_The Temple of Mahadeo and the Manners of such as see India--The
Man by the Water-Troughs and his Knowledge--The Voice of the City
and what it said--Personalities and the Hospital--The House
Beautiful of Jeypore and its Builders._
From the Cotton Press the Englishman wandered through the wide streets
till he came into a Hindu Temple--rich in marble, stone and inlay, and a
deep and tranquil silence, close to the Public Library of the State. The
brazen bull was hung with flowers, and men were burning the evening
incense before Mahadeo, while those who had prayed their prayer, beat
upon the bells hanging from the roof and passed out, secure in the
knowledge that the god had heard them. If there be much religion, there
is little reverence, as Westerns understand the term, in the services of
the gods of the East. A tiny little maiden, child of a monstrously ugly
priest with one chalk-white eye, staggered across the marble pavement to
the shrine and threw, with a gust of childish laughter, the blossoms
she was carrying into the lap of the great Mahadeo himself. Then she
made as though she would leap up to the bells and ran away, still
laughing, into the shadow of the cells behind the shrine, while her
father explained that she was but a baby and that Mahadeo would take no
notice. The temple, he said, was specially favored by the Maharaja, and
drew from lands an income of twenty thousand rupees a year. Thakoors and
great men also gave gifts out of their benevolence; and there was
nothing in the wide world to prevent an Englishman from following their
example.
By this time, for Amber and the Cotton Press had filled the hours, night
was falling, and the priests unhooked the swinging jets and began to
light up the impassive face of Mahadeo with gas! They used Tændstikker
matches.
Full night brought the hotel and its curiously-composed human menagerie.
There is, if a work-a-day world will give credit, a society entirely
outside, and unconnected with, that of the Station--a planet within a
planet, where nobody knows anything about the Collector’s wife, the
Colonel’s dinner-party, or what was really the matter with the Engineer.
It is a curious, an insatiably curious, thing, and its literature is
Newman’s _Bradshaw_. Wandering “old arms-sellers” and others live upon
it, and so do the garnetmen and the makers of ancient Rajput shields.
The world of the innocents abroad is a touching and unsophisticated
place, and its very atmosphere urges the Anglo-Indian unconsciously to
extravagant mendacity. Can you wonder, then, that a guide of
long-standing should in time grow to be an accomplished liar?
Into this world sometimes breaks the Anglo-Indian returned from leave,
or a fugitive to the sea, and his presence is like that of a well-known
landmark in the desert. The old arms-seller knows and avoids him, and he
is detested by the jobber of gharis who calls everyone “my lord” in
English, and panders to the “glaring race anomaly” by saying that every
carriage not under his control is “rotten, my lord, having been used by
natives.” One of the privileges of playing at tourist is the brevet-rank
of “Lord.” _Hazur_ is not to be compared with it.
There are many, and some very curious, methods of seeing India. One of
these is buying English translations of the more Zolaistic of Zola’s
novels and reading them from breakfast to dinner-time in the verandah.
Yet another, even simpler, is American in its conception. Take a
Newman’s _Bradshaw_ and a blue pencil, and race up and down the length
of the Empire, ticking off the names of the stations “done.” To do this
thoroughly, keep strictly to the railway buildings and form your
conclusions through the carriage-windows. These eyes have seen both ways
of working in full blast and, on the whole, the first is the most
commendable.
Let us consider now with due reverence the modern side of Jeypore. It is
difficult to write of a nickel-plated civilisation set down under the
immemorial Aravalis in the first state of Rajputana. The red-grey hills
seem to laugh at it, and the ever-shifting sand-dunes under the hills
take no account of it, for they advance upon the bases of the
monogrammed, coronet-crowned lamp-posts, and fill up the points of the
natty tramways near the Water-works, which are the outposts of the
civilisation of Jeypore.
Escape from the city by the Railway Station till you meet the cactus and
the mud-bank and the Maharajah’s Cotton Press. Pass between a tramway
and a trough for wayfaring camels till your foot sinks ankle-deep in
soft sand, and you come upon what seems to be the fringe of illimitable
desert--mound upon mound of tussocks overgrown with plumed grass where
the parrots sit and swing. Here, if you have kept to the road, you shall
find a bund faced with stone, a great tank, and pumping machinery fine
as the heart of a municipal engineer can desire--pure water, sound pipes
and well-kept engines. If you belong to what is sarcastically styled an
“able and intelligent municipality” under the British Raj, go down to
the level of the tank, scoop up the water in your hands and drink,
thinking meanwhile of the defects of the town whence you came. The
experience will be a profitable one. There are statistics in connection
with the Water-works, figures relating to “three-throw-plungers,”
delivery and supply, which should be known to the professional reader.
They would not interest the unprofessional who would learn his lesson
among the thronged stand-pipes of the city.
While the Englishman was preparing in his mind a scathing rebuke for an
erring municipality that he knew of, a camel swung across the sands, its
driver’s jaw and brow bound mummy fashion to guard against the dust. The
man was evidently a stranger to the place, for he pulled up and asked
the Englishman where the drinking troughs were. He was a gentleman and
bore very patiently with the Englishman’s absurd ignorance of his
dialect. He had come from some village, with an unpronounceable name,
thirty _kos_ away, to see his brother’s son who was sick in the big
Hospital. While the camel was drinking, the man talked, lying back on
his mount. He knew nothing of Jeypore, except the names of certain
Englishmen in it, the men who, he said, had made the Water-works and
built the Hospital for his brother’s son’s comfort.
