The north-west
frontier
of India, on the
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16
[CA.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
a
for a thousand miles inland from Calcutta, whereas the horizon of
Bombay is barred beyond the harbour by the mountain face of the Western
Ghāts. The real greatness of Bombay came only with the opening of the
Suez Canal, and of the railway lines up the Borghāt and the Thalghāt.
The train works up the Ghāts from Bombay through thick forests,
and if it be the rainy season past rushing waterfalls, until it surmounts
the brink top and comes out on to the plain of the Deccan table-land in
the relative drought of the upper climate. The Western Deccan in rear of
Bombay constitutes the Marāthā country. The Marāthās are the southern-
most of the peoples of Indo-European speech in India. Their homeland
on the plateau, round the city of Poona, now forms the main portion of
the Province of Bombay. The landscape of the plateau lies widely open,
studded here and there with table-topped mountains, not unlike the kopjes
of South Africa. These steep-sided isolated mountain blocks have often
served as strongholds in warfare.
South-eastward of Poona, but still on the plateau country, is Hyderā.
bād, the largest native state in India. It is ruled under British suzerainty
by the Nizām. The majority of the Nizām's subjects speak Telugu and are
of Hindu faith, but the Nizām is a Muhammadan. Near his capital, Hyderā.
bād, is Golconda Fort, rising above the open plateau with flat top and cliff
sides. The name of Golconda has become proverbial for immensity of wealth.
Formerly it was the Indian centre of diamond cutting and polishing.
The wide Deccan Plateau is in most parts of no great fertility. Over
large areas it is fitted rather for the pasture of horses and cattle than for
the plough. Agriculture is best in the river valleys. But there is one large
district lying on the plateau top east of Bombay, and on the hill tops north
and south of the Narbadā valley which is of a most singular fertility. The
usually granitic and schistose rocks of the plateau have here been overlaid
by great sheets of basaltic lava. Detached portions of these lava beds form
the table tops of most of the kopje-like hills. The lava disintegrates into a
tenacious black soil, which does not fall into dust during the dry season,
but cracks into great blocks which remain moist. As the dry season
advances these blocks shrink, and the cracks grow broader, so that finally
it is dangerous for a horse to gallop over the plain, lest his hoof should be
caught in one of these fissures.
This remarkable earth is known as the Black Cotton Soil. The cotton
seeds are sown after the rains, and as the young plant grows a clod of earth
forms round its roots which is separated from the next similar clod by
cracks. Wheat is grown on this soil in the same manner, being sown after
the rainy season and reaped in the beginning of the hot season, so that
from beginning to end the crop is produced without exposure to rain, being
drawn up by the brilliant sunshine, and fed at the root by the moisture
preserved in the heavy soil.
## p. 17 (#47) ##############################################
I]
CENTRAL PROVINCES : BARODA
17
Thus in the part of India, which lies immediately east, north-east, and
north of Bombay the lowlands and the uplands are alike fertile - the
lowlands round Ahmadābād and Baroda, and in the valleys of the Narbadā
and Tāpti rivers, because of their alluvial-soil, and the uplands round
Poona and Indore because they are clothed with the volcanic cotton soil.
The east coast of India, where it trends north-eastward from the
mouths of the Godāvarī river to those of the Mahānadi, is backed by great
hill and forest districts, tenanted by big game and by uncivilised tribes of
men. The Eastern Ghāts are here higher than elsewhere, and they approach
near to the coast, so that their foot plain affords only a relatively narrow
selvage of populated country. Through this coastal plain the railway is
carried from Calcutta to Madras.
The reason for the primitive character of this part of the country, and
of many of the districts which extend northward through the hills almost to
the valley of the Son, is to be found in the conditions of soil and climate.
There have been no volcanic outpourings on the gneissic and granitic rocks
hereabouts, and the summer cyclones from the Bay of Bengal strike most
frequently upon this coast and travel inland in a north-westerly direction.
Some of the Gond tribes of the forests, who may perhaps be described as the
aborigines of India, still speak tongues which appear to be older than Dra-
vidian. In the more fertile parts of the upper Mahānadi and Godāvari
basins are comprised the Central Provinces of the direct British Raj, whose
capital is at Nāgpur. The Central Provinces have an area comparable
with that of Italy, though their population is but one-third the Italian
population. They must not be confused with the Central Indian Agency.
We return to the west coast. The Bombay and Baroda Railway runs
out of Bombay northward and does not ascend the Ghāts, but follows the
coastal plain across the lower Tāpti and Narbadā rivers to Baroda, and
thence on, across the alluvial flats of the Mahī and neighbouring small
rivers, to Ahmadābād. The Gaikwār of Baroda governs a small but very
rich and populous lowland. His people speak Gujarātī, though the Gaikwār
is a Marātbā, like Sindhia and Holkar. His territories are so mixed with
those of the Bombay Presidency that the map of the plains round Ahmadā.
bād and Baroda city is like that part of Scotland which is labelled Ross
and Cromarty. Ahmadābād was once the most important Muhammadan
city of Western India, and contains many fine architectural monuments,
surpassed only by those of the great Mughal capitals, Delhi and Agra.
Westward of the alluvial plains of Gujarāt, and beyond the Gulf of
Cambay, is the peninsula of Kāthiāwār, a low plateau, lower considerably
than the Deccan, but clothed in part with similar sheets of fertile volcanic
soil. Baroda has territory in Kāthiāwār, as has also the Presidency of
Bombay, but in addition there are a multitude of petty chieftainships.
## p. 18 (#48) ##############################################
18
[CH.
THE SUB-COVTIVENT OF INDIA
North of Kāthiāwār is another smaller hill district, constituting the island
of Cutch. The Rann of Cutch, a marshy area communicating with the sea,
separates the island from the mainland. Apart from Travancore and Cochin
in the far south, Kāthiāwār and Cutch are the only parts of India where
Feudal States come down to the coast. There are a few diminutive coas-
tal settlements belonging to the French and Portuguese governments, but
these are too insignificant to break the general rule that the shores of India
are directly controlled by the British Raj. The largest of the foreign
European settlements is at Goa on the west coast south of Bombay. Goa
has a fine harbour but the Ghāts block the roads inland.
We have now completed the itinerary of the inner parts of India.
What remains to be described is the north-western land of passage where
India merges with Irān and Turān-Persia and Turkestān. The Himālayan
barrier, and the desert plateau of Tibet in rear of it, so shield the Indian
world from the north and north-east that the medieval Buddhist pilgrims
from China to Gayā were in the habit of travelling westward by the desert
routes north of Tibet as far as the river Oxus, and then southward over
the Hindu Kush. Thus they came into India from the north-west, having
circumvented Tibet rather than cross it. Great mountain ranges articu-
late with the Himālayas at their eastern end, and extend into the roots of
the peninsula of Further India. Thus the direct way from China into
India by the east is obstructed. To-day as we have seen the railway systems
of Burma and India are still separate.
The centre of north-western India is occupied by a group of large
Native States, known collectively as Rājputāna. Through Rājputāna,
diagonally from the south-west north-eastward, there runs the range of
the Arāvalli hills for a distance of fully three hundred miles. The north-
eastern extremity of the Arāvallis is the Ridge of Delhi on the Jumna river.
At their southern end, but separated from the main range by a hollow, is
the isolated Mount Abu, the highest point in Rājputāna, standing up con-
spicuously from the surrounding plains to a height of some five thousand
feet.
East of the Arāvallis, in the basin of the Chambal tributary of the
Jumna-Ganges, is the more fertile part of Rājputāna, with the cities of
Jaipur, Ajmer, Udaipur, and the old fortress of Chitor. Beyond the
Chambal river itself, but within its basin, are Gwalior and Indore, the seats
of the princes Sindhia and Holkar. But Gwalior and Indore belong to the
Central Indian Agency and not to Rājputāna.
West of the Arāvalli hills is the great Indian desert, prolonged seaward
by the salt and partly tidal marsh of the Rann of Cutch. In oases of this
desert are some of the smaller Rājput capitals, notably Bikaner. Beyond the
desert flows the great Indus river through a land which is dry, except for the
## p. 19 (#49) ##############################################
I]
THE GREAT INDIAN DESERT
19
irrigated strips beside the river banks and in the delta of Sind below
Hyderābād. South of Mount Abu streams descend from the end of the
Arāvalli hills to the Gulf of Cambay through the fertile lowland of
Ahmadābād, sunk like a land strait between the plateau of Kāthiāwār to
the west and the ends of the Vindhya and Sātpurā ranges to the east. The
Arāvallis are the last of the Central Indian hills towards the north-west.
Outside the Arāvallis the Indus valley spreads in wide low-lying alluvial
plains, like those of the Ganges, but dry.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to India of the
existence of the great desert of Rājputāna. The ocean to the south-east
and south-west of the peninsula was at most times an ample protection
against overseas invasion, until the Europeans rounded the Cape of Good
Hope. The vast length of the Himālaya, backed by the desert plateau of
Tibet, was an equal defence on the north side. Only to the north-west does
India lie relatively open to the incursions of the warlike peoples of Western
and Central Asia. It is precisely in that direction that the Indian desert
presents a waterless void extending north-eastward from the Rann of
Cutch, for some 400 miles, with a breadth of 150 miles. In rear of the
desert a minor bulwark is constituted by the Arāvalli range.
Only between the north-eastern extremity of the desert and the foot
of the Himālayas below Simla is there an easy gateway into India. No
river traverses this gateway, which'is on the divide between the systems
of the Indus and the Jumna-Ganges. Delhi stands on the west bank of
the Jumna at the northern extremity of the Arāvallis, just where the
invading forces from the north-west came through to the navigable waters.
1 Aided by such powerful natural conditions the Rājputs--the word
means 'sons of princes’– were during many centuries the defenders of India
against invasion by the direct road to Delhi. Unable at last to stem the
tide of Musalmān conquest, they have maintained themselves on the
southern flank of the advance, and to-day some of their princely families
claim to trace their lineage back in unbroken descent from ancestors before
the Christian era. The descendants of conquerors who had won their
kingdoms with the sword, they remain even now proud aristocratic clans
holding a predominant position in the midst of a population far more
numerous than themselves.
Narrow gauge lines branch through Rājputāna in the direction of
Delhi, past the foot of Mount Abu, which rises like an island of granite
from amid the sandy desert. The top of Abu is a small rugged plateau,
measuring fourteen miles by four, in the midst of which is the Gem Lake, a
most beautiful sheet of water, set with rocky islands and overhung with great
masses of rock. The house of the Resident of Rājpuātna is on its shore, for
Mount Abu is the centre from which Rājputāna is controlled, so far as is
## p. 20 (#50) ##############################################
20
[CH,
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
one
>
necessary, by the advice of the Viceroy. The summit of Abu also bears
some famous ruins of Jain temples.
