Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official Part 16

Suttee Tombs--Insalubrity of deserted Fortresses.

On the 3rd we came to Bahrol,[1] where I had encamped with Lord William Bentinck on the last day of December, 1832, when the quicksilver in the thermometer at sunrise, outside our tents, was down to twenty-six degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer. The village stands upon a gentle swelling hill of decomposed basalt, and is surrounded by hills of the same formation. The Dasan river flows close under the village, and has two beautiful reaches, one above, the other below, separated by the d.y.k.e of basalt, over which lies the ford of the river.[2]

There are beautiful reaches of the kind in all the rivers in this part of India, and they are almost everywhere formed in the same manner. At Bahrol there is a very unusual number of tombs built over the ashes of women who have burnt themselves with the remains of their husbands. Upon each tomb stands erect a tablet of freestone, with the sun, the new moon, and a rose engraved upon it in bas-relief in one field;[3] and the man and woman, hand in hand, in the other.

On one stone of this kind I saw a third field below these two, with the figure of a horse in bas-relief, and I asked one of the gentlemen farmers, who was riding with me, what it meant. He told me that he thought it indicated that the woman rode on horseback to bathe before she ascended the pile.[4] I asked him whether he thought the measure prohibiting the practice of burning good or bad.

'It is', said he, 'in some respects good, and in others bad. Widows cannot marry among us, and those who had no prospect of a comfortable provision among their husband's relations, or who dreaded the possibility of going astray, and thereby sinking into contempt and misery, were enabled in this way to relieve their minds, and follow their husbands, under the full a.s.surance of being happily united to them in the next world.'

When I pa.s.sed this place on horseback with Lord William Bentinck, he asked me what these tombs were, for he had never seen any of the kind before. When I told him what they were, he said not a word; but he must have felt a proud consciousness of the debt of grat.i.tude which India owes to the statesman who had the courage to put a stop to this great evil, in spite of all the fearful obstacles which bigotry and prejudice opposed to the measure. The seven European functionaries in charge of the seven districts of the newly-acquired territories were requested, during the administration of Lord Amherst in 1826, to state whether the burning of widows could or should be prohibited; and I believe every one of them declared that it should not. And yet, when it was put a stop to only a few years after by Lord William, not a complaint or murmur was heard. The replies to the Governor- General's inquiries were, I believe, throughout India, for the most part, opposed to the measure.[5]

On the 4th we came to Dhamoni, ten miles. The only thing remarkable here is the magnificent fortress, which is built upon a small projection of the Vindhya range, looking down on each side into two enormously deep glens, through which the two branches of the Dasan river descend over the tableland into the plains of Bundelkhand.[6]

The rays of the sun seldom penetrate to the bottom of these glens, and things are, in consequence, grown there that could not be grown in parts more exposed.

Every inch of the level ground in the bed of the streams below seems to be cultivated with care. This fortress is said to have cost more than a million of money, and to have been only one of fifty-two great works, of which a former Raja of Bundelkhand, Birsingh Deo, laid the foundation in the same _happy hour_ which had been pointed out to him by his astrologers.[7] The works form an acute triangle, with the base towards the tableland, and the two sides hanging perpendicularly over the glens, while the apex points to the course of the streams as they again unite, and pa.s.s out through a deep chasm into the plains of Bundelkhand.

The fortress is now entirely deserted, and the town, which the garrison supported, is occupied by only a small police-guard, stationed here to see that robbers do not take up their abode among the ruins. There is no fear of this. All old deserted fortresses in India become filled by a dense stream of carbonic acid gas, which is found so inimical to animal life that those who attempt to occupy them become ill, and, sooner or later, almost all die of the consequences. This gas, being specifically much heavier than common air, descends into the bottom of such unoccupied fortresses, and remains stagnant like water in old reservoirs. The current of pure air continually pa.s.ses over, without being able to carry off the ma.s.s of stagnant air below; and the only way to render such places habitable is to make large openings in the walls on all sides, from the top to the bottom, so that the foul air may be driven out by the current of pure atmospheric air, which will then be continually rus.h.i.+ng in. When these fortresses are thickly peopled, the continual motion within tends, I think, to mix up this gas with the air above; while the numerous fires lighted within, by rarefying that below, tend to draw down a regular supply of the atmospheric air from above for the benefit of the inhabitants. When natives enter upon the occupation of an old fortress of this kind, that has remained long unoccupied, they always make a solemn religions ceremony of it; and, having fed the priests, the troops, and a crowd of followers, all rush in at once with beat of drums, and as much noise as they can make. By this rush, and the fires that follow, the bad air is, perhaps, driven off, and never suffered to collect again while the fortress remains fully occupied. Whatever may be the cause, the fact is certain that these fortresses become deadly places of abode for small detachments of troops, or small parties of any kind. They all get ill, and few recover from the diseases they contract in them.

