Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by William Sleeman

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e. The Sikhs do not now detest us. They willingly furnish soldiers
and military police of the best class, equal to the Gorkhas, and fit
to fight in line with English soldiers. The Panjab chieftains have
been among the foremost in offers of loyal assistance to the
Government of India in times of danger, and in organizing the
Imperial Service troops. The Sikh states are now sufficiently well
governed.

CHAPTER 66

Collegiate Endowment of Muhammadan Tombs and Mosques.

On the 20th[1] we came to Badarpur, twelve miles over a plain, with
the range of hills on our left approaching nearer and nearer the
road, and separating us from the old city of Delhi. We passed through
Faridpur, once a large town, and called after its founder, Shaikh
Farid, whose mosque is still in good order, though there is no person
to read or hear prayers in it.[2] We passed also two fine bridges,
one of three, and one of four arches, both over what were once
streams, but are now dry beds of sand.[3] The whole road shows signs
of having been once thickly peopled, and highly adorned with useful
and ornamental works when Delhi was in its glory.

Every handsome mausoleum among Muhammadans was provided with its
mosque, and endowed by the founder with the means of maintaining men
of learning to read their Koran over the grave of the deceased and in
his chapel; and, as long as the endowment lasted, the tomb continued
to be at the same time a college. They read the Koran morning and
evening over the grave, and prayers in the chapel at the stated
periods; and the rest of their time is commonly devoted to the
instruction of the youths of their neighbourhood, either gratis or
for a small consideration. Apartments in the tomb were usually set
aside for the purpose, and these tombs did ten times more for
education in Hindustan than all the colleges formed especially for
the purpose.[4] We might suppose that rulers who formed and endowed
such works all over the land must have had more of the respect and
the affections of the great mass of the people than we, who, as my
friend upon the Jumna has it, 'build nothing but private dwelling-
houses, factories, courts of justice, and jails', can ever have; but
this conclusion would not be altogether just.[5] Though every mosque
and mausoleum was a seat of learning, that learning, instead of being
a source of attraction and conciliation between the Muhammadans and
Hindoos, was, on the contrary, a source of perpetual repulsion and
enmity between them--it tended to keep alive in the breasts of the
Musalmans a strong feeling of religions indignation against the
worshippers of idols; and of dread and hatred in those of the
Hindoos.

The Koran was the Book of books, spoken by God to the angel Gabriel
in parts as occasion required, and repeated by him to Muhammad; who,
unable to write himself, dictated them to any one who happened to be
present when he received the divine communications;[6] it contained
all that it was worth man's while to study or know--it was from the
Deity, but at the same time coeternal with Him--it was His divine
eternal spirit, inseparable from Him from the beginning, and
therefore, like Him, uncreated. This book, to read which was of
itself declared to be the highest of all species of worship, taught
war against the worshippers of idols to be of all merits the greatest
in the eye of God; and no man could well rise from the perusal
without the wish to serve God by some act of outrage against them.
These buildings were, therefore, looked upon by the Hindoos, who
composed the great mass of the people, as a kind of religions
volcanoes, always ready to explode and pour out their lava of
intolerance and outrage upon the innocent people of the surrounding
country.

