SOME HUMAN ASPECTS OF INDIAN

GEOGRAPHY.

IN

N India the earth and skies are more terrible things than we feel them to be in the temperate zone. Mountains, rivers, deserts, wind, rain, and dew there control with an irresistible compulsion the destinies of man. The configuration of the mighty triangle, nearly equal to all continental Europe less Russia, which juts southward from mid-Asia into the tropical sea, marked it out as a vast isolated field on which the agencies of earth, air, and ocean might wage their warfare on a Titanic scale. It is as if the Almighty had set apart a region of this planet in which the forces of Nature might run to and fro undisturbed and do His bidding. We still behold the rivers rending the rocks, carrying down thousands of millions of tons every year from the distant mountains and causing the dry earth to rise out of the waters. The ancient secrets of land-making are laid bare; the drama of Genesis is acted before our eyes; and we may stand by and witness, as in a stupendous miracle-play, the third morning of the Mosaic creation.

The vastness and isolation of India, walled out by the Himalayas from the rest of the world, and projected nearly two thousand miles into the ocean, enable the elemental forces to carry on their work, with but slight interruptions from local and variable causes. A majestic order is there revealed in all things. Earth and ocean act and react on each other with a regularity of meteorological results here unknown. The solar heat and the evaporation of the surrounding tropical expanse of water produce an almost unvarying procession of phenomena each year. Nor is this imposing uniformity confined to the annual revolutions of heat, wind, and rain. It seems also to disclose itself in more recondite cycles spread over longer periods, which are only now coming within the range of continuous research. The overwhelming forces of Nature have in India at all times pressed

heavily on the imagination and the lot of man. They profoundly influenced his ideas about God. They gave form to his mythology. They shaped his history. They regulate with a minute and imperious discipline his social institutions and his daily life. I shall presently point out the reservations under which such inferences with regard to the influence of Nature upon man must be received. The danger of confounding coincidence with causation can scarcely be eliminated from them. But, subject to this caveat, it may be safely said that the stupendous scale of Nature in India, and its uncontrollable forces, authoritatively modified the religious conceptions of the Indian races, and powerfully reacted on their social and industrial economy. Early man found himself too weak to stand alone against Nature. The chances against the individual in India are heavy, and at the same time the general conditions are highly favourable to the increase of the race. Isolation has always been felt to involve too serious risks. The gregarious instinct in man accordingly received a very full development in India, and it still exhibits a remarkable vitality. The ancient human groups have there offered a firm resistance to the centrifugal and isolating tendencies. The Undivided Family maintains much of its old coherence in the midst of a complex system of individual rights. Caste binds together the family groups and the separate trades or handicrafts into strongly organized guilds, or semi-religious semi-industrial corporations, of remote ethnical origin, but with a very practical modern basis of reciprocal obligation, reciprocal supervision, and reciprocal help. The social institutions of India which disclose the most characteristic vitality are those which most effectively discharge the functions of mutual assurance societies. Taken as a whole, they do the work of a poorlaw for a dense population, subject to all the calamities of the tropics. This appears clearly among the agricultural masses, who are most obviously at the mercy of Nature. Until our own time,' the village commune was the one stable unit of rural organization in India which raised its head above every succeeding inundation of conquest. And the village commune involved many kinds and degrees of mutual insurance, from a joint responsibility for keeping up the continuous embankment against the river, or for maintaining the common reservoir or irrigation lake, to a joint liability for the revenue, or even a joint distribution of the crops. As the cultivator finds himself better secured against the vicissitudes of the seasons by the scientific appliances of British rule, he grows more self-reliant. When he knows that he can protect his own fields by Government irrigation, or supplement a local failure of crops by grain brought at cheap rates by State railways from other provinces, he insensibly becomes less anxious about his individual risks. It is no longer so necessary for him to spread those risks over a joint village group. One of the strong solvents of corporate village rights in India has been found

to be canal-water. But the most characteristic of the rural institutions of India are still those which act as a mutual assurance against the calamities of Nature and the mischances of life.

Not less masterful has been the influence of the physical geography of India upon its political history. The configuration of the country gave a uniform direction during ages to the invasions of India, and set precise limits to each successive Empire. The dynastic problem in India for hundreds of years preceding our rule was, how to weld together the North and South, in spite of the geographical obstacles. The Mughal Sovereigns staked their empire upon the solution of this problem. They staked and they lost. The fate of previous dynasties had shown that Northern India alone could not permanently withstand the influx of fresh invading races from the hardy breeding grounds of Central Asia. A consolidated India under a vigorous rule might be able to do so. This was the dream of the Mughal dynasty. The last of its great emperors wrecked his armies and his revenues in a fifty years' struggle against the barriers which Nature had set up between the North and South. Out of the magnificent fragments of his empire, the British nation has built up a united India. But it is only in these last days that modern man, with the aid of the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph, is in India emerging victorious from the long struggle with Nature. The dream of the Mughal Emperors has become the reality of British Rule.

