CLEMENS SLEPT ALL THE WAY from Baroda to Bombay, arriving at seven on Saturday morning, February 1, 1896. He then took himself to the Bombay Club, which had made him an honorary member. After drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper in a small breakfast room there, he asked for the bill, only to be brought another cup of coffee. Each time he requested the bill, he was given more coffee. Failing to make the various waiters he approached understand what he wanted, it occurred to him that they mistook him for an intruder and were pacifying him with coffee until they could find a club officer to deal with him.
“It was a delicate situation,” as he later described the episode, which Mrs. Clemens persuaded him to delete from his travel book. “It was embarrassing to stay, & it was embarrassing to try to go. On the whole, I thought I would try to go.” Finally he learned that because the club president had ordered that he not be allowed to pay for anything, none of the waiters would present a bill “It is wonderful, the grip that the natives have upon their solemnity. Without a doubt they would have seen me sit there & pray for the bill & drink coffee until it ran out of my ears, & never have betrayed by a smile that they were not used to that inhuman spectacle every day.”
The Clemenses left Bombay that night for the two-and-a-half-day trip to Allahabad, about 750 miles northeast. They traveled through a great plain, “perfectly flat, dust-colored and brick-yardy,” relieved by “scattering bunches of trees and mud villages,” Clemens wrote in Following the Equator. He noted in his journal that “all the way yesterday was through parched land, sown thick with mud villages in all stages of crumbling decay. It is a sorrowful land — a land of unimaginable poverty and hardship.” Although the Indian countryside is not beautiful, he wrote in his travel book, “there is an enchantment about it that is beguiling, and does not pall,” because you sense its history, the millions who have been born, grown old, and died there, “the barren and meaningless process” that has repeated itself generation after generation, century after century, and “gives to this forlorn, uncomely land power to speak to the spirit and make friends with it; to speak to it with a voice bitter with satire, but eloquent with melancholy.”
They arrived Monday morning, February 3, at Allahabad, where Clemens performed that evening to a sold-out house. Everyone seemed to arrive at the hall in a private carriage, each with its white-turbaned footmen and driver. According to Clemens, this was true of most Indian cities, where Europeans did not walk even short distances: “the vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm, and makes the lecturer feel like an opera.” As for his performance, a reviewer wrote “that it is hardly fair to Mark Twain or his audiences that his remarks should have been so fully reported, and yet the charm of his delivery is so delightful that no one who hears him could wish to have been content with the report.”
The next day, in the light of the early morning, the Clemenses drove about three miles to the huge fort built by the first Mogul emperor, Akbar, three hundred years earlier. Inside the fort they saw a polished stone pillar, thirty-four feet high, erected by the Emperor Asoka more than two hundred years before the current era, engraved with edicts promoting Buddhism. In Clemens’s time as at present, a Hindu temple occupied an underground corner of the fort. “And now the Fort belongs to the English,” he wrote in Following the Equator, “it contains a Christian Church. Insured in all the companies.”
The Asokan pillar still stands inside the fort, now occupied by the Indian army, but it is difficult to see. Save for the area occupied by the underground Hindu temple, the fort is off-limits to visitors, although passes in theory can be obtained by those who are patient.
The fort stands at the confluence or sangam of three rivers, the blue Jamuna, the brown Ganges, and the unseen, mythical Saraswati, the river of enlightenment. Hindus regard river confluences as auspicious places, and none more so than the sacred sangam at Allahabad, where pilgrims in their hundreds of thousands come to its annual religious fair, the Magh Mela, from mid-January to mid-February. As the Clemenses drove out to the fort, they found the road crowded with pilgrims, some of them months on the way, “plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief.” Only a few great souls among “our kind of people, the cold whites,” he wrote, would sacrifice themselves to the same extent. “Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindu.” Clemens was, according to Clara, “amazed at the intense atmosphere of spirituality in all classes of people” that he found in India.
