_A King’s House and Country. Further Consideration of the
Hat-marked Caste._
The hospitality that spreads tables in the wilderness, and shifts the
stranger from the back of the hired camel into the two-horse victoria,
must be experienced to be appreciated.
To those unacquainted with the peculiarities of the native-trained
horse, this advice may be worth something. Sit as far back as ever you
can, and, if Oriental courtesy have put an English bit and bridoon in a
mouth by education intended for a spiked curb, leave the whole
contraption alone. Once acquainted with the comparative smoothness of
English ironmongery, your mount will grow frivolous. In which event a
four-pound steeplechase saddle, accepted through sheer shame, offers the
very smallest amount of purchase to untrained legs.
The Englishman rode up to the Fort, and by the way learnt all these
things and many more. He was provided with a racking, female, horse who
swept the gullies of the city by dancing sideways.
The road to the Fort which stands on the Hill of Strife, wound in and
out of sixty-foot hills, with a skilful avoidance of all shade; and this
was at high noon, when puffs of heated air blew from the rocks on all
sides. “What must the heat be in May?” The Englishman’s companion was a
cheery Brahmin, who wore the lightest of turbans and sat the smallest of
neat little country-breds. “Awful!” said the Brahmin. “But not so bad as
in the district. Look there!” and he pointed from the brow of a bad
eminence, across the quivering heat-haze, to where the white sand faded
into bleach blue sky, and the horizon was shaken and tremulous. “It’s
very bad in summer. Would knock you--Oh yes--all to smash, but we are
accustomed to it.” A rock-strewn hill, about half a mile, as the crow
flies, from the Fort was pointed out as the place whence, at the
beginning of this century, the Pretender Sowae besieged Raja Maun for
five months, but could make no headway against his foe. One gun of the
enemy’s batteries specially galled the Fort, and the Jodhpur King
offered a village to any of his gunners who should dismount it. “It was
smashed,” said the Brahmin. “Oh yes, all to pieces.” Practically, the
city which lies below the Fort is indefensible, and during the many wars
of Marwar has generally been taken up by the assailants without
resistance.
Entering the Fort by the Jeypore Gate, and studiously refraining from
opening his umbrella, the Englishman found shadow and coolth, took off
his hat to the tun-bellied, trunk-nosed God of Good-Luck who had been
very kind to him in his wanderings, and sat down near half-a-dozen of
the Maharaja’s guns bearing the mark, “A. Broome, Cossipore, 1857,” or
“G. Hutchinson, Cossipore, 1838.” Now rock and masonry are so curiously
blended in this great pile that he who walks through it loses sense of
being among buildings. It is as though he walked through
mountain-gorges. The stone-paved, inclined planes, and the tunnel-like
passages driven under a hundred feet height of buildings, increase this
impression. In many places the wall and rock runs up unbroken by any
window for forty feet.
It would be a week’s work to pick out even roughly the names of the dead
who have added to the buildings, or to describe the bewildering
multiplicity of courts and ranges of rooms; and, in the end, the result
would be as satisfactory as an attempt to describe a night-mare. It is
said that the rock on which the Fort stands is four miles in circuit,
but no man yet has dared to estimate the size of the city that they
call the Palace, or the mileage of its ways. Ever since Ras Joda, four
hundred years ago, listened to the voice of a _Fogi_ and leaving Mundore
built his eyrie on the “Bird’s Nest,” as the Hill of Strife was called,
the Palaces have grown and thickened. Even to-day the builders are still
at work. Takht Singh, the present ruler’s predecessor, built royally. An
incomplete bastion and a Hall of Flowers are among the works of his
pleasure. Hidden away behind a mighty wing of carved red sandstone, lie
rooms set apart for Viceroys, Durbar Halls, and dinner-rooms without
end. A gentle gloom covers the evidences of the catholic taste of the
State in articles of “bigotry and virtue”; but there is enough light to
show the _raison d’etre_ of the men who wait in the dak-bungalow. And,
after all, what is the use of Royalty in these days if a man may not
take delight in the pride of the eye? Kumbha Rana, the great man of
Chitor, fought like a Rajput, but he had an instinct which made him
build the Tower of Victory at, who knows, what cost of money and life.
The fighting-instinct thrown back upon itself, must have some sort of
outlet; and a merciful Providence wisely ordains that the Kings of the
East in the nineteenth century shall take pleasure in “shopping” on an
imperial scale. Dresden China snuff-boxes, mechanical engines,
electro-plated fish-slicers, musical boxes, and gilt, blownglass,
Christmas-Tree balls do not go well with the splendours of a Palace that
might have been built by Titans and coloured by the morning sun. But
there are excuses to be made for Kings who have no work to do--at least
such work as their fathers understood best.
In one of the higher bastions stands a curious specimen of one of the
earliest _mitrailleuses_--a cumbrous machine carrying twenty gun-barrels
in two rows, which small-arm fire is flanked by two tiny cannon. As a
muzzle-loading implement its value after the first discharge would be
insignificant; but the soldiers lounging by assured the Englishman that
it had done good service in its time: it was eaten with rust.
