Chapter X: Lucknow

At Lucknow it was Race Week. I had already heard from the famous "Wutzler's," the best hotel, that they had no room; and when I arrived one evening at the capital of Oudh I called vainly at others in a scale of reputation which diminished in accord with my hopes of a bed. I had left Benares the same morning, and after passing land green with various crops, including a great deal of mustard, the train had carried me over plains of grey monotony, only occasionally broken by patches of cultivation, herds of long-eared sheep, long-legged pigs, large black vultures and stray, weary-looking camels.

Surely all Anglo-India had come to Lucknow for the races. I had left a small crowd of English people at the railway station, who had given up hope of finding shelter and were only waiting for a train to take them away again: and believing in the possibilities of canvas, I sought out one after the other, "The Civil and Military," "The Imperial" and "The Prince of Wales'," and then roaming still "without a guide" tried {164} for a tent at the "Eclipse," and at last found one at "The Empress." This last was managed by a thin Mohammedan, who was apparently destitute of any notion of mutual benefits, but rich in appreciation of the fact that every other hostelry in Lucknow was over-full. I certainly obtained a "lodging for the night" at "The Empress," but the fact that with travel-habit I was able to sleep soundly should not be taken as testimony to good accommodation.

The next morning at an early hour I was bargaining with a gharry-wallah who demanded 17 rupees for the day because of the races, and after paying some official calls I went off to see the Residency.

The events of the Mutiny days are so closely identified with every brick in the old red ruins that it would be almost impossible for an Englishman to consider them apart from those associations, but I think if it were possible they would still have more appeal than the extravagant vulgarity of the ugly palaces and other architectural eyesores that were reared so lavishly in Lucknow early in the nineteenth century, and remain for the traveller to stare at for his sins--huge curios of debased art, wearisome to visit and desirable to forget.

One William Ireland, who told me that as a boy of ten he was among the actual defenders of the Residency, being attached to the fourth {165} company of the 3rd Battalion East India Company's B.A., showed me the many points of vivid interest connected with the memorable siege.

Trimly-kept walks surround those hallowed walls, bright in the sunshine with gay pink masses of bougainvillia and golden clusters of bignonia benarola. Every guide-book tells you the heroic tale and the Baillie Gate, Dr Fayrer's house, the Begum Kothi and the rest are household words in England. There are many monuments and memorial tablets at the Residency, and I will quote but one and that the inscription on an obelisk just _outside_ its precincts:--

To the Memory of
The Native Officers and Sepoys
of the
13th Native Infantry 41st Native Infantry
48th Native Infantry 71st Native Infantry
The Oude Irregular Force
Native Pensioners, New Native Levies
Artillery and Lucknow Magazine
Who died near this Spot
Nobly performing their duty
This column is erected by
Lord Northbrook
Viceroy and Governor General of India
1875

Let us never forget those loyal hearts who withstood the insidious influences of a wide-spread crusade of mutiny which combined the appeals of military grievance, race hatred and religious zeal.

{166}

The chief bazaar of Lucknow, which forms one of the six wards of the city, is called the Chauk. Here still thrive jewellers and silversmiths, though the quality of their work is deteriorating. The prices are low and the wages are low. A rupee a day is not enough to satisfy the best artists, nor is four annas enough for a highly-skilled workman. _Bidri_, a kind of damascening lately revived, brasswork, ironwork and wood-carving, all go on here as well as a special local industry, the modelling of small coloured figures from clay worked into a paste with babul gum, belgiri, and sometimes brown paper and cotton-wool.

Then there is the carving of wooden blocks for printing patterns on cloths, the making of musical instruments (see that long sitar hanging in the shop-front) and the beating of gold-leaf and silver-leaf for eating. Indeed, it is true that people at Lucknow eat both gold and silver-leaf. I watched the thin piece of gold-foil being put between two leather leaves and then hammered out on stone, very slowly expanding to thirty times its original size. It is sometimes taken for disease of the heart, but it is not so much in cases of sickness but rather as a general fortifier to give additional strength to the whole body that the metal-leaf is swallowed, and after all the practice is more universal than one thinks at first. Children of many lands have a great {167} fondness for tin trumpets--and I remember a New Year's Eve in London when a certain English Government Official offered me floating gold-leaf to drink for good health!

