Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Read online

  We came slowly up the splendid bay, until within half a mile of the town. The shores being low, nothing but an array of brown tiled roofs, and a small Gothic spire, was visible behind the crowd of vessels at anchor. On the other hand, however, the islands of Elephanta and Panwell, and the ranges of the Mahratta Ghauts, were gorgeously lighted up by the evening sun. But little time was allowed for admiring them; the anchor dropped, and a fleet of boats, conveying anxious friends and relatives, gathered about us. The deck was covered with pyramids of baggage, all was noise and confusion, here shouts of joy and there weeping, here meeting and there parting, many scenes of the drama of life enacted at the same moment. Finding myself left wholly to my own resources, I set about extricating myself from the bewilderment, and accepting the first native who addressed me, I embarked for the shore before the other passengers had thought of leaving.

  ‘Rupees,’ said the master of the boat, holding up three of his fingers. ‘Ek’ (one) I answered. Up went two fingers. ‘Ek’ again; and so I went ashore for one. We came to a stone pier, with a long flight of steps leading down to the water. The top of it was thronged with natives in white dresses and red turbans. Among them were the runners of the hotels, and I soon found the one I wanted.… A line of cabs, buggies and palanquins with their bearers was drawn up on the pier, and in order to be as Indian as possible, I took one of the latter.

  It was not a pleasant sensation to lie at full length in a cushioned box, and impose one’s whole weight (and I am by no means a feather) upon the shoulders of four men. It is a conveyance invented by Despotism, when men’s necks were footstools, and men’s heads playthings. I have never yet been able to get into it without a feeling of reluctance, as if I were inflicting an injury on my bearers. Why should they groan and stagger under my weight, when I have legs of my own? And yet, I warrant you, nothing would please them less than for me to use those legs. They wear pads on the shoulders, on which rests the pole to which the palanquin is suspended, and go forward at a slow, sliding trot, scarcely bending their knees or lifting their feet from the ground. The motion is agreeable, yet as you are obliged to lie on your back, you have a very imperfect view of the objects you pass. You can travel from one end of India to another in this style, but it is an expensive and unsatisfactory conveyance, and I made as little use of it as possible, in my subsequent journeys.…

  Bombay, as a city, presents few points of interest to a traveller. It is wholly of modern growth, and more than half European in its appearance. It is divided into two parts – the Fort, as it is called, being enclosed within the old Portuguese fortifications and surrounded by a moat. It is about a mile in length, extending along the shore of the bay. Outside of the moat is a broad esplanade, beyond which, on the northern side, a new city has grown up. The fortifications are useless as a means of defence, the water of the moat breeds mosquitoes and fevers, and I do not understand why the walls should not have been levelled, long since. The city within the fort is crowded to excess. Many of the streets are narrow, dark and dirty, and as the houses are frequently of wood, the place is exposed to danger from fire. The population and trade of Bombay have increased so much within the last few years, that this keeping up of old defences is a great inconvenience. So far are the old practices preserved, that at one particular gate, where there was a powder magazine twenty years ago, no person is permitted to smoke. Southward of the Fort is a tongue of land – formerly the island of Colaba, but now connected by a causeway – on which stands the lighthouse. To the north-west, beyond the city, rises Malabar Hill, a long, low height, looking upon the open ocean, and completely covered with the gardens and country houses of the native and European merchants.…

