THE PRINCE OF WALES AT BOMBAY.
WHETHER the Prince's visit does auy good or not, either to him, or to Great Britain, or to the people of India, it is pretty evident that, bar-accident, as a grand State pageant it is not going to fail. Whether the people of India, or any one people in India except the British, will feel any more loyalty towards the Heir-Apparent, or more kindly towards this country because of his arrival, or more afraid of rebelling because of his appearance, may be left in doubt; but all classes are undoubtedly interested in seeing him, moved out of their calm by his presence, and disposed to pay him all the honour which, in their idea, it is a social duty, almost a moral duty, to pay to very great personages indeed. A native who has unintention- ally omitted a courtesy to a rank which he acknowledges feels as if he had lost something of his place in the world. There are incidents in the welcome at Bombay, as reported in the long telegrams, which to people familiar with native ways are sufficient to prove this much. The great crowd of native Princes who received the Prince of Wales is not of itself full evidence, for the list, so far as it is intelligible, shows that the gathering was somewhat miscellaneous,—the Kattywar nobles, for instance, are little people, though so nearly independent,—and a hint from the Viceroy would have sent some of the "Princes" to receive anybody for whom their favourable countenance was demanded. But there are some big names in the list. Two of the biggest, the Maharaja of Mysore and the Guicowar of Baroda, are child- ren under pupilage, and their attendance merely shows that re- fusal was not thought of ; but the Raja of Kohlapore is the chief, as far as pedigree is concerned, of all Mahrattas. Our readers may remember his predecessor's strange funeral at Florence, and his touchingly childlike diary ; and even the Viceroy could not have brought the Rana of Oodeypore, the heir of Rama, the head of the Solar line, and indisputably the first in rank of all Hindoos, to a British port without his own consent. He never, we be- lieve, has attended a Durbar, and his historic rank among bis countrymen is so great, and his pretensions still so living, that his arrival surprises us as would the arrival of a Pope in Venice to welcome a Crown Prince of Germany. We only hope it did not also surprise the Prince, whose demeanour towards the great noble without whose consent no Hindoo monarch can be fully conse- crated would be very keenly watched. Even the abstinences prove the great consideration in which the Prince is held, the ceremonial attitude to be observed towards him being evidently deemed a matter of the highest importance, one which fixes the rank of those who take any part in it whatever. The Court of the Deccan was thrown into a commotion by an injudicious order that the Nizam, still a child, should receive the Prince at Bombay, and thus accept, in native estimation, a rank inferior to his Mahratta rivals, Holkar and Scindiah, who do not go to the coast, but entertain the Prince in their own capitals,—Scindiah, in particular, announcing his intention of spending £200,000 in entertainments in his honour. The matter was ultimately settled at Hydrabad by the Premier, Salar Jung, visiting Bombay, with a promise that the Nizam in person should await the Prince in some frontier town of his -dominion, the Prince not, however, going on to Hydrabad. The -distinction thus made places Sciudiah, Holkar, and the Nizam in the first rank of native feudatory monarchs, and admission into that grade will be most eagerly sought, and except to the Rajas of Travancore and Cashmere, probably refused. Then the natives joined cordially in the reception. Two hundred thousand, it is said, came in from the Mofussil—a word equivalent to our own phrase "from the country-side "—and though a police order would produce a fair amount of light, it would not have yielded the illumination amid which the Prince of Wales drove for miles. We are not speaking of the fireworks, though the native members of the Municipality of their own accord increased the vote pro- posed by the officials by 50,000 rs. The natives, who understand illuminations, provided for their guest both their special effects. They can secure easily and cheaply thousands upon thousands, or to speak the exact truth, some millions, in a city like Bombay, of little oil-lights, costless bits of pottery in the shape of Foul- pelia.n night-lights, with a little oil, and a wick floating in it. They are accustomed to place these when an illumination is required in such a way that every line in every house, in the roofs, the gables, the balconies, the windows, is traced in fire, and the effect in the still, soft night of the early cold weather in India is absolutely magical. However well you may know the city, it seems as if you saw its true lineaments for the first time and with every feature bright with welcome. This form of the illumination seems to have been universal, and applied to the hundred thousand houses clustered and sprinkled over the two islands, and answered from the hill-tops and repeated from all the vessels in the harbour, must have excited even a blasé imagination. Then the native gentry,
without, it is said, any European hint, called on the people for another " effect," which cannot be secured without hearty good- will, and which, though not quite impossible in Europe, is very nearly so,— and this was to light the front interior of their houses. A native has usually a room, shop, deep verandah, or what not, in front of his house, which is closed, but only
by mattings, jalousies, or venetians, which can be moved ; and
if these rooms are lighted, the result is to disperse night alto- gether for a height of some seven to ten feet from the ground, and this without putting out the "architectural" illumination.
