Part 5
The Higher Civil Service of India, recruited by competitive examination in England, consists of some twelve hundred officials—the Commissioners, the Collectors of the Districts, and some of the Assistant Collectors. The seniors of the Civil Service man the Provincial and Supreme Governments of India. Only the Governor-General and the Governors of Madras and Bombay are selected from outside the Indian Civil Service and sent out from Britain.
The Collector is constantly touring his District, in order that he may know it from personal investigation. A good Collector may become very popular, and may do much to make his District prosperous. It is a great position which may thus be held by young Englishmen of, say, thirty years of age. They are rulers of a million people at an age when their brothers of the professional classes at home are struggling to establish themselves as young barristers or doctors or clergymen.
It must not be thought, however, that the Government of India, either in its Legislative, Judicial, or Executive capacities, is wholly British, and alien from the subject population. The Legislative Councils of the Governor-General and also of the Lieutenant-Governors in the Provinces contain elected Indian representatives, both Hindu and Musulman. The provincial Councils have, in fact, non-official majorities. Only in the Council of the Governor-General is there an official majority. Many of the Judges even of the High Courts are Indian, either Hindu or Musulman. In the Executive some of the Collectors of Districts are Indian, and also the great majority of the assistant officials, who in the aggregate are an immense number.
[Sidenote: 29. Darjeeling Railway, Chinbatti Loop.] [Sidenote: 30. Darjeeling Railway, Loop No. 4.] [Sidenote: 31. Darjeeling.] As we think over these things we are continuing our journey northward. We must change from train to steamer as we cross the Ganges. The passage of the river occupies about twenty minutes from one low-lying bank to the other. Then, as we traverse the endless rice fields with their clumps of graceful bamboo, the hills become visible across the northern horizon. We run into a belt of jungle, and change to the mountain railway, which carries us up the steep hill front with many a turn and twist. There is tall forest on the lower slopes, of teak and other great trees, hung thickly with creepers. Presently the wood becomes smaller, and we enter the tea plantations with their trim rows of green bushes. Far below us, at the foot of the steep forest, spreads to the southern horizon the vast cultivated plain. Trees of the fir tribe now take the place of leafy trees, and we rise to the ridge top on which is placed Darjeeling, a settlement of detached villas in compounds or enclosures, hanging on the steep hill slopes. Darjeeling is about seven thousand feet above sea level, on a ridge overlooking northward the gorge of the Rungeet River.
[Sidenote: 32. Kinchinjunga, from Darjeeling.] [Sidenote: 33. The Himalaya.] [Sidenote: 34. Mount Everest.] In the early morning, if we are fortunate in the weather and rise before the sun, we may see from Darjeeling, over the valley to north of the hill ridge on which we stand, and over successive ridge tops beyond, the mighty snow range of the Himalayas, fifty miles away, with the peak of Kinchinjunga, more than five miles high, dominating the landscape. Behind it, a little to the west, and visible from Tiger Hill near Darjeeling, though not from Darjeeling itself, is Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, five and half miles high. The glittering wall of white mountains, visible across the vast chasm and bare granite summits in the foreground, seems to hang in the sky as though belonging to another world. The broad distance, and the sudden leap to supreme height, give to this scene a mysterious and almost visionary grandeur. It is, however, only occasionally that the culminating peaks can be seen, for they are often veiled in cloud.
[Sidenote: 35. Tibetan Woman.] [Sidenote: 36. Nepali Ladies.] The people of Sikkim in the hills beyond Darjeeling are Highlanders of Mongolian stock and not Indian. They are of Buddhist religion like the Burmans, and not Hindu or Musulman like the inhabitants of India. They are small, sturdy folk, with oblique cut eyes, and a Chinese expression, and they have the easy-going humorous character of the Burmans, though not the delicacy and civilization of those inhabitants of the sunny lowland. They and the kindred and neighbour Tibetans rarely wash, and the women anoint their faces with a mixture of pigs’ blood, which gives them a dark and mottled appearance. Here we have in colour a portrait of a Tibetan woman, and then a group of Nepali ladies, with various head ornaments.
