JAIPUR
There is a mirror room in the fort at Agra; there are others in almost all the palaces of Rajputana. But the prettiest of them all are the mirror rooms in the palace of Amber. Indeed, I never remember to have seen mirrors anywhere put to better decorative use than here, in this deserted Rajput palace of the seventeenth century. There are no large sheets of glass at Amber; there is no room for large sheets. A bold and elegant design in raised plaster work covers the walls and ceiling; the mirrors are small and shaped to fit into the interstices of the plaster pattern. Like all old mirrors they are grey and rather dim. Looking into them you see “in a glass, darkly.” They do not portray the world with that glaring realism which characterises the reverberations of modern mirrors. But their greatest charm is that they are slightly convex, so that every piece gives back its own small particular image of the world and each, when the shutters are opened, or a candle is lit, has a glint in its grey surface like the curved high-light in an eye.
They are wonderfully rich, these mirror rooms at Amber. Their elaborateness surpasses that even of the famous mirror room at Bagheria, near Palermo. But whereas the Sicilian room is nothing more than the old-fashioned glass-and-gilding merry-go-round made stationary, the Indian rooms are a marvel of cool and elegant refinement. True, this form of decoration does not lend itself to the adornment of large areas of wall or ceiling; it is too intricate for that. But fortunately the rooms in Indian palaces are seldom large. In a country where it rains with a punctual regularity and only at one season of the year, large rooms of assembly are unnecessary. Crowds are accommodated and ceremonials of state performed more conveniently out of doors than in. The Hall of Audience in an Indian palace is a small pillared pavilion placed at one end of an open courtyard. The king sat in the pavilion, his courtiers and petitioners thronged the open space. Every room in the palace was a private room, a place of intimacy. One must not come to India expecting to find grandiose specimens of interior architecture. There are no long colonnaded vistas, no galleries receding interminably according to all the laws of perspective, no colossal staircases, no vaults so high that at night the lamplight can hardly reach them. Here in India, there are only small rooms adorned with the elaborate decoration that is meant to be looked at from close to and in detail. Such are the mirror rooms at Amber.
BIKANER
The desert of Rajputana is a kind of Sahara but smaller and without oases. Travelling across it, one looks out over plains of brown dust. Once in every ten or twenty yards, some grey-green plant, deep-rooted, and too thorny for even camels to eat, tenaciously, and with a kind of desperate vegetable ferocity, struggles for life. And at longer intervals, draining the moisture of a rood of land, there rise, here and there, the little stunted trees of the desert. From close at hand the sparseness of their distantly scattered growth is manifest. But seen in depth down the long perspective of receding distance, they seem—like the in fact remotely scattered stars of the Milky Way—numerous and densely packed. Close at hand the desert is only rarely flecked by shade; but the further distances seem flecked with a dense dark growth of trees. The foreground is always desert, but on every horizon there is the semblance of shadowy forests. The train rolls on, and the forests remain for ever on the horizon; around one is always and only the desert.
Bikaner is the metropolis of this desert, a great town islanded in the sand. The streets are unpaved, but clean. The sand of which they are made desiccates and drinks up every impurity that falls upon it. And what astonishing houses flank these streets! Huge palazzi of red sandstone, carved and fretted from basement to attic, their blank walls—wherever a wall has been left blank—whitewashed and painted with garishly ingenuous modern frescoes of horses, of battles, of trains running over bridges, of ships. These houses, the like of which we had seen in no other city, are the palaces of the Marwari merchants, the Jews of India, who go forth from their desert into the great towns, whence they return with the fruits of their business ability to their native place. Some of them are said to be fabulously wealthy, and Bikaner has, I suppose, more millionaires per thousand of population than any other town in the world.
We were shown over the country villa of one of these plutocrats, built in the desert a mile or two beyond the city wall. Costly and unflagging labour had created and conserved in the teeth of the sand, the scorching wind of summer and the winter frosts, a garden of trees and lawns, of roses and English vegetables. It is the marvel of Bikaner.
The sun was setting as we reached the bungalow. A little army of coolies was engaged in covering the lawns with tarpaulin sheets and fitting canvas greatcoats on all the shrubs. The night frosts are dangerous at this season. In summer, on the other hand, it is by day that the verdure must be jacketted. Such is horticulture in Rajputana.
I had hoped, too optimistically, to find in the Marwari plutocrats the modern equivalents of the Florentine merchant-princes of the quattrocento. But this pleasing bubble of illusion burst, with an almost audible pop, as we passed from the millionaire’s garden into his house. The principal drawing-room was furnished almost exclusively with those polychromatic art nouveau busts that issue from the workshops of the tombstone manufacturers of Carrara, and with clockwork toys. These last had all been set going, simultaneously, in our honour. A confused ticking and clicking filled the air, and wherever we looked our eyes were dizzied by movement.
Tigers, almost life size, nodded their heads. Pink papier-mâché pigs opened and shut their mouths. Clocks in the form of negroes rolled their eyes; in the form of fox-terriers wagged their tails and, opening their jaws to bark, uttered a tick; in the form of donkeys agitated their long ears sixty times a minute. And, preciously covered by a glass dome, a porcelain doll, dressed in the Paris fashions of 1900, jerkily applied a powder-puff to its nose, and jerkily reached back to the powder-box—again and again. These, evidently, are the products of our Western civilisation which the East really admires. I remembered a certain brooch which I had seen one evening, at a dinner party, on the sari of an Indian lady of great wealth and the highest position—a brooch consisting of a disc of blue enamel surrounded by diamonds, on the face of which two large brilliants revolved, by clockwork, in concentric circles and opposite directions. It was an eight-day brooch, I learned, wound every Sunday night.
BIKANER
In the desert, five miles out of Bikaner, stands a city of tombs, the cenotaphs of the Maharajas and their royal kindred. They are to be counted by scores and hundreds—little white domes perched on pillars, or covering cells of masonry. Under each dome a little slab bears the name of the commemorated dead. In the older tombs these slabs are carved with crude reliefs representing the prince, sometimes on horseback, sometimes sitting on his throne, accompanied by as many of his wives and concubines as burnt themselves to death on his funeral pyre. Few of these Maharajas of an earlier generation left the world without taking with them two or three unfortunate women. Some of them were accompanied to the fire by six, seven, and in one case, I counted even nine victims.
On the slab their images form a little frieze below the image of their lord and master—a row of small identical figures stretching across the stone. Nine luscious Hindu beauties, deep-bosomed, small-waisted, sumptuously haunched—their portraits are deliciously amusing. But looking at them, I could not help remembering the dreadful thing these little sculptures commemorated. I thought of the minutes of torment that ushered them out of life into this comical world of art which they now inhabit, under the weather-stained domes in the desert. Every here and there stands a tomb on whose central slab is carved a small conventional pair of feet. These are the feet of those royal ladies who, for one reason or another, did not commit sati. Each time I saw a pair of these marble feet I felt like calling for cheers.
JODHPUR
Standing on the ramparts of the Jodhpur fort—on a level with the highest wheelings of the vultures, whose nests are on the ledges of the precipices beneath the walls—one looks down on to the roofs of the city, hundreds of feet below. And every noise from the streets and houses comes floating up, diminished but incredibly definite and clear, a multitudinous chorus, in which, however, one can distinguish all the separate component sounds—crying and laughter, articulate speech, brayings and bellowings and bleatings, the
