Contents list.

RAMBLES AND RECOLLECTIONS

OF AN

INDIAN OFFICIAL

GENERAL SIR W. H SLEEMAN. K.C.B.

RAMBLES

AND

RECOLLECTIONS

OF AN

INDIAN OFFICIAL

BY

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR W. H. SLEEMAN, K.C.B.

REVISED ANNOTATED EDITION

BY

VINCENT A. SMITH
M.A. (DUBL. ET OXON.), M.R.A.S., F.R.N.S., LATE OF
THE
INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE,
AUTHOR OF ‘THE EARLY HISTORY OF INDIA’
‘A HISTORY OF FINE ART IN INDIA AND CEYLON’.
ETC.

HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW
NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY
1915

Transcriber’s Note

In producing this e-text the numerous notes have been moved to
the end of their respective chapters and renumbered. The printed
‘Additions and Corrections’ have been included in the relevant
text.

The map showing the author’s route has been confined to the area
immediately adjacent to the route, to preserve legibility while
maintaining a reasonable file size.

In the printed edition the spelling of certain words is not
always consistent. This is especially true of the use of
diacritical marks on certain words, even within a single page. This
e-text attempts to reproduce the spellings exactly as used in the
printed edition.

AUTHOR’S DEDICATION

MY DEAR SISTER,

Were any one to ask your countrymen in India what has been their
greatest source of pleasure while there, perhaps nine in ten would
say, the letters which they receive from their sisters at home.
These, of all things, perhaps, tend most to link our affections
with home by filling the landscapes, so dear to our recollections,
with ever varying groups of the family circles, among whom our
infancy and our boyhood have been passed; and among whom we still
hope to spend the winter of our days.

They have a very happy facility in making us familiar with the
new additions made from time to time to the dramatis
personae of these scenes after we quit them, in the character
of husbands, wives, children, or friends; and, while thus
contributing so much to our happiness, they no doubt tend to make
us better citizens of the world, and servants of government, than
we should otherwise be, for, in our ‘struggles through life in
India’, we have all, more or less, an eye to the approbation of
those circles which our kind sisters represent—who may,
therefore, be considered in the exalted light of a valuable species
of unpaid magistracy to the Government of India.

No brother has ever had a kinder or better correspondent than I
have had in you, my dear sister; and it was the consciousness of
having left many of your valued letters unanswered, in the press of
official duties, that made me first think of devoting a part of my
leisure to you in these Rambles and Recollections, while on
my way from the banks of the Nerbudda river to the Himālaya
mountains, in search of health, in the end of 1835 and beginning of
1836. To what I wrote during that journey I have now added a few
notes, observations, and conversations with natives, on the
subjects which my narrative seemed to embrace; and the whole will,
I hope, interest and amuse you and the other members of our family;
and appear, perchance, not altogether uninteresting or
uninstructive to those who are strangers to us both.

Of one thing I must beg you to be assured, that I have nowhere
indulged in fiction, either in the narrative, the recollections, or
the conversations. What I relate on the testimony of others I
believe to be true; and what I relate upon my own you may rely upon
as being so. Had I chosen to write a work of fiction, I might
possibly have made it a good deal more interesting; but I question
whether it would have been so much valued by you, or so useful to
others; and these are the objects I have had in view. The work may,
perhaps, tend to make the people of India better understood by
those of my own countrymen whose destinies are cast among them, and
inspire more kindly feelings towards them. Those parts which, to
the general reader, will seem dry and tedious, may be considered,
by the Indian statesman, as the most useful and important.

The opportunities of observation, which varied employment has
given me, have been such as fall to the lot of few; but, although I
have endeavoured to make the most of them, the time of public
servants is not their own; and that of few men has been more
exclusively devoted to the service of their masters than mine. It
may be, however, that the world, or that part of it which ventures
to read these pages, will think that it had been better had I not
been left even the little leisure that has been devoted to
them.

Your ever affectionate brother,

 W. H. SLEEMAN.

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S DEDICATION

EDITOR’S PREFACES

MEMOIR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER 1
Annual Fairs held on the Banks of Sacred Streams in India

CHAPTER 2
Hindoo System of Religion

CHAPTER 3
Legend of the Nerbudda River

CHAPTER 4
A Suttee on the Nerbudda

CHAPTER 5
Marriages of Trees—The Tank and the
Plantain—Meteors—Rainbows

CHAPTER 6
Hindoo Marriages

CHAPTER 7
The Purveyance System

CHAPTER 8
Religious Sects—Self-government of the
Castes—Chimneysweepers—Washerwomen [1]—Elephant
Drivers

CHAPTER 9
The Great Iconoclast—Troops routed by Hornets—The
Rānī of
Garhā—Hornets’ Nests in India

CHAPTER 10
The Peasantry and the Land Settlement

CHAPTER 11
Witchcraft

CHAPTER 12
The Silver Tree, or ‘Kalpa Briksha’—The ‘Singhāra’, or
Trapa bispinosa, and the Guinea-Worm

CHAPTER 13
Thugs and Poisoners

CHAPTER 14
Basaltic Cappings of the Sandstone Hills of Central
India—Suspension Bridge—Prospects of the Nerbudda
Valley—Deification of a Mortal

CHAPTER 15
Legend of the Sāgar Lake—Paralysis from eating the Grain
of the Lathyrus sativus

CHAPTER 16
Suttee Tombs—Insalubrity of deserted Fortresses

CHAPTER 17
Basaltic Cappings—Interview with a Native Chief—A
Singular Character

CHAPTER 18
Birds’ Nests—Sports of Boyhood

CHAPTER 19
Feeding Pilgrims—Marriage of a Stone with a Shrub

CHAPTER 20
The Men-Tigers

CHAPTER 21
Burning of Deorī by a Freebooter—A Suttee

CHAPTER 22
Interview with the Rājā who marries the Stone to the
Shrub—Order of the Moon and the Fish

CHAPTER 23
The Rājā of Orchhā—Murder of his many
Ministers

CHAPTER 24
Corn Dealers—Scarcities—Famines in India

CHAPTER 25
Epidemic Diseases—Scape-goat

CHAPTER 26
Artificial Lakes in Bundēlkhand-Hindoo, Greek, and Roman
Faith

CHAPTER 27
Blights

CHAPTER 28
Pestle-and-Mortar Sugar-Mills—Washing away of the Soil

CHAPTER 29
Interview with the Chiefs of Jhānsī—Disputed
Succession

CHAPTER 30
Haunted Villages

CHAPTER 31
Interview with the Rājā of Datiyā—Fiscal
Errors of Statesmen—Thieves and Robbers by Profession

CHAPTER 32
Sporting at Datiyā—Fidelity of Followers to their Chiefs
in India—Law of Primogeniture wanting among Muhammadans

CHAPTER 33
‘Bhūmiāwat’

CHAPTER 34
The Suicide-Relations between Parents and Children in India

CHAPTER 35
Gwālior Plain once the Bed of a Lake—Tameness of
Peacocks

CHAPTER 36
Gwālior and its Government

CHAPTER 37 [2]
Contest for Empire between the Sons of Shah Jahān

CHAPTER 38 [2]
Aurangzēb and Murād Defeat their Father’s Army near
Ujain

CHAPTER 39 [2]
Dārā Marches in Person against his Brothers, and is
Defeated

CHAPTER 40 [2]
Dārā Retreats towards Lahore—Is robbed by the
Jāts—Their Character

CHAPTER 41 [2]
Shāh Jahān Imprisoned by his Two Sons, Aurangzēb and
Murād

CHAPTER 42 [2]
Aurangzēb Throws off the Mask, Imprisons his Brother
Murād, and Assumes the Government of the Empire

CHAPTER 43 [2] Aurangzēb Meets
Shujā in Bengal, and Defeats him, after Pursuing
Dārā to the Hyphasis

CHAPTER 44 [2]
Aurangzēb Imprisons his Eldest Son—Shujā and all
his Family are Destroyed

CHAPTER 45 [2]
Second Defeat and Death of Dārā, and Imprisonment of his
Two Sons

CHAPTER 46 [2]
Death and Character of Amīr Jumla

CHAPTER 47
Reflections on the Preceding History

CHAPTER 48
The Great Diamond of Kohinūr

CHAPTER 49
Pindhārī System—Character of the Marāthā
Administration—Cause of their Dislike to the Paramount
Power

CHAPTER 50
Dhōlpur, Capital of the Jāt Chiefs of
Gohad—Consequence of Obstacles to the Prosecution of
Robbers

CHAPTER 51
Influence of Electricity on Vegetation—Agra and its
Buildings

CHAPTER 52
Nūr Jahān, the Aunt of the Empress Nūr Mahal,[3]
over whose Remains the Tāj is built

CHAPTER 53
Father Gregory’s Notion of the Impediments to Conversion in
India—Inability of Europeans to speak Eastern Languages

CHAPTER 54
Fathpur-Sīkrī—The Emperor Akbar’s
Pilgrimage—Birth of Jahāngīr

CHAPTER 55
Bharatpur—Dīg—Want of Employment for the Military
and the Educated Classes under the Company’s Rule

CHAPTER 56
Govardhan, the Scene of Kriahna’s Dalliance with the Milkmaids

CHAPTER 57
Veracity

CHAPTER 58
Declining Fertility of the Soil—Popular Notion of the
Cause

CHAPTER 59
Concentration of Capital and its Effects

CHAPTER 60
Transit Duties in India—Mode of Collecting them

CHAPTER 61
Peasantry of India attached to no existing Government—Want of
Trees in Upper India—Cause and Consequence—Wells and
Groves

CHAPTER 62
Public Spirit of the Hindoos—Tree Cultivation and Suggestions
for extending it

CHAPTER 63
Cities and Towns, formed by Public Establishments, disappear as
Sovereigns and Governors change their Abodes

CHAPTER 64
Murder of Mr. Fraser, and Execution of the Nawāb Shams-ud-
dīn

CHAPTER 65
Marriage of a Jāt Chief

CHAPTER 66
Collegiate Endowment of Muhammadan Tombs and Mosques

CHAPTER 67
The Old City of Delhi

CHAPTER 68
New Delhi, or Shāhjahānābād

CHAPTER 69
Indian Police—Its Defects—and their Cause and
Remedy

CHAPTER 70
Rent-free Tenures—Right of Government to Resume such
Grants

CHAPTER 71
The Station of Meerut—’Atālīs’ who Dance and Sing
gratuitously for the Benefit of the Poor

CHAPTER 72
Subdivisions of Lands—Want of Gradations of
Rank—Taxes

CHAPTER 73
Meerut-Anglo-Indian Society

CHAPTER 74
Pilgrims of India

CHAPTER 75
The Bēgam Sumroo

CHAPTER 76
ON THE SPIRIT OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE IN THE NATIVE ARMY OF
INDIA
Abolition of Corporal Punishment—Increase of Pay with Length
of Service—Promotion by Seniority

CHAPTER 77
Invalid Establishment

Appendix:
Thuggee and the part taken in its Suppression by General Sir W. H.
Sleeman, K.C.B., by Captain J. L. Sleeman
Supplementary Note by the Editor
Additions and Corrections

INDEX

Notes:

1. A blunder for ‘Sweepers’ and ‘Washermen’

2. Chapters 37 to 46, inclusive, are not reprinted in this
edition.

3. A mistake. See post, Chapter 52, note 1.

EDITOR’S PREFACE (1893)^[1]

The Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official,
always a costly book, has been scarce and difficult to procure for
many years past. Among the crowd of books descriptive of Indian
scenery, manners, and customs, the sterling merits of Sir William
Sleeman’s work have secured it pre-eminence, and kept it in
constant demand, notwithstanding the lapse of nearly fifty years
since its publication. The high reputation of this work does not
rest upon its strictly literary qualities. The author was a busy
man, immersed all his life in the practical affairs of
administration, and too full of his subject to be careful of strict
correctness of style or minute accuracy of expression. Yet, so
great is the intrinsic value of his observations, and so attractive
are the sincerity and sympathy with which he discusses a vast range
of topics, that the reader refuses to be offended by slight formal
defects in expression or arrangement, and willingly yields to the
charm of the author’s genial and unstudied conversation.

It would be difficult to name any other book so full of
instruction for the young Anglo-Indian administrator. When this
work was published in 1844 the author had had thirty-five years’
varied experience of Indian life, and had accumulated and
assimilated an immense store of knowledge concerning the history,
manners, and modes of thought of the complex population of India.
He thoroughly understood the peculiarities of the various native
races, and the characteristics which distinguish them from the
nations of Europe; while his sympathetic insight into Indian life
had not orientalized him, nor had it ever for one moment caused him
to forget his position and heritage as an Englishman. This attitude
of sane and discriminating sympathy is the right attitude for the
Englishman in India.

To enumerate the topics on which wise and profitable
observations will be found in this book would be superfluous. The
wine is good, and needs no bush. So much may be said that the book
is one to interest that nondescript person, the general reader in
Europe or America, as well as the Anglo-Indian official. Besides
good advice and sound teaching on matters of policy and
administration, it contains many charming, though inartificial,
descriptions of scenery and customs, many ingenious speculations,
and some capital stories. The ethnologist, the antiquary, the
geologist, the soldier, and the missionary will all find in it
something to suit their several tastes.

In this edition the numerous misprints of the original edition
have been all, and, for the most part, silently corrected. The
extremely erratic punctuation has been freely modified, and the
spelling of Indian words and names has been systematized. Two
paragraphs, misplaced in the original edition at the end of Chapter
48 of Volume I, have been removed, and inserted in their proper
place at the end of Chapter 47; and the supplementary notes printed
at the end of the second volume of the original edition have been
brought up to the positions which they were intended to occupy.
Chapters 37 to 46 of the first volume, describing the contest for
empire between the sons of Shāh Jahān, are in substance
only a free version of Bernier’s work entitled, The Late
Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol. These chapters
have not been reprinted because the history of that revolution can
now be read much more satisfactorily in Mr. Constable’s edition of
Bernier’s Travels. Except as above stated, the text of the present
edition of the Rambles and Recollections is a faithful
reprint of the Author’s text.

In the spelling of names and other words of Oriental languages
the Editor has ‘endeavoured to strike a mean between popular usage
and academic precision, preferring to incur the charge of looseness
to that of pedantry’. Diacritical marks intended to distinguish
between the various sibilants, dentals, nasals, and so forth, of
the Arabic and Sanskrit alphabets, have been purposely omitted.
Long vowels are marked by the sign ¯. Except in a few familiar
words, such as Nerbudda and Hindoo, which are spelled in the
traditional manner, vowels are to be pronounced as in Italian, or
as in the following English examples, namely: ā, as in
‘call’; e, or ē, as the medial vowel in ‘cake’;
i, as in ‘kill’; ī, as the medial vowels in
‘keel’; u, as in ‘full’; ū, as the medial vowels
in ‘fool’; o, or ō, as in ‘bone’; ai, or
āi, as ‘eye’ or ‘aye’, respectively; and au, as
the medial sound in ‘fowl’. Short a, with stress, is
pronounced like the u in ‘but’; and if without stress, as an
indistinct vowel, like the A in ‘America’.

The Editor’s notes, being designed merely to explain and
illustrate the text, so as to render the book fully intelligible
and helpful to readers of the present day, have been compressed
into the narrowest possible limits. Even India changes, and
observations and criticisms which were perfectly true when recorded
can no longer be safely applied without explanation to the India of
to-day. The Author’s few notes are distinguished by his
initials.

A copious analytical index has been compiled. The bibliography
is as complete as careful inquiry could make it, but it is possible
that some anonymous papers by the Author, published in periodicals,
may have escaped notice.

The memoir of Sir William Sleeman is based on the slight sketch
prefixed to the Journey through the Kingdom of Oude,
supplemented by much additional matter derived from his published
works and correspondence, as well as from his unpublished letters
and other papers generously communicated by his only son, Captain
Henry Sleeman. Ample materials exist for a full account of Sir
William Sleeman’s noble and interesting life, which well deserves
to be recorded in detail; but the necessary limitations of these
volumes preclude the Editor from making free use of the
biographical matter at his command.

The reproduction of the twenty-four coloured plates of varying
merit which enrich the original edition has not been considered
desirable. The map shows clearly the route taken by the Author in
the journey the description of which is the leading theme of the
book.

EDITOR’S PREFACE (1915)

My edition published by Archibald Constable and Company in 1893
being out of print but still in demand, Mr. Humphrey Milford, the
present owner of the copyright, has requested me to revise the book
and bring it up to date.

This new edition is issued uniform with Mr. Beauchamp’s third
edition of Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies by the
Abbé J. A. Dubois (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1906), a
work bearing a strong resemblance in substance to the Rambles
and Recollections, and, also like Sleeman’s book in that it ‘is
as valuable to-day as ever it was—even more valuable in some
respects’.

The labour of revision has proved to be far more onerous than
was expected. In the course of twenty-one years the numerous
changes which have occurred in India, not only in administrative
arrangements, but of various other kinds, necessitate the
emendation of notes which, although accurate when written, no
longer agree with existing facts. The appearance of many new books
and improved editions involves changes in a multitude of
references. Such alterations are most considerable in the
annotations dealing with the buildings at Agra, Sikandara,
Fathpur-Sīkrī, and Delhi, and the connected political
history, concerning which much new information is now available.
Certain small misstatements of fact in my old notes have been put
right. Some of those errors which escaped the notice of critics
have been detected by me, and some have been rectified by the aid
of criticisms received from Sir George Grierson, C.I.E., Mr.
William Crooke, sometime President of the Folklore Society, and
other kind correspondents, to all of whom I am grateful. Naturally,
the opportunity has been taken to revise the wording throughout and
to eliminate misprints and typographical defects. The Index has
been recast so as to suit the changed paging and to include the new
matter.

Captain James Lewis Sleeman of the Royal Sussex Regiment has
been good enough to permit the reproduction of his grandfather’s
portrait, and has communicated papers which have enabled me to make
corrections in and additions to the Memoir, largely enhancing the
interest and value of that section of the book.

Notes:

1. Certain small changes have been made.

MEMOIR

OF

MAJ.-GEN. SIR WILLIAM HENRY SLEEMAN, K.C.B.

The Sleemans, an ancient Cornish family, for several generations
owned the estate of Pool Park in the parish of Saint Judy, in the
county of Cornwall. Captain Philip Sleeman, who married Mary Spry,
a member of a distinguished family in the same county, was
stationed at Stratton, in Cornwall, on August 8, 1788, when his son
William Henry was born.

In 1809, at the age of twenty-one, William Henry Sleeman was
nominated, through the good offices of Lord De Dunstanville, to an
Infantry Cadetship in the Bengal army. On the 24th of March, in the
same year, he sailed from Gravesend in the ship Devonshire, and,
having touched at Madeira and the Cape, reached India towards the
close of the year. He arrived at the cantonment of Dinapore, near
Patna, on the 20th December, and on Christmas Day began his
military career as a cadet. He at once applied himself with
exemplary diligence to the study of the Arabic and Persian
languages, and of the religions and customs of India. Passing in
due course through the ordinary early stages of military life, he
was promoted to the rank of ensign on the 23rd September, 1810, and
to that of lieutenant on the 16th December, 1814.

Lieutenant Sleeman served in the war with Nepal, which began in
1814 and terminated in 1816. During the campaign he narrowly
escaped death from a violent epidemic fever, which nearly destroyed
his regiment. ‘Three hundred of my own regiment,’ he observes,
‘consisting of about seven hundred, were obliged to be sent to
their homes on sick leave. The greater number of those who remained
continued to suffer, and a great many died. Of about ten European
officers present with my regiment, seven had the fever and five
died of it, almost all in a state of delirium. I was myself one of
the two who survived, and I was for many days delirious.[1]

The services of Lieutenant Sleeman during the war attracted
attention, and accordingly, in 1816, he was selected to report on
certain claims to prize-money. The report submitted by him in
February, 1817, was accepted as ‘able, impartial, and
satisfactory’. After the termination of the war he served with his
regiment at Allahabad, and in the neighbouring district of
Partābgarh, where he laid the foundation of the intimate
knowledge of Oudh affairs displayed in his later writings.

In 1820 he was selected for civil employ, and was appointed
Junior Assistant to the Agent of the Governor-General,
administering the Sāgar and Nerbudda territories. Those
territories, which had been annexed from the Marāthās two
years previously, are now included in the jurisdiction of the Chief
Commissioner of the Central Provinces. In such a recently-conquered
country, where the sale of all widows by auction for the benefit of
the Treasury, and other strange customs still prevailed, the
abilities of an able and zealous young officer had ample scope.
Sleeman, after a brief apprenticeship, received, in 1822, the
independent civil charge of the District of Narsinghpur, in the
Nerbudda valley, and there, for more than two years, ‘by far the
most laborious of his life’, his whole attention was engrossed in
preventing and remedying the disorders of his District.

Sleeman, during the time that he was in charge of the
Narsinghpur District, had no suspicion that it was a favourite
resort of Thugs. A few years later, in or about 1830, he was
astounded to learn that a gang of Thugs resided in the village of
Kandēlī, not four hundred yards from his court-house, and
that the extensive groves of Mandēsar on the Sāgar road,
only one stage distant from his head-quarters, concealed one of the
greatest bhīls, or places of murder, in all India. The
arrest of Feringheea, one of the most influential Thug leaders,
having given the key to the secret, his disclosures were followed
up by Sleeman with consummate skill and untiring assiduity. In the
years 1831 and 1832 the reports submitted by him and other officers
at last opened the eyes of the superior authorities and forced them
to recognize the fact that the murderous organization extended over
every part of India. Adequate measures were then taken for the
systematic suppression of the evil. ‘Thuggee Sleeman’ made it the
main business of his life to hunt down the criminals and to
extirpate their secret society. He recorded his experiences in the
series of valuable publications described in the Bibliography. In
this brief memoir it is impossible to narrate in detail the
thrilling story of the suppression of Thuggee, and I must be
content to pass on and give in bare outline the main facts of
Sleeman’s honourable career.[2]

While at Narsinghpur, Sleeman received on the 24th April, 1824,
brevet rank as Captain. In 1825, he was transferred, and on the
23rd September of the following year, was gazetted Captain. In
1826, failure of health compelled him to take leave on medical
certificate. In March, 1828, Captain Sleeman assumed civil and
executive charge of the Jabalpur (Jubbulpore) District, from which
he was transferred to Sāgar in January, 1831. While stationed
at Jabalpur, he married, on the 21st June, 1829, Amélie
Josephine, the daughter of Count Blondin de Fontenne, a French
nobleman, who, at the sacrifice of a considerable property, had
managed to escape from the Revolution. A lady informs the editor
that she remembers Sleeman’s fine house at Jabalpur. It stood in a
large walled park, stocked with spotted deer. Both house and park
were destroyed when the railway was carried through the site.

Mr. C. Eraser, on return from leave in January, 1832, resumed
charge of the revenue and civil duties of the Sāgar district,
leaving the magisterial duties to Captain Sleeman, who continued to
discharge them till January, 1835. By the Resolution of Government
dated 10th January, 1835, Captain Sleeman was directed to fix his
head-quarters at Jabalpur, and was appointed General Superintendent
of the operations for the Suppression of Thuggee, being relieved
from every other charge. In 1835 his health again broke down, and
he was obliged to take leave on medical certificate. Accompanied by
his wife and little son, he went into camp in November, 1835, and
marched through the Jabalpur, Damoh, and Sāgar districts of
the Agency, and then through the Native States of Orchhā,
Datiyā, and Gwālior, arriving at Agra on the 1st January,
1836. After a brief halt at Agra, he proceeded through the
Bharatpur State to Delhi and Meerut, and thence on leave to Simla.
During his march from Jabalpur to Meerut he amused himself by
keeping the journal which forms the basis of the Rambles and
Recollections of an Indian Official. The manuscript of this
work (except the two supplementary chapters) was completed in 1839,
though not given to the world till 1844. On the 1st of February,
1837, in the twenty- eighth year of his service, Sleeman was
gazetted Major. During the same year he made a tour in the interior
of the Himalayas, which he described at length in an unpublished
journal. Later in the year he went down to Calcutta to see his boy
started on the voyage home.

In February, 1839, he assumed charge of the office of
Commissioner for the Suppression of Thuggee and Dacoity. Up to that
date the office of Commissioner for the Suppression of Dacoity had
been separate from that of General Superintendent of the measures
for the Suppression of Thuggee, and had been filled by another
officer, Mr. Hugh Eraser, of the Civil Service. During the next two
years Sleeman passed much of his time in the North-Western
Provinces, now the Agra Province in the United Provinces of Agra
and Oudh, making Murādābād his head-quarters, and
thoroughly investigating the secret criminal organizations of Upper
India.

In 1841 he was offered the coveted and lucrative post of
Resident at Lucknow, vacant by the resignation of Colonel Low; but
that officer, immediately after his resignation, lost all his
savings through the failure of his bankers, and Sleeman, moved by a
generous impulse, wrote to Colonel Low, begging him to retain the
appointment.

Sleeman was then deputed on special duty to Bundēlkhand to
investigate the grave disorders in that province. While at
Jhānsī in December, 1842, he narrowly escaped
assassination by a dismissed Afghan sepoy, who poured the contents
of a blunderbuss into a native officer in attendance.[3]

During the troubles with Sindhia which culminated in the battle
of Mahārājpur, fought on the 29th December, 1843,
Sleeman, who had become a Lieut.-Colonel, was Resident at
Gwālior, and was actually in Sindhia’s camp when the battle
unexpectedly began. In 1848 the Residency at Lucknow again fell
vacant, and Lord Dalhousie, by a letter dated 16th September,
offered Sleeman the appointment in the following terms:

 The high reputation you have earned, your
experience of civil administration, your knowledge of the people,
and the qualifications you possess as a public man, have led me to
submit your name to the Council of India as an officer to whom I
could commit this important charge with entire confidence that its
duties would be well performed. I do myself, therefore, the honour
of proposing to you to accept the office of Resident at Lucknow,
with especial reference to the great changes which, in all
probability, will take place. Retaining your superintendency of
Thuggee affairs, it will be manifestly necessary that you should be
relieved from the duty of the trials of Thugs usually condemned at
Lucknow.
 In the hope that you will not withhold from the Government
your services in the capacity I have named, and in the further hope
of finding an opportunity of personally making your
acquaintance,

I have the honour to be,
   Dear Colonel Sleeman,
     Very faithfully yours,
        DALHOUSIE.[4]

The remainder of Sleeman’s official life, from January, 1849,
was spent in Oudh, and was chiefly devoted to ceaseless and
hopeless endeavours to reform the King’s administration and relieve
the sufferings of his grievously oppressed subjects. On the 1st of
December, 1849, the Resident began his memorable three months’ tour
through Oudh, so vividly described in the special work devoted to
the purpose. The awful revelations of the Journey through the
Kingdom of Oude largely influenced the Court of Directors and
the Imperial Government in forming their decision to annex the
kingdom, although that decision was directly opposed to the advice
of Sleeman, who consistently advocated reform of the
administration, while deprecating annexation. His views are stated
with absolute precision in a letter written in 1854 or 1855, and
published in The Times in November, 1857:

 We have no right to annex or confiscate Oude; but
we have a right, under the treaty of 1837, to take the management
of it, but not to appropriate its revenues to ourselves. We can do
this with honour to our Government and benefit to the people. To
confiscate would be dishonest and dishonourable. To annex would be
to give the people a government almost as bad as their own, if we
put our screw upon them (Journey, ed. 1858, vol. i, Intro.,
p. xxi).

The earnest efforts of the Resident to suppress crime and
improve the administration of Oudh aroused the bitter resentment of
a corrupt court and exposed his life to constant danger. Three
deliberate attempts to assassinate him at Lucknow are recorded.

The first, in December, 1851, is described in detail in a letter
of Sleeman’s dated the 16th of that month, and less fully by
General Hervey, in Some Records of Crime, vol. ii, p. 479.
The Resident’s life was saved by a gallant orderly named
Tīkarām, who was badly wounded. Inquiry proved that the
crime was instigated by the King’s moonshee.

The second attempt, on October 9, 1853, is fully narrated in an
official letter to the Government of India (Bibliography, No. 15).
Its failure may be reasonably ascribed to a special interposition
of Providence. The Resident during all the years he had lived at
Lucknow had been in the habit of sleeping in an upper chamber
approached by a separate private staircase guarded by two sentries.
On the night mentioned the sentries were drugged and two men stole
up the stairs. They slashed at the bed with their swords, but found
it empty, because on that one occasion General Sleeman had slept in
another room.

The third attempt was not carried as far, and the exact date is
not ascertainable, but the incident is well remembered by the
family and occurred between 1853 and 1856. One day the Resident was
crossing his study when, for some reason or another, he looked
behind a curtain screening a recess. He then saw a man standing
there with a large knife in his hand. General Sleeman, who was
unarmed, challenged the man as being a Thug. He at once admitted
that he was such, and under the spell of a master-spirit allowed
himself to be disarmed without resistance. He had been employed at
the Residency for some time, unsuspected.

Such personal risks produced no effect on the stout heart of
Sleeman, who continued, unshaken and undismayed, his unselfish
labours.

In 1854 the long strain of forty-five years’ service broke down
Sleeman’s strong constitution. He tried to regain health by a visit
to the hills, but this expedient proved ineffectual, and he was
ordered home. On the 10th of February, 1856, while on his way home
on board the Monarch, he died off Ceylon, at the age of
sixty-seven, and was buried at sea, just six days after he had been
granted the dignity of K.C.B.

Lord Dalhousie’s desire to meet his trusted officer was never
gratified. The following correspondence between the
Governor-General and Sleeman, now published for the first time, is
equally creditable to both parties:

BARRACKPORE PARK,
January 9th, 1856.

I beg to remain,
My dear General,
Very truly yours,
DALHOUSIE.

Major-General Sleeman.

Reply to above. Dated 11th January, 1856.

MY LORD,
    I was yesterday evening favoured with your
Lordship’s most kind and flattering letter of the 9th instant from
Barrackpore.
   I cannot adequately express how highly honoured
I feel by the mention that you have been pleased to make of my
services to Her Majesty the Queen, and how much gratified I am by
this crowning act of kindness from your Lordship in addition to the
many favours I have received at your hands during the last eight
years; and whether it may, or may not, be my fate to live long
enough to see the honourable rank actually conferred upon me, which
you have been so considerate and generous as to ask for me, the
letter now received from your Lordship will of itself be deemed by
my family as a substantial honour, and it will so preserved, I
trust, by my son, with feelings of honest pride, at the thought
that his father had merited such a mark of distinction from so
eminent a statesman as the Marquis of Dalhousie.
   My right hand is so crippled by rheumatism that
I am obliged to make use of an amanuensis to write this letter, and
my bodily strength is so much reduced, that I cannot hope before
embarking for England to pay my personal respects to your
Lordship.
   Under these unfortunate circumstances, I now beg
to take my leave of your Lordship; to offer my unfeigned and
anxious wishes for your Lordship’s health and happiness, and with
every sentiment of respect and gratitude, to subscribe
myself,

Your Lordship’s most faithful and
Obedient servant,
W. H. SLEEMAN,
Major-General.

 To the Most Noble
      The Marquis of Dalhousie,
K.T.,
         Governor-
General, &c., &c.,
           
 Calcutta.

Sir William Sleeman was an accomplished Oriental linguist, well
versed in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and also in possession of a
good working knowledge of Latin, Greek, and French. His writings
afford many proofs of his keen interest in the sciences of geology,
agricultural chemistry, and political economy, and of his
intelligent appreciation of the lessons taught by history. Nor was
he insensible to the charms of art, especially those of poetry. His
favourite authors among the poets seem to have been Shakespeare,
Milton, Scott, Wordsworth, and Cowper. His knowledge of the customs
and modes of thought of the natives of India, rarely equalled and
never surpassed, was more than half the secret of his notable
success as an administrator. The greatest achievement of his busy
and unselfish life was the suppression of the system of organized
murder known as Thuggee, and in the execution of that prolonged and
onerous task he displayed the most delicate tact, the keenest
sagacity, and the highest power of organization.

His own words are his best epitaph: ‘I have gone on quietly,’ he
writes, ‘”through evil and through good report”, doing, to the best
of my ability, the duties which it has pleased the Government of
India, from time to time, to confide to me in the manner which
appeared to me most conformable to its wishes and its honour,
satisfied and grateful for the trust and confidence which enabled
me to do so much good for the people, and to secure so much of
their attachment and gratitude to their rulers.’ [5]

His grandson. Captain J. L. Sleeman, who, when stationed in
India from 1903 to 1908, visited the scenes of his grandfather’s
labours, states that everywhere he found the memory of his
respected ancestor revered, and was given the assurance that no
Englishman had ever understood the native of India so well, or
removed so many oppressive evils as General Sir W. H. Sleeman, and
that his memory would endure for ever in the Empire to which he
devoted his life’s work.

This necessarily meagre account of a life which deserves more
ample commemoration may be fitly closed by a few words concerning
the relatives and descendants of Sir William Sleeman.

His sister and regular correspondent, to whom he dedicated the
Rambles and Recollections, was married to Captain Furse,
R.N.

 His brother’s son James came out to India in 1827, joined
the 73rd Regiment of the Bengal Army, was selected for employment
in the Political Department, and was thus enabled to give valuable
aid in the campaign against Thuggee. In due course he was appointed
to the office of General Superintendent of the Operations against
Thuggee, which had been held by his uncle. He rose to the rank of
Colonel, and after a long period of excellent service, lived to
enjoy nearly thirty years of honourable retirement. He died at his
residence near Ross in 1899 at the age of eighty-one.

In 1831 Sir William’s only son, Henry Arthur, was gazetted to
the 16th (Queen’s) Lancers, and having retired early from the army,
with the rank of Captain, died in 1905.

His elder son William Henry died while serving with the Mounted
Infantry during the South African War. His younger son, James
Lewis, a Captain in the Royal Sussex Regiment, who also saw active
service during the war, and was mentioned in dispatches, has a
distinguished African and Indian record, and recently received the
honorary degree of M.A. from the Belfast University for good work
done in establishing the first Officers’ Training Corps in Ireland.
The family of Captain James Lewis Sleeman consists of two sons and
a daughter, namely, John Cuthbert, Richard Brian, and Ursula Mary.
Captain Sleeman, as the head of his family, possesses the MSS.
&c. of his distinguished grandfather. The two daughters of Sir
William who survived their father married respectively Colonel
Dunbar and Colonel Brooke.

Notes:

1. Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, vol. ii, p.
105.

2. The general reader may consult with advantage Meadows Taylor,
The Confessions of a Thug, the first edition of which
appeared in 1839; and the vivid account by Mark Twain in More
Tramps Abroad, chapters 49,50.

3. The incident is described in detail in a letter dated
December 18, 1842, from Sleeman to his sister Mrs. Furse. Captain
J. L. Sleeman has kindly furnished me with a copy of the letter,
which is too long for reproduction in this place.

4. This letter is printed in full in the Journey through the
Kingdom of Oude, pp. xvii-xix.

5. Letter to Lord Hardinge, dated Jhansee, 4th March, 1848,
printed in Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, vol. i, p.
xxvii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF THE

WRITINGS OF

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR W. H. SLEEMAN, K.C.B.

I.—PRINTED

(1.) 1819 Pamphlet.
Letter addressed to Dr. Tytler, of Allahabad, by Lieut. W. H.
Sleeman, August 20th, 1819.
Copied from the Asiatic Mirror of September the 1st,
1819.
[This letter describes a great pestilence at Lucknow in 1818, and
discusses the theory that cholera may be caused by ‘eating a
certain kind of rice’.]

(2.) Calcutta, 1836, 1 vol. 8vo.
Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language used by
the Thugs, with an Introduction and Appendix descriptive of the
Calcutta system pursued by that fraternity, and of the measures
which have been adopted by the Supreme Government of India for its
suppression.

Calcutta, G. H. Huttmann, Military Orphan Press, 1836.
[No author’s name on title-page, but most of the articles are
signed by W. H. Sleeman.]
Appendices A to Z, and A.2, contain correspondence and copious
details of particular crimes, pp. 1-515. Total pages (v,+270+515)
790.
A very roughly compiled and coarsely printed collection of valuable
documents. [A copy in the Bodleian Library and two copies in the
British Museum. One copy in India Office Library.]

(2a.) Philadelphia 1839, 1 vol. 8vo.
The work described as follows in the printed Catalogue of Printed
Books in the British Museum appears to be a pirated edition of
Ramaseeana:

The Thugs or Phansīgars of India: comprising a history
of the rise and progress of that extraordinary fraternity of
assassins; and a description of the system which it pursues,
&c.
Carey and Hart. Philadelphia, 1839. 8vo.

 A Hindustani MS. in the India Office Library seems to be
the original of the vocabulary and is valuable as a guide to the
spelling of the words.

(3.) (?)1836 or 1837, Pamphlet.
On the Admission of Documentary Evidence.
Extract.
[This reprint is an extract from Ramaseeana. The rules
relating to the admission of evidence in criminal trials are
discussed. 24 pages.]

(4.) 1837, Pamphlet.
Copy of a Letter
which appeared in the Calcutta Courier of the 29th March,
1837, under the signature of ‘Hirtius’, relative to the Intrigues
of Jotha Ram.
[This letter deals with the intrigues and disturbances in the
Jaipur (Jyepoor) State in 1835, and the murder of Mr. Blake, the
Assistant to the Resident. (See post, chap, 67, end.) The reprint
is a pamphlet of sixteen pages. At the beginning reference is made
to a previous letter by the author on the same subject, which had
been inserted in the Calcutta Courier in November,
1836.]

(5.) Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. vi. (1837), p.
621.
History of the Gurha Mundala Rajas, by Captain W. H.
Sleeman.
[An elaborate history of the Gond dynasty of Garhā
Mandlā, ‘which is believed to be founded principally on the
chronicles of the Bājpai family, who were the hereditary prime
ministers of the Gond princes.’ (Central Provinces
Gazetteer, 1870, p. 282, note.) The history is, therefore,
subject to the doubts which necessarily attach to all Indian family
traditions.]

(6.) W. H. Sleeman. Analysis and Review of the Peculiar
Doctrines of the Ricardo or New School of Political
Economy.
8vo, Serampore, 1837.
[A copy is entered in the printed catalogue of the library of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal.]

(7.) Calcutta (Serampore), 1839, 8vo.
A REPORT on THE SYSTEM OF MEGPUNNAISM,
or
The Murder of Indigent Parents for their Young Children (who are
sold as Slaves) as it prevails in the Delhi Territories, and the
Native States of Rajpootana, Ulwar, and Bhurtpore.
By Major W. H. Sleeman.
——
From the Serampore Press.
1839.
[Thin 8vo, pp. iv and 121.
A very curious and valuable account of a little-known variety of
Thuggee, which possibly may still be practised. Copies exist in the
British Museum and India Office Libraries, but the Bodleian has not
a copy.]

(8.) Calcutta, 1840, 8vo.
REPORT ON THE DEPREDATIONS COMMITTED BY THE THUG GANGS of UPPER AND
CENTRAL INDIA,
From the Cold Season of 1836-7, down to their Gradual Suppression,
under the operation of the measures adopted against them by the
Supreme Government in the year 1839.

By Major Sleeman
Commissioner for the Suppression of Thuggee and
Dacoitee.

Calcutta:
G. H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press.
1840.
[Thick 8vo, pp. lviii, 549 and xxvi.
The information recorded is similar to that given in the earlier
Ramaseeana volume. Pages xxv-lviii, by Captain N. Lowis,
describe River Thuggee. Copies in the British Museum and India
Office, but none in the Bodleian. This is the only work by Sleeman
which has an alphabetical index.]

(9.) Calcutta 1841, 8vo.
On the SPIRIT OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE
in our
NATIVE INDIAN ARMY.

By Major N.[sic] H. Sleeman, Bengal Native Infantry.
‘Europaeque saccubuit Asia.’
‘The misfortune of all history is, that while the motives of a few
princes and leaders in their various projects of ambition are
detailed with accuracy, the motives which crowd their standards
with military followers are totally
overlooked.’—Malthus.
 Calcutta:
Bishop’s College Press.
M.DCCC.XLI.
[Thin 8vo. Introduction, pp. i-xiii; On the Spirit of Military
Discipline in the Native Army of India, pp. 1-59; page 60 blank;
Invalid Establishment, pp. 61-84. The text of these two essays is
reprinted as chapters 28 and 29 of vol. ii of Rambles and
Recollections in the original edition, corresponding to
Chapters 21 and 22 of the edition of 1893 and Chapters 76, 77 of
this (1915) edition. Most of the observations in the Introduction
are utilized in various places in that work. The author’s remark in
the Introduction to these essays—’They may never be
published, but I cannot deny myself the gratification of printing
them’—indicates that, though printed, they were never
published in their separate form. The copy of the separately
printed tract which I have seen is that in the India Office
Library. Another is in the British Museum. The pamphlet is not in
the Bodleian.]

(10.) 1841 Pamphlet.
MAJOR SLEEMAN
on the
PUBLIC SPIRIT of THE HINDOOS.
From the Transactions of the Agricultural and Horticultural
Society, vol. 8.
Art. XXII, Public Spirit among the Hindoo Race as indicated
in
the flourishing condition of the Jubbulpore District in former
times, with a sketch of its present state: also on the great
importance of attending to Tree Cultivation and suggestions for
extending it. By Major Sleeman, late in charge of the Jubbulpore
District.

[Read at the Meeting of the Society on the 8th September,
1841.]

[This reprint is a pamphlet of eight pages. The text was again
reprinted verbatim as Chapter 14 of vol. 2 of the Rambles and
Recollections in the original edition, corresponding to Chapter
7 of the edition of 1893, and Chapter 62 of this (1915) edition. No
contributions by the author of later date than the above to any
periodical have been traced. In a letter dated Lucknow, 12th
January, 1853 (Journey, vol. 2, p. 390) the author says-‘I
was asked by Dr. Duff, the editor of the Calcutta Review,
before he went home, to write some articles for that journal to
expose the fallacies, and to counteract the influences of this
[scil. annexationist] school; but I have for many years
ceased to contribute to the periodical papers, and have felt bound
by my position not to write for them.’]

