Bharatpur—Dīg—Want of employment for the Military and the Educated Classes under the Company's Rule.
Our old friends, Mr. Charles Fraser, the Commissioner of the Agra Division, then on his circuit, and Major Godby, had come on with us from Agra and made our party very agreeable. On the 9th, we went fourteen miles to Bharatpur, over a plain of alluvial, but seemingly poor, soil, intersected by one low range of sandstone hills running north-east and south-west. The thick belt of jungle, three miles wide, with which the chiefs of Bharatpur used to surround their fortress while they were freebooters, and always liable to be brought into collision with their neighbours, has been fast diminishing since the capture of the place by our troops in 1826; and will very soon disappear altogether, and give place to rich sheets of cultivation, and happy little village communities. Our tents had been pitched close outside the Mathurā gate, near a small grove of fruit- trees, which formed the left flank of the last attack on this fortress by Lord Combermere.[1] Major Godby had been present during the whole siege; and, as we went round the place in the evening on our elephants, he pointed out all the points of attack, and told all the anecdotes of the day that were interesting enough to be remembered for ten years. We went through the town, out at the opposite gate, and passed along the line of Lord Lake's attack in 1805.[2] All the points of his attack were also pointed out to us by our cicerone, an old officer in the service of the Rājā. It happened to be the anniversary of the first attempt to storm, which was made on the 9th of January, thirty-one years before. One old officer told us that he remembered Lord Lake sitting with three other gentlemen on chairs not more than half a mile from the ramparts of the fort.
The old man thought that the men of those days were quite a different sort of thing to the men of the present day, as well those who defended, as those who attacked the fort; and, if the truth must be told, he thought that the European lords and gentlemen had fallen off in the same scale as the rest.
'But', said the old man, 'all these things are matter of destiny and providence. Upon that very bastion (pointing to the right point of Lord Lake's attack) stood a large twenty-four pounder, which was loaded and discharged three times by supernatural agency during one of your attacks—not a living soul was near it.' We all smiled, incredulous; and the old man offered to bring a score of witnesses to the fact, men of unquestionable veracity. The left point of Lord Lake's attack was the Baldēo bastion, so called alter Baldēo Singh, the second son of the then reigning chief, Ranjīt Singh. The feats which Hector performed in the defence of Troy sink into utter insignificance before those which Baldēo performed in the defence of Bharatpur, according to the best testimony of the survivors of that great day. 'But', said the old man, 'he was, of course, acting under supernatural influence; he condescended to measure swords only with Europeans'; and their bodies filled the whole bastion in which he stood, according to the belief of the people, though no European entered it, I believe, during the whole siege. They pointed out to us where the different corps were posted. There was one corps which had signalized itself a good deal, but of which I had never before heard, though all around me seemed extremely well acquainted with it—this was the Antā Gurgurs. At last Godby came to my side, and told me this was the name by which the Bombay troops were always known in Bengal, though no one seemed to know whence it came. I am disposed to think that they derive it from the peculiar form of the caps of their sepoys, which are in form like the common hookah, called a 'gurgurī', with a small ball at the top, like an 'antā', or tennis, or billiard ball; hence 'Antā Gurgurs'. The Bombay sepoys were, I am told, always very angry when they heard that they were known by this term—they have always behaved like good soldiers, and need not be ashamed of this or any other name.[3]
The water in the lake, about a mile to the west of Bharatpur, stands higher than the ground about the fortress; and a drain had been opened, through which the water rushed in and filled the ditch all round the fort and great part of the plain to the south and east, before Lord Lake undertook the siege in 1805.[4] This water might, I believe, have been taken off to the eastward into the Jumna, had the outlet been discovered by the engineers. An attempt was made to cut the same drain on the approach of Lord Combermere in 1826; but a party went on, and stopped the work before much water had passed, and the ditch was almost dry when the siege began.
The walls being all of mud, and now dismantled, had a wretched appearance;[5] and the town which is contained within them is, though very populous, a mere collection of wretched hovels; the only respectable habitation within is the palace, which consists of three detached buildings—one for the chief, another for the females of his family, and the third for his court of justice, I could not find a single trace of the European officers who had been killed there, either at the first or second siege, though I had been told that a small tomb had been built in a neighbouring grove over the remains of Brigadier-General Edwards, who fell in the last storm. It is, I believe, the only one that has ever been raised. The scenes of battles fought by the Muhammadan conquerors of India were commonly crowded with magnificent tombs, built over the slain, and provided for a time with the means of maintaining holy men who read the Korān over their graves. Not that this duty was necessary for the repose of their souls, for every Muhammadan killed in fighting against men who believed not in his prophet went, as a matter of course, to paradise; and every unbeliever, killed in the same action, went as surely to hell. There are only a few hundred men, exclusive of the prophets, who, according to Muhammad, have the first place in paradise—those who shared in one or other of his first three battles, and believed in his holy mission before they had the evidence of a single victory over the unbelievers to support it. At the head of these are the men who accompanied him in his flight from Mecca to Medina, when he had no evidence either from victories or miracles. In all such matters the less the evidence adduced in proof of a mission the greater the merit of those who believe in it, according to the person who pretends to it; and unhappily, the less the evidence a man has for his faith, the greater is his anger against other men for not joining in it with him. No man gets very angry with another for not joining with him in his faith in the demonstration of a problem in mathematics. Man likes to think that he is on the way to heaven upon such easy terms; but gets angry at the notion that others won't join him, because they may consider him an imbecile for thinking that he is so. The Muhammadan generals and historians are sometimes almost as concise as Caesar himself in describing very conscientiously a battle of this kind; instead of 'I came, I saw, I conquered', it is 'Ten thousand Musālmāns on that day tasted of the blessed fruit of paradise, after sending fifty thousand unbelievers to the flames of hell'.
