Chapter IX: Benares

One morning in the train I woke at Buxar, where Major Hector Munro gained a great victory over the Nawab of Oudh in the eighteenth century. On each side of the railway-line I could see paddy-fields, sugar-cane and various crops, as well as a little jute.

By eleven o'clock I was driving from Benares Station through the lines of red brick, one-storeyed barracks, ranged upon the flat pale-grey dusty earth of the cantonment. The railway station is a long way from the town, but at last, nearly opposite a white-spired English church with a "classic" portico smothered in brilliant bougainvillias, I reached Clark's Hotel, and thanks to a friend's introduction, found that a police inspector, one Mahmud Ali, had been deputed to attend me during my visit and show me Benares.

We began without loss of time and at noon were driving along the hot roads, while more leisured mortals slept at the doors of their house on four-post _charpoys_.

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Upon the plaster walls of the better native houses there was a good deal of rude figure decoration, generally in red and yellow. We passed Queen's College, which is a Sanskrit College for native students, the Prince of Wales' Hospital, and then an old wall upon which were inscribed the words:--

"In the garden within this wall were the quarters occupied in the Autumn of 1781 by Warren Hastings, first Governor General of Fort William in Bengal."

Now I always think it is wise to humour a friendly cicerone, and I was not going at the very outset of our companionship to dispute at any length with Mahmud Ali, but somehow or other his mind was confused in regard to history. He declared that he had something of very great interest to show me in the garden and took me to an old well near a farther wall, saying that Warren Hastings concealed himself there during the Mutiny!

The streets were gay and crowded with foot-passengers, camels and horses, sacred cows and native vehicles. We passed one camel loaded with tobacco from some outlying village and just after, a bridegroom of the Hindoo noble caste Khatri, in a pink dress shot with gold, riding upon a white horse amid a deafening noise of drums and trumpets on his way {144} to worship at a temple before the marriage ceremonies.

We were going to the famous Golden Temple and approached it by the bazaar of the brass-workers, where, between lines of tall houses, the sky dwindled to a narrow strip of blue. Far down the bazaar, past the Madhogi Hindoo Temple, a crowd of people huddled together were hurrying along, as if with a common object, under blue smoke which veiled them like a filmy gauze. These, Mahmud told me, were a band of pilgrims making a round of the Benares shrines, and I saw many such groups of native people going about with a leader like a Cook's conducted party.

Presently we came to a small square on the right of the bazaar, shut in by tall buildings, in which the Golden Temple stands and wherein is also the renowned Well of Knowledge. Sacred bulls were nosing about the pavement round a Bo-tree smeared with a red paint called Sandoor and a sweetmeat stall that was protected from the sun by a huge mushroom-like umbrella. Over the sacred well itself, upon its surrounding stone platform about 2 feet high, was built a pavilion of red-coloured stone and plaster, where an old man in a worn and very dirty coat of English cut sat ladling water out of a bucket to anyone who asked. I, of course, was not permitted to step upon the platform, but the faithful {145} also have nowadays to suffer some prohibitions and are no longer allowed to choke the well with flowers.

In the Well of Knowledge, Vishnu the preserver is said to be for ever and behind it and its surrounding shrines of Ganesh and other gods (Ganesh is the good-luck god who was son of Siva and had, of course, nothing to do with Vishnu) the old Vishnagi Temple stands partly in ruins, as it has been ever since it was broken up by the puritan Aurungzebe, and partly turned into a mosque. The old part of this building is yellow-grey sandstone, tawny with age, but the mosque shone brightly in the sunlight with fresh Mohammedan whitewash.

Close by a Hindoo woman was going quickly round and round the trunk of a Bo-tree, which had at its base a lingam and a small nandi or stone bull (both symbols of Siva). She must have gone round at least a hundred times during the few minutes we stopped to watch her, and always in the same direction, but Mahmud said she would not fall as she was always doing it day in and day out.

It was as simple an employment of energy as children make setting themselves just such tasks--walking along the crack between two boards of a nursery floor and back so many hundred times, or hopping on one foot round and round the table, not always with any added zest of {146} competition. It expressed an opposite need to that of contemplation, but in the monotonous round of its activity appeared to symbolize that view of life which shows it as a ceaseless movement along a path that leads nowhere, progressing without change and never arriving save at some part of its many times traversed orbit identical with all the rest. And well may Siva be worshipped in a circle, for the emblem the woman was running round--which invested with religious garments the mystery of perpetual regeneration--symbolizes the Destroyer also since neither Death nor Life can be conceived alone any more than light and darkness or silence and a song.

