A World of Illusion
THERE IS a belief in the West that we Hindus regard the world as an illusion. We do not, and indeed cannot, for the only idea of an after-life unquestioningly accepted by a Hindu the unconscious assumption behind all that he docs - is that he will be born again and again in the same old world and live in it virtually for eternity, with only short breaks for passage from one birth to another. What he is told beyond.this by the philosophers is neither very intelligible nor attractive. It only assures him of the negation of everything he knows, an Absolute Nothing. A people who have learnt to believe in that way are not likely to be the persons most ready to dismiss the world as insubstantial.
But perhaps we give the nations of the West the impression of being indifferent to the world, by their standards, by exhibiting a marked lack of energy in meddling with our environment. This, however, is partly due to the climate, which makes us casygoing and indolent, not such bad things to be in the low latitudes. In equal measure it is to be set down to a subconscious' philosophy which is not less logical than the consciously formulated philo- sophy of the Vedanta. We simply act in the spirit of the saying that you cannot have your cake and eat it.
Now, to enjoy the world is to exploit it, and to exploit it is to reduce its substance. It is natural in Christian Occidentals to in- dulge this propensity. Their religion teaches them to put their faith in a transcendental world and to live in anticipation of it, in the hope of leading an eternal though disembodied existence after the destruction of the material universe. Even those who have forgotten their Christian eschatology have kept up the habit of mind fostered by it. So they can use up the material world, bear to see all its iron, coal and oil being exhausted, and even take pride in squandering the cosmos with rakish self-indulgence. But we who believe in rebirth have to consider the unborn, who will be our- selves. Therefore we look upon the world as a property entailed in our favour for all time, and prefer to let it lic fallow for fear of disinheriting ourselves.
I think this is also at the bottom of the Hindu habit of hoarding money and the Hindu moral commandment: "Thou shalt not spend more than a quarter of thine income.' We deny ourselves every comfort, contemptuously rejecting the Western notion of improving the standard of living, in order to lay by and leave a fortune at death, so that we may not be poor in future births. We cannot indeed guarantee that we shall inherit our own wealth, but by making the saving habit universal we can at least ensure that everyone will come into some kind of inheritance. This is our way of creating a Welfare State.
So I am inclined to think that this notion that a Hindu considers the world to be an illusion, in so far as it has not been foisted on us by Vedantizing Occidentals, is only an antidote devised by the Hindu moralists to cure us of our desperate clinging to things mundane.
But once in my life, though a Hindu, I did have a feeling that the world was a phantom. That was when I was in England. Yet it had not begun so. From the morning when we had taken off frem Rome, all Europe was unfolding below me like a map, an enormous relief map. One of the advantages of air travel is that it simplifies a man's introduction to a new country by giving him a bird's-eye view of it, presenting it very much as it exists in a geography book.
As the aeroplane flew over Rome the city's well-known land- marks flashed past one after another: the Pyramid of Cestius, the Colosseum, the Forum, the Capitol, the Piazza del Popolo, the Pincio, the Villa Borghese, St Peter's. I could even see the Ponte A World of Illusion Milvio, where the Cross had won its greatest secular victory, the only victory that was military. All these I could identify from map-knowledge.
A little later I saw a lake, which I took for Lake Trasimene, and I remarked to the fellow-passenger in the next scat, an English accountant practising in Hong Kong, "That is where the Romans fought a great battle,' meaning the disastrous one with Hannibal.
'Where two gods came to their aid?' he asked. Obviously he was thinking of Lake Regillus. I was corrected but at the same time felt delighted to find an English accountant practising in Hong Kong who remembered his Livy or at all events his Lays of Ancient Rome. But when on my way back I was staying in Rome, an Italian professor told me that Lake Regillus had dried up, and what I had seen must have been Lake Bolsena.
