Eight Lectures on India

|1.
Map of Bengal.| From Burma we take steamer again and cross the sea to Bengal, the Metropolitan Province of India. The heart of Bengal is one of the largest deltas in the world, a great plain of moist silt brought down by the rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra from the Himalaya mountains. But along the borders of the Province, and especially to the west, much hill country is included.

The map shows to the north the high tableland of Tibet, edged by the Himalaya range, whose southern slopes descend steeply, but with many foot hills, to the level, low-lying plains of the two great river valleys. Eastward of Bengal there is a ridge, rising to heights of more than six thousand feet, densely forested, which separates the Irawaddy valley of Burma from the plains of India. This ridge throws out a spur westward, which near its end rises a little into the Garo hills. The deeply trenched narrow valley of the Brahmaputra, known as the Assam Valley, lies between the Garo hills and the Himalayas. Away in the west of Bengal is another hill spur, bearing the name of Rajmahal, which forms the northeastern point of the plateau of Southern India. The Ganges flows through the plain bounded southward by this plateau and northward by the Himalayas. A broad lowland gateway is left between the Garo and the Rajmahal hills, and through this, on either hand, the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers turn southward and converge gradually until they join to form the vast Megna estuary. The country which lies west of the Megna is the Ganges delta, traversed by many minor channels which branch from the right bank of the river before it enters the Megna. East of the Megna is another deltaic land whose silt is derived in the main from the Garo hills. It is said that the highest rainfall in the world occurs in these hills, when the monsoon sweeps northward from the Bay of Bengal and blows against their southern face. The rainfall on a single day in the rainy season is often as great as the whole annual rainfall of London. Little wonder that there is abundance of silt for the formation of the fertile plains below.

The approach to the coast, as may be concluded from this geographical description, presents little of interest. As you enter the Hooghly river, the westernmost of the deltaic channels, you see broad grey mud banks, with here and there a palm tree. From time to time, as the ship passes some more solid ground, there are villages of thatched huts surrounded by banana plantations with tall broad green leaves.

|2.
Approaching Calcutta.| |3.
Coolie Emigrant Ship on the Hooghly.| |4.
The Hooghly at Calcutta, showing the High Court.| |5.
The Same.| Calcutta, the chief port and capital of India, is placed no less than eighty miles up the Hooghly, on the eastern bank. As we approach it we pass mills and factories with tall chimneys throwing out black smoke. A steamer crosses us, outward bound, carrying, as we are told, coolies going to work in South Africa; for the basin of the Ganges, unlike Burma, is one of the most densely peopled lands in the world, and sends forth annually some thousand emigrants. At last we find ourselves amid a throng of shipping, and our steamer ties up to a buoy in the turbid river, with the great city of Calcutta on the eastern bank, and the large industrial town of Howrah on the western bank, and not a hill in sight round all the horizon, only the great dome of the Post Office rising white in the sunshine.

|6.
Plan of Calcutta.| |7.
Palm Avenue, Calcutta Botanical Gardens.| Let us examine the plan of this mighty city with more than a million inhabitants, second in the Empire in population, and one of the twelve largest towns in the world. The Hooghly flows southward. On its eastern bank stands Fort William, a fortress which with its outworks occupies a space of nearly a thousand acres. Around, to the north, the east, and the south of the fort, is a wide green plain, the Maidan, separating the fort from the city. From north to south the Maidan extends for some two miles, and it is about a mile broad from east to west. In its southern end is the racecourse, where are held at Christmas time the races, the principal social event of Calcutta life. To the east of the Maidan is the European quarter, with its hotels, and clubs, and private houses. To the north, in a garden, is Government House, the residence of the Viceroy of India. Beside Government House, and also facing the Maidan, are the High Court of Justice and the Town Hall. Behind Government House is Dalhousie Square, occupied by a green, in the centre of which is a large tank. Facing this square is the Bengal Government Secretariat, between which and the river are the Post Office and the Customs House. Away to the north is the great native city. One bridge only connects Calcutta with the industrial town of Howrah, where are jute mills and great engineering works. In Howrah also is the terminus of the East Indian Railway. A hundred years ago Howrah was but a small village; to-day it contains some 160,000 people. Finally to the south of Howrah on the west bank of the river are the celebrated Botanical Gardens, containing many great palms, and most notable of all a banyan tree whose circumference measures nearly a thousand feet. North of Calcutta, and on the east bank of the Hooghly, is Barrackpur, with the country house of the Viceroy of India. There is a military cantonment at Barrackpur, and also a garrison in Fort William.

