The West in the East from an American point of view

Front matter

Qass I 1^ ^ J> M Book^ l i-^f .

BOOKS BY PRICE COLLIER

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Introduction

Much ridicule is dealt out to the author who writes of a people, and a country, which he has visited for only a short time. On the other hand, it is the universal and sound opinion that the history of an individual, or of a nation, can only be written impartially by one who stands apart, and at a distance, and whose impressions and opinions are not smothered by details or prejudices.

''My wanderings in the East have been spread over ten years, but what one gains in insight during a long stay one loses in the power of conveying. The most illuminating books on India have been written by people who pass through seeing everything with a fresh eye," writes Edmund Candler; and what he writes of India might well be supported by the evidence of such writings as those of Ford, De Amicis, Dawson, Hammerton, and others.

vii viii INTRODUCTION

This IS not by way of being a defence of my own audacity in this and other volumes, but an explanation.

I imagine that a writer who knew the Rev. Mr. Skeat's dictionary by heart would cease to write, and die of verbal suffocation. He would know so much of words, that he would deem them too dangerous to handle. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but too much knowledge is often exile from activity. They were right in the Garden of Eden.

A year's travel may mean many years of preliminary study, steadied and corrected by observation. I permit myself to say as much for the following pages.

I regret that the list of the names of those who, by their friendliness and hospitality, have made even these slight sketches in the East either possible or profitable is too long to give. I might be accused, too, of gilding the frame of my picture over much. Edward Fitzgerald was much bored one evening in the smoking-room of a certain house in the country by the familiar talk about people of title. He said good-night and left the room. A few minutes later he put his head in at the door, holding his candle in his

INTRODUCTION ix

hand, and said in a solemn voice: '*I knew a lord once, but he is dead now!" I should be sorry to offer such another opportunity at my study door.

Fortunately, those who gave me letters, and those who honored them, and many hosts besides, are not of a class who look to the mention of their names for the assurance of my feeling of gratitude and indebtedness. The book, such as it is, is theirs, and with it go my apologies to them for its un worthiness.

Contents

PAGE

I. On the Way to the East . . 1

II. The Gateway to India ... 46

II

IT is because they are very sophisticated, or because they know the wonders beyond, that certain travellers tell you that Bombay is only the entrance to India, and not interesting. One can make some very accurate guesses about the people inside the house from the condition of the front steps, the cleanliness of the bellhandle or knocker, and the manners and appearance of the servant who opens the door. At least I am almost unconsciously in the habit of doing so, and one is apt to be more cheerful at the drawing-room entrance if the guardian of the outer door gives you a pleasant greeting. The British front door to India, or Government House Bombay, gave us such a pleasant greeting that we were cheerful throughout the rest of our stay, despite hardships and illness here and there.

First we went to the new hotel, considered the best in India, but we were there for a very short time, for after delivering various letters of introduction we were promptly invited to become the guests of His Excellency the Governor of Bombay. But already at the hotel I saw many things. Along the halls outside the guest-rooms I saw little knots of native servants, in groups of from two to half a dozen, according to the size of the master's family. How little an Indian needs, even with the good pay of a servant, was plainly evident. They had their beds and cooking utensils with them, and at certain hours one saw them eating, or sleeping, huddled together outside their master's door.

Our rooms were large and airy. There was only the necessary furniture, no hangings, and our own bedding was used on the beds. Everybody carries his ow^n bedding in India, and outside the large establishments of the government officials, everywhere it is needed. You are supposed to carry your own bedding with you just as you carry your own tooth-brush. In the trains, and there are very long train journeys, by slow trains, in India, in the guest-houses of the native princes, in camp of course always, and in the hotels and inns, your own bedding is a necessity. Indeed you can scarcely carry too much in India if you wish to be comfortable. All sorts of clothing, from fur coats to the thinnest linen, all sorts of hats from a cap to a pith-helmet, a spirit-lamp, a folding table and chair, a small amount of tinned or bottled food and a supply of mineral water for the train, a large supply of linen and underclothing, for one changes often, and the laundry work is done by beating on flat stones. The changes of temperature from noon till midnight are startling. One must give up cold baths and take to tepid or hot water, and be careful, indeed, what, and how much, one eats and drinks. No alcohol before sunset, and very little then, and the plainest and most nourishing food.

In this land, as large almost as the whole of Europe, there are only a few large cities where one can buy any of the luxuries or comforts of life outside the obvious, and what you need you must carry with you. On a large scale you do what the native does, you carry your household gods and goods about with you.

