“We’ve gone past it,” Sanjay says disapprovingly from the height of the rickshaw when we meet again.
“Gone past what?”
“The windmill opposite. What’s left of it. We’ll do a few lefts and see if we can get back.”
We do - and we do. We pass more shops, stalls, lean-tos, shacks, stands and sheds, and it seems that many of them are also factories, cottage industries. If you want a saucepan you go to a saucepan maker, if you want shoes a shoemaker, shirts a kurta maker. A new wheel? There are spoke makers. A new dynamo? There are dynamo rebuilders. New specs? There are spec makers, but you choose the two arms and the lenses from an ancient pile. Want a smoke? Buy one at a time. Want a basket? Go to the weaver. Something woolen? The fleecer is outside, the knitter inside. A new saddle, no, but here’s someone who will rebuild your old one. Want a pee? Right where you stand, or squat.
Eventually we come close to the river. On Twain’s sketch there is sand marked next to river, as there is now at this same time of year. “Of course in the monsoon all this floods up to the level of the shacks,” says the colonel. We look over at the stump of the windmill. I say it looks like a large Shiva lingam, and it does.
“It was around here, Hall’s farm, Andrews Fields,” says Sanjay. It’s almost impossible to think of this as an orderly Europe indigo farm with a steamboat on the end of a jetty. In front of us is a large expanse of greenery, undulating and unkempt. A few cows graze here, a few goats nibble there. A few men sleep randomly on the grass. Small circles of men sit around, playing cards or talking. They look up and wave as we pass. They all, men asleep and men at large, cows and goats, seem to be quite happy in the Indian fashion. On our left are the new villages, all piled in together. Hall’s bungalow may well be in there somewhere but it would take a while wading through the overgrowth of frond huts and bamboo and fertilizer sack shacks to find it. The colonel suggests it would be better not to find it. “There will be whole families in each room, an open fire in the middle, the usual Indian peasant invasion, I’m afraid.”
I ask if there’s a way back without going over the Indian Styx. There isn’t and I’m still in therapy. Sanjay Sharma aside - no doubt like Mark Twain with Roger Hall aside - I can’t wait to get out of the depressing morass of dust-dirt and shed-shacks that calls itself Muzaffarpur. Neither can my companions.
Lucknow
Breakfast at the Mohamed Bagh Club in the cantonment area of Lucknow is as much a sumptuous unhurried Anglo-Indian affair for us now as it was for the Twain party a hundred and fifteen years ago and probably exactly the same fare too: papaya with yoghurt and honey followed by a massala omelette on paratha and real coffee (unusual in Nescafé India). As is the wont in Indian clubs everything is just as it was - and so is just as it should be - but here there has been a striking addition to the breakfast room[63] since Mark Twain’s mornings here of 22, 23 and 24 February 1896: a panel of six one yard square black and white photographs along one wall, each panel going to make up a panorama of Lucknow as she looked in all her splendor in 1923.
A closer look reveals Lucknow much as he would have would seen her, the Lucknow that had just recovered from its first disaster, the Sepoy Uprising of 1857 and was yet to know of its second disaster, the Partition of India of 1947. Before the first disaster Lucknow was the epicenter of the highly evolved Indo-Islamic civilization, a unique post-Moghul center of fine art, poetry, high Urdu and gracious manners. This first disaster, the Sepoy Uprising, was primarily caused by the greed of the East India Company, which after many years snipping away at the edges of the Kingdom of Oudh decided to annex it all, including of course its capital Lucknow. The consequence of the British “victory” in the uprising was that what passed for India was to be run directly by the Crown rather than by the East India Company; the consequence for Lucknow was that by the time of Twain’s visit the pre-uprising glory had returned to the city but the power had not - and, as we know, glory without power soon becomes effete and pantomimic.