To enter the Golden Temple is not permitted to Europeans--only to peep through a hole in the wall and also to look at the roofs from the upper balcony of an adjacent house. There are two tall conical roofs shaped--as in so many Hindoo temples--like a common type of mould for ice puddings and a lower dome between them ridged like a melon, and beyond rises the white Mohammedan mosque. One of the tall roofs is red with only little spikelets gilded, but the other is gold all over as well as the lower dome.

As I turned from looking in at the gateway of the Golden Temple I saw just facing it a small Siva temple of stone delicately carved; and near to this, through a pair of brass doors, I saw the {147} shrine of the "Saturday" god--a round face shown upon the upper part of a hanging cloth, without body or limbs, and with two flower-decked emblems in front of it. Then, a yard or two further on, I came to the Cow Temple and entered a cloistered court, where sacred peacocks strutted at their ease and pigeons fluttered. The temple itself was in the middle of this open court, and from its inner sanctuary at the back of its pillared porch or pavilion came the sound of a woman singing in a shrill high voice. A brown cow was licking the wet blossoms off the lingams, and under the cloisters where a crowd of people stood gazing at him sat a particularly ugly fakir. Naked, except for a loin-cloth, he sat looking at the ground with his legs crossed. Mahmud said he was a "Bramchari fakir," and we learned from the gazers that he had arrived early the same morning and had not moved since. He was extremely fat, as fat as the Chinese god of good luck, but with nothing merry about him and a look that was repulsive to me. His long brown hair hung down on to the pavement behind him. He had a piece of board to sit upon, and on the ground in front were offerings of food, but the people said he could not eat anything (he really looked too full). They admired and stared and wondered, and Mahmud said that the fat fakir was an arrant humbug, but then Mahmud was not a Hindoo.

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The droppings of sacred bulls seemed everywhere; and when we came out of the Cow Temple and turned down a narrow passage, the way was dirtier than ever, and yet more weird and strange. Through two doors open in the side of the wall a huge red Ganesh, festooned with flower garlands, the lower part of his elephant face covered by a yellow cloth, stared with three eyes, and near him some Hindoos were making butter.

The same afternoon I drove out four miles from Benares to Sarnath to see the Buddhist remains there. Wide spaces of dry mud--dazzling in the sunlight--stretched away from each side of the road, parched for lack of the rain which should have covered them in a mantle of green crops.

The Buddhist "Tope" at Sarnath is an immense and apparently solid mass of brick-work raised upon a stone base and reminding one of the Dagobas of Anuradhapura in Ceylon. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims visited Sarnath at the time when the Romans were leaving England and have left descriptions of this earlier Benares. Excavations on an extensive scale are now going on, and 300 coolies were employed upon them at the time of my visit. The walls and general plan of many buildings, probably monasteries referred to in the account of the Chinese pilgrims, have been unearthed, and a museum is being built to house the finds, which {149} are at present kept under a brick shelter. On a trolley near the latter I saw a very remarkable lion capital from a granite column 45 feet high, which was found lying in several pieces. This capital takes the form of a large quadrupled lion, with an annular relief below its feet of small figures of horses and elephants.

There is a Jain temple close to the Buddhist one; but what little daylight remained I spent in wandering about the new excavations and especially in examining a square chamber just uncovered, which was surrounded by short square columns connected by rows of wide cross-bars or rails of stone, lozenge-shaped in section. On some of these cross-bars there were circular medallions carved with geometric patterns in an arrangement similar to that in specimens in the Calcutta museum. Among the carved decoration there was much incised pattern-work with the spaces cut out, leaving square and not rounded edges.

I did not leave Sarnath till just at sunset, and driving back to Benares it seemed as if a sign came that I should never exhaust the wonders of the world. I saw a star sail slowly and almost horizontally across the sky. It was very bright indeed and had a tail or stream of light behind it and remained visible even after I had drawn Mahmud's attention to it, so that he said, "Yes--it is a star."

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Next morning with Mahmud Ali I drove to the river, past lines of shops like tiled sheds divided into open boxes by partitions, past the white buildings of the Maharajah Hatwa's palace, and then past little huts where cactus grew wild against mud walls, sometimes dotted with red spots in crude childish decoration and sometimes covered with dung cakes drying for fuel. The wind blew cold as we crossed Victoria Park, with its grass and flower-beds looking dull under a stormy sky, and followed another long road of dilapidated buildings without one house in which the plaster facing was not half fallen from the tiny bricks. We also passed a square-towered English church, a church for native converts, and then after some long arcades began to meet the crowds returning from the river after bathing. On the water storm was now driving from Mirzapoor, and the river was all whitened with crested waves.

