On the Ganges

by George Black

  When the slaughter was done, the surviving women and children were brought ashore and marched to a villa named Bibighar in the compound of the local magistrate. The decorous translation of Bibighar is “house of the ladies,” the ladies in question, the bibis, being the Indian mistresses of British officials starved for female companionship of their own race.

  The prisoners were kept there for two weeks, under the supervision of a woman named Hussaini Khanum, who is variously described as a courtesan or a common prostitute. What to do with them? Dysentery and cholera were already reducing their numbers. News came that the British relief force was bearing down on the city, and word had surely reached Nana Sahib of the horrors General Neill had inflicted on Allahabad. Wheeler had died in the massacre at the ghat, and there was no one to negotiate with in Kanpur. The women and children were no longer a bargaining chip but a burden. Who gave the order to kill them? Perhaps it was Nana Sahib himself, perhaps Hussaini the courtesan.

  The sepoys were ordered to fire on the prisoners but found the screams more than they could bear, so Hussaini called upon her lover to assemble an execution squad. He rounded up two willing Hindus and a pair of Muslim butchers, who arrived dressed in their white work aprons and carrying meat cleavers. It took them half an hour to work their way through the seventy-three women and one hundred and twenty-four children imprisoned in the Bibighar. When they were done, they stripped the bodies and body parts naked and tossed them into a dry well. When the well was full, they were thrown into the Ganges.

  * * *

  Neill and his Madras Fusiliers arrived two days later. Nana Sahib, or Nana Rao, had vanished after faking his suicide in the river. Neill found the floor of the Bibighar strewn with torn clothing, bonnets, bloody clumps of hair, daguerreotypes, bloodstained pages from the women’s diaries.

  June 17, Aunt Lily died. June 18, Uncle Willy died. June 22, George died. July 9, Alice died. July 12, Mamma died.

  The rank-and-file rebels were summarily hanged, but for the Brahmin leaders of the revolt, hanging was not enough. Neill contrived ingenious forms of caste pollution as a punishment that would follow them through the endless cycles of reincarnation. Beef was forced down their throats. British soldiers called it a Cawnpore dinner. Prisoners were strapped to a cannon and blown to shreds, not knowing whether the blood that was already smeared on the cannon’s mouth was Hindu or Muslim. The floor and walls of the Bibighar were thick with the blood of Christians. Neill had it watered down by lower-caste Indians, adding to its polluting qualities, and then, with the assistance of a cat o’ nine tails, forced the Brahmins to lick it from the floor.

  “To touch blood is most abhorrent to high-caste natives, they think that by doing so they doom their souls to perdition,” Neill wrote. “Let them think so.”

  Two months later, Neill led his Madras Fusiliers into battle to relieve the siege of the Lucknow residency. On September 25, he took a sniper’s bullet to the brain.

  MASSACRE GHAT

  In the weeks and months that followed, the Victorian imagination, with its fever dreams of barbarism and sex, was a beast that demanded feeding. “Such atrocities as those committed by Nana Saheb [sic] are almost unparalleled in the history of the world,” said The Sheffield Daily Telegraph on August 31. The dastardly Hussaini Khanum was most assuredly a prostitute. The women in the Bibighar had been “sold by public auction” and subjected to abuses that could not be named to refined English audiences.

  Punch published a cartoon by John Tenniel that showed the British lion hurling itself on the Bengal tiger as it crouched over the swooning body of a young Englishwoman who belonged in a pre-Raphaelite painting. Edward Armitage, in a work called Retribution, preferred to have Britannia plunge her sword into the tiger’s throat. Charles Ball came up with a specious image of the lissome Miss Wheeler, daughter of the late general, felling a murderous rebel with a pistol shot; another of her attackers is already lying dead on the floor, with a third apparently wounded. Ball also gave his imagination free rein on the topography of the slaughter. His Massacre in the Boats off Cawnpore depicted the riverbank by the ghat as a jungled mass of palm trees, creepers, and giant ferns. The Treacherous Massacre of Women & Children at Cawnpore, a tinted lithograph by a certain T. Packer, conflated the killings at the ghat and those at the Bibighar in a single horrific scene. The Kanpur riverfront was rendered as an Oriental phantasmagoria of low mountains, islands studded with palm trees, opulent pleasure gardens, ornate mosques with towering minarets, and the tapered spires of Shiva temples apparently imported from contemporary paintings of Varanasi.

