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- Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Travel to the Orient with Rudyard Kipling in the latest instalment of Hesperus's bestselling 'On' series. Rudyard Kipling spent many years abroad and his relationship with India is explored in several of his works, both fiction and non-fiction. After leaving school, Kipling was sent to Lahore to take up a job at a local newspaper. He would go on, a few years later, to take up a post at the Pioneer in Allahabad. Kipling said that only a few hours after arriving in India: 'my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength…' Whilst working for the Pioneer Kipling wrote a series of sketches about life in India. In 1889, he left India to become the Pioneer's roving correspondent; he would travel to Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canton and Japan. This collection comprises essays from both his sketches of India and the rest of the Orient, showcasing Kipling's observations, opinions and itinerary. Although his writings might feature in some places outdated opinions and points of view, his eye for detail, character and colour, along with his masterful style, give these pieces a timeless feel and shed new light on the writings of a writer with which we thought we were familiar.
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Kiplingonthe Orient
Contents
India
Of the beginning of things. Of the Taj and the Globetrotter. The young man from Manchester and certain moral reflections.
Except for those who, under compulsion of a sick certificate, are flying Bombaywards, it is good for every man to see some little of the great Indian Empire and the strange folk who move about it. It is good to escape for a time from the House of Rimmon – be it office or cutchery – and to go abroad under no more exacting master than personal inclination, and with no more definite plan of travel than has the horse, escaped from pasture, free upon the countryside. The first result of such freedom is extreme bewilderment, and the second reduces the freed to a state of mind which, for his sins, must be the normal portion of the Globetrotter – the man who ‘does’ kingdoms in days and writes books upon them in weeks. And this desperate facility is not as strange as it seems. By the time that an Englishman has come by sea and rail via America, Japan, Singapore, and Ceylon, to India, he can – these eyes have seen him do so – master in five minutes the intricacies of the Indian Bradshaw, and tell an old resident exactly how and where the trains run. Can we wonder that the intoxication of success in hasty assimilation should make him overbold, and that he should try to grasp – but a full account of the insolent Globetrotter must be reserved. He is worthy of a book. Given absolute freedom for a month, the mind, as I have said, fails to take in the situation and, after much debate, contents itself with following in old and well-beaten ways – paths that we in India have no time to tread, but must leave to the country cousin who wears his pagri tail-fashion down his back, and says ‘cabman’ to the driver of the ticca-ghari.
Now, Jeypore from the Anglo-Indian point of view is a station on the Rajputana-Malwa line, on the way to Bombay, where half an hour is allowed for dinner, and where there ought to be more protection from the sun than at present exists. Some few, more learned than the rest, know that garnets come from Jeypore, and here the limits of our wisdom are set. We do not, to quote the Calcutta shopkeeper, come out ‘for the good of our ’ealth’, and what touring we accomplish is for the most part off the line of rail.
For these reasons, and because he wished to study our winter birds of passage, one of the few thousand Englishmen in India on a date and in a place which have no concern with the story, sacrificed all his self-respect and became – at enormous personal inconvenience – a Globetrotter going to Jeypore, and leaving behind him for a little while all that old and well-known life in which Commissioners and Deputy-Commissioners, Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Aides-de-camp, Colonels and their wives, Majors, Captains, and Subalterns after their kind move and rule and govern and squabble and fight and sell each other’s horses and tell wicked stories of their neighbours. But before he had fully settled into his part or accustomed himself to saying, ‘Please take out this luggage’, to the coolies at the stations, he saw from the train the Taj wrapped in the mists of the morning.
