Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine – Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844

Gopal was not the only amiable character with whom the colonel became acquainted at Calpee, as he sought and obtained an interview with a famous Thug approver, who had retired from the active exercise of his profession, and was travelling the country in company with a party of police, denouncing his former associates to justice. We cannot help suspecting, both from the traits recorded of him, and from the vicinity of Calpee to his former residence at Jalone, that this personage was no other than the celebrated Ameer Ali, whose adventures formed the ground of Captain Meadows Taylor's well-known "Confessions of a Thug;" and as a pendant to the already published descriptions of him, we here quote the impression he made upon the colonel. "I expected to see a great man, but at the first glance I saw that I was in the presence of a master. The Thug was tall, active, and slenderly formed; his head was nearly oval; his eye most strongly resembled that of a cobra di capello; its dart was perfectly wild and maniacal, restless, brilliant, metallic, and concentrated." The colonel had a narrow escape from irretrievably affronting this eminent professor of murder, by unguardedly enquiring whether he was in any way cognizant of a trifling robbery by which the colonel himself had been a sufferer. "No, sir!" he exclaimed with a look which might have frozen a less innocent querist; "murder, not robbery, is my profession … and none but the merest novices would descend so low as to rob a tent or a dwelling-house." The colonel, however, expresses a shrewd suspicion, from circumstances which had come to his knowledge, that his distinguished visitor's esprit de corps led him to deviate from truth in this particular—a belief in which Captain Taylor's pages fully bear him out.

The colonel's movements, after quitting Calpee and its attractive circles, appear to have been somewhat desultory. We find him, successively, at Murgaon or Murgong, Julalpore, Keitah, &c., without being told what decided his route; but from some subsequent remarks, it appears probable that he was engaged on engineering service by order of Government. Between Julalpore and Keitah he fell in with a gang of nutts 9 or gipsies, whom the beauty of their women (a point to which the colonel is always alive) did not prevent him from suspecting of an intention to practise thuggee on his own portly person—a belief in which he was confirmed by hearing them speak in another tongue among themselves—no doubt the Ramasee, or cant language of the Thugs, subsequently made known to the world at large by the investigations of Major Sleeman. At Goraree he purchased some small cups, carved from the variegated serpentine of the rock on which the town is built; but, on proposing to employ the artist in making some larger vases, "he told me that he was a very poor man, and his efforts had never been directed to larger patterns; meaning to infer that it was impossible he could either try or succeed!" Such is Hindoo nature!

Churkaree, the capital of Ruttun Sing Buhadoor, one of the principal of the numerous rajahs among whom Bundelcund is divided, is described as "prettily situated on the side of the hill, over a lake covered with the white lotus flower, and having a very fine appearance from a distance, as most of the houses have their upper stories whitewashed, and are seen peeping through the dark-green leafy trees of the country, but the town, which contains perhaps 15,000 souls, of whom 1000 may be Mussulmen, is very straggling, irregular, and dirty." The male population were all fiercely mustached, and loaded with arms; but their repulsive exterior was more than compensated by the charms of the other sex, all of whom wore immense hollow ankle bangles of zinc, filled with bits of gravel, which tinkled as they walked. "I have never seen so many well-formed and handsome women together as I did at the wells outside the town, drawing water à la Rebecca. Some of their faces were strikingly intelligent, and their figures eminently graceful. The population is almost purely Hindoo; and I think the Hindoo females are more delicate in their forms than the Mussulmanees." The Rajah was, however, absent on a sporting excursion, and the darogah refused to provide the colonel with lodgings, alleging his master's orders that no Feringhis should be allowed in the town; and it was not till after a long altercation, of which the colonel gives himself greatly the best, that he succeeded in finding quarters in the house of a bunneea or grocer. But the next day's march (for Bundelcund is almost as thickly set with sovereign princes as Saxony itself) carried him out of the realm of this inhospitable potentate into the territories of the Rajah of Jalone, the once noted patron and protector of Thuggee, by whose agent he was most politely received at Mahoba, a once splendid but now ruined city, celebrated for its artificial lakes, which in long-past times were formed by a famous Rajpoot prince named Purmal, by damming up the narrow gorges of the hills. "Never had I seen, in the plains of India, a prospect more enchanting! Conceive a beautiful sheet of calm, clear, silvery water, of several miles in circumference, occasionally agitated by the splashing leaps of large fishes, or the gradual alighting of noble swan-like aquatic birds: its margin broken as if by the most skilful artist; now running into the centre, and ending in most romantic low rocky hills, covered with trees and embellished with black, antique Jain temples, deserted probably for hundreds of years, and at present the retreat of the elegant peafowl; in other places embanked with huge blocks of cut granite, embrowned by the shade of magnificent trees, under which small bright Hindoo temples, carefully whitewashed, might be seen in the shade; or bounded by abrupt rocky promontories, surmounted by many-pillared temples in ruins, hanging in the sky. A fine rich sunset gave an exquisite richness and classic magnificence to the scene. Many little boys with rod and line were ensnaring the sweet little singhee, or the golden rohoo or carp—bringing back to my heart the days, when, stealing from school, I was wont to sit on the rocks of the Dee, at Craglug, near Aberdeen, watching the motion of a float that was not under water once in the twenty-four hours."

