Lindsay of the Bengal Civil Service, again tried to remove the prejudices of the people against the occupation and cultivation of this fine village. It had never been measured, and all the revenue officers, backed by all the farmers and cultivators of the neighbourhood, declared that the spirit of the old proprietor would never allow it to be so. Mr. Lindsay was a good geometrician, and had long been in the habit of superintending his revenue surveys himself, and on this occasion be thought himself particularly called upon to do so. A new measuring cord was made for the occasion, and, with fear and trembling, all his officers attended him to the first field; but in measuring it the rope, by some accident, broke. Poor Lindsay was that morning taken ill and obliged to return to Narsinghpur, where he died soon after from fever. No man was ever more beloved by all cla.s.ses of the people of his district than he was; and I believe there was not one person among them who did not believe him to have fallen a victim to the resentment of the spirit of the old proprietor. When I went to the village some years afterwards, the people in the neighbourhood all declared to me that they saw the cord with which he was measuring fly into a thousand pieces the moment the men attempted to straighten it over the first field.[5]
A very respectable old gentleman from the Concan, or Malabar coast,[6] told me one day that every man there protects his field of corn and his fruit-tree by dedicating it to one or other of the spirits which there abound, or confiding it to his guardianship. He sticks up something in the field, or ties on something to the tree, in the name of the said spirit, who from that moment feels himself responsible for its safe keeping. If any one, without permission from the proprietor, presumes to take either an ear of corn from the field, or fruit from the tree, he is sure to be killed outright, or made extremely ill. "No other protection is required", said the old gentleman, "for our fields and fruit-trees in that direction, though whole armies should have to march through them." I once saw a man come to the proprietor of a jack-tree,[7] embrace his feet, and in the most piteous manner implore his protection. He asked what was the matter. "I took", said the man, "a jack from your tree yonder three days ago, as I pa.s.sed at night; and I have been suffering dreadful agony in my stomach ever since. The spirit of the tree is upon me, and you only can pacify him." The proprietor took up a bit of cow- dung, moistened it, and made a mark with it upon the man"s forehead, _in the name of the spirit_, and put some of it into the knot of hair on the top of his head. He had no sooner done this than the man"s pains all left him, and he went off, vowing never again to give similar cause of offence to one of these guardian spirits. "Men", said my old friend, "do not die there in the same regulated spirit, with their thoughts directed exclusively towards G.o.d, as in other parts; and whether a man"s spirit is to haunt the world or not after his death all depends on that."
Notes:
1. December, 1835.
2. Datiya (Datia, Dutteeah) is a small state, with an area of about 911 square miles, and a cash revenue of about four lakhs of rupees.
On the east it touches the Jhansi district, but in all other directions it is enclosed by the territories of Sindhia, the Maharaja of Gwalior. The princ.i.p.ality was separated from Orchha by a family part.i.tion in the seventeenth century. The first treaty between the Raja and the British Government was concluded on the 15th March, 1804.
3. The belief that epileptic patients are possessed by devils is, of course, in no wise peculiar to India. It is almost universal.
Professor Lombroso discusses the belief in diabolical possession in chap. 4 of _The Man of Genius_ (London ed., 1891).
4. "The educated European of the nineteenth century cannot realize the dread in which the Hindoo stands of devils. They haunt his paths from the cradle to the grave. The Tamil proverb in fact says, "The devil who seizes yon in the cradle, goes with you to the funeral pile"." The fear and worship of ghosts, demons, and devils are universal throughout India, and the rites practised are often comical. The ghost of a bibulous European official with a hot temper, who died at Muzaffarnagar, in the United Provinces, many years ago, was propitiated by offerings of beer and whisky at "his tomb. Much information on the subject is collected in the articles "Demon", "Devils", "Dehwar", and "Deified Warriors" in Balfour, _Cyclopaedia of India_ (3rd ed.). Almost every number of Mr. Crooke"s periodical _North Indian Notes and Queries_ (Allahabad: Pioneer Press; London: A. Constable & Co., 5 vols., from 1891-2 to 1895-6) gave fresh instances of the oddities of demon-worship.
5. The officials of the native Governments were content to use either a rope or a bamboo for field measurements, and these primitive instruments continued to satisfy the early British officers. For many years past a proper chain has been always employed for revenue surveys.
