NOSTALGIA FOR THE FORGOTTEN HOME
I AM now going to describe the tribulations of the first Europeans in India, who colonized the country in ancient times as their collateral descendants did North America or Australia at a much later age. But certainly 'tribula- tion' is not the right word, it is too weak. Even ordeal' is inadequate. In reality, it was torture, as cruel as that of Prometheus, but without the grandeur, and finally shorn even of the defiance. It was a pain infinitely pro- longed and thereby made dull, still not ceasing to rankle; a malaise always resented, but never understood.
Therefore all the attempts that were made to get rid of it, or for that matter even to become inured to it, were unconscious, subrational, wild, and extravagant. Conti- nuing through the ages, the pain and the reaction to it have, between them, made us Hindus what we are a combination of putrid flesh and fossil bones. Even now a Hindu who has anything of his European temperament left in him suffers in stoical despair. For the remainder there is only an ache, which like heartbeat has become a part of their physiology.
But the torture has not been of the same kind through- out. During the first two thousand years or so the Hindus suffered as the rulers of the country, and in the next thousand as the subjects of new conquerors. Begin- ning as a positive charge, the pain became a negative one. Naturally, in the independent state, there was some power in their reaction to the environment, and they exhibited a wrong-headed energy in responding to it. But in the cycle of political servitude which followed the strength ebbed away, every impulse or mood became inverted, and be- haviour was oriented very largely towards escape. To their sorrow and pain was added humiliat new age of suffering the Hindus looked back to their old suffering as a sort of glory, as if, recalling even that, they could say, Nessun maggior dolore....
It was during this period that they learned to cherish and gloat on suffering, to do which their own scriptures declared was to succumb to Tamas, unclean darkness. Unable to get rid of it, they made a virtue of necessity by making it an enjoyment, and became incapable henceforth of living without grievances. At the same time those of them who retained any mental efficiency became diabolic- ally cunning, and acquired that formidable talent for mak- ing capital out of their own weaknesses, as also for ex- ploiting the weaknesses and even more the decencies of others, which has distinguished the Hindus ever since. From this follows a corollary that if you see a Hindu who appears to be pleased with himself and with the world around him, be on guard, for you are then facing a thorough rascal, all the more dangerous because of his bland plausibility. I think it was Plato who said that a rich man could never be a good man. I shall say that it is virtually impossible for an optimistic and self-satisfied Hindu to be a good Hindu.
In my young days, when the moral ideas acquired by us from the West in the nineteenth century were still powerful, the Hindus never tried to deny, at least among themselves, that the national character, taken in its norm, was weak when not degraded. But this was attributed to the cumulative effect of many centuries of foreign rule and the deterioration brought about by political subjec- tion. I heard the argument, believed in it, repeated it myself. But I did not have to go far in my reading of Indian history to see that we were putting cause and effect in the wrong order. That is to say, in their actual sequ- ence in history, the degeneracy, instead of being the pro- duct of the subjection, was its cause.
In this and the three following chapters I shall describe the suffering and degeneration of the first phase, some- times descending to later times to draw illustrations re-ion, and in this new age of suffering the Hindus looked back to their old suffering as a sort of glory, as if, recalling even that, they could say, Nessun maggior dolore....
It was during this period that they learned to cherish and gloat on suffering, to do which their own scriptures declared was to succumb to Tamas, unclean darkness. Unable to get rid of it, they made a virtue of necessity by making it an enjoyment, and became incapable henceforth of living without grievances. At the same time those of them who retained any mental efficiency became diabolic- ally cunning, and acquired that formidable talent for mak- ing capital out of their own weaknesses, as also for ex- ploiting the weaknesses and even more the decencies of others, which has distinguished the Hindus ever since. From this follows a corollary that if you see a Hindu who appears to be pleased with himself and with the world around him, be on guard, for you are then facing a thorough rascal, all the more dangerous because of his bland plausibility. I think it was Plato who said that a rich man could never be a good man. I shall say that it is virtually impossible for an optimistic and self-satisfied Hindu to be a good Hindu.
In my young days, when the moral ideas acquired by us from the West in the nineteenth century were still powerful, the Hindus never tried to deny, at least among themselves, that the national character, taken in its norm, was weak when not degraded. But this was attributed to the cumulative effect of many centuries of foreign rule and the deterioration brought about by political subjec- tion. I heard the argument, believed in it, repeated it myself. But I did not have to go far in my reading of Indian history to see that we were putting cause and effect in the wrong order. That is to say, in their actual sequ- ence in history, the degeneracy, instead of being the pro- duct of the subjection, was its cause.
In this and the three following chapters I shall describe the suffering and degeneration of the first phase, some- times descending to later times to draw illustrations relevant to my argument. The combination of the two, together with their results, appears to be unique in his- tory. Yet they are largely unperceived and undiscussed even now. This is a sad omission, because many features of the life, character, and thinking of the Hindus in anci- ent times which seem bewildering can be easily understood on the basis of their unpleasant experiences. These were, in fact, so awful and abnormal that I have thought it necessary to consider them in some detail. I can only hope that the discussion will contribute towards a better understanding of the Hindus of ancient times.
