Through India with the Prince

Front matter

A AS |

7 TO BE ISSUED: OUT i Vv. THOUT PERMISSION. (

: iy I ES PNR See ee ee eS

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. BOMBAY - - - - - - I Il, INDORE - - - - - - 925 II], A WEEK-END IN UDAIPUR - - : - 43 Iv. JAIPUR - - - e = - 52 Vv. IN THE DESERT - - - - - 63 VI. THE PUNJAB AND ITS PEOPLE . - - 74 VII. LAHORE - : - - - - 84

VIII. ON THE NORTH-WEST FRONTIER | - - - 94 Ix, IN LORD KITCHENER’S CAMPS - - - Uli X. AT THE HIMALAYAS - - - - «116 XI, A DAY IN AMRITSAR - - - - 330

Chapter I Bombay

A Tiny peninsula, almost an island, of bright-coloured quaintness, rising out of the Arabian waters, its hem fringed with rugged palm-clad islets, bold promontories, and busy docks, amid which the white wings of countless sailing vessels glide, flashing in the sunlight. Behind them bristle the masts of bigger craft, and columns of black smoke are belched forth from grimy funnels. This is Bombay, ‘The Eye of India,’ viewed from the sea—a picture of many brilliant colours and many promises, embedded in. green foliage and framed by the distant blue range of the Western Ghats. And as the eye dwells upon this entrancing picture, the mind wanders back to the Queen of the Adriatic and her departed greatness. You are. tempted to describe Bombay the Beautiful as the Venice of the East—a Venice robbed of her canals and her campanile and the songs of ever-enamoured gondoliers, but rich in a charm of a subtler and stranger sort.

Such is the first impression of the capital of the western Presidency of British India—a vast tract of territory once partitioned among many independent realms of unrest, now comprising twenty-four quiet British districts and a score of native States, whose rulers enjoy a safe, if limited, freedom under the British egis. It stretches on the north to Baluchistan and the Punjab; on the east to the Mahratta

I

State of Indore, the Central Provinces, and the dominions of the Nizam of Hyderabad; on the south to the Presidency of Madras and the State of Mysore—all of them lands which we will visit at our leisure, if the gods permit.

Meanwhile this city, in its history and present population, is a shorthand summary of the whole province, and, indeed, of a great deal more. At the time when it came to King Charles II., as part of the dowry of a Portuguese bride, Bom Bom Bahia or the Beautiful Bay, was an insignificantly picturesque c picturesque cluster of islets, with-a sparse population living on dried fish, cocoanuts, and golden sunsets. To-day, second to Calcutta in size, it surpasses all cities, not only of the Indian Empire, but of the world, in wealth and in variety of human types. Within its twenty-five square miles of brick and stone and painted wood are packed three-quarters of a million of Oriental souls—packed more densely than are the thousands which languish in the slums of London—house pressed against house, and each house in itself a colony of families.

There is no creed, no caste, no colour, no costume, on earth which does not contribute its note to this motley symphony. As you look out of your window you see the streets below swarming with. all the shades of complexion that the skin of man is capable of: from the blackest coffee of the tropics, through the intermediate gradations of chocolate-brown, to the pale amber of Central Asia. For, though the soul of Hindustan may be uniformly dark, her children are of all colours. As you elbow your way through the busy, crowded bazaars, you collide with absent-minded Jains, still firmly attached to the Buddhist chimeras which formed the established religion throughout the Indian peninsula two thousand years ago—a small remnant of a host once mighty; with self-admiring Brahmans, the solemn exponents of an even more hoary orthodoxy ; with despised and in many ways despicable Sudras; with the more cordially despised, and in a greater variety of ways despicable, pariahs—pessimistic-looking, sullen wretches, yet the only people who in this land of self-inflicted bondage could call their souls their own, had they any; with followers of the Prophet of Mecca— hawk-eyed Arabs, soft Persians, dignified Turks, aquiline - Afghans, vivacious Malays—in their green, gold-broidered turbans, red fezes, or brown coils wound round white headkerchiefs, in their black beards, and imperturbable self-respect ; with haughty Mahrattas, in towering red and white head-dresses; with vulpine banias, or traders,. in conical crimson turbans; with keen-nosed, cash-absorbed and absorbing Jews; with shrewd Armenians, undistinguished Christian converts, ebony-faced negroes, poor and cheerful; with Chinese, pig-tailed, prosperous, and mournful; with trousered and topee’d supercilious Europeans ; and those unfortunate mistakes who in their name, as well as in their complexion, dress, and character, constitute a curious coalition between Europe and Asia—the hapless, casteless Eurasians, children of both continents and recognised by neither. I wonder what it means to be the disinherited of two worlds.

