It was about five years since Sir Pratap moved to Ahmednagar from Idar, eighteen miles away, and his house is practically in a jungle as he delights it to be. Both carriages and motorcars he dislikes as enervating things, and roads he is not fond of, preferring his Arabs and Walers and a life in rough country half spent in the saddle.
I was introduced to His Highness's son, Dolat Singh, and also to his grandson, Himat Singh, a healthy-looking lad in shirt and riding-breeches, with a pearl in each ear, and the next day was granted a sitting by Sir Pratap for a painting, when he appeared in military uniform, with top boots and a grand array of stars and medals and a turban with a beautiful aigrette. He sat very patiently, sought in every way to make my task as easy as possible, and behaved throughout with a charming courtesy.
[1] Reprinted by permission from The Fortnightly Review.
A little Mohammedan boy was sitting cross-legged upon a worn-out old quilt or rezai, the hair-stuffing of which peeped out all over it through irregular holes. The covering was partly red and partly blue. On his knees was a wooden board with a handle piece projecting at one end. This board called a "Takti," shaped like an old English horn-book, had been washed over with mud-water so that it was nearly white and former writings were covered up. In his right hand the boy held a reed pen called a "Colam" with which he made strange characters upon the board. An earthen pot held the ink for his pen. Just in front of him was a little hinge book-rest called a "Ral" on which was a "Kitab" or book of short pieces.
Beside this boy were others also writing upon "Taktis." None were more than twelve years old and most were about eight. Some wore turbans and some little round plush caps, while one had a cap of fine linen with a broidered edge; he wore a quilted jacket of yellow.
In a sing-song voice they read the words they had written. By the door was a heap of brushwood and two little mice peeped at the boys from under it.
The Maulwe sat in the middle of one side of the class upon the floor like the boys. He was very old and had a beautiful yellow beard. Some beards seem to grow yellow instead of white with age. Some of the boys could look down into the water-stream that ran along in the brick gutter. They were quite a yard above the road, but the passers-by came close to them, and once twelve camels passed with three baby camels, woolly things with long, long legs.
The sun was so dazzling that everything outside seemed to shiver and shake, but under the cool roof the boys could see quite well. The roof was partly tiled and partly thatched, and the row of brick columns supporting it at the outer edge was covered with white-washed plaster—at least it was once white, but just where Ghafur, one of the boys, leaned his back against it (when he was not bobbing his back up and down as he read) it was nearly black. How difficult it is for anything to keep white all over! It is easy to keep some patches clean, especially when they are in places we don't use. Ghafur began to eat sugar-cane when the Maulwe was not looking.
If you looked between Go Kal Chung (a boy with a dark crimson turban) and Abdul with the green coat, right across beyond the road, through a dip in the wall on the other side to the far distance—although in the dust and the sunlight all distant things seemed nearly the same colour as the sky—you could just make out on the other side of the River Jumna the great white dome of the Taj Mahal.
I liked it best by moonlight.
In India, moonlight seems so much brighter than in England. Walking at night about the gardens I could still see the colours of the flowers; only the white roses seemed to whisper wakeful and restless, and the red ones to be silent.
The long path of water from the main entrance gateway to the pavement below the platform of the Taj is divided half-way by a circular tank and by this there is a marble seat. The soaring spirit of the vertical lines of the minarets was echoed everywhere; in the little fountains at short intervals all the way, and in the cypress trees along the garden beds parallel to the water-course. Far in the distance against the marble wall the glimmering light of a lantern moved waveringly; I could dimly distinguish the figures of some who had just been within to the tomb chamber. Then a spark, a little spurt of brighter light, gleamed out from far up the building.
The moonlight was slowly creeping round like a tide, and ever as it advanced some other of the innumerable gems set in the delicate pallor of that vast facade for some brief moment, gleamed and died again.
The next day when I passed the little school I found it closed and the reason was that Moharam had begun.
The Moharam Festival extends over many days and at Agra I saw it celebrated elaborately. Its origin was in a fight over the question of succession some time after the death of Mohammed. Two Imams, named Hassan and Hussein, direct descendants of the prophet, died in battle. The place where they were killed was called Kerbela, which means the place of sorrow. Now everything connected with that fighting is remembered and, as far as possible, reproduced or re-enacted at the time of Moharam.
For long beforehand the preparations had been going on. Old swords and maces had been brought out and brightened. At the street corners I had seen men furbishing old weapons, long gauntlet-hilted swords, as well as others making new wooden ones for fencing, covered with red or purple cloth.
The Imams, Hassan and Hussein, died on the night of the tenth day of the month of Moharam, and it is on that day that the innumerable tasias are carried in procession to the Kerbela where the Janazas, the two little biers contained within the gorgeous pagoda-like structure of the tasia, are buried in the earth.
