Winter India/Chapter 21

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

 

CHAPTER XXI
AMRITSAR

HERE was a combination hotel and dak bangla under one roof at Amritsar that was as amusing as anything in comic opera. We arrived at the dak bangla late at night, and moved to the hotel in the morning, by merely crossing the hall. Instead of being served in our own cold, white vault of a bedchamber in the bangla, we dined in the lofty, drafty banquet-hall of the hotel quite as comfortably as if in the train-shed of a railway station on a winter night. All the doors of the place were besieged by insistent touts who sang the same song, "Please come my shop. Please buy my shop," thrust greasy cards at us, clung to the carriage-steps, and outdid their tribesmen elsewhere.

Amritsar, as the holy city of the Sikhs, has an importance and a character distinct from all other places. It is as large a city as Delhi, and for ages has been a great trade-center, lying on the main caravan routes from Central Asia and Kashmir. The streets show a mixture of races, and for color and picturesqueness the bazaars equal those of Lahore. Nearly every man wore a chudda of either vivid red, green, or orange, and if we had remained another day I should have succumbed to the prevailing mode, assumed a bright-red shawl, and with it the theatrical pose and stride, the flap and fling of loose ends of drapery. The Sikhs, "the Swiss of Asia," were old friends, whom I had known before I knew the Panjab—the splendid statuesque, red-turbaned policemen of Shanghai and Hong Kong, "the red-top men" of such terror to Chinese malefactors. Originally Hindus, their Luther protested against caste and idolatry and denounced the corruption of the Brahmans; and, just before Columbus's voyage to America, he established his dissenting sect near Lahore. Akbar showed tolerance and granted them the sacred pool at Amritsar, but his successors persecuted them, tortured their leaders, and so aroused their national and military spirit that after many battles they established their independence in the middle of the eighteenth century. Their last great leader was Runjeet Singh, after whose death in 1839 they embroiled themselves with the English, were defeated at Gujerat in 1849, and the Koh-i-nur went with the Panjab to the victors, and now the pensioned descendants of their ruler live as country gentlemen and champion cricket-players in England, marrying with the English nobility. The Sikhs' loyalty during the Mutiny gave them a prestige still preserved, and these stalwart and interesting people are claimed by the Magyars as long-lost Aryan kinfolk, many common words and the common fashion of beards first suggesting the relationship. While the old men of the Sikhs bewail that their people are backsliding and drifting into Hinduism, a stranger sees that they are as anti-Hindu as anti-Mohammedan; that they pray to the east, refuse tobacco, indulge in spirits, eat pork, and button their coats to the right—if only because their opponents do otherwise. While they venerate the cow, they loathe the saffron color of the Hindu fakir and love the blue the Hindu hates. The Sikh never shaves or trims his hair or beard, parting the latter and twisting and tucking it behind his ears and under the turban. He always wears a sword, if only the miniature tulwar in his turban, and he terrorizes the timid babu, the limp Bengali, and the cowardly Kashmiri as he does the Chinese, and in general is the first man one meets in India.

The heart of the Sikh city and the soul of its people is the Golden Temple in the center of the sacred tank, the Pool of Immortality, and for beauty and impressiveness this Amritsar shrine is second only to the Taj Mahal. Marble terraces and balustrades surround the tank, and a marble causeway leads across the water to a graceful marble temple whose gilded walls, roof, dome, and cupolas, with vivid touches of red curtains, are reflected in the still pool. One gets the first view from a high terrace by the modern Gothic clock-tower, where the Sikh guards halt one until he has removed his shoes. A bearded giant exchanged our shoes for huge felt slippers that were damp and even wet, and led us around the white terrace. The palaces and gardens of Sikh nobles surround the tank, and the path is bordered

 

