W. A. BARLOW by W. A. Barlow

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Nov 7, 1907

W. A. BARLOW

By W. A. Barlow

Santalia and the Santals—No. 2

W. A. BARLOW

The bajra (sorghum vulgare) is another good crop, coming into season a little later than the maize. Its grain appears as a tuft surmounting a stalk eight or ten feet high. It yields one of the cheapest foods in the country, of the grain order, but is less nutritious than the Indian corn. A number of millets are also very widely cultivated. In a good season oats or wheat may be sown in a rice-field after the harvest, and raised as a cold weather crop. The most important of the cold weather crops are the oil seeds, of which castor-oil and mustard are the principal. Flax is also cultivated to a small extent, not for its fiber, but for its oil (linseed). A little cotton is raised, chiefly as a garden crop, but most of the cloth produced in the district is woven from the Bombay yarn. (This is the yarn which we have been using in our small weaving plant, at our Seventh-day Adventist mission station, Babclmohal.) A few vegetables are to be found, among them the sweet potato. The potato itself has probably a future before it; at present it is imported in considerable quantities from other parts of India, and is becoming very popular.

Minerals are the products which give the district its chief importance from the industrial or commercial point of view. Of these coal is the chief.

Ten or twelve years ago this part of Bengal acquired temporary notoriety in connection with the “gold boom” in Calcutta. Bogus companies were formed by the score, in some cases on a basis no more substantial than that the general appearance of a certain district reminded some Australian expert of the country around Ballarat. Most of the companies had but an ephemeral existence, but others went so far as to import valuable machinery, which is still lying

rusting in the jungle. There is no doubt that gold does exist in the soil, but it has not yet been found in sufficient quantities to make it worth while mining for it. Copper and lead are also found in some places, but iron is the most common metal.

The soil throughout the district is not the rich, alluvial soil of the adjoining Gangetic valley, but the “laterite,” sandy, stony, dry soil, with masses of black rock breaking through at intervals. The average rainfall at Chakai (which is only about fourteen miles from Simultala) for the ten years (1893-1903) was found to be fifty-one to fifty-six inches, and this probably approximates to the average of the entire district. Most of the rain falls in the rainy season, between June and the end of September, but during the ten years referred to the only month in which practically no rain was recorded was December. Owing to the character of the soil and the natural drainage by the innumerable streams and rivers, the humidity is less than in any other place in Bengal. The temperature may fall almost to the freezing-point on a cold night in January, when a touch of hoarfrost may occasionally be seen, but it often rises to above one hundred twelve degrees Fahrenheit in the shade in April and May, when the hot dry winds are blowing from the west like blasts from a furnace. The hot season, however, is varied by thunder-storms and “north-westers,” when the temperature may fall twenty or thirty degrees in half an hour; and even at its worst, the dryness of the air makes the heat less exhausting than it would be in a more moist climate. On the whole, the district is an exceptionally healthful one for India, or at least for Bengal.

Historically, this district has always been a border-land. It marks the point where Bengal merges into the North-west, where Bengal and Hindustani meet and intermingle. The local rajahs are chiefly ghatwals, or pass keepers, who held their land in return for their services for keeping raiders and robbers in check. The last stand made by the Mogul power against the British was of near Monghyr (I may say that our Simultala Mission is situated in the division of Monghyr), where Mir Kassim, the Sirdar of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, was finally defeated. The ruins of a bridge which he blew up to cover his retreat into Oudh are still visible. Then in 1857 Santalia marked the limit of the actual mutiny. At Deoghur (about twelve miles south of Simultala, where Brother R. Cook and family have been staying for a few weeks) is the grave of the local magistrate who was murdered in the mutiny. A sepoy regiment that had been stationed there in connection with the Santal rising two years earlier, mutinied and killed their officers. The magistrate saved his wife and child by sending them off in a palki to Raniganj, eighty miles distant, which was then the railway terminus, but he remained at his post till he met the fate which overtook so many of our countrymen at that time.

Simultala, India.