[Sidenote: 37. Political Map of India, distinguishing Bengal, Eastern Bengal and Assam, Nepal, and Bhutan.] It is an interesting fact that these hill people should belong to the race which spreads over the vast Chinese Empire. That race here advances to the last hill brinks which overlook the Indian lowland. The political map of this portion of India illustrates a parallel fact. While the plains are administered directly by British officials, the mountain slopes descending to them are ruled by native princes whose territories form a strip along the northern boundary of India. North of Assam and Bengal we have in succession from east to west, in the belt of hill country, the lands of Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal. From Nepal are recruited the Gurkha Regiments of the Indian army, the Gurkhas being a race of these same hill men, of small stature and sturdy agility, of Hindu religion, but of more or less Mongolian stock, and therefore intermediate between the Tibetans and the Hindus.
[Sidenote: 38. The Bazaar, Darjeeling.] [Sidenote: 39. The same—Nepali Vegetable Sellers.] [Sidenote: 40. Man carrying Fodder, Darjeeling.] [Sidenote: 41. Sikkim Peasants.] [Sidenote: 42. Native Loom, Darjeeling.] [Sidenote: 43. Village in Sikkim.] [Sidenote: 44. The same.] Here we have a typical market scene in Darjeeling. Notice the women doing coolie work. Next are vegetable sellers in the Darjeeling Bazaar, and here is a man carrying fodder. The man with his back turned is a Lepcha of Sikkim. Then we have a group of Sikkim peasants drinking the native beer, made from marwa, a kind of millet. They draw it up through straws from cups made of bamboo. Next we see a native working a hand loom, and then a village in Sikkim. Here in the same village we see a woman carrying baggage.
[Sidenote: 45. Lama Monastery, near Darjeeling.] [Sidenote: 46. The same—Devil Dancers.] [Sidenote: 47. The same—interior.] [Sidenote: 48. The Amban Dance, Darjeeling.] [Sidenote: 49. The same—another view.] Near Darjeeling there is a small Buddhist monastery, a two-storey building of which we have here a view. Notice the semi-circle of tall poles, with linen flags, on which prayers are inscribed. By the entrance are a number of prayer-wheels fastened to the wall. Outside the monastery are men wearing the costumes of devil dancers, such as are used in Buddhist religious ceremonies of these parts. There are long trumpets placed against the door post. Let us glance for a moment within this monastery, and see the hideous wooden masks, and the silk dresses of the priestly dancers. Two scenes follow, from Darjeeling itself, of an elaborate dance by Tibetan peasants called the Amban dance. The lions and dragons are each made of two men, whose bodies are hung with white yak hair and tails. They have grotesque heads, with enormous eyes and gaping mouths, from which hang large scarlet tongues. So we obtain some idea of the stage of barbarism in which the hill tribes remain.
[Sidenote: 50. North Bengal Mounted Rifles, Lebong.] [Sidenote: 51. The same—Sword Pegging.] [Sidenote: 52. Coolies at Darjeeling.] In contrast with these scenes are now two slides illustrating the volunteer service of the white tea planters. Of these the second shows tent-pegging on the Lebong parade ground, above the Rungeet river. This form of tent-pegging is with a sword, and not with the more usual lance. Here is a scene showing Darjeeling coolies returned from work in the tea gardens.
[Sidenote: 53. The Rungeet Gorge.] [Sidenote: 54. The same.] [Sidenote: 55. The Rungeet Bridge, Sikkim.] [Sidenote: 56. A Himalayan Glacier.] [Sidenote: 57. Glacier-fed Torrent in the Himalaya.] [Sidenote: 58. Cane Bridge in the Himalaya.] Finally we have two views in the gorge of the Rungeet river, between Darjeeling and Sikkim, with precipitous sides, and then a glimpse of the Rungeet bridge. The Rungeet drains from the hills of Darjeeling, and from the snow mountains beyond, into a tributary of the Ganges. Several hundred such torrents burst in long succession through deep portals in the Himalayan foot hills and feed the great rivers of the plain, the Brahmaputra and the Ganges. They are perennial rivers, for they originate in the melting of the glaciers, and the Himalayan glaciers cover a vast area, being fed by the monsoon snows. Nearly all the agricultural wealth of Northern India owes its origin to the summer monsoon.
