Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by William Sleeman

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While I was in charge of the district of Narsinghpur, in the valley
of the Nerbudda, in 1823, a cultivator of the village of Bedu, about
twelve miles distant from my court, was one day engaged in the
cultivation of his field on the border of the village of Barkhara,
which was supposed to be haunted by the spirit of an old proprietor,
whose temper was so froward and violent that the lands could hardly
be let for anything, for hardly any man would venture to cultivate
them lest he might unintentionally incur his ghostship's displeasure.
The poor cultivator, after begging his pardon in secret, ventured to
drive his plough a few yards beyond the proper line of his boundary,
and thus add half an acre of Barkhara to his own little tenement,
which was situated in Bedu. That very night his only son was bitten
by a snake, and his two bullocks were seized with the murrain. In
terror he went of to the village temple, confessed his sin, and
vowed, not only to restore the half-acre of land to the village of
Barkhara, but to build a very handsome shrine upon the spot as a
perpetual sign of his repentance. The boy and the bullocks all three
recovered, and the shrine was built; and is, I believe, still to be
seen as the boundary mark.

The fact was that the village stood upon an elevated piece of ground
rising out of a moist plain, and a colony of snakes had taken up
their abode in it. The bites of these snakes had on many occasions
proved fatal, and such accidents were all attributed to the anger of
a spirit which was supposed to haunt the village. At one time, under
the former government, no one would take a lease of the village on
any terms, and it had become almost entirely deserted, though the
soil was the finest in the whole district. With a view to remove the
whole prejudices of the people, the governor, Goroba Pundit, took the
lease himself at the rent of one thousand rupees a year; and, in the
month of June, went from his residence, twelve miles, with ten of his
own ploughs to superintend the commencement of so _perilous_ an
undertaking.

On reaching the middle of the village, situated on the top of the
little hill, he alighted from his horse, sat down upon a carpet that
had been spread for him under a large and beautiful banyan-tree, and
began to refresh himself with a pipe before going to work in the
fields. As he quaffed his hookah, and railed at the follies of the
men, 'whose absurd superstitions had made them desert so beautiful a
village with so noble a tree in its centre', his eyes fell upon an
enormous black snake, which had coiled round one of its branches
immediately over his head, and seemed as if resolved at once to
pounce down and punish him for his blasphemy. He gave his pipe to his
attendant, mounted his horse, from which the saddle had not yet been
taken, and never pulled rein till he got home. Nothing could ever
induce him to visit this village again, though he was afterwards
employed under me as a native collector; and he has often told me
that he verily believed this was the spirit of the old landlord that
he had unhappily neglected to propitiate before taking possession.

My predecessor in the civil charge of that district, the late Mr.
Lindsay of the Bengal Civil Service, again tried to remove the
prejudices of the people against the occupation and cultivation of
this fine village. It had never been measured, and all the revenue
officers, backed by all the farmers and cultivators of the
neighbourhood, declared that the spirit of the old proprietor would
never allow it to be so. Mr. Lindsay was a good geometrician, and had
long been in the habit of superintending his revenue surveys himself,
and on this occasion be thought himself particularly called upon to
do so. A new measuring cord was made for the occasion, and, with fear
and trembling, all his officers attended him to the first field; but
in measuring it the rope, by some accident, broke. Poor Lindsay was
that morning taken ill and obliged to return to Narsinghpur, where he
died soon after from fever. No man was ever more beloved by all
classes of the people of his district than he was; and I believe
there was not one person among them who did not believe him to have
fallen a victim to the resentment of the spirit of the old
proprietor. When I went to the village some years afterwards, the
people in the neighbourhood all declared to me that they saw the cord
with which he was measuring fly into a thousand pieces the moment the
men attempted to straighten it over the first field.[5]

