to the sordid drudgery of fac-simile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception ? No, it shall not be so! Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.

That higher imagination was Beethoven's to a degree not reached by any other artist in any art. Bach and Mozart were great musicians; Beethoven, not less great a musician, was also a seer, and his utterance, as we have said, seems to be the language of a nobler race than ours, audible to him alone, and incommunicable to us, save in part, strive as he would to capture it and set it down. When this mood is on him he rises into remoter air and greater light :

Thin, thin, the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;

Rare the lone pastoral huts-marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun rises, and alone

Spring the great streams.

But he is not always absent from the earth he loved so dearly. In the little song-movement of Op. 90 we hear the tenderest of human speech, and the very last piece he wrote is full of that rejoicing spirit which is one of his most adorable gifts.

The tender poet and the rapt seer are to be found more readily in his compositions for piano than in his works for strings or chorus or orchestra. It is this companionable presence of something half-divine that puts the Sonatas of Beethoven among the most precious volumes in the world.

GEORGE SAMPSON

R

VOL. 245. NO. 500.

THE SUPPRESSION OF SUTTEE IN NATIVE STATES

UTTEE was abolished in the Bengal Presidency in December,

1829, in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies a few months later, but after its abolition in British India it was still practised throughout a vast tract of territory under native rule. British officers at native courts could only express unofficially the abhorrence of their own Government when it occurred; interference did not become peremptory until Dalhousie's time. But the British Government used every chance afforded by territorial changes or the revision of treaties to secure promises to prohibit the rite. The first chance to extend the area of abolition came in March, 1833, when a Raja was installed in Assam, and was made to promise to give up mutilation as a punishment and to forbid suttee.

Yet progress was sometimes accelerated by an individual officer going beyond his duty of registering protest. One such instance, in 1835, started the Bombay Government on a course of vigorous and steady pressure that within five years cleared the rite out of the States on its borders. To explain this incident of 1835, I must first go back to an event of 1833. Idar, a Rajput State under the Bombay Presidency, from ancient times had had a barbaric pre-eminence for its suttees :—

Idar is surrounded by a brick wall in fair preservation, through which a road passes by a stone gateway, marked with many red hands, each recording a victim to the rite of sati.*

On September 5, 1833, before a vast crowd, seven queens, two concubines, four female slaves, and a personal man-slave were burnt with the body of the Raja of Idar. Before the pyre was lit, the eldest Rani addressing the crowd said that she had always intended to burn with her lord, and no appeal could have turned her from her purpose; but she thought it strange that she had heard no single word of compassion or dissuasion. She bade those who were now sweeping her master's household out of

*Imperial Gazetteer of India; vol. xiii.

The

their way to go and live on the plunder they were seizing. funeral was followed by extensive looting of the Raja's personal property.

The incident has an interest beyond its pathos: it shows what from then on is increasingly manifest, that the women of royal households were changing in their attitude towards suttee, now that their sisters in British India were no longer allowed to burn. Two years later, the Ahmadnagar Raja died. His State had formerly been part of Idar State, as it is to-day, and it shared the same ferocious traditions. The British Agent, Mr. Erskine, was in the neighbourhood; determined to prevent a repetition of the Idar suttee, he moved on the town with a force of three hundred men. All day long, on February 8, the deceased Raja's sons pleaded with him not to interfere with their customs; they used the delay to push on their desperate measures for the sacrifice of the Ranis. Finding Erskine resolute, they secretly summoned warriors from the Bhils and other turbulent tribes, and the British Agent became aware that men armed with spears and matchlocks were pouring into the fort. He advanced upon it, but was fired on, some of his men being wounded; he fell back, sent for artillery, and waited. About two o'clock in the morning, women's screams were heard and the red glow of a pyre was seen on the darkness. During the night part of the fort wall had been broken down, and the widows, five in number, dragged to the river-bed and burnt. It was too late to rescue them; that the victims had been unwilling ones was clear. A woman's arm, hacked off by an axe or sword, lay in the ashes. The princes fled, but subsequently surrendered to Erskine.

Erskine's action† had been beyond his legal powers; but his Government supported him against cruelty and insolence so great. In a lengthy memorandum dated February 18, 1836, the new Ahmadnagar ruler provided a scapegoat, and wrote :—

My minister, Mahadjee Soobhavut, is guilty in the affair of the suttee; I will not give him shelter within my territory.

* My authority is the Bombay Courier, Sept. 28, 1834.

