Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by William Sleeman

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I visited the celebrated mosque known by the name of Jami (Jumma)
Masjid, a fine building raised by Shah Jahan, and finished in six
years, A.H. 1060, at a cost of ten lakhs of rupees or one hundred
thousand pounds. Money compared to man's labour and subsistence is
still four times more valuable in India than in England; and a
similar building in England would cost at least four hundred thousand
pounds. It is, like all the buildings raised by this Emperor, in the
best taste and style.[19] I was attended by three well-dressed and
modest Hindoos, and a Muhammadan servant of the Emperor. My attention
was so much taken up with the edifice that I did not perceive, till I
was about to return, that the doorkeepers had stopped my three
Hindoos. I found that they had offered to leave their shoes behind,
and submit to anything to be permitted to follow me; but the porters
had, they said, strict orders to admit no worshippers of idols; for
their master was a man of the book, and had, therefore, got a little
of the truth in him, though unhappily not much, since his heart had
not been opened to that of the Koran. Nathu could have told him that
he also had a book, which he and some fourscore millions more thought
as good as his or better; but he was afraid to descant upon the
merits of his 'shastras', and the miracles of Kishan Ji [Krishna],
among such fierce, cut-throat-looking people; he looked, however, as
if he could have eaten the porter, Koran and all, when I came to
their rescue. The only volumes which Muhammadans designate by the
name of the book are the Old and New Testaments, and the Koran.

I visited also the palace, which was built by the same Emperor. It
stands on the right bank of the Jumna, and occupies a quadrangle
surrounded by a high wall built of red sandstone, about one mile in
circumference; one side looks down into the clear stream of the
Jumna, while the others are surrounded by the streets of the
city.[20] The entrance is by a noble gateway to the west;[21] and
facing this gateway on the inside, a hundred and twenty yards
distant, is the Diwan-i-Amm, or the common hall of audience. This is
a large hall, the roof of which is supported upon four colonnades of
pillars of red sandstone, now white-washed, but once covered with
stucco work and gilded. On one of these pillars is shown the mark of
the dagger of a Hindoo prince of Chitor, who, in the presence of the
Emperor, stabbed to the heart one of the Muhammadan ministers who
made use of some disrespectful language towards him. On being asked
how he presumed to do this in the presence of his sovereign he
answered in the very words almost of Roderic Dhu,

I right my wrongs where they are given,
Though it were in the court of Heaven.[22]

The throne projects into the hall from the back in front of the large
central arch; it is raised ten feet above the floor, and is about ten
feet wide, and covered by a marble canopy, all beautifully inlaid
with mosaic work exquisitely finished, but now much dilapidated. The
room or recess in which the throne stands is open to the front, and
about fifteen feet wide and six deep. There is a door at the back by
which the Emperor entered from his private apartments, and one on his
left, from which his prime minister or chief officer of state
approached the throne by a flight of steps leading into the hall. In
front of the throne, and raised some three feet above the floor, is a
fine large slab of white marble, on which one of the secretaries
stood during the hours of audience to hand up to the throne any
petitions that were presented, and to receive and convey commands. As
the people approached over the intervening one hundred and twenty
yards between the gateway and the hall of audience they were made to
bow down lower and lower to the figure of the Emperor, as he sat upon
his throne, without deigning to show by any motion of limb or muscle
that he was really made of flesh and blood, and not cut out of the
marble he sat upon.

The marble walls on three sides of this recess are inlaid with
precious stones representing some of the most beautiful birds and
flowers of India, according to the boundaries of the country when
Shah Jahan built this palace, which included Kabul and Kashmir,
afterwards severed from it on the invasion of Nadir Shah.[23]

On the upper part of the back wall is represented, in the same
precious stones, and in a graceful attitude, a European in a kind of
Spanish costume, playing upon his guitar, and in the character of
Orpheus charming the birds and beasts which he first taught the
people of India so well to represent in this manner. This I have no
doubt was intended by Austin de Bordeaux for himself. The man from
Shiraz, Amanat Khan, who designed all the noble Tughra characters in
which the passages from the Koran are inscribed upon different parts
of the Taj at Agra, was permitted to place his own name in the same
bold characters on the right-hand side as we enter the tomb of the
Emperor and his queen. It is inscribed after the date, thus, A.H.
1048 [A.D. 1638-9], 'The humble fakir Amanat Khan of Shiraz.' Austin
was a still greater favourite than Amanat Khan; and the Emperor Shah
Jahan, no doubt, readily acceded to his wishes to have himself
represented in what appeared to him and his courtiers so beautiful a
picture.[24]

