Part 9
In the evening I went over and had a chat with the Hazara. One or two of them spoke Hindustani with the accent of a Tommy, calling me "Sabb." Finding them friendly and communicative folk, I asked them their history. They had come over with a Ghenghiz Khan, they told me, to sack Delhi; all agreed that it was Ghenghiz Khan, and that it was about 800 years ago and that they had crossed the Karakoram, and that their own particular ancestors had been left by the Khan to hold the outpost of Ghazni in Afghanistan. I looked up their history afterwards and found that they had given it me more or less as it is set down in the textbooks.
Also I learnt that it is not easy for the Hazaras to leave Afghanistan. The Amir's guards have orders to hold them up at the frontier, though there are time-honoured ways in which they contrive to break the cordon, bribing the guards or slipping through in disguise, generally with the Powindah caravans. It is still more difficult for them to get home and return when on leave, and this is an embargo which indulges the Hazara's natural bent for travel. In the furlough season you will find him as far afield from cantonments as he can get in the time, often as far as Colombo, Calcutta, Madras, or Rangoon. Filthy lucre is not his motive. What he earns he spends. He has a curiosity uncommon in the Asiatic. He likes wandering and seeing the world for its own sake; he lives comfortably, is a bit of a spendthrift, gambles a lot, dresses with an air, and likes to cut a figure in a tonga where the ordinary sepoy would save a few annas by going on foot. If he belongs to a Pioneer regiment he can afford it. For the Pioneer works on a Government contract in peace time, and the Hazara thinks he has fallen on a poor job if he cannot make twelve annas extra for a day's work in addition to his pay.
Few of them can read or write, but though illiterate they are keen-witted and speak with the terseness of a proverb. They are much quicker "at the uptake" than the Gurkha, whom they resemble in many ways. When they go to Kirkee for Pioneer training they generally come out top in the machine-gun, musketry, and signalling courses, and they make excellent surveyors. As Pioneers they are hard to beat.
It will be gathered from the incident of the sepoy who was dispossessed of his tamarisk bush, that the Hazara is of a cheerful disposition. There is generally a comedian in the regiment, and after dinner at Sheikh Saad one of the men was called in to give us a kind of solo-pantomime. He began with the smart salute of the sepoy, bringing his hand down with the mechanical click of a bolt; then he gave us the Sahib's casual lifting of the cane, next he was a havildar drilling a raw recruit. He took the parts in turn and contrived some clever fooling. But I gathered that the man was only second-rate. No sooner had he made his exit than everybody in the mess lamented Faizo who beguiled so many nights of the New Zealanders on the canal, a subtle artist compared to this clown with his stock regimental turns. Faizo is the castigator of pretence, scourge of hypocrisy and the humbug of the Church. In one scene he is the shaven mullah abstractedly mumbling his prayers while he intently prepares his food. A dog comes in and defiles the dish, Faizo for the moment becomes the dog--then the mullah torn with the fury of commination, pursuing the dog with oaths and missiles and spurning the polluted food. Then the mullah again, hungry and unctuously sophisticated, blessing the food, miraculously restoring its virtue, and finding it good.
No one is better at a nickname than Faizo. Few men are known in the regiment by the name their father gave them. They are remembered by some oddity or unhappy lapse of conduct, or the place they come from, and Faizo is the regimental godfather of them all. There is Mahomet Ulta--Mahomet upside down--who always gets hold of the wrong end of the stick; Ser Khuskh--the dry-head, and "The Mullah," and "Kokri Gulpusht," "the frog with a shining posterior," who looks as if his face had been glazed. Also there is Ghulam Shah the "Maygaphon." This is how he came by the name.
