Chapter 52
Nûr Jahân, the Aunt of the Empress Nûr Mahal, over whose Remains the Tâj is built.[1]
I crossed over the river Jumna one morning to look at the tomb of Itimâd-ud-daula, the most remarkable mausoleum in the neighbourhood after those of Akbar and the Tâj. On my way back, I asked one of the boatmen who was rowing me who had built what appeared to me a new dome within the fort. 'One of the Emperors, of course,' said he. 'What makes you think so?'
'Because such things are made only by Emperors,' replied the man quietly, without relaxing his pull at the oar.
'True, very true,' said an old Musalmân trooper, with large white whiskers and moustachios, who had dismounted to follow me across the river, with a melancholy shake of the head, 'very true; who but Emperors could do such things as these?'
Encouraged by the trooper, the boatman continued:--'The Jâts and the Marâthâs did nothing but pull down and destroy while they held their accursed dominion here; and the European gentlemen who now govern seem to have no pleasure in building anything but factories, courts of justice, and jails.'
Feeling as an Englishman, as we all must sometimes do, be where we will, I could hardly help wishing that the beautiful panels and pillars of the bath-room had fetched a better price, and that palace, Tâj, and all at Agra, had gone to the hammer--so sadly do they exalt the past at the expense of the present in the imaginations of the people.
The tomb contains in the centre the remains of Khwâja Ghiâs,[2] one of the most prominent characters of the reign of Jahângîr, and those of his wife. The remains of the other members of his family repose in rooms all round them; and are covered with slabs of marble richly cut. It is an exceedingly beautiful building, but a great part of the most valuable stones of the mosaic work have been picked out and stolen, and the whole is about to be sold by auction, by a decree of the civil court, to pay the debt of the present proprietor, who is entirely unconnected with the family whose members repose under it, and especially indifferent as to what becomes of their bones. The building and garden in which it stands were, some sixty years ago, given away, I believe, by Nâjîf Khân, the prime minister, to one of his nephews, to whose family it still belongs.[3] Khwaja Ghiâs, a native of Western Tartary, left that country for India, where he had some relations at the imperial court, who seemed likely to be able to secure his advancement. He was a man of handsome person, and of good education and address. He set out with his wife, a bullock, and a small sum of money, which he realized by the sale of all his other property. The wife, who was pregnant, rode upon the bullock, while he walked by her side. Their stock of money had become exhausted, and they had been three days without food in the great desert, when she was taken in labour, and gave birth to a daughter. The mother could hardly keep her seat on the bullock, and the father had become too exhausted to afford her any support; and in their distress they agreed to abandon the infant. They covered it over with leaves, and towards evening pursued their journey. When they had gone on about a mile, and had lost sight of the solitary shrub under which they had left their child, the mother, in an agony of grief, threw herself from the bullock upon the ground, exclaiming, 'My child, my child!' Ghiâs could not resist this appeal. He went back to the spot, took up his child, and brought it to its mother's breast. Some travellers soon after came up, and relieved their distress, and they reached Lahore, where the Emperor Akbar then held his court.[4]
Âsaf Khan, a distant relation of Ghiâs, held a high place at court, and was much in the confidence of the Emperor. He made his kinsman his private secretary. Much pleased with his diligence and ability, Âsaf soon brought his merits to the special notice of Akbar, who raised him to the command of a thousand horse, and soon after appointed him master of the household. From this he was promoted afterwards to that of Itimâd-ud-daula, or high treasurer, one of the first ministers.[5]
The daughter who had been born in the desert became celebrated for her great beauty, parts, and accomplishments, and won the affections of the eldest son of the Emperor, the Prince Salîm, who saw her unveiled, by accident, at a party given by her father. She had been betrothed before this to Shêr Afgan, a Turkoman gentleman of rank at court, and of great repute for his high spirit, strength, and courage.[6] Salîm in vain entreated his father to interpose his authority to make him resign his claim in his favour; and she became the wife of Shêr Afgan. Salîm dare not, during his father's life, make any open attempt to revenge himself; but he, and those courtiers who thought it their interest to worship the rising sun, soon made his [Afgan's] residence at the capital disagreeable, and he retired with his wife to Bengal, where he obtained from the governor the superintendency of the district of Bardwân.
Salîm succeeded his father on the throne;[7] and, no longer restrained by his (scil. Akbar's) rigid sense of justice, he recalled Shêr Afgan to court at Delhi. He was promoted to high offices, and concluded that time had removed from the Emperor's mind all feelings of love for his wife, and of resentment against his successful rival--but he was mistaken; Salîm had never forgiven him, nor had the desire to possess his wife at all diminished. A Muhammadan of such high feeling and station would, the Emperor knew, never survive the dishonour, or suspected dishonour, of his wife; and to possess her he must make away with the husband. He dared not do this openly, because he dreaded the universal odium in which he knew it would involve him; and he made several unsuccessful attempts to get him removed by means that might not appear to have been contrived or executed by his orders. At one time he designedly, in his own presence, placed him in a situation where the pride of the chief made him contend, single-handed, with a large tiger, which he killed; and, at another, with a mad elephant, whose proboscis he cut off with his sword; but the Emperor's motives in all these attempts to put him foremost in situations of danger became so manifest that Shêr Afgan solicited, and obtained, permission to retire with his wife to Bengal.
The governor of this province, Kutb,[8] having been made acquainted with the Emperor's desire to have the chief made away with, hired forty ruffians, who stole into his house one night. There happened to be nobody else in the house; but one of the party, touched by remorse on seeing so fine a man about to be murdered in his sleep, called out to him to defend himself. He seized his sword, placed himself in one corner of the room, and defended himself so well that nearly one-half of the party are said to have been killed or wounded. The rest all made off, persuaded that he was endowed with supernatural force. After this escape he retired from Tânda, the capital of Bengal,[9] to his old residence of Bardwân. Soon after, Kutb came to the city with a splendid retinue, on pretence of making a tour of inspection through the provinces under his charge, but in reality for the sole purpose of making away with Shêr Afgan, who as soon as he heard of his approach, came out some miles to meet him on horseback, attended by only two followers. He was received with marks of great consideration, and he and the governor rode on for some time side by side, talking of their mutual friends, and the happy days they had spent together at the capital. At last, as they were about to enter the city, the governor suddenly called for his elephant of state, and mounted, saying it would be necessary for him to pass through the city on the first visit in some state. Shêr sat on horseback while he mounted, but one of the governor's pikemen struck his horse, and began to drive him before them. Shêr drew his sword, and, seeing all the governor's followers with theirs ready drawn to attack him, he concluded at once that the affront had been put upon him by the orders of Kutb, and with the design to provoke him to an unequal fight. Determined to have his life first, he spurred his horse upon the elephant, and killed Kutb with his spear. He now attacked the principal of officers, and five noblemen of the first rank fell by his sword. All the crowd now rolled back, and formed a circle round Shêr and his two companions, and galled them with arrows and musket balls from a distance. His horse fell under him and expired; and, having received six balls and several arrows in his body, Shêr himself at last fell exhausted to the ground; and the crowd, seeing the sword drop from his grasp, rushed in and cut him to pieces.[l0]
His widow was sent, 'nothing loth', to court, with her only child, a daughter. She was graciously received by the Emperor's mother, and had apartments assigned her in the palace; but the Emperor himself is said not to have seen her for four years, during which time the fame of her beauty, talents, and accomplishments filled the palace and city. After the expiration of this time the feelings, whatever they were, which prevented his seeing her, subsided; and when he at last surprised her with a visit, he found her to exceed all that his imagination had painted since their last separation. In a few days their marriage was celebrated with great magnificence;[11] and from that hour the Emperor resigned the reins of government almost entirely into her hands; and, till his death, under the name first of Nûr Mahall, 'Light of the Palace', and afterwards of Nûr Jahân, 'Light of the World ', she ruled the destinies of this great empire. Her father was now raised from the station of high treasurer to that of prime minister. Her two brothers obtained the titles of Âsaf Jâh and Itikâd Khan; and the relations of the family poured in from Tartary in search of employment, as soon as they heard of their success.[12] Nûr Jahân had by Sher Afgan, as I have stated, one daughter; but she had never any child by the Emperor Jahângîr.[13]
Âsaf Jâh became prime minister on the death of his father; and, in spite of his sister, he managed to secure the crown to Shâh Jahân, the third son of Jahângîr, who had married his daughter, the lady over whose remains the Tâj was afterwards built. Jahângîr's eldest son, Khusrû, had his eyes put out by his father's orders for repeated rebellions, to which he had been instigated by a desire to revenge his mother's murder, and by the ambition of her brother, the Hindoo prince, Mân Singh,[14] who wished to see his own nephew on the throne, and by his wife's father, the prime minister of Akbar, Khan Azam.[15] Nûr Jahân had invited the mother of Khusrû, the sister of Râjâ Mân Singh, to look with her down a well in the courtyard of her apartments by moonlight, and as she did so she threw her in. As soon as she saw that she had ceased to struggle she gave the alarm, and pretended that she had fallen in by accident.[16]
By the murder of the mother of the heir-apparent she expected to secure the throne to a creature of her own. Khusrû was treated with great kindness by his father, after he had been barbarously deprived of sight;[17] but when his brother, Shâh Jahân, was appointed to the government of Southern India, he pretended great solicitude about the comforts of his poor blind brother, which he thought would not be attended to at court, and took him with him to his government in the Deccan, where he got him assassinated, as the only sure mode of securing the throne to himself.[18] Parwîz, the second son, died a natural death;[19] so also did his only son; and so also Dâniyâl, the fourth son of the Emperor.[20] Nûr Jahân's daughter by Shêr Afgan had married Shahryâr, a young son of the Emperor by a concubine; and, just before his death he (the Emperor), at the instigation of Nûr Jahân, named this son as his successor in his will. He was placed upon the throne, and put in possession of the treasury, and at the head of a respectable army;[21] but the Empress's brother, Âsaf, designed the throne for his own son-in-law, Shâh Jahân; and, as soon as the Emperor died, he put up a puppet to amuse the people till he could come up with his army from the Deccan--Bulâkî, the eldest son of the deceased Khusrû. Shahryâr's troops were defeated; he was taken prisoner, and had his eyes put out forthwith, and the Empress was put into close confinement. As Shâh Jahân approached Lahore with his army, Âsaf put his puppet, Bulâkî, and his younger brother, with the two young sons of Dâniyâl, into prison, where they were strangled by a messenger sent on for the purpose by Shâh Jahân, with the sanction of Âsaf.[22] This measure left no male heir alive of the house of Tîmûr (Tamerlane) in Hindustan, save Shâh Jahân himself and his four sons. Dârâ was then thirteen years of age, Shujâ twelve, Aurangzêb ten, and Murâd four;[23] and all were present to learn from their father this sad lesson--that such of them who might be alive on his death, save one, must, with their sons, be hunted down and destroyed like mad dogs, lest they might get into the hands of the disaffected, and be made the tools of faction.
Monsieur de Thevenot, who visited Agra, as I have before stated, in 1666, says, 'Some affirm that there are twenty-five thousand Christian families in Agra; but all do not agree in that. The Dutch have a factory in the town, but the English have now none, because it did not turn to account.' The number must have been great, or so sober a man as Monsieur Thevenot would not have thought such an estimate worthy to be quoted without contradiction.[24] They were all, except those connected with the single Dutch factory, maintained from the salaries of office; and they gradually disappeared as their offices became filled with Muhammadans and Hindoos. The duties of the artillery, its arsenals, and foundries, were the chief foundation upon which the superstructure of Christianity then stood in India. These duties were everywhere entrusted exclusively to Europeans, and all Europeans were Christians, and, under Shâh Jahân, permitted freely to follow their own modes of worship. They were, too. Roman Catholic, and spent the greater part of their incomes in the maintenance of priests. But they could never forget that they were strangers in the land, and held their offices upon a precarious tenure; and, consequently, they never felt disposed to expend the little wealth they had in raising durable tombs, churches, and other public buildings, to tell posterity who or what they were. Present physical enjoyment, and the prayers of their priests for a good berth in the next world, were the only objects of their ambition. Muhammadans and Hindoos soon learned to perform duties which they saw bring to the Christians so much of honour and emolument; and, as they did so, they necessarily sapped the walls of the fabric. Christianity never became independent of office in India, and, I am afraid, never will; even under our rule, it still mainly rests upon that foundation.[25]
Notes:
1. The names and titles of the empress 'over whose remains the Tâj is built' were Nawâb Aliyâ Begam, Arjumand Bânû, Mumtâz-i-Mahall. The title Nûr Mahall, as applied to her, is without authority: it properly belongs to her aunt. 'It is usual in this country', Bernier observes, 'to give similar names to the members of the reigning family. Thus the wife of Chah-Jehan--so renowned for her beauty, and whose splendid mausoleum is more worthy of a place among the wonders of the world than the unshapen masses and heaps of stones in Egypt--was named Tâge Mehalle [Mumtâz-i-Mahall], or the Crown of the Seraglio; and the wife of Jehan-Guyre, who so long wielded the sceptre, while her husband abandoned himself to drunkenness and dissipation, was known first by the name of Nour Mehalle, the Light of the Seraglio, and afterwards by that of Nour-Jehan-Begum, the Light of the World.' (Bernier, Travels, ed. Constable, and V. A. Smith, 1914, p. 5.)
2. Properly, Ghiâs-ud-dîn, meaning 'succourer of religion'. The word Ghiâs cannot stand as a name by itself.
3. The author's slight description of Itimâd-ud-daula's exquisite sepulchre is, in the original edition, illustrated by two coloured plates, one of the exterior, and the other of the interior (restored). The lack of grandeur in this building is amply atoned for by its elegance and marvellous beauty of detail. An inscription, dated A.H. 1027 = A.D. 1618, alleged to exist in connexion with the building, has not, apparently, been published. (N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. vii, p. 687.)
Fergusson's description and just criticism deserve quotation. 'The tomb known as that of Itimâd-ud-daula, at Agra, . . . cannot be passed over, not only from its own beauty of design, but also because it marks an epoch in the style to which it belongs. It was erected by Nûr-Jahân in memory of her father, who died in 1621, and [it] was completed in 1628. It is situated on the left bank of the river, in the midst of a garden surrounded by a wall measuring 540 feet on each side. In the centre of this, on a raised platform, stands the tomb itself, a square measuring 69 feet on each side. It is two stories in height, and at each angle is an octagonal tower, surmounted by an open pavilion. The towers, however, are rather squat in proportion, and the general design of the building very far from being so pleasing as that of many less pretentious tombs in the neighbourhood. Had it, indeed, been built in red sandstone, or even with an inlay of white marble like that of Humâyûn, it would not have attracted much attention, its real merit consists in being wholly in white marble, and being covered throughout with a mosaic in 'pietra dura'--the first, apparently, and certainly one of the most splendid, examples of that class of ornamentation in India....
'As one of the first, the tomb of Itimâd-ud-daula was certainly one of the least successful specimens of its class. The patterns do not quite fit the places where they are put, and the spaces are not always those best suited for this style of decoration. [Altogether I cannot help fancying that the Italians had more to do with the design of this building than was at all desirable, and they are to blame for its want of grace.[a]] But, on the other hand, the beautiful tracery of the pierced marble slabs of its Windows, which resemble those of Salîm Chishtî's tomb at Fatehpur Sikrî, the beauty of its white marble walls, and the rich colour of its decorations, make up so beautiful a whole, that it is only on comparing it with the works of Shâh Jahân that we are justified in finding fault.' (Indian and Eastern Architecture, ed. 1910, pp. 305-7.) Further details will be found in Syad Muhammad Latîf, Agra (Calcutta, 1896); A.S.R. iv, pp. 137-41 (Calcutta, 1874); and more satisfactorily, in E. W. Smith, Moghul Colour Decoration of Agra (Allahabad, 1901), pp. 18-20, pl. lxv-lxxvii. Mr. E. W. Smith, if he had lived, would have produced a separate volume descriptive of this unique building.
The building is now carefully guarded and kept in repair. The restoration of the inlay of precious stones is so enormously expensive that much progress in that branch of the work is impracticable. The mausoleum contains seven tombs.
a. This sentence has been deleted by Dr. Burgess in his edition, 1910.
4. This tale is mythical. The alleged circumstances could not be known to any person besides the father and mother, neither of whom would be likely to make them public. Blochmann (transl. Âîn, i. 508) gives a full account of Itimâd-ud-daula and his family. The historians state that Nûr Jahân was born at Kandahâr, on the way to India. Her father was the son of a high Persian official, but for some reason or other was obliged to quit Persia with his family. He was a native of Teheran, not of 'Western Tartary'. The personal name of Nûr Jahân was Mihr-un-nisâ.
