Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water

The history of the present Maharajah of Jeypore is somewhat romantic. Formerly living in exile on an allowance of 1l. per month, he one day found himself raised to the throne and the possessor of an income of half a million sterling. His predecessor only settled the succession three hours previous to his death, a usual custom among these Eastern potentates, on account of the fear of poison from a rival for favour, and out of some hundred relatives with equal claims, to the surprise of all, he chose the present one, who is now only twenty-three years of age. In addition to the annual income there was found in the treasury half a million sterling in solid silver, which took Dr. Hendley twenty-three days to count over.

It has been our usual fate throughout our Indian travels to find commissioners and officials of all sorts away in camp on their inspections, which have to be got through just after the cold weather and before the advent of the hot; maharajahs and rajahs have been absent on pilgrimages or a visit of welcome to Lord Dufferin.

So it is in the present instance. The Maharajah is at Calcutta, performing this duty; and it will be remembered that Sindhia was ill, the Maharajah of Benares returning the day after we left Benares, and later on we were destined similarly to miss seeing the Nizam of Hyderabad.

In the afternoon by special arrangement Miss Joyce, the lady superintendent of the girls' school, kindly took me to see a zenana, in fulfilment of my great wish. There had been a death amongst the rajputs or great nobles at Jeypore—that of a promising young lad, educated at Mayo College—and the elder ladies had gone to pay a visit of condolence to the family, and during their absence the younger ones were not permitted to receive; added to which, until the twelfth day was over, mourning or very plain dress would be de rigueur.

It was not in ancient days the custom for the Hindu women to be kept in the zenana, or to be "in purdah" (literally behind the curtain). The Hindus first began to adopt the plan after the Mohammedan invasion in imitation of their harem, and now all the castes keep the women in purdah, save those only of the very poor class who cannot afford it.

The house we went to was that of Sri Lachman Dat, the high priest of the Court. We were received in a small room on the ground floor of the palace, which, in true oriental fashion, was so much out of repair as to be tumbling down. This room was soon crowded with the brothers, sons, sons-in-law, and the numerous poor relations who are always hangers-on in the house of their richer kin. Altogether they were a family of fifty, and with over 100 servants it brought up this one household to 150 persons, who all found shelter in the palace. Miss Joyce acted as interpreter, and a desultory conversation was maintained. The priest inquired our names, and C. handed him a visiting-card, whereupon he called for paper and pen, and had his name written by his chaplain in exact imitation. The shastri said "that there were several members of his family ill, but that our visit was better than any doctor's, and would make them well," &c., &c.

At last a move was made, and the room cleared, the shutters closed, and C. taken away. When he had been deposited on the roof of the house by the gentlemen of the family—a position where he would be sure to be well out of sight, one after another, the ladies slipped in to us. They were all dusky, dark-eyed girls, some beautiful and others that would have been so with their lustrous eyes, but for coarse lips and thick noses. You would almost think they had arranged their dresses so as to form a pleasing contrast, for one was dressed in pale-yellow with silver, the other in orange with scarlet, and another in pink and gold—gorgeous gowns they were, with the most extensive skirts. Miss Joyce pulled one of them out for me to see, and they are so finely gathered that an infinity of yards of stuff are compressed into one breadth, and this makes them project, at the bottom, and swing like a crinoline. All wore the sari over the head, completely covering the neck and shoulders, and the short-sleeved bodice underneath, which just crosses the breast and nothing more. They were laden with ornaments, and only too delighted to take off each one separately to show me—their bead necklaces with gold fringes, their amulets, their bangles on the ankles, the arms, and above the elbow; their earrings, two inches long, weighed down with gold tassels; their nose-rings, as large as a bangle-ring, and which one took out of her cartilage, allowing that it hurt her. Their feet gave the appearance of being covered with a silver toe-piece, so massive were the rings and ornaments on each toe. The rings for their hands were made joined, for two fingers to pass through at once. Families of children and babies were brought and gathered into the room by degrees with their attendants, who are treated quite on an equality, and it was becoming very crowded when an adjournment was suggested by Miss Joyce.