(11.) London, 1844, 2 vols. large 8vo.
RAMBLES AND RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN OFFICIAL
by
Lieutenant-Colonel W. H. Sleeman, of the Bengal Army.
‘The proper study of mankind is man.’—POPE.
In Two Volumes.
London:
J. Hatchard and Son, 187, Piccadilly.
1844.
[Vol. I, pp. v and 478. Frontispiece, in colours, a portrait of
‘The late Emperor of Delhi’, namely, Akbar II. At end of volume,
six full- page coloured plates, numbered 25-30, viz. No. 25,
‘Plant’; No. 26, ‘Plant’; No. 27, ‘Plant’; No. 28, ‘Ornament’; No.
29, ‘Ornament’; No. 30, ‘Ornaments’.

Vol. 2, pp. vii and 459. Frontispiece, in colours, comprising
five miniatures; and Plates numbered 1-24, irregularly inserted,
and with several misprints in the titles.

The three notes printed at the close of the second volume were
brought up to their proper places in the edition of 1893, and are
there retained in this (1915) edition. The following paragraph is
prefixed to these notes in the original edition: ‘In consequence of
this work not having had the advantage of the author’s
superintendence while passing through the press, and of the
manuscript having reached England in insulated portions, some
errors and omissions have unavoidably taken place, a few of which
the following notes are intended to rectify or supply.’ The edition
of 1844 has been scarce for many years,]

(11a.) Lahore 1888, 2 vols. in one 8vo.
RAMBLES AND RECOLLECTIONS, &o.
(Title as in edition of 1844.)
Republished by A. C, Majumdar.
Lahore:
Printed at the Mufid-i-am Press.
1888.
[Vol. 1, pp. xi and 351. Vol. 2, pp. v and 339. A very roughly
executed reprint, containing many misprints. No illustrations. This
reprint is seldom met with.]

(11b.) Westminster, 1893, 2 vols. in 8vo.
RAMBLES AND RECOLLECTIONS, &c.
A New Edition, edited by Vincent Arthur Smith, I.C.S.; being vol. 5
of Constable’s Oriental Miscellany. The book is now scarce.

(12.) Calcutta, 1849.
REPORT
On
BUDHUK
Alias
BAGREE DECOITS
and other
GANG ROBBERS BY HEREDITARY PROFESSION,
and on
The Measures adopted by the Government of India
for their Suppression.
By Lieut.-Col. W. H. Sleeman, Bengal Army.
Calcutta:
J. C. Sherriff, Bengal Military Orphan Press.
1849.
[Folio, pp. iv and 433. Map. Printed on blue paper. A valuable
work. In their Dispatch No. 27, dated 18th September, 1850, the
Honourable Court of Directors observe that ‘This Report is as
important and interesting as that of the same able officer on the
Thugs’. Copies exist in the British Museum and India Office
Libraries, but there is none in the Bodleian. The work was first
prepared for press in 1842 (Journey, vol. 1, p, xxvi).]

(13.) 1852, Plymouth, Pamphlet.
AN ACCOUNT of WOLVES NURTURING CHILDREN IN THEIR DENS.
By an Indian Official.
Plymouth:
Jenkin Thomas, Printer,
9, Cornwall Street.
1852.
[Octavo pamphlet. 15 pages. The cases cited are also described in
the Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, and are discussed
in V. Ball, Jungle Life in India (De la Rue, 1880), pp.
454-66. The only copy known to me is that in possession of the
author’s grandson.]

(14.)Lucknow, 1852.
Sir William Sleeman printed his Diary of a Journey through
Oude privately at a press in the Residency. He had purchased a
small press and type for the purpose of printing it at his own
house, so that no one but himself and the compositor might see it.
He intended, if he could find time, to give the history of the
reigning family in a third volume, which was written, but has never
been published. The title is: Diary of a Tour through Oude in
December, 1849, and January and February, 1850.

By The Resident
Lieutenant-Colonel W. H. Sleeman.
Printed at Lucknow in a Parlour Press.
1852.

Two vols. large 8vo. with wide margins. Printed well on good
paper. Vol. 1 has map of Oude, 305 pp. text, and at end a printed
slip of errata. Vol. 2 has 302 pp. text, with a similar slip of
errata. The brief Preface contains the following statements:
 ‘I have had the Diary printed at my own expense in a small
parlour press which I purchased, with type, for the purpose. . . .
The Diary must for the present be considered as an official
document, which may be perused, but cannot be published wholly or
in part without the sanction of Government previously obtained.’
[1]
 Eighteen copies of the Diary were so printed and were
coarsely bound by a local binder. Of these copies twelve were
distributed as follows, one to each person or authority:
Government, Calcutta; Court of Directors; Governor-General;
Chairman of Court of Directors; Deputy Chairman; brother of author;
five children of author, one each (5); Col. Sykes, Director
E.I.C.
 A Memorandum of Errata was put up along with some of the
copies distributed. (Private Correspondence, Journey,
vol. 2, pp. 357, 393, under dates 4 April, 1852,
and 12 Jan., 1853.) The Bodleian copy, purchased in June, 1891,
was that belonging to Mrs, (Lady) Sleeman, and bears her signature
‘A. J. Sleeman’ on the fly-leaf of each volume. The book was
handsomely bound in morocco or russia, with gilt edges, by Martin
of Calcutta. The British Museum Catalogue does not include a copy
of this issue. The India Office Library has a copy of vol. 1 only.
Captain J. L. Sleeman has both volumes.

 (15.) 1853, Pamphlet.
Reprint of letter No. 34 of 1853 from the author to J, P. Grant,
Esq., Officiating Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign
Department, Fort William. Dated Lucknow Residency, 12th October,
1853.
[Six pages. Describes another attempt to assassinate the author on
the 9th October, 1853. See ante, p. xxvi.]

(16.) London 1858, 2 vols. 8vo.
A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, in 1849-50, by direction
of the Right Hon. the Earl of Dalhousie, Governor-General.
With Private Correspondence relative to the Annexation of Oude to
British India, &c.
By Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, K.C.B., Resident at the Court
of Lucknow.

In two Volumes.
London:
Richard Bentley, Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty. 1858.
[Small 8vo. Frontispiece of vol. 1 is a Map of the Kingdom of Oude.
The contents of vol. 1 are: Title, preface, and contents, pp. i-x;
Biographical Sketch of Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, K.C.B., pp.
xi-xvi; Introduction, pp. xvii-xxii; Private Correspondence
preceding the Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, pp. xxiii-lxxx;
Diary of a Tour through Oude, chapters i-vi, pp. 1-337. The
contents of vol. 2 are: Title and contents, pp. i-vi; Diary of a
Tour through Oude, pp. 1-331; Private Correspondence relating to
the Annexation of the Kingdom of Oude to British India, pp.
332-424. The letters printed in this volume were written between
5th Dec., 1849, and 11th Sept., 1854, during and after the Tour.
The dates of the letters in the first volume extend from 20th Feb.,
1848, to 11th Oct., 1849. The Tour began on 1st Dec., 1849, The
book, though rather scarce, is to be found in most of the principal
libraries, and may be obtained from time to time.]

II.—UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS

(1.) 1809.
Two books describing author’s voyage to India round the Cape.

(2.) 1837.
Journal of a Trip from Simla to Gurgoohee.
[Referred to in unpublished letters dated 5th and 30th August,
1837.]

(3.) Circa1824.
Preliminary Observations and Notes on Mr. Molony’s Report on
Narsinghpur.
[Referred to in Central Provinces Gazetteer, Nāgpur,
2nd ed., 1870, pp. xcix, cii, &c. The papers seem to be
preserved in the record room at Narsinghpur.]

(4.) 1841.
History of Byza Bae (Baiza Bāī).
[Not to be published till after author’s death. See unpublished
letter dated Jhānsī, Oct. 22nd, 1841.]

(5.)
History of the Reigning Family of Oude.
[Intended to form a third volume of the Journey. See
Author’s Letter to Sir James Weir Hogg, Deputy Chairman, India
House, dated Lucknow, 4th April, 1852; printed in
Journey, vol. 2, p. 358.]

The manuscripts Nos. 1, 2, 4, and 5, and the printed papers Nos.
1, 3, 4, 10, 13, and 15, are in the possession of Captain J, L.
Sleeman, Royal Sussex Regiment, grandson of the author. The India
Office Library possesses copies of the printed works Nos. 2, 7, 8,
9, 11a, 12, 14 (vol. 1 only) and 16.

Notes:

1. The book was written in 1851, and the Directors’ permission
to publish was given in December, 1852. (Journey, ii, pp.
358, 393, ed. 1858. The Preface to that ed. wrongly indicates
December, 1851, as the date of that permission.)

COMPARATIVE TABLE OF CHAPTERS

ABBREVIATIONS

A.C.      After Christ.

Ann. Rep.     Annual Report.

A.S. Archaeological Survey.

A.S.R.      Archaeological Survey
Reports, by Sir Alexander Cunningham and his assistants; 23
vols. 8vo, Simla and Calcutta, 1871-87, with General Index (vol.
xxiv, 1887) by V. A. Smith.

A.S.W.I.      Archaeological Survey
Reports, Western India.

Beale.      T. W. Beale, Oriental
Biographical Dictionary, ed. Keene, 1894.

C.P.      Central Provinces.

E.& D.     Sir H. M. Elliot and
Professor J. Dowson, The History of India as told by its own
Historians, Muhammadan Period; 8 vols. 8vo, London,
1867-77.

E.H.I.      V. A. Smith, Early
History of India, 3rd ed., Oxford, 1914.

Ep. Ind.      Epigraphia Indica,
Calcutta.

Fanshawe.      H. C. Fanshawe, Delhi Past
and Present, Murray, London, 1902.

H.F.A.      V. A. Smith, A History
of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, 4to, Oxford, 1911.

I.G.      Imperial Gazetteer of
India, Oxford, 1907, 1908.

Ind. Ant.      Indian Antiquary,
Bombay.

J.A.S.B.      Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal,Calcutta.

J.R.A.S.      Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society, London.

N.I.N.&      Qu. North-Indian Notes
and Queries, Allahabad, 1891-6

N.W.P.      North-Western Provinces.

Z.D.M.G.      Zeitschrift der deutschen
morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Leipzig.

RAMBLES AND RECOLLECTIONS

CHAPTER 1

Annual Fairs held upon the Banks of Sacred Streams
in India.

Before setting out on our journey towards the Himālaya we
formed once more an agreeable party to visit the Marble Rocks of
the Nerbudda at Bherāghāt.[1] It was the end of
Kārtik,[2] when the Hindoos hold fairs on all their sacred
streams at places consecrated by poetry or tradition as the scene
of some divine work or manifestation. These fairs are at once
festive and holy; every person who comes enjoying himself as much
as he can, and at the same time seeking purification from all past
transgressions by bathing and praying in the holy stream, and
making laudable resolutions to be better for the future. The
ceremonies last five days, and take place at the same time upon all
the sacred rivers throughout India; and the greater part of the
whole Hindoo population, from the summits of the Himālaya
mountains to Cape Comōrin, will, I believe, during these five
days, be found congregated at these fairs. In sailing down the
Ganges one may pass in the course of a day half a dozen such fairs,
each with a multitude equal to the population of a large city, and
rendered beautifully picturesque by the magnificence and variety of
the tent equipages of the great and wealthy. The preserver of the
universe (Bhagvān) Vishnu is supposed, on the 26th of
Asārh, to descend to the world below (Pātāl)
to defend Rājā Bali from the attacks of Indra, to stay
with him four months, and to come up again on the 26th
Kārtik.[3] During his absence almost all kinds of worship and
festivities are suspended; and they recommence at these fairs,
where people assemble to hail his resurrection.

Our tents were pitched upon a green sward on one bank of a small
stream running into the Nerbudda close by, while the multitude
occupied the other bank. At night all the tents and booths are
illuminated, and the scene is hardly less animated by night than by
day; but what strikes a European most is the entire absence of all
tumult and disorder at such places. He not only sees no
disturbance, but feels assured that there will be none; and leaves
his wife and children in the midst of a crowd of a hundred thousand
persons all strangers to them, and all speaking a language and
following a religion different from theirs, while he goes off the
whole day, hunting and shooting in the distant jungles, without the
slightest feeling of apprehension for their safety or comfort. It
is a singular fact, which I know to be true, that during the great
mutiny of our native troops at Barrackpore in 1824, the chief
leaders bound themselves by a solemn oath not to suffer any
European lady or child to be injured or molested, happen what might
to them in the collision with their officers and the Government. My
friend Captain Reid, one of the general staff, used to allow his
children, five in number, to go into the lines and play with the
soldiers of the mutinous regiments up to the very day when the
artillery opened upon them; and, of above thirty European ladies
then at the station, not one thought of leaving the place till they
heard the guns.[4] Mrs. Colonel Faithful, with her daughter and
another young lady, who had both just arrived from England, went
lately all the way from Calcutta to Lūdiāna on the banks
of the Hyphasis, a distance of more than twelve hundred miles, in
their palankeens with relays of bearers, and without even a servant
to attend them.[5] They were travelling night and day for fourteen
days without the slightest apprehension of injury or of insult.
Cases of ladies travelling in the same manner by dāk
(stages) immediately after their arrival from England to all parts
of the country occur every day, and I know of no instance of injury
or insult sustained by them.[6] Does not this speak volumes for the
character of our rule in India? Would men trust their wives and
daughters in this manner unprotected among a people that disliked
them and their rule? We have not a garrison, or walled cantonments,
or fortified position of any kind for our residence from one end of
our Eastern empire to the other, save at the three capitals of
Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay.[7] We know and feel that the people
everywhere look up to and respect us, in spite of all our faults,
and we like to let them know and feel that we have confidence in
them.

Sir Thomas Munro has justly observed, ‘I do not exactly know
what is meant by civilizing the people of India. In the theory and
practice of good government they may be deficient; but, if a good
system of agriculture, if unrivalled manufactures, if the
establishment of schools for reading and writing, if the general
practice of kindness and hospitality, and, above all, if a
scrupulous respect and delicacy towards the female sex are amongst
the points that denote a civilized people; then the Hindoos are not
inferior in civilization to the people of Europe’.[8]

Bishop Heber writes in the same favourable terms of the Hindoos
in the narrative of his journey through India; and where shall we
find a mind more capable of judging of the merits and demerits of a
people than his?[9]

The concourse of people at this fair was, as usual, immense; but
a great many who could not afford to provide tents for the
accommodation of their families were driven away before their time
by some heavy showers of, to them, unseasonable rains. On this and
similar occasions the people bathe in the Nerbudda without the aid
of priests, but a number of poor Brahmans attend at these festivals
to receive charity, though not to assist at the ceremonies. Those
who could afford it gave a trifle to these men as they came out of
the sacred stream, but in no case was it demanded, or even
solicited with any appearance of importunity, as it commonly is at
fairs and holy places on the Ganges. The first day, the people
bathe below the rapid over which the river falls after it emerges
from its peaceful abode among the marble rocks; on the second day,
just above this rapid; and on the third day, two miles further up
at the cascade, when the whole body of the limpid stream of the
Nerbudda, confined to a narrow channel of only a few yards wide,
falls tumultuously down in a beautiful cascade into a deep chasm of
marble rocks. This fall of their sacred stream the people call the
‘Dhuāndhār’, or ‘the smoky fall’, from the thick vapour
which is always seen rising from it in the morning. From below, the
river glides quietly and imperceptibly for a mile and a half along
a deep, and, according to popular belief, a fathomless channel of
from ten to fifty yards wide, with snow-white marble rocks rising
perpendicularly on either side from a hundred to a hundred and
fifty feet high, and in some parts fearfully overhanging. Suspended
in recesses of these white rocks are numerous large black nests of
hornets ready to descend upon any unlucky wight who may venture to
disturb their repose;[10] and, as the boats of the curious European
visitors pass up and down to the sound of music, clouds of wild
pigeons rise from each side, and seem sometimes to fill the air
above them. Here, according to native legends, repose the
Pāndavas, the heroes of their great Homeric poem, the
Mahābhārata, whose names they have transferred to the
valley of the Nerbudda. Every fantastic appearance of the rocks,
caused by those great convulsions of nature which have so much
disturbed the crust of the globe, or by the slow and silent working
of the, waters, is attributed to the god-like power of those great
heroes of Indian romance, and is associated with the recollection
of scenes in which they are supposed to have figured.[11]

The strata of the Kaimūr range of sandstone hills, which
runs diagonally across the valley of the Nerbudda, are thrown up
almost perpendicularly, in some places many hundred feet above the
level of the plain, while in others for many miles together their
tops are only visible above the surface. These are so many strings
of the oxen which the arrows of Arjun, one of the five brothers,
converted into stone; and many a stream which now waters the valley
first sprang from the surface of the earth at the touch of his
lance, as his troops wanted water. The image of the gods of a
former day, which now lie scattered among the ruins of old cities,
buried in the depth of the forest, are nothing less than the bodies
of the kings of the earth turned into stone for their temerity in
contending with these demigods in battle. Ponds among the rocks of
the Nerbudda, where all the great fairs are held, still bear the
names of the five brothers, who are the heroes of this great
poem;[12] and they are every year visited by hundreds of thousands
who implicitly believe that their waters once received upon their
bosoms the wearied limbs of those whose names they bear. What is
life without the charms of fiction, and without the leisure and
recreations which these sacred imaginings tend to give to the great
mass of those who have nothing but the labour of their hands to
depend upon for their subsistence! Let no such fictions be
believed, and the holidays and pastimes of the lower orders in
every country would soon cease, for they have almost everywhere
owed their origin and support to some religious dream which has
commanded the faith and influenced the conduct of great masses of
mankind, and prevented one man from presuming to work on the day
that another wished to rest from his labours. The people were of
opinion, they told me, that the Ganges, as a sacred stream, could
last only sixty years more, when the Nerbudda would take its place.
The waters of the Nerbudda are, they say already so much more
sacred than those of the Ganges that to see them is sufficient to
cleanse men from their sins, whereas the Ganges must be touched
before it can have that effect.[13]

At the temple built on the top of a conical hill at
Bherāghāt, overlooking the river, is a statue of a bull
carrying Siva, the god of destruction, and his wife
Pārvatī seated behind him; they have both snakes in their
hands, and Siva has a large one round his loins as a waistband.
There are several demons in human shape lying prostrate under the
belly of the bull, and the whole are well cut out of one large slab
of hard basalt from a dyke in the marble rock beneath. They call
the whole group ‘Gaurī Sankar’, and I found in the fair,
exposed for sale, a brass model of a similar one from Jeypore
(Jaipur), but not so well shaped and proportioned. On noticing this
we were told that ‘such difference was to be expected, since the
brass must have been made by man, whereas the “Gaurī Sankar”
of the temple above was a real Pākhān, or a conversion of
living beings into stone by the gods;[14] they were therefore the
exact resemblance of living beings, while the others could only be
rude imitations’. ‘Gaurī’, or the Fair, is the name of
Pārvatī, or Dēvī, when she appears with her
husband Siva. On such occasions she is always fair and beautiful.
Sankar is another name of Siva, or Mahādēo, or Rudra. On
looking into the temple at the statue, a lady expressed her
surprise at the entireness as well as the excellence of the
figures, while all round had been so much mutilated by the
Muhammadans. ‘They are quite a different thing from the others’,
said a respectable old landholder; ‘they are a conversion of real
flesh and blood into stone, and no human hands can either imitate
or hurt them.’ She smiled incredulously, while he looked very
grave, and appealed to the whole crowd of spectators assembled, who
all testified to the truth of what he had said; and added that ‘at
no distant day the figures would be all restored to life again, the
deities would all come back without doubt and reanimate their old
bodies again’.

All the people who come to bathe at the fair bring chaplets of
yellow jasmine, and hang them as offerings round the necks of the
god and his consort; and at the same time they make some small
offerings of rice to each of the many images that stand within the
same apartment, and also to those which, under a stone roof
supported upon stone pillars, line the inside of the wall that
surrounds the circular area, in the centre of which the temple
stands. The images inside the temple are those of the three great
gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, with their primaeval consorts;[15]
but those that occupy the piazza outside are the representations of
the consorts of the different incarnations of these three gods, and
these consorts are themselves the incarnations of the primaeval
wives, who followed their husbands in all their earthly ramblings.
They have all the female form, and are about the size of ordinary
women, and extremely well cut out of fine white and green
sandstone; but their heads are those of the animals in which their
respective husbands became incarnate, such as the lion, the
elephant, &c., or those of the ‘vāhans‘, or animals
on which they rode, such as the bull, the swan, the eagle, &c.
But these, I presume, are mere capricios of the founder of
the temple. The figures are sixty- four in number, all mounted upon
their respective ‘vāhans‘, but have been sadly
mutilated by the pious Muhammadans.[16]

The old ‘Mahant’, or high priest, told us that Mahādēo
and his wife were in reality our Adam and Eve; ‘they came here
together’, said he, ‘on a visit to the mountain Kailās,[17]
and being earnestly solicited to leave some memorial of their
visit, got themselves turned into stone’. The popular belief is
that some very holy man, who had been occupied on the top of this
little conical hill, where the temple now stands, in austere
devotions for some few thousand years, was at last honoured with a
visit from Siva and his consort, who asked him what they could do
for him. He begged them to wait till he should bring some flowers
from the woods to make them a suitable offering. They promised to
do so, and he ran down, plunged into the Nerbudda and drowned
himself, in order that these august persons might for ever remain
and do honour to his residence and his name. They, however, left
only their ‘mortal coil’, but will one day return and resume it. I
know not whether I am singular in the notion or not, but I think
Mahādēo and his consort are really our Adam and Eve, and
that the people have converted them into the god and goddess of
destruction, from some vague idea of their original sin, which
involved all their race in destruction. The snakes, which form the
only dress of Mahādēo, would seem to confirm this
notion.[18]

Notes:

1. The Nerbudda (Narbadā, or Narmadā) river is the
boundary between Hindustan, or Northern India, and the Deccan
(Dakhin), or Southern India. The beautiful gorge of the Marble
Rocks, near Jubbulpore (Jabalpur), is familiar to modern tourists
(see I.G., 1908, s.v. ‘Marble Rocks’). The remarkable
antiquities at Bherāghāt are described and illustrated in
A.S.R., vol. ix, pp. 60-76, pl. xii-xvi. Additions and
corrections to Cunningham’s account will be found in A.S.W.I
Progr. Rep., 1893-4, p. 5; and A.S. Ann. Rep., E.
Circle, 1907-8, pp. 14-18.

2. The eighth month of the Hindoo luni-solar year, corresponding
to part of October and part of November. In Northern India the year
begins with the month Chait, in March. The most commonly used names
of the months are: (1) Chait; (2) Baisākh; (3) Jēth; (4)
Asārh; (5) Sāwan; (6) Bhādon; (7) Kuār; (8)
Kārtik; (9) Aghan; (10) Pūs; (II) Māgh; and (12)
Phālgun.

3. Bhagvān is often used as equivalent for the word
God in its most general sense, but is specially applicable to the
Deity as manifested in Vishnu the Preserver. Asārh
corresponds to June-July, Pātāl is the Hindoo
Hades. Rājā Bali is a demon, and Indra is the lord of the
heavens. The fairs take place at the time of full moon.

4. Barrackpore, fifteen miles north of Calcutta, is still a
cantonment. The Governor General has a country house there. The
mutiny of the native troops stationed there occurred on Nov. 1,
1824, and was due to the discontent caused by orders moving the
47th Native Infantry to Rangoon to take part in the Burmese War.
The outbreak was promptly suppressed. Captain Pogson published a
Memoir of the Mutiny at Barrackpore (8vo, Serampore,
1833).

5. Lūdiāna, the capital of the district of the same
name, now under the Punjab Government. Hyphasis is the Greek name
of the Biās river, one of the five rivers of the
Punjāb.

6. Railways have rendered almost obsolete the mode of travelling
described in the text. In Northern India palankeens
(pālkīs) are now seldom used, even by Indians, except for
purposes of ceremony.

7. This statement is no longer quite accurate, though fortified
positions are still very few.

8. The editor cannot find the exact passage quoted, but remarks
to the same effect will be found in The Life of Sir Thomas
Munro, by the Rev. G. R. Gleig, in two volumes, a new edition
(London, 1831), vol. ii, p. 175.

9. Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of
India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1834-5, and a Journey to the
Southern Provinces in 1826 (2nd edition, 3 vols. 8vo, London,
1828.)

10. The bees at the Marble Rocks are the Apis dorsata. An
Englishman named Biddington, when trying to escape from them, was
drowned, and they stung to death one of Captain Forsyth’s baggage
ponies (Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India, 3rd ed., 1885, s.v.
Bee’).

11. The vast epic poem, or collection of poems known as the
Mahābhārata, consists of over 100,000 Sanskrit verses.
The main subject is the war between the five Pāndavas, or sons
of Pāndū, and their cousins the Kauravas, sons of
Dhritarāshtra. Many poems of various origins and dates are
interwoven with the main work. The best known of the episodes is
that of Nala and Damayantī, which was well translated
by Dean Milman, See Macdonell, A History of Sanskrit
Literature (Heinemann, 1900).

12. The five Pāndava brothers were Yudhishthira,
Bhīmia, Arjuna, Nakula, and Sahadeva, the children of
Pāndū, by his wives Kuntī, or Prithā, and
Madrī.

13. ‘The Narbadā has its special admirers, who exalt it
oven above the Ganges, . . . The sanctity of the Ganges will, they
say, cease in 1895, whereas that of the Narbadā will continue
for ever’ (Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in
India, London, 1883, p. 348), See post, Chapter 27.

14. Sleeman wrote ‘Py-Khan’, a corrupt spelling of
pākhān, the Sanskrit pāshāna or
pāsāna, ‘a stone’. The compound pāshāna-
mūrti is commonly used in the sense of ‘stone image’. The
sibilant sh or s usually is pronounced as kh
in Northern India (Grierson, J.R.A.S., 1903, p. 363).

15. Sarasvatī, consort of Brahma; Dēvī
(Pārvatī, Durgā, &c.), consort of Siva; and
Lakshmī, consort of Vishnu. All Hindoo deities have many
names.

16. The author’s explanation is partly erroneous. The temple,
which is a very remarkable one, is dedicated to the sixty-four
Joginīs. Only five temples in India are known to be dedicated
to these demons. For details see Cunningham, A.S.R., vol.
ix, pp. 61-74, pl. xii-xvi; vol. ii, p. 416; and vol. xxi, p. 57.
The word vāhana means ‘vehicle’. Each deity has his
peculiar vehicle.

17. The heaven of Siva, as distinguished from Vaikuntha, the
heaven of Vishnu. It is supposed to be somewhere in the
Himālaya mountains. The wonderful excavated rock temple at
Ellora is believed to be a model of Kailās.

18. This ‘notion’ of the author’s is not likely to find
acceptance at the present day.

CHAPTER 2

Hindoo System of Religion.

The Hindoo system is this. A great divine spirit or essence,
‘Brahma’, pervades the whole universe; and the soul of every human
being is a drop from this great ocean, to which, when it becomes
perfectly purified, it is reunited. The reunion is the eternal
beatitude to which all look forward with hope; and the soul of the
Brahman is nearest to it. If he has been a good man, his soul
becomes absorbed in the ‘Brahma’; and, if a bad man, it goes to
‘Narak’, hell; and after the expiration of its period there of
limited imprisonment, it returns to earth, and occupies the
body of some other animal. It again advances by degrees to the body
of the Brahman; and thence, when fitted for it, into the great
‘Brahma’.[1]

From this great eternal essence emanate Brahma, the Creator,
whose consort is Sarasvatī;[2] Vishnu, the Preserver, whose
consort is Lakshmī; and Siva, alias Māhadēo,
the Destroyer, whose consort is Pārvatī. According to
popular belief Jamrāj (Yamarāja) is the judicial deity
who has been appointed by the greater powers to pass the final
judgement on the tenor of men’s lives, according to proceedings
drawn up by his secretary Chitragupta. If men’s actions have been
good, their souls are, as the next stage, advanced a step towards
the great essence, Brahma; and, if bad, they are thrown back, and
obliged to occupy the bodies of brutes or of people of inferior
caste, as the balance against them may be great or small. There is
an intermediate stage, a ‘Narak’, or hell, for bad men, and a
‘Baikunth’, or paradise, for the good, in which they find their
felicity in serving that god of the three to which they have
specially devoted themselves while on earth. But from this stage,
after the period of their sentence is expired, men go back to their
pilgrimage on earth again.

There are numerous Dēos (Devas), or good spirits, of whom
Indra is the chief; [3] and Daityas, or bad spirits; and there have
also been a great number of incarnations from the three great gods,
and their consorts, who have made their appearance upon the earth
when required for particular purposes. All these incarnations are
called ‘Avatārs’, or descents. Vishnu has been eleven times on
the globe in different shapes, and Siva seven times.[4] The
avatārs of Vishnu are celebrated in many popular poems, such
as the Rāmāyana, or history of the Rape of Sitā, the
wife of Rāma, the seventh incarnation;[5] the
Mahābhārata, and the Bhāgavata [Purāna], which
describe the wars and amours of this god in his last human
shape.[6] All these books are believed to have been written either
by the hand or by the inspiration of the god himself thousands of
years before the events they describe actually took place. ‘It
was’, they say, ‘as easy for the deity to write or dictate a
battle, an amour, or any other important event ten thousand years
before as the day after it took place’; and I believe nine-tenths,
perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred, of the Hindoo population believe
implicitly that these accounts were also written. It is now pretty
clear that all these works are of comparatively recent date, that
the great poem of the Mahābhārata could not have been
written before the year 786 of the Christian era, and was probably
written so late as A.D. 1157; that Krishna, if born at all,
must have been born on the 7th of August, A.D. 600, but was most
likely a mere creation of the imagination to serve the purpose of
the Brahmans of Ujain, in whom the fiction originated; that the
other incarnations were invented about the same time, and for the
same object, though the other persons described as incarnations
were real princes, Parasu Rāma, before Christ 1176, and
Rāma, born before Christ 961. In the Mahābhārata
Krishna is described as fighting in the same army with Yudhishthira
and his four brothers. Yudhishthira was a real person, who ascended
the throne at Delhi 575 B.C., or 1175 years before the birth of
Krishna.[7] Bentley supposes that the incarnations, particularly
that of Krishna, were invented by the Brahmans of Ujain with a view
to check the progress of Christianity in that part of the world
(see his historical view of the Hindoo astronomy). That we find in
no history any account of the alarming progress of Christianity
about the time these fables were written is no proof that Bentley
was wrong.[8]

When Monsieur Thevenot was at Agra [in] 1666, the Christian
population was roughly estimated at twenty-five thousand families.
They had all passed away before it became one of our civil and
military stations in the beginning of the present century, and we
might search history in vain for any mention of them (see his
Travels in India, Part III). One single prince, well
disposed to give Christians encouragement and employment, might, in
a few years, get the same number around his capital; and it is
probable that the early Christians in India occasionally found such
princes, and gave just cause of alarm to the Brahman priests, who
were then in the infancy of their despotic power.[9]

During the war with Nepal, in 1814 and 1815,[10] the division
with which I served came upon an extremely interesting colony of
about two thousand Christian families at Betiyā in the
Tirhūt District, on the borders of the Tarāi forest. This
colony had been created by one man, the Bishop, a Venetian by
birth, under the protection of a small Hindoo prince, the
Rājā, of Betiyā.[11] This holy man had been some
fifty years among these people, with little or no support from
Europe or from any other quarter. The only aid he got from the
Rājā was a pledge that no member of his Church should be
subject to the Purveyance system, under which the people
everywhere suffered so much,[12] and this pledge the
Rājā, though a Hindoo, had never suffered to be violated.
There were men of all trades among them, and they formed one very
large street remarkable for the superior style of its buildings and
the sober industry of its inhabitants. The masons, carpenters, and
blacksmiths of this little colony were working in our camp every
day, while we remained in the vicinity, and better workmen I have
never seen in India; but they would all insist upon going to divine
service at the prescribed hours. They had built a splendid
pucka[13] dwelling-house for their bishop, and a still more
splendid church, and formed for him the finest garden I have seen
in India, surrounded with a good wall, and provided with admirable
pucka wells. The native Christian servants who attended at the old
bishop’s table, taught by himself, spoke Latin to him; but he was
become very feeble, and spoke himself a mixture of Latin, Italian,
his native tongue, and Hindustānī. We used to have him at
our messes, and take as much care of him as of an infant, for he
was become almost as frail as one. The joy and the excitement of
being once more among Europeans, and treated by them with so much
reverence in the midst of his flock, were perhaps too much for him,
for he sickened and died soon after.

The Rājā died soon after him, and in all probability
the flock has disappeared. No Europeans except a few indigo
planters of the neighbourhood had ever before known or heard of
this colony; and they seemed to consider them only as a set of
great scoundrels, who had better carts and bullocks than anybody
else in the country, which they refused to let out at the same rate
as the others, and which they (the indigo lords) were not permitted
to seize and employ at discretion. Roman Catholics have a greater
facility in making converts in India than Protestants, from having
so much more in their form of worship to win the affections through
the medium of the imagination.[14]

Notes:

1. Men are occasionally exempted from the necessity of becoming
a Brahman first. Men of low caste, if they die at particular
places, where it is the interest of the Brahmans to invite rich men
to die, are promised absorption into the great ‘Brahma’ at once.
Immense numbers of wealthy men go every year from the most distant
parts of India to die at Benares, where they spend large sums of
money among the Brahmans. It is by their means that this, the
second city in India, is supported. [W. H. S.] Bombay is now the
second city in India, so far as population is concerned.

2. Brahma, with the short vowel, is the eternal Essence or
Spirit; Brahmā, with the long vowel, is ‘the primaeval male
god, the first personal product of the purely spiritual Brahma,
when overspread by Maya, or illusory creative force’, according to
the Vedanta system (Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life
in India, p. 44).

3. Indra was originally, in the Vedas, the Rain-god. The
statement in the text refers to modern Hinduism.

4. The incarnations of Vishnu are ordinarily reckoned as ten,
namely, (1) Fish, (2) Tortoise, (3) Boar, (4) Man-lion, (5) Dwarf,
(6) Rāma with the axe, (7) Rāma Chandra, (8) Krishna, (9)
Buddha, (10) Kalkī, or Kalkin, who is yet to come. I do not
know any authority for eleven incarnations of Vishnu. The number is
stated in some Purānas as twenty-two, twenty-four, or even
twenty-eight. Seven incarnations of Siva are not generally
recognized (see Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in
India, pp. 78-86, and 107-16). For the theory and mystical
meaning of avatārs, see Grierson, J.R.A.S.,
1909, pp. 621- 44. The word avatār means ‘descent’,
scil. of the Deity to earth, and covers more than the term
‘incarnation’.

5. Sitā was an incarnation of Lakshmī. She became
incarnate again, many centuries afterwards, as the wife of Krishna,
another incarnation of Vishnu [W. H. S.]. Reckoning by centuries
is, of course, inapplicable to pure myth. The author believed in
Bentley’s baseless chronology.

6. For the Mahābhārata, see ante, note 11,
Chapter 1. The Bhāgavata Purāna is the most popular of
the Purānas, The Hindi version of the tenth book
(skandha) is known as the ‘Prem Sāgar’. The date of the
composition of the Purānas is uncertain.

7. The dates given in this passage are purely imaginary. Parts
of the Mahābhārata are very ancient. Yudhishthira is no
more an historical personage than Achilles or Romulus. It is
improbable that a ‘throne of Delhi’ existed in 575 B.C., and hardly
anything is known about the state of India at that date.

8. It is hardly necessary to observe that this grotesque theory
is utterly at variance with the facts, as now known.

9. The existing settlements of native Christians at Agra are
mostly of modern origin. Very ancient Christian communities exist
near Madras, and on the Malabar coast. The travels of Jean de
Thevenot were published in 1684, under the title of Voyage,
contenant la Relation de l’Indostan. The English version, by A.
Lovell (London, 1687), is entitled The Travels of Monsieur de
Thevenot into the Levant, in three Parts. Part III deals with
the East Indies, The passage referred to is: ‘Some affirm that
there are twenty-five thousand Christian Families in Agra, but all
do not agree in that’ (Part III, p. 35). Thevonot’s statement about
the Christians of Agra is further discussed post in Chapter 52.

10. The war with Nepal began in October, 1814, and was not
concluded till 1816. During its progress the British arms suffered
several reverses.

11. The Betiyā (Bettiah of I. G., 1908) Rāj is
a great estate with an area of 1,824 square miles in the northern
part of the Champāran District of Bihār, in the Province
of Bihār and Orissa. A great portion of the estate is held
(1908) on permanent leases by European indigo-planters.

12. For discussion of this system see post, Chapter 7.

13. ‘Pucka’ (pakkā) here means ‘masonry’, as opposed
to ‘Kutcha’ (kachchā), meaning ‘earthen’.

14. Native Christians, according to the census of 1872, number
1,214 persons, who are principally found in Bettiā thāna
[police-circle]. There are two Missions, one at Bettiā, and
the other at the village of Chuhārī, both supported by
the Roman Catholic Church. The former was founded in 1746 by a
certain Father Joseph, from Garingano in Italy, who went to
Bettiā on the invitation of the Mahārāja. The
present number of converts is about 1,000 persons. Being
principally descendants of Brahmans, they hold a fair social
position; but some of them are extremely poor. About one-fourth are
carpenters, one- tenth blacksmiths, one-tenth servants, the
remainder carters. The Chuhārī Mission was founded in
1770 by three Catholic priests, who had been expelled from Nepal
[after the Gōrkha conquest in 1768]. There are now 283
converts, mostly descendants of Nepālis. They are all
agriculturists, and very poor (Article ‘Champāran District’ in
Statistical Account of Bengal, 1877).

 The statement in I.G. 1908, s.v. Bettiah, differs
slightly, as follows:

   ‘A Roman Catholic Mission was established
about 1740 by Father Joseph Mary, an Italian missionary of the
Capuchin Order, who was passing near Bettiah on his way to
Nepāl, when he was summoned by Rājā Dhruva Shah to
attend his daughter, who was dangerously ill. He succeeded in
curing her, and the grateful Raja invited him to stay at Bettiah
and gave him a house and ninety acres of land.’ The Bettiah Mission
still exists and maintains the Catholic Mission Press, where
publications illustrating the history of the Capuchin Missions have
been printed. Father Felix, O.C., is at work on the subject.

CHAPTER 3

Legend of the Nerbudda River.

The legend is that the Nerbudda, which flows west into the Gulf
of Cambay, was wooed and won in the usual way by the Sōn
river, which rises from the same tableland of Amarkantak, and flows
east into the Ganges and Bay of Bengal.[1] All the previous
ceremonies having been performed, the Sōn [2] came with ‘due
pomp and circumstance’ to fetch his bride in the procession called
the ‘Barāt’, up to which time the bride and bridegroom are
supposed never to have seen each other, unless perchance they have
met in infancy. Her Majesty the Nerbudda became exceedingly
impatient to know what sort of a personage her destinies were to be
linked to, while his Majesty the Sōn advanced at a slow and
stately pace. At last the Queen sent Johilā, the daughter of
the barber, to take a close view of him, and to return and make a
faithful and particular report of his person. His Majesty was
captivated with the little Johilā, the barber’s daughter, at
first sight; and she, ‘nothing loath’, yielded to his caresses.
Some say that she actually pretended to be Queen herself; and that
his Majesty was no further in fault than in mistaking the humble
handmaid for her noble mistress; but, be that as it may, her
Majesty no sooner heard of the good understanding between them,
than she rushed forward, and with one foot sent the Sōn
rolling back to the east whence he came, and with the other kicked
little Johilā sprawling after him; for, said the high priest,
who told us the story, ‘You see what a towering passion she was
likely to have been in under such indignities from the furious
manner in which she cuts her way through the marble rocks beneath
us, and casts huge masses right and left as she goes along, as if
they were really so many coco-nuts’. ‘And was she’, asked I, ‘to
have flown eastward with him, or was he to have flown westward with
her?’ ‘She was to have accompanied him eastward’, said the high
priest, ‘but her Majesty, after this indignity, declared that she
would not go a single pace in the same direction with such
wretches, and would flow west, though all the other rivers in India
might flow east; and west she flows accordingly, a virgin queen.’ I
asked some of the Hindoos about us why they called her ‘Mother
Nerbudda’, if she was really never married. ‘Her Majesty’, said
they with great respect, ‘would really never consent to be married
after the indignity she suffered from her affianced bridegroom the
Sōn; and we call her Mother because she blesses us all, and we
are anxious to accost her by the name which we consider to be at
once the most respectful and endearing.’

Any Englishman can easily conceive a poet in his highest
‘calenture of the brain’ addressing the ocean as ‘a steed that
knows his rider’, and patting the crested billow as his flowing
mane; but he must come to India to understand how every individual
of a whole community of many millions can address a fine river as a
living being, a sovereign princess, who hears and understands all
they say, and exercises a kind of local superintendence over their
affairs, without a single temple in which her image is worshipped,
or a single priest to profit by the delusion. As in the case of the
Ganges, it is the river itself to whom they address themselves, and
not to any deity residing in it, or presiding over it: the stream
itself is the deity which fills their imaginations, and receives
their homage.

Among the Romans and ancient Persians rivers were propitiated by
sacrifices. When Vitellius crossed the Euphrates with the Roman
legions to put Tiridates on the throne of Armenia, they propitiated
the river according to the rites of their country by the
suovetaurilia, the sacrifice of the hog, the ram, and the
bull. Tiridates did the same by the sacrifice of a horse. Tacitus
does not mention the river god, but the river itself,
as propitiated (see [Annals,] book vi, chap. 37).[3] Plato
makes Socrates condemn Homer for making Achilles behave
disrespectfully towards the river Xanthus, though acknowledged to
be a divinity, in offering to fight him,[4] and towards the river
Sperchius, another acknowledged god, in presenting to the dead body
of Patroclus the locks of his hair which he had promised to that
river.[5]

The Sōn river, which rises near the source of the Nerbudda
on the tableland of Amarkantak, takes a westerly course for some
miles, and then turns off suddenly to the east, and is joined by
the little stream of the Johilā before it descends the great
cascade; and hence the poets have created this fiction, which the
mass of the population receive as divine revelation. The statue of
little Johilā, the barber’s daughter, in stone, stands in the
temple of the goddess Nerbudda at Amarkantak, bound in chains.[6]
It may here be remarked that the first overtures in India must
always be made through the medium of the barber, whether they be
from the prince or the peasant.[7] If a sovereign prince sends
proposals to a sovereign princess, they must be conveyed through
the medium of the barber, or they will never be considered as done
in due form, as likely to prove propitious. The prince will, of
course, send some relation or high functionary with him; but in all
the credentials the barber must be named as the principal
functionary. Hence it was that Her Majesty was supposed to have
sent a barber’s daughter to meet her husband.

