The Publishers acknowledge their indebtedness to the Editors of The Bombay Chronicle Weekly, The All India Weekly and The Advent in whose pages the essays included in this volume have already appeared—mostly .in a shorter form.

The significance of Jawaharlal Nehru

A Vision of his "Actual" and his "Potential"

PANDIT Jawaharlal Nehru rode on horseback to meet the Cabinet Mission. He had gone in the same way to confer with Lord Wavell a year or so earlier. Gandhi came in a rickshaw; so too did Maulana Abu! Kalam Azad. But Nehru was astride a dappled horse. When I saw him thus in the Indian News Parade I was struck with the significance of the act.

Here was something princely—an old-world nobility made its appearance. Here also was something warriorlike—an adventurous spirit fared forth. Here, again, was something romantic—a dreamer rose above humdrumness and trampled on the mechanically of common life. And here, finally, was man the mental being in full control of animal energy, making the latter's magnificent wildness serve the ends of a far-seeing and ordering urge.

Perhaps this last significance is the most complete. For, Jawaharlal Nehru is pre-eminently the mind-principle in its aspects of lucidity and refinement and idealism. Not that he is mind and nothing else: the vital strength and élan of which the horse is the

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symbol is prominent enough in him, but it is not the master: the master is thought. And this thought is not the dry and abstract speculation of the pure philosopher: it is a warm movement, a visioning activity, an ethical drive—it is the mind of humane civilisation and constructive culture.

You have just to glance at Nehru's face to have a sense of his disposition. The features are very handsome but with no fiashiness—there is nothing of the glamour-boy about him. They have a pensive power. The brow has no ruggedness nor any sudden slope; neither too narrow nor too broad, it is poised and shapely—not indeed easeful, yet showing balance and proportion in its mould of strength. The eyes are bright and mobile but they have a far-away look too, as if whatever dynamic decision he might take carried behind it a great deal of seeing ahead and a large and many-sided consideration, a weighing and piercing of things that are not on the surface nor caught within the passing moment.

A piquant humour is not wanting in the eyes and this is slightly accentuated by certain small irregular curves within the fine arch of the eyebrows, but the piquancy is not unmixed with gentleness and there is nothing sardonic. A touch of self-criticism is also in the gaze, a laughing at his own expense or else a desponding about the gap between desire and achievement. The nose is straight without being bleakly bony, it is the nose of a man of resolution and push as well as understanding penetrativeness_,

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a firm structure and a suave projection distinguish it. The delicately yet not narrowly chiselled sensitive nostrils speak the very opposite of ruthlessness: temporary irritation may be his—assertive rage never.

The mouth is not thin or weak: it is full and has some length, but it is quite free from any suggestion of sensuality or devouringness, though a capacity to appreciate the richness of life, the joyful savor of beautiful things, is clearly indicated—a noble and aristocratic paganism that is rightly guided, kept within graceful limits. The chin is well-formed and substantial, revealing reserves of power and an ability to endure a lot. It is, however, not an aggressive chin: it presents a man who can direct and sustain more than command and jostle.

Yes, the mind of humane civilisation and constructive culture is written all over the face. But there is also something to be read between the lines, so to say. A subtle light seems to play all over, not openly traced in this or that feature, yet forming a general atmosphere in which lives the ensemble of them all. I said "lives", but perhaps the more correct expression would be "exists". For, Nehru is not quite conscious of the subtle atmosphere and he does not explicitly draw upon it. What he does is to stand within its glow without making any effort to recognise and utilise it. He is like a man who feels the sun on his face but has his eyes shut. He cannot help having some sensation of the great

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luminary but he does not see the burning gold nor its far-flung skyey splendour. Between him and that splendour is a veil which, though not utterly opaque> is not accurately translucent either. The true intensity and immensity are never realised: the feel of light that invades him together with the heat is the small "red surmise" born of the luster coming through the skin-cover of the eyelids drawn across the gaze.

The simile of the huge golden sun, centre of the illuminated heavens, becoming that small "red surmise" in front of the head is especially apt in Nehru's case, for he is much governed by the phenomenon of Soviet Russia, the country of the Red Banner. The word "red" has become a mark of the Soviet ideology and this ideology suffuses Nehru's general thought. It strikes him as a glowing thing, a beacon before his eyes: only, he does not know that what he is enamoured of is the outcome of closed eyes and that the reality that lures him in this shape is something different and much greater. What he follows is just an appearance due to a limitation; whatever glory it has is a translation into restricted and diminished and even perverting terms of a magnitude and magnificence which he would behold beyond the Soviet ideology if only somehow the eyes of him broke open.

Nehru's eyes are indeed unopened—inwardly. And the wonder which he does not properly see but whose presence is about him and about his life, can be

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guessed if we go tracing the master-passion of his mind: Freedom. Freedom first came to him in the guise of an education outside his own country. Born in 1889, he spent hardly fourteen years in India before Harrow claimed him. Schooled there, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and got his M. A. and afterwards became Bar-at-Law of the Inner Temple.

He got steeped in Westernism, especially the scientific humanitarian spirit of the modern West. His manners are Western, his tastes are Western, his cast of mind is Western. He is perfectly at home in the air of modern European culture—the culture of individual emancipation, equal rights, daring experimental inquiry, the historical and economic sense, opposition to old customs and conventions, fearlessness towards both the known and the unknown, desire to stand up and fight for a brotherhood of rationalism and socialism. The culmination of the true spirit of this culture seems to him the Soviet Union.

Not that he is a thorough communist or that he fails to realise the various follies and savageries the Soviet Union has committed or the lack of political democracy it exhibits. Still, for its ideal of economic democracy, of concentration on concrete material benefit to each individual, of harnessing all the energies of our normal consciousness to promote a productive and harmonious earth-life delivered from misty escapism, the Soviet Union

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is counted by him the best collective endeavour today of the enlightened philanthropy and dynamic earth-fulfilling culture that are to him essential for Freedom and that he would make his own mind's substance and force.

Side by side with the figure of Freedom which he discerns in the Soviet Union is the figure of it he has followed in India's struggle for independence. In fact, the latter is his most active love. It has led him to serve nine terms of imprisonment—almost half his life! Thrice it has brought him Presidentship of the Congress—a unique honour and responsibility. Westernised though he may be, and also Soviet-coloured, India and India alone calls him with the most intimate, the most imperative voice.

His European education saves him from being narrowly and rigidly Indian: his horizon is wide as the world and he has an international bent. But India is to him the most precious part of the world. Nor is this so because he happens to be an Indian by birth. It is essentially so because he feels there is in India a potentiality, which no other country can equal, of living from the deep places of one's nature, a potentiality of the best Freedom—the freedom from evil. And both the sign and content of that feeling are in the relation he bears to Gandhi.

In accepting Gandhi, despite several differences of viewpoint, as his leader in the national struggle, he made not only a political choice. Gandhi

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stands in the main for five things that exceed politics: simplicity, honesty, non-violence, sexual abstinence and, most important of all, faith in God. Simplicity comes without the least effort to Nehru himself. Though bred in the lap of bounteous fortune, he' never had any lust for possessions; he wants very little for his own needs and it is this innate simplicity as well as the innate generosity of him that spurred him, when his father died without a will, to put his whole inherited wealth at the disposal of his mother and sisters, asking them to consider themselves the real owners of Anand Bhawan and all that Motilal had left and to think of him as only a trustee and adviser!

As for honesty, it has been an obstacle in the path of his politics: he can never stoop to the shifts and meannesses and trickeries that go mostly with them. He will never set a great cause below personal ambition and he is ready always to see his opponent's point of view. As Krishna Kripalani puts it: "He tolerates dissent and obliges enemies, virtues fatal to a politician." Non-violence is not altogether native to him: he has a quick temper and a fighting spirit and has often openly confessed that under certain circumstances he would fling ahimsa to the winds. But he has not at all any trace of brutishness or selfish aggression. His just and generous and refined intelligence turns away from them and induces profound sympathy with Gandhi's curb over animal anger and attack.

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Gandhi's obsession with the "sinfulness" of sex is foreign to him, but that is because he is singularly free from sexual urgencies. Gandhi was sex-ridden in early life; Nehru deems sex a healthy thing and assimilable into culture: it is for him no tyrant and his natural leaning is towards much rarer enjoyments and exhilarations. So Gandhi's chastity, in spite of its too ascetic note, is not out of tune with Nehru's disposition.

The religious cry, however, is found difficult by Nehru to adjust to his own mind: Gandhi's God is unacceptable to this Marxist—and yet what draws him so deeply to Gandhi is a stupendous unknown quantity, something uncharted by Marx and unanalyzed by science and inadequately covered by moral principles. He compares Gandhi's influence to that of Socrates, and thereby confesses his own intuition of the metaphysical and "daemonic" touch. That intuition, fundamentally, binds him to Gandhi for all the empirical mould his mind has acquired from Western education and Soviet influence.

That intuition is also not unnatural to him: the real source of his extreme fineness of being is nothing else than metaphysical and "daemonic". The cultured enlightened mind in command of the vital energy is in itself a beautiful force; yet the super-charm and super-elevation it achieves in Nehru derives from what the mystics know as the secret soul in contact with the Divine

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and it is this soul which gives the subtle light seeming to play on his face.

Nehru is a mystic whose surface is unconscious of his depths! Such a statement would probably startle him the most. But even apart from his sense of a stupendous X behind Gandhi, he has not omitted to record en passant his own unfathomable yearnings. In The Discovery of India, his latest book and a worthy rival to his Autobiography and Glimpses of World History, he writes that, though much in the Marxist philosophical outlook he would accept without demurring, almost unawares a vague idealist approach would creep in, "something rather akin to the Vedanta approach". And he adds significantly: "It was not a difference between mind and matter but rather of something that lay beyond mind."

There is another hint too: his response in the midst of the dust and strife of the world to the image of the Buddha seated on the lotus flower above mortal passion and desire. He asks himself if this tranquillity can be reconciled with action and says: "Behind those still unmoving features there is passion and an emotion, strange and more powerful than the passions and emotions we have known. His eyes are closed but some power of the spirit looks out of them and a vital energy fills the frame." Some peace and power from beyond the mind are what he aspires after when the surface of him is not too insistent.

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It is also a sense of more than natural presences that is aroused in him by the loveliness and grandeur of Nature as well as the perfection of art and poetry. And most of all the spiritual unknown is at the back of the intense hunger he mentions in his Autobiography to visit "Manasarovar, the wonder-lake of Tibet, and snow-covered Kailas nearby"—two of the holiest spots of Hinduism. "I dream of the day", writes Nehru, "when I shall wander about the Himalayas and cross them to reach that lake and mountain of my desire." The words are as of a Pilgrim of Eternity who has lost himself in Time.

It is a pity that a man gifted with a highly developed soul should fail to wake up to his own destiny. The result is an inexplicable sadness that is ever a shadow at Nehru's heels. All who have watched him in private have remarked, as his sister Krishna Hutheesing testifies in With No Regrets, a brooding disconsolate look stealing often into his face as if the dreamer in him who peered into the distance had an unearthly longing which nothing could satisfy.

In action he forgets his sadness and his alert intelligence banishes it with a vast variety of interests and much constructive thought. But he loses it most in the company of children. Not even Gandhi is so completely a child among them, romping about, playing and enjoying himself every bit as much as the children themselves. Perhaps in their company he gets somehow into contact

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with the "clouds of glory" which Wordsworth saw them "trailing" and which the soul in Nehru is calling so keenly and yet so futilely his outer intelligence to realise.

