Sykes' History of Persia Vol 2 (pdf) - Heritage Institute

498 HISTORY OF PERSIA
peasants can afford to indulge in the luxury regularly.
Meat also is a luxury, but is occasionally eaten during
the winter. A peasant usually has three meals, in the
morning, at noon, and at sunset ;
of these, the morning
meal is and the other two are full meals. He
light
manages to save about i a year, but if he is single his
savings are sometimes higher. When wheat is dear the
peasant makes money.
The Panjabi, to continue the comparison, generally
lives on barley and millet and sells his wheat. Indeed,
in every way his scale of living
is much lower. As an
Indian once put
it to me, " In Persia bread and meat is
the question in the towns ;
but in India bread alone."
All peasants, both men and women, smoke tobacco,
which they have generally raised on their own land.
Every house has a kursi arranged as follows : a
wooden frame is set in the middle of a room and live
charcoal placed under it in an open brazier. A quilt
is
then spread over the frame, and the family sits, works
and sleeps
in the same room under the quilt and is thus
kept warm and comfortable, although cases of death from
asphyxiation are not uncommon.
An ordinary peasant rarely spends more than the
following amount on the marriage of his children :
Clothes and jewellery
. . . Ts. 15 or
/3
Expenses of entertainment of .
guests Ts. 20 or
^4
Total . . Ts. 35 or j
The parents of a girl charge from ^4
to 20 as the
price of the mother's milk given to the girl during
infancy
this sum is generally used for the purchase of
;
the bride's clothes and jewellery.
In the Panjab, on the
other hand, hundreds of rupees are spent on a marriage,
which cripples the family permanently.
To summarize, the peasant in Persia, and especially
in the cold parts of the country, is certainly
better clad
and better fed than people of the same class in the
Panjab. The household comforts, too, are greater.
In
the Panjab the peasants are in the hands of the money-