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vol. title: Vol Four of The Theosophical Society of The Arya Samaj of Arya-wart vol. period: Sept 1878 – Sept 1879 pages in vol.: 350 |
Around the World
Life in Bombay grew to be almost home life under the genial hospitality of our hosts on Malabar Point. Although we had been a week in Bombay, there was so much of Europe about us that we could not make up our minds that we were in India. We had not seen a tiger or a cobra, and all our associations were with Europeans. There was a club where you could read the English newspapers and the New York Herald. There was a racing club, where you could sit at your window and see the horses gallop over the course. There were two or three English newspapers published in Bombay, two in English—the Gazette and The Times of India, well printed and well written. It is wonderful how speedily you go through a paper that has no roots in your own country and how even as sad an article as a minute on the famine has no interest to you. Bombay is more European than Indian, and I suppose will always be so while the sea throws the commerce of the world upon her wharves. Much of the prosperity of Bombay—which you see in large majestic stores, in colleges, esplanades and wharves—came from our American war. “It is odd,” said an Englishman, “that Bombay and General Grant should be face to face, for the General ruined Bombay.”
Then came the story of the cotton mania which raged during the American war. The cessation of the cotton supply of the United States threw England back upon India and Egypt. The year before our war Bombay exported about $25,000,000 worth of cotton. During the war the average yearly export was over $100,000,000. Here was a gain to Bombay in four years of $350,000,000, and this sudden addition to the wealth of the city engendered every form of speculation. If people had reasoned they would have known that, whatever way the war ended—whether the North or South won—the close would have been the revival of the cotton crop and an end of these false values. But the gambler never reasons, and Bombay, according to one of the historians of the panic, believed that “the genius of Lee” and “the stubborn valor of the soldiers” would make the war last for a longer time. A good deal of this confidence was due to the tone of the London press on the American war, which, when read now in the cold light of logical and veritable events, represents the lowest point ever reached in the degradation of journalism. The Bombay merchant read his English newspaper and believed it, and continued to gamble. Banks were established—shipping and iron companies, financial associations, land companies, reclamation schemes, railway companies, spinning and weaving, companies in gas, coffee, cotton, oil and brick. Six hundred per cent was a fair return for one’s investments in those days, and I suppose no city in the world was so prosperous as Bombay in 1865. If Lee and Grant had fought a twenty years’ campaign this might have continued. But in the spring of 1865 a telegram came announcing that Lee had surrendered, and Bombay collapsed. The companies went to the wall. A firm of Parsee merchants failed for $15,000,000, and before the end of the year there was not one company remaining of the hundred which had arisen during the war. And all coming from a telegram which, in the afternoon of April 9, 1865, General Grant, sitting on a stone by the wayside of Appomattox, wrote in pencil in his memorandum book—“The army of Northern Virginia surrendered to me this afternoon.” The year 1865 is known as the year of panic, insanity and bankruptcy. I have heard stories of that mad time from many who were here and saw it. Those days of mania were days of splendor for Bombay in many ways, and it was pointed out that all the magnificent buildings which strike your eye on landing came from the men who were mad with the cotton mania.
There was a visit to the English man-of-war Euryalus, the flagship of the English squadron in India. Admiral Corbett received the General, and on his leaving the vessel fired twenty-one guns. There was a visit to the Elephanta Caves, one of the sights in India. We left the wharf and steamed across the bay in a small launch belonging to the government. The afternoon was beautiful, the islands in the bay breaking up the horizon into various forms of beauty that reminded you of Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean. Elephanta Caves belong to Hindoo theology. Here in the rocks the Brahmins built their temples, and now on holy days the people come and worship their gods according to the ritual of their ancestors. What the temple might have been in its best days you cannot imagine from the ruins. After seeing the stupendous remnants of ancient monuments in Egypt; Karnak and Abydos and Memphis you cannot enter into the enthusiasm with which rocks like those at Elephanta are regarded. In Egypt you see that religion was the supreme expression of the people’s life, and there is nothing else in her monuments. The same might be said of India, perhaps, but the men who dug out the Elephanta Caves and fashioned the rocks into temples and the forms of gods had not the earnest spirit of those who built the mighty monuments whose ruins strew the banks of the Nile.
