Читать книгу: «Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine – Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844», страница 8

COLONEL DAVIDSON'S TRAVELS IN INDIA.⁵

The appearance of this work was heralded some three months since, as divers of our readers may possibly remember, by a species of puff-preliminary, for which even the annals of Great Marlborough Street afforded no precedent—being nothing less than the appearance of Mr Colburn, in propriâ personâ, at the bar of the police-office adjoining his premises, to answer the complaint of the gallant and irate author for what he was pleased to consider the unwarrantable detention of the MS. from which his narrative had been printed. It was alleged, in extenuation, that "the gallant colonel's MS. was so nearly undecipherable, that Mr Colburn had been put to considerable expense in revising the press;"—and a mysterious and curiosity-provoking hint was further thrown out, that "it was the custom of the trade, that, until a work was published, the MS. should not be parted with by the publisher, as it might turn out that some part of it was libellous, and in such case the publisher must produce the MS." In the end the gallant colonel (whom the newspaper reports described as "very much excited,") took nothing by his motion in regard to the recovery of the MS.; but though in this respect he may have been somewhat scurvily treated, we cannot equally sympathize with his complaints of the work not having been duly advertised; for surely all the little "neatly turned paragraphs" that ever proceeded from Mr Colburn's laboratory, could not have been so effectual as the method struck out by the impromptu genius of the colonel himself, in intimating to the public that something quite out of the common way might be expected from the forthcoming production thus brought before its notice.

And verily those who have been prepared for a queer volume, will not be disappointed in the diary of our choleric and corpulent colonel. If ever the assurance, which seems to be regarded as indispensable in the preface to works of this class, that the author "wrote the following pages purely for his own amusement," bore the stamp of unequivocal truth, it is in the present instance; and, notwithstanding the asseverations of Mr Colburn and his literary employés, it is difficult to conceive that any revision whatever can have been bestowed on the rough notes of the writer, since they were first hastily committed to paper amidst the scenes which they describe. The style is as rambling and unconnected as the incidents to which it refers; but wherever the author's devious footsteps lead us, from the jungles of Bundelcund to the holy ghâts of Hurdwar, the principal figure is always that of the colonel himself, who, in the portly magnificence of twenty stone minus two pounds, fills up the whole foreground with himself and his accessories of servants, elephant, stud, Nagoree cows, and other component parts of the suwarree or suite of a Qui-hye, who can afford to make himself comfortable after the fashion of the country. The quantity (sometimes not trifling) and quality of his meals, the consequent state of his digestion, and his endless rows on the score of accommodations and forage with thannadars, darogahs, kutwals, and all the other designations for Hindoo and Hindoostani jacks-in-office, (for to Feringhi society he appears to have been not very partial,) may doubtless have been points of peculiar interest to the colonel himself, but are not likely to engage the attention of the world in general, and had better have been omitted in the revision of the diary, instead of being chronicled, as they are on all occasions, with wearisome minuteness of detail. But with all these drawbacks, a man who, as he says of himself, "has dwelt in India twenty-five years, and traversed it from the snowy range to Bombay on the west, must have seen something of the country, and may be supposed to know something of the natives"—among whom, by the way, he seems to have mingled more familiarly than most Feringhis; and in spite of all the egotism and rigmarole with which his pages abound, the rambles of this "stout gentleman" through Upper India, and some other parts of the country not much visited by Europeans, present us with a good deal of plain sense and sterling matter, viewed, it is true, with the eccentric eye of a humorist, and frequently couched in very odd phraseology; but not the less true on that account. His opinions on all men and all things are expressed with the same honesty and candour with which he narrates the various scrapes in which he was involved, while pushing right a-head like an elephant through a jungle;—and though laughing at him quite as often as with him, we have found the colonel, on the whole, far from an unpleasant travelling companion.

