The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  There is little to see in the Residency complex but it’s a lovely space in which to escape from the mayhem of new Lucknow surrounding it. The 65-acre park has some beautiful old banyan and palm trees and some recently planted tamarind and Indian elm. A small team sweeps up the leaves and litter; another team tends the flowers. For the first time since leaving the cantonment one can just sit quietly doing nothing, unmolested, and hear birds that aren’t crows - and birds that are crows. The usual touts and hustlers are kept out by the 100-rupee entrance fee and the imposing uniformed guards on the gate.

  Most visitors would seem to be canoodling couples, mostly with a chaperone. The couples find a quiet alcove or ledge or bench away from the main paths. They sit side by side, the man with his arm draped across her shoulders while she talks incessantly. The chaperone - in English a neutral word but in most languages feminine, and in India actually always feminine - sits quietly out of earshot or strolls, seemingly aimlessly, nearby. Sometimes two chaperones meet and chat and forget their supervisory obligations.

  It is not documented that Twain visited the extraordinary pile known as La Martiniere, but as it is so close to the Residency and the Mohamed Bagh Club and as it played such an important role in the Sepoy Uprising it is hard to imagine that he passed it by.

  It was built by an equally extraordinary Frenchman who eventually became Major General Claude Martin of the East India Company. In 1751, aged sixteen, he was a penniless adventurer who signed with the French Foreign Legion as a common foot soldier and was posted to the French colony of Pondicherry on the east coast of India. From there he was seconded to the French East India Company, but when they were defeated by the forces of the British East India Company four years later he was recruited by the latter and never looked back.

  One of life’s winners, he soon found himself in Lucknow, capital of the state of Oudh or Awadh and indispensable to its Nawab, Asaf-ud-Dowlah. As keen and compulsive a builder as the Nawab, he amassed a fortune as the Mister Fixit between the decadent and extravagant prince and the greedy East India Company - and everyone else in between. In 1785, reputed to be the richest European in India, he started to build a fortress-monument to himself, his own mausoleum, as a European rival to the Taj Mahal. Like a Moghul ruler he kept a harem, which included his original wife Boulone, her three sisters and, it was rumored, eight unrelated spares.

  It is a unique building beyond traditional architectural analysis: it has been described as a brick wedding cake but that seems a bit unfair to bricks and wedding cakes. It is certainly a Gothic fortress, a working castle, perhaps the ultimate expression of tropical-Gothic fantasy and enjoyably full of Baroque follies and foibles - and of course is itself a Baroque folly and foible but one that could defend itself. In his will he bequeathed it as a boys’ school and it is still one of the top private schools in India; described by the old boy who shows us around as India’s Winchester if not its Eton (referring to Mayo College). The old boy couldn’t resist mentioning - as indeed does every guide book and here am I doing the same - that its most famous living old boy was a certain Harold Roger Webb, more popularly known as Cliff, Sir Cliff Richard OBE.[64]

  By the time of the Sepoy Uprising in 1857 it had fifty pupils and twenty staff (which sounds like a sensible pupil/teacher ratio) who were evacuated to the Residency. During the siege the schoolboys and teachers played important roles as messengers and nurses; the building served as a secret depot and was given Battle Honors by the British for its and its students’ and staff’s roles in resisting the revolt; and to this day it is still the only building so endowed.

  The Twain party’s and our last call at Lucknow was to the train station - and very different experiences they were too. In 1897 photographs show a rather undistinguished series of bungalow sheds spread over the width of twelve tracks. It looks at first sight like a staging post for cattle but of course it was for troops; mid-India Lucknow and its cantonment was a major marshaling point for the British Army. The trains were none too glamorous either, and the Patna Mathura Express 13238 rumbled along at a stately 35 miles per hour, stopping frequently, so the forty miles to Kanpur took over two hours.