The secret sadness which is a sign of the disequilibrium between the inner and the outer is not due only to the scientific materialist philosophy Nehru's Western education has landed him in. No doubt, that philosophy inclines him to suspect mysticism of leading away from life here and now. His attitude, however, is not altogether biased. He has enough historical sense to see that ancient Indian culture was mystical and at the same time to admit: "The basic background of that culture was not one of other-worldliness or world-worthlessness. In India we find during every period when her civilisation bloomed, an intense joy in fife and nature, a pleasure in the act of living, the development of art and music and literature and song and dancing and painting and the theatre, and even a highly sophisticated inquiry into the sex relation. It is inconceivable that a culture or view of life based on other-worldliness or world-worthlessness could have produced all these manifestations of vigorous and varied life. Indeed it should be obvious that any culture that was basically other-worldly could not have carried on for thousands of years .... I should have thought that Indian culture, taken as a whole, never emphasized the negation of life though some of its

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philosophies did so: it seems to have done so much less than Christianity." (The Discovery of India, pp. 82-3.)

As for the existence of God, his Marxist penchant makes him turn down the experiences of the mystics as probably phantasms of the self-deluded imagination; he chooses to admire only the passion connected with them for truth and for practical endeavour: "What interests me is the approach, which was not authoritarian or dogmatic, but was an attempt to discover for oneself what lay behind the external aspects of life." Nevertheless, a veiled instinct within him keeps on saying: "Whether we believe in God or not, it is impossible not to believe in something, whether we call it a creative life-giving force or vital energy inherent in matter which gives it its capacity for self-movement and change and growth, or by some other name, something that is as real, though elusive, as life is real when contrasted with death. Whether we are conscious of it or not, most of us worship at the invisible altar of some unknown god and offer sacrifice to it—some ideal, personal, national or international: some distant objective that draws us on though reason itself may find little substance in it; some vague conception of the perfect man and a better world. Perfection may be impossible of attainment, but the daemon in us, some vital force, urges us on and we tread that path from generation to generation." (Ibid., p. 625.)

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Clearly here is a very strong pressure of the spiritual inner on the pragmatic outer. What is wanted is a knock of help that might break through the scientific materialist carapace. If the knock has never come, the fault must lie with whoever has most influenced Nehru. Paradoxically enough, the sadness in him of unfulfilment must be attributed equally to his Western education and to the leader he has accepted in India as the truest Indian— Gandhi!

Weighed in the ultimate spiritual balance, Gandhi is at once a promise and a disappointment. He has the obvious orientation of the great mystics, the mighty yogis, but their essential realisation is not his. None of the five main points of his gospel guarantees the mystical experience: they are no more than a preparation for it. He is profoundly moral and religious, yet he does not plunge with the absolute abandon necessary into the Eternal and the Infinite, he has not achieved union with the Cosmic Consciousness and the Transcendental Perfection. The Immortal In-dweller that the soul is and that leaps utterly towards the Divine does not stand naked in Gandhi for all his austerity.

It is somewhere behind him instead of in his midst. It acts with an indirect power. And that is why Nehru, moved though he is in his very foundations by the power Gandhi strives to transmit, is left unawakened on his surface. There is not that in Gandhi which could dissolve Marxist Materialism

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and Western Pragmatism at one burning blow. A Buddha, if Nehru could meet him in the flesh, might do it; so too might a Ramakrishna or a Viveka-nanda; and at this very moment Raman Maharshi can and, more than all of them, Sri Aurobindo. For, like Nehru himself, Sri Aurobindo was educated in the West and has assimilated all that Westernism can give, and so can reach most effectively the Westernised being of Nehru and yet reach it with the whole bulk of Indian spirituality plunging with a unique dynamic direction in it to break wide a gate for the soul to emerge and make life flower in full.

But Gandhi has not the Moksha, the soul's liberation into the limitless glory of God which the Rishis sang of—Moksha in one form or another, in its bearing on the Impersonal Absolute or the Personal Lord. To a man whose master-passion is Freedom, nothing short of this supreme freedom from mortality can utter the truth towards which he is groping. And without it the earthly paradise which he imagines he glimpses through the Soviet experiment will always have insidious snakes and can never bring him to his goal, for how can there be a perfect brotherhood of men unless what is divinely One in all flowers forth? Without it the independence of India which he has always craved can never bring a sense of fulfilment; for the hidden magnet to his deep self is the search by India of the soul's light above fetters and frailties and not merely of her body's Swaraj.

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So Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru falls short of his highest possibilities and lives with a certain self-ignorance and discontent. But his achievement is still splendid. And though the steed the Vedic Rishis spoke of in their hymns as marching towards a divine dawn has not openly been Nehru's mount, an unforgettable picture full of meaning he remains as he rides on horseback to his country's conferences. And to the symbolism we have read in the act, one more shade must be added. That horse is a Pegasus though without wings; for, if Nehru is no poet Hafting into fire and ether, he is surely a prose-writer with an inspired pace, ranging far and wide on terra firma, and his books have value as literature no less than as personal narratives, political studies, historical surveys and sociological discussions.

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Can Indians write English poetry?

The Indian Mind and the English Language

W. B. YEATS is said to have " pooh-poohed" the idea that an Indian could write English poetry of a high order. It is indeed true that the subtle inwardness one feels towards one's mother-tongue is likely to be missing .when an Indian attempts to express himself in English. But is it impossible to have it? And is it advisable always for us to fall back upon our vernaculars and leave English to Irishmen like Yeats?

Reading most of the verse turned out by English-speaking Indians we are almost persuaded that we shall never succeed in reaching a high standard. But here lurks a fallacy. Read the bulk of poetry written in Gujerati or Bengali—or, for that matter, in English by Englishmen themselves—and you will have nearly the same impression of decorated barrenness. The trouble, therefore, lies not so much in our using the English language as in the difficulty of being a true poet in any language. Of course, it is more marked where a foreign tongue is concerned, yet it is not necessarily insuperable. And for Yeats in particular to have overlooked this is curious short sight.

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The true language of Ireland is not English. English was imposed on her as part of the British rule and it began to spread as a learnt language and not as a native growth of race. A situation similar to India's was Ireland's, making for a degree of check on genuine poetic utterance. May not this situation be one out of several factors owing to which, whatever the prose achievements, there was no Irish poet of authentic first-rate power before Yeats came on the scene? In the pre-Yeatsian period, the peak was Thomas Moore with his Irish Melodies', but the peak was pretty far from the free airs of heaven. Touching as are those poems, they have little breath of magical articulation. They have a graceful diction, but it is tastefully dressed-up commonplace and no true cadence of the soul of the language. Drawing-room ballads they are and no songs trembling with natural inevitable intensity of expression. If we remember Moore, it is mainly for the tunes to which his poems were prettily matched, not for any word and rhythm of intrinsic rarity. But be the pre-Yeatsian poetry what it may, the fact remains that a foreign tongue has at last given birth in Ireland to a voice from its deeper levels of word and rhythm. Nor is Yeats a glorious freak: he has a great compatriot in A. E. and a fine one in James Cousins, not to mention Seumas O'Sullivan and Dorothy Wellesley. Ireland whose native language was Gaelic has triumphantly "arrived" in English poetry. No

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doubt, Yeats and his fellow-singers heard English at their mothers' knee, even though they may not have imbibed it with their mothers' milk. Most Indians cannot claim such a happy fate; but let us not forget that English has been domiciled here for two centuries now and is a compulsory element in all our education, constantly interspersing in daily life our vernaculars. Besides, the Indian mind has a marked faculty for assimilating languages, an innate responsiveness to diverse forms of significant sound. If this mind masters the English poetical technique and is receptive to that gift of the Gods, inspiration, why should it not ride to perfection the English Pegasus? It is understandable that we do not often attempt the feat, since our own languages come more easily to us, but Yeats has definitely not said the last word—our poets shall have many beautiful words to say which would disprove his sweeping contention.

So much for Yeats's argument. But there is another which a critic lately flung against a book by an Indian of poems steeped in mystical vision and experience. The critic remarked that the poems left a vague feeling of inadequacy because they were written by an Indian in a foreign tongue not indeed ungrammatically or unidiomatically or with imcompetent technique but with a certain Indian-ness of thought which fitted like a round peg the square hole, as it were, of the English language.

In support of this subtle standpoint the name of

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that famous interpreter of literature, Middleton Murry, was invoked. Murry had delivered himself on poems not precisely of a mystical type: he had read in them as typically Indian and typically un-English a luxuriant effeminacy, a backboneless love-reverie on a rich divan. How far the epic Valmiki and Vyasa or even the voluptuous Kalidasa with his bold imagination and firm shaping hand could be charged with these so-called Indian qualities is a question merely y requiring to be asked in order to be at once brushed aside. Nor did the author on whom Murry passed judgment Show such , Indianness. But the fact is significant that Murry jibbed at the poems of Manmohan Ghose on the score of temperament , Manmohan Ghose had been taken to England in his early boyhood and had ' passed through an English school and university. Reading him, Murry praised his knowledge of English verse-technique and declared his knowledge of the English tongue to be notable: only, he could nothing himself to consider the work good English poctry. T his he attributed to his impression that English words were being used to convey ideas and attitudes foreign to their own basic genius and tradition.

At the first look one may tend to regard the general issue raised here as superficial and cry out : "what does it matter if it seems that an author has an Indian mind? so long as 10 was good poetry, who cares whether the the good pending so

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English-minded?" I am afraid the real point was that if poetry written in English was not English-minded it was also not good. For, good poetry is a perfect fusion of substance and form. If the poet's vision is not assimilated by his words, his form becomes somehow faulty, he fails in finality of expression. Of course all poetry has a certain aura, so to speak, of the unexpressed and even the inexpressible. There is, for instance, an unfathomable depth, an undertone and overtone of consciousness in Wordsworth's phrase about Newton:

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

But Middleton Murry would not complain that here there is something forced into the words, which they do not naturally tend to hold: their basic genius and tradition have been harmoniously pressed to a particular end, not contradicted and baulked by a meaning, an attitude, a psychology that are un-English. If there were an un-Englishness of mind, then according to Murry the words would not be potent enough to make that perfectly crystallized centre round which the unexpressed and the inexpressible could hang like a halo. Without that centre, poetry would leave a vague feeling of inadequacy and never be absolutely first-rate.

This implies that no Indian can write first-rate English verse—for the one fundamental and all-undermining reason that his psychology does not

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fit the English-minded words he is using. It is quite true that a lot of frothy or else insipid verse is born of Indians taking to the English Muse. That is because the language is not fully at their fingertips and has not got under their skin. But the Murryesque position is surely most wrong-headed. Can we say that the English Muse has one definite basic psychology? When the Romantic Movement caught English poets, did not all the hoary-headed classicists find the result un-English in temper as well as style? How bewildered was even Matthew Arnold by the un-English ethereality that ran riot in Shelley's work! And what about that pre-Romantic Blake? Are his "embryo ideas" and "uninvolved images" and "vague mystic grandeurs" English? Is it English of Wordsworth to poetise the exaltations of pantheism? Is the early Yeats English—Yeats of the dim poignancies and the rich obscurities? Nobody can affirm that the average Englishman has the foggiest notion of what A.E. is singing about; yet A.E.'s poems are a living language, English written by an Irishman with the soul of an Indian. Can we or can we not stamp as English the Bible's poetic passages with their lavish oriental imagination their gorgeous Hebraic religiosity? The English language is the most composite in the world— influences Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, French, Greek, Latin, Italian and Hebraic have gone into its making as well as mind. It has a capacity to assimilate everything, it can take any colour of

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thought, shade of suggestion, glow of feeling, pattern of experience and turn them into truly English effects—that is, effects achieved with perfect adequacy by English words. What has happened in the past can happen again. Would it not be stupendous superficiality to imply that even a praiseworthy knowledge of English poetical technique and a notable command over the English language at the disposal of Indian inspiration could fail to produce good English poetry? "There ain't no sich person" as English poetry with one simple and uniform body and soul!