6. "The author uses the term "Concan" (Konkan) in a wide sense, so as to cover all the territory between the Western Ghats and the sea, including Malabar in the south. The term is often used in a more restricted sense to mean Bombay and certain other districts, to the north of Malabar.
7. _Artocarpus integrifolius_. The jack fruit attains an enormous size, and sometimes weighs fifty or sixty pounds. Indians delight in it, but to most Europeans it is extremely offensive.
CHAPTER 31
Interview with the Raja of Datiya--Fiscal Errors of Statesmen-- Thieves and Robbers by Profession.
On the 17th[1] we came to Datiya, nine miles over a dry and poor soil, thinly, and only partially, covering a bed of brown and grey syenite, with veins of quartz and feldspar, and here and there d.y.k.es of basalt, and a few boulders scattered over the surface. The old Raja, Parichhit,[2] on one elephant, and his cousin, Dalip Singh, upon a second, and several of their relations upon others, all splendidly caparisoned, came out two miles to meet us, with a very large and splendid _cortege_. My wife, as usual, had gone on in her palankeen very early, to avoid the crowd and dust of this "istikbal", or meeting; and my little boy, Henry, went on at the same time in the palankeen, having got a slight fever from too much exposure to the sun in our slow and stately entrance into Jhansi. There were more men in steel chain armour in this _cortege_ than in that of Jhansi; and, though the elephants were not quite so fine, they were just as numerous, while the crowd of foot attendants was still greater. They were in fancy dresses, individually handsome, and collectively picturesque; though, being all soldiers, not quite pleasing to the eye of a soldier. I remarked to the Raja, as we rode side by side on our elephants, that we attached much importance to having our soldiers all in uniform dresses, according to their corps, while he seemed to care little about these matters. "Yes," said the old man, with a smile, "with me every man pleases himself in his dress, and I care not what he wears, provided it is neat and clean." They certainly formed a body more picturesque from being allowed individually to consult their own fancies in their dresses, for the native taste in dress is generally very good. Our three elephants came on abreast, and the Raja and I conversed as freely as men in such situations can converse. He is a stout, cheerful old gentleman, as careless apparently about his own dress as about that of his soldiers, and a much more sensible and agreeable person than I expected; and I was sorry to learn from him that he had for twelve years been suffering from an attack of sciatica on one side, which had deprived him of the use of one of his legs. I was obliged to consent to halt the next day that I might hunt in his preserve (_ramna_) in the morning, and return his visit in the evening. In the Raja"s cortege there were several men mounted on excellent horses, who carried guitars, and played upon them, and sang in a very agreeable style, I had never before seen or heard of such a band, and was both surprised and pleased.
The great part of the wheat, gram,[3] and other exportable land produce which the people consume, as far as we have yet come, is drawn from our Nerbudda districts, and those of Malwa which border upon them; and, _par consequent_, the price has been rapidly increasing as we recede from them in our advance northward. Were the soil of those Nerbudda districts, situated as they are at such a distance from any great market for their agricultural products, as bad as it is in the parts of Bundelkhand that I came over, no net surplus revenue could possibly be drawn from them in the present state of arts and industry. The high prices paid here for land produce, arising from the necessity of drawing a great part of what is consumed from such distant lands, enables the Rajas of these Bundelkhand states to draw the large revenue they do. These chiefs expend the whole of their revenue in the maintenance of public establishments of one kind or other; and, as the essential articles of subsistence, wheat and gram, &c., which are produced in their own districts, or those immediately around them, are not sufficient for the supply of these establishments, they must draw them from distant territories. All this produce is brought on the backs of bullocks, because there is no road from the districts whence they obtain it, over which a wheeled carriage can be drawn with safety; and, as this mode of transit is very expensive, the price of the produce, when it reaches the capitals, around which these local establishments are concentrated, becomes very high. They must pay a price equal to the collective cost of purchasing and bringing this substance from the most distant districts, to which they are at any time obliged to have recourse for a supply, or they will not be supplied; and, as there cannot be two prices for the same thing in the same market, the wheat and gram produced in the neighbourhood of one of these Bundelkhand capitals fetch as high a price there as that brought from the most remote districts on the banks of the Nerbudda river; while it costs comparatively nothing to bring it from the former lands to the markets. Such lands, in consequence, yield a rate of rent much greater compared with their natural powers of fertility than those of the remotest districts whence produce is drawn for these markets or capitals; and, as all the lands are the property of the Rajas, they drew all those rents as revenue.[4]