How differently *'pick up your bed and walk" sounds in your ears when you see a whole population of hundreds of millions actually carrying their beds with them whenever they move. Why should one take heed as to what one shall eat, or drink, or wear, when a handful of rice, a thimbleful of water, and a loin-cloth suffice. The group of servants in front of their master's door at the hotel, or the hundreds of families I have seen travelling by train, by bullock-cart, or even on foot, have squeezed and sifted life's necessities down to the vanishing-point.

I can see why the gentle Prince of Peace appealed to the Roman, the German, the Scandinavian, the Briton. Those heavy-eating, harddrinking, hard-fighting peoples, who must have skins, and furs, and huts, and fires, or die, saw in Him and His teachings the very antipodes of all they were, or strove to be. Not so the gentle Hindu. These are not miracles to him; indeed along material lines, he and his ancestors, so far as any man can recall history, have lived in that way.

India has sixty-two million Muhammadans to-day, and but very few Christians, and most of these Muhammadans are converts. The Muhammadan conquerors brought few women with them, and their direct descendants are few in number to-day compared with their converts. To slay the idolater and the heretic, and to be recompensed in another world of fascinating material, not to say sensual gratifications, for so doing, and in this world to be received at once on conversion into the great Muhammadan brotherhood, where there is no caste and no irremovable inequalities, this has appealed to the Indian far more than the doctrines or promises of Christianity.

Muhammadanism is purely democratic. There is no caste even of priests. He who mounts the pulpit and prays, preaches, or reads from the Koran is only an equal among equals, and not set apart or considered above others. It is much like the democratic ways of early Puritan Congregationalism, when the sages would have snorted indeed at the thought that their religious leader, was in the least tainted with any such doctrine as the indelibility of the priesthood, or powers of confession or absolution, other than those of any father at his own fireside. Congregational ministers of the old type were leaders in politics, were sent to Congress, and abroad as ambassadors, and took a conspicuous part in town meetings, and would have scoffed at any insinuation that they w^ere priests, or not as other men, in the homely duties and responsibilities of daily life. Alas, as society becomes more complicated, it demands easy and simple classifications and nomenclature, and thus a priest is a priest, a banker a banker, a professor a professor, without much time or thought given to shades and differences.

This feature of the Muhammadan creed appeals strongly to the caste-bound and neglected Hindu, who must be born again, and born again in no metaphorical sense, to move

THE Gx\TEWAY TO INDIA 51

an inch above the social status allotted to him by his own religion. Besides this, the Christian brotherliness and love in India are names, not facts. The low-caste Hindu may become what his abilities lead to amongst the Muhammadans, he may become a great man among them, and marry into the proudest family. Their welcome is a real one. But what Christian missionary even, let alone the layman, offers his daughters or sisters to the Hindu convert.^ There is not even a Christian club in India of which he can become a member. The proudest native prince in India is not allowed inside the doors of the Bombay Yacht Club, even as a guest.

One often hears Protestantism and Catholicism compared, to the disadvantage of the latter, because the Protestant countries are more prosperous, wealthier, more powerful. This same reasoning is used when comparing Christianity with Brahmanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, but the argument does not lie, as the lawyers say. To the Hindu mind it is no argument at all. His ideal is to get out of the world, not to get what he can out of it, and stay in it. That one's beliefs should be scientifically true, or that they should produce in an individual or in a nation powers of wealth-getting or comfort-making, is not only not required of his faith by the Oriental, but he looks upon such tests as preposterous. If plague or famine come to a whole province, or loss or illness come to him individually, or the will of a ruler, whom he believes to be divinely guided, brings disgrace upon him, all these are accepted as inevitable. It is part of the mysterious and incomprehensible divine plan, and leads to no questioning, criticism, or even complaint of the ways of God with man. We recognize self-sacrifice and unselfishness as spiritual graces to be cultivated, but the great majority of Christians look upon an unsuccessful Christian as lacking in some essential manner the full dower of his faith. If the Hindu believed that his faith forbade working on Sunday, or forbade divorce for example, he would sacrifice himself rather than disobey. We on the contrary have allowed laws of economics, and laws of health and freedom to over-ride the dicta of the priest.

I am not deciding between the two, though I believe we are right; I am merely noting differences, which must be kept in mind by the student of the East, if he wishes to gain something more of an understanding of the situation, than the mere superficial contempt, and cobw^ebby experiences, of a self-satisfied traveller.

The conversion of the thousand million brown and yellow men of Asia, by the five hundred million Christians, is so far away in the distance that no eye, even of the imagination, can see so far down the aisles of time.