The only genuine criticism possible about a foreign poet handling English is that his knowledge of the verse-technique and the natural idiom is not at all remarkable and therefore gives rise to ineffective poetry, in spite of what ever talent or genius he may have for self-expression in his own tongue. Granted die expressive gift and that intimate knowledge, English verse with its infinite plasticity of temper and tone is out and out the best medium for any living vision, any momentous experience. Does the Murryesque critic realise that he is not merely condemning Indians but' also the English language? If, while genuinely appreciating the substance of that book of mystical and spiritual poems as rare if not new, he had gone berserk and, though conceding to the author the rudiments of grammar, accused him of not knowing balance of construction, vividness of phrase or

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subtlety of metrical rhythm, the argument would have been on grounds that might be plausible. But to charge English words with impotence in expressing fully what may be new or foreign or not commonly appreciable is to forget all innovators and to fall into an error that should have been swept away for good when Symons and Gosse sponsored Sarojini Naidu or Fowler-Wright and Laurence Binyon hailed Harindranath Chattopadhyaya.

It is curious to remember that Gosse's advice to Sarojini Naidu amounted to saying: "If you, an Indian with such a flair for our tongue and our literary technique, want to write good English poetry, do not echo English thought and vision but write utterly as an Indian." Surely, if English words were impervious to Indianness of mind, Gosse's advice would be egregious nonsense. The fact is that English words have so diverse a genius and tradition, so multiple and complex a psychological history that they are fit for any use. Much more than any other language they could be mot-toed with the Roman poet's phrase: "Nothing that is human is alien to me." It is not improbable that an Indian who has mastered English will still be felt by Englishmen as having a slight peculiarity of expression which is not hundred per cent English in turn and tone. It will, however, be critical misfire to forget the numberless foreign strains in the composition of English speech. Each strain, when it first entered English, brought its slight peculiarity.

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In our own day, Conrad's novels are not hundred per cent English in turn and tone: does any one dream of pushing them down from the high shelf of great style and great literature? Slight outward peculiarities do not matter. I should go to the extent of saying: "Even marked peculiarities do not matter. Haven't you heard of Meredithese and Carlyle's? Carlyle often writes English with a German turn and tone. Some critics even condemn Milton for corrupting the genius of the English language by his Latinism of construction in Paradise Lost. Yet Milton is generally put in the frontline of English poets. Today neither Australia nor British Africa is innocent of slight peculiarities, whereas American peculiarities are not slight but whalish! The English tongue has spread over the whole globe and is no longer insular. So long as Indians do not write incorrectly or ignorantly but with a fine technical and sympathetic grip on their medium, they can grow masters of English. And the least of all obstacles to their mastery will be the Indian consciousness they bring to their self-expression. For, one of the most natural tendencies of the basic genius of English words in poetry is the mystical and spiritual sense that is afire in Indian poets."

What can be labelled as un-English in these writers? One sole thing: English poets have not displayed en masse and in all its bearings the type of inspiration which shines out in the recent work

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of Sri Aurobindo or those who have come under his influence. But a prelude to it is already there; hence that inspiration would be a flowering of what is native in essence and not foreign to English words. Even if the inspiration were - entirely new, the English language by its multifariousness would prove competent to assimilate and convey it. Nowhere can we play Canute to such a language: "Thus far and no further." When, on the contrary, we see that the quick manifold suggestion, either delicate or powerful, which is mystically and spiritually the most desirable as an expressive mode, is the mode par excellence of the English tongue, the mode in which it excels all other modern languages, including the Indian ones, and when we see in addition that in recent times this potentiality has been evoked in the service of mystical and spiritual vision and emotion by English poets with a glory of insight and a sense of vibrating vastness that are unique—when we see these two factors— the Murryesque dictum grows still hollower.

The very quotation I have made from Wordsworth—

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone—

is not merely a crowning moment of English poetry but at the same time, for all its reference to the scientist Newton, a culminating spiritual moment which conjures up the atmosphere and rhythm of the ancient Upanishads. A Rishi of old seems to

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intone that ample and profound verse. A Rishi again comes to life with Shelley's

Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

Among earlier English poets, there is the true Upanishadic touch in Vaughan's

1 saw Eternity the other nigbt

Like a great ring of pure and endless light

All calm as it was bright,

or in those lines that open up a sudden Vedantic depth in even the most secular of England's first-rate poets, Shakespeare:

... the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

In our own day we have several voices, both Irish and English, bringing the ache that we find in the Vedic seers. The intensest is A.E.'s:

Some for beauty follow long Flying traces—some there be Seek Thee only for a song; I to lose myself in Thee.

Truly and completely English such utterances are, seeds of divine fire within the English genius, seeds that have not been developed on a large scale or to

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their utmost variety of fruitfulness but are none the less alive for that and none the less natural.

Here we must pause a moment and ponder the two sides of the phenomenon: on the one hand the livingness and naturalness of the mystical and spiritual motif in the polyharmony of the English poetic genius and on the other the falling short by that motif of its own integral fulfilment. The medium is there, ready to hand, a most plastic and profound and vivid instrument for mystical and spiritual self-expression and yet one feels that the supreme poet of the Infinite and the Eternal in English has still to come. Perhaps he will never come from among Englishmen. Certain traits of the English temperament might stand in the way of his advent. But the wonderful instrument is now within the reach of a race to which the Infinite and the Eternal is the very life-breath. All that responds rapturously in the English poets to the One that is everywhere, all that bears a thrilled instinct of the Hound of Heaven, all that leaps colorfully to the Immortal Beauty in its world-wandering, all that is a flaming contact with the Divine Dweller within and with the hidden realms of the Gods is raised to a rare intensity and immensity among the Yogic aspirants of India and moves as a subtle concealed current everywhere in the general life of the country that lies at the foot of the Himalayas. The Indian, with the Himalayas of the Spirit in his national history and consciousness, can alone carry English poetry

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to a summit of spiritual fulfilment. Surely the prevalence of the English language in India bears the stamp of destiny!

It is, therefore, eminently desirable that Indian poets who are at home in English should write from the Yogic heart of their country. Whatever vague feeling of inadequacy there may result must be traced to the average reader's difficulty in absorbing Yogic inspiration and not to any unbridgeable gulf between Indian thoughts and English words. In its full form this afflatus from dimensions of consciousness so far explored only by fits and starts or in their first aspects will constitute a new age by the sustained height and depth and breadth it will reveal. The English tongue will bear a taste of the occult and the Unknown as never before. That will be an Indian extension of its basic genius. Still, the fact remains that the extension will be all the more easy and abundant because it will employ the super-suggestive quality residing in the language of England and complete a vital trend of English poetry itself. English poets as well as the singers of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita triumph in essence when Sri Aurobindo, summing up his Yogic ideal, chants the mantra:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme Delight-Life that meets the Eternal with close breast— An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite— Force one with unimaginable rest.

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Was this the Enlightened One?

Modern Misconceptions about Buddha

The other day I came across an article on Buddha by an Indian writer. I took it up with keen interest, wondering how it would expound Buddha's Nirvana in lucid journalese. It made a good story, but to my disappointment I found that the author got over the Gordian knot of Nirvana by pretending there was no knot at all.

To be a countryman of the great Gautama and yet to quote H.G.Wells on Buddhism—this was beyond belief. How could H.G.Wells probe into the soul of a man who would have regarded the seer of the outer shape of things-to-come as totally ignorant of the inner shape of things as they are? No, sir, our Buddha is much larger than scientific and socialistic Utopianism. He is not a philanthropist or altruist of the Western model. As such he would never have shaken the Indian world in the past nor would the earthquake of his ecstasy be felt even at this day by every spiritual seismograph from Khatmandu to Colombo!

It is necessary to point this out, for the true Indian -view of life is so often watered down to

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suit the Western or the Westernised mind. If a merely humanitarian impulse had been at work in the secret places of Buddha's heart, he would have done nothing more in those famous scenes with an old man, a sick man and a dead man than get down from his chariot and take the old man to an infirmary and the sick man to a hospital and the dead man to the dissolving mercy of the burning ghat. And, surely, he would never have forsaken, as he did, his young wife with a newly born babe when they needed him most—a queer kind of philanthropic "selflessness", I must say! Instead of wandering away at night, becoming a beggar and an ascetic and spending six years aloof from suffering humanity, he would have set himself to introduce social reforms and build up charitable institutions and preach Wellsian Utopias.

But Buddha wanted to heal the very heart of life's misery and not solely to patch up its external wounds. He wanted to achieve for himself and make others achieve a liberation from the cosmic round of rebirths: that liberation was at least his avowed aim and it is impossible to imagine this aim being fulfilled by just the construction of an altruistic philosophy and the humanitarian practice of a Utopianism à la Wells.

I am surprised at an Indian writing: "All night he sat under the Bo Tree in profound thought and then he rose up to impart his vision to the world." Buddha did not sit in thought: he was, according

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to scientific standards, totally unconscious for a night and a day, while, according to spiritual standards, he was in deep trance, one of the chief characteristics of which is an utter suspension of all thought! Intellectual formulation came later; what Buddha sat in was a state of absolute Samadhi in which the human mind is transcended and a vast egoless desireless sorrowless superhuman Ineffable is realised. This Ineffable is Nirvana: Nirvana means literally "No Blowing"—in it the wind of desire, the rushing after this and that, the attachment to earthly things, the whole hungering psychology of bounded personal nature are lost and replaced by a sort of nothingness so far as the sense of limited personality is concerned and even so far as all divided forms and separate entities in the universe are concerned. It is an infinite oneness without feature or distinction—a mystical and spiritual state. It is not a philosophical thinking out of world problems on a unitary basis, not even a high seeing of the possibilities of harmony by the poetic mind, with a philanthropic emotion as the active outcome, as the resultant starting-point for work among one's fellows. It is utterly free from the subtle egoism of the philanthropic worker, with his stormy (and therefore non-Nirvanic) urge to help people and his attachment to some reformist fad or other, not to mention his private little amours and affaires in the interludes of public life and even a secret hunger for fame and reward and

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appreciation for public labours.

Humanitarian service, the moral practice of so-called unselfishness, is undoubtedly a help towards spiritual attainment, as it weakens the bonds of a too narrowly personal life, but it is not the goal of Buddhism. It is one of the steps to the goal which is Nirvana. And it is a step which could very well lead nowhere near Nirvana if the various other steps which have little connection with service to humanity as such did not go with it. Further, it is not an equivalent of what Buddha names compassion. Only after the realisation of Nirvana in a mystical and spiritual sense there is born the luminous Buddhist compassion, the experience and not merely the idea that there is no separation between things, the realisation of an absolute unity between self and non-self, the flowing out of all one's being towards the universe in a spontaneous impartial desireless unattached service. This experience, this realisation, this flowing out are the true Indian way of perfect living.