In spite of this mistake my knowledge of European geography on the whole stood the test of the air journey. I saw the Main and the Moselle winding into the Rhine just as they did on the large- scale maps I had at home, and thought, not of the battle of the Bulge for which I had procured them, but of the vineyards. I spotted the royal palace, the zoo, and the Palais de Justice, when we were passing over Brussels, and at the time of crossing the Channel between Ostend and Margate I found that corner of Kent looking exactly as it did in the atlas. The famous chalk cliffs did not stand out glimmering and vast, as Matthew Arnold had described, but seemed like white creases between the blue-grey sheet of the Channel and the mist-softened green expanse of Kent. And as we were coming down on London Airport I caught sight of Windsor Castle and Eton College Chapel, which I could recognize from the air. I thought it was a good omen that the first historic buildings to catch my eyes on my arrival in England should be these renowned symbols of English life.
But all this confidence vanished as soon as I landed on the ground, and bewilderment took its place. I had no previous idea that things which were so familiar to me from description and pictures, which I could still identify as objects in outline, could become so strange and different in their three dimensions, atmo- sphere and personality. As long as I remained in England a persis- tent trance-like effect never left me, and nothing seemed quite real, not even the human beings I was meeting. The only persons who appeared to be made of flesh and blood were the Englishmen I had known in India. All the rest glided like wraiths.
By a curious chance the first play I saw in London, which was also the first play on the public stage that I had seen in my life, strengthened the impression. It was As You Like It at the Old Vic, and shortly afterwards The Magic Flute at Sadler's Wells con- firmed the spell. I daresay the large crowds of men and women I saw at these places had come to seek there the romance they could not find even in its most democratic standby, the cinema, but for me their own existence did not seem very different from what I saw on the stage. So, after coming back to London from Stratford- upon-Avon, I wrote to my family:
'As I roam about I still have a sense of the unreality of all that I am seeing, the light is different, the atmosphere is different, the smells, colours, and sounds are different. Even when I meet people, for example, when I met old Mr P and Mrs P-, or Mr and Mrs H-, I wondered if I was not calling up in a strange and intolerably vivid dream something I had read about in an English novel. In one sense, England has not become more real to me than it was."
One of my sons, all of whom have been brought up too care- fully not to be capable of taking the healthy exercise of being disrespectful to their father, wrote thus to an American friend of his, after quoting the above passage: 'Father has lived too long in the world of books in regard to these places, don't you think so?"
He was not being very profound, though. A man who has lived too long in the world of books in regard to anything, be it land- scape or love, in the sense of having formed a wholly imaginary A World of Illusion and romanticized conception of what is described in them, does not project his mental picture to transform the reality, he com- plains and whimpers over the shattering of the dream. That sort of cobweb is always crumpled up by actual experience.
My wonder, so far as it had anything to do with books-and it had a good deal to do with them-was due to quite a different reason. I felt as I did partly because what I was seeing corresponded almost preternaturally to what I had read about in books, and yet was infinitely more solid, tangible, and therefore more over- powering to the senses. If an Englishman were to find the world described in Alice in Wonderland actually presenting itself to his eyes he would have had a feeling broadly resembling mine. In no case was the idea of England I had gained from books contradicted by anything I saw, it was on the contrary completed, and that is why I can no longer recover the original bookish idea. It has been absorbed by the reality of which it was an abstraction, like thaw- ing ice in water.
(English literature is the best guide for foreigners to the English scene because it is more closely the product of its geographical environment, more ecological, than any other literature I have read. Į think English literature has gone farthest in fusing Nature and the spirit of man.
I was led to reassert this to myself by a remark made to me at Oxford. I was walking to my hotel from the railway station, when, catching sight of a line of low hills to the south, I asked my companion, 'Are those Cumnor Hills, and is Bablock Hythe in that direction?' He looked at me and put a counter-question, 'Are you thinking of Matthew Arnold?' When I replied, 'Yes', he observed, "That is interesting, for I have been reading a book by an Indian who says that his countrymen come to England with too many literary associations in their mind and are consequently disappointed.'
'I am not disappointed,' was all that I said audibly, but my mental comment on this Indian was severe. It did not become an
Indian, I thought, to air that kind of contempt for literature which came naturally to an English Barbarian, and to pretend that he was brought up on the Pink 'Un from childhood was even more unbecoming. But there were in the olden days in India a class of Indians trained to behave in that way by a class of Englishmen. An Englishman of this type resented our devotion to English literature as a sort of illicit atterfion to his wife, whom he himself was neglecting for his mistress, sport. Therefore he cast the Tenth Commandment in our teeth, tried to cure us of our literary- mindedness, and at the same time sneered at it. The Indians who lent themselves to this treatment and as a result acquired the anti-literary pose, came mostly from the very wealthy and princely classes, who, as Kipling put it, were bear-led by their English tutors.