Our visit to Elephanta was a kind of picnic. Everything we have seen in India thus far has a Prince of Wales value, if I may use the expression. You are taken to see things because the Prince of Wales saw them on his tour. It is remembered that the Prince came to the caves and dined in the halls consecrated in the Hindoo eyes to sacred memories. There were illuminations and fireworks, and the night was so warm that no one enjoyed the dinner. We have a cooling breeze coming in from the Indian Ocean, and as we slowly climb easy flights of steps we have an almost naked retinue of Hindoos, in various stages of squalor, asking alms and offering to sell us gold beetles. The temples are reached in time, and we stroll about studying out the figures, noting the columns and the curious architecture, full, rude, massive, unlike any forms of architectural art familiar to us. The main temple is 125 feet long and the same in width. The idols are hewn out of the rock. The faces of some are comely, and there is a European expression in the features that startles you. The type is a higher one than those we saw in Egypt. One of the idols is supposed to be the Hindoo Trinity—Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. There is matter for thought in the fact that the idea of the trinity, of the holiest of holy mysteries, was somehow grasped by these pagan worlds long before our blessed Lord came among men. There is a figure of a woman with a single breast—the wife of Siva—and you note in these pagan faiths that woman, who holds so sad a place in their domestic economy, was worshipped as fervently as some of us worship the Virgin. It is the tribute which even the heathen pays, as if by instinct, to the supreme blessing of maternity. But when the Portuguese came with the sword and the cross little mercy was shown to the homes of the pagan gods. It is believed that these temples were cut out of the rocks in the tenth century and that for 800 years these stony emblems, which we finger and poke with canes, were worshipped. General Grant observes that his memories of Karnak make it difficult for him to appreciate the caves at their true value. So we saunter about and look out on the waters and watch the descending sun throw its purple golden shadows over Bombay. The night is falling as our launch pushes into the bay. In this land there is no twilight, and a few minutes after the sun goes down darkness reigns, darkness over everything, only the lights of the distant town and the stars looking down from a cloudless sky.
There were visits to be made and Monday was a busy day. Letters were written. Mail day does not come as often in India as at home, and throughout the dominion it is a day dedicated to home. I am afraid we caught the infection, for Sunday was given to zealous correspondence, and the steamer that went out on Monday caused an addition to Her Majesty’s postal revenues. There was a visit to the school of a Parsee gentleman, whose hobby is education. Our Parsee friend had spent a good deal of money on his school; and as the education of woman is something new and startling to the Indian mind it was interesting to see the progress of the experiment. We visited the school in the afternoon of February 17, and were received by the scholars and teachers rising and singing the English national anthem. One of the scholars, a young lady of fifteen, recited one of Macaulay’s lays; another, the advice of Polonius to his son. The accent was peculiar, and it was difficult to adjust the Oriental twisting of the syllables to an American ear. The first impression was that the scholars were speaking a foreign tongue; but in a moment or two we became accustomed to it. The recitations were well done, especially Polonius to Laertes, a speech more apt to impress the Oriental mind, given to proverbs and metaphors, than the fiery clanging verses of Macaulay. There was music, and an exposition of needlework and embroidery. The students looked graceful in their embroidered jackets and caps, and although it was very warm and the room in which the school was gathered was oppressive and inconvenient, our visit was interesting. The future of India lies in the advancement and education of her people, and whatever looks toward that is a hopeful sign.
On Monday the General was entertained in state at the Government House at Malabar Point. Hon. James Gibbs, the member of the Council who acted as Governor in the absence of Sir Richard Temple, presided, and at the close of the dinner the company drank the health of the General. In response the General referred to the kindness he had received in India, which was only renewing the kindness shown him all over Europe, and which he accepted as an evidence of the good will which really existed between Englishmen and Americans, and which was to his mind the best assurance of peace for all nations. After the dinner the General received a large number of the native merchants and gentlemen of Bombay. It seemed odd to our American eyes that merchants and gentlemen should be asked to come in at the end of a feast and not to take part. But this exclusion is their own wish. Many of these merchants and gentlemen belong to castes who look on the food of the Europeans as unclean, who believe in the sacredness of life and will not eat animal food, and who could not sit at the table with the General without losing caste. These men will meet you in business, will serve you in various ways, but their religion prevents their sharing your table. So the invitation to the natives to meet the General was fixed at an hour when dinner was over.
