Chapter 11-

Christian Civilization

THERE IS, however, one region of the cultural life of the English people in which there is no question of anything but seriousness. It is occupied by religion. It must be widely known that the author of one of the supreme achievements of English culture, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was not only devoted to indices and surds, but also to religion. He was deeply distressed by the conduct of a friend who at a dinner in his rooms had repeated some remarks made by children about very sacred subjects on the assumption that since they were innocent when made by children who were unconscious of any irreverence they were also innocent when repeated by a grown-up person. "The hearing of that anecdote, he wrote, 'gave me so much pain, and spoiled so much of the pleasure of my tiny dinner party, that I feel sure you will kindly spare me such in future.' Some Englishmen of today, who do not consider the humour of Alice to be Victorian, set down this seriousness to Victorianism. This discriminatory appraisement will simply not hold water. It has to be admitted that if the nonsense of Alice is national the religious susceptibility of Lewis Carroll is also national. Without it the book would have been a different kind of classic, something like Candide or Gargantua and Pantagruel.

I hope, however, that I am not giving offence to Englishmen by including religion in culture. There is no reason why I should. I wish very much indeed that I could also say something about the place of religion in the personal life of the English people, but I really had no opportunities for learning anything about that. Therefore I am compelled to restrict myself to what I saw. But that too was one of the major aspects of their religious life. Everybody recognizes that Christianity has been a great force behind the rise of Western civilization, and one of its earliest manifestations, the Anglo-Saxon, was intensely Christian. A very vivid way of realizing the difference which the new religion made to the life of these strong and young people is to think of Penda the Mercian and then of Alfred. Religion and culture have always inter- mingled in Europe, more so in England than anywhere else. This is in every elementary textbook, so if I also became conscious of it, there was no originality in my perception. Its only point of interest lies in the fact that it was suggested by a direct personal contact with contemporary affairs, and was not due to what I had read, all of which fortunately had gone out of my mind when I was there.

My introduction to the religious life of the English people began at Canterbury. There could be no fitter place for it. In the Cathedral a very learned canon explained to me what it stood for and symbolized. He considered the spirit which had created it, first, historically and then sub specie acternitatis. He did not, how- ever, say anything about the passing fragment of time in which we were living. The significance of the Cathedral for the present age, I could only feel from the atmosphere, and I felt it un- prompted. Canterbury was not a tourists' town, and I think it was a mistake to call the bombings of 'Baedeker raids'. The bombs did not burst merely on a four-star show-place, however ancient. They hit sensibilities whic, were very much deeper, and certainly went to convince the English people finally that there could be no compromise between Nazism and their way of life.

But I did not attend any religious service at Canterbury. The first one I attended was at Cambridge over Easter. I was fortunate in respect of the place of worship, for it was King's College Chapel. I went to see it one morning with a large number of visitors who had come to spend their holiday in the old university town, instead of going to a gay seaside resort. We were stopped at the entrance of the choir because a rehearsal was going to be held. I looked at the magnificent vault and the glowing stained glass; and suddenly heard a lovely voice singing a melody which rose to the lofty roof like a coil of incense smoke. I was told that it was the voice of a boy chorister. Its quality was different from that of any voice I had heard before, and only the previous night I had been listening to the whole of Handel's Messiah.

In the afternoon I came again, this time to evensong. My English friend, who had not intended to remain through the service but had come only to put me in my seat, stayed on, saying that it was a very mouing experience. He was a literary critic by vocation. I had read so much about the decline of religious belief, falling church attendance, and ignorance of the Bible that I was surprised by the number of people I saw and no less by the absence of any mood which could be called non-devotional. So the old question which had arisen in my mind about Shakespeare posed itself again in a more insistent manner. What was it that had brought so many men and women to a church service?

Though the choir of the Chapel was famous, that could not have been the main inducement. In any case, nobody was treating the service as a song recital, nor was there any concession to that character in the singing itself, from which all traces of virtuosity had been taken away. I noticed the expression on the faces as people left the Chapel. There was no sudden break in the silence, either through resumption of conversation or footfalls. They went out with a grave and abstracted expression as if what they had gone through was still holding them in its grip. Nobody even cast a last look at the noble interior.

The next day was Easter Sunday, and I again went to the Chapel. This time the attendance was even greater than on the previous afternoon. Once again I felt the power of the service, and though I could not define in what it lay, I said to myself that if anywhere I, a Hindu, could think of becoming a Christian it was in such a place.

