THE RIVERS AS DESTROYERS. 31 The obstructed influx, by a rapid contraction of the channel. The Indian rivers not only desert the cities on their banks, Hamlets but they sometimes tear them away. Many a hamlet and torn away. rice-field and ancient grove of trees is remorselessly eaten up each autumn by the current. A Bengal proprietor has often to look on helplessly while his estate is being swept away, or converted into the bed of a broad, deep river. An important branch of Indian legislation deals with the proprietary changes thus caused by alluvion and diluvion. The rivers have a tendency to straighten themselves out. RiverTheir course consists of a series of bends, in each of which the windings. current sets against one bank, which it undermines; while it leaves still water on the other bank, in which new deposits of land take place. By degrees these twists become sharper and sharper, until the intervening land is almost worn away, leaving only a narrow tongue between the bends. The river finally bursts through the slender strip of soil, or a canal is cut across it by human agency, and direct communication is thus established between points formerly many miles distant by the windings of the river. This process of eating away soil from the one bank, against which the current sets, and depositing silt in the still water along the other bank, is constantly at work. Even in their quiet moods, therefore, the rivers steadily steal land from the old owners, and give it to new ones. terminus swept During the rains these forces work with uncontrollable fury. A railway We have mentioned that the first terminus of the Eastern Bengal Railway at Kushtiá had been partially deserted by the Ganges. away. Its new terminus at Goálanda has suffered from an opposite but equally disastrous accident. Up to 1875, the Goálanda station stood upon a massive embankment near the water's edge, protected by masonry spurs running out to the river. About £130,000 had been spent upon these protective works, and it was hoped that engineering skill had conquered the violence of the Gangetic floods. But in August 1875, the Poetry of Indian river names. Crops of the river plains. harvests of the year. solid masonry spurs, the railway station, and the magistrate's court, were all swept away; and deep water covered their site. A new Goálanda terminus had to be erected two miles inland from the former river-bank. Higher up the Ganges, fluvial changes on so great a scale have been encountered at the river-crossing, where the Northern Bengal Railway begins and the Eastern Bengal Railway ends, that no costly or permanent terminus has yet been attempted. Throughout the long courses of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the mighty currents each autumn undermine and then rend away many thousand acres of solid land. They afterwards deposit their spoil in their channels farther down, and thus, as has been shown, leave high and dry in ruin many an ancient city on their banks. Their work, however, is on the whole beneficent; and a poem of Ossian might be made out of the names which the Indian peasant applies to his beloved rivers. Thus, we have the Goddess of Flowing Speech (Saraswati), or, according to another derivation, the River of Pools; the Streak of Gold (Suvarna-rekha); the Glancing Waters (Chitra); the Dark Channel (Kála-nadi), or the Queen of Death (Káli-nadi); the Sinless One (Pápagini = Pápahini); the Arrowy (Sharavati); the Golden (Suvarnamatí); the Stream at which the Deer Drinks (Haringháta); the Forest Hope (Banás); the Old Twister (Burabalang); besides more common names, such as the All-Destroyer, the Forest King, the Lord of Strength, the Silver Waters, and the Flooder. These Throughout the river plains of Northern India, two harvests, and in some Provinces three, are reaped each year. crops are not necessarily taken from the same land; but in most Districts the best situated fields yield two harvests within the twelve months. In Lower Bengal, pease, pulses, oil-seeds, The three and green crops of various sorts, are reaped in spring; the early rice crops in September; and the great rice harvest of the year in November and December. Before the last has been gathered in, it is time to prepare the ground for the spring crops, and the husbandman knows no rest except during the hot weeks of May, when he is anxiously waiting for the rains. Such is the course of agriculture in Lower Bengal. But it should always be remembered that rice is the staple crop in a limited area of India, and that it forms the everyday food of only about 70 millions, or under one-third of the population. It has been estimated that, in the absence of irrigation, the rice crop requires an annual rainfall of at least 36 inches; and an Rice. SCENERY OF BENGAL RIVER PLAINS. 33 the river plains. Indian District requires an average fall of not less than 40 to 60 inches in order to grow rice as its staple crop. A line might almost be drawn across Behar, to the north of which rice ceases to be the staple food of the people; its place being taken by millets, and in a less degree by wheat. There are, indeed, rice-growing tracts in well-watered or low-lying Districts of Northern India, and in the river valleys or deltas and level strips around the southern coast. But speaking generally, throughout North-Western, Central, and Southern India (except in the coast strip), rice is consumed only by the richer classes. The products of each Province are carefully enumerated in the Scenery of separate provincial articles in The Imperial Gazetteer of India, and an account of the most important will be found under the heading of Agriculture in the present volume. They are here referred to only so far as is necessary to give a general idea of the scenery of the river plains. Along the upper and middle courses of the Bengal rivers, the country rises gently In North from their banks in fertile undulations, dotted with mud Western Bengal. villages and adorned with noble trees. Mango groves scent the air with their blossom in spring, and yield their abundant fruit in summer. The spreading banyan, with its colonnades of hanging roots; the stately pipal, with its green masses of foliage; the wild cotton-tree, glowing while still leafless with heavy crimson flowers; the tall, daintily-shaped tamarind, and the quick-growing