The colonel's laudable habit of associating freely, whenever opportunity occurred, with the natives, gave him considerable insight into the state of the country, where the caprices of the native princes were not then much interfered with, and which consequently, as he says, "was pretty much in the situation of the Emerald Isle;" and verily if the tale told him by the Hindoo gosain or priest at Jourâhoô, of the murder of his predecessor in the temple, and the impunity of the robbers, were correctly related, the Bundelas have not much to learn in the arts of bloodshed and depredation. "This village being a sort of corner to the territories of several Rajahs, robberies, murders, and all other diversions, are of daily occurrence; and when enquiries are made; each territory throws the blame on its neighbour." The maxim of government most current in Bundelcund, both with rulers and ruled, seems indeed to have been—

"The good old rule, the simple plan,That those should take who have the power,And those should keep who can;"

for while this strange confusion of meum and tuum prevailed among the peasantry, the country was ruined by the oppressive and irregular exactions of the rajahs, both zemindars and cultivators flying from their habitations to escape the levying of the rents, which were often demanded more than once by different collectors. At Chundla, the colonel was lodged in the house of an opulent zemindar, who had absconded for the reason just given; "and one of the thanna servants told me, that, by those means, Bundelcund was depopulated"—a statement corroborated by the numerous ruined brick houses remaining in the towns among the miserable hovels of the present day. The rajahs of Bundelcund are, almost without exception, of Rajpoot lineage, and thus of a different race from their Bundela subjects; but the condition of the country is much the same wherever it is left under the sway of the Hindoo princes, who are exempt even from the partial restraint which the Koran imposes on the despotism of Mahommedan rulers. The only effectual cure for the evils reigning in Bundelcund will be its formal incorporation with the dominions of the Company—a consummation which, from the refractory spirit shown in the province after our losses in Affghanistan, is probably not far distant.

The remainder of the colonel's notes on Bundelcund relate principally to his visits to the ancient hill-fortresses of Ajeegur and Kalingur, both formerly occupied in force by the British, but now—with the exception of a havildar's (sergeant's) party of sepoys posted at the former, and a single company at the latter—garrisoned solely by the lungoors, or large black monkeys, whom the colonel found holding solemn assembly in the Jain temples and the hall of audience, built by the famous Rajah Purmal at Ajeegur. While exploring his way along the ruined and overgrown ramparts, he had a narrow escape from the fangs of a large venomous serpent, ("the Katula Rekula Poda, No. 7 of Russell,") on which he was on the point of treading, and which, in commendable gratitude for its forbearance; he allowed to glide off unharmed by his fowling-piece; "but he was the first reptile that ever escaped without the chance of losing his life at my hands." On the road to Kalingur he had an interview with a petitioner, who offered him 400 rupees in cash, or a large diamond, for his interest in a certain case then pending before the judge at Bandah; "but I explained to my client that I was not in that line of business, and as I saw he had no intention of insulting me, we parted friends." Kalingur, which was taken by the British after a long siege in 1812, stands on a rock towering "upwards of 850 feet above the plain below, and probably about 3000 feet above the level of the sea;" but its strength as a fortress is as nothing in comparison to its sanctity, which entitles every one, who resides there only as long as it takes to milk a cow, to especial beatitude—the object of veneration being a lingam of black stone enshrined in a temple, the guardianship of which is jointly vested in five resident families of Bramins. "At this time," says the colonel, "the place is not worth keeping, the country being so thoroughly impoverished and desolate;" and he accordingly, after viewing the marvels of the locality, pursued his way to Banda, and thence laid a dâk (or travelled by palanquin with relays of bearers) to Calpee, "there to sit from nine to four, writing filthy accounts of bricks and mortar, square feet, cubic feet, and running feet, rupees, annas, and pie; squabbling with wrinkled unromantic villains, whose cool-tempered and overwhelming patience amply deserve their unlawful gains—I mean as labourers in the vineyard of villany."

