Part 13 (1/2)
What could we say against all this? We cast one more sorrowful look at the caves, and returned to our antediluvian carriages. The Babu and Narayan said we must spend the night at the house of a certain ”chum”
of the Babu, who resided in a small town, three miles further on, and bearing the same name as the caves; and we unwillingly acquiesced.
Many things in India are wonderful and unintelligible, but one of the most wonderful and the most unintelligible, is the geographical and the topographical disposition of the numberless territories of this country.
Political conjunctures in India seem to be everlastingly playing the French game ca.s.se-tete, changing the pattern, diminis.h.i.+ng one part and adding to another. The land that only yesterday belonged to this Raja or that Takur, is sure to be found today in the hands of quite a different set of people. For instance, we were in the Raj of Amjir in Malva, and we were going to the little city of Bagh, which also belongs to Malva and is included in the Amjir Raj. In the doc.u.ments, Malva is included in the independent possessions of Holkar; and nevertheless the Amjir Raj does not belong to Tukuji-Rao-Holkar, but to the son of the independent Raja of Amjir, who was hanged, ”by inadvertence” as we were a.s.sured, in 1857. The city, and the caves of Bagh, very oddly belong to the Maharaja Sindya of Gwalior, who, besides, does not own them personally, having made a kind of present of them, and their nine thousand rupees of revenue, to some poor relation. This poor relation, in his turn, does not enjoy the property in the least, because a certain Rajput Takur stole it from him, and will not consent to give it back. Bagh is situated on the road from Gujerat to Malva, in the defile of Oodeypur, which is owned accordingly by the Maharana of Oodeypur. Bagh itself is built on the top of a woody hillock, and being disputed property does not belong to any one in particular, properly speaking; but a small fortress, and a bazaar in the centre of it are the private possessions of a certain dhani; who, besides being the chieftain of the Bhimalah tribe, was the personal ”chum” of our Babu, and a ”great thief and highway robber,” according to the a.s.sertions of the said Babu.
”But why do you intend taking us to the place of a man whom you consider as a thief and a robber?” objected one of us timidly.
”He is a thief and a brigand,” coolly answered the Bengali, ”but only in the political sense. Otherwise he is an excellent man, and the truest of friends. Besides, if he does not help us, we shall starve; the bazaar and everything in the shops belong to him.”
These explanations of the Babu notwithstanding, we were glad to learn that the ”chum” in question was absent, and we were received by a relation of his. The garden was put at our disposal, and before our tents were pitched, we saw people coming from every side of the garden, bringing us provisions. Having deposited what he had brought, each of them, on leaving the tent, threw over his shoulder a pinch of betel and soft sugar, an offering to the ”foreign bhutas,” which were supposed to accompany us wherever we went. The Hindus of our party asked us, very seriously, not to laugh at this performance, saying it would be dangerous in this out-of-the-way place.
No doubt they were right. We were in Central India, the very nest of all kinds of superst.i.tions, and were surrounded by Bhils. All along the Vindya ridge, from Yama, on the west of the ”dead city,” the country is thickly populated by this most daring, restless and superst.i.tious of all the half-savage tribes of India.
The Orientalists think that the naive Bhils comes from the Sanskrit root bhid, which means to separate. Sir J. Malcolm supposes accordingly that the Bhils are sectarians, who separated from the Brahmanical creed, and were excommunicated. All this looks very probable, but their tribal traditions say something different. Of course, in this case, as in every other, their history is strongly entangled with mythology; and one has to go through a thick shrubbery of fancy before reaching the tribe's genealogical tree.
The relation of the absent dhani, who spent the evening with us, told us the following: The Bhils are the descendants of one of the sons of Mahadeva, or s.h.i.+va, and of a fair woman, with blue eyes and a white face, whom he met in some forest on the other side of the Kalapani, ”black waters,” or ocean. This pair had several sons, one of whom, as handsome as he was vicious, killed the favorite ox of his grandfather Maha-deva, and was banished by his father to the Jodpur desert. Banished to its remotest southern corner, he married; and soon his descendants filled the whole country. They scattered along the Vindya ridge, on the western frontier of Malva and Kandesh; and, later, in the woody wilderness, on the sh.o.r.es of the rivers Maha, Narmada and Tapti. And all of them, inheriting the beauty of their forefather, his blue eyes and fair complexion, inherited also his turbulent disposition and his vice.
