IN this year Khwája ’Ainu’d Din, was appointed to the province of Bareli. This happened thus. When Haidar Beg Khán had become secure in his position and gradually grew insolent, and was careless about remitting the Company’s instalments, Mr. Middleton, to stop his insolence, put forward Shaikh Shafi’ullah, one of the friends of Iraj Khán, and appointed his gomashtas over Haidar Beg Khán’s collectors to gather in revenue: but, as Shafi’ullah was a covetous and imprudent man, Haidar Beg Khán exposed the blunders and dishonesty of his gomashtas and procured their removal. Khwája ’Ainu’d Dín was one of these gomashtas, and was the sazáwal over Kundan L’al aforementioned. As he had kept Haidar Beg Khán in good humour with him in this interval, he was now appointed collector of Bareli, and was maintained there for five or six years, notwithstanding that he caused notorious ruin. He was in 1197 A. H. dismissed on Mr. Bristow’s persistent representations. This ’Ainu’d Dín, one of the companions of Khádim Hasan Khán Bangáli, was an odd character. To show his indifference to the world, there were thousands upon thousands of scoundrel beggars maintained by him in his camp, and once a day he used to walk about among them naked with a stick in his hand, and give each of them a copper with his own hand and indulge in banter with them. He was so vile-tongued and foul-mouthed, that the crowd of them, notwithstanding their absence of restraint were not his match. To make a show of generosity, he used every year, after the 10th of Muharram, to scramble his household furniture, and refuse no one who asked him for a present. If any one asked for a great sum, he wrote the amount on a slip of paper and put it with fifty other slips marked half for smaller and half for larger sums, and gambled for them as Europeans do with one another. In short, his waste from the date of his dismissal to his death in 1209 A. H., as far as the public could observe it, amounted to 40 or 50 lakhs of rupees.
Another event of this year was the death of Mirzá Ali Khán, owing to the bad climate of Almuhrá. The Wazír, from the beginning of his rule, considered two tours incumbent on him every year. One was at the conclusion of the rains, sometimes to Almuhra and sometimes to Butwal, and at this season of the year both these places are like Jahannam for the inclemency of the climate and the difficulties of transit. For this reason, thousands of camp-followers die every year in this tour, and it is impossible to describe the hardships which they endure in crossing ravines and traversing the heights and hollows, and the passes of mountain and forest. In these places the Wazír’s personal servants and followers march first, then the able-bodied members of his escort, and last the invalids. The three parties become jammed, and for a time are unable to find roadway. The Wazír’s personal servants stand at the head of the crowd battering with sticks, and in the same way the able-bodied men of the escort. In this confusion men are unable for two or three days to attend to their necessities and lie on the ground in the open air without food. The price of grain also is under these circumstances, and at all such times, twice as high as at Lucknow; and luxuries of food, such as fruit and the like, cannot be had. If rain happens to fall at this season, there is a tumult as of the resurrection in the camp, and thousands of horses, bullocks, camels, and men are seized with fatal illness. Then, if a camel falls in the mud, all at once so many men tumble over it that the camel sinks, load and all, into the earth and causes a block in the path. In the year 1210 A. H. I was present on a tour of this kind as far as to Faizábád, and saw all the incidents of the camp. The following is a brief narrative:—
In the rains of that year the Wazír, having dismissed Tikait Rai, told Mr. Cherry that he would himself look into the affairs of the province. The rains now stopped, and he determined to go to Butwal. Mr. Cherry said that things could wait, and there was still some prospect of rain; that the Wazír would do well to postpone his determination. The Wazír replied that he would take his ministerial officers with him as far as Faizábád, and on the way decide some matters which were pending, then send back the ministerial establishment, and act afterwards as Mr. Cherry advised. In the second stage, high winds and heavy rain set in and, owing to the great number of elephants and cannon, the whole road became a slough of mud, and the two remaining stages were traversed in six days with indescribable difficulty. From Dariábád to Faizábád it seemed as if dead horses, bullocks, camels, and men had been sown in the mud. When I arrived in Faizábád, most people who could not be accommodated at the Asaf Bágh, the Wazír’s residence, pitched their tents in a place where the mud was a cubit and a half deep, tied their animals to long poles and stood holding on to the ropes on the inside of their tents, owing to the violence of the wind and rain. When this state of things had lasted for fifteen days, the Wazír was no longer able to endure it, and ordered the camp to cross the Ghágra. The bridge they had thrown across the river broke that night, and the boatmen said they could not construct it again. Messengers brought in word that the water was several feet deep in the places where they had gone hunting the previous year, and that the mauza’ where the Wazír’s tents had been separately pitched was under water. The Wazír, believing the story of the messengers to be untrue and to have been concocted by them with the leaders in the camp, ordered, while the rain was still actually falling, that the camp should cross in boats. Jhao L’al appointed his sazáwals to watch the men, and himself stood at the ghát for five days in all the rain, and superintended the transport of the troops. Every time that a boat attempted to cross, the passengers despaired of their lives owing to the turbulence, roughness, and rapidity of the Ghágra, which is in these respects more especially dangerous than other rivers. In those five days several boats and elephants were lost. On the sixth day the Wazír, when he heard that half the camp had crossed the river, determined to go over. It happened that the pegs of the tents had become loose from the heavy rains, and the kahárs were holding the tents up with their hands. Next morning he desired to move the tents to another place. He searched on both sides for some miles, but not a place was found. Accordingly he returned, and gave orders for withdrawal to Faizábád. They returned with the same difficulty they had gone. After some days, when the rains ceased, he again undertook the passage by boats and completed his journey.
