Recently I chanced to find a copy of Professor Lowes Dickenson’s report of his travels in the East. It made me realise clearly the mentality of the British people in their relation to India. When the author indicates, in it, the utter difference of their temperament from ours, it fills me with despair at the unnaturalness of our relationship, which is so humiliating on our side and so demoralising on theirs.
In the pamphlet, he quotes, with approval, a remark made to him by an Englishman, an officer in India, whom he describes as “intelligent and enlightened”. It is about the maintaining by Englishmen of an impassable social gulf between themselves and the people of India, and it says:
“An Englishman cannot be expected to lose his own soul for the sake of other people’s politics.”
Here the author parenthetically explains the word ‘soul’ by saying that it denotes the habits and traditions of one’s race.
All this means, that Englishmen feel a sense of irreconcilable contradiction between their nature and ours; we are like twins, who, by some monstrous freak of destiny, have been tied together back to back. He concludes the summary of his Report by saying:
“But my own opinion is that India has more to gain and less to lose than any other Eastern country by contact with the West.”
He contemptuously ignores the fact that where no communication of sympathy is possible, gifts can be hurled, but not given; that while counting the number of gains by the receiver, we also have to consider the fracture of his skull; and while thanking the doctor for the rest cure, we must hasten to negotiate with the undertaker for the funeral.
It is the very irony of fate for us to be blamed by these people about the iniquity of our caste distinctions. And yet, never, in the blindness of our pride of birth, have we suggested that by coming into contact with any race of men we can lose our souls, although we may lose our caste which is a merely conventional classification. The analogy would be perfect, if the division of the railway compartments, with its inequality of privileges, was defended by the railway directors as being necessary for the salvation of the passengers souls.
Only think in this connexion of the ideal which the life of Akbar represented. This Emperor’s soul was not afraid, for its own safety, of the touch of a neighbouring humanity, but of the want of touch. Aurangzeb, on the other hand, who was certainly “intelligent and enlightened” and meticulously careful about keeping intact what he considered to be his soul, represented a force, insolent and destructive. Such an enormous difference in the ideals of these two most powerful monarchs of Moghal India sprang from fundamentally different interpretations of the world ‘soul’.
Lowes Dickenson has mentioned the possibility of India being benefited by her contact with the West. Very likely he meant the contact to be like that of the root of a tree with the water in the soil. I admit that the light of Europe’s culture has reached us. But Europe, with its corona of culture, is a radiant idea. Its light permeates the present age; it is not shut up in a single bull’s eye lantern, namely, some particular people from Europe who have come to us in India. Yet we are repeatedly asked to be grateful to this bull’s eye lantern and prostrate ourselves before it with loyalty and reverence. But such a thing is not possible; for it is a mere lantern, it has no soul. Not only that, but it circumscribes the light to a narrow circle of barest necessity. The full radiation of European culture has pervaded Japan only because it has not come to her through an unnatural glare of a miserly lens, exaggerating the division between the small shining patch and the vast obscure.
It is our pride which seeks difference, and gloats upon it. But sympathy is a higher faculty; it is our spiritual organ of sight: it has the natural vision of the Advaitam. The world is an ever-moving multitude with an eternal unity of movement, which must not be retarded in any of its parts by a break of cadence. The world of man is suffering because all movements in its individual parts are not in harmony with one another and therefore with the whole: because the relationship of races has not been established in a balance of truth and goodness. This balance cannot be maintained by an external regulation, as in a puppet show. It is a dance which must have music in its heart to regulate it. This great music of love is lacking in the meeting of men which has taken place in the present age; and all its movements in their incongruity are creating complexities of suffering.
I wish I could write to you simple letters giving detailed news about ourselves. But the world-wide agony of pain fills my mind with thoughts that obstruct natural communications of personal life.