outside appearances, as many persons can ascertain by glancing
in a mirror. Ram Zon, and that was what we called him for short,
was a splendid illusion. It turned out that he could not scrape
together enough English to keep an account of his expenditures
and had to trust to his memory, which is very defective in money
matters. He cannot read or write, he cannot carry a message or
receive one; he is no use as a guide, for, although information
and ideas may be bulging from his noble brow, he lacks the power
to communicate them, and, worse than all, he is surly, lazy and
a constitutional kicker. He was always hanging around when we
didn't want him, and when we did want him he was never to be
found.
Ram had not been engaged two hours before he appeared in our
sitting room, enveloped in a dignity that permeated the entire
hotel, stood erect like a soldier, brought his hand to his forehead
and held it there for a long time--the salute of great respect--and
gave me a sealed note, which I opened and found to read as follows:
"Most Honored Sir:--I most humbly beg to inform you this to your
kind consideration and generousitee and trusting which will submit
myself to your grant benevolence for avoid the troublesomeness to
you and your families, that the servant Ram Zon you have been so
honorable and benovelent to engage is a great rogue and conjurer.
He will make your mind buzzling and will steal your properties,
and can run away with you midway. In proof you please touch his
right hand shoulder and see what and how big charm he has. Such
a bad temperature man you have in your service. Besides he only
grown up taller and looks like a dandee as it true but he is
not fit to act in case not to disappeared. I beg of you kindly
consult about those matters and select and choose much experienced
man than him otherwise certainly you could be put in to great
danger by his conjuring and into troubles.
"Hoping to excuse me for this troubles I taking, though he is my
caste and countryman much like not to do so, but his temperature
is not good therefore liable to your honourablesness, etc., etc."
When I told Ram about this indictment, he stoutly denied the
charges, saying that it was customary for envious "bearers" to
say bad things of one another when they lost good jobs. We did not
feel of his right arm and he did not try to conjure us, but his
temperature is certainly very bad, and he soon became a nuisance,
which we abated by paying him a month's wages and sending him off.
Then, upon the recommendation of the consul we got a treasure,
although he does not show it in his looks.
The hotels of India have a very bad name. There are several good
ones in the empire, however, and every experienced traveler and
every clubman you meet can tell you the names of all of them.
Hence it is not impossible to keep a good hotel in India with
profit. The best are at Lucknow and Darjeeling. Those at Caucutta
are the worst, although one would think that the vice-regal capital
would have pride enough to entertain its many visitors decently.
Bombay at last has such a hotel as ought to be found in Calcutta
and all the other large cities, an architectural monument, and
an ornament to the country. It is due to the enterprise of the
late Mr. J. N. Tata, a Parsee merchant and manufacturer, and it
is to be hoped that its success will be sufficient to stimulate
similar enterprises elsewhere. It would be much better for the people
of India to coax tourists over here by offering them comforts,
luxuries and pleasures than to allow the few who do come, to go
away grumbling. The thousands who visit Cairo every winter are
attracted there by the hotels, for no city has better ones, and
no hotels give more for the money. Hence they pay big profits,
and are a source of prosperity to the city, as well as a pleasure
to the idle public.
