Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official

by Sir W. H. Sleeman

I visited the college which is in the mausoleum of Ghāzī-ud-dīn, a fine building, with its usual accompaniment of a mosque and a college. The slab that covers the grave, and the marble screens that surround the ground that contains it, are amongst the most richly cut things that I have seen. The learned and pious Muhammadans in the institution told me in my morning visit that there should always be a small hollow in the top of marble slabs, like that on Jahānārā's, whenever any of them were placed over graves, in order to admit water, earth, and grass; but that, strictly speaking, no slab should be allowed to cover the grave, as it could not fail to be in the way of the dead when summoned to get up by the trumpet of Azraīl on the day of the resurrection.'[32] 'Earthly pride,' said they, 'has violated this rule; and now everybody that can afford it gets a marble slab put over his grave. But it is not only in this that men have been falling off from the letter and spirit of the law; for we now hear drums beating and trumpets sounding even among the tombs of the saints, a thing that our forefathers would not have considered possible. In former days it was only a prophet like Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, that was suffered to have a stone placed over his head.' I asked them how it was that the people crowded to the tombs of their saints, as I saw them at that of Kutb Shāh in old Delhi, on the Basant, a Hindoo festival. 'It only shows,' said they 'that the end of the world is approaching. Are we not divided into seventy-two sects among ourselves, all falling off into Hinduism, and every day committing greater and greater follies? These are the manifest signs long ago pointed out by wise and holy men as indicating the approach of the last day.'[33]

A man might make a curious book out of the indications of the end of the world according to the notions of different people or different individuals. The Hindoos have had many different worlds or ages; and the change from the good to the bad, or the golden to the iron age, is considered to have been indicated by a thousand curious incidents.[34] I one day asked an old Hindoo priest, a very worthy man, what made the five heroes of the Mahābhārata, the demigod brothers of Indian story, leave the plains and bury themselves no one knew where, in the eternal snows of the Himālaya mountains. 'Why, sir,' said he, 'there is no question about that. Yudhisthira, the eldest, who reigned quietly at Delhi after the long war, one day sat down to dinner with his four brothers and their single wife, Draupadī; for you know, sir, they had only one among them all. The king said grace and the covers were removed, when, to their utter consternation, a full-grown fly was seen seated upon the dish of rice that stood before his majesty. Yudhisthira rose in consternation. 'When flies begin to blow upon men's dinners,' said his majesty, 'you may be sure, my brothers, that the end of the world is near—the golden age is gone—the iron one has commenced, and we must all be off; the plains of India are no longer a fit abode for gentlemen.' Without taking one morsel of food,' added the priest, 'they set out, and were never after seen or heard of. They were, however, traced by manifest supernatural signs up through the valley of the Ganges to the snow tops of the Himālaya, in which they no doubt left their mortal coils.' They seem to feel a singular attachment for the birthplace of their great progenitrix, for no place in the world is, I suppose, more infested by them than Delhi, at present; and there a dish of rice without a fly would, in the iron, be as rare a thing as a dish with one in the golden, age.

Muhammadans in India sigh for the restoration of the old Muhammadan regime, not from any particular attachment to the descendants of Tīmūr, but with precisely the same feelings that Whigs and Tories sigh for the return to power of their respective parties in England; it would give them all the offices in a country where office is everything. Among them, as among ourselves, every man is disposed to rate his own abilities highly, and to have a good deal of confidence in his own good luck; and all think that if the field were once opened to them by such a change, they should very soon be able to find good places for themselves and their children in it. Perhaps there are few communities in the world among whom education is more generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India. He who holds an office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn, through the medium of the Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our colleges learn through those of the Greek and Latin—that is, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna: (alias Sokrāt, Aristotalis, Aflātūn, Bokrāt, Jālīnus, and Bū Alī Sena); and, what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through life.[35] He therefore thinks himself as well fitted to fill the high offices which are now filled exclusively by Europeans, and naturally enough wishes the establishments of that power would open them to him. On the faculties and operations of the human mind, on man's passions and affections, and his duties in all relations of life, the works of Imām Muhammad Ghazālī[36] and Nāsir-ud- dīn Tūsī[37] hardly yield to those of Plato and Aristotle, or to those of any other authors who have written on the same subjects in any country. These works, the Ihya-ul- ulūm, epitomized into the Kīmiā-i- Saādat, and the Akhlāk-i- Nāsirī, with the didactic poems of Sādī,[38] are the great 'Pierian spring' of moral instruction from which the Muhammadan delights to 'drink deep' from infancy to old age; and a better spring it would be difficult to find in the works of any other three men.

