Chapter 8-

Love's Philosophy

IF THE ENGLISH people's dealings with money came as some- thing like a discovery to me, there was another thing which I might call a revelation, though its evidence was scattered on the surface of their existence. It was their attitude towards love. In England, as indeed all over Europe, love seemed to be a primary motivation of human beings, a major occupation of men and women, and as serious a pursuit as money-making is in our society. Yet nobody seemed to be conscious that here was a special feature of Western life of which one had to take immediate notice, and I am sure if I had told them so they would have been surprised. In regard to love, Hindu society and Western society stand at oppo- site poles, and although this fact was not wholly unsuspected by me, the radical nature of the difference was a thing totally unexpected.

To a man like me, who is never able to separate life from literature, another difference seemed hardly less striking. In Eng- land it did not take me long to find out that love with its manifold expressions but fundamental unity, which I had met with in English literature, was not primarily a literary phenomenon. This statement would appear to be very odd unless, it is remembered that I am a Hindu, and that in our society it is very difficult to observe the workings of love in human beings, and to watch love-making at first hand is virtually impossible. However, the history of love in Bengali Hindu society is fairly well established. It was introduced from the West much later than tobacco or potatoes, but has neither been acclimatized as successfully, nor has taken as deep roots, as these two plants.

We in Bengal began to deal with love from the literary end. That is to say, at first it was transferred to Bengali literature from English literature, and then taken over from literature to life. As a result of this double transplantation, the plant remains delicate, and a hothouse atmosphere is needed for its survival. I think what is true of Bengal is also true of Hindu society as a whole. It has never needed love for marriage, family, and similar social institu- tions. Even now we speak of two kinds of marriage, marriage properly so called, legitimate marriage so to speak, and 'love- marriage'. The mention of the latter always raises a smile, and the usual reaction of a Bengali mother, on hearing of the proposed or clandestinely accomplished 'love-marriage' of a son, is acute pal- pitation of the heart and high blood-pressure; the father's is not clinical, but it is sterner, and is concerned with the method, which constitutes a defiance of patria potestas. Certainly, in many marriages love comes, but it is ex post facto, and also transient-it burns with a short-lived lambency on married life, like cognac on a pudding already made with other ingredients. It is a marginal luxury, a fancy value, which is never taken into explicit account as one of the pleasures of the married state. Altogether, the Hindu theory and practice foster a certain detachment in respect of love, although in recent times on account of the play of Western influences a number of overtones and undertones have been added, for instance, a strange gladness when wafts of love are borne in on chance winds, or a vague heartache when, thanks to the constant reading of English novels and fiction in the Indian languages modelled on the English and lately to the growing habit of seeing films, the absence of love is felt in life. The popularity of fiction and films in India has a good deal to do with the fact that they are compensatory to actual life. On the whole, however, we can be very happy without love, and indeed not a few of us would consider love well lost for the world.

Therefore when I saw in Western society that love had an independent existence and was not a transference from literature,
that was bound to impress me deeply. I also saw that love-making was an easily observable activity. In fact, it was going on every- where and at all times. I have seen young people falling on one another, crying, and kissing on a studded pedestrian crossing in a wide Paris thoroughfare, thundering with motor traffic. In Rome I spent the last hours of my stay in Europe on the Capitol, and I shall never forget the experience. Though exalted in spirit, I was tired in body, but the benches were occupied by lovers, and not one couple would make room for an aged and footsore stranger, although to all appearance they had one another to prop them- selves up on and hardly needed any additional material support. They were giving a demonstration of love among the ruins. I saw the same spectacle in England, even in the Cambridge Backs, almost under the shadow of King's College Chapel. The exhibition is more self-abandoned by the Seine than by the Thames, but the practical result is about equal by the standards of each nation: it makes Englishmen forget their dignity and French- men their intelligence. But the French authorities, conscious of the awful consequence of a failure of intelligence on the part of Frenchmen, have put up the following notice on all the bridges: Secours! En cas de noyade, ou accident, demandez la brigade fluviale ou les sapeurs-pompiers. In England, however, the tradition of individual freedom is too strong for even such a discreet attempt at safeguarding English dignity. So everybody is allowed to forget that the only places where love-making does not look somewhat ridiculous are, first, the stage, where it is meant to be seen but not felt, and, next, a private place in which it is meant to be felt but not seen.

