Chapter 5-

ON UNDERSTANDING THE HINDUS

THE Hindus are now the largest, and also the dominant element in the population of India. They are the masters and rulers. They have regained political power after many centuries, and are fully aware of it, perhaps over- aware. They are also the only source of energy for the country, considered as a human machine; and it is their desires and aspirations which are keeping it running. No other element counts. As the current jargon describes all the non-Hindus, they are only minorities.

The dominant and also dominating position of the Hindus is so patent that one should have thought that it would create interest in them both as individuals and as a collective personality. It has been said that char- acter is fate. Now, if this is true of individuals, it seems to be no less true for nations. There certainly is such a thing as a national character, and once it has been formed it does control all the subsequent evolution of a people. At least, I have no hesitation in saying that if

This chapter with its concluding paragraphs was written in January, 1962, and the latter are left just as they were. The Indo-Chinese conflict of October-November, 1962, demon- strated very forcefully the real status of the American Ambas- sador in India. Since then a situation has been developing in which there are clear signs that India is well on the way to becoming an Anglo-American protectorate. Of course, Hindu India is still jibbing. However, the Hindu proposes, but the Pentagon disposes. the history of India has taken a certain course in the last fifty years, or for that matter in the last thousand, that is due, above all, to the Hindu character. It has been the most decisive determining influence on the historical process. I feel equally certain that it will re- main so and shape the form of everything that is being undertaken for and in the country.

But I hardly notice the interest which the Hindu char- acter deserves, though I see a good deal in reinforced concrete. The contemporary craze for information about material and external things is not associated in India today with even a balancing interest in the mind and behaviour of the Hindus, though they are a very special- ized type of human being, who cannot be managed at all by imputing Western mental traits to them."

At the most, one finds an American, British, or Euro- pean scholar trying to interpret them in the light of a prefabricated psychology. But Freudian or Freudistic interpretations of the Hindu mind are no better guides to it than any other indoctrinated approach, for example the Marxist. All these are intellectual games with the Hindus as chessmen, and very interesting they are as games. But the living Hindu belongs to his own world, which is not less bizarre than the Freudian, nor is it less dogmatic and fanatical than the Marxist.

Much more puzzling than the contemporary indiffer- ence in respect of the Hindu mind is a past failure. In- credible as it might sound, the British, though they ruled India for two hundred years and at first with great success, never succeeded even in discovering the Hindu mind, not to speak of getting to grips with it. This failure stands in astounding contrast with their knowl- edge in the non-human sphere, and even in the human when it was a question of a kind of fauna only, and not of a fellow-mind. Since I have spoken with undisguised admiration of that knowledge I think I have earned the right to criticize the failure. The British intelligence stopped short at treating human beings in India as animals, and splintered on the mind. It burst above Hindu behaviour like shrapnel on entrenched positions, only irritating the defenders, but giving no help to the attack- ing side.

No one pointed this out more forcefully than a Bengali, and he did so when the British were at the height of their power and prestige in India. He was Bankim Chandra Chatterji, who besides being a genius in imaginative literature, was certainly the most powerful intellect produced by India in the nineteenth century, and one of the greatest of Hindu minds, perhaps equalled in the past-whole of the Hindu past-only by the great Samkara. In one of his books, published in the eighties of the last century, he made a character-whom he represented as a teacher-say that "the English had a limited intelligence and their knowledge was irritating'.

The student in the dialogue at once remarked, showing the Bengali's awe of the English mind in those days, that in an insignificant and petty Bengali this was very cheeky. The teacher stuck to his point and amplified it. I give a translation of the passage:

Yes, even as an insignificant Bengali I will say that the English intellect is narrow. A nation which has been ruling India for one hundred and twenty years and has not understood one thing about its inhabitants, may have many other qualities-I am willing to admit that-but it cannot be credited with a comprehensive intelligence.

Then Chatterji summed up the Englishman's knowledge of India in a vivid and most illuminating simile. He compared it to a large and fine orchard, full of fruit which was neither eaten nor enjoyed by its owner. I do not think that the purely external character of the Bri- tish knowledge of India could be illustrated more effec- tively.

This failure, so inexplicable at first sight, is, however, very easily accounted for. As soon as the English mind came in contact with the Hindu's, which was a very different kind of mind, it completely lost its temper, and so became incapable of dispassionate analysis. But the display of temper was at least spectacular, like fireworks. The pen of the administrators, teachers, missionaries, in fact, of all Englishmen who had to deal at first hand with the Hindus, spluttered pejoratives in the manner of crackers.