On the 10th we came on twelve miles to Kumbhīr, over a plain of poor soil, much impregnated with salt, and with some works in which salt is made, with solar evaporation. The earth is dug up, water is filtered through it, and drawn off into small square beds, where it is evaporated by exposure to the solar heat. The gate of this fort leading out to the road we came is called, modestly enough, after Kumbhīr, a place only ten miles distant; that leading to Mathurā, three or four stages distant, is called the Mathurā gate. At Delhi, the gates of the city walls are called ostentatiously after distant places—the Kashmīr, the Kābul, the Constantinople gates. Outside the Kumbhīr gate, I saw, for the first time in my life, the well peculiar to Upper India. It is built up in the form of a round tower or cylindrical shell of burnt bricks, well cemented with good mortar, and covered inside and out with good stucco work, and let down by degrees, as the earth is removed by men at work in digging under the light earthy or sandy foundation inside and out. This well is about twenty feet below and twenty feet above the surface, and had to be built higher as it was let into the ground.[6]
On the 11th we came on twelve miles to Dīg (Deeg), over a plain of poor and badly cultivated soil, which must be almost all under water in the rains. This was, and still is, the country seat of the Jāts of Bharatpur, who rose, as I have already stated, to wealth and power by aggressions upon their immediate neighbours, and the plunder of tribute on its way to the imperial capital, and of the baggage of passing armies during the contests for dominion that followed the death of the Emperors, and during the decline and fall of the empire. The Jāts found the morasses with which they were surrounded here a source of strength. They emigrated from the banks of the Indus about Multān, and took up their abode by degrees on the banks of the Jumna, and those of the Chambal, from their confluence upwards, where they became cultivators and robbers upon a small scale, till they had the means to build garrisons, when they entered the lists with princes, who were only robbers upon a large scale. The Jāts, like the Marāthās, rose, by a feeling of nationality, among a people who had none. Single landholders were every day rising to principalities by means of their gangs of robbers; but they could seldom be cemented under one common head by a bond of national feeling.
They have a noble quadrangular garden at Dīg, surrounded by a high wall. In the centre of each of the four faces is one of the most beautiful Hindoo buildings for accommodation that I have ever seen, formed of a very fine sandstone brought from the quarries of Rūpbās, which he between thirty and forty miles to the south, and eight or ten miles west of Fathpur-Sīkrī. These stones are brought in in flags some sixteen feet long, from two to three feet wide, and one thick, with sides as flat as glass, the flags being of the natural thickness of the strata. The garden is four hundred and seventy-five feet long, by three hundred and fifty feet wide; and in the centre is an octagonal pond, with openings on the four sides leading up to the four buildings, each opening having, from the centre of the pond to the foot of the flight of steps leading into them, an avenue of jets d'eau.
Dīg as much surpassed, as Bharatpur fell short of, my expectations. I had seen nothing in India of architectural beauty to be compared with the buildings in this garden, except at Agra. The useful and the elegant are here everywhere happily blended; nothing seems disproportionate, or unsuitable to the purpose for which it was designed; and all that one regrets is that so beautiful a garden should be situated in so vile a swamp.[7] There was a general complaint among the people of the town of a want of 'rozgār' (employment), and its fruit, subsistence; the taking of Bharatpur had, they said, produced a sad change among them for the worse. Godby observed to some of the respectable men about us, who complained of this, that happily their chief had now no enemy to employ them against. 'But what', said they, 'is a prince without an army? and why do you keep up yours now that all your enemies have been subdued?' 'We want them', replied Godby, 'to prevent our friends from cutting each other's throats, and to defend them all against a foreign enemy.' 'True,' said they, 'but what are we to do who have nothing but our swords to depend upon, now that our chief no longer wants us, and you won't take us?' 'And what,' said some shopkeepers, 'are we to do who provided these troops with clothes, food, and furniture, which they can no longer afford to pay for?' Company ke amal men kuchh rozgār nahīn ('Under the Company's dominion there is no employment'). This is too true; we do the soldiers' work with one-tenth of the soldiers that had before been employed in it over the territories we acquire, and turn the other nine-tenths adrift. They all sink into the lowest class of religions mendicants, or retainers; or live among their friends as drones upon the land; while the manufacturing, trading, and commercial industry that provided them with the comforts, conveniences, and elegancies of life while they were in a higher grade of service is in its turn thrown out of employment; and the whole frame of society becomes, for a time, deranged by the local diminution in the demand for the services of men and the produce of their industry.
I say we do the soldiers' work with one-tenth of the numbers that were formerly required for it. I will mention an anecdote to illustrate this. In the year 1816 I was marching with my regiment from the Nepāl frontier, after the war, to Allahabad. We encamped about four miles from a mud fort in the kingdom of Oudh, and heard the guns of the Amil, or chief of the district, playing all day upon this fort, from which his batteries were removed at least two miles. He had three regiments of infantry, a corps or two of cavalry, and a good park of artillery; while the garrison consisted of only about two hundred stout Rājpūt landholders and cultivators, or yeomen. In the evening, just as we had sat down to dinner, a messenger came to the commanding officer, Colonel Gregory, who was a member of the mess, from the said Amil, and begged permission to deliver his message in private. I, as the senior staff officer, was requested to hear what he had to say.
'What do you require from the commanding officer?'
'I require the loan of the regiment.'
'I know the commanding officer will not let you have the regiment.'
'If the Amil cannot get more, he will be glad to get two companies; and I have brought with me this bag of gold, containing some two or three hundred gold mohurs.'
I delivered the message to Colonel Gregory, before all the officers, who desired me to say that he could not spare a single man, as he had no authority to assist the Amil, and was merely marching through the country to his destination, I did so. The man urged me to beg the commanding officer, if he could do no more, merely to halt the next day where he was, and lend the Amil the use of one of his drummers.
'And what will you do with him?'
'Why, just before daylight, we will take him down near one of the gates of the fort, and make him beat his drum as hard as he can; and the people within, thinking the whole regiment is upon them, will make out as fast as possible at the opposite gate.'
