Eight Lectures on India

by Halford John Mackinder

If we now look some five hundred miles to the southwest of Kabul, we see that the Afghan mountains come suddenly to an end, and that a pathway leads round their fringe from Herat to the Indus Basin, passing along the border of Seistan. From Herat to beyond Kandahar, this way lies over an upland plain and is easy, but the last part of the journey is through a mountainous district down to the lowland of the Indus. This is the Bolan route, so called from the last gorge towards India. It will be noticed that the Bolan route debouches upon the Indus opposite to the great Indian Desert. Therefore it is that the Khyber route has been the more frequented. It leads directly between the desert and the mountain foot, upon the inner gateway of India at Delhi.

We conquered the Punjab from the Sikhs, but for many centuries it had been ruled by the Musulmans. In the break up of the Mogul Empire invaders had come, during the eighteenth century, from Persia and from Afghanistan, who carried devastation even as far as Delhi. Thus it was that with relative ease the Sikhs as contemporaries of the Marathas established a dominion in the helpless Punjab. They extended their rule also into the mountains of Kashmir, north of Lahore.

Let us commence our survey of the northwest at Dehra Dun, which is placed in a mountain valley among the foot hills of the Himalayas, not far from the hill station of Mussoorie, of which we heard in the last lecture. Then from Dehra Dun we will travel two hundred miles northwestward, crossing the Beas, one of the five rivers of the Punjab, to Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs. Fifty miles west of Amritsar, on the Ravi, another of the Indus tributaries, is Lahore, the traditional capital of the Punjab. From Lahore onward we traverse irrigated strips of fertile ground, with sandy plains intervening, with a scanty herbage for a few camels. Then follows a broken and more desolate country in the north of the Punjab. So we come to the Indus itself, and beyond this, nearly three hundred miles from Lahore, to the military station of Peshawar, the last Indian city on the great track leading northwestward from Calcutta, through Allahabad and Delhi. Not far from Peshawar is the Khyber Pass.

The Khyber is protected by its own hill tribes. We have enlisted them on the side of law and order by enrolling them into military forces, just as the Scottish Highlanders were enrolled in the British army in the 18th century.

Then leaving Peshawar we will visit Quetta, some five hundred miles southwestward, and see there the second great centre of British force on the Frontier. It has been established to command the Bolan route to Kandahar and Herat. The whole army in India is organised with reference to these two points, Peshawar and Quetta, or in other words, the Khyber and the Bolan. There are many other passes in the frontier mountains, but they offer merely loopways from the two main routes.

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12th Bengal Infantry.| |5.
Bombay Mountain Battery.| |6.
Heavy Battery in Elephant Draught.| The Indian forces are now grouped into a Northern and a Southern army. The Northern army is distributed southeastward from Peshawar past Delhi and Allahabad to Calcutta, so that all the forces along that long line may be regarded as supporting the brigades on the Khyber front. The Southern army is similarly posted for the reinforcement of Quetta. It is distributed in the Bombay Presidency and immediately around. The conditions of the defence of India have of course been vitally changed by the construction of the Northwestern Railway from the port of Karachi through the Indus basin, with its two branches towards the Bolan and the Khyber. To-day that defence could be conducted over the seas directly from Britain through Karachi, so that the desert of Rajputana would lie between the defending forces and the main community of India within.

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18th P. W. Tiwana Horse.| |8.
Gurkha Rifles: Physical Drill.| |9.
The Same—Bayonet Practice.| |10.
32nd Mountain Battery, Advancing Down Hill.| |11.
The Same—Retiring Up Hill.| |12.
Battery in Action.| As we start for Dehra Dun let us stop for a moment on the ridge at Delhi to see a squadron of the 18th Prince of Wales’s Tiwana Horse, recruited partly from among the Sikhs and partly from the Musulmans. Then at Dehra Dun we have the Gurkha Rifles. We see them at physical drill and then at bayonet practice. At the same place we visit a battery of Mountain Artillery, for Dehra Dun is in the Terai, at the foot of the Himalayas. Mountain batteries are much utilised in operations over the broken and hilly country towards the Northwest Frontier. The men are Punjabis; and it will be noticed that the guns are carried by mules. Here we see the battery advancing down hill, and here we see it retiring up hill. Then we have a mountain gun in action.

From Dehra Dun we proceed to Amritsar, the chief centre of the Sikh religion, which resulted from a reformation of Hinduism in the middle of the fifteenth century. It is therefore modern indeed as compared with the parent religion itself. The Sikhs abandoned idolatry, and also distinctions of caste. The word Sikh means “disciple.” In their origin a religious sect, the Sikhs developed into a powerful military commonwealth, which rose to great position in the Punjab and surrounding lands as the Mogul strength decayed at Delhi. The Sikhs only succumbed to the British after two wars, fought in 1846 and 1849, which were among the severest in the whole history of British India. Yet they remained loyal during the Mutiny.

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The Causeway and the Golden Temple, Amritsar.| |14.
The Golden Temple, Amritsar.| |15.
The Akal Bungah, Amritsar.| The Emperor Akbar granted to the Sikhs a site for their capital by the shore of a sacred tank, and this capital, Amritsar, has now grown to be a city of over 150,000 inhabitants, the third most wealthy and populous of the Punjab. It is surpassed only by Delhi and Lahore, and Delhi has been included in the Punjab only in recent times, and for convenience of administration. In this view we see the famous Golden Temple, built in the centre of the sacred tank. The bridge across the water leading to the entry is of marble. The doors of the gateway are of silver without, and on the inner side of wood inlaid with ivory. The lower part of the walls of the temple itself are of white marble inlaid with jaspar and mother-of-pearl, but the upper part is plated with gilded copper. In the middle of the temple, under a canopy, is the Grant Sahib, the sacred book of the Sikhs, covered with a cloth of gold. Here we have another view of the Golden Temple seen across the tank, and behind it is the Clock Tower. Opposite the chief entry to the temple is a square surrounded by public buildings, of which the most important is the Akal Bungah, wherein are performed the ceremonies of initiation and investiture of the Sikhs.

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School of Sikh and Hindu Children.| |17.
Street Scene, Amritsar.| |18.
Street Conjurer, Amritsar.| A few scenes follow showing phases of life at Amritsar. Here we see a part of the tesselated pavement which surrounds the sacred tank, and a school of Hindu and Sikh children. Next is a street scene showing the gateway leading to another sacred tank, and here is a conjurer with a cobra entwined about his neck. Amritsar has to-day become an important manufacturing city. From raw materials brought by the Khyber route, from the central Asian markets, are here manufactured shawls of the famous Kashmir design, and also fine silks, embroideries, carpets, carvings, and metal work of various kinds.