Chapter 12-

The Hindus did something like that, but with far greater thoroughness and in a wholly different spirit. They brought sexual life into their religion, or religion into their sexual life-in effect both were the same: but there was neither jest nor ribaldry in their sacrilege, only solemnity, which was the most dreadful thing about it.

I wish I could say that this was the lowest point of descent in the Hindu search for sexual enjoyment. Un- fortunately, it was not, As the centuries passed by their sexual life lost even the fascination of perversity, and be- came chokingly commonplace and squalid. Its all-perva- sive degradation at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury, especially in the towns, so shocked the Bengali Hindu reformers, who were inspired by European moral ideas, that they made it as much a part of their reform- ing campaign to rescue their countrymen from this slime as to preach the new monotheism. I know of this phase partly from my historical reading and partly from my ob- servation of the survivals in my young days.

The reformers succeeded to a remarkable degree, par- ticularly in the higher strata of their society. In this they were, however, helped by another force, an emotional impact which was the real power behind the appearance of a new conception of the sexual relationship that appear- ed in Bengal in the nineteenth century. It was a revela- tion of the passional life of Europe through English lite- rature which took the Bengali Hindus by storm, and its impact led them to recast the love of Europe in a Bengali Hindu mould, and bring into existence one of the most beautiful passional creations in literature and life ever seen in history.

But this also was to die and die even in Bengal. Today the Hindus are at the beginning of another phase of their sexual life. As in all other things connected with their personal life, here too, there is a reversion to the tradi- tional Hindu attitudes and habits with a reassertion of the old commonplace, arid, and degrading sensuality, made even worse by the addition to it of an imported sensu- ality of the most offensively shallow Western type.

I shall not discuss any of these later phases in this book, for they will form the subject-matter of another book dealing with the modern life of the Hindus. I am leaving even the analysis of the mixture of sex and religion for that work, because though this began in late Hindu times, evidence for it comes mostly from writings and practice from the fifteenth century downwards. In this essay I set myself the aim of describing the sexual life of the ancient Hindus only.

But I cannot close it without putting on record what I feel about the contemporary situation in India. To anyone who has any respect for life, or any feeling for the extraordinary filigree of sensibility which men and women as children of love and life have woven round the sex act, any reverence for it as the fountain of life, this contemporary discharge of low, cheap, and unceasing smut and rut is agony. Yet there is no escape from it, because on every pavement and in every street this filth is oozing out of the eyes, and even dripping from the tongues, which somehow unconsciously loll out.

This degradation, which is regarded as smartness by those who are wallowing in it, should not be called an abyss. That would be to give it an undeserved verbal dignity. It is gutter, and the foulest part of it is the Westernized stretch, on which float soggy copies of Lolita, Lady Chatterley's Lover, illustrated books on Hindu ero- tic sculpture, and basse vulgarisation of the Kamasutra in even baser English; and also the oily smiles and sniggers of the Anglicized Hindus who read these books.

Seeing and hearing all this a man feels like recalling the old Hindu sexual life, wild and tortured as it was, with all the passion that is evoked for the gods of Greece by the famous opening of the Schubert-Schiller song: 'Schöne Welt, wo bist du?-Beautiful world! Where art thou?'

THE HINDU ACEDIA

So their great anodyne also failed the Hindus. But that did not make them discontinue its use, for it is only one step from the sedative to the drug. That is to say, their excessive sexual commerce continued as a futile and meaningless indulgence, enfeebling the body and even more the mind, sapping the capacity for enjoyment, and yet making the enslavement stronger and stronger. Neverthe- less, it would be underestimating the yearning for forget- fulness of the Hindus to think that they would stop at this and not seek other remedies for their sorrow. They did, and some of them even discovered another solace which was absolutely fool-proof, because it was depend- ent only on self-deception induced by continuous auto- suggestion. I do not think that I have to say in so many words that this sedative was religious. If anywhere, it is among the Hindus that one finds decisive proof of the saying that religion is the opium of the people.

The most pathetic form of this consolation, which is to be seen everywhere even now, is an inexplicable devo- tion to an unresponsive material object, for instance, a brass image of the crawling baby Krishna, or a crude and garish print, on which women and at times even men will shower all the love and adoration of which they are capable. They will clothe and offer food to it, carry it about in their journeys, hold it in their lap, and lament, even if one feed had to be omitted in a train, that Gopal is suf- fering from hunger.

