INthe comparative cool of early morning, I sallied out on a stroll through the outskirts of Benares. Thousands of women were stepping gracefully along the crowded roads, bearing on their heads the water-jars, while at every few paces there was a well, at which hundreds were waiting along with the bheesties their turn for lowering their bright gleaming copper cups to the well-water to fill their skins or vases. All were keeping up a continual chatter, women with women, men with men: all the tongues were running ceaselessly. It is astonishing to see the indignation that a trifling mishap creates—such gesticulation, such shouting, and loud talk, you would think that murder at least was in question. The world cannot show the Hindoo‘s equal as a babbler; the women talk while they grind corn, the men while they smoke their water-pipes; your true Hindoo is never quiet; when not talking, he is playing on his tomtom.
The Doorgha Khond, the famed Temple of the Sacred Monkeys, I found thronged with worshipers, and garlanded in every part with roses: it overhangs one of the best holy tanks in India, but has not much beauty or grandeur, and is chiefly remarkable for the swarms of huge, fat-paunched, yellow-bearded, holy monkeys, whose outposts hold one quarter of the city, and whose main body forms a living roof to the temple. A singular contrast to the Doorgha Khond was the Queen‘s College for native students, built in a mixture of Tudor and Hindoo architecture. The view from the roof is noticeable, depending as it does for its beauty on the mingling of the rich green of the timber with the gay colors of the painted native huts. Over the trees are seen the minarets at the river-side, and an unwonted life was given to the view by the smoke and flames that were rising from two burning huts, in widely-separated districts of the native town. It is said that the natives, whenever they quarrel with their neighbors, always take the first opportunity of firing their huts; but in truth the huts in the hot weather almost fire themselves, so inflammable are their roofs and sides.
When the sun had declined sufficiently to admit of another excursion, I started from my bungalow, and, passing through the elephant-corral, went down with a guide to the ghauts, the observatory of Jai Singh, and the Golden Temple. From the minarets of the mosque of Aurungzebe I had a lovely sunset view of the ghauts, the city, and the Ganges; but the real sight of Benares, after all, lies in a walk through the tortuous passages that do duty for streets. No carriages can pass them, they are so narrow. You walk preceded by your guide, who warns the people, that they may stand aside and not be defiled by your touch, for that is the real secret of the apparent respect paid to you in Benares; but the sacred cows are so numerous and so obstinate that you cannot avoid sometimes jostling them. The scene in the passages is the most Indian in India. The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo princes spending a week in purification at the holy place, the frescoed fronts of the shops and houses, the deafening beating of the tomtoms, and, above all, the smoke and sickening smell from the “burning ghauts” that meets you, mingled with a sweeter smell of burningspices, as you work your way through the vast crowds of pilgrims who are pouring up from the river‘s bank—all alike are strange to the English traveler, and fill his mind with that indescribable awe which everywhere accompanies the sight of scenes and ceremonies that we do not understand. When once you are on the Ganges bank itself, the scene is wilder still:—a river front of some three miles, faced with lofty ghauts, or flights of river stairs, over which rise, pile above pile, in sublime confusion, lofty palaces with oriel windows hanging over the sacred stream; observatories with giant sun-dials, gilt domes (golden, the story runs), and silver minarets. On the ghauts, rows of fires, each with a smouldering body; on the river, boat-loads of pilgrims, and fakeers praying while they float; under the houses, lines of prostrate bodies—those of the sick—brought to the sacred Ganges to die—or, say our government spies, to be murdered by suffocation with sacred mud; while prowling about are the wolf-like fanatics who feed on putrid flesh. The whole is lit by a sickly sun fitfully glaring through the smoke, while the Ganges stream is half obscured by the river fog and reek of the hot earth.
The lofty pavilions that crown the river front are ornamented with paintings of every beast that walks and bird that flies, with monsters, too—pink and green and spotted—with griffins, dragons, and elephant-headed gods embracing dancing-girls. Here and there are representations of red-coated soldiers—English, it would seem, for they have white faces, but so, the Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies, who are certainly not British. The Benares taste for painting leads to the decoration with pink and yellow spots of the very cows. The tiger is the commonest of all the figures on the walls—indeed, the explanation that therepresentations are allegorical, or that gods are pictured in tiger shape, has not removed from my mind the belief that the tiger must have been worshiped in India at some early date. All Easterns are inclined to worship the beasts that eat them: the Javanese light floating sacrifices to their river crocodiles; the Scindees at Kurrachee venerate the sacred muggur, or man-eating alligator; the hill-tribes pray to snakes; indeed, to a new-comer, all Indian religion has the air of devil-worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some shape: the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are propitiated by infernal music, they are often worshiped with obscene and hideous rites. There is even something cruel in the monotonous roar of the great tomtoms; the sound seems to connect itself with widow-burning, with child-murder, with Juggernauth processions. Since the earliest known times, the tomtom has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics; its booming is bound up with the thousand barbarisms of false religion. If the scene on the Benares ghauts is full of horrors, we must not forget that Hindooism is a creed of fear and horror, not of love.
The government of India has lately instituted an inquiry into the alleged abuses of the custom of taking sick Hindoos to the Ganges-side to die, with a view to regulating or suppressing the practice which prevails in the river-side portion of Lower Bengal. At Benares, Bengal people are still taken to the river-side, but not so other natives, as Hindoos dying anywhere in the sacred city have all the blessings which the most holy death can possibly secure; the Benares Shastra, moreover, forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases of it in the city, although I had seen many near Calcutta. Not only are aged people brought from their sick-rooms, laid in the burning sun, and half suffocatedwith the Ganges water poured down their throats, but, owing to the ridicule which follows if they recover, or the selfishness of their relatives, the water is often muddier than it need be: hence the phrase “ghaut murder,” by which this custom is generally known. Similar customs are not unheard of in other parts of India, and even in Polynesia and North America. The Veddahs, or black aborigines of Ceylon, were, up to very lately, in the habit of carrying their dying parents or children into the jungle, and, having placed a chatty of water and some rice by their side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts. Under pressure from our officials, they are believed to have ceased to act thus, but they continue, we are told, to throw their dead to the leopards and crocodiles. The Maories, too, have a way of taking out to die alone those whom their seers have pronounced doomed men, but it is probable that, among the rude races, the custom which seems to be a relic of human sacrifice has not been so grossly abused as it has been by the Bengal Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of many similar barbarities that disgrace the religion of the Hindoos, but it is fast sharing the fate of suttee and infanticide.
As I returned through the bazaar, I met many most unholy-looking visitors to the sacred town. Fierce Rajpoots, with enormous turbans ornamented with zig-zag stripes: Bengal bankers, in large purple turbans, curling their long white mustaches, and bearing their critical noses high aloft as they daintily picked their way over the garbage of the streets; and savage retainers of the rajahs staying for a season at their city palaces, were to the traveler‘s eye no very devout pilgrims. In truth, the immoralities of the “holy city” are as great as its religious virtues, and it is thechosen ground of the loose characters as well as of the pilgrims of the Hindoo world.
In the whole of the great throng in the bazaar, hardly the slightest trace of European dressing was to be perceived: the varnished boots of the wealthier Hindoos alone bore witness to the existence of English trade—a singular piece of testimony, this, to the essential conservatism of the Oriental mind. With any quantity of old army clothing to be got for the asking, you never see a rag of it on a native back—not even on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket to an out-door servant, he will cut it into strips and wear them as a puggree round his head; but this is about the only thing he will accept, unless to sell it in the bazaar.
As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains of laden camels that were winding slowly through the tortuous streets, I saw a European soldier cheapening a bracelet with a native jeweler. He was the firsttopee wallah(“hat-fellow,” or “European”) that I had seen in Benares City. Calcutta is the only town in Northern India in which you meet Europeans in your walks or rides, and, even there, there is but one European to every sixty natives. In all India, there are, including troops, children, and officials of all kinds, far less than as many thousands of Europeans as there are millions of natives.
