_Divers Passages of Speech and Action whence the Nature, Arts and
Disposition of the King and his Subjects may be observed._
In this land men tell “sad stories of the death of Kings,” not easily
found elsewhere; and also speak of _sati_, which is generally supposed
to be an “effete curiosity” as the Bengali said, in a manner which makes
it seem very near and vivid. Be pleased to listen to some of the tales,
but with all the names cut out, because a King has just as much right to
have his family affairs respected as has a British householder paying
income-tax.
Once upon a time, that is to say when the British power was well
established in the land and there were railways, there was a King who
lay dying for many days, and all, including the Englishmen about him,
knew that his end was certain. But he had chosen to lie in an outer
court or pleasure-house of his Palace; and with him were some twenty of
his favourite wives. The place in which he lay was very near to the
City; and there was a fear that his womenkind should, on his death,
going mad with grief, cast off their veils and run out into the streets,
uncovered before all men. In which case, nothing, not even the power of
the Press, and the locomotive, and the telegraph, and cheap education
and enlightened municipal councils, could have saved them from _sati_,
for they were the wives of a King. So the Political did his best to
induce the dying man to go to the Fort of the City, a safe place close
to the regular zenana, where all the women could be kept within walls.
He said that the air was better in the Fort, but the King refused; and
that he would recover in the Fort; but the King refused. After some
days, the latter turned and said:--“_Why_ are you so keen, Sahib, upon
getting my old bones up to the Fort?” Driven to his last defences, the
Political said simply:--“Well, Maharana Sahib, the place is close to the
road you see, and....” The King saw and said:--“Oh, _that’s_ it! I’ve
been puzzling my brain for four days to find out what on earth you were
driving at. I’ll go to-night.” “But there may be some difficulty,” began
the Political. “You think so,” said the King. “If I only hold up my
little finger, the women will obey me. Go now, and come back in five
minutes, and all will be ready for departure.” As a matter of fact, the
Political withdrew for the space of fifteen minutes, and gave orders
that the conveyances which he had kept in readiness day and night should
be got ready. In fifteen minutes those twenty women, with their
hand-maidens, were packed and ready for departure; and the King died
later at the Fort, and nothing happened. Here the Englishman asked why a
frantic woman must of necessity become _sati_, and felt properly abashed
when he was told that she _must_. There was nothing else for her if she
went out unveiled deliberately.
The rush-out forces the matter. And, indeed, if you consider the matter
from a Rajput point of view, it does.
Then followed a very grim tale of the death of another King; of the long
vigil by his bedside, before he was taken off the bed to die upon the
ground; of the shutting of a certain mysterious door behind the
bed-head, which shutting was followed by a rustle of women’s dress; of a
walk on the top of the Palace, to escape the heated air of the sick
room; and then, in the grey dawn, the wail upon wail breaking from the
zenana as the news of the King’s death went in. “I never wish to hear
anything more horrible and awful in my life. You could see nothing. You
could only hear the poor wretches!” said the Political with a shiver.
The last resting-place of the Maharanas of Udaipur is at Ahar, a little
village two miles east of the City. Here they go down in their robes of
State, their horse following behind, and here the Political saw, after
the death of a Maharana, the dancing-girls dancing before the poor white
ashes, the musicians playing among the cenotaphs, and the golden hookah,
sword and water-vessel laid out for the naked soul doomed to hover
twelve days round the funeral pyre, before it could depart on its
journey towards a fresh birth in the endless circle of the Wheel of
Fate. Once, in a neighboring State it is said, one of the dancing-girls
stole a march in the next world’s precedence and her lord’s affections,
upon the legitimate queens. The affair happened, by the way, after the
Mutiny, and was accomplished with great pomp in the light of day.
Subsequently those who might have stopped it but did not, were severely
punished. The girl said that she had no one to look to but the dead man,
and followed him, to use Tod’s formula, “through the flames.” It would
be curious to know what is done now and again among these lonely hills
in the walled holds of the Thakurs.
But to return from the burning-ground to modern Udaipur, as at present
worked under the Maharana and his Prime Minister Rae Punna Lal, _C. I.
