A PROCESSIONAL HORSE
The passion for bright colour is strikingly evident in these parades, where silk and gold are lavishly spread, and the manes and tails and sometimes the bodies of the animals are dyed magenta, scarlet, or orange. Gold or silver bangles are clasped round the fetlocks or above the knee, where they are hung with silk cloths or streamers. No matter how long the tamásha may last, the animal's head is always pulled tightly back and down with bridle and silken martingale, and one longs with such an exceeding great longing to cut them and set the head free that it is hard to be respectful to the bravery of the show. You feel that as a relic of the externals of the brave days of old (which must have been mainly bad old days) it deserves some respect. Yet no writer who has seen the display from near, and writes honestly, can refrain from noting its seamy side. The late Mr. Aberigh Mackay (Ali Baba of Vanity Fair), one of the brightest and most original, as well as one of the most generous spirits who ever handled Indian subjects, has drawn a picture in his Twenty-one Days in India, of a Raja and his Sowāri which could not be bettered by a hair's breadth.
A RAJA'S CHARGER (MARWAR BREED)
"In the cool of the evening our king emerges from his palace, and, riding on a prodigiously fat white horse with pink points, proceeds to the place of carousal. A long train of horsemen follow him, and footmen run before with guns in red flannel covers and silver maces, shouting 'Raja Maharaja Salaamat,' etc. The horsemen immediately around him are mounted on well-fed and richly caparisoned steeds, with all the bravery of cloth of gold, yaktails, silver chains, and strings of shells; behind are troopers in a burlesque of English uniform; and altogether in the rear is a mob of caitiffs on skeleton chargers, masquerading in every degree of shabbiness and rags, down to nakedness and a sword. The cavalcade passes through the city. The inhabitants pour out of every door and bend to the ground. Red cloths and white veils flutter at the casements overhead. You would hardly think that the spectacle was one daily enjoyed by the city. There is all the hurrying and eagerness of novelty and curiosity. Here and there a little shy crowd of women gather at a door and salute the Chief with a loud, shrill verse of discordant song. It is some national song of the Chief's ancestors and of the old heroic days. The place of carousal is a bare spot near a large and ancient well out of which grows a vast pipal tree. Hard by is a little temple surmounted by a red flag on a drooping bamboo. It is here that the Gangor and Dasehra Solemnities are celebrated. Arrived on the ground, the Raja slowly circles his horse; then, jerking the thorn-bit, causes him to advance plunging and rearing, but dropping first on the near foot and then on the off foot with admirable precision; and finally, making the white monster, now in a lather of sweat, rise up and walk a few steps on his hind legs, the Raja's performance concludes amid many shouts of wonder and delight from the smooth-tongued courtiers. The thakores (barons) and sardars (squires) now exhibit their skill in the manège until the shades of night fall, when torches are brought, amid much salaaming, and the cavalcade defiles through the city, back to the palace."
Is it any wonder that Sir John Malcolm, who had seen so much of this kind of life and could describe it with humour and spirit, was a congenial companion to the good Sir Walter? For it belongs to another world, and another time. Yet, when one knows all about the poor horse and the cruel bit it seems but a dull parody of ancient chivalry.
The ideas current on the qualities, form, and vices of the animal are as antiquated as its treatment. Many are tied up in aphoristic bundles for better preservation. So many parts of the horse should be round, so many square, so many short, and so many long, and everybody speaks of the five vices and of the eight lucky white points of Mangal—Mars. There is an elaborate science of stray hairs with an obstinate twist, of the colour of the markings and the planting of the hair in the skin. The last is a curious, and nowadays but little known subject in England. If you paint a well-groomed, well-conditioned horse in a strong light, you find that the shimmer and reflections of his coat take forms like those in moire antique silk or the "figure" in polished satin-wood and tell in your picture more than the actual form. It is conceivable, indeed, that a sculptor, studying shape only, might find it convenient to dredge his model over with gray powder to kill these reflections. We know that the rich and pictorial effects are partly due to a relatively trivial cause,—the direction in which the hairs are set in the skin, which varies slightly in different individuals. But in Indian horse lore the set of these featherings (they are analogous to the radiating arrangements of birds' feathers), ending sometimes in circles or whorls, are all mapped out like currents on a mariner's chart, and each is named and interpreted for luck, temper, constitution, or quality; but mainly for luck. The "Zinnat ul Khail" or "Beauties of the horse" is an elaborately illustrated text-book of this absurd science. Absurd enough, but those who have rummaged in old books will feel that in the American phrase, they "have been here before." Three hundred years ago, precisely similar notions were current in Europe and learnedly discoursed upon. Mr. Alfred E. T. Watson, in the Riding and Polo volume of the "Badminton Library" quotes from an Elizabethan writer, Maister Thomas Blundevill: "The horse that hath an ostrich feather either on his forehead, or both sides of his maine, or on the one side, or els behind on his buttocks, or in any place where he himself cannot see it, can never be an euill horse."
With reference to colour, we probably have preserved more preferences than we care to admit, though we say "a good horse is never of a bad colour." Such a saying is wildly irreverent from the Oriental point of view, whence colour and colour markings are the first things taken into account. Relics of the old ideas, however, still linger among us in such sayings as the doggerel about white feet,—
"One, you may buy him;
Two, you may try him;
Three, you should doubt him;
Four, do without him,"—