Bareilly, on the fronters of Oude and Rohilcund, was the colonel's starting-point;—and thence on St Patrick's day⁶ he set forward for Hurdwar, at the head of a retinue, the members of which, both quadruped and biped, he enumerates seriatim, giving the pas to the former—a precedence perhaps well merited by steeds up to such a welter weight under the climate of India, over such a set of unredeemed and thriftless knaves as he describes his native attendants. Accordingly, he gives the names and pedigrees of the whole stud, from "the buggy mare Maiden-head and my wicked little favourite Fish-Guts," up to "my favourite brood-mare Fair Amelia, purchased at a prize sale on the frontier, and bred by the king of Bokhara, with his royal stamp on her near flank—stands nearly fifteen and a half hands high, with magnificent action and great show of blood—had, when taken, four gold rings in her nostrils, now removed and replaced by silver, which will be stolen by her groom one by one." His first day's march was to Futtehgunge, ("the mart of victory," being the scene of the memorable battle in 1774, in which the English, as the bought allies of the Nawab Shoojah-ed-dowlah, defeated and slew the gallant Rohilla chief, Hafez-Rehmut;) and here he oracularly announced a discovery in gastronomy, of which it would be unpardonable not to give our readers the benefit. "I used my farourite condiment, tomata sauce, with my beef; and to all who are ignorant of this delicious vegetable I may venture to recommend its sauce, as at once both wholesome and savoury, if eaten with anything but cranberry tart or apple pie!" It is melancholy to reflect how often the best efforts of genius are anticipated and rendered of no avail. The colonel, when he penned this sentence with a heart overflowing with Epicurean philanthropy, was evidently unconscious that "chops and tomata sauce" were already familiar to the British public from the immortal researches of Mr Pickwick!

Rampore, in the territory of which the colonel now found himself, is still a semi-independent state, the Nawab of which has a revenue of sixteen lacs of rupees, (£160,000,) while the city, being without the pale of English law, is "a city of refuge, a very Goshen of robbers, … the streets are crowded with a mob of very handsome, idle, lounging fellows, having generally the fullest and finest jet-black beards and black mustaches in the world. Many of these were handsomely dressed, and many (which struck me as a very curious fact) appeared clean!" These were the Pathans and Rohillas, partly descended from the original Moslem conquerors of India, and partly from those who have more recently migrated from Affghanistan and the adjoining countries. The most athletic and warlike race among the Indian Mahommedans, and too proud of their blood to exercise any profession but that of arms, they are found in every town throughout Upper India, swaggering about with sword, shield, and matchlock, in the retinues of the native princes, and ready to join any enterprise, or flock to the standard of any invader, through whose means any prospect is afforded of shaking off the Feringhi yoke, and resuming their ancient predominance in the country which their forefathers won by their swords from the idolaters. "They hate us with the most intense bitterness, and can any one be surprised at it? We have taken their broad lands foot by foot." Few if any of these turbulent spirits are found in our European regular native army; their dislike to the cumbrous accoutrements and awkward European saddles operating equally, perhaps, with the severity of the drill and discipline to deter them; but they form the strength of the various corps of irregular horse—a force which, of late years, has most judiciously been greatly increased in numbers, and the uniform dashing bravery of which in the field, strongly contrasts with the misconduct of one at least of the regular native cavalry regiments in the late Affghan war. "I have seen," (says the colonel,) "a lineal descendant of Pathan Nawab's serving in the ranks of Hearsay's horse, as a common trooper on twenty rupees a-month, out of which he had merely to buy and feed his horse, procure clothes, arms, and harness, and sustain his hereditary dignity! By his commander and his fellow-soldiers he was always addressed by his title of Nawab Sahib!"

The small-pox was committing dreadful ravages in Rampore and its neighbourhood; and though vaccination was performed gratis at Bareilly, the fatalist prejudices of the natives, even of those of rank and education, prevented them from availing themselves of the boon. All the instances of the colonel, in behalf of a charming little girl, four years old, whose mother and sister had already taken the infection, could get from her father nothing more than a promise "to think of it! If it's her fate–" said he. "'You fool!' said I, in my civil way," (and the colonel's brusquerie was here, at least, not misplaced,) "'if a man throws himself into the fire or a well, or in the path of a tiger, is he without blame?'" Such apathy seems almost unaccountable to English minds; but it may find a parallel in Lady Chatterton's story of the Irish parents, ⁷ who, after refusing to spend fourpence in nourishment for a dying child, came in deep grief after its death to their employer, to solicit an advance of thirty shillings to wake the corpse! Perhaps some ingenious systematists might hence deduce a fresh argument in favour of the alleged oriental origin of the Irish.