The ‘Mahātam’ (greatness or holiness) of the Ganges is
said, as I have already stated, to be on the wane, and not likely
to endure sixty years longer; while that of the Nerbudda is on the
increase, and in sixty years is entirely to supersede the sanctity
of her sister. If the valley of the Nerbudda should continue for
sixty years longer under such a government as it has enjoyed since
we took possession of it in 1817,[8] it may become infinitely more
rich, more populous, and more beautiful than that of the Nile ever
was; and, if the Hindoos there continue, as I hope they will, to
acquire wealth and honour under a rule to which they are so much
attached, the prophecy may be realized in as far as the increase of
honour paid to the Nerbudda is concerned. But I know no ground to
expect that the reverence[9] paid to the Ganges will diminish,
unless education and the concentration of capital in manufactures
should work an important change in the religious feelings and
opinions of the people along the course of that river; although
this, it must be admitted, is a consummation which may be looked
for more speedily on the banks of the Ganges than on those of a
stream like the Nerbudda, which is neither navigable at present
nor, in my opinion, capable of being rendered so. Commerce and
manufactures, and the concentration of capital in the maintenance
of the new communities employed in them, will, I think, be the
great media through which this change will be chiefly effected; and
they are always more likely to follow the course of rivers that are
navigable than that of rivers which are not.[10]

Notes:

1. Amarkantak, formerly in the Sohāgpur pargana of the
Bilāspur District of the Central Provinces, is situated on a
high tableland, and is a famous place of pilgrimage. The temples
are described by Beglar in A.S.R., vol. vii, pp. 227-34, pl.
xx, xxi. The hill has been transferred to the Rīwā State
(Central Provinces Gazetteer (1870), and I.G. (1908),
s.v. Amarkantak).

2. The name is misspelled Sohan in the author’s text. The
Sōn rises at Sōn Mundā, about twenty miles from
Amarkantak (A.S.R., vol. vii, 236).

3. ‘Sacrificantibus, cum hic more Romano suovetaurilia daret,
ille equum placando amni adornasset.’

4.          
      μέγας
ποταμòς
βαθυδίνης,
δυ Ξάνθον
καλέουσι
θεοί,
άνδρες δè
Σκάμανδρον.
—Iliad xx, 73.

5. Iliad xxiii. 140-153.

6. Mr. Crooke observes that the binding was intended to prevent
the object of worship from deserting her shrine or possibly doing
mischief elsewhere, and refers to his article, ‘The Binding of a
God, a Study of the Basis of Idolatry’, in Folklore, vol.
viii (1897), p.134. The name is spelt Johillā in I.G.
(1908), s.v. Sōn River.

7. Monier Williams denies the barber’s monopoly of match-making.
‘In some parts of Northern India the match-maker for some castes is
the family barber; but for the higher castes he is more generally a
Brahman, who goes about from one house to another till he discovers
a baby-girl of suitable rank’ (Religious Thought and Life in
India, p. 377). So far as the editor knows, the barber is
ordinarily employed in Northern India.

8. During the operations against the Pindhārī
freebooters. Many treaties were negotiated with the Peshwa and
other native powers in the years 1817 and 1818.

9. The word in the text is ‘revenue’.

10. Concerning the prophecy that the sanctity of the Ganges will
cease in 1895, see note to Chapter 1, ante, [13]. The
prophecy was much talked of some years ago, but the reverence for
the Ganges continues undiminished, while the development of
commerce and manufactures has not affected, the religious feelings
and opinions of the people. Railways, in fact, facilitate
pilgrimages and increase their popularity. The course of commerce
now follows the line of rail, not the navigable rivers. The author,
when writing this book, evidently never contemplated the
possibility of railway construction in India. Later in life, in
1852, he fully appreciated the value of the new means of
communication (Journey, ii, 370, &c.).

CHAPTER 4

A Suttee[1] on the Nerbudda.

We took a ride one evening to Gopālpur, a small village
situated on the same bank of the Nerbudda, about three miles up
from Bherāghāt. On our way we met a party of women and
girls coming to the fair. Their legs were uncovered half-way up the
thigh; but, as we passed, they all carefully covered up their
faces. ‘Good God!’ exclaimed one of the ladies, ‘how can these
people be so very indecent?’ They thought it, no doubt, equally
extraordinary that she should have her face uncovered, while she so
carefully concealed her legs; for they were really all modest
peasantry, going from the village to bathe in the holy
stream.[2]

Here there are some very pretty temples, built for the most part
to the memory of widows who have burned themselves with the remains
of their husbands, and upon the very spot where they committed
themselves to the flames. There was one which had been recently
raised over the ashes of one of the most extraordinary old ladies
that I have ever seen, who burned herself in my presence in 1829. I
prohibited the building of any temple upon the spot, but my
successor in the civil charge of the district, Major Low, was
never, I believe, made acquainted with the prohibition nor with the
progress of the work; which therefore went on to completion in my
absence. As suttees are now prohibited in our dominions[3] and
cannot be often seen or described by Europeans, I shall here relate
the circumstances of this as they were recorded by me at the time,
and the reader may rely upon the truth of the whole tale.

On the 29th November, 1829, this old woman, then about
sixty-five years of age, here mixed her ashes with those of her
husband, who had been burned alone four days before. On receiving
civil charge of the district (Jubbulpore) in March, 1828, I issued
a proclamation prohibiting any one from aiding or assisting in
suttee, and distinctly stating that to bring one ounce of wood for
the purpose would be considered as so doing. If the woman burned
herself with the body of her husband, any one who brought wood for
the purpose of burning him would become liable to punishment;
consequently, the body of the husband must be first consumed, and
the widow must bring a fresh supply for herself. On Tuesday, 24th
November, 1829, I had an application from the heads of the most
respectable and most extensive family of Brahmans in the district
to suffer this old woman to burn herself with the remains of her
husband, Ummēd Singh Upadhya, who had that morning died upon
the banks of the Nerbudda.[4] I threatened to enforce my order, and
punish severely any man who assisted; and placed a police guard for
the purpose of seeing that no one did so. She remained sitting by
the edge of the water without eating or drinking. The next day the
body of her husband was burned to ashes in a small pit of about
eight feet square, and three or four feet deep, before several
thousand spectators who had assembled to see the suttee. All
strangers dispersed before evening, as there seemed to be no
prospect of my yielding to the urgent solicitations of her family,
who dared not touch food till she had burned herself, or declared
herself willing to return to them. Her sons, grandsons, and some
other relations remained with her, while the rest surrounded my
house, the one urging me to allow her to burn, and the other urging
her to desist. She remained sitting on a bare rock in the bed of
the Nerbudda, refusing every kind of sustenance, and exposed to the
intense heat of the sun by day, and the severe cold of the night,
with only a thin sheet thrown over her shoulders. On Thursday, to
cut off all hope of her being moved from her purpose, she put on
the dhajā, or coarse red turban, and broke her bracelets in
pieces, by which she became dead in law, and for ever excluded from
caste. Should she choose to live after this, she could never return
to her family. Her children and grandchildren were still with her,
but all their entreaties were unavailing; and I became satisfied
that she would starve herself to death, if not allowed to burn, by
which the family would be disgraced, her miseries prolonged, and I
myself rendered liable to be charged with a wanton abuse of
authority, for no prohibition of the kind I had issued had as yet
received the formal sanction of the Government.

On Saturday, the 28th, in the morning, I rode out ten miles to
the spot, and found the poor old widow sitting with the dhajā
round her head, a brass plate before her with undressed rice and
flowers, and a coco-nut in each hand. She talked very collectedly,
telling me that ‘she had determined to mix her ashes with those of
her departed husband, and should patiently wait my permission to do
so, assured that God would enable her to sustain life till that was
given, though she dared not eat or drink’. Looking at the sun, then
rising before her over a long and beautiful reach of the Nerbudda
river, she said calmly, ‘My soul has been for five days with my
husband’s near that sun, nothing but my earthly frame is left; and
this, I know, you will in time suffer to be mixed with the ashes of
his in yonder pit, because it is not in your nature or usage
wantonly to prolong the miseries of a poor old woman’.

‘Indeed, it is not,—my object and duty is to save and
preserve them [sic]; and I am come to dissuade you from this
idle purpose, to urge you to live, and to keep your family from the
disgrace of being thought your murderers.’

‘I am not afraid of their ever being so thought: they have all,
like good children, done everything in their power to induce me to
live among them; and, if I had done so, I know they would have
loved and honoured me; but my duties to them have now ended. I
commit them all to your care, and I go to attend my husband,
Ummēd Singh Upadhya, with whose ashes on the funeral
pile mine have been already three times mixed.'[5]

This was the first time in her long life that she had ever
pronounced the name of her husband, for in India no woman, high or
low, ever pronounces the name of her husband,—she would
consider it disrespectful towards him to do so; and it is often
amusing to see their embarrassment when asked the question by any
European gentleman. They look right and left for some one to
relieve them from the dilemma of appearing disrespectful either to
the querist or to their absent husbands—they perceive that he
is unacquainted with their duties on this point, and are afraid he
will attribute their silence to disrespect. They know that few
European gentlemen are acquainted with them; and when women go into
our courts of justice, or other places where they are liable to be
asked the names of their husbands, they commonly take one of their
children or some other relation with them to pronounce the words in
their stead. When the old lady named her husband, as she did with
strong emphasis, and in a very deliberate manner, every one present
was satisfied that she had resolved to die. ‘I have’, she
continued, ‘tasted largely of the bounty of Government, having been
maintained by it with all my large family in ease and comfort upon
our rent-free lands; and I feel assured that my children will not
be suffered to want; but with them I have nothing more to do, our
intercourse and communion here end. My soul (prān) is
with Ummēd Singh Upadhya: and my ashes must here mix
with his.’

Again looking to the sun—’I see them together’, said she,
with a tone and countenance that affected me a good deal, ‘under
the bridal canopy!’—alluding to the ceremonies of marriage;
and I am satisfied that she at that moment really believed that she
saw her own spirit and that of her husband under the bridal canopy
in paradise.

I tried to work upon her pride and her fears. I told her that it
was probable that the rent-free lands by which her family had been
so long supported might be resumed by the Government, as a mark of
its displeasure against the children for not dissuading her from
the sacrifice; that the temples over her ancestors upon the bank
might be levelled with the ground, in order to prevent their
operating to induce others to make similar sacrifices; and lastly,
that not one single brick or stone should ever mark the place where
she died if she persisted in her resolution. But, if she consented
to live, a splendid habitation should be built for her among these
temples, a handsome provision assigned for her support out of these
rent-free lands, her children should come daily to visit her, and I
should frequently do the same. She smiled, but held out her arm and
said, ‘My pulse has long ceased to beat, my spirit has departed,
and I have nothing left but a little earth, that I wish to
mix with the ashes of my husband. I shall suffer nothing in
burning; and, if you wish proof, order some fire, and you shall see
this arm consumed without giving me any pain’. I did not attempt to
feel her pulse, but some of my people did, and declared that it had
ceased to be perceptible. At this time every native present
believed that she was incapable of suffering pain; and her end
confirmed them in their opinion.

Satisfied myself that it would be unavailing to attempt to save
her life, I sent for all the principal members of the family, and
consented that she should be suffered to burn herself if they would
enter into engagements that no other member of their family should
ever do the same. This they all agreed to, and the papers having
been drawn out in due form about midday, I sent down notice to the
old lady, who seemed extremely pleased and thankful. The ceremonies
of bathing were gone through before three [o’clock], while the wood
and other combustible materials for a strong fire were collected
and put into the pit. After bathing, she called for a ‘pan’ (betel
leaf) and ate it, then rose up, and with one arm on the shoulder of
her eldest son, and the other on that of her nephew, approached the
fire. I had sentries placed all round, and no other person was
allowed to approach within five paces. As she rose up fire was set
to the pile, and it was instantly in a blaze. The distance was
about 150 yards. She came on with a calm and cheerful countenance,
stopped once, and, casting her eyes upward, said, ‘Why have they
kept me five days from thee, my husband?’ On coming to the sentries
her supporters stopped; she walked once round the pit, paused a
moment, and, while muttering a prayer, threw some flowers into the
fire. She then walked up deliberately and steadily to the brink,
stepped into the centre of the flame, sat down, and leaning back in
the midst as if reposing upon a couch, was consumed without
uttering a shriek or betraying one sign of agony.

A few instruments of music had been provided, and they played,
as usual, as she approached the fire, not, as is commonly supposed,
in order to drown screams, but to prevent the last words of the
victim from being heard, as these are supposed to be prophetic, and
might become sources of pain or strife to the living.[6] It was not
expected that I should yield, and but few people had assembled to
witness the sacrifice, so that there was little or nothing in the
circumstances immediately around to stimulate her to any
extraordinary exertions; and I am persuaded that it was the desire
of again being united to her husband in the next world, and the
entire confidence that she would be so if she now burned herself,
that alone sustained her. From the morning he died (Tuesday) till
Wednesday evening she ate ‘pans’ or betel leaves, but nothing else;
and from Wednesday evening she ceased eating them. She drank no
water from Tuesday. She went into the fire with the same cloth
about her that she had worn in the bed of the river; but it was
made wet from a persuasion that even the shadow of any impure thing
falling upon her from going to the pile contaminates the woman
unless counteracted by the sheet moistened in the holy stream.

I must do the family the justice to say that they all exerted
themselves to dissuade the widow from her purpose, and had she
lived she would assuredly have been cherished and honoured as the
first female member of the whole house. There is no people in the
world among whom parents are more loved, honoured, and obeyed than
among the Hindoos; and the grandmother is always more honoured than
the mother. No queen upon her throne could ever have been
approached with more reverence by her subjects than was this old
lady by all the members of her family as she sat upon a naked rock
in the bed of the river, with only a red rag upon her head and a
single-white sheet over her shoulders.

Soon after the battle of Trafalgar I heard a young lady exclaim,
‘I could really wish to have had a brother killed in that action’.
There is no doubt that a family in which a suttee takes place feels
a good deal exalted in its own esteem and that of the community by
the sacrifice. The sister of the Rājā of Rīwā
was one of four or five wives who burned themselves with the
remains of the Rājā of Udaipur; and nothing in the course
of his life will ever be recollected by her brother with so much of
pride and pleasure, since the Udaipur Rājā is the head of
the Rājpūt tribes.[7]

I asked the old lady when she had first resolved upon becoming a
suttee, and she told me that about thirteen years before, while
bathing in the river Nerbudda, near the spot where she then sat,
with many other females of the family, the resolution had fixed
itself in her mind as she looked at the splendid temples on the
bank of the river erected by the different branches of the family
over the ashes of her female relations who had at different times
become suttees. Two, I think, were over her aunts, and one over the
mother of her husband. They were very beautiful buildings, and had
been erected at great cost and kept in good repair. She told me
that she had never mentioned this her resolution to any one from
that time, nor breathed a syllable on the subject till she called
out ‘Sat, sat, sat’,[8] when her husband breathed his last with his
head in her lap on the bank of the Nerbudda, to which he had been
taken when no hopes remained of his surviving the fever of which he
died.

Charles Harding, of the Bengal Civil Service, as magistrate of
Benares, in 1806 prevented the widow of a Brahman from being
burned. Twelve months after her husband’s death she had been goaded
by her family into the expression of a wish to burn with some relic
of her husband, preserved for the purpose. The pile was raised to
her at Rāmnagar,[9] some two miles above Benares, on the
opposite side of the river Ganges. She was not well secured upon
the pile, and as soon as she felt the fire she jumped off and
plunged into the river. The people all ran after her along the
bank, but the current drove her towards Benares, whence a police
boat put off and took her in.

She was almost dead with the fright and the water, in which she
had been kept afloat by her clothes. She was taken to Harding; but
the whole city of Benares was in an uproar, at the rescue of a
Brahman’s widow from the funeral pile, for such it had been
considered, though the man had been a year dead. Thousands
surrounded his house, and his court was filled with the principal
men of the city, imploring him to surrender the woman; and among
the rest was the poor woman’s father, who declared that he could
not support his daughter; and that she had, therefore, better be
burned, as her husband’s family would no longer receive her. The
uproar was quite alarming to a young man, who felt all the
responsibility upon himself in such a city as[10] Benares, with a
population of three hundred thousand people,[11] so prone to
popular insurrections, or risings en masse very like them.
He long argued the point of the time that had elapsed, and the
unwillingness of the woman, but in vain; until at last the thought
struck him suddenly, and he said that ‘The sacrifice was manifestly
unacceptable to their God—that the sacred river, as such, had
rejected her; she had, without being able to swim, floated down two
miles upon its bosom, in the face of an immense multitude; and it
was clear that she had been rejected. Had she been an acceptable
sacrifice, after the fire had touched her, the river would have
received her’. This satisfied the whole crowd. The father said
that, after this unanswerable argument, he would receive his
daughter; and the whole crowd dispersed satisfied.[12]

The following conversation took place one morning between me and
a native gentleman at Jubbulpore soon after suttees had been
prohibited by Government:—

‘What are the castes among whom women are not permitted to
remarry after the death of their husbands?’

‘They are, sir, Brahmans, Rājpūts, Baniyās
(shopkeepers), Kāyaths (writers).’

‘Why not permit them to marry, now that they are no longer
permitted to burn themselves with the dead bodies of their
husbands?’

‘The knowledge that they cannot unite themselves to a second
husband without degradation from caste, tends strongly to secure
their fidelity to the first, sir. Besides, if all widows were
permitted to marry again, what distinction would remain between us
and people of lower caste? We should all soon sink to a level with
the lowest.’

‘And so you are content to keep up your caste at the expense of
the poor widows?’

‘No; they are themselves as proud of the distinction as their
husbands are.’

‘And would they, do you think, like to hear the good old custom
of burning themselves restored?’

‘Some of them would, no doubt.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they become reunited to their husbands in paradise, and
are there happy, free from all the troubles of this life.’

‘But you should not let them have any troubles as widows.’

‘If they behave well, they are the most honoured members of
their deceased husbands’ families; nothing in such families is ever
done without consulting them, because all are proud to have the
memory of their lost fathers, sons, and brothers so honoured by
their widows.[13] But women feel that they are frail, and would
often rather burn themselves than be exposed all their lives to
temptation and suspicion.’

‘And why do not the men burn themselves to avoid the troubles of
life?’

‘Because they are not called to it from Heaven, as the women
are.’

‘And you think that the women were really called to be burned by
the Deity?’

‘No doubt; we all believe that they were called and supported by
the Deity; and that no tender beings like women could otherwise
voluntarily undergo such tortures—they become inspired with
supernatural powers of courage and fortitude. When Dulī Sukul,
the Sihōrā[14] banker’s father, died, the wife of a
Lodhī cultivator of the town declared, all at once, that she
had been a suttee with him six times before; and that she would now
go into paradise with him a seventh time. Nothing could persuade
her from burning herself. She was between fifty and sixty years of
age, and had grandchildren, and all her family tried to persuade
her that it must be a mistake, but all in vain. She became a
suttee, and was burnt the day after the body of the banker.’

‘Did not Dulī Sukul’s family, who were Brahmans, try to
dissuade her from it, she being a Lodhī, a very low
caste?’

‘They did; but they said all things were possible with God; and
it was generally believed that this was a call from Heaven.’

‘And what became of the banker’s widow?’

‘She said that she felt no divine call to the flames. This was
thirty years ago; and the banker was about thirty years of age when
he died.’

‘Then he will have rather an old wife in paradise?’

‘No, sir; after they pass through the flames upon earth, both
become young in paradise.’

‘Sometimes women used to burn themselves with any relic of a
husband, who had died far from home, did they not?’

‘Yes, sir, I remember a fisherman, about twenty years ago, who
went on some business to Benares from Jubbulpore, and who was to
have been back in two months. Six months passed away without any
news of him; and at last the wife dreamed that he had died on the
road, and began forthwith, in the middle of the night, to call out
“Sat, sat, sat!” Nothing could dissuade her from burning; and in
the morning a pile was raised for her, on the north bank of the
large tank of Hanumān,[15] where you have planted an avenue of
trees. There I saw her burned with her husband’s turban in her
arms, and in ten days after her husband came back.’

‘Now the burning has been prohibited, a man cannot get rid of a
bad wife so easily?’

‘But she was a good wife, sir, and bad ones do not often become
suttees.’

‘Who made the pile for her?’

‘Some of her family, but I forget who. They thought it must have
been a call from Heaven, when, in reality, it was only a
dream.’

‘You are a Rājpūt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do Rājpūts in this part of India now destroy their
female infants?’

‘Never; that practice has ceased everywhere in these parts; and
is growing into disuse in Bundēlkhand, where the
Rājās, at the request of the British Government, have
prohibited it among their subjects. This was a measure of real
good. You see girls now at play in villages, where the face of one
was never seen before, nor the voice of one heard.’

‘But still those who have them grumble, and say that the
Government which caused them to be preserved should undertake to
provide for their marriage. Is it not so?’

‘At first they grumbled a little, sir; but as the infants grew
on their affections, they thought no more about it.'[16]

 Gurcharan Baboo, the Principal of the little Jubbulpore
College,[17] called upon me one forenoon, soon after this
conversation. He was educated in the Calcutta College; speaks and
writes English exceedingly well; is tolerably well read in English
literature, and is decidedly a thinking man. After talking
over the matter which caused his visit, I told him of the
Lodhī woman’s burning herself with the Brahman banker at
Sihōrā, and asked him what he thought of it. He said that
‘In all probability this woman had really been the wife of the
Brahman in some former birth—of which transposition a
singular case had occurred in his own family.

‘His great-grandfather had three wives, who all burnt themselves
with his body. While they were burning, a large serpent came up,
and, ascending the pile, was burnt with them. Soon after another
came up, and did the same. They were seen by the whole multitude,
who were satisfied that they had been the wives of his
great-grandfather in a former birth, and would become so again
after this sacrifice. When the “srāddh”, or funeral obsequies,
were performed after the prescribed intervals,[18] the offerings
and prayers were regularly made for six souls instead of
four; and, to this day, every member of his family, and every
Hindoo who had heard the story, believed that these two serpents
had a just right to be considered among his ancestors, and to be
prayed for accordingly in all “srāddh”.’

A few days after this conversation with the Principal of the
Jubbulpore College, I had a visit from Bholī Sukul, the
present head of the Sihōrā banker’s family, and youngest
brother of the Brahman with whose ashes the Lodhī woman burned
herself. I requested him to tell me all that he recollected about
this singular suttee, and he did so as follows:

‘When my eldest brother, the father of the late Dulī Sukul,
who was so long a native collector under you in this district, died
about twenty years ago at Sihōrā, a Lodhī woman, who
resided two miles distant in the village of Khitolī, which has
been held by our family for several generations, declared that she
would burn herself with him on the funeral pile; that she had been
his wife in three different births, had already burnt herself with
him three times, and had to burn with him four times more. She was
then sixty years of age, and had a husband living [of] about the
same age. We were all astounded when she came forward with this
story, and told her that it must be a mistake, as we were Brahmans,
while she was a Lodhī. She said that there was no mistake in
the matter; that she, in the last birth, resided with my brother in
the sacred city of Benares, and one day gave a holy man who came to
ask charity salt, by mistake, instead of sugar, with his food.
That, in consequence, he told her she should, in the next birth, be
separated from her husband, and be of inferior caste; but that, if
she did her duty well in that state, she should be reunited to him
in the following birth. We told her that all this must be a dream,
and the widow of my brother insisted that, if she were not allowed
to burn herself, the other should not be allowed to take her place.
We prevented the widow from ascending the pile, and she died at a
good old age only two years ago at Sihōrā. My brother’s
body was burned at Sihōrā, and the poor Lodhī woman
came and stole one handful of the ashes, which she placed in her
bosom, and took back with her to Khitolī. There she prevailed
upon her husband and her brother to assist her in her return to her
former husband and caste as a Brahman. No soul else would assist
them, as we got the then native chief to prohibit it; and these
three persons brought on their own heads the pile, on which she
seated herself, with the ashes in her bosom. The husband and his
brother set fire to the pile, and she was burned.'[19]

‘And what is now your opinion, after a lapse of twenty
years?’

‘Why, that she had really been the wife of my brother; for at
the pile she prophesied that my nephew Dulī should be, what
his grandfather had been, high in the service of the Government,
and, as you know, he soon after became so.’

‘And what did your father think?’

‘He was so satisfied that she had been the wife of his eldest
son in a former birth, that he defrayed all the expenses of her
funeral ceremonies, and had them all observed with as much
magnificence as those of any member of the family. Her tomb is
still to be seen at Khitolī, and that of my brother at
Sihōrā.’

I went to look at these tombs with Bholī Sukul himself some
short time after this conversation, and found that all the people
of the town of Sihōrā and village of Khitolī really
believed that the old Lodhī woman had been his brother’s wife
in a former birth, and had now burned herself as his widow for the
fourth time. Her tomb is at Khitolī, and his at
Sihōrā.

Notes:

1. Satī, a virtuous woman, especially one who burns
herself with her husband. The word, in common usage, is transferred
to the sacrifice of the woman.

2. The women of Bundēlkhand wear the same costume, a full
loin-cloth, as those of the Jubbulpore district. North of the Jumna
an ordinary petticoat is generally worn.

3. Suttee was prohibited during the administration of Lord
William Bentinck by the Bengal Regulation xvii, dated 4th December,
1829, extended in 1830 to Madras and Bombay. The advocates of the
practice unsuccessfully appealed to the Privy Council. Several
European officers defended the custom. A well-written account of
the suttee legislation is given in Mr. D. Boulger’s work on Lord
William Bentinck in the ‘Rulers of India’ series.

4. Whenever it is practicable, Hindoos are placed on the banks
of sacred rivers to die, especially in Bengal.

5. For explanation of this phrase, see the following story of
the Lodhī woman, following note [14], in this chapter. The
name is abnormal. Upadhya is a Brahman title meaning
‘spiritual preceptor’. Brahmans serving in the army sometimes take
the title Singh, which is more properly assumed by
Rājpūts or Sikhs.

6. An instance of such a prophecy, of a favourable kind, will be
found at the end of this chapter; and another, disastrously
fulfilled, in Chapter 21, post.

7. Rīwā (Rewah) is a considerable principality lying
south of Allahabad and Mirzapore and north of Sāgar. The
chiefs are Baghēl Rājpūts. The proper title of the
Udaipur, or Mēwār, chief is Rānā, not Raja. See
‘Annals of Mewar’, chapters 1-18, pp. 173-401, in the Popular
Edition of Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan
(Routledge, 1914), an excellent and cheap reprint. The original
quarto edition is almost unobtainable.

8. The masculine form of the word satī (suttee).

9. Well known to tourists as the seat of the Mahārāja
of Benares.

10. ‘of’ in text.

11. In the author’s time no regular census had been taken. His
rough estimate was excessive. The census figures, including the
cantonments, are: 1872, 175,188; 1901, 209,331; 1911, 203,804.

12. This Benares story, accidentally omitted from the author’s
text, was printed as a note at the end of the second volume. It has
now been inserted in the place which seems most suitable.
Interesting and well-told narratives of several suttees will be
found in Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, pp. 306-14,
ed. Constable. See also Dubois, Hindu Manners, &c., 3rd
ed. (1906), chapter 19.

13. Widows are not always so well treated. Their life in Lower
Bengal, especially, is not a pleasant one,

14. Sihōrā, on the road from Jubbulpore to
Mirzāpur, twenty-seven miles from the former, is a town with a
population of more than 5,000. A smaller town with the same name
exists in the Bhandāra district of the Central Provinces.

15. The monkey-god. His shrines are very numerous in the Central
Provinces and Bundēlkhand.

16. Within the last hundred years more than one officer has
believed that infanticide had been suppressed by his efforts, and
yet the practice is by no means extinct. In the Agra Province the
severely inquisitorial measures adopted in 1870, and rigorously
enforced, have no doubt done much to break the custom, but, in the
neighbouring province of Oudh, the practice continued to be common
for many years later. A clear case in the Rāi Barelī
District came before me in 1889, though no one was punished, for
lack of judicial proof against any individual. The author discusses
infanticide as practised in Oudh in many passages of his Journey
through the Kingdom of Oudh (Bentley, 1858), It is possible
that female infanticide may be still prevalent in many Native
States. Mr. Willoughby in the years preceding A.D. 1849 made great
progress in stamping it out among the Jharejas of the
Kathiāwār States in the Bombay Presidency. There is
reason to hope that the crime will gradually disappear from all
parts of India, but it is difficult to say how far it still
prevails, though the general opinion is that it is now
comparatively rare (Census Report, India, 1911, p. 217).

17. A college of more pretensions now exists at Jabalpur
(Jubbulpore), and is affiliated in Arts and Law to the University
of Allahabad established in 1887. The small college alluded to in
the text was abolished in 1850.

18. For description of the tedious and complicated ‘srāddh’
ceremonies see chapter 11 of Monier Williams’s Religious Thought
and Life in India.

19. This version of the story differs in some minute particulars
from the version given ante, [14].

CHAPTER 5

Marriages of Trees—The Tank and the
Plantain—Meteors—Rainbows.

Before quitting Jubbulpore, to which place I thought it very
unlikely that I should ever return, I went to visit the groves in
the vicinity, which, at the time I held the civil charge of the
district in 1828, had been planted by different native gentlemen
upon lands assigned to them rent-free for the purpose, on condition
that the holder should bind himself to plant trees at the rate of
twenty-five to the acre, and keep them up at that rate; and that
for each grove, however small, he should build and keep in repair a
well, lined with masonry, for watering the trees, and for the
benefit of travellers.[1]

Some of these groves had already begun to yield fruit, and all
had been married. Among the Hindoos, neither the man who
plants a grove, nor his wife, can taste of the fruit till he has
married one of the mango-trees to some other tree (commonly
the tamarind-tree) that grows near it in the same grove. The
proprietor of one of these groves that stands between the
cantonment and the town, old Barjōr Singh, had spent so much
in planting and watering the grove, and building walls and wells of
pucka[2] masonry, that he could not afford to defray the
expense of the marriage ceremonies till one of the trees, which was
older than the rest when planted, began to bear fruit in 1833, and
poor old Barjōr Singh and his wife were in great distress that
they dared not taste of the fruit whose flavour was so much prized
by their children. They began to think that they had neglected a
serious duty, and might, in consequence, be taken off before
another season could come round. They therefore sold all their
silver and gold ornaments, and borrowed all they could; and before
the next season the grove was married with all due pomp and
ceremony, to the great delight of the old pair, who tasted of the
fruit in June 1834.

The larger the number of the Brahmans that are fed on the
occasion of the marriage, the greater the glory of the proprietor
of the grove; and when I asked old Barjōr Singh, during my
visit to his grove, how many he had feasted, he said, with a heavy
sigh, that he had been able to feast only one hundred and fifty. He
showed me the mango-tree which had acted the part of the bridegroom
on the occasion, but the bride had disappeared from his side. ‘And
where is the bride, the tamarind?’ ‘The only tamarind I had in the
grove died’, said the old man, ‘before we could bring about the
wedding; and I was obliged to get a jasmine for a wife for my
mango. I planted it here, so that we might, as required, cover both
bride and bridegroom under one canopy during the ceremonies; but,
after the marriage was over, the gardener neglected her, and she
pined away and died.’

‘And what made you prefer the jasmine to all other trees after
the tamarind?’

‘Because it is the most celebrated of all trees, save the
rose.’

‘And why not have chosen the rose for a wife?’

‘Because no one ever heard of marriage between the rose and the
mango; while they [sic] take place every day between the
mango and the chambēlī (jasmine).'[3]

After returning from the groves, I had a visit after breakfast
from a learned Muhammadan, now guardian to the young Rājā
of Uchahara,[4] who resides part of his time at Jubbulpore. I
mentioned my visit to the groves and the curious notion of the
Hindoos regarding the necessity of marrying them; and he told me
that, among Hindoos, the man who went to the expense of making a
tank dared not drink of its waters till he had married his tank to
some banana-tree, planted on the bank for the purpose.[5]

‘But what’, said he with a smile, ‘could you expect from men who
believe that Indra is the god who rules the heavens immediately
over the earth, that he sleeps during eight months in the year, and
during the other four his time is divided between his duties of
sending down rain upon the earth, and repelling with his arrows
Rājā Bali, who by his austere devotions (tapasya)
has received from the higher gods a promise of the reversion of his
dominions? The lightning which we see’, said the learned
Maulavī, ‘they believe to be nothing more than the glittering
of these arrows, as they are shot from the bow of Indra upon his
foe Rājā Bali ‘.[6]

‘But, my good friend Maulavī Sāhib, there are many
good Muhammadans who believe that the meteors, which we call
shooting stars, are in reality stars which the guardian angels of
men snatch from the spheres, and throw at the devil as they see him
passing through the air, or hiding himself under one or other of
the constellations. Is it not so?’

‘Yes, it is; but we have the authority of the holy prophet for
this, as delivered down to us by his companions in the sacred
traditions, and we are bound to believe it. When our holy prophet
came upon the earth, he found it to be infested with a host of
magicians, who, by their abominable rites and incantations, get
into their interest certain devils, or demons, whom they used to
send up to heaven to listen to the orders which the angels received
from God regarding men and the world below. On hearing these
orders, they came off and reported them to the magicians, who were
thereby enabled to foretell the events which the angels were
ordered to bring about. In this manner they often overheard the
orders which the angel Gabriel received from God, and communicated
them to the magicians as soon as he could deliver them to our holy
prophet. Exulting in the knowledge obtained in this diabolical
manner, these wretches tried to turn his prophecies into ridicule;
and, seeing the evil effects of such practices among men, he prayed
God to put a stop to them. From that time guardian angels have been
stationed in different parts of the heavens, to keep off the
devils; and as soon as one of them sees a devil sneaking too near
the heaven of heavens, he snatches the nearest star, and flings it
at him.'[7] This, he added, was what all true Muhammadans believed
regarding the shooting of stars. He had read nothing about them in
the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, or Galen, all of which
he had carefully studied, and should be glad to learn from me what
modern philosophers in Europe thought about them.

I explained to him the supposed distance and bulk of the fixed
stars visible to the naked eye; their being radiant with unborrowed
light, and probably every one of them, like our own sun, the great
centre of a solar system of its own; embracing the vast orbits of
numerous planets, revolving around it with their attendant
satellites; the stars visible to the naked eye being but a very
small portion of the whole which the telescope had now made
distinctly visible to us; and those distinctly visible being one
cluster among many thousand with which the genius of Galileo,
Newton, the Herschells, and many other modern philosophers had
discovered the heavens to be studded. I remarked that the notion
that these mighty suns, the centres of planetary systems, should be
made merely to be thrown at devils and demons, appeared to us just
as unaccountable as those of the Hindoos regarding Indra’s
arrows.

‘But’, said he, ‘these foolish Hindoos believe still greater
absurdities. They believe that the rainbow is nothing but the fume
of a large snake, concealed under the ground; that he vomits forth
this fume from a hole in the surface of the earth, without being
himself seen; and, when you ask them why, in that case, the rainbow
should be in the west while the sun is in the east, and in the east
while the sun is in the west, they know not what to say.'[8]

‘The truth is, my friend Maulavī Sahib, the Hindoos, like a
very great part of every other nation, are very much disposed to
attribute to supernatural influences effects that the wiser portion
of our species know to rise from natural causes.’

The Maulavī was right. In the Mishkāt-ul-
Masābih,[9] the authentic traditions of their prophet,[10]
it is stated that Ayesha, the widow of Muhammad, said, ‘I heard His
Majesty say, “The angels come down to the region next the world,
and mention the works that have been pre-ordained in heaven; and
the devils, who descend to the lowest region, listen to what the
angels say, and hear the orders predestined in heaven, and carry
them to fortune-tellers; therefore, they tell a hundred lies with
it from themselves “‘[11]

‘Ibn Abbās said, “A man of His Majesty’s friends informed
me, that whilst His Majesty’s friends were sitting with him one
night, a very bright star shot; and His Highness said, “What did
you say in the days of ignorance when a star shot like this?” They
said, “God and His messenger know best; we used to say, a great man
was born to-night, and a great man died.”[12] Then His Majesty
said, “You mistook, because the shootings of these stars are
neither for the life nor death of any person; but when our
cherisher orders a work, the bearers of the imperial throne sing
hallelujahs; and the inhabitants of the regions who are near the
bearers repeat it, till it reaches the lowest regions. After the
angels which are near the bearers of the imperial throne say, “What
did your cherisher order?” Then they are informed; and so it is
handed from one region to another, till the information reaches the
people of the lowest region. Then the devils steal it, and carry it
to their friends, (that is) magicians; and these stars are thrown
at these devils; not for the birth or death of any person. Then the
things which the magicians tell, having heard from the devils, are
true, but these magicians tell lies, and exaggerate in what they
hear”.’

Kutādah said, ‘God has created stars for three uses; one of
them, as a cause of ornament of the regions; the second, to stone
the devil with; the third, to direct people going through forests
and on the sea. Therefore, whoever shall explain them otherwise,
does wrong, and loses his time, and speaks from his own invention
and embellishes’.[13]

Ibn Abbās. [‘The prophet said,] “Whoever attains to the
knowledge of astrology for any other explanation than the three
aforementioned, then verily he has attained to a branch of magic.
An astrologer is a magician, and a magician is a necromancer, and a
necromancer is an infidel.”‘[14]

This work contains the precepts and sayings of Muhammad, as
declared by his companions, who themselves heard them, or by those
who heard them immediately from those companions; and they are
considered to be binding upon the faith and conduct of Musalmans,
though not all delivered from inspiration.

Everything that is written in the Korān itself is supposed
to have been brought direct from God by the angel Gabriel.[15]

Notes:

1. In planting mango groves, it is a rule that they shall be as
far from each other as not to admit of their branches ever meeting.
‘Plant trees, but let them not touch’ (‘Ām lagao, nis
lageñ nahīñ‘) is the maxim. [W. H. S.]

2. Pakkā; the word here means ‘cemented with lime
mortar’, and not only with mud (kachchā).

3. The chambēlī is known in science as the
Jasminum grandiflorum, and the mango-tree as Mangifera
Indica.

4. A small principality west of Rīwā, and 110 miles
north-west of Jubbulpore. It is also known as Nāgaudh, or
Nāgod.

5. Compare the account of the marriage of the tulasī
shrub (Ocymum sanctum) with the sālagrām stone, or
fossil ammonite, in Chapter 19, post.

6. There is a sublime passage in the Psalms of David, where the
lightning is said to be the arrows of God. Psalm lxxvii:
 17, ‘The clouds poured out water: the skies sent out a sound:
thine arrows also went abroad.
 18. The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven; the
lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook.’ [W.
H. S.]
 The passage is quoted from the Authorized Bible version; the
Prayer Book version is finer.

7. ‘We guard them from every devil driven away with stones;
except him who listeneth by stealth, at whom a visible flame is
darted.’ Korān, chapter 15, Sale’s translation. See
post, end of this chapter.

8. Nine Hindoos out of ten, or perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred,
throughout India, believe the rainbow to arise from the breath of
the snake, thrown up from the surface of the earth, as water is
thrown up by whales from the surface of the ocean. [W. H. S,]

9. ‘Mishkāt is a hole in a wall in which a lamp is
placed, and Masābih the plural of “a lamp”, because
traditions are compared to lamps, and this book is like that which
containeth a lamp. Another reason is, that Masābih is
the name of a book, and this book comprehends its contents’
(Matthews’s translation, vol. i, p. v, note).

10. The full title is Mishkāt-ul-Masābih, or a
Collection of the most Authentic Traditions regarding the Actions
and Sayings of Muhammed; exhibiting the Origin of the Manners and
Customs; the Civil, Religious, and Military Policy of the
Muslemāns. Translated from the original Arabic by Captain
A. N. Matthews, Bengal Artillery. Two vols. 4to; Calcutta, 1809-10,
This valuable work, published by subscription, is now very scarce.
A fine copy is in the India Office Library.

11. Book xxi, chapter 3, part i; vol. ii, p. 384. The quotations
as given by the author are inexact. The editor has substituted
correct extracts from Matthews’s text. Matthews spells the name of
the prophet’s widow as Aáyeshah.

12. In Sparta, the Ephoroi, once every nine years, watched the
sky during a whole cloudless, moonless night, in profound silence;
and, if they saw a shooting star, it was understood to indicate
that the kings of Sparta had disobeyed the gods, and their
authority was, in consequence, suspended till they had been
purified by an oracle from Delphi or Olympia. [W. H. S.] This
statement rests on the authority of Plutarch, Agis, 11.

13. Mishkāt. Part iii of same chapter; vol. ii, p.
386.

14. Ibid. p. 386.

15. But the prying character of these devils is described in the
Korān itself. According to Muhammadans, they had access to all
the seven heavens till the time of Moses, who got them excluded
from three. Christ got them excluded from three more; and Muhammad
managed to get them excluded from the seventh and last. ‘We have
placed the twelve signs in the heavens, and have set them out in
various figures for the observation of spectators, and we guard
them from every devil driven away with stones; except him who
listeneth by stealth, at whom a visible flame is darted’ (Chapter
15).

‘We have adorned the lower heaven with the ornament of stars,
and we have placed therein a guard against every rebellious devil,
that they may not listen to the discourse of exalted princes, for
they are darted at from every side, to repel them, and a lasting
torment is prepared for them; except him who catcheth a word by
stealth, and is pursued by a shining flame’ (Chapter 37). [W. H.
8.] Passages of this kind should he remembered by persons who
expect orthodox Muhammadans to accept the results of modern
science.

CHAPTER 6

Hindoo Marriages.

Certain it is that no Hindoo will have a marriage in his family
during the four months of the rainy season; for among eighty
millions of souls[1] not one doubts that the Great Preserver of the
universe is, during these four months, down on a visit to
Rājā Bali, and, consequently, unable to bless the
contract with his presence.[2]

Marriage is a sacred duty among Hindoos, a duty which every
parent must perform for his children, otherwise they owe him no
reverence. A family with a daughter unmarried after the age of
puberty is considered to labour under the displeasure of the gods;
and no member of the other sex considers himself respectable
after the age of puberty till he is married. It is the duty of his
parent or elder brothers to have him suitably married; and, if they
do not do so, he reproaches them with his degraded
condition. The same feeling, in a degree, pervades all the
Muhammadan community; and nothing appears so strange to them as the
apparent indifference of old bachelors among us to their sad
condition.

