Sighting the Temple of Juggernauth and one palm-tree, but seeing no land, we entered the Hoogly, steaming between light-houses, guard-ships, and buoys, but not catching a glimpse of the low land of the Sunderabunds till we had been many hours in “the river.” After lying right off the tiger-infested island of Saugur, we started on our run up to Calcutta before the sun was risen. Compared with Ceylon, the scene was English; there was nothing tropical about it except the mist upon the land; and low villas and distant factory-chimneys reminded one of the Thames between Battersea and Fulham. Coming into Garden Reach, where large ships anchor before they sail, we had a long, low building on our right, gaudy and architecturally hideous, but from its vast size almost imposing: it was the palace of the dethroned King of Oude, the place where, it is said, are carried on deeds become impossible in Lucknow. Such has been the extravagance of the King that the government of India has lately interfered, and appointed a commission to pay his debts, and deduct them from his income of £120,000 a year; for we pay into the privy purse of the dethroned Vizier of Oude exactly twice the yearly sum that we set aside for that of Queen Victoria. Whatever income is allowed to native princes, they always spend the double. The experience of the Dutch in Java and our own in India is uniform in this respect. Removed from that slight restraint upon expenditure which the fear of bankruptcy or revolution forces upon reigning kings, native princes supported by European governments run recklessly into debt. The commission which was sitting upon the debts of the King of Oude while I was in Calcutta warned him that, if he offended a second time, government would for the future spend his income for him. It is not the King‘s extravagance alone, however, that is complained of. Always notorious for debauchery, he has now become infamous for his vices. One of his wives was arrested while I was in Calcutta for purchasing girls for the harem, but the King himself escaped. For nine years he has never left his palace, yet he spends, we are told, from £200,000 to £250,000 a year.
In his extravagance and immorality the King of Oude does not stand alone in Calcutta. His mode of life is imitated by the wealthy natives; his vices are mimicked by every young Bengalee baboo. It is a question whether we are not responsible for the tone which has been taken by “civilization” in Calcutta. The old philosophy has gone, and left nothing in its place; we have by moral force destroyed the old religions in Calcutta, but we have set up no new. Whether the character of our Indian government, at once leveling and paternal, has not much to do with the spread of careless sensuality is a question before answering which it would be well to look to France, where a similar government has for sixteen years prevailed. In Paris, at least, democratic despotism is fast degrading the French citizen to the moral level of the Bengalee baboo.
The first thing in Calcutta that I saw was the view of the Government House from the Park Reserve—a miniature Sahara since its trees were destroyed by the great cyclone. The Viceroy‘s dwelling, though crushed by groups of lions and unicorns of gigantic stature and astonishing design, is an imposing building; but it is the only palace in the “city of palaces”—a name which must have been given to the pestiferous city by some one who had never seen any other towns but Liverpool and London. The true city of palaces is Lucknow.
In Calcutta, I first became acquainted with that unbounded hospitality of the great mercantile houses in the East of which I have since acquired many pleasing remembrances. The luxury of “the firm” impresses the English traveler; the huge house is kept as a hotel; every one is welcome to dinner, breakfast, and bed in the veranda, or in a room, if he can sleep under a roof in the hot weather. Sometimes two and sometimes twenty sit down to the meals, and always without notice to the butlers or the cooks, but every one is welcome, down to the friend of a friend‘s friend; and junior clerks will write letters of introduction to members of the firm, which secure the bearer a most hospitable welcome from the other clerks, even when all the partners are away. “If Brown is not there, Smith will be, and if he‘s away, why then Johnson will put you up,” is the form of invitation to the hospitalities of an Eastern firm. The finest of fruits are on table between five and six, and tea and iced drinks are ready at all times, from dawn to breakfast—a ceremony which takes place at ten. To the regular meals you come in or not as you please, and no one trained in Calcutta or Bombay can conceive offense being taken by a host at his guest accepting, without consulting him, invitations to dine out in the city, or to spend some days at a villa in its outskirts. Servants are in the corridors by day and night at the call of guests, and your entertainers tell you that, although they have not time to go about with you, servants will always be ready to drive you at sunset to the band-stand in the carriage of some member of the firm.