A police boat was waiting for us at the Dessasumay ghat, which was thronged with pilgrims. We went first up the river to the end of the chief ghats, then turned and came slowly down. The wind was bitterly cold and the boat rocked wildly as we began the time-honoured progress down the long line of majestic palaces, gloomy under grey skies, and the flights of wide innumerable steps, down which a ceaseless stream of pilgrims came to bathe even on such a {151} day in the icy water. Four miles long is this vast line of masonry from the Assi Ghat at one end to Raj Ghat at the other near the Dufferin Bridge, and all that way the other side of the Ganges is but white sand without a single stone.

So many times have travellers told about it, this river-front of Benares, and more times yet new travellers will describe it.

Near the great Mosi Temple is one of the strange vast observatories made by the founder of Jeypore city, Sawar Jaya Singh. It was converted to such use from a great palace built by one of his forbears, the Rajah Man Singh, about 1600; and from its roof (to which we climbed to examine the strange gigantic instruments, the Samrat Yantra for finding time and declination and the hour angle of a star, the Chakrayantra and the rest) a wide and distant view is obtained of city and plain.

At the Mier Ghat, farther on, the masonry looks all falling to pieces and broken through from the foundations sloping at all angles as perpetual reminder that the sacred river is capable of wrath, and in times of flood can devastate as well as sanctify no whit less surely than Siva the destroyer can create anew. Octagonal towers lean and gaps of river stairways yawn as if some earthquake had shaken them, and Mahmud declared that an old man had told him it was just in the same state a hundred years {152} ago--I suppose by report of his fathers, for even the most righteous of the devotees at the small Mohammedan bathing temple beyond scarcely live so long. As we continued through the choppy waves a burning ghat for poor folk came in sight. One body was being burned and another, a woman's, shrouded, lay with the feet dipping in the river.

As we went on I could now hear above the wind the sound of thousands of voices as we neared the Mano Kanka (or Karnika) Ghat, the most sacred of all in Benares, with its holy well of Vishnu perspiration into which Devi (the wife of Siva under another name) dropped once an earring.

More palaces followed--that of the Maharajah of Gwalior and that of Nagpur; then the Mahratta's building and the vast Panch Ganga Ghat, with the tall minarets of Aurangzebe's Mosque above it, built on the site of a Hindoo temple that intolerant puritan destroyed.

Near a Jain temple I noticed a strange colossal recumbent figure which Mahmud called Bean Sing, whom he said was one of the four brothers who were great men in Benares. The huge figure, very rudely shaped, was painted a pink colour with yellow loin-cloth and moustaches of inky blackness. Then there was the Nepaul Temple with its carved woodwork and grotesque little indecencies, and a pair of snake-charmers {153} with quite an assortment of animals--cobra, python and other snakes as well as scorpions.

A temple to Siva's blood-loving consort about a mile from the town is one of the shows of Benares, attractive to Europeans on account of the number of monkeys which live in protection about it. On the way I saw an old mosque to which age and decay had given much beauty. The red brick showed all along the base and in part of the minarets where the plaster had dropped away. Little grey squirrels were running about the walls, green cactus was growing on the yellow earth against the red brick, and in front of it rose a palm tree with can attached high up under a cut in the trunk, catching the liquid from which the spirit called toddy is made. Mahmud told me that all the palms in the district were contracted to one man, and that each morning the cans placed in position the day before were ready for collection.

I left the carriage to walk round the old mosque and saw beyond a fence some potters at work. There was the clay being kneaded by women into lumps of suitable size, and the potter sitting on the ground and turning his simple horizontal wheel with one foot, while with skilful touches of both hands he shaped the vessel. Almost every village in India possesses a potter. He is as essential as the holy man who blesses {154} the fields for harvest, and in country districts is generally paid in kind, getting a definite quantity of grain per plough each harvest for providing the necessary supply of earthen pots to the household, and the shapes of his wares, as well as the method he employs, are probably at least two thousand years old.

Opposite to the mosque across the road was a new _Idgar_ with half the ground paved and at one side the steps of the _Kasbah_ to the _Mimbar_, on which the Mohammedan preacher stands. Under a shelter or roofed shed near the Idgar a processional car of Juggernaut dozed through the idle months and declined to notice more hard-working bullock-carts which groaned past, laden with rough stone for road-making or long sarput grass for thatching houses.

