Autobiographical Notes

To the Editor of the Hindustan

In answer to your request for a statement of my opinion on the intermarriage question, I can only say that everything will have my full approval which helps to liberate and strengthen the life of the individual in the frame of a vigorous society and restore the freedom and energy which India had in her heroic times of greatness and expansion. Many of our present social forms were shaped, many of our customs originated, in a [time]¹ of contraction and decline. They had their utility for self-defence and survival within narrow limits, but are a drag upon our progress in the present hour when we are called upon once again to enter upon a free and courageous self-adaptation and expansion. I believe in an aggressive and expanding, not in a narrowly defensive and self-contracting Hinduism. Whether Mr. Patel's Bill is the best way to bring about the object intended is a question on which I can pronounce no decided opinion. I should have preferred a change from within the society rather than one brought about by legislation. But I recognise the difficulty

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created by the imposition of the rigid and mechanical notions of European jurisprudence on the old Hindu Law which was that of a society living and developing by an organic evolution. It is no longer easy, or perhaps in this case, possible to develop a new custom or revert to an old—for the change proposed amounts to no more than such a [reversion].² It would appear that the difficulty created by the legislature can only be removed by a resort to legislation. In that case, the Bill has my approval.

1918