Letters of Marque - VIII

Letters of Marque - VIII

Divers Passages of Speech and Action whence the Nature, Arts and Disposition of the King and his Subjects may be observed.

Kipling, Rudyard

Excerpt from Kipling Scrapbook (Ballard 1)

The Pioneer Mail

1888-01-10

en

1888-01-11

Dalhousie Libraries Special Collections

Divers Passages of Speech and Action whence the Nature, Arts and Disposition of the King and his Subjects may be observed.

In this land men tell "sad stories of the death of kings," not easily found elsewhere; and also speak of sati, which is generally supposed to be an "effete curiosity" as the Bengali said, in a manner which makes it seem very near and vivid. Be pleased to listen to some of the tales, but with all the names cut out, because a King has just as much right to have his family affairs respected as has a British householder paying income-tax.

Once upon a time, that is to say when the British power was well established in the land and there were railways, there was a King who lay dying for many days, and all, including the Englishmen about him, knew that his end was certain. But he had chosen to lie in an outer court or pleasure-house of his palace; and with him were some twenty of his favourite wives. The place in which he lay, was very near to the City: and there was a fear that his womenkind should, on his death, going mad with grief, cast off their veils and run out into the streets, uncovered before all men. In which case, nothing, not even the power of the Press, and the locomotive, and the telegraph, and cheap education and enlightened municipal councils, could have saved them from sati, for they were the wives of a King. So the Political did his best to induce the dying man to go to the Fort of the City, a safe place close to the regular zenana where all the women could be kept within walls. He said that the air was better in the Fort, but the King refused; and that he would recover in the fort, but the King refused. After some days, the latter turned and said:—"Why are you so keen, sahib, upon getting my old bones up to the Fort." Driven to his last defences, the Political said simply:—"Well, Maharana Sahib—the place is close to the road you see, and…" The King saw and said:—"Oh that's it! I've been puzzling my brain for four days to find out what on earth you were driving at. I'll go to-night." "But there may be some difficulty" began the Political. "You think so," said the King. "If I only hold up my little finger, the women will obey me. Go now, and come back in five minutes, and all will be ready for departure." As a matter of fact, the Political withdrew for the space of fifteen minutes, and gave orders that the conveyances which he had kept in readiness day and night should be got ready. In fifteen minutes, those twenty women with their handmaidens were packed and ready for departure; and the King died later at the Fort, and nothing happened. Here the Englishman asked why a frantic woman must of necessity become sati and felt properly abashed when he was told that she must. There was nothing else for her if she went out unveiled deliberately.

The rush-out forces the matter. And, indeed, if you consider the matter from a Rajput point of view it does.

Then followed a very grim tale of the death of another King; of the long vigil by his bedside, before he was taken off the bed to die upon the ground: of the shutting of a certain mysterious door behind the bed-head, which shutting was followed by a rustle of woman's dress; of a walk on the top of the Palace, to escape the heated air of the sick room, and then, in the grey dawn, the wail upon wail breaking from the zenana as the news of the King’s death went in. "I never wish to hear anything more horrible and awful in my life. You could see nothing, You could only hear the poor wretches!" said the Political with a shiver.

The last resting place of the Maharanas of Udaipur is at Aliar, a little village two miles east of the City. Here they go down in their robes of state, their horse following behind, and here the Political saw, after the death of a Maharana, the dancing-girls dancing before the poor white ashes, the musicians playing among the cenotaphs, and the golden hookah, sword, and water-vessel laid out for the naked soul doomed to hover twelve days round the funeral pyre, before it could depart on its journey towards a fresh birth in the endless circle of the Wheel of Fate. Once, in a neighbouring State it said, one of the dancing-girls stole a march in the next world’s precedence and her lord’s affections, upon the legitimate queens. The affair happened, by the way, after the Mutiny and was accomplished with great pomp in the light of day. Subsequently, those who might have stopped it but did not were severely punished. The girl said that she had no one to look to but the dead man, and followed him, to use Tod’s’ formula, "through the flames." It would be curious to know what is done now and again among these lonely hills in the walled holds of the Thakurs.

