Edwin Arnold has written beautifully about Benares. Hundreds of people have also written about Benares. Tourists, enraptured with its river-front panorama, have exhausted their vocabulary in admiration.
And small wonder, for the scene is beautiful, instinct with color and grace and with that sense of souls' uplifting that surrounds the high altar of any part of the human race.
Benares is the Sacred City of the Hindu world. Countless temples adorn it, set like tiers of crowns above and among the broad flights of stairs that ascend from the Ganges, Holy River. Chains of yellow marigolds are stretched across that river to welcome Mother Ganges as she comes. And as the worshipers, clad in long robes of tender or brilliant colors, bearing their water-jars upon their heads or shoulders, trail up and down the high gray steps, they seem so like figures in the vision of a prophet of Israel that one almost hears the song they sang as "they went up by the stairs of the city of David, at the going up of the wall."
But my visit to Benares was made in the company of the Municipal Health Officer, a man of whom no artist-soul is apt to think.
This gentleman is an Indian. Before taking up his present duties, he made preparatory studies in America, in the enjoyment of a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar, ship in Public Health. Without attempting to convey an idea of his whole problem, one may indicate here a few of its points.
The normal stationary population of Benares is about two hundred thousand, of whom some thirty thousand are Brahmans connected with the temples. In addition, two to three hundred thousand pilgrims come yearly for transient stays. And upon special occasions, such as an eclipse, four hundred thousand persons may pour into the city for that day, to depart a few days later as swiftly as they came.
To take care of all this humanity the Municipality allows its chief Health Officer an annual sum equal to about ten thousand dollars, which must cover his work in vaccination, registration of births and deaths, and the handling of epidemics and infectious diseases.
Much of his best work lies in watching the pilgrims as they debark from the railroad trains, to catch cholera patients before they disappear into the rabbit-warrens of the town. Let that disappearance once be effected and the case will lie concealed until a burst of epidemic announces the presence of the disease. For, although the municipality pays the higher officials and the foremen of the Public Health Department fairly well, it allows a mere pittance to its menial staff, with the result that, if contagion is reported and disinfection is ordered, the subordinates harass the people for what they can wring from distress.
Benares is an old city. Some of its drains were built in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. No one now knows their course except that, wherever they start, their outlets give into the river. Constructed of stone, their location is sometimes disconcertingly revealed by the caving-in of their masonry beneath a building or a street. Sometimes, silt-choked at the outlet, their mouths have been unwittingly or unthinkingly sealed in the course of river-wall repairs. Not a few still freely discharge their thick[1] stream of house-sewage into the river, anywhere along its humanity-teeming front. But most, having become semi-tight cesspools, await the downpours of the rainy season, when their suddenly swollen contents will push into the city's subsoil with daily increasing force.
[1. "Thick" in particular because of the little water used in Indian houses.]
The city stands on a bluff, her streets about seventy-five feet above river level. The face of the bluff, for a distance of three miles or more along the river front, is buttressed by stairs and by high walls of stone. These, because of their continuity, back up the subsoil water, which, from time to time, bursts the masonry and seeps through into the river, all along its famous templed front. There, among the worshiping drinkers and bathers, among the high-born pilgrim ladies, the painted holy-men, the ash-pasted saddhus and yogis, you may see it oozing and trickling down from those long zigzag cracks that so mellow the beauty of the venerable stones.
Against bitter religious opposition, the British, in 1905, succeeded in getting a partial sewage system and water pipe-line into the city. Its main pumping station is at the south end of the town, not much habitation lying above it. The water is settled in a tank, filtered, and then put into general distribution, the Municipal Health Officer himself doing a weekly chemical and bacteriological analysis from each filter.
But the devout will not drink this filtered water. Instead, they go daily to the river, descend the stairs of some bathing-ghat, scoop up a vesself ul in the midst of the bathers under the seepage-cracked wall, and carry it home to quench the thirst of the household. All warnings and protests of the Health Officer they meet with supreme contempt.
"It lies not in the power of man to pollute the Ganges." And "filtering Ganges water takes the holiness out," they reply, firmly.
