Part One

“Bewitching Color, Enchanting Color”

Bombay

I knew we were going to find someone better than Satan. Mark Twain’s Satan had come to him highly recommended, as indeed had the equally highly recommended bearer before him, the poor old butterfingered and confused Manuel.

A bearer - or two - was considered essential for all pre-World War 2 travelers in India and every visitor’s first task was the hiring of one. Thus on the Twain party’s second day in Bombay, 19 January 1896, the hapless Manuel was waiting to be interviewed in the lobby of Watson’s Hotel in downtown Bombay. Mark Twain was feeling ill and had confined himself to bed to starve out the bronchial infection he had picked up on the rust bucket steamship Rosetta[1] as she sailed north across the equator from Ceylon. He had six days in which to recover before the first of his three Talks in Bombay, Talks which needed him to be on stage, alone and unamplified, for up to an hour and a half. Twain’s wife Livy, his daughter Clara and tour manager Carlyle G. Smythe had left him well wrapped and in peace in their suite of rooms at Watson’s Hotel. On their way out they saw the hapless Manuel waiting in the lobby and sent him up to be interviewed.

As Twain wrote,

...the bearer - a native man-servant - is a person who should be selected with some care, because as long as he is in your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes. He is messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, lady’s maid, courier - he is everything.

In India your day may be said to begin with the bearer’s knock on the bedroom door, accompanied by a formula of, words - a formula which is intended to mean that the bath is ready. It doesn’t really seem to mean anything at all. But that is because you are not used to bearer English. You will presently understand.

A tall, stooped, rather pathetic old Indian man stood at the end of Mark Twain’s bed and touched his forehead in salute.

“Manuel,” said the patient, “you are evidently Indian, but you seem to have a Spanish name when you put it all together. How is that?”

Manuel looked perplexed. “Name, Manuel. Yes, master,” he replied placidly.

“I know; but how did you get the name?”

“Oh, yes, I suppose. Think happen so. Father same name, not mother.”

“Well - then - how - did - your - father - get - his name?” asked Twain with early signs of the exasperation that was to follow.

“Oh, he Christian - Portygee; live in Goa; I born Goa; mother not Portygee, mother native-high-caste Brahmin - Coolin Brahmin; highest caste; no other so high caste. I high-caste Brahmin, too. Christian, too, same like father; high-caste Christian Brahmin, master - Salvation Army.”

An awkward silence fell between them and then suddenly Manuel was in full flow. Twain held up his hand.

“There - don’t do that. I can’t understand Hindustani.”

“Not Hindustani, master, English. Always I speaking English sometimes when I talking every day all the time at you.”

Within an hour Manuel had his own bearer and Twain had his first taste of the twists and turns of the Indian caste system. Rather than clean the bathroom himself Manuel “put a coolie at the work, and explained that he would lose caste if he did it himself; it would be pollution, by the law of his caste, and it would cost him a deal of fuss and trouble to purify himself and accomplish his rehabilitation. He said that that kind of work was strictly forbidden to persons of caste, and as strictly restricted to the very bottom layer of Hindoo society, the despised Untouchable.”

Three days later, with the Twain party in despair, Smythe fired Manuel and set about finding a replacement. This time the recovering Mark Twain interviewed... well, he never did get to the bottom of his name but they all soon settled on Satan.

Satan was a whirlwind and all Mark Twain’s “heart, all my affection, all my admiration, went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smiley, engaging, shiny-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming fire-coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it.”

“You’ll suit. What is your name?” Twain said.

“Muzzererivathayana,” Muzzererivathayana replied.

“Let me see if I can make a selection out of it - for business uses, I mean; we will keep the rest for Sundays. Give it to me in installments.”

“Muzz-erer-ivath-ayana,” Muzzererivathayana replied slowly.

“There does not seem to be any shorter, except Mousawhich - suggesting mouse. It is not in your character, too soft, too quiet, too conservative, not of your splendid style. Mousa is short enough, but I don’t quite like it. How do you think Satan would do?”

“Yes, master,” replied the newly christened Satan, “Satan do wair good.”

Well, every chap needs a Satan - especially in India. Much as I would have loved a bearer, or a whole bevy of bearers, for the Mark Twain footsteps task in hand a research assistant is far more useful.

Mine swings into our lives haphazardly. Through a friend at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London I am introduced to the Cultural Attaché from the Indian High Commission, Shaurya Mark. Before a slow lunch at Romanov’s in Aldwych he writes me a sort of “To Whom It May Concern” get-out-of-an-Indian-jail letter of safe passage to tuck into my back pocket. I explain about the research done with the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley and he asks what more needs doing.

“Well, the next stage is to hire an intern in India to do some more research over there and come on the trip with us, interpreting, generally helping us out.”

“Us?”

“Yes, there’s my wife and photographer Gillian too.”

“Ah, good, so you can have a female researcher.”

I must have looked quizzical. “Yes,” he said, “in India this is important. Chaperoning is still in vogue. In this case you are in luck.”

“My four favorite words, but how so?”

“My niece Charusheela John has just finished her studies at Lancaster University and is now back home in Bombay. She needs some work experience for her CV, you need an Indian intern, hey presto!”

“What did she study?” I ask.

“English Literature. 1.1, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Ouch,” I reply, “out-qualified again. And her second name John, would she be Anglo-Indian?”

“No, no, her family - and mine - are Christian. We take the father’s first name as our last. Her father is John. His brother, my father was Mark. Her brother is Paul, and so on.”

“What if you have more than twelve boys?” I ask.

“Then you start over.”

***

The Twain party’s Watson’s Hotel is no longer habitable and we are staying at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club; hardly a hardship posting. An interview with Charusheela had been arranged and she breezes into the august old club, swirling past the wood paneled, trophy-covered walls, a vision of modern India in jet black designer ringlets, pendulum designer earrings, fake designer jeans and slightly-too-tight-but-who-am-I-to-judge fake designer tee-shirt. The interview starts, the dynamic changes and after several cups of Darjeeling’s finest brew I’m pleased to say we seem to have passed and will start with her in a few days.

I mention how Mark Twain had grappled with Muzzererivathayana and settled on calling him Satan. “Look, I hope you don’t mind me saying so but Charusheela doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue either. The idea behind the story is then-and-now. I can’t call you Satan. Maybe I can call you Angel?”

Gillian leans forward imperceptibly and an eyebrow raises towards the conversation. “Maybe not Angel,” I stumble, “What is the name of your favorite Hindu goddess, for example?”

“Sita,” she replies, “She’s not really a goddess but I like her name.”

“And do you like her?”

“Yes, of course, she is Rama’s consort.”

“Then Sita you are. Sita and Satan. I think you are going to make quite a pair.” And they did.

***

Watson’s Hotel ain’t what it used to be. It was built as the finest hotel in Asia in the mid-1860s and by common consent for a generation it was just that - if you were white, for that was its policy. If you were non-white you would have been among the six hundred staff working to service the 150 rooms all of which could be adjoined to make suites; but then you had to be white again, and female, to work in the restaurant; and white again and male to work in the lobby. A popular untruth is that when the Indian tycoon Jamsetji Tata was refused a room in 1903 he built the Taj Mahal Hotel next to the Gateway of India in retaliation. Not so, he had already determined that Watson’s was in incurable decline and Bombay was booming enough to warrant a replacement. And, like a good Tata, he was absolutely right: today the ludicrously overpriced Taj still stands tall and full and Watson’s is condemned and crumbling - but, this being India, still full.

The construction was unusual and serves to show how much the Empire benefited Britain. Private money was raised to employ the civil engineer who cut his teeth on St. Pancras, a Gothic-revival main line train station in London; he used the same system of Lego-linking cast-iron steel girders that had been used at London’s Crystal Palace, built ten years earlier for the Great Exhibition. The four thousand beams were made over three years in three factories in the Black Country in the English Midlands, then shipped by canal to Manchester, by barge to Liverpool and by a series of freighters to Bombay. Like many buildings designed by engineers it wears its heart on its sleeve, or in this case its girders on its façade. It is, even now in its death throes, rather magnificent - albeit more so as a monument to the financial and imperial confidence of the early the Raj period than to its aesthetic merit.