Never did this exhibition of contempt and anger cease so long as British rule remained a live thing in India. 'Degraded, perverse, grotesque, contradictory'-were some of the milder adjectives used. The 'effeminate Hindu' was a stock phrase. The Hindus were regarded as untruthful, dishonest, and shifty, and often described as such to their face. So far from softening in their actual company, the Englishman only felt more provoked by it to speak out his mind. Even after inviting a mod- ern Hindu to a meal he would make the shortcomings of his character the staple of his table-talk. The toast to the guest lost nothing in raciness.

Again, no one noted this more clearly than Bankim Chandra Chatterji, who drew a very unexpected moral from it. In a remarkable article in Bengali, entitled 'Racial Animosity' and published in 1873, he wrote:

If we take up any English newspaper (that is, a news- paper edited by Englishmen) in India we are sure to find somewhere in it some abuse of the Natives, some unfair vilification. Again, looking into any Bengali news- paper, we find as a matter of equal certainty anger against the English and denunciation of them. In every Indian newspaper there is unjust criticism of the English, in every English newspaper the same injustice to Indians. This has been going on for a long time, there is nothing novel about it. Conversation in society runs along the same lines.

Chatterji then went on to say that good people on both sides regretted this, and were trying to put an end to it so far as they could, but with no success whatever. 

Then followed his own comment, which was extremely original. He on his part regretted the failure to consider whether Indians had anything to gain at all by having the racial enmity done with, and whether it was at all removable. He observed that the hatred was the product of the historical situation. Then he concluded:

So long as the conqueror-conquered relationship will last between the English and Indians, and so long as even in our present degraded condition we shall remem- ber our former national glory, there cannot be any hope of lessening the racial hatred. And I sincerely pray that so long as we do not become the equals of the English, may this impact of racial animosity remain as strong on us as it is now! After all, racial hatred and emula- tion run side by side, and it is to the existence of the hatred that we owe our efforts to rival the English up to a point. We shall not make the effort to the same extent if we are pampered by them, as we are now doing under insult and ridicule, because there will not be the same smart all over the body. Competition can exist only with opponents, and not with colleagues. A progressive enemy stimulates progress, a progressive friend is an encourager of indolence.

As a contemporary judgement on the mutual misun- derstanding this passage is remarkable, and all the more so because we now have an opportunity to compare it with the effect of Western praise-the new flattery. No sensible Indian will have a moment's hesitation in say- ing which is preferable. One day I shall write a whole book to describe what we in Bengal did by way of reply. ing to the British contumely. Here I shall only say, and I say it as one of the very last of the Babus who picked up the gauntlet thrown down by the English, that if I write the kind of English I write, it is due partly at least to the ridicule of our English by the local Bri- tish, high and low.  

But I must also be fair. It was not the Englishman alone who felt the irritation, the Muslim felt it equally if not even more. From the very beginning of their relations with the Hindus, even those Muslims who wanted to understand them had to start with unpleasant impressions. Alberuni, to whom I have referred and who lived in the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, has written one of the most valuable accounts of the customs and beliefs of the Hindus as they were on the eve of the Muslim conquest. His account is complete- ly objective, but even he could not suppress his annoy- ance, and had some hard things to set down about the Hindu character at the beginning of his account.

He observed that the character of the Hindus made it 'particularly difficult to penetrate into the essential nature of any Indian subject'. Its peculiarities, he add- ed, were serious obstacles in the way of knowledge, and they were deeply rooted and manifest to all. He was conscious, and he said in so many words that to speak in this way might sound like satire. But he found that there was no escape from the Hindu character. He re- conciled himself to it as if with a shrug of the shoulders, commenting, 'We can only say that folly is an illness against which there is no medicine.' Yet he did not allow this annoyance to interfere with the accuracy and truth of his account. How I wish that the American professors who are so busy with us had some of this real- ism and insight combined. They would be both more patriotic and more philanthropic if they had. But I hear enough among even Americans and also all other foreigners to convince me that they find many traits in the Hindu character very trying, and I do not under- stand why they do not make a clean breast of it, except once in a while in a blundering book which never gets anywhere near the Hindu reality and is all the more pee- vish for being made into a forbidden safety-valve.