What is frightening in this is the stability of the hallu- cination. Ectoplasmic images disappear, the brass ghost never. It should also be pointed out that the Hindus never take to religion with this whole-hearted abandon until they are 'broke' morally and intellectually, also emo- tionally. Whenever any obvious or assertive religious inclination is to be seen in a Hindu always say: 'Cherchez le chagrin, for failure of mental and bodily strength may then be safely assumed. In my young days I used to parade my anti-religious opinions, and the elders before whom I liked to show off in this way always remarked contemptuously, 'Let the hot blood of youth cool, and you will come to heel.' Nothing abashed I would reply, "Yes, I shall also have a bent spine, and I shall walk with a stick. What does that prove? Today, as an old man I would say that I have seen so much of this feckless tragedy of Hindu life on this green earth and under the blue sky, that the moment I see any sign of the Hindu dementia in me, I shall cry out, 'Nunc dimittis. . . .

But of course, given the natural clinging to life and hope of all human beings, which even the Hindus have not been able to wear out, this falling back on self-delusion as a means of relief from the strain of living in the Indian environment could never become universal, even though it could be seen frequently. The majority were bound to pursue their ends in life as a matter of habit and obey the discipline of the biological prison into which they had converted their existence. But even when successful in the worldly way, they have never been able to overcome a sense of hollowness in living. So they have a continuous feeling of boredom as a contrapuntal line to the main tune of their existence. The modern educated Hindu in a high position in the bureaucracy, who is absolutely spherical, thanks to the creature comforts that he can enjoy, has this no less than the Hindu who is lean and has a hungry look. Those who know English and are fashionable call the gnawing sense of failure frustration', taking recourse to the modish word. It is astonishing to hear this word perpetually repeated even by students and by young men who have just entered life. I have, however, called this inescapable accompaniment of Hindu life its acedia.

But it is not really the acedia of which the monks spoke. It is acedia mingled with a more positive feeling-irrita- tion and bad temper, which makes it a dangerously active form of ennui. The ancient Hindu moralists had already discovered it, though still as a mental state which was paralysed rather than irritated. They called it klaivya, which meant impotence in the physiological sense in the first instance, and was afterwards employed to cover all forms of mental inertia. This paralysis of the will is so universal among modern Hindus that even the old idea that it is something to be ashamed of has disappeared from their mind, and they have forgotten the stern warn- ing of their own moralists that it is a deadly sin. On the other hand, they have made an addition of their own to it, and supplemented the inertia with a continuous but in- active bad temper and a corrosive sense of grievance. In its existing form what I have called Hindu acedia is some- thing like an acid.

This acedia in its quiescent form is always observable in the lifeless expression of men and women in public places, and the impassivity is most pronounced in places and situations in which one would expect the greatest dis- play of energy and alertness, for example, in shops, post- offices, or railway stations. The grave shopkeeper does not condescend to answer a customer until the inquiry is repeated at least three times, and not infrequently he does not respond to it at all, and the buyer moves on to the next shop. At a railway station the prospective travel- lers always stand or sit as if they had taken a vow not to move a limb. At a bus stop women and sometimes even men squat on the pavement. At the counter of a post office the clerk fills in the few blanks that are left in the forms with a stately leisureliness that ignores a queue of fifty people before him.

But it is near or in the courts of law that one sees most of this staticity, although it would seem to be so utterly inconsistent with the mission on which people come to such a place. You may watch crowds of hundreds of men, but you will never detect in their faces any sign of the ravening greed for money or revenge which brings them to the courts. On the contrary there is an ineffable unworldliness. I watch this with fascination at the bus terminus from which I travel and which is adjacent to the new courts of Delhi. The litigants do not seem to be in a hurry even to get down from the bus, and in des- cending the three steps with which the Delhi transport authorities provide their vehicles, these men alternately grasp the right and the left handle, and literally brachiate down like the Two-toed Sloth.

Over and above, there is something which is even more awe-inspiring. Since the craze for litigation seizes men late in life and increases with age, this slow procession of human beings creates a collective impression of senility to see which is to feel senile oneself. At first I used to get irritated by the spectacle and was repelled by it. But now I have learnt to see differently, with comprehension and also a passing sympathy.

I shall describe my impression by quoting a favourite author of mine, who puts the words in the mouth of a character of one of his stories. This man finds himself through a strange mischance in the company of a ghostly crew of a ghostly ship, and as he sees them he writes:

They all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins ratt- led in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest.