'And the bag of gold—what is to become of that?'
'You and the old gentleman can divide it between you, and I will double it for you, if you like.'
I delivered the message before all the officers to their great amusement; and the poor man was obliged to carry back his bag of gold to the Amil. The Amil is the collector of revenues in Oudh, and he is armed with all the powers of government, and has generally several regiments and a train of artillery with him.
The large landholders build these mud forts, which they defend by their Rājpūt cultivators, who are among the bravest men in the world. One hundred of them would never hesitate to attack a thousand of the king's regular troops, because they know the Amil would be ashamed to have any noise made about it at court; but they know also that, if they were to beat one hundred of the Company's troops, they would soon have a thousand upon them; and, if they were to beat one thousand, they would soon have ten. They provide for the maintenance of those who are wounded in their fight, and for the widows and orphans of those who are killed. Their prince provides for neither, and his soldiers are, consequently, somewhat chary of fighting. It is from this peasantry, the military cultivators of Oudh, that our Bengal native infantry draws three out of four of its recruits, and finer young men for soldiers can hardly anywhere be found.[8]
The advantage which arises to society from doing the soldiers' duty with a smaller number has never been sufficiently appreciated in India; but it will become every day more manifest, as our dominion becomes more and more stable—for men who have lived by the sword do not in India like to live by anything else, or to see their children anything but soldiers. Under the former government men brought their own arms and horses to the service, and took them away with them again when discharged. The supply always greatly exceeded the demand for soldiers, both in the cavalry and the infantry, and a very great portion of the men armed and accoutred as soldiers were always without service, roaming over the country in search of it. To such men the profession next in rank after that of the soldier robbing in the service of the sovereign was that of the robber plundering on his own account. 'Materia munificentiae per bella et raptus. Nec arare terram, aut expectare annum, tam facile persuaseris, quam vocare hostes et vulnera mereri; pigrum quinimmo et iners videtur sudore acquirere, quod possis sanguine parare.' 'War and rapine supply the prince with the means of his munificence. You cannot persuade the German to cultivate the fields and wait patiently for the harvest so easily as you can to challenge the enemy, and expose himself to honourable wounds. They hold it to be base and dishonourable to earn by the sweat of their brow what they might acquire by their blood.'[9]
The equestrian robber had his horse, and was called 'ghurāsī', horse-robber, a term which he never thought disgraceful. The foot-robber under the native government stood in the same relation to the horse-robber as the foot-soldier to the horse- soldier, because the trooper furnished his own horses, arms, and accoutrements, and considered himself a man of rank and wealth compared with the foot-soldier; both, however, had the wherewithal to rob the traveller on the highway; and, in the intervals between wars, the high roads were covered with them. There was a time in England, it is said, when the supply of clergymen was so great compared with the demand for them, from the undue stimulus given to clerical education, that it was not thought disgraceful for them to take to robbing on the highway; and all the high roads were, in consequence, infested by them.[10] How much more likely is a soldier to consider himself justified in this pursuit, and to be held so by the feelings of society in general, when he seeks in vain for regular service under his sovereign and his viceroys.
The individual soldiers not only armed, accoutred, and mounted themselves, but they generally ranged themselves under leaders, and formed well-organized bands for any purpose of war or plunder. They followed the fortunes of such leaders whether in service or out of it; and, when dismissed from that of their sovereign, they assisted them in robbing on the highway, or in pillaging the country till the sovereign was compelled to take them back, or give them estates in rent-free tenure for their maintenance and that of their followers.
All this is reversed under our government. We do the soldiers' work much better than it was ever before done with one- tenth—nay, I may say, one-fiftieth—part of the numbers that were employed to do it by our predecessors; and the whole number of the soldiers employed by us is not equal to that of those who were under them actually in the transition state, or on their way from the place where they had lost service to the place where they hoped to find it; extorting the means of subsistence either by intimidation or by open violence. Those who are in this transition state under us are neither armed, accoutred, nor mounted; we do not disband en masse, we only dismiss individuals for offences, and they have no leaders to range themselves under. Those who come to seek our service are the sons of yeomen, bred up from their infancy with all those feelings of deference for superiors which we require in soldiers. They have neither arms, horses, nor accoutrements; and, when they leave us permanently or temporarily, they take none with them—they never rob or steal—they will often dispute with the shopkeepers on the road about the price of provisions, or get a man to carry their bundles gratis for a few miles, but this is the utmost of their transgressions, and for these things they are often severely handled by our police.
It is extremely gratifying to an Englishman to hear the general testimony borne by all classes of people to the merits of our rule in this respect; they all say that no former government ever devoted so much attention to the formation of good roads and to the protection of those who travel on them; and much of the security arises from the change I have here remarked in the character and number of our military establishments. It is equally gratifying to reflect that the advantages must go on increasing, as those who have been thrown out of employment in the army find other occupations for themselves and their children; for find them they must or turn mendicants, if India should be blessed with a long interval of peace. All soldiers under us who have served the government faithfully for a certain number of years, are, when no longer fit for the active duties of their profession, sent back with the means of subsistence in honourable retirement for the rest of their lives among their families and friends, where they form, as it were, fountains of good feeling towards the government they have served. Under former governments, a trooper was discharged as soon as his horse got disabled, and a foot- soldier as soon as he got disabled himself—no matter how—whether in the service of the prince, or otherwise; no matter how long they had served, whether they were still fit for any other service or not. Like the old soldier in Gil Blas, they tumed robbers on the highway, where they could still present a spear or a matchlock at a traveller, though no longer deemed worthy to serve in the ranks of the army. Nothing tended so much to the civilization of Europe as the substitution of standing armies for militia; and nothing has tended so much to the improvement of India under our rule.
The troops to which our standing armies in India succeeded were much the same in character as those licentious bodies to which the standing armies of the different nations of Europe succeeded; and the result has been, and will, I hope, continue to be the same, highly beneficial to the great mass of the people.