The evening after that on which I visited the native town, I saw in Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the India hated and dreaded by our troops—by day a blazing deadly heat and sun, at night a still more deadly fog—a hot white fog, into which the sun disappears half an hour before his time for setting, and out of which he shoots soon after seven in the morning, to blaze and kill again—a pestiferous fever-breeding ground-fog, out of which stand the tops ofthe palms, though their stems are invisible in the steam. Compared with our English summer climate, it seems the atmosphere of another planet.
Among the men in the cantonments, I found much of that demoralization that heat everywhere produces among Englishmen. The newly-arrived soldiers appear to pass their days in alternate trials of hard drinking and of total abstinence, and are continually in a state of nervous fright, which in time must wear them out and make them an easy prey to fever. The officers who are fresh from England often behave in much the same manner as the men, though with them “belatee pawnee” takes the place of plain water with the brandy. “Belatee pawnee” means, being translated, “English water,” but, when interpreted, it means “soda-water”—the natives once believing that this was English river-water, bottled and brought to India by us as they carry Ganges water to the remotest parts. The superstition is now at an end, owing to the fact that natives are themselves largely employed in the making of soda-water, which is cheaper in India than it is at home; but the name remains.
Our men kill themselves with beer, with brandy and soda-water, and with careless inattention to night chills, and then blame the poor climate for their fevers, or die cursing “India.” Of course, long residence in a climate winterless and always hot at mid-day produces or intensifies certain diseases; but brandy and soda-water produces more, and intensifies all. They say it is “soda-and-brandy” the first month, and then “brandy-and-soda,” but that men finally take to putting in the soda-water first, and then somehow the brandy always kills them. If a man wears a flannel belt and thick clothes when he travels by night, and drinks hot tea, he need not fear India.
In all ways, Benares is the type of India; in the Secrole cantonments, you have the English in India, intelligent enough, but careless, and more English than they are at home, with garrison chaplains, picnics, balls, and champagne suppers; hard by, in the native town, the fierce side of Hindooism, and streets for an Englishman to show himself in which ten years ago was almost certain death. Benares is the center of all the political intrigues of India; but the great mutiny itself was hatched there without being heard of at Secrole. Except that our policemen now perambulate the town, change in Benares there has been none. Were missionaries to appear openly in its streets, their fate would still very possibly be the same as that which in this city befell St. Thomas.
ONEof the greatest difficulties with which the British have to contend in Hindostan is how to discover the tendencies, how to follow the changes, of native opinion. Your Hindoo is so complaisant a companion, that, whether he is your servant at threepence a day, or the ruler of the State in which you dwell, he is perpetually striving to make his opinions the reflex of your own. You are engaged in a continual struggle to prevent your views from being seen, in order that you may get at his: in this you always fail; a slighthint is enough for a Hindoo, and, if he cannot find even that much of suggestion in your words, he confines himself to commonplace. We should see in this, not so much one of the forms assumed by the cringing slavishness born of centuries of subjection, not so much an example of Oriental cunning, as of the polish of Eastern manners. Even in our rude country it is hardly courteous, whatever your opinions, flatly to contradict the man with whom you happen to be talking; with the Hindoo, it is the height of ill breeding so much as to differ from him. The results of the practice are deplorable; our utter ignorance of the secret history of the rebellion of 1857 is an example of its working, for there must have been a time, before discontent ripened into conspiracy, when we might have been advised and warned. The native newspapers are worse than useless to us; accepted as exponents of Hindoo views by those who know no better, and founded mostly by British capital, they are at once incapable of directing and of acting as indexes to native opinion, and express only the sentiments of half a dozen small merchants at the presidency towns, who give the tone to some two or three papers, which are copied and followed by the remainder.
The result of this difficulty in discovering native opinion is that our officers, however careful, however considerate in their bearing toward the natives, daily wound the feelings of the people who are under their care by acts which, though done in a praiseworthy spirit, appear to the natives deeds of gross stupidity or of outrageous despotism. It is hopeless to attempt to conciliate, it is impossible so much as to govern unless by main force continually displayed, an Eastern people in whose religious thought we are not deeply learned.
Not only are we unacquainted with the feelings of thepeople, but we are lamentably ignorant of the simplest facts about their religions, their wealth, and their occupations, for no census of all India has yet been taken. A complete census had, indeed, been taken, not long before my visit, in Central India, and another in the Northwest Provinces, but none in Madras, Bombay, the Punjaub, or Bengal. The difficulties in the way of the officials who carried through the arrangements for the two that had been taken were singularly great. In the Central Provinces, the census-papers had to be prepared in five languages; both here and in the Northwest, the purely scientific nature of the inquiry had to be brought home to the minds of the people. In Central India the hill-tribes believed that our object in the census was to pave the way for the collection of the unmarried girls as companions for our wifeless soldiers, so all began marrying forthwith. In the Northwest, the natives took it into their heads that our object was to see how many able-bodied men would be available for a war against Russia, and to collect a poll-tax to pay for the expedition. The numerous tribes that are habitually guilty of infanticide threw every difficulty in the way; Europeans disliked the whole affair, on account of the insult offered to their dignity in ranking them along with natives. It must be admitted, indeed, that the provisions for recording caste distinctions gave an odd shape to the census-papers left at the houses at Secrole, in which European officers were asked to state their “caste or tribe.” The census of the Central Provinces was imperfect enough, but that of the Northwest was the second that had been taken there, and showed signs of scientific arrangement and great care.
The Northwest Provinces include the great towns of Benares, Agra, and Allahabad, and the census fellinto my hands at Benares itself, at the Sanscrit College. It was a strange production, and seemed to have brought together a mass of information respecting castes and creeds which was new even to those who had lived long in the Northwest Provinces. All callings in India being hereditary, there were entries recording the presence in certain towns of “hereditary clerks who pray to their inkhorns,” “hereditary beggars,” “hereditary planters of slips or cuttings,” “hereditary grave-diggers,” “hereditary hermits,” and “hereditary hangmen,” for in India a hangmanship descends with as much regularity as a crown. In the single district of the Dehra Valley, there are 1500 “hereditary tomtom men”—drummers at the festivals; 234 Brahmins of Bijnour returned themselves as having for profession “the receipt of presents to avert the influence of evil stars.” In Bijnour, there are also fifteen people of a caste which professes “the pleasing of people by assuming disguises,” while at Benares there is a whole caste—the Bhâts—whose hereditary occupation is to “satirize the enemies of the rich, and to praise their friends.” In the Northwest Provinces, there are 572 distinct castes in all.
The accounts which some castes gave of their origin read strangely in a solemn governmental document: the members of one caste described themselves as “descended from Maicasur, a demon;” but some of the records are less legendary and more historic. One caste in the Dehra Valley sent in a note that they came in 1000 A.D. from the Deccan; another, that they emigrated from Arabia 500 years ago. The Gour Brahmins claim to have been in the district of Moozuffernuggur for 5000 years.
Under the title of “occupations,” the heads of families alone were given, and not the number of thosedependent on them, whence it comes that in the whole province only “11,000 tomtom players” were set down. The habits and tastes of the people are easily seen in the entries: “3600 firework manufacturers,” “45 makers of crowns for idols,” “4353 gold-bangle makers,” “29,136 glass-bangle makers,” “1123 astrologers.” There are also 145 “ear-cleaners,” besides “kite-makers,” “ear-piercers,” “pedigree-makers,” “makers of caste-marks,” “cow-dung sellers,” and “hereditary painters of horses with spots.” There was no backwardness in the followers of maligned pursuits: 974 people in Allahabad described themselves as “low blackguards,” 35 as “men who beg with threats of violence,” 25 as “hereditary robbers,” 479,015 as “beggars,” 29 as “howlers at funerals,” 226 as “flatterers for gain;” “vagabonds,” “charmers,” “informers” were all set down, and 1100 returned themselves as “hereditary buffoons,” while 2000 styled themselves “conjurers,” 4000 “acrobats,” and 6372 “poets.” In one district alone, there were 777 “soothsayers and astrologers” by profession.