Ghulam Shah is that rare thing, a stupid Hazara--and what is worse a stupid havildar. One day on manœuvres he had tied the Hazaras up in an inextricable knot through misunderstanding some command. The Colonel stood on a mound and cursed him from afar off, and as his language became more violent Ghulam Shah became more confused. He stood on one leg and then on the other. Then remembering the megaphone he carried he put it to his ear, and lastly, in despair, to his eye. On the evening of the field day Faizo borrowed the regimental megaphone and pursued the wretched Ghulam Shah round the parade ground. Ghulam Shah was a fat man who ran heavily and panted. Faizo put the instrument to his ear and to his eye. He inspected him with a theatrical gesture of his disengaged hand. He listened to him curiously, as though he was some strange beast. Last insult of all, he put the megaphone to his nose and smelt him.
It was refreshing to see how the Hazaras kept their spirits up in this firepit, and to hear the clipped Mongol speech of the tableland in the plain of Iraq. At Sheikh Saad we were little more than a hundred miles from the plain of Shinar and the site of the Tower of Babel, and we were carrying on with a confusion of tongues that would have demobilised the tower builders. Here was a man talking Persian like a Tibetan, and from beyond the circle of light there penetrated to us the most profane comments delivered in the homeliest Devonshire burr.
Among the Hazaras were Baltis, who are being recruited into the Hazara battalion now. Their country, Baltistan, or Little Tibet, lies to the north of Kashmir, between Fadakh and the Gilgit district. The Baltis, too, have a distinct language of their own and come of a semi-Mongolian stock, and are Shiahs by faith like the Hazaras. They were originally polygamists, like their neighbours the Bhots of Fadakh, but when they became Muhammadans they adopted polyandry. They resemble the Hazaras in looks, but on the whole are shorter and darker. They are an extremely hardy race, and eke out a very scanty living as coolies and tillers of the soil in the valleys of the Indus and its tributaries up Skardu and Shigar way--a happy hunting-ground, the mere thought of which gave one an empty and homesick feeling inside when tied down to one's gridiron or Iraq. I had seen them at work in the high snow passes of Tibet, their natural home, and little expected to meet them in the malignant waste by the Tigris, which one would have thought must be death to mountain-born folk whose villages are seldom found at an altitude of less than 8000 feet above the sea. Yet the descent to Tartarus did not seem to have dismayed them in the least.
The Hazara is probably the nearest approach to the European you will find in the Indian Army. It is odd that a cross of the Mongol and Semitic should have produced this breed. His leg is not of the East; he walks like the Tyke. I do not know the Tartar in his home, but these descendants of his have much in common with us. In his sense of humour, quick temper, rough and tumble wrestling, ragging and practical jokes, and practical common sense; in his curiosity and love of travel, in his complexion and disposition and in his easy-going habits of life, the Hazara is not so very far removed from an Islander of the West.
The Hazara has a good opinion of himself though his pride is unobtrusive. He is hard as nails, a man of tremendous heart, and he is not easily beaten in a trial of physical strength. They nearly always pull off the divisional tug-of-war. In the two mixed-company battalions that enlist Hazaras it is a recognised tradition that the light-weights should be a purely Hazara team.
There is not much material as yet for an estimate of the military virtue of the race, but according to all precedent they should prove good men in a scrap. For the Hazara is an anomaly in the East, where men as a rule are only stout-hearted and self-respecting where they are lords of the soil and looked up to by their neighbours. In Afghanistan, as alien subjects of the Amir, Shiahs among Sunnis, Mongols among Pathans, they have held their heads high and proved themselves unbroken in spirit; though living isolated and surrounded by hostile peoples, and from time to time the objects of persecution, you will find few types of manhood less browbeaten than the Hazara.