Now when these Imams, Hassan and Hussein were fighting against Eazied, all the sources of water were closed and they suffered terribly from thirst. For this reason drink at this time, sherbet, a mixture of milk, sugar and water, or water alone, is obtainable everywhere. All along the streets at short intervals, on wooden stands the size and shape of an Elizabethan bedstead with grandly-decorated canopy, are rows of large red jars from which, in most cases, an attendant ladles the contents to smaller vessels for whoever will to drink.
Men of any means pride themselves not only on the lavish decoration of their "Tasia," but in furnishing one of these stands for free refreshment and keeping it supplied during the festival days. Here and there also I saw a man sitting in a chair, with two large pipes in front of him at which all comers were free to smoke. He kept tending the coal-bowls of the pipes.
For days the air was full of the noise of drums and cymbals, and I would see camels laden with families of children as well as crowded carts coming into the city from outlying places.
On the ninth day the crowds in the streets were very dense, but among them were kept numbers of little circular spaces in which were performed fantasias of various kinds. In one, men would be seen fencing with wooden staves and in another, to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals, a man would dance, wildly brandishing with quick thrusts and whirling, back and forth, up and down, a long quivering sword with stiff gauntlet hilt well above the wrist. Sometimes he would be quite an old greybeard. Round and round he would lead and dance, the flashing steel never, by some miracle, touching the ring of onlookers though passing within an inch of their faces. Serjeant Troy's performance in the wood with Bathsheba would have looked tame to this. Until utterly exhausted the man kept up leap and dart and bound and brandish and then as at last he sank, another out of the eager waiting crowd took up the relinquished sword and the dance continued. Sometimes the people round gave a great yell of encouragement and waved their arms. The poor vultures, much disturbed by the unwonted crowd and the great noise, flew overhead while kites, seemingly less flurried, sat upon the trees.
The most grotesque circle I saw held a fantasia of six big drums. These were really heavy and very cumbrous. The drummers danced wildly together, crossing and changing places and beating all the while, keeping on till exhaustion claimed them and then slipping out of the drum straps for others to take their places.
In costume, it is proper to wear green for Moharam and about a third of the crowd do actually have green turbans.
Comes along a grotesque tiger carried on a man's head on a wooden framework. Comes a "Saddah," a curious box-like erection shaped like a Punch-and-Judy show with the front of it all bunches of green muslin.
The streets were dense with people, but upon the roofs also men and women crowded; and towards sunset in their green, crimson, purple, amber or scarlet robes they looked in the distance like uncut jewels yielding for some mystic occasion the full intensity of their colour without shine or flash.
Another kind of display was a fight with short cloth-covered wooden sticks held in the right hand, while in the left was kept twirling a longer rod with ball ends.
Men carried children on their shoulders, and two little jesters—youngsters with whitened faces and tall pointed caps and dresses covered with jingling bells—dodged under legs and squeezed their way along.
At night, as if there were not quite enough mystery in the moonlight, the air was thick with dust from the trampling feet. I have said nothing of the "Buraks" which were as wonderful chimeras, half mythic creatures on which it is supposed the commander rode, beings with human faces and strong fore-limbs, half like peacocks with great spreading tails. Many of them were borne among the crowd on frames or platforms carried shoulder high.
Here was a space kept for the Barati dancer. In a green vest and a white loin-cloth he danced with a small skull-cap on his head. He carried whirling in his hand the "Barati," a long rod with balls of fire flaring at each end. At one side of the space kept for this dancer, three men held up a frame on which hung specimens of many of the ancient arms, "Buttas" of various kinds, and "Danarh" too, and "Patapazis"—small shields.
Men pushed the circle outward to widen it for a yet wilder dance. "Genari Hadri!" "Genari Hadri!" the crowd yelled for encouragement. A man went round pouring fresh oil on the torches called "Kuppi" and my eyes streamed with the smoke and dust. The fretwork of the projecting upper parts of the houses looked white in this light. Two large "Tasias" passed and many drummers. Then a posse of police, with their tall red hat-like turbans, pushed through the crowd with long sticks.
Out of the great round earthen coolers into the small brown pots, attendants at the "Sabils" or drinking-stands, kept on ladling. Under one, two children lay fast asleep, their dark heads as close together as the golden ones of Goblin Market, while a little girl in green kept watch over them.
These "Sabil" stands are given, some of them, by filles de joie, who are often lavish in charity.
A man was selling coloured plaster figures—he had a great basket of them—two pi for a big one. Paper lanterns called "Kandils" of many shapes, two feet high, hung from the houses. You must understand thousands of people were walking through and through the old city that night, and the people of the houses vied with one another to show each something more bizarre than the rest.
