No. 6

H.E.  THE BENGALI BABOO

Ali Baba avowedly treats the Bengali Baboo merely as a being “full of inappropriate words and phrases ... and the loose shadows of English thought.”  Such being the case, it must never be forgotten that he is the product, in every sense of the word, of British modes of purely secular education.  Modes which, eminently at the present time, are being gravely called in question.

All of which has been more lately elaborated by “F.  Anstey,” i.e. Mr. Thomas Anstey Guthrie, in the persons of “Baboo Jabberjee, B.A.” and “A Bayard from Bengal.”

The broad results of purely secular and mainly literary education might in fact be quite fairly summed up in the reproachful words of Caliban—­

      “You taught me language; and my profit on’t
      Is, I know how to curse.”

Aberigh-Mackay devoted his life in India to counteract the effects of purely literary instruction, which he persistently deprecated; and the last thirty years have undoubtedly witnessed many advances in the same direction, tending to the material progress of India.

Ali Baba trembled for the future of Baboodom, that its tendencies as he depicted them might infect others who might pass, through various stages, into “trampling, hope-bestirred crowds, and so on, out of the province of Ali Baba and into the columns of serious reflection.”

No. 7

WITH THE RAJA

In this article we have a vivid picture—­mainly—­of a type of Indian Noble it was Aberigh-Mackay’s aim and life’s work in India to avoid creating.  That too from the beginning of his career, but more especially in the training, and that not merely in book-learning, he initiated and earned on up to the last days of his life within and without the Residency College at Indore.  To paraphrase the language of the then recently appointed Agent to the Governor-General for Central India—­Sir Lepel Griffin—­in his first Administrative Report, that for 1880-1881, the happy effects of the training some of the leading Chiefs of Malwa received under Aberigh-Mackay were visible in the improved administration of their States.  The most notable instance, the Governor-General’s Agent points out, being observable in Rutlam.  His Highness the “Rajah Saheb having conducted the Government with such ability and success as would do credit to the ablest administrators.”

It is well worthy of special notice that the Rajah of Rutlam had been, from a period several years antecedent to Aberigh-Mackay’s coming to Indore, his special ward.

Most effectually did Aberigh-Mackay, one of the best all-round sportsmen that Modern India ever saw, counteract the “prodigiously fat white horse with pink points” tendencies of any of his alumni.  The description of the kingly cavalcade in this article, vide p. 52, calling forth from John Lockwood Kipling (Beast and Man in India, p. 196), a most competent and discriminating authority, the following eulogy:—­