”We are thieves and robbers,” naively explained the relative of the Babu's ”chum,” ”but we can't help it, because this is the decree of our mighty forefather, the great Maha-deva-s.h.i.+va. Sending his grandson to repent his sins in the desert, he said to him: 'Go, wretched murderer of my son and your brother, the ox Nardi; go and live the life of an exile and a brigand, to be an everlasting warning to your brethren!... ' These are the very words of the great G.o.d. Now, do you think we could disobey his orders? The least of our actions is always regulated by our Bhamyas--chieftains--who are the direct descendants of Nadir-Sing, the first Bhil, the child of our exiled ancestor, and being this, it is only natural that the great G.o.d speaks to us through him.”
Is not it strange that Apis, the sacred ox of the Egyptians, is honored by the followers of Zoroaster, as well as by the Hindus? The ox Nardi, the emblem of life in nature, is the son of the creating father, or rather his life-giving breath. Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus mentions, in one of his works, that there exists a book which gives the exact age of Apis, the clue to the mystery of creation and the cyclic calculations. The Brahmans also explain the allegory of the ox Nardi by the continuation of life on our globe.
The ”mediators” between s.h.i.+va and the Bhils possess such unrestricted authority that the most awful crimes are accomplished at their lightest word. The tribe have thought it necessary to decrease their power to a certain extent by inst.i.tuting a kind of council in every village. This council is called tarvi, and tries to cool down the hot-headed fancies of the dhanis, their brigand lords. However, the word of the Bhils is sacred, and their hospitality is boundless.
The history and the annals of the princes of Jodpur and Oodeypur confirm the legend of the Bhil emigration from their primitive desert, but how they happened to be there n.o.body knows. Colonel Tod is positive that the Bhils, together with the Merases and the Goands, are the aborigines of India, as well as the tribes who inhabit the Nerbuda forests. But why the Bhils should be almost fair and blue-eyed, whereas the rest of the hill-tribes are almost African in type, is a question that is not answered by this statement. The fact that all these aborigines call themselves Bhumaputra and Vanaputra, sons of the earth and sons of the forest, when the Rajputs, their first conquerors, call themselves Surya-vansa and the Brahmans Indu-putras, descendants of the sun and the moon, does not prove everything. It seems to me, that in the present case, their appearance, which confirms their legends, is of much greater value than philology. Dr. Clark, the author of Travels in Scandinavia, is very logical in saying that, ”by directing our attention on the traces of the ancient superst.i.tions of a tribe, we shall find out who were its primitive forefathers much more easily than by scientific examination of their tongue; the superst.i.tions are grafted on the very root, whereas the tongue is subjected to all kinds of changes.”
But, unfortunately, everything we know about the history of the Bhils is reduced to the above-mentioned tradition, and to a few ancient songs of their bards. These bards or bhattas live in Rajistan, but visit the Bhils yearly, in order not to lose the leading thread of the achievements of their countrymen. Their songs are history, because the bhattas have existed from time immemorial, composing their lays for future generations, for this is their hereditary duty. And the songs of the remotest antiquity point to the lands over the Kalapani as the place whence the Bhils came; that is to say, some place in Europe. Some Orientalists, especially Colonel Tod, seek to prove that the Rajputs, who conquered the Bhils, were newcomers of Scythian origin, and that the Bhils are the true aborigines. To prove this, they put forward some features common to both peoples, Rajput and Scythian, for instance (1) the wors.h.i.+p of the sword, the lance, the s.h.i.+eld and the horse; (2) the wors.h.i.+p of, and the sacrifice to, the sun (which, as far as I know, never was wors.h.i.+ped by the Scythians); (3) the pa.s.sion of gambling (which again is as strong amongst the Chinese and the j.a.panese); (4) the custom of drinking blood out of the skull of an enemy (which is also practised by some aborigines of America), etc., etc.
