Caste

Caste

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Title: Caste
Author: W. A. Fraser
Release Date: September 26, 2005 [EBook #16752]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Produced by Al Haines

CASTE
BY
W. A. FRASER

AUTHOR OF "RED MEEKINS," "BULLDOG CARNEY," "THE

THREE SAPPHIRES," "THE LONE FURROW,"
"THOROUGHBREDS," ETC.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

CASTE. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CASTE
CHAPTER I
The three Mahrattas, Sindhia, Holkar, and Bhonsla, were plotting the
overthrow of the British, and the Peshwa was looking out of brooding
eyes upon Hodson, the Resident at Poona.
Up on the hill, in the temple of Parvati, the priests repeated prayers to
the black goddess calling for the destruction of the hated whites.
Each one of the twenty-four priests as he came with a handful of
marigolds laid them one by one at the feet of the four-armed hideous
idol, repeating: "_Om, Parvati_! _Om, Parvati_!" the comprehensive,
all-embracing "_Om_" that meant adoration and a clamour for favour.
Even to Nandi, the brass bull that carried Shiva, he appealed, "Om
Shiva!"

But down on the rock-plateau, where gleamed in the hot sun marble
palaces, a more malign influence was at work. Dandhu Panth, the
adopted son of the Peshwa, had come back from Oxford, and the
English believed he had been changed into an Englishman, Nana Sahib.
Outwardly he was a sporting, well-dressed gentleman, such as Oxford
turns out; but in his heart was lust of power, and hatred of the white
race that he felt would make his inheritance, the Peshwaship, but a
vassalage. His dreams of ruling India would fade, and he would sit a
pensioner of the British. The Mahrattas had been stigmatised by a
captious Mogul ruler, "mountain rats." As Hindus there was a sharp
cleavage of character; the Brahmins, fanatical, high up in the caste
scale, and all the rest of the breed inferior, vicious, blood-thirsty, a
horde of pirates. Even the man who first made them a power, Sivaji,
had been of questionable lineage, a plebeian; and so the body corporate
was of inflammable material--little restraint of breeding.
And for all Nana Sahib's veneer of English class, mental development,
beneath the English shirt he wore the junwa, the three-strand sacred
thread, insignia of the twice-born,--the Brahmin.
From Governor General to the British officers who played polo with
the Peshwa's son, they all accepted him as one of themselves;
considered it good diplomacy that he had been sent to Oxford and made
over.
There was just one man who had misgivings, the Resident at Poona. He
was a small, tired, worn-out official--an executive, a perpetual wheel in
the works, always close to the red-tape-tied papers, always. Strange that
one not a dreamer, no sixth-sense, should have attained to an
intuition--which it was, his distrust of the cheery, sporty Nana Sahib.
That Hodson's superiors intimated that India was getting to his liver
when he wrote, very cautiously, of this obsession, made no difference;
and clinging to his distrust, he achieved something.
After all it was rather strange that the matter had not been taken out of
his hands, but it wasn't. A sort of departmental formula running;
"Commissioner So-and-So has the matter in hand--refer to him." And

so, when a new danger appeared on the distressed horizon, Amir Khan
and a hundred thousand massed horsemen, Captain Barlow was sent to
consult with the Resident. That was the way; a secretive, trusty, brave
man, for in India the written page is never inviolate.
Captain Barlow was sent--ostensibly as an assistant to the Resident, in
reality to acquire full knowledge of the situation, and then go to the
camp of Amir Khan with the delicate mission of persuading him not to
join his riding spear-men to the Mahratta force, but to form an alliance
with the British.
The Resident had asked for Barlow. He had explained that any show of
interest, two men, or five, or twenty, an envoy, even men of
pronounced position, would defeat their object; in fact, believing Nana
Sahib to be what he was, he conceived the very simple idea of playing
the Oriental's Orientalism against him.
Barlow would be the last man in India to whom one as suspicious as
the Peshwa's son would attribute a subtlety deep enough for a serious
mission. He was a great handsome boy; in his physical excellence he
was beautiful; courage