I WAS GOING to start last night for Lahore,” Clemens wrote to Rogers on Sunday, March 15, 1896, “but wasn’t yet in condition; but we all start to-night and lie over a day for rest in Delhi.” They reached Delhi, 150 miles northeast of Jaipur, at half past midnight, and repaired to the mansion of the Burne family — Mr. Burne was with the Bank of Bengal. The Clemenses saw little of the city because they expected to return to it after several At Homes elsewhere. Also, as Mrs. Clemens later told her sister, a smallpox epidemic discouraged them from visiting places frequented by large numbers of the local population. The Clemenses were staying in a private house, she wrote, and naturally they wanted to avoid endangering their hosts.
The private house, wrote Clemens, “was built by a rich Englishman who had become orientalized — so much so that he had a zenana [harem]. But he was a broad-minded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque; to please himself he built an English church.”
The “rich Englishman who had become orientalized” was James Skinner, whose father was a Scottish officer in the East India Company’s army, and whose mother was the daughter of a Rajput landowner. Because of British prejudice toward Anglo-Indians, he could not follow in his father’s footsteps as an officer in the East India Company. So in 1796, at the age of eighteen, he became a junior officer in the forces of one of the Company’s rivals, Sindhia, the Maharaja of Gwalior. As a result of Skinner’s bravery, military skill, and gifts of leadership, he advanced in rank, finally commanding two battalions of infantry. But when Sindhia decided to attack the East India Company’s forces, his French general summarily dismissed all the British and Anglo-Indian officers, including Skinner, who had served gallantly for seven years.
Impressed by Skinner’s reputation, the British offered him the command of an irregular troop of horse, irregular in the sense that it was not part of the Company’s regular army, which was still unprepared to accept an Anglo-Indian officer. Skinner raised, trained, and commanded a corps of 3,000 men, Skinner’s Horse, a mounted guerrilla force that helped the East India Company subdue northern India’s native princes. Skinner’s Horse eventually joined the Company’s army and survives today as an armored regiment in the Indian Army. Unfortunately his house, at which troupes of dancing girls entertained his guests at celebrated parties, and in which the Clemenses spent a night, no longer stands. But the handsome church he built across the way survives.
From Delhi the Clemenses traveled to Lahore, 270 miles northwest, in today’s Pakistan. “Mark Twain at Last!” proclaimed a notice for two AtHomes there. These were scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, March 18 and 19, 1896. “On Wednesday night,” reported Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette, “when he stepped on the platform, he was looking a trifle pale and worn after his recent illness: at the age to which the great humourist has attained, railway travelling is a fatiguing business, especially when added to the delights of our Indian climate. But though Mark Twain’s hair now is nearly white and his cheeks are deeply lined, the fire in his eye testified to the still youthful and indominitable spirit which has made him undertake, in the evening of his life, this crusade in a cause so contrary to the tendencies of our modern age.” In a local allusion, Clemens introduced himself as a friend of Kipling, who had once worked in Lahore.
After his second performance, a reviewer commented that “Mark Twain has come, has been seen, and has conquered the hearts of all Lahore.” Even the lieutenant governor of the Punjab, with whom Clemens lunched, was captivated, if lending an elephant indicates esteem. Apparently it was accepted by the travelers of the day that the best way to see the city’s antiquities was from a howdah. “I am used to being afraid of collisions when I ride or drive,” wrote Clemens in Following the Equator, “but when one is on top of an elephant that feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through a regiment of runaway teams.”
Clemens performed but one more time in India, in Rawalpindi, 160 miles northwest of Lahore, on Friday, March 20. India was becoming too hot. “It was always summer in India,” Clemens wrote Rogers a month later. “Of course we never saw any of the real summer; they do say that when that comes Satan himself has to knock off and go home and cool off.” Clemens received letters from total strangers warning him to leave the country before the intense heat set in. Besides, the sailing date to Ceylon and Mauritius had been advanced by two days. So on Saturday, March 21, the Clemenses left Rawalpindi for Calcutta, a journey of more than 1,200 miles that lasted almost three full days.
At sunrise on Tuesday, March 24, they returned to Calcutta and the Continental Hotel, where a reporter found Clemens “comfortably ensconced in an easy chair and smoking a Meerschaum, black with age.” Clemens was healthy now, he said, but Clara was suffering from a touch of malarial fever, although she was much better. He denied the rumor that he had sold the copyright for his forthcoming travel book for £10,000. It was unlikely, he said, that he would ever sell the copyright to one of his books when he could readily command royalties on sales. Publishing, he stated, is all a gamble. For instance, at the outset of his career he had refused to sell the copyright to The Innocents Abroad because he didn’t know how well it would sell and didn’t want the publisher to lose through him. (The claim was disingenuous. He insisted on a royalty after consulting Henry Ward Beecher, who was experienced in negotiating such contracts.) He had taken a multitude of notes during his tour of India, he said, but he had not had time to work them up because social and business engagements had kept him fully occupied. He would need more than six months, he thought, to prepare his manuscript, which he might begin in Cape Town, the last stop on his world tour. At the moment he was afraid to say anything about so vast and complex a country as India. He needed time to digest his impressions.
