World-Culture in Young India.
The Indian freedom movement has been condemned by some prejudiced Western observers as a movement to withdraw India from all world-currents. It is alleged that Young India is seeking to isolate itself from the rest of the world.
This charge, false as it is, comes from such persons as have deliberately propagated to their own satisfaction still another lie which pervades the scientific circles in Eur-America, viz. that Indian civilization had always in the past pursued a separatist exclusive path. We have seen in a previous essay, that on International India, how utterly unfounded in history is this idola about India's alleged isolation. So far as Young India's swaraj activities are concerned, the fallacy of the calumniators is senseless and absurd.
Ram Mohan Roy, the father of New India, was also one of the founders of the comparative method in social science. He was thus a maker of the modern world. Since then every movement with which the Indian nation-builders have been associated has been broad-based on world-culture.
And Roy in inviting Western culture into Indian consciousness and according to it the rightful place it deserves in all human development was only continuing the historic tradition of India's old masters, e.g., of Varahamihira. This astronomer of the sixth century had frankly admitted that although the Greeks were mlechchhas i.e., "unclean barbarians", they must have to be worshipped as rishis (sages) because the science of astronomy had made great progress among them. Openness of mind is not a new feature in Indian Weltanschauung.
Young India indeed wants separation from Great Britain, in simpler terms, non-cooperation with it, in as much as association with it implies only political, industrial and cultural slavery to the foreigners. Herein is to be read India's "Monroe Doctrine," the Indian aspect of "Asia for the Asians" programme. India's declaration of independence is however a prelude to the establishment of the equality of treatment in international relations such as can be assured only when the races are free from alien control in every form. The attempts at emancipating India from the British yoke or the rest of Asia from Western domination must not therefore be ridiculously interpreted as attempts at bringing about a "splendid isolation."
A veritable Wanderlust and desire to master the world-forces (vishva-shakti) such as is bodied forth in Hemchandra Banerji's memorable verse1 has long seized the mentality of Young India. And the comparative method foreshadowed in the life's work of Roy is so ingrained in India's psyche that the principle of boycott which operates powerfully in the sphere of politics as a weapon for freedom and equality has hardly any application in the cultural enterprises of Indian men and women.
The number of Indians who visit Japan, America, England, France and Germany for industrial and economic investigations has been steadily on the increase. Engineers like Visvesvarayya of Mysore, directors of chemical and pharmaceutical works like Prafulla Chanda Ray of Bengal, and bankers like Fuzbhoy Currimbhoy and Vithaldas Thackersey of Bombay and Rajendranath Mookerjee of Calcutta are in closest touch with the latest developments in Western industry.
India does not study the advance of modern capitalism alone. The other side of the shield, namely, socialism in all its wings, has been receiving equal attention among the Indian path-finders. Chamlal and Saklatwalla of the Punjab, B. P. Wadia and Trimul Acharya of Madras, N. M. Joshi of Bombay, and Manabendra Nath Roy and Khan Lohani of Bengal have been touring the world in order to understand the methods of labor revolt.
Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the poet, and Mrs. Fyzee-Rahamin, the musician, have carried to India the message of the new woman from Sweden, Switzerland and England. Mrs. Lila Singh has studied the social and economic conditions of womanhood in the South American republics. And in the United States Mrs. Parvatibai Athavale has investigated the family life, domestic science and women's education with special reference to the problems obtaining in India.
Wanderlust has already had solid influence on thought. The methodology of Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques, in which a foreign land is idealized as the depositary of all possible cultural and political bliss, has more or less been at work in the Indian journalism and travel literature such as comes from the pen of authors who have lived in Eur-America. Writers on Western institutions and life are quite popular.
The painters and sculptors of Bombay and Calcutta do not seek their technique exclusively from old-Buddhist and medieval Indo-Persian sources. The great masters of Japan and China as well as of Europe have profoundly influenced the work of Abanindra Nath Tagore, Nanda Lal Bose, M. K. Mhatre and Phanindra Nath Bose.
Shakespeare, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman and Ibsen call forth among Indians the some enthusiasm as among the Westerns. Helmholtz, Pasteur, John Stuart Mill and William James, they all have thousands of admirers and followers in India. The great philosophers of Germany from Kant and Fichte to Haeckel and Eucken are as popular in India as her own masters.
The translation of Mazzini's autobiography by Vinayak Savarkar has given the Italian idealist as great a place among the Marathas as that of Ramdas the spiritual adviser of Shivaji. The teachings of Mazzini can be read likewise in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, indeed in almost every Indian language.