A man may spend a long hour in the upper tiers of the Palaces, but still
far from the roof-tops, in looking out across the desert. There are
Englishmen in these wastes, who say gravely that there is nothing so
fascinating as the sand of Bikanir and Marwar. “You see,” explained an
enthusiast of the Hat-marked Caste, “you are not shut in by roads, and
you can go just as you please. And, somehow, it grows upon you as you
get used to it, and you end, y’know, by falling in love with the
place.” Look steadily from the Palace westward where the city with its
tanks and serais is spread at your feet, and you will, in a lame way,
begin to understand the fascination of the desert which, by those who
have felt it, is said to be even stronger than the fascination of the
road. The city is of red-sandstone and dull and sombre to look at.
Beyond it, where the white sand lies, the country is dotted with camels
limping into the Ewigkeit or coming from the same place. Trees appear to
be strictly confined to the suburbs of the city. Very good. If you look
long enough across the sands, while a voice in your ear is telling you
of half-buried cities, old as old Time and wholly unvisited by Sahibs,
of districts where the white man is unknown, and of the wonders of
far-way Jeysulmir ruled by a half distraught king, sand-locked and now
smitten by a terrible food and water famine, you will, if it happen that
you are of a sedentary and civilised nature, experience a new
emotion--will be conscious of a great desire to take one of the lobbing
camels and get away into the desert, away from the last touch of To-day,
to meet the Past face to face. Some day a novelist will exploit the
unknown land from the Rann, where the wild ass breeds, northward and
eastward, till he comes to the Indus. That will be when Rider Haggard
has used up Africa and a new “She” is needed.
But the officials of Marwar do not call their country a desert. On the
contrary, they administer it very scientifically and raise, as has been
said, about thirty-eight lakhs from it. To come back from the influence
and the possible use of the desert to more prosaic facts. Read quickly a
rough record of things in modern Marwar. The old is drawn in Tod, who
speaks the truth. The Maharaja’s right-hand in the work of the State is
Maharaj Sir Pertab Singh, Prime Minister, A.-D.-C. to the Prince of
Wales, capable of managing the Marwari who intrigues like a--Marwari,
equally capable, as has been seen, of moving in London Society, and
Colonel of a newly-raised “crack” cavalry corps. The Englishman would
have liked to have seen him, but he was away in the desert somewhere,
either marking a boundary or looking after a succession case. Not very
long ago, as the Setts of Ajmir knew well, there was a State debt of
fifty lakhs. This has now been changed into a surplus of three lakhs,
and the revenue is growing. Also, the simple Dacoit who used to enjoy
himself very pleasantly, has been put into a department, and the Thug
with him.
Consequently, for the department takes a genuine interest in this form
of _shikar_, and the gaol leg-irons are not too light, dacoities have
been reduced to such an extent that men say “you may send a woman, with
her ornaments upon her, from Sojat to Phalodi, and she will not lose a
nose-ring.” Also, and this in a Rajput State is an important matter, the
boundaries of nearly every village in Marwar have been demarcated, and
boundary _rixes_, in which both sides preferred small-arm fire to the
regulation _lathi_, are unknown. The open-handed system of giving away
villages had raised a large and unmannerly crop of _jaghirdars_. These
have been taken and brought in hand by Sir Pertab Singh, to the better
order of the State.
A Punjabi Sirdar, Har Dyal Singh, has reformed, or made rather, Courts
on the Civil and Criminal Side; and his hand is said to be found in a
good many sweepings out of old corners. It must always be borne in mind
that everything that has been done, was carried through over and under
unlimited intrigue, for Jodhpur is a Native State. Intrigue must be met
with intrigue by all except Gordons or demi-gods; and it is curious to
hear how a reduction in tariff, or a smoothing out of some tangled
Court, had to be worked by shift and by-way. The tales are comic, but
not for publication. Howbeit! Har Dyal Singh got his training in part
under the Punjab Government, and in part in a little Native State far
away in the Himalayas, where the _gumnameh_ was not altogether an
unknown animal. To the credit of the “Pauper Province” be it said, it is
not easy to circumvent a Punjabi. The details of his work would be dry
reading. The result of it is good, and there is justice in Marwar, and
order and firmness in its administration.
Naturally, the land-revenue is the most interesting thing in Marwar from
an administrative point of view. The basis of it is a tank about the
size of a swimming-bath, with a catchment of several hundred square
yards, draining through leeped channels. When God sends the rain, the
people of the village drink from the tank. When the rains fail, as they
failed this year, they take to their wells, which are brackish and breed
guinea-worm. For these reasons the revenue, like the Republic of San
Domingo, is never alike for two years running. There are no canal
questions to harry the authorities; but the fluctuations are enormous.