[Sidenote: 59. Map of the Himalayan River System.] To understand the fundamental conditions governing the Indian climate let us examine the two concluding maps of this lecture. On the first of them all the country with an elevation of more than fifteen hundred feet is coloured with a dark brown, and that with a lower elevation is coloured a light brown. A great angle of the Indian lowland is seen to project northward into the Asiatic upland. For fifteen hundred miles the Himalaya limits the lowland with a gracefully curving mountain edge, and from this edge there flow the series of tributaries which gather to the rivers Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. Beyond, to the south, are seen in dark brown the higher portions of the Deccan plateau.
[Sidenote: 60. Map of South-West Monsoon.] Now compare with this the succeeding map, which shows the winds of the summer time and the average rainfall. The winds sweep in from the southwest, but as they cross Bengal they bend so as to blow from the south and then from the southeast. The dark arrow with the broken shaft striking northwestward through the heart of India represents the usual track of the storms which prevail in the Central Provinces during the summer season, producing the havoc along the Madras coast and northward, of which we spoke in the second lecture. The maximum rainfall, it will be seen, occurs in three regions—first on the west face of the Western Ghats, and on the west face of the mountains of Ceylon; secondly in the east of the Indian Peninsula near the track of the storm centres; and thirdly along the south face of the Garo hills and of the Himalayas north of Bengal, and on the west face of the various mountain ranges of Burma. In other words, in the first and third cases the rain is due to the winds striking the mountain ranges, and is great only on the windward faces of those ranges. In the second case the rainfall is mainly the result of the storms. On the other hand, there is drought at this season under the lee of the mountains of Ceylon and of the Western Ghats, and again in a comparatively small belt, near Pagan, along the Irawaddy river, between the western and the eastern ridges of Burma. Tibet, which is under the lee of the Himalayas, and northwestern India, which is out of the track of the southwest winds, are wide deserts. This map explains the exceptional fertility and density of population of the Province of Bengal.
[Sidenote: Repeat Map No. 1.] India is so vast a country, and so varied, that no traveller can hope to visit all parts of it. On our journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling, we have left the province of Assam away to the east of us. Assam is a through road nowhither, for high and difficult mountains close the eastern end of its great valley. Moreover, though it has vast natural resources, Assam is a country which throughout history has lain for the most part outside Indian civilisation, and, even to-day, has but a sparse population and a relatively small commercial development. Let us, then, just remember in passing that this remote province of India has a geography which, though simple, is built on a very grand scale.
The San-po river rises high on the plateau of Tibet northward of Lucknow. For more than 700 miles it flows eastward over the plateau in rear of the Himalayan peaks; then it turns sharply southward and descends steeply through a deep gorge little known, for it is tenanted by hostile tribes. Where it emerges from the mountains the river has a level not a thousand feet above the sea, and here, turning westward, it forms the Brahmaputra—that is to say, the Son of Brahma, the Creator. The Brahmaputra flows for 450 miles westward through the valley of Assam, deeply trenched between the snowy wall of the Himalayas on the one hand and the forested mountains of the Burmese border and the Khasia and Garo hills on the other hand. The river “rolls down the valley in a vast sheet of water,” depositing banks of silt at the smallest obstruction, “so that islands form and re-form in constant succession. Broad channels break away and rejoin the main river after wide divergences, which are subjected to no control. The swamps on either hand are flooded in the rainy season, till the lower reaches of the valley are one vast shining sea, from which the hills slope up on either side.” The traffic on the river is maintained chiefly by exports of tea and timber, with imports of rice for the labourers on the tea estates. Some day, when great sums of money are available for capital expenditure, the Brahmaputra will be controlled, and Assam will become the seat of teeming production and a dense population. The Indian Empire contains some 300 million people; but, as we learn, it also contains some of the chief virgin resources of the world.
LECTURE IV.
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=THE UNITED PROVINCES.=
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THE MUTINY.
