Chapter XI: Cawnpore

"To-day that's Oudh--to-morrow it may be Cawnpore--the boundary line is the main stream of the Ganges and that is ever shifting." Thus spoke the manager of a great woollen mill as I stood beside him on an embankment in front of it, looking at the vast expanse of open plain beyond the river wrhich flowed past us. The wind was blowing the white sand in clouds over the plain. Lines of long grass planted at intervals slightly broke its force and gave a little protection to the young crops, when any crops were there.

Cawnpore is fast becoming the Manchester of India, and I was visiting some of its large mills and factories. Part of the wool comes from Australia via Calcutta, but most of the raw material used at Cawnpore is Indian. It was being unloaded at the railway siding, and near by women were sorting--picking it over--and men pressing it down with their feet into large sacks.

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Just at the moment this firm had in hand a Government contract for 11,000 coats, and had just finished an order of 33,000 coats for the police of Hyderabad, Deccan.

In an upper storey of the factory a vast floor was covered with khaki; it had been chalked all over from patterns, and Indian cutters were now shearing away at it. A bell rang in the weaving-shed. This was attached to the machine for making the warp. Every time a length of warp of fifty yards is made the bell rings automatically. Then it is taken off on to a roller beam and transferred from the warp-mill to the loom.

Near the cloth-mills there is a leather factory. The skins, mostly buffalo, had come to that raw hide-shed from all over India. Some were simply dried, some arsenicated and some, white-looking skins, had been salted. I was shown a special feature of this tannery--its method of tanning in latticed drums, half submerged in pits. The hides hung lengthways from the rope within the lattices, and at the end of each huge gun-metal or copper drum there were eight arms and a manhole.

In a yard outside bark was being unloaded from railway-trucks, ready for grinding up and infusing with "leaches." Three sorts of bark were being delivered--Babul (_acacea antica_), Sal (_shoria robusta_), and Rhea (not the native {177} Rhea). There was a special and elaborate plant for making extract of bark, a process which was conducted _in vacuo_, so that the colour should not be affected by the boiling. In the same yard there were piles of sacks containing myrabolams from the Central Provinces, and in a corner I caught sight of a group of people dressed in strange sulphur-coloured cloaks, which covered head as well as body, leaving holes for the eyes as in a Mohammedan woman's burka--dresses that made me think of an _auto-da-fé_. The air about them was full of a cloudy yellow dust. "And what are these?" I asked the polite gentleman who was conducting me. "Those--oh--ah--they were not working the other day when the factory commissioners came round!" he said, laughing, and took me to look at something else. The bark extraction, as I said, was conducted _in vacuo_: this other process was evidently carried on _in camera_.

I do not think there is any near danger of India being turned into a machine, and the iron fetters of industrialism may even be welcome to a people living habitually at grips with starvation, and besides--has not one of the largest of the Cawnpore manufacturing companies set noble example in building a model village for their 3500 employees?

The manager was sorely exercised about pilfering propensities, and how much have I {178} heard from Englishmen as to native thieving! I was assured that a Hindoo will so gently tickle with a straw the face of a sleeping traveller that he will turn his head just enough to permit abstraction of any valuables he may have placed under his pillow, and will then tickle the other cheek till the traveller turns back his head to its former position and sleeps on unharassed by any tiresome dreams. No such experience was ever mine, and in fact throughout my stay in the country I was never, to my knowledge, robbed of anything, and the only instance I encountered in India was that of a young French count who was relieved on the railway of much gold by a European train-thief. I wish, indeed, I could think such allegations all as unfounded as the accounts of the imaginary rope-trick.

In Lancashire I have seen many a crowd of mill-hands leaving work, and wanting to compare the similar moment at an Indian factory, I waited outside one of these at Cawnpore a little before closing time. Presently the men began to come out, at first in small batches and then in quickly-growing numbers--but what peculiar gymnastic exercise were they going through at the gates? A horizontal bamboo pole was fixed a couple of feet above the ground, and as each man raised his legs to step over this a chuprassee passed his hands over the workman's sides. Presently one was stopped and bidden to stand {179} aside till the rest had passed. It was an ordeal by search and one of the various devices used to aid detection of the pilfering that I was assured is constant.

Through a small bronze gate, cast from one of the guns of the _Shannon_ (those guns which bluejackets dragged all the way from Calcutta), every Englishman who goes to Cawnpore enters an octagonal sandstone screen in the middle of a small public park. Within, heavy and commonplace, Marochetti's marble angel stands in the centre above the closed well-head. There is not in the recorded history of any people a tragedy at once so terrible and so inimitably sad as that of the Cawnpore massacres: and on emerging from that small enclosed plot with its too ponderous angel, there can hardly be an Englishman who does not carry in his face the expression of a deep emotion. There are many churches in India, but there is no shrine so sacred to her rulers as the Cawnpore Well. Not far away stands the neem tree, on which some of the rebels were hung, and two larger trees are pointed out by the side of which sepoys were blown from the guns. The House of Massacre has long since been razed to the ground, and its site is now only marked by a block of black {180} stone surmounted by a white marble cross and bearing an inscription in gold letters.

A road, shaded by some of the very same trees that hid the Nana Sahib's men on the 27th June 1857, leads to the brick-built ghat and its stone steps. They descend from each side of a small whitewashed Siva temple now, I think, no longer used. The steps are long and walled at each side: when I stood upon them no water lapped beneath. The Ganges was low and its main current had shifted away across the white stretch of sand beyond this narrower meandering stream. To the left the red brick piers of the Oudh and Rohilcund Railway Bridge paled in the heat haze to a faint pink colour. On the opposite shore a few lines of tall Kassa grass dry and dead, were ineffectually trying to protect patches of ground sown with melon seed. Overhead a peepul tree, an old tree--witness of all that terrible past--stretched a canopy of leaves that shimmered in the sunlight and danced in the little breeze, and while I stood there a Hindoo woman, ankles and wrists loaded with heavy silver bangles, went down the steps and over the sand to the water--that sacred water--to bathe and to wash her white garment.

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