The entire 1,500-mile course of the Ganges, or Ganga, as it is properly called, is sacred to Hindus, from its source in the Himalayas to its delta at the Bay of Bengal. Hindus, who believe it fell from heaven to earth and who venerate it as goddess and mother, bathe in it and drink it, especially at such holy sites as Allahabad. They cup the water in their hands and pour it back as an offering to gods and ancestors. They decorate it with floating garlands. In the evening they float small oil-filled lamps upon it. They pour its water into brass vessels that they carry home, often miles away. They bathe in it as newlyweds after their long wedding rites. They consign to it the ashes of their dead.
From the fort, the Clemenses looked down upon “a mighty swarm of pilgrims” and upon the “towns of tents … with a multitude of fluttering pennons,” which occupied a curving spit between the Ganges and the Jamuna. Below, crowds were buying from merchants’ booths; devotees were bathing, praying, and drinking the waters; sick pilgrims were being carried in palanquins; ascetic mendicants, some naked and smeared with ash, were mortifying their bodies.
“If we had got to the Mele this morning,” Clemens wrote in his journal, “we might have seen a man who hasn’t sat down for years; another who has held his hands above his head for years and never trims his nails or hair, both very long; another who sits with his bare foot resting upon a lot of sharp spikes — and all for the glory of God. Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest work of God where is the ignoblest?” The annual fair continues to attract pilgrims in their hundreds of thousands, along with the impressive variety of religious ascetics for which the Magh Mela is especially known.
That afternoon, after their visit to the fort, the Clemenses boarded a train for an even holier city on the Ganges, Benares (now Varanasi), about eighty-five miles southeast. Later, a two-hour wait to change trains proved too short for Clemens. A long interval in a railroad station is usually a dull affair, he commented in Following the Equator, but not so in India, where “you have the monster crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendors of the costumes — dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond speech,” On the same day he noted in his journal that he had thought such sights would become commonplace after a week, but three weeks had only made them more fascinating. “I think I should always like to wait an hour for my train in India.”
After they alighted from their railway carriage, the Clemenses drove through the outskirts of Benares to reach their hotel, through “a vision of dusty sterility, decaying temples, crumbling tombs, broken mud walls, shabby huts,” as Clemens described the scene. “The whole region seems to ache with age and penury. It must take ten thousand years of want to produce such an aspect.” Indeed, Benares is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, not ten thousand years old, like Jericho, but as old as Athens, as old as Jerusalem.
The Clemenses drove to the British Civil Lines, where they found their hotel, today the slightly dilapidated Hotel de Paris, a gracious structure of high ceilings and arched colonnades. For some reason the Clemenses preferred its annex, about a mile away, a large compound with a great peepul tree in which a monkey lived, perhaps because they could take one of the bungalows there for themselves. The compound now offers budget accommodations to Western travelers. One bungalow in the compound, we are informed, is at least one hundred years old; it may have housed the Clemenses. They would, perhaps, be amused by its present incarnation as petrol station, car-repair works, astrologer-palmist’s office, and perfume shop. Soaring above the compound is a nearby telecommunications tower, tapered like an enormous minaret, overshadowing the compound’s great tree, which no longer houses a monkey “Benares is older than history,” Clemens wrote, “older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” It is old because its religious significance has kept it alive. Whereas Greeks no longer worship Zeus and Jews no longer make temple sacrifices, tens of thousands of Hindus dip themselves daily in the Ganges at Benares and light fires along its banks to Lord Shiva. Although Lord Shiva is present everywhere and in everyone, he is thought to live with special intensity in Benares.