Some men carried trophies of swords and green streamers arranged in fan-shape on the top of a ten-foot bamboo pole. This is called "Zulfikar," and at intervals the bearer stopped, raised the pole and balanced it on his chin. "Genari Hadri!" shouted the crowd again, and the "Zulfikar" man marched on with his set of drummers in front of him. Then came men singing Marsias, i.e., verses about the death of Hassan and Hussein—poems of regret: and men of the Shia sect did beat their breasts.
When the enemy cut off the Imams' hands they put them on the spikes of banners and here, above streamer cloths, I saw flat pieces of silvered tin cut in the shape of hands.
Many private houses threw open that night the courtyard and one of the rooms for the crowd to pass through as it did in constant pressing stream. In some of these one sat on a mimbar reading the Marsias, in others the "Tasia" was arranged for show in half of the room corded off or, when it was a very large one, in the courtyard. Bells of the jesters jingled among the crowd. In iron ladles coloured fires were being burnt in front of a colossal burak with gleaming eyes.
The "Tasias" were of infinite variety. One I saw was made entirely of cotton, with animal and architectural subjects painted all over it. In one house were twenty hand banners in one row. I followed streets narrower than that traditional narrowest of old Tours on the Loire. In some houses were grand "Torahs"—pictures, the drawing of which consisted entirely of cleverly-interwoven Arabic characters in such shapes as a camel or the British crown. There were clusters of floating oil lights in crystal glasses on gilded standing candelabras.
In one street a gigantic and most elaborate lantern had within it a revolving cylinder of cut-out figures making shadow pictures to move on its surface. Near this by another alley I was carried with the flow of people into a house where the crowd was more dense than ever. There was a rail across the room and behind that a second rail. Gold embroideries hung along the back, and in the centre stood the "Tasia" in this instance made in the shape of some buildings at Mecca. Vessels for spreading rose-water stood within the railing and a long row of lamps, and in the middle of the front face of the "Tasia" was a miniature stage about two feet square; behind this, curtains dropped and rose again and various scenes, rather on the principle of old-fashioned "trick" valentines, followed one another slowly. The trouble here was that no one wanted to move, and the press was stifling.
At last came the day of the great procession, February 12, of our reckoning. The streets were thronged in the early morning as they had been all night and the previous day and the night and day before that.
I drove past the great mosque, the Jama Masjid; the white zigzags on its dome shone brightly against the red Agra sandstone which now, in the morning light, looked as if it had a kind of bloom upon it. That was on the left—on my right hand I could see the crenelated walls of the fort, colourless against the sun now streaming across them.
Parties of people, gay in new green cloths and turbans, were on their way to take their places in friends' houses for the day. Hand-carts, with seven or more great copper vessels, were being pushed from stand to stand, refilling the great water-jars. All traffic was stopped for the day through the greater part of the city, and I soon had to leave my gharry and continue on foot my way to a house in the Kashmiri Bazaar where a place was being kept for me at a window. At three different places I passed groups of acrobats arranged high in air like a sort of human set piece of six or seven sets of limbs. It looked curious in this country to see them wearing a kind of "tights." In one case all the legs were yellow, in another purple, and in a third black.
Bands of Marsia singers were perambulating the streets. At length I found my window, or rather balcony, and from it for hour after hour I had an excellent view of all that passed. The procession of "Tasias," which did in fact take seven hours to go by, seemed as if it would never end. Stoppages were frequent, and sometimes there would be a wait of ten minutes or even a quarter of an hour. Of every material imaginable, the common denominator was a square base with two carrier poles making four handles and a series of stages diminishing vertically except at the very top where, in some instances, there was a kind of horizontal windmill or other device for movement. Some were of tin, some were gilded, some were silver; some, used year after year, were of intrinsically valuable materials; others, and these the majority, were only built for use on the one occasion, however lavishly and gaily decorated. Several were of green grass, the "Tasia" having been covered with wet cloth smothered in seed like trophies in a cottage garden exhibition, only upon a much larger scale. There were "Tasias" of quite elaborate architecture, covered entirely with flower blossoms. Some sought distinction in exaggerated height, rearing thirteen or twenty stages high in air above the topmost roofs—and these, as may be imagined, were carried with difficulty, the base poles projecting a long way so that many arms could help and cords from the top being used in some cases to steady the toppling pile. There were "Tasias" of coloured paper and "Tasias" of coloured cloths, and with each marched the people to whom it belonged, with drums and stands of old weapons. Buraks of all sizes varied the strange scene, and "Zulfikars" with their "Alams" or tall stands of arms delighted the onlookers by feats of balance during the many stoppages.
