Rajputana

“ Even to-day every traveler in India thinks he has been set down in another world when he treads the ground of Rajputâna and sees around him in place of the weak effeminate servile inhabitants of other parts of the country powerful upright men, splendid warlike figures with blazing defiant eyes and long waving beards.
While Akbar valued the Rajputs very highly his own personality was entirely fitted to please these proud manly warriors. ”

“ Tradition, however, is probably wrong, and the princess was from Jaipur and a true Mussulwoman.
From every height—and particularly from the Panch Mahal's roof—one sees immense prospects and realises what a landmark the stronghold of Fatehpur-Sikri must have been to the dwellers in the plains; but no view is the equal of that which bursts on the astonished eyes at the great north gateway, where all Rajputana is at one's feet. ”

“ By the hidden forces that mould men's lives, he had been drawn to the land of heart's desire; and at home, neither his family nor his country seemed to have any particular need of him. Whether or no India had need of him, he assuredly had need of her. And it was the very strength of that feeling which had given him pause.
But now, at last, he knew beyond cavil that, for all his mind—or was it his conscience?—might haver and split straws, he had been drawn to Rajputana, as irresistibly as if that vast desert region were the moon and he a wavelet on the tidal shore. ”

“ In Rajputana you can still find much pure Hindu architecture. If you look at a Dharmashala, you will feel as if it calls you with open arms to take shelter within and partake of its unqualified hospitableness. If you look at a temple, you are sure to find a Divine Presence in and about it. If you look about a rural cottage, you will at once be able to comprehend the special meanings of its different portions, and that the whole structure bears evidence to the predominant nature and ideal of the owner thereof. ”

“ The common proverb in Rajputana is: "The intelligent woman begets the dull son, and the dull woman begets the sharp son". The fact is, whenever any state or kingdom in Rajputana has been managed by a woman, it has been managed wonderfully well. ”

“ I will not fight against them, for they are honest men for all their madness. If they cannot, then I am for Rajputana, not India—India may burn or rot or burst to pieces, so long as Rajputana stands! But—” He paused a moment, and looked at each man in turn, and tapped his sabre-hilt, “—if a Cunnigan-bahadur were among us—a man whom I could trust to lead me and mine and every man—I would lend him my sword for the sheer honor of helping him hack truth out of corruption! ”

“ India will listen to that song hours without end. It is a saga of Rajput chivalry, and men who know no chivalry nor ever were in Rajputana love to hear it better than the chink of money or the bray of the all-conquering gramophone. Since the white man first imposed himself on India there have not been half a dozen who have learned that lay by heart from end to end, not three who could have sung it, none but Ommony who could have skipped long, tedious parts so artfully and have introduced in place of them extempore allusions to modern politics and local news. ”

“ The greatest Rajput nobles are waiting to see whether Maharana Karan Singh of Udaipur will decide to openly support him. He's the leader of the ranas of Mewar, which is the name for the lands of Rajputana around Udaipur, and they're the highest in rank of all the Rajput chieftains of India. If Maharana Karan Singh agrees to support him with his own army, the other ranas of Mewar may follow, and after them perhaps all of Rajputana. ”

“ We must spread his name in Rajputana, Punjab, U.P., Madras, and such other provinces — yes, in Raiputana, where still there are people who can say, "Such has ever been the custom with Raghu's line that they keep their word even at the cost of life."
A bird, in the course of its flight, reaches a spot whence it looks on the ground below with supreme calmness, Have you reached that spot? He who has not reached there has no right to teach others. ”

“ Round the Midland, on three sides—west, south and east—lay a country inhabited, even in Vedic times, by other Indo-Aryan tribes. This tract included the modern Punjab, Sind, Gujarat, Rajputana with the country to its east, Oudh and Behar. Rajputana belongs geographically to the Midland, but it was a late conquest, and for our present purposes may be considered as belonging to the Outer Band. The various Indo-Aryan dialects spoken over this band were all more closely related to each other than was any of them to the language of the Midland. ”

“ He was more struck with the beauty of Râjputana than with the virtue of exterminating the idolaters who lived there. A country where there was abundance of running water, small pretty lakes, where little spots of rising ground afforded beautiful sites for houses, and where the houses in existence were beautiful and capacious, of hewn stone wrought with great skill and labour, was not a country to devastate. So he came back again, to work on annexation with the pen instead of by the sword, and to receive three more paternal aunts who came crowding to claim his boundless hospitality. ”

“ It is commonly supposed that, because nearly the whole country is ruled by Rajputs, therefore the population consists mainly of Rajput tribes; but these are merely the dominant race, and the territory is called Rajputana because it is politically possessed by Rajputs. The whole number of this race is 620,229, and nowhere do they form a majority of the whole population in a state; but they are Strongest, numerically, in the northern states and in Udaipur. ”

“ The princes of Rajputana had been engaged in wars and feuds amongst themselves from a remote antiquity, but for nearly a century they had been also exposed to the raids and depredations of Mahratta armies. Lord Wellesley had brought the Rajput princes into subsidiary alliance with the British government, but the treaties had been annulled by Sir George Barlow, and war and pillage were as rampant as ever. The evil had been aggravated by the rise of Afghan adventurers, who had conquered territories and founded new kingdoms in central India amidst the prevailing anarchy ”

“ All the heraldry of Rajputana is curious and,{210} for such as hold that there is any worth in the “Royal Science,” interesting. Udaipur’s shield is, naturally gules, a sun in splendor, as befits the “children of the sun and fire,” and one of the most ancient houses in India. Her crest is the straight Rajput sword, the khanda; for an account of the worship of which very powerful divinity read Tod. The supporters are a Bhil and a Rajput, attired for the forlorn-hope ”