Some of the most beautiful cities of India are in Rājputāna. Udaipur
stands beside a lake, with its palaces and ghāts reflected in the clear
waters. Ajmer, now under direct British rule, is set in a hollow among
low hills, and is surrounded by a wall. Here also there is a lake, and upon
its banks are marble pavilions. Jaipur is a walled city, surrounded by
rocky hills crowned with forts. The streets are broad, and cross
another at right angles.
The Rājputāna Agency is as large as the whole British Isles, but it
contains only about ten million people, since a great part of it is desert.
The Central Indian Agency is about as large as England and Scotland
without Wales. It has a population only a little smaller than that of
Rājputāna. We may measure the significance of the more important
chiefs in these two Agencies by the fact that Sindhia rules a country little
less, either in area or population, than the kingdom of Scotland.
From Rājputāna we come to Delhi, which may truly be called the
historical focus of all India ; for, as we have seen, it commands the gate-
way which leads from the Punjab plain to Hindustān, the plain of the
Jumna and the Ganges. Here the fate of invasions from India from the
north-west has been decided. Some have either never reached this gate-
way or have failed to force their way through it. The conquests of Darius
in the latter part of the sixth century B. C. and of Alexander the Great in the
years 327-5 B. C. were not carried beyond the Punjab plain. Such direct in-
fluence as they exercised in modifying the character of Indian civilisation
must, therefore, have been confined to this region. On the other hand, the
invasions which have succeeded in passing the gateway and in effecting a per-
manent settlement in Hindustān have determined the history of the whole
sub-continent. These belong to two groups, the Āryan and the Musalmān,
distinguished by religion, language, and type of civilisation, and separated
from each other by an interval of probably some two thousand years.
For the chronology of the Aryan conquests, which may well have
extended over many generations or even centuries, we possess no certain
dates. All the knowledge which we can hope to gain of the history of
.
this remote period must be gleaned from the study of the apcient scrip-
tures of these Āryan invaders.
The course of Musalmān invasion, which entailed consequences of per-
haps equal importance, may be traced with greater precision. If we reckon
from the Arab conquest of Sind in 712 A. D. to the establishment of the Sul-
tanate of Delhi in 1193 A. D. , we shall see that nearly five centuries elapsed
before Musalmān conquest spread from the confines through the Delhi
gateway into the very 'heart of India. During this long period it was held in
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I]
DELHI
21
check by the Rājput princes ; and their ultimate failure to impede its
progress was due to internal discord which has always been the bane of
feudal confederations.
So Delhi, founded by the Rājputs in the neighbourhood of Indra-
prastha (the modern Indarpat), the capital of the Kurus in the heroic ages
celebrated in India's great epic poem, the Mahābhārata, passed into the
hands of the invading Musalmāns and with it passed the predominant
power in India.
What Benares, and Patna, and Gayā were and are to the Brāhman
and Buddhist civilisations native to India, what Calcutta, and Madras, and
Bombay, and Karāchi are to the English from over the seas, that were
Delhi and Agra to the Musalmāns entering India from the north-west.
More than three centuries and a quarter later another Musalmān
invasion, more effective than the former, came into India by way of Delhi.
The Mughals or Mongols of Central Asia had been converted to Islām, and
in the time of our King Henry VIII they refounded the Musalmān power
at Delhi. For a hundred and fifty years, from the time of our Queen
Elizabeth to that of our Queen Anne, a series of Mughal emperors, from
Humāyān to Aurangzeb, ruled in splendid state at Delhi over the greater
part of India. Agra, a hundred miles lower down the Jumna, became a
secondary or alternative capital, and in these two cities we have to-day
the supreme examples of Muhammadan architectural art.
More than sixty-two millions of the Indian population hold the faith
of Islām. They are scattered all over the land, usually in a minority, but
frequently powerful, for Jsām has given ruling chiefs to many districts
which are predominantly Hindu. Only in two parts of India are the Musal-
māns in a majority, namely, in the east Bengal about Dacca, and in the
Indus basin to the north-west. We may think of the Indus basin - lying
beyond the desert, low beneath the uplands of Afghānistān -- as being an
ante-chamber to India proper. In this ante-chamber, for more than nine
hundred years the Musalmāns have been a majority.
When the decay of the Mughal Empire began in the time of our
Queen Anne, the chief local representatives of the imperial rule, such as the
Nizām of Hyderābād, and the Nawābs of Bengal and Oudh, assumed an
independent position. It was with these new dynasties that the East India
Company came into conflict in the days of General Clive. Thus we may
regard the British Empire in India as having been built up from the fray-
ments into which the Mughal Empire broke. In one region, however, the
Western Deccan, the Hindus reasserted themselves, and there was a rival
bid for empire. From the neighbourhood of Poona the Marāthās conquered
eastward to the borders of Bengal, and north-ward to the walls of Delhi.
>
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22
[CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
It was the work of Lord Lake and General Wellesley to defeat the
Marāthās.
North-westward of Delhi, in the gateway between the desert and the
mountains, the ground is sown over with battlefields - ancient battlefields
near the Jumna, where the incoming Musalmāns overthrew the Indian
resistance, and modern battlefields near the Sutlej, where advancing British
power inflicted defeat upon the Sikhs. It is by no accident that Simla,
the residence of the British Viceroy during half the year, is placed on the
Himālayan heights above this natural seat of empire and of struggle for
empire.
In the Mutiny of 1857 the Sikhs of the Punjab remained loyal to the
British rule, although they had been conquered in terrible battles on the
Sutlej less than ten years before. So it happened that some of the British
forces in the Punjab were free to march to recapture Delhi, which had
been taken by the mutineers. Thus the Indian Mutiny was overcome from
two bases ; on the one hand at Lucknow and Cawnpore by an army from
Calcutta and the sea ; and on the other hand at Delhi by an army advancing
from the Punjab over the track beaten by many conquerors in previous ages.
The river Jumna runs past Delhi with a southward course, and is
there crossed by a great bridge, over which the East Indian Railway runs
from Delhi through the United Provinces and Bengal to Howrah, opposite
Calcutta. West of Delhi is the last spur of the Arāvalli hills, the famous
Ridge of Delhi, striking north-eastward to the very bank of the river. The
city lies in the angle between the Ridge and the Jumna. To the north, in
the point of the angle, is the European quarter; in the centre is Shāhjahān-
ābād, the modern native Delhi; southward of the modern city is Firozābād,
or ancient Delhi. Between Shāhjahānābād and the river is the Fort.
The plain southward of Firozābād continues to widen between the
river and the hills, and is strewn over with still more ancient ruins. To
the west of these, at the foot of the hills, and in part upon them, is the
site chosen for the new imperial capital of British India. Finally, eleven
miles south of Delhi are the buildings of the Kutb Minār, where are some
of the few remains of the early Hindu period.
A hundred miles north-north-east of Delhi is Hardwār on the Ganges,
at the point where the river leaves the last foot-hills of the Himālaya and
enters the plain. Hardwār is the rival of Benares as a centre of Hindu
pilgrimage for the purpose of ablution in the sacred waters. At the annual
fair are gathered hundreds of thousands of worshippers. The great day at
Hardwar is near the end of March when the Hindu year begins. Then,
according to tradition, the Ganges river first appears from its source in
the mountains. The water at Hardwār is purer than at Benares in the
plain. It flows swiftly and is as clear as crystal.
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2
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1
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## p. 22 (#56) ##############################################
Map 2
70
75
80
440
R. Tärim
CHINESE E
TUR KE STAN
SKhotan.
35
Jam
HyberPassila
Ladug TIBET
eshawa
Shelum
Beas
R. Ravi
Chenab
30
Lahore
Amritsar
Sobraonx kaliwa osimla
Ferozeporet Sirhind
12
Mudki Ambalas
Nābhao
Mussoorie
Mardware
Karnală
Panipat
Meerut
DELHID
Bareilly
D
I
Patiala
R. Sutlej
Ferozeshānis
R. Ganges
A
N
R.
Gogre
Vumna
Desert
Jaipur
Agra
Lucknown
Cawnpore
Unipu
Hillso Ajmer
Gwalior
Chambal
Àravalli
Allahābād
25
70
75
80
George Philip & Son, Ltd
A AND THE ADJACENT COUNTRIES
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I]
NEPAL : PATIALA : N. W. FRONTIER
:
23
From near Darjeeling until near Hardwār the foothills of the
Himālaya for five hundred miles belong to the Gurkha kingdom of Nepāl,
whose capital is Kātmāndu. Nowithstanding its close connexion with the
Indian army, Nepāl is counted as an independent state, over which British
suzerainty does not formally extend. From Hardwār, however, for seven
hundred miles north-westward to where the Indus breaks from the moun-
tains, the foothills belong to the Empire, and upon them stand, high above
the plain, a series of hill stations. The first of these stations is Mussoorie,
not far northward of Hardwār. Mussoorie is about a mile above sea level.
Close by, but lower down, is Dehra Dūn, the headquarters of the Gurkha
Rifles. Hereabouts the Tarai, an elephant-haunted jungle belt, follows
the foothills, separating them from the cultivated plains. A hundred miles
farther along the mountain brink is Simla, the summer capital of India,
high on a spur above the divide between the Indus and the Ganges. The
snow often rests on the ground in the winter at Simla.
Immediately to the north of Simla the Sutlej, tributary to the Indus,
trenches a way out of the mountains, and where it issues on to the plain
is the off-take of a great system of irrigation canals. The lowland north-
westward of Delhi has a sparse rainfall, for the monsoon has lost much of
its moisture thus far north-westward from the Bay of Bengal. As a result
of the construction of the irrigation canals colonies have been established
between the Sutlej and the Jumna, and wheat is grown on thousands of
square miles that were formerly waste. India has a great population,
but with modern methods of water supply, and more advanced methods
of cultivation there is still ample room for settlement within its boundaries.
Two Sikh Feudal States, Patiāla and Nābha, are included within the
area now irrigated from the Sutlej, but Amritsar, the holy city of the
Sikhs, lying beyond the Sutlej, about two hundred and fifty miles from
Delhi, is under the immediate British Raj. Fifty miles west of Amritsar
is Lahore, the old Musalmān capital of the Punjab. We conquered the
Punjab from the Sikhs, but for many centuries it had been ruled by the
Musalmāns. In the break-up of the Mughal Empire during the eighteenth
century, invaders came from Persia and from Afghānistān, who carried
devastation even as far as Delhi. In their wake, with relative ease, the
Sikhs, contemporaries of the Marāthās of Poona, established a dominion
in the helpless Punjab. They extended their rule also into the mountains
of Kashmir, north of Lahore.
In all the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which war-
like preparation must ever be ready. It is the north-west frontier of India.
True that there is another boundary even longer, drawn across the Ameri-
can continent, but there fortunately only customs-houses are necessary,
and an occasional police guard.
