Part 19 (2/2)
Every noncommissioned officer and private is ent.i.tled to the use of the inst.i.tute except when excluded for profane or other improper language, for intoxication or other misconduct, for such time as the committee in charge shall deem advisable. The management of the inst.i.tute is entrusted to several committees of non-commissioned officers and soldiers and an advisory committee of three or more officers. These committees have control of all supplies, receipts and expenditures, the preservation of order, the enforcement of the rules, and are enjoined to make the inst.i.tute as attractive as possible. A committee of three, of whom the chairman must be a sergeant, is authorized to purchase supplies; an inventory of the stock must be taken once a month; there may be a co-operative store if deemed advisable by the commanding officer, at which groceries, provisions and general merchandise may be sold to the men at cost price; liquor may be sold in a separate room of limited dimensions, under the supervision of a committee of which a sergeant is chairman, and that committee, by a.s.signing good reasons, has the power to forbid its sale to any person for any length of time. No spirituous liquor except rum can be kept or sold; that must be of the best quality and no more than one dram may be sold to any person within the hour, and only one quart of malt liquor. Beside these, aerated waters and other ”soft drinks” must be provided, with coffee, tea, sandwiches and other refreshments as required. The profits of the inst.i.tute may be devoted to the library, reading-room and recreation department, the purchase of gymnastic apparatus, etc., and articles for the soldiers' mess, and may be contributed to the widows and orphans' fund, if so determined by the patrons of the inst.i.tution.
Those, in short, are the means used by the Indian government to promote temperance and morality in its army, and everyone who has experience and knowledge of the practical operation of such affairs approves them. In addition to the inst.i.tutes described, the Army Temperance a.s.sociation, which is entirely unofficial and composed of benevolent people in private life, has established in several of the large cities of India, where garrisons are stationed, soldiers' clubs, which also prove very efficacious. They are located in the bazaars and other parts of the cities frequented by soldiers and where the most mischief is usually done. They are clubs pure and simple, with reading and writing-rooms, games, music, restaurants, billiard-rooms and bars at which rum, beer, ale and other liquors are sold. There is also a devotional-room, in which religious meetings are held at stated times. These clubs are managed by private individuals in connection with committees of noncommissioned officers and enlisted men, and several of them represent investments of $15,000 and $20,000. In some cases a small members.h.i.+p fee is charged. They have proved very effective in catching human driftwood, and provide a place where men who are tempted may have another chance to escape the consequences.
They are conducted upon a very liberal plan, and after pay day soldiers who start out for a debauch, as so many regularly do, are accustomed to leave their money and valuables with the person in charge before plunging into the sinks of vice, where so many men find pleasure and diversion.
XXIII
MUTTRA, ALIGARH, LUCKNOW, CAWNPORE
On the way back from the frontier are plenty of delightful places at which the journey may be broken. You can have another glimpse of the most beautiful building in the world at Agra, and can take a day's excursion to Muttra, one of the seven sacred cities of India, the birthplace of Krishna, second in rank and popularity of the Hindu G.o.ds. The trains are conveniently arranged; they take you over from Agra in the morning and bring you back at night, which is well, because there is no hotel at Muttra, only what they call a dak bungalow, or lodging-house, provided by the munic.i.p.al authorities for the shelter of travelers who have no friends to put them up. These dak bungalows are quite common in India, for comparatively few of the towns have hotels that a European or American would care to patronize. In j.a.pan the native hotels are miracles of neatness and sweetness. In India, and the rest of Asia, they are, as far as possible, the reverse.
I suppose it would be possible for a white man to survive a day or two in a native hotel, but the experience would not be cla.s.sified as pleasure. Several of the native princes have provided dak bungalows for public convenience and comfort, and one or two are so hospitable as to furnish strangers food as well as lodging free of cost. The maharajas of Baroda, Jeypore, Bhartpur, Gwalior and several other provinces obey the scriptural injunction and have many times entertained angels unawares.
It is an ancient custom for the head of the state or the munic.i.p.al authorities or the commercial organizations or the priests to provide free lodgings for pilgrims and strangers; indeed, there are comparatively few hotels at which natives are required to pay bills. When a Hindu arrives in a strange town he goes directly to the temple of his religion and the priest directs him to a place where he can stop. It is the development of ancient patriarchal hospitality, and the dak bungalow, which is provided for European travelers in all hotelless towns and cities, is simply a refinement of the custom. There are usually charges, but they are comparatively small. You are expected to furnish your own bedding, towels, etc., and there are no wire spring mattresses. Sometimes iron cots are provided and often bunks are built in the wall. If there are none all you have to do is to wrap the drapery of your couch around you and select a soft place on the floor. A floor does not fit my bones as well as formerly, but it is an improvement upon standing or sitting up. Usually the dak bungalows are clean.
