The Critic in the Orient

Calcutta, The Most Beautiful of Oriental Cities

Calcutta, the great commercial port of northern India and the former capital of the Empire, is the most beautiful Oriental city, not even excepting Hongkong. Its main claim to this distinction is the possession of the famous Maidan or Esplanade, which runs along the Hoogly river for nearly two miles and which far surpasses the Luneta of Manila in picturesqueness. The Maidan is three-quarters of a mile wide at its beginning and it broadens out to one and one-quarter miles in width at its lower end. Government House, the residence of the Viceroy, is opposite the northern end of the Maidan, while at the southern end is Belvedere, the headquarters of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. With historic Fort William on one side and most of the large hotels, the big clubs and the Imperial Museum on the other, the Maidan is really the center of all civic life. At the southeast end is the race course; not far away is the fine cathedral. Near by are the beautiful Eden Gardens (the gift of the sisters of the great Lord Auckland), which are noteworthy for the Burmese pagoda, transported from Prome and set up here on the water's edge. It is seldom that a city is laid out on such magnificent lines as is Calcutta. It reminds one of Washington in its picturesque boulevards and avenues, all finely shaded with noble mango trees. And it also has the distinction of green turf even in the heat of summer, owing to the heavy dews that refresh the grass like showers.

Calcutta is associated in the minds of most readers with the infamous Black Hole into which one hundred and forty-six wretched white people were crowded on a hot night of June in 1750 and out of which only twenty-three emerged alive on the following morning. The Black Hole was the regimental jail of old Fort William and its site is now marked by a pavement of black marble and a tablet adjoining the fine postoffice building, while across the street is an imposing monument to the memory of the victims, whose names are all enumerated. The hole was twenty-two by fourteen feet, while it was only eighteen feet in height. These prisoners who were flung into this little jail were residents of Calcutta who fell into the hands of the Nawab of Murshedabad. Calcutta is also famous as the birthplace of Thackeray, a bust of whom ornaments the art gallery of the Imperial Museum. Scattered about the Maidan are statues of a dozen men whose deeds have shed luster on English arms or diplomacy.

Calcutta, as the first city of India that I had seen, impressed me very strongly, although the native life has been colored somewhat by contact with British and other Europeans. Here, for the first time, one sees ninety-nine out of one hundred people in the streets wearing turbans. Here also the women mingle freely in the streets, wearing long robes which they wind dexterously about their bodies, leaving the lower legs and the right arm bare. A few cover the face, but the great majority leave it exposed. Many are hideously disfigured by large nose rings, while others have small rings or jewels set in one nostril. Nearly every woman wears bracelets on arms and wrists, heavy anklets and, in many cases, massive gold or silver rings on the big toes. In some cases what look like heavy necklaces are wound several times around the ankles. It is the custom of the lower and middle classes not to put their savings in a bank, but to melt down the coin and make it into bracelets or other ornaments, which are worn by their women. Here in Calcutta also one sees for the first time hundreds of men and women wearing the marks of their caste on their foreheads, either painted in red or marked in white with the ash of cow dung.

Although the main streets of Calcutta are distinctly European, a walk of a few blocks in any direction from the main business section will bring you into the native or the Chinese quarter, where the streets are narrow, the houses low between stories and the shops mere holes in the wall, with only a door for ventilation. In one quarter every store is kept by a Chinese and here a large amount of manufacturing is done. In other quarters natives are carrying on all kinds of manufacture, in the same primitive way that they worked two thousand years ago. The carpenter uses tools that are very much like those in an American boy's box of toy tools; the shoemaker does all the work of turning out a finished shoe from the hide of leather on his wall. Outside these stores in the street the most common beast of burden is a small bullock of the size and color of a Jersey cow; These little animals pull enormous loads, and they are so clever that when they see an electric car approaching they will start on the run and clear the track.

Many of the houses in the native quarter of Calcutta are built of adobe, with earthen tiles, which make them bear a strong resemblance to the adobe dwellings of the Spanish-Californians before the American occupation. In many cases very little straw is used in this adobe, for the walls have frequently crumbled away under the heavy rains of winter. Other houses are built of brick, faced with plaster, which is either painted or whitewashed.