The Aryans had come to India in high hope as if to a promised land. At last they had moved into a country which offered them, not only virgin land, but as much of it as they could wish for. Moreover, it was a country after their heart. Since leaving the plains of Hungary or the Ukraine, they had been passing through or sojourning in geographical settings which in one way or another were alien or uncongenial to them, because these were either mountainous or semi-desert. They were also dominated by strange cultures for which they had no liking. But from the banks of the Indus or the Sutlej they saw plains stretching away before them, to all appearance without end. They were not daunted by the distances like the soldiers of Alexander the Great. On the contrary, they felt elated. To them it was like setting up in a new home as its young masters and at the same time in the home of the ancestors, to continue the mos majorum in the mos juniorum, pietas in inventio.
It seems surprising that the historians of India have not tried to find the reason for one very striking fact about the Aryan settlement in India. It is that, with the whole country to occupy and freedom to go anywhere, the set- tlers passed over regions which had some of the grandest scenery in the world and chose instead what from the physiographical point of view was the dullest and flattest part of the country, to make it the seat of their re-started life and culture-their vita nova.
The Aryan colonial settlement in India extended east- wards and southwards on the northern plain in a series of stretches placed in a descending order of sanctity and appropriateness. The most sacred area, which was as- sumed to have been created by the gods themselves and whose customs and manners were to be accepted as the standard of conduct by all virtuous men, was also the flattest and dullest even in that whole expanse of flat and dull country. It was a narrow strip of territory between the lost river Saraswati and the Drishadvati whose exact location is uncertain, though both must have belonged to the Sutlej system. This strip was given the name of Brahmavarta, the Land of Brahma. Ranking next in sanctity was the Karnal plain extending to the Jumna, where the country is so flat and featureless that in the daytime the brown earth can be seen to meet the thin grey-blue line of the horizon, which seems to be the rim of the earth, and at night the stars dip into the same turned up glebe, as they do in the sea. This part of the country was called the Brahmarshi Desa, Land of the Brahmanic or great Sages, and the Hindu sacred law laid down that all men on earth-please note the word-were to learn good customs from the Brahmins born in this country. Further east and south was the Madhya Desa, or Mid- dle Country, and all these hierarchical regions, with the rest of the great plain between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas, were in their whole extent called Aryavarta, Land of the Aryans. One special indication was given in respect of the country which was fit for the Vedic sacri- fices: it was the region where the black buck or Indian antelope roamed naturally. The Twice-born were en- joined to live only in these regions, because the rest was the world of the Mlechchhas or unclean barbarians. It is curious that even after the rise of Benares as the Eternal City of the Hindus, and of Pataliputra in Bihar as the political capital, the cultural gradation of the Indo Gangetic plain as laid down in the Dharma Sastras, books of sacred law, did not become obsolete.
This clinging to the plains and the significant order of preference can be explained only on one hypothesis: that the Aryans evolving to the pastoral and agricultural states on the plains of south-eastern Europe and even forming the basical features of their religion and culture there, could not feel that they were living their own life in coun- tries which did not have the physiography to which they were used. So, coming to India after many wanderings and finding there something like their old plains, they made themselves at home, and indeed so much so that they completely forgot that they ever had another country.*
But to forget is one thing, and to be happy another. From the very first the new home began to set problems of its own, and soon it looked as if India had no other satisfaction to offer to the Aryans than that of being flat. They discovered quickly enough that the sweetheart whom they had wedded was going to be a termagent of a wife, and there was no escaping from her for the rest of their existence. They learned neither to tolerate their new environment, nor to adapt themselves to it. This, for a people who had no recollection of an original home, was a terrible destiny.
It is interesting to recall here the disillusionment of one of the most fascinating figures of history, Babur, who came to India in search of a kingdom and founded the Mogul Empire. Hindustan, he said, was a country of few charms. What he very much missed was running water in the gardens and houses, which for a man from I am giving an instance from the ethnic history of India to show that such a lapse of memory is possible. The Khasis of Assam, a Mongoloid people who migrated from somewhere in S.E. Asia into the region which now bears their name, com- pletely forgot the fact and based their cosmology on the hills round Shillong, especially Lum Dingei and Sopet Bneng, which latter they regarded as the umbilicus of the earth. the Islamic world was one of the major pleasures of life. The rains he liked, but he also noted that they made all things limp. The bow of Central Asia could not be drawn; armour, books, cloth, and even utensils were affected. The houses did not last long. In the hot season, under the Bull and Twins, Taurus and Gemini, he said, great winds arose and carried so much dust that the earth disappeared from view, for which people gave to these winds the name of the 'Darkener of the Sky'.
