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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    own native officers. This arises chiefly from the circum- stance of their being less frequently placed in authority among those upon whose good feelings and opinions their welfare and comfort, as those of their children, are likely pennanentiy to depend. In India, under native rule, office became hereditary, because officers expended the whole of their incomes in religious ceremonies, or works of orna- ment and utility, and left their families in hopeless dependence upon the chief in whose service they had laboured all their lives, while they had been educating their sons exclusively with the view of serving that chief in the same capacity that their fathers had served him before them. It is in this case, and this alone, that the law of primogeniture is in force in India. ^ Among Muhamma- dans, as well as Hindoos, all property, real and personal, is divided equally among the children y but the duties of an office will not admit of the same subdivision ; and this, therefore, when hereditary, as it often is, descends to the eldest son with the obligation of providing for the rest of the family. The family consists of all the members who remain united to the parent stock, including the widows and orphans of the sons or brothers who were so up to the time of their death. The old “ chobdar,” or silver-stick bearer, who came with us from the Raja, gets fifteen rupees a month, and his ^ Principalities, and the estates of the talukdars of Oudh also descend to the eldest son. The author states {ante, p. 82) that the same rule applied in his time to the small agricultural holdings in the Sagar and Nerbudda territories. - This statement is inexact; Hindoo daughters, as a rule, inherit nothing from their fathers ; a Muhammadan daughter takes half the share of a son. ^ But it is only the smaller local ministerial officers who are secure in their tenure of office under native governments ; those on whose efficiency the \vell-being of village communities depends. The greatest evil of governments of the kind is the feeling of insecurity which pervades all the higher officers of government, and the instability of all engagements made by the government with them, and by them with the people. [W. H. S.]
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