They came in groups—Hindoos, Arabs, Parsees, native officers—in uniforms, in quaint flowing costumes. The General stood at the head of the hallway, with Mr. Gibbs and Major Rivett-Carnac, the Governor’s military secretary. As each native advanced he was presented to the General with some word of history or compliment from Mr. Gibbs. “This is So-and-So, an eminent Brahmin scholar, who stands high among our barristers;” or, “This is So-and-So, a Parsee merchant, who has done a great deal of good to Bombay and has been knighted for his services by the Queen;” or, “This is the oldest Arab merchant;” or, “This is a gallant officer in our native cavalry;” or, “this is the leading diamond merchant in Bombay, a Hindoo gentleman, one of the richest in India.” As each of them advanced it was with folded hands, as in prayer, or saluting by touching the breast and brow in the submissive, graceful, bending way, so strange to our eyes. Here were men of many races—the Parsee from Persia, the Arab from Cairo, whose ancestors may have ridden with Omar; the Brahmin of a holy caste, in whose veins runs the stainless blood of Indian nobility, descendant of men who were priests and rulers ages before England had risen from her clouds of barbarism. Between these races there is no love. If they do not like England they hate one another. Religious differences, tradition, memories of war and conquest, the unaccountable antipathies of race which we have not eliminated from our civilization—all generate a fierce animosity which would break into flames once the restraining hand were lifted. What welds them together is the power of England, and as you look at this picturesque group—their beards, full eyes, their fine Asiatic type of face, clear and well cut—here assembled peacefully, you see the extent of the empire to which they all owe allegiance, and you admire the genius and courage which has brought them to submit to a rule which, whatever it may have been in the past, grows more and more beneficent.
This dinner at Malabar Point closed our visit to Bombay. After the reception of the native gentlemen and merchants the General strolled over to his bungalow, and, sitting on the veranda looking out upon the ocean, he sat and conversed for a long time with Mr. Gibbs, Major Carnac, Mr. Borie and the gentlemen of the household. It was our last night in Bombay, and so many things were to be talked about, the English in India and the strange romance of their governing India. It is in conversations such as these where you meet gifted men, charged with great trusts, full of their work, and familiar with it, that travel has its advantages, and especially to one in the position of General Grant. Himself a commander of men and ruler of a nation, it is instructive to compare notes with men like those he meets in India, who are charged with the rule of an empire. The interesting fact in India as a political question is this. Here the Englishman is solving the problem of how to govern an ancient and vast civilization, or, rather, varieties of civilization, to govern it by prestige and the sword. In America the Englishman is trying to create a new nation, based on a democracy. The two problems are full of interest, and, fresh from English-speaking America, we see something new every hour in English-governed India. The governments are as far apart as the Poles, for there is no despotism more absolute than the government of India. Mighty, irresponsible, cruel, but with justice, and after safety mercy. This is what you see in India.
On Tuesday we left Bombay. The day was very warm—oppressively warm. We had an idea of what might be felt in an Indian summer. The General drove into town and made some farewell calls. At five he left Government House in a state carriage, accompanied by Major Carnac, who represented Governor Temple, and escorted by a squadron of cavalry. On arriving at the station there was a guard of honor of native infantry drawn up, which presented arms and lowered colors. All the leading men of the Bombay government—Parsee and native merchants; our Consul, Mr. Farnham, whose kindness to us was untiring; Mr. Gibbs, and all the members of the government household—were present. Among those who came to say goodbye was Colonel H. S. Olcott, of New York. Colonel Olcott had just arrived in India, where he proposes to study Indian philosophy. He was accompanied by some Brahmins of high caste, whom he presented to the General. In a few minutes the signal for leaving was made, and the General, thanking his good friends on Malabar Point, the train pushed off amid cheers and the salutes of the military.
Editor's notes