THE CAPITAL OF THE PUNJAB
"_Hatee Aiah! Hatee aiah!_"--"The elephant comes!" cried the
children running, and one small scamp danced in front and shouted,
"_Hatee kuta machi bucha_"--"The elephant is a dog bad beast," and
fled to escape consequences of such boldness. I was now seeing
Lahore city from the back of one of the Lieutenant-Governor's State
elephants which had swelled with pride the heart of Tambusami, my
servant, when in all the bravery of scarlet trappings it came to
fetch me from the hotel. Tambusami's respect for "Government" was
almost sublime. He rarely showed the faintest interest in shrines or
temples, but invariably reflected every manifestation of official
interest in, or attention to, his master. On such occasions the
whole strain of his body seemed differently keyed, and on the back of
that elephant he gave himself the most amusing airs, tilting up his
chin and appearing to bask in an atmosphere of luxurious importance
for all the world like a child playing at chief minister to some
Haroun al Raschid, {252} who had thrown off disguise and shown
himself to the public in proper grandeur.
With me was a delightful Pundit Omaid Chand, Superintendent of the
Punjab Government Records, who accompanied me during my stay at
Lahore. "My native place," he told me, "was Saharanpur in the United
Provinces; but now I am a nationalized Punjabi because I have been
here fifty years since I was eight years old."
We entered the city by the Delhi Gate and filled the narrow street so
that there was consternation among the shopkeepers and joy among the
children all along our route. Elephants are no longer used so much
as formerly, and at Lahore even the Lieutenant-Governor only keeps
two now instead of eight.
When we met a troop of buffaloes there was a mighty hubbub. The
shopkeepers squealed and jibbered much that I am sure was impolite as
the frightened beasts plunged and pressed upon their goods. Many of
the taller buildings with elaborately carved woodwork belonged to
well-to-do Mohammedans, who have their homes away from the city, and
use such houses in the intervals of business, and for friends of an
evening. They do not usually go home till after nine o'clock at
night. We were, of course, on a level with the projecting balconies
{253} and carved oriel windows. Here and there awnings were
stretched across the street between the opposite houses, and once or
twice we had to wait while these were hauled up to let us go by.
Passing through another gateway we halted before a beautiful mosque,
wondrous with exquisite tints of blue and green in the old glazed
tiles that were all about its front and minarets. Its elaborate
inscriptions were in blue, with yellow and green ornament on a white
ground. Baked daily in the sun for nigh three hundred years the
beauty of this glazed inlay was only enhanced by time, and well may
it last unharmed through future centuries! The narrow streets, in
spite of all their charm, will be swept away as the townsfolk
gradually alter their standards and ideas, but the traveller of the
age to come should still find this fair mosque to please his eyes.
Out of the city at length we came to the now open space about the
crenelated walls and bastions of the fort, and the Badshahi Masjid
with its four old capless minars. Midway between the west gate of
this mosque and the walls of the Fort stands the graceful pavilion
called the Baradari. The stone is mostly red Agra sandstone,
Jehangir's favourite building material, recalling Kenilworth in
colour, but the mosque has three domes of white marble.
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Descending once more to earth I walked all over the fort, with its
Pearl Mosque of white Jeypore marble (much, so much less fine than
the Moti Masjids of either Delhi or Agra) its white Nau Lakha, its
Diwan-y-khas, looking ready to tumble to pieces, though now in the
restorer's hands, and its Shish Mahal.
Near these last, to the right of the same quadrangle, is the armoury.
In Europe the traveller is often shown instruments of torture--rack
or boot or "maiden," and in England what village of tourist
attractiveness is without either stocks or pillory? In India,
however, such relics are rare, and those shown at the Lahore Armoury,
including a machine for pulling off thieves' fingers, invented by
Dhuleep Singh, only remind one of the general absence of such
stepping stones to civilization.
