We were introduced to the young Rājā, the old man's adopted son, a lad of about ten years of age, who is to be married in February next. He is plain in person, but has a pleasing expression of countenance; and, if he be moulded after the old man, and not after his minister, the country may perhaps have in him the 'lucky accident' of a good governor.[11] I have rarely seen a finer or more prepossessing man than the Rājā, and all his subjects speak well of him. We had an elephant, a horse, abundance of shawls, and other fine clothes placed before us as presents; but I prayed the old gentleman to keep them all for me till I returned, as I was a mere voyageur without the means of carrying such valuable things in safety; but he would not be satisfied till I had taken two plain hilts of swords and spears, the manufacture of Datiyā, and of little value, which Lieutenant Thomas and I promised to keep for his sake. The rest of the presents were all taken back to their places. After an hour's talk with the old man and his ministers, attar of roses and pān were distributed, and we took our leave to go and visit the old palace, which as yet we had seen only from a distance. There were only two men besides the Rājā, his son, and ourselves, seated upon chairs. All the other principal persons of the court sat around cross-legged on the carpet; but they joined freely in the conversation, I was told by these courtiers how often the young chief had, during the day, asked when he could have the happiness of seeing me; and the old chief was told, in my hearing, how many good things I had said since I came into his territories, all tending to his honour and my credit. This is a species of barefaced flattery to which we are all doomed to submit in our intercourse with these native chiefs; but still, to a man of sense, it never ceases to be distressing and offensive; for he can hardly ever help feeling that they must think him a mere child before they could venture to treat him with it. This is, however, to put too harsh a construction upon what in reality, the people mean only as civility; and they, who can so easily consider the grandfathers of their chiefs as gods, and worship them as such, may be suffered to treat us as heroes and sayers of good things without offence.[12]
We ascended to the summit of the old palace, and were well repaid for the trouble by the view of an extremely rich sheet of wheat, gram, and other spring crops, extending to the north and east, as far as the eye could reach, from the dark belt of forest, three miles deep, with which the Rājā has surrounded his capital on every side as hunting grounds. The lands comprised in this forest are, for the most part, exceedingly poor, and water for irrigation is unattainable within them, so that little is lost by this taste of the chief for the sports of the field, in which, however, he cannot himself now indulge.
On the 19th[13] we left Datiyā, and, after emerging from the surrounding forest, came over a fine plain covered with rich spring crops for ten miles, till we entered among the ravines of the river Sindh, whose banks are, like those of all rivers in this part of India, bordered to a great distance by these deep and ugly inequalities. Here they are almost without grass or shrubs to clothe their hideous nakedness, and have been formed by the torrents, which, in the season of the rains, rush from the extensive plain, as from a wide ocean, down to the deep channel of the river in narrow streams. These streams cut their way easily through the soft alluvial soil, which must once have formed the bed of a vast lake.[14] On coming through the forest, before sunrise we discovered our error of the day before, for we found excellent deer-shooting in the long grass and brushwood, which grow luxuriantly at some distance from the city. Had we come out a couple of miles the day before, we might have had noble sport, and really required the forbearance and humanity to which we had so magnanimously resolved to sacrifice our 'pride of art' as sportsmen; for we saw many herds of the nīlgāi, antelope, and spotted deer,[15] browsing within a few paces of us, within the long grass and brushwood on both sides of the road. We could not stay, however, to indulge in much sport, having a long march before us.
Notes:
1. Some readers may be shocked at the notion of the author shooting pig, but, in Bundēlkhand, where pig-sticking, or hog- hunting, as the older writers call it, is not practised, hog-shooting is quite legitimate.
2. The common antelope, or black buck (Antilope bezoartica, or cervicapra) feed in herds, sometimes numbering many hundreds, in the open plains, especially those of black soil. Men armed with matchlocks can scarcely get a shot except by adopting artifices similar to those described in the text.
3. Sixteen species of hawks, belonging to several genera, are trained in India. They are often fed by being allowed to suck the blood from the breasts of live pigeons, and their eyes are darkened by means of a silken thread passed through holes in the eyelids. 'Hawking is a very dull and very cruel sport. A person must become insensible to the sufferings of the most beautiful and most inoffensive of the brute creation before he can feel any enjoyment in it. The cruelty lies chiefly in the mode of feeding the hawks' (Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, vol. i, p, 109). Asoka forbade the practice by the words: 'The living must not be fed with the living' (Pillar Edict V, c. 243 B.C., in V. A. Smith, Asoka, 2nd ed. (1909), p. 188).
4. The wording of this sentence is unfortunate, and it is not easy to understand why the author mentioned Bhopāl. The principality of Bhopāl was formed by Dost Mohammed Khān, an Afghān officer of Aurangzēb, who became independent a few years after that sovereign's death in 1707. Since that time the dynasty has always continued to be Muhammadan. The services of Sikandar Bēgam in the Mutiny are well known. Mālwa is the country lying between Bundēlkhand, on the east, and Rājputāna, on the west, and includes Bhopāl. Most of the states in this region are now ruled by Hindoos, but the local dynasty which ruled the kingdom of Mālwa and Māndū from A.D. 1401 to 1531 was Musalmān. (See Thomas, Chronicles of the Pathan Kings of Dehli, pp. 346-53.)
5. All near relatives succeed to a Muhammadan's estate, which is divided, under complicated rules, into the necessary number of shares. A son's share is double that of a daughter. As between themselves all sons share equally.
6. Bernier's Revolutions of the Mogul Empire. [W. H. S.] The author seems to have used either the London edition of 1671, entitled The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogul, or one of the reprints of that edition. The anecdote referred to is called by Bernier 'an uncommonly good story'. Aurangzēb made a long speech, ending by dismissing the unlucky pedagogue with the words: 'Go! withdraw to thy native village. Henceforth let no man know either who thou art, or what is become of thee.' (Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, pp. 154-161, ed. Constable and V. A, Smith, 1914.) Manucci repeats the story with slight variations (Storie da Mogor, vol. ii, pp. 29-33).