Eight Lectures on India

by Halford John Mackinder

Here we have views from the summit of the Trichinopoly Rock, looking eastward over the city, and then southward over the roof of the great temple to the tank and the Christian Church. Bishop Heber died at Trichinopoly. In each aspect we see the unbroken plain which surrounds the City. Do you notice the Bull Nandi as an ornament along the edge of the roof of the temple? Here we have him again carved from a great block of granite at Tanjore, a place not far from Trichinopoly. Other scenes at Tanjore follow. One shows us the wall of the Fort with the moat outside, and the gopura of the Great Temple. Another is a vista within the temple walls, and gives some idea of the great spaces which the larger temples occupy. Then suddenly we become conscious of one of the sharp contrasts which characterise the India of to-day. These are Police drilling on the Maidan, or public place of Tanjore, and away on the horizon are the semaphores of the railway.

In the plain of the Carnatic, which surrounds Madura, Trichinopoly, and Tanjore, we are not merely in the midst of the Hindu religion and caste system, but we are also near scenes rendered memorable by the struggle for India, a hundred and fifty years ago, between the French and the English. Two trading companies, the one seated in London and the other in Paris, obtained leave from the local princes to establish trading posts on the Coromandel Coast. They presently fortified these posts and became ambitious rivals.

|Repeat Map No. 3.| At this time there was a disputed succession in the Carnatic State, and the English supported one aspirant for the throne of the Nawab, the French another. The Nawab of the English party was besieged in the Fort of Trichinopoly by the French and their Nawab. To effect a diversion, a young Captain, Robert Clive, in the British company’s service, seized the Fort of Arcot, a hundred miles to the north, and by a prolonged heroic resistance to the siege which gathered round him, succeeded in relieving the pressure on Trichinopoly. That Captain Clive became Lord Clive, Baron of Plassey, the founder of the British Empire in India. He went out as a writer or clerk in the service of the East India Company, and rose to be Governor of Bengal.

It must be remembered, however, that in the time of Clive, no less than to-day, the number of the British in India was surprisingly small. As we saw just now, the Police, a great force, are not British but Indian, and the Indian army, though with British officers, is twice as numerous as the British garrison. The British have organised the peace and unity of India, rather than conquered it in the ordinary sense.

The life of the white man in India is governed by the seasons. Here in the south the temperature is at all times high, though the heat is never so great as in the hot season of northern India. On the other hand there is no cool season comparable with that of the north. In most parts of India, however, there are five cool months, October, November, December, January, and February. March, April, and May are the hot season. The remaining four months constitute the rainy season, when the temperature is moderated by the presence of cloud, but the moisture is trying to the European constitution.

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The Nilgiris, near Ootacamund.| In all parts of India the white population seeks periodical relief by a visit to the hills. Here in the south the favourite hill station is Ootacamund, in the Nilgiri Hills. It is scattered over a wide space, with the bungalows in separate compounds or enclosures.

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Ootacamund, The Bazaar.| |30.
Ootacamund, General View.| |31.
Ootacamund.| |Repeat Map No. 3.| “Ooty,” as it is familiarly called, stands some seven thousand feet above the sea in the midst of a country of rolling downs rising yet another thousand feet. This lofty district forms the southern point of the Deccan plateau where the Eastern and Western Ghats draw together. A deep passage, twenty miles broad, known as the gap of Coimbatore or of Palghat, lies through the Ghats, immediately south of the Nilgiri Hills, from the eastern plain to the Malabar Coast. Other hills, equally high, lie southward of the gap and extend to Cape Comorin. We saw these last hills to our left hand as we travelled northward from Tuticorin to Madura.

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On the Railway to Ootacamund.| |33.
The Same.| |34.
The Same.| |35.
The Same.| The railway from the east coast goes through the Gap of Coimbatore to the Malabar cities of Cochin and Calicut, and from this railway a mountain line has been constructed up into the Nilgiri heights. We have here a succession of striking views on this mountain line. It is a rack and pinion railway, up which the train is worked on the central rail.

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The Drug in the Nilgiri Hills.| There are magnificent landscapes at the edge of the Nilgiris, where the mountains descend abruptly to the plains. This view was taken from a point called Lady Canning’s seat. It shows the Drug, from the top of which prisoners of war used to be thrown, in the days of the tyranny of Hyder Ali and Tippu Sultan, the Mohammedan sovereigns of Mysore, of whom we shall hear more presently.

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Tea Plantation, Nilgiri Hills.| |38.
The Same.| |39.
Hill Tribe, Nilgiri Hills.| |40.
Toda People, near Ootacamund.| The vegetation of the heights is naturally different from that of the lowlands, and the cultivation of the Nilgiris is chiefly tea and cinchona, from the latter of which crops quinine is prepared. Amid the great forests of the slopes large game is numerous, such as sambur, or Indian elk, and tiger. Here also tribes of savage peoples have survived through all the centuries of history practically untouched by the civilization of the plains. One of these tribes, the smallest but the most interesting, are the Todas, who number less than a thousand, but have their own strange, unwritten language.