The Diwan-i-Khas, or hall of private audience, is a much more
splendid building than the other from its richer materials, being all
built of white marble beautifully ornamented. The roof is supported
upon colonnades of marble pillars. The throne stands in the centre of
this hall, and is ascended by steps, and covered by a canopy, with
four artificial peacocks on the four corners.[25] Here, thought I, as
I entered this apartment, sat Aurangzeb when he ordered the
assassination of his brothers Dara and Murad, and the imprisonment
and destruction by slow poison of his son Muhammad, who had so often
fought bravely by his side in battle. Here also, but a few months
before, sat the great Shah Jahan to receive the insolent commands of
this same grandson Muhammad when flushed with victory, and to offer
him the throne, merely to disappoint the hopes of the youth's father,
Aurangzeb. Here stood in chains the graceful Sulaiman, to receive his
sentence of death by slow poison with his poor young brother Sipihr
Shikoh, who had shared all his father's toils and dangers, and
witnessed his brutal murder.[26] Here sat Muhammad Shah, bandying
compliments with his ferocious conqueror, Nadir Shah, who had
destroyed his armies, plundered his treasury, stripped his throne,
and ordered the murder of a hundred thousand of the helpless
inhabitants of his capital, men, women, and children, in a general
massacre. The bodies of these people lay in the streets tainting the
air, while the two sovereigns sat here sipping their coffee, and
swearing to the most deliberate lies in the name of their God,
Prophet, and Koran;--all are now dust; that of the oppressor
undistinguishable from that of the oppressed.[27]

Within this apartment and over the side arches at one end is
inscribed in black letters the celebrated couplet, 'If there be a
paradise on the face of the earth, it is this--it is this--it is
this.[28] Anything more unlike paradise than this place now is can
hardly be conceived. Here are crowded together twelve hundred _kings_
and _queens_ (for all the descendants of the Emperors assume the
title of Salatin, the plural of Sultan) literally eating each other
up.[29]

Government, from motives of benevolence, has here attempted to
apportion out the pension they assign to the Emperor, to the
different members of his great family circle who are to be subsisted
upon it, instead of leaving it to his own discretion. This has
perhaps tended to prevent the family from throwing off its useless
members to mix with the common herd, and to make the population press
against the means of subsistence within these walls. Kings and queens
of the house of Timur are to be found lying about in scores, like
broods of vermin, without food to eat or clothes to cover their
nakedness. It has been proposed by some to establish colleges for
them in the palace to fit them by education for high offices under
our Government. Were this done, this pensioned family, which never
can possibly feel well affected towards our Government or any
Government but their own, would alone send out men enough to fill all
the civil offices open to the natives of the country, to the
exclusion of the members of the humbler but better affected families
of Muhammadans and Hindoos. If they obtained the offices they would
be educated for, the evil to Government and to society would be very
great; and if they did not get them, the evil would be great to
themselves, since they would be encouraged to entertain hopes that
could not be realized. Better let them shift for themselves and
quietly sink among the crowd. They would only become rallying points
for the dissatisfaction and multiplied sources of disaffection;
everywhere doing mischief, and nowhere doing good. Let loose upon
society, they everywhere disgust people by their insolence and
knavery, against which we are every day required to protect the
people by our interference; the prestige of their name will by
degrees diminish, and they will sink by and by into utter
insignificance. During his stay at Jubbulpore, Kambaksh, the nephew
of the Emperor, whom I have already mentioned as the most sensible
member of the family,[30] did an infinite deal of good by cheating
almost all the tradesmen of the town. Till he came down among them
with all his ragamuffins from Delhi, men thought the Padshahs and
their progeny must be something superhuman, something not to be
spoken of, much less approached, without reverence. During the latter
part of his stay my court was crowded with complaints; and no one has
ever since heard a scion of the house of Timur spoken of but as a
thing to be avoided--a person more prone than others to take in his
neighbours. One of these _kings_, who has not more than ten shillings
a month to subsist himself and family upon, will, in writing to the
representative of the British Government, address him as 'Fidwi
Khas', 'Your particular slave'; and be addressed in reply with 'Your
majesty's commands have been received by your slave.'[31]