bábul, rear their heads above the crop fields. As the rivers approach the coast, the palm-trees take possession of the scene. The ordinary landscape in the delta is a flat stretch In the of rice-fields, fringed round with an evergreen border of bam- delta. boos, cocoa-nuts, date-trees, areca, and other coronetted palms. This densely-peopled tract seems at first sight bare of villages, for each hamlet is hidden away amid its own grove of plantains and wealth-giving trees. The bamboo and cocoa-nut play a conspicuous part in the industrial life of the people; and the numerous products derived from them, including rope, oil, food, fodder, fuel, and timber, have been dwelt on with admiration by many writers. North The crops also change as we sail down the rivers. In the Crops of north, the principal grains are wheat, barley, Indian corn, Western and a variety of millets, such as joár (Sorghum vulgare) and Bengal ; bájra (Pennisetum typhoideum). In the delta, on the other of the hand, rice is the staple crop, and the universal diet. In delta. single District, Rangpur, there are 295 separate kinds of rice known to the peasant,1 who has learned to grow his favourite 1 Statistical Account of Bengal, vol. vii. pp. 234-237. VOL. VI. C a Drugs, fibres, oilseeds, etc. crop in every locality, from the comparatively dry ground, which yields the áman harvest, to the swamps 12 feet deep, on the surface of whose waters the rice ears may be seen struggling upwards for air. Sugar-cane, oil-seeds, flax, mustard, sesamum, palma-christi, cotton, tobacco, indigo, safflower and other dyes, ginger, coriander, red pepper, capsicum, cummin, and precious spices, are grown both in the Upper Provinces, and in the moister valleys and delta of Lower Bengal. A whole pharmacopoeia of medicines, from the well-known aloe and castor oil, to obscure but valuable febrifuges, is derived from shrubs, herbs, and roots. Resins, gums, varnishes, india-rubber, perfume-oils, and a hundred articles of commerce or luxury, are obtained from the fields and the forests. Vegetables, both indigenous and imported from Europe, largely enter into the food of the people. The melon and huge yellow pumpkin spread themselves over the thatched roofs; fields of potato, brinjal, and yams are attached to the homesteads. The tea-plant is reared on the hilly ranges which skirt the plains both in the North-West and in Assam; the opium poppy about half-way down the Ganges, around Benares and in Behar; the silkworm mulberry still farther down in Lower Bengal; while the jute fibre is essentially a crop of the delta, and would exhaust any soil not fertilized by river floods. Jungle Even the jungles yield the costly lac and the tasar silk cocoons. products. The mahuá, also a gift of the jungle, produces the fleshy flowers which form a staple article of food in many districts, and when distilled supply a cheap spirit. The sál, sissu, tún, and many other indigenous trees yield excellent timber. Flowering creepers, of gigantic size and gorgeous colours, festoon the jungle; while each tank bears its own beautiful crop of the lotus and water-lily. Nearly every vegetable product which feeds and clothes a people, or enables it to trade with foreign countries, abounds. Third Having described the leading features of the Himalayas on the north, and of the great river plains at their base, we come now to the third division of India, namely, the three-sided Southern table-land which covers the southern half or more strictly This tract, known in ancient literally The South, comprised, Tableland. peninsular portion of India. THE SOUTHERN TABLE-LAND. Deccan ; 35 the sake of easy remembrance, therefore, we may take the inhabitants of the river plains in the north at about 150 millions, and the inhabitants of the southern table-land at 100 millions. The Deccan, in its local acceptation, is restricted to the The high inland tract between the Narbadá (Nerbudda) and the Kistna rivers; but the term is also loosely used to include the whole country south of the Vindhyas as far as Cape Comorin. Taken in this wide sense, it slopes up from the southern edge of the Gangetic plains. Three ranges of hills support its Its three northern, its eastern, and its western side, the two latter supporting meeting at a sharp angle near Cape Comorin. mountain walls. moun ranges; The northern side is buttressed by confused ranges, with a The general direction of east to west, popularly known in the Vindhya aggregate as the Vindhya mountains. The Vindhyas, how- tains; ever, are made up of several distinct hill systems. Two sacred peaks stand as outposts in the extreme east and west, with a succession rather than a series of ranges stretching 800 miles between. At the western extremity, Mount Abu, famous for its exquisite Jain temples, rises, as a solitary outlier of the Aravalli hills, 5653 feet above the Rájputána plains, like an island out of the sea. Beyond the southern limits of that their plain, the Vindhya range of modern geography runs almost various due east from Gujarát, forming the northern wall of the Narbada valley. The Satpura mountains stretch, also east and west, to the south of the Narbadá river, and form the watershed between it and the Tápti. Towards the heart of India, the eastern extremities of the Vindhyas and Satpuras end in the highlands of the Central Provinces. Passing still east, the hill system finds a continuation in the Káimur range and its congeners. These in their turn end in the outlying peaks and spurs that mark the western boundary of Lower Bengal, and abut on the old course of the Ganges under the name of the Rájmahal hills. On the extreme east, Mount Parasnáth-like Mount Abu on the extreme west, sacred to Jain rites-rises to 4479 feet above the Gangetic plain. The various ranges of the Vindhyas, from 1500 to over 4000 feet high, form, as it were, the northern wall and buttresses which support the central table-land. But in this sense the Vindhyas must be taken as a loose convenient the generalization for the congeries of mountains and table-lands ancient between the Gangetic plains and the Narbadá valley. Now between pierced by road and railway, they stood in former times as a Northern barrier of mountain and jungle between Northern and Southern Southern India, and formed one of the main difficulties in welding the India. barrier and |