That afternoon the Clemenses boarded the British India Company’s Wardha for the long voyage to Mauritius, via Madras and Colombo. The vessel remained at its anchorage on the Hooghly River all night. “When wind blew in, icy cold,” Clemens noted in his journal, “the moment it stopped, blistering hot & mosquitoes. We all went up & slept on deck.” At seven in the morning the next day, the Wardha dropped its moorings and started down the Hooghly. “For six hours now,” he wrote in his journal, “it has been impossible to realize that this is India and the Hoogli (river). No, every few miles we see a great white columned European house standing in front of the vast levels, with a forest away back — La. planter? And the thatched groups of native houses have turned themselves into the negro quarters, familiar to me near forty years ago — and so for six hours this has been the sugar coast of the Mississippi.” On the following day they entered the Bay of Bengal, and sailed southwest along the coast.
During their voyage to Madras, Mrs. Clemens wrote a discouraged letter to her sister. Her Hartford home had been much in her thoughts, she said. But when she considered the long list of their creditors and the sums owed them, she felt that it would be a very long time before they could return to their home in Hartford. “Sometimes it comes over me like an overwhelming wave, that it is to be bitterness and disappointment to the end.” Still, most of the time she managed to keep up her courage. Her husband was not as sanguine as she would like him to be, but he had been suffering from colds and other disabilities. Also the fact that he was now sixty years old depressed him. “Naturally I combat that idea all that I can, trying to make him rejoice that he is not seventy." They did not take much money out of India beyond their expenses, she said, because the halls and theaters tended to be small, typically seating no more than four hundred people. But, cheering up, she added that India had become extremely enjoyable. Her husband’s reception there proved to be universally enthusiastic. Besides, India offered better material for his travel book than did Australia or Africa. Clara also relished India. In a letter to her cousin she wrote that their visit to India was “the most interesting by far we ever had or dreamed of having.”
Four days after leaving Calcutta they reached Madras, early on the morning of March 31. The party went ashore for breakfast, intending to drive around the town, but Clemens, who had caught another cold, decided he wasn’t up to sightseeing and returned to the ship while his family spent the day on land. A reporter found him reclining peacefully on deck, in a deep cane-bottomed chair, reading a Madras newspaper. “When this boat leaves Madras today,” he said, “I suppose I will be leaving India quite behind me. Let me see, I landed at Bombay in the middle of January and here is the 31st of March. It seems such a short time and India is such a large place to study” Did he find what he had expected? “Well, hardly … I came here like many others with only a very vague idea of the country, and I am bound to confess that I did not find it the immensely wealthy place it has been described as … A feature that has struck me very forcibly in India is the poverty of the country… Here the failure of the crops is universal at times and when a district can’t be approached in time by railway, famine prevails and the mighty masses die of sheer starvation.”
He had, he continued, noticed that most of the land between Bombay and Calcutta was diligently tilled wherever water was accessible. “As regards General Booth’s scheme, I have read something of it, but I do not think he can hope to succeed if he means to sandwich the religion of the Salvation Army with his peasant-settlement scheme.” William Booth, the founder and first general of the Salvation Army, had recently left India after a promotional tour on behalf of his population redistribution proposal. He hoped to set up colonies in India that would offer low-interest loans to peasants, the settlements to be administered by zealous volunteers from the Salvation Army The government rejected his proposal, which required grants of land as well as money, and his plan found no favor whatsoever among the Indian population, probably because they suspected, as did Clemens, that it was motivated by the desire to convert. In response to Booth’s proposal, an Indian journal wrote that “India is already swarmed enough by various missionary bodies and it is time for all people of India to make a determined stand for the safety of their ancient religion.”
Clemens asked the reporter about an equestrian statue he had seen in Madras. “Sir Thomas Munro, did you say? Ah, that takes one way back in your history to Clive. Yes, I recollect now, he was one of your early Governors.” That reminded him of the last governor, Lord Wenlock. According to one paper Clemens had read, Wenlock was a failure. “I think it a mistake myself to send out your landed noblemen to administer this vast country. They are not cut out for administrative work and are better left on their wealthy estates. You want men who are born to govern and who have made statesmanship a life-long study. Your new Governor comes up to that mark, I am told.”
When the conversation turned to inventive genius, Clemens remarked that it was a mistake to consider America “as the inventors of the world, but we do what is worth a great deal more; we take up an invention and work at it till it results in something perfect. ‘Promoters of inventions’ would be the proper way of describing us Americans.”
As for the Anglo-American conflict over the Venezuelan border, Clemens was gratified to learn that the sides had agreed to arbitration, although he never doubted that the dispute would be resolved peacefully. “It was absolutely silly to think that America and England would ever fire a shot at each other.”
Clemens concluded the interview by thanking the reporter for his kind wishes. “I have had nothing else all over India, and will carry the best recollections of this country home with me.” Indeed, years later, when he was dictating his autobiography, he would say that India was “the only foreign land I ever daydream about or deeply long to see again.”