The Twain party arrived there on the morning of 18 January 1896 and were immediately bedazzled by their early impressions of India. “The lobbies and halls were full of turbaned, and fez’d and embroidered, cap’d, and barefooted, and cotton-clad dark natives, some of them rushing about, others at rest squatting, or sitting on the ground.” Their suite of rooms was on the fourth floor and a long procession of Indians carried their numerous possessions up to the suite. Each man carried one item as is still the case in smart hotels today. “Each native carried a bag, in some cases, in other cases less. One strong native carried my overcoat, another a parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last man in the procession had no load but a fan.”

Gillian and I travel somewhat more modestly: two large suitcases and two carry-ons. All glide along on wheels - the suitcases are four wheel drive - and are easily self-driven but it’s impossible to avoid a scurry of porter activity as soon as you are spotted. The subsequent tipping regime remains unchanged - “each man waited patiently, tranquilly, in no sort of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper, then he bent his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers, and went his way” - although the copper has been replaced by a ten-rupee note per bag. Also unchanged is the first impression: “They seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both winning and touching about their demeanor.”

Fortunately though this has most certainly changed:

The door opening onto the balcony needed cleaning and a native got down on his knees and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn’t, for a burly German in charge put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desires to a slave.

Sita’s research had revealed that the World Monuments Fund, a US-based NGO, had managed to enlist Watson’s as one of the “100 World Endangered Monuments” but being a mere NGO did not have the power to make the landlord repair it; the landlord anyway cited the city’s rent freeze as making restoration infeasible. Meanwhile in a monsoon a large chunk of masonry had fallen from the old hotel’s western façade, killing a beggar below, frightening the life out of passing worthies and damaging various vehicles. Town Hall declared the building unsafe to survive another monsoon and ordered its evacuation and a demolition report. The engineers reported the building was not only evidently unsafe but also economically indestructible and Town Hall were faced with a Watson-22: given its prime downtown location and massive girder construction the old hotel would be so expensive and disruptive to demolish that it had to remain in situ, but to have it remain in situ would mean evacuating it and under an old Raj-era by-law compensating the landlord as if it were in prime condition - compensation he would not be due had they been able to afford to demolish it. Welcome to the labyrinthine world of British-derived Indian bureaucracy.

We arrive to find Mark Twain’s old hotel not only booming but bursting with ramshackle offices and stalls. The illegal temptation to have a free downtown office next to the High Court is too much to resist for dozens of advocates as well as for the shoal of printing, copying and faxing pilot fish attending the legal - well, illegal - sharks. The electric wiring alone is a masterpiece of daring, crackling improvisation; most of the glass from the famous old atrium is smashed and shards lie dagger drawn read to fall from on high, while others lie in wait in the corridors; litter is piled to shoulder height and the lawyers with offices at the rear of the building have had to cut a path through it to reach their shack-offices.

We are keen to reach the fourth floor where we reckon the Twain party stayed; to rephrase - I am keen to make the climb but Gillian takes one look at the holes in the treads of the stairways and stays firmly grounded. I tread the treads but by the third floor it is clear that each one of the old hotel rooms has been divided and subdivided into so many lawyer’s cubicles to make them unrecognizable as the finest rooms in Asia that they were. More fun is to be had reading the overlapping lawyers’ signs, part directions, part advertisements, part pleas for any sort of legal work in the illegal surroundings and all bottomed off by a plethora of buckets to catch the leaks.

***

That afternoon there is a matinee performance of Bollywood’s Tanu Weds Manu at the Excelsior Cinema just around the corner from Watson’s. Sita has a crush on the lead supporting actor Jasjit Singh Gill, who trades under the name Jimmy Shergill, but the official reason for standing outside the Excelsior is that this is where Mark Twain opened his lecture tour of India when the Excelsior Cinema was known as the Novelty Theatre. Waiting outside we pass around the advertisement Sita had found in an old Times of India:

FIRST APPEARANCE IN INDIA

of the

GREATEST HUMOURIST OF THE AGE

The Author of ‘The Innocents Abroad’

MARK TWAIN

who

In the presence of

HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR

And party will

TO-MORROW (FRIDAY) AFTERNOON

at 5-30 in the

NOVELTY THEATRE

give his

FIRST MARK TWAIN ‘AT HOME’

Humorously And Numerously Illustrated With

LIFE AND CHARACTER SKETCHES

---

THE SECOND ‘AT HOME’ with Entirely Different subjects will be on MONDAY at the same time.[2]

---

PRICES OF ADMISSION: Rs 4;3;2;1

Tickets maybe purchased and seats secured at Messrs. SOUNDY & CO.

Inside, the auditorium is unchanged in space but has lost its ornate decorations and gained a shabby nylon carpet. There are and were five six-seat boxes on each side of the hall and forty-one rows of seats at thirty-two to a row. I can feel Smythe beside me now, pencil scratching on the back of an envelope: 1,372 x av Rs 2.50 = Rs 3,430 - 500 exps. = 2,930. 293 for CS, 2637 for MT.

By the time Mark Twain stood up in front of the audience at the Novelty Theatre on 24 January he had already delivered 726 lectures - or as he would insist on calling them, Talks. The “At Home” world tour lasted for exactly a year, from 15 July 1895-6 during which time he gave the At Home Talk 160 times; that first night in Bombay was the 99th date. Why At Home? To include the words “At Home” on a formal invitation to an informal party was a British Empire convention and it was this informal atmosphere in a formal setting that he wished to create. He told the Bombay Gazette the day before the opening how he saw the difference: “A lecture could appear in print by virtue of its calculated form and graceful phrasing. A fine speech might be badly delivered yet it would read perfectly well in print. A Talk is a very different thing. It is the delivery that makes a Talk effective not the phrasing... The audience plays a vital role in completing the Talk... The best and most effective parts of the Talk are acted not spoken.”

To develop this further, in his introduction to How to Tell a Story he notes that:

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind - the humorous. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

The humorous story is strictly a work of art - high and delicate art - and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. Very often the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretence that he does not know it is a nub.

On stage he was really an actor, playing the part of a bumbling country innocent who had no idea why people were laughing at what he said. Off stage he was the opposite, urbane, well connected, fond of luxury and protective of his reputation. I often think the stress of performance must have been worsened by having to change character so profoundly.

The Talk would typically last for an hour and a quarter and although delivered entirely without notes followed a fail-safe formula. He had up his sleeve eight well rehearsed, amusing anecdotes of about fifteen minutes each and on any evening he would use any five of these to suit his mood and how he judged the audience. He also had a choice of two set readings from Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn if he needed a break from adlibbing. He believed in the old adage that an amateur rehearses until he has it right, whereas a professional rehearses until he cannot get it wrong. From the same Bombay Gazette article we find:

I prepare carefully for the lectures. I am not for one moment going to pretend I do not. I don’t believe that any public man has ever attained success as a lecturer to paying audiences who has not carefully prepared, and has not gone over every sentence again and again until the whole thing is fixed upon his memory.

It is all very well to talk about being not prepared and trust into the spirit of the hour. But a man cannot go from one end of the world to the other, no matter how great his reputation may be, and stand before paid audiences in various large cities without finding that his tongue is far less glib than it used to be. He might hold audiences spell bound with unpremeditated oratory in past days when nothing was charged to hear him, but he cannot rely on being able to do so when they have paid for their seats and require something for the money unless he thinks all out before hand.

The theme of “At Home” was moral regeneration, told with the irony that the more wicked you are now the less likely you are to sin in the future. He used the then-current advances in medicine as a physical parallel: just as doctors inoculate patients against deadly diseases by giving them a harmless dose of the same disease, he proposed that we apply the same logic to sinning. To sin then becomes a virtue; there are 462 (or any number he made up on the night) sins and the best we can do is through then whole gamut until we are sin-proof.

His stagecraft was as much a part of the allure as the anecdotes. Dressed all in white,[3] either a morning suit with collared shirt or in morning dress with wing-collar shirt, either of these with a white bow-tie and waistcoat and gold chain, he would wander onto the stage unannounced in a cloud of cigar smoke and stand there looking perplexed when the applause started. Then he would wait for the audience to settle down and pause, still without speaking, until the first nervous sniggers came up to the stage, and then, feet apart, a puff on the cigar, in a very slow syllable-stretching, exaggerated drawl he was off: “I intend to put before the world a scheme for the moral regeneration of the whole human race. I hope I can make it effective but I can’t tell yet - but I know it is planned out upon strictly scientific lines and is up to date in that particular. I propose to do for the moral fabric just what advanced medical art is doing the physical body. I propose to inoculate for sin.”