A very respectable old gentleman from the Concan, or Malabar
coast,[6] told me one day that every man there protects his field of
corn and his fruit-tree by dedicating it to one or other of the
spirits which there abound, or confiding it to his guardianship. He
sticks up something in the field, or ties on something to the tree,
in the name of the said spirit, who from that moment feels himself
responsible for its safe keeping. If any one, without permission from
the proprietor, presumes to take either an ear of corn from the
field, or fruit from the tree, he is sure to be killed outright, or
made extremely ill. 'No other protection is required', said the old
gentleman, 'for our fields and fruit-trees in that direction, though
whole armies should have to march through them.' I once saw a man
come to the proprietor of a jack-tree,[7] embrace his feet, and in
the most piteous manner implore his protection. He asked what was the
matter. 'I took', said the man, 'a jack from your tree yonder three
days ago, as I passed at night; and I have been suffering dreadful
agony in my stomach ever since. The spirit of the tree is upon me,
and you only can pacify him.' The proprietor took up a bit of cow-
dung, moistened it, and made a mark with it upon the man's forehead,
_in the name of the spirit_, and put some of it into the knot of hair
on the top of his head. He had no sooner done this than the man's
pains all left him, and he went off, vowing never again to give
similar cause of offence to one of these guardian spirits. 'Men',
said my old friend, 'do not die there in the same regulated spirit,
with their thoughts directed exclusively towards God, as in other
parts; and whether a man's spirit is to haunt the world or not after
his death all depends on that.'

Notes:

1. December, 1835.

2. Datiya (Datia, Dutteeah) is a small state, with an area of about
911 square miles, and a cash revenue of about four lakhs of rupees.
On the east it touches the Jhansi district, but in all other
directions it is enclosed by the territories of Sindhia, the Maharaja
of Gwalior. The principality was separated from Orchha by a family
partition in the seventeenth century. The first treaty between the
Raja and the British Government was concluded on the 15th March,
1804.

3. The belief that epileptic patients are possessed by devils is, of
course, in no wise peculiar to India. It is almost universal.
Professor Lombroso discusses the belief in diabolical possession in
chap. 4 of _The Man of Genius_ (London ed., 1891).

4. 'The educated European of the nineteenth century cannot realize
the dread in which the Hindoo stands of devils. They haunt his paths
from the cradle to the grave. The Tamil proverb in fact says, "The
devil who seizes yon in the cradle, goes with you to the funeral
pile".' The fear and worship of ghosts, demons, and devils are
universal throughout India, and the rites practised are often
comical. The ghost of a bibulous European official with a hot temper,
who died at Muzaffarnagar, in the United Provinces, many years ago,
was propitiated by offerings of beer and whisky at 'his tomb. Much
information on the subject is collected in the articles 'Demon',
'Devils', 'Dehwar', and 'Deified Warriors' in Balfour, _Cyclopaedia
of India_ (3rd ed.). Almost every number of Mr. Crooke's periodical
_North Indian Notes and Queries_ (Allahabad: Pioneer Press; London:
A. Constable & Co., 5 vols., from 1891-2 to 1895-6) gave fresh
instances of the oddities of demon-worship.

5. The officials of the native Governments were content to use either
a rope or a bamboo for field measurements, and these primitive
instruments continued to satisfy the early British officers. For many
years past a proper chain has been always employed for revenue
surveys.

6. 'The author uses the term 'Concan' (Konkan) in a wide sense, so as
to cover all the territory between the Western Ghats and the sea,
including Malabar in the south. The term is often used in a more
restricted sense to mean Bombay and certain other districts, to the
north of Malabar.

7. _Artocarpus integrifolius_. The jack fruit attains an enormous
size, and sometimes weighs fifty or sixty pounds. Indians delight in
it, but to most Europeans it is extremely offensive.

CHAPTER 31

Interview with the Raja of Datiya--Fiscal Errors of Statesmen--
Thieves and Robbers by Profession.