From the year 1817, when we first took possession of the Sagar and Nerbudda Territories, almost all the detachments of troops we required to keep at a distance from the headquarters of their regiments were posted in these old deserted fortifications. Our collections of revenue were deposited in them; and, in some cases, they were converted into jails for the accommodation of our prisoners. Of the soldiers so lodged, I do not believe that one in four ever came out well; and, of those who came out ill, I do not believe that one in four survived five years. They were all abandoned one after the other; but it is painful to think how many hundreds, I may say thousands, of our brave soldiers were sacrificed before this resolution was taken. I have known the whole of the survivors of strong detachments that went in, in robust health, three months before, brought away mere skeletons, and in a hopeless and dying state. All were sent to their homes on medical certificate, but they almost all died there, or in the course of their journey.

Notes:

1. December, 1835. The name of the village is spelled Behrole by the author.

2. The Dasan river rises in the Bhopal State, flows through the Sagar district of the Central Provinces, and along the southern boundary of the Lalitpur subdivision of the Jhansi District, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. It also forms the boundary between the Jhansi and Hamirpur Districts, and falls into the Betwa after a course of about 220 miles. The name is often, but erroneously, written Dhasan. It is the Sanskrit Dasarna.

3. This emblem is a lotus, not a rose flower. The latter is never used in Hindoo symbolism. The lotus is a solar emblem, and intimately a.s.sociated with the wors.h.i.+p of Vishnu.

4. It rather indicates that the husband was on horseback when killed.

The sculptures on sati pillars often commemorate the mode of death of the husband. Sometimes these pillars are inscribed. They usually face the east. An open hand is often carved in the upper compartment as well as the sun and moon. A drawing of such a pillar will be found in _J.A.S.B._, vol. xlvi. Part I, 1877, pl. xiv. _A.S.R._, vol. iii, p.

10; vol. vii, p. 137; vol. x, p. 75; and vol. xxi, p. 101, may be consulted.

5. The 'newly-acquired territories' referred to are the Sagar and Nerbudda Territories, comprising the seven districts, Sagar, Jubbulpore, Hoshangabad, Seoni, Damoh, Narsinghpur, and Baitul, ceded in 1818, and now included in the Central Provinces. The tenor of the replies given to Lord Amherst's queries shows how far the process of Hindooizing had advanced among the European officials of the Company.

Lord Amherst left India in March, 1828. See _ante._ Chapter 4 and Chapter 8, for cases of sati (suttees). For a good account of the suttee discussions and legislation, see D. Boulger, _Lord William Bentinck_ (1897), chap. v, in 'Rulers of India' Series. No other biography of Lord William Bentinck exists.

6. Dhamoni is in the Sagar district of the Central Provinces, about twenty-nine miles north of Sagar. The fort was taken by General Marshall in 1818. It had been rebuilt by Raja Birsingh Deo of Orchha on an enormous scale about the end of the sixteenth century. In the original edition, the author's march is said to have taken place 'on the 24th'. This must be a mistake for 'on the 4th'; as the last date, that of the march to Bahrol, was the 3rd December. The author reached Agra on January 1, 1836,

7. The number fifty-two is one of the Hindoo favourite numbers, like seven, twelve, and eighty-four, held sacred for astronomical or astrological reasons. Birsingh Deo was the younger brother of Ramchand, head of the Bundela clan. To oblige Prince Salim, afterwards the Emperor Jahangir, he murdered Abul Fazl, the celebrated minister and historian of Akbar, on August 12, 1602, Jahangir, after his accession, rewarded the murderer by allowing him to supersede his brother in the heads.h.i.+p of his clan, and by appointing him to the rank of 'commander of three thousand'. The capital of Birsingh was Orchha. His successors are often spoken of as Rajas of Tehri. The murder is fully described in _The Emperor Akbar_ by Count von Noer, translated by A. S. Beveridge, Calcutta, 1890, vol. ii, pp. 384-404. Orchha is described _post_, Chapters 22,23.

CHAPTER 17

Basaltic Cappings--Interview with a Native Chief--A Singular Character.

On the 5th[1] we came to the village of Seori. Soon after leaving Dhamoni, we descended the northern face of the Vindhya range into the plains of Bundelkhand. The face of this range overlooking the valley of the Nerbudda to the south is, as I have before stated, a series of mural precipices, like so many rounded bastions, the slight dip of the strata being to the north. The northern face towards Bundelkhand, on the contrary, here descends gradually, as the strata dip slightly towards the north, and we pa.s.s down gently over their back. The strata have, however, been a good deal broken, and the road was so rugged that two of our carts broke down in descending. From the descent over the northern face of the tableland into Bundelkhand to the descent over the southern face into the valley of the Nerbudda must be a distance of one hundred miles directly north and south.

