Ashwarth. He told me that when he was studying philosophy at college, he could not understand it when his teacher told him that everything was one. How could one say that one was that table and that table was oneself? It didn’t seem to mean anything. And then one day he understood. He went to see the great falls that are in Mysore, and for a long way drove in a bus through the jungle. He had never seen big trees before, and when he sped along the road through a tunnel of green, with the trees towering above him, the sensation was thrilling; then he came to the waterfall; he stood at the edge of a great round pit and in front of him saw that huge mass of water, for it was just after the monsoon, falling from a prodigious height. It gave him an extraordinary emotion, he felt that he was the water, that he was falling like the water and that the water was himself; and he realised that he and the water were one. He is thirty-eight years old, fairly tall for an Indian of the Deccan, perhaps a couple of inches taller than I am, with black hair, naturally waving, that is turning grey, but his face has remained very young, with hardly a wrinkle on the forehead and no lines under the eyes; his eyes are large and swimming, his nose short, but well shaped and ever so slightly fleshy, his mouth is rather large, with full lips; his ears are small, set close to the head, but with long, fleshy lobes, like those, but of course less exaggerated, in the heads of Gautama. His face is clean-shaven, but his beard is heavy, and even after shaving it shows black through his dark, honey-coloured skin. He is not good-looking, but peculiarly attractive from the earnest candour of his expression. His teeth are excellent, very white and regular. His hands are larger than most Indians’.
He is dressed in a cotton dhoty of the cheapest material, a cotton shirt and a Ghandi cap; he wears the scarf that every Indian of condition carries and leather sandals on his bare feet. He speaks English fluently, though he has never been to England, and his voice is sonorous and pleasing. His sincerity is obvious and the goodness of his heart, but I was not so certain of his intelligence. Everything he thinks he has thought out for himself, and he does not know how many of the notions he has hammered out in suffering and meditation are lamentably commonplace. It is disconcerting when with deep feeling he gives utterance to platitudes of the utmost banality. On the other hand now and then he has a charming and even original thought.
He was arrested for a series of seditious articles which he wrote in the paper he owned, and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. He was put in a separate cell so that he should not contaminate the other prisoners by his conversation, but, though not forced to work, he asked to do so, and made carpets in the workroom with the others. He took his imprisonment very hard. He told me that he used to cry for hours at a time and sometimes would be seized with an irresistible desire to get out, and would beat at the iron bars of his cell door and try to break it open and scream till in exhaustion he threw himself on the mat and fell asleep. At the end of four months the prison food made him so ill that he was taken to the hospital, and spent there the remaining months of his imprisonment. It was then that he decided to renounce his possessions. But his trial had cost a lot of money and during his term in jail his paper did badly, so that when he was set free he found himself deeply in debt. It took him some years to pay his creditors. Then he called his employees together and gave them his paper, his machines, everything, on condition that they should pay his mother thirty rupees a month for her support and for that of his wife, his sister and his two children.
I tried to discover how his family took his decision. He was very casual about their feelings. “They didn’t like it,” he said, “but I couldn’t help that. You can’t do what you think is right without causing somebody pain or inconvenience.” At his birth his horoscope was taken, and the astrologer said that he would either become a very rich, successful man, a king among men, or a sanyasin. For years his ambition had been to make a fortune and a great name for himself; but when he decided to renounce possession of everything he had, his mother, remembering what the astrologer had said, though grieved was not surprised. I asked him what he would answer when his son, on growing up, reproached him for bringing him into the world and instead of giving him the position that might have been his and a good education, had let him be brought up with only elementary knowledge so that he could be no more than a workman. He smiled quietly. “I think he probably will reproach me,” he said, “but he will have had a home to sleep in and food to eat, which I have provided. I do not see why just because you’ve brought a son into the world you must waste your life only that he should have a better one. You have rights as much as he has.”
He narrated an incident that took my fancy. The day after he had thus dispossessed himself of all he owned he went to see a friend who lived several miles out of Bangalore. He walked out, and on the way back, feeling tired, he jumped on a passing bus, but then suddenly recollected that he hadn’t an anna in his pocket and was obliged to stop the bus and get out. I asked him where he lodged.
“If someone offers me shelter I sleep on the veranda, and if not, under a tree.”
“And food?”
“If someone offers me food I eat it, and if not I go without,” he answered simply.
I came to know him in rather a curious fashion. I was staying in Bombay for the second time and he wrote to me from Bangalore saying he would like to come and see me since he was assured I had something to say to him that it was important to him to know. I replied that I was a very ordinary person, a novelist and nothing else, and didn’t think it could possibly be worth his while to travel for two days to see me. He came notwithstanding. I asked him how he had got the railway fare and he told me that he had gone to the station and waited. After some time he got into conversation with a man who was waiting to take the train and told him he was coming to see me, but hadn’t the money to pay for a ticket. The man bought him one. I offered to pay for his return journey, but he wouldn’t take money from me.
“I shall manage to get back somehow,” he smiled.