(But, beyond question, the most -notable unit in this congeries of nations is the colony of Parsis—some 50,000 sleek disciples of Zoroaster in upright mitres of glossy black cardboard and black frock-coats, who, expelled from Iran in the days of yore by the two-edged sword of. Ali, drifted to these shores, whither they have carried, along with their headgear, their faith, their aloofness, and their aptitude for financial enterprise—all these qualities intensified by the loss of political independence. To this colony Bombay owes the largest measure of her prosperity.)

(The Parsis are the Jews of the East—conspicuous out of all proportion to their numbers, clever, mutually helpful, jealous of their tribal distinctions, abhorring proselytes, rigidly tenacious of essentials, yielding in matters of detail, supple, versatile, munificent, and patriotic in a parochial sense. They are strangers in the land of their fathers, and, after twelve centuries’ sojourn, still aliens in that of their adoption. Everywhere and nowhere at home, everywhere and nowhere powerful, these worshippers of Ormuzd and his rival live in profound social isolation, tempered by the commercial exploitation of their neighbours) . (Thus they live in their elegant suburban villas on the sea-girt slopes of Malabar Hill, comfortably; and, when they die, they are neither burnt like the Hindus nor buried like the Mahomedans and Christians, but they are exposed on those grim Towers of Silence}which stand—low, sullen blocks of gray stone—on the gray rocks overlooking ‘the western ocean. Green trees grow in strange abundance out of these gray rocks, shrouding the slopes and. surrounding the gloomy sepulchres. But these trees, like the rocks and the towers, suggest, not life, but the grave. The sun had just sunk in the Arabian Sea as, having passed through the rows of elegant Villas, I reached the mournful summit of the hill. Thesilence was deafening. Suddenly a flight of black carrion-crows arose out of the trees and hovered for a while over one of the towers, cawing hoarsely. Then it was all silence again, and on the top of a palm, silhouetted against the burning gold of the sky, I discerned a-pair of vultures. They stood still, as though carved out of the dark rocks, waiting for their supper, or already torpid with excess of human meat.

(As I drove downhill again between the elegant suburban villas, Leould not help reflecting that their inmates would one of these days be laid out on yon sullen square blocks of gray stone—ladies and gentlemen—a nice, well-nourished feast for the fowls of heaven, thus emphasizing the amiable doctrine that even in death there can be no union or intercommunion between the Zoroastrian shades and those of ordinary mortals) (What will become of this exclusive tribe when India is thoroughly roused to national consciousness the remote future will show. Meanwhile their spiritual arrogance prevents not the Parsis of India, any more than it prevents the Jews of Europe, from enjoying the favour of the powers that be by their ostentatious loyalty and the tolerance of their fellow-citizens by their elasticity.)

Ge wo things, however, I admire about the Parsis—their women and their manners. The former, alone among

Eastern ladies, have the moral courage to expose their

faces to God’s free air and light, and, though not thril-. lingly beautiful, those faces have no reason to be ashamed

of themselves. They are very delicate, these ladies of

Persian blood, and very graceful.) (Graceful and delicate » also are their gossamer veils—light blue, pink, sea-green,

lilac, or primrose—flowing in front and behind in soft

rivulets of silky sheen and shade) (The politeness of both

men and women is remarkable even in this politest part

of the earth. The desire to please is inborn in the Oriental.) A high-caste Hindu servant addresses the outcast sweeper,

whose mere contact defiles, as ‘ Jemindar,’ and the cook

as ‘ Sardar,’ both titles of military rank.

