The devout Hindu knows in Benares the height of ecstasy: but, if I am
typical, the European experiences there both discomfort and inquietude.
Nowhere else in India did I feel so foreign, so alien. To be of cool
Christian traditions and an Occidental, an inquisitive sightseer among
these fervent pilgrims intent upon their pious duties and rapt
in exaltation and unthinking inflexible belief, was in itself
disconcerting, almost to the point of shame; while the pilgrims were so
remarkably of a different world, a different era, that one felt lost.
This, however, is not all. India is never too sanitary, except where the
English are in their own strongholds, but Benares--at any rate the parts
which the tourist must visit--is least scrupulous in such matters. The
canonization of the cow must needs carry a penalty with it, and Benares
might be described as a sanctified byre without any labouring Hercules
in prospect. Godliness it may have, but cleanliness is very distant. The
streets, too, seem to be narrower and more congested than those in any
other city; so that it is often embarrassingly difficult to treat the
approaching ruminants with the respect due to them. Fortunately they
are seldom anything but mild and unaggressive. Part perplexed, part
inquisitive, and part contemptuous, they are met everywhere, while
in one of the temples in which the unbeliever may (to his great
contentment) do no more than stand at the entrance, they are frankly
worshipped. In another temple monkeys are revered too, careering about
the walls and courtyards and being fed by the curious and the devout.
Holiness is not only the peculiar characteristic of Benares: it is also
its staple industry. In the streets there is a shrine at every few feet,
while the shops where little lingams are for sale must be numbered by
hundreds.
The chief glory of Benares is, however, the Ganges, on one side of which
is the teeming sweltering city with its palaces and temples heaped high
for two or three miles, and bathers swarming at the river's edge; while
the other bank is flat and bare. A watering-place front on the ocean's
shore does not end more suddenly and completely. There is nothing that
I have seen with which to compare the north bank of the Ganges, with the
morning sun on its many-coloured façades and towers, but Venice. As one
is rowed slowly down the river it is of Venice that one instinctively
thinks. As in Venice, the palaces are of various colours, pink and red
and yellow and blue, and the sun has crumbled their façades in the
same way. But there is this difference--that over the Benares roofs the
monkeys scamper.
Gradually Venice is forgotten as the novel interest of the scene
captures one's whole attention. At each of the ghauts (a landing place
or steps) variegated masses of pilgrims--no matter how early the hour,
and to see them rightly one ought to start quite by six--are making
their ablutions and deriving holiness from the yellow tide. You saw them
yesterday trudging wearily through the streets, the sacred city at last
reached; and here they are in their thousands, brown and glistening.
They are of every age: quite old white-bearded men and withered women,
meticulously serious in their ritual, and then boys and girls deriving
also a little fun from their immersion. Here and there the bathing ghaut
is diversified by a burning ghaut, and one may catch a glimpse of the
extremities of the corpse twisting among the faggots. Here and there is
a boat or raft in which a priest is seated under his umbrella, fishing
for souls as men in punts on the Thames fish for roach. And over all
is the pitiless sun, hot even now, before breakfast, but soon to be
unbearable.
I was not sorry when the voyage ended and we returned to the Maharajah's
Guest House for a little repose and refreshment, before visiting the
early Buddhist stronghold at Sarnath, the "Deer Park," where the Master
first preached his doctrine and whither his five attendants sought
a haven after they had forsaken him. Drifting about its ruins and
contemplating the glorious capital of the famous Asoka column--all that
has been preserved--I found myself murmuring the couplet,--
With a friendly Buddhist priest I seek respite from
the strife
And manifold anomalies which go to make up life--
but the odds are that even the early Buddhists were not immune.