MARK TWAIN IN INDIA
"... the large number of Parsis present-to say nothing of a good sprinkling of Mahomedans and Hindus-was a noteworthy evidence of the cosmopolitan character of Mark Twain's popularity."
THE ADVENTURES OF
S5r? ARK, TWAIN ON AJANUARYEVENINGseventy years ago, Mark Twain walked on to the stage of the Novelty Theatre in Bombay. Without any sort of prelude, he began to speak in a low, conversational tone. "I was born modest," he said, "but it wore off .... If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one. I do that often. I can do it right now. I can state that at this moment there are two men who are most remarkable. Kipling is one and I am the other one .... Between us we cover all knowledge. He knows all that can be known, and I know the rest." For the next two hours, Mark Twain kept that audience in a state of continuous laughter-a feat he was to repeat at intervals during the following two and a half months, when he visited more than a dozen Indian cities. Explaining the origin of his celebrated lectures, which he called At Homes, Twain recalled, "I once found myself out of ajob. So I hired a hall and gave a lecture. And I've never had to do a day's work since." When Mark Twain came to India in 1896 his name, or rather his pseudonym-he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens-was familiar to people all over
the world. His nine major books, among them The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, had been published in millions of copies. Wherever he went he was recognized by his mane of white hair, bushy black eyebrows and straggling moustache. He was known as a humorist-"I was once presented to an audience as a humorist who was also funny." Newspapers everywhere quoted his remarks-even, sometimes, when he didn't make them. There is no record, for example, that Twain ever defined a shirt as "an article made for the use of dhobis in breaking rocks." But people in India claimed he said it, and somehow the attribution made the remark more humorous. Over the years, Mark Twain's royalties had piled up into a tidy fortune, but when he came to India he was dead broke. More than that, he was deep in debt. He had sunk a great deal of money into a typesetting machine whose inventor couldn't quite make it work. On top of this, a relative had mismanaged his publishing firm, which went bankrupt. Mark Twain could have disavowed the debts, which ran over $100,000. He chose instead to repay every cent. (continued)
Seventy years have passed since Mark Twain tramped abroad in India, giving his famous At Homes in more than a dozen cities and leaving a trail of laughter in his wake.
An elephant ride, the Taj by moonlight, the toy train to Darjeeling, and meetings with princes, governors, swamis-these were just a few of Twain's experiences in India.
In order to do this he undertook at the age of sixty a round-the-world lecture tour, accompanied by his wife and daughter. Describing the tour later, he said, "We lectured and robbed and raided for thirteen months. I sent the money to Mr. Rogers as fast as we captured it. He banked it and saved it up for the creditors." By the end of 1898-adding book earnings to the pot-everyone had been paid in full. TWAIN'SIMPRESSIONS OFINDIAwere set down in Following the Equator, an account of his world tour. Other details are available from his Notebook, which was published posthumously, and from reports appearing in the press of the day. It is a fascinating, if unrewarding, exercise trying to reconstruct Twain's itinerary in India-throughout the effort one bewails the absence of travel agencies in those times. He landed in Bombay by the P&O liner S.S. Rosetta on Saturday, January 18, 1896. He stayed in the city for ten days, visited Poona on January 29, returned to Bombay, lectured in the Gaikwad's palace in Baroda on January 31, "slept all the way back to Bombay," and then embarked on the two-and-a-halfday train journey to Allahabad. Another factor which complicated an already confused situation was Twain's constant illness, apparently influenza, which necessitated frequent changes in schedule. A few days after his arrival he complained to a newspaper reporter, "I have seen nothing of Bombay, excepting these trees, which badly need dusting .... " On March 26, Twain was on the British India Company's 8.S. Wardha, having boarded the boat at Calcutta for his departure from India. In the course of his stay in India, he visited Bombay, Poona, Baroda, Allahabad, Banaras, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Muzaffarpur, Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, Delhi and Jaipur, as well as Lahore and Rawalpindi. Twain said repeatedly that India was his favourite country on the whole Equator journey. And it is clear from all he has written that one of his strongest iInpressions was of the colour and variety of Indian life. Take, for instance, this passage from Following the Equator: "This is indeed India-the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues ... cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition ... the one land that all men desire to see, I
and having once seen, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined." After this uncharacteristic patch of purple prose, Twain adds: "Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will." Bombay itself Twain described as "a bewitching place ... the Arabian nights come again! It does not seem as if one could ever get tired of watching this moving show, this shining and shifting spectacle." In the great bazaar, there is "a sea of rich-co loured turbans and draperies;" at the railway station there is "the monster crowd of jewelled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendours of the costumes;" and everywhere on hand there is "colour, bewitching colour, enchanting colour."