From

†I rely on the Bombay Courier and the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1909), II, p. 443. The Gazetteer gives the number of victims as three; official documents often omit to count slaves or concubines, and the Courier account is within a few months of the event, more than seventy years earlier than the Gazetteer.

this time forward neither I nor my children nor my posterity will perform the ceremony of suttee.*

For many years the Bombay Government were annoyed by the asylum given to the practice of suttee by neighbouring States. British subjects were taken beyond Bombay borders and burnt. The chief of the little island known as Angria's Kolaba, about twenty miles from Bombay, and Pratap Singh, the Raja of Satara, were particular offenders. The latter, a capable ruler but unfriendly, ignored the protests of the British representative, and suttee became very common in Satara. The Bombay Government, sensitive under the loss of prestige when their laws were flouted, began to follow up cases of the burning of their subjects. On January 3, 1838, the Nawab of Junagarh was made to apologise for having allowed the suttee of a British subject, and to promise to prohibit the rite altogether as the only sure way of preventing a recurrence of the offence. The same promise was exacted at the same time from another chief in the Kathiawar Agency. In September, 1839, the Raja of Satara was deposed for intrigues against the Supreme Power. His brother became Raja, and at his accession abolished suttee, later proving his good faith by saving a woman from being burnt.

In the next year, 1840, the Government wrote sharply to the foremost prince in the Presidency, the Gaekwar of Baroda; and that side of India was cleansed from legal suttee by promises wrung from the leading chiefs of Rewa Kanta also.

On the other side of India the Government entered upon the task of extirpating the horrible "meriah " human sacrifices of the Orissa highlands. Progress was slow, and success did not come for some years. In the meantime, on April 14, 1842, fifteen tributary chiefs of Orissa promised to abolish suttee. But among the Sikhs and in States bordering on the Punjab, suttee still continued. To quote the Oxford History :

Among the Sikhs the suttee murders were atrocious! Four ladies burned with Ranjit Singh ; one, against her will, with Kharak Singh ; two with Nao Nihal Singh; 310 (10 wives and 300 unmarried ladies of his zenana) were sacrificed at the obsequies of Raja Suchet Singh ; in September, 1845, four wives of Jawahir Singh were forced on the pyre by the sold ery; and, after Sobraon, the widow of Sardar Shan Singh burnt voluntarily.†

"Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds," IV, p. 76. +" Oxford History," pp. 689-690 n.

But neither Vincent Smith, in this inaccurate summary, nor the many writers who have quoted it, have indicated how incredibly atrocious the suttees of the last years of Sikh independence were. Contemporary British opinion in India was appalled by the obsequies of Ranjit Singh, "the Lion of the Panjab," in July, 1839; but Vigne, who gives the number of victims wrongly, speaks justly when he says:

Seven women only were burned with the body of Runjit Singh ; a very small number considering his rank : but it was, no doubt, deemed expedient to show some respect to European prejudices.*

We have two accounts of the scene by European eye-witnesses;† the accounts contradict each other in minor details, but prove the general inaccuracy of Thorburn's graphic and brilliant description. The four queens came first, walking barefooted from the palace to the body, which was fastened to a wooden board; before each of them a man walked backward, holding a mirror in which the lady could watch her countenance and detect the first glimmer of terror or shrinking. Three had already given their jewels away, the fourth was scattering gifts from a tray carried beside her by a man attendant. All four were in plain silk, without any ornaments. The chief queen, Rani Kundan, placed the hands of the minister and of the new Maharaja and his son on the corpse's breast, and made them swear to be faithful to the Khalsa and to one another, or incur a sati's curse. The four Ranis were then taken up in gorgeous palanquins, before which their mirror and a gilt parasol, the symbol of their rank, were carried. They were borne between a long double line of infantry as down a street; behind them walked seven slave-girls, also barefooted and plainly clad. The board to which the body of their master was fastened was placed on a brilliantly decorated bier, shaped like a ship, with flags and silken sails, embroidered with gold and silver. The pyre was about six feet high, and its surface scattered with cotton-seeds and other inflammable stuffs. The queens (Steinbach tells us) § were excited and exultant, the slaves, some of

* Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo " (1842), p. 86. †John Martin Honigberger, the Court Physician at Lahore, and the adventurer, Lieut.-Col. Henry Steinbach.

"The Punjab in Peace and War," pp. 20-1.

§"The Punjaub," 1846. Psychologically, his account is the more detached and valuable, but Honigberger's contains the fuller details.