By a statute of Elizabeth it was made a capital offence, felony without benefit of clergy, for soldiers or sailors to beg on the high roads without a pass; and I suppose this statute arose from their frequently robbing on the highways in the character of beggars.[11] There must at that time have been an immense number of soldiers in the transition state in England; men who disdained the labours of peaceful life, or had by long habit become unfitted for them. Religions mendicity has hitherto been the great safety valve through which the unquiet transition spirit has found vent under our strong and settled government. A Hindoo of any caste may become a religious mendicant of the two great monastic orders—of Gosāins, who are disciples of Siva, and Bairāgīs, who are disciples of Vishnu; and any Muhammadan may become a Fakīr; and Gosāins, Bairāgīs, and Fakīrs, can always secure, or extort, food from the communities they visit.[12]
Still, however, there is enough of this unquiet transition spirit left to give anxiety to a settled government; for the moment insurrection breaks out at any point, from whatever cause, to that point thousands are found flocking from north, east, west, and south, with their arms and their horses, if they happen to have any, in the hope of finding service either under the local authorities or the insurgents themselves; as the troubled winds of heaven rush to the point where the pressure of the atmosphere has been diminished.[13]
Notes:
1. On the sieges of Bharatpur see ante, chapter 17, note 9.
2. In the original edition the year is misprinted 1804, though the correct date is indicated by the phrase 'thirty-one years before'. The operations on January 9, 1805, are described in considerable detail in Thornton's history, and Pearse, The Life and Military Services of Viscount Lake (Blackwood, 1908). Dīg was taken on December 24, 1804, and Lord Lake's army moved from Mathurā towards Bharatpur on January 1, 1805.
3. The Bombay column joined Lord Lake on February 11, and took part in the third and fourth assaults on the fortress.
4. As in the previous passage, this date is printed 1804 in the original edition.
5. They have been repaired to some extent, and the town has improved much since the author's time.
6. That is to say, the well-cylinder is gradually sunk by its own weight, aided, if necessary, by heavy additional weights piled upon it. The sinking often takes many months, and is continued till a suitable resting-place is found. The cylinder is built on a strong ring of timber. Indian bridge-piers commonly rest on wells of this kind. The ring is sometimes made of iron. Such a method of sinking is possible only in deep alluvium, free from rock, and consequently had not been seen in the Sāgar and Nerbudda territories.
7. In the original edition Dīg is illustrated by four coloured plates. The buildings are all the work of Sūraj Mal, the virtual founder of the Bharatpur dynasty, between A.D. 1725 and 1763. The palace wants, say Fergusson, 'the massive character of the fortified palaces of other Rājpūt states, but for grandeur of conception and beauty of detail it surpasses them all. . . . The greatest defect of the palace is that the style, when it was erected, was losing its true form of lithic propriety. The forms of its pillars and their ornaments are better suited for wood or metal than for stone architecture.' It is a 'fairy creation'. (History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, ed. 1910, vol. ii, pp. 178- 81.)
8. On these topics see the 'Journey through the Kingdom of Oude', passim. The composition of the Bengal army has been much changed.
9. The quotation is from the end of chapter 14 of the Germania of Tacitus.
10. This picture of English roads infested by clergymen turned highwaymen is not to be found in the ordinary histories.
11. The Act alluded to probably is 14 Elizabeth, c. 5. Other Acts of the same reign dealing with vagrancy and the first poor-law are 39 Elizabeth, c. 3, and 43 Elizabeth, c. 2 (A.D. 1601). In 1595 vagrancy had assumed such alarming proportions in London that a provost- marshal was appointed to give the wanderers the short shrift of martial law. The course of legislation on the subject is summarized in the article 'Poor Laws' in Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1904), and the articles 'Poor-Law and Vagrancy' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1910. See also the chapter entitled 'The England of Elizabeth' in Green's History of the English People.
12. As already observed, chapter 29, note 12, the term Gosāin is by no means restricted to the special devotees of Siva; many Gosāins—for example, those in Bengal and those at Gokul in the Mathurā district—are followers of Vishnu. The term 'fakīr' is vaguely used, and often applied to Hindoos.
13. Even still, something of this unquiet spirit hovers about India, and the incompatibility between the ideas of twentieth-century Englishmen and those of Indian peoples whose mental attitude approaches that of Europeans of the twelfth century is a perennial source of unrest.
Govardhan, the Scene of Krishna's Dalliance with the Milkmaids.
On the 10th[1] we came on ten miles over a plain to Govardhan, a place celebrated in ancient history as the birthplace of Krishna, the seventh incarnation of the Hindoo god of preservation, Vishnu, and the scene of his dalliance with the milkmaids (gōpīs); and, in modern days, as the burial—or burning-place of the Jāt chiefs of Bharatpur and Dīg, by whose tombs, with their endowments, this once favourite abode of the god is prevented from being entirely deserted.[2] The town stands upon a narrow ridge of sandstone hills, about ten miles long, rising suddenly out of an alluvial plain and running north-east and south-west. The population is now very small, and composed chiefly of Brahmans, who are supported by the endowments of these tombs, and the contributions of a few pilgrims. All our Hindoo followers were much gratified as we happened to arrive on a day of peculiar sanctity; and they were enabled to bathe and perform their devotions to the different shrines with the prospect of great advantage. This range of hills is believed by Hindoos to be part of a fragment of the Himālaya mountains which Hanumān, the monkey general of Rāma, the sixth incarnation of Vishnu, was taking down to aid his master in the formation of his bridge from the continent to the island of Ceylon, when engaged in the war with the demon king of that island for the recovery of his wife Sītā. He made a false step by some accident in passing Govardhan, and this small bit of his load fell off. The rocks begged either to be taken on to the god Rāma, or back to their old place; but Hanumān was hard pressed for time, and told them not to be uneasy, as they would have a comfortable resting-place, and be worshipped by millions in future ages—thus, according to popular belief, foretelling that it would become the residence of a future incarnation, and the scene of Krishna's miracles. The range was then about twenty miles long, ten having since disappeared under the ground. It was of full length during Krishna's days; and, on one occasion, he took up the whole upon his little finger to defend his favourite town and its milkmaids from the wrath of Indra, who got angry with the people, and poured down upon them a shower of burning ashes.
