The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  As Twain pointed out, the British won a heroic victory against seemingly impossible odds but they were helped enormously by the chaos on the Indian side. The Muslims in particular divided against themselves, Sunni and Shia, or against the Hindus by supporting the British when Hindu success seemed likely. Other Indian groups, like the Sikhs, the Pathans, the Ghurkhas and other Nepalis and the Aga Khan’s Muslims, openly supported the British from the start. Meanwhile the sepoys, at heart an unpaid, officerless peasant army, had no central command or even a cohesive goal, and split more geographically than ideologically were easily picked off by the disciplined - and at the time, desperate - British.

  When the British regained control, that control passed from the East India Company to the British Crown whose first priority was to make sure no future uprisings could give them such a run for their money. Entire native towns were cleared across the northern plains, of which Allahabad was one. In the Sepoy Uprising the British areas had been badly damaged and in their place the British built wide, tree-lined boulevards with large, tree-lined bungalows behind even larger tree-lined walls; a vision of European civilization in the tropics. From these bungalows they ran the districts and in many cities, including Allahabad, they called these areas Civil Lines.

  ***

  Civil Lines in Allahabad Mark Twain described thus: “I saw the English part of the city. It is a town of wide avenues and noble distances, and is comely and alluring, and full of suggestions of comfort and leisure, and of the serenity which a good conscience buttressed by a sufficient bank account gives. The bungalows (dwellings) stand well back in the seclusion and privacy of large enclosed compounds (private grounds, as we should say) and in the shade and shelter of trees.”

  Twain’s hotel was at the western edge of Civil Lines, next to All Saints Cathedral. It still stands and will soon be a functioning hotel again, albeit with the rather unfortunate name of Hotel Harsh. Built in 1875 on two floors with a castellated roof, it is long and low and white and had what Mark Twain described as “a long yellow veranda”, a feature which still zigzags around the front of the hotel now.

  In 1896 it was known as Barnet’s Hotel; its proprietor was Sir G. H. Barnet about whom even Sita cannot find anything noteworthy.

  I meet the current owner, Mr. Adinath Harsh.

  “We are rebuilding it. It has not been a hotel for more than twenty years. But now Allahabad is busy again. Aspects are propitious.”

  He shows me around. There are no records surviving, no guest book of 3 February 1896 for us to pore over.

  “This room is typical room of where they would have stayed. We have yet to divide it.”

  “Divide?”

  “Yes, the rooms are too big for today. Typically they are four hundred square feet with twenty-five foot ceilings. Imagine the cost of cooling that. So we are lowering the ceilings and dividing the rooms. Indians like smaller confines and we get twice as many rooms.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying, and you speak such good Engl...”

  “The name,” Adinath says. “Yes, I know. In Hindi harsh means comfortable - and fortunate. But really the problem is that it is part of our family name and my father is insistent.”

  “It’s his hotel?”

  “It’s his money. And as you say, ‘he who pays the piper plays the tune’.”

  That evening’s Talk was at the Railway Club, a short tonga[24] trot away. Mark Twain noticed how everyone had their own carriage and took it for even the shortest distances: “all the white citizens have private carriages; and each carriage has a flock of white-turbaned black footmen and drivers all over it. The vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm - and makes the lecturer feel like an opera.”

  Railway Clubs were the most racially integrated meeting places in India. While, to quote Rudyard Kipling, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,[25] there was one group where they did meet, the largely unfortunate Anglo-Indians. In the early East India Company days many European men were entranced by the Moghul and Hindu civilizations and, being single, took Indian wives, frequently beautiful widows who otherwise would have been left to wither on the vine. Their offspring, inevitably wealthy and often beautiful, were brought up without stigma; rather the opposite. By the time of Twain’s visit the more interesting, freethinking Europeans had been replaced by stuffier, less imaginative men - and their wives - and affairs between well-born Europeans and Indians were taboo. An Anglo-Indian at the Railway Club that night was more likely to have been the result of a liaison between a British squaddy[26] and an Indian prostitute - and as a result not readily acceptable to either side. Nevertheless they were fiercely racist against the “wog”[27] natives themselves and equally obsequious to the whites. They would only speak English, made the Indian railways their cause and were invaluable as drivers, engineers and junior managers; every major terminus and junction had its “railway colony” of Anglo-Indians. What few privileges their tint gave the twilight Eurasians were lost at Independence and most have now emigrated throughout the Commonwealth - anecdotally at least, largely to Canada.

  Allahabad had become an important junction, but after Independence Indian Railways stopped supporting the club and it declined like so many other Raj institutions. In 1984 it was rescued by a local businessman who saw the need for a school and a community center. The Railway Club’s wing is now the thriving Coral Club Medium School (not I presume, a school for mystics) and the main building a large empty shell used mostly for Hindu weddings. As a Hindu wedding is not a short-lived affair the main hall is in more or less permanent use.

