RIPON THE GOOD

 Why was Ripon called ‘Ripon the good’?

Florence Nightingale called Ripon ‘the Savior of India’ and his rule the beginning of a golden age in India.

Arnold White, on the other hand, thought that Ripon had ‘opened the door to the loss of India’.

Ripon was very popular with the Indians who long remembered him as ‘Ripon the Good and Virtuous’. In his presidential address at the Indian National Congress session at Lahore in 1909, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya said, ‘Ripon was the greatest and most beloved viceroy whom India has known. He was loved and respected by educate Indians as I believe no Englishman who has ever been connected with India, except the Father of the Indian National Congress, Mr. Allen Octavian Hume and Sir William Wedderburn, has been loved and respected. Ripon was loved because he inaugurated that noble scheme of local self-government… because he made the most courageous attempt to act up to the spirit of distinctions, and to treat his Indian fellow subjects as standing on the footing of equality with their European fellow subjects… because he was a type of the noblest of Englishmen, who have an innate love of justice and who wish to see the blessing of liberty which they themselves enjoy extended to all their fellowmen’. One of the last acts of Ripon in 1909 was to vote for the Minto-Morley Reforms in the House of Lords. He died in 1909.

Unfortunately for India and Ripon the best measure of Ripon – Local self-government, substitution of merit for patronage and jobbery in filling posts in the higher branches of subordinate services, the Ilbert Bill – were defeated by the Indian bureaucracy. Very little was done in the sphere of local self-government or as Blunt puts it: ‘Poor little acts were passed allowing native communities to mend their own roads, provided the Commissioner does not think them incapable of doing so’. Perhaps the outcome of Ripon’s efforts was little. Ripon is remembered not that he had been able to do much, but as Surendranath Banerjee puts it, for ‘the purity of his intentions, the loftiness of his ideals, the righteousness of his policy and his hatred of racial disqualifications’. Ripon’s doings though unsuccessful raised hopes and aspirations which marked the beginning of political life in India.