We were each taken by the hand, and led upstairs to the zenana apartments; here the rooms were small, but very neat and clean. The floors were all wadded, and covered with linen, to enable them to sit comfortably cross-legged on it. There were a few pictures on the wall, and they showed me a common cottage clock in a corner, which they evidently considered most curious, and of priceless value. They took me into their sleeping apartments, and made me sit down on their bed, lifting up the curtains and showing me their curious little cheek pillows laid against the bolster. And then they went up some narrow flights of stairs, and passed a courtyard being repaired, whence the men had been carefully cleared by the eunuch, and only fled when warned of C.'s existence on the top of the roof!

All this time left alone, he had been carrying on a conversation by means of animated signs, and they had been examining his watch, hat, and gloves with interest. In descending we were shown the Dunbar hall, and one of the living rooms—such a bare, dirty dungeon.

On returning to the room the usual ceremony was gone through of the presentation of baskets of fruit; the garland of flowers being thrown over our heads, and the sticky paste of sandal-wood and otto of roses smeared on the hands by the host, and returned by the guest.

The zenana women are allowed very occasionally to drive out in a gharry with the shutters closed, and with muslin again hung before these, but none of the servants or men of the household are even then allowed to see them, save those only they have brought from their father's house. It takes a long time before a chief can be persuaded to allow his zenana to be visited by a European lady, and the present Maharajah refused entrance to his zenana to the Duchess of Connaught, because several of the other rajput maharajahs have not allowed their zenanas to be seen by any European woman.

Here then, I say, is the opportunity for the lady doctors of England. When tired of struggling against the blind prejudice that continues to bar their way to advancement at home, here is the wide field of usefulness, the work of charity for their suffering and imprisoned sex—these poor zenana women.8 When the European doctor is called in (and it is only in very bad cases) he feels the pulse of the patient through the purdah, or sometimes through three or four. The women suffer terribly, and die from the want of ordinary skill and care, particularly in their confinements, when no doctor can be called in.

We visited the Raj school, established for girls, and which corresponds to that of the college for boys. Miss Joyce has enrolled on her books pupils who are classed as follows, "Unmarried, married, or widows!" The Hindu girls are married as early as ten years of age. The education is supposed to be entirely secular, but she has a class for religious instruction—a Sunday-school at her bungalow on Sunday.

We drove home through the Zoological Gardens, which are extremely pretty and well laid-out. At their entrance is the Mayo Hospital, dedicated to Lord Mayo by the late Maharajah, who was his personal friend, and further on is the Albert Hall, or Town Hall, the memorial of the Prince of Wales' visit. Jeypore is celebrated for its marble quarries, of which so many of the beautiful buildings in India are built, notably the Taj.

We left Jeypore that evening, and arrived at Ajmere at the inconvenient hour of midnight. This did not prevent Major Loch, the Principal of the Mayo College, in his kindness, coming to meet us at the station, and driving us to his abode inside the grounds. He has a most charming "house," for bungalow it cannot be called, as it possesses the remarkable feature for India of a staircase.

Mayo College was founded by the late Lord Mayo for the education of the sons of rajahs. It was a grand and statesmanlike idea, this scheme for the education of the native ruler, under the immediate guidance of English master minds, thereby engendering a patriotism and attachment to England as a mother country, raising and elevating the tone and domestic life of the native prince, who in his turn was being prepared to wield power humanely, and make the influence of his bringing up felt on those around him. It was the stone dropped in the pool, with ever-widening and concentric influence.

The College is very happily situated under the lee of an amphitheatre of hills, that rise, like all those in this part of the country, sheer out of the plain. It is a very charming feature of the College, the ten houses, of such very varied architecture and style, that lie about the compound, for each state has built and endowed its own college, for the use of the sons of its nobles. There has been a certain amount of rivalry exhibited in their erection. Some have marble cupolas, others arches, and others towers; some are of pure white marble, others a mixture of white and red stone; all are tasteful and uncommon. In the centre, and holding them together as a mother university, is the College Hall, with its clock tower, entirely built of white marble, but rough hewn and unpolished. In the centre hall stands the statue of Lord Mayo; the class-rooms lie around it. The white, green, pink, and black marbles used for the decorations of the hall are all quarried within a radius of fifteen miles around Ajmere.