***
Apart from both of us enjoying the hospitality at the Mohamed Bagh Club and visiting Lucknow fifty years after one its two disasters, Twain and I were both under the care of the resident army: Twain the British and myself the Indian. Twain’s Grand Tour was to a large extent a tour of the Raj rather than a tour of India and in following his footsteps my Re-Tour often meets the Raj’s successors, that particularly British institution, the Indian Army.
The Mohamed Bagh Club, like all the other Indian clubs in which we stay, is in the cantonment - the best day-to-day reminder of the Raj. Apart from the obvious military bearing of the area it is the “maintained” aspect that sets it apart; whereas almost all old buildings in Indian cities are left to crumble and decay, in the cantonments the old military maxim “if it moves salute it, if it doesn’t paint it” holds sway to the good. In the cantonments the roadside trees are painted, the streets are swept clean and there are even pavements. Cantonments also link one back to the loosely populated India of Twain’s time; there are no shops or stalls or rickshaw stands or shantytowns and so none of the teeming mass of humanity and their assorted animal outriders that the towns hold today.
The secretaries at most Indian clubs are ex-military and the Mohamed Bagh Club is no exception. I was lucky that Lt. Col. Amrind G. K. Nazeer was not only generous and hospitable but a historian and an anglophile. Phone calls must have been made while I was admiring the breakfast room panels for at 09.15 hours prompt an olive green military jeep with the EME Regimental Association flag on the starboard wing and a young Sikh lieutenant with a violet turban as its driver pulls up outside the freshly painted club entrance portico. In the fluent hybrid of Hindi-English intermingle spoken by the Indian Army I can make out the words “Residency for certain”, “at his disposal”, “other sites extant”, “Mark Twain”, “townside”, “lunch or tiffin” and “sixteen hundred hours”.
Young Udham Singh asks me, “Where first, sir?” I pull out my Mark Twain Lucknow notes and say, “First the Residency, please. Then the Imambara complex, then Chatter Manzil - the Umbrella Palace, and lastly La Martiniere.”
First we have to leave the cantonment and re-enter Indian India. Wham! Crowds; bustle; joggle; shuffle. We had arrived in Lucknow just before midnight by train and the city was sleeping, but now it is wide awake and stopping and starting and stopping and starting, inch by inch, so densely jammed, so nasty-noisy, so polluted everywhere in sight, so incoherent in its shambles, so unable to support reflection that one wonders at which point the one point two billion Indian psyches will collectively scream “Enough! There’s no more room on the India bus!”
Elsewhere one soon gets used to the overcrowding in India, helped immeasurably by the good nature of the Indians themselves who seem to be so used to being squished and squashed up together that they take it as just another part of life. Transport the rickshaw driver pedaling away in front of us to Alice Springs and he would spooked out by the emptiness and pedal that rickshaw to the nearest city for a nice bit of snuggled-up overcrowding. But Lucknow, even by Indian standards, raises the density bar and for the first time in India I see signs of road rage and bad temper that would have flared up long ago anywhere else in the world but here has yet to gain a foothold - and you’d have to have pretty small feet to gain any sort of foothold around here.
People talk of the population time bomb, not just in India but everywhere bounded by the tropics - but I have the feeling that here on the subcontinent the bomb has already exploded and we are living with the aftermath. In Kenya or Nigeria for example, or in Southeast Asia (apart from dirigiste Singapore and Malaya) one can see quite clearly that large parts of the population are children and certainly half the country is under twenty-five. In Palestine and Israel too teenagers abound, but there the alarm is tempered by the hope that it will be the next generations that settle for peace and prosperity as the old warmongers on both sides die off. But here in
India the evidence of the eyes is different. They take a census every ten years and the last one was nine years ago - and the census takers are the first to admit to hopeful guessing and willful rounding-up - but nine years ago they suggested thirty percent of the population were under fifteen (with the male/female split suggesting that dowry-prevention daughter killing is still horrifying high). It is nothing like thirty percent now; the US Bureau of Census put the under-fifteen guestimate at eighteen percent as the demographic bulge ages upwards.
