Upper India

“ Roughly speaking, India has fourteen and a half times the area of the British Isles. Of most of this country we have next to no history at all, and in the time which is now under consideration we have to deal only with the Punjâb, the "Land of the Five Rivers," the area of which about equals that of Great Britain. That such lack of information should exist is not wonderful, since, for all we know, this upper portion of India may then have been on the shores of a still-receding sea ”

“ Are we to treat the monotonous singing voice which even now echoes out over the length and breadth of India, as in the sunsetting some Brahman recites the ancient hymns--are we to treat this as the first trace of Ancient India? Or, as we sit listening, are we to watch the distant horizon, so purple against the gold of the sky, and wonder if it is only our own unseeing eyes which prevent our tracing the low curve that may mark the site of a town, ancient when the Aryans swept it into nothingness? ”

“ Again, these facts which, in point of truth, are incontrovertible and, in point of time, cover no less than fifty-five centuries of its history, prove that, historically, India is and ever has been in all but name a "continent ". ”

“ But what of the roads on which the Doctor never passes? From Vellore's fortress-crowned hills they stretch north and south, east and west, and toward all the intermediate points of the compass. Every city of India forms such a nucleus for the country around. Amid the wheat fields of the Punjab, under the tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and bamboo clusters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and the roads. ”

“ The country is an infinite green and brown chess-board of young corn and fallow, dead flat on every side, ugly with the complacent plainness of all rich country. Beyond the sheeny ribbon of the Jumna, north, south, east, and west, you can see only land, and land, and land—a million acres with nothing on them to see except the wealth of India and the secret of the greatness of 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. ”

“ When we speak of the Vedic hymns as representing the religion, the thoughts and customs of India three thousand years ago, we cannot mean by India more than some unknown quantity of which the poets of the Veda are the only spokesmen left. When we now speak of India, we think of 250 millions, a sixth part of the whole human race, peopling the vast peninsula from the Himalayan mountains between the arms of the Indus and the Ganges, down to Cape Comorin and Ceylon, an extent of country nearly as large as Europe. ”

“ 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? ”

“ How shouldst thou see, strange-bred as thou art from the uttermost guile of India--this old, old India that was guileful long ages before thy island came into being? What canst thou or thy kind know of the bottomless deceits, the dregs of many years, the sediment of many men which must underlay the smooth levels of India? ”

“ Geographically, India is that large, distinct, and peculiar portion of the earth, stretching over twenty-eight degrees of latitude, and twenty-four degrees of longitude, and enclosed on all sides by the sea, by the stupendous range of the Himmaylayas, and by two of the greatest rivers in the world, the Indus and Burrampooter—boundaries which divide it from countries and races altogether separate and different. ”

“ We ought not to forget that Bengal, Madras, Bombay and the Punjab are all dominated by one great central culture. The epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata are epics of not only the Punjab, of Bombay, of Madras but also of Bengal and the rest of India. The great religious institutions are common—I am speaking of the Hindus only—to all the provinces, Each province has got a speciality of its own, I admit, but over and above that all these different provinces are bound together in one common culture. ”

“ In those days vast territories were still covered by forest, the home of countless wild beasts and scanty tribes of savage men; but regions of great extent in Northern India had been occupied for untold centuries by more or less civilized communities of the higher races who, from time to time, during the unrecorded past, had pierced the mountain barriers of the north-western frontier. ”

“ The triangular sub-continent of India is cut off from the rest of Asia by the vast barriers of the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, the Suleiman mountains, and the Indian Ocean. Its population comprises about two hundred and ninety-five millions, and is of greatest density on the fertile northern plain, which is watered by three river systems, the Indus and its tributaries on the west, and the Ganges and Brahmaputra with their tributaries which pour into the Bay of Bengal. South of the Vindhya mountain ranges is the plateau of the Deccan. ”

“ Now what Colonel Sleeman continually insists on is that no one knows the Indians who does not know them in their village-communities—what we should now call their communes. It is that village-life which in India has given its peculiar impress to the Indian character, more so than in any other country we know. When in Indian history we hear so much of kings and emperors, of rajahs and maharajahs, we are apt to think of India as an Eastern monarchy, ruled by a central power, and without any trace of that self-government which forms the pride of England. ”

“ Such is the spiritual condition of vast regions in India at the present time. According to the language of an able writer, “Some of the finest and most populous parts of the country are altogether neglected, or, if not neglected, supplied at the rate of one missionary to a million or half a million of people, scattered in great districts! Let any one study the map of India, and allow his eye to affect his heart. ”

“ India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange, or, at the very utmost, a curious country. India for the future belongs to Europe, it has its place in the Indo-European world, it has its place in our own history, and in what is the very life of history, the history of the human mind. ”

“ If the whole of India had been thoroughly subjugated and settled like the Punjab and Hindustān, it may be supposed that the same status of impurity would have been imposed upon all the indigenous races ”

