DELHI AND THE DURBAR

Otago Witness, Issue 3015, 27 December 1911, Page 57

DELHI AND THE DURBAR

By Constant Reader. The cables concerning the Coronation Durbar instinctively turned my thoughts towards India and the East. "Nature," wrote the late G. W. Steevens in "In India," "seems to have raised an unscalable barrier between West and East. It has lattices for mutual liking, for mutual respect, but true community of rnind it shuts off inexorably." If Professor Bain is to be believed—and the Professor is steeped to the finger-tips in Hindoo mythology and Eastern lore, —this unscalable barrier has been rendered still more unscalable by Mr Rudyard Kipling. In a note to the preface of his latest book, "The Ashes of a God," Professor Bain says of Rudyard Kipling that his India " is merely a' misrepresented AngloIndia," and that "no man has done more to caricature and misinterpret India in the interest of military vulgarity than this popular writer to whom Hindoo India is a book with seven seals." Bain has. corroboration in this opinion in that beautiful and wonderful romance of India "The Prince of Destiny," where the author, Sarath Kumar Ghosh makes his hero, Barath, "the New Krishna," implore Francis Thompson to write "an accurate but truly poetic version" of "Sakuntala," that* work of the Sanskrit poet Kalidas, devned by Goethe the finest depiction of the noblest of human emotions : For his own recreation Barath had translated the Sanskrit text into plain prose in English in small batches, and had read them to Thompson. He was surprised and delighted to find that at odd intervals of inspiration his friend had rendered them into poetry. Barath saw visions. An. accurate yet truly poetic translation of "Sakuntala" into" English was worth the whole " British army in India. This work contained the essence of domestic ideals in India, and was cherished alike by prince and peasant; was known by heart by the man in the street and in the hamlet; was recited by the village bard to the toiler in the field. "Francis, complete this work, I beg of you," Barath cried .in dawning hope. '' Let the British public read it, and thus understand our most cherished ideals. That will serve to remove a mountain of misconception between Great Britain and India. Too long has the political journalist fostered this misunderstanding to gain his own sordid ends ; too long has the London leaderwriter hurt the deepest of Indian feelings, in sheer ignorance, everytime he rushed into print; and too long has the Indian vernacular journalist retaliated by vilifying all things English. A plague on these political journalists! ... See the writer who first began this campaign of falsehood between Great Britain and India—see the power he has in the land deluding his countrymen. Then let a true poet, a true prophet, undo the evil. Do you doubt the power of a true poet, even in this generation? Then listen! It goes against my heart to say anything adversely of England or of Europe, but see how all Europe has gone mad over Omar Khayyam ; regardless of Ferdousi ; Hafiz, or Sadi, it has fastened on this second-rate Persian poet. Then will you be a new Fitzgerald to Kalidas, truly one of the greatest poets of India? . Will you immortalise his 'Sakuntala' in English poetry? Remember that thereby you will remove from England. a grave reproach. It is in human nature not to appreciate a

thing at its true value till it is lost. The French read even third-rate Indian literature, remembering that they lost ths opportunity of possessing India through Dupleix; and the Germans do likewise because they never even had that opportunity. England alone neglects Indian literature. That is not my reproach, but the reproach of the future historian. We read and appreciate your history and literature, then why don't you read ours? Perhaps you will—when you have lost India."

"The Prince of Destiny" throws much light on Francis Thompson, both as man and poet. One of these days I hope to work the information up into an article, more especially since I have lately received a copy of " Eyes of Youth," a beautiful book of verse, containing four hitherto unpublished poems by Francis Thompson, of whom G. K. Chesterton says in a "Foreword" that " all serious critics" now class him " with Shelley and Keats and those other great ones cut down with their work unfinished." I hope also to lay " The Prince of Destiny" under contribution for a Christmas article I have in mind for Saturday next, to be entitled "The Star of.the East," For the present' my purpose is to deal with "Delhi and the Durbar.". Sarath Kumar Ghosh starts his story in the year 1877, when the late Queen Victoria was about to be proclaimed Empress of India ait Delhi, a city thus eloquently described : Delhi as an Imperial capital has had no equal on earth. Antioch and Nineveh have perished ; Troy and Carthage, Thebes and Memphis are no more; Delhi alone remains, though shorn of her beauty. Called Indraprastha, at her birth fifty centuries ago, she was the prize for which the sons of the godis of Meru fought and died, and dying left their ashes enshrined in the Tombs-