I attended other services at Stratford and Winchester which gave me the same impression. But I did not see any services outside the Anglican Church, and therefore I cannot say what effect they would have produced. I suppose Englishmen would have found a difference, but to me that would certainly not have been material.

All Christian worship in England would have had the same appearance to me. Their spirit would have been common.

But what was that spirit? I never got any insight into it, and'I never asked any Englishman what he was seeking in his religious observances or what he was getting out of them. I could only apply Hindu analogies, with which I was familiar, and they failed to enlighten me. For instance, I wondered if they went to a church as we went to a temple. We go to temples to look on the image of a divine potentate and to watch the ceremonials of his daily life, which are modelled on those of a king. We do indeed prostrate ourselves in awe before him, but that used to be done by the ancient Egyptians before the Pharaoh and by the Japanese before their Emperor. Modern Indians did that before Mahatma Gandhi, and do it now before Jawaharlal Nehru. Between these secular prostrations and the prostrations before the gods there is only a difference of degree and not of kind, because in India the most powerful political leadership is itself quasi-religious. But certainly the English people did not go to their churches to look on a Di- vine Ruler and his daily life.

However, temple cults, popular as they are, are no part of true Hinduism. None of our scriptures refers to them or lays on a Hindu the duty of going to a temple or worshipping an image. These cults were borrowed by the ancient Hindus from western Asia, and even after their adoption in India they and their gods, together with the habitations of these gods, retained the features they had in their homeland. The gods remained the same divine lords of cities as they were in western Asia: all the greater reason why there could be no resemblance between our temple worship and Christian worship, for Christianity had fought and triumphed over those very cults. 

I then tried more specifically Hindu or Brahmanic forms of religious experience. True Hinduism in its most universally under- stood and practised aspect makes us accept the universe and requires us to make such a welfare universe of it with the help of the gods that any man-made welfare state can only be a pinchbeck imitation of it. Some of the welfare is thought of in purely worldly terms. In olden days kings turned to religion for the sake of conquest, for the preservation of their kingdom, and for the recovery of lost thrones; the merchant for wealth; the peasant for crops; and all for children, health, and prosperity. We do so still. This is the prayer to our Mother Goddess: 'Give me longevity, fame, good fortune, O Goddess, give me sons, wealth, and all things desirable."

But a Hindu's pursuit of welfare in the world is not wholly materialistic, although materialism is an essential part of the Hindu religious outlook. Hinduism has kept the old economic gods in the pantheon so that economics might not drive religion out of the life of mankind altogether, as it is doing in the West. It is certainly less foolish, if not more sensible, to keep the two together than to set them at loggerheads. In Hinduism this has served to infuse a glow of spirituality into worldly prosperity and happiness, which are most desirable and at their best in a semi-sanctified state as the necessary preliminary to the triumph of Dharma, which in its turn is the realized and unrealized righteousness that keeps the world going. This is the typical Hindu concept which stands beyond the purely material aspect of the Hindu welfare universe. But all these basic aspirations of Hinduism were absent from the collective worship of the English people, which seemed to be inspired by a movement of the spirit leading away from the world.

Nor was there any trace in it of the third feature of our collec- tive worship: namely, propitiation and coercion of the gods through offerings, sacrifices, and incantations, which create a gamut of moods from a propitious silence and super-magical tenseness to Dionysiac frenzy. In Hinduism it is not the dread Kali alone who exacts a bloody sacrifice from her worshippers, the benign Mother Goddess Durga requires this equally. But a Hindu has not to be a mere suppliant at the feet of his gods and goddesses. He can also assert the claims of mankind on the deities by scrupu- lously performing the duties which are in his part of the covenant. In the Hindu religion, somehow, status has been replaced by contract in the relationship between gods and men. Nowhere is this stated more clearly than in the Gita, which is almost a revealed scripture of Hinduism, though strictly speaking it is not one. About rituals it says:

With this prosper ye the gods And let the gods prosper you; Prospering one the other Ye shall attain the highest welfare. Gita, III-11 (Tr. by Edgerton)

There are, of course, many other facets of Hinduism, but those do not form part of collective worship and so do not come into comparison with what I saw of Christian worship in England, and even where the two did so, it will already have become clear that for me the result was wholly negative. I could not get at the meaning of what I was seeing with the help of what I knew in India, though it is possible that Englishmen will be able to feel from what I have said that their eligious experience is very, different from ours.