(These amenities form part of that general urbanity which the suspicious North European is apt to mistake for dishonesty or servility, and.to enjoy cynically or to resent violently, according to his. temperament and breeding, but to understand never.» In a lesser degree it is the same with the races of Southern Europe—those sunny races with their exuberant cordiality and love for the superlative, of whom*the Parsis often remind one. It seems as though these ancient nations, while losing some of the robust virtues of their civilized forefathers, have retained this inalienable heritage of civilization—courtesy, a treasure which we have not yet acquired, or which, if some of us have acquired it as an accomplishment, has not yet become an instinct. ,

Do we not labour under the barbarously conscientious delusion that a poetical exaggeration is a lie? Do we not . very often, in our terrible anxiety to speak not more than the truth, succeed in speaking less? We call this selfrestraint. It is a good name; it may even, for aught I know, represent a good thing. But it does not help to make us more lovable or loved. The difference is, of course, most unpleasantly forced upon one when he meets the Insolents abroad, and nowhere more than here in Bombay, where I have had the opportunity of seeing the

British tourist amazing and amusing the native mind, which he strives to impress, with his unutterable knicker- -bockers and his ‘no d d nonsense about me’ air.

Such are the constituent members of this humming, bewildering bee-hive called Bombay. The only things they seem to have in common are earnestness in the pursuit of lucre and a strong conviction frankly entertained by each sect that all the others are unclean. ‘Touch me not’ is the motto inscribed in letters invisible and indelible on the pediment of this strange edifice of many tints and many orders. And yet, as a matter of fact, the peace is rarely broken. It is only on holy and festive occasions that the police have some difficulty in preserving good humour and order among the worshippers of a thousand incongruous and antagonistic gods, inebriated with religious fervour and other fountains of enthusiasm. On such occasions outbursts of violence come to mar the normally harmonious discord, and then, the gentle arts of persuasion proving inadequate, there is much shaking of turbans and wagging of tongues at the law, as personified by those creatures in flat yellow coifs, whose dark blue jackets and breeches, tucked up at the knees, bare brown legs, and sandalled feet, are visible everywhere, suggesting sailors ready to swab the earth clean of petty sin.

On closer acquaintance with the town your superficial recollections of the West grow even more vivid. The European residents and their indigenous imitators appear to have fallen in with the eclectic genius of the place, their Renaissance houses, their cafés, their spired churches, reminding one of Marseilles or Alexandria rather than of India, and even the Government has made a courageous effort to bring itself into some harmony with its environment by building its monster Secretariat in a kind of architecture, half Venetian, half Gothic, which successfully combines the characteristic puerilities of both orders. The University also rears its Gothic clock-tower to the sky of Asia unashamedly, and some of the hotels strive to reconcile Gothic gables with Saracenic domes and arches. But the benevolent sun of the East shines tranquilly upon the congruous and the ridiculous alike, glorifying all, smiling politely upon all. He is as well bred as any other native of Bombay, and as unlike as possible the Anglo-Indian official of a rank sufficiently middling to encourage the belief that it is a substitute for breeding.

I am in the native bazaar. Both sides of the street are lined with shops, standing as close to one another as the books in a well-ordered library, and presenting as great a variety in dress and contents.. Many-coloured stuffs are measured out here by fat merchants to fat customers. The dry fragrance of Eastern spices emanates from the boxes and bottles next door. Here are sweets weighed out, and there jewels of gold and silver sparkle through the dusk. And the place is alive with the bustle and the buzz of bargaining and the whirl of wheels. Fashionable landaus clatter past, carrying rich Parsi ladies and gentlemen, gold-turbaned mollahs, Zoroastrian high-priests, all white, or pink-turbaned princes. The tramway also rattles down the middle of the road, cutting —the gods and the drivers only know how—its way safely through the crowd.

But more picturesque than carriage or tramcar is the gilt Noah’s ark kind of vehicle drawn by a pair of obese bullocks, their yard-long horns covered with gold-leaf, their humps wobbling majestically, their necks jingling with bells and amulets. Under the awning of the ark I see two solemn boys sitting stiff in brocade of gold, and two or three little girls equally stiff, yet gay.

From amidst the shops on right and left rise houses climbing on elaborately-carved pillars to the height of four or five handsome stories—dwellings of merchant princes worth many lakhs of rupees—fanned and shaded by the green richness of the peepul and the plantain, or beautified by the jejune elegance of the palm. And behind this fringe of magnificence spreads the broad mantle of misery, noisy, noisome, nauseating.

_ Did not even Venice in the day of her glory have her Ghetto? But what is any slum of Europe beside these Eastern abodes of ancient filth and multiform wretchedness ?