Far be it from me, a Christian, to discourage the attempt. On the contrary, Christianity has become so clogged with materialistic misinterpretations of its messages; the tent-making and fishing apostles have been so lost in cardinals and bishops living in palaces with the revenues of princes, that the Christian missionary seems almost the one fine and genuine thing left. Just because there is no hope of visible success for him, he is the more admirable and the more Christian.

It is true that the East moves slowly, but even if we count by centuries, the Muhammadan has much the best of it. One Oriental race, the Jews, who live among us, who have been persecuted in every country of the world save America, have not been converted to Christianity. The Parsis in Bombay, there are some fifty thousand of them out of a total population of some eight hundred thousand, are the most prominent and the most powerful people, financially and politically there, and come most in contact with the British politically and commercially; but they are as much Zoroastrians to-day as when they fled to India from Persia. The Parsis all over

India still retain the head-gear which was forced upon them as a humiliation in the early days of their coming to India, just as the Chinese retain the pig-tail, which was forced upon them as a mark of bondage, by their conquerors the Tartars, two hundred and fifty years ago. The Parsis, rich and poor alike, though like the Jews there are few poor amongst them, maintain their religious tenets amongst this mass of Hindus and Muhammadans, and despite the influence of their friends the Christian British.

The towers of silence are one of the sights of Bombay. The Parsis will not defile the three elements, water, fire, and earth, with the remains of their dead. They refuse to dispose of bodies after death in the water, in the ground, or by burning.

It happened that we arrived at the towers of silence on Malabar Hill just as a funeral procession was marching in. Shortly after we were escorted to the top by a courteous attendant, whose brother was the chief official. Once there he explained in detail the procedure. In the midst of our talk another procession wended its way up the hill, and we saw at close quarters what was at the moment being described.

The corpse is borne up the hill, followed by relatives and friends in white, walking two by two, and hand in hand, the joining of hands symbohzing the perpetual prayer between the "two thus Unked together. The procession halts, and the body is then carried to a raised platform where the covering is taken off. A swarm of vultures from the surrounding trees flop heavily down, and soon nothing is left but the bones. The bones of all alike are then thrown into a common pit, where they are converted to ashes by chemicals.

The mourners sit about in the quiet grove provided with seats and flowers and fountains, saying their prayers, while the filthy birds have their orgies. Tales are told of a finger, or some other portion of a body, being dropped upon the passers-by in the street below by the gorged and greedy birds. It is a grewsome spectacle to those unaccustomed to it, but the Parsis I saw there seemed serene and peaceful mourners, quite undisturbed by the quarrelling birds flapping their wings lazily in over-fed contentment.

Here was a notable example indeed of difference of custom and its results. My friend the Parsi could hardly refrain from the expression of disgust at our method of delivering our dead to the earth and the worms.

Because we of the West have succeeded beyond measure in material things, as compared with the East, we are apt to assume that our meftiods in spiritual things are for that reason superior. As I have said elsewhere, this is faulty reasoning. I doubt if we have any right to assert ourselves along these lines. These Parsis are as confident in their faith, their creed, their methods, horrible though this particular rite seems to us, as are we. It is this hands-off policy in such matters on the part of the British which deserves the highest encomiums for their rule.

It is a pity that in matters of education they have not adopted the same policy, a pity too that they are playing into the hands of a minute minority both in India and in Egypt by pushing to the front the theory of representative government, which the vast majority, at any rate in India, do not understand, cannot reconcile with their traditions, and do not want. I should be sorry to appear bumptious in making this categorical statement. It is true that I have not talked with all these three hundred millions of people, nor has any one else, but I venture to say, modestly, that I have talked with a greater variety than most travellers, and with a far greater variety than most officials, whose work precludes the possibility of much travel, and the consensus of those I met bears me out in this statement.

It is not, and this is the crux of the confusion in most Western minds, that they are not ready for representative government, and for Christianity, but that they have no wish to get ready. They do not want them at all. We Westerners are exaggeratedly impressed with the superiority of our institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical. We believe that if only other peoples understood them they would adopt them. We spend millions, and many lives, in making them understand, and my personal opinion is that the more they understand, the further they are from adopting our institutions. Our points of view, our traditions, our moral and mental freezing and boiling points, are worlds apart. The Indians who have seen most of England and the English appreciate them least, and have no overpowering wish to copy English institutions, or to become English. The Parsis of Bombay, with no caste prejudices, who are on the friendliest footing with the English, who are an intelligent and intellectually superior people, are as much Zoroastrians to-day as though the New Testament were non-existent. The ideals of Christianity do not appeal to the great mass of the Eastern races, or not to be too didactic, have not appealed to them thus far successfully.

