CONDITIONS IN INDIA

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 75, 23 December 1918, Page 6

CONDITIONS IN INDIA

Sir,—l'revfous communications, from Mr. ,r. Griffiths, hon. secretary of the New Zealand and India League, as published in your columns, have made it plain thnt' his personal kuowledge of India, and probably of any other country where a small white population is hugely outnumbered by an almost totally uneducated coloured population, is small indeed. And, therefore, that he is a very unsafe guide on Indian matters. But, surely, when he asks your readers to believe that n rice diet is both a hardship and an insufficient diet for Indians, he is beating his own previous best attempts to mislead. Rice may fairly be called the .national diet, of the great bulk of the natives of India, and 60 iyell do they flourish on it thot when at the seige of Arcot provisions ran short the native soldiers, as Macaulay tells us, "came to dive, not to complain of their scanty fare, but to propose that all the grain should be given 'to the Europeans, who required more nourishment ' than the natives of Asia. The ll:-in gruel which was ■■ strained away from tho rice would suffice for themselves."

The recent heavy mortality amongst the coloured population of India was not caused or increased by a rico, diet, but by their temperamental inability to iight against' serious illness, a peculiarity which they ehare with the natives of South Africa.—l am,' etc., ANGLO-AFRICAN. December 19, 1918.