XIX The Straits Settlements and Burma
The Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in the dead of winter, and yet with no suggestion of snow, bare fields, or leafless trees. The luxuriant green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and in Singapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator, summer and winter are practically alike.
“But you must remember that we are here in the wintertime,” a fellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed his surprise at not finding it hotter than it really was—the speaker evidently forgetting that at the equator December is as much a summer month as July, and immediately south of it what are the hot months with us become the winter months there. And Singapore is so close to the equator that for it “all seasons are summer,” and the punkah wallas (the coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are made tolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the Fourth of July.
The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers on the tropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoanut palms are silhouetted against the sky in all directions; the dense, heavy foliage of the banana trees is seen on almost every street; the sprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion of roots and branches, casts its dense shadows on the grateful earth; and all around the city are rubber plantations, immense pineapple fields, and uncleared jungle-land in which wild beasts and poisonous serpents carry on the unending life-and-death struggle between the strong and the weak. Singapore, in fact, is said to have been called “the Lion City” for a long while because of the great number of lions found in the neighborhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed nearby, and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long.
There is probably no place on earth in which there have been brought together greater varieties of the human species than in Singapore. I was told that sixty languages are spoken in the city, and if diversity of color may be taken as an indication of diversity of language, I am prepared to believe it. There are many Indians or Hindus, most of them about as black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasian in the main—sharp noses, thin lips, and straight glossy black hair; but 72 per cent, of the population of Singapore is Chinese.
It is interesting to observe that John Chinaman seems to flourish equally in the Tropics and in the Temperate Zone. Here in Singapore under an equatorial sun, or in Canton on the edge of the Tropics, he seems as energetic, as unfailing in industry, as he is in wintry Mukden or northern Mongolia. For hours after sunset many of the Chinese shops in Singapore present as busy an appearance as at mid-day, and the pigtailed rickshaw men, with only a loin-cloth about their bare bodies, seem to run as fast and as far as they would if they were in Peking.
The Chinese are a wonderful people, and I am more and more impressed with the thought of what a hand they are to have in the world’s affairs a hundred years hence when they get thoroughly “waked up.” They were first brought to Singapore, I understand, as common laborers, but now their descendants are among the wealthiest men and women in the place and ride around in automobiles, while descendants of their one-time employers walk humbly on the adjacent sidewalks. It is a tribute to the untiring industry, shrewdness, and business skill of the Chinaman that nowadays when people anywhere speak of desiring Celestials as laborers, they add, “Provided they are under contract to return to China when the work is finished, and do not remain to absorb the trade and wealth of the country.”
From Singapore we made a very interesting trip to Johore, a little kingdom about the size of ten ordinary counties, and with a population of about 350,000. The soil and climate along the route are well suited to the cultivation of rubber trees, and considerable areas have recently been cleared of the dense jungle growth and set to young rubber plants. One of my friends who has a rubber plantation north of Singapore says that while rubber is selling now at only $1.50 a pound as compared with $3 a pound a few months ago, there are still enormous profits in the business, as the rubber should not cost over 25 cents a pound to produce. Some of the older plantations paid dividends of 150 per cent, last year, and probably set aside something for a rainy day in addition.
Yet not even these facts would have justified the wild speculation in rubber, the unreasoning inflation in values, which proved a veritable “Mississippi Bubble” for so many investors in Europe and Asia last year. Shares worth $5 or $10 were grabbed by eager buyers at $100 each. I know of a specific instance where a plantation bought for $16,000 was capitalized at $230,000, or 20 for 1, and the stock floated. When the madness had finally spent itself and people began to see things as they were, not only individuals, but whole communities, found themselves prostrated. Shanghai will not recover for years, and some of its citizens—the young fellow with a $1500 income who incurred a $30,000 debt in the scramble, for example—are left in practical bondage for life as a result. The men who have gone into the rubber-growing industry on a strictly business basis, however, are likely to find it profitable for a long time to come.
The cocoanut industry is also a profitable one, although the modest average of 10 per cent., year in and year out, has not appealed to those who have been indulging in pipe dreams about rubber. Where transportation facilities are good, the profits from cocoanuts probably average considerably in excess of 10 per cent., for the trees require little care, and it is easy for the owners to sell the product without going to any trouble themselves. In one section of the Philippines, I know, the Chinese pay one peso (50 cents gold) a tree for the nuts and pick them themselves. And when we consider the great number of the slim-bodied trees that may grow upon an acre, it is not surprising to hear that many owners of cocoanut groves or plantations live in Europe on the income from the groves, going to no trouble whatever except to have the trees counted once a year.