5. This story is erroneous, and inconsistent with the correct statement in the heading of the chapter that Nûr Jahân, daughter of Ghiâs-ud-dîn, was aunt of the Lady of the Tâj. The author makes out Ghiâs-ud-dîn (whom he corruptly calls Aeeas) to be a distant relation of Âsaf Khan. In reality, Âsaf Khân (whose original name was Mirzâ Abûl Hasan) was the second son of Ghiâs-ud-dîn, and was elder brother of Nûr Jahân, The genealogy, so far as relevant, is best shown in a tabular form, thus:--
Mirzâ Ghiâs-ud-dîn Beg (alias Itimâd-ud-daula). | | |----------------|-------------------------| | | | Muhammad Âsaf Khan *Nûr Mahall* Sharîf. (alias Mirzâ (alias *Nûrjâahân*), Abûl Hasan). *Empress of Jahângîr* | (and widow of | Shêr Afgan). | *Mumtâz-i-Mahall* (alias Arjumand Bânû Bêgam, alias Nawâb Aliyâ Bêgam), *Empress of Shâh Jahân*.
6. Alî Qulî Beg, from Persia entered Akbar's service, and in the war with the Rânâ of Chitôr, served under Prince Salîm (Jahângîr), who gave him the title of Shêr Afgan, 'tiger-thrower', with reverence to his deeds of prowess. The spelling afgan is correct. The word is the radical of the Persian verb afgandan, 'to throw down'.
7. In October, 1605.
8. Properly Kutb-ud-dîn Khan. He was foster-brother of Prince Salîm (Jahângîr), and his appointment as viceroy alarmed Shêr Afgan, and caused the latter to throw up his appointment in Bengal. The word Kutb (Qutb) cannot stand alone as a name. Kutb (Qutb)-ud-dîn means 'pole-star of religion'.
9. Tândân, or Tânra. Ancient town, now a petty village, in Mâlda District, Bengal, the capital of Bengal after the decadence of Gaur. Its history is obscure, and the very site of the city has not been accurately determined. It is certain that it was in the immediate neighbourhood of Gaur, and south-west of that town beyond the Bhâgîrathî. Old Tândân has been utterly swept away by the changes in the course of the Pâglâ. It was occupied by the Afghan king of Bengal in A.D. 1564, and is not mentioned after 1660. (I.G., 1908.)
10. This narrative, notwithstanding all the minute details with which it is garnished, cannot be accepted as sober history; and I do not know from what source the author obtained it. 'This lady, whose maiden name was Muhr-un-Nisâ, or "Seal of Womankind", had attracted the admiration of Jahângîr when he was crown prince, but Akbar married her to a young Turkomân and settled them in Bengal. After Jahângîr's accession the husband was killed in a quarrel with the governor of the province, and the wife was placed under the care of one of Akbar's widows, with whom she remained four years, and then married Jahângîr (1610). There is nothing to justify a suspicion of the Emperor's connivance in the husband's death; nor do Indian historians corroborate the invidious criticisms of "Normal" by European travellers; on the contrary, they portray Nûr-Mahall as a pattern of all the virtues, and worthy to wield the supreme influence which she obtained over the Emperor.' (Lane-Poole, The History of the Moghul Emperors of Hindustan illustrated by their Coins, p. xix.) The authorities on which this statement is founded are given in E. & D., vol. vi, pp. 397 and 402-5. See also Blochmann, Âîn, vol. i, pp. 496, 524. Details of such stories in the various chronicles always differ. Jahângîr openly rejoiced in the death of Shêr Afgan, and it is by no means clear that he was not responsible for the event. He was not troubled by nice scruples. The first element in the lady's personal name seems to be Mihr, 'sun', not Muhr, 'seal'. The words are identical in ordinary Persian writing.
11. The long interval which elapsed between Shêr Afgan's death and the marriage with the Emperor is a fact opposed to the assumptions which the author adopts that Nûr Mahall was 'nothing loth', and that the death of her first husband was contrived by Jahângîr.
12. Quaint Sir Thomas Herbert thus expresses himself: 'Meher Metzia [Mihr-un-nisâ] is forthwith espoused with all solemnity to the King, and her name changed to Nourshabegem [Nûr Shâh Bêgam], or Nor-mahal, i.e., Light or Glory of the Court; her Father upon this affinity advanced upon all the other Umbraes ['umarâ', or nobles]; her brother, Assaph-Chan [Âsaf Khân], and most of her kindred, smiled upon, with the addition of Honours, Wealth, and Command. And in this Sun-shine of content Jangheer [Jahângîr] spends some years with his lovely Queen, without regarding ought save Cupid's Currantoes' (Travels, ed. 1677, p. 74). Authority exists for the title Âsaf Jâh, as well as for the variant Âsaf Khân.
Coins were struck in the joint names of Jahângîr and his consort, bearing a rhyming Persian couplet to the effect that
'By command of Jahângîr the King, from the name of Nûr Jahân his Queen, gold gained a hundred beauties.'
The Queen's administration is censured by some of the European travellers who visited India during Jahângîr's reign as being venal and inefficient, and she is accused of cruelty and perfidy. She died on the 18th December (N.S.), 1645, and was buried by the aide of Jahângîr in his mausoleum at Lahore. At her death she was in her 72nd year, according to the Muhammadan lunar reckoning, and would thus have been thirty-four solar years of age when the Emperor married her in 1610 (Beale: Blochmann).
13. According to Sir Thomas Herbert (Travels, ed. 1677, p. 99), 'Queen Normahal and her three daughters' were confined by order of Shâh Jahân in A.D. 1628.
14. Son of Bhagwân Dâs, of Ambêr or Jaipur, in Râjputâna, and one of the greatest of Akbar's officers.
15. Also known as Azîz Kokah, a foster-brother of Akbar.
16. This story may or may not be true; but a charge of this kind is absolutely incapable of proof, and would be readily generated in the palace atmosphere.
17. According to a contemporary authority, the blinding was only partial, and the prince recovered the sight of one eye (E. & D. vi. 448). With regard to such details the discrepancies in the histories are innumerable.
18. A.H. 1031 = A.D. 1621-2. The charge seems to be true.
19. A.H. 1036 = A.D. 1626-7.
20. This is a blunder. Jahângîr's fourth son was named Jahândâr, and died in or about A.H. 1035 = A.D. 1625-6. Dâniyâl was third son of Akbar, and younger brother of Jahângîr. He died from delirium tremens in A.D. 1605, a few months before the death of Akbar,
21. Jahângîr died, when returning from Kâshmîr, on the 8th November, A.D. 1627 (N.S.), and was buried near Lahore. The fight with Shahryâr took place at Lahore.
22. Bulâkî assumed the title of Dâwar Baksh during his short reign, and struck coins at Lahore. He 'vanished--probably to Persia--after his three months' pretence of royalty; and on 25th January, 1628 (18 Jumâda I, 1037), Shâh-Jahân ascended at Agra the throne which he was to occupy for thirty years'. Shahryâr was known by the nickname of Nâ-shudanî, or 'Good-for-nothing' (Lane-Poole, The History of the Moghul Emperors of Hindustan, illustrated by their Coins, p. xxiii). The two nephews of Jahângîr, the sons of Dâniyâl, slaughtered at this time, had been, according to Herbert, baptized as Christians (Travels, ed. 1677, pp. 74, 98). There are great discrepancies in the accounts given by various authorities concerning the fate of Bulâkî and the other victims of Shâh Jahân. A dissuasion of the evidence would take too much apace, and must be inconclusive, the fact being that the proceedings were secret, and pains were taken to conceal the truth.
23. The dates of birth are, in Old Style:-Dârâ Shikoh, March 20, 1615; Sultan Shujâ, May 12, 1616; Aurangzêb, October 10, 1619; and Murâd Baksh, not stated (Beale).
24. Ante, Chapter 2, text following [8]. The quotation is from Part III, chap. 19, p. 35 of The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot, now made English. London, Printed in the year MDCLXXXVII. The author, in his quotation, omits between 'that' and 'The Dutch' the clause 'This indeed is certain that there are few Heathens and Parsis in respect of Mahometans there, and these surpass all the other sects in power as they do in number.'
25. During the reign of Akbar, many Christians, Portuguese, English, and others, visited Agra, and a considerable number settled there. A Roman Catholic church was built, the steeple of which was pulled down by Shâh Jahân. The oldest inscriptions in the cemetery adjoining the Roman Catholic cathedral are in the Armenian character. Three Catholic cemeteries exist at or near Agra, namely
(l) the old Catholic graveyard at the village of Lashkarpur, dating from the time of Akbar, who made a grant of the site about A.D. 1600. This cemetery includes the Martyrs' Chapel, also known as the Chapel of Father Santus (Santucci), which was erected in memory of Khoja Mortenepus, an Armenian merchant, whose epitaph is dated 1611. The next oldest tombstone, that of Father Emmanuel d' Anhaya, who died in prison, bears the date August, 1633. Father Joseph de Castro, who died at Lahore, on December 15, 1646, lies in the same building.
(2) A cemetery in Pâdrîtola, the native Christian ward of the city behind the old cathedral. Father Tieffenthaler is buried there.
(3) A cemetery in an unnamed village, granted by Jahângîr, and situated a mile north of Lashkarpur. An unpublished letter in the British Museum shows that Jahângîr closed the churches in his dominions in 1615. Notwithstanding, the College at Agra was founded about 1617 by an Armenian who is known by his title Mirzâ Zul- Qarnain. The acute persecution by Shâh Jahân occurred in 1631.
The artillery men in the Mogul service were not all European Christians. Turks from the Ottoman Empire were freely employed. (See Ep. Ind., ii, 132 note.)
The facts concerning the early history of Christianity in Northern India have been imperfectly studied. In this note I have used chiefly a pamphlet by Father H. Hosten, S. J., entitled Jesuit Missionaries in Northern India, &c. (Catholic Orphan Press, Calcutta, 1907), and the confused little book by Fanthome, Reminiscences of Agra (2nd ed., Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta, 1895). The Jesuit and Capuchin Fathers are working at the subject and hope to elucidate it. From the A.S. Progress Rep. N. Circle, Muhammadan Monuments, for 1911-12, p. 21, it appears that arrangements for the proper maintenance of the Old Catholic cemetery are in hand.
The author's observations concerning the official relations of Christianity in India do not apply at all to the very ancient churches of the South (See E.H.I., 3rd ed., 1914, App. M, pp. 245- 7). Even in the north, the modern missionary operations may claim to be 'independent of office'.
Chapter 53
Father Gregory's Notion of the Impediments to Conversion in India-- Inability of Europeans to speak Eastern Languages.
Father Gregory, the Roman Catholic priest, dined with us one evening, and Major Godby took occasion to ask him at table, 'What progress our religion was making among the people?'
'Progress!' said he; 'why, what progress can we ever hope to make among a people who, the moment we begin to talk to them about the miracles performed by Christ, begin to tell us of those infinitely more wonderful performed by Krishna, who lifted a mountain upon his little finger, as an umbrella, to defend his shepherdesses at Govardhan from a shower of rain.[1] The Hindoos never doubt any part of the miracles and prophecies of our scripture--they believe every word of them; and the only thing that surprises them is that they should be so much less wonderful than those of their own scriptures, in which also they implicitly believe. Men who believe that the histories of the wars and amours of Râm and Krishna, two of the incarnations of Vishnu, were written some fifty thousand years before these wars and amours actually took place upon the earth, would of course easily believe in the fulfilment of any prophecy that might be related to them out of any other book;[2] and, as to miracles, there is absolutely nothing too extraordinary for their belief. If a Christian of respectability were to tell a Hindoo that, to satisfy some scruples of the Corinthians, St. Paul had brought the sun and moon down upon the earth, and made them rebound off again into their places, like tennis balls, without the slightest injury to any of the three planets [sic], I do not think he would feel the slightest doubt of the truth of it; but he would immediately be put in mind of something still more extraordinary that Krishna did to amuse the milkmaids, or to satisfy some sceptics of his day, and relate it with all the naïveté imaginable.
I saw at Agra Mirzâ Kâm Baksh, the eldest son of Sulaimân Shikoh, the eldest son of the brother of the present Emperor. He had spent a season with us at Jubbulpore, while prosecuting his claim to an estate against the Râjâ of Rîwâ. The Emperor, Shâh Âlam, in his flight before our troops from Bengal (1762), struck off the high road to Delhi at Mirzapore, and came down to Rîwâ, where he found an asylum during the season of the rains with the Rîwâ Râjâ, who assigned for his residence the village of Makanpur.[3] His wife, the Empress, was here delivered of a son, the present Emperor, of Hindustân, Akbar Shâh;[4] and the Râjâ assigned to him and his heirs for ever the fee simple of this village. As the members of this family increased in geometrical ratio, under the new system, which gave them plenty to eat with nothing to do, the Emperor had of late been obliged to hunt round for little additions to his income; and in his search he found that Makanpur gave name to a 'pargana', or little district, of which it was the capital, and that a good deal of merchandize passed through this district, and paid heavy dues to the Râjâ. Nothing, he thought, would be lost by trying to get the whole district instead of the village; and for this purpose he sent down Kâm Baksh, the ablest man of the whole family, to urge and prosecute his claim; but the Râjâ was a close, shrewd man, and not to be done out of his revenue, and Kâm Baksh was obliged to return minus some thousand rupees, which he had spent in attempting to keep up appearances.
The best of us Europeans feel our deficiencies in conversation with Muhammadans of high rank and education, when we are called upon to talk upon subjects beyond the everyday occurrences of life. A Muhammadan gentleman of education is tolerably acquainted with astronomy, as it was taught by Ptolemy; with the logic and ethics of Aristotle and Plato; with the works of Hippocrates and Galen, through those of Avicenna, or, as they call him, Abû-Alîsîna;[5] and he is very capable of talking upon all subjects of philosophy, literature, science, and the arts, and very much inclined to do so; and of understanding the nature of the improvements that have been made in them in modern times. But, however capable we may feel of discussing these subjects, or explaining these improvements in our own language, we all feel ourselves very much at a loss when we attempt to do it in theirs. Perhaps few Europeans have mixed and conversed more freely with all classes than I have; and yet I feel myself sadly deficient when I enter, as I often do, into discussions with Muhammadan gentlemen of education upon the subject of the character of the governments and institutions of different countries--their effects upon the character and condition of the people; the arts and the sciences; the faculties and operations of the human mind; and the thousand other things which are subjects of everyday conversation among educated and thinking; men in our country. I feel that they could understand me quite well if I could find words for my ideas; but these I cannot find, though their languages abound in them, nor have I ever met the European gentleman who could. East Indians can;[6] but they commonly want the ideas as much as we want the language. The chief cause of this deficiency is the want of sufficient intercourse with men in whose presence we should be ashamed to appear ignorant--this is the great secret, and all should know and acknowledge it.
We are not ashamed to convey our orders to our native servants in a barbarous language. Military officers seldom speak to their 'sipâhîs' (sepoys) and native officers, about anything but arms, accoutrements, and drill; or to other natives about anything but the sports of the field; and, as long as they are understood, they care not one straw in what language they express themselves. The conversation of the civil servants with their native officers takes sometimes a wider range; but they have the same philosophical indifference as to the language in which they attempt to convey their ideas; and I have heard some of our highest diplomatic characters talking,[7] without the slightest feeling of shame or embarrassment, to native princes on the most ordinary subjects of everyday interest in a language which no human being but themselves could understand. We shall remain the same till some change of system inspire us with stronger motives to please and conciliate the educated classes of the native community. They may be reconciled, but they can never be charmed out of their prejudices or the errors of their preconceived opinions by such language as the European gentlemen are now in the habit of speaking to them.[8] We must learn their language better, or we must teach them our own, before we can venture to introduce among them those free institutions which would oblige us to meet them on equal terms at the bar, on the bench, and in the senate.[9] Perhaps two of the best secular works that were ever written upon the facilities and operations of the human mind, and the duties of men in their relations with each other, are those of Imâm-ud-dîn Ghazzâlî, and Nasîr-ud-dîn of Tûs.[10] Their idol was Plato, but their works are of a more practical character than his, and less dry than those of Aristotle.
I may here mention the following, among many instances that occur to me, of the amusing mistakes into which Europeans are liable to fall in their conversation with natives.