I visited the college which is in the mausoleum of Ghazi-ud-din, a
fine building, with its usual accompaniment of a mosque and a
college. The slab that covers the grave, and the marble screens that
surround the ground that contains it, are amongst the most richly cut
things that I have seen. The learned and pious Muhammadans in the
institution told me in my morning visit that there should always be a
small hollow in the top of marble slabs, like that on Jahanara's,
whenever any of them were placed over graves, in order to admit
water, earth, and grass; but that, strictly speaking, no slab should
be allowed to cover the grave, as it could not fail to be in the way
of the dead when summoned to get up by the trumpet of Azrail on the
day of the resurrection.'[32] 'Earthly pride,' said they, 'has
violated this rule; and now everybody that can afford it gets a
marble slab put over his grave. But it is not only in this that men
have been falling off from the letter and spirit of the law; for we
now hear drums beating and trumpets sounding even among the tombs of
the saints, a thing that our forefathers would not have considered
possible. In former days it was only a prophet like Moses, Jesus, or
Muhammad, that was suffered to have a stone placed over his head.' I
asked them how it was that the people crowded to the tombs of their
saints, as I saw them at that of Kutb Shah in old Delhi, on the
Basant, a Hindoo festival. 'It only shows,' said they 'that the end
of the world is approaching. Are we not divided into seventy-two
sects among ourselves, all falling off into Hinduism, and every day
committing greater and greater follies? These are the manifest signs
long ago pointed out by wise and holy men as indicating the approach
of the _last day_.'[33]

A man might make a curious book out of the indications of the end of
the world according to the notions of different people or different
individuals. The Hindoos have had many different worlds or ages; and
the change from the good to the bad, or the golden to the iron age,
is considered to have been indicated by a thousand curious
incidents.[34] I one day asked an old Hindoo priest, a very worthy
man, what made the five heroes of the Mahabharata, the demigod
brothers of Indian story, leave the plains and bury themselves no one
knew where, in the eternal snows of the Himalaya mountains. 'Why,
sir,' said he, 'there is no question about that. Yudhisthira, the
eldest, who reigned quietly at Delhi after the long war, one day sat
down to dinner with his four brothers and their single wife,
Draupadi; for you know, sir, they had only one among them all. The
king said grace and the covers were removed, when, to their utter
consternation, a full-grown fly was seen seated upon the dish of rice
that stood before his majesty. Yudhisthira rose in consternation.
'When flies begin to blow upon men's dinners,' said his majesty, 'you
may be sure, my brothers, that the end of the world is near--the
golden age is gone--the iron one has commenced, and we must all be
off; the plains of India are no longer a fit abode for gentlemen.'
Without taking one morsel of food,' added the priest, 'they set out,
and were never after seen or heard of. They were, however, traced by
manifest supernatural signs up through the valley of the Ganges to
the snow tops of the Himalaya, in which they no doubt left their
mortal coils.' They seem to feel a singular attachment for the
birthplace of their great progenitrix, for no place in the world is,
I suppose, more infested by them than Delhi, at present; and there a
dish of rice without a fly would, in the iron, be as rare a thing as
a dish with one in the golden, age.

Muhammadans in India sigh for the restoration of the old Muhammadan
regime, not from any particular attachment to the descendants of
Timur, but with precisely the same feelings that Whigs and Tories
sigh for the return to power of their respective parties in England;
it would give them all the offices in a country where office is
everything. Among them, as among ourselves, every man is disposed to
rate his own abilities highly, and to have a good deal of confidence
in his own good luck; and all think that if the field were once
opened to them by such a change, they should very soon be able to
find good places for themselves and their children in it. Perhaps
there are few communities in the world among whom education is more
generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India. He who holds an
office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an
education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn, through the
medium of the Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our
colleges learn through those of the Greek and Latin--that is,
grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the
young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled
with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the
young man raw from Oxford--he will talk as fluently about Socrates
and Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna: (_alias_
Sokrat, Aristotalis, Aflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus, and Bu Ali Sena); and,
what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has
learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through
life.[35] He therefore thinks himself as well fitted to fill the high
offices which are now filled exclusively by Europeans, and naturally
enough wishes the establishments of that power would open them to
him. On the faculties and operations of the human mind, on man's
passions and affections, and his duties in all relations of life, the
works of Imam Muhammad Ghazali[36] and Nasir-ud-din Tusi[37] hardly
yield to those of Plato and Aristotle, or to those of any other
authors who have written on the same subjects in any country. These
works, the _Ihya-ul-ulum_, epitomized into the _Kimia-i-Saadat_, and
the _Akhlak-i-Nasiri_, with the didactic poems of Sadi,[38] are the
great 'Pierian spring' of moral instruction from which the Muhammadan
delights to 'drink deep' from infancy to old age; and a better spring
it would be difficult to find in the works of any other three men.

