CLEMENS WROTE TO ROGERS from Benares, “I have been barking around on the platform (troublesome cough), in Bombay, Poona, Baroda, etc., for a week or so, but now at last I’ve got my health and voice back in time for Calcutta — we leave for there to-morrow.” During the seventeen-and-a-half-hour railway journey to Calcutta, about 430 miles southeast of Benares, he caught a severe cold.
On the day of his arrival, Friday, February 7, 1896, he wrote to his daughter Susy: “I caught cold last night, coming from Benares & am shut up in the hotel starving it out; and so, instead of river parties & dinners & things, all three of us must decline & stay at home. It is too bad — yes & too ridiculous. I am perfectly certain that the exasperating colds & the carbuncles come from a diseased mind, & that your mental science could drive them away” Susy, along with many other upper-class Americans of the day, believed that affirmative thinking promoted health and well-being, and that people could regulate their health by force of mind.
Too sick to go out that first day in Calcutta, he nonetheless received two reporters. “If I have seen anything like India anywhere before,” he remarked, “it was years ago — perhaps in the Holy Land. But here there is so much life and colour; it is all on such a big scale; everything is so thoroughly alive.” His interest in Calcutta, he said, was “chiefly historical — Clive, Warren Hastings, and the Black Hole. I mean to see as much as possible. Asked whether his travel book would require a year or two before it appeared, he replied, “Quite that. I am taking a heap of notes, but I have still a tour of several weeks in South Africa before I even go to England to begin it.”
Speaking in connection with what he called “the obvious advantages which the British have conferred on India,” Clemens stated his belief that “the strongest race will by and by become paramount — the strongest physically and intellectually. Now if we look round among the nations we find that the English seems to possess both these qualifications. It has spread all over the earth. It is vigorous, prolific, and enterprising.” Clemens had said as much in Australia and New Zealand. But now he added that “above all [the English race] is composed of merciful people — the best kind of people for colonising the globe.” As an example of their benevolence, he pointed to “the greater humanity with which the American Indians are treated in Canada. In the States we shut them off into a reservation, which we frequently encroached upon. Then ensued trouble. The Red men killed settlers, and of course the Government had to order out troops and put them down. If an Indian kills a white man he is sure to lose his life, but if a white man kills a redskin he never suffers according to law.” Had Clemens momentarily forgotten the transportation of convicts to New South Wales, the extermination of Tasmanians, and the shanghaiing of South Seas islanders to Queensland, among the British atrocities he was to condemn in Following the Equator? Or did he consider that the British — rapacious, brutal, and heartless though they might be — were more merciful than their competitors? Or, like most of us, was he inconsistent, holding two conflicting opinions at the same time?
The Negro question, he agreed, was somewhat allied to the American Indian question, but he thought that the former would eventually settle itself. “The negroes at present are merely freed slaves, and you can’t get rid of the effects of slavery in one or even two generations. But things will right themselves. We have given the negro the vote, and he must keep it.” There was not, he said in response to a question, the slightest likelihood of intermarriage. “The white and the black populations, however, will in time learn to tolerate each other and work harmoniously for the common good. They will co-exist very much as the different races in India have done for centuries.”
The day after his interviews, Clemens dined with Sir Alexander MacKenzie, lieutenant governor of Bengal, who had taken up his post in December. Unlike his colleague in Bombay, Lord Sandhurst, Sir Alexander was no stranger to the Indian service. He had come out to Bengal more than thirty years before in the junior position of assistant magistrate and, before his appointment to the lieutenant governancy of Bengal, the highest post of that province, he had risen through the ranks to become Chief Commissioner of Burma, where he suppressed the raids of hill tribes. His history of the relations between the government and the hill tribes of the northeast frontier of Bengal, criticized for its candor, had become the standard authority. He was considered one of the ablest men of his time in India.
Clemens may have been thinking of Sir Alexander when he wrote, in Following the Equator, about unsung British public servants. “Often a British official spends thirty or forty years in India, climbing from grade to grade by services which would make him celebrated anywhere else, and finishes as a vice-sovereign, governing a great realm and millions of subjects; then he goes home to England substantially unknown and unheard of, and settles down in some modest corner, and is as one extinguished. Ten years later there is a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the reader is paralyzed by the splendors of a career which he is not sure that he had ever heard of before.”
