One William Ireland, who told me that as a boy of ten he was among the actual defenders of the Residency, being attached to the fourth company of the 3rd Battalion East India Company's B.A., showed me the many points of vivid interest connected with the memorable siege.
Trimly-kept walks surround those hallowed walls, bright in the sunshine with gay pink masses of bougainvillia and golden clusters of bignonia benarola. Every guide-book tells you the heroic tale and the Baillie Gate, Dr Fayrer's house, the Begum Kothi and the rest are household words in England. There are many monuments and memorial tablets at the Residency, and I will quote but one and that the inscription on an obelisk just outside its precincts:—
To the Memory of
The Native Officers and Sepoys
of the
13th Native Infantry 41st Native Infantry
48th Native Infantry 71st Native Infantry
The Oude Irregular Force
Native Pensioners, New Native Levies
Artillery and Lucknow Magazine
Who died near this Spot
Nobly performing their duty
This column is erected by
Lord Northbrook
Viceroy and Governor General of India
1875
Let us never forget those loyal hearts who withstood the insidious influences of a wide-spread crusade of mutiny which combined the appeals of military grievance, race hatred and religious zeal.
The chief bazaar of Lucknow, which forms one of the six wards of the city, is called the Chauk. Here still thrive jewellers and silversmiths, though the quality of their work is deteriorating. The prices are low and the wages are low. A rupee a day is not enough to satisfy the best artists, nor is four annas enough for a highly-skilled workman. Bidri, a kind of damascening lately revived, brasswork, ironwork and wood-carving, all go on here as well as a special local industry, the modelling of small coloured figures from clay worked into a paste with babul gum, belgiri, and sometimes brown paper and cotton-wool.
Then there is the carving of wooden blocks for printing patterns on cloths, the making of musical instruments (see that long sitar hanging in the shop-front) and the beating of gold-leaf and silver-leaf for eating. Indeed, it is true that people at Lucknow eat both gold and silver-leaf. I watched the thin piece of gold-foil being put between two leather leaves and then hammered out on stone, very slowly expanding to thirty times its original size. It is sometimes taken for disease of the heart, but it is not so much in cases of sickness but rather as a general fortifier to give additional strength to the whole body that the metal-leaf is swallowed, and after all the practice is more universal than one thinks at first. Children of many lands have a great fondness for tin trumpets—and I remember a New Year's Eve in London when a certain English Government Official offered me floating gold-leaf to drink for good health!
The first time I drove through the gates of the Akbariderwazar at one end of the Chauk a long swing bar, with upright wooden spikes two feet high, lay across the roadway. This was to close the bazaar to vehicles from two o'clock to eight in the evening (in summer from three to nine), the busiest time for shopping. No gharries or ekkas (another kind of wheeled vehicle) are permitted to enter during those hours, except by a special pass of the city magistrate, such as I carried. Were it not for such regulation, the narrow thoroughfare would every afternoon be nothing but a wedged confusion. In the larger Indian cities there is so much traffic that such a narrow street practicable for pedestrians and horse-riders, palanquins and litters, becomes jammed at once if open to wheeled vehicles in the busy hours.
An arch crosses the street at each end of the Chauk, one pointed and the other round—both without mouldings, and along each side a runnel of water flows in an open gutter. There is no profusion of delicate tracery about the projecting windows and other parts of the house-fronts as in many cities, and much tawdry and common workmanship; but looking back through the opening of the pointed archway beyond the near figures of the ever-moving crowd, sombre in the shadow of the houses and blended with the subdued sumptuousness of stuffs and wares, the outer roadway and a few buildings beyond contrast in simple spacious majesty—bathed in the glow of Eastern afternoon.
It was the first time I had noticed cowrie-shells being used as money—as a common medium of exchange—and nothing in India seemed more significant of the frugality of the mass of the people. Upon the brick and stucco platform, about 3 feet from the ground, that fronts many of the houses, there squatted upon a worn dhurrie a cowrie money-changer in a printed cotton dress and a little white cotton cap, and in front of him lay the heaps of shells, seventy-two in each. One anna is, of course, equal to four pice, and here at Lucknow while the gharry-wallah was demanding seventeen rupees for a day's hire, each of the four pice that make an anna was divisible into seventy-two cowries. Imagine yourself being able to divide a farthing in Whitechapel into seventy-two parts!