The review in the same Bombay Gazette two days later could have referred to any of the seventeen At Home Talks in India

The prominent points about Mark Twain’s personal appearance are his long untidy hair, the ferocious moustache and the deep furrows falling outwards from the thin nose to the sides of his mouth which are the external and visible signs of the nasal drawl that characterizes the very thoughts of the man before he had given utterances to them. With his feet planted some little distance apart, the hands sometimes in his trousers, sometimes near his chin, his eyes are oftener than not as they would be in the presence of a group of familiar friends.

Mark Twain used many devices to create an atmosphere of intimacy in the audience. One of them was the easy conversational style that brought about familiarity between the speaker and gathering. His reminiscences of the Mississippi and Nevada days, the narration of anecdotes, often personal and the utterly natural and spontaneous utterances broke the barrier of distance between him and the audience. At times he used anticlimactic sentences, puns and jingling words to surprise and catch the listener’s attention. But the greatest of his devices was the sudden purposeful pause that created a strange expectancy in the audience. The people receive a rude jolt when they discovered something unexpected. It was entertaining to watch the audience - the smile, the anticipatory chuckle, the unrestrained laugh of hearty enjoyment.

The reviews throughout the tour were universally positive, partly because the Indian press were - and still are - suckers for celebrity and partly because Smythe made sure the press was squared before each performance. The routine was always the same: the Twain party would arrive in a city and the local newspaper would pop around to the hotel for an interview; they had their celebrity columns inches and Mark Twain and Smythe had their publicity for that town’s At Home. Indian newspapers were - and again still are - nothing if not verbose and it is easy to see how Twain must have spent as much time in pre-performance interviews as he did on stage. Reading them now, the interviews[4] are as formulated as the Talks: the journalists obliged with the same questions, the humorist obliged with the same answers.

The Bombay Talks started at 5.30 p.m. - which in India means 6 p.m. (or as he would have it “The Trouble Starts at 6.00 pm”) and it would have been all over by 7.30 p.m. The Twain party liked to visit the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, which by happy coincidence is where the Strathcarron party is staying. It still is one of the great clubs in the world, delightfully old-fashioned yet with modems in each of the rooms (typically, still known as “chambers”), the rooms themselves being the size of a small apartment built in the days - the mid-nineteenth century - when space and labor were plentiful and affordable. The day starts with a knock on the door and a bearer brings in “bed-tea” and the Times of India. He throws open the blinds and the view throws onto the Arabian Sea, with the Gateway of India to its left and the Taj Mahal Hotel to its right. It remains a kind of paradise, a last pocket of resistance, more so given the chaos of Bombay that lies, unseen and unheard, behind it.

Like a good Mark Twain footsteps hound I had offered to do a Talk there myself, this one on my book Joy Unconfined! Lord Byron’s Grand Tour Re-Toured.[5] I am nervous about the presentation as no matter how sophisticated and poly-this and poly-that the audience - and this one was as poly as they come - one is still unsure as how far an adventure so quintessential British as Byron’s Grand Tour will be understood. As it happens there were a sprinkling of Brits in the audience and their sniggers and guffaws seemed to encourage our hosts and by halfway through everyone was laughing together.

The writer is an Honorary Member of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club and they offered Mark Twain the same privilege but made the mistake of asking him to pay for it. In his notes he wrote: “Rs 16 for a month’s honorary membership. A Club should not pay a compliment it cannot afford. It may be that some body asked for this honor for me - as to that, I don’t know. In that case they ought to change the title to of it and call Temporary Membership. I have (taken membership).”

***

It wasn’t until two days after the first At Home that Mark Twain felt strong enough to take Livy and Clara for lunch with Governor and Lady Sandhurst. He had previously met Lord Sandhurst at the Garrick Club in London and of course the governor and his family had been to the first Talk and had actually invited the Twain party to lunch as soon as they arrived a week before; an invitation the bronchial cough had forced his guest to decline.

It is a six-mile foray around Marine Drive, the crescent of the old “Bom Bahia”, the “good bay” that the Portuguese found so enchanting on first arriving in 1508. In 1534 they murdered the heathen (actually Muslim) ruler and took the main island, Mumbai, outer islands and shoreline for themselves. The Portuguese then gave Bom Bahia to the British in 1661 as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry to King Charles II. Seven years later Charles leased it to the Honourable East India Company for £10 a year and Mumbai started to become Bombay. Riding along Marine Drive in their two-horse barouche[6] allowed Twain his first proper look at India. He later recalled:

Bombay! A bewitching place, a bewildering place, an enchanting place - the Arabian Nights come again? It is a vast city; contains about a million inhabitants. Natives, they are, with a slight sprinkling of white people - not enough to have the slightest modifying effect upon the massed dark complexion of the public. It is winter here, yet the weather is the divine weather of June, and the foliage is the fresh and heavenly foliage of June.

It is all color, bewitching color, enchanting color - everywhere all around - all the way around the curving great opaline bay clear to Government House, where the turbaned big native chuprassies[7] stand grouped in state at the door in their robes of fiery red, and do most properly and stunningly finish up the splendid show and make it theatrically complete. I wish I were a chuprassy.

Then as now Governor’s House - since renamed Raj Bhavan - occupies the promontory at the end of Malabar Point, the tip of the bay’s crescent, with fabulous views back across the bay and to the city waterfront, and is thus the prime piece of land in Bombay. It was also Twain’s first proper look at the splendors of the Raj:

Government House, on Malabar Point, with the wide sea-view from the windows and broad balconies; abode of His Excellency the Governor of the Bombay Presidency - a residence which is European in everything but the native guards and servants, and is a home and a palace of state harmoniously combined.

That was England, the English power, the English civilization, the modern civilization - with the quiet elegancies and quiet colors and quiet tastes and quiet dignity that are the outcome of the modern cultivation.

One has to agree: Raj Bhavan is still as magnificent as when it was called Governor’s House and is still quietly elegant, quietly colored, quietly tasteful and quietly dignified - also the outcome of modern cultivation. Our own lunch is with the current governor, the eighty-year-old Shri Kateekal Sankaranarayanan, one of India’s most distinguished politicians who apart from his myriad achievements in a lifetime devoted to the public good has also just won the prize for having the most “a’s” in his name. In attendance is Shrikant Deshpande, Secretary to the Governor, and Anuradha Aru, Secretary to the Secretary to the Governor, so a bit of a full house, governor-wise.

If the charm of the governors and their palace remains the same, the governor’s role has changed completely. Whereas Shri Sankaranarayanan’s role in largely ceremonial, to be the local representative of the president (not unlike a governor-general in some Commonwealth countries), Lord Sandhurst was a powerful man indeed. He was only one executive level below the viceroy, and head of the Bombay Presidency, a vast area of twenty-five million people comprising what are now the states of Gujarat, the western two-thirds of Maharashtra, northwestern Karnataka as well as what are Pakistan’s Sindh province and Aden in Yemen. As elsewhere in India only about two-thirds of the country was under direct Raj rule, the remainder being a hotchpotch of “princely states”; in the case of the Bombay Presidency no fewer than three hundred and fifty three of them.

The princely states have been unkindly described as the rump of the Moghul Empire, which ran India for nearly three hundred years before the East India Company and then the Raj. Certainly many of the rulers were Muslim but of the kinder, pre-Wahhabi persuasion.[8] The Pax Britannica arrangement was, by and large, a win-win: the princes kept their thrones and their states and were largely autonomous but they signed away to the British responsibility for external relations and defense - for which delegation they had to pay a sizable tax. In each princely state was a British Resident, a political agent who ensured that “the British voice was heard” “for the greater good of all”, an appointment of some influence. The first rule of the British Resident was not to interfere and except in cases of gross misgovernance the rule was followed. The ceaseless civil wars were brought to an end and prosperity, at least for the rulers, reigned with the rulers.

