He built himself everything that pleased him, palaces and gardens and temples, and then died, and was buried under a white marble tomb on a hill overlooking the city. He was a traitor, if history speak truth, to his own kin, and he was an accomplished murderer, but he did his best to check infanticide; he reformed the Mahomedan calendar; he piled up a superb library and he made Jeypore a marvel.
Later on came a successor, educated and enlightened by all the lamps of British Progress, and converted the city of Jey Singh into a surprise—a big, bewildering, practical joke. He laid down sumptuous trottoirs of hewn stone, and central carriage drives, also of hewn stone, in the main street; he, that is to say, Colonel Jacob, the Superintending Engineer of the State, devised a water-supply for the city and studded the ways with stand-pipes. He built gas-works, set a-foot a School of Art, a Museum, all the things in fact which are necessary to Western municipal welfare and comfort, and saw that they were the best of their kind. How much Colonel Jacob has done, not only for the good of Jeypore city but for the good of the State at large, will never be known, because the officer in question is one of the not small class who resolutely refuse to talk about their own work. The result of the good work is that the old and the new, the rampantly raw and the sullenly old, stand cheek-by-jowl in startling contrast. Thus, the branded bull trips over the rails of a steel tramway which brings out the city rubbish; the lacquered and painted ruth, behind the two little stag-like trotting bullocks, catches its primitive wheels in the cast-iron gas-lamp post with the brass nozzle a-top, and all Rajputana, gaily-clad, small-turbaned, swaggering Rajputana, circulates along the magnificent pavements.
The fortress-crowned hills look down upon the strange medley. One of them bears on its flank in huge white letters the cheery inscript “Welcome!” This was made when the Prince of Wales visited Jeypore to shoot his first tiger; but the average traveller of to-day may appropriate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes great care of strangers and shows them all courtesy. This, by the way, demoralises the Globe-Trotter, whose first cry is:—“Where can we get horses? Where can we get elephants? Who is the man to write to for all these things?”
Thanks to the courtesy of the Maharaja, it is possible to see everything, but for the incurious who object to being driven through their sights, a journey down any one of the great main streets is a day’s delightful occupation. The view is as unobstructed as that of the Champs Elysees; but in place of the white-stone fronts of Paris, rises a long line of open-work screen-wall, the prevailing tone of which is pink—caramel pink, but house-owners have unlimited license to decorate their tenements as they please. Jeypore, broadly considered, is Hindu, and her architecture of the riotous many-arched type which even the Globe-Trotter after a short time learns to call Hindu. It is neither temperate nor noble, but it satisfies the general desire for something that “really looks Indian.” A perverse taste for low company drew the Englishman from the pavement—to walk upon a real stone pavement is in itself a privilege—up a side-street where he assisted at a quail fight and found the low-caste Rajput a cheery and affable soul. The owner of the losing quail was a sowar in the Maharaja’s army. He explained that his pay was six rupees a month paid bi-monthly. He was cut the cost of his khaki blouse, brown-leather accoutrements and jack-boots; lance, saddle, sword, and horse were given free. He refused to say for how many months in the year he was drilled, and said vaguely that his duties were mainly escort ones, and he had no fault to find with them. The defeat of his quail had vexed him; and he desired the Sahib to understand that the sowars of His Highness’s army could ride. A clumsy attempt at a compliment so fired his martial blood that he climbed into his saddle, and then and there insisted on showing off his horsemanship. The road was narrow, the lance was long, and the horse was a big one, but no one objected, and the Englishman sat him down on a doorstep and watched the fun. The horse seemed in some shadowy way familiar. His head was not the lean head of the Kathiawar, nor his crest the crest of the Marwarri, and his fore-legs did not seem to belong to the stony district. “Where did he come from?” The sowar pointed northward and said “from Amritsar,” but he pronounced it “Armtzar.” Many horses had been brought at the spring fairs in the Punpab; they cost about Rs. 200 each, perhaps more, the sowar could not say. Some came from Hissar and some from other places beyond Delhi. They were very good horses. “That horse there,” he pointed to one a little distance down the street, “is the son of a big Sirkar horse—the kind that the Sirkar make for breeding horses—so high!” The owner of “that horse” swaggered up, jaw-bandaged and cat-moustached, and bade the Englishman look at his mouth; bought, of course, when a butcha. Both men together said that the Sahib had better examine the Maharaja Sahib’s stable, where there were hundreds of horses—huge as elephants or tiny as sheep.
To the stables the Englishman accordingly went, knowing beforehand what he would find, and wondering whether the Sirkar’s “big horses” were meant to get mounts for Rajput sowars. The Maharaja’s stables are royal in size and appointments. The enclosure round which they stand must be about half a mile long—it allows ample space for exercising, besides paddocks for the colts. The horses, about two hundred and fifty, are bedded in pure white sand—bad for the coat if they roll, but good for the feet—the pickets are of white marble, the heel-ropes in every case of good sound rope, and in every case the stables are exquisitely clean. Each stall contains above the manger, a curious little bunk for the syce who, if he uses the accommodation, must assuredly die once each hot weather.
A journey round the stables is saddening, for the attendants are very anxious to strip their charges, and the stripping shows so much. A few men in India are credited with the faculty of never forgetting a horse they have once seen, and of knowing the produce of every stallion they have met. The Englishman would have given something for their company at that hour. His knowledge of horseflesh was very limited; but he felt certain that more than one or two of the sleek, perfectly groomed country-breds should have been justifying their existence in the ranks of the British cavalry, instead of eating their heads off on six seers of gram and one of goor per diem. But they had all been honestly bought and honestly paid for; and there was nothing in the wide world to prevent His Highness, if he wished to do so, from sweeping up the pick and pride of all the horses in the Punjab. The attendants appeared to take a wicked delight in saying “eshtud-bred” very loudly and with unnecessary emphasis as they threw back the loin-cloth. Sometimes they were wrong, but in too many cases they were right.
The Englishman left the stables and the great central maidan where a nervous Biluchi was being taught, by a perfect network of ropes, to “monkey jump,” and went out into the streets reflecting on the working of horse-breeding operations under the Government of India, and the advantages of having unlimited money wherewith to profit by other people’s mistakes.
Then, as happened to the great Tartarin of Tarescon in Milianah, wild beasts began to roar, and a crowd of little boys laughed. The lions of Jeypore are tigers, caged in a public place for the sport of the people, who hiss at them and disturb their royal feelings. Two or three of the six great brutes are magnificent. All of them are short-tempered, and the bars of their captivity not too strong. A pariah-dog was furtively trying to scratch out a fragment of meat from between the bars of one of the cages, and the occupant tolerated him. Growing bolder—the starveling growled; the tiger struck at him with his paw and the dog fled howling with fear. When he returned, he brought two friends with him, and the trio mocked the captive from a distance.
It was not a pleasant sight and suggested Globe-Trotters—gentlemen who imagine that “more curricles” should come at their bidding, and on being undeceived become abusive.