THE MER AND MERAT
The Hindu and Muhammadan Mers and Merats from the Merwara Hills round Ajmere are men of curious customs and antecedents, very homely folk, and as good friends to the British Government as any children of the Empire. I met them first at Qurnah, in June, 1916; thin, lithe men with sparse beards like birds' nests in a winter tree. You could not tell the Mer from the Merat. They are of one race, and claim to be the issue of a Rajput king--Prithi Raj, I believe--by a Meena woman,--a mythical ancestry suggested no doubt by Brahmans in order to raise their social standing among other Hindus. They are really the descendants of the aboriginal tribes of Rajputana, but in course of time, through intercourse with Rajput Thakurs as servants, cultivators, and irregular levies, they have imbibed a certain amount of Rajput blood. They are a democratic crowd, and have never owed allegiance to the princes of Rajasthan. Nor have they been defeated by them. In the old days when they made a foray the Rajput cavaliers would drive them back into their impossible country, where among their rocks and trees they would hurl defiance in the shape of stones and arrows at mounted chivalry. Then in the middle of last century an Englishman came along and did everything for them which a true friend can do. Like Nicholson, he became incorporated in the local Pantheon. He gave the Mers a statute and a name, and lamps are still burning at his shrine.
Mota is a Mer. There are six regiments in the Indian Army that draw from his community, one class and five company class battalions. But as Mota is an exaggeration of type, and more blessed with valour than brains and discretion, I will not say to what particular battalion he belonged.
When I saw Mota Jemadar he was rehearsing a part. His Colonel and I were sitting on the roof of a mud Arab house, then a regimental mess, where we had established ourselves for the evening, hoping to find some movement in the stifling air. Looking down we saw the jemadar doubling painfully and deliberately across the walled palm grove in a temperature of 105 degrees in the shade. We thought at first the man had been bitten by a scorpion or a snake, and the Colonel called out to him from the roof, "What is the matter, Mota?" "Nothing is the matter, Sahib," he called up, "I am practising for the Victaria Crarse." The Colonel smiled and sighed. He knew his man, and he told me what these preparations impended. The regiment was new to the country and to war, and I gathered that unless otherwise instructed the jemadar would go over the parapet the first time he found himself in action, doubling along clumsily in the same determined fashion as if he had been propelled mechanically from behind, and that he would not pull up or look round until he got to the enemy's trenches. And he would do this with the full expectation of having the glittering cross pinned on his breast in the evening. The other alternative would not trouble his head.
Also I gathered that the phrase "unless otherwise instructed" implied much uphill work on the part of the regimental officer. Mota was imbued with a fixed idea. His mind was not in that receptive mood which enables the fighting man to act quickly in an emergency. Supposing his rôle were not the offensive. Supposing that he were suddenly attacked at the moment when he felt himself secure, and had no time for deliberation or counsel, the old jemadar might be doubling in any direction under the contagion of example or to reach a place where he could think out the new situation and resolve how to act. When a Mer gets as far as a rehearsal he will never fail in the performance. He is all right so long as he knows exactly what he is expected to do.
There was the historic occasion of Ajmere in 1857, when the action of the Mers and Merats altered the whole course of the Mutiny in their own district, and held back the wave that threatened to sweep over Rajasthan. News came to the local battalion that the garrison had risen at Nasirabad and murdered the British officers. Led by their Sahib and lawgiver, the Mers made a forced march of thirty-eight miles from Beawar to Ajmere, dispossessed the mutinous guards of the treasury and arsenal, and held the fort against the rebels who were advancing upon the city, flushed with success, from Nasirbad. All of which fell in with the Mer legend that they would never be ruled by any save a white king.
It was a class battalion that I met at Qurnah in June, 1916; incidentally it was not Mota's crowd. They had already seen much hard campaigning, and a small scrap or two in the desert between the Kharkeh and Karum rivers, where some of the regiment had died of thirst. But the most interesting point about the Mers and Merats to a student of Indian races is the relationship between the Hindus and Muhammadans of the same stock. In the chapter about the Brahmans and Rajputs in the Army I have given an instance of how the caste system strengthened discipline. Caste, of course, is in itself a discipline, and was originally imposed as such. In its call for the sacrifice of the individual to the community it has played its part in the stiffening of the Hindu for countless generations. But in the twentieth century the most orthodox will admit its disabilities, the exacting ritual involved in it, and the artificial and complex differentiation between men who have really everything in common. The caste question as a rule, when it emerges in a regiment, creates difficulties, and very rarely, as in the case of the excommunicated Rajputs, smooths them over. The Merwara battalion, which was once divided by caste into two camps, is a case in point. It is an old story, but as it is little known it is worth recording as an example of the evils of exclusiveness. And as both parties are now good friends, no harm can be done by telling it.
