In 1878, in the middle of building a steel empire, American industrialist Andrew Carnegie decided to go on a world tour with his friend John Vandervort. The two set off from the Pacific Coast of the United States, spending time in Japan and China, before arriving in Ceylon and India.
The Scottish-born industrialist, whose parents immigrated to the US when he was 12, was raised in a traditional Christian family and harboured a range of odd ideas about India. His biggest obsession was the caste system. Starting from Ceylon, he kept observing its visible manifestations and wrote about them, along with other reflections, in his travelogue Round the World.
Entering India from Madras, Carnegie and Vandervort went to Calcutta and from there took a train to Benares, travelling in the most comfortable manner.
“We had all to ourselves a first-class carriage compartment containing two sofas lengthwise of the car and one across; above these were three upper berths, to be let down, if necessary, and used as beds,” Carnegie wrote in Round the World. “ A smaller compartment contained dressing-room, etc., for all of which there is no extra charge.”
“Our route lay through the opium-growing district, and the white poppies were just beginning to bloom,” he said. “I did not know before that only the white variety is grown, but, curiously enough, the red flower is not nearly so productive. This set us to thinking that there may, after all, be something in the Chinaman’s preference for a black dog to one of another colour.”
An unabashed supporter of the British Empire, Carnegie found it difficult to outright condemn the opium trade from India to China. “My readers may safely assume, I think, that the difficulties we encounter in restraining or abolishing the use of liquor among ourselves, also surround the opium question in the East,” he said. “It is their liquor. China grows most of what she consumes, and I believe would grow it all if the Indian drug was not admitted. Its exclusion by the Chinese would not therefore seriously lessen its use. Still it places England in a false position before the world to enforce its admission by treaty stipulations.”
At the time, the colonial authorities were earning about £7 million a year as revenue from the opium trade with China, which would work out to £1 billion in today’s prices. “I wish England’s hands were entirely free from all stain in connection with this business,” Carnegie wrote. “China should not be compelled by England to admit a drug which is considered pernicious.”
Travelling on the Indian railways, Carnegie could not help but comment on its impact on Indian society. He felt that the introduction of the railways in the country had helped lower caste barriers.
“Caste also goes slowly with the tide of change, and Brahmans are now occasionally found taking employment below that of their caste; and while a high-caste Hindoo some years ago would have considered himself defiled if even the garments of a low-caste person touched him, he now rushes into the same railway compartment among the general crowd and struggles for a seat with various castes, and says nothing about it,” he wrote. “One stand the English home Government took, in deference to English ideas as opposed to those of the Anglo-Indian authorities, which alone dooms caste, sooner or later, to extinction: it would not permit different classes on the railways to be established for Hindoos or Mohammedans, or for castes of the former.”
Carnegie said many in India feared that people will not use the railway for fear of mixing with other castes, “but the result has wonderfully belied these fears and vindicated the sagacity of those who ventured to inaugurate this system”. He added that one saw “Hindoos and Mohammedans, high caste and low caste, jostling each other in their efforts to get desirable seats in the third-class compartments, where, by the way, they travel for less per mile than anywhere else in the world, third-class fares in India being uniformly one-half of a cent per mile”.
Holy city
Carnegie was well informed about the ancient city of Benares and its significance for Hindus.
“Benares is to the pious Hindoo all that Mecca is to the good son of the Prophet, and much more beside, and he esteems himself happy if it is vouchsafed him to die in sight of this stream [Ganga] and this city,” he wrote in Round the World. “Pilgrims flock here from all parts of India, and thousands are carried from long distances, while dying, that their eyes may behold, ere they close, the holy city of God.”
While taking a boat ride on the Ganga, Carnegie saw the king of Nepal by one of the ghats, gazing at the sun and reciting his prayers. “For one full month this intelligent ruler, who speaks English fluently and is well informed of the views Europeans hold of his religious ideas, will nevertheless work hard, visiting daily the temples, going through various exercises, and bathing every morning in the Ganges,” Carnegie said.