THE GOLDEN TEMPLE, AMRITSAR

 

with venders of fruit, flowers, and turban ornaments. Processions of brilliantly clad people passed under the towered gate of the causeway and out over the path on the water; and, doubled in reflections, it all seemed too picturesque, too theatrical to be real. Only the north door of the temple is open to Europeans, but the bearded priests sitting in a gold and painted hall before a magnificently bound Granth, or sacred scriptures, over which the attendants waved brushes, received us kindly. Pigeons flew in and out the arched openings with their massive silver doors; the musicians pounded and blew; the priests sat chanting before the jeweled Granth, which is the object of adoration to the sect, and after we had made our offerings, threw jasmine wreaths over our shoulders and gave us fragrant oranges. The Sikh visitors worshipfully knelt, offering money, cowries, and flowers before the book, and, garlanded in return, were conducted with us to the upper chamber of the temple to see even richer wall decorations of mirrors and gilded fretwork. The place is so precious that it is swept and dusted only with peacock feathers. The silver doors of the temple stand open day and night, and the chanted services are continual, and on moonlight nights in summer this fairy floating temple must seem a dream. Only the chill of those wet felt slippers on that cold winter morning could have hurried us away from the enchanting place; but, sneezing and shivering violently, we fled, and although we spent two more days in Amritsar, we were content to view the temple from the terrace.

Gardens, forts, towers, other temples and palaces dwindled in interest by comparison with the bazaars and street crowds of Amritsar, and hours went by rapidly as we followed the narrow streets of this truly Persian and Central Asian city. In the caravansary by the city walls we saw such delightfully tattered and patched and lusty beggars from Yarkand and Bokhara as no fancy could picture. They are last in the train of pilgrims that come down from the north each winter, taking train at Amritsar and excursion steamer at Bombay for the pilgrimage to Mecca. These plump, red-cheeked, Tatar-faced beggars beat time on a triangle and sang an appealing verse or two, accompanying it with dramatic and graceful gestures; and they wished us long life, health, and wealth in return for our infidel annas. Other Yarkand men came out from the arches of the quadrangle, some blue-eyed and with faces absurdly Teutonic, their originally white skins tinged with sunburn and dirt until, like the Sikhs, they were a dark leather or ginger color. Some were horse-dealers, others had brought wool, silk, jade, turquoises, and agate for sale. All wore long, fur-bordered, wool or wadded coats, with real sleeves and seams in them, instead of the loose ends of cotton and pashmina cloth of the people of the Indian plains. One man in an old Russian military coat and top-boots looked the veritable stage secret-service man, and then we remembered that in this caravansary Kim slept and listened. But how we reveled in the streets and bazaars beyond! The quarter of the shoemakers, where gaudy Mohammedan slippers dandled in gorgeous strings and bunches, and leather-workers bent over rainbow tasks! The wool-shops, where Bokhara camels' wool and Kashmir and Rampur pashmina cloths overflowed from open sacks and bales! And yarn-shops, hung over with skeins of every color! Dye-shops, where turban lengths hung dripping with every brilliant fluid! Copper and brass and damascened metal shops, and shops for the sale of coarse carpets and dhurries, of skin bottles and earthen bowls,—all were fascinating. The shops, however, were the dens of shawl-shops, where pale, fine-featured Kashmiris sat embroidering shawl borders with silks and gold thread. The little Kashmiri boys, with their great eyes and long lashes, were charming creatures, fine products of an old race and an old civilization, purest Aryans of all these people; but the bearded Sikhs despise the Kashmiri only a little less than they despise the Bengali. The gentle, esthetic Kashmiri is not a fighting man, and there are thousands of pure and mixed Kashmir weavers and embroiderers long resident in Amritsar who still quail before the giant Sikhs.

We found the jewelers' row, where women who were themselves walking jewel-shops sat bargaining; and we found the gem-cutters' dens, where jade blocks from Yarkand and farther Turkestan were sawed, cut, and polished. Jewel-boxes, knife-handles, knife-blades, ear-rings, bracelets, slabs, and medallions for Delhi jewelers to inlay with precious stones, were all being evolved from the rough lumps of green stone by means of the primitive bow-string drill and emery-wheel driven by the foot. There was a sociable jade merchant of silky, persuasive manners, who lost much time trying to convince me that gray was green and that any soft stone, if it were even grayish-green, was jade, and that brown streaks and white clouds were desirable variations in the monotonous monochrome surface. After this prelude, he produced better pieces of this most fascinating and oldest lucky stone in the world. Bullock-carts crowded us to the wall and camel-trains brushed contemptuously through the narrow bazaars. One camel, loaded with baskets, scraped a destroying path through the tortuous lane, tearing down flimsy awnings and curtains, sweeping signs and trade samples along and tramping them under his spongy feet, while the shrieks of the despoiled tradesmen filled the air.