First it should be understood that the Mers and Merats are the most home-staying folk in the Indian Army. Like the Gurkhas, the class battalion has one permanent cantonment, and never leaves it except to go on active service. Until this war they had not been on a campaign since the Afghan expedition in 1878-9. They are even more domiciled than the Gurkha, for their depôt at Ajmere is in their own district, and they can get home on a week-end's leave from Friday night till Monday morning; and when their turn comes they seldom let the privilege go by.
Living and serving in their own country, detached from other folk, they evolved a happy easy-going, tolerant, social system of their own. The Mers are Hindus; the Merats Muhammadans. They are of the same stock, but the Mussalman Merats are the descendants of the Mers who were forcibly converted to Islam by Aurungzeb. This conversion did not break up the brotherhood. Hindu and Muhammadan intermarried, and sat at meals together within the chauka as before. It is no doubt on account of their freedom from the restrictions of both religions that the Merats have never reverted to Mers or become Muhammadans in real earnest. They still feared the Hindu deities, and were strangers to the inside of a mosque. Mer and Merat together made up a very united people, and one quite apart. They cared little for dogma or ritual, and had their own ideas about caste. Thus they lived contentedly together until 1904, when a party of them were sent home to England with other details of the Indian Army to attend the Coronation of King Edward VII.
It is sad to think that this happy anniversary should have been the beginning of discord, but the serpent entered their Eden when they took train to Bombay and embarked on the transport. Here they found themselves amongst every kind of sepoy from the Mahratta of the Konkan to the Jharwa of Assam, from the Bhangi Khel of Kohat to the Mussalman of Southern Madras--all of whom had their prescribed ritual and fixed rules of life. Few of this crowd had ever seen the sea before, but they were most of them travelled men of the world compared to the Mer and Merat. Amongst the Rajputs, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, and Punjabi Mussalmans, the Ajmere contingent must have appeared the most open-mouthed and bewildered of country cousins. None of the sepoys knew anything about them. "Who are you? Where do you come from?" they were asked. They were just like children torn from the bosom of the family and plunged for the first time into the unsympathetic entourage of a school. They were twitted unmercifully for their unnatural alliance. Asked to define themselves they stated, quite honestly, that they were Rajputs. The easy-going Hindus made a huge joke out of this; the orthodox were angry and rude. For whoever saw a Rajput and a Mussalman break bread together? The Mer was told that he was not a true Rajput, not even a true Hindu. The poor Merats, too, were regarded as backsliders from Islam. They did all sorts of things that a good Muhammadan ought not to do. All their old customs and easy compromises, all the happy little family understandings, those recognised and cherished inconsistencies which make half the endearments of home-life, became the subject of an unfeeling criticism.
Mer and Merat became mutually suspicious. Before they reached Aden the Mers had already begun to dress their hair differently, more in the Rajput style. At Suez they were in two distinct camps. The cooking-vessels which had been common to both were abhorred by the Hindus; neither would eat what the other had touched; each eyed the other askance.
When they returned to India the infection of exclusiveness spread, and Hindu sectarian missionaries coming into the fold added to the mischief. But happily common sense and old affections prevailed. Now they do not ostensibly feed together and intermarry; but they are good friends, and relations are smooth, though they can never be quite the same happy family again.