Hindus call Benares Kashi, which means “luminous.” At Benares, the City of Light, the world was created and time began. Those fortunate enough to die in Benares attain transcendance, liberation from an unending cycle of reincarnation. So holy is Benares that the fruit of any ritual action there is magnified: in Benares a modest offering to a priest matches a costly gift elsewhere; in Benares fasting for several nights is equal to the abstentions of several lifetimes elsewhere. When pilgrims arrive in Benares, they touch its dust to their foreheads in acknowledgment of the city’s sanctity. “Religion,” wrote Clemens, “is the business of Benares,” a statement which is still true, for the town’s economy continues to be dependent on pilgrimage and tourism.
“Benares is the sacredest of sacred cities,” he wrote. “The moment you step across the sharply defined line which separates it from the rest of the globe, you stand upon ineffably and unspeakably holy ground.” Hindus’ veneration for Benares, he thought, “makes our own religious enthusiasm seem pale and cold.”
Since he understood the religious significance of Benares, it is disconcerting to read his “little itinerary for the pilgrim,” an ironic guide to the city, where “every conceivable earthly and heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so to speak — a sort of Army and Navy Stores, theologically stocked.” Three examples convey the itinerary’s flavor: to protect yourself from fever, you must walk halfway down a flight of steps to “a tank filled with sewage. Drink as much of it as you want”; or to regain your youth, you must visit a temple in which “you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage. It smells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the washings of rotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it; bathe in it gratefully and worshipfully”; or to record your five-day pilgrimage by foot around the sacred city, you must go to a temple, where “you will see a Brahman who will attend to the matter and take the money. If he should forget to collect the money, you can remind him.”
Clemens’s “little itinerary” provides an implicit contrast between the physical Benares — decaying, foul, and venal — and the spiritual Benares, where to the pilgrim every step is holy, but you squirm at its lack of respect for what is sacred to others. Were the Hindu to lose his religion, Clemens wrote, “he would gain much — release from his slavery to two million gods and twenty million priests, fakirs, holy mendicants, and other sacred bacilli.” Of course, Clemens was not writing for an audience schooled in political correctness, an audience sensitive to the sensibilities of others, but to Eurocentric readers awash in the high tide of colonialism. For example, fifteen years later his biographer found the pilgrim’s itinerary “about the best thing in the book.” And it must be remembered that Clemens’s view of Christianity was scarcely more flattering. His description of the Christian holy places in Palestine, in The Innocents Abroad, is as irreverent as his treatment of the holy places in Benares.
Clemens relied on conversations with the Reverend Mr. Arthur Parker, who may have accompanied the Clemenses for part of their time in Benares, and on Parker’s Guide to Benares for information about the city and its holy places. Parker was one of a small group of Christian missionaries — Clemens mentioned five Protestant missions — who had gathered in Benares and opened schools and clinics there, perhaps in hopes that if they could convert the Benarsis, residents of that most holy of Hindu holy cities, other Hindus would surely follow the Benarsis’ example. As one nineteenth-century missionary wrote, “the news would soon spread that Hinduism was drying up at its fountain, and that its power could not much longer be maintained.” Is it too great a dream, he asked, that “the Brahmans of Benares, accepting Jesus as their Saviour, will go forth with His Gospel to diffuse it far and wide among the nations of India, and then, with their converts, make their way to the remotest East?” As a modern ethnographer of Benares has commented, little did the missionaries dream “that when the brahmins of Banaras went forth, it would be to the West, and they would teach Indian music, Vedanta philosophy, Ayurvedic medicine, Hindu meditation, and yogic exercises to the many millions in Europe and America who would appreciate their message.”
Clemens mocked Hindu practices but not Hindu spirituality. Clara reported that when he saw the masses of worshipers at the Ganges, he cried out, “they spend hours like this while we in America are robbing and murdering.”
He was moved by his meeting in Benares with a famous Hindu holy man, Sri Swami Bhaskara Nand Saraswati. “We went to see a recluse,” Clemens later told a reporter in Calcutta, “a man who is worshiped for his holiness from one end of India to the other.” Clemens showed the interviewer a photograph of the saint, sitting cross-legged and miminally clothed, “Yes,” said Clemens, “that man started with a grand head on his shoulders, and after thinking and reading and improving upon his original advantages he came to the conclusion that the greatest object in life is — that.” Clemens pointed to the photograph of the nearly naked ascetic, “but neither in mockery nor contempt,” reported the interviewer. “It may surprise his many readers, but when Mark Twain is serious he is very serious.”
