To John Tytler, 28 January 1835

Dear Sir,

....I deny that it is necessary to teach absurdities either to a man or to a native for the purpose of afterwards refuting those absurdities. It is very well for a few studious men to pass their lives in tracing the history of opinions. But the great mass of students have not a life to give to such researches. If they are taught errors while their education is going on, they will never learn truth afterwards. Nor is it necessary to the rational belief of truth that men should be acquainted with all the forms which error has taken. The same reasoning which establishes truth does ipso facto refute all possible errors which are opposed to that  truth. If I prove that the earth is a sphere, I prove at the same time that it is not a cute, a cylinder, or a cone; --nor is it necessary for me to go through all possible figures one after another, and to direct a separate argument against each....

I deny that we wish to conceal both sides of any scientific question from our students. But life is too short to study everything. You cannot teach your pupils truth and all the various forms of error in the short time which is allotted to education. I cannot see the wisdom of making a boy, for example, a great astrologer, of keeping him several years employed in casting nativities-- and then telling him that the whole of the Science which he has painfully mastered is good for nothing. I think myself entitled to laugh at astrology though I do not know its very rudiments-- to laugh at alchemy though I have no knowledge of it but what I have picked up from Ben Jonson. Would you teach your children astrology?....

You say that there is some truth in the Oriental systems. So there is in the Systems held by the rudest and most barbarous tribes of Caffraria and New Holland. The question is why we are to teach any falsehood at all. You say it is necessary in order to make the truth palatable to the Natives. I am not convinced of this. I know that your Sanscrit and Arabic Books do not sell. I know that the English books of the School book Society do well. I know that you cannot find a single person at your Colleges who will learn Sanscrit and Arabic without being paid for it. I know that the Students who learn English are willing to pay. I believe therefore that the native population if left to itself would prefer our mode of education to yours. At all events the onus probandi [=burden of proof] lies upon you....

Dear Lord William,

I approve most highly of what you propose. The number of votes given to natives in our Committee [=the Committee of Public Instruction] ought, I think, to be limited to two: and this is done in the best way by allowing the managers of the Hindoo College to name two delegates. The Government in this manner pays a high compliment to the natives as a body, and yet escapes from the individious task of selecting individuals.

The only objection that strikes me is this. The Hindoo College admits no Mahometan students. None of the Directors are Mahometans. The high compliment paid to this institution is therefore a compliment paid to the Hindoos at the expense of the Mussulmans. And I see no way of remedying this inconvenience. For there is no Mahometan institution which bears the smallest resemblance to the Hindoo College.

Would you permit me therefore to suggest that, as your minute will probably be published, it might be as well to insert some expressions which might hold out to the Mussulmans a hope that, if they will, like the Hindoos, exert themselves in the cause of education, they will, like the Hindoos, be admitted into the education Committee?....

My dear sisters,

....This is the hottest month of the Bengal year. The sun blazes like a furnace. The soldiers, it is said, dress beef-steaks by laying them at noon on the cannon of Fort William.... We are again in our own fine house, after [having moved out during renovations].... The whole house is brilliant white and brilliant green. Our new matting looks very handsome, and the tatties which I have ordered to be hung up diffuse a delicious fragrance through the rooms. But you do not know what a tatty is. It is a mat, thickly woven of an odoriferous grass, and suspended over a window. A servant keeps it moistened with cold water. The fiercer the heat of the sun, the stronger is the evaporation from this mat, and the cooler is the air from without. sometimes when the sun is hot enough to melt metal on the outside of the window, we are as cool on the inside as if we were in an ice-house. Towards evening a fresh breeze springs up; and we take an airing in an open carriage along the banks of the Hoogley. We come home by star light a little before eight o'clock, and sit down almost immediately to dinner. After finishing our mango-fish, our curry, our asparagus, and our snipes-- (these are now chief articles at table,) we fall on a very fine Stilton-cheese which my aunt has sent us. Hannah and [her husband] Trevelyan generally indulge in bottled ale and porter. I more aristocratically confine myself to sherry or hock and soda water.