The descent over the northern face is not everywhere so gradual; on the contrary, there are but few places where it is at all feasible; and some of the rivers of the tableland between Jubbulpore and Mirzapore have a perpendicular fall of more than four hundred feet over these mural precipices of the northern face of the Vindhya range.[2] A man, if he have good nerve, may hang over the summits, and suspend in his hand a plummet that shall reach the bottom.

I should mention that this tableland is not only intersected by ranges, but everywhere studded with isolated hills rising suddenly out of basins or valleys. These ranges and isolated hills are all of the same sandstone formation, and capped with basalt, more or less amygdaloidal. The valleys and cappings have often a substratum of very compact basalt, which must evidently have flowed into them after these islands were formed. The question is, how were these valleys and basins scooped out? 'Time, time, time!' says Mr. Scrope; 'grant me only time, and I can account for everything.' I think, however, that I am right in considering the basaltic cappings of these ranges and isolated hills to have once formed part of continued flat beds of great lakes. The flat parallel planes of these cappings, corresponding with each other, however distantly separated the hills they cover may be, would seem to indicate that they could not all have been subject to the convulsions of nature by which the whole substrata were upheaved above the ocean. I am disposed to think that such islands and ranges of the sandstone were formed before the deposit of the basalt, and that the form of the surface is now returning to what it then was, by the gradual decomposition and wearing away of the latter rock. Much, however, may be said on both sides of this, as of every other question. After descending from the sandstone of the Vindhya[3] range into Bundelkhand, we pa.s.s over basalt and basaltic soil, reposing immediately on syenitic granite, with here and there beds and veins of pure feldspar, hornblende, and quartz.

Takht Singh, the younger brother of Arjun Singh, the Raja of Shahgarh,[4] came out several miles to meet me on his elephant.

Finding me on horseback, he got off from his elephant, and mounted his horse, and we rode on till we met the Raja himself, about a mile from our tents. He was on horseback, with a large and splendidly dressed train of followers, all mounted on fine sleek horses, bred in the Raja's own stables. He was mounted on a snow-white steed of his own breeding (and I have rarely seen a finer animal), and dressed in a light suit of silver brocade made to represent the scales of steel armour, surmounted by a gold turban. Takht Singh was more plainly dressed, but is a much finer and more intelligent-looking man. Having escorted us to our tents, they took their leave, and returned to their own, which were pitched on a rising ground on the other side of a small stream, half a mile distant. Takht Singh resides here in a very pretty fortified castle on an eminence. It is a square building, with a round bastion at each corner, and one on each face, rising into towers above the walls.

A little after midday the Raja and his brother came to pay us a visit; and about four o'clock I went to return it, accompanied by Lieutenant Thomas. As usual, he had a nautch (dance) upon carpets, spread upon the sward under awnings in front of the pavilion in which we were received. While the women were dancing and singing, a very fine panther was brought in to be shown to us. He had been caught, full-grown, two years before, and, in the hands of a skilful man, was fit for the chase in six months. It was a very beautiful animal, but, for the sake of the sport, kept wretchedly thin.[5] He seemed especially indifferent to the crowd and the music, but could not bear to see the woman whirling about in the dance with her red mantle floating in the breeze; and, whenever his head was turned towards her, he cropped his ears. She at last, in play, swept close by him, and with open mouth he attempted to spring upon her, but was pulled back by the keeper. She gave a shriek, and nearly fell upon her back in fright.

The Raja is a man of no parts or character, and, his expenditure being beyond his income, he is killing his goose for the sake of her eggs--that is, he is ruining all the farmers and cultivators of his large estate by exactions, and thereby throwing immense tracts of fine land out of tillage. He was the heir to the fortress and territory of Garha Kota, near Sagar, which was taken by Sindhia's army, under the command of Jean Baptiste Filose,[6] just before our conquest in 1817. I was then with my regiment, which was commanded by Colonel, afterwards Major-General, G------,[7] a very singular character. When our surgeon. Dr. E------, received the newspaper announcing the capture of Garha Kota in Central India by _Jean- Baptiste_, an officer of the corps was with him, who called on the colonel on his way home, and mentioned this as a bit of news. As soon as this officer had left him, the colonel wrote off a note to the doctor: 'My dear Doctor,--I understand that that fellow, _John the Baptist_, has got into Sindhia's service, and now commands an army-- do send me the newspapers.' These were certainly the words of his note, and, at the only time I heard him speak on the subject of religion he discomfited his adversary in an argument at the mess by 'Why, sir, you do not suppose that I believe in those fellows, Luther, Calvin, and John the Baptist, do you?'