As against the angry thesis of all Occidentals who had first-hand experience of the Hindus, two countertheses were put forward by other Europeans, but for the most part on the strength of hearsay, or only acade- mic study. The first of these came from the European Orientalists, who pieced together a picture of India from Sanskrit and other texts, and tried to represent the Hindu order as a coherent system, with a logic of its own. But from the first this interpretation remained a purely lite- rary creation, a self-sufficient presentation with its ex- clusive data, axioms, postulates, theorems, and corolla- ries, a sort of Euclidean geometry of India, an abstrac- tion in the literary dimension, with no necessary relation to anything that existed in fact, though I cannot say that it did not at times touch hard ground. By way of illus- tration I might refer to the picture of a 'Buddhist India' which we had to read in our young days, but which was only a piecing together of information found in Pali and other Buddhist texts. In actual fact, no exclusive 'Bud- dhist India' existed at any time in the history of the country.

This interpretation has now become the discipline call- ed Indology in Western universities, and there are imi- tations of it in Indian universities also. The science has certainly developed since it was profounded, and it is becoming more accurate and full through continued research, which is largely a better exploitation of the texts. But it still remains the literary creation it was, perfectly valid and even formidable on its own assump- tion and in its own world, but of no practical significance except when it falls in with a set of current myths about India. Then its conclusions are trotted out as scientific confirmation of political lies, but even then it is always put to use in a misunderstood and even deliberately falsi- fied version.

The other interpretation came from the idealists of Europe, who sought the fulfilment of their moral and spiritual aspirations in the far-off, away from a reality where they were always meeting with disappointment. They wanted something illusion-proof, and since Hindu metaphysics knew neither original sin nor evil as an ever-present challenge to moral notions it was easy, to find in it a refuge for the spiritual and moral romantic- ism of nineteenth-century Europe. This line of inquiry was also the continuation of a very much older Euro- pean myth, summed up in the tag-Ex Oriente lux. It was the cult of Mithras or Isis in a revised version, and it invested not only Hinduism, but also Rabindranath Tagore, poor man, with a mysticism which neither of the two possessed! The Hindu spirituality of which the West spoke was the creation of a Western spiritual necessity, and was not to be found in India either in books or among men. But at the beginning the search was at least sincere. Now it has degenerated almost into charla- tanry, and the Orontes is washing itself into the Tiber. There are few characters which are more painfully un- attractive than the Hinduizing Occidental. The Hindus have detected this weakness, and have not been slow in setting their mountebanks on the West. It enables a number of my countrymen to make a comfortable livelihood; still I do not like the imposition.

Besides these two older and established versions of India, there is a third one which is now making its ap- pearance. Like the first, it is a product of academic re- search and, in harmony with the spirit of the age, it is economic in its scope. It is an extension of the old historical inquiry from the cultural to the economic field. The general tendency of this line of research is to rehabi- litate the peoples of Asia who had been reduced to poli- tical subjection by the expansion of Europe, in the eco- nomic sphere. This retrospective attempt at justice, which cannot, of course, undo what history has actually accomplished, aims at showing that, compared with the Western nations, the contemporaneous Asiatics were not less developed economically. So far as knowledge is information, these new investigations are likely to be useful, for they will bring to light a whole body of new facts which are so far unknown. But one must be very careful in their interpretation and in drawing any wider conclusions as to the relative development of the Asiatic and European peoples. It must not be forgotten that history has already pronounced its judgement and no retrospective interpretation can be valid which will even imply that what actually happened was an absurdity, or an injustice, or merely a luscus naturae. There is such a thing as foreclosure in history as in law.

The point which has to be specially kept in mind in re- assessing the economic development of the nations of Asia before the Europeans brought them under their own domination is that similarities in institutions and even in the realized achievements at a particular epoch is no in- dication whatever of future potentialities, or even of the actual quality of the life lived. The basic difference be- tween the peoples of Asia and of Europe in the eighteenth century was this: one was at that point of exhaustion at which the sterility of a people begins, while the other was growing and dynamic. In short, it was a difference in their respective vitality. That made, and will always make, a world of difference. Since the new line of research is sure to continue and develop, two other reservations must be made about it. First, historical research, however objective in its methods, is always conditioned in its interpretations and practical implications by political changes, and the new economic history of Asia is bound to reflect the mood created by the ebb-tide of European imperialism and also by the policy of economic aid to the Asiatic peoples which has been accepted by nearly all Western countries. Secondly, this new scholarly creation is also likely to be an academic one, like the creation of the old Orientalists.

I have also to take note of a popular revision of attitude. This is also a by-product of the passing away of the European empires, and is inspired by a sort of mea- culpism. It regards the uniformly contemptuous views on Asiatics and more especially on the Hindus on the part of Europeans as an expression of racial and political arrogance; and as the product of pride as well as of prejudice. This simply will not hold water. For, if there was any original bias in Europe in regard to India in the eighteenth century, it was a favourable bias. The country was regarded as a land of fabulous wealth and splendour, and of barbaric pearl and gold. In the moral and spiritual sphere, it was supposed to be the home of esoteric wisdom. But this Indolatry broke down as soon as the European came into direct contact with the coun- try and its people. The higher the horse, the greater the fall, and the Occidental soon passed from sentimental admiration to disillusioned abuse.