|8.
The Howrah Bridge, Calcutta.| |9.
Scene from the Howrah Bridge.| Nothing impresses the stranger in Calcutta more than the density of life in this populous city, the focus of a great and fertile province. At no spot is it more evident than on the Howrah Bridge, where from morning to night a close throng crosses and re-crosses. From the approach to the bridge we look down on a crowd bathing in the muddy but sacred water. Cheek by jowl with the busy commercial traffic of the bridge, we have here the religion of the East. Purified by the bath, and clothed again, the bather sits in the crowd while for a few pies, or say a farthing, his sect mark is painted afresh on his forehead.

|10.
Calcutta from Howrah across the Hooghly.| The buildings of Calcutta are worthy of the capital rank of the city, but they are of European design, for Calcutta is a modern city. Fort William was so named from King William III., in whose reign, little more than two centuries ago, Job Charnock, a factor or commercial representative of the East India Company, bought the little village Kalikata, probably so named from a local shrine of the goddess Kali. There he built, on the site of the present Customs House, the first Fort William. Within ten years the population had grown to some ten thousand, and it has never ceased growing to this day, although at one time, in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was an episode in the history of the place which for a time somewhat checked its advance. Suraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, quarrelled with the English at Fort William, and finally attacked them. Most of them escaped down the river, but a hundred and forty-six were taken prisoners when Fort William fell, and were confined for a night in a small cell measuring 22 feet by 14 feet, and some 18 feet high. It was at the end of the hot season, and only twenty-three of the prisoners came out alive the next morning. This tragedy is known in history as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Soon afterwards Colonel Clive, the same Clive who as a Captain defended Arcot in the south of India, arrived with reinforcements and recaptured Calcutta. Fort William was rebuilt on a larger scale, and in a position a little south of the original site.

Suraj-ud-Daulah quarrelled with the East India Company again, and Clive led an army against him into the north of Bengal, and defeated him and his French allies in the famous battle of Plassey. The British force amounted to only three thousand men, of whom but two hundred were English, whereas the Nawab had an army of nearly forty thousand. In 1765 the whole of Bengal was annexed by the East India Company, and from 1772 was ruled from Calcutta. Suraj-ud-Daulah’s capital had been at a place called Murshidabad, a hundred miles to the north of Calcutta.

|11.
Black Hole Monument, Calcutta.| |12.
The Marble Pavement, Black Hole, Calcutta.| Here, at the corner of Dalhousie Square, is the Black Hole Monument, erected by Lord Curzon when Viceroy of India, in the year 1902, upon the site of the original monument which was set up by one of the twenty-three survivors; and here is a marble pavement marking the exact position of the Black Hole.

|13.
Bengal Government Office, Calcutta.| |14.
The High Court, Calcutta.| |15.
Eastern Gateway, Government House, Calcutta.| |16.
Government House, Calcutta.| |17.
The Same.| |18.
Imperial Museum, Calcutta.| We have next the great red brick building in Dalhousie Square known as the Bengal Secretariat. Not far away are the public offices of the Government of India, but most of the staff are removed to Simla in the hills during the hot and rainy seasons. Here, facing the Maidan, is the frontage of the Supreme Court of Justice, with a fine tower nearly two hundred feet high, which we saw just now from the Hooghly. Next is the eastern gateway to the grounds of Government House, and here is Government House itself, with the Union Jack flying above it, and Indian sentries on guard. It was built a little more than a hundred years ago, and contains the throne of Tippu Sultan, the tyrant of Mysore, of whom we heard in the first lecture. Opposite Government House, on the Maidan, is the Jubilee Statue of Victoria, the Queen-Empress of India, which was unveiled in the year 1902. Here we have a more distant view of Government House, as seen from the Maidan, with a statue of one of the Viceroys in the foreground. Next, in Chowringhee road, is the Imperial Museum, a fine building with a valuable Gallery of Antiquities.

