India and the Indians

by Edward Fenton Elwin

CHAPTER XXXIX

PROVERBIAL SAYINGS ABOUT INDIA

Inaccurate statements. Village trades dependent on demand. Platforms for the bird-scarers. Shop lamps of the city. Supposed ascetics. Uncertainty of the monsoon; how it comes. Cold in India; how an Indian deals with it; he cannot work if he is cold. Englishmen and the Indian sun.

There are a number of sayings and statements about India and its people which are either inaccurate or misleading, but which have become almost proverbial, and which are copied from book to book, and conveyed to new-comers by word of mouth, and their often mistaken impressions of many simple things are partly caused by the erroneous expressions and descriptions which they have heard or read. It takes the first several years of a residence in India to gradually unlearn the things which have been wrongly learnt. The stray visitor does not stay long enough to get his view straightened out, and when he returns to write his book about India he repeats the off-told tale.

It is often stated in books that in each village a representative of every trade which supplies the ordinary wants of the inhabitants is to be found—such as the barber, carpenter, blacksmith, potter, cobbler, etc. But there is no rule about this, and it depends, just as it does in English villages, on the size of the place and the demands of trade. In many villages there is no resident barber, and the people depend on the chance visits of one who itinerates. Blacksmiths are, for the most part, wandering people who come and settle down near a village for a few weeks or months, and then, when trade grows dull, move on to a fresh pitch. The potter is now only to be met with here and there. It is a sign of the increasing prosperity of India that brass and copper vessels are largely taking the place of the earthenware cooking-pots. A carpenter is found in almost every village, because petty repairs to farming implements are an everyday need. He is a man of some importance, and wears a sacred thread like a Brahmin.

When travelling in the train from Bombay to Poona for the first time, I noticed here and there in the corner of many fields a sort of litter, about the length of a man, raised on rough poles about six feet high, and on it a mysterious heap of rubbish. I remember vaguely to have read that the bodies of the dead in the East are exposed to be devoured by birds, and I jumped to the conclusion that the platforms were erected for this purpose, and that the heap of rubbish was the remains of the corpse, and that solitary places in remote fields were chosen in order that the dead might not be any annoyance to the living. As a matter of fact, it is only the Parsees who place their dead on tower-like structures, built for the purpose, to be disposed of by the vultures.

I learnt in due course that these rural platforms are for the use of boys who scare away birds and other creatures from the ripening crops, and I have not unfrequently accepted the hospitable invitation of some of the village boys to climb up on to the platform and share their sport. From their post of vantage they can survey the whole field, and they sling stones with marvellous force and accuracy to whatever quarter the birds are attacking. They also make a din by beating empty oil-tins, and use clappers as the country boys at home do. The heap of rubbish only consists of the leaves and grass which the boys collect to make their seat on the perch more comfortable, because they often keep vigil for the whole of a long day.

The visitor having read that to the Hindu everything is permeated with religion, thinks that everything that he sees has some religious significance. Someone describing his first drive from the Poona station to the Mission-house through the native city at night, said how much moved he was at seeing the little flickering lamps burning before the "idols" in the shops. But a Hindu does not put his household gods in his shop, and the flickering lamp was merely his ordinary shop lamp, which a few years back satisfied his wants. There are some modern inventions which Indians have taken to very readily, and amongst these are the new ways of producing brilliant light, and the old-fashioned flickering lamp is now hardly to be seen in Poona.

Going out in the early morning a day or so after my first arrival in India, I met three or four men walking silently one behind each other, and wearing what looked something like a coarse brown habit with a cowl, which they had drawn over their heads so that their faces were almost hidden. Having heard so often about Indian ascetics, I looked at them with some curiosity and respect, as being probably of their number. But in the course of the morning I met so many others of the same type, that I began to think I must have made a mistake. The cowl-like habit turned out to be the coarse native blanket, used for so many purposes by rustic Indians, and which they wear in this monastic fashion in the, sometimes chill, early mornings, or when it is wet. Their walking in single file was not in order to assist them in the preservation of perpetual silence, but because jungle footpaths make this mode of progression a necessity, and country folk get so used to walking in this fashion that when they emerge on to the high-road they preserve the same order.

The monsoon, or rainy season, I had been led to suppose began almost invariably on a certain date, and that rain then fell continuously for three months until another fixed day when it left off, after which no more rain fell till the appointed date of the next year. The expression, "the monsoon has burst," which is often seen in the newspapers, suggests the idea that the advent of the rain is something akin to a deluge produced by the bursting of a great tank. In reality there is, at times, almost as much uncertainty about weather in India as there is in England. The most that can be said is that there are several months in which rain, though possible, is extremely unlikely, and outdoor festivities can be arranged for without those anxious watchings of the heavens which is the lot of the organiser of garden fêtes in England.