The Indian Equator Read online

  But the Durbar Hall is still as magnificent as it was in its pomp and prime and on the night that Mark Twain lectured there. The Venetian mosaic floor, the Flemish stained glass windows, the Moghul-style panels with their intricate inlaid and relief mosaics, the French chandeliers and the Genoan lacquered ceiling are all present and correct, glimmering and glittering in a dazzling display of opulence and extroversion. Compared to the interior, the Grand Entrance - by Fellici - is a bit shabby. It features an Italianate courtyard with water fountains and sculptures in bronze, marble and terracotta. As a design feature the concept “intricate” is an over-simplification.

  Paintings show the wonderful grounds that were landscaped by William Goldring, largely responsible for Kew Gardens; they are now a golf course and like many a golf course it has soon and unintentionally turned itself into wildlife sanctuary.

  The prince, 44, with a flurry of silver hair and complexion polished by a life of ease, is very handsome and gracious and received us in one of the ground-floor reception rooms. An accomplished sportsman and Uppingham old boy, it is clear his interests lie in the golf course rather than the palace, in the pleasure of sporting competition rather than the pain of accountancy and commerce. The family fortune has been decimated by taxes and internecine pay-offs and is in need of urgent rebuilding. With his Bollywood good looks and easy charm he would make the perfect film star - one well-paid way to restock the assets. There is vague talk of him turning the palace into a hotel and conference centre as other maharajas have done. What a venue it would make, but it seems unlikely to happen. One cannot imagine the prince feeling too comfortable with the great unwashed swarming all over the place.

  All around the structure is slowly on the crumble and I fear that within two generations - and his only child is a daughter in a regime of primogeniture - it may be beyond affordable repair. In the meantime his family can wander along the labyrinthine corridors, explore the countless rooms (the prince didn’t know how many there were) and gaze in awe at the paintings and mosaics that look down on the slow decline. For the grandmother in the wheelchair there are wonderful memoirs of shimmering parties; for the children scampering along the endless cracking tiles there is the innocence of the inheritance; and for the prince, perhaps a wistful sideways look at the tumble of life’s dice, which have given him a six when he could have done with a seven.

  1 “...a poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk”

  2 We hope Mark Twain didn’t see the advertisement as there wasn’t enough material for two Entirely Different shows.

  3 ...or black; white mostly in India.

  4 All found in The Complete Interviews edited by Gary Scharnhorst.

  5 The Talk is billed as: “Two hundred years ago, between 1809-11, Lord Byron completed his Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. He was 21 when he left London. After catching a packet from Falmouth to Lisbon, his entourage rode down to Sevilla and Cadiz. He then sailed from Gibraltar to Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Greece, Albania, back to Greece then Turkey, Malta again and then with a heavy heart home to England. His voyage was exotic and poetic, erotic and eccentric. On June 14th 2008 Solent sailors Ian and Gillian Strathcarron boarded their Freedom 40 ‘Vasco da Gama’ at Bucklers Hard and sailed off to recreate Lord Byron’s Grand Tour. Their own voyage was propitious and perilous, mysterious and mischievous - but seldom abstemious.”

  6 A one-driver, four-passenger, two-horse carriage.

  7 Official, uniformed messengers.

  8 The most famous exception was in Kashmir, where the last maharaja was Hindu and decided at Independence to join his largely Muslim subjects to India rather than the more logical Pakistan - the consequences of which decision still rumble on.

  9 None ranked higher than prince to leave protocol space between them and the Empress Victoria.

  10 Gun salutes were an old Royal Navy tradition originating in the need to empty guns peacefully. The larger ships - with the more important captains -carried the greater guns and so greater salutes. By an old sea superstition even numbers foreshadowed death, thus odd numbers only were used.

  11 As a rule a Maharaja was a Hindu ruler and a Nawab a Muslim ruler.

  12 General Wavell invented the mnemonic, Hot Kippers Make Good Breakfast, to remind himself of the precedence: Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior, Baroda. These five alone were entitled to 21 guns.

  13 Indian wine consumption in India is growing as fast as its middle class. Cabernet Sauvignon is the most reliable variety and Grover’s La Reserve and York brands aren’t bad at all. Reveilo Reserve Syrah and Chateau Indage’s Ivy Shiraz are delicious but far too expensive and hard to find. If a restaurant does serve wine it will probably be Riviera, a bland blend but just about quaffable. Whites tend to be sweet and warm. The biggest problem is the price: expect to pay $15-$25 for anything drinkable and quite often the wine part of the meal will cost twice as much as the food. Vineyard tourism north of Bangalore, in the Himalayan foothills and near Poona - our next stop - is just catching on. Not a bad way to see the country as it happens.