The most interesting study in Bombay is the people, but there
are several excursions into the country around well worth making,
particularly those that take you to the cave temples of the Hindus,
which have been excavated with infinite labor and pains out of the
solid rock. With their primitive tools the people of ancient times
chiseled great caverns in the sides of rocky cliffs and hills and
fashioned them after the conventional designs of temples, with
columns, pillars, vaulted ceilings, platforms for their idols
and pulpits for their priests. The nearest of these wonderful
examples of stone cutting is on an island in the harbor of Bombay,
called Elephanta, because at one time a colossal stone elephant
stood on the slope near the landing place, but it was destroyed
by the Portuguese several centuries ago. The island rises about
600 feet above the water, its summit is crowned with a glorious
growth of forest, its sides are covered with dense jungles, and
the beach is skirted by mangrove swamps. You get there by a steam
launch provided by the managers of your hotel, or by Cook & Sons,
the tourist agents, whenever a sufficiently large party is willing
to pay them for their trouble. Or if you prefer a sail you can
hire one of the native boats with a peculiar rigging and usually
get a good breeze in the morning, although it is apt to die down
in the afternoon, and you have to take your chances of staying
out all night. The only landing place at Elephanta Island is a
wall of concrete which has been built out across the beach into
four or five feet of water, and you have to step gingerly lest
you slip on the slime. At the end of the wall a solid stairway
cut in the hillside leads up to the temple. It was formerly used
daily by thousands of worshipers, but in this degenerate age
nobody but tourists ever climb it. Every boat load that lands
is greeted by a group of bright-eyed children, who follow the
sahibs (gentlemen) and mem-sahibs (ladies) up the stairs, begging
for backsheesh and offering for sale curios beetles and other
insects of brilliant hues that abound on the island. Coolies
are waiting at the foot of the stairs with chairs fastened to
poles, in which they will carry a person up the steep stairway
to the temple for 10 cents. Reaching the top you find a solid
fence with a gateway, which is opened by a retired army officer
who has been appointed custodian of the place and collects small
fees, which are devoted to keeping the temples clean and in repair.
The island is dedicated to Siva, the demon god of the Hindus, and
it is therefore appropriate that its swamps and jungles should
abound with poisonous reptiles and insects. The largest of the
several temples is 130 feet square and from 32 to 58 feet high,
an artificial cave chiseled out of the granite mountain side.
The roof is sustained by sixteen pilasters and twenty-six massive
fluted pillars. In a recess in the center is a gigantic figure
of Siva in his character as The Destroyer. His face is turned to
the east and wears a stern, commanding expression. His head-dress
is elaborate and crowned by a tiara beautifully carved. In one
hand he holds a citron and in the other the head of a cobra,
which is twisted around his arm and is reaching towards his face.
His neck is adorned with strings of pearls, from which hangs
a pendant in the form of a heart. Another necklace supports a
human skull, the peculiar symbol of Siva, with twisted snakes
growing from the head instead of hair. This is the great image
of the temple and represents the most cruel and revengeful of all
the Hindu gods. Ten centuries ago he wore altogether a different
character, but human sacrifices have always been made to propitiate
him. Around the walls of the cave are other gods of smaller stature
representing several of the most prominent and powerful of the
Hindu pantheon, all of them chiseled from the solid granite.
There are several chambers or chapels also for different forms of
worship, and a well which receives its water from some mysterious
source, and is said to be very deep.
The Portuguese did great damage here several centuries ago in
a war with India, for they fired several cannon balls straight
into the mouth of the cave, which carried away several of the
columns and destroyed the ornamentation of others, but the Royal
Asiatic Society has taken the trouble to make careful and accurate
repairs.
Although the caves at Elephanta are wonderful, they are greatly
inferior in size and beauty to a larger group at Ellora, a day's
journey by train from Bombay, and after that a carriage or horseback
ride of two hours. There are 100 cave temples, carved out of
the solid rock between the second and the tenth centuries. They
are scattered along the base of a range of beautifully wooded
hills about 500 feet above the plain, and the amount of labor and
patience expended in their construction is appalling, especially
when one considers that the men who made them were without the
appliances and tools of modern times, knew nothing of explosives
and were dependent solely upon chisels of flint and other stones.
The greatest and finest of them is as perfect in its details and
as elaborate in its ornamentations as the cathedrals at Milan
or Toledo, except that it has been cut out of a single piece of
stone instead of being built up of many small pieces.
