_Shows the Charm of Rajputana and of Jeypore, the City of the
Globe-Trotter--Of its Founder and its Embellishment--Explains the
use and destiny of the Stud-Bred, and fails to explain many more
important matters._
If any part of a land strewn with dead men’s bones have a special claim
to distinction, Rajputana, as the cockpit of India, stands first. East
of Suez men do not build towers on the tops of hills for the sake of the
view, nor do they stripe the mountain sides with bastioned stone walls
to keep in cattle. Since the beginning of time, if we are to credit the
legends, there was fighting--heroic fighting--at the foot of the
Aravalis, and beyond in the great deserts of sand penned by those kindly
mountains from spreading over the heart of India. The “Thirty-six Royal
Races” fought as royal races know how to do, Chohan with Rahtor, brother
against brother, son against father. Later--but excerpts from the
tangled tale of force, fraud, cunning, desperate love and more desperate
revenge, crime worthy of demons and virtues fit for gods, may be found,
by all who care to look, in the book of the man who loved the Rajputs
and gave a life’s labours in their behalf. From Delhi to Abu, and from
the Indus to the Chambul, each yard of ground has witnessed slaughter,
pillage and rapine. But, to-day, the capital of the State, that Dhola
Rae, son of Soora Singh, hacked out more than nine hundred years ago
with the sword from some weaker ruler’s realm, is lighted with gas, and
possesses many striking and English peculiarities which will be shown in
their proper place.
Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore,
torn by the intrigues of unruly princes and princelings, fought
Asiatically.
When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of British power, and in what
manner we put a slur upon Rajput honour--punctilious as the honour of
the Pathan--are matters of which the Globe-Trotter knows more than we
do. He “reads up"--to quote his own words--a city before he comes to us,
and, straightway going to another city, forgets, or, worse still, mixes
what he has learnt--so that in the end he writes down the Rajput a
Mahratta, says that Lahore is in the North-West Provinces and was once
the capital of Sivaji, and piteously demands a “guide-book on all India,
a thing that you can carry in your trunk y’know--that gives you plain
descriptions of things without mixing you up.” Here is a chance for a
writer of discrimination and void of conscience!
But to return to Jeypore--a pink city set on the border of a blue lake,
and surrounded by the low red spurs of the Aravalis--a city to see and
to puzzle over. There was once a ruler of the State, called Jey Singh,
who lived in the days of Aurungzeb, and did him service with foot and
horse. He must have been the Solomon of Rajputana, for through the
forty-four years of his reign his “wisdom remained with him.” He led
armies, and when fighting was over, turned to literature; he intrigued
desperately and successfully, but found time to gain a deep insight into
astronomy, and, by what remains above ground now, we can tell that
“whatsoever his eyes desired, he kept not from him.” Knowing his own
worth, he deserted the city of Amber founded by Dhola Rae among the
hills, and, six miles further, in the open plain, bade one Vedyadhar,
his architect, build a new city, as seldom Indian city was built
before--with huge streets straight as an arrow, sixty yards broad, and
cross-streets broad and straight. Many years afterwards the good people
of America builded their towns after this pattern, but knowing nothing
of Jey Singh, they took all the credit to themselves.
He built himself everything that pleased him, palaces and gardens and
temples, and then died, and was buried under a white marble tomb on a
hill overlooking the city. He was a traitor, if history speak truth, to
his own kin, and he was an accomplished murderer, but he did his best to
check infanticide; he reformed the Mahomedan calendar; he piled up a
superb library and he made Jeypore a marvel.
Later on came a successor, educated and enlightened by all the lamps of
British Progress, and converted the city of Jey Singh into a surprise--a
big, bewildering, practical joke. He laid down sumptuous _trottoirs_ of
hewn stone, and central carriage drives, also of hewn stone, in the main
street; he, that is to say, Colonel Jacob, the Superintending Engineer
of the State, devised a water-supply for the city and studded the ways
with stand-pipes. He built gas-works, set a-foot a School of Art, a
Museum, all the things in fact which are necessary to Western municipal
welfare and comfort, and saw that they were the best of their kind. How
much Colonel Jacob has done, not only for the good of Jeypore city but
for the good of the State at large, will never be known, because the
officer in question is one of the not small class who resolutely refuse
to talk about their own work. The result of the good work is that the
old and the new, the rampantly raw and the sullenly old, stand
cheek-by-jowl in startling contrast. Thus, the branded bull trips over
the rails of a steel tramway which brings out the city rubbish; the
lacquered and painted _ruth_, behind the two little stag-like trotting
bullocks, catches its primitive wheels in the cast-iron gas-lamp post
with the brass nozzle a-top, and all Rajputana, gaily-clad,
small-turbaned, swaggering Rajputana, circulates along the magnificent
pavements.
The fortress-crowned hills look down upon the strange medley. One of
them bears on its flank in huge white letters the cheery inscript
“Welcome!” This was made when the Prince of Wales visited Jeypore to
shoot his first tiger; but the average traveller of to-day may
appropriate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes great care of
strangers and shows them all courtesy. This, by the way, demoralises the
Globe-Trotter, whose first cry is:--“Where can we get horses? Where can
we get elephants? Who is the man to write to for all these things?”