On the 17th[1] we came to Datiya, nine miles over a dry and poor
soil, thinly, and only partially, covering a bed of brown and grey
syenite, with veins of quartz and feldspar, and here and there dykes
of basalt, and a few boulders scattered over the surface. The old
Raja, Parichhit,[2] on one elephant, and his cousin, Dalip Singh,
upon a second, and several of their relations upon others, all
splendidly caparisoned, came out two miles to meet us, with a very
large and splendid _cortege_. My wife, as usual, had gone on in her
palankeen very early, to avoid the crowd and dust of this 'istikbal',
or meeting; and my little boy, Henry, went on at the same time in the
palankeen, having got a slight fever from too much exposure to the
sun in our slow and stately entrance into Jhansi. There were more men
in steel chain armour in this _cortege_ than in that of Jhansi; and,
though the elephants were not quite so fine, they were just as
numerous, while the crowd of foot attendants was still greater. They
were in fancy dresses, individually handsome, and collectively
picturesque; though, being all soldiers, not quite pleasing to the
eye of a soldier. I remarked to the Raja, as we rode side by side on
our elephants, that we attached much importance to having our
soldiers all in uniform dresses, according to their corps, while he
seemed to care little about these matters. 'Yes,' said the old man,
with a smile, 'with me every man pleases himself in his dress, and I
care not what he wears, provided it is neat and clean.' They
certainly formed a body more picturesque from being allowed
individually to consult their own fancies in their dresses, for the
native taste in dress is generally very good. Our three elephants
came on abreast, and the Raja and I conversed as freely as men in
such situations can converse. He is a stout, cheerful old gentleman,
as careless apparently about his own dress as about that of his
soldiers, and a much more sensible and agreeable person than I
expected; and I was sorry to learn from him that he had for twelve
years been suffering from an attack of sciatica on one side, which
had deprived him of the use of one of his legs. I was obliged to
consent to halt the next day that I might hunt in his preserve
(_ramna_) in the morning, and return his visit in the evening. In the
Raja's cortege there were several men mounted on excellent horses,
who carried guitars, and played upon them, and sang in a very
agreeable style, I had never before seen or heard of such a band, and
was both surprised and pleased.

The great part of the wheat, gram,[3] and other exportable land
produce which the people consume, as far as we have yet come, is
drawn from our Nerbudda districts, and those of Malwa which border
upon them; and, _par consequent_, the price has been rapidly
increasing as we recede from them in our advance northward. Were the
soil of those Nerbudda districts, situated as they are at such a
distance from any great market for their agricultural products, as
bad as it is in the parts of Bundelkhand that I came over, no net
surplus revenue could possibly be drawn from them in the present
state of arts and industry. The high prices paid here for land
produce, arising from the necessity of drawing a great part of what
is consumed from such distant lands, enables the Rajas of these
Bundelkhand states to draw the large revenue they do. These chiefs
expend the whole of their revenue in the maintenance of public
establishments of one kind or other; and, as the essential articles
of subsistence, wheat and gram, &c., which are produced in their own
districts, or those immediately around them, are not sufficient for
the supply of these establishments, they must draw them from distant
territories. All this produce is brought on the backs of bullocks,
because there is no road from the districts whence they obtain it,
over which a wheeled carriage can be drawn with safety; and, as this
mode of transit is very expensive, the price of the produce, when it
reaches the capitals, around which these local establishments are
concentrated, becomes very high. They must pay a price equal to the
collective cost of purchasing and bringing this substance from the
most distant districts, to which they are at any time obliged to have
recourse for a supply, or they will not be supplied; and, as there
cannot be two prices for the same thing in the same market, the wheat
and gram produced in the neighbourhood of one of these Bundelkhand
capitals fetch as high a price there as that brought from the most
remote districts on the banks of the Nerbudda river; while it costs
comparatively nothing to bring it from the former lands to the
markets. Such lands, in consequence, yield a rate of rent much
greater compared with their natural powers of fertility than those of
the remotest districts whence produce is drawn for these markets or
capitals; and, as all the lands are the property of the Rajas, they
drew all those rents as revenue.[4]