In thus summarizing the human aspects of Indian Geography, I have not thought it needful to vindicate this method of treatment. For one of the irresistible conclusions of recent research is that if geography is to keep its place as a progressive science, it must deal not alone with the physical configuration of the earth, but also with the relations of physical configuration to the phenomena of life. This view, after being carefully worked out in Germany has now been accepted in England. The new teaching does not exclude our former conceptions of geographical research. Scientific geography must still, and at all times, be built up on the sound basis of geodetic and topographical work. But it is not the old geography of our school-days, the dry bones of terrestrial mensuration, and the nomenclature of the earth's surface, that the English Universities have now undertaken to teach. It is, to use the name given to it by General Strachey, Applied Geography, or broadly speaking the relations of terrestrial configuration to terrestrial life.

The doctrine of the dependence of life on geographical conditions has been systematically elaborated in connection with plants and the lower animals. But the supreme problem of the action of geographical environment on man is beset with greater difficulties. For while plants and the lower animals can do little to modify their physical surroundings, man does much. He gradually advances from an animal-like dependence upon his environment into a long struggle with Nature;

a struggle in which millions of his species are destroyed, but from which the most effective races derive an invaluable training and stores of accumulated knowledge. In the final stage, it is difficult to pronounce as to whether man, with the aid of science, more profoundly modifies his environment or is more controlled by it. The problem is no longer one of the direct action of geographical conditions upon life, but of the complex interaction between man and his physical surroundings. When the problem is carried still farther from man as a biological structure to man as a historical development, many new sources of error arise. At each extension of the doctrine of the dependence of life on external conditions into the domain of civilized humanity, it becomes less susceptible of verification. The chain of sequence weakens as it lengthens out.

We can

In such speculations-speculations which cannot be brought to the touchstone of direct experiment-a wise diffidence should govern our speech, and control our conclusions. We can see that in India the majestic scale of Nature, and the overwhelming energies of its forces, have gradually influenced man's conceptions about God. see that geographical and climatic conditions have tended to a full development of social and rural institutions of a certain type, and have given to that type a marked degree of vitality. But we cannot yet say, and we shall probably never be able to state, in what precise degree the physical conditions have contributed to the historical result. The great equation of the interaction between man and Nature cannot be determined by any formula of algebra. The finest instruments available for the research still leave its process one of qualitative and not of quantitative analysis. Especially is this the case in regard to the political aspects of Indian geography. We can see that certain river valleys have in the long run determined the line of march of Indian mankind: that certain chains of mountains have in the long run set limits to successive Indian Empires. But on scrutinising the individual episodes of Indian history, we find that in every case purely human and even personal influences have intervened to determine the result. The march of the races has been deflected from the natural route, and turned to the right hand or to the left, by causes quite independent of the geographical conditions. Armies have halted, and the tide of Empire has been turned back, not because a river or a mountain range could not be crossed, but because, as it seemed at the very moment when the natural obstacle would be overcome, an emperor dreamed a dream, or a rebellious son broke out into revolt in a distant province. All that we can establish is, that the constant factor of geographical configuration has in certain definite directions slowly, steadily, and powerfully controlled the course of Indian history.

The first essential for the study of this historical movements of mankind in India is, therefore, a knowledge at once comprehensive and exact, of Indian geography. That knowledge has, during the

past eighty-eight years, been supplied by a series of operations conducted by the Government, with a magnitude of resource and with a continuity of effort which have no parallel in the annals of research. The trigonometrical mensuration of the Indian continent as a whole, its topographical delineation province by province, a geological survey of its land-structure, a marine survey of its coast and ocean approaches, astronomical observations, and a strongly organized meteorological department, have accumulated invaluable materials for the scientific geographer. Nor have the investigations stopped short at the phenomena of inert matter. The plant-life of India, and certain divisions of its animal life, have been comprehensively studied; the archæological survey has revealed the progress of man in the past; the statistical survey exhibits the population district by district, and systematically records the conditions--physical, moral, and economical —of human life in the present. While Germany has been elaborating, with admirable industry, the principles of Applied Geography, England may claim to have stored up in India materials on an unrivalled scale for the practical structure of the science, from the initial stage of geodetic mensuration to the final problem of the influence of terrestrial environment upon man.

I think that every Englishman may look back with a sense of national exultation to what his countrymen in India have accomplished on behalf of human knowledge during the past eighty years. It is impossible to overrate the political benefits which British rule has, during this period, conferred on the Indian races; and even those natives of India who are desirous for a more sympathetic development of our Indian system of government are most forward in acknowledging its claims on their loyalty and gratitude. But while we know that we have ruled righteously, our national habit of self-depreciation sometimes leads us to underrate what may be termed the intellectual aspects of our Indian government. The scientific and geographical work done by our countrymen in India during the present century forms an unanswerable protest against such despondency.

I shall now summarize a few of the inductions which may with safety be drawn from this great magazine of research. India was marked out from primæval times as a continent which the races of mankind were destined to reach by three definite routes. The sea-coast of Lower Bengal, and the comparatively open approach by its eastern hill frontier, gave an easy access from the south-east. The evidence proves that in a pre-historic period successive migrations entered India by these eastern routes, and brought with them dialects which, after infinite processes of mutation and decay, still establish their relationship with the human groups to which the nations of Eastern Asia, from Burma to China, belong. This advancing tide of races from the south-east was encountered at a very early period by an inflow of population through the mountain passes of the distant north-west. The huge wall of