The Thinking Corner

Mail-bag Musings

A man of letters is often taken to be a man with infinite leisure for letter-writing. His mail-bag bursts with queries and some of them push the interrogation mark to the farthest ends of the universe! But questions are a good stimulus and one who is pelted with them begins to look about him with new eyes and in directions undreamt of. Here are a few I pick out of a recent barrage with a direct or indirect relation to a causerie on literature.

Confucius and a Curious Classification

A correspondent echoes the "intrigued" uncertainty felt by Bertrand Russell about a saying of Confucius. "Men of virtue," declares Confucius, "love the mountains, men of learning the sea." A very attractive classification, admits Bertrand Russell but he scratches his head and confesses himself beaten. I think it is not really too curious or cryptic: the Chinese philosopher was using his imagination, and an imaginative approach will light up the main points of his meaning. Virtue implies an effort at self-exceeding, at rising higher and higher than the normal run of life - as mountains seem to lift themselves, tier on tier, above the earth. It is also a process of discipline, a giving of definite shape to oneself -like the formation of clear controlled contours mountains have undergone. Again, it is a striving after something which is believed to be unchangeable through the ages, after an ideal that is lasting and does not vary but is the same for ever - like the steady and stable shape the mountains uprear. Finally, it is an arduous work - hard, as it were, like the granite of mountains. Learning has an endlessness, space beyond space, horizon beyond horizon. It is manifold, taking a thousand forms, falling into a thousand movements. It is an exploration of the unknown, a diving into strange depths, a searching for hidden treasures. In all these respects it is like

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an experience of the sea. Furthermore, it has a reflective quality, it mirrors the truths of high heaven but is content like the sea to mirror them instead of reaching out towards them for actual possession as mountains appear to do.

Gandhian Satyagraha

Confucius was a man both of virtue and learning. Our Mahatma Gandhi is mainly the former. But, of course, all that is done by a virtue-seeking man need not be right. Sometimes, virtue can be mountainish in the sense of what Gandhi himself calls "a Himalayan blunder" and it can be such a blunder even when one least suspects it. A correspondent asks me whether I have read R.R. Diwakar's book, Satyagraha: Its Technique and History and whether I endorse the policy of Gandhian Satyagraha. I have not gone through the book in question and I believe Satyagraha has a certain force in certain circumstances, but Gandhi's desire always to "play cricket" and not take advantage of an opponent runs to dangerous quixotism. The Gandhian satyagrahi, playing cricket, does his best to expose his stumps freely or else to put his leg where his bat should be and court an l.b.w. If he uses his bat he lifts the ball to an easy catch. Mostly, he throws away his bat instead of hitting out. To a fast ball he offers his body and gets black and blue with hurts. He does everything to make the other! side win - and expects as a result that the opposing captain's heart would melt at the sight of so much self-immolation and an order would be given by him to allow every ball to be slogged to a beautiful "six"! The amazing thing is that the Gandhian satyagrahi, with his fasts, his meek bearing of lathi charges, his open intimation to the police of what he would do, his willing offer of himself for imprisonment did fill the British Government with shame and won many compassionate concessions. One cannot help admiring for a time this novel and not ignoble method. But soon it becomes clear that, though it is effective for a few immediate gains by a subject nation, it must slowly tend to

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undermine the instinct for struggle. Early success in the method would render a people passive if not also soft, lead the nation to depend on pity and, when pity failed, make it go under instead of fighting with righteous fury and coming out on top. Besides, satyagraha can be an absolute "misfire" when practised against a type like Hitler who brought a diabolic strain which unlike the human mind and heart is impervious to appeals to conscience and to attempts to create a sense of moral shame and stir up fellow-feeling. To offer satyagraha, as Gandhism advised, in the face of Hitlerism would be to pave the smoothest and shortest way to the destruction of all that mankind has cherished.

"Saint" and "Rishi"

Mention of Gandhi leads me to the correspondent who, among other things, asks me to consider how loosely the terms "saint" and "saintly" are used in English. Yes, they are, just as "spiritual" and "mystical" are applied to anybody who believes in and thinks about supernormal and supernatural things and experiences. But we Indians must take the English language in hand and chisel the meaning of its great words to represent precisely the inner life. I suppose French is worse still: "spirituel" means in it "mentally sparkling" -even an atheist and materialist and sensualist can be "spirituel"!