And this is the curious feature of Jeypore; though happily the city is
not unique in its peculiarity. When the late Maharaja ascended the
throne, more than fifty years ago, it was his royal will and pleasure
that Jeypore should advance. Whether he was prompted by love for his
subjects, desire for praise, or the magnificent vanity with which Jey
Singh must have been so largely dowered, are questions that concern
nobody. In the latter years of his reign, he was supplied with
Englishmen who made the State their father-land, and identified
themselves with its progress as only Englishmen can. Behind them stood
the Maharaja ready to spend money with a lavishness that no Supreme
Government would dream of; and it would not be too much to say that the
two made the State what it is. When Ram Singh died, Madho Singh, his
successor, a conservative Hindu, forebore to interfere in any way with
the work that was going forward. It is said in the city that he does
not overburden himself with the cares of State, the driving power being
mainly in the hands of a Bengali, who has everything but the name of
Minister. Nor do the Englishmen, it is said in the city, mix themselves
with the business of Government; their business being wholly executive.
They can, according to the voice of the city, do what they please, and
the voice of the city--not in the main roads but in the little
side-alleys where the stall-less bull blocks the path--attests how well
their pleasure has suited the pleasure of the people. In truth, to men
of action few things could be more delightful than having a State of
fifteen thousand square miles placed at their disposal, as it were, to
leave their mark on. Unfortunately for the vagrant traveller, those who
work hard for practical ends prefer not to talk about their doings, and
he must, therefore, pick up what information he can at second-hand or in
the city. The men at the stand-pipes explain that the Maharaja Sahib’s
father gave the order for the Water-works and that Yakub Sahib made
them--not only in the city but out away in the district. “Did people
grow more crops thereby?” “Of course they did: were canals made to wash
in only?” “How much more crops?” “Who knows. The Sahib had better go
and ask some official.” Increased irrigation means increase of revenue
for the State somewhere, but the man who brought about the increase does
not say so.
After a few days of amateur globe-trotting, a shamelessness great as
that of the other loafer--the red-nosed man who hangs about compounds
and is always on the eve of starting for Calcutta--possesses the
masquerader; so that he feels equal to asking a Resident for a
parcel-gilt howdah, or dropping in to dinner with a Lieutenant-Governor.
No man has a right to keep anything back from a Globe-Trotter, who is a
mild, temperate, gentlemanly and unobtrusive seeker after truth.
Therefore he who, without a word of enlightenment, sends the visitor
into a city which he himself has beautified and adorned and made clean
and wholesome, deserves unsparing exposure. And the city may be trusted
to betray him. The _malli_ in the Ram Newa’s Gardens, gardens--here the
Englishman can speak from a fairly extensive experience--finer than any
in India and fit to rank with the best in Paris--says that the Maharaja
gave the order and Yakub Sahib made the Gardens. He also says that the
Hospital just outside the Gardens was built by Yakub Sahib, and if the
Sahib will go to the centre of the Gardens, he will find another big
building, a Museum by the same hand.
But the Englishman went first to the Hospital, and found the
out-patients beginning to arrive. A hospital cannot tell lies about its
own progress as a municipality can. Sick folk either come or lie in
their own villages. In the case of the Mayo Hospital they came, and the
operation-book showed that they had been in the habit of coming. Doctors
at issue with provincial and local administrations, Civil Surgeons who
cannot get their indents complied with, ground-down and mutinous
practitioners all India over, would do well to visit the Mayo Hospital,
Jeypore. They might, in the exceeding bitterness of their envy, be able
to point out some defects in its supplies, or its beds, or its splints,
or in the absolute isolation of the women’s quarters from the men’s.
Envy is a low and degrading passion, and should be striven against. From
the Hospital the Englishman went to the Museum in the centre of the
Gardens, and was eaten up by it, for Museums appealed to him. The casing
of the jewel was in the first place superb--a wonder of carven white
stone of the Indo-Saracenic style. It stood on a stone plinth, and was
rich in stone-tracery, green marble columns from Ajmir, red marble,
white marble colonnades, courts with fountains, richly-carved wooden
doors, frescoes, inlay and colour. The ornamentation of the tombs of
Delhi, the palaces of Agra and the walls of Amber, have been laid under
contribution to supply the designs in bracket, arch, and soffit; and
stone-masons from the Jeypore School of Art have woven into the work the
best that their hands could produce. The building in essence, if not in
the fact of to-day, is the work of Freemasons. The men were allowed a
certain scope in their choice of detail and the result ... but it should
be seen to be understood, as it stands in those Imperial Gardens. And
observe, the man who had designed it, who had superintended its
erection, had said no word to indicate that there was such a thing in
the place, or that every foot of it, from the domes of the roof to the
cool green chunam dadoes and the carving of the rims of the fountains in
the courtyard, was worth studying! Round the arches of the great centre
court are written in Sanskrit and Hindi, texts from the great Hindu
writers of old, bearing on the beauty of wisdom and the sanctity of
knowledge.
In the central corridor are six great frescoes, each about nine feet by
five, copies of illustrations in the Royal Folio of the _Razmnameh_,
the _Mahabharata_, which Akbar caused to be done by the best artists of
his day. The original is in the Museum, and he who can steal it, will
find a purchaser at any price up to fifty thousand pounds.