This comment was occasioned by the great Calcutta monument to Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, the conqueror of Nepal. Clemens expressed surprise that the most notable monument in the city — “a fluted candlestick two hundred and fifty feet high,” as he described it — was dedicated to a man about whom he had never heard, instead of to Clive or Hastings. Ochterlony, he said, could not have expected such a memorial, for “if monuments were always given in India for high achievements, duty straightly performed, and smirchless records, the landscape would be monotonous with them.” The monument still stands, a focal point for political rallies, but it is now known officially as the Shahid Minar, or Martyrs’ Memorial.
Sir Alexander received the Clemenses at Belvedere, a palatial eighteenth-century house that passed through several hands before the government purchased it as the lieutenant governor’s residence. It is now the National Library. As Alice and I approach it, an egret on the grass looks up at the decaying house, its discolored stucco flaking and peeling. The exterior is partially redeemed by potted flowering plants set out at the sides and center of the grand staircase leading from the garden to the main floor, where scholars work at tables under the reading room’s forty-foot ceiling. A gallery, supported by Corinthian columns, runs around three sides of the room.
The next day, Sunday, February 9, Clemens drove out to the site of the Black Hole, the location of a notorious incident in 1756. After the East India Company’s garrison at Calcutta surrendered to the Muslim ruler, the Nawab of Bengal, the surviving defenders were not slaughtered, as might have been expected, but placed for the night in the Company’s lockup, a small room with little ventilation, which even then was known by soldiers as the Black Hole. According to the garrison’s commander, John Z. Holwell, 146 people were confined to the tiny room on that hot June night, and only twenty-three emerged the next morning. The rest had suffocated. Holwell’s report created a sensation in Britain, where the incident was interpreted as evidence of British bravery and the Nawab’s cruelty, and where it contributed to the idealization of British imperialism in India. Clemens, who accepted Holwell’s account at face value, devoted several pages in his travel book to the incident, including a lengthy extract from Holwell’s report. Today most historians believe that Holwell was an unreliable witness, that the Nawab’s contribution to the affair was negligence rather than malice, that the number entering the cell was much lower than Holwell reported, and that the percentage of survivors was much higher. The survivors were no dewy innocents: before the fall of Calcutta, some had been beheading their servants.
Clemens described the Black Hole as “the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared a mighty Empire — the Indian Empire of Great Britain,” for it was that episode that “maddened the British and brought Clive, that young military marvel, raging up from Madras”; it led to the Battle of Plassey, where Clive “laid deep and strong the foundations of England’s colossal Indian sovereignty.” Clemens was surprised to find that the structure housing the prison cell had been “torn down and thrown away as carelessly as if its bricks were common clay, not ingots of historic gold.” He did see, however, an engraved plate. “I saw that; and better that than nothing.” The plaque was removed from the site after Independence.
The lieutenant governor of Bengal and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of India were among the fashionable house at Clemens’s first, sold-out At Home in Calcutta, on Monday, February 10. The crowd cheered his appearance and then repeatedly punctuated his remarks with laughter, although it was clear that he had not fully recovered from his cold, his voice at times sinking to a stage whisper. In the words of one reviewer, the audience paid a “joyous tribute of laughter to the genius of the work-a-day Aristophanes of America.” Another reviewer wrote that “the humour of the speaker was of such an infectious description that he had hardly opened his mouth and spoken half a dozen words before his audience felt on the very best of terms with him … The humour which sparkled from the old grey man who talked to us from the stage of the Theatre Royal is as youthful as ever.”
Clemens gave two more performances in Calcutta that week, on Wednesday and Thursday, both to packed houses in which extra seats had been provided, before departing on Friday for Darjeeling. His ornithorhyncus poem, which he delivered on Wednesday, was an enormous success. “I wrote it in haste while traveling in Australia as I knew the poetlaureateship was vacant, but I have since found that I was too late. However, I am reconciled to having lost the laureateship, for it has been given to a good poet like me … The present Laureate is just the same kind of poet as I am.” The appointment of Tennyson’s successor as laureate, the inept Alfred Austin, was widely derided at the time, so Clemens’s teasing generated vast amusement.
