memory of the victims of the Mutiny, and where a party of the votaries
of Siva are performing their pious ablutions, a building stands in the
Hindoo-Jesuit style of architecture. It is heavy, with white carvings
above its pink paint, and with columns supporting turrets crowned with
large lion-faces, the masks only, in the Indian manner, daylight showing
through the jaws and eyes, and the profiles absurd, shapeless, and
unmeaning. This is the college of La Martinière.
In the chapel of the building through which I passed to go down to the
tomb of La Martinière, two students, seated American fashion, with their
feet on the back of the bench in front of them, were reading the _Times
of India_ and smoking cigarettes.
In the circular marble crypt there is a large cracked bell, inscribed
"Lieutenant-Colonel Martin, 1788," also a bust of the corporal, and, in
an adjoining cell, the tomb of Colonel Martin, who, having left his
native town of Lyons for Pondicherry, after having painfully worked his
way up to the grade of corporal in the French king's army, departed from
thence and travelled to Oudh. There as a favourite of the Moslem king's
and generalissimo of his troops, he amassed a large fortune, and spent
it in building the palaces and colleges which perpetuate his name in
several towns in India. He was an eccentric adventurer, whom some now
remember here, and whose name pronounced in the Indian fashion, with a
broad accent on the _a_, suggests an almost ironical meaning in
conjunction with the idea of a college.
By the side of the road, in the town, the walls are still standing, all
that remains of a great hall in the palace of Secundra Bagh, in which,
after the suppression of the Mutiny in 1857, two thousand sepoys who
refused to surrender were put to death.
And at this day the high road passes Secundra Bagh in ruins, and on the
ground where Nana Sahib's soldiers fell, huge flowers are strewn of
"flame of the forest" fading into hues of blood.
In the middle of a garden, full of clumps of flowering shrubs standing
on green lawns, is the Nadjiff Ackraff, a vast rotunda crowned with
gilt cupolas and spires, and all round the building is an arcade built
in a square and studded with iron pins on which thousands of wax lights
are stuck on the evenings of high festivals.
Inside the mausoleum numberless lustres hang from the roof, and fine
large standing lamps with crystal pendants burn round two tombs covered
with antique hangings and wreathed with jasmine; beneath these lie the
two last kings of Oudh. Small models of two famous mosques, one in gold
and one in silver, are placed on the tombs, round which a whole regiment
of obsequious moollahs and beggars mount guard. On the walls childish
paintings, representing scenes of the Anglo-Indian conflict, alternate
with mirrors in gilt frames, and silk standards exquisitely faded,
embroidered with dim gold and silver, and surmounted by tridents.
Here, once more, is the spectre of the mutiny that broke out in the
Residency, of which the ruins may be seen in the middle of a park
intersected by watercourses, the English flag still proudly waving over
them.
The gateway looks as if it had been carved by the dints of bullets in
the stone, and close by, a breach in the huge enclosing wall scored all
over by shot gave ingress to the murderous host. Inside, on the walls
that are left standing, and they are many, the bullets seem to have
scrawled strange characters. In the bath-house with its graceful columns
and arabesque ornaments, in Dr. Fayrer's house, of which the proportions
remind us of Trianon, where Sir Henry Lawrence died among the ruins of
the mosque--everywhere, we see tablets of black marble commemorating the
numerous victims of the rebellion. In one barrack two hundred and
forty-five women and children were murdered; in another forty-five
officers were buried in the ruins. And close by the scene of carnage, in
a smiling cemetery, their graves hidden in flowers, under the shadow of
the English flag that flies from the summit of the ruined tower which
formerly commanded the country round, sleep the nine hundred and
twenty-seven victims of Nana Sahib's treachery.
CAWNPORE
Here, even more than at Lucknow, are the memories of 1857--columns and
tombs; and on the spot where the last victims who had trusted him were
murdered by the orders of the Indian prince, stands the "Memorial," an
arcade surrounding the figure of an angel, which in its Christmas-card
sentimentality suggests the apotheosis of a fairy drama, and has the
arid lack of feeling that characterizes a monochrome figure in vulgar
decoration, almost counteracting the pity we experience in the presence
of the simpler tombs--all bearing the same date, June, 1857.