  My friend Cursetjee Merwanjee accompanied me one afternoon in a drive around the environs of Bombay. After passing the esplanade, which is thickly dotted with the tents of the military and the bamboo cottages of the officers, we entered the outer town, inhabited entirely by the natives. The houses are two or three stories in height, with open wooden verandahs in front, many of which have a dark, mellow old look, from the curiously carved posts and railings of black wood which adorn them. Mixed with the houses are groups of the beautiful cocoa palm, which rise above the roofs and hang their feathery crowns over the crowded highway. Outside of the town hall is shade and the splendor of tropical bloom. The roads are admirable, and we rolled smoothly along in the cool twilight of embowered cocoa, brab and date palms, between whose pillared trunks the afternoon sun poured streams of broad golden light. The crimson sagittaria flaunted its flame-like leaves on the terraces; a variety of the acacia hung thick with milky, pendulous blossoms, and every gateway disclosed an avenue of urns leading up to the verandah of some suburban palace, all overladen with gorgeous southern flowers. We rode thus for miles around and over Malabar Hill, and along the shores of the Indian Ocean, until the hills of Salsette, empurpled by the sunset, shone in the distance like the mountains of fairy land.

  1939 JOHN MACCALLUM SCOTT

  John MacCallum Scott (b. 1911) was a British Liberal politician whose volume Eastern Journey (1939) described a journey around Malaya and India shortly before the Second World War, when Bombay was both unusually Westernized for India and a stronghold of the Indian nationalist movement.

  Bombay is a law unto itself. It is more a European city than an Eastern city.… To the newcomer who makes it his first experience of India, it must have a tremendous fascination but at the end of the journey it comes rather as an anticlimax. Its broad boulevards and huge apartment houses are far too modern and clean, its sea promenades and its sophisticated dance halls too out of tune with all that one has already seen.…

  Yet Bombay is the sign of the times; it stands in the very vanguard of India’s future. Here a new India is being forged, an India which will be welded into one in spite of itself, not by force of arms but by the power of the rupee. Bombay is known as the Millionaire’s City. It has fathered great commercial and industrial enterprises; railway companies, great trading systems and banks have grown from tiny beginnings in its back streets. And there is still more to come. The city, more than any other in India, has acquired the business point of view. Its citizens are on the lookout for opportunities.…

  Two very different factors have combined to make Bombay what it is. The first is its geographical position. It is the first port of call for ships coming from the West.… Almost every official from the Viceroy down to the junior civil servant out for the first time must arrive there, and go on by train to Delhi or wherever he is to be stationed. And when going home on leave or saying goodbye for the last time, the hills behind the city will be the last thing he will see from the ship’s rail.… Tourists too are frequently to be seen in Bombay. They come on world cruises, stay for a couple of nights maybe, making whoopee in the hotels and nightclubs and then pass on to do the same thing somewhere else.…

  In the evenings we would stroll along the waterfront. Make no mistake about it, Bombay is a very beautiful city, ringed by soft hills and by the sea. To walk there at sunset is to enjoy one of India’s highest prizes. Frequently we would go to the Gateway of India, the grandiose building on the waterfront where the Viceroy receives the homage of the Indian princes when he arrives for the first time. Thousands would collect there in the evening, promenading up and down, women mixing indiscriminately with the men.… Often young Indians, straight down from Oxford by all appearances, would come racing down to the waterfront in sports cars accompanied by girls, just as though all the disabilities under which Indian women suffered were things of the past.

  Sometimes we would go to one of the hotels to dance, and there we would see parties of Indians seated at the tables, the men in faultless evening dress, the women looking very lovely in saris which sparkled with gold and silver brocade.

  1962 V. S. NAIPAUL

  Many writers have commented on the dramatic contrasts between rich and poor in Mumbai, and the intensity of the poverty encountered by every traveller. The novelist V. S. Naipa
ul (1932–2018), Trinidad-born and of Indian descent, visited in the early 1960s. The bleak picture of Indian life he painted in An Area of Darkness (1964) caused the Indian government to ban the book.