|19.
Musulmans at Prayer in the Maidan.| |20.
Ochterlony Monument, Calcutta.| |21.
Calcutta from the Ochterlony Monument.| |22.
Race Course, Calcutta.| |23.
St. Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta.| |24.
Tiretta Bazaar Street, Calcutta.| Let us walk round the Maidan, and note the curiously mingled life upon it. Here, for instance, are Musulmans at prayer, an impressive sight that may be witnessed every evening. Here we are at the foot of the Ochterlony monument, a column erected in honour of Sir David Ochterlony, a successful general in the wars with Nepal. From the top of it we have a fine view over the city. Notice Government House and the High Court. At the other end of the Maidan is the racecourse and polo ground, to which we have already referred, and here amid the trees in the southeastern corner, beside the tank, is the spire of the English Cathedral. Here, in contrast, is a view in the native city. The streets are with a few exceptions very narrow, as in most southern cities where the sunshine is dreaded and where shade is essential to comfort.

|25.
Jute Mills, Howrah.| |26.
A Workshop in Iron Foundry at Howrah.| |27.
The same, Plate Girders.| |28.
Workpeople bathing at Howrah.| Now we cross to Howrah, to the great jute mills, where the jute fibre grown up country is spun and woven in competition with the jute manufacture of Dundee. In these mills you will find that the machinery bears the names of Dundee and Leeds makers, for the industry is relatively new in India, and has not yet reached the stage of manufacturing its own machinery. Next we pass into the engineering works of Messrs. Burn and Co., where some five thousand natives and some sixty Europeans are employed in the steel industry. Here are plate girders made in these works for railway bridge building, and here in this same industrial town of Howrah are people bathing after work in the jute mills.

Let us recount the essence of what we have seen—the Hooghly channel from the ocean, bearing inward the European ships; the Shrine of the Goddess Kali; the Fort which protected the factory of the East India Company; the Monument of the Black Hole; Government House and the Secretariat, whence the vast empire is ruled; the Cathedral and the Racecourse of the white rulers; the Courts of Justice, which, more than any military power, betoken the essence of British rule in India; the Native City with its narrow ways and crowded life drawn from the surrounding agricultural plain; the Howrah Bridge with the steel and jute mills beyond, which imply a vast incoming change in the economic life of this eastern land; and the Botanic Gardens with their wealth of vegetation typifying the ultimate resources of India—the tropical sunshine and the torrential rains.

|Repeat Map No. 1.| Now let us run northward by the East Bengal Railway for some three hundred miles to Darjeeling, the hill station of Calcutta, as Ootacamund is the hill station of Madras. We traverse the dead level of the plain with its thickly set villages and tropical vegetation. There are some seven hundred and fifty thousand villages in India, and these village communities are the real India, for only about ten per cent. of the total population is contained in the cities. Yet Bengal in its present limits, which exclude Eastern Bengal, has a population of more than fifty millions, on an area slightly smaller than that of the United Kingdom. Now the total population of the United Kingdom is only some forty-four millions, and of these forty-four millions fully one-third inhabit some forty large cities. Britain is therefore mainly industrial, whereas India is mainly agricultural, nine-tenths of all the people in India being supported by occupations connected with agriculture. From such statistics some idea may be gained of the density of the agricultural population of Bengal, a Province with one great city only, as greatness of cities is measured in our British Islands.

The rule of these village-dotted plains is the main daily business of the Indian Government. A great Province like Bengal is divided into Districts, each of them about as large as the English county of Lincolnshire or a little larger. On the average each of them contains from half a million to a million and a half of population. There are some 250 of such Districts in British India, that is to say in that greater part of India which is administered directly by British officials. In each District there is a chief executive officer, styled the Collector or Deputy Commissioner. He is the head of the District administration, and he is also the principal Magistrate in the District. Under the Collector there is a staff of Executive Officers, British and Indian, of whom the chief are the Assistant Collector, the Deputy Collector, the Superintendent of Police, the Engineer, and the Civil Surgeon. The Collector is so called because in the days of the old East India Company his main function was to collect revenue. In his other capacity of Magistrate, he is the head of the Magisterial Courts of the District. The laws which he and his assistants administer are made by the Viceroy in Council, and in a subordinate way by the Lieutenant-Governors and their Councils in the various Provinces. The Collector does not decide civil suits. These, as well as all serious criminal cases, come before Civil Judges of different grades, who are independent of the Collector.

