'Khansama', 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, Khansama, and his stomach is now become very delicate, and could not stand anything strong.'

'Certainly not, sir.'

'Well, Khansama, then he has taken a fancy to a roasted mare' ('madiyan'), meaning a 'halwan', or kid.'[15]

'A roasted mare, sir?'

'Yes, Khansama, 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, Khansama, 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 Nepal, 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 Raja, 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 ("kauwa"), and should be glad to get some of them if the Raja could spare them,'—meaning coffee, or 'kahwa'.

The Raja 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, Raja Sahib, 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 Raja, turning round to his followers.

'Yes,' replied they,' it is very strange, Raja Sahib; but such is your 'ikbal' (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 Raja, '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 Raja; '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 Raja'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 ('khansaman') 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 Raja, 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.

Kam Baksh had one sister married to the King of Oudh, and another to Mirza Salim, the younger son of the Emperor. Mirza Salim 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 Kasganj, 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. Sulaiman 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 Timur 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 Kam 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 Mathura (Muttra) district, sixteen miles west of Mathura, Regulation V of 1826 annexed Govardhan to the Agra district. In 1832 Mathura was made the head-quarters of a new district, Govardhan and other territory being transferred from Agra.

2. The Puranas, even when narrating history after a fashion, are cast in the form of prophecies. The Bhagavat Purana is especially devoted to the legends of Krishna. The Hindi version of the 10th Book (skandha) is known as the 'Prem Sagar', 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, Bihar and Orissa in the following year. Shah Alam 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 Maratha 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, Ghulam Kadir.

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 Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, which means 'that Sina was his grandfather. Avicenna is a corruption of either Abu Sina or Ibn Sina. 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 Nasir-ud-din of Tus in Persia was a great astronomer, philosopher, and mathematician in the thirteenth century. The author's Imam-ud-din Ghazzali is intended for Abu Hamid Imam al Ghazzali, one of the most famous of Musulman doctors. He was born at Tus, the modern Mashhad (Meshed) in Khurasan, 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 Danapur) 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 Ghazipur, 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 Ghazipur 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 Sagar 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' (Koran, chap. iv). Compare the ruling in 'Mishkat-ul- Masabih', 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. Kasganj, the residence of Colonel Gardner, is in the Etah district of the United Provinces. In 1911 the population was 16,429.



CHAPTER 54

Fathpur-Sikri—The Emperor Akbar's Pilgrimage—Birth of Jahangir.

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 Bai, the wife of the Emperor Akbar, and the mother of Jahangir. She was of Rajput 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 Rajput 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 Rajput blood in the veins of their princes.[5] 'Better blood' than that of the Rajputs 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 Gurkhas of Nepal, a small diminutive race of men not unlike the Huns, but certainly as brave as any men can possibly be. A Gurkha 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 Sikri, 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 Salim 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 Muin-ud-din of Chisht, at Ajmer. He and his family went all the way on foot at the rate of three 'kos', or four miles, a day, a distance of about three hundred and fifty miles. 'Kanats', 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 Sikri. He went accordingly, and was assured by the old man, then ninety-six years of age, that the Empress Jodh Bai, 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, Mirza Salim, and became in time Emperor of Hindostan, under the name of Jahangir.[7] It was to this Emperor Jahangir 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 Sikri, 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 Koran 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 Koran was the 'ababil', or large black swallow, and not the 'partadil', 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 Salim, the hermit, is a very beautiful little building, in the centre of the quadrangle.[15] The man who guards it told me that the Jats, 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 Jahangir;[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 Salim 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-Sikri 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 Panjab 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 Bihari Mal, chief of Jaipur, in A.D. 1562. There is little doubt that she, Mariam-uz-Zamani, was the mother of Jahangir. See Blochmann, transl. Ain, 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- Zamani', 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 Bai is not a proper name. It seems to mean merely 'princess of Jodhpur'. The only lady really known as Jodh Bai was the daughter of Udai Singh (Moth Raja) of Jaipur, who became a consort of Jahangir. Sleeman's notion that Jahangir's mother also was called Jodh Bai 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 Bai, daughter of Udai Singh, alias Moth Raja, who was married to Jahangir in A.D. 1585, and was the mother of Shah Jahan. Her personal names were Jagat Goshaini and Balmati. She died in A.D. 1619. Akbar's queen, Maryam-uz-Zamani, daughter of Raja Bihari Mall of Jaipur (Amber), who died in A.D. 1623, is buried at Sikandra. (See Beale, s.v. 'Jodh Bai' and 'Mariam Zamani'; Blochmann, transl. Ain, pp. 429, 619.) The tomb of Maryam-uz-Zamani 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 Rajput 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 Rajput blood in the veins' of the ruling princes. The empire was tottering to its fall long before the death of Aurangzeb, who 'had himself married two Hindoo wives; and he wedded his son Muazzam (afterwards the Emperor Bahadur) 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 Gurkhas as enemies only; they now know them as worthy and equal brethren in arms. The recruitment of Gurkhas for the British service began in 1838. The spelling 'Gorkha' is more accurate.

