BEAST AND MAN IN INDIA.*
As its title suggests, Mr. Kipling's sketches with pen and pencil deal mainly with the domesticated or semi-domesticated animals of India. Hitherto beasts of the chase have so far absorbed the attention of sport-loving Englishmen in that country, that the picturesque and natural relation of animal
life to human interests in the great peninsula has been strangely neglected. Even if the subject were less well treated than it is in the clever work under review, we might readily concede Mr. Kipling's claim that " an elementary study of Indian animals, their treatment and usage, and the popular estimate concerning them, opens a side-door to Indian life, thought, and character, the threshold of which is still unworn." The human interest in the book is, in fact, so sus- tained and illustrated, that we might almost reverse the order in which the author has chosen to state his subject, and frankly discuss it as a close and accurate study of the mental and moral status of an ancient social order considered from the side which modern conditions have least affected. This is not, it is true, the point from which the author
wishes it to be understood that he approaches his sub- ject. He is careful to warn his readers against the false inferences which have been drawn from a ritual reverence- for animal life which neither requires nor produces a regard for animal suffering, or a feeling of sympathy for animal wants. In a powerful sketch of modern Hindooism,.
he dismisses the received notion of the general sanctity of animals, and the claim for a " wonderf al immutability of custom." "The High Gods," he writes, " are practically superseded in favour of witchcraft, demonology, and fetishism, and by vulgar manifestations, mainly of an orgiastic type ; and Buddhism, with its general injunctions of mercy, is said to have been " dead and done with in India proper for centuries." He concludes that "feeling for the sufferings of animals, restraint in their use, and a recognition of their rights to consideration, are as modern in India as elsewhere,'
and instances of positive cruelty in their daily treatment, and
horrible torture by neglect, are multiplied with a sickening realism of pen and pencil which truth may demand, but at which the taste revolts. But though Mr. Kipling makes out a good case for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Bill in India, circumstances are in the main too strong for him. The bias of a vast people, originally wholly pastoral or agricul- tural, which leads naturally to the exaltation of the beast. which serves and the propitiation of the beast which harms,.
to the worship of the cow as a god and the propitiation of the
monkey as a devil, leaves a mark on the minds of Indian men as strong as the impression left by the powers of the river of
Egypt on the inhabitants of the Delta ; and as the Nile " flows.
through old hushed Egypt like a dream," so does the nexus of necessity bind and pervade the imaginations of the people of
India in relation to the beasts that earn their bread. Even city life does not weaken their early instincts. "The people have a passion—no other word is strong enough," writes the author, "for the possession of cattle. Indian cities, ful of folk, are also vast cow-byres or mistals, and hitherto- sanitary reform has not ventured to interfere. The cattle
• Beast and Man in India. By John Lockwood Kipling, 0.1..E. London Macmillan and Co.
come and go at their own pleasure, and rub shoulders with humanity with an ineffable air of security and free- dom. Nearly everybody is, or thinks he is, a judge of a cow ; and there is no more popular subject of discourse, and none with so copious a terminology. Every possible, and some apparently impossible, varieties of form and colour ; of hair, horn, tail, udder, dewlap, hump, eyes, and limbs, has its separate name and phrase ;" and the beauty and variety of the Indian breeds described, running in size from that of a mastiff-dog to the huge commissariat ox, seem to justify their enthusiasm. On the other hand, the men who allow the tame or sacred cow to eat fruit from their shops, or block a street when disposed to sleep, do not hesitate to twist the tail of a broken-down draught-bullock till it breaks, to thrust pepper into its eyes, and if it cannot rise, to leave it—here religion steps in—to die slowly of starvation after the vultures and crows have torn out its eyes. Still, the balance lies, in the case of the cow, with kindness ; and the elephant, and in a mistaken way the horse, is the object of lavish good treatment.
The description of "My Lord the Elephant's" toilet is delightful. For his bath before a ceremony " an irrigation cut is generally preferred, where the great baby is made to lie down, to raise his head or a leg at a word, while the mahout, often assisted by his son, who assumes tremendous airs of authority if he is very young, climbs about his huge bulk, and scrubs him with brick-bats. A brick flesh-rubber is in common use for men's feet, and seems to suit the elephant perfectly. But the creature is generally inattentive during the process ; he plays with the soap,' so to speak, blows clouds of vapour from his trunk, lifts up the wrong leg, rolls over at the wrong minute, with now and then, from a hasty mahout, as from an irritable nursemaid, a blow. When the washing is finished, he slings his nurses up to his neck, or gives them a leg-up' behind, in the friendly fashion peculiar to him, and shuffles back to the serai to be dressed." Horses, like elephants, are, in the service of the rich, mainly animals for show, and suffer from over-kindness in the way of feeding, and stupidity in training. If Mr. Kipling is right, the popular estimate of the Indian power of training animals is very far wrong. They can tame, but not train to any purpose. Even the hawks and hunting leopards owe any skill they show to their native instincts,—none to the keeper. Horses are ruined in temper and physique on a system, and then killed by want of exercise and stuffing with food. Indian bits are instruments of torture, and not one but half-a-dozen bearing-reins are fixed about the poor creature for hours, to produce the fashionable distortions which taste demands. Real excellence in riding and skill in management seem to Mr. Kipling to rest solely with the English conquerors. But he makes no mention of the feats of the Indian troopers in our service, or of the care which these men, drawn from a class enjoying some means and position compared with the ordinary Sepoy, show in the management and training of their chargers.
