PLANTER LIFE IN THE MOFUSSIL.*
ALTHOUGH so much has been written in a general way about Anglo-Indians, it has occurred to but very few to describe the daily life of any special class save the military one ; and yet this life, influenced as it necessarily is by differing occupations, by the climate and physical features of a particular district, and by the characters of the native races with whom the Englishman is brought into contact, must have a distinct individuality and marked points of interest ; and the writer who elects to deal with it having the advantage of speaking of things with which he is exceedingly familiar, and of circumstances which affect his personal welfare, is naturally able to give to his picture a vividness which is utterly wanting to the mere generaliser,—that is, supposing him to be tolerably free from egoism, and to have the tact to be tufficiently descriptive without entering into too great minutias. Mr. Inglis has been very happy in his unpretending little book, • aPari and Work on the Nepaul Frontier. By Maori." London: Macmillan & Co.
which takes us into the indigo-planting district of Chumparun, near the Nepaul frontier, where he lived for twelve years, and initiates us into the work and amusements of factory managers and assistants, showing the natives as they appear in the intimate, every-day dealings into which they are brought with Europeans, and giving illustrations of their manners, customs, and conduct, so far as these bear upon the social life of foreign residents amongst them. The district to which the narrative refers is one of the loveliest portions of the beautiful and fertile province of Behar,—a tract of country on one side covered by rolling fields of grain, on the other by vast, billowy sweeps of the changing-hued feathery-indigo, inter- spersed with countless villages, nestling amid plantains and bamboos, with great masses of sombre mango wood every here and there, lakes and rivers adding their charms to the landscape, which is bounded to the north by great tracts of forest and jungle, backed by the Nepaul hills, The chief town, Mooteeharree, with its long bazaar, shaded by battered sacking or rotting bamboo mats, its few yucca houses for the better class, and its many mud dwellings for the lower ones, its Planters' Club, standing in its compound, its little church and row of opium godowns, with its court- house in a grove of trees and district jail near it, is distinctly brought before us. The native house consists of two mud and bamboo huts, united by a ragged fence, forming a quadrangle ; in one of these huts the owner and his family sleep during the rains, while the other forms a shelter for his goat or his cow, if he be rich enough to keep one, and also forms a store-house for his fuel, the animals being pastured on the common which forms an adjunct to almost every Indian village. The little court between the two huts is kept scrupulously clean, and serves as a place for the women to work in, the children to play in, and the men to enjoy their midday siesta, or their nightly chat around the cow-dung fire. At the " station " to which the writer belonged, the Euro- pean element consisted merely of the magistrate and collector, the doctor, the superintendent of police, and the opium agent ; a native regiment was, however, quartered some few miles off, and its officers, with Bohm twenty-five or thirty neighbouring indigo managers and assistants, completed the society of the district, which seems, however, to have been exceedingly genial and united. The factories are always of necessity situated close to a piece of water, and all around them stretch cultivable lauds, which are worked by their own staff of coolies, the number of bullocks being in proportion to the arable acreage. These farms, which are called zeraats, are managed with a thorough- ness and care not to be exceeded by our best-handled Scotch and English holdings, although the methods employed are still in most instances extremely primitive. The land is ploughed and reploughed, pulverised, harrowed, cleaned, and weeded, until the whole surface is moist and friable, and not a clod of the size of a pigeon's egg remains to be -seen the ditches are kept in proper order, the edges of the fields neatly trimmed, useless trees and clumps of jungle cut down, and excellent roads made in every direction. It must, however, be a droll sight to behold at certain seasons some four or five hun- dred coolies seated in a line thwacking the ground with their sticks, and raising a cloud of white dust, through which gleam indistinctly their swarthy figures, while the din and hubbub of their ceaseless chattering, shouting, and squabbling are some- thing indescribable ; scarcely less strange, indeed, than the scene at a later period, when the first green plant having been duly steeped, and the liquor allowed to run off into a second series of vats, a gang of men with furrovahs take their places in them, and with their long, black hair dripping with foam, their bronzed bodies glistening with blue liquor, every muscle stretched to its greatest tension, toss the water high in air with a mea- sured stroke, exciting