public reaction in England to the goings-on in the India of 1983 soon after her independence:
'Such were the pleasing features which distinguished the closing days of the year 1983. The English newspapers congratulated the British Government on its fore-sight in declining to interfere in the affairs of alien races, and on having finally decided, after two hundred years of iniquitous possession, to allow India to stew in her own native juice.'
The tragedy and comedy of post independent India is that over 90 per cent of our legislators (MPs and MLAs) have succeeded magnificently in giving cubic content to the above words of T Harte-Davies. It ill-behoves us as a nation after 60 years of our independence that we should prove the caricatured portraiture of T Harte-Davies done in 1883 bang right in letter and spirit in the India of 2007.
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