Next, about the impression made by the captain: 'It is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense a sentiment ineffable. Finally, the over-all effect is summed up:

The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried cen- turies; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Baal- bec, and Tadmore, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.

Do you know where these lines are from? From Poe's tale MS Found in a Bottle, in which the ghost ship ends by plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool-and by going down amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thund- ering of ocean and tempest.

I, too, have been a dealer in antiquities in the sense of being a student of archaeology and ancient history, and this reading has plunged the greater part of my conscious- ness into the dark, deep, dank, and warm soil of the past with a little shoot, a green plumule, trying to raise its head into the air and sun of the future. But seeing this preternatural exhibition of age near my house that little shoot seems to wither, and I am frightened into crying out, 'Geron, Vuzurk, Maha-sthavira! I renounce life!'

This massive staticity has even succeeded in taking away the impression of motion from movement from place to place which is the distinguishing mark of life at the animal level as distinct from plant life. Even when these men walk it seems as if rooted trees were waving in the wind, hardly anything else. It is normally impossible to have any feeling that they are going towards any goal and are not just somnambulists. Conversely, anyone who walks briskly is not only stared at, but actually jeered at. In a Hindu environment I have acquired the un-Hindu habit of walking in the European manner, that is to say, quickly and with a sense of the goal towards which I am going. So I hear even elderly people shouting after me, Left, right; left, right.' Street urchins march alongside of me with long strides, and giving it up go into peals of laughter. Older boys, and occasionally even grown- ups, call out, Johnnie Walker!' I naturally do not seem to hear them, and walk along. Then they come up to me at times, and waving their arms about, jeer in a ribald manner, putting their slogan in Hindi, Are Jahny. I learned to my mortification that it was not even the Johnnie Walker of whisky that they referred to, but a caricature of him by an Indian film-star.

Friends ask me why I do not go for these impertinent young fellows. I reply that I retain my common sense at least to the point of forcing myself to bear all this philosophically. But being also a naturally irascible man, I sometimes breathe a wish that I possessed a flame- thrower and was free to use it. In my conduct and be- haviour, however, I never betray this lack of charity. I maintain the realism which always reminds me that if to the un-Hindu habit of walking briskly I had added the still more un-Hindu inclination to resent impertinence, my non-conformism, instead of being tolerated with good humour, would have been squashed. Moreover, I never forget that my ways are utterly inconsistent with the spirit of the milieu and with the culture shaped by it, and that I give deliberate provocation to ridicule. At my age I should have shown not only the external stolidity of the Hindu, but also the crumbling, moth-eaten, internal hol- lowness.

But the impression of motionlessness which the Hindus generally give is instantly broken and dispelled as soon as a transaction is on and mouths are opened. The behaviour of the Hindus in public places tends to be extraordinary, unnaturally, and very often illegally quarrelsome. Tempers are lost at the most trifling pro- vocation. One day my hand (which is six inches at its longest and three and a half inches at its widest) brushed against that of a fellow-pedestrian. He glared back at me and roared, 'Do you think your hand is a pat of butter?' One night, returning home from a dinner, I went to a taxi stand where two were waiting. Both wanted to take me, and the drivers started a loud altercation, which develop- ed into filthy, reciprocal abuse. Wishing to put an end to it, I stepped into one of the taxis, and told the driver to go ahead. At once the other man came flying at him with the starting handle, and a scuffle began. As a final effort, I stepped down, declared that even if I had to walk five miles I would not take either taxi, and moved off. I had not gone more than a furlong when the more aggres- sive driver overtook me and picked me up. In these street brawls violence always gets the better of non-vio- lence in our Gandhian society.

Indeed, these quarrels are such common sights in all Indian cities that everybody takes them as natural. There are fights between conductors and passengers as well as passengers and passengers in buses, between customers and shop-keepers, in the shops, between creditors and debtors either at the front door or in the streets-the cre- ditors usually waylay and insult a defaulting debtor in the streets. Children of neighbours quarrel and almost invari- ably involve the parents. I see fights between two hus- bands, in which the respective wives station themselves behind the other woman's husband and scratch or pum- mel the helpless backs. When after getting used to such sights in India Tagore for the first time went to Japan, what struck him was the quiet behaviour of the Japanese people. The absence of shouting and quarrelling made him write:

There is one thing here which strikes the eye in all public places. It is that there are crowds in the streets, but no noise whatever. It was as if the Japanese had not learnt to shout. It is said that in Japan even the babies do not cry. Till now I have not seen one child crying. When motoring in the streets, one finds push carts and the like creating obstructions occasionally, the driver of the car waits quietly, and neither pours out abuse nor shouts. In the street, all of a sudden, a cycle looked like hitting against a car, the driver in our country would not have stopped short of unnecessary abuse of the cyclist, but that man did not even cast a glance. I have heard from the Bengalis here that if in a collision between two cycles or a cycle and a car even bleeding is seen, the two parties neither scream nor abuse each other, but shake off the dust and go their way.