Penang, where we spent only a day, is almost literally in the midst of an immense cocoanut plantation, and I was much interested in seeing the half-naked Hindus gathering the unhusked fruit for shipment. The tall, limbless trunks of the trees, surmounted only by a top-knot of fruit and foliage, are in nearly every case gapped and notched at intervals of about three feet to furnish toe-hold for the natives in climbing.
After tiffin on this winter day, instead of putting on gloves and overcoats, we went out on a grassy lawn, clad in linen and pongee as we were, and luxuriated in the cool shade of the palm trees. The dense foliage of the tropical jungle was in sight from our place by the seaside, and in the garden not far away were cinnamon trees, cloves, orchids, rubber trees, the poisonous upas, and palms of all varieties known.
Penang is a rather important commercial centre, and exports more tin than any other place on earth. The metal is shipped in molten bars like lead or pig iron, and to one who has associated tin only with light buckets, cups, and dippers, it is surprising how much strength it takes to move a bar of the solid metal the size of a small watermelon.
The imports of Penang are also not inconsiderable, and in walking through the warehouses along the wharves I was struck by the number of boxes, crates, bales, and bundles bearing the legend, “Made in Germany.” The Germans are today the most aggressive commercial nation on earth, and I find that their government and their business houses are searching every nook and corner of the globe for trade openings. Unlike our American manufacturers, it may be observed just here, they are quick to change the style of their goods to meet even what they may regard as the whims of their customers, and this is an advantage of no small importance. If a manufacturer wishes to sell plows in the Philippines, for example, it would not be worth while for him to try to sell the thoroughly modern two-handled American kind to begin with. He should manufacture an improved one-handled sort at first and try gradually to make the natives see the advantages of using two handles. At present, as an American said to me in Manila, if you should seek to sell a Filipino a two-handled plow he would probably say that two handles may be all right for Americans who are not expert at plowing, but that the Filipino has passed that stage!
I mention this only by way of illustrating the necessity of respecting the custombre, or custom, of the country. The Germans realize this, and we do not.
One day by steamer from Penang brought us to Rangoon, the capital and most important city in Burma, and (next to Bombay and Calcutta) the most important in British India. We had heard much of the place, situated thirty miles up the river “on the road to Mandalay,” but found that even then the half had not been told. If there were nothing else to see but the people on the streets, a visit to Rangoon would be memorable, for nowhere else on earth perhaps is there such butterfly-like gorgeousness and gaudiness of raiment. At a little distance you might mistake a crowd for an enormous flower-bed. All around you are men and women wearing robes that rival in brilliancy Joseph’s coat of many colors.
The varieties in form of clothing are as great as the varieties in hue. The Burmese babies toddle about in beauty unadorned, and for the grown-ups there is every conceivable sort of apparel—or the lack of it. Most of the laborers on the streets wear only a loin-cloth and a turban (with the addition of a caste-mark on the forehead in case they are Hindus), but others have loose-fitting red, green, yellow, blue, striped, ring-streaked or rainbow-hued wraps, robes, shirts or trousers: and the women, of course, affect an equal variety of colors.
“The whackin’ white cheroot” that the girl smoked in Kipling’s “Road to Mandalay” is also much in evidence here; or perhaps instead of the white cheroot it is an enormous black cigar. In either case it is as large as a medium-sized corncob, that the newly landed tourist is moved to stare thereat in open-eyed amazement. How do Kipling’s verses go?
“‘Er petticoat was yaller, an’ ’er little cap was green.
An’ ’er name was Supi-yaw-lat—jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Queen,
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot.
An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on a ’eathen idol’s foot.”
They are all there in Rangoon yet—the gorgeous coloring of the lady’s raiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols—
“Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud.
Wot they called the Great Gawd Bud.”
How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would be impossible to estimate—I saw them not only in the pagodas, but newly carved in the shops which supply the Buddhist temples in the interior—and the gilded dome of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, “the most celebrated shrine of the entire Buddhist world,” glitters like a beacon for miles before you reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the Washington Monument, it is gilded from top to bottom—with actual gold leaf, Rangoon citizens claim—and around it are innumerable smaller pagodas and shrines glittering with mosaics of colored glass in imitation of all the gems known to mortals. Studied closely, they appear unduly gaudy, of course, but your first impression is that you have found a real Aladdin’s palace, a dazzling, glittering dream of Oriental splendor and magnificence. To these shrines there come to-day, as there have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims from all lands where Buddha’s memory is worshipped, pilgrims not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, and Korea. I shall not soon forget the feeble looks of the old white-haired pilgrim whom two women were helping up the steep ascent as I left the Pagoda after my second visit there. I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all the millions to whom Buddha’s doctrine is “the Light of Asia,” that it is a religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies of Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about the Shwe Dagon present at least some faint idea of a God who tempers justice with mercy and made human life good rather than a God of cruelty who made life a curse and a mockery. Every traveller who sees Buddhist Burma after having seen Hindu India comments on the greater cheerfulness and hopefulness of the Burman people, and especially the happier lives of the women—all a result, in the main, of the difference in religion.
