Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844.
or gipsy, who had been robbed.”  A robbery from a gipsy was such a strange contradiction of terms, that the colonel went personally to enquire into the matter, when he was horror-struck by finding, that the man had been, not only plundered of his earnings by a band of Bunjarras, but frightfully mutilated and wounded, a trifle which the Hindoo servants had not thought worth mentioning.  The poor wretch’s arm was amputated by Dr Ross; and, being carried with the camp and carefully tended, he was at last dismissed, with a fair prospect of recovery, and with a gift of sixty rupees subscribed among the party; but not even the example of the sahibs could teach the Hindoos humanity, and only the peremptory commands of Dr Ross could prevail upon his bearer to place a mattress under the sufferer!  On their return march, the party were further honoured by visits from several rajahs and zemindars, all of whom were “loud in complaint against the extortions of the aumils, who constantly attempted to gather more, and sometimes twice and a half as much, as the stipulated rent, in consequence of which the zemindars were compelled to rebel;” a view of the political condition of Oude which naturally results from its anomalous position, under a sovereign nominally independent, who is at once too weak to control his own subjects, and fearful of diminishing the shadow of authority left to him by calling in the only available aid.  On the 29th of March the party again reached Khyrabad, the appointed place of their separation, as it had been of their meeting; and here the narrative, as before, breaks off abruptly.

The concluding part, in order of time, of the colonel’s lucubrations, contains his narrative of a voyage on the Ganges, from Allahabad, by Dhacca, to Calcutta; but the features and incidents of this navigation have been so frequently described by travellers of all sorts and kinds, from Bishop Heber and Captain Bellew to our own much-esteemed Kerim Khan, that we shall devote but brief space to it.  He quitted Allahabad, as he informs us, December 5, 1839, so deeply regretted by the native population, that they determined to perpetuate his memory by the erection of a new ghat or landing-place, every brick of which was to be stamped with the letter D—­a distinction which he had, no doubt, deserved by the bonhommie towards both Hindoo and Moslem, which forms one of the most favourable traits in the jovial colonel’s character.  The Tribeenee Ghat, immediately below Allahabad, where the streams of the Jumna and the Ganges unite, is one of the holiest spots in India; to which pilgrims resort from all quarters, in the hope of securing paradise by dying at the junction of the sacred waters.  The spirit of religious exclusiveness prevails here as well as in other places; and the colonel mentions his having been once an eyewitness of some rough treatment received by a chumar, or leather-dresser, (one of the lowest castes,) at the hands of some high caste sepoys, who were highly

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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 341, March, 1844 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.