It is worthy of notice that, although there are in the Northwest Provinces half a million of beggars in a population of thirty millions, they seem never to beg of Europeans—at least, I was not once asked for alms during my stay in India. If the smallest service be performed, there comes a howl of “O Bauks-heece!” from all quarters, but at other times natives seem afraid to beg of Englishmen.
The number of fakeers, soothsayers, charmers, and other “religious” vagabonds is enormous, but the dense ignorance of the people renders them a prey to witchcraft, evil-eye, devil-influence, and all such folly. In Central India, there are whole districts which are looked upon as witch-tracts or haunted places, andwhich are never approached by man, but set aside as homes for devils. A gentleman who was lately engaged there on the railroad survey found that night after night his men were frightened out of their wits by “fire-fiends,” or blazing demons. He insisted that they should take him to the spot where these strange sights were seen, and to his amazement he, too, saw the fire-devil; at least, he saw a blaze of light moving slowly through the jungle. Gathering himself up for a chase, he rushed at the devil with a club, when the light suddenly disappeared, and instantly shone out from another spot, a hundred yards from the former place. Seeing that there was some trickery at work, he hid himself, and after some hours caught his devil, who, to escape from a sound drubbing, gave an explanation of the whole affair. The man said that the natives of the surveyor‘s party had stolen his mangoes for several nights, but that at last he had hit on a plan for frightening them away. He and his sons went out at dark with pots of blazing oil upon their heads, and, when approached by thieves, the leading one put a cover on his pot, and became invisible, while the second uncovered his. The surveying party got the drubbing, and the devil escaped scot-free; but the surveyor, with short-sighted wisdom, told his men, who had not seen him catch the fire-bearer, that he had had the honor of an interview with the devil himself, who had joyfully informed him of the thefts committed by the men. The surveyor did not admit that he was from this time forward worshiped by his party, but it is not unlikely that such was the case. One of the hill-tribes of Madras worships Colonel Palmer, a British officer who died some seventy years ago, just as Drake was worshiped in America, and Captain Cook in Hawaii. It was one of these tribesthat invented the well-known worshiping machine, or “praying-wheel.”
The hill-tribes are less refined, but hardly more ignorant in their fanaticism than are the Hindoos. At Bombay, upon the beach where the dead are buried, or rather tossed to the wild beasts, I saw a filthy and holy Hindoo saint, whose claim to veneration consists in his having spent the whole of the days and portions of the nights for twenty years in a stone box in which he can neither stand, nor lie, nor sit, nor sleep. These saintly fakeers have still much influence with the Hindoo mass, but in old times their power and their insolence were alike unbounded. Agra itself was founded to please one of them. The great Emperor Akbar, who, although a lax Mohammedan, was in no sense a Hindoo, kept nevertheless a Hindoo saint for political purposes, and gave him the foremost position in his train. When the emperor was beginning to fortify Futtehpore Sikri, where he lived, the saint sent for him, and said that the work must be stopped, as the noise disturbed him at his prayers. The emperor offered him new rooms away from the site of the proposed walls, but the saint replied that, whether Akbar went on with his works or no, he should leave Futtehpore. To pacify him, Akbar founded Agra, and dismantled Futtehpore Sikri.
From the census it appears that there are, in the Northwest Provinces, no less than twenty-two newspapers under government inspection, of which five are published at Agra. The circulation of these papers is extremely small, and as the government itself takes 3500 of the 12,000 copies which they issue, its hold over them, without exertion of force, is great. Of the other 8500, 8000 go to native and 500 to European subscribers. All the native papers are skillful at cateringfor their double public, but those which are printed half in a native tongue and half in English stand in the first rank for unscrupulousness. One of these papers gave, while I was in India, some French speech in abuse of the English. This was headed on the English side, “InterestingAccount of the English,” but on the native side, “ExcellentAccount of the English.” The “English correspondence” and English news of these native papers are so absurdly concocted by the editors out of their own brains that it is a question whether it would not be advisable to send them weekly a column of European news, and even to withhold government patronage from them unless they gave it room, leaving them to qualify and explain the facts as best they could. Their favorite statements are that Russia is going to invade India forthwith, that the Queen has become a Catholic or a Mohammedan, and that the whole population of India is to be converted to Christianity by force. The external appearance of the native papers is sometimes as comical as their matter. TheUmritsur Commercial Advertiser, of which nothing is English but the title, gives, for instance, the time-tables of the Punjaub Railway on its back sheet. The page, which is a mere maze of dots and crooked lines, has at the top a cut of a railway train, in which guards apparently cocked-hatted, but probably meant to be wearing pith helmets, are represented sitting on the top of each carriage, with their legs dangling down in front of the windows.
Neither Christianity nor native reformed religions make much show in the Northwestern census. The Christians are strongest in the South of India, the Hindoo reformers in the Punjaub. The Sikhs themselves, and the Kookhas, Nirunkarees, Goolab Dasseas, Naukeeka-punth, and many other Punjaubee sects, allshow more or less hostility to caste; but in the Northwest Provinces caste distinctions flourish, although in reality they have no doubt lost strength. The high-caste men are beginning to find their caste a drawback to their success in life, and are given to concealing it. Just as with ourselves kings goincognitowhen they travel for pleasure, so the Bengal sepoy hides his Brahminical string under his cloth, in order that he may be sent on foreign service without its being known that by crossing the seas he will lose caste.
Judging by the unanimous opinion of the native press on the doings of the Maharajahs of Bombay, and on the licentiousness of the Koolin Brahmins, many of our civilians have come to think that Hindooism in its present shape has lost the support of a large number of the more intelligent Hindoos; but there is little reason to believe that this is the case. In Calcutta, the Church of Hindoo Deists is gaining ground, and one of their leaders is said to have met with some successes during a recent expedition to the Northwest, but of this there is no proof. The little regard that many high-caste natives show for caste except as a matter of talk merely means that caste is less an affair of religion than of custom, but that it is a matter of custom does not show that its force is slight: on the contrary, custom is the lord of India.
The success of Mohammedanism in India should show that caste has never been strong except so far as caste is custom. It is true that the peasants in Orissa starved by the side of the sacred cows, but this was custom too: any one man killing the cow would have been at once killed by his also starving neighbors for breaking custom; but once change the custom by force, and there is no tendency to return to the former state of things. The Portuguese and the Mohammedans alikemade converts by compulsion, yet when the pressure was removed there was no return to the earlier faith. Of the nature of caste we had an excellent example in the behavior of the troopers of a Bengal cavalry regiment three weeks before the outbreak of the mutiny of 1857, when they said that for their part they knew that their cartridges were not greased with the fat of cows, but that, as they looked as though they were, it came to the same thing, for they should lose caste if their friends saw them touch the cartridges in question.
It was the cry of infringement of custom that was raised against us by the mutineers: “They aim at subverting our institutions; they have put down the suttee of the Brahmins, the infanticide of the Marattas, caste and adoption are despised; they aim at destroying all our religious customs,” was the most powerful cry that could be raised. It is one against which we shall never be wholly safe; but it is the custom and not the religion which is the people‘s especial care.