It must not be assumed, however, that everybody in England is unruffled by this over-demonstrative behaviour. When I spoke about it to the wife of an English friend of mine, she asked me indignantly if I was not going to write about it. I replied that perhaps it was too namby-pamby a thing to write about. Her husband immediately observed that this was precisely what he could not convince his wife about. She was sure that these goings- on could not be innocent. But the husband added that these people were always like that, and there was nothing in it at all, they would spoon by the hour without coming to much harm. I was inclined to agree with him, though my knowledge was very superficial, because I thought there were some kinds of foolishness which could not be vicious.

I am, for all that, writing about the subfact. Nevertheless, it should not be thought that I am assuming superior airs. It is possible to miss the real significance of the phenomenon by doing so, for this love-making runs fairly deep though it is not of the still sort. It certainly is not a recent fashion, or a result of the laxer standards in matters of sex, about which one is always reading. Love-making as a widespread popular, semi-popular, and aristo- cratic activity has always been present in Western society. It has been going on in country lanes and cottages, great houses and parks, for ages, and no one who has read English literature can remain unaware of the fact.

Today's obtrusive love-making, which appears so trivial, is really a democratic and therefore cheapened and vulgarized form of one of the most significant movements in the evolution of sensibility, which has brought about the emergence of romantic and idealized love as a basis of the intimate relationship between men and women. It is Europe's special contribution to the life of passion of mankind.

Even this is not all. In the West love-making is as much social as biological. They have made family life dependent on love, and so long as their family life remains they will not be able to break this affiliation, so that even if love were to go on asserting its inde- pendence in the manner it is doing today, half of it will remain under the power of the family. The affiliation is best illustrated in Jane Austen. Some people have criticized her for making husband- hunting a barefaced motive in her heroines. But she was too great a moralist and at the same time too fine a realist to be able to forget the social matrix of love. Still she did not make love qua love less intense than it is in, say, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, although her treatment of it was miniaturesque.

All peoples of Aryan origin realized very early in their evolu- tion that the relationship of the sexes had to be lifted out of its biological foundations, if it was to give any lasting happiness. So the Hindus no less than the Christians made marriage a sacrament, and finding that this was not enough brought in additional values. Here, however, the ways of Hindus and Europeans parted. In Europe, throughout the Middle Ages, love was idealized and romanticized by chivalry and courtoisie, the songs of the trouba- dours, and the vows of the knights. Mediaeval love, even when made utterly fanciful, did not lose nobility. Conceits like valen- tines made it more charming rather than less, and in Dante it became something which hardly touched the earth. When, in later ages, the peoples of Europe widened its idea still further, they never went backwards to identify it with the physical impulse, and modem Occidentals must not think that their obsession with sex and their boasted realism in regard to it are very up-to-date. We Hindus, who have had time to become more or less blasé about it, cannot help regarding it with a certain degree of tired and impatient boredom.

It is interesting to see that in Europe love was transformed in such a manner that even what was regarded as the wrong kind of love evoked more pity than repulsion. One has only to compare the associations of such names as Messalina and Francesca, or set the amours of Napoleon's sister Pauline against the love affairs of her contemporary Mme de Staël, or read the two extraordinary stories of the Châtelaine of Vergi and Manon Lescaut, or for that matter, Anna Karenina, to feel the difference.

We Hindus on the other hand left love to take care of itself in the best manner it could, and took our stand on the idea of fidelity.

In Europe the idealization of relations of the sexes was the work of the man; in India or, to be more accurate, in Hindu society, it was that of the woman. If anybody tells you that the Hindu ideal of wifely devotion is an imposition by a patriarchal society, a tyranny prompted by male jealousy, do not believe a word of it. It simply is not true. With us, paradoxical as it may sound, it was the women who stole the wind out of the sails of the men. They set up an ideal of faithfulness which not only made the noose and the sack unnecessary, but even the worth of the man of no consequence. Hindu women gloried in the idea of sati (which is not the same thing as the suttee of the English language, though the word is the same), and gave their love irrespective of the merits of the recipient, in which their defiant love partook of the quality of God's love in Christianity, which is given freely without any reference to the worth of man. We are often told by our Western friends that they just cannot understand our system of marriage. Most of us do not understand theirs either. In any case, countless millions have found happiness in our system, and it is not to be spoken of lightly.