Mr. J. W------n, of the Bengal Civil Service, commonly known by the name of Beau W------n,[11] was the Honourable Company's opium agent at Patna, when I arrived at Dinapore to join my regiment in 1810.[12] He had a splendid house, and lived in excellent style; and was never so happy as when he had a dozen young men from the Dinapore cantonments living with him. He complained that year, as I was told, that he had not been able to save more than one hundred thousand rupees that season out of his salary and commission upon the opium, purchased by the Government from the cultivators.[13] The members of the civil service, in the other branches of public service, were all anxious to have it believed by their countrymen that they were well acquainted with their duties, and able and willing to perform them; but the Honourable Company's commercial agents were, on the contrary, generally anxious to make their countrymen believe that they neither knew nor cared anything about their duties, because they were ashamed of them. They were sinecure posts for the drones of the service, or for those who had great interest and no capacity.[14] Had any young man made it appear that he really thought W------n knew or cared anything about his duties, he would certainly never have been invited to his house again; and if any one knew, certainly no one seemed to know that he had any other duty than that of entertaining his guests.
No one ever spoke the native language so badly, because no man had ever so little intercourse with the natives; and it was, I have been told, to his ignorance of the native languages that his bosom friend, Mr. P------st, owed his life on one occasion. W. sat by the sick-bed of his friend with unwearied attention, for some days and nights, after the doctors had declared his case entirely hopeless. He proposed at last to try change of air, and take him on the river Ganges. The doctors, thinking that he might as well die in his boat on the river as in his house at Calcutta, consented to his taking him on board. They got up as far as Hooghly, when P. said that he felt better and thought he could eat something. What should it be? A little roasted kid perhaps. The very thing that he was longing for! W. went out upon the deck to give orders for the kid, that his friend might not be disturbed by the gruff voice of the old 'khânsâmâ' (butler). P. heard the conversation, however.
'Khânsâmâ', said the Beau W., 'you know that my friend Mr. P. is very ill?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And that he has not eaten anything for a month?'
'A long time for a man to fast, sir.'
'Yes, Khânsâmâ, and his stomach is now become very delicate, and could not stand anything strong.'
'Certainly not, sir.'
'Well, Khânsâmâ, then he has taken a fancy to a roasted mare' ('mâdiyân'), meaning a 'halwân', or kid.'[15]
'A roasted mare, sir?'
'Yes, Khânsâmâ, a roasted mare, which you must have nicely prepared.'
'What, the whole, sir?'
'Not the whole at one time; but have the whole ready as there is no knowing what part he may like best.'
The old butter had heard of the Tartars eating their horses when in robust health, but the idea of a sick man, not able to move in his bed without assistance, taking a fancy to a roasted mare, quite staggered him.
'But, sir, I may not be able to get such a thing as a mare at a moment's notice; and if I get her she will be very dear.'
'Never mind, Khânsâmâ, get you the mare, cost what she will; if she costs a thousand rupees my friend shall have her. He has taken a fancy to the mare, and the mare he shall have, if she costs a thousand rupees.'
The butter made his salaam, said he would do his best, and took his leave, requesting that the boats might be kept at the bank of the river till he came back.
W. went into his sick friend, who, with great difficulty, managed to keep his countenance while he complained of the liberties old servants were in the habit of taking with their masters. 'They think themselves privileged', said W., 'to conjure up difficulties in the way of everything that one wants to have done.'
'Yes', said P------st, 'we like to have old and faithful servants about us, particularly when we are sick; but they are apt to take liberties, which new ones will not.'
In about two hours the butler's approach was announced from the deck, and W. walked out to scold him for his delay. The old gentleman was coming down over the bank, followed by about eight men bearing the four quarters of an old mare. The butler was very fat; and the proud consciousness of having done his duty, and met his master's wishes in a very difficult and important point, had made him a perfect Falstaff. He marshalled his men in front of the cooking-boat, and then came towards his master, who for some time stood amazed, and unable to speak. At last he roared out, 'And what the devil have you here?'
'Why, the mare that the sick gentleman took a fancy for; and dear enough she has cost me; not a farthing less than two hundred rupees would the fellow take for his mare.'
P------st could contain himself no longer; he burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, during which the abscess in his liver burst into the intestines, and he felt himself relieved, as if by enchantment. The mistake was rectified--he got his kid; and in ten days he was taken back to Calcutta a sound man, to the great astonishment of all the doctors.
During the first campaign against Nepâl, in 1815, Colonel, now Major- General, O.H., who commanded the------Regiment, N. I.,[16] had to march with his regiment through the town of Darbhanga, the capital of the Râjâ, who came to pay his respects to him. He brought a number of presents, but the colonel, a high-minded, amiable man, never took anything himself, nor suffered any person in his camp to do so, in the districts they passed through without paying for it. He politely declined to take any of the presents; but said that he 'had heard that Darbhanga produced crows ("kauwâ"), and should be glad to get some of them if the Râjâ could spare them,'--meaning coffee, or 'kahwâ'.
The Râjâ stared, and said that certainly they had abundance of crows in Darbhanga; but he thought they were equally abundant in all parts of India.
'Quite the contrary, Râjâ Sâhib, I assure you,' said the colonel; 'there is not such a thing as a crow to be found in any part of the Company's dominions that I have seen, and I have been all over them.'
'Very strange!' said the Râjâ, turning round to his followers.
'Yes,' replied they,' it is very strange, Râjâ Sâhib; but such is your 'ikbâl' (good fortune), that everything thrives under it; and, if the colonel should wish to have a few crows, we could easily collect them for him.'
'If', said the colonel, greatly delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we are all fond of crows.'
'Indeed,' returned the Râjâ, 'I shall be happy to send you as many as you wish.' ('Much' and 'many' are expressed by the same term.)
'Then we should be glad to have two or three bags full, if it would not be robbing you.'
'Not in the least,' said the Râjâ; 'I will go home and order them to be collected immediately.'
In the evening, as the officers, with the colonel at their head, were sitting down to dinner, a man came up to announce the Râjâ's present. Three fine large bags were brought in, and the colonel requested that one might be opened immediately. It was opened accordingly, and the mess butler ('khansâmân') drew out by the legs a fine old crow. The colonel immediately saw the mistake, and laughed as heartily as the rest at the result. A polite message was sent to the Râjâ, requesting that he would excuse his having made it--for he had had half a dozen men out shooting crows all day with their matchlocks. Few Europeans spoke the language better than General ------, and I do not believe that one European in a thousand, at this very moment, makes any difference, or knows any difference, in the sound of the two terms.
Kâm Baksh had one sister married to the King of Oudh, and another to Mirzâ Salîm, the younger son of the Emperor. Mirzâ Salîm and his wife could not agree, and a separation took place, and she went to reside with her sister, the Queen of Oudh. The King saw her frequently; and, finding her more beautiful than his wife, he demanded her also in marriage from her father, who resided at Lucknow, the capital of Oudh, on a pension of five thousand rupees a month from the King. He would not consent, and demanded his daughter; the King, finding her willing to share his bed and board with her sister, would not give her up.[17] The father got his old friend, Colonel Gardiner, who had married a Muhammadan woman of rank, to come down and plead his cause. The King gave up the young woman, but at the same time stopped the father's pension, and ordered him and all his family out of his dominions. He set out with Colonel Gardiner and his daughter, on his road to Delhi, through Kâsganj, the residence of the colonel, who was one day recommending the prince to seek consolation for the loss of his pension in the proud recollection of having saved the honour of the house of Tamerlane, when news was brought to them that the daughter had run off from camp with his (Colonel Gardiner's) son James, who had accompanied him to Lucknow. The prince and the colonel mounted their horses, and rode after him; but they were so much heavier and older than the young ones, that they soon gave up the chase in despair. Sulaimân Shikoh insisted upon the colonel immediately fighting him, after the fashion of the English, with swords or pistols, but was soon persuaded that the honour of the house of Tîmûr would be much better preserved by allowing the offending parties to marry ![18] The King of Oudh was delighted to find that the old man had been so punished; and the Queen no less so to find herself so suddenly and unexpectedly relieved from all dread of her sister's return. All parties wrote to my friend Kâm Baksh, who was then at Jubbulpore;[19] and he came off with their letters to me to ask whether I thought the incident might not be turned to account in getting the pension for his father restored.[20]
Notes:
1. Govardhan is a very sacred place of pilgrimage, full of temples, situated in the Mathurâ (Muttra) district, sixteen miles west of Mathurâ, Regulation V of 1826 annexed Govardhan to the Agra district. In 1832 Mathurâ was made the head-quarters of a new district, Govardhan and other territory being transferred from Agra.
2. The Purânas, even when narrating history after a fashion, are cast in the form of prophecies. The Bhâgavat Purâna is especially devoted to the legends of Krishna. The Hindî version of the 10th Book (skandha) is known as the 'Prêm Sâgar', or 'Ocean of Love', and is, perhaps, the most wearisome book in the world.
3. This flight occurred during the struggles following the battle of Plassy in 1757, which were terminated by the battle of Buxar in 1764, and the grant to the East India Company of the civil administration of Bengal, Bihâr and Orissa in the following year. Shâh Âlam bore, in weakness and misery, the burden of the imperial title from 1759 to 1806. From 1765 to 1771 he was the dependent of the English at Allahabad. From 1771 to 1803 he was usually under the control of Marâthâ chiefs, and from the time of Lord Lake's entry into Delhi, in 1803 he became simply a prisoner of the British Government. His successors occupied the same position. In 1788 he was barbarously blinded by the Rohilla chief, Ghulâm Kâdir.
4. Akbar II. His position as Emperor was purely titular.
5. The name is printed as Booalee Shina in the original edition. His full designation is Abû Alî al-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sînâ, which means 'that Sînâ was his grandfather. Avicenna is a corruption of either Abû Sînâ or Ibn Sînâ. He lived a strenuous, passionate life, but found time to compose about a hundred treatises on medicine and almost every subject known to Arabian science. He died in A.D. 1037. A good biography of him will be found in Encyclo. Brit., 11th ed., 1910.
6. Otherwise called Eurasians, or, according to the latest official decree, Anglo-Indians.
7. 'Diplomatic characters' would now be described as officers of the Political Department.
8. These remarks of the author should help to dispel the common delusion that the English officials of the olden time spoke the Indian languages better than their more highly trained successors.
9. The author wrote these words at the moment of the inauguration by Lord William Bentinck and Macaulay of the new policy which established English as the official language of India, and the vehicle for the higher instruction of its people, as enunciated in the resolution dated 7th March, 1835, and described by Boulger in Lord William Bentinck (Rulers of India, 1897), chap. 8. The decision then formed and acted on alone rendered possible the employment of natives of India in the higher branches of the administration. Such employment has gradually year by year increased, and certainly will further increase, at least up to the extreme limit of safety. Indians now (1914) occupy seats in the Council of India in London, and in the Executive and Legislative Councils of the Governor-General, Provincial Governors, and Lieutenant-Governors. They hold most of the judicial appointments and fill many responsible executive offices.
10. Khojah Nasîr-ud-dîn of Tûs in Persia was a great astronomer, philosopher, and mathematician in the thirteenth century. The author's Imâm-ud-dîn Ghazzâlî is intended for Abû Hâmid Imâm al Ghazzâlî, one of the most famous of Musulmân doctors. He was born at Tûs, the modern Mashhad (Meshed) in Khurâsân, and died in A.D. 1111. His works are numerous. One is entitled The Ruin of Philosophies, and another, the most celebrated, is The Resuscitation of Religious Sciences (F. J. Arbuthnot, A Manual of Arabian History and Literature, London, 1890). These authors are again referred to in a subsequent chapter. I am not able to judge the propriety of Sleeman's enthusiastic praise.
11. The gentleman referred to was Mr. John Wilton, who was appointed to the service in 1775.
12. The cantonments at Dinapore (properly Dânâpur) are ten miles distant from the great city of Patna.
13. The rupee was worth more than two shillings in 1810. The remuneration of high officials by commission has been long abolished.
14. There used to be two opium agents, one at Patna, and the other at Ghâzîpur, who administered the Opium Department under the control of the Board of Revenue in Calcutta. In deference to the demands of the Chinese Government and of public opinion in England, the Agency at Ghâzîpur has been closed, and the Government of India is withdrawing gradually from the opium trade. Such lucrative sinecures as those described in the text have long ceased to exist.
15. These Persian words would not now be used in orders to servants.
16. This officer was Sir Joseph O'Halloran, K.C.B., attached to the 18th Regiment, N.I. He became a Lieutenant-Colonel on June 4, 1814, and Major-General on January 10, 1837. He is mentioned in Ramaseeana (p 59) as Brigadier-General commanding the Sâgar Division.
17. The King's demand was improper and illegal. The Muhammadan law, like the Jewish (Leviticus xviii, 18), prohibits a man from being married to two sisters at once. 'Ye are also forbidden to take to wife two sisters; except what is already past: for God is gracious and merciful' (Korân, chap. iv). Compare the ruling in 'Mishkât-ul- Masâbih', Book XIII, chap. v, Part II (Matthews, vol. ii, p. 94).
18. The colonel's son has succeeded to his father's estates, and he and his wife are, I believe, very happy together. [W. H. S.] Such an incident would, of course, be now inconceivable. The family name is also spelled Gardner. The romantic history of the Gardners is summarized in the appendix to A Particular Account of the European Military Adventures of Hindustan, from 1784 to 1803; compiled by Herbert Compton: London, 1892.
19. Ante, Chapter 53 text between [2] and [3].
20. Kâsganj, the residence of Colonel Gardner, is in the Etah district of the United Provinces. In 1911 the population was 16,429.
Chapter 54
Fathpur-Sîkrî--The Emperor Akbar's Pilgrimage--Birth of Jahângîr.