There is one point in which caste forms a singular difficulty in our way, which has not yet been brought sufficiently home to us. The comparatively fair treatment which is now extended to the low-caste and no-caste men is itself an insult to the high-caste nobility; and while the no-caste men care little how we treat them, provided we pay them well, and the bunnya, or shop-keeping class, encouraged by the improvement, cry out loudly that the government wrongs them in not treating them as Europeans, the high-caste men are equally disgusted with our good treatment both of middle-class and inferior Hindoos. These things are stumbling-blocks in our way, chiefly because no amount of acquaintance with the various phases of caste feeling is sufficient to bring home its importance to Englishmen. The Indian is essentially the caste man, theSaxon as characteristically the no-caste man, and it is difficult to produce a mutual understanding. Just as in England the people are too democratic for the government, in India the government is too democratic for the people.
Although caste has hitherto been but little shaken, there are forces at work which must in time produce the most grave results. The return to their homes of natives who have emigrated and worked at sugar-planting in Mauritius and coffee-growing in Ceylon, mixing with negroes and with Europeans, will gradually aid in the subversion of caste distinctions, and the Parsees will give their help toward the creation of a healthier feeling. The young men of the merchant-class—who are all pure deists—set an example of doing away with caste distinctions which will gradually affect the whole population of the towns; railways will act upon the laborers and agriculturists; a closer intercourse with Europe will possibly go hand in hand with universal instruction in the English tongue, and the indirect results of Christian teaching will continue to be, as they have been, great.
The positive results of missionary work in India have hitherto been small. Taking the census as a guide, in the district of Mooradabad we find but 107 Christians in 1,100,000 people; in Budaon, 64 “Christians, Europeans, and Eurasians” (half-castes) out of 900,000 people; in Bareilly, 137 native Christians in a million and a half of people; in Shajehanpoor, 98 in a million people; in Turrai, none in a million people; in Etah, no native Christians, and only twenty Europeans to 614,000 people; in the Banda district, thirteen native Christians out of three-quarters of a million of people; in Goruckpoor, 100 native Christians out of three and a half millions of people.Not to multiply instances, this proportion is preserved throughout the whole of the districts, and the native Christians in the Northwest are proved to form but an insignificant fraction of the population.
The number of native Christians in India is extremely small. Twenty-three societies, having three hundred Protestant missionary stations, more than three hundred native missionary churches, and five hundred European preachers, costing with their assistants two hundred thousand pounds a year, profess to show only a hundred and fifty thousand converts, of whom one-seventh are communicants. The majority of the converts who are not communicants are converts only upon paper, and it may be said that of real native non-Catholic Christians there are not in India more than 40,000, of whom half are to be found among the devil-worshipers of Madras. The so-called “aboriginal” hill-tribes, having no elaborate religious system of their own, are not tied down to the creed of their birth in the same way as are Mohammedans and Hindoos, among whom our missionaries make no way whatever. The native Protestant‘s position is a fearful one, except in such a city as Madras, for he wholly loses caste, and becomes an outlaw from his people. The native Catholic continues to be a caste man, and sometimes an idol-worshiper, and the priests have made a million converts in Southern India.
Besides revealing the fewness of the native Christians, the Northwestern census has shown us plainly the weakness of the Europeans. In the district of Mooradabad, 1,100,000 people are ruled by thirty-eight Europeans. In many places, two Europeans watch over 200,000 people. The Eurasians are about as numerous as the Europeans, to which class they may for some purposes be regarded as belonging, forthe natives reject their society, and refuse them a place in every caste. The Eurasians are a much-despised race, the butt of every Indian story, but as a community they are not to be ranked high. That they should be ill educated, vain, and cringing, is perhaps only what we might expect of persons placed in their difficult position; nevertheless, that they are so tends to lessen, in spite of our better feelings, the pity that we should otherwise extend toward them.
The census had not only its revelations, but its results. One effect of the census-taking is to check the practice of infanticide, by pointing out to the notice of our officers the castes and the districts in which it exists. The deaths of three or four hundred children are credited to the wolves in the Umritsur district of the Punjaub alone, but it is remarked that the “wolves” pick out the female infants. The great disproportion of the sexes is itself partly to be explained as the result of infanticide.
One weighty drawback to our influence upon Hindoo morals, is that in the case of many abuses we legislate without effect, our laws being evaded where they are outwardly obeyed. The practice of infanticide exists in all parts of India, but especially in Rajpootana, and the girls are killed chiefly in order to save the cost of marrying them—or, rather, of buying husbands for them. Now we have “suppressed” infanticide—which means that children are smothered or starved, instead of being exposed. It is no easy task to bring about reforms in the customs of the people of India.
The many improvements in the moral condition of the people which the census chronicles are steps in a great march. Those who have known India long are aware that a remarkable change has come over the country in the last few years. Small as have been thepositive visible results of Christian teaching, the indirect effects have been enormous. Among the Sikhs and Marattas, a spirit of reflection, of earnest thought, unusual in natives, has been aroused; in Bengal it has taken the form of pure deism, but then Bengal is not India. The spirit rather than the doctrinal teaching of Christianity has been imbibed: a love of truth appeals more to the feelings of the upright natives than do the whole of the nine-and-thirty Articles. Here, as elsewhere, the natives look to deeds, not words; the example of a Frere is worth the teaching of a hundred missionaries, painstaking and earnest though they be.
THROUGHMirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtehpore, I passed on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at Allahabad; for though the city is strategically important, there is in it but little to be seen. Like all spots of the confluence of rivers, Allahabad is sacred with the Hindoos, for it stands, they say, at the meeting-point of no less than three great streams—the Ganges, the Jumna, and a river of the spirit-land. To us poor pagans the third stream is invisible; not so to the faithful. Catching a glimpse of Marochetti‘s statue at the Cawnpore well, as I hurried through that city, I diverged from the East Indian Railway, and took dawk-carriage to Lucknow.
As compared with other Indian cities, the capital ofOude is a town to be seen in driving rather than in walking; the general effects are superior in charm and beauty to the details, and the vast size of the city makes mere sight-seeing a work of difficulty. More populous before 1857 than either Calcutta or Bombay, it is still twice as large as Liverpool. Not only, however, is Lucknow the most perfect of the modern or Italianized Oriental towns, but there are in it several buildings that have each the charm of an architecture special to itself. Of these, the Martinière is the most singular, and it looks like what it is—the freak of a wealthy madman. Its builder was General Martine, a Frenchman in the service of the Kings of Oude. Not far behind the Martinière is the Dilkousha—a fantastic specimen of an Oriental hunting-lodge. The ordinary show-building of the place, the Kaiser-Bagh, or Palace of the Kings of Oude, is a paltry place enough, but there is a certain grandeur in the view of the great Imaumbara and the Hooseinabád from a point whence the two piles form to the eye but one. The great Imaumbara suffered terribly in 1858 from the wanton destruction which our troops committed everywhere during the war of the mutiny. Had they confined themselves to outrages such as these, however, but little could have been said against the conduct of the war. There is too much fear that the English, unless held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition toward cruelty, wherever they have a weak enemy to meet.
The stories of the Indian mutiny and of the Jamaica riot are but two out of many—two that we happen to have heard; but the Persian war in 1857 and the last of the Chinese campaigns are not without their records of deliberate barbarity and wrong. From the first officer of one of the Peninsular and Oriental steamers, which was employed in carryingtroops up the Euphrates during the Persian war, I heard a story that is the type of many such. A Persian drummer-boy of about ten years old was seen bathing from the bank one morning by the officers on deck. Bets were made as to the chance of hitting him with an Enfield rifle, and one of the betters killed him at the first shot.