Were we to take this revenue, which the Rajas now enjoy, in tribute
for the maintenance of public establishments concentrated at distant
seats, all these local establishments would, of course, be at once
disbanded; and all the effectual demand which they afford for the raw
agricultural produce of distant districts would cease. The price of
this produce would diminish in proportion, and with it the value of
the lands of the districts around such capitals. Hence the folly of
conquerors and paramount powers, from the days of the Greeks and
Romans down to those of Lord Hastings[5] and Sir John Malcolm,[6] who
were all bad political economists, supposing that conquered and ceded
territories could always be made to yield to a foreign state the same
amount of gross revenue as they had paid to their domestic
government, whatever their situation with reference to the markets
for their produce--whatever the state of their arts and their
industry--and whatever the character and extent of the local
establishments maintained out of it. The settlements of the land
revenue in all the territories acquired in Central India during the
Maratha war, which ended in 1817, were made upon the supposition that
the lands would continue to pay the same rate of rent under the new
as they had paid under the old government, uninfluenced by the
diminution of all local establishments, civil and military, to one-
tenth of what they had been; that, under the new order of things, all
the waste lands must be brought into tillage, and be able to pay as
high a rate of rent as before tillage, and, consequently, that the
aggregate available net revenue must greatly and rapidly increase.
Those who had the making of the settlements and the governing of
these new territories did not consider that the diminution of every
_establishment_ was the removal of a _market_, of an effectual demand
for land produce; and that, when all the waste lands should be
brought into tillage, the whole would deteriorate in fertility, from
the want of fallows, Under the prevailing system of agriculture,
which afforded the lands no other means of renovation from over-
cropping. The settlements of land which were made throughout our new
land acquisitions upon these fallacious assumptions of course failed.
During a series of quinquennial settlements the assessment has been
everywhere gradually reduced to about two-thirds of what it was when
our rule began, to less than one-half of what Sir John Malcolm, and
all the other local authorities, and even the worthy Marquis of
Hastings himself, under the influence of their opinions, expected it
would be. The land revenues of the native princes of Central India,
who reduced their public establishments, which the new order of
things seemed to render useless, and thereby diminished the only
markets for the raw produce of their lands, have been everywhere
falling off in the same proportion; and scarcely one of them now
draws two-thirds of the income he drew from the same lands in 1817.

There are in the valley of the Nerbudda districts that yield a great
deal more produce every year than either Orchha, Jhansi, or Datiya;
and yet, from the want of the same domestic markets, they do not
yield one-fourth of the amount of land revenue. The lands are,
however, rated equally high to the assessment, in proportion to their
value to the farmers and cultivators. To enable them to yield a
larger revenue to Government, they require to have larger
establishments as markets for land produce. These establishments may
be either public, and paid by Government; or they may be private, as
manufactories, by which the land produce of these districts would be
consumed by people employed in investing the value of their labour in
commodities suited to the demand of distant markets, and more
valuable than land produce in proportion to their weight and bulk.[7]
These are the establishments which Government should exert itself to
introduce and foster; since the valley of the Nerbudda, in addition
to a soil exceedingly fertile, has in its whole line, from its source
to its embouchure, rich beds of coal reposing for the use of future
generations, under the sandstone of the Satpura and Vindhya ranges,
and beds no less rich of very fine iron. These advantages have not
yet been justly appreciated; but they will be so by and by.[8]

About half-past four in the afternoon of the day we reached Datiya, I
had a visit from the Raja, who came in his palankeen, with a very
respectable, but not very numerous or noisy, train, and he sat with
me about an hour. My large tents were both pitched parallel to each
other, about twenty paces distant, and united to each other at both
ends by separate 'kanats', or cloth curtains. My little boy was
present, and behaved extremely well in steadily refusing, without
even a look from me, a handful of gold mohurs, which the Raja pressed
several times upon his acceptance. I received him at the door of my
tent, and supported him upon my arm to his chair, as he cannot walk
without some slight assistance, from the affection already mentioned
in his leg. A salute from the guns at his castle announced his
departure and return to it. After the audience, Lieutenant Thomas and
I ascended to the summit of a palace of the former Rajas of this
state, which stands upon a high rock close inside the eastern gate of
the city, whence we could see to the west of the city a still larger
and handsomer palace standing, I asked our conductors, the Raja's
servants, why it was unoccupied. 'No prince these degenerate days',
said they, 'could muster a family and court worthy of such a palace--
the family and court of the largest of them would, within the walls
of such a building, feel as if they were in a desert. Such palaces
were made for princes of the older times, who were quite different
beings from those of the present day.'

