Of all printed information upon India, there is none which, either for value or interest, can be ranked with that contained in the Government _Gazette_, which during my stay at Simla was published at that town, the Viceroy"s Council having moved there for the hot weather. Not only are the records of the mere routine business interesting from their variety, but almost every week there is printed along with the _Gazette_ a supplement, which contains memoranda from leading natives or from the representatives of the local governments upon the operations of certain customs, or on the probable effects of a proposed law, or similar communications. Sometimes the circulars issued by the government are alone reprinted, "with a view to elicit opinions," but more generally the whole of the replies are given.
It is difficult for English readers to conceive the number and variety of subjects upon which a single number of the _Gazette_ will give information of some kind. The paragraphs are strung together in the order in which they are received, without arrangement or connection. "A copy of a treaty with his Highness the Maharajah of Cashmere" stands side by side with a grant of three months" leave to a lieutenant of Bombay Native Foot; while above is an account of the suppression of the late murderous outrages in the Punjaub, and below a narrative of the upsetting of the Calcutta mails into a river near Jubbelpore. "A khureta from the Viceroy to his Highness the Rao Oomaid Singh Bahadoor"
orders him to put down crime in his dominions, and the humble answer of the Rao is printed, in which he promises to do his best. Paragraphs are given to "the floating dock at Rangoon;" "the disease among mail horses;" "the Suez Ca.n.a.l;" "the forests of Oude;" and "polygamy among the Hindoos." The Viceroy contributes a "note on the administration of the Khetree chieftainship;" the Bengal government sends a memorandum on "bribery of telegraph clerks;" and the Resident of Kotah an official report of the ceremonies attending the reception of a viceregal khureta restoring the honors of a salute to the Maha Rao of Kotah. The khureta was received in state, the letter being mounted alone upon an elephant magnificently caparisoned, and saluted from the palace with 101 guns.
There is no honor that we can pay to a native prince so great as that of increasing his salute, and, on the other hand, when the Guicodar of Baroda allows a suttee, or when Jung Bahadoor of Nepaul expresses his intention of visiting Paris, we punish them by docking them of two guns, or abolishing their salute, according to the magnitude of the offense.
An Order in Council confers upon the High Priest of the Pa.r.s.ees in the Deccan, "in consideration of his services during the mutiny of 1857,"
the honorary t.i.tle of "Khan Bahadoor." A paragraph announces that an official investigation has been made into the supposed desecration by Scindia and the Viceroy of a mosque at Agra, and that it has been found that the place in question was not a mosque at all. Scindia had given an entertainment to the Viceroy at the Taj Mahal, and supper had been laid out at a building in the grounds. The native papers said the building was a mosque, but the Agra officials triumphantly demonstrated that it had been used for a supper to Lord Ellenborough after the capture of Cabool, and that its name meant "Feast-place." "Report on the light-houses of the Abyssinian coast;" "Agreement with the Governor of Leh," Thibet, in reference to the trans-Himalayan caravans; the promotion of one gentleman to be "Commissioner of Coorg," and of another to be "Superintendent of the teak forests of Lower Burmah;" "Evidence on the proposed measures to suppress the abuses of polyandry in Travancore and Cochin (by arrangement with the Rajah of Travancore);" "Dismissal of Policeman Juggernauth Ramkam--Oude division, No. 11 company--for gross misconduct;" "Report on the Orissa famine;" "Plague in Turkey;" "Borer insects in coffee-plantations;" "Presents to gentlemen at Fontainebleau for teaching forestry to Indian officers;" "Report on the Cotton States of America," for the information of native planters; "Division of Calcutta into postal districts" (in Bengalee as well as English); "Late engagement between the Punjaub cavalry and the Afghan tribes;" "Pension of 3rs. per mensem to the widow (aged 12) of Jamram Chesa, Sepoy, 27th Bengal N. I.," are other headings. The relative s.p.a.ce given to matters of importance and to those of little moment is altogether in favor of the latter. The government of two millions of people is transferred in three lines, but a page is taken up with a list of the caste-marks and nose-borings of native women applying for pensions as soldiers" widows, and two pages are full of advertis.e.m.e.nts of lost currency notes.