With the complaint and criticism of the traveller from the West that everything moves too slowly in the East, from missionary enterprise to the means of locomotion, I have no sympathy. I have ridden ponies, elephants, and camels, and driven in ox-carts and camel-carriages, and travelled nearly fifty-five thousand miles during the last year, in trains and ships, and I find them all too rapid. Even the eight miles an hour on General Kuroki's old military railway through Manchuria was too fast. There is so much to see on every hand that even an ox-cart may go too fast. When I think that this w^hole volume contains about two words for every mile I have travelled, I realize that I am right in saying that one goes too fast, rather than too slow, in the East.

The Strand, Broadway, and even the boulevards of Paris, with the grotesque eccentricities of the male attire, and the present-day unbifurcated trouser gowns of the women, are tame, and brown, and dull, compared with the kaleidoscope of moving color in the streets of Bombay.

At the races one day I turned my back on the horses and counted fifty-eight different kinds of head-gear amongst the men in the grandstand, and no doubt there were others I did not see. The Parsi, with his lacquered cow's hoof, the Arab, the Persian, the Hindu, the Muhammadan, from north, south, east, and west, were there, and how many more I know not, and when it is remembered that the Maharaja of Gwalior's head-gear is as different from that of his neighbor at Indore as is the cowboy's sombrero from the tile of a Beau Brummel, and that these differences exist all over the East, it is easy to realize that the streets of Bombay, to a new-comer, seem to be a waving, moving mass of form and color.

The British in India in spite of the universal dislike of ostentation amongst the best of them, either here or at home, have been obliged to assume, officially at least, an air of state and ceremony. The crimson and gold liveries of the Viceroy, and of the Governors of Bombay and Madras; the splendid body-guard of mounted Sikhs, well horsed, proud in bearing, all of them over six feet in height, with their turbans and lances; the crimson-lined state carriages, with two men in scarlet and gold on the box, and two standing on the foot-board behind, and always splendidly horsed, all this makes for the dignity and splendor that the Asiatic demands of his ruler. It may be absurd to the American, but there is no doubt whatever that a Viceroy in a cloth cap, on a bicycle, would ruin India in a month. We have prejudices the Oriental thinks silly; they have prejudices that we had best in charity and for safety's sake let alone.

The administration of India in England is in the hands of a Secretary of State for India, assisted by a council of not less than ten members appointed for ten years by the Secretary of State.

The executive authority in India itself is vested in the Governor- General in Council. The Governor-General, or, as he is more generally called, the Viceroy, is appointed by the Crown, and holds oflfice for five years ; this term is sometimes extended. The salary of the Viceroy is 250,800 rupees a year. The rupee is now worth one shilling and fourpence, or roughly thirty-four cents; the salary amounts therefore to about $84,000 a year; but I should be sorry to undertake the job and to pay my expenses out of that sum.

The Council of the Viceroy consists of six ordinary members besides the Commander-inchief of the army, and they are appointed by the Crown and hold office for five years. This Council is enlarged into a legislative council by the addition of sixteen other members appointed by the Viceroy under certain restrictions.

Further, India is divided into nine provinces: Bombay, Madras, Bengal, Eastern Bengal,

United Provinces, The Punjab, Central Provinces, North West Frontier Provinces, and Burma. The Governors of Bombay and Madras are the most important officials after the Viceroy, and are appointed by the Crown, and each carries a salary of $40,000 a year. The Governors of Bombay and Madras have an executive council of two members of the Indian Civil Service appointed by the Crown. The Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal, Eastern Bengal, United Provinces, the Punjab, and Burma are appointed by the Viceroy with the approval of the Crown; the Chief Commissioners of the Central Provinces and the Agent to the Governor-General who governs the North West Frontier Provinces are appointed by the Viceroy in Council. Of these divisions I visited seven, and in each I was impressed by the enormous amount of work being done, by the conscientious, often I thought too conscientious, way in which it was done, and by the dignity and fearlessness of the men who were doing it. If it were not for the too frequent interferences from the India Office, and the criticism from ignorant politicians, who shamelessly play India off for votes at home, it would be the most ideally managed, as it is the most successfully administered, dependency in the world.

