Part 20

The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing to the troubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brahminism is that she is responsible through some evil committed either in this existence or a previous one, for the death of her husband, and the cruelest indignities of the Hindu social system are reserved for the bereaved and unfortunate woman. If a man or boy die, no matter if his wife is yet a prattling girl in her mother's home, she can never remarry, but is doomed to live forever as a despised slave in the home of his father and mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved; and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humiliation the gods are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her. In a school I visited in Calcutta I was told that there were two little widows, one five years old and one six.

Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped the practice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow's duty to burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. "It is proper for a woman after her husband's death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws, "to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000 years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve an inviolable chastity." This rite of self-immolation was known as suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the suttees numbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stone with carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where a widow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find these gruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indian roadsides. {244} Moreover, the present general treatment of widows in India is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare that they would prefer the suttee.

And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that a kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blacken the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customs and sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in the case of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows of their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it."

Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless while the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument ever erected in memory of a woman's love. True, Shah Jehan, the monarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet Mohammedanism, although its customs are less brutal, places woman in almost the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status of woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great religions of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an end by referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. Of all that I saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of the Himalayas from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the view of the Taj Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon.

The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, "Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of God," {245} is enough to assure one that Arjmand Banu, "The Exalted One of the Palace," whose dust it was built to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and feature. We know but little about her. There are pictures which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; there are records to show that it was in 1615 that she became the bride of the prince who later began to rule as "His Imperial Highness, the second Alexander (Lord of the two Horns) King Shah Jehan," and we may see in Agra the rooms in the palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian Nights-like splendor characteristic of Oriental courts,

"Mumtaz-i-Mahal," they called her--"Pride of the Palace." And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of motherhood--that way along which woman finds the testing of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her existence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that forever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seven times she walked the mother's ancient way down to the gates of Death and brought back a new life with her, but the eighth time she did not return. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carrying in his heart a sorrow which not all his pomp nor power could heal, declared that she should have the most beautiful tomb that the mind of man could plan. So the Taj was built--"in memory of a deathless love," and in a garden which is always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue of fountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, "like four tall court-ladies tending their princess," there stands this dream in marble, "the most exquisite building on earth."

With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhood of the country in which it is so incongruously placed.

Madras, India.

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XXV

MORE LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK

There are many show places and "points of interest" in India that have a hundred times more attention in the guide books, but there is a simple tomb in Lucknow--it cost no more than many a plain farmer's tombstone in our country burying-places--which impressed me more than anything else I saw excepting only the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal and the view of Benares from the river.

It is the tomb of the heroic Sir Henry Lawrence, who died so glorious a death in the great mutiny of 1857. No commander in all India has planned more wisely for the defence of the men and women under his care; and yet the siege had only begun when he was mortally wounded. He called his successor and his associates to him, and at last, having omitted no detail of counsel or information that might enable them to carry out his far-seeing plans, he roused himself to dictate his own immortal epitaph:

Here Lies

HENRY LAWRENCE

Who Tried to Do His Duty

May the Lord Have Mercy on his Soul.

And so to-day these lines, "in their simplicity sublime," mark his last resting place; and one feels somehow that not even the great Akbar in Secundra or Napoleon in Paris has a worthier monument.

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There are many places in India to which I should like to give a paragraph. I should like to write much of Delhi and its palaces in which the Great Moguls once lived in a splendor worthy of the monarchs in the Arabian Nights--no wonder the stately Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Public Audience, bears the famous inscription in Persian:

"If there be Paradise on earth. It is this, oh, it is this, oh, it is this!"

In the ruins of seven dead and deserted Delhis round about the present city and the monuments and memorials which commemorate "the old far-off unhappy things" of conquered dynasties and romantic epochs, there is also material for many a volume.

Then there is Cawnpore with its tragic and sickening memories of the English women and children (with the handful of men) who were butchered in cold blood by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant; and I was greatly interested in meeting in Muttra one of the few living men, a Christianized Brahmin, who as a small boy witnessed that terrible massacre which for cruelty and heartlessness is almost without a parallel in modern history.

In Agra is the Pearl Mosque, which is itself an architectural triumph splendid enough to make the city famous if the Taj had not already made it so; the Great Temple in Madura is one of the most impressive of the strictly Hindu structures in India; in Madras I found a curious reminder of early missionary activity in the shape of a cathedral which is supposed to shelter the remains of the Apostle Thomas; and the ruins of the once proud and imperial but now utterly deserted cities of Amber and Fatehpuhr-Sikri have a strange and melancholy interest. But all these have been often enough described, and there are things of greater pith and moment in present-day India to which we can better give attention.

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One thing concerning India, which should perhaps have been said in the beginning, but which has not had attention until now, is the fact that it is no more a homogeneous country than Europe is--has perhaps, indeed, a greater variety of languages, peoples, and racial and traditional differences than the European continent. I have already called attention to the fact that there are 2378 castes. There are also 40 distinct nationalities or races and 180 languages. For an utterly alien race to govern peacefully such a heterogeneous conglomeration of peoples, representing all told nearly one fifth of the population of the whole earth, is naturally one of the most difficult administrative feats in history, and Mr. Roosevelt probably did not give the English too high praise when he declared: "In India we encounter the most colossal example history affords of the successful administration by men of European blood of a thickly populated region in another continent. It is the greatest feat of the kind that has been performed since the break-up of the Roman Empire. Indeed, it is a greater feat than was performed under the Roman Empire."