E._ To begin with, His Highness is a racial anomaly in that, judged by
the strictest European standard, he is a man of temperate life, the
husband of one wife whom he married before he was chosen to the throne
after the death of the Maharana Sujjun Singh in 1884. Sujjun Singh died
childless and gave no hint of his desires as to succession and--omitting
all the genealogical and political reasons which would drive a man
mad--Futteh Singh was chosen, by the Thakurs, from the Seorati Branch of
the family which Sangram Singh II. founded. He is thus a younger son of
a younger branch of a younger family, which lucid statement should
suffice to explain everything. The man who could deliberately unravel
the succession of any one of the Rajput States would be perfectly
capable of clearing the politics of all the Frontier tribes from Jumrood
to Quetta.
Roughly speaking, the Maharana and the Prime Minister--in whose family
the office has been hereditary for many generations--divide the power of
the State. They control, more or less, the Mahand Raj Sabha or Council
of Direction and Revision. This is composed of many of the Rawats and
Thakurs of the State, _and_ the Poet Laureate who, under a less genial
administration, would be presumably the Registrar. There are also
District Officers, Officers of Customs, Superintendents of the Mint,
Master of the Horses, and Supervisor of Doles, which last is pretty and
touching. The State officers itself, and the Englishman’s investigations
failed to unearth any Bengalis. The Commandant of the State Army, about
five thousand men of all arms, is a retired non-commissioned officer, a
Mr. Lonergan; who, as the medals on his breast attest, has “done the
State some service,” and now in his old age rejoices in the rank of
Major-General, and teaches the Maharaja’s guns to make uncommonly good
practice. The infantry are smart and well set up, while the
Cavalry--rare thing in Native States--have a distinct notion of keeping
their accoutrements clean. They are, further, well mounted on light wiry
Mewar and Kathiawar horses. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that the
Pathan comes down with his pickings from the Punjab to Udaipur, and
finds a market there for animals that were much better employed in--but
the complaint is a stale one. Let us see, later on, what the Jodhpur
stables hold; and then formulate an indictment against the Government.
So much for the indigenous administration of Udaipur. The one drawback
in the present Maharaja, from the official point of view, is his want of
education. He is a thoroughly good man, but was not brought up with a
seat on the _guddee_ before his eyes, consequently he is not an
English-speaking man.
There is a story told of him, which is worth the repeating. An
Englishman who flattered himself that he could speak the vernacular
fairly well, paid him a visit and discoursed with a round mouth. The
Maharana heard him politely, and turning to a satellite, demanded a
translation; which was given. Then said the Maharana:--“Speak to him in
_Angrezi_.” The _Angrezi_ spoken by the interpreter was the vernacular
as the Sahibs speak it, and the Englishman, having ended his conference,
departed abashed. But this backwardness is eminently suited to a place
like Udaipur, and a “varnished” prince is not always a desirable thing.
The curious and even startling simplicity of his life is worth
preserving. Here is a specimen of one of his days. Rising at four--and
the dawn can be bitterly chill--he bathes and prays after the custom of
his race, and at six is ready to take in hand the first instalment of
the day’s work which comes before him through his Prime Minister, and
occupies him for three or four hours till the first meal of the day is
ready. At two o’clock he attends the Mahand Raj Sabha, and works till
five, retiring at a healthily primitive hour. He is said to have his
hand fairly firmly upon the reins of rule, and to know as much as most
monarchs know of the way in which the revenues--about thirty lakhs--are
disposed of. The Prime Minister’s career has been a chequered and
interesting one, including, _inter alia_, a dismissal from power (this
was worked from behind the screen), and arrest and an attack with words
which all but ended in his murder. He has not so much power as his
predecessors had, for the reason that the present Maharaja allows little
but tiger-shooting to distract him from the supervision of the State.
His Highness, by the way, is a first-class shot, and has bagged eighteen
tigers already. He preserves his game carefully, and permission to kill
tigers is not readily obtainable.
