Twain in India

Mark Twain kept me busy for the last two weeks. Tom Sawyer was a fun read but I found the going hard with Huckleberry Finn. The bulk of the book employed the dialect of the blacks of late 19th century America. I followed up the books with Ken Burns’ 2001 documentary on Twain. In it, I stumbled upon an astonishing fact that I was unaware of – Twain had visited India and traveled extensively across the subcontinent.

In ‘Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World‘, Twain captures his experiences from this sojourn with a verve so typical of him. In 1896, over a three month period, he covered Bombay, Pune, Allahabad, Benaras, Calcutta, Darjeeling (where he managed to hunt and kill 13 tigers), Lucknow, Kanpur, Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. Phew!

And as expected it was the dazzling wealth of the princes, the abject poverty of the land, the servants of the Raj, Kanchenjunga and the monuments (Taj Mahal, the Black Hole memorial in Calcutta, the Residency Ruins of Lucknow) that captured his attention.

The series begins with the hiring of a “bearer” — native man-servant — a person who should be selected with some care, because as long as he is in your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes. In India your day may be said to begin with the “bearer’s” knock on the bedroom door, accompanied by a formula of words — a formula which is intended to mean that the bath is ready. It doesn’t really seem to mean anything at all. But that is because you are not used to “bearer” English. You will presently understand. Where he gets his English is his own secret. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the earth; or even in paradise, perhaps, but the other place is probably full of it. You hire him as soon as you touch Indian soil; for no matter what your sex is, you cannot do without him. He is messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, lady’s maid, courier — he is everything. He carries a coarse linen clothes-bag and a quilt; he sleeps on the stone floor outside your chamber door, and gets his meals you do not know where nor when; you only know that he is not fed on the premises, either

In my opinion, if you want to experience the quirks of a modern-day ‘bearer’ firsthand, all you need to do is to observe the personal staff of any officer belonging to a Government Group A Service. The subservience bears an uncanny resemblance to what Twain wrote 130 years ago.  

His notes on Benaras:

Benares is a religious Vesuvius. In its bowels the theological forces have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling, and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages.

…. According to their creed, the Ganges water makes everything pure that it touches — instantly and utterly pure. The sewer water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; the sacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure and could defile no one. The memory of that sight will always stay by me; but not by request.

… If Vishnu had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it Idolville or Lingamburg.

Despite a few stereotypical descriptions (like the one below), Twain was a sharp observer and his 1896 take on India’s economy, social relationships, train journeys and swamis can ring true even today.

This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations — the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

Overall, I ended up liking Twain. I now better understand why he is widely regarded as the man who inaugurated American literature and the debt the later-day masters owe him. In a moving passage, upon seeing an Indian native slapped by his master, Twain suddenly recalls a similar incident from his childhood. One can see in this the inspiration for his anti-slavery politics and his empathy for the downtrodden, which so vividly comes across in his fiction

When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly — as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it. It is curious — the space-annihilating power of thought. For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native’s smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood — fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!

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