The columns of the _Gazette_, or at all events its supplements, offer to government officials whose opinion has been asked upon questions on which they possess valuable knowledge, or in which the people of their district are concerned, an opportunity of attacking the acts or laws of the government itself--a chance of which they are not slow to take advantage. One covertly attacks the license-tax; a second, under pretense of giving his opinion on some proposed change in the contract law, backs the demands of the indigo-planters for a law that shall compel specific performance of labor-contracts on the part of the workman, and under penalty of imprisonment; another lays all the ills under which India can be shown to suffer at the door of the home government, and points out the ruinous effects of continual changes of Indian Secretaries in London.
It would be impossible to overrate the importance of the supplements to the _Gazette_, viewed either as a subst.i.tute for a system of communicated articles to the native papers, or as material for English statesmen, whether in India or at home, or as a great experiment in the direction of letting the people of India legislate for themselves. The results of no less than three government inquiries were printed in the supplement during my stay in India, the first being in the shape of a circular to the various local governments requesting their opinion on the proposed extension to natives of the testamentary succession laws contained in the Indian Civil Code; while the second related to the "ghaut murders," and the third to the abuses of polygamy among the Hindoos. The second and third inquiries were conducted by means of circulars addressed by government to those most interested, whether native or European.
The evidence in reply to the "ghaut murder" circular was commenced by a letter from the Secretary to the government of Bengal to the Secretary to the government of India, calling the attention of the Viceroy in Council to an article written in Bengalee by a Hindoo in the _Dacca Prokash_ on the practice of taking sick Hindoos to the river-side to die. It appears from this letter that the local governments pay careful attention to the opinions of the native papers--unless, indeed, we are to accept the view that "the Hindoo" was a government clerk, and the article written to order--a supposition favored by its radical and destructive tone. The Viceroy answered that the local officers and native gentlemen of all shades of religious opinion were to be privately consulted. A confidential communication was then addressed to eleven English and four Hindoo gentlemen, and the opinions of the English and native newspapers were unofficially invited. The Europeans were chiefly for the suppression of the practice; the natives--with the exception of one, who made a guarded reply--stated that the abuses of the custom had been exaggerated, and that they could not recommend its suppression. The government agreed with the natives, and decided that nothing should be done--an opinion in which the Secretary of State concurred.
In his reply to the "ghaut murder" circular, the representative of the orthodox Hindoos, after pointing out that the _Dacca Prokash_ is the Dacca organ of the Brahmos, or Bengal Deists, and not of the true Hindoos, went on to quote at length from the Hindoo scriptures pa.s.sages which show that to die in the Ganges water is the most blessed of all deaths. The quotations were printed in native character as well as in English in the _Gazette_. One of the officials in his reply pointed out that the discouragement of a custom was often as effective as its prohibition, and instanced the cessation of the practice of "hook-swinging" and "self-mutilation."
Valuable as is the correspondence as a sample of the method pursued in such inquiries, the question under discussion has not the importance that attaches to the examination into the abuses of the practice of polygamy.
To prevent an outcry that the customs of the Hindoo people were being attacked, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal stated in his letters to the government of India that it was his wish that the inquiry should be strictly confined to the abuses of Koolin polygamy, and that there should be no general examination into ordinary polygamy, which was not opposed even by enlightened Hindoos. The polygamy of the Koolin Brahmins is a system of taking a plurality of wives as a means of subsistence: the Koolins were originally Brahmins of peculiar merit, and such was their sanct.i.ty that there grew up a custom of payments being made to them by the fathers of the forty or fifty women whom they honored by marriage. So greatly has the custom grown that Koolins have sometimes as many as eighty wives, and the husband"s sole means of subsistence consists in payments from the fathers of his wives, each of whom he visits, however, only once in three or four years. The Koolin Brahmins live in luxury and indolence, their wives exist in misery, and the whole custom is plainly repugnant to the teachings of the Hindoo scriptures, and is productive of vice and crime. The committee appointed for the consideration of the subject by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal--which consisted of two English civilians and five natives--reported that the suggested systems of registration of marriages, or of fines increasing in amount for every marriage after the first, would limit the general liberty of the Hindoos to take many wives, which they were forbidden to touch. On the other hand, to recommend a declaratory law on plural marriages would be to break their instructions, which ordered them to refrain from giving the sanction of English law to Hindoo polygamy. One native dissented from the report, and favored a declaratory law.
The English idea of "not recognizing" customs or religions which exist among a large number of the inhabitants of English countries is a strange one, and productive of much harm. It is not necessary, indeed, that we should countenance the worship of Juggernauth by ordering our officials to present offerings at his shrine, but it is at least necessary that we should recognize native customs by legislating to restrain them within due limits. To refuse to "recognize" polygamy, which is the social state of the vast majority of the citizens of the British Empire, is not less ridiculous than to refuse to recognize that Hindoos are black.
