Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by William Sleeman

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The obstacles which our system opposes to the successful prosecution
of robbers of all denominations and descriptions deprive our
Government of all popular support in the administration of criminal
justice; and this is considered everywhere to be the worst, and,
indeed, the only radically bad feature of our government. No
magistrate hopes to get a conviction against one in four of the most
atrocious gang of robbers and murderers of his district, and his only
resource is in the security laws, which enable him to keep them in
jail under a requisition of security for short periods. To this an
idle or apathetic magistrate will not have recourse, and under him
these robbers have a free licence.

In England, a judicial acquittal does not send back the culprit to
follow the same trade in the same field, as in India; for the
published proceedings of the court bring down upon him the
indignation of society--the moral and religions feelings of his
fellow men are arrayed against him, and from these salutary checks no
flaw in the indictment can save him. Not so in India. There no moral
or religions feelings interpose to assist or to supply the
deficiencies of the penal law. Provided he eats, drinks, smokes,
marries, and makes his offerings to his priest according to the rules
of his caste, the robber and the murderer incurs no odium in the
circle in which he moves, either religious or moral, and this is the
only circle for whose feelings he has any regard.[8]

The man who passed off his bad coin at Datiya, passed off more at
Dholpur while my advanced people were coming in, pretending that he
wanted things for me, and was in a great hurry to be ready with them
at my tents by the time I came up. The bad rupees were brought to a
native officer of my guard, who went with the shopkeepers in search
of the knave, but he could nowhere be found. The gates of the town
were shut up all night at my suggestion, and in the morning every
lodging-house in the town was searched for him in vain--he had gone
on. I had left some sharp men behind me, expecting that he would
endeavour to pass off his bad money immediately after my departure;
but in expectation of this he was now evidently keeping a little in
advance of me. I sent on some men with the shopkeepers whom he had
cheated to our next stage, in the hope of overtaking him; but he had
left the place before they arrived without passing any of his bad
coin, and gone on to Agra. The shopkeepers could not be persuaded to
go any further after him, for, if they caught him, they should, they
said, have infinite trouble in prosecuting him in our courts, without
any chance of recovering from him what they had lost.

On the 29th, we remained at Dholpur to receive and return the visits
of the young Raja, or, as he is called, the young Rana, a lad of
about fifteen years of age, very plain, and very dull. He came about
ten in the forenoon with a very respectable and well-dressed retinue,
and a tolerable show of elephants and horses. The uniforms of his
guards were made after those of our own soldiers, and did not please
me half so much as those of the Datiya guards, who were permitted to
consult their own tastes; and the music of the drums and fifes seemed
to me infinitely inferior to that of the mounted minstrels of my old
friend Parichhit.[9] The lad had with him about a dozen old public
servants entitled to chairs, some of whom had served his father above
thirty years; while the ancestors of others had served his
grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and I could not help telling the
lad in their presence that 'these were the greatest ornament of a
prince's throne and the best signs and pledges of a good government'.
They were all evidently much pleased at the compliment, and I thought
they deserved to be pleased, from the good character they bore among
the peasantry of the country. I mentioned that I had understood the
boatmen of the Chambal at Dholpur never caught or ate fish. The lad
seemed embarrassed, and the minister took upon himself to reply that
'there was no market for it, since the Hindoos of Dholpur never ate
fish, and the Muhammadans had all disappeared'. I asked the lad
whether he was fond of hunting. He seemed again confounded, and the
minister said that 'his highness never either hunted or fished, as
people of his caste were prohibited from destroying life'. 'And yet',
said I, 'they have often showed themselves good soldiers in battle.'
They were all pleased again, and said that they were not prohibited
from killing tigers; but that there was no jungle of any kind near
Dholpur, and, consequently, no tigers to be found. The Jats are
descendants of the Getae, and were people of very low caste, or
rather of no caste at all, among the Hindoos, and they are now trying
to raise themselves by abstaining from killing and eating
animals.[10] Among Hindoos this is everything; a man of low caste is
'_sab kuchh khata_', sticks at nothing in the way of eating; and a
man of high caste is a man who abstains from eating anything but
vegetable or farinaceous food; if, at the same time, he abstains from
using in his cook-room all woods but one, and has that one washed
before he uses it, he is canonized.[11] Having attained to military
renown and territorial dominion in the usual way by robbery, the Jats
naturally enough seek the distinction of high caste to enable them
the better to enjoy their position in society.