Impelled by a morbid craving to see the other side of things—the side of reality, which mere Princes are not privileged to see—I leave the main street and plunge into the narrow lanes, seething with a hookah-smoking, betelchewing humanity, buying and selling or only bargaining, whining and worshipping in a medley of unfathomable squalor. The lower parts of the houses are-open cupboards, in which petty tradesmen and artisans squat on their haunches, all but naked, puffing, sleeping, perspiring in malodorous idleness. On the grimy balconies overhead lounge women in all degrees of dusky undress, and to the rickety rails cling little boys and girls who have not yet exchanged their innocence for a loin-cloth. And between these rows of dwellings flows on the turbid, maddening stream of tumult which in the East passes for business.

Suddenly the clangour of a bell breaks upon the clamour of the people... I am before a temple. An attempt to penetrate into the holy interior is met by a chorus of devotees gesticulating with unambiguous unanimity that I am a being polluted and polluting. ... I did not endeavour to \undeceive them. Instead, I looked round from the gateway and beheld enough to cure me of any desire to behold more. On one side of the peepul-shaded quadrangle stand the sacred bulls, immeasurable monsters of no shape, whose sole aim in life appears to be its prolongation and its propagation. On the opposite side spreads a low-browed, many-arched cloister, a number of cells opening on to it. Each dim cell enshrines a glittering god or goddess, many-armed, many-legged, animalheaded, hideous. In the passage bronze monsters lie couchant, while the worshippers, ministers, and idlers of

BOMBAY Ir Ag the templé keep up an incessant concert of delirious discord. ;

In the middle of this enclosure saunter several saints with long black hair, black beard, and a coat of gray ashes for their main attire. A long string of big wooden beads hangs from the neck, and a staff is brandished in one hand. They glare at the infidel in no friendly manner, these holy maniacs or humbugs. They are ‘apparently men who, in embracing the ascetic life, have renounced all luxuries except religious rancour.

I walk away quite satisfied with this glimpse of another world, Perhaps an admittance into the inner depths might have spoiled the sense of mystery and robbed me of the fascinating pastime of surmise concerning the unseen.

I continue my erratic perambulation, and finally pause before a kind of hostelry, bearing the inscription ‘ Panjrapole.’ I enter into the courtyard, to find that it is in reality an asylum for superannuated beasts and birds. Here are cages containing sacred apes, munching the plantains which the faithful provide in such abundance for them; there are venerable goats, feasting on clover ; further down stands a large coop, in which elderly hens and feebly-canting cocks are revelling in heaps of grain, which they share amicably with the interloping sparrows. But by far the greater part of the yard is devoted to the ancient horses and bulls, and cows and buffaloes, and other attenuated quadrupeds, whose skins display the - unseemly marks of a cruel taskmaster. I am informed, however, that many of these seemingly obsolete bundles of bones, after a few months’ strenuous eating, recover sufficiently to perpetuate their respective species. Evidence of the truth of this information is supplied by yon sheds full of lowing young calves and buffaloes. Some of the inmates of the asylum are even resold into slavery; for the pious Hindu who will not sfay a brute for all the gold on earth has no scruple about selling it for a little silver, even when it is fully entitled to the rest of the sanatorium, or, better still, of the grave.

Io THROUGH INDIA

I emerge from these precincts of a preposterous piety, and so back again into the din and the odours of more narrow lanes. The impression wrought upon me by all these scenes is that I am the victim of a bad dream. So I seek, and finally find, the realms of pure air and comparative sanity, the richer by a little wisdom purchased at - the cost of a great disillusion. Was it worth it?

Let me try to extract at least some coherent moral out of my disillusion. The parts of an Oriental city which are brought under Occidental influence fast. outgrow medieval conditions of life; the streets become straight, broad, and airy, and light penetrates into the alleys and courts which the overhanging upper stories once doomed to sempiternal gloom. But the quarters of the poor know none of these blessings. Year after year they grow more populous, and, as the space remains the same, more squalid. Squalor begets degradation, indecent and indescribable, and the fatal gift of fecundity, cultivated in many cases as a religious duty, fosters it.