Our dessert is but a poor one. Nothing can be viler than the tropical fruits. The leechees are the best. They look like very large strawberries. They have a rough skin which is peeled off. Within there is a pulp which looks exactly like a plover's egg when the shell is taken away. This pulp contains a black stone, and tastes verymuch like a grape. As to the plantains, mangoes and so forth, they are detestable. At a quarter to nine we take tea, and go immediately to bed-- a necessery measure, for I am always up and out soon after five in the morning. Before six the barber comes to shave me; and soon after the nurse brings in the baby [Hannah's daughter] to attend my levee. One of the Khitmatgars-- that is the appellation of the servants who wait at table, --attends with coffee and dry toast, and I sit over my books till it is time to bathe. After luxuriating in an enormous tub, I dress and go to breakfast, at which we support nature under the exhausting effects of the climate by means of plenty of eggs, mango-fish, snipe-pies, and frequently a hot beef-steak, in addition to coffee and toast. Then business begins and lasts till the afternoon is far advanced. There you have the history of a day....

Dear Ellis,

I have just received your letter dated December 28th. How time flies!-- Another hot season has almost passed away and we are daily expecting the beginning of the rains. Cold season, hot season, and rainy season are all much the same to me. I enjoy even high health. I shall have been two years on Indian ground in less than a fortnight, and I have not taken ten grains of solid or a pint of liquid medicine during the whole of that time. My sister, her husband, and her baby thrive almost as well. If I judged only from my own sensations I should say that this climate is absurdly maligned. But the yellow spectral figures which surround me serve to correct the conclusions which I should be inclined to draw from the state of my own health.

One execrable effect this climate produces; --it destroys all the works of man with scarcely one exception. Steel rusts; --pins become quite useless; --razors lose their edge; --thread decays; --clothes fall to pieces; --books moulder away and drop out of their bindings; --plaster cracks; --timber rots; --matting is in shreds. The sun, the steam of this vast alluvial tract, the infinite armies of white ants, make such havoc with buildings that every house requires a complete repair everythree years. Ours was in this situation about three months ago; and if we had determined to brave the rains without any precautions we should in all probability have had the roof down upon our heads. Accordingly we were forced to migrate for six weeks from our stately apartments and our flower-beds to a dungeon where we were stifled with the stench of native cookery and deafened by the noise of native music. At last we have returned to our house. We found it all snow-white and pea-green; and we rejoice to think that we shall not again be under the necessity of quitting it till we quit it for a ship bound on a voyage to London....

My dear Lord Lansdowne,

....We are going on here quietly, and, I hope, well, though some of our friends at home seem to think differently. The panic which our Law concerning the press [which abolished censorship of the press in India] excited at the India House and the Board of Control was childish to the last degree.... The English newspapers are neither more nor less scurrilous than they were. As to the natives, the gazettes which circulate most among them are in manuscript and were never affected by the old restrictions. Those gazettes always were and still are extravagantly abusive, --far more so than the worst printed papers either in the English or in the vernacular tongues. To be scrupulous about granting liberty to the better class of papers published by known and responsible persons, and at the same time to allow boundless license to calumny and sedition in a different form, seems not to be a very wise course. The Indian home government, as Colman said on a very different occasion, sits securely on a barrel of gunpowder, and is scared out of its wits at a [fire-]cracker....

We have made a law putting all English settlers up the country under jurisdiction of the company's Courts in civil matters, and for depriving them of the privilege which they have hitherto possessed of dragging every creditor who sued them to the Supreme Court at the Presidency.... There is scarcely any native who would not waive the most righteous claim rather than be forced to engaged in a ruinous litigation before the most expensive tribunal which exists in the world. The free admission of English settlers rendered it, in my opinion, absolutely necessary to deprive the ill-disposed among them of this terrible power of annoying their native creditors...

My dear Father,

....In a few months, I hope indeed in a few weeks, we shall send up the penal code to government. We have got rid of the punishment of death except in cases of aggravated treason and wilful murder. We shall also get rid indirectly of everything that can properly be called slavery in India. There will remain civil claims on particular people for particular services, which claims may be enforced by civil action. But no person will be entitled, on the plea of being the master of another, to do anything to that other which it would be an offence to do to a freeman.

Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. We find it difficult, indeed at some places impossible, to provide instruction for all who want it. At the single town of Hoogley fourteen hundred boys are learning English. The effect of this education on the Hindoos is prodigious. No Hindoo who has received an English education ever continues to be sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy. But many profess themselves pure Deists, and some embrace Christianity. The case with Mahometans is very different. The best-educated Mahometan often continues to be a Mahometan still. The reason is plain. The Hindoo religion is so extravagantly absurd that it is impossible to teach a boy astronomy, geography, natural history, without completely destroying the hold which that religion has on his mind. But the Mahometan religion belongs to a better family. It has very much in common with Christianity; and even where it is most absurd, it is reasonable when compared with Hindooism. It is my firm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytise, without the smallest interference with religious liberty, merely by the natural operation of knowledge and reglection. I heartily rejoice in this prospect....