  I went to see the place for myself. The sky was overcast, and Kanpur was shrouded in its usual haze of vehicle exhaust. In the low water of the post-monsoon “lean period,” the Ganges was a hundred yards away across a bleak expanse of silt littered with garbage. A marauding pack of rhesus macaques was rooting around in the muck, looking for edibles. Raw sewage leaked onto the beach from a stinking drainage channel and, cut off from the river, it had collected in a stagnant, bubbling pool.

  I squelched across the flats to the water’s edge, where women were clustered in circles preparing offerings of coconuts, fruit, and marigold garlands. The river had divided into two channels, separated by a low sandbar. Groups of children were splashing around knee-deep in the shallows. I imagined that the conditions might have been similar on the day of massacre, with the overloaded boats stuck in the mud.

  I squelched back to the ghat. There were no mountains, no pleasure gardens, no mosques. There was a temple with a small statue of Shiva, but it bore no resemblance to the fantastical spires of the Victorian imagination. It was a nondescript modern building, propped up above the flood line on concrete pillars, with an ugly onion dome that was painted cream with an orange trim. There was a small market area at the top of the steps, and I stopped at a chai stall to chat with a bearded man who was tending a couple of cows.

  Satī Caurā Ghat was a name long forgotten, he said. Officially, it was Nana Rao Ghat these days, in honor of the leader of the Kanpur rebellion. But that name hadn’t stuck either. People just called it the Massacre Ghat. There used to be a big Christian cross here, he said, but it had been destroyed during Independence celebrations.

  The British had indeed built a monument to the massacre, three years after it happened. It was a marble Gothic screen, and in front of it was a cross and the figure of an angel, “the mourning seraph.” But it hadn’t been destroyed. After Independence, it had been carefully dismantled and moved from the bricked-up well at the Bibighar to the gardens of All Souls’ Cathedral, which is now known as the Kanpur Memorial Church. Inside the church, there was a marble tablet with the names of the dead.

  MRS. BERRILL—MRS. BORTHWICK—MRS. BRETT—MISS BURN—MISS BURN.…

  MISS GREENWAY—Y. GREENWAY—MARTHA GREENWAY—JANE GREENWAY—JOHN GREENWAY—MARY GREENWAY.…

  MRS. REED—JAMES REED—JULIA REED—C. REED—CHARLES REED—BABY REED.…

  And so on, almost two hundred names until the list finally came to the last item: three ayahs, who remained anonymous. And a verse from Romans 12:19. “Vengeance is Mine, Saith the Lord.”

  MANCHESTER OF THE EAST

  Once the rebellion was put down, out went the British East India Company and in came the Raj—direct rule from London. The army was now formally in the service of the young queen and future empress of India, who had celebrated the twentieth anniversary of her accession to the throne on June 20, 1857, a week to the day before the women and children of Cawnpore were hauled off to the Bibighar.

  If it was to avoid a repetition of the late unpleasantness, the army would need many things. It would need guns and bullets and cannons and horses; it would also need holsters and belts and boots, saddles and tack for the cavalry. All this called for a lot of leather, and the army needed a convenient place to produce it. Cawnpore was the obvious candidate.

  In 1860, after the railway arrived, with the help of countless thousands of sleepers floated down
the Ganga Canal by Frederick Wilson, the Raja of Harsil, the city was chosen as the site of the Government Harness and Saddlery Factory. In came the North West Tanning Company, the Cawnpore Tanning Company, Cooper, Allen & Co. In came cotton from the fields of the United Provinces, present-day Uttar Pradesh and known either way as UP. Cotton goods could now be transported more easily to Calcutta, destined in part for the American market after the Civil War. In came the Elgin Mills, Muir Mills, Cawnpore Woolen Mills. The last third of the nineteenth century was Kanpur’s golden age. The British called the city the Manchester of the East.