If a Hindoo fancied himself injured or insulted by a Muhammadan he
was apt to revenge himself upon the Muhammadans generally, and insult
their religion by throwing swine's flesh, or swine's blood, into one
of their tombs or churches; and the latter either flew to arms at
once to revenge their God, or retaliated by throwing the flesh or the
blood of the cow into the first Hindoo temple at hand, which made the
Hindoos fly to arms. The guilty and the wicked commonly escaped,
while numbers of the weak, the innocent and the unoffending were
slaughtered. The magnificent buildings, therefore, instead of being
at the time bonds of union, were commonly sources of the greatest
discord among the whole community, and of the most painful
humiliation to the Hindoo population. During the bigoted reign of
Aurangzeb and his successors a Hindoo's presence was hardly tolerated
within sight of these tombs or churches; and had he been discovered
entering one of them, he would probably have been hunted down like a
mad dog. The recollection of such outrages, and the humiliation to
which they gave rise, associated as they always are in the minds of
the Hindoos with the sight of these buildings, are perhaps the
greatest source of our strength in India; because they at the same
time feel that it is to us alone they owe the protection which they
now enjoy from similar injuries. Many of my countrymen, full of
virtuous indignation at the outrages which often occur during the
processions of the Muharram, particularly when these happen to take
place at the same time with some religious procession of the Hindoos,
are very anxious that our Government should interpose its authority
to put down both. But these processions and occasional outrages are
really sources of great strength to us; they show at once the
necessity for the interposition of an impartial tribunal, and a
disposition on the part of the rulers to interpose impartially. The
Muhammadan festivals are regulated by the lunar, and those of the
Hindoos by the solar year, and they cross each other every thirty or
forty years, and furnish fair occasions for the local authorities to
interpose effectually.[7] People who receive or imagine insults or
injuries commonly postpone their revenge till these religious
festivals come round, when they hope to be able to settle their
accounts with impunity among the excited crowd. The mournful
procession of the Muharram, when the Muhammadans are inflamed to
madness by the recollection of the really affecting incidents of the
massacre of the grandchildren of their prophet, and by the images of
their tombs, and their sombre music,[8] crosses that of the Holi[9]
(in which the Hindoos are excited to tumultuous and licentious joy by
their bacchanalian songs and dances) every thirty-six years; and they
reign together for some four or five days, during which the scene in
every large town is really terrific. The processions are liable to
meet in the street, and the lees of the wine of the Hindoos, or the
red powder which is substituted for them, is liable to fall upon the
tombs of the others. Hindoos pass on, forgetting in their saturnalian
joy all distinctions of age, sex, or religion, their clothes and
persons besmeared with the red powder, which is moistened and thrown
from all kinds of machines over friend and foe; while meeting these
come the Muhammadans, clothed in their green mourning, with gloomy
downcast looks, beating their breasts, ready to kill themselves, and
too anxious for an excuse to kill anybody else. Let but one drop of
the lees of joy fall upon the image of the tomb as it passes, and a
hundred swords fly from their scabbards; many an innocent person
falls; and woe be to the town in which the magistrate is not at hand
with his police and military force. Proudly conscious of their power,
the magistrates refuse to prohibit one class from laughing because
the other happens to be weeping; and the Hindoos on such occasions
laugh the more heartily to let the world see that they are free to do
so.

A very learned Hindoo once told me in Central India that the oracle
of Mahadeo had been at the same time consulted at three of his
greatest temples--one in the Deccan, one in Rajputana, and one, I
think, in Bengal--as to the result of the government of India by
Europeans, who seemed determined to fill all the high offices of
administration with their own countrymen, to the exclusion of the
people of the country. A day was appointed for the answer; and when
the priest came to receive it they found Mahadeo (Siva) himself with
a European complexion, and dressed in European clothes. He told them
that their European Government was in reality nothing more than a
multiplied incarnation of himself; and that he had come among them in
this shape to prevent their cutting each other's throats as they had
been doing for some centuries past; that these, his incarnations,
appeared to have no religion themselves in order that they might be
the more impartial arbitrators between the people of so many
different creeds and sects who now inhabited the country; that they
must be aware that they never had before been so impartially
governed, and that they must continue to obey these their governors,
without attempting to pry further into futurity or the will of the
gods. Mahadeo performs a part in the great drama of the Ramayana, or
the Rape of Sita, and he is the only figure there that is represented
with a _white face_.[10]

I was one day praising the law of primogeniture among ourselves to a
Muhammadan gentleman of high rank, and defending it on the ground
that it prevented that rivalry and bitterness of feeling among
brothers which were always found among the Muhammadans, whose law
prescribes an equal division of property, real and personal, among
the sons, and the _choice of the wisest_ among them as successor to
the government.[11] 'This', said he, 'is no doubt the source of our
weakness, but why should you condemn a law which is to you a source
of so much strength? I, one day', said he, 'asked Mr. Seaton, the
Governor-General's representative at the court of Delhi, which of all
things he had seen in India he liked best. "You have", replied he,
smiling, "a small species of melon called 'phut' (disunion); this is
the thing we like best in your land." There was', continued my
Muhammadan friend, 'an infinite deal of sound political wisdom in
this one sentence. Mr. Seaton was a very good and a very wise man.
Our European governors of the present day are not at all the same
kind of thing. I asked Mr. B., a judge, the same question many years
afterwards, and he told me that he thought the rupees were the best
things he had found in India. I asked Mr. T., the Commissioner, and
he told me that he thought the tobacco which he smoked in his hookah
was the best thing. And pray, sir, what do you think the best thing?'