It is not easy, but nothing short of it can bring what artists and sculptors have tried to depict on Buddha's face—the godlike peace which is beyond all sorrow yet goes out to all sorrow as a heavenly healing power, both inward and outward. Would any one try to catch that expression on the face of H. G. Wells?...

The portrait of Buddha in the Wellsian manner cast my mind back to another which I had considered

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disappointing too. The author responsible for it had shown a penchant for Western vitalism, the combative adventurous élan of modern Europe and declared Buddhism a warped and unhealthy thing in comparison despite certain features which he could not help eulogising. He viewed the Master somewhat peculiarly. He gave him a lot of compliments with one hand, garlanding him as Saint and Sage, "a man of giant intellect and penetrating vision", "the greatest thinker the world has ever known", but with the other he hung on him the label of "Obsessional Neurotic", saying that Buddha dwelt overmuch and morbidly on life's miseries and evinced an extreme unbalanced recoil of the nerves from them. I do not argue that a great intellect or a keen moral sensibility is incompatible with neurosis. Yet to put Buddha in the same category as a man like Nietzsche is to shoot wide of the mark. The author did not actually lump Buddha and Nietzsche together, but his contrasting descriptions of Buddha cannot help evoking in my mind the picture of Nietzsche. Here was a dynamic intellect, both logical and poetic, acute and inspired, an enemy of the sham, the botched, the pusillanimous, the devitalised—but alas! himself a nervous wreck and finally a dithering lunatic. The Freudian test of Obsessional Neurosis can apply to the German gospeller of anti-Christ Superman because in the long run the single dominant motif broke his health and left him a hysterical chaos.

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Obsession in the psychopathic sense is not the word for any and every kind of master-passion or life-ideal carried to the extreme. Wilberforce fighting throughout his life the one evil Slavery was not an obsessional neurotic, General Booth devoting his entire energy to the Salvation Army was not an obsessional neurotic, Spahlinger concentrating for decades on a vaccine for tuberculosis was not an obsessional neurotic—and they were not obsessional neurotics because their minds and nerves were strong enough to bear the burden of the idée fixe, did not sink into hysteria and exaggerative mania, temporary or permanent, and were untinged by morbid egocentrism.

The charge of "Obsessional Neurotic" against Buddha becomes strikingly false when we see him passing through the severe tension of his youth, the ascetic intensity of year on single-aimed year, to a most serene manhood, a most calm and cool yet humane and generous maturity, a head of the clearest, a heart of the noblest, a physical body of the healthiest and free alike from self-torture and self-indulgence—an all-round sanity, sublimity, sweetness. Such strong nerves, such an equipoised sensorium, such a tranquillity mated with activity, such a subdual of all conflicts cannot be a case for Herr Freud's clinic. Let us remember what our author himself writes in one chapter of his book: "It was said of Buddha that his mere presence brought peace to souls in anguish and that those

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who touched his hands or garments momentarily forgot their pain; evil passions fled at his approach and men whose dull unimaginative lives had been a mode of death arose, as it were, from their living graves when he passed by." Is this the picture of a hypochondriac and a victim to psychopathic?

Is it even true that Buddha shut his eyes to the presence of pleasure in earth-life and saw only pain? He did say that all life is dukkha or unhappiness, but must we turn on him a look of superior pity and marvel how he could be so short-sighted when it is plain that unhappiness is relative and exists merely because happiness or sukha exists, as silence because of sound and darkness because of light? Is not life composed of opposites generated from opposites and must not the seeing of dukkha mean automatically the seeing of sukha} Very good logic, this. But is our interpretation of the term dukkha the same as Buddha's? What was he after? He felt that what he was after was something the whole world was after in its heart of hearts. Everywhere and always the cry is for utter cessation of dukkha, the perpetual end of unhappiness and the perpetual continuation of joy. No matter what hard facts may hedge us in, we cannot deny that urge. Life with its constant sense of incompleteness and imperfection is ever seeking a state of Being immune to time's ravages, a Knowledge that is basic and gives the key to the world-mystery, a Bliss that shall not fade. Our search for lasting

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happiness and conquest of all pain is an agelong one, and perhaps the most dominant strain in our general hunger for Perfection and Permanence. But nowhere in the world do we find a perpetual end of unhappiness, for nowhere is there any Permanence and Perfection. All our sukha, our so-called happiness, arises from brief satisfactions, from small attainments and soon it is succeeded by dukkha. It cannot fill the heart of man and is therefore a gilded form of unhappiness itself. Not this but another experience that is ceaselessly radiant and does not hang for its radiancy on passing occasions or objects can alone be the magnet to our quest, The lack of it is what Buddha calls dukkha, a term which denotes not only the series of sorrows we endure but the whole of life and the whole chain of rebirths, because the play of impermanent pleasure must always leave unappeased the heart's cry for an endless cessation of sorrow. It is because sorrow cannot come to an everlasting stop, it is because sorrow comes recurring and never permits joy to last without end that Buddha looks on all living as a frustration of what life aims at, openly or in secret. That frustration is dukkha. Buddha is not a feverish fool irrationally refusing to acknowledge temporary joy and taking a jaundiced view of earth-existence. His philosophy is not a species of melancholic depression,

A Freudian conception of Buddha will satisfy just as little as a Wellsian. Nor will that satisfy

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which draws him as a man "doped" with Nirvana. Not only is Buddha miles off from neurosis; he also emerges from all accounts as no pale and passive wraith but a store-house of stupendous radiancy. We must not let it slip our memory that he resurrected "living graves". Indeed his was not a brutal obstreperous vitality: he was no Attila or Hitler or even an American hustler and go-getter. Strength and activeness of that type are in various and differing measures the mark of the Titan: the God comes with another face and another step, a dynamis no less effective but rooted in a supreme calm, a force of action that is based on an immense impersonal freedom from the fevers of the limited ego. To leave so profound a stamp on his own age and on thousands of years that followed could not be possible to one who brought merely a negative message, a cessation of all impulses of ordinary life with no grander impulse and more abundant reality to make up for that cessation.

Buddha was a spiritual figure and not just a philosopher or a moralist. A philosophy of life as dukkha or unhappiness, a morality insisting on rejection of tanha or egoistic thirst may sickly earth-existence over with their pale cast of pessimism and ascetic inertia; and in fact earth-existence did get sicklied over when Buddhism survived as a philosophy and a morality, with the true spiritual inwardness gone. Even something worse than pessimism and ascetic inertia may result without that

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inwardness. Tanha which keeps us attached to finite transient objects is a tremendous force in our ordinary psychology and a suppression of it might twist and pervert our nature and issue in various maladies and manias. What is called "sublimation" is no easy matter and may, when achieved, bring some release, but it is a very imperfect tackling of the problem and does not eradicate the roots of egoistic desire: it only prevents, at least for a time, the apparently dangerous deformations. Tanha can neither be suppressed nor sublimated out of existence by any common means, and any effort to keep away from it altogether will cause, at best, a dejection and dullness impairing the founts of activity. When, however, a changeless and beatific Poise outside our human constitution, psychological and physical, is reached, initially in a state of trance but finally as an infinite background to every waking moment—when the spiritual light of Nirvana is there and a divine reality that transcends all limited and temporary objects pervades the consciousness and gives the tone to our life—the effect on a healthy and "rounded" nature is intensely strengthening and intensely creative.

Buddha did not remain in forest seclusion, absorbed in saving his own soul, lost in his own immensity of inner realisation. He was driven by that very immensity out of the limits of personal salvation to embrace the world and uplift it. By his enlightenment a vast monkhood was set aglow

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and mystics went forth everywhere. Whatever served as a hint, a glimmer, a symbolic suggestion of the Nirvanic bliss was taken hold of and creatively used, dynamically manipulated. Beauty, wisdom, service rushed out like a life-giving river.

A civilisation packed with a splendid abundance of noble vitality took birth and sent its emissaries across the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. Was that the work of "doped" cowards and weaklings and sluggards? Can we brand Asoka as such— Asoka with his imperial energy, his endless zeal to harmonise his far-flung kingdom and send the light of Asia to all the continents? Can we stigmatism as anemic and impotent the enthusiastic souls who carved massively in stone or who painted the caves of Ajanta after winning incredible victories of excavation in the basalt cliffs? Buddhist art was created by men on whom the spiritual light had laid its hand, even if it had not in all instances gripped them wholly. The colorful enthusiasm and beautiful optimism which Gladstone Solomon saw in the Ajanta frescoes and considered the ne plus ultra of art-expression are not, as a psychoanalyst might explain, long-repressed life-instincts exploding into artistic ecstasy by a kind of natural revulsion from the Buddhist negation of the world. They are the natural outflow of the ecstasy which was the core of Buddha's life—they catch in rainbow hues and symbolic shapes the richness and the rapture dwelling in true Buddhism, they are a

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prismatic representation of the sunlight that lay for ever, according to all testimonies, on Buddha's face, a visionary loosening forth of the unquenchable beatitude that everyone felt in the presence of Buddha's body. He who stirred and illumined "the dull unimaginative" routine of his contemporaries—surely it was he who through the imagination of artist-monks kindled up and animated the caves of Ajanta!

Nirvana is not a barren nullity. To the Buddhist mystic the world might have been a home of sorrow, but Nirvana brought into it an imperishable smile: life was transfigured and bliss sat like a rose on a stem of thorns and made roses break out in all places, frustrating the thorns' tyranny. Buddhist mysticism did not create world-values for the sake of the world's own importance, it created them to open the world's eyes to the glory of the Beyond; and there it showed a certain over-emphasis on one aspect of being, as all past religious practice has tended to do. But world-values it did create and could not help creating, because the reflection of so grand a reality as Nirvana in the waking consciousness must unseal in a healthy and "rounded" constitution the divine spring of creative power that waits above the purely personal tanha-ridden mind. Though only one aspect and not the integral truth of the spiritual Mystery, Nirvana is still a superb more-than-human height and by that fact it is far above even the finest in Western vitalism

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and makes Buddha a more truly evolutive and creative figure than the heroes of sturdy robust enterprising "realistic" disposition whom we are often asked to admire.

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Art-principles for india

The Marxist Attitude in the Balance

There was recently a burst of tanks and bombers in newspaper columns against an art-critic who ventured to challenge Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's pronouncement some months ago on the essence and aim of art. and aim of art. I do not deny that the said artcritic's statement was lacking in clearness and completeness. Bur was he absolutely off the right line? Was the core of his contention really open to fatal attack?

To understand that core we must look clearly at Nehru's own thought. Nehru seems to have had five principles in mind. First, art should not be cut off from life. Second, it should deal mainly with our own times. Third, it should spring from the life of the people at large. Fourth, it should express the social and political problems and movements of a nation. Fifth, it should be "realistic" in treatment. These principles generalizes more or less the Marxist view of art—and at their back is the idea that the individual exists only in relation to society and that his function is to be the mouthpiece and servant of the masses. What

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stuck in the gullet of the art-critic in question was this idea and the stress on the social and political aspects of a nation's life. That he is not alone in his reaction and that he may not be a total fool is easily shown by what Mr. James Agate, the eminent dramatic critic, wrote in the last number of his autobiographical series: Ego 7. "I believe," said Mr. Agate, "that great art is individualistic, and that any state of society that tends to lessen the importance of individuals tends to do away with the great artist.... Soviet Russia has not produced a composer fit to lick the boots of the Czarist lot....I prefer Tchehov's plays to dramas about communal wash-houses." Of course Mr. Agate had no desire tod efend the unpleasant features of Czarism; what he insisted on—with some unnecessary exaggeration, though—is the inadequacy in several respects of the Marxist attitude towards art.