As an Indian of the ordinary type I am not ashamed to say that if I am to be anything of an Englishman at all, I would rather be an imitation of Jeeves, the manservant, than of his gentleman master. We stand nowhere in regard to England if we give up things like literature. Neither the racehorse, nor cricket and foot- ball, nor even whisky, on which greater reliance is often placed, can be an adequate substitute. We cannot say as an Australian, New Zealander, or even American can say to his son, 'Go and see that manor or farm, for that is where your ancestors came from." It is not for us to say that blood is thicker than water. The only ties felt in the heart that we can have with England are those created by things of the mind. The Englishmen who did their best to break those ties have lost the Indian Empire, and the Indians who allowed them to do so are the most bored or querulous set of foreigners who visit England.
Meeting the Third Dimension
BUT THERE was also something external behind this sense of unreality, and it was, of course, the combination of light and temperature. People from the tropics need a certain level of warmth inside and outside themselves to awaken their sense of actuality, and in its absence, if their faculties do not go into hibernation, they get a feeling as if they were in the castle of the Sleeping Beauty. This is so weirdly oppressive that many reduce their sensibility and observe even less in England than they do in their own countries.
The same effect is felt by the people of cold countries when it becomes unusually hot for them. At Oxford an English friend to whom I mentioned this impression of unreality immediately remarked, 'Mr Chaudhuri, we have the same kind of feeling just for a day or two in the summer, and that is where the phrase "midsummer madness" has come from.' I can well believe that, for on my return to Delhi even I was dazed as a result of the transition from 40°-60°F. to 85°-105°F. in about twenty-four hours.
The light on its part never appears like full daylight to us. To me it always seemed to be dawn there, and I often asked myself, 'Is the sun never going to rise high in this country?' I found it quite impossible to guess where it was in the sky from the condition of the light, which was not only unnaturally low, but also shot through and through with an all-pervasive grey.
After seeing this light I understood why an English Viceroy of India would never remain out of doors except in the early morning even in the cold season, and also why, when I was showing the sights of Delhi to a distinguished English man of letters on a cloudy and grey day, he said that he was better able to feel the grandeur and beauty of the Qutb Minar in that light than on the previous occasion when it was sunny, although that too was a day of our winter.
This light contributes to the sense of unreality. It also creates a mood of pensive wonder, so that a man from the tropics finds it impossible to be gay or blithe in England, although he may be very happy and even achingly joyous. If we were given to writing poetry we would have written Odes to Evening in the broad noon:
If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song May hope, O pensive Eve, to soothe thine ear Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs, and dying gales....
The Nymph Reserved was there at all times of the day.
But I wish to speak here, not so much of the psychological, as of the optical effect of this light. Everything in England presents itself to our eyes in a manner different from visual phenomena on the plains of India. We get a curious sense of the reality of the third dimension, which is perhaps most easily illustrated with reference to trees. Something I had noticed about them in England and France made me take a look at the extensive park which can be seen from the verandah of my flat in Delhi on the very morning I returned from abroad.
There,' I said, 'those trees do look flat, and at midday when the hot winds will be blowing they will become a mirage.' The mango is of all the trees of the Indian plains the most plastic in appearance, but even it loses its roundness except during the rains when there is a good deal of moisture in the atmosphere. In the West the poplar furnishes an instance of the opposite kind. Among all the trees there it is the one which can be expected to look most like a paper cut-out. But even when leafless it keeps its plasticity. When I was in England the trees had not come into leaf, for they Meeting the Third Dimension were all late that year with the exception of a few horse-chestnuts. Nevertheless the bare branches did not look fan-like as such branches do in India, they looked broom-like, and the rooks' nests emphasized the roundness. I was able to judge the real appearance of trees in the West in France.
