The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  Membership was strictly controlled by rank, so a dashing young, independently wealthy lieutenant or solicitor would not have been admitted to the Poona Club whereas a newly arrived, gnarled and penniless captain or senior architect would. This was hardly a disaster as there were other, lesser clubs for the lesser orders and in big cities like Calcutta, to where we are heading, there were a dozen. They all shared formality in common with strict dress codes, tuxedos for dinner and ties at all times in the clubhouse. They also shared a system of credit: before credit cards there were chits, a sort of informal IOU, with the rule that all accounts had to be settled by the 7th of the following month.

  Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the clubs were those not allowed to be members - women, or more precisely wives. The husbands went off every day to work, militarily or civilly, leaving their wives at home. Even the lowest paid officer or civil servant had a bearer, a maid, a cook and if with child, a nanny. There wasn’t much, or anything really, for the wives to do. The clubs were where they passed the afternoon with their fellow wives, and spent most evenings with their husbands - and being British in the tropics, others’ husbands too.

  So why was Twain’s visit such a damp squib? At the end of January Poona was empty of the big cheeses who brought it to life in the season. There was really only the nearby cantonment, and one imagines quite a few inhabitants of the Officers’ Mess were too arrogant to think they could be entertained by an American humorist. Certainly no one from the club met him and Smythe at the end of their five-hour train journey. Smythe recalled that the audience was really inadequate in numbers for the At Home Talk and The Century magazine reported that Twain’s voice was creaking and croaking - either he hadn’t totally shaken off the bronchial infection which had haunted him since Ceylon or the reporter wasn’t used to the slow drawl of a Mark Twain Talk.

  The Bombay Gazette reported that the Bishop of Bombay, who happened to be in Poona and in the audience, took exception to a rather tame morality joke about Adam and the serpent “and left the room therewith and not in the best of tempers. I am sorry that the Lord Bishop did not remain to hear Mark Twain on morals.” Further on the appreciative reviewer noted that “one woman disturbed every body by her loud laughter”, and was, when describing the audience, moved to rhyme:

  A rather gushing one in cream

  A perky on in black

  A fair hared one in blue

  Sitting next to one in ’lac

  A lovely black fared

  with the palest pink

  With bow to match

  The effect was really swell.

  Unfortunately the old three-story wooden wedding-cake that was the clubhouse burned down in 1945, the only surprise being that it hadn’t happened before. The open fires in the kitchens caught the blame but one can imagine a stray cigar butt being as likely a culprit. The fire took the library with it and so we have lost not only all the club records but also a wonderful reference to a slice of Raj history.

  The Poona Gymkhana Club has now become the Poona Club Ltd. and styles itself, quite possibly correctly, as “South Asia’s largest sporting club”. I was shown around by my host, the club secretary Lt. Col. KSS Jamwal (Ret’d). The cricket facilities are wonderful and in January county players from the English leagues stay to keep their eyes in. Games are running all the time. The 18-hole golf course has been completed; the swimming pool keeps itself cool under a fine net shade; next door the squash courts resound to the thump-whack of dull rubber balls; beyond young girls take tennis lessons from older pros. There’s a running track and a gymnasium; it’s exhausting just thinking about the place.

  Off the track and field things aren’t so bright. The rebuilt clubhouse is attractive enough, its large open veranda of a ground floor with its high ceiling and token fans reminding one of a Serengeti safari lodge, but the service is dozy and grudging. One suspects the waiters have been on call since the great fire; there was no hurry then and there’s even less hurry now. The female cleaners squat and sweep like grounded Cossacks, their old horsetail twizzles missing whole swathes of dust and stirring up the rest. The rooms are nothing special and the room service non-existent. Trying to communicate with them by phone or e-mail is a frustratingly one-sided affair. Worse, some bounder has put water in the bar gin.

