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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    inferior agents, whose close inspection of the great parent could not be so displeasing to the Deity.” ^ Ram Chand Pundit said that “ there was no doubt much truth in what Sarlmant Sahib had stated ; that the crops of late had unquestionably suffered from the constant measuring going on upon the lands; but that the people (as he knew) had now become unanimous in attributing the calamities of season, under which these districts had been suffering so much, to the eating of beef-—this was,” he thought, ‘‘ the great source of all their sufferings.” Sarimant declared that he thought “ his Pundit was right, and that it would, no doubt, be of great advantage to them and to their rulers if government could be prevailed upon to prohibit the eating of beef; that so great and general were the sufferings of the people from these calami- ties of seasons, and so firm, and now so general, the opinion that they arose chiefly from the practice of killing and eating cows that, in spite of all the other superior blessings of our rule, the people were almost beginning to wish their old Maratha rulers in power again.” I reminded him of the still greater calamities the people of Bundelkhand had been suffering under. “True,” said he, “but among them there are crimes enough of every day occurrence to account for these things ; but, under your rule, the Deity has only one or other of these three things to be offended with ; and, of these three, it must admitted that the eating of beef so near the sacred stream of the Nerbudda is the worst.” ^ ^Ve are told in 2 Samuel, chap, xxiv, that the Deity was dis- pleased at a census of the people, taken by Joab by the order of David, and destroyed of the people of Israel seventy thousand, besides women and children. [W. H. S.] The editor, in the course of seven years’ experience in the Settlement department, of which six were spent in Bundelkhand, never heard of the doctrine as to the incestuous character of surveys. Probably it has died out. Even a census no longer gives rise to alarm in most parts of the country. The wild rumours and theories common in 1872 and 1881 did not prevail in 1891, when the last census was taken.
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