BENARES
One morning in the train I woke at Buxar, where Major Hector Munro
gained a great victory over the Nawab of Oudh in the eighteenth
century. On each side of the railway-line I could see paddy-fields,
sugar-cane and various crops, as well as a little jute.
By eleven o'clock I was driving from Benares Station through the
lines of red brick, one-storeyed barracks, ranged upon the flat
pale-grey dusty earth of the cantonment. The railway station is a
long way from the town, but at last, nearly opposite a white-spired
English church with a "classic" portico smothered in brilliant
bougainvillias, I reached Clark's Hotel, and thanks to a friend's
introduction, found that a police inspector, one Mahmud Ali, had been
deputed to attend me during my visit and show me Benares.
We began without loss of time and at noon were driving along the hot
roads, while more leisured mortals slept at the doors of their house
on four-post _charpoys_.
{143}
Upon the plaster walls of the better native houses there was a good
deal of rude figure decoration, generally in red and yellow. We
passed Queen's College, which is a Sanskrit College for native
students, the Prince of Wales' Hospital, and then an old wall upon
which were inscribed the words:--
"In the garden within this wall were the quarters occupied in the
Autumn of 1781 by Warren Hastings, first Governor General of Fort
William in Bengal."
Now I always think it is wise to humour a friendly cicerone, and I
was not going at the very outset of our companionship to dispute at
any length with Mahmud Ali, but somehow or other his mind was
confused in regard to history. He declared that he had something of
very great interest to show me in the garden and took me to an old
well near a farther wall, saying that Warren Hastings concealed
himself there during the Mutiny!
The streets were gay and crowded with foot-passengers, camels and
horses, sacred cows and native vehicles. We passed one camel loaded
with tobacco from some outlying village and just after, a bridegroom
of the Hindoo noble caste Khatri, in a pink dress shot with gold,
riding upon a white horse amid a deafening noise of drums and
trumpets on his way {144} to worship at a temple before the marriage
ceremonies.
We were going to the famous Golden Temple and approached it by the
bazaar of the brass-workers, where, between lines of tall houses, the
sky dwindled to a narrow strip of blue. Far down the bazaar, past
the Madhogi Hindoo Temple, a crowd of people huddled together were
hurrying along, as if with a common object, under blue smoke which
veiled them like a filmy gauze. These, Mahmud told me, were a band
of pilgrims making a round of the Benares shrines, and I saw many
such groups of native people going about with a leader like a Cook's
conducted party.
Presently we came to a small square on the right of the bazaar, shut
in by tall buildings, in which the Golden Temple stands and wherein
is also the renowned Well of Knowledge. Sacred bulls were nosing
about the pavement round a Bo-tree smeared with a red paint called
Sandoor and a sweetmeat stall that was protected from the sun by a
huge mushroom-like umbrella. Over the sacred well itself, upon its
surrounding stone platform about 2 feet high, was built a pavilion of
red-coloured stone and plaster, where an old man in a worn and very
dirty coat of English cut sat ladling water out of a bucket to anyone
who asked. I, of course, was not permitted to step upon the
platform, but the faithful {145} also have nowadays to suffer some
prohibitions and are no longer allowed to choke the well with flowers.
In the Well of Knowledge, Vishnu the preserver is said to be for ever
and behind it and its surrounding shrines of Ganesh and other gods
(Ganesh is the good-luck god who was son of Siva and had, of course,
nothing to do with Vishnu) the old Vishnagi Temple stands partly in
ruins, as it has been ever since it was broken up by the puritan
Aurungzebe, and partly turned into a mosque. The old part of this
building is yellow-grey sandstone, tawny with age, but the mosque
shone brightly in the sunlight with fresh Mohammedan whitewash.
Close by a Hindoo woman was going quickly round and round the trunk
of a Bo-tree, which had at its base a lingam and a small nandi or
stone bull (both symbols of Siva). She must have gone round at least
a hundred times during the few minutes we stopped to watch her, and
always in the same direction, but Mahmud said she would not fall as
she was always doing it day in and day out.
