ELEMENS’S PERFORMANCE IN POONA, on January 29, 1896, displeased the Bishop of Bombay. Forbidden fruit, Clemens said in a favorite routine, had always been as attractive to him as it had been to Adam. Everyone else likes it, too. Never in his travels had he found a place in which the apple Adam ate would have been safe — except Poona! The local reference, changed of course for each town, always raised a shout of laughter. Adam only ate the apple, Clemens continued, because it was forbidden, just as everyone else has been doing ever since. “The misfortune was that it wasn’t the serpent that was forbidden, because then Adam would have eaten the serpent, and there would have been no more trouble.” The Bishop of Bombay left the hall.
A listener who stayed to the end was the fourteen-year-old Miss J. M. Cursetjee, a member of an old and progressive Parsi family. Sixty-eight years later, in 1964, she told an interviewer what she remembered. The audience was mainly European, she said, and mainly male. Poona was an army town, and the hall was “splashed” by the red jackets of British soldiers. She didn’t remember Mark Twain’s physical appearance except that it was “insignificant,” at least to an adolescent girl hoping to see someone handsome. The only unusual aspect of his looks was his “untidy” hair. In those days, she explained, people were taught the importance of tidiness. But once he began to talk, “you forgot about his untidy hair — and you were even apologetic about having had this first impression of him.”
The native quarter of Poona, in which Miss Cursetjee presumably lived at the time of Clemens’s performance, looked like “a village tenanted by people in very squalid circumstances,” according to an Indian writer whose description was published in The Times of India. In contrast, the British residential quarters were characterized by “fine, wide, shaded roads, nice bungalows, and lovely gardens.” The British cantonment was no different from the native town, however, in its susceptibility to the flu, which was ravaging the Indians and the British alike. According to one British resident, the epidemic was not an abnormal state of affairs “but a continuous and ever-increasing evil.” In addition, the town was noted for endemic typhoid.
This insalubrious place, about eighty-five miles southeast of Bombay, was the setting for the eleventh annual meeting of the Indian National Congress, at the end of December, one month before Clemens’s appearance. The Congress had begun ten years before as the representative of the new and minuscule middle class. A modern education had given these men a common language — English — and common values, attitudes, and interests, enabling them to work with one another and to look at India as a whole. They resented the government’s manipulation of tariffs, the use of Indian troops for imperial adventures, and the exclusion of Indians from high office. They were outraged by the failure of a proposal to equalize the mandates of Indian and European judges in Bengal, which would have permitted Indian judges to try Europeans without a jury. Resentment, outrage, and nascent nationalism led to the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885.
It began modestly, with only seventy delegates at its first session, which declared the Congress’s loyalty and gratitude to the Crown. But the Congress quickly spread all over India, and by the end of the century it had become the government’s chief opposition. Sixteen hundred delegates and 4,000 observers attended the 1895 Poona conference, which, among numerous resolutions, demanded that the government reduce its military and administrative expenses, demanded that military expenses on the frontiers of India be shared equally with Britain, demanded that the gag order on the press in princely states be dropped, and protested the salt tax as a regressive burden on the poor. The Congress in 1895, according to its president, demanded “modest reforms,” with the aims of assisting rather than revolutionizing the government. Those aims were soon to change. It was the Congress, under the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru, that led India to independence.
At the end of his stay in India, a reporter asked Clemens if he had heard of the Indian National Congress. “Well, I have read of it, here a little and there a little, and all I can understand is that the men composing it, want a little more independence than they now have.” He knew little of their aims, he said, but he was impressed by their proficiency in English. “There is, however, one good quality they lack as a nation — I believe they like to be called a ‘nation’ — and that is, inventive genius in the various practical arts.”
Clemens showed little sympathy for the nationalist movement. No one, he told a reporter in Calcutta, “can deny the obvious advantages which the British have conferred on India. When one looks at the industrial and educational activity which has been set in motion all over the country, and when one considers its security and prosperity one cannot help coming to the conclusion that the British Government is the best for India, whether the Hindus or Mohamedans like it or not.” One can argue, perhaps, that Clemens wanted to ingratiate himself with potential audiences, but later he said much the same thing in Following the Equator, where his attitude reflected the British point of view. For example, when discussing the great uprising of 1857, he called it a “mutiny,” as the British did; he emphasized British heroism and Indian atrocities; and he ignored the appalling British reprisals. He wrote that India was lucky to be ruled by Britain: “When one considers what India was under her Hindu and Mohammedan rulers, and what she is now; when he remembers the miseries of her millions then and the protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the establishment of British supremacy there.”