The north-west frontier of India, on the
## p. 24 (#58) ##############################################
24
(сн.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
other hand, lies through a region whose inhabitants have been recruited
throughout the ages by invading warlike races. Except for the Gurkha
mountaineers of Nepāl, the best soldiers of the Indian army are drawn
from this region, from the Rājputs, the Sikhs, the Punjābi Musalmāns,
the Dogrā mountaineers north of the Punjab, and the Pathān mountaineers
west of the Punjab. The provinces along this frontier and the Afghān land
immediately beyond it, are the one region in all India from which, under
some ambitious lead, the attempt might be made to establish a fresh
imperial rule by the overthrow of the British Raj. Such is the teaching of
history, and such the obvious fate of the less warlike peoples of India,
should the power of Britain be broken either by warfare on the spot, or by
the defeat of our navy. Beyond the north-west frontier, moreover, in the
remoter distance, are the continental powers of Europe.
The Indian army and the Indian strategical railways are, therefore,
organised with special reference to the belt of territory which extends
north-east and south-west beyond the Indian desert, and is traversed from
end to end by the Indus river. This frontier belt divides naturally into
two parts. Inland we have the Punjab, where five rivers—the Indus, Jhelum,
Chenāb, Rāvi, and Sutlej-emerging from their mountain valleys, gradu-
ally close together through the plain to form the single stream of the
Lower Indus ; seaward we have Sind, where the Indus divides into distri-
butaries forming a delta.
Sind is a part of the Bombay Presidency, for it is connected with
Bombay by sea from the port of Karāchi. Of late a railway has been con-
structed from Ahmadābād, in the main territory of Bombay, across the
southern end of the desert to Hyderābād, at the head of the Indus delta.
The Punjab is a separate province, with its own lieutenant-governor at
Lahore, and a population as large as that of Spain.
To understand the significance of the north-west frontier of India
we must look far beyond the immediate boundaries of the Empire. Persia,
Afghānistān, and Baluchistān form a single plateau, not so lofty as Tibet,
but still one of the great natural features of Asia. This plateau in its en-
tirety is most conveniently known as Irān. On all sides the Irānian plateau
descends abruptly to lowlands or to the sea, save in the north-west, where it
rises to the greater heights of Armenia, and in the north-east, where it rises
to the lofty Pāmirs. Southward and south-westward of Irān lie the Arabian
sea and the Persian gulf, and the long lowland which is traversed by the
rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Northward, to the east of the Caspian sea, is
the broad lowland of Turkestān or Turān, traversed by the rivers Oxus and
Jaxartes, draining into the sea of Aral. Eastward is the plain of the Indus.
The defence of India from invasion depends in the first place on the main
tenance of British sea-power in the Persian gulf and the Indian ocean, and
## p. 25 (#59) ##############################################
I]
ROUTES LEADING INTO N. W. INDIA
25
in the second place on our refusal to allow the establishment of alien bases
of power on the Irānian plateau, especially on those parts of it which lie
towards the south and east.
In the north-east corner of Irān, west of the Punjab, a great triangu-
lar bundle of mountain ridges splays out westward and southward from
the north-east. These ridges and the intervening valleys constitute
Afghānistān. Flowing from the Afghān valleys we have on the one hand the
Kābul river, which descends eastward to the Indus, and on the other hand
the greater river Helmand, which flows south-westward into the depressed
basin of Seistān in the very heart of Irān. There the Helmand dividez in-
to many channels, forming as it were an inland delta, from which the
waters are evaporated by the hot air, for there is no opening to the sea.
The valley of the Kābul river on the one hand, and the oasis of Seistān on
the other, might in the hands of an enemy become bases wherein to prepare
for the invasion of India. Therefore, without annexing this intricate and
difficult upland, we have declared it to be the policy of Britain to exclude
from Afghānistān and from Seistān all foreign powers.
There are two lines, and only two, along which warlike invasions of
N. W. India have been conducted in historical times. On the one hand the
mountains become very narrow just north of the head of the Kābul river.
There a single though lofty ridge, the Hindu Kush, is all that separates
the basin of the Oxus from that of the Indus. Low ground, raised only a
few hundred feet above the sea, is very near on the two sides of the Hindu
Kush. There are several ways into India over this great but single range
and down the Kābul valley. The most famous is known as the Khyber
route, from the name of the last defile through which the track descends
into the Indian plain.
The other route of invasion lies five hundred miles away to the west
and south-west. There the Afghān mountains come suddenly to an end,
and an easy way lies round their fringe for four hundred miles over the
open plateau, from Herāt to Kandahār. This way passes not far from
Seistān. South-eastward of Kandahār it descends through a mountainous
district into the lowland of the Indus. This is now called the Bolān route,
from the last gorge towards India ; but in ancient times the road went
farther south over the Müla Pass. It debouches upon the plain opposite
to the great Indian desert. Therefore the Khyber route has been the more
frequently trodden, for it leads directly, between the desert and the moun-
tains, upon the Delhi gateway of inner India.
Another line of communication connecting India with Persia passes
through the Makrān, or the barren region lying along the coast of Baluchis-
tān. This route was much frequented by Arab traders in the Middle
Ages ; and by it at an earlier epoch Alexander the Great led back
## p. 26 (#60) ##############################################
26
[ch.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
one detachment of his forces with disastrous results. But apart from this
return march, and the Indian expeditions of Semiramis and of Cyrus which
it was designed to emulate and which may or may not be historical, this
route seems not to have been followed by any of the great invasions of
India in historical times.
The practical significance of all this geography becomes evident not
only when we study the history of Ancient India but also when we consider
the modern organisation of the Indian defensive forces. They are grouped
into a northern and a southern army. The northern army is distributed
from Calcutta past Allahābād and Delhi to Peshāwar, the garrison city on
the frontier. All the troops stationed along this line may be regarded as
supporting the brigades on the Khyber front. The southern army is
similarly posted with reference to Quetta on the Bolān route. It is dis-
tributed through the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, whence Quetta can
be reinforced by sea through the port of Karāchi.
The conditions of the defence of India have been vitally changed by
the construction of the North-Western Railway from Karāchi through the
Indus basin, with branches towards the Bolān and the Khyber. To-day
that defence could be conducted over the sea directly from Britain through
Karāchi, so that the desert of Rājputāna would lie between the defending
armies and the main community of India within.
Karāchi stands at the western limit of the Indus delta, in a position
therefore comparable to that of Alexandria beside the Nile delta. The
railway keeps to the west of the river for more than three hundred miles
as far as Sukkur, where is the Lansdowne bridge, eight hundred and forty
feet long, between Sukkur and Rohri on the east bank. This is the very
heart of the rainless region of India. During twelve years there were only six
showers at Rohri. A scheme is under consideration for damming the Indus
near this point, in order that the irrigation canals below may be fed, not
only in time of food as at present, but in the season of low water as well.
From Sukkur a branch railway traverses the desert north-westward
to the foot of the hills below the Bolān Pass. This part of the desert
occupies a re-entering angle of lowland, with the mountains of Afghānistān
to the north and those of Baluchistān to the west. On the map, the
Afghān ranges have the effect of being festooned from the Bolān eastward
and northward. The railway ascends to Quetta either by the Mushkāf
valley - the actual line of the Bolān torrent having been abandoned - or
by a longer loop line, the Harnai, which runs to the Pishin valley, north
of Quetta. The latter is the usual way. By the Mushkāf route the
line is carried over a boulder-strewn plain about half a mile broad in
the bottom of a gorge, with steeply rising heights on either side. Here
and there the strip of lower ground is trenched and split by deep canyons.
## p. 27 (#61) ##############################################
1]
PLAN OF THE INDUS
27
At first the rails follow the Mushkāf river, and the gradients are not very
severe, but once Hirok, at the source of the Bolān river, is passed, a
gradient of one in twenty-five begins, and two powerful engines are
required to drag the train up. The steep bounding ridges now close in on
either side, with cliffs rising almost perpendicularly to several hundred
feet. Occasional blockhouses high up amid the crags defend the pass.
The gradients of the Harnai route are not quite so steep as those of
the Mushkāf. Should either way be blocked or carried away by landslips
or foods, the other would be available. The Harnai line passes through
the Chappar rift, a precipitous gorge in a great mass of limestone. The
old Bolān gorge way of the caravans was dangerous because of' the sudden
spates which at times filled all the bottom between the cliffs.
Quetta lies about a mile above sea-level in a small plain, surrounded
by great mountains rising to heights of two miles and more. Irrigation
works have been constructed, so that Quetta is now an oasis amid desert
mountains. It has a population of some thirty thousand.
The Agent
General for British Baluchistān resides there. The town is very strongly
fortified, for it commands the railways leading from the Khojak pass down
into India. Quetta and Peshāwar are the twin keys of the frontier.
From Quetta there is a railway north-westward for another hundred
and twenty miles to Chaman on the Afghān frontier, where is the last
British outpost. This line pierces the Khojak ridge by a tunnel and then
emerges on the open upland plain of Irān. The rails are kept ready at
Chaman for the continuation of the track to Kandahār, seventy miles
further.
We return to Rohri on the Indus. The North-Western Railway now
runs to the east of the river and soon enters the Punjab. Not very long
ago all this land was a desert. To-day, as the result of a great investment
of British capital, irrigation works have changed the whole aspect of the
country. The plain of the Indus has become one of the chief wheat fields
of the British Empire, for wheat is the principal crop in the Punjab, in
parts of Sind, and outside the basin of the Indus itself-in the districts
of the United Provinces which lie about Agra. The wheat production of
India on an average of years is five times as great as that of the United
Kingdom, and about half as great as that of the United States. In the
three years 1910-12 the export of wheat from India to the United Kingdom
exceeded that from the United States to the United Kingdom.
The brown waste of the plains of the Punjab becomes, after the winter
rains, a waving sea of green wheat, extending over thousands of square miles.
Far beyond the area within which the rainfall alone suffices, the lower
Punjab and the central strip of Sind have been converted into a second
Egypt. Though the navigation of the Indus is naturally inferior to that of
7
## p. 28 (#62) ##############################################
28
[cu.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
the Ganges, yet communication has been maintained by boat from the
Punjab to the sea from Greek times downward. The Indus flotilla of
steam-boats has however suffered fatally from the competition of the
North-Western Railway, and the wheat exported from Karāchi is now
almost wholly rail-borne.
At Multān, a considerable mercantile city near the Chenāb, the
railway forks to Lahore and Peshāwar. From Lahore the triangle is
completed by a line to Peshāwar along the foot of the mountains, past
the great military station of Rāwalpindi. The lines from Lahore and
Multān unite on the east bank of the Indus, fifty miles east of Peshāwar,
just below the point where the Kābul tributary enters. They cross the
Indus by the bridge of Attock. Above Rāwalpindi is the hill station of
Murree. The long tongues of land between the five rivers of the Punjab
are known as Doābs, a word which in Persian has the significance of
Mesopotamia in Greek. Punjab signifies the land of five rivers.