There is a story of a Frenchman who feared not God, nor regarded man, sailing to Egypt for the express purpose of scoffing at the Pyramids and – though this is hard to believe – at the great Napoleon who had warred under their shadow. It is on record that that blasphemous Gaul came to the Great Pyramid and wept through mingled reverence and contrition; for he sprang from an emotional race. To understand his feelings it is necessary to have read a great deal too much about the Taj, its design and proportions; to have seen execrable pictures of it at the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition, to have had its praises sung by superior and travelled friends till the brain loathed the repetition of the word; and then, sulky with want of sleep, heavy-eyed, unwashed, and chilled, to come upon it suddenly. Under these circumstances everything, you will concede, is in favour of a cold, critical, and not too impartial verdict. As the Englishman leaned out of the carriage he saw first an opal-tinted cloud on the horizon, and, later, certain towers. The mists lay on the ground, so that the splendour seemed to be floating free of the earth; and the mists rose in the background, so that at no time could everything be seen clearly. Then as the train sped forward, and the mists shifted, and the sun shone upon the mists, the Taj took a hundred new shapes, each perfect and each beyond description. It was the Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come; it was the realization of ‘the gleaming halls of dawn’ that Tennyson sings of; it was veritably the ‘aspiration fixed’, the ‘sigh made stone’ of a lesser poet; and, over and above concrete comparisons, it seemed the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy, and all things unhappy. That was the mystery of the building! It may be that the mists wrought the witchery, and that the Taj seen in the dry sunlight is only, as guidebooks say, a noble structure. The Englishman could not tell, and has made a vow that he will never go nearer the spot, for fear of breaking the charm of the unearthly pavilions.
It may be, too, that each must view the Taj for himself with his own eyes, working out his own interpretation of the sight. It is certain that no man can in cold blood and colder ink set down his impressions if he has been in the least moved.
To the one who watched and wondered that November morning the thing seemed full of sorrow – the sorrow of the man who built it for the woman he loved, and the sorrow of the workmen who died in the building – used up like cattle. And in the face of this sorrow the Taj flushed in the sunlight and was beautiful, after the beauty of a woman who has done no wrong.
Here the train ran in under the walls of Agra Fort, and another train – of thought incoherent as that written above – came to an end. Let those who scoff at overmuch enthusiasm look at the Taj and thenceforward be dumb. It is well on the threshold of a journey to be taught reverence and awe.
But there is no reverence in the Globetrotter: he is brazen. A Young Man from Manchester was travelling to Bombay in order – how the words hurt! – to be home by Christmas. He had come through America, New Zealand, and Australia, and finding that he had ten days to spare at Bombay, conceived the modest idea of ‘doing India’. ‘I don’t say that I’ve done it all; but you may say that I’ve seen a good deal.’ Then he explained that he had been ‘much pleased’ at Agra; ‘much pleased’ at Delhi; and, last profanation, ‘very much pleased’ at the Taj. Indeed, he seemed to be going through life just then ‘much pleased’ at everything. With rare and sparkling originality he remarked that India was a ‘big place’, and that there were many things to buy. Verily, this Young Man must have been a delight to the Delhi boxwallahs. He had purchased shawls and embroidery ‘to the tune of’ a certain number of rupees duly set forth, and he had purchased jewellery to another tune. These were gifts for friends at home, and he considered them ‘very Eastern’. If silver filigree work modelled on Palais Royal patterns, or aniline blue scarves be Eastern, he had succeeded in his heart’s desire. For some inscrutable end it had been decreed that man shall take a delight in making his fellow man miserable. The Englishman began to point out gravely the probable extent to which the Young Man from Manchester had been swindled, and the Young Man said: ‘By Jove! You don’t say so? I hate being done. If there’s anything I hate, it’s being done!’
He had been so happy in the thought of ‘getting home by Christmas’, and so charmingly communicative as to the members of his family for whom such and such gifts were intended, that the Englishman cut short the record of fraud and soothed him by saying that he had not been so very badly ‘done’, after all. This consideration was misplaced, for, his peace of mind restored, the Young Man from Manchester looked out of the window and, waving his hand over the Empire generally, said: ‘I say. Look here. All those wells are wrong, you know!’ The wells were on the wheel and inclined plane system; but he objected to the incline, and said that it would be much better for the bullocks if they walked on level ground. Then light dawned upon him, and he said: ‘I suppose it’s to exercise all their muscles. Y’know a canal horse is no use after he has been on the towpath for some time. He can’t walk anywhere but on the flat, y’know, and I suppose it’s just the same with bullocks.’ The spurs of the Aravalis, under which the train was running, had evidently suggested this brilliant idea which passed uncontradicted, for the Englishman was looking out of the window.
If one were bold enough to generalise after the manner of Globetrotters, it would be easy to build up a theory on the well incident to account for the apparent insanity of some of our cold weather visitors. Even the Young Man from Manchester could evolve a complete idea for the training of well-bullocks in the East at thirty seconds’ notice. How much the more could a cultivated observer from, let us say, an English constituency, blunder and pervert and mangle? We in this country have no time to work out the notion, which is worthy of the consideration of some leisurely Teuton intellect.
