CHAPTER XVII.

BOMBAY.

Crossing the mouths of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay, we reached Bombay in little more than two days from Kurrachee; but as we rounded Colaba Point and entered the harbor, the setting sun was lighting up the distant ranges of the Western Ghauts, and by the time we had dropped anchor it was dark, so I slept on board.

I woke to find the day breaking over the peaked mountains of the Deccan, and revealing the wooded summits of the islands, while a light land breeze rippled the surface of the water, and the bay was alive with the bright lateen sails of the native cotton-boats. The many woods coming down in rich green masses into the sea itself lent a singular softness to the view, and the harbor echoed with the capstan-songs of all nations, from the American to the Beloochee, from the Swedish to the Greek.

The vegetation that surrounds the harbor, though the even mass of green is broken here and there by the crimson cones of the “gold mohur” trees, resembles that of Ceylon, and the scene is rather tropical than Indian, but there is nothing tropical and little that is Eastern in the bustle of the bay. The lines of huge steamers, and forests of masts backed by the still more crowded field of roofs and towers, impress you with a sense of wealth and worldliness from which you gladly seek relief by turning toward the misty beauty of the mountain islands and the Western Ghauts. Were the harbor smaller, it would be lovely; as it is, the distances are over-great.

Notwithstanding its vast trade, Bombay for purposes of defense is singularly weak. The absence of batteries from the entrance to so great a trading port strikes eyes that have seen San Francisco and New York, and the marks on the sea-wall of Bombay Castle of the cannon-balls of the African admirals of the Mogul should be a warning to the Bombay merchants to fortify their port against attacks by sea, but act as a reminder to the traveler that, from a military point of view, Kurrachee is a better harbor than Bombay, the approach to which can easily be cut off, and its people starved. One advantage, however, of the erection of batteries at the harbor‘s mouth would be, that the present fort might be pulled down, unless it were thought advisable to retain it for the protection of the Europeans against riots, and that in any case the broad space of cleared ground which now cuts the town in half might be partly built on.

The present remarkable prosperity of Bombay is the result of the late increase in the cotton-trade, to the sudden decline of which, in 1865 and 1866, has also been attributed the ruin that fell upon the city in the last-named year. The panic, from which Bombay has now so far recovered that it can no longer be said that she has “not one merchant solvent,” was chiefly a reaction from a speculation-madness, in which the shares in a land-reclamation company which never commenced its operations once touched a thousand per cent., but was intensified by the passage of the English panic-wave of 1866 across India and round the world.

Not even in Mississippi is cotton more completely king than in Bombay. Cotton has collected the hundred steamers and the thousands of native boats that are anchored between the Apollo Bunder and Mazagon; cotton has built the great offices and stores of seven and eight stories high; cotton has furnished the villas on Malabar Hill, that resemble the New Yorkers’ cottages on Staten Island.

The export of cotton from India rose from five millions’ worth in 1859 to thirty-eight millions’ worth in 1864, and the total exports of Bombay increased in the same proportion, while the population of the city rose from 400,000 to 1,000,000. We are accustomed to look at the East as standing still, but Chicago itself never took a grander leap than did Bombay between 1860 and 1864. The rebellion in America gave the impetus, but was not the sole cause of this prosperity; and the Indian cotton-trade, though checked by the peace, is not destroyed. Cotton and jute are not the only Indian raw products the export of which has increased suddenly of late. The export of wool increased twentyfold, of tobacco, threefold, of coffee, sevenfold in the last six years; and the export of Indian tea increased in five years from nothing to three or four hundred thousand pounds. The old Indian exports, those which we associate with the term “Eastern trade,” are standing still, while the raw produce trade is thus increasing:--spices, elephants’ teeth, pearls, jewels, bandannas, shellac, dates, and gum are all decreasing, although the total exports of the country have trebled in five years.

India needs but railroads to enable her to compete successfully with America in the growth of cotton, but the development of the one raw product will open out her hitherto unknown resources.

While staying at one of the great merchant-houses in the Fort, I was able to see that the commerce of Bombay has not grown up of itself. With some experience among hard workers in the English towns, I was, nevertheless, astonished at the work got through by senior clerks and junior partners at Bombay. Although at first led away by the idea that men who wear white linen suits all day, and smoke in rocking-chairs upon the balcony for an hour after breakfast, cannot be said to get through much work, I soon found that men in merchants’ houses at Bombay work harder than they would be likely to do at home. Their day begins at 6 A.M., and, as a rule, they work from then till dinner at 8 or 9 P.M., taking an hour for breakfast, and two for tiffin. My stay at Bombay was during the hottest fortnight in the year, and twelve hours’ work in the day, with the thermometer never under 90° all the night, is an exhausting life. Englishmen could not long survive the work, but the Bombay merchants are all Scotch. In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen. It is strange, indeed, that Scotland has not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.