All the way touts dogged our steps. "Please come my shop. Please buy my shop," rang in my ear whenever I stopped to look or to point the camera. They followed us, pleading, if we walked; they leaped off and on the carriage-step if we drove; and "Jao!" had no significance to them save when emphasized by the bearer's stick. One persistent nagger drove us almost to frenzy with his lamentations and upbraidings whenever we stopped at a shop-front. We bade him "Jao!" and to stay "jao," but he was omnipresent, and to get rid of him we went to his shop. He had nothing but weather-worn rubbish; and while he ran to borrow stock from a neighbor we made our escape.

At the large carpet-factory ninety-seven looms

 

WINDOW AT GWALIOR

 

were strung with cotton warp, and little Kashmiri boys, sitting elbow to elbow before them, tied in the wool threads, cut them with miniature scythes, and pressed down the stitches with wooden combs. A spectacled old Kashmiri, seated behind each curtain of warp-threads, read off the directions for the pattern from pages of Kashmir cipher, all understanding and following this ancient, conventional cipher by inherited association more easily than any of the clear, mechanical directions devised and used by the managers of jail carpet-works. Four small boys, with one old man to read the pattern to them, will make a fine, close, velvet-pile carpet, measuring eleven by thirteen feet, in two months and a half,—a carpet worth twenty-five dollars gold at Amritsar. The design is chosen, the materials allotted, and the contract let to the reader, who pays each boy three or four rupees a month. Conventional old Turkish and Persian designs are followed. They are first drawn in colors, traced on sealed paper, graded to the number of warp-threads, and the pattern written in Kashmir cipher. The small boys work mechanically, tying on two, four, or twenty stitches, as the reader calls to them, paying little heed to what is growing under their fingers, whether scroll, leaf, or stripe. "Two pink, three green, one red," chant the boys in monotones after the reader. The reader watches the pattern grow, and, detecting a false stitch, raps the offender with the stick he holds for the purpose. The carpets are valued both for the fineness of the stitches and the quality of the wool, the ordinary "fine old Persian, or Tabriz, rug" of Western auction-rooms costing eleven and twelve rupees a square yard in Amritsar; while a copy of a precious old wine-red Bokhara rug they were then weaving of fine pashmina or shawl wool was worth fifty rupees a square yard.

Each loom was a genre picture and a color study, with the spectacled Kashmiri in sober turban and jacket on one side, and on the other the row of long-lashed boys in brilliant garments, elbowing and shoving one another and tittering together, quite as all children behave in the presence of school visitors. No finished carpets could be seen or bought, since the looms were working overtime, a year behind their orders. New York buyers order largely each year, and large consignments go to London and Paris. There were shawls for sale, bales and bales of them, and stitched in silk threads at the end of each chudda was the number of warp-threads, by which their fineness and value are determined. They are kept in press between boards, and when one bought the silky fabric it was sewed in Kashmir wax-cloth and sealed in a clumsy tin box.

So very enchanting did we find these bazaars that we lingered another day and yet another, to feast on their picturesque setting and incidents each warm, Indian-summery afternoon. Then we hastened to the guard-house terrace overlooking the tank and the Golden Temple, and watched that building of beauty, whose reflection seemed to float upon the splendid sunset sky.

We hurried back to the bazaars again, to see the narrow, irregular lanes illuminated with every kind of poor, crude, clumsy lamp and lantern, tallow dip, rush-light, saucer of oil, and floating wick, fagot, and torch. Shadows hid the dirt and incongruities; each unique thing had its right value; and we haggled over blue-embroidered Yarkand felt rugs, over striped Ludhiana lungis or gold-shot cotton turban-cloths, over jade and blue ferozees and the shadowy Bokhara silks, far into the frosty darkness up to the late dinner-hour.