These colleges are really boarding-houses, where each prince brings his own establishment of servants. One lately admitted, brought twenty-two retainers, which, with some difficulty, Major Loch reduced to eleven. They ride, play cricket, tennis, and football, and are encouraged to be as European in manners and habits as possible. With all this Major Loch does not approve or encourage their being sent to England when their education is complete, as they return impressed with a sense of their own importance; of the number of their servants, their jewels, their state and magnificence compared to that of the same class in England. The native states represented by their colleges at Ajmere are as follows:—Jeypore, Alwar, Bhurtpoor, Ajmere, Tonk Bikanir, Toohpur or Narwar, Kotah, Thallawar, and Udaipur. It is often observed that the College of Jeypore stands apart from the others. The late Maharajah of Jeypore was very angry with Dholpore being allowed the first choice of site, and so he built his college outside the compound. It is only lately that Major Loch has succeeded in smoothing his vanity, and been allowed to include Jeypore, thus completing the circle.

After seeing the College we drove through the walled city of the native population, as Ajmere bazaar is particularly picturesque and dirty. It lies on the hill-side, and the glimpse of mountains as a background to the narrow streets adds to this effect.

There is a very curious tank here, filled with slimy green water, which lies in a natural hollow on the hill-side. Houses lie above it; and the marble courts and gilded minarets of a mosque overhang it on one side. The only access to the tank is by innumerable flights of irregular steps running up and down in all directions. Up and down these steps are always staggering innumerable bheesties, bent under the weight of their bursting skins, and disappearing through the archway of the passage tunnelled through to the street.

Then we drove on to the Adhai-din-ka-Ghompra, which is very interesting, on account of its being a Hindu Temple, with the facing of a Mohammedan mosque. The signification of its long-drawn-out name literally is, "the screen of two and a half days," which is generally supposed to mean that it was built in that short space of time; but Major Loch and others take a more practical view, in suggesting that it meant compulsory labour from every man of two and a half days. The lofty arches are most splendidly carved, and verses of the Koran are introduced among the bold design of the tracery. Inside you see irregular rows of Hindu pillars, carved with that grotesque figure-life of the gods of Hindu religion. These pillars are easily detected to be in three separate pieces, and were doubtless piled on each other to give the necessary height for a Mohammedan mosque, by comparison with the low, intricate structure of pillars of a Hindu temple. General Cunningham, the archæologist, considers this mosque the most interesting piece of antiquity in India.

We are much struck, as are all new arrivals in India, with the ridiculous number of servants required in one establishment. All say it is unavoidable, as each servant will only undertake one duty, and the wages given are extremely small; and there is another thing, you never know what your servant eats, nor where he sleeps—he "finds" himself in a very comprehensive sense of the term. The caste compels the first institution, and the second is in accordance with the habit of all natives. I thought it very strange at first to see the verandahs full of recumbent figures wrapped in their quilts and striped blankets, and looking like so many corpses. They sleep on the mats outside the door, under a tree, or on the road—it is all the same to them where it is, so long as they may sleep long and heavily, for all natives are very somnolent.

I think it may perhaps be interesting to give a complete list of servants necessary for the smallest Indian establishment:—

One sirdár-bearer (body-servant and valet).or two ayahs (maid and nurse).One khansamah (literally "Lord of the stores"), butler and head table-servant.Two khitmutgars (under table-servants).One coachman.Two syces, Two maté-bearers (under-bearers, one to wait on child and ayah).One or grooms for one pair of horses (the allowance being one syce and one grass-cutter to every horse).Two ghasiaras (grass-cutters).One chuprássi (literally badge-bearer), carrier of letters and messages.One sirdár-mati (head-gardener).One or two máte-matés (under-gardeners).One bheestie (water-carrier).One masátchi (literally torchbearer), scullion.One cook.One mihtu (sweeper).One mithráni (sweeper-woman).One dhobi (washerman).