Clemens stood at the hermit’s hut and wondered why the swami was worshiped. “Suddenly a man came up who had travelled thousands of miles for this very object. As soon as he approached near enough he prostrated himself in the dust and kissed the saint’s foot. I had never realised till then what it was to stand in the presence of a divinity. Because he is a divinity. Not even an angel. At the age of seventeen, I am told he renounced his family ties, and embraced the asceticism in which he has lived these forty years and over.” The reporter asked him if the saint’s austerities were reflected in his talk or in his visible behavior. Not at all, Clemens replied. “It is just as though you had taken a very fine, learned, intellectual man, say a member of the Indian Government, and unclothed him. There he is. He is minus the trappings of civilization. He hasn’t a rag on his back. But he has perfect manners, a ready wit, and a turn for conversation through an interpreter… We traded autographs. I said I had heard of him, and he said he had heard of me. Gods lie sometimes, I expect.”
In Following the Equator, Clemens transformed the holy man’s hut into “a good house in a noble great garden” and the anonymous devotee into a raja. Possibly Clemens’s regard for the dedicated religious life, which he stated in his travel book, was similarly inflated, but it rings true. He appeared to respect the swami’s disciple, Mina Bahadur Rana, who had, according to Clemens, abandoned a distinguished career “to live in a hut and study the sacred writings and meditate upon virtue and holiness and seek to attain them.” The disciple believed that “this was not an idle and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employment of it.” Many who revere Christian scholars who are similarly employed, Clemens wrote, will view Mina Bahadur Rana as a crank. “But I shall not. He has my reverence. And I don’t offer it as a common thing and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value.” It costs nothing, he continued, to revere “one’s own sacred things … But the reverence which is difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man whose beliefs are not yours. You can’t revere his gods or his politics, and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you tried hard enough. But it is very, very difficult; it is next to impossible, and so we hardly ever try.”
On Wednesday, February 5, the day after they arrived in Benares, the Clemenses arose at six in order to see the sights of the city. It rises from the western bank of the Ganges and sweeps in a great northward curve for over three miles along the riverbank, fifty to seventy-five feet above the water. The bluff is magnificent, blanketed from top to bottom with palaces, temples, shrines, ashrams, pavilions, and hostels, “a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masronry,” Clemens wrote, “a bewildering and beautiful confusion.” Long flights of stone steps lead from narrow lanes at the top of the bluff down to more than seventy landing platforms from which Hindus enter the water, a daily rite for the city’s residents and the first act of the pilgrim.
“We made the usual trip up and down the river,” Clemens reported, “seated in chairs under an awning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark.” Let us hope that they started their river trip in time to see the sunrise from the river, although if Clemens’s memory of rising at six was correct, they may have been too late.
Alice and I rose at five-thirty this morning to meet a taxi that, after a twenty-minute drive, has deposited us at a point within a five-minute walk of the landing platform where we are to meet our boatman. The driver leads us now on foot along lanes only wide enough for rickshaws. The narrow ways, lined by numerous temples and linga, simple stone shafts that are Shiva’s symbol, are so absorbing that it’s hard to watch your step along the broken surfaces, which are littered with sewage, refuse, and cow patties. Cattle saunter insouciantly, munching on garbage, their tails swishing against your trousers. When asked if he had to make way for the Brahmani bulls in Benares, Clemens responded, “Well, yes. I will make room for a bull any time.”
As we step into our rowboat, the river is pearly pink. When the sun suddenly appears above the clouds at the horizon, the river turns to rose and the splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry along the bluff turns to dull gold, the City of Light glowing in reflected light.
