The New World of Islam Part 19

In the cities, indeed, conditions are even worse than in the country, the slums of the Orient surpa.s.sing the slums of the West. The French publicist Louis Bertrand paints positively nauseating pictures of the poorer quarters of the great Levantine towns like Cairo, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Omitting his more poignant details, here is his description of a Cairo tenement: "In Cairo, as elsewhere in Egypt, the wretchedness and grossness of the poorer-cla.s.s dwellings are perhaps even more shocking than in the other Eastern lands. Two or three dark, airless rooms usually open on a hall-way not less obscure. The plaster, peeling off from the ceilings and the worm-eaten laths of the walls, falls constantly to the filthy floors. The straw mats and bedding are infested by innumerable vermin."[275]

In India it is the same story. Says Fisher: "Even before the growth of her industries had begun, the cities of India presented a baffling housing problem. Into the welter of crooked streets and unsanitary habits of an Oriental city these great industrial plants are wedging their thousands of employees. Working from before dawn until after dark, men and women are too exhausted to go far from the plant to sleep, if they can help it. When near-by houses are jammed to suffocation, they live and sleep in the streets. In Calcutta, twenty years ago,[276] land had reached $200,000 an acre in the overcrowded tenement districts."[277] Of Calcutta, a Western writer remarks: "Calcutta is a shame even in the East. In its slums, mill hands and dock coolies do not live; they pig. Houses choke with unwholesome breath; drains and compounds fester in filth. Wheels compress decaying refuse in the roads; cows drink from wells soaked with sewage, and the floors of bakeries are washed in the same pollution."[278] In the other industrial centres of India, conditions are practically the same. A Bombay native sanitary official stated in a report on the state of the tenement district, drawn up in 1904: "In such houses--the breeders of germs and bacilli, the centres of disease and poverty, vice, and crime--have people of all kinds, the diseased, the dissolute, the drunken, the improvident, been indiscriminately herded and tightly packed in vast hordes to dwell in close a.s.sociation with each other."[279]

Furthermore, urban conditions seem to be getting worse rather than better. The problem of congestion, in particular, is a.s.suming ever graver proportions. Already in the opening years of the present century the congestion in the great industrial centres of India like Calcutta, Bombay, and Lucknow averaged three or four times the congestion of London. And the late war has rendered the housing crisis even more acute. In the East, as in the West, the war caused a rapid drift of population to the cities and at the same time stopped building owing to the prohibitive cost of construction. Hence, a prodigious rise in rents and a plague of landlord profiteering. Says Fisher: "Rents were raised as much as 300 per cent., enforced by eviction. Ma.s.s-meetings of protest in Bombay resulted in government action, fixing maximum rents for some of the tenements occupied by artisans and labourers. Setting maximum rental does not, however, make more room."[280]

And, of course, it must not be forgotten that higher rents are only one phase in a general rise in the cost of living that has been going on in the East for a generation and which has been particularly p.r.o.nounced since 1914. More than a decade ago Bertrand wrote of the Near East: "From one end of the Levant to the other, at Constantinople as at Smyrna, Damascus, Beyrout, and Cairo, I heard the same complaints about the increasing cost of living; and these complaints were uttered by Europeans as well as by the natives."[281] To-day the situation is even more difficult. Says Sir Valentine Chirol of conditions in Egypt since the war: "The rise in wages, considerable as it has been, has ceased to keep pace with the inordinate rise in prices for the very necessities of life. This is particularly the case in the urban centres, where the lower cla.s.ses--workmen, carters, cab-drivers, shopkeepers, and a host off minor employees--are hard put to it nowadays to make both ends meet."[282] As a result of all these hard conditions various phenomena of social degradation such as alcoholism, vice, and crime, are becoming increasingly common.[283] Last--but not least--there are growing symptoms of social unrest and revolutionary agitation, which we will examine in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[239] _I. e._ the educated upper cla.s.s.

[240] Vambery, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.

13.

[241] _I. e._ the priestly cla.s.s.

[242] Vambery, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.

15.

[243] Vambery, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.

51.

[244] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, pp. 221-226.

[245] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, p. 240.

[246] The purdah is the curtain separating the women's apartments from the rest of the house.

[247] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, pp. 254-255.

[248] For progress in Western education in the Orient, under both European and native auspices, see L. Bertrand, _Le Mirage oriental_, pp.

291-392; C. S. Cooper, _The Modernizing of the Orient_, pp. 3-13, 24-64.

[249] In his Introduction to Sir Valentine Chirol's _Indian Unrest_, p.

xii.

[250] Cromer, _Modern Egypt_, Vol. II., pp. 228-243.

[251] J. D. Rees, _The Real India_, p. 162 (London, 1908).

[252] Vambery, _Western Culture in Eastern Lands_, pp. 203-204.

[253] H. E. Compton, _Indian Life in Town and Country_, p. 98 (London, 1904).

[254] Vambery, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.

32.

[255] Cooper, _op. cit._, pp. 48-49.

[256] On this point of comfort _v._ luxury, see especially Sir Bampfylde Fuller, "East and West: A Study of Differences," _Nineteenth Century and After_, November, 1911.

[257] L. Bertrand, _op. cit._, 145-147; J. Chailley, _Administrative Problems of British India_, pp. 138-139. For increased expenditure on Western products, see A. J. Brown, "Economic Changes in Asia," _The Century_, March, 1904; J. P. Jones, "The Present Situation in India,"

_Journal of Race Development_, July, 1910; R. Mukerjee, _The Foundations of Indian Economics_, p. 5.

[258] For higher cost of living in the East, see Chirol, _Indian Unrest_, pp. 2-3; Fisher, _India's Silent Revolution_, pp. 46-60; Jones, _op. cit._; T. T. Williams, "Inquiry into the Rise of Prices in India,"

_Economic Journal_, December, 1915.

[259] Brown, _op. cit._

[260] At the beginning of the nineteenth century the population of India is roughly estimated to have been about 100,000,000. According to the census of 1911 the population was 315,000,000.

[261] Sir W. W. Hunter, _The India of the Queen and Other Essays_, p. 42 (London, 1903).

[262] Cromer, "Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,"

_Nineteenth Century and After_, May, 1913.

[263] Archer, _India and the Future_, pp. 157, 162 (London), 1918.

[264] P. K. Wattal, of the Indian Finance Department, a.s.sistant Accountant-General. The book was published at Bombay, 1916.

[265] Wattal, pp. i-iii.

[266] Wattal, p. 3.

[267] _Ibid._, p. 12.

[268] Wattal, p. 14.

[269] _Ibid._, pp. 19-21.

[270] Wattal, p. 28.

[271] _Ibid._, p. 82.

[272] For conditions in the Near East, see Bertrand, pp. 110, 124, 125-128.

[273] H. N. Brailsford, _The War of Steel and Gold_, pp. 112-113. See also T. Rothstein, _Egypt's Ruin_, pp. 298-300 (London, 1910), Sir W. W.

Ramsay, "The Turkish Peasantry of Anatolia," _Quarterly Review_, January, 1918.

[274] Dr. D. Ross, "Wretchedness a Cause of Political Unrest," _The Survey_, February 18, 1911.

[275] Bertrand, _op. cit._, pp. 111-112.

[276] _I. e._, in 1900.

[277] Fisher, _India's Silent Revolution_, p. 51.

[278] G. W. Stevens, _In India_. Quoted by Fisher, p. 51.