Mathura A District Memoir Chapter-1

"THE MODERN DISTRICT; ITS CONFORMATION, EXTENT AND DIVISIONS AT DIFFERENT PERIODS. THE CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE. THE PREDOMINANT CASTES; THE JATS AND THEIR ORIGIN; THE CHAUBES; THE AHIVASIS; THE GAURUA THAKURS. THE JAINIS AND THEIR TEMPLES. THE PRINCIPAL FAMILIES; THE SETH; THE RAJA F HATHRAS; THE RAIS OF SADABAD. AGRICULTURAL CLASSIFICATION OF LAND; CANALS; FAMINES; THE DELHI ROAD AND ITS SARAES.

The modern district of Mathura is one of the five which together make up the Agra Division of the North West Provinces. It has an area of 1,453 square miles, with a population of 671,690, the vast majority of whom,viz., 611,626, are Hindus. In the year 1803, when its area was first included in British territory, part of it was administered from Agra and part from Sadabad. This arrangement continued till 1832, when the city of Mathura was recognized as the most fitting centre of local government and, superseding the village of Sadabad, gave its name to a new district, comprising eight tahsilis, viz., Aring, Sahar, and Kosi, on the right bank of the Jamuna; and on the left, Mat, Noh-jhil, Mahaban, Sadabad, and Jalesar. In 1860, Mat and Noh-jhil were united, with the former as the head-quarters of the Tahsildar; and in 1868 the revenue offices at Aring were transferred to Mathura, but the general boundaries remained unchanged.

The district, however, as thus constituted, was of a most inconvenient shape. Its outline was that of a carpenter's square, of which the two parallelograms were nearly equal in extent; the upper one lying due north and south, while the other at right angles to it stretched due eastward below. The capital, situ­ated at the interior angle of junction, was more accessible from the contiguous district of Aligarh and the independent State of Bharat-pur than from the greater part of its own territory. The Jalesar pargana was the most remote of all ; its two chief towns, Awa and Jalesar, being respectively 55 and 43 miles from the local Courts, a greater distance than separated them from the capitals of four other districts.

This, under any conditions, would have been justly considered an inconve­nience, and there were peculiar circumstances which rendered it exceptionally so. The transfer of a very large proportion of the land from the old proprietary village communities to wealthy strangers had created a wide-spread feeling of restlessness and impatience, which was certainly intensified by the remoteness of the Courts and the consequent unwillingness to have recourse to them for the settlement of a dispute in its incipient stages. Hence the frequent occur­rence of serious outrages, such as burglaries and highway robberies, which were often carried out with more or less impunity, notwithstanding the number of people that must have been privy to their commission. However willing the authorities of the different districts were to act in concert, investigation on the part of the police was greatly hampered by the readiness with which the crimi­nals could escape across the border and disperse themselves through the five districts of Mathura, Agra, Mainpuri, Eta, and Aligarh. Thus, though a local administrator is naturally jealous of any change calculated to diminish the im­portance of his charge, and Jalesar was unquestionably the richest portion of the district, still it was generally admitted by each successive Magistrate and Collector that its exchange for a tract of country with much fewer natural advan­tages would be a most politic and beneficial measure.(read note 1)

The matter, which had often before been under the consideration of Gov­ernment, was at last settled towards the close of the year 1874, when Jalesar was finally struck off from Mathura. At first it was attached to Agra; but six years later it was again transferred and joined on to Eta, which was then raised to the rank of a full district. No other territory had been given in compensa­tion till 1879, when 84 villages, constituting the pargana of Farrah, were taken from Agra and added on to the Mathura tahsili. The district has thus been rendered much more manageable and compact. It is now in the shape of an imperfect crescent, with its convex side to the south-west and its horns and hollow centre on the left bank of the river looking upwards to the north-east. The eastern portion is a fair specimen of the land ordinarily found in the Doab. It is abundantly watered, both by wells and rivers, and is carefully cultivated. Its luxuriant crops and fine orchards indicate the fertility of the soil and render the landscape not unpleasing to the eye; but though far the more valuable part of the district for the purposes of the farmer and the economist, it possesses few historical associations to detain the antiquary. On the other hand, the western side of the district, though comparatively poor in natural products, is rich in mythological legend, and contains in the towns of Mathura and Brinda-ban a series of the master-pieces of modern Hindu architecture. Its still greater wealth in earlier times is attested by the extraordinary merit of the few speci­mens which have survived the torrent of Muhammadan barbarism and the more slowly corroding lapse of time.

Yet, widely as the two tracts of country differ in character, there is reason to believe that their first union dates from a very early period. Thus, Varaha Mihira, writing in the latter half of the fifth century of the Christian era, seems to speak of Mathura as consisting at that time also of two very dissimilar portions For, in the 16th section of the Brihat Sanhita, he includes its eastern half, with all river lands (such as is the Doab), under the protection of the planet Budha—that is, Mercury ; and the western half, with the Bharatas and Purohits and other managers of religious ceremonies (classes which still to the present day form the mass of the population of western Mathura, and more particularly so if the Bharatas are taken to mean the Bharat-pur Jats) under the tutelage of Jiva--that is, Jupiter. The Chinese pilgrim, Hwen Thsang, may also be adduced as a witness to the same effect. He visited India in the. seventh century after Christ, and describes the circumference of the kingdom of Mathura as 5,000 li i.e., 950 miles, taking the Chinese li as not quite one-fifth of an English mile. The people, he says, are of a soft and easy nature and delight to perform meritorious works with a view to a future life. The soil is rich and fertile and specially adapted to the cultivation of grain. Cotton staffs of fine texture are also here obtainable and gold; while the mango trees (read note 2) are so abundant that they form complete forests-the fruit being of two varieties, a smaller kind, which turns yellow as it ripens, and a larger, which remains always green. From this description it would appear that the then kingdom of Mathura extended east of the capital along the Doab in the direction of Mainpuri; for there the mango flourishes most luxuriantly and almost every village boasts a fine grove; whereas in Western Mathura it will scarcely grow at all except under the most careful treatment. In support of this inference it may be observed that, notwithstanding the number of monasteries and stupas mentioned by the Buddhist pilgrims as existing in the kingdom of Mathura, comparatively few traces of any such buildings have been discovered in the modern district, ex­cept in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital. In Mainpuri, on the con­trary, and more especially on the side where it is nearest to Mathura, fragments of Buddhist sculpture may be seen lying in almost every village. In all pro­bability the territory of Mathura at the time of Hwen -Thsang's visit, included not only the eastern half of the modem district, but also some small part of Agra and the whole of the Shikohabad and Mustafabad parganas of Mainpuri; while the remainder of the present Mainpuri district formed a portion of the kingdom of Sankasya, which extended to the borders of Kanauj. But all local recollec­tion of this exceptional period has absolutely perished, and the mutilated effigies of Buddha and Maya are replaced on their pedestals and adored as Brahma and Devi by the ignorant villagers, whose forefathers, after long struggles, had tri­umphed in their overthrow.

