Each time you reach a clump of banyans, tamarind and tulip trees, you find the same tenants of its shades: village police-station, government posting-stable, and serai are always inclosed within its limits. All the villages are fortified with lofty walls of mud or brick, as are the numerous police-stations along the road, where the military constabulary, in their dark-blue tunics, yellow trowsers, and huge puggrees of bright red, rise up from sleep or hookah as you pass, and, turning out with tulwárs and rifles, perform the military salute—due in India to the white face from all native troops. Your skin here is your patent of aristocracy and your passport, all in one.
It is not only by the police and troops that you are saluted: the natives all salaam to you—except mere coolies, who do not think themselves worthy even to offer a salute—and many Anglo-Indians refuse to return their bow. Every Englishman in India ought to act as though he were an ambassador of the Queen and people, and regulate accordingly his conduct in the most trifling things; but too often the low bow and humble “Salaam sahib” is not acknowledged even by a curt “Salaam.”
In the drier portions of the country, women were busy with knives digging up little roots of grass for horse-food; and four or five times a day a great bugling would be heard and answered by my driver, while the mail-cart shot by us at full speed. The astonishment with which I looked upon the Indian plains grew even stronger as I advanced up country. Not only is bush scarce, and forest never seen, but where there is jungle it is of the thinnest and least tropical kind. It would be harder to traverse, on horse or foot, the thinnest coppice in the south of England than the densest jungle in the plain country of all India.
Both in the villages and in the desert portions of the road, the ground-squirrels galloped in troops before the dawk, and birds without number hopped fearlessly beside us as we passed; hoopoes, blue-jays, and minas were the commonest, but there were many paddy-birds and graceful golden egrets in the lower grounds.
Between Delhi and Kurnaul were many ruins, now green with the pomegranate leaf, now scarlet with the bloom of the peacock-tree, and, about the ancient villages, acre after acre of plantain-garden, irrigated by the conduits of the Mohammedan conquerors; at last, Kurnaul itself—a fortified town—seen through a forest of date, wild mango, and banyan, with patches of wheat about it, and strings of laden camels winding along the dusty road. After a bheestie had poured a skinful of water over me, I set off again for Kalka, halting in the territory of the Puttiala Rajah to see his gardens at Pinjore, and then passed on toward the base of the Himalayan foot-hills. The wheat-harvest was in progress in the Kalka country, and the girls, reaping with the sickle, and carrying away the sheaves upon their heads, bore themselves gracefully, as Hindoo women ever do, and formed a contrast to the coarse old land-owners as these rode past, each followed by his pipe-bearer and his retinue.
A Goorkha battalion and a Thibetan goat-train had just entered Kalka when I reached it, and the confusion was such that I started at once in a jampan up the sides of the brown and desolate hills. A jampan, called, tonjon in Madras, is an arm-chair in shafts, and built more lightly than a sedan; it is carried at a short trot by four men, while another four, and a mate or chief, make their way up the hills before you, and meet you here and there to relieve guard. The hire of the jampan and nine men is less than that of a pony and groom—a curious illustration of the cheapness of labor in the East. When you first reach India, this cheapness is a standing wonder. At your hotel at Calcutta you are asked, “You wish boy pull punkah all night? Boy pull punkah all day and all night for two annas” (3d.). On some parts of the railway lines, where there is also a good road, the natives find it cheaper to travel by palankeen than to ride in a third-class railway carriage. It is cheaper in Calcutta to be carried by four men in a palki than to ride in a “second-class gharry,” or very bad cab; and the streets of the city are invariably watered by hand by bheesties with skins. The key to Indian politics lies in these facts.
