Eight Lectures on India

by Halford John Mackinder

|45.
Kinkob Loom, Secunderabad.| |46.
Carpenters at Aurangabad.| In the midst, however, of this rapid advance we still find the older methods. Here at Secunderabad is a Kinkob loom of the old pattern. Kinkob work is made of gold and silver thread. The boy sitting above is controlling the threads, and helps to make the pattern by raising or lowering them in the warp. The boy sitting below in the well is working the shuttles. This is a street scene in Aurangabad showing natives of the carpenter caste sawing timber.

|47.
The Tomb of the Saint, Roza.| |48.
Roza Fair.| |49.
The Same.| |50.
Daulatabad, from the Road to Roza.| Another aspect of life in the Deccan of India is shown in the next slide, where round the tomb of a saint at a place called Roza is gathered the camp of a fair. A saint of great renown among the Musulmans was buried here in the fourteenth century, and deposited within the shrine are some hairs alleged to be from Muhammad’s beard. There follow two slides showing the usual amusements of the fair, in the latter of which we see a merry-go-round not at all unlike those typical of the country fairs of England. Next we have a view taken on the road from Roza, and in the distance can be seen the hill fort of Daulatabad, built in the thirteenth century on a great isolated mass of granite about five hundred feet high. In this fort was imprisoned and died the last King of Golkonda, and it became the favourite summer resort of his Mogul conqueror, Aurangzeb.

|Repeat Map No. 27.| The upland which fills most of the centre of India and bears in its midst the Nizam’s Dominions is in most parts of no great fertility. Over large areas it is fitted rather for the pasture of horses and cattle than for the plough. Agriculture is naturally best in the river valleys, but there is one large district lying on the plateau top east of Bombay, and on the hill tops about the Narbada valley east of Baroda, which is of a most singular fertility. The usually granitic and schistose rocks of the plateau have here been overlaid by great sheets of basaltic lava. Detached portions of these lava beds form the table tops of the hills in the country rendered famous by Wellesley’s Maratha campaigns. The lava disintegrates into a tenacious black soil, which does not fall into dust during the dry season, but cracks into great blocks, which remain moist. As the dry season advances these blocks shrink, and the cracks grow broader, so that finally it is dangerous for a horse to gallop over the plain lest its hoof should be caught in one of these openings of the ground.

This remarkable earth is known as the Black Cotton Soil. The cotton seeds are sown after the rains, and as the young plant grows a clod of earth forms round its roots, which is separated from the next similar clod by cracks. Wheat is grown on this soil in the same manner, being sown after the rainy season and reaped in the beginning of the hot season, so that from beginning to end the crop is produced without exposure to rain, being drawn up by the brilliant sunshine and fed at the root by the moisture preserved in the heavy soil.

Thus in the part of India which lies immediately east, northeast, and north of Bombay the lowlands and the uplands are alike fertile—the lowlands round Ahmadabad and Baroda and in the valleys of the Narbada and Tapti Rivers because of their alluvial soil, and the uplands round Poona and Indore because they are clothed with the volcanic cotton soil.

Just within the northwestern corner of the Nizam’s territory are the famous rock temples of Ellora, perhaps the most magnificent of their kind in the world. The sculpture is of Brahman, Buddhist, and Jain dates, the monuments of various religions being thus as it were imposed upon one another.

|51.
Entry to Jain Caves, Ellora.| |52.
Jain Caves, Ellora.| |53.
The Juggernath Temple, Jain Caves, Ellora.| |54.
The Same.| |55.
The Kailas Caves, Ellora.| |56.
The Same.| |57.
Buddhist Temple, Ellora Caves.| |58.
The Carpenter Cave, Ellora.| This is the entry to the Jain part of the Ellora caves, and this is the interior of one of the Jain caves, story above story. The niches are full of statues, many of them in perfect condition. Here we have two views of the magnificent Juggernath Temple. Next, in the dim light, we realize something of the internal structure of the Brahman section of the caves. Notice the two men whose height enables you to judge of the scale. These are among the finest of all the monuments of antiquity in India. Here is a view taken on the floor of the Buddhist Temple, with large figures of Buddha seated on a throne, and there follows a view in another cave showing the beautifully carved roof. It will be seen then that in these Ellora caves several religions have contributed, the Jain no less than the Buddhist and the Hindu.

The Jains rose in the time of Buddha, five hundred years before Christ. That was a time of religious stir in India, which resulted in various revolts against the Brahmanical system. The Jain tenets are not unlike those of the Buddhists. They believe in the universal soul, and in the transmigration of souls, so that a man’s soul may pass into an animal. Their regard for animal life, for this reason so general in India, is carried to an extreme. The Jains were strongest in Western India, and they are still present there, although now in a very small minority. They probably total to-day not more than a million and a half, and are perhaps most numerous at Ahmadabad. Of their great temples at Mount Abu we shall hear presently.

|59.
The Mecca Gate, Aurangabad.| |60.
The Mausoleum of Rubia-ud-Daurani.| In order to complete the range of the architectures of India, there follow two specimens of the Muhammadan buildings of the state of Hyderabad. First we see the Mecca Gate at Aurangabad, with the Mecca Bridge underneath it, and then we have the Mausoleum of Rubia-ud-Daurani, the wife of Aurangzeb. The door of the gateway is of brass and all the domes are of marble. The building has recently been restored by the Government of the Nizam, and is now probably second only to the Taj Mahal at Agra among the Muhammadan buildings of India.

|Repeat Map No. 32.| Finally, we must note that a portion of the Bombay Presidency lies far away to the northwest, detached from the remainder. This is the province of Sind, for the most part a desert area, but containing the delta of the river Indus, which is a second Egypt in fertility, for there the alluvium brought down by the great river from the distant Himalaya mountains is deposited, and water is available by irrigation from the same distant source. Curiously, Sind resembles Egypt in its human settlements. At the head of the delta where the distributaries divide, and therefore at the lowest convenient crossing place of the river, is situated the city of Hyderabad, corresponding to Cairo, and on the sea front westward of the deltaic mouths is Karachi, corresponding to Alexandria.