Farther on was the Central Hindoo College, founded largely through the efforts of Mrs Besant, and now accommodating 500 students. The original building, to which much has been added, was presented by the Maharajah of Benares in 1899:--"For the education of Hindoo youth in their ancestral faith and true loyalty and patriotism." In the large playground of this college some Hindoo youths were playing football.

Beyond the white buildings of the Maharajah of Vizianagram's palace with their high-walled gardens and cool-looking pavilions, and the {155} houses of native bankers, surrounded by orange trees laden with green fruit, and yet another temple called the Mahram Barhal, the Durga Temple appeared at last.

A young man had just brought a little black kid for sacrifice. He was dressed in tan leather shoes, a long fawn coat with a pattern on it and a small black cap on his head. He had an orange red caste mark freshly painted on his forehead, and round his shoulders hung a flower garland. He had just recovered from an illness, and for that reason was making sacrifice. Planted in the ground stood a square post, to the base of which a woman, who was sister to the executioner's wife, was helping to tie the unoffending kid. Black flies were swarming round as the woman pulled the hind legs of the goat, and the executioner, with an absurdly large sword, wide and curved, cut off the head at a blow. Monkeys leering and chattering played about all round, and several lean-looking dogs darted forward to lick up greedily the blood spurting from the little body, which was flung down a few yards away. The head was put on a small altar facing the entrance to the inner shrine that the god might see it, and then the executioner and the woman (who, by the way, was tattooed) cleaned and prepared the carcase for cooking, that the young man might take it away with him for home consumption.

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The sun was setting behind the Durga Temple as I walked across a beautiful garden called the Anundabagh, between red blossoming Arhol bushes to see a man named Merthil Swami, who succeeded ten years ago one of the most famous "holy men" of modern India, the Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati. The garden was presented to Bhaskarananda by the Rajah of Amethi, who continues to send money for its upkeep. Swami Bhaskarananda was born of good Brahman family, and after a youth spent in diligent study of Sanskrit and the Vedantic philosophy, renounced the world and became a wandering ascetic, roaming from one end of India to the other clad in a single garment; and at last believing that he had attained "knowledge," settled in Benares for his remaining years, "waiting his deliverance from mortality."

In a little house with brass doors I saw in the garden a life-size marble statue of this old man squatting naked, as he had done in life, with serene and peaceful countenance though with a slight raising of the eyebrows that creased his forehead, and curiously outstanding ears. The statue was made during his lifetime and is said to be very like him. On the bald head lay one red rose.

"Every Maharajah," said Mahmud, "came to pray to him," and he might have added every foreign visitor came to see him, for Bhaskarananda {157} always welcomed English and other European visitors, and gained their appreciation and respect both by his learning and his courteous manners. _Tam cari capitis_.

A disciple named Gaya Purshad who lived in Cawnpore had given a lakh of rupees to build a tomb of white marble for Bhaskara, and it was nearing completion on the spot where he used to sit with his legs crossed and where, being holy beyond all purification of fire, he was buried in the same sitting posture. The tomb, against which leaned a wide bamboo ladder, is a small square building with three windows of pierced marble screen-work and one door opening, and the workmen were busy upon a lovely marble arcade surrounding the whole mausoleum. Inside, on the centre of the floor over the place of burial, there is a little plain slab of stone on which lay a wreath of pale and dark marigolds.

Merthil Swami, the man who was chosen by Bhaskara to take his place in the Anundabagh after he died, does not abjure all clothing like his master, but was dressed in a long plain woollen gown. Smiling courteously, he received me on the veranda of the house in the garden where he had been talking to a number of young men. He has deep brown eyes, a wide forehead and a narrow chin somewhat disguised by a slight grey beard, and his skin is light in colour.

I asked Merthil Swami of the present state {158} of Bhaskara, and Mahmud interpreted his answer:--"Bhaskara's spirit will be in no more man; he has gained Heaven and is with the god Brahma."

It must be a difficult task to wear the halo of a saint so generally revered as Bhaskara, and I was not surprised to hear that Merthil Swami is not yet as popular as his predecessor.

