by John Keay
Through the rocky defiles of many an ambush Tod traced the history of their desperate encounters with Mohammedan and, later, Maratha foes. In the mirrored and marbled halls of Amber and Jodhpur he listened to whispered stories of court intrigues and harem scandals. And in the libraries of Jaipur and Bikaner he tracked down the chronologies and records. If he was inclined to romanticize it was hardly surprising. He was not just studying the past, he was reliving it. Nor was this romantic approach out of place. In their palaces and paintings, as well as in their history and their poetry, the Rajputs evinced a love of pageantry and setting. By rescuing and recording such traditions — and above all, by reverencing them and recognizing them as still vital — Tod restored to the Rajputs a pride of race which more stringent standards of scholarship might simply have destroyed. In short, Tod, single-handed, did for the Rajputs what it would take several generations of scholars to do for the people of India as a whole.
In the preface of Travels in Western India he restated his commitment to the Rajput cause but with an important addition.
Heart and soul did I labour for the one [Annals and Antiquities] and with the same idolatrous affection for the subject have I given up every pursuit, every thought to this [Travels] in the hope of making the Rajputs known by their works; but I linger awhile in the skirts of Rajasthan and lead my reader into the hardly less interesting region of Saurashtra and to the mounts sacred to the monotheistic Jains.
The Jains were traditionally the administrators, merchants and bankers of western India. Already Tod was deeply indebted to their scholarship. His principal pandit was a Jain and he had located whole libraries of Jain texts. (‘We can only pity’, he wrote in a veiled response to Macaulay’s rantings, ‘the overweening vanity which has prompted the assertion that the Hindus possess no historical records.’) As a reformed sect comparable to, and contemporary with, the Buddhists, the Jains had once been numerous throughout India; but they now survived only in scattered pockets centred on their main places of worship. Such places were often lofty hills, on or around which the Jains sculpted their colossal naked statues and built their trim little temples. Gwalior, Parasnath (Bihar) and Sravana Belgola were typical examples; but the most important were in western India and of these the most celebrated was the isolated mountain of Abu, 5000 feet high, which rears up out of the western desert.
Tod was determined, before leaving Rajasthan, to see this famous shrine. By 1822 he was a very sick man (like Everest, he seems to have suffered from permanent dysentery). But he resolved to turn his journey down to Bombay into a sort of Jain pilgrimage. He visited the mountain of Girnar, bristling with whitewashed temples, and there first discovered the famous Ashoka rock inscription. He also explored the ruins of Anhilwara and discovered a pointed arch which, like Havell nearly a century later, he took as evidence that the Jains and Hindus had anticipated the architects of Islam. But Abu, unvisited by any European, was his greatest goal.
It was nearly noon as I cleared the pass of Seetla Mata, and as the bluff head of Mount Abu opened upon me, my heart beat with joy as, with the sage of Syracuse, I exclaimed, ‘Eureka’.
Too weak to climb ‘the Indian Olympus’, Tod accepted the offer of a ride in a pilgrim’s chair. Thus, swinging from a bamboo pole, he was borne aloft, from the desert scrub through the dense jungles and up the steep scarps to the rolling meadows and woods of the summit plateau. On 14 June 1822 he was deposited, ‘in a high fever and unable to articulate’, beside the clump of mango trees in which nestles the Dilwara complex of temples.
Beyond controversy this is the most superb of all the temples of India and there is not an edifice besides the Taj Mahal that can approach it. The pen is incompetent to describe the exuberant beauties of this proud monument of the Jains&. The whole is of pure white marble, every column, dome and altar varying in form and ornament, the richness and delicacy of execution being indescribable&. The most fastidious admirer of chaste design need not apprehend that his taste would be shocked by the accumulation of details, or that the minuteness of ornament would detract from the massive dignity of the whole; on the contrary—When we reflect that all this magnificence is found on the summit of an isolated mountain on the verge of the desert, now inhabited by a few simple and half-civilized people [the tribal Bhils again] the association cannot fail to enhance one’s impression of wonder.
Like many a subsequent visitor Tod was unable to analyse the beauty of the temples. ‘The dazzling rays of a vertical sun, reflected from the marble pavement, drove me for shelter into the piazza.’ The domes and pillars, walls and floors are all of white marble; they trap the light, eliminating all shadow, and they glare with the blinding effect of a glacial serac. In the brittle intricacy of the sculpted detail there is, too, a vitreous quality, as hard and as bright as a diamond. But the design and ornament are all too easily forgotten in what is essentially a physical experience. Like Tod, one reels away to the deep shade of a mango tree with eyeballs seared and senses seduced by the impossible smoothness of the marble flagstones.