"A sporting excursion in Oude," in the spring of 1836, comes next in order of time; and in regular order we accordingly take it, though it has pleased either Mr Colburn or the colonel to place it after the voyage down the Ganges. The colonel left Lucknow, March 2; and three days later the whole party rendezvoused at Khyrabad, consisting of "Mrs, Miss, and Brigadier Churchill, Colonel Arnold, Major Cureton, Lieut. Waugh, Dr Ross of her Majesty's 16th Lancers, and the writer of these amiable records;" to whom was soon after added, in the capacity of guide and hanger-on, "Sam Lall, by birth a Chuttree or Rajpoot, by profession a zemindar, and by inclination a sycophant and shikarree, (hunter.)" Indian field sports, with their concomitants of hogs, hogdeer, jungles, elephants, tigers, and nullahs, have been of late years rendered so familiar to stay-at-home travellers, that we shall but concisely notice the colonel's exploits in this forest campaign, which present no remarkable novelty, though detailed con amore, and with the two-fold zest of a sportsman and an epicure. With all deference, indeed, to the colonel, we have shrewd doubts whether the latter feeling was not the predominant one; for the death of a tiger, nine of which fell during the three weeks' foray before the rifles of himself and his companions, is evidently chronicled with less of heart-felt enthusiasm than characterises his encomiums on the hogdeer soup, the delicate floricans and black partridges, (in the preparation of bread sauce, for which, with his own hands, he earned immortal renown,) and the other materials for good living poured forth from the cornucopia of an Indian game-bag. His gastronomic fervour during this jaunt reaches at times an ecstatic pitch, which, as old Weller says, "werges on the poetical." "For him (the gastronomist) the dark rocks and arid plains of the dry Dekkan produce their purple grapes, and cunning but goodly bustard; for him burning Bundelcund its wonderful rock pigeon and ortolan inimitable; the Jumna, most ancient of rivers, its large rich Kala banse, and tasty crabs; for him yields the low and marshy Terace her elegant florican; the mighty Gunga its melting mahaseer; the Goomtee its exquisite mullet. And shall he not eat and delight in her fruits? … Let the ass eat its thistles, and the swallow its flies au naturel; you and I, reader, know better!"

One day, while wading on their elephants through a deep marsh in pursuit of a tiger, the chasseurs suddenly stumbled upon a pleasant family party—"a labyrinth of huge boa-constrictors or pythons, sound asleep, floating on a bed of crushed nurkool, (a gigantic species of reed,) the least of them twenty feet long, and two feet in circumference. A more beautiful natural mosaic cannot be imagined: they appeared, from being wet, as if recently varnished. Perhaps they were from twenty to thirty in number, and occupied a spot of about twenty feet square. No sooner did the dreadful glistening reptiles hear the click of my rifle, and feel its ball, than they shot forth with all their vigour, and diving, disappeared in an instant under the matted roots of the tall nurkool, and, although I tried, I could not get another glimpse." One of these giant serpents, seventeen feet long, and eighteen inches in circumference, which the colonel calls a small one, was shot a few days afterwards by Colonel Arnold. The marsh and jungle swarmed with peacocks, jungle-fowl, and wild-fowl of all sorts, affording glorious sport; and, besides the smaller kinds of deer, several specimens occurred of a magnificent species of stag with twelve-tyned horns, called baru-singa—apparently allied to the sambur and rusa of the Dekkan. The comparatively small number of tigers killed was, however, a source of disappointment; since the utility of these battues, in which the superior fire-arms and appliances of the English are brought into action for the destruction of these ferocious animals, may be estimated from the damage done by them in the wilder parts of India, "which is beyond the belief even of Indo-European residents, and must, consequently, appear an exaggeration to distant Englishmen. General (then Captain) Briggs, when resident at Dhoolia in Candeish, in 1821, where his potails, or head men, were obliged to keep a register of the oxen (exclusive of sheep and goats) destroyed in their villages, reported that no less than 21,000 had been killed in three years! As no register is kept in Oude, it is impossible to register the number."