It is not only the desire for office that makes the educated Muhammadans cherish the recollection of the old regime in Hīndustan: they say, 'We pray every night for the Emperor and his family, because our forefathers ate the salt of his forefathers'; that is, our ancestors were in the service of his ancestors; and, consequently, were the aristocracy of the country. Whether they really were so matters not; they persuade themselves or their children that they were. This is a very common and a very innocent sort of vanity. We often find Englishmen in India, and I suppose in all the rest of our foreign settlements, sporting high Tory opinions and feelings, merely with a view to have it supposed that their families are, or at some time were, among the aristocracy of the land. To express a wish for Conservative predominance is the same thing with them as to express a wish for the promotion in the Army, Navy, or Church of some of their near relations; and thus to indicate that they are among the privileged class whose wishes the Tories would be obliged to consult were they in power.[39]

Man is indeed 'fearfully and wonderfully made'; to be fitted himself for action in the world, or for directing ably the actions of others, it is indispensably necessary that he should mix freely from his youth up with his fellow men. I have elsewhere mentioned that the state of imbecility to which a man of naturally average powers of intellect may be reduced when brought up with his mother in the seraglio is inconceivable to those who have not had opportunities of observing it.[40] The poor old Emperor of Delhi, to whom so many millions look up, is an instance. A more venerable-looking man it is difficult to conceive, and had he been educated and brought up with his fellow men, he would no doubt have had a mind worthy of his person.[41] As it is, he has never been anything but a baby. Rājā Jīvan Rām, an excellent portrait painter, and a very honest and agreeable person, was lately employed to take the Emperor's portrait. After the first few sittings, the portrait was taken into the seraglio to the ladies. The next time he came, the Emperor requested him to remove the great blotch from under the nose. 'May it please your majesty, it is impossible to draw any person without a shadow; and I hope many millions will long continue to repose under that of your majesty.' 'True, Rājā,' said his majesty, 'men must have shadows; but there is surely no necessity for placing them immediately under their noses. The ladies will not allow mine to be put there; they say it looks as if I had been taking snuff all my life, and it certainly has a most filthy appearance; besides, it is all awry, as I told you when you began upon it.' The Rājā was obliged to remove from under the imperial, and certainly very noble, nose, the shadow which he had thought worth all the rest of the picture. Queen Elizabeth is said, by an edict, to have commanded all artists who should paint her likeness, 'to place her in a garden with a full light upon her, and the painter to put any shadow in her face at his peril'. The next time the Rājā came, the Emperor took the opportunity of consulting him upon a subject that had given him a good deal of anxiety for many months, the dismissal of one of his personal servants who had become negligent and disrespectful. He first took care that no one should be within hearing, and then whispered in the artist's ear that he wished to dismiss this man. The Rājā said carelessly, as he looked from the imperial head to the canvas, 'Why does your majesty not discharge the man if he displeases you?'

'Why do I not discharge him? I wish to do so, of course, and have wished to do so for many months, but kuchh tadbīr chāhiye, some plan of operations must be devised.' 'If your majesty dislikes the man, you have only to order him outside the gates of the palace, and you are relieved from his presence at once.' 'True, man, I am relieved from his presence, but his enchantments may still reach me; it is them that I most dread—he keeps me in a continual state of alarm; and I would give anything to get him away in a good humour.'