The first time I drove through the gates of the Akbariderwazar at one end of the Chauk a long swing bar, with upright wooden spikes two feet high, lay across the roadway. This was to close the bazaar to vehicles from two o'clock to eight in the evening (in summer from three to nine), the busiest time for shopping. No gharries or ekkas (another kind of wheeled vehicle) are permitted to enter during those hours, except by a special pass of the city magistrate, such as I carried. Were it not for such regulation, the narrow thoroughfare would every afternoon be nothing but a wedged confusion. In the larger Indian cities there is so much traffic that such a narrow street practicable for pedestrians and horse-riders, palanquins and litters, becomes jammed at once if open to wheeled vehicles in the busy hours.

An arch crosses the street at each end of the Chauk, one pointed and the other round--both without mouldings, and along each side a runnel of water flows in an open gutter. There is no profusion of delicate tracery about the projecting windows and other parts of the house-fronts as in many cities, and much tawdry and common workmanship; but looking back through the {168} opening of the pointed archway beyond the near figures of the ever-moving crowd, sombre in the shadow of the houses and blended with the subdued sumptuousness of stuffs and wares, the outer roadway and a few buildings beyond contrast in simple spacious majesty--bathed in the glow of Eastern afternoon.

It was the first time I had noticed cowrie-shells being used as money--as a common medium of exchange--and nothing in India seemed more significant of the frugality of the mass of the people. Upon the brick and stucco platform, about 3 feet from the ground, that fronts many of the houses, there squatted upon a worn dhurrie a cowrie money-changer in a printed cotton dress and a little white cotton cap, and in front of him lay the heaps of shells, seventy-two in each. One anna is, of course, equal to four pice, and here at Lucknow while the gharry-wallah was demanding seventeen rupees for a day's hire, each of the four pice that make an anna was divisible into seventy-two cowries. Imagine yourself being able to divide a farthing in Whitechapel into seventy-two parts!

I had an anna converted into cowries without any lapse on the part of the changer from his accustomed gravity, but it was one of the few occasions on which Tambusami was thoroughly amused. I insisted forthwith on {169} seeking what I could purchase with the shells, and a little further along the bazaar I bought for eighteen of them (the equivalent of a fourth part of a farthing) some salt, some spice, some tamarind and a portion of cooked grain-flour called pakori.

The Lucknow Races might have been on Epsom Downs for any evidence thereof in the Chauk that afternoon. A woman with a burka--a Mohammedan begging-woman in a white garment that covered her from feet to crown of head, having two round holes cut for seeing through--relieved us of the balance of our shells; and the police inspector, who accompanied me, drew my attention to a house of more pretentious decoration than its neighbours. Within, he declared, lived a _Paluria_ or dancing-girl, who made 1000 rupees a month; and the fancy came to me out of that mesh of contrasts, where sun and shadow were so closely interwoven on the loom of life that warp and web seemed to become each other's fibre,--what if the unknown woman hidden beneath the ample folds of that snowy burka were, after all, a disguised _Paluria_ of yesterday, accepting alms in white oblivion?

Such women of light hours often, I was told, at Lucknow are those who have lived with some Mohammedan in the curious temporary connection called _Mulaa_, which is a local {170} practice instituted, as far as I could learn, to permit the addition of more wives without indefinite responsibility, the connection being terminable at the will of either party. The women of this class have often a considerable band of retainers, and the professional singing-lady who entertains strangers usually provides fiddlers, drummers and _manjira_ or cymbal-players, who all receive a portion of her fee.

In a side alley leading off the Chauk there is a factory of otto of roses. Lucknow is famous for its perfumes--and one distilled from jasmine is highly popular, as well as an oil from roots of the Khaskas grass.

Lucknow, apart from the native quarters of the town, is a place of wide roads well laid out (after the destruction for military purposes of many houses at the time of the Mutiny), parks, gardens and other open spaces. I made a toilsome round of the chief show buildings, the jejune palaces, the mosques and the ungainly meretricious tombs. There was the Great Imambarah, built under Asaf-ud-daulah, whose tomb it is, as a relief-work in the Chatisa Famine of 1784 (for there were famines in India before the present administration). The interest here is a mechanical one, in the successful construction of an enormous roof in coarse concrete without ribs, beams, pillars, abutment, framework or support of any kind, except from the four {171} surrounding walls. Rather over 160 feet long by 50 wide and 49 feet high, this vast apartment houses the canopied tomb which stands a little oddly, as it is placed with its axis in the direction of Mecca, to which the sides of the hall are not parallel. Near to it stands a huge tinsel _Tasia_ carried annually through the streets at the time of Moharam.

