When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

The colour-rich pen of William Shakespeare would, I think, have found itself inadequate to paint the scenery through which we passed from the banks of the Ganges to the base of Mount Everest. All I can say of that scenery is: It is there; go and see it!

We passed groups of hill people. They were to us a new type of Asiatic humanity. They reminded us strangely and strongly of our own North American Indians. They set us thinking. We tried to recall all we had ever read about the cradle of the Aryan race. We tried to remember the great racial divisions of humanity. And when we found ourselves in a fine mental tangle we gave it up, saying, “What a great and undeniable fact is the brotherhood of all humanity!” and then we ceased to think and only looked—at Nature. We passed through tea plantations, and through miles of cochineal and indigo; that relieved our tension and told us once more that ours was the most practical race in the world; for the plantations were, almost without exception, owned and managed by Anglo-Saxons.

Before we reached Darjeeling we had several sunlit views of the far, snow-covered heights of the great mountains. From Darjeeling we saw them every day—for at Darjeeling we had only sunshine and good fortune. We saw Mount Kinchinjunga at sunrise, at sunflood, and at sunset. We could not see Mount Everest from Darjeeling, but before daylight one morning we went together on horseback and crept to the base of Mount Everest; we lifted our faces reverently and looked upon it.

Darjeeling fascinated me as much because of the hill tribes we found there as for its own wonderful beauty. My husband says that I ruined him in furs and phulkaris, but he has accused me of ruining him in every bazaar in the Orient; and now that we are at home in London, he has quite constituted himself the curator of my curios.

At Darjeeling is one of the lovely homes of those very interesting people, the Maharajah and Maharanee of Cooch Behar.

The Maharajah of Cooch Behar was the handsomest man I ever saw. But I did not discover it the first time I saw him. The Maharanee was with him, and I had no eyes for any one else. The Maharanee of Cooch Behar is indescribably lovely. No intense poem of old Oriental literature contains a description of woman’s loveliness, that would be an exaggeration if it had been written about her Highness. In Calcutta and in Darjeeling she and her husband came to see us play very often. Whenever they came, I used to scurry through my changes that I might stand at the peep-hole and look upon the exquisite Eastern beauty of the Maharanee. The Maharajah I first saw, without his wife, at the Calcutta Races; then I realised what a handsome husband his handsome wife had. Naturally enough, the Cooch Behar children are exceptionally pretty. It was in Darjeeling that I used to see them. The Maharajah of Cooch Behar and his wife stand for all that is best and wisest in Indian life. Their culture is broadly cosmopolitan, their loyalty to their own people is deep and tireless, but not pedantic nor narrow. They adore and adorn the country of their birth. They greatly credit the country of their allegiance.

We went from Darjeeling back to Calcutta. Then we went to Bombay, stopping a week or more at Allahabad and Jubblepore. I revelled again in the native quarters; we were made very happy at night in the theatres, and in the cantonments we met a lot of charming English people. I often wonder how many thousands of charming English people there are in India. There are very many, I know.

Bombay I always associate with Tokio and Vienna. They are the three most lavish cities I have ever seen. And yet, Bombay lacked to me something of the charm of Calcutta. Bombay is undoubtedly the more beautiful of the two cities, but it is far the less dense. Humanity fascinates me more than Nature. I boast of being cosmopolitan. I love several countries as much as, or more than, my own, and yet, the cosmopolitanism of Bombay oppressed me. The cosmos seemed to me objectionably conglomerate. But Bombay was delightful; its shortcomings were very few, its charms were very, very many. Must I leave Bombay—the Queen of the Eastern seas—with a sentence? Perhaps as well leave it that way as another, since I cannot devote the pages of a volume to its praise. The swarming, native quarters, the beautifully-built European section, the pretty Parsi women, the changeable silks and the inch-thick rugs of the borri wallahs, the bright-blue, glistening, dancing bay, the dank recesses of the Elephanta caves, the vultures on the Parsi Towers of Silence, call out to me for recognition. But there is a nineteenth century full to overflowing of tourists to recall them all, better, perhaps, than I could, but not more lovingly than I should—had I the space and the power to more than mention them.

If I filled one page with each golden memory I have of the Orient, those pages would, though they were printed on tissue, make a rather thick volume.