Page:The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose.djvu/17

3 as elsewhere feeling its way towards readjustment to the times. Mahommedans here, too, as nearly always tinged by their Hindu surroundings, are moving along with them.

But East Bengal people are by no means all a gentle peasant folk, responsive to reigion and education. The great rivers introduce strong elements of movement and enterprise, of fishery and transport; in various ways stimulating, adventurous, unsettling, even to the peasant villages. The contrast, the mingling and the clashing of peasant and fisher populations, so deeply formative throughout the history of Mediterranean and Western Europe, have long been here in evidence, though of course on the smaller scale of a river system as compared with seas and coasts, and thus operative on the small scale instead of the great. Peasant prosperity was advanced by easy transports, and vigour and wellbeing improved by fish diet. The villagers were also relieved of their more restive young spirits by the call of the rivers, with their long perspectives promising freer and more adventurous careers.

But beside the eleinents of sport and luck which give charm to the fisher life, and the more ambitious lure of gain, even comparative fortune, through transports and commerce, these rivers have an old and evil reputation for dacoity; for such robberies they notably facilitate, since their numberless creeks and adjacent jungles afford sally-ports and refuges by turns. Here then we have the conditions at once for agricultural and riverine villages in prosperity, but also for a vigorous lawless class, who find these villages worth robbing. Yet the robbers never became strong enough to dominate their district: for even apart from the vigilance and repression of governments, the water-thief and pirate cannot venture far from his boat. Thus his depredations were but sufficient only to produce watchfulness in the villages, with frequent and ready defence and resistance, attack and pursuit, in turn. In short, such villagers tend to be roused beyond the plodding life of the peasant, which is too readily acceptant of life's ills; and