From the deserted palace we went to the new garden which is preparing
for the young Raja, an adopted son of about ten years of age. It is
close to the southern wall of the city, and is very extensive and
well managed. The orange-trees are all grafted, and sinking under the
weight of as fine fruit as any in India. Attempting to ascend the
steps of an empty bungalow upon a raised terrace at the southern
extremity of the garden, the attendants told us respectfully that
they hoped we would take off our shoes if we wished to enter, as the
ancestor of the Raja by whom it was built, Ram Chand, had lately
_become a god_, and was there worshipped. The roof is of stone,
supported on carved stone pillars. On the centre pillar, upon a
ground of whitewash, is a hand or trident. This is the only sign of a
sacred character the building has yet assumed; and I found that it
owed this character of sanctity to the circumstance of some one
having vowed an offering to the manes of the builder, if he obtained
what his soul most desired; and, having obtained it, all the people
believe that those who do the same at the same place in a pure spirit
of faith will obtain what they pray for.

I made some inquiries about Hardaul Lala, the son of Birsingh Deo,
who built the fort of Dhamoni, one of the ancestors of the Datiya
Raja, and found that he was as much worshipped here at his birthplace
as upon the banks of the Nerbudda as the supposed great _originator_
of the cholera morbus. There is at Datiya a temple dedicated to him
and much frequented; and one of the priests brought me a flower in
his name, and chanted something indicating that Hardaul Lala was now
worshipped even so far as the British _capital of Calcutta_, I asked
the old prince what he thought of the origin of the worship of this
his ancestor; and he told me that when the cholera broke out first in
the camp of Lord Hastings, then pitched about three stages from his
capital, on the bank of the Sindh at Chandpur Sunari, several people
recovered from the disease immediately after making votive offerings
in his name; and that he really thought the spirit of his great-
grandfather had worked some wonderful cures upon people afflicted
with this dreadful malady.[9]

The town of Datiya contains a population of between forty and fifty
thousand souls. The streets are narrow, for, in buildings, as in
dress, the Raja allows every man to consult his own inclinations.
There are, however, a great many excellent houses in Datiya, and the
appearance of the place is altogether very good. Many of his
feudatory chiefs reside occasionally in the city, and have all their
establishments with them, a practice which does not, I believe,
prevail anywhere else among these Bundelkhand chiefs, and this makes
the capital much larger, handsomer, and more populous than that of
Tehri. This indicates more of mutual confidence between the chief and
his vassals, and accords well with the character they bear in the
surrounding countries. Some of the houses occupied by these barons
are very pretty. They spend the revenue of their distant estates in
adorning them, and embellishing the capital, which they certainly
could not have ventured to do under the late Rajas of Tehri, and may
not possibly be able to do under the future Rajas of Datiya. The
present minister of Datiya, Ganesh, is a very great knave, and
encourages the residence upon his master's estate of all kinds of
thieves and robbers, who bring back from distant districts every
season vast quantities of booty, which they share with him. The chief
himself is a mild old gentleman, who would not suffer violence to be
offered to any of his nobles, though he would not, perhaps, quarrel
with his minister for getting him a little addition to his revenue
from without, by affording a sanctuary to such kind of people. As in
Tehri, so here, the pickpockets constitute the entire population of
several villages, and carry their depredations northward to the banks
of the Indus, and southward to Bombay and Madras.[10] But colonies of
thieves and robbers like these abound no less in our own territories
than in those of native states. There are more than a thousand
families of them in the districts of Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, and
Meerut in the Upper Doab,[11] all well enough known to the local
authorities, who can do nothing with them.

They extend their depredations into remote districts, and the booty
they bring home with them they share liberally with the native police
and landholders under whose protection they live. Many landholders
and police officers make large fortunes from the share they get of
this booty. Magistrates do not molest them, because they would
despair of ever finding the proprietors of the property that might be
found upon them; and, if they could trace them, they would never be
able to persuade them to come and 'enter upon a worse sea of
troubles' in prosecuting them. These thieves and robbers of the
professional classes, who have the sagacity to avoid plundering near
home, are always just as secure in our best regulated districts as
they are in the worst native states, from the only three things which
such depredators care about--the penal laws, the odium of the society
in which they move, and the vengeance of the god they worship; and
they are always well received in the society around them, as long as
they can avoid having their neighbours annoyed by summons to give
evidence for or against them in our courts. They feel quite sure of
the goodwill of the god they worship, provided they give a fair share
of their booty to his priests; and no less secure of immunity from
penal laws, except on very rare occasions when they happen to be
taken in the tact, in a country where such laws happen to be in
force.[12]