  * * *

  Over the years, Cooper Allen became Allen Cooper, and upscale shoppers of Kanpur can still buy Allen Cooper shoes on the city’s traffic-choked disaster of a main drag, Mall Road. A few hundred yards to the east, beyond Empire Lane, is the gigantic Z Square Mall, owned by the ZAZ Tannery and one of the biggest in the new India. It was the same dazzlingly lit, air-conditioned, multilevel labyrinth of familiar brands and corporate logos you might see in New Jersey or Minnesota or the duty-free section of the New Delhi airport—Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein and the Body Shop and French Connection, as well as India’s own Cocoberry Frozen Yogurt—but it was easy to find the coffee shop where I was going to meet a biologist named A. C. Shukla. All I had to do was tap the digital touch screen in the lobby for directions.

  A good number of Indian men of a certain age and professional standing—engineers, scientists, government officials—have this odd habit of going by two initials instead of a single name. I’d already met an R. K. and an A. K. and a B. D., an R. P., an S. N. and a B. G. Now here was an A. C. It always felt to me like a small and stuffy holdover from the days before Independence, the formality of address that boys endured in England’s great public schools, where brothers were referred to as major and minor.

  Shukla was a thin, gaunt-featured man in his seventies who had taught for more than forty years at Christ Church College in Kanpur. An elite graduate school founded in 1866, its motto is Ego Sum Lux Mundi—“I Am the Light of the World.” During one of the government’s periodic, futile efforts to clean up the Ganges, he had led a team studying the most heavily industrialized stretch of the river, between Kanpur and Kannauj, fifty miles upstream.

  He was a native of Kanpur, proud of his city and at the same time disgusted by what it had become, an urban hell of three or four million people—no one really knew how many, no matter what the census might say—befouled by its famous tanneries. There was something of the scholar-pedant in the stories he told over our espressos, but he also had an old man’s misty-eyed nostalgia. “In my school days, Mall Road was ten feet broad, hardly a car passing in five to ten minutes. There was an irrigation canal. It was a beautiful sight to behold in the evening, with a small lake and gardens. So well I remember those happy days of Kanpur. You could drink water from the Ganges without any problems.”

  The obvious question was what he thought, as a biologist, of the mystery that had baffled everyone from the earliest European travelers to the medical men of the Raj—that gangajal would never spoil.

  “Some people say this, some people say that,” Shukla answered. “Someone is talking about sulfur springs, someone is talking about radioactive substances, someone is talking about bacteriophages, someone else is talking about ozone. We have found five hundred and sixty different kinds of algae in the Ganges, and all of them will contribute to increasing the amount of oxygen in the river. There are forty-three different river fungi, and they will work on the decomposition of dead bodies and plants and other debris. My concept is very clear, that all these things have been together in the mix since time immemorial. But today, it is so polluted that it has lost this capacity. It is an endangered river.”

  These days, he said, no one should think of taking a holy dip in the river south of Haridwar, or of cupping their hands for an aachaman—the purifying mouthful—south of the pilgrimage town of Badrinath, high in the Himalayas. It made me think of my encounter with the priest in Devprayag and my relief that he had exempted me from the aachaman. Shukla shook his head, like someone who had spent most of his life seeing his fact-based version of reality overwhelmed by a larger one. “To add a scientific outlook,” he said, “you are going beyond faith. And you cannot challenge faith.”

  SCAVENGERS

  “All water buffalo,” said Hafizurrahman, gesturing at the yard of his tannery. If there was any cowhide in there, it would most likely be from roadkill.

  There are scholars on the academic fringe who say that Hindus once used to slaughter cows and eat beef and that the nation was never conquered by foreign invaders when this was the custom. Others debate whether the sacredness of the cow is actually rooted in scripture, like the complex taboos on menstrual blood, or in practical economics, reflecting the cow’s value for milk, ghee, and dung for cooking fuel. But the same things could be said in favor of the water buffalo, first cousin to the cow, which has the additional virtue of being a tireless beast of burden. Some say the water buffalo is a lazy animal that likes nothing better than to lie around in a pond with an egret perched on its head, but then again, I’d never seen an energetic cow. Others say that the problem with the water buffalo is that it’s the mount of Yama, the great lord of death. One way or another, no one’s conscience is much troubled by the killing of one.

