The lofty pavilions that crown the river front are ornamented with paintings of every beast that walks and bird that flies, with monsters, too—pink and green and spotted—with griffins, dragons, and elephant-headed gods embracing dancing-girls. Here and there are representations of red-coated soldiers—English, it would seem, for they have white faces, but so, the Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies, who are certainly not British. The Benares taste for painting leads to the decoration with pink and yellow spots of the very cows. The tiger is the commonest of all the figures on the walls—indeed, the explanation that the representations are allegorical, or that gods are pictured in tiger shape, has not removed from my mind the belief that the tiger must have been worshiped in India at some early date. All Easterns are inclined to worship the beasts that eat them: the Javanese light floating sacrifices to their river crocodiles; the Scindees at Kurrachee venerate the sacred muggur, or man-eating alligator; the hill-tribes pray to snakes; indeed, to a new-comer, all Indian religion has the air of devil-worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some shape: the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are propitiated by infernal music, they are often worshiped with obscene and hideous rites. There is even something cruel in the monotonous roar of the great tomtoms; the sound seems to connect itself with widow-burning, with child-murder, with Juggernauth processions. Since the earliest known times, the tomtom has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics; its booming is bound up with the thousand barbarisms of false religion. If the scene on the Benares ghauts is full of horrors, we must not forget that Hindooism is a creed of fear and horror, not of love.
The government of India has lately instituted an inquiry into the alleged abuses of the custom of taking sick Hindoos to the Ganges-side to die, with a view to regulating or suppressing the practice which prevails in the river-side portion of Lower Bengal. At Benares, Bengal people are still taken to the river-side, but not so other natives, as Hindoos dying anywhere in the sacred city have all the blessings which the most holy death can possibly secure; the Benares Shastra, moreover, forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases of it in the city, although I had seen many near Calcutta. Not only are aged people brought from their sick-rooms, laid in the burning sun, and half suffocated with the Ganges water poured down their throats, but, owing to the ridicule which follows if they recover, or the selfishness of their relatives, the water is often muddier than it need be: hence the phrase “ghaut murder,” by which this custom is generally known. Similar customs are not unheard of in other parts of India, and even in Polynesia and North America. The Veddahs, or black aborigines of Ceylon, were, up to very lately, in the habit of carrying their dying parents or children into the jungle, and, having placed a chatty of water and some rice by their side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts. Under pressure from our officials, they are believed to have ceased to act thus, but they continue, we are told, to throw their dead to the leopards and crocodiles. The Maories, too, have a way of taking out to die alone those whom their seers have pronounced doomed men, but it is probable that, among the rude races, the custom which seems to be a relic of human sacrifice has not been so grossly abused as it has been by the Bengal Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of many similar barbarities that disgrace the religion of the Hindoos, but it is fast sharing the fate of suttee and infanticide.
As I returned through the bazaar, I met many most unholy-looking visitors to the sacred town. Fierce Rajpoots, with enormous turbans ornamented with zig-zag stripes: Bengal bankers, in large purple turbans, curling their long white mustaches, and bearing their critical noses high aloft as they daintily picked their way over the garbage of the streets; and savage retainers of the rajahs staying for a season at their city palaces, were to the traveler‘s eye no very devout pilgrims. In truth, the immoralities of the “holy city” are as great as its religious virtues, and it is the chosen ground of the loose characters as well as of the pilgrims of the Hindoo world.
In the whole of the great throng in the bazaar, hardly the slightest trace of European dressing was to be perceived: the varnished boots of the wealthier Hindoos alone bore witness to the existence of English trade—a singular piece of testimony, this, to the essential conservatism of the Oriental mind. With any quantity of old army clothing to be got for the asking, you never see a rag of it on a native back—not even on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket to an out-door servant, he will cut it into strips and wear them as a puggree round his head; but this is about the only thing he will accept, unless to sell it in the bazaar.
As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains of laden camels that were winding slowly through the tortuous streets, I saw a European soldier cheapening a bracelet with a native jeweler. He was the first topee wallah (“hat-fellow,” or “European”) that I had seen in Benares City. Calcutta is the only town in Northern India in which you meet Europeans in your walks or rides, and, even there, there is but one European to every sixty natives. In all India, there are, including troops, children, and officials of all kinds, far less than as many thousands of Europeans as there are millions of natives.
The evening after that on which I visited the native town, I saw in Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the India hated and dreaded by our troops—by day a blazing deadly heat and sun, at night a still more deadly fog—a hot white fog, into which the sun disappears half an hour before his time for setting, and out of which he shoots soon after seven in the morning, to blaze and kill again—a pestiferous fever-breeding ground-fog, out of which stand the tops of the palms, though their stems are invisible in the steam. Compared with our English summer climate, it seems the atmosphere of another planet.
Among the men in the cantonments, I found much of that demoralization that heat everywhere produces among Englishmen. The newly-arrived soldiers appear to pass their days in alternate trials of hard drinking and of total abstinence, and are continually in a state of nervous fright, which in time must wear them out and make them an easy prey to fever. The officers who are fresh from England often behave in much the same manner as the men, though with them “belatee pawnee” takes the place of plain water with the brandy. “Belatee pawnee” means, being translated, “English water,” but, when interpreted, it means “soda-water”—the natives once believing that this was English river-water, bottled and brought to India by us as they carry Ganges water to the remotest parts. The superstition is now at an end, owing to the fact that natives are themselves largely employed in the making of soda-water, which is cheaper in India than it is at home; but the name remains.
Our men kill themselves with beer, with brandy and soda-water, and with careless inattention to night chills, and then blame the poor climate for their fevers, or die cursing “India.” Of course, long residence in a climate winterless and always hot at mid-day produces or intensifies certain diseases; but brandy and soda-water produces more, and intensifies all. They say it is “soda-and-brandy” the first month, and then “brandy-and-soda,” but that men finally take to putting in the soda-water first, and then somehow the brandy always kills them. If a man wears a flannel belt and thick clothes when he travels by night, and drinks hot tea, he need not fear India.
In all ways, Benares is the type of India; in the Secrole cantonments, you have the English in India, intelligent enough, but careless, and more English than they are at home, with garrison chaplains, picnics, balls, and champagne suppers; hard by, in the native town, the fierce side of Hindooism, and streets for an Englishman to show himself in which ten years ago was almost certain death. Benares is the center of all the political intrigues of India; but the great mutiny itself was hatched there without being heard of at Secrole. Except that our policemen now perambulate the town, change in Benares there has been none. Were missionaries to appear openly in its streets, their fate would still very possibly be the same as that which in this city befell St. Thomas.