It was as simple an employment of energy as children make setting
themselves just such tasks--walking along the crack between two
boards of a nursery floor and back so many hundred times, or hopping
on one foot round and round the table, not always with any added zest
of {146} competition. It expressed an opposite need to that of
contemplation, but in the monotonous round of its activity appeared
to symbolize that view of life which shows it as a ceaseless movement
along a path that leads nowhere, progressing without change and never
arriving save at some part of its many times traversed orbit
identical with all the rest. And well may Siva be worshipped in a
circle, for the emblem the woman was running round--which invested
with religious garments the mystery of perpetual
regeneration--symbolizes the Destroyer also since neither Death nor
Life can be conceived alone any more than light and darkness or
silence and a song.
To enter the Golden Temple is not permitted to Europeans--only to
peep through a hole in the wall and also to look at the roofs from
the upper balcony of an adjacent house. There are two tall conical
roofs shaped--as in so many Hindoo temples--like a common type of
mould for ice puddings and a lower dome between them ridged like a
melon, and beyond rises the white Mohammedan mosque. One of the tall
roofs is red with only little spikelets gilded, but the other is gold
all over as well as the lower dome.
As I turned from looking in at the gateway of the Golden Temple I saw
just facing it a small Siva temple of stone delicately carved; and
near to this, through a pair of brass doors, I saw the {147} shrine
of the "Saturday" god--a round face shown upon the upper part of a
hanging cloth, without body or limbs, and with two flower-decked
emblems in front of it. Then, a yard or two further on, I came to
the Cow Temple and entered a cloistered court, where sacred peacocks
strutted at their ease and pigeons fluttered. The temple itself was
in the middle of this open court, and from its inner sanctuary at the
back of its pillared porch or pavilion came the sound of a woman
singing in a shrill high voice. A brown cow was licking the wet
blossoms off the lingams, and under the cloisters where a crowd of
people stood gazing at him sat a particularly ugly fakir. Naked,
except for a loin-cloth, he sat looking at the ground with his legs
crossed. Mahmud said he was a "Bramchari fakir," and we learned from
the gazers that he had arrived early the same morning and had not
moved since. He was extremely fat, as fat as the Chinese god of good
luck, but with nothing merry about him and a look that was repulsive
to me. His long brown hair hung down on to the pavement behind him.
He had a piece of board to sit upon, and on the ground in front were
offerings of food, but the people said he could not eat anything (he
really looked too full). They admired and stared and wondered, and
Mahmud said that the fat fakir was an arrant humbug, but then Mahmud
was not a Hindoo.
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The droppings of sacred bulls seemed everywhere; and when we came out
of the Cow Temple and turned down a narrow passage, the way was
dirtier than ever, and yet more weird and strange. Through two doors
open in the side of the wall a huge red Ganesh, festooned with flower
garlands, the lower part of his elephant face covered by a yellow
cloth, stared with three eyes, and near him some Hindoos were making
butter.
The same afternoon I drove out four miles from Benares to Sarnath to
see the Buddhist remains there. Wide spaces of dry mud--dazzling in
the sunlight--stretched away from each side of the road, parched for
lack of the rain which should have covered them in a mantle of green
crops.
The Buddhist "Tope" at Sarnath is an immense and apparently solid
mass of brick-work raised upon a stone base and reminding one of the
Dagobas of Anuradhapura in Ceylon. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims visited
Sarnath at the time when the Romans were leaving England and have
left descriptions of this earlier Benares. Excavations on an
extensive scale are now going on, and 300 coolies were employed upon
them at the time of my visit. The walls and general plan of many
buildings, probably monasteries referred to in the account of the
Chinese pilgrims, have been unearthed, and a museum is being built to
house the finds, which {149} are at present kept under a brick
shelter. On a trolley near the latter I saw a very remarkable lion
capital from a granite column 45 feet high, which was found lying in
several pieces. This capital takes the form of a large quadrupled
lion, with an annular relief below its feet of small figures of
horses and elephants.