Under the Aravalis the soil is good: further north they grow millet and
pasture cattle, though, said a Revenue Officer cheerfully,--“God knows
what the brutes find to eat.” _Apropos_ of irrigation, the one canal
deserves special mention, as showing how George Stephenson came to
Jodhpur and astonished the inhabitants. Six miles from the city proper
lies the Balsamand Sagar, a great tank. In the hot weather, when the
city tanks ran out or stank, it was the pleasant duty of the women to
tramp twelve miles at the end of the day’s work to fill their lotahs. In
the hot weather Jodhpur is--let a simile suffice. Sukkur in June would
be Simla to Jodhpur.
The State Engineer, who is also the Jodhpur State Line, for he has no
European subordinates, conceived the idea of bringing the water from the
Balsamand into the city. Was the city grateful? Not in the least. It
said that the Sahib wanted the water to run uphill and was throwing
money into the tank. Being true Marwaris, men betted on the subject. The
canal--a built out one, for water must not touch earth in these
parts--was made at a cost of something over a lakh, and the water came
down because the tank was a trifle higher than the city. Now, in the hot
weather, the women need not go for long walks, but the Marwari cannot
understand how it was that the “waters came down to Jodhpur.” From the
Marwari to money matters is an easy step. Formerly, that is to say up
to within a very short time, the Treasury of Jodhpur was conducted in a
shiftless, happy-go-lucky sort of fashion not uncommon in Native States,
whereby the Mahajuns “held the bag” and made unholy profits on discount
and other things, to the confusion of the Durbar Funds and their own
enrichment. There is now a Treasury modelled on English lines, and
English in the important particular that money is not to be got from it
for the asking, and the items of expenditure are strictly looked after.
In the middle of all this bustle of reform planned, achieved, frustrated
and re-planned, and the never-ending underground warfare that surges in
a Native State, moved the English officers--the irreducible minimum of
exiles. As a caste, the working Englishmen in Native States are
curiously interesting; and the traveller whose tact by this time has
been Wilfred-blunted by tramping, sits in judgment upon them as he has
seen them. In the first place, they are, they must be, the fittest who
have survived; for though, here and there, you shall find one chafing
bitterly against the burden of his life in the wilderness, one to be
pitied more than any chained beast, the bulk of the caste are honestly
and unaffectedly fond of their work, fond of the country around them,
and fond of the people they deal with. In each State their answer to a
certain question is the same. The men with whom they are in contact are
“all right when you know them, but you’ve got to know them first” as the
music-hall song says. Their hands are full of work; so full that, when
the incult wanderer said--“What do you find to do?” they looked upon him
with contempt and amazement--exactly as the wanderer himself had once
looked upon a Globe-Trotter, who had put to him the same impertinent
query. And--but here the Englishman may be wrong--it seemed to him that
in one respect their lives were a good deal more restful and
concentrated than those of their brethren under the British Government.
There was no talk of shiftings and transfers and promotions, stretching
across a Province and a half, and no man said anything about Simla. To
one who has hitherto believed that Simla is the hub of the Empire, it is
disconcerting to hear:--“O Simla! That’s where you Bengalis go. We
haven’t anything to do with Simla down here.” And no more they have.
Their talk and their interests run in the boundaries of the States they
serve, and, most striking of all, the gossipy element seems to be cut
out altogether. It is a backwater of the river of Anglo-Indian life--or
is it the main current, the broad stream that supplies the motive power,
and is the other life only the noisy ripple on the surface? You who have
lived, not merely looked at, both lives, decide. Much can be learnt from
the talk of the caste--many curious, many amusing, and some startling
things. One hears stories of men who take a poor, impoverished State as
a man takes a wife, “for better or worse,” and, moved by some
incomprehensible ideal of virtue, consecrate--that is not too big a
word--consecrate their lives to that State in all single-heartedness and
purity. Such men are few, but they exist to-day, and their names are
great in lands where no Englishman travels. Again the listener hears
tales of grizzled diplomats of Rajputana--Machiavellis who have hoisted
a powerful intriguer with his own intrigue, and bested priestly cunning,
and the guile of the Oswal, simply that the way might be clear for some
scheme which should put money into a tottering Treasury, or lighten the
taxation of a few hundred thousand men--or both; for this can be done.
One tithe of that force spent on their own advancement would have
carried such men very far.
Those who know anything of the internals of government, know that such
men must exist, for their works are written between the lines of the
Administration Reports; but to hear about them and to have them pointed
out, is quite a different thing. It breeds respect and a sense of shame
and frivolity in the mind of the mere looker-on, which may be good for
the soul.
Truly the Hat-marked Caste are a strange people. They are so few and so
lonely and so strong. They can sit down in one place for years, and see
the works of their hands and the promptings of their brain, grow to
actual and beneficent life, bringing good to thousands. Less fettered
than the direct servant of the Indian Government, and working over a
much vaster charge, they seem a bigger and a more large-minded breed.
And that is saying a good deal.
But let the others, the little people bound down and supervised, and
strictly limited and income-taxed, always remember that the Hat-marked
are very badly off for shops. If they want a necktie they must get it up
from Bombay, and in the rains they can hardly move about; and they have
no amusements and must go a day’s railway journey for a rubber, and
their drinking water is doubtful; and there is rather less than one lady
_per_ ten thousand square miles.
After all, comparative civilisation has its advantages.