BYGONE DAYS IN INDIA.* STUFFED with quotations and references, Mr.
Douglas Dewar's book makes an excellent guide and bibliography for the explorer of India's recent past. For the same reason it is sometimes slightly tiresome to the casual reader, though the engagingly pictured bewhiskered Anglo-Indians of a century ago must delight anybody. We are given long extracts from many diaries describing journeys to and across India in clippers and paddle-steamers, country-boats and palan- quins. Lady Falkland, wife of a Governor of Bombay, wrote charmingly of the palanquin bearers, or hamals :- " The profession was hereditary. ' We begin to learn the work about seventeen,' says the hamal. An old hand is placed in front and a young one behind under a pole with heavy stones at each end, slung with rope, to give the weight of the palanquin, and so the step is learnt ; some take to it immediately, others are very long in learning."
In the chapter on the Punka (which seems not to have been known in India until the seventeen-eighties) we have some pleasant philosophizing :-
" The punka bears the stamp of the Orient. It is a product of the Torrid Zone, of sun-baked lands, of countries inhabited by people who hold "Tis better to lie than to sit, to sit than to stand, to stand than to walk.' There does not exist a Westerner who would not walk many miles in preference to pulling a punka for six hours, while there is scarce an Indian who would not prefer pulling a punka all night to walking five kos I The hand-pulled punka is a contrivance possible only in countries where patience is abundant and labour cheap. It is no exaggeration to assert that while these lines are being penned hundreds of thousands of men are pulling punkas ; each man is employed on one punka. A dozen men can pull six punkas more or less continuously ; the same number can work an engine that can put thousands of electric fans in motion simultaneously. Thus many men do badly that which a few could do well. Such is the East ! . . . Where it has not been displaced by the electric fan the punka is still hand- pulled and still swings over the exile at a rate which he deems too slow, but which the coolie thinks too fast. Coolies do the pulling, but Europeans supply the motive force, even as happens in the administrative machinery of the country. Those who are fond of drawing parallels cannot fail to have noticed the strange resemblance between the Government and the punka. This,
rhaps, explains in part the annual exodus to the hills. It may that the powers that be cannot bear the sight of this lowly species of the genus makeshift. Even as the punka does not diminish the temperature of the room in which it moves to and fro, but, nevertheless, makes the heat far less oppressive, so does the Indian Government not attempt to root up the ills to which this country is subject, it merely mitigates them. For example, it
does not make a clean sweep of insanitary hamlets ; to such it applies the Village Sanitation Act and doles out a few rupees for the cleansing of wells. The mechanism of both the punka and the Government is so simple that it rarely happens that either gets out of order."
Of English society in India in the eighteen-thirties no one has written better than Edouard Warren, who was French on his mother's side and by education :-
" Notwithstanding the heat you will leave the table with your stomach overloaded, seduced from dish to dish by the spices with which each is seasoned. If you are French you are surprised at the enormous quantity of beer and wine absorbed by young English women, so pale and delicate in appearance. . . My gentle neighbour calmly disposed of one bottle and a half of very strong beer, alternately with a certain amount of Burgundy. She finished up at dessert with five or six glasses of champagne, very light but very strong. The only effect this appeared to have on her was to loosen her tongue and give vivacity to her eyes.' . . . At dessert the hookas appeared. ' This,' writes Warren, ' is the only kind of smoking permitted at table ; it is no uncommon thing to see a lady take a few puffs from her neighbour's hooka. Dinner is followed by an evening without general or even particular conversa- tion—very short, nevertheless too long. After coffee everyone retires at 10 p.m., for the English do not know how to make conversa- tion : they speak only when they have something to say. . Conversation is a fruit eminently French. . . . The English do not expand in society : they seem to reserve their minds and their good qualities for their homes. It needs the warmth of their firesides to melt the ice that envelops them in the world. . . . After a long dinner every guest I have met has complained to me of the dullness and frigidness of the previous night, although he himself has contributed to it and will do likewise on the next occasion by this haughtiness and affectation of reserve, which he does not wish to be the first to break through. As to the women with whom you have to dine or converse, there is nothing more stupid or scandalous than the conversation to which you are con- demned. It is not that the women are lacking in wit or capacity ; indeed, they are generally better educated than ours ; it is again that detestable fashion which compels them to look through an odious prism. An English lady is obliged to appear to be offended if you talk to her seriously about politics or literature ; but she will wax eloquent and never stop if it be a question of details of feeding, weaning, or physicing babies, or, better still, if it is tearing to • Bagons Days in India. By Douglas Dewar. London : John Lam .118v.1 pieces the reputation of her neighbour. The position of the young girl is even more deplorable. She has to choose between two roles. One is the affectation of an impossible innocence, especially in view of the fact that an unexpurgated Bible is placed in her hands from infancy. The other is that of a coquette and romp. The one class are astonished at everything, and their only reply is, Oh ! dear me ' The other class throw themselves at men, and show bad taste by talking loudly and laughing noisily: You avoid both : the prudery of the one is insipid and the forwardness of the other makes you fear an entanglement before you have had time to reflect."
If Warren was severe on the English, whose service he entered and adorned, he yet had a generous admiration for our finer (and rarer) qualities. Writing of two of his brother officers, he says :—
" I found in these two men a type essentially English, and at the same time a degree of perfection to which it is perhaps not given to a Frenchman to attain. You can see that I was not inclined to regard with too indulgent eye the defects of English society, that I think it will not compare for an instant with ours as regards endearing qualities : urbanity, kindness, simplicity, all the little touches that make for happiness in life, such as graciousness, good nature, charm of manner ; but, even as you find diamonds, not in gold and silver mines, but hidden in coarse sand, so is the most perfect type of man found in the rough elements that compose our neighbours ; the perfect English gentleman is the phoenix of the human species.' "
In Warren's view the average Frenchman is a better and pleasanter fellow than the average Englishman, but the best sort of Frenchman is quite eclipsed by the best sort of English- man. As this theory has had other supporters it probably has some foundation in fact, and, as it flatters us (for which of us is not " the best sort " 2), we are always, individually, very willing to accept it.
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