But, of course, neither the one nor the other is without its shortcomings. The greatest failure of the Western attitude is that in making love an end in itself it is encouraging love to be a wild thing, which sends men and women out on a selfish chase after a will-o'-the-wisp. At times, it prompts cruelties which far surpass any that the R.S.P.C.A. deals with, and which are inexplicable in an age in which, in the collective social life of man, compassion has in some respects become a malady. Let me tell an anecdote in this connection.

One evening my wife and I were dining with an English couple. It was a very intimate, candle-lit party, and the talk turned on love. I held forth about what I considered to be the only sane attitude towards it, which was not the Hindu view, though it was opposed to the Western. It was more or less personal. I admitted that love was something quite precious in the lives of men and women and if it came we had every right to feel blessed. But there were so many other things in life which were no less needed for human happiness, which we could not command, had to go without, and were even perfectly reconciled to going without. Therefore, if we did not have love, that was no justification for throwing ourselves into a tragic pose, and least of all for inflicting unhappiness and misery on others.

At the end of my lecture, our hostess got up, placed one hand on the shoulder of her husband and slightly leaped her head on the other shoulder, and said, 'About this love, of which you think so ill, I'll only say that but for the love I bear towards my husband I should not be what I am."

She was a straightforward English girl without any intellectual, aesthetic, or emotional pretensions, but as she spoke such a light came into her eyes and such a music in her voice that I was momentarily taken aback, and considered if I was not speaking about things of which I knew nothing, as a person who has not known motherhood might speak about it.

I have subsequently heard that they are now divorced. I simply do not and cannot understand this. I ask myself, 'Are these men and women so much in love with love that they have ceased to take pity on human beings?" After all, it is one of their moralists who has said that 'it is one of the noblest qualities of our nature that we are able so easily to dispense with greater perfection".

The Hindu concept on its part does not always bring about any idealization of love and allows sex relations to remain at the bodily level, fostering sensuality in wedlock. It also puts too great a burden on the woman.

So, considering everything, one might say that, although the Westerners have made their choice and we ours, the resultant satisfaction and dissatisfaction balance each other, and we are no worse off than they are, and they no worse than we, which made me give the following title to the article which I wrote on the subject and published in one of our newspapers:

Life plus Love Life minus Love 

That, I think, was a fair equation, and no provocation given by silliness in the West or injustice in the East will make me give up this view.

I know I have been rather orthodox over this subject, and this was very quickly detected by a very famous Englishman with whom I once had a conversation. He had listened to my political views, and commented, "You are very unorthodox.' Then the talk drifted to the relations of men and womes. He listened to my exposition of the Hindu view, and as he did so I thought I saw the faint suggestion of a smile at the corners of his mouth. When I concluded, he said abruptly with a twinkle in his eyes, 'You are very orthodox.' I could only reply, "I am not a bad sort at bottom, though I have to criticize my people for their good." 

John Bull, Lost and Found

I HAVE set down a few of my impressions of the positive as well as the negative attitudes of the English people, and shall now con- clude this account of their manners with some general observations. The most widely advertised conception of the Englishman that the outside world used to have till recently was that of John Bull, who was, however, different things to different nations. In India he was identified with the sojourning English type, the Anglo- Indian of olden days. These Englishmen as a rule treated us with authoritarian solicitude mixed with a certain amount of conde- scension, but sometimes also with icy snobbishness, and occasion- ally even with loud and berserker bad temper.

Certain classes in Indian society were always discussing their behaviour, but self-respecting Indians normally kept away from them, or maintained only formal official relations. Our great poet Tagore, who shunned them, as indeed he could be expected to do, felt exasperated when he was compelled to meet them. Of onc such meeting he wrote: "In general I cannot stand the Anglo- Indians, and at the dinner last night I saw another example of their outrageous behaviour. The principal of the college here is an outré Englishman, with a long nose, cunning eyes, a yard of chin, clean- shaven cheeks, deep voice, and a drawling articulation without r's, altogether a full-blown John Bull. He was running down our people....I can hardly tell you how I felt.... Just think how they see us, these people who come to the table of a Bengali, and cannot keep themselves from speaking about us as this man did."