The architect made his plans with the most prodigal detail and
executed them with the greatest perfection. He took a solid rock,
an absolute monolith, and chiseled out of it a cathedral 365
feet long, 192 feet wide and 96 feet high, with four rows of
mighty columns sustaining a vaulted roof that is covered with
pictures in relief illustrating the power and the adventures
and the achievements of his gods. It would accommodate 5,000
worshippers. Around the walls he left rough projections, which
were afterward carved into symbolical figures and images, eight,
ten and twelve feet high, of elephants lions, tigers, oxen, rams,
swans and eagles, larger than life. Corner niches and recesses
have been enriched with the most intricate ornamentation, and
in them, still of the same rock, without the introduction of
an atom of outside material, the sculptors chiseled the figures
of forty or more of the principal Hindu deities. And on each
of the four sides is a massive altar carved out of the side of
the cliff with the most ornate and elaborate traceries and other
embellishment.
Indeed, my pen is not capable of describing these most wonderful
achievements of human genius and patience. But all of them have
been described in great detail and with copious illustrations
in books that refer to nothing else. I can only say that they
are the most wonderful of all the human monuments in India.
"From one vast mount of solid stone
A mighty temple has been cored
By nut-brown children of the sun,
When stars were newly bright, and blithe
Of song along the rim of dawn--
A mighty monolith."
The thirty principal temples are scattered along the rocky mountain
side within a distance of two miles, and seventy-nine others are
in the immediate neighborhood. The smallest of the principal group
is 90 feet long, 40 feet wide, with a roof 40 feet high sustained
by thirty-four columns. They are all alike in one particular. No
mortar was used in their construction or any outside material.
Every atom of the walls and ceilings, the columns, the altars
and the images and ornaments stands exactly where the Creator
placed it at the birth of the universe.
There are several groups of cave temples in the same neighborhood.
Some of them were made by the Buddhists, for it seems to have
been fashionable in those days to chisel places of worship out
of the rocky hillsides instead of erecting them in the open air,
according to the ordinary rules of architecture. There are not
less than 300 in western India which are believed to have been
made within a period of a thousand years. Archæologists dispute
over their ages, just as they disagree about everything else. Some
claim that the first of the cave temples antedates the Christian
era; others declare that the oldest was not begun for 300 years
after Christ, but to the ordinary citizen these are questions of
little significance. It is not so important for us to know when
this great work was done, but it would be extremely gratifying if
somebody could tell us who did it--what genius first conceived
the idea of carving a magnificent house of worship out of the
heart of a mountain, and what means he used to accomplish the
amazing results.
We would like to know for example, who made the designs of the
Vishwa Karma, or carpenter's cave, one of the most exquisite in
India, a single excavation 85 by 45 feet in area and 35 feet
high, which has an arched roof similar to the Gothic chapels
of England and a balcony or gallery over a richly sculptured
gateway very similar to the organ loft of a modern church. At
the upper end, sitting cross-legged in a niche, is a figure four
feet high, with a serene and contemplative expression upon its
face. Because it has none of the usual signs and symbols and
ornaments that appertain to the different gods, archæologists
have pronounced it a figure of the founder of the temple, who,
according to a popular legend, carved it all with his own hands,
but there is nothing to indicate for whom the statue was intended,
and the various stories told of it are pure conjectures that only
exasperate one who studies the details. Each stroke of the chisel
upon the surface of the interior was as delicate and exact as
if a jewel instead of a granite mountain was being carved.
There are temples to all of the great gods in the Hindu catalogue;
there are several in honor of Buddha, and others for Jain, all
more or less of the same design and the same style of execution.
Those who care to know more about them can find full descriptions
in Fergusson's "Indian Architecture."
South of Bombay, on the coast, is the little Portuguese colony
of Goa, the oldest European settlement in India. You will be
surprised to know that there are four or five of these colonies
belonging to other European governments within the limits of British
India, entirely independent of the viceroy and the authority of
Edward VII. The French have two towns of limited area in Bengal,
one of them only an hour's ride from Calcutta. They are entirely
outside of the British jurisdiction and under the authority of
the French Republic, which has always been respected. The Dutch
have two colonies in India also, and Goa, the most important of
all, is subject to Portugal. The territory is sixty-two miles
long by forty miles wide, and has a population of 446,982. The
inhabitants are nearly all Roman Catholics, and the archbishop
of Goa is primate of the East, having jurisdiction over all Roman
Catholics between Cairo and Hong-Kong.