What impresses any visitor is the squalor and the wretchedness of these homes of India's poor. The clothing of a whole family is not worth one American dollar, while about ten cents in our money will feed a family of four. The houses have no furniture, except a bed of the most primitive pattern, made of latticed reeds; the smoke from the cooking fire goes up through the roof or else finds its way out the open door; seldom are there any windows, all the air coming in at the open door; the floor of the house is of dirt and on this squat father and mother and the children, with the family goat. In the small shops work is carried on seven days in the week until nine or ten o'clock at night, with an hour for lunch and siesta at midday. The hopelessness of the lot of the Hindoo (who is bound by rigid caste rules to follow in the footsteps of his father) can never be appreciated until one has seen him here in his native land.

For two hours I watched scores of natives taking a wash at the large, free bathing ghat near the pontoon bridge. On the river front is a restaurant, and back of this steps lead down to a spacious platform on the level of the river. A score of men and boys and one woman were taking a bath in the dirty water, which was thick with mud washed up by passing steamers. A few of these bathers had rented towels from an office on the stairs, but the great majority simply rubbed themselves with their hands and then dried in the sun. All washed their faces in the dirty water and rinsed their mouths with it. The men took off their loin clothes and washed these out, then wrapped them about their bodies and came out dripping water. The lone woman was very fat. She waded into the water and when she came out her thin robe clung to her massive form revealing all its curves. She calmly took a seat on the stairs and proceeded to massage her head.

The most interesting place near Calcutta is the Royal Botanical Gardens, situated on the opposite side of the river and about six miles from town. These gardens were laid out in 1786 and they vie with the botanic gardens at Singapore in the variety of trees and shrubs from all parts of the tropics. Here is the great banyan tree which covers one thousand square feet and is one hundred and forty-two years old. At a height of five and one-half feet from the ground the circumference of the main trunk is fifty-one feet; the height is eighty-five feet, while it has five hundred and seventy aerial roots, which have actually taken root in the ground. The tree at a little distance looks like a small grove.

The Imperial Museum at Calcutta is well worth a couple of hours, for it contains one of the finest collections of antiquities in the Orient. The museum is housed in an enormous building facing the Maidan, which has a frontage of three hundred feet and a depth of two hundred and seventy feet. In the ethnological gallery are arranged figures of all the native races of India with their costumes; agricultural implements, fishing and hunting appliances, models of Indian village life, specimens of ancient and modern weapons and many other exhibits. Another room that will repay study is a gallery containing old steel and wood engravings of the great characters in the mutiny, with busts of Clive, Havelock, Outram and Nicholson, and with a life-size bust of Thackeray.

Bathing and Burning the Dead at Benares

It is estimated that one million pilgrims visit the sacred city of Benares every year, and it is these pilgrims that furnish the largest income which the city receives from any source. Here are the most holy shrines of Buddhism; here Vishnu and Siva have their strongholds, and here must come Hindoos from all parts of India to bathe in the sacred waters of the Ganges and to offer up prayers at the many holy shrines in the city's temples.

Benares is sacred because here Buddha first made his residence. The place that he selected was ancient Sarnath, six miles from Benares, which is now a heap of ruins, in which British government experts are delving for remains of the great city that was founded six centuries before the Christian era. At Sarnath Buddha built a great temple and founded a school from which his disciples spread to all parts of India. But after 750 A.D. Buddhism disappeared gradually from India, and Hindooism took its place. The fine temples that now line the Ganges for three miles were built by Maratha princes in the seventeenth century. They also built the scores of bathing ghats that now furnish one of the most picturesque spectacles that the world affords. A ghat in Hindustani is a stone stairway that leads down to the water, and Benares has a succession of these magnificent stairways leading down to the Ganges, overlooked by palaces of many Maharajas and temples built by rulers and priests. No sight more splendid could be conceived than that of these domes and minarets flashing in the rays of the early morning sun while thousands of devout believers crowd the bathing ghats and offer prayers to Vishnu, after they have bathed in the waters of the Ganges; and mourning relatives burn the bodies of their dead after these have had the sacred water poured over their faces.

