Life in India/To Seringapatam
To Seringapatam.
The conveyance which carried us from Bangalore to Seringapatam, and thence to the mountains, bore the somewhat ironical appellation of a “shigram-po,” or “quick-go;" for, to our sorrow, we found it a most painfully slow-go, and, at times, a no-go. It was a square, two-wheeled affair, with a raised floor on which we laid our mattrass, and under which we packed our boxes, provisions, and cooking utensils, and was drawn by two bullocks. The Indian bullocks are commonly pure white, with horns rising directly above their foreheads, and curving gracefully backwards. The hump between the shoulders, and the long dew-lap hanging half-way to the ground, with the peculiar curve of the horns, make them look very unlike our American cattle. When well kept and trained, they are beautiful creatures, quick, and perfectly obedient to the driver, who guides them by a small cord attached to one horn of each animal. We, however, found the posted bullocks furnished us completely worn out by over-work; often at the commencement of their stage, instead of being fresh, they were quite exhausted, and could only be made to draw the carriage by cruel goadings and blows. To eat beef is esteemed a horrible crime by the Hindus; but to kill the poor creatures by hard work does not trouble their consciences, if it put rupees into their purses.
The road westward from Bangalore to Seringapatam runs through a hilly country, whose hill-sides and rolling valleys are well cultivated, and yield fine crops of rice and other grains to the cultivators. It is rendered solitary and deserted in appearance by the absence of the farm-houses, which meet the eye of the traveller in Western lands, enlivening the way at every turn with their clumps of shade-trees, barns, and grazing cattle. Here men live, not each on his own land, but clustered in villages, from which in the morning they issue forth to their labour, returning at evening like bees to their hive. Thus you may travel for miles through a populous country, and not see a house or any sign of life, except the little elevated lodge for the watchman at the time of the ripening of the crops. It is to these solitary sheds in the midst of the fields that Isaiah refers when, describing the desolateness of his people, he says, “The daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in the garden of cucumbers."
It is a most remarkable fact, that while other countries have the whole face of society changed by conquest and subjection to rulers from foreign lands, India—though swept over by successive hordes of invaders, though plundered and divided among contending despots, though transferred from hand to hand, as each dynasty was crushed by one more powerful than itself—has, to a great extent, remained unchanged. India now is, in its habits, feelings, and pursuits, very much what it was three thousand years ago. The Hindu of the nineteenth century lives and labours, plants, ploughs, weaves, and reaps as did his fathers at the Christian era, when savages roved and chased the deer in the woods of ancient Britain.
This fact is to be attributed more perhaps to the organization of the village government of India than to any other circumstance. Each town, with the adjacent lands, is, to a great extent, an independent community, having its own rulers, its own agriculturalists, its own police, and its own artisans. Though subject to the general government, its affairs are managed within itself. The land is divided and recorded against its farmers, with its quality and extent, and the revenue is collected village by village. It matters little, therefore, to the Hindu peasant who is his master, so long as he is undisturbed in the enjoyment of his hereditary home. To him it is of small moment whether his rent be paid to “Hyder" or to "the Company," to a nabob or a collector. Districts have been depopulated, and provinces made a desert, by the monsters who have soaked India with human gore, and fattened her soil with human flesh; but, until thus depopulated, her villages remain the same.
Cruel as were the despots Hyder and Tippoo, who ruled the territory through which we were now passing, they had the sagacity to know that it was only in the prosperity of their subjects that they could prosper; and the Mysore territories were, on the whole, well governed. War, however, cannot be waged except at the expense of the blood, treasure, and happiness of the people. On our way, while we passed through thriving towns with their shop-lined streets, and saw old forts, unneeded for defence, crumbling to a happy decay, we also traversed lonely and melancholy wastes, where the Musaljee brandished his torch, and joined his cries to those of the bandy-driver, to fright from our path the tigers who roam in these deserted lands. These fearful beasts are not so much dreaded in the dense jungle as in the waste places near to human dwellings. There the denizens of the forest furnish him his food; but here, tempted by hunger to attack man, he ceases to dread him, and prowls about his path and house, ready for the deadly spring upon his victim. Many a poor boy has been borne away in the jaws of the tiger while tending his cattle; and many a villager trembles and starts with hair on end at the thought of the "man-eater" as he returns at dusk from his work, or stoops to draw water from the stream. The successful tiger-hunt of the English officer, while it gives most exciting amusement to the sportsman, takes from the minds of the poor villagers an ever-present and oppressive terror.
Noon of the following day found us looking down from the brow of a hill upon Seringapatam, the far-famed citadel and metropolis of Hyder Ali and his son. Seated upon an island formed by the division of the stream of the Cavery, in the midst of a fertile plain watered by canals leading from the river to its many fields, it realizes to the traveller his idea of an oriental city. The plantations of bright green sugar-cane are checkered by patches of brown grain and stubble-fields, and give an air of peace and plenty; while to the student of Indian history the hills and plains suggest thoughts of armed hosts, European and Mohammedan, meeting in bloody battle; of marauding bands of Mahratta horsemen; of victory and defeat, with all their sad train of horrors.
In the year 1791, after the capture of Bangalore, Lord Cornwallis advanced upon Seringapatam, and having captured the formidable hill-forts between the two cities, attacked Tippoo by night, and defeated him with great loss. Compelled to retire within his stronghold, and threatened by an immense array of English and Hindu troops, the proud sultan saw the uselessness of resistance, and made peace, with the surrender of one-half of his territories.
But this bloodthirsty prince, who is reported to have said that he would "rather live two days as a tiger than a hundred days as a sheep," could not remain quiet while English power was absorbing India. War was recommenced, and in May, 1799, an English army again looked down from the heights on which we stood on the water-girt fortress of Seringapatam. The city was besieged, its walls were breached, and, led on by General Baird, who had himself been a prisoner within the dungeons of the "city of Sri-Runga," the English and allied Hindu troops carried the place by storm. Tippoo, sallying out, with hereditary valour, to meet the victors, fell pierced by two musketballs. An English soldier seized the swordbelt, glittering with jewels, which surrounded the sultan's waist; but the prince's sword was still grasped in his stiffening hand, and with it he wounded the plunderer. The enraged soldier, not knowing his enemy, shot him through the head, and Tippoo was no more. Thus a dynasty set, as it rose, in blood; and thus was the saying of our Lord fulfilled: "He that taketh the sword shall be slain by the sword."
Seringapatam, no longer a metropolis, and scourged by fevers, is going to decay. Its ramparts are in ruins, and its cannon have been tumbled into the moat. The stranger, dreading the miasma which floats in its atmosphere, rarely spends a night within its walls. He stops to gaze at the magnificent tombs of Hyder and his son, in the beautiful Lal Bagh, (red garden,) and mourn that man should thus live and thus die.
The name of Tippoo is synonymous with "tiger," both in the memories of Christian and heathen men. Being a bigoted Mohammedan, he not only hated the English as enemies, but also the native Roman Catholic and Syrian Christians as infidels, and the Brahmins as idolaters. In Calicut, he hung up mothers with their children suspended from their necks, and tied men to the feet of elephants, to be torn limb from limb. Hindus were forced to embrace Mohammedanism to save their lives, and Brahmins were made to break their caste by eating beef. Once seeing a Brahmin pass, he called him to him, and asked, "Where will you go, if you die?" "To Weicounta," (the heaven of Vishnu,) said the Brahmin. "Then send him there," said the tyrant; and fastening rockets to his body, they blew him into the air.
It will not be wondered at that the change of sovereignty from his hands to those of England, has caused little regret among his Hindu subjects, though the Mohammedans mourn that the sceptre has passed from their hands.