“ For the great capitals of India have moved from Delhi and Agra, the old strategic points in the centre of the great northern plain, to Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Rangoon, new cities on the sea, to suit the later over-sea rulers of India. There is the interest of the grand organisation of the British Government, holding in its strong paternal grasp that vast continent of three hundred million souls. ”

“ Delhi, and the great plain north of it, are associated with the most stirring events in both the ancient and modern history of India, and have witnessed the most decisive struggles for empire which have occurred south of the Himalayas. ”

“ Such things have been, nay, are, in India, seeming in truth more fantastic when set down in pen and ink than they do when seen in the warm clasp of that Indian sunlight which shines down indifferently on so many a strange anomaly of caste, and creed, and custom. ”

“ In truth, in this particular argument, India, so present to every mind in every other argument, India, the choicest flower of the Empire, the brightest jewel in the Imperial Crown—any other figure of speech that may spring of the oriental richness of an imperial fancy—seems suddenly to be forgotten. But another land seems also to be forgotten, a land which should surely be more to us than all the wonders of the East, a land whose kindred and friendship should surely be more precious to Englishmen than all the glories and all the treasures of a hundred thousand Great Moguls. ”

“ The compromise between the vaguer and the more precise use of the term is seen in Ptolemy, where the boundaries of the true India are defined, on the whole, with surprising exactness, as 'India within the Ganges,' whilst the darker regions beyond appear as 'India beyond the Ganges.' And this double conception of India, as 'India Proper' (as we may call it) , and India in the vaguer sense, has descended to our own time. ”

“ What, however, really renders India so interesting as an object of study is that it is now a living entity. Greece and Rome are dead and have passed away, and we are living so completely in the midst of modern Europe, that we cannot get outside to contemplate it as a whole. But India is a complete cosmos in itself; bounded on the north by the Himalayas, on the south by the sea, on the east by impenetrable jungle, and only on the west having one door of communication, across the Indus, open to the other world. ”

“ Bouddh., ii. 58.
1298.—"India the Greater is that which extends from Maabar to Kesmacoran (i.e. from Coromandel to Mekran) , and it contains 13 great kingdoms.... India the Lesser extends from the Province of Champa to Mutfili (i.e. from Cochin-China to the Kistna Delta) , and contains 8 great Kingdoms.... Abash (Abyssinia) is a very great province, and you must know that it constitutes the Middle India."—Marco Polo, Bk. iii. ch. 34, 35.
c. 1328.—"What shall I say? The greatness of this India is beyond description. But let this much suffice concerning India the Greater and the Less. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, since these thousand years have, in India, left behind them a very remarkable literature which, even in these latter days, is the root of all life and thought in that vast peninsula, it is as well to attempt a slight sketch of the time, as a whole, before embarking on actual history ”

“ India is about 1,900 miles in extent from north to south, and 1,600 in breadth in latitude 25° north. The boundaries of this vast country, established by nature for the most part, are the Bay of Bengal (now called a sea in the southern portion) on the south-east, and the Arabian Sea on the south-west. On the north the Himalaya Mountains separate it from China, Thibet, and Turkestan ”

“ An European, in the East, may appropriately narrow his field, and confine such a comparison to its great twin river, the Ganges, which, with the Indus, folds, as it were, in the embrace our mighty empire of British India. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We know, too, that there is a vast tract of country in Central India, extending east and west from shore to shore, and north and south from Sadras to Ellora, which is covered with buildings of great beauty and interest, but which nobody cares to explore. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Geologically, as well as physically, India consists of three distinct regions, the Himalayas, the Peninsula, and—between these two—the Indo-Gangetic plain with its covering of alluvium and wind-blown sands. The contrast between the Himalayas and the Peninsula is one of fundamental importance. ”

“ My India was not on the surface, but lay many centuries beneath it; and as to paying a globe-trotter’s visit to Calcutta and Bombay, I might as well walk through Oxford 5Street and Bond Street But, though I never stood on the ghats of Benares, and never saw the men, women, and children step down from them into the sacred waters of the Ganges, I have had the good fortune of knowing a number of Indians in Europe, and no doubt some of the best and most distinguished of the sons and daughters of India. ”

“ The highlands which border on the western sea-coast of India, poured forth a formidable race, a race which was long the terror of every native power, and which, after many desperate and doubtful struggles, yielded only to the fortune and genius of England. ”

“ Whether from the difficulty of approach, the distance, or the diversion of the current of adventure to other quarters of the world, this chief portion of the African continent continues almost unknown to Europeans. The central region is a blank in our maps, but occasional tales reach us of the plenty, the pomp, and even of the civilisation and industry of the table-land. The centre of India is a table-land, possessing, in that region of fire and fever, a bracing air, and a productive, though rugged soil. ”

“ The traveller who has spent a winter in touring India, but has only visited the large towns and show places, and has never lived in an Indian village, remains altogether a stranger to the deep inner life of the Indian. The real India is not seen in the Westernized bazaars of the large cities, but in the myriads of villages, wherein more than 80 per cent. of the population of India dwell. ”