  14 The current estimate is about 35,000 Parsees resident in Mumbai.

  15 Once the population of a group falls below 25,000 the Indian government reclassifies it from a “community” to a “tribe”. Sometime in the 2020s, therefore, the Parsees expect to be officially and not just figuratively tribal.

  16 There are three Towers, two main ones for general use and one for Parsee women who have been misguided enough to marry outside the faith.

  17 4,327 to be exact in 2008 on all three Mumbai suburban lines.

  18 Jet Airways and Kingfisher are excellent and affordable airlines. Indian Airways, now lumped in with Air India, is still equally awful and strike- and cancellation-prone. As Sita was to discover in Jaipur later there have been numerous scandals about Indian pilots buying their ATPL licenses from the state authority - justified in one Times of India report by the latter saying, in effect, “what’s the problem? These things fly themselves anyway.” Unless one is in a hurry - in India? - it’s train time.

  19 Still the largest private investment, in real terms, ever made.

  20 In the same way the British champion Indian dinners, the Indians have perfected the English breakfast.

  Part Two

  The Hindu Heartland

  Allahabad

  The Twain party left for Allahabad by a night train for “it is the custom of the country to avoid day travel when it can conveniently be done. It was a long journey - two nights, one day, and part of another day; but it was always interesting, and not fatiguing.” Livy and Clara were in a ladies’ four-berth compartment, and Mark Twain and Smythe in a male-only one down the corridor. Nowadays one can reserve the more desirable lower berths but in 1896 the etiquette was that whoever laid out their baggage on the lower berth first “bagged” it. The trick was to have “your Satan arrive before somebody else’s servants, and spread the bedding on the two sofas and then stand guard till you come and all will be well; but if they step aside on an errand, they may find the beds promoted to the two shelves, and somebody else’s demons standing guard over their master’s beds, which in the meantime have been spread upon your sofas.”

  This is exactly what happened. Satan had laid out Livy and Clara’s bedding on the lower berths in the female compartment and then gone to the male compartment to do the same for Twain and Smythe. “Clara’s satchels were holding possession of her berth - a lower one. At the last moment, whilst Satan was attending to Smythe and me, a middle-aged American lady swarmed into the compartment, followed by native porters laden with her baggage. She was growling and snarling and scolding, and trying to make herself phenomenally disagreeable; and succeeding. Without a word, she hoisted the satchels into the hanging shelf,
and took possession of that lower berth.”

  Slowly the old steam engine chugged them across the endless plains of northern India:

  Out in the country in India, the day begins early. One sees a plain, perfectly flat, dust-colored and brick-yardy, stretching limitlessly away on every side in the dim gray light, striped everywhere with hard-beaten narrow paths, the vast flatness broken at wide intervals by bunches of spectral trees that mark where villages are. All day long one has this monotony of dust-colored dead levels and scattering bunches of trees and mud villages. You soon realize that India is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it that is beguiling, and which does not pall. You cannot tell just what it is that makes the spell, perhaps, but you feel it and confess it, nevertheless.

  Perhaps the spell was helped when “Satan got left behind somewhere that morning, and did not overtake us until after nightfall. It seemed very peaceful without him. The world seemed asleep and dreaming.”

  ***

  When Mark Twain arrived on the morning of 3 February he promptly christened Allahabad by its direct translation, Godville. Actually, god-wise, he had rather missed Godville’s glory days but he was in the right place and the right time - a once every twelve years right time - to see the most extraordinary outpouring of goddom, the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela.

  For Hindus it is the place where Brahma created the universe untold millions of years gone by; after the Moghuls arrived five hundred years ago they built mosques and forts all over northern India, and one of the best surviving ones is here, the wonderful Akbar fort on the banks of the Ganges; when the British took over two hundred years after that numerous churches and missionary schools were built, the most outstanding church being All Saints Cathedral,[21] modeled on Paris’ Notre Dame and completed only ten years before Twain’s arrival.

  The city had played a part, albeit a minor a part, in the Sepoy Uprising of 1857, a series of mutinies and revolts whose memories were increasingly to preoccupy Twain as his Grand Tour proceeded.

  ***

  I think now would be a good time to say something about the Sepoy Uprising. As Twain traveled east towards Calcutta from here then headed back west to Delhi he journeyed through the Uprising country and was hosted by the same British Army whose attitudes to India had been changed so much by the mutinous events thirty-nine years before.

  The events and heroics of the revolt inspired him, even if he only came across the British view of them: “The military history of England is old and great, but I think it must be granted that the crushing of the Indian Mutiny[22] is the greatest chapter in it. The British were caught asleep and unprepared. They were a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. It would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter or stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and English devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly.”