If I could not understand what they were getting from their religious observances, I was not less baffled by two other questions -how much of their religious practice went deeper than the contiquation of a respected tradition and how much faith was still left among them? Of course, I saw that a new cathedral was being built even in this age. That was at Guildford. It had arisen on a commanding site, and the main structure with the nave and aisles had been completed. Only the apse still remained to be built. 

There was a good deal of the spirit of the Middle Ages in the manner in which it was being built. Did that indicate the presence of a living faith, or was it only a continuation of the forms of the old civilization?

Even on the assumption that it was nothing more, it would be evidence in favour of the conclusion that religion and civilization were still interwoven with each other in England, as indeed in the West as a whole. What I saw gave me an even stronger feeling. It seemed to me that as soon as the life of the English people lost touch with religion it also passed beyond the pale of civilization to that de-civilized state created for a very large number of the people of the West by industrialism and democracy.

An incident at Canterbury made me aware of this. A party of visitors, clearly English, was being taken round the Cathedral by a clergyman. In the very church of Thomas à Becket he was having to explain to them who Thomas was, and yet just in front of them I saw the steps which had been worn down by the pilgrims who had gone up in double rows on their knees to the shrine. These men and women had even to be told who the Black Prince was. I, who had learned about both in a jungle of East Bengal before I was twelve, was deeply shocked in my historical consciousness. I asked some of my English friends in dismay whether knowledge of history was disappearing among them. They said that there was a good deal of ignorance of even the elementary facts of English history. Afterwards I realized that it was not a question of that alone. They had lost touch with religion, and had never trodden the Pilgrims' Way. They were falling from the civilized state for having acquired, not forbidden knowledge, but forbidden ignorance.

I do not think that there is any pretence of secularity in any aspect of the civilization of the English people. When in one of my writings I referred to the Coronation as a secular ritual, an English friend asked me in surprise why I had used that adjective. Even their deepest and highest scientific thought would not have been what it is except for that deep brooding over the mystery of existence which religion alone has fostered so far. In saying this I am not thinking simply of Newton, or Faraday, but even of Rutherford, Jeans, and Thomson. Even if all that could be forgotten, there would still remain the mores of the whole people, which are infused with the spirit that Christianity has created.

It is felt instanteously in the reverence which accompanies their religious rituals. I noticed this in the behaviour of the choir boys in King's College Chapel. As they went about placing the music and books on the stands, they looked like young priests. When they sang they appeared angelic, so that I wanted to say as Gregory the Great had done, 'Not Angles, but angels.' When I said some- thing like that to the young lady who was showing me round Cambridge she remarked, 'Some of them are little devils, though.' I could well believe that. But that was what most forcibly demonstrated the influence of religion on them. It was symbolic of the transformation of those wild folks from the German forests and Scandinavian fjords into civilized peoples.

With all this I also found a sociological fact in connection with religion, in which England to my thinking presented a complete contrast to India. There the so-called upper classes were more religious than the common people, while in India the situation is exactly the opposite. Religion belongs to the people, and the upper classes boast of their irreligiosity. It is not simply that they have lost a particular faith. Men are -lways doing so, and without that there can be no spiritual progress. But men are also striving after and sometimes finding new faiths. The upper classes in India are losing, and have largely lost, their capacity for faith, and they no longer feel its need. As an accident of history has for the time being made them the most prosperous section of the people of India in the worldly sense, they do not see the unhappiness of their

state. 

PART IV

State of the Nation

A Constitutional Parliament

IN BEGINNING this part of the book, in which I wish to set down what little I have to say about the contemporary situation of the English people, I am reminded of the tale of the third calender in The Arabian Nights. That is the story of the prince who spent a delightful year in the company of forty princesses and then, when they had gone to pay a visit to their father, came to grief by opening a door which they had implored him in tears not to open. I have wondered why the girls, when they were so afraid of the risk, did not take the obvious precaution of carrying away the key with them. But, of course, the story-teller made them give it to the prince, because for once an Oriental wished to demonstrate that, besides Fate, man's perverse will and fallible nature also could bring about his ruin and degradation. So the prince duly suc- cumbed to the temptation, and opening the door came upon a beautiful borse in the hall beyond. As he was a lover of fine horses he took it out to ride. But he animal was a winged horse, and as soon as the prince mounted its back it spread out two mighty wings and flew away, ultimately th owing him down and blind- ing one of his eyes by pricking it with the tip of a wing. I am afraid that by trying to write about the present state of the English people I am courting a similar fate. But why am I taking the risk at all?