If I have ever seen anything like India before, it was years ago-perhaps in the Holy Land. But here there is so much life and colour ; everything is so thoroughly alive." ÂŤ
If Twain was enchanted by the "shifting splendours," it was largely because his experiences were so varied. In Bombay, for example, he was taken on a tour of Government House, visited the Parsi Towers of Silence, and spent an hour in the mansion of Kumar Shri Samatsinhji of Palitana State. Here, after inspecting the royal household, Twain observed, "I believe a salaried taster has to taste everything before the prince ventures it-an ancient and judicious custom in the East, which has thinned out the tasters a great deal, for of course it is the cook that puts the poison in. If I were an Indian prince, I would not go to the expense of a taster, I would eat with the cook." His activities included a visit to the elephant stables where "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 mahout talks to the elephant in a low voice all the time, and the elephant seems to understand it all and be pleased with it; and he obeys every order in the most contented and docile way." In Banaras, Mark Twain had a meeting with a famous swami, of whom he said, "He has my reverence. And I don't offer it as a common thing and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value." Sincere as he was at
"If I sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would gather on the railing •.. and talk about me ... my clothes, and my hair, and my complexion, and probahle character and vocation and politics."
that time, when Twain was questioned about this in Calcutta by a reporter from the Englishman, he lapsed into his customary levity. "He is so holy," he said, "that before his name can be written it must be repeated 108 times. I thought that too much even for a god. I made 104times do. We traded autographs. I said I had heard of him, and he said he had heard of me. Gods lie sometimes, I expect." From Calcutta, Twain boarded the 'toy train' for the trip to Darjeeling, during which he changed to a little canvas-canopied car for the thirty-five mile descent. "There was a story," he writes, "of a disastrous trip
made down the mountains once in this little car by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, when the car jumped the track and threw its passengers over a precipice. It was not true, but the story had value for me, for it made me nervous .... The fact that the LieutenantGovernor had escaped was no proof that I would have the same luck." Twain and party drove to the Taj Mahal, "arriving at ll-30-clear sky and splendid moon. At that moment," he adds in the Notebook, "to our surprise an eclipse began and in an hour was total-an attention not before offered to any stranger since the Taj was continued
Fascinated by the sights and sounds of India-the countryside, the people, the fauna and flora-Twain recorded his impressions in his book FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR.
built. Attempts were made to furnish an eclipse for the Prince of Wales in 1876, and in recent years to twenty other princes of that house, but without success. However, Co!. Lock, Political Agent, has much more influence than any of his predecessors have had." During his weeks in India, Twain took in every detail with the practised eve of the serious literary artist. The time when he was regarded simply as a humorist is past. Critics have drawn attention to his many contributions to literature-his masterly use of American colloquial speech, for example. Though he might not have deserved Hemingway's extravagant tribute, "All modern literature stems from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," he could on occasion write expressive prose, as in the following description: "Out in the country in India, the day begins early. One sees a plain, perfectly flat, dust-coloured and brickyardy, stretching limitlessly away on every side in the dim grey light, striped everywhere with hard-beaten narrow paths, the vast flatness broken at wide intervals by bunches of spectral trees that mark where villages are; and all along the paths are slender women and the black forms of lanky naked men moving to their work, the women with brass water-jars on their heads, the men carrying hoes."
"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."
For the people of India, their physical appearance, Twain had much admiration. Here is his tribute, for example, to the colour of their skin. "Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful," he wrote, "but a beautiful white skin is rare .... Where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached out, unwholesome and sometimes frankly ghastly .... As for the Indian brown-firm, smooth, blemishless, pleasant and restful to the eye, afraid of no colour, harmonizing with all colours and adding grace to them all-I think there is no sort of chance for the average white complexion against that rich and perfect tint." His verdict on the Indian people was that "they are a kindly people .... The face and the bearing that indicate a surly spirit and a bad heart seem to me ...
rare among Indians." This was a surprising judgment from one who did not hold too high a view of his fellow-creatures. As he once said, "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." The fauna and flora are other aspects of Indian life that seem to have delighted Mark Twain. Take his famous sketch of the Indian crow. "I never saw such a bird for delivering opinions," he wrote. "Nothing escapes him; he notices everything that happens, and brings out his opinion about it, particularly if it is a matter that is none of his business. And it is never a mild opinion, but always violent-violent and profane -the presence of ladies does not affect him." Twain has described the antics of monkeys "of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled with fear." He relates an incident when "two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning ... and when I woke, one of them was before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book, and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it hurts me yet." Elsewhere, Twain speaks of "a totally leafless tree upon whose innumerable branches a cloud of crimson butterflies had lighted-apparently," and at another point he exclaims, "What a gushing spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo is!" But it is not true that Mark Twain was so bedazzled by the sights and sounds of India that he could see nothing else. There is evidence to suggest that he was troubled by some of the things he saw here. It is now generally acknowledged that Twain was far ahead of his days in his social thinking. This is demonstrated by his treatment of the runaway slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn and his general attitude towards Negroes. Though he could joke about it ("In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. "), he had an indignant sense of right and wrong, an ardent hatred of injustice. The subject of caste, Twain confessed to a Calcutta journalist, "seems to me a great mystery .... I can't grasp the idea." And he told a representative of the Madras Standard, "One feature that has struck me very forcibly in India is the poverty of the country. This is something I knew of only vaguely before." Actually, Mark Twain appears to have known quite a bit about India even before he arrived in the country. As soon as he reached Calcutta, he was asked by a Statesman interviewer whether he had ever met a
According to available newspaper evidence, this is the course of Mark Twain's peregrinations through India. His constant illness during the tour necessitated frequent changes in schedule.