I was interested to find that the American-born residents of India give, if anything, even higher praise to British rule than the British themselves. "I regard the English official in India," one distinguished American in southern India went so far as to say to me, "as the very highest type of administrative official in the world. More than this, 90 per cent. of the common people would prefer to trust the justice of the British to that of the Brahmins." In Delhi an American missionary expressed the opinion that the American Government, if in control of India, would not be half so lenient with the breeders of sedition and anarchy as is the British Government.

It should be said, however, that there are now fewer of these malcontents, and these few are less influential than at any time for some years past. In Madras I was very glad to get an interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer, one of the most distinguished of the Hindu leaders.

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[Illustration: BATHING IN THE SACRED GANGES AT BENARES.]

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[Illustration: THE BATTLE-SCARRED AND WORLD-FAMOUS RESIDENCY AT LUCKNOW.] The writer was shown through the historic fortress by William Ireland, one of the few living survivors of the great siege. In Muttra the writer also met Isa Doss, a Hindu (now a Christian preacher) who saw the massacre of the English women and children by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant.

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"Lord Morley's reforms," he declared, "have been so extensive and have satisfied such a large proportion of our people that the extremists no longer have any considerable following. We no longer feel that it is England's intention to keep us in the condition of hopeless helots. The highest organization for the government of the country is the British Secretary of State and his council; Lord Morley placed two Indians there. In India the supreme governmental organization is the Governor-General and his council; he put an Indian there. In three large provinces--Bombay, Madras, and Bengal--Indians have been added to the executive councils."

"For the first time, too, our people are really an influential factor in the provincial and imperial legislative councils. We have had representation in these councils, it is true, for fifty years; but it was not until 1892 that representation became considerable, and even then the right of the people to name members was not recognized. So-called constituencies were given authority to make nominations, but the government retained the right to reject or confirm these at pleasure."

"Now, however, through Lord Morley's and Lord Minto's reforms, the number of Indians on these councils has been more than doubled--in the case of the Imperial Council actually trebled--and the absolute right given the people to elect a large proportion, averaging about 40 per cent. of the total number, without reference to the wishes of the government. In fact, with two fifths of all the members chosen by the people and a considerable number of other members chosen from municipal boards, chambers of commerce, universities, etc., we now see the spectacle of Provincial Councils with non-official members in the majority. In Bombay the non-official element is two thirds of the whole; and in Madras also the non-official members could defeat the government if they chose to combine and do so. But of course the greater willingness of the government to cooperate with the people has brought {252} about a greater willingness on the part of the people to cooperate with the government."

"The appointment of Indians to the highest offices charged with the responsibility of government; the increased representation given the people on the legislative and executive councils; the recognition of the right of the people to elect instead of merely to nominate members; and the surrender of majority-control to the non-official element--all these are very substantial gains, but the spirit back of them is worth more than the reforms themselves. While there is a feeling in some quarters that the government has not gone far enough, the large majority of my educated countrymen regard the advance as sufficient for the present and look forward with hope to a further expansion of our powers and privileges."

If I may judge by what I gathered from conversation with Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, I should say that no one has given a more accurate and clear-cut statement of the feelings of the Indian people than has Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer in these few terse sentences.

"The wealth of the Indies" has been a favorite phrase with romantic writers from time immemorial; and a book now before me speaks in the most matter-of-course way of "the prosperous and peaceful empire." Yet the Indian is really one of the poorest men on earth. The wealth with which the Moguls and kings of former ages dazzled the world was wrung from the hard hands of peasants who were governed upon the theory that what the king wanted was his, and what he left was theirs. Even the splendid palaces and magnificent monuments, such as the Taj Mahal, were built largely by forced, unpaid labor. In some cases it is said that the monarch did not even deign to furnish food for the men whom he called away from the support of their families.

An ignorant people is always a poor people, and we have already seen that only 10 per cent. of the men in India can read or write, and of these 10 per cent. the majority are Brahmins. {253} Then, again, the people use only the crudest tools and machinery; and a third factor in keeping them poor is the system of early marriage. When it is a common thing for a boy of fifteen or sixteen to be the father of a growing family, it is easy to see that not much can be laid up for rainy days.

Owing to the absence of diversified industries, the crudeness of the tools, the ignorance of the men behind the tools, and the over-crowded population of folk hard-pressed by poverty, the wages are what an American would call shamefully low. An Englishman who had lived in an interior jungle-village, five days by bullock-cart from a railway, told me that twenty years ago laborers were paid 2 rupees (64 cents) a month, boarding themselves, or 4 rupees ($1.28) a year and grain. The wages have now advanced, however, to 5 rupees ($1.60) a month where the man boards himself; and for day labor the wages are now five annas (10 cents) instead of two annas (4 cents) twenty years ago.