And prosperous they were. In terms of wealth the modern equivalent may be the Gulf Arab royal families but the Indian princes had a far longer-standing sense of moral and social responsibility; the Arabs were, after all, desert nomads until - relatively - just the other day. Being Indian they also had their own inter-prince caste system to add to the British-ordained “Warrant of Preference” being determined by the number of gun salutes their arrival or departure attracted. In this way the highest ranking princes[9] like His Exalted Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad and His Highness the Maharaja of Mysore claimed the full 21 salutes,[10] His Highness the Nawab[11] of Bhopol had to keep his head down for just the 19, while His Highness the Maha Rao Raja of Bundi had to get by with 17. In descending order His Highness the Maha Rawal of Banswara heard just 15, His Highness the Deewan of Palanpur had to live with only 13, whereas His Highness the Thakar of Gondal could claim 11, and poor old His Highness the Saraswati Desai of Sawantwadi and His Highness the Thakore Sahib of Rajkot just had the 9 apiece.[12]

The British and the princes shared a love of protocol and hierarchy. The British published a so-called Blue Book which laid down an Order of Preference; no hostess or aide-de-camp could be without one for it determined who sat next to whom at dinner, who stood where in a greeting line, if the wife of a member of the India Civil Service with twelve years standing outranked a District Judge from Burma, if a Chief Engineer of the Royal Indian Marines was superior to a Sanitary Engineer of eight years standing, if a Director of Land Records in a princely state outshone an Officer, 3rd Class Indian Civil Service, how an Agricultural Chemist fared against the Assistant Inspector-General of Forests and so on. Unintentionally the British had created a hierarchy as complex as a Moghul court - and one that attached just as much importance to following the correct protocol and etiquette.

Happily for the British they shared just as much in common with the Hindu ruled as with the Muslim rulers. Hindu society is divided up into four castes with numerous sub-castes. British society in India happened to mirror these divisions. At the Hindu head are the Brahmins of upper and lower rank, who corresponded to the viceregal Indian Civil Service and the regional equivalents. Next come the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste and their sub-castes resembling the British Army and the Indian Army. The British businessmen, the successors to the East India Company pioneers, were wealthy but of low caste, known as “box-wallahs” to those above them, and they had their Indian equals in the Vaisyas, the merchant caste. Like the Vaisyas the mercantile class divided into two: those in commerce - bankers, insurance brokers, shippers and the like - and those in trade: shop owners, buyers and sellers who actually handled goods. At the Hindu bottom were the Untouchables who had their British equivalent, those who had “gone native”, or were of mixed blood.

No doubt over lunch the conversation turned to the princes and their princely states and the fabulous wealth and extravagant palaces and exotic imaginings going on within. Mark Twain was fascinated by the titles: “the princely titles, the sumptuous titles, the sounding titles - how good they taste in the mouth! The Nizam of Hyderabad; the Maharajah of Travancore; the Nabob of Jupillipore; the Begum of Bhopal; the Nawab of Myscenah; the Rance of Gulnare; the Ahkoond of Swat; the Rao of Rohilkund; the Gaikwar of Baroda.” In his notes he had further fun inventing some more:

...the Jimjam of Jubbelpore, The Nizam of the Maharaja the Rajah, the Rao, The Nawab, the Guicowar, The Thakore of Manta (now in dispute), the Slambang of Gutcheree, the Ahkoond of Swat, the Hoopla of Hellasplit, the Breechclout of Buggheroo, His Highness the Juggernaut of Jacksonville, the Jamram of Ramjam.

Governor Sandhurst GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, PC couldn’t quite match these, being merely the first Viscount Sandhurst, but he had taken his seat in the House of Lords on his 21st birthday having inherited the lesser title of Baron Sandhurst from his deceased father. He was a rather uninspiring Liberal career politician who had been made governor of the Bombay Presidency the year before. A mere safe pair of hands was he. His wife, Lady Victoria, was the daughter of Frederick Spencer, the 4th Earl Spencer. Through her brother Charles she was - although she didn’t know it - the great, great, great aunt of another Spencer, Diana, Princess of Wales.

***

A private lunch with the governor and his staff in the Governor’s Dining Room is as splendid now as it was then. The table setting is formal and follows exactly the rules of its own etiquette, just as it has done a thousand lunches before. Moghul-style uniformed waiters hover discreetly behind one’s left shoulder, and serve in the British “silver service” style. There is no scraping and no scrunching. Conversation is small talk and chitter chatter. Napkins blot the mouth as needed then fall to the lap. A glass of Indian red wine[13] is expected to last a course, the lead taken from the governor. This is no leisurely lunch, moving as it does at a steady clip, not rushed but not dallied over. After lunch the menu is presented to the guests as a memento. I’m looking at it now:

Dhan Dar

or

Cold Yoghurt Soup with Mint

***

Lamb in a Cashew Nut Sauce

or

Masala Dosas

Black Pepper Rice

Carrots Stir-Fried with Green Chillies

Baigan Achari

***

Pista Kulfi

Falooda

After lunch an aide-de-camp shows us around the current governor’s great passion, the fifty acres of private parkland with its own botanical gardens. In Mark Twain’s time Governor’s House was only fifteen years old and the grounds were still being planted and landscaped; now, one hundred and fifteen years of care and maturity later they have blossomed and bloomed and are as immaculate - and as unnatural - as only a corps of gardeners can make them. The centerpiece is the croquet lawn, where the governor also holds his quarterly garden parties (sadly, we’ll be long gone in Baroda when the next one is held). I fear for the head gardener’s composure as he sees two hundred guests trampling all over his billiard-table smooth croquet lawn. Unfortunately the aide-de-camp doesn’t play croquet - which seems a bit odd, I thought that was what aides-de-camp did - and steers us over to the cliff top walk. He stays well inland, maybe worried I am going to push him over for not playing croquet.

In the grounds now are also discreet, secluded bungalows where India’s leaders come to relax; we take tea in the one preferred by Jawaharlal Nehru; next door is an English country cottage preferred by his daughter Indira Gandhi. It was also a venue where Nehru carried on his infamous affair with the vicereine, Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma and I regret to say that when the aide-de-camp is showing Gillian something or other in the cottage kitchen I have a vicarious stretch on the lovers’ bed.

***

After thanking and leaving the Sandhursts, Mark Twain, Livy and Clara made a short trot in their barouche to “a scene of a different sort: from this glow of color and this sunny life to those grim receptacles of the Parsee dead, the Towers of Silence”.

The Parsees, as the Indian Zoroastrians are known, can lay claim to belong to the oldest religion in the world, a straightforward battle between the forces of Good and Evil with revelations aplenty. In Twain’s time they were a small but highly influential group, much favored by the British administration. “The Parsees are a remarkable community. There are only about 60,000 in Bombay, and only about half as many as that in the rest of India; but they make up in importance what they lack in numbers. They are highly educated, energetic, enterprising, progressive and rich.”

Today unfortunately they are in decline, partly because after Independence the favoritism was removed, partly because the Hindu and Christian communities in particular have caught up with them educationally and partly because as each of their new generations has been exposed to reason and the world the religious side of Zoroastrianism has declined. In the last census ten years ago there were still 40,000 adherents in Mumbai, but when one considers that the population of the rest of the city has increased twentyfold since Twain’s visit the relative decline has been dramatic.[14] Their strength is now secular and tribal.[15] What has remained is the way they look after each other and the less fortunate: as Twain noted, “the Jew himself is not more lavish or catholic in his charities and benevolences”; not surprising then that the Tatas and Godrejs, two of India’s richest and most philanthropic families, are Parsees.

Twain was fascinated by the Parsee funeral ritual. They hold that “the principle which underlies and orders everything connected with a Parsee funeral is Purity. By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion, the elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried.” Instead they used vultures to pick the body clean, after which the bones were left exposed to the tropical sun and rain - and the sacred elements - for a month, when the powdery remains were placed in a well with a drain and eventually found themselves in the Arabian Sea.

Today, alas, the famously efficient Bombay vultures have vanished, poisoned by the twentieth century with its industrial pollution and agricultural chemicals. In their stead the Parsees have installed solar mirrors above and to the side of the funeral Towers and these are maneuvered to reflect intensified solar rays on to the bodies. The vultures are much missed: decomposition by vultures took as little as thirty minutes, whereas the same process by solar can take a week or so. The Parsees are now rearing fifteen vultures and plan to train them back in the ways of their ancestors, human and avian.

What do remain are the spectacular location and the rather dismal ceremony. “On lofty ground, in the midst of a paradise of tropical foliage and flowers, remote from the world and its turmoil and noise, they stood - the Towers of Silence.” All three Towers[16] are located in extensive and beautifully maintained forested grounds in Mumbai’s exclusive Malabar Point, just north of Raj Bhavan. The parkland must be worth billions of any currency that comes to mind. Only the burial preparation area of the grounds is open to the public and has the air of a well tended upcountry field hospital. Photography is strictly prohibited anywhere on the site but a fair impression of the park and the Towers of Silence can be seen on Google Earth at 18°57’33.14”N; 72°48’23.24”E.