Under each "Tasia" and "Burak" was carried a supply of brushwood. For some while I had wondered what the purpose of this could be, but during one of the halts it was made plain. When the drumskins slackened a little, fire was made of some of the brushwood and the drum held over the flames until the skin became quite taut again.
The irregular line of the roofs as well as the balconies of every floor were studded with spectators up and down the street. Only where there were purdah ladies, blinds and curtains hid them from view.
The next morning I was out, just at dawn, stepping across the bodies of sleeping servants along my veranda. I had heard of a curious custom of the Shia sect of Mohammedans and was anxious to see it carried out. Whereas the Sunnis and indeed nearly all the Mohammedans of Agra, would march in a second procession to the Kerbela beyond the city and there bury in the ground the twin biers from within the "Tasias," the Shias would go down to the Jumna banks and bury theirs by the river.
Close to the pontoon bridge I found the Shias very seriously and reverently carrying out their ceremony. They appeared to take the whole matter gravely. Their "Tasias" were not large or very showy, but the burying was conducted like a solemn ritual. At this time of year the river was of course low, and the Shia gentlemen had dug a long trench close to the edge of the water. Out of each "Tasia" the two little biers garlanded with marigolds were lifted carefully under a white covering cloth, laid in the water at the bottom of the trench, and covered in with earth. Then the "Tasia" itself was broken up, the pieces thrown in and covered with more earth as the trench was refilled.
THE MOHARAM FESTIVAL AT AGRA.
THE MOHARAM FESTIVAL AT AGRA.
The procession of the previous day had simply been a great march round in order that all "Tasias" might be paraded through all streets of the town. Upon this day, the conclusion of the festival, they were to go to the Kerbela for the biers to be buried there. "Hai Hassan ham na huai!" "Oh Hassan!" I heard cried out, "I am very sorry I could not help you at the time of battle."
It was a wild fantastic scene that I beheld when finally after a good deal of persistence I reached the little mosque in the Kerbela, from which some dozen feet above the ground level I was privileged to watch. The whole air was filled with the deafening noise of a thousand drums. Slowly the vast series of "Tasias" advanced into the enclosure, moving them to right or left to carry out the burying where their owners chose or had some right of ground. And there were two among them, taller even than any I had seen on the previous day—so lofty that it was a wonder they could be carried at all without toppling over—bowing and bending now to one side, now to another and then quivering erect for a moment while at the top of one, a peacock turned round and round and round, and at the top of the other a wheel kept revolving. How the children shouted! Many of the grown people were like children those days and shouted too, and the whole air was colour and dust and noise.
Thus ended for that year one of the greatest religious festivals still observed in the British Empire, a festival which I was privileged to see celebrated with all its ancient pomp and circumstance.
[1] Reprinted by permission from The Fortnightly Review.
The river flowing swiftly was a glorious vivid blue, clear as crystal and dancing with gleeful hurry. There was almost a greater contrast between the water of the Ganges here at Hurdwar and at Howrah than between that of the Thames at Billingsgate and Bablock Hythe.
The Hari Ghat lies in a short sidepiece of the river, with a railed iron bridge about two feet wide crossing its neck. From this narrow bridge I looked back at the ghat with its shrines and temples, and the rocky sides of the hills above which here come down steeply. In the water itself were hundreds and hundreds of big large-scaled fish which are cherished and fed regularly. They swirled about the posts of the little bridge in a dense crowd,—dark brownish-green creatures about two feet long, some with red gills showing.
On the steps of the ghat itself no one is permitted to wear shoes, and leaving mine, I walked with stocking feet to visit the "Charan," or sacred footprints, and the Gangadwara Temple. By this a priestess played a flute, squatting upon a tiny platform. She was dressed in bright colours and spangled clothes with a strange conical hat on her head. There was a priestess similarly dressed on another wooden platform at the top of the other end of the steps. There were sacred cows, of which I had already noticed several in the street, bearing a strange deformity in an extra limb hanging loosely from the hump. In some cases this extra limb ended in a hoof, and in some cases in a second pair of horns and in one I saw both together. I wondered whether these excrescences had really been grafted on. There were various holy people about the road leading to the ghat—"Sadhus" and "Nagas" with naked bodies whitened with ashes.
A friendly Brahmin took me into the inner sanctum of the temple at At Khamba Mundi near the ghat and there, under a mauve silk coverlet, decorated with gold thread-work, rested the Granth, the sacred book of the Sikhs. It was rather like a body upon a wooden bed. Above, hung a canopy with a deep border of gold and silver fringe. The place was covered inside and out with paintings of the stories of the gods. In the inner courtyard over the part of the building where the book is kept, there was a tall pole bearing a once white flag and a leafless bush. On the other three sides of the courtyard the buildings were all rest-houses for pilgrims.
