THE PARTY RETURNED to Calcutta at eleven the next morning, Tuesday, February 18. Clemens spent less than half a day in Calcutta; at nine-thirty in the evening, he and Smythe boarded a private car for Muzaffarpur, about 320 miles northwest near the Nepalese border, where an At Home had been scheduled for the following evening. Writing to her daughter Jean from Calcutta that night, Mrs. Clemens explained that she and Clara would follow Clemens the next day. They were tired and had to repack, because two trunks were to be left behind. Presumably these contained their warmer clothing, to be placed on the steamer that would later carry the Clemenses to Ceylon and Mauritius.
The Clemenses reunited on Thursday, Clemens himself traveling southwest from Muzaffarpur and the women northwest from Calcutta. Together they continued to Benares, arriving at noon on February 20. Their return visit to “that strange and fascinating piety-hive” lasted just one day, spent largely in viewing bazaars and temples.
The next day found them traveling to Lucknow, about 170 miles northwest. “Hot as the nation,” Clemens wrote in his journal, “the flat plains the color of pale dust, & the dust flying… No doubt all these native grayheads remember the Mutiny.”
Both in Lucknow and in Cawnpore (now Kanpur) he visited sites connected to the great uprising of 1857. The uprising began among Britain’s Indian troops, sparked by the introduction of the Enfield rifle. Before loading the rifles, soldiers were supposed to bite off the cartridge ends, but the paper cartridges were greased with cows’ fat and pigs’ fat, one forbidden to Hindus and the other to Muslims. As soon as the British realized their mistake, they withdrew the cartridges, but it was too late. The various reforms they had introduced over the past few decades — for example, the abolition of suttee, the suppression of infanticide, the expropriation of land whose holders could not show valid title, and the annexation of states to which there was no direct heir — and the brutal fashion with which they had imposed these reforms convinced the soldiers that the introduction of greased cartridges was part of a deliberate plot to overturn the traditional order. The uneasy and fearful chief representatives of that order, the landowners and princes, helped transform a military mutiny into a general revolt that raged across northern India.
The uprising shook British complacency, but not their confidence in the inherent strength and enduring nature of their rule. Determined to learn from the errors that the uprising exposed, they reorganized and reformed their administrative, financial, and military institutions, and changed their attitude toward their Indian subjects. The British resolved to stay in closer touch with Indian opinion, to enlist the support of the princes and the landed classes, and to avoid offending religious sensitivities. Those changes, practical and psychological, gave to British India the character which Clemens found during the apogee of Imperial rule. During this time, Indian traditionalists, who respected British power, and the newly modern Indian classes, who respected the new knowledge, conceded British superiority.
The military and civil service officers whom Clemens met in clubs throughout India were both efficient and devoted to their work. But they questioned Indian competence, opposed Indian advancement to the higher civil and military services, and regarded the British administration as wise and benevolent, a view that Clemens appeared not to challenge.
On Saturday, February 22, Clemens visited the ruins of the Residency, the palace of the British resident at the court of Oudh, the state whose annexation had contributed to the uprising. This is where the Siege of Lucknow took place. At the end of June 1858, the British residents of Lucknow, the small British garrison, and a smaller number of loyal Indian soldiers took refuge in the Residency complex after rebellious Indian troops had overrun the town. For over four months, until Sir Colin Campbell relieved the siege, the defenders and occupants of the Residency endured a relentless artillery barrage and constant efforts to mine the buildings. They also suffered from malnutrition, cholera, and infected wounds. In Following the Equator, Clemens devoted several pages to the Siege of Lucknow as part of his account of British valor during the uprising.
“The British were caught asleep and unprepared,” he wrote. “They were a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. It would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter or stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and English devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly.”
Clemens described the Residency grounds as “sacred.” He predicted that they would be maintained as a memorial as long as the British remained masters of India. The grounds are a memorial even today. In the shattered Residency itself you can walk down a circular staircase to the cellar, where many women and children slept, and you can see a model of the positions during the siege. Opposite the Residency stands a different memorial, one that honors the martyrs of India’s struggle for independence. It was erected in 1957 to mark the centennial of the great uprising.
On Sunday, the day after their visit to the Residency, the Clemenses rode with Major and Mrs. Aylmer and Captain and Mrs. Dallas over the bloody route taken by Sir Colin Campbell and his relieving force as they fought their way to the Residency, thirty-nine years earlier. They also drove out to the great imamhara (literally “imam’s house,” a mausoleum for a Shiite leader), built in 1784 by the reigning nawab. Lucknow, the capital of the nawabs of Oudh, became a center of Muslim power in the eighteenth century and it is still India’s chief Shiite city. The great imambara, perhaps the principal monument to the Nawabs’ rule, is open to the public.
