CHAPTER 58. Declining Fertility of the Soil--Popular Notion of the Cause.

Declining Fertility of the Soil--Popular Notion of the Cause.

On the 18th we came on ten miles to Sâhar, over a plain of poor soil, carelessly cultivated, and without either manure or irrigation. Major Godby left us at Govardhan to return to Agra. He would have gone on with us to Delhi; but having the command of his regiment, and being a zealous officer, he did not like to leave it so long during the exercising season. We felt much the loss of his society. He is a man of great observation and practical good sense; has an infinite fund of good humour, and a cheerfulness of temperament that never seems to flag--a more agreeable companion I have never met. The villages in these parts are literally crowded with peafowl. I counted no less than forty-six feeding close by among the houses of one hamlet on the road, all wild, or rather unappropriated, for they seemed on the best possible terms with the inhabitants. At Sâhar our water was drawn from wells eighty feet deep, and this is said to be the ordinary depth from which water is drawn; consequently irrigation is too expensive to be common. It is confined almost exclusively to small patches of garden cultivation in the vicinity of villages.

On the 14th we came on sixteen miles to Kosî, for the most part over a poor soil badly cultivated, and almost exclusively devoted to autumn crops, of which cotton is the principal. I lost the road in the morning before daylight, and the trooper, who usually rode with me, had not come up. I got an old landholder from one of the villages to walk on with me a mile, and put me in the right road. I asked him what had been the state of the country under the former government of the Jâts and Marâthâs, and was told that the greater part was a wild jungle. 'I remember,' said the old man, 'when you could not have got out of the road hereabouts without a good deal of risk. I could not have ventured a hundred yards from the village without the chance of having my clothes stripped off my back. Now the whole face of the country is under cultivation, and the roads are safe; formerly the governments kept no faith with their landholders and cultivators, exacting ten rupees where they had bargained for five, whenever they found the crops good; but, in spite of all this "zulm"' (oppression), said the old man, 'there was then more "barkat" (blessings from above) than now. The lands yielded more returns to the cultivator, and he could maintain his little family better upon five acres than he can now upon ten.'

'To what, my old friend, do you attribute this very unfavourable change in the productive powers of your soil?'

'A man cannot, sir, venture to tell the truth at all times, and in all places,' said he.

'You may tell it now with safety, my good old friend; I am a mere traveller ("musafir") going to the hills in search of health, from the valley of the Nerbudda, where the people have been suffering much from blight, and are much perplexed in their endeavour to find a cause.'

'Here, sir, we all attribute these evils to the dreadful System of perjury, which the practices of your judicial courts have brought among the people. You are perpetually putting the Ganges water into the hands of the Hindoos, and the Korân into those of Muhammadans; and all kinds of lies are every day told upon them. God Almighty can stand this no longer; and the lands have ceased to be blessed with that fertility which they had before this sad practice began. This, sir, is almost the only fault we have, any of us, to find with your government; men, by this System of perjury, are able to cheat each other out of their rights, and bring down sterility upon the land, by which the innocent are made to suffer for the guilty.'

On reaching our tents, I asked a respectable farmer, who came to pay his respects to the Commissioner of the division, Mr. Fraser, what he thought of the matter, telling him what I had heard from my old friend on the road. 'The diminished fertility is,' said he, 'owing no doubt to the want of those salutary fallows which the fields got under former governments, when invasions and civil wars were things of common occurrence, and kept at least two-thirds of the land waste; but there is, on the other hand, no doubt that you have encouraged perjury a good deal in your courts of justice; and this perjury must have some effect in depriving the land of the blessing of God. Every man now, who has a cause in your civil courts, seems to think it necessary either to swear falsely himself, or to get others to do it for him. The European gentlemen, no doubt, do all they can to secure every man his right, but, surrounded as they are by perjured witnesses, and corrupt native officers, they commonly labour in the dark.'

Much of truth is to be found among the village communities of India, where they have been carefully maintained, if people will go among them to seek it. Here, as almost everywhere else, truth is the result of self-government, whether arising from choice, under municipal institutions, or necessity, under despotism and anarchy; self- government produces self-esteem and pride of character.