Recognition is one thing, interference another. How far we should interfere with native customs is a question upon which no general rule can be given, unless it be that we should in all cases of proposed interference with social usages or religious ceremonies consult intelligent but orthodox natives, and act up to their advice. In Ceylon, we have prohibited polygamy and polyandry, although the law is not enforced; in India, we "unofficially recognize" the custom; in Singapore, we have distinctly recognized it by an amendment to the Indian Succession Law, which there applies to natives as well as Europeans. In India, we put down suttee; while, in Australia, we tolerate customs at least as barbarous.
One of the social systems which we recognize in India is far more revolting to our English feelings than is that of polygamy--namely, the custom of polyandry, under which each woman has many husbands at a time.
This custom we unofficially recognize as completely as we do polygyny, although it prevails only on the Malabar coast, and among the hill-tribes of the Himalaya, and not among the strict Hindoos. The Thibetan frontier tribes have a singular form of the inst.i.tution, for with them the woman is the wife of all the brothers of a family, the eldest brother choosing her, and the eldest son succeeding to the property of his mother and all her husbands. In Southern India, the polyandry of the present day differs little from that which in the middle of the fifteenth century Niccolo de Conti found flourishing in Calicut. Each woman has several husbands, some as many as ten, who all contribute to her maintenance, she living apart from all of them; and the children are allotted to the husbands at the will of the wife.
The toleration of polygyny, or common polygamy, is a vexed question everywhere. In India, all authorities are in favor of respecting it; in Natal, opinion is the other way. While we suppress it in Ceylon, even among black races conquered by us with little pretext only fifty years ago, we are doubtful as to the propriety of its suppression by the United States among white people, who, whatever was the case with the original leaders, have for the most part settled down in Utah since it has been the territory of a nation whose imperial laws prohibit polygamy in plain terms.
The inquiries into the abuses of polygamy which have lately been conducted in Bengal and in Natal have revealed singular differences between the polygamy of the Hindoos and of the hill-tribes, between Indian and Mormon polygamy, and between both and the Mohammedan law.
The Hindoo laws, while they limit the number of legal wives, allow of concubines, and, in the Maharajah case, Sir Joseph Arnould went so far as to say that polygamy and courtesanship are always found to flourish side by side, although the reverse is notoriously the case at Salt Lake City, where concubinage is punishable, in name at least, by death.
Again, polygamy is somewhat discouraged by Mohammedan and Hindoo laws, and the latter even lay down the sum which in many cases is to be paid to the first wife as compensation for the wrong done her by the taking of other wives. Among the Mormons, on the other hand, polygamy is enjoined upon the faithful, and, so far from feeling herself aggrieved, the first wife herself selects the others, or is at the least consulted.
Among some of the hill-tribes of India, such as the Paharis of Bhaugulpoor, polygamy is encouraged, but with a limitation to four wives.
Among the Mohammedans, the number of marriages is restricted, and divorce is common; among the Mormons, there is no limit--indeed, the more wives the greater a man"s glory--and divorce is all-but unknown.
The greatest, however, of all the many differences between Eastern and Mormon polygamy lies in the fact that, of the Eastern wives, one is the chief, while Mormon wives are absolutely equal in legitimacy and rank.
Not only is equality the law, but the first wife has recognized superiority of position over the others in the Mormon family. By custom she is always consulted by her husband in reference to the choice of a new wife, while the other wives are not always asked for their opinion; but this is a matter of habit, and the husband is in no way bound by her decision. Again, the first wife--if she is a consenting party--often gives away the fresh wives at the altar; but this, too, is a mere custom. The fact that in India one of the wives generally occupies a position of far higher dignity than that held by the others will make Indian polygamy easy to destroy by the lapse of time and operation of social and moral causes. As the city-dwelling natives come to mix more with the Europeans, they will find that only one of their wives will be generally recognized. This will tend of itself to repress polygamy among the wealthy native merchants and among the rajahs who are members of our various councils, and their example will gradually react upon the body of the natives. Already a majority of the married people of India are monogamists by practice, although polygamists in theory; their marriages being limited by poverty, although not by law. The cla.s.ses which have to be reached are the n.o.ble families, the merchants, and the priests; and over the two former European influence is considerable, while the inquiry into Koolinism has proved that the leading natives will aid us in repressing the abuses of polygamy among the priests.