As I rode along this range, which rises gently from the plains at both ends and abruptly from the sides, with my groom by my side, I asked him what made Hanumān drop all his burthen here.
'All his burthen!' exclaimed he with a smile; 'had it been all, would it not have been an immense mountain, with all its towns and villages? while this is but an insignificant belt of rock. A mountain upon the back of men of former days, sir, was no more than a bundle of grass upon the back of one of your grass-cutters in the present day.'
Nathū, whose mind had been full of the wonders of this place from his infancy, happened to be with us, and he now chimed in.
'It was night when Hanumān passed this place, and the lamps were seen burning in a hundred towns upon the mountain he had upon his back—the people were all at their usual occupations, quite undisturbed; this is a mere fragment of his great burthen.'
'And how was it that the men of those towns should have been so much smaller than the men who carried them?' 'God only knew; but the fact of the men of the plains having been so large was undisputed—their beards were as many miles long as those of the present day are inches. Did not Bhīm throw the forty-cubit stone pillar, that now stands at Eran,[3] a distance of thirty miles, after the man who was running away with his cattle?'
I thought of poor Father Gregory at Agra, and the heavy sigh he gave when asked by Godby what progress he was making among the people in the way of conversion.[4] The faith of these people is certainly larger than all the mustard-seeds in the world.
I told a very opulent and respectable Hindoo banker one day that it seemed to us very strange that Vishnu should come upon the earth merely to sport with milkmaids, and to hold up an umbrella, however large, to defend them from a shower. 'The earth, sir,' said he, 'was at that time infested with innumerable demons and giants, who swallowed up men and women as bears swallow white ants; and his highness, Krishna, came down to destroy them. His own mother's brother, Kans, who then reigned at Mathurā over Govardhan, was one of these horrible demons. Hearing that his sister would give birth to a son that was to destroy him, he put to death several of her progeny as soon as they were born.[5] When Krishna was seven days old, he sent a nurse, with poison on her nipple, to destroy him likewise; but his highness gave such a pull at it, that the nurse dropped down dead. In falling, she resumed her real shape of a she- demon, and her body covered no less than six square miles, and it took several thousand men to cut her up and burn her, to prevent the pestilence that must have followed. His uncle then sent a crane, which caught up his highness, who always looked very small for his age, and swallowed him as he would swallow a frog. But his highness kicked up such a rumpus in the bird's stomach that he was immediately thrown up again. When he was seven years old his uncle invited him to a feast, and got the largest and most ferocious elephant in India to tread him to death as he alighted at the door. His highness, though then not higher than my waist, took the enormous beast by one tusk, and, after whirling him round in the air with one hand half a dozen times, he dashed him on the ground and killed him.[6] Unable any longer to stand the wickedness of his uncle, he seized him by the beard, dragged him from his throne, and dashed him to the ground in the same manner.'
I thought of poor old Father Gregory and the mustard-seeds again, and told my rich old friend that it all appeared to us indeed passing strange.
The orthodox belief among the Muhammadans is that Moses was sixty yards high; that he carried a mace sixty yards long; and that he sprang sixty yards from the ground when he aimed the fatal blow at the giant Ūj, the son of Anak, who came from the land of Canaan, with a mountain on his back, to crush the army of Israelites. Still, the head of his mace could reach only to the ankle-bone of the giant. This was broken with the blow. The giant fell, and was crushed under the weight of his own mountain. Now a person whose ankle-bone was one hundred and eighty yards high must have been almost as prodigious as he who carried the fragment of the Himālaya upon his back; and he who believes in the one cannot fairly find fault with his neighbour for believing in the other.[7] I was one day talking with a very sensible and respectable Hindoo gentleman of Bundēlkhand about the accident which made Hanumān drop this fragment of his load at Govardhan. 'All doubts upon that point,' said the old gentleman, 'have been put at rest by holy writ. It is related in our scriptures.
'Bharat, the brother of Rāma, was left regent of the kingdom of Ajodhya,[8] during his absence at the conquest of Ceylon. He happened at night to see Hanumān passing with the mountain upon his back, and thinking he might be one of the king of Ceylon's demons about mischief, he let fly one of his blunt arrows at him. It hit him on the leg, and he fell, mountain and all, to the ground. As he fell, he called out in his agony, 'Rām, Rām', from which Bharat discovered his mistake. He went up, raised him in his arms, and with his kind attentions restored him to his senses. Learning from him the object of his journey, and fearing that his wounded brother Lachhman would die before he could get to Ceylon with the requisite remedy, he offered to send Hanumān on upon the barb of one of his arrows, mountain and all. To try him Hanumān took up his mountain and seated himself with it upon the barb of the arrow as desired. Bharat placed the arrow to the string of his bow, and drawing it till the barb touched the bow, asked Hanumān whether he was ready. 'Quite ready,' said Hanumān, 'but I am now satisfied that you really are the brother of our prince, and regent of his kingdom, which was all I desired. Pray let me descend; and be sure that I shall be at Ceylon in time to save your wounded brother.' He got off, knelt down, placed his forehead on Bharat's feet in submission, resumed his load, and was at Ceylon by the time the day broke next morning, leaving behind him the small and insignificant fragment, on which the town and temples of Govardhan now stand.