Before Babur, that was also the experience of the Aryans. As one finds in a poem attributed to Kalidasa, which might even be an early work of his, the dust raised by intolerable winds from an earth baked by the sun makes it impossible to see anything; the deer is so mad- dened by thirst that he takes the blue horizon for water and rushes towards it; the snake, unable to bear the heat crawls to the shadow cast by the peacock's tail though it is the bird's natural prey; even the frog seeks cool under the spread hood of the cobra: the lion runs about with a lolling tongue and forgets to kill; the wild pig wallows in the mire and the buffalo in mud puddles; so it goes on. More than a thousand years later, without con- sulting notes with his Indo-European forebears, an Eng- lish Aryan also wrote a good deal in the same vein. Here is a sample: The deer and the wild pig broke far away to the perished fields of the villages, dying sometimes be- fore the eyes of men too weak to kill them. Chil, the Kite... brought news to the beasts, too weak to force their way to fresh hunting-grounds, that the sun was killing the Jungle for three days' flight in every direction.'
Even after living in the country for thousands of years the Hindus have not got used to the heat. I have never seen a people so mad for ice in the hot season as the in- habitants of the Gangetic plain are. They put up the price of ice in June, even beggars rush for it, and they remind me of the polar bears in our zoos. Even I, in spite of my climatological philosophy, go half mad. What exasperates me most is that for a month or two no object feels cool to the touch even at night. Every material substance, if not hot, is above the temperature of blood. All this, whether from the Sanskrit poet, or from Babur,
Kipling, or me, might sound like high-flown rhetoric to those who have not lived on the great north Indian plain, but certainly not to those who have. The virtues of un- derstatement are not for the men who know it, and it is an affectation to be surprised at extremism in a land of extremes. That is why I dislike the perpetual air-condi- tioned simper of all Westerners in India today. I do not trust it either, for I have seen the look of ferocity which comes into their eyes if the cooler fails even for a few minutes.
The rains brought relief to the Aryan, Muslim, and Englishman alike, as it does to us now. Babur noted the pleasantness of the season, and for this, too, there is a Hindu precedent. In the Ramayana there is a beautiful description of the rainy season, and it is put in the mouth of Rama himself. After the abduction of Sita by Ravana he was forced by the monsoons to wait in the Malyavan hills, before he could launch his expedition to rescue her. So he whiled away the time by watching the weather and the beauty of the scenery, which he described to his brother.
The Aryans in India were in their way lovers of rain. Indeed, they had to be, because the welfare of an agricul- tural people depended on it. Thus the Vedic sarcifices for rain are among the most essential and important of their rituals. 'Give us rain', was their constant prayer to their gods, to Indra more especially. But the rain they prayed for was the rain of the West, which in India was precipitated by the Mediterranean cyclones, and not by the monsoons of Asia. They said like the Athenians: 'Rain, beloved Zeus, rain on the cornfields and plains of Attica. Still what they wanted was the rain which swell- ed the ears of wheat, and not the rain for thirsty rice. They were repelled by that, and might well be.
Nothing irked the warlike people that the Aryans were more than the enforced slackening of the bow. They felt impatient at being immobilized by the rain and the im- passable roads. Even when they had no wife to rescue like Rama, the Aryans ate their hearts out in boredom during these months. So, as soon as they saw thunder- clouds making way for white and fleecy clouds, the moon again pouring liquid silver on their world, the cranes fly- ing, they got ready for war and bloodshed so dear to them, and held their exuberant martial festival.
They found rain unbearable for two very matter-of-fact reasons as well. In the first place, they never learned to build for monsoon rains, and next. these never agreed with their constitution. I know what monsoon rains are. My boyhood was spent not far from the rainiest spot on earth, Cherapoonji, and our rain came down in such torrents that the rice growing on low-lying fields had to grow and rise with the flood, often many inches a day. Otherwise, it rotted away. I have punted, rowed, and sailed on the flooded rice-fields, and I have seen rice stalks ten to twelve feet long.
We Hindus in East Bengal succeeded in adapting our- selves to the monsoons, and came even to love them, by accepting a material revolution. It consisted in going over from the sun-baked mud of the Middle East to the bamboo, grass, reed, and cane of south-east Asia. I can speak from first-hand knowledge about the bamboo eco- nomy. We lived in thatched huts, which were supported by bamboo posts and protected by mat walls. These structures were a transformation of architecture into dried vegetation. For us cane and rope were the materials which seemed to hold the world together. Our home- steads were surrounded by bamboo and mat stockades. Our villages were made up of scattered homes, nestling among bamboo clumps, and the houses themselves were each a scattered group of separate huts, so that in going from room to room, not to speak of from house to house, in the rainy season, we had to use umbrellas, or got drenched. From the outer edge of the village we saw other villages only as bamboo clumps. There never were any roofs or house tops to be normally seen. The people of the other villages saw ours as the same jungle.