Now, the kindly Brahmin had a glass eye which was very far from clean and had no resemblance to its bloodshot fellow. It seemed to have been rather large for its socket, to have been fixed in years ago and never since disturbed. He showed me the Temple of Sarwarnath where there are statues of elephants within the surrounding courtyard. The bull Nandi was conspicuous on the high stone platform of the temple, and beside the main entrance was a tall iron pole about forty feet high ending in a large green bronze trident called the "Tarshoon," often represented in little in the hand of Siva.
Hurdwar seems to exist upon its importance as a place of pilgrimage, and to have little else of interest about it. The Brahmin, whose terrible eye was more insistent than that of the ancient mariner, told me above all places I ought to visit Rakhykash, twelve miles farther up the river and of very great holiness. It was nearly one o'clock, but it appeared just possible to get there and back that day. I had engaged for the day a vehicle called a tumtum, a kind of two-wheeled cart, and in spite of the protests from the driver that the roads would be impassable we hurried back to the bungalow for my ulster and started on a particularly rough drive.
Passing the Hari Ghat, the road, paved roughly with large round stones, led under a two-storeyed brick archway out of Hurdwar. Below flowed the swift blue river glistening in the sun, and above rose the rocky slope of the hillside. These rock slopes are the end of a line of hills striking at a sharp angle to the river. Leaving them, the way was soon along uneven country—level on the whole, but rough and tumble in detail. The road alternated between collections of boulders and stretches of sand and at intervals streams, some narrow and some wide, crossed it on their way from the hill slopes to join the wider river. Ten times we had to ford considerable rivulets apart from minor water-courses. Only once there was a bridge, wooden and primitive.
Here and there towards the first part of the journey were a few acres of cultivated ground mostly given to paddy, and in one place there was a plantation of fruit trees now snowy with blossom. Most of the way, however, was through a rough tract of jungle with large trees in places and miles of tall rough grass sometimes ten and even twenty feet high. We passed bullock-carts bringing heavy loads of broken wood, and once I saw an ox lie down on the sand under the yoke it found too hard to bear. We passed two men carrying between them in a cloth a huge python which they took out to show me—a creature twice the length of a man.
All the while, far beyond the forest on the other side of the river, mountains were in sight, pale and ethereal in the heat of the afternoon. I passed many ant-hills—ridged grey peaks of mud under which snakes often lie. At one moment a flight of green parrots would rise from near trees and cross the road screaming—at another I would see a crowd of monkeys golden in the sunlight swinging in the slender upper branches. There were cork trees with masses of tiny pink blossoms, and one kind of tree, as large as an English oak, known as the "flame of the forest," was covered with big five-petalled scarlet flowers.
It was getting ominously late and the shadows lengthened every minute. At last the tumtum driver declared that he could not drive over the rocky way to the village. I left him by some great trees on the roadside, and to lead me to the holy places I waylaid a boy whom I drove before me hurrying in a race with the sun—my servant following at his usual decorous pace. I think it was another mile before passing quite a number of large solid brick and stone Darmsalas (or pilgrims' rest-houses) and a small bazaar, I came out on a wide stretch of rounded boulders along the side of the river. The hills now rose from quite near the farther bank and the scene was very beautiful indeed. The water rushed along, rippling over shallows and racing through narrower channels bluer than ever.
There were no temples of any architectural pretensions, and it became evident to me that the importance of Rakhykash did not lie in its buildings at all, but in the worshipping places of the Sikhs. Along and above the shore, I came at intervals to paled enclosures within which a large and devout crowd of people sat listening to a priest who was seated beneath a thatched gable-shaped cover on wooden upright posts. The largest of these was at the head of a path made of smooth white boulders which stretched a furlong from the water's edge. At the opening to the loose tall fence were many shoes. Leaving mine with the rest, I stood for a moment at the entrance, looking inquiring permission to one of the priests. The men were grouped round the front and sides of the thatched cover, and receiving welcome I entered and sat among them on a reed mat like the rest. At one side were a crowd of women farther away than the men, all in white robes which covered their heads like white hoods lovely in the soft warm glow of the setting sun.
The thatched shelter is called the Kuteah. The Padre or chief priest sat just in front of the thatched opening and round him Gristis or minor priests, one of whom was speaking. When he had finished, the women all rose and went out in long single file. The sun had just set. Beyond were the mountains and infinite space. The sound of the river came faintly over the great expanse of stones.