'While little Krishna was frisking about among the milkmaids of Govardhan,' continued my old friend, 'stealing their milk, cream, and butter, Brahmā, the creator of the universe, who had heard of his being an incarnation of Vishnu, the great preserver of the universe, visited the place, and had some misgivings, from his size and employment, as to his real character. To try him, he took off through the sky a herd of cattle, on which some of his favourite playmates were attending, old and young, boys and all. Krishna, knowing how much the parents of the boys and owners of the cattle would be distressed, created, in a moment, another herd and other attendants so exactly like those that Brahmā had taken, that the owners of the one, and the parents of the other, remained ignorant of the change. Even the new creations themselves remained equally ignorant; and the cattle walked into their stalls, and the boys into their houses, where they recognized and were recognized by their parents, as if nothing had happened.
'Brahmā was now satisfied that Krishna was a true incarnation of Vishnu, and restored to him the real herd and attendants. The others were removed out of the way by Krishna, as soon as he saw the real ones coming back.'
'But,' said I to the good old man, who told me this with a grave face, 'must they not have suffered in passing from the life given to death; and why create them merely to destroy them again?'
'Was he not God the Creator himself?' said the old man; 'does he not send one generation into the world after another to fulfil their destiny, and then to return to the earth from which they came, just as he spreads over the land the grass and corn? All is gathered in its season, or withers as that passes away and dies.' The old gentleman might have quoted Wordsworth:
We die,
my friend,
Nor we alone,
but that which each man loved
And prized in
his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with
him, or is changed; and very soon,
Even of the
good is no memorial left.[9]
I was one day out shooting with my friend, the Rājā of Maihar,[10] under the Vindhya range, which rises five or six hundred feet, almost perpendicularly. He was an excellent shot with an English double-barrel, and had with him six men just as good. I asked him whether we were likely to fall in with any hares, using the term 'khargosh', or 'ass-eared'.
'Certainly not,' said the Rājā, 'if you begin by abusing them with such a name; call them "lambkanās", sir, "long-eared", and we shall get plenty.'
He shot one, and attributed my bad luck to the opprobrious name I had used. While he was reloading, I took occasion to ask him how this range of hills had grown up where it was.
'No one can say,' replied the Rājā, 'but we believe that when Rāma went to recover his wife Sītā from the demon king of Ceylon, Rāvan, he wanted to throw a bridge across from the continent to the island, and sent some of his followers up to the Himālaya mountains for stones. He had completed his bridge before they all returned, and a messenger was sent to tell those who had not yet come to throw down their burdens, and rejoin him in all haste. Two long lines of these people had got thus far on their return when the messenger met them. They threw down their loads here, and here they have remained ever since, one forming the Vindhya range to the north of this valley, and the other the Kaimūr range to the south.'
The Vindhya range extends from Mirzapore, on the Ganges, nearly to the Gulf of Cambay, some six or seven hundred miles, so that my sporting friend's faith was as capacious as any priest could well wish it; and those who have it are likely never to die, or suffer much, from an over stretch of the reasoning faculties in a hot climate.
The town stands upon the belt of rocks, about two miles from its north-eastern extremity; and in the midst is the handsome tomb of Ranjit Singh, who defended Bharatpur so bravely against Lord Lake's army.[11] The tomb has on one side a tank filled with water, and, on the other, another much deeper than the first, but without any water at all. We were surprised at this, and asked what the cause could be. The people told us, with the air of men who had never known what it was to feel the uneasy sensation of doubt, that 'Krishna, one hot day, after skying with the milkmaids, had drunk it all dry; and that no water would ever stay in it, lest it might be quaffed by less noble lips'. No orthodox Hindoo would ever for a moment doubt that this was the real cause of the phenomenon. Happy people! How much do they escape of that pain which in hot climates wears us all down in our efforts to trace moral and physical phenomena to their real causes and sources! Mind! mind! mind! without any of it, those Europeans who eat and drink moderately might get on very well in this climate. Much of it weighs them down.
Oh, sir, the good die first,
and those whose hearts (brains)
Are dry as summer dust burn to
the socket.[12]
One is apt sometimes to think that Muhammad, Manu, and Confucius would have been great benefactors in saving so many millions of their species from the pain of thinking too much in hot climates, if they had only written their books in languages less difficult of acquirement. Their works are at once 'the bane and antidote' of despotism—the source whence it comes, and the shield which defends the people from its consuming fire.
