It ready to catch up the sub- most authoritative legends of merged and unconsidered classes old. His Hebraic features, and enrol them in a military cut out of marble, were set and spiritual brotherhood with in a repose that expressed the splendid traditions, every memOriental's unquestioning acber of which is lionised in the ceptance of a lot, predestined, most literal sense of the word fit, part of the natural order of when he puts on the conse- things. The old man's yoke crated steel and adopts the might have been a throne. title of Singh. If a community He might have communed of equal repute and prestige with Abraham. He would were to spring up in the West have inspired reverence in a thousands of discontented rest- Cockney of Camberwell. less spirits would flock to it, but in the East one finds men born in a slough to which they feel themselves naturally affixed. The sense that the old order is right is so strong that they are loath to raise themselves. They inherit an abject trade, the name of which is bandied about among men of a little higher caste as an insult, and they feel that it is the occupation to which they are naturally fitted, and even acquire a dignity in fulfilling it which the European who has risen by push can never hope to attain. The most dignified old man I have ever seen was a Muhammadan greybeard who sat on the yoke of the bullocks that turned his Persian wheel, revolving continuously like an automaton. His eyes were fixed on the shifting horizon with a prophet's steadfast gaze that seemed to penetrate the mysteries of the unseen and dwell there inscrutably, leaving earth and its illusions sifted, searched, and riveted out of mind. His great brow was unwrinkled with the petty cares of the world. His long grey beard swept his loin-cloth in a way that recalled the Dignity is conservative. is the expression of content. In the West it is associated with blue blood; in the East it is the mantle of the humblest. In the West the lower and middle social strata are unsettled with aspirations; in the East fatalism inspires them with repose. In the West the baron with sixteen quarterings has repose because it has not entered his head that he might be anything better. In the East the Muhammadan at the well has repose because it has not entered his head that Allah intended him to be anything different. The general reluctance of the low-caste Hindu to elevate himself by becoming a Sikh may perhaps be explained by the historical exception of the Mazbis. These Sikhs, the descendants of converts from the despised sweeper caste, were welcomed by the Khalsa at a time when they were engaged in a desperate struggle with the forces of Islam. when the Sikhs dominated the Punjab the Mazbis found that the equality their religion promised them existed in theory But powder-bags to blow up the Kashmir Gate, under Home and Salkeld. Their names are inscribed on the arch to-day, and have become historical. John Lawrence wrote of the deed as one of deliberate and sustained courage, as noble as any that has ever graced the annals of war." rather than in fact. They Eight of them carried the occupied much the same position among the Jat- and Khattre descended Sikhs as their ancestors, the sweepers, enjoyed among the Hindus. They were debarred from all privileges, and were at one time even excluded from the army. Then, finding themselves outcasts in a sense, and without occupation, the majority of them became bandits by circumstance, if not by temper. Perhaps it was this continual state of outlawry that stiffened the Mazbi into the man he is. He first served in the British Army during the Mutiny in 1857, when we were in great need of trained sappers for the siege work at Delhi. A number of Mazbis who were employed at the time in the canal works at Madhopur were offered military service and volunteered readily. On the march to Delhi these raw recruits fought like veterans. They were attacked by the rebels, beat them off, and saved the whole of the ammunition and treasure. During the siege Neville Chamberlain wrote of them that "their courage amounted to utter recklessness of life." They might have been engaged on a holy war. Many supernumeraries accompanied the levies, and when a soldier fell "his brother would literally step into his shoes, taking his rifle and all that he possessed, including his name and even his wife and family." These Mazbis who fought at Delhi and Lucknow were the nucleus of the 23rd and 32nd Sikh Pioneers, the sister regiments, one of whom has been engaged on nearly every Frontier campaign since, from Waziristan in 1860 to the Bazar valley in 1908. It was the 32nd who carried the guns from Gilgit over the Shandur pass and relieved the British garrison in Chitral. So the Mazbi has obtained honour in the Army if not elsewhere. But he is still excluded from most privileges by the Khalsa. Stolid caste-ridden prejudice one can understand,-it is the rule in the East. The mystery is how the flame of courage was lighted in the Mazbi; what unperceived embers were smouldering in these hereditary outcasts-men of crushed aspirations. If it was the pride of being caught up among "the chosen," how was it that the stimulus survived the indifference, ingratitude, and contempt with which they were treated? That is one of the mysteries of the influence of Sikhism. It may explain why the Mazbis have 1 The Thirty-second Sikh Pioneers' Regimental History. By Colonel H. R. Brander, C.B. Calcutta: Thacker Spink. 