Would Englishmen today recognize one of themselves or even the traditional John Bull in this picture? Most probably this
Englishman was from Oxford or Cambridge. Yet men of this type must have existed. Englishmen who had lived in India were noticed even in England when they returned there on retirement. In the eighteenth century they were called Nabobs, and later simply Anglo-Indians. They were a distinct set. A friend of mine who was in England in the early 'twenties told me the following story. He was sitting in a very crowded bus when a lady came in. As nobody else got up he did not do so either. Upon that an Englishman who had come in just after the lady began to abuse him, saying that Indians did not know any manners. The Indian said that even the countrymen of the lady had not offered their seats, and the other Englishmen supported him. When this friend of mine reached the house where he was going, he found the same imperious Englishman also coming in. The lady whom he had come to see asked him if he knew the gentleman who had just gone up, for he had been in India. He was a famous former Licuten- ant-Governor of an Indian province. Perhaps I may cite Tagore again on this subject. He had been invited one evening to sing in the house of a lady whom he had known in India and who lived outside London, but was sent back without being given dinner. When he related this adventure to a girl of the family with which he lived she laughed and said, 'You must not think that we are like that, it is the style of hospitality brought over from your country." Now, with the exception of two missionaries and my old chief in the News Division of All India Radio, who was an Englishman, I had never come in close contact with English people till about five or six years ago. So I have no personal testimony to offer about their behaviour or misbehaviour. But I had heard enough to have become curious o see whether the type was to be found in England today, and I remained watchful.

I did meet some Englishmen who had once worked and lived in India, some of them in very high official positions. But unless I had been told about their antecedents I should not have thought from anything in their manners or appearance that they had been John Bull, 

in India. Yet some of those whom I met were controversial and unpopular figures in India. After meeting one of them I wrote to my family: 'Mr S is quite different from what I thought he would be. He does not have any suggestion of being an Anglo- Indian (old sense) in his talk and manners. His rooms are beautiful, and there are some fine English ivory miniatures of his ancestors and ancestresses.

So far as I could see, there was not only no rancour on account of the loss of India, there was not even any hangover of the psychological tension to which I have already referred, and which life in India generated in Englishmen. Their proper environment seemed to have reclaimed them, and restored their natural self. I might use a musical term and say that it had effaced the accidentals and re-established the normal key.

Not to speak of the ci-devants or the émigrés, I did not even see the traditional John Bull, stout, overbearing, and contemptuous of foreigners, who at one time was the object both of insular pride and Continental mirth. One incident among my experiences could, if an uncharitable interpretation were put on it, be regarded as pointing to his survival, but even at its worst it was evidence only for the existence of a little John Calf, and nothing more.

As I was coming out of Canterbury Cathedral I observed a little English boy of about six sitting on the grass and looking at me with an intense gaze, like a lion cub watching a distant zebra, When I came near him he began to rise slowly on his knees, and while still half kneeling raised his arm, pointed a finger at me, and cried out in his sharp treble, 'You're from Africa!" This was the moment for me to scream 'Colour prejudice!" and send a bitter letter to one of our newspapers, for there is nothing a Hindu resents more than being taken for a negro by a white man. But I shouted back, 'No, from India!' The boy dropped on the grass and kept his eyes fixed on it. I thought he had been abashed, but when I met him in another part of the close the mischievous little fellow again piped out, "You're from Africa!' He clearly felt that he had succeeded in teasing me.

But if this incident called for any revenge it was taken more than amply for me by a French workman in Paris. I was sitting at the foot of one of the flights of steps which lead from the upper to the lower quays of the Seine, on the left bank and opposite the apse of Notre-Dame. I have always considered this aspect of the cathedral with its flying buttresses showing over the clumps of trees to be the finest view of it. As I sat looking at it, a clock housed in a small gable in the roof of the south transept struck an hour. I pulled out my watch to compare, and suddenly I heard a voice above me say, 'Neuf heures. Not quite catching the words, I looked up and saw a French workman perched half-way up the steps. He spread out both his hands, folded one thumb and showed the rest of the fingers to me to explain what he had said. Then he asked, 'Monsieur est anglais?' I was taken aback by his idea of the size and looks of an Englishman, and replied, 'Mais non, indien." 'Ah oui, indien!' he replied and showed such readiness to open a conversation that I, having fears for my spoken French, ran away, still wondering how he could have said what he had said.

