XVI
INTRODUCTION.
own made the old fort an anachronism but though rich Hindus may occasionally indulge in a more ambitious architecture, they
still as a body prefer the walls of fresh mud, cooled in the hot weather by a constant evaporation, which sheltered their forefathers from the sun, and the gaudy and ill-contrived mansion, which has been constructed for the admiration of visitors, is supplied with out-houses of the older fashion where the owner can
own tastes in life. The houses of the small zemindars and
consult his
richer inhabitants of the village are almost always of mud, and consist of two or three courtyards, surrounded with dark rooms, unlighted except by the doorway, and with a broad thatched verandah running along the wall in which the principal entrance is made. In this verandah carts are kept, cattle stalled, and sojourning friends or faqirs entertained. The inner courts are occupied by the women, and contain the hearths round which the undivided family colHollow pillars of mud lects naked to the waist for their meals. and wattle support the roof, which is commonly of thatch, and preserve the store of grain. The poorer cultivators are fortunate if they can take in one small yard, and build against the south wall of the low enclosure one or more diminutive sleeping-rooms ; the majority have to be contented with tiny hovels of mud, or sometimes merely screens of twigs and leaves. By the census only 6,542,870 (or 58 per cent, of the whole population) is returned as agricultural, but this is an obvious under-statement, and due to the fact that nearly all the castes with special occupations supplement their trade by the tillage of a few fields. The 232,000 persons who are returned as engaged in the ennobling duty of defending their country will, as a rule, be found to be members of cultivating families who are employed by the landlords in realizing rents from their own class ; the 407,000 manufacturers of textile fabrics and dress are probably so only in virtue of the name of their caste in reality they are either mere serfs or day-labourers engaged on the soil, and at the most eke out a livelihood depending mainly on that source by the sale of coarse cottons woven by themselves or their women in their spare hours and when the ground has rest. And similar criticism is applicable to most of the other elaborate divisions made by the report. Ninety-two per cent, of the population is rural as opposed to urban, and a conjecture which makes 72 per cent, of the whole employed in agriculture has probable grounds and can hardly err on the side of exaggeration. The majority of the million and a half of labourers should certainly be reckoned as agriculturists.