Were we to take this revenue, which the Rajas now enjoy, in tribute for the maintenance of public establishments concentrated at distant seats, all these local establishments would, of course, be at once disbanded; and all the effectual demand which they afford for the raw agricultural produce of distant districts would cease. The price of this produce would diminish in proportion, and with it the value of the lands of the districts around such capitals. Hence the folly of conquerors and paramount powers, from the days of the Greeks and Romans down to those of Lord Hastings[5] and Sir John Malcolm,[6] who were all bad political economists, supposing that conquered and ceded territories could always be made to yield to a foreign state the same amount of gross revenue as they had paid to their domestic government, whatever their situation with reference to the markets for their produce--whatever the state of their arts and their industry--and whatever the character and extent of the local establishments maintained out of it. The settlements of the land revenue in all the territories acquired in Central India during the Maratha war, which ended in 1817, were made upon the supposition that the lands would continue to pay the same rate of rent under the new as they had paid under the old government, uninfluenced by the diminution of all local establishments, civil and military, to one- tenth of what they had been; that, under the new order of things, all the waste lands must be brought into tillage, and be able to pay as high a rate of rent as before tillage, and, consequently, that the aggregate available net revenue must greatly and rapidly increase.
Those who had the making of the settlements and the governing of these new territories did not consider that the diminution of every _establishment_ was the removal of a _market_, of an effectual demand for land produce; and that, when all the waste lands should be brought into tillage, the whole would deteriorate in fertility, from the want of fallows, Under the prevailing system of agriculture, which afforded the lands no other means of renovation from over- cropping. The settlements of land which were made throughout our new land acquisitions upon these fallacious a.s.sumptions of course failed.
During a series of quinquennial settlements the a.s.sessment has been everywhere gradually reduced to about two-thirds of what it was when our rule began, to less than one-half of what Sir John Malcolm, and all the other local authorities, and even the worthy Marquis of Hastings himself, under the influence of their opinions, expected it would be. The land revenues of the native princes of Central India, who reduced their public establishments, which the new order of things seemed to render useless, and thereby diminished the only markets for the raw produce of their lands, have been everywhere falling off in the same proportion; and scarcely one of them now draws two-thirds of the income he drew from the same lands in 1817.
There are in the valley of the Nerbudda districts that yield a great deal more produce every year than either Orchha, Jhansi, or Datiya; and yet, from the want of the same domestic markets, they do not yield one-fourth of the amount of land revenue. The lands are, however, rated equally high to the a.s.sessment, in proportion to their value to the farmers and cultivators. To enable them to yield a larger revenue to Government, they require to have larger establishments as markets for land produce. These establishments may be either public, and paid by Government; or they may be private, as manufactories, by which the land produce of these districts would be consumed by people employed in investing the value of their labour in commodities suited to the demand of distant markets, and more valuable than land produce in proportion to their weight and bulk.[7]
These are the establishments which Government should exert itself to introduce and foster; since the valley of the Nerbudda, in addition to a soil exceedingly fertile, has in its whole line, from its source to its embouchure, rich beds of coal reposing for the use of future generations, under the sandstone of the Satpura and Vindhya ranges, and beds no less rich of very fine iron. These advantages have not yet been justly appreciated; but they will be so by and by.[8]
About half-past four in the afternoon of the day we reached Datiya, I had a visit from the Raja, who came in his palankeen, with a very respectable, but not very numerous or noisy, train, and he sat with me about an hour. My large tents were both pitched parallel to each other, about twenty paces distant, and united to each other at both ends by separate "kanats", or cloth curtains. My little boy was present, and behaved extremely well in steadily refusing, without even a look from me, a handful of gold mohurs, which the Raja pressed several times upon his acceptance. I received him at the door of my tent, and supported him upon my arm to his chair, as he cannot walk without some slight a.s.sistance, from the affection already mentioned in his leg. A salute from the guns at his castle announced his departure and return to it. After the audience, Lieutenant Thomas and I ascended to the summit of a palace of the former Rajas of this state, which stands upon a high rock close inside the eastern gate of the city, whence we could see to the west of the city a still larger and handsomer palace standing, I asked our conductors, the Raja"s servants, why it was unoccupied. "No prince these degenerate days", said they, "could muster a family and court worthy of such a palace-- the family and court of the largest of them would, within the walls of such a building, feel as if they were in a desert. Such palaces were made for princes of the older times, who were quite different beings from those of the present day."