CHAPTER X.
UMRITSUR.
At Umbala, I heard that the Sikh pilgrims returning from the sacred fair, or great Hindoo camp-meeting, at Hurdwar, had been attacked by cholera, and excluded from the town; and as I quitted Umbala in the evening, I came upon the cholera-stricken train of pilgrims escaping by forced marches toward their homes, in many cases a thousand miles away.
Tall, lithe, long-bearded men with large hooked noses, high foreheads, and thin lips, stalked along, leading by one hand their veiled women, who ran behind, their crimson and orange trowsers stained with the dust of travel, while bullock-carts decked out with jingling bells bore the tired and the sick. Many children of all ages were in the throng. For mile after mile I drove through their ranks, as they marched with a strange kind of weary haste, and marched, too, with few halts, with little rest, if any. One great camp we left behind us, but only one; and all night long we were still pa.s.sing ranks of marching men and women.
The march was silent; there was none of the usual chatter of an Indian crowd; gloom was in every face, and the people marched like a beaten army flying from a destroying foe.
The disease, indeed, was pressing on their heels. Two hundred men and women, as I was told at the Umbala lines, had died among them in the single day. Many had dropped from fright alone, but the pestilence was in the horde, and its seeds were carried into whatever villages the pilgrims reached.
The gathering at Hurdwar had been attended by a million people drawn from every part of the Punjaub and Northwest; not only Hindoos and Sikhs, but Scindhees, Beloochees, Pathans, and Afghans had their representatives in this great throng. As we neared the bridge of boats across the Sutlej, I found that a hurried quarantine had been set up on the spot. Only the sick or dying and bearers of corpses were detained, however; a few questions were asked of the remainder, and ultimately they were allowed to cross; but driving on at speed, I reached Jullundur in the morning, only to find that the pilgrims had been denied admittance to the town. A camp had been formed without the city, to which the pilgrims had to go, unless they preferred to straggle on along the roads, dropping and dying by the way; and the villagers throughout the country had risen on the wretched people, to prevent them returning to their homes.
It is not strange that the government of India should lately have turned its attention to the regulation or suppression of these fairs, for the city-dwelling people of North India will not continue long to tolerate enormous gatherings at the commencement of the hot weather, by which the lives of thousands must ultimately be lost. At Hurdwar, at Juggernauth, and at many other holy spots, hundreds of thousands--millions, not unfrequently--are collected yearly from all parts of India. Great princes come down traveling slowly from their capitals with trains of troops and followers so long that they often take a day or more to pa.s.s a given spot. The Maharajah of Cashmere"s camp between Kalka and Umbala occupied when I saw it more s.p.a.ce than that of Aldershot. Camels, women, sutlers without count, follow in the train, so that a body of five thousand men is multiplied until it occupies the s.p.a.ce and requires the equipments of a vast army. A huge mult.i.tude of cultivators, of princes, of fakeers, and of roisterers met for the excitement and the pleasures of the camp is gathered about the holy spot. There is religion, and there is trade; indeed, the religious pilgrims are for the most part shrewd traders, bent on making a good profit from their visit to the fair.
The gathering at Hurdwar in 1867 had been more than usually well attended and successful, when suddenly a rumor of cholera was heard; the police procured the break-up of the camp, and government thought fit to prohibit the visit to Simla of the Maharajah of Cashmere. The pilgrims had hardly left the camp upon their journey home when cholera broke out, and by the time I pa.s.sed them hundreds were already dead, and a panic had spread through India. The cholera soon followed the rumor, and spread even to the healthiest hill-towns, and 6000 deaths occurred in the city of Srinuggur, after the Maharajah"s return with his infected escort from Hurdwar. A government which has checked infanticide and suppressed suttee could not fail to succeed, if it interfered, in causing these fairs to be held in the cold weather.