The Protestant Reformation had much to do with befogging the English language in regard to the inner life. The Roman Catholics had more or less accurate notions about the difference between religio-ethical goodness like our Gandhi's and saintly purity and radiancy arising from mystical communion with the Divine Presence within - though I dare say that in some instances they reduced the difference to a crude cluster of what were called miraculous phenomena. But the canonisation of a man came about after much scratinising of his life and its sources of activity, a careful study of the subjective as well as objective quality of his being. That is

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why even the Pope who is the head of the Church is not in virtue of his mere moral and religious eminence called a saint. Among the Protestants, whoever lives a life of sexual abstinence and charity and service is a saint: often the sexual desideratum is dropped altogether and a 'saintly' prelate or missionary can have his bellyful of wedded debauchery without the least tarnishing of his halo!

My correspondent asks me to say something also about the term "rishi" and decide if it can be applied to Tagore. Well, Sri Aurobindo has explained its root meaning and applied it to Bankim Chandra Chatterji for his discovery of the mantra of India's renascence in the song Bande Mataram, that cry of obeisance to the divine Mother Spirit which is felt behind India's idealistic and soul-questing activity down the ages. In its highest connotation, "rishi" means one who brings about the creative expression of the secret divinity of things, either in word or action, preferably in both, as did the composers of the Vedas and the Upanishads. If Tagore attained, on the plane proper to him, a creative pitch in his poetry of the inner life or of mystical and spiritual realities, he could be hailed as a rishi. In a general sense, the poet who gives sovereign expression from the inside, so to speak, to any plane becomes a rishi, to matter if he does not touch the mystical and spiritual aspect of things. Thus I suppose Shakespeare can be described as the rishi of the plane of the Life Force. I myself, however, prefer to give a mystical and spiritual tinge to the term, so that the profound Mother-worshipping fervour of Bankim Chandra Chatterji would make him a rishi in his national anthem while the emotional patriotism of Iqbal in his Hindustan Hamara would not. So too would I deem Tagore a rishi in his intensest ecstasy of utterance only where he reveals, in the light of his own word-plane, realities of the inner being or of Supernature. And here I should like to point out that in the true rishi-poems there is illumination as well as rapture, a seerhood no less than the soul's lyricism. Certain poems of Tagore's Gitanjali have this double quality - so do others that are not

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devotional at all. Devotionalism is not the sine qua non. I don't think one could designate Tagore's Urvasie as devotional, but I am inclined to rank it among his finest rishi-creations.

It is necessary to say, in passing, that Tagore the poet was on many occasions a rishi but Tagore the man was on the whole far from it. To be a rishi as a man one must be something more than intellectually wise and culturally accomplished, and morally scrupulous. One's judgments and actions must spring de profundis, one must be caught up into the divine depths of one's nature and live there and relate one's outer life to those secret splendours.

The Mystical Afflatus

The complete rishi is a rarity today and even a belief in rishihood is rare enough in these sceptical times. But it must be recognised that one must approach mysticism with some caution, keeping a sharp and clear eye to distinguish the spurious from the true. On the other hand, one must not be rigid or single-tracked in one's approach, laying over-stress on this turn or that of the mystical afflatus whether in life or poetry. A correspondent of mine expresses distrust of the mystical afflatus because he fears it often leads to a fruitless introversion and a hallucinated happiness that have no issue in action, no world-transforming power like that of the great Saints of Christendom. Mysticism of the type he has in mind is truly "cheap and jejune" - but it is no mysticism at all: it is something "pseudo" and it is not less hollow when it tries to be active - its activity has that sickening self-satisfied sanctimonious odour which can never be the keen though subtle oxygen of a new life for mankind. In poetry, mysticism becomes "cheap and jejune" when there is not enough imaginative plunge, enough emotional tension, enough intellectual alertness. To write confusedly in a colourful style or to make one's verse a thin haze of personified abstractions -this is to be false and futile. A certain obscurity is bound to occur at times in the genuine mystical self-expression, but