Peshāwar is the capital of the North-West Frontier Province created
in 1901, a strip of hilly country beyond the Indus. Unlike its sister Quetta,
it lies in the Indian lowland at the foot of the Khyber pass. It has about
a hundred thousand inhabitants, chiefly Musalmān. In the Bāzār are to
be seen representatives of many Asiatic races, for Peshāwar is the market
of exchange where the great road from Samarkand and Bukhāra, over
the Hindu Kush and through Kābul, by the Khyber meets the road from
Delhi and Lahore. Here you may buy skeins of Chinese silk, brought by
the same roundabout ways that were trodden by the Chinese pilgrims in
the Middle Ages.
Jamrūd, at the entrance to the Khyber, lies some nine miles west of
Peshāwar. In the Sarāi at Jamrūd all caravans going into India or
returning to Central Asia halt for the night. The great Bactrian camels,
two-humped and shaggy, present an unwonted contrast with the smaller
Indian camels. The fort of Ali Masjid, nearly three thousand feet above
the sea, crowns the steep ascent to the crest of the pass. At Landi Kotal
begins the descent into Afghānistān. Thus the Khyber is a saddle in the
heights, not the gorge of a torrent as is the Bolān. The Kābuì river flows
through an open valley until it nears the British frontier.
Then it swerves
through a precipitous chasm by a northward loop. The road is therefore
carried over the intervening mountain spur,
The Khyber is protected by its own hill tribes, enlisted in the Khyber
Rifles. We have brought these Pathān mountaineers into the service of law
and order by enrolling them in military forces, just as the Scottish highlan-
ders were enrolled in the British army in the eighteenth century. The
Pathāns are born fighters. They love fighting for its own sake, and many a
curious tale is told of the vendettas intermittently continued when the
## p. 29 (#63) ##############################################
I]
KASHMIR: KARAKORAM ; HINDU KUSH
29
a
>
Khyber riflemen of Peshāwar return from time to time on furlough to their
homes in the hills.
The Indus river rises, like the Brahmaputra, high on the plateau of
Tibet to the north of Benares, and flows north-westward through the
elevated valley of Leh until it reaches the 36th parallel of latitude. There
it turns south-westward and cleaves its way through the Himālayas by the
grandest gorge in the world. You may stand on the right bank of the
Indus and look across the river to where the summit of Nanga Parbat
descends by a single slope of four miles - measured vertically - to the river
bank, every yard of the drop being visible.
Within the great northward angle thus made by the Indus is a second
smaller valley amid the mountains, which is also drained through a gorge
to the Punjab. This is the famous valley of Kashmir, whose central plain,
sheltered in every direction by lofty snow-clad mountains, is a sunny para-
dise of fertility. Srīnagar is the capital of Kashmir, whose Mahārāja rules
also over Ladākh (capital Leh) formerly a province of Tibet.
The northernmost outposts of the Empire are in the valleys of Gilgit
and Chitrāl, which diverge south-eastward and south-westward to the
Indus and Kābul rivers. Enframing Gilgit and Chitrāl is a great angle of
the loftiest mountain ridge, which may be likened, as it appears upon the
map, to a pointed roof sheltering all India to the south. The south-east-
-
ward limb of the angle is the Karakoram range, and the south-westward is
the Hindu Kush range. The north-western extremity of the Himālaya fits
into the angle of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, from which it is
separated by the valleys of Leh, Gilgit, and Chirtāl.
The Karakoram is backed by the heights of the Tibetan plateau,
here it is true at their narrowest, but none the less almost inaccessible, ex-
cept for one or two passes at heights of 18,000 feet, which are traversed in
the summer time by a few Yak caravans. In the Karakoram is mount
Godwin Austen, second only to Everest among the mountains of the world.
There also are the largest glaciers outside the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The Hindu Kush, notwithstanding its elevation, is in marked con-
trast to the Karakoram. It is a single broad ridge, backed by no plateau,
and is notched by some relatively low passes. The ridge itself may be
crossed in a few days or even hours at heights of twelve and thirteen thou-
sand feet. The difficulties of access from the valley head of Kābul to the
lowland of Bactria on the Oxus lie rather in the approaches to the passes
than in the passes themselves. But human patience has in all ages suc-
ceeded in surmounting these difficulties ; and the Hindu Kush, although
the natural boundary of India north-westward, has been no effective
barrier either in a military or a commercial sense.
There is lateral communication between the Khyber and Bolān routes
## p. 30 (#64) ##############################################
30
[CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
a
outside the Indian frontier and yet within the Hindu Kush. The route
follows a chain of valleys between Kābul and Kandahār through Ghazni.
Along it from Kandahār to Kābul the army of Alexander the Great marched
to his Bactrian and Indian campaigns : and it again became famous in the
last generation because of the march of General Roberts from Kābul to
the relief of Kandahār during the Afghān war of 1882. From this Kābul-
Kandahār road several passes penetrate the mountainous belt of the Indian
frontier, presenting alternative exits from the two trunk routes. But amid
the maze of mountains north of the Kābul-Kandahār line, there are no
practicable alternatives to the two ways-over the Hindu Kush and over
the plateau from Seistān.
The long barrier of the Hindu Kush seems as if it were designed by
nature to be the protecting boundary of India on the north-west. It is the
'scientific frontier' which in the last century British policy sought in vain
to secure. At the present time it lies mostly within the 'buffer state of
Afghānistān which was created as the best alternative. But there have
been periods in history when it has formed the actual, as well as the ideal,
limits of the Indian empire. In the last quarter of the fourth century
B. C. , within a few years of the departure from India of Alexander the
Great, it separated the dominions of the Maurya emperor of India, Chandra-
gupta, from those of Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in the eastern
portion of his vast empire. In about the middle of the third century B. C.
the Seleucid province of Bactria, which lay immediately to the north of the
Hindu Kush, became an independent kingdom, from which, when the
Maurya empire declined and the barrier was no longer adequately pro-
tected, a second series of Greek invasions poured into India about 200 B. C.
The river Indus also appears at first sight to form a natural boun-
dary between India and Irān ; but in this case it would be more correct
historically to say that the country through which it flows has more fre-
quently been the cause of contention between India and Irān. The very
name India, the country of the Indus,' was first known to the West as
that of a province of the Persian empire. In Herodotus, the Greek his-
torian of the wars between the Persian empire and Greece in the early part
of the fifth century B. c. , it bears its original meaning. At a later date, Greek
and Roman writers, as so often happens in geographical nomenclature, ,
transferred the name of the best known province to the whole country and
set an example which has since been followed universally.
Thus we conclude a rapid survey of the historical and political geo-
graphy of a vast region. The south and centre of India is structurally an
island, whose steep brinks, the Western and Eastern Ghāts, are continued -
beyond the coastal selvage and the strip of shallow water off shore-by
renewed steep descents into the abysses of the Arabian sea and the Bay of
## p. 31 (#65) ##############################################
I
CONTROLLING GEOGRAPHICAL FACTS
31
-
Bengal, two miles deep. This great island has granitic foundations, although
it is clothed in places with volcanic rocks. Its landward brinks are marked
by mount Abu, the Aravalli hills, the ridge of Delhi, and the long low east-
ward curve of hills ending at Rājmahāl, where the principal coal seams of
India rest on the granitic base. The salient angles at Delhi and Rājmahāl
are received, at a distance, by the great re-entering angles of the main
framework of Asia, constituted by the brink of Irān beyond the Indus, the
Himālayan brink of Tibet, and the mountains of the Burmese border.
Between these rocky limits--salient on the Indian side and re-entering on
the Asiatic side-extends a broad alluvial plain, two hundred miles in
average breadth, and two thousand miles long, from the mouths of the
Ganges northward to the foot of the mountains, then north-westward along
that foot to the Punjab, and then south-westward to the mouths of the
Indus.
The Indian heights proper are so relatively low, attaining to eight or
nine thousand feet only in the far south, that the whole geography of India
seems to be dominated by the Himālayas. We recover our sense of the
true proportions only when we reflect that even the Himālayas are only
five or six miles high, and that India is two thousand miles long. None the
less the Himālayas and Tibet are in very real sense the controlling fact of
Indian geography. They pierce upward through more than half the atmos-
phere into highland climates, and therefore constitute for man a mighty
natural boundary. They also guide and limit the winds of the lower air, and
thus govern the Indian climate. India is an agricultural land, whose tillage
is everywhere dependent, either directly or indirectly, upon the moisture
brought from the southern ocean by the great wind swirl of the summer
and autumn monsoon. That swirl strikes the Malabar coast as a south-west
wind, sweeps over Bengal as a south wind, and drives up the Ganges
plains as a south-east wind. The whole movement is induced by suction to
where the air is rising over the hot plains of the Middle Indus. There in the
summer is one of the hottest places, if not the hottest place in the world.
The winds which come down to it off the Irānian plateau, thus completing
the swirl, stream off a dry land, and bring no moisture. In the winter a dry,
bright wind, the north-east monsoon, descends from Tibet over all India.
Only in the Punjab and in the far south are there considerable winter rains.
The Punjab is in Mediterranean latitudes, where it rains in the winter.
By these physical characteristics India is made fruitful, and is at the
same time more than half isolated from the rest of the world.
The most
primitive of its inhabitants are the Gonds and other tribes, who have been
driven into the forest recesses of the hills eastward of the Deccan plateau
and into other regions difficult of access throughout the sub-continent. The
Dravidian languages have been preserved in the southern promontory. The
## p. 32 (#66) ##############################################
32
(CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
Āryan and later invaders from western and central Asia have come from the
north-west through the passage of Delhi, and have thence dispersed south-
eastward down the Ganges to Bengal, and south-westward to the fertile
Gujarāti and Marāthā countries. Through the eastern mountains, which
sever the Indian Empire from China, have penetrated in historical times
few great invasions ; and these have not been far-reaching in their politi-
cal results. But if we may judge from the physical types and languages of
the populations, and from their social characteristics, there has been from
prehistoric times onwards a constant infiltration of Mongolian stock, not
only abundantly into Burma, and along the Tsan-po valley to the foot-
hills of the Himālaya, but also in lesser degree into Assam and into the
eastern parts of Bengal about Dacca.
From the days of the Greek pilot Hippalus, the monsoons have carri-
ed some sea traffic to and fro over the Arabian sea from the direction of
Aden. Sind was raided by Muhammadans overseas. But Sind lies outside
the desert of Rājputāna. The Malabar coast long had commerical inter-
course with the Nearer East, and thus indirectly with Christendom. But
the Western Ghāts lie behind the Malabar coast. In the south of India, on
the coast, are two curious relics of this traffic, two small ancient communi.
