Letters of Marque - II
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Shows the charm of Rajputana and of Jeypore, the City of the Globe trotter—Of its Founder and its Embellishment—Explains the Use and Destiny of the Stud-bred and fails to explain many more important matters.
If any part of a land strewn with dead men’s bones have a special claim to distinction, Rajputana, as the cockpit of India, stands first. East of Suez men do not build towers on the tops of hills for the sake of the view, nor do they stripe the mountain sides with bastioned stone walls to keep in cattle. Since the beginning of time, if we are to credit the legends, there was fighting, heroic fighting, at the foot of the Aravalis, and beyond in the great deserts of sand penned by those kindly mountains from spreading over the heart of India. The "Thirty-six Royal Races" fought as royal races know how to do, Chohan with Rahtore, brother against brother, son against father. Later—bat excerpts from the tangled tale of force, fraud, canning, desperate love and more desperate revenge, crime worthy of demons and virtues fit for gods, may be found, by all who care to look, in the book of the man who loved the Rajputs and gave a life’s labours in their behalf. From Delhi to Abu, and from the Indus to the Chambul each yard of ground has witnessed slaughter, pillage and rapine. But, to-day, the capital of the State that Dhola Rae, son of Soora Sing, hacked out more than nine hundred years ago with the sword from some weaker ruler's realm is lighted with gas, and possesses many striking and English peculiarities which will be shown in their proper place.
Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore, torn by the intrigues of unruly princes and princelings, fought Asiatically.
When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of British power, and in what manner we put a slur upon Rajput honour—punctilious as the honour of the Pathan—are matters of which the Globetrotter knows more than we do. He "reads up"— to quote his own words—a city before he comes to us, and, straightway going to another city, forgets, or, worse still, mixes what he has learnt—so that in the end he writes down the Rajput a Mahratta, says that Lahore is in the North-West Provinces and was once the capital of Sivaji and piteously demands a "guide-book on all India, a thing that you can carry in your trunk y'know —that gives you plain descriptions of things without mixing you up." Here is a chance for a writer of discrimination and void of conscience!
But to return to Jeypore—a pink city set on the border of a blue lake, and surrounded by the low red spurs of the Aravalis—a city to see and to puzzle over. There was once a ruler of the State, called Jey Singh who lived in the days of Arungzeb and did him service with foot and horse. He must have been the Solomon of Rajputana, for through the forty-four years of his reign his "wisdom remained with him." He led armies, and when fighting was over, turned to literature; he intrigued desperately and successfully, but found time to gain a deep insight into astronomy and, by what remains above ground now, we can tell that "whatsoever his eyes desired, he kept not from him." Knowing his own worth, he deserted the city of Amber founded by Dhola Rae among the hills, and, six miles further, in the open plain, bade one Vedyadhar, his architect, build a new city, as seldom Indian city was built before—with huge streets straight as an arrow, sixty yards broad, and crossstreets broad and straight. Many years afterwards, the good people of America builded their towns after this pattern, but knowing nothing of Jey Singh they took all the credit to themselves.
He built himself everything that pleased him, palaces and gardens and temples, and then died, and was buried under a white marble tomb on a hill overlooking the city. He was a traitor, if history speak truth, to his own kin, and he was an accomplished murderer, but he did his best to check infanticide, he reformed the Mahomedao calendar, he piled up a superb library and he made Jeypore a marvel.
Later on, came a successor, educated and enlightened by all the lamps of British Progress, and converted the city of Jey Singh into a surprise—a big, bewildering, practical joke, He laid down sumptuous trottoirs of hewn stone and central carriage, drives, also of hewn stone, in the main street; he, that is to say Colonel Jacob, the Superintending Engineer of the State, devised a water-supply for the city and studded the ways with stand-pipes. He built gas-works, set afoot a School of Art, a Museum, all the things in fact which are necessary to Western municipal welfare and comfort, and saw that they were the best of their kind. How much Colonel Jacob has done, not only for the good of Jeypore city, but for the good of the State at large, will never be known, because the officer in question is one of the not small class who resolutely refuse to talk about their own work. The result of the good work is that the old and the new, the rampantly raw and the sullenly old, stand cheek by jowl in startling contrast. Thus, the branded bull trips over the rails of a steel tramway which brings out the city rubbish; the lacquered and painted ruthe behind the two little stag-like trotting bullocks, catches its primitive wheels in the castiron gas lamp post with the brass nozzle atop, and all Rajputana, gaily-clad, small-turbaned, swaggering Rajputana, circulates along the magnificent pavements.
The fortress-crowned hills look down upon the strange medley. One of them bears on its flank in huge white letters the cheery inscript, "Welcome!" This was made when the Prince of Wales visited Jeypore to shoot his first tiger, but the average traveller of to-day may appropriate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes great care of strangers and shows them all courtesy. This, by the way, demoralises the Globe-trotter whose first cry is:—"Where can we get horsesr Where can we get elephants? Who is the man to write to for all these things?"