In all twenty-three, and it must be remembered that all are absolutely necessary, as, for instance, no khitmutgar or máti-bearer would take a note or message in place of the chuprássi, and above all, one native in a garden or elsewhere would do a fraction only of the work of the same man in England.

Anglo-Indians are inordinate "grumblers." There is much to be said on their side; the exile for the best years of their life, the return then to England to be looked down upon as a "dried-up Indian official," the separation entailed from children, the same imposed upon wife from either husband or child, the exigencies of the climate, &c.; but on the other hand it ought to be remembered that the salaries are very large, the pensions fairly so in proportion, and that they are enabled to have far more luxuries in India than they could possibly hope for at home—abundance of horses and carriages, superabundance (I had almost said) of servants, at any rate sufficient to enable no Anglo-Indian ever to do or move for himself, and horses enough never to walk. I found a few, but yet a very few who took this view of the case, allowing that at home they would keep two, or at the most three, servants, and have no carriages or horses.

In the afternoon we drove to the lake, which is a beautiful feature of Ajmere. It is a lovely sheet of water—an Italian lake in miniature, with its marble balconies and platforms, with its white houses hanging over the water on the city side, while the other is formed by a range of mountains. It looked particularly smiling this afternoon, with a declining sun, as we toiled up to the Residency. This bungalow has a most perfect situation, built high up on a rocky platform, with broad verandah-rooms overlooking the lake. It seemed a pity that Colonel Bradford, the Resident, is only able to reside here for two months in the year.

In returning we passed the handsome stone building of the offices of the Rajputana-Malwar Railway, whose headquarters are at Ajmere. The adjoining bungalows of officials and clerks form quite a "line" to themselves. In the evening we performed the customary programme of going to the club for an hour, and then the drive home in the dark was made romantically beautiful by the illumination of the tomb of an old saint on the mountain-side, the lights seeming to glimmer and twinkle in mid-air in the density of the darkness.

We left Ajmere that evening, catching up the mail train again at midnight, and travelling for eighteen hours all night and through the day, till we reached Ahmedabad at five this afternoon.

Saturday, February 6th.—Chota hazri after the usual Indian custom, and then a morning's sight-seeing before breakfast at 10 a.m.

Ahmedabad ranks in population as the second town in the Bombay Presidency; and the native quarters, as usual enclosed within a city wall, entered by no less than seventeen gateways, is very large. There is very little of interest to be seen at Ahmedabad. We drove first to the Mogul Viceroy's palace, that of Azim Khán, which has two massive Norman towers flanking the gateway. It forms now a very suitable entrance for its present purpose, for the ci-devant palace is now the jail of the district.

On the other side lies the European quarter, the jail thus forming the boundary-line between the native and European populations. By the side of the walls, hidden away in a corner, are the celebrated windows of the Bhadar. They represent the trunk, branches, and foliage of a single tree in each window, in the carved and fretted stone-work. They are exceedingly beautiful, so much so, that copies of them are in the South Kensington Museum.

The Kankariya Tank is very pretty, and, with its raised causeway leading to the garden island in its midst, has become a favourite evening resort. Near here are seen to rise the beautiful minars of the mosque of Shah Alam, the spiritual adviser and friend of Sultan Ahméd, the founder of the city. Within the court lies the tomb, with double galleries of fretwork—its chief beauty—and it is remarkable that each panel of the double screens is carved in a different pattern and device. The canopy is of oak, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, precious now, as it has become a lost art to the workmen of Ahmedabad.

They have the uncomfortable custom here of covering the marble sarcophagi with precious stuffs; thus, on entering one of these tombs the effect produced is as of a row of coffins covered with palls, more especially when, as frequently, wreaths are laid on them.

Then we followed the usual round of mosques, tombs, and temples, of which we, as well as my readers, I am sure, are wearying—the mosques being represented by the Jamma Mosque—a Hindu temple with Mohammedan arches and network of pillars (date 1567); the tombs by those of Ahméd Shah, the aforesaid founder of the city, and those of his queens; the temples by a purely Hindu one, now called the mosque and tomb of Rani Sipri. Monkeys swarm in the city, and look upon these temples and tombs as their rightful inheritance.

