There was a charming view of Udaipur from our hotel seen through the trees, the massive Maharajah’s palace dominating the city, and bathed in the roseate early morning sunlight it looked particularly lovely. I worked at a sketch of this on Christmas morning; I remember, having to be up at seven o’clock in order to catch the effect, which soon changed. We had the most brilliant moonlight nights here, too.
We visited the Maharajah’s gardens where was a sort of Zoo. There were some handsome tigers in rather small cages, hogs, leopards, one lion, deer, guinea-pigs, geese, cockatoos, and other birds and beasts, including some melancholy dogs of various breeds, chained at intervals around a courtyard. These were supposed to be in hospital.
From the Zoo we drove through a fine wooded park to the Museum called the Victoria Institute, where a native curator showed us round. It was a white building in the Moslem style but quite new. It included a library in which was placed a bad statue of our late Queen. There were modelled heads in coloured plaster, ranged in cases numbered and ticketed, of all the Hindu castes, each with their proper caste mark upon their foreheads. There was a miscellaneous collection otherwise, native arts and industries and antiquities, as well as European, being represented very sparsely. The whole thing had a sort of forced and artificial character in such surroundings and was quite empty of visitors. We were, however, early there.
In driving through the gate of the city, a funeral passed us—a band of young men bearing on a stretcher the corpse which was swathed in red cotton and tightly bound up like a mummy. The bearers moved at a quick, almost jaunty pace, approaching a trot, and with them were other natives who chanted a sort of song. If it was an equivalent for a dirge it was quite a cheerful one—but then the Hindus, as well as the Mohammedans and Indians, look upon death as a happy translation to another existence, and the accompaniments of gloom to which we are accustomed in Christian countries have no existence here.
We departed, on Christmas Day in the morning, from Chitor and Ajmir again, returning by the way we came. Udaipur is at the end of the branch line from Ajmir which has not I believe been in existence many years.
On the way to the station I noticed some very primitive huts clustered in a group on a rising ground above the road. They almost exactly resembled the huts of the early Britons and Gauls as they appear on Trajan’s column, being circular in form, built of mud or sun-baked bricks and roofed with a sort of rude thatch laid over a bamboo trellis. In this land of wonders and contrasts truly, one sees everything both in customs and dwellings from the most primitive to the most elaborate and luxurious, from the most ancient to the most modern forms of life. It is sad to note, however, that at least as far as the outward aspects of life are concerned, all that Western contact seems to have done for the people of India is to introduce corrugated iron, Manchester cotton, and the kerosene can—with petrol and its smell!
At Udaipur station there was a great native crowd of every variety of type, wonderful in colour and costume. Many of the men carried sabres as well as walking-sticks which seem to be the marks of superior caste in Rajputana. There were, too, the usual crowd of poorer travellers with their extraordinary bundles and brown babies. A native woman stood on the platform with a huge sheaf of sugar-cane which she sold in pieces to the travellers, and, of course, there were the sweet stuff sellers, and the inevitable betel-nut.
Reaching Chitorgarh in the late afternoon the old fort with its zigzag walled road looked quite familiar, and at the station our elephant was in waiting again.
We could not get on to Ajmir until night, and so did not arrive there until about 5.30 in the morning. Coming from a plague-stricken district passengers were not allowed to leave the train until a medical inspection had taken place. An English doctor with a native attendant bearing a lantern came round and went through the farce of feeling everybody’s pulse before anybody was allowed to leave the station. We only stopped, however, to get some tea and await a train for Jaipur, our next destination.