The colonel's next stage was to Moradabad, another Pathan city, but under the raj of the Company, where, in a visit to a native original, named Meer Mahommed, he was greatly delighted by his new friend's introduction of the English word swap into a sentence of Hindoostani. And on the 25th he reached Dhampore, where the welcome proclamation, "that the new moon had been seen," terminated the fast of the Ramazan, to the uncontrollable joy of the Mussulmans, who would have been subjected to another day's abstinence if it had not been perceived till the succeeding evening. The colonel, however, slyly remarks, that "it was very odd that the Hindoos could not see the new moon," and hints that their imperfection of vision was shared by himself, but it was otherwise decided by the Faithful; and he proceeded, amid the noisy rejoicings of the Moslem feast of Bukra-Eed, (called by the Turks Bairam,) by Najeena, the Birmingham of Upper India, to Nujeebabad. Here resided, on a pension of 60,000 rupees (£6000) a-year from the English government, the Nawab Gholam-ed-deen, better known by the nickname of Bumbo Khan, a brother of the once famous Rohilla chief Gholam-Khadir. Though past eighty years of age, and weighing upwards of twenty stone, he had not lost, any more than the equiponderant colonel, his taste for the good things of this world; and our traveller, on partaking of the Nawab's hospitality, records with infinite zest the glories of a peculiar preparation of lamb, called nargus, or the narcissus. But, alas! the reminiscences of the nargus were less grateful than the fruition, and the remorse of the colonel's guilty stomach (as poor Theodore Hooke, or some one else, used to call indigestion) continued to afflict him all the way to Hurdwar; and may probably account, by the consequent irritation of his temper, for various squabbles in which he was involved on the route.

The great fair of Hurdwar was in full swing at the colonel's arrival, with its vast concourse of Hindoo devotees from all parts of India, to whom it is in itself a spot of peculiar sanctity, besides lying in the way to the shrine of Gungotree, (the source of the Ganges,) in the Himmalaya—its crowds of merchants and adventurers of all sorts, even from Uzbek Tartary and the remote regions of Central Asia—Seiks by thousands from the Punjab, with their families—Affghan and Persian horse-dealers—and numerous grandees, both of the Hindoo and Moslem faith, who repair hither as to a scene of gaiety and general resort. The colonel found quarters in the tent of a friend employed in the purchase of horses for government, and seems to have entered with all his heart into the humours of the scene; his description of which, and of the varied characteristics of the motley groups composing the half million of human beings present, is one of the most graphic and picturesque sketches in his work. "Huge heaps of assafoetida, in bags, from the mountains beyond Cabool—tons of raisins of various sorts—almonds, pistachio nuts, sheep with four or five horns—Balkh⁸ cats, with long silken hair; of singular beauty—faqueers begging, and abusing the uncharitable with the grossest and most filthy language—long strings of elderly ladies, proceeding in a chant to the priests of the Lingam, to bargain for bodily issue—Ghât priests presenting their books for the presents and signatures of the European visitors—groups of Hindoos surrounding a Bramin, who gives each of them a certificate of his having performed the pilgrimage"—such are a few of the component parts of the scene; but the colonel's attention seems to have been principally fixed upon the horses, and the tricks of the dulals or brokers, to whom the purchase is generally confided, it being almost hopeless for an European to make a personal bargain with a native dealer. But among the greatest curiosities in this way were some tortoiseshell ponies—for we can call them nothing else—a peculiar race from Uzbek Tartary, which we never remember to have heard of before. "They were under thirteen hands high, and the most curious compound of colours and marks that can be imagined. Suppose the animal pure, snowy white; cover the white with large, irregular, light bay spots through which the white is visible; in the middle of these light bay let there be dark bay marbled spots; at every six or eight inches plant rhomboidal patches of a very dark iron-grey; then sprinkle the whole with dark flea-bites! There's a phooldar, ( flower-market,) as they call them;" and we agree with the colonel that such an animal would be a fortune at Bartlemy fair.