But to return from the burning-ground to modern Udaipur, as at present worked under the Maharana and his Prime Minister Rae Punna Lai, C.I.E. To begin with, His Highness is a racial anomaly in that, judged by the strictest European standard, lie is a man of temperate life, the husband of one wife whom he married before he was chosen to the throne after the death of the Maharana Sujjtm Singh in 1884. Sujjun Singh died childless and gave no hint of his desires as to succession and—omitting all the genealogical and political reasons which would drive a man mad— Futteh Singh was chosen, by the Thakurs, from the Seorati Branch of the family which Sangram Singh II. founded. He is thus a younger son of a younger branch of a younger family: which lucid statement should suffice to explain everything. The man who could deliberately unravel the succession of any one of the Rajput States would be perfectly capable of clearing the politics of all the Frontier tribes from Jumrood to Quetta.

Roughly speaking, the Maharana and the Prime Minister—in whose family the office has been hereditary for many generations—divide the power of the State. They control, more or less, the Mahand Raj Sabha or Council of Direction and Revision. This is composed of many of the Rawats and Thakurs of the State, and the Poet Laureate who, under a less genial administration, would be presumably the Registrar. There are also District Officers, Officers of Customs, Superintendents of the Mint, Masters of the Horse, and Supervisor of Doles, which last is pretty and touching. The State officers itself, and the Englishman’s investigations failed to unearth any Bengalis. The Commandant of the State Army, about five thousand men of all arms, is a retired non-commissioned officer, a Mr. Lonergan; who, as the medals on his breast attest, has "done the State some service," and now in his old age rejoices in the rank of Major-General, and teaches the Maharaja’s guns to make uncommonly good practice. The infantry are smart and well set up, while the Cavalry—rare thing in Native States—have a distinct notion of keeping their accoutrements clean. They are, further, well mounted on light wiry Mewar and Kathiawar horses. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that the Pathan comes down with his pickings from the Punjab to Udaipur and finds a market there for animals that were much better employed in—but the complaint is a stale one. Let us see, later on, what the Jodhpur Stables hold; and then formulate an indictment against the Government. So much for the indigenous administration of Udaipur. The one drawback in the present Maharaja, from the official point of view, is his want of education. He is a thoroughly good man, but was not brought up with a seat on the guddee before his eyes. Consequently, he is not an English-speaking man.

There is a story told of him which is worth the repeating. An Englishman who flattered himself that he could speak the vernacular fairly well paid him a visit and discoursed, with a round mouth. The Maharana heard him politely and turning to a satellite demanded a translation; which was given. Then said the Maharana:—"Speak to him in Angrezi." The Angrezi spoken by the interpreter was the vernacular as the Sahibs-speak it, and the Englishman, having ended his conference, departed abashed. But this backwardness is eminently suited to a place like Udaipur, and a "varnished" prince is not always a desirable thing. The curious and even startling simplicity of his life is worth preserving. Here is a specimen of one of his days. Rising at four—and the dawn can be bitterly chill,—he bathes and prays after the custom of his race, and at six is ready to take in hand the first instalment of the day’s work which comes before him through his Prime Minister, and occupies him for three or four hours till the first meal of the day is ready. At two o’clock he attends the Mahand Raj Sabha, and works till five, retiring at a healthily primitive hour. He is said to have his hands fairly firmly upon the reins of rule, and to know as much as most monarchs know of the way in which the revenues—about thirty lakhs—are disposed of. The Prime Minister’s career has been a chequered and interesting one, including, inter alia, a dismissal from power (this was worked from behind the screen), an arrest and an attack with words which all but ended in his murder. He has not so much power as his predecessors had, for the reason that the present Maharaja allows little but tiger-shooting to distract him from the supervision of the State. His Highness, by the way, is a first-class shot and has bagged eighteen tigers already. He preserves his game carefully, and permission to kill tigers is not readily obtainable.