  They tell the story of the Sikh who, returning to India after many years, sat down among his suitcases on the Bombay docks and wept. He had forgotten what Indian poverty was like. It is an Indian story, in its arrangement of figures and properties, its melodrama, its pathos. It is Indian above all in its attitude to poverty as something which, thought about from time to time in the midst of other preoccupations, releases the sweetest of emotions. This is poverty, our especial poverty, and how sad it is! Poverty not as an urge to anger or improving action, but poverty as an inexhaustible source of tears, an exercise of the purest sensibility.…

  India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value; a thousand newcomers to the country before you have seen and said as you. And not only newcomers. Our own sons and daughters, when they return from Europe and America, have spoken in your very words. Do not think that your anger and contempt are marks of your sensitivity. You might have seen more: the smiles on the faces of the begging children, that domestic group among the pavement sleepers waking in the cool Bombay morning, father, mother and baby in a trinity of love so self-contained that they are as private as if walls had separated them from you: it is your gaze that violates them, your sense of outrage that outrages them. You might have seen the boy sweeping down his area of pavement, spreading his mat, lying down: exhaustion and under-nourishment are in his tiny body and shrunken face, but lying flat on his back, oblivious to you and the thousands who walk past in the lane between the sleepers’ mats and house walls bright with advertisements and election slogans, oblivious of the warm, overbreathed air, he plays with fatigued concentration with a tiny pistol in blue plastic. It is your surprise, your anger, that denies him humanity. But wait. Stay six months. The winter will bring fresh visitors. Their talk will also be of poverty; they too will show their anger. You will agree; but deep down there will be annoyance; it will seem to you then, too, that they are seeing only the obvious; and it will not please you to find your sensibility so accurately parodied.

  Ten months later I was to revisit Bombay and to wonder at my hysteria. It was cooler, and in the crowded courtyards of Colaba there were Christmas decorations, illuminated stars hanging out of windows against the black sky. It was my eye that had changed. I had seen Indian villages: the narrow broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the choked back-to-back mud houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, the swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet. I had seen the starved child defecating at the roadside, while the mangy dog waited to eat the excrement. I had seen the physique of the people of Andhra, which had suggested the possibility of an evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body. Nature mocking herself, incapable of remission. Compassion and pity did not answer; they were refinements of hope. Fear was what I felt. Contempt was what I had to fight against; to give way to that was to abandon the self I had known. Perhaps in the end it was fatigue that overcame me…. I had learned too that escape was always possible, that in every Indian town there was a corner of comparative order and cleanliness in which one could recover and cherish one’s self-respect. In India the easiest and most necessary thing to ignore was the most obvious. Which no doubt was why, in spite of all I had read about the country, nothing had prepared me for it.

  But in the beginning the obvious was overwhelming, and there was the knowledge that there was no ship to run back to, as there had been at Alexandria, Port Sudan, Djibouti, Karachi. It was new to me then that the obvious could be separated from the pleasant, from the areas of self-respect and self-love. Marine Drive, Malabar Hill, the lights of the city at night from Kamala Nehru Park, the Parsi Towers of Silence: these are what the tourist brochures put forward as Bombay, and these were the things we were taken to see on three successive days by three kind persons. They built up a dread of what was not shown, that other city where lived hundreds of thousands who poured in a white stream in and out of Churchgate Station as though hurrying to and from an endless football match. This was the city that presently revealed itself, in the broad, choked and endless main roads of suburbs, a chaos of shops, tall tenements, decaying balconies, electric wires and advertisements, the film posters that seemed to derive from a cooler and more luscious world, cooler and more luscious than the film posters of England and America, promising a greater gaiety, an ampler breast and hip, a more fruitful womb. And the courtyards behind the main streets: the heat heightened, at night the sense of outdoors destroyed, the air holding on its stillness the odours of mingled filth, the windows not showing as oblongs of light but revealing lines, clothes, furniture, boxes, and suggesting an occupation of more than floor space. On the roads northwards, the cool redbrick factories set in gardens: Middlesex it might have been, but not attached to these factories and semi-detached or terrace houses, but that shanty town, that rubbish dump. And, inevitably, the prostitutes, the ‘gay girls’ of the Indian newspapers. But where, in these warrens where three brothels might be in one building and not all the sandal-oil perfumes of Lucknow could hide the stench of gutters and latrines, was the gaiety?

