CHAPTER VI.

MOHAMMEDAN CITIES.

Through Mirzapore, Allahabad, and Futtehpore, I passed on to Cawnpore, spending but little time at Allahabad; for though the city is strategically important, there is in it but little to be seen. Like all spots of the confluence of rivers, Allahabad is sacred with the Hindoos, for it stands, they say, at the meeting-point of no less than three great streams--the Ganges, the Jumna, and a river of the spirit-land. To us poor pagans the third stream is invisible; not so to the faithful. Catching a glimpse of Marochetti‘s statue at the Cawnpore well, as I hurried through that city, I diverged from the East Indian Railway, and took dawk-carriage to Lucknow.

As compared with other Indian cities, the capital of Oude is a town to be seen in driving rather than in walking; the general effects are superior in charm and beauty to the details, and the vast size of the city makes mere sight-seeing a work of difficulty. More populous before 1857 than either Calcutta or Bombay, it is still twice as large as Liverpool. Not only, however, is Lucknow the most perfect of the modern or Italianized Oriental towns, but there are in it several buildings that have each the charm of an architecture special to itself. Of these, the Martinière is the most singular, and it looks like what it is--the freak of a wealthy madman. Its builder was General Martine, a Frenchman in the service of the Kings of Oude. Not far behind the Martinière is the Dilkousha--a fantastic specimen of an Oriental hunting-lodge. The ordinary show-building of the place, the Kaiser-Bagh, or Palace of the Kings of Oude, is a paltry place enough, but there is a certain grandeur in the view of the great Imaumbara and the Hooseinabád from a point whence the two piles form to the eye but one. The great Imaumbara suffered terribly in 1858 from the wanton destruction which our troops committed everywhere during the war of the mutiny. Had they confined themselves to outrages such as these, however, but little could have been said against the conduct of the war. There is too much fear that the English, unless held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition toward cruelty, wherever they have a weak enemy to meet.

The stories of the Indian mutiny and of the Jamaica riot are but two out of many--two that we happen to have heard; but the Persian war in 1857 and the last of the Chinese campaigns are not without their records of deliberate barbarity and wrong. From the first officer of one of the Peninsular and Oriental steamers, which was employed in carrying troops up the Euphrates during the Persian war, I heard a story that is the type of many such. A Persian drummer-boy of about ten years old was seen bathing from the bank one morning by the officers on deck. Bets were made as to the chance of hitting him with an Enfield rifle, and one of the betters killed him at the first shot.

It is not only in war-time that our cruelty comes out; it is often seen in trifles during peace. Even a traveler, indeed, becomes so soon used to see the natives wronged in every way by people of quiet manner and apparent kindness of disposition, that he ceases to record the cases. In Madras roads, for instance, I saw a fruit-seller hand up some limes to a lower-deck port, just as we were weighing anchor. Three Anglo-Indians (men who had been out before) asked in chorus, “How much?” “One quarter rupee.” “Too much.” And, without more ado, paying nothing, they pelted the man with his own limes, of which he lost more than half. In Ceylon, near Bentotté rest-house, a native child offered a handsome cowrie (of a kind worth in Australia about five shillings, and certainly worth something in Ceylon) to the child of a Mauritius coffee-planter who was traveling with us to Columbo, himself an old Indian officer. The white child took it, and would not give it up. The native child cried for money, or to have his shell back, but the mother of the white child exclaimed, “You be hanged; it‘s worth nothing;” and off came the shell with us in the dawk. Such are the small but galling wrongs inflicted daily upon the Indian natives. It was a maxim of the Portuguese Jesuits that men who live long among Asiatics seldom fail to learn their vices; but our older civilians treat the natives with strict justice, and Anglo-Indian ladies who have been reared in the country are generally kind to their own servants, if somewhat harsh toward other natives. It is those who have been in the country from five to ten years, and especially soldiers, who treat the natives badly. Such men I have heard exclaim that the new penal code has revolutionized the country. “Formerly,” they say, “you used to send a man to a police-officer or a magistrate with a note:--‘My dear ----. Please give the bearer twenty lashes.’ But now the magistrates are afraid to act, and your servant can have you fined for beating him.” In spite of the lamentations of Anglo-Indians over the good old days, I noticed in all the hotels in India the significant notice, “Gentlemen are earnestly requested not to strike the servants.”

The jokes of a people against themselves are not worth much, but may be taken in aid of other evidence. The two favorite Anglo-Indian stories are that of the native who, being asked his religion, said, “Me Christian--me get drunk like massa;” and that of the young officer who, learning Hindostanee in 1858, had the difference between the negative “né” and the particle “ne” explained to him by the moonshee, when he exclaimed: “Dear me! I hanged lots of natives last year for admitting that they had not been in their villages for months. I suppose they meant to say that they had not left their villages for months.” It is certain that in the suppression of the mutiny hundreds of natives were hanged by Queen‘s officers who, unable to speak a word of any native language, could neither understand evidence nor defense.