Among the distinguished visitors to Hurdwar at this season of festivity was the noted Begum Sombre, or Sumroo, whose face the colonel compares to that of an old Scotch highlander, and her person to a sackful of shawls, and who declared "that the Duke of Wellington must be at heart a Catholic, because he emancipated the Catholics!" He also renewed his gastronomic friendship with his friend Bumbo Khan, with whom the recollections of past indigestion did not prevent him from feasting on mahaseer, a delicious fish found in this part of the Ganges; and on this occasion his Apician ecstasies are not alloyed by subsequent regrets—"even now the recollection soothes me"—and he recommends such of his readers as are yet ignorant of this luxury to start forthwith for Hurdwar and repair the omission. The fair ended April 13; and the colonel having previously succeeded in disposing of his buggy to a potentate whom he calls "the Kheerea Thunnasir Rajah," (we believe, the ruler of one of the Seik protected states,) and buying a stout Turcomani pony for the hills, started the same day on the road to Suharunpoor. He favours his readers, en passant, with some exceedingly original speculations touching the Mosaic deluge, in reference to the hills about Hurdwar, which do not speak very highly for his attainments in geology, though in some other branches of natural history, and particularly in botany, he appears to be no mean proficient. The journey was disturbed by attempts to steal the colonel's new purchase, (which was not, like the rest of the stud, distinguished from the horses of the country by having its tail cut,) and by a quarrel at Secunderpore with a thannadar, or native police magistrate, whose European superior's neglect of the colonel's complaint he charitably attributes to "some (I hope slight) derangement of the stomach." At Suharunpore he visited the well-known botanist Dr Royle, the curator of the Company's botanic garden there, then engaged in those labours on the Flora of the Himmalayas which have been since given to the world; and at Boorea, leaving the British territory, he entered that of the protected Seik states, whose petty chieftains are secured in their semi-independence by the treaty with Runjeet in 1809, which confined the ruler of Lahore to the right bank of the Sutlej. But their reception of the colonel did not appear to indicate any great degree of gratitude for these favours to the British nation, as represented in his person; for not one of the five Seik chiefs, "each of whom has his own snug little fort close to the city," would supply him with a lodging; and it was only by perseverance and ingenuity that he secured a place to lay his head, after long wrangling with the subordinate functionaries. Matters improved, however, as he advanced further into the country; and, at the little mountain-city of Nahun, he was most hospitably received and entertained by the young rajah, Futteh Pur Grass Sing, "who had been educated almost entirely under the kind and fatherly superintendence of Captain Murray," the commissioner of the Seik states, and whose frank and gentlemanlike manners, "so unlike those of the ghee-fed wretches of the plains," did honour to his guardian's precepts. The town of Nahun, which is 3600 feet above the level of the sea, is described as clean and well paved; and the rajah, whose revenue had been increased under the management of Captain Murray from 37,000 to 53,000 rupees, was highly popular, and by the colonel's account deservedly so, with his subjects. He earnestly pressed "the fat gentleman" (whose caution in mounting an elephant, while two men on the other side of the howdah balanced his weight, vehemently excited his risibility) to return to the plains through Nahun, and have a month's shooting with him in the valley; but whether the invitation was accepted or not remains untold, as—"Alas for the literature of the age! when I was ordered to Bundelcund, a vile thief entered my tents at night, and robbed me of my second volume; and thus did I lose my carefully written account of the sub-Himmalayan range, which cost me fully eight months' labour."