Of the notorious stand-offishness of Englishmen I saw nothing. I recall with gratitude the opportunities I had for seeing their home life and also the invitations I could not accept on account of my overcrowded sightseeing programme. I must have been a very unfamiliar character to them, yet they treated me like one of themselves. 'Come and see how we live,' they would say, and take me round their bedrooms, nurseries, kitchens, cellars and attics. In a friend's house I inquired about the fuel they used. It was in the country, and I was told that they had anthracite in an Aga cooker. I had been hearing about the Aga for twenty years, and was very eager to see it. I was taken to the kitchen.

I spent one afternoon in the house of a friend on the outskirts of London. The husband and wife had created a beautiful little garden at the back of their house, and remembering the tradition John Bull, of lawn-keeping in England they apologized for a hand's-breadth of yellow in the grass. After I had come back to India my friend sent me photographs of the garden, and wrote: 'Everyone was pleased to have met you, especially as you fell in with all our habits and customs as if you had lived among us for years. This was a very handsome compliment, and a no less handsome one was paid to me by a lady, for she took me to her house when it was being painted.

One of my last evenings was spent at the house of another friend. He and his wife made me feel so much at honse that I could not have felt more so even in my own house. I let myself go with gusto, and was ready to go on indefinitely, when my hostess got up and said, 'Mr Chaudhuri, you must ge now, for you have to go to Winchester early in the morning. I was to catch my train at seven. I jumped up and replied, 'I must obey you, Mrs P, you are in loco uxoris for me here. The husband laughed. But they were not trying to get rid of me. They drove me back to Blooms- bury from near Hampton Court, and went back only after setting me down at the door of my hotel.

I have still to speak about the very last evening, spent at a friend's flat in Kensington. Hearing of my interest in wines he brought out a bottle of vin rouge, over which we chatted until it was nearly midnight. I was to go to the airport at ten, and had not only to finish my packing but also to write a sheaf of letters. When I got up at five next morning to face my tasks I had no tired feeling. That was not due to the wine; nothing makes social life more tiring than lack of intimacy.

In spite of all this there is no doubt that old John Bull is still alive for a very large number of my countrymen in England, who are there for education, business, or other purposes. Even after staying there for a relatively long time most of them remain without English friends. They live a lonely and at times very unhappy life, grumbling about everything from food to social customs. They have friends only among their countrymen, and feel that the English are a proud, cold, and even mobbish people. Many of them develop into a type which is complementary to the old Anglo-Indian, living in a country and yet nursing a grievance against it. Not a few turn rabidly anti-English.

I had heard about this, and learned something from first-hand experience. I was even asked by some thoughtful young country- men of mine to say something about this attitude, with the object of persuading them to give it up, to a group of students at Oxford. I could not do so, but I certainly should have liked to if I had had the time. I can see what it is due to, and one of the reasons is that most of my countrymen go to England, not out of love for things English, but only for vocational advantages. The dominant class in India is very paradoxical in one thing: it will never give any well-paid job to anyone who has not been educated or trained in the West, and yet it will not teach the men whom it compels to go abroad to love or respect anything outside the country. Therefore their enforced stay irks them. But it is no less due to the fact that English social life is still English social life, and trying to enter it is like entering a club. Physical nearness means very little there. In my London hotel, which was not large, I did not notice anyone making friends with the other inmates. An African, obviously a highly educated man, always took his meals alone, and even I did not go up and talk to him, falling in, I suppose, with the spirit of the society. On my part, I too did not make any friends in any of the hotels I stayed in, and hardly even talked to the other residents. The only person in England who opened a conversation with me was an Irishman in a railway carriage: All Indians, and I believe Americans and Continentals too, get a poor impression of the Englishman's sociability.