At Wilson‘s at Calcutta, the rule of the hotel obliges one to hire a kitmutghar, who waits at table. This I did for the magnificent wage of 11d. a day, out of which Cherry—the nearest phonetic spelling of my man‘s name—of course fed and kept himself. I will do him the justice to add that he managed to make about another shilling a day out of me, and that he always brought me small change in copper, on the chance that I should give it him. Small as seemed these wages, I could have hired him for one-fifth the rate that I have named had I been ready to retain him in my service for a month or two. Wages in India are somewhat raised by the practice of dustooree—a custom by which every native, high or low, takes toll of all money that passes through his hands. My first introduction to this institution struck me forcibly, though afterward I came to look upon it as tranquilly as old Indians do. It was in the gardens of the Taj, where, to relieve myself from importunity, I had bought a photograph of the dome: a native servant of the hotel, who accompanied me much against my will, and who, being far more ignorant of English than I was of Hindostanee, was of absolutely no use, I had at last succeeded in warning off from my side, but directly I bought the photograph for half a rupee, he rushed upon the seller, and claimed one-fourth of the price, or two annas, as his share, I having transgressed his privilege in buying directly instead of through him as intermediary. I remonstrated, but to my amazement the seller paid the money quietly, and evidently looked on me as a meddling sort of fellow enough for interfering with the institution of dustooree. Customs, after all, are much the same throughout the world. Our sportsmen follow the habit of Confucius, whose disciples two or three thousand years ago proclaimed that “he angled, but did not use a net; he shot, but not at birds perching;” our servants, perhaps, are not altogether innocent of dustooree. However much wages may be supplemented by dustooree, they are low enough to allow of the keeping of a tribe of servants by persons of moderate incomes. A small family at Simla “require” three body servants, two cooks, one butler, two grooms, two gardeners, two messengers, two nurses, two washermen, two water-carriers, thirteen jampan-men, one sweeper, one lamp-cleaner, and one boy, besides the European lady‘s maid, or thirty-five in all; but if wages were doubled, perhaps fewer men would be “absolutely needed.” At the house where I stayed at Simla, ten jampan-men and two gardeners were supposed to be continuously employed in a tiny flower-garden round the house. To a European fresh from the temperate climates there is something irksome in the restraint produced by the constant presence of servants in every corner of an Indian house. To pull off one‘s own socks or pour out the water into the basin for one‘s self becomes a much-longed-for luxury. It is far from pleasant to have three or four natives squatting in front of your door, with nothing to do unless you find such odd jobs for them as holding the heel of your boot while you pull it on, or brushing your clothes for the fourteenth time.
The greater or less value of the smallest coin in common use in a country is a rough test of the wealth or poverty of its inhabitants, and by the application of it to India we find that country poor indeed. At Agra, I had gone to a money-changer in the bazaar, and asked him for change, in the cowrie-shells which do duty as money, for an anna, or 1½d. piece. He gave me handful after handful, till I cried enough. Yet when in the afternoon of the same day I had a performance on my threshold of “Tasa-ba-tasa”—that singular tune which reigns from Java to the Bosphorus, with Sanscrit words in Persia, and Malay words in the Eastern islands—the three players seemed grateful for half a dozen of the cowries, for they treated me to a native version of “Vee vont gah ham tall mardid, vee vont gah ham tall mardid,” by way of thanks. Many strange natural objects pass as uncoined money in the East: tusks in Africa, women in Arabia, human skulls in Borneo; the Red Indians of America sell their neighbors’ scalps for money, but have not yet reached the height of civilization which would be denoted by their keeping them to use as such; cowrie-shells, however, pass as money in almost every ancient trading country of the world.
The historical cheapness of labor in India has led to such an obstinate aversion to all labor-saving expedients that such great works as the making of railway embankments and the boulevard construction at Delhi are conducted by the scraping together of earth with the hands, and the collected pile is slowly placed in tiny baskets, much like strawberry pottles, and borne away on women‘s heads to its new destination. Wheelbarrows, water-carts, picks, and shovels are in India all unknown.
If, on my road from Kalka to Simla, I had an example of the cheapness of Indian labor, I also had one of its efficiency. The coolie who carried my baggage on his head trotted up the hills for twenty-one hours, without halting for more than an hour or two, and this for two days’ pay.