[Sidenote: 1. Map of India, distinguishing the United Provinces.] Northwestward from Bengal, over the great plain of the Ganges, we enter the next region of India. The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh have an area almost equal to that of Great Britain, and a population as dense. When we go from Bengal to the United Provinces, it is as though we were crossing from one to another of the great continental States of Europe, say from Germany into France.
[Sidenote: 2. Map of the United Provinces.] The Himalayan mountains lie to the north; the hills of Central India to the south. The plain between them, raised only a little above the sea, is two hundred miles across, measured from the foot hills of the Himalayas to the first rise of the Central Indian hills. Two great rivers, the Ganges and the Jumna, emerge from Himalayan valleys, and traverse the plain southward, and presently southeastward, leaving between them a tongue of land, known in Hindustani as the Doab, or two waters. Mesopotamia, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris in the Nearer East, signifies the same in the Greek language. The Jumna joins the Ganges near the southern limit of the plain, and in the angle of the confluence is the large city of Allahabad, the capital and seat of the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces. Other great tributaries flow to the Ganges from more eastern parts of the Himalayas, and bending southeastward join the main river one after another.
Five considerable cities focus the great population of the United Provinces—Allahabad, already mentioned, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra, and Benares. A hundred miles above Allahabad, on the right or south bank of the Ganges, is the city of Cawnpore, and on the opposite or northern bank extends the old Kingdom of Oudh, with Lucknow for its capital, situated some forty miles northeast of Cawnpore. Agra, which gives its name to all that part of the United Provinces which did not formerly belong to Oudh, is situated on the right or south bank of the Jumna, a hundred and fifty miles west of Lucknow. Eighty miles below Allahabad, on the north bank of the Ganges, is Benares, the most sacred city of the Hindus. All these distances between the cities of Agra, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Allahabad, and Benares, lie over the dead level of the plain, dusty, and like a desert in the dry season, but green and fertile after the rains. Scattered over the plain are innumerable villages, in which dwell nineteen out of twenty of the inhabitants of the joint Provinces. Lucknow is the largest of the cities, yet it has only a quarter of a million inhabitants.
The United Provinces are the heart of India, the typical Indian land, safe from invasion from the north by reason of the Himalayan barrier and the desert plateau of Tibet; relatively inaccessible from the ocean, and not conquered by Britain until long after Bengal had become a Province of the East India Company; relatively safe also from northwestern invasion. Its people remain dominantly Hindu in their religion and customs, whereas the great province of the Punjab further northwestward has a majority of Musulmans. Southward is the plateau of Central India, comparatively thinly peopled.
The language of the United Provinces, and of considerable districts to west, south, and east of them, is Hindi, the most direct derivative of the ancient Sanskrit tongue, whose use was contemporary with that of Latin and Greek. All three of these ancient tongues, as well as Old Persian, belong to the family of the Indo-European languages. Sanskrit was brought into India by a conquering people from the northwest. Hindi is now spoken by a hundred million people in all the northern centre of India. It is the language not only of the United Provinces but also of the western part of Bengal which is known as Behar, of that part of the Punjab which surrounds Delhi, and of a wide district in Central India ruled by the great Maratha chiefs, Sindhia and Holkar. Other tongues of similar origin are spoken in the regions around—Bengali in Bengal, Marathi and Gujrati in the lands which lie east and north of Bombay, and Punjabi in the Punjab. We must think of these various Indian languages as differing from one another much as French and Spanish and Italian differ, which are all derived from a common Latin source. The Hindi language was picked up by the Musulman conquerors of India, and by adding to it words of their own Persian speech they formed Urdu, the language of the camp. This is the language of educated Musulmans all over India to this day. Under the name of Hindustani it has become a sort of _lingua franca_ throughout India, and is used by Europeans when talking to their servants.
Away to the south, beyond the limit of the Sanskrit tongues, in the province of Madras and neighbouring areas, are talked languages wholly alien from Sanskrit, and differing from Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujrati, and Punjabi, much as the Turkish and Hungarian languages differ from the group of allied Indo-European tongues spoken in Western Europe. These southern Indian tongues are known as Dravidian. The most important of them are Telugu, spoken by twenty millions, and Tamil, spoken by some fifteen millions. The Hindu religion, however, is held by the great majority both of the Dravidian south and of the Indo-European north and centre.