On the 6th January we left Agra, which soon after became the residence of the Governor of the North-Western Provinces, Sir Charles Metcalfe.[1] It was, when I was there, the residence of a civil commissioner, a judge, a magistrate, a collector of land revenue, a collector of customs, and all their assistants and establishments. A brigadier commands the station, which contained a park of artillery, one regiment of European and four regiments of native infantry.[2]
Near the artillery practice-ground, we passed the tomb of Jodh Bâî, the wife of the Emperor Akbar, and the mother of Jahângîr. She was of Râjpût caste, daughter of the Hindoo chief of Jodhpur, a very beautiful, and, it is said, a very amiable woman.[3] The Mogul Emperors, though Muhammadans, were then in the habit of taking their wives from among the Râjpût princes of the country, with a view to secure their allegiance. The tomb itself is in ruins, having only part of the dome standing, and the walls and magnificent gateway that at one time surrounded it have been all taken away and sold by a thrifty Government, or appropriated to purposes of more practical utility.[4]
I have heard many Muhammadans say that they could trace the decline of their empire in Hindustan to the loss of the Râjpût blood in the veins of their princes.[5] 'Better blood' than that of the Râjpûts of India certainly never flowed in the veins of any human beings; or, what is the same thing, no blood was ever believed to be finer by the people themselves and those they had to deal with. The difference is all in the imagination, and the imagination is all-powerful with nations as with individuals. The Britons thought their blood the finest in the world till they were conquered by the Romans, the Picts, the Scots, and the Saxons. The Saxons thought theirs the finest in the world till they were conquered by the Danes and the Normans. This is the history of the human race. The quality of the blood of a whole people has depended often upon the fate of a battle, which in the ancient world doomed the vanquished to the hammer; and the hammer changed the blood of those sold by it from generation to generation. How many Norman robbers got their blood ennobled, and how many Saxon nobles got theirs plebeianized by the Battle of Hastings; and how difficult it would be for any of us to say from which we descended--the Britons or the Saxons, the Danes or the Normans; or in what particular action our ancestors were the victors or the vanquished, and became ennobled or plebeianized by the thousand accidents which influence the fate of battles. A series of successful aggressions upon their neighbours will commonly give a nation a notion that they are superior in courage; and pride will make them attribute this superiority to blood--that is, to an old date. This was, perhaps, never more exemplified than in the case of the Gûrkhas of Nepal, a small diminutive race of men not unlike the Huns, but certainly as brave as any men can possibly be. A Gûrkha thought himself equal to any four other men of the hills, though they were all much stronger; just as a Dane thought himself equal to four Saxons at one time in Britain. The other men of the hills began to think that he really was so, and could not stand before him.[6]
We passed many wells from which the people were watering their fields, and found those which yielded a brackish water were considered to be much more valuable for irrigation than those which yielded sweet water. It is the same in the valley of the Nerbudda, but brackish water does not suit some soils and some crops. On the 8th we reached Fathpur Sîkrî, which lies about twenty-four miles from Agra, and stands upon the back of a narrow range of sandstone hills, rising abruptly from the alluvial plains to the highest, about one hundred feet, and extends three miles north-north-east and south- south-west. This place owes its celebrity to a Muhammadan saint, the Shaikh Salîm of Chisht, a town in Persia, who owed his to the following circumstance:
The Emperor Akbar's sons had all died in infancy, and he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the celebrated Muîn-ud-dîn of Chisht, at Ajmêr. He and his family went all the way on foot at the rate of three 'kôs', or four miles, a day, a distance of about three hundred and fifty miles. 'Kanâts', or cloth walls, were raised on each side of the road, carpets spread over it, and high towers of burnt bricks erected at every stage, to mark the places where he rested. On reaching the shrine he made a supplication to the saint, who at night appeared to him in his sleep, and recommended him to go and entreat the intercession of a very holy old man, who lived a secluded life upon the top of the little range of hills at Sîkrî. He went accordingly, and was assured by the old man, then ninety-six years of age, that the Empress Jodh Bâî, the daughter of a Hindoo prince, would be delivered of a son, who would live to a good old age. She was then pregnant, and remained in the vicinity of the old man's hermitage till her confinement, which took place 31st of August, 1569. The infant was called after the hermit, Mirzâ Salîm, and became in time Emperor of Hindostan, under the name of Jahângîr.[7] It was to this Emperor Jahângîr that Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador, was sent from the English Court.[8] Akbar, in order to secure to himself, his family, and his people, the advantage of the continued intercessions of so holy a man, took up his residence at Sîkrî, and covered the hill with magnificent buildings for himself, his courtiers, and his public establishments.[9]
The quadrangle, which contains the mosque on the west side, and tomb of the old hermit in the centre, was completed in the year 1578, six years before his death; and is, perhaps, one of the finest in the world. It is five hundred and seventy-five feet square, and surrounded by a high wall, with a magnificent cloister all around within.[10] On the outside is a magnificent gateway, at the top of a noble flight of steps twenty-four feet high. The whole gateway is one hundred and twenty feet in height, and the same in breadth, and presents beyond the wall five sides of an octagon, of which the front face is eighty feet wide. The arch in the centre of this space is sixty feet high by forty wide.[11] This gateway is no doubt extremely grand and beautiful; but what strikes one most is the disproportion between the thing wanted and the thing provided--there seems to be something quite preposterous in forming so enormous an entrance for a poor diminutive man to walk through--and walk he must, unless carried through on men's shoulders; for neither elephant, horse, nor bullock could ascend over the flight of steps. In all these places the staircases, on the contrary, are as disproportionately small; they look as if they were made for rats to crawl through, while the gateways seem as if they were made for ships to sail under.[12] One of the most interesting sights was the immense swarms of swallows flying round the thick bed of nests that occupy the apex of this arch, and, to the spectators below, they look precisely like swarm of bees round a large honeycomb. I quoted a passage in the Korân in praise of the swallows, and asked the guardians of the place whether they did not think themselves happy in having such swarms of sacred birds over their heads all day long. 'Not at all,' said they; 'they oblige us to sweep the gateway ten times a day; but there is no getting at their nests, or we should soon get rid of them.' They then told me that the sacred bird of the Korân was the 'abâbîl', or large black swallow, and not the 'partâdîl', a little piebald thing of no religious merit whatever.[13] On the right side of the entrance is engraven on stone in large letters, standing out in bas-relief, the following passage in Arabic: 'Jesus, on whom be peace, has said, "The word is merely a bridge; you are to pass over it, and not to build your dwellings upon it".' Where this saying of Christ is to be found I know not, nor has any Muhammadan yet been able to tell me; but the quoting of such a passage, in such a place, is a proof of the absence of all bigotry on the part of Akbar.[14]
The tomb of Shaikh Salîm, the hermit, is a very beautiful little building, in the centre of the quadrangle.[15] The man who guards it told me that the Jâts, while they reigned, robbed this tomb, as well as those at Agra, of some of the most beautiful and valuable portion of the mosaic work.[16] 'But,' said he, 'they were well plundered in their turn by your troops at Bharatpur; retribution always follows the wicked sooner or later.'[17] He showed us the little roof of stone tiles, close to the original little dingy mosque of the old hermit, where the Empress gave birth to Jahângîr;[18] and told us that she was a very sensible woman, whose counsels had great weight with the Emperor.[19] 'His majesty's only fault was', he said, 'an inclination to learn the art of magic, which was taught him by an old Hindoo religious mendicant,' whose apartment near the palace he pointed out to us.
'Fortunately,' said our cicerone, 'the fellow died before the Emperor had learnt enough to practise the art without his aid.'
Shaikh Salîm had, he declared, gone more than twenty times on pilgrimage to the tomb of the holy prophet; and was not much pleased to have his repose so much disturbed by the noise and bustle of the imperial court. At last, Akbar wanted to surround the hill with regular fortifications, and the Shaikh could stand it no longer.[20] 'Either you or I must leave this hill,' said he to the Emperor; 'if the efficacy of my prayers is no longer to be relied upon, let me depart in peace.' 'If it be your majesty's will,' replied the Emperor, 'that one should go, let it be your slave, I pray.' The old story: 'There is nothing like relying upon the efficacy of our prayers,' say the priests, 'Nothing like relying upon that of our sharp swords,' say the soldiers; and, as nations advance from barbarism, they generally contrive to divide between them the surplus produce of the land and labour of society.
The old hermit consented to remain, and pointed out Agra as a place which he thought would answer the Emperor's purpose extremely well. Agra, then an unpeopled waste, soon became a city, and Fathpur-Sîkrî was deserted.[21] Cities which, like this, are maintained by the public establishments that attend and surround the courts of sovereign princes, must always, like this, become deserted when these sovereigns change their resting-places. To the history of the rise and progress, decline and fall, of how many cities is this the key?
Close to the tomb of the saint is another containing the remains of a great number of his descendants, who continue to enjoy, under the successors of Akbar, large grants of rent-free lands for their own support, and for that of the mosque and mausoleum. These grants have, by degrees, been nearly all resumed;[22] and, as the repair of the buildings is now entrusted to the public officers of our government, the surviving members of the saint's family, who still reside among the ruins, are extremely poor. What strikes a European most in going over these palaces of the Moghal Emperors is the want of what a gentleman of fortune in his own country would consider elegantly comfortable accommodations. Five hundred pounds a year would at the present day secure him more of this in any civilized country of Europe or America than the greatest of those Emperors could command. He would, perhaps, have the same impression in going over the domestic architecture of the most civilized nations of the ancient world, Persia and Egypt, Greece and Rome.[23]
Notes:
1. The Act of 1833 (3 & 4 William IV, c. 85), which reconstituted the government of India, provided that the upper Provinces should be formed into a separate Presidency under the name of Agra, and Sir Charles Metcalfe was nominated as the first Governor. On reconsideration, this arrangement was modified, and instead of the Presidency of Agra, the Lieutenant-Governorship of the North-Western Provinces was formed, with head-quarters at Agra. Sir C. Metcalfe became Lieutenant-Governor in 1836, but held the office for a short time only, until January, 1838, when Lord Auckland, the Governor- General, took over temporary charge. The seat of the Local Government was moved to Allahabad in 1868. From 1877 the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces was also Chief Commissioner of Oudh. The name North-Western Provinces, which had become unsuitable and misleading since the annexation of the Panjâb in 1849, could not be retained after the formation of the North-West Frontier Province in 1902. Accordingly, from that year the combined jurisdiction of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh received the new official name of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. The title of Chief Commissioner of Oudh was dropped at the same time, but the legal System and administration of the old kingdom of Oudh continued to be distinct in certain respects.
2. The civil establishment and garrison are still nearly the same as in the author's time. The inland customs department is now concerned only with the restrictions on the manufacture of salt. The offices of district magistrate and collector of land revenue have long been combined in a single officer.
3. Akbar married the daughter of Bihârî Mal, chief of Jaipur, in A.D. 1562. There is little doubt that she, Mariam-uz-Zamânî, was the mother of Jahângîr. See Blochmann, transl. Aîn, vol. i, p. 619. Mr. Beveridge has given up the opinion which he formerly advocated in J.A.S.B., vol. lvi (1887), Part I, pp. 164-7.
The Jodhpur princess was given the posthumous title of 'Mariam-uz- Zamânî', or 'Mary of the age', which circumstance probably originated the belief that Akbar had one Christian queen. Her tomb at Sikandara is locally known simply as Rauza Maryam, 'the mausoleum of Mary', a designation which has had much to do with the persistence of the erroneous belief in the existence of a Christian consort of Akbar. Mr. Beveridge holds, and I think rightly, that Jodh Bâî is not a proper name. It seems to mean merely 'princess of Jodhpur'. The only lady really known as Jodh Bâî was the daughter of Udai Singh (Môth Râjâ) of Jaipur, who became a consort of Jahângîr. Sleeman's notion that Jahângîr's mother also was called Jodh Bâî is mistaken (Blochmann, ut supra).
4. It was blown up about 1832 by order of the Government, and the materials of the gates, walls, and outer towns were used for the building of barracks. But the mausoleum itself resisted the spoiler and remained 'a huge shapeless heap of massive fragments of masonry'. The building consisted of a square room raised on a platform with a vault below. The marble tomb or cenotaph of the queen still exists in the vault. A fine gateway formerly stood at the entrance to the enclosure, and there was a small mosque to the west of the tomb (A.S.R. vol. iv. (1874), p. 121: Muh. Latif, Agra, p. 192). It is painful to be obliged to record so many instances of vandalism committed by English officials. This tomb is the memorial of Jodh Bâî, daughter of Udai Singh, alias Môth Râjâ, who was married to Jahângîr in A.D. 1585, and was the mother of Shâh Jahân. Her personal names were Jagat Goshaini and Bâlmatî. She died in A.D. 1619. Akbar's queen, Maryam-uz-Zamânî, daughter of Râjâ Bihârî Mall of Jaipur (Ambêr), who died in A.D. 1623, is buried at Sîkandra. (See Beale, s.v. 'Jodh Bâî' and 'Mariam Zamânî'; Blochmann, transl. Aîn, pp. 429, 619.) The tomb of Maryam-uz-Zamânî has been purchased by Government from the missionaries, who had used it as a school, and has been restored. (Ann. Rep. A.S., India, 1910-11, pp. 92-6.)
5. Although it may be admitted that the Râjpût strain of blood improved the constitution of the royal family of Delhi, the decline and fall of the Timuride dynasty cannot be truly ascribed to 'the loss of the Râjpût blood in the veins' of the ruling princes. The empire was tottering to its fall long before the death of Aurangzêb, who 'had himself married two Hindoo wives; and he wedded his son Muazzam (afterwards the Emperor Bahâdur) to a Hindoo princess, as his forefathers had done before him'. (Lane-Poole, The History of the Moghul Emperors of Hindustan illustrated by their Coins, p. xviii. ) The wonder is, not that the empire of Delhi fell, but that it lasted so long.
6. When the author wrote the above remarks, Englishmen knew the gallant Gûrkhas as enemies only; they now know them as worthy and equal brethren in arms. The recruitment of Gûrkhas for the British service began in 1838. The spelling 'Gôrkhâ' is more accurate.
7. The 'kôs' varies much in value, but in most parts of the United Provinces it is reckoned as equal to two miles. According to the N.W.P. Gazetteer (p. 568), the nearest approximate value for the Agra kôs is 1 3/4 mile. Three kôs would, therefore, be equal to about 5 1/4 miles. Muîn-ud-dîn died in A.D. 1236. Sleeman, on I know not what authority, represents Akbar as resorting to Salîm Chishtî, Shaikh of Fathpur-Sîkrî, on the advice given by a vision accorded at Ajmêr. The Tabaqât-i-Akbarî simply records that Akbar had visited the Shaikh, the 'very holy old man' of Sleeman, several times, and had obtained the promise of a son. That promise was fulfilled by the birth of the princes Salîm and Murâd, who both saw the light at Fathpur-Sîkrî. The pilgrimage of Akbar on foot to Ajmêr, which began on Friday, Shabân (8th month) 12, A.H. 977, took place after the birth of Prince Salîm, which occurred on the 18th of Rabî-ul-auwwal (3rd month) of the same Hijrî year. Akbar travelled at the rate of 7 or 8 kôs a day, and spent about 25 days on the journey (E. & D. v. 333, 334). If he had moved at the rate stated by Sleeman he would have been nearly three months on the road. He reached Ajmêr about the middle of February (N.S.). Shaikh Salîm Chishtî died in A.D. 1572 (A. H. 979) aged 96 lunar years.
8. Sir Thomas Roe was sent out by James I, and arrived at Jahângîr's court in January, 1616. He remained there till 1618, and secured for his countrymen the privilege of trading at Surat. The best edition of his book is that by Mr. William Foster (Hakluyt Soc., 1899).
9. Fathpur-Sîkrî is fully described and illustrated in the late Mr. E. W. Smith's fine work in quarto entitled The Moghul Architecture of Fathpur-Sîkrî (4 Parts, Allahabad Govt. Press, 1894-8), which supersedes all other writings on the subject. The double name of the town means 'Fathpur at Sîkrî' according to a familiar Indian practice. The name Fathpur ('City of Victory') was bestowed in A.D. 1573 to commemorate the glorious campaign in Gujarât, but building on the site had been begun in 1569. The historians usually call the town simply Fathpur, which name also is found on the coinage, from probably A.H. 977 (A.D. 1569-70). The mint was not in regular working order until eight years later (A.H. 985). Coins continued to be struck regularly at Fathpur until A.H. 989 (A.D. 1581-2). Akbar abandoned his costly foundation a little later. The only coin from the Fathpur mint of subsequent date is one of the first year of Shâhjahân (Wright, Catalogue of Coins in Indian Museum, Mughal Emperors, 1908, p. xlvii). But Rodgers believed in the genuineness of a zodiacal gold coin of Jahângîr purporting to be struck at Fathpur (J.A.S.B., vol. lvii (1888), Part I, p. 26).
10. Sleeman's dates and details require much correction. The mosque was completed at some time in the year A.H. 979 (May 26, 1571, to May 13, 1572, o.s.), excepting the Buland Darwâza, which was erected in A.H. 983 (1575-6). The 'old hermit', Shaikh Salîm, died on February 13, 1572 (Ramazân 27, A.H. 979). E. W. Smith (op. cit., Part IV, p. 1) gives the correct measurements as follow: 'Exclusive of the bastions upon the angles it measures 542' from east to west to the outside of the lîwân or sanctuary, or 515' 3" to the outside of the west main wall (which sets back from the outer wall of the lîwân) and 438' from north to south. The general plan adopted by Muhammadans for their masjids has been followed. In the centre is a vast courtyard open to the heavens, measuring 359' 10" by 438' 9", surrounded on the north, south, and east sides by spacious cloisters 38' 3" in depth, and on the west by the lîwân itself, 288' 2" in length by 65' deep. It is said to be copied from one at Makka [Mecca], and was erected according to a chronogram over the main arch in A.D. 1571, or at the same time as Rajah Bir Bal's house.' The 'six years before his death' of Sleeman's text should be 'six months' (Latif, Agra, p. 149).
11. The southern portal, known as the Buland Darwâza, or Lofty Gateway, does not match the other gateways. It was built in A.D. 1575-6 (A.H. 983), and was adorned in A.D. 1601-2 (A.H. 1010) with an inscription recording Akbar's triumphant return from his campaign in the Deccan. The date is fixed by a chronogram, preserved in Beale's work entitled Miftâh-ul-tawârîkh (Ann. Progr. Rep. A. S. Northern Circle, for 1905-6, p. 34, correcting E. W. Smith). Correct measurements are:
From roadway below to pavement . . . 42 feet From pavement to top of finial . . . 134 " Breadth across main front . . . . 130 " Breadth across back facing the mosque . . 123 " Depth . . . . . . . . 88 1/2 feet.
Full details, with ample illustrations, are given by E. W. Smith, op. cit., Part IV, chap. ii. In the original edition of Sleeman a chromolithograph of the gateway is inserted. Photographs are reproduced in H.F.A., Pl. xcvi, and Fergusson, History of Indian and E. Archit. (ed. 1910), fig. 425.
12. Fergusson (ed. 1910, vol. ii, p. 297) successfully justifies the vast size of the gateway. 'The semi-dome is the modulus of the design, and its scale that by which the imagination measures its magnificence.'
The cramped staircases criticized by Sleeman are those ascending from the pavement to the roof, one on the north-west, and the other on the north-east side of the gate. Each flight has 123 steep steps.
13. See the 105th chapter of the Korân. 'Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the masters of the elephant? Did he not make their treacherous design an occasion of drawing them into error; and send against them flocks of swallows which cast down upon them stones of baked clay, and rendered them like the leaves of corn eaten by cattle?' [W. H. S.] The quotation is from Sale's translation, but Sale uses the word 'birds', and not 'swallows'. In his note, where he tells the whole story, he speaks of 'a large flock of birds like swallows'. The Arabic, Persian, and Hindustânî dictionaries give no other word than 'abâbîl' for swallow. The word 'partâdîl' (purtadeel) occurs in none of them. According to Oates, Fauna of British India (London, 1890), the 'abâbîl' is the common swallow, Hirundo rustica; and the 'mosque-swallow' ('masjid-abâbîl'), otherwise called 'Sykes's striated swallow', is the H. erythropygia, H. Daurica of Balfour, Cyclop. of India, 3rd ed., s.v. Hirundinidae. This latter species is the 'little piebald thing' mentioned by the author.