My dear sisters,

...The cold season has begun, a most agreeable season, except that the air is too biting early in the mornings and after sunset in the evenings. This is the season of fine vegetables, --young potatoes and delicious peas. It is also the season when the best ships come in from England. In January they generally set off on their return with their passengers. This year their arrival is not [a] matter of much interest to us. Next year we shall be choosing our ship, buying furniture for our cabins, and packing our books. --How time flies! It seems to me but yesterday since I was packing my library in Gray's Inn in order to come out. And in a twelve-month, if I live, I shall be packing it here for the purpose of going home. I have every reason to believe that it will be in my power to make you all comfortable without any sacrifice which will be painful to myself. Indeed I am already tolerably at ease as to the future circumstances of our family....

We have had very few gaities lately. I avoid them as much as I can: the Governor General lives quietly; of the members of Council some are poor and some are ill. One of the Judges has been laid up, and the wife of another has been brought to bed: so that we seldom dine out more than once a week. Tonight however I have been persuaded to go to a party at the Villa of a very wealthy native who proposes to entertain us with a shew of fire-works. As he is a liberal, intelligent man, a friend to education, and in opinions an Englishman, though in morals, I fear, a Hindoo, I have accepted his invitation. The party cannot possibly be so stupid as one of our great formal dinners, which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary....

Dear Charles,

....In another year my banishment will be over, and I shall be packing up for my voyage. I already begin to feel the pleasure of returning from exile. That pleasure ought to be very great to compensate for the bitter pain of so long and so complete a separation from home. And it is very great. For though England is not all that it once was to me [before his sister Margaret's death], yet I have no hopes or wishes but what point to England; and I would rather go home with the knowledge that I should die there next year than live here till seventy in the midst of whatever splendour or comfort India affords. I quite understand how it was that neither goddesses nor enchanted palaces nor royal matches nor immortality itself could bribe Ulysses to give up his rugged little Ithaca, and that he was willing to forego everything else to see once more the smoke going up from the cottages of his dear island.

Few people I believe have the feeling so strongly as I have it. Indeed the great majority of the members of the services here seem perfectly willing to pass their lives in India; and those who go home talk with very little pleasure of the prospect before them. This is not strange. For they generally come out at eighteen or nineteen. Their banishment is their emancipation. The separation from home is no doubt at first disagreeable to them. But the pain is compensated to a great extent by the pleasure of independence, --of finding themselves men, --and, if they are in the Civil Service, of finding themselves rich. A lad who six months before was under strict discipline, who could indulge in few pleasures for want of money, and who could not indulge in any excess without being soundly scolded by his father and his pedagogue, finds himself able to feast on snipes and drink as much champagne as he likes, to entertain guests, to buy horses, to keep a mistress or two, to maintain fifteen or twenty servants who bow to the ground every time that they meet him, and suffer him to kick and abuve them to his heart's content. He is surrounded by money-lenders who are more desirous to supply him with funds than he is himself to procure them. Accordingly the coming out to India is quite as often an agreeable as a disagreeable event to a young fellow.

If he does not take his furlough-- and not one civil servant in three takes his furlough, --he remains in India till he is forty five or fifty, and is then almost unfit for England. He has outlived his parents. He is estranged from his early friends. His children who have been sent over to England at six or seven years old are estranged from him. He is a man of consequence in the East. In Europe he knows that he will be considered as an old, yellow-faced bore, fit for nothing but to drink Cheltenham water and to ballot at the India House. He has acquired, it may be, a great deal of valuable information on Indian affairs, --is an excellent Oriental Scholar, --knows intimately all the interests of the native Courts, --is as well acquainted with the revenue-system of Bengal as Huskisson was with the revenue-system of England, --is as deeply read in Hindoo and Mahometan jurisprudence as Sugden in the law of England. He knows that these acquirements which make him an object of admiration at Calcutta will procure for him no applause-- nay not the smallest notice-- in London. He has probably acquired some lazy self-indulgent habits. He cannot dress without the help of two or three servants. He cannot dine without a great variety of dishes. He cannot go out without a carriage. Under such circumstances he finds England a wretched place. He was powerful. He was eminent. He was comfortable. He is utterly insignificant, and is forced to go without the attendance and the luxuries which habit has rendered necessary to him.