Occasionally they are not. This depends upon the character and industry of the person employed to attend them. The charges are intended to cover the expense of care and maintenance, and are therefore very moderate, and everybody is treated alike.
After a long, dusty drive in the suburbs of Delhi one day I crept into the grateful shade of a dak bungalow, found a comfortable chair and called for some soda to wash down the dust and biscuits to hold my appet.i.te down until dinner time. I was sipping the cool drink, nibbling the biscuits and enjoying the breeze that was blowing through the room, when the attendant handed me a board about as big as a s.h.i.+ngle with a hole drilled through the upper end so that it could be hung on a wall. Upon the board was pasted a notice printed in four languages, English, German, French and Hindustani, giving the regulations of the place, and the white-robed khitmatgar pointed his long brown finger to a paragraph that applied to my case. I paid him 10 cents for an hour's rest under the roof. It was a satisfaction to do so. The place was clean and neat and in every way inviting.
At many of the railway stations beds are provided by the firm of caterers who have a contract for running the refreshment-rooms.
Most of the stations are neat and comfortable, and you can always find a place to spread your bedding and lie down. There is a big room for women and a big room for men. Sometimes cots are provided, but usually only hard benches around the walls. There are always washrooms and bathrooms adjoining, which, of course, are a great satisfaction in that hot and perspiring land. The restaurants at the railway stations are usually good, and are managed by a famous caterer in Calcutta, but the men who run the trains don't always give you time enough to eat.
On the pa.s.senger trains, ice, soda water, ginger ale, beer and other soft drinks are carried by an agent of the eating-house contractor, who furnishes them for 8 cents a bottle, and it pays him to do so, for an enormous quant.i.ty is consumed during the hot weather. The dust is almost intolerable and you cannot drink the local water without boiling and filtering it. The germs of all kinds of diseases are floating around in it at the rate of 7,000,000 to a spoonful. A young lady who went over on the s.h.i.+p with us didn't believe in any such nonsense and wasn't afraid of germs. She drank the local water in the tanks on the railway cars and wherever else she found it, and the last we heard of her she was in a hospital at Benares with a serious case of dysentery.
[Ill.u.s.trations: GROUP OF FAMOUS BRAHMIN PUNDITS]
Mark Twain says that there is no danger from germs in the sacred water of the Ganges, because it is so filthy that no decent microbe will live in it; and that just about describes the situation.
It is a miracle that the deaths are so few. Millions of people fill their stomachs from that filthy stream day after day because the water washes away their sins, and I do not suppose there is a dirtier river in all the universe, nor one that contains more contagion and filth. It receives the sewage of several of the largest cities of India. Dead bodies of human beings as well as animals can be seen floating daily. From one end of it to the other are burning ghats where the bodies of the dead are soaked in it before they are placed upon the funeral pyres, and when the bones and flesh are consumed the ashes are cast upon the sacred stream. But the natives observe no sanitary laws, and the filth in which they live and move and have their being is simply appalling.
But I started out to tell you about Muttra, which is a very ancient place. It is mentioned by Pliny, the Latin historian, Ptolemy, the Egyptian geographer, and other writers previous to the Christian era, and is a.s.sociated with the earliest Aryan migrations. Here Krishna, the divine herdsman, was born. He spent his childhood tending cattle in the village of Gokul, where are the ruins of several ancient temples erected in his honor, but, although he seems to have retained his hold upon the people, they have allowed them to crumble, and the profuse adornments of the walls and columns have been shamefully defaced. At one time it is said there were twenty great monasteries at that place, with several hundred monks, yet nothing is left of them but piles of stone and rubbish. All have been destroyed in successive wars, for Muttra has been the scene of horrible atrocities by the Mohammedans who have overrun the country during several invasions. Therefore most of the temples are modern, and they are too many to count. There is a succession of them on the banks of the river the whole length of the city, interspersed with hospices for the entertainment of pilgrims, and palaces of rich Hindus, who go there occasionally to wash away their sins, just as the high livers of London go to Homburg and Carlsbad to restore their digestions. One of the palaces connected with the temple, built of fine white stone in modern style, belongs to Lakshman Das, a Hindu who the guide told us is the richest man in India. The many merchants of Muttra all seem prosperous. The city is visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year, all of whom bring in more or less money, and the houses and shops are of a more permanent and imposing order of architecture than those of Delhi, Agra and other places.
It has the appearance of being a rich community.
The shade trees along the streets swarm with monkeys and parrots, which are sacred, and when you go there you mustn't jump if a grinning monkey drops down upon your shoulders in a most casual manner and chatters in your ear. The animals are very tame. They are fed by the pilgrims, who gain great merit with the G.o.ds thereby, and the river is filled with sacred turtles, which are also objects of great interest and devotion.
