I

The religious differences of these three ancient dwellers of Bombay are best reflected in the burial of the dead. The Mohammedans place their dead in tombs like everywhere else. The Hindus cremate their dead. People take whoever dies during the day to a spacious cemetery enclosed by high walls or, in other words, a cremation ground which can be entered from four sides, lay them on a common or private pyre, and once it gets dark, incinerate them all. Since this cremation ground is close to the Malabar Coast, we could see the fire in that building every night, and the powerful walls, illuminated by the red flame, looked like a colossal cyclopic workshop in the middle of the night. Taking into consideration a great number of the Brahmani citizens in Bombay, it is not difficult to imagine how much work there is to do during the night. A gentle breeze would here and there waft the scented smoke from the smoldering ruins when it blew towards our port; the rich spend a lot of money for the rest of the dead people’s souls here just as they do anywhere else, and since they cannot spend the money on bells, hearses, and other “pompous” things, they build a pyre out of expensive sandal wood and set their dear deceased on it.

It should be familiar to my readers that the Brahman religion prescribes that a widow be burnt alive with her deceased husband on a single pyre. It is not difficult to imagine what kind of scenes one could experience during such “ceremonies”; poor women would jump from the pyre half-burnt, but despite all of their screaming, they would be cast back into the flames by force. This religious custom has been banned in British India, but people in the inland parts continue to practice it as before. The widow goes to the burning site willingly, maybe because she believes in the promise of Ayurveda that she would continue a better life with her husband there, and maybe because she knows that it would do her no good if she protested.

The Parsi bury their dead just as rationally as the Hindus but with much less expenditure. At the foot of the Malabar hillock, at a high and spacious place, a quite large round roofless tower has been built. One is to enter it from the upper floor of the house that has been built next to it, through a long hallway. At the first glance, the spectator will notice that the trees in the forest are studded with vultures of all sorts. In the middle of the tower, on top of the vault from which one enters, there is a thick cemented steel grid. When a dead man is brought into the house, the vultures come to life on the branches, they start screeching and fluttering. Eagles and goshawks immediately commence flying around the tower, and some already sit down on its upper edge. The dead man is brought into the tower over the bridge and is laid down on the grid stark naked, and that same instant the vultures pray on them. Some are so hungry that they make a mistake of who they are supposed to eat and they attack the white carriers if they do not leave the site quickly. What happens after that in the tower is not hard to imagine: one eagle after the other comes flying out of it with a piece of meat in their talons and returns to their place. In a blink of an eye, the corpse is stripped of meat, and after them it is sparrowhawks’, crows’, and other vultures’ turn to eat it to the bone. Finally, mice do their job and the bones, one by one, fall through the grid onto the vault, from where the “undertakers” collect them and throw them to the bottom of the tower through a small door. Once the procedure is over, there is again absolute silence around the tower, until the same scene is repeated, and that is the reason why this place is called “The Tower of Silence.” Wherever the Parsi live, there is a Tower of Silence: in Aden there are only two or three families and even they have their monumental mausoleum. It is said in Bombay that sometimes the members of that religion are sentenced to death on account of some religious transgression, and they are exposed to the hungry vultures in the tower by force. I do not know if this is the truth; however, a girl was notoriously sentenced to such death because she had been in a proscribed relationship with an English officer. The authorities somehow found out about it and they came to the girl’s rescue just as she was to be brought into the tower. I was retold this account by an Englishman, a senior officer in Bombay, once when I gossiped about his countrymen, saying that they behaved in an unkind way towards the Parsi, the people of our race, and that they avoided their company. – If such an act is in accordance with European civilization – he said upon ending his story – then we are mistaken in every way! – To say it quite frankly, from that moment on I have gazed upon the colorful Parsi world with new eyes myself.