of-the-Kinge for thirty centuries. Then Indraprastha became Delhi, when the Choh&n dynasty, the noblest of the Eajputs, held sway over India. The sceptre passed from the Chohan to the Afghan, the Toork, the Moghul; but all made Delhi their capital and themselves Emperors of India, not alien. They kept inviolate the Tombe-of-the Kings. Their Hindu predecessors had preferred the pyre to the sepulchre, but the gold and silver caskets containing their ashes reposed in state in that vast mausoleum, for thirty centuries] and

the Moslem Emperors, alike the Afghan, the Toork, the Moghul, erected their marble and alabaster sepulchres beside the gold and silver caskets. And now the Tomb-of-the-Kings was converted into a brlliard room for the use of the British army. Why not? Mr Thomas Atkins, who was regarded as the ultimate ruler of India, had to have his beer and skittles somewhere, Then why not in that huge structure, that was lying idle and could be put to no other public use?

Francis Thompson did not live to comr plete his " Parsifal," as the author of "The Pi-ince of Destiny" dubs the: contemplated versification in English of the Sanskrit poet's " Sa.kuntala"; an<J the British Empire and the British people are poorer thereby.. But at least the books by Professor Bain are open to the reading public, and a wonderful insight into the temperament and tradition of India is to be found in those pages, which for sheer prefeetion of prose, approach most nearly to poetry. There are nine of these beautiful books, which in the charming pocket edition recently issuecf by Messrs Methuen, are accessible t<f men of moderate means. A more de« lightful Christmas present than thesfl nine little volumes it is impossible to conceive; matchless in style, mystical in method, and filled with all the mysterious fascination of India and Hinduism, they are pages in plenty to pore over in the langorous sunny days which I hope are yet to borne, even in Dunedin. In a, knowledge of Sanskrit is to be found the key to. India. This is the burden of Professor Bain's lament, extracted from the preface to " The Ashes of a God" : Here in the young nations of the West, literature and religion are not on© thing, but two, with essences and origins altogether different, and da&tinct, though now and then a Milton or a Dante may by welding them together produce something more analagous to Indian poetry. For in India, religion and literature are inseparable; they look back not to Greece on the one hand and Judea on the other, but to a sacred compound of the two, all the nearer because it is their very own, whereas .to us both Greece and Judea are foreign, not only the places but the tongues, and likely in the immediate future to" become still stranger than they are. This is why nobody can possibly understand anything of India who is ignorant of Sanskrit, which is the key to India, and from which all the modern local idioms, be they Aryan or not, borrow almost everything literary, .religious, or philosophical that they contain. ... This old Sanskrit language then, in>

which dwells the spirit of a classic' paganism, not less beautiful and holier than Helias, pre-Christian, idolatrous, preserves among other things opposed to Western modernism, an element of charm which in Europe too much knowledge is destroying; the element of distance, of the unknown of that which is outside the map, beyond, afar. Foe us the time is gone when as Plutarchsays, geographers filled up the emptiness beyond the limits known with bogs, or deserts., or wild beasts. But Hindoo stories move in an .enchanted land,, a thing to dream oyer like the world "a» known to Homer" or the scraps of mythological geography in Pindar eode, \ when for example Rhodes was not an but lay lurking before the a divided earth in the briny hollow* of the sea. And as we pore on it we feel inclined to murmur with Voltairs that error has its worth as well aa

truth. Did the -discovery of America make up for the lost mystery that brooded like the spirit over the waters of the dim Atlantic, when even Hiber* nia was half a myth. . . , The old literature of India, its epics and tititihases, are the very home of mythical geography, of lotus lands, white islands,. seas of milk, and distant hills behind which, far beyond the sea, the suns go down to die, which never even Sinbad saw. It is all one gigantic dream, fairy tale reduced to a kind of system, where wild imagination is reality, and the commonplace is not. Teach the Hindoo the earth goes round the sun; it may be so, but in his heart there echoes eome scrap of ancient poetry where every sun descende to rest behind the western hill. Would you blame him for choosing rather to err with Kalidas and Waimiki, than go right with some elementary, manual of geography? For him the* dream is the reality, and the spell is in the language in which these things are written.—who does not know the language cannot understand the spell. Mill and your Macaulay argue on. these matters like blind men reasoning on colour. Only that grows never old which never lived. Yon cannot kill a dream, because it is already dead.

