The Best of Mark Twain on India

 

Mark Twain has always been one of my favorite writers and I finally got my hands on a print copy of his India reflections in the book Following the Equator.

I’ve added several posts where I’ve quoted some of my favorite excerpts. Aside from his usual wittiness, I was amazed at how many of his observations are spot on for today’s India even though Twain’s trip was in 1887. All of the selections can be viewed here, but I’ve given a little introduction to each of them along with my favorite quote.

 

Mark Twain on an Indian Train

A beautiful section on Twain’s first ride on a train and the hospitality he encountered there. A great reason to check out Tips for Train Travel in India!

My favorite quote:

There was plenty of time, hours and hours of it, and the thing that was to happen would happen–there was no hurrying it.

 

Mark Twain on Cultural Adaptation

One of the best cross-cultural insights I’ve read as Twain reflects on the different rules regarding modesty near Varanasi. Lots of thoughts that can be applied to Value Rankings.

My favorite quote:

All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose. It is best so, no doubt. The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

 

Mark Twain on the Indian Crow

If you’ve ever seen the crows around here, you know what characters they are. Twain has an imaginary conversation with a few of them.

My favorite quote:

and they would sit there, in the most unabashed way, and talk about my clothes, and my hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and politics, and how I came to be in India, and what I had been doing, and how many days I had got for it, and how I had happened to go unhanged so long, and when would it probably come off, and might there be more of my sort where I came from, and when would they be hanged,–and so on, and so on, until I could not longer endure the embarrassment of it;

 

Mark Twain on Fair Skin

Skin color is a taboo topic in India since most people want to be ‘fair’. Here, Twain turns that argument on its head and talks about the uglyness of fair skin.

My favorite quote:

The white man’s complexion makes no concealments. It can’t. It seemed to have been designed as a catch-all for everything that can damage it. Ladies have to paint it, and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic, and enamel it, and be always enticing it, and persuading it, and pestering it, and fussing at it, to make it beautiful; and they do not succeed

 

Mark Twain on the Indian Heat

Twain is baffled when his colleagues in Calcutta refer to “the cold weather”.

My favorite quote:

I believe that in India “cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

 

Mark Twain on Why Hindus Don’t Accept Foreign Gods

A conversation between Twain and a missionary as they approach India. It is a great piece to not only understand a little more about Hinduism, but why trying to change the Indian worldview is as futile as it is challenging.

My favorite quote:

The Christians have but few gods, and they are new–new, and not strong; as it seems to us. They will increase in number, it is true, for this has happened with all gods, but that time is far away, many ages and decades of ages away, for gods multiply slowly, as is meet for beings to whom a thousand years is but a single moment.

 

Why Mark Twain Thinks India is Amazing

These are some of Twain’s general thoughts on India’s uniqueness as a country.

My favorite quote:

It takes eighty nations, speaking eighty languages, to people her, and they number three hundred millions.

 

 

Two oddities in Twain’s writings need some context. The first is his obsession with ‘Thuggee‘ and ‘Suttee‘. The first is the story of a band of killers who waited on highways and killed innocent people for sport to be sacrificed to their god. Some credit Twain with bringing this story to the greater public’s awareness. It even shows up nearly 100 years later in Indiana Jones. The full truth behind it is questioned by some scholars. Suttee (also called Sati) is the practice of a wife throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, thereby committing suicide. Twain references both of these practices multiple times throughout the book.   

The second oddity is a character called ‘Satan’. This is a bearer that Twain hired (and later fired) who looked after his things. He nicknamed him Satan because he couldn’t pronounce his full name. Not exactly a best practice when it comes to cultural adaptation, but what can you do?

 

I hope you enjoy them!