I sometimes wonder which manner is really unnatural. Living in India I am hardly entitled to say that ours is. In the homes, too, the quarrelsomeness is universal and persistent. The general atmosphere of a Hindu home is one of heavy and listless dullness, which drives the in mates out into the streets at all times of the day. People are always gadding about, putting an intolerable extra burden on the inadequate public transport of the cities. But how could it be helped when the home just chokes?

Staying quietly at home of an evening is not therefore one of the pleasures of life in Hindu society, and among the well-to-do the possession of cars has made running away from home not only easy but also fashionable. If owing to circumstances anyone is compelled to stay at home, that is looked upon as a form of imprisonment. So, in the buses I see women with newborn babies, whose red and wrinkled skin can be seen through the folds of the towels in which they are wrapped. It would seem that In this connexion one extraordinary instance of loss of temper might be recalled. Dr Gopal, son of the President of India and himself a high official, was travelling from Jakarta to Delhi by air. In the aeroplane, while at a meal, he was having a conversation with a fellow-passenger who was described as an 'employee of the Indian Embassy in Indonesia. The conversa- tion developed into an argument and it became so heated that the man attacked Dr Gopal with the knife and wounded him. The injury was minor, but Dr Gopal had to go to a hospital on his arrival in Delhi.

India human beings are motile like protozoa, though not mobile in the metazoic animal fashion. Such dullness would make any change welcome, and people would say, 'Anything rather than this. But when the change does come, it is seen to be more frightening and unendurable, for it is always for the worse-dullness giving place to personal clashes ranging from bickerings to the most sordid and indecent explosions. When there is any conversation in the family beyond the routine ex- change of words necessary for living together, it is nor- mally either an arid discussion of money matters, or a peevish airing of grievances against relatives, or-if the family is exceptionally united-a wailing in chorus about wants which cannot be removed.

Dwelling on and sorrowing for conditions which can- not be helped is as common in Hindu society as is the want itself. It never occurs to these people that the best way to deal with financial troubles about which nothing can be done for the time being is not to talk about them. On the contrary, if a family is seen to be cheerful in poverty and trying to put a brave face on a hard lot, that is set down, not to courage or fortitude, but to the secret pos- session of money combined with a hypocritical pretence of poverty, which is taken as a heartless mockery of real poverty. If, over and above, a family in difficulty tries to keep up its self-respect by maintaining appearances out- wardly by a kind of expense which is not usual in Hindu society its poverty is cast in its teeth in the most brutal manner.

For some years after my marriage my wife and I with two children had to go through very great want, for I was then unemployed. Still, to keep up our spirits, we tried to live in pleasant surroundings and once we bought some silk net for curtaining our windows. Even though made in England they were not very expensive in those days. It was very soon brought to our ears that our neighbours were saying with cutting sarcasm: "They have no money for food, and they buy silk curtains. To be gay and cheerful is looked upon as inhumanity towards one's less fortunate fellow-creatures. The resentment, even when not put in words, is always implied in the looks. The reproachful eyes seem to say: 'It is all very well for you to look so happy, but we ..., and the hand is press- ed to the heart. You can make things very much worse by inviting someone to see your flowers or plants. The shrill and bitter reply would be, 'As if I am in the mood for such frivolities!"

Seeing long faces day in day out, at one time I used to call our world the world of the Mock-Turtle. At times I even sent forth the scream 'Hjckrrh!' and chuckled, 'It's all his fancy, that: he hasn't got no sorrow, you know." But with age I have given up that flippancy. I realize that one should not go on playing the fool in a sob-chamber if one has to live in it till the end of life. One should try to understand why our world has become a sob-chamber, and, so far as one can, give everybody sympathy. Thus it happens that though even today I can see no real sor- row in the lives of most fellow-Hindus I can perceive all the sorrow of their delusion of sorrow.