Envy may have prompted a too bitter judgement of the Young Man from Manchester; for, as the train bore him from Jeypore to Ahmedabad, happy in his ‘getting home by Christmas’, pleased as a child with his Delhi atrocities, pink-cheeked, whiskered, and superbly self-confident, the Englishman whose home for the time was a dark bungaloathsome hotel, watched his departure regretfully; for he knew exactly to what sort of genial, cheery British household, rich in untravelled kin, that Young Man was speeding. It is pleasant to play at Globetrotting; but to enter fully into the spirit of the piece, one must also be ‘going home for Christmas’.
The temple of Mahadeo and the manners of such as see India. The man by the water-troughs and his knowledge. The voice of the city and what it said. Personalities and the hospital. The house beautiful of Jeypore and its builders.
From the cotton press the Englishman wandered through the wide streets till he came into an Hindu temple – rich in marble stone and inlay, and a deep and tranquil silence, close to the Public Library of the State. The brazen bull was hung with flowers, and men were burning the evening incense before Mahadeo; while those who had prayed their prayer beat upon the bells hanging from the roof and passed out, secure in the knowledge that the God had heard them. If there be much religion, there is little reverence, as Westerns understand the term, at the services of the Gods of the East. A tiny little maiden, child of a monstrously ugly, wall-eyed priest, staggered across the marble pavement to the shrine and threw, with a gust of childish laughter, the blossoms she was carrying into the lap of the Great Mahadeo himself. Then she made as though she would leap up to the bell and ran away, still laughing, into the shadow of the cells behind the shrine, while her father explained that she was but a baby and that Mahadeo would take no notice. The temple, he said, was specially favoured by the Maharaja, and drew from lands an income of twenty thousand rupees a year. Thakoors and great men also gave gifts out of their benevolence; and there was nothing in the wide world to prevent an Englishman from following their example.
By this time – for Amber and the cotton press had filled the hours – night was falling, and the priests unhooked the swinging jets and began to light up the impassive face of Mahadeo with gas. They used Swedish matches!
Full night brought the hotel and its curiously composed human menagerie.
There is, if a workaday world will believe, a society entirely outside, and unconnected with, that of the station – a planet within a planet, where nobody knows anything about the Collector’s wife, the Colonel’s dinner party, or what was really the matter with the Engineer. It is a curious, an insatiably curious, thing, and its literature is Newman’s Bradshaw. Wandering ‘old arms-sellers’ and others live upon it, and so do the garnetmen and the makers of ancient Rajput shields. The world of the innocents abroad is a touching and unsophisticated place, and its very atmosphere urges the Anglo-Indian unconsciously to an extravagant mendacity. Can you wonder, then, that a guide of long-standing should in time grow to be an accomplished liar?
Into this world sometimes breaks the Anglo-Indian returned from leave, or a fugitive to the sea, and his presence is like that of a well-known landmark in the desert. The old arms-seller knows and avoids him, and he is detested by the jobber of gharis who calls every one ‘my lord’ in English, and panders to the ‘glaring race anomaly’ by saying that every carriage not under his control is ‘rotten, my lord, having been used by natives’. One of the privileges of playing at tourist is the brevet – rank of ‘Lord’.
There are many, and some very curious, methods of seeing India. One of these is buying English translations of the more Zolaistic of Zola’s novels and reading them from breakfast to dinnertime in the veranda. Yet another, even simpler, is American in its conception. Take a Newman’s Bradshaw and a blue pencil, and race up and down the length of the Empire, ticking off the names of the stations ‘done’. To do this thoroughly, keep strictly to the railway buildings and form your conclusions through the carriage windows. These eyes have seen both ways of working in full blast; and, on the whole, the first is the most commendable.
Let us consider now with due reverence the modern side of Jeypore. It is difficult to write of a nickel-plated civilisation set down under the immemorial Aravallis in the first state of Rajputana. The red-grey hills seem to laugh at it, and the ever-shifting sand dunes under the hills take no account of it, for they advance upon the bases of the monogrammed, coronet-crowned lamp posts, and fill up the points of the natty tramways near the waterworks, which are the outposts of the civilisation of Jeypore.