In the time of the Emperor Akbar the land now included in the Mathura district formed parts of three different Sarkars, or Divisions—viz., Agra, Kol, and Sahar.

The Agra Sarkar comprised 33 mahals, four of which were Mathura, Maholi, Mangotla, and Maha-ban. Of these, the second, Maholi, (the Madhupuri of Sanskrit literature) is now quite an insignificant village and is so close to the city as almost to form one of its suburbs. The third, Mangotla or Magora, has disappeared altogether from the revenue-roll, having been divided into four pattis or shares, which are now accounted so many distinct villages. The fourth, Maha-ban, in addition to its present area, included some ten villages of what is now the Sadabad pargana and the whole of Mat; while Noh –jhil, lately united with Mat was at that time the centre of pargana Noh (read note 3) which was included in the Kol Sarkar.The Sadabad (read note 4) pargana had no independent existence till the reign of Shahjahan, when his famous minister, Sadullah Khan, founded the town which still bears his name, and subordinated to it all the sur­rounding country, including part of Khandauli, which is now in the Agra district.

The Sahar Sarkar consisted of seven mahals, or parganas, and included the territory of Bharat-pur. Its home pargana comprised a large portion of the modern Mathura district, extending from Kosi and Shergarh on the north to Aring on the south. It was not till after the dissolution of the Muhammadan power that Kosi was formed by the Jats into a separate pargana ; as also was the case with Shahpur, near the Gurganw border, which is now merged again in Kosi. About the same unsettled period a separate pargana was formed of Gobardhan. Subsequently, Sahar dropped out of the list of Sarkars, alto­gether; great part of it, including its principal town, was subject to Bharat-­pur, while the remainder came under the head of Mathura then called Islampur or Islamabad. Since the mutiny, Sahar has ceased to give a name even to a pargana ; as the head-quarters of the Tahsildar were at that time removed, for greater safety, to the large fort-like sarae at Chhata.

As might be expected from the almost total absence of the Muhammadan element in the population, the language of the people, as distinct from that of the official classes, is purely Hindi. In ordinary speech 'water' is jal ; ' land' is dharti; 'a father,' pita; ‘grandson,' nati (from the Sanskrit naptri),and 'time' is often ‘samay’.Generally speaking, the conventional Persian phrases of compliment are represented by Hindi equivalents, as for instance, ikbal by pratap and tashrlf lana by kripa krana . The number of words absolutely peculiar to the district is probably very small; for Braj Bhasha (and Western Mathura is coterminous with Braj), is the typical form of Hindi, to which other local varie­ties are assimilated as far as possible. A short list of some expression that might strike a stranger as unusual has been prepared and will be found in the Appendix. In village reckonings, the Hindustani numerals, which are of sin­gularly irregular formation and therefore difficult to remember, seldom employed in their integrity, and any sum above 20, except round numbers, is expressed by a periphrasis—thus, 75 it not pachhattar, but panch ghat assi, i.e., 80—5 ; and 97 is not suttanawe but tin ghat eau, i.e., 100-3. In pronun­ciation there are some noticeable deviations from established usage; thus, let s is substituted for sh, as in samil for shamil ; sumar for shumar : 2nd, ch takes the place of s as in Chita for Sita, and occasionally vice versa; as in charsa for church: and 3rd, in the vowels there is little or no distinction between a and i, thus we have Lakshmin for Lakshman The prevalence of this latter vulgarism explains the fact of the word Brahman being ordinarily spelt in English as Brahmin. It is still more noticeable in the adjoining district of Mainpuri; where, too, a generally becomes 0, as chalo gayo, “he went," for chala gaya-a provincialism equally common in the mouths of the Mathura peasants. It may also, as a grammatical peculiarity, be remarked that kari, the older form of the past participle of the verb karna, 'to do,' is much more popular than its modern abbreviation, ki; ne, which is now generally recognized as the sign of the agent, is sometimes used in a very perplexing way, for what it originally was, viz., the sign of the dative; and the demonstrative pronouns with the open vowel terminations, ta and wa, are always preferred to the sibilant Urdu forms is and us. As for Muhammadan proper names, they have as foreign a sound and are as much corrupted as English; for example, Wazir-ud-din, Hidayat-ullah and Taj Muhammad would be known in their own village only as Waju, Hatu and Taju, and would themselves be rather shy about claiming the longer title; while Mauja, which stands for the Arabic Mauj-ud-din, is transformed so completely that it is no longer recognized as a specially Muham­madan name and is often given to Hindus.