  Outside the club Poona is - to put it mildly - in full swing. It’s growing so quickly that officials can only guess at the population, and their guess is four million. It feels like they are all on the same piece of road at the same time, all rushing and racing in a mass of ambition and endeavor. The city is expanding in all directions all at once without, it would seem, any direction at all. There is no room for pleasing lines or subtle shades in the cost-controlled concrete building rush. Being a pedestrian is a fearsome pastime: traffic lights and crossings and even pavements - if one can find one - are simply ignored. India is famously a structured society and pedestrians are near the bottom of the transport hierarchy, just above dogs and just below bicycles. The only consolation for not being able to amble about aimlessly is that one doesn’t really want to amble about aimlessly; ugliness and pollution cure the foot-borne wanderlust and send us scurrying back to the sleepy veranda and the second innings at the Poona Club, where I’m writing now and still waiting for the Kingfisher beer I ordered at the start of the paragraph before last - or was it the one before that?

  Poona the city and Poona the club are fine examples of the patronizing dilemma of the India lover; the India lover wants the India that was, while the India liver wants the India that is - and that the latter is far better off cannot be denied. And, as the songstress stressed, we are living in a material world.

  Baroda

  Sitting here in the public library in Baroda it seems that researching Indian history is not as simple as one might hope. The problem for the researcher is that in the eyes of most Indians their country’s history does not start until Independence in 1947. Before that “India” had not existed, not in the sense that Indians understand it now. In 1525 Babur and his Moghul army - directly descended from Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes - swept into the Punjab from Afghanistan and colonized the hundreds of northern principalities that comprise the northern India, Pakistan and parts of Bangladesh of today. When the British Crown took direct control from the East India Company in 1857/8 “India” was a patchwork of those princely states that had sworn allegiance to the Crown (some more willingly than others), but nevertheless “India” was ruled by a system of suzerainty and paramountcy rather than as a unified bloc. Thus one can see the librarians’ point that “Indian History” before 1947 is an oxymoron.

  This hotchpotch of a history means that when one enters, for example, this or any other library and asks about local history in January/February 1896 there are only blank looks and shrugged shoulders. Attempting to dig deeper soon seems impolite as the modern Indian librarian seems rather sheepish about the lack of Indianity for most of the last five hundred years - and if he or she were to dig deeper forever, before that too.

  The BBC recently re-ran a documentary that started with the proposition that the greatest gift the British had left India was Indian Railways. I disagree. Indian railways is surely a remarkable legacy, a superb vision of investor[19] and political confidence executed by a stunning feat of engineering and millions of hours of sweat and toil - and indeed hundreds of lives. However, all these factors also required to create success a common country across which to build the railways, and then a common language with which to direct the enterprise and a then a common rule of law and civil administration to ensure its operation.

  One hates to question the received post-colonial guilt wisdom of the BBC, but the greatest gift the British left India was surely India itself, even if it still speaks twenty official languages and experiences all the inter-regional tensions such a vast, artificially created country is bound to feel. English is the Esperanto, the common lang
uage, a useful enough legacy in itself. The rule of law and the civil service may not be what it was at Independence but it is still better than it was five hundred years ago, before the Moghuls, let alone the British, arrived. Indian Railways is even more remarkable now than when the British left it, but surely a mere convenience compared to the fundamentals of the ninety-year legacy of the British Raj - but just don’t mention any of this to the librarian at Baroda if you want to look at the one pamphlet referring to an (irrelevant) event in January 1896.

  ***

  Mark Twain and Smythe left Poona twenty-four hours after they arrived, presumably with slim regrets to go with the slim pickings, to rejoin Livy and Clara back in Bombay’s VT for the change of trains up to Baroda, in this case the overnight Dehradun Express. Livy and Clara would have taken one compartment, Twain and Smythe another. Then and now it arrives at crack of dawn.