To the curse of over-population is added the annual flood of the rains, which transforms the tortuous lanes into marshy lakes, fills the lower stories with malarious mud, and turns the whole quarter into an abode of prematurely aged men, of stunted, elderly children, and of repulsive wrecks of womanhood—a region where Poverty and Vice dance hand in hand, and where man is engaged in a perpetual struggle with Death. Nay, more often he does not even attempt to struggle, but succumbs with a prayer on his lips and in his heart despair, or the © pathetic hope of a better world. ;

Year after year the plague comes, following what mathematicians call a harmonic curve, her path rising and sinking and rising again in normal accordance with the seasons. And day after day the victims are carted off to their dissolution in the earth, air, or the stomach of the vultures, after each sect’s special hallucination.

A standing heading in every Indian newspaper is ‘ Plague

BOMBAY II

Statistics.’ Here is a recent specimen: ‘ Plague mortality in India is again going up. Last week 4,080 deaths were reported, 2,732 being in the Bombay Presidency, 580 in the Central Provinces and Berar, 145 in Hyderabad, 131 in Mysore, 30 in the Punjab, 60 in the United Provinces, and 187 in the Madras Presidency.’

With the cold weather the scourge waxes more virulent and the victims more numerous. Whole villages and towns are evacuated by the terrified survivors, the schools are closed, the bazaars are deserted, and the hand of Death lies heavy upon all. Then every man has an_ infallible remedy which he recommends to his friends, until his own turn comes, and his remedy fails with him.

Some native doctors recommend a fire in one’s bedroom during any epidemic. There may inthis advice be embodied the lessons of long experience. Unfortunately, in proof of its efficacy, one of them tells the following story :

‘Once upon a time there came a hermit to a certain village in Kashmir. At the time cholera was playing havoc in the village, and hundreds were daily carried off by the disease. The hermit took pity on the people in their terrible distress,-and advised a religious sacrifice. ‘Logs of wood were collected and cast into the sacrificial pit, and a huge fire was kept blazing for three days and three nights. And behold! within three days of the sacrifice the epidemic abated and gradually departed.’

The narrator had nothing but scorn for ‘men read in Western sciences,’ who, foolish ones, ascribed the effect to the purifying influence of the fire on the soil and air of the village, and not to the three days’ sacrifice.

Others believe in the poison of the cobra, the sacred serpent of Hindustan. One of these dangerous phy- Sicians declares that he has found it prescribed in the Ayurveda writings of three thousand years ago, and that he has tried it repeatedly, but apparently not on his own person. None of his patients ever died—so he says. Cobra poison, according to this amusing quack, does not only cure plague, but also promotes piety. ‘ The success which attended this humble discovery of mine was simply unbounded. People, panic-stricken and confounded before this, took heart and an optimistic view of God’s providence.’

The British authorities are equally energetic, equally ingenious, and equally successful. Although the epidemic has now been in India for ten years, we are still quite in the dark as to its cause, its prevention, and its cure. The authorities, however, with a brave optimism “as remarkable as their failure, are persevering in experiments which are by the more sanguine described, guardedly, as being ‘on the right lines.’ Among these essays in hygiene the most interesting, from a spectacular point of view, is the rat-hunt.

The theory is that the disease is communicated from one person to another by the bites of fleas which have deserted the rats that have died of plague. It is claimed that, when measures were adopted for the systematic destruction of rats, careful inquiries showed that new cases of plague occurred-with almost mathematical precision in inverse ratio to the number of rats destroyed. It is further stated that, when a recrudescence occurred, the only district that suffered severely was one where the proprietor objected to the destruction of his household rats on religious grounds. The result of the discovery was a proclamation of a general and truceless crusade against this new enemy of mankind.

The operations began a twelvemonth ago. Stations for the reception of rats, dead or alive, were established in many parts of the country. At each of these stations were placed one keeper, one sweeper, and two cages—one for the corpses and the other for the captives. Rat-traps were supplied at municipal expense to the poor, and a price was offered of one pice (farthing) per head, dead or alive. At three o’clock in the afternoon all the cages were collected to a central station, where a tank was dug, and its water mixed with a solution of carbolic acid. There, in the presence of the special plague doctor, the prisoners were thoroughly drowned, then taken out, and all the corpses were counted carefully and cremated solemnly.