To believe in art's individualism is not, as the Marxists might suppose, to think the artist has no connection with reality or with contemporary factors or with the general life of the nation to which he belongs. It is not tantamount to saying: "Beethoven could have sprung into existence as easily in Timbuctoo during the time of the Roman Empire as in Germany in the age of Napoleon." No doubt, a nation does feed the secret springs of an individual and the age in which he lives does colour and shape him, but he is not altogether a

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national product nor is he grooved in contemporary conditions. Beethoven's Eroica drew its inspiration from the age of Napoleon and his other compositions bear signs of the German temperament and the German scene, but most of them transcend both Germany and the Napoleonic influence and, further, the German temperament and scene in them have nothing at all to do with mass-problems or social and political purposes of his day. Beethoven in love, Beethoven responding to Nature, Beethoven in the midst of purely personal joys and despairs, Beethoven in contact with other individuals and their personal attitudes, Beethoven looking up to some spiritual ideal, Beethoven invoking some Mystery and Beatitude beyond the earth—these are what mainly constitute his sonatas and symphonies.

And just because he is so individualistic he need not be considered as cut off from life and reality. He is no dawdler over some private dream devoid of consequence—a sort of opium-eater. But he certainly is cut off to a marked extent from mass-movements, especially of a social and political type. If distance from such movements means divorce from life and reality, then Beethoven is a dweller among the dead. But, truly speaking, we should confine, as regards the content of art, the meaning of the words "life" and "reality" to a freedom from sterile escapism. Sterile escapism cannot be charged to even those who are more individualistic and esoteric than Beethoven. To be dissatisfied

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with things as they are in the mass, to follow an ideal that is rare and that is difficult for most human beings at the moment, to rise above one's fellows, —is not to be an ineffective ghost in artistic content. All leaders, pioneers, planners, progressives rise above their fellows, cultivate a difficult vision, foster a rare emotion. Not that they wholly refuse to keep in touch with common contemporary experience, but their art can be just as genuine and vital when its content strikes beyond that experience's range and only a few at the moment can avail themselves of its message. The sole proviso is: there should be depth and significance and purpose in their work.

The Marxist notion that an individual is real only in relation to society and that he should voice in his art proletarian purposes and social and political movements of the bulk of a nation, is based on an external materialistic view of what an individual and the world are. Is the individual simply a member of a social aggregate? He would be such, if the social aggregate were the only reality of any consequence. But if there is a thing called the soul distinct from the body and if that soul is a spark of a Divine Consciousness that emanates and sustains the universe, then the individual's supreme significance and reality need not be limited to society. He would be related to an Immortal In-dweller, to a Cosmic Presence and to a Transcendental Perfection. His deepest significance would lie

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in this relation. In the light of it his relation to society would be determined. His art-expression would most legitimately be derived from religious, metaphysical, mystical, spiritual sources. He would be under no obligation to restrict himself to proletarian affairs, especially of a social and political kind. And even when he turned to them he would be principally concerned with giving an outlet through them to motives and inspirations beyond their existence. They would not be all in all. And to deem them not all in all is hardly to hold a brief for art for art's sake in a narrow barren sense.

The art-critic who found fault with Nehru's doctrine and cited Tolstoy, Emerson, Ruskin and Morris on his own behalf sought to justify the artist's drawing inspiration from within himself, from his own profound emotions and personal ideals and individual heights rather than from proletarian purposes and social and political matters. The art-critic's wording was somewhat vague: he seemed to favour sterile escapism as opposed to the tackling of vital issues and concrete actualities, but it is excessive to reply to him by saying that if he knew anything about these writers at all he would scarcely try to defend his theory with the help of the greatest champions in the nineteenth century of the theory actually being put forward by Nehru! The names of Tolstoy, Emerson, Ruskin and Morris cannot be used for upholding entirely the Marxist view

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of art. Surely, these men were purposeful and had the good of society at large in mind: they were, however, not in the least materialistic, they were poles apart from believing the individual to be real only in relation to society.

Tolstoy was religious to the marrow and looked for the fountain-head of all conduct in duty to God. Emerson was a mixture of pantheist and tran-scendentalist: he held that the truest springs of action lay in the divine infinity hidden behind phenomena. Besides, he was a pugnacious individualist vis à vis average social conventions and the rating of common human collectivities as paramount. Ruskin also was surcharged with a conviction of the Infinite and the Eternal—art to him was most valuable when through natural objects it had suggestions of them, open or subtle. Morris followed Karl Marx in his general socialist opinions, yet he too had a living sense of realities beyond the human and the earthly, as had the mediaeval master-craftsmen whom he admired.

Nor exactly can Plato be enlisted on Marx's side on the strength of his socialist leanings. The highest goal of the Platonic life was oneness with the divine beauty, truth and goodness. Morality and social behaviour were closely knit in Platonism with the mystical and metaphysical intuition. Though the Platonic artist was meant to be a social-motived creature, he could never serve society with a materialistic penchant. Plato wanted all art to have a keen

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consciousness of the archetypal world he posited above the flux of phenomena.

Whether these "visionaries" are right, or the pragmatic Marxist, may seem to many modern-minded Indians an issue long-decided by science in the latter's favour. But the materialistic and mechanical reading of the universe by nineteenth-century physics is now shown to be seriously garbled, if not altogether erroneous. Although twentieth-century physics has not yet evolved a clear and consistent picture, a return to the old materialism and mechanism appears impossible. The materialism which calls itself dialectical as contrasted with mechanical and which is the official basis of the Marxist ideology is trying hard to adjust the revolutionary world of relativity and quanta and "waves" and the Law of Indeterminacy to its anti-mystical and anti-spiritual position. But the odds against it are heavy. And there has been another and severer attack from the ranks of science on the Marxist basis. Whatever the formal departures from the old mechanical materialism in regard to the process of phenomena, this basis is really no different from that of Buchner and Haeckel in that the physical is regarded as the prime reality. The inner self is still viewed as an outcome and a dependent of the outer. The psychology current in Soviet Russia is Behaviourism: it looks on all mental activity as the sum-total of the throat's muscle-movements—to think is simply to talk loudly or

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under one's breath! There is for the Marxist nothing else than phases of physical function. Philosophically, the absurdity of Behaviourism can be exposed in one minute. Tremors of the throat-muscles, if determined by purely physical factors, cannot have the power to make any kind of valid judgment about the world. A motion of the larynx or the thorax occurring solely because of physical changes in the body would not be guided by a sense or intuition of the true and the false, a criterion of rational validity, the logical implications of the object about which we are talking. So, if Behaviourism is right, then Behaviourism which is itself a theory or judgment about the world can carry no intrinsic tightness or reasonableness and is probably incorrect and no ultimate importance need be attached to it! To answer this argument by saying that the bodily changes which determine the course of our thought and our sense of rationality are themselves a "reflection" of the rational structure of the environment is to indulge in guess-work, if not to beg the whole question. Yes, philosophically the Behaviourist cuts the very branch upon which he is standing. But even scientifically the holder of any type of materialism is given no standing-ground by what has come to be known as "extra-sensory perception". Researches in extrasensory perception have been carried out under test conditions and statistical scrutiny in Cambridge and Duke University in North California. When anything

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is transmitted across physical space, the distance diminishes the strength in exact inverse ratio; but controlled and certified experiments in telepathy have found that a thought transmitted from afar is invariably as strong and definite as one from a neighboring locality. So it is proved that telepathy is not a kind of radio across physical space with a bodily part acting at either end. Much less can a bodily part be held responsible for pre-vision, for seeing correctly the future. The mathematically sifted fool-proof laboratory instances brought forward of pre-vision set at nought physical time in addition to physical space. The evidence collected by Dr. Rhine and others has given with a strict scientific procedure the coup de grace to materialistic self-sufficiency. Of course the body-formula yet holds sway over those who refuse to look at the new facts and figures about faculties present in us though seldom developed; but no honest inquirer can now help concluding that experimentation as accurate and systematic as any scientist could ask for has shown it to be wanting in finality.* Though extra-sensory perception as studied in the scientific West does not directly demonstrate the existence of God or the divine qualities of the hidden soul, it leaves the road wide open for a mystical and spiritual

* See Sixty Years of Extra-Sensory Perception by Dr. Rhine; Prof. C. D. Broad's Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research, 1936; the Journal of Parapsychology (Duke University) June, September and December, 1942.

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belief or intuition or quest and for a removal of the Marxist stress on an external view of the individual and the world.

Once that stress is gone, society at large and its mass-activities cannot dominate the stage of art. And even when the cause of the masses has prominent and "realistic" play, it would be erroneous to hold that it forms the essence of art. To support his individualism, the critic instanced the writers of Czarist Russia where there was not the so-called rule of the people to supply mass-inspiration of a "realistic" socio-political character. This argument was turned against him by showing how the best Russian writers from Pushkin and Gogol to Gorki were the most politically and socially conscious, channeled the common people's aspirations and exposed in a "realistic" manner the grotesque and gruesome tyranny of Czarism. But the turning of the argument does not affect the individualism of those writers—individualism inasmuch as they wrote under no compulsion of serving the masses, they freely chose to be what they were and if their inclinations had been otherwise they would not have hesitated to be neither "realistic" nor socially and politically conscious.

Moreover, their being what they were did not by itself make them artists. They would have been propagandist pamphleteers without the least artistic fire if they had not brought to their job a sense of beauty. Without the breath of beauty all their

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realism and social and political consciousness would have been dead things. And for beauty's breath to be present, what is required is a certain measured intensity within the individual, giving birth to perfection of form. "The strength of a nation" or any other external source is not the provider of that intensity. Out of the individual's own recesses it has got to be evoked and it has nothing to do with any particular theme, any particular national activity, any "realism" of treatment and technique. All themes, activities, "isms" of treatment and technique can be animated by it. Even "escapist" tendencies can become art through it. From the standpoint of form, art can be genuine and vital no matter how other-worldly, cloud-cuckooish, opium-eating it may be. The sole proviso here is: there should be beauty created from within and no superficial empty decorativeness.

It is not necessary to take up this extreme position in order to challenge the new art-principles. The formula of freedom from sterile escapism, joined to the formula of beauty created from within, is enough to justify as art those works which do not teem with matters of the masses and an outward realism. Nehru's phrase "the problems and realities of life" would be very poor and limited if it covered merely national movements, social revolutions, patriotic struggles, economic perplexities, mass-travails. The works of art mentioned by the challenger— the landscapes of Turner, Rembrandt's portraits

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and the Japanese sea-scapes—are indeed quite innocent of such problems and realities. Their bearing on the issue at stake cannot be confused by attributing to the challenger the notion that these works are totally cut off from life and earth. Nobody in his senses denies they have some connection with life and earth: the Japanese sea-scapes have surely something to do with the expanses of water around Japan, Turner is closely related to English sky-effects and Venetian lights, while Rembrandt is "realistically" linked with many aged and poor Netherlanders. Yet the problems and realities presented are of non-social non-political wave and wind and cloud and sunset, or of individuals with feelings and faces quite removed from political and patriotic ferments or large mass-movements. They have no propaganda value either: they cannot be used as a stick to beat Capitalism or Imperialism.