Marriage, with all its ceremonies, its rights, and its duties,
fills their imagination from infancy to age; and I do not believe
there is a country upon earth in which a larger portion of the
wealth of the community is spent in the ceremonies, or where the
rights are better secured, or the duties better enforced,
notwithstanding all the disadvantages of the laws of polygamy. Not
one man in ten can afford to maintain more than one wife, and not
one in ten of those who can afford it will venture upon ‘a sea of
troubles’ in taking a second, if he has a child by the first. One
of the evils which press most upon Indian society is the necessity
which long usage has established of squandering large sums in
marriage ceremonies. Instead of giving what they can to their
children to establish them, and enable them to provide for their
families and rise in the world, parents everywhere feel bound to
squander all they can borrow in the festivities of their marriage.
Men in India could never feel secure of being permitted freely to
enjoy their property under despotic and unsettled governments, the
only kind of governments they knew or hoped for; and much of the
means that would otherwise have been laid out in forming
substantial works, with a view to a return in income of some sort
or another, for the remainder of their own lives and of those of
their children, were expended in tombs, temples, sarāis,
tanks, groves, and other works—useful and ornamental, no
doubt, but from which neither they nor their children could ever
hope to derive income of any kind. The same feeling of insecurity
gave birth, no doubt, to this preposterous usage, which tends so
much to keep down the great mass of the people of India to that
grade in which they were born, and in which they have nothing but
their manual labour to depend upon for their subsistence. Every man
feels himself bound to waste all his stock and capital, and exhaust
all his credit, in feeding idlers during the ceremonies which
attend the marriage of his children, because his ancestors
squandered similar sums, and he would sink in the estimation of
society if he were to allow his children to be married with
less.

But it could not have been solely because men could not invest
their means in profitable works, with any chance of being long
permitted to enjoy the profits under such despotic and unsettled
governments, that they squandered them in feeding idle people in
marriage ceremonies; since temples, tanks, and groves secured
esteem in this life, and promised some advantage in the next, and
an outlay in such works might therefore have been preferred. But
under such governments a man’s title even to the exclusive
possession of his wife might not be considered as altogether secure
under the mere sanction of religion; and the outlay in feeding the
family, tribe, and neighbourhood during the marriage ceremony seems
to have been considered as a kind of value in exchange given for
her to society. There is nothing that she and her husband recollect
through life with so much pride and pleasure as the cost of their
marriage, if it happen to be large for their condition of life; it
is their amoka, their title of nobility;[3] and their
parents consider it their duty to make it as large as they can. A
man would hardly feel secure of the sympathy of his family, tribe,
circle of society, or rulers, for the loss of ‘his ox, or his ass,
or anything that is his’, if it should happen to have cost him
nothing; and, till he could feel secure of their sympathy for the
loss, he would not feel very secure in the possession. He,
therefore, or those who are interested in his welfare, strengthen
his security by an outlay which invests his wife with a tangible
value in cost, well understood by his circle and rulers. His
family, tribe, and circle have received the purchase money, and
feel bound to secure to him the commodity purchased; and, as they
are in all such matters commonly much stronger than the rulers
themselves, the money spent among them is more efficacious in
securing the exclusive enjoyment of the wife than if it had been
paid in taxes or fees to them for a marriage licence.[4] The pride
of families and tribes, and the desire of the multitude to
participate in the enjoyment of such ceremonies, tend to keep up
this usage after the cause in which it originated may have ceased
to operate; but it will, it is to be hoped, gradually decline with
the increased feeling of security to person, property, and
character under our rule. Nothing is now more common than to see an
individual in the humblest rank spending all that he has, or can
borrow, in the marriage of one of many daughters, and trusting to
Providence for the means of marrying the others; nor in the higher,
to find a young man, whose estates have, during a long minority,
under the careful management of Government officers, been freed
from very heavy debts, with which an improvident father had left
them encumbered, the moment he attains his majority and enters upon
the management, borrowing three times their annual rent, at an
exorbitant interest, to marry a couple of sisters, at the same rate
of outlay in feasts and fireworks that his grandmother was married
with.[5]

Notes:

1. The author’s figure of ‘eighty millions’ was a mere guess,
and probably, even in his time, was much below the mark. The
figures of the census of 1911 are:
 Total population of India, excluding
  Burma . . . . 301,432,623
  Hindus . . . . 217,197,213
The proportions in different provinces vary enormously.

2. See ante. Chapter 1, note 3.

3. The word amoka is corrupt, and even Sir George
Grierson cannot suggest a plausible explanation. Can it be a
misprint for anka, in the sense of ‘stamp’?

4. Akbar levied a tax on marriages, ranging from a single copper
coin (dām = 1/40th of rupee) for poor people to 10 gold
mohurs, or about 150 rupees, for high officials. Abūl Fazl
declares that ‘the payment of this tax is looked upon as
auspicious’, a statement open to doubt (Blochmann, transl.
Aīn, vol. i, p. 278). In 1772 Warren Hastings abolished
the marriage fees levied up to that time in Bengal by the
Muhammadan law-officers. But I am disposed to think that a modern
finance minister might reconsider the propriety of imposing a
moderate tax, carefully graduated.

5. Extravagance in marriage expenses is still one of the
principal curses of Indian society. Considerable efforts to secure
reform have been made by various castes during recent years, but,
as yet, small results only have been attained. The editor has seen
numerous painful examples of the wreck of fine estates by young
proprietors assuming the management after a long term of the
careful stewardship of the Court of Wards.

CHAPTER 7

The Purveyance System,

We left Jubbulpore on the morning of the 20th November, 1835,
and came on ten miles to Baghaurī. Several of our friends of
the 29th Native Infantry accompanied us this first stage, where
they had a good day’s shooting. In 1830 I established here some
venders in wood to save the people from the miseries of the
purveyance system; but I now found that a native collector, soon
after I had resigned the civil charge of the district, and gone to
Sāgar,[1] in order to ingratiate himself with the officers and
get from them favourable testimonials, gave two regiments, as they
marched over this road, free permission to help themselves gratis
out of the store- rooms of these poor men, whom I had set up with a
loan from the public treasury, declaring that it must be the wish
and intention of Government to supply their public officers free of
cost; and consequently that no excuses could be attended to. From
that time shops and shopkeepers have disappeared. Wood for all
public officers and establishments passing this road has ever
since, as in former times, been collected from the surrounding
villages gratis, under the purveyance system, in which all native
public officers delight, and which, I am afraid, is encouraged by
European officers, either from their ignorance or their indolence.
They do not like the trouble of seeing the men paid either for
their wood or their labour; and their head servants of the kitchen
or the wardrobe weary and worry them out of their best resolutions
on the subject. They make the poor men sit aloof by telling them
that their master is a tiger before breakfast, and will eat them if
they approach; and they tell their masters that there is no hope of
getting the poor men to come for their money till they have bathed
or taken their breakfast. The latter wait in hopes that the
gentleman will come out or send for them as soon as he has been
tamed by his breakfast; but this meal has put him in good humour
with all the world, and he is now no longer unwilling to trust the
payment of the poor men to his butler, or his valet de
chambre. They keep the poor wretches waiting, declaring that
they have as yet received no orders to pay them, till, hungry and
weary, in the afternoon they all walk back to their homes in utter
despair of getting anything.

If, in the meantime, the gentleman comes out, and finds the men,
his servants pacify him by declaring either that they have not yet
had time to carry his orders into effect, that they could not get
copper change for silver rupees, or that they were anxious to
collect all the people together before they paid any, lest they
might pay some of them twice over. It is seldom, however, that he
comes among them at all; he takes it for granted that the people
have all been paid; and passes the charge in the account of his
servants, who all get what these porters ought to have received.
Or, perhaps the gentleman may persuade himself that, if he pays his
valet or butler, these functionaries will never pay the poor men,
and think that he had better sit quiet and keep the money in his
own pocket. The native police or revenue officer is directed by his
superior to have wood collected for the camp of a regiment or great
civil officers, and he sends out his myrmidons to employ the people
around in felling trees, and cutting up wood enough to supply not
only the camp, but his own cook-rooms and those of his friends for
the next six months. The men so employed commonly get nothing; but
the native officer receives credit for all manner of superlatively
good qualities, which are enumerated in a certificate. Many a fine
tree, dear to the affections of families and village communities,
has been cut down in spite, or redeemed from the axe by a handsome
present to this officer or his myrmidons. Lambs, kids, fowls, milk,
vegetables, all come flowing in for the great man’s table from poor
people, who are too hopeless to seek for payment, or who are
represented as too proud and wealthy to receive it. Such always
have been and such always will be some of the evils of the
purveyance system. If a police officer receives an order from the
magistrate to provide a regiment, detachment, or individual with
boats, carts, bullocks, or porters, he has all that can be found
within his jurisdiction forthwith seized—releases all those
whose proprietors are able and willing to pay what he demands, and
furnishes the rest, which are generally the worst, to the persons
who require them. Police officers derive so much profit from these
applications that they are always anxious they should be made; and
will privately defeat all attempts of private individuals to
provide themselves by dissuading or intimidating the proprietors of
vehicles from voluntarily furnishing them. The gentleman’s servant
who is sent to procure them returns and tells his master that there
are plenty of vehicles, but that their proprietors dare not send
them without orders from the police; and that the police tell him
they dare not give such orders without the special sanction of the
magistrate. The magistrate is written to, but declares that his
police have been prohibited from interfering in such matters
without special orders, since the proprietors ought to be permitted
to send their vehicles to whom they choose, except on occasions of
great public emergency; and, as the present cannot be considered as
one of these occasions, he does not feel authorized to issue such
orders. On the Ganges, many men have made large fortunes by
pretending a general authority to seize boats for the use of the
commissariat, or for other Government purposes, on the ground of
having been once or twice employed on that duty; and what they get
is but a small portion of that which the public lose. One of these
self-constituted functionaries has a boat seized on its way down or
up the river; and the crew, who are merely hired for the occasion,
and have a month’s wages in advance, seeing no prospect of getting
soon out of the hands of this pretended Government servant, desert,
and leave the boat on the sands; while the owner, if he ever learns
the real state of the case, thinks it better to put up with his
loss than to seek redress through expensive courts, and distant
local authorities. If the boat happens to be loaded and to have a
supercargo, who will not or cannot bribe high enough, he is
abandoned on the sands by his crew; in his search for aid from the
neighbourhood, his helplessness becomes known—he is perhaps
murdered, or runs away in the apprehension of being so—the
boat is plundered and made a wreck. Still the dread of the delays
and costs of our courts, and the utter hopelessness of ever
recovering the lost property, prevent the proprietors from seeking
redress, and our Government authorities know nothing of the
circumstances.

We remained at Baghaurī the 21st to enable our people to
prepare for the long march they had before them, and to see a
little more of our Jubbulpore friends, who were to have another
day’s shooting, as black partridges[2] and quail had been found
abundant in the neighbourhood of our camp.[3]

Notes:

1. Or Saugor, the head-quarters of the district of that name in
the Central Provinces. The town is 109 miles north-west of
Jabalpur. The author took charge of the Sāgar district in
January 1831.

2. Francolinus vulgaris.

3. The purveyance system (Persian rasad rasānī)
above described is one of the necessary evils of Oriental life. It
will be observed that the author, though so keenly sensitive to the
abuses attending the system, proposes no substitute for it, and
confesses that the small attempt he made to check abuse was a
failure. From time immemorial it has been the custom for Government
officials in India to be supplied with necessaries by the people of
the country through which their camps pass. Under native
Governments no officials ever dream of paying for anything. In
British territory requisitions are limited, and in well ordered
civil camps nothing is taken without payment except wood, coarse
earthen vessels, and grass. The hereditary village potter supplies
the pots, and this duty is fully recognized as one attaching to his
office. The landholders supply the wood and grass. None of these
things are ordinarily procurable by private purchase in sufficient
quantity, and in most cases could not be bought at all. Officers
commanding troops send in advance requisitions specifying the
quantities of each article needed, and the indent is met by the
civil authorities. Everything so indented for, including wood and
grass, is supposed to be paid for, but in practice it is often
impossible, with the agency available, to ensure actual payment to
the persons entitled. Troops and the people in civil camps must
live, and all that can be done is to check abuse, so far as
possible, by vigilant administration. The obligation of landholders
to supply necessaries for troops and officials on the march is so
well established that it forms one of the conditions of the
contract with Government under which proprietors in the permanently
settled province of Benares hold their lands. The extreme abuses of
which the system is capable under a lax and corrupt native
Government are abundantly illustrated in the author’s Journey
through the Kingdom of Oudh. ‘The System of Purveyance and
Forced Labour’ is the subject of article xxv in the Hon. F, J,
Shore’s curious book, Notes on Indian Affairs (London, 1837,
2 vols. 8vo). Many of the abuses denounced by Mr. Shore have been
suppressed, but some, unhappily, still exist, and are likely to
continue for many years.

CHAPTER 8

Religious Sects—Self-government of the
Castes—Chimney- sweepers—Washerwomen[1]—Elephant
Drivers.

Mīr Salāmat Alī, the head native collector of the
district, a venerable old Musalmān and most valuable public
servant, who has been labouring in the same vineyard with me for
the last fifteen years with great zeal, ability, and integrity,
came to visit me after breakfast with two very pretty and
interesting young sons. While we were sitting together my wife’s
under-woman[2] said to some one who was talking with her outside
the tent-door, ‘If that were really the case, should I not be
degraded?’ ‘You see, Mīr Sāhib’,[3] said I, ‘that the
very lowest members of society among these Hindoos still feel the
pride of caste, and dread exclusion from their own, however
low.'[4]

‘Yes’, said the Mīr, ‘they are a very strange kind of
people, and I question whether they ever had a real prophet among
them.’

‘I question, Mīr Sahib, whether they really ever had such a
person. They of course think the incarnations of their three great
divinities were beings infinitely superior to prophets, being in
all their attributes and prerogatives equal to the divinities
themselves.[5] But we are disposed to think that these incarnations
were nothing more than great men whom their flatterers and poets
have exalted into gods—this was the way in which men made
their gods in ancient Greece and Egypt. These great men were
generally conquerors whose glory consisted in the destruction of
their fellow creatures; and this is the glory which their
flatterers are most prone to extol. All that the poets have sung of
the actions of men is now received as revelation from heaven;
though nothing can be more monstrous than the actions attributed to
the best incarnation, Krishna, of the best of their gods,
Vishnu.[6]

‘No doubt’, said Salāmat Ali; ‘and had they ever had a real
prophet among them he would have revealed better things to them.
Strange people! when their women go on pilgrimages to Gayā,
they have their heads shaved before the image of their god; and the
offering of the hair is equivalent to the offer of their heads;[7]
for heads, thank God, they dare no longer offer within the
Company’s territories.’

‘Do you. Mīr Sahib, think that they continue to offer up
human sacrifices anywhere?’

‘Certainly I do. There is a Rājā at Ratanpur, or
somewhere between Mandlā and Sambalpur, who has a man offered
up to Dēvī every year, and that man must be a Brahman. If
he can get a Brahman traveller, well and good; if not, he and his
priests offer one of his own subjects. Every Brahman that has to
pass through this territory goes in disguise.[8] With what energy
did our emperor Aurangzēb apply himself to put down iniquities
like this in the Rājputāna states, but all in vain. If a
Rājā died, all his numerous wives burnt themselves with
his body—even their servants, male and female, were obliged
to do the same; for, said his friends, what is he to do in the next
world without attendants? The pile was enormous. On the top sat the
queen with the body of the prince; the servants, male and female,
according to their degree, below; and a large army stood all round
to drive into the fire again or kill all who should attempt to
escape.'[9]

‘This is all very true, Mīr Sāhib, but you must admit
that, though there is a great deal of absurdity in their customs
and opinions, there is, on the other hand, much that we might all
take an example from. The Hindoo believes that Christians and
Musalmāns may be as good men in all relations of life as
himself, and in as fair a way to heaven as he is; for he believes
that my Bible and your Korān are as much revelations framed by
the Deity for our guidance, as the Shāstras are for his. He
doubts not that our Christ was the Son of God, nor that Muhammad
was the prophet of God; and all that he asks from us is to allow
him freely to believe in his own gods, and to worship in his own
way. Nor does one caste or sect of Hindoos ever believe itself to
be alone in the right way, or detest any other for not following in
the same path, as they have as much of toleration for each other as
they have for us.[10]

‘True,’ exclaimed Salāmat Alī, ‘too true! we have
ruined each other; we have cut each other’s throats; we have lost
the empire, and we deserve to lose it. You won it, and you
preserved it by your union—ten men with one heart are
equal to a hundred men with different hearts. A Hindoo may feel
himself authorized to take in a Musalmān, and might even think
it meritorious to do so; but he would never think it
meritorious to take in one of his own religion. There are no less
than seventy- two sects of Muhammadans; and every one of these
sects would not only take in the followers of every other religion
on earth, but every member of every one of the other seventy-one
sects; and the nearer that sect is to its own, the greater the
merit in taking in its members.'[11]

‘Something has happened of late to annoy you, I fear, Mīr
Sāhib?’

‘Something happens to annoy us every day, sir, where we are more
than one sect of us together; and wherever you find Musalmāns
you will find them divided into sects.’

It is not, perhaps, known to many of my countrymen in India that
in every city and town in the country the right of sweeping the
houses and streets is one of the most intolerable of monopolies,
supported entirely by the pride of caste among the scavengers, who
are all of the lowest class. The right of sweeping within a certain
range is recognized by the caste to belong to a certain member;
and, if any other member presumes to sweep within that range, he is
excommunicated—no other member will smoke out of his pipe, or
drink out of his jug; and he can get restored to caste only by a
feast to the whole body of sweepers. If any housekeeper within a
particular circle happens to offend the sweeper of that range, none
of his filth will be removed till he pacifies him, because no other
sweeper will dare to touch it; and the people of a town are often
more tyrannized over by these people than by any other.[12]

It is worthy of remark that in India the spirit of combination
is always in the inverse ratio to the rank of the class; weakest in
the highest, and strongest in the lowest class. All infringements
upon the rules of the class are punished by fines. Every fine
furnishes a feast at which every member sits and enjoys himself.
Payment is enforced by excommunication—no one of the caste
will eat, drink, or smoke with the convicted till the fine is paid;
and, as every one shares in the fine, every one does his best to
enforce payment. The fines are imposed by the elders, who know the
circumstances of the culprit, and fix the amount accordingly.
Washermen will often at a large station combine to prevent the
washermen of one gentleman from washing the clothes of the servants
of any other gentleman, or the servants of one gentleman from
getting their clothes washed by any other person than their own
master’s washerman. This enables them sometimes to raise the rate
of washing to double the fair or ordinary rate; and at such places
the washermen are always drunk with one continued routine of feasts
from the fines levied.[13] The cost of these fees falls ultimately
upon the poor servants or their masters. This combination, however,
is not always for bad or selfish purposes. I was once on the staff
of an officer commanding a brigade on service, whose elephant
driver exercised an influence over him that was often mischievous
and sometimes dangerous;[14] for in marching and choosing his
ground, this man was more often consulted than the
quarter-master-general. His bearing was most insolent, and became
intolerable, as well to the European gentlemen as to the people of
his caste.[15] He at last committed himself by saying that he would
spit in the face of another gentleman’s elephant driver with whom
he was disputing. All the elephant drivers in our large camp were
immediately assembled, and it was determined in council to refer
the matter to the decision of the Rājā of Darbhanga’s
driver, who was acknowledged the head of the class. We were all
breakfasting with the brigadier after muster when the reply
came-the distance to Darbhanga from Nāthpur on the
Kūsī river, where we then were, must have been a hundred
and fifty miles.[16] We saw men running in all directions through
the camp, without knowing why, till at last one came and summoned
the brigadier’s driver. With a face of terror he came and implored
the protection of the brigadier; who got angry, and fumed a good
deal, but seeing no expression of sympathy on the faces of his
officers, he told the man to go and hear his sentence. He was
escorted to a circle formed by all the drivers in camp, who were
seated on the grass. The offender was taken into the middle of the
circle and commanded to stand on one leg[17] while the Raja’s
driver’s letter was read. He did so, and the letter directed him to
apologize to the offended party, pay a heavy fine for a feast, and
pledge himself to the offended drivers never to offend again. All
the officers in camp were delighted, and some, who went to hear the
sentence explained, declared that in no court in the world could
the thing have been done with more solemnity and effect. The man’s
character was quite altered by it, and he became the most docile of
drivers. On the same principle here stated of enlisting the
community in the punishment of offenders, the New Zealanders, and
other savage tribes who have been fond of human flesh, have
generally been found to confine the feast to the body of those who
were put to death for offences against the state or the individual.
I and all the officers of my regiment were at one time in the habit
of making every servant who required punishment or admonition to
bring immediately, and give to the first religious mendicant we
could pick up, the fine we thought just. All the religionists in
the neighbourhood declared that justice had never been so well
administered in any other regiment; no servant got any sympathy
from them—they were all told that their masters were far too
lenient.

We crossed the Hiran river[18] about ten miles from our last
ground on the 22nd,[19] and came on two miles to our tents in a
mango grove close to the town of Katangī,[20] and under the
Vindhya range of sandstone hills, which rise almost perpendicular
to the height of some eight hundred feet over the town. This range
from Katangī skirts the Nerbudda valley to the north, as the
Sātpura range skirts it to the south; and both are of the same
sandstone formation capped with basalt upon which here and there
are found masses of laterite, or iron clay. Nothing has ever yet
been found reposing upon this iron clay.[21] The strata of this
range have a gentle and almost imperceptible dip to the north, at
right angles to its face which overlooks the valley, and this face
has everywhere the appearance of a range of gigantic round bastions
projecting into what was perhaps a lake, and is now a well-peopled,
well-cultivated, and very happy valley, about twenty miles wide.
The river crosses and recrosses it diagonally. Near Jubbulpore it
flows along for some distance close under the Sātpura range to
the south; and crossing over the valley from Bheraghāt, it
reaches the Vindhya range to the north, at the point where it
reaches the Hiran river, forty miles below.

Notes:

1. This is a slip, probably due to the printer’s reader. There
are no chimney-sweepers in India. The word should be ‘sweepers’.
The members of this caste and a few other degraded communities,
such as the Doms, do all the sweeping, scavenging, and conservancy
work in India. ‘Washerwomen’ is another slip: read ‘Washermen’.

2. The ‘under-woman’, or ‘second ayah’, was a member of the
sweeper caste.

3. The title Mīr Sāhib implies that Salāmat
Alī was a Sayyid, claiming descent from Alī, the cousin,
son-in-law, and pupil of Muhammad, who became Khalīf in A.D.
656.

4. The sweeper castes stand outside the Hindoo pale, and often
incline to Muhammadan practices. They worship a special form of the
Deity, under the names of Lāl Beg, Lāl Guru, &c.

5. No avatār or incarnation of Brahma is known to
most Hindoos, and incarnations of Siva are rarely mentioned. The
only avatārs ordinarily recognized are those of Vishnu,
as enumerated ante. Chapter 2, note 4.

6. This theory is a very inadequate explanation of the doctrine
of avatārs.

7. ‘Women . . . are most careful to preserve their hair intact.
They pride themselves on its length and weight. For a woman to have
to part with her hair is one of the greatest of degradations, and
the most terrible of all trials. It is the mark of widowhood. Yet
in some sacred places, especially at the confluence of rivers, the
cutting off and offering of a few locks of hair (Venī-
dānam) by a virtuous wife is considered a highly
meritorious act’ (Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in
India, p, 375). Gayā in Bihār, fifty-five miles south
of Patna, is much frequented by pilgrims devoted to Vishnu.

8. All the places named are in the Central Provinces. Ratanpur,
in the Bilāspur District, is a place of much antiquarian
interest, full of ruins; Mandlā, in the Mandlā District,
was the capital of the later Gond chiefs of Garhā Mandlā;
and Sambalpur is the capital of the Sambalpur District. If the
story is true, the selection of a Brahman for sacrifice is
remarkable, though not without precedent. Human sacrifice has
prevailed largely in India, and is not yet quite extinct. In 1891
some Jāts in the Muzaffarnagar District of the United
Provinces sacrificed a boy in a very painful manner for some
unascertained magical purpose. It was supposed that the object was
to induce the gods to grant offspring to a childless woman. Other
similar cases have occurred in recent years. One occurred close to
Calcutta in 1892. In the hill tracts of Orissa bordering on the
Central Provinces the rite of human sacrifice was practised by the
Khonds on an awful scale, and with horrid cruelty, It was
suppressed by the special efforts of Macpherson, Campbell,
MacViccar, and other officers, between the years 1837 and 1854.
Daring that period the British officers rescued 1,506 victims
intended for sacrifice (Narrative of Major-General John
Campbell, C.B., of his Operations in the Hill Tracts of Orissa for
the Suppression of Human Sacrifices and Female Infanticide.
Printed for private circulation. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861).
The rite, when practised by Hindoos, may have been borrowed from
some of the aboriginal races. The practice, however, has been so
general throughout the world that few peoples can claim the honour
of freedom from the stain of adopting it at one time or another,
Much curious information on the subject, and many modern instances
of human sacrifices in India, are collected in the article
‘Sacrifice’ in Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India, 3rd edition,
1885. Major S. C. Macpherson, Memorials of Service in India
(1865), and Frazer, Golden Bough, 3rd edition, Part V, vol.
i (1912), pp. 236 seq., may also be consulted.

9. Bernier vividly describes an ‘infernal tragedy’ of this kind
which he witnessed, in or about the year 1659, during
Aurangzēb’s reign, in Rājputāna. On that occasion
five female slaves burnt themselves with their mistress
(Travels, ed. Constable and V. A. Smith (1914), p. 309).

10. Hinduism is a social system, not a creed, A Hindoo may
believe, or disbelieve, what speculative doctrine he chooses, but
he must not eat, drink, or marry, save in accordance with the
custom of his caste. Compare Asoka on toleration; ‘The sects of
other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another’ (Rock
Edict xii; V. A. Smith, Asoka, 2nd edition (1909), p.
170).

11. Mīr Salāmat Alī is a stanch Sunnī, the
sect of Osmān; and they are always at daggers drawn with the
Shīas, or the sect of Alī. He alludes to the Shīas
when he says that one of the seventy-two sects is always ready to
take in the whole of the other seventy-one. Muhammad, according to
the traditions, was one day heard to say, ‘The time will come when
my followers will he divided into seventy-three sects; all of them
will assuredly go to hell save one.’ Every one of the seventy-three
sects believes itself to be the one happily excepted by their
prophet, and predestined to paradise. I am sometimes disposed to
think Muhammad was self-deluded, however difficult it might be to
account for so much ‘method in his madness’. It is difficult to
conceive a man placed in such circumstances with more amiable
dispositions or with juster views of the rights and duties of men
in all their relations with each other, than are exhibited by him
on almost all occasions, save where the question of faith in
his divine mission was concerned.

A very interesting and useful book might be made out of the
history of those men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of
mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical
analysis of the points on which they were really mad and really
sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a
madhouse during the whole career of their glory. [W. H. S.]

For an account of Muhammadan sects, see section viii of the
Preliminary Dissertation in Sale’s Korān, entitled, ‘Of the
Principal Sects among the Muhammadans; and of those who have
pretended to Prophecy among the Arabs, in or since the Time of
Muhammad’; and T. P. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam (1885). The
chief sects of the Sunnīs, or Traditionists, are four in
number. ‘The principal sects of the Shīas are five, which are
subdivided into an almost innumerable number.’ The court of the
kings of Oudh was Shīa. In most parts of India the Sunnī
faith prevails.

The relation between genius and insanity is well expressed by
Dryden (Absalom and Achitopfel):

    Great wits are sure to madness near
allied,
    And thin partitions do their bounds
divide.

The treatise of Professor Cesare Lombroso, entitled The Man
of Genius (London edition, 1891), is devoted to proof and
illustration of the proposition that genius is ‘a special morbid
condition’. He deals briefly with the case of Muhammad at pages 31,
39, and 325, maintaining that the prophet, like Saint Paul, Julius
Caesar, and many other men of genius, was subject to epileptic
fits. The Professor’s book seems to be exactly what Sir W. H.
Sleeman desired to see.

12. In the author’s time, when municipal conservancy and
sanitation were almost unknown in India, the tyranny of the
sweepers’ guild was chiefly felt as a private inconvenience. It is
now one of the principal of the many difficulties, little
understood in Europe, which bar the progress of Indian sanitary
reform. The sweepers cannot be readily coerced because no Hindoo or
Musalmān would do their work to save his life, nor will he
pollute himself even by beating the refractory scavenger. A strike
of sweepers on the occasion of a great fair, or of a cholera
epidemic, is a most dangerous calamity. The vested rights described
in the text are so fully recognized in practice that they are
frequently the subject of sale or mortgage.

13. The low-caste Hindoos are generally fond of drink, when they
can get it, but seldom commit crime under its influence.

14. An elephant driver, by reason of his position on the animal,
has opportunities for private conversation with his master.

15. Elephant drivers (mahouts) are Muhammadans, who
should have no caste, but Indian Musalmāns have become
Hinduized, and fallen under the dominion of caste.

16. Darbhanga is in Tirhūt, seventy miles NE. of Dinapore.
The Kūsī (Kōsī or Koosee) river rises in the
mountains of Nepāl, and falls into the Ganges after a course
of about 325 miles. Nāthpur, in the Puraniya (Purneah)
District, is a mart for the trade with Nepal.

17. The customary attitude of a suppliant.

18. A small river which falls into the Nerbudda on the
right-hand side, at Sānkal. Its general course is
south-west.

19. November, 1835.

20. Described in the Gazetteer (1870) as ‘a large but
decaying village in the Jabalpur district, situated at the foot of
the Bhānrer hills, twenty-two miles to the north-west of
Jabalpur, on the north side of the Hiran, and on the road to
Sāgar’.

21. The convenient restriction of the name Vindhya to the hills
north, and of Sātpura to the hills south of the Nerbudda is of
modern origin (Manual of the Geology of India, 1st ed., Part
I, p. iv). The Sātpura range, thus defined, separates the
valley of the Nerbudda from the valleys of the Taptī flowing
west, and the Mahānadī flowing east. The Vindhyan
sandstones certainly are a formation of immense antiquity, perhaps
pre-Silurian. They are azoic, or devoid of fossils; and it is
consequently impossible to determine exactly their geological age,
or ‘horizon’ (ibid. p. xxiii). The cappings of basalt, in some
cases with laterite superimposed, suggest many difficult problems,
which will be briefly discussed in the notes to Chapters 14 and
17.

CHAPTER 9

The Great Iconoclast—Troops routed by
Hornets—The Rānī of Garhā—Hornets’ Nests
in India.

On the 23rd,[1] we came on nine miles to Sangrāmpur, and,
on the 24th, nine more to the valley of Jabērā,[2]
situated on the western extremity of the bed of a large lake, which
is now covered by twenty-four villages. The waters were kept in by
a large wall that united two hills about four miles south of
Jabērā. This wall was built of great cut freestone blocks
from the two hills of the Vindhiya range, which it united. It was
about half a mile long, one hundred feet broad at the base, and
about one hundred feet high. The stones, though cut, were never,
apparently, cemented; and the wall has long given way in the
centre, through which now falls a small stream that passes from
east to west of what was once the bottom of the lake, and now is
the site of so many industrious and happy little village
communities.[3] The proprietor of the village of Jabērā,
in whose mango grove our tents were pitched, conducted me to the
ruins of the wall; and told me that it had been broken down by the
order of the Emperor Aurangzēb.[4] History to these people is
all a fairy tale; and this emperor is the great destroyer of
everything that the Muhammadans in their fanaticism have demolished
of the Hindoo sculpture or architecture; and yet, singular as it
may appear, they never mention his name with any feelings of
indignation or hatred. With every scene of his supposed outrage
against their gods or their temples, there is always associated the
recollection of some instance of his piety, and the Hindoos’
glory—of some idol, for instance, or column, preserved from
his fury by a miracle, whose divine origin he is supposed at once
to have recognized with all due reverence.

 At Bherāgarh,[5] the high priest of the temple told
us that Aurangzēb and his soldiers knocked off the heads,
arms, and noses of all the idols, saying that ‘if they had really
any of the godhead in them, they would assuredly now show it, and
save themselves’. But when they came to the door of Gaurī
Sankar’s apartments, they were attacked by a nest of hornets, that
put the whole of the emperor’s army to the rout; and his imperial
majesty called out: ‘Here we have really something like a god, and
we shall not suffer him to be molested; if all your gods could give
us proof like this of their divinity, not a nose of them would ever
be touched’.

The popular belief, however, is that after Aurangzēb’s army
had struck off all the prominent features of the other gods, one of
the soldiers entered the temple, and struck off the ear of one of
the prostrate images underneath their vehicle, the Bull. ‘My dear’,
said Gaurī, ‘do you see what these saucy men are about?’ Her
consort turned round his head;[6] and, seeing the soldiers around
him, brought all the hornets up from the marble rocks below, where
there are still so many nests of them, and the whole army fled
before them to Teorī, five miles.[7] It is very likely that
some body of troops by whom the rest of the images had been
mutilated, may have been driven off by a nest of hornets from
within the temple where this statue stands. I have seen six
companies of infantry, with a train of artillery and a squadron of
horse, all put to the rout by a single nest of hornets, and driven
off some miles with all their horses and bullocks. The officers
generally save themselves by keeping within their tents, and
creeping under their bed-clothes, or their carpets; and servants
often escape by covering themselves up in their blankets, and lying
perfectly still. Horses are often stung to a state of madness, in
which they throw themselves over precipices and break their limbs,
or kill themselves. The grooms, in trying to save their horses, are
generally the people who suffer most in a camp attacked by such an
enemy. I have seen some so stung as to recover with difficulty; and
I believe there have been instances of people not recovering at
all. In such a frightful scene I have seen a bullock sitting and
chewing the cud as calmly as if the whole thing had been got up for
his amusement. The hornets seldom touch any animal that remains
perfectly still.

On the bank of the Bīnā river at Eran, in the
Sāgar district, is a beautiful pillar of a single freestone,
more than fifty feet high, surmounted by a figure of Krishna, with
the glory round his head.[8] Some few of the rays of this glory
have been struck off by lightning; but the people declare that this
was done by a shot fired at it from a cannon by order of
Aurangzēb, as his army was marching by on its way to the
Deccan. Before the scattered fragments, however, could reach the
ground, the air was filled, they say, by a swarm of hornets, that
put
the whole army to flight; and the emperor ordered his gunners to
desist, declaring that he was ‘satisfied of the presence of the
god’. There is hardly any part of India in which, according to
popular belief, similar miracles were not worked to convince the
emperor of the peculiar merits or sanctity of particular idols or
temples, according to the traditions of the people, derived, of
course, from the inventions of priests. I should mention that these
hornets suspend their nests to the branches of the highest trees,
under rocks, or in old deserted temples. Native travellers,
soldiers, and camp followers, cook and eat their food under such
trees; but they always avoid one in which there is a nest of
hornets, particularly on a still day. Sometimes they do not
discover the nest till it is too late. The unlucky wight goes on
feeding his fire, and delighting in the prospect of the feast
before him, as the smoke ascends in curling eddies to the nest of
the hornets. The moment it touches them they sally forth and
descend, and sting like mad creatures every living thing they find
in motion. Three companies of my regiment were escorting treasure
in boats from Allahabad to Cawnpore for the army under the Marquis
of Hastings, in 1817.[9] The soldiers all took their dinners on
shore every day; and one still afternoon a sipāhī
(sepoy), by cooking his dinner under one of those nests without
seeing it, sent the infuriated swarm among the whole of his
comrades, who were cooking in the same grove, and undressed, as
they always are on such occasions. Treasure, food, and all were
immediately deserted, and the whole of the party, save the European
officers, were up to their noses in the river Ganges. The hornets
hovered over them; and it was amusing to see them bobbing their
heads under as the insects tried to pounce upon them. The officers
covered themselves up in the carpets of their boats; and, as the
day was a hot one, their situation was still more uncomfortable
than that of the men. Darkness alone put an end to the
conflict.

I should mention that the poor old Rānī, or Queen of
Garhā, Lachhmī Kuār, came out as far as Katangī
with us to take leave of my wife, to whom she has always been
attached. She had been in the habit of spending a day with her at
my house once a week; and being the only European lady from whom
she had ever received any attention, or indeed ever been on terms
of any intimacy with, she feels the more sensible of the little
offices of kindness and courtesy she has received from her.[10] Her
husband, Narhar Sā, was the last of the long line of sixty-two
sovereigns who reigned over these territories from the year A.D.
358 to the Sāgar conquest, A.D. 1781.[11] He died a prisoner
in the fortress of Kūrai, in the Sāgar district, in A. D.
1789, leaving two widows.[12] One burnt herself upon the funeral
pile, and the other was prevented from doing so, merely because she
was thought too young, as she was not then fifteen years of age.
She received a small pension from the Sāgar Government, which
was still further reduced under the Nāgpur Government which
succeeded it in the Jubbulpore district in which the pension had
been assigned; and it was not thought necessary to increase the
amount of this pension when the territory came under our
dominion,[13] so that she has had barely enough to subsist upon,
about one hundred rupees a month. She is now about sixty years of
age, and still a very good- looking woman. In her youth she must
have been beautiful. She does not object to appear unveiled before
gentlemen on any particular occasion; and, when Lord W. Bentinck
was at Jubbulpore in 1833, I introduced, the old queen to him. He
seemed much interested, and ordered the old lady a pair of shawls.
None but very coarse ones were found in the store-rooms of the
Governor-General’s representative, and his lordship said these were
not such as a Governor-General could present, or a queen, however
poor, receive; and as his own ‘toshakhāna’ (wardrobe) had gone
on,[l4] he desired that a pair of the finest kind should be
purchased and presented to her in his name. The orders were given
in her presence and mine. I was obliged to return to Sāgar
before they could be carried into effect; and, when I returned in
1835,[15] I found that the rejected shawls had been
presented to her, and were such coarse things that she was ashamed
to wear them, as much, I really believe, on account of the exalted
person who had given them, as her own. She never mentioned the
subject till I asked her to let me see the shawls, which she did
reluctantly, and she was too proud to complain. How the good
intentions of the Governor-General had been frustrated in this case
I have never learned. The native officer in charge of the store was
dead, and the Governor-General’s representative had left the place.
Better could not, I suppose, be got at this time, and he did not
like to defer giving them.

Notes:

1. November, 1835.

2. Sangrāmpur is in the Jabalpur District, thirty miles
north-west of Jabalpur, or the road to Sāgar, The village of
Jabērā is thirty-nine miles from Jabalpur.

3. Similar lakes, formed by means of huge dams thrown across
valleys, are numerous in the Central Provinces and
Bundēlkhand. The embankments of some of these lakes are
maintained by the Indian Government, and the water is distributed
for irrigation. Many of the lakes are extremely beautiful, and the
ruins of grand temples and palaces are often found on their banks.
Several of the embankments are known to have been built by the
Chandēl princes between A.D. 800 and 1200, and some are
believed to be the work of an earlier Parihār dynasty.

4. A.D. 1658—1707. Aurangzēb, though possibly
credited with more destruction than he accomplished, did really
destroy many hundreds of Hindoo temples. A historian mentions the
demolition of 262 at three places in Rājputāna in a
single year (A.D. 1679-80) (E. and D. vii, 188).

5. This name is used as a synonym for Bheraghāt,
ante, Chapter 1, paragraph 1. It is written Beragur in the
author’s text. The author, in Ramaseeana, Introduction, p.
77, note, describes the Gaurī-Sankar sculpture as being ‘at
Beragur on the Nerbudda river’.

6. Gaurī is one of the many names of Pārvatī, or
Dēvī, the consort of the god Siva, Sankar, or
Māhadēo, who rides upon the bull Nandī.

7. This village seems to be the same as Tewar, the ancient
Tripura, ‘six miles to the west of Jabalpur; and on the south side
of the Bombay road’ (A. S. R., vol. ix, p. 57). The adjacent
ruins are known by the name of Karanbēl.

8. The pillar bears an inscription showing that it was erected
during the reign of Budha Gupta, in the year 165 of the Gupta era,
corresponding to A.D. 484-5. This, and the other important remains
of antiquity at Eran, are fully described in A. S. R., vol.
vii, p. 88; vol. x, pp. 76-90, pl. xxiii-xxx; and vol. xiv, p. 149,
pl. xxxi; also in Fleet, Gupta Inscriptions (Calcutta,
1888). The material of the pillar is red sandstone. According to
Cunningham the total height is 43 feet. The peculiar double-faced,
two-armed image on the summit does not seem to be intended for
Krishna, but I cannot say what the meaning is (H. F. A., p. 174,
fig. 121).

9. During the wars with the Marāthās and
Pindhārīs, which ended in 1819.

10. After we left Jubbulpore, the old Rānī used to
receive much kind and considerate attention from the Hon. Mrs.
Shore, a very amiable woman, the wife of the Governor-General’s
representative, the Hon. Mr. Shore, a very worthy and able member
of the Bengal Civil Service. [W. H. S.] For notice of Mr. Shore,
see note at end of Chapter 13.

11. See the author’s paper entitled ‘History of the Gurha
Mundala Rajas‘, in J. A. S. B., vol. vi (1837), p. 621,
and the article ‘Mandla’ in C. P. Gazetteer (1870).

12. Kūrai is on the route from Sāgar to
Nasīrābād, thirty-one miles WNW. of the former.

13. The ‘Sāgar and Nerbudda Territories’, comprising the
Sāgar, Jabalpur, Hoshangābād, Seonī, Damoh,
Narsinghpur, and Baitūl Mandlā Districts, are now under
the Local Administration of the Chief Commissioner of the Central
Provinces, established in 1861 by Lord Canning, who appointed Sir
Richard Temple Chief Commissioner. These territories were at first
administered by a semi-political agency, but were afterwards, in
1852, placed under the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western
Provinces (now the Agra Province in the United Provinces of Agra
and Oudh), to whom they remained subject until 1861. They had been
ceded by the Marāthās to the British in 1818, and the
cession was confirmed by the treaty of 1826.