Social intercourse in England, as everybody knows, has to pass through 'proper channels', and it is not as easy to be rightly canalized in it as for one's aeroplane at an airport. This applies not John Bull, only to foreigners in England but to the natives as well. Yet perhaps for us Indians this is not the greatest difficulty, which arises from the fact that we cannot cash in on the introductions fully, because we and Englishmen belong to different psychological species, which are not a bit less real than zoological species. The English animal will not take the initiative to make friends with the exotic creature, and so even though we are of the guest team we have to do the honours. I shall quote my son once again. He is no believer in intimate personal relations between Englishmen and Indians, but has succeeded in solving the problem to a certain point. He has written to us:

The English well-bred middle-class type is so very English that it is impossible to get to know their various little ways unless you have lived with them. They will relax only in the privacy of their homes. They are too polite and considerate to think of imposing their habits on foreigners, yet they get upset if people do not conform to English ways in England, a marvellous specimen of human beings, very complex altogether. Living among them I realize why I get on with the English people if they themselves respond."

So for most of us, old John Bull survives in English social life. To my thinking, he also does in the international relations of the English people, which will sound unconvincing unless it is re- membered that John Bull, like Janus, always had two faces, the conservative and the radical. The conservative John Bull was symbolized in world affairs by men like Palmerston, but better still by actions like the bombardment of Alexandria. This John Bull is dead, or is to be found only in a very refined, or alter- natively secret, form, and even in this avatar lie is rejected by more than half of his people.

But there was also another John Bull who had a remarkable flair for falling headlong in love with anybody he considered oppressed or unfairly treated, and who, provided he had got hold of what he regarded as a moral principle, never hesitated to go the whole hog in its pursuit, however shoddy or sloppy it might be. In its light he would haul his own people over the coals, applaud every enemy of England, and provide ample ammunition for attacking his own country. Very few people seem to know that three-quarters of the arguments of Indian nationalism, as distinct from its subconscious urges, was the pure milk of the radical John-Bullite word, and bore the label 'Made in England'. This John Bull is still going strong.

But if I think that John Bull lives on, I have something else too in mind, and that is John Bull, not in his relations with foreign peoples and the outside world, but John at home in his private capacity, as an English personality. There is no doubt that he exists, although in his case the distinction that English law makes between the innate dangerousness of a bull and of a cow is almost wholly obsolete. If anyone falls foul of him now and is gored he will have to prove that the animal was dangerous.

To me it seemed that the John Bull reformed and redivivus could be most easily recognized among the English working people, a manly and shrewd set of men, who were always friendly but never impertinent, who knew their place and yet were not servile, and who wanted not only to live but also to understand things in their own way. If any vulgarity has lately appeared among these descendants of the men who fought at Crécy and Agincourt, it is not in the stock, it has come and is coming from that modern thing, universal primary education. Even this working-class John Bull is sometimes misunderstood by us. I remember a story which a friend of mine, a Bengali, told me in the early 'thirties. He was passing through London on his way back to India after living for some years in the United States, and was getting his shoes blacked somewhere in the City. The man looked up at him as he polished, and asked, 'What country are you from, sir?' When he was told that it was India, he brightened up and asked again, 'What do you think of our rule  there?" "That is what they are like, those English,' commented my friend indignantly, 'even their shoe-blacks think that they are our masters. To me both the question and the reaction to it seemed so typical that I laughed out loud, but the attempts that I made to persuade my friend to take a less lurid view of the natter failed completely.

However, I saw very little of the English working classes, and when an English friend in India heard that, he observed that I had not seen the English people at all. This friend may have been Labourite in his politics, but he was partly right. I did not, how- ever, get the opportunity to meet the working people in the first instance, and then if I had got it I do not think I would have made proper use of it. To go out to study the English workers, between whom and me flowed a wide river of class-consciousness, would have been too much like social research or visiting for my taste. So I kept myself to the class broadly resembling mine. In it, too, I thought I was meeting John Bull with his characteristic outlooks and behaviour. I found that the sophisticated English upper middle-class, inaccessible as it was to us in many respects, was yet much more simple and elemental over the fundamentals of life than we Hindus. Men and women of this class were not quite as specialized as human beings as we were.