Most of the reviewers praised his performance, although the Calcutta correspondent for the Madras Mail’ was dissatisfied. “Mark Twain as a lecturer is rather disappointing. He has a sing song methodical kind of delivery that becomes monotonous as he proceeds. He draws out his stories to the last extremity, and it seems to me that he was trying to kill time; and he failed to give all the points that might have been given to his best jokes. Still, he is a very funny man and most interesting. He has a refined intellectual face beaming with kindness and good nature, though sometimes wearing an expression of sadness and weariness that was touching.”
Perhaps that was the performance in which Clemens’s servant had misunderstood what to do. “Barney was to put a glass of water on my stage table,” Clemens noted in his journal. “He seemed to understand perfectly after I had explained, behind the scenes, four times and pointed to the stage. What he finally did was to put a vast empty glass on the stage and a full one behind the scenes.”
The one unfavorable opinion notwithstanding, the demand for tickets was so great that Smythe planned a fourth performance for the following week — an appearance that, in the end, had to be cancelled due to scheduling conflicts.
“There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not plenty of time for it,” Clemens observed in Following the Equator, but in fact he did see a great deal. For example, on the day of his first At Home he watched an early-morning inspection of the Calcutta garrison and later attended a repeat performance of the Grand Military Tournament. It closed, he reported, “with the mimic storming of a native fort which was as good as the reality for thrilling and accurate detail, and better than the reality for security and comfort.”
The tournament of 1896 was “the best and greatest military show that Calcutta has ever witnessed,” according to a newspaper of the day. An editorial expressed gratification that the performances had “attracted all classes of the native community” and then related “an amusing incident [that] illustrates the irresistible force of the fascination which the show exercises on the Native mind. A swarm of Natives were seen, as they may be seen at any performance, peeping through the matting of the enclosure. Patiently they stuck to their peep-holes, rewarded by the occasional glimpse of a trooper in the outer circle. An hour and a half went past, and then began the storming of the mountain fortress. The effect of the fusilade on the peeping throng was electrical. In a moment all was excitement, and when Maxim and mule battery came into play, the outsiders cast thrift to the winds and made a rush for tickets. Eagerly they paid the full charge of eight annas for the final ten minutes of the show.” When you read this editorial on its yellowing page, a page so brittle it crumbles at the edges, you are glad the writer is dead, because otherwise you would be tempted to shoot him. But then you wonder if you would have noted the cruelty and condescension of that column one hundred years ago, had you had been an English resident of Calcutta reading the paper as you sipped your breakfast tea. It is pleasant to consider ourselves superior to the people of that time.
Clemens visited a session of the Governor-General’s Council chaired by the viceroy Lord Elgin (Calcutta was then the capital of British India), inspected the portraits at Government House, lunched with the lieutenant governor, and called on the commander-in-chief. In addition, according to Following the Equator, Clemens’s sightseeing included the “fort that Clive built,” the Indian Museum, “the great botanical gardens,” and the site near Belvedere House at which Hastings, who created the outlines of British India as its first governor-general, shot his political tormentor Philip Francis in a duel Today you must obtain special permission to enter the fort, which is still in use, but no permission is required to visit the Indian Museum or the Botanical Gardens. The high-ceilinged museum, built around a pleasant central courtyard, is the greatest in India. “One should,” Clemens advised, “spend a month in the museum, an enchanted palace of Indian antiquities.” The museum, however, needs no promotion. Its fossils, stuffed animals, superb ancient sculptures and carvings, archaeological finds, and nineteenth-century Indian paintings, among other exhibits, attract thousands of visitors from all over the country.
The Botanical Gardens lie in Howrah, Calcutta’s twin city across the Hooghly River. The taxi that Alice and I have hired for the day takes us over the new suspension bridge, sleek and elegant, its cables forming ever-changing geometric patterns as we approach. On the other side of the river we share narrow lanes with bicycle rickshaws and two herds of goats. A man in spotless white trousers and smock passes a woman relieving herself in the gutter.