The visitor who wishes to see the pious Hindoos bathe in the Ganges goes to the river in the early morning soon after the sun has risen. He descends one of the large ghats and takes a boat, in which he may be rowed down the river past the bathing ghats and the one ghat where the dead are burned. The scene is one that will never be forgotten. Against the clear sky is outlined a succession of domes and spires that mark the position of a score of sacred shrines, with two slender minarets that rise from the mosque built by the great Moslem Emperor, Aurunzeb. The sunlight flashes on these domes and spires and it lights up thousands of bathing floats and stands that line the muddy banks of the river. The floats are dotted with hundreds of bathers and the number of these increases every few minutes. They come by hundreds down the great stone stairways to their favorite bathing places, where, after a thorough bath, they may be shaved or massaged or may listen to the expounding of the Hindoo sacred books by a learned Brahmin sitting in the shade of a huge umbrella. A characteristic feature of this hillside is the number of these large umbrellas, each of which marks the place of a priest or a holy man who has done some marvels of penance that give him a strong hold on the superstitious natives and induce them to pay him well for prayers or a sacred talisman.

With my boat moored near the bank and directly opposite the Manikarnika ghat, the favorite place on the river, I watched the stream of bathers for nearly an hour. The fanatical devotion that will induce a reasonable human being to bathe in the waters of the Ganges seems incredible to anyone from the Western World. The water of the sacred river is here of the consistency of pea soup. The city's sewer pipes empty into the Ganges just above the bathing ghats, and the current carries this filth directly to the place which the Hindoos have selected for their rites. The water is not only muddy and unclean, but it offends the nose. Yet Hindoos of good family bathe here side by side with the poverty stricken. They use the mud of the Ganges in lieu of soap; they scrub their bodies thoroughly, and then they actually take this foul-smelling water in their mouths and clean their teeth with it. This creed of Buddha is a pure democracy, for there is no distinction of class in bathing. Women bathe by the side of men, although they remain covered with the gauze-like garments that are a sop to modesty.

The Manikarnika ghat is the most picturesque of all these bathing places along the Ganges, as the long flight of stone steps is in good preservation and the background of temples and palaces satisfies the eye. The river front for thirty feet is densely crowded with bathers who stand on small floats or go into the shallow water. With a Western crowd so dense as this there would be infringments of individual rights that would lead to quarrels and fights, but the Hindoo is slow to anger, and, like the Japanese, he has great courtesy for his fellows. Hundreds bathed at the ghat while I watched them and no trouble ensued. Nothing could be more striking, nothing more Oriental than the picture of scores of bathers, in bright-hued garments, moving up and down these long flights of massive steps. In the background were a half-dozen temples, the most noteworthy of which is the red-domed temple of the Rajah of Amethi, whose beautiful palace overlooks this scene. Near the water is a curious leaning temple, whose foundations were evidently unsettled by the severe earthquake which destroyed several temples farther down the river.

The busiest men on these bathing ghats are the Hindoo priests, who reap a harvest from the hundreds of pilgrims who visit the ghats during the day. These priests cannot be escaped by the poorest Hindoo. They levy toll from every one who descends these long flights of stairs. One fellow I watched as he sat under his great umbrella. He had his sacred books spread before him, but he was given no leisure for reading them, as a constant stream of clients passed before him. Some of these were regular daily visitors from Benares, who pay a certain rate every week or every month, according to their financial standing. Others were pilgrims who, in their enthusiasm over the sacred Ganges (which they had traveled hundreds of miles to bathe in), were not careful in regard to their fees. Others were mourning relatives who applied for prayers for the corpse which they had brought to the waterside, and still others demanded hurried prayers for the dying, whose last breath would be drawn by the bank of the sacred river. Incidentally the priests sold charms and amulets guaranteed to bring good fortune. Most of the payments were in copper pice, four of which make one of our cents, but many of these priests had great heaps of this coin in front of them, showing that though India may be suffering from a bad harvest the faker may always feed on the fat of the land.