One thing in . particular endears-me to Professor Bain; he pays frequent and passionate adoration to the moon.. He declares in one of his illuminating prefaces—" An Incarnation of the Snow " that there would be more than a grain of truth in the assertion that all old Hindoo literature is little, but a long hymn to the moon. "It moves in a. lunar atmosphere, found nowhere else on earth, a strange holy twilight, suggestive of another world, ■ Nothing is so dreamy, so utterly remote from everyday reality, as this enchanted, ghostly air. And yet it is easily intelligible, since the normal condition of those who live in it is the occassional experience of every common mortal. For who has not now and then fallen under the spell, and found himself, so to say, diabolically snared into the worship of the moon? Who is there that has not felt that planetary influence, that magnetic, half-mysterious attraction, that Lohengrinesque amalgam of dusky camphor and mountain snowflake, silver of swan and foam of sea, which oo*es, as the Hindoos say, out of the evening moon? Nature can sing it to herself by means of her magical creation, the voices of the nightingales 'at shut of eve'; but what

Articulate Endymion could ever put his passion into words?" Professor Bain proceeds to tell how he was himself almost bewitched, the occasion being the arrival of the then Prince of Wales in India in 1905 :

On that auspicious morning all was enthusiasm and tumult in Bombay. Viceroys and rajas, dignitaries of all descriptions, civil or military, eastern or western, were jostling one another to do honour to the heir of Empire. There was to be found everybody in India Who was anybody. But I, being unfortunately nobody, far away in the purple ghauts, had risen long before the sun, and in the pale, cool, shadowy dawn, while yet "the faint east quickened." I went obscure down, down; down past bushes of deep red shoeflower, glimmering out of dusky brakes; down by winding leafy roads, past long ascending, grunting files of early-rising nearly-naked, copper-coloured sons and daughters of the soil, bending under bowing loads of rustling grass that hid their heads; past giant, cactus candlesticks fastoon&d with hanging chains of blue convolvulus, and perched where, you might have dropped a stone suddenly into the tops of trees a thousand feet below; past here and there a monster spray ot white "wild arrowroot" standing a little bent alone with its own loveliness ineffable, against a background of the dark; down, down by jagge'd, rocky beds, resembling what in fact they were, the dried-up beds of torrents, fit rather to be monkeys' ladders than ways for voice-dividing men ; down, hour by hour, until at last the sun was high and I came out into a steaming airless valley, through which a little brook ran babbling its waters clear as crystal, flashing with swarms of tiny minnows so brightly as to be almost painful to the eye. Then on along a white and glaring dusty road, ■where flocks of emerald parrots shot and screamed about the trees; and then pnce more up and up, by a dark and cool delicious forest path, like the very road to the bower of a Sleeping Beauty, till finally I gained the top and stood within the old Maratha fort. And as I.lay, sharing with the vultures the vast distance and the dizzy depth, the drought of the infinite, the old blessing of Joseph in a faroff Syrian land, suddenly rushed into my mind. Here on the tops of "ancient hills," you seem to become endowed, like the old yogis, with an extra sense. You seem to hear as you he and listen, the ticking of the great clock, and a faint echo of the spheres. Aye! Patanjali was right. Those who listen habitually .to silence learn to hear voices, and a music far sweeter than any earthly strain. And I looked north, towards Bombay, hidden away on the far horizon in the haze and glare. And I said, "0 Prince of Wales, who of all that, cross thy path in India will either know or dare to tell thee the thing that is in India's heart, as she sits down with the face turned down and back, so utterly lost in worship of gods that the world has all forgotlten that she cares for nothing else?" "Behold me, a withered branch, trunk, how I have suddenly shot out with foreign foliage! I, who of old myself produced great store of fruit and leafy beauty, not a whit inferior to this. But let a man chose for his mistress one who will understand him, and requite him even after he is dead." My heart is stifled, I want my own old gods, not yours—yours that were only the child of mine.. Your Protestant missionary is pure impertinence, jt our frigid, melancholy theism is a mere segment of my joyous mystical polytheism, which better reflects the itaany faces of an incomprehensibe divinity. An incarnation is not your idea but mine. All that you come to teach me I knew better than even Egypt knew it, long before you ever were. ' For I also am a Holy Land; my very air is sacred, yet you send conceited Gobblers and stupid wife-embracing parsons to teach me little isolated fragments of my own old mystic lore. As, well might the Welsh hills come over sea to Kailas, or Hanahanjnnga, what a mountain really is, or the Sahara Marasthali itself deem itself competent to teach botany to Brazil. Do men carry owl? to Athens or coals to Newcastle? What art was to the Greek, or policy to the Romans, or business is to London, that religion is to me. And if, indeed, religion is only nonsense, as your wise men say, then am I also less than nothing. But if not, then learn once for all, that the Ganges is more sacred than the Thames, and that all the London churches contain less religion than Benares, where calm-eyed sages sat if old, by the purifying water, repeating, "One is the Deity, but the wise call him by names," when Oxford and Cambridge were as yet homes for the bittern and the snipe.