By the roadside came two figures tottering along, and then, turning to
look at me, showed me the horror of their shrivelled bodies, their
dimmed eyes--all that seemed alive in those drawn faces of skin and
bone--the jaw stiffened in a skull-like grimace; victims of the famine,
who had come from the Central Provinces where there had been no rain for
two years, and where everything was dying. This couple were making their
way to a poorhouse hard by. They had come from a village in Bundelkund,
whence all the inhabitants had fled--themselves the sole survivors of a
family of eighteen souls. First the children died, then the very old
folks. These two had kept themselves alive on what had been given them
on the way, but immigrants soon were too many in the districts unvisited
by famine, and ere long they could get nothing; then they fed on roots,
on what they could steal from fields or garden-plots, or found left to
rot, scorned even by the beasts.
They were clad in colourless rags, matted and grizzled hair hung about
their pain-stricken faces. The woman was the more delicate, her bones
smaller and less knotted than those of the man, whose joints were
gnarled, his scraggy knees forming thick bosses of bone above his shins.
They threw themselves like hungry animals on some cooked grain which
Abibulla brought out for them, and then, with scared looks all round,
they went quickly away, as quickly as they could with halting, weary
feet, without even saying thank-you.
The poorhouse is about two miles from the city; it consists of a
courtyard enclosed by walls, from which awnings are stretched supported
on poles. And here from twelve to fifteen hundred wretched skeletons had
found shelter, spectres with shoulder-blades almost cutting through the
skin, arms shrunk to the bone, with the elbow-joint like a knot in the
middle, and at the end hands which looked enormous and flat and limp, as
if every knuckle were dislocated. Their gnarled knees projected from the
fearful leanness of their legs, and the tightened skin between the
starting ribs showed the hollow pit of the stomach. Men and women alike
were for the most part naked, but for a ragged cotton loin-cloth. And
all had the same scared look in their eyes, the same grin of bare teeth
between those hollow cheeks. Almost all had bleeding wounds where the
bones had come through the skin.
Such as were able to work at making rope or straw mats earned an anna a
day, the children half an anna. This was extra to their food, a cake of
gram flour, which was all the allowance for twenty-four hours. But among
those admitted to the poorhouse about a quarter of the number were
unable to work. In a similar but smaller enclosure adjacent was the
infirmary, a hospital with no physician, no remedies. The shrunken
creatures lay shivering in the sun, huddled under rags of blanket. All
were moaning, many were unconscious, wandering in delirium, shrieking,
and writhing. One man, too weak to stand, came up grovelling on his
hands and knees, taking me for a doctor, and beseeching me to go to his
wife who was lying over there, and by her a dusky moist rag as it
seemed--her very inside purged out by dysentery.
Near her was another woman, gone mad, dancing, her skeleton limbs
contorted in a caricature of grace; and a child of some few months,
like an undeveloped abortion, of the colour of a new penny, with a large
head rolling on a neck reduced to the thickness of the vertebræ, and
arms and legs no larger than knitting-pins, but, in a sort of mockery,
the swollen belly of the fever-stricken. The eyes blinked in the little
wrinkled face, seeking something in vacancy; it tried to cry, but the
only sound was a feeble croak.
One boy, who being very tall looked even more emaciated than the rest,
dragged an enormous leg swollen with elephantiasis, which had not
diminished with the reduction of the rest of his body.
"And is there no doctor?"
"He comes now and then," said the baboo, who was our guide; but on my
pressing the question this "now and then" remained vague, no day or week
could be named.
"And no medicine?"
"We give rice to the sick, who all have dysentery, instead of the daily
cake."
"And is that all?"
"But rice is very good, and it is very dear, and some of them have been
ill for three weeks."
"And how many die every day?"
"Five--six," said the baboo, hesitating; then, seeing that I was quite
incredulous, "Sometimes more," he added.
Further away was one of the famine-camps--established all over India--to
afford the means of earning a living to those whom the scourge had
driven from their native provinces.
