The Sun and The Rainbow

When Nehru Met Shaw

The history of our times is full of memorable meetings between the Modern East and the Modern West, Perhaps the meeting that took place in May 1949 was the most imaginatively significant — not only because two outstanding representatives met but also because of what the one gave to the other.

Both the meeting and the gift were eminently in the fitness of things. Immediately after achieving what seemed like "squaring the circle" — the reconciliation of the concept of India the sovereign independent Republic with the concept of the British Commonwealth of Nations — Jawaharlal Nehru could not have acted more appropriately than by meeting that master of surprise and paradox, Bernard Shaw. Nor could he have done anything more appropriate at the meeting than giving Shaw not the usual presents one might anticipate, such as a tiny model of the Taj Mahal or a statuette of Nataraja or a pocket edition of the Bhagavad Gita, but that most unexpected symbol of his country — the mango!

In the world of fruits the mango is as essentially Indian as olives are Greek, grapes French, figs Spanish, oranges Maltese and dates Arabian. Even more so — since it is a stauncher nationalist than any of them inasmuch as it has refused to thrive to any marked degree in a non-Indian soil, although Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, Brazil and the U.S.A. have done their best to plant mango groves. It is also as old as Indian history: .the specimens Nehru put into Shaw's hands are known by botanists to have had at least five thousand years of ancestors behind them, in the land of Arjuna and Tilak, Kapila and jagadish Chunder Bose, Vyasa and Tagore, Sri Krishna and Sri 'Aurobindo.

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Further, the mango is fraught with the flavour and bouquet of the typical Indian genius. This genius combines in its unity a large diversity of elements so that India is a sort of microcosm of all humanity's numerous cultural and racial types: this fruit, as a recent writer on its many merits pointed out, holds in Its own unique taste and smell the presence of the apricot, the melon, the peach, the pineapple and is, to Europeans, suggestive even of turpentine! What is more, we learn from the same writer that in the Hitopadesha and Pancha Tantra it is regarded not only as the medicine par excellence for humans but also as the food of the Gods. It is, therefore, the emblem of the spiritual delight which is said to sustain the celestial realms and we are told that according to ancient records certain varieties of this fruit were actually "named after the Gods themselves for whom they were supposed to be the approved and relished bhoga or offering." India the seeker of the Supreme Spirit can very well consider the mango as suggestively summing up at the same time the high ideal of her inner life and the sacrificial, the dedicative, the detached attitude which is commanded to the idealistic soul by Krishna in the famous phrase of the Gita: "Thou hast a right to the work but not to to the fruit thereof."

A most poetic and profound gesture, then, can be read in Nehru's action, conveying to Shaw the truth and beauty of historical India in the shape of the mango. But an added touch of the sympathetic imagination may be found if we realise that no other figure among the intellectuals in England could be so fitting a recipient of this delicacy as Shaw. Shaw is the most emphatic voice raised there against what he considers the superfluity no less than the barbarity of eating flesh. Throughout his life he has stressed that from the nutritive point of view it is not in the least necessary for man to be a carnivorous animal. All that the body needs, says he, is found in vegetables and fruits. But perhaps even Shaw did not know that in the mango we have the complete food: medical dieticians inform us that here are all the ingredients required to

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keep the body vibrant with every conceivable vitamin! Hence the mango is the master confirmation of the Shavian thesis.

An even deeper aspect of Shavianism is hidden in this fruit. But before we touch upon it let us- refer to a lighter side of the situation of Nehru's giving Shaw the mango. The Irish thinker and wit, with his grand beard, reminds us of the story in which an Iranian traveller who had returned to the court of a great Shah saved his life by a brilliant brain-wave. The traveller praised to the Shah the wonderful Indian fruit of the mango. The potentate told him that the praises had no point unless the mango's taste could be described. "If you cannot tell us," the traveller was informed, "what the mango tastes like, we shall cut off that head of yours which is so full of vain words." The poor rhapsodist was in a panic. Then a thought struck him. He called for honey. Dipping both his hands in the jar he smeared his own big beard with the sweet stuff and, holding it towards the astonished Shah, said: "If Your Majesty deigns to taste of the honey on this most humble beard, the taste of the mango will be revealed." The Shah, we are told, "was so impressed by the novelty of the proposal that he made the traveller his vizier." What the traveller did to convey the mango's deliciousness has indeed a strong taste of the mind and personality of the original and impudent yet patriarchal Shaw.

The most profoundly Shavian association, however, of the mango is by way of a pun. And this pun drives home also the most luminous philosophy that has sprung up on Indian soil in our day — the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo — and filled what in Shaw is but visionary aspiration with a concrete substance and practicality beyond his dreams. Often has Shaw declared that the mere change of institutions and of outer social forms is of no avail if man does not change himself, set astir his imagination and dynamise his will and evolve into a better brain for the purpose of fulfilling the immense potentialities of wisdom and harmony lying within that secret Something which is at the back of all being and striving, that

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secret Something called the Holy Ghost in the past and named the Life Force by Shaw. No doubt, the Shavian gospel lacks the true mystical sense and impulse; too many intellectual hedgings have taken away from the novel version of the Holy Ghost the dynamics of divinity; but an intense dissatisfaction and disgust with materialism and mechanism animate Shaw and some touch he does bring of

the prophetic Soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

The cry which Nietzsche raised of "surpassing man" and going beyond to a greater formula of embodied consciousness is ever on Shaw's lips, although he is not a strict partisan of Nietzsche's apotheosis of strength and aggression and reckless rapture. It is no use, he says, our playing variations on the theme of Man: we must make this old theme give place to a new one — the Superman. But, while the Modem West has vaguely searched in a Neo-Vitalism for a means to this theme, the Modern East in the figure of Sri Aurobindo the Master of the Integral Yoga has shown the actual inner and outer Way by which it can be worked out. What is to Shaw's credit, in spite of all his shortcomings, is that he has looked farther than the common "isms" bespelling the usually extravert West: the deep urge within is to him more important than the vast surge without. Our life, in his view, will be genuinely fruitful if we keep always in our mind and heart like an uplifted torch of truth a longing for Man's departure and Superman's advent. Of that genuine fruitfulness we can very welt conceive Shaw himself ingeniously making the mango expressive. Perhaps the extreme pleasure with which Shaw accepted Nehru's gift was due to the fact that the word "mango" sounds the first note of his world-message — a world-message which, in a highly transfigured form unrecognised by him and even by Nehru, is also India's Weltanschauung today and which, in brief, is:

"Man, go! Superman, come!"

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