  The stage is still set at one end of the main hall, and as it is made of brick I can only assume it is as it was when Twain delivered his “At Home” there. The Allahabad Pioneer,[28] the paper on which his new friend Rudyard Kipling used to work, reported that “Mark Twain’s humor is often of the ladies’ postscript sort - in a casual incidental way he introduces a circumstance that puts quite a new color on a detailed story...The charm of his delivery is so delightful that no one who hears him could wish to have been content with a report.”

  ***

  Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling were arguably the two most celebrated writers in the English language in the late nineteenth century. They formed a mutual admiration society.

  Twain told the Calcutta Hindoo Patriot in an interview the following week that he had met Rudyard Kipling several times and “I like him very much. I admire his work prodigiously. There is no question as to his genius and that must be confessed by everyone. He has genius and plenty of it. I have an amazing fondness for his Plain Tales from the Hills and I think that some of his ballad work is inimitable. I don’t see how anyone could possibly surpass it.”

  They first met in the summer of 1890 in Elmira, NY and gave back-to-back accounts of their encounter; Kipling’s on meeting Twain in the New York Herald of 17 August 1890 and Twain’s on meeting Kipling in the New York World a week later. Mark Twain was 55; Rudyard Kipling was 25.

  Kipling’s piece starts with an imaginary address to an audience in India:

  You are a contemptible lot out there! Some of you are Commissioners and some Lieutenant-Governors and a few of you are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar - no two cigars - with him and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand I do not despise you - indeed I don’t. I am only very sorry for you all from the Viceroy downwards. To soothe your envy and to prove I still regard you as my equals I will tell you about it.

  I was impressed that Mark Twain had time to entertain an escaped lunatic from India, be he ever so full of admiration. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk - this man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away.

  The New York World piece started:

  The young story-write
r of old England paid his respects in earnest person as well as in luminous prose to the veteran humorist of New England. The latter opined: “It would be a good thing to read Mr. Kipling’s writings for their style alone if there were no back story to it. But, as you say, there always is a story there and a powerfully interesting one generally. How people have gotten to read and talk about his stories! Why, when a young man not yet 24 years of age, succeeds in the way Kipling has succeeded, it simply shows, doesn’t it, that the general public has a strong appreciation of a good thing when it gets hold of one?

  “His great charm to me is the way he ‘swings nervous’ English! It is wonderful. That it seems to me is one great secret of the hold he takes on his readers. They can understand what he is at. He is simple and direct.”

  ***

  The next morning, wrote Twain:

  In the early brightness we made a long drive out to the Fort. Part of the way was beautiful. It led under stately trees and through groups of native houses and by the usual village well, where the picturesque gangs are always flocking to and fro and laughing and chattering; and this time brawny men were deluging their bronze bodies with the limpid water, and making a refreshing and enticing show of it; enticing, for the sun was already transacting business, firing India up for the day. There was plenty of this early bathing going on, for it was getting toward breakfast time, and with an unpurified body the Hindoo must not eat.

  Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of India, the Kumbh Mela, was being held, just beyond the Fort. It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.

  Early this morning, as Gillian and Sita head off for the museum and library, I team up with my guide, a personable young Brahmin, Rajesh Giri. The reason I need a Brahmin will become clear soon. I jump on the back of his scooter and we head off for the fort. The reason we need a scooter will also become clear soon. As we duck and weave in and out of the blaring traffic it seems hard to imagine that “Part of the way was beautiful. It led under stately trees...” None of the way is beautiful now, in fact for rank ugliness, what Twain called “uncomeliness”, dirt and depravity, it is as bad as anything seen in India so far - a bar not set too low.

  For Allahabad has spread way beyond Civil Lines and is one of the many places in northern India to claim the title “fastest growing city”. It is a town divided by the railway tracks and, as always, there is the right side of the tracks and the wrong side of the tracks. Civil Lines and its wide streets and low-rise houses are on the fancy side; Chowk, an Indian version of souk, isn’t fancy-side at all. Even on a scooter it takes twenty minutes, pedestrian speed, to clear the main street, leaving plenty of time to look around at all the garbage piled high: the fruit and vegetable trash being chewed by cows, the bag trash being inspected by dogs, the paper trash being slept on by goats, the metal trash being sifted by scavenger children, the glass trash being bagged by their parents, the bright trash being carried off by crows, the traffic trash just sitting there reproducing - and the smell of trash just hanging aimlessly in the air. The aural backdrop is the blaring horns. Right behind us is a particularly noisy and noisome old Ambassador.[29] The driver just holds down his horn a few feet behind me. None of the cars, motorbikes, pedal- or auto-rickshaws, cows or ox carts can go anywhere where they are not already going; can’t go any faster either. I turn around and give him - always a him - a shrug sign. He just blows another blast. I get off the pillion and walk back a few feet.