Most of the turbaned priests were in woollen robes or togas of a colour between saffron and salmon pink. The thatched hut of long grass was, I should have said, facing the river so that the high priest looked towards it. The pilgrims and other people were in white or other colours and a few in black blankets. Just in front of the priests were four musicians, with grey clothes and white turbans, the ones nearest me with two tom-toms and the farther one with a kind of viol. They were now singing to their music words of the Granth. The viol player was blind and made grimaces as he sang; all had black beards. One Gristi, who had in front of him the holy book itself folded in a cloth on a book-rest, presently stopped the singers and sent a man to say they were all pleased to see me among them. He told me that they do not make temples but worship only the words of the Granth, and that the musicians were singing some of these words. These men all looked clean and healthy. Most of their faces were refined—some of them noble.
Slowly the light faded and when I came away the last thing I saw of that place was the splendid landscape—the river flowing under solemn hills and stars coming out. I do not suppose I shall ever see nearer to the source of the Ganges.
Darkness had fallen before I again found the tumtum. The driver was sitting with some other men who were preparing food at a fire under the trees. An elephant was supping on a heap of green branches which had been thrown down for him close by.
When we started to come back we had no lamp but borrowed a lantern a little later from a camp outside Rakhykash under promise of return by coolie next day.
The long journey back was nearly as much walk as drive. After an hour and a half the light of a fire showed above the road and we stopped to rest the horse. A man came down the rocks and said there was a holy lady there who gave tea to all travellers and had sent word she would be pleased if the sahib would stop and take refreshment. Now it was late and the night was very dark, but it would be good to rest the horse rather longer, and I went up rough steps in the rock to a level place some ten feet above the road which was here passing a piece of low hill.
On the ground were mats, but I was shown a place on a slab of stone. We were under a thatched roof without sides, and in front of me was a wood fire with one large forked branch smouldering, and every now and then this blazed up brightly as the fire was stirred. There were a few people sitting along each side, and immediately behind the fire, facing me, was a woman sitting very upright with crossed legs. She was naked to the waist, with a dark cloth round her lower limbs, and her face and body were entirely whitened with white ash. She had very long hair which fell in thick brown coils about her shoulders, but being pushed back from the forehead left her face quite uncovered. The flames cast as they danced a great shadow of the woman on a cloth hanging at the back to keep out the wind.
I learned after many questions that this woman had lost both father and mother when she was twelve years of age, and had thenceforward given her life to make refreshment for pilgrims and travellers; that she was now fifty-five years old, and that for the last five years she had stayed here: that the place was called Dudupani, and that her own name was Duthani Hookamnajee.
Of fakirs, anchorites and other holy people she was the first I had seen in India who seemed to me beautiful, and indeed had a strange loveliness. Not only did she look much less old than the age she told me, but her face had that subtle curve immediately below the cheek bones that draws like a strain of music, and which I have seen only in two women and in La Joconda, and one marble head shown as a piece by Praxiteles at the Burlington Fine Arts Club a few years ago.
Her large ecstatic eyes, her tall forehead, her long, straight nose, her delicate lips and chin were alike lovely, and the wan pallor added by the white ash made the favourite Eastern comparison to the beauty of the moon less unreal than with any princess it was ever applied to; she was not emaciated, and her body had that moderate fullness which best shows the perfection of each natural curve. Her eyes as I have said were large and dull, but although wide as if their gaze came from the depths of some far away uncharted sea, they had also in them recognition and arrest—and empire.
Oh! Flaubert with your talk of the mummy of Cleopatra—would you not rather have seen the strange beauty of this living death than any coffined husk of once warm flesh?
But when she spoke in the hush of this strange night, the sweetness of her soft low tones was almost passionately unendurable. Music not of the Venusberg but eloquent of the appealing purity of a being locked in chains of ice, doomed slowly to die, renouncing the world in which it has been placed, judging its Maker in a fatal mad conceit.
Slowly she kept moving her little hands, warming them at the fire. In a brass cup hot tea was brought to me made not with water but with fresh milk from the cow. The other people were passing round fresh pipes, with glowing coals in their flower-shaped cups. In the fire three or four irons were standing upright, and three of them had trident heads like the tarshoon at Sarwan Nath. Was this woman herself impaled on a real trident of which the irons were but outward signs?
"You have done better to see me than to see all priests," she said. I asked which of the gods she liked best, and she answered, "There is only one God." Later she said, "I shall speak of you with the God every night wherever you may be."
She put her hand down into a large brass bowl at her side and took out fruits which were passed to me on a brass dish. I ate an orange slowly and asked her if there was anything she would like sent to her from Europe. She said she wanted nothing. "I give tea—I give all—only my name I keep," and her name is Duthani Hookamnajee.
Consequences do not appeal as a subject of interest to the typical British mind until they have arrived. But when, as was the case in our acquisition of India, a heedlessness of consequences is accompanied by ignorance of the future development of his own government into a democratic tyranny, the extension of free institutions by a conqueror to a subject race becomes fraught with aggravated dangers. These are now upon us and we have to steer between a panic withdrawal of liberties and an equally rash programme in their too rapid extension.
