HINDU CHILDREN--NOTICE THE FOREHEAD CASTE MARKS.
{212 continued}
The streets, if such they may be called, are often little more than crooked water-rutted paths, so narrow that one may reach from the mud walls of the houses on one side to the mud walls on the other, and so crooked that you are likely to meet yourself coming back before you get to the end. Or perhaps you wind up unexpectedly in some mahullah--a group of huts representing several families of kinsfolk. Enclosed by a mud wall, the little brown bright-eyed, black-haired, half-naked children are playing together in the little opening around which the houses are bunched, and the barefooted mothers are cooking chapatis, spinning cotton on knee-high spinning wheels, weaving in some wonderfully primitive way, gathering fuel, or are engaged in other household tasks. The equipment of one of these human ant-hills, called a home, is about as primitive as the building itself. There is, of course, a bed or cot: it is about {215} half knee-high, and the heavy twine or light rope knitted together after the fashion of a very coarse fish-net is the only mattress. The coarse grain which serves for food is stored in jars; the meagre supply of clothing hangs in one corner of the room; there are no chairs, knives or forks. The stove or fireplace is a sort of small clay box for the fire, with an opening on top for the kettle or oven. In one corner of the room is the fuel: a few small sticks and dried refuse from cow stalls that Americans use for fertilizing their fields. "We have found rather bad results," a missionary told me, "from providing Indian girls with mattresses, chairs, knives, forks, etc., at our mission schools. Later, when they marry our native workers, the $5-a-month income of the family (which is about all they can expect) is insufficient to provide these luxuries, and the girl's recollections of former comforts are likely to prove a source of dissatisfaction to her."
At first you ask, "But why are there no windows in the houses? Surely the people could leave openings in the clay walls that would give light and ventilation?" The answer is that most of the year the weather is so hot that the hope of the owner is to get as nearly cave-like conditions as possible; to find, as it were, a cool place in the earth, untouched by the fiery glare of the burning sun outside. Even in north central India in the houses of the white men, where everything has been done to reduce the temperature and with every punkah-fan swinging the room's length to make a breeze, the temperature in May and June is 106 or higher, and at midnight in the open air the thermometer may reach 105. "It is then no uncommon thing," a friend in Agra told me, "to find even natives struck down dead by the roadside; and the railways have men designated to take and burn the bodies of those who succumb to the heat in travel by the cars."
In such a warm climate the dress of the people, as has already been suggested, is not very elaborate. In fact, the garb of the adult man is likely to be somewhat like the uniform of the {216} Gunga Din (the Indian bhisti or water-carrier for the British regiment):
"The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind--
For a twisty piece o' rag
And a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field equipment 'e could find."
In cold weather, however, the majority of the men are rather fully covered, and in any case they add a turban or cap of some gaudy hue to the uniform just suggested.
As for the dress of the women, a typical woman's outfit will consist of, say, a crimson skirt with a green border, a navy-blue piece of cloth as large as a sheet draped loosely (and quite incompletely) around the head and upper part of the body, and a breast-cloth or possibly a waist of brilliant yellow. This combination of hues, of course, is only a specimen. The actual colors are variable but the brilliancy is invariable.
Furthermore, the celebrated Old Lady of Banbury Cross, who boasted of rings, on her fingers and bells on her toes, would find her glory vanish in a twinkling should she visit India. Not content with these preliminary beginnings of adornment, the barefooted Hindu woman wears--if she can afford it--a band or two of anklets, bracelets halfway from wrist to elbow, armlets beyond the elbow, ear-rings of immense size, a necklace or two, toe-rings and a bejewelled nose-ring as big around as a turnip. Sometimes the jewelry on a woman's feet will rattle as she walks like the trace-chains on a plow-horse on the way to the barn.
This barbaric display of jewelry, it should be said, is not made solely for purposes of show. The truth is that the native has not grown used to the idea of savings banks (although the government is now gradually convincing him that the postal savings institutions are safe), and when he earns a spare rupee he puts it into jewelry to adorn the person of himself or {217} his wife. If all the idle treasures which the poor of India now carry on their legs, arms, ears, and noses were put into productive industry, a good deal might be done to alleviate the misery for which the agitators profess to blame the British Government.