It is not only in war-time that our cruelty comes out; it is often seen in trifles during peace. Even a traveler, indeed, becomes so soon used to see the natives wronged in every way by people of quiet manner and apparent kindness of disposition, that he ceases to record the cases. In Madras roads, for instance, I saw a fruit-seller hand up some limes to a lower-deck port, just as we were weighing anchor. Three Anglo-Indians (men who had been out before) asked in chorus, “How much?” “One quarter rupee.” “Too much.” And, without more ado, paying nothing, they pelted the man with his own limes, of which he lost more than half. In Ceylon, near Bentotté rest-house, a native child offered a handsome cowrie (of a kind worth in Australia about five shillings, and certainly worth something in Ceylon) to the child of a Mauritius coffee-planter who was traveling with us to Columbo, himself an old Indian officer. The white child took it, and would not give it up. The native child cried for money, or to have his shell back, but the mother of the white child exclaimed, “You be hanged; it‘s worth nothing;” and off came the shell with us in the dawk. Such are the small but galling wrongs inflicted daily upon the Indian natives. It was a maxim of the Portuguese Jesuits that men who live long among Asiatics seldom fail to learn their vices; but our older civilians treat the natives with strict justice, and Anglo-Indian ladies who have been reared in the country aregenerally kind to their own servants, if somewhat harsh toward other natives. It is those who have been in the country from five to ten years, and especially soldiers, who treat the natives badly. Such men I have heard exclaim that the new penal code has revolutionized the country. “Formerly,” they say, “you used to send a man to a police-officer or a magistrate with a note:—‘My dear ——. Please give the bearer twenty lashes.’ But now the magistrates are afraid to act, and your servant can have you fined for beating him.” In spite of the lamentations of Anglo-Indians over the good old days, I noticed in all the hotels in India the significant notice, “Gentlemen are earnestly requested not to strike the servants.”
The jokes of a people against themselves are not worth much, but may be taken in aid of other evidence. The two favorite Anglo-Indian stories are that of the native who, being asked his religion, said, “Me Christian—me get drunk like massa;” and that of the young officer who, learning Hindostanee in 1858, had the difference between the negative “né” and the particle “ne” explained to him by the moonshee, when he exclaimed: “Dear me! I hanged lots of natives last year for admitting that they had not been in their villages for months. I suppose they meant to say that they had not left their villages for months.” It is certain that in the suppression of the mutiny hundreds of natives were hanged by Queen‘s officers who, unable to speak a word of any native language, could neither understand evidence nor defense.
It is in India, when listening to a mess-table conversation on the subject of looting, that we begin to remember our descent from Scandinavian sea-king robbers. Centuries of education have not purified the blood: our men in India can hardly set eyes upon anative prince or a Hindoo palace before they cry, “What a place to break up!” “What a fellow toloot!” When I said to an officer who had been stationed at Secrole in the early days of the mutiny, “I suppose you were afraid that the Benares people would have attacked you,” his answer was, “Well, for my part, I rather hoped they would, because then we should have thrashed them, and looted the city. It hadn‘t been looted for two hundred years.”
Those who doubt that Indian military service makes soldiers careless of men‘s lives, reckless as to the rights of property, and disregardful of human dignity, can hardly remember the letters which reached home in 1857, in which an officer in high command during the march upon Cawnpore reported, “Good bag to-day; polished off —— rebels,” it being borne in mind that the “rebels” thus hanged or blown from guns were not taken in arms, but villagers apprehended “on suspicion.” During this march, atrocities were committed in the burning of villages, and massacre of innocent inhabitants, at which Mohammed Togluk himself would have stood ashamed, and it would be to contradict all history to assert that a succession of such deeds would not prove fatal to our liberties at home.
The European officers of native regiments, and many officers formerly in the Company‘s service, habitually show great kindness to the natives, but it is the benevolent kindness of the master for a favorite slave, of the superior for men immeasurably beneath him; there is little of the feeling which a common citizenship should bestow, little of that equality of man and man which Christianity would seem to teach, and which our Indian government has for some years favored.
At Lucknow, I saw the Residency, and at Cawnpore, on my return to the East Indian Railway, the intrenchments which were, each of them, the scene in 1857 of those defenses against the mutineers generally styled “glorious” or “heroic,” though made by men fighting with ropes about their necks. The successful defenses of the fort at Arrah and of the Lucknow Residency were rather testimonies to the wonderful fighting powers of the English than to their courage,—for cowards would fight when the alternative was, fight or die. As far as Oude was concerned, the “rebellion” of 1857 seems to have been rather a war than a mutiny; but the habits of the native princes would probably have led them to have acted as treacherously at Lucknow in the case of a surrender as did the Nana at Cawnpore, and our officers wisely determined that in no event would they treat for terms. What is to be regretted is that we as conquerors should have shown the Oude insurgents no more mercy than they would have shown to us, and that we should have made use of the pretext that the rising was a mere mutiny of our native troops, as an excuse for hanging in cold blood the agriculturists of Oude. Whatever the duplicity of their rulers, whatever the provocation to annexation may have been, there can be no doubt that the revolution in the land-laws set on foot by us resulted in the offer of a career as native policemen or railway ticket-clerks to men whose ancestors were warriors and knights when ours wore woad; and we are responsible before mankind for having treated as flagrant treason and mutiny a legitimate war on the part of the nobility of Oude. In the official papers of the government of the Northwest Provinces, the so-called “mutiny” is styled more properly “a grievous civil war.”
There is much reason to fear, not that the mutiny will be too long remembered, but that it will be too soon forgotten. Ten years ago, Monghyr was an ash-heap, Cawnpore a name of horror, Delhi a stronghold of armed rebels, yet now we can travel without change of cars through peaceful and prosperous Monghyr and Cawnpore—a thousand and twenty miles—in forty hours, and find at the end of our journey that shaded boulevards have already taken the place of the walls of Delhi.
Quitting the main line of the East Indian Railway at Toondla Junction, I passed over a newly-made branch road to Agra. The line was but lately opened, and birds without number sat upon the telegraph-posts, and were seemingly too astonished to fly away from the train, while, on the open barrens, herds of Indian antelopes grazed fearlessly, and took no notice of us when we passed.
Long before we entered Akbarabad, as the city should be called, by the great new bridge across the Jumna, I had sighted in the far distance the majestic, shining dome of the famed Taj Mahal; but when arrived within the city, I first visited the citadel and ramparts. The fort and palace of Akbar are the Moslem creed in stone. Without—turned toward the unbeliever and the foe—the far-famed triple walls, frowning one above the other with the frown that a hill-fanatic wears before he strikes the infidel; within is the secure paradise of the believing “Emperor of the world”—delicious fountains pouring into basins of the whitest marble, beds of rose and myrtle, balconies and pavilions; part of the zenana, or women‘s wing, overhanging the river, and commanding the distant snow-dome of the Taj. Within, too, the “Motee Musjid”—“Pearl of Mosques” in fact as well as name—amarble-cloistered court, to which an angel architect could not add a stone, nor snatch one from it, without spoiling all. These for believers; for non-believers the grim old Saracenic “Hall of the Seat of Judgment.” The palace, except the mosque, which is purity itself, is overlaid with a crust of gems. There is one famed chamber—a woman‘s bath-house—the roof and sides of which are covered with tiny silver-mounted mirrors, placed at such angles as to reflect to infinity the figures of those who stand within the bath; and a court is near at hand, paved with marble squares in black and white, over which Akbar and his vizier used to sit and gravely play at draughts with dancing girls for “pieces.”
On the river bank, a mile from Akbar‘s palace, in the center of a vast garden entered through the noblest gateways in the world, stands the Taj Mahal, a terrace rising in dazzling whiteness from a black mass of cypresses, and bearing four lofty, delicate minars, and the central pile that gleams like an Alp against the deep-blue sky—minars, terrace, tomb, all of spotless marble and faultless shape. Its Persian builders named the Taj “the palace floating in the air.”