In my broadcasts I had to include he subject because the B.B.C. expected me to say something about the Welfare State and similar recent developments in a series of talks meant for its overseas listeners. Now, however, I am free, and there is no temptation before me, for of all the things I saw in England contemporary conditions were those which interested me least. Indeed, more than once, I thought of omitting the topic altogether from this book. But after considering the matter further I find that there are one or two reasons which call for its inclusion.

For one thing, I saw certain aspects of the present-day life of the English people for which I was not prepared by what I had read. Perhaps they were implicit in the printed word, but some had not been fully brought home to me, and some I had simply not believed. I found the discoveries quite interesting in themselves, and others might like to hear about them. Moreover, I think I ought to cover the present situation to give completeness to my account. Not that I am afraid of being criticized for being taken up exclusively with the traditional aspects of English life and civilization. These are, to my thinking, the only ones that deserve attention in their own right. Nevertheless, I also think that the Timeless England whose presence I felt so strongly and which I have described in my own way, will remain hanging in the air and may even be dismissed as a fantasy of my own imagination unless I bring it in relation with present-day conditions. I became aware of this risk when soon after my return I went to speak before a very intelligent audience of students in Delhi on the cultural life of the English people. At the end of my talk a young man, possibly a disciple of one of the disciples of the London School of Economics, got up and observed that I seemed to have a yery narrow notion of culture, for I had not said a word about the Welfare State and economic questions, which were surely as much a part of culture as literature, art, the stage and the other things I had described.

The objection was so unexpected that I had no answer to it, and simply replied that I had spoken according to my lights, old lights, wax-lights in the days of electricity, so to speak. But I have now recovered my wits, and have arrived at a view of the connection between the Welfare State and other contemporary phenomena on the one hand and the traditional features of English civilization on the other, which will give greater solidity to my description of them and vindicate my stand. This view will come out gradually in the course of what follows. But in the first instance I shall give an account of my discoveries, beginning with politics.

Until very recently, before the people of the West began to admire us as promising parliamentarians, with even otherwise sensible Englishmen joining in the chorus to gain some private end, England was the Mecca of politically-minded Indians, and the House of Commons the stone of Kaaba. Since I belong to one of these older generations I should have been keen on seeing something of English political life. But for a number of reasons I had come to lose interest in it, and was not willing to devote any considerable time out of my all-too-short stay to something which had no great appeal for me. Nevertheless, I was bound to be shown a little of it, and I am glad of that, because even that super- ficial view gave me clues to the course of English politics since the end of the war, by which I had been very much puzzled.

It began with a visit to the House of Commons, and the experi- ence was memorable in its way. The chamber itself was fine, and I thought that it had been rebuilt with impeccable taste and pro- priety. There was a good deal of very becoming architectural piety in it. But what was happening within affected me very peculiarly. I could not brug myself to believe that what I was seeing and hearing was in any way connected with government, or with the cruel trade of politics, n which good-nature had no place. On the contrary, the mental state created within me by the proceedings was a more or less close anticipation of what I felt at Sadler's Wells the same night, and at the Horse Guards a few days later, when I went to see the ceremony of Changing the Guard.

Curiously enough, it was the garest Parliamentarian of our times, Sir Winston Churchill, whom I regard also as the greatest political figure of our age and perhaps the greatest the world has seen since Napoleon, Bismarck, and Lincoln, who contributed most to this impression. I saw him in what may have been his last appearance as Prime Minister in the House, and I was astonished by his wholly unstatesmanlike appearance and behaviour. He was not there when the sitting began, but came in unobserved by me while I was listening to an exchange between a Minister and a Labour front-bencher. Suddenly, turning my eyes to another part of the Treasury Bench, I saw an old gentleman huddled up between two colleagues. It was Churchill, whose portrait hung in my study during the war by the side of a large reproduction of the Mona Lisa, to the scandal and indignation of my cultured and patriotic friends.