At Jullundur I encountered a terrible dust-storm. It came from the south and west, and, to judge from its fierceness, must have been driven before the wind from the great sandy desert of Northern Scinde. The sun was rising for a sultry day, when from the south there came a blast which in a minute covered the sky with a leaden cloud, while from the horizon there advanced, more slowly, a lurid ma.s.s of reddish-brown. It soon reached the city, and then, from the wall where I sought shelter, nothing could be seen but driving sand of ocher color, nothing heard but the shrieking of the wind. The gale ceased as suddenly as it began, but left a day which, delightful to travelers upon the Indian plains, would elsewhere have been called by many a hard name--a day of lowering sky and dropping rain, with chilling cold--in short, a day that felt and looked like an English thaw, though the thermometer must have stood at 75. Another legacy from the storm was a view of the Himalayas such as is seldom given to the dwellers on the plains. Looking at the clouds upon the northern horizon, I suddenly caught sight of the Snowy Range hanging, as it seemed, above them, half-way up the skies. Seen with a foreground of dawk jungle in bright bloom, the scene was beautiful; but the view too distant to be grand, except through the ideas of immensity called up by the loftiness of the peaks. While crossing the Beeas (the ancient Hyphasis, and eastern boundary of the Persian empire in the days of Darius), as I had crossed the Sutlej, by a bridge of boats, I noticed that the railway viaduct, which was being built for the future Umritsur and Delhi line, stood some way from the deep water of the river; indeed, stood chiefly upon dry land. The rivers change their course so often that the Beeas and Sutlej bridges will each have to be made a mile long.
There has lately been given us in the Punjaub a singular instance of the blind confidence in which government orders are carried out by the subordinates. The order was that the iron columns on which the Beeas bridge was to rest should each be forty-five feet long. In placing them, in some cases the bottom of the forty-five feet was in the shifting sand--in others, it was thirty feet below the surface of the solid rock; but a boring which was needless in the one case and worse than useless in the other has been persevered in to the end, the story runs, because it was the "hook"m." The Indian rivers are the great bars to road and railway making; indeed, except on the Grand Trunk road, it may be said that the rivers of India are still unbridged. On the chief mail-roads stone causeways are built across the river-beds, but the streams are all-but impa.s.sable during the rains. Even on the road from Kalka to Umbala, however, there is one river-bed without a causeway, across which the dawk-gharree is dragged by bullocks, who struggle slowly through the sand; and, in crossing it, I saw a steam-engine lying half buried in the drift.
In India, we have been sadly neglectful of the roads. The Grand Trunk road and the few great railroads are the only means of communication in the country. Even between the terminus of the Bengal lines at Jubbelpore and of the Bombay railroad at Nagpore there was at the time of my visit no metaled road, although the distance was but 200 miles, and the mails already pa.s.sed that way. Half a day at least was lost upon all the Calcutta letters, and Calcutta pa.s.sengers for Bombay or England were put to an additional expense of some 30 and a loss of a week or ten days in time from the absence of 200 miles of road. Until we have good cross-roads in India, and metaled roads into the interior from every railway station, we shall never succeed in increasing the trade of India, nor in civilizing its inhabitants. The Grand Trunk road is, however, the best in the world, and is formed of soft white nodules, found in beds through North India, which when pounded and mixed with water is known as "kunkur," and makes a road hard, smooth, clean, and lasting, not unlike to that which asphalt gives.
At Umritsur I first found myself in the true East--the East of myrtles, roses, and veiled figures with flashing eyes--the East of the "Arabian Nights" and "Lalla Rookh." The city itself is Persian, rather than Indian, in its character, and is overgrown with date-palms, pomegranates, and the roses from which the precious attar is distilled.
Umritsur has the making of the attar for the world, and it is made from a rose which blossoms only once a year. Ten tons of petals of the ordinary country rose (_Rosa centifolia_) are used annually in attar-making at Umritsur, and are worth from 20 to 30 a ton in the raw state. The petals are placed in the retort with a small quant.i.ty of water, and heat is applied until the water is distilled through a hollow bamboo into a second vessel, which contains sandal-wood oil. A small quant.i.ty of pure attar pa.s.ses with the water into the receiver. The contents of the receiver are then poured out, and allowed to stand till the attar rises to the surface, in small globules, and is skimmed off.
The pure attar sells for its weight in silver.
Umritsur is famous for another kind of merchandise more precious even than the attar. It is the seat of the Cashmere shawl trade, and three great French firms have their houses in the town, where, through the help of friends, shawls may be obtained at singularly low prices; but travelers in far-off regions are often in the financial position of the Texan hunter who was offered a million of acres for a pair of boots--they "have not got the boots."