II

Now that I have started talking about the female sex, let me present to my reader the female dwellers of Bombay. Dark Indians are of middle stature, mostly petite, but, just like men, of very nice, proportional physique. Their faces are oval, symmetrical; their hair is black and long, braided and wrapped around their heads, embellished by white, very scented flowers. Their clothes consist of three pieces: a silk bodice with short sleeves; a drape wound around their legs in the form of swim trunks; and a longer drape into which the torso is wrapped and its end is tossed over the shoulders. In such clothes, it goes without saying, body shapes are so discernible almost as if there were no clothes on them whatsoever, in particular because the drape is made of thin white muslin, usually with a scarlet hem. The better-off women wrap themselves in silk, brightly colored drapes, and the women of poor coolies have only the bodice and the pants on themselves which are not too white. Their legs, or, more precisely, the limbs are naked, but above their ankles every Hindu woman wears a silver link, which is sometimes so thick that it may impede her walking. Apart from that, she wears on each toe one or two silver rings. She puts on her thighs a thickish chain made of intertwined silver wires, just like the men do, and they use it to tighten their pants. The bracelets, or, as I have called them, the links are semicircular in cross-section or thicker on the inner side, just like the bracelets of our women; however, they have no clasps, so they cannot be opened, and a goldsmith has to forge them on their legs. These links weigh much more than a kilogram, and if someone collected all the silver, based on what can be seen on the Hindu women in Bombay, from all the women in India, it would be quite an undertaking for the greater part of the whole English fleet to ship it all to Europe in one day. Beside the regular jewelry, the well-off women also wear golden earrings and necklaces, but all of them without exception, rich or poor, pierce the left nostril once they are married and put a golden button in it, similar to what can be seen in the ears of our women. This is the only sign which marks the difference between the married Hindu women and the unmarried ones. 

Parsi women are as white as lilies and fair-looking, of plump yet regular physique and with long black hair, which, once they are married, they cover like Jewish women in a tight silk headscarf so deftly that you cannot see even a tiny lock of hair. Since there is no poverty among them, they are clothed in silk garments. As regards the cut, these clothes differ in no way from the clothes on Hindu women, except that they are richer. However, the Parsi woman differs from others in that she wears tight silk pants and puts fine socks and slippers on her feet. The drape, which she wraps her body with, is usually made of colored Chinese silk; on a younger woman, it is of a bright red or blue color, and on an older one of dark blue or black. Each drape is hemmed with golden glitter, and it is so wide that it can be wound around the body three times: first around the thighs, as a skirt, then around the shoulders, as a mantle, and the end is tossed over the head and it imitates a capuchon [hood]. As the thin Chinese silk descends in fine folds down the body, it makes the clothes just as light as they are beautiful. The chest is clothed in a silk bodice of short sleeves, just as it is the case with Hindu women, save that the fabric is very expensive since golden wires are woven into it. These women wear no jewelry, and only some of them may be seen in a carriage with English “Schmuck.” Certainly, Parsi women are more beautiful than Hindu women not only because of the white color of their skin, which is much more beautiful and softer than that of European women, but also because of their nice and plump physique. Hindu women as a race have narrow hips and skinny calves, which tarnishes the beauty of their otherwise regular body.

Muslim women, finally, are clothed as everywhere else, in sirwals and colorful bodices; the silk cover they wear is the same as on all other Indian women, save that they display a lot of jewelry. They do not walk covered like they do in our parts of the world, but with their face open as in other women. In terms of beauty, Muslim women lag far behind Parsi women: there are too many overweight women among them, and their skin is not pure white.  

III

There is a huge monument of the ancient Brahma culture in Bombay, and I cannot finish my letter without recalling it. That is Elephanta Island at the end of Bombay harbor. The island got its name after a colossal ancient pagoda carved into its simple serpentine rock. But what a shape that rock got by human hand! A spacious staircase leading up to an elevated portico was carved into one side of the rock. At the end of this portico there is a labyrinth made of … I would say caves, if they were not spacious halls, lit up from above, whose arches rest on giant elephants. Hence the name of the island. The idea itself, to carve a simple rock in this way, is as audacious as it is unusual; and the architectural knowledge, which guided the execution of that idea, and the effort, which was invested there, arouses in man such admiration, when one looks upon the colossal proportions of this, to put it that way, building. 