Another monument, the Chattar Manzil palace, was the United Services Club during the Clemenses’ visit. Major Aylmer’s uniformed orderly, riding a caparisoned camel, brought Clemens an invitation to dine there. Clemens described the palace as “ancient and elegant” and “sumptuous,” a far cry from the modest if comfortable club at Darjeeling. It was at the Chattar Manzil palace that Clemens met a survivor of the siege, who in 1857 “was perfecting his teething and learning to talk.” The forty-one-year-old survivor was to Clemens “the most impressive object in Lucknow after the Residency ruins.” The palace in which this meeting took place now stands empty, forlorn and neglected.
During one of his performances at Lucknow, he addressed his routine on moral regeneration mainly to a child who sat close to the platform. She was, according to Smythe, “a delightful little girl… conspicuous for her naive and evident enjoyment.” Later, just before the club banquet in Clemens’s honor, a guest told him of a difference of opinion between the child and her parents as to the number of possible sins that Clemens had mentioned. Clemens claimed that the number given by the child was right. Then and there he insisted on writing her a note confirming that her memory was correct, that there were only 354 possible sins in the world, and that none of the experts in jail had been able to invent any more.
After three days and two performances at Lucknow, the Clemenses left on Tuesday, February 25, for Cawnpore, about forty miles southwest, where Clemens performed that night and visited some of the sites associated with the uprising. He saw the site at which the besieged British garrison fought until promised a safe conduct by Nana Sahib, one of the leaders of the revolt. He saw the small temple on the shores of the Ganges where a bugle blew to signal the massacre of the garrison after it surrendered. He saw the palace in which, shortly before the arrival of a rescue party, Nana Sahib slaughtered the British women and children that had been rounded up and imprisoned. And he saw the infamous well into which the victims of the palace butchery had been thrown. One can imagine the lofty self-righteousness with which Clemens’s guides described these atrocities. No Indian guide showed him the sites of British reprisals, which included blowing away captives spread-eagled to the mouths of cannons.
The Clemenses left Cawnpore at three on Thursday morning and reached Agra, about 150 miles northwest, seven and a half hours later. In a letter to her sister, Mrs. Clemens wrote that they were staying there with a high British functionary, Colonel Loch, who oversaw the local rulers of three states. “Nine months ago there was a Rajah deposed, and it has brought much extra work upon him.” Clemens noted in his journal that he offered to dethrone one or two princes for him, or, for the sake of change, drown some.
Five other guests were staying at the house, in addition to the Clemenses, so that when all went sightseeing, they required two carriages, each with a coachman and two footmen standing behind. The Clemenses saw the Taj Mahal twice, once during the day and once at night. After the At Home on February 28, the Clemenses reached the monument at eleven-thirty, under a clear sky and a full moon. To their surprise, a total eclipse began immediately upon their arrival. “Attempts were made to furnish an eclipse for the Prince of Wales in 1876,” wrote Clemens in his journal, “and in recent years to 20 other princes ofthat house, but without success.” The Clemenses’ host, however, had “much more influence than any of his predecessors have had.”
Clemens claimed to have been disappointed by the Taj Mahal. He knew all the time he saw it that it was a wonder of the world, but it was not the building he had imagined on the basis of the literary descriptions he had read. These had led him to expect transcendence, a monument “built of tinted mists upon jeweled arches of rainbows supported by colonnades of moonlight.”
In 1896, photographic images of tourist icons were only beginning to become common property through their publication in newspapers and magazines. Today, before you have reached middle age, you have seen thousands of photographs of the Taj Mahal, taken at all hours of the day and night and from every imaginable vantage point. You have seen these pictures not only in newspapers and magazines, in articles and in advertisements, but also on television and in film. The Taj Mahal in your imagination is based not on written descriptions but on repeated visual images, and by the time you arrive in Agra you have seen so many of them that you half wonder why you are bothering to visit the original at all. And so, when you finally view it, you are shocked to discover that it is even more impressive than you had expected it to be. You return to it at night and you glimpse it from various parts of the town and you are surprised that successive sightings do not diminish your pleasure or wonder. What a pity that the main input to Clemens’s imagined Taj Mahal had been written rather than visual.
On Saturday February 29, following their night visit to the Taj Mahal, the Clemenses traveled 130 miles southwest to Jaipur, the capital of a princely state founded in the twelfth century. When they arrived the next morning, Clemens felt unwell According to Mrs. Clemens, he had noticed for several weeks “a pricking sensation in his left hand & arm, which made us rather anxious.” He was also suffering from diarrhea. “I am in the doctor’s hands again,” he wrote to Rogers from Jaipur five days after his arrival “He made me cancel a week’s engagements and shut myself in my room and rest. Said he would not be responsible for the consequences if I didn’t.” Smythe and Clara also fell ill; the stay in Jaipur lengthened to two weeks. Meanwhile, news of Clemens’s illness, announced to explain the cancellation of several performances, spread swiftly and in exaggerated form so that the world thought he was seriously ill Rogers wrote him that “we have been quite disturbed in regard to the newspaper reports concerning your illness … Do try and take care of yourself.”
The Clemenses’ hotel in Jaipur was the Kaiser-i-Hind, which means Emperor of India, a grandiose name for the small, noisy establishment run by nine brothers. It stood, he reported in Following the Equator, “in a large empty compound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man’s head.” The brothers lived with their families off to one side of the compound, in a building whose veranda was always “loosely stacked” with children, among whom was “a detachment of the parents wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever they call it.”
