Page:Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India etc. (Volume III.).djvu/391

Rh wilder form and debased by much alloy of treachery and violence, is conspicuous in the smaller and less good-looking inhabitants of Rajpootana and Malwah; while the mountains and woods, wherever they occur, shew specimens of a race entirely different from all these, and in a state of society scarcely elevated above the savages of New Holland, or New Zealand; and the inhabitants, I am assured, of the Deckan, and of the Presidencies of Madras and Bombay, are as different from those which I have seen, and from each other, as the French and Portuguese from the Greeks, Germans, or Poles; so idle is it to ascribe uniformity of character to the inhabitants of a country so extensive, and subdivided by so many almost impassable tracts of mountain and jungle; and so little do the majority of those whom I have seen deserve the gentle and imbecile character often assigned to them. Another instance of this want of information, which at the time of my arrival excited much talk in Bengal, was the assertion made in Parliament, I forget by whom, that “there was little or no sugar cultivated in India, and that the sugar mostly used there came from Sumatra and Java.” Now this even the cockneys of Calcutta must have known to be wrong, and I can answer for myself, that in the whole range of Calcutta, from Dacca to Delhi, and thence through the greater part of Rajpootana and Malwah, the raising of sugar is as usual a part of husbandry, as turnips or potatoes in England; and that they prepare it in every form, except the loaf, which is usually met with in Europe. This, 1