And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable enough—its temples infested by fortune-tellers, witches, and fakirs, its faith mingled with gross superstitions and charms to propitiate the “nats” or spirits which are supposed to inhabit streams, forests, villages, houses, etc., and to have infinite power over the lives and fortunes of the people. A common sight on the morning streets is a group of yellow-robed priests with their begging bowls, into which pious Buddhists put food and other offerings; without these voluntary offerings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma, as in Siam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a few days and get his living in this way.
The ordinary beast of burden in Rangoon is the Indian bullock. Often pure white, usually with a well-kept appearance and with a clean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he should be on the way to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about his head. Teams of black Hindus, three quarters naked, are also seen pulling heavy carts and drays; and it may be that the small boys utilize the long-eared goats (they have heavy, drooping ears like a foxhound’s) to pull their small carts, but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city that interested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the elephants of Rangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of Peking in my memory and affection. Of course, the elephants of Rangoon are not so numerous as are the camels in China’s capital, but those that one sees display an intelligence and certain human-like qualities that make them fascinating.
One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co.’s lumber yard at Ahloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained elephants there handle the heavy saw-logs which it is necessary to move from place to place. It was better than a circus.
“Elephants a-pilin’ teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek.”
It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other beings in the Tropics, doesn’t entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he “cussed” in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a magnificent tusker, pushed the logs with his snout and tusks, while the others pulled them with chains. But the most marvellous thing is how the barefooted, half-naked driver, or mahout, astride the great giant’s shoulders, makes him understand what to do in each case by merely kicking his neck or prodding his ears.
At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna got his log stuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring profanely about his trials, when the tusker’s mahout bid that royal beast go help his troubled brother. Straightway, therefore, went the tusker, leaving great holes in the mud at each footprint as if a tree had been uprooted there, gave a mighty shove to the recalcitrant log, and there was peace again in the camp.
For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any ordinary sized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if it were a piece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in piling heavy plank he is remarkably careful about matching. Eying the pile at a distance, he looks to see if it is uneven or any single piece out of place, in which case he is quick to make it right. The young lady in our party was also much amused when the mahout called out, “Salaam to memsahib” (“Salute the lady”), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation as gracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit.
One of my fellow-passengers, a rubber planter from the Straits Settlements, has worked elephants, has used them on the plantation and as help in building bridges, and has told me some interesting stories concerning them. He had two—one a tusker worth 2500 rupees, or $833-1/3, and the other a mutna (without tusks) worth 2250 rupees, or $750. On one occasion the mutna heard “the call of the wild,” and went back to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren didn’t like the civilized ways he brought back with him, for when he returned home later two thirds of his tail had been pulled off, and he bore other marks of struggle on his body. The tusker on one occasion ran mad (as they will do now and then) and killed one of his keepers.
I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is caught. Driven into a stockade, the tamed elephants close in on him, and the mahouts get him well chained before he knows what has happened. For a day or two he remains in enforced bondage, then two or three of the great tamed creatures take him out for a walk or down to the river where he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts set about taming him—talk to him in the affectionate, soothing, half hypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in his stories, and stroke his trunk from discreet but gradually lessening distances. In a couple of months “my lord the Elephant” is fully civilized, responds promptly to the suggestions of his mahout, and a little later adopts some useful occupation.
In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the immense rafts of teak trees that are floated down the rivers for export. My friend the rubber planter has also had one or two good travelling elephants on which he used to travel through the jungle from one plantation to the other, a distance of twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion he has run into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On good roads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make seven miles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which, however, they are likely to lose if set to heavy work.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the great quantity of food required to keep him going. Eight hundred pounds a day will barely “jestify his stummuck,” as Uncle Remus would say, and when he gets hungry “he wants what he wants when he wants it,” and trumpets thunderously till he gets it. The skipper on a Singapore-Rangoon steamer told of having had a dozen or more on board a few months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they waxed mutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear the whole vessel to pieces, when the ship fortunately came near enough to land to enable the officers to signal for a few tons of feed to be brought aboard for the elephants’ breakfast.
I haven’t seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question assured me that he will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn’t.
