CHAPTER X
IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT IS ONLY TOO HAPPY TO GET OFF WITH THE LOSS OF HIS SHOES
No one is ignorant of the fact that India, the great reversed triangle whose base is to the north and its apex to the south, comprises a superficial area of fourteen hundred thousand square miles, over which is unequally scattered a population of one hundred and eighty millions of inhabitants. The British government exercises a real dominion over a certain portion of this vast country. It maintains a Governor-General at Calcutta, Governors at Madras, Bombay, and Bengal, and a Lieutenant-Governor at Agra.
But English India, properly so-called, counts only a superficial area of seven hundred thousand square miles, and a population of one hundred to one hundred and ten millions of inhabitants. It is sufficient to say that a promiment part of the territory is still free from the authority of the Queen; and, indeed, with some of the rajahs of the interior, fierce and terrible, Hindoo independence is still absolute. Since 1756—the period at which was founded the first English establishment on the spot to-day occupied by the city of Madras—until the year in which broke out the great Sepoy insurrection, the celebrated East India Company was all-powerful. It annexed little by little the various provinces, bought from the rajahs at the price of annual rents, which it paid in part or not at all; it named its Governor-General and all its civil or military employes; but now it no longer exists, and the English possessions in India are directly under the Crown. Thus the aspect, the manners, and the distinctions of race of the peninsula are being changed every day. Formerly they traveled by all the old means of conveyance, on foot, on horseback, in carts, in small vehicles drawn by men, in palanquins, on men's backs, in coaches, etc. Now, steamboats traverse with great rapidity the Indus and the Ganges, and a railway crossing the entire breadth of India, and branching in various directions, puts Bombay at only three days from Calcutta.
The route of this railway does not follow a straight line across India. The air line distance is only one thousand to eleven hundred miles, and trains, going at only an average rapidity, would not take three days to make it; but this distance is increased at least one-third by the arc described
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