Through India and Burmah with pen and brush

by A. Hugh Fisher

The Mayo School of Industrial Art, which is attached to the Lahore Museum, was founded to revive arts now half forgotten, and generally to develop the Industrial Art of the Province. I went thoroughly over its various departments, its schools of modelling and design, architecture, engineering, wood-carving and carpentry, repoussé and blacksmith's work—and I do not think the importance of this college, as an educational institution, could be exaggerated. Its ambition to turn out a constant succession of the best possible craftsmen, rather than theoretic students, makes it the best means yet arrived at of moral and mental development inseparable to my thinking from the purely utilitarian value of handicraft training. Among the students were pointed out to me lads from distant villages and outlying districts, some in receipt of Government stipends, others supported by District and Municipal Boards and others again by Independent States. A well-regulated boarding-house is connected with the school for the accommodation of such pupils, a large proportion of whom find immediate employment on the completion of their course at the school and so continually add to the popularity of its training.

The energy, talent and success of Mr Percy Brown during the many years in which he has developed and enlarged the scheme initiated under the late Mr Lockwood Kipling, are beyond praise, and I only hope that his recent translation to Calcutta may bring an extension to other provinces of India of practical application of the same educational ideas.

The museum is justly proud of its Buddhist sculptures, the best of which is one in black hornblende schiste (from the Yusafzai country near Peshawar), of Buddha after his forty-nine days' fast. Carved with extreme delicacy and refinement, this wonderful sculpture seems to carry one rather to Renaissance Italy than the North-West Provinces. Who were they, these sculptors? How much or how little were they identified with the people whose gods they carved? Would Alexander of Macedon have had in his train men of sufficient eminence in their craft to account for the apparent Western influence?

One of the latest additions under Mr Brown's curatorship is a collection of paintings and drawings of the Moghul Emperors and people of their times, which includes many exquisite illuminations and old water-colour drawings of extreme fineness and delicacy and yet full of character, design and amazing distinction. Appreciation of such things since the days of their production is only beginning to be re-awakened, and they are still purchasable in India at such prices as the museum can afford. Mr Brown told me that I was the first who had yet looked at this collection with enthusiasm to justify his own in buying them, but "who knows the spelling of Du Guesclin?" They are as wonderful as Holbein's drawings, their detail would have enchanted Altdorfer, and their exquisite line might have delayed the death of Aubrey Beardsley! Such are the Mullah Do Piaza, the picture of Akhbar's jester and his thin Rosinante, or the beautiful drawing of Humayun, Babar's son, out a-hunting.

India is a land which changes any sympathetic traveller to a set of strings on which its spirit plays through all the working-hours. Every day is crowded with new wonders, and no sooner does he sink to earth, as if fallen from the hands of one player, than he is snatched up again and every fibre wrung by some new loveliness he knew not of.

One afternoon I drove out with the pundit to Shaddra where Jehangir is buried and Nour Jehan. We started to the west of the city on the high road to Peshawar, past the Mohammedan cemetery and the Hindoo burning-ground, outside which some women in white and yellow robes sat waiting while their men-folk burned a body within.

In the time of Ranjeet Singh, the pundit told me, the river used to flow past the Badshahi Masjid, a large red sandstone mosque, which we next passed: but in India the rivers are not so constant as the stars in their courses.

A little farther on we crossed the dry bed called the Ravi Nullah and then, driving through the Ravi Forest, reached the bridge of boats that spans the Ravi River at a little distance from the railway-bridge. A merry old Kuka Sikh on a white donkey was waiting at the bridge toll-gate for someone from whom to beg the money to cross. It is a long bridge and very narrow, so that two vehicles cannot pass one another and a bullock-cart, which had just started to cross from the opposite bank, seemed inclined to take an infinity of time about it; but the Kuka Sikh was in no hurry, and when we had paid his toll joked with the pundit to beguile the time. This boat-bridge has to be dismantled in the rainy season, from June to August, when the river is swollen.

We left the Peshawar road soon after crossing the bridge and presently reached Shaddra and Jehangir's tomb, a large and elaborate affair with much space about it and great entrance gateways and lines of narrow water tanks in the gardens within. Dismounting from the gharry we walked over the great open space of the Sarai and through the eastern gateway, with its honeycomb vaulted ceiling and soft warm flower decoration on its pink stucco-covered brick-work, to the water channels of the tomb garden, past the central tank and on to the Mausoleum itself, an exquisite low building with four tall minarets, half of white marble and half of the red Agra stone, of which Jehangir was so fond.