Nor can one wholly summon Aeschylus and Dante to prop up by their work this modernist thesis. Aeschylus may show us Athenian patriotism, the struggle against tyranny and the place of the individual in society in some parts of his plays, but he expresses many other things too—supernatural presences, superhuman fates, individual aspirations, personal passions. Dante did write a notable political treatise and did import politics with pungent effect into his verse, yet far greater is the poetry he wrote inspired by the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, his own religious and mystical temper,

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his love for and idealisation of Beatrice. There is neither politics nor sociology in the grand finale of Divina Comedia—the ascent to the highest circle of heaven, the plea of St. Bernard to the Virgin and the disclosure of the Beatific Vision. That outburst of poetry which stands among the top marvels of inspiration is utterly useless in the scales proposed by the modernist thesis—as useless as the frescoes of Ajanta.

Ajanta cannot be called "dead" or jeered at because of the "dreamy and oblong (and therefore fantastic) eyes" of the women on its walls nor can we justly declare that it has nothing to give us any more. We forget that when new times come and the present problems vanish and other techniques are in vogue the art now encouraged will be termed just as dead by men bound by what would then be considered modern or present-day standards. Let us by all means have "realistic" art imbued with our time-spirit and tense with our national activities and our masses' problems; but let us also remember that art cannot be circumscribed by any school and that activities and problems of a private and personal nature, a cosmic nature, a transcendental nature are equally important if the whole of reality is to be compassed by art. The frescoes of Ajanta are not at all dead and can never die, for they have wonderful depth and significance and purpose, and they have a ravishing beauty breaking from within their painters' being and not an empty decorativeness

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laid on from without. No realism is theirs, and yet a most revealing skill. They have no strictly social and political value, they have no proletarian message—but they undoubtedly are not antiquated; for the insight and fervour of soul that are in them are still among us and are fresh and radiant in those who still keep alive India's traditions of spiritual seeking, of straining towards what is beyond the human and the mortal, of aspiring after a loveliness and an ecstasy such as pervades our mighty scriptures and the lives of our prophets and yogis from Buddha to Sri Aurobindo. Many new impulses must be given outlet, many changes must be introduced even in our spiritual quest, since we cannot merely repeat the past, but the past if truly inspired cannot be lifeless or unfruitful, and a work of art cannot be judged by narrow standards of technique or those of time and clime, socio-political utility and relevance to the masses.

I might end here. But Ajanta calls for a little more. There is a special sense in which to describe its frescoes as dead would show an insufficient sensitiveness to the vibrations of vitality. For, whoever has seen those paintings cannot help thrilling to their intense joie de vivre, rich abandon and rhythmic mobility. It is not merely the line-work that is remarkable for fineness and vigour; what is more remarkable is the adventurous uninhibited élan of heart and mind which has here made even religious themes a glory of dancing and

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singing blood, a flame of fearless youth. O the energy, the zest assailing us from those caves of colour, the harmonious urge to tune our life into a perfect symphony! What should have been said is not that Ajanta is dead and that our painters ought to leave it for good, but that, as N. G. Jog has recently remarked, our artists often copy its line while leaving the life of it in the ancient vaults. To re-create the formalism of the old masters, yet miss their spirit altogether, is the deadly mistake so many of our brush-wielders commit. If this mistake had been pointed out, that would have been a salutary service. Ajanta lives and with a healthy and no feverish vitality. If "the strength of a nation", which Nehru puts forward, has anything to do with superabundant healthy vitality, then without doubt, whatever else we may welcome in order to live many-sidedly, there should never be a break with Ajanta!

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The inspiration of Sarojini Naidu

A Defence against Colour-blind

and Tone-deaf "Debunkers"

"Debunking" is the favourite sport of our time —often a healthy necessary sport; but futile and thankless is the attempt to "debunk" skylarks and nightingales and Sarojini Naidu! Critics have begun to find her work void of true emotion; they see no real creative drive in it. Mere colour, vague imagery, tinsel sentiment—these sum her up in their view. The sole compliment they pay her is that she has an attractive command over language and a consummate skill in poetic form. That is, her technique is impressive but the inspiration is no more than fantastic, fevered and artificial.

It is quite natural that her work should convey an impression of exuberance and heat, for, on the whole, Sarojini the poet lives not in high reflective moments nor even in profoundly emotional ones but in a brilliant beauty of suggestive sensation. Yet to deny genuineness to poetry of such a character is to conceive the aim of inspiration too rigidly. Sarojini loves to be luxurious; she has a texture of rich warmth, because she deals with tangibilities,

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her genius is predominantly visual and auditory— sight and sound and vibrant palpableness are the constituents of her soul. But we must not forget that poetry is basically sensuous. The varieties of it depend on whether sensuousness is subdued or spurts out or keeps a-quiver in the forefront. Where rhythmic speech is employed to catch the light of thought or an emotional incandescence, there is of sensuousness either a controlled power as in Wordsworth or an intensity that rushes and recedes as in Shelley. Where, on the other hand, the motive-force is neither aspiring thought nor ecstatic emotion, it is inevitable that the sensuous nature of verse should hold the field almost altogether and act on the reader's consciousness directly, a thrill of iridescence and melody weaving an imaginative spell without any strong desire to ennoble the mind or spiritualise the heart. A typical instance is from Indian Dancers:

The scents of red roses and sandalwood flutter and die in the maze of their gem-tangled hair,

And smiles are entwining like magical serpents the poppies of lips that are opiate-sweet

Their garments of purple are burning like tremulous dawns in the quivering air,

And exquisite, subtle, and slow are the tinkle and tread of their slumber-soft feet.

This provides no ideas worth living out, no emotions worth dying for. What it gives is an

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aesthetic joy pure and sheer, an enchantment laid upon us by word-painting, bold figures of speech and a rhythm-movement that answers marvellously to the meaning. Call it art for art's sake if you like; but one point must be remembered: here is an inspiration as authentic as any of your majestic rolls or edifying tremolos. Art for art's sake is barren only when the language is used with a hollow decorative effect, when the words are in excess of their substance, when the glitter and luxury are on the body of a corpse.

We cannot affirm that Sarojini never indulges in fruitless verbiage; yet how can her occasional defects of effusive and hectic emptiness wipe off the living flush or the haunting witchery she exhibits at her best? Her success lies in her using the sensuous basis of poetry for the one legitimate aim all poetic language must have: the revelation of realities not quite of the earth earthy. She is, in the main, no spiritual teacher, no penetrating idealist, but her poems do draw aside the veil of the gross world and show us brief vistas of some subtle, more abiding, more perfect sense-existence—the colour and cry of a dream-plane which is a kind of magic background to the earth and an intuition of which spreads strangeness over the sense-responses of daily life. Take the Palanquin Bearers:

Lightly, O lightly, we bear her along,

She sways like a flower in the wind of our song!

She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream.

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She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream.

Gaily, O gaily, we glide and we sing,

We bear her along like a pearl on a string.

Softly, O softly, we bear her along, She hangs like a star In the dew of our song; She springs like a beam on the brow of a tide, She falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride. Lightly, O lightly, we glide and we sing, We bear her along like a pearl on a string.

There we have not so much an actual scene as an imaginative essence of rhythm and colour behind the physical act of carrying a princess in a palanquin. It is material movement heard by an inner ear bent on catching a dream-echo of the outer sense-experience. To be more correct, we should say "dream-original" instead of "dream-echo", since a poet's descriptions are always tinged by some sort of perfect model or archetype felt by him as pre-existing somewhere. All authentic poetry goes beyond the crude data of life and if Sarojini touches a picturesque lucency behind the surface rather than a significant luminosity, she fails to be like Wordsworth or Shelley but she does not fail to be a genuine poet in her own way.

In addition to her flair for the shiningly picturesque, Sarojini has a style in which simple feeling blends a graceful pity, a delicate sadness, with the pervading colour-pomp. The best example I can recollect is Purdah Nashin;

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Her life is a revolving dream

Of languid and sequestered ease;

Her girdles and her fillets gleam

Like changing fires on sunset seas;

Her raiment is like morning mist,

Shot opal, gold and amethyst.

From thieving light of eyes impure,

From coveting sun or wind's caress,

Her days are guarded and secure

Behind her carven lattices,

Like jewels in a turbaned crest,

Like secrets in a lover's breast.

But though no hand unsanctioned dares

Unveil the mysteries of her grace,

Time lifts the curtain unawares,

And sorrow looks into her face. ...

Who shall prevent the subde years,

Or shield a woman's eyes from tears!

Surely these lines give the lie to those critics who credit Sarojini with mere technical triumphs. Vision and language, matter and form have been fused into a single glowing whole. Nor does any touch creep in of the gaudy lavishness of a mind trying to poeticise. Beautiful and sparkling words are indeed used, but without self-conscious effort: a sense of proportion holds together the bright effects in a significant interpretative play, and there is restraint in the midst of richness, pointing in the most natural undidactic manner the unavoidable pathos of life. All the phrases strike the imagination

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like concrete gestures: some have a sweep about them while others are softly suggestive. Of the latter type the last stanza is beyond praise, especially the concluding four lines where every turn and semi-turn come with a fine-edged felicity, the inner and the outer absorbing each other's vividnesses and values with a pictorial cunning most gentle yet penetrative. Yes, these lines are the best in the art of the simple and the subtle combined, just as the first stanza is the best in that of the magnificently meaningful; but the closing couplet of the middle stanza introduces, with also a subdued indirect emphasis worth noting, the presence and power that rules this "revolving dream" of concealed splendour and precious indolence, the lord and master who cherishes the Purdah Nashin. He is hinted first by a simile bringing in the "turbaned crest", emblem of stately manliness; soon after, the mere man is revealed as the lover who himself lives in the open but creates the harem because it is his heart's jealously treasured secrets that are, as it were, embodied by him in the hidden beauty of a wife on whom he has imposed the Purdah.

The whole poem is flawless, with an appeal. that is human as well as aesthetic. It must be confessed that Sarojini has not given us such work in abundance, but whenever she has mingled the exuberant verve with an exquisite sympathy her very choicest successes have been achieved.

She has also tried her hand at shaping the spiritual

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imagination of her race into poetry, and though it is not her most characteristic vein certain lines of a high tenor stand to her account. The verses To a Seated Buddha have throughout a dignity and weight which will assure them a place in anthologies; but to my mind the most striking snatch of intuitive language from her in the spiritual mood is in The Soul's Prayer. The divine answer comes to the praying soul:

Thou shalt drink deep of joy and fame,

And love shall burn thee like a fire,

And pain shall cleanse thee like a flame,

To purge the dross from thy desire.

So shall thy chastened spirit yearn

To seek from its blind prayer release,

And, spent and pardoned, come to learn

The simple secret of My peace.

I, bending from My sevenfold height,

Will teach thee of My quickening grace,

Life is a prism of My Light And

Death the shadow of My Face.

There is in the lines a lift of tone and a depth of insight culminating in a scriptural revelation at the close. Words cannot express more compactly the wisdom of that serene state which solves all problems by an inner aloofness from the changes of time and yet discovers in time's varied phenomena a play of gleam and gloom subtly suggesting the same ineffable Beauty. In that grand finale, the

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nightingale and the skylark in Sarojini have for once turned eagle and shown a power to look the sun of spiritual truth in the face !