I do not intend entering here on a scientific ethnological discussion; and, besides, I am sure no one fails to see that the reasoning of scientists sometimes takes a very strange turn when they set to prove some favorite theory of theirs. It is enough to remember how entangled and obscure is the history of the ancient Scythians to abstain from drawing any positive conclusions whatsoever from it. The tribes that go under one general denomination of Scythians were many, and still it is impossible to deny that there is a good deal of similitude between the customs of the old Scandinavians, wors.h.i.+pers of Odin, whose land indeed was occupied by the Scythians more than five hundred years B.C. and the customs of the Rajputs. But this similitude gives as much right to the Rajputs to say that we are a colony of Surya-vansas settled in the West as to us to maintain that the Rajputs are the descendants of Scythians who emigrated to the East. The Scythians of Herodotus and the Scythians of Ptolemy, and some other cla.s.sical writers, are two perfectly distinct nationalities. Under Scythia, Herodotus means the extension of land from the mouth of Danube to the Sea of Azoff, according to Niebuhr; and to the mouth of Don, according to Rawlinson; whereas the Scythia of Ptolemy is a country strictly Asiatic, including the whole s.p.a.ce between the river Volga and Serika, or China. Besides this, Scythia was divided by the western Himalayas, which the Roman writers call Imaus, into Scythia intra Imaum, and Scythia extra Imaum. Given this lack of precision, the Rajputs may be called the Scythians of Asia, and the Scythians the Rajputs of Europe, with the same degree of likelihood. Pinkerton's opinion is that European contempt for the Tartars would not be half so strong if the European public learned how closely we are related to them; that our forefathers came from northern Asia, and that our primitive customs, laws and mode of living were the same as theirs; in a word, that we are nothing but a Tartar colony... Cimbri, Kelts and Gauls, who conquered the northern part of Europe, are different names of the same tribe, whose origin is Tartary. Who were the Goths, the Swedes, the Vandals, the Huns and the Franks, if not separate swarms of the same beehive? The annals of Sweden point to Kashgar as the fatherland of the Swedes. The likeness between the languages of the Saxons and the Kipchak-Tartars is striking; and the Keltic, which still exists in Brittany and in Wales, is the best proof that their inhabitants are descendants of the Tartar nation.
Whatever Pinkerton and others may say, the modern Rajput warriors do not answer in the least the description Hippocrates gives us of the Scythians. The ”father of medicine” says: ”The bodily structure of these men is thick, coa.r.s.e and stunted; their joints are weak and flabby; they have almost no hair, and each of them resembles the other.” No man, who has seen the handsome, gigantic warriors of Rajistan, with their abundant hair and beards, will ever recognize this portrait drawn by Hippocrates as theirs. Besides, the Scythians, whoever they may be, buried their dead, which the Rajputs never did, judging by the records of their most ancient MSS. The Scythians were a wandering nation, and are described by Hesiod as ”living in covered carts and feeding on mare's milk.” And the Rajputs have been a sedentary people from time immemorial, inhabiting towns, and having their history at least several hundred years before Christ--that is to say, earlier than the epoch of Herodotus. They do celebrate the Ashvamedha, the horse sacrifice; but will not touch mare's milk, and despise all Mongolians. Herodotus says that the Scythians, who called themselves Skoloti, hated foreigners, and never let any stranger in their country; and the Rajputs are one of the most hospitable peoples of the world. In the epoch of the wars of Darius, 516 B.C., the Scythians were still in their own district, about the mouth of the Danube. And at the same epoch the Rajputs were already known in India and had their own kingdom. As to the Ashvamedha, which Colonel Tod thinks to be the chief ill.u.s.tration of his theory, the custom of killing horses in honor of the sun is mentioned in the Rig-Veda, as well as in the Aitareya-Brahmana. Martin Haug states that the latter has probably been in existence since 2000-2400 B.C.----
But it strikes me that the digression from the Babu's chum to the Scythians and the Rajputs of the antediluvian epoch threatens to become too long, so I beg the reader's pardon and resume the thread of my narrative.