Out of the fierce heat and blazing sunlight you enter into chill and darkness, but soon begin to see the hollow dome growing into form above your head, and the tomb itself—that of Noor Mahal, the favorite queen of Shah Jehan—before you, and beside it her husband‘s humbler grave. Though within and without the Taj is white, still here you find the walls profusely jeweled, and the purity retained. Flowers are pictured on every block in mosaic of cinnamon-stone, carnelian, turquoise, amethyst, and emerald; the corridors contain the whole Koran, inlaid in jet-black stone, yet the interior as a whole exceeds in chastity the spotlessness of the outer dome. Oriental, it is not barbaric, and asweet melancholy is the effect the Taj produces on the mind, when seen by day; in the still moonlight, the form is too mysterious to be touching.
In a Persian manuscript, there still remains a catalogue of the prices of the gems made use of in the building of the Taj, and of the places from which they came. Among those named are coral from Arabia, sapphires from Moldavia, amethysts from Persia, crystal from China, turquoises from Thibet, diamonds from Bundelcund, and lapis-lazuli from Ceylon. The stones were presents or tribute to the emperor, and the master-masons came mostly from Constantinople and Bagdad—a fact which should be remembered when we are discussing the intellectual capacity of the Bengal Hindoos. That a people who paint their cows pink with green spots, and their horses orange or bright red, should be the authors of the Pearl Mosque and the Taj, would be too wonderful for our belief; but the Mohammedan conquerors brought with them the chosen artists of the Moslem world. The contrast between the Taj and the Monkey Temple at Benares reminds one of that between a Cashmere and a Norwich shawl.
It is not at Agra alone that we meet the works of Mogul emperors. Much as we have ourselves done in building roads and bridges, there are many parts of Upper India where the traces of the Moslem are still more numerous than are at present those of the later conquerors of the unfortunate Hindoos. Mosques, forts, conduits, bridges, gardens—all the works of the Moguls are both solid and magnificent, and it was with almost reverential feelings that I made my pilgrimage to the tomb at Secundra of the great Emperor Akbar, grandfather of Shah Jehan, son of Hoomayoon, and founder of Agra City.
It is to be remarked that the Mohammedans in India make a considerable show for their small numbers. Of the great cities of India, the three Presidency towns are English; and the three gigantic cities of Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow, chiefly Mohammedan. Benares alone is a Hindoo city, and even in Benares the Mohammedans have their temples. All the great buildings of India are Mohammedan; so are all the great works that are not English. Yet even in the Agra district the Mohammedans are only one-twelfth of the population, but they live chiefly in the towns.
The history of the Mogul empire of India from the time of the conquest of the older empire by Tamerlane in the fourteenth century, and the forced conversion to Mohammedanism of a vast number of Hindoos, and that of Akbar‘s splendor and enormous power, down to the transportation of the last emperor in 1857 to Rangoon, and the shooting of his sons in a dry ditch by Captain Hodson, is one for us to ponder carefully. Those who know what we have done in India, say that even in our codes—and they are allowed to be our best claim to the world‘s applause—we fall short of Akbar‘s standard.
Delhi, the work of Shah Jehan, founder of the Taj and the Pearl Mosque, was built by himself in a wilderness, as was Agra by the Emperor Akbar. We who have seen the time that has passed since its foundation by Washington before the capital of the United States has grown out of the village shape, cannot deny that the Mogul emperors, if they were despots, were at least tyrants possessed of imperial energy. Akbar built Agra twenty or thirty miles from Futtehpore Sikri, his former capital, but Jehan had the harder task of forcing his people to quit an earlier site notfive miles from modern Delhi, while Akbar merely moved his palace and let the people follow.
Delhi suffered so much at our hands during the storm in 1857, and has suffered so much since in the way of Napoleonic boulevards intended to prevent the necessity of storming it again, that it must be much changed from what it was before the war. The walls which surround the whole city are nearly as grand as those of the fort at Agra, and the gate towers are very Gibraltars of brick and stone, as we found to our cost when we battered the Cashmere Gate in 1857. The palace and the Motee Musjid are extremely fine, but inferior to their namesakes at Agra; and the Jumna Musjid—reputed the most beautiful as it is the largest mosque in the world—impressed me only by its size. The view, however, from its minars is one of the whole Northwest. The vast city becomes an ant-heap, and you instinctively peer out into space, and try to discern the sea toward Calcutta or Bombay.
The historical memories that attach to Delhi differ from those that we associate with the name of Agra. There is little pleasure in the contemplation of the zenana, where the miserable old man, the last of the Moguls, dawdled away his years.
AFTERvisiting Nicholson‘s tomb at the Cashmere Gate, I entered my one-horse dawk—the regulation carriage of India—and set off for Kurnaul and Simla, passing between the sand-hills, gravel-pits, and ruined mosques through which the rebel cavalry made their famous sortie upon our camp. It was evening when we started, and as the dawk-gharrees are so arranged that you can lie with comfort at full-length, but cannot sit without misery, I brought my canvas bag into service as a pillow, and was soon asleep.
When I woke, we had stopped; and when I drew the sliding shutter that does duty for door and window, and peered out into the darkness, I discovered that there was no horse in the shafts, and that my driver and his horse syce—or groom—were smoking their hubble-bubbles at a well in the company of a passing friend. By making free use of the strongest language that my dictionary contained, I prevailed upon the men to put in a fresh horse; but starting was a different matter. The horse refused to budge an inch, except, indeed, backwards, or sideways toward the ditch. Six grooms came running from the stable, and placed themselves one at each wheel, and one on each side of the horse, while many boys pushed behind. At a signal from the driver, the four wheelmen threw their whole weight on the spokes, and one of the men at the horse‘s head held up the obstinate brute‘s off fore-leg, so that he was fairly run off the ground, and forced to make a start, which he did with a violent plunge, for which all the grooms were, however, well prepared. As they yelled with triumph, we dashed along for some twenty yards, then swerved sideways, and came to a dead stop. Again and again the starting process was repeated, till at last the horse went off at a gallop, which carried us to the end of the stage. This is the only form of starting known to up-country horses, as I soon found; but sometimes even this ceremony fails to start the horse, and twice in the Delhi-to-Kalka journey we lost a quarter of an hour over horses, and had finally to get others from the stable.
About midnight, we reached a government bungalow, or roadside inn, where I was to sup, and five minutes produced a chicken curry which, in spite of its hardness, was disposed of in as many more. Meanwhile a storm had come rumbling and roaring across the skies, and when I went to the door to start, the bungalow butler and cook pointed to the gharree, and told me that driver and horse were gone. Not wishing the bungalow men to discover how small was my stock of Hindostanee, I paid careful attention to their conversation, and looked up each time that I heard “sahib,” as I knew that then they must be talking about me. Seeing this, they seemed to agree that I was a thorough Hindostanee scholar, but too proud to answer when they spoke. While they were humbly requesting that I would bow to the storm and sleep in the bungalow, which was filled with twittering sparrows, waked by the thunder or the lights, I was reading my dictionary by the faint glimmer of the cocoanut oil-lamp, and trying to find out how I was to declare that I insisted on going on at once. When at last Ihit upon my phrase, the storm was over, and the butler soon found both horse and driver. After this adventure, my Hindostanee improved fast.