Two or three thousand haggard and fleshless beings were digging or
carrying earth to form an embankment for a railway or a road. With arms
scarcely thicker than the handles of the tools they wielded, the
labourers gasped in the air, tired in a minute, and pausing to rest in
spite of the abuse of the overseers. Emaciated women, so small in their
tattered sarees, carried little baskets on their heads containing a few
handfuls of earth, but which they could scarcely lift. One of them,
wrinkled and shrunken, looked a hundred years old tottering under her
load; on reaching the spot where she was to empty out the soil, she
leaned forward a little and let the whole thing fall, indifferent to the
dust which covered her and filled her mouth and eyes; and after taking
breath for a moment, off she went again as if walking in her sleep.
The men are paid as much as two annas (one penny) a day. The women earn
ten, seven, or three cowries (shells at the rate of about 190 to the
anna) for each basket-load, according to the distance, and could make as
much as an anna a day. But each of these toilers had to support many
belongings who could not work, and squatted about the camp in their
desolate and pitiable misery. And the food was insufficient for any of
them, only hindering the poor creatures from dying at once.
The baboo who has lost caste and been half-civilized in the Anglo-Indian
colleges, is always the middleman between the Government and the poor;
and he, barefaced and with no pretence of concealment, took twenty per
cent. of the wages he was supposed to pay the labourers. And there were
none but baboos to superintend the poorhouses and the famine-camps. It
is said that during the previous famine some made fortunes of six to
eight lacs of rupees (the lac is £10,000).
These gentlemen of the Civil Service would put in an appearance "now and
then"--the eternal "now and then" that answers every question in India.
They stepped out of a buggy, walked quickly round, had seen, and were
gone again in a great hurry to finish some important work for the next
European mail.
And of all the victims of the disaster those I had just seen were not
the most to be pitied. It was on families of high caste, men who might
not work and whose wives must be kept in seclusion, that the famine
weighed most cruelly. At first they borrowed money (and the rate of
interest recognized and tolerated here is seventy-five per cent.), then
they sold all they could sell. Bereft of every resource, unable to earn
anything in any way, regarding the famine as an inevitable infliction by
the incensed gods, they let themselves starve to death in sullen pride,
shut up in their houses with their womankind. Thus they were the most
difficult to rescue. Their unassailable dignity made them refuse what
they would have regarded as charity, even to save the life of those
dearest to them, and it needed the angelic craft of the women of the
Zenana Mission to induce the kshatriyas to accept the smallest sum to
keep themselves alive.
Grain was now at five times the usual price, and would continue to rise
till the next harvest-time. Official salaries and the wages of the poor
remained fixed, and misery was spreading, gaining ground on all sides of
the devastated districts.
A few officers, a few clergy only, had organized some distribution of
relief; the administration, wholly indifferent, was drawing double pay
in consideration of the increase of work in famine time.
The road from Cawnpore to Gwalior makes a bend towards central India
across a stony, barren tract, where a sort of leprosy of pale lichen has
overgrown the white dust on the fields that are no longer tilled. There
is no verdure; mere skeletons of trees, and a few scattered palms still
spread their leaves, protecting under their shade clumps of golden
gynerium.
As we approached Jhansi we passed a village whence all the inhabitants
had fled. The houses, the little temples, the gods on their pedestals by
the dried-up tanks--everything was thickly coated with white dust.
Through the half-open doors in the courtyards bones were bleaching,
almost buried under the fine powder that lies on everything. And from
this dust, as we trod it, rose a sharp smell of pepper and smoke.
Twisted branches drooped forlorn from the skeletons of a few trees that
were left standing. Parasitic creepers had woven a flowing robe of
tangle over a statue of Kali, left unbroken in front of a small temple
in ruins; and all over the withered and faded growth the fine white
dust had settled in irregular patterns, a graceful embroidery rather
thicker in the folds.
There was not a living thing in the silence and overheated air--not a
bird, not a fly; and beyond the houses lay the plain once more, a
monotonous stretch of dead whiteness, the unspeakable desolation of
murderous nature, henceforth for ever barren.
At Jhansi, by the station, were parties of famishing emigrants, all with
the same dreadful white grimace and glazed eyes, and in the town more
starving creatures dragging their suffering frames past the
shops--almost all closed--or begging at the doors of the temples and
mosques; and the few passers-by hurried on as if they, too, wanted to
escape, overpowered by this scene of dread and horror.
The train, now travelling northwards again, ran for a long way across
the scorched plain through groves of dead trees and sandhills covered
with lichen, till, in the golden sunset close to Gwalior, suddenly, at
the foot of a hill, we came upon the greenery of fine parks with palaces
rising above cool marble tanks.