Only two towns in India are more sacred than Muttra. One is Benares and the other is Jagernath, or Juggernaut, which is about 150 miles south of Calcutta on the sh.o.r.e of the Bay of Bengal. There is the great idol which we have all heard about from the missionaries, and, I regret to say, some have been guilty of a good deal of misrepresentation and exaggeration. When I was a boy I read in Sunday-school books the most heart-tearing tales about the poor heathen, who cast themselves down before the car of Juggernaut and were crushed to lifeless pulp under its monstrous wheels. This story has been told thousands of times to millions of horrified listeners, but an inquiry into the facts does not confirm it. It is true that on certain holy days the great image of Juggernaut, or Jagernath, whichever way you choose to spell it, and it weighs many tons, is placed upon a car and the car is drawn through the crowded streets by thousands of pilgrims, who cast flowers, rice, wheat, palm leaves, bamboo wisps, sweetmeats and other offerings in its way. Occasionally in the throng that presses around the image some one is thrown down and has the life trampled out of him; on several occasions people have been caught by the wheels or the frame of the car and crushed, and at rare intervals some hysterical wors.h.i.+per has fallen in a fit of epilepsy or exhaustion and been run over, but the official records, which began in 1818, show only nine such occurrences during the last eighty-six years.
I have great respect for missionaries, but I wish some of them would be more charitable in disposition, a little more accurate in statement, and not print so much trash. In Muttra you have a good ill.u.s.tration of their usefulness. The American Methodists commenced work there in 1887. No educational or evangelical work had ever been attempted previous to that time, but the men and women who came were wise, tactful and industrious, and the result may be seen in a dozen or more schools, with several thousand pupils, a flouris.h.i.+ng, self-supporting church, a medical mission, a deaconesses' home and training school, a printing establishment and bookshop which is self-supporting and a large number of earnest, intelligent converts. Wherever you go in heathen lands you will find that wisdom, judgment, tact and ability, when applied in any direction, always show good results, but all missionaries, I regret to say, are not endowed with those qualities or with what Rev. Dr. Hepburn of j.a.pan calls ”sanctified common sense,”
and the consequences are sometimes deplorable.
”By their works ye shall know them.”
At Aligarh, a town of 50,000 inhabitants on the railway between Agra and Delhi, is a very rare and indeed a unique inst.i.tution--a Moslem university and printing press--the only ones in India, and the only ones in the world established and conducted on modern lines. The university is modeled upon the English plan. It has an English president and dean and several English professors, all of them graduates of the University of Cambridge. The preparatory school has an English head master and a.s.sistant, and in the faculty is a professor of physical culture, who has brought manly sports among the students to a standard unequaled elsewhere in India.
The Aligarh University has the best football team and the best cricket team in the empire.
This remarkable inst.i.tution was founded in 1875 by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a Mohammedan lawyer and judge on the civil bench, for the education of his co-religionists in order that they may take places in the world beside the graduates of English and European universities and exercise a similar influence. He recognized that the Moslem population of India must degenerate unless it was educated; that it could not keep pace with the rest of the world. He was shocked at the ignorance and the bigotry of his fellow Mohammedans and at their stubborn conservatism. He was a sincere believer in his own religion, and insisted that the faith of Islam, properly understood, was as much in the interest of truth and progress in every branch of human knowledge and activity as the Christian religion, and he devoted his entire fortune and collected contributions from rich Mohammedans for the establishment of a school that should be entirely up-to-date and yet teach the Koran and the ancient traditions of Islam. There are now about 500 students, who come from the most important families in India. They live together in dormitories built about the college, dine in the same refectory and enjoy a healthy, active college life. Foreign and Christian professors fill the chairs of science, mathematics and languages, while able mullahs give instruction in the Koran and direct the students in the daily exercise of the Mohammedan rites.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan met with bitter opposition and animosity from the conservative element of his faith, and while some of his opponents admitted the purity and n.o.bility of his motive, he was often accused of apostasy, but his n.o.ble life was spared until March, 1898, and he was permitted to see his inst.i.tution enjoying great popularity and usefulness. There is at present a movement among the Mohammedans of India for the higher education of the members of that sect. It is the fruit of his labors and the men who are leading it are graduates of the Aligarh College.
Lucknow and Cawnpore are usually neglected by American travelers, but are sacred objects of pilgrimage to all Englishmen because of their terrible memories of the awful struggles of the mutiny of the sepoys, or native soldiers, in 1857, and their heroic defense and heroic relief by a handful of British troops under Sir Henry Havelock, General James Outram and Sir Colin Campbell.
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