  The Army is still the major user of the station now, which is certainly why it is in such good condition. Built in 1914 in the style of a Moghul fort - it resembles the shorter north face of the great fort at Agra and is painted the same ochre-red - it spreads beyond the original bungalow sheds and in stature is in keeping with Lucknow’s military status. The trains too have been modernized and it is home to the new Lucknow Kanpur Suburban Railway system.[65] It may be more comfortable than the old Patna Mathura Express but don’t expect to arrive there much more quickly: the forty miles still take just under two hours - when it’s on time.

  Kanpur

  “Kanpur”, the poster in the Tourist Office boldly declared, “the Manchester of the East”. Ye gods, has no-one told them? The irony is wriggling around in the hyperbole: more in keeping might be the “Chernobyl of the South”.

  For Kanpur is unrelenting grim, shabby, broken down, falling apart, dense, dirt-dusty and dark-brown monotone. This is not the India of the south and west, the India that seduces the visitor by her charm and humor and playful chaos, the India of sensuous explosion and life by the cubic foot, the India of Moghul imagination and Hindu philosophy, the India of momentous weddings and endless festivals - no, this is the India of the flat northern Ganges plains, the badlands, the India of hopeless poverty and dozy illiteracy, the India of gangster politicians and private armies, the India of Maoist insurgents more Maoist than Mao, the India of Naxalites and dacoits, the India of tandoori-oven summers and post-diluvian autumns, the India of tuberculosis and spitting. Even the doorstep size Lonely Planet cannot find room for a solitary sentence about Kanpur.

  We are only here because on 25 February 1896, in quieter times when Kanpur was called Cawnpore and the only industry was textiles - hence the Manchester of the East - the Twain party passed through here too. It was a strange assignment, born of Twain’s growing fascination with the Sepoy Uprising and especially what he saw as the heroic stand of his British hosts. Certainly Smythe would not have been too pleased with the receipts, for Twain’s performance was more an after-dinner speech in the officers’ mess than the usual Talk in a town hall or theatre.

  In fairness to Twain’s enthusiasm for visiting the place, one can say that although Cawnpore played only a minor strategic part in the Sepoy Uprising, events here so horrified the British imagination that that the retaliatory massacres were deemed to be justified - and in Twain’s account ignored.

  ***

  But we jump behind ourselves. Twain was determined to see all the sites of British heroism and massacre, and as usual Sita, Gillian and I want to follow in his footsteps. The problem is Kanpur. There are none of the usual touts and hustlers one finds in tourist India and who are either annoying or helpful depending on your needs. We decide to start in the Tourist Office and it is there we see the Manchester of the East poster.

  The office is up a flight of peeling, grubby Kanpur open-air stairs. Outside holy cows wander past in sack coats, men urinate in the open gutter opposite and electric wires spill in mayhem and profusion from pylons, lampposts and junctions. Inside, decades-worth of dust covers bundled documents lying haphazardly around various equally dusty desks. To one side stands an old rusty chair with dirty grey nylon webbing hanging loosely from the seat frame. Neither of the very elderly assistants speaks English; in fact they look unusually dozy.

  Time to wheel out Sita. Gillian and I are by now so used to her breezing around in her tight designer jeans and T-shirts, her long jet black mane trying to keep up, her enormous Gucci sunglasses propped up on her head, her Havaianas sandals flapping around her bejeweled ankles, her Prada bag with its Hermes scarf hanging loosely from the straps, that we forget that she can be a bit of a... sensation. She doesn’t exactly pout, not in the Western sense, bu
t she certainly doesn’t do demur. In the big cities and tourist towns she merely stops the traffic, but here in Kanpur, in this grubby little geriatric tourist-free Tourist Office she stops the world. The looks of bewilderment and disapproval, of civilizations falling apart, confirm that her snappy high-caste orders in Hindi are making no more progress than our polite requests in English.

  Time to wheel out Cultural Attaché Shaura Mark’s magic letter from the Indian High Commission. It is tucked into a side pocket of Gillian’s camera bag. We haven’t used it yet; haven’t had to. Written in English and Hindi, it “requires and requests whomsoever read the letter to extend your good offices for India’s guests’ benefit and convenience”; in effect, a direct order from on-high to make whoever reads it make themselves useful.