There is a great variety among this choice collection of weapons, and
although it cannot compete with that of Turin, Valetta or Hertford
House, it would prove at least a valuable addition to any one of
them. Here are recalled the times of Ranjeet Singh, the one-eyed
monarch, who had the genius to gather under him European officers of
such calibre as Avitabile, Allard and Ventura. Here are cuirasses,
imported by General Ventura for his French legion of 8000 men,
bearing on their fronts the Gallic cock with laurels and standards on
a star {255} of steel, and beside them Sikh shields with copper
bosses. Here are swords from Iran, with ivory hilts and blades
engraved with mottoes calling on the help of "Ali." There are
combination swords and pistols, Afghan knives, old flint-lock and
match-lock guns with barrels damascened, old four-chambered
match-lock revolver guns, musquets (short carbines or blunderbusses)
carried by the Gurcharahis, (Sikh cavalry 4000 strong), tir kaman
(bows and arrows), tarkash (quivers), Abyssinian shotels made with a
double curve and wielded with the point downwards, Mahratta swords,
farangs--straight swords adapted by the Mahrattas from the
Portuguese, Khandahs, those long Sikh swords made broader near the
point, a Persian mace of the time of Rustem--a gem for any
collection--tabai (battle-axes) gokru, the crowsfoot--caltrap of
ancient Europe for throwing down to stop cavalry, a Burmese Dha or
Dhas, a fakir's baraggan or short sword-stick leaning on which some
"muni of the ages" has sat in meditation in the jungle. There are
Goorkha kukris and Hindoo Katars, the iron-shod stick of a Chaukidar,
a powder-flask of golden thread, back-plates and breast-plates and
helmets of steel and brass.
The armoury is certainly more interesting to-day than the Shish Mahal
opposite wherein, as in a certain chamber at Versailles, it is {256}
said that begums and a man would shut themselves for weeks together.
Here there is indeed no armoury of love--is it because the weapons of
that warfare were of a kind inseparable from those who wielded
them--the charms that vanished with their owners? Or can it be that
their enduring pattern has never been improved upon, so that each
blade and buckler of the past is still in full demand for current
wear?
I went up to the roof of the Shish Mahal for the view of Ranjeet
Singh's tomb and the Badshahi mosque, and between its minarets
towards the west could see the silver band that is the Ravi River,
and then before going back to the elephant I looked at Ranjeet
Singh's tomb on which certain bosses are carved in the marble with
curious significance. Eleven of these are grouped round a large
centre, and of the eleven four are for Ranees (who are married women)
and seven for concubines, while at two of the corners of the slab are
detached smaller bosses to commemorate a pair of pigeons burned in
the funeral pyre.
What a contrast, I thought, on returning to the spacious roads of the
modern town outside the city gates, between the new order and the
old! On arriving at Lahore the first thing that the stranger notices
is the fortified railway station, then a tank and an old mosque
covered {257} with green-glazed tiles with others about it of bright
peacock-blue; and then, as he drives from the station in a gharry,
through white dust, past quite handsome modern buildings in pale red
brick, comes the "Upper Mall," a perfect road with an ideal lay-out
for a modern town--wide and trim with electric-light standards
painted a clean grey on brick-edged grass strips which separate the
centre roadway from a riding track that, in its turn, runs parallel
to a footway; while on either side stretches a line of gardens. It
is all as handsome as the Boulevard Anspach at Brussels, and as
different from the more lovable streets in old Lahore as can well be
imagined.
I had seen in front of the museum Zam Zammah, the old gun with a long
history which Rudyard Kipling played round as a boy long before Kim
was written, and had watched the urchin scrambling on its back when
the policeman was not looking. Having heard that the character of
Mahbub Ali of _Kim_--"known as one of the best horse-dealers in the
Punjab"--was drawn from a man named Wazir Khan (not that minister of
Akhbar after whom the Chauk of Wazir Khan is named, but an old
horse-dealer who is still alive), I took some trouble to inquire for
him. The old man was on the road, however, having gone to a
horse-fair at Jhelum, but I found his son and asked {258} him to show
me the old Sarai where his father used to sleep on his visits to
Lahore. This is called the Sarai of Mahomet Sultan and belongs to
the Maharajah of Kashmir. It is a wide quadrangle, about 60 yards
square, with round-arched cloisters on all sides; and the son of
Wazir Khan showed me, shut off between pillars, the place where his
father used to sleep in the old days. The shadows of a large shisham
tree flickered over the broken white plaster of the wall. There was
a well in the centre, and near it was a group of horses from
Waziristan. Out through the gateway ("the Gate of the Harpies who
paint their eyes and trap the stranger") I could see the Lunda Bazaar
and a woman squatting on the edge of the footway washing her face
with soap. Near her was a tamasha wallah, a boy with a cage of green
parrots, and a Hindoo woman cooking chupatties over a fire of
dung-cakes, and from one of the houses there was singing in Pushtu.