Now, whoever bathes in the Ganges at Benares and drinks Ganges water there, having at the same time due regard to the needs of the priests, may be cured of the worst disease that flesh is heir to. Consequently upon Benares are deliberately focused all the maladies of the Hindu millions. Again, whoever dies in Benares, goes straight to heaven. Therefore endless sick, hopeless of cure, come here to breathe their last, if possible, on the brink of the river with their feet in the flood.
Many of the incidents connected with this tenet are exquisitely beautiful and exalted in spirit. But the threat to public health needs little emphasis.
One such has to do with the over-burdened burning-ghats.
The main burning-ghat lies directly in the middle of the populous waterfront. "Nothing on earth can move it from there," says my conductor, "because the place is of particular sanctity. So all I can do is to try to see that all bodies are completely burned."
But complete burning takes a lot of wood. Not every heir will or can face so heavy a cost. And the Indian-run municipality, thus far, has been unable to interest itself in the matter to the extent of giving an additional quantity of wood when necessary to complete incineration.
"See those dogs nosing among the ashes. There--one has found a piece!" said I to the doctor, as we stood looking on.
"Yes," he answered. "That happens often enough. For they burn bodies here, sometimes rather incompletely, at all hours of day and night. Still, if the dog hadn't got that bit, it would simply have got into the river, to float down among the bathers. As the dead babies do, in any case. No Hindu burns an infant. They merely toss them into the stream."
There are no latrines along the water-front. The people prefer to use the sandy places at the water's brink among the bathing stairs. Thus and otherwise one typhoid or cholera carrier may, during his stay, infect ten thousand persons. The river banks are dried sewage. The river water is liquid sewage. The faithful millions drink and bathe in the one, and spread out their clothes to dry upon the other. Then in due time, having picked up what germs they can, they go home over the length and breadth of India to give them further currency, carrying jars of the precious water to serve through the year.
Also, the beautiful and picturesque temples do their part. This may be sufficiently indicated in the words of a distinguished Brahman pathologist, educated in European universities and an annual visitor to London and Paris. Said he, with deep feeling:
"The temples of Benares are as evil as the ooze of the river-banks. I myself went within them to the point where one is obliged to take off one's shoes, because of sanctity. Beyond lay the shrines, rising out of mud, decaying food and human filth. I would not walk in it. I said No! But hundreds of thousands do take off their shoes, walk in, worship, walk out, and put back their shoes upon their unwashed feet. And I, a Hindu and a doctor, must bear witness to that!"
The position of Public Health Officer of Benares, one key to the health of India, means so large and difficult a task that it would seem to confer honor and distinction upon any man to whom it is entrusted. The present incumbent appeared to be confronting his job in a good spirit, determined to piece out his little means with his wits. But I found in the attitude of an Indian brother doctor a differing view. This man, also a Rockefeller Foundation scholar, said: "That fellow has a rotten job."
"Why rotten?" I asked, sincerely surprised.
"Because it is so hard. But chiefly because of the indignity that he, a Rockefeller scholar, should have to serve under a white man. The Minister is an Indian, of course. But the immediate superior, the Director of Public Health, is a Briton. It is a miserable shame!"
Curiously enough, this remark was made while, with the speaker, I was visiting an Indian attempt at sanitary self-help. The attempt was not brilliant, but at least it was a beginning, and the workers were simple, eager, unpretentious little folk hungry and thirsty for encouragement. Seeing which hunger, our Rockefeller scholar, now an official and to them a great luminary, slowly, thoroughly, and without a glimmer of sympathy, impaled them on the toasting-fork of his laughing scorn.
Other holy cities exist in India, other centers of pilgrimages. Each, automatically, is a reservoir and a potential distributing point of disease, demanding the utmost vigilance and the utmost tact in handling.
But the public health problem presented by an ordinary Indian city is stiff enough. Take, for example, Lahore. The European section of the town has something about it of western America--all of one age, new, roomy, airy, with certain of its good modern buildings erected by the public spirit of that fine old Punjabi, Sir Ganga Ram. But Kim's Lahore, the old Indian quarter, where the crowds live and move, and in particular its bazaar, where the crowds adore to congregate, is the danger-point that keeps the Director of Health awake at night.