There is a Jain temple close to the Buddhist one; but what little
daylight remained I spent in wandering about the new excavations and
especially in examining a square chamber just uncovered, which was
surrounded by short square columns connected by rows of wide
cross-bars or rails of stone, lozenge-shaped in section. On some of
these cross-bars there were circular medallions carved with geometric
patterns in an arrangement similar to that in specimens in the
Calcutta museum. Among the carved decoration there was much incised
pattern-work with the spaces cut out, leaving square and not rounded
edges.
I did not leave Sarnath till just at sunset, and driving back to
Benares it seemed as if a sign came that I should never exhaust the
wonders of the world. I saw a star sail slowly and almost
horizontally across the sky. It was very bright indeed and had a
tail or stream of light behind it and remained visible even after I
had drawn Mahmud's attention to it, so that he said, "Yes--it is a
star."
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Next morning with Mahmud Ali I drove to the river, past lines of
shops like tiled sheds divided into open boxes by partitions, past
the white buildings of the Maharajah Hatwa's palace, and then past
little huts where cactus grew wild against mud walls, sometimes
dotted with red spots in crude childish decoration and sometimes
covered with dung cakes drying for fuel. The wind blew cold as we
crossed Victoria Park, with its grass and flower-beds looking dull
under a stormy sky, and followed another long road of dilapidated
buildings without one house in which the plaster facing was not half
fallen from the tiny bricks. We also passed a square-towered English
church, a church for native converts, and then after some long
arcades began to meet the crowds returning from the river after
bathing. On the water storm was now driving from Mirzapoor, and the
river was all whitened with crested waves.
A police boat was waiting for us at the Dessasumay ghat, which was
thronged with pilgrims. We went first up the river to the end of the
chief ghats, then turned and came slowly down. The wind was bitterly
cold and the boat rocked wildly as we began the time-honoured
progress down the long line of majestic palaces, gloomy under grey
skies, and the flights of wide innumerable steps, down which a
ceaseless stream of pilgrims came to bathe even on such a {151} day
in the icy water. Four miles long is this vast line of masonry from
the Assi Ghat at one end to Raj Ghat at the other near the Dufferin
Bridge, and all that way the other side of the Ganges is but white
sand without a single stone.
So many times have travellers told about it, this river-front of
Benares, and more times yet new travellers will describe it.
Near the great Mosi Temple is one of the strange vast observatories
made by the founder of Jeypore city, Sawar Jaya Singh. It was
converted to such use from a great palace built by one of his
forbears, the Rajah Man Singh, about 1600; and from its roof (to
which we climbed to examine the strange gigantic instruments, the
Samrat Yantra for finding time and declination and the hour angle of
a star, the Chakrayantra and the rest) a wide and distant view is
obtained of city and plain.
At the Mier Ghat, farther on, the masonry looks all falling to pieces
and broken through from the foundations sloping at all angles as
perpetual reminder that the sacred river is capable of wrath, and in
times of flood can devastate as well as sanctify no whit less surely
than Siva the destroyer can create anew. Octagonal towers lean and
gaps of river stairways yawn as if some earthquake had shaken them,
and Mahmud declared that an old man had told him it was just in the
same state a hundred years {152} ago--I suppose by report of his
fathers, for even the most righteous of the devotees at the small
Mohammedan bathing temple beyond scarcely live so long. As we
continued through the choppy waves a burning ghat for poor folk came
in sight. One body was being burned and another, a woman's,
shrouded, lay with the feet dipping in the river.
As we went on I could now hear above the wind the sound of thousands
of voices as we neared the Mano Kanka (or Karnika) Ghat, the most
sacred of all in Benares, with its holy well of Vishnu perspiration
into which Devi (the wife of Siva under another name) dropped once an
earring.