Thus abruptly terminates the first part of the colonel's travels, and at the commencement of the second we find him crossing the Jumna to Calpee, the frontier town of Bundelcund, a wild and unsettled province, prolific in Thugs and bad characters of all sorts, and principally inhabited by a peculiar race called Bundelas, who have never been perfectly reconciled to the British supremacy, and who, at this present writing, are kept quiet only by the presence of a force of 15,000 men. Calpee is said to be the hottest place in India, the thermometer in June, according to the colonel, standing even on a cloudy day at 145 degrees—a degree of heat almost incredible; and it is also the principal mart for the cotton, which the rich black soil of Bundelcund produces of finer quality than any other part of Hindostan. But, notwithstanding its commercial inportance, the town was at this time left to the government of a native Darogah or chief of police, the nearest European courts being at Hameerpore, thirty miles distant, and the state of society seems to have been somewhat singular. Among its most conspicuous members is "Gopal, the celebrated robber, murderer, and smuggler, a tall athletic man about forty-two years of age, with a most hideous muddy eye, having the glare of hell itself. It is said that he has always fifteen servants in stated pay, and can in a few hours command the services of three hundred armed and desperate men; and the strength and vigour of the Calpee police may be estimated by the fact, that he has been known to walk into the house of a rich merchant in the centre of the town, when he was surrounded by his servants and family; he has very coolly selected the gold bangles of his children, and silenced the trembling remonstrances of the Mahajun by threats of vengeance; nor is this a solitary instance. When he murders, he is equally above all concealment; as in the recent case of a sepahee returning home with his savings, who was waylaid and murdered by our hero in open day. He very coolly gave himself up, acknowledging that he had killed the sepahee, who had first assaulted him. It was proved on the trial, that the sepahee was wholly unarmed, and he was condemned to be hung by the court of Hameerpore on his own confession, but released, from want of evidence, by the Sudder Court at Calcutta. Their objection was excellent, though curious; that if his confession was taken, it must be taken altogether, and not that part only which could lead to his conviction. He was released, and now walks about in his Sunday clothes, a living evidence of British tenderness."

Gopal was not the only amiable character with whom the colonel became acquainted at Calpee, as he sought and obtained an interview with a famous Thug approver, who had retired from the active exercise of his profession, and was travelling the country in company with a party of police, denouncing his former associates to justice. We cannot help suspecting, both from the traits recorded of him, and from the vicinity of Calpee to his former residence at Jalone, that this personage was no other than the celebrated Ameer Ali, whose adventures formed the ground of Captain Meadows Taylor's well-known "Confessions of a Thug;" and as a pendant to the already published descriptions of him, we here quote the impression he made upon the colonel. "I expected to see a great man, but at the first glance I saw that I was in the presence of a master. The Thug was tall, active, and slenderly formed; his head was nearly oval; his eye most strongly resembled that of a cobra di capello; its dart was perfectly wild and maniacal, restless, brilliant, metallic, and concentrated." The colonel had a narrow escape from irretrievably affronting this eminent professor of murder, by unguardedly enquiring whether he was in any way cognizant of a trifling robbery by which the colonel himself had been a sufferer. "No, sir!" he exclaimed with a look which might have frozen a less innocent querist; "murder, not robbery, is my profession … and none but the merest novices would descend so low as to rob a tent or a dwelling-house." The colonel, however, expresses a shrewd suspicion, from circumstances which had come to his knowledge, that his distinguished visitor's esprit de corps led him to deviate from truth in this particular—a belief in which Captain Taylor's pages fully bear him out.

The colonel's movements, after quitting Calpee and its attractive circles, appear to have been somewhat desultory. We find him, successively, at Murgaon or Murgong, Julalpore, Keitah, &c., without being told what decided his route; but from some subsequent remarks, it appears probable that he was engaged on engineering service by order of Government. Between Julalpore and Keitah he fell in with a gang of nutts ⁹ or gipsies, whom the beauty of their women (a point to which the colonel is always alive) did not prevent him from suspecting of an intention to practise thuggee on his own portly person—a belief in which he was confirmed by hearing them speak in another tongue among themselves—no doubt the Ramasee, or cant language of the Thugs, subsequently made known to the world at large by the investigations of Major Sleeman. At Goraree he purchased some small cups, carved from the variegated serpentine of the rock on which the town is built; but, on proposing to employ the artist in making some larger vases, "he told me that he was a very poor man, and his efforts had never been directed to larger patterns; meaning to infer that it was impossible he could either try or succeed!" Such is Hindoo nature!