Tnanks to the courtesy of the Maharaja, it is possible to see everything, but for the incurious who object to being driven through their sights, a journey down anyone of the great main streets is a day's delightful occupation. The view is as unobstructed as that of the Champs Elysses, but in place of the white-stone fronts of Paris, rises a long line of open-work screen-wall, the prevailing tone of which is pink—caramel pink, but house-owners have unlimited license to decorate their tenements as they please. Jeypore, broadly considered is Hindu, and her architecture of the riotous many, arched type which even the Globe-trotter after a short time learns to call Hindu. It is neither temperate nor noble, but it satisfies the general desire for something that "really looks Indian." A perverse taste for low company drew the Englishman from the pavement—to walk upon a real stone pavement is in itself a privilege—up a side-street where he assisted at a quail fight and found the low-caste Rajput a cheery and affable soul. The owner of the losing quail was a sowar in the Maharaja’s army. He explained that his pay was six rupees a month paid bi-monthly. He was cut the cost of his khaki blouse, brown-leather accoutrements and jack-boots; lance, saddle, sword and horse were given free. He refused to say for how many months in the year he was drilled, and said vaguely that his duties were mainly escort ones, and he had no fault to find with them. The defeat of his quail had vexed him, and he desired the Sahib to under, stand that the sowars of His Highness’s army could ride. A clumsy attempt at a compliment so fired his martial blood that he climbed into his saddle, and then and there insisted on showing off his horsemanship. The road was narrow, the lance was long, and the horse was a big one, but no one objected, and the Englishman sat him down on a doorstep and watched the fun. The horse seemed in some shadowy way familiar. His head was not the lean head of the Kathiawar nor his crest the crest of the Marwarri, and his fore-legs did not seem to belong to the stony district. "Where did he come from?" The sowar pointed northward and said "from Amritsar," but he pronounced it "Armtzar." Many horses had been brought at the spring fairs in the Punjab; they cost about Rs. 200 each, perhapsmore, the sowar could not say. Some came from Hissar and some from other places beyond Delhi. They were very good horses. "That horse there," he pointed to one a little distance down the street, "is the son of a big Sirkar horse—the kind that the Sirkar make for breeding horses—so high!" The owner of "that horse" swaggered tip, jaw-bandaged and cat-moustached and bade the Englishman look at his mount; bought, of course, when a butcha. Both men together said that the Sahib had better examine; the Maharaja Sahib’s stable where there were hundreds of horses—huge as elephants or tiny as aheep.
To the stables the Englishman accordingly went, knowing beforehand what he would find, and wondering whether the Sirkar’s “"big horses" were meant to get mounts for Raj put sowars. The Maharaja’s stables are royal in size and appointments. The enclosure round which they stand must be about half a mile long—it allows ample space for exercising besides paddocks for the colts. The horses, about two hundred and fifty, are bedded in pure white sand—bad for the coat if they roll, but good for the feet—the pickets are of white marble, the heel-ropes in every case of good sound rope, and in every case the stables are exquisitely clean. Each stall contains above the manger, a curious little bunk for the syce who, if he uses the accommodation, must assuredly die once each hot weather.
A journey round the stables is saddening, for the attendants are very anxious to strip their charges, and the stripping shows so much. A few men in India are credited with the faculty of never forgetting a horse they have once seen, and of knowing the produce of every stallion they have met. The Englishman would have given something for their company at that hour. His knowledge of horseflesh was very limited, but he felt certain that more than one or two of the sleek, perfectly groomed country-breds should have been justifying their existence in the ranks of the British cavalry, instead of eating their heads off on six seers of gram and one of goor per diem. But they had all been honestly bought and honestly paid for; and there was nothing in the wide world to prevent His Highness, if he wished to do so, from sweeping up the pick and pride of all the horses in the Punjab. The attendants appeared to take a wicked delight in saying "eshtud-bred" very loudly and with unnecessary emphasis as they threw back the loin-cloth. Sometimes they were wrong, but in too many cases they were
The Englishman left the stables and the great central maidan where a nervous Biluchi was being taught, by a perfect network of ropes, to "monkey jump," and went out into the streets reflecting on the working of horse-breeding operations under the Government of India, and the advantages of having unlimited money where with to profit by other people’s mistakes.
Then, as happened to the great Tataria of Tarescon in Milianah, wild beasts began to roar, and a crowd of little boys laughed. The lions of Jeypore are tigers, caged in a public place for the sport of the people who hiss at them and disturb their royal feelings. Two or three of the six great brutes are magnificent. All of them are short-tempered and the bars of their captivity not too strong. A pariah-dog was furtively trying to scratch out a fragment of meat from between the bars of one of the cages, and the occupant tolerated him. Growing bolder, the starveling growled; the tiger struck at him with his paw and the dog fled howling with fear. When he returned, he brought two friends with him, and the trio mocked the captive from a distance.
It was not a pleasant sight and suggested Globe-trotters—gentlemen who imagine that "more curricles" should come at their bidding and on being undeceived become abusive.