Even when I was very young, my mind was tinged with a large atmosphere and an environment of reality. That is to say, fact indicated some truth to me, even though I did not clearly understand it. That is why my mind was constantly struck with things that, in themselves, were commonplace.
When I watched, from over the wall of the terrace of the inner apartments of our Jorashanko house, the cocoanut trees and the tank surrounded by the huts of the milk vendors, they came before me with a more-than-themness that could not be exhausted. That faculty—though subsequently mingled with reasoning and self-analysis—has still continued in my life. It is the sense and craving for wholeness. Constantly it has been the cause of my separation from others and also of their misunderstanding my motives.
Swadeshism, Swarajism, ordinarily produce intense excitement in the minds of my countrymen, because they carry in them some fervour of passion generated by the exclusiveness of their range. It cannot be said that I am untouched by this heat and movement. But somehow, by my temperament as a poet, I am incapable of accepting these objects as final. They claim from us a great deal more than is their due. After a certain point is reached, I find myself obliged to separate myself from my own people, with whom I have been working, and my soul cries out—“The complete man must never be sacrificed to the patriotic man, or even to the merely moral man.”
To me, humanity is rich and large and many-sided. Therefore, I feel deeply hurt when I find that, for some material gain, man’s personality is mutilated in the western world and he is reduced to a machine. The same process of repression and curtailment of humanity is often advocated in our country under the name of patriotism. Such deliberate empoverishment of our nature seems to me a crime. It is a cultivation of callousness, which is a form of sacrilege. For God’s purpose is to lead man into that perfection of growth, which is the attainment of a unity comprehending an immense manifoldness. But when I find man, for some purpose of his own, imposing upon his society, a mutilation of mind, a niggardliness of culture, a Puritanism which is spiritual penury, it makes me inexpressibly sad.
I have been reading a book by a Frenchman on Japan—it makes me feel almost envious! The sensitiveness to the ideal of beauty, which has been made universal in Japan, is not only the source of her strength, but of her heroic spirit of renunciation. For true renunciation blossoms on the vigorous soil of beauty and joy—the soil which supplies positive food to our souls.
But the negative process of making the soil poor produces a ghastly form of renunciation, which belongs to the nihilism of life. An emaciation of human nature has already been going on for a long time in India. Let us not add to it by creating a mania for self-immolation. Our life to-day needs more colour, more expansion, more nourishment, for all the variety of its famished functions. Whatever may be the case in other countries, we need in India more fullness of life, and not asceticism.
Deadness of life, in all forms, gives rise to impurities, by enfeebling our reason, narrowing our vision, creating fanaticism, owing to forcing our will power into abnormal channels. Life carries its own purification, when its sap finds the passage unbarred through all ramifications.