'Why, Nawab Sahib, I am always very well pleased when I am free from
pain, and can get my nostrils full of cool air, and my mouth full of
cold water in this hot land of yours; and I think most of my
countrymen are the same. Next to these, the thing we all admire most
in India, Nawab Sahib, is the entire exemption which you and I and
every other gentleman, native or European, enjoy from the taxes which
press so heavily upon them in other countries.[12] In Kashmir, no
midwife is allowed to attend a woman in her confinement till a heavy
tax has been paid to Ranjit Singh for the infant; and in England, a
man cannot let the light of heaven into his house till he has paid a
tax for the window.'[13]

'Nor keep a dog, nor shoot a partridge in the jungle, I am told,'
said the Nawab.

'Quite true, Nawab Sahib.'

'Hindustan, sir,' said he, 'is, after all, the best country in the
world; the only thing wanted is a little more (_rozgar_) employment
for the educated classes under Government.'

'True, Nawab Sahib, we might, no doubt, greatly multiply this
employment to the advantage of those who got the places, but we
should have to multiply at the same time the taxes, to the great
disadvantage of those who did not get them.'

'True, very true, sir,' said my old friend.

Notes:

1. January, 1836.

2. Faridpur is a mistake for Faridabad, a small town sixteen miles
from Delhi, founded in 1607 by Shaikh Farid, treasurer of Jahangir,
to protect the high road between Agra and Delhi.

3. The beds are dry in the cold season, but the streams, which flow
from the hills to the south of Delhi, are torrents in the rainy
season.

4. But the education in such schools is of very little value, being
commonly confined to the committing of the Koran to memory by boys
ignorant of Arabic.

5. In modern India the British buildings are far more varied, and
many aspire to some architectural merit.

6. Muhammad is said to have received these communications in all
situations; sometimes when riding along the road on his camel, he
became suddenly red in the face, and greatly agitated; he made his
camel sit down immediately, and called for some one to write. His
rhapsodies were all written at the time on leaves and thrown into a
box. Gabriel is believed to have made him repeat over the whole once
every year during the month of Ramazan. In the year he died Muhammad
told his followers that the angel had made him repeat them over twice
that year, and that he was sure he would not live to receive another
visit. [W. H. S.]

7. The Muhammadan year consists of twelve lunar months of 30 and 29
days alternately. The common year, therefore, consists of only 354
days. But, when intercalary days in certain years are allowed for,
the mean year consists of 354 11/30 days. Inasmuch as a solar year
consists of about 365 1/4 days, the difference amounts to nearly 11
days, and any given month in the Muhammadan year consequently goes
the round of the seasons in course of time.

8. The Muharram celebration takes its name from the first month of
the Muhammadan year, during which it takes place. Ali, the cousin of
Muhammad, was married to the prophet's daughter Fatima, and,
according to the Shia sect, must be regarded as the lawful successor
of Muhammad, who died in June, A.D. 632. But, as a matter of fact,
Omar, Abu Bakr, and Othman (Usman) in turn succeeded to the
Khalifate, and Ali did not take possession of the office till A.D.
655. After five and a half years' reign he was assassinated in
January, A.D. 661, and his son Hasan, who for a few months had held
the vacant office, was poisoned in A.D. 670. Husain, the younger son
of Ali, strove to assert his rights by force of arms, but was slain
on the tenth day of the month Muharram (10th October, A.D. 680) in a
great battle fought at Karbala near the Euphrates. These events are
commemorated yearly by noisy funeral processions. Properly, the
proceedings ought to be altogether mournful, and confined to the Shia
sect, but in practice, Sunni Muhammadans, and even Hindoos, take part
in the ceremonies, which are regarded by many of the populace as no
more solemn than a Lord Mayor's show.

9. The disgusting festival of the Holi, celebrated with drunkenness
and obscenity, takes place in March, and is supposed to be the
festival of the vernal equinox (see _ante_, chapter 27 note 16). The
magistrates in India have no duty which requires more tact,
discretion, and firmness than the regulation of conflicting religions
processions. The general disarmament of the people has rendered
collisions less dangerous and sanguinary than they used to be, but,
in spite of all precautions, they still occur occasionally. The total
prohibition of processions likely to cause collisions is, of course,
impracticable.