Therefore we find in India that essential division of the Legislature, Judicature, and Executive which is the chief security of freedom in all British communities. Subject to the law and to the instructions of the superior Provincial Officers, the District Collector is, however, supreme, except in the Civil Courts of his District. He it is who alone for the vast majority of the Indian population represents the Raj or Rule of the King-Emperor. Between the Collectors and the Lieutenant-Governors are intermediate controlling officers known as Commissioners, who superintend Divisions or groups of several Districts.

The Higher Civil Service of India, recruited by competitive examination in England, consists of some twelve hundred officials—the Commissioners, the Collectors of the Districts, and some of the Assistant Collectors. The seniors of the Civil Service man the Provincial and Supreme Governments of India. Only the Governor-General and the Governors of Madras and Bombay are selected from outside the Indian Civil Service and sent out from Britain.

The Collector is constantly touring his District, in order that he may know it from personal investigation. A good Collector may become very popular, and may do much to make his District prosperous. It is a great position which may thus be held by young Englishmen of, say, thirty years of age. They are rulers of a million people at an age when their brothers of the professional classes at home are struggling to establish themselves as young barristers or doctors or clergymen.

It must not be thought, however, that the Government of India, either in its Legislative, Judicial, or Executive capacities, is wholly British, and alien from the subject population. The Legislative Councils of the Governor-General and also of the Lieutenant-Governors in the Provinces contain elected Indian representatives, both Hindu and Musulman. The provincial Councils have, in fact, non-official majorities. Only in the Council of the Governor-General is there an official majority. Many of the Judges even of the High Courts are Indian, either Hindu or Musulman. In the Executive some of the Collectors of Districts are Indian, and also the great majority of the assistant officials, who in the aggregate are an immense number.

|29.
Darjeeling Railway, Chinbatti Loop.| |30.
Darjeeling Railway, Loop No. 4.| |31.
Darjeeling.| As we think over these things we are continuing our journey northward. We must change from train to steamer as we cross the Ganges. The passage of the river occupies about twenty minutes from one low-lying bank to the other. Then, as we traverse the endless rice fields with their clumps of graceful bamboo, the hills become visible across the northern horizon. We run into a belt of jungle, and change to the mountain railway, which carries us up the steep hill front with many a turn and twist. There is tall forest on the lower slopes, of teak and other great trees, hung thickly with creepers. Presently the wood becomes smaller, and we enter the tea plantations with their trim rows of green bushes. Far below us, at the foot of the steep forest, spreads to the southern horizon the vast cultivated plain. Trees of the fir tribe now take the place of leafy trees, and we rise to the ridge top on which is placed Darjeeling, a settlement of detached villas in compounds or enclosures, hanging on the steep hill slopes. Darjeeling is about seven thousand feet above sea level, on a ridge overlooking northward the gorge of the Rungeet River.

|32.
Kinchinjunga, from Darjeeling.| |33.
The Himalaya.| |34.
Mount Everest.| In the early morning, if we are fortunate in the weather and rise before the sun, we may see from Darjeeling, over the valley to north of the hill ridge on which we stand, and over successive ridge tops beyond, the mighty snow range of the Himalayas, fifty miles away, with the peak of Kinchinjunga, more than five miles high, dominating the landscape. Behind it, a little to the west, and visible from Tiger Hill near Darjeeling, though not from Darjeeling itself, is Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, five and half miles high. The glittering wall of white mountains, visible across the vast chasm and bare granite summits in the foreground, seems to hang in the sky as though belonging to another world. The broad distance, and the sudden leap to supreme height, give to this scene a mysterious and almost visionary grandeur. It is, however, only occasionally that the culminating peaks can be seen, for they are often veiled in cloud.