GWALIOR
A giant rock and natural fortress command the plain, towering above the
garden-land. Two roads, hewn in the stone, lead by easy ascents to the
top. All along the rock wall bas-reliefs are carved, warriors riding on
elephants, and Kalis in graceful attitudes. There are openings to the
green depths of reservoirs, small temples, arcades sheltering idols
bowered in fresh flowers. Arches in the Jaïn style of architecture span
the road, and at the summit, beyond the inevitable drawbridge, stands
Mandir, the palace of King Pal, a dazzling structure of yellow stone,
looking as if it had grown on the hill-rock that it crowns with beauty.
Towers carrying domed lanterns spring skywards above the massive walls.
The decoration is playfully light, carvings alternating with inlaid
tiles; and all round the lordly and solemn edifice wheels a procession
of blue ducks on a yellow ground in earthenware.
Under the archway by which we entered a cow crossed our path, her head
decked with a tiara of peacock's feathers, and went her way alone for a
walk at an easy pace. Within the palace is a maze of corridors, and
pierced carving round every room fretting the daylight. An inner court
is decorated with earthenware panels set in scroll-work of stone. A
slender colonnade in white marble is relieved against the yellow walls,
and below the roof, in the subdued light of the deeper angles, the
stone, the marble, the porcelain, take hues of sapphire, topaz, and
enamel, reflections as of gold and mother-of-pearl. In a pavilion is a
little divan within three walls, all pierced and carved; it suggests a
hollow pearl with its sides covered with embroidery that dimly shows
against the sheeny smoothness of the marble. The effect is so
exquisitely soft, so indescribably harmonious, that the idea of size is
lost, and the very materials seem transfigured into unknown substances.
One has a sense as of being in some fairy palace, enclosed in a gem
excavated by gnomes--a crystal of silk and frost, as it were, bright
with its own light.
The rock is girt with a belt of walls, and in the citadel, besides
Mandir, with its outbuildings and tanks, there is a whole town of
palaces and temples, which are being demolished little by little to make
way for barracks.
In front of these stolid-looking sepoys, their black heads and hands
conspicuous in their yellow uniforms, are drilled to beat of drum,
marking every step and movement.
Adinath, a Jaïn temple, is roofed with huge blocks of stone. The airy
architecture is a medley of balconies, of pierced panels, of arcades in
squares, in lozenges, in octagons; the two stories, one above the other,
are on totally different plans, and along every wall, on every column
and every balustrade runs a fatiguing superfluity of ornament, figures
and arabesques repeated on the stone, of which not an inch is left
plain.
The roof, upheld by a double row of stone blocks set on end, and
somewhat atilt, weighs on the building, which is already giving way; and
the next monsoon will destroy this marvel of the Jaïn to spare the
trouble of military constructors--the builders of barracks.
Another temple, Sas Bahu, likewise elaborately carved under a roof too
heavy for it, has a terrace overhanging the hill, whence there is a view
over Lashkar, the new palace, gleaming white among the huge trees of the
park.
At our feet lay old Gwalior, sacked again and again, and as often
rebuilt out of its own ruins; and now the princely residences, all of
marble wrought in almost transparent lacework, serve to shelter
wandering cattle.
One mosque alone, a marvel of workmanship, its stones pierced with a
thousand patterns, remains intact amid the Indian dwellings built, all
round the sacred spot, of the remains of ancient magnificence, of which,
ere long, nothing will be left standing.
A fortified wall encloses Lashkar, the residence of the Maharajah of
Gwalior; the bridges, which form part of the enclosure crossing the
river that flows through the estate, have thick bars filling up the
arches.
On entering the park the cocked turbans of the bodyguard again reminded
us of the hats of the French Guards.
Heavy coaches with solid wheels, hermetically covered with red stuff
patterned with white, were bringing home the invisible but noisy ladies
of the zenana.
The garden, which is very extensive and laid out in beds carefully
crammed with common flowers, has Jablochkoff lamps at every turning. It
is traversed by a little narrow-gauge railway, and the toy train is
kept under a vault of the brand-new, spotless white palace.
