Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India: From Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-1825, (with Notes Upon Ceylon,) an Account of a Journey to Madras and the Southern Provinces, 1826, and Letters Written in India/Volume I/Chapter 12

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Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India: From Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-1825, (with Notes Upon Ceylon,) an Account of a Journey to Madras and the Southern Provinces, 1826, and Letters Written in India, Volume I (1829)
by Reginald Heber

Chapter XII.

Chapter XIII.

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4363167Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India: From Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-1825, (with Notes Upon Ceylon,) an Account of a Journey to Madras and the Southern Provinces, 1826, and Letters Written in India, Volume I — Chapter XII.1829Reginald Heber

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Gothic gateway at Ghazeepoor.

The whole country seems in cultivation, but less with rice than wheat. The villages are numerous and large, but the scattered dwellings few, and there is but little wood. Fuel is, consequently, extremely dear, and to this circumstance is imputed the number of bodies thrown into the river without burning. Suttees are less numerous in Benares than many parts of India, but self-immolation by drowning is very common. Many scores, every year, of pilgrims from all parts of India, come hither expressly to end their days and secure their salvation. They purchase two large Kedgeree pots between which they tie themselves, and when empty these support their weight in the water. Thus equipped, they paddle into the stream, then fill the pots with the water which surrounds them, and thus sink into eternity. Government have sometimes attempted to prevent this practice, but with no other effect than driving the voluntary victims a little further down the river; nor indeed when a man has come several hundred miles to die, is it likely that a police-officer can prevent him. Instruction seems the only way in which these poor people can be improved, and that, I trust, they will by degrees obtain from us.

The Vidalaya is a large building divided into two courts galleried above and below, and full of teachers and scholars, divided into a number of classes, who learn reading, writing, arithmetic (in the Hindoo manner,) Persian, Hindoo law, and sacred literature, Sanscrit, astronomy according to the Ptolemaic system, and astrology! There are 200 scholars, some of whom of all sorts came to say their lessons to me, though, unhappily, I was myself able to profit by none, except the astronomy, and a little of the Persian. The astronomical lecturer produced a terrestrial globe, divided according to their system, and elevated to the meridian of Benares. Mount Meru he identified with the north pole, and under the southern pole he supposed the tortoise “chukwa” to stand, on which the earth rests. The southern hemisphere he apprehended to be uninhabitable, but on its concave surface, in the interior of the globe, he placed Padalon. He then shewed me how the sun went round the earth once in every day, and how, by a different but equally continuous motion, he also visited the signs of the zodiac. The whole system is precisely that of Ptolemy, and the contrast was very striking between the rubbish which these young men were learning in a Government establishment, and the rudiments of real knowledge which those whom I had visited the day before had acquired, in the very same city, and under circumstances far less favourable. I was informed that it had been frequently proposed to introduced an English and mathematical class, and to teach the Newtonian and Copernican system of astronomy; but that the late superintendent of the establishment was strongly opposed to any innovation, partly on the plea that it would draw the boys off from their Sanscrit studies, and partly lest it should interfere with the religious prejudices of the professors. The first of these arguments is pretty much like what was urged at Oxford, (substituting Greek for Sanscrit,) against the new examinations, by which, however, Greek has lost nothing. The second is plainly absurd, since the Ptolemaic system, which is now taught, is itself an innovation, and an improvement on the old faith of eight worlds and seven oceans, arranged like a nest of boxes.