It is only shawls of the second cla.s.s that can be bought cheap at Umritsur; those of the finest quality vary in price from 40 to 250, 30 being the cost of the material. The shawl manufacture of the Punjaub is not confined to Umritsur; there are 900 shawl-making shops in Loodiana, I was told while there. There are more than sixty permanent dyes in use at the Umritsur shawl-shops; cochineal, indigo, log-wood, and saffron are the commonest and best. The shawls are made of the down which underlies the hair of the "shawl-goat" of the higher levels. The yak, the camel, and the dog of the Himalayas, all possess this down as well as their hair or wool; it serves them as a protection against the winter cold. _Chogas_--long cloaks used as dressing-gowns by Europeans--are also made in Umritsur, from the soft wool of the Bokhara camel, for Umritsur is now the headquarters of the Central Asian trade with Hindostan.
The bazaar is the gayest and most bustling in India--the goods of all India and Central Asia are there. Dacca muslin--known as "woven air"--lies side by side with thick chogas of kinkob and embroidered Cashmere, Indian towels of coa.r.s.e huckaback half cover Chinese watered silks, and the brilliant dyes of the brocades of Central India are relieved by the modest grays of the soft _puttoo_ caps. The buyers are as motley as the goods--Rajpoots in turbans of deep blue, ornamented with gold thread, Cashmere valley herdsmen in strange caps, nautch girls from the first three bridges of Srinuggur, some of the so-called "hill-fanatics," whose only religion is to levy contributions on the people of the plains, and Sikh troopers, home on leave, stalking through the streets with a haughty swagger. Some of the Sikhs wear the pointed helmets of their ancestors, the ancient Sakae; but, whether he be helmeted or not, the enormous white beard of the Sikh, the fierce curl of his mustache, the c.o.c.k of the turban, and the amplitude of his sash, all suggest the fighting-man. The strange closeness of the likeness of the Hungarians to the Sikhs would lead one to think that the races are identical. Not only are they alike in build, look, and warlike habits, but they brush their beards in the same fashion, and these little customs endure longer than manners--longer, often, than religion itself.
One of the crowd was a ruddy-faced, red-bearded, Judas-haired fellow, that looked every inch a Fenian, and might have stepped here from the Kilkenny wilds; but the majority of the Sikhs had aquiline noses and fine features, so completely Jewish of the best and oldest type that I was reminded of Sir William Jones"s fanciful derivation of the Afghan races from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. It may be doubted whether the Sikhs, Afghans, Persians, ancient a.s.syrians, Jews, ancient Scythians, and Magyars were not all originally of one stock.
In India, dress still serves the purpose of denoting rank. The peasant is clothed in cotton, the prince in cloth of gold; and even religion, caste, and occupation are distinguished by their several well-known and unchanging marks. Indeed, the fixity of fashion is as singular in Hindostan as its infinite changeableness in New York or France. The patterns we see to-day in the Bombay bazaar are those which were popular in the days of Shah Jehan. This regulation of dress by custom is one of the many difficulties in the way of our English manufacturers in their Indian ventures. There has been an attempt made lately to bring about the commercial annexation of India to England: Lancashire is to manufacture the Longee, Dhotee, and Saree, we are told; Nottingham or Paisley are to produce us shumlas; Dacca is to give way to Norwich, and Coventry to supersede Jeypoor. It is strange that men of Indian knowledge and experience should be found who fail to point out the absurdity of our entertaining hopes of any great trade in this direction. The Indian women of the humbler castes are the only customers we can hope to have in India; the high-caste people wear only ornamented fabrics, in the making of which native manufacturers have advantages which place them out of the reach of European compet.i.tion: cheap labor; workmen possessed of singular culture, and of a grace of expression which makes their commonest productions poems in silk and velvet; perfect knowledge of their customers" wants and tastes; scrupulous regard to caste conservatism--all these are possessed by the Hindoo manufacturer, and absent in the case of the firms of Manchester and Rochdale. As a rule, all Indian dress is best made by hand; only the coa.r.s.est and least ornamented fabrics can be largely manufactured at paying rates in England. As for the clothing of the poorer people, the men for the most part wear nothing, the women little, and that little washed often, and changed never. Even for the roughest goods we cannot hope to undersell the native manufacturers by much in the presidency towns. Up country, if we enter into the compet.i.tion, it can scarcely fail to be a losing one. England is not more unlikely to be clothed from India than India from Great Britain. If European machinery is needed, it will be erected in Yokohama, or in Bombay, not in the West Riding.