Escape from the city by the Railway Station till you meet the cactus and the mudbank and the Maharaja’s cotton press. Pass between a tramway and a trough for wayfaring camels till your foot sinks ankle-deep in soft sand, and you come upon what seems to be the fringe of illimitable desert – mound upon mound of tussocks overgrown with plumed grass where the parrots sit and swing. Here, if you have kept to the road, you shall find a dam faced with stone, a great tank, and pumping machinery fine as the heart of a municipal engineer can desire – pure water, sound pipes, and well-kept engines. If you belong to what is sarcastically styled an ‘able and intelligent municipality’ under the British Rule, go down to the level of the tank, scoop up the water in your hands and drink, thinking meanwhile of the defects of the town whence you came. The experience will be a profitable one. There are statistics in connection with the waterworks figures relating to ‘three throw plungers’, delivery and supply, which should be known to the professional reader. They would not interest the unprofessional who would learn his lesson among the thronged standpipes of the city.
While the Englishman was preparing in his mind a scathing rebuke for an erring municipality that he knew of, a camel swung across the sands, its driver’s jaw and brow bound mummy-fashion to guard against the dust. The man was evidently a stranger to the place, for he pulled up and asked the Englishman where the drinking troughs were. He was a gentleman and bore very patiently with the Englishman’s absurd ignorance of his dialect. He had come from some village, with an unpronounceable name, thirty kos away, to see his brother’s son, who was sick in the big hospital. While the camel was drinking the man talked, lying back along his mount. He knew nothing of Jeypore, except the names of certain Englishmen in it, the men who, he said, had made the waterworks and built the hospital for his brother’s son’s comfort.
And this is the curious feature of Jeypore; though happily the city is not unique in its peculiarity. When the late Maharaja ascended the throne, more than fifty years ago, it was his royal will and pleasure that Jeypore should advance. Whether he was prompted by love for his subjects, desire for praise, or the magnificent vanity with which Jey Singh must have been so largely dowered, are questions that concern nobody. In the latter years of his reign, he was supplied with Englishmen who made the state their fatherland, and identified themselves with its progress as only Englishmen can. Behind them stood the Maharaja ready to spend money with a lavishness that no Supreme Government would dream of; and it would not be too much to say that they together made the state what it is. When Ram Singh died, Madho Singh, his successor, a conservative Hindu, forbore to interfere in any way with the work that was going forward. It is said in the city that he does not overburden himself with the cares of State, the driving power being mainly in the hands of a Bengali, who has everything but the name of Minister. Nor do the Englishmen, it is said in the city, mix themselves with the business of government; their business being wholly executive.
They can, according to the voice of the city, do what they please, and the voice of the city – not in the main roads, but in the little side alleys where the stall-less bull blocks the path – attests how well their pleasure has suited the pleasure of the people. In truth, to men of action few things could be more delightful than having a state of fifteen thousand square miles placed at their disposal, as it were, to leave their mark on. Unfortunately for the vagrant traveller, those who work hard for practical ends prefer not to talk about their doings, and he must, therefore, pick up what information he can at second-hand or in the city. The men at the standpipes explain that the Maharaja Sahib’s father gave the order for the waterworks and that Yakub (Jacob) Sahib made them – not only in the city, but out away in the district. ‘Did the people grow more crops thereby?’ ‘Of course they did. Were canals made only to wash in?’ ‘How much more crops?’ ‘Who knows? The Sahib had better go and ask some official.’ Increased irrigation means increase of revenue for the State somewhere, but the man who brought about the increase does not say so.
After a few days of amateur Globetrotting, a shamelessness great as that of the other loafer – the red-nosed man who hangs about one garden and is always on the eve of starting for Calcutta – possesses the masquerader; so that he feels equal to asking a Resident for a parcel-gilt howdah, or dropping into dinner with a Lieutenant-Governor. No man has a right to keep anything back from a Globetrotter, who is a mild, temperate, gentlemanly, and unobtrusive seeker after truth. Therefore he who, without a word of enlightenment, sends the visitor into a city which he himself has beautified and adorned and made clean and wholesome, deserves unsparing exposure. And the city may be trusted to betray him. The malli in the Ram Newas Gardens – gardens which are finer than any in India and fit to rank with the best in Paris – says that the Maharaja gave the order and Yakub Sahib made the gardens. He also says that the hospital just outside the gardens was built by Yakub Sahib, and if the Sahib will go to the centre of the gardens, he will find another big building, a museum by the same hand.