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there must also be the vision-stir and the living touch in the writing that give one the impression that here is reality, no matter if this reality be of an order not normal to day-to-day experience. Blake, for example, has poems cutting no precise figure in the mind; yet we feel because of the life-throb in the style a sense of profundity and an emotion that has a grandeur in it. Another kind of effect is produced by the vivid vagueness, if I may so put it, of Yeats's Celtic insight: depths are awakened in us and a lovely mist begins to wash the being to a new quiver of delight. The mist is not penetrated everywhere by our eyes, but our eyes are given a keenly focussed picture of it so that its presence becomes a strange reality evocative of unsuspected dimensions in our consciousness. This sort of mystical poetry may be called "moonlit" - there is another that is a "sunlit" wideness and clarity, not logical clarity but a revelatory interpretative power sweeping one towards horizons larger and more splendid than those of the natural world. Whether these horizons exist in a supernatural plane or in man's labyrinthine mind is not a question with which a critic is directly concerned: it suffices that they seem to exist, have an air of reality, affect us deeply, enrich our consciousness and touch springs in us of finer and subtler action among our fellows. The mystical afflatus of both the moonlit and the sunlit varieties is to be found again and again in the best poets and it is nothing to be "uneasy" over. Nor is it in actual life any more than in literature a thing to be distrusted or regretted so long as it is clear of inane or else effusive falsity. I join with my correspondent heartily in looking askance at the Inane and the Effusive going about in pontifical robes.

A Critic Run Amok

We must beware, however, of mistaking because of its supernormality such tinsel for real spiritual magnificence. And we must beware also of jibbing at somebody who faces it on his knees, though with a poised, sanely scrutinising

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attitude and a far from hysterical gesture. My remarks are provoked by a review, sent by another correspondent, of Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar's book Sri Aurobindo. The review is signed P.M. and my correspondent is much upset by what he terms its stupidity.

Looking behind the stupidity I suspect an inferiority complex at work in P.M. If I might play Chesterton I should say that P.M. feels acutely that he is no A.M. In other words, he feels that he is a sort of light that can do nothing but go winking and has neither the colourful hope of dawn nor the intense achievement of noon. I should add, too, in the same punning vein, that with the sense of sinking there is mixed in P.M. the tendency of westering: he leans toward the values of the modern West and is obsessed by the mightiness of English writers in their own tongue. Now, these two strains of his inferiority complex - first, the impression that Sri Aurobindo towers far above him in everything, that even Prof. Iyengar has written an interesting book, while P.M. is practically nobody and nowhere; and second, his belief that all this Yoga-business which is so unmodernly unwestern is at bottom "bunk" and that hagiography is so very eastern and rubbishy and that no Indian can write admirable stuff in an admirable manner in the English language which has so many awe-inspiring names of English writers - these two strains instigate the overemphatic sneering at the book under review for not only treating its subject in a certain way but also for choosing this particular subject.

Sri Aurobindo is a persona ingrata with P.M. P.M. does not like him as a literary figure and he does not like him as a Yogi: he considers his English imitative and stone-stiff -lifelessly ersatz - and his spiritual experience a kind of many-sided muddle scarcely deserving the hagiographical approach that seems to be Prof. Iyengar's. If P.M. did not suffer from an inferiority complex "which when it is sought to be suppressed causes always the cocky and destructive temper, he would be able to state his own lack of sympathy with the method of Sri Aurobindo's philosophical writing - on the one

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hand, an acute dividing, defining, discriminating and on the other a massive building up with a multiform vision and a stately style - and yet recognise the power that is at the service of that method. Also, he would be able to observe the hagiographical basis of Prof. Iyengar's book and still appreciate the effort Prof. Iyengar has made to raise on this basis a biographical superstructure of several wings with the aid of various views of the subject supplied by references, reminiscences, revelations by people in touch with the subject or by the subject himself. Considering the non-detailed somewhat scantily historical material at Iyengar's disposal, he has not done a bad job: much charm and some versatility and plenty of stamina are there. Faults and gaps are present which even the level at which he writes does not excuse or justify - but his work provides on the whole an excellent popular introduction. Anybody can see this, hagiography or no. But P.M. is blind in both eyes, and the self-assertive parade he makes of his blindness does not so much shock me as draws contempt. A pretty small mind is here, in which its own smallness is rubbed in smartingly by its jealousy of what is big and which tries to impose on itself and on others an illusion of its own bigness.

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