# The Calcutta Review/Series 1/Number 2/Article 4

Art. IV.—1. Parliamentary Papers, Infanticide, India, 1824.
2. Parliamentary Papers, Infanticide, India, 1828.
3. Parliamentary Papers, Infanticide, India, 1843.
Infanticide is no new crime in the multitudinous catalogue of human guilt. Other flagrant transgressions of the moral law have been limited to particular ages or climes, to particular conditions of life or stages of society. The simplicity of primitive or patriarchal times exempted them from many of those forms of delinquency that spring spontaneously out of the multiplied relationships and conventional artificialities of later epochs. The enormity of Sati, or the burning of widows alive on the funeral piles of their husbands, is, in a great measure, peculiar to these Indian realms—being a natural sprout of the baneful superstition that overshadows it. The superabounding affluence of the noble and the mighty, speedily purchasing the gratification of every desire, saves them from temptations that hurry into violations of law, the contraction of ignominy and shame, and ultimate inevitable destruction, whole multitudes of the hunger-bitten sons of poverty. The horrible atrocity of cannibalism is restricted to hordes, which, having to contend with the elements and beasts of prey for a scanty and precarious subsistence, have become so sunk and brutalized as to retain little else than the insulted prerogative of the human form;—while the civilized crime of forgery can obviously have no existence among tribes that have no metallic currency, no paper circulation, and no knowledge whatever of the art of writing. To Infanticide, on the other hand, belongs the fell and the fatal pre-eminence of ubiquity as to time and place, and rank and condition. It is common to all ages—having been sanctioned by many of the “world’s grey Fathers,” as well as by their distant posterity of yesterday. It is common to all climes—staining alike the sands of the torrid, and the snows of the frigid zone, with the blood of innocents,—and replenishing the temperate regions between, with many a voice of lamentation and woe. It is common to all ranks and degrees of life—leaving the memorials of its sanguinary presence in the palaces of princes not less than in the cottages of the poor. It is common to all stages and gradations of society, from the lowest depths of savage barbarism to the topmost heights of civilization and refinement. But, probably, in no age or clime, in no condition of life or stage of society, has the unnatural crime prevailed so extensively and systematically, as for many generations, ​it has done, among certain clans of feudatory Rajputs and other tribes in Central and Western India.
Before entering into details it may be well to glance at the geographical aspect or general “physiognomy” of the regions, within whose territorial limits, the unnatural crime, to a greater or less extent, is known or suspected to be perpetrated. For this end, let the reader, with a good map before him, suppose himself to start from Bombay towards the Bay of Cambay. Passing the river Tapti and city of Surat, on his right, let him advance to that part of the Bay, opposite to which the Nerbudda disembogues its waters into it. There, let him take his stand. Immediately in front, across the plains at the head of the Bay, at the distance of about three hundred miles, the insulated Abu—“the Saint’s pinnacle”—“the Rajput Olympus”—the loftiest mountain in Hindustan—rears its head. Near it, a little to the east, commences the chain of the Aravalli (Ar-bali) or “mountains of strength,” which stretch away in bold ridges, in a north easternly direction, towards the imperial city of Dehli—constituting, as it were, the back bone of Upper India—and separating the arid plains, and ever-shifting sand-hills of Marwar, Jaissalmir, and Bikanir from the fields and forests of Mewar, Ajmir, and other more highly favoured states of eastern Rajasthan. Immediately on his left, to the west, swells out the large peninsula of Gujarat (Guzzerat), on whose shores, washed by the waves of the Arabian sea, stood the celebrated temple of Somnath. Beyond its western boundary, the Gulf of Kach (Cutch), lies the country of that name, which extends to the great Delta of the Indus. Immediately on his right, to the east, is the magnificent valley of the Nerbudda, rising towards the crest or Highlands of Jabalpur, whose waters are drained off on either side, by the Ganges and the Nerbudda, into the Bay of Bengal and that of Cambay. The northern side of this valley is flanked throughout by the Vindhya chain of mountains. Between these and the Aravalli, extends the great plateau or elevated table land of Central India,—subdivided into the provinces or states of Malwa and Mewar, Harauti, including Bundi and Kotah, Ajmir and Khisengar, Kerauli and Jaipur, Bhopal and Gwalior,—and watered by the Chumbal and many other considerable streams which fall into the Jumna, between Agra and Allahabad.