Close to our tents we found the people at work, irrigating their fields from several wells, whose waters were all brackish. The crops watered from these wells were admirable--likely to yield at least fifteen returns of the seed. Wherever we go, we find the signs of a great government passed away--signs that must tend to keep alive the recollections, and exalt the ideas of it in the minds of the people. Beyond the boundary of our military and civil stations we find as yet few indications of our reign or character, to link us with the affections of the people. There is hardly anything to indicate our existence as a people or a government in this country; and it is melancholy to think that in the wide extent of country over which I have travelled there should be so few signs of that superiority in science and arts which we boast of, and really do possess, and ought to make conducive to the welfare and happiness of the people in every part of our dominions. The people and the face of the country are just what they might have been had they been governed by police officers and tax-gatherers from the Sandwich Islands, capable of securing life, property, and character, and levying honestly the means of maintaining the establishments requisite for the purpose. Some time after the journey here described, in the early part of November, after a heavy fall of rain, I was driving alone in my buggy from Garhmuktesar on the Ganges to Meerut. The roads were very bad, the stage a double one, and my horse became tired, and unable to go on. I got out at a small village to give him a little rest and food; and sat down, under the shade of one old tree, upon the trunk of another that the storm had blown down, while my groom, the only servant I had with me, rubbed down and baited my horse. I called for some parched gram from the same shop which supplied my horse, and got a draught of good water, drawn from the well by an old woman in a brass jug lent to me for the purpose by the shopkeeper.

While I sat contentedly and happily stripping my parched gram of its shell, and eating it grain by grain, the farmer, or head landholder of the village, a sturdy old Râjpût, came up and sat himself, without any ceremony, down by my side, to have a little conversation. To one of the dignitaries of the land, in whose presence the aristocracy are alone entitled to chairs, this easy familiarity on the part of a poor farmer seems at first somewhat strange and unaccountable; he is afraid that the man intends to offer him some indignity, or, what is still worse, mistakes him for something less than the dignitary. The following dialogue took place.

'You are a Râjpût, and a "zamîndâr"?' (landholder).

'Yes; I am the head landholder of this village.'

'Can you tell me how that village in the distance is elevated above the ground? Is it from the debris of old villages, or from a rock underneath?'

'It is from the debris of old villages. That is the original seat of all the Râjpûts around; we all trace our descent from the founders of that village who built and peopled it many centuries ago.'

'And you have gone on subdividing your inheritances here, as elsewhere, no doubt, till you have hardly any of you anything to eat?'

'True, we have hardy any of us enough to eat; but that is the fault of the Government, that does not leave us enough, that takes from us as much when the season is bad as when it is good.'

'But your assessment has not been increased, has it?' 'No, we have concluded a settlement for twenty years upon the same footing as formerly.'

'And if the sky were to shower down upon you pearls and diamonds, instead of water, the Government would never demand more from you than the rate fixed upon?'

'No.'

'Then why should you expect remissions in the bad seasons?'

'It cannot be disputed that the "barkat" (blessing from above) is less under you than it used to be formerly, and that the lands yield less to our labour.'

'True, my old friend, but do you know the reason why?'

'No.'

'Then I will tell you. Forty or fifty years ago, in what you call the times of the "barkat" (blessing from above), the cavalry of Sikh freebooters from the Panjâb used to sweep over this fine plain, in which stands the said village from which you are all descended; and to massacre the whole population of some villages, and a certain portion of that of every other village; and the lands of those killed used to be waste for want of cultivators. Is not this all true?'

'Yes, quite true.'

'And the fine groves which had been planted over the plain by your ancestors, as they separated from the great parent stock, and formed independent villages and hamlets for themselves, were all swept away and destroyed by the same hordes of freebooters, from whom your poor imbecile emperors, cooped up in yonder large city of Delhi, were utterly unable to defend you?'

'Quite true,' said the old man with a sigh. 'I remember when all this fine plain was as thickly studded with fine groves of mango-trees as Rohilkhand, or any other part of India.'

