SOME INDIAN PICTURES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3525, 4 October 1921, Page 54

SOME INDIAN PICTURES.

The following pictures of Indian scenes are taken from a novelist, Maud Diver, -who has made India her special field of fiction. Her hooks are distinguished by their intimate acquaintance with Indian life and thought. Evidently she aims at making India better known to the country which for nigh two centuries has assumed direction of its fortunes. Whereas most English written fiction about India is con-

cerned only with English characters and tlie pursuits of English society in India, sue gives studies of purely Indian 1 iie, and of English and Indians brought into close contact, showing the conflict of racial ideas and customs when this occurs. Hence her stories give in popular form considerable insight into the problems of British rule in India and the future relations of the two countries. She shows well the indifferent or arrogant aloofness characteristic of a very large proportion of those who make a temporary home in India ; though, happily, this is contradicted by the example of some of the ablest Englishmen in the Indian service and by other English workers, men and women. Will India remain in the Empire? The prospect is none too reassuring at present. Tlie story from which the following extracts are taken is -‘Ear to Week," Mrs Diver s latest book. Its hero is of mixed English and Indian parentage, hus mother being daughter of a Itajput of ancient lineage, who is concerned in the administration of one of the nati\e states. .Educated in England, he later goes to his mother’s country, desiring to study its conditions and devote himself to promoting harmony between the two peoples to whom he belongs. Here is a picture of Jaipur, chief city of the native feudatory state of Rajputana, and famous in Indian history “A mile or less of tree-bordered road sloped gently from the Residency to the walled city of \ ictory, backed by the craggy red-grey spurs ot the Aravalli range, hidden almost in feathery heads of banyan, acacia, and iieem —a dusty, well-ordered oasis, holding its own against the stealthy oncoming ol the desert “North and east ran the screen of lowhills with their creeping lines of masonry; but from the south and west the softly encroaching thing crept up to the city w alls, in through the gates, powdering every twig and leaf and lattice with the fine white dust of death. Bhadeless and colourless, to the limit of vision, it rose and fell in long billowing waves, as if some wizard in the morning of the world had smitten a living ocean to lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and gaunt cactus bushes —their limbs petrified in weird gesticulation. “Rut on the road i tv elf was a sufficiency of life and colour —parroqueets flashing from tree to tree, like emeralds; village women swathed in red and yellow veils; prancing Rajput cavaliers, straight from the middle ages ; ox-carts and camels —unlimited camels, with flapping lip and scornful eye; a sluggish stream of life rising out of the landscape and flowing from dawn to dusk through the seven gates of Jaipur. . . . Close against the ramparts, sand and dust were blown into a deep drift; or was it a deserted pile of rags ? Suddenly, with a sick sensation, he saw the raga heave and stir. Arms emerged—if you could call them arms —belonged to punched shadowy faces. And from that human dust-heap came a quavering wail, ‘Maharaj ! Maharaj !’ “‘What is it, Bishun Singh?’ he asked sharply of the sais trotting at his stirrup, “ “Only the famine, Hazur. Not a big trouble this year, they say. But from the villages these come crawling to the city, believing the Maharaj has (ilenty and will give.’ “ ‘Dees lie give V “Bishun Singh’s gesture seemed to deprecate undue curiosity. ‘The Maharaj is great, but the people are like flies. If their Karma is good, they find a few handfuls; if evil, they die.’ ’’ (Asiatic fatalism, fostered by Asiatic religious beliefs, and the disregard of human lile common in the crowded populations of the East, where, as De Quincey has said, the human race is a weed. The young Englishman scatters a handful of coins in the gateway.) “Instantly a cry went up, ‘He gives money for food.’ Not merely arms, but entire skeletons emerged, seething, scrambling, with hands wasted to mere claws. A few of the boldest caught at Roy’s stirrup; whereat Bishun Singh brushed them off, as if they were fiie3 indeed. Unresisting, they tottered and fell one against another, like ninepins; and Roy, h.ating the man, turned sharply away. One could do nothing. “Spectres vanished, however, in the kaleidoscope of the vast main street, paved with wide strips of hewn stone ; one-half of it sun-flooded, one-half in shadow. The colour and movement, the vista of pink-washed houses speckled with white florets, the gay muslins, the small turbans and inimitable swagger of the Rajput —Sun-descended--awakened in hi nr gleams of ancestral memory. Sights and sounds and smells —the pungent mingling of spices and dust and animals —assailed his senses with a vague yet poignant familiarity; fruit and cornshops, with their pyramids of yellow and red and ochre, and the fat brown bunnia in their midst; shops bright with brass work and Jaipur enamel; lattice windows, lowbrowed arches, glimpses into shadowed courts; flitting figures of veiled women; humbler women, unveiled, winnowing grain, or crowned with baskets of sacred cow-dung, stepping like queens ! “And the animals! Extinct almost in modern machine ridden cities, here they visibly and audibly prevailed. For Asia lives intimately— if not always mercifully

