Indian Antiquary Vol 42

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 308

294
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[DECEMBER, 1913.
with its appanage, the directly British administered Sudan, which alone covers about a million square miles of territory in thirteen provinces, in Northern Africa. These two areas occupy, as it were, a position between the self-governing and the directly-governed areas. Of these, there are in Europe, Malta and Gibraltar, Cyprus being officially included in Asia. In Asia itself is the mighty Indian Empire, which includes Aden and the Arabian Coast on the West and Burma on the East, and many islands in the intervening sens, with its fiftoen provinces and some twenty categories of Native States' in subordinate alliance,' that is, under general Imperial control. To these are added Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, and the Malay States. federated or other, North Borneo and Sarawak, and in the China Seas Hongkong and Wei-haiwei. In South Africa we find Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Rhodesia ; in British West Africa, Gambia, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria ; in Eastern and Central Africa, Somaliland, the East Africa Protectorate, Uganda, Zanzibar, and Nyassaland; while attached to Africa are the Mauritius, Seychelles, Ascension and St. Helena. In Central and South America are Honduras and British Guiana, and attached to that continent the Falkland Islands, and also Bermuda and the six colonies of British West Indies. In the Pacific Ocean are Fiji, Papua and many of the Pacific Islands.
I am afraid that once more during the course of this exposition I have been obliged to resort to a concentration of statement that is almost bewildering. But let that be. If one is to grapple successfully with a large and complex subject, it is necessary to try and keep before the mind, so far as possible, not only its magnitude, but the extent of its complexity. This is the reason for bringing before you, however briefly and generally, the main geographical details of the British Empire. The first point to realise on such a survey is that the mere extent of such an Empire makes the subject of its administration an immensely important one for the British people.
The next point for consideration and realisation is that an empire, situated in so many widely separated parts of the world, must contain within its boundaries groups of every variety of mankind, in such numerical strength as to render it necessary to control them as individual entities. They do not consist of small bodies lost in a general population, and therefore negligible from the administrator's point of view, but of whole races and tribes or of large detachments thereof.
These tribes of mankind profess every variety of religion known. They are Christians, Jews, Mahomedang, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Animists and to use a very modern expression, Animatists, adherents of main religions followed by an immense variety of sects, governed, however loosely, by every species of philosophy that is or has been in fashion among groups of mankind, and current in every stage of development, from the simplest and most primitive to the most historical and complex. One has to bear in mind that we have within our borders the Andamanese, the Papuan, and the Polynesian, as well as the highly civilised Hindu and Chinese, and that not one of these, nor indeed of many other peoples, has any tradition of philosophy or religion in common with our own; their very instincts of faith and belief following other lines than ours, the prejudices with which their minds are saturated being altogether alien to those with which we ourselves are deeply imbued.
The subjects of the British King-Emperor speak between them most of the languages of the world, and certainly every structural variety of human speech has its example somewhere in the British Empire. A number of these languages is still only in the process of becoming understood by our officials and other residents among their speakers, and let there be no mistake as to the magnitude of the question involved in the point of language alone in British