It is not only the desire for office that makes the educated
Muhammadans cherish the recollection of the old regime in Hindustan:
they say, 'We pray every night for the Emperor and his family,
because our forefathers ate the salt of his forefathers'; that is,
our ancestors were in the service of his ancestors; and,
consequently, were the _aristocracy_ of the country. Whether they
really were so matters not; they persuade themselves or their
children that they were. This is a very common and a very innocent
sort of vanity. We often find Englishmen in India, and I suppose in
all the rest of our foreign settlements, sporting high Tory opinions
and feelings, merely with a view to have it supposed that their
families are, or at some time were, among the aristocracy of the
land. To express a wish for Conservative predominance is the same
thing with them as to express a wish for the promotion in the Army,
Navy, or Church of some of their near relations; and thus to indicate
that they are among the privileged class whose wishes the Tories
would be obliged to consult were they in power.[39]

Man is indeed 'fearfully and wonderfully made'; to be fitted himself
for action in the world, or for directing ably the actions of others,
it is indispensably necessary that he should mix freely from his
youth up with his fellow men. I have elsewhere mentioned that the
state of imbecility to which a man of naturally average powers of
intellect may be reduced when brought up with his mother in the
seraglio is inconceivable to those who have not had opportunities of
observing it.[40] The poor old Emperor of Delhi, to whom so many
millions look up, is an instance. A more venerable-looking man it is
difficult to conceive, and had he been educated and brought up with
his fellow men, he would no doubt have had a mind worthy of his
person.[41] As it is, he has never been anything but a baby. Raja
Jivan Ram, an excellent portrait painter, and a very honest and
agreeable person, was lately employed to take the Emperor's portrait.
After the first few sittings, the portrait was taken into the
seraglio to the ladies. The next time he came, the Emperor requested
him to remove the great _blotch from under the nose_. 'May it please
your majesty, it is impossible to draw any person without _a shadow_;
and I hope many millions will long continue to repose under that of
your majesty.' 'True, Raja,' said his majesty, 'men must have
shadows; but there is surely no necessity for placing them
immediately under their noses. The ladies will not allow mine to be
put there; they say it looks as if I had been taking snuff all my
life, and it certainly has a most filthy appearance; besides, it is
all awry, as I told you when you began upon it.' The Raja was obliged
to remove from under the imperial, and certainly very noble, nose,
the shadow which he had thought worth all the rest of the picture.
Queen Elizabeth is said, by an edict, to have commanded all artists
who should paint her likeness, 'to place her in a garden with a full
light upon her, and the painter to put _any shadow_ in her face at
his peril'. The next time the Raja came, the Emperor took the
opportunity of consulting him upon a subject that had given him a
good deal of anxiety for many months, the dismissal of one of his
personal servants who had become negligent and disrespectful. He
first took care that no one should be within hearing, and then
whispered in the artist's ear that he wished to dismiss this man. The
Raja said carelessly, as he looked from the imperial head to the
canvas, 'Why does your majesty not discharge the man if he displeases
you?'

'Why do I not discharge him? I wish to do so, of course, and have
wished to do so for many months, but _kuchh tadbir chahiye_, some
plan of operations must be devised.' 'If your majesty dislikes the
man, you have only to order him outside the gates of the palace, and
you are relieved from his presence at once.' 'True, man, I am
relieved from his presence, but his enchantments may still reach me;
it is them that I most dread--he keeps me in a continual state of
alarm; and I would give anything to get him away in a good humour.'