A curious instance of the old order giving place to the new is in process of evolution and deserves notice. The Prime Minister’s son, Futteh Lai, a boy of twenty years old, has been educated at the Mayo College Ajmir, and speaks and writes English. There are few native officials in the State who do this; and the consequence is that the lad has won a very fair insight into State affairs and knows generally what is going forward both in the Eastern and Western spheres of the little Court. In time he may qualify for direct administrative powers, and Udaipur will be added to the list of the States that are governed "English fash" as the irreverent Americans put it. What the end will be, after three generations of Princes and Dewans have been put through the mill of Rajkumar Colleges, those who live will learn.

More interesting is the question, for how long can the vitality of a people whose life was arms be suspended. Men in the North say that, by the favour of the Government, the Sikh Sirdars are rotting on their lands; and the Rajput Thakurs say of themselves that they are growing "rusty." The old, old problem forces itself on the most unflec- tive mind at every turn in the gay streets of Udaipur. A Frenchman might write:—"Behold there the horse of the Rajput—foaming, panting, caracoling, but always fettered with his head so majestic upon his bosom so ample filled with a generous heart. He rages but he does not advance. See there the destiny of the Rajput who bestrides him, and upon whose left flank bounds the sabre useless—the haberdashery of the iron-monger only. Pity the horse in reason, for that life there is his raison d'etre. Pity ten thousand times more the Rajput, for he has no raison d'etre. He is an anachronism in a blue turban."

The Gaul might be wrong, but Tod wrote things which seem to support this view, in the days when he wished to make "buffer-states" of the land he loved so well.

Let us visit the Durbar Gardens where little naked Cupids are trampling upon fountains of fatted fish, all in bronze, where there are cypresses and red paths, and a deer-park full of all varieties of deer, besides two growling, fluffy, little panther cubs, a black panther who is the Prince of Darkness and a gentleman, and a terrace full of tigers, bears and Guzerat lions bought from the King of Oudh’s sale.

On the best site in the Gardens is rising the Victoria Hall, the foundation stone of which was laid by the Maharana in the 21st of June last. It is built after the designs of Mr. C. Thompson, Executive Engineer of the State, and will be in the Hindu-Saracenic style; having two fronts, west and north. In the former will be the principal entrance, approached by a flight of steps leading to a handsome porch of carved pillars supporting stone beams—the flat Hindu arch. To the left of the entrance hall will be a domed octagonal tower eighty feet high, holding the principal staircase leading to the upper rooms. A corridor on the right of the entrance will lead to the Museum; and immediately behind the entrance hall is the reading-room, 42 by 24 feet, and beyond it the library and office. To the right of the reading-room will be an open Courtyard with a fountain in the centre, and, beyond the courtyard, the museum—a great hall one hundred feet long. Over the library and the entrance hall will be private apartments for the Maharana approached by a private staircase. The communication between the two upper rooms will be by a corridor running along the north front having a parapet of delicately cut pillars and cusped arches—the latter filled in with open tracery. Pity it is that the whole of this will have to be whitewashed to protect the stone from the weather. Over the entrance-porch, and projecting from the upper room, will be a very elaborately cut balcony supported on handsome brackets. Facing the main entrance will be a marble statue, nine feet high, of the Queen, on a white marble pedestal ten feet high. The statue is now being made at home by Mr. Birch, R. A. The cost of the whole will be about Rs. 80,000. Now it is a curious tiling that the statue of Her Majesty will be put some eighty feet below the level of the great bund that holds in the Pichola lake. But the bund is a firm one and has stood for many years.

Another public building deserves notice, and that is the Walter Hospital for native women, the foundation-stone of which was laid by the Countess of Dufferin on that memorable occasion when the Viceroy, behind Artillery Horses, covered the seventy miles from Chitor to Udaipur in under six hours. The building, by the same brain that designed the Hall, will be ready for occupation in a month. It is in strict keeping with the canons of Hindu architecture externally, and has a high, well ventilated waiting-room out of which, to the right, are two wards for in-patients and to the left a dispensary and consulting-room. Beyond these, again, is a third ward for in-patients. In a Courtyard behind are a ward for low caste patients and the offices.

When all these buildings are completed Udaipur will be dowered with three good hospitals including the State’s and the Padri’s, and a first instalment of Civilization.

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