Bengali. "Not yet in the flesh," he replied, "but in literature can I ever forget him ?"-and he waved a copy of the biography of 'Onocool Chunder Mookerjee' in the reporter's face. In Madras he revealed familiarity with the names of some early governors and the work of the National Congress. If Twain could see beyond the colour of Indian life to the plight of the poor, he could in a sense see even beyond this. His overall view of India would seem to contain a certain mysticism, perhaps an essential quality for a correct understanding of this vast, heterogenous sub-continent. This is the feeling that pervades this passage from Following the Equator: "You soon realize that ,India is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it which is beguiling and which does not pall. You cannot tell just what it is that makes the spell, perhaps, but you feel it and confess it nevertheless. Of course, at bottom, you know in a vague way that it is historv: it is that that affects you, a haunting sense of
the myriad of human lives that have blossomed and withered and perished here, repeating and repeating and repeating, century after century, and age after age, the barren and meaningless process; it is this sense that gives to this land power to speak to the spirit. ... " FASCINATING AS ARE his observations on India, Mark Twain was not in the country on a sight-seeing tour: he was here for the express purpose of raising money to payoff his creditors, and the means he used for this were his lectures. Each of his At Homes in India was before a packed house, composed largely of Englishmen. But as the Times of India and several other newspapers point out, there was also "the large number of Parsee, Mahomedan and Hindoo (sic) ladies and gentlemen, who were no whit behind their European friends in the manifestation of their appreciation of the unflagging humour of the lecturer." (continued)
In his At Homes, Twain took some of his best stories and strung them together loosely, but his success as a lecturer was also due to his brilliant platform technique.
Like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain relied almost entirely on his books for the substance of his talks-"I went forth upon the public highway with all the other bandits, and gave readings from my works." Unlike Dickens, however, he did not read long extracts from his works. He just took some of his best stories, strung them together loosely, and retold them in his own inimitable manner. The material for Mark Twain's talks, like his books, was woven out of the fabric of his life. "I was born," he used to say, "in the almost invisible village of Florida, Missouri. The village contained 100 people, and I increased the population by one per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town-even Shakespeare." By the time Samuel Langhorne Clemens was thirtyfive, he had worked in several cities as a journeyman printer; had mastered the exacting trade of a Mississippi steamboat pilot; mined silver in Nevada; and worked as a reporter for several western newspapers. It was here that he started writing his books and adopted the name Mark Twain (an old steamboat term signifying a depth of two fathoms). One of his favourite stories went back to his mining days in Nevada. "In Carson City," he would relate, "I once made the mistake of buying a genuine Mexican plug-on the advice of a man I later found out was the auctioneer's brother. Soon as I mounted that horse, he put all his feet together-in a bunch. He lowered his back and shot me straight up into the air four or five feet. I came down again, lit in the saddle, shot up again, came down almost on the high pommel ... it was just too much variety for me. I decided to get off, but I was in the air again .... I came down and when I arrived the genuine plug was gone. I dug myself out of the ground and made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's funeral took place while I was in Carson City, I would postpone all other recreations and attend it." Near the end of his life, Twain remarked, "I have achieved seventy years in the usual way: by strictly sticking to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else." Until he died on April 21, 1910, he retained his fondness for high living ("I have no objection to abstinence-so long as it doesn't harm anybody."); for tobacco ("I can give up smoking whenever I want toI've done it a thousand times."); and for liquor ("I only drink as a preventive for toothache-I've never had the toothache."). These are the things he talked about in his At
Homes, and each time the audience would roar its approval. In his first Calcutta talk-he gave three at the Theatre Royal-Twain started out: "When a schoolboy it often fell to my lot to come across a rainy day-one of those days which schoolboys all over the world regard as too rainy to go to school and just rainy enough to go fishing." Returning from his unauthorized expedition, he decided to spend the night in a little office. Unknown to him, a murder had been committed in the town that day, and the corpse had been placed in the office awaiting the inquest. He then described how the position he was in gradually dawned on him and how he left the room. "I just went out from there," he said, "I did not go in any indecent haste. I went. I simply went out the window, and carried the sash along with me, although I didn't really want it."
