Letters of Marque - XIII

The Englishman rode up to the Fort and by the way learnt all these things and many more. He was provided with a racking, female, horse who swept the gullies of the city by dancing sideways.

The road to the Fort which stands on the Hill oi Strife, wound in and out of sixty-foot hills, with a skilful avoidance of all shade; and this was at high noon, when puffs of heated air blew from the rock on all sides. "What must the heat be in May?" The Englishman’s companion was a cheery Brahmin, who wore the lightest of turbans and sat the smallest of neat little country-breds. "Awful!" said the Brahmin "But not so bad as in the District. Look there!” and he pointed from the brow of a bad eminence, across the quivering heat-haze, to where the white sand faded into bleached blue sky, and the horizon was shaken and tremulous. "It's very bad in summer. Would knock you, Oh yes, all to smash, but we are accustomed to it." A rock-strewn hill, about half a mile, as the crow flies, from the Fort was pointed out as the place whence, at the beginning of this century, the Pretender Sowae besieged Raja Maun for live months, but could make no headway against his foe. One gun of the enemy’s batteries specially galled the Fort and the Jodhpore king offered a village to any of his gunners who should dismount it. "It was smashed," said the Brahmin. "Oh yes, all to pieces" Practically, the City which lies below the Fort is indefensible and during the many wars of Marwar has generally been taken up by the assailants without resistance.

Entering the Fort by the Jaipur Gate, and studiously refraining from opening his umbrella, the Englishman found shadow and coolth, took off his hat to the tun-bellied, trunk-nosed God of Good-luck who had been very kind to him in his wanderings, and sat down near half a dozen of the Maharaja’s guns bearing the mark, "A: Broome, Cossipore, 1857," or "G. Hutchinson, Cos-sipore, 1838." Now, rock and masonry are so curiously blended in this great pile, that he who walks through it loses sense of being among buildings. It is as though he walked through mountain-gorges. The stone-paved, inclined planes, and the tunnel-like passages driven under a hundred feet height of buildings, increase this impression. In many places, the wall and rock runs up unbroken by any window for forty feet.

It would be a week’s work to pick out even roughly the names of the dead who have added to the buildings, or to describe the bewildering multiplicity of courts and ranges of rooms; and, in the end, the result would be as satisfactory as an attempt to describe a nightmare. It is said that the rock on which the Fort stands is four miles in circuit, but no man yet has dared to estimate the size of the city that they call the Palace, or the mileage of its ways. Ever since Pas Joda, four hundred years ago, listened to the voice of a Jogi and leaving Mundore built his eyrie on the "Bird’s Nest," as the Hill of Strife was called, the palaces have grown and thickened. Even to-day the builders are still at work. Taklit Singh, the present ruler’s predecessor, built royally. An incomplete bastion and a Hall of Flowers are among the works of his pleasure. Hidden away behind a mighty wing of carved red sandstone, lie rooms set apart for Viceroys, Durbar Halls and dinner-rooms without end. A gentle gloom covers the evidences of the catholic taste of the State in articles of "bigotry and virtue;" but there is enough light to show the raison diet re of the men who wait in the dak-bungalow. And, after all, what is the use of Royalty in these days if a man may not take delight in the pride of the eye? Kumbha Rana, the great man of Chitor, fought like a Rajput, but he had an instinct which made him build the Tower of Victory at who knows what cost of money and life. The fighting-instinct thrown back upon itself, must have some sort of outlet; and a merciful Providence wisely ordains that the Flings of the East in the nineteenth century shall take pleasure in "shopping" on an imperial scale. Dresden China snuff-boxes, mechanical engines, electroplated fish-slices, musical boxes, and gilt, blown-glass, Christmas-Tree balls do not go well with the splendours of a palace that might have been built by Titans and coloured by the Morning Sun. But there are excuses to be made for Kings who have no work to do—at least such work as their fathers understood best.

In one of the higher bastions, stands a curious specimen of one of the earliest mitrailleuses—a cumbrous machine carrying twenty gun-barrels in two rows, which small-arm fire is flanked by two tiny cannon. As a muzzle-loading implement its value after the first discharge would be insignificant; but the soldiers lounging by assured the Englishman that it had done good service in its time. —It was eaten with rust.

