The Port Gibson Reveille

Social Life in India.

The mode of life of the Indian husbandman
is one of extreme simplicity, too often even
miserable, from the continual and severe ex-
tortion practiced upon them by the Zemin-
dars, or great lords of the soil, and others of
that class. The members of a family dwell
together most contentedly and happily. All,
from the grandfather to the grandchild, shel-
tered by the same roof or bamboo wall, satis-
fied if their simple meal of roots and grain
comes at the usual time, and tempted now
and then to snatch a mouthful of forbidden
rice from the fields their hands cultivate for
the tax farmers; and happy, indeed, if at har-
vest time all that crop be not wrung from
them under pretence of taxation. Of house-
hold furniture he has no store: a bundle of
rushes carpets his mud floor; a few earthen
vessels for water or for cooking; a bamboo
stool, a rush mat for a bed, which, when not
in use, is rolled up in a corner, compose his
worldly goods. His dinner service is plucked
from the banana plant, whose leaves supply
him with an unending succession of clean
plates from which his frugal meal is eaten.—
In dress he has little to boast of: one strip
of cotton cloth, bleached in its numerous
cleansings, or perhaps stained yellow or pink,
is wound round the loins. On occasion of
great display, he adds another piece loosely
flung across the shoulders, to be afterwards
laid carefully aside for future use. The wo-
men wear a similar piece, but longer, wrap-
ped about them in apparent negligence, and
yet so gracefully as to set off the figure to the
utmost advantage.—In this brief sketch, the
reader has a picture of what may truly be call-
ed the bone and sinew of the Indian Empire,
the source from which springs the vast export
trade amounting to seventeen millions ster-
ling annually. (about $34,000,000) and from
whom is wrung the greater part of the twen-
ty-two millions sterling ($110,000,000) yield-
ed in the shape of taxation.