On the 10th we came on twelve miles to Kumbhīr, over a plain of poor soil, much impregnated with salt, and with some works in which salt is made, with solar evaporation. The earth is dug up, water is filtered through it, and drawn off into small square beds, where it is evaporated by exposure to the solar heat. The gate of this fort leading out to the road we came is called, modestly enough, after Kumbhīr, a place only ten miles distant; that leading to Mathurā, three or four stages distant, is called the Mathurā gate. At Delhi, the gates of the city walls are called ostentatiously after distant places—the Kashmīr, the Kābul, the Constantinople gates. Outside the Kumbhīr gate, I saw, for the first time in my life, the well peculiar to Upper India. It is built up in the form of a round tower or cylindrical shell of burnt bricks, well cemented with good mortar, and covered inside and out with good stucco work, and let down by degrees, as the earth is removed by men at work in digging under the light earthy or sandy foundation inside and out. This well is about twenty feet below and twenty feet above the surface, and had to be built higher as it was let into the ground.[6]
On the 11th we came on twelve miles to Dīg (Deeg), over a plain of poor and badly cultivated soil, which must be almost all under water in the rains. This was, and still is, the country seat of the Jāts of Bharatpur, who rose, as I have already stated, to wealth and power by aggressions upon their immediate neighbours, and the plunder of tribute on its way to the imperial capital, and of the baggage of passing armies during the contests for dominion that followed the death of the Emperors, and during the decline and fall of the empire. The Jāts found the morasses with which they were surrounded here a source of strength. They emigrated from the banks of the Indus about Multān, and took up their abode by degrees on the banks of the Jumna, and those of the Chambal, from their confluence upwards, where they became cultivators and robbers upon a small scale, till they had the means to build garrisons, when they entered the lists with princes, who were only robbers upon a large scale. The Jāts, like the Marāthās, rose, by a feeling of nationality, among a people who had none. Single landholders were every day rising to principalities by means of their gangs of robbers; but they could seldom be cemented under one common head by a bond of national feeling.
They have a noble quadrangular garden at Dīg, surrounded by a high wall. In the centre of each of the four faces is one of the most beautiful Hindoo buildings for accommodation that I have ever seen, formed of a very fine sandstone brought from the quarries of Rūpbās, which he between thirty and forty miles to the south, and eight or ten miles west of Fathpur-Sīkrī. These stones are brought in in flags some sixteen feet long, from two to three feet wide, and one thick, with sides as flat as glass, the flags being of the natural thickness of the strata. The garden is four hundred and seventy-five feet long, by three hundred and fifty feet wide; and in the centre is an octagonal pond, with openings on the four sides leading up to the four buildings, each opening having, from the centre of the pond to the foot of the flight of steps leading into them, an avenue of jets d'eau.
Dīg as much surpassed, as Bharatpur fell short of, my expectations. I had seen nothing in India of architectural beauty to be compared with the buildings in this garden, except at Agra. The useful and the elegant are here everywhere happily blended; nothing seems disproportionate, or unsuitable to the purpose for which it was designed; and all that one regrets is that so beautiful a garden should be situated in so vile a swamp.[7] There was a general complaint among the people of the town of a want of 'rozgār' (employment), and its fruit, subsistence; the taking of Bharatpur had, they said, produced a sad change among them for the worse. Godby observed to some of the respectable men about us, who complained of this, that happily their chief had now no enemy to employ them against. 'But what', said they, 'is a prince without an army? and why do you keep up yours now that all your enemies have been subdued?' 'We want them', replied Godby, 'to prevent our friends from cutting each other's throats, and to defend them all against a foreign enemy.' 'True,' said they, 'but what are we to do who have nothing but our swords to depend upon, now that our chief no longer wants us, and you won't take us?' 'And what,' said some shopkeepers, 'are we to do who provided these troops with clothes, food, and furniture, which they can no longer afford to pay for?' Company ke amal men kuchh rozgār nahīn ('Under the Company's dominion there is no employment'). This is too true; we do the soldiers' work with one-tenth of the soldiers that had before been employed in it over the territories we acquire, and turn the other nine-tenths adrift. They all sink into the lowest class of religions mendicants, or retainers; or live among their friends as drones upon the land; while the manufacturing, trading, and commercial industry that provided them with the comforts, conveniences, and elegancies of life while they were in a higher grade of service is in its turn thrown out of employment; and the whole frame of society becomes, for a time, deranged by the local diminution in the demand for the services of men and the produce of their industry.
I say we do the soldiers' work with one-tenth of the numbers that were formerly required for it. I will mention an anecdote to illustrate this. In the year 1816 I was marching with my regiment from the Nepāl frontier, after the war, to Allahabad. We encamped about four miles from a mud fort in the kingdom of Oudh, and heard the guns of the Amil, or chief of the district, playing all day upon this fort, from which his batteries were removed at least two miles. He had three regiments of infantry, a corps or two of cavalry, and a good park of artillery; while the garrison consisted of only about two hundred stout Rājpūt landholders and cultivators, or yeomen. In the evening, just as we had sat down to dinner, a messenger came to the commanding officer, Colonel Gregory, who was a member of the mess, from the said Amil, and begged permission to deliver his message in private. I, as the senior staff officer, was requested to hear what he had to say.
'What do you require from the commanding officer?'
'I require the loan of the regiment.'
'I know the commanding officer will not let you have the regiment.'
'If the Amil cannot get more, he will be glad to get two companies; and I have brought with me this bag of gold, containing some two or three hundred gold mohurs.'
I delivered the message to Colonel Gregory, before all the officers, who desired me to say that he could not spare a single man, as he had no authority to assist the Amil, and was merely marching through the country to his destination, I did so. The man urged me to beg the commanding officer, if he could do no more, merely to halt the next day where he was, and lend the Amil the use of one of his drummers.