It is probable that with the passage of years she would have more often made such superb flights. Even 1f there had been no mystical development, we we should have been her exploring with wurd-rnagie the thousand and there pathways of her country's day-t o-day consciousness, the many- hued crises-cross of majesty and misery and mystery that makes up the external life of the East. But she deserted poetry for politics : the platform and the loud- speaker have routed the lyric cry, the "fairy fancies". I recall a talk long ago with one of her daughters, in which that young lady inveighed against the the "sacrosanct " view of inspiration., T he poet, according to this view, takes his work \0 seriously that he makes a cult of it, invoking the muse in quiet and concentration, keeping himself aloof from all hubbubs in the heads with things like politics produce. A cult of this kinds is, no doubt, a lop-sided exaggeration: the poet cannot completely cut himself off from the roots of common life, especially when his genius is secular and not philosophies or spiritual. But I believe that to be true to his inspiration he must be prepared for creation sacrifices.

After all, poetic utterance, however spontaneous,is the rarest kind of expression, and if that particular part of [he mind which is 'its fount is not

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granted clear passage for its activity with the help of a serious sustained concentration on one's art, the mere ordinary brain-currents are liable to muddy the nectar-flow, if not quite submerge it. Poets may be born and not made; but they are often unmade by self-negligence and die while still alive. Public activity with its glaring limelight is life's prose with a vengeance: it does little short of murdering the poetic impulse by sparing it neither the quiet nor the leisure to flower in. Perhaps Sarojini has by some miracle escaped the usual doom, and literary gems sparkle, like the Purdah Nashin's less valuable jewels, in unpublished privacy. I for one have grave misgivings: at most, extremely brilliant speeches are all we may expect to be in her desk. Yes, speeches that are flashes of eloquence and yet one line like that famous description of the crescent moon, evoking a solemn and sacred atmosphere—

A caste-mark on the azure brows of heaven—

is worth a hundred bursts of rhetoric. What rousing speech will equal the strange pictorial spell of

The moon-enchanted estuary of dreams?

Or take these verses—

Feed the sweet flame with spice and incense rare, Curds of rose-pastured kine.

If one wanted an example of what poetry is in

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quintessence, those five final words would suffice. They have a concrete vision, an arresting play of shape and colour; they have a lovely varying harmony, with a shifting stress, a balance between the initial "c" and the almost terminal "k", a well-arranged modulated sibilance, a deft echo from an unaccented "urd"-sound to the same sound accented; above all, they have the suggestion of a wonder beyond the world we know—the kine we see day after day become, by being "rose-pastured", parts of a blissful paradise, strayed denizens of a realm of rapturous beauty.

A somewhat similar transformation, leading to quintessential poetry, is effected in the stanza from Summer Woods:

And bind your brows with jasmine sprays and play on carven flutes,

To wake the slumbering serpent-kings among the banyan roots,

And roam at fall of eventide along the river's brink,

And bathe in water-lily pools where golden panthers drink.

Lines 2 and 4 immediately bewitch us: the one brings an unusual half-occult glimpse; the other by its juxtaposition of lilies and panthers, by the luminous epithet for the latter and by combining their drinking with the bathing of humans conjures up a "brave new world" of delicacy wedded

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to strength, power to happiness and safety, in one fluent yet diversified glow. Not openly pictorial of such a world but as felicitous in disclosure of strange potencies is the apostrophe—

Temple-bells! deep temple-bells! Whose urgent voices wreck the sky!

Mark the justness in both sound and sense of the adjectives "deep" and "urgent", the accurate force of the verb "wreck" with its implication of bursting through the blue distance and silence, of taking the kingdom of heaven by storm. There are also strange potencies let out, with what Arnold calls "natural magic", in that couplet about coloured bangles:

Some are aglow with the bloom that cleaves To the limpid glory of new-born leaves.

And a poignant wonder-working vagueness invades us through the imagery and emotion in A Song from Shiraz, most in the quatrain which answers the query about the worth of the music of Shiraz's feasting singers:

The stars shall be scattered like jewels of glass,

And Beauty be tossed like a shell in the sea,

Ere the lutes of their magical laughter surpass

The lute of thy tears, O Mohamed Ali!

We do not bother to know what precisely is meant and who bears that name at the end; something

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surprising and unforgettable is happening, intense chords are struck in our heart, a reverie that presses ecstasy out of pain comes upon us—and we touch poetry neat and fresh. One thing, of course, we do know: the Mohamed Ali spoken of is neither the brother of Shaukat, famous in the old days of the Khilafat controversy, nor Mr. Jinnah addressed in a mood of familiarity. No, there is no politics here: Sarojini Naidu's genius cannot flower from a political soil, at least not when she herself is an active mover to and fro on it.

Far better than her losing her enchanted gift it would have been if she had turned even into a recluse from life's thrilled richnesses and yet kept singing as she does in those three lines from In Salutation to the Eternal Peace:

What care I for the world's loud weariness, Who dream in twilight granaries Thou dost blessWith delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

How shall we be consoled for the cessation of such faultless song? Sarojini the poet deserves to be defended against colour-blind and tone-deaf critics; but for so prematurely ceasing to be a poet, not even her own passionate rhetoric from the Congress's platforms can provide a satisfying defence.

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The world-leader of tomorrow

Sri Aurobindo through a Biographer's Eyes

"ETERNITY !·how learnt I that strange word?" asks Laurence Binyon in a poem. The question might more appropriately have been put by a young Bengali to himself during his student days in England with his two elder brothers, one of whom was an intimate friend of Laurence Binyon. For this young Bengali was caught in puzzling psychological cross-currents. Educated in England from early boyhood, he was as completely Westernised as any Indian could be-Westernised not only in the sense that the whole world of European culture, ancient, me diaevaland modern, became part of him; but also in the sense that a strong stamp was laid upon his mind of what Shaw has called the infidel half-century, the period in which scientific materialism. and atheism rose like an irresistible flood. Yes, that Bengali youth was swayed by the agnostic Time-Spirit. But even while his mind doubted and denied, the Indian in him was troubled by uncharted profundities. "Eternity" seemed indeed a strange word to the surface of his being; and yet from his own unplumbed depths it appeared to .come

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like a simple and natural utterance.

Although he knew scarcely anything of Indian ideals, a sudden concrete expansion of consciousness such as India has always sought_hadJiappened to him momentarily at the age of fourteen, an expansion which neither Huxley nor Haeckel allowed to be possible. So Binyon's query may be considered as setting the secret basic rhythm to the life of the boy from Bengal who had been taken out of India in 1881 when seven years old, tutored privately at first in an English family at Manchester, sent later to St. Paul's School in London and finally to King's College at Cambridge.

The slowly unfolding answer to this query is the tale Professor K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar has to tell in the neatly got-up and chastely printed book of four hundred and odd pages entitled Sri Aurobindo.* The book is the first full-length biographical picture of one whose name has been for long on people's lips. Professor Iyengar is perhaps the best man for undertaking such a work. Not that he is the deepest student of Sri Aurobindo's vision; but he has a bright and quick intelligence, an attractive easy style of writing and the valuable attitude of an observer who is at once inside and outside his subject. There is no esoteric heaviness in his book; any layman can pick it up and run through it; the clear graceful sentences ripple on, rising here and

* Published by Arya Publishing House, College Street, Calcutta, price Rs. 8

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there to a beautiful glittering crest, bending in several directions but keeping always a recognizable course, carrying a good deal of academic knowledge but with a light glancing gesture. The author is no dry pedant with his head among cobwebs, he is in touch with contemporary movements in various fields and has ever the living voice, the tone of a causeur and raconteur. As a first comprehensive introduction nothing more suitable than his survey can be thought of—so lucid and charming it is, finely popular, with not a trace of the shallow, the dogmatic and the flashy that usually mar popular writing.

The story is centrally of a mystical quest: Sri Aurobindo is above all a pilgrim of Eternity. But he is a very remarkable pilgrim in two ways. While seeking Eternity he never ignores Time and both the acts are done by an individual in whom a multitude of personalities flame up into genius. The merit of Professor Iyengar's biography lies chiefly in the thoroughness with which the author has travelled round his many-sided subject. From every imaginable angle he has viewed it. The result is striking. Like a rare aroma the impression is received by us that here is presented a man who is truly "integral".

History is not bare of figures that have been "multifoliate" (to use a favourite term of Professor Iyengar's)—but the rich phenomenon here is not just multifoliate: it emerges as "integral" from the all-round treatment given to it. Integrality implies

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more than a diversity organised about a centre: it implies a harmonious completeness, the manifestation of an Archetype, so to speak—Man full and whole. What Sri Aurobindo seems to have is harmonious completeness and not complex versatility alone. However, to judge properly what it means to be harmoniously complete, we must remember that the full and whole man does not rest with combining opposed factors—realism and idealism, intellect and emotion, practicality and artistry, scientific analysis and religious fervour. Rare as such a combination may be, it is not the full and whole man. Human fullness and wholeness come when the entire range of conscious being possible to the human creature is compassed. Behind our common experience are occult regions of abnormal gleams and shadows which Western psychologists vaguely call the "subliminal". Beyond these are regions still more marvellous, which the Yogis of the East especially search for—the deep concealed Soul that is a growing spark of divinity, the vast Cosmic Spirit at once witness and worker, the ineffable Transcendent where both the individual and the universe find their perfect source. The full and whole man has to be a mystic par excellence. That is one indispensable condition. The other is that, having become a mystic par excellence, he must turn back to all that is apparently undivine and, seeing it as the Divine involved, attempt to evolve its secret potentialities, so that all may be

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divinised, the earth-existence rendered a pure and powerful instrument of the Supreme Light.

Sri Aurobindo fulfils either indispensable condition of integrality. Nor is everything said when this has been said. The earth-existence of his into which he channels the Supreme Light contains each essential aspect of manhood equally extensive and each aspect lives in him with the utmost colour and force. That is why from Professor Iyengar's sympathetically constructed picture he steps out as the world-leader of tomorrow.

The first point that engages our attention before we have gone far afield in the book is the genius-glow attained in Sri Aurobindo by a synthesis of cultures. The Orient and the Occident meet in him and catch intense fire. Having spoken nothing except English as a boy and having lived in its very home from his seventh to his twenty-first year, he has a spontaneous mastery of its turns and nuances. But English is not the only tongue he knows nor the literature of England the only "monument of the mind's magnificence" he is familiar with.

From St. Paul's School, London, he went with a senior classical scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he took away in one year all the prizes for Greek and Latin verse. In the open I.C.S. examination in which he competed he scored record marks in these ancient languages that lie at the very foundation of European culture. Among Europe's modern languages, he has been intimately acquainted

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with French from his early Manchester years. Nor are Italian and German any strangers: he rubs shoulders with Dante and Goethe in the original. The speech of Calderon too is on more than nodding terms with him: I am told that once inspiration seized him with force enough to pour through him a couple of hundred lines of brilliant poetry in Spanish! On his return to India he set about getting to the heart of Eastern culture. He steeped himself in Sanskrit and took in his rapid linguistic stride many present-day vernaculars. India's hoary civilisation unveiled its real form to him and holding in his two hands the treasures of the two hemispheres he stands between as a creative mediator.

Creative—because Sri Aurobindo is not simply a superb scholar and man of culture; he is also a thinker and an artist of towering proportions. Professor Iyengar gives us a wide-sweeping review of the work after luminous work in poetry no less than prose that has taken birth under Sri Aurobindo's pen. Rich and sensuous yet strong and supple, shot with tones of body as well as soul, touching a vast variety of themes in rhyme and blank verse and quantitative metre, his poetry moves with a tempo and atmosphere ever-changing, an inspiration now delicate and exquisite,

Whose laughter dances like a gleam Of sunlight on a hidden stream That through a wooded way Runs suddenly into the perfect day—

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now audacious and enormous and remote:

Snow on ravine and snow on cliff and snow Sweeping in strenuous outlines to heaven. With distant gleaming vales and turbulent rocks. Giant precipices black-hewn and bold Daring the universal whiteness—

now in the same breath far and near, mysterious and concrete:

Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's; Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway Words that live not save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots.