More palaces followed--that of the Maharajah of Gwalior and that of
Nagpur; then the Mahratta's building and the vast Panch Ganga Ghat,
with the tall minarets of Aurangzebe's Mosque above it, built on the
site of a Hindoo temple that intolerant puritan destroyed.
Near a Jain temple I noticed a strange colossal recumbent figure
which Mahmud called Bean Sing, whom he said was one of the four
brothers who were great men in Benares. The huge figure, very rudely
shaped, was painted a pink colour with yellow loin-cloth and
moustaches of inky blackness. Then there was the Nepaul Temple with
its carved woodwork and grotesque little indecencies, and a pair of
snake-charmers {153} with quite an assortment of animals--cobra,
python and other snakes as well as scorpions.
A temple to Siva's blood-loving consort about a mile from the town is
one of the shows of Benares, attractive to Europeans on account of
the number of monkeys which live in protection about it. On the way
I saw an old mosque to which age and decay had given much beauty.
The red brick showed all along the base and in part of the minarets
where the plaster had dropped away. Little grey squirrels were
running about the walls, green cactus was growing on the yellow earth
against the red brick, and in front of it rose a palm tree with can
attached high up under a cut in the trunk, catching the liquid from
which the spirit called toddy is made. Mahmud told me that all the
palms in the district were contracted to one man, and that each
morning the cans placed in position the day before were ready for
collection.
I left the carriage to walk round the old mosque and saw beyond a
fence some potters at work. There was the clay being kneaded by
women into lumps of suitable size, and the potter sitting on the
ground and turning his simple horizontal wheel with one foot, while
with skilful touches of both hands he shaped the vessel. Almost
every village in India possesses a potter. He is as essential as the
holy man who blesses {154} the fields for harvest, and in country
districts is generally paid in kind, getting a definite quantity of
grain per plough each harvest for providing the necessary supply of
earthen pots to the household, and the shapes of his wares, as well
as the method he employs, are probably at least two thousand years
old.
Opposite to the mosque across the road was a new _Idgar_ with half
the ground paved and at one side the steps of the _Kasbah_ to the
_Mimbar_, on which the Mohammedan preacher stands. Under a shelter
or roofed shed near the Idgar a processional car of Juggernaut dozed
through the idle months and declined to notice more hard-working
bullock-carts which groaned past, laden with rough stone for
road-making or long sarput grass for thatching houses.
Farther on was the Central Hindoo College, founded largely through
the efforts of Mrs Besant, and now accommodating 500 students. The
original building, to which much has been added, was presented by the
Maharajah of Benares in 1899:--"For the education of Hindoo youth in
their ancestral faith and true loyalty and patriotism." In the large
playground of this college some Hindoo youths were playing football.
Beyond the white buildings of the Maharajah of Vizianagram's palace
with their high-walled gardens and cool-looking pavilions, and the
{155} houses of native bankers, surrounded by orange trees laden with
green fruit, and yet another temple called the Mahram Barhal, the
Durga Temple appeared at last.
A young man had just brought a little black kid for sacrifice. He
was dressed in tan leather shoes, a long fawn coat with a pattern on
it and a small black cap on his head. He had an orange red caste
mark freshly painted on his forehead, and round his shoulders hung a
flower garland. He had just recovered from an illness, and for that
reason was making sacrifice. Planted in the ground stood a square
post, to the base of which a woman, who was sister to the
executioner's wife, was helping to tie the unoffending kid. Black
flies were swarming round as the woman pulled the hind legs of the
goat, and the executioner, with an absurdly large sword, wide and
curved, cut off the head at a blow. Monkeys leering and chattering
played about all round, and several lean-looking dogs darted forward
to lick up greedily the blood spurting from the little body, which
was flung down a few yards away. The head was put on a small altar
facing the entrance to the inner shrine that the god might see it,
and then the executioner and the woman (who, by the way, was
tattooed) cleaned and prepared the carcase for cooking, that the
young man might take it away with him for home consumption.