From the deserted palace we went to the new garden which is preparing for the young Raja, an adopted son of about ten years of age. It is close to the southern wall of the city, and is very extensive and well managed. The orange-trees are all grafted, and sinking under the weight of as fine fruit as any in India. Attempting to ascend the steps of an empty bungalow upon a raised terrace at the southern extremity of the garden, the attendants told us respectfully that they hoped we would take off our shoes if we wished to enter, as the ancestor of the Raja by whom it was built, Ram Chand, had lately _become a G.o.d_, and was there worshipped. The roof is of stone, supported on carved stone pillars. On the centre pillar, upon a ground of whitewash, is a hand or trident. This is the only sign of a sacred character the building has yet a.s.sumed; and I found that it owed this character of sanct.i.ty to the circ.u.mstance of some one having vowed an offering to the manes of the builder, if he obtained what his soul most desired; and, having obtained it, all the people believe that those who do the same at the same place in a pure spirit of faith will obtain what they pray for.
I made some inquiries about Hardaul Lala, the son of Birsingh Deo, who built the fort of Dhamoni, one of the ancestors of the Datiya Raja, and found that he was as much worshipped here at his birthplace as upon the banks of the Nerbudda as the supposed great _originator_ of the cholera morbus. There is at Datiya a temple dedicated to him and much frequented; and one of the priests brought me a flower in his name, and chanted something indicating that Hardaul Lala was now worshipped even so far as the British _capital of Calcutta_, I asked the old prince what he thought of the origin of the worship of this his ancestor; and he told me that when the cholera broke out first in the camp of Lord Hastings, then pitched about three stages from his capital, on the bank of the Sindh at Chandpur Sunari, several people recovered from the disease immediately after making votive offerings in his name; and that he really thought the spirit of his great- grandfather had worked some wonderful cures upon people afflicted with this dreadful malady.[9]
The town of Datiya contains a population of between forty and fifty thousand souls. The streets are narrow, for, in buildings, as in dress, the Raja allows every man to consult his own inclinations.
There are, however, a great many excellent houses in Datiya, and the appearance of the place is altogether very good. Many of his feudatory chiefs reside occasionally in the city, and have all their establishments with them, a practice which does not, I believe, prevail anywhere else among these Bundelkhand chiefs, and this makes the capital much larger, handsomer, and more populous than that of Tehri. This indicates more of mutual confidence between the chief and his va.s.sals, and accords well with the character they bear in the surrounding countries. Some of the houses occupied by these barons are very pretty. They spend the revenue of their distant estates in adorning them, and embellishing the capital, which they certainly could not have ventured to do under the late Rajas of Tehri, and may not possibly be able to do under the future Rajas of Datiya. The present minister of Datiya, Ganesh, is a very great knave, and encourages the residence upon his master"s estate of all kinds of thieves and robbers, who bring back from distant districts every season vast quant.i.ties of booty, which they share with him. The chief himself is a mild old gentleman, who would not suffer violence to be offered to any of his n.o.bles, though he would not, perhaps, quarrel with his minister for getting him a little addition to his revenue from without, by affording a sanctuary to such kind of people. As in Tehri, so here, the pickpockets const.i.tute the entire population of several villages, and carry their depredations northward to the banks of the Indus, and southward to Bombay and Madras.[10] But colonies of thieves and robbers like these abound no less in our own territories than in those of native states. There are more than a thousand families of them in the districts of Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, and Meerut in the Upper Doab,[11] all well enough known to the local authorities, who can do nothing with them.