|35.
Tibetan Woman.| |36.
Nepali Ladies.| The people of Sikkim in the hills beyond Darjeeling are Highlanders of Mongolian stock and not Indian. They are of Buddhist religion like the Burmans, and not Hindu or Musulman like the inhabitants of India. They are small, sturdy folk, with oblique cut eyes, and a Chinese expression, and they have the easy-going humorous character of the Burmans, though not the delicacy and civilization of those inhabitants of the sunny lowland. They and the kindred and neighbour Tibetans rarely wash, and the women anoint their faces with a mixture of pigs’ blood, which gives them a dark and mottled appearance. Here we have in colour a portrait of a Tibetan woman, and then a group of Nepali ladies, with various head ornaments.

|37.
Political Map of India, distinguishing Bengal, Eastern Bengal and Assam, Nepal, and Bhutan.| It is an interesting fact that these hill people should belong to the race which spreads over the vast Chinese Empire. That race here advances to the last hill brinks which overlook the Indian lowland. The political map of this portion of India illustrates a parallel fact. While the plains are administered directly by British officials, the mountain slopes descending to them are ruled by native princes whose territories form a strip along the northern boundary of India. North of Assam and Bengal we have in succession from east to west, in the belt of hill country, the lands of Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal. From Nepal are recruited the Gurkha Regiments of the Indian army, the Gurkhas being a race of these same hill men, of small stature and sturdy agility, of Hindu religion, but of more or less Mongolian stock, and therefore intermediate between the Tibetans and the Hindus.

|38.
The Bazaar, Darjeeling.| |39.
The same—Nepali Vegetable Sellers.| |40.
Man carrying Fodder, Darjeeling.| |41.
Sikkim Peasants.| |42.
Native Loom, Darjeeling.| |43.
Village in Sikkim.| |44.
The same.| Here we have a typical market scene in Darjeeling. Notice the women doing coolie work. Next are vegetable sellers in the Darjeeling Bazaar, and here is a man carrying fodder. The man with his back turned is a Lepcha of Sikkim. Then we have a group of Sikkim peasants drinking the native beer, made from marwa, a kind of millet. They draw it up through straws from cups made of bamboo. Next we see a native working a hand loom, and then a village in Sikkim. Here in the same village we see a woman carrying baggage.

|45.
Lama Monastery, near Darjeeling.| |46.
The same—Devil Dancers.| |47.
The same—interior.| |48.
The Amban Dance, Darjeeling.| |49.
The same—another view.| Near Darjeeling there is a small Buddhist monastery, a two-storey building of which we have here a view. Notice the semi-circle of tall poles, with linen flags, on which prayers are inscribed. By the entrance are a number of prayer-wheels fastened to the wall. Outside the monastery are men wearing the costumes of devil dancers, such as are used in Buddhist religious ceremonies of these parts. There are long trumpets placed against the door post. Let us glance for a moment within this monastery, and see the hideous wooden masks, and the silk dresses of the priestly dancers. Two scenes follow, from Darjeeling itself, of an elaborate dance by Tibetan peasants called the Amban dance. The lions and dragons are each made of two men, whose bodies are hung with white yak hair and tails. They have grotesque heads, with enormous eyes and gaping mouths, from which hang large scarlet tongues. So we obtain some idea of the stage of barbarism in which the hill tribes remain.

|50.
North Bengal Mounted Rifles, Lebong.| |51.
The same—Sword Pegging.| |52.
Coolies at Darjeeling.| In contrast with these scenes are now two slides illustrating the volunteer service of the white tea planters. Of these the second shows tent-pegging on the Lebong parade ground, above the Rungeet river. This form of tent-pegging is with a sword, and not with the more usual lance. Here is a scene showing Darjeeling coolies returned from work in the tea gardens.

|53.
The Rungeet Gorge.| |54.
The same.| |55.
The Rungeet Bridge, Sikkim.| |56.
A Himalayan Glacier.| |57.
Glacier-fed Torrent in the Himalaya.| |58.
Cane Bridge in the Himalaya.| Finally we have two views in the gorge of the Rungeet river, between Darjeeling and Sikkim, with precipitous sides, and then a glimpse of the Rungeet bridge. The Rungeet drains from the hills of Darjeeling, and from the snow mountains beyond, into a tributary of the Ganges. Several hundred such torrents burst in long succession through deep portals in the Himalayan foot hills and feed the great rivers of the plain, the Brahmaputra and the Ganges. They are perennial rivers, for they originate in the melting of the glaciers, and the Himalayan glaciers cover a vast area, being fed by the monsoon snows. Nearly all the agricultural wealth of Northern India owes its origin to the summer monsoon.