A remarkable misapprehension prevails in England concerning the languages of India. The natives of India, we are inclined to believe, speak Hindostanee, which is the language of India as English is that of Britain. The truth is that there are in India a multitude of languages, of which Hindostanee is not even one. Besides the great tongues, Urdu, Maratti, and Tamil, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of local languages, and innumerable dialects of each. Hindostanee is a camp language, which contains many native words, but which also is largely composed of imported Arabic and Persian words, and which is not without specimens of English and Portuguese. “Saboon,” for soap, is the latter; “glassie,” for a tumbler, and “istubul,” for a stable, the former: but almost every common English phrase and English word of command forms in a certain measure part of the Hindostanee tongue. Some terms have been ingeniously perverted; for instance, “Who comes there?” has become “Hookum dar?” “Stand at ease!” is changed to “Tundel tis,” and “Present arms!” to “Furyunt arm!” The Hindostanee name for a European lady is “mem sahib,” a feminine formed from “sahib”—lord, or European—by prefixing to it the English servants’ “mum,” or corruption of “madam.” Some pure Hindostanee words have a comical sound enough to English ears, as “hookm,” an order, pronounced “hook‘em;” “misri,” sugar, which sounds like “misery;” “top,” fever; “molly,” a gardener; and “dolly,” a bundle of vegetables.
Dawk traveling in the Punjaub is by no means unpleasant; by night you sleep soundly, and by daythere is no lack of life in the mere traffic on the road, while the general scene is full of charm. Here and there areserais, or corrals, built by the Mogul emperors or by the British government for the use of native travelers. Our word “caravansery” is properly “caravan-serai,” an inclosure for the use of those traveling in caravans. The keeper of the serai supplies water, provender, and food, and at night the serais along the road glow with the cooking-fires and resound with the voices of thousands of natives, who when on journeys never seem to sleep. Throughout the plains of India, the high-roads pass villages, serais, police-stations, and groups of trees at almost equal intervals. The space between clump and clump is generally about three miles, and in this distance you never see a house, so compact are the Indian villages. The Northwest Provinces are the most densely-peopled countries of the world, yet between village and village you often see no trace of man, while jackals and wild blue-cows roam about as freely as though the country were an untrodden wilderness.
Each time you reach a clump of banyans, tamarind and tulip trees, you find the same tenants of its shades: village police-station, government posting-stable, and serai are always inclosed within its limits. All the villages are fortified with lofty walls of mud or brick, as are the numerous police-stations along the road, where the military constabulary, in their dark-blue tunics, yellow trowsers, and huge puggrees of bright red, rise up from sleep or hookah as you pass, and, turning out with tulwárs and rifles, perform the military salute—due in India to the white face from all native troops. Your skin here is your patent of aristocracy and your passport, all in one.
It is not only by the police and troops that you aresaluted: the natives all salaam to you—except mere coolies, who do not think themselves worthy even to offer a salute—and many Anglo-Indians refuse to return their bow. Every Englishman in India ought to act as though he were an ambassador of the Queen and people, and regulate accordingly his conduct in the most trifling things; but too often the low bow and humble “Salaam sahib” is not acknowledged even by a curt “Salaam.”
In the drier portions of the country, women were busy with knives digging up little roots of grass for horse-food; and four or five times a day a great bugling would be heard and answered by my driver, while the mail-cart shot by us at full speed. The astonishment with which I looked upon the Indian plains grew even stronger as I advanced up country. Not only is bush scarce, and forest never seen, but where there is jungle it is of the thinnest and least tropical kind. It would be harder to traverse, on horse or foot, the thinnest coppice in the south of England than the densest jungle in the plain country of all India.
Both in the villages and in the desert portions of the road, the ground-squirrels galloped in troops before the dawk, and birds without number hopped fearlessly beside us as we passed; hoopoes, blue-jays, and minas were the commonest, but there were many paddy-birds and graceful golden egrets in the lower grounds.
Between Delhi and Kurnaul were many ruins, now green with the pomegranate leaf, now scarlet with the bloom of the peacock-tree, and, about the ancient villages, acre after acre of plantain-garden, irrigated by the conduits of the Mohammedan conquerors; at last, Kurnaul itself—a fortified town—seen through a forest of date, wild mango, and banyan, with patches of wheat about it, and strings of laden camels winding along thedusty road. After a bheestie had poured a skinful of water over me, I set off again for Kalka, halting in the territory of the Puttiala Rajah to see his gardens at Pinjore, and then passed on toward the base of the Himalayan foot-hills. The wheat-harvest was in progress in the Kalka country, and the girls, reaping with the sickle, and carrying away the sheaves upon their heads, bore themselves gracefully, as Hindoo women ever do, and formed a contrast to the coarse old land-owners as these rode past, each followed by his pipe-bearer and his retinue.
A Goorkha battalion and a Thibetan goat-train had just entered Kalka when I reached it, and the confusion was such that I started at once in a jampan up the sides of the brown and desolate hills. A jampan, called, tonjon in Madras, is an arm-chair in shafts, and built more lightly than a sedan; it is carried at a short trot by four men, while another four, and a mate or chief, make their way up the hills before you, and meet you here and there to relieve guard. The hire of the jampan and nine men is less than that of a pony and groom—a curious illustration of the cheapness of labor in the East. When you first reach India, this cheapness is a standing wonder. At your hotel at Calcutta you are asked, “You wish boy pull punkah all night? Boy pull punkah all day and all night for two annas” (3d.). On some parts of the railway lines, where there is also a good road, the natives find it cheaper to travel by palankeen than to ride in a third-class railway carriage. It is cheaper in Calcutta to be carried by four men in a palki than to ride in a “second-class gharry,” or very bad cab; and the streets of the city are invariably watered by hand by bheesties with skins. The key to Indian politics lies in these facts.
At Wilson‘s at Calcutta, the rule of the hotel obligesone to hire a kitmutghar, who waits at table. This I did for the magnificent wage of 11d. a day, out of which Cherry—the nearest phonetic spelling of my man‘s name—of course fed and kept himself. I will do him the justice to add that he managed to make about another shilling a day out of me, and that he always brought me small change in copper, on the chance that I should give it him. Small as seemed these wages, I could have hired him for one-fifth the rate that I have named had I been ready to retain him in my service for a month or two. Wages in India are somewhat raised by the practice of dustooree—a custom by which every native, high or low, takes toll of all money that passes through his hands. My first introduction to this institution struck me forcibly, though afterward I came to look upon it as tranquilly as old Indians do. It was in the gardens of the Taj, where, to relieve myself from importunity, I had bought a photograph of the dome: a native servant of the hotel, who accompanied me much against my will, and who, being far more ignorant of English than I was of Hindostanee, was of absolutely no use, I had at last succeeded in warning off from my side, but directly I bought the photograph for half a rupee, he rushed upon the seller, and claimed one-fourth of the price, or two annas, as his share, I having transgressed his privilege in buying directly instead of through him as intermediary. I remonstrated, but to my amazement the seller paid the money quietly, and evidently looked on me as a meddling sort of fellow enough for interfering with the institution of dustooree. Customs, after all, are much the same throughout the world. Our sportsmen follow the habit of Confucius, whose disciples two or three thousand years ago proclaimed that “he angled, but did not use a net; he shot, but not at birds perching;” our servants, perhaps, are not altogether innocent of dustooree. However much wages may be supplemented by dustooree, they are low enough to allow of the keeping of a tribe of servants by persons of moderate incomes. A small family at Simla “require” three body servants, two cooks, one butler, two grooms, two gardeners, two messengers, two nurses, two washermen, two water-carriers, thirteen jampan-men, one sweeper, one lamp-cleaner, and one boy, besides the European lady‘s maid, or thirty-five in all; but if wages were doubled, perhaps fewer men would be “absolutely needed.” At the house where I stayed at Simla, ten jampan-men and two gardeners were supposed to be continuously employed in a tiny flower-garden round the house. To a European fresh from the temperate climates there is something irksome in the restraint produced by the constant presence of servants in every corner of an Indian house. To pull off one‘s own socks or pour out the water into the basin for one‘s self becomes a much-longed-for luxury. It is far from pleasant to have three or four natives squatting in front of your door, with nothing to do unless you find such odd jobs for them as holding the heel of your boot while you pull it on, or brushing your clothes for the fourteenth time.