They extend their depredations into remote districts, and the booty they bring home with them they share liberally with the native police and landholders under whose protection they live. Many landholders and police officers make large fortunes from the share they get of this booty. Magistrates do not molest them, because they would despair of ever finding the proprietors of the property that might be found upon them; and, if they could trace them, they would never be able to persuade them to come and "enter upon a worse sea of troubles" in prosecuting them. These thieves and robbers of the professional cla.s.ses, who have the sagacity to avoid plundering near home, are always just as secure in our best regulated districts as they are in the worst native states, from the only three things which such depredators care about--the penal laws, the odium of the society in which they move, and the vengeance of the G.o.d they worship; and they are always well received in the society around them, as long as they can avoid having their neighbours annoyed by summons to give evidence for or against them in our courts. They feel quite sure of the goodwill of the G.o.d they worship, provided they give a fair share of their booty to his priests; and no less secure of immunity from penal laws, except on very rare occasions when they happen to be taken in the tact, in a country where such laws happen to be in force.[12]
Notes:
1. December, 1835.
2. Raja Parichhit died in 1839.
3. The word gram (_Cicer arietinum_) is misprinted "grain" in the author"s text, in this place and in many others.
4. Bundelkhand exports to the Ganges a great quant.i.ty of cotton, which enables it to pay for the wheat, gram, and other land produce which it draws from distant districts, [W. H. S.] Other considerable exports from Bundelkhand used to be the root of the _Morinda citrifolia_, yielding a dark red dye, and the coa.r.s.e _kharwa_ cloth, a kind of canvas, dyed with this dye, which is known by the name of "_ al_". But modern chemistry has nearly killed the trade in vegetable dyes. The construction of railways and roads has revolutionized the System of trade, and equalized prices.
5. Governor-General from October 4, 1813, till January 1, 1823. He was Earl of Moira when he a.s.sumed office.
6. Sir John Malcolm was Agent to the Governor-General in Central India from 1817 to 1822, and was appointed Governor of Bombay in 1827.
7. The construction of railways and the development of trade with Europe have completely altered the conditions. The Nerbudda valley can now yield a considerable revenue.
8. The iron ore no doubt is good, but the difficulties in the way of working it profitably are so great that the author"s sanguine expectations seem unlikely to be fully realized. V. Ball, in his day the best authority on the subject, observes, "As will be abundantly shown in the course of the following pages, the manufacture of iron has, in many parts of India, been wholly crushed out of existence by compet.i.tion with English iron, while in others it is steadily decreasing, and it seems destined to become extinct" (_Economic Geology_ (1881), being part of the _Manual of the Geology of India_, p. 338). Ball thought that, if improved methods of reduction should be employed, the Chanda ore might be worked profitably. As regards the rest of India, with the doubtful exception of Upper a.s.sam, he had little hope of success. Full details of the working of the mines in the Jabalpur, Narsinghpur, and Chanda districts of the Central Provinces are given in pp. 384 to 392 of the same work. See also _I.
G._ (1908), vol. x, p. 51; and _The Oxford Survey of the British Empire_ (Oxford, 1914), vol. ii, Asia, pp. 143, 160. A powerful company formed at Bombay in 1907, operating at a spot on the borders of the Central Provinces and Orissa, hopes to turn out 7,000 tons of "steel shapes" per month.
Coal is not found below the very ancient sandstone rocks, cla.s.sed by geologists under the name of the Vindhyan Series. The princ.i.p.al beds of coal are found in the great series of rocks, known collectively as the Gondwana System, which is supposed to range in age from the Permian to the Upper Jura.s.sic periods of European geologists (_Manual_, vol. i, p. 102). This Gondwana System includes sandstones.
A coalfield at Mohpani, ninety-five miles west-south-west from Jabalpur by rail, was worked from 1862 to 1904 by the Nerbudda Coal and Iron Company; and is now worked by the G. I. P. Railway Company.
The princ.i.p.al coal-field of the Central Provinces for some years was that near Warora in the Chanda district, but the amount which can be extracted profitably is approaching exhaustion; in fact the colliery was closed in 1906. Thick seams are known to exist to the south of Chanda near the Wardha river. See _I. G._, 1907, vol. iii, chap. iii, p. 135; vol. x. p. 51.
9. See note to Chapter 25, _ante_, note 7.
10. "Pickpockets" is not a suitable term.
11. The Persian word "doab" means the tract of land between two rivers, which ultimately meet. The upper doab referred to in the text lies between the Ganges and the Jumna.
