Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the elegance of their gait. In the hot weather, the saree is the sole garment of the Hindoo women, and lends grace to the form without concealing the outlines of the trunk or the comely shapes of the well-turned limbs. The saree is eight yards long, but of such soft thin texture that it makes no show upon the person. It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo habits, that at this Mohammedan festival the Mohammedan women should all be wearing the long seamless saree of the conquered Hindoos.
In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was nothing distinctively Mohammedan. Hindoos joined in the festivities, and “Portuguese,” or descendants of the slaves, half-castes, and native Christians who at the time of the Portuguese occupation of Surat assumed high-sounding names and titles, and now form a large proportion of the inhabitants of towns in the Bombay Presidency. The temptation of a ten days’ holiday is too great to be resisted by the prejudices of even the Christians or Hindoos.
The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river-side, where the taboots, one after the other, made their exit from ten days of glory into unfathomable slush; and such was the number of the “camp taboots,” as those of the native soldiers in our service are styled, and the “bazaar taboots,” or city contributions, that the immersion ceremonies were not completed when the illumination and fireworks commenced.
After dark, the bazaar was lit with colored fires, and with the ghostly paper-lanterns that give no light; and the noise of tomtoms and fire-crackers recommenced in spite of proclamations and police-rules. Were there in Indian streets anything to burn, the Mohurrum would cause as many fires in Hindostan as Independence-day in the United States; but, although houses are burnt out daily in the bazaars, they are never burnt down, for nothing but water can damage mud. We could have played our way into Lucknow in 1857 with pumps and hoses at least as fast as we contrived to batter a road into it with shot and shell.
During the day I had been amused with the sayings of some British recruits, who were watching the immersion ceremonies, but in the evening one of them was in the bazaar, uproariously drunk, kicking every native against whom he stumbled, and shouting to an officer of another regiment, who did not like to interfere: “I‘m a private soldier, I know, but I‘m a gentleman; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do; and I knows a cloud when I sees it, damned if I don‘t.” On the other hand, in some fifty thousand natives holiday-making that day, many of them Christians and low-caste men, with no prejudice against drink, a drunken man was not to be seen.
It is impossible to overestimate the harm done to the English name in India by the conduct of drunken soldiers and “European loafers.” The latter class consists chiefly of discharged railway guards and runaway sailors from Calcutta,—men who, traveling across India and living at free quarters on the trembling natives, become ruffianly beyond description from the effect upon their originally brutal natures of the possession of unusual power.
The popularity of Mohammedan festivals such as that of the Mohurrum has been one of the many causes which have led us to believe that the Mohammedans form a considerable proportion of the population of Hindostan, but the census in the Northwest Provinces revealed the fact that they had there been popularly set down as three times as numerous as they are, and it is probable that the same is the case throughout all India. Not only are the Indian Mohammedans few, but their Mohammedanism sits lightly on them: they are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in ceremonies, in daily life, and all-but Hindoos in their actual worship. On the other hand, this Mohurrum showed me that the Hindoos do not scruple to attend the commemoration of Hassan and Hoosein. At Benares there is a temple which is used in common by Mohammedans and Hindoos, and throughout India, among the low-caste people, there is now little distinction between the religions. The descendants of the Mohammedan conquerors, who form the leading families in several native States, and also in Oude itself, are among the most dangerous of our Indian subjects, but they appear to have but little hold upon the humble classes of their fellow-worshipers, and their attempts to stir up their people to active measures against the English have always failed. On the other hand, we have hitherto somewhat ignored the claims upon our consideration of the Indian Mohammedans and still more numerous hill-tribes, and permitted our governments to act as though the Hindoos and the Sikhs were the only inhabitants of Hindostan.
CHAPTER XIX.
ENGLISH LEARNING.
THE English traveler who crosses India from Calcutta to Bombay is struck with the uncivilized condition of the land. He has heard in England of palaces and temples, of art treasures and of native poetry, of the grace of the Hindoo maidens, of Cashmere shawls, of the Taj, of the Pearl Mosque, of a civilization as perfect as the European and as old as the Chinese. When he lands and surveys the people, he finds them naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and superstition, and safe only from extermination because the European cannot dwell permanently in the climate of their land. The stories we are told at home are in no sense false:—the Hindoos, of all classes, are graceful in their carriage; their tombs and mosques are of extraordinary beauty, their art patterns the despair of our best craftsmen; the native poetry is at least equal to our own, and the Taj the noblest building in the world. Every word is true, but the whole forms but a singularly small portion of the truth. The religious legends, the art patterns, the perfect manner and the graceful eye and taste seem to have descended to the Hindoos of to-day from a generation whose general civilization they have forgotten. The poetry is confined to a few members of a high-caste race, and is mainly an importation from abroad; the architecture is that of the Moslem conquerors. Shan Jehan, a Mohammedan emperor and a foreigner, built the Taj; Akbar the Great, another Turk, was the designer of the Pearl Mosque; and the Hindoos can no more be credited with the architecture of their early conquerors than they can with the railways and bridges of their English rulers, or with the waterworks of Bombay City. The Sikhs are chiefly foreigners; but of the purely native races, the Rajpoots are only fine barbarians, the Bengalees mere savages, and the tribes of Central India but little better than the Australian aborigines or the brutes. Throughout India there are remains of an early civilization, but it has vanished as completely as it has in Egypt; and the Cave-temples stand as far from the daily life of Hindostan as the Pyramids do from that of Egypt.
It is to be feared that the decline has been extremely rapid since the day when we arrived in India. Just as it is almost impossible, by any exertion of the mind, to realize in Mexico the fact that the present degraded Aztecs are the same people whom the Spaniards found, only some three hundred years ago, dwelling in splendid palaces, and worshiping their unknown gods in golden temples through the medium of a sacred tongue, so now it is difficult to believe that the pauperized inhabitants of Orissa and the miserable peasantry of Oude are the sons of the chivalrous warriors who fought in the last century against Clive.