India beggars description—the interminable races, languages, creeds, colors, manners, costumes.
The streets of Madras (Blacktown) are a blaze of color—predominant white, but red, orange, brilliant green and even blue cloths and turbans meet the eye in every direction. Blacktown reminds one of Pompeii—as it may have been in its time—mostly one-storied buildings, stuccoed brick with little colonnades or lean-to thatches in front, cool dark stone interiors with little or no furniture—a bit of a court somewhere inside, with a gleam of the relentless sun—a few mango leaves over the door in honor of the Pongal festival (now going on), and saffron smeared on doorposts; a woman standing half lost in shadow, men squatting idling in a verandah, a brahman cow with a bright brass necklace lying down just in the street—(sometimes in the verandah itself); a Hindu temple with its queer creepy images fronting on the street, and a Juggernath car under a tall thatch, waiting for its festival; or a white arabesqued and gimp-arched mosque with tall minarets pinnacled with gold spiring up into the blue; absurd little stalls with men squatted among their baskets and piled grains and fruits; and always this wonderful crowd going up and down between.
I should think half the people have religious marks on their foreheads—black, white, or red spots on the frontal sinus—horizontal lines (Saivite), vertical lines (Vaishnavite)—sometimes two vertical white marks joined at the base with a red mark between, sometimes a streak of color all down the ridge of the nose—and so forth. It is as if every little sect or schism of the Christian Church declared itself by a symbol on the brow.
How different from Ceylon! There is a certain severity about India, both climate and people. The dry soil, the burning sun (for though so much farther north the sun has a more wicked quality about it here), are matched by a certain aridity and tension in the people. Ceylon is idyllic, romantic—the plentiful foliage and shade everywhere, the easy-going nature of the Cinghalese themselves, the absence of caste—even the English are softened towards such willing subjects. But here, such barriers, such a noli-me-tangere atmosphere!—the latent feud between Hindu and Mussulman everywhere, their combined detestation of the English springing out upon you from faces passing; rigid orthodoxies and superiorities; the Mahomedans (often big and moderately well-conditioned men) looking down with some contempt upon the lean Hindu; the Hindus equally satisfied in their own superiority, comforting themselves with quotations from Shastras and Puranas.
As to the boatmen and drivers and guides and servants generally, they torment one like gadflies; not swindling one in a nice open riant way like the Italians of the same ilk, but with smothered dodges and obsequious craft. The last hotel I was at here was odious—a lying Indian manager, lying and cringing servants, and an idiotic old man who acted as my “boy” and tormented my life out of me, fiddling around with my slippers on pretence of doing something, or holding the towel in readiness for me while I was washing my face. On my leaving, the manager—as he presented his bill with utmost dignity and grace—asked for a tip; so did the head-waiter, and all the servants down to the bath-man; then there were coolies to carry my luggage from the hotel steps (where the servants of course left it) to the cab, and then when I had started, the proprietor of the cab ran after it, stopped it, and demanded a larger fare than I had agreed to! On one occasion (in taking a boat) I counted eleven people who put in a claim for bakshish. Small change cannot last for ever, and even one’s vocabulary of oaths is liable to be exhausted in time!
It requires a little tact to glide through all this without exposing oneself to the enemy. Good old John Bull pays through the nose for being ruler of this country. He overwhelms the people by force, but they turn upon him—as the weaker is prone to do—through craft; and truly they have their revenge. Half believing in the idea that as sahib and ruler of the country he must live in such and such style, have so many servants, etc., or he would lose his prestige, he acquiesces in a system of impositions; he is pestered to death, and hates it all, but he must submit. And the worst is one is conscious all the time of being laughed at for one’s pains. But British visitors must not commit the mistake—so commonly made by people in a foreign country—of supposing that the classes created in India by our presence, and who in some sense are the reflection of our own sins, are or represent the normal population—even though we naturally see more of them than we do of the latter.
There are however in the great cities of India little hotels kept and frequented by English folk where one is comparatively safe from importunities; and if you are willing to be altogether a second-rate person, and go to these places, travel second class by train, ride in bullock-hackeries, and “undermine the empire” generally by doing other such undignified things, you may travel with both peace of mind and security of pocket.
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Madras generally is a most straggling, dull, and (at night) ill-lighted place. Blacktown, already described, and which lies near the harbor, is the chief centre of native life; but the city generally, including other native centres, plexuses of commercial life, knots of European hotels and shops, barracks, hospitals, suburban villas and bungalows, stretches away with great intervals of dreary roads between for miles and miles, over a dead flat on whose shore the surf beats monotonously. Adyar, where the Theosophists have their headquarters—and which is still only a suburb of Madras—is seven miles distant from the harbor. The city however, though shorn of its former importance as far as the British are concerned, and slumbering on its memories of a hundred years ago, is a great centre of native activity, literary and political; the National Indian Congress receives some of its strongest support from it; many influential oysters reside here; papers like the Hindu, both in English and vernacular, are published here, and a great number of books printed, in Tamil and other South Indian languages.
At Adyar I saw Bertram Keightley and one or two others, and had some pleasant chats with them. Col. Olcott was absent just at the time. The Theosophist villa, with roomy lecture-hall and library, stands pleasantly among woods on the bank of a river and within half a mile of the sea. Passing from the library through sandalwood doors into an inner sanctum I was shown a variety of curios connected with Madame Blavatsky, among which were a portrait, apparently done in a somewhat dashing style—just the head of a man, surrounded with clouds and filaments—in blue pigment on a piece of white silk, which was “precipitated” by Madame Blavatsky in Col. Olcott’s presence—she simply placing her two hands on the white silk for a moment. Keightley told me that Col. Olcott tested a small portion of the silk so colored, but found the pigment so fast in the fibre that it could not by any means be washed out. There were also two oil portraits—heads, well framed and reverently guarded behind a curtain—of the now celebrated Kout Houmi, Madame Blavatsky’s Guru, and of another, Col. Olcott’s Guru—both fine-looking men, apparently between forty and fifty years of age, with shortish beards and (as far as I could see, for the daylight was beginning to fail) dark brown hair; and both with large eyes and what might be called a spiritual glow in their faces. Madame Blavatsky knew Col. Olcott’s Guru as well as her own, and the history of these two portraits (as told me by Keightley) is that they were done by a German artist whom she met in the course of her travels. Considering him competent for the work—and he being willing to undertake it—she projected the images of the two Gurus into his mind, and he painted from the mental pictures—she placing her hand on his head during the operation. The German artist medium accounted for the decidedly mawkish expression of both faces, as well as for the considerable likeness to each other—which considering that Kout Houmi dates from Cashmere, and the other (I think) from Thibet, might not have been expected. All the same they are fine faces, and it is not impossible that they may be, as I believe Madame Blavatsky and Col. Olcott considered them, good likenesses. Keightley was evidently much impressed by the “old lady’s” clairvoyant power, saying that sometimes in her letters from England she displayed a knowledge of what was going on at Adyar, which he could not account for. Altogether I had an interesting conversation with him.