12. These "colonies of thieves and robbers" are still the despair of the Indian administrator. They are known to Anglo-Indian law as "criminal tribes", and a special Act has been pa.s.sed for their regulation. The principle of that Act is police supervision, exercised by means of visits of inspection, and the issue of pa.s.sports. The Act has been applied from time to time to various tribes, but has in every case failed. In 1891, Sir Auckland Colvin, then Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces, adopted the strong measure of suddenly capturing many hundreds of Sansias, a troublesome criminal tribe, in the Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, and Aligarh Districts. Some of the prisoners were sent to a special jail, or reformatory, called a "settlement", at Sultanpur in Oudh, and the others were drafted off to various landlords" estates. These latter were supposed to devote themselves to agriculture. The editor, as Magistrate of Muzaffarnagar, effected the capture of more than seven hundred Sansias in that district, and dispatched them in accordance with orders. As most people expected, the agricultural pupils promptly absconded. Mult.i.tudes of Sansias in the Panjab and elsewhere remained unaffected by the raid, which could not have any permanent effect. The milder expedient of settling and nursing a large colony, organized in villages, of another criminal tribe, the Bawarias (Boureahs), was also tried many years ago in the same district of Muzaffarnagar. The people settled readily enough, and reclaimed a considerable area of waste land, but were not in the least degree reformed. At the beginning of the cold season, in October or November, most of the able-bodied men annually leave the villages, and remain absent on distant forays till March or April, when they return with their booty, enjoying almost complete immunity, for the reasons stated in the text. On one occasion some of these Bawarias of Muzaffarnagar stole a lakh and a half of rupees (about 12,000 at that time), in currency notes at Tuticorin, in the south of the peninsula, 1,400 miles distant from their home. The number of such criminal tribes, or castes, is very great, and the larger of these communities, such as the Sansias, each comprise many thousands of members, diffused over an enormous area in several provinces. It is, therefore, impossible to put them down, except by the use of drastic measures such as no civilized European Government could propose or sanction. The criminal tribes, or castes, are, to a large extent, races; but, in many of these castes, fresh blood is constantly introduced by the admission of outsiders, who are willing to eat with the members of the tribe, and so become for ever incorporated in the brotherhood. The gipsies of Europe are closely related to certain of these Indian tribes. The official literature on the subject is of considerable bulk. Mr. W. Crooke"s small book, _An Ethnographic Glossary_, published in 1891 (Government Press, Allahabad), is a convenient summary of most of the facts on record concerning the criminal and other castes of Northern India, and gives abundant references to other publications. See also his larger work, _Castes and Tribes of the N. W. P. and Oudh_, 4 vols. Calcutta, 1906. The author"s folio book, _Report on the Budhuk alias Bagree Decoits and other Gang Robbers by Hereditary Profession, and on the Measures adopted by the Government of India for their Suppression_ (Calcutta, 1849), _ante_, Bibliography No. 12, probably is the most valuable of the original authorities on the subject, but it is rare and seldom consulted.
CHAPTER 32
Sporting at Datiya--Fidelity of Followers to their Chiefs in India-- Law of Primogeniture wanting among Muhammadans.
The morning after we reached Datiya, I went out with Lieutenant Thomas to shoot and hunt in the Raja"s large preserve, and with the _humane_ and determined resolution of killing no more game than our camp would be likely to eat; for we were told that the deer and wild hogs were so very numerous that we might shoot just as many as we pleased.[l] We were posted upon two terraces, one near the gateway, and the other in the centre of the preserve; and, after waiting here an hour, we got each a shot at a hog. Hares we saw, and might have shot, but we had loaded all our barrels with ball for other game. We left the "ramna", which is a quadrangle of about one hundred acres of thick gra.s.s, shrubs, and brushwood, enclosed by a high stone wall.