It IS curious to note that an agnostic even in oflBce is apt to be more sentimental in his dealings with men than the believer. As an avowed heretic he may wish to prove that he is even more merciful than the orthodox; or he may salve his conscience by assuming an exaggerated love for humanity as his love of God dwindles. To worship the God of the multitude must be a hard thing for the intelligent man, either in the West or in the East; but to turn from that to the flattery and adulation of the multitude itself is to proclaim oneself to all intelligent men, no matter what rewards and prizes are gained thereby, as a scoffer among scoffers, as scornful in the seats of the scorners. Conscience is so pitiless, that even to be a prince in an ochlocracy can hardly recompense the intellectual traitor; and surely a trained mind, laughing in its sleeve, will find a peculiarly painful punishment awaiting it somewhere.

The misfortune of a dangerous illness brought us the good fortune to spend some two weeks as the guest of the Governor of Bombay. Here we saw housekeeping, as I saw it again later as the guest of the Viceroy at Calcutta, on the magnificent and dignified scale made necessary by the climate, the social demands, the high position of the host, and his unceasing and unending procession of guests. Very few of thera are of his own choosing or inviting, few of them indeed his personal friends, but Bombay is the door to India, and England has many friends all over the world, and for reasons of state, or courtesy, or of frank hospitality. Government House Bombay receives them all, some to stay a night or two, and all to lunch or to dine. Dinners of a dozen, or of twenty, or of seventy, night after night, and the dinner of seventy as well and as noiselessly served as the tete-a-tete dinner in our own sitting-room. At the head of this establishment the Governor of Bombay, with a besetting sin of toiling when he should be at play, at exercise, or in bed.

The steward, or manager of an establishment as well conducted as this must be a housewifeic jewel of the Koh-i-noor variety. But that is behind the scenes. I can only speak of the results.

A man who has a province of 75,000 square miles and a population of over 15,000,000 to govern, including a city the size of Bombay, must have his hands full, and can spare little time for his guests and their entertainment.

I had heard of the institution called an aide-de-camp before, and I have met them in other parts of the world ; but just as there are peaches outside of Jersey, strawberries elsewhere than in Maryland, clam-bakes elsewhere than in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, soft-shell crabs, oysters, terrapin, canvas-back ducks elsewhere than in America, but none quite so good, so if you would know the fine flower of aide-de-campship you must needs go to India.

A man with as many strings to his bow as a governor of one of these great provinces must have many servants, capable, willing, and efficient, or the business would soon be in a tangle. These men must not only be capable, w^illing and efficient, they must be loyal, and if in addition they like their chief, you have a corps of assistants approaching perfection. There is the Military Secretary, the Private Secretary, the Physician, and others, each with his duties. But besides their specific duties they are the hosts by proxy of their chief, and everywhere and at all times they are there to save him trouble and to make his work easy.

Every day in your dressing-room before dinner you find a type-written list of the guests you are to meet that night, and the name of the lady assigned to you to take in to dinner. Austrian and Polish nobles, Russian and French princes, German diplomats, members of Parliament, officials, British and Indian, Royal Highnesses, all must be properly placed, and all must know who their neighbors are, and as a result what subjects of conversation may cause friction and are to be avoided. When all are assembled in the drawing-room, the aide on duty for that day appears with the Governor, whom he announces: His Excellency! That gentleman makes the round of the room, shaking hands with each, offers his arm to the lady entitled to that honor, and we go in to dinner where a score or more of turbaned servants, in crimson and gold liveries and barefooted, serve the meal.

It is noticeable that the other Europeans are impressed by the stately and dignified way things are done by the British officials in India. The Governor is easily king, no matter who is there, and during my stay he entertained all sorts, including royalty and high diplomacy, renowned travellers, sportsmen, journalists, and statesmen. One gets an impression of the sturdy self-control, of the patient mental power, which are the driving force behind the handful of Englishmen who hold this country. They have it in their blood, the best of these people, and these highly placed Englishmen almost without exception — I only met one exception, and the harm he does, although negatively, makes one gasp to think what would happen were there more like him — take the throne with an air of authority and a lack of self -consciousness, as of men sitting down for a chat with a friend.

In these democratic days much ceremony and formality, a semblance of pomp, makes the observer uneasy very often lest something, so to speak, should come unstarched, or go wrong, lest the procession should be marred by a sense of unreality, and tempt one to titter. Not so here. Even after the novelty wears off, one is not impressed by the artificiality so much as more and more impressed by a growing feeling that this is not the simulacrum, but the reality of power. But it takes a big man to carry it off, England, by one of her blunders, still has a knot of them here in India.