The tomb of Sūraj Mall, the great founder of the Jāt power at Bharatpur, stands on the north-east extremity of this belt of rocks, about two miles from the town, and is an extremely handsome building, conceived in the very best taste, and executed in the very best style.[13] With its appendages of temples and smaller tombs, it occupies the whole of one side of a magnificent tank full of clear water; and on the other side it looks into a large and beautiful garden. All the buildings and pavements are formed of the fine white sandstone of Rūpbās, scarcely inferior either in quality or appearance to white marble. The stone is carved in relief with flowers in good taste. In the centre of the tomb is the small marble slab covering the grave, with the two feet of Krishna carved in the centre, and around them the emblems of the god, the discus, the skull, the sword, the rosary. These emblems of the god are put on that people may have something godly to fix their thoughts upon. It is by degrees, and with fear and trembling, that the Hindoos imitate the Muhammadans in the magnificence of their tombs. The object is ostensibly to keep the ground on which the bodies have been burned from being defiled; and generally Hindoos have been content to raise small open terraces of brick and stucco work over the spot, with some image or emblem of the god upon it. The Jāts here, like the princes and Gosāins in Bundēlkhand, have gone a stage beyond this, and raised tombs equal in costliness and beauty to those over Muhammadans of the highest rank; still they do not venture to leave it without a divine image or emblem, lest the gods might become jealous, and revenge themselves upon the souls of the deceased and the bodies of the living. On one side of Sūraj Mall's tomb is that of his wife, or some other female member of his family; and upon the slab over her grave, that is, over the precise spot where she was burned, are the same emblems, except the sword, for which a necklace is substituted. At each end of this range of tombs stands a temple dedicated to Baldēo, the brother of Krishna; and in one of them I found his image, with large eyes, a jet black complexion, and an African countenance. Why is this that Baldēo should be always represented of this countenance and colour, and his brother Krishna, either white, or of an azure colour, and the Caucasian countenance?[14] The inside of the tomb is covered with beautiful snow-white stucco work that resembles the finest marble; but this is disfigured by wretched paintings, representing, on one side of the dome, Sūraj Mall in 'darbār', smoking his hookah, and giving orders to his ministers; in another, he is at his devotions; on the third, at his sports, shooting hogs and deer; and on the fourth, at war, with some French officers of distinction figuring before him. He is distinguished by his portly person in all, and by his favourite light-brown dress in three places. At his devotions he is standing all in white before the tutelary god of his house, Hardēo.[15] In various parts, Krishna is represented at his sports with the milkmaids. The colours are gaudy, and apparently as fresh as when first put on eighty years ago; but the paintings are all in the worst possible taste and style.[16] Inside the dome of Ranjīt Singh's tomb the siege of Bharatpur is represented in the same rude taste and style. Lord Lake is dismounted, and standing before his white horse giving orders to his soldiers. On the opposite side of the dome, Ranjīt Singh, in a plain white dress, is standing erect before his idol at his devotions, with his ministers behind him. On the other two sides he is at his favourite field sports. What strikes one most in all this is the entire absence of priestcraft. He wanted all his revenue for his soldiers; and his tutelary god seems, in consequence, to have been well pleased to dispense with the mediatory services of priests.[17] There are few temples anywhere to be seen in the territories of these Jāt chiefs; and, as few of their subjects have yet ventured to follow them in this innovation upon the old Hindoo usages of building tombs,[18] the countries under their dominion are less richly ornamented than those of their neighbours. Those who build tombs or temples generally surround them with groves of mango and other fine fruit-trees, with good wells to supply water for them, and, if they have the means, they add tanks, so that every religions edifice, or work of ornament, leads to one or more of utility. So it was in Europe; often the Northern hordes swept away all that had grown up under the institution of the Romans and the Saracens; for almost all the great works of ornament and utility, by which these countries became first adorned and enriched, had their origin in church establishments. That portion of India, where the greater part of the revenue goes to the priesthood, will generally be much more studded with works of ornament and utility than that in which the greater part goes to the soldiery. I once asked a Hindoo gentleman, who had travelled all over India, what part of it he thought most happy and beautiful. He mentioned some part of Southern India, about Tanjore, I think, where you could hardly go a mile without meeting some happy procession, or coming to a temple full of priests, or find an acre of land uncultivated.
The countries under the Marāthā Government improved much in appearance, and in happiness, I believe, after the mayors of the palace, who were Brahmans, assumed the Government, and put aside the Sātārā Rajas, the descendants of the great Sivājī.[19] Wherever they could, they conferred the Government of their distant territories upon Brahmans, who filled all the high offices under them with men of the same caste, who spent the greater part of their incomes in tombs, temples, groves, and tanks, that embellished and enriched the face of the country, and thereby diffused a taste for such works generally among the people they governed. The appearance of those parts of the Marāthā dominion so governed is infinitely superior to that of the countries governed by the leaders of the military class, such as Sindhia, Holkār, and the Bhonslā, whose capitals are still mere standing camps—a collection of hovels, and whose countries are almost entirely devoid of all those works of ornament and utility that enrich and adorn those of their neighbours.[20] They destroyed all they found in those countries when they conquered them; and they have had neither the wisdom nor the taste to raise others to supply their places. The Sikh Government is of exactly the same character; and the countries they governed have, I believe, the same wretched appearance—they are swarms of human locusts, who prey upon all that is calculated to enrich and embellish the face of the land they infest, and all that can tend to improve men in their social relations, and to link their affection to their soil and their government.[21] A Hindoo prince is always running to the extreme; he can never take and keep a middle course. He is either ambitious, and therefore appropriates all his revenues to the maintenance of soldiers, to pour out in inroads upon his neighbours; or he is superstitions, and devotes all his revenue to his priesthood, who embellish his country at the same time that they weaken it, and invite invasion, as their prince becomes less and less able to repel it.
The more popular belief regarding this range of sandstone hills at Govardhan is that Lachhman, the brother of Rāma, having been wounded by Rāvan, the demon king of Ceylon, his surgeon declared that his wound could be cured only by a decoction of the leaves of a certain tree, to be found in a certain hill in the Himālaya mountains. Hanumān volunteered to go for it, but on reaching the place he found that he had entirely forgotten the description of the tree required; and, to prevent mistake, he took up the whole mountain upon his back, and walked off with it to the plains. As he passed Govardhan, where Bharat and Charat, the third and fourth brothers of Rāma, then reigned, he was seen by them.[22] It was night; and, thinking him a strange sort of fish, Bharat let fly one of his arrows at him. It hit him in the leg, and the sudden jerk caused this small fragment of his huge burden to fall off. He called out in his agony, 'Rām, Rām', from which they learned that he belonged to the army of their brother, and let him pass on; but he remained lame for life from the wound. This accounts very satisfactorily, according to popular belief, for the halting gait of all the monkeys of that species;[23] those who are descended lineally from the general inherit it, of course; and those who are not, adopt it out of respect for his memory, as all the soldiers of Alexander contrived to make one shoulder higher than the other, because one of his happened to be so. When he passed, thousands and tens of thousands of lamps were burning upon his mountain, as the people remained entirely unconscious of the change, and at their usual occupations. Hanumān reached Ceylon with his mountain, the tree was found upon it, and Lachhman's wound cured.[24]
Govardhan is now within the boundary of our territory, and a native collector resides here from Agra.[25]
Notes:
1. January, 1836.
2. See note on Govardhan, ante, chapter 53, note 1.
3. Ante, chapter 9, note 8.
4. Ante, beginning of chapter 53.
5. This Hindoo version of the Massacre of the Innocents necessarily recalls to mind the story in St. Matthew's Gospel. Numerous incidents of the Gospel narrative, including the birth among the cattle, the stable, the manger, and the imperial census, are repeated in the Indian legends of Krishna. The exact channel of communication is not known, but the intercourse between Alexandria and India is, in general terms, the explanation of the coincidences (Weber, Die Griechen in Indien, 1890, and Abh. über Krishna's Geburtfest, 1868).