But all over northern India, living in a country sub- ject to the monsoons, men built as if they were still in the Middle East. They never carried out any adapta- tion to the climate and weather. Their huts are still made of sun-baked clay, with a stiffening of lath. The roofs are flat, and they are often of mud and wattle. The villages are nucleated, and in them the houses stand shoulder to shoulder in rows separated only by narrow and miry lanes, reeking of cattle.
I did not understand the villages of the Gangetic plain until I saw a picture of a reconstruction of the earliest agricultural settlement known to history, which was found at Qalat Jarmo in Mesopotamia. Why,' I said to my self as I looked at the illustration, it might be a village in the U.P. To this day, from the Punjab to Bihar, the villages and houses are of this late neolithic and early bronze age type. Those who live in them have every right to feel a grievance against rain.
Even in a big city like Delhi, the capital of India, the houses of the common people are of this simple style and material, and, what is not less interesting, the brick houses also are not strongly built. Nearly all the new and pretentious Government offices now being built in New Delhi begin to leak from the beginning. The old residential houses are ramshackle. Therefore, among the citizens of this no mean city, nothing gives rise to more scandalized indignation than wet days. On any day of heavy rain I hear the fire-siren going and the fire-engines ringing and tearing through the streets, and unable to forget the association ask, 'How can a house be on fire in this weather? My wife corrects me: 'They are go- ing to rescue buried people. Next morning I read in the newspaper of houses collapsed, and men, women, and children sometimes dead, sometimes rescued from under the debris by the fire brigade.
People here have hardly learnt even to walk in wet weather. While the rulers of Delhi have tried to march with the times by building sewers in certain parts of the city, the common people have not learnt how to avoid man-holes. So, after each heavy downpour, I also read of men being washed into these holes, and even being drowned in the flooded streets, not to speak of drains or ditches.*
The physique of the people has not also adapted itself to the climate of a monsoon country. The constitution of persons brought up in upper India breaks down if they go to the more wet parts of the country, for instance, to Bengal. I think the India infantry battalion which was stationed at Alipur in Calcutta suffered more than the British soldiers in Fort William and at Barrackpore. The monsoon is so harmful to north Indians that for the Burma campaigns the British sent troops from the Madras Army, and not from the Bengal Army, which was recruited from the Punjab and U.P.
Therefore all of those who lived in Hindustan, upper India, hated the monsoons and monsoon-ridden Bengal. The Muslim rulers called the province 'Hell overflowing with bread'. Every Hindustani soldier or policeman who had to serve there complained. The workmen grumbled. Even the Afghan usurer who lent money at 200 per cent abused the towns and villages which were making him rich.
Yet if the Hindus found the rain intolerable where could they go to avoid the almost equally intolerable, though in a different way, heat of their own plains? The British solved the problem by going to the hills for relief, and built hill-stations all over the country, espe- cially in the Himalayas, as summer resorts. The Angli- cized Hindus have taken over both the habit and the stations. From April onwards they flock to them from every big city on the plains, and modern Hindu journal- ists send glowing descriptions of the garish lures of these places to their papers, which draw still greater crowds to Simla, Mussoorie, Naini Tal, or Darjeeling. These overdressed crowds and their admirers are not aware, however, of the Hindu tradition in regard to the Hima- layas, though the endless files of pilgrims on the moun- tain-paths keep it alive and show what it is.
The Hindus of ancient times could not dream of treat- ing the Himalayas in this way. To them they were the symbol of other values. In the first place, they were overwhelmed by their beauty and grandeur, and express- ed their admiration for both in a very reverent manner. In almost all Sanskrit poetry, epic or classical, and even in the Puranas there are vivid and impressive descrip- tions of the Himalayas. The name itself-Abode of Snows-was given by the Hindus. Kalidasa's imagina- tion was haunted by them, and in one marmoreal phrase he compared their eternal snows to the piled-up laughter of Siva.
Next, they set an intangible, transcendental value on the Himalayas and articulated them with their religious life. This sprang, however, from their perception, in the first instance, of a purely material connexion-the geographical relationship between the great plain and the great mountain, which at first sight seems to be nonexistent. The geography of northern India exhibits a complete external separation between the two. There is no intermingling of hill and plain, and in passing from the one to the other a man passes from one kind_of world to another, and the passage is very abrupt. For hundreds of miles the ground shows no rise at all, but suddenly from the farthest edge of the plain to the north,it soars up to heights which are covered with permanent snow. Yet this separation is only superficial. In reality, there is a profound and unbreakable physical articulation be- tween the plain and the mountain. The Indo-Gangetic plain cannot be made independent of the Himalayas, nor the Himalayas of the plain. Nobody felt this more strongly than Kalidasa, though his knowledge of the direction and alignment of the Himalayas as a mountain- range was not absolutely correct. He described the northern mountains as a Divine Soul-Devata ima Himalayo-nama Nagadhiraja-which dipping into the east- ern and western oceans formed the spine and measur- ing rod of the earth. However figuratively expressed, the notion corresponded to a concrete reality in the geo- graphy of India. The entire Gangetic plain has a north- ward and snow-ward orientation, for which the Hindus have always looked upon the mountain as a front ter- race, and never as a hinterland. Without an anchorage in the Himalayas, in the manner of a cantilever bridge, the great plain would hang loose, to be eroded by its wild winds, until the primeval seas which its alluvium had filled up came in again.