I returned to the old gun and entered the building of the
"wonder-house" in front of which it stands.
The Mayo School of Industrial Art, which is attached to the Lahore
Museum, was founded to revive arts now half forgotten, and generally
to develop the Industrial Art of the Province. I went thoroughly
over its various departments, its schools of modelling and design,
architecture, {259} engineering, wood-carving and carpentry, repoussé
and blacksmith's work--and I do not think the importance of this
college, as an educational institution, could be exaggerated. Its
ambition to turn out a constant succession of the best possible
craftsmen, rather than theoretic students, makes it the best means
yet arrived at of moral and mental development inseparable to my
thinking from the purely utilitarian value of handicraft training.
Among the students were pointed out to me lads from distant villages
and outlying districts, some in receipt of Government stipends,
others supported by District and Municipal Boards and others again by
Independent States. A well-regulated boarding-house is connected
with the school for the accommodation of such pupils, a large
proportion of whom find immediate employment on the completion of
their course at the school and so continually add to the popularity
of its training.
The energy, talent and success of Mr Percy Brown during the many
years in which he has developed and enlarged the scheme initiated
under the late Mr Lockwood Kipling, are beyond praise, and I only
hope that his recent translation to Calcutta may bring an extension
to other provinces of India of practical application of the same
educational ideas.
The museum is justly proud of its Buddhist {260} sculptures, the best
of which is one in black hornblende schiste (from the Yusafzai
country near Peshawar), of Buddha after his forty-nine days' fast.
Carved with extreme delicacy and refinement, this wonderful sculpture
seems to carry one rather to Renaissance Italy than the North-West
Provinces. Who were they, these sculptors? How much or how little
were they identified with the people whose gods they carved? Would
Alexander of Macedon have had in his train men of sufficient eminence
in their craft to account for the apparent Western influence?
One of the latest additions under Mr Brown's curatorship is a
collection of paintings and drawings of the Moghul Emperors and
people of their times, which includes many exquisite illuminations
and old water-colour drawings of extreme fineness and delicacy and
yet full of character, design and amazing distinction. Appreciation
of such things since the days of their production is only beginning
to be re-awakened, and they are still purchasable in India at such
prices as the museum can afford. Mr Brown told me that I was the
first who had yet looked at this collection with enthusiasm to
justify his own in buying them, but "who knows the spelling of Du
Guesclin?" They are as wonderful as Holbein's drawings, their detail
would have enchanted Altdorfer, and their exquisite line {261} might
have delayed the death of Aubrey Beardsley! Such are the Mullah Do
Piaza, the picture of Akhbar's jester and his thin Rosinante, or the
beautiful drawing of Humayun, Babar's son, out a-hunting.
India is a land which changes any sympathetic traveller to a set of
strings on which its spirit plays through all the working-hours.
Every day is crowded with new wonders, and no sooner does he sink to
earth, as if fallen from the hands of one player, than he is snatched
up again and every fibre wrung by some new loveliness he knew not of.
One afternoon I drove out with the pundit to Shaddra where Jehangir
is buried and Nour Jehan. We started to the west of the city on the
high road to Peshawar, past the Mohammedan cemetery and the Hindoo
burning-ground, outside which some women in white and yellow robes
sat waiting while their men-folk burned a body within.