There is one gate on the west side, and this is kept open during the night, to let the game out and in. It is shut and guarded during the day, when the animals are left to repose in the shade, except on such occasions as the present, when the Raja wants to give his guests a morning"s sport. On the plains and woods outside we saw a good many large deer, but could not manage to get near them in our own way, and had not patience to try that of the natives, so that we came back without killing anything, or having had any occasion to exercise our _forbearance_. The Raja"s people, as soon as we left them, went about their sport after their own fashion, and brought us a fine buck antelope after breakfast. They have a bullock trained to go about the fields with them, led at a quick pace by a halter, with which the sportsman guides him, as he walks along with him by the side opposite to that facing the deer he is in pursuit of. He goes round the deer as he grazes in the field, shortening the distance at every circle till he comes within shot. At the signal given the bullock stands still, and the sportsman rests his gun upon his back and fires. They seldom miss. Others go with a fine buck and doe antelope, tame, and trained to browse upon the fresh bushes, which are woven for the occasion into a kind of hand-hurdle, behind which a man creeps along over the fields towards the herd of wild ones, or sits still with his matchlock ready, and pointed out through the leaves. The herd seeing the male and female strangers so very busily and agreeably employed upon their apparently inviting repast, advance to accost them, and are shot when they get within a secure distance.[2] The hurdle was filled with branches from the "dhau" (_Lythrum fructuosum_) tree, of which the jungle is for the most part composed, plucked as we went along; and the tame antelopes, having been kept long fasting for the purpose, fed eagerly upon them. We had also two pairs of falcons; but a knowledge of the brutal manner in which these birds are fed and taught is enough to prevent any but a _brute_ from taking much delight in the sport they afford.[3]
The officer who conducted us was evidently much disappointed, for he was really very anxious, as he knew his master the Raja was, that we should have a good day"s sport. On our way back I made him ride by my side, and talk to me about Datiya, since he had been unable to show me any sport. I got his thoughts into a train that I knew would animate him, if he had any soul at all for poetry or poetical recollections, as I thought he had. "The n.o.ble works in palaces and temples," said he, "which you see around you, Sir, mouldering in ruins, were built by princes who had beaten emperors in battle, and whose spirits still hover over and protect the place. Several times, under the late disorders which preceded your paramount rule in Hindustan, when hostile forces a.s.sembled around us, and threatened our capital with destruction, lights and elephants innumerable were seen from the tops of those battlements, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing under the walls, ready to defend them had the enemy attempted an a.s.sault.
Whenever our soldiers endeavoured to approach near them, they disappeared; and everybody knew that they were spirits of men like Birsingh Deo and Hardaul Lala that had come to our aid, and we never lost confidence." It is easy to understand the devotion of men to their chiefs when they believe their progenitors to have been demiG.o.ds, and to have been faithfully served by their ancestors for several generations. We neither have, nor ever can have, servants so personally devoted to us as these men are to their chiefs, though we have soldiers who will fight under our banners with as much courage and fidelity. They know that their grandfathers served the grandfathers of these chiefs, and they hope their grandchildren will serve their grandsons. The one feels as much pride and pleasure in so serving, as the other in being so served; and both hope that the link which binds them may never be severed. Our servants, on the contrary, private and public, are always in dread that some accident, some trivial fault, or some slight offence, not to be avoided, will sever for ever the link that binds them to their master.
The fidelity of the military cla.s.ses of the people of India to their immediate chief, or leader, whose _salt they eat_, has been always very remarkable, and commonly bears little relation to his _moral virtues_, or conduct to _his_ superiors. They feel that it is their duty to serve him who feeds and protects them and their families in all situations, and under all circ.u.mstances; and the chief feels that, while he has a right to their services, it is his imperative duty so to feed and protect them and their families. He may change sides as often as he pleases, but the relations between him and his followers remain unchanged. About the side he chooses to take in a contest for dominion, they ask no questions, and feel no responsibility. G.o.d has placed their destinies in dependence upon his; and to him they cling to the last. In Malwa, Bhopal, and other parts of Central India, the Muhammadan rule could be established over that of the Rajput chief only by the annihilation of the entire race of their followers.[4] In no part of the world has the devotion of soldiers to their immediate chief been more remarkable than in India among the Rajputs; and in no part of the world bas the fidelity of these chiefs to the paramount power been more unsteady, or their devotion less to be relied upon. The laws of Muhammad, which prescribe that the property in land be divided equally among the sons,[5] leaves no rule for succession to territorial or political dominion. It has been justly observed by Hume: "The right of primogeniture was introduced with the feudal law; an inst.i.tution which is hurtful by producing and maintaining an unequal division of property; but it is advantageous in another respect by accustoming the people to a preference for the eldest son, and thereby preventing a part.i.tion or disputed succession in the monarchy."