I have just received a birth-day greeting from Germany through a committee consisting of men like Eucken, Harnack, Hauptmann, and others, and with it a most generous gift consisting of at least four hundred copies of valuable German books. It has deeply touched my heart, and I feel certain that it will find response in the hearts of my countrymen.
To-morrow I have my invitation at Zurich, and on the thirteenth of this month I leave Switzerland for Germany. Haven’t I said to you, in some letter of mine, that my life has followed the course of my celestial namesake, the Sun—and that the last part of my hours is claimed by the West? How genuine has been the claim, I never realised before I had visited the continent of Europe. I feel deeply thankful for this privilege, not only because it is sweet to realise appreciation from one’s fellow-beings, but because it has helped me to feel how near we are to the people who in all appearance are so different from ourselves.
Such an opportunity has become rare to us in India because we have been segregated from the rest of the world. This has acted upon the minds of our people in two contrary ways. It has generated that provincialism of vision in us, which either leads to an immoderate boastfulness, urging us to assert that India is unique in every way—absolutely different from other countries—or to a self-depreciation which has the sombre attitude of suicide. If we can come into real touch with the West through the disinterested medium of intellectual co-operation, we shall gain a true perspective of the human world, realise our own position in it, and have faith in the possibility of widening and deepening our connection with it. We ought to know that a perfect isolation of life and culture is not a thing of which any race can be proud. The dark stars are isolated, but stars that are luminous belong to the eternal chorus of lights.
Greece was not shut up in the solitude of her culture, nor was India, when she was in the full radiance of her glory. We have a Sanskrit expression, ‘that which is not given is lost’. India, in order to find herself, must give herself. But this power of giving can only be perfected when it is accompanied by the power of receiving. That which cannot give, but can only reject, is dead. The cry which has been raised to-day of rejecting western culture only means the paralysing of our own power to give anything to the West. For, in the human world, as I have said, giving is exchanging. It is not one sided. Our education will not attain its perfection by refusing to accept all lessons from the West, but by realising its own inheritance. This will give us the means to pay for such lessons. Our true wealth, intellectual as well as material, lies not in the acquisition itself, but in our own independent means of acquisition.
So long as our intellectual attainments were solely dependent on an alien giver, we have been accepting and not acquiring. Therefore these attainments have mostly been barren of production, as I have discussed in my pamphlet on Education. But it would be wrong to blame the western culture itself for such futility. The blame lies in our not using our own receptacle for this culture. Intellectual parasitism causes degeneracy in the intellectual organs of one’s mind. It is not the food, but the parasitism that has to be avoided. *