There is but one such creation made by man elsewhere in India and that is the pantheon of the ancient Hindus in Ellora, which probably took centuries to complete, leaving far behind cyclopic buildings in terms of its magnitude. These gigantic monuments of the ancient Indian culture have withstood thousands of years of the detrimental effect of the hot and humid climate, and they will undoubtedly persist for at least that many more, until they are finally crushed by the ravages of time; and among those, the first Christian churches lie in dust, and only the underground ones, like those in Alexandria, have been preserved against the time that has passed. And who knows, maybe these colossuses will defy time even when the proud Christian cathedrals and underground catacombs are all sunken! The world admires the monumental architecture of Egypt, yet the Theban temples lose out in comparison with the caves, just as big as they are beautiful, or, better said, the fairy-dwellings on Elephanta. When we stand before these colossal buildings, being so tiny, it seems to us that the sight itself is but a vain image of our imagination, like the ones which beautiful Eastern fairy tales depict in our fantasy. Legend has it that the demonic mason Vizma Karma cleft the huge Brahma pantheon in Ellora in one night lasting for six months, and that he left his work when he heard a rooster announcing dawn, and that is the reason why the building is unfinished. And truly, considering the colossal proportions of these buildings, where a human barely reaches the ankles of an elephant, we are prone to believe that a supernatural force of sorts must have created it. 

The gigantic Indian nature is reflected not only in these buildings but also in everything that surrounds us on this continent. The formation of the mountains, with its regular angles and steep straight crevices, looks like a cyclopic dwelling when seen from afar; tall cumulus clouds resemble, with their deep shades and bathed in the warm hues of the evening, living giants walking in the sky, and our imagination perceives various human and animal images in every shape. In the town, one can see people carrying logs so thick that one cannot imagine what the whole tree must have been like; a plank of such a log is used to make a dining-table board accommodating six to ten people. This wood is either of dark color (teak wood) or of chocolate color (blackwood) and it is so solid that it can be carved into arabesques and leaves. Home furniture is not only made in good taste and deftly carved but it is also so massive that one can find a “fauteuil” or a cabinet two or three centuries old in a depot. To put it succinctly: Everything that exists in this country, be it made by nature or human hand, has a stamp of the constant and the glorious. Leaves are forever green; flowers smell nice even when withered; pineapple and banana, which are picked here, are eaten somewhere in Europe a few months later; a table or any other household item built here lasts for centuries; fabric does wear out, but it takes years until it tears; a building, once erected, survives for centuries and tells a story, maybe to the generation a hundred times removed, about the level of human culture that once was there, while at the same time the proud Europeans, the current lords of the land, still dressed in rawhide. Everything that surrounds us in these parts of the world not only attracts our utmost attention but also arouses admiration in us, and after a longer interval of observing and thinking, we retreat gladly to gaze upon our European “cultural accomplishments” more modestly. Whenever I have returned from Bombay to Trieste, everything has seemed so miniscule in it when compared to the proportions the eye got accustomed to in these parts of the world.

However, most certainly, there are a lot of miniatures in this gigantic world! Those are the people of our kind, who, in their pursuit of happiness, scatter across this beautiful and fertile land, to browse [like goats]. Like any other tasty fruit, India has its own caterpillars, that is, temporary residents who will, after a longer or a shorter while, when they metamorphose into gold-winged butterflies, fly back to their own native lands. But I will not let these small people spoil the feelings of devout admiration which I have saved in my soul for this colossal cradle of humankind: I will gather them on one ship and we will have enough time to inspect and observe them on a long voyage across the Ocean.

IV

So where have those thoughts taken me from this beautiful part of the Front India? I have started thinking about the centuries-old competition in striving to conquer this ancient country in which European culture was begotten. Fourteen centuries before the common era, cultured people from the foot of the Himalayas started entering the Hindukush, occupied Persian land and in doing so, they had left their cradle and moved closer to the west. Here, on the Persian Gulf coastline, they lay the foundation of their journey to Egypt, because trading ships, which could not leave the ocean due to their weak construction, reached all the way to Persia. So, what stopped a great people whose culture gave them an impetus to conquer? Their own nature. The sea gave them the pearl at home; the earth gave them gold and precious stones, and the field tasty fruit and fragrant spices. Just one palm, growing in the wilderness, fed them with its fruit, clothed them with its fiber, and offered them shade in sweltering heat. So, when nature itself offered them such joy, why should they struggle and make an effort for it? That is the cause of the tame, vicarious nature of the Hindu, which has made them an easy prey to energetic Asian races and which even today, makes millions of them slaves to the more energetic British. Once the ships became sturdier and began circumnavigating the oceans, the world soon found out all about the “Indian treasure” and the European game to scatter that treasure commenced. While the brave Portuguese and Dutch were spilling their blood on the coastline, which I am sailing by now, and conquering piece by piece of the Front Indian soil in their heroic struggle, a company of salesmen snuck up from another side, from behind, and that company, which became despotic because of Indian treasure, in less than two hundred years transformed into an Indian British power. It had been pushing the valiant Portuguese conquerors out step by step until it finally pushed them out entirely, leaving them only one place, Goa, on the west coast, maybe to remember their humiliation there. That promised land of the Indian British company is today part of the great British Kingdom, and since it is much greater in territory than the kingdom itself, they have named it almost an Indian Empire.

