THE UNITED PROVINCES.
THE MUTINY.
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Map of India, distinguishing the United Provinces.| Northwestward from Bengal, over the great plain of the Ganges, we enter the next region of India. The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh have an area almost equal to that of Great Britain, and a population as dense. When we go from Bengal to the United Provinces, it is as though we were crossing from one to another of the great continental States of Europe, say from Germany into France.
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Map of the United Provinces.| The Himalayan mountains lie to the north; the hills of Central India to the south. The plain between them, raised only a little above the sea, is two hundred miles across, measured from the foot hills of the Himalayas to the first rise of the Central Indian hills. Two great rivers, the Ganges and the Jumna, emerge from Himalayan valleys, and traverse the plain southward, and presently southeastward, leaving between them a tongue of land, known in Hindustani as the Doab, or two waters. Mesopotamia, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris in the Nearer East, signifies the same in the Greek language. The Jumna joins the Ganges near the southern limit of the plain, and in the angle of the confluence is the large city of Allahabad, the capital and seat of the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces. Other great tributaries flow to the Ganges from more eastern parts of the Himalayas, and bending southeastward join the main river one after another.
Five considerable cities focus the great population of the United Provinces—Allahabad, already mentioned, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Agra, and Benares. A hundred miles above Allahabad, on the right or south bank of the Ganges, is the city of Cawnpore, and on the opposite or northern bank extends the old Kingdom of Oudh, with Lucknow for its capital, situated some forty miles northeast of Cawnpore. Agra, which gives its name to all that part of the United Provinces which did not formerly belong to Oudh, is situated on the right or south bank of the Jumna, a hundred and fifty miles west of Lucknow. Eighty miles below Allahabad, on the north bank of the Ganges, is Benares, the most sacred city of the Hindus. All these distances between the cities of Agra, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Allahabad, and Benares, lie over the dead level of the plain, dusty, and like a desert in the dry season, but green and fertile after the rains. Scattered over the plain are innumerable villages, in which dwell nineteen out of twenty of the inhabitants of the joint Provinces. Lucknow is the largest of the cities, yet it has only a quarter of a million inhabitants.
The United Provinces are the heart of India, the typical Indian land, safe from invasion from the north by reason of the Himalayan barrier and the desert plateau of Tibet; relatively inaccessible from the ocean, and not conquered by Britain until long after Bengal had become a Province of the East India Company; relatively safe also from northwestern invasion. Its people remain dominantly Hindu in their religion and customs, whereas the great province of the Punjab further northwestward has a majority of Musulmans. Southward is the plateau of Central India, comparatively thinly peopled.
The language of the United Provinces, and of considerable districts to west, south, and east of them, is Hindi, the most direct derivative of the ancient Sanskrit tongue, whose use was contemporary with that of Latin and Greek. All three of these ancient tongues, as well as Old Persian, belong to the family of the Indo-European languages. Sanskrit was brought into India by a conquering people from the northwest. Hindi is now spoken by a hundred million people in all the northern centre of India. It is the language not only of the United Provinces but also of the western part of Bengal which is known as Behar, of that part of the Punjab which surrounds Delhi, and of a wide district in Central India ruled by the great Maratha chiefs, Sindhia and Holkar. Other tongues of similar origin are spoken in the regions around—Bengali in Bengal, Marathi and Gujrati in the lands which lie east and north of Bombay, and Punjabi in the Punjab. We must think of these various Indian languages as differing from one another much as French and Spanish and Italian differ, which are all derived from a common Latin source. The Hindi language was picked up by the Musulman conquerors of India, and by adding to it words of their own Persian speech they formed Urdu, the language of the camp. This is the language of educated Musulmans all over India to this day. Under the name of Hindustani it has become a sort of lingua franca throughout India, and is used by Europeans when talking to their servants.
Away to the south, beyond the limit of the Sanskrit tongues, in the province of Madras and neighbouring areas, are talked languages wholly alien from Sanskrit, and differing from Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujrati, and Punjabi, much as the Turkish and Hungarian languages differ from the group of allied Indo-European tongues spoken in Western Europe. These southern Indian tongues are known as Dravidian. The most important of them are Telugu, spoken by twenty millions, and Tamil, spoken by some fifteen millions. The Hindu religion, however, is held by the great majority both of the Dravidian south and of the Indo-European north and centre.
If there be one part of India which we may think of as the shrine of shrines in a land where religion rules all life, it is to be found in a triangle of cities just contained within the map before us. There on the Ganges we see Benares and Patna, and some fifty miles south of Patna the smaller town of Gaya. Benares from prehistoric times has been the focus of Hinduism. Patna was the capital of the chief Gangetic kingdom more than two thousand years ago, when the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, first of the Westerns, travelled thus far into the East. Gaya was the spot where Buddha, seeking to reform Hinduism some six hundred years before Christ, obtained enlightenment, and then migrated to teach at Benares, or rather at Sarnath, now in ruin, some three or four miles north of the present Benares. The peoples of all the vast Indian and Chinese world, from Karachi to Pekin and Tokyo, look to this little group of cities as the centre of holiness, whether they be followers of Brahma or of Buddha.