A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II

by Sir W. H. Sleeman

Maun Sing is to leave my camp to-day, and return to Shahgunge. Of the fraud and violence, abuse of power, and collusion with local authorities, by which he and his father seized upon the lands of so many hundreds of old proprietors, there can be no doubt; but to attempt to make the family restore them now, under such a government, would create great disorder, drive off all the better classes of cultivators, and desolate the face of the country, which they have rendered so beautiful by an efficient system of administration. Many of the most powerful of the landed aristocracy of Oude have acquired, or augmented, their estates in the same manner and within the same time; and the same difficulty would attend the attempt to restore the old proprietors in all parts. A strong and honest government might overcome all these difficulties, and restore to every rightful proprietor the land unjustly taken from him, within a limited period; but it should not attempt to enforce any adjustment of the accounts of receipts and disbursements for the intervening period. The old proprietor would receive back his land in an improved condition, and the usurper might fairly be considered to have reimbursed himself for all his outlay. The old proprietor should be required to pledge himself to respect the rights of all new tenants.

December 24, 1849.—Meranpoor, twelve miles. Soil between this and Sultanpoor neither so fertile nor so well cultivated, as we found it on the other side of the Goomtee river, though it is of the same denomination—generally doomut, but here and there mutear. The term mutear embraces all good argillaceous earth, from the light brown to the black, humic or ulmic deposit, found in the beds of tanks and lakes in Oude. The natives of Oude call the black soil of Malwa and southern India, and Bundlekund, muteear. This black soil has in its exhausted state abundance of silicates, sulphates, phosphates, and carbonates of alumina, potassa, lime, &c., and of organic acids, combined with the same unorganic substances, to attract and fix ammonia, and collect and store up moisture, and is exceedingly fertile and strong.

Both saltpetre and common salt are made by lixiviation from some of the poor oosur soils; but, from the most barren in Oude, carbonates of soda, used in making glass and soap, are taken. The earth is collected from the surface of the most barren spots and formed into small, shallow, round tanks, a yard in diameter. Water is then poured in, and the tank filled to the surface, with an additional supply of the earth, and smoothed over. This tank is then left exposed to the sun for two days, during the hottest and driest months of the year. March, April, and May, and part of June, when the crust, formed on the surface, is taken off. The process is repeated once; but in the second operation the tank is formed around and below by the debris of the first tank, which is filled to the surface, after the water has been poured in, with the first crust obtained. The second crust is called the reha, which is carbonate or bicarbonate of soda. This is formed into small cakes, which are baked to redness in an oven, or crucible, to expel the moisture and carbonic acid which it contains. They are then powdered to fine dust, which is placed in another crucible, and fused to liquid glass, the reha containing in itself sufficient silica to form the coarse glass used in making bracelets, &c.

A superabundance of nitrates seem also to impair or destroy fertility in the soil, and they may arise from the decomposition of animal or vegetable matter, in a soil containing a superabundance of porous lime. The atmospheric air and water, contained in the moist and porous soil, are decomposed. The hydrogen of the water combines with the nitrogen of the air, and that given off by the decomposing organic bodies, and forms ammonia. The nitrogen of the ammonia then takes up the oxygen of the air and water, and becoming nitric acid, forms nitrates with the lime, potash, soda, &c., contained in the soil. Without any superabundance of lime in the soil, however, the same effects may be produced, when there is a deficiency of decaying vegetable and animal matter, as the oxygen of the decomposed air and water, having no organic substances to unite with, may combine with the nitrogen of the ammonia, and form nitric acid; which, uniting with the lime, potash, soda, &c., may form the superabounding nitrates destructive of fertility.

This superabundance of reha, or carbonate of soda, which renders so much of the surface barren, must, I conclude, arise from deposits of common salt, or chloride of sodium. The water, as it percolates through these deposits towards the surface, becomes saturated with their alkaline salts; and, as it reaches the surface and becomes evaporated in the pure state, it leaves them behind at or near the surface. On its way to the surface, or at the surface, the chloride of sodium becomes decomposed by contact with carbonates of ammonia and potassa—sulphuric and nitric acids. In a soil well supplied with decaying animal or vegetable matter, these carbonates or sulphates of soda, as they rise to the surface, might be formed into nutriment for plants, and taken up by their roots; or in one well flooded occasionally with fresh water, any superabundance of the salts or their bases might be taken up in solution and carried off. The people say, that the soil in which these carbonates of soda (reha) abound, are more unmanageable than those in which nitrates abound: they tell me that, with flooding, irrigating, manuring, and well ploughing, they can manage to get crops from all but the soils in which this reha abounds.