It had been stipulated that I should walk to the bottom of the steps
to receive the Rana, as is the usage on such occasions, and carpets
were accordingly spread thus far. Here he got out of his chair, and I
led him into the large room of the bungalow, which we occupied during
our stay, followed by all his and my attendants. The bungalow had
been built by the former Resident at Gwalior, the Honourable R.
Cavendish, for his residence during the latter part of the rains,
when Gwalior is considered to be unhealthy. At his departure the Rana
purchased this bungalow for the use of European gentlemen and ladies
passing through his capital.

In the afternoon, about four o'clock, I went to return his visit in a
small palace not yet finished, a pretty piece of miniature
fortification, surrounded by what they call their 'chhaoni', or
cantonments. The streets are good, and the buildings neat and
substantial; but there is nothing to strike or particularly interest
the stranger. The interview passed off without anything remarkable;
and I was more than ever pleased with the people by whom this young
chief is surrounded. Indeed, I had much reason to be pleased with the
manners of all the people on this side of the Chambal. They are those
of a people well pleased to see English gentlemen among them, and
anxious to make themselves useful and agreeable to us. They know that
their chief is indebted to the British Government for all the country
he has, and that he would be swallowed up by Sindhia's greedy army,
were not the sevenfold shield of the Honourable Company spread over
him. His establishments, civil and military, like those of the
Bundelkhand chiefs, are raised from the peasantry and yeomanry or the
country; who all, in consequence, feel an interest in the prosperity
and independent respectability of their chief. On the Gwalior side,
the members of all the public establishments know and feel that it is
we who interpose and prevent their master from swallowing up all his
neighbours, and thereby having increased means of promoting their
interest and that of their friends; and they detest us all most
cordially in consequence. The peasantry of the Gwalior territory seem
to consider their own government as a kind of minotaur, which they
would be glad to see destroyed, no matter how or by whom; since it
gives no lucrative or honourable employment to any of their members,
so as to interest either their pride or their affections; nor throws
back among them for purposes of local advantage any of the produce of
their land and labour which it exacts. It is worthy of remark that,
though the Dholpur chief is peculiarly the creature of the British
Government, and indebted to it for all he has or ever will have, and
though he has never had anything, and never can have, or can hope to
have, anything from the poor pageant of the house of Timur, who now
sits upon the throne of Delhi;[12] yet, on his seal of office he
declares himself to be the slave and creature of that imperial
'warrior for the faith of Islam'. As he abstains from eating the good
fish of the river Chambal to enhance his claim to caste among
Hindoos, so he abstains from acknowledging his deep debt of gratitude
to the Honourable Company, or the British Government, with a view to
give the rust of age to his rank and title. To acknowledge himself a
creature of the British Government were to acknowledge that he was a
man of yesterday; to acknowledge himself the slave of the Emperor is
to claim for his poor veins 'the blood of a line of kings'. The petty
chiefs of Bundelkhand, who are in the same manner especially
dependent on the British Government, do the same thing.

At Dholpur, there are some noble old mosques and mausoleums built
three hundred years ago, in the reign of the Emperor Humayun, by some
great officers of his government, whose remains still rest
undisturbed among them, though the names of their families have been
for many ages forgotten, and no men of their creed now live near to
demand for them the respect of the living. These tombs are all
elaborately built and worked out of the fine freestone of the country
and the trellis-work upon some of their stone screens is still as
beautiful as when first made. There are Persian and Arabic
inscriptions upon all of them, and I found from them that one of the
mosques had been built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in A.D. 1634,[13]
when he little dreamed that his three sons would here meet to fight
the great fight for the throne while he yet sat upon it.[14]

Notes:

1. December, 1835.

2. The author's remark that in India the roads are 'nowhere metalled'
must seem hardly credible to a modern traveller, who sees the country
intersected by thousands of miles of metalled road. The Grand Trunk
Road from Calcutta to Lahore, constructed in Lord Dalhousie's time,
alone measures about 1,200 miles. The development of roads since 1850
ha been enormous, and yet the mileage of good roads would have to be
increased tenfold to put India on an equality with the more advanced
countries of Europe.

3. _Ante_, Chanter 36, notes 26 & 27.