14. Muh. Latif (Agra, pp. 146, 147) gives the text and English rendering of the inscription, which is in Persian, except the logion ascribed to Jesus, which is in Arabic. His translation of the Jesus saying is as follows:
'So said Jeans, on whom be peace! "The world is a bridge; pass over it, but build no house on it. He who reflected on the distresses of the Day of Judgement gained pleasure everlasting.
'"Worldly pleasures are but momentary; spend, then, thy life in devotion and remember that what remains of it is valueless".'
Like the author, I am unable to trace the source of the quotation. The inscription probably was recorded after Akbar's breach with Islam, which may be dated from 1579 or 1580. When he built the mosque, in 1571-5, he was still a devout Musalman, although entertaining liberal opinions. He died on October 25, 1605 (N.S.; October 15, O.S.)
15. For a full account of the exquisite sepulchre of Shaikh Salîm, see E. W. Smith, op. cit.. Part III, chap. ii. An inscription over the doorway is dated A.H. 979 = 1571-2, the year of the saint's death. The building, constructed regardless of expense, must be somewhat later. 'As originally built by Akbar, the tomb was of red sandstone, and the marble trellis-work, the chief ornament of the tomb, was erected subsequently by the Emperor Jahângîr' (Latif, Agra, p. 144).
16. The first plundering of Akbar's tomb at Sikandra by the Jâts occurred in 1691 according to Manucci (ante, chapter 51, note 29.). The outrages at Fathpur-Sîkrî seem to have been later in date, and to have happened after the capture of Agra in 1761 by Sûraj Mall, the famous Râjâ of Bhurtpore (Bharatpur). The Jâts retained possession of Agra until 1774 (I.G., 1908, vol. viii, p. 76). That is the period while they reigned, to use the author's words. Tradition affirms that daring that time they shot away the tops of the minarets at the entrance to the Sikandra park; took the armour and books of Akbar from his tomb, and sent them to Bharatpur, and also melted down two silver doors at the Tâj, which had cost Shâh Jahân more than 125,000 rupees (N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. vii, p. 619)
17. We besieged and took Bharatpur in order to rescue the young prince, our ally, from his uncle, who had forcibly assumed the office of prime minister to his nephew. As soon as we got possession, all the property we found, belonging either to the nephew or the uncle, was declared to be prize-money, and taken for the troops. The young prince was obliged to borrow an elephant from the prize agents to ride upon. He has ever since enjoyed the whole of the revenue of his large territory. [W. H. S.] The final siege and capture of Bharatpur by Lord Combermere took place in January, 1826. The plundering, as Metcalfe observed, 'has been very disgraceful, and has tarnished our well-earned honours'. All the state treasures and jewels, amounting to forty-eight lâkhs of rupees, or say half a million of pounds sterling, which should have been made over to the rightful Râjâ, were treated as lawful prize, and at once distributed among the officers and men. Lord Combermere himself took six lâkhs (Marshman, History of India, ed., 1869, vol. ii, p. 409).
18. The 'little dingy mosque' was built over the cave in which the saint dwelt, and was presented to him by the local quarry-men. It is therefore called The Stone-cutters' Mosque. It is fully described by E. W. Smith, op. cit., Part IV. chap. iii. It is earlier in date than any of Akbar's buildings, having been built in A. H. 945 (A.D. 1538- 9), a year after the saint had settled in the 'dangerous jungle' (Progr. Rep. A. S. N. Circle, 1905-6, p. 35).
19. The people of India no doubt owed much of the good they enjoyed under the long reign of Akbar to this most excellent woman, who inspired not only her husband but the most able Muhammadan minister that India has ever had, with feelings of universal benevolence. It was from her that this great minister, Abûl Fazl, derived the spirit that dictated the following passages in his admirable work, the Aîn- i-Akbarî; 'Every sect becomes infatuated with its particular doctrines; animosity and dissension prevail, and each man deeming the tenets of his sect to be the dictates of truth itself, aims at the destruction of all others, vilifies reputation, stains the earth with blood, and has the vanity to imagine that he is performing meritorious actions. Were the voice of reason attended to, mankind would be sensible of their error, and lament the weaknesses which led them to interfere in the religious concerns of each other. Persecution, after all, defeats its own end; it obliges men to conceal their opinions, but produces no change in them.
'Summarily, the Hindoos are religious, affable, courteous to strangers, prone to inflict austerities on themselves, lovers of justice, given to retirement, able in business, grateful, admirers of truth, and of unbounded fidelity in all their dealings.
'This character shines brightest in adversity. Their soldiers know not what it is to fly from the field of battle; when the success of the combat becomes doubtful, they dismount from their horses, and throw away their lives in payment of the debt of valour. They have great respect for their tutors; and make no account of their lives when they can devote them to the service of their God.
'They consider the Supreme Being to be above all labour, and believe Brahmâ to be the creator of the world, Vishnu its preserver, and Siva its destroyer. But one sect believes that God, who hath no equal, appeared on earth under the three above-mentioned forms, without having been thereby polluted in the smallest degree, in the same manner as the Christians speak of the Messiah; others hold that all these were only human beings, who, on account of their sanctity and righteousness, were raised to these high dignities.' [W. H. S.] The passage quoted is from Gladwin's translation, vol. ii, p. 318 (4th ed., London, 1800). The wording varies in different editions of Gladwin's work. A better version will be found in Jarrett, transl. Âîn (Calcutta, 1894), vol. iii, p. 8.
There is no substantial foundation for the author's statement that Abûl Fazl learned his charity and toleration from the Hindoo mother of Jahângîr. The influences which really moulded the opinions of both Abûl Fazl and his royal master are well known. When Akbar and Abûl Fazl are compared with Elizabeth and Burleigh, Philip II and Alva, or the other sovereigns and ministers of the age in Europe, it seems to be little less than a miracle that the Indian statesmen should have held and practised the noble philosophy expounded in the above quotation from the 'Institutes of Akbar'. No man has deserved better than Akbar the stately eulogy pronounced by Wordsworth on a hero now obscure:
A meteor wert thou in a darksome night; Yet shall thy name, conspicuous and sublime, Stand in the spacious firmament of time, Fixed as a star: such glory is thy right. (Sonnets dedicated to Liberty, Part Second, No. XVII.)
20. The story is absurd, the saint having died early in 1572, when the Fathpur-Sîkrî buildings were in progress.
'The city . . . is enclosed on three sides by high embattlemented stone walls pierced by. . . gateways protected by heavy and grim semi-circular bastions of rubble masonry. The fourth side was protected by a large lake.' There were nine gateways (E. W. Smith, op. cit., pp. 1, 59; pl. xci, xciii). The Sangîn Burj, or Stone Tower, is a fine unfinished fortification (ibid., p. 34). The dam of the lake burst in the 27th year of the reign, A.D. 1582 (Latif, Agra, p. 159). The circumference of the town is variously stated as either six or seven miles.
21. Akbar began the works at the fort of Agra in A.H. 972, corresponding to A.D. 1564-65, several years before he began those at Fathpur in A.D. 1569-70 (E. & D., vol. v, pp. 295, 332); and the buildings at Agra and Fathpur were carried on concurrently. He continued building at Fathpur nearly to the close of his reign. Agra was never 'an unpeopled waste' during Akbar's reign. Sikandar Lodî had made it his capital in A.D. 1501.
22. That is to say, the grantees have now to pay land revenue, or rent, to the state.
23. No good general description of the buildings at Agra, Sikandra, and Fathpur-Sîkrî exists. The following list indicates the beat treatises available.
(1) Syad Muhammad Latif--Agra, Historical and Descriptive., &c.; 8vo, Calcutta, 1896, Useful, but crude and badly illustrated.
(2) E. W. Smith--The Moghul Architecture of Fathpur-Sikri; 4 Parts, 4to, Government Press, Allahabad, 1894-8.
(3) Same author--Moghul Colour Decoration of Agra; 4to, Government Press, Allahabad, 1901.
(4) Same author--Akbar's Tomb, Sikandarah; posthumous; 4to, Allahabad Government Press, 1909.
The three works by Mr. E. W. Smith are magnificently illustrated and worthy of the subject.
(5) Nûr Baksh--'The Agra Fort and its Buildings', in A.S. Annual Report for 1903-4, pp. 164-93.
(6) Moin-ud-din--The History of the Taj, &c.; thin 8vo, 116 pp.; Moon Press, Agra, 1905. Useful, as being the only book devoted to the Tâj and connected buildings, but crude and inadequate.
The Archaeological Survey of India, since its reorganization, has not had time to study the Tâj buildings, except for conservation purposes. The report by Mr. Carlleyle on the minor remains at and near Agra in A.S.R., vol. iv, 1874, is almost worthless.
In 1873 Major Cole prepared a handsome volume entitled Illustrations of Buildings near Muttra and Agra, &c.
Some information, to be used with caution, is to be found in gazetteers of different dates.
The brief observations in Fergusson's History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (ed. 1910) are of permanent value. The plan of the editor's work, A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon (H. F. A.), Oxford, 1911, does not permit of detailed descriptions. The well-known little Handbook by Mr. H. G. Keene contains many errors and is unworthy of the author's reputation as an historian.
A good guide-book, prepared with knowledge and accuracy, is badly wanted. It would be difficult to find an author possessed of the needful local knowledge and sufficiently well read to compile a satisfactory book. An adequate illustrated history of the Tâj buildings on the lines of Mr. E. W. Smith's work on Fathpur-Sîkrî is much to be desired, but would be a formidable undertaking, and is not likely to be written for a long time to come. Perhaps some wealthy admirer of Akbar and his achievements may appear and provide the considerable funds required for the preparation of the desired treatise. The Christian antiquities of Agra also deserve systematic treatment. At present the information on record is in a chaotic state.
Chapter 55
Bharatpur--Dîg--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 Mathurâ 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 Râjâ. 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 Baldêo bastion, so called alter Baldêo Singh, the second son of the then reigning chief, Ranjît Singh. The feats which Hector performed in the defence of Troy sink into utter insignificance before those which Baldêo 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 Antâ 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 'gurgurî', with a small ball at the top, like an 'antâ', or tennis, or billiard ball; hence 'Antâ 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 Korân 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 Musâlmâns 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 Kumbhîr, 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 Kumbhîr, a place only ten miles distant; that leading to Mathurâ, three or four stages distant, is called the Mathurâ gate. At Delhi, the gates of the city walls are called ostentatiously after distant places--the Kashmîr, the Kâbul, the Constantinople gates. Outside the Kumbhîr 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 Dîg (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 Jâts 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 Jâts found the morasses with which they were surrounded here a source of strength. They emigrated from the banks of the Indus about Multân, 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 Jâts, like the Marâthâs, 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 Dîg, 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 Rûpbâs, which he between thirty and forty miles to the south, and eight or ten miles west of Fathpur-Sîkrî. 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.
Dîg 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 'rozgâr' (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 rozgâr nahîn ('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 Nepâl 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 Râjpût 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 Râjpût 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 'ghurâsî', 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 Gosâins, who are disciples of Siva, and Bairâgîs, who are disciples of Vishnu; and any Muhammadan may become a Fakîr; and Gosâins, Bairâgîs, and Fakîrs, 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). Dîg was taken on December 24, 1804, and Lord Lake's army moved from Mathurâ 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 Sâgar and Nerbudda territories.
7. In the original edition Dîg is illustrated by four coloured plates. The buildings are all the work of Sûraj 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 Râjpût 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 Gosâin is by no means restricted to the special devotees of Siva; many Gosâins-- for example, those in Bengal and those at Gokul in the Mathurâ district--are followers of Vishnu. The term 'fakîr' 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.
Chapter 56
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 (gôpîs); and, in modern days, as the burial--or burning-place of the Jât chiefs of Bharatpur and Dîg, 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 Himâlaya mountains which Hanumân, the monkey general of Râma, 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 Sîtâ. 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 Râma, or back to their old place; but Hanumân 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 Hanumân 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.'
Nathû, 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 Hanumân 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 Bhîm 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 Mathurâ 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 Ûj, 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 Himâlaya 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 Bundêlkhand about the accident which made Hanumân 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 Râma, was left regent of the kingdom of Ajodhya,[8] during his absence at the conquest of Ceylon. He happened at night to see Hanumân 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, 'Râm, Râm', 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 Hanumân on upon the barb of one of his arrows, mountain and all. To try him Hanumân 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 Hanumân whether he was ready. 'Quite ready,' said Hanumân, '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, Brahmâ, 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 Brahmâ 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.
'Brahmâ 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 Râjâ 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 Râjâ, 'if you begin by abusing them with such a name; call them "lambkanâs", 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 Râjâ, 'but we believe that when Râma went to recover his wife Sîtâ from the demon king of Ceylon, Râvan, he wanted to throw a bridge across from the continent to the island, and sent some of his followers up to the Himâlaya 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 Kaimûr 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 Sûraj Mall, the great founder of the Jât 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 Rûpbâs, 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 Jâts here, like the princes and Gosâins in Bundêlkhand, 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 Sûraj 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 Baldêo, 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 Baldêo 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, Sûraj Mall in 'darbâr', 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, Hardêo.[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 Ranjît 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, Ranjît 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 Jât 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 Marâthâ 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 Sâtârâ Rajas, the descendants of the great Sivâjî.[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 Marâthâ dominion so governed is infinitely superior to that of the countries governed by the leaders of the military class, such as Sindhia, Holkâr, and the Bhonslâ, 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 Râma, having been wounded by Râvan, 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 Himâlaya mountains. Hanumân 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 Râma, 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, 'Râm, Râm', 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. Hanumân 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. Ûj is the Og, King of Bashan, of the Hebrew version of the legend. The extravagant stories quoted in the text are not in the Korân, but are the inventions of the commentators. Sale gives references in his notes to chap. 5 of the Korân.
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 Brahmâ is conceived as a [Greek text], 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, Râma, 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. Râjâ of Bharatpur, not to be confounded with the Lion of the Panjâb.
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 Dîg would apply to this tomb also; the style is good, but not quite the best. Sûraj Mall was killed in a skirmish in 1763.
14. Baldêo, or in Sanskrit Bâladeva, Bâlabhadra, or Bâlarâma, 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 Ajantâ 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 Jâts detest Brahmans. The members of a Jât 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. Sivâjî, the indomitable opponent of Aurangzêb in the Deccan, belonged to the agricultural Kunbî caste. He was born in May A.D. 1627, and died in April 1680. The Brahman ministers of the Râjâs of Sâtârâ were known by the title of Peshwâ. Bâjî Râo I, who died in 1740, the second Peshwâ, was the first who superseded in actual power his nominal master. The last of the Peshwâs was Bâjî Râo II, who abdicated in 1818, after the termination of the great Marâthâ war, and retired to Bithûr near Cawnpore. His adopted son was the notorious Nânâ Sâhib. The Marquis of Hastings, in 1818, drew the Râjâ of Sâtârâ from captivity, and re-established his dignity and power. In 1839 the Râjâ's treachery compelled the Government of India to depose him. His territory is now a district of the Bombay Presidency. See Mânkar, The Life and Exploits of Shivâji, 2nd ed., Bombay, Nirnayasâgar Press, 1886.
20. The Râjâ of Berâr, also known as the Râjâ of Nâgpur, was called the Bhonslâ. The misrule of Gwâlior has been described ante, in chapters 36 and 49. The condition of Gwâlior and Indore, the capitals of Sindhia and Holkâr respectively, is now very different. The Bhonslâ has vanished.
21. Since the annexation of the Panjâb 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 Panjâb 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 Râma, 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 'Hanumân', and 'langûr' 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 Mathurâ district. The town of Mathurâ (Muttra) became the head-quarters of a separate District in 1832. The official at Govardhan in 1836 must, therefore, have been subordinate to Mathurâ, not to Agra.
57. Veracity
The people of Britain are described by Diodorus Siculus (Book V, chap. 2) as in a very simple and rude state, subsisting almost entirely on the produce of the land, but as being 'a people of much integrity and sincerity, far from the craft and knavery of men among us, contented with plain and homely fare, and strangers to the luxuries and excesses of the rich'. In India we find strict veracity most prevalent among the wildest and half-savage tribes of the hills and jungles in Central India, or the chain of the Himâlaya mountains; and among those where we find it prevail most, we find cattle- stealing most common; the men of one tribe not deeming it to be any disgrace to lift, or steal, the cattle of another. I have known the man among the Gonds of the woods of Central India, whom nothing could induce to tell a lie, join a party of robbers to lift a herd of cattle from the neighbouring plains for nothing more than as much spirits as he could enjoy at one bout. I asked a native gentleman of the plains, in the valley of the Nerbudda, one day, what made the people of the woods to the north and south more disposed to speak the truth than those more civilized of the valley itself. 'They have not yet learned the value of a lie,' said he, with the greatest simplicity and sincerity, for he was a very honest and plain-spoken man.