The more we can help India to become a nation, the more we can knit her together by conscious bonds of common needs and aspirations the better it will be for her and the better, therefore, for ourselves now that we can no longer tolerate with equanimity an exploitation of a subject race solely for our own commercial advantage.
That East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, is one of the worst superstitions prevalent among British people. Let those who so glibly reiterate what I believe to be a falsehood pernicious in its tendency to preserve a bigoted exclusiveness, compare India not with the West of to-day but with ancient and mediæval Europe.
The anchorite in a cage at some street corner, mendicant friars and pilgrims with their bowls, flagellants and the innumerable sects that seek to honour God by scorning his gifts, altars made red with the blood of sacrifice, the tight-rope walker and the ballad man, religious pageantry and the pomp of kings, the calm aloofness of sequestered lives, the careless luxury of courts, the squalid existence of a servile peasantry, the sordid rookeries of each reeking town, unchecked disease and callous cruelty, the taciturn denial of every new discovery, and brooding superstition over all—the counterpart of nearly every phase of life, so often considered as typically Oriental—surely existed in past ages between Rome and Bristol.
It needs no conscious pharisaism for men of both authority and learning to contrast the ideals of modern industry unfavourably with those of renunciation and quietism and to call the one new and the other old; but this is only another way of saying that authority and learning are not always denied even to sentimentalists though they be without hope and see the world with but a single eye.
Oh, wondrous dreamings of a golden age that never was under the light of the sun! Were the people of India under Akhbar or Asoka better in any one respect than they are to-day? The wanderings of ascetic Sadhus and Yogis have probably worked towards the cementing of the country, and their spirit of detachment has at the same time helped to withdraw attention from the yoke of foreign rule.
It has been shown in the history of modern India that at a time of mutiny and under the excitement of anger at inhuman butchery, one of our bravest and (in his own profession of soldiering) most capable of men may have his ideas of civilization so far distorted as to plead for a return to methods of the most extreme savagery in the treatment of prisoners; but it has not been shown that any Englishman of recognized capability to-day has such a distorted view that he looks upon India as a permanent goose to be kept sufficiently nourished to lay golden eggs for the benefit of his own country. To whatever party he may belong, every Englishman in England, who studies Indian affairs and the relation of India to the rest of our Empire, feels that our rule should be so conducted as to prepare India for ultimate self-government and a place in the future councils of a British confederation among the other units of the Empire.
The growth of a national spirit in India under our self-appointed guardianship, while giving us just pride in the nobility of our achievement, may yield us the yet nobler crown of humility when we behold in its maturity the developed genius of our foster-children.
Mr Theodore Morison, writing on Imperial Rule in India, sought authority for his proposed suppression of all newspapers but a subsidized government organ in "the policy which has done so much for the progress of Mexico," and remarked, "It is apparently necessary for English politicians to behold a country given up to anarchy before they can realize that popular institutions make for the disruption of a nation which is not yet compact and unified."
The recent happenings in his chosen instance incline me to say that even Mr Morison himself would now, doubtless, admit that such despotic methods only produce an apparent and temporary calm and are certain sooner or later to break down, together with the government that enforced them.
The influence of the Press is only beginning to help the creation of a national spirit. Newspapers are naturally more likely to fan the red embers of latent animosities than to attack the infinitely more difficult and less lucrative task of sound patriotic afforestation to make a permanent fuel supply to those fires of national aspiration, which as yet have little more hold than a handful of crackling thorns.
It is as erroneous to assume that local press opposition to any particular measure of government is the sign of an united national feeling as to pretend that an united national feeling can only be created by agitation against the British rule.
The fact that there is not yet a national sympathy in India strong enough to overrule the enmity of religions or the rivalry of races, is the best of all arguments for cherishing its growth by every means in our power. National feeling must first be associated with territorial boundaries and many many will be the years to come ere the Mohammedan will lie down with the Hindoo and a little Parsee shall lead them to the sound of Sikh flutes and Christian tabors!
Mr Theodore Morison contends that all men east of Suez think themselves the slaves and chattels of the man God has set above them for their king,[1] but in whatever way they regard their relation to their rulers we, at least, may no longer regard them as slaves and chattels; rather must we think of them as wards for whom we have become responsible through the actions of our grandfathers—wards whom we have not only recognized as family relations but have trained in our own business and given just so much knowledge of our methods as to make them capable of being invaluable to our rivals though not as yet in any way competent to exercise independent authority.