14. All official presents given by native chiefs to the
Governor- General are credited to the ‘toshakhāna’, from which
also are taken the official gifts bestowed in return.

15. By resolution of Government, dated January 10, 1836, the
author was appointed General Superintendent of the Operations
against Thuggee, with his head-quarters at Jubbulpore.

CHAPTER 10

The Peasantry and the Land Settlement.

The officers of the 29th had found game so plentiful, and the
weather so fine, that they came on with us as far as Jaberā,
where we had the pleasure of their society on the evening of the
24th, and left them on the morning of the 25th.[1] A great many of
my native friends, from among the native landholders and merchants
of the country, flocked to our camp at every stage to pay their
respects, and bid me farewell, for they never expected to see me
back among them again. They generally came out a mile or two to
meet and escort us to our tents; and much do I fear that my poor
boy will never again, in any part of the world, have the blessings
of Heaven so fervently invoked upon him by so many worthy and
respectable men as met us at every stage on our way from
Jubbulpore. I am much attached to the agricultural classes of India
generally, and I have found among them some of the best men I have
ever known. The peasantry in India have generally very good
manners, and are exceedingly intelligent, from having so much more
leisure and unreserved and easy intercourse with those above them.
The constant habit of meeting and discussing subjects connected
with their own interests, in their own fields, and ‘under their own
fig-trees’, with their landlords and Government functionaries of
all kinds and degrees, prevents their ever feeling or appearing
impudent or obtrusive; though it certainly tends to give them
stentorian voices, that often startle us when they come into our
houses to discuss the same points with us.

Nine-tenths of the immediate cultivators of the soil in India
are little farmers, who hold a lease for one or more years, as the
case may be, of their lands, which they cultivate with their own
stock. One of these cultivators, with a good plough and bullocks,
and a good character, can always get good land on moderate terms
from holders of villages.[2] Those cultivators are, I think, the
best, who learn to depend upon their stock and character for
favourable terms, hold themselves free to change their holdings
when their leases expire, and pretend not to any hereditary right
in the soil. The lands are, I think, best cultivated, and the
society best constituted in India, where the holders of estates of
villages have a feeling of permanent interest in them, an assurance
of an hereditary right of property which is liable only to the
payment of a moderate Government demand, descends undivided by the
law of primogeniture, and is unaffected by the common law, which
prescribes the equal subdivision among children of landed as well
as other private property, among the Hindoos and Muhammadans; and
where the immediate cultivators hold the lands they till by no
other law than that of common specific contract.

When I speak of holders of villages, I mean the holders of lands
that belong to villages. The whole face of India is parcelled out
into estates of villages.[3] The village communities are composed
of those who hold and cultivate the land, the established village
servants, priest, blacksmith, carpenter, accountant, washerman,
basket-maker (whose wife is ex officio the midwife of the little
village community), potter, watchman, barber, shoemaker, &c.,
&c.[4] To these may be added the little banker, or agricultural
capitalist, the shopkeeper, the brazier, the confectioner, the
ironmonger, the weaver, the dyer, the astronomer or astrologer, who
points out to the people the lucky day for every earthly
undertaking, and the prescribed times for all religious ceremonies
and observances. In some villages the whole of the lands are
parcelled out among cultivating proprietors, and are liable to
eternal subdivisions by the law of inheritance, which gives to each
son the same share. In others, the whole of the lands are parcelled
out among cultivators, who hold them on a specific lease for
limited periods from a proprietor who holds the whole collectively
under Government, at a rate of rent fixed either permanently or for
limited periods. These are the two extremes. There are but few
villages in which all the cultivators are considered as
proprietors—at least but few in our Nerbudda territories; and
these will almost invariably be found of a caste of Brahmans or a
caste of Rājpūts, descended from a common ancestor, to
whom the estate was originally given in rent-free tenure, or at a
quit-rent, by the existing Government for his prayers as a priest,
or his services as a soldier. Subsequent Governments, which resumed
unceremoniously the estates of others, were deterred from resuming
these by a dread of the curses of the one and the swords of the
other.[5] Such communities of cultivating proprietors are of two
kinds: those among whom the lands are parcelled out, each member
holding his share as a distinct estate, and being individually
responsible for the payment of the share of the Government demand
assessed upon it; and those among whom the lands are not parcelled
out, but the profits divided as among copartners of an estate held
jointly. They, in either case, nominate one of their members to
collect and pay the Government demand; or Government appoints a man
for this duty, either as a salaried servant or a lessee, with
authority to levy from the cultivating proprietors a certain sum
over and above what is demandable from him.

The communities in which the cultivators are considered merely
as leaseholders are far more numerous; indeed, the greater part of
the village communities in this part of India are of this
description; and, where the communities are of a mixed character,
the cultivating proprietors are considered to have merely a right
of occupancy, and are liable to have their lands assessed at the
same rate as those held on a mere lease tenure. In all parts of
India the cultivating proprietors in such mixed communities are
similarly situated; they are liable to be assessed at the same rate
as others holding the same sort of lands, and often pay a higher
rate, with which others are not encumbered. But this is not
general; it is as much the interest of the proprietor to have good
cultivating tenants as it is that of the tenants to have good
proprietors; and it is felt to be the interest of both to adjust
their terms amicably among themselves, without a reference to a
third and superior party, which is always costly and commonly
ruinous.[6]

It is a question of very great importance, no less morally and
politically than fiscally, which of these systems deserves most
encouragement—that in which the Government considers the
immediate cultivators to be the hereditary proprietors, and,
through its own public officers, parcels out the lands among them,
and adjusts the rates of rent demandable from every minute
partition, as the lands become more and more subdivided by the
Hindoo and Muhammadan law of inheritance; or that in which the
Government considers him who holds the area of a whole village or
estate collectively as the hereditary proprietor, and the immediate
cultivators as his lease-tenants—leaving the rates of rent to
be adjusted among the parties without the aid of public officers,
or interposing only to enforce the fulfilment of their mutual
contracts. In the latter of these two systems the land will supply
more and better members to the middle and higher classes of the
society, and create and preserve a better feeling between them and
the peasantry, or immediate cultivators of the soil; and it will
occasion the re- investment upon the soil, in works of ornament and
utility, of a greater portion of the annual returns of rent and
profit, and a less expenditure in the costs of litigation in our
civil courts, and bribery to our public officers.

Those who advocate the other system, which makes the immediate
cultivators the proprietors, will, for the most part, be found to
reason upon false premisses—upon the assumption that the
rates of rent demandable from the immediate cultivators of the soil
were everywhere limited and established by immemorial usage, in
a certain sum of money per acre, or a certain share of the crop
produced from it; and that ‘these rates were not only so
limited and fixed, but everywhere well known to the people‘,
and might, consequently, have become well known to the Government,
and recorded in public registers. Now every practical man in India,
who has had opportunities of becoming well acquainted with the
matter, knows that the reverse is the case; that the rate of
rent demandable from these cultivators never was the same upon
any two estates at the same time: nor even the same upon any one
estate at different limes, or for any consecutive number of
years.[7] The rates vary every year on every estate, according
to the varying circumstances that influence them—such as
greater or less exhaustion of the soil, greater or less facilities
of irrigation, manure, transit to market, drainage—or from
fortuitous advantages on one hand, or calamities of season on the
other; or many other circumstances which affect the value of the
land, and the abilities of the cultivators to pay. It is not so
much the proprietors of the estate or the Government as the
cultivators themselves who demand every year a readjustment of the
rate demandable upon their different holdings. This readjustment
must take place; and, if there is no landlord to effect it,
Government must effect it through its own officers. Every holding
becomes subdivided when the cultivating proprietor dies and leaves
more than one child; and, as the whole face of the country is open
and without hedges, the division is easily and speedily made. Thus
the field-map which represents an estate one year will never
represent it fairly five years after; in fact, we might almost as
well attempt to map the waves of the ocean as field-map the face of
any considerable area in any part of India.[8]

If there be any truth in my conclusions, our Government has
acted unwisely in going, as it has generally done, into [one or
other of] the two extremes, in its settlement of the land
revenue.

In the Zamīndārī settlement of Bengal, it
conferred the hereditary right of property over areas larger than
English counties on individuals, and left the immediate cultivators
mere tenants-at-will.[9] These individuals felt no interest in
promoting the comfort and welfare of the village communities, or
conciliating the affections of the cultivators, whom they never saw
or wished to see; and they let out the village, or other
subdivision of their estates, to second parties quite as little
interested, who again let them out to others, so that the system of
rack-renting went on over the whole area of the immense possession.
This was a system ‘more honoured in the breach than in the
observance’; for, as the great landholders became involved in the
ruin of their cultivators, their estates were sold for arrears of
revenue due to Government, and thus the proprietary right of one
individual has become divided among many, who will have the
feelings which the larger holders wanted, and so remedy the evil.
In the other extreme, Government has constituted the immediate
cultivators the proprietors; thereby preventing any one who is
supported upon the rent of land, or the profits of agricultural
stock, from rising above the grade of a peasant, and so depriving
society of one of its best and most essential elements. The remedy
of both is in village settlements, in which the estate shall be of
moderate size, and the hereditary property of the holder,
descending on the principle of a principality, by the right of
primogeniture, unaffected by the common law. This is the system
which has been adopted in the Nerbudda territory, and which, I
trust, will be always adhered to.

When we enter upon the government of any new territorial
acquisition in India, we do not require or pretend to change the
civil laws of the people; because their civil laws and their
religion are in reality one and the same, and are contained in one
and the same code, as certainly among the Hindoos, the Muhammadans,
and the Parsees, as they were among the Israelites. By these codes,
and the established usages everywhere well understood by the
people, are their rights and duties in marriage, inheritance,
succession, caste, contract, and all the other civil relations of
life, ascertained; and when we displace another Government we do
not pretend to alter such rights and duties in relation to each
other, we merely change the machinery and mode of procedure by
which these rights are secured and these duties enforced.[10]

Of criminal law no system was ever either regularly established
or administered in any state in India, by any Government to which
we have succeeded; and the people always consider the existing
Government free to adopt that which may seem best calculated to
effect the one great object, which criminal law has everywhere in
view—the security of life, property, and character, and
the enjoyment of all their advantages. The actions by which
these are affected and endangered, the evidence by which such
actions require to be proved, and the penalties with which they
require to be visited, in order to prevent their recurrence, are,
or ought to be, so much the same in every society, that the people
never think us bound to search for what Muhammad and his companions
thought in the wilds of Arabia, or the Sanskrit poets sang about
them in courts and cloisters. They would be just as well pleased
everywhere to find us searching for these things in the writings of
Confucius and Zoroaster, as in those of Muhammad and Manu: and much
more so, to see us consulting our own common-sense, and forming a
penal code of our own, suitable to the wants of such a mixed
community.[11]

The fiscal laws which define the rights and duties of the landed
interests and the agricultural classes in relation to each other
and to the ruling powers were also everywhere exceedingly simple
and well understood by the people. What in England is now a mere
fiction of law is still in India an essential principle. All lands
are held directly or indirectly of the sovereign: to this rule
there is no exception.[12] The reigning sovereign is essentially
the proprietor of the whole of the lands in every part of India,
where he has not voluntarily alienated them; and he holds these
lands for the payment of those public establishments which are
maintained for the public good, and are supported by the rents of
the lands either directly under assignment, or indirectly through
the sovereign proprietor. When a Muhammadan or Hindoo sovereign
assigned lands rent-free in perpetuity, it was always
understood, both by the donor and receiver, to be with the small
reservation of a right in his successor to resume them for the
public good, if he should think fit.[13] Hindoo sovereigns, or
their priests for them, often tried to bar this right by
invoking curses on the head of that successor who should
exercise it.[14] It is a proverb among the people of these
territories, and, I believe, among the people of India generally,
that the lands which pay no rent to Government have no ‘barkat’,
blessing from above—that the man who holds them is not
blessed in their returns like the man who pays rent to Government
and thereby contributes his aid to the protection of the community.
The fact is that every family that holds rent-free lands must, in a
few generations, become miserable from the minute subdivision of
the property, and the litigation in our civil courts which it
entails upon the holders.[15] It is certainly the general opinion
of the people of India that no land should be held without paying
rent to Government, or providing for people employed in the service
of Government, for the benefit of the people in its defensive,
religious, judicial, educational, and other establishments. Nine-
tenths of the land in these Nerbudda territories are held in lease
immediately under Government by the heads of villages, whose leases
have been renewable every five years; but they are now to have a
settlement for twenty.[l6] The other tenth is held by these heads
of villages intermediately under some chief, who holds several
portions of land immediately under Government at a quit-rent, or
for service performed, or to be performed, for Government, and lets
them out to farmers. These are, for the most part, situated in the
more hilly and less cultivated parts.

Notes:

1. November, 1835.

2. This observation does not hold good in densely populated
tracts, which are now numerous.

3. These ‘estates of villages’ are known by the Persian name of
‘mauza’. The topographical division of the country into ‘mauzas’,
which may be also translated by the terms ‘townlands’ or
‘townships’, has developed spontaneously. Some ‘mauzas’ are
uninhabited, and are cultivated by the residents of neighbouring
villages.

4. In some parts of Central and Southern India, the
‘Gārpagrī’, who charms away hail-storms from the crops,
and ‘Bhūmkā’, who charms away tigers from the people and
their cattle, are added to the number of village servants, [W. H
.S.] ‘In many parts of Berār and Mālwa every village has
its “bhūmkā”, whose office it is to charm the tigers; and
its “gārpagrī”, whose duty it is to keep off the
hail-storms. They are part of the village servants, and paid by the
village community, After a severe hail-storm took place in the
district of Narsinghpur, of which I had the civil charge in 1823,
the office of “gārpagrī” was restored to several villages
in which it had ceased for several generations. They are all
Brahmans, and take advantage of such calamities to impress the
people with an opinion of their usefulness. The “bhūmkās”
are all Gōnds, or people of the woods, who worship their own
Lares and Penates’ (Ramaseeana, Introduction, p. 13.
note).

5. Very often the Government of the country know nothing of
these tenures; the local authorities allowed them to continue as a
perquisite of their own. The holders were willing to pay them a
good share of the rent, assured that they would be resumed if
reported by the local authorities to the Government. These
authorities consented to take a moderate share of the rent, assured
that they should get little or nothing if the lands were resumed.
[W. H. S.] ‘Rent’ here means ‘land-revenue’. Of course, under
modern British administration the particulars of all tenures are
known and recorded in great detail,

6. Since the author wrote these remarks the legal position of
cultivating proprietors and tenants has been largely modified by
the pressure of population and a long course of legislation. The
Rent Acts, which began with Act x of 1859, are now numerous, and
have been accompanied by a series of Land Revenue Acts, and many
collateral enactments. All the problems of the Irish land question
are familiar topics to the Anglo-Indian courts and
legislatures.

7. This proposition no doubt was true for the ‘Sāgar and
Nerbudda Territories’ in 1835, but it cannot be predicated of the
thickly populated and settled districts in the Gangetic valley
without considerable qualification. Examples of long-established,
unchanged, well-known rent-rates are not uncommon.

8. In recent years this task of ‘mapping the waves of the ocean’
has been attempted. Every periodical settlement of the land revenue
in Northern India since 1833 has been accompanied by the
preparation of detailed village maps, showing each field, even the
tiniest, a few yards square, with a separate number. In many cases
these maps were roughly constructed under non-professional
supervision, but in many districts they have been prepared by the
cadastral branch of the Survey Department. The difficulty mentioned
by the author has been severely felt, and it constantly happens
that beautiful maps become useless in four or five years. Efforts
are made to insert annual corrections in copies of the maps through
the agency of the village accountants, and the
‘kānūngos’, or officers who supervise them, but the task
is an enormous one, and only partial success is attained. In
addition to the maps, records of great bulk are annually prepared
which give the most minute details about every holding and each
field.

9. The Permanent Settlement of Bengal, effected under the orders
of Lord Cornwallis in 1793, was soon afterwards extended to the
province of Benares, now included in the United Provinces of Agra
and Oudh. Illusory provisions were made to protect the rights of
tenants, but nothing at all effectual was done till the passing of
Act x of 1859, which has been largely modified by later
legislation.

10. The general principle here stated of respect for personal
substantive law in civil matters is still the guide of the Indian
Legislature, but the accumulation of Privy Council and High Court
rulings, combined with the action of codes, has effected
considerable gradual change. Direct legislation has anglicized the
law of contract, and has modified, though not so largely, the law
of marriage, inheritance, and succession.

11. In the author’s time the courts of the East India Company
still followed the Muhammadan criminal law, as modified by the
Regulations. The Indian Penal Code of 1869 placed the substantive
criminal law on a thoroughly scientific basis. This code was framed
with such masterly skill that to this day it has needed little
material amendment. The first Criminal Procedure Code, passed in
1861, has been twice recast. The law of evidence was codified by
Sir James FitzJames Stephen in the Indian Evidence Act of 1870.

12. This proposition, in the editor’s opinion, truly states the
theory of land tenures in India, and it was a generally accurate
statement of actual fact in the author’s time. Since then the long
continuance of settled government, by fostering the growth of
private rights, has tended to obscure the idea of state ownership.
The modern revenue codes, instead of postulating the ownership of
the state, enact that the claims of the state—that is to say,
the land- revenue—are the first charge on the land and its
produce. The Malabar coast offers an exception to the general Hindu
role of state ownership of land. The Nairs, Coorgs, and Tulus
enjoyed full proprietary rights (Dubois, Hindu Manners,
&c., 3rd edition (1906), p. 57).

13. Amīr Khān, the Nawāb of Tonk, assigned to his
physician, who had cured him of an intermittent fever, lands
yielding one thousand rupees a year, in rent-free tenure, and gave
him a deed signed by himself and his heir-apparent, declaring
expressly that it should descend to him and his heir for ever. He
died lately, and his son and successor, who had signed the deed,
resumed the estate without ceremony. On being remonstrated with, he
said that ‘his father, while living, was, of course, master, and
could make him sign what he pleased, and give land rent-free to
whom he pleased; but his successor must now be considered the best
judge whether they could be spared or not; that if lands were to be
alienated in perpetuity by every reigning Nawāb for every dose
of medicine or dose of prayers that he or the members of his family
required, none would soon be left for the payment of the soldiers,
or other necessary public servants of any description’. This was
told me by the son of the old physician, who was the person to whom
the speech was made, his father having died before Amīr
Khān. [W. H. S.] Amīr Khān was the famous
Pindhārī leader. H. T. Prinsep translated his Memoirs
from the Persian of Busawun Lāl (Calcutta, 1832).

14. The ancient deeds of grant, engraved on copper, of which so
many have been published within the last hundred years, almost
invariably conclude with fearful curses on the head of any rash
mortal who may dare to revoke the grant. Usually the pious hope is
expressed that, if he should be guilty of such wickedness, he may
rot in filth, and be reborn a worm.

15. Revenue officers commonly observe that revenue-free grants,
which the author calls rent-free, are often ill cultivated. The
simple reason is that the stimulus of the collector’s demand is
wanting to make the owner exert himself.

16. These leases now carry with them a right of ownership,
involving the power of alienation, subject to the lien of the land
revenue as a first charge. Conversely, the modern codes lay down
the principle that the revenue settlement must be made with the
proprietor. The author’s rule of agricultural succession by
primogeniture in the Nerbudda territories has survived only in
certain districts (see post, Chapter 47). The land-revenue
law and the law concerning the relations between landlords and
tenants have now been more or less successfully codified in each
province. Mr. B. H. Baden-Powell’s encyclopaedic work The Land
Systems of British India (3 volumes: Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1892) gives very full information concerning Indian tenures as now
existing, and the law applicable to them at the date of
publication.

CHAPTER 11

Witchcraft.

On leaving Jabērā,[1] I saw an old acquaintance from
the eastern part of the Jubbulpore district, Kehrī Singh.

‘I understand, Kehrī Singh’, said I, ‘that certain men
among the Gonds of the jungle, towards the source of the Nerbudda,
eat human flesh. Is it so?’

‘No, sir; the men never eat people, but the Gond women do.’

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere, sir; there is not a parish, nay, a village, among
the Gonds, in which you will not find one or more such women.’

‘And how do they eat people?’

‘They eat their livers, sir.’

‘Oh, I understand; you mean witches?’

‘Of course! Who ever heard of other people eating human
beings?’

‘And you really still think, in spite of all that we have done
and said, that there are such things as witches?’

‘Of course we do—do not we find instances of it every day?
European gentlemen are too apt to believe that things like this are
not to be found here, because they are not to be found in their own
country. Major Wardlow, when in charge of the Seonī district,
denied the existence of witchcraft for a long time, but he was at
last convinced.’

‘How?’

‘One of his troopers, one morning after a long march, took some
milk for his master’s breakfast from an old woman without paying
for it. Before the major had got over his breakfast the poor
trooper was down upon his back, screaming from the agony of
internal pains. We all knew immediately that he had been bewitched,
and recommended the major to send for some one learned in these
matters to find out the witch. He did so, and, after hearing from
the trooper the story about the milk, this person at once declared
that the woman from whom he got it was the criminal. She was
searched for, found, and brought to the trooper, and commanded to
cure him. She flatly denied that she had herself conjured him; but
admitted that her household gods might, unknown to her, have
punished him for his wickedness. This, however, would not do. She
was commanded to cure the man, and she set about collecting
materials for the “pūjā” (worship); and before she could
get quite through the ceremonies, all his pains had left him. Had
we not been resolute with her, the man must have died before
evening, so violent were his torments.’

‘Did not a similar case occur to Mr. Fraser at Jubbulpore?’

‘A “chaprāsī”[2] of his, while he had charge of the
Jubbulpore district, was sent out to Mandlā[3] with a message
of some kind or other. He took a cock from an old Gond woman
without paying for it, and, being hungry after a long journey, ate
the whole of it in a curry. He heard the woman mutter something,
but being a raw, unsuspecting young man, he thought nothing of it,
ate his cock, and went to sleep. He had not been asleep three hours
before he was seized with internal pains, and the old cock was
actually heard crowing in his belly. He made the best of his way
back to Jubbulpore, several stages, and all the most skilful men
were employed to charm away the effect of the old woman’s spell,
but in vain. He died, and the cock never ceased crowing at
intervals up to the hour of his death.’

‘And was Mr. Fraser convinced?’

‘I never heard, but suppose he must have been.’

‘Who ate the livers of the victims? The witches themselves, or
the evil spirits with whom they had dealings?’

‘The evil spirits ate the livers; but they are set on to do so
by the witches, who get them into their power by such accursed
sacrifices and offerings. They will often dig up young children
from their graves, bring them to life, and allow these devils to
feed upon their livers, as falconers allow their hawks to feed on
the breasts of pigeons. You “sāhib lōg” (European
gentlemen) will not believe all this, but it is, nevertheless, all
very true.'[4]

The belief in sorcery among these people owes its origin, in a
great measure, to the diseases of the liver and spleen to which the
natives, and particularly the children, are much subject in the
jungly parts of Central India. From these affections children pine
away and die, without showing any external marks of disease. Their
death is attributed to witchcraft, and any querulous old woman, who
has been in the habit of murmuring at slights and ill treatment in
the neighbourhood, is immediately set down as the cause. Men who
practise medicine among them are very commonly supposed to be at
the same time wizards. Seeking to inspire confidence in their
prescriptions by repeating prayers and incantations over the
patient, or over the medicine they give him, they make him believe
that they derive aid from supernatural power; and the patient
concludes that those who can command these powers to cure can, if
they will, command them to destroy. He and his friends believe that
the man who can command these powers to cure one individual can
command them to cure any other; and, if he does not do so, they
believe that it arises from a desire to destroy the patient. I
have, in these territories, known a great many instances of medical
practitioners having been put to death for not curing young people
for whom they were required to prescribe. Several cases have come
before me as a magistrate in which the father has stood over the
doctor with a drawn sword by the side of the bed of his child, and
cut him down and killed him the moment the child died, as he had
sworn to do when he found the patient sinking under his
prescriptions.[5]

The town of Jubbulpore contains a population of twenty thousand
souls,[6] and they all believed in this story of the cock. I one
day asked a most respectable merchant in the town, Nādū
Chaudhrī, how the people could believe in such things, when he
replied that he had no doubt witches were to be found in every part
of India, though they abounded most, no doubt, in the central parts
of it, and that we ought to consider ourselves very fortunate in
having no such things in England. ‘But’, added he, ‘of all
countries that between Mandlā and Katāk (Cuttack)[7] is
the worst for witches. I had once occasion to go to the city of
Ratanpur[8] on business, and was one day, about noon, walking in
the market-place and eating a very fine piece of sugar-cane. In the
crowd I happened, by accident, to jostle an old woman as she passed
me. I looked back, intending to apologize for the accident, and
heard her muttering indistinctly as she passed on. Knowing the
propensities of these old ladies, I became somewhat uneasy, and on
turning round to my cane I found, to my great terror, that the
juice had been all turned to blood. Not a minute had
elapsed, such were the fearful powers of this old woman. I
collected my followers, and, leaving my agents there to settle my
accounts, was beyond the boundaries of the old wretch’s influence
before dark; had I remained, nothing could have saved me. I should
certainly have been a dead man before morning. It is well known’,
said the old gentleman, ‘that their spells and curses can only
reach a certain distance, ten or twelve miles; and, if you offend
one of them, the sooner you place that distance between you the
better.’

Jangbār Khān, the representative of the Shāhgarh
Rājā,[9] as grave and reverend an old gentleman as ever
sat in the senate of Venice, told me one day that he was himself an
eye-witness of the powers of the women of Khilautī. He was
with a great concourse of people at a fair held at the town of
Rāipur,[10] and, while sauntering with many other strangers in
the fair, one of them began bargaining with two women of middle age
for some very fine sugar-canes. They asked double the fair price
for their canes. The man got angry, and took up one of them, when
the women seized the other end, and a struggle ensued. The
purchaser offered a fair price, seller demanded double. The crowd
looked on, and a good deal of abuse of the female relations on both
sides took place. At last a sepoy of the governor came up, armed to
the teeth, and called out to the man, in a very imperious tone, to
let go his hold of the cane. He refused, saying that ‘when people
came to the fair to sell, they should be made to sell at reasonable
prices, or be turned out’. ‘I’, said Jangbār Khān,
‘thought the man right, and told the sepoy that, if he took the
part of this woman, we should take that of the other, and see fair
play. Without further ceremony the functionary drew his sword, and
cut the cane in two in the middle; and, pointing to both pieces,
‘There’, said he, ‘you see the cause of my interference’. We looked
down, and actually saw blood running from both pieces, and forming
a little pool on the ground. The fact was that the woman was a
sorceress of the very worst kind, and was actually drawing the
blood from the man through the cane, to feed the abominable devil
from whom she derived her detestable powers. But for the timely
interference of the sepoy he would have been dead in another
minute; for he no sooner saw the real state of the case than he
fainted. He had hardly any blood left in him, and I was afterwards
told that he was not able to walk for ten days. We all went to the
governor to demand justice, declaring that, unless the women were
made an example of at once, the fair would be deserted, for no
stranger’s life would be safe. He consented, and they were both
sewn up in sacks and thrown into the river; but they had conjured
the water and would not sink. They ought to have been put to death,
but the governor was himself afraid of this kind of people, and let
them off. There is not’, continued Jangbār, ‘a village, or a
single family, without its witch in that part of the country;
indeed, no man will give his daughter in marriage to a family
without one, saying, “If my daughter has children, what will become
of them without a witch to protect them from the witches of other
families in the neighbourhood?” It is a fearful country, though the
cheapest and most fertile in India.’

We can easily understand how a man, impressed with the idea that
his blood had all been drawn from him by a sorceress, should become
faint, and remain many days in a languid state; but how the people
around should believe that they saw the blood flowing from both
parts of the cane at the place cut through, it is not so easy to
conceive.

I am satisfied that old Jangbār believed the whole story to
be true, and that at the time he thought the juice of the cane red;
but the little pool of blood grew, no doubt, by degrees, as years
rolled on and he related this tale of the fearful powers of the
Khilautī witches.

Notes:

1. Ante, Chapter 9.

2. An orderly, or official messenger, who wears a
‘chaprās’, or badge of office.

3. On the Nerbudda, fifty miles south-east of Jubbulpore.

4. Of the supposed powers and dispositions of witches among the
Romans we have horrible pictures in the 5th Ode of the 6th Book of
Horace, and in the 6th Book of Lucan’s Pharsalia. [W. H. S.]
The reference to Horace should be to the 5th Epode. The passage in
the Pharsalia, Book VI, lines 420-830, describes the
proceedings of Thessalian witches.

5. Such awkward incidents of medical practice are not heard of
nowadays.

6. The population of Jabalpur (including cantonments) has
increased steadily, and in 1911 was 100,651, as compared with
84,556 in 1891, and 76,023 in 1881.

7. Katāk, or Cuttack, a district, with town of same name,
in Orissa.

8. In the Bilāspur district of the Central Provinces. The
distance in a direct line between Mandlā and Katāk is
about 400 miles.

9. Shāhgarh was formerly a petty native state, with town of
same name. The chief joined the rebels in 1857, with the result
that his dominions were confiscated, and distributed between the
districts of Sāgar and Damoh in the Central Provinces, and
Jhānsī (formerly Lalitpur) in the United Provinces of
Agra and Oudh. The town of Shāhgarh is in the Sāgar
district.

10. Rāipur is the chief town of the district of the same
name in the Central Provinces, which was not finally annexed to the
British dominions until 1854, when the Nāgpur State
lapsed.

CHAPTER 12

The Silver Tree, or ‘Kalpa Briksha’—The
Singhāra or Trapa bispinosa, and the Guinea-Worm.

Poor old Salāmat Alī wept bitterly at the last meeting
in my tent, and his two nice boys, without exactly knowing why,
began to do the same; and my little son Henry[1] caught the
infection, and wept louder than any of them. I was obliged to hurry
over the interview lest I should feel disposed to do the same. The
poor old Rānī,[2] too, suffered a good deal in parting
from my wife, whom, she says, she can never hope to see again. Her
fine large eyes shed many a tear as she was getting into her
palankeen to return.

Between Jaberā and Harduā, the next stage, we find a
great many of those large forest trees called ‘kalap’, or ‘Kalpa
Briksha’ (the same which in the paradise of Indra grants what is
desired), with a soft, silvery bark, and scarcely any leaves. We
are told that the name of the god Rām (Rāma) and his
consort Sītā will be found written by the hand of God
upon all.[3]

I had the curiosity to examine a good many in the forest on both
sides of the road, and found the name of this incarnation of Vishnu
written on everyone in Sanskrit characters, apparently by some
supernatural hand; that is, there was a softness in the impression,
as if the finger of some supernatural being had traced the
characters. Nathū, one of our belted attendants[4] told me
that we might search as deeply as we would in the forest, but we
should certainly find the name of God upon every one; ‘for’, said
he, ‘it is God himself who writes it’. I tried to argue him out of
this notion; but, unfortunately, could find no tree without these
characters—some high up, and some lower down in the
trunk—some large and others small—but still to be found
on every tree. I was almost in despair when we came to a part of
the wood where we found one of these trees down in a hollow, under
the road, and another upon the precipice above. I was ready to
stake my credit upon the probability that no traveller would take
the trouble to go up to the tree above, or down to the tree below,
merely to write the name of the god upon them; and at once pledged
myself to Nathū that he should find neither the god’s name nor
that of his wife. I sent one man up, and another man down, and they
found no letters on the trees; but this did not alter their opinion
on the point. ‘God’, said one, ‘had no doubt put his name on these
trees, but they had somehow or other got rubbed off. He would in
good time renew them, that men’s eyes might be blessed with the
sight of His holy name, even in the deepest forest, and on the most
leafless tree.'[5] ‘But’, said Nathū, ‘he might not have
thought it worth while to write his name upon those trees which no
travellers go to see.’ ‘Cannot you see’, said I, ‘that these
letters have been engraved by man? Are they not all to be found on
the trunk within reach of a man’s hand?’ ‘Of course they are’,
replied he, ‘because people would not be able conveniently to
distinguish them if God were to write them higher up.’

Shaikh Sādī has a very pretty couplet, ‘Every leaf of
the foliage of a green tree is, in the eye of a wise man, a library
to teach him the wisdom of his Creator.'[6] I may remark that,
where an Englishman would write his own name, a Hindoo would write
that of his god, his parent, or his benefactor. This difference is
traceable, of course, to the difference in their governments and
institutions. If a Hindoo built a town, he called it after his
local governor; if a local governor built it, he called it after
the favourite son of the Emperor. In well regulated Hindoo
families, one cannot ask a younger brother after his children in
presence of the elder brother who happens to be the head of the
family; it would be disrespectful for him even to speak of his
children as his own in such presence—the elder brother
relieves his embarrassment by answering for him.

On the 27th[7] we reached Damoh,[8] where our friends, the
Browns, were to leave us on their return to Jubbulpore. Damoh is a
pretty place. The town contains some five or six thousand people,
and has some very handsome Hindoo temples. On a hill immediately
above it is the shrine of a Muhammadan saint, which has a very
picturesque appearance.

There are no manufactures at Damoh, except such as supply the
wants of the immediate neighbourhood; and the town is supported by
the residence of a few merchants, a few landholders, and
agricultural capitalists, and the establishment of a native
collector. The people here suffer much from the guinea-worm, and
consider it to arise from drinking the water of the old tank, which
is now very dirty and full of weeds. I have no doubt that it is
occasioned either by drinking the water of this tank, or by wading
in it: for I have known European gentlemen get the worm in their
legs from wading in similar lakes or swamps after snipes, and the
servants who followed them with their ammunition experience the
same effect.[9] Here, as in most other parts of India, the tanks
get spoiled by the water-chestnut, ‘singhāra’ (Trapa
bispinosa), which is everywhere as regularly planted and
cultivated in fields under a large surface of water, as
wheat or barley is on the dry plains. It is cultivated by a class
of men called Dhīmars, who are everywhere fishermen and
palankeen bearers; and they keep boats for the planting, weeding,
and gathering the ‘singhāra’.[10] The holdings or tenements of
each cultivator are marked out carefully on the surface of the
water by long bamboos stuck up in it; and they pay so much the acre
for the portion they till. The long straws of the plants reach up
to the surface of the waters, upon which float their green leaves;
and their pure white flowers expand beautifully among them in the
latter part of the afternoon. The nut grows under the water after
the flowers decay, and is of a triangular shape, and covered with a
tough brown integument adhering strongly to the kernel, which is
white, esculent, and of a fine cartilaginous texture. The people
are very fond of these nuts, and they are carried often upon
bullocks’ backs two or three hundred miles to market. They ripen in
the latter end of the rains, or in September, and are eatable till
the end of November. The rent paid for an ordinary tank by the
cultivator is about one hundred rupees a year. I have known two
hundred rupees to be paid for a very large one, and even three
hundred, or thirty pounds a year.[11] But the mud increases so
rapidly from this cultivation that it soon destroys all reservoirs
in which it is permitted; and, where it is thought desirable to
keep up the tank for the sake of the water, it should be carefully
prohibited. This is done by stipulating with the renter of the
village, at the renewal of the lease, that no ‘singhāra’ shall
be planted in the tank; otherwise, he will never forgo the
advantage to himself of the rent for the sake of the convenience,
and that only prospective, of the village community in general.

Notes:

1. Afterwards Captain H. A. Sleeman, He died in 1905.

2. Of Garhā, see ante, Chapter 9, prior to note
10.

3. The real ‘kalpa’, which now stands in the garden of the god
Indra in the first heaven, was one of the fourteen varieties found
at the churning of the ocean by the gods and demons. It fell to the
share of Indra. [W. H. S.] The tree referred to in the text perhaps
may be the Erythrina arborescens, or coral-tree, which sheds
its leaves after the hot weather.

4. That is to say, orderlies, or ‘chaprāsīs’.

5. Every Hindoo is thoroughly convinced that the names of
Rām and his consort Sītā are written on this tree by
the hand of God, and nine-tenths of the Musalmāns believe the
same.

    Happy the man who sees a God
employed
    In all the good and ill that chequer
life,
    Resolving all events, with their
effects
    And manifold results, into the will
    And arbitration wise of the Supreme.

           
           
  COWPER. [W. H. S.]

The quotation is from The Task, Book II, line 161.

6. Sādī (Sa’dī) is the poetic name, or nom de
plume, of the celebrated Persian poet, whose proper name is
said to have been Shaikh Maslah-ud-dīn, or, according to other
authorities, Sharf-ud-dīn Mislah. He was born about A.D. 1194,
and is supposed to have lived for more than a hundred years. Some
writers say that he died in A.D. 1292. His best known works are the
Gulistān and Būstān. The editor has
failed to trace in either of these works the couplet quoted.
Sādī says in the Gulistān, ii. 26, ‘That
heart which has an ear is full of the divine mystery. It is not the
nightingale that alone serenades his rose; for every thorn on the
rose-bush is a tongue in his or God’s praise’ (Ross’s
translation).

7. November, 1835.

8. Spelled Dhamow in the author’s text. The town, the head-
quarters of the district of the same name, is forty-five miles east
of Sāgar, and fifty-five miles north-west of Jabalpur. The
C. P. Gazetteer (1870) states the population to be 8,563. In
1901 it had grown to 13,335; and the town is still increasing in
importance (I. G., 1908). Inscriptions of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries at Damoh are noticed in A. S. R., vol.
xxi, p. 168.

9. The guinea-worm (Filaria medinensis) is a very
troublesome parasite, which sometimes grows to a length of three
feet. It occurs in Africa, Arabia, Persia, and Turkistan, as well
as in India.

10. The Dhīmars (Sanskrit dhīvara, ‘fisherman’)
are the same caste as the Kahārs, or ‘bearers’. The boats used
by them are commonly ‘dugout’ canoes, exactly like those used in
prehistoric Europe, and now treasured in museums.

11. In the author’s time the rupee was worth two shillings, or
more, that is to say, the ninth or tenth part of a sovereign. After
1873 the gold value of the rupee fell, so that at times it was
worth little more than a shilling. Since 1899 special legislation
has succeeded in keeping the rupee practically steady at 1s. 4d. In
other words, fifteen rupees are the legal equivalent of a
sovereign, and a hundred rupees are worth £6 13s. 4d.

CHAPTER 13

Thugs and Poisoners.

Lieutenant Brown had come on to Damoh chiefly with a view to
investigate a case of murder, which had taken place at the village
of Sujaina, about ten miles from Damoh, on the road to
Hattā.[1] A gang of two hundred Thugs were encamped in the
grove at Hindoria in the cold season of 1814, when, early in the
morning, seven men well armed with swords and matchlocks passed
them, bearing treasure from the bank of Motī Kochia at
Jubbulpore to their correspondents at Bānda,[2] to the value
of four thousand five hundred rupees.[3] The value of their burden
was immediately perceived by these keen-eyed sportsmen, and
Kosarī, Drigpāl, and Faringia, three of the leaders, with
forty of their fleetest and stoutest followers, were immediately
selected for the pursuit. They followed seven miles unperceived;
and, coming up with the treasure- bearers in a watercourse half a
mile from the village of Sujaina, they rushed in upon them and put
them all to death with their swords.[4] While they were doing so a
tanner from Sujaina approached with his buffalo, and to prevent him
giving the alarm they put him to death also, and made off with the
treasure, leaving the bodies unburied. A heavy shower of rain fell,
and none of the village people came to the place till the next
morning early; when some females, passing it on their way to
Hattā, saw the bodies, and returning to Sujaina, reported the
circumstance to their friends. The whole village thereupon flocked
to the spot, and the body of the tanner was burned by his relations
with the usual ceremonies, while all the rest were left to be eaten
by jackals, dogs and vultures, who make short work of such things
in India.[5]

We had occasion to examine a very respectable old gentleman at
Damoh upon the case, Gobind Dās, a revenue officer under the
former Government,[6] and now about seventy years of age. He told
us that he had no knowledge whatever of the murder of the eight men
at Sujaina; but he well remembered another which took place seven
years before the time we mentioned at Abhāna, a stage or two
back, on the road to Jubbulpore. Seventeen treasure-bearers lodged
in the grove near that town on their way from Jubbulpore to
Sāgar. At night they were set upon by a large gang of Thugs,
and sixteen of them strangled; but the seventeenth laid hold of the
noose before it could be brought to bear upon his throat, pulled
down the villain who held it, and made his way good to the town.
The Rājā, Dharak Singh, went to the spot with all the
followers he could collect; but he found there nothing but the
sixteen naked bodies lying in the grove, with their eyes apparently
starting out of their sockets. The Thugs had all gone off with the
treasure and their clothes, and the Rājā searched for
them in vain.

A native commissioned officer of a regiment of native infantry
one day told me that, while he was on duty over some Thugs at
Lucknow, one of them related with great seeming pleasure the
following case, which seemed to him one of the most remarkable that
he had heard them speak of during the time they were under his
charge.

‘A stout Mogul[7] officer of noble bearing and singularly
handsome countenance, on his way from the Punjab to Oudh, crossed
the Ganges at Garhmuktesar Ghāt, near Meerut, to pass through
Murādābād and Bareilly.[8] He was mounted on a fine
Tūrkī horse, and attended by his “khidmatgār”
(butler) and groom. Soon after crossing the river, he fell in with
a small party of well-dressed and modest- looking men going the
same road. They accosted him in a respectful manner, and attempted
to enter into conversation with him. He had heard of Thugs, and
told them to be off. They smiled at his idle suspicions, and tried
to remove them, but in vain. The Mogul was determined; they saw his
nostrils swelling with indignation, took their leave, and followed
slowly. The next morning he overtook the same number of men, but of
a different appearance, all Musalmāns. They accosted him in
the same respectful manner; talked of the danger of the road, and
the necessity of their keeping together, and taking advantage of
the protection of any mounted gentleman that happened to be going
the same way. The Mogul officer said not a word in reply, resolved
to have no companions on the road. They persisted—his
nostrils began again to swell, and putting his hand to his sword,
he bid them all be off, or he would have their heads from their
shoulders. He had a bow and quiver full of arrows over his
shoulders,[9] a brace of loaded pistols in his waist-belt, and a
sword by his side, and was altogether a very formidable-looking
cavalier. In the evening another party that lodged in the same
“sarāi”[10] became very intimate with the butler and groom.
They were going the same road; and, as the Mogul overtook them in
the morning, they made their bows respectfully, and began to enter
into conversation with their two friends, the groom and butler, who
were coming up behind. The Mogul’s nostrils began again to swell,
and he bid the strangers be off. The groom and butler interceded,
for their master was a grave, sedate man, and they wanted
companions. All would not do, and the strangers fell in the rear.
The next day, when they had got to the middle of an extensive and
uninhabited plain, the Mogul in advance, and his two servants a few
hundred yards behind, he came up to a party of six poor
Musalmāns, sitting weeping by the side of a dead companion.
They were soldiers from Lahore,[11] on their way to Lucknow, worn
down by fatigue in their anxiety to see their wives and children
once more, after a long and painful service. Their companion, the
hope and prop of his family, had sunk under the fatigue, and they
had made a grave for him; but they were poor unlettered men, and
unable to repeat the funeral service from the holy Koran-would his
Highness but perform this last office for them, he would, no doubt,
find his reward in this world and the next. The Mogul
dismounted—the body had been placed in its proper position,
with its head towards Mecca. A carpet was spread—the Mogul
took off his bow and quiver, then his pistols and sword, and placed
them on the ground near the body—called for water, and washed
his feet, hands, and face, that he might not pronounce the holy
words in an unclean state. He then knelt down and began to repeat
the funeral service, in a clear, loud voice. Two of the poor
soldiers knelt by him, one on each side in silence. The other four
went off a few paces to beg that the butler and groom would not
come so near as to interrupt the good Samaritan at his
devotions.