- The people, conscientious scruples notwithstanding, have taken kindly to the game. On a single day, which happened to be a holy festival, the pious Mahomedans ° of a village, being forbidden to work, collected as many aS 4II rats, and earned as many farthings. Lest the mere proclamation of the tempting blood-money should fail to reach every heart, the people are usually called to arms once a week by the beat of the tom-tom—an official instrument of distress as popular in modern India as the town-crier’s bell and the night-watchman’s rattle were in old England.

Yet, after a whole year’s ruthless anthropomyomachia, we are no safer than in time of peace, and all sensible people and Lieutenant-Governors have to fall back upon the trite recommendations of cleanliness, disinfection, segregation, fresh air, regular habits, and like wise platitudes. At the same time the persecution of the wretched rats is going furiously on,.and, in any case, it can injure no one, except the rats; for there has not yet come into being any society forthe prevention of cruelty to vermin, although it is true the Indian Humanitarian Committee has issued a_manifesto denouncing the Pasteur Institute at Kasauli for the ‘inhuman barbarities perpetrated on the lower-animals,’ with no other purpose than that of alleviating human misery.

Nor-are European humanitarians the only opponents of scientific research. The native press from time to time, when tired of attacking Lord Curzon, has been seeking relaxation in attacks on inoculation. These attacks, as I read them, arise partly from genuine cussedness and partly from a scepticism which, seeing the results which science has so splendidly succeeded in not attaining, is neither incomprehensible nor unpardonable. Less intelligible to me is the faith of Lord Lamington, the Governor of this presidency, who the other day, in the course of a speech at the Bombay Government Plague Research

Laboratory, extolled the part which the Government is playing in the campaign against the disease, and appealed to all who had influence over the people to do their utmost to convert them to the worship of science. Lord Lamington has no philosophic doubts. The foundations of. his belief are official statistics. But the Indians prefer the evidence of their own unenlightened eyes. And this evidence shows that, after ten years’ scientific research, the disease is thriving.

But perhaps the deepest and most general source of distrust of scientific methods is what may be crudely described as superstition. The fact is that the people of this country, even the educated among them, still live in the theological age. The immortals still walk in the plains of Hindustan, fighting against each other and finding favour in the eyes of the daughters of man. Sky and heaven still are synonymous terms here, and the air is peopled with spirits. The miraculous is an everyday occurrence, and the only thing that is incredible is the natural. Whatever of. good or evil befalls man does so through the direct agency of the gods. The mythological interpretation of things is the only interpretation intelligible to the Indian mind, and the only method for averting calamity is prayer, magic, and multifarious incantations and propitiations of the powers of evil.

How can we expect these people to look upon our laboratories as other than things presumptuous and ridiculous? Let us be thankful that they do not regard our scientific experiments as a wanton provocation of the evil ones.

After all, it is not so very long since we quitted the mythological cradle ourselves—or have we altogether quitted it yet? Do we not still pray to be delivered from disease ? The Indian’s fault is that, like our own medieval ancestors, he is consistent in his animistic theory of the universe, while we are no longer. Therein lies the sole difference. It is, I think, a question of time. Let us be patient with those who are to-day what we were yesterday.

But, at the worst, plague is only a modern upstart, and has not yet been definitely deified by the priests of Hindustan. If she is feared as a goddess, the fear is reasonable and the godship vague. This is not, however, the case with her great rival. Small-pox is an ancient deity of assured position, worshipped in dread earnest and with terrible results. Not long ago thirty patients were found in the very temple from which I was so ignominiously expelled. They had been taken there for a cure by means of the customary rites of propitiation. The temples, therefore, despite the Health Department, are no mere places of devotion, but also active and popular centres for the dissemination of disease.

To make success doubly sure, the stricken congregation drives to the temple in the public conveyances, each of which is thus automatically converted into a vehicle of death. These public conveyances, like everything else in Bombay, are of two kinds and of two continents: smart, smoothly-rolling victorias with indiarubber tyres and the merry bullock-carts already described. Both are numbered as hackney carriages, and the facilities for infection offered by the one are equal to those offered by the other. These are some of the perils which the adventurous explorer of the bazaars of Bombay has a good chance of encountering.. A/drive through those gay bazaars may be confidently recommended to all those who suffer from Vennut_de la vie. It can cure them either of life or, at least, of the ennui. For though in Bombay you may be driven'to death or to madness, you cannot be bored.