More than half of the population are converted Hindus, descendants
of the original occupants of the place, who were overcome by
the Duke of Albuquerque in 1510, and after seventy or eighty
years of fighting were converted by the celebrated and saintly
Jesuit missionary, St. Francis Xavier. He lived and preached
and died in Goa, and was buried in the Church of the Good Jesus,
which was erected by him during the golden age of Portugal--for
at one time that little kingdom exercised a military, political,
ecclesiastical and commercial influence throughout the world
quite as great, comparatively speaking, as that of Great Britain
to-day. Goa was then the most important city in the East, for
its wealth and commerce rivaled that of Genoa or Venice. It was
as large as Paris or London, and the viceroy lived in a palace
as fine as that occupied by the king. But very little evidence of
its former magnificence remains. Its grandeur was soon exhausted
when the Dutch and the East India Company came into competition
with the Portuguese. The Latin race has never been tenacious either
in politics or commerce. Like the Spaniards, the Portuguese have
no staying power, and after a struggle lasting seventy years,
all of the wide Portuguese possessions in the East fell into the
hands of the Dutch and the British, and nothing is now left but
Goa, with its ruins and reminiscences and the beautiful shrine
of marble and jasper, which the Grand Duke of Tuscany erected
in honor of the first great missionary to the East.
IV
THE EMPIRE OF INDIA
India is a great triangle, 1,900 miles across its greatest length
and an equal distance across its greatest breadth. It extends
from a region of perpetual snow in the Himalayas, almost to the
equator. The superficial area is 1,766,642 square miles, and
you can understand better what that means when I tell you that
the United States has an area of 2,970,230 square miles, without
counting Alaska or Hawaii. India is about as large as that portion
of the United States lying east of a line drawn southward along
the western boundary of the Dakotas, Kansas and Texas.
The population of India in 1901 was 294,361,056 or about one-fifth
of the human race, and it comprises more than 100 distinct nations
and peoples in every grade of civilization from absolute savages to
the most complete and complex commercial and social organizations.
It has every variety of climate from the tropical humidity along
the southern coast to the frigid cold of the mountains; peaks of
ice, reefs of coral, impenetrable jungles and bleak, treeless
plains. One portion of its territory records the greatest rainfall
of any spot on earth; another, of several hundred thousand square
miles, is seldom watered with a drop of rain and is entirely
dependent for moisture upon the melting snows of the mountains.
Twelve thousands different kinds of animals are enumerated in
its fauna, 28,000 plants in its flora, and the statistical survey
prepared by the government fills 128 volumes of the size of our
census reports. One hundred and eighteen distinct languages are
spoken in various parts of India and fifty-nine of these languages
are spoken by more than 100,000 people each. A large number of
other languages and dialects are spoken by different tribes and
clans of less than 100,000 population. The British Bible Society
has published the whole or parts of the Holy Scriptures in forty-two
languages which reach 220,000,000 people, but leave 74,000,000
without the Holy Word. In order to give the Bible to the remainder
of the population of India it would be necessary to publish 108
additional translations, which the society has no money and no
men to prepare. From this little statement some conception of
the variety of the people of India may be obtained, because each
of the tribes and clans has its own distinct organization and
individuality, and each is practically a separate nation.