Gradually, the British in India built up a comprehensive local tradition in respect of Indians, which was a sort of common law of disparagement based on ad hoc judgements. Throughout the nineteenth century it grew by broadening from precedent to precedent, without providing any redress in equity. Every newcomer from Britain was quickly initiated into it, and lost his sense of fairness with an ease which, to say the least, was remarkable. We Indians noticed the transformation, and it was a subject of frequent comment among us. In my young days, if a teacher or missionary was even passably nice, the students at once recognized a newcomer in him (of course helped by the state of his complexion too), and they observed ruefully that he would not be recognizable in a year's time. We always attributed this change to the evil influence of the hard-boiled Anglo-Indian (old sense). and never even imagined that the man's personal experience might have something to do with it.

I think Mr E. M. Forster can be cited as a witness on this question: whether or not first-hand experience was the really decisive factor in bringing about a change of pinion in the Englishman in regard to Indians. In the eyes of the British and Indians alike Mr Forster is the pro-Indian Englishman. He was adored by the Indian toadies who in the olden days longed for English com- panionship, male and female, and is even now very highly regarded by the ex-toadies who bask in the sunshine of British company in the big cities of India, especially New Delhi. But his novel, A Passage to India, presents all the Indians in it either as perverted, clownish, or queer characters. There are few delineations of the In- dian character which are more insultingly condescend- ing to self-respecting Indians, Muslim and Hindu, than those of this book. The Muslim who was a Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council at the time the book was published was furious over it. And I, suspecting from the reviews that it would be painful to go through while British rule lasted in India, did not read it till 1954. Then all my fears were confirmed.

But the important thing is that Mr Forster was not influenced by the local tradition. He was not persona grata with the British ruling class in India, and he reci- procated the unfriendliness. If he was badly treated by some of them he did not treat them less unkindly. Yet, when it came to drawing Indian characters, he was as satirical and uncomplimentary as the worst of the others could be. Mr Forster makes no secret that he did not feel drawn towards the Hindus, and that he preferred the Muslims.

So, the revision of history as well as the revision of policy leaves the old unfavourable judgement untouched. It stands as a challenge to everyone who would offer an alternative interpretation of the Asiatic and more especially the Hindu character. The angry reaction was universal, and there was no European who came to India who did not leave the country with a poorer opinion of its inhabitants than he had come with, and many recorded it. This massive, spontaneous, and uniform criticism by live minds which were formed by a culture at the height of its power cannot be cancelled by after- thoughts which have their source in the Untergang des Abenlandes.

I accept the empiric albeit slapdash, judgements as sincere, as opinions founded on actual experience of something or other though not as final assessments, and I believe they should be the starting-point for any in- tellectual appraisement. No new interpreter will reach dependable conclusions about the Hindus by treating these old judgements as dishonest. It is only by ad- mitting their bona fides that one can get past the denigration.

My criticism of the former Western attitude is this: that it did not go forward from anger to understanding: and my criticism of the Hindu revisionists is also on the same lines that they get angry without understand- ing the Western reaction. I do not get angry any more, though I used to, and I think, by accepting the Western anger as genuine, I have put the interpretations of Hindu life that I am going to offer on a sound footing.

Intellectually, the European mind was outraged by the Hindus precisely in those three principles which were fun- damental to its approach to life, and which it had been applying with ever greater strictness since the Renais- sance: that of reason, that of order, and that of mea- sure. Those who were calling even the beautiful mediae- val civilization Gothic barbarism in the light of the new European values were not likely in any circumstances to be complimentary or even understanding with the Hindus. To these men everything about these people appeared to be irrational, inconsistent, unholy, and ex- travagant, also lush, awry, and hypertrophied beyond conception.

The contradictions were formidable. There was an extreme of renunciation with its opposite in an avarice of whose sordidness no European could form any idea. There was an unnatural insistence, partly realized in practice, on chastity, accompanied by a sex-obsession and sensuality in personal life whose scale and degrada- tion had to be seen to be believed. To give another example, there was a morbid respect for animal life, going hand in hand with beastly cruelty to living creatures subject to human exploitation. Well, one could go on listing such things indefinitely.