Thanks to the courtesy of the Maharaja, it is possible to see
everything, but for the incurious who object to being driven through
their sights, a journey down any one of the great main streets is a
day’s delightful occupation. The view is as unobstructed as that of the
Champs Elysees; but in place of the white-stone fronts of Paris, rises a
long line of open-work screen-wall, the prevailing tone of which is
pink--caramel pink, but house-owners have unlimited license to decorate
their tenements as they please. Jeypore, broadly considered, is Hindu,
and her architecture of the riotous many-arched type which even the
Globe-Trotter after a short time learns to call Hindu. It is neither
temperate nor noble, but it satisfies the general desire for something
that “really looks Indian.” A perverse taste for low company drew the
Englishman from the pavement--to walk upon a real stone pavement is in
itself a privilege--up a side-street where he assisted at a quail fight
and found the low-caste Rajput a cheery and affable soul. The owner of
the losing quail was a sowar in the Maharaja’s army. He explained that
his pay was six rupees a month paid bi-monthly. He was cut the cost of
his khaki blouse, brown-leather accoutrements and jack-boots; lance,
saddle, sword, and horse were given free. He refused to say for how many
months in the year he was drilled, and said vaguely that his duties were
mainly escort ones, and he had no fault to find with them. The defeat
of his quail had vexed him; and he desired the Sahib to understand that
the sowars of His Highness’s army could ride. A clumsy attempt at a
compliment so fired his martial blood that he climbed into his saddle,
and then and there insisted on showing off his horsemanship. The road
was narrow, the lance was long, and the horse was a big one, but no one
objected, and the Englishman sat him down on a doorstep and watched the
fun. The horse seemed in some shadowy way familiar. His head was not the
lean head of the Kathiawar, nor his crest the crest of the Marwarri, and
his fore-legs did not seem to belong to the stony district. “Where did
he come from?” The sowar pointed northward and said “from Amritsar,” but
he pronounced it “Armtzar.” Many horses had been brought at the spring
fairs in the Punpab; they cost about Rs. 200 each, perhaps more, the
sowar could not say. Some came from Hissar and some from other places
beyond Delhi. They were very good horses. “That horse there,” he pointed
to one a little distance down the street, “is the son of a big Sirkar
horse--the kind that the Sirkar make for breeding horses--so high!” The
owner of “that horse” swaggered up, jaw-bandaged and cat-moustached, and
bade the Englishman look at his mouth; bought, of course, when a
_butcha_. Both men together said that the Sahib had better examine the
Maharaja Sahib’s stable, where there were hundreds of horses--huge as
elephants or tiny as sheep.
To the stables the Englishman accordingly went, knowing beforehand what
he would find, and wondering whether the Sirkar’s “big horses” were
meant to get mounts for Rajput sowars. The Maharaja’s stables are royal
in size and appointments. The enclosure round which they stand must be
about half a mile long--it allows ample space for exercising, besides
paddocks for the colts. The horses, about two hundred and fifty, are
bedded in pure white sand--bad for the coat if they roll, but good for
the feet--the pickets are of white marble, the heel-ropes in every case
of good sound rope, and in every case the stables are exquisitely clean.
Each stall contains above the manger, a curious little bunk for the syce
who, if he uses the accommodation, must assuredly die once each hot
weather.
A journey round the stables is saddening, for the attendants are very
anxious to strip their charges, and the stripping shows so much. A few
men in India are credited with the faculty of never forgetting a horse
they have once seen, and of knowing the produce of every stallion they
have met. The Englishman would have given something for their company at
that hour. His knowledge of horseflesh was very limited; but he felt
certain that more than one or two of the sleek, perfectly groomed
country-breds should have been justifying their existence in the ranks
of the British cavalry, instead of eating their heads off on six seers
of gram and one of _goor_ per diem. But they had all been honestly
bought and honestly paid for; and there was nothing in the wide world to
prevent His Highness, if he wished to do so, from sweeping up the pick
and pride of all the horses in the Punjab. The attendants appeared to
take a wicked delight in saying “eshtud-bred” very loudly and with
unnecessary emphasis as they threw back the loin-cloth. Sometimes they
were wrong, but in too many cases they were right.
The Englishman left the stables and the great central maidan where a
nervous Biluchi was being taught, by a perfect network of ropes, to
“monkey jump,” and went out into the streets reflecting on the working
of horse-breeding operations under the Government of India, and the
advantages of having unlimited money wherewith to profit by other
people’s mistakes.
Then, as happened to the great Tartarin of Tarescon in Milianah, wild
beasts began to roar, and a crowd of little boys laughed. The lions of
Jeypore are tigers, caged in a public place for the sport of the people,
who hiss at them and disturb their royal feelings. Two or three of the
six great brutes are magnificent. All of them are short-tempered, and
the bars of their captivity not too strong. A pariah-dog was furtively
trying to scratch out a fragment of meat from between the bars of one of
the cages, and the occupant tolerated him. Growing bolder--the
starveling growled; the tiger struck at him with his paw and the dog
fled howling with fear. When he returned, he brought two friends with
him, and the trio mocked the captive from a distance.
It was not a pleasant sight and suggested Globe-Trotters--gentlemen who
imagine that “more curricles” should come at their bidding, and on being
undeceived become abusive.