Even those two duennas of English life at its highest level, Oxford and Cambridge, formidable as they are as finishing governesses, have not done much to attenuate this simplicity, if indeed that was ever their object. A self-conscious Oxford or Cambridge man can be unattractive in spite of a studied gentle- ness. But the great majority are not self-conscious in an unpleasant way, though they remain conscious that they have passed through these places. No one who has profited from an Oxford or Cam- bridge education flaunts his cachet, valued as it is in English society. Most of them are like the lawns of their colleges, which do not know what centuries of mowing and rolling have done for them. Others only remember with gratitude what they owe to Oxford and Cambridge. I have always thought it somewhat curious that Englishmen who are always glorifying their public schools, colleges, and universities, never pay any formal tribute of grati- tude to their parents. I have not read any acknowledgement of the debt owed to parents and relations written by an Englishman in the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Yet it seems, in the end, it is their parents who teach them at school and college, though at one remove. It is they who have made the schools and universities in their own image, and they feel sure that in these places their sons will be made in the very same image, without their having to take the trouble of licking the adolescent bear-cubs into shape themselves. Thus even higher education in England results ultimately in the perpetuation of the traits of John Bull. In one way, I would say, Oxford and Cam- bridge men are the most typical John Bulls I have met.

I should, however, illustrate the point I have made about the relative simplicity of the upper middle-class Englishman, or what might be described even as 'under-development' by our standards. This can be done, for one thing, by referring back to their attitude to money. As I have said something about the subject I shall only explain why I consider it to be less evolved than ours.

Everybody knows that the human intellect originated as a means of bringing about adjustments of the organism with its material environment. But in the West it has now acquired a life which is largely independent of its purely utilitarian purpose, and man the maker has also become man the thinker, who is honoured as such.

On the same analogy, money-making, which in its practical aspec is only a means of living a comfortable life, should have developed into a more or less absolute pursuit, and the money-maker become as much an object of national pride as a great scientist or philo- sopher. This has happened among us Hindus, but not in the West, where money is still tied to its uses, and the money-maker does not become respectable until intellectuals and philanthropists by creating endowments for their hobbies. Those Occidentals who call us economically backward, or euphemistically 'under-developed', in the pride of techno- logical progress, have no inkling that in another aspect of economic life they are far less developed than we Hindus, who look upon the millionaire as the natural complement of the Sadhu.

The English middle-class is also simple in its attitude to mariual work, which has made the servantless household possible. Econo- mic conditions and social changes may have made their contribu- tion to this, but when one remembers to what extent, the standard of life of the English upper middle-class depended on a large staff of servants, one realizes that the servantless house would not have worked without a perceptible decline in elegance, comfort, and cleanliness without this pre-existent attitude to bodily labour even in Englishmen of the highest classes.

In our society an official of middle-class origifts not only does. not carry his briefcase. he does not even take a paper to a colleague, he rings for the peon. This peon on his part will carry papers and files but not packages. When I was working in a Government office in Delhi, a peon was asked one day to bring a bound volume of newspapers, and he refused. On a complaint being made to the Administrative Officer, the latter gave the decision that a peon should not have been expected to carry a load, for which a coolie should have been requisitioned. This same peon will not dust a table, for which another functionary is employed, and the table- duster will not sweep the floor, that being the task of yet another functionary. In our society every rise in status is accompanied by a progressive diminution of physical labour. So when in England I saw shop-assistants sweeping the floor of the shop and even the pavement, and my friends carrying my suitcase for me, I was bound to notice the difference.

There is something monastic in the English attitude to physical labour, but it must not be forgotten that this monastic attitude was itself Western and not brought over from the East with thehe has begun to spend his gains for other ends besides more money-making, and even for bribing intellectuals and philanthropists by creating endowments for their hobbies. Those Occidentals who call us economically backward, or euphemistically 'under-developed', in the pride of techno- logical progress, have no inkling that in another aspect of economic life they are far less developed than we Hindus, who look upon the millionaire as the natural complement of the Sadhu.

The English middle-class is also simple in its attitude to mariual work, which has made the servantless household possible. Econo- mic conditions and social changes may have made their contribu- tion to this, but when one remembers to what extent, the standard of life of the English upper middle-class depended on a large staff of servants, one realizes that the servantless house would not have worked without a perceptible decline in elegance, comfort, and cleanliness without this pre-existent attitude to bodily labour even in Englishmen of the highest classes.

