Greater Britain

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE MOHURRUM

ALTHOUGH Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital, and a thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout India for the splendor with which its people celebrate the Mohammedan Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in such a way as to reach the town upon the day of the “taboot procession.”

The ascent from the Konkan, or flat country of Bombay, by the Western Ghauts to the table-land of the Deccan, known as the Bhore Ghaut incline, in which the railway rises from the plain 2000 feet into the Deccan, by a series of steps sixteen miles in length, is far more striking as an engineering work than the passage of the Alleghanies on the Baltimore and Ohio track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada railway works. The views from the carriage windows are singularly like those in the Kaduganava Pass between Columbo and Kandy; in fact, the Western Ghauts are of the same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the hills being almost invariably either flat-topped or else rent by volcanic action into great pinnacles and needle-peaks.

The rainy season had not commenced, and the vegetation that gives the Ghauts their charm was wanting, although the “mango showers” were beginning, and spiders and other insects, unseen during the hot weather, were creeping into the houses to seek shelter from the rains. One of the early travelers to the Deccan told the good folks at home that after the rains the spiders’ webs were so thickly laced across the jungle that the natives of the country were in the habit of hiring elephants to walk before them and force a passage! At the time of my visit, neither webs nor jungle were to be seen, and the spiders were very harmless-looking fellows. One effect of the approaching monsoon was visible from the summit of the Ghaut, for the bases of the mountains were hid by the low clouds that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are held to be unsafe during the monsoon, but they are not so bad as the Kotree and Kurrachee line, which runs only “weather permitting,” and is rendered useless by two hours’ rain – a fall which, luckily for the shareholders, occurs only about once in every seven years. On the Bhore Ghaut, on the contrary, 220 inches in four months is not unusual, and “the rains” here take the place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry away bridges, lines, and trains themselves; but in the dry season there is a want of the visible presence of difficulties overcome, which detracts from the interest of the line.

At daybreak at Poonah, the tomtom-ing, which had lasted without intermission through the ten days’ fast, came to a sudden end, and the police and European magistrates began to marshal the procession of the taboots, or shrines, in the bazaar.

A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted on the walls, announcing the order of the procession and the rules to be enforced. The orders were that the procession to the river was to commence at 7 A.M. and to end at 11 A.M., and that tomtom-ing, except during those hours, would not be allowed. The taboots of the light cavalry, of three regiments of native infantry, and of the followers of three English regiments of the line, and of the Sappers and Miners, were, however, to start at six o‘clock; the order of precedence among the cantonment or regimental taboots was carefully laid down, and the carrying of arms forbidden.

When I reached the bazaar, I found the native police were working in vain in trying to force into line a vast throng of bannermen, drummers, and saints, who surrounded the various taboots or models of the house of Ali and Fatima where their sons Hassan and Hoosein were born. Some of the shrines were of the size and make of the dolls’-houses of our English children, others in their height and gorgeousness resembled the most successful of our burlesques upon Guy Fawkes: some were borne on litters by four men; others mounted on light carts and drawn by bullocks, while the gigantic taboot of the Third Cavalry required six buffaloes for its transport to the river. Many privates of our native infantry regiments had joined the procession in uniform, and it was as strange to me to see privates in our service engaged in howling round a sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with the tomtom, as it must have been to the English in Lucknow in 1857 to hear the bands of the rebel regiments playing “Cheer, boys, cheer.”

Some of the troops in Poonah were kept within their lines all day, to be ready to suppress disturbances caused by the Moslem fanatics, who, excited by the Mohurrum, often run amuck among their Hindoo neighbors. In old times, quarrels between the Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting Mussulmans, used to be added to those between Mohammedans and Hindoos at the season of the Mohurrum, but except upon the Afghan border these feuds have all-but died out now.

At the head of the procession marched a row of pipers, producing sounds of which no Highland regiment would have felt ashamed, followed by long-bearded, turban-wearing Marattas, on foot and horseback, surrounding an immense pagoda-shaped taboot placed on a cart, and drawn by bullocks; boys swinging incense walked before and followed, and I remarked a gigantic cross – a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit College for this Mohammedan festivity. After each taboot there came a band of Hindoo “tigers” – men painted in thorough imitation of the jungle king, and wearing tiger ears and tails. Sometimes, instead of tigers, we had men painted in the colors worn by “sprites” in an English pantomime, and all – sprites and tigers – danced in the fashion of the medieval mummers. Behind the tigers and buffoons there followed women, walking in their richest dress. The nautch girls of Poonah are reputed the best in all the East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch is not to be compared with the Cashmere nautch of Lahore.