each other to greater exertions by the wildest cries, until, after some three hours' work, the colour has come, and the exhausted coolie is permitted to rest. This beating, which serves two purposes, that of oxygenating the indigo, and that of separating it from the water in which it is held in solution, is now frequently effected by machinery ; and Mr. Inglis is of opinion that a great loss of material might be prevented by the adoption of improved methods both of culti- vation and manufacture. However this may be, his picturesque account of the old processes cannot fail to be read with interest, and the busy life of the planter, admitting, as it does, of many an occasional bit of sport and gaiety, would seem to be excep- tionally delightful. The indigo grown on the zeraats forms but
a small proportion of that which is taken to each factory, for by a peculiar system of obtaining the leasehold of the circurajacent 'villages the manager is enabled to induce the ryot to grow indigo in a certain portion of his little holding, and this involves that official's taking the superintendence of the cultivation, not merely of the plant, but, as upon the good farming depends the payment of the rent, of all the other crops. At earliest dawn, therefore, the assistant may be seen, his " bobbery pack" of miscellaneous canine creatures at his heels, first giving a look at his own zeraats, and then passing over the other lands, ordering harrow- ing here, reploughing there, and weeding somewhere else, com- mending the diligent ryot, reproving the lazy, and winding up by a burst after a jackal or a fox, on his way home to his bath and breakfast. The planter is, of course, assisted by a regular staff of native officials, each of whom, in an ascending ratio, has control over a certain part of the business ; and besides the ordinary poor coolies and low-caste Hindoos who do the ploughing, there is usually attached to each factory .a tola, or village of Dangurs, always ready for whatever work may be going on. These people originally, it is supposed, from ,Chota Nagpore, but now spread over the whole province of Behar, an active, industrious, tractable, faithful, merry-hearted race, are, in fact, the planter's special stand-by, and without them he would be very badly off. We must turn, however, from the Oustennie, and Bedahennee, and Mahye, which keep him so busy for the greater portion of the year, to the planter's play- time, when, in the short enjoyable, cool season, when work is slack, he hunts, visits, races, dances, and enjoys himself generally with a zest which is altogether unknown, except to those who have not seen their friends for a twelvemonth, and who know that such another interval must elapse before they see them again. In this part of the book we have spirited descriptions of pig-stick- ing, leopard and tiger-shooting, and stranger than all, of alli- gator-fishing. This last performance is accomplished by means of a strong rope, its strands loose, and merely knotted together, to which is attached an iron hook, and by way of bait a poor live duck which quacks dismally in anticipation of its fate, as on a little raft of plantain-pith it slowly floats down the muddy river. The mugger, or square-nosed alligator, to which nothing comes amiss, and which has a predilection for animal food, seizes it in his mighty jaws and disappears, entangling at the same time its teeth in the loosened strands of the rope, by means of which it is dragged against the bank, and speedily despatched by a spear-wound under its fore-arm or a bullet through the eye. In speaking of tiger-shooting, Mr. Inglis not only gives many anec- dotes of striking adventures with the royal foe, but enters at some length into descriptions, the result of personal observation, of the animal and of his habits, which are of decided interest. Naturally, however, that portion of " Maori's " work which re- fers more especially to the natives will be found the more curious and readable ; village sports, such as quail catching, wrestling,
are well described, as also the Pooneah, or rent-day, with its attendant festival, a Dangur dance, the Bara roopees, or actors, the Rajbhats, or wandering minstrels, and the village functionaries of all descriptions. Of the native police force he speaks indeed in most condemnatory terms, appearing to think it in need of much improvement, and particularly of an increase of European officers. Of the character of the Hindoo, Mr. Inglis has not evidently formed a high estimate, contending that far from being fit for self-government, he is 'utterly opposed to honest, truthful, stable government at all; and, moreover, entirely incapable of being educated up to any approximation to the European. However this may be, he has certainly given us, in his account of a planter's life, a very entertaining and instruc- tive volume; and we should like to see his example imitated. Others who have had opportunities of observing special phases of Indian life and character, would do well to give us in the same way an unpretending but faithful description of what they have seen and experienced.
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