The population of Calcutta is as motley as that of Galle, though the constituents are not the same. Greeks, Armenians, and Burmese, besides many Eurasians, or English-speaking half-castes, mingle with the mass of Indian Mohammedans and Hindoos. The hot weather having suddenly set in, the Calcutta officials, happier than the merchants—who, however, care little about heat when trade is good—were starting for Simla in a body, “just as they were warming to their work,” as the Calcutta people say, and, finding that there was nothing to be done in the stifling city, I, too, determined to set off.
The heat was great at night, and the noisy native crows and whistling kites held durbars inside my window in the only cool hour of the twenty-four—namely, that which begins at dawn—and thus hastened my departure from Calcutta by preventing me from taking rest while in it. Hearing that at Patna there was nothing to be seen or learnt, I traveled from Calcutta to Benares—500 miles—in the same train and railway carriage. Our first long stoppage was at Chandernagore, but, as the native baggage-coolies, or porters, howl the station names in their own fashion, I hardly recognized the city in the melancholy moan of “Orn-dorn-orn-gorne,” which welcomed the train, and it was not till I saw a French infantry uniform upon the platform that I remembered that Chandernagore, a village belonging to the French, lies hard by Calcutta, to which city it was once a dangerous rival. It is said that the French retain their Indian dependencies, instead of selling them to us as did the Dutch, in order that they may ever bear in mind the fact that we once conquered them in India; but it would be hard to find any real ground for their retention, unless they are held as centers for the Catholic missions. We will not even permit them to be made smuggling depots, for which purpose they would be excellently adapted. The whole of the possessions in India of the French amount together to only twenty-six leagues square. Even Pondicherry, the largest and only French Indian dependency of which the name is often heard in Europe, is cut into several portions by strips of British territory, and the whole of the French-Indian dependencies are mere specks of land isolated in our vast territories. The officer who was lounging in the station was a native; indeed, in the territory of Chandernagore there are but 230 Europeans, and but 1500 in all French India. He made up to my compartment as though he would have got in, which I wished that he would have done, as natives in the French service all speak French, but, seeing a European, he edged away to a dark uncomfortable compartment. This action was, I fear, a piece of silent testimony to the prejudice which makes our people in India almost invariably refuse to travel with a native, whatever may be his rank.
As we passed through Burdwan and Rajmahal, where the East Indian Railway taps the Ganges, the station scenes became more and more interesting. We associate with the word “railway” ideas that are peculiarly English:—shareholders and directors, guards in blue, policemen in dark green, and porters in brown corduroy; no English institution, however, assumes more readily an Oriental dress. Station-masters and sparrows alone are English; everything else on a Bengal railway is purely Eastern. Sikh irregulars jostle begging fakeers in the stations; palkees and doolies—palankeens and sedans, as we should call them—wait at the back doors; ticket-clerks smoke water-pipes; an ibis drinks at the engine-tank; a sacred cow looks over the fence, and a tame elephant reaches up with his trunk at the telegraph-wire, on which sits a hoopoe, while an Indian vulture crowns the post.
When we came opposite to the Monghyr Hills, the only natural objects which for 1600 miles break the level of the great plain of Hindostan, people of the central tribes, small-headed and savage-looking, were mingled with the Hindoos at the stations. In blackness there was not much difference between the races, for low-caste Bengalees are as black as Guinea negroes.
As the day grew hot, a water-carrier with a well-filled skin upon his back appeared at every station, and came running to the native cars in answer to the universal long-drawn shout of “Ah! ah! Bheestie—e!”
The first view of the Ganges calls up no enthusiasm. The Thames below Gravesend half dried up would be not unlike it; indeed, the river itself is as ugly as the Mississippi or Missouri, while its banks are more hideous by far than theirs. Beyond Patna, the plains, too, become as monotonous as the river,—flat, dusty, and treeless, they are in no way tropical in their character; they lie, indeed, wholly outside the tropics. I afterward found that a man may cross India from the Irawaddy to the Indus, and see no tropical scenery, no tropical cultivation. The aspect of the Ganges valley is that of Cambridgeshire, or of parts of Lincoln seen after harvest time, and with flocks of strange and brilliant birds and an occasional jackal thrown in. The sun is hot—not, indeed, much hotter than in Australia, but the heat is of a different kind from that encountered by the English in Ceylon or the West Indies. From a military point of view, the plains may be described as a parade-ground continued to infinity; and this explains the success of our small forces against the rebels in 1857, our cavalry and artillery having in all cases swept their infantry from these levels with the utmost ease.