In the time of Ranjeet Singh, the pundit told me, the river used to
flow past the Badshahi Masjid, a large red sandstone mosque, which we
next passed: but in India the rivers are not so constant as the stars
in their courses.
A little farther on we crossed the dry bed called the Ravi Nullah and
then, driving through the Ravi Forest, reached the bridge of boats
{262} that spans the Ravi River at a little distance from the
railway-bridge. A merry old Kuka Sikh on a white donkey was waiting
at the bridge toll-gate for someone from whom to beg the money to
cross. It is a long bridge and very narrow, so that two vehicles
cannot pass one another and a bullock-cart, which had just started to
cross from the opposite bank, seemed inclined to take an infinity of
time about it; but the Kuka Sikh was in no hurry, and when we had
paid his toll joked with the pundit to beguile the time. This
boat-bridge has to be dismantled in the rainy season, from June to
August, when the river is swollen.
We left the Peshawar road soon after crossing the bridge and
presently reached Shaddra and Jehangir's tomb, a large and elaborate
affair with much space about it and great entrance gateways and lines
of narrow water tanks in the gardens within. Dismounting from the
gharry we walked over the great open space of the Sarai and through
the eastern gateway, with its honeycomb vaulted ceiling and soft warm
flower decoration on its pink stucco-covered brick-work, to the water
channels of the tomb garden, past the central tank and on to the
Mausoleum itself, an exquisite low building with four tall minarets,
half of white marble and half of the red Agra stone, of which
Jehangir was so fond.
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We walked up the steps and crossing a pavement of badal stone entered
the inner chamber through an arch with a dado of old glazed inlay.
Within, a flat oil-lamp upon a metal stand, threw flickering light in
a bright path upon the marble floor. There was rich inlay of agate,
cornelian and amethyst, the ninety-nine names of God and the titles
of Jehangir, all but the most important title--that of husband of
Nour Jehan. She is buried, the Queen who ruled him and his
people--only her own brother she could not save from his wrath--about
half a mile away and I was surprised to find the place in a state of
utter neglect. It is awkward to approach and I expect is rarely
visited.
When we reached it the sun was very low. A cow was stalled in one
part of the neglected tomb and, as I approached, a Mohammedan fakir,
rising from the ground to his full height, tall and thin, shook his
hands at the sky and cried in Persian--_Al Mout! Al Mout!_
("Everyone must die--everyone must die!")
"But this is a stable," said the pundit, whose learning perhaps did
not include Bethlehem. It is true that the tomb was railed round,
but the railings were broken and the sturdy rogue of a fakir had
settled himself comfortably with his charpoy, his goat and his cow.
His beard was grey and his unkempt hair peeped out in tufts from his
roughly-tied turban, once white {264} and spotted with dark blue.
The things he continued to shout were curious, but the pundit agreed
with me it was mere wildness and no scheming for backsheesh that
prompted a reference to England. Waving his arms round and round he
cried--"The English will rule all over the world," and then--"One God
to rule over us all. He created Adam and Eve: _bismillah heraai
mornana heem la ilia illillah_."
I walked up some broken brick steps and passing through a series of
low-pointed arches, down on the other side of a low circular wall, I
stood before two tombs. The one nearest to me was that of Nour
Jehan, who had been called Rose of the Harem, Light of the World: its
neighbour was that of her adopted daughter.
The tombs are quite plain plaster-covered brick-work. In the outer
passages there remain some traces of painted ornament--but because
she had no children, and her stepson, Shah Jehan, was not on good
terms with her when she died, there is here no decoration, no
inscription. Not for her tomb are the ninety-nine names of God!
Through the arches on the farther side I could see the trunks of date
palms and old, old mango trees in the Begumpura, a garden Nour Jehan
had loved. I went underground to the crypt-like chamber below the
tomb, and with the help of matches made out that there was {265}
nothing upon the floor--only in the ceiling one inset space
corresponding to the cenotaph above. The pundit thought the body was
probably very deep in the ground--I know not.
When we came out above ground the last of daylight was making golden
play among the palms and mango trees. They were in flower--and next
June fruit would be upon them.
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