The dismal ceremony? “None may touch the dead or enter the Towers where they repose except certain men who are officially appointed for that purpose. They receive high pay, but theirs is a dismal life, for they must live apart from their species, because their commerce with the dead defiles them, and any who should associate with them would share their defilement.”

The Towers have a circular flat floor with surrounding walls - not unlike a squashed bull-ring, or as Twain put it, “a gasometer”. The solar panels are above and beyond the walls. The floor is divided into three concentric rings: the bodies of the Parsee men are arranged around the outer ring, women in the middle ring and children in the innermost ring. In the centre is a circular pit where the bones are left to be bleached by the sun and washed by the rain, and thus powdered and cleaned are eventually washed into the sea nearby as before. Not so much dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes as powder-to-powder, water-to-water.

The illustration below, with the vultures awaiting their next meal, explains the Towers of Silence better than the thousand words I am hereby spared writing.

One animal disposal accessory that has survived since Twain’s time is the dog which accompanies the body on its final voyage to the Towers; not the same dog of course, but a random ceremonial dog chosen for life, as it were, from the Parsee community. Even then the reason for the canine involvement in the ritual was lost in time: “The origin of at least one of the details of a Parsee funeral is not now known - the presence of the dog. Before a corpse is borne from the house of mourning it must be uncovered and exposed to the gaze of a dog; a dog must also be led in the rear of the funeral.”

Twain was an early American advocate of cremation and he compared it with the Parsee vulture system: “as a sanitary measure, their system seems to be about the equivalent of cremation, and as sure. When cremation becomes the rule we shall cease to shudder at it; we should shudder at burial if we allowed ourselves to think what goes on in the grave.”

Two days and two Talks later Mark Twain was ready to make his first foray on the road, a Talk and overnight stay at Poona, five hours away to the southeast by train. Smythe went with him; Livy and Clara stayed behind at Watson’s Hotel. By then Mark Twain had seen enough of India, albeit still only of Bombay, to remember:

This is indeed India! The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations - the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

It seems that like so many of us, he was smitten - but more of that later.

Poona

The journey to Poona was also Twain’s first experience of Indian railways - what was to become, after Independence, Indian Railways. The train left from Bombay’s famous Victoria Terminus, known to one and all as VT, a massive Victorian Italianate Gothic Revival pile, like Watson’s Hotel modeled - or so it would seem - along the lines of St. Pancras train station in London. It had been opened just nine years before Twain’s visit and named after the Queen Empress Victoria herself. Today renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, or CST, it is still widely known to Mumbai taxi drivers and its three and a half million daily commuters - and lovers of the Gothic - as VT.

Twain’s first impressions will be instantly recognizable to any VT visitor today:

What a spectacle the railway station was! It was very large, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole world was present - half of it inside, the other half outside, and both halves, bearing mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight, trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods of patient, gentle, long-suffering natives, with whites scattered among them at rare intervals. Wherever a white man’s native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the white man’s privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all intervening black things out of it. In these exhibitions of authority Satan was scandalous.

Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed natives swept along, this way and that, in massed and bewildering confusion, eager, anxious, belated, distressed. And here and there, in the midst of this hurly-burly, and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great groups of natives on the bare stone floor, young, slender brown women, old, gray wrinkled women, little soft brown babies, old men, young men, boys; all poor people, but all the females among them, both big and little, bejeweled with cheap and showy nose-rings, toe-rings, leglets, and armlets, these things constituting all their wealth, no doubt.

If he thought it was teeming then he should see it now! Working the late afternoon arrival time at Poona of their five-hour journey backwards, Smythe and Mark Twain were on the Hyderabad Express, which still leaves at midday, a period of slightly lesser mayhem.

Mayhem in all its madness, pandemonium in all its confusion, bedlam in all its uproar, merely scratch the surface of VT at rush hour. They arrive on the carriage roofs; they arrive hanging from the window bars; they arrive clinging to the door frames; they arrive balancing on the bogeys; four and a half thousand die from these antics every year[17] - and the trains are not some super smooth Japanese contraptions, nor the tracks the latest in German seamless welding technology, but rickety old Raj-era jigger-buckets which give every impression of trying to shake their passengers off like a dog in from the rain.

Yet the real amusement for the first timer comes when any of the three and a half million daily commuters tries to disembark. It’s out of the question to wait for the train to stop; much more fun to jump from it as soon as it is alongside any part of the platform. The first fliers inevitably stumble as they land and their trick is to be up and away before, mere seconds later, fliers from the following carriage land in the same spot. Pile-ups inevitably occur every few steps along the way but never a cross-word is heard. The driver joins in the fun too: instead of pulling alongside the platforms at walking speed he barrels in at a good trot looking backwards at the flying fun behind, then brakes hard as he approaches the stoppers and then has time for a last look behind as any stragglers are thrown off by the sudden stop.

By now those inside the carriages are starting to leap out, pushed from behind by the hundreds on board anxious to join in the fun on the platform. Each carriage is so full that it seems to take a minor eternity to empty itself. Eight hours later the process is reversed when after the gates open the Platform Olympic Games sees thousands of commuters sprint, hurdle, high jump and long jump first into and then over each other onto the carriages; just when you think the train is full, just when the train is full, just when it you think it is overflowing, just when it is overflowing, a fresh layer of desperadoes climbs on top of those already on top to make their way up onto the roof... and off it shudders through the slums.

It’s a funny thing about the Indians that although so many of them spend so much time - and danger and discomfort - commuting, they haven’t learnt Lesson One: let ’em off before you let ’em on. This phenomenon is best observed on the commuter trains or, better still, the metro. First you notice something strange: between stations commuters shuffle and shove for position within the carriages, some moving towards the doors and some backing off. The reason becomes clear as the overpacked carriage arrives at a station. The moment the doors open an inch the pushing and heaving starts in equal measure: those trying to get in, try to get in and those trying to get out, try to get out. It’s a crush, it’s a scrum, it’s a heaving scramble. The trick to getting out is to line up in the second row behind one of the larger commuters and then when the doors open use him as your battering ram, as you yourself will be used from behind. The trick to getting in is to line up in the third row and when the pushing stops you will be just outside the doors at which point you haul the man in front back and take his place just as the doors close. It’s more fun than it sounds.

Train travel between cities is a lot less fraught and can be quite comfortable; it is always slow and always absorbing. When Twain caught the Hyderabad Express on 29 January there were three classes. “The natives traveled third class, and at marvelously cheap rates. There was an immense string of those third-class cars, for the natives travel by hordes; and a weary hard night of it the occupants would have, no doubt.”

Now there are no fewer than eight classes. The old First Class, by which the Twain Grand Tour traveled when not in a special VIP “Palace-on-Wheels” carriage laid on by one of their hosts, is now only fourth in the hierarchy of comfort. Indian train journeys are built around overnight travel, partly because the distances are so long and the speed so slow, and partly because it is so much more comfortable to travel in the cool of the night. Top spot now goes to Air-conditioned First Class (AC1), which has only two berths in a lockable compartment; AC1 is now a rare class as the deregulated airlines[18] have taken the money of those who can afford AC1’s relatively high prices. AC2 (as in two-tier bunks per compartment) is half the price of AC1 and has four-berth curtained off compartments, with fresh sheets and pillows and blankets supplied each night. AC2 is how the Indian middle class and most tourists travel; it is how the Strathcarron Re-Tour travels (although Sita looks a bit glum: her family normally travel AC1).

After AC3, which means three tiers of bunk, so six per compartment, comes (non-air-conditioned) First Class in fourth spot and not much changed from that day in 1896.

It was a car that promised comfort; indeed, luxury. The floor was bare, but would not long remain so when the dust should begin to fly.

Across one end of the compartment ran a netting for the accommodation of hand-baggage; at the other end was a door which would shut, upon compulsion, but wouldn’t stay shut; it opened into a narrow little closet which had a wash-bowl in one end of it, and a place to put a towel.

On each side of the car, and running fore and aft, was a broad leather-covered sofa to sit on in the day and sleep on at night. Over each sofa hung, by straps, a wide, flat, leather-covered shelf - to sleep on. In the daytime you can hitch it up against the wall, out of the way - and then you have a big unencumbered and most comfortable room to spread out in.

No car in any country is quite its equal for comfort (and privacy) I think. For usually there are but two persons in it; and even when there are four there is but little sense of impaired privacy. Our own cars at home can surpass the railway world in all details but that one: they have no cosiness; there are too many people together.