The walls of the Imambara are very thick indeed, with innumerable passages and stairways in them which lead to a veritable maze on the roof level, and it is from some of these passages that the little "loges" or tiny box-like balconies high up in the walls are reached, from which purdah ladies could look down on function or ceremony, as English women from the ladies' gallery in the House of Commons.

I saw the handsome three-domed mosque of the Jama Masjid, with blue and purple decoration painted in line on walls and ceilings, except on the ceiling of its middle porch which was coloured in green. From the platform of the Jama Masjid I could see the ornate Husainabad Imambara, another tomb built in the year of Queen Victoria's accession, by the same king as the great mosque itself, as a burial-place for himself and his mother. A red-brick modern clock-tower showed some distance beyond the tallest of its gilded cupolas. The Husainabad Imambara, built almost entirely of painted {172} stucco, is gaudy and vulgar in decoration and feeble in design. Its great hall contains some tons weight of glass chandeliers and common German ornaments. An enclosed court with paved walks and flower-beds contains a long rectangular piece of water, on which a barge with life-size figures of a man and a horse upon it is pushed up and down by one of the attendants. Coloured glass balls hang from arches of bent ironwork, and the railings along the flower-beds are all fitted with sockets for lights, while the stucco faces of the building are furnished with a multitude of small hooks for the same purpose. The stucco itself is of a peculiarly bright quality, and illuminated at night by thousands of fairy-lights, these buildings have evoked much admiration; but so also have the plaster decorations of Cremorne, Vauxhall or Ranelagh, the white palaces of Shepherd's Bush and the _cafés chantants_ of the Champs Elysees; and, after all, it was race-week, and since Lucknow had its "Grand Prix" if only these far from venerable mausoleums could be turned into an "Ambassadeurs" or a "Jardin de Paris," they might cease to be troublesome!

A less offensive building is the Kerbela of Dianatud Doulah, of old red sandstone, rosy in the sunlight, surmounted by another gilded cupola, but marred horribly by a new porch roofed with corrugated iron. The Kasmain {173} also, a copy of a sacred place in Baghdad, had much beauty in the coloration of its arabesque patterns of pale celadon greens, buffs, reds and smoky greys.

Seeking a little rest in the cool basement of the Lucknow Museum I came upon a lovely piece of sculpture, the very sight of which was as refreshing as a plashing fountain in a waste of sand. It was apparently the upper portion of an octagonal pillar, and was found amongst the ruins of Asaykhera, a small village in Etawah, on the right bank of the Jumna. Eight dancing-girls move in a circle slowly and rhythmically, and although their feet are supported by brackets their attitudes are full of easy movement. They wear jewelled bangles and anklets and a string of jewels encircles each of their necks, passing between and round the breasts to fall in front of the otherwise undraped thighs. The heads of the figures are broken, but their loss seems hardly felt in the delightful movement of the group. I found a luxurious sense of calm and quietude in contemplating this sculpture and for the time forgot the Imambaras and the noisy chaffering of the Chauk Bazaar. I think Cellini would have liked it; he must have enjoyed the carving even if he had deemed the group too homogeneous; certainly Lorenzo would have admired it.

But the strong spirit that holds the English {174} visitor to Lucknow is certainly not the sensuous magic of æsthetic charm. "It is the due admixture of romance and reality," said Sir Henry Lawrence, "that best carries a man through life,"--and the heroic days of the Mutiny have left at Lucknow memories so compact of both that the stranger can but heed them and drink in the tale with ever-growing eagerness.

I turned my steps towards the old Sikandra Bagh, beyond the horticultural gardens, to see the little that is left of the walls through which Private Dunlay of the 93rd, on the spot now traversed by the road to the river, was the first to enter that stronghold of the rebels. On the way the flattened dome of the Shah Najaf, another great tomb, appeared against pale rosy clouds, a red flag clinging to its mast above walls of such tremendous thickness that they withstood both naval guns and Captain Middleton's battery. But it is another flag that keeps in my mind whenever I think of Lucknow--that one from the old staff on the Residency tower. A new one flies from it every year, but its pattern does not change. We last a few years longer than the shred of bunting and others will succeed us--may the high and noble courage of our people in the past be constant still enduring after us!

{175}