7. The 'kos' 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 kos is 1 3/4 mile. Three kos would, therefore, be equal to about 5 1/4 miles. Muin-ud-din died in A.D. 1236. Sleeman, on I know not what authority, represents Akbar as resorting to Salim Chishti, Shaikh of Fathpur-Sikri, on the advice given by a vision accorded at Ajmer. The Tabaqat-i-Akbari 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 Salim and Murad, who both saw the light at Fathpur-Sikri. The pilgrimage of Akbar on foot to Ajmer, which began on Friday, Shaban (8th month) 12, A.H. 977, took place after the birth of Prince Salim, which occurred on the 18th of Rabi-ul-auwwal (3rd month) of the same Hijri year. Akbar travelled at the rate of 7 or 8 kos 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 Ajmer about the middle of February (N.S.). Shaikh Salim Chishti 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 Jahangir'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-Sikri is fully described and illustrated in the late Mr. E. W. Smith's fine work in quarto entitled The Moghul Architecture of Fathpur-Sikri (4 Parts, Allahabad Govt. Press, 1894-8), which supersedes all other writings on the subject. The double name of the town means 'Fathpur at Sikri' according to a familiar Indian practice. The name Fathpur ('City of Victory') was bestowed in A.D. 1573 to commemorate the glorious campaign in Gujarat, 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 Shahjahan (Wright, Catalogue of Coins in Indian Museum, Mughal Emperors, 1908, p. xlvii). But Rodgers believed in the genuineness of a zodiacal gold coin of Jahangir 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 Darwaza, which was erected in A.H. 983 (1575-6). The 'old hermit', Shaikh Salim, died on February 13, 1572 (Ramazan 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 liwan or sanctuary, or 515' 3" to the outside of the west main wall (which sets back from the outer wall of the liwan) 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 liwan 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 Darwaza, 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 Miftah-ul-tawarikh (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 Koran. '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 Hindustani dictionaries give no other word than 'ababil' for swallow. The word 'partadil' (purtadeel) occurs in none of them. According to Oates, Fauna of British India (London, 1890), the 'ababil' is the common swallow, Hirundo rustica; and the 'mosque-swallow' ('masjid-ababil'), 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 Salim, 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 Jahangir' (Latif, Agra, p. 144).

16. The first plundering of Akbar's tomb at Sikandra by the Jats occurred in 1691 according to Manucci (ante, chapter 51, note 29.). The outrages at Fathpur-Sikri seem to have been later in date, and to have happened after the capture of Agra in 1761 by Suraj Mall, the famous Raja of Bhurtpore (Bharatpur). The Jats 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 Taj, which had cost Shah Jahan 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 lakhs of rupees, or say half a million of pounds sterling, which should have been made over to the rightful Raja, were treated as lawful prize, and at once distributed among the officers and men. Lord Combermere himself took six lakhs (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, Abul Fazl, derived the spirit that dictated the following passages in his admirable work, the Ain- i-Akbari; '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 Brahma 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. Ain (Calcutta, 1894), vol. iii, p. 8.