The monthly journals like Vividha-jnâna-vistâra of Poona, Saraswati of Allahabad and Prabâsi of Calcutta are each an organ of vishva-shakti. They seek to bring to their readers all currents in the contemporary world of culture. Readers of periodicals thus become familiar with the aesthetics of Croce, the social philosophy of Karl Marx and Sorel, as well as the psycho-analysis of Freud and Jung.
In Rabindra Nath Tagore's school at Bolpur lessons are given not only in French and German but even in old Greek and Latin. The poet himself is an admirer of the Austrian violinist Kreisler and is trying to introduce European music among Indian experts.
On the other hand, a young Indian, Sahid Suhrawardy, has for several years been régisseur of the Russian Art Theatre in Moscow. Evidently India has been able to assimilate occidental histrionic art.
Nor has India lagged behind in the effort to understand the radical political and economic philosophy of the West. In his Urdu writings Lajpat Rai has ever sought to communicate the message of the new Occident to his countrymen. In his English blook entitled National Education (1921) he has, besides, made it clear that Young India does not seek to accentuate a patriotic chauvinism but to assimilate truth and life from every race, even from the English people. And yet Lajpat Rai, the politician, is an inveterate enemy of England,—and as such, has been suffering imprisonment for the second time (February 1922).
India's efforts to understand the world-forces and make the best use of vishva-shakti have resulted also in the establishment of political centres for Indian activity in foreign countries. The foreign politics of Young India constitute an important factor in its contemporary culture and have by all means served to expand the soul of its men and women.
India's kinship with Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia has been cemented by the pioneering enterprises of Ajit Singh, Obedulla, Zafar Ali Khan, Vasant Singh, Hormusji Kershap, Pramatha Datta, Chait Singh, Mahendra Pratap, Pandurang Khankhoje, Barakatulla, Hrishikesh Latta, Mirza Abbas and others. The Mohammedan world from Angora to Morocco is today part of India's daily consciousness, thanks to the labours of Hafiz, Mansur, Abdul Wahid, Ansari, Ali Brothers, Sattar Brothers and Syed Hussein.
Rash Behari Bose, Bhagwan Singh, Heramba Lal Gupta, Jodh Singh, Chanchayya, Dhirendra Nath Sen and Hariharlal Thulal have succeeded in expanding India in the Far East by their strenuous exertions in Japan, China and Siam. It must not be forgotten that owing to the labours of M. K. Gandhi, Manilal, Mehta and Parmanand the Indian labourers and retail store-keepers settled in South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius and other British colonies have learned to be conscious of their rights as men.
The United States today,—not only the labouring classes and labour parties of all denominations but also the intellectuals and bourgeois press are taking up the cause of India's freedom as a plank in their own liberalism. And for this India has to thank the propaganda of Ram Chandra, Santokh Singh, Tarak Nath Das, Har Dayal, Lajpat Rai, Basanta Koomar Roy, Jagat Singh, Sailendra Nath Ghose, N. S. Hardiker, Surendra Nath Karr and others.
Finally, Europe's cooperation with Young India in its revolutionary movements is due to the patience and perseverance of Madam Cama and Messrs Krishnavarma, Virendra Nath Chattopadhyaya, Sardarsingji Rana, Hem Chandra Das, Madanlal Dhingra, the Savarkar Brothers, R. B. Subrahmahmaniya Aiyar, Madhava Row, Moreshwar Prabhakar, Chempakaram Pillai, Bhupendra Nath Datta and G. S. Dara.
India will thus be found to be in terms of intimate intercourse with every land, every race, and every field of thought and work. In other words, there exists to-day a "Greater India" as a power among the powers of the world. And this fact must have to be recognized by every nation that is interested in the political and cultural reconstruction of mankind. For, in every project that is likely to come up before the world Young India is either a potential friend or a potential enemy. Statesmen who are busying themselves with the problem of new alliances or ententes will certainly not overlook this great factor in Realpolitik.
In these international complications rest the chances for the freedom of India. The political emancipation of India will be achieved, as world-forces should lead one to believe, not so much on the banks of the Ganges and the Godaveri as on the Atlantic and the Pacific, not so much in the Indus Valley or on the Deccan Plateau as in the Chinese plains, the Russian steppes or the Mississippi Valley. Young India can therefore hardly afford to remain indifferent to "entangling alliances" among the nations of the world,—but must have to be in evidence in every nook and corner of the globe. Kinship with world-culture is the only guarantee for India's self-preservation and self-assertion.
Notes
- Infra p. 311.↩