“ Linguistic evidence supports tradition in proving that their unity was broken up by the Mahommedan conquest, for the inhabitants of the Himalayan valleys still speak a language akin to those of Rajputana proper, though separated from them by the wide Gangetic valley.
The Rajputs are fine, brave men, and retain the feudal instinct strongly developed. Pride of blood is their chief characteristic, and they are most punctilious on all points of etiquette. ”

“ To meet it, many noble efforts are being made in various parts of India by the more enlightened of the natives themselves. The nobles of Rajputana have formed themselves into a league to put a stop to child marriages, and in other places strenuous efforts are being made to induce men of good character and position to come forward and marry child widows, and to encourage their remarriage by every possible means. ”

“ He also praised the Diwan. We discussed most of the political and social problems of India, and he takes rather an optimistic view of things from his experience being almost entirely of Rajputana. But he admitted that in other parts there was a very dangerous ill-feeling between the English and the natives, though he said they would never rebel again after the lesson of the Mutiny. I disagree with him here. On the whole an honest good fellow who does his duty and seems to be liked by all. ”

“ This country is called the Rajputana--pronounced Raashpootana--and is composed of the most interesting of all the native states of India, twenty in number, with an area of 150,000 square miles and a population of more than 12,000,000. They are the only part of the empire where ancient political institutions and dynasties survive, and their preservation is due to the protection of the British authorities. Each prince is the hereditary chief of a military clan, the members of which are all descended from a common ancestor, and for centuries have been the lords of the soil. ”

“ The same living architectural art is practised all over Rajputana at the present day. The preference we show for the incomparably inferior art of the mongrel eclectic styles we have imported into India, is only a proof that there is something wanting in the superior civilization and culture which we believe ourselves to possess.
There is also at Govardhan a very fine Hindu temple, dating from the time of Akbar. ”

“ Alwar was the first native state to accept a currency struck at the Calcutta mint, of the same weight and assay as the imperial rupee, with the head of the British sovereign on the obverse. Imperial service troops are maintained, consisting of both cavalry and infantry, with transport. The state is traversed by the Delhi branch of the Rajputana railway. A settlement of the land revenue has been carried out by an English civilian. ”

“ The Maharana of Udaipur, speaking with the authority of his unique position amongst Hindus as the premier Prince of Rajputana, not only condemns an agitation "which is detrimental to all good government and social administration," but declares it to be "a great disgrace to their name as also to their religious beliefs that, in spite of the great prosperity India has enjoyed under the British régime, people are acting in such an ungrateful way." ”

“ They are of one race, and claim to be the issue of a Rajput king--Prithi Raj, I believe--by a Meena woman,--a mythical ancestry suggested no doubt by Brahmans in order to raise their social standing among other Hindus. They are really the descendants of the aboriginal tribes of Rajputana, but in course of time, through intercourse with Rajput Thakurs as servants, cultivators, and irregular levies, they have imbibed a certain amount of Rajput blood. They are a democratic crowd, and have never owed allegiance to the princes of Rajasthan. ”

“ Such Durbars were the centres of culture in every country and not merely in ours. In the present day, the western parts of India, especially Rajputana, are much better off in this respect than Bengal, as something similar to these old Durbars still obtains there. ”

“ The Jains as a sect are hardly now known in Rajputana, and their temples are consequently neglected and falling into decay; though some of them, being of the best age and unrestored, are of extreme interest to the investigator of Indian art.
Among these, few are more pleasing than the little temple at Amwah, near Ajunta (Woodcut No. 141) . It is only a fragment. The sanctuary with its spire are gone, only the portico remaining; and its roof externally is so ruined, that its design can with difficulty be made out. ”

“ He commanded the escort attached to the resident with Sindia from 1812 to 1817. In the latter year he was in charge of the Intelligence Department which largely contributed to break up the confederacy of Maratha chiefs in the Pindari War, and was of great assistance in the campaign in Rajputana. In 1818 he was appointed political agent for the states of western Rajputana, where he conciliated the chieftains, settled their mutual feuds and collected materials for his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (2 vols., 1829–1832) . ”

“ In Rajputana generally, the Political swears by the Hindu, and holds that the Mahomedan is untrustworthy. But a man who will eat with you and take your tobacco, sinking the fiction that it has been doctored with shrab, cannot be very bad after all.
That night when the tales were all told and the guard, bless them, were snoring peaceably in the starlight, a man came stealthily into the enclosure of kanats and woke the Englishman by muttering Sahib, Sahib in his ear. ”

“ You hear a great deal about the astuteness of the Russians and the yellow races, and a Greek or Turk can lie with a fairly straight face when he sees a profit in deception, but none of them is to be classed with these people. If we English ever decide to let India rule herself, her diplomatic corps will be recruited exclusively from the flower of Rajputana's chivalry."
"I'll back Salig Singh against the field," said Raikes grimly; "he'll be dean of the corps, when that time comes. He'd rather conspire than fight, and the Rajputs—of course you know—are a warrior caste. ”

“ Herewith I forward to you a letter from one of our ruling princes of Rajputana, His Highness the Maharaja of Khetri, and another from the opium commissioner, late minister of Junagad, one of the largest states in India, and a man who is called the Gladstone of India. These I hope would convince you of my being no fraud.
One thing I forgot to tell you. I never identified myself anyway with Mr. Mazoomdar's party chief. (Evidently, Keshab Chandra Sen.) If he says so, he does not speak the truth. ”