Furthermore, in the tour at this season, there are a hundred mast elephants in the camp, and sometimes while they are marching, or when they break from their tether or get beyond the control of their mahauts, they kill people, and the drivers often tie their elephants near the tents of the Wazír’s courtiers, and by this trick get money from them for their removal; and these persons are subjected to the same infliction night and day without intermission for two or three months.
The second tour is made to Bahraich in the very height of the hot season, and although this tour does not last over a month and a half, yet horses, cattle, and men die in numbers from the excessive heat of the sun. As the Wazír indulges in opium, he sleeps until very late in the morning, and then eats breakfast and starts on his march after a full watch of the day has passed; and travelling in a palankeen made of khas which water-carriers keep sprinkling on all sides, he arrives at his halting-place some time after midday. Here so many tents of khas and movable pavilions of grass are pitched, that the severe cold gives ague to any one who sits down, and it is only those who have experienced the pain know what men then suffer.
A greater hardship still is, that every grove which is under or near his camp is kept exclusively reserved for the domestic uses of the Wazír and for his stables, and if any grove be unoccupied, no one pitches in it, for if the Wazír sees a tent, he drives the owner of the tent out of the country. This order prevails from a jealousy of the comfort of other men, which is a natural characteristic of his, and which is not more especially exemplified on his tours than at his fixed residence. A proof of this is his prohibition of certain articles, one of which is ice. Although the ice manufacturers have frequently represented to him that if he would allow them to sell ice, they would manufacture an even greater stock for him than they were doing, and their expenses would be less, he has refused to allow them. Although he possesses hundreds of gardens in Lucknow and Faizábád, and in the suburbs of both cities, and they yield such quantities of fruit and flowers that hundreds of low-caste men among his orderlies gather them, and there is still to spare, yet fruit and flowers decay, fall, and are thrown away. In the mango season he attaches all the groves of the residents of Lucknow and Faizábád, and in this way many houses of the poor are plundered by the piádas who are appointed to confiscate the produce of the groves. The restriction on the sale of keora and roses, and all perfumes is so strict, that people import essence of keora from Bengal, and the better classes at the marriages of their children make garlands of flowers gathered from the jungles and put them round the necks of their guests, for the sale of wild flowers is forbidden in the city. Rare foods are wholly interdicted, but such fruits as ground-melons, mangos, and so on, are barred only during the first fifteen days of their respective seasons. Fine clothing materials and all articles of luxury which can be confiscated, are interdicted. Accordingly, some one introduced a new invention into Lucknow for calico printing. The Wazír ordered that he should deliver all his outturn to him. One day the Wazír happened to see a specimen of this chintz on some one, and he put the master-printer on a donkey and had him paraded through the city, although he was a respectable man, and the employer of four or five hundred apprentices. And horse-dealers are not allowed to sell to any one else until they have shown their horses to the Wazír and writhed under the hands and tongue of Rája Mahrá,* and so with other merchants. And his personal servants and attendants, both when on tour and when at head-quarters, are forbidden to go to women, even to their wives, and harkáras are employed especially and precautions are taken so closely, that if some unlucky fellow goes anywhere secretly at midnight, he is arrested. When could all these things be told? Moreover, I do not intend to record the Wazír’s fanlts, for my book would become bulky. But all that is connected with the public, and that is necessary to history, I have written. If affairs of this description were unnoticed, it would be impossible to write a history of his times.