Some taboots were guarded on either side by sheiks on horseback, wearing turbans of the honorable green which denotes direct descent from the Prophet, though the genealogy is sometimes doubtful, as in the case of the Angel Gabriel, who, according to Mohammedan writers, wears a green turban, as being an “honorary” descendant of Mohammed.

Thousands of men and women thronged the road down which the taboots were forced to pass, or sat in the shade of the peepul trees until the taboot of their family or street came up, and then followed it, dancing and tomtom-beating like the rest.

Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the elegance of their gait. In the hot weather, the saree is the sole garment of the Hindoo women, and lends grace to the form without concealing the outlines of the trunk or the comely shapes of the well-turned limbs. The saree is eight yards long, but of such soft thin texture that it makes no show upon the person. It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo habits, that at this Mohammedan festival the Mohammedan women should all be wearing the long seamless saree of the conquered Hindoos.

In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was nothing distinctively Mohammedan. Hindoos joined in the festivities, and “Portuguese,” or descendants of the slaves, half-castes, and native Christians who at the time of the Portuguese occupation of Surat assumed high-sounding names and titles, and now form a large proportion of the inhabitants of towns in the Bombay Presidency. The temptation of a ten days’ holiday is too great to be resisted by the prejudices of even the Christians or Hindoos.

The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river-side, where the taboots, one after the other, made their exit from ten days of glory into unfathomable slush; and such was the number of the “camp taboots,” as those of the native soldiers in our service are styled, and the “bazaar taboots,” or city contributions, that the immersion ceremonies were not completed when the illumination and fireworks commenced.

After dark, the bazaar was lit with colored fires, and with the ghostly paper-lanterns that give no light; and the noise of tomtoms and fire-crackers recommenced in spite of proclamations and police-rules. Were there in Indian streets anything to burn, the Mohurrum would cause as many fires in Hindostan as Independence-day in the United States; but, although houses are burnt out daily in the bazaars, they are never burnt down, for nothing but water can damage mud. We could have played our way into Lucknow in 1857 with pumps and hoses at least as fast as we contrived to batter a road into it with shot and shell.

During the day I had been amused with the sayings of some British recruits, who were watching the immersion ceremonies, but in the evening one of them was in the bazaar, uproariously drunk, kicking every native against whom he stumbled, and shouting to an officer of another regiment, who did not like to interfere: “I‘m a private soldier, I know, but I‘m a gentleman; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do; and I knows a cloud when I sees it, damned if I don‘t.” On the other hand, in some fifty thousand natives holiday-making that day, many of them Christians and low-caste men, with no prejudice against drink, a drunken man was not to be seen.

It is impossible to overestimate the harm done to the English name in India by the conduct of drunken soldiers and “European loafers.” The latter class consists chiefly of discharged railway guards and runaway sailors from Calcutta, – men who, traveling across India and living at free quarters on the trembling natives, become ruffianly beyond description from the effect upon their originally brutal natures of the possession of unusual power.

The popularity of Mohammedan festivals such as that of the Mohurrum has been one of the many causes which have led us to believe that the Mohammedans form a considerable proportion of the population of Hindostan, but the census in the Northwest Provinces revealed the fact that they had there been popularly set down as three times as numerous as they are, and it is probable that the same is the case throughout all India. Not only are the Indian Mohammedans few, but their Mohammedanism sits lightly on them: they are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in ceremonies, in daily life, and all-but Hindoos in their actual worship. On the other hand, this Mohurrum showed me that the Hindoos do not scruple to attend the commemoration of Hassan and Hoosein. At Benares there is a temple which is used in common by Mohammedans and Hindoos, and throughout India, among the low-caste people, there is now little distinction between the religions. The descendants of the Mohammedan conquerors, who form the leading families in several native States, and also in Oude itself, are among the most dangerous of our Indian subjects, but they appear to have but little hold upon the humble classes of their fellow-worshipers, and their attempts to stir up their people to active measures against the English have always failed. On the other hand, we have hitherto somewhat ignored the claims upon our consideration of the Indian Mohammedans and still more numerous hill-tribes, and permitted our governments to act as though the Hindoos and the Sikhs were the only inhabitants of Hindostan.

CHAPTER XIX.