Nothing could stand this argument. All the party burst into a laugh, which the old gentleman took for an unequivocal recognition of his victory, and his adversary was silenced. He was an old man when I first became acquainted with him. I put into his hands, when in camp, Miss Edgeworth's novels, in the hope of being able to induce him to read by degrees; and I have frequently seen the tears stealing down over his furrowed cheeks, as he sat pondering over her pages in the corner of his tent. A braver soldier never lived than old G------; and he distinguished himself greatly in the command of his regiment, under Lord Lake, at the battle of Laswari[8] and siege of Bharatpur.[9] It was impossible ever to persuade him that the characters and incidents of these novels were the mere creations of fancy--he felt them to be true--he wished them to be true, and he would have them to be true. We were not very anxious to undeceive him, as the illusion gave him pleasure and did him good. Bolingbroke says, after an ancient author, 'History is philosophy teaching by example.'[10] With equal truth may we say that fiction, like that of Maria Edgeworth, is philosophy teaching by emotion. It certainly taught old G------ to be a better man, to leave much of the little evil he had been in the habit of doing, and to do much of the good he had been accustomed to leave undone.

Notes:

1. December 5, 1835, The date is misprinted '3rd' in the original edition. See note 2 to last preceding chapter, p. 110.

2. A good view of the precipices of the Kaimur range, the eastern continuation of the Vindhyan chain, is given facing page 41 of vol. i of Hooker's _Himalayan Journals_ (ed. 1855).

3. The author's theory is untenable. He failed, to realize the vast effects of sub-aerial denudation. All the evidence shows that the successive lava outflows which make up the Deccan trap series ultimately converted the surface of the land over which they welled out into an enormous, nearly uniform, plain of basalt, resting on the Vindhyan sandstone and other rocks. This great sheet of lava, extending, east and west, from Nagpur to Bombay, a distance of about five hundred miles, was then, in succeeding millenniums, subjected to the denuding forces of air and water, until gradually huge tracts of it were worn away, forming beds of conglomerate, gravel, and clay.

The flat-topped hills have been carved out of the basaltic surface by the agencies which wore away the ma.s.sive sheet of lava. The basaltic cappings of the hills certainly cannot have 'formed part of continued flat beds of great lakes'. See the notes to Chapter 14, _ante_. Mr.

Scrope was quite right. Vast periods of time must be allowed for geological history, and millions of years must have elapsed since the flow of the Deccan lava.

4. In the Sagar district. The last Raja joined the rebels in 1857, and so forfeited his rank and territory.

5. The name panther is usually applied only to the large, fulvous variety of _Felis pardus (Linn.) (F. leopardus, Leopardus varius)_.

The animal described in the text evidently was a specimen of the hunting leopard, _Felis jubata (F. guttata, F. venatica)_.

6. This officer was one of the many '_condottieri_' of various nationality who served the native powers during the eighteenth century, and the early years of the nineteenth. He commanded five infantry regiments at Gwalior. His 'kingdom-taking' raid in 1815 or 1816 is described _post_ in Chapter 49. The history of the family is given by Compton in _European Military Adventures of Hindustan from 1784 to 1803_ (Unwin, 1892), App. pp, 352-6. In 1911 Michael Filose of Gwalior was appointed K.C.I.E.

7.'G------' appears to have been Robert Gregory C.B.

8. The fiercely contested battle of Laswari was fought on November 1, 1803, between the British force under Lord Lake and the flower of Sindhia's army, known as the 'Deccan Invincibles'. Sindhia's troops lost about seven thousand killed and two thousand prisoners. The British loss in killed and wounded amounted to more than eight hundred. A medal to commemorate the victory was struck in London in 1851, and presented to the survivors. Laswari is a village in the Alwar State, 128 miles south of Delhi.

9. Bharatpur (Bhurtpore), in the Jat State of the same name, is thirty-four miles west of Agra. In January and February, 1805, Lord Lake four times attempted to take it by a.s.sault, and each time was repulsed with heavy loss. On January 18, 1826, Lord Combermere stormed the fortress. The fortifications were then dismantled. A large portion of the walls is now standing, and presents an imposing appearance. They seem to have been repaired. See _post_, Chapter 62.

10. 'I will answer you by quoting what I have read somewhere or other--in _Dionysius Halicarn_., I think--that history is philosophy teaching by example' (Bolingbroke, _Letters on the Study and Use of History_, Letter II, p. 14 of vol. viii of edition printed by T.

Cadell, London, 1770). The Greek words are. . . . . . . .

CHAPTER 18

Birds' Nests--Sports of Boyhood.