Read an Excerpt

I. INS AND OUTS OF THE VILLAGE.1 In ail attempt to describe for English readers a type specimen of an agricultural village as it exists in Bengal at the present day, it should be premised that the Bengal village differs as much from an English village, as two things bearing the same designation can well be conceived to differ. There is but one form of landscape to be seen in deltaic Bengal, and that a very simple one. From the sea line of the Sunderbunds on the South, to the curve which, passing through Dacca, Pubna, Moorsheedabad, forms the lower boundary of the red land of the North, the whole country is analmost perfectly level alluvial plain. It exhibits generally large open spacessometimes very large limited to the eye by heavy masses of foliage. These open spaces, during the height of the South-West Monsoon, are more or less covered with water; at the end of the rains by green waving swarths of rice; and in the dry season are to a large extent fallow ground, varied by plots of the different cold weather (or rabi) crops. 1 This with the six succeeding sections, almost as they now stand, appeared as an article in the July and October numbers of the Calcutta Review for 1874. There exist almost no roads; that is to say, except a few trunk roads of communication between the capital and the district towns, there are almost none of the European sort, only irregular tracks, sometimes traversable by wheels, along the balks (or ails) which divide and subdivide the soil into small cultivated patches or khets. The few other roads which do exist, are kachcha, ie., unmetalled, and are pretty nearly useless except in the dry season.1 1 On the relatively high land of West Bengal, which liesoutside the delta and below the ghats, something like roads may be seenthrough an...