But the Hindu world is not even an unmixed Mock- Turtle's world. For most of the time a toxic peevish- ness simmers in it, and when it breaks out in personal feuds the outpourings of pent-up hate and anger are aw- ful to see. Most Hindu families, especially the joint, develop and retain chronic maladjustments, which are of three kinds: monetary clashes which take place between fathers and sons, brothers and brothers, mothers and sons, and of course between uncles and nephews and cousins and cousins; clashes for power are mostly seen between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law but also between the wives of two brothers; the emotional stresses and explo- sions, on the other hand, are confined to mothers and sons, and husbands and wives. In these quarrels all the parties get equally mauled.

Even after such abnormal mutual relations have be- come permanent, the relatives live together, always treading on smouldering volcanoes, which erupt from time to time in smoke, fire, and brimstone. In the course of the quarrels all reticence and reserve is thrown to the winds, and the grossest abuse and even blows are exchanged. The weak are beaten, equals hurt one another, until the other members of the family and at times even neighbours separate the parties. Otherwise kind, decent, honourable, and educated men do things which remain in the mind like unwashable stains of shame, and are felt as unheal- ed festering sores. All, men as well as women, show a perverse genius in discovering words which will wound most.

Such unrestrained outbursts would certainly have led to a total disruption of family and social life if the environ- ment which was responsible for them had not also gene- rated another faculty of the mind which could neutralize their effect. Somehow an alkali is always present with the acid of Hindu life: it is a marvellous and boundless tolerance of bad language and blows, which is some sort of a conditioned reflex of forgiveness. The Hindu pos- sess a faculty of callous charity. Two passengers in a railway compartment who have fought with shameless selfishness for seats, will, as soon as they have cooled off, offer betel, cigarettes, and even sweets to each other, and be friends for the rest of a long journey of, say, eight hundred miles. In the families the sun hardly ever rises on anger. After a brawl lasting till midnight not only peace but even harmony seems to be restored the next morning. 

But such alterations of conflict and co-existence cannot go on without leaving some permanent effects on the per- sonality and mind. The first effect is the creation of a double consciousness, each complete and coherent, but capable of shutting out the other when one is dominant. The parallel mental states are seen particularly in mar- ried life, and naturally the wife exhibits the split person- ality most typically. In one of her personalities she does not seem to remember any grievance, and goes about quietly doing her work, and even shows affection to the husband. But once a quarrel has begun, it does not re- main limited to the occasion; every quarrel since the day of wedding is recalled; all the grievances become connect- ed; in retrospect the sorrows gain a cumulative fury, and the anger is poured out in red-hot streams of lava. List- ening to the words, one would naturally imagine that a resumption of married life could not take place, and as long as the fit lasts both the husband and wife also think so. But, in actual fact, no such calamity comes about, because the Nature of Things in India sees to it that this does not happen. So, one might say that for most Hindu husbands the wife is a beautiful bath of gleaming porcelain, with both cold and hot water taps, with this difference, however, that the taps are not under control but flow as they list, and by turns the husband is bathed in a cool spray of love or scalded in a geyser of anger.

But the more serious permanent effect is the settling down of an unbroken pall of gloom and dejection on personal life, which is like grey mists on a marsh. I have already given some indication of it, and from that its whole nature can be guessed. But remarkable as the gloom is by itself, it is made more so by three special and peculiar features it presents. The first of these is a gloating on troubles of a personal character and on sor- row, which makes not only a virtue but even a glory of necessity. People talk about their troubles, poverty, and disappointments as if these were things to brag about. They do not want to outgrow even the painful grief of bereavement, and keep it alive by every artificial means they can think of. That is their idea of loyalty to the dead, and they never suspect that it is really the luxury of self-pity.

Conversely, they get angry, and in any case are hurt, if anybody says to any one of them that he, or especially she, is looking well and happy. 'I, happy?'-will be the exclamation in an injured tone. Therefore, in speaking to a woman in our society one has to be particularly care- ful about such faux pas. On the other hand, one of the surest ways to appeal to her heart is to remark how ill, poorly, emaciated, or miserable she is looking. A lady I know, and who works in a school, was not well during a vacation. So, when she went back to work, her collea- gues and pupils noticed her ailing appearance. She came home with a bursting heart and told me triumphantly, 'At home nobody even believed that I was ill, but whoever saw me at school said that I had become unrecognizable.'

It follows from this that amongst us there is a keen competition in feeling unhappy, and in trying to prove that oneself is the most unhappy. Everybody is therefore ready to dispute everybody else's title to be miserable. If a woman claims a record share of sorrows the woman to whom she is speaking will at once treat her to a longer tale. In this rivalry one will say that everyone is a stealer of his own happiness, and the other will retort that he is also a hoarder of his own sorrows.