At the foot of each sofa was a side-door, for entrance and exit. Along the whole length of the sofa on each side of the car ran a row of large single-plate windows, of a blue tint-blue to soften the bitter glare of the sun and protect one’s eyes from torture. These could be let down out of the way when one wanted the breeze.

Air-conditioning has really done for First Class. To keep out the heat the dark blue tinted windows that Twain described are actually almost black, which means one cannot see the great Indian countryside, and they need to be left a bit ajar for ventilation, which fills the compartment with heat and dust. After these come various versions of non-a/c discomfort known as Second Class, which Twain would have known as Second and Third class. He noted also that: “The Indian trains are manned by natives exclusively. The Indian stations except very large and important ones - are manned entirely by natives, and so are the posts and telegraphs. The rank and file of the police are natives. All these people are pleasant and accommodating.” Actually a large part of the trains and stations were manned by Anglo-Indians and we’ll see how they fared later.

***

Twain’s and Smythe’s visit to Poona was a bit of a damp squib. Poona itself was at its colonial finest. The British had discovered a pretty little mountain town a hundred miles southeast of Bombay - but more importantly 1,500 feet above the rank humidity of the monsoon-prone coast. From June to September the governor and his government decamped to the hill station and moved their whole operation into Poona’s Governor’s House. Scattered around the surrounding hills were the old Peshwa palaces, with pride of place going to the Parvati hill temple - all remnants of past Hindu glories and all giving the area an added oriental heritage and zest. By 1896 Poona was a full-scale, but still small-scale, Raj summer resort and year-round military headquarters centered in the cantonment area.

This was Twain’ first cantonment experience; over the next two months he would experience many more cantonments as he was to a large extent under the care of the military side of the Raj and it was in cantonments that they were based. In small towns like Poona the cantonment quickly became the centre of activity and to visit a cantonment now is to experience an India that was: freshly painted buildings, swept and uncrowded streets and a strange sense of order and functionality. The Indian Army, Raj-like in so many ways, keep the cantonments all over India not just intact but spick and span, and Poona, being the headquarters of Southern Command, is especially spick and not a little span.

Fifteen years before Twain’s Talk here the British had built the Poona Gymkhana Club adjoining the cantonment. “Gymkhana” is an Urdu and Hindi word for any form of sporting contest; the Indian nuance tips towards racket games, especially squash and badminton, and the British nuance towards equestrian events, especially polo and show-jumping. By the time Twain visited Poona on 30 January 1896 the Club had a large enough cricket ground to play two games simultaneously, numerous tennis and squash courts, two polo pitches and the beginnings of what is now an 18-hole golf course scattered across Poona’s cantonment area.

When not disporting themselves on the sports or the battle fields Gymkhana Club members could enjoy tiffin in the day or cocktails in the evening, all served by uniformed bearers on the long veranda that joined onto the cricket pavilion. The bearers and the other staff were the only non-royal Indians allowed into the club. Royal Indians, with their boundless wealth and anyway tending to be more British than the British, were more than welcome - and more than paid their way. The founding fathers of the Poona Gymkhana Club were indeed the great and the good of Anglo-Indian society, proclaimed on a varnished and gold-leafed plaque above the entry to the veranda:

His Exalted Highness The Aga Khan

Nawab Shah Rookh Yar Jung Bahadur

Sir Cowasji Jehangir

Aga Kasim Shah

Sir Nusserwanjee Wadia

Aga Jalal M. Shah

Sir Jehangir (Kothari)

Sir Dhanjbhoy Bomanji

His Highness The Nawab of Junagadh

Sir Victor Sassoon

His Highness The Maharaja of Jodhpur

His Highness The Maharaja of Rajpipla

Sir Sasoon David

Sir Dorab Tata

Sir Cusrow Wadia

His Highness The Gaikwar of Baroda

It is hard to stress too highly the importance of club life in the Raj days. Most, like the Poona Club here or my Royal Bombay Yacht Club, started off as sporting clubs as sport was the overwhelming leisure activity of the Europeans in India. But the real value of club life for its members came off the polo pitch, tennis court or golf links, when the military and civilians could meet in the cool of the evening at bridge or cocktails or dinner. The club was where a major could compare notes with a sessions judge, a captain could confer with the district forest officer, a colonel could rub shoulders with a headquarters tax-collector and so on.

Membership was strictly controlled by rank, so a dashing young, independently wealthy lieutenant or solicitor would not have been admitted to the Poona Club whereas a newly arrived, gnarled and penniless captain or senior architect would. This was hardly a disaster as there were other, lesser clubs for the lesser orders and in big cities like Calcutta, to where we are heading, there were a dozen. They all shared formality in common with strict dress codes, tuxedos for dinner and ties at all times in the clubhouse. They also shared a system of credit: before credit cards there were chits, a sort of informal IOU, with the rule that all accounts had to be settled by the 7th of the following month.

Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the clubs were those not allowed to be members - women, or more precisely wives. The husbands went off every day to work, militarily or civilly, leaving their wives at home. Even the lowest paid officer or civil servant had a bearer, a maid, a cook and if with child, a nanny. There wasn’t much, or anything really, for the wives to do. The clubs were where they passed the afternoon with their fellow wives, and spent most evenings with their husbands - and being British in the tropics, others’ husbands too.

So why was Twain’s visit such a damp squib? At the end of January Poona was empty of the big cheeses who brought it to life in the season. There was really only the nearby cantonment, and one imagines quite a few inhabitants of the Officers’ Mess were too arrogant to think they could be entertained by an American humorist. Certainly no one from the club met him and Smythe at the end of their five-hour train journey. Smythe recalled that the audience was really inadequate in numbers for the At Home Talk and The Century magazine reported that Twain’s voice was creaking and croaking - either he hadn’t totally shaken off the bronchial infection which had haunted him since Ceylon or the reporter wasn’t used to the slow drawl of a Mark Twain Talk.

The Bombay Gazette reported that the Bishop of Bombay, who happened to be in Poona and in the audience, took exception to a rather tame morality joke about Adam and the serpent “and left the room therewith and not in the best of tempers. I am sorry that the Lord Bishop did not remain to hear Mark Twain on morals.” Further on the appreciative reviewer noted that “one woman disturbed every body by her loud laughter”, and was, when describing the audience, moved to rhyme:

A rather gushing one in cream

A perky on in black

A fair hared one in blue

Sitting next to one in ’lac

A lovely black fared

with the palest pink

With bow to match

The effect was really swell.

Unfortunately the old three-story wooden wedding-cake that was the clubhouse burned down in 1945, the only surprise being that it hadn’t happened before. The open fires in the kitchens caught the blame but one can imagine a stray cigar butt being as likely a culprit. The fire took the library with it and so we have lost not only all the club records but also a wonderful reference to a slice of Raj history.

The Poona Gymkhana Club has now become the Poona Club Ltd. and styles itself, quite possibly correctly, as “South Asia’s largest sporting club”. I was shown around by my host, the club secretary Lt. Col. KSS Jamwal (Ret’d). The cricket facilities are wonderful and in January county players from the English leagues stay to keep their eyes in. Games are running all the time. The 18-hole golf course has been completed; the swimming pool keeps itself cool under a fine net shade; next door the squash courts resound to the thump-whack of dull rubber balls; beyond young girls take tennis lessons from older pros. There’s a running track and a gymnasium; it’s exhausting just thinking about the place.

Off the track and field things aren’t so bright. The rebuilt clubhouse is attractive enough, its large open veranda of a ground floor with its high ceiling and token fans reminding one of a Serengeti safari lodge, but the service is dozy and grudging. One suspects the waiters have been on call since the great fire; there was no hurry then and there’s even less hurry now. The female cleaners squat and sweep like grounded Cossacks, their old horsetail twizzles missing whole swathes of dust and stirring up the rest. The rooms are nothing special and the room service non-existent. Trying to communicate with them by phone or e-mail is a frustratingly one-sided affair. Worse, some bounder has put water in the bar gin.