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The sun was setting behind the Durga Temple as I walked across a
beautiful garden called the Anundabagh, between red blossoming Arhol
bushes to see a man named Merthil Swami, who succeeded ten years ago
one of the most famous "holy men" of modern India, the Swami
Bhaskarananda Saraswati. The garden was presented to Bhaskarananda
by the Rajah of Amethi, who continues to send money for its upkeep.
Swami Bhaskarananda was born of good Brahman family, and after a
youth spent in diligent study of Sanskrit and the Vedantic
philosophy, renounced the world and became a wandering ascetic,
roaming from one end of India to the other clad in a single garment;
and at last believing that he had attained "knowledge," settled in
Benares for his remaining years, "waiting his deliverance from
mortality."
In a little house with brass doors I saw in the garden a life-size
marble statue of this old man squatting naked, as he had done in
life, with serene and peaceful countenance though with a slight
raising of the eyebrows that creased his forehead, and curiously
outstanding ears. The statue was made during his lifetime and is
said to be very like him. On the bald head lay one red rose.
"Every Maharajah," said Mahmud, "came to pray to him," and he might
have added every foreign visitor came to see him, for Bhaskarananda
{157} always welcomed English and other European visitors, and gained
their appreciation and respect both by his learning and his courteous
manners. _Tam cari capitis_.
A disciple named Gaya Purshad who lived in Cawnpore had given a lakh
of rupees to build a tomb of white marble for Bhaskara, and it was
nearing completion on the spot where he used to sit with his legs
crossed and where, being holy beyond all purification of fire, he was
buried in the same sitting posture. The tomb, against which leaned a
wide bamboo ladder, is a small square building with three windows of
pierced marble screen-work and one door opening, and the workmen were
busy upon a lovely marble arcade surrounding the whole mausoleum.
Inside, on the centre of the floor over the place of burial, there is
a little plain slab of stone on which lay a wreath of pale and dark
marigolds.
Merthil Swami, the man who was chosen by Bhaskara to take his place
in the Anundabagh after he died, does not abjure all clothing like
his master, but was dressed in a long plain woollen gown. Smiling
courteously, he received me on the veranda of the house in the garden
where he had been talking to a number of young men. He has deep
brown eyes, a wide forehead and a narrow chin somewhat disguised by a
slight grey beard, and his skin is light in colour.
I asked Merthil Swami of the present state {158} of Bhaskara, and
Mahmud interpreted his answer:--"Bhaskara's spirit will be in no more
man; he has gained Heaven and is with the god Brahma."
It must be a difficult task to wear the halo of a saint so generally
revered as Bhaskara, and I was not surprised to hear that Merthil
Swami is not yet as popular as his predecessor.
Late that evening a heavy hailstorm made terrifying play on iron
roofs with large stones, and blustering weather continued the next
day. I determined to try to paint in spite of it, and went early to
the Aurungzebe Mosque. Far above the river on the paved space
outside the mosque at the top of the great ghat, a fakir was sitting
on a bed of iron nails. They were iron spikes about four inches
long, and he perched on one end of the bed, with a loin-cloth which
afforded considerable protection. As the spikes were very blunt and
close together there seemed to me no great difficulty in the man's
performance. For eight years, people said, he had sat there; but a
few yards from him, under a peepul tree, was a low umbrella tent
closed to the ground on every side, and into this the fakir is
carried on his spike bed every night. Mahmud gave no account of him,
and although I had no religious bias he looked to me a peculiarly
nasty person. "He hides his money somewhere under the ground like
other fakirs," Mahmud added, "and {159} if it could be found after
his death it would be Government property, as he would have no heir,"
which may or may not be true.
Swallows were flying back and forth in the mosque. The stone walls
were whitewashed, and the ceilings within the cupolas were decorated
with a dull red pattern on plaster once white and now a creamy grey.
