FIRST SIGHT OF INDIA.

Northern Advocate, 14 February 1912, Page 2

FIRST SIGHT OF INDIA.

Mr J. A. Spender, the editor of the "Westminster Gazette," thus describes his first sight of India: — "The first sight of India leaves the mind in a whirl. I understand now why Anglo-Indian writers have found it necessary to invent a language of their own ; consisting largely of untianslatable vnd unintelligible heathen words. For Bombay is full of a multitude of things for which I am unable to find a name. "I never imagined such a variety (of people) as Bombay displays in its circuit of twenty miles. CLOSE-PACKED MULTITUDE. "I have some acquaintance with the East End of London and its crowded tenements, but nowhere in London or in any European town that I know, except possibly ir one quarter of Naples, have I ever seen anything like this swarming, vivid, various humanity. "No multitude could live thus closepacked without establishing some rough rule of mutual forbearance. Yet those who know them well tell you that this immense jumble of humanity sorts itself into hundreds of intensely separate little heaps, each of which is guarded from the others by an unimaginable code of pride or prejudice. "Bombay mnet be the despair of the Indian sanitary reformer. The grey and brown slums of an English town are bad enough, but those brilliant, bizarre, sun-smitten slums of Bombay, with the plague in their dark places, give yov a shudder such as you could get in no northern country. Ihere is, one feels instinctively, something poisono is in their glittering squalor. Nothing would help but a fire which swept them all away. THE HANDFUL OF RULERS.

"It does in a measure take your breath away to iind the handful of the ruling race asserting themselves so absolutely over these rich and success ful men of business, men who veritably possess the place, who have made large fortunes as merchants and cot-ton-spinners, and who are obviously no whit iuferior in the managing capacity to the ablest of Europeans. It is as though Manchester or Liverpool were being governed by a handful of Civil Servants sent, not from London, but from Eerlin. Yet, ifi you ask the question,' you are told at once that these men have no grievance. British rule, and British alone, has provided them with the opportunity of making their fortunes, and like capitalists everywhere, they cry out for security. "You must be a very forlorn man in Bombay if you have not a friend to take you to the Yacht Culb. There towards sunset you will find the English colony as.3«jmbled on a green lawn fronting the ser. which might be anywhere in England. "While you are here you -.'orget the great, seething miasmic city behind you, and wonder at the cheerfulness, smartness, good looks, and good manners of the Bombay English toid their womenkind. Civilians or soldiers, tb.ey are clearly a strong, se.'f-reliant, well-favoured race, with an indefinable air of beirg in authority. It is an authority, however, which is never flaunted. * NO BIG TALK. "You hear vo big talk; it is indeed, the most difficult thing in the world to induce any of them to talk at all about themselves or their duties. They seem to take for granted that they should be there and doing what they are doing. The first dominant impression one bears away is that they liave a great interest in governing 2nd none at ill in possessing."