Outside the club Poona is - to put it mildly - in full swing. It’s growing so quickly that officials can only guess at the population, and their guess is four million. It feels like they are all on the same piece of road at the same time, all rushing and racing in a mass of ambition and endeavor. The city is expanding in all directions all at once without, it would seem, any direction at all. There is no room for pleasing lines or subtle shades in the cost-controlled concrete building rush. Being a pedestrian is a fearsome pastime: traffic lights and crossings and even pavements - if one can find one - are simply ignored. India is famously a structured society and pedestrians are near the bottom of the transport hierarchy, just above dogs and just below bicycles. The only consolation for not being able to amble about aimlessly is that one doesn’t really want to amble about aimlessly; ugliness and pollution cure the foot-borne wanderlust and send us scurrying back to the sleepy veranda and the second innings at the Poona Club, where I’m writing now and still waiting for the Kingfisher beer I ordered at the start of the paragraph before last - or was it the one before that?

Poona the city and Poona the club are fine examples of the patronizing dilemma of the India lover; the India lover wants the India that was, while the India liver wants the India that is - and that the latter is far better off cannot be denied. And, as the songstress stressed, we are living in a material world.

Baroda

Sitting here in the public library in Baroda it seems that researching Indian history is not as simple as one might hope. The problem for the researcher is that in the eyes of most Indians their country’s history does not start until Independence in 1947. Before that “India” had not existed, not in the sense that Indians understand it now. In 1525 Babur and his Moghul army - directly descended from Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes - swept into the Punjab from Afghanistan and colonized the hundreds of northern principalities that comprise the northern India, Pakistan and parts of Bangladesh of today. When the British Crown took direct control from the East India Company in 1857/8 “India” was a patchwork of those princely states that had sworn allegiance to the Crown (some more willingly than others), but nevertheless “India” was ruled by a system of suzerainty and paramountcy rather than as a unified bloc. Thus one can see the librarians’ point that “Indian History” before 1947 is an oxymoron.

This hotchpotch of a history means that when one enters, for example, this or any other library and asks about local history in January/February 1896 there are only blank looks and shrugged shoulders. Attempting to dig deeper soon seems impolite as the modern Indian librarian seems rather sheepish about the lack of Indianity for most of the last five hundred years - and if he or she were to dig deeper forever, before that too.

The BBC recently re-ran a documentary that started with the proposition that the greatest gift the British had left India was Indian Railways. I disagree. Indian railways is surely a remarkable legacy, a superb vision of investor[19] and political confidence executed by a stunning feat of engineering and millions of hours of sweat and toil - and indeed hundreds of lives. However, all these factors also required to create success a common country across which to build the railways, and then a common language with which to direct the enterprise and a then a common rule of law and civil administration to ensure its operation.

One hates to question the received post-colonial guilt wisdom of the BBC, but the greatest gift the British left India was surely India itself, even if it still speaks twenty official languages and experiences all the inter-regional tensions such a vast, artificially created country is bound to feel. English is the Esperanto, the common language, a useful enough legacy in itself. The rule of law and the civil service may not be what it was at Independence but it is still better than it was five hundred years ago, before the Moghuls, let alone the British, arrived. Indian Railways is even more remarkable now than when the British left it, but surely a mere convenience compared to the fundamentals of the ninety-year legacy of the British Raj - but just don’t mention any of this to the librarian at Baroda if you want to look at the one pamphlet referring to an (irrelevant) event in January 1896.

***

Mark Twain and Smythe left Poona twenty-four hours after they arrived, presumably with slim regrets to go with the slim pickings, to rejoin Livy and Clara back in Bombay’s VT for the change of trains up to Baroda, in this case the overnight Dehradun Express. Livy and Clara would have taken one compartment, Twain and Smythe another. Then and now it arrives at crack of dawn.

We arrived at 7 this morning. The dawn was just beginning to show. It was forlorn to have to turn out in a strange place at such a time, and the blinking lights in the station made it seem night still. But the gentlemen who had come to receive us were there with their servants, and they make quick work; there was no lost time. We were soon outside and moving swiftly through the soft gray light, and presently were comfortably housed - with more servants to help than we were used to, and with rather embarrassingly important officials to direct them. But it was custom; they spoke Ballarat English, their bearing was charming and hospitable, and so all went well.

The entourage deposited the Twain party at the Soni Pati Bhavan, the Maharaja of Gwaekor’s visitors’ guesthouse, just opposite the main gate. Since then the solidly cubed eight-room guesthouse has fallen on hard times, being a crumbling squat for the lowest castes, feral dogs and listless - if still holy - cows. This being India, the humans are intrigued and hospitable, the dogs wary at first and then easier and the cows pre-occupied with eating the garbage, a holy enough occupation hereabouts.

Time then for a wholesome English breakfast[20] and then an eventful tour of Baroda.

Breakfast was a satisfaction, after which the day began - and a sufficiently busy one.

We came to the city, by and by, and drove all through it... And the houses - oh, indescribably quaint and curious they were, with their fronts an elaborate lace-work of intricate and beautiful wood-carving, and now and then further adorned with rude pictures of elephants and princes and gods done in shouting colors; and all the ground floors along these cramped and narrow lanes occupied as shops - shops unbelievably small and impossibly packed with merchantable rubbish, and with nine-tenths-naked natives squatting at their work of hammering, pounding, brazing, soldering, sewing, designing, cooking, measuring out grain, grinding it, repairing idols - and then the swarm of ragged and noisy humanity under the horses’ feet and everywhere, and the pervading reek and fume and smell! It was all wonderful and delightful.

By and by to the elephant stables, and I took a ride; but it was by request - I did not ask for it, and didn’t want it; but I took it, because otherwise they would have thought I was afraid, which I was. The elephant kneels down, by command - one end of him at a time - and you climb the ladder and get into the howdah, and then he gets up, one end at a time, just as a ship gets up over a wave; and after that, as he strides monstrously about, his motion is much like a ship’s motion. Among these twenty-five elephants were two which were larger than any I had ever seen before, and if I had thought I could learn to not be afraid, I would have taken one of them while the police were not looking.

Later Clara remembered the incident thus:

Father seated on an elephant defies description. There was something funny about the sight, and Father, suspecting what I was giggling about, said “What are you laughing at, you sassmill?”

‘”If you could see yourself, Father, you would laugh too. The elephant looks so unreal with all his important trappings and you have had such a troubled air, as if you realized your hat did not match the blue-and-red harness.”

Father never minded being laughed at, so he replied he did not believe the picture could be any stranger than his feelings. What could he do if the elephant decided to run? Nobody could answer this question, so he decided to forget it and enjoy the picturesque little streets and unfamiliar architecture.

***

I had worried that Mark Twain’s Grand Tour of India seemed a bit light on the maharaja audiences. One of the richest of them, actually the second richest and by general consent the most enlightened, was that of Baroda, in the modern state of Gujarat, where Sayajirao III, the Maharaja of Gwaekor, ruled in fabulous splendor and general munificence. As Twain noted: “This is indeed one of the oldest of the princedoms of India, and has always been celebrated for its barbaric pomps and splendors, and for the wealth of its princes.”

His full form and title was His Highness Farzand-i-Khas-i-Daulat-i-Inglishia, Shrimant Maharaja Sir Sayajirao III, Gaekwad, Sena Khas Khel Shamsher Bahadur, Maharaja of Baroda, GCSI, GCIE, KIH. He had been on the throne for twenty years when Twain met him and in that time had just finished building the amazingly ornate, massively overwrought Laxmi Vilas Palace in the then-fashionable Moghul-British Indo-Saracenic style. It was four times the size of Buckingham Place and was said to have cost £200,000, a staggering sum considering that the labor was practically free. Perhaps he considered £200,000 was a sensible amount for a palace-cum-safe in which to keep his £3,000,000 (worth £12 million and £180 million today respectively) collection of jewelry - a collection which included the famous Brazilian diamond, the Star of the South and no fewer than four carpets made of pearls with diamonds, rubies and emeralds sewn into the silk. Every time the maharaja or maharini left or entered the palace the household guard, with their white breeches, blue and gold jackets and black boots, would strike up the Baroda anthem.

By the time of Twain’s lecture tour he had already visited Europe five times - no small undertaking in itself - and in his library were several of Twain’s books among many thousand others. Twain observed: “The prince is an educated gentleman. His culture is European. He has been in Europe five times. People say that this is costly amusement for him, since in crossing the sea he must sometimes be obliged to drink water from vessels that are more or less public, and thus damage his caste. To get it purified again he must make pilgrimage to some renowned Hindoo temples and contribute a fortune or two to them. His people are like the other Hindoos, profoundly religious; and they could not be content with a master who was impure.” The maharaja sent his personal representative, his Vakeel, Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, to Bombay to persuade Twain - for the princely sum of 1,000 rupees - to lecture in the Durbar Hall at Laxmi Vilas Palace.