“Now that my pilgrimage is over, wrote Tod, ‘I feel content; it is one of my desiderata accomplished.’ He retired to his camp-bed, feverish, but clutching a copy of the Ramayana. Next morning he was worse. ‘Abu has completely demolished me, the fever raging, my hands and face prodigiously swollen&. The European traveller should distrust his physical powers on this seductive mount.’ After such a gamble with his health, he was understandably tenacious about his discovery. Others, including Heber, published accounts of Abu before his own came out. But ‘the discovery was my own; to Abu I first assigned a local habitation and a name; and if I am somewhat jealous of my rights in this matter, it is the sole recompense for the toils I have gone through and no small deterioration of health as well as of purse’. For the man who launched the study of Indian coins, who contributed to the solution of the Ashoka script, who pieced together much of India’s medieval history and who, above all, rescued the Rajputs from obscurity and related their history in one of the noblest monuments of British scholarship, the discovery of the Abu temples was indeed a most fitting reward.
What Tod did for the Rajputs, others would do for all the tribes and castes of India. Joseph Cunningham, for instance, the Archaeological Surveyor’s brother, wrote the first history of the Sikhs, and Edgar Thurston compiled a massive handbook to all the tribes and castes of south India. The country’s quite exceptional human diversity was a perpetual source of wonder and had intrigued even the earliest visitors. John Marshall, he of the ‘yogis’ and ‘mairmaids’, was much interested in the tribal peoples of Nepal who descended to the plains during the winter. Having never known shoes, ‘nothing will hurt them to tread upon it, for they are at the soles like hoofes’. He noted ‘but few hares [sic] in their beards’, and credited the women with a most disagreeable habit.
The women of Nepal are said usually to piss in the streets in the day time before people, which I am apt to believe, being at Hajipur whither came many women from Nepal, I saw one woman (that passed by me as I was walking), who almost as soon as she was past me, sat her down in the middle of the path before me and pissed.
Nepal was to provide one of the classic fields for ethnological research. This was partly due to its geography which had kept its various tribes isolated and distinct; but it also owed much to the presence, there and in Darjeeling, for nearly forty years, of that remarkable scholar, Brian Hodgson. Hodgson’s contributions to the discovery of India cover so many different subjects and such a long span of years that one might be excused for thinking he was several different people, members of the same family perhaps, with a long connection with the Himalayas. But no, Hodgson whose collections of Nepalese and Tibetan texts won him the title of ‘founder of the true study of Buddhism’, was also Hodgson the naturalist, ‘the father of Indian zoology’, Hodgson the ethnologist, ‘the highest living authority on the native races of India’, and Hodgson the promoter of India’s vernacular languages and protagonist of Macaulay. �
�I doubt whether any Englishman of our century,’ wrote his biographer, ‘received so many distinctions from so many learned bodies representing both the scholarly and the scientific sides of research’. At the Linnaean Society and the Royal Society, the Ethnological Society and the Zoological Society his name was as much revered as in the purely orientalist societies of India, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and the United States. No man better represented Sir William Jones’s vision of the scope of Indian studies and no man better typifies the spirit of the discovery of India.
Born in the year 1800, Brian Houghton Hodgson had no sooner arrived in India than his health collapsed. He was advised to return to England immediately and seek another career; and no doubt he would have done so had it not been for the necessity of supporting his impoverished parents and their several other children. Instead, therefore, he opted for service in the Himalayas, particularly Kathmandu, where alone the climate was considered mild enough for his delicate constitution. And there he stayed for twenty-four years in self-imposed exile. As Assistant Resident and then Resident at the Nepalese court, he rarely had the company of more than two of his fellow countrymen. The frequent hostility and constant feuding of the Nepalese, coupled with the often unsympathetic attitude of the government in Calcutta, made his position as perilous as it was lonely. Yet somehow he survived. He fought off the loneliness not only by immersing himself in his studies but also by the now much frowned on expedient of ‘forming a domestic connection’ with a young Mohammedan lady. They had two children to whom Hodgson became devoted.
In 1833 he wrote to his sister describing his various activities.
The antiquities of the land afford me much entertainment; I pore over the pictorial, sculptural and architectural monuments of Buddhism. But the past chiefly interests me as it can be made to illustrate the present — the origin, genius, character and attainments of the people.
His first paper was not on ancient Buddhism but on the modern Buddhists, and this highly practical approach coloured all his researches. The chronic instability of Nepal he traced to the underemployment of its manpower. Trade was a possible solution and he desperately tried to open new markets and commercial routes. More important, though, was his recognition of the martial traditions of the people; until some outlet for their fighting spirit could be found, peace must always be fragile. Hodgson studied each of the tribes in great detail, contributing a paper on them to the Asiatic Society as early as 1833. And he was the first to recommend that, so far as the Gurkha peoples were concerned, the only solution was recruitment into the Company’s forces. The Gurkha regiments of the Indian, and later the British, army are amongst his least expected legacies.
The Gurkhas apart, Hodgson’s main interest in ethnology was in India’s most primitive peoples, the aboriginal tribes. Before the Aryans, before the Indus Valley people, perhaps even before the Dravidians, there were layers of indigenous peoples whose modern representatives still survived in the jungles of south and central India and in the hidden valleys of the eastern Himalayas. In the Himalayas alone he discovered and studied a host of hitherto unknown peoples. He compiled vocabularies and grammars for their unwritten languages, noted their customs and beliefs, and measured their crania. By circulating questionnaires he extended his enquiries further and further into the subcontinent until they reached Ceylon and the Indus. In twenty-one separate papers submitted to the Asiatic Society he identified all the main regions, from the Nilgiris to the Himalayas, in which aboriginal tribes still survived and he examined their anthropological and linguistic affinities. Much work remained to be done but, as in so many other fields, Hodgson prepared the ground, laid down the direction of future researches and inspired others to pursue them.