The third accompaniment to the gloom of life is an in- satiable craving for sympathy, even from strangers, or rather mostly from strangers. One woman meeting an- other casually will very soon begin a story of woe, espe cially if she has been spoken to or even looked at kindly. These confessions are made in the course of railway jour- neys and even very short bus trips. But the explana- tion for this unreserve is really simple. It is only stran- gers who can give sympathy liberally without incurring the responsibility of following it up by practical action. Be- sides, it is a natural human impulse to have a kind look for anybody who appears to be suffering, and the cases are in their great majority genuinely pathetic. In any case, the large, liquid, black, and sad eyes do draw out one's deepest compassion. As Emerson put it, 'the effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cor- dial exhilaration'.

On their part, the recipients feel genuinely grateful and relieved to have only lip sympathy. In their unwavering fatalism the Hindus do not believe that unless a kind fate does something, fellow-men can do anything for them: the most precious service from man to man is therefore only commiseration. This deep-seated private disposition of the Hindus explains why during the fighting with China the Government of India addressed all and sundry for sympathy, and why the people of India found the sym- pathy when it was given so soothing, instead of being insulting.

The last special feature of the Hindu gloom is less well known because it can be observed only within the family. It is the impulse, which gradually grows into a habit, of one of the members of a family, generally a wife, to injure herself by neglecting health in every conceivable way, out of an imaginary grievance that nobody cares for her. So, in order to punish the husband, who is guilty in her eye without having any awareness of his guilt, she would overwork, partly starve, and suppress disorders, until one day a sudden serious illness startles the man and puts a heavy and at times unbearable financial burden on him. Even then the woman would at times only pretend to take the medicines and secretly throw them away. Before the calamity bursts on him the husband most often has no inkling of what is happening without his knowledge, and even when a woman is robust enough to take all this without serious harm, every meal omitted or not fully en- joyed and every headache is entered against the husband in a mentally maintained charge-sheet for the final day of reckoning. When that day comes woe to the man who takes the plea that he was ignorant.

In extreme cases this sense of grievance leads to a strange readiness to commit suicide, which is very pro- nounced in Hindu women. This is due to a general and overpowering conviction of the futility of living in ever- lasting suffering. The immediate incidents that provoke these acts of madness are in most cases only the pulling of the trigger. In these fits of monomania certain mate- rial objects become symbols of release and exercise a dan- gerous attraction. For instance, some plant supposed to be poisonous, or a pond, a roof, a high window, a railway line becomes an irresistible temptation. Even the Qutb Minar of Delhi was made to play this role. For some years there were so many suicides by jumping from its top that the Archaeological Survey stopped the going up of people singly. When this proved ineffectual, the De- partment disfigured the monument by putting up a high wire fence round the balconies. These have, however, been recently taken down.

The situation is tragic, not only pathetic, when seen in its eternal twilight. If any world had and has the right to put up this inscription:

Through me you pass into the City of Woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain; Through me among the people lost for aye.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

the Hindu world has and had that right.

But the Hindus have by their own behaviour made their tragedy pitiful. Deadened by their slow, dull, and be- numbed palsy of suffering they have become unheroic, and their absorption in self-pity has made them incapable of analysing their sorrow. They have become even more incapable of perceiving and admitting that any action of theirs might be responsible for it. They will always throw the blame on others. I would, however, say that the obstinate self-righteousness that they exhibit amounts to unconscious wisdom, for their sorrows and suffering are created by a power in whose hands they are only pup- pets. Even their own incredible follies, by means of which they bring untold but unnecessary troubles on them- selves, are due to a sort of predestination ordained by the same power. So, if they disavow their moral res- ponsibility for their sad lot, they are not as wrong and perverse as anyone nourished on the doctrine of free will might feel inclined to think.

But where they do go wrong is in not recognizing the operation of the same determination in those whom they hold responsible for their sorrows-be they father, bro- ther, husband, wife, friend, neighbour, countrymen, gov- ernment, or Nehru: all of whom are as helpless puppets in inflicting the suffering as they are themselves in being victims of it. All are equal instruments in the hands of our collective destiny, of which they have no inkling. It is this destiny which I would ask fellow-Hindus to become aware of. Listen then to the voice of your Lord, O Hindus:

Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.

That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.

Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drink- ers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.