10. Ante chapter 15 text at [9].

11. Muslim daughters also succeed, each taking half the share of a
son.

12. _Tempora mutantur_. The land revenue, in the author's time, fully
preserved its character of rent, and obviously was not a tax. Later
legislation has obscured its real nature, and made it look like a
tax. When the author wrote, the only taxes levied were indirect ones,
as that on salt, which was paid unconsciously. The modern income-tax,
local rates, municipal taxation, and gun licences were all unknown.

13. The window tax was levied at varying rates from 1697 to 1851.

CHAPTER 67

The Old City of Delhi.

On the 21st we went on eight miles to the Kutb Minar, across the
range of sandstone hills, which rise to the height of about two
hundred feet, and run north and south. The rocks are for the most
part naked, but here and there the soil between them is covered with
_famished_ grass, and a few stunted shrubs; anything more
unprepossessing can hardly be conceived than the aspect of these
hills, which seem to serve no other purpose than to store up heat for
the people of the great city of Delhi. We passed through a cut in
this range of hills, made apparently by the stream of the river Jumna
at some remote period, and about one hundred yards wide at the
entrance. This cut is crossed by an enormous stone wall running north
and south, and intended to shut in the waters, and form a lake in the
opening beyond it. Along the brow of the precipice, overlooking the
northern end of the wall, is the stupendous fort of Tughlakabad,
built by the Emperor Tughlak the First[1] of the sandstones of the
range of hills on which it stands, cut into enormous square
blocks.[2]

On the brow of the opposite side of the precipice, overlooking the
southern end of the wall, stands the fort of Muhammadabad, built by
this Emperor's son and successor, Muhammad, and resembling in all
things that built by his father.[3] These fortresses overlooked the
lake, with the old city of Delhi spread out on the opposite side of
it to the west. There is a third fortress upon an isolated hill, east
of the great barrier wall, said to have been built in honour of his
master by the Emperor Tughlak's _barber_.[4] The Emperor's tomb
stands upon an isolated rock in the middle of the once lake, now
plain, about a mile to the west of the barrier wall. The rock is
connected with the western extremity of the northern fortress by a
causeway of twenty-five arches, and about one hundred and fifty yards
long. This is a fine tomb, and contains in a square centre room the
remains of the Emperor Tughlak, his wife, and his son. The tomb is
built of red sandstone, and surmounted by a dome of white marble. The
three graves inside are built of brick covered with stucco work. The
outer sides of the tomb slope slightly inwards from the base, in the
form of a pyramid; but the inner walls are, of course,
perpendicular.[5]

The impression left on the mind after going over these stupendous
fortifications is that the arts which contribute to the comforts and
elegancies of life must have been in a very rude state when they were
raised. Domestic architecture must have been wretched in the extreme.
The buildings are all of stone, and almost all without cement, and
seem to have been raised by giants, and for giants, whose arms were
against everybody, and everybody's arm against them. This was indeed
the state of the Pathan sovereigns in India--they were the creatures
of their armies; and their armies were also employed against the
people, who feared and detested them all.[6]

The Emperor Tughlak, on his return at the head of the army, which he
had led into Bengal to chastise some rebellious subjects, was met at
Afghanpur by his eldest son, Juna, whom he had left in the government
of the capital. The prince had in three days raised here a palace of
wood for a grand entertainment to do honour to his father's return;
and when the Emperor signified his wish to retire, all the courtiers
rushed out before him to be in attendance, and among the rest, Juna
himself. Five attendants only remained when the Emperor rose from his
seat, and at that moment the building fell in and crushed them and
their master. Juna had been sent at the head of an army into the
Deccan, where he collected immense wealth from the plunder of the
palaces of princes and the temples of their priests, the only places
in which much wealth was to be found in those days. This wealth he
tried to conceal from his father, whose death he probably thus
contrived, that he might the sooner have the free enjoyment of it
with unlimited power.[7]

Only thirty years before, Ala-ud-din, returning in the same manner at
the head of an army from the Deccan loaded with wealth, murdered the
Emperor Firoz the Second, the father of his wife, and ascended the
throne.[8] Juna ascended the throne under the name of Muhammad the
Third;[9] and, after the remains of his father had been deposited in
the tomb I have described, he passed in great pomp and splendour from
the fortress of Tughlakabad, which his father had just then
completed, to the city in which the Minar stands, with elephants
before and behind loaded with gold and silver coins, which were
scattered among the crowd, who everywhere hailed him with shouts of
joy. The roads were covered with flowers, the houses adorned with the
richest stuffs, and the streets resounded with music.