And the Indian people? They have tried countless numbers of times to shake off their uninvited guests, seeing that they would suck their blood out. In the middle of our century, we witnessed their last desperate attempt to liberate themselves; but we saw their leaders tied to the mouths of British cannons and torn apart. There has been dead silence in British India ever since: a nation of twenty million people holds in a tight grip another nation of two hundred million; the former makes the shackles for the latter of their own gold, and whatever remains (and there is a lot), the proud Albion swallows. There are some who think that it cannot last long, even among the English there are those who consider the British colonies in India to be merely a bivouac. However, I do not think that way: the Hindus have not been conquered by Britain, but by their own indolent nature. Where people are of such nature, there the energy of a single man cannot achieve anything. Before the British, the masters were the Dutch, and then the Portuguese; yet before them the Arabian Muslims—a handful of people ruled over the mass of Hindus. And one day when India is finally knocked out of British hands, the same people will be ruled by someone else, maybe the French or the German—just not the Hindu. Such is the nature of sluggish peoples and “passive races,” as a cultural historian has named them quite conveniently. – –

V

Greater European countries have their own corners in the East, and they observe one another covetously from those points, to ensure that one does not take more than the other. In order to prevent England from idling alone in the Indias, France has her own Pondicherry in the Front India, and her own Saigon in the Back India, and while the former is spreading comfortably across Hindustan and the Deccan, the latter does her utmost to create the “balance” so beloved by diplomats in the east of the Back India, in Annam; and in order not to be alone in that commendable job of plundering other countries, Germany has come to keep them company with their Schiller at hand—“Ich sei, gewährt mir die Bitte, In eurem Bunde der dritte.” (Please grant me my plea, to be the third in your union). And now all the three “great powers” are doing their best to make those people happy, each one in its own way. They have that right on account of—their colored skin. Truth be told, lesser maritime powers such as Spain, Italy, and Portugal also get a piece of the prey, and so, as we can see, the marauding of both Africa and the Indias is progressing “in the concert” of the big and small European powers. And it will probably go on in the same manner until that sluggish Mongolian and Aryan race galvanizes in the south of the Asian continent and knocks yet again on the European door, and then “the concert” will probably hide in a mousehole of a historical folder. 

However, today it is progressing quite well, just like our ship at the southernmost point of the Front India. We are sailing on the sea as if we were at home: as if it were not hot midday here, while in Europe it is still morning, and as if there were not huge pagodas in the scenery which are as many centuries old as our churches count in years. It is our sea because the machines are—ours, and when they chase us in the end, just like they are doing now in China, we rush back to our ship, where they cannot do us harm, and it will be so until the Asians remember again that there is a dry road to Europe, and start a campaign, to ask us what is being done over there, in their house?
 

1. Milan Jovanović Morski (Morski is a nickname meaning ’of the sea’) was a Serbian doctor, academician of the Serbian Royal Academy (today Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts) and a travelogue writer. He was born in Jarkovac, the Habsburg Monarchy, in 1834 and upon having earned his degree in medicine in Leipzig in 1867, he spent some time traveling as a cruise ship doctor for the Austrian company “Lloyd.” He traveled to China, India, and other eastern countries and his travelogues were written on that occasion. He died in Belgrade in 1896.
2. The translated texts depict his thoughts and observations on Indian burial rites, women in India, the colossal architecture, deft carpentry, and the nature of people in India as reflected through the history of colonialism in this area. Additionally, he comments on the hypocrisy of the European powers and assumes that it is just a matter of time until the proud Mongolian and Aryan race knocks on the European door again.