There is no substantial foundation for the author's statement that Abul Fazl learned his charity and toleration from the Hindoo mother of Jahangir. The influences which really moulded the opinions of both Abul Fazl and his royal master are well known. When Akbar and Abul 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-Sikri 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 Sangin 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 Lodi 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-Sikri 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) Nur 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 Taj and connected buildings, but crude and inadequate.

The Archaeological Survey of India, since its reorganization, has not had time to study the Taj 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 Taj buildings on the lines of Mr. E. W. Smith's work on Fathpur-Sikri 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—Dig—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 Mathura 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 Raja. 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 Baldeo bastion, so called alter Baldeo Singh, the second son of the then reigning chief, Ranjit Singh. The feats which Hector performed in the defence of Troy sink into utter insignificance before those which Baldeo 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 Anta 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 'gurguri', with a small ball at the top, like an 'anta', or tennis, or billiard ball; hence 'Anta 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 Koran 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 Musalmans 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 Kumbhir, 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 Kumbhir, a place only ten miles distant; that leading to Mathura, three or four stages distant, is called the Mathura gate. At Delhi, the gates of the city walls are called ostentatiously after distant places—the Kashmir, the Kabul, the Constantinople gates. Outside the Kumbhir 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 Dig (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 Jats 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 Jats found the morasses with which they were surrounded here a source of strength. They emigrated from the banks of the Indus about Multan, 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 Jats, like the Marathas, 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 Dig, 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 Rupbas, which he between thirty and forty miles to the south, and eight or ten miles west of Fathpur-Sikri. 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.

Dig 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 'rozgar' (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 rozgar nahin ('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 Nepal 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 Rajput 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 Rajput 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 'ghurasi', 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 Gosains, who are disciples of Siva, and Bairagis, who are disciples of Vishnu; and any Muhammadan may become a Fakir; and Gosains, Bairagis, and Fakirs, 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). Dig was taken on December 24, 1804, and Lord Lake's army moved from Mathura 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 Sagar and Nerbudda territories.

7. In the original edition Dig is illustrated by four coloured plates. The buildings are all the work of Suraj 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 Rajput 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 Gosain is by no means restricted to the special devotees of Siva; many Gosains— for example, those in Bengal and those at Gokul in the Mathura district—are followers of Vishnu. The term 'fakir' 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 (gopis); and, in modern days, as the burial—or burning-place of the Jat chiefs of Bharatpur and Dig, 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 Himalaya mountains which Hanuman, the monkey general of Rama, 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 Sita. 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 Rama, or back to their old place; but Hanuman 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 Hanuman 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.'

Nathu, 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 Hanuman 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 Bhim 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 Mathura 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 Uj, 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 Himalaya 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 Bundelkhand about the accident which made Hanuman 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 Rama, was left regent of the kingdom of Ajodhya,[8] during his absence at the conquest of Ceylon. He happened at night to see Hanuman 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, 'Ram, Ram', 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 Hanuman on upon the barb of one of his arrows, mountain and all. To try him Hanuman 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 Hanuman whether he was ready. 'Quite ready,' said Hanuman, '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, Brahma, 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 Brahma 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.

'Brahma 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 Raja 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 Raja, 'if you begin by abusing them with such a name; call them "lambkanas", 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 Raja, 'but we believe that when Rama went to recover his wife Sita from the demon king of Ceylon, Ravan, he wanted to throw a bridge across from the continent to the island, and sent some of his followers up to the Himalaya 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 Kaimur 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 Suraj Mall, the great founder of the Jat 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 Rupbas, 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 Jats here, like the princes and Gosains in Bundelkhand, 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 Suraj 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 Baldeo, 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 Baldeo 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, Suraj Mall in 'darbar', 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, Hardeo.[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 Ranjit 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, Ranjit 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 Jat 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.