This is the mosque which shows from the river, with its minarets high
up above the vast flight of steps of the Panch Ganga Ghat, the best
known scene at Benares. I painted it from the water, but the wind
was too strong to keep the boat still, even close to shore, while
occasional sudden showers of rain increased the difficulties.
The last time I went upon the river at Benares was one evening just
after sunset, when the clouds were dove-coloured above the long line
of ghats and palaces, sweeping along in a majestic curve which
continued above the white flat sand of the farther bank. Mahmud and
I had reached the Ganges at the Assi Ghat, the farthest upstream, and
on the opposite shore rose the palace of the Maharajah of Benares,
one of the few buildings upon that side. A police boat was
waiting--and leaving the carriage by a golden tract of mustard to
drive round and pick us up lower down the river, we were taken
swiftly down-stream by four Hindoo rowers. In the far distance over
the curve of sand the {160} Dufferin Bridge was visible. The water
looked blue-green and clear, and I thought that evening the usual
accounts of its pollution must be exaggerated. Swiftly the rowers
urged the boat along till I stopped them at a palace of yellow
sandstone, in which some old Delhi kings yet drag out with their
harems and opium pipes squalid pensioned lives. We pulled up to the
great steps called Sivati Ghat, where a man sat cleaning his
_goriaya_, a Benares pipe. Pigeons were flying about the walls and
cupolas above, and a faint rose-colour just flushed the clearer
spaces of the sky. On the wall a marble tablet was inscribed:--
"This was the residence of Rajah Chait Singh where he was arrested by
the order of Warren Hastings, on the 16th August, 1731 (sic), and
where, on the same date, after the massacre of two companies of
native troops with their British officers, he was rescued by his
adherents."
There was the window by which Chait Singh escaped--he went off on an
elephant.
Re-embarking we sped down the stream again past the Hanuman Ghat,
above which showed the neem trees about the largest of the temples in
Benares--that to Hanuman, the monkey-friend of Rama, who rescued
Sita, his wife, from a king of Ceylon who had carried her away.
On--past a little burning ghat called Masan with {161} broken steps
and past the Kedar Ghat and the building of one Tivwa, a rich
Bengali, and a large charity house for fakirs, and past little lamps
that floated on the water in front of a stone lingam on the wall.
All along the edge of the river many similar lights were now
twinkling. People were putting them to float for worship, lamps with
butter and not oil in them. In the twilight lines of pilgrims were
still distinguishable trooping along in robes of green and rose and
white and purple. Temple music sounded, drums and cymbals and wind
instruments. Against the walls like great targets hung now many of
the huge mushroom-like grass umbrellas of the selling stalls. The
same obese fakir I had seen the day before in the Golden Temple sat
now gazing at the sacred river with a crowd of gapers watching as
before.
We passed more neem trees, and then in rapidly increasing darkness
once more approached the famous burning-ghat. One pile was almost
burnt out, while another was flaming high. Two of the dead man's
relations tended the fire; higher up the steps fifteen or twenty of
his relatives and friends sat watching the last scene of his life's
little drama.
"Eight maunds of wood for each," said Mahmud, "cost two rupees,
fourteen annas (one maund equals eighty pounds), but for a {162} rich
man's body to be burned by sandal wood at the Rajah's Ghat costs 150
rupees."
The darkness gathered more and more and the pale white figures
sitting in rows on the upper steps of the ghat were almost lost,
except when now and then more lurid flames rose, dancing up to light
them; the rowers bore us on again past more and more little lamps on
the water. This time not Hindoo but Mohammedan hands were setting
them afloat, and Mahmud said:--"Mohammedans worship all rivers,
Hazarat Khizar."
We passed the burning-ghat of rajahs, with its odour of sandalwood
and the Vishnu footprints, and once more that holy tank of the
Manokanka Ghat, of which the water is believed to be sweat of his
body.
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