16
[CA.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
a
for a thousand miles inland from Calcutta, whereas the horizon of
Bombay is barred beyond the harbour by the mountain face of the Western
Ghāts. The real greatness of Bombay came only with the opening of the
Suez Canal, and of the railway lines up the Borghāt and the Thalghāt.
The train works up the Ghāts from Bombay through thick forests,
and if it be the rainy season past rushing waterfalls, until it surmounts
the brink top and comes out on to the plain of the Deccan table-land in
the relative drought of the upper climate. The Western Deccan in rear of
Bombay constitutes the Marāthā country. The Marāthās are the southern-
most of the peoples of Indo-European speech in India. Their homeland
on the plateau, round the city of Poona, now forms the main portion of
the Province of Bombay. The landscape of the plateau lies widely open,
studded here and there with table-topped mountains, not unlike the kopjes
of South Africa. These steep-sided isolated mountain blocks have often
served as strongholds in warfare.
South-eastward of Poona, but still on the plateau country, is Hyderā.
bād, the largest native state in India. It is ruled under British suzerainty
by the Nizām. The majority of the Nizām's subjects speak Telugu and are
of Hindu faith, but the Nizām is a Muhammadan. Near his capital, Hyderā.
bād, is Golconda Fort, rising above the open plateau with flat top and cliff
sides. The name of Golconda has become proverbial for immensity of wealth.
Formerly it was the Indian centre of diamond cutting and polishing.
The wide Deccan Plateau is in most parts of no great fertility. Over
large areas it is fitted rather for the pasture of horses and cattle than for
the plough. Agriculture is best in the river valleys. But there is one large
district lying on the plateau top east of Bombay, and on the hill tops north
and south of the Narbadā valley which is of a most singular fertility. The
usually granitic and schistose rocks of the plateau have here been overlaid
by great sheets of basaltic lava. Detached portions of these lava beds form
the table tops of most of the kopje-like hills. The lava disintegrates into a
tenacious black soil, which does not fall into dust during the dry season,
but cracks into great blocks which remain moist. As the dry season
advances these blocks shrink, and the cracks grow broader, so that finally
it is dangerous for a horse to gallop over the plain, lest his hoof should be
caught in one of these fissures.
This remarkable earth is known as the Black Cotton Soil. The cotton
seeds are sown after the rains, and as the young plant grows a clod of earth
forms round its roots which is separated from the next similar clod by
cracks. Wheat is grown on this soil in the same manner, being sown after
the rainy season and reaped in the beginning of the hot season, so that
from beginning to end the crop is produced without exposure to rain, being
drawn up by the brilliant sunshine, and fed at the root by the moisture
preserved in the heavy soil.
## p. 17 (#47) ##############################################
I]
CENTRAL PROVINCES : BARODA
17
Thus in the part of India, which lies immediately east, north-east, and
north of Bombay the lowlands and the uplands are alike fertile - the
lowlands round Ahmadābād and Baroda, and in the valleys of the Narbadā
and Tāpti rivers, because of their alluvial-soil, and the uplands round
Poona and Indore because they are clothed with the volcanic cotton soil.
The east coast of India, where it trends north-eastward from the
mouths of the Godāvarī river to those of the Mahānadi, is backed by great
hill and forest districts, tenanted by big game and by uncivilised tribes of
men. The Eastern Ghāts are here higher than elsewhere, and they approach
near to the coast, so that their foot plain affords only a relatively narrow
selvage of populated country. Through this coastal plain the railway is
carried from Calcutta to Madras.
The reason for the primitive character of this part of the country, and
of many of the districts which extend northward through the hills almost to
the valley of the Son, is to be found in the conditions of soil and climate.
There have been no volcanic outpourings on the gneissic and granitic rocks
hereabouts, and the summer cyclones from the Bay of Bengal strike most
frequently upon this coast and travel inland in a north-westerly direction.
Some of the Gond tribes of the forests, who may perhaps be described as the
aborigines of India, still speak tongues which appear to be older than Dra-
vidian. In the more fertile parts of the upper Mahānadi and Godāvari
basins are comprised the Central Provinces of the direct British Raj, whose
capital is at Nāgpur. The Central Provinces have an area comparable
with that of Italy, though their population is but one-third the Italian
population. They must not be confused with the Central Indian Agency.
We return to the west coast. The Bombay and Baroda Railway runs
out of Bombay northward and does not ascend the Ghāts, but follows the
coastal plain across the lower Tāpti and Narbadā rivers to Baroda, and
thence on, across the alluvial flats of the Mahī and neighbouring small
rivers, to Ahmadābād. The Gaikwār of Baroda governs a small but very
rich and populous lowland. His people speak Gujarātī, though the Gaikwār
is a Marātbā, like Sindhia and Holkar. His territories are so mixed with
those of the Bombay Presidency that the map of the plains round Ahmadā.
bād and Baroda city is like that part of Scotland which is labelled Ross
and Cromarty. Ahmadābād was once the most important Muhammadan
city of Western India, and contains many fine architectural monuments,
surpassed only by those of the great Mughal capitals, Delhi and Agra.
Westward of the alluvial plains of Gujarāt, and beyond the Gulf of
Cambay, is the peninsula of Kāthiāwār, a low plateau, lower considerably
than the Deccan, but clothed in part with similar sheets of fertile volcanic
soil. Baroda has territory in Kāthiāwār, as has also the Presidency of
Bombay, but in addition there are a multitude of petty chieftainships.
## p. 18 (#48) ##############################################
18
[CH.
THE SUB-COVTIVENT OF INDIA
North of Kāthiāwār is another smaller hill district, constituting the island
of Cutch. The Rann of Cutch, a marshy area communicating with the sea,
separates the island from the mainland. Apart from Travancore and Cochin
in the far south, Kāthiāwār and Cutch are the only parts of India where
Feudal States come down to the coast. There are a few diminutive coas-
tal settlements belonging to the French and Portuguese governments, but
these are too insignificant to break the general rule that the shores of India
are directly controlled by the British Raj. The largest of the foreign
European settlements is at Goa on the west coast south of Bombay. Goa
has a fine harbour but the Ghāts block the roads inland.
We have now completed the itinerary of the inner parts of India.
What remains to be described is the north-western land of passage where
India merges with Irān and Turān-Persia and Turkestān. The Himālayan
barrier, and the desert plateau of Tibet in rear of it, so shield the Indian
world from the north and north-east that the medieval Buddhist pilgrims
from China to Gayā were in the habit of travelling westward by the desert
routes north of Tibet as far as the river Oxus, and then southward over
the Hindu Kush. Thus they came into India from the north-west, having
circumvented Tibet rather than cross it. Great mountain ranges articu-
late with the Himālayas at their eastern end, and extend into the roots of
the peninsula of Further India. Thus the direct way from China into
India by the east is obstructed. To-day as we have seen the railway systems
of Burma and India are still separate.
The centre of north-western India is occupied by a group of large
Native States, known collectively as Rājputāna. Through Rājputāna,
diagonally from the south-west north-eastward, there runs the range of
the Arāvalli hills for a distance of fully three hundred miles. The north-
eastern extremity of the Arāvallis is the Ridge of Delhi on the Jumna river.
At their southern end, but separated from the main range by a hollow, is
the isolated Mount Abu, the highest point in Rājputāna, standing up con-
spicuously from the surrounding plains to a height of some five thousand
feet.
East of the Arāvallis, in the basin of the Chambal tributary of the
Jumna-Ganges, is the more fertile part of Rājputāna, with the cities of
Jaipur, Ajmer, Udaipur, and the old fortress of Chitor. Beyond the
Chambal river itself, but within its basin, are Gwalior and Indore, the seats
of the princes Sindhia and Holkar. But Gwalior and Indore belong to the
Central Indian Agency and not to Rājputāna.
West of the Arāvalli hills is the great Indian desert, prolonged seaward
by the salt and partly tidal marsh of the Rann of Cutch. In oases of this
desert are some of the smaller Rājput capitals, notably Bikaner. Beyond the
desert flows the great Indus river through a land which is dry, except for the
## p. 19 (#49) ##############################################
I]
THE GREAT INDIAN DESERT
19
irrigated strips beside the river banks and in the delta of Sind below
Hyderābād. South of Mount Abu streams descend from the end of the
Arāvalli hills to the Gulf of Cambay through the fertile lowland of
Ahmadābād, sunk like a land strait between the plateau of Kāthiāwār to
the west and the ends of the Vindhya and Sātpurā ranges to the east. The
Arāvallis are the last of the Central Indian hills towards the north-west.
Outside the Arāvallis the Indus valley spreads in wide low-lying alluvial
plains, like those of the Ganges, but dry.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to India of the
existence of the great desert of Rājputāna. The ocean to the south-east
and south-west of the peninsula was at most times an ample protection
against overseas invasion, until the Europeans rounded the Cape of Good
Hope. The vast length of the Himālaya, backed by the desert plateau of
Tibet, was an equal defence on the north side. Only to the north-west does
India lie relatively open to the incursions of the warlike peoples of Western
and Central Asia. It is precisely in that direction that the Indian desert
presents a waterless void extending north-eastward from the Rann of
Cutch, for some 400 miles, with a breadth of 150 miles. In rear of the
desert a minor bulwark is constituted by the Arāvalli range.
Only between the north-eastern extremity of the desert and the foot
of the Himālayas below Simla is there an easy gateway into India. No
river traverses this gateway, which'is on the divide between the systems
of the Indus and the Jumna-Ganges. Delhi stands on the west bank of
the Jumna at the northern extremity of the Arāvallis, just where the
invading forces from the north-west came through to the navigable waters.
1 Aided by such powerful natural conditions the Rājputs--the word
means 'sons of princes’– were during many centuries the defenders of India
against invasion by the direct road to Delhi. Unable at last to stem the
tide of Musalmān conquest, they have maintained themselves on the
southern flank of the advance, and to-day some of their princely families
claim to trace their lineage back in unbroken descent from ancestors before
the Christian era. The descendants of conquerors who had won their
kingdoms with the sword, they remain even now proud aristocratic clans
holding a predominant position in the midst of a population far more
numerous than themselves.
Narrow gauge lines branch through Rājputāna in the direction of
Delhi, past the foot of Mount Abu, which rises like an island of granite
from amid the sandy desert. The top of Abu is a small rugged plateau,
measuring fourteen miles by four, in the midst of which is the Gem Lake, a
most beautiful sheet of water, set with rocky islands and overhung with great
masses of rock. The house of the Resident of Rājpuātna is on its shore, for
Mount Abu is the centre from which Rājputāna is controlled, so far as is
## p. 20 (#50) ##############################################
20
[CH,
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
one
>
necessary, by the advice of the Viceroy. The summit of Abu also bears
some famous ruins of Jain temples.