In our society an official of middle-class origifts not only does. not carry his briefcase. he does not even take a paper to a colleague, he rings for the peon. This peon on his part will carry papers and files but not packages. When I was working in a Government office in Delhi, a peon was asked one day to bring a bound volume of newspapers, and he refused. On a complaint being made to the Administrative Officer, the latter gave the decision that a peon should not have been expected to carry a load, for which a coolie should have been requisitioned. This same peon will not dust a table, for which another functionary is employed, and the table- duster will not sweep the floor, that being the task of yet another functionary. In our society every rise in status is accompanied by a progressive diminution of physical labour. So when in England I saw shop-assistants sweeping the floor of the shop and even the pavement, and my friends carrying my suitcase for me, I was bound to notice the difference.

There is something monastic in the English attitude to physical labour, but it must not be forgotten that this monastic attitude was itself Western and not brought over from the East with the institution of monasticism. It is no less remarkable that the physical labour of the monks was wholly utilitarian. When we Hindus thought of physical exertion as a means of spiritual catharsis, we indulged in Yoga. Of course, in England, too, physical exercise has been ritualized in the form of games and sport, and perhaps most so in the centres of intellectual training. It might even be said that to a certain extent the ideal of mens sana in corpore sano has been put into practice as the reality of inane minds in a tough body. But even at its worst the ritualistic physical culture has remained physical, and has not been resorted to as a means of overriding the laws of nature, including gravitation. But as a general rule, even those Englishmen who make a fetish of ritualized physical exercise remain capable of workaday and useful physical exertion.

But even more strikingly than in these things, the simplicity of the English middle-class appeared to me to be illustrated in their manner of following a profession or career. In our society a man does not mind sacrificing the general business of living for the one or the other. I have seen lawyers devoting themselves to their cases from morning till bedtime, doctors doing the same thing, officials shutting themselves up at home to study their files. And most of them would be thoroughly unhappy if they were not allowed to do so. General conversation in company is not only an unlearned art for them, it is a dissipation in their eyes.

Leisure is a torture to them, and some condemn it. In my early life when I was a clerk, a high official once told me that Calcutta was possibly the worst place to have an office in. I was naturally surprised and asked him why he thought so. He replied, 'It is a bi city with many distractions, and nobody cares to come to the office on Sundays. At Ranchi we had nothing to do at home, and nothing to see in the town, and so all of us went to our offices on Sundays.' I sometimes ask them the meaning of all this, and they all plead the compulsion of bread-earning, which is not true, for, to speak only of those who are in Government service, they beg in the most abject manner for extensions of service beyond the age limit even when they have earned a full pension and saved enough to be independent. Still, admitting their plea, I put a Socratic question to them: "That is perfectly true so far as it goes, but will you tell me why you go on earning a livelihood, sacrificing everything else to it, when you do not live at all?' They simply do not understand me.

Taking the attitude to work to the next higher stage, I found the English middle-class to differ from us even more radically. It seemed to me that in selecting a career they took their main interest in life into account, and this interest not only governed the choice but also took the question of money and worldly position in its stride. Englishmen, if they have a sense of vocation at all, are ready to leave even a well-paid and secure job when they find it coming in the way of what they want to do in life, maybe felt not at all as a mission or grand passion, but only as a matter of simple personal inclination. 'What do you want to do in life?' is a pointless question to most of us. We are ready to do anything provided it gives us wealth, security, worldly position, and power, which mingle as inducements in differing proportions with different persons. Therefore we also plan our careers in terms of wealth, position, and power, and pursue the selected career with an almost NapoIconic deliberation. We have no indissoluble emotional or ethical ties with anything we are doing at a particular time of our life. If a little more money or prestige is going in another post we do not hesitate to leave the one we are lulding for one in a completely different line. The rush of the intellectuals from the universities to the secretariat is one of the most striking career-drifts seen in our country. All this would appear to Englishmen as being something like an adventurer's outlook on life. B" the word adventurer is not familiar to us, it would, even when known, be taken as the equivalent of an adventurous person. What, however, is more to the point is the fact that a man who has eliminated all other interests in life in order to follow a profession or a career is a much more specialized being than one who has not. Whether he is regarded by some as an adventurer, arriviste, or egoist will not make any difference to that indisputable fact. That brings me back to the point I was wanting to make, that the English middle-class is much more simple and general than we are.