In Madura a well-educated Hindu with whom I was talking rang the familiar changes on the "increasing cost of living," and pointed out that in four or five years the cost of unskilled labor has increased from eight to twelve cents. "And in some towns," he declared, looking at the same time as if he feared I should not believe his story, "they are demanding as much as 8 annas (16 cents) a day!" In Bombay I was told that coolies average 16 to 20 cents a day; spinners in jute factories, $1.16 a week, weavers, $1.82. In a great cotton factory I visited in Madras, employing about 4000 natives (all males) the average wages for eleven and a half hours' work is $3.84 to $4.85 a month. In Ahmedabad, another cotton manufacturing centre, about the same scale is in force. Miners get 16 to 28 cents a day. Servants, $3.20 to $3.84 a month.

The women in Calcutta (some of them with their babies tied out to stakes while they worked) whom I saw carrying brick and mortar on their heads to the tops of three and four story buildings, get 3 to 4 annas a day--6 to 8 cents. In {254} Darjeeling the bowed and toil-cursed women laden like donkeys, whom I found bringing stone on their backs from quarries two or three miles away managed to make 12 to 16 cents a day for their bitter toil up steep hills and down, for eight long hours. Women who carried lighter loads of mud, making 50 trips averaging 20 miles of travel, earned only 8 cents, as did also the women with babies strapped on their backs, who nevertheless toiled as steadily as the others.

"As for the men I pay these strong, brawny Bhutia fellows 8 annas (16 cents) a day," the contractor told me, "but those Nepalese who are not so strong get only 5 annas for shovelling earth."

Director of Agriculture Couchman of the Madras Presidency gave me the following as the usual scale of wages for farm work: men 6 to 8 cents; women 4 to 6; children 3 to 5, the laborers boarding themselves.

With this Mr. Couchman, whom I have just mentioned, I had a very interesting interview in Madras which should shed some light on Indian agriculture.

"In Madras Presidency," he told me, "we cultivate 10,000,000 acres of rice, which is the favorite food of the people. As it is expensive compared with some cheaper foods, however, the people put 4,500,000 acres to a sort of sorghum--not the sorghum cultivated for syrup or sugar but for the seed to be used as a grain food--and also grow 4,000,000 acres of millet the seed of which are used as a grain food."

"Then we grow 2,000,000 acres in cotton, but cotton in India is grown only on black soils. We want some for red soils, and we are also seeking to increase the yield and the length of staple in the indigenous varieties. In both these points the Indian cotton now compares very badly with the American. Our average yield is only about 50 to 100 pounds lint per acre, and the staple is only three quarters to five eights of an inch in length, and not suitable for spinning over 20s in warp."

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[Illustration: BURNING THE BODIES OF DEAD HINDUS.]

[Illustration: AN INDIAN CAMEL CART.]

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[Illustration: TRAVEL IN INDIA.] How the author and his friends made the trip from Jeypore to Amber

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"Of course, with our dense population, land is high and our system of farming expensive. Good irrigated wet land, used chiefly for rice, is worth from $166 to $500 per acre, renting for $20 to $25; dry land sells for $17 to $133 per acre and rents for from $3 to $5. It is commonly said that a man and his family should make a living on two acres, and the usual one-man farm consists of 5 to 10 acres of wet land or 30 to 50 of dry. The wet land farmers are generally renters, the others owners. Of course, you have noticed that no horses are used on the farms, nothing but bullocks; nor do I think that horses will be used for a long time to come. We are making some progress in introducing better methods of farming. Little, of course, can be done with bulletins where such a small percentage of the people can read, but demonstration farms have proved quite successful, and the government is much pleased with the results obtained from employing progressive native farmers to instruct their neighbors."

The advancing price of cotton has proved a matter of hardly less interest to India than to America, and for several years the crop has been steadily increasing. The 1910-11 crop (the picking ended in May) was almost 4,500,000 bales of 400 pounds each. The necessity for growing food crops, however, is so imperative that the cotton acreage cannot be greatly increased--at least not soon. During our Civil War, it will be remembered, India did her uttermost; and Bombay laid the foundations of her greatness in the high prices then paid for the fleecy staple. Hers is still a great cotton market and down one of her main streets from morning to night one sees an almost continuous line of cotton carts, drawn by bullocks and driven by men almost as black as our negroes in the South. I was very much interested in seeing how much better the lint is baled than in America. In the first place the bagging is better--less ragged than that we commonly use--and in the next place it is held in place by almost twice as many encircling bands or ties as our bales.

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All in all, I regret to say good-by to India. Its people are poor; its industries primitive; its religion atrocious; its climate generally oppressive, and yet, after all, there is something fascinating about the country. For one thing, there is a large infusion of Aryan blood among the people, and after one has spent several months among the featureless faces of the Chinese and Japanese, these Aryan-type faces are strangely attractive. The speech of the people, too, is picturesque beyond that of almost any other folk, as readers of Kipling have come to know. It is very common for a beggar to call out, "Oh, Protector of the Poor, you are my father and mother, help me, help me."

"I salute you," said our old guide at the Kutab Minar, speaking in his native Hindustani, which my friend interpreted for me. "I know that you are the kings of the realm, but I have eaten your salt before, and I am willing to eat it again."