Some of the most beautiful cities of India are in Rājputāna. Udaipur
stands beside a lake, with its palaces and ghāts reflected in the clear
waters. Ajmer, now under direct British rule, is set in a hollow among
low hills, and is surrounded by a wall. Here also there is a lake, and upon
its banks are marble pavilions. Jaipur is a walled city, surrounded by
rocky hills crowned with forts. The streets are broad, and cross
another at right angles.
The Rājputāna Agency is as large as the whole British Isles, but it
contains only about ten million people, since a great part of it is desert.
The Central Indian Agency is about as large as England and Scotland
without Wales. It has a population only a little smaller than that of
Rājputāna. We may measure the significance of the more important
chiefs in these two Agencies by the fact that Sindhia rules a country little
less, either in area or population, than the kingdom of Scotland.
From Rājputāna we come to Delhi, which may truly be called the
historical focus of all India ; for, as we have seen, it commands the gate-
way which leads from the Punjab plain to Hindustān, the plain of the
Jumna and the Ganges. Here the fate of invasions from India from the
north-west has been decided. Some have either never reached this gate-
way or have failed to force their way through it. The conquests of Darius
in the latter part of the sixth century B. C. and of Alexander the Great in the
years 327-5 B. C. were not carried beyond the Punjab plain. Such direct in-
fluence as they exercised in modifying the character of Indian civilisation
must, therefore, have been confined to this region. On the other hand, the
invasions which have succeeded in passing the gateway and in effecting a per-
manent settlement in Hindustān have determined the history of the whole
sub-continent. These belong to two groups, the Āryan and the Musalmān,
distinguished by religion, language, and type of civilisation, and separated
from each other by an interval of probably some two thousand years.
For the chronology of the Aryan conquests, which may well have
extended over many generations or even centuries, we possess no certain
dates. All the knowledge which we can hope to gain of the history of
.
this remote period must be gleaned from the study of the apcient scrip-
tures of these Āryan invaders.
The course of Musalmān invasion, which entailed consequences of per-
haps equal importance, may be traced with greater precision. If we reckon
from the Arab conquest of Sind in 712 A. D. to the establishment of the Sul-
tanate of Delhi in 1193 A. D. , we shall see that nearly five centuries elapsed
before Musalmān conquest spread from the confines through the Delhi
gateway into the very 'heart of India. During this long period it was held in
## p. 21 (#51) ##############################################
I]
DELHI
21
check by the Rājput princes ; and their ultimate failure to impede its
progress was due to internal discord which has always been the bane of
feudal confederations.
So Delhi, founded by the Rājputs in the neighbourhood of Indra-
prastha (the modern Indarpat), the capital of the Kurus in the heroic ages
celebrated in India's great epic poem, the Mahābhārata, passed into the
hands of the invading Musalmāns and with it passed the predominant
power in India.
What Benares, and Patna, and Gayā were and are to the Brāhman
and Buddhist civilisations native to India, what Calcutta, and Madras, and
Bombay, and Karāchi are to the English from over the seas, that were
Delhi and Agra to the Musalmāns entering India from the north-west.
More than three centuries and a quarter later another Musalmān
invasion, more effective than the former, came into India by way of Delhi.
The Mughals or Mongols of Central Asia had been converted to Islām, and
in the time of our King Henry VIII they refounded the Musalmān power
at Delhi. For a hundred and fifty years, from the time of our Queen
Elizabeth to that of our Queen Anne, a series of Mughal emperors, from
Humāyān to Aurangzeb, ruled in splendid state at Delhi over the greater
part of India. Agra, a hundred miles lower down the Jumna, became a
secondary or alternative capital, and in these two cities we have to-day
the supreme examples of Muhammadan architectural art.
More than sixty-two millions of the Indian population hold the faith
of Islām. They are scattered all over the land, usually in a minority, but
frequently powerful, for Jsām has given ruling chiefs to many districts
which are predominantly Hindu. Only in two parts of India are the Musal-
māns in a majority, namely, in the east Bengal about Dacca, and in the
Indus basin to the north-west. We may think of the Indus basin - lying
beyond the desert, low beneath the uplands of Afghānistān -- as being an
ante-chamber to India proper. In this ante-chamber, for more than nine
hundred years the Musalmāns have been a majority.
When the decay of the Mughal Empire began in the time of our
Queen Anne, the chief local representatives of the imperial rule, such as the
Nizām of Hyderābād, and the Nawābs of Bengal and Oudh, assumed an
independent position. It was with these new dynasties that the East India
Company came into conflict in the days of General Clive. Thus we may
regard the British Empire in India as having been built up from the fray-
ments into which the Mughal Empire broke. In one region, however, the
Western Deccan, the Hindus reasserted themselves, and there was a rival
bid for empire. From the neighbourhood of Poona the Marāthās conquered
eastward to the borders of Bengal, and north-ward to the walls of Delhi.
>
## p. 22 (#52) ##############################################
22
[CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
It was the work of Lord Lake and General Wellesley to defeat the
Marāthās.
North-westward of Delhi, in the gateway between the desert and the
mountains, the ground is sown over with battlefields - ancient battlefields
near the Jumna, where the incoming Musalmāns overthrew the Indian
resistance, and modern battlefields near the Sutlej, where advancing British
power inflicted defeat upon the Sikhs. It is by no accident that Simla,
the residence of the British Viceroy during half the year, is placed on the
Himālayan heights above this natural seat of empire and of struggle for
empire.
In the Mutiny of 1857 the Sikhs of the Punjab remained loyal to the
British rule, although they had been conquered in terrible battles on the
Sutlej less than ten years before. So it happened that some of the British
forces in the Punjab were free to march to recapture Delhi, which had
been taken by the mutineers. Thus the Indian Mutiny was overcome from
two bases ; on the one hand at Lucknow and Cawnpore by an army from
Calcutta and the sea ; and on the other hand at Delhi by an army advancing
from the Punjab over the track beaten by many conquerors in previous ages.
The river Jumna runs past Delhi with a southward course, and is
there crossed by a great bridge, over which the East Indian Railway runs
from Delhi through the United Provinces and Bengal to Howrah, opposite
Calcutta. West of Delhi is the last spur of the Arāvalli hills, the famous
Ridge of Delhi, striking north-eastward to the very bank of the river. The
city lies in the angle between the Ridge and the Jumna. To the north, in
the point of the angle, is the European quarter; in the centre is Shāhjahān-
ābād, the modern native Delhi; southward of the modern city is Firozābād,
or ancient Delhi. Between Shāhjahānābād and the river is the Fort.
The plain southward of Firozābād continues to widen between the
river and the hills, and is strewn over with still more ancient ruins. To
the west of these, at the foot of the hills, and in part upon them, is the
site chosen for the new imperial capital of British India. Finally, eleven
miles south of Delhi are the buildings of the Kutb Minār, where are some
of the few remains of the early Hindu period.
A hundred miles north-north-east of Delhi is Hardwār on the Ganges,
at the point where the river leaves the last foot-hills of the Himālaya and
enters the plain. Hardwār is the rival of Benares as a centre of Hindu
pilgrimage for the purpose of ablution in the sacred waters. At the annual
fair are gathered hundreds of thousands of worshippers. The great day at
Hardwar is near the end of March when the Hindu year begins. Then,
according to tradition, the Ganges river first appears from its source in
the mountains. The water at Hardwār is purer than at Benares in the
plain. It flows swiftly and is as clear as crystal.
## p. 22 (#53) ##############################################
2
## p. 22 (#54) ##############################################
1
## p. 22 (#55) ##############################################
## p. 22 (#56) ##############################################
Map 2
70
75
80
440
R. Tärim
CHINESE E
TUR KE STAN
SKhotan.
35
Jam
HyberPassila
Ladug TIBET
eshawa
Shelum
Beas
R. Ravi
Chenab
30
Lahore
Amritsar
Sobraonx kaliwa osimla
Ferozeporet Sirhind
12
Mudki Ambalas
Nābhao
Mussoorie
Mardware
Karnală
Panipat
Meerut
DELHID
Bareilly
D
I
Patiala
R. Sutlej
Ferozeshānis
R. Ganges
A
N
R.
Gogre
Vumna
Desert
Jaipur
Agra
Lucknown
Cawnpore
Unipu
Hillso Ajmer
Gwalior
Chambal
Àravalli
Allahābād
25
70
75
80
George Philip & Son, Ltd
A AND THE ADJACENT COUNTRIES
## p. 23 (#57) ##############################################
I]
NEPAL : PATIALA : N. W. FRONTIER
:
23
From near Darjeeling until near Hardwār the foothills of the
Himālaya for five hundred miles belong to the Gurkha kingdom of Nepāl,
whose capital is Kātmāndu. Nowithstanding its close connexion with the
Indian army, Nepāl is counted as an independent state, over which British
suzerainty does not formally extend. From Hardwār, however, for seven
hundred miles north-westward to where the Indus breaks from the moun-
tains, the foothills belong to the Empire, and upon them stand, high above
the plain, a series of hill stations. The first of these stations is Mussoorie,
not far northward of Hardwār. Mussoorie is about a mile above sea level.
Close by, but lower down, is Dehra Dūn, the headquarters of the Gurkha
Rifles. Hereabouts the Tarai, an elephant-haunted jungle belt, follows
the foothills, separating them from the cultivated plains. A hundred miles
farther along the mountain brink is Simla, the summer capital of India,
high on a spur above the divide between the Indus and the Ganges. The
snow often rests on the ground in the winter at Simla.
Immediately to the north of Simla the Sutlej, tributary to the Indus,
trenches a way out of the mountains, and where it issues on to the plain
is the off-take of a great system of irrigation canals. The lowland north-
westward of Delhi has a sparse rainfall, for the monsoon has lost much of
its moisture thus far north-westward from the Bay of Bengal. As a result
of the construction of the irrigation canals colonies have been established
between the Sutlej and the Jumna, and wheat is grown on thousands of
square miles that were formerly waste. India has a great population,
but with modern methods of water supply, and more advanced methods
of cultivation there is still ample room for settlement within its boundaries.
Two Sikh Feudal States, Patiāla and Nābha, are included within the
area now irrigated from the Sutlej, but Amritsar, the holy city of the
Sikhs, lying beyond the Sutlej, about two hundred and fifty miles from
Delhi, is under the immediate British Raj. Fifty miles west of Amritsar
is Lahore, the old Musalmān capital of the Punjab. We conquered the
Punjab from the Sikhs, but for many centuries it had been ruled by the
Musalmāns. In the break-up of the Mughal Empire during the eighteenth
century, invaders came from Persia and from Afghānistān, who carried
devastation even as far as Delhi. In their wake, with relative ease, the
Sikhs, contemporaries of the Marāthās of Poona, established a dominion
in the helpless Punjab. They extended their rule also into the mountains
of Kashmir, north of Lahore.
In all the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which war-
like preparation must ever be ready. It is the north-west frontier of India.
True that there is another boundary even longer, drawn across the Ameri-
can continent, but there fortunately only customs-houses are necessary,
and an occasional police guard.