But the effect is most powerfully and cleanly observed in architecture. I arrived in London one afternoon, and early next morning I was walking towards Hyde Park from a place near Albion Gate. It was, I believe, a normal residential locality, and in any case it had no features of any particular interest. But the whole scene affected me in a very queer way, and trying to account for this sensation of strangeness and even oddity, I found that to my eyes the houses were rising more steeply and perpendicularly from the pavement, forming a higher skyline, and altogether standing more four-square than anything in the way of houses I had seen doing in my own country, even in a big modern city like Calcutta.
The impression of solidity was so strong that if I had had a hammer in my hand I should have walked along unconsciously tapping the houses with it, and in a mood of impatience, which endless rows of brick and stone often generate, I should have involuntarily thought of a battering-ram, as in the same circum- stances in India the idea of a volley of burning torches would have suggested itself to my mind.
When the architecture is fine the light sets off its proper beauty. In India I have never seen an architectural ensemble taking shape as does the Place Vendôme in Paris, or the courts and quads at Cambridge and Oxford, all of which seemed to convert even the enclosed air into cubes. I cannot remember any historic building in northern India, with the exception of the Taj at dawn, which conveys the feeling of mass. Our temples, big and soaring as they are, get lost in the upper air, and do not stand out as, for instance, I saw Winchester or Chartres doing. The beauty of our monu- ments is more like that of a clean-cut etching, it lies in their outline. The three-dimensionality of the Western buildings is felt even in their interiors. In the spacious audience halls of the Muslim palaces and inside most of the mosques I have a sensation of extension in space confined only to a plane surface, before, behind, and to right and left. But in England and France the walls or pillars and the ceilings were always forcing themselves on my consciousness. My senses climbed up one set of piers, crawled across the ceiling, and tame down again along the piers on the opposite side. I felt this most strongly in the Gothic cathedrals and the great chapels, like Henry VII's, St George's, King's College, but certainly it was equally perceptible in St Paul's as well as St Peter's.
Sir Edwin Lutyens, the English architect, became aware of this as soon as he arrived in India to plan and design the new capital in Delhi at the invitation of the Indian Government. He noticed that the fierce sun of the country disrupted architectural masses, and after examining the Mogul buildings he thought that their wide cornices or dripstones were meant to counteract the blurring effect of the light along the upper edges, by throwing a broad band of shadow and thus solidifying the top. Whether the Moguls had any such conscious motive or not, the optical effect observed by Lutyens is at all events real, as I have seen myself. This also explains why in India we not only tolerate but even yearn for a certain amount of corpulence in the human figure, both masculine and feminine. A bulk which in Regent's Park would be mistaken for that of a hippopotamus strayed from its enclosure, would, after the light of Delhi had played on it to produce its disruptive effect, only give to the physical presence of a man or woman its modicum of impressiveness.
Lutyens also spoke of the washing away of colour by the Indian sun, not of fading with time or being filmed with dust, but appearing far less deep than it really was at all times. In England I made the opposite discovery and found that colour in my country and colour there were quite different things. In our country we have many flowers with blazing colours, but these Meeting the Third Dimension hues always seem to flow and run into the surrounding atmos- phere, as dyes which are not fast do in water. In England and France on the other hand I saw floral colours almost as frozen masses, and for the first time understood the plastic function of colour in painting. All the flowers in the West had to my eyes a pronounced waxen appearance, and when they were the annuals I was familiar with in India-for we sultivate many English annuals in our country-they seemed to be quite different flowers. In borders and beds the English flowers looked like pietra dura, and in formal parterres, as in the Knot Garden of New Place at Stratford-upon-Avon, they seemed to have been woven into a vast Persian carpet.
Another striking effect of the light is seen in the English land- scape, which seemed decidedly more stereoscopic to me than any visual reality I had been familiar with previously. I thought I was looking at everything through a pair of prismatie binoculars. In India any landscape tends to resolve into a silhouette, with a side- to-side linking of its components, in the West it becomes a composition in depth, with an into-the-picture movement, a recession, which carries the eye of the onlooker, wherever any opening is left, to the vanishing point on the horizon. The con- figuration of the country, the ever-present rolling aspect, accen- tuates the impression, as I found when I looked up a slope to a ring of trees or down a hill into a wooded hollow. I am not surprised to find Englishmen regarding flat country as dull, nor at their reading a figurative meaning into the phrase 'lie of the land", for being always aware of their position in space they quite spontaneously carry the association into the sphere of their actions and behaviour, matching geographical with psychological topo- graphy.