4. The Baiza Bai was the widow of Daulat Rao Sindhia. He had died on
March 21, 1827. With the consent of the Government of India, she
adopted a boy as his successor, but, being an ambitions and
intriguing woman, she tried to keep all power in her own hands. The
young Maharaja fled from her, and took refuge in the Residency in
October, 1832. In December of the same year Lord William Bentinck
visited Gwalior, and assumed an attitude of absolute neutrality. The
result was that trouble continued, and seven months later the
Maharaja again fled to the Residency. The troops then revolted
against the Baiza Bai, and compelled her to retire to Dholpur. This
event put an end to her political activity. Ultimately she was
allowed to return to Gwalior, and died there in 1862 (Malleson, _The
Native States of India_, pp. 160-4). The author wrote an unpublished
history of Baiza Bai (_ante_, Bibliography).

5. Long since abolished.

6. The law now permits the person injured to be compensated out of
any fine realized.

7. The system of employing gangs of prisoners on the roads was open
to great abuses, and has been long given up. The prisoners are now,
as a rule, employed only on the jail promises, and cannot be utilized
for outside work, except under special circumstances by special
sanction.

8. The notes to this edition have recorded many changes in India, but
no change has taken place in the difficulties which beset the
administration of criminal law. They are still those which the author
describes, and Police Commissions cannot remove them. The power to
exact security for good behaviour from known bad characters still
exists, and, when discreetly used, is of great value. The conviction
of atrocious robbers and murderers is, perhaps, less rare than it was
in the author's time, though many still escape even the minor penalty
of arrest. The want of a sound moral public opinion is the
fundamental difficulty in Indian police administration--a truth fully
Understood by the author, but rarely realized by members of
Parliament.

9. The title of the Dholpur chief is now Maharaja Rana. In 1905 his
reduced army numbered 1,216 of all ranks (_I. G._, 1908). The force
is not of serious military value.

10. The identification of the Jats, or Jats, with the Getae is not
even probable. The anchor exaggerates the lowness of the social rank
of the Jats, who cannot properly be described as people of 'very low
caste'. They are, and have long been, numerous and powerful in the
Panjab and the neighbouring countries. It is true that they hate
Brahmans, care little for Brahman notions of propriety, either as
regards food or marriage, and to a certain extent stand outside the
orthodox Hindoo system; but they are heterodox rather than low-caste.
The Rajas of Bharatpur, Dholpur, Nabha, Patiala, and Jind are all
Jats. The Jats are a fine and interesting people, who seem to suffer
little deterioration from the notorious laxity of their matrimonial
arrangements. They are skilled and industrious cultivators. A saying
has been current in Upper India that, if the British power is ever
broken, the succession will pass to the Jats.

11. This is the Brahman and Baniya theory. A high-spirited Rajput of
Rajputana, full of pride in his long ancestry, and yet fond of wild
boar's flesh, would indeed be wroth if denounced as a low-caste man.
It is, however, unfortunately, quite true that all races which become
entangled in the meshes of Hinduism tend to gradually surrender their
freedom, and to become proud of submission to the senseless
formalities and restrictions which the Brahman loves.

12. Akbar II. He was titular emperor from A.D. 1806 to 1837, and was
succeeded by Bahadur Shah II, the last of his line. The portrait of
Akbar II is the frontispiece to volume i of the original edition of
this work, and a miniature portrait of him is given in the
frontispiece of volume ii.

13. One of these tombs, namely, that of Bibi Zarina, dated A.H. 942 =
A.D. 1535-6, is described by Cunningham (_A.S.R._, xx, p. 113, pl.
xxxvii), who notes that according to an obviously false local popular
story, the lady was a daughter of Shah Jahan, who lived a century
later. This story seems to have misled the author. No inscription of
the reign of Shah Jahan at Dholpur is recorded.

14. The three sons were Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb, and Murad Baksh.

CHAPTER 51

Influence of Electricity on Vegetation--Agra and its Buildings.

On the 30th and 31st,[1] we went twenty-four miles over a dry plain,
with a sandy soil covered with excellent crops where irrigated, and a
very poor one where not. We met several long strings of camels
carrying grain from Agra to Gwalior. A single man takes charge of
twenty or thirty, holding the bridle of the first, and walking on
before its nose. The bridles of all the rest are tied one after the
other to the saddles of those immediately preceding them, and all
move along after the leader in single file. Water must tend to
attract and to impart to vegetables a good deal of electricity and
other vivifying powers that would otherwise he dormant in the earth
at a distance. The mere circumstance of moistening the earth from
within reach of the roots would not be sufficient to account for the
vast difference between the crops of fields that are irrigated, and
those that are not. One day, in the middle of the season of the
rains, I asked my gardener, while walking with him over my grounds,
how it was that some of the fine clusters of bamboos had not yet
begun to throw out their shoots. 'We have not yet had a thunderstorm,
sir,' replied the gardener. 'What in the name of God has the
thunderstorm to do with the shooting of the bamboos?' asked I in
amazement. 'I don't know, sir,' said he, 'but certain it is that no
bamboos begin to throw out their shoots well till we get a good deal
of thunder and lightning.' The thunder and lightning came, and the
bamboo shoots soon followed in abundance. It might have been a mere
coincidence; or the tall bamboo may bring down from the passing
clouds, and convey to the roots, the electric fluid they require for
nourishment, or for conductors of nourishment.[2]