Bombay life is not without its compensation. It is not always May or June, and from November to March the climate is all-but perfect. Even in the hottest weather, the Byculla Club is cool, and Mahabaleswar is close at hand, for short excursions, whenever the time is found; while the Bombay mango is a fruit which may bear comparison with the peaches of Salt Lake City, or the melons of San Francisco. The Bombay merchants have not time, indeed, to enjoy the beauties of their city, any more than Londoners have to visit Westminster Abbey or explore the Tower; and as for “tropical indolence,” or “Anglo-Indian luxury,” the bull-dogs are the only members of the English community in India who can discover anything but half-concealed hardships in the life. Each dog has his servant to attend to all his wants, and, knowing this, the cunning brute always makes the boy carry him up the long flights of stairs that lead to the private rooms over the merchants’ houses in the Fort.

Bombay bazaar is the gayest of gay scenes. Besides the ordinary crowd of any “native town,” there are solemn Jains, copper-colored Jews, white-coated Portuguese, Persians, Arabs, Catholic priests, bespangled nautch girls, and grinning Seedees. The Parsees are strongest of all the merchant peoples of Bombay in numbers, in intelligence, and in wealth. Among the shopkeepers of their race, there is an over-prominence of trade shrewdness in the expression of the face, and in the shape even of the head. The Louvre bust of Richelieu, in which we have the idea of a wheedler, is a common type in the Parsee shops of the Bombay bazaar. The Parsee people, however, whatever their looks, are not only in complete possession of Bombay, but are the dark-skinned race to which we shall have to intrust the largest share in the regeneration of the East. Trading as they do in every city between Galle and Astrakan, but everywhere attached to the English rule, they bear to us the relative position that the Greeks occupy toward Russia.

Both in religion and in education, the Parsees are, as a community, far in advance of the Indian Mohammedans, and of the Hindoos. Their creed has become a pure deism, in which God‘s works are worshiped as the manifestations or visible representatives of God on earth, fire, the sun, and the sea taking the first places; although in the climate of Bombay prayers to the sun must be made up of more supplications than thanksgivings. The Parsee men are soundly taught, and there is not a pauper in the whole tribe. In the education and elevation of women, no Eastern race has as yet done much, but the Parsees have done the most, and have paved the way for further progress.

In the matter of the seclusion of women, the Parsee movement has had some effect even upon others than Parsees, and the Hindoos of Bombay City stand far before even those of Calcutta in the earnestness and success of their endeavors to promote the moral elevation of women. Nothing can be done toward the regeneration of India so long as the women of all classes remain in their present degradation; and although many native gentlemen in Bombay already recognize the fact, and act upon it, progress is slow, since there is no basis upon which to begin. The Hindoos will not send their wives to schools where there are European lady teachers, for fear of proselytism taking place; and native women teachers are not yet to be found; hence all teaching must needs be left to men. Nothing, moreover, can be done with female children in Western India, where girls are married at from five to twelve years old.

I had not been two days in Bombay when a placard caught my eye, announcing a performance at the theater of “Romeo and Juliet, in the Maratta tongue;” but the play had no Friar Lawrence, no apothecary, and no nurse; it was nothing but a simple Maratta love-tale, followed by some religious tableaux. In the first piece an Englishman was introduced, and represented as kicking every native that crossed his path with the exclamation of “Damned fool:” at each repetition of which the whole house laughed. It is to be feared that this portion of the play was “founded upon fact.” On my way home through the native town at night, I came on a marriage procession better than any that I had seen. A band of fifers were screaming the most piercing of notes in front of an illuminated house, at which the horsemen and carriages were just arriving, both men and women clothed in jeweled robes, and silks of a hundred colors, that flashed and glittered in the blaze of the red torches. The procession, like the greater number of the most gorgeous ceremonials of Bombay, was conducted by Parsees to celebrate the marriage of one of their own people; but it is a curious fact that night marriages were forced upon the Parsees by the Hindoos, and one of the conditions upon which the Parsees were received into India was, that their marriage processions should take place at night.

The Caves of Elephanta have been many times described. The grandest sight of India, after the Taj, is the three-faced bust of the Hindoo Trinity, or God in his threefold character of Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. No Grecian sculpture that I have seen so well conveys the idea of Godhead. The Greeks could idealize man, the Italians can paint the saint, but the builders of Elephanta had the power of executing the highest ideal of a pagan god. The repose which distinguishes the heads of the Creator and Preserver is not the meditation of the saint, but the calm of unbounded power; and the Destroyer‘s head portends not destruction, so much as annihilation, to the world. The central head is, in its mysterious solemnity, that which the Sphinx should be, and is not, but one attribute alone is common to the expression of all three faces,--the presence of the Inscrutable.