The main structure, a smaller version of the Hotel de Paris in Benares, still operates as a hotel, but its verandas and scalloped arches now welcome budget travelers. When Alice and I visit, we find an old Indian lady reclining on floor cushions at the entrance to the central veranda. She appears to be one of the locals who occupy the smaller buildings inside the compound. The “mud wall as high as a man’s head,” which surrounded the compound in Clemens’s day, has been replaced by a lower stone wall and by a building facing the street. An enormous water tank now rises behind the main house.
“The secluded and country air of the place,” which Clemens mentioned, was destroyed when the town spread out to meet it. Across the street stands a new luxury hotel, with a waterfall in its lobby, whose guest rooms are probably half the size of the original chambers at the Kaiser-i-Hind. If the Clemenses were to visit Jaipur today, they would probably choose not the new, glitzy hotel but the romantic Rambagh Palace Hotel, formerly the home of the Maharajah of Jaipur, where plashing fountains moisten the air and peacocks strut upon well-tended lawns.
During their two-week stay, the Clemenses ventured forth from their hotel. On their way to watch a religious procession, they passed what Clemens described as a “new and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and value.” This was Albert Hall, “a beautiful construction of stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding, terrace-fashion, toward the sky.” The terraces were crammed with Indians, who presumably had come to watch the procession. “One must try to imagine those solid masses of splendid color, one above another, up and up, against the blue sky, and the Indian sun turning them all to beds of fire and flame.”
Mrs. Clemens visited the museum on a ladies’ morning, when women who observed purdah would be safe from the gaze of men. Muslims introduced purdah, the seclusion of women from public view, but many Hindu families had adopted the custom and still practiced it in the Clemenses’ time. When Clemens performed in Baroda, the Marahani and two court ladies watched him from behind a screen, and when the Clemenses called on the prince of Palitana, Mrs. Clemens and Clara made a separate visit to the Princess. Writing to her daughter Jean about her visit to the museum, Mrs. Clemens said she wanted to visit it on a ladies’ morning in order to see the local women and their sumptuous costumes. The place, she wrote, was packed with gorgeously dressed women. “The only trouble was that I was as great a curiosity to them as they were to me.”
The Albert Hall, with its arched verandas and domed pavilions, continues to serve the public, though Western visitors are no longer a curiosity. Some of the exhibits appear unchanged from one hundred years ago: a mummy, Egyptian statuary, stuffed animals, lifeless fabrics. A series of small terra cotta figures illustrate yoga positions, of which only one looks comfortable, lying prone upon one’s back. Pigeons fly through the long, dark corridors lined with poorly labeled exhibits. Museums like this, common a few generations ago, can still be found in small American towns. This one attracts crowds of locals, including a few women garbed from head to toe in black, their faces covered, accompanied by a man.
The Clemenses visited the walled city, built in the eighteenth century by Maharajah Jai Singh, who named it after himself. A philosopher king and enthusiast of astronomy, he and his architect laid out the city according to ancient Hindu principles of city planning, with straight, spacious streets at right angles to one another, each street lined with houses, shops, temples, and mosques whose design had first to be approved by the city’s architect. The straight-ness of the streets, in marked contrast to the winding alleys characteristic of Indian cities of the day, served as a foil to the embellishment of the buildings. “The blocks of houses,” wrote Clemens in Following the Equator, “exhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintnesses, the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies, pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and inviting perches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured by the brush, and the whole of them have the soft rich tint of strawberry ice-cream.”
From a vantage point in the old city, the Clemenses watched a procession, bracketed at the front by “majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of gaudinesses,” as Clemens described them in Following the Equator, and at the rear by stately camels. In those days no great occasion was complete without a procession of gaily decorated elephants. Today’s visitors to Jaipur can still see gaudily embellished elephants if they attend the Elephant Festival, held annually in the Chaugan Stadium.
“The paradoxical pachyderm known as elephant is coming toward you … dripping in radiant color,” announces a female voice, whose English throughout the spectacle is as decorated as the beasts who are entering the grounds. The enormous animals are draped in velvet brocade, with great bracelets circling their ankles and scales of silver blanketing their foreheads. Tinsel chandeliers sprout from their brass-rimmed tusk-sheaths, gold and silver embroidered scarves hang from their ears and tusks, and chalk-drawn stylized flowers and bits of glittering paste festoon their bare skin. Even their toenails are painted. In addition to processions, the organizers of the event treat us to elephant races (the jockeys prod the poor beasts with a device that combines a spear with a hook), a tug-of-war between an elephant and twenty tourists (the elephant wins easily), and a bit of elephant polo, all of which are interspersed with marching bands and troupes of singers, as well as dancers in resplendent costumes, hips swaying and shoulders shrugging. When visitors leave this spectacle they feel as Clemens did, after he watched the procession, that “for color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishiness, and sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I had ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking upon its like again.”