  Bolt upright does the younger geriatric stand; onto his feet does the elder geriatric struggle. A telephone call does the former make; a cup of tea does latter organize. Sita lays on the pressure in Hindi; I hear the word “babu” - as in “if I were you, babu, I’d get moving sharpish” - as she taps the table. Twenty minutes later the very dark and dapper - and as it transpires utterly charming - Mohit Singh bursts in, all apologies and bonhomie. The younger boss; Mr. Tourism of Kanpur; not a role one imagines is overly taxing.

  We take tea as the two elderly incumbents stare at the apparition known as Sita, a real tourist attraction, and Mohit works out how to show us what we need to see. I explain about Mark Twain and the sites he saw: the Hindu temple at the Satti Chaura Ghat from where the signal to attack the British came, the ghat itself which in his time was known as the Slaughter Ghat, the well down which parts of the dead and dying British women and children were flung; and the memorial with its lament to the “dying who along with the dead were cast down into the well”. I also wanted to see the officers’ mess where Twain lectured, now the Cawnpore Club.

  ***

  Cawnpore was an important garrison town with about 10,000 sepoys and a thousand British officers, their wives, children and servants. As word of the Uprising spread from Lucknow a local ne’er-do-well nobleman called Nana Sahib rounded up several thousand malcontent sepoys and for three weeks they besieged the British officers and families in their fortifications.

  In the first days of June the aged general, Sir Hugh Wheeler[66] commanding the forces at Cawnpore, was deserted by his native troops. He had with him a few hundred white soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children than soldiers. He was short of provisions, short of arms, short of ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage and devotion to duty. The defense through twenty-one days and nights of hunger, thirst, Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of bullets, bombs, and cannon-balls is one of the most heroic episodes in history.

  After three weeks the beleaguered British negotiated a truce: there was to be safe passage in barges downstream on the Ganges to Allahabad. They were to board the barges at the Satti Chaura Ghat just south of the cantonment. Most ghats have a temple attached, and Satti Chaura Ghat had one - and still does, as we shall see - to Shiva, and it was from this temple that Nana Sahib’s lieutenants gave the signal to attack.

  When at last the Nana found it impossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball, he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded. He agreed to supply them with food and send them to Allahabad in boats. They came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery, the Nana’s host closed around them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacre began. About two hundred women and children were spared - for the present - but all the men except three or four were killed.

  The Satti Chaura Ghat is still there as is the adjoining Shiva temple with the usual eclectic gang of Brahmins and their supporters, human and bovine and canine and goatish, hanging around doing nothing very much in particular. In an early sign of the collective amnesia that events at Cawnpore encourage we find that no one knows from where the fateful signal came, or from where the barges embarked or where in the river the slaughter happened. The scene by the Ganges is peaceful again, even indolent now, and the imagination needs a pause and spurt before summoning up the horrors of the massacre, the screaming of the slain and the lust of the slayers. It all just seems so... un-Indian. Even the famous Ganges vultures have fled the scene.

  The sluggish river drifted by, almost currentless. It was dead low water, narrow channels with vast sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and the only living thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, the Adjutant,[67] standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar, with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking; thinking of his prize, I suppose - the dead Hindoo that lay awash at his feet, and whether to eat him alone or invite friends. He and his prey were a proper accent to that mournful place. They were in keeping with it, they emphasized its loneliness and its solemnity.

  ***

  All but one hundred and twenty of the British escapees were shot or slain in the Ganges barges as they were leaving Satti Chaura Ghat. The survivors, all women and children, were brought ashore and sent off to a supposedly safe house, the Bibighar,[68] while Nana Sahib decided what to with them. They were soon joined by a further eighty women and children from nearby Uprising skirmishes; all the men had already been murdered.

