Eurasians -- Fiction; India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947 -- Fiction
We have, however, something like it in India. A rajah has amassed wealth
by oppressing his ryots and taking usury from the poor. On account of
some paltry gift to the Dufferin Fund or subscription to some begging
paper to raise a monument to some man whom the people would not care to
remember, he is granted the privilege by Government of not obeying a
summons to appear as a witness in court. He could be driven there every
day and it would be only a pleasure nor would there be any loss to him
in any way.
Another, a ryot of this man, is obliged to go from twenty to fifty miles
on foot. He is compelled to hang around from a week to twenty days or
has to go several times. While away from home his fields are neglected
and the crop on which he and his family depended for the year’s food is
lost. What recourse has he? None whatever. What is the difference in the
two cases? It is this. The one is a wealthy rajah and the other a poor
devil of a ryot. Such is justice in India so like that in England.
My best argument for immortality is this, that there must be, in all
justice, some other place or some future when the accounts of this life
shall be balanced, for there is no equity here.
These were my reflections in my room at my lodgings at the close of my
privileged leave.
However, in vindication of myself, that to make some atonement,—as I am
not without good impulses at times—for the misdemeanors of the morning,
if such they may be called, in going to see the ranks of the city, high
rank and low rank, the latter of the rankest kind,—I went to a church in
the evening where there was a very quiet unpretentious service in which
there was a real sincere worship of God. I felt better for it, thanking
God that while there was so much of vanity, vice and want in the city,
there were also some righteous people, truly noble, belonging to the
nobility of heaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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