A man may spend a long hour in the upper tiers of the palaces, but still far from the rooftops, in looking out across the desert. There are Englishmen in these wastes, who say gravely that there is nothing so fascinating as the sand of Bikanir and Marwar. "You see," explained an enthusiast of the Hat-marked Caste, "you are not shut in by roads, and you can go just as you please. And, somehow, it grows upon you as you get used to it, and you end, y'know, by falling in love with the place." Look steadily from the Palace westward where the City with its tanks and serais is spread at your feet, and you will, in a lame way, begin to understand the fascination of the desert which, by those who have felt it, is said to be even stronger than the fascination of the Road. The City is of red-sandstone and dull and sombre to look at. Beyond it, where the white sand lies, the country is dotted with camels limping into the Eiwigkeit or coming from the same place. Trees appear to be strictly confined to the suburbs of the City. Very good. If you look long enough across the sands, while a voice in your ear is telling you of half-buried cities, old as old Time and wholly unvisited by Sahibs, of districts where the white man is unknown, and of the wonders of far-way Jeysulmir ruled by a half distraught king, sand locked and now smitten by a terrible food and water-famine, you will, if it happen that you are of a sedentary and civilised nature, experience a new emotion—will be conscious of a great desire to take one of the lobbing camels and get away into the desert, away from the last touch of To-day, to meet the Past face to face. Some day, a novelist will exploit the unknown land from the Rann, where the wild ass breeds, northward and eastward, till he comes to the Indus. That will be when Rider Haggard has used up Africa and a new "She" is needed.

But the officials of Marwar do not call their country a desert. On the contrary, they administer it very scientifically and raise, as has been said, about thirty-eight lakhs from it. To come back from the influence and the possible use of the desert to more prosaic facts. Read quickly a rough record of things in modern Marwar. The old is drawn in Tod, who speaks the truth. The Maharaja’s right hand in the work of the State is Maliaraj Sir Pertab Singh, Prime Minister, A.-D.-C. to the Prince of Wales, capable of managing the Marwarri who intrigues like a—Marwarri, equally capable, as has been seen, of moving in London Society, and Colonel of a newly raised "crack" Cavalry corps. The Englishman would have liked to have seen him, but he was away in the desert somewhere, either marking a boundary or looking after a succession case. Not very long ago, as the Shetts of Ajmir knew well, there was a State debt of fifty lakhs. This has now been changed into a surplus of three lakhs, and the revenue is growing. Also, the simple Dacoit who used to enjoy himself very pleasantly has been put into a department, and the Thug with him.

Consequently, for the department takes a genuine interest in this form of shikar, and the gaol leg-irons are not too light, dacoities have been reduced to such an extent that men say "you may send a woman, with her ornaments upon her, from Sujat to Phalodi, and she will not lose a nose-ring." Also, and this in a Rajput State is an important matter, the boundaries of nearly every village in Marwar have been demarcated, and boundary rives, in which both sides preferred small-arm fire to the regulation lathi, are unknown. The open-handed system of giving away villages had raised a large and unmannerly crop of jaghirdars. These have been taken and brought in hand by Sir Pertab Singh, to the better order of the State.

A Punjabi, Sirdar Har Dyal Singh, has reformed, or made rather, Courts on the Civil and Criminal Side; and his hand is said to be found in a good many sweepings out of old corners. It must always be borne in mind that everything that has been done, was carried through over and under unlimited intrigue, for Jodhpore is a Native State. Intrigue must be met with intrigue by all except Gordons or demi-gods; and it is curious to hear how a reduction in tariff, or a smoothing out of some tangled Court, had to be worked by shift and by-way. The tales are comic, but not for publication. Howbeit, Har Dyal Singh got his training in part under the Punjab Government, and in part in a little native State far away in the Himalayas, where the gumnameh was not altogether an unknown animal. To the credit of the "Pauper province" be it said it is not easy to circumvent a Punjabi. The details of his work would be dry reading. The result of it is good, and there is justice in Marwar and order and firmness in its administration.

Naturally, the land revenue is the most interesting thing in Marwar from an administrative point of view. The basis of it is a tank about the size of a swimming-bath, with a catchment of several hundred square yards, draining through leeped channels. When God sends the rain the people of the village drink from the tank. When the rains fail, as they failed this year, they take to their wells, which are brackish and breed guinea-worm. For these reasons the revenue like the Republic of San Domingo, is never alike for two years running. There are no canal questions to harry the authorities; but the fluctuations are enormous. Under the Aravallis, the soil is good: further north they grow millet and pasture cattle, though, said a Revenue Officer cheerfully "God knows what the brutes find to eat." Apropos of irrigation, the one canal deserves special mention, as showing how George Stephenson came to Jodhpore and astonished the inhabitants. Six miles from the City proper, lies the Balsamand Sagar, a great tank. In the hot weather, when the City tanks ran out or stank it was the pleasant duty of the women to tramp twelve miles at the end of the day’s work to fill their lotas. In the hot weather Jodhpore is-let a simile suffice. Sukkur in June would be Simla to Jodhpore!