On the banks of the Mohun-nuddee the party was joined by Rajah Ruttun Sing, a chief holding a considerable tract of country under the suzerainté of Oude, who favoured them with his company while they remained in his district—a compliment which he expected to be acknowledged, as he distinctly intimated on taking leave, by the gift of a valuable fowling-piece; but this modest request was parried by the rejoinder, that none of their guns were good enough for his highness! During one of the halts, an incident occurred which strongly illustrates the inhuman apathy of the Hindoos towards any one not connected with them by the ties of caste. A man was found sitting under a tree near the camp, uttering strange cries, and the servants were desired to order him to withdraw; "they returned, saying carelessly that he was a nutt, or gipsy, who had been robbed." A robbery from a gipsy was such a strange contradiction of terms, that the colonel went personally to enquire into the matter, when he was horror-struck by finding, that the man had been, not only plundered of his earnings by a band of Bunjarras, but frightfully mutilated and wounded, a trifle which the Hindoo servants had not thought worth mentioning. The poor wretch's arm was amputated by Dr Ross; and, being carried with the camp and carefully tended, he was at last dismissed, with a fair prospect of recovery, and with a gift of sixty rupees subscribed among the party; but not even the example of the sahibs could teach the Hindoos humanity, and only the peremptory commands of Dr Ross could prevail upon his bearer to place a mattress under the sufferer! On their return march, the party were further honoured by visits from several rajahs and zemindars, all of whom were "loud in complaint against the extortions of the aumils, who constantly attempted to gather more, and sometimes twice and a half as much, as the stipulated rent, in consequence of which the zemindars were compelled to rebel;" a view of the political condition of Oude which naturally results from its anomalous position, under a sovereign nominally independent, who is at once too weak to control his own subjects, and fearful of diminishing the shadow of authority left to him by calling in the only available aid. On the 29th of March the party again reached Khyrabad, the appointed place of their separation, as it had been of their meeting; and here the narrative, as before, breaks off abruptly.

The concluding part, in order of time, of the colonel's lucubrations, contains his narrative of a voyage on the Ganges, from Allahabad, by Dhacca, to Calcutta; but the features and incidents of this navigation have been so frequently described by travellers of all sorts and kinds, from Bishop Heber and Captain Bellew to our own much-esteemed Kerim Khan, that we shall devote but brief space to it. He quitted Allahabad, as he informs us, December 5, 1839, so deeply regretted by the native population, that they determined to perpetuate his memory by the erection of a new ghât or landing-place, every brick of which was to be stamped with the letter D—a distinction which he had, no doubt, deserved by the bonhommie towards both Hindoo and Moslem, which forms one of the most favourable traits in the jovial colonel's character. The Tribeenee Ghât, immediately below Allahabad, where the streams of the Jumna and the Ganges unite, is one of the holiest spots in India; to which pilgrims resort from all quarters, in the hope of securing paradise by dying at the junction of the sacred waters. The spirit of religious exclusiveness prevails here as well as in other places; and the colonel mentions his having been once an eyewitness of some rough treatment received by a chumar, or leather-dresser, (one of the lowest castes,) at the hands of some high caste sepoys, who were highly indignant that so mean a carcass should presume to defile the holy ground! Leaving the ghâts and devotees behind him, however, and floating down the stream in his capacious three-roomed budgerow, he passed Mirzapoor, Chunar, and even the holy city of Benares, (which he perversely spells Bunarus,) without halting; and reached without adventure or mishap the mouth of the Goomtee, where his attention was attracted by a party of eighteen young elephants, the property of the king of Oude, bathing in the river. "Of all animals, saving the Bundela goat, there is none that suffers more from change of climate than the elephant: of the numbers caught on the eastern frontier, probably not one in four survives a journey to Delhi. Bred in the darkest and most gloomy forests, they are in a great measure sheltered from heat by the eternal moisture of the cool shady bower under which they rove; and are then expected to bear all on a sudden the most intense heat, acting directly on their jet-black skins, when brought into the plains of Upper India. A very clever native told me he could make money by any thing but young elephants." Another curious fact relative to the elephant, mentioned in a subsequent chapter on the authority of Captain Broadfoot of the Madras commissariat, is, that both wild and tame elephants are extremely subject to a pulmonary disease, which proved on dissection to be tubercular—in fact, consumption! It was found to yield, however, to copious bleedings, if taken in its early stages.

The colonel's pages, at this point, are filled with digressions and dissertations on subjects somewhat miscellaneous—Aberdeen pale ale—the enormities of Warren Hastings' government—the late James Prinsep and the moral precepts of the Rajah Piyâdâsee—and a most incomprehensible rhapsody about "a red mustached member of the Bengal civil service," of which we profess ourselves utterly incompetent to make either head or tail, and strongly recommend the colonel to expunge it if the work reaches another edition. The voyage presents no incidents but the usual ones of pelicans, alligators, and porpoises: and on January 15, he arrived at Dhacca, "the once famous city of muslins." But the muslin trade has now almost wholly disappeared; and with it "the thousands of families of muslin weavers, who, from the extreme delicacy of their manufacture, were obliged to work in pits, sheltered from the heat of the sun and changes of the weather; and even after that precaution, only while the dew lay on the ground, as the increasing heat destroyed the extremely delicate thread." The jungle is in consequence advancing close upon the city, which is thus rendered almost uninhabitable from malaria—the only manufacturers which continue to flourish being those of violins, bracelets, made from a peculiar shell resembling the Murex tulipa, and—idols for Hindoo worship!

