The programme of the function had been carefully worked out. A chorus of children was to sing during the period of waiting before Mr. Patel entered. Somebody was to recite a congratulatory poem when he had taken his seat. Then there were to be speeches, with Mr. Patel’s reply and the presentation of the address in its silver casket to finish off the proceedings. A perfect programme, on paper; but in practice, as it turned out, not quite so good as it might have been. For the band played and the audience talked all through the children’s singing; indeed, it was only quite by chance, because I happened to notice that they were opening and shutting their mouths in an unnatural, fish-like sort of way, that I came to know that the children were singing at all. And when the reciter began intoning his congratulatory poem, the indefatigable band struck up the tune of “Why did you kiss that Girl?”—the poem was lost.
But by this time some few thousands of Bombay’s innumerable population of crows had settled in the trees outside the hall and were discussing the question, as gregarious birds will do at sunset, of retiring for the night. Their cawing was portentous. Never in Europe have I heard anything like it. I was sitting on the platform, within a few feet of the speakers; but their voices were quite inaudible, even to me. It was only some half an hour later, when the crows had dropped off to sleep, that any word can have reached the audience. After that the proceedings went off pretty smoothly, and with only a little hitch or two about the reading of the address and the presentation of the casket to mar the solemnity of the occasion.
I was reminded very much of analogous functions in Italy. There is no word of which Italian journalists are fonder than the word solenne. Every ceremony of which you read an account in an Italian newspaper is solemn—solemn foundation-stone layings, solemn depositings of wreaths on tombs, solemn celebrations of centenaries, solemn royal entrances and exits. In the papers, as I say, all these things are solemn. In practice, however, they are rarely anything but slipshod, haphazard, and to northern eyes at any rate, ineffective and unimpressive. The good Catholic who comes to Rome in the hope of seeing noble and soul-stirring religious ceremonies, generally returns disappointed to his own country.
The fact is that they order these things better in France, in England, in Belgium, in Germany—in any northern land. We Northerners stage-manage our effects more professionally than do the people of the south. We take pains to impress ourselves; and at the same time we give the ceremony which we have staged every chance of seeming impressive to us by deliberately throwing ourselves into a serious state of mind and consistently keeping our seriousness till the function is over. The Southerner declines to take trouble over the details of stage-management, and will not be bothered to hold one mental attitude for a long time at a stretch. To us, in consequence, he seems disgracefully slipshod, cynical, and irreverent.
But we must not be over-hasty in our judgments. The Southerner has his own traditions about these matters, and they happen to be different from ours. In this respect, I should guess, his habits of thought and feeling are nearer to the Oriental’s than to ours. Let us try to understand before we condemn.
We call the Southerner slipshod because he tolerates shabbiness among his grandeurs, and permits his solemnities to be marred by a ludicrous inefficiency. But he could retort by calling us crassly unimaginative because we are incapable of seeing the fine intention through the inadequate medium of its expression, of appreciating the noble general effect in spite of the shabbiness of the details. For in matters of art, he would argue (and a religious ceremony, a civic or political function are forms of art, being only solemn ballets and symbolical charades), it is the intention and the general effect that count. Those little struts and flying buttresses of marble, with which the Greeks strengthened their statues, are absurd, if you choose to consider them closely. But they are meant to be ignored. Structurally, a sham façade is ludicrous; the Southerner knows it, of course, just as well as Mr. Ruskin. But, more wise than Ruskin, he does not fly into a passion of moral indignation over the falsehood of it; he permits himself to enjoy the genuine grandiosity of its appearance when seen from the right angle.