The greater or less value of the smallest coin in common use in a country is a rough test of the wealth or poverty of its inhabitants, and by the application of it to India we find that country poor indeed. At Agra, I had gone to a money-changer in the bazaar, and asked him for change, in the cowrie-shells which do duty as money, for an anna, or 1½d. piece. He gave me handful after handful, till I cried enough. Yet when in the afternoon of the same day I had a performance on my threshold of “Tasa-ba-tasa”—thatsingular tune which reigns from Java to the Bosphorus, with Sanscrit words in Persia, and Malay words in the Eastern islands—the three players seemed grateful for half a dozen of the cowries, for they treated me to a native version of “Vee vont gah ham tall mardid, vee vont gah ham tall mardid,” by way of thanks. Many strange natural objects pass as uncoined money in the East: tusks in Africa, women in Arabia, human skulls in Borneo; the Red Indians of America sell their neighbors’ scalps for money, but have not yet reached the height of civilization which would be denoted by their keeping them to use as such; cowrie-shells, however, pass as money in almost every ancient trading country of the world.
The historical cheapness of labor in India has led to such an obstinate aversion to all labor-saving expedients that such great works as the making of railway embankments and the boulevard construction at Delhi are conducted by the scraping together of earth with the hands, and the collected pile is slowly placed in tiny baskets, much like strawberry pottles, and borne away on women‘s heads to its new destination. Wheelbarrows, water-carts, picks, and shovels are in India all unknown.
If, on my road from Kalka to Simla, I had an example of the cheapness of Indian labor, I also had one of its efficiency. The coolie who carried my baggage on his head trotted up the hills for twenty-one hours, without halting for more than an hour or two, and this for two days’ pay.
During the first half-hour after leaving Kalka, the heat was as great as on the plains, but we had not gone many miles before we came out of the heat and dust into a new world, and an atmosphere every breathof which was life. I got out, and walked for miles; and when we halted at a rest-house on the first plateau, I thoroughly enjoyed a cup of the mountain tea, and was still more pleased at the sight of the first red-coated English soldiers that I had seen since I left Niagara. The men were even attempting bowls and cricket, so cool were the evenings at this station. There is grim satire in the fact that the director-general of military gymnastics has his establishment at Simla, in the cold of the Snowy Range, and there invents running drills and such like summer diversions, to be executed by the unfortunates in the plains below. Bowls, which are an amusement at Kussoolie, would in the hot weather be death at Kalka, only ten miles away; but so short is the memory of climate that you are no more able to conceive the heat of the plains when in the hills than the cold of the hills when at Calcutta.
There is no reason except a slight and temporary increase of cost to prevent the whole of the European troops in India being concentrated in a few cool and healthy stations. Provided that all the artillery be retained in the hands of the Europeans, almost the whole of the English forces might be kept in half a dozen hill-stations, of which Darjeeling and Bangalore would be two, and some place near Bombay a third. It has been said that the men would be incapable, through want of acclimatization, of acting on the plains if retained in hill-stations except when their services were needed; but it is notoriously the fact that newcomers from England—that is, men with health—do not suffer seriously from heat during the first six months which they pass upon the plains.
Soon after dark, a terrific thunder-storm came on, the thunder rolling round the valleys and along the ridges, while the rain fell in short, sharp showers. My menput me down on the lee-side of a hut, and squatted for a long smoke. The custom common to all the Eastern races of sitting round a fire smoking all night long explains the number and the excellence of their tales and legends. In Europe we see the Swedish peasants sitting round their hearths chatting during the long winter evenings: hence follow naturally the Thor legends; our sailors are with us the only men given to sitting in groups to talk: they are noted story-tellers. The word “yarn” exemplifies the whole philosophy of the matter. We meet, however, here the eternal difficulty of which is cause and which is effect. It is easy to say that the long nights of Norway, the confined space of the ship, making the fo‘castle the sailor‘s only lounge, each in their way necessitate the story-telling; not so in India, not so in Egypt, in Arabia, in Persia: there can here be no necessity for men sitting up all night to talk, short of pure love of talk for talking‘s sake.
When the light came in the morning, we were ascending the same strangely-ribbed hills that we had been crossing by torchlight during the night, and were meeting Chinese-faced Thibetans, with hair done into many pig-tails, who were laboriously bringing over the mountain passes Chinese goods in tiny sheep-loads. For miles I journeyed on, up mountain sides and down into ravines, but never for a single moment upon a level, catching sight sometimes of portions of the Snowy Range itself, far distant, and half mingled with the clouds, till at last a huge mountain mass rising to the north and east blocked out all view save that behind me over the sea of hills that I had crossed, and the scene became monotonously hideous, with only that grandeur which hugeness carries with it—a view, in short, that would be fine at sunset, and at no other time. The weather, too, grew damp and cold—a cruelcold, with driving rain—and the landscape was dreariness itself.
Suddenly we crossed the ridge, and began to descend, when the sky cleared, and I found myself on the edge of the rhododendron forest—tall trees with dark-green leaves and masses of crimson flowers; ferns of a hundred different kinds marking the beds of the rivulets that coursed down through the woods, which were filled with troops of chattering monkeys.
Rising again slightly, I began to pass the European bungalows, each in its thicket of deodar, and few with flat ground enough for more than half a rose-bed or a quarter of a croquet-ground. On either side the ridge was a deep valley, with terraced rice-fields five thousand feet below, and, in the distance, on the one side the mist-covered plains lit by the single silvery ribbon of the distant Sutlej, on the other side the Snowy Range.
The first Europeans whom I met in Simla were the Viceroy‘s children and their nurses, who formed with their escort a stately procession. First came a tall native in scarlet, then a jampan with a child, then one with a nurse and viceregal baby, and so on, the bearers wearing scarlet and gray. All the residents at Simla have different uniforms for their jampanees, some clothing their men in red and green, some in purple and yellow, some in black and white. Before reaching the center of the town, I had met several Europeans riding, although the sun was still high and hot; but before evening a hailstorm came across the range and filled the woods with a chilling mist, and night found me toasting my feet at a blazing fire in an Alpine room of polished pine—a real room, with doors and casement; not a section of a street with a bed in it, as are the rooms in the Indian plains. Two blankets were aluxury in this “tropical climate of Simla,” as one of our best-informed London newspapers once called it. The fact is that Simla, which stands at from seven to eight thousand feet above the sea, and in latitude 31°, or 7° north of the boundary of the tropics, has a climate cold in everything except its sun, which is sometimes strong. The snow lies on the ground at intervals for five months of the year; and during what is by courtesy styled “the hot weather,” cold rains are of frequent occurrence.
The climate of Simla is no mere matter of curiosity; it is a question of serious interest in connection with the retention of our Indian empire. When the government seeks refuge here from the Calcutta heat, the various departments are located in tiny cottages and bungalows up on the mountain and down in the valley, practically as far from each other as London from Brighton; and, moreover, Simla itself is forty miles from Kalka by the shortest path, and sixty by the better bridle-path. There is clearly much loss of time in sending dispatches for half the year to and from a place like this, and there is no chance of the railway ever coming nearer to it than Kalka, even if it reaches that. On the other hand, the telegraph is replacing the railway day by day, and mountain heights are no bar to wires. This poor, little, uneven hill-village has been styled the “Indian Capua” and nicknamed the “Hill Versailles;” but so far from enervating the ministers or enfeebling the administration, Simla gives vigor to the government, and a hearty English tone to the State papers issued in the hot months. English ministers are not in London all the year long, and no men, ministers or not, could stand four years’ continual brain-work in Calcutta. In 1866, the first year of the removal of the government as a whole and publicationof theGazetteat Simla during the summer, all the arrears of work in all the offices were cleared off for the first time since the occupation by us of any part of India.