These regions, as described by Colonel Tod, in his Annals of Rajasthan, Rajwarra, Raethana, or Rajputana, exhibit every conceivable variety of surface. Here, are fields of richest mould, watered and fertilized by many a meandering stream; there, is “a chaotic mass of rock with it’s splintered pinnacles rising over each ​other, in varied form, or frowning over the dark indented recesses of its forest-covered and rugged declivities.” Here, are low flat plains of black loam; there, lofty ridges that are “quite dazzling with enormous masses of vitreous rose-coloured quartz.” Here, are districts in which genial nature shoots forth with exuberant and almost spontaneous luxuriance; there, are tracts of barren sand and still more barren salt, relieved only by an occasional oasis of doubtful and half-forced verdure. Here, cultivation is carried on with infinite ease—the whole country resembling a well-dressed garden; there, along the slopes of rugged hills, it is conducted “with infinite labour, on terraces, as the vine is cultivated in Switzerland and on the Rhine,” Here, the hamlets of the peasantry lie scattered in peaceful seclusion amid groves and rivulets; there, the fortress of the proud chieftain scowls defiance from the summit of each lowering rock. Here, are lakes of fresh water, with banks and islets of surpassing beauty; there, are salt marshes, whose touch seems to be pollution, and whose exhalation, the very breath of the pestilence. And, what is still more rare—while there are large rivers of fresh water, there are large rivers of salt! Here, is the Chumbal, “the paramount Lord of the floods of Central India,” fed by a thousand streams and minor rills, from twice as many perennial springs—diffusing fertility and joy from the heights of Malwa and Mewar to its points of confluence with the Jumna; there, is the Luni, which, issuing from the sacred Lakes of Ajmir, and in its course becoming saturated with salt, spreads desolation as it rolls along, till it loses itself in the Run of Kach—in the rains, “a dirty saline solution,” and, in the dry season, presenting nought to the eye but a vast “glaring sheet of salt, spread over its insidious surface full of dangerous quicksands.”
In regions so exceedingly diversified, it is not to be supposed that there is a destitution of mineral resources. Accordingly, we are assured, that the Geologist and Mineralogist might there reap a rich harvest, if not of actual discovery, at least of illustrative and corroborative facts. But, this is a theme on which our limits will not allow us to enter. Neither can we venture to do more than simply to refer to the subject of their Antiquities—those wondrous remains of citadels, temples, palaces and triumphal pillars, which bespeak to the eye of the modern traveller, the glory and renown of bye-gone days—and which, amid many relics of still surviving barbarism, present monuments of an early civilization coeval with that of Greece and Rome, and decidedly surpassed only by the grandeur and magnificence of those proud commonwealths.
But, diversified as is the surface of these romantic regions, not ​Page:The Calcutta Review (1844), Volume 1.djvu/386 ​of these, Col. Tod tells us that each race has “its genealogical creed, describing the essential peculiarities, religious tenets and pristine locale of the clan”—that “every Rajput should be able to repeat this creed”—and that in point of fact, “there is scarcely a chief of character for knowledge, who cannot repeat the genealogy of his line;” though, in these degenerate days, many are satisfied with referring to the family bard or rhyming chronicler. These genealogical tables, which are the “touch-stone of affinities, and guardian of the laws of inter-marriage,” include in the lines of unbroken descent from Manu, all the names that are most renowned in the national epics of the Mahabharat and Ramayan—the Purans and other heroic legends of India;—the names, not merely of giants and mighty warriors, but also of demi-gods or incarnate deities. And hence, beyond all debate, one chief cause of that inconceivable and almost superhuman pride which forms so distinguishing a characteristic of the Rajput tribes. Even in Christian and highly civilized countries how often is the pride of birth found to operate with a fell and deadly potency?—the ability to trace up a lineage through several centuries to some robber chief, or stalwart warrior, being supposed to confer the prerogative of stalking abroad with an air of loftiness that might make an Archangel pay the forfeit of his crown!—as if the poorest beggar or most clownish artizan could not, as well as they, trace his lineage still higher—even to Noah and Adam, the first and second father of the race of man! What, then, must it be among demi-civilized and Pagan races like the Rajputs, where each Rana and petty chief, down to the remotest member of his family or clan, believes, with all the intensity of an undoubting faith, that he is of a superlatively ancient and royal descent,—yea, that his genealogical tree mounts upwards for millions of years, from the present iron age, through the brazen and the silver, to the very commencement of the age of gold—and that, consequently, in his veins there literally flows the blood of those mighty kings and warriors, with the praises of whose magnificence and feats of unrivalled heroism all India has for ages rung.
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