—with her animals, and Key’s catholic affection embraced them all. Horses first •—a long way first. But bollocks had their charm; the graceful trotting zebus, horns painted red and green. And the ponderous swaying of the elephants, sensitive creatures, nervous of their own bulk, resplendently caparisoned. And there—a flash of the jungle, among casual goats, fowls, and pariahs—went the royal cheetahs, led on slips, walking delicately between scarlet jieons, looking for all the world like amiable maiden ladies with blue-hooded caps tied under their chins. In the wake of this magnificence two distended donkeys, on parodies of legs, staggered under loads more distended still, plump dhobies perched callously on their cruppers. Above all, Roy’s eye delighted in the jewelled sheen of peacocks, rivalling in sanctity the real lords of Jaipur— Shiva’s sacred bulls. Some milk-white and onyx-eyed, some black and insolent, they sauntered among the open shop fronts, levying toll and obstructing traffic —assured, arrogant, immune. And, at stated intervals, like wrong notes in a succession of harmonies, there sprang wrought-iron gas-lamps fitted with electricbulbs ! ‘‘So riding, be came to the heart of the city—a. vast open space, where the shops seemed brighter, the crowds gayer, and by contrast with the human rag and bone heaps, beggars and cripples, more terrible to behold. . . . Here architectural exuberance culminated in the vast bewildering facade of the Hall of the Winds and ihe Palace flaunting its royal standard—five colours blazoned on cloth of geld. But it was not these that held Roy’s gaze. It was the group of Brahmin temples, elaborately carven, rose-red from plinth to summit, rising through flights of crows and irridescent pigeons; their monolithic forms clean cut against the dusty haze ; their shallow steps flanked with marble elephants, splashed with orange yellow robes of holy men and groups of brightly veiled women.” Here is a glimpse of Delhi, the imperial city of the Mohammedan conquerors of India, now the capital of the British Government : “But the city’s pandemonium of composite noises was offset by the splendid remnants of Imperial Delhi —the Pearl Mosque, a dream in marble, dazzling against the blue; inlaid columns of the Dewan-i Khas, every leaf wrought in jade or malachite, every petal a precious stone ; swelling domes and rose-pink minarets of the Jumna Musjid rising superbly from a network of narrow streets and shabby toppling houses. For in India the sordid and the stately rub shoulders with sublime disregard for effect.” Truly a land of contrasts, of immense diversity of races, creeds, and fortunes; a vast land presenting vast and bafflingproblems. BIRDS AT WAIKGUASTI. TO THE EDITOR. Sir,- —I want to say I made a grievous error in my last week’s letter with regard to the tieke, which I mentioned as the Maori name for the stitch bird. Tieke is the Native name for the saddleback, a bird formerly common to all Otago, and now only found at Erewhon and on the West Coast. The name for the stitch bird is ihi. Xo doubt the saddleback was common at Waikouaiti, so I must apologise to Mr Pratt for the mistake, and accept Mr Watkin's list as absolutely correct. —I am, etc., Ornithologist.