The Maharajah was out, at his devotions; I could see everything. Up a
staircase with a gilt paper and gilt banisters, leading to rooms where
crystal lustres hang like tears above Oxford Street furniture, and
lovely chromo-lithographs in massive and glittering frames.
In the forecourt a cast-metal nymph presides over a sham-bronze
fountain.
The south-western side of the great rock of Gwalior is hewn into temples
sheltering gigantic statues of Tirthankar; there are the usual
bas-reliefs all over the walls, idols squatting under canopies and
pagodas, slender columns supporting arches, standing out in contrast
with the ochre-coloured stone. Other temples, vast halls as at Ellora--a
vale of pagodas, "the happy valley"--have all disappeared under the
picks of engineers, to make a dusty road to the new town of bungalows
all adobe and straw thatch.
As the sun sank the citadel absorbed the gold and purple glory, and
looked as though it were of some translucent half-fused metal; the
towers and temples with their decoration of tiles blazed against the
pure sky. High over Mandir a little balcony with spindle columns,
overhanging the precipice at a giddy height, caught the last rays of
Surya, and flashed with a gem-like gleam above Gwalior, which was
already shrouded in the blue haze of night.
AGRA
In a suburb of little houses beyond a great open square stands a
gateway--a monumental portico of pink sandstone inlaid with white
marble, on which the texts from the Koran, in black marble, look green
in the intense light.
On entering this portal, lo, a miraculous vision! At the end of an
avenue of dark cypress trees stands the tomb of Mumtaj-Mahal, a dream in
marble, its whiteness, crowned by five cupolas that might be pearls,
mirrored in a pool edged with pink stone and borders of flowers.
The whole mausoleum, the terrace on which it stands, the four minarets
as tall as light-towers, are all in dead white marble, the whiteness of
milk and opal, glistening with nacreous tints in the brilliant sunshine
under a sky pale with heat and dust.
Inside, the walls are panelled with mosaic of carnelian and chalcedony,
representing poppies and funkias, so fragile-looking, so delicate, that
they seem real flowers blooming in front of the marble. And marble
screens, carved into lace-work, filling the high doorways and the
windows, admit a tender amber-toned light.
Under the central dome sleeps Mumtaj-Mahal, the well-beloved sultana,
for whom Shah Jehan erected the most beautiful mausoleum in the world.
A marble balustrade, of flowing design and astounding delicacy,
exquisitely harmonious and artistic, encloses the white sarcophagus,
which is inlaid with _mindi_ and basilic flowers in costly agate, linked
by inscriptions looking like lacings of narrow black braid. This
balustrade alone, in the Taj, under the marble pile which forms the tomb
of the empress, and on which 20,000 craftsmen laboured for twenty years,
would, in its indescribable beauty of workmanship, have amply fulfilled
Shah Jehan's vow.
On the outside, all round the lower part of the monument, carved borders
frame flowers of pale mosaic in the walls; the ornament is in such faint
relief that at a short distance it is invisible, and the Taj is seen
only in the perfect elegance of its proportions. The mausoleum is built
on a broad terrace of white marble at a height of 270 feet, overhanging
the Jumna; and the impressive, harmonious outline commands the plain
from afar.
Legends have gathered round the Taj Mahal as about every old building in
India, and this one seems to me not impossible in its barbarity.
When the last stone was placed, Shah Jehan sent for the architect and
went with him to the top of the mausoleum.
"Could you design another tomb as beautiful as this?" asked the emperor.
And on the man's replying that he would try, the sultan, who chose that
the monument should have no rival, caused the architect to be thrown
into the Jumna on the spot, where he was dashed to pieces at the foot of
his masterpiece, which remains unique.
The fort, rising from a rock wall of rose-red sandstone, is reached by a
series of drawbridges and bastions, now no longer needed and open to all
comers.
The central square, formerly the Sultan Akbar's garden, is now a
parade-ground for soldiers, and barracks occupy the site of ruined
palaces. Still some remains of ancient splendour are to be seen that
have escaped the vandals.
Here, a white marble mosque with three flights of open arcades, with
white domes to roof it, is paved with rectangular flags, each bordered
with a fillet of black marble ending in an arch-like point, immovable
prayer-carpets turned towards Mecca. Behind the marble lattices that
form one wall of this mosque, the women of the zenana come to hear the
moollah recite prayer.