In church, the priest may gabble, as though he were trying to break a world’s record, the acolytes may pick their noses, the choir-boys sing out of tune, the vergers spit; we Northerners are revolted, but the wisely indulgent Southerner passes over these trivial details, and enjoys the fine general effect of the ecclesiastical ballet in spite of its little blemishes. But if he enjoys it, the Northerner now asks, why doesn’t he at least sit still and refrain from laughing chatter, why doesn’t he try to look, and looking, make himself feel, consistently serious? To which the other will retort by deriding the Northerner’s slowness and inelasticity of mind, his pomposity, his incapacity for frankly feeling two emotions at once, or at any rate in very rapid succession. “I can see ludicrous and shabby details just as clearly as you do,” he will say, “and, like you, I deplore them. But I keep my sense of proportion, and do not permit mere details to interfere with my appreciation of the general effect.
You have a talent for high seriousness; but I can smile and feel solemn within the same minute. In church I pray fervently at one moment, I am transported by the beauty of the ceremonial (in spite of the shoddy details), and the next I make eyes at the young woman across the aisle or talk to my neighbour about the price of rubber shares. Operatic airs, I know, are stagey and conventional, and I deride the ludicrously strutting tenor who sings them; but at the same time I rapturously applaud his bawling and abandon myself, even while I mock, to the throaty passion of the music. Your mind is clumsier, more stiffly starched than mine. You can only be one thing at a time, and you regard as shocking the nimble emotional antics of those more fortunately endowed than yourself or more reasonably brought up. For my part I can only pity you for your limitations.”
The speeches, all but that of Mrs. Naidu, who gave us English eloquence, were in Gujarati, and for me, therefore, no better than gibberish. I amused myself by listening for the occasional English words with which the incomprehensibility was powdered. “Gibber gibber gibber Bombay Presidency”; it was thus that I should have reported a typical speech of the evening. “Gibber gibber committee, gibber gibber gibber minority report, gibber gibber Government of India, gibber gibber gibber George Washington, gibber Edmund Burke, gibber gibber gibber Currency Commission, gibber gibber gibber gibber . . .” It was thus, I reflected, that our Saxon fathers borrowed from the invaders’ speech the words for which they could find no equivalent in their own debased, post-Conquest English. Listening to the incomprehensible chatter of his foreign vassals, the Norman baron would have been amused to catch, every now and then, the sound of such familiar words as “army,” “castle,” “law.”
The function came to an end. Festooned with flowers—for there had been a generous distribution of garlands, by which even we, albeit quite undeserving, had profited—we followed our hostess into the garden. There under palm-trees, we drank a kind of richly perfumed soda-water, we ate strange dumplings stuffed with mincemeat that was at once sweet and violently peppery—chopped mutton mixed with a vitriolic jam—and tried to take the burning taste of them away with little cakes and sandwiches, slabs of almond icing and fried savouries. At the other side of the garden, safely removed from possible contamination, the orthodox refreshed themselves with special foods prepared by cooks of guaranteed good family. White-bearded and most majestically robed, Mr. Patel moved among the guests, looking like a minor, even a major, prophet—but a prophet, as we saw when he sat down at table, with a most reassuringly humorous twinkle in his eyes.
It was nearly nine when we got back to the hotel. Coming up from dinner, an hour later, we found our room magically perfumed by the tuberoses and champaks of our garlands. That night, and all next day, till they were quite withered, the flowers poured out their scent, and the wind driven down on us by the electric fan in the ceiling was a warm air impregnated with strange and tropical sweetness.
KASHMIR
It is cheaper in this country to have a waggon pulled by half a dozen men than by a pair of oxen or horses. All day, on the road below our house, the heavy-laden carts go creaking slowly along behind their team of human draft animals. The coolies sing as they pull, partly out of sheer lightness of heart (for these Kashmiris are wonderfully cheerful, in spite of everything), and partly, no doubt, because they have discovered the psychological fact that to sing in chorus creates a strengthening sense of solidarity within the singing group, and seems to lighten the work in hand by making the muscular effort respond almost automatically to a regular rhythmic stimulus. I noticed two main types of labourer’s chantey. One of these is melodically quite ambitious; for it ranges over no less than three notes
