Page:A General Biography of Bengal Celebrities Vol 1.djvu/88

 THE INDIGO CRISIS IN 1800. 79 their loss of prestige, power, and position. In this awful predicament, the planters, instead of adopting a conciliatory course, as Dr. Duff very rightly observed at the time, they should have done, made their position worse by taking recourse to harsher measures with a view to coerce the refractory ryots into submission. They took the law into their own hands, kidnapped the ring-leaders of the ryots, kept them illegally con- fined in low, moist godowns for days together, burnt villages and Bazars (market places), knocked down houses of the poor ryots, forcibly took away their catties, wounded men sometimes, and outraged and ill- treated women. And it is our duty as an impartial writer of history to say that in the commission of these crimes, the aggrieved ryots did not suffer all these nu- merous wrongs without giving tit for tat But being the weaker party in the contest, their sufferings were great and sometimes exceeded the limits of human patience. They were no match for the combined strength of the great planting community which osten- sibly counted upon and actually received the sympa- thy, direct or indirect, from the Government as well as from the European civilians holding sway over the different districts of Bengal." The isolated body of civilians residing in the out-of-the-way places in the Mofusil received hospitality from their planter friends and close friendship naturally existed between them. The Government, on the other hand, from a political point of view considering that the residence of non- official Europeans in the interior,- would, in hours of danger serve as a safeguard, did every thing that lay in its power to foster the interests of the planting com- munity. Such being the case, the natural conscious superiority of the ruling race of which the Indigo Planters formed a part and parcel, conjoined with the sympathy they were sure to expect from the govern- ing class, led the planters, as a general rule, to become more oppressive than before.