The process above described, by which the bracelet makers extract the carbonates of soda and potash from the earth of the small, shallow tanks, is precisely the same as that by which they are brought from the deep bed of earth below and deposited on or near the surface. In both processes, the water which brings them near the surface goes off into the atmosphere in a pure state, and leaves the salts behind. To make soap from the reha, they must first remove the silex which it contains.

There are no rocks in Oude, and the only form in which lime is found for building purposes and road-pavements is that of kunkur, which is a carbonate of lime containing silica, and oxide of iron. In proportion as it contains the last, the kunkur is more or less red. That which contains none is of a dirty-white. It is found in many parts of India in thin layers, or amorphous masses, formed by compression, upon a stiff clay substratum; but in Oude I have seen it only in nodules, usually formed on nuclei of flint or other hard substances. The kingdom of Oude must have once been the bed, or part of the bed, of a large lake, formed by the diluvial detritus of the hills of the Himmalaya chain, and, as limestone abounds in that chain, the bed contains abundance of lime, which is taken up by the water that percolates through it from the rivers and from the rains and floods above. The lime thus taken up and held in solution with carbonic add gas, is deposited around the small fragments of flint or other hard substances which the waters find in their way. Where the floods which cover the surface during the rains come in rivers, flowing from the Himmalaya or other hills abounding in limestone rocks, they of course contain lime and carbonic-acid gas, which add to the kunkur nodules formed in the bed below; but in Oude the rivers seldom overflow to any extent, and the kunkur is, I believe, formed chiefly from the lime already existing in the bed.

Doctor O'Shaughnessy, the most eminent chemist now in India, tells me that there are two marked varieties of kunkur in India—the red and the white; that the red differs from the white solely in containing a larger proportion of peroxide of iron; that the white consists of carbonate of lime, silica, alumina, and sometimes magnesia and protoxide of iron. He states that he considers the kunkur to be deposited by calcareous waters, abounding in infusorial animalculæ; that the waters of the annual inundation are rich in lime, and that all the facts that have come under his observation appear to him to indicate that this is the source of the kunkur deposit, which is seen in a different form in the Italian travertine, and the crescent nodules of the Isle of Sheppey and of Bologne.

Doctor O'Shaughnessy further states, that the reha earth, which I sent to him from Oude, is identical with the sujjee muttee of Bengal, and contains carbonate of soda and sulphate of soda as its essential characteristic ingredients, with silicious clay and oxide of iron. But in Oude, the term "sujjee" is given to the carbonate and sulphate of soda which remains after the silex has been removed from the reha. The reha is fused into glass after the carbonic acid and moisture have been expelled by heat, and the sujjee is formed into soap, by the addition of lime, fat, and linseed oil, in the following proportions, I am told:—6 sujjee, 4 lime, 2½ fat, and 1½ ulsee oil.

The sujjee is formed from the reha by filtration. A tank is formed on a terrace of cement. In a hole at one corner is a small tube. Rows of bricks are put down from one end to the other, with intervals between for the liquor to flow through to the tube. On these rows a layer of stout reeds is first placed, and over them another layer composed of the leaves of these reeds. On this bed the coarse reha earth is placed without being refined by the process described in the text above. Some coarse common salt (kharee nimuck) is mixed up with the reha. The tank is then filled with water, which filters slowly through the earth and passes out through the tube into pans, whence it is taken to another tank upon a wider terrace of cement, where it evaporates and leaves the sujjee deposited. The second tank is commonly made close under the first, and the liquor flows into it through the tube, rendering pans unnecessary. It is only in the hot months of March, April, May, and part of June, till the rains begin to fall, that the reha and sujjee are formed. During the other nine months, the Looneas, who provide them, turn their hands to something else. The reha, deprived of its carbonic acid and moisture by heat, is fused into glass. Deprived of silex by this process of filtration, it is formed into sujjee, from which the soap is made.