We notice a great difference amongst the lower orders now that we are in the Bombay Presidency as compared to that of Bengal. The natives look more well-to-do, are more clothed. There are fewer of those "savage-clothed" coolies, with their single strip of muslin around the loins. The neatly-plaited Hindu turban supersedes the hitherto more common loosely-wound Mohammedan one.

We left Ahmedabad by the ten o'clock train, and reached Baroda at 4.30 in the afternoon. Here we stayed five hours to catch up the mail train in the evening to Bombay.

We were reduced to taking a curious native cart at the station for a drive round the city. It was not quite an ekka, nor yet quite a tea-cart, but a cross between the two; and the small plank seats were put crossways and not lengthways, one behind the other. We jolted about in this for two hours till we suffered severely from a feeling of dislocation in many of our joints.

Baroda is a small and pretty city without any pretensions to special interest, save as the capital and residence of the celebrated Gaekwar of Baroda. We drove first to the pretty garden where stands his summer-house, and his cage of wild beasts. The native quarter is very large—more than usually picturesque, and the four main streets meet in the lines of a cross at a gateway, a lofty structure in white and yellow plaster. Here the guard keeps watch, a single sentry on the lofty platform of its tower commanding the whole view of the city. From his post of observation we saw a sight unequalled for the artist-loving eye—for at the moment a wedding procession was slowly threading its way from under the gateway below us, streaming away down the street in gay ribbons, narrowing with the perspective, and finally disappearing through a grey gateway further away. The block in the streets occasioned by the motley procession of ekkas and bullock-carts, and the acclamations of the crowd, further added to the striking scene.

Just beyond this gateway is the grand, grim, grey old palace of the Gaekwar. A covered gallery leads to the blue and yellow quarters of the zenana, seeming to tell of the "airy-fairy," do-nothing life of the zenana ladies by comparison with the sterner duties of the men—as if the Gaekwar liked to pass from the duties of the grey palace to the light pleasures and recreation of the gay-coloured zenana. The green buildings of the barracks are near, and the orange and yellow verandah of the police-station lower down, together forming a vivid collection of colour. The Gaekwar's cavalry paraded the streets in twos and threes, and a guard was in waiting outside the palace gate to accompany his carriage. We drove on further to see the gold and silver cannon. There are four gold cannon mounted on silver carriages! kept in a yard, where many white horses are stabled round, for in the prince's stables none but white horses are found.

In returning to the station we were fortunate enough to see another curious sight, during our few hours' stay only at Baroda. Heralded by a mounted body-guard, and a running, shouting escort, the ladies of the harem passed swiftly by. The barouche was carefully closed and curtained, with a duenna standing up with the eunuch behind. The guard from the guard-house turned out to salute, bugle, and beat a tattoo.

We passed repeatedly leopards being paraded through the streets by their keepers, the pariah or "pi" dogs barking furiously at them. The animal strained at his chains, and walking with stealthy, springing step, glaring cautiously around for his prey, but the people do not fear their escaping, and are very proud of their Gaekwar's wild beasts. There is an arena at Baroda where he occasionally holds a wild-beast fight.

We came back to the station by a beautiful and stately avenue of banyan-trees.

Leaving Baroda by the mail train that night, at seven the next morning we found ourselves stopping at the various stations along the great Queen's Road of Bombay, bordered by the sea.

We drove to Watson's Hotel on the Esplanade, kept by the same proprietor, and a counterpart of the discomfort and dirt of the Great Eastern at Calcutta.

We spent a quiet day driving out to Government House at Parell, six miles away from the town, and a far from pleasant drive through some native quarter. Sir James Fergusson is away at Calcutta, paying a farewell visit to the Viceroy, as he leaves India early in March.

We went to the cathedral in the evening for service, as following the usual custom of always "thinking it hot," the morning service is held at 7 a.m.