Twain was then shown the maharaja’s two palaces: the older Makapura Palace, now purloined by the Indian Air Force for knocking its officers into shape, and the newer Laxmi Vilas Palace where he was to lecture later that day. He much preferred the former, which he found “oriental and charming”, and damned the latter as being without merit “except for its costliness”. He saw the silver and gold cannons built by successive maharajas in a gilded display of one-upmanship, which “seemed to be six-pounders. They were not designed for business, but for salutes upon rare and particularly important state occasions. This sort of artillery is in keeping with the traditions of Baroda, which was of old famous for style and show. It used to entertain visiting rajahs and viceroys with tiger-fights, elephant-fights, illuminations, and elephant-processions of the most glittering and gorgeous character.”

Although the Laxmi Vilas Palace was “not a good place to lecture in, on account of the echoes, it is a good place to hold durbars in and regulate the affairs of a kingdom, and that is what it is for. If I had it I would have a durbar every day, instead of once or twice a year.” Baroda made a deep impression on Twain, who thought it all “intensely Indian, crumbly and mouldering and immemorially old”; I can echo that impression having, like Twain, arrived here from downtown Bombay and cantonment Pune - this for the first time on his Tour and indeed on our Re-Tour was “India”.

***

Two hundred and fifty specially invited guests, who had been summoned by gold-leafed invitations to hear the “Yankee humor”, attended the At Home Talk. Twain considered the Talk a success although Smythe noted that the female part of the royal household watching from behind the mezzanine screens didn’t laugh at his jokes as heartily as the men did and the acoustics in the cavernous Durbar Hall caused each joke to be told several times.

Like a good footsteps hound I was keen to meet the current scion of the Gaekwad dynasty and visit the Durbar Hall and Laxmi Vilas Palace. Through connections at the American Centre in Bombay I made an appointment for an audience for Gillian and me with the heir to the throne, Yuvraj (Prince) Samarjitsingh Gaekwad, Yuvaraj Sahib of Baroda. He further promised that his secretary, Mr. Mahendrasinh Chauchan, would show us around later, which he did.

Actually I had already paid the Laxmi Vilas Palace a visit the day before as an anonymous tourist to see how the general public would see it. It was not, one might say, overly impressive. The palace itself is still, just about, overly impressive but tourists are left to feel they are only allowed in through grated teeth. To buy a ticket one has to visit a subsidiary library a quarter of a mile off the beaten track. Once in the palace it is clear that only half a dozen or so rooms - and all in one wing of the ground floor - are open to inspection. No-one in a uniform knows anything about the history of the building; in fact no-one speaks English even though it is the lingua franca of tourism. For some bizarre reason photography is forbidden inside the palace, even though high-resolution images are freely available on the internet and digital throw-away photography is the essence of modern tourism. Welcome one is not made.

But the Durbar Hall is still as magnificent as it was in its pomp and prime and on the night that Mark Twain lectured there. The Venetian mosaic floor, the Flemish stained glass windows, the Moghul-style panels with their intricate inlaid and relief mosaics, the French chandeliers and the Genoan lacquered ceiling are all present and correct, glimmering and glittering in a dazzling display of opulence and extroversion. Compared to the interior, the Grand Entrance - by Fellici - is a bit shabby. It features an Italianate courtyard with water fountains and sculptures in bronze, marble and terracotta. As a design feature the concept “intricate” is an over-simplification.

Paintings show the wonderful grounds that were landscaped by William Goldring, largely responsible for Kew Gardens; they are now a golf course and like many a golf course it has soon and unintentionally turned itself into wildlife sanctuary.

The prince, 44, with a flurry of silver hair and complexion polished by a life of ease, is very handsome and gracious and received us in one of the ground-floor reception rooms. An accomplished sportsman and Uppingham old boy, it is clear his interests lie in the golf course rather than the palace, in the pleasure of sporting competition rather than the pain of accountancy and commerce. The family fortune has been decimated by taxes and internecine pay-offs and is in need of urgent rebuilding. With his Bollywood good looks and easy charm he would make the perfect film star - one well-paid way to restock the assets. There is vague talk of him turning the palace into a hotel and conference centre as other maharajas have done. What a venue it would make, but it seems unlikely to happen. One cannot imagine the prince feeling too comfortable with the great unwashed swarming all over the place.

All around the structure is slowly on the crumble and I fear that within two generations - and his only child is a daughter in a regime of primogeniture - it may be beyond affordable repair. In the meantime his family can wander along the labyrinthine corridors, explore the countless rooms (the prince didn’t know how many there were) and gaze in awe at the paintings and mosaics that look down on the slow decline. For the grandmother in the wheelchair there are wonderful memoirs of shimmering parties; for the children scampering along the endless cracking tiles there is the innocence of the inheritance; and for the prince, perhaps a wistful sideways look at the tumble of life’s dice, which have given him a six when he could have done with a seven.

1 “...a poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk”

2 We hope Mark Twain didn’t see the advertisement as there wasn’t enough material for two Entirely Different shows.

3 ...or black; white mostly in India.

4 All found in The Complete Interviews edited by Gary Scharnhorst.

5 The Talk is billed as: “Two hundred years ago, between 1809-11, Lord Byron completed his Grand Tour of the Mediterranean. He was 21 when he left London. After catching a packet from Falmouth to Lisbon, his entourage rode down to Sevilla and Cadiz. He then sailed from Gibraltar to Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Greece, Albania, back to Greece then Turkey, Malta again and then with a heavy heart home to England. His voyage was exotic and poetic, erotic and eccentric. On June 14th 2008 Solent sailors Ian and Gillian Strathcarron boarded their Freedom 40 ‘Vasco da Gama’ at Bucklers Hard and sailed off to recreate Lord Byron’s Grand Tour. Their own voyage was propitious and perilous, mysterious and mischievous - but seldom abstemious.”

6 A one-driver, four-passenger, two-horse carriage.

7 Official, uniformed messengers.

8 The most famous exception was in Kashmir, where the last maharaja was Hindu and decided at Independence to join his largely Muslim subjects to India rather than the more logical Pakistan - the consequences of which decision still rumble on.

9 None ranked higher than prince to leave protocol space between them and the Empress Victoria.

10 Gun salutes were an old Royal Navy tradition originating in the need to empty guns peacefully. The larger ships - with the more important captains -carried the greater guns and so greater salutes. By an old sea superstition even numbers foreshadowed death, thus odd numbers only were used.

11 As a rule a Maharaja was a Hindu ruler and a Nawab a Muslim ruler.

12 General Wavell invented the mnemonic, Hot Kippers Make Good Breakfast, to remind himself of the precedence: Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior, Baroda. These five alone were entitled to 21 guns.

13 Indian wine consumption in India is growing as fast as its middle class. Cabernet Sauvignon is the most reliable variety and Grover’s La Reserve and York brands aren’t bad at all. Reveilo Reserve Syrah and Chateau Indage’s Ivy Shiraz are delicious but far too expensive and hard to find. If a restaurant does serve wine it will probably be Riviera, a bland blend but just about quaffable. Whites tend to be sweet and warm. The biggest problem is the price: expect to pay $15-$25 for anything drinkable and quite often the wine part of the meal will cost twice as much as the food. Vineyard tourism north of Bangalore, in the Himalayan foothills and near Poona - our next stop - is just catching on. Not a bad way to see the country as it happens.

14 The current estimate is about 35,000 Parsees resident in Mumbai.

15 Once the population of a group falls below 25,000 the Indian government reclassifies it from a “community” to a “tribe”. Sometime in the 2020s, therefore, the Parsees expect to be officially and not just figuratively tribal.

16 There are three Towers, two main ones for general use and one for Parsee women who have been misguided enough to marry outside the faith.

17 4,327 to be exact in 2008 on all three Mumbai suburban lines.

18 Jet Airways and Kingfisher are excellent and affordable airlines. Indian Airways, now lumped in with Air India, is still equally awful and strike- and cancellation-prone. As Sita was to discover in Jaipur later there have been numerous scandals about Indian pilots buying their ATPL licenses from the state authority - justified in one Times of India report by the latter saying, in effect, “what’s the problem? These things fly themselves anyway.” Unless one is in a hurry - in India? - it’s train time.

19 Still the largest private investment, in real terms, ever made.

20 In the same way the British champion Indian dinners, the Indians have perfected the English breakfast.