Northwestern India

“ Those of us who know Northern India have memories of many such a sojourn in the enchanted no-man's-land of a Punjâb river-bed, where the soil on which the tent is pitched one year may be deep stream the next, and the great solemn cranes stalk amongst the young green wheat, and the flocks of flamingoes show rosy-red in the sunrises. ”

“ From a political point of view the north-west frontier of India is also full of interest. After a century of conquest, with dominions now extending [Pg 219] 1,600 miles from Calcutta to Peshawur, we have at length arrived at a region which seems marked out by nature as the boundary of our Empire. The conditions of the north-west frontier no doubt involve difficult considerations, but it seems to me clear that, whilst guarding against incursions, our policy towards our somewhat turbulent neighbours should be one of forbearance and conciliation, combined in some cases with subsidies. ”

“ As the history of India under British occupation grew and expanded and the painting red process gradually developed, whilst men were ever reaching north-westward with their eyes set on these frontier hills, the countries which lay beyond came to be regarded as the "ultima thule" of Indian exploration, and Afghanistan and Baluchistan were reckoned in English as the hinterland of India, only to be reached by the efforts of English adventurers from the plains of the peninsula. ”

“ India is shut off from the rest of Asia on the north by a vast mountainous region, known in the aggregate as the Himalayas, amid which lie the independent states of Nepal and Bhutan, with the great table-land of Tibet behind. The native principality of Kashmir occupies the north-western angle of Boundaries. ”

“ No country in the Orient is of greater interest to the West today than is India. It is picturesque in its life, wonderful in its history, remarkable in its present conditions and fascinating in its promise for the future.
It is a land most worthy of study both for what it has been, for what it is and for what it is to become; as the arena for the greatest conflict upon which our Faith and Civilization have ever entered ”

“ It is necessary, once more, to remind the reader that the peninsula of India has an area and population roughly equal to the area and population of Europe without Russia. Everyone who has learnt geography at school is familiar with the great triangle, its base in the soaring Himalayan heights in the north, its apex jutting into the Indian Ocean, and marked by the satellite island of Ceylon. To the north, then, is the great mountain barrier, a tangled mass of snowy peaks, glaciers and snowfields, separating the sunny plains of India proper from the plateaux of Central Asia. ”

“ They are social, good-natured, straightforward {24} people. In the western Himalayas, there has been intermixture with Aryan invaders, as in the Kangra Valley and Nepāl, and the ruling dynasties claim Rājput origin, for the Indo-Aryans loved to settle in the cool hills, much as the Anglo-Indian does to this day. ”

“ During some centuries India, as a political region, was not delimitated on the north-western side as it is at present and numerous principalities rose and fell which included Indian territory as well as parts of Afghanistan. ”

“ The East is the full complement of the West. In life and thought we are only an hemisphere, and we need the East to fill up our full-orbed beauty. The mystic piety of India will correct our too practical, mundane view of things. The quiet, passive virtues which find their perfect realization in that land we must learn from them to accentuate in addition to the more aggressive and positive virtues of the West. ”

“ But on the memorable morning which we are met to celebrate, one bolt from the moral sky of Britain left these blood stained irons all scattered and broken throughout the West Indies, and the limbs they had bruised, out-stretched in praise and thanksgiving to God for deliverance. No man of any sensibility can read the account of that great transaction without emotions too great for utterance. There was something Godlike in this decree of the British nation. It was the spirit of the Son of God commanding the devil of slavery to go out of the British West Indies. ”

“ So much, at least, of geographical description must be given as a clue to the distribution of the peoples of India. {2} Along the Himalayas, growing stronger in numbers as we go eastwards, are races mostly of a Mongolian type, mingled with purely Indian elements. In the Panjāb and the United Provinces, sending offshoots southwards along the well-watered west coast, are the peoples in whom the traces of Aryan immigration are most visible. In Bengal we find a duskier race, provisionally termed Mongolo-Dravidian, but with a strong infusion, in the upper classes, of western blood. ”

