India and Indian Engineering. / Three lectures delivered at the Royal Engineer Institute, Chatham, in July 1872

by J. G. Medley

As we go north, after leaving Bengal, we find ourselves amongst a more manly race—the stalwart Jat, the manly Rajpoot, the warlike Sikh, and the fierce and treacherous Puthan. These are the men with whom we wrestled for the empire of the East, and who now recruit our best native regiments,—who helped to plant the British flag on the towers of Pekin and the heights of Magdala.

Nor are these men at all deficient in intellectual power, though they have been less quick than the Bengalee to appreciate the advantages of education. But the Northern colleges and schools are now crowded with students, and even the frontier chieftains, who once thought it disgraceful that a son of theirs should wield a pen instead of a sword, have given in their adherence to the new-fangled ways of their conquerors.

The chief languages spoken in India are Tamil, Teloogoo and Canarese in the south; Mahratta and Guzerati in the west; Bengali, a dialect of Hindi, in Bengal; Oordoo or Hindustani in the North-west Provinces; Punjabee, a dialect in the Punjab; Burmese in Burmah; and Pooshtoo, the language of the Afghans. Sanscrit, as you probably know, is a dead language, in which the Shasters, or Hindoo scriptures, are written. Arabic is that of the Koran, read in India, but not spoken. Persian is only used by the best-educated people at the native courts. The Hindustani, or Oordoo, is the lingua franca current to a certain extent over the empire, at least, amongst the people with whom we chiefly come in contact, but scarcely understood by the people generally out of Hindustan, i.e. the North-west Provinces. It is a mixture (not a compound,) of words from the Hindi, Persian, Arabic, and Sanscrit, not unlike French in many of its characteristics, and easy to speak, but difficult to read and write. It is written both in the Persian and Hindi characters.

It is absolutely necessary for every Anglo-Indian to acquire a certain colloquial proficiency in it; for English-speaking natives are rare, and when found in the ranks of domestic servants, do not bear the best of characters.

The people of Upper India generally are a good-looking race, with well-formed features and good figures. The complexion varies very much, but is generally brown or dark olive—very rarely black. Many of the men are strikingly handsome, but the best-looking women are generally secluded at home, and it is only occasionally that one sees a real Eastern beauty. I need hardly tell so intelligent an audience that both the Indian and English races belong to the same great Aryan stock, and that the people of whom I am speaking have nothing in common with the low-developed, barbarous races of Southern or Central Africa, or Australasia. On the contrary, they have a language, a religion, a code of laws, and a civilization, considerably older than our own, and which, though now degraded from their original purity, yet exist in full force amongst the great bulk of the people, and by their wonderful conservatism and adaptation to the requirements of Eastern life, bid fair to maintain their ascendancy for many generations to come, and to set European innovations at defiance.

As you know, of course, the vast majority of the people of India are Hindoos by religion. Boodhism, once prevalent in India as it is now in China, has disappeared, and Brahminism prevails. I have no time to enter into any learned dissertation on the Hindoo tenets, but I must allude to one of its most distinguishing features—that of Caste—because it has more practical bearing on the every-day life of the people than all the rest of the tenets put together, and because it is also generally misunderstood.

Everyone probably knows that the original division of mankind, according to the Vedas, was into the four castes of the Brahmins, or priests; the Rajpoots, or warriors; the Ksatryahs, or writers; and the Sudras, or low-caste men. But this division has been so modified and altered, that it has practically disappeared. Brahmins are soldiers, traders, or cultivators, as well as priests; Rajpoots are cultivators rather than warriors, while all four castes have been divided and subdivided into innumerable petty castes, which, as a rule, are identical with the trade or calling of their votaries. Thus, a man who is a carpenter, will bring up all his sons to be carpenters, and so on ad infinitum; though this is being slowly altered where education opens out a prospect of more profitable employment in another line.

To lose caste, or be put out of caste, is as great a misfortune as ever, but there are very few offences for which a man cannot get back his caste by the payment of a few rupees, which are expended in eating and drinking by his fellow caste-men. The offences which involve loss of caste are offences against custom rather than religion, and indeed there are no people so grossly ignorant of technical religion and their sacred books as the Hindoos. The ordinary Brahmins are no better than the common people, and caste is a thing of custom and not of religious doctrine.

But if it be thought that, on that account, its hold on the people is small, the thinker has very little acquaintance with the power of custom in the East. The most bigoted Tory in England—if such a phenomenon now exists—is a Red Republican in presence of the Conservatism of the East. There you may see the land cultivated and the fields watered now as they were 2000 years ago, when the Macedonian phalanx defeated Porus on the banks of the Jhelum; there you may see “two women grinding at the mill” the corn for the daily meal, and can understand the force of the prophecy that one shall be taken and the other left. The ploughs and carts in every-day use are the same as those shown on the sculptures of Egypt or Assyria. The unleavened cakes that Sara prepared on the hearth for the angels were exactly similar to those your Indian servants now give you if you want a hasty meal. You see hundreds of men every morning sleeping outside their houses, and “taking up their beds and walking,” by the simple process of rolling up their light cotton mattress under one arm, or carrying it and their light bamboo bedstead on their heads together. The women draw water from the well, and poise the same shaped vessels on their heads that Rebekah did when Abraham’s servant greeted her, and, but a few steps off you will see the camels kneeling down, and the men unloading their burdens.

It is this wonderful conservatism that perhaps strikes the observant traveller more than anything else in the East; which opens his eyes to a state of society utterly foreign to all his Western experience, and makes him pause to think whether he is right after all in his ideas of the advantages of civilization. Is the man of the West any happier for his railways, electric telegraphs, steam factories, and Parliamentary Governments? Here he finds people who are not in the least anxious to govern themselves; who think fifteen or twenty miles a rather long day’s journey, and very seldom take that; who are content to follow their fathers’ calling as a matter of course, and who shrink with horror from that restless, bustling, feverish, active life which has become a second nature to the Englishman. The fact is, that each follows out, so to speak, the law of his being, and neither has a right to dictate to the other as to how he shall find his happiness.