The north-west frontier of India, on the
## p. 24 (#58) ##############################################
24
(сн.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
other hand, lies through a region whose inhabitants have been recruited
throughout the ages by invading warlike races. Except for the Gurkha
mountaineers of Nepāl, the best soldiers of the Indian army are drawn
from this region, from the Rājputs, the Sikhs, the Punjābi Musalmāns,
the Dogrā mountaineers north of the Punjab, and the Pathān mountaineers
west of the Punjab. The provinces along this frontier and the Afghān land
immediately beyond it, are the one region in all India from which, under
some ambitious lead, the attempt might be made to establish a fresh
imperial rule by the overthrow of the British Raj. Such is the teaching of
history, and such the obvious fate of the less warlike peoples of India,
should the power of Britain be broken either by warfare on the spot, or by
the defeat of our navy. Beyond the north-west frontier, moreover, in the
remoter distance, are the continental powers of Europe.
The Indian army and the Indian strategical railways are, therefore,
organised with special reference to the belt of territory which extends
north-east and south-west beyond the Indian desert, and is traversed from
end to end by the Indus river. This frontier belt divides naturally into
two parts. Inland we have the Punjab, where five rivers—the Indus, Jhelum,
Chenāb, Rāvi, and Sutlej-emerging from their mountain valleys, gradu-
ally close together through the plain to form the single stream of the
Lower Indus ; seaward we have Sind, where the Indus divides into distri-
butaries forming a delta.
Sind is a part of the Bombay Presidency, for it is connected with
Bombay by sea from the port of Karāchi. Of late a railway has been con-
structed from Ahmadābād, in the main territory of Bombay, across the
southern end of the desert to Hyderābād, at the head of the Indus delta.
The Punjab is a separate province, with its own lieutenant-governor at
Lahore, and a population as large as that of Spain.
To understand the significance of the north-west frontier of India
we must look far beyond the immediate boundaries of the Empire. Persia,
Afghānistān, and Baluchistān form a single plateau, not so lofty as Tibet,
but still one of the great natural features of Asia. This plateau in its en-
tirety is most conveniently known as Irān. On all sides the Irānian plateau
descends abruptly to lowlands or to the sea, save in the north-west, where it
rises to the greater heights of Armenia, and in the north-east, where it rises
to the lofty Pāmirs. Southward and south-westward of Irān lie the Arabian
sea and the Persian gulf, and the long lowland which is traversed by the
rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Northward, to the east of the Caspian sea, is
the broad lowland of Turkestān or Turān, traversed by the rivers Oxus and
Jaxartes, draining into the sea of Aral. Eastward is the plain of the Indus.
The defence of India from invasion depends in the first place on the main
tenance of British sea-power in the Persian gulf and the Indian ocean, and
## p. 25 (#59) ##############################################
I]
ROUTES LEADING INTO N. W. INDIA
25
in the second place on our refusal to allow the establishment of alien bases
of power on the Irānian plateau, especially on those parts of it which lie
towards the south and east.
In the north-east corner of Irān, west of the Punjab, a great triangu-
lar bundle of mountain ridges splays out westward and southward from
the north-east. These ridges and the intervening valleys constitute
Afghānistān. Flowing from the Afghān valleys we have on the one hand the
Kābul river, which descends eastward to the Indus, and on the other hand
the greater river Helmand, which flows south-westward into the depressed
basin of Seistān in the very heart of Irān. There the Helmand dividez in-
to many channels, forming as it were an inland delta, from which the
waters are evaporated by the hot air, for there is no opening to the sea.
The valley of the Kābul river on the one hand, and the oasis of Seistān on
the other, might in the hands of an enemy become bases wherein to prepare
for the invasion of India. Therefore, without annexing this intricate and
difficult upland, we have declared it to be the policy of Britain to exclude
from Afghānistān and from Seistān all foreign powers.
There are two lines, and only two, along which warlike invasions of
N. W. India have been conducted in historical times. On the one hand the
mountains become very narrow just north of the head of the Kābul river.
There a single though lofty ridge, the Hindu Kush, is all that separates
the basin of the Oxus from that of the Indus. Low ground, raised only a
few hundred feet above the sea, is very near on the two sides of the Hindu
Kush. There are several ways into India over this great but single range
and down the Kābul valley. The most famous is known as the Khyber
route, from the name of the last defile through which the track descends
into the Indian plain.
The other route of invasion lies five hundred miles away to the west
and south-west. There the Afghān mountains come suddenly to an end,
and an easy way lies round their fringe for four hundred miles over the
open plateau, from Herāt to Kandahār. This way passes not far from
Seistān. South-eastward of Kandahār it descends through a mountainous
district into the lowland of the Indus. This is now called the Bolān route,
from the last gorge towards India ; but in ancient times the road went
farther south over the Müla Pass. It debouches upon the plain opposite
to the great Indian desert. Therefore the Khyber route has been the more
frequently trodden, for it leads directly, between the desert and the moun-
tains, upon the Delhi gateway of inner India.
Another line of communication connecting India with Persia passes
through the Makrān, or the barren region lying along the coast of Baluchis-
tān. This route was much frequented by Arab traders in the Middle
Ages ; and by it at an earlier epoch Alexander the Great led back
## p. 26 (#60) ##############################################
26
[ch.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
one detachment of his forces with disastrous results. But apart from this
return march, and the Indian expeditions of Semiramis and of Cyrus which
it was designed to emulate and which may or may not be historical, this
route seems not to have been followed by any of the great invasions of
India in historical times.
The practical significance of all this geography becomes evident not
only when we study the history of Ancient India but also when we consider
the modern organisation of the Indian defensive forces. They are grouped
into a northern and a southern army. The northern army is distributed
from Calcutta past Allahābād and Delhi to Peshāwar, the garrison city on
the frontier. All the troops stationed along this line may be regarded as
supporting the brigades on the Khyber front. The southern army is
similarly posted with reference to Quetta on the Bolān route. It is dis-
tributed through the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, whence Quetta can
be reinforced by sea through the port of Karāchi.
The conditions of the defence of India have been vitally changed by
the construction of the North-Western Railway from Karāchi through the
Indus basin, with branches towards the Bolān and the Khyber. To-day
that defence could be conducted over the sea directly from Britain through
Karāchi, so that the desert of Rājputāna would lie between the defending
armies and the main community of India within.
Karāchi stands at the western limit of the Indus delta, in a position
therefore comparable to that of Alexandria beside the Nile delta. The
railway keeps to the west of the river for more than three hundred miles
as far as Sukkur, where is the Lansdowne bridge, eight hundred and forty
feet long, between Sukkur and Rohri on the east bank. This is the very
heart of the rainless region of India. During twelve years there were only six
showers at Rohri. A scheme is under consideration for damming the Indus
near this point, in order that the irrigation canals below may be fed, not
only in time of food as at present, but in the season of low water as well.
From Sukkur a branch railway traverses the desert north-westward
to the foot of the hills below the Bolān Pass. This part of the desert
occupies a re-entering angle of lowland, with the mountains of Afghānistān
to the north and those of Baluchistān to the west. On the map, the
Afghān ranges have the effect of being festooned from the Bolān eastward
and northward. The railway ascends to Quetta either by the Mushkāf
valley - the actual line of the Bolān torrent having been abandoned - or
by a longer loop line, the Harnai, which runs to the Pishin valley, north
of Quetta. The latter is the usual way. By the Mushkāf route the
line is carried over a boulder-strewn plain about half a mile broad in
the bottom of a gorge, with steeply rising heights on either side. Here
and there the strip of lower ground is trenched and split by deep canyons.
## p. 27 (#61) ##############################################
1]
PLAN OF THE INDUS
27
At first the rails follow the Mushkāf river, and the gradients are not very
severe, but once Hirok, at the source of the Bolān river, is passed, a
gradient of one in twenty-five begins, and two powerful engines are
required to drag the train up. The steep bounding ridges now close in on
either side, with cliffs rising almost perpendicularly to several hundred
feet. Occasional blockhouses high up amid the crags defend the pass.
The gradients of the Harnai route are not quite so steep as those of
the Mushkāf. Should either way be blocked or carried away by landslips
or foods, the other would be available. The Harnai line passes through
the Chappar rift, a precipitous gorge in a great mass of limestone. The
old Bolān gorge way of the caravans was dangerous because of' the sudden
spates which at times filled all the bottom between the cliffs.
Quetta lies about a mile above sea-level in a small plain, surrounded
by great mountains rising to heights of two miles and more. Irrigation
works have been constructed, so that Quetta is now an oasis amid desert
mountains. It has a population of some thirty thousand.
The Agent
General for British Baluchistān resides there. The town is very strongly
fortified, for it commands the railways leading from the Khojak pass down
into India. Quetta and Peshāwar are the twin keys of the frontier.
From Quetta there is a railway north-westward for another hundred
and twenty miles to Chaman on the Afghān frontier, where is the last
British outpost. This line pierces the Khojak ridge by a tunnel and then
emerges on the open upland plain of Irān. The rails are kept ready at
Chaman for the continuation of the track to Kandahār, seventy miles
further.
We return to Rohri on the Indus. The North-Western Railway now
runs to the east of the river and soon enters the Punjab. Not very long
ago all this land was a desert. To-day, as the result of a great investment
of British capital, irrigation works have changed the whole aspect of the
country. The plain of the Indus has become one of the chief wheat fields
of the British Empire, for wheat is the principal crop in the Punjab, in
parts of Sind, and outside the basin of the Indus itself-in the districts
of the United Provinces which lie about Agra. The wheat production of
India on an average of years is five times as great as that of the United
Kingdom, and about half as great as that of the United States. In the
three years 1910-12 the export of wheat from India to the United Kingdom
exceeded that from the United States to the United Kingdom.
The brown waste of the plains of the Punjab becomes, after the winter
rains, a waving sea of green wheat, extending over thousands of square miles.
Far beyond the area within which the rainfall alone suffices, the lower
Punjab and the central strip of Sind have been converted into a second
Egypt. Though the navigation of the Indus is naturally inferior to that of
7
## p. 28 (#62) ##############################################
28
[cu.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
the Ganges, yet communication has been maintained by boat from the
Punjab to the sea from Greek times downward. The Indus flotilla of
steam-boats has however suffered fatally from the competition of the
North-Western Railway, and the wheat exported from Karāchi is now
almost wholly rail-borne.
At Multān, a considerable mercantile city near the Chenāb, the
railway forks to Lahore and Peshāwar. From Lahore the triangle is
completed by a line to Peshāwar along the foot of the mountains, past
the great military station of Rāwalpindi. The lines from Lahore and
Multān unite on the east bank of the Indus, fifty miles east of Peshāwar,
just below the point where the Kābul tributary enters. They cross the
Indus by the bridge of Attock. Above Rāwalpindi is the hill station of
Murree. The long tongues of land between the five rivers of the Punjab
are known as Doābs, a word which in Persian has the significance of
Mesopotamia in Greek. Punjab signifies the land of five rivers.