It is in India, when listening to a mess-table conversation on the subject of looting, that we begin to remember our descent from Scandinavian sea-king robbers. Centuries of education have not purified the blood: our men in India can hardly set eyes upon a native prince or a Hindoo palace before they cry, “What a place to break up!” “What a fellow to _loot_!” When I said to an officer who had been stationed at Secrole in the early days of the mutiny, “I suppose you were afraid that the Benares people would have attacked you,” his answer was, “Well, for my part, I rather hoped they would, because then we should have thrashed them, and looted the city. It hadn‘t been looted for two hundred years.”

Those who doubt that Indian military service makes soldiers careless of men‘s lives, reckless as to the rights of property, and disregardful of human dignity, can hardly remember the letters which reached home in 1857, in which an officer in high command during the march upon Cawnpore reported, “Good bag to-day; polished off ---- rebels,” it being borne in mind that the “rebels” thus hanged or blown from guns were not taken in arms, but villagers apprehended “on suspicion.” During this march, atrocities were committed in the burning of villages, and massacre of innocent inhabitants, at which Mohammed Togluk himself would have stood ashamed, and it would be to contradict all history to assert that a succession of such deeds would not prove fatal to our liberties at home.

The European officers of native regiments, and many officers formerly in the Company‘s service, habitually show great kindness to the natives, but it is the benevolent kindness of the master for a favorite slave, of the superior for men immeasurably beneath him; there is little of the feeling which a common citizenship should bestow, little of that equality of man and man which Christianity would seem to teach, and which our Indian government has for some years favored.

At Lucknow, I saw the Residency, and at Cawnpore, on my return to the East Indian Railway, the intrenchments which were, each of them, the scene in 1857 of those defenses against the mutineers generally styled “glorious” or “heroic,” though made by men fighting with ropes about their necks. The successful defenses of the fort at Arrah and of the Lucknow Residency were rather testimonies to the wonderful fighting powers of the English than to their courage,--for cowards would fight when the alternative was, fight or die. As far as Oude was concerned, the “rebellion” of 1857 seems to have been rather a war than a mutiny; but the habits of the native princes would probably have led them to have acted as treacherously at Lucknow in the case of a surrender as did the Nana at Cawnpore, and our officers wisely determined that in no event would they treat for terms. What is to be regretted is that we as conquerors should have shown the Oude insurgents no more mercy than they would have shown to us, and that we should have made use of the pretext that the rising was a mere mutiny of our native troops, as an excuse for hanging in cold blood the agriculturists of Oude. Whatever the duplicity of their rulers, whatever the provocation to annexation may have been, there can be no doubt that the revolution in the land-laws set on foot by us resulted in the offer of a career as native policemen or railway ticket-clerks to men whose ancestors were warriors and knights when ours wore woad; and we are responsible before mankind for having treated as flagrant treason and mutiny a legitimate war on the part of the nobility of Oude. In the official papers of the government of the Northwest Provinces, the so-called “mutiny” is styled more properly “a grievous civil war.”

There is much reason to fear, not that the mutiny will be too long remembered, but that it will be too soon forgotten. Ten years ago, Monghyr was an ash-heap, Cawnpore a name of horror, Delhi a stronghold of armed rebels, yet now we can travel without change of cars through peaceful and prosperous Monghyr and Cawnpore--a thousand and twenty miles--in forty hours, and find at the end of our journey that shaded boulevards have already taken the place of the walls of Delhi.

Quitting the main line of the East Indian Railway at Toondla Junction, I passed over a newly-made branch road to Agra. The line was but lately opened, and birds without number sat upon the telegraph-posts, and were seemingly too astonished to fly away from the train, while, on the open barrens, herds of Indian antelopes grazed fearlessly, and took no notice of us when we passed.

Long before we entered Akbarabad, as the city should be called, by the great new bridge across the Jumna, I had sighted in the far distance the majestic, shining dome of the famed Taj Mahal; but when arrived within the city, I first visited the citadel and ramparts. The fort and palace of Akbar are the Moslem creed in stone. Without--turned toward the unbeliever and the foe--the far-famed triple walls, frowning one above the other with the frown that a hill-fanatic wears before he strikes the infidel; within is the secure paradise of the believing “Emperor of the world”--delicious fountains pouring into basins of the whitest marble, beds of rose and myrtle, balconies and pavilions; part of the zenana, or women‘s wing, overhanging the river, and commanding the distant snow-dome of the Taj. Within, too, the “Motee Musjid”--“Pearl of Mosques” in fact as well as name--a marble-cloistered court, to which an angel architect could not add a stone, nor snatch one from it, without spoiling all. These for believers; for non-believers the grim old Saracenic “Hall of the Seat of Judgment.” The palace, except the mosque, which is purity itself, is overlaid with a crust of gems. There is one famed chamber--a woman‘s bath-house--the roof and sides of which are covered with tiny silver-mounted mirrors, placed at such angles as to reflect to infinity the figures of those who stand within the bath; and a court is near at hand, paved with marble squares in black and white, over which Akbar and his vizier used to sit and gravely play at draughts with dancing girls for “pieces.”