It is said that the selection of Delhi In place of Calcutta ae the future seat of Government of the Indian Empire has given the greatest satisfaction. In his book '' In India" G. W. Steevens has a fine chapter on " Delhi," in the course of which he says:—"Delhi is still seamed •with the scars of her spoilers, and still jewelled with remnants of the gems they ■fought for. If you take them in order you will go first, not into the city, but 11 miles south, to the tower Kuth-Minar. 33rrough the dust of the road, rising out of the springing wheat, among the mud and' mat huts before which squat the jbrown-limbed peasants, you see the co*untry a litter of broken . walla, tumbling towers, rent domes. There are fragments of seven cities built by seven kings beif ore the present Delhi, was; 11 miles of them bring you to the tower and mosque of Kuth. Kuth-el Din was a slave who raised himself to Viceroy of Delhi when .the Mussulmans took it, then Emperor of Hindustan and founder of a dynasty. [Whether he or his son, or the last of the JETindu Kings built the tower, antiquaries

are undecided and others careless. It is enough that here is on© landmark in Delhi's history, one splendid monument reared for a symbol of triumph by a victor whom now nobody can certainly identify." Sir Henry Craik, in his "Impressions of India," has a fine chapter on "Two Aspects of Delhi," in which he gives a moving description of the Km tab Minar :

On© marvel of beauty—to my mind the chief pride of Delhi and its neighbourhood—still stands practically mtaot—the Kutab-Minar or tower of Kutab. Of all the monuments of Mogul art that I have yet seen, this has impressed me most. It rises some 240tt, tapering from a base of some 50ft in diameter to a summit of less than 10ft. At intervals it is hroken by the five storeys, each of which is marked by a graceful balustrade, and towards the summit the marble predominates over the red stone of which it is constructed, and thus adds to its lightness and its flower-like grace. It is strange and, to Western eyes, at first bizarre. But it emerges with such consummate grace from the massive ruins around us, that it seems at once so delicate and so strong that the rich incrustation of its decorations and the marvellous beauty of its -colouring compel our submissive admiration. It shakes away from its feet the dust and crumbling ruins round it which tell of mingled faiths and centuries of bloodshed. It remains a tall and solitary flower of surpassing beauty, rising proudly and with all the brilliancy of springtime from the dusty, withered, and decayed plants that spread in desolate confusion round its teet. And what must it mean to all those thousands who to-day crowd into tins historic stage, live through their obscure existence, pass and repass amid the shadows of these tombs of the past.' None of the traditions, of the ruins has faded from their memories. The tombs are guarded by those who claim on good grounds'kinship with the founders of these splendid relics. Fable and tradition, memories of old dynasties, the mvstic symbols of religion—all are as real to them as they were of old. They mingle together now, Hindu and Mussulman, sharing in the same festivals, bound by the same love of religious mysticism, only superficially touched by contact with the Western spirit. They must feel that they live amongst the ruins of a tragic past of struggle' and of cruelty. In this vast sink of contention no real national spirit has been evolved. They are the product of all these centuries of ceaseless strife and ruthless tyranny, and from it they have learned infinite patience inbred habits of submission, apathy and lack of energy, and ingrained aptitude for obedience to authority, broken only by passionate obedience to custom, and by a potentiality of blind religious' zeal. To them our rule must seem a couch of restful ease after the nightmare of centuries of tragedy. It is only by the simple directness of its aim, by its quiet assertion of authority, by its undeviating rectitude of justice, by its slow persuasiveness, that our rule can preserve its hold. It is to them a dream of infinite restfulness whatever the hardships of their lonely Life may be. How terrible the responsibility of any reckless words, any hair-brained schemes, that would break the spell and let loose once more the flood-gates of strife and anarchy and religious fanaticism."

