22. I know of no authority for the name Charat (Churut), which seems to be a blunder for Satrughna. The sons of Dasaratha were Rāma, by the chief queen; Bharat, by a second; and Lachhman (Lakshmana), and Satrughna by a third consort.
23. The species referred to is the long-tailed monkey called 'Hanumān', and 'langūr' in Hindi, the Presbytis entellus of Jerdon (=P. anchises, Elliot; = Semnopithecus, Cuvier).
24. The author seems to have forgotten that he has already told this story, ante, this chapter following [8] in the text.
25. It is in the Mathurā district. The town of Mathurā (Muttra) became the head-quarters of a separate District in 1832. The official at Govardhan in 1836 must, therefore, have been subordinate to Mathurā, not to Agra.
[CHAPTER 57]
Veracity.
The people of Britain are described by Diodorus Siculus (Book V, chap. 2) as in a very simple and rude state, subsisting almost entirely on the produce of the land, but as being 'a people of much integrity and sincerity, far from the craft and knavery of men among us, contented with plain and homely fare, and strangers to the luxuries and excesses of the rich'. In India we find strict veracity most prevalent among the wildest and half-savage tribes of the hills and jungles in Central India, or the chain of the Himālaya mountains; and among those where we find it prevail most, we find cattle-stealing most common; the men of one tribe not deeming it to be any disgrace to lift, or steal, the cattle of another. I have known the man among the Gonds of the woods of Central India, whom nothing could induce to tell a lie, join a party of robbers to lift a herd of cattle from the neighbouring plains for nothing more than as much spirits as he could enjoy at one bout. I asked a native gentleman of the plains, in the valley of the Nerbudda, one day, what made the people of the woods to the north and south more disposed to speak the truth than those more civilized of the valley itself. 'They have not yet learned the value of a lie,' said he, with the greatest simplicity and sincerity, for he was a very honest and plain-spoken man.
Veracity is found to prevail most where there is least to tempt to falsehood, and most to be feared from it. In a very rude state of society, like that of which I have been speaking, the only shape in which property is accumulated is in cattle; things are bartered for each other without the use of a circulating medium, and one member of a community has no means of concealing from the other the articles of property he has. If they were to steal from each other, they would not be able to conceal what they stole—to steal, therefore, would be no advantage. In such societies every little community is left to govern itself; to secure the rights, and enforce the duties, of all its several members in their relations with each other; they are too poor to pay taxes to keep up expensive establishments, and their Governments seldom maintain among them any for the administration of justice, or the protection of life, property, or character. All the members of all such little communities will often unite in robbing the members of another community of their flocks and herds, the only kind of property they have, or in applauding those who most distinguish themselves in such enterprises; but the well- being of the community demands that each member should respect the property of the others, and be punished by the odium of all if he does not.[1]
It is equally necessary to the well-being of the community that every member should be able to rely upon the veracity of the other upon the very few points where their rights, duties, and interests clash. In the very rudest state of society, among the woods and hills of India, the people have some deity whose power they dread, and whose name they invoke when much is supposed to depend upon the truth of what one man is about to declare. The 'pīpal' tree (Ficus religiosa) is everywhere sacred to the gods, who are supposed to sit among its leaves and listen to the music of their rustling. The deponent takes one of these leaves in his hand, and invokes the god who sits above him to crush him, or those dear to him, as he crushes the leaf in his hand, if he speak anything but the truth; he then plucks and crushes the leaf, and states what he has to say.[2]
The large cotton-tree is, among the wild tribes of India, the favourite seat of gods still more terrible,[3] because their superintendence is confined exclusively to the neighbourhood; and having their attention less occupied, they can venture to make a more minute scrutiny into the conduct of the people immediately around them. The 'pīpal' is occupied by one or other of the Hindoo triad, the god of creation, preservation, or destruction, who have the affairs of the universe to look after;[4] but the cotton and other trees are occupied by some minor deities, who are vested with a local superintendence over the affairs of a district, or perhaps, of a single village.[5] These are always in the view of the people, and every man knows that he is every moment liable to be taken to their court, and to be made to invoke their vengeance upon himself, or those dear to him, if he has told a falsehood in what he has stated, or tells one in what he is about to state. Men so situated adhere habitually, and I may say religiously, to the truth; and I have had before me hundreds of cases in which a man's property, liberty, or life has depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it to save either; as my friend told me, 'they had not learned the value of a lie', or rather, they had not learned with how much impunity a lie could be told in the tribunals of civilized society. In their own tribunals, under the pīpal-tree or cotton-tree, imagination commonly did what the deities, who were supposed to preside, had the credit of doing; if the deponent told a lie, he believed that the deity who sat on the sylvan throne above him, and searched the heart of man, must know it; and from that moment he knew no rest—he was always in dread of his vengeance; if any accident happened to him, or to those dear to him, it was attributed to this offended deity; and if no accident happened, some evil was brought about by his own disordered imagination.[6]