This unique pattern of separation and integration in the geographical environment of their life made it impossible for the Hindus to take the mountains lightly and make them an extension of their ordinary habitat. Even apart from the fact that their economy was not suited to moun- tains, they felt that these were too superhuman and awe- inspiring to be used for workaday activities, and to con- vert them into pleasure resorts was, of course, out of the question. That would have been a sacrilege even from the geographical point of view to them, if it were not, as it came to be considered, one from the religious. So they made the Himalayas, and particularly the mythical Mount Sumeru, which they placed at what they regard- ed as the focal point of the whole range, the basis of their geocosmology.
Over and above, besides being an exalted material phenomenon, the Himalayas became for the Hindus a symbol of far deeper significance, and, therefore, invio- lable. The separation and articulation between the moun- tain and the plain was to them the material counterpart of a similar relationship between their worldly life and religious life.
From the perception of the analogy, it was a very easy thing for the Hindus to correlate the two relationships, the first of which existed between the plain and the moun- tain; and the other between worldly life and spiritual life. Living their worldly life on the plains, they made the Himalayas the home of beatitude and salvation. Ac- cording to their way of thinking, man ascended from the plain to fulfil Dharma-Law, by Moksha-Salvation. The two were placed in a series and could not overlap. As a consequence, the Hindus could never think of going to the Himalayas to seek relief from physical discomfort. They could go there if only they were on a religious quest, and in the way of all flesh they had to suffer on the plains.
The Vindhya mountains were not so grand. On the contrary, they were soothing in their green and dark mystery. But the Hindus could no more go to them than to the Himalayas which overwhelmed them by their grandeur. The hills and woods of Central India remain- ed unacceptable in a different way. Not that the Aryan Hindu was not always conscious of the beauty of this region, and an admirer of it. I had not seen any hills, or to be exact I had no recollection of the hills I had been taken to in early childhood, when I came upon a picture of the road to Pachmarhi, a well- know hill-station in Central India. I cannot even now forget the idyllic impact it made on me. In this I was a true descendant of the old Aryan and Hindu, who loved the Vindhyas, but with a feeling very different from his adoration of the Himalayas. If the latter were divine, the Vindhyas were only too, too warmly human. The epics and classical Sanskrit poetry never omit to des- cribe the beauty of these regions even if there is a slight excuse for it. The rushing waters of the Central Indian hills, the foaming and murmuring rapids in their gorges, the étangs in the woods, lakes like Pampa, are dwelt on lovingly. There is in these descriptions even a touch of the sentimentality found in Corot's landscapes of l'Isle de France. Souvenir de Mortefontaine? Ah no! To the Aryan it was souvenir des fontaines vivantes. What springs, I shall presently say.
The blue hills are not less tenderly described. The Sanskrit poet Bhavabhuti, who most probably lived in the eighth century and ranks next only to Kalidasa, wrote about a part of the Vindhya region: 'Here are the Prasravana Hills, with their soft blue made softer still by the ever-drizzling clouds, their caverns echoing the babbling Godavari, their woods a solid mass of azure, made up of tangled foliage.' Englishmen! Please recall here, too, the evocations of the same region by your Aryan, Kipling.
But, again, the ancient Hindus could not live among those hills so long as they remained loyal to their distinc- tive way of life. These were as unsuited to their economy as the Himalayas, and were besides the home of their traditional enemy, the hunter. But the deeper reason was that they engendered moods to which, as the Aryan saw the matter, he had no right. Even in the literary descriptions there is a suggestion as if they were toying with forbidden pleasure. The Vindhya region softened too much. In it the Aryan girl who, if jilted, could easily be the Oenone of the Achaeans, ran the risk of becoming Tennyson's Oenone, a pinning, lovesick maiden.
A young Hindu woman of ancient times, if left widow- ed and childless, could in the interest of the Aryan com- munity and without the least hesitation or shame call upon a brother-in-law or any other near relative or even a good and strong Brahmin to perform the niyoga on her, that is to say, to procreate a child so that an Aryan shoot might not wither in a colony which needed ever more colonists. This was perfectly natural on the plains, a hard remedy for a hard situation, as matter-of-fact as the taking of seven or eight short-lived husbands in suc- cession by an Englishwoman in the early days of Virginia.