***
Sorry for the digression, and back to Mark Twain’s tour. The Great Imambara complex, centered around the late eighteenth-century mausoleum, is at the heart of the Indo-Islamic city and civilization that Twain saw when it was still alive and we now see as a needless wreck, a neglected monument to past Islamic colonial glories that seem at best like an irrelevance and at worst an embarrassment to modern Hindu India.
But what a sight it must have been! The skyline of gilded domes and sculptured whitewashed cupolas and confident minarets were all on a grand, sweeping scale; one is reminded of Constantinople. Spread out between them were the formal gardens and watercourses, not unlike Versailles in scope and design. To the side were square lakes and wallowing palaces, not unlike Udaipur. It was a unique civilization born out of the heart of the disintegrating Moghul Empire moving east and absorbing Hindu influences as it did so, an attempt by the principalities to be more Moghul than the Moghuls. They called them the days of gold and silver: Islamic rule being the gold and Hindu influences being the silver, the best of all worlds.
That was then; this is now. Old Lucknow lies abandoned, caught in the crossfire of Muslim and Hindu rivalries that left Islamic Lucknow abandoned to its Hindu fate after Partition. The skyline is still there but has not been cleaned or painted for fifty years. The gardens are littered with old plastic bags and bottles. The watercourses have dried up and become secondary garbage dumps. The lakes are fetid, fluid rubbish tanks, the palaces dying of neglect.
Lucknow and its principality of Oudh or Awadh, like most of northern India, has for the last seven hundred years been the Poland of Asia, invaded by empires as they swept this way and that. This only came to an end with Indian Independence in 1947. The Muslim elite which had ruled Lucknow for three hundred years left for Karachi in Pakistan, their places being taken by simpler Hindu Punjabis heading the other way. Lucknow has only been Indian for the last 65 years and - heaven knows, understandably enough - the Indian government feels it has better things to spend its money on than maintaining reminders of imperial Islamic magnificence.
What is less clear is why some of the oil-rich Islamic countries - or companies or individuals--don’t step into the breach. Here, after all, is Islamic culture at its most refined, open to the new and admirable to all. The buildings (not a word to do their splendor justice) are still only a few hundred years old and built to last for several hundred more. The old gardens may be covered in new litter but are still easily salvageable. The attempt at just keeping the paint inside the palaces up to scratch is pathetic: it only reaches up to stretch height and no effort to match the colors has been made at all. Faced with such imaginary Arab largesse, even the Indian government might feel honor-bound to move the Punjabi junk stalls out of the central enclave that divides the palace grounds and whose presence there completely ruins the effect the architects intended and the visitor hopes for.
The Saudis spend freely enough promoting Islam but the sad fact is that the kind of conservative, fundamental Islam promoted by the Saudis, Wahhabism, is a far cry from the liberal, poetic and cultural Islam practiced by the Nawabs here even up to sixty five years ago. For a fraction of what they spend building madrasahs in Pakistan to teach children the Koran by rote in Arabic they could really show a skeptical world that Islam isn’t just synonymous with terrorism. They won’t, but there’s no reason not to hope that more enlightened Gulf Muslim states or companies might pay for a lick of paint and a dozen gardeners.
Walking back to the jeep, seeing Indian hovels leaning against the arches and walls under the stucco explosion above, seeing the garbage piled up in the moats which once were home to crocodiles, seeing souvenirs shops in the gateways selling tack and tat, seeing the zenana complex that once held the Nawab’s eight hundred wives rotting from within and without, seeing around the site not domes and minarets but already-decaying-yet-still-unfinished tower blocks, one has an idea what a visitor to Rome must have felt like in 450 AD, a generation after Alaric and his Visigoths had sacked the city.
***
Mark Twain’s next stop was the Chattar Manzil, the famous Umbrella Palace, so-called because of the brolly-shaped dome that sits on top of it. Twain lectured there, hosted by the United Services Club who used it as their headquarters. Udham Singh and his passengers were not detained there long; we got no nearer than the main gate and were turned away; the old palace is now the Central Drug Research Centre and out of bounds to anyone without the required swipe card.