Meanwhile he himself came to conform more and more to the ideal of the Himalayan sage. In 1839 he had given up meat and liquor and lived, like a Brahmin, on the strictest vegetarian diet. His success in Nepal owed as much to his reputation as a guru as to his political astuteness. When relieved of his post by the inconsistencies of Lord Ellenborough’s policies he simply moved a few hundred miles east, and a few thousand feet higher, to Darjeeling, then an equally isolated spot. And there, in a hill-top house half lost in the clouds, he continued his studies for another thirteen years, withdrawn, and more than ever the ‘Hermit of the Himalayas’.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Stupendous Fabric of Nature
In that same letter of 1833 to his sister, Hodgson described all his various ‘amusements’ and gave pride of place, not to Buddhist studies or ethnological researches, but to natural history.
Zoology in the branches of birds and quadrupeds amuses me very much&. I possess a wild tiger, a wild sheep, a wild goat, four bears, three civets and three score of our beautiful [Himalayan] pheasants. And my drawings now amount to 2000.
That Hodgson, in the mid-nineteenth century, should be credited with fathering Indian zoology might seem strange given that the country’s fauna had always been one of its main attractions. Visitors to the Moghul court in the eighteenth century invariably sent home wide-eyed reports of the emperor’s 14,000 elephants, of his camels and cheetahs, and of his ‘unicornes’ or ‘rhinocerots’ (‘which are large beastes as bigge as the fayrest oxen England affords; the skins lie platted, or, as it were, in wrinkles upon their back’). The same writer, Edward Terry, paid particular attention to the elephants. Although no longer regarded as beasts of legend, they were still virtually unknown in Europe; Terry felt obliged to render a description – no easy task – of their anatomy.
Their trunks are long grisselly snouts hanging downe twixt their teeth, by some called their hands, which they make use of upon all occassions&. The male’s testicles lie about his forehead, the female’s teates are betwixt her forelegges.
He was right about the teats, wrong about the testicles. But, then, the whole question of where lay the elephant’s generative organs, and of how these strange creatures contrived to mate, was perhaps India’s single greatest zoological mystery. John Marshall, with his talent for spotting the curious and controversial, earmarked the subject for particular enquiry.
Mr Hatton saith, elephants when they gender, the male gets upon the female as a horse doth a mare and putting his yard under the female’s belly, hee bends it back againe (it having a joynt in it ⅓ part from the end), which he puts into the female into that part which distinguisheth her sex, which lies under her belly; which was a wonder formerly how they should engender, some affirming it was as woman to man, and others that the female kneeled down etc.
Marshall was on the right track; but the theory of their mating face to face survived well into the nineteenth century and, as late as 1903, a paper on the subject was published by the London Zoological Society.
Like Hodgson, many Englishmen of an earlier generation had formed their own menageries. Jones himself, with his tiger cub, his herds of sheep and goats and his tortoise, had something of the sort. William Carey, another great Sanskritist and the promoter of the Bengali language, kept a small zoo, the Duke of Wellington kept and studied cheetahs, and his brother Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General, founded the first official menagerie at Government House in 1804. Wellesley attached great importance to natural history and urged the East India Company to provide funds for its research. ‘Many of the most common quadrupeds and birds of this country are either altogether unknown to the naturalist or have been imperfectly and inaccurately described. The illustration and improvement of that important branch of natural history & is worthy of the munificence and liberality of the East India Company and must necessarily prove a most acceptable service to the world.’ He commissioned a magnificent series of some 3000 drawings of plants, birds and animals, and he installed the indefatigable Dr Francis Buchanan, late of the Mysore Survey, as superintendent of the menagerie. Buchanan did noble work collecting and describing hundreds of species; but, with his going on leave and Wellesley’s recall, the initial impetus failed. The East India Company had not been impressed
by the Governor-General’s scheme and the Government House menagerie degenerated into a fairground.
A further stumbling block to the development of the scientific study of India’s fauna was the, for once, far from encouraging attitude of Sir William Jones. Nothing shows more clearly the great man’s influence over the course of indological studies and nothing better exemplifies his extraordinarily humane outlook. In his tenth Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society he stated his position plainly.
Could the figure, instincts and qualities be ascertained & without giving pain to the object of our examination, few studies would afford us more solid instruction, or more exquisite delight; but I never could learn by what right nor conceive with what feeling, a naturalist can occasion the misery of an innocent bird, and leave its young, perhaps, to perish in a cold nest, because it has gay plumage; or deprive even a butterfly of its natural enjoyment, because it has the misfortune to be rare or beautiful.
No doubt this deep compassion had much to do with the reverence for life which pervades all Indian religions and cultures and which Jones had imbibed so deeply. Certainly, it was never more nobly expressed; and, given the tragic consequences of ignoring it, one might regret that Indian zoology ever progressed beyond the menagerie stage.