“ It should also be remembered and made prominent in our consideration of this subject that the people of India are an Oriental people and are the children of the tropics and, as such, will always remain and must remain very different from us of the Northwest. ”

“ The third region, or the triangular table-land in the south, has a character quite distinct from either of the other two divisions, and a population which is now working out a separate development of its own. Broadly speaking, the Himalayas are peopled by Mongoloid tribes; the great river plains of Hindustan are still the home of the Aryan race; the triangular table-land has formed an arena for a long struggle between that gifted race from the north and what is known as the Dravidian stock in the south. ”

“ West India freedom, though more than twenty-one years old, is yet but an infant. And to predicate its future on its present weakness, awkwardness, and improvidence now, is about as wise as to apply the same rule to your little toothless children. It has taken at least a thousand years to bring some of the leading nations of the earth from the point where the negroes of the West Indies started twenty-three years ago, to their present position. ”

“ Only a few years ago, India, like other countries of the Orient, was a far Eastern problem. To-day, if rightly judged, it has already become a near Western issue. Except for the few scholars of oriental history and literature, who occupied themselves diligently in exploring the hidden treasures of Hindu civilization, the name of India was an unknown thing to the rest of the American world. For the average man and woman in the United States the affairs of that oriental country were too remote an issue for them to notice. ”

“ The ancient kingdoms of the south, although rich and populous, inhabited by Dravidian nations not inferior in culture to their Aryan rivals in the north, were ordinarily so secluded from the rest of the civilized world, including Northern India, that their affairs remained hidden from the eyes of other nations, and, native annalists being lacking, their history, previous to the year 1000 of the Christian era, has almost wholly perished. ”

“ I shall afterwards have occasion to show, that the various classes of Hindus, that is, of the natives of India, who have adopted the Brahmans for spiritual guides, have not in all periods composed a great proportion of the population, nor have even entered any part of the country as residents. At present, indeed, in most parts of the kingdom, except in Nepal itself, they, or converts to their doctrine, form a large proportion of the inhabitants; and the more recent the importation, I should expect the greater resemblance between the colonists and the inhabitants of the plains of India ”

“ The Himalayas not only form a double wall along the north of India, but at both their eastern and western extremities send out ranges to the south, which protect its north-eastern and north-western frontiers. On the north-east, those offshoots, under the name of the Naga and Patkoi mountains, &c., form a barrier between the civilized districts of Assam and the wild tribes of Upper Burma. On the opposite or north-western frontier of India, the mountainous offshoots run down the entire length of the British boundaries from the Himalayas to the sea. ”

“ India vexes one sadly because of the irrational, illogical turns of the Indian mind and character, the strange impasses in the Indian brain, the contradictions of traits; and, because of the many things he cannot account for or reach solution of, he quits the country baffled and in irritation—forever the great gulf yawning between the Occidental and the Asiatic. "East is East, and West is West." ”

“ As to these Aryan migrations, we do not know when a large body crossed the Himalaya Mountains, and settled on the banks of the Indus, but probably it was at least two thousand years before Christ. Northern India had great attractions to those hardy nomadic people, who found it so difficult to get a living during the long winters of their primeval home. India was a country of fruits and flowers, with an inexhaustible soil, favorable to all kinds of production, where but little manual labor was required,--a country abounding in every kind of animals, and every kind of birds ”

“ Eastern Africa was influenced, largely through the medium of Arab sea trade. Towards the north and northeast as far as Mongolia and Japan, India has been a dispenser of culture content and has taken little in return. Toward the southeast, Indian influence has been the largest component in the civilization of Indo-China and the East Indian archipelago, which as regards their higher attainments may be regarded as cultural dependencies or extensions of India. ”

“ It seems certain that in prehistoric times, when the geographical conditions of Western India were different from what they are now, Turanian peoples in tribal crowds must have made their way into India southwards from Western Asia, but they 527 drifted by routes that hugged the coast-line. ”