In an oblique reference in his journal, Clemens mentioned what was daily before his eyes: people relieving themselves in public, the human excrement on pathways. “You have noticed from the car windows that [Indians] publicly and without embarrassment indulge in various habits which to us are forbidden … Each race determines for itself what indecencies are. Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.” In a bow to Victorian sensibilities, Following the Equator did not mention these “various habits.” Nor did it exploit Clemens’s journal entries regarding the “pious cant” of not providing clean prostitutes for the 70,000 British soldiers in India, of whom there were constantly more than 3,000 in hospital from this cause.
We pass the leafy quadrangle of a college and then stop at the gates of the Botanical Gardens. It is a weekday, with only a few visitors enjoying the grounds. Most of the bicyclists and pedestrians here, some with briefcases, seem intent on their destinations, to which the park may be a shortcut. On one side of a long avenue, a scummy lake nourishes glorious water lilies, pale purple and white. The park’s most notable feature, an enormous banyan tree, was about 140 years old at the time Clemens saw it. Almost one hundred feet tall and covering a circumference of over sixteen hundred feet, the aerial roots that drop from its branches and anchor themselves in the ground create the illusion of a small woods. Although it lost its central trunk to a fungus about thirty years after Clemens’s visit, the tree continues to flourish.
After leaving the gardens, Alice and I enter another unexpected refuge, the South Park Street cemetery. At this peaceful, shaded, quiet spot, we wander among English tombs from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The monuments and gravestones, often slightly askew on ground that has shifted, stand crowded together like guests at a reception. You are impressed by the grandeur of some of the monuments and saddened by the youth of many who lie buried here. Here lie Joseph Hatton, eight years old, his sister Elizabeth, five years old, and their father Henry, forty years old. All perished within fourteen months of one another, between 1839 and 1840. Here lies Rose Aylmer, who died in 1800 at the age of twenty. This daughter of a noble house was immortalized by Walter Savage Landor’s brief poem, perhaps his most famous. It is engraved on the plinth of her monument, a tall, fluted, tapering column, its splendor sadly at variance with the simple elegance of Landor’s elegy. Here lies Sir William Jones, whose monument, according to a list of notable tombs, is the tallest in the cemetery. He was one of the men brought out by Hastings, who wanted to create a corps of British officials that could speak the local languages and that would be respectful of local traditions. Sir William, a judge and legal writer, founded the Bengal Asiatic Society. Oddly, the list of notable tombs fails to mention his most significant achievement, the discovery that Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, the holy language of the Hindus, sprang from a common ancestor. He was forty-seven when he died in 1794. Outside the cemetery walls, a long line of indigent people moves slowly forward. A charitable agency is distributing food.
Clemens did not visit the cemetery, which would have seemed less exotic in 1896 than it does one hundred years later, although it was little more than a mile from his hotel. It was at his hotel, in fact, that he later claimed to have encountered the past, not in the tombs of dead colonists, but in a long-forgotten personal episode. As he entered the hotel, he glimpsed in passing a lovely young woman going out. The glimpse shocked him. She looked exactly like a childhood friend. Later he found that the young woman was not a ghost but the granddaughter of that friend, now a gray-haired widow, who was staying in the same hotel and who invited him to call. “We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty souls in the reviving wine of the past, the pathetic past, the beautiful past, the dear and lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips for fifty years and it was as if they were made of music.” They recalled story after story and laughed until tears flowed. Suddenly his childhood friend revealed that she had witnessed a boyhood scene in which he had capered naked, unaware that two girls were watching him behind a screen. Later, the boy Clemens was mortified to learn there had been female witnesses, although he did not know who they were. Finally, fifty years later in Calcutta, he learned the identity of one of them. An account of his meeting in Calcutta appears among Clemens’s autobiographical jottings and dictations, some of which bear little resemblance to the facts. It is probably an invention, although it may have been psychologically true, based on an incident, perhaps in Calcutta, that reminded him of his youth.