But in the Vindhyas a strange change, thoroughly anarya-justa, unworthy of an Aryan, was likely to come over Aryan girls. These maidens, who expected to be as straight, strong, and awful as Valkries, learned in the soft Vindhyas to yearn for their premarital sexual inter- course. As a Sanskrit poet made one of them say:
Yah kaumara-harah, sa eva hi vara,- s'ta eva Chaitra-ksapa'- S'te ch'onmilita-malati-surabhayah praudhah kadamva'nilah; Sa ch'aivasmi; tathapi tatra surata-vyapara-lila-vidhau, Reva-rodhasi, vetasi-taru-tale chetah samutkanthate.
I give a translation which is literal, and I have also tried to put it in something like the metre of the original- Sardulavikridita. Here it is:
Stole he my maidenhead, and today's husband he! Just the same are nights of spring; Blossoming málati, cadámba's pollen blown Scent the selfsame heavy breeze;
I, too, the same, same she!-Still, by Reva* narrows, 'Neath a tree in tangled cane, Ah! on that very spot, for coitus-fantasies
Wistful, wistful grows the heart!
This just would not do for an Aryan maiden. Scholars will remind me that the old Aryan, too, was prey to lust. A timely reminder lest 1 forget. But his lust was the rut of animals-fleshly, natural, undisguised, un- ashamed, violent, with no impingement on the higher emo- tions. The epics, and even the religious texts from the earliest and most vigorous periods of Brahmanism, are full of instances of such fits of rut. In fact, they give such stories in scores. But these sudden and wild squalls past, these stallions became Aryan warriors and priests again, as stern as the fire or sun they worshipped, and as straight and taut as the bows they drew.
To the Aryan, it was, however, one thing to give in to nature in this straightforward, honest, and simple fash- ion, and quite another to rest the head on the sill of a latticed window, half-drunk, half-roused by whiffs of heavy scent from poppy, mahua, or screw-pine,† gaze at fold on fold of blue hills, moan, and dream back the sweets of lost virginity. The Aryan was entitled to rut, but not to daydream: that was completely un-Aryan.
So, they had to resist the lure of the Vindhyas, live on their bare plains, nursing the Aryan heritage and bearing their cross. After a few hundred years, even before the newness of the colonization had worn off, it became so heavy that an opaque Weltschmerz, a grey The river whose later name is Narbada; Narmada in Sanskrit. Papaver somniferum; Illipe latifolia, in Sanskrit Madhuka; Pandanus adoratissimus, in Sanskrit Ketaki. pall, blotted out the green of the earth from their eyes. It was the moral and nervous breakdown brought about by this suffering which finally shaped their philosophies, and gave to them their specific colour. Western schol- ars have sometimes made Buddhism or Vedanta res- ponsible for the apparent indifference of the Hindus to the things of the world, especially for their disinclination to mental and bodily exertion, and attributed to us a world-negation which we never had. The philosophies did not make our life what it is, it was the life which made the philosophies what they are. That is the proper order of attack in correlating our philosophical systems with our outlook and behaviour.
Nothing, to my thinking, makes the movement of the Hindu mind from the bodily suffering to the pessimistic philosophies clearer than the story of Buddhism, the first philosophy of sorrow to appear in the existence of the Hindus. Siddharta, according to the well-known le- gend, went out on pleasure excursions, and one after another saw a man bent with age, another stricken by malady, and a third borne on a bier. These sights weighed on his mind as a terrible nightmare until, going out a fourh time, he saw a man with a shaven head, and wearing clothes dyed with red ochre, walking along calmly. He was so struck by the bearing and counte- nance of this man, that he went up to him and asked who and what he was. The man replied that he was a mendicant who had left the world and its ways, forsaken friends and home, and thus found deliverance. At last, Siddharta saw a way out of the fears which had haunted him in the previous weeks, and he also decided to leave the world.
Can anyone conceive of a more pitiful failure, from the moral point of view, of courage, and from the biological of vitality? Where would a man stand in regard to faith and effort once he allowed himself to be intimidat- ed by the commonplace lot of all flesh?
However, the connexion between this failure of the Hindus and their philosophies need not be established only by interference from legend. It is laid bare in so many words in all the texts. Our metaphysical systems were not erected for their own sake, but for a practical end.
'Jagad'eva duhkha-pamka-nimagnam'-uddidhirsuh par- ama-karuniko munih anviksikim praninaya.
-Seeing the world sunk in the mire of sorrow, the most compassionate sage composed his philosophy in order to rescue it.' So declared a commentator on the Vaiseshik or atomic system of Hindu philosophy.
Even more emphatic and direct is the declaration of Samkhya, which to my thinking is the most typical sy- stem of Hindu philosophy. The very first couplet of the earliest extant text of this school says that philosophical inquiry arises from the impact of threefold sorrow, which prompts the effort to discover the means of getting rid of it. Equally unambiguous is the later aphorism: Now, in putting an end to three kinds of sorrow lies the goal of human effort. The rejection of the intellectual motiva- tion could not be more uncompromising.
