aware that the great and steady rise in prices of late years in India is one of the consequences of a great and long-continued influx of the precious metals, and therefore a symptom of the growing prosperity of the country; but the English subaltern or railway engineer finds only that it leaves him at the end of the year a poorer man than he would have been at home, when he expected to have been richer, and he is very apt to attribute his disappointment to the Government, and to imagine that he has been entrapped into a bad bargain.
The natives are naturally still less likely to weigh against the inconveniences of rising prices, the many advantages to all the labouring and mercantile classes with which high prices are accompanied, when caused by a cheapening of the precious metals; and very bitter are the invectives often directed against the 'Government which makes bread dear.'
The Narrator's notion that 'the English fixed the rupee at sixteen annas' is another specimen of a very widespread Indian popular delusion. The rupee always consisted of sixteen annas, for the anna means only the sixteenth part of anything, but to the poor the great matter for consideration in all questions of currency is the quantity of small change they can get for the coin in which their wages are paid. Formerly this used to fluctuate with the price of copper, and the quantity of copper change which a silver rupee would fetch varied as copper was cheap or dear, and was always greatest when the copper currency was most debased. The English introduced all over India a uniform currency of copper as well as of silver, and none of course were greater gainers in the long-run by this uniformity than the very poor. But, as usually happens in such cases, the memory of the occasional gain when the rupee brought more than its normal proportion of change, has outlived the recollection of the more frequent loss when it brought less; and the popular intelligence, however it may smart under the evils of an uncertain and irregular currency, is slow to recognise the benefits of uniformity.
NOTE C.
I am unable, at present, to give either the native words or music of this curious little Calicut song. It is probably of Portuguese origin, or may have been derived from the Syrian Christians who have been settled on that coast since the earliest ages.
The English translation of the words as explained to me by Anna, is as follows:—
PART I.
THE SONG FROM THE SHIP.
(To be sung by one or more voices.)
2. Now darkness, lightning, and very little rain; but big flashes, two yards long, that looked as if they fell into the sea.
3. On the third day the Captain looks out for land, shading his eyes with his hand. There may be land. The sailors say to him, 'What do you see?' He answers, 'Far off is the jungle, and, swinging in a tree, is an old monkey with two little monkeys in her arms. We must be nearing land.'
4. Again the Captain looks out; the sailors say to him, 'What do you see?' He answers, 'On the shore there walks a pretty little maiden, with a chattee on her head; she skips, and runs, and dances, as she goes. We must be nearing land.'