The history of the Mogul empire of India from the time of the conquest of the older empire by Tamerlane in the fourteenth century, and the forced conversion to Mohammedanism of a vast number of Hindoos, and that of Akbar‘s splendor and enormous power, down to the transportation of the last emperor in 1857 to Rangoon, and the shooting of his sons in a dry ditch by Captain Hodson, is one for us to ponder carefully. Those who know what we have done in India, say that even in our codes—and they are allowed to be our best claim to the world‘s applause—we fall short of Akbar‘s standard.
Delhi, the work of Shah Jehan, founder of the Taj and the Pearl Mosque, was built by himself in a wilderness, as was Agra by the Emperor Akbar. We who have seen the time that has passed since its foundation by Washington before the capital of the United States has grown out of the village shape, cannot deny that the Mogul emperors, if they were despots, were at least tyrants possessed of imperial energy. Akbar built Agra twenty or thirty miles from Futtehpore Sikri, his former capital, but Jehan had the harder task of forcing his people to quit an earlier site not five miles from modern Delhi, while Akbar merely moved his palace and let the people follow.
Delhi suffered so much at our hands during the storm in 1857, and has suffered so much since in the way of Napoleonic boulevards intended to prevent the necessity of storming it again, that it must be much changed from what it was before the war. The walls which surround the whole city are nearly as grand as those of the fort at Agra, and the gate towers are very Gibraltars of brick and stone, as we found to our cost when we battered the Cashmere Gate in 1857. The palace and the Motee Musjid are extremely fine, but inferior to their namesakes at Agra; and the Jumna Musjid—reputed the most beautiful as it is the largest mosque in the world—impressed me only by its size. The view, however, from its minars is one of the whole Northwest. The vast city becomes an ant-heap, and you instinctively peer out into space, and try to discern the sea toward Calcutta or Bombay.
The historical memories that attach to Delhi differ from those that we associate with the name of Agra. There is little pleasure in the contemplation of the zenana, where the miserable old man, the last of the Moguls, dawdled away his years.
CHAPTER VII.
SIMLA.
AFTER visiting Nicholson‘s tomb at the Cashmere Gate, I entered my one-horse dawk—the regulation carriage of India—and set off for Kurnaul and Simla, passing between the sand-hills, gravel-pits, and ruined mosques through which the rebel cavalry made their famous sortie upon our camp. It was evening when we started, and as the dawk-gharrees are so arranged that you can lie with comfort at full-length, but cannot sit without misery, I brought my canvas bag into service as a pillow, and was soon asleep.
When I woke, we had stopped; and when I drew the sliding shutter that does duty for door and window, and peered out into the darkness, I discovered that there was no horse in the shafts, and that my driver and his horse syce—or groom—were smoking their hubble-bubbles at a well in the company of a passing friend. By making free use of the strongest language that my dictionary contained, I prevailed upon the men to put in a fresh horse; but starting was a different matter. The horse refused to budge an inch, except, indeed, backwards, or sideways toward the ditch. Six grooms came running from the stable, and placed themselves one at each wheel, and one on each side of the horse, while many boys pushed behind. At a signal from the driver, the four wheelmen threw their whole weight on the spokes, and one of the men at the horse‘s head held up the obstinate brute‘s off fore-leg, so that he was fairly run off the ground, and forced to make a start, which he did with a violent plunge, for which all the grooms were, however, well prepared. As they yelled with triumph, we dashed along for some twenty yards, then swerved sideways, and came to a dead stop. Again and again the starting process was repeated, till at last the horse went off at a gallop, which carried us to the end of the stage. This is the only form of starting known to up-country horses, as I soon found; but sometimes even this ceremony fails to start the horse, and twice in the Delhi-to-Kalka journey we lost a quarter of an hour over horses, and had finally to get others from the stable.
About midnight, we reached a government bungalow, or roadside inn, where I was to sup, and five minutes produced a chicken curry which, in spite of its hardness, was disposed of in as many more. Meanwhile a storm had come rumbling and roaring across the skies, and when I went to the door to start, the bungalow butler and cook pointed to the gharree, and told me that driver and horse were gone. Not wishing the bungalow men to discover how small was my stock of Hindostanee, I paid careful attention to their conversation, and looked up each time that I heard “sahib,” as I knew that then they must be talking about me. Seeing this, they seemed to agree that I was a thorough Hindostanee scholar, but too proud to answer when they spoke. While they were humbly requesting that I would bow to the storm and sleep in the bungalow, which was filled with twittering sparrows, waked by the thunder or the lights, I was reading my dictionary by the faint glimmer of the cocoanut oil-lamp, and trying to find out how I was to declare that I insisted on going on at once. When at last I hit upon my phrase, the storm was over, and the butler soon found both horse and driver. After this adventure, my Hindostanee improved fast.
A remarkable misapprehension prevails in England concerning the languages of India. The natives of India, we are inclined to believe, speak Hindostanee, which is the language of India as English is that of Britain. The truth is that there are in India a multitude of languages, of which Hindostanee is not even one. Besides the great tongues, Urdu, Maratti, and Tamil, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of local languages, and innumerable dialects of each. Hindostanee is a camp language, which contains many native words, but which also is largely composed of imported Arabic and Persian words, and which is not without specimens of English and Portuguese. “Saboon,” for soap, is the latter; “glassie,” for a tumbler, and “istubul,” for a stable, the former: but almost every common English phrase and English word of command forms in a certain measure part of the Hindostanee tongue. Some terms have been ingeniously perverted; for instance, “Who comes there?” has become “Hookum dar?” “Stand at ease!” is changed to “Tundel tis,” and “Present arms!” to “Furyunt arm!” The Hindostanee name for a European lady is “mem sahib,” a feminine formed from “sahib”—lord, or European—by prefixing to it the English servants’ “mum,” or corruption of “madam.” Some pure Hindostanee words have a comical sound enough to English ears, as “hookm,” an order, pronounced “hook‘em;” “misri,” sugar, which sounds like “misery;” “top,” fever; “molly,” a gardener; and “dolly,” a bundle of vegetables.
Dawk traveling in the Punjaub is by no means unpleasant; by night you sleep soundly, and by day there is no lack of life in the mere traffic on the road, while the general scene is full of charm. Here and there are serais, or corrals, built by the Mogul emperors or by the British government for the use of native travelers. Our word “caravansery” is properly “caravan-serai,” an inclosure for the use of those traveling in caravans. The keeper of the serai supplies water, provender, and food, and at night the serais along the road glow with the cooking-fires and resound with the voices of thousands of natives, who when on journeys never seem to sleep. Throughout the plains of India, the high-roads pass villages, serais, police-stations, and groups of trees at almost equal intervals. The space between clump and clump is generally about three miles, and in this distance you never see a house, so compact are the Indian villages. The Northwest Provinces are the most densely-peopled countries of the world, yet between village and village you often see no trace of man, while jackals and wild blue-cows roam about as freely as though the country were an untrodden wilderness.