The colonel remained at Dhacca till February 4, awaiting ulterior orders from headquarters, and had, consequently, abundance of leisure for making himself acquainted with the place and its people. These researches, however, were not always unattended with danger; for on one occasion, while viewing the city from an elevated building, a piece of plaster was struck from the cornice near where he stood by a matchlock ball—a delicate hint that the Mussulmans disliked being overlooked. The Nawab, apparently the son of Bishop Heber's acquaintance, Shumseddowlah, still resides in the palace of his ancestors, but is described as an extravagant, uneducated youth, who has mortgaged away his income from 5000 to 200 rupees per mensem—that is, from L.6000 to L.240 per annum. The inhabitants were a mixture of almost all the creeds and nations of Asia—Chinese, Thibetans, Mugs from Arracan, Burmese, Malays, etc.; but the great majority are Hindoos, whose sanguinary goddess Kalee is adored in not less than fifty temples. The Greeks and Armenians also have each a church, the services of which, as described by the colonel, are conducted in much the same form as at Constantinople:—"But among the (Armenian) matrons only was any appearance of devotion visible; one of them, most gorgeously appareled in the Armenian fashion, with a magnificent tiara of jewels on her brow, and wearing a superb shawl, threw herself on the ground, with her head sunk between her arms, towards the altar, and remained in that position nearly five minutes. The others, being dressed à l'Anglaise, with stiff stays and fashionable bonnets, could not afford to indulge in such a position." The Armenians were formerly numerous in Dhacca, and are still an influential and wealthy body; the Greeks are now "few and far between," but in the palmy days of Dhacca they were a flourishing community.

Dhacca was a place abounding in strange characters from all parts of the world; and among others whom the colonel encountered, was a singular specimen of a cosmopolite, a native of Fez, who called himself a Moslem, but whom our friend vehemently suspected of being a Jew. He had been almost as great a traveller as his countryman the famous Sheikh Ebn Batuta, whose wanderings are immortalized in the pages of Maga,10 and came last from Moulmein, with a cargo of black pepper and rubies. He had resided seventeen years in India, and proposed to the colonel, whom he claimed as a brother, "since from his own home he could reach England in ten days," that they should jointly freight a vessel with valuables, and go home together! And, among other scattered facts, a casual encounter with some Chinese in the employ of the Assam Tea Company, whom the colonel considerably astonished by addressing them in their own language, introduces "the very curious fact," that at Tipperah, a civil station not more than fifty or sixty miles from Dhacca, the natives have from time immemorial used the tea which grows there abundantly, and is prepared after a fashion of their own. "And yet" (continues the colonel—and we fear there is too much truth in his remarks) "the existence of the tea-plant is but a recent discovery! Any other nation would have established a tea-manufactory at Tipperah, immediately after the first settlement, and the Yankees would have 'progressed' railroads and steam-boats for its success. India is at this moment a mine of unexplored wealth. No sooner had steam-boats appeared than coal has been discovered in every direction!" The manufacture of native iron in Bengal, which had been pressed upon Lord Hastings, as the colonel seems to imply, by himself, and at first warmly adopted by him, was objected to in the council, and ultimately abandoned, "on the grounds that it would militate against the commercial interests of Great Britain—that is, against the profits of those India stockholders, possessing votes, who followed the trade of ironmongers!" There is many a true word spoken in jest; and this and other side-cuts of the colonel at the shortsighted proceedings of the Bahadurs at Calcutta, though sometimes queerly worded, contain now and then some unpalatable facts. The administration of the present Governor-General has shown at least some promise of a better state of things—and if the impulse now given to the development of the resources of India be steadily followed up, this reproach will erelong be taken away. The receipt of his final orders, however, which pointed out China as his destination, put an end to the colonel's speculations; and re-embarking on the stream of the Booree Gunga, he passed, with little incident worth noticing, through the numerous branches of the river, and the picturesque jungles of the Soonderbunds, and arrived safely, after an absence of twenty-one years, at the city of palaces—and there we leave him.