THE NORTH-WEST PROVINCES OF INDIA

BY J. KENNEDY

A GREAT alluvial plain, once the bed of a pre-historic sea, separates the massive buttresses of the Himalayas from the volcanic plateau of the Dekhan. The upper portion of this plain is known as the Punjab, the lower part is Bengal, while the central area forms a single province, generally termed, on account of its early history under British rule, the North-West Provinces of India. It has an extreme length of 480 miles from Dehra Doon to Ghazipur, and 210 or 220 miles is the average breadth between the Himalayas and the Vindhias. The province includes the whole of the upper valley of the Ganges, and a considerable portion of the Himalayas, extending beyond the outer range of snows to the borders of Tibet. The Himalayan districts, the mountains of Kumaon and Garhwal, are covered with forest, cultivation is confined to the valleys, and the population is scarce. The alluvial plain, on the other hand, is traversed by the Ganges, and is one of the most fertile in the world; it rises to an average altitude of about 600 feet above sea-level near Delhi, and slopes with a scarcely perceptible fall to the south-east. The Ganges carries with it the waters of numerous great tributaries, of which the Jumna, the Gumti, and the Gogra are the most famous, and in the rains it is swollen to thirteen times its size during the hot weather. country is above all things agricultural. All the cold weather through, one hears the creaking of the waterwheels and sees the bullocks drawing water from the

The

wells. Wheat, millets, sugar-cane, and cotton are the staple crops, and the land yields two harvests in the year. The towns are, many of them, among the oldest and most famous in Indian history; they are chiefly to be found on the banks of the great rivers, and they are densely crowded. But the agricultural population outnumbers the urban population ten times over, and in the eastern districts it far exceeds in density the rural population of the richest parts of Europe. The landscape is rarely broken by undulations or by sandhills, and is always over-canopied by an immense expanse of sky. The earth teems with life of plants and reptiles, of birds and beasts, and men; and the sun and the sky are the lords of the land.

If we exclude the Himalayan region which we took from Nepal in 1816, and include Delhi and the surrounding country on the right bank of the Jumna which originally belonged to the province, but was transferred to the Punjab after the Mutiny of 1857, we have the Hindustan of the Indian chroniclers. It forms a unity distinguished by its history, by its language, by the character of its inhabitants, and by its physical aspects, from the steamy rice lands and bamboo clumps of Bengal on the east. On the west its history and its physical features serve to distinguish it from the bare red hills and sandy deserts of Rajputana; while the Sikhs and the Pathans of the Punjab have a different religion and another tongue. But in the heart of the province, between the Ganges and the Gogra, and ringed round about by it on almost every side, there lies what was once the Kingdom, and is now the Chief Commissionership, of Oudh—a historical creation dating from the first half of the eighteenth century. The area of Oudh is less, and its population somewhat more, than one-third of the North-West Provinces; the country and the people are essentially the same, and both have been placed since

1878 under the same Lieutenant-Governor; but the disintegration of society has been arrested at one stage in Oudh, at another in the North-West Provinces. The systems of land revenue, of landlordism, and of tenant right differ greatly in the two, and such differences mean in an agricultural country like India different courts, and officials, and rules. Oudh and the North-West with cognate populations form different administrations.1

It will be seen, then, that the term North-West Provinces is, geographically speaking, a misnomer; they are the North-West Provinces of the Bengal Presidency. Their earliest official designation used to be "the Ceded and the Conquered Provinces," and the history of their acquisition is the history of the way in which Hindustan proper was added to Bengal.

When the province was first formed in 1803 it included Delhi and it excluded the Himalayas. I have said that this region corresponds with the Hindustan of the Mohamedan historians, and presents a certain unity. It is peopled throughout by what is now a nearly homogeneous race. A single language -the Hindustani, a compound of Persian and the vernacular Hindi-is spoken everywhere; its grammar is Hindi, its vocabulary largely Persian. In the countryside the villagers use a Hindi dialect which is fairly pure; but the dialects are numerous, and differ considerably in different parts of the country. I propose first to say something of the history and

1 I subjoin a few statistics. There are thirty-seven districts in the North-West Provinces, with a total area of 83,286 square miles, and a total population of 34,254,254. The rural population numbers 804 per square mile in Azamgarh, 805 in Ballia, and 816 in Jaunpur. Oudh is divided into twelve districts, with an area of 24,216 square miles, and a population of 12,650,831. The Oudh districts are not quite so large as those of the North-West, and the population, whether urban or rural, is not so dense as in the most populous parts of the older province. The total area under the Lieutenant-Governor amounts to 107,502 square miles, and the total population to 46,905,085, giving an average density of 436 persons to the square mile.

ethnology of the province, and to describe the composition of the population. I shall then sketch the history of our administration and the way in which it has affected the different strata of society.

I

To write the history of the province is almost equivalent to writing the history of India. All the most famous cities of Indian history or myth are found within it. Hastina-pura, the scene of the immortal combat between the Pandavas and the Bhāratas, was somewhere in the neighbourhood of modern Delhi. Mathura was sacred to the amours of Krishna before the days of Alexander the Great, and before Hellenic colonists had settled in it. Kanauj formed the capital of a great kingdom during the first twelve centuries of the Christian era, and the renowned Siladitya held his court there. Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, was equally sacrosanct five centuries B.C., when Buddha taught in the deer-park at Sarnath. Almost every Hindu town and sacred spot in Upper India, Hardwar, Allahabad, Chitarkot, Ajudhia, boasts of an immemorial antiquity. And yet everything seems modern. A few monuments on the fringe of the province or in places difficult of access like Mahoba, and some solitary pillars of Asoka transported from their original sites, are almost the sole remains of antiquity that meet the eye. Everything else is buried in the earth, or has been employed by Mohamedan conquerors in the construction of such magnificent mosques as those at the Kutb, Jaunpur, and Kanauj. A similar fate has overtaken the early history of the people: it is buried out of sight. Brahmanism sprang up in the north-west, and Buddha lived

1 Lucknow and Cawnpore are the only great towns in the NorthWest Provinces or Oudh which have sprung up within the last 120 years.

in the north-east of the province, and the distinction between them somewhat corresponds to a difference which still exists between the inhabitants of the Doab and of the Benares division; but Buddhism is extinct, and the land of the two rivers knows the Manavas no more. The real history of the province commences with the rise of the Rajput clans in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. It is they who have more than any others determined the present constitution of the population. Medieval history begins with them, or rather modern history, for society has scarcely even yet emerged beyond the mediæval stage. In the eighth century A.D. the Hindus were masters only of the towns. and the great river valleys. The interior of the country was occupied by aborigines, who had their own forts and kings, but were either not at all or very slightly Hinduised. In the west there were Meos and Ahirs; the Bhars occupied the centre of the country; the east was inhabited by Cheros and Domras. All these were set in motion, overthrown, confused, broken up, and Hinduised by Rajput clans in search of new settlements, or individual Rajput leaders bent on fresh conquests. The tribes that escaped conquest assumed the style and privileges of Rajputs. The commotions that ensued when Kanauj and Delhi fell before the Mohamedan invaders still find an echo in the traditions of the people. To these Rajput conquests and migrations must be ascribed the spread of Neo-Hinduism and the present constitution of caste; and the process did not end until the fourteenth or fifteenth century A.D.

The establishment of Neo-Hinduism is the first great historical factor in the present life of the people. The Mohamedan conquest is the second. From the conquest of Delhi by Kutb-ud-din in 1191 A.D. down to the advent of the English-a period of 600 years— the Mohamedans were the rulers of the land. Their rule was coterminous with the province, and it was the

M