Accents like these confer on Sri Aurobindo a commanding voice in the kingdom of art. Nor is he wanting in perfection where prose is concerned. For over six years, almost single-handed, he carried on a monthly magazine named Arya of subtle, penetrating and puissant thought on innumerable world-issues. To measure the range of his mind we have only to glance at the titles of the diverse series he kept running simultaneously: The Life Divine (its final expanded version, recently published, was recommended by Sir Francis Young-husband for the Nobel Prize and called by him the greatest book of our times), The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of the Veda, A Defence of Indian Culture, The Psychology of Social Development, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Future Poetry.

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And the vast mental range here disclosed bore upon it the play of a vitalizing sunshine that fused logical acumen with supra-intellectual insight. The words that etched and painted, broadly outlined and minutely shaped the panorama for us showed not the least sign of fatigue or failure in any place. Precision, clarity, élan side by side with manysuggestioned beauty and plastic rhythm, a Shavian trenchancy mingling with a sensitive splendour that is half Landoresque and half Newmanish, a Bergsonian lucidness and felicity companioned by a haunting polyphonic revelation a la Sir Thomas Browne—this is the highly original prose of Sri Aurobindo everywhere in its voluminous manifestation.

It is natural that Professor Iyengar, himself a gifted writer, should dwell with lingering relish on Sri Aurobindo's literary output and cannot in addition resist reprinting as an appendix an article which is a little gem of expository treatment, a detailed analysis making us enter into the "organism" as well as the "mechanism" of a poem by Sri Aurobindo and lighting up at the same time its art and its mystical substance. But Professor Iyengar does not permit the scheme of his book to get lop-sided. He devotes a good number of pages to Sri Aurobindo the politician in order to reveal his subject as a most dynamic dreamer through action.

He is aware that without the plunge into politics

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—and to a lesser degree the secretarial service to the Gaekwar of Baroda and the educational enterprise for a short spell—Sri Aurobindo would not cut the figure of a world-leader. The world needs guidance by a man who can lay moulding hands on whole nations. Professor Iyengar shows vividly how Sri Aurobindo stirred Bengal and, through Bengal, India from end to end to a magnificent nationalism which was yet neither narrow rior isolationist. In eight crowded years Sri Aurobindo, choosing for leader the sincere clear-headed resourceful and dauntless Tilak, changed the entire countenance of Indian politics, giving it a positive and creative bent. What is more, he infused into nationalism a spiritual ideal, an intense aspiration to revive the true genius of India, which is the realisation of a divine consciousness. It was the Vedic Rishis and the Seers of the Upanishads and the shining procession of Saints and Yogis down the centuries, that had kept the civilisation of India so bright and beautiful. Unless in the days of her decline we evoked the Godward instinct, we would never lift her up. She whose sons in myriads had communed for ages with the Eternal must be herself a Goddess, an aspect of the Divine Mother, the world-creatrix. Wrapped in the atmosphere of the Supreme Being must she be visioned and worshipped. That was the core of the Aurobindonian nationalism.

Out of it sprang the mighty movements of the

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Aurobindonian politics. It was the fountain of countless constructive articles, a host of practical programmers, a tireless run of meetings and sessions. The enthusiasm and energy it inspired we can imagine by looking at the photograph Professor Iyengar has put into his book, of Sri Aurobindo in Calcutta. A poise of unhurried power touched with something holy confronts us in the seated yet alert body, one foot thrust forward, the finely shaped fingers half-closed in a sensitive but strong grip, the mouth above the rounded chin at once calm and set, the nostrils of the semi-aquiline nose a little dilated with ardor, the eyes wearing a firm look that goes far and still more far, the whole expression of the broad-browed and thick-moustached face in-drawn to a concentrated potentiality of leaping fierily forward. Though the luminous height and depth and wideness that the later photograph of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry suggests are still to come, enough is here to convince us that, whatever walk of life he may choose, he would be a grand doer no less than a grand dreamer and that he is born to hold the helm of world-affairs.

The quick-shifting drama of Sri Aurobindo's career as politician is brought out very thrillingly by Professor Iyengar. The agitations, the arrests, the house-searching's, the legal attacks and counterattacks are resurrected with vivid strokes. The climax of the drama was the year-long detention of Sri Aurobindo as under-trial prisoner in Alipore

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Jail and the subsequent court-scenes with Eardley Norton the most brilliant criminal lawyer in India as Crown Prosecutor, Chittaranjan Das shielding Sri Aurobindo by a case for defence worked out through feverish months at the cost of his own health and the loss of a lucrative practice, Mr. Beach croft sitting in judgment over a man who had been with him at Cambridge and had beaten him there to second place in Greek and Latin! The charge of implication in the bomb-outrage at Muzzaferpore was torn to shreds by Das in a historic speech: Sri Aurobindo was acquitted. This was the second time he had been accused and acquitted. A third prosecution was launched against him a little while later—but he was no more in British India then and it was diverted against the printer of his paper. Nothing again could be proved and with its fizzling out the last political storm round Sri Aurobindo died down. For years the Congress kept wooing the self-exiled lion to return to his ldngdom. Chittaranjan Das and Lala Lajpat Rai delivered in person their earnest appeals. All to no avail, for though Sri Aurobindo still remained leonine a Call more pressing than that of any Congress or national spokesman had come and he had to answer it, since without doing so he felt he would never fulfil what the Eternal Spirit whom India worshipped had destined for him.

Mystical experiences had visited him at intervals throughout his early life. There was the shock of

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an inner immensity once in England. "A vast calm", writes Professor Iyengar, "descended upon him with his first step on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, his first contact with the soil and spirit of India; and this calm surrounded him and remained with him for long months afterwards. Again, while walking on the ridge of the Takht-i-SuIeman in Kashmir, the realisation of the vacant Infinite came upon him, unbidden as it were; the living presence of Kali in the shrine on the banks of the Narmada came upon him unawares and filled him with its stupendous majesty; and he had, on another occasion, when he was in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay there, a vision of the Godhead surging up from within him and mastering and controlling with its gaze all events and surroundings." But these and other experiences like them were unexpected unlinked outbreaks: there was no constant Yoga behind them for methodically dynamising life with spirituality.

In 1905, at the age of thirty-one Sri Aurobindo took to Yogic discipline. One of his helpers in Yoga, the Mahratta Lele, relates that three days of meditation in Baroda in 1908 brought Sri Aurobindo the complete cessation of the mind's activity in a Nirvanic peace: henceforth all his movements, inward or outward, derived from some divine spaciousness above the brain-clamped mind. A year's detention in Alipore Jail gave him the

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precious opportunity to dive single-pointedly into the synthetic Yoga taught in the Bhagwad Gita: the figure of Sri Krishna became an omnipresent reality to him, which he beheld even in the court where his trial took place-behind judge and prosecutor and counsel for defence and every wines Sri Krishna was seen standing and working out the future! And it was Sri Krishna's command he obeyed when he withdrew from British India to Chandernagore and ultimately to Pondicherry. But Sri Aurobindo withdrawn or retired is no world-forgetful ascetic. .Professor Iyengar makes this abundantly and interestingly clear by his account of the years in the capital of French India, the growth of the Ashram there, the diverse writings and publications, the innumerable letters of wisdom and wit to the disciples on every conceivable topic, the unbroken touch with the world's events, the emphatic enlightened anti-Hitler and pro-Allies attitude and action throughout the War in the midst of the wavering Yeas and Nays of Indian politics. "My life", says Sri Aurobindo in a letter quoted by Professor Iyengar, "has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle; the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character." Only, we must understand that what Sri Aurobindo wields is-to quote a phrase from his own poctry-

Force one with unimaginable rest .

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A luminous drive, based on and issuing from the boundless tranquillity of the Everlasting, wages the Aurobindonian battle.

And it is a drive whose aim is a divinisation of our embodied nature such as no Yoga has ever contemplated in the past, a perfect and integral divinisation and not a mere reflected radiance in our members, a divinisation of all our parts down to our physical body. Yes, this very body must become Godlike and incorruptible with the descent of the Supreme Light. "A quixotic hope!" cries the doubter in us, but it is Sri Aurobindo's vision that, if all things have sprung originally from the Divine into the evolutionary process, there must be in the Divine their secret truth, their archetypal reality, and this truth and reality they are meant to evolve on the earth: matter no less than mind and vital stuff can undergo a total transformation and flower into a new substance. The dream of a terrestrial heaven can never be actualised without such a transformation. And it has not been actualised up to now because a certain crowning dynamis of the Spirit which Sri Aurobindo terms Supermind has not been fully possessed and turned upon earth-problems. What Sri Aurobindo sets working in his Ashram is that dynamis. Armed with it, he serenely marches onward over titanic difficulties, beckoning us to follow him along the path he carves out. His whole character and career convince us that he can be no chaser of splendid

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phantoms: the man's clear-headed honesty and keen practical trend are also evident when we consider that for nearly a decade and a half during his stay in Pondicherry he kept saying to his disciples each time they inquired whether his goal would be reached, "I must wait and see", and that only in 1926 he gave a positive assurance of his success in the future.

Sri Aurobindo's unique insistence on bodily divinisation completes his equipment as the world-leader of tomorrow. It is in utter tune with our modern age of science. It brings him into the laboratory, as it were, to meet the challenge of materialism and atheism on the grounds they have themselves chosen, and with results of the exact concreteness they require. It must have a tremendous repercussion on physics, biology, physiology and medicine. A Planck, a Julian Huxley, a Pavlov, a Steinbach will not feel they are groping for the invisible and the intangible when they deal with the final triumphs of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. At the heart of the Ashram in Pondicherry is the power of a super-spirituality that is super-science as much as super-culture, super-art, super-philosophy and super-organisation of outward active life. In the days ahead, when from the ruins of the War and from the smoke of the present a new order will cry out to be born, the integral personality of Sri Aurobindo will be the most creative figure; for, he alone can justly declare in

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the words of Lascelles Abercrombie:

I have Golden within me the whole fate of man.

"He alone", I have said. But a qualification is demanded, which yet diminishes nowise the essence of the statement. Sri Aurobindo does not stand solitarily at the Ashram's centre: he shares it with one whom, except in appearance and for purposes of distribution of labour, he does not regard as distinct from himself. The joint centre, among other important things, is evident in a letter which Professor Iyengar cites. "We", affirms Sri Aurobindo, "know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outgoing and realising Force. So, although we have Faith— and whoever did anything without faith in his mission or the Truth at work behind him?—we do not found ourselves on Faith only, but on a great ground of Knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives." At several places hints are scattered by Professor Iyengar about the significance of this "we"—a radiant figure working side by side with Sri Aurobindo and known as the Mother. She strikes the reader as the Master's feminine counterpart in spiritual attainment and manifestation—co-parent with him of the golden tomorrow. Professor Iyengar's brief tantalising glimpses of her make us avid for her biography as the next venture of his accomplished

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pen. It will carry more richly, more intimately home to our benighted souls the secret of the divine dawn that is Sri Aurobindo.

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