Streets about eight feet wide, twisting like earth worms after a rain, straight up from whose edges rise solid lines of dwelling houses sometimes several stories high. At their base, on either side, a row of little open-fronted shops, their cottons, brasses, holy pictures, embroideries, silks, grain-piles, jewelry, exposed on their floors or walls. Many rickety wooden platforms, built of intermittent slats, project from the front edge of the shop floors, at street level, to the edge of the street. Close under these platforms, on both sides of the road, runs an open gutter about a foot wide. The gutter is in steady and open use as a public latrine. Heaped on the slats of the wooden platforms, just escaping the gutter, are messes of fried fish, rice cakes, cooked curry, sticky sweetmeats, and other foods for sale. All the food-heaps lie practically underfoot, exposed to every sort of accident, while flies, dirty hands, the nosing of dogs, cows, bulls and sheep, and scurrying rats constantly add their contributions; as do the babies and children with sore eyes and skin diseases, pawing and rolling in the midst of it all, enveloped in clouds of dust and of acrid smoke.
And you must be careful, in walking, not to brush against the wall of a house. For the latrines of the upper stories and of the roofs drain down the outside of the houses either in leaking pipes or else from small vent-holes in the walls, dripping and stringing into the gutter slow streams that just clear the fried fish and the lollypops.
Mr. Gandhi, whose early sojourn in England has influenced his general point of view in more ways, perhaps, than he knows, has repeatedly written on this subject. He says, for example:[2]
[2. Young India, October 29, 1925, p. 371.]
Some of the [Indian] national habits are bad beyond description, and yet so ingrained as to defy all human effort. Wherever I go this insanitation obtrudes itself upon my gaze in some shape or another. In the Punjab and Sind, in total disregard of the elementary laws of health we dirty our terraces and roofs, breeding billions of disease-producing microbes and founding colonies of flies. Down south we do not hesitate to dirty our streets, and early in the morning it is impossible for any one in whom the sense of decency is developed to walk through the streets which are lined with people performing functions of nature which are meant to be performed in seclusion and in spots which human beings need not ordinarily tread. In Bengal the same tale in varying form has to be told; the same pool in which people have washed their dirt, their pots, and in which cattle have drunk, supplies drinking water...These are not ignorant people; they are not illiterate; many have travelled even beyond the borders of India...No institution can handle this problem better and more speedily than our Municipalities. They have...all the powers they need in this direction, and they can get more if necessary. Only the will is often wanting.
And again:[3]
[3. Ibid., November 19, 1925. Mr. Gandhi on "Our Insanitation," p. 399. In its issue of January 21, 1926, Young India all too clearly shows that the sanitary habits of the body of Hindu political delegates just assembled at Cawnpore in the Indian National Congress are identical with the worst that Mr. Gandhi elsewhere describes.]
Whilst the Government has to answer for a lot, I know that the British officers are not responsible for our insanitation. Indeed if we gave them free scope in this matter, they would improve our habits at the point of the sword.
Mr. Gandhi's judgment of the attitude of Indian-ized municipal governments was corroborated by my own observations in big and little towns in many parts of India.
The city of Madras, for example, the third largest city in the land, completed its present water system in 1914. The catchment area, in the hills, includes several villages. The water, as it reaches the city plant, is about as foul as water can be. By the design of the system it is here passed through slow sand-filters into a pure-water tank at the rate of 10,000,000 gallons a day.
But the population of Madras has increased and the capacity of the plant is now 4,000,000 gallons short of the daily needs of the town. Detailed plans for the construction of adequate new filters, backed by British experts, have been laid before the Municipal Council. But these sixty leaders and guardians of the public weal, Indians all, have adopted a simpler scheme. As I saw and heard for myself from the Indian Superintendent on the spot, they now filter 10,000,000 gallons of water a day, run it into the pure-water tank, then add 4,000,000 gallons of unfiltered sewage, and dish the mixture out, by pipes, to the citizens of the town.
In judging this performance, one must remember that it takes longer to outgrow race thought and habits of life than it does to learn English. The well-dressed man who speaks with an easy Oxford accent may come from a village where, if they desire a new well, they do today what their fathers did a thousand years ago; they choose the site not by the slope of the land but by throwing a bucket of water over a goat. The goat runs away. The people run after. And where the goat first stops and shakes himself, though it be in the middle of the main street, just there the new well is dug.