6. This story may be an adaptation of the similar Buddhist tale.
7. Ūj is the Og, King of Bashan, of the Hebrew version of the legend. The extravagant stories quoted in the text are not in the Korān, but are the inventions of the commentators. Sale gives references in his notes to chap. 5 of the Korān.
8. The kingdom included the modern Oudh (Awadh). The capital was the ancient city, also named Ajodhya, adjoining Fyzabad, which is still a very sacred place of pilgrimage.
9. It is, I think, absolutely impossible for the most sympathetic European to understand, or enter into, the mental position of the learned and devout Hindoo who implicitly believes the wild myth related in the text, and sees no incongruity in the congeries of inconsistent ideas which are involved in the story. We may dimly apprehend that Brahmā is conceived as a δημιουργός, or Architect of the Universe, working in subordination to an impersonal higher power, and not as the infinite, omniscient, omnipotent Creator whom the Hebrews reverenced, but we shall still be a long way from attaining the Hindoo point of view. The relations of Krishna, Vishnu, Brahma, Rāma, Siva, and all the other deities, with one another and with mankind, seem to be conceived by the Hindoo in a manner so confused and contradictory that every attempt at elucidation or explanation must necessarily fail. A Hindoo is born, not made, and the 'inwardness' of Hinduism is not to be penetrated, even by the most learned of 'barbarian' pundits.
10. Ante, chapter 20, note 6.
11. Rājā of Bharatpur, not to be confounded with the Lion of the Panjāb.
12. Wordsworth, Excursion, Book I.
13. The original edition gives a coloured plate of this tomb, which is not noticed by Fergusson. That author's remarks on the palace at Dīg would apply to this tomb also; the style is good, but not quite the best. Sūraj Mall was killed in a skirmish in 1763.
14. Baldēo, or in Sanskrit Bāladeva, Bālabhadra, or Bālarāma, was the elder brother of Krishna. His myth in some respects resembles that of Herakles, as that of Krishna is related to the myths of Apollo. The editor is not able to solve the queries propounded by the author.
15. i.e. Hari deva, a form of Vishnu. The temple of Hari deva at Govardhan was built about A.D. 1560. (N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. viii, p. 94.)
16. Modern India shows little appreciation of good art, and the paintings ordinarily executed for decorative purposes are as crude as those described by the author. A school of clever artists in Bengal is doing something to raise the public taste. The high merit of the ancient Indian paintings at Ajantā and elsewhere is now fully recognized. A great revival of pictorial art took place about A.D. 1570 in the reign of Akbar. From that date the Indo-Persian and Indian schools of painting maintained a high standard of excellence, especially in portraiture, for a century approximately. During the eighteenth century marked deterioration may be observed. See A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, Oxford, 1911.
17. The Jāts detest Brahmans. The members of a Jāt deputation complained one day to the editor when in the Muzaffarnagar district that they suffered many evils by reason of the Brahmans.
18. The author's meaning seems to be that building tombs is not an old Hindoo usage.
19. Sivājī, the indomitable opponent of Aurangzēb in the Deccan, belonged to the agricultural Kunbī caste. He was born in May A.D. 1627, and died in April 1680. The Brahman ministers of the Rājās of Sātārā were known by the title of Peshwā. Bājī Rāo I, who died in 1740, the second Peshwā, was the first who superseded in actual power his nominal master. The last of the Peshwās was Bājī Rāo II, who abdicated in 1818, after the termination of the great Marāthā war, and retired to Bithūr near Cawnpore. His adopted son was the notorious Nānā Sāhib. The Marquis of Hastings, in 1818, drew the Rājā of Sātārā from captivity, and re-established his dignity and power. In 1839 the Rājā's treachery compelled the Government of India to depose him. His territory is now a district of the Bombay Presidency. See Mānkar, The Life and Exploits of Shivāji, 2nd ed., Bombay, Nirnayasāgar Press, 1886.
20. The Rājā of Berār, also known as the Rājā of Nāgpur, was called the Bhonslā. The misrule of Gwālior has been described ante, in chapters 36 and 49. The condition of Gwālior and Indore, the capitals of Sindhia and Holkār respectively, is now very different. The Bhonslā has vanished.
21. Since the annexation of the Panjāb in 1849, the Sikhs have justly earned so much praise as loyal and gallant soldiers, the flower of the Indian army, that their earlier less honourable reputation has been effaced, Captain Francklin, writing in 1803, and apparently expressing the opinion of George Thomas, declares that 'the Seiks are false, sanguinary, and faithless; they are addicted to plunder and the acquirement of wealth by any means, however nefarious'. (Military Memoirs of Mr. George Thomas, London reprint, p. 112.) The Sikh states of the Panjāb are now sufficiently well governed.
22. I know of no authority for the name Charat (Churut), which seems to be a blunder for Satrughna. The sons of Dasaratha were Rāma, by the chief queen; Bharat, by a second; and Lachhman (Lakshmana), and Satrughna by a third consort.
23. The species referred to is the long-tailed monkey called 'Hanumān', and 'langūr' in Hindi, the Presbytis entellus of Jerdon (=P. anchises, Elliot; = Semnopithecus, Cuvier).
24. The author seems to have forgotten that he has already told this story, ante, this chapter following [8] in the text.
25. It is in the Mathurā district. The town of Mathurā (Muttra) became the head-quarters of a separate District in 1832. The official at Govardhan in 1836 must, therefore, have been subordinate to Mathurā, not to Agra.