‘All being ready, one of the four, in a low undertone, gave the
“jhirnī” (signal),[12] the handkerchiefs were thrown over
their necks, and in a few minutes all three—the Mogul and his
servants—were dead, and lying in the grave in the usual
manner, the head of one at the feet of the one below him. All the
parties they had met on the road belonged to a gang of
Jamāldehī Thugs, of the kingdom of Oudh.[13] In despair
of being able to win the Mogul’s confidence in the usual way, and
determined to have the money and jewels, which they knew he carried
with him, they had adopted this plan of disarming him; dug the
grave by the side of the road, in the open plain, and made a
handsome young Musalmān of the party the dead soldier. The
Mogul, being a very stout man, died almost without a struggle, as
is usually the case with such; and his two servants made no
resistance.’

People of great sensibility, with hearts overcharged with
sorrow, often appear cold and callous to those who seem to them to
feel no interest in their afflictions. An instance of this kind I
will here mention; it is one of thousands that I have met with in
my Indian rambles. It was mentioned to me one day that an old
‘fakīr’,[14] who lived in a small hut close by a little shrine
on the side of the road near the town of Morādābād,
had lately lost his son, poisoned by a party of ‘daturiās’, or
professional poisoners,[15] that now infest every road throughout
India. I sent for him, and requested him to tell me his story, as I
might perhaps be able to trace the murderers. He did so, and a
Persian writer took it down while I listened with all the coldness
of a magistrate who wanted merely to learn facts and have nothing
whatever to do with feelings. This is his story literally:

‘I reside in my hut by the side of the road a mile and [a] half
from the town, and live upon the bounty of travellers, and the
people of the surrounding villages. About six weeks ago, I was
sitting by the side of my shrine after saying prayers, with my only
son, about ten years of age, when a man came up with his wife, his
son, and his daughter, the one a little older, and the other a
little younger than my boy. They baked and ate their bread near my
shrine, and gave me flour enough to make two cakes. This I prepared
and baked. My boy was hungry, and ate one cake and a half. I ate
only half a one, for I was not hungry. I had a few days before
purchased a new blanket for my boy, and it was hanging in a branch
of the tree that shaded the shrine, when these people came. My son
and I soon became stupefied. I saw him fall asleep, and I soon
followed. I awoke again in the evening, and found myself in a pool
of water. I had sense enough to crawl towards my boy. I found him
still breathing, and I sat by him with his head in my lap, where he
soon died. It was now evening, and I got up, and wandered about all
night picking straws—I know not why. I was not yet quite
sensible. During the night the wolves ate my poor boy. I heard this
from travellers, and went and gathered up his bones and buried them
in the shrine. I did not quite recover till the third day, when I
found that some washerwomen had put me into the pool, and left me
there with my head out, in hopes that this would revive me; but
they had no hope of my son. I was then taken to the police of the
town; but the landholders had begged me to say nothing about the
poisoners, lest it might get them and their village community into
trouble. The man was tall and fair, and about thirty- five; the
woman short, stout, and fair, and about thirty; two of her teeth
projected a good deal; the boy’s eyelids were much diseased.’

All this he told me without the slightest appearance of emotion,
for he had not seen any appearance of it in me, or my Persian
writer; and a casual European observer would perhaps have
exclaimed, ‘What brutes these natives are! This fellow feels no
more for the loss of his only son than he would for that of a
goat’. But I knew the feeling was there. The Persian writer put up
his paper, and closed his inkstand, and the following dialogue,
word for word, took place between me and the old man:

Question.—What made you conceal the real cause of
your boy’s death, and tell the police that he had been killed, as
well as eaten, by wolves?

Answer.—The landholders told me that they could
never bring back my boy to life, and the whole village would be
worried to death by them if I made any mention of the poison.

Question.—And if they were to be punished for this
they would annoy you?

Answer.—Certainly. But I believed they advised me
for my own good as well as their own.

Question.—And if they should turn you away from
that place, could you not make another?

Answer.-Are not the bones of my poor boy there, and the
trees that he and I planted and watched together for ten years?

Question.-Have you no other relations? What became of
your boy’s mother?

Answer.-She died at that place when my boy was only three
months old. I have brought him up myself from that age; he was my
only child, and he has been poisoned for the sake of the blanket!
(Here the poor old man sobbed as if his heartstrings would break;
and I was obliged to make him sit down on the floor while I walked
up and down the room.)

Question.—Had you any children before?

Answer.—Yes, sir, we had several, but they all died
before their mother. We had been reduced to beggary by misfortunes,
and I had become too weak and ill to work. I buried my poor wife’s
bones by the side of the road where she died; raised the little
shrine over them, planted the trees, and there have I sat ever
since by her side, with our poor boy in my bosom. It is a sad place
for wolves, and we used often to hear them howling outside; but my
poor boy was never afraid of them when he knew I was near him. God
preserved him to me, till the sight of the new blanket, for I had
nothing else in the world, made these people poison us. I bought it
for him only a few days before, when the rains were coming on, out
of my savings-it was all I had. (The poor old man sobbed again, and
sat down while I paced the room, lest I should sob also; my heart
was becoming a little too large for its apartment.) ‘I will never’,
continued he, ‘quit the bones of my wife and child, and the tree
that he and I watered for so many years. I have not many years to
live; there I will spend them, whatever the landholders may
do—they advised me for my own good, and will never turn me
out.’

I found all the poor man stated to be true; the man and his wife
had mixed poison with the flour to destroy the poor old man and his
son for the sake of the new blanket which they saw hanging in the
branch of the tree, and carried away with them. The poison used on
such occasions is commonly the datura, and it is sometimes given in
the hookah to be smoked, and at others in food. When they require
to poison children as well as grown-up people, or women who do not
smoke, they mix up the poison in food. The intention is almost
always to destroy life, as ‘dead men tell no tales’; but the
poisoned people sometimes recover, as in the present case, and lead
to the detection of the poisoners. The cases in which they recover
are, however, rare, and of those who recover few are ever able to
trace the poisoners; and, of those who recover and trace them, very
few will ever undertake to prosecute them through the several
courts of the magistrate, the sessions, and that of last instance
in a distant district, to which the proceedings must be sent for
final orders.

The impunity with which this crime is everywhere perpetrated,
and its consequent increase in every part of India, are among the
greatest evils with which the country is at this time affected.
These poisoners are spread all over India, and are as numerous over
the Bombay and Madras Presidencies as over that of Bengal. There is
no road free from them, and throughout India there must be many
hundreds who gain their subsistence by this trade alone. They put
on all manner of disguises to suit their purpose; and, as they prey
chiefly upon the poorer sort of travellers, they require to destroy
the greater number of lives to make up their incomes. A party of
two or three poisoners have very often succeeded in destroying
another of eight or ten travellers with whom they have journeyed
for some days, by pretending to give them a feast on the
celebration of the anniversary of some family event. Sometimes an
old woman or man will manage the thing alone, by gaining the
confidence of travellers, and getting near the cooking-pots while
they go aside; or when employed to bring the flour for the meal
from the bazaar. The poison is put into the flour or the pot, as
opportunity offers.

People of all castes and callings take to this trade, some
casually, others for life, and others derive it from their parents
or teachers. They assume all manner of disguises to suit their
purposes; and the habits of cooking, eating, and sleeping on the
side of the road, and smoking with strangers of seemingly the same
caste, greatly facilitate their designs upon travellers. The small
parties are unconnected with each other, and two parties never
unite in the same cruise. The members of one party may be sometimes
convicted and punished, but their conviction is accidental, for the
system which has enabled us to put down the Thug associations
cannot be applied, with any fair prospect of success, to the
suppression of these pests to society.[16]

The Thugs went on their adventures in large gangs, and two or
more were commonly united in the course of an expedition in the
perpetration of many murders. Every man shared in the booty
according to the rank he held in the gang, or the part he took in
the murders; and the rank of every man and the part he took
generally, or in any particular murder, were generally well known
to all. From among these gangs, when arrested, we found the
evidence we required for their conviction—or the means of
tracing it—among the families and friends of their victims,
or with persons to whom the property taken had been disposed of,
and in the graves to which the victims had been consigned.

To give an idea of the system by which the Government of India
has been enabled to effect so great a good for the people as the
suppression of these associations, I will suppose that two sporting
gentlemen, A at Delhi, and B in Calcutta, had both described the
killing of a tiger in an island in the Ganges, near
Hardwār[17] and mentioned the names of the persons engaged
with them. Among the persons thus named were C, who had since
returned to America, D, who had retired to New South Wales, E to
England, and F to Scotland. There were four other persons named who
were still in India, but they are deeply interested in A and B’s
story not being believed. A says that B got the skin of the tiger,
and B states that he gave it to C, who cut out two of the claws.
Application is made to C, D, E, and F, and without the possibility
of any collusion, or even communication between them, their
statements correspond precisely with those of A and B, as to the
time, place, circumstances, and persons engaged. Their statements
are sworn to before magistrates in presence of witnesses, and duly
attested. C states that he got the skin from B, and gave it to the
Nawāb of Rāmpur[18] for a hookah carpet, but that he took
from the left forefoot two of the claws, and gave them to the
minister of the King of Oudh for a charm for his sick child.

 The Nawāb of Rāmpur, being applied to, states
that he received the skin from C, at the time and place mentioned,
and that he still smokes his hookah upon it; and that it had lost
the two claws upon the left forefoot. The minister of the King of
Oudh states that he received the two claws nicely set in gold; that
they had cured his boy, who still wore them round his neck to guard
him from the evil eye. The goldsmith states that he set the two
claws in gold for C, who paid him handsomely for his work. The
peasantry, whose cattle graze on the island, declare that certain
gentlemen did kill a tiger there about the time mentioned, and that
they saw the body after the skin had been taken off, and the
vultures had begun to descend upon it.

To prove that what A and B had stated could not possibly be
true, the other party appeal to some of their townsmen, who are
said to be well acquainted with their characters. They state that
they really know nothing about the matter in dispute; that their
friends, who are opposed to A and B, are much liked by their
townspeople and neighbours, as they have plenty of money, which
they spend freely, but that they are certainly very much addicted
to field-sports, and generally absent in pursuit of wild beasts for
three or four months every year; but whether they were or were not
present at the killing of the great Garhmuktesar tiger, they could
not say.

Most persons would, after examining this evidence, be tolerably
well satisfied that the said tiger had really been killed at the
time and place, and by the persons mentioned by A and B; but, to
establish the fact judicially, it would be necessary to bring A, B,
C, D, E, and F, the Nawāb of Rāmpur, the minister of the
King of Oudh, and the goldsmith to the criminal court at Meerut, to
be confronted with the person whose interest it was that A and B
should not be believed. They would all, perhaps, come to the said
court from the different quarters of the world in which they had
thought themselves snugly settled; but the thing would annoy them
so much, and be so much talked of, that sporting gentlemen,
nawābs, ministers, and goldsmiths would in future take good
care to have ‘forgotten’ everything connected with the matter in
dispute, should another similar reference be made to them, and so A
and B would never again have any chance.

Thug approvers, whose evidence we required, were employed in all
parts of India, under the officers appointed to put down these
associations; and it was difficult to bring all whose evidence was
necessary at the trials to the court of the district in which the
particular murder was perpetrated. The victims were, for the most
part, money-carriers, whose masters and families resided hundreds
of miles from the place where they were murdered, or people on
their way to their distant homes from foreign service. There was no
chance of recovering any of the property taken from the victims, as
Thugs were known to spend what they got freely, and never to have
money by them; and the friends of the victims, and the bankers
whose money they carried, were everywhere found exceedingly averse
to take share in the prosecution.

To obviate all these difficulties separate courts were formed,
with permission to receive whatever evidence they might think
likely to prove valuable, attaching to each portion, whether
documentary or oral, whatever weight it might seem to deserve. Such
courts were formed at Hyderabad, Mysore, Indore, Lucknow,
Gwālior, and were presided over by our highest diplomatic
functionaries, in concurrence with the princes at whose courts they
were accredited; and who at Jubbulpore, were under the direction of
the representative of the Governor-General of India.[l9] By this
means we had a most valuable species of unpaid agency; and I
believe there is no part of their public life on which these high
functionaries look back with more pride than that spent in
presiding over such courts, and assisting the supreme Government in
relieving the people of India from this fearful evil.[20]

Notes:

1. A town on the Allahabad and Sāgar road, sixty-one miles
north-east of Sāgar. It was the head-quarters of the Damoh
district from 1818 to 1835.

2. The chief town of the district of the same name in
Bundēlkhand, situated on the Kēn river, ninety-five miles
south-west from Allahabad.

3. Worth at that time £450 sterling, or a little more.

4. An unusual mode of procedure for professed Thugs to adopt,
who usually strangled their victims with a cloth. Faringia
(Feringheea) Brahman was one of the most noted Thug leaders. He is
frequently mentioned in the author’s Report on the Depredations
committed by the Thug Gangs (1840), and the story of the
Sujaina crime is fully told in the Introduction to that volume.
Faringia became a valuable approver.

5. Lieutenant Brown was suddenly called back to Jubbulpore, and
could not himself go to Sujaina. He sent, however, an intelligent
native officer to the place, but no man could be induced to
acknowledge that he had ever seen the bodies or heard of the
affair, though Faringia pointed out to them exactly where they all
lay. They said it must be quite a mistake—that such a thing
could not have taken place and they know nothing of it. Lieutenant
Brown was aware that all this affected ignorance arose entirely
from the dread these people have of being summoned to give evidence
to any of our district courts of justice; and wrote to the officer
in the civil charge of the district to request that he would assure
them that their presence would not be required. Mr. Doolan, the
assistant magistrate, happened to be going through Sujaina from
Sāgar on deputation at the time; and, sending for all the
respectable old men of the place, he requested that they would be
under no apprehension, but tell him the real truth, as he would
pledge himself that not one of them should ever be summoned to any
district court to give evidence. They then took him to the spot and
pointed out to him where the bodies had been found, and mentioned
that the body of the tanner had been burned by his friends. The
banker, whose treasure they had been carrying, had an equal dislike
to be summoned to court to give evidence, now that he could no
longer hope to recover any portion of his lost money; and it was
not till after Lieutenant Brown had given him a similar assurance,
that he would consent to have his books examined. The loss of the
four thousand five hundred rupees was then found entered, with the
names of the men who had been killed at Sujaina in carrying it.
These are specimens of some of the minor difficulties we had to
contend with in our efforts to put down the most dreadful of all
crimes. All the prisoners accused of these murders had just been
tried for others, or Lieutenant Brown would not have been able to
give the pledge he did. [W. H. S.] Difficulties of the same kind
beset the administration of criminal justice in India to this
day.

6. Of the Marāthās. The district was ceded in
1818.

7. More correctly written Mughal. The term is properly applied
to Muhammadans of Turk (Mongol) descent. Such persons commonly
affix the title Beg to their names, and often prefix the Persian
title Mīrzā.

8. Meerut, the well-known cantonment, in the district of the
same name. The name is written Meeruth by the author, and may be
also written Mīrath. Ghāt (ghaut) means a ferry, or
crossing- place. Murādābād and Bareilly
(Barelī) are in Rohilkhand. The latter has a considerable
garrison. Both places are large cities, and the head-quarter of
districts.

9. The bow and quiver are now rarely seen, except, possibly, in
remote parts of Rājputāna. A body of archers helped to
hold the Shāh Najaf building at Lucknow against Sir Colin
Campbell in 1858. Even in 1903-4 some of the Tibetans who resisted
the British advance were armed with bows and arrows.

10. An inn of the Oriental pattern, often called caravanserai in
books of travel.

11. Then the capital of Ranjit Singh, the great Sikh chief.

12. ‘This is commonly given either by the leader of the gang or
the belhā, who has chosen the place for the murder.’ It
was usually some commonplace order, such as ‘Bring the tobacco’
(Ramaseeana, p.99, &c.). See also Meadows Taylor,
Confessions of a Thug.

13. The Jamāldehī Thugs resided ‘in Oude and some
other parts east of the Ganges. They are considered very clever and
expert, and more stanch to their oath of secrecy than most other
classes’ (ibid. p. 97). At the time referred to Oudh was a separate
kingdom, which lasted as such until 1856. A map included in the
printed Thuggee papers reveals the appalling fact that the Thugs
had 274 fixed burying-places for their victims in the area of the
small kingdom, about half the size of Ireland.

14. Fakīr (fakeer), a religious mendicant. The word
properly applies to Muhammadans only, but is often laxly used to
include Hindoo ascetics.

15. So called because the poison they use is made of the seeds
of the ‘datura’ plant (Datura alba), and other species of
the same genus. It is a powerful narcotic.

16. The crime of poisoning travellers is still prevalent, and
its detection is still attended by the difficulties described in
the text. In some cases the criminals have been proved to belong to
families of Thug stranglers. The poisoning of cattle by arsenic,
for the sake of their hides, was very prevalent forty years ago,
especially in the districts near Benares, but is now believed to be
less practised. It was checked under the ordinary law by numerous
convictions and severe sentences.

17. In the Sahāranpur district, where the Ganges issues
from the hills.

18. A small principality in Rohilkhand, between
Murādābād and Bareilly (Barēlī).

19. The special laws on the subject, namely: Acts xxx of 1836,
xviii of 1837, xix of 1837, xviii of 1839, xviii of 1843, xxiv of
1843, xiv of 1844, v of 1847, x of 1847, iii of 1848, and xi of
1848, are printed in pp. 353-7 of the author’s Report on Budhuk
alias Bagree Decoits, &c. (1849). See Bibliography,
ante. No. 12.

20. I may here mention the names of a few diplomatic officers of
distinction who have aided in the good cause. Of the Civil
Service—Mr. F. C. Smith, Mr. Martin, Mr. George
Stockwell, Mr. Charles Fraser, the Hon. Mr. Wellesley, the Hon. Mr.
Shore, the Hon. Mr. Cavendish, Mr. George Clerk, Mr. L. Wilkinson,
Mr, Bax; Majors-General—Cubbon and Fraser;
Colonels—Low, Stewart, Alves, Spiers, Caulfield,
Sutherland, and Wade; Major Wilkinson; and, among the foremost,
Major Borthwick and Captain Paton. [W. H. S.]

The author’s characteristic modesty has prevented him from
dwelling upon his own services, which were greater than those of
any other officer. Some idea of them may be gathered from the
collection of papers entitled Ramaseeana, the contents of
which are enumerated in the Bibliography, ante. No. 2.
Colonel Meadows Taylor has given a more popular account of the
measures taken for the suppression of Thuggee (thagī) in his
Confessions of a Thug, written in 1837 (1st ed. 1839). The
Thug organization dated from ancient times, but attracted little
notice from the East India Company’s Government until the author,
then Captain Sleeman, submitted his reports on the subject while
employed in the Sāgar and Nerbudda Territories, where he had
been posted in 1820. He proved that the Thug crimes were committed
by a numerous and highly organized fraternity operating in all
parts of India. In consequence of his reports, Mr. F. C. Smith,
Agent to the Governor- General in the Sāgar and Nerbudda
Territories, was invested, in the year 1829, with special powers,
and the author, then Major Sleeman, was employed, in addition to
his district duties, as Mr, Smith’s coadjutor and assistant. In
1835 the author was relieved from district work, and appointed
General Superintendent of the operations for the suppression of the
Thug gangs. He went on leave to the hills in 1836, and on resuming
duty in February, 1839, was appointed Commissioner for the
suppression of Thuggee and Dacoity, which office he continued to
hold in addition to his other appointments.

Between 1826 and 1835, 1,562 prisoners were tried for the crime
of Thuggee, of whom 1,404 were either hanged or transported for
life. Some individuals are said to have confessed to over 200
murders, and one confessed to 719. The Thug approvers, whose lives
were spared, were detained in a special prison at Jubbulpore, where
the remnant of them, with their families, were kept under
surveillance. They were employed in a tent and carpet factory,
known as the School of Industry, founded in 1838 by the author and
Captain Charles Brown. If released, they would certainly have
resumed their hereditary occupation, which exercised an awful
fascination over its votaries. Most of the Thug gangs had been
broken up by 1860, but cases of Thuggee have occurred occasionally
since that date. A gang of Kahārs (palanquin bearers)
committed a series of Thug murders in, I think, 1877, at
Etāwa, in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. The office of
Superintendent of Thuggee and Dacoity was kept up until 1904, but
the officer in charge was more concerned with Dacoity (that is to
say, organized gang-robbery with violence) in the Native States
than with the secret crime of Thuggee. Secret crime is now watched
by the Central Criminal Intelligence Department under the direct
control of the Government of India, and has to deal with novel
forms of evil-doing. In India it is never safe to assume that any
ancient practice has been suppressed, and I have little doubt that,
if administrative pressure were relaxed, the old form of Thuggee
would again be heard of. The occasional discovery of murdered
beggars, who could not have been killed for the sake of their
property, leads me to suppose that the Megpunnia variety of
Thuggee, that is to say, murder of poor persons in order to kidnap
and sell their children, is still sometimes practised.

Among the officers named by the author the best known is Sir
Mark Cubbon, who came to India in 1800, and died at Suez in 1861.
During the interval he had never quitted India. He ruled over
Mysore for nearly thirty years with almost despotic power, and
reorganized the administration of that country with conspicuous
success (Buckland, Dict. of Indian Biography, Sonnenschein,
1906).

The Hon. Frederick John Shore, of the Bengal Civil Service,
officiated in 1836 as Civil Commissioner and Political Agent of the
Sāgar and Nerbudda Territories. In 1837 he published his
Notes on Indian Affairs (London, 2 vols. 8vo), a series of
articles dealing in the most outspoken way with the abuses and
weaknesses of Anglo-Indian administration at that time.

Mr. F. C. Smith was Agent to the Governor-General at Jubbulpore
in 1830 and subsequent years. The author was then immediately
subordinate to him. Messrs. Martin and Wellesley were Residents at
Holkar’s court at Indore. Mr. Stockwell tried some of the Thug
prisoners at Cawnpore and Allahabad as Special Commissioner, in
addition to his ordinary duties: correspondence between him and the
author is printed in Ramaseeana. Mr. Charles Fraser preceded
the author in charge of the Sāgar district, and in January,
1832, resumed charge of the revenue and civil duties of that
district, leaving the criminal work to the author. The Hon. Mr.
Cavendish was Resident at Sindhia’s court at Gwālior. Mr.
George Clerk became Sir George Clerk and Lieutenant-Governor of the
North-Western Provinces, Governor of Bombay, and Permanent Under-
Secretary of State for India; he died at a great age in 1889. Mr.
Lancelot Wilkinson, Political Agent in Bhopal, was considered by
the author to be ‘one of the most able and estimable members of the
India Civil Service’ (Journey, ii. 403). Mr. Bax was
Resident at Indore; Colonel (afterwards Sir John) Low, was Resident
at Lucknow, and had served at Jubbulpore; Colonel Stewart and
Major-General Fraser were Residents at Hyderabad; Major (Colonel)
Alves was Political Agent in Bhopal and Agent in
Rājputāna; Colonel Spiers was Agent at Nīmach, and
officiated as Agent in Rājputāna; Colonel Caulfield had
been Political Agent at Harautī; Colonel Sutherland was
Resident at Gwālior, and afterwards Agent in
Rājputāna; Colonel (Sir C. M.) Wade had been Political
Agent at Lūdiāna; Major Borthwick was employed at Indore;
Captain Paton was Assistant Resident at Lucknow (see Journey
through Kingdom of Oudh, vol. ii, pp. 152-69).

Besides the officers above named, others are specified in
Ramaseeana as having done good service.

Note.—Mr. Crooke suggests, and, I think, correctly,
that the words Megpunnia and Megpunnaism
(ante, note 20, and Bibliography No. 7) are corruptions of
the Hindī Mēkh-phandiyā, from
mēkh, ‘a peg’, and phandā, ‘a noose’,
equivalent to the Persian tasmabāz, meaning ‘playing
tricks with a strap’. Creagh, a private in a British regiment at
Cawnpore about 1803, is said to have initiated three men into the
peg and strap trick, as practised by English rogues. These men
became the leaders of three Tasmabāz Thug gangs, whose
proceedings are described by Mr. R. Montgomery in Selections of
the Records of Government, N.W.P., vol. i, p. 312. A strap is
doubled and folded up in different shapes. The art consists in
putting in a stick or peg in such a way that the strap when
unfolded shall come out double. The Tasmabāz Thugs seem to be
identical with the ‘Megpunnia’ (N.I.N.& Qu., vol. i, p.
108, note 721, September 1891).

 General Hervey records seven modern instances of
strangulation by Megpunnia Thugs in Rājputāna (Some
Records of Crime (1867), vol. i, pp. 126-31).

CHAPTER 14

Basaltic Cappings of the Sandstone Hills of
Central India—Suspension Bridge—Prospects of the
Nerbudda Valley—Deification of a Mortal.

On the 29th[1] we came on to Pathariā, a considerable
little town thirty miles from Sāgar, supported almost entirely
by a few farmers, small agricultural capitalists, and the
establishment of a native collector,[2] On leaving Pathariā,
we ascend gradually along the side of the basaltic hills on our
left to the south for three miles to a point whence we see before
us this plane of basaltic cappings extending as far as the eye can
reach to the west, south, and north, with frequent breaks, but
still preserving one uniform level. On the top of these tables are
here and there little conical elevations of laterite, or indurated
iron clay.[3] The cappings everywhere repose immediately upon the
sandstone of the Vindhya range; but they have occasional beds of
limestone, formed apparently by springs rising from their sides,
and strongly impregnated with carbonic acid gas. For the most part
this is mere travertine, but in some places they get good lime from
the beds for building.

On the 1st of December we came to the pretty village of
Sanodā, near the suspension bridge built over the river
Biās by Colonel Presgrave, while he was assay master of the
Sāgar mint.[4] I was present at laying the foundation-stone of
this bridge in December 1827. Mr. Maddock was the
Governor-General’s representative in these territories, and the
work was undertaken more with a view to show what could be done out
of their own resources, under minds capable of developing them,
than to supply any pressing or urgent want.

The work was completed in June, 1830; and I have several times
seen upon the bridge as many as it could hold of a regiment of
infantry while it moved over; and, at other times, as many of a
corps of cavalry, and often several elephants at once. The bridge
is between the points of suspension two hundred feet, and the clear
portion of the platform measures one hundred and ninety feet by
eleven and a half. The whole cost of the work amounted to about
fifty thousand rupees; and, under a less able and careful person
than Colonel Presgrave, would have cost, perhaps, double the
amount. This work has been declared by a very competent judge to be
equal to any structure of the same kind in Europe, and is eminently
calculated to show what genius and perseverance can produce out of
the resources of a country even in the rudest state of industry and
the arts.

The river Nerbudda neither is nor ever can, I fear, be made
navigable, and the produce of its valley would require to find its
way to distant markets over the Vindhya range of hills to the
north, or the Sātpura to the south. If the produce of the
soil, mines, and industry of the valley cannot be transported to
distant markets, the Government cannot possibly find in it any
available net surplus revenue in money; for it has no mines of the
precious metals, and the precious metals can flow in only in
exchange for the produce of the land, and the industry of the
valley that flows out. If the Government wishes to draw a net
surplus revenue from the valley or from the districts that border
upon it, that is, a revenue beyond its expenditure in support of
the local public establishments, it must either draw it in produce,
or for what can be got for that produce in distant markets.[5]
Hitherto little beyond the rude produce of the soil has been able
to find its way into distant markets from the valley of the
Nerbudda; yet this valley abounds in iron mines,[6] and its soil,
where unexhausted by cropping, is of the richest quality.[7] It is
not then too much to hope that in time the iron of the mines will
be worked with machinery for manufactures; and that multitudes,
aided by this machinery, and subsisted on the rude agricultural
produce, which now flows out, will invest the value of their labour
in manufactured commodities adapted to the demand of foreign
markets and better able from their superior value, compared with
their bulk, to pay the cost of transport by land. Then, and not
till then, can we expect to see these territories pay a
considerable net surplus revenue to Government, and abound in a
middle class of merchants, manufacturers, and agricultural
capitalists.[8]

At Sanodā there is a very beautiful little fortress or
castle now unoccupied, though still entire. It was built by an
officer of the Rājā Chhatar Sāl of Bundēlkhand,
about one hundred and twenty years ago.[9] He had a grant, on the
tenure of military service, of twelve villages situated round this
place; and a man who could build such a castle to defend the
surrounding country from the inroads of freebooters, and to secure
himself and his troops from any sudden impulse of the people’s
resentment, was as likely to acquire an increase of territorial
possession in these parts as he would have been in Europe during
the Middle Ages. The son of this chief, by name Rāi Singh,
was, soon after the castle had been completed, killed in an attack
upon a town near Chitrakōt;[10] and having, in the estimation
of the people, become a god, he had a temple and a tomb
raised to him close to our encampment. I asked the people how he
had become a god; and was told that some one who had been
long suffering from a quartan ague went to the tomb one night, and
promised Rāi Singh, whose ashes lay under it, that if he could
contrive to cure his ague for him, he would, during the rest of his
life, make offerings to his shrine. After that he had never another
attack, and was very punctual in his offerings. Others followed his
example, and with like success, till Rāi Singh was recognized
among them universally as a god, and a temple raised to his name.
This is the way that gods were made all over the world at one time,
and are still made all over India. Happy had it been for mankind if
those only who were supposed to do good had been deified.[11]

On the 2nd we came on to the village of Khojanpur (leaving the
town and cantonments of Sāgar to our left), a distance of some
fourteen miles. The road for a great part of the way was over the
bare back of the sandstone strata, the covering of basalt having
been washed off. The hills, however, are, at this distance from the
city and cantonments of Sāgar, nicely wooded; and, being
constantly intersected by pretty little valleys, the country we
came over was picturesque and beautiful. The soil of all these
valleys is rich from the detritus of the basalt that forms or caps
the hills; but it is now in a bad state of cultivation, partly from
several successive seasons of great calamity, under which the
people have been suffering, and partly from over-assessment; and
this posture of affairs is continued by that loss of energy,
industry, and character, among the farmers and cultivators, which
must everywhere result from these two evils. In India, where the
people have learnt so well to govern themselves, from the want of
settled government, good or bad government really depends almost
altogether upon good or bad settlements of the land revenue.
Where the Government demand is imposed with moderation, and
enforced with justice, there will the people be generally found
happy and contented, and disposed to perform their duties to each
other and to the state; except when they have the misfortune to
suffer from drought, blight, and other calamities of
season.[l2]

I have mentioned that the basalt in the Sāgar district
reposes for the most part immediately upon the sandstone of the
Vindhya range; and it must have been deposited on the sand, while
the latter was yet at the bottom of the ocean, though this range is
now, I believe, nowhere less than from fifteen hundred to two
thousand feet above the level of the sea. The marks of the ripple
of the sea may be observed in some places where the basalt has been
recently washed off, beautifully defined, as if formed only
yesterday, and there is no other substance to be seen between the
two rocks.

The texture of the sandstone at the surface, where it comes in
contact with the basalt, has in some places been altered by it, but
in others it seems to have been as little changed as the
habitations of the people who were suffocated by the ashes of
Vesuvius in the city of Pompeii. I am satisfied, from long and
careful examination, that the greater part of this basalt, which
covers the tableland of Central and Southern India, must have been
held for some time in suspension in the ocean or lake into which it
was first thrown in the shape of ashes, and then gradually
deposited. This alone can account for its frequent appearance of
stratification, for the gentle blending of its particles with those
of the sand near the surface of the latter; and, above all, for
those level steps, or tables, lying one above another horizontally
in parallel bars on one range, corresponding exactly with the same
parallel lines one above another on a range twenty or thirty miles
across the valley. Mr. Scrope’s theory is, I believe, that these
are all mere flowing coulées of lava, which, in their
liquid state, filled hollows, but afterwards became of a harder
texture, as they dried and crystallized, than the higher rocks
around them; the consequence of which is that the latter has been
decomposed and washed away, while the basalt has been left to form
the highest elevations. My opinion is that these steps, or stairs,
at one time formed the beds of the ocean, or of great lakes, and
that the substance of which they are composed was, for the most
part, projected into the water, and there held in suspension till
gradually deposited. There are, however, amidst these steps, and
beneath them, masses of more compact and crystalline basalt, that
bear evident signs of having been flows of lava.[l3]

Reasoning from analogy at Jubbulpore, where some of the basaltic
cappings of the hills had evidently been thrown out of craters long
after this surface had been raised above the waters, and become the
habitation both of vegetable and animal life, I made the first
discovery of fossil remains in the Nerbudda valley. I went first to
a hill within sight of my house in 1828,[14] and searched exactly
between the plateau of basalt that covered it and the stratum
immediately below, and there I found several small trees with
roots, trunks, and branches, all entire, and beautifully petrified.
They had been only recently uncovered by the washing away of a part
of the basaltic plateau. I soon after found some fossil bones of
animals.[15] Going over to Sāgar, in the end of 1830, and
reasoning there upon the same analogy, I searched for fossil
remains along the line of contact between the basalt and the
surface upon which it had been deposited, and I found a grove of
silicified palm- trees within a mile of the cantonments. These
palm-trees had grown upon a calcareous deposit formed from springs
rising out of the basaltic range of hills to the south. The
commissariat officer had cut a road through this grove, and all the
European officers of a large military station had been every day
riding through it without observing the geological treasure; and it
was some time before I could convince them that the stones which
they had every day seen were really petrified palm-trees. The roots
and trunks were beautifully perfect.[l6]

Notes:

1. November, 1835.

2. In the Damoh District, twenty-four miles west of Damoh. The
name appears to be derived from the ‘great quantity of hewn stone
(Hind. patthar or pāthar) lying about in all
directions’. The C. P. Gazetteer (1870) calls the place ‘a
considerable village’.

3. A peculiar formation, of ‘widespread occurrence in the
tropical and subtropical regions of the world’. It is ordinarily of
a reddish ferruginous or brick-dust colour, sometimes deepened into
dark red. Apparently the special character which distinguishes
laterite from other forms of red-coloured weathering is the
presence of hydrous oxide of alumina in varying proportions. . . .
‘Though there is still a great deal of uncertainty about the way in
which laterite was formed, the facts which are known of its
distribution seem to show that it is a distinct form of weathering,
which is confined to low latitudes and humid climates; its
formation seems to have been a slow process, only possible on flat
or nearly flat surfaces, where surface rain-wash could not act’
(Oldham, in The Oxford Survey of the British Empire, vol.
ii, Asia, p. 10: Oxford, 1914). It hardens and darkens by exposure
to air, and is occasionally used as a building stone.

4. The Sāgar mint was erected in 1820 by Captain Presgrave,
the assay master, and used to employ four hundred men, but, after
about ten or twelve years, the business was transferred to
Calcutta, and the buildings converted to other uses (C. P.
Gazetteer, 1870). Mints are now kept up at Calcutta and Bombay
only. The Biās is a small stream flowing into the Sunār
river, and belonging to the Jumna river system. The name is printed
Beeose in the original edition.

5. Since the author’s time the conditions have been completely
changed by the introduction of railways. The East Indian, Great
Indian Peninsular, and other railways now enter the Nerbudda
Valley, so that the produce of most districts can be readily
transported to distant markets. A large enhancement of the land
revenue has been obtained by revisions of the settlement.

6. Details will be found in the Central Provinces
Gazetteer (1870). The references are collected under the head
‘Iron’ in the index to that work. Chapter VIII of Ball’s
Economic Geology of India gives full information concerning the
iron mines of the Central Provinces and all parts of India. That
work forms Part III of the Manual of the Geology of
India.

7. The soil of the valley of the Nerbudda, and that of the
Nerbudda and Sāgar territories generally, is formed for the
most part of the detritus of trap-rocks that everywhere covered the
sandstone of the Vindhya and Sātpura ranges which run through
these territories. This basaltic detritus forms what is called the
black cotton soil by the English, for what reason I know not. [W.
H. S.] The reason is that cotton is very largely grown in the
Nerbudda Valley, both on the black soil and other soils. In
Bundēlkhand the black, friable soil, often with a high
proportion of organic matter, is called ‘mār’, and is chiefly
devoted to raising crops of wheat, gram, or chick-pea (Cicer
arietinum), linseed, and joār (Holcus sorghum).
Cotton is also sown in it, but not very generally. This black soil
requires little rain, and is fertile without manure. It absorbs
water too freely to be suitable for irrigation, and in most seasons
does not need it. The ‘black cotton soil’ is often known as
regur, a corruption of a Tamil word. ‘The origin of
regur is a doubtful question. . . . The dark coloration was
attributed by earlier writers to vegetable matter, and taken to
indicate a large amount of humus in the soil; more recent
investigations make this doubtful, and in all probability the
colour is due to mineral constitution rather than to the very
scanty organic constituents of the soil,’ It may possibly be formed
of ‘wind-borne dust’, like the loess plains of China (Oldham, in
The Oxford Survey of the British Empire, vol. ii, Asia, p.
9: Oxford, 1914).

8. The land revenue has been largely increased, and the
resources and communications of the country have been greatly
developed during the last half-century. The formation of the
Central Provinces as a separate administration in 1861 secured for
the Sāgar and Nerbudda territories the attention which they
failed to obtain from the distant Government of the North-Western
Provinces. Sir Richard Temple, the first Chief Commissioner,
administered the Central Provinces with extraordinary energy and
success.

9. Rājā Chhatarsāl Bundela was Rājā of
Pannā. The history of Chhatarsāl is related in
I.G. (1908), vol. xix, p. 400, s.v. Panna State. In 1729 he
called in the Marāthās to help him against Muhammad Khan
Bangash, and when he died in 1731 rewarded them by bequeathing
one-third of his dominions to the Peshwa. The correct date of his
death is Pūs Badi 3, Samvat 1788 (Hamīrpur Settlement
Report (1880), note at end of chapter 2). The date is often
given inaccurately.

10. Chitrakōt, in the Bānda district of
Bundēlkhand, under the government of the United Provinces of
Agra and Oudh, and seventy-one miles distant from Allahabad, is a
famous place of pilgrimage, much frequented by the votaries of
Rāma. Large fairs are held there.

11. The performance of miraculous cures at the tomb is not
necessary for the deification of a person who has been specially
feared in his lifetime, or has died a violent death. Either of
these conditions is enough to render his ghost formidable, and
worthy of propitiation. Shrines to such persons are very numerous
both in Bundēlkhand and other parts of India, Miracles, of
course, occur at nearly every shrine, and are too common and well
attested to attract much attention.

12. These observations are as true to-day as they were in the
author’s time. Disastrous cases of over-assessment were common in
the early years of British rule, and the mischief so wrought has
been sometimes traceable for generations afterwards. Since 1833 the
error, though less common, has not been unknown.

13. Since writing the above, I have seen Colonel Sykes’s notes
on the formations of Southern India in the Indian Review.
The facts there described seem all to support my conclusion, and
his map would answer just as well for Central as for Southern
India; for the banks of the Nerbudda and Chambal, Sōn, and
Mahānadī, as well as for those of the Bām and the
Bīmā. Colonel Sykes does not, I believe, attempt to
account for the stratification of the basalt; he merely describes
it. [W. H. S.]

The author’s theory of the subaqueous origin of the greater part
of the basalt of Central and Southern India, otherwise known as the
‘Deccan Trap Series’, had been supported by numerous excellent
geologists, but W. T. Blanford proved the theory to be untenable,
there being ‘clear and unmistakable evidence that the traps were in
great part of sub-aerial formation’, The intercalation of
sedimentary beds with fresh-water fossils is conclusive proof that
the lava-flows associated with such beds cannot be submarine. The
hypothesis that the lower beds of traps were poured out in a vast,
but shallow, freshwater lake extending throughout the area over
which the inter- trappean limestone formation extends appears to be
extremely improbable. The lava seems to have been poured, during a
long succession of ages, over a land surface, uneven and broken in
parts, ‘with intervals of rest sufficient for lakes, stocked with
fresh- water mollusca, to form on the cold surfaces of several of
the lava- flows’ (Holland, in I.G. (1907), i. 88). A great
tract of the volcanic region appears to have remained almost
undisturbed to the present day, affected by sub-aerial erosion
alone. The geological horizon of the Deccan trap cannot be
precisely defined, but is now vaguely stated as ‘the close of the
cretaceous period’. The ‘steps’, or conspicuous terraces, traceable
on the hill-sides for great distances, are explained as being ‘due
to the outcrop of the harder basaltic strata, or of those beds
which resist best the disintegrating influences of exposure’.

The general horizontality of the Deccan trap over an area of not
less than 200,000 square miles, and the absence of volcanic hills
of the usual conical form, are difficulties which have caused much
discussion. Some of the ‘old volcanic vents’ appear to have existed
near Poona and Mahāblēshwar. The entire area has been
subjected to sub-aerial denudation on a gigantic scale, which
explains the occurrence of the basalt as the caps of isolated
hills. Much further investigation is required to clear up details
(Manual of the Geology of India, ed. 1, Part I, chap.
13)

14. The author took charge of the Jubbulpore District in March
1828.

15. The fossiliferous beds near Jubbulpore, described in the
text, seem to belong to the group now classed as the
Lamētā beds. The bones of a large dinosaurian reptile
(Titanosaurus indicus) have been identified (I.G.,
1907, vol. i, p. 88).