The photograph panel in the breakfast room showed that Twain’s main point of interest in Lucknow, the Residency - the scene of the heroic British resistance for five hot and horrible months to the Sepoy Uprising - was a tonga ride through open country from the Great Imambara. Not so now; after a nerve-racking hour-long walk through the obstacle course and race track of the new Lucknow we arrive at the Baillie Gate, the starting point then and now of the tour of the Residency.
The word “Residency” sounds like a single grand building with some matching grounds but actually it describes half a dozen grand buildings lying around a 65-acre park. It has been left exactly as it was at the end of the five-month siege, a series of shelled out or even razed buildings with only the size of the foundations to indicate their previous grandeur. It is today a perfectly tasteful monument to all those who died in the Sepoy Uprising, British and Indians alike - and, of course, many more loyal Indian natives died for the British cause than did British natives on this foreign soil. There was death and desperation in equal measure.
Twain’s description is as good as I’ve read:
In Lucknow there was a great garrison, composed of about 7,000 native troops and between 700 and 800 whites. These white soldiers and their families were probably the only people of their race there; at their elbow was that swarming population of warlike natives, a race of born soldiers, brave, daring, and fond of fighting.
The natives established themselves in houses close at hand and began to rain bullets and cannon-balls into the Residency; and this they kept up, night and day, during four months and a half, the little garrison industriously replying all the time. The women and children soon became so used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep. The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in the midst of death, which came in many forms - by bullet, small-pox, cholera, and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, by the long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and nightly battle in the oppressive Indian heat, and by the broken rest caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, and fleas.
Six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half of the original force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths of the original native force. But the fighting went on just the same. Both sides fought with energy and industry.
The exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the next month October. Then, November 2nd, news came Sir Colin Campbell’s relieving force would soon be on its way from Cawnpore. On the 12th the boom of his guns was heard. On the 13th the sounds came nearer - he was slowly, but steadily, cutting his way through, storming one stronghold after another and the long siege of Lucknow was ended.
The last eight or ten miles of Sir Colin Campbell’s march was through seas of blood. The weapon mainly used was the bayonet, the fighting was desperate. Neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it. At the
Secundrabagh, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied a great stone house in a garden, the work of slaughter was continued until every man was killed. That is a sample of the character of that devastating march.
***
But there is an interesting dynamic going on here. Just before arriving at the Residency entrance one walks past an old Nawab palace and garden, presumably abandoned in 1947. The palace is small, as palaces go, and the garden the width of the palace façade, say twenty yards, and about a hundred yards long. The building itself is now a filthy, crumbling squat and the garden an urban scrub farm with goats nibbling at what they can, chickens pecking at this and that and some squat shacks and grubby hovels along the edges. Of course, litter is everywhere. In other words this rather charming ensemble, which would have made a fine museum or art gallery and ornamental garden, or even a boutique hotel or government office, has been left to rot. As we enter the Residency compound five minutes later, however, we see another old structure in ruins - and meant to be in ruins - yet these ruins are maintained to a particularly high standard. Thus in Twain’s time, “The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressive and beautiful. They and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer no neglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the British remain masters of India. Within the grounds are buried the dead who gave up their lives there in the long siege.”
The answer lies in national pride, or rather lack of national embarrassment. All the Nawab splendor is a reminder of Islamic subjugation, and no matter how enlightened the rulers were they can still be viewed as foreign rulers who ruled over a supine people. The Residency on the other hand - even when it stood - was a far, far less impressive symbol of civilization than the Indo-Islamic pieces that surround it. Yet it does represent a Hindu fightback against foreign rule; even though the Sepoy Uprising was ultimately unsuccessful it did succeed in proving that British rule was not invincible or inevitable.
The Indian Equator Page 19