On the river bank, a mile from Akbar‘s palace, in the center of a vast garden entered through the noblest gateways in the world, stands the Taj Mahal, a terrace rising in dazzling whiteness from a black mass of cypresses, and bearing four lofty, delicate minars, and the central pile that gleams like an Alp against the deep-blue sky--minars, terrace, tomb, all of spotless marble and faultless shape. Its Persian builders named the Taj “the palace floating in the air.”

Out of the fierce heat and blazing sunlight you enter into chill and darkness, but soon begin to see the hollow dome growing into form above your head, and the tomb itself--that of Noor Mahal, the favorite queen of Shah Jehan--before you, and beside it her husband‘s humbler grave. Though within and without the Taj is white, still here you find the walls profusely jeweled, and the purity retained. Flowers are pictured on every block in mosaic of cinnamon-stone, carnelian, turquoise, amethyst, and emerald; the corridors contain the whole Koran, inlaid in jet-black stone, yet the interior as a whole exceeds in chastity the spotlessness of the outer dome. Oriental, it is not barbaric, and a sweet melancholy is the effect the Taj produces on the mind, when seen by day; in the still moonlight, the form is too mysterious to be touching.

In a Persian manuscript, there still remains a catalogue of the prices of the gems made use of in the building of the Taj, and of the places from which they came. Among those named are coral from Arabia, sapphires from Moldavia, amethysts from Persia, crystal from China, turquoises from Thibet, diamonds from Bundelcund, and lapis-lazuli from Ceylon. The stones were presents or tribute to the emperor, and the master-masons came mostly from Constantinople and Bagdad--a fact which should be remembered when we are discussing the intellectual capacity of the Bengal Hindoos. That a people who paint their cows pink with green spots, and their horses orange or bright red, should be the authors of the Pearl Mosque and the Taj, would be too wonderful for our belief; but the Mohammedan conquerors brought with them the chosen artists of the Moslem world. The contrast between the Taj and the Monkey Temple at Benares reminds one of that between a Cashmere and a Norwich shawl.

It is not at Agra alone that we meet the works of Mogul emperors. Much as we have ourselves done in building roads and bridges, there are many parts of Upper India where the traces of the Moslem are still more numerous than are at present those of the later conquerors of the unfortunate Hindoos. Mosques, forts, conduits, bridges, gardens--all the works of the Moguls are both solid and magnificent, and it was with almost reverential feelings that I made my pilgrimage to the tomb at Secundra of the great Emperor Akbar, grandfather of Shah Jehan, son of Hoomayoon, and founder of Agra City.

It is to be remarked that the Mohammedans in India make a considerable show for their small numbers. Of the great cities of India, the three Presidency towns are English; and the three gigantic cities of Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow, chiefly Mohammedan. Benares alone is a Hindoo city, and even in Benares the Mohammedans have their temples. All the great buildings of India are Mohammedan; so are all the great works that are not English. Yet even in the Agra district the Mohammedans are only one-twelfth of the population, but they live chiefly in the towns.

The history of the Mogul empire of India from the time of the conquest of the older empire by Tamerlane in the fourteenth century, and the forced conversion to Mohammedanism of a vast number of Hindoos, and that of Akbar‘s splendor and enormous power, down to the transportation of the last emperor in 1857 to Rangoon, and the shooting of his sons in a dry ditch by Captain Hodson, is one for us to ponder carefully. Those who know what we have done in India, say that even in our codes--and they are allowed to be our best claim to the world‘s applause--we fall short of Akbar‘s standard.

Delhi, the work of Shah Jehan, founder of the Taj and the Pearl Mosque, was built by himself in a wilderness, as was Agra by the Emperor Akbar. We who have seen the time that has passed since its foundation by Washington before the capital of the United States has grown out of the village shape, cannot deny that the Mogul emperors, if they were despots, were at least tyrants possessed of imperial energy. Akbar built Agra twenty or thirty miles from Futtehpore Sikri, his former capital, but Jehan had the harder task of forcing his people to quit an earlier site not five miles from modern Delhi, while Akbar merely moved his palace and let the people follow.

Delhi suffered so much at our hands during the storm in 1857, and has suffered so much since in the way of Napoleonic boulevards intended to prevent the necessity of storming it again, that it must be much changed from what it was before the war. The walls which surround the whole city are nearly as grand as those of the fort at Agra, and the gate towers are very Gibraltars of brick and stone, as we found to our cost when we battered the Cashmere Gate in 1857. The palace and the Motee Musjid are extremely fine, but inferior to their namesakes at Agra; and the Jumna Musjid--reputed the most beautiful as it is the largest mosque in the world--impressed me only by its size. The view, however, from its minars is one of the whole Northwest. The vast city becomes an ant-heap, and you instinctively peer out into space, and try to discern the sea toward Calcutta or Bombay.

The historical memories that attach to Delhi differ from those that we associate with the name of Agra. There is little pleasure in the contemplation of the zenana, where the miserable old man, the last of the Moguls, dawdled away his years.