After making sorrow and suffering their starting point, the philosophies go on to define these, and in doing so reveal the connexion I have in mind even more clearly. The idea of universal and inescapable suffering does not come from moral or spiritual experience, from any feel- ing of being abandoned by God, or from the spectacle of evil. No Hindu thinker would have understood the agony of St Augustine or, for that matter, even of Scho- penhauer, which makes me offer the incidental remark that if the latter had any conception of Hindu philosophy it was a singularly misconceived notion. The Hindu never represented human suffering as anything but the ills flesh is heir to. Even Hindu salvation, which is release from sorrow, is reduced to terms of the flesh. That partly explains the curious emphasis which Hindu spiritual discipline places on states of the body, meta- bolism, and psychoses.
According to Hindu philosophy suffering is of three kinds: that which proceeds from the 'self'; that which comes from external sources, things or other living crea- tures; and that which is inflicted by supernatural agen- cies and acts of God. It should be noted that the classi- fication is only by the sources of suffering, and not by its nature, which is one-suffering of the body, with the mind thrown in as the agent of consciousness. All the systems agree over this, and I give by way of illustra- tion the summing-up of a well-known commentator on Samkhya.
Suffering of the first kind, proceeding from the self, is again of two sorts-bodily and mental, the first ori- ginating in the disturbances of wind, bile, and phlegm; and the second from the emotions, e.g. lust, anger, greed, delusion, fear, envy, or sadness. Suffering from these causes occurs within the personality, and therefore these are called sufferings due to the self.
Suffering from external sources is also of two kinds: that due to other living creatures or to inanimate things; and that which is caused by supernatural agencies. In order to leave no room for doubt as to the first exter- nal source, the following are specifically mentioned: thieves, enemies, lions, tigers, buffaloes, snakes, mos- quitoes, scorpions, crocodiles, trees, and stones. In the second external source are placed spirits like yakshas. rakshasas, vinayakas, and planets, among the troubles inflicted by them are storms, rain, hail, heat, and cold.
I am going into all these details to show that Hindu philosophy leaves no foom for doubt as to what it re- gards as human suffering, and from what it seeks to deliver mankind. All of it comes from checks inflicted on lust of the flesh, lust of the eye, and pride of life. To Hindu philosophy, which seeks to turn the tables on the order of nature in revenge for these attacks, these forms of suffering are not, to use a musical term, the accidentals of life, but its main key. That outlook is possible only among those who have been beaten by nature and broken in spirit. All of it boils down to one simple fact: collapse of courage and vitality. There is no hint anywhere that anything is happening in the moral or spiritual sphere. All the suffering is placed in the secular order: in one word, in the torturous Indo- Gangetic plain.
But once it is admitted that Hindu philosophy is a philosophy of failure on the bodily plane, it must also be acknowledged that it has given to that failure a grandeur of expression which no mere failure could ever hope to have. There are few systems of philosophy and religion known to me which make the proclamation of universal and inescapable sorrow so resonant. Compared with it, vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas is a trifle didactic, des- pite the ring; and Job's lament is personal, in spite of the passion which makes it infinitely greater art than any conscious art. In these Hebrew texts sorrow re- mains on the earth, but in Hindu philosophy man's suf- fering, arising not from his higher nature but only from his body, envelopes the whole cosmos. It is as if the dust of the Gangetic plain was rising to permeate the nebulae. Bodily suffering felt with this intensity natu- rally generated a passion commensurate with it.
It seems to me that the Western interpreters of Hindu philosophy, and more so their Indian imitators, have committed a great mistake and done harm by intellec- tualizing it too much. Much of the modern writing on the subject is just dry as dust, choking, and soul-stripped logic-chopping, which belabours the mind until it feels sick of Hindu philosophy.
To me, on the contrary, it gives a different feel, which I shall try to communicate with the help of an image. It seems to me that the authors of the various systems of Hindu philosophy are captains of ships passing through a storm. All of them evoke in my mind the figure of Captain MacWhirr in Conrad's story, Typhoon. There is no contradiction between this simile and the relentless logic of the Hindu metaphysical constructions. Can the captain of a ship passing through a cyclone afford to be illogical? Please remember that Captain MacWhirr walked into his chart-room and consulted his barometers, and also his remark about the mate who had become hysterical: 'Don't listen to him. He is not on duty." The philosophical systems lose none of their passional character by being drily argumentative in form. Per- haps this is best seen in the Nyaya system, a system of logic usually ridiculed even by the Hindus for its quib- bles, but which basically remains passional, and rides on the current of Hindu sorrow.
A little thinking will show why the passion had to come. The suffering of the Hindus in everyday life was so drab and even sordid, and again it was so con- tinuous and irritating that no man, if he knew he was condemned to live with it for ever, could hope to save himself from utter degradation except by raising the suffering to a level at which it could be borne without shame, and on which it would not be so cowardly, squa- lid, and repulsive as it was in life.