The Banns Of Marriage
Next day, early in the morning, the local s.h.i.+karis went under the leaders.h.i.+p of the warlike Akali, to hunt glamoured and real tigers in the caves. It took them longer than we expected. The old Bhil, who represented to us the absent dhani, proposed that in the meanwhile we should witness a Brahmanical wedding ceremony. Needless to say, we jumped at this. The ceremonies of betrothal and marriage have not changed in India during the last two millenniums at least. They are performed according to the directions of Manu, and the old theme has no new variations. India's religious rites have crystallized long ago.
Whoever has seen a Hindu wedding in 1879, saw it as it was celebrated in ancient Aryavarta many centuries ago.----
A few days before we left Bombay we read in a small local newspaper two announcements of marriages: the first the marriage of a Brahman heiress, the second of a daughter of the fire-wors.h.i.+pers. The first announcement was something to the following effect: ”The family of Bimbay Mavlankar, etc., etc., are preparing for a happy event. This respectable member of our community, unlike the rest of the less fortunate Brahmans of his caste, has found a husband for his grand-daughter in a rich Gujerat family of the same caste. The little Rama-bai is already five, her future husband is seven. The wedding is to take place in two months and promises to be brilliant.”
The second announcement referred to an accomplished fact. It appeared in a Parsi paper, which strongly insists on the necessity of giving up ”disgusting superannuated customs,” and especially the early marriage.
It justly ridiculed a certain Gujerati newspaper, which had just described in very pompous expressions a recent wedding ceremony in Poona. The bridegroom, who had just entered his sixth year ”pressed to his heart a blus.h.i.+ng bride of two and a half!” The usual answers of this couple entering into matrimony proved so indistinct that the Mobed had to address the questions to their parents: ”Are you willing to have him for your lawful husband, O daughter of Zaratushta?” and ”Are you willing to be her husband, O son of Zoroaster?” ”Everything went as well as it could be expected,” continued the newspaper; ”the bridegroom was led out of the room by the hand, and the bride, who was carried away in arms, greeted the guests, not with smiles, but with a tremendous howl, which made her forget the existence of such a thing as a pocket-handkerchief, and remember only her feeding-bottle; for the latter article she asked repeatedly, half choked with sobs, and throttled with the weight of the family diamonds. Taking it all in all, it was a Parsi marriage, which shows the progress of our speedily developing nation with the exact.i.tude of a weather gla.s.s,” added the satirical newspaper.
Having read this we laughed heartily, though we did not give full credit to this description, and thought it a good deal exaggerated. We knew Parsi and Brahman families in which were husbands of ten years of age; but had never heard as yet of a bride who was a baby in arms.----
It is not without reason that the Brahmans are fervent upholders of the ancient law which prohibits to everyone, except the officiating Brahmans, the study of Sanskrit and the reading of the Vedas. The Shudras and even the high-born Vaishyas were in olden times to be executed for such an offence. The secret of this rigour lies in the fact that the Vedas do not permit matrimony for women under fifteen to twenty years of age, and for men under twenty-five, or even thirty. Eager above all that every religious ceremony should fill their pockets, the Brahmans never stopped at disfiguring their ancient sacred literature; and not to be caught, they p.r.o.nounced its study accursed. Amongst other ”criminal inventions,” to use the expression of Swami Dayanand, there is a text in the Brahmanical books, which contradicts everything that is to be found in the Vedas on this particular matter: I speak of the Kudva Kunbis, the wedding season of all the agricultural cla.s.ses of Central Asia. This season is to be celebrated once in every twelve years, but it appears to be a field from which Messieurs les Brahmans gathered the most abundant harvest. At this epoch, all the mothers have to seek audiences from the G.o.ddess Mata, the great mother--of course through her rightful oracles the Brahmans. Mata is the special patroness of all the four kinds of marriages practised in India: the marriages of adults, of children, of babies, and of specimens of humanity that are as yet to be born.