  We arrived at 7 this morning. The dawn was just beginning to show. It was forlorn to have to turn out in a strange place at such a time, and the blinking lights in the station made it seem night still. But the gentlemen who had come to receive us were there with their servants, and they make quick work; there was no lost time. We were soon outside and moving swiftly through the soft gray light, and presently were comfortably housed - with more servants to help than we were used to, and with rather embarrassingly important officials to direct them. But it was custom; they spoke Ballarat English, their bearing was charming and hospitable, and so all went well.

  The entourage deposited the Twain party at the Soni Pati Bhavan, the Maharaja of Gwaekor’s visitors’ guesthouse, just opposite the main gate. Since then the solidly cubed eight-room guesthouse has fallen on hard times, being a crumbling squat for the lowest castes, feral dogs and listless - if still holy - cows. This being India, the humans are intrigued and hospitable, the dogs wary at first and then easier and the cows pre-occupied with eating the garbage, a holy enough occupation hereabouts.

  Time then for a wholesome English breakfast[20] and then an eventful tour of Baroda.

  Breakfast was a satisfaction, after which the day began - and a sufficiently busy one.

  We came to the city, by and by, and drove all through it... And the houses - oh, indescribably quaint and curious they were, with their fronts an elaborate lace-work of intricate and beautiful wood-carving, and now and then further adorned with rude pictures of elephants and princes and gods done in shouting colors; and all the ground floors along these cramped and narrow lanes occupied as shops - shops unbelievably small and impossibly packed with merchantable rubbish, and with nine-tenths-naked natives squatting at their work of hammering, pounding, brazing, soldering, sewing, designing, cooking, measuring out grain, grinding it, repairing idols - and then the swarm of ragged and noisy humanity under the horses’ feet and everywhere, and the pervading reek and fume and smell! It was all wonderful and delightful.

  By and by to the elephant stables, and I took a ride; but it was by request - I did not ask for it, and didn’t want it; but I took it, because otherwise they would have thought I was afraid, which I was. The elephant kneels down, by command - one end of him at a time - and you climb the ladder and get into the howdah, and then he gets up, one end at a time, just as a ship gets up over a wave; and after that, as he strides monstrously about, his motion is much like a ship’s motion. Among these twenty-five elephants were two which were larger than any I had ever seen before, and if I had thought I could learn to not be afraid, I would have taken one of them while the police were not looking.

  Later Clara remembered the incident thus:

  Father seated on an elephant defies description. There was something funny about the sight, and Father, suspecting what I was giggling about, said “What are you laughing at, you sassmill?”

  ‘”If you could see yourself, Father, you would laugh too. The elephant looks so unreal with all his important trappings and you have had such a troubled air, as if you realized your hat did not match the blue-and-red harness.”

  Father never minded being laughed at, so he replied he did not believe the picture could be any stranger than his feelings. What could he do if the elephant decided to run? Nobody could answer this question, so he decided to forget it and enjoy the picturesque little streets and unfamiliar architecture.

  ***

  I had worried that Mark Twain’s Grand Tour of India seemed a bit light on the maharaja audiences. One of the richest of them, actually the second richest and by general consent the most enlightened, was that of Baroda, in the modern state of Gujarat, where Sayajirao III, the Maharaja of Gwaekor, ruled in fabulous splendor and general munificence. As Twain noted: “This is indeed one of the oldest of the princedoms of India, and has always been celebrated for its barbaric pomps and splendors, and for the wealth of its princes.”

  His full form and title was His Highness Farzand-i-Khas-i-Daulat-i-Inglishia, Shrimant Maharaja Sir Sayajirao III, Gaekwad, Sena Khas Khel Shamsher Bahadur, Maharaja of Baroda, GCSI, GCIE, KIH. He had been on the throne for twenty years when Twain met him and in that time had just finished building the amazingly ornate, massively overwrought Laxmi Vilas Palace in the then-fashionable Moghul-British Indo-Saracenic style. It was four times the size of Buckingham Place and was said to have cost £200,000, a staggering sum considering that the labor was practically free. Perhaps he considered £200,000 was a sensible amount for a palace-cum-safe in which to keep his £3,000,000 (worth £12 million and £180 million today respectively) collection of jewelry - a collection which included the famous Brazilian diamond, the Star of the South and no fewer than four carpets made of pearls with diamonds, rubies and emeralds sewn into the silk. Every time the maharaja or maharini left or entered the palace the household guard, with their white breeches, blue and gold jackets and black boots, would strike up the Baroda anthem.