  “I tell you what. I’ll sit in your car and blow the horn and you sit on the back of the scooter and try and get out of the way.”

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Why what?”

  “Why problem?”

  “Why problem because I’m sitting a few feet from your horn. Your horn isn’t making any difference. None of us can go anywhere we are not already trying to go.”

  He ceases. In the meantime the traffic has moved forward four feet. That is enough to get up a barrage of klaxoned abuse from those behind him. I walk forward and jump back on the pillion. He resumes his position an inch from our tail. And then he resumes his position on the horn.

  “What’s the problem?” asks Rajesh, blowing his tinny horn at the cycle rickshaw in front of him and the cow in front of that and everything and everyone on the road in front of them.

  “Nothing,” I reply and chalk another one up to irreconcilable cultural differences, patience and courtesy on the road not being part of the Indian DNA - like asking an Italian to wear a seatbelt or an Englishman to jump a line (there being no Hindi word or Indian concept for line[30]).

  Eventually, nerves tattered and eardrums shattered, we reach Akbar’s splendid old fort. We need a break from the madness and find a chai stall. I ask Rajesh about his life as tourist guide.

  “I’m only doing it as I was hopeless at mathematics so couldn’t do computer sciences like all my friends at school.”

  “Is that what they are all doing now?” I ask, “Hardware, software, that sort of thing?”

  “You’ve seen the billboards for computer training courses?” I have, they are everywhere. “The whole country is going IT mad. I worked in a call centre after college.”

  “How was that?”

  “I didn’t like it for lots of reasons. We Brahmins speak the best English but even we had to take the MTI course.”

  “What’s that?”

  “MTI? Mother Tongue Influence. They try to make us sound less sing-song. I had to learn Australian slang too.”

  “So you speak ’Strain?”

  “Yeah, Ozzie too, I guess. No probs, mate. I was on railway inquiries.”

  “You had to keep Ozzie hours too?”

  “That’s right, up all night our time. And four-hour shifts. And some rude and racist people on the other end too. It was sweat shop.”

  “But a well paid sweat shop.”

  “It is well paid, two US bucks an hour, about twenty thousand roops a month. Much more if you are selling something. On commission. My God, you can treble that. But I like this guiding. Not so much money but outdoors. And meeting interesting people, not just talking on the phone.”

  We look up as the old fort. It must have been completely splendid when it was built four hundred years ago and it still is relatively splendid even now. Twain described it: “The Fort is a huge old structure, and has had a large experience in religions. In its great court stands a monolith which was placed there more than 2,000 years ago to preach (Buddhism) by its pious inscription; the Fort was built three centuries ago by a Mohammedan Emperor - a resanctification of the place in the interest of that religion. There is a Hindoo temple, too, with subterranean ramifications stocked with shrines and idols; and now the Fort belongs to the English, it contains a Christian Church. Insured in all the companies.” Very droll.

  No insurance is needed now as three-quarters of the old fort has been taken over by the Indian Army. It looks in fine shape: painted buildings, mown lawns, a polo pitch. Left-right, left-right on the parade ground. I’m not quite sure why the third biggest army in the world needs to be here, as far as they can be from any border, mucking up our sightseeing but I am

  sure it’s all for the best. The quarter not taken over by the Indian Army is going to the mange-dogs, physically and proverbially. There are four impromptu Hindu temples, surrounded by overgrowing general shrubbery; the civilian part of the fort will soon be of interest to archaeologists only.

  From the turrets, now ou
t of bounds, Twain could see the view I cannot see now. To reach the object of the view I need Rajesh, the Brahmin on the scooter.

  Two rivers join at that point - the pale blue Jumna, apparently clean and clear, and the muddy Ganges, dull yellow and not clean. On a long curved spit between the rivers, towns of tents were visible, with a multitude of fluttering pennons, and a mighty swarm of pilgrims. It is a fair as well as a religious festival. Crowds were bathing, praying, and drinking the purifying waters, and many sick pilgrims had come long journeys in palanquins to be healed of their maladies by a bath; or if that might not be, then to die on the blessed banks and so make sure of heaven.

  There were fakirs in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so is the rest of it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor. There were seated families, fearfully and wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping represented the families of certain great gods. There was a holy man who sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did not seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all day holding his withered arms motionless aloft, and was said to have been doing it for years. All of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them for the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the people give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to him. At last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and I wrenched myself away.