The irrationality was equally perplexing. In political thought the so-called Kautilya, now called Kautalya, in his Arthasastra gives expression to the frankest conceiv- able raison d'état. The book should be a vade mecum for all who want to run a secular and police state, but its last chapter seriously lists the methods and drugs by using which spies can become invisible! The Manu Smriti, the famous 'Laws of Manu', the most authori- tative of the treatises on Hindu sacred law, is as a whole a very noble exposition of the Brahmanic way of life, but its final chapter describes seriously what kind of re- birth is punishment for which sin. It actually says that if a man steals silk he becomes a partridge, but by steal- ing dyed cloth he becomes not any kind of partridge but only a francolin partridge (black partridge). Some other threatened metempsychoses are for stealing cot- ton-cloth a man becomes a crane, but by stealing linen he becomes a frog. Please read the whole chapter in an English translation, e.g., Buehler's.

All this was noticed by Alberuni, and it did not make him more respectful of the Hindu mind. Comparing the Hindus with the Greeks, he said that the former had no one to bring the sciences to a classical perfection. There- fore, he went on to say, the scientific theories of the Hindus were in a state of utter confusion, devoid of order, and in the last resort always mixed up with the silly notions of the crowd. Alberuni compared their mathematics and astronomy to a mixture of pearls and sour dates or dung, and observed that both kinds of things were equal in their eyes because they could not raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.

I myself have all my life seen professors of physics loaded with amulets, secularists poring over horoscopes and palms, and politicians refraining from submitting their election nominations except on auspicious days. 

As I am writing these lines, preparations are going on in the park before my house for a great Yajna or Brah- manic sacrifice to avert the destruction of the world at the beginning of February, the year being 1962. This has been predicted by the astrologers and is to be brought about by a conjunction of eight planets. I am sure that, simultaneously, the secular Hindus of New Delhi (who are not above coming to these sacrifices) are whispering into American ears that Hinduism is dying of Americanism, and getting promises of more money to hasten the process.

The Western sense of measure, if anything, was even more outraged. Neither time nor space had any limits for the Hindus. Alberuni noted this as well. Thousands and even millions were nothing to them, and if they only could they would have put co after every men- tion of space, and nth after every enumeration of mag- nitude. Even now the Hindus get angry if the usual historical chronology in terms of Christ's birth is ap- plied to their existence. They say that it is too petty a scale to apply to anything Hindu: their duration must be measured in aeons. In the same way the number of their gods became swollen from some thirty-three of the earliest times to three hundred and thirty million in later times. It is inherent in the Nature of Things in India that such magnifications should take place. To the Hindu world might be applied the words of the old Dutch navigator quoted by Poe: 'Surely, there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman. Varying the simile one might say that the Hindu mind is so convex that it is in itself a microscope.

In the moral sphere, the Europeans were shocked by contradictions, which seemed wholly unnatural to them, which they could not reconcile with any principle of morality familiar to them. These contradictions were particularly resented by the Western mind when the Hindus mixed up sexual experiences with the spiritual. 

They attributed such things to a devilish hypocrisy or utter degradation, and I must say that I have myself been shocked by their capacity for sophistry. When I was young a neo-Hindu Sadhu came to preach in my town. He spoke of Krishna, and referring to the accusation brought forward by the Christian missionaries that he was licentious, the champion of Hinduism said something in Hindi whose equivalent I give in English: "That showed that Krishna was a mighty hero. If you had to carry on with sixteen hundred lusty young women like Krishna, in one night your face would look like a baked apple.' The roar of laughter and the approving murmur that fol- lowed showed that the Hindu crowd was satisfied that the blasphemous missionaries had been answered in the way they deserved.

The Hindus, on their part, cannot understand the European impatience and criticism. They get angry and attribute them to racial arrogance. Now, I accept the Hindu position as I do the European, and therefore I can make allowance for both. But if I am able to do so, that detachment has been arrived at by taking great pains to understand both the attitudes, and to discover their springs.

The point which must be thoroughly grasped before anyone can attempt to deal with Hindu behaviour is that in one's contacts with it one is in very much deeper waters than is generally suspected. Having obtained a sounding of the depths I am no longer offended by the contempt which European rationalism airs towards us, nor am I taken in by the tricks of the expositors of Hindu spiritual- ity. Thus, in offering my interpretation of the Hindus. I have no need to be in awe of either of the attitudes, and, least of all, of the European disapproval. For angry and vociferous but honest defence of the Hindu behaviour my readers should go to the traditional Hindu, and for sheep- ish, mumbled, and dishonest apologies to the Anglicized Hindu. I belong to neither school.