It was the perpetual sight of an oozing of uncleanli- ness into the consciousness, taken with the visible fact of the proneness of all things to decompose in a tropical country, that created the characteristic Hindu concept of Tamas, as the lowest of the gunas or attributes. The word tamas literally means darkness, but in Hindu thought and feeling it stands really for a very comprehen- sive term for all kinds of squalor-material, biological, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. Suffering in tamas was the Hindu hubris.
Yet the Hindu idealists saw that it was to this that their people were being driven by the relentless environ- ment. They did not identify the power behind the de- gradation as Nature herself as she was in their country, but even without discovering the cause they were suffi- ciently frightened by the effect, and realizing that total escape from physical and mental suffering was impos- sible, tried at least to redeem it-to take it from its Indian inferno to a Hindu purgatory, where it could be chastened. They succeeded in that.
But the purgatory was also terrible. Dante's is an idyll in comparison. The ways of deliverance recom- mended by the philosophers were more difficult to tread than even the via dolorosa of worldly existence, from which they sought to divert men. The tragedy of all the systems of Hindu philosophy is that they confront man with only one choice: Remain corruptible and corrupt flesh, or become incorruptible and incorrupt stone. The alternatives presented were both cruel, but in a country which was excruciatingly cruel, could there be any kind of life which was not so? The only im- provement that could be brought about was that which lay between the cruelty of degradation, and the cruelty of ennoblement.
Thus there is nothing to be surprised at if Samkhya, which (let me repeat) is in my view the most typical of Hindu philosophies, is also the most cruel in the pre- sentation of the alternatives. There is no end to the sorrow of hunger, it declares, for it is ever-recurring: there is no respite from bereavement, because after the death of one son another might die; does it appear to you that death will release you from sorrow?-no, for you will be reborn and come again into its grindmill; there is no hope in that salvation which is identified with absorption in the Absolute Brahma-none at all, because a drowned man may rise again. Where then is the end of suffering? The answer of Samkhya is awful, when taken seriously. It lies in the total severance of the bond between Purusha and Prakriti-two highly tech- nical terms which have been elaborately explained, but which in sum are fairly simple notions. Prakriti is all that a man can understand, feel, yearn for, and even be: Purusha is an Absolute which for all human purposes is annihilation, Nirvana or extinction. Even the Nyaya system defines salvation in such terms. It is, according to Nyaya, the sleep of the dreamless man who never wakes up. What happiness!
Of all the Hindu philosophies it was Vedanta alone which did not face man with a double tragedy. It de- nied the reality of worldly joys but put another kind of joy before men. Salvation, it said, was to be found by regarding the manifested and changeful world, which was subject to destruction, only as Maya or illusion, and trying to be united in spirit with the unchanging Abso- lute Soul, which was infinite and eternal. In the union was eternal and indestructible joy.
Even such a promise of joy could not come from an Aryan of the Gangetic plain. He was too exhausted. So the Vedanta philosophy in its most typical form, which offered some kind of joy and contained a certain amount of positivism, had to come from a colonial Aryan of the South, Samkara. It was as if an Australian were to offer a revivification and re-interpretation of the Eng- lish spirit to an England which was passing from her present silver age to a state of ossification in culture. It had passed beyond the mental resources and capacity of the Aryavarta to formulate and develop even the most exiguous of optimistic philosophies.
And exiguous Vedantic optimism was. The system did indeed offer joy in the Absolute Being, but it could not define that Being in any terms which were comprehen- sible to men who knew life as lived. Not only Samkara, but all the revealed scriptures on whose interpretation by himself he based the authority of his personal philo- sophy, failed to define the Universal Soul as anything but a negation of all that was accessible to the senses, to thought, and to feelings even. Neti, Neti', 'Not that, not that was all that they could say about It. So, by a devious way, even Vedanta came back to the negation of Samkhya, with only an exalted autohypnosis induced by continuous suggestion.
No wonder then that the Vedantist who regarded the world as an illusion was himself held up to ridicule in Hindu society as an illusionist. To ordinary Hindus he and his fellow-philosophers appeared like men who were devoid of common sense, if not even sense. The philo- sophers were not credited even with being able to speak grammatical Sanskrit. The idea that the Hindus had great love and reverence for philosophy and respect for philosophers is a figment of the European mind. What we respect are the Sadhus, possessors of occult power, not philosophers who professed to possess only knowledge, and that useless in our eyes.
Thus rejecting their own philosophies for two reasons -the intrinsic negation and the queerness of the philoso- phers, the Hindus in their suffering remained as unsup- ported in spirit as they were in the body. They lived on in pain, but they never discovered that it sprang from their inability to accept their new home and their nos- talgia for the old but forgotten home.