Moreover, whenever a landscape has been consciously laid out the natural appearance of the country not only inspires the design, it is even made more coherent and obvious. I felt this in every park of every great country house I saw, but most strongly perhaps when I was standing before the conservatory in Warwick Castle, inside which is the famous Warwick Vase. A peacock was walking on the terrace, steps led down to the formal garden, then the ground sloped towards the river to show a long stretch of gleam- ing water between wooded hills. It was a wholly traditional aspect of the English landscape, but to me it was novel to the point of being revolutionary.
The interiors of the houses were so disposed that they showed the aspects in the same way. While going through some of them, I could understand why Elizabeth Bennet ceased to look at the furniture at Pemberley, and went to a window, for I too found that outside objects were taking different positions from room to room, and that from every window there were beauties to be seen.
But perhaps even more than in landscape gardening the plastic vision finds a significant expression in the gardens themselves. Landscape after all is a collection of features disposed in space, but we think of a garden most naturally as a plane surface, with a two-dimensional pattern. But the English gardens become three- dimensional through variations of level. Until I had seen them with their terraces, sunk lawns, ponds and hedges, I could never imagine that gardens could be so architectural and even statuesque. I think I ought to stress the hedges, for they are linear by their very function, but in the Western gardens they had become cubic. Clipped yew, topiaries, or even formal gardens are unthinkable in the tropics. The formal gardens which the Moguls introduced in India are a wholly different kind of creation, a horticultural extension of the flat and linear Persian art.
All this must seem very trite. But what I want to do is to lead from these observed facts to a generalization which though not wholly new has been confirmed in me by experience. All art critics, and above all Roger Fry, have said that Oriental art is linear, whereas the Western is plastic, but they do not seem to have realized that this distinction was related to the natural appearance of the visual phenomena to the peoples of the two worlds. The Meeting the Third Dimension different forms of art simply reflect the different appearances. An Indian who had seen only pictures by Constable but not the English landscape would not be very unreasonable if on seeing the landscape he argued that it was copied from the paintings. Yet there are clever people who think it fashionable to say that paint- ing can be un-representational.
Is that why the contemporaneous preference in England was for Turner, to the neglect of Constable? The English ordinarily look at a picture for its story, characterization, romance, or, at a lower level, moral, and perhaps they found Constable's work too much like what they were always seeing, while Turner was putting in the light that never was on sea or land. Perhaps this too explains why the French, being more analytical, took to him immediately. I had come to regard Constable as the greatest English painter without in any way denying Turner's greatness. So it distressed me when I heard a painter friend of mine, whose judgement I respected, telling me after his return from England that to his thinking Turner was decidely above Constable. But when I saw the original Constables myself and felt his passionate and revealing truthfulness, I wrote to say that I stuck to my old preference.
The third-dimensionality of the English scene seems to have influenced the visual evocations in English literature as well. There is a curious solidity and into-the-space movement in them too. From the top of Bredon Housman hears the bells ringing in all the shires from steeples far and near: Matthew Arnold sees the elm tree bright against the West, overlooking Ilsley Downs, the three lone wers, and the youthful Thames; Wordsworth takes in at a glance ten thousand daffodils, stretched in never-ending line along the margin of the bay; even Milton pictures the fallen Satan in this way With head uplift above wave, and eyes That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides Prone on the flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood.
If all this sounds very fanciful, there is at all events my experi- ence of the English scene. After seeing it I have come to feel how idle it is to speak of an objective vision. We see the world as it dictates our way of seeing, we in the East in one, a rarefied way, and they in the West in another, a concrete way. I do not know whether these different ways of appearing also correspond to different ways of existing in reality. But to me even the differing vision was something like a shock. Alice, when she wanted to get rid of the fright which the Queen had given her by calling for her head, cried out, "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!' I on the contrary exclaimed, 'Why, they are all cubes! And I am not at all surprised that a super-logical set of Europeans should have invented a style of painting called Cubism.