Late that evening a heavy hailstorm made terrifying play on iron roofs with large stones, and blustering weather continued the next day. I determined to try to paint in spite of it, and went early to the Aurungzebe Mosque. Far above the river on the paved space outside the mosque at the top of the great ghat, a fakir was sitting on a bed of iron nails. They were iron spikes about four inches long, and he perched on one end of the bed, with a loin-cloth which afforded considerable protection. As the spikes were very blunt and close together there seemed to me no great difficulty in the man's performance. For eight years, people said, he had sat there; but a few yards from him, under a peepul tree, was a low umbrella tent closed to the ground on every side, and into this the fakir is carried on his spike bed every night. Mahmud gave no account of him, and although I had no religious bias he looked to me a peculiarly nasty person. "He hides his money somewhere under the ground like other fakirs," Mahmud added, "and {159} if it could be found after his death it would be Government property, as he would have no heir," which may or may not be true.

Swallows were flying back and forth in the mosque. The stone walls were whitewashed, and the ceilings within the cupolas were decorated with a dull red pattern on plaster once white and now a creamy grey. This is the mosque which shows from the river, with its minarets high up above the vast flight of steps of the Panch Ganga Ghat, the best known scene at Benares. I painted it from the water, but the wind was too strong to keep the boat still, even close to shore, while occasional sudden showers of rain increased the difficulties.

The last time I went upon the river at Benares was one evening just after sunset, when the clouds were dove-coloured above the long line of ghats and palaces, sweeping along in a majestic curve which continued above the white flat sand of the farther bank. Mahmud and I had reached the Ganges at the Assi Ghat, the farthest upstream, and on the opposite shore rose the palace of the Maharajah of Benares, one of the few buildings upon that side. A police boat was waiting--and leaving the carriage by a golden tract of mustard to drive round and pick us up lower down the river, we were taken swiftly down-stream by four Hindoo rowers. In the far distance over the curve of sand the {160} Dufferin Bridge was visible. The water looked blue-green and clear, and I thought that evening the usual accounts of its pollution must be exaggerated. Swiftly the rowers urged the boat along till I stopped them at a palace of yellow sandstone, in which some old Delhi kings yet drag out with their harems and opium pipes squalid pensioned lives. We pulled up to the great steps called Sivati Ghat, where a man sat cleaning his _goriaya_, a Benares pipe. Pigeons were flying about the walls and cupolas above, and a faint rose-colour just flushed the clearer spaces of the sky. On the wall a marble tablet was inscribed:--

"This was the residence of Rajah Chait Singh where he was arrested by the order of Warren Hastings, on the 16th August, 1731 (sic), and where, on the same date, after the massacre of two companies of native troops with their British officers, he was rescued by his adherents."

There was the window by which Chait Singh escaped--he went off on an elephant.

Re-embarking we sped down the stream again past the Hanuman Ghat, above which showed the neem trees about the largest of the temples in Benares--that to Hanuman, the monkey-friend of Rama, who rescued Sita, his wife, from a king of Ceylon who had carried her away. On--past a little burning ghat called Masan with {161} broken steps and past the Kedar Ghat and the building of one Tivwa, a rich Bengali, and a large charity house for fakirs, and past little lamps that floated on the water in front of a stone lingam on the wall. All along the edge of the river many similar lights were now twinkling. People were putting them to float for worship, lamps with butter and not oil in them. In the twilight lines of pilgrims were still distinguishable trooping along in robes of green and rose and white and purple. Temple music sounded, drums and cymbals and wind instruments. Against the walls like great targets hung now many of the huge mushroom-like grass umbrellas of the selling stalls. The same obese fakir I had seen the day before in the Golden Temple sat now gazing at the sacred river with a crowd of gapers watching as before.

We passed more neem trees, and then in rapidly increasing darkness once more approached the famous burning-ghat. One pile was almost burnt out, while another was flaming high. Two of the dead man's relations tended the fire; higher up the steps fifteen or twenty of his relatives and friends sat watching the last scene of his life's little drama.

"Eight maunds of wood for each," said Mahmud, "cost two rupees, fourteen annas (one maund equals eighty pounds), but for a {162} rich man's body to be burned by sandal wood at the Rajah's Ghat costs 150 rupees."

The darkness gathered more and more and the pale white figures sitting in rows on the upper steps of the ghat were almost lost, except when now and then more lurid flames rose, dancing up to light them; the rowers bore us on again past more and more little lamps on the water. This time not Hindoo but Mohammedan hands were setting them afloat, and Mahmud said:--"Mohammedans worship all rivers, Hazarat Khizar."

We passed the burning-ghat of rajahs, with its odour of sandalwood and the Vishnu footprints, and once more that holy tank of the Manokanka Ghat, of which the water is believed to be sweat of his body.

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