The spectacle, however, which stamps Benares upon the memory is the burning of the dead at a ghat by the Ganges. This ghat is reserved exclusively for the cremation of Hindoo dead. No Mussulman can use it. It was about eight o'clock in the morning when my boat reached this burning ghat. Already one body had been placed on a funeral pyre of wood. The guide said this body was that of a poor man who had no relatives or friends, as the place where the relatives sit until the cremation is complete was empty. Soon, however, two men came rushing down the stone steps with a corpse strapped to a bamboo stretcher. The body was that of a woman, dressed in red garments, which signified that she was a married woman. Unmarried women are arrayed in yellow and other colors, while men must be content with white. The stretcher-bearers placed their burden with its feet in the Ganges and then went in search of wood which is purchased from a dealer. Soon they had a supply, which they piled up in the form of a bier, and on this they placed the woman's corpse. Then one of the men, who, the guide said, was the dead woman's husband, with tears streaming from his eyes, bore some of the water of the Ganges to the bier, exposed the face of the dead and poured the sacred water upon her mouth and her eyes. Then while his companion piled wood above the body the husband sought the low-caste Hindoos who sell fire for burning the body. He soon returned with several large bundles of coarse straw, one of which was smoking. Seven times the husband passed around the bier with the smoking straw before he applied the flame to the wood. The fire licked greedily at the wood, and soon the flames had reached the body. Then the husband and his friend repaired to a stand near by, from which they watched the cremation.

Meanwhile two other bodies had been rushed down to the water's edge. One was evidently that of a wealthy woman, dressed in yellow silk and borne by two richly garbed attendants. The other was that of an old man, attended by his son. The latter was very speedy in securing wood and in building a funeral pyre. Soon the old man's corpse was stretched on the bier and the son was applying the torch. He was a good-looking young fellow, dressed in the clean, white garments of mourning and freshly shaved for the funeral ceremonies. While he was burning the body of his father another corpse of a man was rushed down to the river's edge and placed upon a bier. This body was fearfully emaciated, and when the two attendants raised it in its white shroud, one arm that hung down limp was not larger than that of a healthy five-year-old boy, while the legs were mere skin and bones. It was an ugly sight to see the Ganges water poured over the face of this corpse, which was set in a ghastly grin with wide-open eyes. The man had evidently died while he was being hurried to the burning ghat, as the Hindoos believe that it is evil for one to die in the house. Hence most of the corpses have staring eyes, as they breathed their last on the way to the river.

No solemnity marks this cremation by the river's edge. The relatives who bring down the body haggle over the price of the wood and try to cheapen the sum demanded by the low-caste man for fire for the burning. The greed of the priest who performs the last rite and who prepares the relatives for the cremation is an unlovely sight. All about the burning ghat where the poor dead are being reduced to ashes hundreds are bathing or washing their clothes. The spectacle that so profoundly impresses a stranger is to them so common as to excite no interest.

Lucknow and Cawnpore, Cities of The Mutiny

Lucknow and Cawnpore are the two cities of India that are most closely associated in the minds of most readers with the great mutiny. The one recalls the most heroic defense in the history of any country; the other recalls the most piteous tragedy in the long record of suffering and death scored against the Sepoys. The British government in both of these cities has raised memorials to the men who gave their lives in defending them and, though the art is inferior in both, the story is so full of genuine courage, loyalty, devotion and self-sacrifice that it will always find eager readers. So the pilgrims to these shrines of the mutiny cannot fail to be touched by the relics of the men and women who showed heroism of the highest order. When one goes through the rooms in the ruined Residency at Lucknow he feels again the thrill with which he first read of the splendid defense made by Sir Henry Lawrence and of the Scotch girl who declared she heard the pipes of the Campbells a day before they actually broke on the ears of the beleaguered garrison. And when one stands in front of the site of the old well at Cawnpore, into which the bleeding bodies of the butchered women and children of the garrison were thrown, the tears come to his eyes over the terrible fate of these poor victims of the cruelty of Nana Sahib. The sight of these Indian cities also makes one appreciate more fully the tremendous odds against which this mere handful of English men and women contended.