16. ‘Many years ago Dr. Spry (Note on the Fossil Palms and
Shells lately discovered on the Table-Land of Sāgar in Central
India, in J.A.S.B. for 1833, vol. ii, p. 639) and,
subsequently to him, Captain Nicholls (Journal of Asiatic Soc.
of Bombay, vol. v, p. 614), studied and described certain
trunks of palm-trees, whose silicified remains are found imbedded
in the soft intertrappean mud-beds near Sāgar. . . . The trees
are imbedded in a layer of calcareous black earth, which formed the
surface soil in which they grew; this soil rests on, and was made
up of the disintegration of, a layer of basalt. It is covered over
by another and similar layer of the same rock near where the trees
occur. . . . The palm-trees, now found fossilized, grew in the
soil, which, in the condition of a black calcareous earthy bed, we
now find lying round their prostrate stems. They fell (from
whatever cause), and lay until their silicification was complete. A
slight depression of the surface, or some local or accidental check
of some drainage- course, or any other similar and trivial cause,
may have laid them under water. The process of silicification
proceeded gradually but steadily, and after they had there, in
lapse of ages, become lapidified, the next outburst of volcanic
matter overwhelmed them, broke them, partially enveloped, and
bruised them, until long subsequent denudation once more brought
them to light’ (J. G. Medlicott, in Memoirs of the Geological
Survey of India, vol. ii. Part II, pp. 200, 203, 204, 205, 216,
as quoted in C. P. Gazetteer (1870), p. 435). The
intertrappean fossils are all those of organisms which would occur
in shallow fresh-water lakes or marshy ground.

Besides the author’s friend and relative, Dr. H. H. Spry, Dr.
Spilsbury contributed papers on the Nerbudda fossils to vols. iii,
vi, viii, ix, x, and xiii of the J.A.S.B. Other writers also
have treated of the subject, but it appears to be by no means fully
worked out. James Prinsep, to whom no topic came amiss, discussed
the Jubbulpore fossil bones in the volume in which Dr. Spry’s paper
appeared. Dr. Spry was the author of a work entitled Modern
India: with Illustrations of the Resources and Capabilities of
Hindustan (2 vols. 8vo, 1838). He became F.R.S.

CHAPTER 15

Legend of the Sāgar Lake—Paralysis from
eating the Grain of the Lathyrus sativus.

The cantonments of Sāgar are about two miles from the city
and occupied by three regiments of native infantry, one of local
horse, and a company of European artillery.[1] The city occupies
two sides of one of the most beautiful lakes of India, formed by a
wall which unites two sandstone hills on the north side. The fort
and part of the town stands upon this wall, which, according to
tradition, was built by a wealthy merchant of the Banjāra
caste.[2] After he had finished it, the bed of the lake still
remained dry; and he was told in a dream, or by a priest, that it
would continue so till he should consent to sacrifice his own
daughter, then a girl, and the young lad to whom she was affianced,
to the tutelary god of the place. He accordingly built a little
shrine in the centre of the valley, which was to become the bed of
the lake, put the two children in, and built up the doorway. He had
no sooner done so than the whole of the valley became filled with
water, and the old merchant, the priest, the masons, and
spectators, made their escape with much difficulty. From that time
the lake has been inexhaustible; but no living soul of the
Banjāra caste has ever since been known to drink of its
waters. Certainly all of that caste at present religiously avoid
drinking the water of the lake; and the old people of the city say
that they have always done so since they can remember, and that
they used to hear from their parents that they had always done so.
In nothing does the Founder of the Christian religion appear more
amiable than in His injunction, ‘Suffer little children to come
unto me, and forbid them not’. In nothing do the Hindoo deities
appear more horrible than in the delight they are supposed to take
in their sacrifice—it is everywhere the helpless, the female,
and the infant that they seek to devour—and so it was among
the Phoenicians and their Carthaginian colonies. Human sacrifices
were certainly offered in the cities of Sāgar during the whole
of the Marātha government up to the year 1800, when they were
put a stop to by the local governor, Āsā Sāhib, a
very humane man; and I once heard a very learned Brahman priest say
that he thought the decline of his family and government arose from
this innovation. ‘There is’, said he, ‘no sin in not
offering human sacrifices to the gods where none have been offered;
but, where the gods have been accustomed to them, they are
naturally annoyed when the rite is abolished, and visit the place
and people with all kinds of calamities.’ He did not seem to think
that there was anything singular in this mode of reasoning, and
perhaps three Brahman priests out of four would have reasoned in
the same manner.[3]

On descending into the valley of the Nerbudda over the Vindhya
range of hills from Bhopal, one may see by the side of the road,
upon a spur of the hill, a singular pillar of sandstone rising in
two spires, one turning above and rising over the other, to the
height of from twenty to thirty feet. On a spur of a hill half a
mile distant is another sandstone pillar not quite so high. The
tradition is that the smaller pillar was the affianced bride of the
taller one, who was a youth of a family of great eminence in these
parts. Coming with his uncle to pay his first visit to his bride in
the procession they call the ‘barāt’, he grew more and more
impatient as he approached nearer and nearer, and she shared the
feeling. At last, unable to restrain himself, he jumped upon his
uncle’s shoulder, and looked with all his might towards the spot
where his bride was said to be seated. Unhappily she felt no less
impatient than he did, and raised ‘the fringed curtains of her
eye’, as he raised his, [and] they saw each other at the same
moment. In that moment the bride, bridegroom, and uncle were all
converted into stone pillars; and there they stand to this day a
monument, in the estimation of the people, to warn men and
womankind against too strong an inclination to indulge curiosity.
It is a singular fact that in one of the most extensive tribes of
the Gond population of Central India, to which this couple is said
to have belonged, the bride always goes to the bridegroom in the
procession of the ‘barāt’, to prevent a recurrence of this
calamity. It is the bridegroom who goes to the bride among every
other class of the people of India, as well Muhammadans as Hindoos.
Whether the usage grew out of the tradition, or the tradition out
of the usage, is a question that will admit of much being said on
both sides. I can only vouch for the existence of both. I have seen
the pillars, heard the tradition from the people, and ascertained
the usage; as in the case of that of the Sāgar lake.

The Mahādēo sandstone hills, which in the Sātpura
range overlook the Nerbudda to the south, rise to between four and
five thousand feet above the level of the sea;[4] and in one of the
highest parts a fair was formerly, and is, perhaps, still held[5]
for the enjoyment of those who assemble to witness the self
devotion of a few young men, who offer themselves as a sacrifice to
fulfil the vows of their mothers. When a woman is without children
she makes votive offerings to all the gods, who can, she thinks,
assist her, and promises of still greater in case they should grant
what she wants. Smaller promises being found of no avail, she at
last promises her first-born, if a male, to the god of destruction,
Mahādēo. If she gets a son, she conceals from him her
vows till he has attained the age of puberty; she then communicates
it [sic] to him, and enjoins him to fulfil it. He believes
it to be his paramount duty to obey his mother’s call; and from
that moment he considers himself as devoted to the god. Without
breathing to any living soul a syllable of what she has told him,
he puts on the habit of a pilgrim or religious mendicant, visits
all the celebrated temples dedicated to this god in different parts
of India;[6] and, at the annual fair on the Mahādēo
hills, throws himself from a perpendicular height of four or five
hundred feet, and is dashed to pieces upon the rocks below.[7] If
the youth does not feel himself quite prepared for the sacrifice on
the first visit, he spends another year in pilgrimages, and returns
to fulfil his mother’s vow at the next fair. Some have, I believe,
been known to postpone the sacrifice to a third fair; but the
interval is always spent in painful pilgrimages to the celebrated
temples of the god. When Sir R. Jenkins was the Governor-General’s
representative at the court of Nāgpur,[8] great efforts were
made by him and all the European officers under him to put a stop
to these horrors by doing away with the fair; and their efforts
were assisted by the cholera morbus, which broke out among
the multitude one season while they were so employed, and carried
off the greater part of them. This seasonable visitation was, I
believe, considered as an intimation on the part of the god that
the people ought to have been more attentive to the wishes of the
white men, for it so happens that Mahādēo is the only one
of the Hindoo gods who is represented with a white face.[9] He
figures among the dramatis personae of the great pantomime
of the Rāmlīlā[10] or fight for the recovery of
Sitā from the demon king of Ceylon; and is the only one with a
white face. I know not whether the fair has ever been revived, but
[I] think not.

In 1829 the wheat and other spring crops in this and the
surrounding villages were destroyed by a severe hail-storm; in 1830
they were deficient from the want of seasonable rains; and in 1831
they were destroyed by blight. During these three years the
‘teorī’, or what in other parts of India is called
‘kesārī’ (the Lathyrus sativus of botanists), a
kind of wild vetch, which, though not sown itself, is left
carelessly to grow among the wheat and other grain, and given in
the green and dry state to cattle, remained uninjured, and thrived
with great luxuriance.[11] In 1831 they reaped a rich crop of it
from the blighted wheat-fields, and subsisted upon its grain during
that and the following years, giving the stalks and leaves only to
their cattle. In 1833 the sad effects of this food began to
manifest themselves. The younger part of the population of this and
the surrounding villages, from the age of thirty downwards, began
to be deprived of the use of their limbs below the waist by
paralytic strokes, in all cases sudden, but in some cases more
severe than in others. About half the youth of this village of both
sexes became affected during the years 1833 and 1834, and many of
them have lost the use of their lower limbs entirely, and are
unable to move. The youth of the surrounding villages, in which the
‘teorī’ from the same causes formed the chief article of food
during the years 1831 and 1832, have suffered to an equal degree.
Since the year 1834 no new case has occurred; but no person once
attacked had been found to recover the use of the limbs affected;
and my tent was surrounded by great numbers of the youth in
different stages of the disease, imploring my advice and assistance
under this dreadful visitation. Some of them were very fine-looking
young men of good caste and respectable families; and all stated
that their pains and infirmities were confined entirely to the
parts below the waist. They described the attack as coming on
suddenly, often while the person was asleep, and without any
warning symptoms whatever; and stated that a greater portion of the
young men were attacked than of the young women. It is the
prevailing opinion of the natives throughout the country that both
horses and bullocks, which have been much fed upon ‘teorī’,
are liable to lose the use of their limbs; but, if the poisonous
qualities abound more in the grain than in the stalk or leaves,
man, who eats nothing but the grain, must be more liable to suffer
from the use of this food than beasts, which eat it merely as they
eat grass or hay.

I sent the son of the head man of the village and another, who
were among the young people least affected, into Sāgar with a
letter to my friend Dr. Foley, with a request that he would try
what he could do for them; and if he had any fair prospect of being
able to restore these people to the use of their limbs, that
measures might be adopted through the civil authorities to provide
them with accommodation and the means of subsistence, either by
private subscription, or by application to Government. The civil
authorities, however, could find neither accommodation nor funds to
maintain these people while under Dr. Foley’s care; and several
seasons of calamity had deprived them of the means of maintaining
themselves at a distance from their families. Nor is a medical man
in India provided with the means found most effectual in removing
such affections, such as baths, galvanic batteries, &c. It is
lamentable to think how very little we have as yet done for the
country in the healing art, that art which, above all others, a
benevolent and enlightened Government should encourage among the
people of India.

All we have as yet done has been to provide medical attendants
for our European officers; regiments, and jails. It must not,
however, be supposed that the people of India are without medical
advice, for there is not a town or considerable village in India
without its practitioners, the Hindoos following the Egyptian
(Misrānī), and the Musalmāns the Grecian
(Yunānī) practice. The first prescribe little physic and
much fasting; and the second follow the good old rules of
Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, with which they are all tolerably
well acquainted. As far as the office of physician goes, the
natives of India of all classes, high and low, have much more
confidence in their own practitioners than in ours, whom they
consider too reckless and better adapted to treat diseases in a
cold than a hot climate. They cannot afford to give the only fees
which European physicians would accept; and they see them, in their
hospital practice, trust much to their native assistants, who are
very few of them able to read any book, much less to study the
profound doctrines of the great masters of the science of
medicine.[12] No native ventures to offer an opinion upon this
abstruse subject in any circle where he is not known to be
profoundly read in either Arabic or Sanskrit lore; nor would he
venture to give a prescription without first consulting,
‘spectacles on nose’, a book as large as a church Bible. The
educated class, as indeed all classes, say that they do not want
our physicians, but stand much in need of our surgeons. Here they
feel that they are helpless, and we are strong; and they seek our
aid whenever they see any chance of obtaining it, as in the present
case.[13] Considering that every European gentleman they meet is
more or less a surgeon, or hoping to find him so, people who are
afflicted, or have children afflicted, with any kind of
malformation, or malorganization, flock round them [sic]
wherever they go, and implore their aid; but implore in vain, for,
when they do happen to fall in with a surgeon, he is a mere
passer-by, without the means or the time to afford relief. In
travelling over India there is nothing which distresses a
benevolent man so much as the necessity he is daily under of
telling poor parents, who, with aching hearts and tearful eyes,
approach him with their suffering children in their arms, that to
relieve them requires time and means which are not at a traveller’s
command, or a species of knowledge which he does not possess; it is
bitter thus to dash to the ground the cup of hope which our
approach has raised to the lip of mother, father, and child; but he
consoles himself with the prospect, that at no distant period a
benevolent and enlightened Government will distribute over the land
those from whom the afflicted will not seek relief in vain.[14]

Notes:

1. The garrison is stated in the Gazetteer (1870) to
consist of a European regiment of infantry, two batteries of
European artillery, one native cavalry and one native infantry
regiment. In 1893 it consisted of one battery of Royal Artillery, a
detachment of British Infantry, a regiment of Bengal Cavalry, and a
detachment of Bengal Infantry. According to the census of 1911, the
population of Sāgar was 45,908.

2. The Banjāras, or Brinjāras, are a wandering tribe,
principally employed as carriers of grain and salt on bullocks and
cows. They used to form the transport service of the Moghal armies,
and of the Company’s forces at least as late as 1819. Their
organization and customs are in many ways peculiar. The development
of roads and railways has much diminished the importance of the
tribe. A good account of it will be found in Balfour,
Cyclopaedia of India, 3rd ed., 1885, s. v. ‘Banjāra’.
Dubois (Hindu Manners, &c., 3rd ed. (1906), p. 70)
states that ‘of all the castes of the Hindus, this particular one
is acknowledged to be the most brutal’.

3. See note on human sacrifice, ante, Chapter 8, note
8.

4. In the Hoshangābād district of the Central
Provinces. The sandstone formation here attains its highest
development, and is known to geologists as the ‘Mahādēo
sandstones’. The new sanitarium of Pachmarhī is situated in
these hills.

5. It has been long since suppressed.

6. Benares is the principal seat of the worship of
Mahādēo (Siva), but his shrines are found everywhere
throughout India. One hundred and eight of these are reckoned as
important. In Southern India the most notable, perhaps, is the
great temple at Tanjore (see chap. 17 of Monier Williams’s
Religious Thought and Life in India).

7. ‘This mode of suicide is called Bhrigu-pātā,
“throwing one’s self from a precipice”. It was once equally common
at the rock of Girnār [in Kāthiāwār], and has
only recently been prohibited’ (ibid. p. 349).

8. Nagpore (Nāgpur) was governed by Marāthā
rulers, with the title of Bhōnslā, also known as the
Rājās of Berār. The last Rājā,
Raghojī, died without heirs in 1853. His dominions were then
annexed as lapsed territory by Lord Dalhousie. Sir Richard Jenkins
was Resident at Nāgpur from 1810 to 1827. Nāgpur is now
the head-quarters of the Chief Commissioner of the Central
Provinces.

9. ‘There is a legend that Siva appeared in the Kali age, for
the good of the Brahmans, as “Sveta”, “the white one”, and that he
had four disciples, to all of whom the epithet “Sveta” is applied’
(Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, p.
80, note 2). Various explanations of the legend have been offered.
Professor A. Weber is inclined to think that the various references
to white teachers in Indian legends allude to Christian
missionaries. The Mahābhārata mentions the travels of
Nārada and others across the sea to ‘Sveta-dwīpa’, the
‘Island of the White Men’, in order to learn the doctrine of the
unity of God. This tradition appears to be intelligible only if
understood to commemorate the journeys of pious Indians to
Alexandria, and their study of Christianity there (Die Griechen
in Indien, 1890, p. 34).

10. The Rāmlīlā, a performance corresponding to
the mediaeval European ‘miracle-play’, is celebrated in Northern
India in the month of Kuār (or Asvin, September-October), at
the same time as the Durgā Pūjā is solemnized in
Bengal. Rāma and his brother Lachhman are impersonated by
boys, who are seated on thrones in state. The performance concludes
by the burning of a wicker image of Rāvana, the demon king of
Lankā (Ceylon), who had carried off Rāma’s queen,
Sitā. The story is the leading subject of the great epic
called the Rāmāyana.

11. The Lathyrus sativus is cultivated in the Punjab and
in Tibet. Its poisonous qualities are attributed to its excessive
proportion of nitrogenous matter, which requires dilution. Another
species of the genus, L. cicer, grown in Spain, has similar
properties. The distressing effects described in the text have been
witnessed by other observers (Balfour, Cyclopaedia, 3rd ed.,
1885, s.v. ‘Lathyrus’).

12. One of the tent-pitchers one morning, after pitching our
tent, asked the loan of a small extra one for the use of his wife,
who was about to be confined. The basket-maker’s wife of the
village near which we were encamped was called; and the poor woman,
before we had finished our breakfast, gave birth to a daughter. The
charge is half a rupee, or one shilling for a boy, and a quarter,
or sixpence, for a girl. The tent-pitcher gave her ninepence, which
the poor midwife thought very handsome, The mother had come
fourteen miles upon a loaded cart over rough roads the night
before; and went the same distance with her child the night after,
upon the same cart. The first midwife in Europe could not have done
her duty better than this poor basket-maker’s wife did hers. [W. H.
S.]

13. The ‘present case’ was of a medical, not a surgical,
nature.

14. The Hindoo practitioners are called ‘baid’ (Sanskrit
‘vaidya’, followers of the Veda, that is to say, the Ayur Veda).
The Musalmān practitioners are generally called ‘hakīm’.
The Egyptian school (Misrānī, Misrī, or
Suryānī, that is, Syrian) never practise bleeding, and
are partial to the use of metallic oxides. The Yunānī
physicians approve of bleeding, and prefer vegetable drugs. The
older writers on India fancied that the Hindoo system of medicine
was of enormous antiquity, and that the principles of Galenical
medical science were ultimately derived from India. Modern
investigation has proved that Hindoo medicine, like Hindoo
astronomy, is largely of Greek origin. This conclusion has been
expressed in an exaggerated form by some writers, but its general
truth appears to be established. The Hindoo books treating of
medicine are certainly older than Wilson supposed, for the Bower
manuscript, written in the second half of the fourth century of our
era, contains three Sanskrit medical treatises. The writers had,
however, plenty of time to borrow from Galen, who lived in the
second century. The Indian aversion to European medicine, as
distinguished from surgery, still exists, though in a degree
somewhat less than in the author’s time. Many municipal boards have
insisted on employing ‘baids’ and ‘hakīms’ in addition to the
practitioners trained in European methods. Well-to-do patients
often delay resort to the English physician until they have
exhausted all resources of the ‘hakīm’ and have been nearly
killed by his drastic treatment. One medical innovation, the use of
quinine as a febrifuge, has secured universal approbation. I never
heard of an Indian who disbelieved in quinine. Chlorodyne also is
fully appreciated, but most of the European medicines are regarded
with little faith.

Since the author wrote, great progress has been made in
providing hospital and dispensary accommodation. Each ‘district’,
or unit of civil administration, has a fairly well equipped
combined hospital and dispensary at head-quarters, and branch
dispensaries exist in almost every district. An Inspector-General
of Dispensaries supervises the medical administration of each
province, and medical schools have been organized at Calcutta,
Madras, Bombay, Lahore, and Agra. During Lord Dufferin’s
Viceroyalty and afterwards, energetic steps were taken to improve
the system of medical relief for females. Pandit Madhusadan Gupta,
on January 10, 1836, was the first Hindoo who ventured to dissect a
human body and teach anatomy. India can now boast of a considerable
number of Hindoo and Musalmān practitioners, trained in
European methods, and skilful in their profession. Much has been
done, infinitely more remains to be done. Details will be found in
I.G. (1907), vol. iv, chap. 14, ‘Medical Administration’,
The article ‘Medicine’ in Balfour, Cyclopaedia, 3rd ed.,
1885, on which I have drawn for some of the facts above stated,
gives a good summary of the earlier history of medicine in India,
but greatly exaggerates the antiquity of the Hindoo books. On this
question Weber’s paper, ‘Die Griechen in Indien’ (Berlin, 1890, p.
28), and Dr. Hoernle’s remarks on the Bower manuscript (in
J.A.S.B., vol. lx (1891), Part I, p. 145) may be consulted.
Dr. Hoernle’s annotated edition and translation of the Bower MS.
were completed in 1912. Part of the work is reprinted with
additions in the Ind. Ant. for 1913 and 1914.

CHAPTER 16

Suttee Tombs—Insalubrity of deserted
Fortresses.

On the 3rd we came to Bahrol,[1] where I had encamped with Lord
William Bentinck on the last day of December, 1832, when the
quicksilver in the thermometer at sunrise, outside our tents, was
down to twenty-six degrees of Fahrenheit’s thermometer. The village
stands upon a gentle swelling hill of decomposed basalt, and is
surrounded by hills of the same formation. The Dasān river
flows close under the village, and has two beautiful reaches, one
above, the other below, separated by the dyke of basalt, over which
lies the ford of the river.[2]

There are beautiful reaches of the kind in all the rivers in
this part of India, and they are almost everywhere formed in the
same manner. At Bahrol there is a very unusual number of tombs
built over the ashes of women who have burnt themselves with the
remains of their husbands. Upon each tomb stands erect a tablet of
freestone, with the sun, the new moon, and a rose engraved upon it
in bas-relief in one field;[3] and the man and woman, hand in hand,
in the other. On one stone of this kind I saw a third field below
these two, with the figure of a horse in bas-relief, and I asked
one of the gentlemen farmers, who was riding with me, what it
meant. He told me that he thought it indicated that the woman rode
on horseback to bathe before she ascended the pile.[4] I asked him
whether he thought the measure prohibiting the practice of burning
good or bad.

‘It is’, said he, ‘in some respects good, and in others bad.
Widows cannot marry among us, and those who had no prospect of a
comfortable provision among their husband’s relations, or who
dreaded the possibility of going astray, and thereby sinking into
contempt and misery, were enabled in this way to relieve their
minds, and follow their husbands, under the full assurance of being
happily united to them in the next world.’

When I passed this place on horseback with Lord William
Bentinck, he asked me what these tombs were, for he had never seen
any of the kind before. When I told him what they were, he said not
a word; but he must have felt a proud consciousness of the debt of
gratitude which India owes to the statesman who had the courage to
put a stop to this great evil, in spite of all the fearful
obstacles which bigotry and prejudice opposed to the measure. The
seven European functionaries in charge of the seven districts of
the newly-acquired territories were requested, during the
administration of Lord Amherst in 1826, to state whether the
burning of widows could or should be prohibited; and I believe
every one of them declared that it should not. And yet, when it was
put a stop to only a few years after by Lord William, not a
complaint or murmur was heard. The replies to the
Governor-General’s inquiries were, I believe, throughout India, for
the most part, opposed to the measure.[5]

 On the 4th we came to Dhamonī, ten miles. The only
thing remarkable here is the magnificent fortress, which is built
upon a small projection of the Vindhya range, looking down on each
side into two enormously deep glens, through which the two branches
of the Dasān river descend over the tableland into the plains
of Bundēlkhand.[6] The rays of the sun seldom penetrate to the
bottom of these glens, and things are, in consequence, grown there
that could not be grown in parts more exposed.

Every inch of the level ground in the bed of the streams below
seems to be cultivated with care. This fortress is said to have
cost more than a million of money, and to have been only one of
fifty-two great works, of which a former Rājā of
Bundēlkhand, Bīrsingh Deo, laid the foundation in the
same happy hour which had been pointed out to him by his
astrologers.[7] The works form an acute triangle, with the base
towards the tableland, and the two sides hanging perpendicularly
over the glens, while the apex points to the course of the streams
as they again unite, and pass out through a deep chasm into the
plains of Bundēlkhand.

The fortress is now entirely deserted, and the town, which the
garrison supported, is occupied by only a small police-guard,
stationed here to see that robbers do not take up their abode among
the ruins. There is no fear of this. All old deserted fortresses in
India become filled by a dense stream of carbonic acid gas, which
is found so inimical to animal life that those who attempt to
occupy them become ill, and, sooner or later, almost all die of the
consequences. This gas, being specifically much heavier than common
air, descends into the bottom of such unoccupied fortresses, and
remains stagnant like water in old reservoirs. The current of pure
air continually passes over, without being able to carry off the
mass of stagnant air below; and the only way to render such places
habitable is to make large openings in the walls on all sides, from
the top to the bottom, so that the foul air may be driven out by
the current of pure atmospheric air, which will then be continually
rushing in. When these fortresses are thickly peopled, the
continual motion within tends, I think, to mix up this gas with the
air above; while the numerous fires lighted within, by rarefying
that below, tend to draw down a regular supply of the atmospheric
air from above for the benefit of the inhabitants. When natives
enter upon the occupation of an old fortress of this kind, that has
remained long unoccupied, they always make a solemn religions
ceremony of it; and, having fed the priests, the troops, and a
crowd of followers, all rush in at once with beat of drums, and as
much noise as they can make. By this rush, and the fires that
follow, the bad air is, perhaps, driven off, and never suffered to
collect again while the fortress remains fully occupied. Whatever
may be the cause, the fact is certain that these fortresses become
deadly places of abode for small detachments of troops, or small
parties of any kind. They all get ill, and few recover from the
diseases they contract in them.

From the year 1817, when we first took possession of the
Sāgar and Nerbudda Territories, almost all the detachments of
troops we required to keep at a distance from the headquarters of
their regiments were posted in these old deserted fortifications.
Our collections of revenue were deposited in them; and, in some
cases, they were converted into jails for the accommodation of our
prisoners. Of the soldiers so lodged, I do not believe that one in
four ever came out well; and, of those who came out ill, I do not
believe that one in four survived five years. They were all
abandoned one after the other; but it is painful to think how many
hundreds, I may say thousands, of our brave soldiers were
sacrificed before this resolution was taken. I have known the whole
of the survivors of strong detachments that went in, in robust
health, three months before, brought away mere skeletons, and in a
hopeless and dying state. All were sent to their homes on medical
certificate, but they almost all died there, or in the course of
their journey.

Notes:

1. December, 1835. The name of the village is spelled Behrole by
the author.

2. The Dasān river rises in the Bhopāl State, flows
through the Sāgar district of the Central Provinces, and along
the southern boundary of the Lalitpur subdivision of the
Jhānsī District, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. It
also forms the boundary between the Jhānsī and
Hamīrpur Districts, and falls into the Betwa after a course of
about 220 miles. The name is often, but erroneously, written
Dhasān. It is the Sanskrit Dasārna.

3. This emblem is a lotus, not a rose flower. The latter is
never used in Hindoo symbolism. The lotus is a solar emblem, and
intimately associated with the worship of Vishnu.

4. It rather indicates that the husband was on horseback when
killed. The sculptures on satī pillars often commemorate the
mode of death of the husband. Sometimes these pillars are
inscribed. They usually face the east. An open hand is often carved
in the upper compartment as well as the sun and moon. A drawing of
such a pillar will be found in J.A.S.B., vol. xlvi. Part I,
1877, pl. xiv. A.S.R., vol. iii, p. 10; vol. vii, p. 137;
vol. x, p. 75; and vol. xxi, p. 101, may be consulted.

5. The ‘newly-acquired territories’ referred to are the
Sāgar and Nerbudda Territories, comprising the seven
districts, Sāgar, Jubbulpore, Hoshangābād,
Seonī, Damoh, Narsinghpur, and Baitūl, ceded in 1818, and
now included in the Central Provinces. The tenor of the replies
given to Lord Amherst’s queries shows how far the process of
Hindooizing had advanced among the European officials of the
Company. Lord Amherst left India in March, 1828. See ante.
Chapter 4 and Chapter 8, for cases of satī (suttees). For a
good account of the suttee discussions and legislation, see D.
Boulger, Lord William Bentinck (1897), chap. v, in ‘Rulers
of India’ Series. No other biography of Lord William Bentinck
exists.

6. Dhamonī is in the Sāgar district of the Central
Provinces, about twenty-nine miles north of Sāgar. The fort
was taken by General Marshall in 1818. It had been rebuilt by
Rājā Bīrsingh Deo of Orchhā on an enormous
scale about the end of the sixteenth century. In the original
edition, the author’s march is said to have taken place ‘on the
24th’. This must be a mistake for ‘on the 4th’; as the last date,
that of the march to Bahrol, was the 3rd December. The author
reached Agra on January 1, 1836,

7. The number fifty-two is one of the Hindoo favourite numbers,
like seven, twelve, and eighty-four, held sacred for astronomical
or astrological reasons. Bīrsingh Deo was the younger brother
of Rāmchand, head of the Bundēla clan. To oblige Prince
Salīm, afterwards the Emperor Jahāngīr, he murdered
Abūl Fazl, the celebrated minister and historian of Akbar, on
August 12, 1602, Jahāngīr, after his accession, rewarded
the murderer by allowing him to supersede his brother in the
headship of his clan, and by appointing him to the rank of
‘commander of three thousand’. The capital of Bīrsingh was
Orchhā. His successors are often spoken of as Rājās
of Tehrī. The murder is fully described in The Emperor
Akbar by Count von Noer, translated by A. S. Beveridge,
Calcutta, 1890, vol. ii, pp. 384-404. Orchhā is described
post, Chapters 22,23.

CHAPTER 17

Basaltic Cappings—Interview with a Native
Chief—A Singular Character.

On the 5th[1] we came to the village of Seorī. Soon after
leaving Dhamonī, we descended the northern face of the Vindhya
range into the plains of Bundēlkhand. The face of this range
overlooking the valley of the Nerbudda to the south is, as I have
before stated, a series of mural precipices, like so many rounded
bastions, the slight dip of the strata being to the north. The
northern face towards Bundēlkhand, on the contrary, here
descends gradually, as the strata dip slightly towards the north,
and we pass down gently over their back. The strata have, however,
been a good deal broken, and the road was so rugged that two of our
carts broke down in descending. From the descent over the northern
face of the tableland into Bundēlkhand to the descent over the
southern face into the valley of the Nerbudda must be a distance of
one hundred miles directly north and south.

The descent over the northern face is not everywhere so gradual;
on the contrary, there are but few places where it is at all
feasible; and some of the rivers of the tableland between
Jubbulpore and Mirzapore have a perpendicular fall of more than
four hundred feet over these mural precipices of the northern face
of the Vindhya range.[2] A man, if he have good nerve, may hang
over the summits, and suspend in his hand a plummet that shall
reach the bottom.

I should mention that this tableland is not only intersected by
ranges, but everywhere studded with isolated hills rising suddenly
out of basins or valleys. These ranges and isolated hills are all
of the same sandstone formation, and capped with basalt, more or
less amygdaloidal. The valleys and cappings have often a substratum
of very compact basalt, which must evidently have flowed into them
after these islands were formed. The question is, how were these
valleys and basins scooped out? ‘Time, time, time!’ says Mr.
Scrope; ‘grant me only time, and I can account for everything.’ I
think, however, that I am right in considering the basaltic
cappings of these ranges and isolated hills to have once formed
part of continued flat beds of great lakes. The flat parallel
planes of these cappings, corresponding with each other, however
distantly separated the hills they cover may be, would seem to
indicate that they could not all have been subject to the
convulsions of nature by which the whole substrata were upheaved
above the ocean. I am disposed to think that such islands and
ranges of the sandstone were formed before the deposit of the
basalt, and that the form of the surface is now returning to what
it then was, by the gradual decomposition and wearing away of the
latter rock. Much, however, may be said on both sides of this, as
of every other question. After descending from the sandstone of the
Vindhya[3] range into Bundēlkhand, we pass over basalt and
basaltic soil, reposing immediately on syenitic granite, with here
and there beds and veins of pure feldspar, hornblende, and
quartz.

Takht Singh, the younger brother of Arjun Singh, the
Rājā of Shāhgarh,[4] came out several miles to meet
me on his elephant. Finding me on horseback, he got off from his
elephant, and mounted his horse, and we rode on till we met the
Rājā himself, about a mile from our tents. He was on
horseback, with a large and splendidly dressed train of followers,
all mounted on fine sleek horses, bred in the Rājā’s own
stables. He was mounted on a snow-white steed of his own breeding
(and I have rarely seen a finer animal), and dressed in a light
suit of silver brocade made to represent the scales of steel
armour, surmounted by a gold turban. Takht Singh was more plainly
dressed, but is a much finer and more intelligent-looking man.
Having escorted us to our tents, they took their leave, and
returned to their own, which were pitched on a rising ground on the
other side of a small stream, half a mile distant. Takht Singh
resides here in a very pretty fortified castle on an eminence. It
is a square building, with a round bastion at each corner, and one
on each face, rising into towers above the walls.

A little after midday the Rājā and his brother came to
pay us a visit; and about four o’clock I went to return it,
accompanied by Lieutenant Thomas. As usual, he had a nautch (dance)
upon carpets, spread upon the sward under awnings in front of the
pavilion in which we were received. While the women were dancing
and singing, a very fine panther was brought in to be shown to us.
He had been caught, full-grown, two years before, and, in the hands
of a skilful man, was fit for the chase in six months. It was a
very beautiful animal, but, for the sake of the sport, kept
wretchedly thin.[5] He seemed especially indifferent to the crowd
and the music, but could not bear to see the woman whirling about
in the dance with her red mantle floating in the breeze; and,
whenever his head was turned towards her, he cropped his ears. She
at last, in play, swept close by him, and with open mouth he
attempted to spring upon her, but was pulled back by the keeper.
She gave a shriek, and nearly fell upon her back in fright.

The Rājā is a man of no parts or character, and, his
expenditure being beyond his income, he is killing his goose for
the sake of her eggs—that is, he is ruining all the farmers
and cultivators of his large estate by exactions, and thereby
throwing immense tracts of fine land out of tillage. He was the
heir to the fortress and territory of Garhā Kotā, near
Sāgar, which was taken by Sindhia’s army, under the command of
Jean Baptiste Filose,[6] just before our conquest in 1817. I was
then with my regiment, which was commanded by Colonel, afterwards
Major- General, G———,[7] a very singular
character. When our surgeon. Dr. E———, received
the newspaper announcing the capture of Garhā Kotā in
Central India by Jean-Baptiste, an officer of the corps was
with him, who called on the colonel on his way home, and mentioned
this as a bit of news. As soon as this officer had left him, the
colonel wrote off a note to the doctor: ‘My dear Doctor,—I
understand that that fellow, John the Baptist, has got into
Sindhia’s service, and now commands an army—do send me the
newspapers.’ These were certainly the words of his note, and, at
the only time I heard him speak on the subject of religion he
discomfited his adversary in an argument at the mess by ‘Why, sir,
you do not suppose that I believe in those fellows, Luther, Calvin,
and John the Baptist, do you?’

Nothing could stand this argument. All the party burst into a
laugh, which the old gentleman took for an unequivocal recognition
of his victory, and his adversary was silenced. He was an old man
when I first became acquainted with him. I put into his hands, when
in camp, Miss Edgeworth’s novels, in the hope of being able to
induce him to read by degrees; and I have frequently seen the tears
stealing down over his furrowed cheeks, as he sat pondering over
her pages in the corner of his tent. A braver soldier never lived
than old G———; and he distinguished himself
greatly in the command of his regiment, under Lord Lake, at the
battle of Laswāri[8] and siege of Bharatpur.[9] It was
impossible ever to persuade him that the characters and incidents
of these novels were the mere creations of fancy—he felt them
to be true—he wished them to be true, and he would have them
to be true. We were not very anxious to undeceive him, as the
illusion gave him pleasure and did him good. Bolingbroke says,
after an ancient author, ‘History is philosophy teaching by
example.'[10] With equal truth may we say that fiction, like that
of Maria Edgeworth, is philosophy teaching by emotion. It certainly
taught old G——— to be a better man, to leave much
of the little evil he had been in the habit of doing, and to do
much of the good he had been accustomed to leave undone.

Notes:

1. December 5, 1835, The date is misprinted ‘3rd’ in the
original edition. See note 2 to last preceding chapter, p. 110.

2. A good view of the precipices of the Kaimūr range, the
eastern continuation of the Vindhyan chain, is given facing page 41
of vol. i of Hooker’s Himalayan Journals (ed. 1855).

3. The author’s theory is untenable. He failed, to realize the
vast effects of sub-aerial denudation. All the evidence shows that
the successive lava outflows which make up the Deccan trap series
ultimately converted the surface of the land over which they welled
out into an enormous, nearly uniform, plain of basalt, resting on
the Vindhyan sandstone and other rocks. This great sheet of lava,
extending, east and west, from Nāgpur to Bombay, a distance of
about five hundred miles, was then, in succeeding millenniums,
subjected to the denuding forces of air and water, until gradually
huge tracts of it were worn away, forming beds of conglomerate,
gravel, and clay. The flat-topped hills have been carved out of the
basaltic surface by the agencies which wore away the massive sheet
of lava. The basaltic cappings of the hills certainly cannot have
‘formed part of continued flat beds of great lakes’. See the notes
to Chapter 14, ante. Mr. Scrope was quite right. Vast
periods of time must be allowed for geological history, and
millions of years must have elapsed since the flow of the Deccan
lava.

4. In the Sāgar district. The last Raja joined the rebels
in 1857, and so forfeited his rank and territory.

5. The name panther is usually applied only to the large,
fulvous variety of Felis pardus (Linn.) (F. leopardus, Leopardus
varius). The animal described in the text evidently was a
specimen of the hunting leopard, Felis jubata (F. guttata, F.
venatica).

6. This officer was one of the many ‘condottieri‘ of
various nationality who served the native powers during the
eighteenth century, and the early years of the nineteenth. He
commanded five infantry regiments at Gwālior. His ‘kingdom-
taking’ raid in 1815 or 1816 is described post in Chapter
49. The history of the family is given by Compton in European
Military Adventures of Hindustan from 1784 to 1803 (Unwin,
1892), App. pp, 352-6. In 1911 Michael Filose of Gwālior was
appointed K.C.I.E.

7.’G———’ appears to have been Robert Gregory
C.B.

8. The fiercely contested battle of Laswāri was fought on
November 1, 1803, between the British force under Lord Lake and the
flower of Sindhia’s army, known as the ‘Deccan Invincibles’.
Sindhia’s troops lost about seven thousand killed and two thousand
prisoners. The British loss in killed and wounded amounted to more
than eight hundred. A medal to commemorate the victory was struck
in London in 1851, and presented to the survivors. Laswāri is
a village in the Alwar State, 128 miles south of Delhi.

9. Bharatpur (Bhurtpore), in the Jāt State of the same
name, is thirty-four miles west of Agra. In January and February,
1805, Lord Lake four times attempted to take it by assault, and
each time was repulsed with heavy loss. On January 18, 1826, Lord
Combermere stormed the fortress. The fortifications were then
dismantled. A large portion of the walls is now standing, and
presents an imposing appearance. They seem to have been repaired.
See post, Chapter 62.

10. ‘I will answer you by quoting what I have read somewhere or
other—in Dionysius Halicarn., I think—that
history is philosophy teaching by example’ (Bolingbroke, Letters
on the Study and Use of History, Letter II, p. 14 of vol. viii
of edition printed by T. Cadell, London, 1770). The Greek words are
ίστορία
φιλοσοφία
έστìν έκ
παραδειγμάτ
ων.

CHAPTER 18

Birds’ Nests—Sports of Boyhood.

On the 6th[1] we came to Sayyidpur, ten miles, over an
undulating country, with a fine soil of decomposed basalt, reposing
upon syenite, with veins of feldspar and quartz. Cultivation
partial, and very bad; and population extremely scanty. We passed
close to a village, in which the children were all at play; while
upon the bushes over their heads were suspended an immense number
of the beautiful nests of the sagacious ‘bayā’ bird, or Indian
yellow- hammer,[2] all within reach of a grown-up boy, and one so
near the road that a grown-up man might actually look into it as he
passed along, and could hardly help shaking it. It cannot fail to
strike a European as singular to see so many birds’ nests, situated
close to a village, remain unmolested within reach of so many
boisterous children, with their little proprietors and families
fluttering and chirping among them with as great a feeling of
security and gaiety of heart as the children themselves enjoy.

In any part of Europe not a nest of such a colony could have
lived an hour within reach of such a population; for the bayā
bird has no peculiar respect paid to it by the people here, like
the wren and robin-redbreast in England. No boy in India has the
slightest wish to molest birds in their nests; it enters not into
their pastimes, and they have no feeling of pride or pleasure in
it. With us it is different—to discover birds’ nests is one
of the first modes in which a boy exercises his powers, and
displays his love of art. Upon his skill in finding them he is
willing to rest his first claim to superior sagacity and
enterprise. His trophies are his string of eggs; and the eggs most
prized among them are those of the nests that are discovered with
most difficulty, and attained with most danger. The same feeling of
desire to display their skill and enterprise in search after birds’
nests in early life renders the youth of England the enemy almost
of the whole animal creation throughout their after career. The boy
prides himself on his dexterity in throwing a stone or a stick; and
he practises on almost every animal that comes in his way, till he
never sees one without the desire to knock it down, or at least to
hit it; and, if it is lawful to do so, he feels it to be a most
serious misfortune not to have a stone within his reach at the
time. As he grows up, he prides himself upon his dexterity in
shooting, and he never sees a member of the feathered tribe within
shot, without a desire to shoot it, or without regretting that he
has not a gun in his hand to shoot it. That he is not entirely
destitute of sympathy, however, with the animals he maims for his
amusement is sufficiently manifest from his anxiety to put them out
of pain the moment he gets them.