Veracity is found to prevail most where there is least to tempt to falsehood, and most to be feared from it. In a very rude state of society, like that of which I have been speaking, the only shape in which property is accumulated is in cattle; things are bartered for each other without the use of a circulating medium, and one member of a community has no means of concealing from the other the articles of property he has. If they were to steal from each other, they would not be able to conceal what they stole--to steal, therefore, would be no advantage. In such societies every little community is left to govern itself; to secure the rights, and enforce the duties, of all its several members in their relations with each other; they are too poor to pay taxes to keep up expensive establishments, and their Governments seldom maintain among them any for the administration of justice, or the protection of life, property, or character. All the members of all such little communities will often unite in robbing the members of another community of their flocks and herds, the only kind of property they have, or in applauding those who most distinguish themselves in such enterprises; but the well-being of the community demands that each member should respect the property of the others, and be punished by the odium of all if he does not.[1]
It is equally necessary to the well-being of the community that every member should be able to rely upon the veracity of the other upon the very few points where their rights, duties, and interests clash. In the very rudest state of society, among the woods and hills of India, the people have some deity whose power they dread, and whose name they invoke when much is supposed to depend upon the truth of what one man is about to declare. The 'pîpal' tree (Ficus religiosa) is everywhere sacred to the gods, who are supposed to sit among its leaves and listen to the music of their rustling. The deponent takes one of these leaves in his hand, and invokes the god who sits above him to crush him, or those dear to him, as he crushes the leaf in his hand, if he speak anything but the truth; he then plucks and crushes the leaf, and states what he has to say.[2]
The large cotton-tree is, among the wild tribes of India, the favourite seat of gods still more terrible,[3] because their superintendence is confined exclusively to the neighbourhood; and having their attention less occupied, they can venture to make a more minute scrutiny into the conduct of the people immediately around them. The 'pîpal' is occupied by one or other of the Hindoo triad, the god of creation, preservation, or destruction, who have the affairs of the universe to look after;[4] but the cotton and other trees are occupied by some minor deities, who are vested with a local superintendence over the affairs of a district, or perhaps, of a single village.[5] These are always in the view of the people, and every man knows that he is every moment liable to be taken to their court, and to be made to invoke their vengeance upon himself, or those dear to him, if he has told a falsehood in what he has stated, or tells one in what he is about to state. Men so situated adhere habitually, and I may say religiously, to the truth; and I have had before me hundreds of cases in which a man's property, liberty, or life has depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it to save either; as my friend told me, 'they had not learned the value of a lie', or rather, they had not learned with how much impunity a lie could be told in the tribunals of civilized society. In their own tribunals, under the pîpal-tree or cotton-tree, imagination commonly did what the deities, who were supposed to preside, had the credit of doing; if the deponent told a lie, he believed that the deity who sat on the sylvan throne above him, and searched the heart of man, must know it; and from that moment he knew no rest--he was always in dread of his vengeance; if any accident happened to him, or to those dear to him, it was attributed to this offended deity; and if no accident happened, some evil was brought about by his own disordered imagination.[6]
In the tribunals we introduce among them, such people soon find that the judges who preside can seldom search deeply into the hearts of men, or clearly distinguish truth from falsehood in the declarations of deponents; and when they can distinguish it, it is seldom that they can secure their conviction for perjury. They generally learn very soon that these judges, instead of being, like the judges of their own woods and wilds, the only beings who can search the hearts of men, and punish them for falsehood, are frequently the persons, of all others, most blind to the real state of the deponent's mind, and the degree of truth and falsehood in his narrative; that, however well-intentioned, they are often labouring in the 'darkness visible' created by the native officers around them. They not only learn this, but they learn what is still worse, that they may tell what lies they please in these tribunals; and that not one of them shall become known to the circle in which they move, and whose good opinion they value. If, by his lies told in such tribunals, a man has robbed another, or caused him to be robbed, of his property, his character, his liberty, or his life, he can easily persuade the circle in which he resides that it has arisen, not from any false statements of his, but from the blindness of the judge, or the wickedness of the native officers of his court, because all circles consider the blindness of the one, and the wickedness of the other, to be everywhere very great.
Arrian, in speaking of the class of supervisors in India, says: 'They may not be guilty of falsehood; and indeed none of the Indians were ever accused of that crime.'[7] I believe that as little falsehood is spoken by the people of India, in their village communities, as in any part of the world with an equal area and population. It is in our courts of justice where falsehoods prevail most, and the longer they have been anywhere established, the greater the degree of falsehood that prevails in them. Those entrusted with the administration of a newly-acquired territory are surprised to find the disposition among both principals and witnesses in cases to tell the plain and simple truth. As magistrates, they find it very often difficult to make thieves and robbers tell lies, according to the English fashion, to avoid running a risk of criminating themselves. In England, this habit of making criminals tell lies arose from the severity of the penal code, which made the punishment so monstrously disproportionate to the crime, that the accused, however clear and notorious his crimes, became an object of general sympathy.[8] In India, punishments have nowhere been, under our rule, disproportionate to the crimes; on the contrary, they have generally been more mild than the people would wish them to be, or think they ought to be, in order to deter from similar crimes; and, in newly-acquired territories, they have generally been more mild than in our old possessions. The accused are, therefore, nowhere considered as objects of public sympathy; and in newly-acquired territories they are willing to tell the truth, and are allowed to do so, in order to save the people whom they have injured, and their neighbours generally, the great loss and annoyance unavoidably attending upon a summons to our courts. In the native courts, to which ours succeed, the truth was seen through immediately, the judges who presided could commonly distinguish truth from falsehood in the evidence before them, almost as well as the sylvan gods who sat in the pîpal- or cotton-trees; though they were seldom supposed by the people to be quite so just in their decisions. When we take possession of such countries, they, for a time at least, give us credit for the same sagacity, with a little more integrity. The prisoner knows that his neighbours expect him to tell the truth to save them trouble, and will detest him if he does not; he supposes that we shall have the sense to find out the truth whether he tells it or not, and then humanity to visit his crime with the punishment it merits, and no more.
The magistrate asks the prisoner what made him steal; and the prisoner enters at once into an explanation of the circumstances which reduced him to the necessity of doing so, and offers to bring witnesses to prove them; but never dreams of offering to bring witnesses to prove that he did not steal, if he really had done so; because the general feeling would be in favour of his doing the one, and against his doing the other. Tavernier gives an amusing sketch of Amîr Jumla presiding in a court of justice, during a visit he paid him in the kingdom of Golconda, in the year 1648. (See Book I, Part II, chap. 11.)[9]
I asked a native law officer, who called on me one day, what he thought would be the effect of an Act to dispense with oaths on the Korân and Ganges water, and substitute a solemn declaration made in the name of God, and under the same penal liabilities, as if the Korân or Ganges water had been in the deponent's hand. 'I have practised In the courts thirty years, sir,' said he, 'and during that time I have found only three kinds of witnesses--two of whom would, by such an Act, be left precisely where they were, while the third would be released by it from a very salutary check.' 'And, pray, what are the three classes into which you divide the witnesses in our courts?'
'First, sir, are those who will always tell the truth, whether they are required to state what they know in the form of an oath or not.' 'Do you think this a large class?'
'Yes, I think it is; and I have found among them many whom nothing on earth could make to swerve from the truth; do what you please, you could never frighten or bribe them into a deliberate falsehood. The second are those who will not hesitate to tell a lie when they have a motive for it, and are not restrained by an oath. In taking an oath they are afraid of two things, the anger of God and the odium of men. Only three days ago, 'continued my friend,' I required a power of attorney from a lady of rank, to enable me to act for her in a case pending before the court in this town. It was given to me by her brother, and two witnesses came to declare that she had given it. "Now," said I, "this lady is known to live under the curtain; and you will be asked by the judge whether you saw her give this paper; what will you say?" They both replied: "If the judge asks us the question without an oath, we will say yes--it will save much trouble, and we know that she did give this paper, though we did not really see her give it; but if he puts the Korân into our hands we must say no, for we should otherwise be pointed at by all the town as perjured wretches--our enemies would soon tell everybody that we had taken a false oath." Now,' my friend went on, 'the form of an oath is a great check upon this sort of persons. The third class consists of men who will tell lies whenever they have sufficient motive, whether they have the Korân or Ganges water in their hands or not. Nothing will ever prevent their doing so; and the declaration which you propose would be just as well as any other for them.'
'Which class do you consider the most numerous of the three?'
'I consider the second the most numerous, and wish the oath to be retained for them.'
'That is of all the men you see examined in our courts, you think the most come under the class of those who will, under the influence of strong motives, tell lies if they have not the Korân or Ganges water in their hands?'
'Yes.'
'But do not a great many of those, whom you consider to be included among the second class, come from the village communities--the peasantry of the country?'
'Yes.'
'And do you not think that the greatest part of those men who tell lies in the court, under the influence of strong motives, unless they bear the Korân or Ganges water in their hands, would refuse to tell lies, if questioned before the people of their villages among the circle in which they live?'
'Of course I do; three-fourths of those who do not scruple to lie in our courts, would be ashamed to be before their neighbours, or the elders of their village.'
'You think that the people of the village communities are more ashamed to tell lies before their neighbours than the people of towns?'
'Much more[10] here is no comparison.'
'And the people of towns and cities bear in India but a small proportion to the people of the village communities?'
'I should think a very small proportion indeed.'
'Then you think that in the mass of the population of India out of our courts, and in their own circles, the first class, or those who speak truth, whether they have the Korân or Ganges water in their hands or not, would be found more numerous than the other two?'
'Certainly I do; if they were always to be questioned before their neighbours or elders, or so that they could feel that their neighbours and elders would know what they say.'
This man is a very worthy and learned Muhammadan, who has read all the works on medicine to be found in Persian and Arabia; gives up his time from sunrise in the morning till nine, to the indigent sick of the town, whom he supplies gratuitously with his advice and medicines, that cost him thirty rupees a month, out of about one hundred and twenty that he can make by his labours all the rest of the day.
There can be no doubt that, even in England, the fear of the odium of society, which is sure to follow the man who has perjured himself, acts more powerfully in making men tell the truth, when they have the Bible in their hands before a competent and public tribunal, and with a strong worldly motive to tell a lie, than the fear of punishment by the Deity in the next world for having 'taken his name in vain' in this. Christians, as well as other people, are too apt to think that there is yet abundance of time to appease the Deity by repentance and reformation; but they know that they cannot escape the odium of society, with a free press and high tone of moral and religions feeling, like those of England, if they deliberately perjure themselves in open court, whose proceedings are watched with so much jealousy. They learn to dread the name of 'perjured villain' or 'perjured wretch', which would embitter the rest of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children.[11]
In a society much advanced in arts and the refinements of life, temptations to falsehood become very great, and require strong checks from law, religion, or moral feeling. Religion is seldom of itself found sufficient; for, though men cannot hope to conceal their transgressions from the Deity, they can, as I have stated, always hope in time to appease Him. Penal laws are not alone sufficient, for men can always hope to conceal their trespasses from those who are appointed to administer them, or at least to prevent their getting that measure of judicial proof required for their conviction; the dread of the indignation of their circle of society is everywhere the more efficient of the three checks; and this check will generally be found most to prevail where the community is left most to self- government--hence the proverb, 'There is honour among thieves'. A gang of robbers, who are outlaws, are, of course, left to govern themselves; and, unless these could rely on each other's veracity and honour in their relations with each other, they could do nothing. If Governments were to leave no degree of self-government to the communities of which the society is composed, this moral check would really cease--the law would undertake to secure every right, and enforce every duty; and men would cease to depend upon each other's good opinion and good feelings.[12]
There is perhaps no part of the world where the communities of which the society is composed have been left so much to self-government as in India. There has seldom been any idea of a reciprocity of duties and rights between the governing and the governed; the sovereign who has possession feels that he has a right to levy certain taxes from the land for the maintenance of the public establishments, which he requires to keep down rebellion against his rule, and to defend his dominions against all who may wish to intrude and seize upon them; and to assist him in acquiring the dominions of other princes when favourable opportunities offer; but he has no idea of a reciprocal duty towards those from whom he draws his revenues. The peasantry from whom the prince draws his revenues feel that they are bound to pay that revenue; that, if they do not pay it, he will, with his strong arm, turn them out and give to others their possessions--but they have no idea of any right on their part to any return from him. The village communities were everywhere left almost entirely to self- government; and the virtues of truth and honesty, in all their relations with each other, were indispensably necessary to enable them to govern themselves.[13] A common interest often united a good many village communities in a bond of union, and established a kind of brotherhood over extensive tracts of richly cultivated land. Self- interest required that they should unite to defend themselves against attacks with which they were threatened at every returning harvest in a country where every prince was a robber upon a scale more or less large according to his means, and took the field to rob while the lands were covered with the ripe crops upon which his troops might subsist; and where every man who practised robbery with open violence followed what he called an 'imperial trade' (pâdshâhî kâm)--the only trade worthy the character of a gentleman. The same interest required that they should unite in deceiving their own prince, and all his officers, great and small, as to the real resources of their estates; because they all knew that the prince would admit of no other limits to his exactions than their abilities to pay at the harvest. Though, in their relations with each other, all these village communities spoke as much truth as those of any other communities in the world; still, in their relation with the Government, they told as many lies;--for falsehood, in the one set of relations, would have incurred the odium of the whole of their circles of society--truth, in the other, would often have involved the same penalty. If a man had told a lie to cheat his neighbour, he would have become an object of hatred and contempt--if he told a lie to save his neighbour's fields from an increase of rent or tax, he would have become an object of esteem and respect.[14] If the Government officers were asked whether there was any truth to be found among such communities, they would say, No, that the truth was not in them; because they would not cut each other's throats by telling them the real value of each other's fields.
If the peasantry were asked, they would say there was plenty of truth to be found everywhere except among a few scoundrels, who, to curry favour with the Government officers, betrayed their trust, and told the value of their neighbours' fields. In their ideas, he might as well have gone off, and brought down the common enemy upon them in the shape of some princely robber of the neighbourhood.