'You know that the land requires rest from labour, as well as men and bullocks, and that, if you go on sowing wheat and other exhausting crops, it will go on yielding less and less returns, and at last not be worth the tilling?'

'Quite well.'

'Then why do you not give the land rest by leaving it longer fallow, or by a more frequent alternation of crops relieve it?'

'Because we have now increased so much that we should not get enough to eat were we to leave it to fallow; and unless we tilled it with exhausting crops we should not get the means of paying our rents to the Government.'

'The Sikh hordes in former days prevented this; they killed off a certain portion of your families, and gave the land the rest which you now refuse it. When you had exhausted one part, you found another recovered by a long fallow, so that you had better returns; but now that we neither kill you, nor suffer you to be killed by others, you have brought all the cultivable lands into tillage; and under the old System of cropping to exhaustion, it is not surprising that they yield you less returns.'

By this time we had a crowd of people seated around us upon the ground, as I went on munching my parched gram, and talking to the old patriarch.

They all laughed at the old man at the conclusion of my last speech, and he confessed I was right.

'This is all true, sir, but still your Government is not considerate; it goes on taking kingdom after kingdom, and adding to its dominions without diminishing the burden upon us, its old subjects. Here you have had armies away taking Afghanistan, but we shall not have one rupee the less to pay.'

'True, my friend, nor would you demand a rupee less from those honest cultivators around us, if we were to leave you all your lands untaxed. You complain of the Government--they complain of you.' (Here the circle around us laughed at the old man again.) 'Nor would you subdivide the lands the less for having it rent-free; on the contrary, it would be every generation subdivided the more, inasmuch as there would be more of local ties, and a greater disinclination of families to separate and seek service abroad.'

'True, sir, very true--that is, no doubt, a very great evil.'

'And you know it is not an evil produced by us, but one arising out of your own laws of inheritance. You have heard, no doubt, that with us the eldest son gets the whole of the land, and the younger sons all go out in search of service, with such share as they can get of the other property of their father?'

'Yes, sir; but when shall we get service?--you have none to give us. I would serve to-morrow if you would take me as a soldier,' said he, stroking his white whiskers.

The crowd laughed heartily; and some wag observed that I should perhaps think him too old.

'Well,' said the old man, smiling, 'the gentleman himself is not very young, and yet I dare say he is a good servant of his Government.'

This was paying me off for making the people laugh at his expense.

'True, my old friend,' said I, 'but I began to serve when I was young, and have been long learning.'

'Very well,' said the old man, 'but I should be glad to serve the rest of my life upon a less salary than you got when you began to learn.'

'Well, my friend, you complain of our Government; but you must acknowledge that we do all we can to protect you, though it is true that we are often acting in the dark.'

'Often, sir? you are always acting in the dark; you, hardly any of you, know anything of what your revenue and police officers are doing; there is no justice or redress to be got without paying for it, and it is not often that those who pay can get it.'

'True, my old friend, that is bad all over the world. You cannot presume to ask anything even from the Deity Himself, without paying the priest who officiates in His temples; and if you should, you would none of you hope to get from your Deity what you asked for.'

Here the crowd laughed again, and one of them said that 'there was this certainly to be said for our Government, that the European gentlemen themselves never took bribes, whatever those under them might do'.

'You must not be too sure of that, neither. Did not the Lâl Bîbî, the Red Lady, get a bribe for soliciting the judge, her husband, to let go Amîr Singh, who had been confined in jail?'

'How did this take place?'

'About three years ago Amîr Singh was sentenced to imprisonment, and his friends spent a great deal of money in bribes to the native officers of the court, but all in vain. At last they were recommended to give a handsome present to the Red Lady. They did so, and Amîr Singh was released.'

'But did they give the present into the lady's own hand?'

'No, they gave it to one of her women.'

'And how do you know that she ever gave it to her mistress, or that her mistress ever heard of the transaction?'

'She might certainly have been acting without her mistress' knowledge; but the popular belief is that the Lâl Bîbî got the present.'