"What a good thing Adam hadwhen he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before."
Old press clippings of the period provide a good idea of the contents of his lectures. Here, for instance. is an extract from a Bombay newspaper: "Mark Twain has a scheme for the moral regeneration of the human race. It is simple-a man should save himself by his crimes, by reflection upon the moral lessons of each error he commits. The more crimes, the more lessons, so that by the time he has committed all possible crimes-there are only 352-he would have reached the heights of absolute perfection. . . . Mark Twain was very funny, indeed, anent his first duel. It was with a rival editor. 'I had called him some little thing -an assassin or something. He did not like it and he challenged me. My antagonist was a long lanky gaspipe kind of creature-the worst possible material for revolver practice and an excellent shot. I had a number of little things to do first-borrow some money to leave in my will and so on.' As to how the duel fell through, and why, Mark Twain was eloquently humorous." Mter one of Twain's Calcutta lectures. the Statesman carried this notice: "Really, after all, what is there laughable in the story of the man who could never succeed in telling how his grandfather lost his silver ten-cent piece? We all know such a person, but his silly maunderiage, his habit of losing the thread of the
narrative . . . merely excite commiseration. Yet Mark Twain contrives to make him an unconscionably funny fellow. "When he takes up the discursive tale, it seems quite natural that it should merge into the adventures of a ram that knocked an old gentleman down 'by invitation'; of Miss Whittaker's glass eye, which she used to lend on occasion to a lady, when that lady, being also bereft of an optic, desired to receive company; of Uncle Lam who was killed by an Irish hodman falling on him; and of poor Mr. Wheeler who getting 'mixed up' with the machinery of a carpet factory, 'was wove up into fourteen yards of three-ply carpet, which his widow, being determined to perform the funeral rites handsomely, purchased and placed in a vault with a suitable inscription.' And yet no one is disappointed when he is left in doubt, at the end of these rambling observations, as to the ultimate fate of the ten-cent piece." There are literally dozens of such stories, but his success on the platform was due as much to his presentation as to the material itself-a point made by nearly every Indian newspaper reviewing his talks. As one summed it up: "The interest and the humour lie not so much in the thing said as in his manner of saying it. He sees that the essence of wit is surprise, and when one least expects a joke, he fires it at one's face and is off again on some other tack, long before the resulting cachinnation has ceased." To the general chorus of praise, however, there was one dissenting voice. The Madras Mail noted that "Mark Twain as a lecturer is disappointing. He has a sing-song mechanical kind of delivery which becomes monotonous as he proceeds." The vogue Twain enjoyed as a lecturer-when he came to India he had been speaking in public for exactly thirty years-was no happy accident. When a Bombay Gazette reporter asked him, "Then I presume you prepare carefully for your lectures?" he replied, "Yes, I am not for one moment going to pretend that I do not. I don't believe that any public man has ever attained success as a lecturer to paid 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." Any modern comedian could profit greatly by a study of Mark Twain's public-speaking methods. Hal Holbrook, the actor who has had great success with his Mark Twain characterizations, has dug up
many of Twain's notes with their subtle analysis of platform techniques: the value and exact length of the pause, and such tricks as letting a joke explode in three or four bursts-like fire-crackers-in the seemingly careless off-hand delivery. ÂŤWhenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
This technique showed to advantage in such stories as one set in Honolulu, where he was advised that the best way to see the place was on a horse. "I said I preferred a safe horse to a fast one," he begins. "I asked for an excessively gentle horse, one with no spirit whatsoever. (Laughter) A lame one, at that. (Laughter) They showed me an animal that looked as though he wanted to lean up against something. So I chose him. It went along peaceably enough, but so absorbed in meditation. It began to worry me. I thought to myself, 'This horse is planning some outrage. No horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly just for nothing.' Well, the more the thing preyed on my mind, the more uneasy I got, until finally I dismounted to see if there was anything wild in his eye. I can't tell you what a relief it was to find he was only asleep." (Laughter and applause) Though he was a master of the comedian's art, Mark Twain did not direct all of his effort towards making people laugh. As the Bombay Gazette commented, "Mark Twain has the power of moving people to tears as well as to laughter, and sandwiched between the numerous anecdotes with which he delighted the audience were one or two incidents of extreme pathos, rendered additionally pathetic by the author's dramatic and impressive way of telling them." This, then, is the secret of the Mark Twain legendand of his extraordinary success as a writer, as a lecturer, and as a man. Considering the time that has elapsed since he was born-November 30 marks his 131st birth anniversary-his image is incredibly fresh and alive. His appeal lies in his basic humanity, in the skill with which he depicts man as a funny, sad, inconsistent creature, capable of unspeakable cruelty and of heroism beyond belief. And this is why William Dean Howells, who knew him better than most men did, has testified to "the intensity with which Mark Twain pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world." END