DACCA.
The Romance of an Eastern Capital. By F. B. Bradley-Birt. (Smith, Elder, and Co. 12s. 13d. net.)—Although Dacca, as capital of the new province of Eastern Bengal, has already made sub- stantial advances in administrative, industrial, and commercial progress, the legendary and historic glories of the city and the adjacent regions must not be forgotten. The story of the countries called by ohronielers "the land of emerald and silver" is now well told by a writer with adequate knowledge and artistic powers. In the van is the Buddhist kingdom of Vikrampur ; then come the Hindu and Mnssulman dynasts of Sonargaon, with their capital, famous for its muslins, now all rice-fields and jungle, and afterwards the domain of the Moghul Emperors of Delhi, the Viceroy of one of whom built for himself as chief residence the present Dacca. Clive and Plessey brought the countries of the Brabmaputra under the rule of the India Company, who had long maintained a branch factory in the city of the delta, which for Bishop Heber, on his visitation of 1824, was a depopulated medley of mosques, ruins, and bushes, without trade or manufacture, lying altogether outside the movement of the great Indian world. Mr. Bin's narrative is always vigorous and realistic, be his topio a dynastic change, a tumbledown palace, a herd of buffaloes or a procession of elephants, a muezzin calling to prayer, or an endless train of pilgrims crowding to obtain pardon for their bins from the omnipotent Brahma by washing in the river. As a painter of Nature the author recalls in places Lamertine or Thine; but at the sight of dawn or sunset he overloads his sentences with he names of all the colours of the paint-box and invokes precious stones enough to fill a jeweller's shop. An odd freak of fancy has induced him to interleave his pictures of Oriental splendour with a series of pages on a whitewashed Roman Catholic church of village measurements and fittings, where half-a-dozen believers, descendants of the early French and Portuguese local factory hands, are witnessing the celebration of a Mass which is described in sustained splendour of rhetoric suitable for a vast Pontifical function in St. Peter's. Very captivating are the scattered paragraphs on the muslins of Sonargaon and Dacca, once so largely exported to Europe, a garment made of which, said Tavernier in 1666, he could pull through a ring, while a turban sixty cubits in length would go into a small cocoanut. Mr. Bin t explains bow our English market for " Running Water," "Evening Dew," and "the King's Water" (still known as Malmal lilhas) was blocked more than a century ago by a prohibitive tariff-duty on cotton, but he does not add that the place of those muslins has been commercially taken here by native and Swiss goods. We read that the Dacca output is still of incomparable fineness, although the native appliances are as primitive as eves.. As this volume says little of the immediate political antecedents and results of the creation of the new province, we think it desirable to explain that the efficient government of a country as large as France, with a population of eighty millions, by a single Lieutenant-Governor and Staff, has long been held to be an impossibility, so that schemes of reform have been in the air for half-a-century. Amongst the excellent results of the division may be named the satisfaction thus given to the Mohammedan majority of the population (eighteen millions to twelve of Hindus), whose approval has been strongly re-echoed by the followers of the Prophet in other parts of India. The inexorable logic of facts encourages the hope that the new Bengal, with its resources of jute, cotton, and Assam tea, will one day rank with the moat important of our Indian provinces. Assam tea, we believe, is not of Darjeeling or Ceylon
value, and is chiefly used here for blending ; the demand for jute as a substitute for linen in certain domestic textiles is largely extending.
Previous page