The investiture of Delhi as the capital and seat of Government of India will certainly be accepted by the Hindoo as part fulfilment of an ever-remembered prophecy that the possessor of Delhi has always been the suzerain of India. This prophecy is thus paraphrased in " The Prince of Destiny" : —"Now listen. 0 beloved, to the doming of the New Krishna. For he will come again to rebuild the walls of Indraprastha, Where he had reigned as King in his. first coming. Indraprastha built by Krishna's divine puissance shall never perish, kings and emperors shall pass away but Indraprastha shall last for ever, and 'he that holds it shall be the suzerain of Barath-barsha." The explanation of the final word being that India is known to the Hindoo as the Kingdom of Barath. Professor B?,in in "the preface to " The Essence of the- Dusk" thus records a visit he paid to Delhi not many years ago, and here is his description of the KutubMinar : The Kutub-Minar is a needle of red stone that rises from a plain as flat as paper to a height of 250 ft; and you might compare it as you catch approaching glimpses of it in the distance to a coTotsal ohhrmey, a Pharos, Or a Efreet of the Jinn. Th» last would be the best. For nothing on the surface of the earth can parallel the scene of desolation which unrolls itself below, if you climb its 380 steps, and look out from the dizzy verge ; a thing that will test both the muscles of your knees and the steadiness of your nerves. Round you is empty space; look down the pillar bends and totters and you seem to rock in air; you shudder, you are falling; and away below, far as the eye can carry, yousee the dusty plain, studded with a thousand tombs and relics of forgotten kings. There is the grim old fortress of the Toghlaks; there is the singular observatory of the Rama astronomer Jaya Singh, and there Ihe tomb, Humaioon'c tomb, before which Hodson, Hodßon the brave, Hodson the slandered, Hodson tho unforgotten sat for two long hours, still as if man and horse were carved in stone, with the hostile crowd that loathed and feared him, tossing and seething and surging itranid him waiting for the last Mogul to come out and be led e,way* The air is thick

and sparkles with blinding dust and glare and the- wind whistles in your ears. Over the bones of dynasties the hot wind wail« and sobs and moans. Aye, if a man seeks for melancholy I

will tell him where to find it—at the top of the old Kutub-Minar.

Delhi is a monument of mystery and melancholy, for added to its dim and glorious traditions are the memories of the dreadful, mutiny of 50 years ago. South of the present city are the ancient shrines and tombs that make the plain ana vast cemetery. But northwards, out from the Cashmere Gate, may be seen the ruined bastions broken in the cannonade of 1857. Across the road stands the statue of John Nicholson, while right in front is the red Flagstaff tower where the refugees crowded in hourly expectation of death. And as the cable carries the description of the wondrous glories of the Coronation Durbar from end to end of the great British Empire, there must bt; in many minds, mixed feelings, as all that Delhi means and stands for rises so poignantly and vividly before them. For myself, I have amplified the cabled accounts with the wonderful description of the Durbar of 1877, which forms the opening chapter of "The Prince of Destiny," from which one all-too-brief extract must make my conclusion: It was early dawn upon the Ridge. The city of pavilions that had-arisen like Aladdin's magic palace lay beneath. Beyond it towards the rising sun still slumbered the. Imperial City. *.A thin white mist glimmered like a mystic light above its golden cupolas and marble domes and minarets. Then in the centre of the veil" there came to being a luminous disc, pink and orange, fringed with rays of blue and violet. A moment later the veil had vanished in the air, and like a radiant god the sun sat enthroned upon Imperial Delhi, embracing the earth in ten thousand arms. " 11-lalla, Allah ilia ! Allah Akbar !" the voice of,the muezzin floated on the

stilness of the morn from the topmost minaret of the Jumma Muejid; then minaret and dome and cupola took up the call : "God is God, the Great the Good." And Delhi awoke at that call. The voice of the West answered it, the voice of a hundred and one cannon placed upon the Ridge. Then the city of pavilions also awoke and the two cities went forth together to assemble in the great ampitheatre that lay between. Built centuries before the Roman 'Coliseum, it had witnessed the battles of the great epics re-enacted with vivid realism in the days of the Hindu Emperors of Delhi, and contests of skill and valour, less heroic but more sensational beneath the gaze of the Toork and the MoghuL, and having fallen into decay in thesa degenerate times, it had been rebuilt for the special purpose of this Durbar.

A short while afterwards the procession was formed and India's chivalry set

forth for.the amphitheatre, a hundred and one'Maharajahs, Rajahs, Thakars, and Nawabs, borne on a hundred and one white-tusked elephants. . . . A gorgeous cavalcade came behind each potentate and that constituted a spectacle, a drama, a sermon, a prophecy unparalleled on earth. . . . Each cavalcade furnished a chapter from the ancient and mediaeval history of India, as a living picture of the present. Mailclad warriors upon champing steeds, some armed with sword and battle-axe, others with falchion and arquebus; the steeds of all adorned with trappings of gold or silver and nodding plumes of bright hued feathers upon their heads. Among the spectators there were some who possessed the soul of the poet, of the artist, who had come to the Durbar as to a feast of the emotions. So they looked at the cavalcades and from every group singled out a figure that. aroused in them a thousand memories. 1 ' There goes Tristan ! Siegfried ! . . . King Arthur ! Ivanhoe! And a hundred others that leapt back to life from the pages of European history. These spectators saw most—they saw India, as she is, as she was, as she ever will be.