“ East Indians are those off springs of Christians of the East, and they atimes gather the offsprings of Eurasians to the entering their marriage to the East Indian females in the East Indian community, thereby they are called East Indians. ”

“ In considering the important and somewhat intricate subject of policy on the North-Western frontier of our Indian Empire it will be desirable, in the first place, to give a concise history of the events which have guided our action, and which for many years past have exercised a predominating influence in that part of our Eastern dominion. ”

“ In Western India, Kāṭhiāwār and all the portions of Gujarāt above Broach lie to the north of the Narbadā; but from the palaeographic point of view, if not so much from the historical, they belong essentially to Southern India. Our modern Central India lies entirely in Northern India, but has various palaeographic connexions with Southern India. Our Central Provinces extend in the Saugar district into Northern India ”

“ In the days of the early explorers, after the islands discovered by Columbus were called the West Indies, some people began to call the Indian continent the East Indies, to distinguish it; and some of the papers about India drawn up for the information of Parliament about Indian affairs still use this name, but it is not a familiar use to most people. ”

“ The Native States cannot, however, live wholly in water-tight compartments. They must be more or less directly affected by what goes on in British India just across their own often very artificial boundaries. Their material interests are too closely bound up with those of their British-Indian neighbours. In many matters, e.g. railways, posts, telegraphs, irrigation, etc., they are in a great measure dependent upon, and must fall into line with, British India. ”

“ To all offices, below that of the Governor of the Province, natives are eligible. As Judges of the High Court and as Members of the legislative bodies not a few Indians are found; as they are also in the Indian Civil Service which was so long exclusively filled by Anglo-Indians. It hardly appears how England can hold that great land to herself, as a member of her empire, with fewer of her own citizens than are now found at the helm. ”

“ India is made up of a multiplicity of races and tribes, professing every religion of paganism; and these are separated by thousands upon thousands of castes each going its own distinct and peculiar way. Great Britain's control of these teeming millions is unique in the history of oversea rule. India is almost exclusively agricultural, and in sections of Bengal averages 900 people to the square mile. ”

“ Who, for instance, has properly appraised and inwardly digested, until it remains as a living picture in the mind's eye for ever, that quaint thirty days' halt of the Macedonian legions on the western bank of the Indus, while on the eastern lay, ripe for plucking, the rich harvest of the fertile plains of India? ”

“ The first time I heard of Lâl was on a bright spring morning, one of those mornings when the plains of Northern India glitter with dew-drops; when a purple haze of cloud-mountain bounds the pale wheat-fields to the north, and a golden glow strikes skywards from the sand-hills in the south. I was in a tamarisk jungle on the banks of the Indus, engaged in the decorous record of all the thefts and restitutions made during the year by that most grasping and generous of rivers. ”

“ The whole of this region, and, indeed, the whole of Central and Northern Asia, has been the cradle of the people of India from the remotest antiquity. Hindus and Mohammedans are all immigrants from beyond the Indus. The Dravidian races, the pre-Aryan people, brought their devil worship and noisy orgies from Northern Asia into Hindustan. Eventually they were driven to Southern India by the Aryan people, who brought the Vedic gods and hymns, the sacred hôma and the ministration of Rishis, from Persia and Media into Northern India. ”

“ Indo-Germanic, a term at one time employed especially among German writers, synonymous with Aryan.
Indore, 1, a native principality (1,094) , in Central India, somewhat larger than Wales, embraces the Vindbya and Satpura Mountains, and is traversed by the Nerbudda River; there are great forests on the mountains; the valley of the river is fertile; wheat, sugar, cotton, tobacco, and large quantities of opium are raised; the climate is sultry, and at certain seasons unhealthy; the natives are chiefly Mahratta Hindus; among the hills are Bhils and Gonds, the wildest tribes of India ”