Locke says: 'Outlaws themselves keep faith and rules of justice one with another--they practise them as rules of convenience within their own communities; but it is impossible to conceive that they embrace justice as a practical principle who act fairly with their fellow highwaymen, and at the same time plunder or kill the next honest man they meet.' (Vol. i, p. 37.) In India, the difference between the army of a prince and the gang of a robber was, in the general estimation of the people, only in degree--they were both driving an imperial trade, a 'pâdshâhî kâm'. Both took the auspices, and set out on their expedition after the Dasahrâ, when the autumn crops were ripening; and both thought the Deity propitiated as soon as they found the omens favourable;[15] one attacked palaces and capitals, the other villages and merchants' storerooms. The members of the army of the prince thought as little of the justice or injustice of his cause as those of the gang of the robber; the people of his capital hailed the return of the victorious prince who had contributed so much to their wealth, to his booty, and to their self-love by his victory. The village community received back the robber and his gang with the same feelings: by their skill and daring they had come back loaded with wealth, which they were always disposed to spend liberally with their neighbours. There was no more of truth in the prince and his army in their relations with the princes and people of neighbouring principalities, than in the robber and his gang in their relations with the people robbed. The prince flatters the self-love of his army and his people; the robber flatters that of his gang and his village--the question is only in degree; the persons whose self- love is flattered are blind to the injustice and cruelty of the attack--the prince is the idol of a people, the robber the idol of a gang. Was ever robber more atrocious in his attacks upon a merchant or a village than Louis XIV of France in his attacks upon the Palatine and Palatinate of the Rhine? How many thousand similar instances might be quoted of princes idolized by their people for deeds equally atrocious in their relations with other people? What nation or sovereign ever found fault with their ambassadors for telling lies to the kings, courts, and people of other countries?[16]
Rome, during the whole period of her history, was a mere den of execrable thieves, whose feelings were systematically brutalized by the most revolting spectacles, that they might have none of those sympathies with suffering humanity, none of those 'compunctious visitings of conscience', which might be found prejudicial to the interests of the gang, and beneficial to the rest of mankind. Take, for example, the conduct of this atrocious gang under Aemilius Paulus, against Epirus and Greece generally after the defeat of Perseus, all under the deliberate decrees of the senate: take that of this gang under his son Scipio the younger, against Carthage and Numantia; under Cato, at Cyprus--all in the same manner under the deliberate decrees of the senate. Take indeed the whole of her history as a republic, and we find it that of the most atrocious band of robbers that was ever associated against the rest of their species. In her relations with the rest of mankind Rome was collectively devoid of truth; and her citizens, who were sent to govern conquered countries, were no less devoid of truth individually--they cared nothing whatever for the feelings or the opinions of the people governed; in their dealings with them, truth and honour were entirely disregarded. The only people whose favourable opinion they had any desire to cultivate were the members of the great gang; and the most effectual mode of conciliating them was to plunder the people of conquered countries, and distribute the fruits among them in presents of one kind or another. Can any man read without shuddering that it was the practice among this atrocious gang to have all the multitude of unhappy prisoners of both sexes, and of all ranks and ages,--who annually graced the triumphs of their generals, taken off and murdered just at the moment when these generals reached the Capitol, amid the shouts of the multitude, that their joys might be augmented by the sight or consciousness of the sufferings of others? (See Hooke's Roman History, vol. iii, p. 488; vol. iv, p. 541.) 'It was the custom that, when the triumphant conqueror tumed his chariot towards the Capitol, he commanded the captives to be led to prison, and there put to death, that so the glory of the victor and the miseries of the vanquished might be in the same moment at the utmost.' How many millions of the most innocent and amiable of their species must have been offered up as human sacrifices to the triumphs of the leaders of this great gang! The women were almost as brutalized as the men; lovers met to talk 'soft nonsense', at exhibitions of gladiators. Valeria, the daughter and sister of two of the first men in Rome, was beautiful, gay, and lively, and of unblemished reputation. Having been divorced from her husband, she and the monster Sylla made love to each other at one of these exhibitions of gladiators, and were soon after married. Gibbon, in speaking of the lies which Severus told his two competitors in the contest for empire, says, 'Falsehood and insincerity, unsuitable as they seem to the dignity of public transactions, offend us with a less degrading idea of meanness than when they are found in the intercourse of private life. In the latter, they discover a want of courage; in the other, only a defect of power; and, as it is impossible for the most able statesmen to subdue millions of followers and enemies by their own personal strength, the world, under the name of policy, seems to have granted them a very liberal indulgence of craft and dissimulation.'[17]
But the weak in society are often obliged to defend themselves against the strong by the same weapons; and the world grants them the same liberal indulgence. Men advocate the use of the ballot in elections that the weak may defend themselves and the free institutions of the country, by dissimulation, against the strong who would oppress them.[18] The circumstances under which falsehood and insincerity are tolerated by the community in the best societies of modern days are very numerous; and the worst society of modern days in the civilized world, when slavery does not prevail, is immeasurably superior to the best in ancient days, or in the Middle Ages. Do we not every day hear men and women, in what are called the best societies, declaring to one individual or one set of acquaintances that the pity, the sympathy, the love, or the admiration they have been expressing for others is, in reality, all feigned to soothe or please? As long as the motive is not base, men do not spurn the falsehood as such. How much of untruth is tolerated in the best circles of the most civilized nations, in the relations between electors to corporate and legislative bodies and the candidates for election? between nominators to offices under Government and the candidates for nomination? between lawyers and clients, vendors and purchasers? (particularly of horses), between the recruiting sergeant and the young recruit, whom he has found a little angry with his widowed mother, whom he makes him kill by false pictures of what a soldier may hope for in the 'bellaque matribus detestata' to which he invites him?[19]
There is, I believe, no class of men in India from whom it is more difficult to get the true statement of a case pending before a court than the sepoys of our native regiments; and yet there are, I believe, no people in the world from whom it is more easy to get it in their own village communities, where they state it before their relations, elders, and neighbours, whose esteem is necessary to their happiness, and can be obtained only by adherence to truth. Every case that comes before a regimental court involves, or is supposed to involve, the interest or feelings of some one or other of their companions; and the question which the deponent asks himself is-not what religion, public justice, the interests of discipline and order, or the wishes of his officers require, or what would appear manly and honourable before the elders of his own little village, but what will secure the esteem, and what will excite the hatred, of his comrades. This will often be downright, deliberate falsehood, sworn upon the Korân or the Ganges water before his officers.
Many a brave sepoy have I seen faint away from the agitated state of his feelings, under the dread of the Deity if he told lies with the Ganges water in his hands, and of his companions if he told the truth, and caused them to be punished. Every question becomes a party question, and the 'point of honour' requires that every witness shall tell as many lies about it as possible.[20] When I go into a village, and talk with the people in any part of India, I know that I shall get the truth out of them on all subjects as long as I can satisfy them that I am not come on the part of the Government to inquire into the value of their fields with a view to new impositions, and this I can always do; but, when I go among the sepoys to ask about anything, I feel pretty sure that I have little chance of getting at the truth; they will take the alarm and try to deceive me, lest what I learn should be brought up at some future day against them or their comrades. The Duke of Wellington says, speaking of the English soldiers: 'It is most difficult to convict a prisoner before a regimental court-martial, for, I am sorry to say, that soldiers have little regard to the oath administered to them; and the officers who are sworn well and truly to try and determine according to the evidence, the matter before them, have too much regard to the strict letter of that administered to them.' Again: 'The witnesses being in almost every instance common soldiers, whose conduct this tribunal was instituted to control, the consequence is that perjury is almost as common an offence as drunkenness and plunder, &c.'[21]
In the ordinary civil tribunals of Europe and America a man commonly feels that, though he is removed far from the immediate presence of those whose esteem is necessary for him, their eyes are still upon him, because the statements he may give will find their way to them through the medium of the press. This he does not feel in the civil courts of India, nor in the military courts of Europe, or of any other part of the world, and the man who judges of the veracity of a whole people from the specimens he may witness in such courts, cannot judge soundly.
Shaikh Sâdî, in his Gulistân, has the following tale: 'I have heard that a prince commanded the execution of a captive who was brought before him; when the captive, having no hope of life, told the prince that he disgraced his throne. The prince, not understanding him, tumed to one of his ministers and asked him what he had said. "He says," replied the minister, quoting a passage from the Korân, "God loves those who subdue their passions, forgive injuries, and do good to his creatures." The prince pitied the poor captive, and countermanded the orders for the execution. Another minister, who owed a spite to the one who first spoke, said, "Nothing but truth should be spoken by such persons as we in the presence of the prince; the captive spoke abusively and insolently, and you have not interpreted his words truly". The prince frowned and said, "His false interpretation pleases me more than thy true one, because his was given for a good, and thine for a malignant, purpose; and wise men have said that 'a peace-making lie is better than a factious or anger exciting truth'."'[22]
He who would too fastidiously condemn this doctrine should think of the massacre of Thessalonica, and how much better it would have been for the great Theodosius to have had by his side the peace-making Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, than the anger-exciting Rufinus, when he heard of the offence which that city had committed.[23]
In despotic governments, where lives, characters, and liberties are every moment at the mercy, not only of the prince but of all his public officers from the highest to the lowest, the occasions in which men feel authorized and actually called upon by the common feelings of humanity to tell 'peacemaking lies' occur every day--nay, every hour, every petty officer of government, 'armed with his little brief authority', is a little tyrant surrounded by men whose all depends upon his will, and who dare not tell him the truth--the 'point of honour' in this little circle demands that every one should be prepared to tell him 'peace-making lies'; and the man who does not do so when the occasion seems to call for it, incurs the odium of the whole circle, as one maliciously disposed to speak 'anger-exciting or factions truths'. Poor Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were obliged to talk of love and duty toward their brutal murderer, Henry VIII, and tell 'peace-making lies' on the scaffold to save their poor children from his resentment. European gentlemen in India often, by their violence surround themselves with circles of the same kind, in which the 'point of honour' demands that every member shall be prepared to tell 'peace-making lies', to save the others from the effects of their master's ungovernable passions--falsehood is their only safeguard; and, consequently, falsehood ceases to be odious. Countenanced in the circles of the violent, falsehood soon becomes countenanced in those of the mild and forbearing; their domestics pretend a dread of their anger which they really do not feel; and they gain credit for having the same good excuse among those who have no opportunity of becoming acquainted with the real character of the gentlemen in their domestic relations--all are thought to be more or less tigerish in these relations, particularly before breakfast, because some are known to be so.[24]
I have known the native officers of a judge who was really a very mild and worthy man, but who lived a very secluded life, plead as their excuse for all manner of bribery and corruption, that their persons and character were never safe from his violence; and urge that men whose tenure of office was very insecure, and who were every hour in the day exposed to so much indignity, could not possibly be blamed for making the most of their position. The society around believed all this, and blamed, not the native officers, but the judge, or the Government, who placed them in such a situation. Other judges and magistrates have been known to do what this person was merely reported to do, otherwise society would neither have given credit to his officers nor have held them excused for their malpractices.[25] Those European gentlemen who allow their passions to get the better of their reason among their domestics do much to lower the character of their countrymen in the estimation of the people; but the high officials who forget what they owe to themselves and the native officers of their courts, when presiding on the bench of justice, do ten thousand times more; and I grieve to say that I have known a few officials of this class.
We have in England known many occasions, particularly in the cases of prosecutions by the officers of Government for offences against the State, where little circles of society have made it a 'point of honour' for some individuals to speak untruths, and for others to give verdicts against their consciences; some occasions indeed where those who ventured to speak the truth, or give a verdict according to their conscience, were in danger from the violence of popular resentment. Have we not, unhappily, in England and among our countrymen in all parts of the world, experience of a wide difference between what is exacted from members of particular circles of society by the 'point of honour', and what is held to be strict religions truth by the rest of society? Do we not see gentlemen cheating their tradesmen, while they dare not leave a gambling debt unpaid? The 'point of honour' in the circle to which they belong demands that the one should be paid, because the non-payment would involve a breach of faith in their relations with each other, as in the case of the members of a gang of robbers; but the non-payment of a tradesman's bill involves only a breach of faith in a gentleman's relations with a lower order. At least, some gentlemen do not feel any apprehension of incurring the odium of the circle in which they move by cheating of this kind. In the same manner the roué, or libertine of rank, may often be guilty of all manner of falsehoods and crimes to the females of the class below him, without any fear of incurring the odium of either males or females of his own circle; on the contrary, the more crimes he commits of this sort, the more sometimes he may expect to be caressed by males and females of his own order. The man who would not hesitate a moment to destroy the happiness of a family by the seduction of the wife or the daughter, would not dare to leave one shilling of a gambling debt unpaid--the one would bring down upon him the odium of his circle, but the other would not; and the odium of that circle is the only kind of odium he dreads. Appius Claudius apprehended no odium from his own order--the patrician--from the violation of the daughter of Virginius, of the plebeian order; nor did Sextus Tarquinius of the royal order, apprehend any from the violation of Lucretia, of the patrician order--neither would have been punished by their own order, but they were both punished by the injured orders below them.
Our own penal code punished with death the poor man who stole a little food to save his children from starvation, while it left to exult in the caresses of his own order, the wealthy libertine who robbed a father and mother of their only daughter, and consigned her to a life of infamy and misery. The poor victim of man's brutal passions and base falsehood suffered inevitable and exquisite punishment, while the laws and usages of society left the man himself untouched. He had nothing to apprehend if the father of his victim happened to be of the lower order, or a minister of the Church of Christ; because his own order would justify his refusing to meet the one in single combat, and the other dared not invite him to it, and the law left no remedy.[26]
Take the two parties in England into which society is politically divided. There is hardly any species of falsehood uttered by the members of the party out of power against the members of the party in power that is not tolerated and even applauded by one party; men state deliberately what they know to be utterly devoid of truth regarding the conduct of their opponent; they basely ascribe to them motives by which they know they were never actuated, merely to deceive the public, and to promote the interests of their party, without the slightest fear of incurring odium by so doing in the minds of any but their political opponents. If a foreigner were to judge of the people of England from the tone of their newspapers, he would say that there was assuredly neither honour, honesty, nor truth to be found among the classes which furnished the nation with its ministers and legislators; for a set of miscreants more atrocious than the Whig and Tory ministers and legislators of England were represented to be in these papers never disgraced the society of any nation upon earth.
Happily, all foreigners who read these journals know that in what the members of one party say of those of the other, or are reported to say, there is often but little truth; and that there is still less of truth in what the editors and correspondents of the ultra journals of one party write about the characters, conduct, and sentiments of the members of the other.
There is one species of untruth to which we English people are particularly prone in India, and, I am assured, everywhere else. It is this. Young 'miss in her teens', as soon as she finds her female attendants in the wrong, no matter in what way, exclaims, 'It is so like the natives'; and the idea of the same error, vice, or crime, becomes so habitually associated in her mind with every native she afterwards sees, that she can no more separate them than she can the idea of ghosts and hobgoblins from darkness and solitude. The young cadet or civilian, as soon as he finds his valet, butler, or groom in the wrong, exclaims, 'It is so like blacky--so like the niggers; they are all alike!' And what could you expect from him? He has been constantly accustomed to the same vicious association of ideas in his native land--if he has been brought up in a family of Tories, he has constantly heard those he most reverenced exclaim, when they have found, or fancied they found, a Whig in the wrong, 'It is so like the Whigs--they are all alike--there is no trusting any of them.' If a Protestant, 'It is so like the Catholics; there is no trusting them in any condition of life.' The members of Whig and Catholic families may say the same, perhaps, of Tories and Protestants. An untravelled Englishman will sometimes say the same of a Frenchman; and the idea of everything that is bad in man will be associated in his mind with the image of a Frenchman. If he hears of an act of dishonour by a person of that nation, 'It is so like a Frenchman--they are all alike; there is no honour in them.' A Tory goes to America, predisposed to find in all who live under republican governments every species of vice and crime; and no sooner sees a man or woman misbehave than he exclaims, 'It is so like the Americans--they are all alike; but what could you expect from republicans?' At home, when he considers himself in relation to the members of the parties opposed to him in religion or politics, they are associated in his mind with everything that is vicious; abroad, when he considers the people of other countries in relation to his own, if they happen to be Christians, he will find them associated in his mind with everything that is good, or everything that is bad, in proportion as their institutions happen to conform to those which his party advocates. A Tory will abuse America and Americans, and praise the Austrians. A Whig will, perhaps, abuse the Austrians and others who live under paternal or despotic governments, and praise the Americans, who live under institutions still more free than his own. This has properly been considered by Locke as a species of madness to which all mankind are more or less subject, and from which hardly any individual can entirely free himself. 'There is', he says, 'scarce a man so free from it, but that if he should always, on all occasions, argue or do as in some cases he constantly does, would not be thought fitter for Bedlam than civil conversation. I do not here mean when he is under the power of an unruly passion, but in the steady, calm course of his life. That which thus captivates their reason, and leads men of sincerity blindfold from common sense will, when examined, be found to be what we are speaking of. Some independent ideas, of no alliance to one another, are, by education, custom, and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, that they always appear there together, and they can no more separate them in their thoughts than if they were but one idea, and they operate as if they really were so.' (Book II, Chap. 33.)
Perjury had long since ceased to be considered disgraceful, or even discreditable, among the patrician order in Rome before the soldiers ventured to break their oaths of allegiance. Military service had, from the ignorance and selfishness of this order, been rendered extremely odious to free-born Romans; and they frequently mutinied and murdered their generals, though they would not desert, because they had sworn not to do so. To break his oath by deserting the standards of Rome was to incur the hatred and contempt of the great mass of the people--the soldier dared not hazard this. But patricians of senatorial and consular rank did not hesitate to violate their oaths whenever it promised any advantage to the patrician order collectively or individually, because it excited neither contempt nor indignation in that order. 'They have been false to their generals,' said Fabius, 'but they have never deceived the gods. I know they can conquer, and they shall swear to do so.' They swore, and conquered.
Instead of adopting measures to make the duties of a soldier less odious, the patricians tumed their hatred of these duties to account, and at a high price sold an absolution from their oath. While the members of the patrician order bought and sold oaths among themselves merely to deceive the lower orders, they were still respected among the plebeians; but when they began to sell dispensations to the members of this lower order, the latter also, by degrees, ceased to feel any veneration for the oath, and it was no longer deemed disgraceful to desert duties which the higher order made no effort to render less odious.
'That they who draw the breath of life in a court, and pass all their days in an atmosphere of lies, should have any very sacred regard for truth, is hardly to be expected. They experience such falsehood in all who surround them, that deception, at least suppression of the truth, almost seems necessary for self-defence; and, accordingly, if their speech be not framed upon the theory of the French cardinal, that language was given to man for the better concealment of his thoughts, they at least seem to regard in what they say, not its resemblance to the tact in question, but rather its subserviency to the purpose in view.' (Brougham's George IV.) 'Yet, let it never be forgotten, that princes are nurtured in falsehood by the atmosphere of lies which envelops their palace; steeled against natural sympathies by the selfish natures of all that surround them; hardened in cruelty, partly indeed by the fears incident to their position, but partly too by the unfeeling creatures, the factions, the unnatural productions of a court whom alone they deal with; trained for tyrants by the prostration which they find in all the minds which they come in contact with; encouraged to domineer by the unresisting medium through which all their steps to power and its abuse are made.' (Brougham's Carnot.)