Churkaree, the capital of Ruttun Sing Buhadoor, one of the principal of the numerous rajahs among whom Bundelcund is divided, is described as "prettily situated on the side of the hill, over a lake covered with the white lotus flower, and having a very fine appearance from a distance, as most of the houses have their upper stories whitewashed, and are seen peeping through the dark-green leafy trees of the country, but the town, which contains perhaps 15,000 souls, of whom 1000 may be Mussulmen, is very straggling, irregular, and dirty." The male population were all fiercely mustached, and loaded with arms; but their repulsive exterior was more than compensated by the charms of the other sex, all of whom wore immense hollow ankle bangles of zinc, filled with bits of gravel, which tinkled as they walked. "I have never seen so many well-formed and handsome women together as I did at the wells outside the town, drawing water à la Rebecca. Some of their faces were strikingly intelligent, and their figures eminently graceful. The population is almost purely Hindoo; and I think the Hindoo females are more delicate in their forms than the Mussulmanees." The Rajah was, however, absent on a sporting excursion, and the darogah refused to provide the colonel with lodgings, alleging his master's orders that no Feringhis should be allowed in the town; and it was not till after a long altercation, of which the colonel gives himself greatly the best, that he succeeded in finding quarters in the house of a bunneea or grocer. But the next day's march (for Bundelcund is almost as thickly set with sovereign princes as Saxony itself) carried him out of the realm of this inhospitable potentate into the territories of the Rajah of Jalone, the once noted patron and protector of Thuggee, by whose agent he was most politely received at Mahoba, a once splendid but now ruined city, celebrated for its artificial lakes, which in long-past times were formed by a famous Rajpoot prince named Purmal, by damming up the narrow gorges of the hills. "Never had I seen, in the plains of India, a prospect more enchanting! Conceive a beautiful sheet of calm, clear, silvery water, of several miles in circumference, occasionally agitated by the splashing leaps of large fishes, or the gradual alighting of noble swan-like aquatic birds: its margin broken as if by the most skilful artist; now running into the centre, and ending in most romantic low rocky hills, covered with trees and embellished with black, antique Jain temples, deserted probably for hundreds of years, and at present the retreat of the elegant peafowl; in other places embanked with huge blocks of cut granite, embrowned by the shade of magnificent trees, under which small bright Hindoo temples, carefully whitewashed, might be seen in the shade; or bounded by abrupt rocky promontories, surmounted by many-pillared temples in ruins, hanging in the sky. A fine rich sunset gave an exquisite richness and classic magnificence to the scene. Many little boys with rod and line were ensnaring the sweet little singhee, or the golden rohoo or carp—bringing back to my heart the days, when, stealing from school, I was wont to sit on the rocks of the Dee, at Craglug, near Aberdeen, watching the motion of a float that was not under water once in the twenty-four hours."

The colonel's laudable habit of associating freely, whenever opportunity occurred, with the natives, gave him considerable insight into the state of the country, where the caprices of the native princes were not then much interfered with, and which consequently, as he says, "was pretty much in the situation of the Emerald Isle;" and verily if the tale told him by the Hindoo gosain or priest at Jourâhoô, of the murder of his predecessor in the temple, and the impunity of the robbers, were correctly related, the Bundelas have not much to learn in the arts of bloodshed and depredation. "This village being a sort of corner to the territories of several Rajahs, robberies, murders, and all other diversions, are of daily occurrence; and when enquiries are made; each territory throws the blame on its neighbour." The maxim of government most current in Bundelcund, both with rulers and ruled, seems indeed to have been—

 
"The good old rule, the simple plan,
That those should take who have the power,
And those should keep who can;"
 

for while this strange confusion of meum and tuum prevailed among the peasantry, the country was ruined by the oppressive and irregular exactions of the rajahs, both zemindars and cultivators flying from their habitations to escape the levying of the rents, which were often demanded more than once by different collectors. At Chundla, the colonel was lodged in the house of an opulent zemindar, who had absconded for the reason just given; "and one of the thanna servants told me, that, by those means, Bundelcund was depopulated"—a statement corroborated by the numerous ruined brick houses remaining in the towns among the miserable hovels of the present day. The rajahs of Bundelcund are, almost without exception, of Rajpoot lineage, and thus of a different race from their Bundela subjects; but the condition of the country is much the same wherever it is left under the sway of the Hindoo princes, who are exempt even from the partial restraint which the Koran imposes on the despotism of Mahommedan rulers. The only effectual cure for the evils reigning in Bundelcund will be its formal incorporation with the dominions of the Company—a consummation which, from the refractory spirit shown in the province after our losses in Affghanistan, is probably not far distant.