I then told the story of the affair at Jubbulpore, when Mrs. Smith's name had been used for a similar purpose, and the people around us were all highly amused; and the old man's opinion of the transaction with the Red Lady evidently underwent a change.

We became good friends, and the old man begged me to have my tents, which he supposed were coming up, pitched among them, that he might have an opportunity of showing that he was not a bad subject, though he grumbled against the Government.

The next day at Meerut I got a visit from the chief native judge, whose son, a talented youth, is in my office. Among other things, I asked him whether it might not be possible to improve the character of the police by increasing the salaries of the officers, and mentioned my conversation with the landholder.

'Never, sir,' said the old gentleman; 'the man that now gets twenty- five rupees a month is contented with making perhaps fifty or seventy-five more; and the people subject to his authority pay him accordingly. Give him a hundred, sir, and he will put a shawl over his shoulders, and the poor people will be obliged to pay him at a rate that will make up his income to four hundred. You will only alter his style of living, and make him a greater burthen to the people. He will always take as long as he thinks he can with impunity.'

'But do you not think that when people see a man adequately paid by the Government they will the more readily complain of any attempt at unauthorized exactions?'

'Not a bit, sir, as long as they see the same difficulties in the way of prosecuting him to conviction. In the administration of civil justice' (the old gentleman is a civil judge), 'you may occasionally see your way, and understand what is doing; but in revenue and police you never have seen it in India, and never will, I think. The officers you employ will all add to their incomes by unauthorized means; and the lower these incomes, the less their pretensions, and the less the populace have to pay.'

Notes:

1. January, 1836.

2. The old Anglo-Indian rose much earlier than his successor of the present day commonly does.

3. For other popular explanations of the alleged decrease in fertility of the soil, see ante, Chapter 27, where three explanations are offered, namely, the eating of beef, the prevalence of adultery, and the impiety of surveys.

4. The inapplicability of these observations of the author to the present time is a good measure of the material progress of India since his day. The Ganges Canal, the bridges over the Indus, Ganges, and other great rivers, and numberless engineering works throughout the empire, are permanent witnesses to the scientific superiority of the ruling race. Buildings which can claim any high degree of architectural excellence are, unfortunately, still rare, but the public edifices of Bombay will not suffer by comparison with those of most capital cities, and for some years past, considerable attention has been paid to architecture as an art. A great architectural experiment is in progress at the new official capital of Delhi (1914).

5. The road is now an excellent one.

6. Parched gram, or chick-pea, is commonly used by Indian travellers as a convenient and readily portable form of food. The 'brass jug' lent to the author could be purified by fire after his use of it.

7. Growls of this kind must not be interpreted too literally. Any village landholder, if encouraged, would grumble in the same strain.

8. This is the permanent difficulty of Indian revenue administration, which no Government measures can seriously diminish.

9. The mission to Kabul, under Captain Alexander Burnes, was not dispatched till September, 1837, and troops did not assemble before the conclusion of the treaty with the Sikhs in June, 1838. The army crossed the Indus in January, 1839. The conversation in the text is stated to have taken place 'some time after the journey herein described', and must, apparently, be dated in November, 1839. The author was in the North-Western Provinces in that year.

10. Some of Mrs. Smith's suitors entered into a combination to defraud a suitor in his court of a large sum of money, which he was to pay to Mrs. Smith as she walked in the garden. A dancing girl from the town of Jubbulpore was made to represent Mrs. Smith, and a suit of Mrs. Smith's clothes was borrowed for her from the washerman. The butler took the suitor to the garden, and introduced him to the supposed Mrs. Smith, who received him very graciously, and condescended to accept his offer of five thousand rupees in gold mohurs. The plot was afterwards discovered, and the old butler, washerman, and all, were sentenced to work in a rope on the roads. [W. H. S.]

Penal labour on the roads has been discontinued long since. Similar plots probably have often escaped detection. The whole conversation is a valuable illustration of Indian habits and modes of thought.

11. The subject of the police administration is more fully discussed post, in Chapter 69.