[36]. At these royal fairs were also sold the productions of princely artisans, male and female, and which, out of compliment to majesty, made a bounteous return for their industry. It is a fact but little known, that most Asiatic princes profess a trade: the great Aurangzeb was a cap-maker, and sold them to such advantage on these ‘ninth day’ fairs, that his funeral expenses were by his own express command defrayed from the privy purse, the accumulation of his personal labour. A delightful anecdote is recorded of the Khilji king Mahmud, whose profession was literary, and who obtained good prices from his Omrahs for his specimens of calligraphy. While engaged in transcribing one of the Persian poets, a professed scholar, who with others attended the conversazione, suggested an emendation, which was instantly attended to, and the supposed error remedied. When the Mullah was gone, the monarch erased the emendation and re-inserted the passage. An Omrah had observed and questioned the action, to which the king replied: “It was better to make a blot in the manuscript than wound the vanity of a humble scholar.” [Ferishta tells the story of Nāsiru-d-dīn Mahmūd, i. 246.]
[37]. [Compare the later accounts of these fairs by Bernier 272 f.; and Manucci i. 195. Aurangzeb transferred the Nauroz rejoicings to the coronation festival in Ramazān (Jadunath Sarkar, Life of Aurangzib, iii. 93). The ladies of the Mughal court usually spoke, not Pushto, but Turki.]
[38]. This laxity, as regards female delicacy, must have been a remnant of Scythic barbarism, brought from the banks of the Jaxartes, the land of the Getae, where now, as in the days of Tomyris, a shoe at the door is a sufficient barrier to the entrance of many Tatar husbands. It is a well-known fact, also, that the younger son in these regions inherited a greater share than the elder, which is attributed to their pastoral habits, which invited early emigration in the elder sons. This habit prevailed with the Rajput tribes of very early times, and the annals of the Yadus, a race allied to the Yuti-Getae, or Jāt, afford many instances of it. Modified it yet exists amongst the Jarejas (of the same stock), with whom the sons divide equally; which custom was transmitted to Europe by these Getic hordes, and brought into England by the Jut brothers, who founded the kingdom of Kent (kanthi, ‘a coast’ in Gothic and Sanskrit), where it is yet known as Gavelkind. In English law it is termed borough-English. In Scotland it existed in barbarous times, analogous to those when the Nauroza was sanctioned; and the lord of the manor had privileges which rendered it more than doubtful whether the first-born was natural heir: hence, the youngest was the heir. So in France, in ancient times; and though the ‘droit de Jambage’ no longer exists, the term sufficiently denotes the extent of privilege, in comparison with which the other rights of ‘Noçages,’ the seigneur’s feeding his greyhounds with the best dishes and insulting the bride’s blushes with ribald songs, were innocent. [The ethnological views in this note do not deserve notice.]
[39]. The loss of this is the sign of mourning. [There is naturally no confirmation of these anecdotes in the Musalmān historians, but they possibly may be true.]
[41]. These mountains are of granite and close-grained quartz; but on the summit of the pass there is a mass of columnar rocks, which, though the author never examined them very closely, he has little hesitation in calling basaltic. Were it permitted to intrude his own feelings on his reader, he would say, he never passed the portals of Debari, which close the pass leading from Chitor to Udaipur, without throwing his eye on this fantastic pinnacle and imagining the picture he has drawn. Whoever, in rambling through the ‘eternal city,’ has had his sympathy awakened in beholding at the Porta Salaria the stone seat where the conqueror of the Persians and the Goths, the blind Belisarius, begged his daily dole,—or pondered at the unsculptured tomb of Napoleon upon the vicissitudes of greatness, will appreciate the feeling of one who, in sentiment, had identified himself with the Rajputs, of whom Partap was justly the model.
[42]. [A pun on maur, ‘a crown,’ and the Maurya tribe.]
[43]. ‘The queen of battlements,’ the turreted Cybele of Rajasthan.
[44]. This magnificent lake is now adorned with marble palaces. Such was the wealth of Mewar even in her decline. [The lake is said to have been constructed by a Banjāra at the end of the fourteenth century, and the embankment was built by Rāna Udai Singh in 1560. The lake is 2¼ miles long, and 1¼ broad, with an area of over one square mile. In the middle stand the island palaces, the Jagmandir and the Jagniwās (Erskine ii. A. 109).]