  As British reinforcements were rumored to be arriving Nana Sahib decided to execute them, but the Bibighar sepoys, who knew all of the survivors at least by sight and in many cases much more closely than that, mutinied against him and refused to murder them. Undaunted, he rounded up half a dozen Muslim butchers from the town and had them dismember the survivors with meat cleavers and throw the limbs, torsos and heads into the Bibighar well to hide the evidence. Not all of the women and children were successfully hacked to death, and with time short the next morning he ordered the remaining living, mostly by now children, to be thrown down the well alive to join the dead.

  The infamous well is now in Nano Rao Park, a pleasant enough escape from the squalor of downtown Kanpur. Wrote Twain: “And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children, and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which contains their remains. The Black Hole of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverent age is come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving and heroic sufferings and achievements of the garrison of Cawnpore will be guarded and preserved.”

  In fact, the well has now been bricked over. As with the Black Hole memorial in Calcutta post-Independence India did not want to be reminded of one of its least glorious moments. Indeed, the terrible events seem to be been wiped out of the collective consciousness, as Mohit has the rather unnerving insistence that this is “where the English jumped into the well” and that next we will go to the memorial to “where the English jumped into the well”.

  The “costly memorial built over the well” that Twain saw has been transferred to All Souls Cathedral, a massive, defiant structure built by the British in memoriam fifteen years later. Now renamed (but as usual with Indian government new names ignored) the Kanpur Memorial Church, the cathedral cuts a lonely figure in a wilderness in the cantonment surrounded as it is by Indian Army barracks and installations, with barely a Christian in sight and the barest of congregations come Sunday.

  ***

  With public opinion inflamed at home the British in India retaliated in kind, in what became known as the Cawnpore Massacre. Under the directions of General Neill the rebel sepoys were rounded up and sent to the Bibighar. He then built a series of gallows around the well and had the sepoys lick the British blood off the Bibighar walls; not a pleasant task for a devout Hindu or even a sensitive Muslim. Those who refused were hanged on the spot. Those who licked the blood off the walls were hanged later anyway. When it seemed to Neill that there were not enough sepoys being hanged he rounded up random natives, including women and children, and forced them into the Bibighar. And then he hanged them too.

 
***

  The Indians have moved the British memorial from the well to the British cathedral and ones senses that if they could find somewhere even more mournful to which to remove the memorial and the cathedral they would do just that. Only shared shame and regret remain from those terrible, unheroic days in June 1857. The Nana Sahib was lucky; he simply vanished from history.

  ***

  Which brings us finally to the Cawnpore Club, the officers’ mess therein and the scene of Mark Twain’s low-key after-dinner speech. The Cawnpore Club remains an exact copy of everything it was except for off-duty Indian officers rather than off-duty British ones. The dining room, where he gave his after-dinner speech, has been spruced up recently. For the first time in an Indian club we come across obstreperousness. Gillian wants to take a photograph of me standing where Twain might have stood, behind the top table.

  “No madam, you cannot do that,” says the aide-de-camp showing us around.

  “Cannot do what?” asks Gillian.

  “Take photos. You need written permission.”

  Sita jumps in, eyes ablaze, “You are joking, are you not?”

  And that pretty much puts a nail in that coffin.

  ***

  And so ended the tour of the ghastly Kanpur; never before have we been so pleased to see an Indian train and never before so eager to board one, even if it was the same Patna Mathura Express 13238 that the Twain party took all those years ago. The change from steam doesn’t seem to have helped the journey time: two hours to cover the 35 miles to Agra.

  Agra

  “Yes, but the Taj Mahal is a curse for us, for Agra,” says Dr. Dubeyji, Chief Librarian at Agra University. We had been chatting about the strange phenomenon of being in a relatively uncrowded Indian city, namely Agra. “Relatively” is the word to bear in mind: anywhere else it would be considered uncomfortably full, here it is comfortably empty. It also feels down at heel; all Indian cities could be said to be down at heel but one feels the others are on the up; Agra feels to be on the down.