Part 10 (1/2)

236 seq., may also be consulted.

9. Bernier vividly describes an 'infernal tragedy' of this kind which he witnessed, in or about the year 1659, during Aurangzeb's reign, in Rajputana. On that occasion five female slaves burnt themselves with their mistress (_Travels_, ed. Constable and V. A. Smith (1914), p.

309).

10. Hinduism is a social system, not a creed, A Hindoo may believe, or disbelieve, what speculative doctrine he chooses, but he must not eat, drink, or marry, save in accordance with the custom of his caste. Compare Asoka on toleration; 'The sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another' (Rock Edict xii; V. A.

Smith, _Asoka_, 2nd edition (1909), p. 170).

11. Mir Salamat Ali is a stanch Sunni, the sect of Osman; and they are always at daggers drawn with the s.h.i.+as, or the sect of Ali. He alludes to the s.h.i.+as when he says that one of the seventy-two sects is always ready to take in the whole of the other seventy-one.

Muhammad, according to the traditions, was one day heard to say, 'The time will come when my followers will he divided into seventy-three sects; all of them will a.s.suredly go to h.e.l.l save one.' Every one of the seventy-three sects believes itself to be the one happily excepted by their prophet, and predestined to paradise. I am sometimes disposed to think Muhammad was self-deluded, however difficult it might be to account for so much 'method in his madness'.

It is difficult to conceive a man placed in such circ.u.mstances with more amiable dispositions or with juster views of the rights and duties of men in all their relations with each other, than are exhibited by him on almost all occasions, save where the question of _faith_ in his divine mission was concerned.

A very interesting and useful book might be made out of the history of those men, more or less mad, by whom mult.i.tudes of mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical a.n.a.lysis of the points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole career of their glory. [W. H. S.]

For an account of Muhammadan sects, see section viii of the Preliminary Dissertation in Sale's Koran, ent.i.tled, 'Of the Princ.i.p.al Sects among the Muhammadans; and of those who have pretended to Prophecy among the Arabs, in or since the Time of Muhammad'; and T.

P. Hughes, _Dictionary of Islam_ (1885). The chief sects of the Sunnis, or Traditionists, are four in number. 'The princ.i.p.al sects of the s.h.i.+as are five, which are subdivided into an almost innumerable number.' The court of the kings of Oudh was s.h.i.+a. In most parts of India the Sunni faith prevails.

The relation between genius and insanity is well expressed by Dryden (_Absalom and Achitopfel_):

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin part.i.tions do their bounds divide.

The treatise of Professor Cesare Lombroso, ent.i.tled _The Man of Genius_ (London edition, 1891), is devoted to proof and ill.u.s.tration of the proposition that genius is 'a special morbid condition'. He deals briefly with the case of Muhammad at pages 31, 39, and 325, maintaining that the prophet, like Saint Paul, Julius Caesar, and many other men of genius, was subject to epileptic fits. The Professor's book seems to be exactly what Sir W. H. Sleeman desired to see.

12. In the author's time, when munic.i.p.al conservancy and sanitation were almost unknown in India, the tyranny of the sweepers' guild was chiefly felt as a private inconvenience. It is now one of the princ.i.p.al of the many difficulties, little understood in Europe, which bar the progress of Indian sanitary reform. The sweepers cannot be readily coerced because no Hindoo or Musalman would do their work to save his life, nor will he pollute himself even by beating the refractory scavenger. A strike of sweepers on the occasion of a great fair, or of a cholera epidemic, is a most dangerous calamity. The vested rights described in the text are so fully recognized in practice that they are frequently the subject of sale or mortgage.

13. The low-caste Hindoos are generally fond of drink, when they can get it, but seldom commit crime under its influence.

14. An elephant driver, by reason of his position on the animal, has opportunities for private conversation with his master.

15. Elephant drivers (_mahouts_) are Muhammadans, who should have no caste, but Indian Musalmans have become Hinduized, and fallen under the dominion of caste.

16. Darbhanga is in Tirhut, seventy miles NE. of Dinapore. The Kusi (Kosi or Koosee) river rises in the mountains of Nepal, and falls into the Ganges after a course of about 325 miles. Nathpur, in the Puraniya (Purneah) District, is a mart for the trade with Nepal.

17. The customary att.i.tude of a suppliant.

18. A small river which falls into the Nerbudda on the right-hand side, at Sankal. Its general course is south-west.

19. November, 1835.

20. Described in the _Gazetteer_ (1870) as 'a large but decaying village in the Jabalpur district, situated at the foot of the Bhanrer hills, twenty-two miles to the north-west of Jabalpur, on the north side of the Hiran, and on the road to Sagar'.

21. The convenient restriction of the name Vindhya to the hills north, and of Satpura to the hills south of the Nerbudda is of modern origin (_Manual of the Geology of India_, 1st ed., Part I, p. iv).

The Satpura range, thus defined, separates the valley of the Nerbudda from the valleys of the Tapti flowing west, and the Mahanadi flowing east. The Vindhyan sandstones certainly are a formation of immense antiquity, perhaps pre-Silurian. They are azoic, or devoid of fossils; and it is consequently impossible to determine exactly their geological age, or 'horizon' (ibid. p. xxiii). The cappings of basalt, in some cases with laterite superimposed, suggest many difficult problems, which will be briefly discussed in the notes to Chapters 14 and 17.

CHAPTER 9

The Great Iconoclast--Troops routed by Hornets--The Rani of Garha-- Hornets' Nests in India.

On the 23rd,[1] we came on nine miles to Sangrampur, and, on the 24th, nine more to the valley of Jabera,[2] situated on the western extremity of the bed of a large lake, which is now covered by twenty- four villages. The waters were kept in by a large wall that united two hills about four miles south of Jabera. This wall was built of great cut freestone blocks from the two hills of the Vindhiya range, which it united. It was about half a mile long, one hundred feet broad at the base, and about one hundred feet high. The stones, though cut, were never, apparently, cemented; and the wall has long given way in the centre, through which now falls a small stream that pa.s.ses from east to west of what was once the bottom of the lake, and now is the site of so many industrious and happy little village communities.[3] The proprietor of the village of Jabera, in whose mango grove our tents were pitched, conducted me to the ruins of the wall; and told me that it had been broken down by the order of the Emperor Aurangzeb.[4] History to these people is all a fairy tale; and this emperor is the great destroyer of everything that the Muhammadans in their fanaticism have demolished of the Hindoo sculpture or architecture; and yet, singular as it may appear, they never mention his name with any feelings of indignation or hatred.