We had long talks on two successive days. I was wretchedly conscious all the time that he was expecting from me some high doctrine or at least a significant message. I had nothing to give him. He could not but have been disappointed, and it may be that I should have done better to fill him up with some highfalutin clap-trap. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Goa. You drive through coconut groves among which you see here and there ruins of houses. On the lagoon sail fishing-boats, their lateen sails shining white in the brilliant sun. The churches are large and white, their façades decorated with honey-coloured stone pilasters. Inside they are large, bare, spacious, with pulpits in Portuguese baroque carved with the utmost elaboration and altar-pieces in the same style. In one, at a side altar, a priest, a native, was saying mass with a dark-faced acolyte to serve him. There was no one to worship. In the Franciscan Church you are shown a wooden Christ on a crucifix and the guide tells you that six months before the destruction of the city it wept tears. In the cathedral they were holding a service, the organ was playing and in the organ loft there was a small choir of natives singing with a harshness in which somehow the Catholic chants acquired a mysteriously heathen, Indian character. It was strangely impressive to see these great empty churches in that deserted place and to know that day by day with not a soul to listen the priests said mass in them.
The priest. He came to see me at the hotel. He was a tall Indian, neither thin nor fat, with good, somewhat blunt features and large dark liquid eyes, with shining whites to them. He wore a cassock. At first he was very nervous and his hands moved restlessly, but I did what I could to put him at his ease, and presently his hands were still. He spoke very good English. He told me that he was of Brahmin family, his ancestor, a Brahmin, having been converted by one of the companions of St. Francis Xavier. He was a man in the early thirties, of powerful physique and of a fine presence. His voice was rich and musical. He had been six years in Rome and during his stay in Europe had travelled much. He wanted to go back, but his mother was old
and wished him to remain in Goa till she died. He taught in a school and preached. He spent much of his time converting the Sudras. He said it was hopeless now to try to do anything with the high-caste Hindus. I tried to get him to speak of religion. He told me that he thought Christianity was large enough to embrace all the other faiths, but regretted that Rome had not allowed the Indian Church to develop according to the native inclinations. I got the impression that he accepted the Christian dogmas as a discipline, but without fervour, and I am not sure that if one had been able to get to the bottom of his beliefs one would not have found that they were held with at least a certain scepticism. I had a feeling that even though there were four hundred years of Catholicism behind him he was still at heart a Vedantist. I wondered if to him the God of the Christians was not merged, if not in his mind, at least in some obscure depth of the unconscious, with the Brahman of the Upanishads. He told me that even among the Christians the caste system still obtained to this extent that none of them married out of his own caste. It would be unheard of that a Christian of Brahmin extraction should marry a Christian of Sudra extraction. He was not displeased to tell me that there was not in his veins a drop of white blood; his family had always kept resolutely pure. “We’re Christians,” he said to me, “but first of all we’re Hindus.” His attitude to Hinduism was tolerant and sympathetic.
The backwaters of Travancore. They are narrow canals, more or less artificial, that is to say natural stretches of water have been joined up by embanked channels to make a waterway from Trivandrum to Cochin. On each side grow coconuts, and thatched houses with mud roofs stand at the water’s edge, each surrounded by its little compound in which grow bananas, papaya and sometimes a jack tree. Children play; women sit about, or pound rice; in frail boats, sometimes carrying loads of coconuts or leaves or provender for cattle, men and boys slowly paddle up and down; on the banks people fish. I saw one man with a bow and arrow and a little bundle of fish that he had shot. Everyone bathes. It is green, cool and quiet. You get a very curious impression of pastoral life, peaceful and primitive, and not too hard. Now and then a big barge passes, poled by two men from one town to another. Here and there is a modest little temple or a tiny chapel, for a large proportion of the population is Christian.
The river is grown over with the water hyacinth. The plants, with their delicate mauve flowers, rooted not in soil but in water, float along, and as your boat passes through, making a channel of clear water, they are pushed aside; but no sooner has it passed than they drift back with the stream and the breeze, and no trace that you have gone that way remains. So with us who have made some small stir in the world.
The Dewan. I had been told that he was not only an astute but an unscrupulous politician. Everyone agreed that he was as clever as he was crooked. He was a thickset, sturdy man, no taller than I, with alert but not very large eyes, a broad brow, a hooked nose, full lips and a small rounded chin. He had a thick crop of fuzzy hair. He was dressed in a white dhoty, a white tunic fitting close round the neck, and a white scarf; his feet were bare and he wore sandals which he slipped on and off. He had the geniality of the politician who for years has gone out of his way to be cordial with everyone he meets. He talked very good English, fluently, with a copious choice of words, and he put what he had to say plainly and with logical sequence. He had a resonant voice and an easy manner. He did not agree with a good deal that I said and corrected me with decision, but with the courtesy that took it for granted I was too intelligent to be affronted by contradiction. He was of course very busy, having all the affairs of the state in his charge, but seemed to have enough leisure to talk for the best part of an hour on Indian metaphysics and religion as though there were nothing that interested him more. He seemed well read not only in Indian literature, but in English, but there was no indication that he had any acquaintance with the literature or thought of other European countries.