Two generations or more of regimental life have passed since these events, and I heard a very different story of a Merwara company on board a transport in this war. When they embarked in Karachi harbour they trod the deck of the vessel tentatively and with suspicion. But soon timidity gave place to pride. "You see, Sahib," the Subadar explained, "we are not laid out by this sea-sickness which we are told is very disastrous to certain classes of sepoys, and even to some sahibs." The unknown peril had been the theme of conversation most of the way from Rajputana, and the Mers, no doubt, believed that the first entries in the "Regimental Roll of Honour" would be the victims of the subtle and malignant paralysis with which Kala pani (the black water) can infect the strongest. As bad luck would have it, no sooner had the transport cleared the harbour than they struck dirty weather and a choppy sea. Mer and Merat collapsed as one. On the third day those who had legs to support them or strength to stir the pot were carrying round food to the less fortunate, united in this common emergency and careless of caste and creed. The sea separated them, and ten years afterwards the sea joined them again. Let us hope that the voyage marked a revival of the golden age.
The story of both voyages bears out the comment of Mota's Colonel, that the Mer and Merat, though far from being impressionable, are singularly open to example. These brave and friendly folk may be lacking in initiative, but give them a lead, show them what may be done, and they will never fail in emulation. Hardly a man of military age is not enlisted, and the traditions of Ajmere were continued at Kut, where there was a company of Mers and Merats in one of the two regiments who held the liquorice factory so gallantly through the siege.
THE RANGHAR
The Mussalmans of Rajput descent are a fine fighting stock. The best known are the Ranghars of the Eastern Punjab and the Kaim Khanis of Rajputana proper. The handsomest sepoy I met in Mesopotamia was a Ranghar, and he had that jolly, dare-devil look about him which recalls the best traditions of the highwayman.
When the non-military Hindus, most of them unwilling converts, embraced Muhammadanism, it was the custom in choosing their Islamic name to adopt the prefix "Sheikh." Alma Ram became Sheikh Ali, for instance, and Gobind Das Sheikh Zahur-ud-din. But the proud Rajput warriors were unwilling to be classed with these. "We come of a fighting stock," they argued, "like the Pathans. Our history is more glorious than theirs." So they adopted the suffix "Khan," which with the man of genuine Muhammadan ancestry implies Pathan descent. The Chohans, when they became converted, were known to the Rajputs as the Kaim Khanis, or "the firm and unbreakable ones." Every Ranghar, too, was be-khaned, and as a class they have shown a martial spirit equal to the title.
The British officer in the Indian Cavalry swears by the Ranghars. I know cavalry leaders who would unhesitatingly name him if asked in what breed they considered there was the best makings of a sowar. He is born horseman and horsemaster. And he is very much "a man." Even in the Punjab, where there are collected the best fighting stocks in India--that is to say, the best fighting stocks in the East--he is a hero of romance. "You'll find the Ranghar," the Pirrhai tells us,
"In the drink shop, or in the jail, On the back of a horse, Or in the deep grave."
I had heard that tag long before I met the Ranghar on service, and I wanted to see how his dare-devil, undisciplined past--if indeed it was as dare-devil as it is painted--served him on a campaign. The Ranghar, one knows, is a Rajput by origin and a Muhammadan by faith. His ancestors were brought to see eye to eye with the Mogul--a change of vision due to no priestcraft, but dictated by the sword. It must be remembered that their lands were exposed to the full tide of the Moslem flood. The Rajputs who earned immortality by their defiance of Akbar, the lions of Rajasthan, lived far from Delhi in the shelter of their forests and hills. The vicinity of the Ranghars to the Mogul capital helps to explain their submission; it does not explain the relative virility and vitality of the breed to-day compared with their Hindu Rajput contemporaries. It will be generally admitted, I think, that the average Ranghar or Khaim Khani is a stouter man than the Rajput pure and simple. Why this should be so; why the descendants of the unconverted Rajputs who held by their faith should not produce as hard a breed of men as the Rajputs who were the first to submit to Islam, and that under compulsion, is a mystery unexplained. One does not set much store by converts in the East. They are generally a yielding, submissive crew. But the Ranghar is very decidedly "lord of himself," a man of action, with something of the pagan in him perhaps, but no hidden corners in his mind where sophistry can enter in and corrupt. The best answer I have heard to the Hun Jehadist wile was given by a Ranghar.