|59.
Map of the Himalayan River System.| To understand the fundamental conditions governing the Indian climate let us examine the two concluding maps of this lecture. On the first of them all the country with an elevation of more than fifteen hundred feet is coloured with a dark brown, and that with a lower elevation is coloured a light brown. A great angle of the Indian lowland is seen to project northward into the Asiatic upland. For fifteen hundred miles the Himalaya limits the lowland with a gracefully curving mountain edge, and from this edge there flow the series of tributaries which gather to the rivers Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. Beyond, to the south, are seen in dark brown the higher portions of the Deccan plateau.

|60.
Map of South-West Monsoon.| Now compare with this the succeeding map, which shows the winds of the summer time and the average rainfall. The winds sweep in from the southwest, but as they cross Bengal they bend so as to blow from the south and then from the southeast. The dark arrow with the broken shaft striking northwestward through the heart of India represents the usual track of the storms which prevail in the Central Provinces during the summer season, producing the havoc along the Madras coast and northward, of which we spoke in the second lecture. The maximum rainfall, it will be seen, occurs in three regions—first on the west face of the Western Ghats, and on the west face of the mountains of Ceylon; secondly in the east of the Indian Peninsula near the track of the storm centres; and thirdly along the south face of the Garo hills and of the Himalayas north of Bengal, and on the west face of the various mountain ranges of Burma. In other words, in the first and third cases the rain is due to the winds striking the mountain ranges, and is great only on the windward faces of those ranges. In the second case the rainfall is mainly the result of the storms. On the other hand, there is drought at this season under the lee of the mountains of Ceylon and of the Western Ghats, and again in a comparatively small belt, near Pagan, along the Irawaddy river, between the western and the eastern ridges of Burma. Tibet, which is under the lee of the Himalayas, and northwestern India, which is out of the track of the southwest winds, are wide deserts. This map explains the exceptional fertility and density of population of the Province of Bengal.

|Repeat Map No. 1.| India is so vast a country, and so varied, that no traveller can hope to visit all parts of it. On our journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling, we have left the province of Assam away to the east of us. Assam is a through road nowhither, for high and difficult mountains close the eastern end of its great valley. Moreover, though it has vast natural resources, Assam is a country which throughout history has lain for the most part outside Indian civilisation, and, even to-day, has but a sparse population and a relatively small commercial development. Let us, then, just remember in passing that this remote province of India has a geography which, though simple, is built on a very grand scale.

The San-po river rises high on the plateau of Tibet northward of Lucknow. For more than 700 miles it flows eastward over the plateau in rear of the Himalayan peaks; then it turns sharply southward and descends steeply through a deep gorge little known, for it is tenanted by hostile tribes. Where it emerges from the mountains the river has a level not a thousand feet above the sea, and here, turning westward, it forms the Brahmaputra—that is to say, the Son of Brahma, the Creator. The Brahmaputra flows for 450 miles westward through the valley of Assam, deeply trenched between the snowy wall of the Himalayas on the one hand and the forested mountains of the Burmese border and the Khasia and Garo hills on the other hand. The river “rolls down the valley in a vast sheet of water,” depositing banks of silt at the smallest obstruction, “so that islands form and re-form in constant succession. Broad channels break away and rejoin the main river after wide divergences, which are subjected to no control. The swamps on either hand are flooded in the rainy season, till the lower reaches of the valley are one vast shining sea, from which the hills slope up on either side.” The traffic on the river is maintained chiefly by exports of tea and timber, with imports of rice for the labourers on the tea estates. Some day, when great sums of money are available for capital expenditure, the Brahmaputra will be controlled, and Assam will become the seat of teeming production and a dense population. The Indian Empire contains some 300 million people; but, as we learn, it also contains some of the chief virgin resources of the world.