When the Rājā return to Meerut, he received a visit from one of the Emperor's sons or nephews, who wanted to see the place. His tents were pitched upon the plain not far from the theatre; he arrived in the evening, and there happened to be a play that night. Several times during the night he got a message from the prince to say that the ground near his tents was haunted by all manner of devils. The Rājā sent to assure him that this could not possibly be the case. At last a man came about midnight to say that the prince could stand it no longer, and had given orders to prepare for his immediate return to Delhi; for the devils were increasing so rapidly that they must all be inevitably devoured before daybreak if they remained. The Rājā now went to the prince's camp, here he found him and his followers in a state of utter consternation, looking towards the theatre. The last carriages were leaving the theatre, and going across the plain; and these silly people had taken them all for devils.[42]

The present pensioned imperial family f Delhi are commonly considered to be of the house of Tīmūr lang (the Lame), because Bābur, the real founder of the dynasty, was descended from him in the seventh stage.[43] Tīmūr merely made a predatory inroad into India, to kill a few million of unbelievers,[44] plunder the country of all the movable valuables he and his soldiers could collect, and take back into slavery all the best artificers of all kinds that they could lay their hands upon. He left no one to represent him in India, he claimed no sovereignty, and founded no dynasty there. There is no doubt much in the prestige of a name; and though six generations had passed away, the people of Northern India still trembled at that of the lame monster. Bābur wished to impress upon the minds of the people the notion that he had at his back the same army of demons that Tīmūr had commanded; and be boasted his descent from him for the same motive that Alexander boasted his from the horned and cloven-footed god of the Egyptian desert, as something to sanctify all enterprises, justify the use of all means, and carry before him the belief in his invincibility.

Bābur was an admirable chief—a fit founder of a great dynasty—a very proper object for the imagination of future generations to dwell upon, though not quite so good as his grandson, the great Akbar. Tīmūr was a ferocious monster, who knew how to organize and command the set of demons who composed his army, and how best to direct them for the destruction of the civilized portion of mankind and their works; but who knew nothing else.[45] In his invasion of India he caused the people of the towns and villages through which he passed to be all massacred without regard to religion, age, or sex. If the soldiers in the town resisted, the people were all murdered because they did so; if they did not, the people were considered to have forfeited their lives to the conquerors for being conquered; and told to purchase them by the surrender of all their property, the value of which was estimated by commissaries appointed for the purpose. The price was always more than they could pay; and after torturing a certain number to death in the attempt to screw the sum out of them, the troops were let in to murder the rest; so that no city, town, or village escaped; and the very grain collected for the army, over and above what they could consume at any stage, was burned, lest it might relieve some hungry infidel of the country who had escaped from the general carnage.

All the soldiers, high and low, were murdered when taken prisoners, as a matter of course; but the officers and soldiers of Tīmūr's army, after taking all the valuable movables, thought they might be able to find a market for the artificers by whom they were made, and for their families; and they collected together an immense number of men, women, and children. All who asked for mercy pretended to be able to make something that these Tartars had taken a liking to. On coming before Delhi, Tīmūr's army encamped on the opposite or left bank of the river Jumna; and here he learned that his soldiers had collected together above one hundred thousand of these artificers, besides their women and children. There were no soldiers among them; but Tīmūr thought it might be troublesome either to keep them or to turn them away without their women and children; and still more so to make his soldiers send away these women and children immediately. He asked whether the prisoners were not for the most part unbelievers in his prophet Muhammad; and being told that the majority were Hindoos, he gave orders that every man should be put to death; and that any officer or soldier who refused to kill or have killed all such men, should suffer death. 'As soon as this order was made known,' says Tīmūr's historian and great eulogist, 'the officers and soldiers began to put it in execution; and, in less than one hour, one hundred thousand prisoners, according to the smallest computation, were put to death and their bodies thrown into the river Jumna. Among the rest, Mulānā Nasīr-ud- dīn Amr, one of the most venerable doctors of the court, who would never consent so much as to kill a single sheep, was constrained to order fifteen slaves, whom he had in his tents, to be slain. Tīmūr then gave orders that one-tenth of his soldiers should keep watch over the Indian women, children, and camels taken in the pillage.'[46]