  By the time of Twain’s lecture tour he had already visited Europe five times - no small undertaking in itself - and in his library were several of Twain’s books among many thousand others. Twain observed: “The prince is an educated gentleman. His culture is European. He has been in Europe five times. People say that this is costly amusement for him, since in crossing the sea he must sometimes be obliged to drink water from vessels that are more or less public, and thus damage his caste. To get it purified again he must make pilgrimage to some renowned Hindoo temples and contribute a fortune or two to them. His people are like the other Hindoos, profoundly religious; and they could not be content with a master who was impure.” The maharaja sent his personal representative, his Vakeel, Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, to Bombay to persuade Twain - for the princely sum of 1,000 rupees - to lecture in the Durbar Hall at Laxmi Vilas Palace.

  Twain was then shown the maharaja’s two palaces: the older Makapura Palace, now purloined by the Indian Air Force for knocking its officers into shape, and the newer Laxmi Vilas Palace where he was to lecture later that day. He much preferred the former, which he found “oriental and charming”, and damned the latter as being without merit “except for its costliness”. He saw the silver and gold cannons built by successive maharajas in a gilded display of one-upmanship, which “seemed to be six-pounders. They were not designed for business, but for salutes upon rare and particularly important state occasions. This sort of artillery is in keeping with the traditions of Baroda, which was of old famous for style and show. It used to entertain visiting rajahs and viceroys with tiger-fights, elephant-fights, illuminations, and elephant-processions of the most glittering and gorgeous character.”

  Although the Laxmi Vilas Palace was “not a good place to lecture in, on account of the echoes, it is a good place to hold durbars in and regulate the affairs of a kingdom, and that is what it is for. If I had it I would have a durbar every day, instead of once or twice a year.” Baroda made a deep impression on Twain, who thought it all “intensely Indian, crumbly and mouldering and immemorially old”; I can echo that impression havi
ng, like Twain, arrived here from downtown Bombay and cantonment Pune - this for the first time on his Tour and indeed on our Re-Tour was “India”.

  ***

  Two hundred and fifty specially invited guests, who had been summoned by gold-leafed invitations to hear the “Yankee humor”, attended the At Home Talk. Twain considered the Talk a success although Smythe noted that the female part of the royal household watching from behind the mezzanine screens didn’t laugh at his jokes as heartily as the men did and the acoustics in the cavernous Durbar Hall caused each joke to be told several times.

  Like a good footsteps hound I was keen to meet the current scion of the Gaekwad dynasty and visit the Durbar Hall and Laxmi Vilas Palace. Through connections at the American Centre in Bombay I made an appointment for an audience for Gillian and me with the heir to the throne, Yuvraj (Prince) Samarjitsingh Gaekwad, Yuvaraj Sahib of Baroda. He further promised that his secretary, Mr. Mahendrasinh Chauchan, would show us around later, which he did.

  Actually I had already paid the Laxmi Vilas Palace a visit the day before as an anonymous tourist to see how the general public would see it. It was not, one might say, overly impressive. The palace itself is still, just about, overly impressive but tourists are left to feel they are only allowed in through grated teeth. To buy a ticket one has to visit a subsidiary library a quarter of a mile off the beaten track. Once in the palace it is clear that only half a dozen or so rooms - and all in one wing of the ground floor - are open to inspection. No-one in a uniform knows anything about the history of the building; in fact no-one speaks English even though it is the lingua franca of tourism. For some bizarre reason photography is forbidden inside the palace, even though high-resolution images are freely available on the internet and digital throw-away photography is the essence of modern tourism. Welcome one is not made.