  NAPLES

  The ancient city of Naples was the dominant city of southern Italy from the Middle Ages, but from the 12th century was under the control of, successively, Norman, German, Aragonese and then Spanish dukes or kings, as capital of the Kingdom of Sicily. It was a centre for the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 18th century, Naples — together with its nearby volcano Vesuvius and, after its discovery in 1748, the Roman town of Pompeii — became an essential stop on the Grand Tour for British aristocrats, and then American tourists in the 19th century.

  In 1870, Naples became part of the new Kingdom of Italy. In the 20th century it was notorious for its organized gangsterism. In the Second World War, heavy Allied bombing (1940–43) and eventual liberation in 1943 did little to shake this reputation.

  Unlike most of the other Grand Tour destinations, Naples is no longer a can’t-miss tourist destination, despite the close proximity of Pompeii, Capri and the popular Amalfi coast.

  1782 WILLIAM BECKFORD

  William Beckford (1760–1844), a wealthy English art collector, architect and traveller, undertook his journey to Italy to avoid scandal at home. On his arrival in Naples he attended the reception of Ferdinand IV, Bourbon king of Naples, who was renowned for his love of hunting.

  As soon as we arrived in sight of Capua, the sky darkened, clouds covered the horizon and presently poured down such deluges of rain as floated the whole country. The gloom was general; Vesuvius disappeared just after we had discovered it. At four o’clock darkness universally prevailed, except when a livid glare of lightning presented momentary glimpses of the bay and mountains.…

  For three hours the storm increased in violence, and instead of entering Naples on a calm evening, and viewing its delightful shores by moonlight – instead of finding the squares and terraces thronged with people and animated by music, we advanced with fear and terror through dark streets totally deserted, every creature being shut up in their houses, and we heard nothing but driving rain, rushing torrents and the fall of fragments beaten down by their violence. Our inn, like every other habitation, was in great disorder, and we waited a long while before we could settle in our apartments with any comfort. All night the waves roared round the rocky foundations of a fortress beneath my windows, and the lightning played clear in my eyes.

  4 November The sky was cloudless when I awoke, and such was the transparence of the atmosphere that I could clearly discern the rocks, and even some white buildings on the island of Caprea, though at the distance of thirty miles.… I lay half an hour gazing on the smooth level waters and listening to the confused voices of the fishermen, passing and repassing in light skiffs, whi
ch came and disappeared in an instant.

  Running to the balcony the moment my eyes were fairly open (for till then I saw objects, I know not how, as one does in dreams), I leaned over its rails and viewed Vesuvius, rising distinct into the blue aether, with all that world of gardens and casinos which are scattered about its base; then looked down into the street, deep below, thronged with people in holiday garments, and carriages, and soldiers in full parade. The shrubby, variegated shore of Posillipo drew my attention to the opposite side of the bay. It was on those very rocks, under those tall pines, San Nazaro was wont to sit by moonlight, or at peep of dawn, composing his marine eclogues. It is there he still sleeps; and I wished to have gone immediately and strewed coral over his tomb, but I was obliged to check my impatience and hurry to the palace in form and gala.

  A courtly mob had got thither upon the same errand, daubed over with lace and most notably be-periwigged. Nothing but bows and salutations were going forward on the staircase, one of the largest I ever beheld, and which a multitude of prelates and friars were ascending with awkward pomposity. I jostled along to the presence-chamber, where His Majesty was dining alone in a circular enclosure of fine clothes and smirking faces. The moment he had finished, twenty long necks were poked forth, and it was a glorious struggle among some of the most decorated who first should kiss his hand, the great business of the day. Everybody pressed forward to the best of their abilities. His Majesty seemed to eye nothing but the end of his nose, which is doubtless a capital object.

  1838 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

  American romantic novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) spent several years in Europe in the 1820s to early 1830s, describing them in two volumes published in 1838. On his visit to Italy he toured the usual tourist and cultural highlights.