Although India is a land of walkers, there is no sound of footfalls.
Most of the feet are bare and all are silent: dark strangers overtake
one like ghosts.
Both in the cities and the country some one is always walking. There are
carts and motorcars, and on the roads about Delhi a curious service of
camel omnibuses, but most of the people walk, and they walk ever. In the
bazaars they walk in their thousands; on the long, dusty roads, miles
from anywhere, there are always a few, approaching or receding.
It is odd that the only occasion on which Indians break from their walk
into a run or a trot is when they are bearers at a funeral, or have
an unusually heavy head-load, or carry a piano. Why there is so much
piano-carrying in Calcutta I cannot say, but the streets (as I feel now)
have no commoner spectacle than six or eight merry, half-naked fellows,
trotting along, laughing and jesting under their burden, all with an
odd, swinging movement of the arms.
One of one's earliest impressions of the Indians is that their hands are
inadequate. They suggest no power.
Not only is there always some one walking, but there is always some one
resting. They repose at full length wherever the need for sleep takes
them; or they sit with pointed knees. Coming from England one is struck
by so much inertness; for though the English labourer can be lazy enough
he usually rests on his feet, leaning against walls: if he is a land
labourer, leaning with his back to the support; if he follows the sea,
leaning on his stomach.
It was interesting to pass on from India and its prostrate philosophers
with their infinite capacity for taking naps, to Japan, where there
seems to be neither time nor space for idlers. Whereas in India one
has continually to turn aside in order not to step upon a sleeping
figure--the footpath being a favourite dormitory--in Japan no one is
ever doing nothing, and no one appears to be weary or poor.
India, save for a few native politicians and agitators, strikes one as a
land destitute of ambition. In the cities there are infrequent signs of
progress; in the country none. The peasants support life on as little as
they can, they rest as much as possible and their carts and implements
are prehistoric. They may believe in their gods, but fatalism is their
true religion. How little they can be affected by civilisation I learned
from a tiny settlement of bush-dwellers not twenty miles from Bombay,
close to that beautiful lake which has been transformed into a
reservoir, where bows and arrows are still the only weapons and rats are
a staple food. And in an hour's time, in a car, one could be telephoning
one's friends or watching a cinema!