The case with me is very different. I have not yet become reconciled to the change from the English to Indian habits. I have not suffered the ordinary helplessness of my countrymen here to grow upon me. I never suffer anybody to assist me in dressing or in any of the thousand little offices which every man ought to be in the habit of performing for himself. My acquirements such as they are fit me far better for Europe than for Asia....

I think that after an hour's talk with a civilian of forty I could guess nine times out of ten whether he had or had not taken his furlough. Some of the cleverest men and of the most valuable public servants in India have never seen England from sixteen to fifty. But, whatever their merits may be, there is always a certain peculiar narrowness and Orientalism about them....

My dear Empson,

We are just at the close for which Heaven be praised of a tremendously severe and tremendously long hot season. The fury with which the sun has blazed upon us during the last 3 weeks is far beyond anything, not only in my short Indian experience, but in the recollection of the oldest English inhabitants of Calcutta. The tanks are dry; the earth is baked as if it had been in a furnace; the peasantry have begun to quit their villages and to assemble in crowds on the banks of the river. The natives themselves have not unfrequently died of mere heat. One groom dropped down a corpse yesterday while attending a buggy. Two soldiers died in the same way while on guard at Fort William. The Cholera Morbus which generally accompanies the hot weather has been raging among the lower classes. "Black fellow die much, master," said my barber to me....

At length yesterday evening some rain fell, enough to cool the air which was like a blast from a furnace, and soon after midnight we had a very heavy shower. I really do not think that I ever remember any public event which excited such general rejoicing. Indeed if the rain had been much longer delayed the heat would have been the least part of the evil. We should have had reason to apprehend famine....

When it was the worst I lay from 9 in the morning till 6 in the afternoon on my sofa under a punkah reading Voltaire and Plutarch, with all the windows and blimes of my library most carefully closed; for if the smallest cranny were left open, a blast like that from the mouth of hell rushed in. Twice a week I was forced to go to Council; and I really believe that the Council described in the 2nd book of Paradise Lost was a great deal cooler. As to Trevelyan who was forced to go daily to office, I was afraid that he would have a brain fever; and I believe that if he had not been copiously relieved by leeches he would not now have been alive....

Before the beginning of these heats our house had been made a sad one by the death of my younger niece, a little thing only 3 months old.... Since I heard of the death of my sister Margaret, my spirits have never been what they once were, and a lighter domestic calamity than this would have been sufficient to depress them.... In all vexations the near prospect of return is a most powerful cordial to me. I believe that nobody ever loved his country as a place to live in with so exclusive a love as mine for England....

Dear Mrs. Drummond,

....We have our share of the miseries of life in this country. We are annually baked four months, boiled four more, and allowed the remaining four to become cool if we can. At this moment the Sun is blazing like a furnace; the earth, soaked with oceans of rain, is steaming like a wet blanket. Vegetation is rotting all round us. Insects and undertakers are the only living creatures which seem to enjoy the climate. But, though our atmosphere is hot, our factions are lukewarm. The utmost fury of sedition in a society like this is merely laughable to a person accustomed to the contests of English parties. A bad epigram in a newspaper, --or a public meeting attended by a tailor, a pastry-cook, a reporter for a newspaper, two or three barristers, and eight or ten attorneys, are our most formidable annoyances. We have agitators in our own small way, Tritons of the minnows, bearing the same sort of resemblance to O'Connel that a lizard bears to an alligator. Therefore Calcutta for me in preference to Dublin.

Luckily I am not compelled to choose between Dublin and Calcutta. In a very short time I hope to be, for the first time in my life, an absolutely free and independent man, possessed of a competence, subject to no official superior, and at perfect liberty to choose my own path in life....

My dear sisters,

....I have a noble supply of German books which Longman has just sent out to me, and I intend to give ten or elevan hours a day during the voyage to the mastering of that language. I have found a few occasional hours for it during the last five or six weeks, and I already get on with it tolerably. When we reach England I hope to have finished Schiller's works in twelve volumes and Goethe's in fifty-five. I promise myself a greater quantity of information and amusement from German than I have found in any modern foreign language, except French....

I shall bring home with me a folio volume of my works, --a complete penal Code with notes, the last sheet of which is to be printed off today. It will have no interest for ladies. But I hope that it will not do me discredit among people who take note of such things....