He was a man of great learning, and a great patron of learned men; he
was a great founder of churches, had prayers read in them at the
prescribed times, and always went to prayers five times a day
himself.[10] He was rigidly temperate himself in his habits, and
discouraged all intemperance in others. These things secured him
panegyrists throughout the empire during the twenty-seven years that
he reigned over it, though perhaps he was the most detestable tyrant
that ever filled a throne. He would take his armies out over the most
populous and peaceful districts, and hunt down the innocent and
unoffending people like wild beasts, and bring home their heads by
thousands to hang them on the city gates for his mere amusement. He
twice made the whole people of the city of Delhi emigrate with him to
Daulatabad in Southern India, which he wished to make the capital,
from some foolish fancy; and during the whole of his reign gave
evident signs of being in an unsound state of mind.[11] There was at
the time of his father's death a saint at Delhi named Nizamuddin
Aulia, or the Saint, who was supposed by supernatural means to have
driven from Delhi one night in a panic a large army of Moghals under
Tarmasharin, who invaded India from Transoxiana in 1303, and laid
close siege to the city of Delhi, in which the Emperor Ala-ud-din was
shut up without troops to defend himself, his armies being engaged in
Southern India.[12] It is very likely that he did strike this army
with a panic by getting some of their leaders assassinated in one
night. He was supposed to have the 'dast ul ghaib', or supernatural
purse' [literally, 'invisible hand'], as his private expenditure is
said to have been more lavish even than that of the Emperor himself,
while he had no ostensible source of income whatever. The Emperor was
either jealous of his influence and display, or suspected him of dark
crimes, and threatened to humble him when he returned to Delhi. As he
approached the city, the friends of the saint, knowing the resolute
spirit of the Emperor, urged him to quit the capital, as he had been
often heard to say, 'Let me but reach Delhi, and this proud priest
shall be humbled'.

The only reply that the saint would ever deign to give from the time
the imperial army left Bengal, till it was within one stage of the
capital, was '_Dihli dur ast_'; 'Delhi is still far off'. This is now
become a proverb over the East equivalent to our 'There is many a
slip between the cup and the lip'. It is probable that the saint had
some understanding with the son in his plans for the murder of his
father; it is possible that his numerous wandering disciples may in
reality have been murderers and robbers, and that he could at any
time have procured through them the assassination of the Emperor. The
Muhammadan Thugs, or assassins of India, certainly looked upon him as
one of the great founders of their system, and used to make
pilgrimages to his tomb as such; and, as he came originally from
Persia, and is considered by his greatest admirers to have been in
his youth a robber, it is not impossible that he may have been
originally one of the 'assassins', or disciples of the 'old man of
the mountains', and that he may have set up the system of Thuggee in
India and derived a great portion of his income from it.[13] Emperors
now prostrate themselves, and aspire to have their bones placed near
it [_scil._ the tomb]. While wandering about the ruins, I remarked to
one of the learned men of the place who attended us that it was
singular Tughlak's buildings should be so rude compared with those of
Iltutmish, who had reigned more than eighty years before him.[14]
'Not at all singular,' said he, 'was he not under the curse of the
holy saint Nizam-ud-din?' 'And what had the Emperor done to merit the
holy man's curse?' 'He had taken by force to employ upon his palaces
several of the masons whom the holy man was employing upon a church,'
said he.

The Kutb Minar was, I think, more beyond my expectations than the
Taj; first, because I had heard less of it; and secondly, because it
stands as it were alone in India--there is absolutely no other tower
in this Indian empire of ours.[15]

Large pillars have been cut out of single stones, and raised in
different parts of India to commemorate the conquests of Hindoo
princes, whose names no one was able to discover for several
centuries, till an unpretending English gentleman of surprising
talents and industry, Mr. James Prinsep, lately brought them to light
by mastering the obsolete characters in which they and their deeds
had been inscribed upon them.[16] These pillars would, however, be
utterly insignificant were they composed of many stones. The
knowledge that they are cut out of single stones, brought from a
distant mountain, and raised by the united efforts of multitudes when
the mechanical arts were in a rude state, makes us still view them
with admiration.[17] But the single majesty of this Minar of Kutb-ud-
din, so grandly conceived, so beautifully proportioned, so chastely
embellished, and so exquisitely finished, fills the mind of the
spectator with emotions of wonder and delight; without any such aid,
he feels that it is among the towers of the earth what the Taj is
among the tombs--something unique of its kind that must ever stand
alone in his recollections.[18]