[1] "East of Suez ... there lies upon the eyes and foreheads of all men a law which is not found in the European Decalogue; and this law runs: 'Thou shalt honour and worship the man whom God shall set above thee for thy king; if he cherish thee thou shalt love him; and if he plunder and oppress thee thou shalt still love him, for thou art his slave and his chattel.'" Imperial Rule in India (Page 43). Theodore Morison.
There must come a time when the people of every habitable part of the world will have tried the system of government by majority of elected representatives. Even in the case of a nation like China, which has at present no desire among its proportionally small class of educated minds for such a form of rule, the popular longing for enfranchisement will arise, and sooner or later a representative form of government will be established. The obviously possible oppression and tyranny of democratic rule are dangers which no people as a whole will learn except by their own experience. The stirring spirit of life that brings man self-reliance will make him claim his share in the ordering of his own country sooner or later but in any case sooner than he has been able to learn that a measure is liberal or tyrannous, not according to the type of government that imposes it but according to the degree of liberty it secures to, or takes away from, the individuals it affects.
How many Englishmen who have ever given a thought to India have imagined themselves for a moment as natives of that land? Try to put yourself in the place of any native-born Indian and consider fairly what your thought would be about politics or government. If you were a ryot, an uneducated villager, you would know nothing of such matters. For you, all life and its affairs would be in the hands of the gods and the money-lender, and endeavours to assuage their wrath or cruelty, to induce their patronage or favour, would exhaust whatever surplus energy remained from daily rounds of toil.
But put yourself for a moment in the place of the young Mohammedan who has just left his university and is trying to obtain a berth in the post-office, or of a Hindoo medical assistant in the hospital of a country town, or of a large native landowner who has just left college and succeeded to an estate in Bengal, or of a native pleader in the courts, or of a native assistant magistrate—would you then be quite indifferent to questions of government and politics? You would feel conscious that you were being ruled by strangers whose superiority, in whatever respects you deemed them superior, was the most galling thing about them—far more so than their habitual disclination to have more touch with you than was necessary to the efficient discharge of their official duties. Among the very few you ever met, after leaving college, one Englishman might seem to you lovable; but would that reconcile you to the fact that his race was ruling yours, dividing its territories in the teeth of the protest of their powerless inhabitants, and, as you gathered from your reading, denying you rights of self-government which his own people years ago had risen in arms to obtain?
But in order to give India the chance of future autonomy and independence, we must distinguish between the extreme claims of isolated and non-representative enthusiasts and the reasonable progressive changes warranted by a gradual advance of liberal education and increase of religious tolerance: we must distinguish between the exuberance of inexperienced youths and the irritation of dissatisfied place-hunters on the one hand and the mature opinions on the other hand of enlightened Indians who have proved their power of wise judgment by years of serious responsibility in positions of trust and authority. And first and last, we must never forget, in our continued efforts to make a nation out of a tangle of many states and peoples, the tremendous power we have gradually gained to influence the general liberty and progress of the world, and that no part of that power can ever be yielded up save as the shameful shifting of a burden it is our noblest privilege to bear.
THE END
ABORNIA, 129
Afridi, 236, 240, 242, 244, 248
Aghoris, 203
Agra, 183, 184, 191, 193, 197, 320, 327
Ahmadabad, 309
Aindaw Pagoda, 74
Ajmere, 303-305
Akhbar, 181, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 193, 194, 197, 257, 261, 300, 304, 346
Alexander, 89
Ali Masjid, 239, 242, 243, 244, 246, 250
Aligar College, 228
Allard, 254
Amban Dance, 138
Amber, 290
Amethi, Rajah of, 156
Amias, 192
Amir of Afghanistan, 194, 229, 242, 283
Amir Khusran, 204
Amir (of Lucknow), 192
Annexation of Burmah, 65, 80, 81
Assykhera, 173
Assam, 100
Aurungzebe, 145, 152, 158, 194
Australia, 175
Ava, 65
BABA ATTAL, 221
Bad Shahi Masjid, 253
Bamboo, 17, 26, 37, 44, 48, 55, 69, 73, 90, 94, 99, 131, 136, 211, 233, 243, 325
Baradari, 253
Bay of Bengal, 2
Bazaars, 37, 81, 82, 166, 167, 173, 212, 231, 246, 258, 291, 328, 337
Beadon Square, 122
Bean Sing, 152
Bear, 50
Bee-eaters, 24
Begari Canal, 281
Benares, 142-162, 163, 289, 301
Benares, Maharajah of, 154, 159
Bengal Government Offices, 108
Bengali, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127
Bengali theatres, 121-128
Bernard Free Library, 66
Besant, Mrs, 154
Bhaskarananda Saraswati, 156, 157, 158
Bhils, 102
Bodawpaya, 65
Bodh tree, 121