A friend of mine, now no more, Captain Medwin, was once looking
with me at a beautiful landscape painting through a glass. At last
he put aside the glass, saying: ‘You may say what you like,
S—, but the best landscape I know is a fine black
partridge[3] falling before my Joe Manton.’

The following lines of Walter Scott, in his Rokeby, have
always struck me as very beautiful:-

    As yet the conscious pride of art
    Had steel’d him in his treacherous
part;
    A powerful spring of force unguessed
    That hath each gentler mood suppressed,
    And reigned in many a human breast;
    From his that plans the rude campaign,
    To his that wastes the woodland reign,
&c.[4]

Among the people of India it is very different. Children do not
learn to exercise their powers either in discovering and robbing
the nests of birds, or in knocking them down with stones and
staves; and, as they grow up, they hardly ever think of hunting or
shooting for mere amusement. It is with them a matter of business;
the animal they cannot eat they seldom think of molesting.

Some officers were one day pursuing a jackal, with a pack of
dogs, through my grounds. The animal passed close to one of my
guard, who cut him in two with his sword, and held up the reeking
blade in triumph to the indignant cavalcade; who, when they came
up, were ready to eat him alive. ‘What have I done’, said the poor
man, ‘to offend you?’ ‘Have you not killed the jackal?’ shouted the
whipper- in, in a fury.

‘Of course I have; but were you not all trying to kill him?’
replied the poor man. He thought their only object had been to kill
the jackal, as they would have killed a serpent, merely because he
was a mischievous and noisy beast.

The European traveller in India is often in doubt whether the
peacocks, partridges, and ducks, which he finds round populous
villages, are tame or wild, till he asks some of the villagers
themselves, so assured of safety do these creatures become, and so
willing to take advantage of it for the food they find in the
suburbs. They very soon find the difference, however, between the
white-faced visitor and the dark-faced inhabitants. There is a fine
date-tree overhanging a kind of school at the end of one of the
streets in the town of Jubbulpore, quite covered with the nests of
the bayā birds; and they are seen, every day and all day,
fluttering and chirping about there in scores, while the noisy
children at their play fill the street below, almost within arm’s
length of them. I have often thought that such a tree so peopled at
the door of a school in England might work a great revolution in
the early habits and propensities of the youth educated in it. The
European traveller is often amused to see the pariah dog[5]
squatted close in front of the traveller during the whole time he
is occupied in cooking and eating his dinner, under a tree by the
roadside, assured that he shall have at least a part of the last
cake thrown to him by the stranger, instead of a stick or a stone.
The stranger regards him with complacency, as one that reposes a
quiet confidence in his charitable disposition, and flings towards
him the whole or part of his last cake, as if his meal had put him
in the best possible humour with him and all the world.

Notes:

1. December, 1835. The name of the village is given in the
author’s text as Seindpore. It seems to be the place which is
called Siedpore in the next chapter.

2. The common weaver bird, Phoceus baya, Blyth.
‘Ploceinae, the weaver birds. . . . They build nests like a
crucible, with the opening downwards, and usually attach them to
the tender branches of a tree hanging over a well or tank. P.
baya is found throughout India; its nest is made of grasses and
strips of the plantain or date-palm stripped while green. It is
easily tamed and taught some tricks, such as to load and fire a toy
cannon, to pick up a ring, &c,’ (Balfour, Cyclopaedia,
3rd ed., 1885, s.v. ‘Ploceinae’).

3. Francolinus vulgaris; a capital game bird.

4. Canto V, stanza 22, line 3.

5. The author spells the word Pareear. The editor has used the
form now customary. The word is the Tamil appellation of a large
body of the population of Southern India, which stands outside the
orthodox Hindoo castes, but has a caste organization of its own.
Europeans apply the term to the low-caste mongrel dogs which infest
villages and towns throughout India. See Yule and Burnell,
Glossary of Anglo-Indian Words (Hobson-Jobson), in either
edition, s.v.; and Dubois, Hindu Manners, &c., 3rd ed.
(1906, index, s.v.).

CHAPTER 19

Feeding Pilgrims—Marriage of a Stone with a
Shrub.

At Sayyidpur[1] we encamped in a pretty little mango grove, and
here I had a visit from my old friend Jānkī Sewak, the
high priest of the great temple that projects into the Sāgar
lake, and is called Bindrāban.[2] He has two villages rent
free, worth a thousand rupees a year; collects something more
through his numerous disciples, who wander over the country; and
spends the whole in feeding all the members of his fraternity
(Bairāgīs), devotees of Vishnu, as they pass his temple
in their pilgrimages. Every one who comes is considered entitled to
a good meal and a night’s lodging; and he has to feed and lodge
about a hundred a day. He is a man of very pleasing manners and
gentle disposition, and everybody likes him. He was on his return
from the town of Ludhaura,[3] where he had been, at the invitation
of the Rājā of Orchhā, to assist at the celebration
of the marriage of Sālagrām with the Tulasī,[4]
which there takes place every year under the auspices and at the
expense of the Rājā, who must be present.
‘Sālagrāms'[5] are rounded pebbles which contain the
impressions of ammonites, and are washed down into the plains of
India by the rivers from the limestone rocks in which these shells
are imbedded in the mountains of the Himalaya.[6] The Spiti
valley[7] contains an immense deposit of fossil ammonites and
belemnites[8] in limestone rocks, now elevated above sixteen
thousand feet above the level of the sea; and from such beds as
these are brought down the fragments, which, when rounded in their
course, the poor Hindoo takes for representatives of Vishnu, the
preserving god of the Hindoo triad. The Sālagrām is the
only stone idol among the Hindoos that is essentially
sacred, and entitled to divine honours without the ceremonies
of consecration.[9] It is everywhere held most sacred. During the
war against Nepāl,[10] Captain B———, who
commanded a reconnoitring party from the division in which I
served, one day brought back to camp some four or five
Sālagrāms, which he had found at the hut of some priest
within the enemy’s frontier. He called for a large stone and
hammer, and proceeded to examine them. The Hindoos were all in a
dreadful state of consternation, and expected to see the earth open
and swallow up the whole camp, while he sat calmly cracking
their gods with his hammer, as he would have cracked so many
walnuts. The Tulasī is a small sacred shrub (Ocymum
sanctum), which is a metamorphosis of Sītā, the wife
of Rāma, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu.

This little pebble is every year married to this little
shrub; and the high priest told me that on the present
occasion the procession consisted of eight elephants, twelve
hundred camels, four thousand horses, all mounted and elegantly
caparisoned. On the leading elephant of this cortège,
and the most sumptuously decorated, was carried the pebble
god, who was taken to pay his bridal visit (barāt) to the
little shrub goddess. All the ceremonies of a regular
marriage are gone through; and, when completed, the bride and
bridegroom are left to repose together in the temple of
Ludhaura[11] till the next season. ‘Above a hundred thousand
people’, the priest said, ‘were present at the ceremony this year
at the Rājā’s invitation, and feasted upon his
bounty.'[12]

The old man and I got into a conversation upon the characters of
different governments, and their effects upon the people; and he
said that bad governments would sooner or later be always put down
by the deity; and quoted this verse, which I took down with my
pencil:

    Tulasī, gharīb na
sātāe,
    Burī gharīb kī hai;
    Marī khāl ke phūnk se
    Lohā bhasm ho jāe.

‘Oh, Rājā Tulasī! oppress not the poor; for the
groans of the wretched bring retribution from heaven. The
contemptible skin (in the smith’s bellows) in time melts away the
hardest iron.'[13]

On leaving our tents in the morning, we found the ground all
round white with hoar frost, as we had found it for several
mornings before;[14] and a little canary bird, one of the two which
travelled in my wife’s palankeen, having, by the carelessness of
the servants been put upon the top without any covering to the
cage, was killed by the cold, to her great affliction. All attempts
to restore it to life by the warmth of her bosom were
fruitless.

On the 7th[15] we came nine miles to Bamhaurī over a soil
still basaltic, though less rich, reposing upon syenite, which
frequently rises and protrudes its head above the surface, which is
partially and badly cultivated, and scantily peopled. The silent
signs of bad government could not be more manifest. All the
extensive plains, covered with fine long grass, which is rotting in
the ground from want of domestic cattle or distant markets. Here,
as in every other part of Central India, the people have a great
variety of good spontaneous, but few cultivated, grasses. They
understand the character and qualities of these grasses extremely
well. They find some thrive best in dry, and some in wet seasons;
and that of inferior quality is often prized most because it
thrives best when other kinds cannot thrive at all, from an excess
or a deficiency of rain. When cut green they all make good hay, and
have the common denomination of ‘sahīa’. The finest of these
grasses are two which are generally found growing spontaneously
together, and are often cultivated together-‘kēl’ and
‘musēl’; the third ‘parwana’; fourth ‘bhawār’, or
‘gūniār’; fifth ‘sainā’.[16]

Notes:

1. Spelled Siedpore in the author’s text.

2. More correctly Brindāban (Vrindāvana). The name
originally belongs to one of the most sacred spots in India,
situated near Mathurā (Muttra) on the Jumna, and the reputed
scene of the dalliance between Krishna and the milkmaids
(Gopīs); also associated with the legend Rāma.

3. Twenty-seven miles north-west of Tehrī in the
Orchhā State.

4. The Tulasī plant, or basil, Ocymum sanctum, is
‘not merely sacred to Vishnu or to his wife Lakshmī; it is
pervaded by the essence of these deities, and itself worshipped as
a deity and prayed to accordingly. . . . The Tulasī is the
object of more adoration than any other plant at present worshipped
in India. . . .It is to be found in almost every respectable
household throughout India. It is a small shrub, not too big to be
cultivated in a good-sized flower-pot, and often placed in rooms.
Generally, however, it is planted in the courtyard of a well-to-do
man’s house, with a space round it for reverential
circumambulation. In real fact the Tulasī is par
excellence a domestic divinity, or rather, perhaps, a woman’s
divinity’ (M. Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India,
p. 333).

5. The fossil ammonites found in India include at least fifteen
species. They occur between Trichinopoly and Pondicherry as well as
in the Himalayan rocks. They are particularly abundant in the river
Gandak, which rises near Dhaulagiri in Nepāl, and falls into
the Ganges near Patna. The upper course of this river is
consequently called Sālagrāmī. Various forms of the
fossils are supposed to represent various avatārs of
Vishnu (Balfour, Cyclopaedia, 3rd ed., s.v. ‘Ammonite’,
‘Gandak’, ‘Salagrama’; M. Williams, Religious Thought and Life
in India, pp. 69, 349). A good account of the reverence paid to
both sālagrāms and the tulasī plant
will be found in Dubois, Hindu Manners, &c., 3rd ed.
(1906), pp. 648-51.

6. The author writes ‘Himmalah’. The current spelling Himalaya
is correct, but the word should be pronounced Himālaya. It
means ‘abode of snow’.

7. The north-eastern corner of the Punjāb, an elevated
valley along the course of the Spiti or the Li river, a tributary
of the Satlaj.

8. Fossils of the genus Belemnites and related genera are
common, like the ammonites, near Trichinopoly, as well as in the
Himalaya.

9. This statement is not quite correct. The pebbles representing
the Linga of Siva, called Bāna-linga, or Vāna-linga, and
apparently of white quartz, which are found in the Nerbudda river,
enjoy the same distinction. ‘Both are held to be of their own
nature pervaded by the special presence of the deity, and need no
consecration. Offerings made to these pebbles—such, for
instance, as Bilwa leaves laid on the white stone of
Vishnu—are believed to confer extraordinary merit’ (M.
Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, p. 69).

10. In 1814-16.

11. ‘Sadora’ in author’s text, which seems to be a misprint for
Ludora or Ludhaura.

12. The Tulasī shrub is sometimes married to an image of
Krishna, instead of to the sālagrāma, in Western India
(M. Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, p. 334).
Compare the account of the marriage between the mango-tree and the
jasmine, ante, Chapter 5, Note [3].

13. These Hindī verses are incorrectly printed, and loosely
rendered by the author. The translation of the text, after
necessary emendation, is: ‘Tulasī, oppress not the poor; evil
is the lot of the poor. From the blast of the dead hide iron
becomes ashes.’ Mr. W. Crooke informs me that the verses are found
in the Kabīrkī Sakhī, and are attributable to
Kabīr Dās, rather than to Tulasī Dās. But the
authorship of such verses is very uncertain. Mr. Crooke further
observes that the lines as given in the text do not scan, and that
the better version is:

    Durbal ko na satāiye,
    Jāki māti hai;
    Mūē khāl ke sāns se
    Sār bhasm ho jāe.

Sār means iron. The author was, of course, mistaken
in supposing the poet Tulasī Dās to be a Rājā.
As usual in Hindī verse, the poet addresses himself by
name.

14. Such slight frosts are common in Bundēlkhand,
especially near the rivers, in January, but only last for a few
mornings. They often cause great damage to the more delicate crops.
The weather becomes hot in February.

15. December, 1835.

16. ‘Musēl’ is a very sweet-scented grass, highly esteemed
as fodder. It belongs to the genus Anthistiria; the species
is either cimicina or prostrata. ‘Bhawār’ is
probably the ‘bhaunr’ of Edgeworth’s list, Anthistiria
scandens. I cannot identify the other grasses named in the
text. The haycocks in Bundēlkhand are a pleasant sight to
English eyes. Edgeworth’s list of plants found in the
Bāndā district, as revised by Messrs. Waterfield and
Atkinson, is given in N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. i, pp.
78-86.

CHAPTER 20

The Men-Tigers.

 Rām Chand Rāo, commonly called the
Sarīmant, chief of Deorī,[1] here overtook me. He came
out from Sāgar to visit me at Dhamonī[2] and, not
reaching that place in time, came on after me. He held Deorī
under the Peshwā, as the Sāgar chief held Sāgar, for
the payment of the public establishments kept up by the local
administration. It yielded him about ten thousand a year, and, when
we took possession of the country, he got an estate in the
Sāgar district, in rent-free tenure, estimated at fifteen
hundred a year. This is equal to about six thousand pounds a year
in England. The tastes of native gentlemen lead them always to
expend the greater part of their incomes in the wages of trains of
followers of all descriptions, and in horses, elephants, &c.;
and labour and the subsistence of labour are about four times
cheaper in India than in England. By the breaking up of public
establishments, and consequent diminution of the local demand for
agricultural produce, the value of land throughout all Central
India, after the termination of the Mahrātha War in 1817, fell
by degrees thirty per cent.; and, among the rest, that of my poor
friend the Sarīmant. While I had the civil charge of the
Sāgar district in 1831 I represented this case of hardship;
and Government, in the spirit of liberality which has generally
characterized their measures in this part of India, made up to him
the difference between what he actually received and what they had
intended to give him; and he has ever since felt grateful to me.[3]
He is a very small man, not more than five feet high, but he has
the handsomest face I have almost ever seen, and his manners are
those of the most perfect native gentleman. He came to call upon me
after breakfast, and the conversation turned upon the number of
people that had of late been killed by tigers between Sāgar
and Deorī, his ancient capital, which lies about midway
between Sāgar and the Nerbudda river.

One of his followers, who stood beside his chair, said[4] that
‘when a tiger had killed one man he was safe, for the spirit of the
man rode upon his head, and guided him from all danger. The spirit
knew very well that the tiger would be watched for many days at the
place where he had committed the homicide, and always guided him
off to some other more secure place, when he killed other men
without any risk to himself. He did not exactly know why the spirit
of the man should thus befriend the beast that had killed him;
but’, added he, ‘there is a mischief inherent in spirits; and the
better the man the more mischievous is his ghost, if means are not
taken to put him to rest.’ This is the popular and general belief
throughout India; and it is supposed that the only sure mode of
destroying a tiger who has killed many people is to begin by making
offerings to the spirits of his victims, and thereby depriving him
of their valuable services.[5] The belief that men are turned into
tigers by eating of a root is no less general throughout India.

The Sarīmant, on being asked by me what he thought of the
matter, observed ‘there was no doubt much truth in what the man
said: but he was himself of opinion that the tigers which now
infest the wood from Sāgar to Deorī were of a different
kind—in fact, that they were neither more nor less than men
turned into tigers—a thing which took place in the woods of
Central India much more often than people were aware of. The only
visible difference between the two’, added the Sarīmant, ‘is
that the metamorphosed tiger has no tail, while the
bora, or ordinary tiger, has a very long one. In the jungle
about Deorī’, continued he, ‘there is a root, which, if a man
eat of, he is converted into a tiger on the spot; and if, in this
state, he can eat of another, he becomes a man again—a
melancholy instance of the former of which’, said he, ‘occurred, I
am told, in my own father’s family when I was an infant. His
washerman, Raghu, was, like all washermen, a great drunkard; and,
being seized with a violent desire to ascertain what a man felt in
the state of a tiger, he went one day to the jungle and brought
home two of these roots, and desired his wife to stand by with one
of them, and the instant she saw him assume the tiger shape, to
thrust it into his mouth. She consented, the washerman ate his
root, and became instantly a tiger; but his wife was so terrified
at the sight of her husband in this shape that she ran off with the
antidote in her hand. Poor old Raghu took to the woods, and there
ate a good many of his old friends from neighbouring villages; but
he was at last shot, and recognized from the circumstance of his
having no tail. You may be quite sure,’ concluded
Sarīmant, ‘when you hear of a tiger without a tail, that it is
some unfortunate man who has eaten of that root, and of all the
tigers he will be found the most mischievous.’

How my friend had satisfied himself of the truth of this story I
know not, but he religiously believes it, and so do all his
attendants and mine; and, out of a population of thirty thousand
people in the town of Sāgar, not one would doubt the story of
the washerman if he heard it.

I was one day talking with my friend the Rājā of
Maihar.[6] on the road between Jubbulpore and Mirzapore, on the
subject of the number of men who had been lately killed by tigers
at the Katrā Pass on that road,[7] and the best means of
removing the danger. ‘Nothing’, said the Rājā, ‘could be
more easy or more cheap than the destruction of these tigers, if
they were of the ordinary sort; but the tigers that kill men by
wholesale, as these do, are, you may be sure, men themselves
converted into tigers by the force of their science, and such
animals are of all the most unmanageable.’

‘And how is it. Rājā Sāhib, that these men
convert themselves into tigers?’

‘Nothing’, said he, ‘is more easy than this to persons who have
once acquired the science; but how they learn it, or what it is, we
unlettered men know not.’

‘There was once a high priest of a large temple, in this very
valley of Maihar, who was in the habit of getting himself converted
into a tiger by the force of this science, which he had thoroughly
acquired. He had a necklace, which one of his disciples used to
throw over his neck the moment the tiger’s form became fully
developed. He had, however, long given up the practice, and all his
old disciples had gone off on their pilgrimages to distant shrines,
when he was one day seized with a violent desire to take his old
form of the tiger. He expressed the wish to one of his new
disciples, and demanded whether he thought he might rely on his
courage to stand by and put on the necklace. ‘Assuredly you may’,
said the disciple; ‘such is my faith in you, and in the God we
serve, that I fear nothing.’ The high priest upon this put the
necklace into his hand with the requisite instructions, and
forthwith began to change his form. The disciple stood trembling in
every limb, till he heard him give a roar that shook the whole
edifice, when he fell flat upon his face, and dropped the necklace
on the floor. The tiger bounded over him, and out of the door, and
infested all the roads leading to the temple for many years
afterwards.’

‘Do you think, Rājā Sahib, that the old high priest is
one of the tigers at the Katrā Pass?’

‘No, I do not; but I think they may be all men who have become
imbued with a little too much of the high priest’s
science—when men once acquire this science they can’t
help exercising it, though it be to their own ruin, and that of
others.’

‘But, supposing them to be ordinary tigers, what is the simple
plan you propose to put a stop to their depredations,
Rājā Sahib?’

‘I propose’, said he, ‘to have the spirits that guide them
propitiated by proper prayers and offerings; for the spirit of
every man or woman who has been killed by a tiger rides upon his
head, or runs before him, and tells him where to go to get prey,
and to avoid danger. Get some of the Gonds, or wild people from the
jungles, who are well skilled in these matters—give them ten
or twenty rupees, and bid them go and raise a small shrine, and
there sacrifice to these spirits. The Gonds will tell them that
they shall on this shrine have regular worship, and good sacrifices
of fowls, goats, and pigs, every year at least, if they will but
relinquish their offices with the tigers and be quiet. If this is
done, I pledge myself’, said the Raja, ‘that the tigers will soon
get killed themselves, or cease from killing men. If they do not,
you may be quite sure that they are not ordinary tigers, but men
turned into tigers, or that the Gonds have appropriated all you
gave them to their own use, instead of applying it to conciliate
the spirits of the unfortunate people.'[8]

Notes:

1. Deorī, in the Sāgar district, about forty miles
south-east of Sāgar. In 1767, the town and attached tract
called the Panj Mahāl were bestowed by the Peshwā, rent-
free, on Dhōndo Dattātraya, a Marātha pundit,
ancestor of the author’s friend. The Panj Mahal was finally made
part of British territory by the treaty with Sindhia in 1860, and
constitutes the District called Pānch Māhals in the
Northern Division of the Bombay Presidency. The vernacular word
pānch like the Persian panj, means ‘five’. The
title Sarīmant appears to be a popular pronunciation of the
Sanskrit srīmant or srīmān,
‘fortunate’, and is still used by Marāthā nobles.

2. Ante, Chapter 16, note 6. The name is here erroneously
printed ‘Dhamoree’ in the author’s text.

3. He had good reason for his gratitude, inasmuch as the
depression in rents was merely temporary.

4. An Indian chief is generally accompanied into the room by a
confidential follower, who frequently relieves his master of the
trouble of talking, and answers on his behalf all questions.

5. When Agrippina, in her rage with her son Nero, threatens to
take her stepson, Britannicus, to the camp of the Legion, and there
assert his right to the throne, she invokes the spirit of his
father, whom she had poisoned, and the manes of the Silani, whom
she had murdered. ‘Simul attendere manus, aggerere probra;
consecratum Claudium, infernos Silanorum manes invocare, et tot
invita fari nova.’-(Tacitus, lib, xviii, sec. 14.) [W. H. S.] The
quotation is from the Annals. Another reading of the
concluding words is ‘et tot irrita facinora’, which gives much
better sense. In the author’s text ‘aggerere’ is printed
‘aggere’.

6. A small principality, detached from the Pannā State. Its
chief town is about one hundred miles north-east of Jubbulpore, on
the route from Allahabad to Jubbulpore. The state is now traversed
by the East Indian Railway. It is under the superintendence of the
Political Agent of Baghēlkhand, resident at
Rīwā.

7. This pass is sixty-three miles south-east of Allahabad, on
the road from that city to Rīwā.

8. These myths are based on the well-known facts that man-eating
tigers are few, and exceptionally wary and cunning. The conditions
which predispose a tiger to man-eating have been much discussed. It
seems to be established that the animals which seek human prey are
generally, though not invariably, those which, owing to old wounds
or other physical defects, are unable to attack with confidence the
stronger animals. The conversations given in the text are excellent
illustrations of the mode of formation of modern myths, and of the
kind of reasoning which satisfies the mind of the unconscious myth-
maker.

The text may be compared with the following passage from the
Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh (vol. i, p. 124): ‘I
asked him (the Rājā of Balrāmpur), whether the
people in the Tarāi forest were still afraid to point out
tigers to sportsmen. “I was lately out with a party after a tiger”,
he said, “which had killed a cowherd, but his companions refused to
point out any trace of him, saying that their relative’s spirit
must be now riding upon his head, to guide him from all danger, and
we should have no chance of shooting him. We did shoot him,
however”, said the Rājā exultingly, “and they were all
afterwards very glad of it. The tigers in the Tarāi do not
often kill men, sir, for they find plenty of deer and cattle to
eat,”‘

CHAPTER 21

Burning of Deorī by a Freebooter—A
Suttee.

Sarīmant had been one of the few who escaped from the
flames which consumed his capital of Deorī in the month of
April 1813, and were supposed to have destroyed thirty thousand
souls. I asked him to tell me how this happened, and he referred me
to his attendant, a learned old pundit, Rām Chand, who stood
by his side, as he was himself, he said, then only five years of
age, and could recollect nothing of it.

‘Mardān Singh,’ said the pundit, ‘the father of
Rājā Arpan Singh, whom you saw at Seorī, was then
our neighbour, reigning over Garhā Kotā;[1] and he had a
worthless nephew, Zālim Singh, who had collected together an
army of five thousand men, in the hope of getting a little
principality for himself in the general scramble for dominion
incident on the rise of the Pindhārīs and Amīr
Khan,[2] and the destruction of all balance of power among the
great sovereigns of Central India. He came to attack our capital,
which was an emporium of considerable trade and the seat of many
useful manufactures, in the expectation of being able to squeeze
out of us a good sum to aid him in his enterprise. While his troops
blocked up every gate, fire was, by accident, set to the fence of
some man’s garden within. There had been no rain for six months;
and everything was so much dried up that the flames spread rapidly;
and, though there was no wind when they began, it soon blew a gale.
The Sarīmant was then a little boy with his mother in the
fortress, where she lived with his father[3] and nine other
relations. The flames soon extended to the fortress, and the
powder- magazine blew up. The house in which they lived was burned
down, and every soul, except the lieutenant [sic] himself,
perished in it. His mother tried to bear him off in her arms, but
fell down in her struggle to get out with him and died. His nurse,
Tulsī Kurmin,[4] snatched him up, and ran with him outside of
the fortress to the bank of the river, where she made him over
unhurt to Harirām, the Mārwārī merchant.[5] He
was mounted on a good horse, and, making off across the river, he
carried him safely to his friends at Gaurjhāmar; but poor
Tulsī the Kurmin fell down exhausted when she saw her charge
safe, and died.

‘The wind appeared to blow in upon the poor devoted city from
every side; and the troops of Zālim Singh, who at first
prevented the people from rushing out at the gates, made off in a
panic at the horrors before them. All our establishments had been
driven into the city at the approach of Zālim Singh’s troops;
and scores of elephants, hundreds of camels, and thousands of
horses and ponies perished in the flames, besides twenty-five
thousand souls. Only about five thousand persons escaped out of
thirty thousand, and these were reduced to beggary and wretchedness
by the loss of their dearest relations and their property. At the
time the flames first began to spread, an immense crowd of people
had assembled under the fortress on the bank of the Sonār
river to see the widow of a soldier burn herself. Her husband had
been shot by one of Zālim Singh’s soldiers in the morning; and
before midday she was by the side of his body on the funeral pile.
People, as usual, begged her to tell them what would happen, and
she replied, “The city will know in less than four hours”; in less
than four hours the whole city had been reduced to ashes; and we
all concluded that, since the event was so clearly foretold, it
must have been decreed by God.'[6]

‘No doubt it was,’ said Sarīmant; ‘how could it otherwise
happen? Do not all events depend upon His will? Had it not been His
will to save me, how could poor Tulsī the Kurmin have carried
me upon her shoulders through such a scene as this, when every
other member of our family perished?’

‘No doubt’, said Rām Chand, ‘all these things are brought
about by the will of God, and it is not for us to ask why.'[7]

I have heard this event described by many other people, and I
believe the account of the old pundit to be a very fair one.

One day, in October 1833, the horse of the district surgeon,
Doctor Spry, as he was mounting him, reared, fell back with his
head upon a stone, and died upon the spot. The doctor was not much
hurt, and the little Sarīmant called a few days after, and
offered his congratulations upon his narrow escape. The cause of so
quiet a horse rearing at this time, when he had never been known to
do so before, was discussed; and he said that there could be no
doubt that the horse, or the doctor himself, must have seen some
unlucky face before he mounted that morning—that he had been
in many places in his life, but in none where a man was liable to
see so many ugly or unfortunate faces; and, for his part, he never
left his house till an hour after sunrise, lest he should encounter
them.[8]

Many natives were present, and every one seemed to consider the
Sarīmant’s explanation of the cause quite satisfactory and
philosophical. Some days after, Spry was going down to sleep in the
bungalow where the accident happened. His native assistant and all
his servants came and prayed that he would not attempt to sleep in
the bungalow, as they were sure the horse must have been frightened
by a ghost, and quoted several instances of ghosts appearing to
people there. He, however, slept in the bungalow, and, to their
great astonishment, saw no ghost and suffered no evil.[9]

Notes:

1. A fortress, twenty-five miles cast of Sāgar, captured by
a British force under General Watson in October 1818, For
Seorī and Rājā Arjun Singh see ante, Chapter
17, text by notes 1 and 4.

2. Amīr Khān, a leader of predatory horse, has been
justly described as ‘one of the most atrocious villains that India
ever produced’. He first came into notice in 1804, as an officer in
Holkar’s service, and in the following year opposed Lord Lake at
Bharatpur. A treaty made with him in 1817 put an end to his
activity. The Pindhārīs were organized bands of mounted
robbers, who desolated Northern and Central India during the period
of anarchy which followed the dissolution of the Moghal empire.
They were associated with the Marāthās in the war which
terminated with the capture of Asīrgarh in April 1819. In the
same year the Pindhārī forces ceased to exist as a
distinct and recognized, body.

    My father was an Afghān, and came
from Kandahar:
    He rode with Nawāb Amir Khan in the
old Marāthā war:
    From the Dekhan to the Himalay, five
hundred of one clan,
    They asked no leave of prince or chief as
they swept thro’ Hindusthan.

(Sir A. Lyall, ‘The Old Pindaree’; in Verses written in
India, London, 1889).

3. Named Govind Rāo. The proper name of the Sarīmant
was Rāmchand Rāo (C.P. Gazetteer, 1870).

4. Kurmin is the feminine of Kurmī, the name of a widely
spread and most industrious agricultural caste, closely connected,
at least in Bundēlkhand, with the similar Lodhī
caste.

5. Mārwār, or Jodhpur, is one of the leading states in
Rājputāna. It supplies the rest of India with many of the
keenest merchants and bankers.

6. See ante, Chapter 4, note 6, for remarks on the
supposed prophetic gifts of satī women.

7. Such feelings of resignation to the Divine will, or fate, are
common alike to Hindoos and Musalmāns.

8. ‘One of a wife’s duties should be to keep all bad omens out
of her husband’s way, or manage to make him look at something lucky
in the early morning. . . . Different lists of inauspicious objects
are given, which, if looked upon in the early morning, might cause
disaster’ (M. Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India,
p. 397).

9. Dr. Spry died in 1842, and his estate was administered by the
author. The doctor’s works are described ante, Chapter 14,
note 16.

CHAPTER 22

Interview with the Rājā who marries the
Stone to the Shrub—Order of the Moon and the Fish.

On the 8th,[1] after a march of twelve miles, we readied
Tehrī, the present capital of the Rājā of
Orchhā.[2] Our road lay over an undulating surface of soil
composed of the detritus of the syenitic rock, and poor, both from
its quality and want of depth. About three miles from our last
territory we entered the boundary of the Orchhā
Rājā’s territory, at the village of Aslōn, which has
a very pretty little fortified castle, built upon ground slightly
elevated in the midst of an open grass plain.

This, and all the villages we have lately passed, are built upon
the bare back of the syenitic rock, which seems to rise to the
surface in large but gentle swells, like the broad waves of the
ocean in a calm after a storm. A great difference appeared to me to
be observable between the minds and manners of the people among
whom we were now travelling, and those of the people of the
Sāgar and Nerbudda territories. They seemed here to want the
urbanity and intelligence we find among our subjects in the latter
quarters.

The apparent stupidity of the people when questioned upon points
the most interesting to them, regarding their history, their
agriculture, their tanks, and temples, was most provoking; and
their manners seemed to me more rude and clownish than those of
people in any other part of India I had travelled over. I asked my
little friend the Sarīmant, who rode with me, what he thought
of this.

‘I think’, said he, ‘that it arises from the harsh character of
the government under which they live; it makes every man wish to
appear a fool, in order that he may be thought a beggar and not
worth the plundering.’

‘It strikes me, my friend Sarīmant, that their government
has made them in reality the beggars and the fools that they appear
to be.’

‘God only knows’, said Sarīmant; ‘certain it is that they
are neither in mind nor in manners what the people of our districts
are.’

The Rājā had no notice of our approach till intimation
of it reached him at Ludhaura, the day before we came in. He was
there resting, and dismissing the people after the ceremonies of
the marriage between the Salagrām and the Tulasī.
Ludhaura is twenty-seven miles north-west of Tehrī, on the
opposite side from that on which I was approaching. He sent off two
men on camels with a ‘kharītā’ (letter),[3] requesting
that I would let him know my movements, and arrange a meeting in a
manner that might prevent his appearing wanting in respect and
hospitality; that is, in plain terms, which he was too polite to
use, that I would consent to remain one stage from his capital,
till he could return and meet me half-way, with all due pomp and
ceremony. These men reached me at Bamhaurī,[4] a distance of
thirty-nine miles, in the evening, and I sent back a
kharītā, which reached him by relays of camels before
midnight. He set out for his capital to receive me, and, as I would
not wait to be met half-way in due form, he reached his palace, and
we reached our tents at the same time, under a salute from his two
brass field-pieces.

We halted at Tehrī on the 9th, and about eleven o’clock the
Rājā came to pay his visit of congratulation, with a
magnificent cortège of elephants, camels, and horses,
all mounted and splendidly caparisoned, and the noise of his band
was deafening. I had had both my tents pitched, and one of them
handsomely fitted up, as it always is, for occasions of ceremony
like the present. He came to within twenty paces of the door on his
elephant, and from its back, as it sat down, he entered his
splendid litter, without alighting on the ground.[5] In this
vehicle he was brought to my tent door, where I received him, and,
after the usual embraces, conducted him up through two rows of
chairs, placed for his followers of distinction and my own, who are
always anxious to assist in ceremonies like these.

 At the head of this lane we sat upon chairs placed across,
and facing down the middle of the two rows; and we conversed upon
all the subjects usually introduced on such occasions, but more
especially upon the august ceremonies of the marriage of the
Salagrām with the Tulasī, in which his highness had been
so piously engaged at Ludhaura.[6] After he had sat with me
an hour and a half he took his leave, and I conducted him to the
door, whence he was carried to his elephant in his litter, from
which he mounted without touching the ground.

This litter is called a ‘nālkī’. It is one of the
three great insignia which the Mogul Emperors of Delhi conferred
upon independent princes of the first class, and could never be
used by any person upon whom, or upon whose ancestors, they had not
been so conferred. These were the nālkī, the order of the
Fish, and the fan of the peacock’s feathers. These insignia could
be used only by the prince who inherited the sovereignty of the one
on whom they had been originally conferred. The order of the Fish,
or Mahī Marātib, was first instituted by Khusrū
Parvīz, King of Persia, and grandson of the celebrated
Naushīrvān the Just. Having been deposed by his general,
Bahrām, Khusrū fled for protection to the Greek emperor,
Maurice, whose daughter, Shīrīn, he married, and he was
sent back to Persia, with an army under the command of Narses, who
placed him on the throne of his ancestors in the year A.D. 591.[7]
He ascertained from his astrologer, Araz Khushasp, that when he
ascended the throne the moon was in the constellation of the Fish,
and he gave orders to have two balls made of polished steel, which
were to be called Kaukabas (planets),[8] and mounted on long poles.
These two planets, with large fish made of gold, upon a third pole
in the centre, were ordered to be carried in all regal processions
immediately after the king, and before the prime minister, whose
cortège always followed immediately after that of the
king. The two kaūkabas are now generally made of copper, and
plated, and in the shape of a jar, instead of quite round as at
first; but the fish is still made of gold. Two planets are always
considered necessary to one fish, and they are still carried in all
processions between the prince and his prime minister.

The court of this prince Khusrū Pārvīz was
celebrated throughout the East for its splendour and magnificence;
and the chaste love of the poet Farhad for his beautiful queen
Shīrīn is the theme of almost as many poems in the East
as that of Petrarch’s for Laura is in the West. Nūh
Samānī, who ascended the throne of Persia after the
Sassanians,[9] ascertained that the moon was in the sign Leo at the
time of his accession, and ordered that the gold head of a lion
should thenceforward accompany the fishes, and the two balls, in
all royal processions. The Persian order of knighthood is,
therefore, that of the Fish, the Moon, and the Lion, and not the
Lion and Sun, as generally supposed. The emperors of the house of
Taimūr in Hindustan assumed the right of conferring the order
upon all whom they pleased, and they conferred it upon the great
territorial sovereigns of the country without distinction as to
religion. He only who inherits the sovereignty can wear the order,
and I believe no prince would venture to wear or carry the order
who was not generally reputed to have received the investiture from
one of the emperors of Delhi.[10]

As I could not wait another day, it was determined that I should
return his visit in the afternoon; and about four o’clock we set
out upon our elephant—Lieutenant Thomas, Sarīmant, and
myself, attended by all my troopers and those of Sarīmant. We
had our silver-stick men with us; but still all made a sorry figure
compared with the splendid cortège of the
Rājā. We dismounted at the foot of the stairs leading to
the Rājā’s hall of audience, and were there met by his
two chief officers of state, who conducted us to the entrance of
the hall, when we were received by the Rājā himself, who
led us up through two rows of chairs laid out exactly as mine had
been in the morning. In front were assembled a party of native
comedians, who exhibited a few scenes of the insolence of office in
the attendants of great men, and the obtrusive importunity of
place- seekers, in a manner that pleased us much more than a dance
would have done. Conversation was kept up very well, and the visit
passed off without any feeling of ennui, or anything whatever to
recollect with regret. The ladies looked at us from their
apartments through gratings, and without our being able to see them
very distinctly. We were anxious to see the tombs of the late
Rājā, the elder brother of the present, who lately died,
and that of his son, which are in progress in a very fine garden
outside the city walls, and, in consequence, we did not sit above
half an hour. The Rājā conducted us to the head of the
stairs, and the same two officers attended us to the bottom, and
mounted their horses, and attended us to the tombs.

After the dust of the town raised by the immense crowd that
attended us, and the ceremonies of the day, a walk in this
beautiful garden was very agreeable, and I prolonged it till dark.
The Rājā had given orders to have all the cisterns filled
during our stay, under the impression that we should wish to see
the garden; and, as soon as we entered, the jets d’eau
poured into the air their little floods from a hundred mouths. Our
old cicerone told us that, if we would take the old capital of
Orchhā in our way, we might there see the thing in perfection,
and amidst the deluges of the rains of Sāwān and
Bhādon (July and August) see the lightning and hear the
thunder. The Rājās of this, the oldest principality in
Bundēlkhand, were all formerly buried or burned at the old
capital of Orchhā, even after they had changed their residence
to Tehrī. These tombs over the ashes of the Rājā,
his wife, and son, are the first that have been built at
Tehrī, where their posterity are all to repose in future.

Notes:

1. December, 1835.

2. The State of Orchhā, also known as Tehrī or
Tīkamgarh, situated to the south of the Jhānsī
district, is the oldest and the highest in rank of the Bundela
principalities. The town of Tehrī is seventy-two miles north-
west of Sāgar. The town of Orchhā, founded in A.D. 1531,
is 131 miles north of Sāgar, and about forty miles from
Tehrī. Tīkamgarh is the fort of Tehrī.

3. A kharītā is a letter enclosed in a bag of
rich brocade, contained in another of fine muslin. The mouth is
tied with a string of silk, to which hangs suspended the great
seal, which is a flat round mass of sealing-wax, with the seal
impressed on each side of it. This is the kind of letter which
passes between natives of great rank in India, and between them and
the public functionaries of Government. [W. H. S.]

4. Ante, Chapter 19, after note [15].

5. The Rājā’s unwillingness to touch the ground is an
example of a very widespread and primitive belief. ‘Two of those
rules or taboos by which . . . the life of divine kings or priests
is regulated. The first is . . . that the divine personage may not
touch the ground with his foot.’ This prohibition applies to the
Mikado of Japan and many other sacred personages. ‘The second rule
is that the sun may not shine upon the sacred person.’ This second
rule explains the use of the umbrella as a royal appendage in India
and Burma. (Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1st ed., vol. ii, pp.
224, 225.)

6 Ante, Chapter 19, note 3.

7. During the time he remained the guest of the emperor he
resided at Hierapolis, and did not visit Constantinople. The Greeks
do not admit that Shīrīn was the daughter of Maurice,
though a Roman by birth and a Christian by religion. The Persians
and Turks speak of her as the emperor’s daughter. [W. H. S.]
Khusrū Pārvīz (Eberwiz), or Khusrū II, reigned
as King of Persia from A.D. 591 to 628. In the course of his wars
he took Jerusalem, and reduced Egypt, and a large part of northern
Africa, extending for a time the bounds of the Persian empire to
the Aegean and the Nile. Khusrū I, surnamed
Naushīrvān, or (more correctly) Anushīrvān,
reigned from A.D. 531 to 579. His successful wars with the Romans
and his vigorous internal administration captivated the Oriental
imagination, and he is generally spoken of as Ādil, or The
Just. His name has become proverbial, and to describe a superior as
rivalling Naushīrvān in justice is a commonplace of
flattery. The prophet Muhammad was born during his reign, and was
proud of the fact. The alleged expedition of Naushīrvān
into India is discredited by the best modern writers. Gibbon tells
the story of the wars between the two Khusrūs and the Romans
in his forty- sixth chapter, and a critical history of the reigns
of both Khusrū (Khosrau) I and Khusrū II will be found in
Professor Rawlinson’s Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy
(London, 1876). European authors have, until recently, generally
written the name Khusrū in its Greek form as Chosroes. The
name of Shīrīn is also written Sira.

‘With the name of Shirin and the rock of Bahistun the Persians
have associated one of those poetic romances so dear to the
national genius. Ferhad, the most famous sculptor of his time, who
was very likely employed by Chosroes II to execute these
bas-reliefs, is said in the legend to have fallen madly in love
with Shīrīn, and to have received a promise of her from
the king, if he would cut through the rock of Behistun, and divert
a stream to the Kermanshah plain. The lover set to work, and had
all but completed his gigantic enterprise (of which the remains,
however interpreted, are still to be seen), when he was falsely
informed by an emissary from the king of his lady’s death. In
despair he leaped from the rock, and was dashed to pieces. The
legend of the unhappy lover is familiar throughout the East, and is
used to explain many traces of rock- cutting or excavation as far
east as Beluchistan’ (Persia and the Persian Question, by
the Hon. George N. Curzon, M.P. (London, 1892), vol. i, p. 562,
note. See also Malcolm, History of Persia, vol. i, p.
129).