  Like many great events in history the casus belli of the Sepoy Uprising was not one single catastrophic eruption but a series of minor tremors, each survivable on its own but which when thrown together became combustible. The most major of the minor incidents was the decision - motivated purely by greed - in the spring of 1857 by the ruling East India Company to annex the Kingdom of Oudh. As Twain noted: “It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of Oudh by the East India Company - characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as “the most unrighteous act that was ever committed”.”“

  This being India, caste - and the protection of caste rights - also played its part. Luckily for the British the revolt was confined to only one of the three armies, the one from Bengal,[23] and this was the only one recruited from the higher-caste Rajputs and Brahmins. Ironically, this recruitment was done in the early days of Company expansion as it was thought the caste system, with its inbuilt respect of hierarchy, would provide greater loyalty. In fact of the 140,000 sepoys - indigenous infantry privates - in the Bengal Army only 8,000 remained loyal.

  As the Company’s empire spread west and the newly acquired lands came under British control the ruling castes lost some of their perks and privileges, causing disquiet; this disquiet, allied to the better education which their higher caste had given them, fermented into revolt - and well-led revolt at that. According to Twain: “The leaders moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and made his heart burn for revenge. They were able to point to two facts of formidable value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive’s day, native armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they were weak against Clive’s organized handful of well-armed men, but the thing was the other way, now. The British forces were native; they had been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the British, all the power was in their hands - they were a club made by British hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing to oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of.”

  There was a related issue to caste: religion. In the early days of British expansion the East India Company had concentrated on its main aim, commerce. As the unofficial empire expanded more force was needed and the army presence grew. With the army came chaplains and religiously minded officers, some in very high rank, whose own interpretation of their mission was as much to save the heathen Hindu from his sins as to establish trade routes for the Company. Inevitably this postulating from the Christians leaders, who made the mistake of seeing Hinduism as a religion - and an inferior one - led to resentment among the sepoys who made the mistake of seeing Christianity as another philosophy - and an inferior one - to which they were not about to descend. As the Christians were in power and Hindus subjugated, the latter felt the need to make a stand to protect their way of life - and for them was Hinduism is just that.

  The most infamous cause of the uprising - and certainly the most ineptly handled by the British - was the issuing of ammunition greased in animal fat. The army had recently been re-equipped with the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle. This new technology needed better shot which had to be tightly wrapped in greased paper. The drill was for the sepoys to bite off the end of the cartridge to release the powder. The shot now came pre-greased with tallow made from animal fat, either from a cow or a pig; the vegetarian Hindu sepoys could tolerate biting neither tallow and the Muslim sepoys could not tell from which beast it derived and so chose the abhor them both as haram.

  Amazingly the British ignored all warnings about the unacceptability of the sepoys biting into tallow and insisted, to the point of court martial, that the new shot was used as designed. When unrest became restless the British tried denying there was animal fat in the tallow but as the high-caste sepoys could see the low-caste tallow-wallahs at work the denial only aroused suspicions. When the British then re-issued the shot with hand-torn cartridges the original suspicions were only confirmed.

  Finally, there was a less tangible, more Indian factor at work, best explained by Twain as follows: “...the bravest and best Indian troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or strong. But, against that, there was a prophecy - a prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to prophecy at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. There was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of Clive’s which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would be overthrown and swept away by the natives.”

  It is hard in retrospect to see how the British did not see the trouble brewing. The reason was in large part benign neglect; the older and more senior East India Company British officers had developed a strong attraction to India and felt they had a
special relationship with the sepoys, and the sepoys with them, and as a result the sepoys would never revolt against them. They had after all learnt the native language - no sepoy was allowed to speak English to an officer and no officer allowed to speak English to a sepoy. Younger officers who sounded the alarm were ignored as inexperienced types who didn’t understand the native mind and spirit. In Twain’s words: “...a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons, and it grew day-by-day and spread wider and wider. The younger military men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in authority. Old-men were in the high places of the army - men who should have been retired long before, because of their great age - and they regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. They loved their native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to revolt.”

  We shall see how the Sepoy Uprising affected Twain’s visits to the northern cities as he passed through these places For now suffice to say that the revolt failed and the British retribution was unjust and terrible, “disproportionate” as we would say now. A further tragedy was the breakdown in trust between the British and the Indians. Before 1857 the British in India called themselves “Indians” and the Indians “natives”, with no hint of disparagement. After the slaughter of British women and children, in particular, the feelings of bonding turned to disgust - and fear, the feeling of “the degradation of fearing those we had taught to fear us” in the words of Sir John Kaye. H. G. Keene in his Anglo-Indian Sketches wrote that “a terrible abyss has opened between the rulers and the ruled; and every huckster, every pettifogger who wears a hat and beaches, looks down upon the noblest of the natives.” Even Sir Bartle Frere, an ex-Governor of Bombay and in many ways the father of the modern city, said, “You have no idea how much India has altered. The sympathy which Englishman felt for the natives has changed to a general feeling of repugnance.”