A curious instance of the old order giving place to the new is in
process of evolution and deserves notice. The Prime Minister’s son,
Futteh Lal, a boy of twenty years old, has been educated at the Mayo
College, Ajmir, and speaks and writes English. There are few native
officials in the State who do this; and the consequence is that the lad
has won a very fair insight into State affairs, and knows generally what
is going forward both in the Eastern and Western spheres of the little
Court. In time he may qualify for direct administrative powers, and
Udaipur will be added to the list of the States that are governed
“English fash” as the irreverent Americans put it. What the end will be,
after three generations of Princes and Dewans have been put through the
mill of Rajkumar Colleges, those who live will learn.
More interesting is the question--For how long can the vitality of a
people whose life was arms be suspended? Men in the North say that, by
the favour of the Government, the Sikh Sirdars are rotting on their
lands; and the Rajput Thakurs say of themselves that they are growing
“rusty.” The old, old problem forces itself on the most unreflective
mind at every turn in the gay streets of Udaipur. A Frenchman might
write:--“Behold there the horse of the Rajput--foaming, panting,
caracoling, but always fettered with his head so majestic upon his bosom
so amply filled with a generous heart. He rages, but he does not
advance. See there the destiny of the Rajput who bestrides him, and upon
whose left flank bounds the sabre useless--the haberdashery of the
iron-monger only. Pity the horse in reason, for that life there is his
_raison d’etre_. Pity ten thousand times more the Rajput, for he has no
_raison d’etre_. He is an anachronism in a blue turban.”
The Gaul might be wrong, but Tod wrote things which seem to support this
view, in the days when he wished to make “buffer-states” of the land he
loved so well.
Let us visit the Durbar Gardens, where little naked Cupids are trampling
upon fountains of fatted fish, all in bronze, where there are cypresses
and red paths, and a deer-park full of all varieties of deer, besides
two growling, fluffy little panther cubs, a black panther who is the
Prince of Darkness and a gentleman, and a terrace-full of tigers, bears,
and Guzerat lions bought from the King of Oudh’s sale.
On the best site in the Gardens is rising the Victoria Hall, the
foundation-stone of which was laid by the Maharana on the 21st of June
last. It is built after the designs of Mr. C. Thompson, Executive
Engineer of the State, and will be in the Hindu-Saracenic style; having
two fronts, west and north. In the former will be the principal
entrance, approached by a flight of steps leading to a handsome porch of
carved pillars supporting stone beams--the flat Hindu arch. To the left
of the entrance hall will be a domed octagonal tower eighty feet high,
holding the principal staircase leading to the upper rooms. A corridor
on the right of the entrance will lead to the museum, and immediately
behind the entrance hall is the reading-room, 42 by 24 feet, and beyond
it the library and office. To the right of the reading-room will be an
open courtyard with a fountain in the centre, and, beyond the courtyard,
the museum--a great hall, one hundred feet long. Over the library and
the entrance hall will be private apartments for the Maharana,
approached by a private staircase. The communication between the two
upper rooms will be by a corridor running along the north front having a
parapet of delicately cut pillars and cusped arches--the latter filled
in with open tracery. Pity it is that the whole of this will have to be
whitewashed to protect the stone from the weather. Over the
entrance-porch, and projecting from the upper room, will be a very
elaborately cut balcony supported on handsome brackets. Facing the main
entrance will be a marble statue, nine feet high, of the Queen, on a
white marble pedestal ten feet high. The statue is now being made at
home by Mr. Birch, _R.A._ The cost of the whole will be about Rs.
80,000. Now, it is a curious thing that the statue of Her Majesty will
be put some eighty feet below the level of the great bund that holds in
the Pichola lake. But the bund is a firm one and has stood for many
years.
Another public building deserves notice, and that is the Walter Hospital
for native women, the foundation-stone of which was laid by the Countess
of Dufferin on that memorable occasion when the Viceroy, behind
Artillery Horses, covered the seventy miles from Chitor to Udaipur in
under six hours. The building, by the same brain that designed the hall,
will be ready for occupation in a month. It is in strict keeping with
the canons of Hindu architecture externally, and has a high,
well-ventilated waiting-room, out of which, to the right, are two wards
for in-patients, and to the left a dispensary and consulting-room.
Beyond these, again, is a third ward for in-patients. In a courtyard
behind are a ward for low caste patients and the offices.
When all these buildings are completed, Udaipur will be dowered with
three good hospitals, including the State’s and the Padre’s, and a first
instalment of civilisation.