Clemens did not, however, believe in “the white man’s burden,” or in claims that colonization would “civilize” the ruled. “We are obliged to believe,” he wrote in connection with the transportation of convicts to Australia, “that a nation that could look on, unmmoved, and see starving or freezing women hanged for stealing twenty-six cents’ worth of bacon or rags, and boys snatched from their mothers, and men from their families, and sent to the other side of the world for long terms of years for similar trifling offenses, was a nation to whom the term ‘civilized’ could not in any large way be applied. And we must also believe that a nation that knew, during more than forty years, what was happening to those exiles and was still content with it, was not advancing in any showy way toward a higher grade of civilization.” Nonetheless, he supported the Raj.
His support seems inconsistent with his contempt for claims of cultural superiority. It also appears inconsistent with the sympathy he expressed throughout Following the Equator for victims of colonial rapacity, cruelty, and hypocrisy: South Seas islanders, shanghaied and enslaved for work in the plantations of Queensland; Maoris and Australian aborigines, whose land was stolen from them; Tasmanian aborigines, who were exterminated; the Mashonas and Matabeles, who were robbed of their land and their cattle in Rhodesia; even the hotel servant in Bombay, cuffed by an arrogant manager. Where, then, was his sympathy for Indian independence?
Perhaps one reason Clemens showed no support for the Indian national movement was that it was still small, weak, and confined to a microscopic minority, whereas the British Empire was at its zenith, far too strong for such an unrepresentative minority to challenge it. As one Hindu commentator put it at the time, “appealing to the British nation at this stage of our political development is like steering a ship straight for a rock.” Furthermore, European powers were continuing to seize territories in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, which may have made the partitioning of the globe among the powers of Europe seem inevitable. “In our day,” wrote Clemens, “land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy. Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it.” Clemens, who admired the English, probably believed that a target of imperialism was better off under British administration than it would be under that of a rival colonial power, particularly the French. In the case of Madagascar, for example, which the French invaded when the Clemenses were traveling around the world, Clemens scolded the British. England should have taken Madagascar from the French. “Without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late.”
Although Britain ran the Indian empire for its own advantage, and although British civil servants in India were often serenely condescending, the administration was reasonably competent and honest, and the security of persons and property reasonably high. While the government’s large-scale construction of roads, canals, and railroads benefited the British, these ambitious public works, especially the railroads, helped the local population as well. Except for repressing thuggee, the ritual strangulation of travelers by a murderous sect, and outlawing suttee, the self-immolation of Hindu widows upon their husbands’ funeral pyres (Clemens wrote about both in Following the Equator), the British permitted the free exercise of religion. The mass of the population, ruled arbitrarily for millennia, often by foreign powers, accepted their yoke as they had always done, hoping that their overlords would maintain order and security and not levy taxes too hard to bear, criteria that the British satisfied as well as if not better than former rulers. Western notions of nationalism and representative government had not yet reached the Indian masses. In the meantime, if they had to be ruled by strangers, they could do worse than be ruled by the British, who placed all of India under a single administration for the first time in Indian history, and maintained security and stability.
Finally, Clemens may have viewed the congeries of peoples, languages, religions, and castes that constituted India as too diverse to work together for a common cause. Particularly striking was the animosity between Hindus and Muslims. An editorial in a Muslim paper, appearing shortly before Clemens’s performance in Poona, declared that the two communities “live in a fever pitch of constant tension of feelings.” A week later, a column in that paper accused the Congress of representing “only the Hindu element” and denied the possibility that Muslims and Hindus could unify their interests. “If the Hindus, who are so much better off, seek to enlist our cooperation, it must be because they think they can keep all the rewards to themselves.” All things considered, Clemens’s indifference toward Indian nationalism is understandable.
When Clemens was in India, in 1896, few could have foreseen that within only fifty-one years, within Clara’s lifetime, the world’s most powerful country would shrink to a second-class power and quit India; that India would be partitioned into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan; that as a consequence millions of people would uproot themselves to flee from one state to the other; and that during their flight, tens of thousands would be raped and hundreds of thousands massacred, their corpses strewn along dirt roads and in bloodied railroad carriages. If those achievements and those horrors were hard to foresee, it was even harder to believe that it would be intangibles — the English language, the rule of law, a modern administration, and democratic political institutions — that would be the most important legacies of the British in India.