Volume 1

Rambles and recollections of an Indian official / [Sir William Henry Sleeman].

  • William Henry Sleeman
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Rambles and recollections of an Indian official / [Sir William Henry Sleeman]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    fever prevailed more generally among the people of Hindustan than any I have ever known, though I am now an old man. The speech of the trooper and the supposed result soon spread; and others tried the experiment with similar success, and it acted everywhere like a charm. I had the fever myself, and, though by no means a super- stitious man, and certainly no lover of Jeswant Rao Holkar, I tried the experiment, and the fever left me from that day. From that time, till the epidemic dis- appeared, no man, from the Nerbudda to the Indus, fed his horse without invoking the spirit of Jeswant Rao, though the chief was then alive and well. Some one had said he found great relief from plunging into the stream during the paroxysms of the fever ; others followed the example, and some remained for half an hour at a time, and the sufferers generally found relief. The streams and tanks throughout the districts between the Ganges and Jumna became crowded, till the propitiatory offering to the spirit of the living Jeswant Rao Holkar were [wV] found equally good, and far less troublesome to those who had horses that must have got their grain, whether in Holkar’s name or not.” There is no doubt that the great mass of those who had nothing but their horses and their good blades to depend upon for their subsistence did most fervently pray through- out India for the safety of this Maratha chief, when he fled before Lord Lake’s army; for they considered that, with his fall, the Company’s dominion would become everywhere securely established, and that good soldiers would be at a discount. “ Company ke amal men knchh rozgdr nahin haip—“there is no employment in the Company’s dominion,” is a common maxim, not only among the men of the sword and the spear, but among those merchants who lived by supporting native civil and military establish- lishments with the luxuries and elegancies which, under the new order of things, they have no longer the means to enjoy.
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