ENGLISH LEARNING

THE English traveler who crosses India from Calcutta to Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condition of the land. He has heard in England of palaces and temples, of art treasures and of native poetry, of the grace of the Hindoo maidens, of Cashmere shawls, of the Taj, of the Pearl Mosque, of a civilization as perfect as the European and as old as the Chinese. When he lands and surveys the people, he finds them naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and superstition, and safe only from extermination because the European cannot dwell permanently in the climate of their land. The stories we are told at home are in no sense false: – the Hindoos, of all classes, are graceful in their carriage; their tombs and mosques are of extraordinary beauty, their art patterns the despair of our best craftsmen; the native poetry is at least equal to our own, and the Taj the noblest building in the world. Every word is true, but the whole forms but a singularly small portion of the truth. The religious legends, the art patterns, the perfect manner and the graceful eye and taste seem to have descended to the Hindoos of to-day from a generation whose general civilization they have forgotten. The poetry is confined to a few members of a high-caste race, and is mainly an importation from abroad; the architecture is that of the Moslem conquerors. Shan Jehan, a Mohammedan emperor and a foreigner, built the Taj; Akbar the Great, another Turk, was the designer of the Pearl Mosque; and the Hindoos can no more be credited with the architecture of their early conquerors than they can with the railways and bridges of their English rulers, or with the waterworks of Bombay City. The Sikhs are chiefly foreigners; but of the purely native races, the Rajpoots are only fine barbarians, the Bengalees mere savages, and the tribes of Central India but little better than the Australian aborigines or the brutes. Throughout India there are remains of an early civilization, but it has vanished as completely as it has in Egypt; and the Cave-temples stand as far from the daily life of Hindostan as the Pyramids do from that of Egypt.

It is to be feared that the decline has been extremely rapid since the day when we arrived in India. Just as it is almost impossible, by any exertion of the mind, to realize in Mexico the fact that the present degraded Aztecs are the same people whom the Spaniards found, only some three hundred years ago, dwelling in splendid palaces, and worshiping their unknown gods in golden temples through the medium of a sacred tongue, so now it is difficult to believe that the pauperized inhabitants of Orissa and the miserable peasantry of Oude are the sons of the chivalrous warriors who fought in the last century against Clive.

The truth is, that in surveying Oriental empires from a distance, we are dazzled by the splendor of the kings and priests; drawing near, we find an oppressed and miserable slave class, from whose hard earnings the wealth of the great is wrung; called on to govern the country, we extinguish the kings and priests in the fashion in which Captain Hodson, in 1857, shot the last sons of the Imperial family of India in a dry ditch, while we were transporting the last Mogul, along with our native thieves, in a convict-ship to British Burmah. There remains the slave class, and little else. We may select a few of these to be our policemen and torturers-in-chief, we may pick another handful to wear red coats and be our guards and the executioners of their countrymen; we may teach a few to chatter some words of English, and then, calling them great scoundrels, may set them in our railway stations and our offices; but virtually, in annexing any Eastern country, we destroy the ruling class, and reduce the government to a mere imperialism, where one man rules and the rest are slaves. No parallel can be drawn in Europe or North America to that state of things which exists wherever we carry our arms in the East: were the President and Congress in America, and all the wealthy merchants of the great towns, to be destroyed to-morrow, the next day would see the government proceeding quietly in the hands of another set every bit as intelligent, as wise, and good. In a lesser degree, the same would be the case in England or in France. The best example that could be given nearer home of that which occurs continually in the East would be one which would suppose that the Emperor and nobility in Russia were suddenly destroyed, and the country left in the hands of the British ambassador and the late serfs. Even this example would fail to convey a notion of the extent of the revolution which takes place on the conquest by Britain of an Eastern country; for in the East the nobles are better taught and the people more ignorant than they are in Russia, and the change causes a more complete destruction of poetry, of literature, and of art.

It being admitted, then, that we are in the position of having, in Hindostan, a numerous and ignorant, but democratic people to govern from without, there comes the question of what should be the general character of our government. The immediate questions of the day may be left to our subordinates in India; but the direction and the tendencies of legislation are matters for us at home. There can be nothing more ridiculous than the position of those of our civilians in India who, while they treat the natives with profound contempt, are continually crying out against government from at home, on the ground set forth in the shibboleth of “India for the Indians.” If India is to be governed by the British race at all, it must be governed from Great Britain. The general conditions of our rule must be dictated at London by the English people, and nothing but the execution of our decrees, the collection of evidence, and the framing of mere rules, left to our subordinates in the East.

