Peeps at Many Lands—India

by John Finnemore

The life of the villages in this plain is, as a rule, untouched by modern ideas. They move upon the world-old ways which their fathers followed. In many of them, far from the main river and the railway, a white face is scarcely ever seen. There are great towns in the Ganges basin, but these are only specks on the face of the mighty plain. The Indian ryot knows nothing of them and goes on in his own way.

Water is his first need, and lucky is the man who has a good well or whose field is upon the bank of a river. The water is drawn in many ways. One peasant employs the simple method of watering by hand, filling his pots and emptying them upon the roots of the thirsty plants; but if the crop be rice, which demands a flood of water, a pair of oxen are set to the work. They are harnessed to a rope which runs over a pulley and has a huge water-skin fastened to its farther end. As the oxen go away from the well they pull up the skin full of water till it reaches a prepared channel. Here a man is waiting, who empties the skin into the channel, and the water runs away to the field. Now the oxen come back, and the skin sinks to the water; then they turn again, and the skin rises. One man drives the team, the other empties the water, and so the work goes on from dawn to dark.

WATERING CATTLE. Page 32.

These are the people who produce the wealth of India, these quiet, patient toilers growing their endless crops of wheat, of rice, of barley, of poppies for opium, of cotton, and of maize. They cut their ditches for irrigation, and flood a once-barren stretch of country with water. Thenceforth they take from it always two, and often three, crops in a year.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LAND OF THE MOGUL KINGS

Far in the north-west of the great plain of Hindostan, the ancient and famous city of Delhi stands on the broad Jumna, the chief tributary of the Ganges, and around her lies the land of the Mogul Kings. Delhi has a great name in the history of India. She saw the empire of the powerful Mogul Kings; she saw some of the most desperate fighting of the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the last Mogul was driven from his throne. But long before the Mutiny the power of the Moguls had vanished. Their palmy days were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the strongest of them all, Akbar, the Great Mogul, began to reign in 1556. He came to the throne two years before Elizabeth became Queen of England; he died two years after her, in 1605.

Akbar the Great was only fourteen years old when he became King, but "from that moment his grip was on all India." He proved a wonderful ruler and leader of men. India was a welter of conflicting races, tongues, and creeds. Under his firm and wise government strife died away, peace and order took its place, and those who had been the fiercest enemies lived side by side in friendship. He was at once law-maker, soldier, ruler, and philosopher. He was tall, and as strong in body as in mind, for he was the best polo player in India, and it is recorded of him that he once rode 800 miles on camel-back, and then, without staying for rest, at once gave battle to his enemy.

To find the wonderful buildings which the Great Mogul left behind him, we must leave Delhi and go down the Jumna to Agra and its neighbourhood. Agra is still called by the natives Akbarabad, the city of Akbar, and here stands the mighty fort which the monarch built, a city in itself. In a land of magnificent buildings there is nothing grander than the fort at Agra. Its battlements of red sandstone tower 70 feet from the ground, the walls run a mile and a half in circuit, and the immense mass of masonry dwarfs the modern town. Within the fort is a maze of courts, pavilions, corridors, and chambers, wrought in dazzling white marble, and decorated with the most beautiful carving and exquisite tracery in stone. The chief features of the vast building are Akbar's palace, with its golden pinnacles glittering in the sunshine, and the Moti Masjid, a small mosque of most beautiful proportions, so perfect both in design and in the beauty of its ornaments that it is called the Pearl Mosque, being the pearl of all mosques.