When I began to speak of religion in India as being the basis of all their philosophy, he corrected me. “No,” he said, “that is not so; there is no religion in India in your sense of the word; there are systems of philosophy, and theism, Hindu theism, is one of its varieties.”
I asked him if educated, cultured Hindus had still an active belief in Karma and transmigration. He answered with emphasis. “I absolutely believe in it myself with all the strength of my being. I am convinced that I have passed through innumerable lives before this one and that I shall have to pass through I do not know how many more before I secure release. Karma and transmigration are the only possible explanations I can see for the inequalities of men and for the evil of the world. Unless I believed in them I should think the world meaningless.”
I asked him if, believing this, the Hindu feared death less than the European. He took a little time to think of his answer, and, as I had already discovered was his way, while he was considering it, talked of something else so that I thought he was not going to answer. Then he said: “The Indian is not like the Japanese who has been taught from his earliest years that life is of no value and that there are a number of reasons for which he must not hesitate for an instant to sacrifice it. The Indian does not fear death because it will take him away from life, he fears it because there is uncertainty in what condition he may be born next. He can have no assurance that he will be born a Brahmin, an angel or even a God, he may be born a Sudra, a dog or a worm. When he thinks of death it is the future he fears.”
The viña-player. He was a stoutish man of forty, clean-shaven, with all the front part of his head shaven too; his hair, long at the back, was tied in a knot. He was dressed in a dhoty and a collarless shirt. He sat on the floor to play. His instrument was highly decorated, carved in low relief and ending in a dragon’s head. He played for a couple of hours, now and then breaking into a few bars of song, music hundreds of years old, but some much less, music of the last century when under a Maharajah of Travancore, himself an accomplished musician, there was great enthusiasm for the art. It is elaborate music, which requires all your attention, and I do not think I could have followed it at all if I hadn’t had some acquaintance with modern music. It is slowly rhythmical and when your ear gets accustomed to it various and tuneful. Of late years the composers have been not a little influenced by modern music, European music, and it is queer in these Eastern melodies to discern a faint recollection of the bagpipes or the martial din of a military band.
A Hindu house. The owner was a judge who had inherited it from his fathers. He was dead, and I was received by his widow, a stout woman in white with white curly hair hanging down her back and bare feet. You entered by a door in a blank wall and found yourself in a sort of loggia with a carved wooden ceiling of jackwood. It was decorated with lotus leaves and in the centre a bas-relief of Siva dancing. Then came a small dusty courtyard in which were growing crotons and cassias. Then the house. In front was a veranda with hanging eaves, showing the open woodwork of the roof, beautifully joined, and with a carved ceiling of a rich brown like that of the loggia. At each end was a raised part under which were receptacles in which the owner normally kept his clothes and which served as seats. Here he received his guests. At the back were two doors with rich locks and hinges of decorated brass; they led to two small dark rooms, with one bed in each, and in one of which the master of the house had slept. At one side was a closed aperture which led to a space in which the grain was kept. Going through a small door at the side you came into another courtyard; at the back of this were the women’s apartments and on the sides the kitchen and other small rooms. I was shown into one room in which was some poor, shabby and old-fashioned European furniture.
The first courtyard at night would surely lose its dusty neglected aspect, and under the moon and the stars, cool and silent, form a romantic setting. I should have liked to listen there to the viña-player, his absorbed and serious face lit by the smoky flame of a brass lamp, its wick floating in coconut oil.
The Yogi. He was of average height for an Indian, of a dark
honey colour, with close-cropped white hair and a close-cropped white beard. He was not stout, but plump. Though he wore nothing but a white loin-cloth he looked neat, very clean and almost dapper. He walked slowly, leaning on a stick, and he had a slight limp. His mouth was somewhat large, with thickish lips, and his eyes were neither so big nor so lustrous as are the eyes of most Indians; the whites were bloodshot. He bore himself with simplicity and at the same time with dignity. He was cheerful, smiling, polite; he did not give me the impression of a scholar, but rather of a sweet-natured old peasant. He came into the room in which I was lying down on a pallet bed, followed by two or three disciples, and after a few words of cordial greeting seated himself. I was not very well, having fainted a little time before, and he sat close to me. It was because he had been told that I was not well enough to go to the hall in which he ordinarily sat that he came to the little room into which I had been carried.
After the first few moments he ceased to look at me and with a sidelong stare of a peculiar fixity gazed as it were over my shoulder. His body was absolutely still, but one of his feet tapped now and then a little on the floor. He remained thus for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and they told me afterwards that he was concentrating in meditation on me. Then he broke off and asked me whether I wished to say anything to him or to ask him any questions. I was feeling weak and ill and said so, whereupon he smiled and said: “Silence also is conversation.” He turned his head away again slightly and resumed his concentrated meditation, again looking as it were over my shoulder. He remained like this for perhaps another quarter of an hour, no one saying a word, the other persons in the room with their eyes riveted on him, and then got up, bowed, smiled a farewell, and slowly, leaning on his stick, followed by his disciples, limped out of the room.
A Writer's Notebook Page 30