First among the reforms that must be introduced from London is the general instruction in the English language of the native population. Except upon a theory that will fairly admit of the forcing upon a not unwilling people of this first of all great means of civilization, our presence in India is wholly indefensible. Unless also that be done, our presence in India, or that of some nation stronger than us and not more scrupulous, must endure forever; for it is plainly impossible that a native government capable of holding its own against Russia and America can otherwise be built up in Hindostan. Upon the contrary supposition, – namely, that we do not intend at any time to quit our hold on India, – the instruction of the people in our language becomes still more important. Upon the second theory, we must teach them English, the language of the British government; upon the first, English, the language of the world. Upon either theory, we must teach them English. Nothing can better show the trivial character of the much-talked-of reforms introduced into India in the last few years, since our Queen has assumed the imperial throne of Hindostan, than the fact that no progress whatever has been made in a matter of far more grave importance than are any number of miles of railway, canal, or Grand Trunk roads. Our civilians in India tell us that, if you teach the natives English, you expose them to the attacks of Christian missionaries, and us to revolt – an exposure which speaks not too highly of the government which is forced to make it. Our military officers, naturally hating the country to which they now are exiled, instead of being sent as formerly of their own free will, tell you that every native who can speak English is a scoundrel, a liar, and a thief, which is, perhaps, if we except the Parsees, not far from true at present, when teaching is given only to a few lads, who thus acquire a monopoly of the offices in which money passes through native hands. Their opinion has no bearing whatever upon a general instruction of the people, under which we should evidently be able to pick our men, as we now pick them for all employments in which a knowledge of English is not required.

A mere handful of Spaniards succeeded in naturalizing their language in a country twice as large as Europe: in the whole of South America, the Central States, and Mexico. Not only there, but in the United States, the Utes and Comanches, wild as they are, speak Spanish, while their own language is forgotten. In the west of Mexico there is no trace of pure Spanish blood, there is even comparatively little mixture – yet Spanish, and that of the best, is spoken, to the exclusion of every other language, in Manzanillo and Acapulco. This phenomenon is not confined to the Western world. In Bombay Presidency, five millions of so-called Portuguese – who, however, for the most part are pure Hindoos – speak a Latin tongue, and worship at the temples of the Christian God. French makes progress in Saigon, Dutch in Java. In Canada, we find the Huron Indians French in language and religion. English alone, it would seem, cannot be pressed upon any of the dark-skinned tribes. In New Zealand, the Maories know no English; in Natal, the Zulus; in India, the Hindoos. The Dutch, finally expelled from South Africa in 1815 and from Ceylon in 1802, have yet more hold by their tongue upon the natives of those lands than have the English – masters of them since the Dutch expulsion.

To the early abolition or total non-existence of slavery in the British colonies, we may, perhaps, trace our unfortunate failure to spread our mother-tongue. Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, all practiced a slavery of the widest kind; all had about them not native servants, frequently changing from the old master to the new, and passing unheeded to whatever service money could tempt them to engage in, but domestic slaves, bred up in the family, and destined, probably, to die within the house where they were reared, to whom the language of the master was taught, because your Spanish grandee, with power of life and death over his family slaves, was not the man to condescend to learn his servants’ tongue in order that his commands should be more readily understood. Another reason may have caused the Portuguese and other dominant races of the later middle ages to have insisted that their slaves should learn the language of the master and the government; namely, that in learning the new, the servile families would speedily forget the older tongue, and thus become as incapable of mixing in the conspiracies and insurrections of their brother natives as Pyrenean shepherd dogs of consorting with their progenitors, the wolves. Whatever their reasons, however, the Spaniards succeeded where we have failed.

The greatest of our difficulties are the financial. No cheap system is workable by us, and our dear system we have not the means to work. The success of our rule immediately depends upon the purity and good feeling of the rulers, yet there are villages in British India where the people have never seen a white man, and off the main roads, and outside the district towns, the sight of a European official is extremely rare. To the inhabitants of the greater portion of rural India, the governor who symbolizes British rule is a cruel and corrupt Hindoo policeman; himself not improbably a Bengal mutineer in 1857, or drawn from the classes whom our most ignorant sepoys themselves despised. It is not easy to see how this vital defect can be amended, except by the slow process of raising up a native population that we can trust and put in office, and this is impossible unless we encourage and reward the study of the English tongue. The most needed of all social reforms in India, an improvement in the present thoroughly servile condition of the native women, could itself in no way be more easily brought about than by the familiarization of the Hindoos with English literature; and that greatest of all the curses of India, false-swearing in the courts, would undoubtedly be both directly and indirectly checked by the introduction of our language. The spread of the English tongue need be no check to that of the ancient classical languages of the East; the two studies would go hand in hand. It is already a disgrace to us that while we spend annually in India a large sum upon our chaplains and church schools, we toss only one-hundredth part of the sum – a paltry few thousands of rupees – to the native colleges, where the most venerable of languages – Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian – are taught by the men who alone can thoroughly understand them. At the moment when England, Germany, and America are struggling for the palm in the teaching of Oriental literature – when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are contending with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and Harvard, in translating and explaining Eastern books – our government in India is refusing the customary help to the publication of Sanscrit works, and starving the teachers of the language.