But Lord Brougham is too harsh. Johnson has observed truly enough, 'Honesty is not necessarily greater where elegance is less'; nor does a sense of supreme or despotic power necessarily imply the exercise or abuse of it. Princes have, happily, the same yearning as the peasant after the respect and affection of the circle around them, and the people under them; and they must generally seek it by the same means.
I have mentioned the village communities of India as that class of the population among whom truth prevails most; but I believe there is no class of men in the world more strictly honourable in their dealings than the mercantile classes of India. Under native governments a merchant's books were appealed to as 'holy writ', and the confidence in them has certainly not diminished under our rule. There have been instances of their being seized by the magistrate, and subjected to the inspection of the officers of his court. No officer of a native government ventured to seize them; the merchant was required to produce them as proof of particular entries, and, while the officers of government did no more, there was no danger of false accounts.
An instance of deliberate fraud or falsehood among native merchants of respectable station in society is extremely rare. Among the many hundreds of bills I have had to take from them for private remittances, I have never had one dishonoured, or the payment upon one delayed beyond the day specified; nor do I recollect ever hearing of one who had. They are so careful not to speculate beyond their means, that an instance of failure is extremely rare among them. No one ever in India hears of families reduced to ruin or distress by the failure of merchants or bankers; though here, as in all other countries advanced in the arts, a vast number of families subsist upon the interest of money employed by them.[27]
There is no class of men more interested in the stability of our rule in India than this of the respectable merchants; nor is there any upon whom the welfare of our Government and that of the people more depend. Frugal, first upon principle, that they may not in their expenditure encroach upon their capitals, they become so by habit; and when they advance in life they lay out their accumulated wealth in the formation of those works which shall secure for them, from generation to generation, the blessings of the people of the towns in which they have resided, and those of the country around. It would not be too much to say that one-half of the great works which embellish and enrich the face of India, in tanks, groves, wells, temples, &c., have been formed by this class of the people solely with the view of securing the blessings of mankind by contributing to their happiness in solid and permanent works.[28] 'The man who has left behind him great works in temples, bridges, reservoirs, and caravanserais for the public good, does not die,' says Shaikh Sâdî,[29] the greatest of Eastern poets, whose works are more read and loved than those of any other uninspired man that has ever written, not excepting our own beloved Shakspeare.[30] He is as much loved and admired by Hindoos as by Muhammadans; and from boyhood to old age he continues the idol of the imaginations of both. The boy of ten, and the old man of seventy, alike delight to read and quote him for the music of his verses, and the beauty of his sentiments, precepts, and imagery.[31]
It was to the class last mentioned, whose incomes are derived from the profits of stock invested in manufactures and commerce, that Europe chiefly owed its rise and progress after the downfall of the Roman Empire, and the long night of darkness and desolation which followed it. It was through the means of mercantile industry, and the municipal institutions to which it gave rise, that the enlightened sovereigns of Europe were enabled to curb the licence of the feudal aristocracy, and to give to life, property, and character that security without which society could not possibly advance; and it was through the same means that the people were afterwards enabled to put those limits to the authority of the sovereign, and to secure to themselves that share in the government without which society could not possibly be free or well constituted. Upon the same foundation may we hope to raise a superstructure of municipal corporations and institutions in India, such as will give security and dignity to the society; and the sooner we begin upon the work the better.[32]
Notes:
1. Johnson says: 'Mountaineers are thievish because they are poor; and, having neither manufactures nor commerce, can grow rich only by robbery. They regularly plunder their neighbours, for their neighbours are commonly their enemies; and, having lost that reverence for property by which the order of civil life is preserved, soon consider all as enemies whom they do not reckon as friends, and think themselves licensed to invade whatever they are not obliged to protect.' [W. H. S.] The quotation is from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.
The observations in the text apply largely to the settled Hindoo villages, as well as to the forest tribes.
2. Ficus religiosa is the Linnaean name for the 'pîpal'. Other botanists call it Urostigma religiosum. In the original edition the botanical name is erroneously given as Ficus indicus. The Ficus indica (F. Bengalensis, or Urostigma B.) is the banyan. A story is current that the traders of a certain town begged the magistrate to remove a pîpal-tree which he had planted in the market-place, because, so long as it remained, business could not be conducted. They knew 'the value of a lie'.
3. The red cotton, or silk-cotton, tree, when in spring covered with its huge magnolia-shaped scarlet blossoms, is one of the most magnificent objects in nature. Its botanical name is Salmalia malabarica (Bombax malabaricum; B. heptaphyllum). This is the tree referred to in the text. The white silk-cotton tree (Eriodendron anfractuosum; Bombax 'pentandrum; Ceiba pentandra; Gossampinus Rumphii) has a more southern habitat. (Balfour, Cyclopaedia, 3rd ed., s.v. 'Salmalia' and 'Eriodendron'.)
4. The pîpal is usually regarded as sacred only to Vishnu, the Preserver. The Ficus indica, or banyan, is sacred to Siva, the Destroyer, and the Butea frondosa (Hind. 'dhâk', 'palâs', or 'chhyûl ') to Brahmâ, the Creator, or [Greek text].
5. The sacred trees and plants of India are numerous. 'Balfour (Cyclop., 3rd ed., s.v. 'Sacred') enumerates eighty, and the list is by no mean complete. The same author's article, 'Tree', may also be consulted. The minor 'deities' alluded to by the author are the real gods of popular rural Hinduism. The observations of Mr. William Crooke, probably the best authority on the subject of Indian popular religion, though made with reference to a particular locality, are generally applicable. 'Hinduism certainly shows no signs of weakness, and is practically untouched by Christian and Muhammadan proselytism. The gods of the Vedas are as dead as Jupiter, and the Krishna worship only succeeds from its marvellous adaptability to the sensuous and romantic side of the native mind. But it would be too much to say that the creed exercises any real effect on life or morals. With the majority of its devotees it is probably more sympathetic than practical, and ranks with the periodical ablutions in the Ganges and Jumna, and the traditional worship of the local gods and ghosts, which really impress the rustic. He is enclosed on all sides by a ring of precepts, which attribute luck or ill-luck to certain things or actions. These and the bonds of caste, with its obligations for the performance of marriage, death, and other ceremonies, make up the religions life of the peasant. Nearly every village and hamlet has its local ghost, usually the shrine of a childless man, or one whose funeral rites remained for some reason unperformed. In the expressive popular phrase, he is 'deprived of water' (aud). The pious make oblations to his cenotaph twice a year, and propitiate his ghost with offerings of water to allay his thirst in the lower world. The primaeval serpent-worship is perpetuated in the reverence paid to traditional village-snakes. Of the local ghosts some are beneficent. Sometimes they are only mischievous, like Robin Goodfellow, and will milk the cows, and sour the milk, or pull your hair, if you wander about at night in certain well-known uncanny places. A more dangerous demon is heard in the crackling of the dry leaves of the date-tree in the night wind; and some trees are haunted by a vampire, who will drag you up and devour you, if you venture near them in the darkness.' (N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. vii. Supplement, p. 4.) See also the same author's work Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 2nd ed., 2 vols. Constable, 1896.
6. Compare the story of Râmkishan in Chapter 25. Books on anthropology cite many instances of deaths caused by superstitious fears.
7. Arrian, Indica, chap. 12: 'The sixth class consists of those called "superintendents". They spy out what goes on in country and town, and report everything to the king where the people have a king, and to the magistrates where the people are self-governed, and it is against use and wont for them to give a false report;--but indeed no Indian is accused of lying.' (McCrindle, Ancient India, as described by Megasthenes and Arrian, Trübner, 1877, p. 211). Arrian uses the word [Greek text 1]; in the Fragments of Megasthenes quoted by Diodorus and Strabo, the word is [Greek text 2]. The people referred to seem to be the well-known 'news-writers' employed by Oriental sovereigns (ante, chapter 33, note 7); a simple explanation missed by McCrindle (op. cit. p. 43, note). The remark about the truthfulness of the Indians appears to be Arrian's addition. It is not in the Fragment of Megasthenes from which Arrian copies, and the falsity of the remark is proved by the statement (ibid., p. 71) that 'a person convicted of bearing false witness suffers mutilation of his extremities'. But in Fragment XXVII from Strabo (op. cit., p. 70) Megasthenes says, 'Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem'; and in Fragment XXXIII (ibid., p. 85) he asserts that 'the ablest and moat trustworthy men' are appointed [Greek text 2].
8. Up to the year 1827 'grand larceny', that is to say, stealing to a value exceeding twelve pence, was punishable with death. The Act 7 George IV, cap. 28, abolished the distinction of grand and petty larceny. In 1837, the first year of Queen Victoria's reign, the punishment of death was abolished in the case of between thirty and forty offences. Other statutes have further mitigated the ferocity of the old law.
9. The year was 1652, not 1648 (Tavernier, Travels, transl. Ball, vol. i, p. 260, note). The passages describing the criminal procedure of Amîr Jumla are not very long, and deserve quotation, as giving an accurate account of the administration of penal justice by an able native ruler. 'On the 14th [September] we went to the tent of the Nawâb to take leave of him, and to hear what he had to say regarding the goods which we had shown him. But we were told that he was engaged examining a number of criminals, who had been brought to him for immediate punishment. It is the custom in this country not to keep a man in prison; but immediately the accused is taken he is examined and sentence is pronounced on him, which is then executed without any delay. If the person whom they have seized is found innocent, he is released at once; and whatever the nature of the case may be, it is promptly concluded. . . . On the 15th, at seven o'clock in the morning, we went to the Nawâb, and immediately we were announced he asked us to enter his tent, where he was seated with two of his secretaries by him. . . . The Nawâb had the intervals between his toes full of letters, and he also had many between the fingers of his left hand. He drew them sometimes from his feet, sometimes from his hand, and sent his replies through his two secretaries, writing some also himself. . . . While we were with the Nawâb he was informed that four prisoners, who were then at the door of the tent, had arrived. He remained more than half an hour without replying, writing continually and making his secretaries write, but at length he suddenly ordered the criminals to be brought in; and after having questioned them, and made them confess with their own mouths the crime of which they were accused, he remained nearly an hour without saying anything, continuing to write and to make his secretaries write, . . . Among these four prisoners who were brought into his presence there was one who had entered a house and slain a mother and her three infants. He was condemned forthwith to have his feet and hands cut off, and to be thrown into a field near the high road to end his days. Another had stolen on the high road, and the Nawâb ordered him to have his stomach slit open and to be flung in a drain, I could not ascertain what the others had done, but both their heads were cut off. While all this passed the dinner was served, for the Nawâb generally eats at ten o'clock, and he made us dine with him.' (Ibid., pp. 290-3.) Such swift procedure and sharp punishments would still be highly approved of by the great mass of Indian opinion in the villages.
10. Misprinted 'much less' in original edition.
11. The new Act, V of 1840, prescribes the following declaration: 'I solemnly affirm, in the presence of Almighty God, that what I shall state shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth',--and declares that a false statement made on this shall be punished as perjury. [W. H. S.] The law now in force is to the same effect. This form of declaration is absolutely worthless as a check on perjury, and never hinders any witness from lying to his heart's content. The use of the Korân and Ganges water in the courts has been given up.
12. The tendency of modern India is to rely too much on formal law and the exercise of the powers of the central government. The contemplation of the vast administrative machinery working with its irresistible force and unfailing regularity in obedience to the will of rulers, whose motives are not understood, undoubtedly has a paralysing influence on the life of the nations of India, which, if not counteracted, would work deep mischief. Something in the way of counteraction has been done, though not always with knowledge. The difficulties inherent in the problem of reconciling foreign rule with self-government in an Asiatic country are enormous.
13. But panegyrics on the self-government of Indian villages must always be read with the qualification that the standard of such government was low, and that hundreds of acts and omissions were tolerated, which are intolerable to a modern European Government. Hence comes the difficulty of enforcing numerous reforms loudly called for by European opinion. The vast Indian population hates reform and innovation for many reasons, and, above all, because they involve expense, which to the Indian mind appears wholly unwarrantable.
14. The same phenomenon is observable in rural Ireland, where, as in India, an unhappy history has generated profound distrust and dislike of official authority. The Irish peasant has always been ready to give his neighbour 'the loan of an oath', and a refusal to give it would be thought unneighbourly. An Irish Land Commission and an Indian Settlement Officer must alike expect to receive startling information about the value of land.
15. Ante, chapter 49, text at [16].
16. Hume, in speaking of Scotland in the fifteenth century, says, 'Arms more than laws prevailed; and courage, preferably to equity and justice, was the virtue most valued and respected. The nobility, in whom the whole power resided, were so connected by hereditary alliances, or so divided by inveterate enmities, that it was impossible, without employing an armed force, either to punish the most flagrant guilt, or to give security to the most entire innocence. Rapine and violence, when employed against a hostile tribe, instead of making a person odious among his own clan, rather recommended him to their esteem and approbation; and, by rendering him useful to the chieftain, entitled him to the preference above his fellows.' [W. H. S.]
17. Gibbon, chap. 5. The remark refers to Septimius Severus.
18. The Ballot Act became law in 1872.
19. All that the author says is true, and yet it does not alter the fact that Indian society is and always has been permeated and paralysed by almost universal distrust. Such universal distrust does not prevail in England. This difference between the two societies is fundamental, and its reality is fully recognized by natives of India.
20. Compare the author's account of the fraudulent practices of the Company's sepoys when on leave in Oudh. (Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, vol. i, pp. 286-304.)
21. The editor has failed to find these quotations in the Wellington Dispatches.
22. This is the first story in the first chapter of the Gulistân. The Mishkât-ul-Masâbih (Matthews, vol. ii, p. 427) teaches the same doctrine as Sâdî: 'That person is not a liar who makes peace between two people, and speaks good words to do away their quarrel although they should be lies; and that person who carries good words from one to another is not a tale-bearer.'
23. Gibbon, chapter 27. In the year A.D. 390 Botheric, the general of Theodosius was murdered by a mob at Thessalonica. Acting on the advice of Rufinus, the emperor avenged his officer's death by an indiscriminate massacre of the inhabitants, in which numbers variously estimated at from 7,000 to 15,000 perished. The emperor quickly felt remorse for the atrocity of which he had been guilty, and submitted to do public penance under the direction of Ambrose.
24. The sum total of truth in India would not, I fear, be appreciably increased if every European had the temper of an angel.
25. The editor has never known a reputation for corruption in any way lower the social position of an official of Indian birth.
26. The argument in the anthor's mind seems to be that the unveracity practised and condoned by certain classes of the natives of India on certain occasions is, at least, not more reprehensible than the vices practised and condoned by certain classes of Europeans on certain occasions.
27. Since the author wrote the above remarks, the conditions of Indian trade have been revolutionized by the development of roads, railways, motors, telegraph, postal facilities, and exports. The Indian merchant has been drawn into the vortex of European and American commerce. He is, in consequence, not quite so cautions as he used to be, and is more liable to severe loss or failure, though he is still, as a rule, far more inclined to caution than are his Western rivals. The Indian private banker undoubtedly is honest in ordinary banking transactions and anxious to maintain his commercial credit, but he will often stoop to the most discreditable devices in the purchase of a coveted estate, the foreclosure of a mortgage, and the like. His books, nowadays, are certainly not 'appealed to as holy writ', and many merchants keep a duplicate set for income-tax purposes. The happy people of 1836 had never heard of income tax. Private remittances are now made usually through the post office or the joint-stock banks, which did not exist in the author's days. In recent times failures of banks and merchants have been frequent.
28. These observations, which are perfectly true, form a corrective to the fashionable abuse of the Indian capitalist, whose virtues and merits are seldom noticed.
29. The editor has not succeeded in tracing this quotation, but several passages to a similar effect occur in the Gulistân.
30. I ought to except Confucius, the great Chinese moralist. [W. H. S.]
31. For a brief notice of Sâdî (Sa'dî) see ante, chapter 12, note 6. The Gulistân is everywhere used as a text-book in schools where Persian is taught. The author's extant correspondence shows that he was fascinated by the charms of Persian poetry, even during the first year of his residence in India.
32. The work was 'begun upon' many years ago, and 'a superstructure of municipal corporations and institutions' now exists in every part of India. But 'the same foundation' does not exist. The stout burghers of the mediaeval English and German towns have no Indian equivalents. The superstructure of the municipal institutions is all that Acts of the Legislature can make it; the difficulty is to find or make a solid foundation. Still, it was right and necessary to establish municipal institutions in India, and, notwithstanding all weaknesses and defects, they are of considerable value, and are slowly developing.