Twenty-One Days in India; and, The Teapot Series | Page 9

Empire, we must all agree that the Baboo itself is a subject for
tears.
The other day, as I was strolling down the Mall, whistling Beethoven's
9th Symphony, I met the Bengali Baboo. It was returning from office. I
asked it if it had a soul. It replied that it had not, but some day it hoped
to pass the matriculation examination of the Calcutta University. I
whistled the opening bars of one of Cherubini's Requiems, but I saw no
resurrection in its eye, so I passed on.
[I have just procured an adult specimen of the Bengali Baboo (it was

originally the editor of the Calcutta Moonshine), and I have engaged an
embryologist, on board wages, to examine and report upon it.
I once found George Bassoon weeping profusely over a dish of
artichokes. I was a little surprised, for there was a bottle close at hand
and he had a book in his hand. I took the book. It was not Boccaccio; it
was not Rabelais; it was not even Swinburne. I felt that something must
be wrong. I turned to the title-page. I found it was a poem printed for
private circulation by the Government of India. It was called "The
Anthropomorphous Baboo subtilised into Man."]
When I was at Lhassa the Dalai Lama told me that a virtuous
cow-hippopotamus by metempsychosis might, under unfavourable
circumstances, become an undergraduate of the Calcutta University,
and that, when patent-leather shoes and English supervened, the thing
was a Baboo. [This sounds very plausible; but how about the prehensile
tail which the Education Department finds so much in the way of
improvement, which indeed is said to preclude all access to the Bengali
mind, and which can grasp everything but an idea, even an inquisitorial
schoolmaster? "Hereby hangs a tail" is a motto in which Edward
Gibbon had no monopoly.]
I forget whether it was the Duke of Buckingham, or Mr. Lethbridge, or
General Scindia--I always mix up these C.I.E.'s together in my mind
somehow--who told me that a Bengali Baboo had never been known to
laugh, but only to giggle with clicking noises like a crocodile. Now this
is very telling evidence, because if a Baboo does not laugh at a C.I.E.
he will laugh at nothing. The faculty must be wanting.
[The Raja of Fattehpur, Member of the Legislative Council, and
commonly known as "Joe Hookham," says that fossil Baboos have
been found in Orissa with the cuckoo-bone, everything that a
schoolmaster could wish. Now "Joe" is a palæontologist not to be
sneezed at. This confirms the opinion of General Cunningham that the
mounted figure in the neighbourhood of Lahore represents a Bengali
washerwoman riding to the Ghât to perform a lustration. Because
unless the os coccyx were all right it would be as difficult to ride a
bullock as to get educated by the usual process.]

When Lord Macaulay said that what the milk was to the cocoanut, what
beauty was to the buffalo, and what scandal was to woman, that Dr.
Johnson's Dictionary was to the Bengali Baboo, he unquestionably
spoke in terms of figurative exaggeration; nevertheless, a core of truth
lies hidden in his remark. It is by the Baboo's words you know the
Baboo. The true Baboo is full of words and phrases--full of
inappropriate words and phrases lying about like dead men on a
battlefield, in heaps to be carted away promiscuously, without reference
to kith or kin. You may turn on a Baboo at any moment and be quite
sure that words, and phrases, and maxims, and proverbs will come
gurgling forth, without reference to the subject or to the occasion, to
what has gone before or to what will come after. Perhaps it was with
reference to this independence, buoyancy, and gaiety of language that
Lord Lytton declared the Bengali to be "the Irishman of India."
You know, dear Vanity, I whispered to you before that the poor Baboo
often suffers from a slight aberration of speech which prevents his
articulating the truth--a kind of moral lisp. Lord Lytton could not have
been alluding to this; for it was only yesterday that I heard an Irishman
speak the truth to Lord Lytton about some little matter--I forget what;
cotton duty, I think--and Lord Lytton said, rather curtly, "Why, you
have often told me this before." So Lord Lytton must be in the habit of
hearing certain truths from the Irish.
It was either Sir Andrew Clarke, Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, or Sir
Some-one-else, who understands all about these things, that first told
me of the tendency to Baboo worship in England at present. I
immediately took steps, when I heard of it, to capitalise my pension and
purchase gold mines in the Wynaad and shares in the Simla Bank.
(Colonel Peterson, of the Simla Fencibles,