1906. always been among our loyalest and Benares, often with an supporters and are likely to under-feeling of shame as if I remain so. Another class of Sikh who are reputed to have been desperately brave in days when all men used to carry arms are the Akalis, who frequent the Akal Banga on the pavement facing the causeway. These spare, blue-robed fanatics, with their hawks' eyes, iron-ringed staff, and conical turban glittering with hoops of steel, catch the eye of the stranger before any other religious sect. They embody the spirit of hyperbole and beggar our conception of pride. The singular number is little affected in the East, but while most men are content with the unadorned plural, the Akali alone thinks in lakhs. He speaks of himself as a lakh and a quarter-i.e., 125,000 men. If a companion joins him, then there are 200,000. When he starts on a journey he says "the army is afoot.' If he is lame he has "a hundred different ways of walking." When he hands a brother a cup of milk he says, "Take the ocean. He is a mendicant who scorns to beg. He "collects revenue. Leaving the Akal Banga, I slipped out of the enclosure by a back passage leading into the bazaar. All round the tank there is a network of alleys, many of them too narrow for a beast of burden, yet leading to great houses with massive brass-studded doors. These backwaters I always think are the most fascinating quarters of great cities. I have threaded the same warrens in Baghdad were some prying Pentheus in haunts too intimate and private to enter inquisitively. One finds oneself there, and one cannot help prying. Just two glances, the vague surmise, and the rapid interpretation of it, right or wrong. But it is enough. One has intruded. A servant's hand is arrested in its mysterious work. The sound of beaten metal dies away. A lemon silk petticoat glides behind a well. In these old purlieus the heart of the East is throbbing almost audibly. The men we meet in offices and durbars come out of them and masquerade among us in disguises that we have unwittingly chosen. Through our imperfect sympathy we help them to select the masks, and then forget that they are not the particular thing they seem. Only when we wander alone and lost among their secret places do we remember that we cannot hope to know much even of the most communicative of them. There is a small passage by the Kaulsar tank where, if one were to walk with arms akimbo, one might almost brush the cobwebs on either side. Here I found a house, of which the doorway within the porch, lintels and cornice and all, was eighteen feet high. Two heavy doors stood ajar, and through the wicket-gate of one of them peered a cow and a little girl in a purple velvet shift. The lintels of the door were of Shisham wood, which is like old walnut, intricately carved. On either side were two corbelled windows with a corbelled balcony between, and above a cornice supported by rows of stone peacocks, purple-breasted, with purple golden - starred wings spread out fanwise behind. A fakir in sackcloth carrying an iron staff with jangling rings stood on the lowest step and cried out a verse of Farid mands the tank. Among the sights of Amritsar that every native will point out to you impressively are two atrocities for which we are directly or indirectly responsible. One is a brand-new, red-brick, pepperbox clock-tower, which might perhaps assimilate with the architecture of Bolton or Huddersfield, but has no business on the brink of the Waters of Immortality. The other is a “Thousands leave the world every day statue of Queen Victoria, for and none return." He cried it out again and jangled the rings on his staff, but the little girl and the cow paid no heed to his hymn of the obvious, and I passed on. A turn and I was in a busy quarter. In the brass market I met the Granth, or the Holy Rider, as it is called when on its passage from the temple to the house of a bedridden disciple. It was borne in a palanquin, enveloped in a yellow silk cloth, and preceded by a band, with rebecks and serpentheaded trumpets. Four martial Sikhs strode beside it to an inspiring tune, fanning it with the mor- chhor or peacockfeather fan and the chauri or sacred white cow's tail. In another street I met the Yarkandis again. They were staring at a potsherd which hung from the wall of a new house with a fantastic grin, and a malicious slit mouth like a lantern turnip, to keep off the evil eye. I was borne along the tortuous alleys with the stream of indolently-occupied folk, until I debouched again into the square where the clock tower com which some municipal chairman ought to hang. It is the caricature of a ghoulish old lady in a nursery rhyme, half witch, half zany. Her anatomy is all higgledy-piggledy, and she is tottering forward without a stick, with the proclamation in her hands, held out as if it were a bunch of speciously advertised patent herbs. She is terrible. But for all that, or perhaps because of it, the country folk do obeisance, and rub their foreheads on the plinth. Just about sunset I found myself outside the city, on the great trunk road that leads from Calcutta to Peshawur. As the sun went down a chill sprang from the earth as sudden as the twilight. The incoming camels, with the urchins swinging on their rumps, loomed black in the distance. The leaves of the Babul-trees, creatures of sand, were etched in a pin-point, criss-cross pattern against the violet screen in the west, and the great pods of the Siris, lit with the faint saffron sheen that proceeds from no point in the sky, yet suffuses everything in those few conciliatory moments after sunset; gilds dust, mud, and adobe, and permeates earth and trees with its mysterious autumnal glow. If there is a moon in the sky, so much the lovelier. For then the saffron and the violet melt into the prevalent hue more lingeringly; while trees that have been uncommunicative all day exude sweet fragrance and flirt with their shadows. Driving through the city gate I entered a stratum of warm air radiated from the sunbaked walls, and I was met with the comfortable reek of wood and cow-dung fires. felt that the very smells were manlier in the north, and I was drawn again irresistibly to the temple. When I reached the causeway they had just finished the evening prayer. Once again I was in a throng of men. A soldier on the pavement sang out the cry of victory, and I thought of the words of Govind: 1 1 The Tunkha Nameh of Guru Govind. The translation is from Cunningham's 'History of the Sikhs.' |