The description of the elephant's toilet quoted above, is a specimen of Mr. Kipling at his best ; but the book contains such store of good stories, told with great freshness and sympathy, that we need not scruple to quote freely. He is a capital observer, and much of his information, gathered at first-hand, will be new to English ideas. Take, for instance, the excessive restlessness of the elephant, whose bulk and solidity is associated in most European minds with an im- pression of ponderous immobility. But "An elephant's shoulder is never still," is a native saying, and Mr. Kipling gives a curious instance of their fidgety habits. Forty elephants had been shipped in a steamer which anchored in a perfectly smooth sea off Saugor Point. " At first they said it was a ground-swell that made the ship roll so much, but soon the Captain came in dire alarm to the officer in charge of the freight. The elephants had found that by swaying to and fro all together, a rocking motion was produced which seemed to please them immensely. So the great heads and bodies rolled and swung in unison, till the ship, which had no other cargo and rode light, was in imminent danger of rolling clean over. The mahouts were harried down into the hold, and each seated on his beast made him break step,' so to speak," and the elephants' dangerous little amusement stopped. One of the best sides of Indian treatment of animals is the complete toleration of wild creatures round their homes. " Look at that beast of a robin ; I should like to catapult him !" says the small boy in Punch, watching the birds being fed. But the Hindoo boy does not even throw stones, and the villager spends dreary days and nights, and exhausts ingenious devices to protect his crops from bird and beast without injury to either. How serious is the loss so patiently endured, is shown by the Indian saying that public calamities' are seven,—drought, floods, locusts, rats, parrots, tyranny, and invasion." The sacred monkeys are not far behind the parrots as pests, and a comical story is told of the efforts of a pious community to get rid of the sacred but superfluous monkeys. Numbers were caught, caged, and despatched in bullock-carts to places many miles distant. There they were let loose; but as the empty carts returned, the monkeys, "quick to perceive and defeat the plan of their enemies, bounded gaily alongside, and trooped in through the city gates with the air of a holiday party returning from a picnic." The next time the monkeys were sent away by train to a junction near the hills, with a request to the station-master (like that so often received from pigeon- fanciers in England) to " liberate, and return the baskets." But the monkeys got loose, invaded the station and rail- way workshops, and for a time almost took possession of the line. Among the bird-stories, we may notice that of the tame crows stealing ice, and their indignation at its speedy disappearance; and the sensible Indian habit of making a pet of the partridge, one of the boldest, cleverest, and most sociable of birds. " The bird follows its master with a rapid and pretty gait that suggests a graceful girl tripping along with a full skirt well held up. The Indian lover can pay his sweetheart no higher compliment than to say that she runs like a partridge." This idea may be commended to those who are in want of a pet which will grow quite tame, does not need a cage, and will live to a ripe old age, with a steady increase in beauty. We have known a brood of ten home-reared partridges so tame as to fly into the dining-room and pick up the crumbs under the breakfast-table, flying out again when the food was exhausted. For the low popular estimate of the dog in India, Mr. Kipling cites much folk-lore, and one sufficient reason. The last is the miserable quality of the common Indian dog itself. But popular sayings, even if all on one side, which Sir George Birdwood questions in the case of Indian feeling, do not go so far as Mr. Kipling seems to infer. Much evil is current about the dog in English speech, while in practice the dog is often master of his owner. We may contrast or compare, as individual experience of the East suggests, a curious Turkish sentiment with Indian feeling on the subject of the dog. In towns where "old Turkish" ideas prevail, a dignified and bearded Tnrk, his head thrown back and eyelids lowered, may sometimes in the early morning be seen stepping out into the streets with a faggot of long loaves of bread under his left arm. The street- dogs rush to meet him, and the good Moslem, with a certain dignity and feeling for ritual, casts the loaves carelessly, one by one, heedless where they fall, among the dogs around him. It is a minor penance,—or atonement for some sin of com- mission or omission against the law of Mahommed. And the reason is this. When Satan drew near to devour Adam and Eve after they were driven from the Garden, the foam which flecked his lips fell to the ground. But when it touched the kindly earth, the foam changed into the form of fierce dogs, which instantly assumed the rote of the protectors of mankind, and drove back Satan from his purpose. Of the illustrations, the greater number, and by far the best, are by Mr. Kipling. Most of these are marked by a great natural feeling for the subjects and the setting ; and the treatment is often strengthened by a quick insight into " values " of light and distance. But the drawing occasionally suggests a want of stability in his four- legged subjects, and not even the cleverness of the sketch of " Ploughing " (p. 151) can convince us that the ribs of Indian oxen incline to curve forwards rather than backwards. But as an aid to a right understanding of Indian native life, the book must claim a high place ; and its store of interest and amusement is exceptional.
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