We have never seen it done but once, when India from Lahore to Calicut broke into a blaze on the proclamation of the Queen's sovereignty, a proclamation which realised the old prophecy about the duration of the Company's sway, but the scene it produces is most marvellous. The rooms are like covered lanterns, they throw their whole blaze forwards, and a horseman may ride along half a street with every button on his uniform in glaring daylight, and his head as invisible as if wrapped in cloud. The devices in words are hardly native, though the one which has been specially tele- graphed, "Tell Mama we are happy," reads like the effusion of some educated Hindoo, but the native welcome was un- mistakable. We wonder what the natives thought of the Prince.
The Special Correspondents cannot tell us yet, though
there will be a store of anecdotes by-and-by, but they
have no confusing ideas about coronets or robes, and a Euro- pean in the gorgeous Field-Marshal's uniform, bowing, but dignified, must be very nearly what they expected to see, and they rushed after him with unusual effusiveness, to the dismay of soldiers and policemen. There must have been dreadful ques- tions of rank within the procession, with its seventy Princes, Sirdars, and Jaghiredars, but nobody doubted that the Prince was
first, and the difficulty about the Viceroy's rank has been adroitly removed. He has never taken precedence of the Prince of Wales, and never given it to him, sitting always by his side, and he will not accompany or even visit him on his tour, not even when he inspects the Camp of Exercise at Delhi. He contents him- self with arranging all things for his guest's honour, and his first order, that the salute on landing should be re- peated instantaneously throughout India, was well judged, and to Anglo-Indians rather excites the imagination. That simultaneous roar of cannon in homage to an invisible Prince from Peshawur to Cochin, and Scinde to Madras, is evidence of an authority which is very real, if only because it can affect a continent at once. So far, in fact, as can be judged from this distance, everything has been well considered, and the natives will enjoy a pageant adding much, though momentary, colour to somewhat monotonous lives. Why are they monotonous? Because they are lives led in India, where, as the Emperor Baber said, nothing is attractive but wealth, where everything repeats itself endlessly, where the jungles are all alike, and the ground the same colour, and turf unknown, and all men lead lives settled for them in externals by precepts as old as their land.
It may be urged that we make too much of Bombay, which is a city of European creation, enriched by British trade, and full of Parsees whose loyalty nobody doubts, as but for British rule they would be massacred without scruple. Something about the " Guebres " offends the Mohammedans even now, till they hardly endure to live in the same city. Those who argue thus, however, forget how representative a crowd is in Bombay, or Calcutta, or Madras, how utterly the Europeans are out- numbered, say, two-hundredfold, and how enormously important the loyalty or acquiescent obedience of these cities is. While they are content nothing is finally lost, for everything can be regained. They are our gates, and till they are closed English policemen can go in at will The loyalty of Bombay is worth as much to England as the loyalty of Halifax, and much more than the loyalty of Benares, or Umritsur, or Hydrabad, or any city where sectarian feeling is supposed to be all-powerful Even, moreover, if there were danger of a different reception there, which we doubt, except as regards Hydrabad, it would be greatly diminished by the scene within Bombay. In India, as everywhere else, nothing succeeds like success ; the first reception will set the general tone ; and the Government is relieved of a fear which is always the greatest in India, —that of a ceremonial made slightly ridiculous by an impression of failure. The popular ballads will be honorific, and not satirical, and that in India is a success, and one that, under the circumstances, is of a special value. The Prince's life is in no particular danger, except, of course, from madmen, of whom there is the usual proportion, and from some fanatic who has sworn a vendetta against the British. The former can be kept off, and nothing daunts the latter like the presence of a crowd visibly hostile to his design, and capable, if he attempts it, of tearing him to pieces on the spot.
Previous page