We ask our boatman if the hand-propelled canopied boats of Clemens’s day are still afloat, for we haven’t seen any. Yes, he tells us, there are a few, but he prefers to supply his clients with umbrellas to protect them from the sun. Awnings impede photography, he says. As we approach one of the two main platforms on which corpses are cremated, foreign tourists in a riverboat are boldly and shamelessly videotaping, with long-distance lenses, the smoke rising from a funeral pyre and the praying mourners circling its fire. Unfortunately, none of the photographers falls into the river. After the wood has been consumed by fire, the ashes of the departed will be added to the water.
Each year about 40,000 traditional riverside funerals are held at Benares. The corpses of those too poor to afford a traditional funeral are simply thrown into the river, perhaps three thousand a year. To reduce this number, as well as the amount of bone and flesh incompletely consumed by traditional burning but nonetheless entrusted to the river, the government has introduced an electric crematorium on one of the two main burning platforms. These funerals, which cost about one-twentieth of a traditional funeral, have become popular.
Modern technology, however, is inadequate to the task of cleaning up the Ganges, into which more than one hundred cities dump their raw sewage and where, at Benares, the fecal-coliform count sometimes reaches 340,000 times the acceptable level. The expensive wastewater plants that the government has built along the river are unsuitable for Indian conditions, where the electricity supply is uncertain, where the plants are overwhelmed during the monsoon, and where many cities are unable to afford their maintenance. A more appropriate and less costly sustainable technology is now being considered: a system of ponds in which waste decomposes naturally through bacterial action and photosynthesis.
In an interview in Calcutta, Clemens commented upon the filthy state of the river, in the context of caste restrictions. “The subject of caste,’’ he said, “seems to me a great mystery … When I am told that this man will not drink out ofthat man’s lota, because if he does so he will be defiled — these are simply so many words to me. I can’t grasp the idea. When, again, you say that the man with a special cord round his neck is a Brahmin, and twice born, and that because of the cord and what it implies he is to be grovelled before, I ask how is it? And I can’t for the life of me imagine. When, too, I see a Hindu — the very man, perhaps, who fears defilement so much through the other man’s lota — when I see him going down to the muddy, filthy Ganges, and washing himself in and drinking out of water only fifteen yards away from where a dead body is lying — I can’t help thinking he is at least sincere.”
Muddy and filthy as Clemens found the Ganges, it was cleaner than European rivers of comparable size. Experiments by Mr. E. H. Hankin, a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, whom Clemens was to meet in Agra, had recently shown that in spite of the corpses thrown into the Ganges and the Jamuna and in spite of the sewage emptied there, those rivers were from one hundred to three hundred times safer than the Elbe at Hamburg. The Indian rivers were purer, he explained, because microbes were killed by intense sunlight acting at high temperatures and because of the small percentage of organic matter in the rivers, which were chiefly made up of melted snow from the Himalayas. He found that some Indian wells, in contrast, were hideously polluted. At Allahabad, for example, he found 90,000 microbes per centimeter in water distant from the Ganges, whereas in the river itself he found 360 microbes. Since one hundred microbes per centimeter was considered safe to drink, Ganges water was dangerous at Allahabad. But he found the Ganges safe at other locations, including Benares, with only six per centimeter. If his figures were correct, today’s river pollution is many times greater than it was one hundred years ago, not surprising in view of India’s great increase in population and industrialization. As for his comparison with European rivers, it is unlikely that residents of Hamburg, then as now, would have drunk from the Elbe.
As our boatman rows us down the river, Brahmins seated upon the platforms offer blessings to the faithful, while bathers — serene, eyes closed, reciting prayers — purify themselves. Men and women, old and young, well built and flabby, their wet skin glistening, all manage their ablutions with modesty. One older man, perhaps aware that the spiritually cleansing river is frighteningly unsafe, holds his nose as his head disappears beneath the water.