When the Raja return to Meerut, he received a visit from one of the
Emperor's sons or nephews, who wanted to see the place. His tents
were pitched upon the plain not far from the theatre; he arrived in
the evening, and there happened to be a play that night. Several
times during the night he got a message from the prince to say that
the ground near his tents was haunted by all manner of devils. The
Raja sent to assure him that this could not possibly be the case. At
last a man came about midnight to say that the prince could stand it
no longer, and had given orders to prepare for his immediate return
to Delhi; for the devils were increasing so rapidly that they must
all be inevitably devoured before daybreak if they remained. The Raja
now went to the prince's camp, here he found him and his followers in
a state of utter consternation, looking towards the theatre. The last
carriages were leaving the theatre, and going across the plain; and
these silly people had taken them all for devils.[42]

The present pensioned imperial family f Delhi are commonly considered
to be of the house of Timur lang (the Lame), because Babur, the real
founder of the dynasty, was descended from him in the seventh
stage.[43] Timur merely made a predatory inroad into India, to kill a
few million of unbelievers,[44] plunder the country of all the
movable valuables he and his soldiers could collect, and take back
into slavery all the best artificers of all kinds that they could lay
their hands upon. He left no one to represent him in India, he
claimed no sovereignty, and founded no dynasty there. There is no
doubt much in the prestige of a name; and though six generations had
passed away, the people of Northern India still trembled at that of
the lame monster. Babur wished to impress upon the minds of the
people the notion that he had at his back the same army of demons
that Timur had commanded; and be boasted his descent from him for the
same motive that Alexander boasted his from the horned and cloven-
footed god of the Egyptian desert, as something to sanctify all
enterprises, justify the use of all means, and carry before him the
belief in his invincibility.

Babur was an admirable chief--a fit founder of a great dynasty--a
very proper object for the imagination of future generations to dwell
upon, though not quite so good as his grandson, the great Akbar.
Timur was a ferocious monster, who knew how to organize and command
the set of demons who composed his army, and how best to direct them
for the destruction of the civilized portion of mankind and their
works; but who knew nothing else.[45] In his invasion of India he
caused the people of the towns and villages through which he passed
to be all massacred without regard to religion, age, or sex. If the
soldiers in the town resisted, the people were all murdered because
they did so; if they did not, the people were considered to have
forfeited their lives to the conquerors for being conquered; and told
to purchase them by the surrender of all their property, the value of
which was estimated by commissaries appointed for the purpose. The
price was always more than they could pay; and after torturing a
certain number to death in the attempt to screw the sum out of them,
the troops were let in to murder the rest; so that no city, town, or
village escaped; and the very grain collected for the army, over and
above what they could consume at any stage, was burned, lest it might
relieve some hungry infidel of the country who had escaped from the
general carnage.

All the soldiers, high and low, were murdered when taken prisoners,
as a matter of course; but the officers and soldiers of Timur's army,
after taking all the valuable movables, thought they might be able to
find a market for the artificers by whom they were made, and for
their families; and they collected together an immense number of men,
women, and children. All who asked for mercy pretended to be able to
make something that these Tartars had taken a liking to. On coming
before Delhi, Timur's army encamped on the opposite or left bank of
the river Jumna; and here he learned that his soldiers had collected
together above one hundred thousand of these artificers, besides
their women and children. There were no soldiers among them; but
Timur thought it might be troublesome either to keep them or to turn
them away without their women and children; and still more so to make
his soldiers send away these women and children immediately. He asked
whether the prisoners were not for the most part unbelievers in his
prophet Muhammad; and being told that the majority were Hindoos, he
gave orders that every man should be put to death; and that any
officer or soldier who refused to kill or have killed all such men,
should suffer death. 'As soon as this order was made known,' says
Timur's historian and great eulogist, 'the officers and soldiers
began to put it in execution; and, in less than one hour, one hundred
thousand prisoners, according to the smallest computation, were put
to death and their bodies thrown into the river Jumna. Among the
rest, Mulana Nasir-ud-din Amr, one of the most venerable doctors of
the court, who would never consent so much as to kill a single sheep,
was constrained to order fifteen slaves, whom he had in his tents, to
be slain. Timur then gave orders that one-tenth of his soldiers
should keep watch over the Indian women, children, and camels taken
in the pillage.'[46]