He looked very much like his figure in a toby jug, but was much more rosy, white-haired, and childlike than I could have imagined him to be. It was surprising how successfully he had divested himself of all atmosphere, of all suggestion of being not only a writer, historian and political thinker, but also a statesman and war leader. He showed no signs of being weighed down with anxiety for anything, the world or his country, war or peace. He had no brooding prophetic air, no eagle glances, no rebukes for anybody. He appeared like a schoolboy in a class of schoolboys, not like a teacher among school children, as our new statesmen in India always try to look. Winston Churchill the statesman and Winston Churchill the House of Commons man seemed to be wholly different persons.

I cannot say either that the others created a different and more political impression. Everybody in that chamber seemed to be conforming to some pre-established pattern of behaviour, a fixed code which laid down that the debates should have an air of high-spirited and even angry contests and yet mean nothing at all in the upshot. The questions and answers seemed to me to be more like the pulling of crackers by two friends than the sharp rapier thrusts they were meant to resemble. I asked myself, "What is the meaning of this highly stylized behaviour?" As the question rose in my mind, the answer also suggested itself.

What I was seeing was a traditional and even venerable ritual, which had to be gone through correctly, decorously, and even in a devout manner, in order to maintain the tradition of par- liamentary government. Of course, I could also feel that there was a practical purpose behind this ritual, but that was a purpose which was contained within the four corners of the new role of the House of Commons. It seemed that after establishing a constitutional monarchy the English people had taken another great step in the evolution of their political institutions by bring- ing into existence a purely constitutional form of parliamentary government, in which the House of Commons also reigned but did not govern, that business having passed to one of the parties chosen by the people and entrusted with power for the time being.

This, however, is no triumph for the caucus or a fulfilment of the old saying that the best party is but a conspiracy against the rest of the nation. For if there is any conspiracy in party rule, the whole nation has fully entered into it. It makes use of the party system to run the government according to its wishes and to keep the bureaucracy, if not quite under its thumb, at all events in reins. Through the same system the nation keeps the ruling party subservient, for it can always turn that party out.

In this system of government, which can be described as a plebiscitary oligarchy, Parliament definitely has its place, be- cause the party chosen by the people cannot take over the government and administration directly, but has in the first instance to hold a majority in the House of Commons, and also because the House still remains the most important platform from which to canvass the people for the next lease of power. It is, however, a formal constitutional role. As to real government, the party in power can do anything it likes, so long as it keeps the nation pleased.

If there is anything at all in this view of the role of the House of Commons today, then it is pointless to complain that it is com- posed of small men. What business can bigness have in it, even when present in indivi-lual members? The formal duty of an M.P. is to keep the conventions and appearance of parliamentary government going. His real duty is to serve the party, passively in any case by always voting for it, and actively, if he has the brains for it, by making persuasive speeches to convince the people that the rule of the party is also the rule of reason and justice, for even though true democracy is government by collective whim, no electorate likes to think that it is being whimsical. In addition, the members have an overriding duty to themselves, which is to remain members, and some also think that in fairness to them- selves they cannot turn a blind eye to the prospect of becoming a Minister.

None of these functions of an M.P. calls for greatness in the usually understood sense of the word. Voting for the party is a fundamental duty for him, but it has no connection with ability. Edward Gibbon, an undoubted genius in his line, made no bones about it. He said, 'I took my seat at the beginning of the memor- able contest between Great Britain and America, and supported, with many a sincere and silent vote, the rights, though not, perhaps, the interests of the mother-country. Today the party demands the silent vote, whether it is sincere or not, with even greater insistence than in the past, and the member does not expect a sinecure.

The other functions of an M.P., particularly that of becoming a minister, require certain kinds of ability. As Thomas Jefferson has said: 'If due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few, by resignation none." In India the insistence on the right is so great that à Chief Minister has to create ad hoc vacancies to satisfy it. In England this cannot be done, and therefore ability even now has some place in Parliament. But it can be a specialized kind of ability, and some- times only of the kind which in the days of William Pitt the Elder made the Duke of Newcastle, and not him, the first man in Parliament.

Thus whether there will be greatness in or about Parliament depends wholly on external circumstances. The safe rule is to assume that if the English people are themselves doing big things in politics, some greatness will also make its appearance in Parliament. If they are not, any greatness that any member might possess will remain unutilized and unperceived. In a word, the greatness of the House of Commons can only be a reflected greatness. The two World Wars with the two periods of peace following them have proved that decisively enough. In a peace- time Parliament a natural selection operates against a Lloyd George or a Churchill.