Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official

by Sir W. H. Sleeman

The castle stands upon the summit of a small hill of syenitic rock. The elevation of the outer wall is about one hundred feet above the level of the plain, and the top of the tower on which I stood about one hundred feet more, as the buildings rise gradually from the sides to the summit of the hill. The city extends out into the plain to the east from the foot of the hill on which the castle stands. Around the city there is a good deal of land, irrigated from four or five tanks in the neighbourhood, and now under rich wheat crops; and the gardens are very numerous, and abound in all the fruit and vegetables that the people most like. Oranges are very abundant and very fine, and our tents have been actually buried in them and all the other fruits and vegetables which the kind people of Jhānsī have poured in upon us. The city of Jhānsī contains about sixty thousand inhabitants, and is celebrated for its manufacture of carpets.[11] There are some very beautiful temples in the city, all built by Gosāins, one [sic] of the priests of Siva who here engage in trade, and accumulate much wealth.[12] The family of the chief do not build tombs; and that now raised over the place where the late prince was buried is dedicated as a temple to Siva, and was made merely with a view to secure the place from all danger of profanation.[13]

The face of the country beyond the influence of the tanks is neither rich nor interesting. The cultivation seemed scanty and the population thin, owing to the irremediable sterility of soil, from the poverty of the primitive rock from whose detritus it is chiefly formed. Raghunāth Rāo told me that the wish of the people in the castle to adopt a child as the successor to his nephew arose from the desire to escape the scrutiny into the past accounts of disbursements which he might be likely to order. I told him that I had myself no doubt that he would be declared the Rājā, and urged him to turn all his thoughts to the future, and to allow no inquiries to be made into the past, with a view to gratify either his own resentment, or that of others; that the Rajas of Jhānsī had hitherto been served by the most respectable, able, and honourable men in the country, while the other chiefs of Bundēlkhand could get no man of this class to do their work for them—that this was the only court in Bundēlkhand in which such men could be seen, simply because it was the only one in which they could feel themselves secure—while other chiefs confiscated the property of ministers who had served them with fidelity, on the pretence of embezzlement; the wealth thus acquired, however, soon disappearing, and its possessors being obliged either to conceal it or go out of the country to enjoy it. Such rulers thus found their courts and capitals deprived of all those men of wealth and respectability who adorned the courts of princes in other countries, and embellished, not merely their capitals, but the face of their dominions in general with their chateaus and other works of ornament and utility. Much more of this sort passed between us, and seemed to make an impression upon him; for he promised to do all that I had recommended to him. Poor man! he can have but a short and miserable existence, for that dreadful disease, the leprosy, is making sad inroads in his System already.[14] His uncle, Raghunāth Rāo, was afflicted with it; and, having understood from the priests that by drowning himself in the Ganges (taking the 'samādh'), he should remove all traces of it from his family, he went to Benares, and there drowned himself, some twenty years ago. He had no children, and is said to have been the first of his family in whom the disease showed itself.[15]

Notes:

1. December, 1835.

2. Now the head-quarters of the British district of the same name, and also of the Indian Midland Railway. Since the opening of this railway and the restoration of the Gwālior fort to Sindhia in 1886, the importance of Jhānsī, both civil and military, has much increased. The native town was given up by Sindhia in exchange for the Gwālior stronghold.

3. This chief is called Rājā Rāo Rāmchand in the N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed. He died on August 20, 1835. His administration had been weak, and his finances were left in great disorder. Under his successor the disorder of the administration became still greater.

4. Dowagers in Indian princely families are frequently involved in such intrigues and plots. The editor could specify instances in his personal experience. Compare Chapter 34, post.

5. An adopted son passes completely out of the family of his natural, into that of his adoptive, father, all his rights and duties as a son being at the same time transferred. In this case, the adoption had not really taken place, and the lad's duty to his living natural father remained unaffected.

6. This statement will not apply to those districts in the United Provinces where elephants are numerous and often kept by gentry of no great rank or wealth, A Rājā, of course, always likes to have a few mounted men clattering behind him, if possible.

7. The 'prāyaschit' is an expiating atonement by which the person humbles himself in public. It is often imposed for crimes committed in a former birth, as indicated by inflictions suffered in this. [W. H. S.] The practical working of Hindoo caste rules is often frightfully cruel. The victims of these rules in the case described by the author were a boy ten years old, and his child- wife of still more tender years. Yet all the penalties, including rigorous fasts, would be mercilessly exacted from these innocent children. Leprosy and childlessness are among the afflictions supposed to prove the sinfulness of the sufferer in some former birth, perhaps thousands of years ago.