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Turkish baths were places where Ottoman citizens expressed at once their sensual, spiritual, and symbolic being. This is where body and soul were meant to be reconciled, writes B. N. Goswamy
THE bather’s form, especially the female bather’s, has, one knows well, always been a subject much loved of the artists, whether of the West or the East. ‘The Baigneuse’, as the French call it, is something that neither Rubens nor Degas, neither Cezanne nor Matisse, could much resist. One can go back considerably in time and continue to find them: opulent fleshy figures soaking in water, or, coyly, about to enter it. Turning eastwards, consider all those Persian images of Khusrau catching his first glimpse of Shirin as she bathes, or lissome nayikas in Indian painting admiring themselves in thumb-ring mirrors having just finished their bath, hair streaming down shapely shoulders, swans raising eager necks to catch drops of water falling from them as if they were pearls. It is a painting by the great 19th century classicist, Jean Auguste Ingres, however, which created for me a trail of sorts. ‘The Turkish Bath’, the painting is titled, and in it the artist fills his large circular canvas with the most incredibly delicate renderings of the nude female form: in a vast stepped hall, figure is crowded upon succulent, loose-limbed figure, young and soft to the touch, recumbent or alert, eyes open or half closed in lassitude, even as a seated young woman keeps a watch over them as it were, her luminous bare back turned to the viewer. The beauty of the painting apart, however, is this what the inside of a Turkish bath looked like, I have often wondered. The more I inquired into the subject, the more I have wondered, and by now I am convinced that Ingres had never been inside a Turkish bath himself. The great and ancient institution could not have been unknown to him, but he was using it apparently only as an excuse to indulge himself, and to create a vision of Oriental luxury—or dissipation—, the sight of a bevy of voluptuous women in states of partial or complete undress. But then what does a Turkish bath, or Hammam as it is properly called, look like? Detailed accounts, and even some images, are available not only of the contemporary, re-created baths in Turkish or East European hotels that cater to today’s tourist trade, but of old, authentic baths that were once the glory of Turkey. There is, for instance, that 18th century account—of 1762, to be precise—by Lady Mary Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the court of the Sultan of Turkey. Turkish Embassy Letters, a work celebrated in its own way, is where the Lady’s delightful description of her visit to a bath in Turkey occurs. Quite naturally, the lady went to a women’s bath, and her description does not necessarily apply in all details to a men’s bath, but there could not have been too many dissimilarities, one imagines, at least in the physical description of the structures and the set-up. "In one of these covered wagons" the Lady writes, "I went to the bagno about ten o’clock. It was already full of women. It is built of stone in the shape of a dome, with no windows but in the roof, which gives light enough. There were five of these domes joined together, the outmost being less than the rest and serving only as a hall, where the portress stood at the door. Ladies of quality generally give this woman the value of a crown or ten shillings and I did not forget that ceremony. The next room is a very large one paved with marble, and all round it raised two sofas of marble one above another. There were four fountains of cold water in this room, falling first into marble basins, and then running on the floor in little channels made for that purpose, which carried the streams into the next room, something less than this, with the same sort of marble sofas, but so hot with steams of sulphur proceeding from the baths joining to it, ‘twas impossible to stay there with one’s clothes on. The two other domes were the hot baths, one of which had cocks of cold water turning into it to temper it to what degree of warmth the bathers have a mind to." So on does this long account proceed, filled with vignettes laced with wit and astute observation. But slowly, through it, and through the corridors of gossip and camaraderie and playfulness that she records, one is led to understanding how places like these worked. And to appreciating how elegant these structures could be and how much a part of civilised life they were in those times. The Turkish baths were an obvious throwback to the Greek or Roman, mostly Roman, baths—thermae as they were called—in their facilities, especially in respect of the different chambers of which the baths consisted: the frigidarium or the cold room, the tepidarium or the warm room, and the caldarium or hot room, back to the room with the cold plunge. They had none of the fine statuary and marble columns and mosaics that made Roman baths what they were—great architectural and visual treats—but they had an elegance of their own, especially reflected as it was in the tall domes and the exquisite shafts of light that filtered through from a great height, bathing everything in a gentle glow. Turkish baths were places where Ottoman citizens, as has been said, expressed at once their sensual, spiritual, and symbolic being. This is where body and soul were meant to be reconciled. Much else happened inside Turkish baths too, and one can go on speaking of them, as poets have done over time, sometimes with levity, at others with wit. But my mind turns easily to that great verse extolling the virtues of good company that Sa’adi, the great Persian poet, wrote against the background of a hammam and begins with the words: "gili khushboo-e dar hammam rozi/ raseed az dast-i mahboobi ba-dastam `85." One can only render it into poor prose. One day, the poet says, I received in the hammam, a wonderfully fragrant cake of clay (an early substitute for soap) from the hand of the loved one. Amazed, I turned to the clay and asked: ‘what are you that you smell so sweet? Amber? Musk?’ In answer, the tablet said quietly: ‘I am neither. I am but a clod of earth; my fragrance comes only from the company of flowers that I was in.’
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