I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude my impression of Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the lighter-skinned and lighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather notably with the dark and serious Hindus. Many of the Hindus are in Burma only temporarily. One ship that I saw coming into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India, was literally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They will work through the Burman rice harvest—rice is the one great crop of the country—at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents) a day, and after three or four months of this will return home. Because they are so poor at home the steamship charges only ten rupees ($3) for bringing them to Rangoon, but requires fifteen rupees for carrying them back.
Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed me very much in Rangoon: the graves of the English officers who were killed in the war with the Burmans many years ago, and are now buried within the walls of the picturesque old Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sun never sets on the English flag; and one finds much to remind him, too, that the sun never sets on the graves of that flag’s defenders. Scattered through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone—more refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate ever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother’s lullaby, how it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whispered among the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great blades of the bananas welcomed it!
With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if of Araby the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our leave of Burma.
Rangoon, Bunna.
If it were any other country but India, I might write last of the religion the people profess, but, since it is India, it is the first thing to be considered. Religion is the supreme fact of Indian life— if we may call religion what has been more properly defined as “a sacred disease.”
Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where the entire life of the people is so molded by their spiritual beliefs. Two children are born the same day. The one, of high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed shall be all his life, no matter how stupid or vicious, a privileged and “superior” being, to whom all lower orders must make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and mother, Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere touch works pollution worse than crime. And through the lifetime of each, Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme religion of India is called, will exercise over him an influence more potent and incessant than any civil government has ever exercised over its subjects.
About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admittedly a certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this from Hindu literature one must wade through cesspools of filth and obscenity and must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of Deity, while in its practical manifestations modern Hinduism is the most sickening combination of superstition, idolatry, and vice that now disgraces the name of religion in any considerable portion of the earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, “Samsara,” the belief that you have had millions of births (as men and animals) and may have millions more (unless you earlier merit the favor of the gods and win release from life), and that what you are in your present life is the result of actions in previous existence, and what you do in this present existence will influence all your future rebirths—this is a doctrine that might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with such ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical Hinduism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, but on rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid observance of caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper sacrifices to fickle or bloodthirsty gods and goddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that God can be worshipped only in spirit.
Another doctrine, that Self, that a man’s own soul is an Emanation of God, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man’s existence to hasten a final absorption into God—this also (although destructive of the idea of individuality, the sacredness of personality, so fundamental in Christian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral force, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Samsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu gods themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene and criminal.
Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism “powerless to be born,” is only the illusion which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands of the sea for multitude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pass in review before you, every eighth person in the ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hinduism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples.
It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta. This temple is dedicated to Kali, or “Mother Kali,” as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, the bloody goddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and assassins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron goddess and whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before her image: all this in a “temple” of “religion.”
The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, bloody head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to worship her brings a little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terrible goddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place runs ankle-deep in blood.
In the old days—and not so long ago at that—there were human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them, his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has been attempted within a decade.
From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims were washing away their sins or “acquiring merit” with the gods. On the way we passed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola, “the Mother of the Smallpox,” as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest assured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked “worshippers” and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming—and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his assistance—there ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of “worshippers,” such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a swift glimpse of the idol’s hideous head.
Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for “more”) I went back to my hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu “religion.”
It was Sunday morning.
Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went that afternoon to another Indian religious service—this time of Christians—and compared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of a money-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher’s block and exacting a prescribed fee from each pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty goddess, herself only one of the many jealous gods and goddesses to be favored and propitiated—instead of this there was a converted Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whose characteristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. And instead of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the fine rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily recognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words into the strange tongue of the Bengali.
At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives even of those of
“Deaf ear and soul uncaring”
who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no desire to preach, I set down these things, simply because they are as obvious as temples or scenery to any Oriental traveller who travels with open eyes and open mind.
But let us now go to Benares, the fountain-head of the Hindu faith, the city which is to it what Mecca is to Mohammedanism and more than Jerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares is so important that I must give more than a paragraph to my impressions of it.
The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I found surprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many-storied pilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious to win the favor of the gods, tower like mountains from the river bank. A strange mingling of many styles and epochs of Oriental architecture are they, and yet mainly suggestive of the palaces and temples that lined the ancient Nile. An earthquake, too, has heightened the effect by leaving massive ruins, the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem to whisper tales even older than any building now standing in Benares. For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was old when the walls of Rome were built; it was historic when David sat on the throne of Israel.
But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly unlike these beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth may one see crowds like these—crowds that overflow the acres and acres of stone steps leading up from the river’s edge through the maze of buildings and spill off into the water. There are indeed all sorts and conditions of men and women. Princes come from afar with their gorgeous retinues and stately equipages, and go down into the bathing-places calling on the names of their gods as trustingly as the poor doomed leper who thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring the hoped-for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own households— they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained, man-borne palki and are taken within boats with closed sides, where they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and women, old and young, high and low (except the outcasts)—all come. There are once-brown Hindus with their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with limbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or that impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearest Hindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by dying in the sacred place.