The State Engineer, who is also the Jodh-pore State Line, for he has no European subor-dinates, conceived the idea of bringing the water from the Balsamand into the City. Was the City grateful? Not in the least. It said that the Sahib wanted the water to run up-hill and was throwing money into the tank. Being true Marwarris, men betted on the subject. The canal—a built out one, for water must not touch earth in these parts—was made at a cost of something over a lakh, and the water came down because the tank was a trifle higher than the City. Now in the hot weather, the women need not go for long walks, but the Marwarri cannot un-clerstand how it was that the "waters came down to Jodhpore." From the Marwarri to money matters is an easy step. Formerly, that is to say up to within a very short time, the Treasury of Jodh-pore was conducted in a shiftless, happy-go-lucky sort of fashion not uncommon in Native States, whereby the Mahajuns "held the bag" and made unholy profits on discount and other things, to the confusion of the Durbar Funds and their own enrichment. There is now a Treasury modelled on English lines, and English in the important particular that money is not to be got from it for the asking, and the items of expenditure are strictly looked after.

In the middle of all this bustle of reform planned, achieved, frustrated and replanned, and the never-ending, underground warfare that surges in a Native State, move the English officers-the irreducible minimum of exiles. As a caste, the working Englishmen in Native States are curiously interesting; and the traveller whose tact by this time has been Wilfred-blunted by tramping, sits in judgment upon them as he has seen them. In the first place they are, they must be, the fittest who have survived; for though, here and there, you shall find one chafing bitterly against the burden of his life in the wilderness, one to be pitied more than any chained beast, the bulk of the Caste are honestly and unaffectedly fond of their work, fond of the country around them, and fond of the people they deal with. In each State, their answer to a certain question is the same. The men with whom they are in contact are "all right when you know them, but you’ve got to know them first" as the music-hall song says. Their hands are full of work; so full that, when the incult wanderer said:—"What do you find to do?” they looked upon him with contempt and amazement—exactly as the wanderer himself had once looked upon a Globe-Trotter who had put to him the same impertinent query. And—but here the Englishman may be wrong—it seemed to him that, in one respect their lives were a good deal more restful and concentrated than those of their brethren under the British Government, There was no talk of shiftings and transfers and promotions, stretching across a Province and a half, and no man said anything about Simla. To one who has hitherto believed that Simla is the hub of the Empire, it is disconcerting to hear:-"O Simla! That’s where you Bengalis go. We haven't anything to do with Simla down here.” And no more they have. Their talk and their interests run in the boundaries of the States they serve, and, most striking of all, the gossipy element seems to be cut out altogether. Is it a backwater of the river of Anglo- Indian life—or is it the main current, the broad stream that supplies the motive power, and is the other life only the noisy ripple on the surface? You who have lived, not merely looked at, both lives, decide. Much can be learnt from the talk of the Caste—many curious, many amusing, and some startling things. One hears stories of men who take a dour, impoverished State as a man takes a wife, "for better or worse," and, moved by some incomprehensible ideal of virtue, consecrate—that is not too big a word—consecrate their lives to that State in all single-heartedness and purity. Such men are few, but they exist to-day, and their names are great in lands where no Englishman travels. Again, the listener hears tales of grizzled diplomats of Rajputana—Machiavellis who have hoisted a powerful intriguer with his own intrigue, and bested priestly cunning, and the guile of the Oswal, simply that the way might be clear for some scheme which should put money into a tottering Treasury, or lighten the taxation of a few hundred thousand men—or both; for this can be done. One tithe of that force spent on their own advancement would have carried such men very far.

Those who know anything of the internals of government, know that, such men must exist, for their works are written between the lines of the Administration Reports: but to hear about them, and to have them pointed out, is quite a different thing. It breeds respect and a sense of shame and frivolity in the mind of the mere looker-on, which may be good for the soul.

Truly the Hat-marked Caste are a strange people. They are so few and so lonely and so strong. They can sit down in one place for years, and see the works of their hands and the promptings of their brain, grow to actual and beneficent life, bringing good to thousands. Less fettered than the direct servant of the Indian Government, and working over a much vaster charge, they seem a bigger and a more large-minded breed. And that is saying a good deal.

But let the others, the little people bound down and supervised, and strictly limited and income-taxed, always remember that the Hat-marked are very badly off for shops. If they want a necktie they must get it up from Bombay, and in the Rains they can hardly move about; and they have no amusements and must go a day’s railway journey for a rubber, and their drinking-water is doubtful; and there is rather less than one lady per ten thousand square miles.

After all, comparative civilisation has its advantages.