In the Isle of France,[3] people have a notion that the mushrooms
always come up best after a thunderstorm. Electricity has certainly
much more to do in the business of the world than we are yet aware
of, in the animal, mineral, and vegetable developments.[4]

At our ground this day, I met a very respectable and intelligent
native revenue officer who had been employed to settle some boundary
disputes between the yeomen of our territory and those of the
adjoining territory of Dholpur.

'The Honourable Company's rights and those of its yeomen must', said
he, 'be inevitably sacrificed in all such cases; for the Dholpur
chief, or his minister, says to all their witnesses, "You are, of
course, expected to speak the truth regarding the land in dispute;
but, by the sacred stream of the Ganges, if you speak so as to lose
this estate one inch of it, you lose both your ears"--and most
assuredly would they lose them,' continued he, 'if they were not to
swear most resolutely that all the land in question belonged to
Dholpur. Had I the same power to cut off the ears of witnesses on our
side, we should meet on equal terms. Were I to threaten to cut them
off, they would laugh in my face.' There was much truth in what the
poor man said, for the Dholpur witnesses always make it appear that
the claims of their yeomen are just and moderate, and a salutary
dread of losing their ears operates, no doubt, very strongly. The
threatened punishment of the prince is quick, while that of the gods,
however just, is certainly very slow--

Ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est.

On the 1st of January, 1836, we went on sixteen miles to Agra, and,
when within about six miles of the city, the dome and minarets of the
Taj opened upon us from behind a small grove of fruit-trees, close by
us on the side of the road. The morning was not clear, but it was a
good one for a first sight of this building, which appeared larger
through the dusty haze than it would have done through a clear sky.
For five-and-twenty years of my life had I been looking forward to
the sight now before me. Of no building on earth had I heard so much
as of this, which contains the remains of the Emperor Shah Jahan and
his wife, the father and mother of the children whose struggles for
dominion have been already described. We had ordered our tents to be
pitched in the gardens of this splendid mausoleum, that we might have
our fill of the enjoyment which everybody seemed to derive from it;
and we reached them about eight o'clock. I went over the whole
building before I entered my tent, and, from the first sight of the
dome and minarets on the distant horizon to the last glance back from
my tent-ropes to the magnificent gateway that forms the entrance from
our camp to the quadrangle in which they stand, I can truly say that
everything surpassed my expectations. I at first thought the dome
formed too large a portion of the whole building; that its neck was
too long and too much exposed; and that the minarets were too plain
in their design; but, after going repeatedly over every part, and
examining the _tout ensemble_ from all possible positions, and in all
possible lights, from that of the full moon at midnight in a
cloudless sky to that of the noonday sun, the mind seemed to repose
in the calm persuasion that there was an entire harmony of parts, a
faultless congregation of architectural beauties, on which it could
dwell for ever without fatigue.

After my quarter of a century of anticipated pleasure, I went on from
part to part in the expectation that I must by and by come to
something that would disappoint me; but no, the emotion which one
feels at first is never impaired; on the contrary, it goes on
improving from the first _coup d'oeil_ of the dome in the distance to
the minute inspection of the last flower upon the screen round the
tomb. One returns and returns to it with undiminished pleasure; and
though at every return one's attention to the smaller parts becomes
less and less, the pleasure which he derives from the contemplation
of the greater, and of the whole collectively, seems to increase; and
he leaves with a feeling of regret that he could not have it all his
life within his reach, and of assurance that the image of what he has
seen can never be obliterated from his mind 'while memory holds her
seat'. I felt that it was to me in architecture what Kemble and his
sister, Mrs. Siddons, had been to me a quarter of a century before in
acting--something that must stand alone--something that I should
never cease to see clearly in my mind's eye, and yet never be able
clearly to describe to others.[5]