A great many pilgrims—may God have pity, as He will, on their poor untutored souls—die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, ere they reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but many other aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that they have reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick work of the morrow’s funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the Ganges. “Rama, nama, satya hai” (The name of Rama is true): so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is wrapped in white if a man’s, in red if a woman’s, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before breakfast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that which was a breathing human being when the sun set the day before.
Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief that accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimes hired—for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wail heart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law—but somehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show little evidence of grief. “But where are the bereaved families?” I asked a Hindu priest as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor of burning human flesh. “Oh, those are the families you see there,” he replied. And sure enough they were—I suppose—although I had thought them only the persons hired to help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the funerals occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the cremation is concluded it is the son’s duty—in some places I visited, at least—to take a big stick and crack the skull in order to release his father’s spirit!
But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why should the Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his theology, is itself a curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul running its course through the bodies of beasts and men, the ultimate good, the greatest boon to be won from the propitiated gods, is “remerging in the general soul,” the Escape from Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and Self; not Annihilation itself but the Annihilation of Personality, of that sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement in human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that you are a son of God and that you will maintain a separate, conscious, responsible identity throughout eternity, Hinduism teaches that your spirit is a part of the Divine and will ultimately be reabsorbed into it. Its doctrine in this respect is much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably neither religion lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of the individual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian civilization, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic of the social and political institutions of the Orient.
TYPES AT DARJEELING, NORTHERN INDIA, AND AT DELHI, CENTRAL INDIA.
India has not a homogeneous population. There are almost as many races, types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The right-hand figure in the upper picture bears a striking resemblance to a North American Indian. The instrument in his hands is a praying-wheel.
Supi-yaw-lat and her “whackin’ white cheroot.” A Hindu girl.
TWO RANGOON TYPES.
Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one need not go far to find the Burmese girl Kipling has immortalized:
“‘Er petticoat was yaller and ’er little cap was green,
An er name was Supi-yaw-lat—jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Queen
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot.
An’ a wastin’ Christian kisses on a ‘eathen idol’s foot’”
{207 continued}
But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do not all die, nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred waters of “Mother Gunga,” as the Ganges is called. Naturally there are many temples in which they must worship, many priests whom they must support. There are said to be 2000 temples in Benares and the high priest of one of them—while sparring for a bigger tip for his services—told me that he was at the head of 400 priests supported by his establishment alone (the Golden Temple).
And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are “temples” in Benares—so-called “temples” that should minister to man’s holier nature, with so-called “priests” to act as guides to their foulness—that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for Hindu “religious”(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the endurance of the British Government, and at the Nepalese Temple I was told that the authorities do not allow such structures to be built now. Moreover, it is not only admitted that the temples in many parts of India are the resort of the lowest class of women, “temple girls” dedicated to gods and goddesses, but their presence is openly defended as proper.
Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanliness as they are from godliness. The Golden Temple with its sacred cows penned up in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked worshippers, its holy cesspool known as “The Well of Knowledge,” its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its lustful god Krishna, and its mercenary priests, is a good illustration. And the famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the misfortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on the ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, won a place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their monkey companions. I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmers were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to look at them.
That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares, discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindu religious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help his argument. Emerson’s phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, “What you are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”
Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get a better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to a happier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary of northern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range. In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highest mountains formed by the Almighty’s hand, the sublimest scenery on which the eye of mortal man may ever rest.
Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse and wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tour are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point we looked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a view whose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left there glittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twin attendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest mountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the view directly in front of us, for there only one third as far away as Everest, royal Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majesty toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kingly peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored the pure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or two had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues of its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of massive chasms and rugged foothills (these “foothills” themselves perhaps as high as the highest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higher yet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above which its further bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling silhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike’s Peak and imagine another Pike’s Peak piled on top; stand at the foot of Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitchells on top of one another above its highest point—the massive bulk in either case stretching thousands and thousands of feet above the line of everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga.
Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a view it was not meet for any but the high gods themselves to see. About it all was a suggestion of illimitableness, of more than earthly majesty, of infinite serenity and measureless calm, which sat upon our spirits with a certain eerie unworldliness.
It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I learned later that it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama Buddha dreamed his dream of the Nirvana and of its brooding and endless peace in which man’s fretful spirit—
“From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free”—
may find at last the rest that it has sought in vain through all our human realm of Time and Place.
Lucknow, India.