If there be one part of India which we may think of as the shrine of shrines in a land where religion rules all life, it is to be found in a triangle of cities just contained within the map before us. There on the Ganges we see Benares and Patna, and some fifty miles south of Patna the smaller town of Gaya. Benares from prehistoric times has been the focus of Hinduism. Patna was the capital of the chief Gangetic kingdom more than two thousand years ago, when the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, first of the Westerns, travelled thus far into the East. Gaya was the spot where Buddha, seeking to reform Hinduism some six hundred years before Christ, obtained enlightenment, and then migrated to teach at Benares, or rather at Sarnath, now in ruin, some three or four miles north of the present Benares. The peoples of all the vast Indian and Chinese world, from Karachi to Pekin and Tokyo, look to this little group of cities as the centre of holiness, whether they be followers of Brahma or of Buddha.
[Sidenote: 3. Buddhist Tope at Sarnath.] [Sidenote: 4. Sculptures at Sarnath.] [Sidenote: 5. Lion-capital at Sarnath.] Old Benares, whose ruins are now known as Sarnath, was a few miles north of the existing city. We have here one of the Buddhist topes of Sarnath, which was the spot to which Buddha removed after he had received enlightenment at Gaya. Here he and his disciples began to teach. We have another view at Sarnath, showing some of the ancient sculptures, and a gigantic lion-capital recently excavated. Its size can be appreciated by noticing the man behind.
[Sidenote: 6. Plan of Benares.] [Sidenote: 7. View across the Ganges to the Southern Shore.] [Sidenote: 8. Panchganga Ghat, Benares.] [Sidenote: 9. The Same—another view.] [Sidenote: 10. Palace of the Raja of Bhinga, Benares.] [Sidenote: 11. The Same—another view.] Benares extends for four miles along the northern bank of the Ganges. This bank is here higher than the southern, and descends to the river edge with a steep brink. Down this brink are many flights of steps, known as “ghats,” which we may translate by the word “approaches.” We have already heard the word “ghat” applied to the steep mountain-high brinks of the southern plateau of India, where the upper ground breaks away to the shore of the Arabian Sea on the one hand, and to the low-lying plain of the Carnatic on the other. The city of Benares is situated on the plateau top above the ghats, and for four miles the river front is crowned with palaces and temples, built of a yellow sandstone. The opposite, the southern, shore lies low and without buildings. Here is a view looking southward across the river from the brink edge; it shows the low and non-sacred southern shore. Here are two views of the brink itself, faced and crowned with buildings of yellow sandstone. There follow two views of the palace of the Raja of Bhinga, and in both we see the ghat steps descending to the water’s edge.
[Sidenote: 12. Dasashwamedh Ghat, Benares.] [Sidenote: 13. Manikarnika Ghat, Benares.] The population of Benares numbers some two hundred thousand, of whom the great majority are of the Hindu faith, and no fewer than thirty thousand are Brahmans, the priestly caste. It is said that more than a million pilgrims visit the city every year. In the early morning they descend the ghats to bathe in the river and to drink the sacred water. Here we have the scene at one of these ghats, with the conical towers of a temple, and the great sun umbrellas. Another scene of a similar character follows at another ghat, the most sacred in Benares.
[Sidenote: 14. Burning Ghat, Benares.] [Sidenote: 15. Another Burning Ghat, Benares.] Some of the ghats are used for the burning of dead bodies. Wrapped in a white shroud, the corpse is dipped into the river, then laid on a pile of faggots, and other faggots are built around, and a light is set to the pile. The ashes are thrown into the river. These rites are performed by the nearest relatives. We have here the body of a woman of the poorer classes nearly consumed, and the few relatives looking on. Here preparations are in progress for another cremation. The corpse may be seen, with its feet in the water, resting aslant at the foot of the ghat. The bodies of the higher castes are burnt at the Raja Ghat on costly fires of sandal-wood. At night, from the water, the city, with its thousands of lights and the tall flames at the Burning Ghats, is deeply impressive.