  The great plain of the Ganges is the heart of what people sometimes call India’s Cow Belt, although that term is considered politically incorrect. Cow killing is against the law in Uttar Pradesh, as it is in all but five Indian states, but here the enforcement can be especially savage. In UP, even the rumor of killing a cow, or the accusation that you’re carrying the carcass of a cow in your truck, can invite attack by marauding gangs of gau raksha, cow vigilantes. A few weeks before I arrived in Kanpur, a Muslim man had been dragged from his home in the village of Bisara and beaten to death on the unfounded suspicion that he was storing and eating beef in his home.

  Most of Kanpur’s tanneries—there are more than four hundred of them, large and small—are clustered in the Jajmau district, just a few hundred yards downstream from the Massacre Ghat. Jajmau is a Muslim community. Even though there is no formal taboo, Hindus generally disdain the industry, which is defined by blood, death, and toxic chemicals. So the tanneries give the Muslims of Kanpur an unusual amount of economic power in a state where they are widely disliked and often the victims of spasms of mass violence.

  On the way to see Hafizurrahman, I stopped at a nullah, a drainage channel, that carried waste from the tanneries to the Ganges. Half a dozen fat pigs were wallowing chin-deep in the blue-black liquid; one of them had its head fully submerged as it nosed around on the bottom. I wondered what a wine critic would say of the smell: decomposing animal matter and battery acid on the nose, a long, intense finish with lingering notes of ammonia, feces, and burned hair.

  * * *

  We pulled up at the gate of H. Rahman Tanning Industries. Crudely hand-painted on it, as required by law, was a NOTICE OF HAZARDOS CHEMICAL AND WASTES. There were spaces for the details to be filled out in various categories: tons of acids (sulfuric, formic, etc.), tons of chromium sulfate, liters or kilograms of thinners and dyes, and so forth. All of them had been left blank.

  Hafizurrahman was a soft-spoken elderly Muslim with a white beard. He wore a pale pink long-sleeve shirt, black pants, black loafers, and an improbably natty suede porkpie hat. He said he had inherited the business from his father in 1968. In 1987, he was elected president of the Small Tanners Association—“small” meaning a business that processed fewer than sixty hides a day—and he had held the job ever since.

  “We work with offcuts that are discarded by the larger businesses,” he said as he walked me around his tannery. The misshapen chunks of yellow-brown rawhide strewn around the yard were destined to become chew toys for dogs. In the main processing area, there were four large rotating wooden drums where the hides were softened with a mixture of lime and sodium sulfide and stripped o
f the last of their flesh and hair. Pickling the hides in a slush of chromium salts gives them a distinctive gray-blue color. A skinny teenage boy, glistening with sweat, was squelching around in a brick-lined pit, sorting pieces of this “wet blue.” Recommended safety measures for working with wet blue include wearing protective gloves, safety goggles, and a face mask. The boy was naked apart from his shorts. The soles of my boots were coated in a rank gray slime. Dickens and Engels came to mind.

  What passed as an office for Hafizurrahman was a large windowless shed with walls of rough cement. Flop-eared goats and quarrelsome geese rooted around on the floor among bright blue barrels of chemicals.

  “The government!” he said. “Nothing but trouble! The Ganges gets polluted, and we’re always the ones to blame. But they are the main culprits!” When the government opened a plant to treat waste from the tanneries, they had to contribute part of the cost themselves. But then the construction budget tripled, and so did the amount levied on the tanners; so many contractors, middlemen, and officials had to take their cut. “There were only 175 tanneries at that time,” he said. “But then another 227 came up—and they asked them to pay again. But they never upgraded the plant! The money just went into their pockets!”

  And then there was the mela. Each year, on a date determined by astrologers, millions of Hindus gather in Allahabad, farther downstream, for the Magh Mela, a bathing festival at the sacred confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the invisible Saraswati. Once every twelve years, it becomes the greatest of all the festivals, the Kumbh Mela, the largest assembly of humans anywhere on the planet. The last Kumbh Mela in Allahabad had been in 2013. It lasted more than seven weeks; on one single day, thirty million people converged on the river. The government felt it was unreasonable to expect them to bathe in diluted tannery waste.