The American industrialist witnessed a cremation in Benaras. As he watched the burning pyre, his guide told him that some women were still keen on committing sati even though the practice was outlawed by the British. To Carnegie, this did not seem outrageous. He said he would not blame the widows for taking their lives: “I’m sure I don’t see why, beyond the mere instinct of self-preservation, they should have a wish to live on. Those educated people among us who commit suicide have prospects before them which might be called blissful compared with what confronts poor widows in India.”
He was mesmerised by the textiles he saw in the holy city. “Benares has been famous for centuries for its manufacture of gold and silver embroideries,” Carnegie wrote. “I remember that Macaulay speaks of them in his essay on Warren Hastings as decorating alike the court of Versailles and the halls of St. James. We went to the native village and saw the work carried on. How such exquisite fabrics come from the antiquated looms situated in mud hovels it is hard to understand, but they do.”
Carnegie could see that, as a member of the ruling race, the racial hierarchies of the Raj accorded him privileges denied to the brown man.
“I never was more thoroughly impressed with the position of the European of India than to-day when pushing through the crowded, narrow lanes of Benares,” he said in his travelogue. “Our native guide went before us carrying a whip which he cracked and brandished among the crowd, calling out ‘Sahib! Sahib!’ and the people, casting one glance behind, at once hurried out of our way, making a clear track for our august person supposed to represent the conquering race.”
He seemed to enjoy the “respectful salaams” of the locals and their “deferential, not to say obsequious, attitude” towards the sahibs. “That ‘all men are born free and equal’ will not enter the Hindoo mind for centuries – not till England has brought it up to the standard of self-government, which it is gradually doing, however, by its schools and colleges,” Carnegie argued.
It saddened him to see the plight of the poor in a country that he said had the “cheapest labour” in the world. “It is doubtful if men can be found anywhere else to do a day’s work for as little as they are paid in India,” he wrote. “Railway labourers and coolies of all kinds receive only four rupees per month, and find themselves; these are worth just now forty cents each, or, say, $1.60 in gold for a month’s service.”
“Is it any wonder that the masses are constantly upon the verge of starvation?” he continued. “Women earn much less, and of course every member of a family has to work and earn something.”
Hypnotic scenes
Like many other visitors to Benares, Carnegie could not help but admire the hypnotic scenes by the river, which he said far excelled any representation he had seen or any description he had read.
“Photographs cannot be made to convey a just idea of its picturesque beauty, because the view is enlivened by such masses and combinations of colour as [English Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William] Turner alone could do justice to,” he said. “Indeed, my first thought as I saw the thousands on the ascending banks – one tier of resting-places above another, culminating in the grand temples’ towering at the tops – was that I had seen something akin to this in a dazzling picture somewhere.”
Only in London’s Turner Gallery could such colours be seen, he said. Turner “should have painted the ‘Hindoo Bathers at Benares,’ and given the world one more gem revealing what he alone, in his generation, fully saw in the mind’s eye, ‘the light which never shone on sea or shore,’” he wrote. “We have voted this scene at Benares the finest sight we have yet witnessed.”
From Benaras, Carnegie and Vandervort travelled to Lucknow, a city they associated with the 1857 Indian War of Independence, and appreciated its bazaars. They also visited Agra, where Carnegie was awestruck by the Taj Mahal.
“We have seen it, but I am without the slightest desire to burst into rapturous adjectives,” Carnegie said. “Do not expect me to attempt a description of it, or to try to express my feelings. There are some subjects too sacred for analysis, or even for words, and I now know that there is a human structure so exquisitely fine, or unearthly, as to lift it into this holy domain.”
So amused was he by the Taj that he proclaimed: “If I am ever sentenced to hard labour for life for some unlawful outburst of my wild republicanism, I will make one request as I throw myself upon the mercy of the court: Let me be transported to India, and allowed to perform my daily task in beautifying and preserving the Taj. This would be a labor of love, and I should not be unhappy with my idol to worship, doing my part to hand it down untarnished to future generations.”
Carnegie and Vandervort left India from Bombay, a city Carnegie described as “by far the finest city in the East”.
His description of life in India in 1879 sounds eerily similar to how some expatriates or non-resident Indians describe the country now: “Life in India is only rendered tolerable by the opportunity people have to enjoy things which would be beyond their reach at home without fortunes.”
Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.