It is hardly to be believed that Englishmen have for some years been attempting to induce the natives to adopt our flower patterns--peonies, b.u.t.terflies, and all. Ornament in India is always subordinate to the purpose which the object has to serve. Hindoo art begins where English ends. The principles which centuries of study have given us as the maxims upon which the grammar of ornament is based are those which are instinctive in every native workman. Every costume, every vase, every temple and bazaar in India, gives eye-witness that there is truth in the saw that the finest taste is consistent with the deepest slavery of body, with the utmost slavishness of mind. A Hindoo of the lowest caste will spurn the gift of a turban or a loin-cloth the ornamentation of which consists not with his idea of symmetry and grace. Nothing could induce a Hindoo to clothe himself in such a gaudy, masquerading dress as maddens a Maori with delight and his friends with jealousy and mortification. In art as in deportment, the Hindoo loves harmony and quiet; and dress with the Oriental is an art: there is as much feeling--as deep poetry--in the curves of the Hindoo Saree as in the outlines of the Taj.
Umritsur is the spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and the Durbar Temple in the center of the town is the holiest of their shrines. It stands, with the sunbeams glancing from its gilded roof, in the middle of a very holy tank, filled with huge weird fish-monsters that look as though they fed on men, and glare at you through cruel eyes.
Leaving your shoes outside the very precincts of the tank, with the police guard that we have stationed there, you skirt one side of the water, and then leave the mosaic terrace for a still more gorgeous causeway, that, bordered on either side by rows of golden lamp-supporters, carries the path across toward the rich pavilion, the walls of which are as thickly spread with gems as are those of Akbar"s palace. Here you are met by a bewildering din, for under the inner dome sit worshipers by the score, singing with vigor the grandest of barbaric airs to the accompaniment of lyre, harp, and tomtom, while in the center, on a cushion, is a long-bearded gray old gooroo, or priest of the Sikh religion--a creed singularly pure, though little known. The effect of the scene is much enhanced by the beauty of the surrounding houses, whose oriel windows overhang the tank, that the Sikh princes may watch the evolutions of the lantern-bearing boats on nights when the temple is illuminated. When seen by moonlight, the tank is a very picture from the "Arabian Nights."
This is a time of ferment in the Sikh religion. A carpenter named Ram Singh--a man with all that combination of shrewdness and imagination, of enthusiasm and worldliness, by which the world is governed--another Mohammed or Brigham Young, perhaps--has preached his way through the Punjaub, infusing his own energy into others, and has drawn away from the Sikh Church some hundred thousand followers--reformers--who call themselves the Kookas. These modern Anabaptists--for many are disposed to look upon Ram Singh as another John of Leyden--bind themselves by some terrible and secret oath, and the government fear that reformation of religion is to be accompanied by reformation of the State of a kind not advantageous to the English power. When Ram Singh lately proclaimed his intention of visiting the Durbar Temple, the gooroos incited the Sikh fanatics to attack his men with clubs, and the military police were forced to interfere. There is now, however, a Kooka temple at Lah.o.r.e.
In spite of religious ferment, there is little in the bazaar or temples of Umritsur to remind one of the times--only some twenty years ago--when the Sikh army crossed the Sutlej, and its leaders threatened to sack Delhi and Calcutta, and drive the English out of India; it is impossible, however, to believe that there is no undercurrent in existence. Eighteen years cannot have sufficed to extinguish the Sikh nationality, and the men who beat us at Chillianwallah are not yet dead, or even old. When the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh returned from England in 1864 to bury his mother"s body, the chiefs crowded round him as he entered Lah.o.r.e, and besought him to resume his position at their head.
His answer was a haughty "Jao!" ("Begone!") If the Sikhs are to rise once more, they will look elsewhere for their leader.
CHAPTER XI.
LAh.o.r.e.
Crossing in a railway journey of an hour one of the most fertile districts of the Punjaub, I was struck with the resemblance of the country to South Australia: in each great sweeps of wheat-growing lands, with here and there an acacia or mimosa tree; in each a climate hot, but dry, and not unhealthy;--singularly hot here for a tract in the lat.i.tude of Vicksburg, near which the Mississippi is sometimes frozen.
Through groves of a yellow-blossomed, sweet-scented, weeping acacia, much like laburnum, in which the fortified railway station seems out of place, I reached the tomb-surrounded garden that is called Lah.o.r.e--a city of pomegranates, oleanders, hollyhocks, and roses. The date-groves of Lah.o.r.e are beautiful beyond description; especially so the one that hides the Agra Bank.