The Emperor and his Queen he buried side by side in a vault beneath
the building, to which we descend by a flight of steps. Their remains
are covered by two slabs of marble; and directly over these slabs,
upon the floor above, in the great centre room under the dome, stand
two other slabs, or cenotaphs, of the same marble exquisitely worked
in mosaic. Upon that of the Queen, amid wreaths of flowers, are
worked in black letters passages from the Koran, one of which, at the
end facing the entrance, terminates with 'And defend us from the
tribe of unbelievers'; that very tribe which is now gathered from all
quarters of the civilized world to admire the splendour of the tomb
which was raised to perpetuate her name.[6] On the slab over her
husband there are no passages from the Koran--merely mosaic work of
flowers with his name and the date of his death.[7] I asked some of
the learned Muhammadan attendants the cause of this difference, and
was told that Shah Jahan had himself designed the slab over his wife,
and saw no harm in inscribing the words of God upon it; but that the
slab over himself was designed by his more pious son, Aurangzeb, who
did not think it right to place these holy words upon a stone which
the foot of man might some day touch, though that stone covered the
remains of his own father. Such was this 'man of prayers', this
'Namazi' (as Dara called him), to the last. He knew mankind well,
and, above all, that part of them which he was called upon to govern,
and which he governed for forty years with so much ability.[8]

The slab over the Queen occupies the centre of the apartments above
and in the vault below, and that over her husband lies on the left as
we enter. At one end of the slab in the vault her name is inwrought,
'Mumtaz-i-mahal Banu Begam', the ornament of the palace, Banu Begam,
and the date of her death, 1631. That of her husband and the date of
his death, 1666, are inwrought upon the other.[9]

She died in giving birth to a daughter, who is said to have been
heard crying in the womb by herself and her other daughters. She sent
for the Emperor, and told him that she believed no mother had ever
been known to survive the birth of a child so heard, and that she
felt her end was near. She had, she said, only two requests to make;
first, that he would not marry again after her death, and get
children to contend with hers for his favour and dominions; and,
secondly, that he would build for her the tomb with which he had
promised to perpetuate her name. She died in giving birth to the
child, as might have been expected when the Emperor, in his anxiety,
called all the midwives of the city, and all his secretaries of state
and privy counsellors to prescribe for her. Both her dying requests
were granted. Her tomb was commenced upon immediately. No woman ever
pretended to supply her place in the palace; nor had Shah Jahan, that
we know of, children by any other.[10] Tavernier saw this building
completed and finished; and tells us that it occupied twenty thousand
men for twenty-two years.[11] The mausoleum itself and all the
buildings that appertain to it cost 3,17,48,026--three _karor_,
seventeen lakhs, forty-eight thousand and twenty-six rupees, or
3,174,802 pounds sterling;--three million one hundred and seventy-
four thousand eight hundred and two![12] I asked my wife, when she
had gone over it, what she thought of the building. 'I cannot', said
she, 'tell you what I think, for I know not how to criticize such a
building, but I can tell you what I feel. I would die to-morrow to
have such another over me.' This is what many a lady has felt, no
doubt.

The building stands upon the north side of a large quadrangle,
looking down into the clear blue stream of the river Jumna, while the
other three sides are enclosed with a high wall of red sandstone.[13]
The entrance to this quadrangle is through a magnificent gateway in
the south side opposite the tomb; and on the other two sides are very
beautiful mosques facing inwards, and corresponding exactly with each
other in size, design, and execution. That on the left, or west, side
is the only one that can be used as a mosque or church; because the
faces of the audience, and those of all men at their prayers, must be
turned towards the tomb of their prophet to the west. The pulpit is
always against the dead wall at the back, and the audience face
towards it, standing with their backs to the open front of the
building. The church on the east side is used for the accommodation
of visitors, or for any secular purpose, and was built merely as a
'jawab' (answer) to the real one.[14] The whole area is laid out in
square parterres, planted with flowers and shrubs in the centre, and
with fine trees, chiefly the cypress, all round the borders, forming
an avenue to every road. These roads are all paved with slabs of
freestone, and have, running along the centre, a basin, with a row of
_jets d'eau_ in the middle from one extremity to the other. These are
made to play almost every evening, when the gardens are much
frequented by the European gentlemen and ladies of the station, and
by natives of all religions and sects. The quadrangle is from east to
west nine hundred and sixty-four feet, and from north to south three
hundred and twenty-nine.[l5]