India and Indian Engineering. / Three lectures delivered at the Royal Engineer Institute, Chatham, in July 1872

by J. G. Medley

Of the state of the Arts and Manufactures in India, all of you can form some judgment yourselves by an inspection of the beautiful specimens collected in the Indian annexe of the International Exhibition.

Some of the once famous Indian manufactures have almost disappeared in modern times, such as the Dacca muslin, of which it was said that a full-sized dress piece could be drawn through a finger ring. Native architecture too of the present day is tawdry and meretricious. But Cashmere is still famous for its wonderful shawls, in which we know not which to admire most, the beauty of the fabric, or the exquisite patterns and harmonious contrast of colours; Agra still executes that beautiful inlaid stone-work, which is yet only one of the wonders of the Taj Mehal; Delhi and Benares send gorgeous embroideries, heavy with gold and rich in colouring; Cuttack furnishes its exquisite silver filagree work; Sealkote, its steel inlaid with gold in arabesque patterns; Bombay, its massive and curiously-carved ebony furniture. But Art can never attain to its highest development in the absence of a healthy national life, and it is to former ages we must turn for structures like some of the Hindoo Temples, or the great mosque at Delhi, or “the Dream in Marble” at Agra (the Taj Mehal), and even the artistic manufactures I have named are legacies from the past, that are apt to degenerate at the present day into a grotesque copying of European designs.

Yet there is an indwelling spirit of artistic grace in the East that will not easily die, which you see in the instinctive choice of colours in the clothes of the very poorest on a holiday festival,—in the shape of the commonest earthenware utensils,—in the very salutation that you get from the poorest peasant in the fields.

Mahomedanism is certainly no friend to sculpture or painting, for it takes in a very literal sense the prohibition of the Jewish decalogue to “make no likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.” No good Mussulman will even have his portrait taken, and geometric forms or the flowing Arabic sentences from the Koran are the proper ornaments of the orthodox mosque. But the prohibition has been relaxed at least in the case of flowers, and the exquisite carving and inlaid work of the Taj are almost unapproachable in excellence, while the fretted marble screens at Jyepore and elsewhere are more like lace than stone.

I can tell you but little of the inner life of all these millions of our fellow-subjects, for it is jealously guarded from European eyes; they and their white masters lead a separate existence, as I have already said, in all that concerns social and domestic matters, the one living in their towns and villages, the others in their stations or cantonments from one to five miles distant. But in their external life, which we do see, they are generally a quiet and simple race, temperate in their living, patient and much-enduring, not deficient in courage, great fatalists and very superstitious; of strong domestic affections; fond of holiday making and childish amusements. Public spirit, philanthropy, chivalrous feeling, high principle, truth, chastity and generosity,—these, as we all know, are the outgrowths, if not of Christianity, at least of a healthy national life; and in these qualities natives are, as a rule, deficient. But this at least may be said, that those amongst us who see most of and live most amongst them like them the best, and are the readiest to admit their many good qualities, and to acknowledge that, in spite of the differences created by religion, colour, race, climate, and manners, there is no such great difference, after all, in human nature.

And now I should like to tell you something more of Indian life in its English aspect, and make you congratulate yourselves or regret (according to your tastes) that your lot has not been cast in India.

Well, an Indian up-country Station, say in Northern India, is a piece of very flat ground, divided by very straight roads into very square patches, or “compounds” as we call them, which are bounded by prickly cactus hedges, or often by low mud walls. In each “compound,” or enclosure, stands a one-storied house, with more or fewer rooms, and of greater or less size, according to the rent paid for it. Behind and near the house is a row of mud huts inhabited by your servants, a range of stables, and a kitchen or cook-house, whose very primitive arrangements would drive an English cook into a lunatic asylum, but in which your native chef manages to turn out very presentable dinners.

Part of the compound is occupied by the garden, in which your Malee, or native gardener, grows vegetables, which naturally cost you a great deal more than if you bought them in the bazar. However, if you want peas and beans, you must grow them, for they are not to be found in the town; the natives don’t eat them themselves, for neither their fathers, nor their grandfathers, nor their great-grandfathers did so, and why should they? Potatoes having been introduced some 400 years or so, are now beginning to be eaten in some parts of the country by the people, not I suspect without many misgivings lest they should be suddenly converted to Christianity by eating white men’s food. Besides English vegetables grown from imported seeds, the kitchen garden produces some very nasty native vegetables, trees growing plums and peaches only fit for tarts, a bed of strawberries if you are very lucky, a patch of Indian corn, and last, not least, two or three mangoe trees, from which you get the only fruit fit to eat in Northern India, unless I except the melon.