Peshāwar is the capital of the North-West Frontier Province created
in 1901, a strip of hilly country beyond the Indus. Unlike its sister Quetta,
it lies in the Indian lowland at the foot of the Khyber pass. It has about
a hundred thousand inhabitants, chiefly Musalmān. In the Bāzār are to
be seen representatives of many Asiatic races, for Peshāwar is the market
of exchange where the great road from Samarkand and Bukhāra, over
the Hindu Kush and through Kābul, by the Khyber meets the road from
Delhi and Lahore. Here you may buy skeins of Chinese silk, brought by
the same roundabout ways that were trodden by the Chinese pilgrims in
the Middle Ages.
Jamrūd, at the entrance to the Khyber, lies some nine miles west of
Peshāwar. In the Sarāi at Jamrūd all caravans going into India or
returning to Central Asia halt for the night. The great Bactrian camels,
two-humped and shaggy, present an unwonted contrast with the smaller
Indian camels. The fort of Ali Masjid, nearly three thousand feet above
the sea, crowns the steep ascent to the crest of the pass. At Landi Kotal
begins the descent into Afghānistān. Thus the Khyber is a saddle in the
heights, not the gorge of a torrent as is the Bolān. The Kābuì river flows
through an open valley until it nears the British frontier.
Then it swerves
through a precipitous chasm by a northward loop. The road is therefore
carried over the intervening mountain spur,
The Khyber is protected by its own hill tribes, enlisted in the Khyber
Rifles. We have brought these Pathān mountaineers into the service of law
and order by enrolling them in military forces, just as the Scottish highlan-
ders were enrolled in the British army in the eighteenth century. The
Pathāns are born fighters. They love fighting for its own sake, and many a
curious tale is told of the vendettas intermittently continued when the
## p. 29 (#63) ##############################################
I]
KASHMIR: KARAKORAM ; HINDU KUSH
29
a
>
Khyber riflemen of Peshāwar return from time to time on furlough to their
homes in the hills.
The Indus river rises, like the Brahmaputra, high on the plateau of
Tibet to the north of Benares, and flows north-westward through the
elevated valley of Leh until it reaches the 36th parallel of latitude. There
it turns south-westward and cleaves its way through the Himālayas by the
grandest gorge in the world. You may stand on the right bank of the
Indus and look across the river to where the summit of Nanga Parbat
descends by a single slope of four miles - measured vertically - to the river
bank, every yard of the drop being visible.
Within the great northward angle thus made by the Indus is a second
smaller valley amid the mountains, which is also drained through a gorge
to the Punjab. This is the famous valley of Kashmir, whose central plain,
sheltered in every direction by lofty snow-clad mountains, is a sunny para-
dise of fertility. Srīnagar is the capital of Kashmir, whose Mahārāja rules
also over Ladākh (capital Leh) formerly a province of Tibet.
The northernmost outposts of the Empire are in the valleys of Gilgit
and Chitrāl, which diverge south-eastward and south-westward to the
Indus and Kābul rivers. Enframing Gilgit and Chitrāl is a great angle of
the loftiest mountain ridge, which may be likened, as it appears upon the
map, to a pointed roof sheltering all India to the south. The south-east-
-
ward limb of the angle is the Karakoram range, and the south-westward is
the Hindu Kush range. The north-western extremity of the Himālaya fits
into the angle of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, from which it is
separated by the valleys of Leh, Gilgit, and Chirtāl.
The Karakoram is backed by the heights of the Tibetan plateau,
here it is true at their narrowest, but none the less almost inaccessible, ex-
cept for one or two passes at heights of 18,000 feet, which are traversed in
the summer time by a few Yak caravans. In the Karakoram is mount
Godwin Austen, second only to Everest among the mountains of the world.
There also are the largest glaciers outside the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The Hindu Kush, notwithstanding its elevation, is in marked con-
trast to the Karakoram. It is a single broad ridge, backed by no plateau,
and is notched by some relatively low passes. The ridge itself may be
crossed in a few days or even hours at heights of twelve and thirteen thou-
sand feet. The difficulties of access from the valley head of Kābul to the
lowland of Bactria on the Oxus lie rather in the approaches to the passes
than in the passes themselves. But human patience has in all ages suc-
ceeded in surmounting these difficulties ; and the Hindu Kush, although
the natural boundary of India north-westward, has been no effective
barrier either in a military or a commercial sense.
There is lateral communication between the Khyber and Bolān routes
## p. 30 (#64) ##############################################
30
[CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
a
outside the Indian frontier and yet within the Hindu Kush. The route
follows a chain of valleys between Kābul and Kandahār through Ghazni.
Along it from Kandahār to Kābul the army of Alexander the Great marched
to his Bactrian and Indian campaigns : and it again became famous in the
last generation because of the march of General Roberts from Kābul to
the relief of Kandahār during the Afghān war of 1882. From this Kābul-
Kandahār road several passes penetrate the mountainous belt of the Indian
frontier, presenting alternative exits from the two trunk routes. But amid
the maze of mountains north of the Kābul-Kandahār line, there are no
practicable alternatives to the two ways-over the Hindu Kush and over
the plateau from Seistān.
The long barrier of the Hindu Kush seems as if it were designed by
nature to be the protecting boundary of India on the north-west. It is the
'scientific frontier' which in the last century British policy sought in vain
to secure. At the present time it lies mostly within the 'buffer state of
Afghānistān which was created as the best alternative. But there have
been periods in history when it has formed the actual, as well as the ideal,
limits of the Indian empire. In the last quarter of the fourth century
B. C. , within a few years of the departure from India of Alexander the
Great, it separated the dominions of the Maurya emperor of India, Chandra-
gupta, from those of Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in the eastern
portion of his vast empire. In about the middle of the third century B. C.
the Seleucid province of Bactria, which lay immediately to the north of the
Hindu Kush, became an independent kingdom, from which, when the
Maurya empire declined and the barrier was no longer adequately pro-
tected, a second series of Greek invasions poured into India about 200 B. C.
The river Indus also appears at first sight to form a natural boun-
dary between India and Irān ; but in this case it would be more correct
historically to say that the country through which it flows has more fre-
quently been the cause of contention between India and Irān. The very
name India, the country of the Indus,' was first known to the West as
that of a province of the Persian empire. In Herodotus, the Greek his-
torian of the wars between the Persian empire and Greece in the early part
of the fifth century B. c. , it bears its original meaning. At a later date, Greek
and Roman writers, as so often happens in geographical nomenclature, ,
transferred the name of the best known province to the whole country and
set an example which has since been followed universally.
Thus we conclude a rapid survey of the historical and political geo-
graphy of a vast region. The south and centre of India is structurally an
island, whose steep brinks, the Western and Eastern Ghāts, are continued -
beyond the coastal selvage and the strip of shallow water off shore-by
renewed steep descents into the abysses of the Arabian sea and the Bay of
## p. 31 (#65) ##############################################
I
CONTROLLING GEOGRAPHICAL FACTS
31
-
Bengal, two miles deep. This great island has granitic foundations, although
it is clothed in places with volcanic rocks. Its landward brinks are marked
by mount Abu, the Aravalli hills, the ridge of Delhi, and the long low east-
ward curve of hills ending at Rājmahāl, where the principal coal seams of
India rest on the granitic base. The salient angles at Delhi and Rājmahāl
are received, at a distance, by the great re-entering angles of the main
framework of Asia, constituted by the brink of Irān beyond the Indus, the
Himālayan brink of Tibet, and the mountains of the Burmese border.
Between these rocky limits--salient on the Indian side and re-entering on
the Asiatic side-extends a broad alluvial plain, two hundred miles in
average breadth, and two thousand miles long, from the mouths of the
Ganges northward to the foot of the mountains, then north-westward along
that foot to the Punjab, and then south-westward to the mouths of the
Indus.
The Indian heights proper are so relatively low, attaining to eight or
nine thousand feet only in the far south, that the whole geography of India
seems to be dominated by the Himālayas. We recover our sense of the
true proportions only when we reflect that even the Himālayas are only
five or six miles high, and that India is two thousand miles long. None the
less the Himālayas and Tibet are in very real sense the controlling fact of
Indian geography. They pierce upward through more than half the atmos-
phere into highland climates, and therefore constitute for man a mighty
natural boundary. They also guide and limit the winds of the lower air, and
thus govern the Indian climate. India is an agricultural land, whose tillage
is everywhere dependent, either directly or indirectly, upon the moisture
brought from the southern ocean by the great wind swirl of the summer
and autumn monsoon. That swirl strikes the Malabar coast as a south-west
wind, sweeps over Bengal as a south wind, and drives up the Ganges
plains as a south-east wind. The whole movement is induced by suction to
where the air is rising over the hot plains of the Middle Indus. There in the
summer is one of the hottest places, if not the hottest place in the world.
The winds which come down to it off the Irānian plateau, thus completing
the swirl, stream off a dry land, and bring no moisture. In the winter a dry,
bright wind, the north-east monsoon, descends from Tibet over all India.
Only in the Punjab and in the far south are there considerable winter rains.
The Punjab is in Mediterranean latitudes, where it rains in the winter.
By these physical characteristics India is made fruitful, and is at the
same time more than half isolated from the rest of the world.
The most
primitive of its inhabitants are the Gonds and other tribes, who have been
driven into the forest recesses of the hills eastward of the Deccan plateau
and into other regions difficult of access throughout the sub-continent. The
Dravidian languages have been preserved in the southern promontory. The
## p. 32 (#66) ##############################################
32
(CH.
THE SUB-CONTINENT OF INDIA
Āryan and later invaders from western and central Asia have come from the
north-west through the passage of Delhi, and have thence dispersed south-
eastward down the Ganges to Bengal, and south-westward to the fertile
Gujarāti and Marāthā countries. Through the eastern mountains, which
sever the Indian Empire from China, have penetrated in historical times
few great invasions ; and these have not been far-reaching in their politi-
cal results. But if we may judge from the physical types and languages of
the populations, and from their social characteristics, there has been from
prehistoric times onwards a constant infiltration of Mongolian stock, not
only abundantly into Burma, and along the Tsan-po valley to the foot-
hills of the Himālaya, but also in lesser degree into Assam and into the
eastern parts of Bengal about Dacca.
From the days of the Greek pilot Hippalus, the monsoons have carri-
ed some sea traffic to and fro over the Arabian sea from the direction of
Aden. Sind was raided by Muhammadans overseas. But Sind lies outside
the desert of Rājputāna. The Malabar coast long had commerical inter-
course with the Nearer East, and thus indirectly with Christendom. But
the Western Ghāts lie behind the Malabar coast. In the south of India, on
the coast, are two curious relics of this traffic, two small ancient communi.
