I have seen rich fields of uninterrupted wheat cultivation for twenty miles by ten, in the valley of the Nerbudda, so entirely destroyed by this disease that the people would not go to the trouble of gathering one field in four, for the stalks and the leaves were so much injured that they were considered as unfit or unsafe for fodder; and during the same season its ravages were equally felt in the districts along the tablelands of the Vindhya range, north of the valley and, I believe, those upon the Satpura range, south.  The last time I saw this blight was in March, 1832, in the Sagar district, where its ravages were very great, but partial; and I kept bundles of the blighted wheat hanging up in my house, for the inspection of the curious, till the beginning of 1835.[6]

When I assumed charge of the district of Sagar in 1831 the opinion among the farmers and landholders generally was that the calamities of season under which we had been suffering were attributable to the increase of adultery, arising, as they thought, from our indifference, as we seemed to treat it as a matter of little importance; whereas it had always been considered under former Governments as a case of life and death.  The husband or his friends waited till they caught the offending parties together in criminal correspondence, and then put them both to death; and the death of one pair generally acted, they thought, as a sedative upon the evil passions of a whole district for a year or two.  Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than our laws for the punishment of adultery in India, where the Muhammadan criminal code has been followed, though the people subjected to it are not one-tenth Muhammadans.  This law was enacted by Muhammad on the occasion of his favourite wife Ayesha being found under very suspicious circumstances with another man.  A special direction from heaven required that four witnesses should swear positively to the fact.

Ayesha and her paramour were, of course, acquitted, and the witnesses, being less than four, received the same punishment which would have been inflicted upon the criminals had the fact been proved by the direct testimony of the prescribed number—­that is, eighty stripes of the ‘kora’, almost equal to a sentence of death. (See Koran, chap. 24, and chap. 4.)[7] This became the law among all Muhammadans.  Ayesha’s father succeeded Muhammad, and Omar succeeded Abu Bakr.[8] Soon after his accession to the throne, Omar had to sit in judgement upon Mughira, a companion of the prophet, the governor of Basrah,[9] who had been accidentally seen in an awkward position with a lady of rank by four men while they sat in an adjoining apartment.  The door or window which concealed the criminal parties was flung open by the wind, at the time when they wished it most to remain closed.  Three of the four men swore directly to the point.  Mughira was Omar’s favourite, and had been appointed to the government by him, Zaid, the brother of one of the three who had sworn to the fact, hesitated to swear to the entire fact.