Language. Spoken by Language. Spoken by
Hindi 85,675,373 Malayalam 5,428,250
Bengali 41,343,762 Masalmani 3,669,390
Telugu 19,885,137 Sindhi 2,592,341
Marathi 18,892,875 Santhal 1,709,680
Punjabi 17,724,610 Western Pahari 1,523,098
Tamil 15,229,759 Assamese 1,435,820
Gujarathi 10,619,789 Gond 1,379,580
Kanarese 9,751,885 Central Pahari 1,153,384
Uriya 9,010,957 Marwadi 1,147,480
Burmese 5,926,864 Pashtu 1,080,931
The Province of Bengal, for example, is nearly as large as all
our North Atlantic states combined, and contains an area of 122,548
square miles. The Province of Rajputana is even larger, and has a
population of 74,744,886, almost as great as that of the entire
United States. Madras has a population of 38,000,000, and the
central provinces 47,000,000, while several of the 160 different
states into which India is divided have more than 10,000,000
each.
The population is divided according to religions as follows:
Hindus 207,146,422 Sikhs 2,195,268
Mohammedans 62,458,061 Jains 1,334,148
Buddhists 9,476,750 Parsees 94,190
Animistic 8,711,300 Jews 18,228
Christians 2,923,241
It will be interesting to know that of the Christians enumerated
at the last census 1,202,039 were Roman Catholics, 453,612 belonged
to the established Church of England, 322,586 were orthodox Greeks,
220,863 were Baptists, 155,455 Lutherans, 53,829 Presbyterians
and 157,847 put themselves down as Protestants without giving
the sect to which they adhere.
The foreign population of India is very small. The British-born
number only 96,653; 104,583 were born on the continent of Europe,
and only 641,854 out of nearly 300,000,000 were born outside
the boundaries of India.
India consists of four separate and well-defined regions: the
jungles of the coast and the vast tract of country known as the
Deccan, which make up the southern half of the Empire; the great
plain which stretches southward from the Himalayas and constitutes
what was formerly known as Hindustan; and a three-sided tableland
which lies between, in the center of the empire, and is drained
by a thousand rivers, which carry the water off as fast as it
falls and leave but little to refresh the earth. This is the
scene of periodical famine, but the government is pushing the
irrigation system so rapidly that before many years the danger
from that source will be much diminished.
The whole of southern India, according to the geologists, was once
covered by a great forest, and indeed there are still 66,305,506
acres in trees which are carefully protected. The black soil of
that region is proverbial for its fertility and produces cotton,
sugar cane, rice and other tropical and semi-tropical plants with
an abundance surpassed by no other region. The fruit-bearing
palms require a chapter to themselves in the botanies, and are a
source of surprising wealth. According to the latest census the
enormous area of 546,224,964 acres is under cultivation, which
is an average of nearly two acres per capita of population, and
probably two-thirds of it is actually cropped. About one-fourth
of this area is under irrigation and more than 22,000,000 acres
produce two crops a year.
Most of the population is scattered in villages, and the number
of people who are not supported by farms is much smaller than would
be supposed from the figures of the census. A large proportion of
the inhabitants returned as engaged in trade and other employments
really belong to the agricultural community, because they are the
agents of middlemen through whose hands the produce of the farms
passes. These people live in villages among the farming community.
In all the Empire there are only eight towns with more than 200,000
inhabitants; only three with more than 500,000, and only one with
a million, which is Calcutta. The other seven in order of size are
Bombay, Madras, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Rangoon, Benares and Delhi.
There are only twenty-nine towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants;
forty-nine with more than 50,000; 471 with more than 10,000; 877
with more than 5,000, and 2,134 organized municipalities with
a population of 1,000 or more. These municipalities represent an
aggregate population of 29,244,221 out of a total of 294,361,056,
leaving 265,134,722 inhabitants scattered upon farms and in 729,752
villages. The city population, however, is growing more rapidly
than that of the country, because of the efforts of the government
to divert labor from the farms to the factories. In Germany,
France, England and other countries of Europe and in the United
States the reverse policy is pursued. Their rural population is
drifting too rapidly to the cities, and the cities are growing
faster than is considered healthful. In India, during the ten
years from= 1891 to 1901 the city population has increased only
2,452,083, while the rural population has increased only 4,567,032.
The following table shows the number of people supported by each
of the principal occupations named: